Art of the Week

Korean, Three Kingdoms (50-668)
Standing bodhisattva, 500-99
Bronze 27 cm. h.
Gift of J. R. von Reinhold Jamesson ‘51

The Three Kingdoms of Korea refer to the ancient Korean kingdoms of Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla, which dominated the Korean peninsula and parts of Manchuria for much of the 1st millennium. The Three Kingdoms period ran from 57 ad until Silla’s triumph over Goguryeo in 668, which marked the beginning of the North and South States period of Unified Silla in the South and Balhae in the North. All three kingdoms shared a similar culture and language. Their original religions appear to have been shamanistic, but they were increasingly influenced by Chinese culture, particularly Confucianism and Taoism. In the 4th century, Buddhism was introduced to the peninsula and spread rapidly, briefly becoming the official religion of all three kingdoms.

Bodhisattvas are beings in the Buddhist pantheon that have attained enlightenment but have opted to stay on the temporal world to help those who have not yet reached nirvana. Bodhisattva images of the 6th century are rarely independent figures. Most surviving images are those that were once attached as attendants to a Buddha in a single mandorla triad. Occasionally single mandorla triads were made with the bodhisattva as the main figure with two monks as attendants. This piece figures a plump face and gently depicted robes; fishtail draperies, and large hands.

McKillop, Beth. Korean art and design.  [New York]: IconEditions, [1992].
Korean arts and culture. Seoul, Korea: Seoul International Pub. House, c1986.
Pak, Youngsook. Buddhist sculpture. Seoul: Yekyong, 2002.
Buddhist sculptures of Korea. By: LEE, Lena Kim. Arts of Asia, July/August 1981, Vol. 11, p96-103.

Art of the Week

Henry Walton (fl.1836-1850)
Hobart Free College, Geneva, N.Y., 1836-37
Lithograph, 18 x 28 cm.

Henry Walton worked for the lithography firm of Stone & Clark in Ithaca, New York beginning in 1936. He is known primarily for his lithographs of upstate New York towns made between 1836 and 1850. Walton was also a portrait and miniature painter most often working in watercolor. In 1849 he joined the Gold Rush to California. There is some discrepancy on Walton’s birth and death dates. Falk’s “Who Was Who in American Art” has the dates 1804-1865 though it does note many different possible dates and sources. According to Falk, Walton left California and settled in Michigan in 1857. Hughes’ “Artist’s in California” has the dates 1821-1873 and states that Walton resided in San Francisco until his death.

Perhaps it is not generally Known to the citizens of Ithaca and its vicinity, that we have residing in our village an artist, who, though unpretending, is a proficient in the use of the pencil.”  So begins an editorial published May 23, 1838, in the Ithaca Journal, as Henry Walton embarks on his fifteen-year stay in the Finger Lakes region. Walton and his work remained virtually unknown until November 1937, when his portrait of J. P. Jenks was published on the cover of the Magazine of Antiques. The cover image and its accompanying editorial note brought the little-known artist out of obscurity and into the public eye briefly. Twenty years later, five of Henry Walton’s works were included in the exhibition, Rediscovered Painters of Upstate New York, which traveled through New York state from June 1958 to February 1959. Lithographs of Saratoga Springs, New York, published circa 1825-1830 are some of Walton’s earliest known town scenes. The certainty that Walton was in Saratoga Springs in the late 1820’s eventually lead researchers to discover that he was the son of judge Henry Walton (1768-1844) who had significant land holdings in that same area.

Walton arrived in Ithaca as early as 1835 and stayed in
the area until heading west to California for the gold rush in 1851. Throughout his time in the Finger Lakes, Walton was steady in his execution of lithographs of town views in this region. Leigh Rehner describes “two themes prevalent in Walton’s town Views: celebration of the topographical landscape and technical progress.” She notes Walton’s inclusion of civilization and progress in his town views, specifically his documentation and depiction of buildings in the towns he viewed. Others have noted Walton’s linear style, apparent skill in architectural draftsmanship, and overall technique. Rehner wonders if Walton did not use a ruler to achieve the linear qualities of his town views. Force enthuses about not only Walton’s technique, but also his use of color.

