Maurice Prendergast: Boston Public Garden Watercolors AT THE MET

From 1895 to 1897, Maurice Prendergast (1858–1924) filled the pages of a folio album with drawings in watercolor, pencil, and pen and ink, sketched on-site in the Boston Public Garden. These radiant watercolors capture incidental pastimes in one of America’s famed urban parks. Once called the poet laureate of the picnic and the celebration, Prendergast ranks among the finest watercolorists of his generation. Several of the sketches originated as ideas for advertisements, while others laid out subjects for monotype printmaking. The album, later called the Large Boston Public Garden Sketchbook, likely served as a presentation piece for publishers and other clients.

Maurice Prendergast: Boston Public Garden Watercolors, on view at the Metropolitan Museum through September 7, 2015, presents all 45 works from the sketchbook—watercolors and several drawings—a fitting tribute to an American artist whose colorful imagery chronicled charming pastimes in and around his beloved city.

Maurice Brazil Prendergast (American, 1858–1924). A Fountain in the Public Garden (detail) from Large Boston Public Garden Sketchbook, 1895–97. Watercolor over pencil, bordered in pencil and watercolor, on paper; 14 1/8 x 11 3/16 in. (35.8 x 28.4 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.945) 

 

 

The Large Boston Public Garden Sketchbook was purchased by Robert Lehman in 1961 from the widow of Prendergast's brother, Charles. There was evidence of deterioration from mold, and it was then decided to dismantle the album to ensure the preservation of its drawings. The superb album of drawings is the largest and most elaborate of Maurice Prendergast’s many sketchbooks.

Maurice Brazil Prendergast | Large Boston Public Garden Sketchbook: The Huntington Avenue Streetcar | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Maurice Brazil Prendergast | Large Boston Public Garden Sketchbook: A mother pushing her baby in a perambulator, with her daughter at her side  

A woman passing a café, Folio 44 recto from Large Boston Public Garden Sketchbook, 1895-97, watercolor over pencil on paper, 14-1/16 x 11-3/16 inches, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 1975.1.967 

Born in Newfoundland, Canada, Prendergast spent much of his life in Boston, where the picturesque landscapes and seascapes in and around the vibrant city provided the perfect setting for his repertoire of leisured subjects at play. Armed with portable watercolors, Prendergast could slip in and out of a beachfront crowd or a promenading family in the park unnoticed. Few artists at the turn of the last century captured so tellingly the spirit of incidental daily pastimes. The carefree recreation of cosseted children and their adoring mothers populate almost every page of the Large Boston Public Garden Sketchbook.

The Public Garden encompasses 24 acres in south central Boston. Today bounded by Boylston and Beacon streets, the parkland was once a tidal flat at the city’s edge. Together with the Boston Common, these two parks designed by George Meacham form part of a succession of green spaces that was laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted and were known as the Emerald Necklace. As the first public botanical garden in the United States, the Boston Public Garden is a marvelous legacy of Victorian landscape design, replete with fountains, statuary, flowerbeds, and majestic trees. Its pathways provided artists like Maurice Prendergast with the perfect mise-en-scène for colorful on-site sketching.

Also on view at the Metropolitan Museum this summer is Prendergast’s oil painting Central Park (1903). It is on display in the American Wing (Gallery 772) with works by the early 20th-century urban realists known as the Ashcan group and The Eight.

