Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to announce the opening, on May 4, 2006, of John Twachtman (1853-1902): A “Painter’s Painter”, an exhibition of over eighty works spanning the career of an artist whose landscapes are esteemed as probably the most original, modern, and poetic among those of the American Impressionists. Incapable of following trends or painting to please the art buyers of his time, Twachtman never created derivative or simply pretty images, and his devotion to a spirit of inquiry, experimentation, and to his personal vision brought him an unmatched admiration from his peers, who deemed him a “painter’s painter,” and an artist, ahead of his era, whose “time would come.”
Accompanying the show is a catalogue by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D. Building on her 1995 dissertation on Twachtman and the catalogue she wrote for an exhibition of Twachtman’s art, organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, in 1999, Dr. Peters addresses Twachtman’s role in the context of his time in three essays and explores the uniqueness of his art in entries on the works in the show. The catalogue also includes contributions by John Nelson, on Twachtman’s former home in Greenwich, Connecticut, where Nelson has lived for thirty-five years, and by Simon Parkes, whose conservation of Twachtman’s paintings over the course of a few decades, has led him to a deep appreciation and understanding of the artist’s techniques. The catalogue is a prelude to the Twachtman Catalogue Raisonné, coauthored by Ira Spanierman and Dr. Peters, which is currently in progress. With over one hundred illustrations, the two-hundred page exhibition catalogue is available for $85 (ppd) from spanierman.com and through the gallery.
An opening reception for the show will be held at Spanierman Gallery on Thursday, May 4, from 6 to 8 pm, which will benefit the Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich, Connecticut. This summer a smaller version of this exhibition will travel to the historical society, where it will be on view from July 13 through October 29, 2006, providing an opportunity for Twachtman’s art to be seen in the place that he loved and where he created many of his works, the Holley House, which is the home of the historical society today.
Fourteen works in the exhibition represent the early phase in Twachtman’s career, a time when he was a leading figure in the Munich School, the group of American painters who studied in Munich in the 1870s, there deriving inspiration from the direct and dynamic Realist approach of the German painter Wilhelm Leibl—a disciple of the French Realist Gustave Courbet. Many of Twachtman’s peers who emulated Leibl were criticized in reviews of the time for using new methods to show off their virtuosity rather than to fulfill Realist objectives. By contrast, Twachtman was consistently praised as one of the few artists to use the style with purpose, managing in Venetian scenes “to inspire the belief that there is thought and life behind his mall-stick,” and proving in a view of the suburbs of Cincinnati “that even such homely material may be wrought into satisfactory and, of course, quite original sorts of art.” Twachtman’s forthright images of modern life—including depictions of Venice’s Grand Canal intruded on by an unruly steamship, of an industrial dredge used for excavation purposes in New York harbor, and of emerging suburbs on snow-covered hilltops in Cincinnati—were heralded by the New York press for providing a new direction for American landscape painting, based in the notion that our art “must seek its materials from immediate surroundings if it is to be truly vital and characteristic.” Critics also perceived that the portrayal of such new subject matter had spurred Twachtman to an individualism that was exemplary, and they concurred in the view that American art would strengthen if other artists followed his cue in conveying their personal responses to their motifs using their own stylistic methods.
Deriving influence from the art of the Dutch Hague School, which he had studied during his honeymoon in Holland in the summer of 1881, by the winter of 1883 Twachtman had tempered his art, restraining the unbridled bravado and the heavy paint surfaces of his Munich style. His approach is evident in Cincinnati snow scenes in which he created reductive arrangements, painted with unobtrusive brushwork, and used graduated light tones of gray and green to record atmospheric subtleties, producing works that draw the viewer slowly into their quiet, reflective spaces. He developed this style further during French period, lasting from the fall of 1883 through the end of 1885. The eight examples of the works from this period, demonstrate the impact of the new draftsmanship skills that he attained while training at the Académie Julian in Paris, while showing his progression toward a distillation of his subjects to their primal and essential qualities. Not exhibited since 1966, Windmills is a culminating work of this period. While the spatial recession in this image is convincing, its true subject is the way that it draws the viewer into its somnolent mood through the rhythmic relationship of forms within the picture plane. “Very subtly the picture itself begins to exert its influences,” a critic wrote of it when it was exhibited in 1886, noting that instead of representing the “truth of form,” here Twachtman had conveyed the greater “truth of impression.”
The period between the end of Twachtman’s French period and his move to Greenwich, Connecticut, in approximately the fall of 1889 has been little understood in the past. The ten paintings and pastels included in the show that probably all date from this time clarify this time of transition, revealing Twachtman’s early exploration of Impressionism, as he moved from the more considered and conceptual approach of his French period to create images that evoke a spontaneous sense of experience. Among them, Branchville is Twachtman’s largest known canvas. Here he painted a plein-air view from the front door of J. Alden Weir’s farmhouse in Branchville, Connecticut, using a monumentally scaled format for an intimate scene that has the feeling of being lifelike. This was the period when he was most absorbed in pastels, and wandering through the hills of Branchville with Weir, he used this medium with painterly expressiveness to convey his immediate impressions of the light and tonal qualities in meadows and tree glades, often incorporating the textures and colors of his fibrous papers into his designs.
