An American Collection
http://www.nationalacademy.org/
The National Academy Museum reopens after being closed for renovations since July 2010. The reopening exhibitions and installations of works from the permanent collection will present American art from 1820 through today and architecture since 1945. The centerpiece of the exhibitions will be An American Collection, the first rotation of a salon-style installation of approximately 100 works from the museum’s collections of over 7,000 works of art and architecture. An American Collection will present paintings by masters who charted the course of American art from 1820 through the 1970s, starting with artist, inventor, and National Academy founder Samuel F.B. Morse. Highlights of the exhibition include works by Asher B. Durand, a leading and influential American landscape painter, among them his 1850 Landscape, which presents two artists amid an idealized landscape of the Hudson Valley. William Merritt Chase chose the socially provocative title of The Young Orphan (1884) for his tender rendering of a waif. In Hollyhocks (Among the Hollyhocks), by Frederick Carl Frieseke (by 1912), the artist demonstrates his fresh and dazzling approach to outdoor painting: "If you are looking at a mass of flowers in the sunlight out of doors you see a sparkle of spots of different colors – then paint them that way." Reginald Marsh succeeds in his goal of bringing the vitality of Peter Paul Rubens and Eugène Delacroix to a Coney Island attraction in Barrel of Fun (1943). Richard Estes’s NYC Parking Lot (1969) turns the reflections of buildings on the hoods and in the windows of cars into an urban landscape, a subject that captivated him from the late 1960s through the 1970s. IMAGE: Reginald Marsh, Barrel of Fun, 1943.