Maurice Prendergast: Boston Public Garden Watercolors is organized by Dita Amory, Acting Associate Curator in Charge and Administrator of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Book :

Van Gogh: Irises and Roses at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The exuberant bouquets of spring flowers that punctuate Van Gogh’s work in Provence are reunited in Van Gogh: Irises and Roses at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, through August 16, 2015. The exhibition brings together for the first time the quartet of flower paintings—two of irises, two of roses, in contrasting formats and color schemes—that Van Gogh made on the eve of his departure from the asylum at Saint-Rémy. In them, he sought to impart a “calm, unremitting ardor” to his “last stroke of the brush.” Conceived as a series or ensemble on a par with the Sunflower decoration he painted earlier in Arles, the group includes the

Metropolitan Museum’s Irises

and Roses and their counterparts:

the upright Irises from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam,

and the horizontal Roses from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The presentation is timed to accord with the blooming of the flowers that had captivated the artist’s attention, opening 125 years to the week that Van Gogh announced he was working on these “large bouquets” in letters to his brother dated May 11 and 13, 1890. It offers a revealing look at the signature still lifes in a singular context, inviting reconsideration of his artistic aims and the impact of dispersal and color fading on his intended results.

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) worked with steady enthusiasm on the suite of irises and roses during his last week at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy, where he had taken refuge since the previous May (for a condition diagnosed by his doctors as a form of epilepsy). With his release from institutional life in sight, he marked the end of his yearlong stay by painting flowers gathered from the overgrown garden he had depicted upon his arrival, bringing his work in Saint-Rémy full circle. At the same time, he extended his repertoire of still life (which had suffered neglect in the interim) with an admirable sequel to the glorious Sunflower series of Arles. 

They were made while he was packing his belongings for his move to Auvers, in the wake of an incapacitating breakdown that had robbed him of early spring—a pocket of time he likened to the calm after the storm. Completed just three days before he boarded the northbound train, on May 16, 1890, this painting campaign reflects his spirited determination to make up for lost ground, to prove he had not lost his touch, and to make the last strokes count. 

Van Gogh’s facility of execution is matched by the rigor behind this concerted undertaking. He relied on canvases corresponding in size, each composition anchored by a slightly off-center vase and unified by a common horizon line. He then engaged the power of contrast, giving full reign to the pairing of opposites (color, format, and floral motif) that would complement and enhance one another in juxtaposition. Orchestrated around two sets of complementary colors—yellow and violet, pink and green, varied for different expressive effects—the series follows the arc of the artist’s evolving sensibility as a colorist, advancing from the strident high-keyed palette he favored in Arles to the subtler, more softly modulated range of hues he came to use in Saint-Rémy.

Holding a loaded brush in one hand and the “laws of color” in his mind’s eye, Van Gogh painted the bouquets with the surefire command of an artist who had routinely teased out his originality as colorist by painting floral still lifes: from the mixed arrangements he made by the dozens in Paris to update his lackluster Dutch palette, to the pared-down, single-flower motifs he undertook in Arles that cleared the way for exploiting the rich potential of suggestive color. An artist deeply appreciative of nature, he knew that “flowers wilt quickly and it’s a matter of doing the whole thing in one go,” and he did not skimp when it came to tracing the lively arabesques of the irises’ sword–like leaves or the manifold petals of the distinctive Roses de Provence (known as the “hundred-petaled rose”).

The bouquets took shape in swift and almost seamless succession. Van Gogh paused only once, when he shifted his focus from irises to roses. It was at this juncture—after six days of silence—that he sent a progress report to his brother Theo, on May 11, 1890. Leading off with current news, he briefly mentioned “a canvas of roses” (so vaguely as to fit either version) and then backtracked from there, elaborating on the color schemes and effects of the two Irises, which he had already resolved. On May 13, he wrote Theo that he had “just finished” the second Roses.

Three days later, Van Gogh checked himself out of the asylum, bringing his Provençal sojourn to a close, having completed in a spirited bid against time, a capstone series—or coda—to his staggering achievement of a little more than two years, an enterprise he described as a “revelation of color.” Left behind to dry, the paintings were sent to him in Auvers, arriving in late June, a month before he died. They were dispersed by the following spring, and have not been seen together since. Like their group dynamic, the colors and effects he had intended are no longer intact, owing to his use of highly light-sensitive red lake pigments. In turn, the violet irises are nearly blue, the pink roses almost white. The carefully plotted color relationships (within and between the works), the integrity of various details, and the intensity of overall expression have been lost in the balance. Never has Van Gogh’s observation “paintings fade like flowers” been more compelling.

