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Spanierman Gallery is pleased to announce the opening on February 25, 2010 of Allen Tucker: The Force of Emotion—A Post-Impressionist Rediscovered. An artist of prominence in New York from the mid-1910s through the 1930s, Allen Tucker elicited inordinate respect from his peers for his integrity and broad-mindedness as well as for the creative versatility of his art, which critic Virgil Barker commended in 1928 for its “robust plentitude.” Including oils, and several watercolors, this exhibition showcases the variety and individuality of Tucker’s art, placing him within the unfolding of modernism in this country. The most comprehensive treatment thus far of Tucker’s career, the twenty-four page catalogue accompanying the exhibition includes an essay by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D., color illustrations of the thirty-five works in the show, and documentation on Tucker’s exhibitions, references, and collections.
Born in Brooklyn, Tucker studied architecture at Columbia University. In 1895, after working as a draftsman under Richard Morris Hunt, Tucker began his own architectural firm, with Alexis Reed McIlvane. About the same time, he also pursued his passion for art, studying at the Art Students League, where his mentor was John Twachtman. After McIlvane’s death in 1904, Tucker left architecture behind for painting. Spending summers abroad, mostly in France, he fraternized with other American artists, including Robert Henri, whose portrait he painted in the Brittany town of Concarneau. In 1908 he was among the first artists to show at the Whitney Studio Club, exhibiting with George Bellows, Jo Davidson, Henri, Ernest Lawson, and others. He played a significant role in the organization of the Armory Show of 1913, taking part in planning meetings and heading the Catalogue Committee. After the show, he was included in exhibitions at Montross Gallery, one of the first American galleries to respond positively to the new and innovative art. His first solo exhibitions were both in 1914, at Montross and the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester.
Tucker also served as unpaid advisor to Juliana Force, the curator of the Whitney Studio Club, the precursor to the Whitney Museum of American Art. When a memorial show of Tucker’s work was held at the Whitney in 1939, Force recalled Tucker as a man “whose faultless taste in art and inexhaustible sympathy with the problems of his fellow artists led to an association of many years, wherein his wisdom and understanding were of the greatest value in the development of those ideas which resulted in the formation of this museum.” Tucker was described similarly by his champion, Forbes Watson, art critic for the New York Evening Post and the New York World. Writing several articles and a book on Tucker, Watson unfailingly supported Tucker as an artist who fearlessly sought just the right means to express his personal and emotional responses to his subjects. This is borne out in both the diversity of Tucker’s subject matter and his willingness to change his stylistic handling from one work to the next. His admiration for the art of van Gogh, which led to his reputation as “the Vincent of America,” can be seen both in the rhythmic directness of his brushwork and in the way that his feelings drove his expression.
Writing was an additional interest for Tucker. He published a book of poetry in 1919, including many poems written in response to World War I (he served as a volunteer in the American Ambulance Service in France). In 1930 he completed Design and the Idea, a book based on a series of lectures he had given at the Art Students League (where he taught from 1921 to 1926)—the book was republished in 1939. In 1931 he published a monograph on his former teacher, Twachtman, as part of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s American Artists Series.
Shown at Tucker’s exhibition at Rehn Galleries in 1933, The Flying Dutchman (1932)—which evokes Albert Pinkham Ryder’s image of this subject of ca. 1887—was described by New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell in a glowing review of the show as “a piece of decoration that holds so brilliantly together that even the artist’s truest and best-informed admirers are likely to be unprepared.” The low vantage point draws our gaze through swelling seas, painted in radiant swirls of turquoise, pink, and white, to the phantom ship, outlined in orange against a lighter orange sky. The Last Bricks (ca. 1920), a view of the aerial landscape of New York City, captures the abstract arrangement of buildings and the pieces of sky they enframe, while revealing the subtleties of color within brick facades struck by sunlight. Woman in a Garden exemplifies Tucker’s unusual approach to the figure, in which rather than integrating the figure within a landscape setting, he gave equal weight to both and suggested more than a physical connection between them. Responsive to place, Tucker captured the clear atmosphere and vast sense of space in New Mexico in several works. Blending a variety of influences Tucker worked from the standpoint of a post-impressionist, evoking varying emotions and levels of human awareness through a highly expressive and versatile stylistic method.
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