Written by Nicole Gaudier, Curatorial Intern
Clyde Singer (1908 – 1999), Barn Dance, 1938, Oil on canvas, Collection of John and Susan Horseman.
The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens would like to present Modern Dialect: American Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman collection. This exhibit brings together 58 examples of American Scene and Modernist paintings from the 1930s and 1940s, works that exposed and sometimes celebrated a changing America.
William Zorach (1887–1966), Interior and Exterior, 1919, Oil on canvas, Collection of John and Susan Horseman.
Organized by the Dixon Gallery & Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee, Modern Dialect highlights works by some of the most respected American artists of the early twentieth century, including Charles Burchfield, George Ault, Charles Sheeler, and Clarence Carter. The exhibition also introduces such fascinating artists as Clyde Singer, Lois Mabel Head, Arthur Osver, and others.
George Copeland Ault (1891 – 1948), The Stairway, 1921, Oil on canvas, Collection of John and Susan Horseman.
The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are structured thematically to reveal the concerns of American painters from every region of the country. The more than forty artists featured in Modern Dialect hail from all parts of the United States, and they painted wherever they found inspiration.
Valleja “Wally” Strautin (1898 – 1989), Abstract, c. 1930, Oil on canvas, Collection of John and Susan Horseman.
These artists do not so much adhere to a single style as they do to a common interest in portraying their realities in a decidedly modern fashion. From simplified and even fragmented rural landscapes, to modern industrial cities and the people who inhabit them, to purely abstracted compositions, the exhibition reveals the scope of the American modernist aesthetic, and the vision and integrity each artist brought to the representation of the American experience.
Charles Sheeler (1883 – 1965), Tree and Landscape, 1947, Tempera on paper on board, Collection of John and Susan Horseman.
This exhibition will be held in the Mason Gallery from October 19, 2013 to January 5, 2014.
