Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts
Montgomery, AL
334-244-5700
American Impressionism from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery
The fifty paintings
included in this exhibition are drawn from the exceptional collection of
the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska and document
achievements of important American artists who worked in the style of Impressionism.
This style, most closely identified with nineteenth-century French artists,
rejected traditional academic approaches to painting and sought to capture
fleeting effects of light, color and the aspects of everyday life on canvas.
Many of America's greatest painters in the Impressionist style are included
in this exhibition, among them William Merritt Chase, Chide Hassam, Robert
Henri, Ernest Lawson and Maurice Prendergast.
Impressionism was originally a French phenomenon arising
from a confluence of social, scientific and art histories. During the brief
period from about 1870 to about 1890, academic painting, with its reliance
upon classical references and historic themes conveyed through a Renaissance
(e.g. "window") sense of space and composition, was supplanted
by a growing interest in an art of immediacy. The French Impressionists
applied pigment in small touches of pure color which seemed dazzlingly bright
and unfinished when compared to works by contemporary academic artists.
As photography captured the present tense and the Industrial Revolution
propelled Europe into the future, the Impressionists sought to establish
the visual reality of everyday life as legitimate subject matter. Their
study of light and its effect on familiar objects was a radical departure
from the narrative, romantic, and historical concerns of the previous generation.
As the aesthetic of Impressionism developed and transcontinental travel and study became customary for Americans, some American artists began to adopt the Impressionist style--sometimes as much as sixty years after the height of Impressionism in France. What is referred to as American Impressionism is actually a hybrid of influences converging in the United States over the course of many decades (about 1890-1930).
The style was one of many that were popular during this
time period. Like their French prototypes, American Impressionists applied
pigment in small touches of pure color and looked to contemporary life for
their subject matter. Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, John Twachtman,
J. Alden Weir, and Willard Metcalf organized The Ten American Painters,
a group formed in 1897 after a feud with the Society of American Artists.
Though individual styles vary within the group, The Ten are regarded as
the first official American derivative of Impressionism.
This exhibition was organized by the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, which includes color reproductions of many of the exhibition's paintings, and interpretive essays by acclaimed American art historian William Gerdts and former Sheldon Gallery Curator, Daphne Deeds.
From top to bottom: William Glackens, Mahone Bay, 1910, oil on canvas; Theodore Wendel, Girl with Turkeys, Giverny, 1886, oil on canvas; Louis Ritman, Dormitory Breakfast, 1913, oil on canvas
rev. 11/22/10
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