"American Works on Paper, 1800-Present" Exhbition
Spanierman Gallery
This event has ended.
Consisting of over ninety works, this exhibition conveys the diversity of American art over the course of more than two hundred years. Sometimes considered to take second place to paintings, works on paper often have the upper hand. Whereas artists at times create oils to make statements or to grab the attention of buyers or exhibition-goers, they frequently enjoy a greater freedom and creativity when working on paper. Deriving inspiration from the distinctive properties of graphite, charcoal, pastel, watercolor, and other formats, their images— as many of the examples in this exhibition reveal— seem naturally to arise from their mediums and materials or vice versa. Due to their usually lower price level, works on paper are often locked away or emerge from obscurity, their stories lost or forgotten. Many of the images in this exhibition tell tales that draw us in and wait for their secrets to be known. And several artists used works on paper to capture slices of life, as may be seen in James Daugherty’s "Hester Street, October 26, 1933" (1933), which conveys the congested nature of New York’s Lower East Side through his subject and composition. In a number of abstract works, the medium is the subject. A precise use of gouache and ink afforded the sense of balance achieved by Rolf Scarlett in his asymmetrical arrangement of crisp geometric shapes in "Composition with Blue Circle" (1940s). Similarly Burgoyne Diller combines movement and stability in the overlapping linear circles and angles in Composition (ca. 1934).
Even if they are inconspicuous or quickly rendered, the works in this exhibition number among the finest by the artists who created them.
[Image: James Henry Daugherty "Hester Street (New York)" (1933) charcoal on paper 22 x 17 in.]
Media
Schedule
from April 01, 2010 to May 01, 2010
Artist(s)
Thomas Hart Benton, Albert Bricher, J.G. Brown, Alexander Calder, George Catlin, Jasper Cropsey, John Steuart Curry, Arthur B. Davies, Burgoyne Diller, Arthur Wesley Dow, George Grosz, Philip Leslie Hale, Martin Johnson Heade, Robert Henri, Daniel Huntington, Charles Bird King, George Luks, Reginald Marsh, Edward Potthast, William Trost Richards, Norman Rockwell, Edmund Tarbell, John Henry Twachtman, Andrew Wyeth, William Zorach et al.