The National Academy Museum and School
of Fine Arts
New York, NY
212-369-4880
http://www.nationalacademy.org/
The Cos Cob Art Colony:
Impressionists on the Connecticut Shore
February 14 - May 13, 2001
From 1890 until about
1920, the Cos Cob section of Greenwich, Connecticut, was the site of a lively
art colony. There, John Henry Twachtman, Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam,
and J. Alden Weir participated in shaping American Impressionism. Cos Cob
in the 1890s was as important to them as Argenteuil in the 1870s had been
to Monet, Renoir, and Manet. It was their testing-ground for new styles,
new themes, and, for Hassam at least, new media.
This
first fully documented analysis of one of America's oldest, pre-eminent
art colonies will feature more than sixty works by twelve artists, including
Twachtman, Hassam, Robinson, and Weir. During the art-colony period, Greenwich
was changing from a farming and fishing community to a prosperous suburb
of New York. Keenly aware of those changes, the artists who gathered in
Cos Cob produced work that reflects the underlying tensions between tradition
and modernity, nature and technology, and country and city. While depiction
of popular subjects such as colonial houses, contemplative women, and quiet
landscapes were quite commonplace at the time, exhibition curator Susan
G. Larkin maintains that the artists of Cos Cob treated these subjects with
unusual acuity and depth. (left: John Twachtman, Hemlock Pool,
c. 1900, oil on canvas, 30 x 25 inches, Collection of Addison Gallery of
American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA)
Painting along the Mianus River, Theodore Robinson's treatment
of the nautical landscape in transition, for example, ranges in subject
from the gleaming pleasure craft near the stylish new Riverside Yacht Club,
to the battered commercial vessels around the old shipyard. Rife with nuances,
the somber palette, compressed space, and foreshortening techniques employed
in his treatment of a dilapidated freighter in The E. M. J. Betty
(1894), stands in marked contrast with the expansive, high vistas, and keyed
palettes of The Anchorage, Cos Cob (1894). While executed the same
year, the later painting suggests the artist's exhilaration with the trappings
of modern leisure, while the former indicate his melancholy over the passing
of traditional ways.
In order to further distinguish the many ways in which
each artist imbued the commonplace, Dr. Larkin has organized the exhibition
into four thematic sections: The Nautical Landscape; Images of Cos Cob's
Architecture; Familiar Faces; and Familiar Places. Archival photographs,
maps, and other materials will help visitors identify with the subjects
the artists chose and the social context within which they lived and worked.
While
the environmental experience changed, the art colony's enthusiasm for experimentation
was a constant defining characteristic. Many artists adopted techniques
found in Japanese art including an attention to pattern, use of flattened
shapes, and unusual composition as demonstrated in works including Hassam's
Bowl of Goldfish (1912), and Weir's In the Shade of a Tree (1894).
Among the surprises offered by the exhibition is Twachtman's rarely exhibited
Barnyard (1915), in which the artist adapted conventions from European
religious painting in a view of his young daughter feeding chickens and
doves. (left: Childe Hassam, Bowl of Goldfish, 1912, oil on
canvas, 25 1/8 x 30 1/4 inches, Collection of Ball State University Art
Gallery, Muncie, Indiana)
Because Hassam used several of his sojourns in Cos Cob
to experiment with pastel, watercolor, and etching, the exhibition is distinguished
by a remarkable group of his works on paper. Hassam depicted The Old
Brush House, a pre-Revolutionary cottage in Cos Cob, in a sun-drenched
pastel of 1902. Fifteen years later, he portrayed it in watercolor, capturing
the dappled sunlight on the ramshackle building in luminous veils of color.
During a visit to Cos Cob in 1915, Hassam turned seriously to etching for
the first time. In a brilliant suite of images, including The Steps,
he translated the Impressionist concern with light to the black-and-white
medium.
The Art Colony
The Cos
Cob art colony's focal point was the Holley family's boardinghouse,
a rambling old saltbox overlooking the small harbor. (Now known as the Bush-Holley
House, it is a museum operated by the Historical Society of the Town of
Greenwich. See our earlier article concerning the Bush-Holly Historic Site)
The diversity of the group that gathered at the Holley House contributed
to the art colony's experimental atmosphere. Painters exchanged ideas with
writers including novelist Willa Cather, muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens
and political commentators, essayists, and humorists. The art students who
attended Twachtman's summer classes provided a steady infusion of youthful
energy. One of them, the Japanese artist Genjiro Yeto, was a personal link
to the culture the Impressionists of Cos Cob deeply admired.
"In their diversity and dynamism," Dr. Larkin
writes, "the quiet rebels of the Holley House formed a bohemian enclave
of avant-garde art and progressive politics within the larger community."
At first, the art colonists held aloof from the newcomers who were buying
up old farms and transforming the community into a suburb. Eventually, however,
the artists recognized the growing population of affluent suburbanites as
potential patrons. In 1912, they tapped that market by forming the Greenwich
Society of Artists, which mounted annual exhibitions at the then-new Bruce
Museum.
On the national level, several members of the art colony,
notably Elmer Livingston MacRae and Henry Fitch Taylor, were among the principal
organizers of the Armory Show, the landmark exhibition that, in 1913, introduced
European modernism to a vast American audience. Twachtman and Robinson had
died by then, but they were among the five Americans presented as precursors
of modernism. Twachtman's Hemlock Pool (ca. 1900), which was exhibited
at the Armory Show, is one of the highlights of The Cos Cob Art Colony.
Travel dates
June 17 to September 16, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
October 27 to January 20, 2002, Denver Art Museum
Book to accompany the exhibition
Yale University Press on the occasion of the exhibition
will publish a richly illustrated book -- the first devoted to the art colony.
The Cos Cob Art Colony: Impressionists on the Connecticut Shore by
Susan G. Larkin is the long-awaited history and analysis of this influential
artistic enclave. Drawing on maritime history, garden design, contemporary
literature, women's studies, and more, Dr. Larkin places the art colony
in context and reveals unexpected depths in paintings of enormous popular
appeal. With 78 color and 67 black-and-white illustrations.
Symposium
"Painting Among Friends: American Art Colonies, 1890
- 1920." April 7, 2001, 9:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. Huntington Room, National
Academy of Design's School of Fine Arts, 5 East 89th Street. Speakers will
be Dr. William H. Gerdts, Dr. Susan G. Larkin, Dr. Jeffrey Andersen, Kathleen
Kienholz, and Dr. Thomas Wolf. Admission:
Read a review on the exhibition by Carter B. Horsley with
six images in The City
Review
rev. 12/20/00, 5/14/01
Read more about the National
Academy Museum in Resource Library Magazine
Please click on thumbnail images bordered by a red line
to see enlargements.
For further biographical information on selected artists
cited above please see America's Distinguished
Artists, a national registry of historic artists.
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more information. rev. 4/27/11
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This
first fully documented analysis of one of America's oldest, pre-eminent
art colonies will feature more than sixty works by twelve artists, including
Twachtman, Hassam, Robinson, and Weir. During the art-colony period, Greenwich
was changing from a farming and fishing community to a prosperous suburb
of New York. Keenly aware of those changes, the artists who gathered in
Cos Cob produced work that reflects the underlying tensions between tradition
and modernity, nature and technology, and country and city. While depiction
of popular subjects such as colonial houses, contemplative women, and quiet
landscapes were quite commonplace at the time, exhibition curator Susan
G. Larkin maintains that the artists of Cos Cob treated these subjects with
unusual acuity and depth. (left: John Twachtman, Hemlock Pool,
c. 1900, oil on canvas, 30 x 25 inches, Collection of Addison Gallery of
American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA)