Click the dropdowns below to view descriptions and information about past exhibitions.
SURGE: Senior Graphic Design and Studio Art Majors Exhibition
Saturday, March 23 – Sunday, May 5
This annual exhibition showcases the accomplishments of Susquehanna University’s graduating graphic design and studio art majors. Featuring work from: Tomas Bogoslaw, Caroline Estey, Marie Gilbert, Morgan Hough, Riley Keefer, Kristina Moncelsi, Max Palmer, Kiara Shuler, Caleb Ukuni, Jayme Underhill and Daniella Whippie.
Tim Seibles and Jennifer Fish: Disrupting the Expected
Saturday, Jan. 27–Sunday, March 3
In a collaboration between the Lore Degenstein Gallery and Susquehanna’s School of Humanities, this exhibition highlights the work of poet Tim Seibles and sociologist/photographer Jennifer Fish. Emeritus Professor of English at Old Dominion University and former Poet Laureate of Virginia, Seibles’ poetry engages both the political and mystical realms as well as the beauty of intimacy and the persistence of memory. Fish, Professor of Sociology at Old Dominion, speaks to the global movement of workers, women and refugees. Her projects employ documentary photography and film in the service of human rights movements. For the bulk of their careers, Fish and Seibles have worked independently. Disrupting the Expected puts their work in dialogue for the first time, exploring how disparate investigations into human experience can be mutually enriching.
14th Annual Figurative Art Exhibition
Oct. 28 – Dec. 3, 2023
This national, juried visual art competition and exhibition is open to two-dimensional figurative artists (referencing the human figure), working in painting, drawing and printmaking, who are over the age of 18. This year’s juror is Nicole M. Santiago, Professor of Art at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA.
This year’s prize winners:
Flow
Sept. 2 – Oct. 13, 2023
Water is life; a remarkable, inimitable substance that covers over 70% of the Earth’s surface and is fundamental to the survival of all living things. This exhibition addresses how water systems support life, while acknowledging that water is more than its use-value as a commodity. From perspectives like storytelling, community, and sensory experience, artists Naoe Suzuki, Allie Wist, Stacy Levy, and sTo Len look beyond water’s role as a standing reserve to consider its personal, social, and cultural meanings.
GERALD LANG & JENNIFER ANNE TUCKER: A RETROSPECTIVE
April 29 - May 14, 2023
This retrospective exhibition celebrates the immensely productive careers of area artists Gerald Lang and Jennifer Anne Tucker. Lang is Emeritus Professor of Art and Integrative Arts at Penn State University, where he founded the Digital Photography Studio in the College of Arts and Architecture in the mid-1990s. An explorer of technology and ideas, Lang’s artistic impulses span the history of the medium: he’s both experimented with antique photographic equipment and processes, and pioneered classroom applications of digital photography when it was still a nascent technology. Tucker received her MFA from Penn State in the 1970s, and in addition to her photography work, she has been a practicing herbalist and flower essence practitioner for over 45 years.
The gallery will showcase several individual and collaborative projects the artists have engaged in over the years, including their ongoing Botanical Series: hyper-realistic images created on a large flat-bed digital scanner of specimens from around their home at Hill Crystal Farm in Spring Mills, Pennsylvania.
IN ACTUALITY: SOCIAL REALISM AND ITS LEGACY FROM THE ROBERT B. MENSCHEL COLLECTION
January 28 – March 5, 2023
Following the advent of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, artists and critics alike struggled to make sense of this new technology and its place in the world of modern art. Some photographers chose to experiment with chemical processes and lighting techniques in order to achieve more abstract and painterly images, resembling traditional forms of art. Others embraced the camera’s documentary function and championed stark reality as a subject.
This exhibition explores photographic works from the artistic movement known as social realism, popularized in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, through which artists captured frank and unembellished scenes of working-class life and industrialized spaces.
This exhibition was organized by the Syracuse University Art Museum in honor of Mr. Robert B. Menschel, ’51, H’91 and his philanthropic generosity resulting in the contribution of over 400 works of art to the Syracuse Museum since 1978. The images included in this display are drawn from his most recent gift in 2018, a selection of over 180 photographs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, representing the works of more than 75 artists.
13 th ANNUAL FIGURATIVE DRAWING AND PAINTING EXHIBITION
Nov. 5 - Dec. 11, 2022
This national, juried visual art competition and exhibition is open to two-dimensional figurative artists (referencing the human figure), working in painting, drawing and printmaking who are over the age of 18. This year’s juror was Mira Gerard, a Professor in the Department of Art & Design at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee. Mira gave remarks and awarded prizes at the opening reception.
Best in show:
- Joan Cox, “Origin of the Family”
- Second: Jeanne Ciravolo, “Daughter”
- Third: Becca Shmuluvitz, “Shears”
- Fourth: Daniel Dallmann, “Morning Light”
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Fifth: Athena Rigas, “Perpetually Uptown”
TERMS OF SERVICE
Sept. 3 – Oct. 23, 2022
Black women get stuff done. They inspire, they lift up and they are often at the center of progress for marginalized communities and the American culture at large. This exhibition honors and celebrates Black women artists who use their creative practice as lynchpin and springboard for their work in activism, advocacy and leadership.
Co-curated by members of the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority, who were inspired by their organization’s motto, “Greater Service, Greater Progress,” local and regional artists were selected whose creativity and service work to advance equity, empathy and social justice.
Object Study: Selections from the Permanent Collection
May 6–15 and May 27–29, 2022
In 2000, the Lore Degenstein Gallery’s first director, Dr. Valerie Livingston, curated a selection from the permanent collection under the title Collecting in the Academic Environment. Her accompanying text posed questions which considered the value of acquiring and caring for works of art for the academic museum, as well as the role of the collection in the academic environment. Then as now, art works help us define ourselves and provide opportunities for engagement and study.
Object Study honors the gallery’s past as an educational resource for the university. Through student research and conversations with faculty, it creates a space where select pieces are interpreted beyond an art historical framework to encourage enrichment through cross-disciplinary inquiry. This exhibition was co-curated by 2021–22 Gallery Intern Alexis Rich ’22.
Material Pulses: Seven Viewpoints
Feb. 5– March 13, 2022
Material Pulses
, an exhibition focused on the art of quilt-making, presents seventeen works by seven fiber artists representing the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Curated by internationally renowned artist and teacher Nancy Crow, Material Pulses contributes to the dialogue of contemporary textile arts. “Material Pulses is the culmination of my mission to bring back the majesty, strength, and energy of textile works, particularly large quilts,” said Crow. The exhibition is a program of ExhibitsUSA, a national division of Mid-America Arts Alliance and The National Endowment for the Arts.
12th Annual Figurative Drawing and Painting Exhibition
November 6–December 12, 2021
This national, juried visual art competition and exhibition was open to two-dimensional figurative artists (referencing the human figure), working in painting, drawing and printmaking who are over the age of 18. This year’s juror was Anne Harris, Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago. Harris selected the exhibition works from the pool of entries and announce the awards during the gallery talk at the opening reception.
Best of Show: Gjon Izano, “Odysseus”
Second: Heidi Brueckner, “Tween”
Third: Rachel Mindrup, “Uncertain Outcomes”
Fourth: Teresa Dunn, “Ballad of Lillian Young (Allegory of Black Joy and Sorrow)”
Fifth: Brad Silk, “Andy”
Honorable Mentions:
Michael Shum, “Do Ducks Also Hate Humidity?”
Susan Stephenson, “Neiko”
Commonplace Attachments: Artistic Practice During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Sept. 4 – Oct. 24, 2021
The first exhibition of the 2020-21 academic year, invites visitors to reflect on the complex impact of the most extensive health crisis of the 21st century.
The exhibition features paintings by Scott Brodie, photographs by Geandy Pavón in collaboration with Imara López -Boada, and mixed-media video installations by Brett Wallace. The artists will attend the reception and will speak briefly about their work.
The exhibition invites visitors to reflect on the complex, uneven and multilayered impact of the most extensive health crisis of the 21st century, and addresses themes of loss, isolation, love, hope, fear, labor and community. Each artist focuses on commonplace attachments to objects and people to reveal the multiple ways in which we navigate, combat and survive our collective yet differently experienced trauma.
Drawing on the Susquehanna: 4 Centuries of Artistic Inspiration and Commerce
April 18, 2020
The exhibition, Drawing on the Susquehanna: 4 Centuries of Artistic Inspiration and Commerce, was scheduled to open on April 18, 2020 at the Lore Degenstein Gallery. The work in this exhibition is part of a comprehensive survey of artistic works and artifacts featuring the Susquehanna River, curated by artist Rob Evans. Evans has a personal history and connection to the river, and has shared his research and insights into the historical influences it has had on civilization for the last 4 centuries. His research begins with Native Americans living in the Susquehanna Valley and continues to the present day.
Included here is a sampling of the extraordinary work in the exhibition. Since we were unable to have a physical exhibition due to the Covid-19 pandemic, here is the link to the material on Rob Evans’ webpage: https://www.robevansart.org/drawing-on-the-susquehanna-catalog
“I AM 400” The Art of Jerome & Jeromyah Jones
Winter 2021
This powerful exhibition, created by artists Jerome W. Jones, Jr. and his son, Jeromyah Jones, highlights the 400-year history of Africans in America from 1619 to 2019. It explores not only the suffering but also the successes of African Americans. On display are 62 paintings and a banner entitled “I AM 400”, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in colonial North America. The exhibition offers a unique experience of walking through the milestones of notable African Americans who have made a lasting contribution to American culture.
View the gallery here: https://youtu.be/Ya9gtS5Ezso
Luba Lukova Designing Justice
2020
Internationally renowned, New York-based Luba Lukova is regarded as one of the most original image-makers working today. Whether by using an economy of line, color and text to pinpoint essential themes of humanity or to succinctly visualize social commentary, her work is undeniably powerful and thought provoking.
In Lukova’s art, less is more. More effect, more message, more expression; all while doing it with less. The graphic elements are bold with few fine details but the intent is clear. Her messages reflect the human condition, fundamental fairness, and justice. Yet while it is easy to focus solely on the messages of her provocative works, it is important to take a step back to appreciate the artistic merit in her simplicity. Her use of striking, metaphoric images gives the viewers art to not only appreciate visually but intellectually.
Reflecting on complex social issues has been Lukova’s career-long focus because of her firmly held belief that art is central to human existence and that morality and creativity are aligned. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Social Justice portfolio, addressing themes such as peace, censorship, immigration, ecology, hunger and corruption. The collection has been exhibited around the world and has gone viral on the Internet.
Lukova’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Denver Art Museum; Bibliothéque nationale de France, Paris; Hong Kong Heritage Museum, Centre de la Gravure et de I’Image imprimée, La Louviére, Belgium; the Library of Congress; and the World Bank, Washington D.C. Her solo exhibitions include UNESCO, Paris; DDD Gallery, Osaka, Japan; La MaMa Gallery, New York; the Art Institute of Boston; and the Museum of Design Atlanta.
Sons, Seeing the Modern African American Male
January 24 through March 9, 2020
Featured in this exhibition is the photography of nationally-renowned artist Jerry Taliaferro. The portraits in this exhibition include men who were selected from Susquehanna University and the greater Susquehanna River Valley and are designed to explore how African American men perceive themselves and are perceived by others. Quoting Mr. Taliaferro, “The exhibition is both timely and relevant. Recent events point to the urgent need for conversations about the contemporary Black American male. Any effort, however humble, to foster an understanding of this largely misunderstood and often marginalized segment of the American population is of utmost importance.
Prints by Women
Selected European and American Works from the Georgia Museum of Art
Jan. 27 – March 4, 2018
This exhibition, organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, included 46 prints—woodcuts, lithographs, drypoints, etchings, screen prints and more—ranging from the 19th through the 21st centuries, each by a different European or American woman artist. Prints by Women used works from the museum’s permanent collection to provide a visual chronicle of art by women.
Organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens.
This program was supported in part by the Georgia Council for the Arts through the appropriations of the Georgia General Assembly. The Council is a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Abstract and Nonrepresentational Painting
April 21 – May 15, 2018
This exhibition showcased nine different approaches to abstract and nonrepresentational painting. Artists included in the show were Valerie Allen, Neil Anderson, Carol Galligan, Claire Giblin, Susan Gottlieb, Jerome Hershey, Mark Mahosky, John McCluskey and John Myers.
The Quickening Image
Sept. 1 – Oct. 7, 2018
The wax-resist drawings of David Dodge Lewis and Ephraim Rubenstein chronicle a new way to draw. Wax-resist drawing is a layered, large-scale, mixed-media approach that utilizes wax as a resist for subsequent ink and charcoal washes. It incorporates both wet and dry materials, as well as linear and painterly elements. The process allows for carefully rendered passages alongside more spontaneous and chaotic applications.
10th Annual Figurative Drawing and Painting Exhibition
Oct. 20 – Dec. 9, 2018
This national, juried visual art competition and exhibition was open to two-dimensional figurative artists (referencing the human figure), working in painting, drawing and printmaking who are over the age of 18. This year’s juror was Lance Esplund, an art critic for The Wall Street Journal. Esplund selected the exhibition works from the pool of entries and announce the awards during the gallery talk at the opening reception.
- Best of Show: Jill Eberle, “Not This Time”
- Second: Alia El-Bermani, “Hear Me”
- Third: Gjon Izano, “Exodus”
- Fourth: Anna Rose Bain, “Silent Snowfall”
- Fifth: Linda Tracy Brandon, “Read To Me”
- Honorable Mentions: Manuel Azcuy, “Anger” and Joseph Miller, “Alliance”
Sue Coe: Print Retrospective
Jan. 26 – Mar. 6, 2019
Sue Coe is a contemporary English artist noted for her intensely political graphic illustrations and activism. Born in 1951 in Staffordshire, England, she grew up near a slaughterhouse, which helped instill a lifelong passion for animal rights activism. This political sensibility characterizes Coe’s work, which often explicitly makes animal rights and other social issues its central subject. The artist uses painting, printmaking and a realistic drawing style to depict cruelty against animals, sweatshops, prisons, AIDS, war and anti-capitalism throughout her work.
Ordinary Extraordinary: Collage in America
Apr. 20 – May 13, 2019
The exhibition featured a varied selection of mixed media pieces by Matthew Cusick, Jim Gaylord, Addie Herder, Lisa Hoke, Don Joint, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Lance Letscher, Charles McGill, Salvatore Meo, Diane Samuels, Donna Sharrett, Mark Wagner and May Wilson.
The exhibition was presented in collaboration with Pavel Zoubok Fine Art.
Selections From the Permanent Collection
Sept. 7 – Oct. 6, 2019
This exhibition drew from the eclectic collection of the Lore Degenstein Gallery of Susquehanna University. Curated by gallery director Dan Olivetti, the exhibition included paintings, drawings, prints, fiber art, photography, sculpture and mid-20th century French posters. Many of the recent works by contemporary artists had been acquired through the gallery’s annual figurative drawing and painting competitions and from artists who had been featured in gallery exhibitions. Other notable works included American Regionalist prints by such notable artists as John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. Two extraordinary pieces in the show, hewn from Italian Carrara marble, harkened back to the classical days of sculpture. Polaroids and prints by Andy Warhol, donated to the gallery from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, were also on display.
11th Annual Figurative Drawing and Painting Exhibition
Oct. 26–Dec. 9, 2019
This national, juried visual art competition and exhibition was open to two-dimensional figurative artists (referencing the human figure), working in painting, drawing and printmaking who are over the age of 18. This year’s juror was Alberto Jorge Carol, an international award winning figurative artist living in Miami, Florida. Carol selected the exhibition works from the pool of entries and announce the awards during the gallery talk at the opening reception.
Best of Show: Jill Eberle - “Not This Time”
Second: Alia El-Bermani - “Hear Me”
Third: Gjon Izano - “Exodus”
Fourth: Anna Rose Bain - “Silent Snowfall”
Fifth: Linda Tracy Brandon -“Read To Me”
Honorable Mentions:
Manuel Azcuy - “Anger”
Joseph Miller - “Alliance”
Drawing on the Susquehanna: 4 Centuries of Artistic Inspiration and Commerce
April 18, 2020
The exhibition, Drawing on the Susquehanna: 4 Centuries of Artistic Inspiration and Commerce, was scheduled to open on April 18, 2020 at the Lore Degenstein Gallery. The work in this exhibition is part of a comprehensive survey of artistic works and artifacts featuring the Susquehanna River, curated by artist Rob Evans. Evans has a personal history and connection to the river, and has shared his research and insights into the historical influences it has had on civilization for the last 4 centuries. His research begins with Native Americans living in the Susquehanna Valley and continues to the present day.
Included here is a sampling of the extraordinary work in the exhibition. Since we were unable to have a physical exhibition due to the Covid-19 pandemic, here is the link to the material on Rob Evans’ webpage: https://www.robevansart.org/drawing-on-the-susquehanna-catalog
Bob Diven: “Wall Street” or “How to Drive a Street Painter Up the Wall”
September 1, 2012 - October 10, 2012
Bob Diven paints on the street-literally-in chalk and pastel, creating transitory illusion and fleeting commentary. This award-winning artist converted the walls of the Lore Degenstein Gallery into a 200-foot vertical roadway of temporary art filled with wit, color and startling realism in just two weeks.
Fourth Annual Figurative Drawing and Painting Competition
October 27, 2012 - December 7, 2012
This was our fourth annual, national, juried visual art competition and exhibition, open to two-dimensional figurative artists, working in painting and drawing who are over the age of 18. This year’s juror was Amy Freeman, a figurative painter currently teaching painting and drawing at the University of Florida. Amy selected the exhibition works and announced the awards during her gallery talk at the opening reception.
Congratulations to all of the artists in the Lore Degenstein Gallery Fourth Annual National Figurative Drawing and Painting Competition and Exhibition.
- First Prize: “Self III” by Kelly Blevins
- Second Prize: “The Garden” by Aynslee Moon
- Third Prize: “Loretta Marble” by Emily Blocker
- Fourth Prize: “Desdemona’s Second Thoughts” by Anne Emerson Hall
- Fifth Prize: “Casey and the Red Ball” by Annie Robinson
Under Pressure: Group Printmaking Exhibition
January 26, 2013 - March 1, 2013
This contemporary, group printmaking exhibition features a variety of printmaking styles by artists including James Ehlers, John Hancock, Richie Lasansky, Ryan O’Malley, Dennis McNett, Jillian Sokso, Shelley Thorstensen, Mark Linnemeier, Katy Seals and Kathryn Polk.
Presence: The paintings of Ann Piper and Aaron M. Brown
April 13, 2013 - May 10, 2013
Ann Piper and Aaron M. Brown are contemporary figurative painters whose work combines elements of observation and psychology, the objective and subjective. In their work, the human figure becomes a locus of alchemical change. It is placed at the center of a pictorial drama in which mundane aspects of the everyday world shed their familiar roles, becoming harbingers of transformation.
Remains to Be Seen: Alternative Process and Manipulated Photography
August 31, 2013 - October 5, 2013
This group photography exhibition is curated by Adam Dienst-Scott, a photographer and educator currently living and working in Omaha, Neb. He will speak at the opening reception regarding the eclectic works he selected for the exhibition. The work in the exhibition showcases different styles and techniques of alternative process photography. Artists include Carol Golemboski, Dan Estabrook, Adam Dienst-Scott, Kalee Appleton, Heather F. Wetzel, Lisa Kokin, Daniel Coburn, Carol Panaro-Smith/James Hajicek, James Kueffner and Charlie Stock.
Fifth Annual Figurative Drawing and Painting Competition
October 19, 2013 - December 6, 2013
The fifth annual, national, juried visual art competition and exhibition was open to two-dimensional figurative artists (referencing the human figure), working in painting, drawing or printmaking who are over the age of 18. This year’s juror was Alessendra Sulpy, a figurative painter and art educator currently living and working in Winona, Minn. Sulpy selected the exhibition works and announced the awards during her gallery talk at the opening reception
The Last Supper: 550 Final Meals of US Death Row Inmates
January 18, 2014 - March 1, 2014
Julie Green, professor of art at Oregon State University, presented 550 ceramic plates depicting the last meal requests from death row inmates. The artist created the series in the early 2000’s and she intends to paint 50 plates annually until the death penalty is abolished. Green sees the plates as a way to humanize the individual inmates and as a commemoration for people unlikely to receive such recognition. The sheer number of meal requests in one room brings home the gravity of the subject matter. She uses cobalt blue mineral paint on found and vintage tableware. The blue is a reference to Chinese porcelain and Delftware, as well as more metaphorically “the blues” and “blue plate specials.”
Freedom and Romanticism: Paintings by Gjon Izano
April 12, 2014 - May 9, 2014
Gjon Izano is a U.S. national, born in Albania. The paintings in this exhibition are inspired by his experiences in both New York City and Albania. The artist works primarily with oil on canvas, often on a large scale and with a great deal of impasto. Izano’s imagery is representational in nature but is imbued with a romantic sensibility.
Between Midnight and Dawn, Midcentury Noir and Crime Film Posters
August 30, 2014 - October 3, 2014
The movie posters included in this exhibition (from the personal collections of Mark Fertig and Eddie Muller) are all theater-used originals from the 1940s and 1950s. They have been deacidified, archivally mounted to acid-free Japanese paper and cotton canvas, and touched up with water-reversible pigments in order to restore them to their original appearance and preserve them for the future. They offer insight not only into Hollywood movie marketing techniques, but also into the gun-waving, cigarette-smoking, fedora-wearing, loot-grabbing, back-stabbing, car-crashing, legs-showing, bare-knuckled glorious iconography of the film noir style. These “one-sheets” offer up a bank vault’s worth of midcentury art and design, featuring stunning illustration, photography, and typography, all too often created in anonymity by studio-employed artists who were unfortunately not permitted to sign their work.
Eddie Muller is a novelist, filmmaker, historian and Turner Classic Movies host. Widely celebrated as the “Czar of Noir,” Muller is the author of three seminal books on the subject and has provided commentaries on countless film noir DVDs. As founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation, he organizes annual “Noir City” film festivals in cities across the country, and works tirelessly to rescue and preserve America’s noir heritage. Muller gave an interesting, informative gallery talk at the opening reception.
Mark Fertig, exhibition curator, is chair of the department of art at Susquehanna University and associate professor of graphic design.
Sixth Annual Juried Figurative Drawing and Painting Exhibition
October 18, 2014 - December 5, 2014
This is a national visual art competition and exhibition of contemporary figurative painting, drawing and printmaking. This year’s juror was Pamela Wilson, a figurative painter and art educator working and living in Santa Barbara, Calif. Pamela selected the works in the exhibition and announced the following awards during her gallery talk at the opening reception:
- 1st Prize: Wave, by Joseph A. Miller
- 2nd Prize: Packages Series: Strip Loin, by Chris Valle
- 3rd Prize: Flamingo’s Den, by Joel Dugan
- 4th Prize: Masquerade, by Michael Nolan
- 5th Prize: Natalie, by Julia Clift
Catalyst: Leaving a Lasting Impression
January 17, 2015 - February 22, 2015
This exhibition features the artwork of 36 artists from around the country.
Their work represents a wide variety of artistic disciplines, including sculpture, glass, ceramics, fiber, drawing, printmaking, painting and mixed media.
Among this grouping, there are smaller communities of artists who have influenced each other in their development.
This exhibition showcases the aesthetic relationship of the mentor/mentee in expected and unexpected ways.
Contemporary Fiber: Breaking Tradition
April 11, 2015 - May 11, 2015
This exhibition showcased the varied styles and approaches often prominent fiber artists-Beth Carney, Linda Colsh, Jane Dunnewold, Valerie Goodwin, Meredith Grimsley, Kate Pasquini- Masopust, Mary Pal, Susan Shie, Kate Themel, and Paula Swett. These artists blended tradition with a contemporary perspective that illustrated the uniquely intimate power of fiber to communicate.
Re-Writing the Streets: The Interational Language of Stickers
Sept. 5-Oct. 11, 2015
Street art stickers have emerged as a vehicle for self-expression and as an effective way to engage passersby. Incorporating the finest examples from two collectors, Catherine Tedford in the United States and Oliver Baudach in Germany, this traveling exhibition includes more than 800 original, unused stickers grouped by artists, themes, dates and geographic locations. The Lore Degenstein Gallery is proud to be the first venue in the United States to host this exhibition.
Seventh Annual Juried Figurative Drawing and Painting Competition and Exhibition
Oct. 24–Dec. 11, 2015
This national, juried visual art competition and exhibition is open to two-dimensional figurative artists (referencing the human figure), working in painting, drawing and printmaking who are over the age of 18. The juror will select the exhibition works from the pool of entries and announce the awards during the gallery talk at the opening reception.
Identity and Place
January 23–February 28, 2016
A group exhibition featuring artists Amy Abattoir, Kelly Blevins, Jeremiah Johnson, Anna Kell, Joanne Landis, Sharon McCuen, John McKaig, Howard Tran, and Sanh Tran working in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography and mixed media.
Mixed Environs: Contemporary Painters
April 16 - May 11, 2016
A group exhibition featuring artists Aaron Morgan Brown, Julia Clift, Rob Evans, Randall Exon, Mark Innerst, Keith Jacobshagen, Alex Kanevsky, Dean Mitchell, Stephanie Pierce and Hollis Heichemer.
Victory for a Dime: Fighting Comic Books of the Second World War
Sept. 3 - Oct. 2, 2016
The comic book industry reached dizzying heights during the Second World War, when comics became an integral part in America’s propaganda war and forever cemented a place in American popular culture. This unprecedented exhibition, featuring more than 100 poster-size covers, offers a look at the moment when a bunch of talented dreamers, most of them Jewish kids in New York, created iconic characters who battled it out with the Axis while the fate of the world hung in the balance. Slide lecture by exhibition curator Mark Fertig in the Degenstein Theatre at 7 p.m.
Eighth Annual Figurative Drawing and Painting Competition
Oct. 22 - Dec. 9, 2016
In its eighth year, this national, juried visual art competition and exhibition is open to two-dimensional figurative artists (referencing the human figure), working in painting, drawing and printmaking who are over the age of 18. The juror this year was Judy Takács, an Ohio figurative artist best known for her blog, book and portrait series, “Chicks with Balls,” which honors unsung female heroes.
Photography as Social Conscience: Impassioned Portrayals of Race in the United States
Jan. 28-March 5, 2017
Photography has always been an essential medium for revealing realities of race relations in the United States, both unsettling and uplifting. This national juried photography exhibition seeks images that portray a broad range of perspectives on race in the country today.
Drawn to Creating: A Survey of Contemporary Drawing
April 22 – May 17, 2017
Drawing is often our first exploration of creativity. This can be seen in the artist in the studio, children exploring expression, or humanity discovering self. It is the most immediate act of creation and expression, the most in-depth act of observation, and the most direct form of imaging. Spurred by technological revolutions that have their foundations from its methods, drawing has become incredibly diverse, and as relevant and important as ever.
Drawn to Creating: A Survey of Contemporary Drawing is an exhibition seeking to show, as much as a single exhibition can, the depth of what is happening in the current discipline of drawing. Considering work from the most academic to the most experimental, and from the formal to the conceptual, it presents drawing as an independent and expanding discipline.
Artist-curator, Nick Reszetar, has chosen the 10 artists and their works for the exhibition, from his own research into, and love of, drawing. He will give a gallery talk at the opening reception to discuss the depth of the work.
Featured Artists:
- Tamie Beldue
- Robert Bubp
- Joomi Chung
- Donovan Entrekin
- Michael Raymond Kareken
- Armin Mersmann
- Juan Carlos Perdiguero
- Benjamin Pond
- Deborah Anne Rockman
- Bruce Samuelson
- Nick Reszetar (Director’s Choice)
Closeup II: Nine Contemporary Cuban Artists
Sept. 2 - Oct. 8, 2017
Featuring the work of Alberto Jorge Carol, Ivonne Ferrer, Lia Galletti, Victor Gomez, Aldo Menéndez, Heriberto Mora, Ismael Gomez Peerealta, Aimee Pérez, and Rafael Lópe Ramos.
Ninth Annual Figurative Drawing and Painting Competition
Oct. 28 - Dec. 10, 2017
This national, juried visual art competition and exhibition was open to two-dimensional figurative artists (referencing the human figure), working in painting, drawing and printmaking who are over the age of 18.
The juror selected the exhibition works from the pool of entries and announced the awards during the gallery talk at the opening reception. The juror this year was Alia El-Bermani, a Contemporary Figurative Painter currently living, working, and teaching in Raleigh, North Carolina. More info at www.alia-fineart.com.
60 x 60: Small Prints from Purdue University Galleries
September 6, 2007 - October 21, 2007
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 less than 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.
Ralph Wickiser: A Retrospective
November 8, 2007 - December 14, 2007
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.
The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art: Works on Paper
January 19, 2008 - March 15, 2008
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.
Le Salon des Arts Ménagers (The Household Arts Exhibition): Posters of the Modern French Home 1945-1982
April 11, 2008 - June 3, 2008
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.
Susquehanna University: A 150 Year Retrospective
August 28, 2008 - October 4, 2008
As part of a yearlong 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.
Global Matrix II: An International Print Exhibition
October 18, 2008 - December 10, 2008
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.
Transforming Metal, Wood and Photography
January 17, 2009 - February 27, 2009
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.
Frank Hyder: Poems from a Threatened Eden
April 4, 2009 - June 23, 2009
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.
Society of American Graphic Artists New Century Members Exhibition - The Late Summer Exhibition
September 5, 2009 - October 11, 2009
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.
The Lore Degenstein Gallery National Juried Figurative Drawing and Painting Competition
October 24, 2009 - December 11, 2009
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.
Wondrous Cold: An Antarctic Journey
January 23, 2010 - February 28, 2010
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.
Dalí Illustrates Dante’s Divine Comedy
April 10, 2010 - May 23, 2010
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.
A Complex Weave: Women and Identity in Contemporary Art
September 4, 2010 - October 15, 2010
This exhibition presented the work of seventeen women artists of diverse backgrounds who address aspects of identity, including nationality, ethnicity, gender and religion. Media included sculpture, video, painting, prints, fiber and metals, photography, and installation.
The Lore Degenstein Gallery National Figurative Drawing and Painting Exhibition
October 30, 2010 - December 17, 2010
This was a national, juried exhibition of contemporary figurative drawing and painting. This year’s juror, Tim Doud, is an associate professor of art at American University in Washington, D.C., and is represented by Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York City.
Women of a New Tribe, a Photographic Celebration of Black American Women
January 22, 2011 - March 4, 2011
This exhibition is a photographic study of the physical and spiritual beauty of the black American woman. The subjects are from all walks of life and include the young and the old, mothers and daughters, artists and professionals. One particularly unique feature of this project is that up to 20 local subjects will be photographed and included in the exhibition. The photographic style is reminiscent of the photography of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood.
Warhol and His Imitators
April 9, 2011 - May 6, 2011
Drawn from the Lore Degenstein Gallery’s recent gift of photographs from the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program, this exhibition features a selection of Warhol’s black and white prints and Polaroid color portraits. Warhol’s prints reveal his daily life experiences, and his portrait subjects include artists, socialites, athletes and designers.
Warhol often used his photographs as source material for other projects, such as his famous screen prints of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. In this spirit of transforming documentary evidence to make-believe, Susquehanna University’s graphic design and photography students were presented with the challenge of imitating Warhol’s screen prints. Using digital tools and imagination, the students worked from photographs of Warhol’s less-famous subjects, as well as subjects of their own, to add a new dimension to this exhibition.
Simon Snyder of Pennsylvania: Citizen and Governor 1759 - 1819
June 3, 2011 - June 26, 2011
Simon Snyder, a 19th century rural Pennsylvanian and self taught man, rose from obscurity, through the rungs of a career ladder in politics, to three terms in the Governor’s office from 1808-1817. This exhibition examines Snyder’s character and his actions and vividly displays for the 21st century viewer the complexity of Snyder’s life in paintings, engravings and objects of daily life.
Contemporary Ceramics Exhibition
September 3, 2011 - October 12, 2011
The Lore Degenstein Gallery presents its first contemporary ceramics invitational exhibition featuring prominent national ceramic artists and potters from around the country. The ceramic artists featured in this exhibition work in a wide range of styles and create functional, non-functional and sculptural ceramics.
Third Annual Figurative Drawing and Painting Competition and Exhibition
October 29, 2011 - December 9, 2011
This was a national visual art competition and exhibition of contemporary, figurative, painting, drawing and printmaking. The juror was Cindy Stockton Moore, a Philadelphia-based painter and writer. Cindy selected the works in the exhibition from the digital images of the entries and awarded the prizes during her gallery talk at the opening reception. Best in Show:Rio by Matthew Wren, Second Prize: Corner by Alex Churchill, Third Prize: Echo by Michael Nichols, Fourth Prize: Reflection - Angels of the Morning by Yeqiang Wang, Fifth Prize: Choices by Alessandra Sulpy.
Asya Reznikov “Up-Routed For”
January 21, 2012 - March 2, 2012
The exhibition Up-Routed For by New York-based, international artist, Asya Reznikov, showcased her exploration of immigration, emigration, cultural identity, foreignness, travel and one’s sense of home. The works included photography, free standing and wall hung video sculptures and installations as well as drawings and paintings. The artist talked about her work at the opening reception.
John Hultberg and Monhegan Island: The Man, The Place, And His Dreams
April 14, 2012 - May 25, 2012
This exhibition examines the relationship between John Hultberg (1922-2005), an artist schooled in abstract impressionism by Richard Diebenkorn, Mark Rothko, and Morris Kantor, and Monhegan Island, Maine where Hultberg summered from 1961 to 1984 and where he found inspiration for many of his most important paintings. During an extended Paris stay in 1954, Hultberg met the now-legendary New York art dealer Martha Jackson who soon became his dealer and champion, arranging 60 solo exhibitions of his work in America and Europe. Throughout his career he won many prizes, such as first prize at the Corcoran Gallery of Art Biennial and at the International Congress for Cultural Freedom in Rome, he received many fellowships and grants from several important art foundations, and his paintings were acquired by many museums around the U.S. and in Europe. The works in the exhibition consist of three types: a large group of paintings that emerged from the artist’s dreams; representational paintings characterizing significant events in the artist’s life; and landscapes from his first summer on the island.
Monhegan Modernists: 1940-1970 Paintings and Sculptures from the Collection of John M. Day
September 28, 2002 - December 8, 2002
The unique opportunity to exhibit paintings and sculptures precisely focused upon time and place - as reflected in the collection of John M. Day - represents a privilege to examine a phenomenon of the art world that continues to this present day. The selection shows the work of more than fifty American artists all responding to a particular setting during the advent of abstraction in the New York art scene from 1940 to 1970. The exhibition shows the work of artists who found fellowship and an intellectual community with friends and colleagues each summer on Monhegan, a small island off the coast of Maine. Though most were trained at a variety of professional art schools, some are products of self exploration in their efforts to arrive at an individual statement in their art. We are familiar with the various active summer artists’ colonies spawned in New England, Provincetown, Ogunquit, Cape Anne, and Old Lyme, however, none of these has the unusual distinction of attracting artists of diverse perspectives which are retained in their work as that of Monhegan. Though addressing abstraction as a universal experiment in the art world at the time, each artist distinguishes vision and style with an absolute fidelity to individuality in spite of the tantalizing subjects which they all portray.
John Day has been collecting art for more than twenty-five years. Determined to limit his selections to a particular time and place, he responded to the art of his home state, Maine, and became quickly enamored of the conceptual framework observed in paintings from Monhegan. The artists were often friends and neighbors as well as colleagues who had shared experiences in the Works Progress Administration in New York City in the 1930s. They often serendipitously found their way to Monhegan or were persuaded by their friends to try out the summer setting. Day was intrigued by the passion of their involvement with the island scenery and events, while noting the diversity of vision found in their work.
During this thirty-year period, 1940-1970, New York was a hotbed of artistic activity. The Surrealists had emigrated from Europe because of their expulsion by the Nazi regime; young avant-garde New York artists were influenced by the newness of the gallery spirit; the Abstract Expressionists declared their pre-eminence in their “takeover” of international acclaim - the first universally significant art movement for the United States. This was the flavor of the times during which most of these Monhegan artists emerged.
Few of the artists embraced elements of Surrealism, but all the artists in this exhibition found their message in abstraction. Flavors of Cubism (Picasso and Braque), Neo-Plasticism (Mondrian and Van Doesburg), Abstract Expressionism (Hans Hofmann and de Kooning) to mention a few, began to show up in the subjects that Monhegan offered: shipwrecks; views of rocks and sea; houses and studios; and particularly the Headlands, 160’ cliffs that dashed the visitor visually down to a turbulent sea.
These modernists, as they can best be described, were preceded by American artists from the turn of the 19th century: Robert Henri, Rockwell Kent, Edward Redfield, George Bellows, all of whose prominence in their careers began an awareness of Monhegan through their emphasis on realistic portrayals of the extraordinary scenery. Later, the Wyeths and Edward Hopper extended the views of land and sea to observe the natural phenomena with a personal idiom. Much of this effort of realism is still present today.
But it is the modernists that attract our attention as they portray the subjects with an emphasis on a style of painting that can be recognized as uniquely responsive to the New York School beginning in the early 1940s. Artists, who witnessed tragic events found in the abstractions of a wreck in 1949 of a ship, the St. Christopher, such as Joseph de Martini and his painting in the exhibition, record the moment in an expressive disembowelment of the ship against a raging sea. This painting, one of three versions of the St. Christopher by the artist, is based upon his direct encounter with the subject. We know that the Metropolitan Museum acquired the painting in that same year, only to deaccession it recently, when John Day acquired it.
Other paintings represented in the collection demonstrate the village and studios of the artists. William McCartin’s Interior of 1956 gives his viewer an intimate moment in his cottage where his subsequent involvement with non-objective abstraction emerged. McCartin was a member of a group of artists who focused their New York community around Zero Mostel at his studio on 28th Street. Calling themselves “the 28th Street Gang,” they held a weekly meeting at a poker game each Thursday in the city. Many of the group continued their friendship in their summers on Monhegan. Mostel’s close friend Herbie Kallem was a sculptor who built a studio just a few houses away from Zero’s cottage on the island. Summers perpetuated the spirit of New York by these artists, but their styles and approaches to their subjects remained individualized expressions.
Several Monhegan artists claim early experiences with modernism because of their studies with Hans Hofmann, who never actually came to the island himself. Hofmann’s school of painting in New York attracted all the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s bringing a new realization of the visual impact of abstraction on the subjects of the island. As a result, Ted Davis, Alexander Minewski, Robert Casper, Michael Loew, and Lynne Drexler all observed the island in their paintings embracing the elements of Abstract Expressionism learned at the feet of the master, Hofmann. Loew, who also was part of the 28th Street group, eventually evolved his work to focus on the precise, analytical approach to nature established by the Neo-plasticist, Mondrian. Thus, it can be observed that a cross section of the American avant-garde was alive and well in the summers on Monhegan from 1940 to 1970.
Of the more than seventy artworks in the exhibition, all demonstrate an adherence to the avant-garde aesthetic of the New York artworld. John Day’s vision in selecting artists and paintings that support this notion is the governing spirit of the exhibition. It is the intention to travel this show to colleges and museums across the country to share the wonders of this art. Though some of the paintings were shown at Bates College in the summer of 2001, the Lore Degenstein Gallery is appreciative of the opportunity to be the first to display this, the inaugural exhibition, that will be the focus of the subsequent tour. The efforts of the Lore Degenstein Gallery are made possible through the Charles B. Degenstein endowment, which supports our exhibition program.
Art of the French Poster: Cognac, Café, and Culture
January 25, 2003 - March 23, 2003
French posters in the twentieth century exhibit a legacy from the turn of the nineteenth century’s creative designs from such graphic artists as Jules Chéret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Their crisp imagery established a model for a hundred years of artful graphic design to follow. Every item offered for sale was featured in the form of a brightly colored enormous-scale work of art which was to find a place on billboards on the streets of Paris and throughout France. One of the subjects that tantalized the populace was social beverages, which included wine - the mainstay of the French table - and other alcoholic drinks that were produced in France and its environs. Moderating influences co-opted the advertising vehicle intending to promote an alternative to the abuse of alcohol, namely, coffee and its implements of production. Most significantly, governmental programs used posters to warn of the hazards of indulgence and to produce a spirit of sobriety.
Edward Steichen and the Advent of Hollywood Celebrity Portraiture in Vanity Fair: 1923-1937
April 5, 2003 - June 1, 2003
Edward Steichen was a major figure in American photography. Transcending the nineteenth-century Pictorialist movement with an emphasis on photography as an art form, Steichen made portraiture a stunning commercial product for publication in Vanity Fair magazine with his revolutionary photographs of young, aspiring film stars. His sense of mood and drama in the presentation of these burgeoning actors introduced a new concept into their relationship of art with commercial enterprise. Steichen was appointed by Condé Nast as chief photographer for Vanity Fair which at the time was less than nine years into production.
Nast recognized Steichen’s achievements in various applications of photography. He trusted the artist to achieve a visual effect for the magazine that set it apart from other publications just as he had trusted Frank Crowninshield as its editor. Vanity Fair was unique in its focus on “things people talk about at parties — the arts, sports, humor,” asserted Crowninshield. Inevitably, Vanity Fair soon became a “pioneer in so many areas that it was later said to be a significant yardstick of American culture,” along with setting “a new standard for photography and picture journalism.” The visually pleasing magazine was noted for its first-rate writing by young authors and for the 1930 Pulitzer Prize won by Edward Steichen.
Steichen was first and foremost an artist and secondarily a photographer, but he was also an innovator in the distinct visual attributes that photography had to offer. Working with photographer Alfred Stieglitz in his promotion of the Photo-Secession movement to rid photography of its mere documentary role, Steichen designed the first cover and the initial publicity for Camera Work, Stieglitz’s publication to advance photography as a fine art. He worked as a painter in France before World War I and during the war directed aerial photography for Allied Forces. After the war he became enamored of fashion and advertising photography; this was the time he worked with Vanity Fair.
The number of photographs Steichen produced for Vanity Fair exceeds that of any other photographer on the staff. Steichen recognized that Hollywood’s methodology in the formation of the “star” was “image” focused upon sophistication and recognition, soon to become an American icon by its familiarity. The fresh, young faces of these stars were defined by a formula both romantic and expressive - some portrayed in costume and role as in Steichen’s 1927 portrait of Fred Astaire; some as elegant portrayals of the emblems of beauty as in his many portraits of youthful actors Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson, and Greta Garbo among many others.
As Steichen’s career moved to another phase, he left Vanity Fair in 1937 turning his attention to the blurring of aesthetic distinctions that were being produced by such social commentary projects as the Farm Security Administration photographs in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s program to document the results of the American Depression of the 1930s and the photo reportage of documentary magazines like Life Magazine. During World War II, he became the Director of Naval Combat Photography, and, at the conclusion of the war, took on the directorship of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His expansive creative output, however, was never greater than the years of his involvement with Vanity Fair.
The Lore Degenstein Gallery presents a collection of more than seventy of the photographic portraits produced by Edward Steichen in his Vanity Fair years on loan from the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York. It is our pleasure to exhibit these images as our ongoing support of the medium of photography in its multitude of manifestations as fine art, as documentation, and as aesthetic offering for students in the Department of Art on our campus. We are particularly appreciative of the Charles B. Degenstein Endowment which provides ongoing support for the programming of the Lore Degenstein Gallery.
Robert Henri and His Influence
September 13, 2003 - October 26, 2003
American art of the twentieth century cannot be discussed without reference to Robert Henri (pronounced hen-rye) whose essential message to the world of artists, patrons, and public was to seek a truly American outlook in painting and sculpture of the day. Henri proposed that what is necessary for art in America is first an appreciation of the great native ideas…and then the achievement of masterly freedom in expressing them. He encouraged artists to take note of the art of France but to avoid imitation of visual information. Rather, he believed that art should express the artist’s own encounter with emotion, with mood, and with feeling toward or from the sitter. Having a direct encounter with his subject freed him to paint or sculpt with an interpretation that was clearly his own, rather than the achievement of verisimilitude that could be criticized for its lack of memory or of skill in the mere recording of nature.
Henri engendered a coterie of artists and friends wherever he went. After graduating from art school at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia, Henri spent three years at the Académie Julian in France where he explored art of both the past and the avant-garde present. He returned to Philadelphia in 1891 to teach at the Academy but soon became embroiled in bitter controversy over his support of the Impressionist style that had begun to appear in his work. At weekly open house sessions in his studio, he attracted like-minded artists who became lifelong adherents to his ideas. In 1895 he led a small group of artist friends through Europe to seek reassurance for his artistic goals but instead discovered the dark, low-key tonalities of the Dutch paintings. In Henri’s work and that of his colleagues, the new taste for limited palettes of grays and drab colors began to appear which in America became a movement termed “Tonalism.” This could be seen in the paintings of Whistler, George Inness, and many others in addition to those of Henri and his friends. Henri retained this darkness in his paintings even as he eventually introduced a later bright coloration that continued until the end of his life.
Finding his place in Philadelphia difficult in opposing the influence of the Academy, Henri moved to New York City in 1900. For a brief time he taught in William Merritt Chase’s art school gaining popularity for his charismatic performance as a dissident who protested the conservative practices of the National Academy of Design. As a result he put together a group called “The Eight,” who in 1908 exhibited their new ideas about subject matter, focusing upon the landscape of the New York street in a manner of which was later described as “The Ash-Can School.”
The tendency at this time of artists to mount exhibitions of their protestations against tradition in the art world provided a generative force for the founding of such European movements as Cubism, Fauvism, and many other artistic statements that resisted realism in favor of abstraction. Henri’s group was clearly not in conflict with realism; it was more interested in the opportunities for the dissemination of new ideas regarding subject matter, freedom for the artist, and the application of paint. Such was the flavor of the times when Henri became involved in the group of artists that organized the Armory Show, a vast exhibition of avant-garde works from both Europe and American that changed the course of history in terms of the new direction American art was to take. Over twelve-hundred paintings and sculptures appeared in an exhibition at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in February 1913, an event that would rock the art world.
Among those artists who were closest to Henri were John Sloan, William Glackens, and George Luks who followed him from Philadelphia. Later other artists who were to feel his influence included: George Bellows, Rockwell Kent, Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, and many others. His fruitful energies in teacher appear in his book, The Art Spirit that contains his ideas about art: texts for the assertion of the artist’s position in 20th century America. The book is still in print to this day. Henri’s influence extended beyond New York City. His communications with Rockwell Kent and George Bellows encouraged these artists to visit and paint on Monhegan Island, Maine, introducing New York artists to the northern environs to leave their impact from that time forward. Henri’s influence continued into mid-20th century and beyond, although before his death in 1921, the artist’s writings had much to say about the use of subjects and their rightful place in the history of American art.
A significant collection of paintings by Robert Henri and his contemporaries is on loan to the Lore Degenstein Gallery from the University of Nebraska through the efforts of Smith Kramer. We are particularly appreciative of the Charles B. Degenstein endowment that continues to support the gallery’s programs.
Painting and Sculpture by Florence Putterman: A Ten-Year Retrospective
November 1, 2003 - December 7, 2003
During 1993, Susquehanna University opened the new Lore Degenstein Gallery in its inaugural year with a large exhibition of paintings by Florence Putterman. The exhibition included an analytical catalogue that argued for the artist’s work to be placed in the history of postmodernism relating to feminist narrative. Ten years later, a retrospective of subsequent paintings and sculptures reinforces the artist’s pursuit of this tradition with her depictions of figures and subjects that suggest a personal statement defying interpretation. Color is still an exciting aspect of her work, vibrant and saturated, with emphasis upon the exotic palette that might recall the Caribbean and southern environs. Since Putterman spends half a year in Florida, it is not surprising that she responds to the brilliant, high-key chromas of her southern home.
It is possible in this exhibit to trace aspects of the artist’s earlier work, particularly noticeable in her characters, which are apparent in the intensity of her narratives. The paintings describe a continued relationship with representational art. Though seemingly autobiographical, they are decipherable in terms of familiar subjects, birds, humans, and household animals that appear to construct a narrative. The narrative immediately suggests an environment of feminine encounter with events from the artist’s life, but it simultaneously seems to provoke metaphorical messages of global magnitude that fit the current definition of postmodernism.
Summarizing properties of postmodernism, historian Diana Crane states, “Like the modernist, the postmodernist was often interested in problems of light and visual perception but, unlike the modernist, he or she was also concerned with the subject matter and the expression of feeling.” Challenging modernism in style, meaning, and intention, postmodernism is a pluralistic art developed since the 1970’s. It is most evident in Putterman’s work by her inclusion of subjective narration that arouses a heightened sense of drama or emotion. One such painting, New York Stories, 1999, shows a cast of characters that might have emerged from her earlier work on the series, Bird, Hand, and Man. The harsh coloration with prevailing reds and golds describes the flashing neon of Broadway, figures reaching towards each other to weave an indeterminate tale. A huge bird emerges from one corner of the painting reminiscent of earlier “stories” that were equally as enigmatic.
It should be noted that Putterman’s work is quite confrontational, given the brilliance of the colors, the strength of the implied narrative, and the scale of the paintings. Most paintings in the exhibition measure at least four feet in one direction; one is a diptych (two paintings shown as one), doubling the effect by virtue of its size. Dreams, Voices, Illusions, 1995, a six foot canvas, bears the same name as an earlier version that is filled with similar iconographic images: birds, the spiral, tropical trees, and fantasy animals. In the later painting shapes are more succinctly defined, almost sculptural in their origin. The viewer may choose to parallel these forms with several wooden sculptures in the exhibition, which have shapes that seem to be described in the paintings. A contradiction to that notion is apparent when comparing the dates of their execution: these sculptures seem to emerge in the artist’s oeuvre later, around the year 2000. Several assemblages of found wooden objects painted brightly with similar colors (Intersection, 2002) attest to the artist’s facility with forms, both illusionistic and actual. The sculptures bear a familial resemblance to works of Louise Nevelson, an American sculptor from whom Putterman has expressed admiration, though their appearance is quite different given their coloration. Nevelson’s sculpture is monochromatic, usually entirely black!
The exhibition includes forty large paintings and several sculptures in the artist’s later style, allowing an assessment of the evolution of her work over the past ten years. As a currently significant player in the art world, Putterman was recently chosen to have her work represented in an exhibition of animal sculptures in nearby Harrisburg. Her submission may surprise visitors of the Lore Degenstein Gallery by its preview in this exhibition, an added encouragement to visit this show.
Impossible to Forget: The Nazi Camps Fifty Years After
January 24, 2004 - March 5, 2004
Fifty years have passed since the world became aware of the atrocities committed in Nazi camps at various places in Europe during World War II. Time has provided a resolve to move forward, to heal the pain and suffering of families and friends directly impacted by the horrific events and their byproducts. But the need to keep alive an awareness of this past in order to prevent reoccurrences is always a part of our present. This resolve to remember can be witnesses through the Lore Degenstein Gallery’s current exhibition of photography by Michael Kenna, whose twelve-year project documenting thirty Nazi concentration camps reignites the public’s awareness of these sites of genocide.
From a period of repeated visits to these camps from 1998 through 2000, Kenna made several thousand images, eighty-eight of which have been selected for view in an exhibition responding to the artist’s feeling that the scenes he witnessed were “impossible to forget.” He had been initially inspired by seeing a haunting photograph of a mountain of shaving brushes from Auschwitz produced by a fellow student of the Banbury School of Art in England where Kenna was studying art.
Though Kenna was born in a generation after the War, he reflected upon the initial emotional impact of the Holocaust by developing a photographic project to study it in further detail. He has returned repeatedly to Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Ravensbruck, Buchenwald, and other camps to photograph the mood and spirit of that which had taken place in the past.
Born in England in 1953, Kenna moved to San Francisco in 1981. While having no direct encounter with personal or familial histories of the Holocaust, he found the subject compelling for his work in photography. His images are initially benign, reflections of their history rather than illustrations of the atrocities. The responsibility of remembrance lies with the viewer who must bring to the haunting images knowledge of those crimes against humanity that were committed at the sites and with the implements shown. To some degree, the fact that they resist graphic encounter is more compelling in that it requires responsibility from the viewer.
The exhibition of Kenna’s photographs was organized by Patrimoine Photographique, Paris, with the support of the French Ministry of Culture. With appreciation to the Charles B. Degenstein Endowment for the Gallery’s programs, the Lore Degenstein Gallery has the privilege of showing the exhibition through the efforts of the artist and Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles. An additional partner to this exhibition must also be acknowledged: The Jewish Studies, who arranged for Dr. Barbie Zelizer of the University of Pennsylvania, author of Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye, to speak at the opening reception.
Charles E. Martin: Paintings from the Covers of the New Yorker Magazine
March 27, 2004 - June 6, 2004
Charles Martin’s art defines a lifetime of humor and subtle irony that contributed to years of pleasure by the readers of The New Yorker magazine. Martin shared his love for New York and the Maine environs by bringing quiet moments of contemplation to millions who found his familiarity with life’s vagaries endearing. From his first publication of a New Yorker cover on August 6, 1938 throughout his five-decade career, his clarity of vision for gentle observations of the human condition told a story of the life in the big city and the small island of Monhegan, Maine. The city views struck a note of the classical, large American city with a personality formed by its resident and visitors; the Maine subjects took us to the typical rural experience where vacations and quiet living were shared.
Martin’s years with The New Yorker entailed a weekly ritual of presenting his cartoons and cover paintings to the art department to be acknowledge by the editor with acceptance or with questions. One hundred eighty-seven covers were published through 1987 when his last publication was produced for the sophisticated audience that moved him to visual conversation through his medium. The original watercolors and gouaches began as paintings that over the years have entered collections of families who adored his art. It is most important, however, for his work to be seen in the museum setting since acknowledgement of the artist’s skill places him in a role equivalent to his artist friends who were raising hackles and breaking records in the museums from the 1950s forward.
Close to artists in the Abstract Expressionist movement - Wilhem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Ashile Gorky - among many others, Marin poured his artistic efforts more into a communicative art form rather than avant-garde art. His process was immediate, personal, non-confrontational, and, perhaps most important, regular in his opportunities to have his work seen. Raising the standards of the public’s awareness of the magazine’s artwork, that is, his cover work rather than his small cartoons, Martin gave to the tradition a name (his) and a face (ours) to his art and to his audience.
Cartoon art has played a role in publication since mid-19th century in such artists as Honore Daumier with his regular publications in Charvari, a weekly journal of sophistication and culture. Not dissimilar in its manifestation of humor with words that conjured up a chuckle from the reader, Daumier’s art observed the human condition, as did Charles Martin’s. Without a political sting but with an observant tingle, the regular publication of cartoons appeared in the press to engage the reader into empathy with the intention of the journal and its message. By Martin’s generation in American in the 1930s, rich drawing and hyper detail to evince a smile was out of fashion and the succinct linear style of the “modern” cartoonist allocated milliseconds of attention to multi-memories of empathy with the characters. Martin’s characters had no identifiers except finding “us” in their stories; stories in some instances required visual puns without verbal explanations.
The New Yorker “spots” that first attracted Martin’s editor in 1934 evolved into illustrations of humorous moments of life. Drawn in rough form for their presentation for approval, the cartoons were crisply finished by the artist for publication. Text, if it were required, was typeset in the style of the magazine rather than in the artist’s hand. Signing his name as “Martin,” the artist soon became simple C.E.M, initials that identified subtleties in a flavor that promoted his following.
Martin began a regular working relationship with covers and cartoons, the former finished paintings; the latter black ink drawings on white paper. He received commissions from Life Magazine, Time, and several other notable publications, but it was The New Yorker that sustained him for fifty years. Such subjects appear as the front of the Metropolitan Museum that is only recognizable by a careful scrutiny of stone walls and park benches, to those whose lives include regular visits to the temple of culture.
Around 1960 Martin and his wife, Florence, with their son Jared, discovered Monhegan Island, Maine, and purchased a cottage that captured their interest for three to four months each summer. As a result he introduced new subjects into his covers, the rural Maine scenes and idiosyncrasies of the summer cottage life. People with children at recreational events related to Island living, the images describe an Americana that appeals to vacationers and nature enthusiasts. Amusing scenes charmed the New Yorker readers: artists with their easels surrounding a seagull posing as a model by the harbor as well as quiet solitude with boats tucked away for the evening or filled with tomato plants in the off season.
Balancing an active career as a productive illustrator and cartoonist, Martin produced an extraordinary oeuvre in the medium or watercolor, which included an unusual series of paintings he titled: Follies of War. During World War II he had made illustrated leaflets that were dropped by air on Nazi Germany as propaganda pieces. Later, Martin declared in the Follies that the concept of war was simply foolish. Each of the more than twenty large watercolors included quotations from the history of art mingled with medieval war-faring figures of knights who, like Don Quixote, found themselves jousting with flowers and other elusive enemies. These paintings smack of Surrealism’s imaginary world in which the subconscious state of culture is “ravaged” by a feckless military.
Throughout Charles Martin’s career as an artist, an energetic force emerges in him that expresses an uncompromising realism versus an imaginary world that portrays life in a dream-like fantasy allowing his fancy to guide his brush. With the entire range of Martin’s various subjects and intentions to develop artistic explorations, the artist adheres to his personal avant-garde in the medium which provides him most assurance: the illustrations of his mind.
The Lore Degenstein Gallery displayed the delights of Charles Martin’s lifetime efforts including his gently humorous cover designs, his subtly amusing cartoons, watercolors from his production of children’s books, his imaginary Follies of War; paintings of nature in the seafaring island of Monhegan, and the varieties of categories that make his imagery create his life. With our most profound appreciation to his family: his widow, his son, his grandson, and his friends, we are able to exhibit more than one hundred paintings and illustrations that define this fertile career. As support for the gallery programs, the Charles B. Degenstein and the Florence and Saul Putterman endowments have generously brought this artistic experience to Susquehanna University.
Gods, Prophets, Heroes: The Sculpture of Donald De Lue
September 18, 2004 - October 24, 2004
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.
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.
Academy Connections: The Lore Degenstein Gallery and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
November 6, 2004 - December 5, 2005
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 mastodon 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, credentialed 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 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 verisimilitude, 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 privileged 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 facilities that house our exhibitions and permanent collection of over 2,500 works of art at the Lore Degenstein Gallery.
An American Legacy: African American Printmakers
January 22, 2005 - February 20, 2005
The Lore Degenstein Gallery presents an exhibition of fine art graphics by several generations of African American printmakers represented by twenty-six artists. These works on paper have been brought together to show diversity of techniques and media from early traditional woodcuts, etchings, and lithographs to present-day processes using a variety of media, including digital. The earliest prints from the 1930s tend to draw from autobiographical subjects and images of familiarity with the artists’ personal encounters. The later images eschew subject matter ignoring a sense of cultural history while they explore a range or experimental techniques that are more focused on artistic endeavors than historical ones.
Present day printmaking techniques engage the artist into a dialogue with the medium, allowing the reproductive process to include collage, hand coloration, drawing, and even digital media, to mention a few, into the creative experience. The effect is exciting, dramatic, bold, and sometimes quiescent, cautious, or timid depending upon the mood and intentions of the artist. In contrast, traditional techniques describe and record while generating empathetic responses from the viewer based more often upon subject matter that involves narrative.
We are appreciative of the contribution of these artists who have generously lent their work to this exhibition through the efforts of curator Cynthia Hawkins who also engaged work from the collection of the Kenkeleba House, a New York gallery specializing in African American art. We also thank the Charles B. Degenstein Endowment for its continued support for the programming and facilities of the Lore Degenstein Gallery.
Violet Oakley’s Spirit of History 1895-1961
April 9, 2005 - June 5, 2005
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 approximately 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 stylistic development 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.
Sounds
September 10, 2005 - October 14, 2005
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.
Process Toward Performance: The Art of Theatrical Design
January 21, 2006 - March 3, 2006
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 artistic 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.
Process Toward Performance: The Art of Theatrical Design
January 21, 2006 - March 3, 2006
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 provides 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 artistic 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.
Joseph De Martini, A Retrospective: New York Abstractionist and the Monhegan Art Colony
April 1, 2006 - May 14, 2006
Joseph De Martini, one of a group of artists who embraced the new abstract painting of the 1940s and 1950s in New York’s art world, 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 fish house 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.
Edward Weston: Life Work
September 8, 2006 - October 13, 2006
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.
Impassioned Images: German Expressionist Prints
October 25, 2006 - December 8, 2006
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.
Pull: Contemporary Music Posters
January 27, 2007 - March 10, 2007
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.
The Artist Revealed: Artist Portraits and Self-Portraits
April 12, 2007 - June 3, 2007
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.
Textiles From Vanishing Cultures
September 13, 1997 - October 12, 1997
The art of weaving utilitarian objects from the fibers of herd animals belongs to a variety of cultures around the world. Weavings of rugs for use as tent rugs, prayer rugs, offering rugs, tent dividers, and other purposes share commonality with those of saddle and food bags, tent and animal trappings, shawls and blankets: exemplified the designs and patterns that identify their culture, and their creators are almost every women. Their pastoral societies which depend upon herd animals to supply daily needs make use of harvested wool spun into yarn and transformed into objects that express traditions of techniques and designs handed down for generations. Within the confines of these traditions, idiosyncratic variations define the individual whose desire for personal expression provides imaginative hybrids.
The cultures which create these textiles are rapidly vanishing. Tribal peoples of nomadic and semi-nomadic lifestyles living in a traditional manner are yielding to urban pressures to settle, leaving behind their needs for the woven objects. As a result the art of weaving is also disappearing. Some of the cultures from which magnificent tribal weavings have been produced are themselves vanishing. Political events in Bosnia and Afghanistan have caused devastating effects upon communities which provided remarkable tribal textiles.
As the production of these textiles declines so also does the opportunity to document the sources and styles which they represent. Such examples as those appearing in the exhibition in the Lore Degenstein Gallery provide a cross-section of cultural life in the Middle East, North Africa, North America, and Central Asia from 50 to 100 years past. Included in the exhibition are examples from Afghanistan, Iran, Peru, Mexico, and the Navajos.
The exhibition of more than 40 objects are a part of a large collection by Valerie Sharaf Justin, who has brought together examples of a variety of types of textiles representative of numerous cultures. Author of a pioneering study of kilim weavings, Flat-Woven Rugs of the World, 1980, Justin observed that among the weavers, “women did most of the work-wives and daughters dutifully taking care of the home. But, they were more than just household drudges-they were expected to be agile with the loom and make textiles both useful and pleasing.” Their role is underscored by an old Turkish saying, “No food for a woman who cannot weave a carpet.” The exhibition was organized by Landau Travelling Exhibitions of Los Angeles, California.\
James Fitzgerald and Spiritual Transformation 1899 - 1971
October 25, 1997 - December 14, 1997
James Fitzgerald’s powerful watercolor paintings of the American coast and the environs of California and New England, his various sojourns, confirm a commitment to the legacy of American painting that harks back to 19th-century realist landscapes. With the firmly rooted traditions of American art in his grasp, Fitzgerald brings to that history of American art in his grasp, Fitzgerald brings to that history a strength of 20th-century conviction that sustains a medium once relegated to a less serious focus, watercolor. At the hands of the modernist, Fitzgerald’s art transformed watercolor into a substance both enduring and profound.
Painting the world around him-whether a humble team of plow animals or a scene of nature unleashed on rock and sea-Fitzgerald brought light, paint, and inspiration together to evoke his personal encounter with his subjects, linking viewer and motif to his experience with nature. Countering the traditional preference for oil painting, he made of his watercolors a strikingly permanent visual record. The work is as enduring as the stones of the sea he portrays.
No neophyte to the art world, Boston-born Fitzgerald studied from 1919-1923 at the Massachusetts College of Art with American masters, Cyrus Dallin, Wilbur Hamilton, and Ernest Major and subsequently at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His career took him in the 1920’s to Monterey, California, with the Cannery Row artists’ and writers’ circle, working on projects for the public works programs in the 1930s. There he developed a testy camaraderie with John Steinbeck and Edward “Doc” Ricketts along with the intellectual community that they engendered.
It wasn’t until Fitzgerald became a regular summer resident on Monhegan Island, Maine, in 1938 that his art began to evolve. The immersion of the artist into the spirit of the harsh island declared itself in the transformation of his art from academic realism into virile expressionism. Fitzgerald approached the subject of the surf, sea, and rocks with a vigor reminiscent of the powerful paintings of Winslow Homer, imbuing his work also with the calligraphic strokes of Oriental art informed by his interest in Eastern philosophy.
Fitzgerald eventually purchased the studio of Rockwell Kent, one of the early artist settlers of the island, deriving spiritual solace and metaphysical inspiration from the seafaring community. The island’s artist-colony atmosphere in the summer encouraged Fitzgerald to explore a relationship with the life of the sea, but he did not engage in the seafaring activities upon which the local lobstermen and fishermen depended for their livelihood. Fitzgerald was a voyeur of that life and yet a dependent on the arduous experience, which informed his art and inspired his approach to it.
During his more than thirty-year encounter with Monhegan Island, Fitzgerald continually read and studied Oriental philosophies, which became sustenance for his art. A friendship developed in 1958 with Anne Hubert, his champion and confidant who, along with her husband, Ed, assisted Fitzgerald in his financial struggle to acquire Kent’s cottage when the studio became less suitable for a home in his later years. The dedication of the two devoted friends to assist the artist in his times of greatest need proves a model of devotion to a belief in the artist’s right to pursue his art unencumbered by financial constraints.
The Huberts’ collection of Fitzgerald’s paintings provides a context from which to view the late artist. Selecting works that typify the various moods and sites which moved him, the Huberts maintained a record of artistic achievement that defines both a person and personal vision. The paintings in the exhibition have been selected to represent a small segment of each of several topics that sustained Fitzgerald’s interest throughout his life, including portraits of his former wife, Pegs, and views of the magnificent sea off the Maine Coast.
Public and Private Eyes: Photojournalists’ View of Rural Pennsylvania by the Farm Security Administration and H. Winslow Fegley
January 31, 1998 - March 1, 1998
Contributing to a view of Pennsylvania’s history of its people during the first 40 years of the 20th century, the concerns of this exhibition will be to examine two collections of photographs of rural Pennsylvania each of which exemplifies a position that both documents and manipulates the view of the history they present. Photographs by Pennsylvania photojournalist, H. Winslow Fegley, offer the simple intention to preserve the history of the rural Pennsylvania German community. Similarly focused on the rural community, images by photographers working for Federal assistance programs of the 1930s begin with an intention to serve an agenda predetermined by the project organizers. Both groups of photographers contribute to a definition of Pennsylvania’s history, but with distinctly different results. Seen together, it is possible to recognize the extraordinary value of visual documents as historical evidence of an era, particularly when the context and intention of the photographer offer their own interpretation.
