GOUCHER COLLECTS:
Living with Art
Red Grooms (American, b. 1937) Boy on a Cold Day, 1958 Oil on canvas 27 x 27 inches Signed with additional information on verso Gift of Ethel Steur Epstein ’23 in 1960
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To everyone who made this exhibition possible, I offer my deepest gratitude. My first thanks go to Toni Young ’67 whose long-term vision of what might be possible for the collection and Goucher College turned an idea into a reality. To Adam Siegel, director of development, for his unwavering support and guidance throughout the whole planning and execution phases, and for being my main go-to-person for everything. To Margaret-Ann Radford-Wedemeyer, former assistant vice-president for advancement, who helped to get the ball rolling on this project when it was in its initial stages. To the Office of Advancement, especially the tireless efforts of Trishana Bowden, vice president of advancement, in providing me entrée and introductions to our alumnae/i. To the Art and Art History Department for supporting me in this effort, especially professors April Oettinger and Gail Husch, for brainstorming ideas, proofreading essays, and countless words of encouragement. To Laura Amussen, director of the Silber and Rosenberg Galleries, whose help in and support of this project was amazing and continuous. To Ben Sugerman, Ariel Foster ’16, Ben Bernstein ’16, Abby Jones ’17, Sara Kattler-Gold ’17, Kari DeVault ’16, and Sibilla Maiarelli ’18 for all of their help in preparing and hanging the show. To the Office of Communications, especially Ayumi Yasuda and Angie Cochrun, for all of their work in creating the beautiful catalogue and print information, and for their work in promoting the exhibition. To Ed Worteck and Ben Bernstein ’16 for photographing the collection pieces. To Facilities Management and Campus Security, thank you for your generous cooperation and for being amenable to the additional work this project caused. To Provost Leslie Lewis for her enthusiastic support and guidance. To President José Bowen for allowing me this opportunity and taking a chance on my ideas. Finally and most importantly, this exhibition would not be possible without the generous support of all of the lenders who were kind enough to open up their homes and their collections to Goucher and to trust Goucher with some of their treasured possessions. Thank you! Sonja Klein Sugerman Art and Artifact Collection Curator
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Theodoros Stamos (American/Greek, 1922-1997) Statis I, circa 1960 Oil on canvas 48 x 48 inches Signed lower left, titled on the reverse Gift of Robert and Jane Meyerhoff ’45 in 1965
WORKS ON VIEW in this exhibition are from the Goucher Art Collection as well as the following generous lenders: Kimara Ahnert ’91 Ethel Weber Berney ’46 Frieda Kahn Bradlow ’54 A. Will Brown ’10 Frona Brown ’65 and Beryl Rosenstein Constance Caplan ’57 Suzanne Fineman Cohen ’56 Yvonne Owens Everett ’73 Julia Gelfand ’75 and David Lang Beth Himmelstein Goldsmith ’72, M.Ed. ’73 Robert Haber P ’15, P ’17 Gloria Hall MAHP ’15 Nancy Hubbard Fern Karesh Hurst ’68 Miriam Brown Hutchins ’73 and Argin Hutchins Mary Hyman ’71 Rodica Isaila Johnson ’72 Miriam Katowitz ’73 and Arthur Radin Ruth Shapiro Lenrow ’74 and Jay Lenrow Charlotte Silberstein Lichtenberg ’49* and Joseph Lichtenberg Susan Kraft P ’15 and Don Michaels P ’15 Louise Rorer Rosett ’67, P ’92 and Walter Rosett P ’92 Jean Flah Silber ’54 and Sidney Silber* Ann-Carter Kennedy Stonesifer ’59 Barbara Toll ’67 Muriel Weisberg Silverstein ’47 Jamila and Philip Weintraub P ’17 Toni Perlman Young ’67, P ’98 and Stuart B. Young P ’98*
*deceased
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ABOUT THE ART AND ARTIFACT COLLECTION The Art and Artifact Collection at Goucher dates to the founding of the college in 1885, when Dr. John Franklin Goucher donated pieces from his personal collection for the benefit of students. The purpose of Goucher’s Art and Artifact Collection, which now numbers more than 1,000 pieces, has always been twofold: to adorn college buildings and grounds with art, and to serve as a teaching tool. Over the years, the college has purchased some items for its collection, but the majority of pieces have been gifts from alumnae/i and other generous donors. During your visit to the college, we hope you are able to enjoy some of the additional pieces from the collection on view in our public spaces, including our most recent gift of thirteen outdoor sculptures.
ABOUT GOUCHER COLLECTS Great art collections represent the passion, expertise, and commitment of their owners. Now, for the first time, Goucher College and its Board of Trustees have invited art-collecting alumnae/i, parents, and friends to share that passion. These generous lenders have offered exemplary works from their private collections in order to share the joy and inspiration they find in the art they love. Goucher Collects, on view in the Silber gallery from Alumnae/i Weekend through Commencement, features works drawn from Goucher’s Art and Artifact Collection as well as from individual collections. Teaching through art is central to the mission of the college’s collection, and this exhibition highlights a broad history of art as well as the importance and pleasure of collecting.
