Displaying items by tag: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

It is being rumored that Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress and founder of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AK, purchased Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola (3) from Christie’s in November. The painting sold for $57.2 million during the auction house’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale. The price is more than Walton has been known to have ever spent at an auction.

The work is one of only four paintings of a single Coca-Cola bottle made by the Pop artist between 1961 and 1962. Coca-Cola (3) was being offered by New York art dealer Jose Mugrabi and was expected to garner between $40 million and $60 million.

A representative for Walton would neither confirm nor deny the purchase.  

On November 9, 2013 the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas unveiled the exhibition The Artists’ Eye: Georgia O’Keeffe and the Alfred Stieglitz Collection. The monumental presentation features 101 works of American and European art as well as African art from the collection of photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. Works on view include masterpieces by his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec.

The exhibition traces the rise of American Modernism, a movement that Stieglitz championed through his career as a photographer and gallerist. When he opened his gallery in the early 20^th century, Stieglitz was one of the first gallery owners in the United States to showcase European Modernists. Soon, he became devoted to highlighting the works of American modernists, often purchasing artworks from them and providing them with studio space.

The collection that comprises The Artists’ Eye was donated to Fisk University in Nashville by O’Keeffe after Stieglitz’s death in 1946 and is now co-owned by Crystal Bridges and Fisk. The collection will travel between the two institutions every two years.

The Artists’ Eye will be on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art through February 3, 2014.

Gifts from three families affiliated with the Princeton University Art Museum have established the John Wilmerding Curatorship of American Art. The endowed curatorship honors John Wilmerding, an esteemed scholar, curator, collector and Professor of American Art, Emeritus at Princeton University. Karl Kusserow, the museum’s current curator of American art, has been named the inaugural Wilmerding curator.

An anonymous donor with long-standing ties to Princeton made the first gift towards the curatorship. The Sherrerd family, who previously established two funds in support of scholarship and programming in American art at Princeton, and the Anschutz family, which includes one of Wilmerding’s former students, made additional contributions.

Wilmerding, who assumed emeritus status in 2007 and retired from Princeton last spring, has been reappointed by President Obama to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. He is a trustee of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Wyeth Foundation of American Art. Kusserow, who joined the Princeton University Art Museum in 2005, previously held positions at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has organized numerous important exhibitions and his articles and reviews have appeared in American Art, Drawing, Folk Art and The Journal of American History.

James Steward, director of the Princeton University Art Museum, said, “This endowed curatorship not only honors one of the most eminent and versatile scholars of our time, and one of the Museum’s greatest friends, John Wilmerding, but also recognizes the Princeton University Art Museum’s excellence in American art and visual culture. The very first work of art to enter Princeton’s collection in the 1750s was, in fact, an American painting. With this endowment, our work in American art can go forward with confidence and assure Princeton’s leadership in the field of American studies.”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has unveiled John Trumbull’s life-size portrait of founding father Alexander Hamilton for the first time ever. The international financial services group Credit Suisse donated the painting to both the Met and the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas back in March. The painting had been on loan to the Crystal Bridges Museum since it opened to the public in 2011.

Credit Suisse acquired the striking portrait in 2000 when it absorbed the New York-based investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. Richard Jenrette, one of the bank’s founding partners, had assembled a remarkable art collection for the company that became part of Credit Suisse’s acquisition. Credit Suisse decided that giving the portrait to two well-known institutions would maximize the public’s enjoyment of the work by expanding its audience.

The painting, which was commissioned by the New York Chamber of Commerce in 1771 while Hamilton was serving as President Washington’s Secretary of Treasury, will remain on view at the Met until 2014 when it will return to the Crystal Bridges Museum. Eventually the painting will be on view at each institution for two-year stretches.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AK will soon debut a recently acquired painting by the American Modernist painter Edward Hopper. The work, titled Blackwell’s Island, was sold at Christie’s in May to a private collector for $19.2 million – the second highest price ever paid for a painting by the artist at auction. The Crystal Bridges Museum later announced that they had acquired the work from the private collection. The painting is slated to go on on view by mid-September in the museum’s Early 20th Century Art Gallery.

Blackwell’s Island depicts what is now known as Roosevelt Island, located off of Manhattan in the East River. The painting, which features a wide expanse of blue sky above swirling water and an industrial skyline, creates a sense of distance between the viewer and the impersonal subject. The composition promotes feelings of loneliness and isolation, which pervade much of Hopper’s work.

Crystal Bridges’ President, Don Bacigalupi, said, “This is a most ambitious composition for Hopper. He painted this work at the height of his powers and it exemplifies some of the best of Hopper’s style: a complex architectural composition with a full range of light and shadow, few people and drama of the past colliding with the present in the form of historic architecture meeting modern.”

While the Crystal Bridges Museum has a number of Hopper’s works on paper in its collection, Blackwell’s Island is its first major oil painting by the artist.

On Saturday, May 11, 2013, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art In Bentonville, Arkansas launched two exhibitions dedicated to American genre painting. Genre painting, which became popular during the mid-19^th century, involved the depiction ordinary scenes of everyday life. As religious artworks waned in prevalence, genre painting struck a chord with the public as they could easily relate to the narratives, which spanned various races, regions, and classes.

American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life presents five paintings by a handful of the most well known artists from the movement including George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879), Eastman Johnson (1824-1906), and Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (1819-1905). Between Bingham, who painted scenes of life on the American frontier, Johnson, who captured the true spirits of the people of New England, the western frontier, the slavery-ridden south, and prominent Americans, and Tait, whose subject of choice was wildlife, the three artists come together to communicate a varied and comprehensive American experience.

