119 minute read
Favorite: Philip Pearlstein on Piero della Francesca, by David Masello
G E T T I N G P E R S P E C T I V E
PHILIP PEARLSTEIN
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Artist
The Flagellation of Christ PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA (c. 1416–1492) c. 1455–60, oil on panel, 23 x 32 in. Galleria Nazionale delle Marche (Urbino, Italy)
Philip Pearlstein (b. 1924) learned about perspective while awaiting combat. Despite the gravity of his wartime assignment, the real lesson he learned was about the meaning of one-point perspective, more so even than the perspective on life itself.
As a young infantryman in Italy during World War II, Pearlstein was stationed outside Rome as preparations were made for an Allied invasion against the Germans to capture a mountainous region between Florence and Bologna. While some servicemen might have been visiting USO halls or doing mess-hall duty, Pearlstein and a group of like-minded soldiers he befriended would visit the Vatican Museum and other venues while waiting for the battle plan to be forged. “We visited all of these galleries and for me it was a fantastic education in Renaissance art,” says the 94-year-old Pearlstein from his painting studio in Manhattan. “I didn’t learn about Renaissance art and perspective and Piero della Francesca from a college textbook like Janson’s. I learned it firsthand.”
One of the most afecting classrooms, of sorts, that he attended was the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino, where the 20-year-old Pearlstein first saw Piero’s Flagellation of Christ (c. 1455–60), and where it remains today. “That painting became the basis of my own development as an artist. The lessons it provides on perspective and its use of the Golden Section divisions of the rectangle became the basis, too, for my work as a teacher of more than 30 years. The lessons I learned from the painting are built into the work I do as an artist.” So enamored still is Pearlstein with the painting he first saw more than 70 years ago that he always keeps a half-size reproduction of it at hand. “It’s laying on some surface here in the studio.”
Fortunately, as he acknowledges, Pearlstein didn’t fight in that final battle after all. “When the war ended, I was reassigned to paint road signs along demolished roads,” he says. After completing his military service, Pearlstein returned to his native Pittsburgh to attend Carnegie Mellon University, eventually moving to New York to work as a graphic designer. “I worked for a man who taught at Pratt [Institute]. He saw me looking through his art books and he told me that, since I still had some GI Bill benefits left, I should go back to school. I applied to New York University and eventually got an M.F.A. in art history there. I started teaching at Pratt in 1959 and it wasn’t until then that I had enough time to consider myself a full-time artist and started to create my figurative paintings. In that sense I was a late starter."
Piero’s Flagellation of Christ is famous not only for its radical application of perspective and its realistic interpretation of Christ’s punishment by his captors, but also for its enigmatic quality. Its lefthand scene shows Christ standing within an architecturally precise classical temple, while the scene at right features three men, seemingly indiferent to the brutal beating occurring nearby. For centuries, numerous theories have been posited about the identities of this trio and about both settings. When asked for his take on the subject, Pearlstein replies with candor, “I’m not interested at all in interpretations of this picture. I have always felt a kind of gratitude toward it. It’s a wonderful painting and always surprising when I see it.”
HEATHER ARENAS WAOW
“One with the Shadows”, 18x24, oil on birch, available at Mary Williams Fine Arts
“Get Your Greens Here”, 12x24, oil on cradled wood, available at Reinert Fine Art
WOMEN ARTIST OF THE WEST 48TH ANNUAL EXHIBITION TALLGRASS RENDEZVOUS SEPTEMBER 10-NOVEMBER 4, 2018 • PRICE TOWER ARTS CENTER • BARTLESVILLE, OK
MARY WILLIAMS FINE ARTS
BOULDER, CO | 303.938.1588 MARYWILLIAMSFINEARTS.COM
REINERT FINE ART
179 KING STREET | CHARLESTON, SC 29401 843.694.2445 | WWW.REINERTFINEART.COM
CHRISTINE DEBROSKY AIS
Clarkdale, Arizona Late Summer Winesap, 16 x 20 in., soft pastel christine@christinedebrosky.com | 928.679.0357 www.christinedebrosky.com
SUSIEHYER
Evergreen, Colorado Summer on the Farm, 12 x 9 in., oil on masonite susiehyer1@yahoo.com | 303.670.3609 www.susiehyerstudio.com
LISA GLEIM
Atlanta, Georgia Kitchen Window Peonies, 9 x 12 in. pastel on Pastelbord lisa@lisagleimfineart.com | 770.919.7719 www.lisagleimfineart.com
JUDY CROWE AIS
Bluff Dale, Texas Cloud Illusions, 16 x 20 in., oil on linen judyacrowe@gmail.com | 832.640.7131 www.judycrowe.com
DEBRA JOY GROESSER AIS
Ralston, Nebraska
PAMELA C. NEWELL AIS
Fishers, Indiana
Still Life in Red 14 x 18 in. oil on linen panel
MICHELE BYRNE AIS
Reading, Pennsylvania Manhattan Morning Light, 10 x 10 in., oil on linen panel michele@michelebyrne.com | 610.670.7932 www.michelebyrne.com
NANCY BOREN
The Colony, Texas Spring Pink, 24 x 18 in., oil on canvas nancy@nancyboren.com | 972.625.6261 www.nancyboren.com
ROBIN WEISS
Poulsbo, Washington Camellias with Sugar Bowl, 12 x 9 in., oil robinweiss@earthlink.net | 360.779.3940 www.robinweissfineart.com
KATHLEEN COY
Colorado Springs, Colorado The Thinker, 9 x 12 in., oil on birch panel kathleen@kathleencoy.com www.kathleencoy.com
PENNY FRENCH-DEAL
North Manchester, Indiana
The Blue Vase 11 x 14 in. oil on linen
JENNIFER STOTTLE TAYLOR
Taft, Tennessee Walking with Renoir, 18 x 24 in., oil on linen jennifer@jstaylorart.com | 931.993.8891 www.jstaylorart.com
LESLIE WHITE | WAOW Associate Member “Guadalupe River Bathtub” • 30 x 22 • Watercolor www.trailheadstudios.com JUDE TOLAR | WAOW Associate Member “Sweet Ice Follies” • 11 x 14 • Pastel www.judetolar.com
JILL BANKS | WAOW Associate Member “Show Girls” • 16 x 20 • Oil www.jillbanks.com
KATHY WARDLE
WAOW Associate Member “Fine Wine, Good Memories” 78 x 46 x 32 Bronze www.wardlearts.com
KATHRYN A. MCMAHON | WAOW Master Member “Whiskey Creek” • 12 x 16 • Oil www.kathrynamcmahon.com
SHERYL KNIGHT FINE ART | WAOW Associate Member “Monterey Morning” • 16 x 9 • Oil • www.sherylknight.com
GRACE SCHLESIER | WAOW Signature Member “After the Storm” • 12 x 16 • Oil www.graceschlesier.com
GEORGENE MCGONAGLE | WAOW Signature Member “Eyas” • 14 x 7.7 x 5 • Bronze www.mcgonaglestudio.com
DENA PETERSON | WAOW Signature Member “Towering Seedheads” • 16 x 16 • Oil www.denapaints.com MICHELE COMBS | WAOW Associate Member “Fountain at Glensheen” • 12 x 16 • Oil www.michelecombs.com
KELLI FOLSOM | WAOW Associate Member “Apple Blossom Tea” • 14 x 18 • Oil www.kellifolsom.com
KATE KLINGENSMITH | WAOW Associate Member “The Helper” • 20 x 27 • Oil www.kateklingensmithart.com
DOREEN IRWIN | WAOW Associate Member “Beach Bums” • 12 x 24 • Acrylic www.doreenirwin.com KAY STRATMAN | WAOW Associate Member “Shaken, Not Stirred” • 16 x 16 • Watercolor on Silver Board www.kaystratman.com
CELEBRATING WORK BY OVER 150 WOMEN ARTISTS FROM ACROSS THE COUNTRY
There is a lot of superb art being made these days; this column by Allison Malafronte shines light on a trio of gifted individuals.
HEATHER ARENAS (b. 1969), Oscar and Sharon’s Big Day Out, 2017, oil on cradled wood, 24 x 30 in., RS Hanna Gallery (Fredericksburg, TX)
The Florida-based artist HEATHER ARENAS (b. 1969) may paint many types of subjects — still lifes, portraits, plein air scenes, interiors, Western landscapes — but it is the figure she finds most inspiring. Although her childhood was filled with an abundance of creative activity and influence, her fascination with the form and function of the human body led her to study orthopedic surgery. Eventually, she found her way back to art, and her medical studies in anatomy only served to enhance her figure paintings. “Figures are a vehicle for me to show my appreciation of the grace and mechanics of life’s ultimate creation,” Arenas says. “When I paint them, I’m thinking not only of their physical beauty, but also of the underlying structure that I observe.”
Regardless of the subject matter, Arenas paints what she finds beautiful and interesting, with a focus on light, shadow, and storytelling. She is an artist who clearly thinks through why and what she is painting before putting brush to canvas, adjusting the composition, color scheme, and focal point to her vision. That doesn’t mean, however, that she is afraid of an occasional happy accident. In fact, her looser, impressionistic style of painting — with its bold brushwork and broken color — practically requires an educated ability to respond creatively in the moment.
In both her strategic planning and in her spontaneity, Arenas is as much a designer as a fine artist. This duality — along with some modernistic impulses — is especially evident in her recent painting Oscar and Sharon’s Big Day Out, one of several in Arenas’s Museum series. It seems to show what would happen stylistically if Vuillard and Bonnard were invited to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Sargent: the strong composition contains silhouetted figures, patterned fabrics, large abstractions of color, and traditional portraiture, the highlight of which is Sargent’s controversial Madame X — the unexpected departure from his career of painting commissioned portraits for high society.
In her personal life, Arenas knows firsthand how powerful the influence of artistic women can be because of the creative encouragement she received from her grandmothers and mother as a child. As a member of American Women Artists and Women Artists of the West, as well as the mother of a young daughter, she is passionate about encouraging women in the arts and beyond “because I know they have voices that need to be heard.”
Arenas is represented by Mary Williams Fine Arts (Boulder, CO), Reinert Fine Art Gallery (Charleston), RS Hanna Gallery (Fredericksburg, TX), and Weiss Fine Art (Santa Fe).
It’s not every day that a French rock star becomes a landscape painter of the American West, but that is the story of the Los Angeles artist MARK MAGGIORI (b. 1977). It may seem like a farfetched tale, but when you learn about the series of events that influenced Maggiori, it makes perfect sense that his teenage fascination with the Southwest would later manifest in the signature subject matter and award-winning paintings he is known for today.
Maggiori’s multiple talents — especially in fine art and music — became apparent at a young age, and when he was in his early 20s he enrolled at the historic Académie Julian in Paris to develop his drawing and painting skills. Not only had several legendary classical artists studied there, but also members of New Mexico’s Taos Society of Artists: Ernest L. Blumenschein, Bert Geer Phillips, and Joseph Henry Sharp. After finishing his academic training, Maggiori formed a successful rock band in France and began touring Europe. The performing demands that followed caused the artist to temporarily put aside his fine art aspirations.
As fate would have it, Maggiori returned to the U.S. with his wife and settled in California, where he steeped himself in the Golden State’s history and reconnected with the Southwest’s landscape during several road trips. As much as music was a mainstay in Maggiori’s life, it was at that moment, at 36, that he decided to follow his fine art calling and paint the subject matter that spoke to him most. In the few years since then, Maggiori has become a leading painter of the West, creating work that resonates with both longtime and emerging collectors.
Symbiosis is a fine example of the style that makes Maggiori’s paintings unique. With its exacting Remington-esque illustration and expertly handled sunset-drenched color, it also reflects the artist’s deep sensitivity to the Western way of life, earned through his immersive experiences on ranches in New Mexico, Arizona, and Wyoming. “This painting came together pretty quickly after I drew a sketch of that iconic pose,” Maggiori shares. “I wanted to glorify it with an epic cloud and get a quintessential image. Something that could represent the West in the blink of an eye.”
Maggiori is represented by Gerald Peters Gallery (Santa Fe), Maxwell Alexander Gallery (Los Angeles), Medicine Man Gallery (Tucson), and Trailside Galleries (Jackson Hole).
MARK MAGGIORI (b. 1977), Symbiosis, 2018, oil on linen, 40 x 40 in., private collection
ANN SCOTT (b. 1948), Foggy Morning, 2016, oil on canvas, 30 x 30 in., available from the artist
There’s something to be said for a painting created with the simple purpose of transferring peace and serenity from one set of eyes to another. This is the gift that artist ANN SCOTT (b. 1948) ofers viewers of her oil and watercolor landscape paintings, creating moments of respite from a world that often seems the opposite of stillness.
Scott spent 35 years living in Boston until her longing for peaceful pastures led her to the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts, where she has been surrounded by forests and farmland for the last five years. “I’m a country gal at heart, and nature and space are extremely important to me,” the artist notes. “From the moment I arrived here I felt uplifted, and I painted everything in sight for days on end.” Scott sees outdoor painting as an opportunity to develop ideas, sharpen observational skills, or quickly record a scene. When the weather is still, or when Scott needs more structure, she paints barns and buildings instead. In her studio, she works up larger paintings from her sketches.
Although Scott paints en plein air and in her studio, the great outdoors is where she feels completely at home and free. Artistically speaking, what she finds most exciting in nature is watching how atmospheric conditions morph the appearance of the landscape. “I’m a complete weather nerd,” she admits. “I love clouds and have a particular penchant for fog, which I feel is one of the more poetic manifestations of weather. I'm especially interested in how fog conceals and reveals as it moves through and reshapes the landscape. I also adore a good storm.”
Scott’s 30-x-30-inch painting Foggy Morning is one of a series she created from the same vantage point on a farm near her home. Painted just as the dawn fog was burning away into early morning, this composition is an exercise in simplicity and understatement: the brushwork is soft, the palette is pared back, and her focus is the expansive sky’s quiet power. Although Foggy Morning likely took Scott only a few hours to paint, it’s the kind of work that one could contemplate for much longer — a visual breath of fresh air that the artist clearly enjoyed creating as much as we enjoy viewing it.
Scott is represented by Real Eyes Gallery (Adams, MA) and is currently showing at the Southern Vermont Arts Center (Manchester). She is the first visiting artist at Jiminy Peak Ski Resort (Hancock, MA), where a selection of her paintings is on display through October.
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
ARUY GOBA
SAON
ounded in 1999 by the New Jersey collectors Fred, Sherry, and Kara Lysandra Ross with several of their fellow scholars, the Art Renewal Center (ARC) is a nonprofit educational foundation that encourages the reemergence of traditional art and training techniques. The fruits of its labors are becoming ever more apparent as time goes by.
ARC is probably best known to readers of Fine Art Connoisseur for its impressive website (artrenewal.org), which contains more than 80,000 high-resolution images by Old Master, 19th-century, and early-20th-century artists, along with artist biographies and related articles. The site has evolved into an invaluable reference for anyone interested in historical realism.
ARC is equally committed to bringing this rich heritage up to date by highlighting the booming field of contemporary realism. In addition to its ever-growing roster of recommended ateliers, its registry and 5,000-image gallery of “Living Master” artists, and its generous scholarship program for atelier students, ARC organizes the ever more popular International Salon Competition online.
