Hudson River School Drawings On View At Frick Art Museum

PITTSBURGH, PENN.

:An exhibition of 39 rarely exhibited drawings of the Hudson River School from the collection of Dia Art Foundation is now open at The Frick Art Museum.

"Hudson River School Drawings from Dia Art Foundation" was organized by The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College to celebrate the May 2003 opening in the Hudson River Valley of Dia:Beacon, a museum that houses the permanent collection of Dia Art Foundation, a contemporary art organization based in New York City. The drawings included in the exhibition were assembled by one of Dia's principal artists, Dan Flavin (1933-1996), during the late 1970s and early 1980s when he and Dia were planning a museum for his own work in the Hudson River Valley.

"Hudson River School Drawings from Dia Art Foundation" is augmented by an ancillary exhibition organized by the Frick's director of collections and exhibitions Tom Smart, "Dan Flavin, drawing water light," comprising a selection of 98 small sketches and drawings from the 1960s and 1970s that Flavin made along the shores of the Hudson River and the southern coast of Long Island. One of Flavin's light works that has an affinity to the landscape is presented in the exhibition.

Both exhibitions are on view though July 9.

"Hudson River School Drawings from Dia Art Foundation" comprises 39 pencil, ink and charcoal sketches and two oil studies from Dia Art Foundation's collection of Hudson River School drawings, which is on extended loan to the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.

A longtime resident of the Hudson River Valley, Flavin's well-known installations of fluorescent lights infuse gallery spaces with variously colored light, turning them into glowing abstract environments of line and color. He acknowledged the light and the landscape of the valley, as well as the work of his Nineteenth Century predecessors, as influential on his art. Flavin also worked with Dia on plans, which were never realized, to display his own work alongside the Nineteenth Century landscape drawings in a museum in the Hudson Valley.

Advanced by the British-born painter Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School grew to be the most influential manifestation of landscape painting in Nineteenth Century America. Sharing the philosophy of the American Transcendentalists, Hudson River School painters created visual embodiments of the Romantic ideals about which authors like Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman wrote.

"Hudson River School Drawings from Dia Art Foundation" includes sketches that present a wide range of Hudson River School subjects, from Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York and the valleys of the Catskill Mountains in southern New York to mountainous, picturesque sites abroad. In these locales, the confluence of land and sky wrapped in light and atmosphere was of primary interest for Hudson River School artists. Back in their studios, these artists would consult their drawings in order to interpret and refine on canvas their fervent response to nature.

The exhibition concentrates on drawings by John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872) and Aaron Draper Shattuck (1832-1928). Kensett, a leading Hudson River School painter at midcentury, made numerous seasonal sketching trips in the United States and abroad. Between 1840 and 1847, his sketching tours and studies took him to locales in England, France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, where he executed elegant ink and pencil drawings that reflected his indebtedness to the harmonious landscape ideal of Seventeenth Century French painter Claude Lorraine (1600-1682).

Like other Hudson River School painters, Kensett also spent much time sketching landscape scenery in New York and New England. He came to be associated with artists known as "Luminists," so called because of their experiments with the effects of light on water and sky.

Shattuck was a friend of Kensett's and was also associated with the White Mountain School of Hudson River painters. Unlike Kensett, however, Shattuck appears not to have traveled abroad, but rather studied portrait painting during the first half of the 1850s and drawing at New York's National Academy of Design in 1852. The drawings in the exhibition illustrate Shattuck's use of the white of the sheet to evoke the light of the season and almost tangible airiness of location.

In addition to works by Shattuck and Kensett, the exhibition includes sketches by Franklin Anderson (1844-1891), Samuel Colman (1832-1920), Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900), Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880), Robert Havell Jr (1793-1878) and James David Smillie (1833-1909).

Flavin was an inveterate draftsman. His drawings seek to express his direct experience of a particular time and place. Their lively energy and dynamic, gestural style that is evident in "Crow's Nest," a 1965 drawing, testify to Flavin's enormous creative spirit. By drawing from the landscape, he wanted to interpret not only its unique qualities and energy, but he wanted his drawings to serve as existential traces of his encounter with the land, sky and light and the people who moved in and through his field of perception as he drew.

The Frick Art & Historical Center is at 7227 Reynolds Street. For information, www.frickart.org or 412-371-0600.