“The Roaring Twenties” as represented in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby, the book selected for the second annual UConn Reads program, was a gilded age marked by overt displays of wealth, widespread urbanization, and dizzying modernity. This exhibition of early 20th-century paintings and works on paper from the Museum’s permanent collection gives visual form to the era in which Fitzgerald’s story of Jay Gatsby and his dark secret unfolds. Featured works include paintings by Reginald Marsh and Everett Shinn, photographs by Paul Stand, and prints by Peggy Bacon and Edward Hopper.
Adolf Dehn (American, 1895-1968). We Nordics, 1931. Lithograph. 13-3/4 x 11-1/4 inches. Gift of Andrew and Andrea Lowe.Walt Kuhn (American, 1880-1949). Study for Bareback Rider, 1926. Oil on board. 36 x 24-3/4 inches. Gift of Helen Benton Bol
Edward Hopper (American, 1882-1967). Night Shadows, 1921. Etching. 6-7/8 x 8-1/4 inches. The Louise Crombie Beach Memorial Fund.
Everett Shinn, The Dancer, 1909, oil on board. Gift of Charles and Marjorie Benton.
Over the past thirty plus years that I have been at the Benton, many works of art have entered its collections, and the nature of these works has significantly changed. Geographically, the once predominantly European and American emphasis had by the mid-1990s broadened to include Asian, Latin American, and African art. Chronologically, the collections that once spanned only the period from the 15th to mid-20th centuries today extend to the present. The only media represented in the 1970s in significant numbers were painting, sculpture, prints, and drawings; today a fifth major area of collecting is photography. Many of these works have come in as gifts, but the growth since 1980s in the number of endowments specifically designated for purchasing art has been a major factor.
The selection of works for this exhibition is my choice. They represent my eye, which is biased towards European and 19th-century American art. There are prints, drawings, and photographs with only an occasional painting, a preference that reflects my own scholarly and collecting interests. Some names are familiarRembrandt, Drer, Homer, and Boucher; others like Nanteuil, Vernet, Roth, and Zingg perhaps not so. However, each work is a part of the collections for a reason, and invariably that reason is pedagogical. Nonetheless, each work of art also has a role to play as visual pleasure, intellectual stimulation, historical artifact, and perhaps moral and ethical enlightenment. For me, each work represents a specific moment because I bought it or because I knew the collector from whom it came. But institutional collecting is not about the individual, and what I would ultimately hope is that each work might not only play a role in future exhibitions, but always be there to excite a student’s interest in things historical, social, cultural, and artistic. After all, isn’t that the best of reasons for working in a university art museum?Thomas P. Bruhn, Interim Director and Curator.
Claude Lorrain, La Pont de bois / Rebecca and Eliezer, ca. 1638-41, etching. Robert S. and Naomi C. Dennison Fund.
MetroPAL.IS., the creation of the contemporary artist Shimon Attie, is presented in an oval configuration of eight video screens with the viewer standing within the oval. The artist’s intention is for the artwork to re-imagine and re-configure the seemingly intractable Middle East conflict between Palestinians and Israelis by engaging their shared secondary hybrid identitythat of being New Yorkers. In many ways, the artwork is as much about what it means to be a New Yorker, to live in the United States, and to have a layered identity as an Israeli or Palestinian as it is about conflict in the Middle East. The artist invited twenty-four members of both communities, of various genders and occupations, into his studio to be filmed individually. They reflect in pairs not only their Palestinian and Israeli identities, but comparable occupations and conditions. Each participant read a scripted part from a hybrid document that Attie created, that merges the Israeli Declaration of Independence from 1948 with the Palestinian Declaration of Independence from 1988. When a few obvious key signifiers are removed, it is remarkable how much the two documents overlap and mirror each other. MetroPAL.IS. has been crafted and edited such that, like a Greek chorus, there are times when only one individual is speaking, or two, or eight, or none. Attie conceived of the piece in musical terms, with the relationship of individual voices being thought of as a score. The overall outcome results in the viewers finding themselves in a quasi endless hall of mirrors, of uncannily similar claims, assertions, and visages, alternating between a boisterous chorus and a single plaintive voice.