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Arthur Rothstein (American, 1915-1985) No. 2, Girl at Gee’s Bend, Alabama, 1937 Gelatin Silver Print 11 x 14 inches Signed Edition 50/50 Gift of Elizabeth Solomon ’68 in 1986
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Maurice de Vlaminck (French, 1876-1958) Landscape with River on a Cloudy Day, circa 1870 Oil on canvas 13 x 16 inches Signed lower left Gift of Ethel Steur Epstein ’23 in 1957
ART COLLECTING: A SHORT HISTORY What drives someone to collect those particular objects we have come to designate as art, objects whose meaning and purpose lie somewhere beyond practical use? There are as many reasons as there are collectors: to understand one’s own history; to explore the beliefs and aspirations of other times and places; to surround oneself with objects of beauty, of inspiration, of challenge, and disquiet; to create a legacy for a wider audience. Art collecting has a long and storied tradition, dating to ancient Egypt, Babylonia, China, and India, as arrays of precious objects and artworks stored in temples and tombs (although these had ritual rather than primarily aesthetic functions) as well as the palaces and treasuries of kings. In Hellenistic Greece, a taste for creating and collecting art for its own sake truly began, and with the rise of Rome, art collecting came into its own. As the Roman Empire expanded, Greek cities were plundered of their artwork. Wealthy Romans formed collections of Greek sculptures and paintings, and commissioned copies to be made if the originals were beyond their reach. During the Middle Ages, monasteries and churches became the main repositories of liturgical and sacred objects, and although ancient works were not collected per se, a wide array of classical fragments—spoglia— were embedded, “recycled” in effect, in the masonry of ecclesiastical and palace architecture. In the Renaissance and after, kings, princes, and other men and women of power and influence across Europe were avid collectors—think of the Medici Family in Florence and the Gonzaga Family in Mantua or, in the 17th-century, the Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin of France. European royalty commissioned famous artists to paint their portraits, to decorate the ceilings of their magnificent palaces, and to adorn their gardens with sculpture—consider Louis XIV, whose palace at Versailles continues to draw people to this day. Through the 18th-and-19th-centuries, the social and economic background of collectors changed. Nobility still commissioned artists to create works for their estates, but with expanding exhibition opportunities and a growing network of art dealers, non-aristocratic collectors were able to form important collections. At the same time, many of Europe’s great private collections were opened to the public, and aristocrats began to donate their holdings to museums. In the 19th-century, wealthy industrialists supplanted aristocrats as major collectors, with Americans such as J.P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Henry and Arabella Huntington, playing significant roles. They, too, amassed private collections, many of which were donated to public museums.
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By the 20th-century, anyone who chose to could be a collector, from those with vast fortunes to those with modest incomes, for example, Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, pioneering collectors of minimalist and conceptual art. Peggy Guggenheim, one of the best-known collectors of the early 20th-century, used her inheritance to support first the Parisian avant-garde and then abstract expressionists. Her impressive collection is now a private museum in Venice, Italy. A notable example from the Baltimore area is, of course, the Cone sisters, who in the early 20th-century collected works by Picasso, Matisse and some of their contemporaries. The Baltimore Museum of Art became the beneficiary of their life-long love of art. Key to the Cone sisters’ collecting was their dedication to living artists. The sisters developed relationships with these artists—in some ways akin to the patron relationships of the Renaissance—relationships whose collaborative nature is apparent in the sisters’ correspondence with the artists they supported and whose work inspired them. We have asked some of the lenders to Goucher Collects to share with you why they, too, caught this passion for collecting. We have asked what drew them to the particular works they sought out and brought home, and we are very grateful to them for their stories of these “living” collections. Sonja Klein Sugerman Art and Artifact Collection Curator
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Carlos Alfonzo (Cuban, 1950 - 1991) Ballet I, 1988 Gouache on Paper 30 x 44 inches Signed lower left Gift of Barbara Greene ’64 in 1989
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THE CONCEPT OF COLLECTING IS TO SURROUND YOURSELF WITH THINGS YOU LOVE, THINGS THAT INSPIRE OR TEACH YOU. — Toni Young, Class of 1967
ON COLLECTING: THOUGHTS BY SOME OF OUR LENDERS TONI YOUNG, CLASS OF 1967
Before I married Stuart, I was what you might call an art enthusiast. I loved to paint, draw, and work with clay. I thought, and still think, of myself as a creative person. At Goucher, I enjoyed my art history course. I loved to visit museums and admire great art, but I never thought of owning art. Stuart was a collector who loved to visit the New York art galleries and kept up with the contemporary art scene. On one of our first days of gallery hopping, we were enjoying a show, when he said, “Come here and look at this drawing. Do you like it?”
“Very much,” I answered
“Could you live with it?”
“Could you live without it?” I quickly responded
“Sure, but that’s not the question,” he explained, “If you love something and you can afford it, there is no reason to live without it.” Some people think collecting is only for the wealthy. We never believed that. There’s always a print, a study for a larger work, or a small painting for sale. If you go to a show of a new artist and you “trust your eye” you can get a good price. There’s also bartering. If you know an artist, you can exchange a skill of yours or something you own for an original work of art. Often people would ask us if a work of art was worth what the gallery was asking. “If you love it and can afford it then you should buy it,” we would advise them. “Don’t buy it expecting to make a lot of money; don’t buy it if it’s too much of a stretch for your budget.” Never let an art dealer or a friend convince you that you have to own something if you don’t love it. You’ll regret it later on. The key is to buy what you love and what you can afford. The concept of collecting is to surround yourself with things you love, things that inspire or teach you. Our collection focused on contemporary American Art. In 1960, Stuart began the collection with prints. Over the years, we changed our definition of who was American and expanded to earlier 20th-century American art as well as 21st-century art. Sometimes we ignored the rules that we had imposed, and bought art we loved in other countries we visited.