Launched in 2004, the Salon concluded its 13th edition earlier this year when ARC announced the latest award winners, honorable mentions, and finalists. Chief operating ofcer Kara Lysandra Ross reports that the jury found it difcult to winnow down to the 1,076 finalist works (by 647 artists) — 28 percent of the 3,750 works originally submitted from 69 countries. This year’s jurors were Frederick C. Ross and Kara Lysandra Ross, the scholars Jean Stern and Vern Swanson, the artists Michael John Angel, Juliette Aristides, Daniel Graves, Tom Hughes, Dan Thompson, Anthony Waichulis, and Yuqi Wang, B. Eric Rhoads (Fine Art Connoisseur), Jeannie Wilshire (IX Arts), collector Tim Newton, and Mandy Hallenius (Da Vinci Initiative).
In addition to the two top prizes (Best in Show and the William Bouguereau Award), the jury awarded first, second, and third place prizes in each of nine categories: figurative, imaginative realism, still life, portraiture, landscape, sculpture, drawing, plein air, and animals. A host of additional awards were given, including the Da Vinci Initiative Award for younger artists. These categories also featured numerous honorable mentions and finalists. More than $100,000 in cash awards have been distributed since the jurors made their final decisions.
To make the project more visible to the public, ARC has scheduled four exhibitions highlighting various winning and finalist works. A total of 89 works will appear at New York City’s Salmagundi Club from September 21 through October 2. These works will next go on view at the Los Angeles branch of Sotheby’s (December 4–13) and will finally appear at Barcelona’s Museu Europeu d’Art Modern (MEAM) from February 8 through March 31, 2019.
In addition, ARC has planned an innovative partnership with Fashion Week San Diego (FWSD) this autumn: seven FWSD designers will each create an original couture outfit and look inspired by a specific winning artwork from the ARC Salon. The artworks and their corresponding garments (worn by live models) will be presented together on the evening of October 12 — FWSD’s opening event at the Lux Art Institute in Encinitas. All will remain on view there for the remainder of Fashion Week. Also on October 12, FWSD and ARC will co-host a panel discussion as guests “vote” for their favorite pairings.
Entries for the next edition of the Salon are being accepted from December 1, 2018 through March 15, 2019. Thanks to the Internet’s flexibility, anyone can submit an entry at any hour, day or night. This is a truly global enterprise, one made possible by the Internet, but made real by the dedication of the ARC team.
KELLY COMPTON is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.
Information: The Salon catalogue can be ordered via arcsalon.org, where all winners and finalists can now be seen as high-resolution scans. For exhibition details, visit artrenewal.org/13thARCSalon/Home/Exhibition.
MING YU (b. 1977), In Bvlag, 2014, oil on linen, 15 1/2 x 19 1/2 in., Best in Show ($10,000)
(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) KATSU NAKAJIMA (b. 1954), Woman in the Forest, 2017, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 63 3/4 x 63 3/4 in., William Bouguereau Award ($3,000) IRIS LIU (b. 2000), Her Familiars, 2017, oil on Masonite, 42 x 28 in., First Place (Da Vinci Initiative Award, $2,500) JIE CAI (b. 1973), Flower Language, 2014, oil on linen, 43 1/4 x 21 1/2 in., First Place (Portraiture), $2,500 JULIE BELL (b. 1958), Speak Softly, 2017, oil on linen, 48 x 60 in., First Place (Animals), $2,500
(ABOVE) GERALD BROM (b. 1965), The Night Mare, 2017, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in., First Place (Imaginative Realism), $2,500 (LEFT) ALEJANDRO ROSEMBERG (b. 1981), Samsara Series — Vanitas II, 2017, oil on canvas, 20 1/4 x 31 1/4 in., First Place (Still Life), $2,500
(CLOCKWISE FROM RIGHT) JIM McVICKER (b. 1951), Roses and Apples, 2017, oil on linen panel, 24 x 18 in., First Place (Plein Air), $2,500 BENJAMIN VICTOR (b. 1979), The Angel, 2017, bronze, 27 x 17 x 18 in., First Place (Sculpture), $2,500; also ARC Purchase Award ($5,000) JOSEPH McGURL (b. 1958), Light, Sea, Earth, and Sky, 2017, oil on panel, 30 x 24 in., First Place (Landscape), $2,500
(TOP LEFT) YOANN LOSSEL (b. 1985), The Rise, 2017, graphite, gold (24k), and silver leaf on paper, 27 1/2 x 19 1/2 in., First Place (Drawing), $2,500; also ARC Purchase Award ($8,000), Arcadia Contemporary Award, Aristides Publication Prize for Drawing, Second Place (Imaginative Realism), $1,000 (BOTTOM LEFT) LAUREN TILDEN (b. 1981), Jairus’s Daughter, 2017, oil on panel, 36 x 48 in., First Place (Figurative), $2,500; also ARC Purchase Award ($12,000)
ALEX BAUWENS (b. 1988), Asleep, 2017, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in., Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine Award Winner
Alex Bauwens Wins the ARC Salon’s Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine Award
Everyone at Fine Art Connoisseur congratulates Alex Bauwens on her superb painting Asleep, which has won this magazine’s annual award in the latest edition of the ARC Salon. A native of Chicago, Alex Bauwens (b. 1988) has been committed to art and animals for as long as she can remember. Her artistic training began at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Palette and Chisel Club, and the American Academy of Art. At Vitruvian Fine Art Studio, she studied under David Jamieson and Melinda Whitmore, then apprenticed with Scott Tallman Powers. Now based in Scottsdale, Bauwens draws inspiration there from daily life, film, literature, her own vivid imagination, and the barns where she spends time with her beloved animals. Her childhood memories are especially inspirational for Bauwens, who explains, “As children, we create our own magical worlds out of cardboard. Without realizing it, children take control of their surroundings and create powerful symbols to express their desires and fears. Yet this world exists only as long as the materials do, symbolizing the fragility of one’s control of the world all around. I enjoy using children as subjects in order to represent innocence and naivete, particularly as they pertain to control and power.” Animals are equally significant to Bauwens, as we can see in her affectionate yet respectful portrayal of resting dogs in Asleep. For details, visit alexbauwens.com.
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
AASCINAION WIHISH
Human beings’ engagement with fish is a complicated matter. First and foremost, much of the world’s population relies on fish for sustenance, whether they are “fished” from oceans, lakes, rivers, or “farms” in which they are grown. Frankly, it’s easier to kill and eat a fish that seems unattractive (think tuna, shark, eel, octopus, or skate, which are large and often scary-looking), yet even those species possess a strange beauty that has beguiled people for millennia. There are, of course, beautiful fish, too — most famously the colorful tropical ones that adorn aquariums around the world.
Our relationship with fish is further complicated by the fact that they are difcult to touch. We can pet a dog or horse — feel its fur or gaze into its eyes — but with most fish this is challenging, if not impossible. The resulting emotional distance is a fact of life, and surely one key factor in what makes fishing (with a rod and line) so thrilling: an animal that otherwise remains unavailable to us can be hooked and brought into our hands. Relatively few anglers hold their trophies for long (they are slippery and wriggly), yet their brief moment of encounter is always memorable, and just part of what makes sport fishing so popular almost everywhere.
This portfolio highlights an array of fish-related imagery — from glimpses of the animals themselves to their points of contact, not only with humans but also with other animal predators. To be sure, Earth is a better place because fish live here, and we urge readers to do everything they can to protect fish and the cleanliness of the water on which they rely.
Matthias Anderson is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.
JIM BORTZ (b. 1963), Swirl, 2018, oil on gessoboard, 18 x 14 in., Mountain Trails Gallery, Jackson, Wyoming
(TOP) BETH BATHE (b. 1959), Capt. Rufus and Happy Boy, 2018, oil on panel, 12 x 24 in., private collection (AT LEFT) TODD BAXTER (b. 1954), No Hurry, No Worry, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in., private collection (ABOVE) BRIENNE M. BROWN (b. 1977), The Livin’ Is Easy, 2018, watercolor on watercolor panel, 11 x 14 in., available from the artist
(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) JOYFUL ENRIQUEZ (b. 1987), Beneath the Pads, 2018, oil on linen, 20 x 16 in., Artist Cove Gallery, Panama City, Florida
MICHAEL HARRELL (b. 1964), Oysterman & Shorebird on St. Helena Island, 2017, pencil on paper, 10 x 9 1/2 in., Red Piano Gallery, Bluffton, South Carolina
ROD LAWRENCE (b. 1951), Brown Trout, 1995, acrylic on Sintra PVC panel, 7 x 9 3/4 in., private collection CARTER R. JONES (b. 1945), First Fish, 2007, bronze, 50 x 20 x 42 in., Brookgreen Gardens, Murrells Inlet, South Carolina
(ABOVE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) DAVID LENZ (b. 1962), No Luck Today, 1995, oil on linen, 26 x 36 in., collection of Nancy Aten and Daniel Collins CHUCK MARSHALL (b. 1957), Cutthroat, 2018, oil on canvas, 12 x 19 in., available from the artist COLIN PAGE (b. 1977), Fresh Fish, 2017, oil on linen, 18 x 24 in., Anglin Smith Fine Art, Charleston KIRK MCBRIDE (b. 1952), Coming In, 2017, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in., Roux & Cyr International Fine Art Gallery, Portland, Maine ((LEFT) POPPY BALSER (b. 1971), Parrsboro Weir, 2017, watercolor on paper, 15 x 22 in., available from Harvest Gallery, Wolfville, Nova Scotia
(ABOVE) SIMON BALYON (b. 1965), Watching the Fishermen, 2013, oil on panel, 20 x 30 in., Lotton Gallery, Chicago (AT RIGHT) JEREMIAH D. WELSH (b. 1973), Mayflies and Trout Rise, Okutama River (#1 of 3), 2016, bronze, 20 5/8 x 11 3/8 x 1/2 in., available from the artist (BELOW) LOU PASQUA (b. 1952), Sunday Afternoon, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 13 x 18 in., on view at the Southeastern Wildlife Exposition (Charleston) in February 2019
(TOP) MATT PATTERSON (b. 1981), Brook Trout (Orvis limited edition print), 2018, graphite and acrylic on paper toned with coffee, 16 x 20 in., available from Orvis Ltd. (ABOVE) JAMES PROSEK (b. 1975), Great White Shark, 2015, mixed media on tea-stained paper, 60 x 180 in., courtesy of James Prosek and Singer | Wajahat, New York
(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) JANTINA PEPERKAMP (b. 1968), Summer, 2017, acrylic on wood, 7 3/4 x 9 3/4 in., RJD Gallery, Bridgehampton, Long Island JACOB A. PFEIFFER (b. 1974), Scales II, 2017, oil on panel, 20 x 12 in., Meyer Gallery, Santa Fe CHRISTOPHER M. DEWEES (b. 1946), Red Irish Lords, 2007, indirect print on silk mounted on paper, 34 x 23 in., collection of the artist SHANNON RUNQUIST (b. 1970), Blues Traveler II, 2018, oil on linen, 30 x 30 in., Horton Hayes Fine Art, Charleston
(TOP) MICHELE USIBELLI (b. 1962), Drift Boat, 2016, oil on panel, 16 x 20 in., private collection (ABOVE) MATTHEW BIRD (b. 1977), Branzino for Two, 2018, watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 in., available from the artist (LEFT) EUSTAQUIO SEGRELLES (b. 1936), Pescadores y Rocas, Valencia, Espana, 2012, oil on canvas, 39 x 31 in., Manitou Galleries, Santa Fe
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
Henk Helmantel (right) in his studio with the author
CHINSARWORKS IN HNK HLMAN’S SII PAININGS
Based in the northeast of the Netherlands, Henk Helmantel (b. 1945) makes intensely realistic paintings, mostly still lifes. In order to create a dramatic efect, his scenes are almost always lit by a north-facing window, with light emanating from the right side. Most of the paintings begin life as a quick, wild sketch, on top of which Helmantel applies at least two more layers that achieve the perfected detail for which he is admired internationally.
To truly understand Helmantel as a person, one must experience the environment where he lives and paints — the village of Westeremden in the province of Groningen. In the 1970s, he and his family worked hard to rebuild a farmhouse into a home and studio that evoke the Middle Ages. The surrounding countryside is flat, with a vast sky above. The terrain is all brown clay, adorned with the green and yellow coloring of meadows and rapeseed fields and intersected by blue waterways. Here and there a farmhouse, or a village with just one cafe, is spotted, occupied by contentedly inward-looking people. In Westeremden and other villages, the picturesque Protestant churches are encircled by graveyards, which remind the neighbors that death is always present — a veritable memento mori. This “Vanitas” theme (from the Biblical warning that “all is vanity”) was regularly highlighted by painters of the Dutch Golden Age, including the Haarlembased master Pieter Claesz. Illustrated here is his gloomily toned still life, in which the skull, discarded quill, empty inkwell and glass, flickering wick, and old books underscore the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death.
While studying at the Minerva Art Academy in the northeastern Dutch city of Groningen, Helmantel came to appreciate 17th- and 18th-century still life paintings of all kinds. A fine example is the other Old Master scene illustrated here, Willem Kalf’s “Pronk” painting (Dutch for “show”). It features colorful objets d’art once accumulated by the European elite: silver, a knife with tortoiseshell handle, exotic fruits, a Turkish carpet, and Venetian glass. At the very center is a bowl of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, brought to Holland in huge quantities by the Dutch East India Company (V.O.C.).
PIETER CLAESZ (1596/7–1661), Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628, oil on panel, 9 1/2 x 14 1/8 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
WILLEM KALF (1619–1693), Still Life with a Chinese Bowl, Nautilus Cup, and Other Objects, 1662, oil on canvas, 31 1/4 x 26 1/2 in., Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inspired by such paintings, Helmantel began to purchase Chinese objects, often quite expensive, in Dutch antique shops; in a few cases, he received them as gifts from admirers. His collection now consists of pottery and porcelain, and also bronzes. Two of his exquisite visions of a delicate white bowl are illustrated below.
A highlight among Helmantel’s ceramics is the large white dish that carries a stamp on its underside reading “Made in the Kangxi period of the (Great) Qing Dynasty” (1644–1912). Its luminosity — it seems to radiate light from within — difers significantly from the non-glossy surfaces of the celadons and clay horses that Helmantel also favors. Interestingly, he has generally avoided the blue-and-white ware once prioritized by the V.O.C., perhaps because its rich patterning does not suit his straightforward aesthetic.
