Through Three Shows, Hyde Will Present a History of American Art
From a 1758 portrait by John Singleton Copley through 19th century landscape paintings of the Adirondacks to the late drawings of Andy Warhol, The Hyde Collection will present a year of American Art.
The most wide-ranging survey of American art can be seen in a show that runs through January 4 titled “Picturing America: Signature Works from the Westmoreland Museum of American Art.”
Originating from the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, which is currently undergoing a renovation and expansion, the exhibition features 57 paintings and sculptures from the Colonial period to the mid twentieth century.
“The exhibition complements the American art in our collection and adds breadth to it,” said Charles Guerin, The Hyde’s executive director.
Portrait of Helen Gallagher, c. 1928, by Malcolm Parcell
Strawberries and Pitcher, by Austin C. Wooster (1838-1913)
The exhibition includes work by Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Susan MacDowell Eakins, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, George Inness, Paul Manship, John Singer Sargent and Benjamin West as well as Charles Willson Peale and his children Rembrandt, Rubens and Mary Jane.
“Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of George Washington is particularly wonderful,” said Guerin. “It depicts him in his everyday soldiers’ uniform, rather than in the grandiose manner in which he was usually portrayed at the time.”
The painting is Peale’s own version of another portrait of Washington that he painted for the US Capitol.
As the last living artist to have painted Washington from life, Peale once wrote, “the reduplication of my work, by my own hand, should be esteemed the most reliable.”
Once “Picturing America: Signature Works from the Westmoreland Museum of American Art,” closes, paintings from the permanent collection of the Adirondack Museum will be installed in the galleries.
“Since the Adirondack Museum is closed in the winter and we’re open, we thought we should begin collaborating more frequently,” said Guerin.
The Adirondack Museum’s collection features works depicting the Adirondack landscape over more than two centuries. Paintings, drawings, prints, sketches, and photographs represent artists like Thomas Cole, John Frederick Kensett, William Trost Richards, Seneca Ray Stoddard, Edward Bierstadt, Harold Weston, Eliot Porter, and Nathan Farb. Since the early 1800s, images of the Adirondack landscape have helped shape the American relationship to, and definitions of, “wilderness” and “nature.”
“The Late Drawings of Andy Warhol” arrives in Glens Falls next spring. In the mid-1970s, Warhol began producing paintings and prints prolifically. Bob Colacello, associate and close friend of Warhol, attributes this “incredible outpouring” of work to the new, spacious studio Warhol moved into in 1974. “Warhol was inspired by the open vastness of the new space. For Andy, space was a void to be filled.”
Warhol often used an overhead projector to trace the source image onto heavy drawing paper. This technique used throughout his lifetime allowed Warhol to produce “machine made” lines that are equally automatic and expressive, impersonal and intimate. Many of the drawings in this exhibition had never been displayed before this travelling exhibition was organized.
