Leading Works from the Contemporary Art Collection of Edgar Foster Daniels by LewAllen Galleries

Leading Works from the Contemporary Art Collection of

Edgar Foster Daniels

Leading Works from the Contemporary Art Collection of

Edgar Foster Daniels February 19 - March 27, 2021

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com cover: Danny Robinette, Untitled (Landscape), detail, oil on canvas, 68.5 x 58.5 inches

Leading Works from the Contemporary Art Collection of Edgar Foster Daniels LewAllen Galleries is honored to present an exhibition of contemporary art from the collection of the late Edgar Foster Daniels, who was long regarded for his patronage of the arts. Daniels’ history of thoughtful and quiet giving, which supported numerous productions of opera, chamber music, and theater across the United States and abroad, also reflected his reputation as an ardent supporter of North Carolina and New Mexico artists and as a discerning collector of fine art. Daniels is acclaimed for his generosity in underwriting numerous opera productions, chamber music, and theater, having supported opera worldwide and serving on the Board of Directors of companies such as The Metropolitan Opera, The San Francisco Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, The Los Angeles Opera, the Royal Opera House in London, the Houston Grand Opera, and The Santa Fe Opera, where he was described as “one of the most generous supporters... in its entire history.” As a deeply committed music lover, Daniels also provided significant support for festivals such as the Salzburg Festival, the Bayreuth Festival, the Spoleto Festival, the Glyndebourne Festival and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Daniels underwrote the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s popular Noontime Concert Series, which allowed the organization to offer high-quality short mid-day concerts at a low admission price. Daniels, who resided in Santa Fe during the last 42 years of his life, was awarded the prestigious New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2015. Prior to his role as one of the most significant philanthropists for the performing arts in the country and internationally, Daniels studied theater and acting at Columbia University and spent 30 years working as a performer on stage, screen, and television. He performed in eight shows on Broadway and had roles in numerous productions including on such television programs as Bonanza, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The High Chaparral, and The Young and the Restless. He performed in various operas including in a Santa Fe Opera production of Strauss’ Die Fledermaus. We are pleased to mount this exhibit of works from Edgar Foster Daniels’ personal collection of visual art. Daniels collected both contemporary and historic masterworks, but this exhibition highlights his patronage of well-known 20th century artists from New Mexico and Daniels’ home state of North Carolina. This fascinating collection displays a discerning, inquisitive, and sometimes eccentric eye, an appreciation for craft, and an engagement with a range of artistic attitudes and perspectives. Among the more than 30 works that will be on view will be paintings and assemblages by noted New Mexico artists John Fincher, Susan Hertel, and Susan 2

Contreras, as well as two distinguished artists from North Carolina, Danny Robinette and Maude Gatewood. A significant aspect of Edgar Foster Daniels’ art collection is made up of works by the major New Mexico artist, John Fincher (1941- ). For more than five decades, Fincher has created art that explores diverse art historical and personal references, in particular offering new understandings of the American West and its natural and cultural landscapes. His art is well known for its consideration of the familiar symbols of the American Frontier, examining its mythic role as a reservoir of pride, strength, individualism and renewal. With nuanced brushwork, dramatic lighting, and intense points of contrasting color, Fincher's images of cowboy boots, towering poplar trees, and prickly pear cacti unravel those manifold cultural meanings. Elsewhere, as in a suite of serially repeated images of shaving brushes, the artist transmutes commonplace objects into powerful expressions at the juncture between cultural symbolism and the intensely diaristic. Establishing his reputation as an icon of art in the Southwest, Fincher’s art has been represented in important group exhibitions as such venues as SITE Santa Fe, the Tucson Art Museum, and the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. His work also resides in major public institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Art in New Orleans, and the Albuquerque Museum. Of particular interest in the exhibition is Daniels’ collection of John Fincher’s assemblages, which recall the shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell. In these works, Fincher’s careful arrangements of objects (postcards, collaged paintings, images from pop culture or art history, and other ephemera) in transparent Plexiglas boxes have an enigmatic sensibility that evokes a variety of intriguing narratives. These intricate works are rarely shown by Fincher (about once every five years)—fittingly, the artist described them as ‘joyfully time-consuming.’ The paintings of Susan Contreras (1932- ), also a beloved figure of Santa Fe art, further this narrative thread within Daniels’ collection, her vivid and colorful painting brimming with compositional energy. New York Dog Walkers is a classic example of Contreras’ ability to convey dynamic scenes of animal and human figures with an emphasis on motion and drama. Edgar Foster Daniels loved dogs, and this painting was one of his favorites, hanging for many years above his main dining table. Contreras studied under Nathan Oliveira and Wayne Thibeaud at the Santa Fe Institute of Fine Arts, though her mature paintings involve a concern with visual narrative that recalls her professional work as a photojournalist. Born in Mexico City, Contreras earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Photography at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara and then later receiving a BFA and MFA from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She also 3

