Cape Ann and Monhegan Island Vistas: Contrasted New England Art Colonies will explore the relationship between the historic and still-thriving art colonies of Monhegan, Maine, and Cape Ann, Massachusetts, featuring the work of artists connected with both places. Organized in collaboration with the Cape Ann Museum, this exhibition will be on view at the Monhegan Museum of Art & History, Monhegan Island, Maine, from July 1 through September 30, 2021.

At the turn of the 20th century, American artists flocked to the new summer art colonies that stretched from California to New England. This exhibition pairs paintings and prints by artists who worked at both of two very different art colonies in the northeast: Cape Ann, Massachusetts, and Monhegan Island, Maine. Separated by one hundred miles of ocean, these colonies, like many others, became important crossroads in the history of American art, hosting major artists through the years. Each of the artists represented visited and/or lived in both Cape Ann and Monhegan: Theresa Bernstein, Eric Hudson, Leon Kroll, Hayley Lever, James Fitzgerald, Lester Stevens, Don Stone, and Stow Wengenroth, among others.

Cape and Island Vistas explores how these artists depicted aspects of each location, reflecting the differences between the city-size Cape Ann—with its large industrial harbor in Gloucester, a sizable fishing fleet, and the extended Rockport seashore—and the tiny offshore island of Monhegan, with its striking cliff formations and modest village harbor. Two paintings by Ken Gore, for example, embrace the contrasts in the two locales’ very different, but equally iconic, coastlines. One, Sea Mist, captures the crash of rushing waves at the base of Monhegan’s rocky cliffs; conversely, the sea shown in The Beach, painted on Cape Ann, rolls slowly onto a gentle strand. Landscape painter and printmaker Jacqueline “Jackie” Hudson spent much of her life on Monhegan but also had a studio in Cape Ann. Her energetic Church Fair, Main Street, Rockport is a colorful and lighthearted view of Cape people at play, while her watercolor Storm in Monhegan Harbor is dramatically different: the mood is somber; the colors are menacingly dreary; and the water inside the harbor is at a boil. A pair of scenes by European-trained Boston School artist and Cape Ann resident Aldro T. Hibbard, in turn, records the difference between Rockport harbor architecture in winter, centered on a shed that came to be known to artists and public alike as “Motif No. 1,” and a summery view of the small harbor at Monhegan.

Cape and Island Vistas—Cape Ann and Monhegan Island: Contrasted New England Art Colonies includes several works from the collections of the Monhegan Museum of Art and History, the Cape Ann Museum, the Rockport Art Association, and private collections. Co-organized with the Cape Ann Museum, the exhibition will travel to the Cape Ann Museum in the fall, where it will be on view October 23, 2021–January 16, 2022. A 64-page, fully illustrated catalogue with contributions by James F. O’Gorman, Martha Oaks, Oliver Barker, and Jennifer Pye, will accompany the exhibition. The catalog will be available for purchase in the Monhegan Museum Store or online for $20.

The San Diego Museum of Art plans to open to two summer exhibitions, Cranach to Canaletto: Masterpieces from the Bemberg Foundation and Everything You See Could Be A Lie: Photorealistic Drawings by Ana de Alvear. From Old Master paintings to contemporary, hyper-realistic drawings, works from these exhibitions are rarely seen in the U.S. and will be on view at the San Diego Museum beginning June 18, 2021, through Sept. 27, 2021.

(Concurrently, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will be showing modern French paintings from the Bemberg Foundation from June 27 to Sept. 19, 2021, in Monet to Matisse: Impressionism to Modernism.)

Cranach to Canaletto: Masterpieces from the Bemberg Foundation

Organized by the Bemberg Foundation, based at the historic Hôtel d’Assézat in Toulouse, France, the exhibition features over 80 works produced between 1500 and 1800. This exhibition marks the first time these works have been shown publicly in the U.S. and features some of the biggest names in European painting.

Artists represented include renowned Venetian painters: Jacopo Robusti (Tintoretto), Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), Paolo Veronese, Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto), Giandomenico Tiepolo and Alessandro Longhi; French artists: Jean Clouet, Jean-Marc Nattier, François Boucher and Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun; and Flemish and Dutch painters: Pieter Brueghel The Younger, Jan Van Goyen and Anthony Van Dyck. Four Lucas Cranach the Elder paintings will also be on display, a testament to Bemberg’s appreciation of this seminal figure of the German Renaissance. 

Grouped thematically in four sections, Cranach to Canaletto: Masterpieces from the Bemberg Foundation explores themes of portraiture, landscape, mythology and domestic environments with layers of storytelling within each painting. Along the way, issues of perceived beauty, romance, realism and faith are considered. The exhibition space was also created specifically to highlight the collection, including gallery archways inspired by the Hôtel d’Assézat architecture, long sightlines and a dramatic, intimate final section.

The exhibition is composed entirely of works from The Bemberg Foundation and is co-curated by Philippe Cros, Director of the Bemberg Foundation, and Michael Brown, Ph.D., Curator of European Art at The San Diego Museum of Art. 

Georges Bemberg was an Argentina-born French collector, world traveler and Harvard-trained scholar, who amassed an extraordinary collection of Western art from the end of the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Bemberg’s private collection was preserved through the Foundation, which is currently closed for renovations. 

“It is an exceptional and unique opportunity to collaborate with the Bemberg Foundation and bring these magnificent masterpieces from France to the U.S. for the first time in our Cranach to Canaletto: Masterpieces from the Bemberg Foundation exhibition,” said Roxana Velásquez, Maruja Baldwin Executive Director at The San Diego Museum of Art. “This collection is very complementary to our own permanent collection and a true delight for the senses.” 

The American Art Fair celebrates spring 2021 American Art Week from May 15-22 with Open Houses by appointment at most galleries during the opening weekend, featured in-gallery exhibitions, as well as online highlights at theamericanartfair.comthrough June 30.

The Spring 2021 American Art Week heralds new May dates for The American Art Fair beginning in 2022. As announced by the Fair’s Founder, Tom Colville: “We are initiating a comprehensive collaboration under the umbrella of American Art Week with The American Art Fair, lectures and other programming, museum and gallery exhibitions, and the spring American paintings sales to make New York in May a destination for collectors and curators.”

Exhibitors in American Art Week include Alexandre Gallery, American Illustrators Gallery, Avery Galleries, Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts, Conner • Rosenkranz, D. Wigmore Fine Art, D C Moore Gallery, Debra Force Fine Art, Forum Gallery, Godel & Co., Graham Shay 1857, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, John H. Surovek Gallery, Jonathan Boos, Kraushaar Galleries, Menconi + Schoelkopf, Meredith Ward Fine Art, Questroyal Fine Art, Taylor | Graham, Thomas Colville Fine Art, and Vose Galleries.

Gallery highlights include works by Reynolds Beale, Ludwig Bemelmans, George Wesley Bellows, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Robert Indiana, Jacob Lawrence, Frederick Kann, Edward Lamson Henry, Doris Lee, Harriet Frishmuth, Frederick MacMonnies, Willard Leroy Metcalf, Paul Howard Manship, Reginald Marsh, Alfred Maurer, George L.K. Morris, Dale Nichols, Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Raphael Soyer, and Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones.

American Art Week gallery exhibitions include Debra Force Fine Art’s American Impressionism and An Adventurous Spirit: Julian Alden Weir (both through June 18; Hirschl & Adler Galleries’The American Dream: Eight Decades of Reality and Imagination in American Art; and Godel & Co., Inc.’s Director’s Choice: 19th- and Early 20th-Century American Paintings.

Meredith Ward Fine Art’s exhibition Frank Diaz Escalet (1930-2012) features the Puerto Rican-born artist who lived in New York City and Maine, where he created bold and innovative images based on the everyday lives of working people. Largely self-taught, Escalet was a painter and master leather crafter and developed his own technique for creating images out of cut leather that vividly capture the mood of the scene.

Two gallery exhibitions relate to the founding of American Abstract Artists. D. Wigmore Fine Art’s The Birth of American Abstraction: Revisiting the 1936 Concretionist Exhibition considers the 1936 exhibition organized by Albert Eugene Gallatin as a protest against Alfred Barr’s exclusion of American artists in MoMA’s Cubism and Abstract Art. Gallatin’s exhibition included works by Charles Biederman, Alexander Calder, John Ferren, George L. K. Morris, and Charles Green Shaw. In the summer the exhibition traveled to Paris (Galerie Pierre) and London (Mayor Gallery) and Gallatin replaced Calder as the fifth exhibitor. Menconi + Schoelkopf’s The Park Avenue Cubists focuses on Gallatin’s circle which established American Abstract Artists later in 1936 to create opportunities for abstract artists decades before abstract painting would become synonymous with New York painting. A related exhibition focused on American abstract artists is Kraushaar Galleries’ The Contours of Abstraction (through July 2) with works by Esphyr Slobodkina and Dorothy Dehner among others.

The North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) announced its fall 2021 exhibitions, including Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau Visionary, opening October 23, 2021, and on view through January 23, 2022. 

Czech-born Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939) was one of the most influential and celebrated artists in turn-of-the-20th-century Paris. He is best known for his graphic work, such as theater posters for superstar actress Sarah Bernhardt and decorative panels and advertisements featuring graceful women. Mucha created a distinctive approach characterized by harmonious compositions, sinuous forms, organic lines, and muted colors, which became synonymous with the decorative style called art nouveau.

“This fall the North Carolina Museum of Art is pleased to present a series of exhibitions that span the 19th to the 21st centuries and offer insight into art made in different parts of the world,” says Valerie Hillings, Museum director. “Our fall season features internationally beloved and recognized work by Alphonse Mucha alongside local, national, and international contemporary artists who explore a range of techniques and social and cultural histories.”  

Despite the powerful impact of Mucha’s style, his ideas behind its development are less well known. Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau Visionary draws on the latest research to examine the theoretical aspects of his style, which evolved as a language for communication with the wider public. Featuring some 100 objects from the Mucha Trust collection, including rarely seen works from the artist’s family, the exhibition looks at Mucha’s contributions to the art nouveau style and how he later used his visual language to express his vision for an independent Czechoslovak nation.

The international scope of Mucha’s aesthetic, influences, and impact are elaborated in the exhibition and accompanying catalogue through the addition of works from the North Carolina Museum of Art collection and new research on their relationship to Mucha’s art and times.

The Seattle Art Museum will present Monet at Étretat (July 1–October 17, 2021), exploring the artist’s engagement with Étretat, a seaside village in Normandy, France. 

