VISUAL ARTS: Primary Colors

For artist and art-lover, it’s all too easy to be seduced, mesmerized, and enthralled by hue, tint, and shade, in palettes that range from the soft and evocative to the explosive and exciting—color might just be an artist’s most powerful tool.

 

This summer, a sumptuous feast of color awaits Berkshire museumgoers, providing the opportunity to view the charming watercolors of Maurice Prendergast, early oils by Georgia O’Keeffe, works by American cubists, and the aggressive hues of Sol LeWitt’s later wall drawings, in four shows well worth sampling at area museums.

 

Spending a few hours in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with the breezy watercolors of Maurice Prendergast might be the next best thing to a vacation in Venice. Prendergast was enjoying that city when he made some of these pictures, and the sunny joy of an Italian holiday can be had for the price of admission to the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA)—an excellent deal, since admission is always free.

 

Prendergast in Italy is an extensive exhibition; more than sixty watercolors, oils, and monotypes, created during Prendergast’s two trips to Italy—1898-99 and 1911—are included in the show, on view from July 18 through September 20, as are sketchbooks, letters, prints, photographs, guidebooks, and travel advertisements. There are views of Rome, Siena, Capri, and, of course, Venice, among these delightful vacation snapshots: festivals, gondoliers, sailboats, and city streets filled with strolling pedestrians crowd these vivid pictures.

 

Prendergast is described as an American impressionist, but by the time of his second trip to Italy, his approach had shifted toward twentieth-century modernism. His vibrant palette is bewitching—Mediterranean blues and greens splashed with golden yellows and sunny oranges. Festa del Redentore is particularly captivating, depicting a jumble of colorful lanterns on boats bobbing over a dark canal at night, and in Fiesta-Venice-S. Pietro in Volta, children in white frocks gather under a fluttering canopy of vivid flags and pennants. Curated by WCMA’s Nancy Mowll Mathews and Elizabeth Kennedy of the Terra Foundation, this is the first exhibition of Prendergast’s Italian watercolors and monotypes. The show will travel next to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in October, putting these works back into their creative context.

 

Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1924 painting, Dark Abstraction, depicts a nighttime landscape of the deepest black, edged by a rim of blue with a narrow field of terra cotta on the right. In Arthur Dove’s image, Fog Horns, seductive, diaphanous spheres of deep rose and salmon hues hover on the horizon.

 

Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence, a show of paintings by these two pioneers of American art, is on view at The Clark in Williamstown through September 7, and includes significant and visually powerful works by both, produced between 1910 and 1943. O’Keeffe’s iconic images of flowers and the Southwest are well-known, but what is less familiar is that her fascination with nature-inspired abstracts began early in her career with her discovery of the work of Arthur Dove, widely acknowledged as the first American abstract artist. “The way you see nature depends on whatever has influenced your way of seeing. I think it was Arthur Dove who affected my start, who helped me to find something of my own,” said O’Keeffe.

 

O’Keeffe first became aware of Dove’s work in 1914; Dove and O’Keeffe met in New York City in 1918, introduced by photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, who later became O’Keeffe’s husband. O’Keeffe and Dove remained friends, and as Dove influenced her in the teens and 1920s, she later influenced his work in the 1930s. “It’s an interesting story of mutual inspiration and mutual respect,” says Clark senior curator Richard Rand. “The installation integrates the work of the two artists; one can see the visual and thematic links between the two painters, in colors and in subjects.”

 

Guest curator Debra Bricker Balken explains that the title, Circles of Influence, was inspired by the many works in the show that include sun or moon imagery. She is confident that the connections between the two artists will be readily apparent; some viewers may even be confounded as to which works are O’Keeffe’s and which are Dove’s.

 

“For the informed scholar and for a visitor who knows little, viewers will understand that these connections are meaningful.” The show, however, is much more than an academic exercise, she adds. “The works are so beautiful.”

 

The titles of some of the paintings—Dove’s River Bottom, Silver, Ochre, Carmine, Green and O’Keeffe’s Red and Orange Streak—hint at the importance of color to the artists. “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way,” O’Keeffe said. A pair of cityscapes (Dove’s Silver Tanks and Moon and O’Keeffe’s City Night) are expressed in silvery white contrasted with deep nighttime blue-blacks; O’Keeffe’s The Lawrence Tree, a major piece by the artist, is a mystical midnight vision. Balken is especially pleased to have two of O’Keeffe’s jack-in-the-pulpit images included; the larger of the paintings is lush in the application of color, all mahogany and red against lush green leaf shapes tipped by sunshine.

 

Color and Form: The Language of Abstract Art pairs work by two contemporary artists, Chuck Webster and Charles Thomas O’Neil, with selections from the A.E. Gallatin collection, mostly dating to the 1930s and 1940s, at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, through November 1. In true Berkshire fashion, this show of abstract paintings, curated by Hellmut Wohl, is riddled with coincidences and serendipity. Albert Eugene Gallatin, a painter as well as a noted collector of art, belonged to a group of artists known as the Park Avenue Cubists, which included George L.K. Morris, Morris’s wife Suzy Frelinghuysen, and Charles G. Shaw. Morris and Frelinghuysen owned a home in Lenox, Massachusetts, now a house museum called the Frelinghuysen Morris House and Studio; it’s possible that through this friendship, Gallatin may have spent time in the Berkshires, prompting the gift of more than a dozen pictures from his impressive collection to the Berkshire Museum. This summer’s show includes paintings by Shaw, Morris, and Gallatin himself.

 

Berkshire Museum executive director Stuart A. Chase first saw work by O’Neil in a gallery in Santa Fe while on vacation; surprising since O’Neil lives and works in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Webster now lives in Binghamton, New York, but he has lived in the Berkshires, and for a time painted murals on barns in the region with a group of artists known as the Barnstormers.

 

Cubism is marked by an austerity in composition and the use of geometric shapes, but for Gallatin, Shaw, and Morris, their use of color was anything but austere; instead it was abundant in bright, hot reds and cool blues. That very use of color is the component that ties the mid-century works to the current pieces: intense, saturated, and boldly applied. The contemporary pieces are exuberant, joyful even, in the use of bright pigments. O’Neil’s undulating, organic shapes, rendered with hard edges, vibrate as orange floats over blue, or red and yellow exist side by side. Webster’s paintings offer a single bright image on a solid ground—in RAAH, a bright blue geyser erupts top and bottom, and in Order of the Arrow, a cluster of tangerine-toned directional markers seem to dance merrily.
 

 

For anyone who craves the maximum color experience, there’s just one place to go—Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. Color in LeWitt’s wall drawings is enormous, overwhelming—breathtaking in its use and power. The palette in many of the works on the second level of the exhibition, those from the middle years of LeWitt’s career, is bright but somewhat muted by the layering of the color applications, giving the blocks and bands of color a textural surface. On the third level are pieces from later in LeWitt’s career, which veritably assault the viewer via the intensity of the colors, smooth and bright on the walls. But it is also on this level that an entirely black wall, with an undulating band of glossy varnish, captures the viewers’ attention, as do several black-on-black groups of stripes adjacent to a white-on-white depiction, all delineated by the use of matte paint and the shiny varnish.

 

Some of LeWitt’s more subtle use of color is in his earliest wall-sized drawings, made up of thousands and thousands of carefully calibrated lines in pencil. The red, yellow, blue, and gray marks become, as one steps back, an interplay of muted beiges and soft tones, most pleasing to the eye.

 

LeWitt used color brilliantly, pairing soothing, harmonious tones side-by-side and then juxtaposing jarring colors that vibrate and excite. For sheer exuberance, the Sol LeWitt show is worth another visit, and another, and yet another. Good thing it will be here for twenty-five more years. (JULY 2009)

Senior editor Lesley Ann Beck loves color; she lives in a blue house with an orange door.

 

THE GOODS

Color and Form: The Language of Abstract Art
Through Nov 1
Berkshire Museum
/
Pittsfield, Mass.

www.berkshiremuseum.org

Dove/O’Keeffe:
Circles of Influence
Through Sept 7
The Clark
.
Williamstown, Mass.

www.clarkart.edu

Sol LeWitt: A Wall
Drawing Retrospective
Through 2033
MASS MoCA
.
North Adams, Mass.

www.massmoca.org

Prendergast in Italy
Jul 18-Sept 20
Williams College Museum of Art

Williamstown, Mass.

www.wcma.org

 

Images, from the top:

From The Lake, No. 1 (1924) by Georgia O’Keeffe, oil on canvas, is a colorful example of the artist’s early nature-inspired abstractions. Image courtesy the Clark/Nathan Emory Coffin Collection of the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society

 

Festa del Redentore (ca. 1899) by Maurice Prendergast, watercolor and pencil on paper, was painted during the artist’s first trip to Italy. Williams College Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast, courtesy WCMA

 

The Grand Canal, Venice (ca. 1898-99) by Maurice Prendergast, watercolor and pencil on paper. Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, courtesy Williams College Museum of Art

 

The Lawrence Tree (1929) by Georgia O’Keeffe. Image courtesy the Clark; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn., Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society

 

Silver Tanks and Moon (1930) by Arthur Dove. Image courtesy the Clark; Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Arthur Steiglitz Collection, courtesy the estate of Arthur Dove/courtesy Terry Dintenfass

Fog Horns (1929) by Arthur Dove. Image courtesy the Clark; Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, courtesy the estate of Arthur Dove/courtesy Terry Dintenfass
 

Order of the Arrow (2008) by Chuck Webster. Image courtesy Berkshire Museum

2564 by Charles Thomas O’Neil. Image courtesy Berkshire Museum

Wall Drawing 340 (1980) by Sol LeWitt. Image courtesy Mass moca