Displaying items by tag: National Academy Museum

The National Academy Museum in New York presents William Trost Richards: Visions of Land and Sea. The exhibition features approximately 60 works by the 19^th century painter from the museum’s permanent collection. The National Academy houses a significant collection of Richards’ works thanks to the estate of the artist’s daughter, Anna Richards Brewster, which bequeathed over 100 works spanning Richards’ career to the museum in 1954.

William Trost Richards, a native of Philadelphia, was an American landscape painter associated with the Hudson River School as well as the American Pre-Raphaelite movement. Richards studied intermittently with the German-born landscape painter Paul Weber in the 1850s and greatly admired the works of Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church and the English Pre-Raphaelites. Richards is best known for his landscapes and marine paintings of Rhode Island, the White Mountains and the shorelines of Great Britain, France and Norway.

William Trost Richards: Visions of Land and Sea will be on view at the National Academy Museum through September 8, 2013.

The Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY is currently hosting the exhibition Albert Bierstadt in New York & New England. Guest curated by Anne Blaugrund, former director of National Academy Museum in New York, the exhibition features a wide selection of Albert Bierstadt’s (1830-1902) east coast paintings.

Bierstadt (1830-1902) a German-American painter best known for his lush landscapes of the American west, also spent time capturing the natural beauty of the White Mountains, the Hudson Valley, and New England in his work. All of the works on view were created between the late 1850s and 1880s and range from oil sketches to finished paintings. Albert Bierstadt in New York & New England is the 10^th annual presentation of 19^th century landscape paintings at the Thomas Cole site.

The Thomas Cole National Historic Site, which is also known as Cedar Grove, is comprised of the home and studios of Thomas Cole (1801-1848), the founder of the Hudson River School of painting. A National Historic Landmark, the site aims to communicate Cole’s profound influence on American art to a broader modern audience.

Albert Bierstadt in New York & New England is on view through November 3, 2013.

A printmaker and painter, there is a quiet, striking quality that pervades all of Will Barnet’s art. Best known for his portraits of women, children, animals, family members, and friends, Barnet passed away at his home in Manhattan on November 13. He has lived at the National Arts Club building on New York City’s Gramercy Park since 1982. Barnet was 101.

A native of Beverly, Massachusetts, Barnet studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and then, starting in 1931, at the Arts Students League in New York. It was here that Barnet studied briefly with the early Modernist painter Stuart Davis and became acquainted with Arshile Gorky, a major influence on Abstract Expressionism. Four years after joining the League, Barnet was named the official printer and went on to work for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. He also made prints for well-known artists such as the Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco and the painter and cartoonist William Gropper.

Barnet started out as a Social Realist printmaker and had his first solo exhibition in 1935 at the Eighth Street Playhouse in Manhattan. Three years later, he had his first gallery show at the Hudson Walker Gallery. It was during this time that he married Mary Sinclair, a painter and fellow student. They had three sons.

In the 1940s Barnet was inspired by Modernist inclinations and his paintings became more colorful and fractured, depicting family scenes and young children. By the end of the decade Barnet moved towards complete abstraction after becoming involved with the Indian Space Painters, a group that created abstract paintings using forms from Native American art and modern European painting.

In the 1950s Barnet divorced Sinclair and remarried Elena Ciurlys with whom he had a daughter. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Barnet returned to representational painting, often using his wife and daughter as subjects. Barnet’s style had evolved and the portraits from this time are flatter and more exact. He also made a number of portraits of the architect Frederick Kiesler, the art critic Katherine Kuh, and the art collector Roy Neuberger during this time.

Barnet never stopped painting and continued to experiment and evolve stylistically, returning to abstraction in 2003. In 2010 he was the subject of the exhibition Will Barnet and the Art Students League at the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery in Manhattan. He was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 2011, which he accepted from President Obama at a ceremony at the White House. The subject of many museum retrospectives, Will Barnet at 100, which took place at the National Academy Museum in 2011, was the last.

   Besides his work as an artist, Barnet was also an influential instructor. He taught graphic arts and composition at the Art Students League in 1936 and went on to teach painting at the school until 1980. Barnet also taught at Cooper Union from 1945 to 1978 and briefly at Yale, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and other schools.

Barnet is survived by his wife, three sons, one daughter, nine grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

One-hundred years in the making, Will Barnet at 100 – the artist’s first New York museum retrospective – will open at the National Academy Museum on September 16, 2011 and continue through December 31.

Barnet has work in virtually every major museum in the United States, and his figurative and abstract paintings and prints continue to advance the fine arts.  During a career that has spanned over 80 years, Barnet has been a printer for major artists, including Louise Bourgeois, a teacher of Eva Hesse, James Rosenquist, and Tom Wesselmann, and he remains a colleague and source of inspiration to hundreds of artists, curators, and collectors.