BRONZES
An alloy of copper, lead, and tin, bronze of great sophistication was being produced by the Chinese as early as 3,000 B.C. Made for both ritual use and as gifts for the deceased ancestors of upper-class patrons, these bronzes often feature complex exterior patterning and inscriptions on the inside. Helmantel recently showed me one of his bronze dishes, which features an array of green and brown tones modulated by uneven areas of wear, variations caused by acids in the soil in which the dish was once buried, and rough patches of mineral incrustation. To describe what he sees, Helmantel uses
Two Henk Helmantel paintings from 1977: (left) Chinese Bowl with Three Eggs, oil on Masonite, 9 x 10 1/4 in., Museum Helmantel, Westeremden-Groningen; (right) Chinese Eggshell Bowl, oil on Masonite, 3 1/4 x 3 3/4 in., Museum Helmantel, Westeremden-Groningen
Helmantel inspects the underside of his large white dish, which appears at right in his painting Chinese Kangxi Bowl with Pomegranates and Star-Apples, 2006, oil on Masonite, 23 1/2 x 31 1/2 in., private collection
HENK HELMANTEL, Chinese Bronzes and Garlic, 1977, oil on Masonite, 20 1/2 x 27 1/4 in., private collection; a detail appears above
the word “skin” rather than “surface,” though Chinese connoisseurs are not familiar with this poetic metaphor. In one painting, he has contrasted this dish with other green objects — Roman glass, nonChinese bronzes, and even a silken Chinese apron. Helmantel never consults photographs, painting only from the original objects. This approach became particularly important to him in 2008, when he spent hours at the Groninger Museum drawing a bronze water basin loaned by the Shanghai Museum.
A fine example of Helmantel’s interest in metalwork is illustrated above, showing two bronzes arrayed on a table alongside cloves of garlic. The larger item has a top that can be removed so hot food can be placed inside. The close-up photo above reveals how many brushstrokes Helmantel has applied to capture the efect of worn “skin.”
In A Food Cauldron and Two Wine Containers, Helmantel painted three tripods (Shang Dynasty, 1800–1100 B.C.). He has strategically set them against a pink background to bring out their exquisitely incised details.
In Helmantel’s paintings, attentive viewers can discover the deeper meanings he seeks to convey. Earlier this year the Museum of Gouda wisely titled his retrospective exhibition Inspiration: Christian Belief, Harmony, and Silence, underscoring the artist’s profound respect for the universe God has created. Some reviewers focused
HENK HELMANTEL, A Food Cauldron and Two Wine Containers, 18-11th century B.C., Shanghai Museum, 2008, oil on Masonite, 35 1/2 x 48 in., Museum Helmantel, Westeremden-Groningen; a detail appears at left
instead on the emptiness and abstract simplicity of China’s Zen philosophy, a response that amused Helmantel greatly. In fact, he is dedicated to presenting the beauty of aging and transience ad majorem Dei gloriam (“to the greater glory of God”). His use of Chinese objects — be they simple or ornate — only underscores the universality of his message, reminding us that the distinctions between East and West are insignificant in the context of the grander concerns that afect all of humanity.
FREERK HEULE, Ph.D. is a researcher in philosophy at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He first presented this article’s material at The Representational Art Conference (TRAC), chaired this past May by Dr. Michael Pearce (California Lutheran University) in the Dutch city of Leeuwarden. The author thanks Henk Helmantel and others who ofered assistance during his research, as well as Art Revisited®, which provided the Helmantel images.
Information: To learn more, see Sofia Komarova et al., H.F.N. Helmantel: A Contemporary Old Master: A Legacy, A Century, A Genius (Rome: Prima Musa, 2015). Also useful are three catalogues: T.L. Huang et al., Henk Helmantel (Taiwan: Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, 1997, in Mandarin and English); Chen Xiejun, Kees van Twist, and Oliver Moore, Antieke Bronzen: Meesterwerken uit het Shanghai Museum (Zwolle: Waanders, 2008, in Dutch); and Chimei Museum: Henk Helmantel: The Beauties of Simplicity (Tainan: Chimei Museum of Fine Arts, 2018, in Mandarin and English).
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
RCORDS OH PAINING PROCSS:
RCN WORK BY OY RANK
Wedding, 2018, oil on linen, 96 x 140 in.
Picasso is thought to have said, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Whether he coined this truism or not, it is highly relevant to the promising career of Zoey Frank (b. 1987). Théodore Géricault’s famous painting The Raft of the Medusa (Musée du Louvre, Paris) is a comparative I was not anticipating when I arrived recently at Frank’s studio in Loveland, Colorado. There I encountered Wedding, the very large painting she subsequently completed this summer. Sparked by the French master’s jumble of desperate people frantically signaling to a ship on the horizon, Frank has cast her own crescendo of humanity clambering upward and leftward, culminating in the start of a traditional hora dance.
When she took flight from Géricault’s masterpiece, Frank was building on a pattern of appropriation she has pursued in several recent works: drawing from Velázquez’s Los Borrachos and Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe; playing on the theme of Pygmalion; and quoting liberally from imagined and real Greco-Roman sculptures. All of these demonstrate her participation in a vital tradition of representational art: originality can reside in the context of imitation.
With Wedding, however, Frank has swerved considerably from the academic script. By now she has deconstructed the cohesiveness of the template that was so evident in her first sketch for the scene (2017), a composition that reads like a Poussin drawing from the early 1630s. In subsequent sketches, she turned to modernist sensibilities by treating the overall composition with broad swaths of color rather than modulating it. After extensive work on the canvas, Frank made the surprising decision to reconsider the overall composition, as seen in the latest sketch illustrated here (2018). By deflating the figurative components, she pays homage to the Orphic Cubism of early 20th-century France, yet her palette and rough, granular handling suggest such contemporaries as Ann Gale, Susan Lichtman, and Eve Mansdorf.
FIVE YEARS OF EXPERIMENTATION
The modernist sensibilities in Wedding build upon a turn Frank first took with Taboret (2013), which she painted midway through her M.F.A. studies at California’s Laguna College of Art & Design. This was her initial efort to reconcile experimentation with her prior training in the classical atelier at the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle. By imbuing Taboret with striking surface tensions through a variety of viscosities, tonality, and pigment handling, Frank attempted to make the most of her bifurcated training, an efort that has defined virtually all of her work since then.
Frank is discovering that working in various means and methods enriches her experience as an artist, even as she faces the daunting challenge of accommodating the surfeit of visual data pouring in from Google searches and the history of art. On a recent trip to Italy, for example, she encountered ancient Roman fresco painting, gold-back quattrocento panels, the monumental stillness of Piero della Francesca’s art, and the brilliant lighting and choreography of Caravaggio’s canvases. At some point, Frank will assimilate elements from all of them into her own painting. For now, she recognizes that solving problems of strictly formal concerns is the crux of her current approach, and quite possibly her strongest leitmotif.
Frank’s acceptance of modernist predilections can be detected even in her more academic works, as when she allows remnants of her imprimatura and sketchy grisaille to show through more opaque passages. Like other artists who paint in oils, she is exploring the sensual properties of the medium
(TOP) Study for Wedding, 2017, graphite on paper, 4 1/4 x 6 in. (ABOVE) Study for Wedding, 2018, gouache on panel, 12 x 17 3/4 in.
(ABOVE) Taboret, 2013, oil on linen on panel, 42 x 54 in. (LEFT) Sandwich #5, 2018, oil on panel, 14 x 16 in.
itself: “I love the consistency of oil pigments — the goop, the flexibility in how they can be reworked and manipulated in so many diferent ways. I like the way oil paintings are built up in layers, and the richness of the surface when different layers show through.” Another advantage is that oils are forgiving: you can scrape of a motif and replace it with another, as Degas often did. Frank did exactly that in Girl in Striped Shirt, the creation of which is captured vividly on a YouTube video.
These days, Frank conjures up images from a glimmer of an idea — see her series of sandwiches, such as Sandwich #5 (2018) — then elaborates on the composition with aidesmemoire ranging from Web images to the actual uneaten sandwich in her studio. She wants her compositions to evolve during the process, to gravitate away from that initial vague notion. This desire may be why Frank fusses with her surfaces, often adding granulated impasto, gold leaf, and traditional glazing.
Frank reflects, “I’ve become more interested in allowing the surface to hold a record of my painting process. A
record of the time spent producing the painting can be embedded in the static image. As I find new solutions to compositional problems, traces of that process are left in the work. For me the mark-making or surface qualities are more a result of that investigation than a direct goal.”
Making a change on the spot necessitates both spontaneity and a willingness to adjust all adjacent formal elements. Frank has demonstrated this flexibility in the Berlin Windows series, which reminds me of the British painter Thomas Jones (1742–1803). She realizes that these formal concerns come to bear on the content of the piece — be it a figure, portrait, landscape, or still life, all genres she traverses efortlessly. In the end, Frank values serendipity as part of her modus operandi: “I don’t want my paintings to be tied to the past or nostalgic; I want them to incorporate elements of modernism as well.” Thus she approaches them alla prima, eschewing the laborious method of transferring preliminary drawings onto a larger canvas. This reminds us of Degas, who loathed closure; instead he worked and reworked his compositions with a variety of
(LEFT) Berlin Window #1, 2018, oil on linen on panel, 24 x 24 in. (BELOW) Dinner Party, 2017, oil on linen, 54 x 60 in.
Peter’s Desk, 2017, oil on linen, 58 x 48 in.
means, sometimes even obliterating the composition’s original motifs.
Figuration is perhaps the genre most challenging for Frank because it often invokes narration or additional layers of meaning. In some respects, such figurative works as Peter’s Desk (2018) and Dinner Party (2018) “represent specific states of mind for me,” in which the “images bring up the same feeling that I had at moments in my life, rather than illustrating the moments themselves. I want to make compelling images without relying on the power of the subjects themselves.”
To create poetic art that is uniquely hers, Frank tackles the sometimes frightening challenge of assimilating source material by marshalling all of her technical and aesthetic faculties. Her ongoing success in absorbing, transforming, and ultimately afrming her own voice within this maelstrom is a case study for representational artists who struggle to reconcile their academic training with their interest in alternative means of mark-making. Frank’s immersion in the latter is thrilling, even as it poses more risks than would following academic tradition: her embrace of chance, her tapping into the unconscious, and her formal experimentation can yield results that are not immediately understood by viewers. Those risks, however, are worth the reward: Frank’s latest works are at their best when she forges into new territory.
TIMOTHY J. STANDRING is Gates Family Foundation Curator at the Denver Art Museum, and enjoys the challenge of writing about contemporary representational painters. His next exhibition, Rembrandt: Painter as Printmaker, opens at Denver this September.
Information: Zoey Frank is represented by Galerie Mokum (Amsterdam) and Haynes Galleries (Franklin, TN).
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
SWAR WHI
HAS WARCOORS, WIRAV
he Baltimore-based artist Stewart White (b. 1953) is having a moment this autumn. In Easton, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the South Street Art Gallery will soon highlight his latest works in the exhibition Of the Beaten Path: Paintings from My Travels (November 2–25). Now seems an ideal time to focus on this rarest of plein air painters — one who uses watercolors to work outdoors and in the studio, where he consults references and sketches captured on location. Though he draws inspiration from both the American Impressionists (who showed us how light reveals form) and the Ashcan School (with their instantly recognizable scenes of specific places), White is most definitely of our time, not a throwback.
Mid Pike Low Rise, Mixed Use, 2012, watercolor on paper, 11 x 15 in., courtesy of Design Collective, Inc.
(ABOVE) Airport Study BWI, 2016, watercolor on ground Masonite, 5 x 7 in. (LEFT) Air BNB, Granada, Spain, 2017, oil on panel, 16 x 20 in.
Somehow his watercolors resonate as contemporary, even as they tap into traditions that have thrived for well over a century.
A native of Kentucky, White started his training at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, but three years in the U.S. Army interrupted that program. After completing his military service, he earned his Bachelor’s degree in fine arts at the University of California, Berkeley. Rather than pursuing a full-time career in fine art, White built a sterling reputation in the field of architectural illustration. Today he is a senior associate at Design Collective, Inc., and previously taught as an adjunct professor of technical illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
By day, White produces highly convincing watercolors of buildings old and new, commissions that entice clients with valuable information about architectural elements and underlying geometries — delivered in a painterly manner that cannot fail to charm. As a former president of the American Society of Architectural Illustrators, he has seen this field change enormously. Today most architectural renderings are made on computers, but White still prefers hand-drawn ones because they possess “a pleasure factor that digital work lacks. There is, however, some
(ABOVE LEFT) Rocky Beach, Tossa del Mar, 2017, watercolor on paper, 20 x 14 in. (TOP RIGHT) Sketch, A Wexford Street, Ireland, 2018, graphite wash on paper, 10 x 7 in. (BOTTOM RIGHT) A Walk in Barcelona, 2017, acrylic on panel, 18 x 12 in.
(ABOVE) A Bit of Beach in Collioure, 2017, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in. (LEFT) Killmore Quay, 2017, watercolor on paper, 10 x 14 in.
Green Table, 2018, oil on Arches oil paper, 28 x 20 in.
extraordinary work being done digitally these days.” In spite of that, there is no substitute for “the human touch” of a hand-rendered illustration. (See the superb example illustrated here, Mid Pike Low Rise, Mixed Use.)
Decades of success in this field have endowed White with key advantages: “I understand some laws of perspective, the nature of light and shadow, and have some knowledge of construction. These disciplines inform my ‘fine art’ much the same way that knowledge of anatomy helps a painter render the figure or a portrait.” Imbued with a love of buildings and space, White has always traveled extensively, as one might gather from the study illustrated here that shows a jetliner parked expectantly at its gate. Throughout his adventures in Europe and the U.S., White has painted and sketched his most meaningful experiences and memories, though he also photographs them as a backup.
Of course he captures conventionally beautiful scenes of natural scenery and important monuments, but there are far more seemingly “average” villages, gardens, markets, beaches, and city streets, all of which come alive through White’s vigorous brushwork. Possibly because he lives in Baltimore — once a great industrial center — he also teases out the strange beauty of gritty workaday sites such as mills and train stations, airports, ships, harbors, cranes, and quarries.
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
It is no accident that White favors watercolor: it has always been the easiest and most portable medium for artists who love to travel. It is prized for its transparency — for how light bounces of the paper back to our eyes. To borrow another observer’s phrase, “White uses no whites,” which means his palette lacks the more opaque medium of gouache (watercolor with chalk or another dense material mixed in to absorb light). Instead he uses a highly controlled palette, often with one color predominating and accented by touches of its complement. The result of his deft layering is a sense of atmosphere viewers can feel.
Watercolor is not for the faint of heart, of course. White cautions, “You can’t be controlling with it. You have to be in a state of listening. When you make a mark, it is still moving when you take your brush of the paper. There are the elements of time and gravity, viscosity and absorption that you don’t have to pay attention to in oil painting. It takes everything you can bring to it. After two hours painting in watercolor, you really feel like you’ve been in deep meditation. I have to concentrate; I cannot talk or listen to music.” With watercolor it is also crucial to know when to stop; one stroke more and the work is compromised because corrections are so difcult. (With oils, no problem — just scrape it of, or slap on another layer.)
The theme of White’s show this fall is travel, and to give a sense of how he works, he will exhibit approximately 30 small (7 x 10 inch) sketches in graphite, wash, and watercolor that he made on the road. (He explains that “if they look good at that scale, they will probably turn out well on a larger one.”) In addition, South Street Art Gallery owner Alan Brock has asked White to exhibit an uncharacteristically large work (yet to be made), which his fans look forward to seeing.