In the early decade of the 1900s, H. Winslow Fegley produced a focused view of Pennsylvania Germans through a large body of photographs. Fegley’s images appear to have been created in the community of his birth around 1903-5 as a project for preserving a historical past that was immanently declining. His documentation of the practices, people, and customs of the German-American farming community in Pennsylvania exhaustively preserves the visual history of a cultural that compromises a significant part of the state’s population. Focusing on the farms and people of Hereford, a village in Berks County 50 miles north of Philadelphia, the photographer builds a comprehensive study of people in costume indigenous to their heritage who are posed in settings that define their homes and workplaces. Individuals are shown in the act of preparing food for the community defining every process of a working farm from planting to harvest to table preparation or, in the case of livestock, from rearing to butchering to the cleaning of meat for food. The entire body of these photographs address the issue of documentation of a bygone era.
Fegley’s journalistic approach to his history of the Pennsylvania German community must have been for a project quite grand. Several hundred photographic images-some glass plate negatives and around 150 silver prints-are in the collection given to the Schwenfelder Library and Museum in Pennsburg, PA. The photographs, many of which bear captions describing Hereford subjects, propose an ambitious documentary project suitable for an article for the Pennsylvania German Society (Fegley became a member in 1902), or, even further, for use in a book. Fegley’s agenda seems straightforward: to document the culture he knew, nostalgically acknowledging the forthcoming decline of an era.
Extrapolating from their images an understanding of particular ethnic or societal groups, the viewer is given the subtly imposed perspective of the photographer who may have altered the meaning to suit a particular agenda. In a selection from a second group of photographs in the exhibition, those of the Far Security Administration (FSA) now in the collection of the Library of Congress, social conditions during the climactic years of the Great Depression of the 1930’s are preserved in a pictorial essay of the times. Among this latter group of more than 70,000 photographs only around 700 images of Pennsylvania subjects appear that bear upon an understanding of the economic impact of the Depression felt by people of the Commonwealth. While, like Fegley’s work, the FSA subjects show people in farming communities, they place greater emphasis on narrative, metaphor, and a definite political agenda.
Roy E. Stryker was hired in April 1935 to head up the historical section of the Resettlement Administration (in 1936 it became the FSA-Farm Security Administration) to describe and elucidate the social responses of rural America to Roosevelt’s New Deal Federal assistance programs. Receiving his authority and direction from his former Columbia economics professor, Rexford G. Tugwell who had set up the Resettlement Administration, Stryker hired a team of photographers who could work in the field under his precise direction. The photographs were given written assignments identifying areas of the country to photograph, along with a rationale describing a point of view to take with their subjects-a “shooting script.” Accompanying the instructions were books and pamphlets discussing background material on the locales, which included data on economics, history of the community, and every imaginable kind of information that might familiarize the photographer with his or her assignments. The director maintained rigid control over the objectives of the photography project. What he was unable to control was the photographers’ creative vision.
Though the disparate subjects of the early photographic studies of Pennsylvania German farmers by H. Winslow Fegley and those of the FSA photographer of the 1930’s seem unrelated, their objectives appear less divergent when considering the artists’ intentions. Fegley, whose career was dedicated to words as well as images, ennobles his subjects much like those of the FSA photographers, engendering a sense of dignity in their humble tasks. Even Ben Shahn’s “Children Picking over Refuse in a Dumpsite,” shares with Fegley’s women an iconic quality given to their occupations that brings respect for their industriousness in the consideration of their economic struggles. A metaphor for these people is created by Walker Evans in his Household Supply Store, 1935, which pairs utilitarian objects in a display window-pots and pans nestle together like family members, a suggestion of their future place in the American home.
The FSA photographers-academically trained, professional, and urbane-initiated their photographic project as a journalistic assignment not unlike that of Fegley. Finding the personalities of their subjects compelling, they each sought to emulate artistic elements in their compositions, evoking in the picture not only the poignant situation of the sitter, but the aesthetic sensibility of the photographer.
The exhibition developed from a collaboration between Susan Johnson and Valerie Livingston for papers given at the Pennsylvania Historical Association in November, 1997. Through a University Grant, thirty archivally printed photographs were added to the collection of the Lore Degenstein Gallery.
Landscapes of Jewish Experience: Paintings by Samuel Bak
March 18, 1998 - April 19, 1998
Samuel Bak’s twenty large landscapes bear witness to the artist’s childhood experience in Vilna, Poland, during World War II. Bringing to his audience a compelling message of Jewish survival in the face of Nazi oppression, the images are replete with metaphors for remembrance conceived as if to thwart a recurrence of this kind of devastation to humanity. Each painting, executed with a meticulous attention to detail and a precise rendering of natural forms, bears a distant resemblance to paintings of the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. Subject matter and artistic intention, however, mitigate references to the dreamlike imagery of such an artist as Salvador Dali to create in Bak’s paintings a landscape of magic realism fraught with the substance of recalled trauma. Bak thrusts his viewer into the landscape, and, by extension, into the emotional recollection of a past to hold before us for all time.
In the years preceding 1941 when the Germans invaded Vilna, Bak was a small boy, immersed in a center of Yiddish leaning amidst a Jewish culture of 57,000. By the time of the liberation in July 1944 only a few thousand had survived - Bak and his mother among them. The destruction of not only his home, by the entire Jewish community laid bare the artist’s pain and defined his future artistic perceptions. The artist described his awareness that his paints convey “a sense of a world that was shattered, of a world that was broken, of a world that exists again through an enormous effort to put everything together, when it is absolutely impossible to put it together because the broken things can never become whole again.”
Bak’s visual references to symbols and structures rivet the viewer’s attention to the devastation of his culture through the melding of substance into the nurturing landscape from with springs all life. Life in memory cannot put away what for him has been wrought in those days. Effigies of houses appear ghostlike as shards of human reality now buttressing the present by their shear numbers. Crematoria have become the new abode, sometimes appearing in the form of the train used to transport people to their doom.
The text of Bak’s paintings remains at once declarative and circumspect, inviting involvement at both the immediate and the contemplative level. Complex symbolism, disguised and blended with the landscape, have undergone exhaustive analysis by Lawrence L. Langer in his catalogue for the exhibition. As a scholar of Holocaust themes, Langer resolutely offers his view of the artist’s motivation in that “perhaps, for Bak himself, the rituals of belief have been replaced by the equally demanding rituals of art. His paintings are his acts of devotion, his tributes to remembrance.”
The Lore Degenstein Gallery presents this series of twenty paintings accompanied by a selection of works on paper that share the artist’s thoughts at the moment of their germination. We are exceedingly appreciative of Samuel Bak’s efforts to bring this body of work to Susquehanna. Through the cooperation of the Pucker Gallery, Boston, arrangements have been made to mount this exhibition for our campus and community.
Virtually Real: Paintings and Drawings of the World of Robert Birmelin
April 25, 1998 - June 7, 1998
In the presence of Robert Birmelin’s paintings, there is a sense of recognizing a transition from life into art, enhanced by the scale and drama of their execution and by the visual games the artist plays upon the viewer. Attacking his canvas with zeal, Birmelin brings new meaning to the slice of life realism anticipated in the 1960s by the Pop Art movement’s response to Abstract Expressionism. Then, as now, the subject is a fleeting view of action on the streets of Manhattan amidst crowds and teaming population. However, somewhat like television sound bites, Birmelin presents visual snippets of life in the city, seen as fragments of perception which offer the feeling of reality rather than tie illustration of it. The viewer occupies the artist’s position - action happens to the viewer, or threatens to do so, as the crowd presses forward.
Birmelin’s recent works seem to cast off the agitation of these cityscapes approaching in his paintings of the same scale a sense of mystery and duality. The artist’s perspective as now changed into a quieter, more voyeuristic position. Mostly of domestic interiors, the paintings suggest a narrative that we are intended to comprehend. Objects occupy strategic positions as if they are references to unraveling the puzzle before us; people are truncated at the periphery, making no effort to interact with the artist. To further the sense of melodrama, the paintings disguise an alternative reading by including an inverted picture which appears to define a mystery of a different sort. This dual nature of each painting thwarts attempts to decipher meaning, hence, the viewer is mystified and experiences a sense of awe.
Enchanting his audience with voluptuous technique as well as provocative content, Birmelin employs a drawing style that is rooted in an understanding of the visual world he portrays. For the last 23 years as Professor of Art at Queens College, Birmelin has brought to his students a reverence for the underpinnings of good drawing. Trained at both the Cooper Union in New York and the Slade School of Art at University of London, Birmelin finished his graduate degree at Yale in 1960 where the department was influenced by Bauhaus artist Joseph Albers. Albers’s work on the interaction of colors proposed a view of perception which altered a color merely by changing the color of the background.
The twenty large works in the current exhibition were selected by the artist to demonstrate the relationship of drawing to the painted canvas. Robert Birmelin has exhibited at more than ten college galleries, receiving numerous grants and scholarships including three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Fulbright Scholarship. He has recently held a major retrospective of his drawings at the Jersey City Museum and an exhibition this past fall at the Peter Findlay Gallery on 57th Street, New York. The Lore Degenstein Gallery welcomes Robert Birmelin to Susquehanna University.
Self-Made Worlds Visionary Folk Art Environments
September 12, 1998 - October 17, 1998
Throughout the world and over the centuries the phenomenon of decorating the home environment has been practiced with a variety of intentions and a myriad of visual results including temporary observations of festivals as well as permanent installations. To consider the artistic contribution of the latter is the underlying thesis of the curators and photographers whose work is presented in the Lore Degenstein Gallery. More than sixty photographs document the curators’ world-wide investigation of the efforts of artists - largely self-taught - whose homes have become the canvas for their art. Some represent private contemplative responses; others exemplify a need for public awareness, perhaps even in the spirit of advertising a political or religious point of view.
Often the ornamentation developed out of an elaborated garden design. Raymond Isodore, a cemetery caretaker in Chartres, France, sought to embellish his home with bits of glass and broken ceramic plates creating mosaics which ornament the garden walls. As his passion grew, so further did the impact of his need to expand, finally into the house. Every aspect of the house is covered with mosaic decoration, even the furniture. Beginning his work around 1938, he continued to work on his property until shortly before his death in 1964. The impact of Isadore’s work imposes images of the cathedral and details of nature, almost to the exclusion of anything organic in his environment.
Following a trend in the artworld today to look to “outsider art” as a sort of new frontier the exhibition celebrates the self-taught artist and the message conveyed by the work. Some of the photographs show work fraught with religious opinions, often dependant upon verbiage displayed as signs or as messages on buildings. Finding public opinion negative in some instances the artist creates a message of confrontation. W. C. Rice’s “Miracle Cross Garden” in Prattville, Alabama, is covered with hundreds of crosses bearing messages which engender tension with his neighbors. Alternatively, Samuel P. Dinsmoor’s “Garden of Eden” in Lucas, Kansas, describes an Old Testament morality through allegorical tableaux created out of concrete. It is the oldest complete, self-taught artist’s environment in the United States.
Seeking to document sites of self-taught artists has been the quest of the exhibition’s curators who have identified numerous examples hoping to preserve them. Finding that most of the artists they have encountered appear to have something to say, Roger Manley, author of the accompanying catalogue, notes: They react to their own worlds of racial injustice, religious doubt, love, and loneliness. Most of them display the kind of enormous productivity that would be impossible to sustain without the commitment that comes from having a definite point of view - a point of view nurtured by its origins in a very particularized context. Manley identifies means of supporting the art through foundations and societies, charging the museum with responsibility to inspire such preservation.
In some European installations, preserving the work has been an effective goal. One of the earliest preserved environments was created in 1879 near Lyon, France by Ferdinand Cheval. It defines a type of architectural construction that suggests ancient civilizations and ritual forms. The building is four-stories tall and over eighty-six feet long, covered with figures and verbal commentary carved in stone. He called it his Ideal Palace, a tribute to his own creativity.
The contributions of eleven photographers comprise the exhibition, facilitating both an understanding of the idiosyncratic effect of the artwork and a dialogue with the artworld, raising new questions about the nature of the creative process. The catalogue of the exhibition, written by Roger Manley and Mark Sloan, will be available at the Lore Degenstein Gallery.
City Streets & Country Byways The World of Walter E. Baum
October 24, 1998 - December 13, 1998
Pennsylvania landscape painting reached its zenith in the 1910s and 1920s with the work of a number of artists trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts who sought a romantic affinity with the picturesque streams and country roads of the eastern segment of the state. Taking his cue from such artists as Edward Redfield and W. Elmer Schofield, who fondly expressed the wintry landscape in many of their paintings, a younger artist, Walter Emerson Baum, joined his love of the land near his home in Sellersville with the then-current taste for impressionism transformed from an avant-garde style to one of established tradition. Persistent in his desire to embrace both the style and the technique of his mentors, by the end of his life Baum had left a legacy of accomplishment and experiment in his vast oeuvre of paintings of the Pennsylvania land.
Baum’s work and life have recently undergone scholarly investigation resulting in a broad inquiry into the artist’s contribution to his Pennsylvania heritage. Art historian Martha Hutson-Saxton engages us in her extensive appraisal of the artist in her 1996 monograph, entitled Walter Emerson Baum, 1884-1956. Dr. Saxton’s book is the first comprehensive approach to the subject which allows Baum’s viewers to recognize the breadth of his accomplishments.
Preparing her research to accompany a large exhibition at the Allentown Art Museum which assessed Baum’s style and place in American Art, Saxton subsequently curated a show that would continue the dialog in his treatment of urban and rural subjects. The Lore Degenstein Gallery is privileged to exhibit this latter collection of Baum painting which was organized by the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College and contains work lent by the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as by numerous private collectors, including a large collection of paintings owned by the Berman Museum.
After Baum’s death in 1956, Philip and Muriel Berman acquired roughly 1,500 paintings by various Pennsylvania artists from Flora Baum, the artist’s wife. Baum’s work of the early 1950s was included, which became the source for a large number of work appearing at the Berman museum. With more than 40 paintings, the museum maintains the largest institutional collection of Baum’s work.
What Baum provides in his large oil paintings is an historical record of the locale as well as his exploration of style. Working as an art columnist for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and later the Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin for over 30 years, Baum wrote hundreds of articles about art in the community.
His reviews were mostly positive listings of as many exhibitions and artists as he could include. Baum’s aim was always to support the artist and his milieu. He knew firsthand the difficulties in trying to survive on the sale of paintings.
Clearly Baum’s career as an artist and writer were only partially able to support his family of four children. To supplement his income, Baum taught art classes and eventually opened an art academy in Allentown that became known as “The Baum School.” Springing from interest in the arts generated by Baum, the Allentown Art Museum was soon to be founded by his supporters.
Little is discussed about Baum’s direct relationships with the artists of the Pennsylvania Academy - Redefied, Schofield, and Garber - however, in addition to the stylistic directions in his work which reflect theirs, Baum also named his son, Edgar Schofield Baum. To date no correspondence between the two artists appears in either papers of Baum or Schofield, however, it will be sought in forthcoming Schofield research.
It is an extraordinary opportunity for the Lore Degenstein Gallery to bring this exhibition to Susquehanna. We are appreciative of the efforts of Martha Hutson-Saxton and the director of the Berman Museum, Lisa Barnes, to share the exhibition with our audience. At its first venue, the exhibition was companioned by a one-day symposium in which scholars working on related research discussed their progress. Histories of Pennsylvania landscape painters from Baum’s milieu continue to develop our understanding of the valuable contribution made by these artists.
Edward S. Curtis Photographs of the North American Indian 1907-1930
January 30, 1999 - February 28, 1999
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the North American Indian became a cultural curiosity, scrutinized by such painters and sculptors as Charles Russell and Frederic Remington in remarkable reconstructions of prairie life that captured the hearts of the American public. It was the time of the Wild West Show; it was the minting of the Buffalo Nickel, to mention a few commonly recognized commentaries on the presence of the Native American culture in our midst. In the spirit of this movement to acknowledge the indigenous people of the U.S., a photographer from Seattle sought to document some eighty Indian tribes by producing a “faithful” rendering of their appearance and folklore. Edward S. Curtis, a prominent studio photographer, determined to recreate the romantic past of days of Indian lore at a time when warfaring and hostilities toward the white population was safely relegated to melodrama. Curtis began his “cataloging” procedure by effecting a sense of inclusivity among various tribes, photographing men, women, and children in costume performing routine tasks, recreating Indian-like activities, and simply posing for their portrait.
Over a period of twenty-three years, Curtis was able to publish these photographs bearing the title The North American Indian, which was amplified by his commentary. Twenty volumes of Moroccan leather-bound text provided an extraordinary document of his efforts accompanied by twenty folios each containing thirty-five large photogravure prints; the image were printed in a coppery tone on fine ivory paper. The effect was dramatic. The impact shared a similar intent to that of the mid-19th century documentation of the American Indian, painter George Catlin: to preserve a vanishing culture for posterity. Curtis defined his task: The pictures should be made according to the best of modern methods and of a size that the face might be studied as the Indian’s own flesh…. The pictures were to be transcriptions for future generations that they might behold the Indian as nearly lifelike as possible as he moved about before he ever saw a paleface or knew there was anything human or in nature other than what he himself had seen.
The subject of Curtis’s photographs were seldom unaware of the camera. Dressed in native costume, sometimes with props provided by the photographer, young maidens and elderly chieftains alike contributed to the record of themselves somberly and, on occasion, winsomely. A young woman from the Pima tribe disguises a moment of laughter as she is caught with a woven basket balanced precariously on her head. An ancient tribesman presents the silence of his station wearing the feather bonnet that marks the position of importance. Close-up portraits identify individuals of note: Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce and Geronimo, whom Curtis had met at the White House during Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural procession.
Among the portraits Curtis also included staged activities: mounted Indians in a war party and sham battles similar to the Wild West Shows. In these photographs the reflection of popular taste for the warfaring Great Plains tribes appears as the focus of Curtis’s images. On occasion Curtis was criticized for developing stereotypes of “Indianness,” but a reading of the accompanying text suggests his awareness of this aim, perhaps demonstrating their small hope for the future as long as they retain the instincts of their past. There is a poignancy in these photographs that seeks an audience, more intent than by accident.
Curtis’s project was expensive. To produce in the highest available technology the limited edition of photographs and text, Curtis sought funding amongst his family, friends, and, eventually, President Theodore Roosevelt and financier J. Piermont Morgan. Morgan was so fascinated with Curtis’s proposed endeavor that he pledged $15,000 per year for five years to cover the cost of production to be repaid in sales and books. Curtis was summarily engaged not only to make field trips to gather images of the Native Americans, but also to serve in the capacity of publisher and salesman to recoup the funds by selling subscriptions in advance of each volume’s publication.
Beginning in 1906 Curtis hired Frederick Webb Hodge as his editor. Hodge worked for the Smithsonian Institution and also edited The American Anthropologist. They undertook the first field trip to the lands of Apache, Navajo, and Hopi tribes, photographing peoples and their rituals and recording their ceremonies with Curtis’s “motion picture machine.” Throughout his subsequent years of gathering materials for his book, Curtis acquired audio recordings of the voices and music of the tribes, the earliest made on Edison Cylinders. His time spent raising money for the publication included lectures given around the country at which he introduced the music and language to scholars and other interested parties.
The first two volumes were published in 1908. President Roosevelt wrote the forward to Volume I appreciating Curtis’s efforts: “The Indian as he has hitherto been is on the point of passing away…. It would be a veritable calamity if a vivid and truthful record of these conditions were not kept.” Roosevelt, who had engaged Curtis to photograph his family in 1904, wrote his introduction with the intention that Curtis might use it to gain funding for the publication.
Very few of the Curtis publications exist intact today. Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, received a gift from John W. Snyder in 1951 of a complete set of twenty volumes including the twenty portfolios of photogravures. It is from this collection, courtesy of the Payne Gallery, that Susquehanna University’s Lore Degenstein Gallery is privileged to show a selection of the large photogravures. We are deeply indebted to the Director, Les Reker, for arranging this loan for us.
Marketing Mamas The Provocative Woman in French Poster Art
March 27, 1999 - April 25, 1999
Throughout the 20th-century visual advertising has used the tantalizing image of a beautiful woman, sometimes provocative in presentation and certainly her request that the public take note of her as she makes her pitch to sell a product. That French art has innovatively employed the richly produced poster is well known to collectors and to the public that has “enjoyed” the medium since its rise to artistic status in the 1890s. The female figure is often subtle in its presence among these posters, suggesting that for more than 100 years they contain the message that female sexuality sells.
An assessment of the role played by women as sales provocateur is the subject of the current exhibition, a selection of thirty-one large French posters from the extensive collection of Susquehanna University’s Lore Degenstein Gallery. Over 1,600 posters came to the university in 1997 through a generous gift from Joseph and Ann Silbaugh. Independent appraisals described this gift as the “largest collection of French Poster art in the United States.” Posters in the exhibition range from 1897 to 1988 including work of such prominent artists as Bernard Villemot, Pierre Fix-Masseau, and Razzia.
The subjects of the selected posters include figures that overtly express sexual provocation and sophistication, but, curiously, are not necessarily aimed at a male audience. Products offered include bicycles, art exhibitions, the lottery, alcoholic beverages, household appliances, women’s shoes, and dance hall performances. Consequently, the majority of these posters are aimed at the female consumer, perhaps appealing to her need to acquire sophistication or sexual power and beauty.
One poster, particularly, illustrates this issue. Does an advertisement for bathing suits by Reard of California direct its “come hither” gesture to an admiring male? Rather the act of purchasing the bathing suit addresses the woman consumer, guaranteeing her instant social adoration. The message states: purchase it and receive the magic talisman that transforms its wearer into an attractive bathing beauty.
The French use of the sophisticated model to sell a product has been established since the inception of the medium. A promise of sexual power is subtly suggested when viewers are offered a glass of wine and a promise of pleasurable moments ahead; or a ride on the Orient Express offers a similar assurance of a discreet sexual liaison. It is the promise of attainable sophistication with the implication that the buyer will acquire a certain personal power that directs the message.
Some of the posters seem to provocatively speak directly to a mail audience. If, for example, a figure bares her breasts and raises her skirt, is she not inviting a male consumer to purchase her thermostatically controlled space heater? Seductively attired figures appear in many of the posters, enticing the viewer to attend performances of burlesque dance reviews or art exhibitions or to invest in the lottery.