Hobart Free College, the hand-colored lithograph, looks south on Geneva’s South Main Street and includes a view of Seneca Lake around 1851. on the left is Durfee House; the buildings on the right-hand side of the street are the old chapel, “Polyonomous,” and Geneva Hall. Beyond Geneva Hall is the Middle Building, used as the Medical School and later the college library. On the far side of the Middle Building is Trinity Hall.

The existence of this work may have been unknown to scholars as it was not noted or included in either of the exhibits curated by Leigh Rehner in Ithaca (1968-1969 and 1988-1989), the catalogues of which are regarded as some of the most authoritative documentation on what is known of Henry Walton. Researchers have hypothesized that one reason for Walton’s obscurity for so long is that much of his work was purchased by locals and remained in the hands of private collectors and descendants of the original portrait sitters.

Sara Greenleaf, Associate Librarian for Collection Services
Moments in Time: Lithographs from the HWS Art Collection, 2009

Agnes Halsey Jones, Rediscovered Painters of Upstate New York, 1700-1875 (Utica, NY, 1958)
Leigh Rehner, “Henry Walton, American artist,” Antiques 97, no. 3 (March 1970)
Leigh Rehner, “Henry Walton,” in Henry Walton, 19th Century American Artist. (Ithaca, NY: Ithaca College Museum of Art, 1968)

New Acquisition

Ronald Gonzalez (b.1952, U.S.)
Study for Black Figures
Manipulated found objects, wax, wire, metal filings, glue, and soot over welded steel, 31.75 cm. h.
Gift of the artist

Ronald Mario Gonzalez was born in Johnson City, N.Y. in 1952, the third of five children to Phillip Gonzalez and Lilia Finelli. His father was of Spanish and Jewish descent and worked at E J. shoe factory in Johnson City NY.  and sold used cars. His mother was Italian, a devout catholic, who preached and did healings. In his childhood Gonzalez underwent several stomach surgeries to correct a birth defect from his mother having German measles during pregnancy.  He filled these recuperative years in front of a small black and white television, and played with gumball machine trinkets and dollhouse miniatures that he collected.  “Growing up in fifties consumer culture of talking appliances and mass-produced excess led to my defective television mentality” and a lifelong preoccupation with caricatured personalities.  This preoccupation with the new transforming medium of TV also created a kinship with Hollywood sci – fi films, monsters, robots, alien creatures, and corpses, along with the post-cold war threat of nuclear apocalypse.  Gonzalez’s subjective encounter with the co- existence, of beauty and repulsion, humor and sadness as well as the undercurrents of social turmoil, absurdity and distortion in those formative years set the stage for his overwhelming desire to represent, in figural form, the substratum of the human soul. In 1973, after returning to finish high school, Gonzalez saw a Time Life book on Rodin’s “Gates of Hell.”  Also, showing photographs of boxes of collected fragments. He recalls being obsessed by the idea of creating imaginary worlds of figures inseparable from the life and death drama of existence, “The boxes themselves were a collection of ideas having to do with time, memory, disintegration, the serialization of form, and the power of collections.  “That day he bought a bag of clay and began to work in his bedroom making his own collection of small figures and fragments.  He soon assessed so many figures that he bought and pitched a used tent in a friend’s back yard to store his work. In 1976, he enrolled in the Fine Arts Department at Harpur College, Binghamton, New York, to study sculpture and to use the studios to work on his figures.  During this time, he learned to weld, allowing his figures to take on a greater scale and to incorporates a more varied assortment of objects.  After graduating in 1983, he travelled to Italy, France, and Greece, to see “the history of scarred bodies and souls in art.”  During his trip Gonzalez visited the studios of Giacomo Manzu in Rome, and Manuel Neri, in Carrara Italy. In 1999, Gonzalez joined the Art Department at Binghamton University where he continues to teach as a professor of Art and Sculpture.  His recent work consists of life size figures and fragments, always painted black; the pieces are often exhibited individually or in groups staged on long runway platforms.  These works are dominated by the use of corroded found objects and steel armatures that evoke a wasted, desolate realm where blackened heads and bodies are marked by trauma and loss.

“I prefer things with all the marks of desolation and ruin to create empathies. For me, sculpture begins with the human body as the supreme object of mystery and imagination. My affinity is for the tradition of transformation; to seek and find is not enough. The lessons of nature always bring me back to the transitoriness of things. In art, the collector amasses materials in the face of death in order to preserve expression. My work is rooted in the unity of metaphoric anatomies and measured by the beauty of presence. I search for the blended energies of forms reinvented, reconfigured and reassembled in space as part and whole. These In-animates have been ravaged by possession. As entities, they conceal lived experience as commonplace and transitory. Like us, things are tempered and shaped by their environment from hands that have conducted memories, histories, analogies and resemblances into them. These figures stand as imaginary beings of real life existence, a repertoire of decaying personas reborn as things that I can see.” Ronald Gonzalez, 2015

http://www.ronaldgonzalezstudio.com/

Art of the Week

Garth Weiser (b.1979)
Twenty Thousand Leagues, 2004
Oil on canvas, 157 x 188
Gift of John Raimondi

Garth Weiser is an artist based in New York. Weiser was born in Montana. He earned his MFA from Columbia University of the Arts, New York, NY, 2005; his BFA from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY, 2003.

The work of Garth Weiser is concerned with languages of abstraction and the physicality of the painted surface.  Marked by a sense of materiality and texture, as well as a striking synthesis of addition and subtraction, Weiser’s densely textured oeuvre underlines the artist’s fascination with the evolution of painting. His work is created by overlaying abstraction upon abstraction, each unique layer representing a distinct history in terms of content, form and materiality, resulting in a gestural surface burnished with shimmering strata of thick pigment. Highly textured, his paintings resemble fossilized slabs, their facture near tangible to the viewer. The vascular surfaces of the works trigger chromatic vibrations and optical illusions. Multiple perspectives and after-images emerge and recede with tributaries feeding and looping back into one another, giving rise to a new and complex visual lexicon, rooted in the canon of abstract painting.

A departure from his early work, which demonstrated a strong interest in graphic and geometric design, drawing on elements of the Op Art movement, Weiser’s recent work reveals a new engagement with composition, agency and intention, confronting abstract expressionistic tropes with the use of different effects, procedures and materials. The layering of pigment in the paintings complicates the distinction between areas of colour and line, generating a sense of uncertainty to the identity of each. Surfaces absorb light and reflect it unevenly, keeping the viewer mobile via optical instability and a lack of figure-ground distinctions. While abstract, the works are still illusionistic, and shadows, gradations of colour, a sense of movement, variations between light and darkness, rippling waves, wood grain, and reverberating contours are evoked in the undulating palette and seismic surfaces of the artist’s multi-faceted practice.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: Vingt mille lieues sous les mers) is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne published in 1870. It tells the story of Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus as seen from the perspective of Professor Pierre Aronnax. The original edition had no illustrations; the first illustrated edition was published by Hetzel with illustrations by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou.

http://www.simonleegallery.com/artists/garth-weiser/

Art of the Week

George McNeil (1908-95)
Henry and Mara, 1980
Lithograph, 28 x 22 cm.

