Announced Art Piques Curiosity in Untold Works

By Tracie Dungan

Posted: November 5, 2011 at noon

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BENTONVILLE — Art scholars, curators and dealers who live and breathe art await the Nov. 11 opening of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art with an anticipation borne of their depth of knowledge of some of its announced works.

In addition, with only about 75 of some 500 works from the museum’s permanent collection announced, those experts dream of what surprises visitors will encounter on the museum’s opening day.

Betty Krulik, a private dealer of American art in New York City, said it’s impossible for her to pick a favorite among Crystal Bridges’ announced collection.

“I’m more interested in the surprises than what’s been announced,” she said. “Lots of secrets there.”

Krulik credits Alice Walton’s knowledge of the art field and “ability to choose the best” for the known collection thus far.

“She’s got such amazing taste and connoisseurship,” Krulik said. “I think we’re really going to be blown away.”

Graham C. Boettcher, the William Cary Hulsey curator of American art at the Birmingham (Ala.) Museum of Art, also fancies the mystery of Crystal Bridges’ unannounced works but has favorites among the known acquisitions.

“The anticipation of what will be behind those walls is a large part of the story,” he said.

Iconic artworks

Some of the art Walton has collected already earned its fame, Boettcher said. His favorites are among the most famous and revered in the collection.

“Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits is one of the most storied paintings in American history,” he said.

Durand’s 1849 oil on canvas work depicts the painter Thomas Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant viewing the Catskills from the vantage point of a rocky ledge.

The New York Times reported May 13, 2005, that Walton bought the painting from the New York Public Library, quoting anonymous sources as saying the price exceeded $35 million.

“It is both a landscape and a portrait,” Boettcher said, as well as a posthumous testament to a late friend of Durand’s. “It was painted the year after Thomas Cole died, Cole being the father of what is known as the Hudson River School.”

Kindred Spirits is considered among the top examples of the Hudson River School of painting, he said, defining it as a movement in which landscape artists used as their subject matter the Hudson River Valley and its environs, such as the Catskills, Adirondacks and the White Mountains.

“One could also think of it as religious,” he said. “The bough of the tree, the way the branch comes out and arches over the two men ... it strongly resembles the Gothic arch of a cathedral.”

Cole’s death left his fellow artists questioning whether landscape painting would continue as a dominant art form, as it was in the mid-19th century, Boettcher said. Before Cole, landscapes were not as valued as portraiture or depictions of historical events.

A couple of things Durand’s work has in common with the other work on Boettcher’s favorites list, Norman Rockwell’s 1943 Rosie the Riveter, is that both were created during the midpoint of their respective centuries.

“Both of them define a seminal moment in American history,” he said.

“With Rosie the Riveter, we saw how women stepped into the workforce in place of men,” Boettcher said. This aspect of World War II’s upheaval changed America forever.

Rockwell painted the image of feminine brawn that symbolizes women’s place in the World War II-era workforce for the May 29, 1943, cover of The Saturday Evening Post.

Rockwell’s Rosie is posed on the 52-by-40-inch oil on canvas as an homage to Michelangelo’s frescoed depiction of the prophet Isaiah from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

“She’s on her lunch break, but she’s really a majestic figure,” he said. “One of the details people might miss is that her foot is on the cover of Mein Kampf, just squashing the enemy.”

Obscure but amazing

Sid Sachs, director of exhibitions at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, noted that Crystal Bridges will have some less well-known works from artists such as Marisol that are nonetheless important to the story of American art historyˆ.

In December, the Bentonville museum announced it had acquired Marisol’s 1977 sculpture Portrait of Martha Graham.

“She’s kind of an underrated artist,” Sachs said of Marisol Escobar, a 1960s-era contemporary of Andy Warhol, who goes by her first name.

She began making her name during Sachs’ favorite artistic period, roughly 1958-66, the beginning of pop art and “assemblage” art.

