Heckscher Museum Identity Crisis in Art

Written by Inan Sokoloff Sunday, 29 January 2012 21:13

HUNTINGTON, NY .- The Heckscher Museum of Art presents Identity Crisis: Authenticity, Attribution and Appropriation. This exceptional exhibition which opened on January 15, 2011 and runs through March 27, 2011, explores issues relating to the artistic use of other artists’ styles and images in historical and contemporary works. Historically popular artists had followers, imitators and forgers, while more recent artists openly adopt well-known images and styles to comment on originality, authorship and culture. This exhibition presents old master and nineteenth-century works from The Heckscher Museum Permanent Collection, providing a framework for connoisseurship issues, such as authenticity and attribution. Artists to be considered include Canaletto, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Jean-Desire-Gustave Courbet, and George Inness, among others.

Contemporary appropriation artists add a new dimension to the use of adopted images, as seen in the work of such artists as Mike Bidlo, David Bierk, George Deem, Audrey Flack, Kathleen Gilje, Paul Giovanopoulos, Deborah Kass, Jiri Kolar, Sherrie Levine, Carlo Mariani, Yasumasa Morimura, Vik Muniz, Richard Pettibone, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and others, providing an instructive and stimulating counterpoint to the issues raised by the historical works in the show.

The Heckscher Museum of Art, founded in 1920 by August Heckscher, is dedicated to furthering the appreciation and understanding of art by conserving, interpreting, refining and expanding its Permanent Collection, fostering scholarship, and presenting stimulating and inspiring exhibitions and educational programs for this and future generations. The Museum Permanent Collection contains more than 2,200 works from the early 16th century to present.

The Heckscher Museum of Art’s collection spans 500 years of Western art with particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Established in 1920 with a gift from August Heckscher of 185 works, the collection now numbers more than 2100 pieces by American and European artists.  American landscape painting and work by Long Island artists, past and present, are particular strengths, as is American and European modernism.  Photography is a growing part of the collection.

American modernism is the focus of the Baker-Pisano Collection, which includes Georgia O’Keeffe’s watercolor Machu Picchu (Peruvian Landscape), 1956 (shown in sidebar), as well as works by Oscar Bluemner, Charles Burchfield, Arthur B. Carles, Charles Demuth, Guy Pène du Bois, Rockwell Kent, Paul Manship, John Marin, Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella, and Max Weber.

The earliest major work in the collection is Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Virgin, Child, St. John the Baptist and Angels, 1534 (shown in sidebar),  which was painted in the artist’s native Germany.  Other old master works include seventeenth-century Dutch and Italian paintings and English portraiture, including works by Beechey, D'Hondecoeter, Girardon, Largillierre, Raeburn, Verbeeck, and Verstraelen.  Nineteenth-century European holdings include works by Eugène Louis Boudin, Gustave Courbet, and Jean Léon Gérôme.

Nineteenth century American landscape painting in The Heckscher collection includes Frederic Church’s Autumn, 1845, Asher B. Durand’s Keene Valley, 1860s (shown in sidebar), George Inness’s, The Pasture, Durham, Connecticut, c. 1879, and Albert Bierstadt’s, Autumn Landscape, undated, as well as works by Ralph Albert Blakelock, Alfred Thompson Bricher, and Samuel Colman.  The Moran family of landscape painters, many of whom lived on Long Island, is well-represented with works by Thomas Moran, Edward Moran, E. Percy Moran, Leon John Moran, Mary Nimmo Moran, and Peter Moran.  Thomas Moran’s Bluebeard’s Castle, 1915, is a visitor favorite.  The museum also owns a rare Winslow Homer tile painting, The Resting Shepherdess, 1878, and Thomas Eakins’s, sketch for The Cello Player, 1896.

The Museum has significant holdings in the work of three important Huntington artists:  the American modernists Arthur Dove and his wife Helen Torr, and the Berlin Dadaist George Grosz.  Except for five years spent in Dove's hometown of Geneva, N.Y., Dove and Torr lived in Huntington from 1924 until their respective deaths:  Dove in 1946 and Torr in 1967.  Prime examples of their work here include Dove’s watercolor Boat, 1932, his oil painting Indian Summer, 1941, and Helen Torr’s oil Oyster Stakes, 1929.  George Grosz lived in Huntington from 1947 to 1959, the year he died.  His influence was significant in the full-time reopening of The Heckscher Museum after World War II; and he taught art at the Museum through the Huntington Township Art League.  The Museum’s Grosz holdings comprise fifteen paintings and works on paper, including his large masterpiece Eclipse of the Sun, 1926 (shown in sidebar),  an allegory about greed, power, and corruption in Germany’s military-industrial complex of the 1920s. Many consider this painting to be one of the most important art works of the twentieth-century.

In photography, the Museum has extensive holdings of the work of Berenice Abbott, Larry Fink, and Eadweard Muybridge. The collection recently received an important gift of Man Ray’s Electricité portfolio of 1931, consisting of ten rayographs commissioned by a Parisian electric company, the Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d'Electricité (CPDE), to promote the domestic uses of electricity.

The most significant contemporary work recently acquired by the Museum is Your House, 2006 by the Scandinavian artist Olafur Eliasson. This specially designed book of laser-cut sheets presents a progression of  views of the interior of a house as one leafs through the pages.

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