Displaying items by tag: Marsden Hartley

Suspended Forms: American Modernism 1908-1928 opened yesterday, January 31, 2013 at Driscoll Babcock Galleries in New York and will run through February 16, 2013. The exhibition focuses on American modern art’s earlier phase and includes paintings and drawings by modern masters such as Alfred Maurer (1868-1932), Walt Kuhn (1877-1949), Stuart Davis (1892-1964), Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), and Joseph Stella (1877-1946).

Suspended Forms will be held at Driscoll Babcock’s relatively new location in Chelsea. Founded 160 years ago, Driscoll Babcock Galleries moved from its former Fifth Avenue location to Chelsea in September 2012.

Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 opened on December 23 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and celebrates the bold art movement that swept across mediums and continents during the first half of the twentieth century. Severing ties with the realistic, practical images that dominated western art, abstraction infiltrated everything from sculpture and painting to poetry, music, and film.

Inventing Abstraction brings together over 350 works including paintings, stained glass, needlepoint, film, sculpture, and illustrated books. Organized by Leah Dickerman, a curator in MoMA’s painting and sculpture department, and Masha Chlenova, a curatorial assistant, the show includes many pieces that are on loan from outside museums.

Inventing Abstraction features works by Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), and many others. While extremely comprehensive, the exhibition draws connections between artists and illustrates the development of abstraction over time.

On December 22, American Legends: From Calder to O’Keeffe opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The exhibition features works by defining artists of the first half of the twentieth century including Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), Alexander Calder (1898-1976), Stuart Davis (1892-1964), Arthur Dove (1880-1946), Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) , Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), and Elie Nadelman (1880-1946).

Drawing from the Whitney’s impressive permanent collection, the yearlong show is organized into small-scale retrospectives for each artist and includes iconic and lesser-known works across a range of mediums. While, many of the works have not been on view in years, the show also includes some of the Whitney’s best-known holdings including Edward Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun (1961), Jacob Lawrence’s War Series 1946), and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Summer Days (1936).  

Curated by Barbara Haskell, the exhibition will undergo a rotation in May 2013 so that other artists’ works can be installed. Including realist and modernist masterpieces, American Legends illustrates the dynamic and varied nature of American art during the early twentieth century.  

Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton’s large-scale import of big-name artworks for her just-opened Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark., has been the talk of the nation for months.

Now, the board of another museum in the country’s sprawling middle has decided to sell off what one expert describes as the “crown jewel” of its collection.

The Birger Sandzen Memorial Gallery on the campus of Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kan., is scheduled to sell its sole work by Marsden Hartley, one of the leading American modernist painters of the 20th century.

Curator Ron Michael said the gallery fell $700,000 short on its recent capital campaign to fund much needed renovations and hopes to raise that amount and more by selling Hartley’s “Untitled (Still life)” (1919) at an auction Thursday at Sotheby’s in New York.

Executed in oil on board and measuring 32 by almost 26 inches, the work is estimated to bring between $700,000 and $900,000.

“It was a very tough decision to make,” Michael said. “The board decided it was in the best interest of the long-term sustainability of the gallery.”

“We really looked at a variety of options,” he added, “and felt this would be the most expedient way to complete the renovation.”

The Hartley still life, featuring a bouquet of flowers in a Pueblo Indian pot before a window with a view of the Southwestern landscape, entered the gallery’s collection in 1968 as a gift from a Bethany piano teacher, Oscar Thorsen.

Thorsen bought the piece in Santa Fe, N.M., during a trip there with Birger Sandzen, a widely exhibited Swedish-born painter whose reputation has climbed considerably in recent years. Sandzen taught at Bethany for more than 50 years. His family founded the Birger Sandzen Memorial Gallery.

Sandzen admired Hartley, whom he praised as “one of our best American moderns.” In 1919, he included two of Hartley’s paintings in a traveling exhibit he organized in Lindsborg.

When Thorsen died in 1968, he left his entire collection, including the Hartley still life and works by Sandzen and others, to the Sandzen Memorial Gallery.

The gallery decided to sell it, Michael said, “because the Hartley painting didn’t fit the gallery’s mission statement: to promote Birger Sandzen and his contemporaries and associates.”

“We felt the Hartley would be better utilized in another institution,” he added.

At least one illustrious alumnus of the college vehemently disagrees.

Randall Griffey, curator of American art at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in Massachusetts, calls the sale “a tragedy.”

“They fell short on the capital campaign, so the board voted to sell its crown jewel,” he said.

Griffey, a Hartley scholar who earned a bachelor of arts degree at Bethany in 1990, said the Sandzen Gallery’s painting played a significant part in the trajectory of his career.

“It was the first Hartley I laid my eyes on when I was in college there,” he said.