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.