The exhibition takes Fishing Boats at Étretat (1885), the only work by Claude Monet in SAM’s collection, as inspiration, presenting it alongside nine other paintings by Monet from his visits to the village as well as five paintings by his contemporaries. Monet at Étretat offers a nuanced look at a famed artist, highlighting his artistic and personal struggles in the 1880s as he strove to create a new vision in his paintings.

Organized by SAM, the exhibition is curated by Chiyo Ishikawa (view her art talk on YouTube), SAM’s former Susan Brotman Deputy Director for Art and Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, who retired in 2019 after a 30-year career at the museum. “This exhibition reintroduces audiences to Claude Monet as a struggling artist,” says Ishikawa. “When he heads to Étretat, he is in his mid-40s, widowed, and under financial and personal strains; yet he is utterly committed to his vision of a deeper relationship with nature. In these works, we see an artist pursuing what would become his legacy and make him a beloved artist to this day.”

The exhibition introduces Étretat as a geographical wonder and a site of artistic pilgrimage. Dominated by dramatic limestone cliff formations, the village was a popular summer destination in the mid-19th century. The exhibition includes a map outlining its four major cliffs and formations that artists and tourists alike marveled at: the Porte d’Amont, the Porte d’Aval, the Manneporte, and the Needle. Well before Claude Monet (1840–1926) first traveled there to work in 1883, painters, photographers, and writers had created a recognizable iconography of the village. His stated goal was to “try to do it differently.”

The village was 16 miles northeast of Monet’s hometown of Le Havre, and he had many happy memories of the Normandy coast with his wife and two sons before the tragic death of his wife Camille in 1879 at the age of 32. As he headed to Étretat in the off-season of 1883 in search of novel scenes, he was in a difficult place. He was under pressure from his dealer to produce marketable paintings, and the physical demands of painting outdoors in changeable weather were exhausting. He was also struggling over his unresolved relationship with Alice Hoschedé, the wife of his patron and surrogate mother
to his children.

Along with two paintings by Monet from this first sojourn, the first gallery features three paintings by Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), Monet’s first teacher, as well as one painting each by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) and Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). They highlight the different approaches his contemporaries took to the site, capturing alternately the grandeur or picturesque elements of the village, rather than Monet’s goal of capturing the passage of time itself. Also on view are six albumen silver print photographs from the time period, as well as a charcoal drawing of Monet by his friend, the American artist Theodore Robinson (1852-1896).

The second gallery focuses on the physical aspects of plein air painting, with insights from Nicholas Dorman, SAM’s Jane Lang Davis Chief Conservator. Monet, his predecessors, and his peers used a range of new pigments and commercial innovations to transform painting in the second half of the 19th century; visitors can explore their practices through paintings, implements, and technical details about Monet’s Fishing Boats at Étretat, as well two other works from SAM’s collection, Charles Francois Daubigny’s The Banks of the Oise River (19th c.) and Berthe Morisot’s Lucie Léon at the Piano (1892). The latter two
works will be on view in a case to reveal details on the paintings’ backs.

This gallery also includes two large-scale monitors with images by the German photographer Christoph Irrgang (b. 1961) superimposed over paintings by Monet, showing how Monet followed nature as he painted. Also on view is a video from the Art Institute of Chicago exploring Monet’s changes during the painting process of their collection work, The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (1867).

The final gallery is devoted to eight paintings by Monet, all done during his second visit to the village in 1885. They show the varied styles he used to portray two primary subjects—fishing boats and cliffs—in changing conditions of weather, light, and viewpoint, anticipating his future breakthrough with serial paintings that would at last bring him critical and financial success. This novel approach to places is best described by the artist’s own words in 1891: “For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearances changes at every moment, but its surroundings bring it to life—the air and the light, which
vary continually…For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives objects their real value.”

Also on view in this final gallery are tourist postcards of Étretat from various time periods, as well as a copy of Portraits of Places, an 1884 collection of Henry James’s travel sketches for the New York Tribune, including dispatches from Étretat, on loan from the University of Washington Libraries’ special collections. 

The Olana Partnership, Olana State Historic Site, and the Thomas Cole National Historic Site will jointly present “Cross Pollination: Heade, Cole, Church, and Our Contemporary Moment,” opening on June 12 at the two historic sites – with a unique presentation of the exhibition on the east coast, shown in the landscapes and historic spaces that so dramatically influenced and continue to influence the evolution of art in America. For the first time in over two decades, 16 paintings from the influential series of hummingbirds and habitats – The Gems of Brazil (1863-64) – by Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) will be on view in New York for public audiences. The project uses the metaphor of cross-pollination inspired by Heade’s paintings to explore interconnections in art and science, between artists, and across the 19th and 21st centuries. Paintings, sketches, sculpture, and natural history specimens will be displayed in provocative juxtapositions.

Artist Martin Johnson Heade has long been associated with the Hudson River School of landscape painting, which is characterized by the epic landscapes of the artists Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and Frederic Church (1826-1900). Heade, though, with his series The Gems of Brazil, was making a different kind of “landscape” that magnified the intricate operations within nature itself. Heade traveled to Brazil in 1863, so that he could study the hummingbirds in their natural habitat. Heade’s focus in The Gems and his related writing, which decries the overhunting of bird species, aligns with the proto-environmentalism of Thomas Cole, who wrote against deforestation in his own time. Heade’s own Brazilian journey was inspired by Frederic Church’s travels in Latin America. The environmental awareness and advocacy of these 19th-century artists connect thought and conversations taking place today, as concern for preservation and protection of the environment reaches critical urgency.

