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Artists of the Commonwealth:
Realism and Its Response in Pennsylvania Painting, 1900-1950
December 1, 2006 - April 8, 2007
Artists of the
Commonwealth: Realism and Its Response in Pennsylvania Painting, 1900-1950 is currently open at the Erie Art Museum. This exhibition, organized
by the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in collaboration with the Erie
Art Museum and the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, brings together the
work of Pennsylvania artists that, although stylistically varied, are firmly
based upon the foundation of representational art. By celebrating the contributions
of Pennsylvania artists and placing them and their work within the greater
context of American art, Artists of the Commonwealth: Realism and Its Response
in Pennsylvania Painting, 1900-1950 will provide museum visitors with a
rare opportunity to assess the direction of art at the opening of the 20th
century.
The exhibition has traveled to the following venues: The
Westmorland Museum of Art: Feb. 26 - May 21, 2006; Southern Alleghenies
Museum of Art, Saint Francis University (Loretto, PA): August 4 - November
5, 2006; Erie Art Museum (Erie, PA): December 1, 2006 - April 8, 2007; and
will travel to the James A. Michener Art Museum (Doylestown, PA): May 19
- September 2, 2007.
This exhibition received funding from the Pennsylvania
Council on the Arts (PCA), a state agency, through a PCA program that supports
Pennsylvania traveling exhibitions and a website promoting these exhibitions
-- www.picturepa.org. The Richard
C. von Hess Foundation provides additional funding.
The Significance of the Artists of Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania has held a prominent place in the advancement
of American painting. Exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine
Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Carnegie Museum of Art, along
with nationally recognized studio art programs at the Pennsylvania Academy
of the Fine Arts and Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon
University) played an important role in the American art scene in the opening
decades of the 20th Century. This period in American art was an extremely
energetic, creative and quickly changing one with artists addressing a barrage
of new styles defined by abstraction and modernism.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the instruction
and works of such Pennsylvania artists as George Hetzel, Thomas Anshutz,
and Thomas Eakins set the stage for Robert Henri, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and
Mary Cassatt, each of whom became synonymous with a different movement in
American realism, focusing on the city and modern life. Artists including
Aaron Harry Gorson, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan, who continued an interest
in urban life, closely followed these artists. N.C. Wyeth, Violet Oakley,
and Maxfield Parrish were artists whose works focused on images from mythology,
history and literature.
Artists included in the exhibition
- William Baziotes (1912-)
- Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942)
- Arthur B. Carles (1882-1952)
- Clarence Carter (1904-2000)
- Mary Cassatt (1845-1926)
- Fern Coppedge (1883-1951)
- Virginia Cuthbert (1908-2001)
- George Ericson, a.k.a. Eugene Iverd (1893-1936)
- Daniel Garber (1880-1958)
- William Glackens (1870-1938)
- Aaron Harry Gorson (1872-1933)
- Johanna K. W. Hailman (1871-1958)
- Robert Henri (1865-1929)
- Roy Hilton (18921963)
- John Kane (1860-1934)
- Albert King (1854-1945)
- George Luks (1867-1933)
- Norwood MacGilvary (18741949)
- Violet Oakley (1874-1961)
- Malcolm Parcell (1896-1987)
- Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966)
- Horace Pippin (1888-1946)
- Hobson Pittman (1900-1972)
- Joseph Plavcan (1908-1981)
- Edward Redfield (1869-1965)
- Samuel Rosenberg (1896-1972)
- Walter Elmer Schofield (1867-1944)
- Charles Sheeler (1883-1965)
- Everett Shinn (1876-1953)
- John Sloan (1871-1951)
- Robert Spencer (1879-1931)
- Walter Stuempfig (1914-1970)
- Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937)
- A. Bryan Wall (1861-1935)
- Christian Walter (1872-1938)
- Everett Warner (1877-1963)
- Franklin Watkins (1894-1972)
- N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945)
Overview of Artists and Artworks
-
- William Baziotes (1912-1963)
- Untitled, 1946
-
- William Baziotes was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in
Reading, Pennsylvania. He studied painting at the National Academy of
Design, graduating in 1936. He was employed by the WPA through 1941.
His first one-man exhibition was held in 1944 at Peggy Guggenheim's Art
of This Century Gallery. He was a founding member, along with Robert Motherwell,
Mark Rothko, David Hare and Barnett Newman, of the Subjects of the Artist
School in New York. After his death in 1963, a memorial exhibition which
traveled the country was organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
-
- Baziotes' work reflects an interest in Automatism (tapping
the unconscious for the creation of images), Surrealism, and the art of
Miro, Matta and Arp. He developed a personal vocabulary of abstract symbols
which often have a rounded, lifelike character. These "biomorphs"
are shapes that suggest a living organism but do not consciously represent
one. Paintings from the mid-1940s, like Untitled from 1946, represent
the biomorphs as seen through a window or doorway, or as places on a platform
or stage, suggesting space despite the flatness of the composition. In
his mature works, the forms are magnified to occupy the entire canvas,
and the surrounding framework disappears. Baziotes' paintings represent
a synthesis of Surrealist subject and Cubist style.
