Allen Tucker: Post Impressionist Works of “Robust Plentitude”

Allen Tucker, Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum J0024455. Lisa N. Peters At the outset of our work on a show of the art of Allen Tucker, opening February 25, we gathered what we knew to be the standard reference material on Tucker, but we soon discovered that what we found initially was the tip of the iceberg. More and more articles on Tucker and information on him and his art kept surfacing. As we examined it, we pieced together a full picture of Tucker’s career in the show's catalogue (the most comprehensive yet), realizing in the process that he was an artist of much prominence in New York from the mid-1910s through the 1930s and that he elicited an inordinate amount of respect from his peers for his integrity and broad-mindedness as well as for the creative versatility of his art, which critic Virgil Barker commended in 1928 for its “robust plentitude.” Allen Tucker, "Mountain Landscape, ca. 1911-16

Tucker began his career as an architect, but was led away from this profession by his passion for painting.  His early mentor was John Twachtman, with whom he studied at the Art Students League and in Cos Cob, Connecticut.  Tucker shared Twachtman’s gentlemanly outlook and genuine appreciation of artistic individuality.  After the Armory Show of 1913, in which he played a role in the organization, Tucker was a leading figure in the emergence of the modernist art scene in New York.  His work was shown at Montross Gallery, one of the first galleries to respond to the innovations of the Armory Show, and he was an unpaid advisor to Juliana Force, the curator of the Whitney Studio Club, the precursor to the Whitney Museum of American Art.  When a memorial show of Tucker’s work was held at the Whitney in 1939, Force recalled Tucker as a man “whose faultless taste in art and inexhaustible sympathy with the problems of his fellow artists led to an association of many years, wherein his wisdom and understanding were of the greatest value in the development of those ideas which resulted in the formation of this museum.”

Allen Tucker, "Woman in a Garden," ca. 1919-20

Tucker was described similarly by his champion, Forbes Watson, art critic for the New York Evening Post and the New York World.  Writing several articles and a book on Tucker, Watson was unfailing in his support of Tucker as an artist who fearlessly sought just the right means to express his personal and emotional responses to his subjects.  This is borne out in both the diversity of Tucker’s subject matter and his willingness to change his stylistic handling from one work to the next.  His admiration for the art of van Gogh, which led to his reputation as “the Vincent of America,” can be seen both in the rhythmic directness of his brushwork and in the way that his feelings drove his expression.

In Mountain Landscape Tucker chose an elevated viewpoint and treated the mountain before us as an upright plane, forgoing foreshortening and using dabs and swirls of color to focus on the energy of light and color across the surface. In Woman in a Garden, the elongated figure in a black coat and high feathered hat is less a part of her space than balanced against it, the spinning clouds perhaps personifying the intensity of her thoughts. A post impressionist who sought his own way, Allen Tucker is overdue a rediscovery for the unceasing vitality of his art and for a determination of his place in the story of the art of his time.

Home from Russia: Paintings by Ivan Olinsky and Nicolai Cikovsky

Ivan Olinsky (1878-1962), "Venice Waterfront," Oil on board, 15 x 18 inches, Signed lower left: "Ivan A. Olinsky".

Now back at the gallery are four paintings recently lent by Spanierman Gallery to the exhibition American Artists from the Russian Empire; two by the Ukrainian-born Ivan Olinsky and two by Polish-born Nicolai Cikovsky (all pictured here).

The exhibition, which traveled to the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; the Fred Jones Jr. Museum, University of Oklahoma, Norman; and the San Diego Museum of Art, California, featured nearly seventy paintings and sculptures by many of the best known artists working in America in the post WWII period, all of whom left the Russian Empire before the end of the 1930s. These artists created a significant body of work in the U.S., and the exhibition provided unique insights into the immeasurable contributions they made to the creation of American culture.

In Memory of Jimmy Ernst

Today, February 6, 2010, on the closing day of our exhibition, Jimmy Ernst: Radiant Silence, we remember the life of Ernst, who died at age sixty-four on this day in 1984.

