Ride the wave of modern art
William Glackens exhibit opens in Fort Lauderdale.
OnSunday, visitors to the NSUMuseum of Art Fort Lauderdale should notice a familiar realism painter’s works adorning the first- floor walls: William Glackens, one of the earliest practitioners of American modern art.
The museum is hosting the first major retrospective of the painter’sworks in 46 years, titled“William Glackens” and featuring 85 paintings and paper sketches drawn fromits permanent collection and on loan from other museums, including the WhitneyMuseum of American Art and theMetropolitan Museum of Art.
While the museum already fills its upstairs Glackens Wing with the painter’s elegant originals— it owns about 500 suchworks— this survey marks the first time so many of the Philadelphia- born artist’s paintings have appeared in a museum at once.
“It’s long overdue. The artist deserves a fresh look,” saysAvis Berman, a Glackens expert and the show’s independent curator, who will lecture about the painter at 2 p. m. Sunday. “Alot of these haven’t been seen in public for 50 years, and that is this show’s strength.”
Glackens, who died in1938, is credited with delivering an early, American- ledwave of modern art, rooted in the European influence of EdouardManet, Paul Cezanne andHenriMatisse. His works fromthe early1900s include dark- hued paintings of vaudeville scenes such as “Hammerstein’sRoof Garden” and portraits of his bemused- looking wife, the painter Edith Dimock. He captured the crowded, workingclass urban realism of NewYork’sGreenwichVillage, where he lived, but also color- saturated summer seashore scenes at Ellis Island and at Bellport in Long Island.
Glackens began his career illustrating for newspapers and magazines, sketching scenes frommemory, including the charge up San Juan Hill during the SpanishAmericanWar forMcClure’s magazine. Photojournalism was still “unreliable” in the 1890s, Berman says, but his faithful memory proved useful years later for diagramming more complex landscapes, especially “Christmas Shoppers, Madison Square,” a1912watercolor showing an intersection clogged with FordModelTs, men toting sandwich boards, a street- corner Santa and, at the bottom center, a man picking the pocket of a poshlooking shopper.
“There are so many tiny vignettes here,” Berman says. “This is a composite of many days of visiting the square, being an eyewitness to the commercialism. He had such an incredible visual memory.”