-
-
- Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942)
- Portrait of Mrs. Andrew Carnegie, 1917-18
-
- Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) produced handsome large canvases
of her socially prominent subjects, some rivaling the bravura technique
of John Singer Sargent, the favored painter of the American aristocracy.
Born in Philadelphia, with the death of her mother shortly after she was
born, her grief-stricken father returned to his native France, leaving
Cecilia and her sister to be raised by her maternal grandmother and two
aunts. It was an unusual upbringing, but her genteelly impoverished relatives
appreciated the arts and valued culture, and Beaux's career benefited from
her solid grounding within her extended family, who supported her decision
to become an artist. After private art lessons, Beaux enrolled in the Pennsylvania
Academy in 1877, pursuing further study in Paris for two years.
-
- Returning to Philadelphia in 1889, she soon gained a
reputation as a skilled portraitist, receiving commissions from elite patrons
in the major cities of the Northeast. Such was the demand for her work,
that by the turn of the twentieth century, she established her studio in
New York. It was there that she painted her handsome Portrait of Mrs.
Andrew Carnegie (1917-18), commissioned by the Carnegie Institute to
honor the spouse of its founder. When health problems made it difficult
for her to paint after 1924, Beaux focused her energies on writing her
autobiography, publishing Background with Figures in 1930. She died in
1942 at the age of eighty-seven.
-
-
- Arthur B. Carles (1882-1952)
- Tulips, n.d.
-
- Arthur B. Carles (1882-1952), born in Philadelphia, studied
at the Pennsylvania Academy between 1900 and 1907, and would return to
teach there between 1917 and 1925. Carles returned regularly to Paris,
often staying with Edward Steichen at his house in Voulangis, a small village
about thirty miles from the city. In the spirit of Matisse, his work reveals
the free handling of paint and brilliant Fauvist color that was the hallmark
of his work through the twenties, by which time he was known as "the
man who paints with color." Alfred Stieglitz included his work in
a group show at his seminal gallery 291, and gave the artist his first
one-man show in 1912. The luminous, floating colors of Tulips (1918),
is a fine example of early American modernist still life.
-
-
- Clarence Carter (1904-2000)
- Study for the Barnesville Post Office Mural, 1935
-
- The work of Clarence Holbrook Carter (1904-2000) is deeply
rooted in the Ohio River Valley town of Portsmouth, located in the southern
part of the state across the border from Kentucky. By the thirties, he
had achieved his distinctive realist style, a powerful combination of the
bleak loneliness of Edward Hopper and the more emotionally charged imagery
of Charles Burchfield. Strongly regional in character, his realism was
both nostalgic and hallucinatory, grounded in a vernacular vision. Even
when he left Ohio, his memories of his native state continued to inform
his vision. Wherever he lived, he remained an independent thinker: "My
expression of America has been shaped by its vigor and vitality, its peace
and calm and the spell of its past."
-
- Carter sought support from the federal government, executing
several murals. While Carter did not win the competition for Barnesville,
Ohio, his 1935 entry portrays a typical theme. Pictured is a plane, a lighthouse,
a train, and a structure that appears to be a new airplane terminal-all
elements facilitating the efficient delivery of the mail. A postman wearing
the gray-blue uniform of his profession and carrying a mail sack, concentrates
on his task.
-
- Between 1938 and 1944, Carter taught at Carnegie Tech.
He found the city picturesque and full of character, but the smoke that
inspired Gorson and Hailman made it, in his opinion "a miserable place
to live." He regarded it as "the most important indictment of
capitalism that I know." Wanting more time to devote to his painting,
in 1944 he resigned his position, and moved to the quiet solitude of Bucks
County, remaining there until 1948, when he settled in Milford, New Jersey,
near the Delaware River.
-
-
- Mary Cassatt (1845-1926)
- Mother and Two Children, 1901
-
- Cassatt had studied at the Academy for five years beginning
in 1861, going abroad to continue her studies in 1866, making her Salon
debut in 1868. Except for when she returned for a short period during the
Franco-Prussian War, France would be her home for the rest of her life.
Although an expatriate, her family's fortune derived from the Pennsylvania
Railroad and gave her name a continuing economic presence in the state.
She was the only American member of the French Impressionists, with whom
she would exhibit beginning in 1877, and continuing until 1882.
-
- Executed at the beginning of the artist's late period,
Mother and Two Children (1901) was painted when the artist was fifty-six.
At the turn of the twentieth century, her reputation was secure and her
prestige in the international art world at its height: "The most eminent
of living American women painters." During this period she traveled
extensively, and her many social obligations meant she had less time to
spend in her studio. Cassatt continued working until about 1915, when problems
with her eyes forced her stop painting.
-
- The painting portrays a typical subject she had explored
in paintings, prints, and drawings for more than two decades. In contrast
to the flaneur boulevardiers of the male Impressionists like her friend
Degas, her subject is situated in distinctly female space, and is a domestic
scene within the world of women. A graceful image of a woman with two children,
the circular format evokes the Renaissance stability of Raphael's Madonnas.
