Just as the French are getting an introduction to the art contained inside Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, so are Northwest Arkansas residents.
The Bentonville museum opened in November 2011 and has been toured by hundreds of thousands of guests - local, national and international - in the time since.
And so an exhibit that premiered earlier this year at the venerable Louvre Museum in Paris will now go on display at Crystal Bridges in Bentonville.
“In a lot of ways, we’re still introducing American art to Northwest Arkansas and the region,” says Kevin Murphy, curator of American art for Crystal Bridges.
Courtesy of a partnership among Crystal Bridges, the Louvre, the Terra Foundation for American Art - which does not have a physical location - and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, some of that introduction will be completed in stages.
The first collaboration among the partner groups resulted in “American Encounters: Thomas Cole and the American Landscape,” which debuted last year and was shown at the participating museums. As the name implies, it highlighted landscapes. Future exhibits courtesy of the same partnership will include American portraiture and still life works. And the current exhibit, which opened in Paris earlier this year and at Crystal Bridges earlier this month, explores genre painting.
“American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life” will be on display at Crystal Bridges through Aug. 12before departing for the High Museum.
Genre paintings naturally follow in the footsteps of landscape paintings. Those included in the previous exhibit, from Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand, illustrate American landscapes but are somewhat confined to the East Coast. As American culture expanded westward, genre art followed it. During the 1840s through the 1860s, when genre painting was at its peak, America and Americans were on the move.
“That’s when the American experience became broader,” Murphy says.
Examples of genre works are typified by stock characters in everyday situations. One of the works in the exhibition - and one previous Crystal Bridges guests might already recognize - is Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait’s “A Tight Fix - Bear Hunting, Early Winter.” In the piece, a bear straddles a hunter’s fallen gun as the animal and the hunter face each other at point-blank range. The bear swings his claws, the hunter steadies a knife, and the outcome is not readily guessed. Another, “The Jolly Flatboatmen” by George Caleb Bingham, shows a group ofmen on a boat, smiling and playing music.
Peter John Brownlee, associate curator for the Terra Foundation, took the curatorial lead for the newest exhibition.
The works selected would have been many people’s in-color introduction to the sailors and frontiersmen of the West.
“Culture was changing rapidly,” Brownlee says.
As thematic works, the artists went back to the concept often, with various versions of the paintings now represented at Crystal Bridges. That’s certainly the case for Bingham’s “Flatboatmen” and Eastman Johnson’s “Negro Life at the South,” Brownlee says.
The examples currently at Crystal Bridges are both latterday interpretations of the artist’s early work on the samesubject. Both works were those for which the artists became known.
Tait’s work is one of the five genre paintings selected for the exhibit, and it is Crystal Bridges’ only example on the tour. That means “A Tight Fix” is back on display temporarily but will travel again for the conclusion of the exhibit.
Other works in the new exhibit are the examples by Bingham and Johnson alongside Dutch and English examples - those are the Louvre’s contribution - of genre painting that inspired the American side of the movement.
“Each one of us has different strengths of our collections,” Murphy says.
Whats Up, Pages 24 on 05/24/2013