Despite these casualties—which are endemic to Van Gogh’s mature work as a whole, given his penchant for working in series and bright red lakes—the pictures were invested with enough wall power to hold their own. (The two in the Metropolitan’s collection had held a place on the walls of his mother’s house until her death in 1907; by then, the once-pink roses that had hung in her vestibule, were described as “white.”)

The Museum’s initiative in reuniting the group of four paintings has been the stimulus for new technical and documentary investigations, undertaken in close collaboration with researchers, conservators, and scientists at the lending institutions. These findings are introduced in the exhibition, which includes digital color reconstructions, based on extensive analysis and comparative study. The installation presents the paintings in the order in which they were realized, and in frames adapted from the artist’s profile but designed to be unobtrusive, so that the unfolding logic and verve of Van Gogh’s four-part painting campaign may be fully appreciated.

Exhibition Credits and Related Programs

Van Gogh: Irises and Roses is organized by Susan Alyson Stein, Engelhard Curator of Nineteenth-Century European Painting in the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of European Paintings. Charlotte Hale, Conservator in the Department of Paintings Conservation, directed the technical research and analysis undertaken in conjunction with the project.

Gods and Heroes: Masterpieces from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris

Portland Art Museum JUN 13 – SEP 13, 2015

This rich overview of masterpieces from the École des Beaux-Arts—the original school of fine arts in Paris and a repository for work by Europe’s most renowned artists since the seventeenth century—includes approximately 140 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper dating from antiquity through the nineteenth century.

The exhibition focuses on epic themes such as courage, sacrifice, and death, as well as the ways that changing political and philosophical systems affected the choice and execution of these subjects. Among the featured works are paintings by Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Anne-Louis Girodet, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres; sculpture by Antoine-Louis Barye, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Jean-Antoine Houdon, and François Rude; and drawings by Simon Vouet, Antoine-Jean Gros, and Théodore Géricault.

Pierre-Charles Jombert. Apollo and Diana Killing the Children of Niobe, 1772. Oil on canvas. 53 3/16 x 44 1/8 inches. École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (PRP 17). Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

David d'Angers. Pain, 1811. Plaster. 26 5/8 x 12 x 10 1/4 inches. École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (TES 4). Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Achilles Receiving the Ambassadors of Agamemnon, 1801. Oil on canvas. 44 1/2 x 57 1/2 inches. École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (PRP 40). Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Jeroboam Sacrificing to the Idols, 1752. Oil on canvas. 43 7/8 x 56 1/2 inches. École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (PRP 7). Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Jacques Phillippe Joseph de Saint Quentin. Death of Socrates, 1762. Oil on canvas. 43 7/8 x 54 1/2 inches. École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (PRP 10). Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Achille-Etna Michallon. Democritus and Abderites, 1817. Oil on canvas. 45 1/4 x 57 1/16 inches. École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (PRP 56). Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Torso (Painted Half-Figure), 1800. Oil on canvas. 40 3/16 x 31 1/2 inches. École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (Torse 15). Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Jacques-Louis David. Erasistratus Discovers the Cause of Antiochus's Disease, 1774. Oil on canvas. 47 1/4 x 61 inches. École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (PRP 18). Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Michel-Martin Drolling. The Wrath of Achilles, 1810. Oil on canvas. 44 1/2 x 57 1/2 inches. École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (PRP 48). Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Disdain, 1850. Oil on canvas. 21 5/8 x 18 1/8 inches. École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (TEP 28). Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Gods and Heroes offers unique insight into the development of an aesthetic ideology that fostered some of western art’s most magnificent achievements. The epic deeds of gods and heroes, enshrined in the Bible and the works of Homer, were the primary narratives from which both aspiring and established academicians drew their inspiration. At the École, learning how to construct persuasive and powerful paintings from carefully delineated anatomy, expressive faces, and convincing architectural and landscape settings was understood to be the route to success and recognition. The ideology was rooted in the study of the idealized human form as envisioned in classical art. The exhibition features extraordinary works that served as models for the students, including ancient sculpture, a drawing by Raphael, and prints by Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt van Rijn.



The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue with a major essay by Guest Curator Emmanuel Schwartz, Conservateur du patrimoine/Research Curator at the École des Beaux-Arts, as well as several other major contributions.

Gods and Heroes: Masterpieces from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris is organized by the American Federation of Arts and the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and host curated by Dawson Carr, Ph.D., The Janet and Richard Geary Curator of European Art.

Auerbach, Chagall, Gertler, Grosz, and Soutine: Masterpieces from the Ben Uri Collection

Out Of Chaos; Ben Uri: 100 Years in London running from 2 July to 13 December 201 in Somerset House: 

In this exhibition, a group of rarely seen masterworks by mainly Jewish émigré artists will go on show from the Ben Uri collection, including works by the first Jewish Royal Academician, Solomon Hart, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, First World War poet Isaac Rosenberg, Jacob Epstein, Max Liebermann, Josef Herman, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and R B Kitaj.

A group of important recent acquisitions will also be shown including

 La Soubrette (1933), a rare portrait – probably the finest in the UK – by Chaïm Soutine, acquired in 2012; 

The Interrogation (1938) by George Grosz, acquired in 2010; 

Chagall’s rare and rediscovered response to the Holocaust, Apocalypse en Lilas, Capriccio (1945), acquired in 2010, 

and Mornington Crescent, Summer Morning II (2004) by Frank Auerbach, acquired in 2006.
 

The exhibition also reflects the prominence of women artists in the Ben Uri Collection since its foundation, including Clare Winsten (1894–1989), Lily Delissa Joseph (1863–1940) Amy Drucker (1873–1951), Chana Kowalska (1907–1941), Irma Stern (1894–1966), Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959), Clara Klinghoffer (1900–1970), Dorothy Bohm (1924– ) and Sophie Robertson (1988–).

Tate will make a rare loan of 

Mark Gertler’s most celebrated work, Merry-Go-Round (1916), 

his visceral reaction to the First World War. Presented to the collection of the Ben Uri Art Society, by Gertler’s dealers, the Leicester Galleries, in 1944, six years after the artist’s death, the painting was sold to the Tate in 1984, where it has remained ever since.

More images:

(MarkGertler, Rabbi and Rabbitzin, 1914, watercolour and pencil on paper, 82.5 x 71cm, Ben Uri Collection)

Torn Poster, London by Dorothy Bohm

Ben Uri Gallery and Museum began life as an Art Society founded by émigré Jews in Whitechapel’s ghetto in July 1915. It is the oldest Jewish cultural organisation in the UK. It is the only art museum in Europe whose raison d’etre is to address universal issues of identity and migration through the visual arts. Its collection of more than 1,300 works by 392 artists from 35 countries continues to grow and principally reflects the work, lives and contribution of British and European artists of Jewish descent, interpreted within the context of 20th and 21st century art history, politics and society.

Out of Chaos is co-curated by Rachel Dickson, Head of Curatorial Services, and Sarah MacDougall, Eva Frankfurther Research and Curatorial Fellow for the Study of Émigré Artists / Head of Collections at the Ben Uri Gallery. Two extensive catalogues will be published to coincide with the exhibition including texts by Shulamith Behr, Richard Cork, Rachel Dickson, David Herman, James Hyman, Tony Kushner, Sarah MacDougall, David Mazower, Kathrin Pieren and Brian Sewell. 

Night Vision: Nocturnes in American Art

The first major museum survey dedicated to scenes of night in American art from 1860 to 1960—fromt he introduction of electricity to the dawn of the Space Age—opened at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) this June. 

