ism of the week - week 4

Each week during our current exhibition, ...isms: Unlocking Art's Mysteries, we will post deeper insight into one of the paintings on view. Past the credit line, past the exhibition label, Assistant Curator Amanda Burdan shares her thoughts:

Elmer MacRae’s Still Life with Magnolias is among the newest paintings in the Florence Griswold Museum’s collection. This modern looking painting may seem like a surprising choice for the collection given that MacRae is an important Impressionist from the Cos Cob art colony. He is, perhaps, even more important to the overall history of American art for the work he did as a member of the American Association of Painters and Sculptors, the group that organized and mounted the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show. That pivotal exhibition helped to introduce American audiences to a broad range of the modern styles coming out of Europe. MacRae submitted Impressionist styled works to that exhibition, but soon after came under the influence of the twentieth-century Europeans, updating his style.

This still life, painted two years after the Armory Show moves away from the sketch-like images of his Impressionist years, substituting in bold brush strokes to represent the vase, flowers, and especially the patterned background. MacRae takes a step toward Modernism with the abstract qualities of the work—a radical move for a young American at the time, but he may appear to our eyes to remain conservative in his choice of subject matter. In fact, Modernists like Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso embraced the simple still life as a vehicle for their more groundbreaking experiments in style.

Elmer Livingston MacRae (1875–1953)

Still Life with Magnolias, 1915

Oil on canvas
Florence Griswold Museum

Museum purchase

ism of the week - week 3

Each week during our current exhibition, ...isms: Unlocking Art's Mysteries, we will post deeper insight into one of the paintings on view. Past the credit line, past the exhibition label, Assistant Curator Amanda Burdan shares her thoughts:

Instrumental in many ways to the establishment of abstract art in the United States, Harry Holtzman is best remembered today for his close friendship with and writing about Piet Mondrian. Holtzman’s colleague, the abstract artist Burgoyne Diller, proved pivotal to his future as an artist. Diller introduced Holtzman to the Gallatin Collection at New York University where Holtzman first encountered Mondrian’s work. Though he had not seen Mondrian’s paintings before, Holtzman had been working in a similar geometric style. Intrigued to the point of obsession, Holtzman traveled to Paris in 1934, intent on meeting Mondrian.

By 1934 Mondrian had firmly established his Neo-Plasticism, an entirely abstract style made up—in its ultimate form—strictly of horizontal and vertical lines and primary colors. Mondrian was beginning to experiment with three-dimensional interpretations of his iconic style. The two men shared theories of art and parted as friends when Holtzman returned to the United States the following spring.

Holtzman continued to be active in the New York art world, teaching classes at European modernist Hans Hoffman’s school. He, along with other advanced artists of the period founded the American Abstract Artists group in 1937, to further the cause of abstraction in this country. During the Depression Holtzman also worked as an administrator for the mural painting division of the Federal Art Program, a branch of the Works Progress Administration. In 1940, Holtzman sponsored Mondrian’s immigration to the United States, supporting the artist through the last four years of his life. Mondrian passed away, naming Holtzman as the sole heir to his estate, the administration of which consumed much of his time. The lifelong project of publishing Mondrian’s complete writings only came to fruition months before Holtzman’s death in 1987.

A recent acquisition to the Museum's collection---
Harry Holtzman (1912–1987)
Red, Orange, Green and Yellow
Oil on canvas
Florence Griswold Museum
Museum purchase, Alice Talcott Enders Purchase Fund

Exploring the modern landscape

Tula Telfair, Most Approaches suffer from the Predictable Isolation of Schools, 2010.  Oil on canvas, 72h x 108w inches. Courtesy of Forum Gallery.

Tula Telfair's powerful landscapes reflect memories of her own experiences in nature. At a young age, she witnessed the vast terrain, varied weather systems, and changing color palettes of landscapes around the world. But unlike the traditional works of the American Impressionists or Hudson River Valley School, the images on her canvases don't represent real locales.

Instead, Telfair's landscapes are imagined - vividly imagined. When I spoke to her last week about her work, she emphasized how important it is that her dramatic paintings provoke strong emotional responses or memories in viewers. As a thoroughly modern landscape painter, she creates image-based work that treats both the landscape, and its' viewer, as subject. 

As viewers, we're on the right path if we feel on edge or overwhelmed, or if a painting triggers powerful physical sensations from our own remembered experiences of the natural world.

Certain landscapes have the power to remind us how ephemeral our lives are, in the context of our existence in a mysterious universe. Many of us have experienced universal moments of awe and wonder as we have looked across a mountain range or craned our necks to see a night sky full of stars.  It's this sometimes unsettling, but essential aspect of the human experience, that Telfair's work evokes. Which landscapes have had that effect on you?