The exhibition will also include paintings by Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, as well as botanical works on both paper and porcelain by Emily Cole, Cole’s daughter, and Isabel Charlotte Church, Church’s daughter, which will be shown together here for the first time. The exhibition highlights natural specimen collections amassed by Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, including Cole’s mineral and herbarium collections and a sampling of the Church family’s extensive collection of bird eggs.

“Cross Pollination” positions these 19th-century artists in a call and response with 21st-century American artists, whose works engage contemporary issues related to biodiversity, habitat protection, and environmental sustainability. The contemporary artists are Rachel Berwick, Nick Cave, Mark Dion, Richard Estes, Juan Fontanive, Jeffrey Gibson, Paula Hayes, Patrick Jacobs, Maya Lin, Flora C. Mace, Vik Muniz, Portia Munson, Lisa Sanditz, Emily Sartor, Sayler/Morris, Dana Sherwood, Jean Shin, Rachel Sussman, and Jeff Whetstone.

The joint project will be presented simultaneously as one exhibition at both Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, NY, and the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY, from June 12 to October 31, 2021. The two historic sites are connected by the Hudson River Skywalk, a scenic walkway across the Hudson River – with sweeping views of the Hudson Valley and the Catskill Mountains – that opened in June 2019. “Cross Pollination” is the second major collaborative project between Olana and the Thomas Cole Site and builds upon the success of the inaugural “River Crossings: Contemporary Art Comes Home” exhibition in 2015.

The “Cross Pollination” exhibition was created by The Olana Partnership at Olana State Historic Site, Thomas Cole National Historic Site, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. The exhibition was originally scheduled to open in May 2020 at the two historic sites in New York but was delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition tour is presented at a total of five venues: Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville, FL, Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, NC, Thomas Cole National Historic Site and The Olana Partnership at Olana State Historic Site in New York’s Hudson Valley, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. The exhibition tour is organized by Crystal Bridges.

The exhibition will include site-specific artwork created expressly for this occasion and inspired by The Gems of Brazil, the natural environment, and the landscapes, historic homes, and studios of Cole and Church. The following artists made new work for these specific settings: Rachel Berwick, Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood, Lisa Sanditz and Emily Sartor, and Jean Shin. In addition, Sayler/Morris, Portia Munson, and Paula Hayes drew from existing works to create new site-specific installations for “Cross Pollination.” The Pollinator Pavilion, for instance, is a major public artwork by Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood created for the exhibition at the Thomas Cole Site; it is designed so that pollinators and humans may share the same space. Nationally renowned artist Jean Shin will create a site-specific installation at Olana titled "FALLEN," a memorial artwork created from a much-beloved hemlock tree that died of natural causes. “FALLEN” creates an opportunity to reflect on the sadness of both this hemlock and the wider history of environmental loss in the Catskills region.  

Olana and the Thomas Cole Site interpret and open their landscapes to the community for free as public parks and follow all pandemic protocols laid out by New York State. 

“Cross Pollination” is curated by Kate Menconeri, Curator & Director of Exhibitions and Collections at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site; Julia B. Rosenbaum, Associate Professor and Chair of Art History & Visual Culture, Bard College, and former Director of Research & Publications at The Olana Partnership; Mindy N. Besaw, Curator of American Art & Director of Fellowships and Research at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and William L. Coleman, Director of Collections & Exhibitions at The Olana Partnership. The exhibition was created collaboratively by the partner museums and in conversations with leading American artists, scholars, scientists, and historians.

A richly illustrated companion book – also titled “Cross Pollination” – accompanies the exhibition and features new original essays by the exhibition curators. The book is published by the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and The Olana Partnership.

For more information, visit hudsonriverskywalk.org/crosspollination 

As the days grow longer and the weather warmer, the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State will open Summer Light: American Impressionist Paintings from the Thomas Clark Collection. On view through August 29, this special exhibition features twenty-four paintings from the major forthcoming gift of collector Thomas Clark, whose private holdings contain some of the finest in the American impressionist genre.

“We are thrilled to present a selection of works from the expansive collection of Tom Clark to audiences this summer,” said Palmer Museum Director Erin M. Coe. “Impressionism is an enduring style that has spanned generations and geographic locales. It is a fitting tribute to our shared resilience as we emerge from the pandemic and bask in the light of these 
luminous landscape paintings after months of indoor isolation and limited travel. It is also a tribute to Tom, who has generously committed his collection to Penn State,” Coe added. 

Impressionist painting, in its various forms, flourished in the United States well past its initial reception by American artists in the 1880s. The once-radical French movement, characterized in part by efforts to capture the changing conditions of natural light through loose brushwork, bright colors, and painting out of doors, gradually transitioned into a popular style on this side of the Atlantic. Featuring more than twenty-five works, Summer Light explores the durability and dissemination of Impressionism in America between about 1910 and 1940. 

The summer season’s associations with vitality and leisure appealed to a broad range of artists who painted sun-streaked canvases in the open air. From Maine to Florida, from Texas to California, their bright palettes and broken brushwork rendered all facets of the American landscape and enjoyed popular acclaim. Whether depicting the bustle of harbors and beaches or the radiance of mountains and coastlines, American artists adapted French techniques to their own sensibilities and tastes. Many of the artists sustained vibrant careers and enjoyed praise in their lifetimes, though some are less widely known today. Significantly, ten women artists are featured in the exhibition, among them Anna Althea Hills, Margaret Jordan Patterson, and Jane Peterson.

A number of summer schools and art colonies flourished and were important centers for the spread of American Impressionism. Cape Ann, Massachusetts, was home to the oldest art colony in the country and attracted several artists featured in the exhibition, including Louise Upton Brumback, Alice Judson, Hayley Lever, Carl Peters, and Frederick Carl Smith. Farther afield, artists in California, such as Maurice Braun, Franz Bischoff, Anna Althea Hills, and Selden Connor Gile, likewise focused on the warmth and freedom associated with the summer season.

“The works of the artists characterized as American Impressionists have been an act of both collecting and study for many years,” stated Tom Clark. “The seemingly endless ability of these artists to capture ‘the moment’ and convey that ‘impression’ to the viewer is a source of continuing appreciation. This exhibition, as does the collection, highlights the significant 
contribution of women artists—whose path to recognition was definitely not an easy task during this period of American art.”

Organized by the Palmer Museum, this exhibition is the first presentation of works from Mr. Clark’s major forthcoming gift of some 170 paintings.

"This first, focused exhibition of paintings from Mr. Clark's vast collection offers a rare glimpse into the circulation of Impressionism throughout many regions of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century,” said Adam Thomas, curator of American art at the Palmer who organized the exhibition with museum director Erin Coe. 

The exhibition will be on view at the Palmer Museum of Art beginning May 22 through August 29. Free timed tickets can be reserved through the palmermuseum.psu.edu website.

The major traveling exhibition Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group kicks off this summer.

This landmark museum exhibition—the first exhibition of this important group of American modernists to be shown beyond New Mexico’s borders, and the first to be accompanied by a major scholarly publication—is devoted to an often overlooked group of 20th century abstract artists who pursued enlightenment and spiritual illumination. Organized by independent curator Michael Duncan and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Calif., this survey of 85 works made by the 11 visionary abstractionists is drawn from a variety of private and public collections including the Crocker’s. It aims to provide a broad perspective on the group’s work and reposition it within the history of modern painting and 20th century American art. The groundbreaking show will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication by Duncan and other scholars, including the Crocker’s Associate Director and Chief Curator Scott A. Shields, who assert the group’s artists as crucial contributors to an alternative through line in modern art history, one with renewed relevance today. The traveling exhibition opens at the Albuquerque Museum on June 26, 2021, and then travels to four additional venues (see schedule at end).

“These motivated individuals transformed the dramatic natural surroundings of the Southwest into luminous reflections of the human spirit,” says Shields, a leading specialist in the art of California and the American West. “This sets their work apart from abstraction made in Europe at the same time—that and the otherworldly beauty and quality of the artwork itself. Well connected, well read, but isolated geographically, the artists sought to connect and communicate with viewers through potently charged symbols and dynamic relationships of color and form.”

“Despite the quality of their works, this group of Southwest artists have been neglected in most surveys of American art, their paintings rarely exhibited outside of New Mexico,” said Duncan, who originally planned the exhibition nearly a decade ago. A corresponding editor for Art in America whose writings have focused on maverick artists of the 20th century and West Coast modernism, he asserts that “as we settle into the 21st century, the ‘spiritual’ seems no longer a complete taboo, and art history is undergoing a vast sea change.”

The Transcendental Painting Group achieved their modernity through potently charged shapes, patterns, and archetypes that they believed dwelled in the “collective unconscious.” The artists looked to a wide variety of literary, religious, and philosophical forces, including Zen Buddhism, Theosophy, Agni Yoga, Carl Jung, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and were greatly impacted by the Russian-born artist and theoretician Wassily Kandinsky. Convinced that an art capable of being intuitively understood would have equal validity to representational painting in an era of uncertainty, political divide, and fear, they attempted to promote abstraction that pursued enlightenment and spiritual illumination. Their manifesto stated their purpose: “To carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual.”

The group was co-founded by New Mexico painters Raymond Jonson (1891–1982), today a vastly underrated figure in the development of abstraction in the United States who generally pursued a rigorous clarity in his art and was the stalwart backbone of the group, and Emil Bisttram (1895–1976), a key Southwest modernist, whose work evidenced a calculated precision that demonstrated his interest in the theory of Dynamic Symmetry and geometry’s potential for occult symbolism.

All of the artists in the TPG sought to imbue their art with unforgettable, affecting metaphors, symbols, and visions, employing the freewheeling imagery of Surrealism to depict a transfigured, spiritually alive America. Agnes Pelton (1881–1961), increasingly appreciated today for her shimmering, celestial forms, was the honorary president of the group and its educational arm, the American Foundation for Transcendental Painting. Lawren Harris (1885–1970), of Canada, was the group’s only non-American member and known primarily for his light-filled, sharply delineated mountain landscapes. Florence Miller Pierce (1918–2007), the youngest member, created stunning paintings and drawings using geometric and biomorphic forms. Horace Pierce (1916–1958), who created graph-like and spiraling geometries in space, was also an experimental filmmaker.

Robert Gribbroek (1906–1971) was a fine artist, commercial art director, and layout artist for Hollywood animation studios; William Lumpkins (1909–2000), the only New Mexico native of the group, produced expressive watercolors that were the most unrefined and expressionistic, his style manifesting his interest in Zen Buddhism and Eastern thought; Stuart Walker’s (1904–1940) layered, swooping pastel forms embody transformative movement, growth, and enlightenment (pictured); and Ed Garman (1914–2004) was an idealist who took an improvisatory but analytical approach to his abstract compositions.