Night Vision: Nocturnes in American Art explores the critical importance of nocturnal imagery in the development of modern art by bringingtogether90worksin a range of media—including paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, and sculptures—created by such leading American artists as Ansel Adams, Charles Burchfield, Winslow Homer, Lee Krasner, Georgia O’Keeffe, Albert Ryder, John Sloan, Edward Steichen, and Andrew Wyeth, among others.

Featuring works from the BCMA’s robust collection of American art,as well as loans from 30 prestigious public and private collections across the United States—such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Phillips Collection; Philadelphia Museum of Art;a nd Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—the exhibition provides visitors with an opportunity to consider transformations in American art across generations and traditional stylistic confines. 

Organized by BCMA Curator Joachim Homann, and on view at Bowdoin from June 27 through October 18, 2015, Night Vision demonstrates the popularity of the theme with American artists of diverse aesthetic convictions and investigate show they responded to the unique challenges of picturing the night. 

The works featured in Night Vision reflect the diversityof subject matters that attracted artists to night scenes—ranging from reflections of moonlight on ocean waves, to encounters in electrified urban streets,to firework celebrations. For somemid-19th-centuryartists, such as Albert Bierstadt, paintings of the night offered the compelling artistic challenge of representing the natural elements of clouds, moon, and sky when shrouded in darkness, while at the same time providing rich opportunities for the symbolic use of light. 

Following the industrial revolution and emergence of electricity in thelate19thand early 20th centuries, artists such as Winslow Homer, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Charles Burchfield began to use nighttime conditions as a platform to disregard the conventions of naturalism in favor of new techniques, motifs, and artistic ideas. Across the range of works presented in Night Vision, visitors will see how reduced visual information and an altered perception in the dark tested artists’ ability to render shadow, light, and form.This lack of light ultimately resulted in less illustrative scenes and transformedt he night into an arena for stylistic experimentation and the rise of abstraction in the early-mid-20thcentury.

American artists during this period perceived the night as a catalyst for creative inspiration, expressive possibilities, and picturing nature’s infinite mystery,” said Homann. “When they claimed the moon for themselves, these artists occupied the night as a time of heightened observation and self-reflection—allowing them to become invisible, turn inward, and express personal truths in unique and poetic ways. Bringing this collection of nocturnes together for the first time, Night Vision seeks to expand the broader discourse on American art, the rise of modernism, and the value of art as personal expression.”

Night Vision is organized chronologically beginning with landscape artists’ visions of moonlight, moving to early Modernists’ experimental representations of electrified evenings,and concluding with interpretations of the night by American realists and abstract artists. Notable works in the exhibition include: 

•Winslow Homer’s The Fountains at Night, World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), an oil painting created in response to the 1893 World’s Fairin Chicago.The work depicts Frederick MacMonnies’ Columbian Fountain, a monumental neoclassical sculpture illuminated by electricity, helping to promote the United States as a leader in art, science, and industry. 

•Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Nicodemus Visiting Jesus (1899), the artist’s renowned painting of a moment in the Gospel of John during which the Pharisee Nicodemus listens intently to Christ’s teachings. Tanner, a master of the religious nocturne, uses light in subtle variations to create a spiritual aura, enhancing the message of the biblical subject matter. This work was one of several paintings Tanner created during his two trips to Jerusalem between 1897 and 1899, after expatriating himself from the United States due to racial discrimination. It was bought by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, of which the artist was the first African American graduate.

.•George Bellows’s Outside the Big Tent (1912), one of two oil paintings the artist created documenting a benefitcircus organized by hiswife, Emma, in her hometown of Montclair, New Jersey.Bellows submitted this work’s companion painting, The Circus, to the Armory Show in1913, where it received high praise for its drama and evocative quality. Both Outside the Big Tent and The Circusexhibit the artist’s signature dynamic brushwork, and predilection for painting spontaneous movement and action.

 •Charles Burchfield’s The Night Wind (1918), a haunting watercolor portraying the unsettling effects of darkness and the elements on the human experience as clouds and snow drifts morph into monstrous shapes overtaking a homestead. 

