Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to announce the opening on January 12th 2006 of Jonas Lie (1880-1940), an exhibition and sale featuring thirty-one oils, ranging from the artist’s early Tonalist-inspired landscapes to the radiant mountain and coastal scenes that comprise his mature work and contributed to his reputation as one of the most celebrated landscape painters of his era. The show is accompanied by a full color catalogue with essays by Dr. William H. Gerdts and Dr. Carol Lowrey, in addition to a chronology and bibliography (available for $65 postpaid).

Lie was born in Moss, Norway, the only son of a Norwegian civil engineer and his Connecticut-born wife. He began studying art at the age of twelve, spending three months in the studio of his cousin, the artist Christian Skredsvig. Later that year, while residing in Paris with his famous uncle and namesake, the novelist Jonas Lauritz Edemil Lie, he took drawing lessons during the evening and visited the Louvre and Luxembourg museums. After moving to New York City in 1893, he studied art under Dewing Woodward at Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture School. On graduating in 1897, he worked for Manchester Mills, a textile factory in New York, while continuing his formal training at the Cooper Union School, the Art Students League, and probably, the National Academy of Design.

From about 1900 to 1906, Lie painted outdoors in the countryside around Ridgefield, New Jersey, with fellow members of the Country Sketch Club, producing landscapes that reveal the impact of Tonalism and the muted color harmonies of James McNeil Whistler, and that, as noted by one contemporary critic, “conveyed a sense of the elemental spirit of nature and the natural scene.” In January of 1901 he made his professional debut at the National Academy of Design, where his A Gray Day, a moody, tonal landscape painted at Rockaway Beach, was selected for inclusion in that year’s annual. Two months later, he contributed five oils to an exhibition of work by the County Sketch Club held at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 1903, his canvas, A Winter Idyll (location unknown) was acquired by the celebrated painter William Merritt Chase from the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Lie’s star was clearly on the rise; he went on to receive a silver medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904, and he had solo shows at the New Gallery in New York and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1905.

In 1906 Lie left his job at Manchester Mills and tuned his full attention to painting. During that same year he traveled to Paris, where he saw and was deeply inspired by the paintings of Claude Monet, an experience that caused him to brighten his palette considerably. His belief in the power of color was further enhanced in 1909, when, on another trip to Paris, he was drawn to the work of avant-garde painters such as the Fauvist Henri Matisse and the Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin.

Lie’s gamble that he could make it in the competitive New York art world paid off: as early as 1907 the critic James Huneker had informed his readers that there was something special about Lie’s art, referring to him as a “painter of poetic temperament and individual vision,” while a writer for Craftsman praised his ability to translate the moods of nature into paint. In 1912, by which time Lie had abandoned his Tonalist approach in favor of a robust style in which he fused aspects of Realism and Impressionism, he was identified by a penman for Current Literature as “one of the most promising of the younger artists now working in New York,” expressing an artistic vision shaped by his American milieu and training and by his Scandinavian background.

Lie resided in Plainfield, New Jersey from 1901 until 1910, when he returned to Manhattan and began incorporating urban motifs--the streets, bridges and architecture of New York--into his repertoire of subjects. His output of the early to mid-1910s includes city and townscapes as well as images related to modern labor and toil, including a series of dynamic paintings depicting the excavation and construction of the Panama Canal. However, after the first world war, as his iconography became increasingly personal--shaped and informed by his Nordic background--Lie shifted his attention to the forest and mountain scenes and the serene, light-resplendent coastal landscapes for which he is best known today. As revealed by the work in this exhibition, he found the majority of his maritime motifs along the New England seaboard, especially in port towns such as Rockport, Massachusetts, where he was a well-known member of the local artists’ colony. He also drew inspiration from littoral locales in Maine, the Canadian Maritimes, Brittany, Cornwall, and his native Norway too, producing depictions of harbors and shorelines in which he fused his interest in powerful designs and an intuitive use of color with his own emphasis on feeling and emotion. These paintings are a reminder that although Lie is often branded a conservative who shunned progressive forms of art, his mature aesthetic was informed to varying degrees by the tenets of Post-Impressionism, with its emphasis on simplified shapes, structured designs, and bold hues applied in an arbitrary manner for emotional purposes and to capture light. The artist’s penchant for a glowing, all-encompassing luminosity is apparent in a number of striking oils that feature sweeping vistas of boats and water, among them the stunning Amber Light, a painting that also bears historical resonance in that it was presented by the artist to his friend President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

While mood-oriented coastal views occupied much of Lie’s creative energies, he was equally drawn to forest and mountain subjects, often finding his motifs in the woodlands of Maine, where he encountered the unspoiled scenery, clear, transparent air, and wintry setting that so reminded him of his native Norway. He experienced similar conditions in the Adirondack Mountains of northeastern New York, a region he began visiting as early as 1921 and where he resided during 1923-24. It was there that he developed another favorite theme—that of a waterway flanked by lithe birch trees silhouetted against distant mountains, a subject he loved to explore during the depths of winter. Lie’s engagement with the pictorial offerings of the Adirondacks went even further—in February 1930 he spent a month at Kamp Kill Kare on Lake Kora (the summer residence of Mr. and Mrs. Francis P. Garvan), where he painted ten oils, including views of lakes, birch groves, and camp buildings, two of which are included in the current exhibit.

Lie occupied a mainstream position in the art world. He attracted sustained critical support from the early 1910s well into the 1930s, during which time he enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions throughout the country and was inducted into the most prestigious art societies. He continued to create landscapes and marines well into the 1930s, making painting trips to Holland, Cornwall, Maine, and Québec’s Gaspé peninsula. Apropos his belief that an artist “should serve, as well as paint,” he combined his artistic activity with his role as an administrator, holding a position on the Art Students League’s Board of Control from 1931 to 1933 and serving as president of the venerable National Academy of Design from 1934 to 1939.

In the wake of Lie’s death in 1940, Peyton Boswell of Art Digest summed up his oeuvre as reflecting the “ ‘front-yard’ of the American scene--picturesque seaboard villages, snug fishing harbors, silvery birches mirrored in still, blue-green water, peaceful landscapes and other aspects of beauty in America.” His comments aptly describe the work in this exhibition—a collection of paintings that, while serving to bring Lie’s accomplishments to the attention of contemporary audiences, also underscores his enduring concern for an art based on personal experience, subjective response, and traditional ideals of beauty and fine craftsmanship.