studied at Maine’s Skowheagan School of Painting and Sculpture before returning to Santa Fe, where she married painter Elias Rivera (1937-2019). “Contreras is one of the rare contemporary artists who, with tenacity, unique vision, and unusual talent, has succeeded in the hyper-competitive environment [of Santa Fe],” Stephen Parks, Taos gallery owner wrote. “She’s an original, an artist who seems virtually incapable of producing a boring or derivative painting.” Susan Hertel (1930-1992) is known best for her more contemplative scenes of animals and human figures in landscape and domestic environments. In her work, Hertel evokes the quiet magic and joy of everyday life, centering her imagery on the people, animals, and places she most intimately knew. As in Nubian Goats with Seedsack #2, her art often includes intimate and heartfelt depictions of the livestock on her ranches in Glendora, CA, and Cerrillos, NM. Recalling the works of Pierre Bonnard, Paul Gaugain, and Henry Matisse, Susan Hertel is known for conveying her subject matter through a Modernist sense of space, expressive brushwork, and an overall feeling of sincerity and warmth. Susan Hertel studied drawing, painting and sculpture at Scripps College in Claremont, California and later at the Kann Art Institute in Los Angeles. After a trip to Europe in 1955, Hertel recalled, “In Paris, I saw my first Bonnards…. Here was a painter who organized shapes and patterns in a way that was completely compelling to me, and his subjects were from his own personal environment. That, I realized, was what I wanted to paint also.” Moving to New Mexico in 1980, Susan Hertel exhibited her art at the Elaine Horwitch Gallery in Santa Fe for many years. The Horwitch Gallery was the original incarnation of what is today the LewAllen Galleries. Also on display are works by Maud Gatewood (1934-2004), considered one of North Carolina’s most respected and influential contemporary painters. Gatewood’s art included a diverse array of subject matter, though much of her most well-known work involves a buoyant and non-naturalistic treatment of landscape forms. Above all, Gatewood’s art was informed by a close relationship with the natural world and her observation of humanity’s connection with and impact upon it—these include the charming and off-kilter works, Provincial Town and From the Nile. Both are outdoor scenes that convey lush, manicured flora through layers of crosshatched brushstrokes and a palette evocative of the colorations of sunset. After earning a Fulbright Grant in 1963 to study painting in Vienna under the Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, Maud Gatewood returned to the United States to continue her career in art, receiving an Award in Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1972 and the North Carolina Award in Fine Arts in 1984. Her paintings were included in the landmark exhibitions, Painting in the South at the Virginia Museum 4

