Spanierman Gallery is pleased to announce Art for the New Collector III: Re-Emerging American Artists, an exhibition and sale of paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculpture by American artists from the 1830s to the present that will open on July 6, 2004. The prominent artists in the show include, Milton Avery, Oscar Bluemner, Paul Cadmus, James Daugherty, José de Creeft, John Haberle, Wolf Kahn, John Francis Murphy, William Trost Richards, James Smillie, and E. Ambrose Webster. A catalogue with sixty-eight pages and 106 color plates and artist-biographies accompanies the show ($25 postpaid).
The third annual exhibition featuring works for new collectors, this show once again demonstrates that there are still many affordable works by American artists in a broad range of mediums and stylistic approaches, reflecting the great diversity of our artistic heritage. As in the past, we would like to extend an invitation to both seasoned and new collectors, who are interested in adding to collections or beginning to build one.

Among the earliest works in the show is John Dodson Barrow’s The Gorge (ca. 1860s), a work in the Hudson River School style featuring a dramatic view of a landscape in upstate New York, which draws us from the midst of a forest into a deep chasm formed during the state’s early geological history. The 1870s saw the rise of a cosmopolitan movement among American artists who sought training and experience in Europe. Exemplifying the new stylistic approach of the era, in which the aesthetics of an image was given more emphasis than the subject portrayed, Harry Chase’s Y’Port (ca. 1870s), rendered in Normandy, is a richly textured, closely cropped image of the simple motif of two beached boats covered by thatched roofs. The lure of Europe, with its wealth of age-old architectural traditions held American artists through the end of the century, as reflected in Impressionist-inspired two scenes capturing the lushness of Spain: Colin Campbell Cooper’s Spanish Garden (ca. 1890-1919) and Robert David Gauley’s Fountain in Cordoba Spain (1895). Other native artists of the nineteenth century used European-influenced styles to capture the uniqueness of places in America that remained rural, as is refelcted in two road scenes: Charles Harold Davis’s Barbizon-influenced Trees with Fence and Rocks, Connecticut (1878) and John Marshall Gamble’s atmospheric, semi-abstract The Sandy Road Santa Barbara, California (ca. 1910s).

The turn of the century ushered in a pluralistic era, when American artists created works that ranged across a broad spectrum of stylistic modes. Many changed aesthetic modes over the course of their careers. An example is the English-born artist Dawson Dawson-Watson, who abandoned a traditional academic approach for an Impressionist method, honed during five years in Giverny, France. After immigrating to the United States in 1893, Dawson-Watson eventually developed a modernist style with which he rendered his painterly and boldly abstract Grand Canyon (ca. 1920s). Other artists remained steadfast, portraying a well-loved subject with a relatively unchanging stylistic method over many decades. This approach was followed by Emile Gruppe, represented in this exhibition by Afternoon Sky over Gloucester (ca. 1930s), in which he captured the broad coloristic effects of sunlight and shadows on a quiet fishing harbor.

The perpetuation of a variety of stylistic impulses continued as the twentieth century progressed. In the 1960s Paul Cadmus continued the realist tradition, creating images that served as either social commentaries or academic portrayals that attest to his masterful draftsmanship, such as Seated Female Figure (1965). By contrast, in the same decade, James Daugherty produced a series of dynamic abstract color paintings such as Abstract Composition (ca. 1965), which are reminiscent of his radical work from the 1910s, which had been inspired by American Synchromism and the Orphic Cubism of the Parisian painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay.

Works by artists of today draw on on all of the polaritides of our artistic legacy. Contemporary images in the exhibition include William Matthews’s John Griggs Up (2003), in which the artist’s controlled and precise yet fluid use of watercolor captures the textures of a cowboy’s attire and the concentration and solitude of his life. In Stilll Life with Blue and White Porcelain, Apples, and Oranges (2003), the contemporary Chinese-born painter Yin Yong Chun has portrayed objects with a meticulous detail that recalls the trompe l’oeil art of the late nineteenth century, while Chun also synchronized the relationships among forms to produce a yin/yang sense of balance and harmony.

With this exhibition, we are glad to present a selection of affordable works that are original, compelling, and highly varied, reflecting the richness of our art over the last century and a half.