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Current Exhibition - Towbin Museum WingMain Gallery | Towbin Museum | Solo Show |Founders Gallery | YES!!
June 14 - September 28, 2008
Yasuo Kuniyoshi 1889-1953
Landscape, 1921
Oil on board
WAAM Pemanent Collection
Gift from the estate of
Sara Mazo Kuniyoshi
Philip Guston 1913-1980
Book, 1968
Charcoal
WAAM Permanent Collection
Gift of Musa and Tom Mayer
George Bellows 1882-1925
The Barricade (detail), 1918
Lithograph
WAAM Permanent Collection
Gift of Bill and Andrea Broyles
The Woodstock Artists Association & Museum (WAAM) marks the 35th year of its Permanent Collection with an exhibition of Recent Acquisitions June 14 through September 28, 2008. The exhibition opens with a reception on Saturday, June 14 from 4 to 6 pm.
This much anticipated exhibition provides an overview of some the many quality works accepted to the WAAM Permanent Collection in the last five years and features some of the key figures in 20th-century American Art, including George C. Ault, George Bellows, Philip Guston, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Doris Lee. Prominent contemporary artists will also be featured including Robert Angeloch, Bruce Ackerman, Bruce Dorfman, Yale Epstein, Mary Frank, Gary Hill, Kate McGloughlin, Rick Pantell and Carolyn Plochmann. The majority of works displayed are generously donated by collectors from the region and across the United States.
The WAAM Permanent Collection was established in 1973 to collect and preserve the work of important artists associated with the Woodstock art colony. The collection has multiplied one hundred times from the original 17 works accessioned in its inaugural year to over 1700 works of art today. As interest in American art has developed in the last 20 years, the WAAM Permanent Collection – along with the organization’s Archives of original documents, photographs, and books – has gained recognition for its important holdings and is a renowned source for curators, scholars, students, and collectors, alike. “Although sometimes labeled a ‘regional’ collection, our Permanent Collection is much more,” says executive director and curator Josephine Bloodgood. “Artists like Guston, Bellows, and Kuniyoshi are appreciated nationally and internationally and we have excellent examples of works by each of these and many other artists of similar standing in the art world.”
According to Sylvia Leonard Wolf, WAAM Board member and a fine art consultant, Philip Guston (1913-1980) “was one of the most influential and important American painters of the 20th century. His work spans fifty years and has been highly influential to a generation of younger artists.” Guston’s charcoal drawing Book from 1968 is a recent gift from the artist’s family and will be featured in the upcoming WAAM exhibition. Book relates to a series of drawings currently on view at the Morgan Library and Museum, NYC. Ken Johnson elaborated on similar works on view in the Morgan show in a recent New York Times article: “In 1966 Guston stopped painting and did nothing but draw for two years. He wanted, he said, “to clear the decks.” Here the impulse to get down to basics asserts itself in rigorously spare […] compositions: a single vertical mark at the top of a page; two vertical lines from top to bottom; a horizontal line meeting a vertical line; a sagging, flat-bottomed circle made with short strokes as though by a careful child. In such drawings it does look as if Guston were going back to the prehistoric origins of drawing.” (New York Times, May 2, 2008). Guston’s use of charcoal in this particular work seems a fitting choice as he returned to the most basic elements of image making.
George Bellows (1882-1925) was one of the earliest members of the Woodstock Artists Association, submitting works to numerous gallery shows in first years of the 1920s. By this time, Bellows was already widely recognized as a major American artist and appreciated for moving images and active figural compositions. A strong proponent of U.S. intervention against the Germans in World War I, Bellows created a striking series of lithographs and paintings graphically depicting the atrocities committed against Belgium citizens by the Nazis. A selection of prints from the War Series will be featured in the Recent Acquisitions show. The WAAM’s The Barricade (1918) – a large lithograph from this series that measures almost three feet wide – depicts Belgian civilians stripped naked and marched in front of German troops as human shields. Bellows’ skills as a draughtsman are evident here in the rich range of lights and darks and bold marks which delineate both the nude figures in the foreground and the crouching riflemen in the shadows. “Bellows combines tremendous feeling and precise technique in all of his work,” says Bloodgood. “We are thrilled to have received this important group of 14 prints from the War Series, which adds to our already healthy collection of works on paper by Bellows.”
Also well represented by works on paper in the WAAM Permanent Collection is Japanese-American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953). Only recently, however, was an oil painting by this important artist acquired as a bequest from the artist’s widow Sara Mazo Kuniyoshi. Landscape from 1921 demonstrates Kuniyoshi’s early modernist tendencies, reflecting the influence of Paul Cezanne’s pre-Cubist emphasis of pictorial space through the use of flattened and structured brushstrokes. This painting of a white house against a Catskill-like peak also indicates Kuniyoshi’s interest in American folk art and his emerging connection to the Woodstock region, where he began visiting in the late 1910s. Kuniyoshi, like Bellows, Guston, and others in the WAAM exhibition, has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions and collections across the United States and beyond. The Kuniyoshi painting and the artist’s private library (now part of the WAAM Archives) were the subject of a lecture led by Bard professor Tom Wolf last December at the WAAM. Further information on the artist and his life is available in the catalog At Woodstock Kuniyoshi (WAAM, 2003).
Recent Acquisitions to the Permanent Collection will also feature the following historic and contemporary artists: Franklin Alexander, March Avery Cavanaugh, Louis Bouché, Brock, John F. Carlson, John Carroll, Hunt Diederich, Paul Fiene, John B. Flannagan, Ernest Frazier, Eugenie Gershoy, Doris Lee, Margaret Lowengrund, John McClellan, Carol Summers, Carl Walters, Dewing Woodward, and many others.
All WAAM exhibitions and programs are supported by the WAAM Founders’ Circle, other individual and business supporters, and our artist membership. For more information about exhibitions and programs at the WAAM, go to www.woodstockart.org or call 845-679-2940. The Woodstock Artists Association is located at 28 Tinker Street in the center of Woodstock and is open Friday and Saturday, 12 – 6 pm and Sunday 12 – 5 pm