New York Night , 1928-1929 Georgia O'Keeffe

Radiator Building — Night, New York by Georgia O'Keeffe 1927 

•Georgia O’Keeffe’s New York Night (1927), a prime example of the artist’s now signature modernist style—as well as her shift from depicting nature’s landscapes to urban scenery—developed during her time in New York City between 1926 and 1929. A particularly popular subject during this period, New York skyscrapers were perceived as a symbol of technological innovation. O’Keeffe’s renderings were created based on observations of the height and distance of various structures, as well as the careful study of nighttime conditionsand the interplay between light, wind, and the moon. New York Night is one of several paintings that captured the view from the artist’s apartment at the Shelton Hotel. 

 •Andrew Wyeth’s Night Hauling(1944), an unsettling depiction of a nocturnal lobster thief at work just as the threat of air raids duringWorld War II made the night a time of anxiety. The painting testifies to Wyeth’s ability to record an unusual light conditionwith great accuracy—phosphorescent algae growing in seawater. 

•Beauford Delaney’s Untitled (Jazz Club) (c. 1950), one of the artist’s depictions of Harlem’s vibrant jazz scene early in his career. During the 1940s and 50s, Delaney’s work focused on portraits, modernist interiors, and street scenes, which he rendered using impasto and large areas of saturated color. It was during this time that he forged close connections with Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Al Hirschfeld, whose work influenced his own artistic sensibility.

Night Vision is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, which includes a lead essay by Joachim Homannon the allure of the night for modern artists from Georgia O’Keeffe to Lee Krasner.C ontributions by Linda Docherty, Associate Professor Emerita of Art History; Alexander Nemerov, Professor of Art and Art History, Stanford University; Avis Berman, art historian and curator, New York; and Daniel Bosch, poet and faculty member, Emory University, explore aspects of American night scenes, such as the nighttime celebration of the Fourth of July, the symbolism of the moon, urban nightlife, and visual images of the night invoked in poetry of the period.

More images here

High Museum of Art Premieres Major U.S. Exhibition of Alex Katz Landscapes

The High Museum of Art presents a major exhibition of 60 works created between 1954 and 2013 by internationally acclaimed American artist Alex Katz, including 15 monumental landscape paintings to be displayed publicly together for the first time. “Alex Katz, This Is Now” is one of the largest exhibitions focused on the artist’s landscapes in almost 20 years. The High is the sole U.S. venue for the exhibition, which will also tour to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

On view from June 21 to Sept. 6, 2015, the exhibition traces Katz’s unique artistic treatment of the landscape throughout the trajectory of his career, from his 1950s collages that use the environment as a setting for the human figure, to the artist’s later works, which illustrate Katz’s shift to landscape as the dominant subject. Approximately one third of the paintings featured in the exhibition were created by Katz within the last decade, offering visitors an opportunity to view the artist’s contemporary works alongside early examples from his career.

“The works in ‘This Is Now’ reveal the absolute clarity and power of Katz’s vision, which has enabled his work to stand out among his contemporaries since the 1950s as new art movements were introduced,” said Michael Rooks, Wieland Family curator of modern and contemporary art at the High. “Today, at the age of 87, Katz seems as young as any emerging artist. He paints with gutsiness and a personal resolve that has driven his practice for six decades, but which has become increasingly accelerated in recent years, reflecting a uniquely American boldness and steadfastness of purpose.”

“We are delighted to build on the High’s commitment to engage our audiences with the work of living artists and to provide a platform for such a major figure in American art,” said Michael E. Shapiro, Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr. director of the High.

Katz utilizes a signature shorthand of rapid paint-handling to convey essential, abridged imagery, which is even more urgent and powerful in the landscapes of his late career. “This Is Now” places particular focus on what Katz calls his “environmental paintings.” These works, in monumental size and scale, engulf viewers with their expansive, painterly surfaces that depict moments of intense observation in the landscape—what Katz describes as “flashes” of perception or “quick things passing.”