Also included in the survey are paintings by Dane Rudhyar (1895–1985), a philosopher, composer, artist, poet, novelist, and astrologer. Though not an official TPG member, his writings were critical in the group’s formation and cohesion.

The show includes striking, sublime works such as Oversoul (circa 1941), a warm, lyrical oil by Bisttram; Pelton’s stylized, shimmering Birthday (1943), that depicts the hallucinatory aura of the desert sky and landscape; and an ethereal, sensuous 1938 canvas by Walker invoking an idealized landscape of hills and clouds.

The exhibition is the sum of an astonishing array of loans and includes works drawn from the Crocker’s permanent collection including Winter (1933), a radiant, vibrant painting by Pelton, who sometimes incorporated representational elements that she felt could assist on the path to inner awareness and whose masterful and delicate abstractions have since the 1990s been rediscovered. The Crocker has also contributed two paintings by Jonson, a critical figure in expanding Southwest art beyond landscape painting and regional depictions to incorporate the light, color, and spirit of New Mexico in rich, metaphorical abstraction. These works, both from the early 1940s, demonstrate his interest in mechanical forms. Jonson, Duncan points out, himself became a strong advocate of Pelton’s work, praising her work for its luminosity.

“Another World” is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue (Delmonico Books, 2021). Revelatory, in-depth essays by Duncan; Shields; art historian, author, and independent curator Malin Wilson Powell; Catherine Whitney, a curator with a specialization in the regional Taos and Santa Fe painters; and Ilene Susan Fort, Curator Emerita at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; comprise the most significant contribution to the study and understanding of the group to date. The texts range from an exploration of the group in light of their international artistic peers, to their involvement with esoteric thought and Theosophy, their sources in the culture and landscape of the American Southwest, and the experience of its two female members. The handsome, colorful volume features stand-alone essays on each member, an illustrated chronology of the group with archival photography and ephemera, and an extended excerpt from Rudhyar’s polemical unpublished 1938 treatise positioning Transcendental art as a redemptive 20th century movement.

In the opening essay, “Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group,” Duncan asserts the group as contributors to an alternative approach to abstraction and places their art within the history of modern painting and 20th century American art. While Shields, in his “The Transcendental Painting Group and Significant Abstraction,” argues that while their art very often shares formal resemblances to that of modernist pioneers like Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe, “it was not the lack of an objective stimulus that set their work apart from that of their predecessors but a difference in motivation,” and that the group’s 19th century definition of Transcendentalism “gave way to the idea that art should be focused on the relationship between the maker’s inner self and the divine, rather than nature and the divine.”

The Brandywine River Museum of Art will reopen to the public on Sunday, June 20, 2021, with a new special exhibition, Ralston Crawford: Air & Space & War. During its temporary closure, the Museum underwent several facility renovations. Additionally, the Museum’s other galleries have been refreshed with paint and rehung with a new selection of recent acquisitions and loans, as well as rarely seen works from the permanent collection. 

On view through September 19, 2021, Ralston Crawford: Air & Space & War will explore U.S. aviation and military history through the art and personal experiences of the renowned American Modernist Ralston Crawford. Organized by the Vilcek Foundation, in collaboration with the Brandywine, this focused exhibition will feature an extensive collection of nearly 80 works by the artist, including drawings, photographs, paintings and lithographs from the 1940s that narrate his involvement with aerospace and World War II.

Highlighting Crawford’s encounters with aviation and war from many angles, the collected works illustrate the influence of the artist’s own military service in the U.S. Army Air Force, as well as the commissions he undertook at the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft Plant in Buffalo, and his assignment to document nuclear weapons tests conducted by the U.S. Joint Army/Navy Task Force at Bikini Atoll for Fortune Magazine in 1946. 

“Ralston Crawford: Air + Space + War traces the dramatic evolution of Ralston Crawford’s art in the 1940s, which was influenced by aviation—from his personal experiences in flight, to his exposure to the construction of airplanes and his knowledge of the destruction they wrought in war,” said Emily Schuchardt Navratil, curator for the Vilcek Foundation. “Crawford’s insight into warcraft as a result of the Curtiss-Wright commission and his experience—from knowledge of aircraft, of military exercise and of propaganda—forged the themes that he would explore for the rest of his artistic career,” added Vilcek Foundation President Rick Kinsel. “His mature works vibrate with tension, rendering elements of war, culture, and ritual, with horror and awe—and beauty.”

In the late 1920s, Crawford studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Barnes Foundation in Merion, and then later lived and painted in Exton and Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania in the late 1930s. He was also a visiting art instructor at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1940. In World War II, he served in the Weather Division of the Army Air Force, heading the Visual Presentation unit—where he created pictorial representations of weather patterns for airplane pilots—and continued working as an artist throughout the war. During that time, he was exposed to “endless plane tragedies,” which he recorded in works like Bomber, 1944, and Air War, 1944. As the exhibition will illuminate, these experiences had a profound impact on Crawford and marked a major turning point in his life and art. 

In addition to this landmark exhibition, the Museum has a full slate of engaging virtual and socially distant in-person events scheduled throughout the summer. All upcoming events can be found at www.brandywine.org/events. More details on the exhibition can be found at www.brandywine.org/crawford.