George McNeil (1908-1995) had a career that spanned the entire postwar American art era. McNeil attended Pratt Institute and the Art Students’ League, where he studied with Jan Matulka. From 1932-36, he studied with Hans Hofmann, becoming Hofmann’s studio classroom monitor. In 1936 he worked for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project and became one of the founding members of the American Abstract Artists group. McNeil was one of the few abstract artists whose work was selected for the New York World’s Fair in 1939. During World War II, he served in the US Navy. In the late 1940s McNeil taught at the University of Wyoming and then taught art and art history at Pratt Institute until 1980, influencing generations of young artists. A pioneer Abstract Expressionist of the New York School, McNeil had over forty solo exhibitions during his lifetime. Between the ’40s and until the mid ’60s his art was decidedly abstract but it was always joined to metaphor. From the ’70s onward, McNeil explored ways to expand beyond the cannons of the Abstract Expressionism. In this period his work became more figurative, drawing inspiration from the dynamic life of the city, its dancers, discos and sports. Throughout his career as a painter McNeil commanded a mastery technique, capable of creating paintings of rich texture depth and color. In 1989, McNeil was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. George McNeil’s work is represented in numerous museum collections around the country, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; Whitney Museum of America Art, New York, New York; San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, California; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Sometimes art is wild and fun, rather than serious and pompous!

Howard, Richard. George McNeil (1908-1995). Salander Oreilly, 2005
“Sensibility of the sixties.” By: Rose, Barbara; Sandler, I. Art in America, January 1967, Vol. 55, p44-57
“Heroes of myth and of the morning after: George McNeill.” By: Higgins, Judith. ARTnews, September 1986, Vol. 85, p90-99

Art of the Week

Will Barnet (1911-)
Widow’s Walk, 1974
Lithograph on Arches paper, 66 x 50 cm.
Gift of Kenneth L. Halsband ‘88

Born in 1911 in Beverly, Massachusetts, as a child Barnet enjoyed climbing the hills to watch the ships in the harbor, playing baseball, and reading at the local public library. He was excited to discover the art section. As he remembers, “I used to bury myself in those rooms day after day. It was practically my whole life. That’s where my first yearning for art began.”  At the age of 12, he established a studio in his parent’s basement where he drew and painted. He made frequent trips to Boston and Salem to explore the collections of the Peabody and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Continually dissatisfied with high school, in his last year he decided to leave. In 1927, Barnet enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where he learned drawing, painting, anatomy, and art history in the European tradition.

After several years, Barnet decided to continue his study at the Art Students League in New York, where he developed an interest in lithography, etching, and woodcutting. Between 1932 and 1942, Barnet became an avid printmaker, using the medium to capture the economic and social despair of the Depression years.  He would subsequently teach at the New School for Social Research, at New Jersey State Teachers College, and from 1945-1978 at Cooper Union in New York.

Following the birth of his first son in 1938, Barnet made his wife and children his sole artistic subjects. He painted scenes of domesticity such as Soft Boiled Eggs (1946) and Summer Family (1948) using bright, emotive colors and cubist-inspired from. These abstractions attest to his careful study of the great modern artists such as Matisse, Picasso and, Léger. Focusing on images of family Barnet was “trying to purge himself of the subject, searching for the essence in the act of painting.”

Throughout the fifties and into the early sixties, Barnet painted abstractly, moving from the figure to cityscape and landscape painting.  Although he lived in Manhattan, he traveled frequently during this period in America and Europe. He spent summers in Provincetown Massachusetts, in Duluth Minnesota, where he taught a 1959 summer session at the University of Minnesota, and in Spokane, Washington, where he taught during the summer of 1963. While these trips fueled his interest in representing the American landscape through form and color, in the early sixties the figure reappeared as the primary subject in Barnet’s art.  By the seventies he joined his interest in figurative and landscape painting in works that combined the female form with the organic images of forest, sky, and sea.

Will Barnet’s prints depict the human figure and animals, both in casual scenes of daily life and in transcendent dreamlike worlds. His sustained exploration of the relationship between abstract forms and perception echo the works of famed artist Alex Katz and the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning.
“My interest has been in developing further the plastic convictions that have been evolving in my abstract paintings; so that a portrait, while remaining a portrait, becomes in this sense an abstraction: the idea of a person in its most intense and essential aspect.”
-Will Barnet, 1962

Doty, Robert M. Will Barnet. Harry N. Abrams, 1984
“Will Barnet: a part of and apart from his times.” By: TRUCCO, Terry. ARTnews, December 1982, Vol. 81, p94-98

New Collection

The Colleges have received an anonymous gift of 68 Inuit sculptures and prints. The following is a representative sample

Parr, Nuna (b. 1949, Canada).
Dancing Bear, 1900-1999.
Stone, 69 cm h.
Anonymous gift.

Parr was born near Cape Dorset and lived with his adoptive parents, the graphic artists Parr and Eleeshushe. His interest in hunting and his regard for the animal life of the Arctic are directly reflected in his work. His rounded forms have great movement and a natural flow with the grain of the stone. He is the most prolific and recognized Inuit artist alive today. He is well known for his dancing and walking bears and frequently injects his work with a sense of fun and exuberance for life.

The polar bear is not a harmless artistic subject. Considered by Inuit as an object of greed and a prestigious source; the bear is the animal who looks like most the Inuit people, taking place at the top of the animal hierarchy. As an Inuk, the polar bear is a predator, what implies relations of rivalry and competition: they hunt both the same game and represent a mutual threat. A marine and ground mammal at the same time, the bear is cunning, powerful and comfortable in the water as on ground. We say that humans imitate the polar bear’s way of hunting. It is not rare to find bears near villages while they look for food and their strength inspires fear and respect.

Things made by Inuit. 
Québec: Fédération des coopératives du Nouveau-Québec, c1980.
“Nuna Parr: A Hunter’s Perspective.” Cartwright, Jennifer. Inuit Art Quarterly, Fall 2002, Vol. 17 Issue 3, p20-22, 3p
“Inuit Art: Markers of Cultural Resilience.” Igloliorte, Heather. Inuit Art Quarterly, Spring/Summer 2010, Vol. 25 Issue 1/2, p4-11, 8p

Art of the Week

George Grosz (1893-1959)
The End of a Perfect Day, 1939
Drypoint, 27 x 34 cm.
Gift of Robert North in memory of Marion de Mauriac North ‘32

George Grosz was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1893. After studying art in Dresden and Berlin he began contributing cartoons to German journals such as Ulk and Lustige Blatter. On the outbreak of the First World War, Grosz was conscripted into the German Army. A strong opponent of the war, he was eventually released as unfit for duty. However, the following year, desperate for soldiers, Grosz was called up again. Kept from frontline action, Grosz was used to transport and guard prisoners of war. After trying to commit suicide in 1917, Grosz was placed in an army hospital. It was decided to execute Grosz, but he was saved by the intervention of one of his patrons, Count Kessler. Grosz was then diagnosed as suffering from shell-shock and was discharged from the German Army. In 1917, Grosz joined with John Heartfield in protesting German wartime propaganda campaign against the allies. After the Armistice, Grosz was active in left-wing politics and contributed to communist journals published by Malik-Verlag. He also joined with artists such as John Heartfield, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters to form the German Dada group. Grosz’ drawings often attacked members of the government and important business leaders. Grosz was taken to court several times, but although heavily fined, managed to escape imprisonment. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Grosz directed his attacks against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. In 1932, Grosz was forced to flee from Nazi Germany and after settling in the United States became a naturalized citizen in 1938. His memoirs, The Autobiography of George Grosz was published in 1955. George Grosz returned to Germany in 1959, saying “My American dream turned out to be a soap bubble”. He died shortly after his arrival following a fall down a flight of stairs.