MetroPAL.IS. (video stills), 2010
The success of MetroPAL.IS. is predicated in the belief that political discourse is best carried out by the personal voice of individuals, not by governments or political entities. Reconciliation is at the heart of MetroPAL.IS., yet ultimately the artist’s intention was to create a layered artwork that resists easy interpretation and defies expectations or preconceived notions as what it means to be an Israeli, or a Palestinian-and a New Yorker, or by extension, an American. The commissioning and presentation of this multiple-channel immersive HD video installation originated with and was supported by the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. Its presentation at the Benton is supported in part by the Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut, Storrs. Shimon Attie with Vale Bruck MetroPAL.IS., 2011 Eight-channel high-definition video installation Digital video, color, sound; 11:41 minutes Editor and audio post-production: Paul Hill, Wexner Center for the Arts Production Managers: Neta Zwebner-Zaibert and Hilla Medalia (kNow Productions) Field Producer: Jamie Abrahams Commissioned by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Alfred J. Frueh, Poster for Horace Brodzky Exhibition, Linocut, 1918. Gift of Alfred J. & Nancy Frueh.
How do you build a university museum collection? In the case of the William Benton Museum of Art, it all began in 1933, when former Connecticut College of Agriculture President Charles Lewis Beach donated to the College many of the works that would comprise the Museum’s founding collection, accompanied by a trust fund for future acquisitions. By 1967 when the Museum was founded, the University’s collection had grown to include nearly 200 paintings and prints, and the Museum opened as the University Art Museum. The Museum was renamed the William Benton Museum of Art in 1971, and, in the years since, generous donations and endowments have allowed for the continued growth of the collection. Today, the Benton holds approximately 6,000 objects that span a period from the 15th century to the present and encompass a variety of styles, media, and cultures.
Taking Shape: Building The Benton’s Permanent Collection offers a behind-the-scenes look at various stages in the development of the Museum’s institutional holdings. The exhibition considers the multifaceted process of building a museum collection, acknowledging such factors as the geography, size, and mission of the collecting institution, the expertise of the director and curator, and the often unpredictable character of donations and funding.
Artists featured in the exhibition include American Impressionists Childe Hassam and William Irvine, whose works were among the first to grace the Benton’s walls. Works from well-known artists of the Abstract Expressionist era, such as Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell, that became part of the collections in the 1970s, are also among those on display. Additionally, thematic areas within the Benton collection are highlighted through examples of portraiture, ephemera, and genre scenes of urban America.
Alongside the diverse factors that have influenced the character of the Museum’s collection over the years, the Benton’s holdings have blossomed with form and intention. Taking Shape foregrounds the manner in which the Benton has emerged as a place for art, education, and culture for the University community and beyond.
September 4-October 14, 2012
Reception: Thursday, September 6, 5-7:30 pm
The East Gallery
For artistic variety, contemporaneity and quality, the annual Art and Art History Department studio faculty exhibition excels. The exhibition features a variety of media including painting, sculpture, illustration, graphic design, printmaking, photography, and installation art. This diverse body of works represents many of the most significant directions in contemporary art as well as the unique vision of each artist-faculty member. Thirteen faculty members from the Storrs and Torrington campuses are exhibiting this year. The featured artists in the exhibitionall of whom were on sabbatical during last academic year are Monica Bock, sculpture and installation; Cora Lynn Deibler, illustration; and Pamela Bramble, painting
September 4-October 14, 2012
Reception: Thursday, September 6, 5-7:30 pm
The Evelyn Simon Gilman Gallery
Max Klinger, A Glove, Plate 3, 1881, etching. The Naomi and Robert Dennison Fund.
“The dark side of life” is a quote from the German artist Max Klinger (1857-1920) when comparing painting to the graphic arts. Klinger said that the black and white abstraction of the graphic arts was better suited to depicting the emotional and social realities of contemporary life than the coloristic optimism of painting. His work embodied this dichotomy as did that of his fellow artists Alfred Rethel (1816-1859) and Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945). During the latter half of the 19th century, all three created narrative cycles of thematically related works in print media that dealt with the realities of life directly and indirectly. Their picture stories, as a genre of storytelling, were hardly new, and their most immediate predecessors were from the 18th century: William Hogarth’s “modern moral tales” and Francisco Goya’s Caprichos and Desastres. The three 19th-century artists confronted contemporary society with narratives about the consequences of societies deeply divided by class and economics or with imagery that dwelled on individual psychology.
