Linda Maletz: French Landscapes
Aug 4 to Sept 4, 2010
Reception: Aug 14, 2 to 4 pm
The paintings displayed are the product of annual trips to France beginning in 1970. It has been said that France is a garden, and if the mind’s eye vigorously suppresses commercial despoliation, that remains true. Whether the Channel, Atlantic or Mediterranean coasts, the Alps or the Pyrenees, the undulating fields of Normandy or the limestone outcroppings of Provence, the country’s natural beauty is as breathtaking as are the innumerable medieval structures and town centers, and the monuments testifying to the wealth and taste of a bygone aristocracy. I have tried to depict the authentic and the undiminished, so as to create a visual record of what was and what we hope to preserve.
Image Above: Asparagus Fields, Perigold, oil on canvas
En Plein Air: Paintings Here and Abroad
by Lynne Friedman
June 23 - July 29, 2010 Reception: Saturday, July 10, 2 to 4 pm
Lynne Friedman, an artist influenced by Fauvism, paints on location in Southern France, Spain, Ireland, the Southwest and the Hudson Valley, NY where she resides. This exhibit features colorful painterly landscapes inspired by the qualities of the land, the changing light and the seasons.
Friedman exhibits throughout the US and at the Prince Street Gallery in New York City. She has received seven artist residency awards and her work is in the corporate collections of Pfizer, McGraw Hill and the Ritz Carleton Hotel. Recent shows include a solo exhibition at the Booth Western Art Museum in Georgia and the Lifebridge Sanctuary in Rosendale, NY. She received her BA and MFA from Queens College, a doctorate from Columbia University and has studied at The New York Studio School.
Image: July on the Hudson, oil on canvas
Artist website: www.mountaincloud.com
Docent Training Program
The Whistler House Museum of Art is seeking individuals who are interested in becoming Volunteer Docents. A new Docent Training Program will begin on May 26, 2010. This training program will provide volunteers with the information necessary to conduct guided tours of the historic house and the Permanent Collection of the Lowell Art Association Incorporated. Informal training begins now and formal classes will be held at the Whistler House Museum of Art at 243 Worthen Street, Lowell later this year. Please email jdyment@whistlerhouse.org or call 978-452-7641 for more information.
Impressionist Painting Lessons
at the Whistler House Museum of Art / Parker Gallery
A basic overview of the Cape Cod method
Dennis Lucas, the instructor, is a traditional Impressionist painter trained at the Cape School in Provincetown. His work focuses on the ever-changing light key and its effects on color in nature. His work is currently featured on the Cape and Islands and is collected throughout the United States. Lucas is a past artist-in-residence at the Whistler House Museum of Art.
Materials Needed
Basic oil colors
Canvas or masonite boards
Palette knife/brushes
Turpentine
Paper towels
We are collecting names now to run a session this summer:
5 Day Workshops $250
- meeting for a two hour period (5 days in one week)
August 16 - 20 and/or Aug 23 - 27
Weekend Workshop $150
- two day session for three hours each day.
Saturdays & Sundays, from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm
August 21 & 22
August 28 & 29
September 11 & 12
September 25 & 26
Call to register: 978-452-7641
(c) 2009 Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
DRAWINGS & PAINTINGS BY
ARSHILE GORKY
MINA BOEHM METZGER COLLECTION
On Display Now in the Historic House
This fall, the Whistler House Museum of Art premiered a special exhibition by the internationally acclaimed artist, Arshile Gorky (1904 - 1948), known to be the Father of American Abstract Expressionism. The exhibit, entitled Drawings and Paintings by Arshile Gorky - Mina Boehm Metzger Collection, is named after a friend, patron and student of Gorky’s. It presents 28 never-before-seen and rarely seen works of art and will be exhibited in the museum’s Parker Gallery. The collection is significant in that it presents many of Gorky’s earlier works and traces his progression as an artist. Included in this collection, which is made up of drawings and paintings, is the only surviving stone sculpture executed by the artist.
As part of its permanent collection, the Whistler House Museum of Art owns one of Gorky’s few remaining works of the time, Park Street Church, Boston (1924), which was painted in a Post-Impressionistic style and has been exhibited at many museums, including the Smithsonian and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
An Armenian immigrant, Vosdanig Monoog Adoian, (better known as Arshile Gorky) was born in the village of Khorkom on Lake Van, in the Van Province of Armenia, on April 15, 1904. As a child, Gorky survived the genocide of the Armenian people by the Ottoman Turks. While escaping to Russian-controlled Armenia, his family of three sisters and his parents were displaced and dispersed. Leaving his family behind, his father escaped the Turkish military draft by moving to the United States and settling in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1919, during a forced march in Yerevan, his mother died of starvation in Gorky’s arms. (Her memory inspired a series of portraits.) In 1920, at the age of sixteen, leaving behind the war-ridden territory of the collapsed Russian empire, Gorky arrived at Ellis Island and then joined his father. He spent his early years in the United States in Providence, Rhode Island, Boston and Watertown, Massachusetts.