In the 1950s, Marisol began experimenting with Cubist assemblage techniques, using objects found in the streets and discarded wood. Her first solo exhibition was in 1958. In the 1960s, she was associated with pop artists and was part of Warhol’s circle.

“She’s in museums, but they don’t have her work out. ... Sculptures in general take up space,” Sachs said, meaning Crystal Bridges visitors will be fortunate to see one of her works. “A lot of her pieces are in Europe, and there’s one in Israel.”

Unlike Warhol, Marisol didn’t have numerous assistants to help produce her labor-intensive works, so she made fewer than she otherwise could have. She has done a lot of the sawing, laminating and painting herself.

“It was carving, it was casting — it was nailed together,” he said of her works, which used resins, ceramics and other materials. “She had to use power equipment.”

Portraits with mystery

William Keyse Rudolph, curator of American art and decorative arts with the Milwaukee Art Museum, singled out a group of a half-dozen Colonial American portraits from what is known as the Levy-Franks works.

“The group of portraits is the incredibly important series of images of a Jewish family in New York,” Rudolph said.

There aren’t many museums outside New York that have 18th-century New York portraiture, he said. “And Crystal Bridges, now with this set, has one of the biggest and the best and the most important series of New York Colonial portraits,” he said.

According to the Bentonville museum’s directory of announced works, the six Levy-Franks portraits all are dated 1735 and are oil on canvas.

The portraits were commissioned long before the days of photography to capture people’s formal or informal images, Rudolph said.

“Portraits helped colonists document and maintain family and business relationships as well as demonstrating their wealth and taste,” according to Crystal Bridges’ website.

Art historians have researched the identity of the artist behind the Levy-Franks works. The artist is believed to be Gerardus Duyckinck, Rudolph said.

“It’s not uncommon to have an unsigned portrait from the 18th century, and that is part of the nightmare and the challenge of working in that era,” Rudolph said of curators and art scholars.

The portraits had a different use than today.

“A lot of portraits were made to sit in people’s homes — they were never exhibited,” Rudolph said. At the time: “The important thing was who was in the picture, not who made the picture.”

Overall, “The thing that was important about this series, it was made in New York when New York had become English but still retained a lot of Dutch history and heritage,” Rudolph said. “It’s a generation after New Amsterdam has become New York, but people still feel pretty Dutch.”

Technology vs. nature

Alissa Walls Mazow, an assistant professor of contemporary art at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, wrote her doctoral dissertation on two of the artists with works featured at Crystal Bridges: Roxy Paine and Walton Ford.

“I’m personally excited to have their work there,” Mazow said.

The Bentonville museum has already unveiled a 47-foot-tall sculpture by Paine at the main entrance of its grounds.

Yield resembles a bare tree in winter, formed from cantilevered stainless steel. Paine is known for his Dendroid series, a group of 24 tree-like, stainless-steel sculptures, museum officials have said.

Its collection also includes Ford’s 2009 triptych The Island.

Mazow said the large, three-paneled watercolor work depicts an island formed of an intermingled pile of “thylacines,” or wolf-like, carnivorous marsupials.

“No one paints with watercolor on this scale,” as does Ford, she said. “When you look at the piece, it looks aged.”

The painting is full of contradictions.

“Extinct marsupials are devouring these innocent, white lambs,” she said. “It has a kind of sacred quality to it, but clearly it’s not a religious piece — it’s secular.”

Paine fascinates her because many of his works involve using various machines to sculpt, draw or paint fungi and other plants out of resins and polymers.

For instance, one piece he created titled Bad Lawn sports weeds and fungi that look like real grasses from afar.

Mazow said Paine juxtaposes “industrial, biotech processes” with the natural processes of birth, death and living things’ return to the soil in a way that makes viewers question whether the manmade can compare to the perfection of nature.

“They’re both using historical natural history to address biological, ecological and technological issues of ownership and control in the 21st century,” she said.

Mazow predicts that when visitors view the Ford and Paine pieces, “People will be blown away by their vibrancy.”

This article was previously published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Aug. 28, 2011.

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