Archives

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0in;
mso-para-margin-right:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0in;
line-height:115%;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

Levis Fine Art Nantucket

Form + Figure Exhibition

July 17-August 6th, 2009

 

While the “figure” has held a prominent position in the imagery of art since the prehistoric period, the development of 20th century modern ideologies provided the catalyst for the elements of “form”, i.e. color, shape, dimension, and line, to take an equally prominent role as the subject.   Consequently, the artistic language of this period was grounded in abstraction, an alternative style believed to be more effective in addressing the modern concerns of humanity. “New needs require new techniques”, stated Jackson Pollock in defense of abstraction, “…the modern painter cannot express this age– the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio–in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any past culture”. 

 

For centuries, art relied on the “figure” as a subject, while the formal qualities of art developed separately: the simplicity of Egyptian line, the minute detail of Roman dimension, the exaggerated palette of Fauvist color, and the defragmentation of Cubist shape and composition.  The 20th century abstract artist developed a new vocabulary for expression, one which successfully captured both the nuances of their uncertainty and the confidence of their instinct.  In exploring the formal qualities of art, these artists denounced the figure, or object, as the subject and consequently the art became a reflection of the artist’s inner thought. As Robert Motherwell poignantly stated, “Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.” 

Abstract art is infused with the energy, innovation and colors that artistically embody the essence of the changing American nation during the 20th century.  Paralleling the major advances in modern technology, nuclear and atomic warfare, science, photography, and aeronautics, the dominant art of the period suggests an entirely new relationship between the artist, the art, and the viewer.  As a result, a new desire for subjectivity for both subject and form developed, allowing artists the freedom to express their own artistic concerns as finished compositions.  For many, the process of discovery became an “arena in which to act” and therefore the process became equally integral to the work as a finished composition.  As noted art historian Robert Rosenblum stated,”these works are so radical in their breaks with the conventions of the easel picture—they are lighthouses of art that can illuminate a vast territory.” 

 

The artists whose works are included in this exhibition successfully represent the fundamental ideologies associated with the abstract movement within 20th century modernism.  Their representations of both “figure” and “form” remain a testament to their importance within our artistic and cultural history, which has subsequently become the foundation for contemporary visual expression.

Johann Mongels Culverhouse was one of six children born to parents R. Culverhouse and C. Mongels in Rotterdam, Holland in 1825.  Around twenty-four years of age, Johann moved to the United States, where he settled in the New York area.  He created paintings that appealed to the American art market, and focused on genre scenes and idealized landscapes.  Despite his audience, Johann Mongels Culverhouse referred back to his strongest influences as a painter when creating his own canvasses; 17th Century Dutch art.  The tradition of the night market was a popular theme amongst Dutch painters of the 17th Century.  Known as “candlelight paintings” because of the common inclusion of candles and moonlight, this genre flourished amidst the Salons of the time.  It is this type of painting that Culverhouse is well known for today.

 

According to the Syracuse Journal, Culverhouse had established a studio in the art gallery of Judson N. Knapp at 47 Genesee Street in 1871.  One year later, in 1872 he moved to the St. Charles Hotel in Syracuse. 

 

Johann Mongels Culverhouse exhibited while living in the New York area with the National Academy of Design in 1865 and 1866.  It is known that he traveled back and forth to Europe several times during his career, but mainly remained in America from 1849-1891.  Johann Mongels Culverhouse died in New York City around 1895.  The exact date and location of his death is unknown.

Edward Gay was born in Ireland in 1837, and came to America with his parents in 1848 in the wake of the Potato Famine. The family settled in Albany, New York.  Difficult times forced Gay to go to work as a child, where his talent was recognized by the successful local painters George Boughton and the Hart brothers who encouraged his interest.  He studied landscape painting with James Hart and was eventually encouraged to travel to Europe and study in Karlsrue, Germany with the traditional historical painters Karl Freidrich Lessing and Johann Schirmer. Gay was disappointed with his training in Europe and when he returned to the United States in 1864 he and his wife moved to Mt. Vernon, New York. At the time, Mt. Vernon was open farmland with sunny meadows and orchards stretching along Long Island Sound.

