Drawings from the Boston Public Library
Curated by Robert Conway
Exhibition Available 2007 - 2008
Billy Sunday
George Bellows
Boston Public Library
The Trust for Museum Exhibitions is privileged to offer for exhibition an incomparable collection of drawings by the modern American master George Bellows. The Albert H. Wiggin Collection of the Boston Public Library, which contains nearly 50 masterpieces by one of America’s greatest draftsmen, was last exhibited in the 1950s and has never been presented in its entirety. Demonstrating the artist’s technical and aesthetic versatility, these drawings range in subject from popular sporting events and powerful social commentary, to intimate figure studies and family portraits.
A general lack of scholarly attention to the artist’s drawings might suggest that the medium was, for Bellows, secondary. As the Wiggin Collection demonstrates repeatedly, Bellows created large, highly finished drawings as ends in themselves, as well as developing sketches along the way to the creation of major works in other media.
This groundbreaking exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue of the Wiggin Collection that will feature an important group of essays examining Bellows’ status as a great draftsman, his place among American realist artists and writers, the relationship of these powerful works to his better known paintings and prints, and the history of the Wiggin gift itself.
Window on the West
Views from the American Frontier
The Phelan Collection
Exhibition Available 2007 - 2008
Hopi Maiden
Louis Akin
It is not just the West that you have seen in the movies, and not the stuff of legend, but rather the West as a newly-minted place. These 60 paintings from the Arthur J. Phelan Collection were selected to give a historically accurate cross-section of what really happened in the expansion of the West. They depict the people who moved west from the Mississippi. They examine how the West was gradually transformed over the decades as the continent filled and the frontier receded and then disappeared.
Included are works by the greats – Frederic Remington, Carl Wimar, Alfred Jacob Miller, Karl Bodmer and John Frederick Kensett, as well as Lone Wolf who was perhaps the first academically trained Native American artist. However, this exhibition is unique in that it emphasizes the views of lesser-known men and women artists, personally recording what they observed in the newly-founded country.
“I use art as a way to try to visualize the past – it becomes my personal time machine. Let’s not take John Wayne’s West or the Indian aficionado’s West as the only West. There were many Wests,” says Phelan who became interested in the West in his graduate study. His collection is our Window on the West, a balanced, historical view from the artists themselves.
Rivers, Sea and Shore
Reflections on Water
Exhibition Available 2007 - 2008
The Bark Columbia
(Ships in New York Harbor)
detail
Antonio Jacobsen
Rivers, Sea and Shore is an exhibition of 50 beautiful and dramatic paintings exploring more than a century of American life on the water, from 1830 to 1945. Organized from the collection of Arthur J. Phelan and sure to appeal to viewers as much as the water itself does, the exhibition is grouped from three principal themes:
Ships and Seascapes, Rivers and Boats
Beginning in the early nineteenth century, American captains commissioned paintings of their ships. The earliest such painting in the exhibition was done in 1828 by John S. Blunt and likely inspired by the return of the U.S.S. Constitution from an extended tour in the Mediterranean. The power and motion of waves, seen in William Trost Richards’ Reflections in the Surf (c. 1895) was a challenge to realistic painters, and one seen often in this exhibition.
Seaside Towns
After impressionism crossed the Atlantic, artist colonies were established on the Northeast Coast. Many notable artists working near Old Lyme, Connecticut, are represented in this exhibition including those by Robert Vonnoh, Guy Wiggins and Edmund Graecen. Many Connecticut artists painted seaside towns that had long been associated with whaling or commerce, reflecting nostalgia for a pre-industrial time. They include Noank Harbor by Eliot Clark, views of Mystic by Walter Clark and George Thompson, and a view of Greenwich by Elmer McCrae.
Life by the Water
As impressionism spread people were increasingly shown enjoying the beach, such as in paintings by Graecen and Percy E. Moran, and engaging in sport, suggested in Frank Benson’s Afternoon Ducks. By the 1930s, artistic subjects began to turn to industrialization. Concerns about joblessness created greater respect for industrial waterfronts, ferry boats, iron ships, bridges, and cars – all seen in this exhibition.