Tag: Smithsonian

last chance! splendid waves at peabody essex museum FEATURE CROSS COUNTRY MUST SEE LOANS

Posted on by Catherine

Today, tomorrow (Oct. 3) final days of exhibit, In American Waters: The Sea in American Paintings, at Peabody Essex Museum.

Don’t be distracted by a simplistic thematic construct especially when it coaxes a mind game of “What about…?” as in: What about this artist or that one? Why aren’t they included? (Visual artists like May Stevens, Vija Celmins, Blanche Lazzell, Juane Quick to see Smith, April Gornik, Joan Nelson, Duncanson, Eric Aho, Morris graves, Rauschenberg, Fischl, Frankenthaler, Fitz Henry Lane, Winslow Hopper, and Edward Hopper sprang readily to mind. And more Lawrence.) What about the de rigueur annual summer exhibitions at major galleries and institutions, since late 1880s? Aren’t the planet’s oceans a global motif not limited by media or place?

Ignore the categories or “chapters”.

Forget the sea change promise.

Just go.

Do make the must see trip to be awed and enjoy the momentous loans and great gift of seeing these selections displayed, together and their many moods of expression. Sensuous, tranquil, volatile, mysterious, distant, abstract–this major group show delivers art that conveys emotion, expressed and experienced.

installation view photos

photos: c. ryan, May 29, 2021

Stunning installation design

*mostly (scroll through till end for some misses)

individual works

in no particular order

Animated some to help bring you there:

Museum wall labels – 3d letters, Frederick Douglass quote

Major American lending institutions and private collections including:

Crystal Bridges

Crystal Bridges partnered with PEM, so naturally most loans were procured from Arkansas.

William Trost Richards; Richard Diebenkorn; Frank Benson; Amy Sherald; Marsden Hartley

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Charles Sheeler; Jan Matulka

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

William Trost Richards

New York, Metropolitan Museum

John Frederick Kensett

Collection of New York City

John Wesley Jarvis

Navy Art Collection

Hughie Lee Smith; Paul Cadmus

American Civil War Museum

Conrad Wise Chapman

Phillips Collection

John Sloan

Smithsonian

Stuart Davis; Hughie Lee Smith

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Cuneo

Brooklyn Museum

Rockwell Kent

MoMa Museum of Modern Art

Fletcher Martin

Wadsworth Athenaeum

Kensett

Cahoon Museum American Art

North Carolina Museum of Art

Luks

This show was also billed as one exhibition comprising PEM’s **new** Climate and Environmental Initiative. **Includes iconic American homoerotic art – Cadmus Fleet’s In and Fletcher Martin**

Installation views and museum labels more of a miss

Waters elsewhere on view from the Peabody Essex Museum

Josh Simpson megaplanet glass earth, 1989

Michael C. McMillen detail of The Pequod II

Sea Coco

installation view Rockman exhibit, May 29, 2021, see more here

Continue reading “last chance! splendid waves at peabody essex museum FEATURE CROSS COUNTRY MUST SEE LOANS” →

Last chAnce: In American Waters Peabody Essex Museum. splendid waves amazing loans. Go!

Posted on by Catherine

Today, tomorrow 10/3/2021 final days of exhibit, In American Waters: The Sea in American Paintings, at Peabody Essex Museum.

Don’t be distracted by a simplistic thematic construct especially when it coaxes a mind game of “What about…?” as in: What about this artist or that one? Why aren’t they included? (Visual artists like May Stevens, Vija Celmins, Blanche Lazzell, Juane Quick to see Smith, April Gornik, Joan Nelson, Duncanson, Eric Aho, Morris graves, Rauschenberg, Fischl, Frankenthaler, Fitz Henry Lane, Winslow Hopper, and Edward Hopper sprang readily to mind. And more Lawrence.) What about the de rigueur annual summer exhibitions at major galleries and institutions, since late 1880s? Aren’t the planet’s oceans a global motif not limited by media or place? Ignore these categories or “chapters”.

Forget the sea change promise.

Just go!

Do make the must see trip to be awed and enjoy the momentous loans and great gift of seeing these selections displayed, together and their many moods of expression. Sensuous, tranquil, volatile, mysterious, distant, abstract–this major group show delivers art that conveys emotion, expressed and experienced.

installation views

C. Ryan May 29, 2021 – stunning installation design, mostly

individual works, no particular order

Animated some to help bring you there:

Museum wall labels – 3d letters, Frederick Douglass quote

Major American lending institutions and private collections including:

Crystal Bridges

Crystal Bridges partnered with PEM, so naturally most loans were procured from Arkansas.