A member of the National Academy since 1982, Barnet lives in New York City and celebrated his 100th birthday on May 25, 2011.

Will Barnet at 100 will include 43 paintings and prints that range in date from 1935 – five years after he moved from Beverly, MA to New York City at age 19 – through 2008.  The loan exhibition, which includes works from numerous public and private collections, is organized by Bruce Weber, Senior Curator, Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Art, National Academy Museum, and will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue.

In related programming, the museum will host Will Barnet in Conversation on October 12, 2011, when Barnet will join Weber in a discussion of the retrospective and his career, and Will Barnet at 100 – A Symposium on November 5.  The day-long symposium will include a series of lectures by art historians on different aspects of Barnet’s life and work, as well as a panel discussion including artist Philip Pearlstein that will illuminate Barnet’s place within the context of American art. 

The retrospective, talk, and symposium are among the National Academy Museum’s reopening events after being closed for renovation since July 2010.

Barnet was born in Beverly, MA in 1911.  He moved to New York in 1930 and embarked on an 80-year career as an artist, printmaker, and instructor.  Barnet taught at the Art Students League (1941-1979) and Cooper Union (1945-1967) in New York and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1967-1992) in addition to shorter term appointments. He also continues to conduct workshops and critiques at the National Academy School, which he has done since 2001.

The works in the exhibition trace Barnet’s explorations of figuration and abstraction, including WPA-tinted realism, Hard-Edged abstraction, and Indian Space painting, with its fields of color and imagery inspired by indigenous art of North and South America.  An impassioned student of the visual arts of many cultures, Barnet’s investigations have been informed by old and modern masters, Byzantine art, Hopi bowls, geometric patterns found in ancient Peruvian textiles, and American folk art.   

The arc of Barnet’s work runs from realism in the 1930s, when he worked primarily as a graphic artist and printer, to increasingly abstract work in the 1940s, full abstraction in the 1950s and early 1960s, and a figurative style in the 1960s through 2003, when he returned to abstraction.

Highlights of the exhibition include Idle Hands, from 1935, in which a deflated man is seated, his elbows resting on his knees and arms crossed as his torso slumps forward.  With a cap covering his downcast face, the figure illuminates the Depression-era plight of millions of people unable to find work.

By 1946, when Barnet completed Soft Boiled Eggs, he had entered the realm of Modernism.  In the painting, Barnet’s wife and three children surround a kitchen table.   In sharp contrast to Idle Hands, all of the flatly rendered elements in the painting are brought to the foreground without any hint of depth or pictorial illusion.

The 1959 Singular Image is a purely abstract work “prompted by a glimpse of his shadow as it intersected cracks in a city sidewalk,” as Weber notes in the exhibition catalogue, Will Barnet at 100.  Barnet has explained that the cross-like form outlined in white and floating against a dark background expresses “the idea of modern man being … pushed in by all kinds of forces.”  

In the early ‘60s, Barnet returned to figuration in paintings of his family, friends, and associates.  The 1972 painting, Woman and the Sea, was inspired by a moment when he saw the silhouetted figure of his second wife, Elena, leaning against a porch column in a summer house in Maine and looking out across the ocean.  As Weber notes in his catalogue essay, “The picture alludes to New England days of the past and the countless women left behind by men who went to sea…  For Barnet, the woman was a universal symbol of strength, home, and endurance in the face of life’s mysteries.”   

In 2003, Barnet returned to abstraction to explore form, space, and color anew.  Strolling, from 2008, has a lighter palette and freer and more open sense of composition than many of his earlier abstract works.

Founded in 1825, the National Academy Museum and School is the only institution of its kind that integrates a museum, art school, and honorary association of artists and architects dedicated to creating and preserving a living history of American art.  The Academy promotes American art and architecture through exhibition and education and continues to play a critical role in fostering the visual arts in America.

Exhibition:         Will Barnet at 100
Dates:               September 16 – December 31, 2011
Hours:              Wednesday – Sunday, 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Note:                Closed July 4th, Thanksgiving, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day
 
Discussion:        Will Barnet in Conversation
Date:                October 12, 2011
Time:                6:45 PM
 
Symposium:       Will Barnet at 100 – A Symposium
Date:                November 5, 2011
Hours:              9:30 AM – 5:00 PM
 
Location:           National Academy Museum, 1083 Fifth Avenue, 89th/90th Streets
Admission:        Adults: $12; Seniors (65+) and students with valid ID: $7
Children, members, and students of the National Academy School: free