The exhibition’s submission deadline is not getting in the way of White’s favorite activity: travel. From September 24 through October 1, he will be teaching a workshop in the Provençal town of Arles, leading students to places Van Gogh and Gauguin might have painted. Andlater in October he will be teaching at the Todd & Huf Art Center in South Carolina. We look forward to seeing the images that pour forth then and there, though we will probably have to await his next show for them.
Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, 2010, watercolor on paper, 10 x 14 in.
BEHIND THE SCENES
MARRID MUSUM CO-DIRCORS: A LADRSHIP MOD OR HUUR?
In January 2013, when Maine’s Bowdoin College announced the appointment of Frank H. Goodyear III and Anne Collins Goodyear as co-directors of its campus art museum, initial reviews of the married couple’s hiring varied. “CC me on that, honey,” ARTnews magazine tweeted archly; the Association of Art Museum Directors handle liked that post. In the Observer, Andrew Russeth noted that the co-leadership model follows the ancient Roman diarchy, which was “ruled by two leaders.” An “exit interview” in The Washington Post noted the longtime curators had not come to the National Portrait Gallery as a package deal but were leaving it together. “Forget splitting the household chores,” the Post’s Katherine Boyle wrote. “Their upcoming experiment in management and marriage is one that would make Sheryl Sandberg fans downright euphoric.”
The “Great Man” leadership theory, in which “one sole leader rules over the masses from the ivory tower,” has expired, although co-leadership, absent a strong relationship, “can easily become draining and frustrating,” opined a 2015 Harvard Business Review article. Bowdoin’s now-5-year-old “experiment” comes at a time when museums are increasingly responding to gender gaps in the C-suite, and its museum equivalent.
A 2017 report by the Association of Art Museum Directors found that women led 48 percent of its member institutions in 2016, up from 43 percent in 2013. Yet the AAMD found that hurdles remain. Women tend to lead art museums with budgets smaller than $15 million; the likelihood that a man directs the museum increases with its budget. The jury is still out on whether the pioneering leadership model at the highly ranked private liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine — which by all accounts is going swimmingly — owes more to the unique abilities of the Goodyears, who recently celebrated 18 years of marriage, or whether other institutions can realistically hope to replicate their success.
“There are moments that I wish, somehow, I could have a clone able to tackle more than one thing at a time, including something across the country and another here at the museum,” muses Thomas Padon, director of the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, who has worked with the Goodyears for several years. At AAMD meetings, colleagues often ask the Goodyears, who have separate Bowdoin contracts but the same
(AT LEFT) Anne Collins Goodyear and Frank H. Goodyear III, co-directors of Maine’s Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BELOW) Bowdoin College Museum of Art; photo: Blind Dog Photo Associates
Thomas Padon, director of Pennsylvania’s Brandywine River Museum of Art Richard Kurin, acting director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art
job description, how things are going. Frank says, “A lot of times our colleagues, in a somewhat joking manner, might say, ‘Gosh, I wish I had a co-director.’” Directors are so busy that it makes sense to have two people doing the job, he continues. In an environment where museum directors, particularly those at academic or teaching museums, are expected to create and shepherd scholarship, court donors, interact with colleagues, and handle countless other duties, a tag team seems to make good sense. “In a way, Bowdoin really is a laboratory,” Padon notes. “From the outside and with a limited view of the inner workings, it seems to be working well.”
A LONE STAR START
One reason Anne and Frank believe their codirectorship — which is unique among museums — has worked so well is that they’ve been involved in the art world as long as they’ve known each other. And they’ve struck similar work-life balances and collaborated from the start.
The two met in a photography course at the University of Texas at Austin, where they were graduate students, Anne in art history and Frank in American studies. UT, Anne says, has strong photography holdings, including what’s widely reputed to be the world’s first photograph. The bulk of this material came from the collection of Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, who, incidentally, were married historians, Anne notes.
In 2001, Anne and Frank were hired, separately and within roughly half a year, at the Smithsonian Institution, where each had already been a fellow. “Our personal lives, professional lives, and social lives are deeply engaged with the arts. The arts, in a way, are an avocation,” Anne explains. “Because we’ve been doing this as long as we’ve known one another, the transition to co-leadership at Bowdoin has felt somewhat natural. In a sense, the fact that we are married is a little bit incidental to our ability to do this job.”
Although the duo is often asked if maintaining a work-life balance is difcult, Frank says it’s not as tough to master as it may seem. “People worry, ‘Gosh, I hope you get some time for yourself,’” he says. “The answer is yes, of course we do. Each of us has myriad interests, friends, and big families that provide wonderful time away from the work we do.” After hours, the couple invariably discuss challenges or brainstorm about opportunities and who will meet which artist or donor, but they don’t see themselves as unusual in operating beyond the 9-to-5 workday. Frank’s father, who had a career of more than 40 years in art, including directorship of Phoenix’s Heard Museum, often didn’t have nights or weekends to himself. Anne’s father, who conducted the first heart transplant in New
Installation view of the museum’s 2016 exhibition This Is a Portrait if I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today; photo: Dennis Griggs, Tannery Hill Studio
England as thoracic and cardiac surgery chief at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, also maintained fluid hours. “To be perfectly honest,” Frank admits, “we have surprisingly normal lives away from work.”
Texas must be where the Goodyears learned to be such good hosts, according to Richard Kurin, a distinguished scholar, ambassador-at-large for the Smithsonian, and currently acting director of its Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art. Kurin, who has known the Goodyears for more than 15 years, says the couple is very good at reading people and connecting them, including artists, colleagues, board members, and donors. “If you wanted to have a dinner party, having them organize and lead it would be a good thing,” Kurin says, noting that the best salon hosts and hostesses are subtle, don’t dominate, and invite the right people to the table to ensure the discussion is civil and substantive. There must be more to Austin than drinking, music, and South by Southwest, Kurin laughs. “The Goodyears must have gotten some of their politeness from there.”
AN EVEN DIVISION OF LABOR
In the laboratory of museum leadership that is the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the Goodyears say university president Barry Mills let them decide how to run things back in 2013. “With a sense of quiet confidence, he said, ‘You guys are smart. You’ll figure it out,’” Frank remembers.
Anne recalls, “When Frank and I took on this role, we were invited to define it in the fashion we thought made the most sense. We mindfully created a new model, not one in which we carved out the responsibilities associated with co-directing, but rather one in which we deliberately thought to create an integrated collaborative framework.” The co-directors share everything from oversight of curatorial projects to fundraising to managing the staf of 14. “If you imagine sharing the portfolio, we divide the files,” Anne explains. “Neither Frank nor I is ever going to overrule the other person; it doesn’t work that way. We have to work together. It’s never one person’s impulse or one person’s point of view.”
Although the Goodyears say their joined position at Bowdoin is pioneering in the museum world, they are aware of similar collaborations in the arts. In the wake of Lynn Zelevansky’s departure as director of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, two interim co-directors were named. “That’s been fun for us to see,” Anne says. And a year after the Goodyears came to Bowdoin, the college’s International Music Festival announced the appointment of brothers David and Phillip Ying as artistic co-directors. (The festival also has an executive director.) “It makes me hopeful that there may be other organizations who can see the benefit of shared responsibility,” Anne notes.
The closest that Padon, of Brandywine, has seen to a museum power couple was Anne d’Harnoncourt, the late Philadelphia Museum of Art director, and her husband, Joseph Rishel, who was the museum’s curator of European painting. “A lot of people thought that would be fraught with difculty, but certainly both of them were so highly professional that they forestalled even the appearance of favoritism or conflict,” Padon recalls.
There are also precedents for creative couples working together, including the architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, the artists Coosje van Bruggen and Claes Oldenburg, and the artists Jeanne-Claude and Christo. “It’s only in recent years, maybe 15 years at most, that we have, as a collective group of historians and curators, really given credit to both parts of the couple,” Anne says. “It’s interesting to recognize that, in fact, couples have things that pull them together, and couples have worked in teams for a long time.” Just for example, Bowdoin’s recent collaboration with the artist Abelardo Morell (b. 1948) benefited significantly from conversations between him and the co-directors. “Our three minds led to outcomes that I think otherwise would not have materialized,” Anne notes.
Importantly, the Goodyears can cover twice the amount of ground a single museum director can. Earlier this year, Frank attended the opening of a Bowdoin exhibition about Soviet propaganda posters at Miami’s Wolfsonian–Florida International University, while Anne remained at home for an event with the artist Byron Kim. Last year, Anne spoke near Paris about the history of academic art museums, while Frank welcomed Bowdoin alumni for a reunion.
Anne and Frank bring diferent strengths to the table. Frank specializes in cultural history and in the history of photography, while Anne, who is an art historian, is interested in hybrid fields, including the intersection of art and technology. “It’s as though it’s one voice, but they have diferent skill sets,” Padon says admiringly.
Mark Bessire, director of Maine’s Portland Museum of Art
IS CO-DIRECTORSHIP THE WAY FORWARD?
When the Goodyears discuss the future of museum leadership, they both emphasize how exciting the horizon looks. That’s a perspective their colleagues share.
“You really hope that when an institution takes on a choice that is not normative, that it’s successful, so there’s the possibility to replicate it in another institution,” says Mark Bessire, director of the Portland Museum of Art, who met the Goodyears when they arrived in Maine and promptly became “such a fixture in our New England art world. I feel like they’ve been here longer than they probably have. And I think it now could be replicable because we know it can work,” Bessire says of the co-directorship model. “They have set an excellent example.”
Particularly in academic institutions located in rural areas, where one wants to retire a term like “trailing spouse,” but where couples can struggle to find two enticing positions simultaneously, Bowdoin’s dual hire is a promising model. “Whether it’s Hamilton or Middlebury, think of where the great colleges are located,” Bessire says. “There are not a lot of other jobs.” Yet he doesn’t think Bowdoin would have made this choice if the Goodyears themselves were not involved.
Padon also thinks it’s premature to talk about a paradigm shift. “People in the museum world will certainly be looking to see how this works, and in their own careers, what Anne and Frank do next,” he says. “Do they go to another institution as a couple, or will this be a very interesting experiment, but they themselves will want to do something diferent? Their own experience will really help determine how the museum community sees this.”
The Smithsonian’s Kurin agrees. “It’s intriguing because of the co-direction and that it’s a husband-and-wife pair, and they have complementary interests,” he says. “If it’s an experiment, we haven’t seen the full result of it yet.”
When the Goodyears look out on the future, they think the arts are the perfect kind of laboratory in which to test innovative leadership models. Artists are often the ones who identify sections of cities that the mainstream has neglected; once they take up residence in those neighborhoods, artists demonstrate to everyone else how beautiful those places can be, Anne says.
“It may well be the case that the arts are a great testing ground for new approaches to leadership,” she continues. “There are many ways in which the emphasis on creative process and risk-taking, which we associate with the arts, may indeed provide an environment to conceptualize a relationship such as this one.”
MENACHEM WECKER is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. He holds a M.A. in art history from George Washington University.
H I S T O R I C M A S T E R S
COUR PORRAIUR DURING NAPOON’S RIGN
Premiered at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts last spring, the exhibition Napoleon: Power and Splendor is about to close at Richmond’s Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and will then move to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City (October 26, 2018 through March 10, 2019). Its final venue will be the Château de Fontainebleau in France (April 5–July 15, 2019). Focused on the Emperor’s reorganization of French court life between 1804 and 1814, this show reveals how the extraordinary man born Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) created an efective propaganda machine that modernized and legitimized his reign as self-titled Emperor. Corsican by birth and French by design, he continually reinvented himself: he was a minor nobleman and military general whose political ambition inspired his every move. More than 200 paintings, sculptures, decorative artworks, and engravings — borrowed from collections worldwide and in many cases never exhibited in the U.S. before — reveal the intricacies of the Emperor’s daily life and the range of works commissioned by and for him.
Drawing upon the Revolutionary ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité, Napoleon created a new aristocracy of individuals based on merit and ability, not on the birth and class prioritized during the ancien régime. Today this initiative may seem unremarkable, but in the early 19th century it was, in its own way, completely revolutionary. The exhibition includes a fascinating group of ofcial portraits that reveal how neoclassical artists helped Napoleon shape and promote the new aristocratic identity he had set in motion.
THE EMPEROR HIMSELF
This exhibition was inspired in part by Ben Weider’s donation of his magnificent Napoleon collection to the Montreal Museum of Fine
Studio of François-Pascal-Simon Gérard (1770–1837), Bust-length Portrait of Napoleon in Ceremonial Robes, c. 1805–14, oil on canvas, 32 1/4 x 25 1/2 in. (painting), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Ben Weider Collection; photo: Christine Guest. Attributed to Delporte Frères, the frame of carved and gilded wood is adorned with symbols of the Empire.
Imperial School of Mosaics of Francesco Belloni (1772–1863), after François-Pascal-Simon Gérard (1770–1837), Portrait of Napoleon in the Uniform of a Colonel of the Grenadier of the Foot Guards, 1813–14, pietra dura mosaic and cast glass, 45 1/4 x 31 1/2 in., Musée national des châteaux de Malmaison et Bois-Préau, RueilMalmaison © photo: Hervé Lewandowski
Arts in 2008. One of its treasures is the Bust-length Portrait of Napoleon in Ceremonial Robes, an oval canvas painted in the studio of François Gérard after the original commissioned from him in 1804 by Prince de Talleyrand, Napoleon’s grand chamberlain and minister of foreign afairs. Almost immediately this likeness was adopted by the regime as the defining image of imperial authority. Most of the replicas made after it were presented as ofcial gifts to courtiers, foreign heads of state, and diplomats. (Unfortunately, the original recipient of Montreal’s version remains a mystery.) Gérard’s likeness of Napoleon was also transferred by Gobelins onto tapestries between 1808 and 1814, and by Sèvres onto its renowned porcelain vases and plaques.
Particularly notable is the original frame that surrounds the portrait. This outstanding example of wood carving features symbols representing the power, honors, and arms of the Emperor. Among these symbols are ones visible in the full-length portrait on which this abbreviated version is based: the eagle at the top of the frame recalls the large scepter Napoleon holds in the larger portrait, and the bees around its edges are borrowed from the embroidery on his cloak. The thick laurel wreath at top is taken from Napoleon’s throne and represents the stability of his institutions.
Also in Napoleon: Power and Splendor is an astonishing mosaic portrait of the Emperor owned by the Château de Malmaison, one of Napoleon’s palaces, located 10 miles west of Paris. This is a rare example from the Imperial School of Mosaics directed by the artist Francesco Belloni. Born in Rome and trained by the mosaicists of the papal workshops, Belloni arrived in Paris in 1797, hoping to establish there a mosaics manufactory comparable to what he had experienced in the Eternal City. He had to await approval from the interior ministry, which ultimately founded the École parisienne de mosaïque in 1801 and made him its director. This new institution had an unusual policy: to employ and teach “all the skills of this art” to pupils chosen from the deaf-and-mute students at Paris’s École des sourdsmuets. Honored with the title “imperial” in 1807, Belloni’s school proceeded to create numerous decorations for such imperial palaces as the Louvre, the Tuileries, and Malmaison.
Mentioned in an 1813 report about the school’s activities is the ongoing development of a likeness of the Emperor “executed after a portrait by M. Gérard, which M. Belloni evaluates at 25,000 francs” (a fortune at the time). Created by three students who referred to yet another portrait of Napoleon painted by Gérard around 1812 (now in the Musée de l’Ile d’Aix), this stunning mosaic was never purchased by the state because the Emperor abdicated in April 1814; thus it remained in Belloni’s possession. We still do not know why he and his students chose this image of the Emperor, who wears the uniform of a colonel in the foot grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, rather than ceremonial garb. Nonetheless, it underscores the enduring success, until the fall of the regime, of a less monarchical iconography: here both the uniform and the pose emphasize Napoleon’s status as a secular head of state, as he had once been during the Consulate period (1799–1804).
LOYAL COMRADES AMONG THE IMPERIAL HOUSEHOLD’S HIERARCHY
Commissioned in 1806, Antoine-Jean Gros’s likeness of General Géraud-Christophe-Michel DuRoc belongs to a series of portraits of the Grand Ofcers of the Imperial Household intended to hang in one of Napoleon’s palaces. Loaned by the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, this is undoubtedly the most regal of them in its composition, Gros likely having borrowed the pose from Jean-Baptiste van Loo’s portrait of King Louis XV (1761, Château de Versailles).
Born of a penniless noble family, Duroc became Napoleon’s aidede-camp during the first Italian campaign and followed him to Egypt. He was involved in the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire (November 9, 1799) and later became governor of the Palais des Tuileries. An excellent administrator and talented diplomat, Duroc was appointed Grand Marshal of the Palace in 1804 and brought his efciency to bear on all departments of the Imperial Household. He was particularly devoted to Napoleon, and the two enjoyed a close relationship; indeed, Duroc may have been one of the Emperor’s few real friends. Having been made Duke of Friuli in 1808, he fought in Russia (1812) and finally Saxony (1813), where he was cut down by a cannonball.
Gros has rendered Duroc’s court uniform brilliantly, its amaranth coloring signifying his association with the department of the Grand Marshal of the Palace. He stands on a terrace, leaning in a lordly manner on a Grand Ofcer’s court staf. Behind him can be seen Paris’s Vendôme Column, rendered in shades of white even though the actual column was bronze. This detail places the scene somewhere in the gardens of the Tuileries, the first of the palaces to be administered by the Grand Marshal. The column evokes Duroc’s military career, especially his participation in the victory at Austerlitz (1805) — indeed, here the column reads like an extension of the staf he holds. It is not known exactly when this canvas was completed; in January 1807, it was still with Gros, but it arrived in May 1808 at Compiègne, another of Napoleon’s palaces.
No less spectacular is another portrait by Gros, who clearly drew inspiration from British aristocratic portraiture of the previous century, particularly Thomas Gainsborough’s. Loaned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this depicts Dominique-Alexandre Legrand in the uniform of second lieutenant of the Cuirassiers. The sitter was born in 1790 in Metz, the son of Alexandre Legrand, who later became a general and a Count of the Empire. Motherless from an early age and left at home by his campaigning father, he entered the house of pages of the Imperial Household in 1805 and remained there for three years. Upon turning 18, Legrand joined the army as second lieutenant, a rank in the Cuirassiers reserved for former pages, and headed to Madrid to help quell an uprising. Soon, however, he was killed instantly when an enormous vase, thrown from a rooftop by two women, landed on his head during a riot. Napoleon himself referenced this tragedy in a letter criticizing the deployment of troops in the Spanish capital: “I am told that my former page Legrand was killed in the streets. Let us learn from experience; that no one be housed in the city, but that everyone be set up in the Palais…”
Napoleon’s recruitment of pages reflected his eagerness to tie the sons of prominent men more closely to himself. The Household expected these adolescents to be well educated and “most handsome.” Indeed, Legrand’s haughty pose efectively conveys his pride at having joined the army, to which his distant father had devoted his life; no doubt the boy dreamed of glory and triumphs, but they were not to be. This portrait was very likely commissioned by his father after Dominique-Alexandre’s death; it was first mentioned in 1810 while being exhibited at Paris’s annual Salon.
ANTOINE-JEAN GROS (1771–1835), Portrait of Dominique-Alexandre Legrand, Former Page to the Emperor, in the Uniform of a Second Lieutenant of the Cuirassiers, c. 1809–10, oil on canvas, 111 x 82 1/2 in., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of California Charities Foundation © 2017 Museum Associates / LACMA, licensed by Art Resource, NY ANTOINE-JEAN GROS (1771–1835), Portrait of Géraud-Christophe-Michel Duroc, Duke of Friuli, in the Costume of a Grand Marshal of the Palace, 1806–7, oil on canvas, 80 1/4 x 54 in., Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy © P. Mignot
AN EMPRESS’S FRIEND AND THE NEXT GENERATION OF COURTIERS
Finally, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston has loaned Gérard’s extraordinary portrait of the Duchess of Montebello, lady of honor to
FRANÇOIS-PASCAL-SIMON GÉRARD (1770–1837), Portrait of Louise-Antoinette-Scholastique de Guénéheuc-Lannes, Duchess of Montebello, with Her Children, 1814, oil on canvas, 102 1/4 x 72 in., Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by the Brown Foundation, Accessions Endowment Fund, and Alice Pratt Brown Museum Fund © MFAH
Empress Marie-Louise, seen with her own children. Its composition follows a pictorial tradition actively promoted during the Empire, that of the family portrait, whereby the relatives and children of the new aristocracy could establish themselves as the source of imperial France’s future dynasties. Gérard specialized in this kind of image, as seen in his studio’s many portraits of members of the imperial family.
Louise-Antoinette-Scholastique de Guénéheuc was the daughter of a noble valet in King Louis XVI’s bedchamber. In 1800 she married the revolutionary general Jean Lannes, a man of modest birth and a close companion of Bonaparte. Lannes belonged to the first group of French ofcers dubbed Marshals of the Empire in 1804, then became Duke of Montebello in 1808. The following year, he was struck by a cannonball during the battle of Essling in Austria, and died after a week of agony. His remains were returned to Paris and placed in the Pantheon. The grieving duchess withdrew from public life, but a year later Napoleon appointed her as a lady-in-waiting to his new Empress, who treated her as a real friend with whom she could escape the burdens of palace life. Relations between the duchess and Emperor were strained, however, as she blamed him for her husband’s death and he distrusted her.
When Gérard painted this portrait in 1814 — the Empire’s final year — the duchess had already been a widow for five years. Here she strolls gracefully through the garden of her country estate, Château de Maisons, surrounded by her five children. The group passes a monumental statue (at left). Although only its lower portion is visible, the cannonball here tells us immediately that the sculpture depicts General Lannes. Rather than his noble titles, it was the appalling manner of his death that assures his surviving family’s honor.
Gérard’s portrait — at first seemingly joyous and innocent — actually evokes bloodshed and tragic loss. At center, the oldest son, LouisNapoléon, gazes up at his father’s efgy with a dignified and serious expression. His younger brother, Jean-Ernest — holding two racquets over his shoulder as if they were guns — looks out toward us. Both boys wear whimsical military costumes, and the ball resting at the feet of their youngest brother, Gustave-Olivier, echoes the ominous cannonball at the sculpted feet of his father. This composition presents a disconcerting interaction between conventions appropriate to the dramas of adult life and the mischievous world of childhood — between the fate of the dead man and the innocence of his orphaned progeny. Gérard has given us an image at once beautiful and cruel, one in which personal tragedy expresses the transmission of the noble yet bitter values of heroism.
SYLVAIN CORDIER, Ph.D., is curator of early decorative arts at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Under the direction of Nathalie Bondil, he organized Napoleon: Power and Splendor. He edited the handsome 352-page catalogue that accompanies it.
Information: vmfa.museum, nelson-atkins.org. The exhibition has been organized, produced, and circulated by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts with the participation of the Château de Fontainebleau and the exceptional support of Mobilier National de France.
H I S T O R I C M A S T E R S
GRÔM’S HOOP DANCR: SCUPUR INO I
In the late 19th century, the discovery of a trove of ancient terracotta statuettes at the archeological site of Tanagra — in Boeotia, Greece — captured the world’s imagination. In 1878, approximately 50 of these figurines were exhibited at Paris’s acclaimed Exposition Universelle. Dynamic, brightly colored, and produced for mass consumption, these diminutive works held particular interest for contemporary painters and sculptors, including the celebrated French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904). Indeed, the Tanagra figurines would preoccupy and influence him for the rest of his life, directly inspiring the creation of The Hoop Dancer (1891), his most popular and widely reproduced carved work.
TANAGRA
Uniquely among his sculptures, The Hoop Dancer was envisioned by Gérôme as an independent work and as part of a larger ensemble. In 1890, plagued by accusations that he could not render movement or emotion in stone, he answered with Tanagra, a life-size work that features two interpretations of the classical and idealized female form. The seated figure, a monumental nude, stretches her hand outward, stoic, sober, and still. Balanced on her palm is the graceful Hoop Dancer, turning and twirling in a cascade of seemingly liquid
The Hoop Dancer seen from two angles, 1891, painted plaster, 9 1/8 in. high, private collection, photos: Jon Swihart
floor-length robes. Her head dips into the golden ring she cradles in one hand; in the other is a golden ball.
Gérôme’s fascination with the rhythmic movement of the female body and the contortions of the human form, as well as the suspended dynamism of cloth, was influenced by his travels and a variety of current events. In Rome and Dresden he studied the bacchantes en delire, or Maenads; in the Parisian quarter of Montmartre he visited dance halls and the cabaret; and in America and Paris he witnessed the voluminous silk costumes and whirling choreography of the dancer Loie Fuller, whose performances astonished contemporary audiences with their beauty and grace.1 Gérôme may also have drawn from recent developments in music and physical fitness in order to achieve the Hoop Dancer’s idiosyncratic pose: the French inventor and photographer George Demeny had created exercises to music designed to promote poise and flexibility, much like Jaques-Dalcroze’s famed “eurythmics” — specialized training for musicians and dancers. Many of these featured hoops and weighted balls.
Begun in the 1860s, Gérôme’s series of paintings depicting Egyptian dancing girls are also important to this piece. (Dance of the Almeh, illustrated below, is a fine example.) The similarities between these lyrical works and The Hoop Dancer suggest a previously unrecognized progression in Gérôme’s art, the close relationship that existed for him between sculpture and painting,2 and between the modern Middle East and the classical world.
EAST/WEST
Though it broke away from the Ottoman Empire in 1830, Greece was still considered — for much of the 19th century — part of an unchanging and
(LEFT) Tanagra, 1890, painted marble, 70 in. high, Musée d’Orsay, Paris; photo: RMNGrand Palais/ René-Gabriel Ojéda (BELOW) Dance of the Almeh, 1863, oil on panel, 19 3/4 x 32 in., Dayton Art Institute, Ohio
Bathsheba, 1889, oil on canvas, 24 x 39 1/4 in., private collection
exotic East. Orientalist painters often fused these two worlds, merging antique themes and idealized nudes with Islamic architecture and design. In 1889, Gérôme painted Bathsheba, in which a nude woman bathes on a rooftop terrace in an Arab town.3 Though her female servant is clearly Middle Eastern, the unclothed woman might be mistaken for virtually any conventional classical “type.”
The efortless shift between Orientalist and classical references in these and other works suggests the need for a qualification of Gérôme’s “ethnographic,” carefully researched archaeological style.4 This may also be interpreted as evidence of Gérôme’s recommitment, after decades of strictly Middle Eastern subject matter, to the reinvention of the antique world. Though best known as an Orientalist, he had begun his career in 1847 leading a group of young painters studying in Paris with Charles Gleyre and Paul Delaroche. Inspired by Greek art and the recent discoveries of frescoes at Pompeii and Herculaneum (sites that Gérôme himself visited during extensive international travels), as well as by contemporaries’ love of narrative, these Néo-grecs painted antique genre scenes with a salacious touch and a distinctive, sun-drenched palette.5 Such subjects were the perfect vehicle for Gérôme to display his lifelong love of drama, theater, gesture, and costume — elements abundant in The Hoop Dancer — and to indulge his developing interests in color, light, and archaeological reconstructions of civilizations past. By 1863, when the Néo-grecs disbanded, his name had been made as a classical painter, and his art, considered a more approachable form of history painting, had already become a favorite of bourgeois audiences in Europe and beyond.
TO MARKET
With the help of the famed dealer Adolphe Goupil, Gérôme’s success as a painter “for the people” was transferred to other mediums as well. More than 100 editions of The Hoop Dancer were produced after 1890 in marble, pewter, bronze, and biscuit.6 To allow for a range of price points, editions were produced in two diferent sizes and a variety of finishes, from the relatively subtle to brilliant, gilded bronze. Plaster editions of The Hoop Dancer were created as well, though these seem to have been reserved exclusively for Gérôme’s personal use.7 Some were presented as gifts to his students and friends. The plaster Hoop Dancer illustrated here was inscribed and given to Gérôme’s student and colleague Albert-Pierre Dawant.8 It was later purchased by the late Professor Gerald Ackerman, author of the Gérôme catalogue raisonné.
In all, Gérôme is thought to have given three plaster versions of The Hoop Dancer to his acquaintances: in addition to the work illustrated here, a larger version was presented to Julius LeBlanc Stewart, an American student who accompanied him to Egypt in 1874 (this version appears in Stewart’s painting At Home of 1897), and there is a damaged statue meant for an unknown recipient, now at the Musée Georges-Garret in Vesoul.9 A gilt bronze version may also have been a gift to the acclaimed British painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema.10 With these personalized presentations, and with the sheer abundance of afordable editions for sale, Gérôme’s Hoop Dancer quickly became a fixture in middle-class households, as well as in contemporary paintings, sculptures, and even, by 1900, in poetry and song.11
THE POLITICS OF POLYCHROMY
Though made in the humblest of materials, it is the plaster editions of The Hoop Dancer that may hold the greatest value. Each of the versions given to Gérôme’s friends was delicately painted, or polychromed, by the artist, and many others of his sculptures were painted as well.12 Indeed, after 1880, nearly all of Gérôme’s sculptures had at least one polychromed version made after the original, earning him the sobriquet le père Polychrome (the father of polychrome) from the French symbolist writer Marcel Schwob. As one of a handful of polychromed sculptures to retain its coloring, the plaster illustrated here holds a special place in Gérôme’s oeuvre.
In the last decades of the 19th century, the debate about whether to add color to statues was, according to the art historian Michael
The Antique Pottery Painter: Painting Breathes Life into Sculpture, 1893, oil on canvas, 19 3/4 x 27 in., Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
Hatt, “the most urgent issue in sculptural aesthetics.”13 The argument against it may be summarized by the following contemporary view: “It is simply the antithesis of statuary ... the renunciation of art. [It] is close to the painted flesh of corpses; the efect is horrific.”14 For Gérôme, however, the opposite was true. “I first set about coloring marbles,” he explained, “because I’ve always been put of by the coldness of a statue if, once the work is finished, it is left in its natural state.”15 In 1890, encouraged by evidence of polychromy in ancient Greek statuary, particularly at Tanagra, and no longer concerned with popular or critical tastes, Gérôme tinted the skin, hair, lips, and nipples of his Tanagra, causing a sensation at the Salon.