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There are probably as many approaches to collecting as there are collectors. Our favorite was to buy through galleries. We found the owners and managers of art galleries to be very knowledgeable and eager to share their insights and enthusiasm for their artists. We chose not to buy at auction. In recent years, art fairs have become the rage; it is a whole different scene. In our opinion, the crowds are too big, there’s too much to see and not enough time to really talk about the art. The intimacy of the gallery was, for us, a wonderful way to learn and build a collection. Beginning in 1960, Stuart read all the art magazines and The New York Times Arts Section religiously. He always had a copy of the newest Gallery Guide covered with handwritten notes about what we needed to see— usually 90% of everything listed. Every few weeks we would go to New York and spend the entire day, with only a very short lunch break, going from gallery to gallery to gallery. We knew many of the gallery owners, and they would sit with us talking about the show and the artists in their galleries and in other galleries and museums. On some of these gallery days, we would buy something; many times we just enjoyed the day and learned a lot.
A small and delicate, yet lastingly direct book titled Confessions of a Poor Collector by Eugene M. Schwartz, found its way into my life in the winter of 2011. I was in the midst of graduate school in San Francisco studying Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts—a trying and exciting time. Schwartz published this book for the first time in 1970, but his words remain relevant today, and, strikingly, for me his ideas about art extend into the foreseeable future. Confessions is less a guide and more a manifesto that, as the title implies, approaches the subject of collecting from a pseudo-devotional, and certainly dedicated perspective; this is the attitude with which I try to conduct my own humble collecting activities. Before he passed away at the age of 68 in 1995, Schwartz, an advertising copywriter and author, became one of the foremost collectors of contemporary art in the United States, if not the world. His story is not dissimilar from that of Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, a now well-known New York City couple, a postman and a librarian, who spent every last dime on art, most of which is now in world-renowned museum collections, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. As a curator of contemporary art, it is important for me to note that my relationship with collecting is neither aspirational nor financial and I look to both Eugene Schwartz and the Vogels as examples of how and why to collect. My approach is to collect art that I am drawn to, that is, at least most of the time, reasonably within my reach, though sometimes
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A. WILL BROWN CLASS OF 2010
collecting an artwork is at the expense of other lifestyle choices. Distilling a central thematic or overarching strategy for my collection is not really possible and I find it of little interest to do so. Fittingly, the more I work with artists and institutions to make projects and exhibitions the less interested I am in overarching and thematic exhibitions, perhaps this is a contrarian streak, or more aptly it is my own anti-thematic as thematic approach. Either way, collecting raises just these sorts of questions and ideas for me as I continue to find and acquire work from artists I want to support and spend time with. There are two questions I ask myself before agreeing to terms with an artist or gallery: Does the work challenge my everyday ideas and assumptions about the world? Does this work hold a complexity or simplicity of form, concept, and execution that I can look at fresh every day and consider anew? Great art has to work on you, it takes time and energy; it requires active looking and thinking, humor and empathy, all of which is trained through sensitivity and deep-seated interest and commitment.
FRIEDA KAHN BRADLOW CLASS OF 1954
As townhouse owners, we wanted to cover our walls with art we loved. Even at 1950’s prices, we could not collect oil paintings. Starting with print galleries and art shows, we began an eclectic body of works ranging from contemporary artists to drypoint etchings from the 19th-century. In the years that followed, we became knowledgeable enough to buy at auction, often bidding against dealers. Invariably, we bought what we liked whether it was by established artists or young talent at street shows or art schools. For example, the suite of prints by Louise Nevelson, which I previously donated to Goucher, I found in a Madison Avenue Gallery, but located and bought them directly from the workshop where they were “pulled” under the artist’s supervision. In the late 1960’s, already avid fine print collectors, we went to a biennial exhibit of Japanese woodcuts at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. We had never seen anything like it as no gallery in New York carried them. I was enamored enough to locate galleries in Tokyo and Kyoto. In response to my request for works of particular artists, I was sent Polaroid photos and prices. Thus began a collection of woodcuts of exceptional beauty. Printmakers who have seen these works are astounded at their intricacy and complexity, in some cases involving as many as twelve woodblocks. After almost five decades, looking at them on our walls still gives me pleasure.
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Arthur Rothstein (American, 1915-1985) No. 3, Vernon Evans, migrant to Oregon from South Dakota, 1936 Gelatin Silver Print 11 x 14 inches Signed Edition 50/50 Gift of Elizabeth Solomon ’68 in 1986
THERE ARE TWO QUESTIONS I ASK MYSELF BEFORE AGREEING TO TERMS WITH AN ARTIST OR GALLERY: DOES THE WORK CHALLENGE MY EVERYDAY IDEAS AND ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE WORLD? DOES THIS WORK HOLD A COMPLEXITY OR SIMPLICITY OF FORM, CONCEPT, AND EXECUTION THAT I CAN LOOK AT FRESH EVERY DAY AND CONSIDER ANEW? GREAT ART HAS TO WORK ON YOU, IT TAKES TIME AND ENERGY; IT REQUIRES ACTIVE LOOKING AND THINKING, HUMOR AND EMPATHY. — A. Will Brown, Class of 2010
I first met Sidney in January 1955, and on our second date he took me out for an early dinner and then to visit the Maryland Institute, what is now the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Sid had spent many happy hours there studying studio art, both after school and occasionally on a Saturday. During his college years in Boston, he spent many Saturdays at Harvard (although he attended MIT, the other college in Cambridge), learning lithography and etching, but never attempted sculpture. He was constantly sketching and drawing and developed a real love of drawing. He was never without a pen and a slide rule in his pocket, whipping them out in an instant when he was working on a project or simply to make a point. In Boston, he was forever drawing while in museums or looking at architectural beauties on the street. In short, he loved art in its many manifestations but knew little of art history. So it was that when we built our house in a woodland area with many paths, we thought it would be fun to buy some small simple sculptures to place throughout. We married in October 1955, had three children by 1961, and the beginnings of a garden by 1962. We discovered a small art gallery in Georgetown run entirely by a group of sculptors called The Artists’ Mart with a small garden in the rear alive with sculptures of bear cubs, cats, pelicans, etc. and we were instantly enchanted! We bought several pieces from different artists whom we got to know and, believe it or not, they allowed us to purchase sculptures over time with no interest. Those were the beginnings of our sculpture garden and we still have three of them. At the same time, I began a yearlong course in art history at the Baltimore Museum of Art to qualify as a docent in the BMA’S first docent course in fall of 1961. There I discovered art of all kinds and Sid and I both became addicts, going to both great museums in Baltimore as well as art exhibits in nearby Washington, Philadelphia, and even Druid Hill Park. Sidney heard of a sculpture course being given at the BMA and signed up for it in the early 1960’s and discovered a new love: working with clay and stone. He studied studio sculpture for about 15 years following those introductory classes, and with the exception of two years in the mid-1960’s when we purchased several sculptures from a Danish artist during a trip to Copenhagen, we began our serious collecting in the late 1970’s. By now we had a large garden that could easily accommodate our growing collection. Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s we studied sculptors, sculptures, and traveled to sculpture gardens around the world and throughout the U.S. It was a great time to travel abroad and see great sculpture parks like Hakone in Japan, Louisiana in Denmark, Kroller Muller in the Netherlands, Chatsworth House in England, and more. Sid kept at his love of trying anything and everything he could, switching in his late 80’s to oil painting
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JEAN FLAH SILBER CLASS OF 1954
(for his old age he said) but still buying sculpture. The BMA Sculpture Gardens, given by two wonderful Baltimore families, was and still remains one of our cherished places to visit in Baltimore. In our travels throughout the U.S., we have visited college campuses where sculptures large and small are in evidence indoors and out, which led us to think about the Goucher campus. And the rest, as they say, is history…
FERN KARESH HURST CLASS OF 1968
I collect American paintings, generally ashcan and modernists, painters of the first half of the 20th-century, although lately I am moving into the 50’s through 70’s. I think it’s partially because of my background as a political science major and city planner that I like paintings of urban America, the nitty-grittyness of the Ashcan School, and paintings of popular culture before television (boxing, circuses, tent shows). Although the subject of my two works in the exhibition are not examples of the above, I acquired them because Arthur Dove is an exemplary American modernist, part of the Stieglitz circle, and perhaps America’s first abstract painter. I love the abstraction of the subject, and I love the fact that I have the study, which was purchased separately and after I acquired the oil.
BARBARA TOLL CLASS OF 1967
Why I have an art collection: Most art dealers have “atypical” collections. Ileana Sonnabend’s collection when shown at the Museum of Modern Art was a case in point. The exhibition had all the right names but not the works that one would expect. Although I never intended to become a collector, as a gallery owner there were many reasons I ended up owning art. Often, when a work didn’t sell, I bought it to shore up the artist. Sometimes I found myself telling clients to buy works, which they did, then sold and made a profit. After a while, I decided I would try to buy those things myself. For a long period, I limited the work I collected to drawings because I could afford them, plus I felt they contained the essence of an artist’s work. I have always looked at art formally and abstractly. What attracts me is an economy of means. Finally, I try to buy things that appeal to me that may have lasting value.
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We began collecting early American colored glass in 1982, to be exact. Close family friends introduced us to the art of collecting and taught us to always pay attention to the quality, uniqueness, and most importantly, the condition of the piece we’re considering. Our very first purchase was a sapphire blue Thistle candlestick from Pittsburgh, circa 1850. At the time, we lived on the 34th floor of a high-rise apartment building. Each time we would add a new piece to our window ledge, we would begin to enjoy the beauty of leaded glass when viewed through natural light. As we added more colors, such as amethyst, canary yellow, emerald green, electric blue, and fiery opalescent, we would be greeted by the beauty of their rich jewel tones each and every morning. Our collection has grown to more than 1,500+ pieces. The contagion rapidly spread to the collection of early American furniture, paintings, and decorative arts. We are honored to be “temporary” custodians of these glorious pieces that have been around for almost 200 years. Sharing their delicate forms and beautiful craftsmanship with our family, friends and now, the Goucher community, is one of our greatest joys.
