Art, Nature, and the American City, 1840-1955 at the Clay Center, Charleston, West Virginia

September 9, 2010 — Lisa N. Peters
David Johnson - Landscape (White Mansion in the Distance), 1863

David Johnson, "Landscape (White Mansion in the Distance)," 1863, oil on canvas, 18 x 28 inches

Lisa N. Peters

Last year the Collector’s Club of the Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences of West Virginia (Charleston) visited the gallery and a lively dialogue ensued as members considered possible acquisitions with the gallery’s associate director Gina Greer.   This interchange was the impetus for Art, Nature, and the American City, 1840-1955, an exhibition the gallery has lent to the Clay Center that opened July 16 and will remain on view through October 10.

Including over eighty paintings and works on paper, the show raises many fascinating questions with regard to attitudes, as manifested through art, about the American city and countryside. Read the rest of this entry »

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Notable Pictures, Inspiring Chairs

November 3, 2009 — Spanierman Gallery, LLC
Katherine Bogden
I’m an avid reader, and because sometimes I find the couch a little too comfortable I’ve been daydreaming about purchasing a modest chair, which I think is just what I need to keep my eyes on the page.

Until this week, I had been ogling chairs in decorator’s magazines, store displays, and those quick glimpses through the windows of the handsomely decorated brownstones of my Brooklyn neighborhood.

And then, I found myself  jealously eyeing the chairs in some of the paintings in the gallery’s collection. Here are a few I’ve noticed:

Nicolai Cikovsky, Flowers on a Chair
(oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches)

The blue-green chair in this picture expresses the painting’s simple and homey ambiance. Its  square legs and flat seat, which hold a vase of wildflowers, suggest stability. The touches of green throughout the picture, coupled with the portrait on the far wall, create a sense of life even without a human presence. The color of the chair draws in the those of the lush growth outside the window. Like the overall simplicity of the composition, the plainness of the wooden chair appeals to me, and its hard, straight back would certainly help me stay awake when reading. Read the rest of this entry »
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William Glackens: Park at Gracie Square

October 6, 2009 — Spanierman Gallery, LLC
Katherine Bogden

When I first moved to New York in 2006 I lived in Yorkville, just a few blocks from Gracie Mansion. I frequently walked in the park there, which runs along the East River from 79th to 87th Streets. In fact, when I left the neighborhood, it was that park, called Carl Schurz Park, that I missed the most.

And so last year, during an exhibition at the gallery, I was pleased to assist the head of our research department, Lisa N. Peters, with research on William Glackens’s, Park at Gracie Square (Carl Schurz Park, New York). At first, we couldn’t understand the picture’s title. Could the park have once been called Gracie Square? Many phone calls and newspaper articles later, we found out the following information:

  • The park was established in 1887 as East End Park.
  • It was renamed in 1910 after Carl Schurz, a German immigrant who moved to New York in 1881 and became an important member of the New York community (he served as Secretary of the Interior under Rutherford B. Hayes).
  • Gracie Square, though not actually part of the park, is the name given to the street that runs along the southern end of the park. This picture shows a view of the park from Gracie Square.
  • The bridge, seen from afar in the drawing, spans the East River, near its junction with the Harlem River. This intersection was referred to as Hell Gate because of the dangerous currents created by the confluence. In 1917 the Hell Gate Bridge (formally the New York Connecting Railroad Bridge) was completed and is visible here.
While conducting our research, we also became aware of various other paintings William Glackens rendered of the park, including one other after the name change, which is presently in the White House Collection (for more see Peters’s entry in the Works on Paper exhibition catalogue).
Although the gallery’s photographer, who still lives in the area, kindly offered to search for the exact scene Glackens shows us here, she turned up empty-handed. It seems reasonable to me to assume the swings and benches were lost in one of the park’s transformations since the 1920s.
However, Glackens’s chalk and charcoal rendering certainly captures something more than just the physical elements of the park, for despite whatever conversions have occurred, the picture is immediately recognizable to me—I feel once again like a resident of Yorkville, out for an afternoon stroll.

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Ashcan School – Part III

October 1, 2009 — Spanierman Gallery, LLC
Ashcan School continued . . . Now that some issues of this quite confusing term have been addressed, it’s time to turn to the question of . . . what is it that makes an Ashcan School work, which seems less confusingWhat can be said in brief is that, instead of the genteel subjects painted by American artists inspired by French Impressionism, whose urban views generally consisted of the parks and squares frequented by the wealthy, Ashcan images depicted the new realities of urban experience in the early twentieth century, which meant that their creators (or the New York Realists) did not shy away from capturing the gritty, crude, and seamy aspects of New York life, not neglecting evidence of the disparities in social rank that were apparent during a day of dramatic immigration, a burgeoning lower class, dense neighborhoods bursting with tenements where laundry lines crisscrossed over dark alleyways, and urban crowding. They also painted the novelties of modern life in the city. They portrayed crowded street scenes where the El train rumbled overhead (the full awareness of the misery caused by these noisy tracks clanking overhead and dripping oil on pedestrians was not yet at the forefront in the 1910s), Chinese restaurants (a new phenomenon of New York life then—imagine that!), boxing matches (this was the prehistoric age of American professional sports), and children sledding in Central Park (it was a new idea then that children should have free time, the concept that is now destroying our lives—or at least mine), and yes, occasionally, vagrants picking through garbage left on the street. Read the rest of this entry »
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Ashcan School – Part I

September 25, 2009 — Spanierman Gallery, LLC
Lisa N. Peters
(Read Ashcan School-Part II and Ashcan School-Part III)
 Focus on the Ashcan School. . . . hmm. We currently have an online Ashcan School show on our website, so the question came up of what exactly is the Ashcan School????I will try to answer this question as succinctly as possible in a three-part post series.

This so-called “school” refers to a group of artists who painted gritty, vital views of many strata of New York City life in the early twentieth century.

Yet there’s a problem: the Ashcan School was not only never literally a “school,” but it also never consisted of an organized group of artists. Because of this, to my mind, it seems more reasonable to use the term “Ashcan School” to refer to works that fit certain criteria associated with this school rather than to try to assign this label to certain artists. Read the rest of this entry »

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