Encouraging American Genius: Mint Museum of Art

Written by Shawn Nieves Wednesday, 15 December 2010 00:03

Charlotte, NC – Exceptional quality, breadth, and depth characterize the Corcoran’s outstanding collection of American paintings.  Encouraging American Genius: Master Paintings from the Corcoran Gallery of Art features iconic works by Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, and Edward Hopper, among other notable painters.  Organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Encouraging American Genius tours nationally in 2006–2007 and will be on view at the Mint Museum of Art October 7 – December 31, 2006, following its presentation at the Corcoran.

Featuring 74 works, Encouraging American Genius is organized into roughly chronological thematic groupings to demonstrate the museum’s strengths in colonial and federal portraiture, nineteenth-century landscape and genre painting and early twentieth-century realism.  A major grouping of paintings in the exhibition features well-known examples of Hudson River School landscape painting.  These celebrations of New World promise include Thomas Cole’s well-known cycle The Departure and The Return (1837), Frederic Church’s majestic Niagara (1857) and Albert Bierstadt’s operatic Mount Corcoran (c. 1876-77). Several galleries in the exhibition present the Corcoran’s prized American Impressionist holdings, which include Mary Cassatt’s Young Girl at a Window (c. 1883-85) and Childe Hassam’s A North East Headland (1901).

Complementing this section of the exhibition is a stylistically diverse grouping of paintings depicting women in Gilded Age settings, such as John Singer Sargent’s Marie Buloz Pailleron (Madame Édouard Pailleron) (1879) and Thomas Eakins’ Singing a Pathetic Song (1881).  A third category of paintings in the exhibition portrays the pulsating energy and change of early twentieth-century American culture.  This section features vibrant scenes such as George Bellows’ Forty-two Kids (1907), John Sloan’s Yeats at Petipas’ (1910) and Edward Hopper’s Ground Swell (1939).

In addition to these three major groupings, the exhibition highlights a number of outstanding individual works by American masters.  From famed early portraitists John Singleton Copley and Joshua Johnson, to American Barbizon painter George Inness and trompe-l’oeil master William Michael Harnett, to modernist greats Maurice Prendergast, Thomas Hart Benton and Marsden Hartley, Encouraging American Genius presents a remarkable selection of American paintings from the Corcoran’s collection.

PUBLICATION
The exhibition is accompanied by an informative, fully-illustrated book entitled A Capital Collection: Masterworks from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, published by Third Millennium, and available in hardcover and softcover.  This companion catalogue takes a thematic approach to the Corcoran’s diverse holdings in all media, both American and European.  Engrossing text and in-depth studies of over 125 selected works.

Encouraging American Genius: Master Paintings from the Corcoran Gallery of Art is curated by Sarah Cash, Bechhoefer Curator of American Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art. Charles Mo, Chief Curator of Fine Art, is the project manager at the Mint Museum of Art.

ABOUT THE CORCORAN GALLERY OF ART
The Corcoran Gallery of Art was founded in 1869 as Washington’s first museum of art.  It is a privately funded institution incorporating both a museum and college of art and design.  As one of America's oldest art institutions, the institution is known internationally for its distinguished collection of historical and modern American art as well as European painting, sculpture, photography and decorative arts.

Visit The Mint Museum of Art : http://www.mintmuseum.org/ ; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art www.corcoran.org