15th AnniversaryThe uptown and downtown Washburn Galleries have consolidated in a big move into the Fuller Building (41 East 57th Street). Leaving the cozy confines and drawing room feel of its three exhibition floors across 57th Street, it is now ensconced in a much more orderly and organized "gallery" space. Lost, however, is that archaic feeling of intimacy with the art works that the former space encouraged. If the new space no longer has the salon warmth, much appreciated in its former incarnation, the staff and management are bubbly about the move, as friendly as ever and, most importantly, as we can be immediately assured stepping into the new space, the Washburn Gallery continues to be a rare showcase for the nuggets of American art. Now celebrating its 15th anniversary, it's like an instant museum in there with blockbusters by Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keefe, Arthur Dove, a few charming colonial era stand-outs and a tasty sampling of their 1930s–40s specialties. For this birthday treat, they've reassembled these major works from the museums and private collections that acquired them from the Washburn over the past 15 years. The chronology is obvious kicking off with an 1816 portrait by Ammi Phillips of a young child in night gown. The starkness and primitive stripping down of all extraneous periphery creates a bold, awesome power here. It's American in its threadbare cold tones and Puritan simplicity. We move on through a fine group portrait by Joshua Johnson to a somewhat typical late 19th Century landscape by Martin Johnson Heade. The painting's distinguished by its evocation of contrasting moods—a lushness of vegetation that shows fertility but shadowed in rain clouds, ominous and threatening. Eerie whispers in this scene of unbounded nature. From there it's an enormous jump, though only 30 years, to a masterpiece by Marsden Hartley, Abstraction (Military Symbols) from 1914–15. Here is where the European trails to abstraction begin to show up in American painting. Hartley synthesizes the bold symbols of military pageantry with his impeccable design sense to forge a passionate arrangement to contain his brooding presence of the time. Like a poem will, he assembles the imagery of his day to infuse it with an ordering and to combine it with reaction so it can stand as testament. Nothing so extraordinary occurs with a work Still Life, ca. 1924, by gallery favorite Patrick Henry Bruce. His arrangement of lines and arcs, painted in pinks, reds, purple, red, blue, is decorative and simply an exercise, a working out of nothing but process. The revelation of the show is a large canvas by Edwin Dickinson. This artist was shown along with Pollock, Still, and Rothko in a "15 Americans" show at MoMA in 1952. He's not exactly unknown, always revered by fellow painters, yet the vast public is, unfortunately, not well acquainted with his work. The poet and art critic James Schuyler, in a 1959 Portfolio, said of his work: "At the beginning the situation appears close enough, but continued scrutiny discloses ambiguities. There are surprises, and finally, a resolution." His magnificent The Cello Player of 1924–25, a somber portrait that combines the displaced and stretched realities of El Greco (whom he adored) and Cubism, flushes the color from a scene cluttered with the periphery of a bent man concentrated on the low soaring of his cello music. We're looking down at an odd angle, as if from the ceiling, so we are displaced and forced to investigate this scene, already disconcerting in the clutter of objects and flushing out of color, from an odd perspective. Books, several coffee pots, 2 pianos, sea shells and the subject and his cello are seen in the barest of perspective so all seem about to float, though enough definition is hinted at to pull us down into the personal gravity of the sitter. Terrific canvases by Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keefe, and Stuart Davis continue the developing story. We are kayoed with the realization that so much fine work is marketed through these facilities to private collections where we'll be lucky to ever see them again. This show however, is such an opportunity. It affirms the grand place that the Washburn Gallery has as a dealer in cultural masterworks. It is to the credit of the gallery that its choices, for the most part, shine through the ages. (Arts, December 1986) |