In these paintings, images are often cropped and lack a specific point of spatial reference, such as a horizon line, thus inviting a contemplative experience and generating the feeling of immersion in Katz’s open-ended pictorial space. Works in “This Is Now” demonstrate the very deliberate choices that Katz makes to translate the temporal nature of “quick things passing” into keenly observed and powerfully felt moments of perception—when the understanding of visual information and the construction of one’s relationship to it happen simultaneously.

Among the 15 monumental landscape paintings featured in the exhibition are two recent acquisitions from the High’s collection that exemplify Katz’s unique style: 

“Winter Landscape 2” (2007) and 

“Twilight” (1988). 

“Winter Landscape 2” depicts a stand of trees that have shed their leaves, which are set against a cool, snowy background.  In the galleries, the painting is complemented by works from Katz’s “January” series, which incorporate the same composition, demonstrating Katz’s repeated return to subjects and specific imagery. “Twilight” features small slivers of a moonlit sky as seen through the top of a grove of shadowy fir trees.

Other significant works in the exhibition include:

• “10:30 am” (2006) – Elements of this large-scale work demonstrate what Katz calls “environmental” painting. No horizon line or ground plane is indicated in the composition. Instead, it provides a vast, indefinable pictorial space that viewers are invited to enter. A series of tree trunks are rhythmically located across the surface of the painting, while an allover pattern of leaves provides a counterpoint.

• “Blue Umbrella #2” (1972) – Perhaps Katz’s best-known image, painted of his wife Ada beneath an umbrella, this work is an early example of Katz’s use of the environment as a setting for the figure.

• “7:45pm Monday, 7:45pm Tuesday, 7:45pm Wednesday, 7:45pm Thursday” (1998) – One of Katz’s largest paintings, the work consists of four large panels and depicts four separate moments of the same setting at dusk.

Fundamental to his artistic practice, Katz has cited landscape as “a reason to devote my life to painting.” Upon Katz’s graduation from The Cooper Union in 1949, he began studying at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where he was exposed to painting en plein air. That experience was pivotal in his development as an artist, and landscape painting has remained a fundamental aspect of his practice through subsequent decades.

In the late 1950s, Katz invented a new mode of painting, radically departing from the mainstream American art of the time. Working in a style that became his signature— characterized by the artist’s fixed concentration on a central subject, typically isolated against a monochromatic ground, or landscape—Katz created representational paintings that challenged the New York School’s critical authority, which championed the dominance of non-objective, abstract painting at the time. His paintings corresponded directly to the external appearance of the people and places around him—what American Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman called “object matter.”

Katz applied a renewed focus on landscape as a central theme in his work in the 1980s. He began to produce his monumental paintings, stripping away unnecessary information and representing his subjects in a way that is as much about the essence of form as it is about light, time, and the appearance of the world around him.

Accompanying “This Is Now” is a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Rooks, art critic Margaret Graham, and artist David Salle, as well as poems by John Godfrey and Vincent Katz, the artist’s son. 

Alex Katz, Sunset 5, 2008 , oil on linen, 274.3 cm x 487.7 cm/ 9' x 16' © Pace Wildenstein- 22nd St.

Alex Katz’s “My Mother’s Dream” (1998)
 
About Alex Katz

Alex Katz (born Brooklyn, N.Y., 1927) is represented in more than 100 museums worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Tate Gallery, London; the Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others. Katz has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions around the world since 1951.

Setting out as a young painter in the 1950s, Katz immersed himself in the art world of New York, then populated with the larger-than-life figures of Abstract Expressionism to whom most artists of his generation aspired to emulate. However, in spite of the preeminence of that movement, Katz took a separate path that represented a new direction in painting. Inspired by the open structure of Jackson Pollock’s allover paintings, Katz made the radical decision to apply Pollock’s formal framework to representational painting, employing the idea of the color field as environmental space between and among the things that populated his canvases.

Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954, and since that time has produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints. His earliest work took inspiration from various aspects of mid-century American culture and society, including television, film and advertising, and over the past five-and-a-half decades he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life. Utilizing characteristically wide brushstrokes, large swaths of color, and refined compositions, Katz created what art historian Robert Storr called "a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation."

Bruce Museum Greenwich CT: Seven Deadly Sins Exhibition Part of Collaboration among Area Museums

The galleries of the Bruce Museum will be bursting with pride this summer, and into falwith the exhibition The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride  June 27 through October 18, part of a groundbreaking series of area exhibitions exploring the Seven Deadly Sins. Presented by seven members of the Fairfield/Westchester Museum Alliance (FWMA), the Seven Deadly Sins exhibitions represent the group’s first ever collaborative effort.

Other area exhibitions in the Seven Deadly SinsFWMA collaboration include: •Lust, open now through July 26, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art•Seven Deadly Sins: Wrath –Force of Nature, open now through September 7, Wave Hill•Envy, An Installation by Adrien Broom, open now through September 26, Hudson River Museum•Emilie Clark: The Delicacy of Decomposition, exploring Gluttony, opening July 12 (through September 6), Katonah Museum of Art•Greed, GOLD, opening July 12 (through October 11), Neuberger Museum of Art•Sloth, opening July 19 (through October 18), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

“The Seven Deadly Sins have played a significant role in theology, literature and art since the Middle Ages,” says Susan Ball, Deputy Director of the Bruce Museum and a curator of the Bruce’se xhibition. 

“Pride, or superbia, represents the mother of all sins and the one from which all others arise –the root of a many-branched tree .It’s a fascinating,intriguing subject, and we’re delighted to be presenting it at the Bruce.” 

The Bruce Museum exhibition places the sin of Pride within a historical context, presenting nearly 50 works ranging from Dürer works on paper from as far back as 1498 to Fay Ku’s 2014 graphite and oil on mylar. Susan Ball and Co-Curator Amanda Skehan have selected paintings, engravings, etchings, lithographs, illustrated books, magazines, three-dimensional objects and more from private collections, galleries, and institutions that include Yale University Art Gallery, Minneapolis Institute of Art, National Gallery of Art, Princeton Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Clark Art Institute. 

The exhibition’s curators point out that the show is intended not only to put the sin of pride within a historical context, but also to encourage discussion, raisingquestions about the history of morality and moralizing.

“The debate about the definition of sinfulness in general and each specific transgression in particular has raged for centuries,” Ball says. “One might ask, at what point is the line between healthy self-esteem, or pride, and the sin of arrogant self-aggrandizement, or pridefulness, crossed?”

Hendrick Goltzius (Dutch, 1558-1617) after Cornelis van Haarlem (Dutch, 1562-1638) Phaeton from The Disgracers, 1588 Engraving Collection of The Hearn Family Trust Photograph by Paul Mutino 

Fay Ku (American, 1974-) Juno's Creatures, 2014Graphite and oil on mylar, 42 x 30 in. Courtesy of the artist and Claire Oliver Gallery, New York

  

Jan Pietersz Saenredam (Dutch, 1565-1607) after Abraham Bloemaert (Dutch, 1564-1651)Temptation of Man, from The History of Adam and Eve, 1604EngravingCollection of The Hearn Family Trust Photograph by Paul Mutino

Honoré Daumier (French, 1808–1879)Mlle. Etienne-Joconde-Cunégonde-Bécassin de Constitutionnel..., 1834 Lithograph, 17 7/8 x 14 in. David Tunick, Inc. New York Photograph courtesy of David Tunick, Inc. New York

Gabriel Schachinger (1850-1912 )Sweet Reflections, 1886 Oil on canvas, 51 x 31 in. Woodmere Art Museum: Bequest of Charles Knox Smith Photograph by Rick Echelmeyer