Rethel’s Another Dance of Death (Auch ein Totentanz, 1849) is the best-known visual commentary on the revolutionary events in Europe in 1848. While the title of the six woodcut images is based on Hans Holbein the Younger’s Dance of Death published in 1538, Rethel’s image of Death is as a seducer of the lower classes to riot to subvert the social and political order, but their actions result only in death and destruction. The thrust of Rethel’s visual commentary is reactionary and anti-republican, and has little sympathy for the lower and middle classes. His imagery, however, is both powerful and sarcastic, and found such a huge audience that the number of folios printed between 1848 and 1849 ran into the thousands.
Käthe Kollwitz’s 1897 narrative cycle The Weavers’ Revolt (Ein Weberaufstand) stands in striking contrast to Rethel’s position. Based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1893 play The Weavers (Die Weber), the narrative relates in generalized terms the events of an equally abortive revolt by Silesian weavers in 1844; an uprising that again leads only to death and destruction and not to change. Kollwitz’s sympathies, however, lie with the peasant workers and the intensely difficult economic circumstances under which they lived. Both Rethel’s and Kollwitz’s narratives serve political ends, and their differences reflect the increasingly complex social picture of 19th-century Europe.
Max Klinger, like Rethel and Kollwitz, focused on the “dark side of life,” but for him it was more the individual than the social group. By “dark side,” Klinger meant psychological figments of the imagination, the sordid and the abnormal, the good and the bad of reality and of the psyche. In varying degrees these qualities are seen in Klinger’s narrative cycles that carry titles like Eve and the Future, Dramas, A Life and On Death, Part I and Part II. The most famous of his narrative tales and the most psychologically complex, however, was the cycle of ten etched plates comprising his 1881 story, A Glove (Ein Handschuh), which centers on the psychological turmoil of the protagonist who has found and kept the dropped glove of an unknown and beautiful woman. This sexual and fetishistic fantasy resonates in the 20th century, and it predates Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams by two decades.
Besides these three folios, two other narrative series by Klinger and Kollwitz are presented in “The Dark Side of Life.” The five sets together represent the emerging interest in 19th-century Europe in narrative series that thematically engage the modern world and whose visualization does not rely on religious or mythological premises. Rather the modern world is seen in an unconventional and oft times searing light.
Philadelphia sculptor Leo Sewell (b. 1945) grew up in Annapolis near a naval community dump where he began playing with its found objects before he was ten. With the help of his father and access to his father’s workshop, he began creating assemblages using fasteners and welding. While in college in the 1960s, he studied modern artwriting a Master’s thesis on the Use of the Found Object in Dada and Surrealismand decided to dedicate his life to making sculptures from manufactured objects. Over the subsequent fifty years, he has produced more than 4,000 sculptures. Sewell’s naturalistic creations are composed of recognizable objects of plastic, metal and wood that are selected for their color, shape, texture, durability, and patina. Using nails, bolts and screws, he assembles the sculptures into a variety of subjects and sizes including a house cat and other animals, a life-size lady and other figures, a forty-foot Statue of Liberty hand and torch and other installations. On exhibition will be more than a dozen of his colorful works, all of them green, both whimsical and serious, and the offspring of trash heaps, yard sales and flea markets.
Leo Sewell, Boxer, mixed media.Leo Sewell, Teddy Bear, mixed media.
Sam Barber, Summer Path, 1989, oil on masonite. Gift of the Artist.
Four Seasons takes visitors on a visual journey through the diverse scenes and activities that characterize a year. Drawn from the Benton’s collection of late 19th- to late 20th-century American art, the works in this exhibition reflect the artists’ enduring interest in the surrounding world and a lasting tradition of defining American identity in time and place. Among the featured artists are Reginald Marsh, Maurice Prendergast, Winslow Homer, and Fairfield Porter.