Our approach to collecting is totally eclectic and undisciplined. We have purchased works on street corners, from galleries, from the artists, from the Brooklyn Academy of Music and other charity fund raisers, from wedding and other gifts, from parental legacies, from a dealer who was a good friend, from tax shelter leftovers, from Sotheby’s, from Christie’s, art shows, and many other places no longer recalled. Of course we display both Miriam’s and her mother’s needlepoint. We also like to purchase art on our vacations. We have purchased art in Europe, South Africa, China, Japan, Mexico, Turkey, and various states in the U.S. We have an ancient Chinese statue (a lokapola), Chinese calligraphy, Chinese and Koran wall hangings, Chinese porcelain, New York School prints, etchings, Japanese netsukes, Navaho blankets, works on paper, works in oil, watercolors, ceramics, a tapestry, etc. Our rules, though not always enforced, are: We should have fun buying it, one of us must really like it, we can’t be forced into bankruptcy because of the purchase, we must be willing to live with it the rest of our lives, and if possible, when we look at it we enjoy it both as art and a remembrance of the purchase. We rarely sell art (although one piece—an unloved one—was sold at Christie’s). We believe that if art hangs in the same place too long it fades into the woodwork so we try to rotate it somewhat. Sometimes our children like certain pieces, those of course end up in their homes. We live in our homes in Brooklyn and East Hampton, happily surrounded by the art, and visiting the pieces that have gone to our kids’ homes
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JAMILA AND PHILIP WEINTRAUB PARENTS - CLASS OF 2017
ART RADIN AND MIRIAM KATOWITZ CLASS OF 1972
LOUISE RORER ROSSETT CLASS OF 1967
When I enrolled at Goucher, I knew I wanted a liberal arts education which would include an exposure to art history and classical music. Although I had no background in either discipline, I believed a welleducated individual should be aware of the cultural history represented by the arts. I took two semesters of art history and two semesters of music and made my first trip to an art museum, The Walters Art Gallery. After graduation, my husband Walter and I lived in New York City. Walt had taken a few classes in making art as a child, but had no exposure to art history or art museums. We were both open to learning more. Although we were students who had to save up for the subway fare, we would visit art museums and window shop at some of the galleries. We never thought of entering a gallery however, as that was intimidating. It never occurred to us that someday we would be able to afford a modest collection. Ten years after graduation we made Albuquerque our home. New Mexico is a state with a strong art community and an appreciation for creative talent whether is originates in the native, Hispanic, or Anglo population. We enjoyed attending many arts and crafts festivals. In 1982, Walt and his partner decided to build a new office building. Each of them had a budget to purchase art for the walls of the new structure. We didn’t know where to begin. The interior designer (who happened to be my sister) introduced us to Lise Hoshour, owner of a contemporary gallery in Albuquerque. Lise brought in work by nationally prominent artists from New York and Chicago. It was our introduction to the world of galleries. Lise enjoyed educating gallery patrons, spending hours introducing the artist and his/ her work. She became our mentor. She told us about record keeping for the work and the artists we bought. She encouraged us to subscribe to art publications and to visit as many galleries and museum shows as possible to develop our “eye.” We started to attend all of the openings held at the Hoshour Gallery and soon began visiting other galleries and museums in whichever city we were visiting. We attended the Navy Pier show in Chicago several times as well as Art Basel in Switzerland. We were hooked. Today we are members of the Contemporary Art Society of New Mexico which sponsors monthly events at artist studios, galleries, and museums. It is difficult to define or describe our interests or likes other than abstract art. Beauty and color are important. This in no way limits us as we have found wonderful pieces that do not meet these criteria. A large portion of our art is from New Mexico artists, both prominent and newly emerging, in all media. Our collection also includes art made by artists who live and work in California, Chicago, New York, Kansas City, Colorado, Germany, and Spain. Our purchases are not an intellectual process. We don’t care about the projected investment return on a work. Rather, the piece must speak to us on an emotional level. An unexpected benefit to becoming involved in the art community has been the friendships we have formed with these wonderfully creative people.
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Marisol (nĂŠe Marisol Escobar) (French, b. 1930) Untitled #5, 1978 Colored Lithograph Edition 48/100 52 x 38 inches Signed, numbered, and dated bottom center Gift of Stanley de Lisser in 1981
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GLOSSARY OF ART-HISTORICAL PERIODS AND STYLES REPRESENTED IN GOUCHER COLLECTS (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER)
Abstract Expressionism—a term that came into common use circa 1950 to describe the non-geometric art that flourished in the United States in the wake of World War II. The crisis of war and its aftermath are key to understanding the concerns of the Abstract Expressionists. These young artists, troubled by man’s dark side and anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, wanted to express their concerns in a new art of meaning and substance. Early on, the Abstract Expressionists, in seeking a timeless and powerful subject matter, turned to primitive myth and archaic art for inspiration. Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and William Baziotes all looked to ancient or primitive cultures for expression. In 1947, Pollock developed a radical new technique, pouring and dripping thinned paint onto raw canvas laid on the ground (instead of traditional methods of painting in which pigment is applied by brush to primed, stretched canvas positioned on an easel). The paintings were entirely nonobjective. In their subject matter (or seeming lack of one), scale (huge), and technique (no brush, no stretcher bars, no easel), the works were shocking to many viewers. Wilhelm De Kooning, too, was developing his own version of a highly charged, gestural style, alternating between abstract work and powerful iconic figurative images. Other colleagues, including Lee Krasner and Franz Kline, were equally engaged in creating an art of dynamic gesture in which every inch of a picture is fully charged. For Abstract Expressionists, the authenticity or value of a work lay in its directness and immediacy of expression. American Impressionism—the French Impressionists, rejecting the academics’ devotion to invented subjects and meticulous technique, depicted landscapes and intimate scenes of everyday middle-class life using natural light, rapid brushwork, and a high-keyed palette. During the mid-1880s, as French Impressionism lost its radical edge, American collectors began to value the style, and more American artists began to experiment with it after absorbing academic
fundamentals. By the early 1890s, Impressionism was firmly established as a valid style of painting for American artists. Some were captivated by the energy of urban life, responding to the fragmented experience that marked the age in rapidly rendered vignettes. Many American artists worked in the Impressionist style into the 1920s, but innovation had long since waned. By 1910, the less genteel approach of urban realists known as the Ashcan School had emerged. American Social Realist Photography— American social realist photography refers to photographs that documented rural poverty during America’s Great Depression of the 1930s and 1940s. Photographers were commissioned by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to document rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers in an attempt to garner support for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The photographs were distributed free of charge to newspapers across the country and brought the plight of displaced farming communities to the public’s attention. The most famous images were those of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, whose black-and-white images of impoverished fruit-pickers in California became iconic symbols of the Great Depression. Art Nouveau—Art Nouveau is an international style in architecture and design that emerged in the 1890s and is characterized by sinuous lines and flowing organic shapes based on plant and other organic forms. This complex international style in architecture and design paralleled symbolism in fine art. Developed through the 1890s, it was brought to a wider audience by the 1900 Exposition Universelle. Key examples of Art Nouveau are Paris Metro station entrances by Hector Guimard; Tiffany glass; chair designs by Charles Rennie Mackinstosh and his Glasgow School of Art; and the book designs of Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Ricketts and followers such as Arthur Rackham. Art Nouveau flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century but was outdated by World War I.
