December 11, 2004 - March 13, 2005 
 

The yearlong celebration of Art of the Americas at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art culminates with the special exhibition The Art of David Ireland: The Way Things Are, on view December 11, 2004 - March 13, 2005.   The first in-depth assessment of Ireland's art and its significance, the exhibition surveys three decades of the work of this key figure in the Conceptual art movement.  Conceptual art, which became a major worldwide phenomenon in the 1960s, elevates the idea or concept behind the work of art at times over the technical skill in making the art itself.

Ireland (b. 1930) is one of the West Coast's most significant artists working in the challenging area of Conceptual and installation art. He is part of a community of international contemporary artists committed to redefining art: how it is made, what it looks like, and what it means.   In Ireland's mind, art can be made from anything and in any way.   Ireland's ideas are based on the simple belief that everyday objects and activities can be as beautiful and captivating as more conventional forms of art.  Ireland challenges traditional ideas about art by presenting alternative propositions-among them the notion that beauty may be irrelevant to art.

For Ireland, art is a state of mind: "Ideally my work has a visual presence that makes it seem like part of a usual, everyday situation," he says. "I like the feeling that nothing's been designed, that you can't tell where the art stops and starts." A self-described "post-discipline" artist guided by Zen thought, Ireland moves fluidly from making small drawings to creating sculptures as large as houses. 

The exhibition features more than 80 works created between 1972 and 2002, including two-dimensional pieces, sculptures, and large-scale installations such as the tour-de-force Angel Go-Round.   The variety of work included demonstrates Ireland's adventuresome sense of creativity, from early two-dimensional works from the 1970s, made of dirt, talcum, and cement to more recent two- and three-dimensional pieces that reflect his wide-ranging interests, from exploration of the phenomenon of chance to his interest in process and history.

Ireland's belief that ordinary life experiences can be art is clearly expressed in one of his best-known artworks: his home in San Francisco. In 1975, he purchased a run-down Victorian residence at 500 Capp Street and spent the next three years working on it. Decades of history confronted him-layers of wallpaper and paint, old carpeting, grime, and stains.   In the ensuing months, the process of cleaning the house and getting to know it became an artistic process. He approached the tasks of stripping wallpaper, polishing floors, sanding trim, and repairing the sidewalk with a deliberate respect and finesse that for him fixed his actions firmly in the realm of art. When he repaired the sidewalk in front of his home, Ireland videotaped it as though it were an artistic performance. The house is filled with Ireland's sculptures made out of non-traditional materials, including old brooms, bent wire, cement, and wet paper.

Ireland was born in Bellingham, Washington, in 1930. He received his bachelor's degree in industrial design and printmaking from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1953. He returned to school in the early 1970s, studying plastics technology and printmaking at Laney College and receiving a master of fine arts degree in printmaking in 1974 from the San Francisco Art Institute.

He did not fully commit himself to art until he was in his early 40s, after traveling extensively around the world and working as an architectural draftsman, carpenter, designer, businessman, and African safari guide. The exhibition looks at how these early life experiences have been influential, resulting, for example, in the reference to elephants in his works, the claiming of architecture as art, and the open-ended sense of exploration that is the foundation for his work.

Ireland's work has been presented in more than 40 solo exhibitions, at venues including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. He has created major art projects and private commissions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other cities. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Oakland Museum of California, and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, among others.

This exhibition has been organized by the Oakland Museum of California and is supported by the Oakland Museum Women's Board, National Endowment for the Arts, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. It is accompanied by a 248-page catalog published by The University of California Press. The catalog contains 140 color and black-and-white illustrations along with essays on the development and significance of Ireland's work by the exhibition curator, Karen Tsujimoto, senior curator of art at the Oakland Museum of California; and Jennifer R. Gross, Seymour H. Knox, Jr. curator of modern and contemporary art at the Yale University Art Gallery.

The Art of David Ireland: The Way Things Are marks the finale of Art of the Americas, the yearlong celebration of art from the United States and Latin America at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.   Throughout 2004 a series of six thought-provoking exhibitions spanning the past two centuries addresses anew what it means to be American.   From the groundbreaking innovations in painting and photography by leading modernists, such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, who changed the course of American art, the series culminates with this major retrospective which examines the very issue of what art can be, as Ireland's remarkable architectural transformations, installations, objects, and drawings challenge viewers' everyday distinctions between art and non-art.

