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Traveling Exhibitions
American Moderns on Paper: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
This exhibition will be the first in-depth examination and presentation of the Atheneum’s American modernist works on paper. The Wadsworth Atheneum has great strength in the area of American works on paper, ranging from the mid-eighteenth-century to the early twenty-first century; its greatest strength, both in quality and depth, lies in the body of works on paper by America’s leading modern artists.
The exhibition will begin with sections on the Ashcan school, including works by John Sloan and William Glackens, and then traces the emergence of American modernism and the circle of Alfred Steiglitz. The American modernism section will feature works by Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), Stuart Davis (1894-1964), Arthur Dove (1880-1946), Edward Hopper (1882-1967), and John Marin (1870-1953), where there is tremendous depth in the collection. The Atheneum’s collection also includes Social realism, represented by Reginald Marsh and Ben Shahn; Regionalism by Thomas Hart Benton and Jacob Lawrence; rich examples of Surrealism and Neoromanticism, highlighted by Salvador Dalí and Pavel Tchelitchew, and drawings by modernist sculptors such as Alexander Calder, Gaston Lachaise, and Theodore Roszak. The exhibition will conclude with strong examples of postwar realism and abstraction as seen in works by Ellsworth Kelly and Andrew Wyeth.
Just as the museum’s founder, Daniel Wadsworth (1771-1848), established the vision for the quality of the American painting collection in the early decades of the nineteenth-century, directly acquiring landscapes from the leading Hudson River school artists Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, the museum’s first professional director, the renowned A. Everett Austin, Jr. (1900-1957), appointed in 1927, set the vision for the twentieth-century. In the area of American art, Austin defined his intention for acquisitions: “…it is hoped that a collection of watercolors by modern Americans can be formed, as in this medium the American artist appears to find the ability to express himself more completely and characteristically than in the field of oils.” [April, 1928] In his first two years as director, Austin strategically purchased watercolors by Charles Demuth, Preston Dickinson, and Edward Hopper, and it was the Atheneum that held a solo exhibition of Hopper’s watercolors in 1928.
The presentation and publication of these works is long overdue and has been made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts American Masterpieces Program, who awarded the Atheneum $140,000 in 2007. In addition, the project received a Conservation Grant from the Henry Luce Foundation that allowed for the treatment of all of the works in the exhibition.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Yale University Press, January 2010. The catalogue includes scholarly essays by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Chief Curator and Krieble Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, and Carol Troyen, Kristin and Roger Servison Curator Emerita of American Paintings, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and artist biographies and entries on each object.
This exhibition has been organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. Made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius and the Henry Luce Foundation.
Venues
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX February 27—May 30, 2010
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME June 22—September 12, 2010
Edward Hopper, Marshall’s House, 1932. Watercolor on paper, 14 x 20 in. Purchased through the gift of Henry and Walter Keney, 1933.93
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