In his attempt to preserve and reinvigorate the academic tradition through this practice, and to educate his students and peers, Gérôme often ordered special Apennine marble — known for its capacity to absorb pigment, which he applied in moderate quantities using a wax solution similar to encaustic. Gérôme’s polychromed works in this stone, like his highly detailed paintings, achieve a remarkably lifelike efect. For his plasters and earthenware editions, a simpler technique was used, with straight oil paint being applied to the untreated surface. In his painting The Antique Pottery Painter: Painting Breathes Life into Sculpture, three versions of which exist, Gérôme references this process.16 Here, a Tanagran woman paints 12 terracotta figures, all from an edition of The Hoop Dancer. Reminiscent of Gérôme’s and Goupil’s own production of numerous versions of the figurine for the market, and with this added gloss, the picture shifts from a record of everyday classical pursuits to a biographical conceit.17
Gérôme’s historicizing and legitimization of polychromy in this scene, and the commodification of his art as a marketable good, would not be the final word. Controversy continued to surround the artist even after his death. The success and significance of The Hoop Dancer, however, was never in doubt. Both personally and professionally, this painted figurine reflected nothing less compelling than the story of his life.
EMILY M. WEEKS is an independent art historian and consultant for museums, auction houses, and private collectors in America, Europe, and the Middle East. Her areas of expertise include Orientalism and 19th-century British and European visual culture; she is also the acknowledged expert on the artist Jean-Léon Gérôme.
ENDNOTES
1. Despite such compelling examples, the actual model for The Hoop Dancer may have been Emma Dupont-Bonnat. 2. Since 1878, Gérôme had made sculptures of subjects taken from or inspired by his most popular paintings, and, as early as 1859, had sculpted figurines that served as maquettes for his later pictures. Initially, Gérôme enlisted the aid of Alexandre Falguière (1831–1900) and Antonin Mercié (1845–1916), two famous sculptors-cum-painters. Later, perhaps dissatisfied with how others were interpreting his figures, Gérôme was more closely involved in the process. 3. Gérôme created several sculptures after the figure of Bathsheba as well. 4. For more on the topic of the “reality efect” in Gérôme’s and others’ Orientalist works, see Emily M. Weeks, “Gendered Geographies: John Frederick
Lewis’s The Reception of 1873,” in Cultures Crossed: John Frederick Lewis (1804–1876) and the Art of Orientalism, New Haven and London, 2014. 5. The first and most famous of these works by Gérôme was Le Combat de
Coqs (The Cock Fight), of c. 1846–65. 6. Goupil formalized his professional relationship with Gérôme in 1859, four years before the artist married into the Goupil family. See Gérôme and
Goupil: Art and Enterprise, exh. cat., Paris, 2000. 7. Gérôme typically modeled in plaster, making life-size and remarkably lifelike works to be used for his finished sculptures. These plaster “masters” were a source of great pride for the artist, who often photographed them together with the model to demonstrate their accuracy. 8. Albert-Pierre Dawant (1852–1923) was a fellow member of the Legion of
Honor. He was elected secretary for the Exposition Universelle in 1900, when Gérôme was elected its president. 9. Gerald A. Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Paris, 1986, p. 316, cat. no. S21. 10. It appears in Alma-Tadema’s The Golden Hour of 1908. 11. See, for example, the poem “La Danseuse au Cerceau,” Léonce de Joncières,
Tanagra, Paris, Mercure de France, 1900, p. 140. 12. For additional examples, see Gérôme’s Bust of Sarah Bernhardt, c. 1890s (Musée de Lunéville), and Corinthe of c. 1903–04 (Musée d’Orsay). 13. Michael Hatt, “Thoughts and Things: Sculpture and the Victorian Nude,” in Exposed: The Victorian Nude, ed. Alison Smith, London, 2001, pp. 38–39.
The origins of the polychromy debate lay with Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy’s Le Jupiter Olympien, published in 1814; previously the art world had been unaware that ancient sculptors used color in their work. 14. G. Gefroy, “Salons de 1892. Aux Champs-Élysées. VIII Les statues peintes,” in La Vie artistique, Paris, 1893, p. 289. Emmanuelle Héran has amusingly labeled those opposed to polychromy “chromophobes” (“L’Évolution du regard sur la sculpture polychrome,” La Revue du Musée d’Orsay, vol. 18, 2004, pp. 63–67). 15. “Je me suis tout d’abord occupe de la coloration des marbres, car j’ai toujours ete efraye par la froideur des statues,” Gérôme to Germain Papst, 2 February 1892, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, 4o V 5381. 16. In several paintings and sculptures by the artist and his colleagues, Gérôme himself is depicted painting his statues and figurines, boldly demonstrating the centrality of polychromy in his art. 17. Gérôme’s controversial practice of depicting scenes of everyday life in the classical world is also defended here: Tanagran and other similar antique sculptures included light-hearted genre figures as well as religious subjects.
One of the most famous showed a female dancer, Danseuse Titeux; it was unearthed at the base of the Acropolis in Athens in 1846 by the architect
Philippe-Auguste Titeux (1812–1846). It may have been this specific work, as well as his Orientalist pursuits, that inspired Gérôme to create The Hoop
Dancer, and that encouraged him to unite familiar scenes of daily life with the elements of classical art.
T R A C K I N S I D E
AR RASURS ROM INDIA, OWND BY BRITAIN’S QUN
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II owns one of the finest private collections of South Asian art — that is, art made on the Indian subcontinent. It is important to know right away that neither she nor her forebears looted even one of these exquisite drawings, vividly colored paintings, or illustrated manuscripts, as is often perceived. Rather, most were presented to British monarchs during several centuries of diplomatic gift-giving, an enriching saga that ran parallel to — sometimes intertwined with, sometimes diverging from — the East India Company’s separate and quite ruthless global trading enterprise. Today, these gifts are part of The Royal Collection, one of the world’s largest art holdings, and one of the last great European collections remaining intact. As well as being given new and much-deserved scholarly attention, many of the South Asian pieces are going on public view for the first time. This is the background for a pair of complementary exhibitions (on view until October 14) at the Queen’s Gallery, which adjoins Buckingham Palace in London; exhibitions there are invariably well conceived and executed. Eastern Encounters: Four Centuries of Paintings and Manuscripts from the Indian Subcontinent is a cornucopia of the best works received by British monarchs over more than 400 years; Splendours of the Subcontinent: A Prince’s Tour of India 1875–6 puts just one year of gift-giving diplomacy under the microscope, displaying many of the specially commissioned presents made for the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII). On his return home, he insisted the gifts make their own tour to 10 venues in Britain, Paris, and Copenhagen for all to enjoy, complete with late opening hours and the world’s first museum gift shops, dubbed “oriental bazaars.” More than two-and-a-half million people saw this unprecedented exhibition.
FINALLY OUT OF STORAGE
The efervescent and enthusiastic Emily Hannam has curated the larger Eastern Encounters exhibition. She is assistant curator of Islamic and South Asian collections at the Royal Collections Trust, the first to hold the position — and it’s her first job. “My whole aim is to make the works available to study, to write about, encouraging people to come and see them. So I want to show as broad a range as possible of the uniformly high-quality South Asian pictures we have,” Hannam says emphatically. The pieces, which date from the 15th through the 20th centuries, make for a trail-blazing show, only the second in the Queen’s Gallery devoted to Her Majesty’s South Asian items. (The first showed just one Mughal manuscript — the Padshahnama, or Book of Emperors.)
“Ours is a small collection,” Hannam explains, “but of uniformly high quality.” British monarchs have felt a particular afection for it. “When part of George III’s library went to the British Library, the Indian collection was kept back and housed at Buckingham Palace. When
JOHAN ZOFFANY (1733–1810), Portrait of Asaf al-Daula, Nawab of Awadh, c. 1784, black, white, and red chalk on brown paper, 8 1/2 x 6 in.
(ABOVE) The Day of Judgement Is Discussed in a Bathhouse, from the Khamsa (Quintet) of Nava’I (Timurid court of Herat), 1540s, with Mughal additions by Govardhan, c. 1605–10, opaque watercolor with gold leaf and metallic paint on paper, image: 8 3/4 x 5 3/4 in. (AT RIGHT) Shamsa (Sunburst) from the Padshahnama (Mughal), c. 1657, opaque watercolor, gold metallic paint, decorative incising, and black ink on paper, 18 x 11 1/4 in.
William IV established the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, he brought the Indian art collection there so it was more stable and would not be moved around. His idea worked, as it remains there today. Later, when people visited Windsor, Queen Victoria would show them her Indian and Persian manuscripts.” In 2015, when Indian prime minster Narendra Modi visited London and lunched with the Queen, she discussed select pieces from her collection with him. To complement this conversation, he presented her with fresh diplomatic gifts: silk brocade stoles, Indian tea, organic honey, and a photograph of the Queen’s first visit to India, in 1961, when she spoke in Hindi to the crowds. “The art and the other gifts are living diplomatic tools,” Hannam explains. “They encourage non-political conversations, and historically, they demonstrate monarchs engaging in other cultures.”
The quality of the pieces in Hannam’s show reveals the significance of diplomatic relations through the centuries. Many are, quite simply, the best of their type. Taking advantage of the large conservation program at Windsor — which encompasses a book-binding department where the Queen has started a new training scheme — Hannam has been able to exhibit some illustrated manuscripts previously too fragile to open due to cracking and flaking paint. These had never been studied, let alone published or displayed. In the show, several leaves from a manuscript are set on a sloping surface so visitors can enjoy the intended experience of looking at them intimately, taking in the detail and subtleties. (They were never meant to hang in frames on walls.)
One series is from the Khamsa (Quintet) of Nava’I, made at the Timurid court of Herat in 1495. Accumulating additional illustrations along the way, it passed through the libraries of Mughal emperor Jahangir and, later, the Nawab of Lucknow, who in 1798 gave it (via the bibliophile governor-general Lord Teignmouth) to George III. An accomplished drawing of the Nawab by Johan Zofany (1733–1810), hung not far away, captures the character of this sophisticated connoisseur, whom the East India Company damned as a debauched wastrel; it was Company soldiers who would later loot and destroy his fine library during the 1858 Rebellion. The Khamsa sheets on display in London now are a glistening double page of script heavily decorated with lapis and gold arabesque patterns, three fine illustrated leaves of Jahangir’s time, and a picture of men in an elegant bathhouse discussing the Day of Judgement. The latter is a hodgepodge of a painting made in Bukhara in the 1540s; later, Jahangir had his star artist Govardhan scratch out and overpaint the figures, then declared it the finest painting in his collection. Indeed, the whole bathhouse is a poetic space, free of time and a fixed viewpoint. Its steamy interior is tense with desire as the added figures cast meaningful glances at each other.
The Padshahnama is the most sumptuous royal Mughal manuscript to have survived anywhere; tragically, its two companion volumes are lost. And although the Queen’s Gallery has already presented an exhibition devoted to it, some pages from the Padshahnama just had to go in the new show. It was commissioned in 1657 by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (who built the Taj Mahal) as a propagandist
(ABOVE) Portrait of Emperor Shah Jahan from the Padshahnama (Mughal), c. 1657, opaque watercolor with gold metallic paints and decorative incising on paper, 22 3/4 x 14 1/4 in. (AT RIGHT) Mir Muhammad Sa'id, known as Mu'azzam Khan (Mughal), c. 1660, ink and watercolor with gold metallic paint on paper, later additions in opaque watercolor, 6 3/4 x 3 3/4 in.
celebration of himself, his reign, and his dynasty. He oversaw its production closely by holding morning meetings with the army of artists and artisans to inspect their work. Hannam has chosen to exhibit the great sunburst signifying the divine light that God transfers to kings, the frontispiece with the emperor’s sensitive portrait, and pages of royal pastimes and dazzling court events. “I wanted to cut across the subjects,” says Hannam, “to show the fineness of the portraiture, to show formality mixed with individualism.” Diferent color palettes create diferent moods: brilliant metallic-bright tones for the court scenes, fresh khaki ones for the lush hunting scenes, familiar Mughal pastel shades for moonlit nocturnes.
More remarkable 17th-century Mughal portraits and calligraphy fill an album that a ruler of Awadh probably gave George IV around 1828. These were painted on paper using opaque watercolors, then mounted on a large decorated leaf. As in the Padshahnama, the portraits have a distinct realism, definition, and intensity, and they reward close study. One reason for their acuteness is that physiognomy was considered a direct reflection of character at the Mughal court, where the science of “firasa” was practiced: one could better understand a person’s nature by studying his or her face. Top artists were considered to have given the dead new life and immortality. In their portraits the forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, and chin are made with fine strokes and strong outlines; muslin cloth is translucent and delicate, jewels glow hard, realism blends seamlessly with abstraction. Nearby, two fine and subtle monochrome portraits of a Mughal courtier and prince have been worked up in minuscule brushstrokes using ink and watercolor (the colored sections were added later). As Hannam explains, “By using highly burnished paper, every brushstroke sits on it, rather than being absorbed.” Looking at them up close makes you hold your breath.
The second half of Hannam’s show may have fewer masterpieces, but it romps through the centuries with some startling works. Possibly the first Hindu texts to arrive in Britain were presented to George III in 1784, the year serious study of India’s cultural history began with the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal by a Calcutta judge, William Jones. By contrast, a decidedly seductive
A Nayika Waiting for Her Lover (Mughal), c. 1730–50, watercolor and opaque watercolor, gold metallic paint, and decorative incising on paper, 6 3/4 x 4 in.
(AT LEFT) Plan of the temple at Srirangam, Company School (Tamil Nadu), c. 1800, inks and watercolor over graphite pencil on paper, 19 1/4 x 14 1/4 in. (ABOVE) Pair of silver rosewater sprinklers, Nahan Foundry, c. 1873–76, silver, 14 1/2 x 4 1/4 in. (BELOW) Nainsukh Family Workshop (Pahari), Narasimha Bursts out of the Pillar and Attacks Hiranyakashipu (from a series depicting the Bhagavata Purana), c. 1775–90, opaque watercolor with gold and silver metallic paints on paper, 9 1/4 x 12 1/2 in. (image)
portrait of a bare-breasted woman expecting her lover was given to the more risqué George IV. There are accomplished scale drawings of mysterious South Indian temples that would surely have flummoxed the British royals, and a European-style oil portrait of the by-then-down-at-heel emperor Akbar Shah II made in 1801 when, thanks in part to the British, the Mughals’ continent-wide empire had been reduced to one building. One wonders why it was thought a suitable gift for the British monarch.
Not so for the 16 top-quality, bold watercolors illustrating a Hindu mythological saga, made in the Lower Himalayas around 1775–90 by the renowned Nainsukh family, and later acquired by George V’s wife Queen Mary. Their large flat areas of pure color in unusual palette combinations were achieved by burnishing layers of thin paint, the geometric compositions setting up areas of tension so that realist details float in surreal spaces. The method works as successfully for a grisly incident of a demon king ordering the assassination of his son as for the bucolic bird’s-eye view of “The Earth,” illustrating the great flood story common to most philosophies. During the royal visit to India in 1911–12, Queen Mary wrote in her diary about nipping of to bazaars, meeting craftsmen, shopping like any discerning tourist would today — but it remains a tantalizing mystery how she got these exquisite paintings. “They haven’t been seen ever,” says Hannam, joyful about their public airing
Peacock Inkstand (Jaipur) formed of 19 pieces, c. 1870–75, gold, enamel, rubies, sapphires, diamonds, silver, and pearl, 7 x 2 1/4 x 15 1/2 in. (overall)
this season. “They are exceptionally good, so we put out all 16 folios that tell the narrative.” They are now ripe for research.
A TOUR TO REMEMBER
The second show at the Queen’s Gallery, Splendours of the Subcontinent: A Prince’s Tour of India 1875–6, looks closely at the astonishing gifts gathered or specially made for high-ranking Indians to present to the first British royal visitor to the sub-continent: Victoria’s son and heir, the Prince of Wales and later Edward VII (and father of George V). Victoria, who was besotted by India but never went there, viewed the four-month-long visit as a way to teach him about the wider world’s cultures and history, establish diplomatic links, and prepare him for kingship.
Edward had already traveled to Canada, the U.S., Egypt, and the Middle East. The India trip, however, would be like no other. Following the Government of India Act of 1858, the British Crown assumed direct rule of India — the East India Company lost control and ceased operations in 1874. The prince was prepared for his trip with a big reading list and curatorial visits to what is now the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Indian Museum Collection to learn about Indian history, society, and crafts. He then left Britain, sailed through the recently opened Suez Canal and landed at Bombay (now called Mumbai) on HMS Serapis on November 8, 1875. Traveling 10,000 miles around India using trains, boats, carriages, and elephants, Edward took in Madurai in the south, Calcutta in the east, Kashmir in the Himalayan hills, and the Taj Mahal (twice), and departed from Bombay on March 13, 1876. Even today, few people could make such a trip, let alone cope with the social program.
“He met with and was sprinkled with rosewater by 90 diferent rulers,” says Kajal Mebhani, curator of the exhibition, “and received more than 2,000 gifts.” Throughout, the Illustrated London News published eagerly read weekly supplements following the tour’s progress. “The tour really had two themes,” Mebhani explains. “It was about diplomacy and crafts. So, our show is about both themes. We are lucky because all the objects speak to both.” This is the first time most have been on exhibition for more than 130 years. Just as the Prince of Wales put his presents on tour when he got home (primarily for British and European craftsmen to be inspired), so Mebhani’s show will go on a tour of Britain to inspire its artists today. This gives weight to The Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts established in 2005 by Prince Charles, which encourages traditional arts and skills, including drawing and painting, in the UK and 20 countries worldwide.
So, what did the Indians give the prince? First, their natural generosity had to be reined in. Fearing the gifts would be too big, British “residents” attached to the royal courts were instructed to gently suggest that small was beautiful, as was local craftsmanship. Thus, exquisite gifts show of local master craftsmen’s skills rooted in tradition. Many relate to the welcome etiquette the prince followed when he met each ruler: giving perfume and betel-nuts in a special tent theatrically furnished to look like a royal throne room, so that both sides were on an equal footing. Thus, the Rajah of Nahan gave Edward an elegant pair of silver rosewater sprinklers that blend European and Indian ideas; the Raja of Kapurthala ofered gold water bottles decorated with birds and Indian mythical animals; the Maharaja of Indore gave silver betel-nut boxes. Many rulers could not resist giving India’s renowned gem-encrusted gold jewelry – Ratlam, Mysore, Jaipur, Udaipur, Gwalior, and others presented prestigious baubles. The prince himself bought two bangles to give his mother on her next birthday; she was thrilled.
Perhaps the gift that best symbolizes the Prince of Wales’s tour is the Peacock Inkstand presented by the Maharaja of Benares, the Hindus’ holiest spot on the River Ganges. Its shape is that of the maharaja’s state barge, the Maurpankhi, which he used to transport the prince along the Ganges on January 5, 1876 — the mast is inscribed with a dedication to his royal visitor. The barge can be taken apart into 19 pieces that include a penknife, two inkwells, two pen nibs, and a pair of scissors; indeed, the exhibition contains a video that shows the disassembling process. The inkstand was commissioned from Jaipur craftsmen who were the best in both mechanical intricacy and application of glowing enamels. The Benares ruler also gave his visitor an ivory model of his own palace, which opens as three drawers; this was made by local carvers retained at the royal court.
The prince’s return journey to Britain took about a month. Just six weeks after he docked at Portsmouth, prime minister Benjamin Disraeli announced that Queen Victoria would be given the title Empress of India, to take efect on January 1, 1877. The Raj panoply continued until India won its freedom in 1947. Together these two exhibitions should inspire practicing artists globally and also help the rest of us understand the multi-layered, centuries-long relationship between Britain and South Asia.
LOUISE NICHOLSON is an art historian and arts journalist who was raised in the UK but has lived in New York since 2001. Her specialty is South Asia, which she has studied for 40 years. She runs a company for discerning travel to India (louisenichol sonindia.com).
Information: royalcollection.org.uk
All photos courtesy Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018
GRAAR NATIONWID
GEORGE SHAW TAKES YALE
GEORGE SHAW: A CORNER OF A FOREIGN FIELD
Yale Center for British Art 1080 Chapel Street New Haven, CT 06520 203.432.2800, britishart.yale.edu October 4–December 30
The Yale Center for British Art will soon open the first museum exhibition in America dedicated to one of Britain’s leading contemporary painters, George Shaw (b. 1966). On view will be nearly 70 paintings, 60 drawings, and numerous prints, sketchbooks, and notebooks, all made since 1996.
Shaw was born in Coventry, in the Midlands region that was once an industrial powerhouse but has been in economic decline for half a century. While earning his B.A. from Shefeld Polytechnic (not far from home) and then his M.A. from London’s Royal College of Art, he became steeped in art history and the art of our own time. His engagement with the past intensified during a residency at London’s National Gallery, which culminated in a solo show there.
Shaw is best known for realist scenes of the Tile Hill housing estate where he grew up — a postwar experiment in socialism that has not fared well — and also of the ancient woodlands that surround it. Usually devoid of people, these suburban visions are melancholy, sometimes poignant, underscoring Shaw’s embrace of the British landscape tradition while also subverting it. Since 1998, he has used Humbrol, a sticky, quick-drying enamel paint — primarily marketed toward model airplane and car enthusiasts rather than professional artists. It imparts the metallic sheen and hard edges that help make Shaw’s scenes so memorable.
Yale’s exhibition will contain several new works, and also an installation titled The Woodsman that will transform one gallery into a graphite thicket of branches. Organized in collaboration with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery (both in London), this project will move on to the Holburne Museum in Bath (February 8–May 6, 2019). On October 9, curator Mark Hallett (Paul Mellon Centre) will lead a conversation with Shaw open to the public.
GEORGE SHAW (b. 1966), Scenes from The Passion: No. 57, 1996, Humbrol enamel on board, 16 15/16 x 20 7/8 in., Royal College of Art, London, courtesy of the artist and the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London © George Shaw 2018
IMPRESSIONISTS HEAD TO WISCONSIN
DAWN WHITELAW (b. 1945), Bungalow Aglow, 2018, oil on linen, 18 x 24 in.
AMERICAN IMPRESSIONIST SOCIETY 19TH ANNUAL NATIONAL JURIED EXHIBITION
Peninsula School of Art 3900 County Road F Fish Creek, WI 54212 920.868.3455, peninsulaschoolofart.org September 27–October 28
The American Impressionist Society (AIS) is hosting its 19th Annual National Juried Exhibition at the Peninsula School of Art. On view will be approximately 175 paintings, with an additional 20 by AIS Master members, ofcers, and co-founders. Artist Dawn Whitelaw will serve as awards judge and will present a workshop (September 24–26), then a demonstration on September 28. On the 27th she will preside over the prize-giving, which encompasses more than $65,000 in awards, including $12,000 for Best of Show. The opening week also features a gallery tour, a panel discussion, a group painting demonstration, a lecture by Kami Mendlik, a lecture on studio safety by Gamblin Artist Oils, and even an all-member paint-out. The school is located in scenic Door County, which has an active plein air painting scene and enthusiastic collectors all around.
Founded in 1998 by Florida artists William Schultz, Charlotte Dickinson, Marjorie Bradley, and Pauline Ney, AIS is a nonprofit organization with more than 1,500 active members across the United States.
AMERICAN MASTERS MARKS ITS FIRST DECADE
10TH ANNUAL AMERICAN MASTERS FINE ART EXHIBITION & SALE
Salmagundi Club 47 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10003 212.255.7740 americanmastersart.com October 8–26
The Salmagundi Club is marking the first decade of its popular American Masters selling show by welcoming 70 of North America’s leading representational artists to participate. On view for 18 days will be their paintings and works on paper, encompassing everything from landscapes, marine scenes, and still lifes to figures and portraits. The show’s most intriguing events, including educational programs, are set to occur the weekend of October 11–14, and the exhibits themselves will first be available for purchase during the ticketed gala on October 12.
Housed in an elegant Greenwich Village brownstone mansion it acquired in 1917, the Salmagundi has successfully renovated its large gallery on the main floor and is laying plans to upgrade facilities elsewhere in the building. Part of the proceeds from American Masters will benefit these upcoming enhancements.
FRENCH MASTERWORKS GO SOUTH
STORYTELLING: FRENCH ART FROM THE HORVITZ COLLECTION
John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art 5401 Bay Shore Road Sarasota, FL 34243 941.359.5700, ringling.org September 9–December 2
For more than 30 years, the Massachusetts collector Jefrey E. Horvitz has been acquiring superb French drawings and paintings, which now number more than 1,600. He has shared these treasures through many exhibitions worldwide, all curated by Alvin L. Clark, Jr., Ph.D. (Harvard Art Museums). Now, to complement its own rich holdings of historic French art, the Ringling will mount two separate exhibitions that Clark has selected from the Horvitz Collection.
The larger show features 60 drawings and 10 related prints for book illustrations created between the 16th and 19th centuries. Many entail elaborate compositions that incorporate multiple figures, demonstrating their creators’ sensitivity in imagining visually compelling translations of written stories. Visitors will discover the range of techniques they employed, from pen-and-ink to chalk, charcoal, and graphite. Among the names represented are famous ones like Charles Le Brun (1619–1690) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), and also some less familiar now (e.g., Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson [1767–1824]).
The smaller Horvitz exhibition features 10 paintings of Biblical and mythological scenes by such talents as Nicolas de Largillière (1656–1746) and Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre (1714–1789), as well as two memorable portraits by the celebrated Louis-Michel Vanloo (1707–1771).
After closing in Sarasota, the two shows will move to Connecticut’s Fairfield University Art Museum (January 25–March 29, 2019).
JOSH ELLIOTT (b. 1973), Cloud Coat, 2018, oil on board, 18 x 54 in., available at American Masters
EDME BOUCHARDON (1698–1762), Visigoths Attacking Clovis as He Kills Alaric, n.d., red chalk on cream antique laid paper, framing lines in red chalk, 3 3/4 x 7 15/16 in.
CRAIG BLIETZ (b. 1956), Helianthus, 2018, oil on panel, 48 x 60 in., on view at the Museum of Wisconsin Art
IT’S CRAIG BLIETZ’S YEAR
CRAIG BLIETZ: HERD
Museum of Wisconsin Art 205 Veterans Avenue West Bend, WI 53095 262.334.9638, wisconsinart.org October 13–January 13
The Wisconsin painter Craig Blietz is the toast of his native state, thanks to two exhibitions on view this season. His solo show at the Museum of Wisconsin Art features a new body of 30 works that depict the cows so beloved in this dairy-minded state. As seen here in Helianthus, Blietz places his impeccably drawn cows front and center, allowing them to float in a depth-less background of quilt-like patterns and muted agrarian symbols. (Note the sunflowers at left and barn at right.) The seemingly abstract designs of his cowhides are far from accidental, however: Blietz knows his cow models well and can distinguish one from the next with ease. The resulting scenes — part psychedelic, part Barbizon School — are a unique contribution to American art and deserve more attention beyond the Midwest.
Blietz is also participating in a group exhibition at the Plymouth Arts Center (Plymouth, WI) titled In Fine Form: The Human Presence. On view October 12–November 30, this project shifts attention away from four-legged animals to two-legged ones like us.
A TIMELESS HERITAGE
Legacy Gallery 7178 E. Main Street Scottsdale, AZ 85251 480.945.1113, legacygallery.com November 2–3
In 1988, Jinger and Brad Richardson, with the help of Jinger’s mother, Marilyn Murray, opened Legacy Gallery in the heart of Scottsdale, Arizona. In the 30 years since then, it has become one of the country’s leading sources of art of the American West. Moreover, it has added a successful location in Jackson Hole, co-founded the popular Scottsdale Art Auction held every spring, and hired a certain lady who just happens to be the Richardsons’ daughter, Janell.
To celebrate the gallery’s 30th anniversary, the Richardsons have invited 30 top Western artists — some currently on Legacy’s roster and others previously represented by it — to send major works to the show and sale occurring the first weekend of November. Among the participants are Bill Anton, Scott Christensen, John Coleman, Glenn Dean, Martin Grelle, Jeremy Lipking, John and Terri Moyers, Jim Norton, and Kyle Polzin. Their artworks will be sold by draw or silent bid, and there will be a full day of activities on November 3. These include presentations by John Coleman and C. Michael Dudash and tours of Scottsdale’s Museum of the West.
Everyone at Fine Art Connoisseur congratulates Legacy on reaching this milestone.
JOHN COLEMAN (b. 1949), Little Crow, 2018, oil on canvas, 26 x 18 in.
LINES IN MOTION: DRAWINGS FROM HISTORIC & CONTEMPORARY MASTERS
Salmagundi Club 47 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10003 212.255.7740, salmagundi.org September 21–29
WILL ST. JOHN (b. 1980), Man in Profile, 2014, red, black, and white chalk on paper, 11 x 14 in. GREGORY MORTENSON (b. 1976), Self-Portrait at 40, 2016, graphite on paper, 12 x 10 in.
At the Salmagundi Club, member and professional art conservator Alexander Katlan has enlivened the already intriguing exhibition of 19th-century drawings he selected from his own collection by inviting more than 40 contemporary artists to display their drawings, too. The result will be almost 60 works in total, all connected in spirit and style. "Together these drawings trace a continuous line of natural observation,” Katlan explains.