Flavell, M. Kay. George Grosz, a biography.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
Lewis, Beth Irwin. George Grosz: art and politics in the Weimar Republic.Madison, University of Wisconsin Press [1971]

New Art

Barbara Kohl-Spiro
Pinwheel and Pride, 1980
Silkscreen, 56 x 76 cm.
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William E. Welsh, Jr. P’84

Barbara Kohl-Spiro
Sweet Soul, 1980
Silkscreen, 56 x 76 cm.
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William E. Welsh, Jr. P’84

Barbara Kohl-Spiro has exhibited nationally, and her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, the Albright Knox Museum in Buffalo, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and in numerous private collections.

“Make the soul sing-this is my mission. Kafka said art should cleave the frozen sea inside a heart. I think that. When critics, curators, gallery owners, art historians, etc., are no longer around 100 years after a work is created, it is the lone work left to relate to future generations. In all times, certain basic things reach the human heart. The fundamental things survive as time goes by. I hope I can add a little something to that part of human culture. I am  Jewish and my tradition teaches the importance of thinking of generations to come. I think of the legacy given to me by all the great artists of the past. To me many of these artists were women-often anonymous, often part of the decorative arts. I hope I can be a small part of the creative people’s legacy. In this series, I often refer to Ellie Needleman’s “Kicking Lady” because she has a spirit of celebration. I love the blessing of finding joy in the work I do every day. I specially treasure my glorious family and friends who always are making more rooms in my heart. I thank God for giving me a creative soul.”

Art of the Week

John Sloan (1871-1951)
Turning Out the Light, 1905
Etching, 16 x 20 cm.
Gift of Robert North in memory of Marion de Mauriac North ‘32

A leader of The Eight, John Sloan was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. Sloan grew up in Philadelphia, where he studied briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and in 1892 joined the art staff of the Philadelphia Inquirer. That year he met Robert Henri, who would become his life-long friend and inspire him to become a painter. Among his fellow newspaper artists in Philadelphia were William Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn. In 1904 Sloan and Dolly, his wife of three years, moved to New York, where he continued to work as an illustrator and became increasingly interested in depicting city life and city scenes. In 1910 Sloan joined the Socialist Party and contributed illustrations to its publications, notably the magazine The Masses. With the advent of World War I he resigned from the party. It was probably due to Sloan’s paintings, which favored a dark palette and scenes of the gritty side of urban life in turn-of-the-century New York City, that the Eight was later dubbed the “Ashcan School.” Sloan’s subjects are voyeuristic, a spectator of the human dramas he glimpsed in the streets and tenements of New York. Duncan Phillips further noted in A Collection in the Making, that Sloan was a “…sympathetic and understanding observer of class consciousness, crowd psychology and the bitter ironies of life.” One of America’s most revered artists in his later years, Sloan continued to paint, etch, and experiment with new printing techniques, until his death in 1951.

This etching comes from the series of 10 prints entitled New York City Life, recording the lives of the ordinary inhabitants in less affluent areas of Manhattan. The prints had a mixed reception at the time and a number were rejected from an exhibition of the American Watercolor Society as ‘vulgar’ and ‘indecent’. The mood of Turning out the Light is one of anticipation and intimacy: the woman glances down at the man lying stretched out on their unmade bed, while her discarded stockings are draped over the bed frame. The intimacy is heightened by the strong contrast between the densely-worked areas of cross-hatching in the deeper shadows and the unetched blank areas of the light.

Scott, David W., John Sloan. New York : Watson-Guptill, 1975.
“Exhibition of ‘The Eight’: its history and significance.” By: Homer, William Innes. American Art Journal, Spring 1969, Vol. 1 Issue 1, p53-64, 12p
“John Sloan memorial; his complete graphic work.” Bulletin: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1956, Vol. 51 Issue 248, p17-31, 15p
“Re-viewing John Sloan’s images of women” By: Coco, Janice M. Oxford Art Journal, 1998, Vol. 21 Issue 2, p79-97, 19p
“Women as urban spectators in John Sloan’s early work.” By: Weintraub, Laural. American Art, Summer2001, Vol. 15 Issue 2, p72-83, 12p