The Art of the Americas Celebration is generously supported, in part, by Jill and John C. Bishop, Jr., The Charles and Mildred Bloom Fund, The Challenge Fund, The Cheeryble Foundation, Melissa and Trevor Fetter, Christine Garvey, Larry and Astrid Hammett, Lillian and Jon Lovelace, the Grace Jones Richardson Trust, Santa Barbara Bank & Trust, Santa Barbara Museum of Art Visionaries, Santa Barbara Museum of Art Women's Board, Mr. and Mrs. C. William Schlosser, Tenet Healthcare Foundation, Louise L. Tighe Family Charitable Lead Trust, and anonymous donors.

Matta On Paper:  The John Todd Figi Collection                                                                      

October 9, 2004 - February 6, 2005

The celebration of Art of the Americas continues this fall at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art with the special exhibition Matta On Paper:   The John Todd Figi Collection, on view October 9, 2004 – February 6, 2005. The exhibition tells a compelling story of one collector’s passion for the vibrant Surrealist drawings, watercolors, gouaches, and several related paintings by Matta, the world-renowned Chilean-born artist, who many consider to be one of the greatest draftsmen of the twentieth century.  Part of the series of thought-provoking exhibitions at the SBMA during 2004 that looks at the American experience from varying perspectives, this select grouping from the late 1930s and 1940s represents the critical period when, living and working in New York, Matta exercised significant influence on United States Surrealism and the New York School of Abstract Expressionism.

These key works from the collection of John Todd Figi demonstrate how Matta became one of the leading practitioners of automatism, a method of unconscious composition developed by the European Surrealists. Inspired by contemporary ideas in psychology, he formulated an intuitive, free-flowing approach to drawing in order to give expression to his inner thoughts and feelings. Described as “a fuse that lit up the New York scene,” Matta helped shape the major shift from veristic Surrealism—the form epitomized by Salvador Dalí where dreams are represented with a hyperrealism—to an abstract, biomorphic Surrealism that was critical to the United States artists Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock.

In profiling Matta’s works on paper and related paintings from the 1930s and 1940s known as “psychological morphologies” or “inscapes,” the exhibition reveals one collector’s dedication to fully represent what many consider to be Matta’s most significant period.   Some twenty years ago, John Todd Figi began his collection of Latin American art by acquiring Pre-Columbian art.  While attending a New York auction of ancient, Pre-Hispanic art, however, Figi was stunned when his eye glimpsed a painting by Mexican modernist Rufino Tamayo.  Since that life-changing moment, which led to his acquisition of that riveting painting, Figi has amassed one of the most prominent collections of Latin American art in the United States.  While he has collected widely in the area of modern Latin American art, his main focus now is the art of Matta, primarily the artist’s works on paper, which are thought to be equal in importance and innovation to his works on canvas.

In Figi’s own words, “I think that Matta is an amazing draftsman. What he did early on in drawing is always so much more spontaneous to me.  I am really drawn to it.  I never met Matta, but through the spontaneity, I feel I can see him, touch him …. Sometimes at night I will just walk around the house and stand in front of the artworks.  On other nights I will go back again and look at the same works and they will look different.  You almost wonder if the hand of Matta came in overnight and changed them!  When I think about Matta and his practice of automatism and then look at his works on paper, I think, ‘That can’t be.’  I mean the creative imagination and technical finesse are extraordinary!”

Matta was born in Santiago, Chile in 1911. After studying architecture at the Universidad Católica in Santiago, he traveled to Paris in 1933 and worked for two years as a draftsman in the Paris studio of the famed architect Le Corbusier. While visiting his aunt in Madrid, he met poets and artists such as Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Salvador Dalí, and André Breton. Impressed by Matta's drawings, Breton invited him to join the Surrealist group in 1937. Influenced by his association with the Surrealists and by Marcel Duchamp's theories of movement and process, Matta began to explore the realm of the subconscious and to develop an imagery of cosmic creation and destruction. By 1939, World War II drove Matta to exile in New York where he held his first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1941. In 1948, Matta returned to Europe, settling permanently in Paris. 