Visitation information is available at www.brandywine.org/reopening

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has announced that it will display in its American galleries The Arch of Nero, a masterpiece by the great 19th-century American landscape painter Thomas Cole (1801–1848), as a long-term loan from the Thomas H. and Diane DeMell Jacobsen PhD Foundation. Purchased by the Foundation at Sotheby’s American art auction in New York on May 19, 2021, this painting was one of a number of works of art sold by the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, New Jersey, to raise funds for the direct care of its collection. The Arch of Nero was widely considered to be the most important of the works sold by the museum. The Jacobsen Foundation, an organization dedicated to sharing its collection of American art with museums across the country, purchased The Arch of Nero intending to keep this important painting in the public domain. It will be placed on view in Gallery 208 of the Philadelphia Museum of Art beginning July 2, 2021.

Cole painted The Arch of Nero at the height of his powers in 1846, drawing upon his memory and sketches made in Italy in 1832. A boldly composed image with Cole’s typically expressive handling, the subject focuses on a monumental arch, ravaged by the passage of time and seen against green hills and a bright blue sky with gathering clouds. Known as the “Arch of Nero” in Cole’s day, the subject of this painting was actually part of an ancient Roman aqueduct near Tivoli. To Cole, this ruin served as a meditation on the transitory glory of empires and the cycle of rise and fall of civilizations repeated throughout world history. The aura of emperor Nero’s violent and decadent rule (54–68 CE) hangs over this painting, representing in Cole’s vision an era when the Roman republic had devolved into a corrupt and tyrannical empire. Painted in the year that the United States invaded Mexico in a thinly veiled land grab, The Arch of Nero calls to mind the similarly greedy expansion of the Roman empire and its ultimate ruin. As the Cole scholar William L. Coleman has noted, the artist’s lesson on the fate of tyrants, his concern over the erosion of republican values in this country, and his critique of the nation’s expansion of colonial (and slaveholding) territories—implicit in his choice of the subject of this painting and its red, white, and blue-clad figures—remains pertinent today.

Revered in his lifetime, Cole was recognized as the leader of a group of New York-based landscape artists known as the Hudson River School. His legacy can be seen in the galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the work of artists who were inspired by his example, such as Asher B. Durand, Frederick E. Church, Albert Bierstadt, Sanford Gifford, Martin Johnson Heade, and George Inness. The museum owns two early paintings by Cole, but no painting that represents his finest and most mature work. “We are thrilled to have this great painting in our galleries,” said Kathleen A. Foster, the museum’s Robert L. McNeil Jr. Senior Curator of American Art, “and we are grateful to the Jacobsen Foundation for ensuring that it will continue to be seen by the public for years to come.”

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Arch of Nero will be presented in context with works by Cole’s Hudson River School peers and other important examples of mid-late 19th-century American landscapes that capture the romanticism of the age.

The mission of the Jacobsen Foundation is “to carefully research and obtain American masterpieces, provide restoration, if necessary, and facilitate long-term loans to accredited major museums and traveling exhibitions.” This unique program allows curators to affordably complement works in their museum galleries and to build enriched education programs. The Foundation Collection, coupled with the founder’s personal collection, is composed of 400 works of art, featuring paintings, sculptures, works on paper, silver, glass, ceramics, and furniture. Since its inception in 2011, the Foundation has offered loans to over 30 major museums, as well as a traveling exhibition drawn from the collection, “The Art of Seating,” that appeared in twenty-eight venues throughout North America.

Another major oil painting recently acquired by the Jacobsen Foundation, Mary Cassatt’s Baby Charles Looking over his Mother’s Shoulder (No. 3) of 1900, was sold by the Brooklyn Museum. Like the Cole, it will continue to be enjoyed by the public, as it will be placed on loan this summer to The Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.

From the heroines of ancient myth to the female trailblazers of the modern era, centuries of independent and rebellious women have been trivialized or condemned through the degrading myths and gendered stereotypes perpetuated in printed imagery. From July 18–December 19, 2021, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) presents an exhibition that captures visual representations of independent, defiant, and sometimes misunderstood women and explores the role of European and American art in both continuing their condemnation and celebrating their achievements. Women Behaving Badly: 400 Years of Power and Protest features over 75 prints, photographs, and books from the Renaissance to the early 20th century drawn from the BMA’s vast works on paper collection and supplemented with loans from the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, Maryland Center for History and Culture, and private collections.

“Rebellious women who pushed against the confines of their prescribed roles to assert agency and claim their human rights have long been trivialized, shamed, and punished. Art has played a powerful role as a messenger through time and culture, both upholding and reimagining longstanding misconceptions,” said Andaleeb Badiee Banta, BMA Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs. “Women Behaving Badly reclaims the representations of women whose actions were chronicled in visual culture as transgressive, inflammatory, and disruptive and celebrates the groundwork they laid for generations of women afterward.”

The exhibition begins with historic European depictions of the women of ancient Greek and Roman narratives whose independence was often seen as undermining male heroism. These ideas, represented by artists for centuries, shaped Western thought about the role of women in society. Women Behaving Badly continues with archetypal imagery of witches, vampires, and other embodiments of female temptation by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Francisco Goya, and Edvard Munch, and includes depictions of Eve, Delilah, and Salomé whose Biblical stories are defined by their misdeeds. These narratives—and the artworks that they have inspired—have continued to present female ambition, independence, and achievements as elements to be contained or banished for the betterment of society.