William Trost Richards; Richard Diebenkorn; Frank Benson; Amy Sherald; Marsden Hartley

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Charles Sheeler; Jan Matulka

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

William Trost Richards

New York, Metropolitan Museum

John Frederick Kensett

Collection of New York City

John Wesley Jarvis

Navy Art Collection

Hughie Lee Smith; Paul Cadmus

American Civil War Museum

Conrad Wise Chapman

Phillips Collection

John Sloan

Smithsonian

Stuart Davis; Hughie Lee Smith

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Cuneo

Brooklyn Museum

Rockwell Kent

MoMa Museum of Modern Art

Fletcher Martin

Wadsworth Athenaeum

Kensett

Cahoon Museum American Art

North Carolina Museum of Art

Luks

This show was also billed as one exhibition comprising PEM’s **new** Climate and Environmental Initiative. **Includes iconic American homoerotic art – Cadmus Fleet’s In and Fletcher Martin**

Installation views and museum labels more of a miss

Waters elsewhere on view from the Peabody Essex Museum

Josh Simpson megaplanet glass earth, 1989

Michael C. McMillen detail of The Pequod II

Sea Coco

installation view Rockman exhibit, May 29, 2021, see more here

Continue reading “Last chAnce: In American Waters Peabody Essex Museum. splendid waves amazing loans. Go!” →

Mother Goose genius design | 1938 rotating sculpture by artist Richard H. Recchia and Sam Hershey WPA mural Rockport Public Library #RockportMA

Posted on by Catherine

The Rockport Public Library maintains a wonderful art collection. When visiting the temporary Once Upon a Contest: Selections from Cape Ann Reads in the children’s room and the special Betty Allenbrook Wiberg installation, don’t miss the genius Mother Goose 1938 bronze by Richard H. Recchia, and the Sam Hershey WPA-era mural, Rockport Goes to War, 1939.

The new Josh Falk mural (2019) is behind the Rockport Public Library.

Photos & video clip: Catherine Ryan

Genius design bronze by Richard H. Recchia, Mother Goose, 1938

at the Rockport Public Library

This impression is annotated by the artist as a “sketch model sculpture by R. H. Recchia” (1888-1983). The sculpture rotates to illustrate the rhymes and beautifully expresses how children are captivated by stories. The sculpture is a tribute to his wife, Kitty Parsons (1889-1976), artist & writer, and one of the original founders of Rockport Art Assoc. It was originally situated within the library’s former smaller digs: the Rockport’s Carnegie Library established in 1906, a Beaux-Arts beauty around the corner, now a private home. It was one of 43 Carnegie libraries built in Massachusetts.  In 1993 the library moved to its current site in an 1880s mill building, the Tarr School, thanks to the Denghausen bequest.

Parsons & Recchia resided and worked at their home “Hardscrabble” at 6 Summer Street in Rockport. (Rockport was their permanent address from 1928 till his death.) Recchia was born in Quincy. His dad was a stone carver from Verona who worked for Bela Pratt and Daniel Chester French. Later, Recchia was Pratt’s assistant.

For more bas relief examples by Recchia, see his Bela Pratt in the Yale collection, digitized entry here ) Recchia public sculptures are on permanent display at the Rockport Art Association & Museum. More photos below.

snippet video of Recchia Mother Goose sculpture rotating

click/double click on photos to enlarge photos to actual size (or pinch and zoom) | hover to read caption

Sam Hershey WPA mural, 1939

Sam Hershey Rockport Goes to War featured Rockport Public Library; W. Lester Stevens WPA mural Preparing Rockport for Granite dating from the same year is across the street in the Post Office

Samuel F. Hershey WPA era mural 1939 at Rockport Public Library Rockport Mass. ©c ryan

Samuel F. Hershey Rockport Art Assoc catalogue members from 1940

Stevens 1939 mural Rockport Mass post office
W. Lester Stevens 1939 mural in Rockport Post Office

Josh Falk street mural outside

Josh Falk 

Once Upon a Contest

is displayed on the same floor as Recchia and Hershey works February 3 –  February 29, 2020.

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Once Upon a Contest exhibit of children’s picture books is presented by the four libraries of Cape Ann with support from Bruce J Anderson Foundation | The Boston Fund . In this photograph, carved box by Lars and Betty Wiberg. Illustration by John Plunkett for Prince of Winter on left and illustration of dog by Mary Rhinelander on right.

REVIEW: Art at Peabody Essex Museum | Hasten to Hassam

Posted on by Catherine

CHARLES HASSAM SURVEY AT PEM 2016

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American Impressionist: Childe Hassam and the Isle of Shoals at the Peabody Essex Museum is one of the best exhibitions I saw this year. Go. You will come nearly as close as any observer can to feeling the rapturous meeting of an artist’s take with the shimmering world.

Hassam’s paintings don’t reproduce well in books, or photography. They need to be addressed– sized up, walked towards. Inhaled.

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This approach is beneficial even if you study just one. But my, what luxury seeing so many in one place at one time.  Again and again, the show brought forth connections and insight.”Funny, I hadn’t seen that before,” I found myself thinking, “Artists Howard Hodgkin and Lucian Freud are coming to mind.”

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The exhibition features more than 40 Hassam oil paintings and watercolors of the eastern seaboard dating from the late 1880s to 1912–an Isle of Shoals painting reunion, with secrets revealed. 

The Peabody Essex Museum and the North Carolina Museum of Art co-organized and partnered with marine scientists at Shoals Marine Laboratory, Cornell University, and the University of New Hampshire. Their new research examined all the sites on the island, and Hassam’s painting process. I liked the research, the pacing of the installation, and the thoughtful viewshed. Besides the two museums, loans came from near and mostly far such as: private collections from coast to coast (which I’d never see);  the Portland Museum of Art; Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis; Yale (Sinclair Lewis gifted that one to Yale!); Wichita Art Museum; Toledo Museum of Art; Smith; Smithsonian; and the National Gallery of Art.

Basically all painting is abstraction: I relished the chance to study so many in one spot.

I was not a fan of the piped in sound, nor all the wall paint choices as my senses were already acutely challenged by observation. My disdain for the canned ambient sound was so distracting, I had to take a break. On my second visit, the scent of coconut wafted out the entrance. My goodness, have they piped in fake scent like a boutique hotel or experiential attraction, too? They hadn’t. It was my overreaction in the wake of another visitor’s adornment, a lingering fragrance, perhaps sunscreen on a summer day.

Tucked away within the Hassam exhibit was a good photo installation of Alexandra de Steiguer’s work as the Isles winter keeper– for 19 years! For anyone who wondered more about life as a keeper after reading The Light Between Oceans, de Steiguer wrote about her real experiences here, http://connected.pem.org/alone-on-an-island/. It’s beautiful!

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More photos of the Hassam installation at the Peabody Essex Museum:

Peabody Essex Museum Hassam banners
Peabody Essex Museum Hassam 2016
Childe Hassam Sunset at Sea 1911 anonymous loan
Poppies, Isles of Shoals,1891 National Gallery of Art acquisition in 1997
Childe Hassam, illustration for the Island Garden, w/c, 1892 from the Smithsonian (gifted in 1929)
An Island Garden by Celia Thaxter, 1893, with illustrations by Hassam
Childe Hassam, White Island Light, Isles of Shoals at Sundown, 1899, Smith (a 1973 gift of Mr. and Mrs. Hodgkinson (Laura White Cabot, class of 1922) ) Smith has a beauty.
detail of Hassam at Smith
Childe Hassam, The West Wind, Isle of Shoals, 1904, Yale, bequest of Sinclair Lewis to the Beinecke (1952) impossible to photograph well and will knock your socks off. Startling.
Childe Hassam, The West Wind, Isle of Shoals, 1904, Yale, bequest of Sinclair Lewis to the Beinecke (1952)
Childe Hassam, The West Wind, Isle of Shoals, 1904, Yale, bequest of Sinclair Lewis to the Beinecke (1952)
Summer Sea, Isles of Shoals, 1902, o/c, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH, gift of Florence Scott Libbey in 1912
Jelly Fish, 1912, Wichita Art Museum, KS, John W and Mildred L Graves Collection (acquired 1986)
Childe Hassam, Moonrise Isle of Shoals, 1899, collection Donald Head, Old Grandview Ranch, CA
Childe Hassam, The Laurel in the Ledges, Appledore, 1895, North Carolina Museum of Art,
Childe Hassam, Lyman’s Ledge, Appledore, 1903, private collection “northern bayberry, popularly confused with laurel, wedged into the deep clefts”
(detail)
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“During his first summers on Appledore, Hassam stayed near to the places favored by his close friend, Celia Thaxter (1834-1894).”

http://celiathaxtergarden.com/