The ease of the mother's pose, emblematic of maternal affection, and the
beautiful gown she wears show the cocooned comfort of their economic circumstance.
Yet such a comfortable image could intersect modern political concerns.
This painting was originally produced as part of a mural competition for
the State Capitol building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Cassat, frustrated
with the state of government and the amount of graft involved, eventually
withdrew her work from the competition. In 1915, the painting was shown
at Knoedler Gallery in New York, as part of a "Loan Exhibition of
Old and Modern Painters for the Benefit of Woman Suffrage," organized
by Cassatt's good friend, collector Louisine Havemeyer.
-
-
- Fern Coppedge (1883-1951)
- Back Road to Pipersville, n.d.
-
- "People used to think me queer when I was a little
girl because I saw deep purples and reds and violets in a field of snow.
I used to be hurt over it until I gave up trying to understand people and
concentrated on my love and understanding of landscapes. Then it didn't
make any difference."
- -Fern I. Coppedge
-
- Born in Illinois, Fern Isabel Coppedge studied at the
Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Students League, and finally at the Pennsylvania
Academy (1917-18), where one of her instructors was likely Daniel Garber.
She was also a student at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women,
becoming active in the Philadelphia Ten between 1922 and 1935. In 1920
she purchased a house and studio across from Garber's. She favored the
snowscapes that were common subjects for members of the New Hope group.
Her Back Road to Pipersville portrays the route to a town not far from
Lumberville, and its strong brushwork and lively color are typical of her
paintings. Coppedge worked on a smaller scale than her male contemporaries,
making sketches ahead of time.
-
-
- Virginia Cuthbert (1908-2001)
- Slum Clearance on Ruch's Hill, Pittsburgh, 1937
-
- Born in West Newton, Virginia Cuthbert pursued a broad
art training in America and abroad and as a result had a range of styles
and subjects. As a child she had studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology,
returning to the University of Pittsburgh in 1932, and a year later had
her first solo show in the city. She continued to exhibit widely in Pittsburgh
and in 1934 won a prize for the best painting by a woman from the Carnegie
Institute, a reminder of the many challenges faced by women artists, often
slighted by separate "women's awards." For more than a decade
she lived in Pittsburgh, and her connection to the city deepened with her
marriage to another artist from the city, Phillip Elliot (they would move
to Buffalo in 1941.)
-
- The Depression hit major American industrial cities hard,
and Pittsburgh was no exception. Cuthbert's expressive Slum Clearance
on Ruch's Hill, Pittsburgh (1937) responds to the dramatic social changes
that took place during the thirties. Her scene, which was shown at the
Carnegie International, portrays a group of African American women and
children watching their homes in a blighted neighborhood being demolished
by workmen, nearly all of whom are white. The scene is bleak, and it is
not clear if the urban renewal it represents includes finding new homes
for those who have been displaced. Her subdued colors convey the somber
nature of her subject.
-
-
- George Erickson (1893-1936)
- Young Scientist, 1932
-
- Born in Minnesota, George Ericson, working under the
pseudonym Eugene Iverd, became famous as an illustrator, producing covers
for the Saturday Evening Post, as well as images for other leading magazines.
Advertisements were another important source of income for artists willing
to undertake commercial work. In 1916, after a year of study at the St.
Paul Art institute, he enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy. Drafted into
the Army in 1918, the Armistice was declared before his outfit could be
shipped out. He was then transferred to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington,
D.C., where he taught art to wounded veterans. After his discharge from
the Army in 1921, he secured a teaching position in Erie. He did well in
his new position and soon was promoted to become the city-wide supervisor
of art instruction. His illustration career took off during this period,
and by 1926 he could cut back the hours he worked for the city. In a letter
written to his mother, Ericson's enthusiasm about a career as an illustrator
is evident:
-
- Dear Precious Darling Mother:
-
- Excuse this big salutation, but I can't wait another
moment. I must tell you the good news. You will remember my telling you
I submitted four canvases to The Saturday Evening Post. Well, yesterday
I got a letter from them, and they told me they were very much interested
and see possibilities in several. They also said that a Mr. Martin was
coming to Erie to go over the pictures with me. Last night I got a telegram
from them saying Mr. Martin would see me this evening. He came with the
big canvases up to the house, and I talked with him for an hour. He told
me so many things. I can't believe them even now.
-
- I had a lot of other stuff to tell you, but Mother,
I am too excited. Think of it, Mother. I was good enough to have them send
a special man down to see me. If I can get in with them, Mother, you will
have every thing you ever wished for. The big artists get from $1,000 to
$1,500 for each of their covers.
-
- He said they were anxious to find young men who
could develop into cover artists. He said they received thousands of covers
by artists trying to get in.... He said that they want young men who can
grow with them.
-
- Ericson's Young Scientist (1932) was a typical
subject for a painter who preferred to paint children. Holding a magnifying
glass, his youthful subject bends down to inspect an insect on a milkweed
plant. His net, specimen jar, and binoculars are on the ground in front
of him. With a pencil tucked in his ear, he is ready to jot down his observations
in the notebook he holds in his left hand. Intent on his task, the sunny
summer atmosphere conveys the optimism typical of his work. Although the
depression was in full force, one senses the optimistic possibility of
a bright future.