Most of the deceased artists here — primarily American — were trained in the atelier-based academic tradition: Milton J. Burns, Colin Campbell Cooper, Dean Cornwell, William Hart, Walter C. Hartson, F. Luis Mora, Peter Moran, J. Francis Murphy, Alfred Parsons, Stephen Rogers Peck, Arthur Quartley, Everett Shinn, Walter Granville Smith, Elihu Vedder, and Robert Walter Weir. Like their forerunners, the living artists have made drawings in charcoal, graphite, or chalk. They are Steven Assael, Stephen Bauman, Liz Beard, Charles H. Cecil, Kevin Mueller Cisneros, Landon Clay, Jacob Collins, Tony Curanaj, Savannah Cuf, Jon DeMartin, Kathryn Engberg, Daniel Graves, Amaya Gurpide, Cornelia Hernes, Sam Hung, Brendan H. Johnston, Molly Judd, David Jon Kassan, John Darren Kingsley, Judith Pond Kudlow, Andrew Lattimore, Ben Long, Carlos Madrid, Rodrigo Mateo, Gregory Mortenson, Edward Minof, Richard Piloco, Edmond Rochat, Will St. John, Burton Silverman, Jordan Sokol, Brandon Solof, Dan Thompson, Peter Van Dyck, John A. Varriano, Brian West, Robbie Wraith, and Dale Zinkowski.
Katlan notes that four of the artists proved instrumental in the early 1990s revival of classical realism and the humanist tradition: Graves, Cecil, Long, and Wraith. All had studied in Florence during the 1970s with Italy’s “patriarch of realism” Pietro Annigoni (1910–1988) and/or Nerina Simi (1891–1988). As it happens, Katlan met Graves and Cecil in Simi’s studio more than 40 years ago. As for the younger artists in this show, many studied at Graves’s Florence Academy of Art, Charles C. Cecil Studios (Florence), Jacob Collins’s Grand Central Academy (New York), or Nelson Shanks’s Studio Incamminati (Philadelphia). (Shanks had also studied with Annigoni in the ’70s.)
Lest anyone fear this will be a ho-hum lineup of highly realistic likenesses, Katlan has reassuring words: “Interestingly, what these artists decided to omit in transferring their observations to paper is often as important as what is actually drawn on paper. Although one might assume that a representational drawing or painting is an exact replication of reality, in fact it is an interpretation of reality filtered through the artist’s observations, just as the viewer ultimately interprets what is represented.”
Most of the exhibition’s educational programming is concentrated on the weekend of September 23–25. A reception is scheduled for the 23rd, and the next day Katlan will moderate a panel discussion titled Drawing from Life vs. Drawing from Photographs. Participating in this dialogue are the artists Jacob Collins, Max Ginsburg, and Burton Silverman, all ebullient conversationalists. Finally, on September 25, Dan Thompson and Stephen Bauman will demonstrate their drawing techniques.
All works in this exhibition will be priced under $4,000, and the living artists will receive 100 percent of the purchase price.
The National Watercolor Society (NWS) is hosting its 98th International Open Exhibition in San Pedro, California. In 1999 the NWS bought its headquarters building there; today it encompasses ofces, a gallery, workshops, and a place to house the growing permanent collection. On view this fall will be watercolors by 91 diferent artists, selected by jurors Linda Daly Baker, Linda A. Doll, Carla O’Connor, Charles Rouse, and Michael Schlicting. On October 20, NWS will host its annual meeting, recognition luncheon, and opening reception. During the festivities, awards juror (and distinguished curator) D. Scott Atkinson will announce more than $40,000 in prizes.
DEAN MITCHELL (b. 1957), Carolyn, 2018, watercolor on watercolor board, 25 x 20 in.
THE BEST IN WATERCOLORS
NATIONAL WATERCOLOR SOCIETY 98TH INTERNATIONAL OPEN EXHIBITION
915 S. Pacific Avenue San Pedro, CA 90731 310.831.1099 nationalwatercolorsociety.org October 4–December 16
NATIONAL ARTS CLUB
15 Gramercy Park South New York, NY 10003 212.475.3424, nationalartsclub.org November 1–January 4
DANIEL GARBER (1880–1958), The Wild Grape Vine, 1908, oil on canvas, 44 x 35 1/2 in.
The National Arts Club (NAC) is celebrating its 120th anniversary in style. It was founded in 1898 by author and poet Charles De Kay as a gathering place to welcome artists of all genres, arts lovers, and patrons. Today the NAC hosts both members-only and public events honoring exemplary leaders in the arts as well as exhibitions, theatrical and musical performances, lectures, and readings. Its feature programs focus on visual arts, literature, film, architecture, fashion, photography, and music.
To mark this milestone, the NAC will exhibit the very best of its permanent collection, which includes major paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by such masters as Will Barnet, Colin Campbell Cooper, Charles Curran, Lois Dodd, Daniel Garber, Robert Henri, Edward Potthast, Paul Manship, Francis Mora, Larry Rivers, Lucas Samaras, and Mark Tobey — some housed in elaborate gilt frames designed by Stanford White.
The exhibition will run for just over two months, but the opening weekend is the ideal time to see it if you can. Non-members of the NAC can purchase a ticket for events to be held on three consecutive days: on November 2 there will be an opening night celebration; on the 3rd comes the black-tie dinner and presentation of gold medals to four honorees; and on the 4th is a brunch. All of these events will feature live music, and their proceeds will benefit the club’s endowment, an appropriate allocation in view of its rich history and bright future.
WALTER ELMER SCHOFIELD (1867–1944), Ebb Tide, 1912, oil on canvas, 26 x 30 in.
NANCY BUSH’S VISIONS OF THE SUN AND MOON
NANCY BUSH: LUNA Y SOL
InSight Gallery 214 West Main Street Fredericksburg, TX 78624 830.997.9920, insightgallery.com September 27–October 18
NANCY BUSH (b. 1947), Early Moonrise, 2018, oil on board, 30 x 36 in.
The tonalist painter Nancy Bush will soon exhibit her most recent landscapes at InSight Gallery, located in her hometown of Fredericksburg, Texas. Renowned for the tranquility and soft palette of her aesthetic vision, Bush has long portrayed the Texas Hill Country and mountains of New Mexico she loves. Her latest pictures highlight the significance of the sun and the moon, which, according to the artist, “nourish our bodies and souls on a daily cycle and provide us with endless poetry, joy, peace, contemplation, hope, renewal, and beauty. This is often beyond description and always unique in its interpretation. My hope is to convey some of these feelings and emotions in my work that will touch others in a personal way. Landscape is my love and is always a challenge, spiritually and emotionally. The variety and vastness of it can sometimes be overwhelming. Simplification is the answer.”
THE BEST OF AMERICA IN CINCINNATI
MATTHEW CUTTER (b. 1974), Fall Reflections, 2018, acrylic and oil on paper mounted to ACM (aluminum composite material) panel, 14 x 21 in.
NATIONAL OIL & ACRYLIC PAINTERS’ SOCIETY BEST OF AMERICA
Eisele Gallery of Fine Art 5729 Dragon Way Cincinnati, OH 45227 513.791.7717, eiselefineart.com September 14–October 13
The National Oil & Acrylic Painters’ Society (NOAPS) is hosting its national show, Best of America, for the 28th consecutive year. For this edition, to be held at Eisele Gallery in Cincinnati, more than 900 entries were submitted, but only 125 were selected. The participants hail from 30 states, Canada, and as far away as Malaysia and China. On the opening weekend, awards judge (and distinguished artist) Adam Clague will distribute more than $25,000 in awards. All paintings in the exhibition will be for sale.
PASTEL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 46TH ANNUAL EXHIBITION
National Arts Club 15 Gramercy Park South New York, NY 10003 212.475.3424 pastelsocietyofamerica.org September 4–29
At the National Arts Club this season is the 46th Annual Exhibition of the Pastel Society of America (PSA). Selected by jurors Rainie Crawford, Colette Odya Smith, and Jimmy Wright, the artworks will be reviewed by awards judge Calvin Brown (Princeton University Art Museum) before he distributes $40,000 in prizes on September 23. On that occasion, member Diana DeSantis will be presented with the PSA’s 2018 Hall of Fame award; she has been an instructor of still life, landscape, and portraiture in the PSA School for Pastels since 2011. In addition, the Friend of Pastel award, bestowed on individuals who demonstrate major commitment to the PSA, will be presented to longtime board member Claire Paisner and to Pierre-Yann Guidetti, co-founder and CEO of the artists’ supply firm Savoir-Faire. Scheduled throughout the exhibition’s run will be an array of demonstrations, portfolio reviews, workshops, a public gallery tour and reception, and a materials fair.
DIANA DESANTIS (b. 1927), Zandore`s Profile, 2014, pastel on paper, 30 x 22 in.
QUEST FOR THE WEST ART SHOW & SALE
Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art 500 West Washington Street Indianapolis, IN 46204 317.636.9378, quest.eiteljorg.org September 9–October 14
GLADYS ROLDAN-DE-MORAS (b. 1965), Reverie, 2018, oil on linen, 48 x 24 in. GEORGE HALLMARK (b. 1949), La Parroquia, 2018, oil on linen, 36 x 36 in.
The 13th annual Quest for the West Art Show & Sale returns to the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art.
On view will be approximately 200 paintings, sculptures, and drawings by 50 major artists, none of them exhibited previously. The returning participants include Michael Dudash, Robert Grifng, Logan Maxwell Hagege, P.A. Nisbet, Heide Presse, and Gladys Roldan-de-Moras; the four new arrivals are Brent Cotton, Donna HowellSickles, Mark Kelso, and Terri Kelly Moyers.
The opening weekend (September 7–8) promises many delights to patrons who purchase the necessary tickets. During the gala, they will meet the artists and bid on artworks in a “luck-of-the-draw” process that opens and closes with the sound of a bugle. Enlivening the weekend are a tour of the nearby Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site and a separate sale of miniatures created by many of the participating artists. In addition, there will be a reception honoring the 2017 Quest Artist of Distinction, Howard Post, who has been creating what he calls “ranchscapes” for more than 40 years. On view (through November 18) will be a show featuring 18 of Post’s artworks from the past 20 years.
On September 9, the Quest show will open to the general public, who are welcome to buy artworks that did not sell during the opening weekend.
RECORDING THE WEST
NATURE’S SPONTANEITY
Sorrel Sky Gallery 125 W. Palace Avenue Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.501.6555, sorrelsky.com October 5–31
Sorrel Sky Gallery is presenting a show of the distinctive yet complementary plein air paintings created recently by Peggy Immel and Stephen Day. Each has submitted roughly a dozen works inspired by the Western landscapes they revere.
Immel has been focusing on color relationships, how they change the mood or feeling of a painting as she shifts her palette from cooler to warmer. She has also been introducing more man-made objects, perhaps a road, a fence-line, a small structure or village, to preserve the human influence and keep her paintings engaging. Immel says she likes to “walk a site that attracts me, writing down my ideas, my reason to paint what I see. Later, I’ll make a small value sketch. Finally, I set all of that aside and just paint intuitively. This process allows for an easier flow of creativity. I believe the ‘why’ of a painting matters more than the ‘what.’ The most exciting pieces to paint have both a visual and philosophical foundation.”
Day often revisits his childhood memories of the big skies and open spaces of Wyoming. On a recent trip, he took more than 800 photographs and painted various small plein air studies. Some of those studies have turned into large pieces made in the studio. Day often works on a piece for a time, sets it aside, and works on something else. Later, he will return to the original piece, developing and enhancing the final imagery. “I paint every day, pretty loose and quick to get a fresh response. These are landscapes, skies, and seasonal scenes inspired by the Southwest. But part of my heart will always be in Wyoming.”
PEGGY IMMEL (b. 1943), Peaches and Cream, 2016, oil on linen panel, 8 x 10 in.
WOMEN ARTISTS GRACE OKLAHOMA
WOMEN ARTISTS OF THE WEST 48TH NATIONAL JURIED EXHIBITION
Price Tower Arts Center 510 Dewey Avenue Bartlesville, OK 74003 918.336.4949, waow.org September 20–November 4
Women Artists of the West (WAOW) is the oldest juried women’s art organization in the U.S. Originally focused on Western themes, it now encompasses all genres and subjects through works created by its 350 professional women painters and sculptors. The group’s 48th National Juried Exhibition will occur in the Price Tower Arts Center, a 19-story landmark completed in 1956 by architect Frank Lloyd Wright and located just 40 minutes north of Tulsa.
On view will be more than 175 works; the first look will go to patrons and donors during the pre-sale and reception on September 20. The following day will see the ofcial opening reception, during which artist and awards juror Krystii Melaine will announce cash prizes totaling $20,000. A round of members’ demos is set for September 22, and a day later the members will participate in a paint-out at the Woolaroc Museum & Wildlife Preserve and Prairie Song Pioneer Village.
ILENE GIENGER-STANFIELD (b. 1956), Decisions, 2017, oil on panel, 24 x 18 in.
SEPTEMBER IN WYOMING
centerofthewest.org rendezvousroyale.org jacksonholechamber.com wildlifeart.org/western-visions jacksonholeartauction.com christensenstudio.com
September is an ideal time for art lovers to visit the great state of Wyoming. The weather is mild, the scenery impressive, and the art world humming with activities.
The Jackson Hole Arts Festival gets underway September 5–16. A key feature is the National Museum of Wildlife Art’s 32nd annual Western Visions show, which centers on a weekend-long series of celebrations and sales running September 13–15. This year’s featured artist is Dennis Ziemienski, who will be signing posters of his lead image at Altamira Fine Art on September 12. Running concurrently is the 12th annual Jackson Hole Art Auction, presented by Trailside Galleries and Gerald Peters Gallery (September 14-15). This two-day sale ofers a range of wildlife, sporting, figurative, landscape, and Western works by historical and contemporary masters. And before Western Visions really gets going, everyone can enjoy the Western Design Conference (September 6–10) and also a gallery walk downtown (September 7).
Speaking of Jackson’s galleries, Astoria Fine Art will welcome Joshua Tobey and Mark Eberhard (September 13), then Luke Frazier and Richard Lofer (September 14). At Legacy Gallery, Greg Beecham will be highlighted (September 13), followed by Tim Shinabarger (September 14). Over at Trailside Galleries, Morgan Weistling will be signing books on September 15, the same day as the open house featuring Dustin Van Wechel, Jhenna Quinn Lewis, Sueellen Ross, and Adam Smith. On September 7, Turner Fine Art will spotlight Kathryn Mapes Turner, Mitch Baird, Jane Hunt, Stacey Peterson, and John Felsing, and the exhibition Art That Inspires: A Curated Show of Master Painters will run there from September 3 through October 19. Just over the pass from Jackson is Victor, Idaho, where — on September 12 — artist Scott Christensen will host a one-day encounter with five gifted artists at his extraordinary studio and gallery.
In Cody, the Rendezvous Royale is a multi-faceted program that spans late August and much of September. At the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the 37th annual Bufalo Bill Art Show & Sale is already on view, as is a show of miniatures that closes September 14. On the weekend of September 20–22, a range of lively events and educational programs will unfold, encompassing classes, demonstrations, tours, auctions, a quick draw competition, and (on September 20) a luncheon-lecture featuring Tim Newton of New York City’s Salmagundi Club. Cody’s selling exhibition of design, furniture, and other functional items (By Western Hands) runs September 20–22, and the whole season culminates on September 22 with the Patrons Ball.
DEAN CORNWELL (1892–1960), Illustration for The Enchanted Hill, 1924, oil on canvas, 36 x 30 in., Jackson Hole Art Auction, estimate: $50,000–$75,000
DAVID KAMMERZELL (b. 1939), Heartless Smokey Bill, 2018, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 in., on view at the Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale, Cody
