The Georgia Museum of Art Exhibits Will Henry Stevens From the Collection

Written by Horace Micheldeever Sunday, 05 February 2012 00:21

Athens, Georgia.- The Georgia Museum of Art is proud to present "Will Henry Stevens", on view in the Boone and George-Ann Knox Gallery II through March 25th. In 2001, The Will Henry Stevens Memorial Trust via Janet Stevens McDowell, the artist’s daughter, presented the Georgia Museum of Art a large gift of diverse work by the American painter. Stevens emerged as a regional artist whose works were primarily known in the South until the 1940s. During the 1930s and 1940s, Stevens painted in three modes: an American Scene style, an American abstraction that retained elements of naturalism and a geometric abstraction. In many of the images in this special display, Stevens creates work that demonstrates his interest in the harmonious interconnection between the visible planet and the universal world that exists beyond human physical senses.

Will Henry Stevens was born in Vevay, Indiana, a town along the Ohio River. His father was an apothecary and taught Stevens the elements of chemistry and techniques of emulsions, which were later to play a large part in Stevens' experiments with different media. Stevens studied at the Cincinnati Art Academy for three years before leaving the Academy to begin working at the Rookwood Pottery as a painter/designer beginning in 1904. In 1906, Stevens made the first of many visits to New York. He studied for a while at the Art Students League, but was dissatisfied by the classroom style of William Merritt Chase, and soon dropped out. Stevens was featured in several exhibitions at the New Gallery on 30th Street, which displayed an active interest in the more contemporary art movements under the guidance of its owner, Mary Beacon Ford. At the New Gallery, Stevens met and received the encouragement of Jonas Lie, Van Dearing Perrine, and Albert Pinkham Ryder. Stevens received his first one-man exhibition at the New Gallery in March 1907. Stevens took a teaching position in Louisville, KY around 1912 and remained there for nearly a decade. He exhibited regionally, and by the early 1920s had shown in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and New Orleans. For many years, Stevens made annual trips to New York to keep in touch with colleagues and stay abreast of contemporary art. He also spent every summer in the mountains of North Carolina, teaching summer classes and painting the woods and hillsides. In 1921, he was invited to join the faculty of Newcomb College in New Orleans where he remained until his retirement in 1948. As in New York, Stevens quickly became part of a community of painters and writers, through which Stevens maintained an active contact with a wide range of ideas and cultural changes, while still quietly pursuing his own idiosyncratic path.


As an artist, Stevens' interest in nature as subject matter was inspired by his well-documented enthusiasm for the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. During his years at the Cincinnati Art Academy, Stevens recalled little he liked except the subtly abstracted works of the Impressionist John Henry Twactman, whose influence is apparent in Stevens’ early landscapes. Other influences at that time included James Abbott McNeill Whistler. During a trip to Washington, D.C. in the early 1900s, Stevens discovered an exhibition of Chinese paintings on silk from the Sung Dynasty at the Freer Gallery. Stevens admired their abstract qualities. Regarding the bold black and white linearity, rendered with authority on such a tentative, soft ground, Stevens remarked, "I could not look at Sung without realizing that it had the same kind of philosophy that I had discovered in Whitman." Stevens clearly experienced in the Sung aspect of oriental art that which the impressionists found in Japanese prints, an affirmation of the two-dimensionality of the picture plane. Art historian, Jessie Poesch wrote that, "the selection by the Sung artists of the salient essences of forms, rather than the explicit and detailed delineation of them, obviously appealed to Stevens, as did, apparently, the sense of line on the surface, the network of lines and forms that suggested distance, rather than clearly defined sense of recession found in most western painting up to the early twentieth century. Seeking more information on Oriental Art and philosophy, Stevens eventually came to the teachings of Lao-Tzu, in which Stevens saw creative parallels to the poetry of Walt Whitman. What Stevens felt all of these diverse sources held in common was an attitude toward the world, summed up in Stevens' own statement, "The best thing a human can do in life is to get rid of his separateness or selfness and hand himself over to the nature of things—to this mysterious thing called the Universal Order, that any artist must sense...In human nature we are consciously trying to achieve an order. And we are distressed by it, by the task of patterning it on an Order that is not personal or human—that is what I call spiritual." In the late 1920s and early 1930s during visits to New York Stevens discovered the works of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Their works, particularly, were a revelation, and confirmation of Stevens' own sense of aesthetic direction. Stevens began to work in a "non-objective" mode while he continued to produce his more "objective" landscapes. In a taped interview with Bernard Lemann, Stevens observed,"I do not draw a line between objective and non-objective (painting)...I am doing both and will continue to, so long as either seems vital to me."