-
-
- Daniel Garber (1880-1958)
- Spring Valley Inn, 1940
-
- Born in Indiana, Daniel Garber was the son of a Pennsylvania
Mennonite farmer. After attending summer classes at the Derby School of
Painting in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, with Thomas Anshutz and Hugh
Breckenridge, he enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy in 1899. He spent
six years there, studying with William Merritt Chase, and possibly Cecilia
Beaux. After two years in Europe, he returned to Pennsylvania in 1909,
taking a teaching position at the Pennsylvania Academy, where he would
remain an instructor until 1950. In his Lumberville studio, he produced
some of the handsomest landscapes and figure paintings produced by any
Pennsylvania Impressionist. His graceful and lyrical compositions were
inspired by scenes near his home. A skilled figure painter, his poetic
canvases reveal his thoroughly academic training and strong drawing skills
in their harmonious presentation.
-
- At the time he painted Spring Valley Inn (1940),
Garber was well established and successful. The canvas conveys the warmth
of late summer at his home, his flickering brushwork capturing the kind
of idyllic scene favored by both French and American Impressionists. His
use of broken patches of color also suggest an understanding of Post-Impressionism.
-
-
- William Glackens (1870-1938)
- The Easter Hat, c. 1930
-
- Born in Philadelphia, William Glackens began his career
as a newspaper illustrator. After meeting Robert Henri in 1891, he was
inspired to pursue a painting career. Five years later, he moved to New
York and joined The Eight in 1908. Glackens was a principle member of the
Ashcan school although his work bordered on Impressionism rather than Social
Realism. The Ashcan school was a group of urban realist painters in America
creating work around the early part of 20th century. The group, founded
by the artist and teacher Robert Henri, began its activities in Philadelphia
around 1891.
-
- The Ashcan school was more revolutionary in its subject
matter rather than its style. The Ashcan school artists sought to paint
"real life" and urban reality. These artists believed what was
real and true in life was what was beautiful and what constituted "art."
They painted gritty urban scenes and the poor and disenfranchised in America.
-
- His early paintings share the dark tones of Manet and
Hals favored by several of the leading members of The Eight, but after
spending six summers at Bellport on Long Island between 1911 and 1916,
his palette brightened. After 1914, he took on less commercial work in
order to concentrate more on his painting. In the thirties, he painted
some handsome figural compositions, of which The Easter Hat (c.
1930) is a strong example of the reserved formality characteristic of his
studio work.
-
-
- Aaron Harry Gorson (1872-1933)
- Monongahela Steel Mills and Barges, 1912
-
- Aaron Harry Gorson was born June 2, 1872, in Kovno (Kaunas),
Lithuania. Kovno was a city with a thriving textile industry, and at age
thirteen Gorson was apprenticed to a tailor. In 1888 he immigrated to the
United States to join an older brother in Philadelphia. He soon found employment
and worked as a machine operator in a clothing factory during the day,
while at night he attended classes at the Spring Garden Institute to pursue
his dream of becoming a painter.
-
- He settled in Pittsburgh in 1903, and soon began to paint
the city's steel mills. Most he painted from the outside, though occasionally
he made dramatic interior views. The industrial landscape remained his
favorite theme until he moved to New York in 1921, and his night scenes
of the Bessemer furnaces convey the dark beauty of his subjects, some of
which he painted at dusk to emphasize a poetic mood. Like most of the artists
who were inspired by industry before the Depression, he was little concerned
with the labor conditions inside, and Monongahela Steel Mills and Barges
(1912) is typical of his Pittsburgh work. Smoke, whether it came from smokestacks
or trains, appealed to Gorson and was a strong formal element of his paintings
of the rugged mills. But the smoke, soot, and fumes that were characteristic
of the nation's capitol of coal and steel may have been picturesque to
the artists who painted it, but the air pollution created by these industries
was a public health problem for those who lived nearby.
-
-
- Johanna Hailman (1871-1958)
- Mills, Trains, and Barges, 1940
-
- In the twentieth century, women increasingly challenged
societal strictures about appropriate female behavior. More women became
artists than ever before, though their careers were often less successful
and they were judged by a different standard. The daughter of wealthy Pittsburgh
painter who married a steel industrialist, Johanna Hailman could have settled
for a life of privilege and amateur painting. Yet this woman possessed
of a strong personality and exuberant energy who linked Pittsburgh's art
and social worlds did not settle for the easy route, and combined an art
career with a strong commitment to civic service. When she showed in New
York in the 1920s, Forbes Watson characterized her as an individual "troubled
by no doubts and no hesitation." By the 1930s, Hailman was regarded
as "Pittsburgh's foremost woman artist" and the "dowager
doyen of Pittsburgh," yet this painter still had more than twenty-five
years left in her career. An avid gardener, she was well known for her
paintings of flowers, regarded as an acceptable subject for a woman artist.
She was also an art patron who for many years annually purchased a painting
from the Carnegie International (she bequeathed her collection to the Carnegie).