The second-to-last exhibition in the SBMA’s Art of the Americas Celebration, Matta On Paper is unique in this yearlong exhibition series because it features the collector’s viewpoint, looking at a Latin American artist through the eyes of John Todd Figi. The series is centered by the dramatic reinstallation of the Museum’s permanent collection, which showcases art from Latin America and the United States side by side for the first time ever. Art of the Americas began with the groundbreaking innovations in painting and photography by leading modernists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz who changed the course of American art, and culminates with the Conceptual art of the contemporary California-based artist David Ireland.

September 26, 2004 - January 9, 2005

The celebration of Art of the Americas continues at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art with the opening of the exhibition Agustín Víctor Casasola:  Mirada y memoria (Glance and Memory).  One of Latin America’s first photojournalists, Casasola documented the tumultuous events of the early twentieth century, in a style that ranged from the celebratory to the unforgettably tragic.  Keenly aware of the power of the photographic image, Casasola approached every subject with as much objectivity as possible and countless documentary photographers emulated his trademark style.

The exhibition of 92 images was selected by contemporary photographer Pablo Ortiz Monasterio from the more than 500,000-image archive housed at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico.   A 220-page publication entitled Mexico.  The Revolution and Vision:  Photographs by Casasola, 1900-1940 accompanies the exhibition and includes additional images as well as essays by Pete Hamill, Sergio Raul, and Rosa Casanova, and is available in the SBMA store.

The exhibition is organized into eight different categories, which show Casasola’s range, technical expertise, and extraordinary drive to record his country during one of its critical periods.   Among the most powerful are his images of the Mexican Revolution, a fratricidal war that shook the country for almost twenty years and caused nearly a million deaths, and his individual and group portraits which encompass nearly all strata of society. 

Born in Mexico City in 1874, Casasola began working in typographic workshops at an early age, and was already a reporter by the age of twenty.   At the turn of the century he had established himself as a photographer.  In 1912, he opened one of the first professional photography agencies in partnership with his brother Miguel; later his children and grandchildren joined the partnership.  Casasola’s motto for the company was, “I have or can produce the photo you need.”  This agency helped Casasola realize his lifelong obsession:  the creation of a photographic archive that recorded the history of Mexico as it unfolded.  

“Casasola’s portraits are particularly strong, for he believed that the true indicator of the nation’s health was not found simply in economics, but in the tenor of its people.    He captured the turbulence of the times while also documenting the cultural trends,” said Karen Sinsheimer, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s curator of photography. 

Agustín Víctor Casasola:   Mirada y memoria has been organized by Canopia and Turner in collaboration with the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and Pachuca National Photography Library (Fototeca Nacional de Pachuca, Mexico). The Art of the Americas Celebration is generously supported, in part, by Jill and John C. Bishop, Jr., The Charles and Mildred Bloom Fund, The Challenge Fund, The Cheeryble Foundation, Melissa and Trevor Fetter, Christine Garvey, Larry and Astrid Hammett, Lillian and Jon Lovelace, Santa Barbara Bank & Trust, Santa Barbara Museum of Art Visionaries, Santa Barbara Museum of Art Women's Board, Mr. and Mrs. C. William Schlosser, Tenet Healthcare Foundation, Tighe Family Charitable Lead Trust, and anonymous donors.

The Art of the Americas exhibition is a whole new way of looking at art.  Instead of showing art from the United States in one gallery and art from Latin America in another, this dramatic presentation of the SBMA’s distinguished permanent collection offers viewers the opportunity to compare works from across centuries and countries of origin and come up with fresh ideas of what it means to be American. 

Art of the Americas puts the SBMA right on the cutting edge of national and international ideas of how to exhibit art.  While some museums have re-organized their curatorial departments to include the arts of the Americas, the SBMA is among the first to dedicate much of its gallery space to such a radical reinterpretation of its permanent collection of United States and Latin American art.  The first major project completed during the tenure of the SBMA’s new Director, Phillip M. Johnston, Art of the Americas also features a complete re-design of the Museum’s main gallery spaces by the nationally renowned architect Frederick Fisher.

The nearly 200 paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, photographs, and installation art are divided into four categories:  people; places; things and things abstracted; and art, society, and politics in the Americas.  Within each category, the works are grouped by themes, such as “Representing Women,” “The Modern Cityscape,” and “Form and Spirit.” New as well as familiar permanent collection works are arranged in striking juxtapositions that encourage fresh interpretations.  These pairings acknowledge similarities but also critical differences in art shaped by related, yet diverse, regional histories.  The United States artist James Peale’s portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Rouvert of 1803, for example, seen alongside the Mexican artist Federico Cantú’s image of himself and of his wife Gloria, of more than a century later, demonstrate radically different treatments of the double portrait, a time-honored convention in western art.  William Merritt Chase’s Lady in Pink, 1886, juxtaposed with Walt Kuhn’s Trude, 1931, elicits the same exciting opportunity for new perspectives, in this case on the varying representations of women in the Victorian and modern periods. Joaquín Torres-García’s Constructivist grid, 1932, and Adolph Gottlieb’s pictograph, 1947, form a compelling pair, revealing as many differences as similarities in how these artists interpreted modernist form and ancient indigenous art.  Two installation pieces, Carrie Mae Weems’ The Jefferson Suite, 1999, and Miguel Ángel Ríos’ untitled quipu (ancient tabulating device from the Andes), 1993, speak to the common theme in contemporary art of history and identity.  Works of the last decade by Hung Liu and Xiaowen Chen expand understanding of the American experience, addressing the theme of ethnic identity and the issues of recent immigration from Asia to the United States.

Major metropolitan museums, such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art now include Latin American and United States art within the designation of art of the Americas.  The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, recently established the International Center for the Arts of the Americas.   Mexican and British museums have also begun to combine art from Latin America, the United States, and Europe.  But the SBMA is a leader in the integration and display of modern and contemporary Latin American and United States art.  “The Art of the Americas can be a new and stimulating example of redefining the presentation of American art, and the SBMA hopes that it may serve as a model for the interpretation and display of permanent collections,” said SBMA Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Diana C. du Pont.

A whole new approach to exhibiting art at the SBMA required a whole new look for the Museum’s main gallery spaces and graphic materials.  SBMA Director Phillip M. Johnston and Curator Diana C. du Pont engaged award-winning architect Frederick Fisher to create the Museum’s new look.  Fisher decided to reveal the original construction of the Museum’s primary spaces by removing the temporary walls.  Instead, he used freestanding architectural elements called “interventions” to add distinctive, eccentric accents. In place of the stark white walls traditionally used to display modern and contemporary art, Fisher and architectural colorist Scott Flax chose a family of colors evoking the idea of many voices connected by a larger whole.  Each gallery is distinguished by color, as are the thematic groupings in each gallery.  Print and environmental graphic designers Tim McNeil and Christopher Muñiz completely revamped the Museum’s graphics, including signage, banners, and wall labels.

Art of the Americas is the centerpiece of a grand celebration of American art at the SBMA during 2004.  This year-long event features six exhibitions, launched by the Museum's presentation of In the American Grain: Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz from The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.  In June, Heartland:  Paintings by Bo Bartlett, 1978-2002 opens, presenting a contemporary reinterpretation of realism, a prominent theme in American art.  In September, Agustín Víctor Casasola: Mirada y memoria (Glance and Memory) features one of the most outstanding and legendary documentary photographers in all Latin America. In October, Matta On Paper: The John Todd Figi Collection will highlight one collector’s passion for the drawings, watercolors, and related paintings of the 1930s and 1940s by Matta, the world-renowned Chilean-born artist who many consider to be one of the greatest draftsman of the twentieth century. The Art of the Americas celebration culminates in December with the major retrospective The Art of David Ireland: The Way Things Are.  In contrast to the monumental realism of Bartlett, the vibrant Surrealist works of Matta, and the dramatic photojournalism of Casasola, Ireland’s remarkable architectural transformations, installations, objects, and drawings challenge viewers’ everyday distinctions between art and non-art. 

The Art of the Americas Celebration is generously supported, in part, by The Charles and Mildred Bloom Fund, The Challenge Fund, The Cheeryble Foundation, Christine Garvey, Lillian and Jon Lovelace, Larry and Astrid Hammett, Mr. and Mrs. C. William Schlosser, Santa Barbara Museum of Art Visionaries, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Women’s Board, Santa Barbara Bank & Trust, and an anonymous donor.

Heartland: Paintings by Bo Bartlett, 1978 - 2002

June 5 - August 22, 2004

The Art of the Americas Celebration at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art continues in the summer of 2004 with the special exhibition Heartland: Paintings by Bo Bartlett, 1978-2002, on view June 5 - August 22. Organized by the Columbus Museum in Georgia, where the artist was born and raised, this mid-career retrospective offers a contemporary reinterpretation of realism, an important and recurring theme in United States art.

Like his distinguished predecessors Thomas Eakins and Andrew Wyeth, Bartlett draws inspiration from what is most familiar to him. His powerful and engaging paintings treat the people, places, and events that make up the fabric of his life. For Bartlett, though, the familiar is the foil for epic narratives about life, death, love, family, memory, and conflict. He pushes the boundaries of the realist tradition with surreal ambiguities and classic motifs drawn from history, religion, and literature. Bartlett’s dramatic works capture on canvas emotionally charged, larger-than-life moments.

The scope of the exhibition tells the story of Bartlett’s early interest in figure painting and how he studied the genre first in Florence in 1974 and then in Philadelphia beginning in 1975. Following the example of realist painter Thomas Eakins, Bartlett augmented his arts education at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts by studying human anatomy at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (1977-78). His subsequent training as a filmmaker at New York University in 1986 accounts, in part, for the cinematic, contemporary quality of Bartlett’s painting.

Bartlett first considered becoming a preacher and admits that his early attempts at drawing took place while in church. As a mature painter, Bartlett draws from these childhood experiences, which inspired a deep religious symbolism in many of his paintings. Bartlett contends that spirituality is a layer to which he tries to add art historical and cultural symbolism. The result is a metaphorical form of contemporary painting that is rooted in Bartlett’s personal experience. For example, Homecoming, 1995, an eerie rendition of a bonfire with a surround of football players and their elegantly dressed dates, is said to be a tribute to his wife Melonie, who was his high school sweetheart. The painting Bone, 2000, depicts Bartlett’s oldest son, Will, carrying the mandible of a whale, which he discovered on a beach in Maine where the Bartlett family spends their summers.

The exhibition's main title, Heartland, derives from a painting acquired by the SBMA in 1994. Heartland depicts Bartlett's other young son, Eliot, pulling a red wagon laden with sticks. Suggested by its title, the setting for this painting is the rolling fields of the United States’ "heartland," the symbolic center of the nation’s traditional values. The poignant image of a young boy, standing alone with his Radio Flyer wagon at his side, calls forth the innocence of childhood, while the desolate landscape evokes the larger idea of the United States in the "age of experience."

Bartlett’s work is represented in various public collections in addition to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Denver Art Museum; The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia; the La Salle University Museum of Art, Philadelphia; the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina; and the Columbus Museum of Art, Georgia.

The 2004 Art of the Americas Celebration at the SBMA began in February with In the American Grain: Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz (February 14- May 9), an exhibition organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. which presented a fascinating view of American modernism through groundbreaking works by artists of the Stieglitz Circle. Building on the foundation of In the American Grain, the celebration of American art at the SBMA showcases Art of the Americas: Latin America and the United States, 1800 to Now!, a major reinstallation of the Museum’s permanent collection which opened in March and runs through November 21. Art of the Americas explores a broader concept of "America" by integrating works by artists from the United States and Latin America. In September, Agustín Víctor Casasola: Mirada y memoria (Glance and Memory) features one of the most outstanding and legendary documentary photographers in all Latin America. In October, Matta On Paper: The John Todd Figi Collection will highlight one collector’s passion for the drawings, watercolors, and related paintings of the 1930s and 1940s by Matta, the world-renowned Chilean-born artist who many consider to be one of the greatest draftsmen of the twentieth century. The Art of the Americas Celebration culminates in December with the major retrospective The Art of David Ireland: The Way Things Are. In contrast to the monumental realism of Bartlett, the vibrant Surrealist works of Matta, and the dramatic photojournalism of Casasola, Ireland’s remarkable architectural transformations, installations, objects, and drawings challenge viewers’ everyday distinctions between art and non-art.

The Art of the Americas Celebration is generously supported, in part, by Jill and John C. Bishop, Jr., The Charles and Mildred Bloom Fund, The Challenge Fund, The Cheeryble Foundation, Christine Garvey, Larry and Astrid Hammett, Lillian and Jon Lovelace, Santa Barbara Bank & Trust, Santa Barbara Museum of Art Visionaries, Santa Barbara Museum of Art Women’s Board, Mr. and Mrs. C. William Schlosser, The Tighe Family Charitable Lead Trust and anonymous donors.

Heartland: Paintings by Bo Bartlett, 1978-2002 has been organized by the Columbus Museum, Georgia. Major funding for the exhibition and catalogue was made possible by friends in Columbus, Georgia.

6:30 AM
March 27 - June 20, 2004

6:30 AM features 26 large-scale pigment photographs by the contemporary American photographer Robert Weingarten. The series captures the changing light of the same scene over the course of one year, revealing an almost unbelievable range of colors and effects.

Weingarten describes his images as an "attempt to reflect the timelessness of a landscape, the fleeting nature of a particular confluence of light and conditions that render a dramatic and single moment." In thinking about a project, Weingarten, as many great photographers before him have done, decided to explore his own backyard; in his case, the vast Pacific Ocean. From a window of his Malibu mesa home, Weingarten photographed the same scene from precisely the same location each day. Using a long lens, without filters, he made a negative each day as the clock struck 6:30 exactly. From these the artist produced a series of 137 unmanipulated pigment prints. A world of seemingly infinite variety and color revealed itself as a year at 6:30 a.m. was captured in Weingarten's frame.

From its inception, photography has been utilized to document and reveal the ordinary, transforming it into the extraordinary. Eadweard Muybridge revealed Animal Locomotion in the nineteenth century. In the mid-twentieth century, Harold Edgerton used strobes to capture the invisible, such as bullets in flight or a drop of liquid caught in mid-air. Contemporary photographer Richard Misrach photographed the Golden Gate Bridge from the same vantage point, selectively choosing the times and seasons over a period of several years. His serial approach made evident the constantly changing nature of a view that appears static in any single image. In this tradition, Robert Weingarten's 6:30 a.m. series is a twenty-first-century photographic odyssey into uncharted waters. Where other photographers mediated their results by carefully selecting the time of their exposure, Weingarten, by taking the image precisely at 6:30 a.m. every day, allowed natural conditions to dictate the end result.

Mr. Weingarten is an accomplished landscape photographer. His work is in the collection of museums throughout the United States including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, CA; the Monterey Museum of Art in Monterey, CA; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX. He is represented by the Marlborough Gallery in New York, NY and the Weston Gallery in Carmel, CA. He has recently exhibited his work at the Royal Photographic Society in Bath, England; the Riverside Art Museum in Riverside, CA; and the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA. He holds the distinction of Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society (FRPS) of Great Britain.
 

February 14 - May 9, 2004
 

In the American Grain:
Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Alfred Stieglitz kicks off Art of the Americas, a year-long celebration of American art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Drawn exclusively from the distinguished Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., this extraordinary presentation of forty paintings by artists of the Stieglitz Circle, as well as a selection of photographs by Stieglitz himself, features the groundbreaking innovations of these leading modernists who changed the course of American art. This exhibition has been organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Together, the bold and original works of In the American Grain also tell the captivating story of friendship between Stieglitz, a pioneering art dealer and promoter of American modernism, and Duncan Phillips, the legendary art collector who avidly supported Stieglitz's galleries and his circle of key artists for over 20 years. Confirming Phillips' dedication as one of the greatest patrons of modern art in the United States, this remarkable collection profiles the intense passion that he and Stieglitz shared for young artists committed to defining a new form of American painting in the first half of the twentieth century.

From 1907 to 1917, Alfred Stieglitz's gallery 291 in New York was at the center of a community of artists and critics pursuing new discoveries and statements in the arts. Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Georgia O'Keeffe were associated personally and professionally with Alfred Stieglitz for almost forty years. Having each gravitated at a young age to 291, where they were exposed to European avant-garde art, they became convinced of the independent merits of color and form, a fundamental discovery essential to the development of American modernism.

Stieglitz immediately responded to the brooding intensity of Hartley's thatched strokes of color and his strong identification with form. The spontaneity of Marin's watercolors shared close kinship with the immediacy of Stieglitz's photographs. O'Keeffe's stark simplicity and intense color distinguished her from her male counterparts. More so than the others, Dove used the texture of physical objects to shape his abstractions.

Stieglitz retained unwavering confidence in these four artists long after he had closed 291 and ceased his proselytizing for the avant-garde. In 1925, when Stieglitz opened a new gallery in New York City, Duncan Phillips added a room to his museum specifically dedicated to new American painting. Phillips, a wealthy Washington art patron and conservative critic, had initially dismissed abstraction and the European avant-garde. After World War I, he came to terms with abstraction-"a sudden conversion to red blood," as Stieglitz put it. Both Stieglitz and Phillips believed in exploring the frontiers of new American painting in intimate gallery spaces and dedicated their lives and fortunes to making that viewing experience possible.

From 1926 to 1946 the Stieglitz Circle claimed the lion's share of Phillips' commitment to living American artists. He acquired the world's largest and most representative group of works by Arthur Dove, quintessential examples of every aspect of John Marin's development, signal works by Georgia O'Keeffe and Marsden Hartley, and photographs by Stieglitz.

Arthur Dove's remarkable paintings convinced Duncan Phillips that abstraction was not an arbitrary style but an artistic process. In 1910, he was the first American artist to abandon any hint of narrative content in his paintings. After working as a commercial illustrator in New York and converting to the aesthetic avant-garde in Paris, Dove returned to New York and embraced abstraction-an abstraction based in nature. His mature work of the 1930s and 1940s, created while he lived on a houseboat, includes assemblages and collages which show his fascination with what he called "things…hewn out of nature." Throughout his career, Dove would test the loyalty of his patrons as he continued to experiment with unorthodox materials such as wax emulsion. These works comprised some of the strongest abstractions in Phillip's collection.

On New Year's Day 1916, Stieglitz was introduced to Georgia O'Keeffe. To Stieglitz, her semi-abstract charcoals seemed utterly new, completely without debt to the European art which he had presented at 291. He immediately invited her to exhibit her work. The last show Stieglitz ever hung at 291 in April 1917 was a solo O'Keeffe exhibition. After 291 closed, Stieglitz and O'Keeffe continued their celebrated personal and professional partnership. She later turned to representation in her paintings, exploring cropped, close-up views of flowers and leaves in a magnified scale. She finally settled in New Mexico where she created her well-known works featuring vivid blue skies and arid hills.

Alfred Stieglitz first exhibited Marsden Hartley's dark landscapes from Maine at 291 in 1909. In 1912, Hartley moved to Europe, where he became influenced by Vasily Kandinsky's new theories of painting, which led him to devise his first abstractions and subsequently painted still lifes inspired by European artists. In March 1930, at Stieglitz's urging, Hartley returned to the United States and settled permanently in Maine. His late work, characterized by bold primary colors and strongly outlined shapes, expressed profound emotions that resonated in the haunting seascapes and mountains of his home state.

Like Stieglitz, Marin was recognized as a master of his medium. He was a superb draftsman and a virtuoso in watercolor. Early in his career in Paris, Marin embarked on a series of radical departures exploring vigorous strokes of color as he responded to his own moods and states of the weather. When he returned he was among the first Americans to capture the tempo and pace of New York City. Sharing Hartley's attraction to the northern ocean, Marin summered in Maine after 1920. Yet Marin's more staccato Cubist rhythms could not be further from Hartley's weighty brooding forms.