The second section of the exhibition is devoted to the modern era—from circa 1800 to the period of first-wave feminism in the early 20th century—when women began to break with traditionally domestic designations of wife and mother and assert their presence into the public sphere in an attempt to rectify centuries of disenfranchisement and oppression. Among the formidable women depicted are performers Josephine Baker, Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Bessie Smith, and Anna May Wong; authors Collette, Julia Ward Howe, George Sand, and Virginia Woolf; and activists Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth. Among the artists documenting these women are Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Carl Van Vechten, and James Van Der Zee. Female artists who portrayed the pioneering modern women in the exhibition include Bernarda Bryson Shahn, Elizabeth Catlett, Gisèle Freund, Frances Benjamin Johnston, and Sarah Choate Sears. 

Women Behaving Badly: 400 Years of Power and Protest is curated by BMA Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs Andaleeb Badiee Banta. 

At the Discover Portsmouth Welcome Center (Portsmouth Historical Society) in New Hampshire this summer is a special exhibition on two underappreciated American Impressionists.

“Twilight of American Impressionism: Alice Ruggles Sohier and Frederick A. Bosley” (through Sept. 12, 2021) showcases the largely unsung talents of Alice Ruggles Sohier and Frederick A. Bosley, two American impressionists working at a time when realistic art was falling out of fashion and abstract art was in vogue. 

Alice Ruggles Sohier (1880–1969) and Frederick Andrew Bosley (1881–1942) were students of Edmund Tarbell, trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Related by marriage (Frederick was Alice’s brother-in-law), each artist became a master of the so-called Boston School, creating landscapes, interiors, still lifes, portraits, and other refined and elegant works notable for their sublime treatment of light and shade in the grand manner espoused by Tarbell and his disciples. Today, however, as was the case with Gertrude Fiske, Sohier and Bosley’s work is not particularly well known, nor have these important and intriguing artists received the scholarly attention that they deserve. This exhibition attempts to address this situation by bringing to light many of their major works that have slumbered for nearly a century and through enriching the biographical record of their lives.

Each artist faced challenges common to Boston School artists as they pursued a traditional career in an art world that was shifting dramatically to more modern modes as the twentieth century progressed. Sohier and Bosley, after enjoying the relative prosperity of the 1910s and 1920s, also had to cope with the effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Each also confronted individual obstacles. Alice had to navigate her career and family through a world dominated by men, and Frederick suffered from bouts of depression, especially after his resignation as director of the Museum School in 1931, a decision triggered by the institution’s shift to modernism.

As with the Fiske and Tarbell shows, the Sohier/Bosley exhibition will draw heavily on privately owned works that have rarely been exhibited publicly. Many of the works remain in the families of the artists’ descendants. Those same families also retain some of the furniture and small objects used as props in the paintings, as well as significant caches of period photographs and important documents.

These rich materials allowed us, to an unprecedented extent, to trace the trajectory of each artist’s career, as well as to provide an overview of their respective oeuvre. The result is a greater understanding of these individual overlooked artists and their place in the evolution of the Boston School. Twilight’s twenty-first-century perspective on the work of Sohier and Bosley shows that, while they may have been painting at the end of an era, they were at the height of their art.

In total, the exhibition contains about 65 major works with an additional number of studies, drawings, and associated objects, documents, and photographs.

The show will be accompanied by a catalogue published by the Portsmouth Marine Society Press, the publishing arm of the Society. This richly illustrated volume will include an essay by guest curator William Brewster Jr. Brewster, a grandson of Bosley and great-nephew of Sohier, is the author of the only previously published work devoted solely to the two artists, a pamphlet published in 2000 by the Portsmouth Athenaeum to accompany a small show of their work. A catalogue section will illustrate the individual works. The book also will include a bibliography.

Alice Ruggles Sohier, from a venerable Massachusetts family, received her art education in the Art Students League in Buffalo, New York, and then at the Museum School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from which she graduated in 1907. During her academic career, she studied with Tarbell and Frank W. Benson, and received many awards and honors. Upon graduation she was the recipient of a prestigious Paige Traveling Scholarship, which provided funds for two years of travel and study in Europe. Upon her return, she exhibited widely from 1910 to 1930, being represented in at least twenty-nine shows throughout the country and receiving a bronze medal at the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. Her work was noted for its realism and treatment of light in the Tarbell manner. Throughout her career, Sohier faced the challenges common to female artists at the time, including balancing career and family. She married Louis Sohier, an engineer, in 1913. (Louis Sohier’s sister Emily was married to Frederick Bosley.) The Sohiers moved to Pennsylvania and, later, to Concord, Massachusetts. Although Sohier stopped exhibiting ca. 1930, she continued to paint until at least 1959.

Frederick Andrew Bosley was born in Lebanon, New Hampshire. After high school, he too attended the Museum School, finishing the seven-year program in only six years. Like Sohier, he studied with Tarbell and Benson and won a Paige scholarship. In 1913, he succeeded Tarbell as the director of the Department of Drawing and Painting and as instructor in Advanced Painting, influential teaching positions he held until 1931. Bosley was known for his portraits, interiors, and landscapes, as well as for his abilities in pencil and charcoal drawing, and his prize-winning work was also widely exhibited. In the 1920s, he painted at the art colony in Peterborough, N.H., and he also attempted to open his own art school in Piermont. In 1930, the Museum School shifted its focus away from traditional representational painting to a more modern approach. Bosley, along with several other faculty members, resigned in protest the next year. He suffered from depression for the next decade and passed away in 1942.