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Changing Views: Painting As Metaphor
November 8 2013 - October 26 2014
November 8 2013 - October 26 2014
Painting is a metaphor. You cannot represent a three-dimensional world in two dimensions without metaphor...I’m trying to recreate in terms of painting—in painterly terms.
—Rackstraw Downes
Many artists throughout history have broadened the traditional definition of landscape painting to include the cityscape and the built environment. The recreation of a scene, the visual truth of that image, will at some point become secondary to the artist’s desire to create a work of art in “painterly terms.” The 19th- and 20th-c. paintings in this gallery—ordinary vistas which any one of us might see and pass by, unremarked upon, any day—have here been made remarkable by the artist’s eye.
In the summer of 1889, William Merritt Chase and his family lived in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to escape the city’s summer heat. In Bath Beach: A Sketch, his wife Alice is seen walking with their first child, Alice Dieudonnée, along the promenade by the water, a scene modeled after the work of the many French Impressionists he had seen during his time in Europe. Theodore Robinson repeatedly painted the mill in Giverny, France, following the lead of his mentor Claude Monet. William Lamb Picknell’s A French Garden, painted in southern France, shows the intense effects of light on the surface of natural forms. John Sloan spent six summers painting in Gloucester, on the Massachusetts coast at Cape Ann. Of his experience painting outdoors he wrote: “Instead of imitating the colors in nature, I decided on some quality of color that interested me and set a limited palette.”
Around 1916, John Marin began a series in Weehawken, New Jersey, of nearly a hundred small paintings to improvise quick landscape sketches of the barren late-fall views from the Jersey side of the Hudson River looking toward midtown Manhattan. Fairfield Porter lived for many years in New York City before moving to Southampton in 1949. Porter had a clear affection for the narrow streetscapes and the backyard views that he depicted during those years. Hughie Lee-Smith infuses barren landscapes with mystery and meaning. In Hamptons Drive-In, Howard Kanovitz pioneered the meticulous process of transferring an image from photographs to canvas, yet it is ultimately the “painterly terms” he has used that bring the work into full focus.
—Rackstraw Downes
Many artists throughout history have broadened the traditional definition of landscape painting to include the cityscape and the built environment. The recreation of a scene, the visual truth of that image, will at some point become secondary to the artist’s desire to create a work of art in “painterly terms.” The 19th- and 20th-c. paintings in this gallery—ordinary vistas which any one of us might see and pass by, unremarked upon, any day—have here been made remarkable by the artist’s eye.
In the summer of 1889, William Merritt Chase and his family lived in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to escape the city’s summer heat. In Bath Beach: A Sketch, his wife Alice is seen walking with their first child, Alice Dieudonnée, along the promenade by the water, a scene modeled after the work of the many French Impressionists he had seen during his time in Europe. Theodore Robinson repeatedly painted the mill in Giverny, France, following the lead of his mentor Claude Monet. William Lamb Picknell’s A French Garden, painted in southern France, shows the intense effects of light on the surface of natural forms. John Sloan spent six summers painting in Gloucester, on the Massachusetts coast at Cape Ann. Of his experience painting outdoors he wrote: “Instead of imitating the colors in nature, I decided on some quality of color that interested me and set a limited palette.”
Around 1916, John Marin began a series in Weehawken, New Jersey, of nearly a hundred small paintings to improvise quick landscape sketches of the barren late-fall views from the Jersey side of the Hudson River looking toward midtown Manhattan. Fairfield Porter lived for many years in New York City before moving to Southampton in 1949. Porter had a clear affection for the narrow streetscapes and the backyard views that he depicted during those years. Hughie Lee-Smith infuses barren landscapes with mystery and meaning. In Hamptons Drive-In, Howard Kanovitz pioneered the meticulous process of transferring an image from photographs to canvas, yet it is ultimately the “painterly terms” he has used that bring the work into full focus.
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