Arts and Crafts Movement—The Arts and Crafts Movement emerged from the Pre-Raphaelite circle with the founding by William Morris of the design firm Morris and Co. in 1861. Morris recruited Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, and Edward Burne-Jones as artist-designers with the key principle of raising design to the level of art. Morris emphasized simple functional design without the excess ornament and historical imitation typical of Victorian styles. Wallpapers or fabrics were based on natural motifs, particularly plant forms treated as flat pattern. The Arts and Crafts movement is often seen as the starting point for modern design approaches, and was a key direct influence on the Aesthetic Movement and Art Nouveau. Ashcan School (the Eight)—A group of American painters formed in 1907, including Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and George Bellows (later). Ash-can or “kitchen sink style” did not have one specific unifying theme, rather it was a revolt against the current academic aestheticism and a determination to bring painting back into direct touch with everyday life. Baroque—Baroque was the dominant style in art and architecture of the 17th-century, characterized by self-confidence, dynamism and a realistic approach to depiction. Its dynamic movement, bold realism (giving viewers the impression they were witnessing an actual event), and direct emotional appeal were ideally suited to proclaiming the reinvigorated spirit of the Catholic Church. Although originating in Rome, Baroque was influential across Europe. It was also used to depict many non-religious themes and can be seen in portraits, still lifes as well as mythical subjects. Barbizon School—an important movement in French painting, the term refers to a group of painters who beginning in the 1820s settled in and around the French village of Barbizon near the Fontainebleau forest. Noted above all for their plein-air painting, Barbizon artists developed a
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remarkable naturalism, minutely observing natural settings. In so doing, they rejected many of the canons of academic art in their quest to establish a new and prosaic form of realist painting. Their paintings are mostly landscapes of plains, trees and forests, all rendered in a fluid style. Color Field—Later stages of Abstract Expressionism lay in the expressive potential of color. Rothko, Newman, and Still, for instance, created art based on simplified, large-format, color-dominated fields. The impulse was, in general, reflective and cerebral, with pictorial means simplified in order to create a kind of elemental impact. Rothko and Newman, among others, spoke of a goal to achieve the “sublime” rather than the “beautiful,” harkening back to Edmund Burke in a drive for the grand, heroic vision in opposition to a calming or comforting effect. Newman described his reductivism as one means of “… freeing ourselves of the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend… .” Rothko wanted his glowing, soft-edged rectangles of luminescent color to provoke in viewers a quasi-religious experience, even eliciting tears. As with Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists, large scale contributed to meaning; the viewer would be enveloped by the experience of the work. Rothko said, “I paint big to be intimate.” Conceptual Art—In the wake of Abstract Expressionism, a number of painters developed strategies that extended the life of painting while simultaneously pointing to its inevitable demise. Jasper Johns’s flags and targets were epistemological cul-de-sacs—the image they portrayed could not be separated from their material qualities, literally, as flag or target. Like his colleague Robert Rauschenberg, Johns revived concerns of the prewar avant-garde in a postwar context, but in a more conceptually provocative manner in his fusion of two previously antithetical paradigms, that of Duchamp’s readymade with notions of abstraction and the grid from Malevich and Constructivism. Slightly later, Frank Stella created paintings from programmatic arrangements of lines that radiated outward to determine the overall shape of the canvas; all compositional and expressive decision making had been suppressed in favor of the execution of an idea. Conceptual art can be—and can look like—almost anything. This is because, unlike a painter or sculptor who will think about how best they can express their idea using paint or sculptural materials and techniques, a conceptual
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artist uses whatever materials and whatever form is most appropriate to putting their idea across—this could be anything from a performance to a written description.
one thousand. Sets of pressed glass dishes were also made in the 1930s and 1940s, although these are generally referred to as “Depression Era Glass.”
Contemporary Art—The term contemporary art is loosely used to refer to art of the present day and of the relatively recent past, of an innovative or avant-garde nature.
Fauvism—is a term applied to work produced by a group of artists (most importantly Henri Matisse) from circa 1905 to 1910, characterized by strong, non-naturalistic color (often applied directly from the tube) and vigorous, loose brushwork. The name les fauves (‘the wild beasts’) was coined in 1905 by the critic Louis Vauxcelles in response to the work of Henri Matisse and André Derain.
