2004–10
2009–2010
Dalí Illustrates Dante’s Divine Comedy
Apr. 10-May 23, 2010
.jpg "Dali Caricature, Web")
This exhibition featured 100 prints from Salvador Dalí's Divine Comedy Suite. In 1957, the Italian government commissioned Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) to illustrate The Divine Comedy. Written by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) sometime between 1306 and 1321, The Divine Comedy describes Dante’s symbolic journey through hell, purgatory and heaven. Dalí’s paintings were to be reproduced as wood engravings and released as a limited-edition print suite in honor of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth. Upon receiving the commission, Dalí immediately began creating a series of 100 watercolors, each one illustrating a verse from the poem. When the project was announced to the public, Italians were outraged that a Spaniard had been chosen to honor the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth, and the commission was rescinded. Dalí was confident that a publisher could be found. He worked for more than nine years to produce 100 original watercolors. The suite, published in 1964 by Jean Estrade of Les Heured Claires, was considered by Dalí to be one of the most important projects of his career.
Organized by the Las Cruces Museum of Art, Las Cruces, N.M.
Tour management by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services, Kansas City, Mo.
Wondrous Cold: An Antarctic Journey
Jan. 23–Feb. 28, 2010
LDG Wondrous Cold: An Antarctic Journey Exhibition postcard
Funded by an Antarctic Artists and Writers Program grant from the National Science Foundation, award-winning photographer Joan Myers spent four months photographing the daily lives of scientists and support staff working at and around the continent’s research stations. The result of her work is Wondrous Cold, an exhibition of 50 spectacular photographs and a companion book of the same title. Enhanced by commentary on the scientific and historic significance of her subjects, the exhibition juxtaposes sweeping panoramas of Antarctica’s severe beauty with scenes of wildlife, people and the abandoned huts of legendary explorers.
The exhibition is organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and made possible through the generous support of Quark Expeditions.
The Lore Degenstein Gallery National Juried Figurative Drawing and Painting Competition
Oct. 24–Dec. 11, 2009
LDG Figurative Exhibition postcard
This was a national, juried visual art competition and exhibition that was open to two-dimensional figurative artists, working in painting or drawing. Exhibition works were selected by Daniel Dallmann, professor of art at Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Dallmann also selected the three cash award winners of the competition and announced them during his gallery talk at the Exhibition Opening reception.
Society of American Graphic Artists New Century Members Exhibition – The Late Summer Exhibition
Sept. 5–Oct. 11, 2009
Society of American Graphic Artists: New Century Members postcard
The Lore Degenstein Gallery brings to the Susquehanna University community a selection of recent works of current members of the Society of American Graphic Artists (SAGA). The society, a nonprofit national organization of fine art printmakers, originated in New York City in 1915 as the Brooklyn Society of Etchers and adopted its current name in 1952. SAGA has been sponsoring national exhibitions since 1922 and has long reflected the growth and changes taking place in printmaking.
2008–09
Frank Hyder: Poems from a Threatened Eden
April 4 - June 23, 2009
Colored Rhythm, Frank Hyder, mixed media on handmade paper mounted on canvas, 82 x 84 in.
Frank Hyder's gallery sized installations, where walls are covered in assembled landscape images evoking South American rainforests, create a New Eden-like experience for the visitor while raising awareness of how this Eden is being threatened by the actions of the industrial world. Using mixed media elements, Hyder's installations create a magical environment of painting, sculpture, sound, and light, transporting the viewer through a sensory experience.
Transforming Metal, Wood and Photography
Jan. 17 – Feb. 27, 2009
Outsourced, Gordon R. Wenzel, photograph
This exhibition showcases the talents of Pennsylvania metal sculptors Jeff Apfelbaum, George Tenedios, Jodi Scholvin, and Pat Bruno, wood sculptor J. Mark Irwin, and photographic image sculptor Gordon R. Wenzel. Flowing, organic forms of polished wood complement and contrast abstract, figurative assemblages of found, steel objects, many finished in black or bright colors. Complementing the three-dimensional pieces is photographic imagery juxtaposing industrial decay with organic textures, part of a social commentary on human endeavor's impact on the natural world.