After settling in Greenwich, Twachtman felt a satisfaction he had lacked during his years of travel and rootlessness. He purchased a small farmhouse and eventually acquired approximately seventeen acres of land, through which Horseneck Brook wound and formed a waterfall. Within this secure domain, his children could roam freely, and he thoroughly enjoyed the combined pleasures of country living and domestic experience. He wrote to J. Alden Weir in 1891 that he felt it was necessary to “live always in the country—at all seasons of the year.” Although he traveled regularly to New York City to teach and join friends at club gatherings, he spent an inordinate amount of time enhancing his home and property. As his family grew, he expanded his house, but rather than just enlarging it, he extended it so that it flowed harmoniously with the lay of the land. He planted willow trees along the brook, constructed vine trellises to link his house with the grounds, and created an abundant garden, while adding subtle touches to other aspects of the vegetation. His involvement with the land inspired his art, and his works express the fondness he felt as his years of familiarity and associations with it went on, as is reflected in the nineteen Greenwich works in the exhibition.
Often setting his house high in his canvases, he evoked its spiritual presence in the way that it presides over the landscape. Painting the back facade of his house through the tangled flora of his garden, he created compositions of flat, superimposed forms inspired by Japanese prints that expressed how seeing a familiar site in a new way could increase his enjoyment of the locale itself. In a view toward the back of his house, he used compositional and tonal means to convey his surprise and pleasure at seeing a tree with sparkling new spring foliage offset against a still snow-blanketed landscape. In views of his barn, he explored the way that the small angular structure, seen in relationship to its snowy surroundings, appeared at times to exude an ethereal presence and at others to seem a bastion of fortitude against the harshness of winter. In Autumn Mists, he created an abstract arrangement, conveying the essence of fall not with a palette of autumnal rusts and browns, but with a luminescent prismatic blend of turquoise, peach, and yellow that resonate from a design of reflecting, repeating, and paralleling forms.
Whereas the inspiration received from familiarity exudes from Twachtman’s Greenwich art, the opposite feeling radiates from the works he created during a trip he took to Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, in September of 1895. Of the fourteen Yellowstone paintings he is known to have done, five are included in this exhibition. Twachtman wrote to Major William Wadsworth, who had funded his sojourn, that the scenery was “fine enough to shock any mind,” and observed how several snow storms had made the ground white and the pools more refined in color. In two views of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, he conveyed his amazement at this stunning landscape, painting the delicate color harmonies in snow-covered volcanic rock walls in one work and expressing the brilliant dazzling qualities of the bare walls, free of snow, in another. A view of the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone is one of Twachtman’s most vivid works, while his paintings of the thermal pools of the park, including Edge of the Emerald Pool, Yellowstone and Morning Glory Pool, Yellowstone, demonstrate an unparalleled modernity. In Edge of the Emerald Pool, his cropped and partial view of a deep pool suspends the viewer in an indeterminate space in which the relationship between the earth and sky is left ambiguous and the reverberating blues in the water have an almost perilous, inescapable beauty.
The way that Twachtman derived his aesthetic from his emotive responses to his sites is also demonstrated in the works he created during his last three summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, from 1900 through 1902, in which he was overjoyed to rejoin old friends from Cincinnati, Munich, and Venice and to explore the varied scenery and brilliant light of a village that was an active fishing port and a growing vacation destination. Working quickly, often on the tops of cigar boxes, he painted with energy and freedom, noting his quick impressions of his surroundings with confident, free handling and taking advantage of the seemingly readymade artists’ compositions provided by the glimpses of boats beside and beneath wharves and the views looking down to the Inner Harbor from Banner Hill in East Gloucester. From this locale he often adjusted his range and focus, taking different perspectives on his subjects so as to see them in new ways, as is reflected in difference between the broad inclusive scene, painted with flickering strokes in Gloucester Harbor, and the structured design he used in Boats at Anchor. The eight Gloucester views included in this show reveal the range, vibrancy, and strength of the art Twachtman produced at the end of his career.
Also featured in the show is a group of four paintings that Twachtman created while staying at the Holley House in Cos Cob in the winter of 1901, at a time when his family was in Paris. Repeatedly depicting the view from inside this inn and boarding house and from its lower porch, Twachtman encompassed the mill dam on the Mianus River, a bridge crossing it, and the architectural forms on the opposite shore as shapes within the picture plane that, through their arrangement, placement, and tonal properties, evoke different sensations associated with the seasons portrayed and with the artist’s fluctuating emotions.
Driven to paint according to his own individualistic responses to his surroundings, Twachtman used experimental techniques and created unusual, sophisticated compositions. It was because his pictures often stood outside the conventions of his day that few of them sold during his lifetime, leaving him frequently struggling to support his family. Although he was disheartened by this lack of sales, he was incapable of marketing or promoting his works, in the ways that so many of his colleagues mastered, in order to pique the interest of buyers. In addition, he could not adapt his work to fit trends and fashions in the art world that might have made it more commercially viable. Yet, it was precisely his dedication to painting according to his own vision that resulted in the great admiration of his fellow artists, that gave his work an integrity admired by American modernists of the early twentieth century, and that draws our attention and interest today.
Twachtman died suddenly in Gloucester at age forty-nine in August of 1902, and thus how his art might have developed during an age of Modernism cannot be determined. Yet, as his friends and fellow artists perceptively predicted, his work both forecast the art of the future and would, as his friend Thomas Dewing remarked in 1903, “one day be a ‘classic,’ to use a literary term; for the public catches but slowly the professional opinion, though in the end the professional opinion becomes the public opinion.”
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