Displaying items by tag: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Back in 2013, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, acquired Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bachman Wilson House from Lawrence and Sharon Tarantino, a husband-and-wife architect-designer team. The only catch was that the house was located in Millstone, New Jersey. Staff at the Crystal Bridges quickly got to work devising a plan to disassemble, transport, and rebuild the house on the museum’s sprawling 120-acre campus. After months of preparation, The Art Newspaper reports that the structure’s first posts are due to be raised this month.

Wright designed the Bachman Wilson House for Abraham Wilson and his wife Gloria Bachman, whose brother, Marvin Bachman, was an apprentice in the Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesin Fellowship, in 1954. Perched on a bank of the Millstone River, the house was subject to repeated flooding over the decades as the river and surrounding landscape continued to encroach on the glass-and-mahogany structure.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in 2011 in Wal-Mart's hometown, Bentonville, Arkansas, with a respectable collection of work by famous artists from Norman Rockwell's "Rosie the Riveter" to a George Washington portrait by Gilbert Stuart.

But the museum has just opened a massive exhibition of contemporary art called "State of the Art" that could be a game-changer. The museum is sometimes mocked by critics from outside the region for its location and Wal-Mart connections — its permanent collection was funded by Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton — but the new show represents a serious effort to introduce contemporary art to a mainstream audience far from the rarefied galleries of hipster neighborhoods and urban centers.

The first significant new museum of American art in nearly half a century debuted in 2011. But to view Crystal Bridges' collection—from a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington to Jackson Pollock canvases—you don't travel to New York, Los Angeles or Chicago. You head down a forested ravine in a town in northwestern Arkansas.

As museum founder and Walmart heiress Alice Walton scooped up tens of millions of dollars' worth of art from across the country, thinly veiled snobbish rhetoric began to trickle out from the coasts. Most notably, when she purchased Asher B. Durand's 1849 "Kindred Spirits" from the New York Public Library for $35 million, some culturati bristled at the thought that this famed Hudson River School landscape would be leaving for Bentonville. The controversy raised the question: Who deserves access to great art?

After a restless cross-country search in which two curators logged more than 100,000 miles in airplanes and rental cars, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art – founded by the Walmart heiress Alice Walton – announced Tuesday that it had finalized its artist list for an ambitious fall show that will present a snapshot of unheralded 21st century American art.

To organize the exhibition, “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now,” which will open at the museum, in Bentonville, Ark., on Sept. 13, the museum’s president, Don Bacigalupi, and an assistant curator, Chad Alligood, spent several months visiting the studios and homes of almost 1,000 artists, most of whom were not well known outside their cities or regions.

On March 15, the Museum of Modern Art’s William S. Paley Collection will go on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. “A Taste for Modernism” presents 62 works that cover all of the pivotal movements that defined the art world between 1880 and 1940. The exhibition features works by 24 major artists including Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, and Francis Bacon. The William S. Paley Collection has been on a North American tour since 2012. The Crystal Bridges Museum will be the last venue to host the exhibition before it returns to MoMA.

Highlights from the exhibition include two works by Cézanne, which Paley acquired from the artist’s son; eight works by Picasso that trace his artistic evolution over the first three decades of the 20th century, including “Boy Leading a Horse” from his Rose period, the Cubist painting “An Architect’s Table,” and the collage-inspired composition “Still Life with Guitar”; Gauguin’s “The Seed of the Areoi,” which was inspired by the artist’s trips to Tahiti; and realist landscapes by Edward Hopper.

William S. Paley, the media mogul who built the CBS broadcasting empire, was an important art collector and philanthropist. Paley began collecting in the 1930s and had a particular fondness for French modernist movements such as Fauvism, Cubism, and Post-Impressionism. Paley played a major role in establishing MoMA as one of the most significant institutions in the world and he fulfilled various roles at the museum including patron, trustee, president, and board chairman from 1937 until his death in 1999.

“A Taste for Modernism” will remain on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art through July 7.

The Louvre in Paris, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and the Terra Foundation in Chicago have announced the third installation in their four-year collaboration focusing on the history of American art. "American Encounters: Anglo-American Portraiture in an Era of Revolution," which is currently on view at the Louvre, examines how portraiture style evolved in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as American and European painters were influenced by each other.

The exhibition features five works that have never before been exhibited together -- "George Washington after the Battle of Princeton," attributed to Charles Wilson Peale; "Portrait of Hugh Percy, Second Duke of Northumberland" by Gilbert Stuart; "Lieutenant Robert Hay of Spott" by Henry Raeburn; "George Washington (The Constable-Hamilton Portrait)" by Gilbert Stuart; and "George Washington, Porthole Portrait" by Rembrandt Peale. When its presentation at the Louvre ends on April 28, 2014, the exhibition will travel to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (May 17, 2014-September 15, 2014) and to the High Museum of Art (September 28, 2014-January 18, 2015).  

Guillaume Faroult, the Louvre's Curator of Paintings, said, "The potential for new scholarship and education that comes from bringing these five portraits together is exactly the spirit of our international collaboration and shows how much all of our institutions have to gain from it, as now our visitors are familiarizing themselves with American painting and are greatly anticipating this third installation."

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas has acquired ‘Hanging Heart (Gold/Magenta)’, a nearly ten-foot wide metallic sculpture by the contemporary artist Jeff Koons. Weighing in at over 3,000 pounds, the mirror-polished stainless steel sculpture arrived via cargo flight and was transported to its spot in the museum using a specially designed trolley from Koons’ studio. Workers used a forklift to hoist the sculpture up and suspend it on a custom mount. ‘Hanging Heart’ is one of the largest works to be installed inside of the museum.

‘Hanging Heart’ is one of five unique versions created by Koons, each with a different transparent color coating. This particular iteration was the only one kept by the artist before being sold directly to Crystal Bridges in 2013. The ‘Hanging Heart’ sculptures are part of Koons’ ‘Celebration’ series, which began in 1994, and were meant to signify the various celebratory events of a lifetime.

‘Hanging Heart’ is mounted nine feet above the heads of diners in the museum’s restaurant, Eleven.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AK has acquired Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bachman Wilson House in Millstone, NJ from architect/designer team Lawrence and Sharon Tarantino. Built along the Millstone River, the house has suffered significant flood damage and relocation has been recommended in order to preserve the structure. The Tarantinos held a multi-year search to find a buyer that could provide an appropriate setting and context for the historic building. The house will be disassembled and relocated to Bentonville, where it will be re-assembled on Crystal Bridges’ 120-acre campus.

The Bachman Wilson house was commissioned in 1954 by Abraham Wilson and Gloria Bachman, whose brother, Marvin Bachman, was an apprentice in the Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesin Fellowship. The structure reflects Wright’s Usonian period, which was defined by simplicity and practicality. Crystal Bridges plans to incorporate the house into its educational and public program offerings. In addition, thanks to an ongoing partnership with the University of Arkansas, the museum anticipates making Wright’s house available to the University’s Fay Jones School of Architecture.

Site preparation at Crystal Bridges for the Bachman Wilson House will begin this spring. The museum plans to have the project completed in early 2015.

On January 18, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art will present the exhibition ‘At First Sight: Collecting the American Watercolor.’ The show will explore Crystal Bridges’ founder Alice Walton’s affinity for watercolors and how her early interest in the medium helped shape her future as one of the most important collectors of American art.

‘At First Sight’ will features some of the works that sparked Walton’s earliest collecting interests including paintings by Thomas Hart Benton, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth and Georgia O’Keeffe. Walton will loan a portion of her private collection to the museum for the exhibition.

‘At First Sight’ will be on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum through April 21, 2014. Admission to the exhibition will be free.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AK has acquired a number of works by Andy Warhol. The first acquisition, ‘Coca-Cola (3),’ was purchased at Christie’s for $57.3 million in November. It had previously belonged to a private collection.

The Crystal Bridges’ other Warhol acquisitions were gifts -- an early painting from the artist’s time as a student at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and a book of 21 dye diffusion transfer prints, which are being donated to the museum by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

‘Coca-Cola (3)’ and the early painting will go on view alongside the Warhol works already in the Crystal Bridges’ collection on December 26. The prints will not be immediately exhibited.