Her work was shown in the International beginning with the first exhibit
held in 1896 when she was twenty-five, and exhibited every year thereafter
(except two) until 1955, three years before her death at the age of eighty-seven.
-
- Hailman shared Gorson's enthusiasm for industrial subject
matter, as seen in her stunning Mills, Trains, and Barges (1940).
Portraying industry and technology remained a largely masculine enterprise,
but some powerful images were created by Hailman. Many of her works were
inspired by the seascapes and landscapes she saw on her travels (she wintered
in Nassau), and gardens, she could also powerfully portray the spectacle
of the smoking mills of the industrial city that remained her lifelong
home. Other strong works include her Jones and Laughlin Mill (c.
1925-30, Carnegie Institute) whose buildings and fumy smokestacks capture
the visual essence of one of the city's leading industry.
-
-
- Robert Henri (1865-1929)
- Gitana Vieja (Madre Gitana), 1912
-
- Born Robert Henry Cozad, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the artist
took the surname, Henri (pronounced Hen-rye), when he was eighteen because
his family was forced to change their identities after his father killed
a man in self defense. The name reflected his French heritage, although
Henri insisted on an American pronunciation.
-
- After a rather tumultuous childhood, Henri studied at
the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia under Thomas
Anshutz (1852-1912) where he was instructed in the realist tradition.
He later traveled to Europe where he came briefly under the influence of
the impressionists, although his palette retained the dark, earth tones
of the Philadelphia school.
-
- While in Philadelphia, Henri became a mentor to several
younger artists who gathered at his Walnut Street studio to hear his philosophy
of art and share criticisms. Four of these painters, together with Henri,
were later to form the core of The Eight, a radical group of artists who
defended artistic freedom against the strictures of the National Academy
in New York after the turn-of-the-century. John Sloan (1871-1951), George
Luks (1867-1933), Everett Shinn (1876-1953), and William Glackens (1870-1938)
were to remain life-long friends even after they went their separate ways
as they each earned their own reputations.
-
- During the summer of 1912, Henri was in Spain with his
second wife Marjorie and a group of students. The artist relished painting
ordinary people who struck him as full of life and character, about whom
he took a broad humanistic vantage:
-
- "The people I like to paint are 'my people,' whoever
they may be, wherever they may exist, the people through whom dignity of
life is manifest, that is, who are in some way expressing themselves naturally
along the lines Nature intended for them. My people may be old or young,
rich or poor, I may speak their language or I may communicate with them
only by gestures. But wherever I find them, the Indian at work in the white
man's way, the Spanish gypsy moving back to the freedom of the hills, the
little boy, quiet and reticent before the stranger, my interest is awakened
and my impulse is to tell about them through my own language: drawing and
painting in color."
-
- Gitana Vieja (Madre Gitana)
of 1912 illustrates Henri's words, and the artist was evidently struck
by his subject's red skirt and contrasting dark top.
-
-
- Roy Hilton (1892-1963)
- Light Snow, c. 1948
-
- Roy Hilton grew up Winchester, Massachusetts and attended
the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts before entering the Eric
Pape School to study art. In 1928 he came to Pittsburgh to become an instructor
at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) the
beginning of a nearly thirty year teaching career.
-
- Landscape remained a popular theme throughout the forties.
Light Snow (c. 1948) by Roy Hilton depicts the artist's house as seen
from his driveway. Although each element is entirely recognizable, the
low horizon line, sharp angle of vision, and the startling coral sky create
a surreal effect. The artist, a native of Boston, came to teach at the
Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1928, remaining on the faculty for
nearly thirty years.
-
-
- Joseph Hirsch
- Editorial, 1942
-
- Joseph Hirsch (1910-1981), born in Philadelphia, was
a student of George Luks in New York. Working as a painter and a printmaker,
the strong graphic techniques he employed in his etchings and lithographs,
informed the canvases of this artist who possessed a keen social conscience.
His mature style was established by the time of his first one-man show
in 1937, and in Editorial (1942), he portrays the ordinary working
class subject this social-realist artist typically favored.
-
-
- John Kane (1860-1934)
- Turtle Creek Valley No. 1, c. 1930
-
- An American painter of Scottish birth, Kane immigrated
to western Pennsylvania in 1879. He worked as a bricklayer, coal miner,
steel worker and carpenter in the Ohio River valley and, in 1890, began
to sketch local scenery. After losing his leg in a train accident in 1891,
he was employed painting railway carriages. When his son died in 1904,
Kane left his family and spent years wandering and working in odd jobs.
His earliest surviving paintings date from around 1910. Settling in Pittsburgh,
he worked as a house painter and in his spare time painted portraits, religious
subjects, the city's urban landscape and memories of his Scottish childhood.
In 1927 the jury of the Carnegie International Exhibition, Pittsburgh,
encouraged by the painter-juror Andrew Dasburg, accepted Kane's Scene in
the Scottish Highlands. Kane's success, at first considered a hoax by the
press, was based on the modernist interest in primitive and folk art. His
work was regarded as non-academic and boldly original and he became the
first contemporary American folk artist to be recognized by a museum.
