Annie Gooding Sykes

Walking through Five American Watercolorists, I was reminded that watercolor is a surprisingly demanding medium, despite its seemingly effortless—when done well—results.

Although all five artists included in the show handle the medium adeptly, Annie Gooding Sykes is perhaps my favorite. In viewing her striking body of work it becomes apparent she had an exceptional ability to handle the intricacies of the medium.

She was also a remarkable woman.

Even by contemporary standards, she had it all: an extensive education, successful career, supportive husband, and two daughters. She traveled widely (in North America and Europe), was revered by her peers, successfully sold her work, and was a supporter of numerous organizations, many of which promoted the recognition of woman artists. Impressive all the more, Sykes was born in 1855.


Mending Nets (pictured here) is my favorite work in the exhibition. Our research suggests it was painted in Nonquitt, Massachusetts, where the artist’s family had a summer home. The picture shows two groups of figures, yet the composition is dominated far more by the presence of color—or absence there of—than by figural elements. I can’t help but wonder if the muted colors hint at another side to Sykes, one drawn more to soft blues and grays than the heartening reds, yellows and greens so often found in her work.

To my eye, with such a vague foreground, the artist’s position in the scene seems in question—is she on the docks? On a boat? Looking on from a building’s porch? Like the color, the artist seems both present and absent, simultaneously. As a viewer, I find myself feeling similarly—taken in by the scene but aware the moment has come to pass.

As a woman myself, I feel a sort of collective pride when viewing these pictures for Sykes was extremely successful during a period which was incredibly trying for women artists.

It’s been nearly eight decades since her death, yet in Five American Watercolorists Annie Gooding Sykes once again holds her own; she is the only woman represented.

Katherine Bogden 

Ashcan School - Part II

Arthur Bowen Davies
Children Playing, ca. 1896
Oil on canvas, 18 x 22 in, Lisa N. Peters
Controversy and question: so . . . where did the term “Ashcan School” originate from? Most scholars seem to agree that it appeared long after the heyday of the group, surfacing first in the 1934 book Art in America in Modern Times by art dealer Holger Cahill and art historian Alfred H. Barr, who used it to describe the derision with which the Eight’s 1908 Macbeth Galleries show was received. Cahill and Barr wrote that “in retrospect [the Eight’s] program seems moderate enough, but when they first showed as a group in New York in 1908, they were anathematized as ‘the Ashcan School’ and ‘the Revolutionary Black Gang.’” William Innes Homer in Robert Henri and His Circle (1969, Cornell University Press) says that it was Cahill who probably came up with the term, having heard it in a derisive statement made around the time by the cartoonist Art Young toward the earlier works of Sloan and others, which Young was contrasting negatively with the more socially conscious art of the then contemporary Regionalists. However, and a big however . . . not only does it seem that the term “Ashcan” (defined by the dictionary as “a large metal barrel, can, or similar receptacle for ashes, garbage, or refuse”) never did appear in reviews of the 1908 exhibition (please correct me if I’m wrong), but the press reviews of the show were mixed, with many critics praising the animated and distinctively national qualities of the works. The negative comments were directed toward what one said was the painters’ “unhealthy nay even coarse and vulgar point of view,” while other members of the press honed in on what they saw as the poor drawing in the works. None of the reviews appear to have referred to ash cans, garbage, or rubbish, etc., so why did the term Ashcan stick? Perhaps the reason is that it seems to fit this work, both its “ashy” tones and the painting of subjects then considered ugly or seamy, portraying the some of the undersides of urban life. The artists who created these works were the first to see beauty in this phenomena, however, and we often have ever since—perhaps because they allowed us a means to do so.

Robert Henri
The Strollers Sketch, ca. 1917
Pastel on paper laid on board
12 1/2 x 20 in. One alternative, proposed in American Impressionism and Realism, the 1994 catalogue that accompanied an exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and written by H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry is to use “New York Realists,” presumably as a replacement for “Ashcan School.” This makes some sense, but is it too bland?, lacking the character of a term ingrained in our minds and implanted in scholarship.

If you have a chance, please do let us know what you think. Does it make sense to keep using Ashcan School as a term or not? Should we replace it with “New York Realists?”

In the next and last post, I will consider what we might say distinguishes an Ashcan School work.