Renoir did not turn to sculpture until late in his career, and only produced two pieces himself. In 1913 Renoir began working with young Catalan artist and student of Aristide Maillol, Richard Guino. He established a working method in which Renoir would select one of his paintings, and under close supervision, Guino would model the image into a three-dimensional clay work.

Renoir seems to have had the enviable ability to see anything as potentially of interest. More than any of the Impressionists, he found beauty and charm in the modern sights of Paris. He does not go deep into the substance of what he sees but seizes upon its appearance, grasping its generalities, which then enables the spectator to respond with immediate pleasure. "Pleasure" may be decried by the puritanical instinct within us all, but it is surely the necessary enhancer that life needs. It also signifies a change from Realism: the Impressionists’ paintings have none of the labored toll of Millet’s peasants, for example. Instead they depict delightful, intimate scenes of the French middle class at leisure in the country or at cafes and concerts in Paris. Renoir always took a simple pleasure in whatever met his good-humored attention, but he refused to let what he saw dominate what he wanted to paint. Again he deliberately sets out to give the impression, the sensation of something, its generalities, its glancing life. Maybe, ideally, everything is worthy of attentive scrutiny, but in practice there is no time. We remember only what takes our immediate notice as we move along.

In The Boating Party Lunch, a group of Renoir’s friends are enjoying that supreme delight of the working man and woman, a day out. Renoir shows us interrelationships: notice the young man intent upon the girl at the right chatting, while the girl at the left is occupied with her puppy. But notice too the loneliness, however relaxed, that can be part of anyone’s experience at a lunch party. The man behind the girl and her dog is lost in a world of his own, yet we cannot but believe that his reverie is a happy one. The delightful debris of the meal, the charm of the young people, the hazy brightness of the world outside the awning – all communicates an earthly vision of paradise.

One of Renoir’s early portraits, A Girl with a Watering Can, has all the tender charm of its subject, delicately unemphasized, not sentimentalized, but clearly relished. Renoir stoops down to the child’s height so that we look at her world from her own altitude. This, he hints, is the world that the little one sees – not the actual garden that adults see today, but the nostalgic garden that they remember from their childhood. The child is sweetly aware of her central importance. Solid little girl though she is, she presents herself with the fragile charm of the flowers. Her sturdy little feet in their sensible boots are somehow planted in the garden, and the lace of her dress has a floral rightness; she also is decorative. With the greatest skill, Renoir shows the child, not amid the actual flowers and lawns, but on the path. It leads away, out of the picture, into the unknown future when she will longer be part of the garden but an onlooker, an adult, who will enjoy only her memories of the present now depicted.

 

– Text from "Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting", by Wendy Beckett

Normal
0

false
false
false

MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

st1:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) }

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-ansi-language:#0400;
mso-fareast-language:#0400;
mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

Theodor Kleehaus (also written ‘Theodore Kleehaas’) was born on November 9, 1854 in Germersheim. A painter of genre scenes and flowers, he studied for several years in New York at the Cooper Institute. From 1879 to 1887, he trained at the Fine Art Academy in Munich under A. Strahuber, J. Benczur, and Al. v. Wagner, Kleehaus, and was awarded two medals during that time. In 1889, he debuted his work in the Crystal Palace in Munich (since destroyed). From 1893 to 1914, Kleehaus exhibited in Berlin and abroad, including at the Crystal Palace in London in 1897. He studied in Italy, France, and Belgium, where he found inspiration for his genre scenes portraying the rural population of the Rheinpfalz, the Black Forest and upper Bavarian and Tyrolean farm life. Kleehaus is perhaps best known for his lively scenes depicting the world of children, famous for works such as On to the Dance, The Love of Brothers and Sisters, Orphans and Girl in the Garden.

Pierre Jean Charles Deval was born August 20, 1897 in Lyon, the third child of a silk merchant, Gustave Deval (1853-1943). As a young man, Deval frequented the galleries of the Luxembourg Palace and the Louvre, as well as the Musée Saint Pierre in Lyon, where he was deeply impressed by the drawings and sculpture of August Rodin. He also visited the Institute of Archeology, where he saw the reproductions of Greco-Latin statues and developed a passion for Greek and Roman myths. These early artistic exposures greatly influenced his later work.