Prior to immigrating to the United States, Arshile Gorky was mainly a self-taught artist. Passionate about his Armenian heritage and love of art of the past, its shades were dominantly present in his work throughout his lifetime. In Boston, he enrolled in the New School of Design, which he attended from 1922 to 1924. During this period, Gorky was heavily influenced by the French Post-Impressionist painter, Paul Cezanne, who paved the way to Cubism. On moving to New York, sometime in 1925, he began to follow the contemporary artistic style of Pablo Picasso’s Synthetic Cubism and the innovative style of Spanish Surrealist painter, Joan Miro.
While in New York, Gorky began an artistic and personal friendship with such artists as Stuart Davis, John Graham and Willem de Kooning. He attended both the National Academy of Design and the Grand Central School of Art, where he also taught until 1931. It was at this time that he changed his name from Vosdanig Adoian to Arshile Gorky, claiming to be a relative of the prominent Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, who enjoyed considerable fame in the West. Seeking to make a name for himself in the art world, he felt justified in taking on a pseudonym, as did many of his colleagues of the time. He was determined to eventually reveal himself as an Armenian.
Gorky’s body of work is a unique combination of Surrealist, Cubist, and Expressionistic artistic styles, mastering each of the highly diverse styles with equal ease. By the 1940s he was known as a surrealist painter and is considered to be the important bridge and direct link between European Surrealists and US Abstract Surrealists.
Gorky was one of the major forces behind the emergence of the Abstract Expressionist movement. It was a movement of artistic styles, during the mid 1940’s, that involved complete freedom from all traditional aesthetic and social values. It combined abstract form and favored spontaneous, liberated personal expression. It is said to be America’s most important contribution to Modernism. Gorky’s work greatly influenced famous Abstract Expressionist such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Willem De Kooning.
The Mina Boehm Metzger Collection contains works that span his artistic career, showcasing Arshile Gorky as a seminal figure in the movement toward abstraction that ultimately transformed American art as we know it today. Along with museums all over the world, including the Tate Modern in London, his works can be found in most major American museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
Gorky was an enigmatic and intense character, but a man of great poetic spirit. Although achieving personal success and fame, his final years were full of melancholy, loneliness, and a yearning for his homeland of Armenia. At the height of his creative success, he experienced cancer, a failed marriage, a broken neck due to a car accident and a fire, which destroyed many of his new works. In 1948, at the age of 44, he committed suicide.
Mina Boehm Metzger, for whom the collection was named, was born in 1877 in Vienna, Austria, “under the American flag”. Her father was an inventor who in his youth had explored the American west with Buffalo Bill. Later he became a noted architect in New York City where he headed up his own firm.
In 1898, she married David Metzger, a young, successful New York business man, and the following year had twin daughters. For many years she led a busy life often accompanying her husband on business trips to Europe where she had the opportunity to visit many museums. This was the beginning of the stimulating age of Impressionism. These experiences left a lasting impression on her artistic spirit.
Although she studied art as part of her early education, she did not have any formal training until the 1930s. In New York City, where Mina Boehm Metzger lived, the Grand Central Art School offered a class in beginning painting in which she enrolled. It was there that she met Arshile Gorky, the teacher. She was not only his student, but one of the first to recognize his genius. She and her husband became his patrons at a time when the aftermath of depression made life almost impossible for young artists.
Metzger, along with her daughter, Margaret Vandercook, a sculptor, and Gorky had adjoining studios in Union Square in New York City. All three were part of the exciting art revival in New York at that time. The collection contains several important images of Metzger in the form of drawings.
In October 2009, The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a major retrospective exhibition on Gorky, entitled Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective. It will open in Philadelphia and travel to Los Angeles and London. It will be the first full-scale survey of Gorky’s work since the retrospective held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1981. This occasion will introduce Gorky’s work to a new generation of viewers, and for the artist’s longtime admirers, will celebrate his singular importance within the history of art. The Whistler House Museum’s Park Street Church, Boston (1924) will be a part of the important traveling exhibition.
The Whistler House Museum of Art, located in Lowell, Massachusetts, is the historic birthplace of the famous American artist, James McNeill Whistler. Established in 1878, as the Lowell Art Association Inc., it is the oldest incorporated art association in the United States. It is known internationally for its distinguished collection of 19th and early 20th century New England representational art. The Whistler House hosts many exhibits, lectures, educational programs, concerts and an array of social events.
The Mina Boehm Metzger Collection is a significant addition to the Whistler House Museum of Art. The museum is proud to have this important collection on permanent loan. After the premiere exhibition, the collection will be on display in the historic house. A catalogue, Drawings and Paintings by Arshile Gorky-The Mina Boehm Metzger Collection, will accompany the exhibition. This special exhibit has been made possible through a grant from the Theodore Edson Parker Foundation, the Lowell Cultural Council and the legal support of Gallagher and Cavanaugh LLP.
Sources: Arshile Gorky, His Life and Work, a biography by Hayden Herrera, Arshile Gorky (1908-1948) A Retrospective by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York The Arshile Gorky Foundation Website.