The limited literature about the artists of these posters persuades us to take a closer look at not only the treatment of the subject in the allure of its advertising, but in the artistic milieu that is presented. Three artists represented in the exhibition demonstrate the profound significance of the message: Bernard Villemot, Pierre Fix-Masseau, and Razzia. A poster is “like a telegraph that speaks to the multitudes,” said Villemot. An artist of considerable reputation in commercial advertising, Villemot contracted throughout his career with Bally Shoes and Orangina. His hand-painted approach harks back to a style before the 1970s before photography largely supplanted the images of graphic artists. Pierre Fix-Masseau, working earlier in the century, brought ideas of modern reductivism into his art. Clean, straightforward with a minimum of detail strike the viewer with the value of the product rather than of his technical prowess. Razzia (his Lnomme d’artiste), who is currently working in Paris and New York, presses the issue of the sophisticated model as the sales person in his poster art. His “hard-edge” realism reflects the fashion industry’s present interest in exoticism, although his posters focus on automobiles and sparkling wines rather than on feminine products alone.
Scholarship on French poster art of the twentieth century is still to be written. The poster itself has been analyzed through many significant studies of worldwide examples throughout the century, however, the focus on individual French artists, the agencies and products that represent them, and the range of their contributions to the development of advertising in other countries is yet to be published. Exhibition catalogues have tended to be based on the individual collections of museums, which have broadened their vision of national styles. It is the specificity of focus on the present exhibition, “Marketing Mamas,” that explores more the subject of the advertisers’ audience than that of the artists themselves, generating an interest in the visual methods necessary to convey their messages. We anticipate that Susquehanna University’s extensive collection of French posters will inspire students and scholars for year to come in the quest for knowledge about this artform.
The students of the Spring 1999 Museum Studies course led by Dr. Valerie Livingston were largely responsible for the organization, curatorship, and mounting of this exhibition. They include: Christine Catafalmo; Erin Kennedy; Tim La Pointe; Victoria Long; Jennifer Messimer; and Brooke Ollinger.
A Celebration of Sculpture at Susquehanna University A Special Selection of Large and Small Sculptures by Glenn Zweygardt
May 1, 1999 - June 6, 1999
When outdoor sculpture takes its place amidst the architecture and landscape of a college campus, it proclaims a celebration of art to be witnessed by all who walk past it. Susquehanna University has been privileged to enjoy art in Lore Degenstein Gallery for the last six years, bringing a range of art from traditional landscape paintings to modernist abstraction into the lives of the campus community. Now the gallery joins in the celebration of modernist sculptures that take their place outdoors to proclaim the importance of art entering into campus life.
In late March 1999 three large sculptures were installed at Susquehanna, gifts of Muriel and the late Philip I. Berman. The Bermans, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, have been noted collectors of art and benefactors to numerous college and university campuses. Dr. Muriel Berman offered a gift of three sculptures to the university, thereby beginning an opportunity for art to become a visual presence on campus. The university was granted a selection from among the vast Berman collection of modernist sculpture. The works chosen represent current issues in American sculpture that address aspects of the 20th-century dialogue between realism and abstraction. The artists of the selected works Menashe Kadishman, John Hock, and Glenn Zweygardt, each worked in an idiosyncratic language that explores material and techniques from their artistic milieu.
Kadishman’s Three Discs, fabricated of construction-grade steel, challenges our sense of gravity as the discs appear to fall over, setting up visual tension engendering the expectation of thier spilling onto the ground. Kadisman, an Israeli artist who has numerous works in major sculpture collections, often toys with his viewers’ awareness that steel has an inherent weight and power that is manifest in architecture of the 20th century. The surface of his sculptures bears the marks of the environment - acid raid and environmental pollutants which add rust and color changes to its presentation.
John Hock’s untitled sculpture traces the history of the twentieth-century modernism arising from the early 1930’s when Pablo Picasso and Julio Gonzalez experimented with found pieces of metal that shared elements of their original shapes with the new forms created by their constructions. Faces and the human figure began to “grow” visually as the sculptures take on new lives in the bringing together of pieces of metal. Hock works in the spirit of these constructivist sculptors, welding building materials and castoff pieces of similar metals together to bring a sort of totemic presence to his work.
Glenn Zweygardt seeks primordial essence in his large granite sculpture, entitled Slice II, incorporating the language of monumental, steel construction material with natural, unaltered quarry stone. Creating the illusion of the heavy stone being parted by a triangular blade of steel, Zweygardt sets up an incongruity with our visual belief system and forces a recognition of the affinity between the power of both materials, natural and manmade.
Lore Degenstein Gallery Celebrates Campus Sculpture
To complement the campus sculpture while celebrating the Bermans’ gift, the Lore Degenstein Gallery has organized an exhibition of works large and small by Glenn Zweygardt. Professor of Sculpture and Head of the Art Department at the College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Zweygardt has had a relationship with the Bermans since the early 1970s when one of his sculptures was purchased by the collectors and given to Temple University. Philip Berman purchased the maquette for his private collection and became aware of other work by Zweygardt through an exhibition catalogue. Desiring to see more, the Bermans drove to Alfred, New York, in a snowstorm to see the originals. After catching view of six sculptures covered with snow, the Bermans decided to purchase them all, hence, the beginning of remarkable years of patronage with the young sculptor. After that initial encounter, Philip bought all Zweygardt’s pieces in each subsequent show.
Zweygardt’s reputation began to develop as the Bermans each year continued to purchase his work which they gave to colleges and universities. The artist was the first contemporary sculptor to have work placed on the campus of Ursinus Collge, a beginning of many benevolences to follow for the college, including the Bermans’ establishment of the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art.
While Zweygardt’s earlier work was constructed metal, in the 1980’s his interest in materials changed. He went with Philip to a quarry to see large pieces of granite dynamited and removed from the ground. Berman became fascinated with the possibilities of stone re-emerging in sculptural art with the same profundity as modern steel, its surfaces bearing the marks of the powerful tools that released it from the earth. Setting up a working atelier at the Wentz granite monument works in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Philip provided the means by which Zweygardt could fabricate his new ideas in sculpture.
Artists’ work often evolves with the serendipity of new encounters, and such was the case with Zweygardt’s interest in cast glass. Hiring a new faculty member at Alfred University, Steve Edwards, who worked in a glass casting process, Zweygardt began to introduce “occuli” or windows of solid, sometimes colored glass into his massive stone pieces. His intent for Slice II is to carve an opening into the large slab and place a cast glass “eye” into its surface. The sculpture has been sited to take advantage of the angle of the sun which will stream through the glass at certain times of the day. At this moment, Zweygardt is discussing red as the color of the glass. It is anticipated that in the fall 1999, the artist will provide a demonstration of the process to Susquehanna students as he installs the glass.
The gallery exhibition will display several large pieces of Zweygardt’s sculpture and a number of smaller maquettes giving the opportunity to show a retrospective collection of work by the artist. It is through the generous spirit of Muriel and Philip Berman that Susquehanna University is able to enjoy the treasures of modern sculpture, adding our name to the list of many Pennsylvania institutions that have been so honored.
Christopher Ries: Sculpture of Glass
September 11, 1999 - October 10, 1999
The Lore Degenstein Gallery of Susquehanna University welcomes an exhibition of glass sculpture by Christopher Ries as the opening exhibition of our 1999-2000 year. Ries works on his sculpture at Schott Glass Technologies in Duryea, Pennsylvania, where he has been an artist in residence since 1986. Schott is a manufacturer of precision optical glass, providing material for such applications as large lenses for telescopes and other industrial uses of glass. It made a distinctive collaboration for the sculptor to combine his working process with a company that could provide him with the high-quality material needed to fit his aesthetic and technical purposes.
Ries’s sculpture employs the technique of coldwork. As opposed to heating and blowing glass sculpture, Ries grinds, slices, cuts, carves, polishes, and otherwise treats the surface of glass material while it is cold to refine its reflective and refractive properties. His finished product incorporates forms which enhance his goals by introducing ambient light into the final effect. Some of his pieces are monumental forms; Sunflower, 1992, for example, utilizes simple facets carved into 770 pounds of glass along with engraved images of petals and plant forms to give the impression of a large flower floating in a crystal pool.
Ries’s collabrative project with Schott Glass has led to opportunities for both the corporation and the sculptor to advantage. Ries states,
I began to promote this material to other artists which led to a secondary market for Schott, whose primary market is ophthalmic glass, laser glass, radiation shielding, optic crystal, and such. They had a fair quantity of glass that did not meet the company’s very rigid specifications. That glass used to be turned into landfill as there was no scientific use for second-quality material. But Schott’s second-quality glass is at least three times as good as the very best being made in art glass studios. To an artist, the glass was a dream material.
For Schott’s benefit, Ries offers demonstrations of the use of hand grinding and polishing techniques, particularly that of diamond technology, and he has built a polishing lathe which facilitates the polishing of large round and curved forms by hand. Ries feels that one of the important benefits of the collaboration is that the company is able to display his work at trade shows. The attractive nature of the artwork, Ries says, “always draws a crowd.”
After receiving his BFA degree at Ohio State University in 1975, Ries found his focus on glass to be continued at the University of Wisconsin where his graduate studies allowed him to maintain a private glassblowing studio in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. He was later to abandon the hotwork process and begin a viable affiliation with Schott to develop new techniques which are evident today in his oeuvre.
Objects in the exhibition include Sunflower, mentioned previously, and several smaller works that can be experienced for their intricate approach to carving utilizing the surfaces of the sculpture to provide an illusion of interior forms. Many of these sculptures can be seen at the conclusion of the exhibition at Ries’s studio and gallery near Scranton.
The Lore Degenstein Gallery appreciates the efforts of the artist and David Schimmel of Schott Glass Technologies for bringing the exhibition to Susquehanna. We are also deeply indebted to the Degenstein Center Theater and Lore Degenstein Gallery Endowment for making our exhibition program possible.
Buggies: The Development of the Horse-Drawn Light Carriage in Central Pennsylvania
October 23, 1999 - December 10, 1999
When the horseless carriage made its impact as the major mode of transportation around the turn of the nineteenth century, it replaced a tradition of wheeled vehicles that saw their origins far back into Antiquity. The American buggy fueled the popular taste for individual transportation in rural as well as urban settings. In Central Pennsylvania even today the presence of buggies still persists with numerous groups of people resisting technological innovation in efforts to retain a lifestyle of the past.
The history of the buggy in America appears to have had its inception around the 1850s with the intention of providing a vehicle that would exhibit a number of desirable properties over its predecessor coaches and wagons. First, it limited transport of riders to two, providing a means of personal transportation for such individuals as physicians and landlords who wanted to avoid the delays imposed upon them in larger vehicles when additional passengers requested rides. Moreover, the nature of rutted and poorly maintained roadways at mid-century made heavier vehicles more cumbersome and difficult to manage. The lightweight buggy, built to clip along at a brisk pace, was the answer to the transportation needs of the nation. Its ease of handling because of its weight, also made it suitable for women to drive. Charles M. Snyder in his essay, Buggy Town: An Era of American Transportation, 1984, notes the popularity of the vehicle:
The word “buggy” was scarcely a part of the American vocabulary until mid-century. In fact for some years after the public was flocking to acquire them, most of the manufacturers continue to call their businesses coach or carriage works. But it was the buggy which became their principal stock in trade, and “horse and buggy days” remains an appropriate expression of the era between 1865 and 1915.1
The means of spreading the word on the design and manufacture of buggies took place in the literature of The Carriage Monthly, a journal began in 1865. Carriage Builders’ National Association, organized in 1872, held annual conventions at Madison Garden in New York at which designers and manufacturers could develop advances on the mechanics and decorative treatments of the vehicle.
In the first published manufacturing of the buggy, a number of high-level artisans were employed including, among others, the tanner, the blacksmith, the machinist, the carpenter, the woodworker, the painter, and the wheelwright. Buggies were manufactured in a particular order, beginning with the body, the wheel, the gears (axles and springs), shafts and poles, and, finally, paint and trimmings. As the form of the buggy evolved, big city manufacturers referred to their type or style by terms familiar to the public: piano box, square coal box, cut under, panel seat, square box, spindle seat, the Jenny Lind, and the Brewster. The piano box buggy was by far the most popular in the early 20th century.
Numerous centers for the production of the buggy were established both in large cities and small rural towns. The intense demand for more buggies developed a kind of cottage industry in which manufacturing companies sprang up everywhere, increasing their production before the advent of the auto. Success stories may be told by the names of prominent manufacturers - the Brewster, for instance - however, smaller successes also appeared in regional productions of the vehicle.
One such success story may be found in Mifflinburg, Pennsylvania, a small town situated northwest of the Susquehanna River Valley not far from Susquehanna University. Lovingly referred to as “Buggy Town,” it once supported over 70 family-owned companies producing buggies. Early days saw the fabrication of all manner of parts and elements of the buggy’s structure, however, the machine-manufactured parts business began to flourish in the last quarter of the century making assembly of the vehicle easier, so new emphasis was placed on custom finishing.
Among the Mifflinburg buggy companies was a prominent firm founded by William A. Heiss in 1883. Actively producing some of the community’s finest examples, Heiss continued to operate well into “post-buggy days,” finally succumbing to the automobile’s impact as did most of the Mifflinburg companies between 1908 and 1912.
The William A. Heiss Coach Works, manufacturer of quality buggies, survives today in a new form - that of the Mifflinburg Buggy Museum. Several buildings, including the blacksmith shop, the family home, and the repository of display center, have been preserved in a pristine state, housing buggies of various types from the community as a museum of historic artifacts related to the development of the buggy in Mifflinburg.
The Lore Degenstein Gallery brings this exhibition of a selection of objects from the museum, including examples of authentically restored buggies which tell the story of a place of honor for this important utility vehicle. Various other museums and collections have provided additional objects. Through the gracious accommodations of the Board of Directors of the Buggy Museum and the museum’s director, James Remar, we are pleased to hold an exhibition which portrays American ingenuity in one of its incipient forms, the art of invention and productivity.
John Fischer’s Electronic Paintings
January 29, 2000 - February 27, 2000
The term “electronic paintings’ refers to computer graphics that in some manner relates to the painter’s art, i.e, the use of formal qualities characteristic to painting. Though both painting and drawing share a number of these forms, that which is usually considered distinctive to painting is color. Computers have remarkable facility with color in graphic design applications, evidenced by brilliant computer screen displays, enabling the computer artist to create endless images “painted” with “millions of colors” available on the screen. But the art fails if it has no foundation in the elements of artistic training and experience in traditional media and methods.
Computer art by John Fischer bears the mark of the experienced virtual artist. His background in traditional art training at City University in New York, along with many years of exploration of the media of painting and drawing, give evidence to the mature vision of this artist. Born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1930, Fischer’s education also includes study in classical piano which launched his later interest into modern jazz. His numerous jazz compositions for piano developed into a career parallel with his painting and sculpture, soon to become uniquely integrated with his computer-generated art.
It was not until 1975 that Fischer began to discover a correlation between the composition of music by electronic means with that of electronic “painting.” As computer technology advanced, his art evolved into color fantasies that shared paradigms with that of music. His recent compositions include video productions of images and music that bear the rhythmic parameters of each.
Fischer described the discovery of the phenomenon in his art, remarking in 1993 that:
After years of drawing and painting with traditional materials, I found in the computer’s graphic capabilities a magical universe - irresistible, fascinating. The computer’s visual prowess is seemingly endless in its diversity. In collaboration with the latest in software programming, the artist creates new pictorial vocabularies… The computer solves visual problems in a way that changes the rhythm of the creative process. The transformations are virtually instantaneous. The work appears in the mind’s eye and is realized on the monitor’s screen.
Suggesting the immediacy of the resolution of idea and image, Fischer developed an affinity with a medium that was boundless in its anticipations. Rather than the more pedestrian term, computer art, the artist prefers the notion of “electronic paintings,” which lends an air of sophistication to a medium both facile and quickly realized.
Fischer’s electronic painting, CD017, 1997, exemplifies the elements of abstract lines and tertiary colors in a “wash” of greens and oranges across its surface. Working in Pixel Paint® and Adobe Photoshop®, Fisher achieves a painterly quality in his work that is subsequently printed on handmade archival paper, creating an effect of a color lithograph or tightly controlled watercolor painting. The colors are saturated, intense with a preponderance of movement that almost suggests a musical accompaniment.
Fischer spends his time now in his New York environs and in those of Geneva, Switzerland, where he enjoys the stimulation of sharing his discoveries through teaching art. His legacy to the world of music is replete with composition including a concerto for piano with thirteen instruments as well as an octet for woodwinds and brass. He has appeared at jazz festivals in Austria, Germany, France, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, the Soviet Union, and the United States.
Fischer’s legacy to the visual arts appears in the current exhibition at the Lore Degenstein Gallery. We are appreciative of the artist’s efforts to bring our audience over fifty works that allow us a glimpse of the breadth of invention available in the world of computer art. The exhibition is made possible through the generosity of the Charles B. Degenstein foundation which supports the gallery’s programs.
Collecting In The Academic Environment
March 18, 2000 - April 16, 2000
What is the value of collecting works of art and artifacts of artistic and historical nature for the academic museum? Why is it desirable to expend efforts and resources in the maintenance and care of objects that help us define ourselves or our past? These are the questions whose answers describe the university or college museum’s intention to bring these values to the students and the campus community. The role of the collection in the academic environment is to provide an ongoing opportunity for works of art to be viewed and, more importantly, studied, providing a dialogue among members of the art audience to learn about cultural and aesthetic values.
Collections begin the moment art objects are acquired by the college. Some are from generous donors whose interest in particular types of art brought them pleasure during their lives to be shared with others in the future. Some collections are provided with an interest in impacting upon the visual environment of the campus with works of art that engender discussions. Others may afford a provocative view of art and society either in the recent or distant past. Art is never meant to “decorate,” but intends to facilitate our passage through life.
The museum collection has never been more successful to this end than in the present, however, it must be noted that the notion of building and art collection appeared more than 2000 years ago with the Greek Hellenistic reverence for the treasures of their own culture and the preservation fo relics of their past:
About 290 B.C. Ptolemy I established a center of learning [in Alexandria] dedicated to the muses (hence “museum,” house of the muses, “mouseion” in Greek). It consisted of the famous library in addition to collections in all of the museum fields, and astronomical observatory, and facilities for research and for establishment and was, in fact, the first real museum.
Thus, the museum and its collections were deemed important in the preservation of art and artifacts of the past, even in the Ancient World. Earlier still, in 5th century B.C. Greece, we are told of the Pinakotheke, a building on the Athenian Acropolis that is known to have supported a picture gallery. The northern wing of the Propylaea contains a large rectangular hall that provided, according to architectural historian Marvin Trachtenberg, “the first room known to be built especially for this purpose. Light was admitted through the central doorway and the flanking windows; the pictures themselves were displayed on boards fastened to the walls.”
In our present day conception of the collecting and exhibiting of art in the academic environment, we realize the significance of providing our public with the opportunity to study the objects in the collection, an important function of the Lore Degenstein Gallery. Not only do we display special exhibitions from collections outside the university, but we make available the works that are maintained within the Gallery’s collection. An example of this effort can be noted in our use of the Joseph and Ann Silbaugh gift of French Posters. A photograph of each poster is currently being entered into a database and will subsequently be stored on a CD-ROM disc that can be borrowed from the Gallery for the purpose of studying the artwork. An added measure of interest in this collection is the benefit of sharing some of the work with other institutions in travelling exhibition. An exhibition organized by the Gallery with the assistance of museum studies students and interns, entitled “Marketing Mamas: the Provocative Woman in French Advertising Art,” has travelled to Colgate University where it was shown in the Picker Art Museum.
Since the Lore Degenstein Gallery’s inception in 1993, numerous gifts and collections of artwork have been brought into the permanent collection. The present exhibition invites a brief glance at some of these objects, demonstrating the strengths and the treasures that they represent. Among the various gifts, we show a small group of ancient artifacts that were given to the university many years ago. The donor’s name and the provenance of these pieces (the history of the objects’ possession through time) are, at present, unknown, however, we display the objects in the hope of learning more about them. Featured in this group is a small pinched-lip pitcher - and “oenochoe” from Ancient Greece. It is a red-figure terra-cotta vase in the style that originated around 530 B.C. and was used for pouring liquid, perhaps water or wine. Noting the profile of the face on the front of the vase, the image of a greek deity comes to mind. Although little is known about its provenance, it provides a meaningful dialogue with its viewer. Other artworks given to the university since 1993 invite an appreciation of the artists who created them. Though the exhibition is diverse in its offerings, it shows the variety of aesthetic approaches in the collection.
Mahantongo Valley Quilts and Crafts: A Pennsylvania-German Community’s Surviving Aesthetic
April 29, 2000 - June 5, 2000
Situated in Central Pennsylvania just east of the Susquehanna River in Schuylkill and Dauphin counties, on the southern border of Northumberland county, lies a small Germanic community that began its culture in the late 18th century and continues its folk art traditions into the present. Responding to a need for color and exuberantly decorated objects for the home, the residents produced an idiosyncratic style in their arts and crafts that is the focus of this exhibition. Most notable among the works shown is the distinctive treatment and handling of needlework, particularly in their quilts. Though the colors and symbols in their work maintain a direct, rudimentary formula of reds, greens, and yellows with recognizable designs which include the eight-point star, the heart, and flowers - often the tulip - Mahantongo Valley artisans transform everyday objects into vibrant works of art.
We are priviledged to have as curator of this exhibition Jane DuPree Richardson, Director of the Northumberland County Historical Society, who initiated her research through a comprehensive survey of quilts from the Valley. Discovering through her inquiries a parallel among the painted objects, the fraktur, the furniture, baskets, household objects, hand-worked metal items with designs and colors of the quilts, Richardson defined a group of objects that, shown together, demonstrates the integral nature of their craft and vision.
The name of the community, “Mahantongo,” was so designated by the Delaware Indians as “plenty of meat” or “good hunting grounds.” A creek which divides Northumberland and Dauphin counties as well as a mountain which delimits the valley to the south both bear the word, Mahantongo, thus providing the valley with its name. Richardson describes its location as:
Nestled in the pocket of the Blue Mountains of Central Pennsylvania’s Appalachian chain, the Mahantongo Valley extends east from the Susquehanna River for seventeen miles. Bordered to the north by Line Mountain - once the boundary between the Commonwealth and the Indian Lands - it extends four miles to the south where the Mahantongo Mountain closes the valley.
Two major communities are defined by the Mahantongo Valley watersheds where the traditional artforms can also be found: the Schwaben Creek to the north and the Mahantongo Creek to the south. Unification of these areas may have been the result of the circuit followed by Isaac Faust Stiehly, a Reformed minister, who from 1827 to 1864 regularly serviced the churches potentially bringing them to an integration of the arts.