of Art in 1983 and Nine from North Carolina at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC in 1989. A large-scale retrospective exhibit of Gatewood’s art opened at the University of North CarolinaGreensboro's Weatherspoon Gallery in April of 1994. Her paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Hunter Museum of Art, the Mint Museum of Art, the Nasher Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. Danny Robinette (1954-2005) is recognized for his remarkable paintings of the rural landscapes of North Carolina. Finding inspiration from artists from the Hudson River School and the Barbizon School, Robinette’s canvases evoke a singular vision of landscape that is rich with understated atmosphere. With a feeling of subtlety and poetry, Robinette’s works disclose hidden meanings concealed within the familiar landscapes of the American South. With its depiction of a stunning North Carolina sunset on a sizable canvas, “Untitled” is a remarkable example of Robinette’s masterful use of vivid color. Reynolds Price, Director of the Duke Art Museum (now the Nasher Museum of Art), wrote in 2001, “[Robinette] has made a whole world from the sights of his life; and most human beings alive on the Earth here at the start of the 21st century could confirm at least that the world he sees - and so calmly translates onto twodimensional surfaces - is both recognizable, nobly hospitable, instructive, disturbing, and finally consoling," Robinette's work has been exhibited extensively, including at the Hickory Museum of Art; the Duke Art Museum in Durham, NC; the National Arts Club in New York, NY; Elon College, Elon, NC; and the Greenhill Center for the North Carolina Artist, Greensboro, NC. This exhibition reveals both the exquisite connoisseurship of a major figure in arts and culture, as well as intimate examples of the particular contemporary art with which he chose to surround himself. These works represent parts of Daniels’ enduring legacy as a major collector and benefactor of fine arts. Kenneth R. Marvel

Susan Hertel, Nubian Goats with Seedsack #2, Oil on canvas, 50.5 x 68 inches

Susan Contreras, New York Dog Walkers, 1989, Oil on canvas, 73 x 58 inches

Maud Gatewood, From the Nile, 1993, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 72 inches

Maud Gatewood, Provincial Town, 1990, Acrylic on canvas, 54 x 44 inches

Danny Robinette, Snow Scene with Flamingos, Acrylic on canvas, 40.5 x 48.5 inches

Danny Robinette, Untitled (Landscape), Oil on canvas, 68.5 x 58.5 inches

John Fincher, Big Boots, 1979, Oil on canvas, 28 x 28 inches

John Fincher, Black Ax, 1997, Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

John Fincher, Edith Anne, 2015, Oil on canvas, 32 x 30 inches

John Fincher, Flores, 2016, Oil on linen, 24 x 18 inches

John Fincher, For Edgar Daniels, 1996, Conte crayon on paper, 14 x 17 inches

John Fincher, Sphinx, 1991, Oil on canvas, 38 x 64 inches

John Fincher, Sapello (#1, 2 3), 1996, Oil on canvas, 24 x 72 inches

John Fincher, 83 Brush #3, 1983, Oil on canvas, 12 x 9 inches

John Fincher, Brush '81, 1981, Oil on canvas, 12 x 9 inches

John Fincher, Brush Off #3, Oil on canvas, 12 x 9 inches

John Fincher, Detroit Brush, Oil on canvas, 10 x 8 inches

John Fincher, M.G.M. Brush, Oil on canvas, 10 x 8

John Fincher, Anxious Awareness, 1990, Mixed media on paper, 35.5 x 27.5 inches

John Fincher, Bridge Street Cabinet '75, 1975, Mixed media, oil, collage, assemblage on wood, 22.5 x 18.5 inches

John Fincher, Blood and Teeth, 1990, Mixed media on paper, 30 x 22 inches

John Fincher, Despair, 1990, Mixed media on paper, 30 x 26.5 inches

John Fincher, Forty-Eight, c. 1990, Mixed media on paper, 22 x 30 inches

John Fincher, Crash, 1997, Mixed media assemblage, 24 x 16 x 4 inches

John Fincher, Opium, 1989, Mixed media assemblage, 23 x 15 x 4 inches

John Fincher, The Student #2, 1989, Mixed media assemblage, 23 x 15 x 4 inches

John Fincher, Warlord, 1989, Mixed media assemblage, 23 x 15 x 4 inches

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com ÂŠ 2021 LewAllen Contemporary, LLC Artwork ÂŠ Susan Contreras, John Fincher, Maud Gatewood, Susan Hertel, Danny Robinette