Jimmy Ernst and Ernst, “The Chant,” 1955, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

Luigi Lucioni: “Realism and Something More”

Luigi Lucioni (1900-1988), "Retrospections," 1952, oil on canvas, 34 x 28 inches

Carol Lowrey

In February of 1932, the New York Times reported that William Sloan Coffin, the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had recently admitted that the museum had been paying scant attention to the work of contemporary American artists.  The writer for the Times went on, noting that the Met’s attempt to rectify the situation was now underway with the purchase of Dahlias and Apples, a still life by Luigi Lucioni, who was already represented in several public collections in the United States (“Metropolitan Buys Paintings by Lucioni,” New York Times, 24 February 1932).  That the venerable Metropolitan Museum decided to add a Lucioni to their holdings is not surprising, for this young artist––he was thirty-one years old––was the talk of the art world.  In fact, the Met’s picture was purchased from Lucioni’s sixth one-man show at the Ferargil Galleries––an exhibition (according to a notice in Art Digest, 1 March 1932) that broke all sales records for solo exhibitions held that season in New York.  But there’s more to this story: when the Metropolitan’s curator, Bryson Burroughs, saw Lucioni’s Pears with Pewter (1930), he decided that he liked it even better than Dahlias and Apples and an exchange was duly arranged (see Stuart P. Embury, The Etchings of Luigi Lucioni: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1984, 10).  I’m sure Lucioni didn’t care; his star was on the rise and he was now represented in the country’s leading art museum, a career marker that must surely have been thrilling for this up-and-coming American artist.

Betty Parsons: Travels, Both Literal and Metaphorical

Betty Parsons on the Beach at Southold, Long Island, photograph, Parsons Estate

Lisa N. Peters

While working on our third exhibition of the art of Betty Parsons (1900-1982), opening February 9, I was once again amazed by Parsons.   She seems to have lived several lives at once and didn’t compromise on any of them.  Her New York gallery is viewed today as the most important and groundbreaking of the Abstract Expressionist era.  She championed the artists she showed, both famous (Jackson Pollock, Barnet Newman, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko) and little known, with relentless energy and passion.  Friendship was important to her, and she kept close contact with her inner circle of friends; her work as a dealer was integral with her social life.  In addition to the artists she exhibited, her friendships included a surprising list of other well-known figures in the arts, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Martha Graham, Ezra Pound, Janet Flanner, and even Greta Garbo (for whom she was at times mistaken).

“On Jimmy Ernst” by James Johnson Sweeney

Typescript, ca. 1970s, James Johnson Sweeney "On Jimmy Ernst" (Click to enlarge)

Lisa N. Peters

When Sean Sweeney came by Spanierman Modern earlier this month to see our exhibition of the work of Jimmy Ernst, he left with us what he called, some “bits and pieces from my workspace.”  These consisted of papers to do with Ernst that had been in the files of Sean’s father James Johnson Sweeney (1900-1986), an art historian who was director of the Museum of Modern Art (1935-1946) and of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1952-60).   Among them was a never-published typescript James Johnson Sweeney wrote during the 1970s about Ernst’s work, which is reproduced (at left) and transcribed (below).

In 1954, Sweeney acquired Ernst’s Alone (1954), from Ernst’s series of black on black works (see example below), for the Guggenheim, and it became part of a group of contemporary works Sweeney brought into the collection to supplement the art that had been purchased during the years that the Guggenheim was known as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (including the many Kandinskys acquired by Hilla Rebay).  Other living artists whose work Sweeney acquired in the 1950s include Karel Appel, Alberto Burri, Eduardo Chillida, Willem de Kooning, Jimmy Ernst, Hans Hartung, Jackson Pollock, Pierre Soulages, and Antoni Tapies.

Noteworthy Events

In the gallery and beyond!

In the Gallery

David Johnson (1827 - 1908), "Dish of Apples and Quinces," ca. 1857, oil on canvasboard, 10 1/4 x 12 1/2 inches, signed lower right with the artist's initials: "D.J."

Spanierman Gallery: American Still-Life Paintings (1829-2009), on view until February 20, is an exhibition of works by American artists dating from the 1850s to the present. The show is accompanied by a brochure with a text by William H. Gerdts, professor emeritus of art history, Graduate School of the City of New York and author of Painters of a Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still-Life, 1801-1939 (1984) and American Still-Life Painting (1967). The artists represented include Thomas Hart Benton, Patrick Henry Bruce, Arthur Beecher Carles, Emil Carlsen, William Glackens, Claude Raguet Hirst, John Frederick Peto, and Severin Roesen.