The Mahantongo Valley aesthetic has been explored in various recent studies, particularly those of Frederick S. Weiser and Mary Hammond-Sullivan who focused attention on decorated furniture made in the region. They described a highly distinctive furniture that had been created between 1798 and 1828 along the Schwaben Creek Area of the Mohantongo Valley. Henry M. Reed’s Decorated Furniture of the Mahantongo Valley limited its research to extraordinary pieces of furniture shown in an exhibition at Bucknell University in 1987 for which there was an exhibition catalogue. Through the breadth of these and other less-formalized studies, a view of the spread of the Mahantongo Valley culture to the adjacent areas closer to the Susquehanna River can be found in art objects from outlying regions as well.
The Lore Degenstein Galllery will display numerous works of art and craft from the hands of the historic creators, including quilts, coverlets, and other objects that demonstrate the aesthetic unique to the Mahantongo Valley. We appreciate the generosity of all those who lent objects to this exhibition. We are particularly appreciative of Jane DuPree Richardson for her efforts and professional expertise in bringing this exhibition to Susquehanna University. We are deeply indebted to the Degenstein Gallery Endowment for making our exhibition program possible.
Dwayne Franklin: Letter From A Land Of Sinners
September 9, 2000 - October 8, 2000
In trying to define the art of Dwayne Franklin, one finds how nearly impossible it is to make a concise declaration. The viewer cannot conveniently find a concrete foundation for his images. They are simply points of departure for us to interpret as we wish.
Though his work remains enigmatic, Franklin’s background can more easily be explained. As a child, he lived in such culturally diverse areas as Japan, California, and Texas. He graduated from The Maryland Institute College of Art in 1985 and is represented by Gomez Gallery in Baltimore. He lives and works at his art in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Through several conversations with Franklin, Interim Gallery Director Jody Horn posed several questions that generated a brief discussion offereing a glimpse into his art and what it means to him.
JH: Why “Letter from a Land of Sinners” as a title for this show?
DF: I like the way that words and phrases come together. It’s a near quotation from a poem by Adrienne Rich. I didn’t think of it while I was making the work. It came to mind
when asked for a title. I always thought that it was a particularly evocative line. She’s a good writer. You’ll have to look her up.
JH: You have defined this work as “non-linear narratives.” What do you mean by that?
DF: Non-linear, not straight, multi-directional, without a clearcut beginning, middle , or end. False narrative is another apt description.
JH: A narrative suggests you are trying to tell us something; a story is being told. Are you trying to communicate something with these images?
DF:Narrative refers to a process or technique. My work IS narrative. This implies that there is a dialogue that occurs between the one telling the story and the one listening. In this case, the work is the storyteller; the viewer is the listener. The narrative, or dialogue, is what occurs in the “space” between the viewer and the work.
JH: You went to The Maryland Institute College of Art. What do we see in your work today that is a direct reminder of that study?
DF: Everything, and nothing. I was around amazing people. I saw amazing things. I can’t begin to sum up the experience. The city of Baltimore was as much a part of my education as the Institute. I wasn’t prepared for all that I would see. I could just as well stuck a pin in a map as to have found myself in a place so foreign.
JH: What would be some of the artistic influences (artists, styles, works) that relate to you?
DF: No comment. I look at everything and everyone. I don’t consciously take from anyone. Whether you’re talking about something that’s abstract or figurative, a good painting has essential qualities of presence. It’s not something that you can put into words. You internalize what you come to understand and hope that your work emits this presence that you admire. As far as style is concerned, that’s a bad word. I paint figuratively for the most part, but my focus is something abstract. What style is that?
JH: Finally, what would ne the message you hope viewers will get out of these image?
DF: Well, I didn’t set out to give a message so I guess there isn’t one. I kind of set out to make pictures. Hopefully, interesting pictures that hold people’s attention, maybe give them something to talk about.
We are grateful to the artist for this installation and a glimpse of his work. The exhibition is made possible through that generosity of the Charles B. Degenstein Foundation which supports the gallery’s programs.
Let Children Be Children: Lewis Wickes Hine’s Crusade Against Child Labor
October 21, 2000 - December 3, 2000
At the beginning of the Twentieth century, the horrid living conditions of immigrants and poor, unprotected children were illustrated with dignity and truthfulness for an America entering the Modern age. This documentation was done by Lewis Wickes Hine, a self-taught photographer and an academically trained sociologist. Believing that the camera could be an educational tool, he traveled thousands of miles, taking to the docks, mines, and factories of our country, producing over a thousand images depicting the plight of the child laborer. He was employed from 1906 until 1918 by the National Child Labor Committee to produce bulletins exposing the human side of modern technology. During this time, he photographed children at their work and thought doing so, told stories about an undeniable reality—a reality many said didn’t exist. Thus, he helped challenge beliefs and in fact was instrumental in eliciting sympathy and garnering support for the agency formed to see that laws were enacted prohibiting the abusive practices of child labor. Owen Lovejoy, chairman of the N.C.L.C said, “The work Hine did for the abolition of that evil was more responsible than all the other efforts for bringing the facts and conditions of child employment to public attention.” Legislation was eventually passed to protect America’s children from the unspeakable exploitations Hine and his camera uncovered.
Were his images political or were they artistic? In answer: they are both. Extremely well-crafted works were produced that also told a story of a powerful, social evil. The subject is at once unaffected and direct. This creates a result that is powerful and engaging for the viewer. Years after their initial purpose has ended, images of exceptional artistic value remain. That Lewis Hine is as much an American storyteller as a superb photographer is evident in the body of the work now seen in the Lore Degenstein Gallery of Susquehanna University.
“Let Children Be Children: Lewis Wickes Hine’s Crusade Against Child Labor” is an exhibition of 55 black and white photographs on tour by The George Eastman House of International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY. It will be in view through December 3, 2000.
Magnum Cinema: Photography from Fifty Years of Movie-Making
January 20, 2001 - February 18, 2001
At the conclusion of World War II, a collective of photographers who called themselves “Magnum” had acquired a reputation for strikingly powerful images of the social and political strife that transpired over the decades of the 1930s and 1940s. Their photographs, recognized by the public through the medium of such magazines as LifeandTime, described poignant human events that depicted the changes that war had brought upon the world. Along with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David “Chim” Seymour, George Rodger, and Bill Vandivert, Robert Capa founded the photo agency, Magnum, in 1947. It was the first cooperative of its kind, comprised of a membership of working photographers who chose the editors and set the policies on how their work would be represented and marketed. They all shared in the agency’s profits, proportionally distributed according to individual contributions.
Capa, a photojournalist who had made his mark with photographs taken amidst the heat of battle in both the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and in the Allied landing at Normandy in 1944, brought together knowledge of human drama that fit perfectly into the realm of movie making. Always longing to be on both sides of the camera in the movies, Capa had had a torrid love affair with Ingrid Bergman that ended in 1946. His friendship with American writers John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway and film director John Huston opened doors for the photographer in the wonderful world of Hollywood. His first job documenting activities on the set of Beat the Devil, 1954, introduced him to Humphrey Bogart, which, in turn, paved his way to cover the filming of The Barefoot Contessa,1954.
Soon his contracts with the stars of cinema were legion. His image of John Huston and Colette Marchand in Moulin Rouge,1952, and Ingrid Bergman with Alfred Hitchcock in the film Notorious, 1946, are familiar icons of the Hollywood tradition.
Henri Cartier-Besson, another major figure in establishing Magnum, had pursued an interest in cinema by becoming a production assistant with film-maker Jean Renoir. Cartier-Besson’s major contribution to the film shoot of The Misfits, 1961, starring Marilyn Monroe, provided him with a poignant, warm appreciation for the actress’s off-screen personality. The idea of establishing a contractual relationship to be present at the filming of a movie documenting the actors and the filming activities landed Magnum photographers a steady job which gave them a regular place in the industry as well as a regular income. The photographs from these ventures established glamour of Hollywood in American magazines whose audience had a fascination for this genre.
The Misfits marks a turning point for Magnum’s role in cinema. The negotiation of a contract to provide pairs of Magnum photographers “on shoot” for two weeks stints were the most monumental event in Magnum’s history with film. Because of the nature of celebrity in the movie’s stars - Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift - the producers sought to minimize the ordeal of having hordes of magazine reporters on the set. Determining that the world press would be provided with Magnum photographs of exceptional quality, the producers’ choice to limit access to one agency kept a melee from interfering with the actors’ privacy and their fragile psychological condition. This was the last film for Monroe and Gable and a particularly difficult time in her life as her marriage with Arthur Miller was in crisis producing an emotional experience in which she overdosed on sleeping pills. Magnum photographer Eve Arnold provided a calming effect on the actress staying with the job until the film was finished.
Selected from over 7,000 photographs in Magnum’s archives, the images in the Lore Degenstein Gallery’s exhibition demonstrates the off-screen, off-guard presence of actors and filmmakers giving us a privileged position as voyeurs onto the private moments of its stars. Some photographs witness the intimate exchange between members of the crew; others show the interaction of photographer and subject as the “mug” for the camera. The exhibition, organized by Magnum Photos and circulated by Curatorial Assistance, Los Angeles, is funded in part through the generosity of the Charles B. Degenstein Foundation. An accompanying book with an introduction by Alain Bergala has been published by Phaidon Press Limited, London, 1998.
Beads
February 24, 2001 - April 8, 2001
“Bead International 2000,” an exhibition organized by The Diary Barn Cultural Arts Center in Athens, Ohio, highlights seventy pieces of contemporary beadwork by fifty-seven artists. The exhibition is a result of a juried competition among artists who work in the specialized medium of beads. Through this exhibition, the Lore Degenstein Gallery offers our campus community a revelation of the many inventive and imaginative ways beads are used today as a medium of artistic expression.
The History of these of beads goes back to the beginning of time. As a material that was used for ornamentation, it can be traced to 38,000 B.C. in the area known later as Mesopotamia in the Ancient World. Made of glass, shell, bone, or whatever else nature could provide, these object transcended all cultures. Mainly beads were used in stitchery as a form if decoration for everyday objects. However, in many societies beads have also been vital to communication. They have served as an important part of a culture’s forms of wealth and exchange. It is also typical that many cultures have added a spiritual connotation to these objects. For example, today, religions of nearly two-thirds of the world’s population utilize some form of prayer beads. Now there is a new type of art which enables us to encounter this material. The recent emergence of beads used as a medium of fine art has become of current interest in many exhibitions and museums worldwide.
Beads are no longer designed only for jewelry, adornment, or communication. They are used to interpret the elements of art through their special characteristics of decoration, energy, and the incorporation of ideas. “Beads International 2000” is a focus on the experience of beadwork as a medium of fine art. Beadwork artists are exploring criteria new to their process through traditional elements of all art forms. Traditionally, beadwork has been considered a craft. The idea of craft becoming art is more accessible if we remember that it is not defined by its technique and materials but by its form and content. The objects offered in thes show reveal artist seeking to stimulate thought and dialogue, while intending to excite and challenge the viewer.
The selection process and the artwork presented in this exhibition were the result of a complex jury procedure that reviewed over 400 works during a yearlong competition in the year 2000. Jurors were David K. Chatt, NanC Meinhart, and Kenneth R. Trapp. Each artist submitted up to three objects for consideration. The submissions included a range of objects created by a time-consuming, detailed process to those focusing on the most literal definition of a bead as any pierced object. The exhibition includes a diverse technical representation of an aesthetically stimulating example of the medium.
It is the hope of the curators and jurors of this show that a new audience will be receptive to all that bead art now illustrates and that viewers will leave with a newfound appreciation for contemporary beadwork. By bringing these works together, the exhibition gives is a look at the variety and quality of the medium.
We appreciate the efforts of The Dairy Barn Cultural Arts Center in Ohio for their cooperation in organizing this exhibition. In addition, we acknowledge the generosity of the Charles B. Degenstein Foundation in provident partial funding for this exhibition. This was a large undertaking and it is with excitement that we invite you to come see this heritage of antiquity brought to new life.
Hans Moller, Purveyor of Color: the Essence of a Vision
April 28, 2001 - June 10, 2001
At the forefront of the New York art world in less than ten years after his 1933 arrival in the United States, German-born artist Hans Moller (1904-2000) invoked a strength and determination to discover the art of his new homeland. The opportunities for him in America were legion. He vigorously explored stylistic variations on the avant garde movements that had been so vehemently rejected by the rising Third Reich in Nazi Germany. During those early American years before he broke away to try the tempers of New York critics and the gallery scene, Moller had been hired as a graphics designer within a week after landing in New York, and in the 1940’s he taught art classes at Cooper Union. More significantly, he found financial stability in his experiments with Surrealism from 1943 to the early 1950s.
With an oeuvre of over 1,300 oil paintings, watercolors, and collages, Hans Moller left a legacy to the devotees of his art and to a history of life confined to the making of it. His exhibitions sold out each year spreading among a large group of collectors the bulk of his production. The museum world was to benefit from Moller’s presence with a few paintings granted over the years by purchases and gifts. Though numerous small exhibitions regularly explored his current year’s work, the large analytical retrospective was not to take place until after his death in the year 2000 at age 95.
The Celebration of Woman in the Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise
September 8, 2001 - October 21, 2001
Gaston Lachaise was a sculptor of life found in portraits and metaphorical nudes that proclaim his love of the voluptuous celebration of human existence. Working in the first three decades of the 20th century, Lachaise produced monumental figures - and small sculptures that appear monumental - in both bronze and marble that attest to his goals. Though Lachaise’s oeuvre contains sculptures of a large number of subjects - ornamental architectural adornments; peacock sculptures for the James Deering estate; a decorative frieze for the AT&T building - his passion for the figure drew him closest to becoming the human imperative.
The figure of woman cast in bronze as a metaphor for this celebration of the presence of life has loomed controversially in the oeuvre of Lachaise since his early work of the 1910s. Throughout his career and prominently focused in a group of small bronzes, appears the female nude which declares the vitality of the female form - a comment on the history of art from the cave era to the present. Female heads, as seen in Egyptian Head (cover), also give corporeal expression to the concept of woman as omnipresent reference to the mother goddess whose disembodied form oversees the life of humankind. Lachaise invoked in his sculpture, “the Goddess I am searching to express in all things,” which he eventually found in his wife Isabel whom he had met in 1902 and eventually married in 1917.
The antecedent of these figural works can be seen in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Elevation of 1912-1927. A standing figure of a female nude, rising upon her toes with her fingers reaching upward gives evidence to the notion of lightness and delicacy of a robust body which otherwise declares ponderous weightiness. This sculpture and its subsequent study, Torso of Elevation (in the exhibition), is a seminal work for Lachaise and the model for his subsequent sculptures which utilize the female figure to express the dynamism of existence. It was Isabel, of course; she was the essence of his sculptural expression, his obsession throughout his life.
The figures, by and large, are of exceedingly robust forms that were neither the standard of feminine beauty of the times nor descriptive of particular women with whom he came in contact. Though his wife became his muse, she was only present as the spirit of his art not the direct translation of it. During and after the First World War, Lachaise was in conflict with “the cult of slenderness of 1918” which, according to Gilbert Seldes in a 1931 New Yorker article, showed the artist to be “a sort of public enemy of its thin and athletic idea.”
A classicist born in 1882 and trained in France in the academic tradition the artist came to America in 1906 during the artistic era of expressionism. The avant-garde artist chose to follow in the path of Auguste Rodin, master proponent for sculpture of the human figure as the expression of life. Rodin had introduced in the late 1880s the use of the partial figure from his vast study of sculpture of Antiquity, made partial by the vagaries of time. The human figure, no matter how truncated, still contained the stuff of life, the constancy and persistence of existence.
Lachaise’s early productive life in America led him to work as a sculptor’s assistant casting swords and buttons to complete the academic Civil War sculptures of Henry Kitson. He eventually went to work for Paul Manship where he employed the art of gold working. He later settled in New York maintaining a studio separate from Isabel’s apartment where she lived alone. There he worked at night on his own sculptures while drawing a paycheck during the daytime working for others.
His friendship with e. e. cummings, Lincoln Kirstein, Marsden Hartley, and others from the intellectual set involved in the publication of The Dial, brought champions to Lachaise’s art and engaged interest from among the great collectors of the 1920s and 1930s. Among them, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and A. E. Gallatin were described as “a small liberal elite critical of the narrow philistinism of American culture, and in particular of the inhibited, repressive spirit of Puritanism that denied the body.” In Lachaise’s complex sculptures fraught with sexual overtones, the artist experimented with the newly publicized insights of Sigmund Freud. Eventually, with the fear of public outcry, his friends withheld Lachaise’s more sexually explicit sculpture from his major exhibition of 1935 in the Museum of Modern Art. It was not until years after his untimely death from a sudden, brief bout with leukemia that same year that these works began to be shown.
The late works appear to be largely under the influence of such Stone Age fertility fetishes as the Venus of Willendorf which he first saw reproduced in 1923, Marsden Hartley described Lachaise’s more “liberated” works as made by “a natural male…the indomitable pagan who saw the entire universe in the form of a woman.” These figures were faceless and sometimes headless but constant in their emphases upon the generative spirit thought to be consistent with their function of promoting fecundity. In his 1993 art historical analysis of Lachaise’s small sculptures, Sam Hunter quotes critic Barbara Rose’s definition of the artist’s female figure as “a voluptuous mother goddess who is neither madonna nor whore, but an abundant, generous fertility and creation symbol.”
The Lachaise Foundation through the auspices of the Salander O’Reilly Galleries in New York has brought to the Lore Degenstein Gallery the opportunity to show thirty-nine small bronze sculptures - portraits and figures - along with drawings from the artist’s oeuvre. We are greatly indebted to the Charles B. Degenstein Endowment for making our exhibition program possible.
David Scharf: The Art of Color in Scanning Electron Microscope Photography
October 27, 2001 - December 2, 2001
When art and science interconnect, the effect is majestic bringing together unique concepts of each. Subject matter and technique may combine in a way that appeal to an audience both seeking information and considering the visual result. Images by David Scharf attest to the power of the aesthetic treatment of scientific data, recorded through the scanning electron microscope, processed by computer, and printed through high quality color processing, Scharf controls the subject viewed by the Macintosh computer as a signal from the electron microscope; he subjects the image to coloration from a system of his own invention; and he further presses the limit of the current state of technology printing the image on a color-calibrated large format printer that precisely reads his definition for intense, saturated color.
Scharf’s subjects - a result of his many projects to provide investigators with microscopic views - range from insects, botanical subjects, and nano particles to higher magnification of even smaller bacteriological specimens and the micro world of medical science. The image of an immature corn flower (cover), for instance, demonstrates the anthropomorphic nature of vegetal life when seen at a closer level than the eye can behold. Color, visible as pigment only at a macro level, is a virtual creation of the photographer’s technique, produced by his patented process of using separate RGB (red, green, blue) electron detectors affording an eerie “natural” appearance. This color enhances the three-dimensional quality of the image enabling the viewer to read hills and valleys as if they were visually accessible without the aid of his technology.
It is significant of Scharf’s impeccable photographer’s eye that his scientific images exude a kind of beauty usually reserved for paint on canvas or color photography. That these images could be subjected to the scrutiny of the art museum and its visitors, attests to the nature of his composition and resourceful selections from the less than visible world. Yet, science has found its way into the art museum for hundreds of years. Witness the magnificent drawings of Leonardo that explore the visual world with means now revered among the highest aesthetic traditions. At the brink of discovery Leonardo produced drawings that preserved an understanding of visual perception unknown before. The intention of these drawings was to record phenomena rather than to delight the senses. If however, the end result serves both goals, then the visual effect can be profound.
In the present day scientific photography similarly provides new information through a visual experience that aids discovery. Sophisticated instruments augment the camera’s eye focusing upon distant as well as minute images. We can liken the electron microscope to a camera with the photographer in command of the way in which the material under scrutiny can be seen. David Scharf, using the scanning electron microscope (SEM) as his camera, manipulates the viewer’s perception of objects too miniscule to see and too difficult to define under conventional scientific techniques.
Working for years with a tool that destroys its subject in order to observe it, Scharf manipulates the fatal vacuum tube that ordinarily snuffs out the life of its subject as it allows photographs to be made. The necessity to exclude oxygen from this large cylinder in order to facilitate the movement of electrons around the object under examination is part of the conventional operating procedure of the electron microscope. Normally the object desicates and shrivels in this environment. Scharf however, has developed a technique that keeps the integrity of the object in its original state. Working with his own electron microscope in his lab in Los Angeles, Scharf has defined a procedure that is revolutionary to the scientific world and has invented a technological process to color the object as he views it. He observes that on occasion, an insect under 70 seconds of this bombardment often can be released into his garden, still alive.
Known for over twenty-five years for his SEM pictures, Scharf’s images are regularly published in science journals, popular magazines - Time, Nature, and Discovery, to name a few - and even in cinema form. His earliest experience with the latter appears in the 1982 movie, “Blade Runner,” in which his SEM image of a snake is revealed as a mechanical device, thus aiding Harrison Ford to “zoom in” on his opponent. Scharf this year received an Emmy award for his contributions to an IMAX film in which he incorporated animation of his specimens to travel through the body’s interior.
Beginning his career as an engineering student at Monmouth College, Scharf went to California and ran a vacuum physics lab for Burroughs Corporation. There he found the process of seeing the unseen tantalizing and sought ways to continue to use the SEM eventually in his own studio. Since an electron microscope occupies an entire room of electronic equipment required for its fascinating process, he was able to fund his equipment through numerous studies for hire. He currently maintains an image bank that can be accessed for commercial and scientific use at a premium, income for the photographer.
The exhibition at the Lore Degenstein Gallery shows 59 of David Scharf’s current images in which he has used virtual coloration, printing them from high-resolution digital computer files on a large-format inkjet printer. The photographer uses cutting edge technology to explore the micro world in an enhanced way, bringing the viewer to a new level of understanding of the forms and objects that we cannot see.
Urban Fusions: Photography by Leo Mendonça
January 26, 2002 - February 24, 2002
For over a hundred years photographers have sought new avenues of visual expression, particularly where subject matter can be manipulated to alter our way of seeing the world around us. Photographers in the early 20th century considered the streets of New York as fodder for their cameras to record the flavor and feel of the urban landscape. Combined with a movement called “straight photography,” this began at the very inception of photographers’ desire to capture the image without manipulating the print in the darkroom, thus, providing a “truthful” approach to the subject.
With and historical consideration for the photographic ideas which inform his art, Leo Mendonça, a photographer of a more recent vintage, has established a body of images that persuade his viewer toward his personal perspective of New York City - its people and its expressions. Mendonça offers a view of the city that sees anew that history which tempted photographers of past generations.
Mendonça photographs reveal a slice of urban existence that emerges from their silver gelatin surface in layers of reflected meanings. The viewer is titillated by the enigmatic interplay of image and reflections as actual and virtual co-mingle in one frame. Because his camera observes more than just the street life passing by, it finds the heart of the city, beating with a vibrancy that describes its personality. Minor White, an influential American photographer, told us that the camera should reveal “things for what they are” and “for what else they are,” a cryptic statement that suggests the camera provides more than mere description.
Earlier in the 20th century an approach to the concept of straight photography was introduced through the work of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston who were seeking equivalences between form and feeling. Their intention was to obliterate visual information about locale, size, and identifiable characteristics in order to provide an enigmatic view of nature that allowed viewers to see whatever they wished. The photographers of the “Stieglitz Circle” found fascination in the subject of New York, its architecture, its abstract elements.
After the Second World War, photographers looked at New York again this time with influences from the various art movements which were generated by an energetic breed of young New York artists. Images of the streetscapes with layers of visual information appear in the 1960s Photorealist movement paintings of Richard Estes, among others, in which the reflection introduces new levels of information that was often obscured by the way in which it was presented, confusing store windows’ contents with reflected images from their glass surfaces. Walker Evans in the 1930s had already photographed store windows in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, but the layers of meaning in his images were the humanized contents of the window, showing functional objects that described their future owners.
Mendonça was aware that his predecessors in the use of the subject had already explored this territory for many years before he came to the city. Having arrived in the United States from Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1990, he discovered that New York brought about familiar longings for his distant home, recreating for him a reflection of that home that was, he commented, “a familiar fit where I was neither simply spectator nor tourist but a seasoned participant.” Evolving circuitously into a career in photography, Mendonça had a prior degree in architecture and urban planning from Brazil, which, he noted, made him aware of “the frequent use of signage in the urban setting,” which eventually became for him “an essential component of the photograph.”
The list of photographers who have found their place in the streets of the city filled with varied approaches, each to a personal confrontation with it. Berenice Abbott’s love affair with New York in the 1920s and 30s pushed the envelope of the documentary photograph. In her book published in 1939, she stated:
“To make a portrait of a city is a life work and no
one portrait suffices, because the city is always
changing. Everything in the city is properly part
of its story - its physical body of brick, stone,
steel, glass, wood its lifeblood of living breathing
men and women.”
While Abbott placed responsibility on her feelings toward the city, others found a serendipitous pleasure in capturing special moments. Mendonça responds both to the flavor of the city in his observations and to that happenstance event that causes him to patiently wait for the right moment to use his camera. The result is an interplay of word, image, people, reflections of people, all describing what Pop artist James Rosenquist terms, the fleeting expression of the city. In Mendonca’s image of a gargantuan sign for Trump (cover), the view of reflected architecture and people on the street fusing into a statement of its own, enhanced by the medium of black and white which restricts it to a classical document of time and urban essence.
Pre-Columbian Art from the Collection of Robert and Virginia Williamson
March 16, 2002 - April 21, 2002
Pre-Columbian Art has long been a favorite of collectors of antiquities, probably for reasons related to the beauty of the objects as well as the history that the artifacts describe. The title perhaps is a misnomer, suggesting a time before the arrival in the New World of Christopher Columbus in 1492; however, the Spanish conquest of Mexico by Cortez in 1521 and the subsequent incursion on Peru by Pizarro in 1532 more specifically influenced the artistic production of Mesoamerica. Some scholars refer to this period as Pre-Hispanic rather than the more popular term, Pre-Columbian. Either term describes a location in time and place and the impact of indigenous peoples on the objects - both functional and decorative - that produced a remarkable tradition which helps us understand them in our present time.
The artwork in this complex culture usually is considered to extend from a few centuries B.C.E. (called Pre-classical) to the 16th-century European presence mentioned above. The location spans two continents from Mexico to the tip of South America with particular cultures developing their individual aesthetics in various pockets of local culture. Some cross fertilization of ideas, techniques, and function occurred as interactions brought new influences, however, for the most part each of these cultures retained its individualistic appearance and function.
The two major cultures generally defined by scholars are described as Mesoamerica which includes Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and part of El Salvador; and the southerly cultures, termed the Andean Area, considered to be southern Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and northern Chile and Argentina. Intersecting these two major regions is the “Intermediate Area,” which includes Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Columbia, and northern Ecuador. The distinctions among these cultures reflect attitudes towards their people, their religion, and their emphases upon important values which show markedly in the subject matter portrayed and the techniques employed from rough, primitive forms to highly polished, idiosyncratic, and technically precise examples.
It is the pleasure of “reading” the narrative in the objects that brings particular delight to collectors and historians. From assessments of these remarkable works of art, we are able to conjecture upon the more functional aspects of each culture, Just as Attic vase decoration described Ancient Greed religion, mythology, and cultural practices which informs our understanding of a time before Classical Antiquity, so also do the various objects in collections of Pre-Columbian art.
The artwork in this exhibition is part of a larger collection of artifacts owned by Robert and Virginia Williamson. The exhibition is organized by traditional historic cultures representing many of the aesthetic examples which typify their production over particular time periods. The cultures shown include artifacts from along the southwestern border of Mexico: Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima; and the central and Gulf coast: Vera Cruz, Tlatilco, and Maya from the Yucatan. Mesoamerican cultures include Nicoya and Quimbaya. Peruvian cultures include Chimu, Moche, Chavin, Inca, Chancay, and Nazca, among others. Forms range from religious figures to functional vessels, some with human or animal effigies providing information about deities or everyday activities. People demonstrate various illnesses, sexual interactions, and possibly, portraits. Animals adorn objects, some incorporating their forms into that of the vessel, some as painted decorations. Most of the objects are figurative with some exceptions in the abstract designs of painted vessels by Maya and Nazca artists.
The material used is predominantly terracotta, clay fired at high temperatures to provide rigidity and the ability to hold liquids. In some cultures, a sophisticated decoration of polychrome (the use of various colors) is applied as slip (thinned liquid clay) which when fired becomes an integral part of the vessel. Stone is used by the Mexican Guerrero culture to a large extent; mostly small figures and heads appear in the Williamson collection. The Peruvian Nazca objects display the most elaborate polychromy, with abstract repeated patterns and descriptions of deities in a variety of actions, perhaps defining a mythological narrative. These latter vessels are highly polished and represent a considerable concert for craft.
Of all the effigy vases, the Mochica examples perhaps bear the most significant reputation for workmanship and precision in their descriptions of human heads and figures. Portraits as well as actions are portrayed in a highly realistic manner. Some scholars believe the artisans to be the women of the culture describing every manner of their culture existence, including elaborate depictions of sexual interactions and complex descriptions of the ill.
With over 100 artifacts in the Williamson exhibition, arranged by culture and demonstrating both typical and aberrant examples, it is possible through the art to assess the nature of human activity as a record of its time and its people. The Lore Degenstein Gallery is privileged to show this valuable collection and grateful to Dr. and Mrs. Williamson for their generosity in bringing it to our door. We also thank the Charles B. Degenstein Endowment for the programs of art shown throughout the year in the Lore Degenstein Gallery.
Winslow Homer Illustrations 1857-1888
April 27, 2002 - June 9, 2002
Winslow Homer’s name is a household word in American art, beloved painter of sea, people, 19th-century genre, and American life. Understanding his involvement with illustration early in his career is a particular perspective upon the artist’s contribution to a medium that not only is aesthetic in its inspiration and application but is journalistic in its initial intention. Homer was an observer of current events for such magazines and journals as Harper’s Weekly and Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion. Though well known in the study of his life and work, the consideration of these images separated from their original context places then in the general arena with his paintings, which were created solely for aesthetic purposes. The exhibition intends to explore this aspect of Homer’s oeuvre and allow an assessment of the opportunity the illustrated image was given for informational as well as artistic presentation.
Homer’s exposure to the world of print media began with his apprenticeship in Bufford’s lithography shop in Boston, where he was confronted with the role of the artist in the new application of the inclusion of pictures with printed stories. Prior to this time, articles were basically composed of verbiage; however, the 1850’s dailies, weeklies, and other publications began to use pictorial descriptions that corresponded to the written word. With printing processes turning artists’ drawings into wood engravings that cleverly replicated the drawn line, the possibilities were endless for artists to flourish in this medium. Thus was born the illustrator/journalist - at least for a limited time, since the process ceased with the advent of the photographic image that would engender its own revolution in the late 1870’s.
The literature surrounding Homer and his historical position tends to distinguish the artist’s illustrative work from his paintings. It is important to note that the overlay between the two can be viewed as a continuum of the artist’s production, the illustrations often inspiring larger works produced later in a more traditionally artistic medium. Such is the example of Snap the Whip, published in Harper’s Weekly, 20 September 1873. Nine boys hand-in-hand play the rough and tumble game of disengaging weaker members at the end of the line. The illustration is transformed into a painting seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that reduces the number to eight, while creating a strong horizontal genre scene of children at play.
Nothing remains of the engraving blocks from which the prints were made, undoubtedly because they were continually reused; the consistency of the size of his prints supports this notion. Homer’s involvement with the process was most likely limited to his drawing on the white, smooth surface of the hard wooden block that would have been cut by an engraver who eliminated all but the line which was then used in printing the image.
Homer’s activities during the Civil War involved his going to the front as an artist/correspondent who covered the events of the war. Selling his work as a free-lance artist, Homer described scenes behind the battles of soldiers at leisure or in camp with an eye towards developing narratives that gave a sense of humanity to those involved in the war. Unlike the stark realism of photographic observations of such artists as Mathew Brady, Homer’s illustrations provide a lasting record of individuals engaged in the conflict between Americans fighting for their beliefs.
Disconnecting himself from the issues of the war at its conclusion, Homer continued to produce over one-hundred more illustrations for engravings for Harper’s Weekly. Genre and agrarian views embody the work of this period until his career with Harper’s ended in 1875. Curiously, Homer’s intentions did not appear to be directed toward social commentary on either the reconstruction at the end of the war or on the events of the industrial revolution, both of which would have engendered strong persuasive narrative illustrations. Rather, Homer maintained a focus upon Americans at leisure, modest life on farms, children’s activities, the workers of the sea, and drama surrounding the sea.
Homer produced around 200 illustrations throughout the years 1857-1888, after which he turned exclusively to painting and watercolor. A selection of wood engravings from among those illustrations demonstrates the vision of the artist at the beginning of his career leading into his mature work in painting. The exhibition has been organized by the George D. and Harriet W. Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, and provided for our pleasure by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services. We are privileged to hold this exhibition through the generosity of the Charles B. Degenstein Endowment for the Lore Degenstein Gallery which supports our ongoing exhibits and programs.
Walter Elmer Schofield: Proud Painter of Modest Lands
March 19, 1993 - April 18, 1993
Trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, W. Elmer Schofield worked both in Pennsylvania and in Cornwall, England, during the first half of this century. Schofield’s early Tonalist landscape paintings reflect an interest in the muted colors, misty, ethereal light, and soft-focused images. His brighter impressionist palette, adopted after 1903, prevailed throughout the remainder of his life emphasizing light greens and cobalt blues. In recent years, Schofield’s work has been reconsidered for its prominence in the American landscape tradition.
On loan from the Philip and Muriel Museum of Art at Ursinus College, the exhibition has toured college and regional art galleries over the past four years accompanied by a scholarly catalogue by Valerie Livingston, Director of the Lore Degenstein Gallery. Other paintings in the exhibition are on loan from private collection and from the originator of the show, the Payne Gallery of Moravian College.
The Lutheran Brotherhood Collection of Religious Art
April 28, 1993 - May 16, 1993
In recent years, a growing number of corporations in America have been forming art collections. Lutheran Brotherhood has also embarked on such a program. In 1982, the Society began to assemble a significant collection of religious art consisting of prints and drawings by important Old and Modern Masters, including works by Durer, Cranach, Rembrandt, Tiepolo, Delacroix, Sargent and Bellows, among others. The collection, which currently consists of approximately 400 works, included pieces from the 15th through the 20th centuries.
The Lutheran Brotherhood Collection of Religious Art, from which selected works are included in this circulating exhibition, graphically depicts events in Judeo-Christian history as perceived by artists of many periods.
Because Lutheran Brotherhood has historical ties with Lutherans and the Lutheran Church, it seems fitting that the Collection should reflect this relationship in its religious content.
As the collection continues to grow, its objects will be to demonstrate Lutheran Brotherhood’s commitment to the cause of education and culture and to be a source of enjoyment and spiritual enrichment to its viewers.
Encountering the Narrative in the Recent Work of Florence Putterman
November 20, 1993 - February 20, 1994
Over the past few years, Florence Putterman’s vibrant paintings and monotypes have taken a new direction from her previous colorful abstractions and glyphic images created since the early 1970s. Her recent work is representational and seemingly autobiographical, comprised of familiar subjects-birds, humans, household animals-that appear to construct a narrative. On the surface, the narrative suggests an environment of feminine encounter with events from her life, but it simultaneously seems to provoke metaphorical messages of global magnitude which engages a personal interpretation from the viewer.
Monotypes, works on paper created as both unique and original graphic art, play a vital role in the process of Putterman’s painting. In her recent work, Putterman uses the monotype to reflect the narrative of her paintings-recast in new light with the encounter reinterpreted by a variety of individual treatments giver each print.
The Lore Degenstein Gallery’s current exhibition of thirty-four paintings, monotypes, and sculptures will explore these narrative elements in Putterman’s work, comparing her various approaches to the different media. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
Intimate Perceptions: Aesthetic Considerations of Photography through the Microscope and Underwater
January 21, 1994 - March 13, 1994
In recent years, scientists producing photographs with technologically sophisticated microscopes have fascinated the public with introductions to astonishing miniature worlds. Beyond popular appeal, the affirmation of these images in aesthetic terms is the subject of this exhibition, focusing on the vision of the individual photographer who sees micro-objects with an artistic eye. Each has been selected for their aesthetic contribution which has in some instances particular associations with such traditional art forms as portraits, still life, and abstraction.
Of these 60 photographs, a variety of minute substances achieve monumental distinction in both color and black and white. Insects, moon rocks, aviation metals, meteorites - as well as materials encountered everyday like dust and sugar - are transforms by this intimate view. What might appear to be birch trees in a bed of leaves is a surprise to the viewer who discovers it is human hair. Minute substances used in oil well drilling used to “pro” up crevices in the substrata (proppants) appear as huge rocks.
The exhibition, organized by Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, has been on tour to college and regional museums and is supported in part by the Microscopy Society of American and university grants.
Joseph Priestley in America: 1794 - 1804
March 19, 1994 - May 15, 1994
The Lore Degenstein Gallery at Susquehanna University in collaboration with the Trout Gallery at Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, has organized a comprehensive exhibition entitled: Joseph Priestley in American: 1794-1804. The exhibition will focus on the American legacy of the scientist, humanist, theologian, philosopher, and political dissident, Joseph Priestley, celebrating the 200th anniversary of his arrival in America in 1794.
Priestley, who was born in Yorkshire, England in 1733, is best known for his discovery of oxygen in Leeds, England, announced on August 1, 1774. Priestley’s studies of gases, or “airs” as they were then known, led him to the discovery of other gases including nitrous oxide (“laughing gas”), ammonia, and a gas later identified as carbon monoxide. Priestley’s work also led to a technique for producing carbonated water.
Priestley was known not only for his scientific work, but for his work in philosophy, theology, and political theory. Ordained as a dissenting minister, he was one of the founders of the Unitarian movement in England. Priestley’s political theories, especially his support for the principles of the French Revolution, led to his being branded a political dissident. The controversy over his political views caused him to leave his home in Birmingham, England, where an outbreak of mob violence on the second anniversary of the French Revolution led to the burning of his house, laboratory, and library.
After his arrival here in 1794, Priestley settled in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, where he built a house and laboratory. He continued to perform scientific experiments but was hindered by difficulty in communicating with colleagues in England. Priestley’s interest in politics remained. He was friends with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. He also continued to pursue his literary and religious interests until his death in 1804.
The exhibition will contain many objects associated with Priestley’s life in America including portraits, drawings, prints, and sculptures as well as decorative arts, such as furnishings; scientific apparatus and publications; and documents. Prints and paintings depicting Priestley’s locale on the Susquehanna River in Northumberland and an exhibit of political prints of the time, including works by James Gillray will also be shown.
Chronicles of the Pennsylvania Plain People: 18 Years of Photography by David A. Lauver and a Selection of Quilts That Color Their Homes
September 17, 1994 - October 16, 1994
For almost two decades David A. Lauver has photographed the folkways and expressions of joy and determination that surround the Central Pennsylvania Amish and Old Order Mennonites. The primary focus of Lauver’s career has been the communities of “plain people”-so-called for their resistance to modern customs and dress-who live, work, and worship in Snyder, Union, Lancaster, and Mifflin Counties quietly making their presence little known. Since 1972 Lauver has documented the changes which continue to take place in these communities, particularly from the incursion of modern social concerns, the Pennsylvania highway system, electric power lines that intrude on their properties and the curiosity-seeking public.
Lauver’s interest in the plain people of Pennsylvania has a special dimension because he is a direct descendant of Jacob Lauver, the found of the Lauver Mennonite Church in Juniata County. Living with Amish and Mennonite families from 1978 to 1986, he had the opportunity to participate in their daily activities and gain insights about their lifestyles.
Careful not to exploit the people he photographs, Lauver has earned year of trust and respect which he invests into his art. He intends to dispel some of the myths surrounding the Amish community. One such myth is that the plain people do not allow their picture to be taken; although some sects prohibit photographs, others do not. Some allow themselves to be photographed from a distance or from behind, which children usually can be photographed without reservation.
Lauver’s sensitive depictions of the children of the plain people liberate their joyful spirit allowing them the ephemeral pleasures of vanity that will soon give way to more serious life obligations as they grow older. They cavort in the schoolyard, modeling for the camera and proudly displaying treasured artwork created by their own hands.
The exhibition will contain 50 photographs depicting various aspects of the lives of the plain people in Central Pennsylvania, including children, schools, adults, families, transportation, farming, worship, animals, domestic environments, etc. Sharing the spotlight is a sampling of colorful quilts, exquisitely crafted artful statements for which the Amish and Old Order Mennonites are so well known.
The Pennsylvania Watercolor Society
October 29, 1994 - December 10, 1994
The Lore Degenstein Gallery is please to host the Pennsylvania Watercolor Society’s 15th Juried Exhibition this year. The opportunities to view new directions in the medium of watercolor, through the work of artists from around the nation and abroad, helps us to fulfill our ongoing mission of contributing to the cultural life of the Susquehanna University community and our surrounding neighbors in Central Pennsylvania.
A Collector’s Eye: Depression-Era Paintings from the Collection of John Horton
February 1, 1995 - February 26, 1995
John Horton, a resident of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, has collected American art for twenty years. He began his collection with 19th-century landscape paintings. In the early 1980s, with the help of New York gallery owner, Samuel L. Rosenfield, he began to acquire American paintings from 1930s and 1940s.
Horton’s criteria for his acquisitions are works that show “vigorous” expression with animated compositions and forceful color contrasts and works that have themes concerned with the human condition, especially compassion for the oppressed, the unfortunate, and the unhappy. Particular favorites for him were paintings by the American Regionalists and Social Realists of the 1930s and 1940s.
The American Regionalists found their subject matter in the celebration of everyday life of rural America. Living and working in the country’s heartland, they passionately rejected the artistic domination of New York and other urban centers, and in their art glorified the life of the farmer and the small town.
In contrast, the Social Realists were urban artists and by far the more political of the two groups. The Social Realists focused on the indignities and injustices that were regularly faced by laborers and the urban poor. They were not afraid to take a frank look at the social ills of society and felt compelled to use their art for political expression.
The Lore Degenstein Gallery will show several paintings from these two movements as well as various works by artists that illustrated other paths taken by artists during the period. One of the paintings, Apple Seller by Julius Bloch, documents a common sight during the Great Depression of the 1930s: the destitute, unemployed people who tried to earn money selling such items as pencils and fruit on city streets.
We extend our appreciation to the Michener Museum of Art in Doylestown, PA, and to John Horton for the opportunity to display the paintings in this exhibition.
George Catlin’s Paintings of North American Indians: 1855 - 1869
March 8, 1995 - April 26, 1995
Mandan, Sioux, Apache, Cheyenne, among countless other Native American tribes visited by Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, artist George Catlin, were studied over a period of thirty-four years in his life’s effort to preserve the “noble races of red men” who he recognized were fading from this earth. His paintings, based on field studies gathered from his travels, witness the appearance, activities, and tribal customs of families of peoples who granted him privilege to record them in their most private moments, occasionally even in their secret ceremonies.
Catlin defined his project as that of a preservationist, publishing his notes in 1841. Through both his verbal and visual voices, his legacy continues the lives of these aboriginal people into the present day. At the outset of his project, he wrote:
I have, for many past, contemplated the noble races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless parries, melting away at the approach of civilization. Their rights invaded, their morals corrupted, their lands wrested from them, their customs changed, and therefore lost to the world,..I have flown to their rescue-not of their lives or of their race (for they are “doomed” and must perish), but to the rescue of their looks and their modes…; yet, phoenix-like, they may rise from the “stain on a painter’s palette,” and live once again upon canvass, and stand forth for centuries yet to come, the living monuments of a noble race. For this purpose, I have designed to visit every tribe of Indians on the Continent….
If I should live to accomplish my design, the result of my labors will doubtless be interesting to future ages; who will have little else left from which to judge of the original inhabitants of this simple race of beings, who require but a few years more of the march of civilization and death, to deprive them all of their native customs and character.
George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, 1841
The Lore Degenstein Gallery is privileged to share with its Susquehanna community fifty Catlin paintings selected from the Paul Mellon Collection of over 350 works given to the National Gallery of Art in 1965. The assembled exhibition has toured college and university galleries around the U.S. for the last few years. A National Gallery catalogue, authored by Donna Mann describing the life and experiences of the artist, accompanies the exhibition.
Bradley W. Shoemaker: Recent Paintings
May 2, 1995 - June 4, 1995
Bradley W. Shoemaker’s paintings of Central Pennsylvania depict scenes reminiscent of the artist’s childhood and familiar to many of his viewers. Painting on location, Shoemaker documents structures and landscapes which are disappearing as the land is developed for new uses.
Shoemaker is a watercolorist, but his technique is closer to that traditionally associated with oil painting. He first builds layers of transparent washes before applying glazes. According to Shoemaker, “This slow build-up of color enhances the luminosity of the watercolor paper and results in an extraordinary warmth and richness of color.”
Shoemaker studied art at Penn State University receiving his master’s degree in 979 after a sojourn teaching art in a high school program in Beaver Springs, Pennsylvania. Preferring to paint rather than teach, he augmented his earlier experiences in studio art which included a summer arts program with Pennsylvania landscape painter David Armstrong and private lessons with former Susquehanna art professor Hilda Karniol. He currently works in his studio in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he continues to interpret the local terrain.
The exhibition will contain 50 works on paper depicting various scenes from the Susquehanna Valley as well as a few from other locations including Martha’s Vineyard. The composition and technique of these paintings share many elements with works of the 20th-century American Realist painters. With these works, the viewer is able to gain a broader understanding of these artistic traditions and also to chare the artist’s interpretation of scenes which have a personal meaning for him.
Society of American Graphic Artists
September 5, 1995 - October 15, 1995
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. A not-for-profit national organization of fine art printmakers, the society originated in Brooklyn, NY, in 1915 as the “Brooklyn Society of Etchers.” After undergoing several name changes, in 1952 it became the Society of American Graphic Artists. Founding members were Troy Kinney, Eugene Higgins, Fred Reynolds, Paul Roche, and Ernest Roth, the society’s first president. The first exhibition was held in 1916 at the Brooklyn Museum, featuring 197 works by member artists adding John Taylor Arms, Frank W. Benson, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, John Marin, and Mahonri Young. The society continued to grow during the 1930s. Prominent members at that time included John Sloan and Reginald Marsh. The Society took on several new initiatives offering exhibit exchanges with European print clubs and a selection of miniature prints in its annual shows.
Over the past 80 years the society has organized over 65 national print exhibitions in addition to international, traveling, and exchange exhibitions. These exhibitions have presented various techniques and artistic styles which represent a cross-section of American printmaking. 63 original graphic works by 21 current members of the society are featured in this exhibition at the gallery, including etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, and other print media. The exhibition was organized for the Thomas J. Walsh Gallery of Fairfield University located in Fairfield, Conn., where it appeared in late 1994.
Seeking The Tranquil In Forest and Stream: Les Reker’s Pennsylvania Landscapes
October 29, 1995 - December 15, 1995
The intimate relationship with nature which Les Reker defines in his views of the Pennsylvania landscape emerges as the artist’s search for tranquility. Though concerned with the essential of description, the paintings transcend verisimilitude, transporting the viewer to a feeling of place as well as a comprehension of the power of nature. Painted en plein air, on site, the paintings reflect the artist’s philosophical encounter with the macrocosm as he maintains an adherence to the visual information before him.
A realist artist since his graduate school days at Queen’s College, Reker has concentrated his attention on the close observation of nature as discussed by Emerson and Thoreau in the 19th century, whose impact on the tradition of American landscape painting arose as the Hudson River School. Its artistic leader, Thomas Cole, left a legacy to the 20th century, favoring the particular and the specific over the visionary or the imaginary. In this tradition and spirit, Reker’s landscapes make note of both the size and the feeling of their creation.
The paintings on view at the Lore Degenstein Gallery continue the gallery’s commitment to artists who are affiliated with college art departments. Reker is Associate Professor of Art at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he also leads a substantive program of exhibitions as Director of the Payne Gallery, drawing upon art from museums and major collections. During his twelve years at Moravian, he has maintained his professional artistic productivity with a major New York gallery and is currently represented by a gallery in Philadelphia.
Reker’s recent small-scale landscapes resulted from a series of paintings begun on his sabbatical leave in 1991. Exploring the cataracts and streams along the Susquehanna, Lehigh, and Delaware Rivers in Bucks, Lehigh, and Carbon Counties in Pennsylvania, Reker found through philosophical inquiry a new comprehension of the intuitive construction of the landscape when immersed in its presence. It is these small works nestled among the larger exhibition pieces that become the framework for an understanding of the commitment an artist may find in the association of experience and intellect. For the viewer there is pure delight - the familiar resonance of the forest and stream playing quiet harmonies in the paintings of Les Reker.
The Triumphant Spirit
January 31, 1996 - March 3, 1996
Fifty years after the end of World War II and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, those who survived or were witnesses share a common cause: to resist prejudice and intolerance by keeping alive reminders of the Holocaust. Frequently noted among these people is a spirit of triumph over the adversities of their experience. Photojournalist Nick Del Calzo began a photographic series of Holocaust survivors’ portraits inspired by his visit in 1991 to Dachau, a death camp near Munich. He found their stories told of ensuring hope for a better future, and, through their ability to transcend the unspeakable evil, their faces have become a metaphor for survival.
Del Calzo’s photographs, assembled in an exhibition containing accounts of these experiences along with the portraits, will be shown at the Lore Degenstein Gallery. Funded in part by the Charles B. Degenstein Foundation, it is presented in conjunction with the Susquehanna University Holocaust-Genocide Studies Project.
Land Survey 1970 - 1995: Paintings by Diane Burko
March 19, 1996 - April 21, 1996
To consider 20th Century landscape painting a refreshing new statement on an age-old tradition is to witness the breath of new life brought to the canvas by Diane Burko. Her stunningly voluptuous paintings of the landscapes of her travels over the past two decades enrich and confront her audience with a sense of the monumentality of nature both from her point of view and from the grand scale of her work. Reminiscent of the scale of salon-style presentations of the 19th century, Burko treats her subjects with the cold objectivity of a modernist’s eye. Distancing herself from her motif, Burko made calculated studies of aerial perspectives photographed by her from a small plane chartered for expeditions over the mountains and canyons in the American West and other places she visited.
This intense commitment to objectify nature resulted in large, analytical paintings that portray an arid, crystalline landscape wherever she travelled. Burko eventually purged her paintings of their geological scrutiny in the mid 1980s as she brought her canvas closer to the site seeking in a warmer affinity with nature. Evidence of this treatment can be found in the small studies made at Philadelphia’s Morris Arboretum in 1983 which appear to launch her landscapes in a new direction. For every trip she made through the countryside, Burko found fodder for her camera and her palette: the coasts of California, Brittany, Normandy - each trip resulting in new light and new colors for exploration. The canvases, transformed by bravura brushwork and buttery pigment, show the mature artist’s authoritative confrontation of her subject. More recent paintings in the 1990s revisit the sites of earlier masters, the benefits of grants and fellowships that placed her on the European continent for an extended period. Such scenes as Monet’s lily pond at Giverny describe a renewed affection for familiar sites while awakening traditions of landscapes past to transmutation by a modern realist.
Diane Burko maintains a studio in the Philadelphia environs. The exhibition of her more than twenty large paintings has been on tour to several college campuses in the East and was organized by the Payne Gallery of Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA.
Diane Burko’s Web site
Collections from the Lore Degenstein Permanent Collection
April 27, 1996 - June 2, 1996
One of the traditional benefits of allying an academic gallery with classes in Art History is the chance to spotlight certain objects with the ambitious research efforts of students who have culled from university records and published documents as much information as they could find. Susquehanna students in American Art History class, fall 1995, studied a collection of fine art prints that had been given to the university in the 1970s. A selection from among the forty-six prints is exhibited this spring along with accompanying material from the students’ investigations.
The students discovered that Robert U. Redpath, a member of the university’s Board of Directors at the time, in 1976 contributed his collection of lithographs and etchings produced by Associated American Artists. The AAA is a New York publisher of prominent artists, particularly during the 1940s and 1950s. Such American Regionalists as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton and their colleagues provided a view of Americana reflective of the Depression and its aftermath. Themes of life activities from rural America describe narratives of hardship or leisure in these prints - statements of the persistence of the common place in the face of global economic and political crises.
In their process of studying the history of the prints, Art History students were joined with other students from the Gallery internship program to accession them into the university collection, photograph and catalog the art, and assess their need for conservation. The prints on exhibit have been recently restored with combined funding from the Lore Degenstein Gallery and the Blough-Weis Library. The remainder of the prints will receive conservation as future funds develop. It is the intention of this collection to be exhibited at the library for the continued benefits of their further study.
Mark Rothko The Spirit of the Myth
September 7, 1996 - October 13, 1996
Prominent for his contribution to American innovations in abstract art after World War II, Mark Rothko was one of the spearheads of the group of young artists known as “the New York School.” Also called “Abstract Expressionists,” they included Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, Herbert Ferber, William de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and more than a dozen others who met regularly to exchange new ideas toward the development of abstract art. Theirs was more a movement than a style of painting and sculpture, focusing on ideas surrounding a new way of defining art. Motivated by the European surrealists who had emigrated to New York in the wake of political oppression in Nazi Germany in the late 1930’s, the younger artists established a powerful wave of influence that literally “captured” the artworld away from its former center in Paris. As a result, America had established international importance in avante-garde art.
Rothko’s role in the sweeping changes that followed is earmarked by his mature works, large paintings of soft-focus hovering rectangles, beginning with acid colors in the early 1950’s and developing into somber maroons and blacks just before his self-inflicted death in 1970. Less familiar are his prior to this period as he was experiencing Surrealism on his own terms, experimenting with “automatism” and dream-like “biomorphic” imagery that was the crux of that movement. The notion of tapping into the subconscious for forms and modes of expression was in the air for him and his contemporaries and informs his paintings of the 1940’s.
Earlier still are his works from the 1930’s, figurative investigations of forms generated by Cubism and Expressionism of the post-World War I era. Assimilating the idea that all art of importance must be “tragic and timeless,” Rothko, Newman, and Gottlieb, sent a declaration of this intent to the New York Times in 1943 - language which established the importance of myth as well as the essential fabric from which the new art world would be woven. Inspired also by Friedrich Nietzche’s Birth of Tragedy, Rothko stated that mythology was meaningful to him, not for “the particular anecdote, but rather [for]…the Spirit of the Myth.” This spirit was to become the hallmark of the artist’s quest in the years to follow.
Rothko’s family tradition originated in Dvinsk, Russia, where he was born in 1903. Emigrating to the United States in 1913, he spent his youth in Portland, Oregon, and later he studied at Yale University. He moved to New York in 1923 and began to study art at the Art Students League. His relationship with the young American avant-garde began in the early 1930’s through opportunities to exhibit at the little galleries in New York willing to take a chance on emerging artists. His first New York exhibition was held in 1933 at the Contemporary Arts Gallery. Exhibiting at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in the mid 1940’s placed him in the milieu of the Surrealists and the burgeoning New York School. Subsequent galleries, Betty Parsons, Sidney Janis, and Marlboro, handled his work in New York and provided him with annual solo exhibitions throughout his career.
The exhibition at the Lore Degenstein Gallery celebrates the early works of Mark Rothko with twenty-six paintings, a selection from 195 paintings and over 770 drawings donated to the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., in 1986 by The Mark Rothko Foundation. Organized by the National Lending Service, the loan is part of a program designed to make the National Gallery’s collection more accessible to museums nationwide. It is our privilege to hold this special exhibition, the second such opportunity at Susquehanna University following the distinctive collection of North American Indian paintings by George Catlin held in 1995.
Stone Echoes Original prints by Françoise Gilot
October 26, 1996 - December 15, 1996
The artistic career of Francoise Gilot, spanning the era of WWII to the present, brings to the realm of the lithographic print a vision both powerful and feminine. Her dedication to the medium had a reluctant beginning in her efforts to avoid the printmaking’s provocative enticements, when Picasso introduced her to the French artistic milieu of the day, which included Matisse, Braque, Chagall, and Miro, Gilot discovered a natural affinity for lithography. She developed a vocabulary in the medium that brought her work to the attention of Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, a major art dealer who showed her work in his Parisian gallery in early 1952. She was only the second female artist whose work he handled. Gilot developed a “nourishing collaboration” with Mourlot - according to Mel Yoakum in his catalogue raisonne of her graphic works - printing at his atelier for many years.
Additional patronage arose in the United States in 1961 with the interest of Sylvan Cole, director of Associated American Artists. Cole commissioned an edition of her lithographs produced at Mourlot Atelier for distribution to an American market. With this sponsorship, Gilot was able to explore the medium’s offerings with unguarded experimentation, discovering a vibrant approach to color that became the hallmark of her mature style. Her subsequent devotion to printmaking coincided with a phenomenal revival of the medium, both in America and Europe beginning in the 1960s.
Author of several books-Life With Picasso, The Painter and the Mask, Mattise and Picasso: A Friendship in Art-Gilot continues to work in her studios in California, New York, and Paris.
The Lore Degenstein Gallery is privileged to display a retrospective of Gilot’s prints in an exhibition organized by the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa. Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue raisonne authored by Mel Yoakum, curator of the Gilot Archives.
Seeing the Unseen Photographs by Harold E. Edgerton
February 1, 1997 - March 2, 1997
Herold Edgerton was born in Fremont, Nebraska, in 1903, where his father was principal of the high school and coach of the football team. A few years after his birth, the family moved to Washington, D.C., where his father worked as a reporter for the Washington Times and studied law.
Washington, however, could not compete with the attractions of Nebraska. The family moved back-residing in Lincoln, on the Winnebago Indian Reservation, and finally in Aurora. At 14, Edgerton bought his first camera, a postcard folding model from a mail order catalog.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Nebraska, Edgerton spent a year with General Electric in Schenectady, New York. He then enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he won both a master’s degree and a doctorate in electrical engineering. It was Edgerton’s work in electrical measurements at MIT that first led him to investigate the stroboscope and the possibility of using it for photography.
During his doctoral studies, Edgerton needed to find a way to accurately measure the transient changes in the angular displacement of the rotor of a synchronous electric motor. With the stroboscopes then available, measurements had to be recorded visually, and it was difficult to capture with accuracy the transient changes in the turning rotors. To overcome the problem, Edgerton designed the first electronic stroboscope device that would produce enough light in controlled flashes of short duration and of proper actinic quality for “stopping motion” on photographic film. His success in developing this stroboscope, first described in the May 1931 issue of the journal, Electrical Engineering, led to his life-long work in high-speed photography.
Two other MIT graduates, Kenneth Germesshausen and Herbert E. Grier, who were to become Edgerton’s business partners, made critical contributions in the early 1930’s to further development of strobe systems. The pioneering research of these three men led to the realization of today’s electronic flash camera. In 1947, the trio organized their informal partnership of thirteen years into a company which has successfully specialized in electronic technology applicable to space exploration, atomic physics, medicine, marine science, electro- optics, and sophisticated testing devices.
The industrial/corporate world held no charms for Edgerton, who by this time was affectionately called “Doc” by his students. Leaving the management of the burgeoning enterprise to his partners, he preferred to dedicate his time to his students and research. As his pioneering photographs stirred worldwide interest in strobe photography, Edgerton’s MIT laboratory became a mecca for people who wished to learn his techniques or use his equipment for motion analysis. His stroboscope, in a convenient portable form, found wide use in industry for studying such things as the complexities of the automobile crankshaft, a high-speed loom’s shuttle, or the meshing of gears.
During World War II, Edgerton developed a powerful flash system that was used for night aerial photography over Normandy in Europe. In the later years, Jacques Yves Cousteau, along with the National Geographic Society, enlisted his aid for underwater photography. Cousteau and the crew of the Calypsodubbed him “Papa Flash.”
More recently Edgerton’s inventions include the side -scan device used in the discovery of the ironclad USS Monitor, sunk off Cape Hatteras in 1862 by the Confederate ironclad Merrimac . Robert Ballard and the team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute found the wreck of the Titanic using Edgerton’s side- scan sonar. “Nessie,” the sea monster supposedly residing in the 700- foot-deep Loch Ness in Scotland, has been another subject of Edgerton’s research using the side-scan sonar.
Edgerton, as a photographer, was first of all a scientist and an electrical engineer who investigated, measured, and sought new facts about natural phenomenon. His photographic genius, which he always down-played, has captured bullets in flight and athletes in motion; captured the detonation of atomic bombs at a hundred millionth of a second; and produced the renowned coronet picture of the drop of milk as it splattered into a saucer. His photographs, as scientific records, bestow on us comprehension and increase our awareness. They reveal the new forms, subtle relationships of time and space, and the essence of motion. He created a universal visual scientific language for all to appreciate—a unique image of that time world beyond the threshold of our eyes.
Edgerton received the nation’s highest awards, including the Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, the International Center for Photography’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Medal of Technology. His 1982 New England Inventor of the Year Award reads, “He has pressed back the frontiers of our knowledge of vision and motion with his stroboscopic photography and through his marvelous invention he has captured and revealed new beauty and order in both nature and industry,”—a marvelous citation for a person whose life work has so enriched our lives.
Shadows of Time Photo-transfer Prints by Gordon R. Wenzel
March 19, 1997 - April 13, 1997
Gordon R. Wenzel’s photo-transfer prints have a monumentality that belies their diminutive scale. His images hint of the past with reflections of aging architecture and old world subjects, shadows of a time once held in esteem. Modesty of scale, however, in no way diminishes their effect; soft muted times melting into textural watercolor paper implore the viewer to move closer to inspect their intriguing appearance. Small size and faded colors are reminiscent of picture postcards of the past that were used to describe romantic faraway places and sentimental scenes of gardens and flowers. Collectibles of such papers ephemera are now found in antique shops and museums saved from extinction by loving hands. Wenzel’s photographs remind us of such things.
Manipulating a technique that itself suggests melting and fading, Wenzel derives his images from his own negatives taken years ago and reworked in a transfer process with the assistance of Polaroid film. The nature of this film, layered on its surface with a spectrum of colors, when applied to dampened watercolor paper gives up its image to a new aesthetic medium. Colors impregnate the paper, sometimes sliding beyond the image into the margins mingling figure and background with an appearance of a French Impressionist’s brushstroke.
Wenzel shares his techniques as well as his aesthetic ideas with students in the Art Department at Susquehanna University, where he teachers two classes of Photography. As a professional photographer in the community, he has worked in a variety of areas including commercial and portrait photography and has a studio in Danville, Pennsylvania. National awards in competitions have landed his work in various collections, including the Pennsylvania Heritage Affairs Commission Traveling Collection, for which he was recognized by the Lieutenant Governor.
American Regionalist Prints from the Robert U. Redpath Collection, Susquehanna University, Part 2:
The second part of the Robert U. Redpath Collection of American Regionalist Prints affords the Lore Degenstein audience an opportunity to view the collection in its entirety. A selection of these prints that had undergone conservation last spring were shown as a project of an American Art History course, involving the research efforts of those students. Their work has provided information on the gift of the work in 1977 by Redpath and the history of the Regionalist artists who printed lithographs and etchings for Associated American Artists (AAA) in the 1930s and 40s. The AAA, an organization in New York City, gave artists an experience to produce graphic arts that described American life: conditions in the aftermath of the Great Depression - during the Dustbowl years in rural America in the 1930s when farming struggled for survival and cities dealt with the crises of unemployment as well as later subjects of life recovering. Such prominent artists as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood as strongly evident in the collection.
Masters of the French Poster From the Collection of Joseph and Ann Silbaugh
April 20, 1997 - June 8, 1997
The French contribution to graphic design in the twentieth century is no more apparent than its rich heritage and continuing tradition of poster art that appears on the streets of France and in art museums all over the world. France is credited with having initiated this art form in the late nineteenth century with the extraordinary efforts of Jules Charet who brought color, images, and lithography together with words that conveyed information as well as invention in communicating messages to the public. In the twentieth century the poster literally becomes the art of the street, as advertising is transformed into visual pleasure for the passerby.
With the emergence of the poster as an avenue of opportunity for artists interested in reaching diverse audiences with their drawings and lithographs, experiments with the medium of the poster bear the names of painters Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. Some of these artists innovated the gallery poster, designed for the specific purpose of advertising an exhibition of their work. The intention of this poster was not to reproduce a work in the exhibition, but to allow the artist the freedom of conceiving a new image that responds to the poster medium. Working with other such lithograph ateliers (studios) as Mourlot in Paris, the results were also printed on heavier paper and editioned for collectors in the art world.
Other artists, focused more exclusively on the realm of visual advertising, developed their art solely for the commissions of their clients. From announcing events to advertising merchandise, these artists directed their posters to the art of persuasion, engaging in the attention of the audience to try new experiences or to purchase the company products. With such a clearly defined goal, the medium evolved with the times, responding to the visual trends in avant garde art movements-Cubism, Surrealism, and later, Pop Art.
The poster also developed new visual criteria of its own, owing to the basic requirement of attracting the attention of the audience. Leonetto Cappiello working in Paris throughout his career, eliminated inessentials from his posters and used what he called “the science of the blot,” a means of contrasting the poster with its environment so that it would not compete for attention. To this end he placed a figure on against a stark background, giving it an activity to perform that related to the product while minimizing the text. The text itself was subjected to manipulation for the sake of design in the posters of A. M. Cassandre. Working in Paris in the 1930’s, Cassandre described the lettering as “the star of the wall stage because it alone is charged with telling public the magic formula it sells.” With this objective in mind, Cassandre’s posters incorporate the text into the image, allowing the typography to become a graphic element of the picture.
Twentieth-century poster artists earned their place in history not only through their innovative designs, but through their identification with certain advertisers with whom they established a long-term relationship. Bernard Villemot’s images sold such products as Orangina drink and Bally shoes from the 1950s through the 1980s. Villemot stated that “a good poster must be a telegram.” Subsuming words to images in his posters, visual power alone conveys the message, which is clearly evident in his first poster for Orangina published in 1953.
Artists of the French poster established graphic design criteria that crossed cultural barriers, facilitating accessibility to the messages their advertisers desired. Evolving their art from an emphasis on text at the beginning of the twentieth century, the artists subsequently placed their focus on pictorial means to bring universal legibility to an international public. As this evolution is observed, the discovery of individual masters emerges to recount a history rich in visual pleasure not only for the audience of the street, but for the audience of the museum as well.
The exhibition, Masters of the French Poster, surveys issues of graphic design and advertising communications with a view of contributions by individual artists of the twentieth century whose innovations define distinctive cultural, artistic, and historical trends. Joseph and Ann Silbough, who have collected French posters for many years, have generously established a major collection of these works at Susquehanna University for future study of this medium by students, scholars, and the general public.