The Smithsonian American Art Museum Shows Highlights From the Koffler Collection

Written by Helmut Danziger Monday, 09 January 2012 21:11

Washington, D.C.- The Smithsonian American Art Museum is pleased to present “Made in Chicago: The Koffler Collection”, on view at the museum until January 2nd 2012. The exhibition features 25 paintings, sculpture and works on paper from 1960 to 1980, including works by Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Theodore Halkin, Vera Klement, Ellen Lanyon, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barry Tinsley and Ray Yoshida. The artworks are all by Chicago artists from the S.W. and B.M. Koffler Foundation collection, given to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Samuel and Blanche Koffler.

The Kofflers, avid art collectors in Chicago, formed a foundation in 1971 to purchase art by local artists. A board of five administrators—a painter, a sculptor, a museum director, an art historian and a critic—all with Chicago connections, determined the acquisitions. Many of the artworks in the installation are typical of the well-known Chicago taste for figurative art. Guest curator Franz Schulze, a Chicago-based art critic, and acting chief curator George Gurney organized the exhibition. This collection is presented in honor of Blanche Koffler, who passed away in 2010, and Samuel Koffler, who passed away in 1994, and their dedication to contemporary art.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum, the nation's first collection of American art, is an unparalleled record of the American experience. The collection captures the aspirations, character and imagination of the American people throughout three centuries. The American Art Museum is the home to one of the largest and most inclusive collections of American art in the world. Its artworks reveal key aspects of America's rich artistic and cultural history from the colonial period to today. More than 7,000 artists are represented in the collection, including major masters, such as John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence, Helen Frankenthaler, Christo, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Lee Friedlander, Nam June Paik, Martin Puryear, and Robert Rauschenberg.

The Museum has been a leader in identifying significant aspects of American visual culture and actively collecting and exhibiting works of art before many other major public collections. American Art has the largest collection of New Deal art and the finest collections of contemporary craft, American impressionist paintings, and masterpieces from the Gilded Age. Other pioneering collections include historic and contemporary folk art, work by African American and Latino artists, photography from its origins in the nineteenth century to contemporary works, images of western expansion, and realist art from the first half of the twentieth century. In recent years, the Museum has focused on strengthening its contemporary art collection through acquisitions and by commissioning new artworks. Visit the museum's website at ... http://americanart.si.edu/

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~