19th- and 20th- Century Works on Paper    Nov 20 - Jan 10, 2009

Spanierman Gallery, LLC, is pleased to announce the opening on November 20, 2008 of Works on Paper 2008. Consisting of seventy-seven works, this exhibition conveys the diversity of American art from the mid-nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Included are examples by some of our nation’s pre-eminent artists, who found in watercolor, pastel, gouache, crayon, and graphite a freshness and freedom that painting in oil often did not afford, and they used their materials to discover new means of expression and to develop their individuality. Accompanying the exhibition is a 160-page catalogue with full-page color illustrations along with complete documentation on each work and scholarly entries, placing each image in context, by Drs. Carol Lowrey and Lisa N. Peters.

There are many notable and rare inclusions in the show. Among the earliest is a work by George Inness in watercolor, a medium he used rarely. A spontaneously rendered field study from ca. 1866, the image dates from the period that Inness lived in Eagleswood, New Jersey, where he completed his well-known Peace and Plenty (1865, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). An oil on paper portraying Montague Bay, Nassau, in the Bahamas is among Albert Bierstadt’s largest plein-air works. Showing a tiny figure walking alone on the beach while a storm gathers, Bierstadt perhaps created the scene to convey his saddened response to the death of wife, which took place in Nassau in 1893. Four of the images reveal James McNeill Whistler’s dexterity as a draftsman and his love of travel. These works include two graphite drawings of Rouen (ca. 1858), an ink and wash drawing of London’s East End towered over by St. Paul’s church (ca. 1885), and a sensitively rendered graphite drawing of a doorway in Ajaccio, Corsica (1901). Among the show’s highlights are Winslow Homer’s poignant watercolor featuring a pensive woman gazing out to sea, created in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1880, and John La Farge’s sparkling watercolor of the surf breaking on a reef in the South Seas, executed by the artist on his 1891 trip to Tahiti.

Two images by Thomas Dewing of ethereal women from the 1920s reveal the way Dewing matched the delicacy of his pastel handling to his subject matter, while three watercolors demonstrate how Theodore Robinson used this medium with a equal balance of spontaneity and control, portraying a Giverny scene of a girl in an orchard (ca. 1889) and two views of Antibes, created on his trip to southern France to restore his health in 1890-91. Five of the works are by John Twachtman, including a rare and large pastel he made in Holland in 1885 that relates to his prizewinning French period painting Windmills (1885, private collection) and three of the suggestive and spare pastels of the Connecticut countryside that reveal his use of this medium to create works that simultaneously bring their scenes to life and demonstrate a level of abstraction that other artists of his time did not achieve. Maurice Prendergast used watercolor in a work of ca. 1893-94 to describe the flair of two Parisian women who converse while dressed in the latest fashions of the day, while Edward Potthast’s vision of the vivacity of the American beach vacation is fully expressed in Canoeing (ca. 1920), rendered in the same medium. Four watercolors reveal Childe Hassam’s long involvement with this medium, from Woodland Stream (ca. 1883), in which he followed the truth-to-nature approach of John Ruskin to the vivid Old Houses on the Hudson (1916), in which he expressed his veneration for the reassuring qualities of old saltbox homes set in gracious, accommodating landscapes.

Works by artists who were associated with the Ashcan School include Woman Dressing (ca. 1904), in which Everett Shinn’s observational skills and humor emerge in a freely rendered chalk drawing, The Stroller’s Sketch (ca. 1918), a pastel created by Robert Henri during his last visit to Monhegan Island, Maine, and Park at Gracie Square (ca. 1922), in which William Glackens returned after a hiatus to the urban subject matter of his earlier art, expressing the lively qualities of an upper-class neighborhood on the rise. Three drawings by Joseph Stella from ca. 1903, ca. 1909, and ca. 1930 reveal the masterful nature and broad range of Stella’s draftsmanship styles and abilities. Yesterday, Rose (ca. 1908) is a drawing in charcoal by Lilian Westcott Hale, demonstrating the method of extreme precision she attained in the medium; she sharpened her crayons with a razor blade to alternate the varying thickness of the lines and strokes as is seen in this depiction of a young, stylish woman in a languid pose and wearing a dreamy gaze. Among the intriguing images included is a graphite drawing created by Edward Hopper during his 1943 trip to Mexico, in which he drew a stilled horse and buggy, situated at the picture’s edge and seemingly inattentive to their role as transportation.

Among the later examples in the show are an almost abstract image of a Provincetown sand spit by Milton Avery, two comprehensive ink and graphite drawings produced by Thomas Hart Benton in about 1933 by for his important Social History of Indiana murals, and a work entitled Brooding Bird by Charles Burchfield in which, saddened by his destruction of an image portraying how a landscape looked to a bird that he had created in 1919, Burchfield recreated the image in 1963. Andrew Wyeth’s desire to “see the romance in the surroundings of the commonplace” is epitomized in his watercolor Back on the Island, Maine (1994), featuring his Alaskan Chinook dog Nome asleep in the dark shade of the barn at his Benner Island home, while the Fish House, where Wyeth often painted, is seen beyond a mossy slope in background. Two watercolors reflecting a similar sense of longing by Jamie Wyeth are also included.

Broad-ranging in their subjects and techniques and thoroughly researched in the shows’s catalogue, the images in Works on Paper 2008 reveal the richness, inventiveness, and many-faceted ways that American artists explored the use of many mediums, styles, and approaches in works on paper.