American fascination with the landscape has generally expressed itself in rural settings, but the urban environment has provided inspiration as well. Spring in the City, a wood engraving after Winslow Homer, offers one example. Although Homer is best known for his seascapes, he began his career as an illustrator working in New York City. Originally published in the April 17, 1858 issue of Harper’s Weekly, Spring in the City is an urban scene and among the earliest works included in the exhibition. It is joined by five other Homer wood engravings also from the famous New York journal.
Outdoor editorialist Hal Borland wrote, April is a promise that May is bound to keep, a sentiment embodied in Frank Alfred Bicknell’s painting April Morning (ca. 1920s). It transforms the hope for warm days into pastel tones. In Unfolding Year (1924), Carleton Wiggins presents his version of springtime optimism in the form of a flock of sheep grazing in a verdant pasture. Landscape (1891) by Robert William Vonnoh has the warm tones of a summer afternoon, with strong sun and saturated colors. The same attention to the effects of light on the landscape during a long summer’s day appears in Sunset and Lilies (1960) by Fairfield Porter.
Fairfield Porter, Sunset and Lilies, 1960, oil on canvas. Gift of Mrs. Fairfield Porter.
“Autumn is a second spring where every leaf is a flower,” remarked Nobel Laureate Albert Camus, and many artists have shared his delight in the beauty of the fall season. Among them is Maurice Prendergast, whose watercolor Early Fall, New Hampshire (ca. 1912) is dominated by brightly colored trees that dwarf both the houses and the horse and carriage that compete for the viewer’s attention. The rich reds and deep oranges that characterize Landscape (ca. 1890) by William Louis Sonntag remind us of the warmth of an autumn day.
In the painting Mantle of Winter (1924), Guy C. Wiggins, son of Carleton Wiggins, depicts the solitary and mysterious nature of winter. The painting mimics a thick layer of snow that covers the countryside revealing the contours of the land but not what lies beneath. Contemporary artist Lori Nix, who credits 19th-century landscape painting as an important influence, reflects on the dangers of winter in her photograph Ice Storm (1999). The subject here is not an actual landscape, but a constructed scene built from models and miniatures.
The four seasons have been an artistic theme dating back to the Middle Ages. It speaks to the yearly renewal of the natural world and the cycle of human experience.
Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Early Fall, New Hampshire, oil, ca 1912. Gift of Mrs. Eugenie Prendergast.
The Benton is pleased to present an exhilarating exhibition of works by the MFA degree candidates in the Class of 2012: David Cool (video/installation / new media); Yelizaveta Masalimova (mixed media / sculptor and printmaker); Alyssa Matthews (painter); David Sinaguglia (sculpture and multimedia); and Heather Stamenov (painter).
Daniel Gordon, July 19, 2009 from the series Thirty-One Days, C-print, 2009.
In concert with the School of Fine Arts’ digital media initiatives and the debut of the interdisciplinary Digital Media Center early last year, the Benton presents an exhibition focused on the social and creative impact of digital media’s most ubiquitous arena: the Internet. From the development of the largely text-based and specialized World Wide Web of the 1990s through to the highly visual, user-generated Web 2.0 of the past decade, artists have continuously found inspiration in the form, context, and material of the Internet for their art practice.
Screenshots brings together a group of national and international artists working in response to the production, circulation, and consumption of visual material online. Starting at the site of the computer screen, these artists appropriate and alter images and video from websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Craigslist. Reformatted and reframed through the process of collating, the digital image finds a place within the physical space of the gallery. This shift in environment moves the focus from the technology of the Internet to the activities, behaviors, and experiences that technology fosters for users both online and offline.
In his 1927 essay Mass Ornament, cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer stated that to understand the character of a moment one should look to the inconspicuous surface-level expressions of that time. Kracauer’s investment in analyzing the unconscious production of his surroundings for its larger meaning offers an apt approach for confronting the deluge of Web-based visual content. The screen and the images it offers are all surface; yet, through accumulation the six artists in Screenshots aim for depth, highlighting collective experiences of our contemporary moment and considering the impact of the Internet on the field of art. Screenshots features works by Pauline Bastard, Natalie Bookchin, Daniel Gordon, Phillip Maisel, Jon Rafman and Penelope Umbrico.
Curator: Ally Walton, University of Connecticut M.A. candidate, Art History, 2012.