The works in American Encounters are accompanied by two paintings from the Louvre – one is from the Dutch genre painting school and another from the English interpretation of the movement. American Encounters is also complemented b the exhibition Genre Scenes on Paper from Crystal Bridges’ Permanent Collection.

Genre Scenes on Paper provides a sampling of the museum’s 19^th century watercolors and drawings, many of which have never been on public view. The exhibition explores themes of work and leisure in the city and country and features works by Winslow Homer (1836-1910), Thomas Waterman Wood (1823-1903), and John Lewis Krimmel (1786-1821). Just as the paintings in American Encounters, these works come together to show how a variety of artists interpreted daily life in a young country still coming into its own.

American Encounters and Genre Scenes on Paper will be on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum through August 12, 2013. American Encounters, which is the second exhibition in a four-year partnership between Crystal Bridges, the Louvre and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, will then travel to the High where it will be on view from September 14, 2013 through January 14, 2014.

The Museum of Modern Art’s William S. Paley collection is currently on view at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. A Taste for Modernism presents 62 works that cover all of the pivotal movements that defined the art world during the late 19^th and 20^th centuries. The exhibition features works by 24 major artists including Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Joan Miró (1893-1983), Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), and Francis Bacon (1909-1922). The William S. Paley collection has been on a North American tour since 2012 and the Portland Museum of Art is the only venue in New England that the exhibition will visit.

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 20^th century including Boy Leading a Horse (1905-06) from his Rose Period, the Cubist painting An Architect’s Table (1912), and the collage-inspired composition Still Life with Guitar (1920); Gaugin’s The Seed of the Areoi (1892), which was inspired by the artist’s trips to Tahiti; and Edward Hopper’s (1882-1967) realist landscapes.

William S. Paley (1901-1999), the media mogul responsible for building the CBS broadcasting empire, was an important art collector and philanthropist during the 20th century. Paley began collecting in the 1930s and took a particular liking to French modernist movements including Fauvism, Cubism, and Post-Impressionism. Paley played a major role in cementing the Museum of Modern Art as one of the most significant institutions in the world. MoMA was founded in 1929 and Paley fulfilled various roles at the museum including patron, trustee, president, and board chairman from 1937 until his death.

A Taste for Modernism will be on view at the Portland Museum of Art through September 8, 2013. It will them travel to the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (October 10, 2013-January 5, 2013) and The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas (February-April, 2014).

After receiving some criticism for its meager collection of 20^th century art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas made a number of major acquisitions. The works will debut at the museum later this month as part of the 20^th Century Art Gallery’s rotating exhibition schedule. Along with the newly acquired works, Mark Rothko’s (1903-1970) No. 210/No. 211 (Orange), which was purchased by Crystal Bridges in 2012, will be reinstalled.

Highlights from the museum’s recent purchases include Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) Hammer and Sickle (1977). The 6 x 7 foot acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas work is a part of Warhol’s Hammer and Sickle series. Crystal Bridges also acquired a major copper and Plexiglas sculptural work by the minimalist artist Donald Judd (1928-1994). Untitled 1989 (Bernstein 89-24) (1989) stands nearly 19 feet tall and is comprised of ten box-like elements made of copper and red Plexiglas. The sculpture is a prime example of Judd’s pioneering work.

In addition to the works by Warhol and Judd, Crystal Bridges acquired Max Weber’s (1864-1920) early modernist painting, Burlesque #1 (1909); Agnes Pelton’s (1881-1961) desert inspired oil on canvas work, Sand Storm (1932); and Marvin Dorwart Cone’s (1891-1965) Stone City Landscape (1936), which is executed in the Regionalist tradition.

The international financial services group, Credit Suisse, has decided to donate a portrait of Alexander Hamilton by Revolution-era painter, John Trumbull (1756-1843), to not one, but two museums. The painting has been on loan to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas since it opened to the public in 2011.

Credit Suisse decided that giving the portrait to Crystal Bridges and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, two well-known institutions, would maximize the public’s enjoyment of the work by expanding its audience. The shared ownership will see that the portrait remains in Arkansas until the summer, when it will travel to the Met for a year. The painting will return to Crystal Bridges in 2014 for another year. Eventually the painting will be on view at each museum for two-year stretches.

Credit Suisse acquired the striking full-length portrait in 2000 when it absorbed the New York-based investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. Richard Jenrette, one of the bank’s founding partners, had assembled a remarkable art collection for the company that became part of Credit Suisse’s acquisition.  

The New York Chamber of Commerce commissioned Trumbull to paint the Hamilton portrait in 1791 while he was serving as President Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury.

On March 9, 2013 the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened a sweeping exhibition focused on the work of the widely popular 20^th century painter and illustrator, Norman Rockwell (1894-1978). Rockwell is best known for his archetypical portrayals of American life as well as his cover illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post magazine, a job he fulfilled for over 40 years.

American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell is a traveling exhibition that features 50 original Rockwell paintings as well as the 323 covers the artist created for the Saturday Evening Post. The show features some of Rockwell’s most recognized images including Triple Self-Portrait (1960), Girl at Mirror (1954), and Going and Coming (1947) as well as portraits of presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. American Chronicles includes a number of pieces from Rockwell’s archives such as preliminary sketches, color studies, photographs, letters, manuscripts, and detailed drawings.

The well-rounded exhibition allows visitors a glimpse into Rockwell’s artistic process and illustrates how he came to be the visual interpreter of day-to-day life in post-World War II America. American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell will be on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum through May 27, 2013.