John H.Twachtman " A Painter's Painter " at Spanierman

Written by Lester Lawton Tuesday, 28 September 2010 00:09

New York City - Spanierman Gallery, presents John Twachtman (1853-1902): A “Painter’s Painter,” an exhibition of over eighty works spanning the career of an artist whose landscapes are esteemed as probably the most original, modern, and poetic among those of the American Impressionists.  Incapable of following trends or painting to please the art buyers of his time, Twachtman never created derivative or simply pretty images, and his devotion to a spirit of inquiry, experimentation, and to his personal vision brought him an unmatched admiration from his peers, who deemed him a “painter’s painter,” and an artist, ahead of his era, whose “time would come.”

Accompanying the show is a catalogue by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D.  Building on her 1995 dissertation on Twachtman and the catalogue she wrote for an exhibition of Twachtman’s art, organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, in 1999, Dr. Peters addresses Twachtman’s role in the context of his time in three essays and explores the uniqueness of his art in entries on the works in the show.  The catalogue is a prelude to the Twachtman Catalogue Raisonné, coauthored by Ira Spanierman and Dr. Peters, which is currently available from spanierman.com and through the gallery.  This major exhibition ends June 24, 2006.

Fourteen works in the exhibition represent the early phase in Twachtman’s career, a time when he was a leading figure in the Munich School, the group of American painters who studied in Munich in the 1870s, there deriving inspiration from the direct and dynamic Realist approach of the German painter Wilhelm Leibl—a disciple of the French Realist Gustave Courbet.  Twachtman was consistently praised as one of the few artists to use the style with purpose, managing in Venetian scenes “to inspire the belief that there is thought and life behind his mall-stick,” and proving in a view of the suburbs of Cincinnati “that even such homely material may be wrought into satisfactory and, of course, quite original sorts of art.”  Twachtman’s forthright images of modern life—including depictions of Venice’s Grand Canal intruded on by an unruly steamship, of an industrial dredge used for excavation purposes in New York harbor, and of emerging suburbs on snow-covered hilltops in Cincinnati—were heralded by the New York press for providing a new direction for American landscape painting, based in the notion that our art “must seek its materials from immediate surroundings if it is to be truly vital and characteristic.”

Deriving influence from the art of the Dutch Hague School, in Holland in the summer of 1881, by the winter of 1883 Twachtman had tempered his art, restraining the unbridled bravado and the heavy paint surfaces of his Munich style.  His approach is evident in Cincinnati snow scenes in which he created reductive arrangements, painted with unobtrusive brushwork, and used graduated light tones of gray and green to record atmospheric subtleties, producing works that draw the viewer slowly into their quiet, reflective spaces.  The eight examples of the works from this period, demonstrate the impact of the new draftsmanship skills that he attained while training at the Académie Julian in Paris, while showing his progression toward a distillation of his subjects to their primal and essential qualities.  Not exhibited since 1966, Windmills is a culminating work of this period.  “Very subtly the picture itself begins to exert its influences,” a critic wrote of it when it was exhibited in 1886, noting that instead of representing the “truth of form,” here Twachtman had conveyed the greater “truth of impression.”

The period between the end of Twachtman’s French period and his move to Greenwich, Connecticut, in approximately the fall of 1889 has been little understood in the past.  The ten paintings and pastels included in the show that probably all date from this time clarify this time of transition, revealing Twachtman’s early exploration of Impressionism, as he moved from the more considered and conceptual approach of his French period to create images that evoke a spontaneous sense of experience.

After settling in Greenwich, Twachtman felt a satisfaction he had lacked during his years of travel and rootlessness.  He wrote to J. Alden Weir in 1891 that he felt it was necessary to “live always in the country—at all seasons of the year.” Although he traveled regularly to New York City to teach and join friends at club gatherings, he spent an inordinate amount of time enhancing his home and property.  His involvement with the land inspired his art, and his works express the fondness he felt as his years of familiarity and associations with it went on, as is reflected in the nineteen Greenwich works in the exhibition.  In Autumn Mists, he created an abstract arrangement, conveying the essence of fall not with a palette of autumnal rusts and browns, but with a luminescent prismatic blend of turquoise, peach, and yellow that resonate from a design of reflecting, repeating, and paralleling forms.

Whereas the inspiration received from familiarity exudes from Twachtman’s Greenwich art, the opposite feeling radiates from the works he created during a trip he took to Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, in September of 1895.  Of the fourteen Yellowstone paintings he is known to have done, five are included in this exhibition.  A view of the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone is one of Twachtman’s most vivid works, while his paintings of the thermal pools of the park, including Edge of the Emerald Pool, Yellowstone and Morning Glory Pool, Yellowstone, demonstrate an unparalleled modernity. In Edge of the Emerald Pool, his cropped and partial view of a deep pool suspends the viewer in an indeterminate space in which the relationship between the earth and sky is left ambiguous and the reverberating blues in the water have an almost perilous, inescapable beauty.

The way that Twachtman derived his aesthetic from his emotive responses to his sites is also demonstrated in the works he created during his last three summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, from 1900 through 1902.  His quick impressions of his surroundings with confident, free handling and taking advantage of the seemingly readymade artists’ compositions provided by the glimpses of boats beside and beneath wharves and the views looking down to the Inner Harbor from Banner Hill in East Gloucester.  From this locale he often adjusted his range and focus, taking different perspectives on his subjects so as to see them in new ways, as is reflected in difference between the broad inclusive scene, painted with flickering strokes in Gloucester Harbor, and the structured design he used in Boats at Anchor.  The eight Gloucester views included in this show reveal the range, vibrancy, and strength of the art Twachtman produced at the end of his career.

Although he was disheartened by this lack of sales, he was incapable of marketing or promoting his works, in the ways that so many of his colleagues mastered, in order to pique the interest of buyers.  In addition, he could not adapt his work to fit trends and fashions in the art world that might have made it more commercially viable.  Yet, it was precisely his dedication to painting according to his own vision that resulted in the great admiration of his fellow artists, that gave his work an integrity admired by American modernists of the early twentieth century, and that draws our attention and interest today. 

Twachtman died suddenly in Gloucester at age forty-nine in August of 1902, and thus how his art might have developed during an age of Modernism cannot be determined.  Yet, as his friends and fellow artists perceptively predicted, his work both forecast the art of the future and would, as his friend Thomas Dewing remarked in 1903, “one day be a ‘classic,’ to use a literary term; for the public catches but slowly the professional opinion, though in the end the professional opinion becomes the public opinion.”

Visit Spanierman Gallery at : http://www.spanierman.com/