New Acquisitions 1998 at the Portland Museum of Art

Portland Museum of Art

Portland, Maine

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"New Acquisitions 1998" at the Portland Museum of Art

Frederic Edwin Church, Mount Katahdin from Millinocket Camp, 1895, oil on canvas, 26 1/2 x 42 1/4 inches, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine. Gift of Owen and Anna Wells in memory of Elizabeth B. Noyce (1998.96) Photo by Melville McLean

An expanded installation of the Portland Museum of Art's annual New Acquisitions exhibition celebrates an unprecedented year of gifts and purchases. Featuring more than 40 works, New Acquisitions 1998 is on view through April 18, 1999.

Nineteen hundred and ninety-eight saw the Museum's Collection grow by more than 150 works of art. The exhibition features many of the gifts received in 1998, including paintings by Claude Monet and Andrew Wyeth, a Maine pastel by William Partridge Burpee, and important prints by Alex Katz. It also focuses on several purchase initiatives which have allowed the Museum to set its sights on ambitious acquisitions such as Alexander Archipenko's ceramic Standing Figure (conceived 1916), Charles Burchfield's The Big Tree (watercolor, circa 1920), and Marguerite Zorach's The Garden (oil on canvas, 1914).

Straightforward gifts and purchases are only two of the ways in which a work of art may enter the Museum's permanent collection. The exhibition also celebrates acquisitions which have arisen from special exhibitions and programs at the Museum. John Bisbee's sculpture Husk, the winner of the Purchase Prize for the 1998 Portland Museum of Art Biennial, is on view; as well as two works which were acquired from the Print & Photo Fair 1998, a photograph by recent Golden Light Award-winner Jack Montgomery, and a print by American modernist Salvatore Pinto. This past year also saw the formation of two important sub-collections: the Ernst Haas Memorial Collection, featuring photographs by students and colleagues of the acclaimed photojournalist; and the Barbara Cash Collection, a collection and an endowed fund dedicated to the acquisition of private press and artists' books. Works from both of those collections, including a photograph by Arnold Newman and books by Cash herself, are included in New Acquisitions 1998

Read more about the Portland Museum of Art in the Resource Library

For further biographical information on selected artists cited above please see America's Distinguished Artists, a national registry of historic artists.

rev. 9/20/10

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