Spanierman Modern: Jimmy Ernst: Radiant Silence, on view through February 6, is an exhibition of the eloquent and quietly moving abstract paintings and works on paper by an artist (1920-1984) who was uniquely part of two worlds—the European vanguard to which he was exposed during his youth, as the son of the Dadaist and surrealist Max Ernst and of the journalist and art historian Lou Straus-Ernst, and the New York School, where after immigrating to the United States in 1938, he was embraced by the leading figures in the Abstract Expressionist movement.

An Impressionist Sensibility: The Halff Collection

An Impressionist Sensibility: The Halff Collection at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX

The McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX is celebrating the American art collection of the Halff’s, long-time friends and clients of Spanierman Gallery.  The exhibition, An Impressionist Sensibility: The Halff Collection, will be on view from February 3-May 9, 2010. Here are a few words from the museum’s website:

We are pleased to begin the new year with a remarkable private collection of American paintings of the Impressionist era formed by San Antonians Marie and Hugh Halff. The 26 paintings in their collection are notable for both their range and quality and include superb examples by leading masters of the period from the 1870s to 1930.

Although their collection is not large, it is characterized by a surprising depth. Key artists, among them John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, and Theodore Robinson are represented by multiple works.

The collection also includes works by Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, John Henry Twachtman, and James McNeill Whistler.

Read more on the McNay’s site. And if you’re at the Annual Patron’s Party on Monday night, be sure to say hello to our very own, Christine Berry.

Hendrik Glintenkamp (1887-1946)

Hendrik Glintenkamp (1887 - 1946), "Rooftops, Hoboken," oil on canvas, 25-3/4 x 32 inches

Carol Lowrey

When we think of American art of the early twentieth century, the work of Ashcan School painters such as Robert Henri and John Sloan and modernists such as John Marin immediately come to mind––so much so that we tend to forget about the accomplishments of talented but underappreciated individuals such as Hendrik Glintenkamp.  Known to his friends as “Glint,” he was a painter, printmaker, illustrator and sculptor––part of an artistic milieu that included such influential figures as Henri, Sloan and Stuart Davis.  There’s been relatively little written about Glintenkamp’s career as a painter; described by one commentator as an urbane individual who retained “a little of the old-fashioned glamour of the traditional artist, who with Bohemian insouciance tossed off masterpieces between two bouts and an orgy” (Ida E. Prigohzy, “Pen Portraits – H. Glintenkamp: Wanderer in Woodcuts,” Creative Art, March 1932), he was born in Augusta, New Jersey, the son of a Dutch father and a French mother.  He went on to study at the National Academy of Design in New York and then at the New York School of Art, where his teachers included Henri and Sloan. 

A Tribute to Parents: Jimmy Ernst’s “A Not-So-Still Life”

Jimmy Ernst, A Not-so-Still Life (1984), cover

Lisa N. Peters
In the course of working on our exhibition of the work of Jimmy Ernst, currently on view at Spanierman Modern, I read Ernst’s autobiography A Not-So-Still Life, completed in 1983, a year before the artist’s sudden and untimely death.  I was unable to put the book down—it has the feel of a novel.  This is partly because Ernst had such an amazing life story and partly because of the moving and observant way he described it.  Ernst had an ability to notice what was around him as well as to step back and take a reflective stance, analyzing without casting judgment.

This is especially apparent in his writings about his parents.  His characterizations of his father, the Dadaist and surrealist painter Max Ernst, bring to life this elusive and magnetically charismatic artist and his tempestuous relationships with the strong women in his life–including Gala Éluard (wife of Dali), the surrealist painter and poet Leonora Carrington, Peggy Guggenheim (his third wife, who desperately tried to keep her marriage to Max intact and of whom Jimmy’s descriptions are especially poignant), and the painter and writer Dorothea Tanning (his fourth wife).  Jimmy Ernst also reveals a father who was unpredictable, self-absorbed, at times dismissive, and often distant, expressing affection for his son only in oblique and transient moments.  Jimmy’s ability to see the larger picture is reflected in his lack of resentment toward Max and the way that Jimmy attributed his father’s behavior to a time when the small band of intellectuals in Europe were surrounded by massive hostility.  Jimmy states: “I would be hard pressed if I were asked to single out, in retrospect, individuals of that generation who, in one way or another, could not be called ‘monsters.’”

Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, ca. 1948, Robert Bruce Inverarity, photographer, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.