Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Dallas Museum of Art acquires four masterworks of 19th and early 20th century art through the McDermott Art Fund

By Pegasus News wire

Image provided by the Dallas Museum of Art

Francis Guy, Winter Scene in Brooklyn, c. 1817-1820, Oil on canvas; 41 x 64 in.

The Dallas Museum of Art recently acquired four highly significant works of American art through the Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund as the newest additions to the Museum’s collection, it was announced by Bonnie Pitman, The Eugene McDermott Director of the DMA.

The pieces, all commanding examples of American art that span 200 years, include: a unique pair of c. 1885-1895 Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass windows from an aquatic “Four Seasons” series; a Gustav Stickley linen chest (c. 1903); Winter Scene in Brooklyn, an early 19th-century work by Francis Guy, “a grandfather of American landscape painting”; and Mountains, no. 19, a 1930 oil by modernist painter Marsden Hartley.

Each of these works of art is an integral addition to the Museum’s acclaimed collection of American art, and their acquisitions were led by Kevin W. Tucker, The Margot B. Perot Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, and by William Keyse Rudolph, The Pauline Gill Sullivan Associate Curator of American Art at the DMA. All four works are scheduled to go on view in August in the Museum’s fourth floor American galleries and third floor 20th-century decorative arts and design galleries.

“We are deeply honored and appreciative of the Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund for this exceptional group of gifts, which will enhance tremendously the Museum’s American collection,” says Bonnie Pitman, The Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art. “They join the very significant number of masterpieces that the McDermott Art Fund has lavished on the Museum over many decades.”

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Stained-Glass Windows

The richly encrusted surfaces, expert manipulation of color and translucency, and distinguishing subjects of the two windows mark the pair as among the finest work produced under the direction of Louis Comfort Tiffany, America’s leading tastemaker and glass designer at the end of the 19th century, according to Tucker. “Tiffany’s ability to transform natural motifs into a sumptuous display of deep color, texture and form is fully evident in these masterful examples of his architectural glass,” he notes. The four seasons was a favored subject in late 19th-century art and design, including the work of Tiffany, but these windows are the only known version depicting life forms under the sea – anemones and starfish. This is the first example of a Tiffany window to enter the DMA’s collections.

Gustav Stickley, Linen Chest

The Gustav Stickley linen chest is, says Tucker, “an incomparable realization of American Arts and Crafts philosophy at the turn of the 20th century.” A custom work for a 1903 Syracuse exhibition, Stickley’s linen chest is among the finest objects produced by his firm and stands as a gateway to introducing the fin de siècle American consumer to progressive concepts in furniture and related domestic design. Its acquisition gives the DMA the distinction of owning one of the most important Stickley objects in any public collection, and it will be featured in the Museum’s 2010 exhibition Gustav Stickley and the American Arts and Crafts Movement.

Francis Guy, Winter Scene in Brooklyn

Highly regarded as one of America’s earliest landscape artists, British-born Francis Guy came to the United States in 1795 and, with no formal training in art, became a New York-based full-time painter at the turn of the century. Winter Scene in Brooklyn, c. 1817-1820, is one of several versions of Guy’s neighborhood seen from his studio on Front Street. A remarkably detailed view of early 19th-century New York, it “is one of the finest extant examples of the topographical tradition of American landscape painting – heretofore unrepresented in the DMA’s collections,” states Rudolph. “It is also the chronologic and art historical ancestor to the Hudson River school, which developed in the late 1820s and beyond and included such masters as Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole and John Frederick Kensett.”

Marsden Hartley, Mountains No 19

Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest early 20th-century American painters, Marsden Hartley is the artist whose work is most arguably on par with the accomplishments of European modernism. Mountains, no. 19, the first significant Hartley painting to enter the DMA’s collections, is “a dazzling example of the painter’s work, deeply colorful and lushly harmonious,” says Rudolph.

The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund was established in 1960 by acclaimed Dallas philanthropists Eugene and Margaret McDermott. For nearly fifty years, its resources have enabled the curators of the Dallas Museum of Art to build the Museum’s collections with masterworks.

Source: The Dallas Museum of Art

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