The Santa Barbara Museum of Art Showcases Gems in its Permanent Collection

Written by Florence Iverson Friday, 03 February 2012 01:31

Santa Barbara, California.- This winter, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) revisits the gems in its vaults to delight visitors through 2012.  Both “old friends” and new acquisitions grace galleries walls as the Museum looks both domestically and abroad to display some if its most treasured and impressive examples of American and French art from the 19th and early 20th centuries. "Scenery, Story, Spirit: American Painting and Sculpture from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art" opens on February 4th. Between the 1830s and the end of WWI, American art came into its own.  From the majestic Hudson River School paintings of Thomas Cole, John Kensett, and Albert Bierstadt to the gritty urban realism of Robert Henri and John Sloan, this presentation of 60 paintings and sculpture draws on the rich holdings of American works in SBMA’s collection.

Organized by guest curator Peter John Brownlee (Associate Curator at the Terra Foundation, Chicago), this selection highlights the maturation of a distinctly American idiom, one informed by international currents and engaged with capturing the fluxes of modern life. Masterpieces of landscape, genre, still-life, and portraiture, punctuated by a selection of sculptures, trace an evolution in style from an art driven by the mandates of westward expansion to one animated by experimentation.  In both idealized and naturalistically rendered landscapes, in scenes of everyday life, or meticulously detailed images of everyday objects, the presentation also narrates an important chapter in American cultural history that witnessed the Civil War and its aftermath, the expansion of national boundaries and the closing of the western frontier, and the transformations wrought by the emergence of new technologies at the dawn of the 20th century. Framed by the sentimental culture of the early 19th century, landscape painting in the United States quickly shed its idealism to embrace the meticulous rendering of detail that could rightly establish a national art on the representation of America's unique and vastly abundant natural resources.  The purview of landscape painting expanded with and eventually beyond the nation's territorial borders to incorporate a more global view over the course of the 19th century.



However, a shift from the territorially-expansive approach of the Hudson River School to a more subjective, inward view can be seen in the stylistic evolution away from the detailed images of Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt (Mirror Lake, Yosemite Valley, 1864) to the evocative and evanescent scenes of George Inness (Morning, Catskill Valley, 1894) and Ralph Blakelock made in the century's final decades. Just as scenes of everyday life served as repositories for racial and ethnic stereotypes in the antebellum decades, narrative painting persisted in the second half of the 19th century as a vehicle for a culture wrestling with the transformations unleashed by the Civil War, increased immigration from Europe and Asia, and rapid urbanization.  From the still-life paintings of William Harnett and John Peto (My Studio Door, 1895), the opulent interiors of painter Walter Gay, and the genteel public spaces of metropolitan centers depicted by Childe Hassam (Manhattan Club, n.d. ca. 1891) to the grandeur of Old Europe as captured by expatriates like John Singer Sargent, American artists, both at home and increasingly abroad, assumed a more cosmopolitan outlook. However, the artistic and cultural sophistication of the Gilded Age coincided with the closing of the western frontier, a moment captured by painters Frederic Remington (Fight over a Waterhole, 1897) and Joseph Henry Sharp. In the opening decades of what Henry Luce would call "The American Century," artists turned to the spectacle of mass entertainments like the cinema and the increasingly urban experience of everyday life for subjects. Energy, vitality, and spontaneity animated American painting and sculpture in this period. All three are captured in the gritty urban realism of the Ashcan School, exemplified by George Bellows (Steaming Streets, 1908), and the artistic variety of the Eight, which featured both the painterly impasto of Robert Henri, John Sloan, and William Glackens and the European-inspired modernisms of Maurice Prendergast, Arthur Davies, and Ernest Lawson.


The Santa Barbara Museum of Art opened to the public on June 5, 1941, in a building that was at one time the Santa Barbara Post Office (1914–1932). Chicago architect David Adler simplified the building’s façade and created the Museum’s galleries, most notably Ludington Court which offers a dramatic sense of arrival for museum visitors. The newly renovated Park Wing Entrance and Luria Activities Center open in June 2006. Over its history the Museum has expanded with the addition of the Stanley R. McCormick Gallery in 1942 and the Sterling and Preston Morton Galleries in 1963. Significant expansions came when the Alice Keck Park Wing opened to the public in 1985 and the Jean and Austin H. Peck, Jr. Wing in 1998. The Ridley-Tree Education Center at McCormick House, a center for art education activities, was established in 1991. Today, the Museum’s 60,000 square feet include exhibition galleries, a Museum Store, Cafe, a 154-seat auditorium, a library containing 50,000 books and 55,000 slides, a children’s gallery dedicated to participatory interactive programming and an 11,500-square-foot off-site facility, the Ridley-Tree Education Center at McCormick House. The Museum’s collection of the arts of Asia, Europe, and the Americas includes paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, ceramics, glass, jades, bronzes, lacquer, and textiles. The broad areas in which SBMA holds a significant number of works of exceptional quality include international antiquities from China, India, Greece, Rome, Egypt, and the Near East and 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century art from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Particular strengths of the collection are 19th- and 20th-century American and European art, contemporary American painting, photography, and the arts of Asia, especially China. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.sbma.net

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