Deval studied art in Paris as student of painter Émile-René Ménard and Lucien Simon. His first show of drawings and portraits of young women was held at the Lyon salon of 1918. In 1921, he befriended Tristan Tzara, writers Andre Breton an dLouis Aragon, and French surrealist poet Jacques Rigaut, who introduced him into the circle of the Dadaism. Deval served as editor of an artistic review in Lyon between February 1921 and June 1922. At the 1921 Salon d’Automne in Paris, which included works by Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Gauguin, Roussel and Cross, Deval sold his first painting, Ariane, which was purchased by the French Government for the Musee Luxembourg, and hung in the Jeu de Pomme.

In the autumn of 1922, the success of his painting Ariane earned him a two year fellowship at the Villa Abd-el-Tif in Algiers, a residence for painters; he was 25 years old. Having become disenchanted with the Dada group, he began to look for a style of his own. In Algeria, he met and forged a friendship with fauvist painter Albert Marquet, who was twenty-two years his senior. During this period, his paintings ranged from landscapes of Algiers and scenes of Algerian women bathing and dressing to more modern works.

In 1924 he was selected to participate in the Venice Biennale with a group of French artists, including Albert Marquet, Pierre Bonnard, and Maurice Denis. His works of this period featured exotic scenes and cityscapes from Algeria and odalisques. His racially diverse modernist figurative paintings and drawings were condemned by traditional critics as too radical, while his other paintings were condemned by modernist critics as too traditional.

When his fellowship ended, Deval returned to Paris and moved into the studio at 19 quai St. Michel, which Matisse had just vacated. He experimented with different styles, and in 1926 he painted five watercolors of modern Parisian life for a book, L’ecole des indifferents,’ by Jean Giraudoux. He worked as an illustrator for several journals and showed his work in Paris galleries.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Domaine d’Orvès, Deval’s house at La Valette-du-Var, was a gathering place for French artists who worked along the Cote d’Azur and in Provence. At this residence, he kept the company of Henri Bosco, and the painters Raoul Dufy, Marquet, Jean Puy and Willy Eisenschitz. During his time at La Valette-du-Var, Deval solidified his lasting painterly reputation with realistic scenes of Marseille and Toulon, and sensitive paintings of women, children and families. In 1933 he took part in a show in Marseille on Provence, where he continued to show for many years thereafter. He died at his house in 1993.

Museums:
Musée National des Beaux Arts – Algiers, Musée Ahmed Zabana – Oran, National Museum -Tokyo, British Museum – London

 

George Beattie was born in Cleveland, Ohio and attended the Cleveland School of Art. Known for landscape, genre, and murals, he was active within the state of Georgia. An art educator, Beattie exhibited at the Cress Gallery at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga; the Art Institute of Chicago; and has works in the collection of the Montclair Art Museum; High Museum of Art; Georgia Museum of Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art. In Macon, Georgia, a cycle of the artist’s murals depicts regional history themes in the U.S. Federal Post Office building. 

In the manner of Social Realism of the 1930s and 40s, Beattie depicted a woman in casual beach attire on the pier at Tybee Island, a resort community located close to Savannah. A skillful watercolorist, Beattie conveys the sea breeze gently blowing through the woman’s sheer dress and the strong contrasts of reflected light and shadow typical of the coastal atmosphere. VAL

Normal
0

false
false
false

MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-ansi-language:#0400;
mso-fareast-language:#0400;
mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

James Smillie, a skilled and highly respected engraver, played a major role in the watercolor and etching revivals of the late nineteenth century.  He also established a notable reputation as a landscape painter, drawing widespread acclaim for his meticulously rendered views of mountain scenery.

 

Smillie was born in New York City, the son of James Smillie, a noted engraver.  Both Smillie and his younger brother George Smillie, who also became a painter, received their earliest art instruction from their father.  After making his first engraving plate when he was eight, Smillie went on to work closely with his father, producing bank note vignettes as well as prints.

 

Smillie produced his first oil painting in 1864, after returning from a trip to Europe.  He subsequently ended his collaboration with his father in order to devote the majority of his time to painting.  He also began exploring the techniques of etching, dry point, lithography and aquatint.

 

Smillie began exhibiting his work at the National Academy of Design in 1864, and in the following year was elected an associate member.  He became a full academician in 1876.  During this period, he also participated in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Art Association and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Smillie was also a founding member of the American Water Color Society (1866) and the New York Etching Club (1877).

 

Throughout the 1860s, Smillie made numerous sketching trips to the Catskill and Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York and to the White Mountains in New Hampshire.  In 1871, accompanied by his brother, he travelled to the west coast, visiting sites such as Yosemite and the Sierra Nevadas.  During the journey, Smillie produced many oil sketches and watercolors which were admired for their wealth of detail.  In 1872, he contributed an article on the Yosemite Valley, as well as illustrations, to Picturesque America.  Smillie made a second trip abroad in 1884.  While in France, he painted many seascapes in and around Etretat.

 

James Smillie died in Bronxville, New York, in 1909.  Representative examples of his work can be found in many important public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Oakland Museum; and the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth.

 

 

Carol Lowrey

 

 

© The essay herein is the property of Spanierman Gallery and is copyrighted by Spanierman Gallery.  It may not be reproduced without written permission from Spanierman Gallery nor shown or communicated to anyone without due credit being given to Spanierman Gallery.

Normal
0

false
false
false

MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-ansi-language:#0400;
mso-fareast-language:#0400;
mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

James Smillie, a skilled and highly respected engraver, played a major role in the watercolor and etching revivals of the late nineteenth century.  He also established a notable reputation as a landscape painter, drawing widespread acclaim for his meticulously rendered views of mountain scenery.

 

Smillie was born in New York City, the son of James Smillie, a noted engraver.  Both Smillie and his younger brother George Smillie, who also became a painter, received their earliest art instruction from their father.  After making his first engraving plate when he was eight, Smillie went on to work closely with his father, producing bank note vignettes as well as prints.

 

Smillie produced his first oil painting in 1864, after returning from a trip to Europe.  He subsequently ended his collaboration with his father in order to devote the majority of his time to painting.  He also began exploring the techniques of etching, dry point, lithography and aquatint.

 

Smillie began exhibiting his work at the National Academy of Design in 1864, and in the following year was elected an associate member.  He became a full academician in 1876.  During this period, he also participated in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Art Association and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Smillie was also a founding member of the American Water Color Society (1866) and the New York Etching Club (1877).

 

Throughout the 1860s, Smillie made numerous sketching trips to the Catskill and Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York and to the White Mountains in New Hampshire.  In 1871, accompanied by his brother, he travelled to the west coast, visiting sites such as Yosemite and the Sierra Nevadas.  During the journey, Smillie produced many oil sketches and watercolors which were admired for their wealth of detail.  In 1872, he contributed an article on the Yosemite Valley, as well as illustrations, to Picturesque America.  Smillie made a second trip abroad in 1884.  While in France, he painted many seascapes in and around Etretat.

 

James Smillie died in Bronxville, New York, in 1909.  Representative examples of his work can be found in many important public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Oakland Museum; and the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth.

 

 

Carol Lowrey

 

 

© The essay herein is the property of Spanierman Gallery and is copyrighted by Spanierman Gallery.  It may not be reproduced without written permission from Spanierman Gallery nor shown or communicated to anyone without due credit being given to Spanierman Gallery.

John William Godward’s art is the punctuation mark of the so-called Victorian High Renaissance.  His Greco-Roman compositions reached maturity in the mid-1890s, more or less concurrently with the deaths of two of the movement’s leading figureheads, Frederic, Lord Leighton and Albert Joseph Moore.  To be sure, Godward’s more famous Victorian High Renaissance contemporary, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, was still active in the 1890s, and would be through the first decade of the twentieth century.  But Godward outlived them all, and continued to create his placid and often wistful Neo-Classical Mediterranean figure paintings through the tumultuous years of World War I and into the early 1920s.