William Glackens: Park at Gracie Square

Katherine Bogden 


When I first moved to New York in 2006 I lived in Yorkville, just a few blocks from Gracie Mansion. I frequently walked in the park there, which runs along the East River from 79th to 87th Streets. In fact, when I left the neighborhood, it was that park, called Carl Schurz Park, that I missed the most. 

And so last year, during an exhibition at the gallery, I was pleased to assist the head of our research department, Lisa N. Peters, with research on William Glackens’s, Park at Gracie Square (Carl Schurz Park, New York). At first, we couldn’t understand the picture’s title. Could the park have once been called Gracie Square? Many phone calls and newspaper articles later, we found out the following information:

John Whorf Watercolors

By Lisa N. Peters

What strikes me in looking at the watercolors of John Whorf, featured in our current show of five American watercolorists, is a feeling that I’d like to be in the places that Whorf painted and that this might actually be possible!
 

Although Whorf depicted many of the same types of subjects as those of Winslow Homer and Frank Benson in their own watercolors, what stands out as distinctive in Whorf’s work is the sense that the experiences he shows us are accessible ones. Large expanses often open up before us within his frames, yet there is always a point of reference from which to look out and see through the artist’s eyes.

Rather than statements of artistic dexterity (although he was dexterous) or poetic rumination (and there is certainly poetry in his sensitivity to light in particular), what appears to have interested Whorf time after time were those moments when, in the course of doing something active or sportive in the outdoors, we are struck with a sudden sense of amazement at just how beautiful nature is—it’s as if we hadn’t noticed what is around us because we are too busy, and then there’s a moment where we look up and become aware of our surroundings.

Dodge Macknight’s Watercolors

During the early twentieth century, Boston was an important center for watercolor painting in the United States. And when we think about the watercolor tradition there, names such as Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and Frank Benson immediately come to mind. All were masters of this difficult and challenging medium, which was especially popular among artists who loved to work outdoors. This was certainly the case with Dodge Macknight (1860-1950), who is considered by many––including myself––to be the most avant-garde of the Boston watercolorists because of his use of a daring palette. Indeed, of all the Boston watercolorists I’ve done research on at Spanierman Gallery, Macknight has proven to be one of the most interesting to write about, because of the diversity of their subject matter and most importantly, because they are truly dazzling in their coloration. I’m certainly not the only admirer of his work: during his day, Macknight’s aquarelles were acquired by such discerning collectors as Isabella Stewart Gardner (who created a special “Macknight Room” at Fenway Court) and Sarah Choate Sears. Their patronage no doubt inspired other art aficionados to collect his paintings as well––to the extent that by the early 1920s, sales from Macknight’s watercolor shows never dropped below the $10,000 mark!

Macknight began his career as a theatrical and sign painter, after which he studied with the academic painter Fernand Cormon in Paris during the mid-1880s. However, his formal training appears to have had little effect on his art. Instead, his sojourn in the French capital brought him into contact with Vincent van Gogh, a fellow student who shared his interest in modern strategies of color and light. In fact, Macknight’s aesthetic outlook was so like his own that at one point Van Gogh invited him to join him and Paul Gauguin at Arles, declaring that his American friend “paints better than most Yankees do.”

A peripatetic artist, Macknight created watercolors inspired by his travels throughout Europe, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, Mexico, the Grand Canyon and his native New England. In the current exhibition, Five American Watercolorists, Macknight’s fluent technique is readily apparent but it’s his use of color that really makes him stand out, especially the way he manipulated it to create light. Take, for example, Jamaica Landscape: Tropical Island (above), with its deep electric purple––one of Macknight’s favorite colors and one that prompted Boston’s conservative critics (who were more attuned to the harmonious chromatic combinations of the impressionists) to dub his works “Macknightamares.” Macknight’s signature purple can also be seen in Haying in the Salt Marshes (shown at right), from 1924, but the dominant tones––the ones that evoke the moist, heat-laden atmosphere, are vivid oranges and yellows. In walking around the exhibit today, I was reminded of a review I found in the February 1, 1930, issue of Art Digest, in which a New York critic is quoted as proclaiming “If [Macknight] has ever seen anything drab and dismal in Morocco, Spain, Cape Cod, Jamaica or New Hampshire . . . he has not set anything of the kind on paper.”

Carol Lowrey

Ashcan School - Part III

Lisa N. Peters

Ashcan School continued . . . Now that some issues of this quite confusing term have been addressed, it’s time to turn to the question of . . . what is it that makes an Ashcan School work, which seems less confusing.


Everett Shinn
Woman Dressing, ca. 1904What can be said in brief is that, instead of the genteel subjects painted by American artists inspired by French Impressionism, whose urban views generally consisted of the parks and squares frequented by the wealthy, Ashcan images depicted the new realities of urban experience in the early twentieth century, which meant that their creators (or the New York Realists) did not shy away from capturing the gritty, crude, and seamy aspects of New York life, not neglecting evidence of the disparities in social rank that were apparent during a day of dramatic immigration, a burgeoning lower class, dense neighborhoods bursting with tenements where laundry lines crisscrossed over dark alleyways, and urban crowding. They also painted the novelties of modern life in the city. They portrayed crowded street scenes where the El train rumbled overhead (the full awareness of the misery caused by these noisy tracks clanking overhead and dripping oil on pedestrians was not yet at the forefront in the 1910s), Chinese restaurants (a new phenomenon of New York life then—imagine that!), boxing matches (this was the prehistoric age of American professional sports), and children sledding in Central Park (it was a new idea then that children should have free time, the concept that is now destroying our lives—or at least mine), and yes, occasionally, vagrants picking through garbage left on the street.

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.