"American Still-Life Paintings (1829-2009)" Exhibition
Spanierman Gallery
This event has ended.
The exhibition of works by American artists dating from the 1850s to the present includes over seventy works and is accompanied by a brochure with a text by William H. Gerdts, professor emeritus of art history, Graduate School of the City of New York. As Professor Gerdts notes, still-life was ranked at the bottom of the hierarchy of the arts from the seventeenth century well into the nineteenth due to the obviously fallacious notion that still-life painting was merely imitative of “the real thing,” and as such neither inspiring nor difficult to execute. In the twentieth century, the realization of the appeal, the inspirational, the necessary technical mastery, and certainly the individuality of the still-life masters and their achievements were universally recognized, and still lifes have subsequently become treasured components of the arts in all nations, sought after by private and public collectors, some of the latter specializing only in that genre.
[Image: Gershon Benjamin "Milkweed" (c. 1945) oil on canvas 36 x 29 in.]
Media
Schedule
from January 19, 2010 to February 20, 2010