(See Ashcan School-Part I)

Hayley Lever as a Watercolorist

Hayley Lever (1876-1958)
Fishing Wharf, Marblehead, MA, ca. 1924
Watercolor on paper, 17 1/2 x 22 in. Monday, September 28th, marks the birthday of Hayley Lever (1876-1958), an Australian-American artist I had the pleasure of writing about, on behalf of Spanierman Gallery, in 2003. Born in Bowden Tannery, a suburb of Adelaide, he was christened Richard, but as a professional artist he preferred to use his second and last names only. I had conducted research on this talented painter on numerous occasions in the past, but the opportunity to do a book-length publication allowed me to examine all facets of Lever’s oeuvre––from the marines and urban scenes he produced in England and France during the early 1900s to the portrayals of New York City, New Jersey, upstate New York and coastal Massachusetts created after his move to the United States in 1912. His paintings are very personal, reflecting his belief that “art is the re-creation of mood in line, form and color,” but they were informed by styles such as impressionism and post-impressionism, including the bold aesthetic of Vincent van Gogh. In fact, it was Lever’s deft combination of realism, modernism and his own subjective vision that contributed to his popularity with collectors such as Duncan Phillips.

Ashcan School - Part I

Lisa N. Peters


Focus on the Ashcan School. . . . hmm

We currently have an online Ashcan School show on our website, so the question came up of what exactly is the Ashcan School????
 

I will try to answer this question as succinctly as possible in a three-part post series.

This so-called “school” refers to a group of artists who painted gritty, vital views of many strata of New York City life in the early twentieth century.


William Glackens
The Terrace, 1896-97
Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in. Yet there’s a problem: the Ashcan School was not only never literally a “school,” but it also never consisted of an organized group of artists. Because of this, to my mind, it seems more reasonable to use the term “Ashcan School” to refer to works that fit certain criteria associated with this school rather than to try to assign this label to certain artists.

Clearly, though, there were several painters who can be viewed as the leading Ashcan Schoolers. These—most notably Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, and George Luks—all belonged to the group called the Eight, which broke off in 1907 from the National Academy of Design in protest against the way that the organizers of its exhibitions favored the work of academic painters over the more original works by artists of a more progressive bent. “The academy is hopelessly against what is real and vital in American art,” said Henri.

However, even in their statements for what turned out to be their groundbreaking 1908 exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries in New York, the group proclaimed: “We’ve come together because we’re so unlike.” Their works probably look more consistent to us today than they did to the artists then, but few of the paintings by group members Arthur B. Davies or Maurice Prendergast are in keeping with what we would deem to be the Ashcan School idiom, and Ernest Lawson’s works are often closer to those his Impressionist-inspired predecessors (such as his teacher John Twachtman) than to darker manner associated with the Ashcan School.

Some other artists kept more consistently to the Ashcan mode, perhaps even more so than the members of the Eight, such as George Bellows and Jerome Myers, while other artists of the time only occasionally crossed into Ashcan territory, depending on what they were painting and where they were in their careers. To make things even more confusing, many members of the Eight took off in highly individualistic directions later in their careers, creating works that are far outside of an Ashcan style let alone an Ashcan point of view.

In Part II, I will discuss the origins and controversy of the term.

George B. Luks (1867-1933)
The Guitar (a portrait of the artist's brother with his son), 1908
Oil on canvas, 28-1/4 x 29 inches

 Robert Henri (1865 - 1929)

Sea and Land (Monhegan Island, Maine), ca. 1909

Oil on panel, 3 3/4 x 6 inches

George Bellows (1882-1925)
Head of Boy (Gray Boy), ca. 1905
Oil on canvas, 26-1/4 x 20-1/2 inches

Dan Christensen

Christensen enthusiasts: take note!

Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting which opened at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, in May will move to the Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln on October 23, 2009 and remain on view until the end of January, 2010.

The show’s press release states: “This survey of his paintings documents [Christensen’s] never-ending quest to understand the possibilities of color, paint, and pictorial space. Often placed within the Color Field movement, Christensen’s experimentation with tools and techniques make him resistant to any one label or category but do place him among this country’s most ambitious abstract and gestural painters. Art critic Clement Greenberg called his work ‘post-painterly abstraction’ and said, in 1990, ‘Dan Christensen is one of the painters on whom the course of American art depends.’”