-
- His Turtle Creek Valley 1 (c. 1930), was one of
several inspired by this view. Pittsburgh's many valleys and rivers made
it a city of bridges, common elements in his work. Kane's painting depicts
the sturdy concrete spans of the George Westinghouse Bridge. The artist
had a keen eye for local detail, and the city's bridges, trains, and hills
were among his favorite subjects: "I find beauty everywhere in Pittsburgh.
It is the beauty of the past which the present has not touched. The city
is my own."
-
-
- Albert King (1854-1945)
- Still Life with Watermelon on a Wood Crate, n.d.
-
- Albert F. King was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and
became one of the city's best-known artists. A member of the Scalp Level
artists led by George Hetzel, King, although a generation younger, traveled
with the group to the remote area near Johnstown, Pennsylvania where they
painted landscapes in the summer months. King also studied with Martin
B. Leisser, a landscape and portrait painter who was an influential leader
in Pittsburgh's art circles. King became a master in portraiture, but also
painted still lifes, landscapes, and genre scenes often for his own pleasure.
He made a living by painting portraits for the city's bank presidents and
business professionals. Many portraits of the distinguished men of Pittsburgh
hung in the Duquesne Club, a private club of which King was a member as
well.
-
- His undated Still Life with Watermelon on a Wood Crate,
a humble subject he painted several times, continues the trompe l'oeil
realist traditions of the Peale family, John Frederick Peto, and William
M. Harnett. His compositions are simple and straightforward, with the dark
background serving to highlight his tasty subject. A wedge has been cut
out so a beverage may be poured in, and the knife stuck in the bright green
rind, with the pink fruit being the chief color notes.
-
-
- George Luks (1867-1933)
- The Guitar (Portrait of the Artist's Brother with
his Son), 1908
-
- George Luks, a native of the logging town of Williamsport,
moved with his family to Shenandoah in coal country when he was about six.
His father was a doctor, and his upbringing a comfortable one. After study
at the Pennsylvania Academy for a month in 1884, he went abroad. In 1894
he took a position as a staff artist with the Philadelphia Press, which
is where he met the other newspaper artists who became part of Henri's
circle. Moving to New York in 1896, he was hired by the New York World,
where he was joined by Glackens and Shinn in 1897.
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- The Guitar (1908) in its dark coloration and brushy style
is typical of his early work, when his gusto for ordinary people and the
street life of the Lower East Side is evident. In 1925, he returned for
the summer to Pottsville, where his family had lived for a short time while
he was growing up, to do a mural at a local hotel on the theme of the coal
industry. While there, he executed a series of canvases portraying Pennsylvania
anthracite miners in the mid twenties. Like many members of The Eight,
Luks was a professor of art, first at the Arts Student League and later,
at a school he established himself.
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- Luks traveled widely and led a life full of incident,
but because he was an inveterate storyteller who cultivated a flamboyant
public persona, it is often hard to separate myth from fact. Shinn described
him as "a glutton for existence." The subject matter, style,
and quality of his work varies widely, but he loved to paint and was fascinated
by the life around him.
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- Norwood MacGilvary (1874-1961)
- Here and Elsewhere, c. 1944
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- Norwood Hodge MacGilvary was born in Bangkok, Siam on
November 14, 1874 of American parents. He studied at the University of
California at Berkeley, Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco, with Myron
Barlow in England and Laurens in Paris. A resident of New York and Providence,
Rhode Island, he was again in San Francisco for an extended period during
the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915.
-
- Norwood MacGilvary's symbolic Here and Elsewhere (c.
1944) was inspired by current events. The cosmic scene painted by this
normally realistic artist, features the moon, stars, and galaxies. The
artist, who taught at Carnegie Tech between 1921 and 1943, reflects his
interest in philosophy which he had earlier studied at the University of
California. A giant baby sits on the earth, his raised right arm shaking
a red rattle. Two eruptions are visible, referencing World War II being
fought in European and Pacific theatres. The catastrophe represented by
the war is also seen in the comet that streaks between the earth and the
moon. But the artist's unusual image is not without hope, although the
war had not yet ended when the artist painted his canvas. Not only is the
baby's expression open and full of eager expectation, the face of God is
seen at the right. His head is topped with a galaxial swirl of concern,
and the intense blue of his eyes echoed in the comet. His hand protectively
cradles the planet that has been wracked by global conflict.
-
-
- Violet Oakley (1874-1961)
- Unity (Study for International Understanding and Unity
Mural, Pennsylvania State Capitol, Harrisburg), 1906
-
- Violet Oakley is considered by some to have been America's
greatest woman muralist of the early 20th century. The success of her
murals that were painted in the Pennsylvania state capitol led to many
commissions and international reputation as a painter of moral and idealistic
subjects.
-
- Oakley's early works showcased her confidence and independence
as a woman artist. As she traveled and studied in America and Europe,
she exuberantly painted portraits and landscapes in a spontaneous, impressionistic
style. Violet's shift to illustration and mural painting was related to
the onset of her father's illness in 1896.
