Young GALLERY
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Richard B. Coe (aka Richard Blauvelt Coe)
(Selma, Alabama, 1904 - 1978, New York, New York) Birmingham Steel Mill 1934 Twentieth Century Oil on canvas 20 1/8 in. x 24 1/8 in. (51.12 cm x 61.28 cm) Signed and dated, center verso: "COE 34" Gift of the artist 1940.0031 Richard Coe painted "Birmingham Steel Mill" the same year he expounded his philosophy that American painting should reflect American populist values. It illustrates his dictum in that it beautifies the technology that was at the core of the Alabama's largest city’s economic and political power. The mechanism of the furnace, surrounded by steam and sparks, is the sole focus of the composition, the human workers subservient in scale and barely visible within the gloom. While Coe dramatized and romanticized industrial development, which had become a key component of the New South’s economy, by minimizing the human presence he suggested that it was a mixed blessing at best. The economic promise was encouraging, but the dark, cavernous factory setting speaks of the dehumanizing environment that would displace the family farms at the heart of the agrarian economy, fueled by the Southern sunshine. |
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Charles Shannon
(Montgomery, Alabama, 1914 - 1996, Montgomery, Alabama) The Lover 1937 Twentieth Century Oil on canvas 30 1/4 in. x 45 in. (76.84 cm x 114.3 cm) Signed and dated, lower right: "Chas. Shannon '37" Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts Association Purchase and Gift of The Blount Foundation, Algie H. Neill, Fred Richard, Babette L. and Charles H. Wampold, Charlotte Weil, Jane and S. Roberts Blount, Martha and Tranum Fitzpatrick, Charlotte and George Goodwyn, Joan and Frank Loeb, Martha and John Cameron, Mary Lynne and Herbert F. Levy, Patricia and Al J. Sansone, Eleanor and Eugene Ballard, Kittie and Jack Norment, Edna M. Rosen, Hilda and Julian Slager, Melinda and Barry Wilson, Priscilla and Quentin Crommelin and anonymous donor 1986.0006 The Lover" was inspired by Charles Shannon’s experience of rural black Southern culture. While he portrayed the people with whom he lived and worked, he maintained that his themes came from his imagination. At the time of his retrospective in 1981, Shannon recalled painting "The Lover." “I had a studio on the second floor of a servant’s house near downtown Montgomery. One night in the fall I began working on a sketch in charcoal—the image just came to me.” He embarked on the canvas the next morning and had finished it by the end of the day. With its elongated figure and dark, brooding coloration, "The Lover" demonstrates Shannon’s highly expressive style. It conveys his empathy for the suffering of the rural poor through the integration of the tortured figure, with its attenuated limbs and bony fingers, into an environment of ominous portent demonstrated in the moonlit, blustery sky. This subject closely relates Shannon’s work to the Regionalist and the Mexican muralist schools of painting that flourished in the 1930s. "The Lover" won third prize at the exhibition of contemporary painting at the San Francisco International Exposition of 1939. |
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Raphael Soyer
(Borisoglebsk, Tambov, Russia, 1899 - 1987, New York, New York) Woman with Green Dress 1979 Twentieth Century Oil on canvas 20 1/16 in. x 16 in. (50.96 cm x 40.64 cm) Gift of Dr. and Mrs. M. Bonner Engelhardt 2009.0014.0002 |
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John Heliker (aka John Edward Heliker)
(Yonkers, New York, 1909 - 2000, Bar Harbor, Maine) Maine Rocks ca. 1946 Twentieth Century Oil on canvas 24 1/4 in. x 35 1/8 in. (61.6 cm x 89.22 cm) Signed, lower right corner: Heliker Gift of Babette L. and Charles H. Wampold 1995.0009.0001 "Maine Rocks" is representative of Heliker's representational style, reflecting the influences of Cezanne and Marsden Hartley. The piece is strongly reminiscent of other Heliker works from this period in its subject (a Maine landscape; he spent his summers on Cranberry Island, Maine), emphasis on angular forms, and the use of large areas of blended color bordered by a dark outline. |
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William Lewis Lester
(Graham, Texas, 1910 - 1991, Austin, Texas) South of Study Butte 1952 Twentieth Century Oil on Masonite 23 5/8 in. x 29 5/8 in. (60.01 cm x 75.25 cm) Gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; Childe Hassam Fund 1954.0003 |
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Abraham Rattner
(Poughkeepsie, New York, 1893 - 1978, New York, New York) Composition with Three Figures 1952 Twentieth Century Oil on canvas 35 1/4 in. x 45 3/4 in. (89.54 cm x 116.21 cm) Gift of Babette L. and Charles H. Wampold 2006.0010 Rattner was born in Poughkeepsie, NY and studied at the Corcoran School of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He served as a camouflage expert in World War 1 and that experience may have influenced his subsequent painting style with its faces and figures that seem to dissolve and reappear amidst fractured painting surfaces. An Expressionist, he absorbed Cubist and Futurist influences, rendering his commentary on the human condition in high-keyed color on countless canvasses. His themes range from crucifixions to landscapes. His abstracted figurative forms with their roughly encrusted surfaces evoke a vulnerability wholly understandable to his contemporaries who had seen the horrors of The Great War, the rise of Nazi Germany, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. |
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Irving Kriesberg
(Chicago, Illiniois, 1919 - 2009, New York, New York) Portrait of Irene 1957 Twentieth Century Oil on canvas 22 3/8 in. x 19 5/8 in. (56.83 cm x 49.85 cm) Anonymous gift 2004.0014 |