The Georgia Museum of Art, on the campus of the University of Georgia, in Athens, is both an academic museum and, since 1982, the official art museum of the state of Georgia. The permanent collection consists of American paintings, primarily 19th- and 20th-century; American, European and Asian works on paper; the Samuel H. Kress Study Collection of Italian Renaissance paintings; and growing collections of southern decorative arts and Asian art. From the time it was opened to the public in 1948 in the basement of an old library on the university’s historic North Campus, the museum has grown consistently both in the size of its collection and in the size of its facilities. Today the museum occupies a contemporary building in the Performing and Visual Arts Complex on the university’s burgeoning east campus. There, 79,000 square feet house more than 8,000 objects in the museum’s permanent collection—a dramatic leap from the core of 100 paintings donated by the museum’s founder, Alfred Heber Holbrook. Much of the museum’s collection of American paintings was donated by Holbrook in memory of his first wife, Eva Underhill Holbrook. Included in this collection are works by such luminaries as Frank Weston Benson, William Merritt Chase, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Jacob Lawrence and Theodore Robinson. Over the years it has been impossible to separate the history of the museum from the story of Holbrook’s generosity. Holbrook retired from an active New York law practice at the age of 70. He began a personal quest to learn about the world of art, an interest piqued by his passion for visiting museums. In his retirement he was determined to study art in a gentle southern climate. A trip to Athens in the mid-1940s led to his introduction to Lamar Dodd, head of the university’s art department. Instantly, the two began a friendship, sharing a joint vision of enriching the visual arts environment in Georgia. Holbrook, clad in a knee-length pink artist’s smock with pipe in hand, attended art classes at the university. The Georgia Museum of Art was founded in 1945, and Holbrook became its first director and one of the university’s and the state’s most beloved citizens. Holbrook continued to serve as the museum’s director past his 90th birthday.

Exhibitions from international museums such as the National Gallery of Scotland, the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, the Rembrandt House and the San Carlos National Museum in Mexico City have all been displayed in the galleries of the museum over the past decade.. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.georgiamuseum.org

The National Gallery of Denmark adds a new chapter to The Story of Vilhelm Hammershøi

Written by Beatrice Danielson Saturday, 04 February 2012 23:30

COPENHAGEN.- This year’s major spring exhibition at the National Gallery of Denmark adds a new chapter to the story of Vilhelm Hammershøi and marks the first time that a major selection of his works are shown side by side with masterpieces by some of the greatest European artists of his day. Loneliness, intimacy, and alienation. With his timeless and universal subject matter and his unmistakable, carefully restricted palette Vilhelm Hammershøi is one of the most important and distinctive figures in the history of Danish art. His reputation reaches farther beyond his native soil than that of any other Danish painter, and over the course of the last 15 years a number of retrospective exhibitions in Europe, USA, and Japan has firmly established Hammershøi’s position as the equal of the other main artists from the period. On exhibition 4 February until 20 May.

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Art Knowledge News Presents "This Week In Review"

Written by Editor, Art Knowledge News Friday, 03 February 2012 20:58

This is a new feature for the subscribers and visitors to Art Knowledge News (AKN), that will enable you to see "thumbnail descriptions" of the last ninety (90) articles and art images that we published. This will allow you to visit any article that you may have missed ; or re-visit any article or image of particular interest. Every day the article "thumbnail images" will change. For you to see the entire last ninety images just click : here .

When opened that also will allow you to change the language from English to anyone of 54 other languages, by clicking your language choice on the upper left corner of our Home Page.  You can share any article we publish with the eleven (11) social websites we offer like Twitter, Flicker, Linkedin, Facebook, etc. by one click on the image shown at the end of each opened article.  Last, but not least, you can email or print any entire article by using an icon visible to the right side of an article's headline.

The DC Moore Gallery to Showcase Charles Burchfield and Janet Fish

Written by Adele Winterton Saturday, 04 February 2012 04:27

New York City.- The DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present two solo exhibitions, "Charles Burchfield: Landscapes 1916-1962" and "Janet Fish: Recent Paintings", both open at the gallery on February 9th and run through March 17th 2012. One of the most original artists of the twentieth century, Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) created highly personal works that project an atmospheric intensity and a strong sense of mood. Throughout his life, he found evidence of the divine in the natural world and frequently imbued his paintings with a sense of otherworldly presence. This focused exhibition in our West Gallery presents a prime selection of watercolors that spans his fifty-year career. Drawing from the tradition of still life painting, Fish defies its connotations by engaging primarily with the movement of paint. Her paintings radiate with bold color and light, and her gestural brushstrokes guide the eye through transparent surfaces and across intricate patterns in paint.

Among Burchfield's earliest paintings are modernist views of his hometown of Salem, Ohio and the surrounding countryside. While a student at the Cleveland School of Art from 1912-16, Burchfield was introduced to major trends in European and American modernism, Chinese and Japanese art, and contemporary design theory. His work at the time often evidenced an interest in imaginative, expressionist landscapes and a personal visual language of fantasy. In "Sunlight in Park" (1917), he approached abstraction through the bold optical effects of a burst of sunlight that creates dense, colorful patterning on a screen of trees while also illuminating the ground below. After moving to Buffalo, New York, in 1921, Burchfield engaged a deeper concern with realism and became a founder of the American Scene painting movement. Much of his work addressed the harsh realities of twentieth-century industrialization and life in small towns and urban areas. At the same time, he strived for compositions that were almost classical in form and often poetic in feeling. He once wrote that he preferred to be known as a “romantic-realist,” adding, “It is the romantic side of the real world that I portray. My things are poems—(I hope).”


In the early 1940s, Burchfield returned to a more active expressionism. Swirling skies, anthropomorphic forms, visual notations of insect sounds, and heavily outlined trees radiating a visible energy are some of the elements that characterize his watercolors from the decades that followed. He also focused on what he knew best—the landscape around his home in upstate New York. In "Brown Land" (c. 1962-63), he turned his attention to one of his favorite subjects, an intimate view of a field, a close up of a cluster of plants set against a backdrop of schematic trees at a time of seasonal transition. In both his life and art, Burchfield saw the universal in the particular, and nothing was too small or insignificant to capture his attention. He felt strongly that his identity as an artist was bound up with his relation to nature. “I feel impelled to embrace the earth,” he wrote in his journals. On another day spent in the fields and woods, he found that his “spirit was in complete harmony with the world of nature and absorbed every sight and sound with a completeness that has not been my lot for many a month.” DC Moore Gallery is the exclusive representative of The Charles E. Burchfield Foundation.

Janet Fish sometimes spends days meticulously arranging her compositions with objects that often connote particular seasons or activities. The specific objects chosen, however, do not create the content of the work. Fish utilizes colored glassware, crystal tchotchkes, patterned textiles, and vibrant floral bouquets merely as a surface for her energetic exploration of the properties of paint. “The real structure of a painting comes from the movement of color over the surface,” Fish has said. Indeed, the wild and mesmerizing motion of her colored lines combined with commonplace decorative items produces what artist and critic Robert Berlind has called a “hallucinatory experience of the everyday.”Fish attributes her fascination with light and color to her childhood spent in Bermuda. Her grandfather was the American Impressionist painter Clark Voorhees, and her mother was a sculptor. Fish attended Smith College and earned her Master’s Degree in Fine Art from Yale University in 1963, when art school faculties taught Abstract Expressionism. Fish notes that she absorbed those artists’ interest in gesture and matters of form, but she independently gravitated toward figuration. Fish lives in New York City and Vermont. Works by Janet Fish are included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, TX; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, among others. Harry N. Abrams published a monograph of Fish’s work by poet and critic Vincent Katz in 2002. DC Moore Gallery is the exclusive representative of Janet Fish.

Art Rotterdam To Present the Latest Developments in Contemporary Art

Written by Arnold Weltzinger Saturday, 04 February 2012 03:28

Rotterdam, Netherlands - Art Rotterdam returns to present the latest developments in contemporary art. From February 9th to February 12th, the stunning departure hall of the Holland America Line is the set for the thirteenth edition of Art Rotterdam, the international fair to discover emerging talent. Some seventy galleries from home and abroad present their most daring artists. Next to the absolute best in Dutch galleries, that have attended for a number of years, a strong participation of foreign galleries stands out (40% of all participants).

Art Rotterdam proudly presents one of the most important emerging talents of this moment, Dutch conceptual artist Navid Nuur (1976), as focused artist. On a central location at the fair Nuur shows his work ‘Distant relations between lovers could fail by the lack of your true focus’. This work is about the relation between artists and public commercial art places, like f.e. magazines, catalogues and art fairs. The print work of the fair is an integral part of the artwork, as well as the participation of the visitor, from whom Nuur expects an interactive role. Also on show, from featured artists Driessens & Verstappen is "E-volved Cultures", a software presentation by which an artificial landscape is being created in ‘real time’. Virtual organisms, that leave behind visible traces in interaction with their surroundings, together generate a dynamic pixel fabric. Bright, abstract animations bring about associations with geological processes, cloud formations, mould cultures, organ tissue or satellite photos. But in the end they withdraw themselves from any fixed identifications.


During the fair at the site of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) a temporary pavilion designed and built from reclaimed materials from the rebuilding of the NAi, by Kaleb de Groot, will be open. This pavilion will show films by video artists that are represented by galleries at Art Rotterdam. Alongside these artists, the films of the award winners at the Princess Margriet Routes Awards 2011 will be shown. This award is given annually in celebration of the achievements of artists, activists and thinkers who make an outstanding contribution to discourse on cultural diversity in Europe. This year’s laureates are: filmmaker and contemporary artist Kutlug Ataman [1961, Istanbul] and artist Šejla Kamerid [1976, Sarajevo].

Simultaneously with Art Rotterdam, in the (opposite) building Las Palmas, 'Object Rotterdam' will take place. At this international fair for autonomous design twenty participants present unique or limited edition objects in the field of current design, crafts and jewelry. Object Rotterdam exposes the cutting edge between art and design and is the place to experience the latest developments. Talented designer Aldo Bakker (1971) will present his latest series of wooden chairs in the booth of Particles Gallery. With his work Bakker aims to surprise the visitor and to initiate discussions. Gallery Zand shows work of Marc Mulders. This Dutch painter has evolved himself, over the past years, into a glass artist, a.o. by creating leaded- light windows in De Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam and the Sint- Jan in Den Bosch. At Object Rotterdam Gallery Zand shows fifteen blown glass objects, painted by Marc Mulders.


Various cultural institutions in the city offer a range of activities that are, during the fair, free of charge and accessible for a broad audience. On show in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is the first large-scale solo exhibition ‘Suspension of Disbelief’ by Dutch artist Gabriel Lester (1972). By means of an integral installation, consisting of interventions, film and sculptures, Lester displays in this exhibition the various aspects of fate. The Kunsthal presents ‘I promise to love you’, a retrospective of the very best from the Caldic Collection, the largest private collection in the Netherlands from collector Joop van Caldenborgh. Furthermore, Rotterdam galleries TENT. Mama and Witte de With organize special evening openings with work of promising young artists Artist collective Het Wilde Weten organizes a market for special artists’ books, and Rotterdam architects, designers and artists will open their studios and workspaces for the public. Visit the fair's website at ... http://www.artrotterdam.nl

This Week in Review in Art Knowledge News

Written by Editor, Art Knowledge News Thursday, 02 February 2012 20:19

This is a new feature for the subscribers and visitors to Art Knowledge News (AKN), that will enable you to see "thumbnail descriptions" of the last ninety (90) articles and art images that we published. This will allow you to visit any article that you may have missed ; or re-visit any article or image of particular interest. Every day the article "thumbnail images" will change. For you to see the entire last ninety images just click : here .

When opened that also will allow you to change the language from English to anyone of 54 other languages, by clicking your language choice on the upper left corner of our Home Page.  You can share any article we publish with the eleven (11) social websites we offer like Twitter, Flicker, Linkedin, Facebook, etc. by one click on the image shown at the end of each opened article.  Last, but not least, you can email or print any entire article by using an icon visible to the right side of an article's headline.