A catalogue, by the noted art historian Karen Wilkin, accompanies the exhibition.
Another exhibition of the artist’s work, Dan Christensen: The Plaid Paintings, will be on view at Spanierman Modern, New York from October 13 to November 14, 2009.

Christensen’s plaids, such as Night Delight at left, were described by Jim Monte, curator at the Whitney Museum in the 1970s, as offering “a very unique contribution to the history of pure abstraction…a freshly conceived approach to geometric configuration, a necessary antidote to that all-consuming dullness” of much of the Minimal painting of the 1960s and 1970s.

Additional information on this exhibition will be available soon.

Read more on Dan Christensen.

Adam Lehr "Niagara Falls" and Howard Russell Butler "California, Moonlight"

Our director, Ira Spanierman, would like to take you through a quick video tour of the current exhibition Summer Selections, showing works priced from $4,000 to $25,000.  Ira also shares his thoughts on Adam Lehr's Niagara Falls (1880) and Howard Russell Butler's California, Moonlight (ca. 1905-1926).

(Trouble viewing? Click to view on YouTube)

Please leave us your own comments and observations on the Lehr and Butler paintings. Ira would love to hear your thoughts as well.

Summer Selections ends September 26th. Stop in to see its final week!

Hampton Event Calendars

Since we've been on the topic of East Hampton I wanted to share some web info with our Hamptons audience. There are some great events calendars that I've come across on Hamptons.com, BlogHamptons, The East Hampton Star, 27east.com, and DansHamptons. All are chock-full of events,  art related and otherwise!

• The Hamptons.com calendar makes it very easy to peruse by allowing you to sort by region and category. 
• The BlogHamptons calendar is a Google Calendar, which means you can easily add it to your own Google Calendar, if you have one. 
• The East Hampton Star's calendar is EH specific and breaks events down into categories.
  
• 27east.com has a nice "weekend events email blast" you can sign up for.
• DansHamptons has a cool mobile-specific site if you're on the go and want to check events from your phone browser.

Each site allows you to submit your own events/listings.


Thanks to all for keeping us in the Hampton loop!  

If I've left any out, please leave me a link in the comments.

Clifford Smith's Ocean Field Paintings

One of Spanierman Modern's contemporary artists, Clifford Smith, is currently part of The Art of Fashion in the Hamptons held at Guild Hall (Aug. 15-Oct. 12, 2009). In the exhibition, fashion designers chose works from Guild Hall’s permanent collection as well as local artists’ works as inspiration for hand crafted vignettes. “The exhibition uses both art and fashion to depict how for decades the Hamptons have attracted and nurtured artists, designers, society mavens, as well as ordinary folks, from the locals to weekend renters," stated Ruth Appelhof, executive director of Guild Hall.

We are thrilled that Clifford Smith’s Ocean Field II (2009) was chosen by fashion designer Nicole Miller. Miller said, “Weekends in The Hamptons recharge and invigorate me". While imagery of the ocean can evoke something different within each of us, here Smith shares his thoughts behind these unique seascape paintings (taken from our press release of the show Clifford Smith, held at Spanierman Modern this past January):

Of the “Ocean Field” paintings for which Smith is acclaimed, he notes: “When I’m painting water, I am thinking of how it tastes and feels, of expressing my central response to it, instead of just a visual one.” What motivates Smith is a desire to “get beyond the physical essence of something,” to express a broader understanding of it. “When I’m looking at a landscape, that landscape is alive,” Smith says, “and I’m responding to what I know and feel about it.”

A few samples of Smith's ocean "fields”:

Study for Blue Ocean Field, 2009, oil on paper, 24 x 34 inches

Study for Grey Ocean Field, 2009, oil on paper, 20 x 28 inches

If you'd like info, please see Clifford Smith works, biography, and past Spanierman exhibitions.

Josh Dayton

Also featured in Four Visions is painter and sculptor Josh Dayton (b. 1956). Art historian Phyllis Braff has described Dayton’s use of materials in his paintings as “daring…extend[ing] beyond surface boundaries.”