Global Matrix II: An International Print Exhibition
Oct. 18 – Dec. 10, 2008
The Universe, Alicia Candiani, 2004, digital print on Duraclear film, 27.75 x 39 in.
This traveling exhibition is a contemporary review of fine art printmaking in all media from around the world. Featuring 87 works by 75 artists from 24 countries, Global Matrix II was developed by Purdue University Galleries, West Lafayette, Indiana.
Susquehanna University: A 150 Year Retrospective
Aug. 28 – Oct. 4, 2008
Selinsgrove Hall, 1863
As part of a year long celebration of Susquehanna University's 150 year anniversary, the Lore Degenstein Gallery will present an exhibition showcasing the history of the university. Presenting ninety photographic reproductions, as well as artifacts selected from the university library archives and friends of Susquehanna, the exhibition will provide an informative and entertaining look back at many elements of the university's past.
Back to top
2007–08
Le Salon des Arts Ménagers (The Household Arts Exhibition): Posters of the Modern French Home 1945-1982
April 11 – June 3, 2008
Candy. Gilbert Paplorey. Color lithograph. 63 x 47"
Collection of the Lore Degenstein Gallery.
The "modern home" imagined by French business and government in the 1950s-60s was a model of cleanliness and harmony, despite a severe housing shortage. The "modern woman" presided over this refuge, using science to enhance family life. Such ideals were promoted through the Salon des Arts Ménagers, an annual trade show in Paris attracting millions of visitors to its displays of technical innovation for the home. These ideals are depicted in this exhibition of posters drawn from the Lore Degenstein Gallery's permanent collection. Colorful images promote the Salon itself and appliances for the modern home. This bilingual English-French exhibition is a project of Susquehanna University students in French 460: Women in Postwar France.
The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art: Works on Paper
Jan. 19 – March 5, 2008
Sharecropper, Catlett, 1952, Two color linoleum cut
This exhibition features sixty-nine works on paper by fifty-three African American artists. Selected from the collection Harman and Harriet Kelly, the works include drawings, etchings, lithographs, watercolors, pastels, gouaches, linocuts, woodcuts, and colorscreen prints. The majority of the works in this exhibition were produced during the 1930s and 1940s, a period that gave birth to a school of African American regionalism and black consciousness. The artwork portrays African American subjects in rural and urban settings, with an emphasis on community, labor, and family life during the Depression era. The exhibition also includes pieces depicting the political struggles of African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement, in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Ralph Wickiser: A Retrospective
Nov. 8 – Dec. 14 2007
Light and Dark, Ralph Wickiser, oil on linen, 1997, 24 x 40"
The exhibition brings together a selection of paintings and drawings representing the life work of New York artist and art educator Ralph L. Wickiser (1910-1998). Wickiser's brilliant oil paintings of woods and streams near his home in Woodstock, New York, reflect his lifelong fascination with form, color, texture and light patterns in nature. His textbook on modern art, An Introduction to Art Activities (1947), was used by more than 600 colleges and universities during the 1950's and '60's. This significant retrospective coincides with the growing recognition of Wickiser's work in New York City today.
60 x 60: Small Prints from Purdue University Galleries
Sept. 6 – Oct. 21, 2007
Little Crow #2, Jan Arabas, Digital print on Somerset Paper, 1 x 2 in
For the past 28 years, the Purdue University Galleries have presented a national biennial small-scale contemporary printmaking competition called “Sixty Square Inches”. The traveling exhibition, “60 x 60”, consists of sixty prints acquired from previous Sixty Square Inches competitions. The prints were made using a variety of printmaking techniques, with each image measuring under sixty square inches in size.