Cubism—Cubism, one of the most influential visual art styles of the early 20th-century, was developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914, and soon adopted and modified by a variety of other painters and sculptors. The French art critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the term Cubism after seeing the landscapes Braque painted in 1908 at L’Estaque in emulation of Cézanne. Vauxcelles called the geometric forms in the highly abstracted works “cubes.” Other influences on early Cubism have been linked to Primitivism and non-Western sources. The stylization and distortion of Picasso’s groundbreaking Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Museum of Modern Art, New York), painted in 1907, came from African art. Cubist painters rejected traditional illusionistic techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening, all of which assumed one fixed point of view. They wanted instead to emphasize the dynamism of vision as well as the two-dimensionality of the canvas, reducing and fracturing objects and then realigning these within a shallow, relief-like space. Cubists also depicted multiple or contrasting points of view. Early American Modernism—was an artistic and cultural movement in the United States starting at the turn of the 20th-century with its core period between World War I and World War II. Numerous directions of American “modernism” did not result in one coherent style, but evoked the desire for experiment and artistic challenge, much it responding to avant-garde European trends. Early American Pressed Glass—Pressed glass, also referred to as pattern glass, was produced from 1850 to 1910 in the United States, although similar types of pressed glass were manufactured in Europe at the same time. The majority of American pressed glass was produced in the 1880s. Originally designed for everyday use, pressed glass was made to be both durable and attractive tableware. Producers made a variety of patterns to attract customers; these designs and their names were patented. The number of patterns made in extensive sets was probably close to
Hudson River School—is the collective name given to a number of 19th-century North American landscape painters who depicted scenes of natural beauty in areas that included the Hudson River Valley and the Catskill Mountains. Impressionism—developed in France by Paris-based artists in the 1860s and 1870s. French Impressionists, rejecting the academics’ devotion to invented subjects and meticulous technique, depicted landscapes and intimate scenes of everyday middle-class life using natural light, rapid brushwork, and a high-keyed palette. Rather than paint in a studio, Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by working quickly, in front of their subjects, in the open air (en plein air). Brushwork became rapid and broken into separate dabs in order to render the fleeting quality of light. Japanese Prints—The Ukiyo-e style of woodblock printing (“ukiyo” refers to the world of common people and “e” means picture) first emerged in the late 16th-century, usually depicted everyday life in the city of Kyoto. In the 18th-entury ukiyo-e became a popular art form, partly due to advances in woodblock printing techniques. Towards the end of the 19th-century and the beginning of the 20th-century, traditional ukiyo-e had been widely replaced by Western printing techniques like lithography and photomechanical printing machines. Beginning circa 1915, two new movements in printmaking came out of the ashes: the shin hanga “new prints” and the sosaku hanga “creative prints” movements. After World War II, print production soared again, and it was the American occupation force in Japan that placed large orders for shin hanga.
Modern Art—Prior to the 19th-century, artists were most often commissioned to make artwork by wealthy patrons, or institutions like the church. Much of this art depicted religious or mythological scenes that told stories and were intended to instruct the viewer. During the 19th-century, many artists started to make art about people, places, or ideas that interested them, and of which they had direct experience. Moving into the 20th-century, artists continued to challenge the notion that art must realistically depict the world and they began to experiment with non-traditional uses of color, shape, technique, and materials. Minimalism—An extreme form of abstract art developed in the U.S. in the 1960s. Minimalist artists believed that art should have its own reality and not be an imitation of some other thing. With minimalism, no attempt is made to represent an outside reality; the artist wants the viewer to respond only to what is in front of them. The medium, (or material) from which it is made, and the form of the work is the reality. Minimalist painter Frank Stella famously said about his paintings ‘What you see is what you see.’ Minimalism emerged in the late 1950s when artists such as Frank Stella, whose Black Paintings were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959, began to turn away from the gestural art of the previous generation. It flourished in the 1960s and 1970s with Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Robert Morris as the movement’s most important innovators. The development of minimalism is linked to that of conceptual art (which also flourished in the 1960s and 1970s). Both movements challenged the existing structures for making, disseminating, and viewing art and argued that the importance given to the art object was misplaced and led to a rigid and elitist art world that only the privileged few can afford to enjoy. Neo-Impressionism—Neo-impressionism is the name given to the work of Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and their followers who, inspired by optical theory, painted using tiny adjacent dabs of color to create the effect of light. Neo-impressionism is characterized by the use of the divisionist technique (often popularly but incorrectly called pointillism, a term Paul Signac repudiated). Divisionism attempted to put Impressionist painting of light and color on a scientific basis by using more orderly paint strokes, with particular emphasis on the effect of adjacent complements. (Complementary colors are pairs of colors appear opposite each other
on scientific models such as the color wheel, and when used side-by-side in a painting make each other look brighter.) In addition, Neo-Impressionist paintings are more deliberately composed than Impressionist works, and were usually completed in the studio rather than out-of-doors. New York School—The term New York school seems to have come into use in the 1940s to describe the radical art scene that emerged in New York after the Second World War. The intensely creative and innovative developments in New York in the 1940s gave birth to the radical and world-conquering new style of painting that in the early 1950s became known as Abstract Expressionism. The two terms are effectively interchangeable, that is the artists of the New York school are the Abstract Expressionists. The term New York school, which seems to have come into use in the 1940s, has echoes of school of Paris and may also be seen to reflect the notion that after the Second World War, New York took over from Paris as the world center for innovation in modern art. Pop Art—an art movement that emerged in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in the United States and Britain, drawing inspiration from sources in popular and commercial culture such as advertising, Hollywood movies and pop music. Key pop artists include Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake and David Hockney. Emerging in the mid 1950s in Britain and late 1950s in America, Pop Art reached its peak in the 1960s. Young artists felt that what they were taught at art school and what they saw in museums did not have anything to do with their lives or the things they saw around them every day. Post-Impressionism—is a term which describes the influence of Impressionism on several significant innovative artists from about 1886, the date of last Impressionist group show in Paris. The term is usually confined to the four major figures who explored and expanded Impressionism in distinctly different directions: Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh. Cézanne retained the fundamental doctrine of painting from nature but with added rigor. Seurat put Impressionist painting of light and color on a scientific basis (Neo-Impressionism, divisionism, pointillism). Gauguin retained intense light and color but rejected painting from nature and reintroduced imaginative subject matter. Van Gogh painted from nature but developed highly personal use of color and brushwork directly expressing
emotional response to subject and his inner world. Post-Impressionism as a term was first used by British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1910. Realism—refers to a mid-19th century artistic movement characterized by subjects painted from everyday life in a naturalistic manner; however the term is also generally used to describe artworks painted in an illusionistic, almost photographic way. The term Realism was coined by the French novelist Champfleury in the 1840s and in art was exemplified in the work of his friend the painter Gustave Courbet. In practice, 19th-century Realist subject matter meant scenes of peasant and working class life, the life of the city streets, cafes and popular entertainments, and an increasing frankness in the treatment of the body and sexual subjects. The term generally implies a certain grittiness in choice of subject. Romanticism—first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the 19th-century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. In Romantic art, nature— with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the 18th-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, “all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime.” In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.” School of Paris—In the 19th-century, Paris was the center of both artistic tradition and artistic experimentation that culminated in the dazzling innovations of impressionism and post-impressionism. As a result, in the early years of the 20th-century, Paris became a magnet for artists from all over the world and the birthplace for some of the principal innovations of modern art, notably fauvism, cubism, abstract art and surrealism.
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Social Realism—an international art movement, referring to the work of painters, printmakers, photographers, and filmmakers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working class and the poor; social realists are critical of the social structures which maintain these conditions. While the movement’s characteristics vary from nation to nation, it almost always utilizes a form of descriptive or critical realism Street Photography—In the late 1950s and early 1960s, American photographers reinvented the documentary tradition once again. This time the subjective tradition that had emerged in the 1940s and early 1950s became a kaleidoscope through which photographers like Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander looked at the world. Trained in the “astonish-me” aesthetics of Alexey Brodovitch’s Design Workshops, Winogrand (1928–1984) claimed to make photographs in order “to see what the world looks like in photographs.” Although he possessed a particular fondness for visual puns and tilted exposures, his images belie a mastery of the 35mm camera
and a seriously innovative point of view. The significance of Winogrand’s chance observations of daily life delved far beneath their whimsical surface appearance. Studio Glass—The roots of the studio-glass movement were established as early as the 1870s, when the French designer Emile Galle made a radical change in the prevailing attitude toward his medium by being the first modern glass artist to sign his individual creations. But it was not until the 1960s that the contemporary studio-glass movement was born. The intervening years had brought isolated experimentation by a few daring individuals. In Cleveland in the 1950s, Edris Eckhardt, a ceramist and self-taught glass sculptor, invented her own glass formulas, which she melted in a converted electric ceramic kiln. Apart from glass casting in Czechoslovakia, lampworking in Germany, and some pâte de verre in France and Japan, there was little hot glasswork being done in artists’ studios. In 1962, Harvey Littleton, a professor of ceramics at the University of Wisconsin, held a series of informal workshops on the grounds of the Toledo
Museum of Art to explore the possibility of hot glass working in a studio setting. Dominick Labino, the director of research at the Johns-Manville Fiber Glass Corporation and an acquaintance of Littleton’s, attended the workshops, contributed his technical expertise, and went on to devise the first glass formula that would both melt at the low temperatures generated by small, portable furnaces and provide a consistency suitable for blowing. Littleton’s and Labino’s efforts unleashed a flurry of creativity not seen before in the field of glass. Washington Color School—The Washington Color School was founded in response to the Abstract Expressionism of the New York school. An exhibition of their paintings in 1965 at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art cemented their reputation for creating paintings that disregarded structure for color. Many of the artists used acrylic paint on raw canvas, which led to the description hard edge painting. Artists associated with Washington color school include Sam Gilliam, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Alma Thomas.
REFERENCES: The following references were used for the catalogue essay for background information and for the definitions of various periods of art Alsop, Joseph. The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and Its Linked Phenomena Wherever These Have Appeared. Princeton University Press/Harper and Row Publishers, New York, 1987. Carrier, David. Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. 2006. Glossary of art terms. The Tate Museum, London, 2000-2016. Gombrich, Ernst. The Story of Art. Phaidon Press, New York, 1995. Higonnet, Anne. A Museum of One’s Own. Periscope Publishing / Prestel Publishing, New York, 2009. Haskell, Frances. The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition. Yale University Press. New Haven, CT, 2000. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Funded by the Heilbrunn Foundation, The New Tamarind Foundation, and the Zodiac Fund. The Metroplitam Museum of Art, New York, 2000-. Kleiner, Fred S. Gardner’s Art the Ages: A Global History. Vol I and II. Cengage Learning; 14th Edition, 2012. Osborne, Harold. ED. The Oxford Companion to Art. Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, 1987.
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Arthur Rothstein (American, 1915-1985) No. 8, Migrant Worker, Visalia, California, 1940 Gelatin Silver Print 11 x 14 inches Signed Edition 50/50 Gift of Elizabeth Solomon ’68 in 1986
GOUCHER COLLECTS:
Living with Art April 14 – May 21, 2016 Silber Gallery
Sanford J. Ungar Athenaeum Goucher College Baltimore, MD This exhibition was made possible by the generous support of Toni Perlman Young ’67, P ’98 In loving memory of Stuart B. Young z’l who taught her about collecting and living with art
www.goucher.edu/silber