Dayton, who grew up in East Hampton, cited Pollock as an early influence on his art. He was also influenced by the work of Alfonso Ossorio, whom he met when as a teenager he assisted his carpenter father with some work on Ossorio’s East Hampton estate.

Near Bottom, shown here, is dominated by color. Created with acrylic and paper on canvas, the organic forms juxtaposed against flat color fields are representative of Dayton’s recent paintings.

The exhibition features all recent paintings by Josh Dayton, priced from $2,000 to $8,000.

View all Josh Dayton works in the exhibition.

John Little

John Little (1907-1984) is one of the four artists represented in Four Visions. Curated by Arlene Bujese, the exhibition is now on view at Spanierman Gallery, LLC, East Hampton.

A painter and sculptor, Little attended the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy and the Art Students League, New York, where he studied with George Grosz. He also trained under Hans Hofmann at Hofmann’s renowned schools in New York and Provincetown. Along with Elizabeth Parker and Alfonso Ossorio, he helped to establish the Signa Gallery, the first gallery in East Hampton to focus on contemporary, abstract artists.

In a 2008 exhibition catalogue Little’s daughter Abigail Tooker described her father as a “dedicated focused man” who loved gardening. She tells of the frequent dinner parties her parents hosted full of “brilliant, passionate, creative people” (among them Lee Krasner and Alfonso Ossorio) who would request that Little read from I Ching, from which he studied.

Tooker wrote of her father: “I see him standing before a canvas supported on his big paint-spattered easel in the big barn studio lit by the immense north window. Standing, left arm bent across his chest, left hand clutching his right arm, dangling paintbrush held in his right hand. Standing and absorbing and studying the canvas before him for what seemed hours, then step forward…a brush stroke applied to the canvas…step back, and more contemplation…more study.”

Pictured here is Purple Life. Rendered with rich blues, lavenders, and splashes of hot reds and yellows, the painting hints at the living earth—ocean, sky, and arched natural forms.

Works by John Little in the exhibition range in price from $14,000 to $42,500 and explore a range of media.

View all John Little works in the exhibition.

Hans Van de Bovenkamp

Your Turn
Bronze, 23 x 33 x 17 inches

Another artist featured in Four Visions (see Robert Richenburg post below) is Hans Van de Bovenkamp, a Dutch-born internally known architectural designer and sculptor, who has designed, fabricated, and maintained unique sculptures, fountains, and installations in collaboration with architects and designers, producing over one hundred commissions. Small in scale, the works in this exhibition derive from his Menhir series and refer to monolithic form.

Adopted from the French Breton language (men [stone] and hir [long] [modern welsh maen hir or “long stone”], a menhir is “an upright monumental stone standing either alone or with others.” Found throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia (including Stonehenge) and originating from different periods in pre-history, such forms, once perhaps territorial markers or sites of Druidic human sacrifice, served functions that have been lost to time.

Describing traditional Menhirs as “sacred spaces…often associated with graves…suggest[ing] they were the primitive temples of a universal religion,” noted critic Donald Kuspit wrote that Van de Bovenkamp’s “Menhirs” seem in direct conversation with those of the past, despite being from bronze and stainless steel rather than stone. ”Their fluid edges suggest organic figures, and their fragmentation are “sublimely attuned to the life of every other fragment.”

View all works by Hans Van de Bovenkamp.

Robert Richenburg

On September 10th, Spanierman Gallery, East Hampton, opened Four Visions, curated by Arlene Bujese, featuring four artists with intersecting careers and connections with Long Island. The artists were selected by Arlene Bujese a well-known presence in the East Hampton art world and the curator of the Ossorio Foundation.

Highlighted here is the work of one of the four artists: Robert Richenburg (1917-2006). Richenburg, who trained under Hans Hofmann, was a contemporary of Jackson Pollock, and belonged to “The Club,” along with Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline.

From the artist’s obituary in the New York Times: “Mr. Richenburg was praised by critics and sought after by collectors, and was particularly known for ominous paintings in which fields of black were punctuated by bursts of color and line.” ("Robert Richenburg, 89, Artist of Abstract Expressionist Works, Dies,” Randy Kennedy, New York Times, October 13, 2006.)