Accompanying the exhibition will be a display of various printmaking media to illustrate the methods used by contemporary printmakers. There will also be a PowerPoint presentation on the history and development of printmaking, as well as supplies for hands-on relief printing demonstrations.
2006–07
The Artist Revealed: Artist Portraits and Self-Portraits
April 12 – June 3, 2007
Alex, Chuck Close, color woodcut, 1992, 23.5 x 19.5"
An artist's portrait, like all good portraits, offers the viewer more than physical features. One sees the unique characteristics of the sitter. Traditional portraiture often came with expectations that the image be a favorable likeness of the subject. Self-portraiture removed those restrictions enabling artists to be more experimental. This exhibition brings together fifty self-portraits and portraits of other artists. Included are works by Milton Avery, Leonard Baskin, Chuck Close, Norman Rockwell, Edward Steichen, and Anders Zorn. Sitters include Pablo Casals, Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Eakins, C.S. Lewis, and James McNeill Whistler.
Pull: Contemporary Music Posters
Jan. 27 – March 10, 2007
Posters by Dick Fowler, Patent Pending Industries, Thomas Scott, The Little Friends of Printmaking, Jason Munn, Zach Hobbs, and David Witt
The poster, shunted aside by newer means of promotion since the advent of the electronic era, has been in steady decline as an advertising and marketing tool. Currently, however, the American poster is enjoying a renaissance. The force behind this resurgence is not the mainstream graphic design and advertising industry, but a group of young, on-the-fringes designers and illustrators whose handcrafted posters for music gigs have revitalized a unique art form. The posters in the exhibition showcase the virtuosity and eclecticism of a broad range of designers promoting diverse musical genres.
Impassioned Images: German Expressionist Prints
Oct. 25 – Dec. 8, 2006
The Archer, Wassily Kandinsky, color woodcut, 1908, 6.5 x 6"
Courtesy of Syracuse University Art Collection
A distinct style of printmaking emerged in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is arguably the most important German art since the Renaissance. While scholarship continues on the question of whether German Expressionism is a formal style, a nationalistic movement, or a pluralistic vision generated from individual experience, this exhibition explores the latter premise. Our selection of images takes into account Ernst Kirchner's desire that artists "express inner convictions... with sincerity and spontaneity."
This exhibition includes the work of artists who were members of the Brücke (Erich Heckel, Ernst Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde, and Otto Mueller) and the Blaue Reiter (Wassily Kandinsky, Heinrich Campendonck, and Max Beckmann) as well as some others who have become associated with German Expressionism. The subjects explored by these artists were varied. Religious, moral, social, political, and artistic issues were confronted with an energy seldom seen in the art academies of the day. Even the media they used, woodcut, drypoint, lithography, and etching, were handled in a startlingly new manner.
In the early decades of the 20th century, the German Expressionists experimented with various print media, particularly the woodcut, in startling new ways. Artists like Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rotluff carved wood blocks that released the psychological turmoil brought on by the first world war and its aftermath. Other artists including Otto Dix and Kathe Kollwitz through images depicting the avarice of industrialists or the ravages caused by World War I.
Bold, aggressive, and innovative use of the media became the hallmark of the German Expressionist artist, and the impact they have had on modern art and artists is undeniable and remarkable.
Edward Weston: Life Work
Sept. 8 – Oct. 13, 2006
Iceberg Lake, Sierra Nevada, Edward Weston, Gelatin Silver Plate, 7.375 x 9.5 in
Edward Weston: Life Work is a 99-image survey of this great American photographer, containing an outstanding grouping of vintage prints from all phases of Weston’s five-decade career. Previously unpublished masterpieces are interspersed with well-known signature images. A striking 1909 outdoor Pictorialist study of his wife, Flora, is perhaps Weston's first nude. A 1907 landscape features a cow skull in the Mojave Desert and precedes by thirty years his later interest in death in the desert. A smoky view of the Chicago River harbor from 1916 pays homage to Coburn and Stieglitz, and anticipates the urban modernism famously captured by Armco Steel, Ohio, 1922. Armco Steel marked Weston’s final break from the confines of Pictorialism and studio work, and signified the emergence of his sharply focused style.
“To survey chronologically his oeuvre is to witness a purposeful and heroic shelling away of subjective addenda, of all the trimming that, to the average observer, transmutes a photograph into a work of art,” wrote the Mexican painter Jean Charlot in the 1932 monograph.
In the mid-1920s Weston unleashed his new approach in Mexico with Tina Reciting, Heaped Black Ollas, and Excusado. Upon his return to California in 1927, Weston continued to experiment with pure form and disconcerting scale shifts in his long exposures of shells, peppers, mushrooms, radishes and kelp. These studies segue naturally into a remarkable set of sculptural nudes done in 1933 and 1934.
Weston loosened up his style considerably when he turned to the open landscape. This exhibition includes an important suite of six dune studies made near Oceano, Calif., from 1934 to 1946. In addition to landscapes and studies of desert detritus made with the support of a Guggenheim grant, portraits of prominent artistic and literary figures are also well represented. The chronological survey concludes with Weston's consummate final photograph, nicknamed The Dody Rocks, 1948.
Edward Weston: Life Work is organized and circulated by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, of Los Angeles, Calif. All works are courtesy of the Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg Collection.
2005–06
Joseph De Martini, A Retrospective: New York Abstractionist and the Monhegan Art Colony
April 1 – May 14 2006
The Wreck at Squeaker Cove, Joseph De Martini, oil on canvas, 1950, 30 x 40"
Collection of Geoffrey H. Robinson, River Gallery Fine Art
Joseph De Martini, one of a group of artists who embraced the new abstract painting of the 1940s and 1950s in New York’s artworld, brought to the summer community of Monhegan Island, Maine, a fresh response to the aura of the sea. While earlier artists painted what they saw, De Martini painted the impact of nature playing on his senses.
Born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1894, De Martini’s presence in New York was strongly felt during the 1930s in the New Deal art movement and a decade later with somber abstractions of the visual world. Art critics observed his rugged seascapes:
"With painting-shadowed sides and strong, dark lines where rocks meet the water, he can create a pattern of great strength without declaring for abstraction and without losing the romance of place which gives his paintings their greatest appeal" (Art Digest, 1942).
Before migrating to the North, De Martini spent a year at University of Georgia as “Artist-in-Residence,” building an alliance with noted champion of modernism, Lamar Dodd, who founded the Art Department at the school. It was likely that Dodd was charmed into discovering Monhegan through De Martini’s influence as he, also, began to view the rocks and surf with an expressionistic canvas.
The Monhegan summer art colony attracted De Martini’s friends from New York who collected mutual feelings for the sea while painting assiduously – with a strength of emotion – the ravaged shipwrecks, storms at sea, foam- thrashing shoreline, and dramatic dawns and sunsets. A taste for abstraction was shared by all, while De Martini alternated his passionate responses with quiet scenes from his fishhouse studio.
Self reflection occupied his visual interest over the entirety of his life ranging from a youthful 1930 image to that of his latter years in his striped bathrobe, standing stalwartly like a classical column. Three themes in De Martini’s art– the sea, the studio, the man – describe the 50 paintings exhibited here that profoundly define the person.
Process Toward Performance: The Art of Theatrical Design
Jan. 21 – March 3, 2006
Oct. 20 – Dec. 11, 2005
Sunshine Boys, Wes Peters, watercolor and pen on paper, 1996, 11 x 20"
Collection of the artist
Theatre performances are appraised by the quality of the acting, the script, and the visual impact of the production. To comprehend the production, it is necessary to take into account multiple layers of professional skills for which the work is usually viewed in support of the performance. Design issues including set construction, costumes, lighting, and technical achievements, when seen as individual components of the performance, can be identified as works of visual art, particularly when they are displayed in a museum setting. Whether thumbnails or finished works of two-or three-dimensional compositions, each represents a point of time in the process of creating the final achievement, the performance.
Many theatrical designers find it useful to produce works on paper that can be illustrative of such concept interaction. They do this in the form of watercolors, pastels, pencil or even computer-generated imagery that provide an overview of stage components for the purpose of visualization and communication of ideas. Often these works can be scintillating objects with aesthetic merits that stand alone, apart from their context as functioning partners to a larger enterprise. Whether it is the method of their display in the museum setting or an appreciation of their individual contribution, theatrical designs make an artisitc statement that enjoys public awareness if not acknowledgment.
With selections from the work of ten theatrical designers, the Lore Degenstein Gallery displays various forms that define their contributions as visual art. Curated by Erik Viker and Andy Rich, assistant professors of Theatre at Susquehanna University, the exhibition explores examples of a wide range of methods that share a common goal: that of making the production successful. Traditional materials - watercolor, pastel, etc. - provide a "window" to the stage, allowing the viewer to "dwell" in an imaginary place. Subtle treatment of perspective, illusionistic scale of objects and structures, and an aura of emotion can all be heightened by the artist's manipulation of the drawing tool. Computer graphics permit the artist to "render" the stage set with a vision that closely approximates the hand-drawn result with greater succinctness and elimination of excesses. The audience projects its vision into the illusionistic space presented.
Costume design, though also presenting character and emotion, intends to instruct us in the method of crafting a piece of clothing. The artist has considered the actor's ability to move and act in a fabric encasement that must neither restrict nor confuse the performance. Similarly, with lighting design issues of mood, emotion, and spatial illusionism appear in the objects as they address a means to an end in the creation of the forms.
Not to be compared with book illustration, the theatrical design demonstrates more than mere physical description of the narrative, directing attention to the acting yet recognizing the value of cooperative design in which all must coalesce into a cohesive and functioning unit. Only in this way can the message of the play be ideally conveyed.
The Art of Theatrical Design: Process Toward Performance will allow its audience to assess these designs with a different comprehension of art. With appreciation to the Charles B. Degenstein Endowment for its support of gallery programs, the Lore Degenstein Gallery continues its twelfth year of cutting edge art brought to Susquehanna University audiences, appealing to both the viewers of the art and to the aspiring artists who are learning the elements of creation.
Sounds
Sept. 10 – Oct. 14, 2005
Cowboy Boot, Ken Butler, 1997
Collection of the artist
Art and Music have traditionally explored separate aesthetic experiences – one visual, the other aural. In bringing together their unique qualities, this exhibition displaces musical instruments that share an aesthetic character with the music they produce, and sculpture that resonates with scintillating sounds: gongs and sonic reverberations. A Balinese Gamelan, an orchestra of metal instruments including gongs and xylophones played with a mallet, displays a colorful visual promise of Indonesian customs that might have included parading musicians wearing brilliantly decorated costumes. Other musical instruments on view are fabricated from disparate materials familiar in non-musical settings, stringed instruments made from a cowboy boot, dust mop, coat hanger, parts of a gramophone, and leg cast, to name a few. Why this strange trio? They share a common goal in their challenge to the museum visitor to observe their appearance or to make them resonate as an invitation to touch and play them.
Val Bertoia creates his “sonic” sculpture of repetitive rods of monel metal or brass surmounted with brass tops of various sizes. Long or short rods with delicate or heavy tops of bronze – the artist calls them “cattails” – the sculptures vibrate with melodious sounds when stroked. The musical ear hears distinct tonal differences, while the rest of us feel the soothing ringing of distant chimes.
Bertoia’s sculpture evolves from that of his father, Harry Bertoia, a modernist artist from the mid 20th century who defined these sound sculptures during his experiments with welded resonant metals. Val continues his father’s legacy in Bally, Pennsylvania, showing his work in his studio in an elaborate setting among hundreds of vibrating rods.
Ken Butler brings to the exhibition an idiosyncratic instrument collection from found objects selected for their visual properties, retaining the funkiness of identity with their origins. Most of these instruments are wired for electronic performance emulating violin, guitar and cello. Some are more significantly endowed with physical elegance disguising the sources of their construction from coat hangers to phonograph parts, displaying less than their playability but promising more.
Butler was trained as a studio artist, receiving three National Endowment grants to develop his new art forms. Turning to concepts that invoke musical sounds generated from objects not intended for this purpose, Butler has performed his hybrid instruments with such notable artists as John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Butch Morris, Soldier String Quartet, and the Tonight Show Band.
The exhibition in the Lore Degenstein Gallery offers its viewer the opportunity to “play” some of the sculptures as well as appreciate their visual effect. Gongs and bronze rods that shiver with motion and resonance when touched await the moment of activation. Brought to Susquehanna University from an exhibition organized by Professor Emeritus of Music, Paul Larson, at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the artwork raises new challenges for understanding the creative spirit.
We greatly appreciate the continuing support of our program from the Charles B. Degenstein Endowment, which sponsors our programs and facilitates our exhibitions and permanent collection of over 2,500 works of art at the Lore Degenstein Gallery.
2004–05
Violet Oakley's Spirit of History 1895-1961
April 9 – June 5, 2005
The Pool of Bethesda: Arise, Take Up Thy Bed and Walk, Violet Oakley, painting on wood panel, 1945
The exhibition of more than sixty-five paintings and works on paper by Pennsylvania artist Violet Oakley and others, entitled "Violet Oakley's Spirit of History: 1895-1961," opened at the gallery followed by a lecture by noted Oakley scholar Dr. Bailey Van Hook at Degenstein Center Theater at 7:30 p.m. Van Hook is the Professor of Art History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blackburg, VA, and has been working on a definitive biography of Oakley, artist of the Pennsylvania Capitol Building murals, for several years.
The exhibition brings to light a review of Oakley's art and the milieu in which it was created, given her work was last shown in the 1970's. With efforts from curators Jane Richardson and Sara Herlinger, a number of opportunities await the viewers of this exhibition. Richardson has located Oakley's military altarpieces in triptych form which was created for the Bethesda Naval Hospital around the end of World War II. Titled The Pool of Bethesda: Arise, Take Up Thy Bed and Walk, 1945, the painting, on wood panel in three sections that fold for portability, describes healing of the ill by Jesus. The United States Nazy Art Collection has lent the painting to Susquehanna University specifically for this exhibition. It represents one of the approximtely twenty-four altarpieces created by Oakley, which have not been seen by the general public nor documented in the artist's oeuvre. Records concerning the commission are, as yet, undiscovered, however, the exhibition of this important work provides the opportunity for future research by art historians.
Other paintings and drawings in the exhibition will review Oakley's sylistic developement in her studies for the Pennsylvania Capitol, including her sketchbook for Senate Chamber murals; panels for the International Law Series and the International Court of Justice; William Penn in Oxford, England, and others, located by Herlinger, Lore Degenstein Gallery curator. Earlier, Herlinger had worked on a small exhibition for the Pennsylvania Capitol Preservation Committee held at the State Capitol Building and provided research for their 2004 book on Violet Oakley. The current exhibition also includes Oakley's art from institutional collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Pennsylvania Capitol Preservation Committee, The State Museum of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Woodmere Museum of Art, The Drexel Collection, Drexel University, The Delaware Art Museum, Brandywine River Museum, The Free Library of Philadelphia, the R. Tait McKenzie Memorial Museum, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Academy Connections: The Lore Degenstein Gallery and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Nov. 6 – Dec. 5, 2004
Umapati, William Gannotta, oil on linen mounted to panel, 60 x 35"
Nearly 200 years ago The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was established in Philadelphia for the purpose of teaching, exhibiting, and promoting artists in their field of endeavor for the benefit of an American audience as the first academy of art in the United States. Painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and other forms of fine art were beginning to be part of our culture with origins in America rather than from Europe. In 1805 Charles Willson Peale established, from his early museum in Independence Hall- and his even earlier museum called the Columbianum- an art museum connected with a school of art that could educate young aspiring artists as well as exhibit their work before the public. The museum, first conceived to display Peale's collection of natural history artifacts, quickly expanded into portraits of notable Americans, plaster casts of antique sculptures, and American paintings, and soon exhausted the space allotted to them. His archaeological excavation of a gigantic mastadon in 1801, for example, needed a home to be seen by a curiosity-seeking audience, housed amidst stuffed animals and birds as well as his works of painting and sculpture. "An academy for the encouragement of the Fine Arts" was Peale's vision which was ultimately supported by some seventy American statesman and businessmen when the current academy was founded in 1805.
Since that time, art academies have grown up throughout the United States to perpetuate this notion, including Fine Art instruction in colleges and universities as well as in dedicated schools of art. Susquehanna University contributes to this tradition in teaching art, awarding degrees in art, and exhibiting art in the Lore Degenstein Gallery. Exhibitions in the gallery's eleven years of years of operation have brought paintings and sculpture as well as decorative arts and ethnographic artifacts to Central Pennsylvania audiences from major museums and private collections as a function of the scholarly process of its professional staff and the sharing of varieties of exhibitions with its sister institutions. In the spirit of perpetuating a place in our society for art of the academy, the Lore Degenstein Gallery has brought together the work of artists who were educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and who have a working relationship with our university. William Gannotta, Michael Moser, and Kevin Strickland all contribute to the Lore Degenstein Gallery's operation through various activities from transporting museum works, to mounting and framing art and installing exhibitions.
It is important to note that these artists, credentialled through the Academy's educational program, are actively working and exhibiting their art. As professional artists they each endorse the tenets of their training while adding their significant skills to the academic pursuits of other museums to keep the spirit of the Academy alive and well. A Range of specialties in the works of these artists is on view: Ganotta is a painter, Moser, a sculptor, and Strickland, a printmaker.
William Ganotta, graduating from the Academy in 1978, paints the landscape of Pennsylvania environs and rural scenes from other states as well. His vibrant color and modernist perspective bring to his large paintings a vitality and a sense of immediacy in his relationship with the outdoors. Ganotta lives and works in Philadelphia. Michael Moser, who attended the Academy in the 1990s, works in a sculptural method related to "direct carving," a means of intuitively allowing the stone, metal, or wood to direct the artist's movements as he works the medium to create warmth and tactility in his sculptures. Moser's studio is located in Catawissa, Pennsylvania. Kevin Strickland, graduated from the Academy in 1996, takes exception to the traditional printmaking process of creating aquatints by line and color. His meticulous prints engender intimate illusions of simplicity in their verisimiltude, likening reality to shadow and form. Strickland is developing an art studio community in a historic area of East Phildelphia.
The Lore Degenstein Gallery is priviledged to present these artists' works which give students and audience the opportunity to not only experience the products of the working artists but to witness the evidence of process found in professional artists today. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has established a foundation for the teaching of art that continues to this present day, a tradition which Susquehanna University is grateful to pursue. We appreciate the support from the endowments of Charles B. Degenstein and Florence and Saul Putterman which sponsor our programs of fine arts and the facilites that house our exhibitions and permanent collection of over 2,500 works of art at the Lore Degenstein Gallery.
Gods, Prophets, Heroes: The Sculpture of Donald De Lue
Sept. 18 – Oct. 24, 2004
Cosmic Head, Donald De Lue, gilded bronze, 1943, 32"
Metaphor in the sculpture of American artist Donald De Lue praises gods, prophets, and heroes with the splendor of human form, characterizing movement and gesture as meaning, celebrating or memorializing a point in history or the present. Throughout his long career – he worked to the end of his life at age 89 – he found reason to illustrate a concept or idea with energetic figural marbles or bronzes that cavorted through space as if gravity were not present. His commissions for war memorials, public monuments, and architectural sculptures can be found in great numbers wherever memories of distinguished Americans were required or qualities of heroic myths were intended to convey meaning.
Comprehension of the history of art exudes in De Lue’s work. Though he was not classically trained and can claim only minimal academic instruction at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the artist learned his skills through the difficult process of holding numerous apprenticeships at the beginning of career. Born in Boston in 1897, where he barely finished a high school education, De Lue worked exhaustively at studios of various sculptors making models and plaster casts for their designs rather than for his own.
Though his background included a vigorous routine of drawing and modeling from the living figure, he was advised by one of his early teachers to draw from memory after he had grasped the anatomy of the figure. This would assure that his figures would have creative substance rather than copied presence. He worked under a maxim of Michelangelo, which advised the artist to train the memory so that he can do it over and over again. Years later, with an assumption of his own consummate understanding of the figure, De Lue explained,
I won’t ever use a model any more. I draw from what I think it should be. A model can’t give you anything, it hasn’t got any meaning, there is no energy to it. A model is a placid thing that stands still and has no movement.
One of the strongest facets in De Lue’s work is his involvement with battlefield memorials and war monuments. His sculptures appear at a time in U.S. history when the war memorial was at risk of being turned into such “practical” gestures of honor for the deceased as academic scholarships, beds in hospitals, public parks, or community swimming pools. The polemics that arose after World War II shouted down traditional forms of memorials. “Jefferson will be forever imprisoned in that round appallingly permanent banality,” said a Harvard University dean of the Washington, D.C. monument shaped like an ancient Greek temple. Thus “Memorials That Live” became the by-word for public monuments. However, one critic wrote that the utility test in celebrating heroes is like giving a pair of shoes to a child for a Christmas present.2
In contrast to the hundreds of living memorials that were awarded in the aftermath of the war, the American Battle Monuments Commission, chaired by George C. Marshall, established a policy to use American sculptors at the Omaha Beach Memorial in Normandy, France, where American soldiers were honored. De Lue’s war monument was his most significant, designed in 1949 and finally installed in 1955. The twenty-two foot bronze sculpture called Spirit of American Youth Rising From the Waves occupies the centerpiece and was complimented by conservative art critic Thomas Craven as possibly “the most inspired memorial ever created by an American sculptor”3 The architectural monument also includes De Lue’s America and France as nine-foot granite figures, guardian forms that protect the ends of the monument.
Whether De Lue’s work was life-size or monumental in scale, its heroic quality of motion and gesture appears to defy gravity in figures that leap, thrust, cavort, or fly, with movement that gives the appearance of the sculpture levitating from its base. At a time in the history of art in the 20th century when the tenants of modernist sculpture in the academic tradition were challenged by abstraction, public sculpture fought for recognition in the realm of “the new.” De Lue introduced in his art evidence of his constant awareness of the modern era in which he worked. Implied motion rather than static emotion suffuses his sculpture throughout his career. His inspiration of upward mobility suggests an outreach toward a better world, place, or idea-the future.
The Lore Degenstein Gallery could not have a more representative art form that illustrates our own academic principles, singling out the tenet of excellence as a goal towards achievement for our students. Our sincere appreciation goes to Chiles Gallery in Boston for their generosity in giving us the opportunity to exhibit the elegant sculptures of Donald De Lue. I would also like to offer special thanks to Roger Howlett, Director of Childs Gallery and organizer of the De Lue collection, for his gracious assistance in making this exhibition possible at Susquehanna University. We also thank the Charles B. Degenstein Endowment for its continued support of our exhibition program.
