Displaying items by tag: Bowdoin College Museum of Art

The first major museum survey dedicated to scenes of night in American art from 1860 to 1960—from the introduction of electricity to the dawn of the Space Age— opened at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art this June. Night Vision: Nocturnes in American Art explores the critical importance of nocturnal imagery in the development of modern art by bringing together 90 works in a range of media—including paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, and sculptures—created by such leading American artists as Ansel Adams, Charles Burchfield, Winslow Homer, Lee Krasner, Georgia O’Keeffe, Albert Ryder, John Sloan, Edward Steichen, and Andrew Wyeth, among others. Featuring works from the BCMA’s robust collection of American art, as well as loans from 30 prestigious public and private collections across the United States—such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Phillips Collection; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—the exhibition provides visitors with an opportunity to consider transformations in American art across generations and traditional stylistic confines. Organized by BCMA Curator Joachim Homann, and on view at Bowdoin from June 27 through October 18, 2015, Night Vision demonstrates the popularity of the theme with American artists of diverse aesthetic convictions and investigates how they responded to the unique challenges of picturing the night.

The first major museum survey dedicated to scenes of night in American art from 1860 to 1960—from the introduction of electricity to the dawn of the Space Age—opens at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) this June. "Night Vision: Nocturnes in American Art" explores the critical importance of nocturnal imagery in the development of modern art by bringing together 90 works in a range of media—including paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, and sculptures—created by such leading American artists as Ansel Adams, Charles Burchfield, Winslow Homer, Lee Krasner, Georgia O’Keeffe, Albert Ryder, John Sloan, Edward Steichen, and Andrew Wyeth, among others.

Katy Kline, an experienced museum administrator, will serve as interim executive director of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln.

Starting Wednesday, May 14, she will take over until a replacement is found for former director Dennis Kois who has accepted a position at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Kline said she’s “delighted’’ to “help keep things moving forward until the arrival of a permanent director.’’

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine has acquired a late 19th-century camera originally owned by the American artist Winslow Homer. The dry plate camera was manufactured around 1880 and will enhance the museum’s existing collection of archival material related to Homer’s life and work.

The camera, which was donated to the museum by Neal Paulsen, a long-time resident of Maine, was designed for amateur photographers and renowned for its portability and ease of use. It was manufactured by Mawson & Swan, a photography business in England. Homer purchased the camera in 1882, during a two-year residence in Cullercoats, a small fishing village in northeast England. The date, “Aug 15, 1882,” and Homer’s initials are inscribed into the camera’s wooden plate holder.

Frank Goodyear, Co-Director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, said, “We are so pleased to receive this exciting gift, which complements our current holdings of Homer’s work and documentation perfectly. The camera highlights Homer’s varying artistic interests, and helps to illuminate a lesser-known side of one of America’s greatest painters.”

Homer is one of the foremost figures in American art and is well known for his seascapes and marine paintings. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Homer was an avid traveler and spent time living and working in New York City, Paris, and England, among other places. However, during his years in Prout’s Neck, Maine, Homer produced some of his most defining masterpieces. Homer moved to Maine in 1883 and spent most of his time working in his studio, a former carriage house, just 75  feet from the ocean. Homer remained in Prout’s Neck on his family’s estate until his death in 1910. Homer’s paintings from this period are defined by their crashing waves, rocky coasts, and his expert use of light.

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art has a special exhibition on Homer and photography scheduled for August 2015. The show will feature the recently acquired camera alongside photographs taken by Homer.

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, ME announced that it has received 320 works from the collection of Dorothy and Herb Vogel. The gift, which includes works by Julian Schnabel and Richard Tuttle, will greatly enhance the museum’s modern and contemporary art holdings and is among the most significant donations the institution has received in its more than 200-year history.

The late Herb Vogel and his wife, Dorothy, began collecting art in the early 1960s and went on to build one of the most notable collections of minimal, conceptual, and post-minimal art. Following the gift to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Dorothy said, “This donation represents a true highlight in the giving of our collection. I take pleasure knowing that artworks included here, by leading American artists, have the capacity to inspire many generations of audiences, from students to locals, to a broad range of international visitors.”

The gift is one of the largest contributions of works from the Vogels’ collection since the couple made a major donation to Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art in 1992.

Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea, which is now on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, explores the artist’s lifelong fascination with the sea. Maurice Prendergast, a pioneering post-Impressionist painter, spent much of the late 19^th century and early 20^th century capturing modern life on the coast of New England.

 By the Sea is the first retrospective of Prendergast’s oeuvre in over two decades. The exhibition presents more than 90 works in a variety of media from over 30 public and private collections in addition to Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s own holdings. The exhibition traces the development of Prendergast’s highly personal style, which is recognized for its use of jewel-like colors and pattern-like compositions containing flattened, free-form figures. The exhibition also includes Prendergast’s sketchbooks and oil studies, allowing visitors to see into the Modernist artist’s creative process.

Highlights include the watercolor The Balloon, which is part of a private collection and has not been included in earlier Prendergast retrospectives; St. Malo, a bright watercolor on loan from the Williams College Museum of Art, which was lauded as one of the first American introductions of the bold European Post-Impressionist avant-garde; and a number of works that the artist contributed to the seminal Armory Show of 1913 (also known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art).

Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea will be on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art through October 13, 2013.

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art presents Edward Hopper ‘Maine’ an exhibition on view from July 15 through Oct 16, 2011.

Organized in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, Edward Hopper’s Maine brings together 88 of these early paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints. With loans from nearly thirty public and private collections, this exhibition represents the first comprehensive examination of this crucial period of artistic experimentation. Among the institutions who have generously loaned works are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

After studying painting with William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, Edward Hopper traveled to Europe three times between 1906 and 1910. Once he settled in his New York studio, he began to reconcile his indigenous training with the painterly traditions that he had encountered abroad, attempting to set himself apart from legions of other downtown artists. Like many painters, he sought refuge from New York City summers in coastal colonies, initially in Gloucester, MA, then traveling to Maine for the first time in 1914. Hopper spent two consecutive summers in Ogunquit, the second of which saw his plein-air painting thwarted by fog. In 1916 he decamped for the more remote Monhegan Island, where he would return for the next three summers, one of a very diminished number of wartime visitors.

At the core of Edward Hopper’s Maine are nearly all of the thirty-two oil sketches that the artist executed during the summers he spent on Monhegan. These small panels, many of which were never shown in the artist’s lifetime and continue to be under-exhibited, are astonishing in their jewel-like hues, painterly execution, and spatial ambiguity. Seen en masse, these oils yield unique insight into the artist’s process by revealing his sustained contemplation of similar motifs. Stalking his subject, Hopper painted the Monhegan headlands repeatedly, but under such varying conditions, and from such different vantages, that the works’ seriality is not immediately apparent.

By 1924, Edward Hopper had taken up watercolor painting and begun to exhibit at the Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery in New York, where he would enjoy his first significant commercial success. Returning to Maine in 1926 (this time to Rockland), and again in 1927 and 1929, he painted some of his most iconic Maine images — lighthouses, beam trawlers, dories, and coastal villages like Cape Elizabeth. Natural beauty becomes increasingly peripheral to Hopper’s study of structures and vessels, and one begins to perceive here the heightened tension between rational operations and subjective sensations (“the most exact transcription of my most intimate expressions”) that will characterize his mature painting. This concentrated look at a significant body of rarely seen work sheds new light on one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century.

A 176 page, fully illustrated catalogue accompanies Edward Hopper’s Maine published by DelMonico Books-Prestel. Contributors include Hopper scholar Carol Troyen, actor-collector-writer Steve Martin, poet Vincent Katz, Whitney Museum curator Carter Foster, Kevin Salatino and Diana Tuite.

www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum