American Art Reveiw

The August 2007 issue of American Art Review is almost entirely dedicated to American art in Georgia museums.

Included in the issue is a 12-page spread, with 24 color illustrations, about the American collections at the Georgia Museum of Art.

The American collections at several other Georgia museums -- The Morris Museum of Art (Augusta), Brenau University Art Collection (Gainesville), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), The Telfair Museum of Art (Savannah), Albany Museum of Art, The Columbus Museum, Booth Western Art Museum (Cartersville), and Clark University Art Galleries (Atlanta) -- are also featured in this special magazine.

American Art Review should be available amid the other art periodicals at whatever your favorite locale -- Borders, Barnes and Noble, etc. -- is to buy a magazine.

If you have an interest in American art, or a curiosity about the history of art museums in Georgia, the issue is absolutely worth a look. Lots and lots of pretty, color pictures. Go out and buy a copy.

ABH: The paint, and interpretations, fly at museum

Last Saturday's Athens Banner-Herald had the following story by Christopher Butler:

At the age of 4, Grayson Fraker of Winterville has drawn rainbows arching through the sky, Spiderman leaping tall buildings and spaceships hurtling toward the moon, but he faced a new artistic challenge Saturday.

Grayson and 120 other kids tried their hands at abstract painting - sort of.

They could visit the Georgia Museum of Art's Suitcase Paintings exhibit, and then it was time to let the paint fly behind the museum, where they were invited to fling paint brushes, roll paint-sodden balls or swipe paint-covered fingers across paper canvases.

Adults usually interpret abstract art in wildly different ways, and children are no different, said Cecelia Hinton, the museum's curator of education.

Hinton watched a brother and sister interpret a painting Saturday - he said two dots represented someone's eyes, while she thought the dots represented a fire.

"Children will say things that have an awful lot of truth and there's no greater opportunity to understand them than to hear what they think about abstract art," Hinton said.

Grayson was outside the museum steps drawing his first ever piece of abstract art, which he and his mother proudly put on display for anyone who passed by.

His inspiration came from the abstract paintings he saw in the museum which "were just weird and funny," Grayson said.

"I don't really know what I've drawn. I only know that it's black, green, blue, red and white," Grayson said, adding he would part with his painting for $5 and a stack of baseball cards.

Meanwhile, Isabella Jordan, 8, from Atlanta also had no idea what she was painting as she dipped a rubber ball in different colors of paint and rolled the ball around a blank sheet of paper, creating squiggly wavy lines.

"I don't know what to say about what this picture means or what people are supposed to think. It's just messy," Jordan said.

Lots of the budding artists admitted they were more into making a mess than a masterpiece, but not 8-year-old Isaac Parham of Colbert.

He usually draws pictures of Pokemon and dinosaurs, but on Saturday chose a more obscure theme.

"This picture is supposed to be my idea of what 'crazy' looks like," Parham said.

Images: (1) From left, Grayson Fraker, 4, and Emily Maynor, 7, both of Winterville, throw paint onto their paper as Gabrielle Mason of Athens watches Isabella Jordan, 8, of Atlanta paint Saturday at the Georgia Museum of Art during the "Flying Paint" family day; and (2) Yeyoung Kang, 4, of Athens paints an abstract painting using techniques of the late American painter Jackson Pollack on Saturday at the Georgia Museum of Art, during the "Flying Paint" family day. The interpretations proved as varied as the artwork. Both images from the linked article.

Two exhibitions

This evening, two new exhibitions open at the Georgia Museum of Art.

One, organized by The Butler Institute of American Art, is John R. Grabach: Century Man. The exhibition features about 60 paintings and works on paper by the once renowned artist.

The long career of John Grabach (1880-1981), born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, spans much of the history of 20th century art in America. His approach to art both reflected and influenced the central artistic styles -- Impressionism, “Ash Can” realism, social realism, American scene painting, and surrealism -- of the early 20th century. He studied at the Art Students League in New York with Kenyon Cox and George Bridgman. Having worked as a die-cutter, silverware designer, and plant supervisor in both New Jersey and Massachusetts during the early 1910s, Grabach also created maps for the U.S. government during World War I. In the early 1920s, he had a New York studio overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge and formed “The Dialis,” a group of 12 artists that sketched and exhibited together. Grabach lived at his home and studio in Irvington, New Jersey from 1924 until his death at the age of 101 in 1981.

Image: Grabach, East Side New York, 1920. Watercolor on paper, 19 x 24 inches. Private collection.

Grabach earned his first solo exhibition, at the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1928. During the 1920s and 1930s, Grabach’s paintings were exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. He also taught at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art and the Sloan School. In 1980, he had a one-man show, John R. Grabach: Seventy Years An Artist, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. This exhibition is the first major museum exhibition of Grabach’s work since that 1980 show.

Image above: View of the Alston Gallery, Georgia Museum of Art, showing three of Grabach's early paintings.
Images below: one of Grabach's Hoover Dam worker studies in graphite, from a Private Collection; and a detail of the center panel of Grabach's triptych, Hoover Dam, 1937, also from a Private Collection.

Perhaps the most interesting works of art in the Grabach exhibition are a series of images, executed in 1937, showing the ongoing construction of Hoover Dam. The series includes a triptych study for a Works Progress Administration mural project that never came to materialize.

The second exhibition, Imprinting the South: Works on Paper from the Collection of Lynn Barstis Williams and Stephen J. Goldfarb, is at the center of a whole summer of programs at the museum.

A very large print exhibition, it presents images of the South from the 1920s to the 1940s. It is a collection that Lynn Williams began to support her research as a library faculty member at Auburn University and has culminated in a book titled Imprinting the South: Southern Printmakers and their Images of the Region, the 1920s-1940s just published by the University of Alabama Press.

From the museum's web site: "The collectors have tried to acquire both positive and critical views of the South that were made during the first half of the 20th century with a few showing origins in the Etching Revival of the 1880s as well. Some figural prints that reflect critical perspectives on race will be on view, but most are landscape, architecture and genre scenes relating to work, entertainment and worship."

Images: Robert Gwathmey, Tobacco Farmers, n.d. Serigraph, 13 1/2 inches x 10 1/2 inches; and James Routh, Cotton Farm, n.d. Lithograph, 8 5/8 x 11 5/8 inches. Collection of Lynn Barstis Williams and Stephen J. Goldfarb.

Meanwhile, this is the final weekend for the previously-blogged-about Suitcase Paintings: Small Scale Work by Abstract Expressionists.

Stairway: Frances de La Rosa

Installed this week in the main stairway at the Georgia Museum of Art...Frances de La Rosa's Landscape Series #1-12, 2006-07, oil on canvas, each 48" x 48".

More on her [here].

Some installation shots, including Dennis Harper (our curator of exhibitions), Larry Forte (Daura art handler), Lanora Pierce (preparator), Frances, and Frances's husband, photographer Fernando La Rosa: