Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to announce the opening on November 16, 2006 of American Paintings, 1850-1965. The exhibition and sale is comprised of over one hundred works by many noted as well as lesser-known American artists. The best known artists in the show include George Bellows, Albert Bierstadt, Frederick Bridgman, Samuel Colman, Willem de Kooning, Maria Richards Oakey Dewing, William Glackens, Robert Henri, Winslow Homer, George Inness, Leon Kroll, Ernest Lawson, Jonas Lie, Willard Metcalf, Richard Miller, Thomas Moran, Georgia O’Keeffe, Fairfield Porter, Edward Potthast, Man Ray, Theodore Robinson, Norman Rockwell, Randolph Rogers, Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Twachtman, James McNeill Whistler, N. C. Wyeth, and William Zorach.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a forty-four-page catalogue with full-color illustrations of seventy-seven paintings. Many of the works on view have been important discoveries, including a sweeping panorama of Inyo County, California (ca. 1872-73) by Albert Bierstadt. Rendered in the Sierras in 1872-73, where Bierstadt concentrated his attention after having found that the Yosemite Valley to the north had become too populated by tourists, the scene incorporates many of the defining motifs that had assured the artist’s fame, including towering, snow-capped mountain peaks, extravagantly steep and evanescent waterfalls, and impossibly tall redwoods. In the early 1880s, Albert Pinkham Ryder worked with the artist Homer Dodge Martin on a three-panel screen for Cottier & Co., New York. The two panels that Ryder created, both in the exhibition, depict stags in forest glades drinking. These are Ryder’s only known works produced in oil on gilded leather, a forum well suited to the artist’s interest in creating the rich atmospheric ambiance associated with a romantic world existing between the realms of the real and the imaginary.

Rendered in 1891, George Inness’s Afternoon Glow at Pompton, New Jersey, is exemplary of the works of the artist’s late career in which he sought to capture the spiritual forces in nature by portraying that transitional moment when the distinction between night and day blur, as is reflected in this image in which hazy landscape forms hover against the shimmer of an ebbing orange sunlight. By contrast with the introspective quality of Inness’s scene, Edward Potthast’s Ladies in White Dresses, painted in a broad and freely expressive Impressionist manner, expresses the jubilance associated with the experience of leisurely days at coastal resorts, a theme that has become synonymous with the artist. Among the show’s most unusual images is Ridgefield Landscape (1913), a scene of rural New Jersey by Man Ray, rendered in the Cubist-Expressionist inspired style employed by the artist during the brief period in which he frequented Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291 along with his friend Max Weber. Brilliantly colored and dramatic, N. C. Wyeth’s The Magic Fire Spell (1928), is one of a group of four canvases commissioned from Wyeth by Steinway & Sons as a means of promoting their piano, known as the “Instrument of the Immortals.” This allegorical scene depicts the most compelling moment from Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre in which the Norse god, Wotan, punishes his favorite daughter Brunnhilde by taking away her immortality. The painting is a superb example of Wyeth’s ability to maniuplate pose and gesture for dramatic effect to convey the psychological intensity of the moment. The work is also an important piece of musical memorabilia.

These works are only a few of the many fascinating highlights of this richly diverse exhibition.