-
- Forty-four feet long, International Understanding
and Unity is the largest of her Capitol murals. Its scale necessitated
the enlargement of her studio, and the artist painted on canvas from many
studies, working on a moveable scaffold without assistants. Her idealistic
and ambitious composition is replete with symbolism "in which she
depicted a world free from war and oppression, united by international
cooperation." She inscribed her allegorical panel with a passage from
the Apocalypse: "He carried me away to a great and high mountain and
showed me the Great City and he showed me a pure river of Water of Life
as crystal proceeding out of the throne. The Leaves of the Tree were for
the Healing of Nations." The monumental figure of a woman with outstretched
arms serves as the "keystone" of her composition allegorically
conveys the artist's thematic vision. She symbolizes the Water of Life
or Unity. Other panels portray "The End of Warfare," "The
End of Slavery" (based on Penn's principles), includes Man removing
the shackles of Woman. That she has portrayed an image of a strong female
references the women's suffrage movement of the time.
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-
- Malcolm Parcell (1896-1987)
- Portrait of Helen Gallagher, c. 1928
-
- Malcolm Parcell, the son of a minister, grew up in Washington,
Pennsylvania, where his father was pastor of the Broad Street Baptist Church.
He returned home after his graduation from Carnegie Tech in 1918, and soon
met Helen Louine Gallagher, who became his wife in 1937 when she was thirty-four.
His portrait of her, Louine (1918, Board of Public Education, Pittsburgh),
painted when she was fifteen, earned for him his first acclaim, winning
a medal when it was exhibited the next year at the National Academy of
Design. She remained his favorite model, and the profile pose of his 1943
full-figure portrait of her is unusual. She was a public school teacher
in Washington, though her stylish bobbed hair and dress suggest a night
out rather than classroom attire. Her pose implies some discomfort, as
one of her arms rests on the arm of the chair, while the other is draped
over the back, her tense fingers perhaps signaling impatience with posing.
-
-
- Horace Pippin (1888-1946)
- Losing the Way, n.d.
-
- Horace Pippin was born in West Chester Pennsylvania.
He was a self taught artist whose subject matter ranged from paintings
of childhood memories, war experiences, personal heroes and religion.
These paintings were widely exhibited and became fashionable along the
Main Line in Philadelphia. Pippin once commented, "When I was a boy
I loved to make pictures", but it was World War I that "brought
out all the art in me. I can never forget suffering and I will never forget
sunsetso I came home with all of it in my mind and I paint from it today.
-
- Pippin recorded his experiences in writing as well.
His "Life Story of Art" and other memoirs of his military service
include descriptions of life in the trenches, night forays into no man's
land and losing his platoon to machine gun fire. Pippin lost the use of
his right arm after being shot by a German sniper. He adapted by using
his left hand to guide his right while painting.
-
- His winter scene Losing the Way (1930) was painted
in oil on a burnt-wood panel, suggesting the highly individualized technical
approaches taken by folk artists. A man walks in the snow beside a horse-drawn
covered wagon in search of the path, which has been covered by snow. The
painting is small as the artist's disability limited his ability to work
on a large scale. It was one of a series of oil on burnt-wood panels he
executed. He would draw his designs in pencil, then burning the line with
a hot poker, before applying paint.
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-
- Hobson Pittman (1900-1972)
- Heavy Furnace, 1933
-
- Hobson Pittman's brooding Heavy Furnace (1933) conveys
not the dramatic display of industrial production, but rather the bleak
isolation that was often the condition of modern industrial life. The artist
grew up in rural North Carolina, moving to Philadelphia in 1918. He attended
Penn State University (1921-22) and Columbia University (1924-25), before
enrolling in Carnegie Tech in 1926. In 1931, he began what would be a long
teaching career at Philadelphia area institutions, including the Academy,
where he taught between 1949 and 1972. Some of his canvases convey a mood
of "strange nostalgic fantasy," informed by the moody memory
of his Southern childhood and an enthusiasm for the Victorian era. The
industrial subject is an unusual one for Pittman.
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-
- Joseph Plavcan (1908-1981)
- Classroom, 1940
-
- In 1926 Joseph Plavcan began studying at the Pennsylvania
Academy, where his teacher, George Ericson, had also studied. Plavcan did
well in his studies, winning a Cresson Scholarship to study and travel
in Europe in 1928. In 1931 Plavcan returned to Erie. The next year he took
a teaching position at Erie Technical High School, where he taught between
1932 and 1970. By the time of his retirement, he had earned a reputation
as Erie's most influential art teacher and had earned the respect of several
generations of students. Scenes from the city inspired him throughout his
half-century career.
-
- Plavcan's Classroom (1940) presents the constants
in his life: his art, his students, and his interest in the community around
him. While Erie Tech was a trade school whose purpose was to teach students
practical skills with which they could secure employment after graduation,
he gave his vocational art classes a broad general grounding in the fine
arts. To hone their skills of observation, he took them outside to draw
and paint from nature. When it was too cold to do this during the winter,
his students worked from models or modest still life arrangements inside.
In this scene, four students are visible. One pauses to look directly at
the artist, while the other three are absorbed in their drawings. The class
is diverse, with an African-American, two women, and a young white man.
