While an artist-in-residence at Phillips Academy, Charles Sheeler created crisp, colorful depictions of old, abandoned mill buildings just south of the campus, like "Ballardvale,” 1946. "The stark, aging beauty of the mills,” says co-curator Agee, "captured his imagination, appearing like newly discovered remnants of long-lost ancient monuments.”
:Since its founding in 1931, the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., has assembled an extraordinary collection of some of America's finest paintings and sculpture. It is surely the premier art collection in any American preparatory school and, indeed, one of the best collections of American art anywhere.
All this is abundantly clear in a grand traveling exhibition of more than 70 selections from the Addison collection, "Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s to 1950s," on view at Southern Methodist University's Meadows Museum of Art through February 24. It is organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Addison and ably curated by the Addison's associate director and curator Susan C. Faxon and William C. Agee, professor of art history at Hunter College and an Andover alumnus.
Because of the quality and comprehensive nature of the exhibition, it offers a rare opportunity to trace the evolution of America's unique aesthetic identity, starting with Hudson River School landscapes and concluding with the emergence of Abstract Expressionism, which secured America's preeminent position in the international art world. In addition, with masterpieces of Spanish art in adjoining galleries, the Meadows Museum venue provides an opportunity to explore connections and influences between Spanish and American artists in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
Although the exhibition does not include any Colonial-era paintings, it begins with a bang with works by the Hudson River School artists, who toward the beginning of the Nineteenth Century used depictions of the country's bountiful, pristine landscape to help shape a national identity and distinguish America's art tradition from that of Europe.
Operating from his home/studio on Washington Square North, Edward Hopper painted realistic images of the city around him, like "Manhattan Bridge Loop,” 1928.
Leading the way, along with Thomas Cole, was Asher B. Durand (1796–1886), who both painted and wrote about what he called the "virgin charms of our native land." Durand's "Study of a Woodland Interior," circa 1855, shows a quintessential sylvan glade, replete with a precisely delineated, moss-covered rock surrounded by a lush, tangled forest.
Other works document the manner in which Durand's contemporaries utilized distinctly American landscapes to forge a national expression. Frederic Church chronicled the beauty of Maine's Lake Millinocket and Mount Katahdin, Jasper Cropsey created a glowingly romantic view of New Jersey's Greenwood Lake, and German-born Albert Bierstadt suggested the dramatic impact of an impending storm on deer and nature alike.
Around midcentury, Luminists like Fitz Henry Lane cast a romantic glow over marine and inland scenes, while George Inness brought a darker Barbizon School touch to evocative canvases such as "The Coming Storm," circa 1879.
Other standouts are Martin Johnson Heade's elegant "Apple Blossoms and Hummingbird," Eastman Johnson's evocative "The Conversation," William Merritt Chase's vigorously brushed portrait of a cigar-smoking young tough, "The Leader," and fascinating trompe l'oeil works by William M. Harnett and John F. Peto.
