Affinities and Distinctions
Glackens and Renoir are the subject of an exhibition at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale
Glackens and Renoir are the subject of an exhibition at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale
Alfred C. Barnes (1872-1951) was an inventor and founder of the famed Barnes Foundation. William J. Glackens (1870-1938) was one of the organizers of the groundbreaking International Exhibition of Modern Art in 1913, now known as The Armory Show, which introduced modern European artists to audiences in New York, Chicago and Boston. Barnes and Glackens were childhood friends and attended Central High School in Philadelphia together.
In 1912, Barnes sent Glackens to Paris with a large sum of money “to buy some good modern paintings.” Barnes recalled later, “the most valuable single educational factor to me has been my frequent association with a life-long friend who combines greatness as an artist with a big man’s mind.”
Glackens sent back works by Paul Cézanne, vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-auguste Renoir and others. when Barnes opened the foundation in 1922, the collection contained some 400 works by French impressionists and postimpressionists, including about 178 works by Renoir (1841-1919). Glackens’ son Ira (1870-1938) bequeathed a large collection of paintings and works on paper spanning his father’s career to Nova Southwestern University Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale in 1991.The university is now home to the William J. Glackens Research Collection and Study Center. In 2014, the NSU Museum hosted the exhibition William Glackens, the first comprehensive exhibition of his work in nearly 50 years. From October 21 through May 19, 2019, it will host the exhibition William J. Glackens and Pierreauguste Renoir: affinities and Distinctions. It has been curated by Barbara Buhler Lynes, PH.D., Sunny Kaufman Senior Curator at the museum.
The exhibition brings together “25 works by each artist that illuminate
paint during other important eras of American history, including the boom years after World War II, the Cold War and “Red Scare” era, and throughout the civil rights movement in the 1960s. It should also be mentioned that White was, for a brief time, married to another important American artist, sculptor Elizabeth Catlett.
The retrospective is co-curated by Sarah Kelly Oehler, the Fieldmccormick Chair and Curator of American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, who started working on the exhibition roughly five years ago after growing familiar with nearly 50 works in the museum’s permanent collection. “I had been thinking about White for a very long time. His work is so powerful and compelling, but there wasn’t much research on it nor was there exposure
to a broader audience,” Oehler says, adding that White’s work will feel very timely to many audiences. “we’re at this moment where it feels so important to have an artist like this speak to our viewers about equality, racism, about an entire history of people of the United States who were very much denied their civil rights…our job is to provide some historical context to the art, but really the beauty of art is that people can come in and respond however they like, in their own individual ways.and I think White’s work will do that exceptionally well because it is very accessible—he created figures and people will make connections with them.”
One aspect that viewers will be drawn to, Oehler says, is the different mediums White worked in. “he worked in everything. Every conceivable media he could get his hands on: painting, drawing, oils, tempura, watercolor, pen and ink, crayon, charcoal, he was a printmaker and worked in linocut… and he often mixed all these together. Aesthetically he was pushing himself to create the best message at all times, and he chose his means accordingly,” the co-curator says. “throughout much of the 1950s and 1960 he was working as a draughtsman, but he never thinks it’s part of the hierarchy of things, he just wanted to elevate drawing and he enjoyed the process.and what’s so amazing about his work is that he mastered his art on so many different levels, and I truly mean that—he mastered everything he worked on.” Works in the retrospective include the 1951 egg tempera Our Land, which draws inspiration from two very different sources: Mexican modernism and Grant Wood’s masterpiece American Gothic.the piece shows a black woman holding a pitchfork at the open door to her home.“mexican modernists
were a primary influence on White as a younger artist. He learned his sense that art has a purpose. From Mexican modernists he also developed his figurative style, which is more naturalistic, but also very stylized,” Oehler says. “For American Gothic, I’m speaking to you as a curator of art at the home of American Gothic, so we’re excited to have this work because many artists are inspired by it, and this is White laying his own claim to American Gothic.with this piece he is engaging with the history of American art.the Wood painting was a cultural touchstone, even cultural controversy about how to define American.white was wading into that conversation with his own piece.”
In Harvest Talk, a drawing from 1953, White creates a similar image with two black men in a field with a scythe.the work was acquired by the museum in 1991, becoming the first White in the collection.“this work really embraces his more naturalistic style. He drops the stylization for these incredibly volumetric, well-rounded and beautiful figures,” Oehler says.“the men don’t look overtly political—not like the Trenton Six, which is a directly political work—but I would make the case that almost everything was political in one way. Harvest Talk is tied to a specific event, a trip made to the Soviet Union. White was an outright leftist and likely a communist. He visited the Soviet Union in 1951, which would have been very interesting to the Fbi.while he was there he was incredibly impressed, especially with social realism, which was Soviet propaganda at the time. It’s been suggested the scythe directly links the work to that trip.”
Oehler adds that White was later called before the House Un-american Activities Committee, which was outing communists and blacklisting them from their respective fields, but never had to appear as his subpoena was canceled.
Additional works in the exhibition include Gideon, a drawing of a man’s upturned face; Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man), an oil wash on board; and various studies and sketches from his five murals, including The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy from Hampton University invirginia. In addition to the mural work, the exhibition will also feature several lithographs.“white always felt that art should not be for the elites, that it should be out in the community for everyone,” Oehler says.“so he would issue high-quality offset lithographs so people could buy them for a couple of dollars, or even free calendars.”
The exhibition will feature more than 80 paintings, drawings and prints, as well as 18 photographs taken by White and several pieces of ephemera.