Spanierman Gallery is pleased to announce the opening on July 12, 2005 of Art for the New Collector IV, an exhibition and sale of paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculpture rendered mostly by American artists, from the 1860s to the present. The works range in price from $1,500 to $15,000. Some of the prominent artists in the show include Oscar Bluemner, Colin Campbell Cooper, Frederick Carl Frieseke, William Glackens, John Graham, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, William McGregor Paxton, Joseph Raphael, Theodore Robinson, and Albert Sterner. A catalogue with eighty pages and 126 color plates and artist-biographies accompanies the show ($23 plus tax and shipping).

In 2002 Spanierman Gallery held its first show featuring affordable art for collectors who were either just beginning to build collections or seeking to add to them. Due to the enthusiastic reception to the exhibition, an annual tradition was begun, and this is now our fourth show of art for new collectors. Larger than those of past years, this exhibition presents a wide variety of art, ranging from quickly rendered studies, to small-scale fully developed images, to vivid modernist compositions, to bronze sculptures.

Many landscapes in the exhibition exemplify the emphasis of American artists in the last two decades of the nineteenth century on the expression of spiritual and poetic qualities in nature. This attitude is reflected in Henry Farrer’s watercolor, Pond at Dusk (1896), in which the artist portrayed a quiet rural scene at the end of day, using thin washes in softly modulated gradations of gray that are offset by the shimmering pink glow of a sunset that permeates the atmosphere. Charles Harold Davis, a landscape painter, identified with American Tonalism, also depicted a scene (ca. 1890s) in the early evening, creating an aesthetically conceived arrangement in which the dark forms of a fence and tree are silhouetted against a gray sky that holds the last light of the day.

In the early twentieth century, American artists created landscapes in which they used form and color to more personal and freely expressive ends. Exemplifying this approach, Oscar Bluemner drew with scribbled, brightly hued crayon to produce a semi-abstract image, in Blackwell’s Hills, Raritan Canal, New Jersey (1911). Impressionism continued to be a basis for the art of Alson Skinner Clark after he moved to Pasadena, California, in 1919. An artist who had studied in Chicago, New York, and Paris, Clark found a “mecca” in California, remaining there throughout the rest of his career and expressing his joyful response to the intense colors and dramatic scenery of the region in works such as From the Terrace, 1923. A greater concern for topographic accuracy is reflected in Colin Campbell Cooper’s Stresa (1924), a view of this popular vacation resort in the northern Italian lake country. Applying gouache with delicacy and control, Cooper captured the refreshing natural beauty and restful feeling of this charming locale on the edge of Lake Maggiore.

The drawings in the show reveal the high level of skill that artists achieved with graphic means. Theodore Robinson’s ink drawing, Woman on a Hearth, Normandy (1875-79) reflects the precision and fluidity that the artist attained during his years of studying in Paris with both Charles-Emile-Auguste Duran (Carolus-Duran) and Jean-Léon Gérôme. A London-born artist who spent most of his career in the United States, Albert Sterner also studied with Gérôme, but his exposure to modernist art in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century greatly influenced his style, The result was a combination of a direct treatment of form with an interest in creating works that were psychologically astute, as is reflected in his sanguine drawing of his wife, Marie (1921).

Among the sculptures in the show are bronze bookends of two Native American chiefs by Charles Harry Humphriss (1900-10), abstractly treated forms of two women by Hugo Robus (ca. 1920s-30s), and a mounted figure by Charles Cary Rumsey of the socially prominent New York lawyer Harrison Tweed engaging in polo playing, an activity in which the artist himself excelled as a member of the United States Polo team from 1913 until his death in 1922.

Presenting a diverse group of high-quality works, Art for New Collectors IV provides an ideal opportunity for those who are considering the foundations of new collections as well as those wishing to fill gaps or enhance existing ones.