On the window sill may be seen a small collection of plaster casts taken
from Renaissance and classical works. Outside a wintry landscape is visible.
The trees are bare of leaves and the ground snow covered.
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-
- Edward Redfield (1869-1965)
- Fleecydale Road, n.d.
-
- The most influential member of the New Hope school was
Edward Redfield (1869-1965, who moved to Center Bridge in 1898, the first
of the group to settle in the area. He had studied at the Academy during
the late 1880s before going abroad. His early friendship with Robert Henri,
with whom he would travel, serves as a reminder that many of these artistic
circles were permeable, with considerable stylistic overlap. His several
trips to France during the 1890s introduced him to plein air painting,
and thereafter he painted out of doors year round. He completed his canvases
in a single day, and remains best known for his large snow scenes. Fleecydale
Road captures the small scale of village life in the region, and his
muted palette conveys a typical overcast winter day. One of the most successful
landscape painters of his day, after his first one-man show at the Academy
in 1896, his work was exhibited widely.
-
-
- Samuel Rosenberg (1896-1972)
- God's Chillun, 1934
-
- Born in Philadelphia, Samuel Rosenberg, who would become
known as "The Dean of Pittsburgh Painters," moved with his family
to that city in 1907 at the age of eleven. He taught at Carnegie Tech for
forty years (1924-1964), where he had earned his degree in 1926, as well
as at the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College, 1937-1945).
-
- Beginning as a portraitist, he later made many paintings
portraying the socioeconomic life of the inner city. Artists nationwide
pursued an art of social protest and conscience as conditions worsened
for the urban poor throughout the Depression. Rosenberg's Social Realist
God's Chillun (1934) portrays an incident of African-American street
life in Pittsburgh's Hill District. A religious revival proceeds down Crawford
Street, led by a large woman at the center who wears a white dress emblazoned
with sash bearing the words "Faith, Hope, and Charity." She sings
and bangs a drum, accompanied by a crowd of others with cymbals and trumpets.
The neighborhood where the artist lived also had a large Jewish population.
Many other canvases were inspired by the scenes he saw near his home,
including Eviction (1935). His pantings became more expressively abstract
in style during the forties.
-
-
- Morton Livingston Schamberg
- The Machine, 1916
-
- The career of Morton Livingson Schamberg (1881-1918)
was cut tragically short at the age of thirty-seven in 1918 when he fell
victim to the international flu pandemic that swept the world that year.
He had been born in Philadelphia, and earned an architecture degree from
the University of Pennsylvania in 1903. But by the time he had graduated
he realized that he preferred painting and drawing to designing buildings.
After pursuing summer classes with William Merritt Chase (1902-1903), he
enrolled in the Academy (1903-1906). One of his fellow students, Charles
Sheeler, became one of his closest friends, and the pair traveled to Europe
together. They also shared a studio, and spent weekends in Sheeler's Doylestown
home. His second trip to Paris (1908-09) was pivotal, and his encounter
with the work of Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso changed the direction
of his work. In 1910, he had his first one-man show, and several of his
pieces were included in the Armory Show. His work, which developed rapidly,
shows a range of influences, including Fauvism, Cubism, Synchromism, and
Dada, the latter which saw form in a series of fascinating mechanical abstractions,
as seen in Machine (1916).
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-
- Walter Elmer Schofield (1867-1944)
- Early May Morning, n.d.
-
- Walter Elmer Schofield was born in Philadelphia in 1867.
He attended Swarthmore College and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
before leaving for Paris to study at the Academie Julian. Schofield moved
to England and settled in the St. Ives art colony at Cornwall. Here he
practiced the tradition of plein air landscape painting and developed his
impressionistic style.
-
- Schofield is remembered for his impressionistic winter
scenes of the Deleware River in Pennsylvania and various landscapes in
England. His paintings are rich and infused with a brilliant cobalt blue.
Most of his work is not signed and must be authenticated by an expert
art historian.
-
- His Early May Morning (c. 1919), a painting of his middle
years, was inspired by structures in a rural Cornwall village, but its
landscape theme, bright colors, and the fact it was painted outdoors all
are hallmarks of the Pennsylvania Impressionists.
-
-
- Charles Sheeler (1882-1965)
- Bird's Nest, 1944
-
- Charles Sheeler (1882-1965), a contemporary of fellow
Pennsylvania Precisionist Charles Demuth (1883-1935), portrayed the plain
structure of Bucks County barns and the Ephrata Cloister in Reading with
the scientific precision of observation of the Machine Age. While he did
not paint Pennsylvania industry, his images of factories and mills were
quintessential Precisionist works in their combination of modernism and
realism. A student at the Pennsylvania Academy between 1903 and 1906, his
particular American modernism was solidly grounded in both a sense of place
and an appreciation for the past. Sheeler had a strong interest in antiques
and craft artifacts, as well as in historic buildings, whose straightforward
design resonated with his modernist paintings. His Pennsylvania interests
persisted even when not working in the state, and Bird's Nest (1944)
portrays the Victorian house in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, where he
moved in 1942.
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-
- Everett Shinn (1876-1953)