Noted art critic Lawrence Campbell wrote in 1959: Richenburg’s process involved working “in an automatist trance, weaving a wonderful complexity, tossing paint into a sea of multicolored surf. Then he pulls across a curtain of paint as black as Egypt’s night. When dry, he digs back into it, discovering bit by bit the forms of his painting. He is like the Romantic archeologist Heinrich Schliemann who looked for Troy but dug through to a civilization a thousand years older to find jewelry.” (Read the full 1959 ArtNews review).

Above is The City (1960), relating to Richenburg’s Black Paintings series begun in the 1950s and first exhibited at the legendary Ninth Street Show (1951). The artist described his process of these paintings as “pulling in the immense, haunting blackness around me, becoming one with it.”

Included in the show are works by the artist from the late 1940s through the 1960s in a variety of media; they range in price from $8,000 to $68,000.

View additional work by Robert Richenburg.

Read a New York Times Review of his first New York exhibition.

Gary Komarin: Leandro and Luz

“The act of painting and the condition of being an artist is about making choices and wrestling with the unknown. Putting paint to canvas in the age of the microchip keeps me rooted to earlier times and all times.”

“My work proceeds largely without preconception, and unfolds step by step. Painting travels along a road from mystery to order, chaos to illumination. Whether the image is narrative or not, the commitment to plastic concerns: color, line, and space are as important as image. My ideas come from practically everywhere: art history, popular culture, dreams, drama, and melodrama. The paintings that work best are those that don’t answer all the questions.”

In these statements, Gary Komarin expresses the outlook by which he is guided in his work, and his opulent, robust abstractions resonate with a witty vitality, both innocent and knowing. They counter our screen-dependent lives with surfaces that are boldly gestural yet softly, subtly layered, elegantly harmonious yet cartoonishly playful. The artist constantly reconfigures his vision as he explores aesthetic and psychological revelations.

The energy at the opening of Komarin’s second solo exhibition at Spanierman Modern, which occurred last Wednesday (September 9), matched that of his work. Above, photo of Gary Komarin with Ira Spanierman and others in attendance.

For information on, and purchase of, the catalogue accompanying the show, including an essay by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D., click here.

In the show, Komarin’s paintings carry out a discourse, but one that each viewer is challenged to read in a different way. Gregarious and sociable, evoking baseball in the backyard in the summer, footprints on stepping stones, The Digressive Interlocutor  (right) reaches out to the more introverted In Praise of the Canadian Navy (below), where an upside down heart floats and pulsates within a realm of varied blues evoking unquiet contemplation. The contrast expresses the complexity of personality and subtleties of mood and unspoken human interactions.

Born in New York City, Komarin is the son of two immigrants: his father was a Czech architect who fled the Holocaust, and his mother was from Vienna, where she developed the skills at baking the cakes that have become a leitmotif in Komarin’s art. Komarin studied with the New York School painter Philip Guston at Boston University, where he received his MFA. For more on the artist, see Komarin's biography.

Please view Gary Komarin: Leandro and Luz at Spanierman Modern, exhibiting until October 10, 2009.

An American Art Blog by Spanierman Gallery, LLC

Welcome to The Spanierman Gallery Blog, a supplemental forum to our website that will provide you with information on American art through a variety of media and encourage dialogue.

Some post topics will include:

--video discussions and interviews with Ira Spanierman who began his career in the art world in his father’s auction gallery in the 1940s. He has a vast and perhaps unmatched body of experience and knowledge of American art and the New York art world as it has unfolded over the decades. Ira’s observations on art, based on his years of looking deeply and developing a rich appreciation for artists and their achievement, have always drawn a following, which we hope to share with a broader audience. (See Ira’s past video discussions on YouTube.)

--research in progress, in which our research and archives departments will share the perplexing and intriguing problems that arise in cataloguing and placing works of art in their proper context.

--interviews with contemporary artists whose work we are exhibiting at Spanierman Modern and Spanierman Gallery, LLC at East Hampton.

--links of interest and relevance to the gallery’s holdings and exhibitions and information on exhibitions, events, and lectures that we feel you might enjoy.

--thoughts and advice from our staff on such topics as handling a work of art, framing, photography, and keeping track of auction activity.

We are pleased to receive and respond to any questions, inquiries, or suggestions.

Spanierman Gallery, LLC
Servicing the fine arts community for over half a century.