REMINDERS:
To visit the R. W. Norton Art Gallery website, go to http://www.rwnaf.org/.
Ongoing Special Exhibits: Turning Wood Into Art will be on display through January 3, 2010.
Ultra Realistic Sculpture by Marc Sijan will be on display through December 20, 2009.
The next First Saturday Tour
on November 7, 2009 at 2 p.m. is It Runs in the Family.
The next Saturday Speaker Charles Brutus will present Code Cracker: Unlocking the Hidden Messages of the Negro Spirituals on November 14, 2009 at 2 p.m.
Around the Gallery
Editor
Kristi Kohl
Contributors
Everl Adair
Gary D. Ford
Jennifer DeFratis
Kip Dehart
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Robert Frost once famously said of America, “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” For the first century and a half of its existence, America’s English-speaking immigrant culture thought of itself as British. Even after the eruption of political thought and action that transformed separate colonies into a united republic, Americans as a whole felt historically cast adrift, a nation and a people who had not yet formulated a sense of identity independent of old world roots. A key instrument that largely forged that sense of an American self was a group of artists collectively known as the Hudson River School.
An American landscape movement beginning in 1825, the Hudson River School soared in popularity from 1840 to 1870. The Hudson River artists were both a product of their time and a significant influence on it. Artists who lived and worked in New York, including Thomas Cole and Asher Durand, dominated the early years of the school. They shared a philosophic outlook as well as a common style, technique, and subject--the Hudson River and the Catskills and Adirondacks that bordered it. Just as importantly, they felt a keen sense of mission in creating an image of America not only for itself, but also for the outside world. John Dewey, philosopher, educator and writer, later wrote that art conveys the knowledge of how to perceive the world around us. The Hudson River artists were the first to teach us how to perceive America.
The father of the Hudson River School was, ironically, an immigrant. Thomas Cole was born in England and came to America at seventeen. Despite a lack of formal training, he began painting and persuaded a framer in New York to display some of his work in his shop window. One day, Asher Durand and John Trumbull, then America’s leading artist, happened to stroll by that window and history was made. Trumbull became Cole’s mentor and booster, Durand his follower, and the movement that would become known as the Hudson River School was launched.
Borrowing from the Romanticism of James Fenimore Cooper and the nature worship of the New England transcendentalists, Cole evolved a new style of landscape painting that sought the sublime. His first rule was that painting must possess fidelity with regard to observed fact; no more copying Europeans. The second was that artists were to strive for the ideal: the depiction of a benevolent God through a benevolent nature. That meant no sordid scenes of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” as Longfellow phrased it. The third and final rule was that each work should be an expression of lofty ideas, following the dictum of Ralph Waldo Emerson that every “natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.”
The first “rule” of the Hudson River School, fidelity to observed fact, didn’t mean they painted exactly what they saw exactly the way they saw it. None of the Hudson River devotees ascribed to the method of painting known as en plein air, when artists took canvases into the countryside and painted what they observed. Instead, they made sketches and notations, then returned to their well-equipped New York studios to paint large, idealized composites of the best of what they had seen and recorded. These artists were not interested in painting anything as limited as reality as we would define it today; they were attempting to render God’s presence in the natural world, a different and higher reality.
After the Civil War, however, critics and audiences began to turn away from the art of the Hudson River School. A public that had suffered through such a long, bitter, and bloody conflict lacked the optimism and the transcendent sense of God’s benign presence in the world around them that had animated those artists. In his famous elegiac poem about the death of Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Doorway Bloom’d”, Walt Whitman asks what pictures will go into the burial chamber with the dead leader, and answers:
Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes,
With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright
With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air.
It is obvious whose painting he means. As critic Robert Hughes phrases it, “Like a dead pharaoh, Whitman’s Lincoln takes art into the grave with him – and the art is Hudson River School landscape.” By 1883, the most influential art critic of his time, Clarence Cook, pronounced the movement “defunct or moribund.” By the turn of the century, their paintings could hardly be given away. In 1912, a Cole painting went for $70, and in 1916, a John Frederick Kensett for just $6. Some were just included in the sales of the houses in which they hung. Others were deliberately destroyed.
Interest has grown since the middle of the 20th century, and continues to grow. In 1979, Church’s The Icebergs was auctioned for a phenomenal $2.5 million and a recent auction set the list price for a Thomas Moran between $2 and $3 million. Ultimately, however, the value of these paintings has nothing to do with monetary worth. What they capture for us is priceless – the moment in our history when we were truly born as a people, at one with the country around us, unbound by any sense of limitation, and filled with the conviction that America was destined to be the greatest nation on earth. The golden sunlight that shines in so much of their work warms a world filled with purpose, possibility, and promise. In the paintings of the Hudson River School, we are forever young.
Everl Adair, Director of Research and Rare Collections
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Landscape, Sunset (1849) by Asher B. Durand
Main Building
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Hudson River School artists represented in the
R.W. Norton Art Gallery:
Thomas Cole (1801-1848)
Asher Durand (1796-1886)
Frederic Church (1826-1900)
Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)
Jasper Cropsey (1823-1900)
Thomas Moran (1837-1926)
Daniel Huntington (1816-1906)
William Louis Sonntag (1822-1900)
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TIPS FROM KIP: The Ugly Duckling of Trees
If you are trying to decide which trees to plant in your yard this fall, you may want to consider the Chinese pistache (Pistacia chinensis). You will not be disappointed with the selection. As indicated in the October 2001 issue of Southern Living, the Chinese pistache is “quite simply one of the garden's prettiest and most trouble-free trees. Acid soil? It likes it. Alkaline soil? Likes that too. Monsoon rain? No problem. Withering drought? No big deal. Bugs and diseases? Just forget about 'em.” How much easier can choosing and maintaining a tree get?
As its name suggests, the tree is native to central and western China. No, it does not produce the edible pistachio nut. It’s oval, rounded canopy creates a wonderful shade tree. Over time, mature lower branches droop forming a spreading crown. Green blooms in April and May provide food for insects, while birds and rodents love the bright red fruit that ripens to dark blue. The lustrous dark green leaves of summer turn a brilliant scarlet in fall.
The Chinese pistache prefers full sun. As mentioned previously, this long-lived hardy ornamental tree tolerates heat and drought, and resists pests. Pistaches can grow two to three feet each year and are capable of reaching sixty feet in height with a 25- to 35-foot spread. Known as the “Ugly Duckling” of trees, the Chinese pistache begins as unattractive, asymmetrical and misshapen, with poor branch structure. However, with some early pruning the awkward sapling transforms into a magnificent ornamental tree.
You can see some Chinese Pistache specimens in the Norton landscape at the corner of Creswell Avenue and Thora Drive.
Kip Dehart, Landscape Director
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OUT IN THE GARDENS: Xeriscape, or Zeroscape
Stroll around to our “backyard,” and you’ll see a new garden that only needs sips of water and requires less maintenance. The Norton landscaping crew has recently added a xeriscape behind the north wing of the museum. Although rare in our corner of northwest Louisiana, xeriscaping has risen as a popular trend in gardening, especially in the southwestern United States. The artistic display of plants, rocks, and architecture is a sight to behold.
Xeros is Greek for dry. Xeriscape landscaping, also known as zeroscaping or smart scaping, is a type of gardening that conserves water by using plants that need little moisture. Proper bed design takes full advantage of rainfall and avoids losing water to evaporation and run-off. In addition to reducing or eliminating the need for supplemental irrigation, these gardens typically need less weeding, raking, and other maintenance procedures.
Despite the commonly held belief that these gardens grow prickly with cacti and is spread with rocks, ours sports other growth, with plants that are regionally and seasonally appropriate. Specific plants used depend upon the climate. Although the garden includes cacti and rocks, it features many other shrubs and trees native to southwestern United States and South America that can weather our wet days. Acacia, aloysia, dasylirion, agave, cactus, juniper, and sedum are just a few plants that thrive in full sun, adapt well to drought, and like life in northwest Louisiana.
Not only does the Norton’s xeriscape display unusual plants, it also consists of a beautiful exhibit of rocks, and waterfall. The green foliage, white rocks, and smooth, blue beach pebbles contrast nicely with the newly constructed bridge leading to the Fairy Tale Gallery courtyard and apiary. The next time you visit the museum, meander through the xeriscape, take a photo by one of the conspicuously positioned boulders, or just rest on the bench near the waterfall. Take in the scenery of the nearby arid landscape or enjoy the lush wooded grounds in the distance. Either way, you will find no other destination in northwest Louisiana quite like it.
Kristi Kohl, Staff Researcher
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VOICES FROM THE ARCHIVES: Private John Gipson, U. S. Army
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| Mr. John Gipson, Jr. at the Ruston Public Library in Ruston, Louisiana on June 8, 2006 |
In World War II African-Americans, especially those in the South like John Gipson, fought on two fronts--against the enemy overseas, and for civil rights here at home. In an odd and tragic way, he says, World War II was “a great help for black people.”
When World War II came about certain people were just tired of being ignored and treated like slaves. This made a difference. We just said we’re not going to take it anymore.
Interviewer: So, you’re thinking that World War II was maybe the beginning of Civil Rights for us?
Yeah, I really do. I really do. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not taking anything from Martin Luther King and all the rest of them, but I’m saying that the beginning of World War II was the beginning I believe of it. I really do.
Mr. Gipson served as a truck driver in the European Theater’s famed Red Ball Express. He is among more than 400 men and women from the Shreveport area who graciously gave their time to tell us their life stories of service and sacrifice. We’re preserving those stories as part of our Oral History Project, an ongoing effort to interview members of the World War II generation, along with veterans of subsequent American conflicts. We also want to hear from eyewitnesses and participants in the civil rights struggle, as well as those who shaped the economical and cultural heritage of the city and the nation.
Click here to view additional photographs and to listen to the audio of the interview with Mr. Gipson.
If you or someone you know would like to share stories with us, please call (318) 865-4201, or contact ohp@rwnaf.org.
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FEATURED ARTIST IN THE COLLECTION: Robert William Addison
Originally from Boise, Idaho, Robert Addison launched his artistic career during a tour with the army in World War II when the Red Cross exhibited a group of his watercolors. After the war, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago and later supported himself as an industrial illustrator. As an artist, his chief concern was the disappearance of “Americana,” such as main street shop fronts and nineteenth and early twentieth century residences. These became the subject of his paintings. Addison’s works were particularly noteworthy for his handling of “the fall of light and shadow,” evident in New Orleans Façade, #1 (right).
Everl Adair, Director of Research and Rare Collections
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FEATURED ARTWORK IN THE COLLECTION: Pressed Glass
The technique for producing pressed glass didn’t emerge until the nineteenth century. When it did, the general public could then afford glassware for everyday use. Essentially the process uses a plunger to press molten glass into a mold. In 1825 John P. Bakewell, an American, developed the first commercial glass-pressing machine in order to make glass doorknobs. In 1827, Deming Jarves of the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company at Sandwich, Massachusetts began using his own technique to manufacture glassware decorated with fancy patterns. Extremely intricate combinations of dots, circles, diamonds, leaves, and garlands covered surfaces of glass articles, something that more traditional methods of cutting and engraving could not accomplish. By 1833, pressed glass was also being made in England and from there it spread to the rest of Europe.
Two different companies, Gillinder & Sons and Central Glass, created glass on display at the Norton. Gillinder & Sons glass currently on exhibit includes the “Westward Ho!” series, complete with Indians, buffaloes, and prairie sod houses, and the African series, which features lions. The company was established in 1861, but it wasn’t until 1876, America’s centennial year, when business really took off. During Philadelphia’s Centennial Celebration, Gillinder and Sons, much to everyone’s amazement, set up a miniature glass factory right on the grounds, to demonstrate their glass-making skills. People thought that they were crazy to go through such a herculean effort. In retrospect, it was a brilliant move.
Gillinder and Sons had accurately gauged that that fairgoers really wanted was a small keepsake to take home. They produced twenty-four different souvenirs, including a replica of their lion’s head as a paperweight, seen on the African series dishware. Their most popular souvenir was a Cinderella slipper. They sold over 100,000 slippers in the six-month fair. The company has recently began reissuing the famed slipper with a new marking of “GB” (for Gillinder Brothers), which distinguishes it from original souvenirs that are stamped with “Centennial Exhibition.”
Like many glass companies, Gillinder and Sons survived the Great Depression by making a product far less expensively than most competitors.
The Norton also displays pieces from Central Glass Company. The Wheeling, West Virginia enterprise was established in the spring of 1863 and for almost forty years turned out fine glassware. In 1892, the company issued two different coin patterns. The first, the Colombian Coin, celebrated the 400th anniversary of the Christopher Columbus voyage to the New World.
The other coin pattern included exact pressed replicas of U.S. coins dated 1892, including dollars, half-dollars, quarters, twenty-cent pieces, dimes, and half-dimes (now known as nickels). The coins were so accurate in detail that the federal government feared afraid the plates used in the glass-pressing process could be stolen or abused to make counterfeit coins. It ordered production halted and the plates destroyed after only five months of manufacture.
Jennifer DeFratis, Tour and Special Events Coordinator
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| African Series Compote by Gillinder & Sons on display in the Main Building |
Westward Ho! Oval Covered Dish by Gillinder & Sons on display in the Main Building |
U. S. Coin Pattern Compote by Central Glass Company on display in the
Main Building |
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BEHIND THE SCENES: Phil Lynch, Director of the Oral History Project
When he interviews service men and women, Phil Lynch, director of the Oral History Project of the R.W. Norton Art Gallery, shares with them a real personal connection. He’s a veteran, too, having served in both the United States Army and Air Force for twenty-two years.
The mission of the project is to document the stories of individuals who served in and witnessed World War II and subsequent wars and conflicts, as well as persons who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement, the musical history of Louisiana, and the oil and gas industry.
Mr. Lynch discovers interested participants many ways, including announcements through newspapers and by contacting various local organizations, including the VFW and American Legion, and churches. After reading brochures in the Norton museum’s lobby, many wives, children, and grandchildren of veterans call to inquire about the program. Most, however, result from one friend telling another. “The most productive method is by word of mouth. Someone I interview tells me about a friend who also served,” he comments.
The Oral History Project, which actually began as an experiment almost 10 years ago, has grown to more than 400 participants.
Along with veterans, Mr. Lynch also interviews women who served in war industries in the 1940s. Commonly referred to as “Rosie the Riveter,” these women performed many different jobs in war industries by producing aircraft, weapons, ammunition, and other supplies.
Others from the World War II era he has interviewed include victims who survived the Holocaust, a Japanese woman who was a teenager in war-time Japan, and Americans who witnessed life on the home front as children. Meanwhile, veterans of the Korean War, Vietnam, and Desert Storm conflicts significantly contribute to the project’s collection of oral and written documentation. Mr. Lynch would also welcome veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Oral History Project staff would like to interview people who have been active in the music industry in Shreveport, as well, both in recording and performing (ie. the Louisiana Hayride or on KWKH). “Quite a few very famous musicians got their start here, and there are still artists in Shreveport who performed with them,” he says.
Shreveport also has an extensive history in the oil and gas industry. Many Shreveporters played an important role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, too. Mr. Lynch is always looking for folks who were active here in those days and would like to share their experiences with him.
If you would like to share your story, please click here to contact us or call 865-4201 ext. 122.
Kristi Kohl, Staff Researcher
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SATURDAY SPEAKER: Cracking the ‘Code’ of Spirituals with Charles Brutus
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| Funeral Procession by Clementine Hunter |
With voices lifted high, African-Americans in bondage in the antebellum South sang hymns now known as Negro spirituals. Did the simple words of faith and hope, however, also contain deeper, hidden meanings?
Charles Brutus may reveal some answers in “Code Cracker: Unlocking the Hidden Messages of the Negro Spirituals,” on November 14 at R.W. Norton Art Gallery. Brutus, music instructor at Shreveport’s South Highlands Elementary Magnet School, is the presenter in the museum’s “Saturday Speaker Series,” held each month at 2 p.m. There is no admission charge.
Brutus, who is also choir director of St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Shreveport, will lift his own baritone voice in singing spirituals such as “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,” “Every Time I Feel the Spirit,” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”
Those tunes that rang the rafters of simple meeting houses, soared to heaven during work in fields, and wafted softly in the early candlelight of evenings, Brutus says, also may have contained directions on escaping to freedom.
“Some think they have secret codes,” he comments of the lyrics. “Others don’t believe that. I personally think they are what they are.”
Those tunes are some of America’s earliest music. When African slaves embraced Christianity, he says, they created their spirituals as versions of hymns that whites sang. Many of the songs, therefore, have Scottish roots. Lyrics and tempo also may have varied throughout the years. Most of the songs were not codified until the 1860s. In one form or another they survived into the next two centuries.
“We sang them in my church when I was growing up,” he says. Although many younger persons now consider them “old folks’ music,” he continues, contemporary Christian secular music sprang from these spirituals.
Sly message or humble hymn, Negro spirituals provided joy and solace, and expressed the yearning for freedom from bearing another man’s burden. Like all early tunes, their echoes provided a firm foundation for other, later forms of music all Americans have come to love.
Brutus, director of the South Highlands’ Tiger Chorus, composes music for children and adult ensembles, and has served as chorus director for the Shreveport Opera. He is also founding director of the Northwest Louisiana Children’s Chorus. Brutus holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Northeast Louisiana State University, and a level three certification in orff-schulwerk (a process of teaching sacred music education to children) from the University of Memphis. He is also a recipient of a Fulbright Memorial Fund Scholarship to Japan.
Gary Ford, Staff Writer
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FROM THE VAULTS: Amor Caritas (1898) by Augustus Saint-Gaudens
The Norton owns a forty-inch bronze of Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Beaux-Arts style, Amor Caritas, which translates roughly to "Angel of Charity." Another example of this bronze was recently described in a Christie’s auction catalog, which states that Saint-Gaudens’ subject “was derived from several earlier commissions incorporating draped female figures and portraits of his favorite model, Davida Clark. Among these are his 1879-80 project for the Edwin D. Morgan tomb (which was never completed), his 1881-83 caryatid figures for a mantle piece in Cornelius Vanderbilt II's New York mansion, and his 1887 design for the Ann Maria Smith tomb at the Island Cemetery in Newport, Rhode Island.”
Christie’s continues to explain, “Dissatisfied with the translation into stone of his design for the Smith tomb, and inspired by John Singer Sargent's praise of the model, Saint-Gaudens reworked his design in 1898. Amor Caritas was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 where it was awarded the Grand Prize.”
The French government purchased a bronze cast of this relief for the Luxembourg Museum. In 1918, the work was rendered in gilt-bronze for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Saint-Gaudens cast approximately twenty reductions of Amor Caritas (of which the Norton’s piece is an example) in response to the Salon reception and to the public's enthusiasm for the model.
Kristi Kohl, Staff Researcher
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| Photo courtesy of Christie’s |
NOTE: The Norton's Amor Caritas will be on display during the Christmas exhibit which will run from December 8th through January 3rd.
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DID YOU KNOW?
The R.W. Norton Art Gallery now maintains an apiary, an area where bees are kept, outside the Fairy Tale Gallery. The Norton joins approximately 500 other bee colonies in Caddo, Bossier and Red River parishes, all of which are maintained by Hummer & Son, of Bossier City, from whom we acquired our hives.
“Bees generally live for four to six weeks,” comments William Hummer, owner of the business. “Summer bees live a hard, short life. During the winter, the bees can live up to four months.”
Our colonies, says Mr. Hummer, held approximately 10,000 bees when they were delivered early last summer. With the natural decline of bees over the busy summer, however, he now estimates that our apiary population hovers around 7,500.
Although their metabolism slows during winter, bees do not hibernate. You should still see activity around the colonies on sunny days through autumn and winter. Worker bees maintain the colony through the cooler seasons. The queen bee, however, will be taking a much-deserved break. She stops laying eggs around Thanksgiving and won’t resume until early January.
During peak production of brood (the early life stages of bees), the queen may lay more than 1,500 eggs a day. Because the bee population grows quickest in late winter and early spring, Mr. Hummer predicts that our colony will double in size within a month, starting in February 2010. At that time, you may see thousands of bees doing orientation flights.
The first honey and wax extraction at the apiary should occur mid-March through mid-June, with a second harvest mid-June to September. Mr. Hummer believes that around 115 pounds of honey will be taken from each colony, with six pounds of wax extracted from all four boxes. Extracted honey and wax will be bottled up and given back to the Norton.
Take a look at our apiary this fall. While many animals are preparing for winter hibernation, our bees will still be busy producing wax and honey!
If you would like to learn more about beekeeping, you can attend the 48th Louisiana Beekeepers Associations' Convention in Shreveport on December 4 and 5. For more information, see http://www.labeekeepers.org/.
Kristi Kohl, Staff Researcher
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WORTH THE TRIP: Portland Museum of Art
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| Sweet Dreams, Baby! (1965) by Roy Lichtenstein
(Photo courtesy of the Portland Museum of Art) |
Since its founding in 1892, the Portland Museum of Art in Oregon has amassed a significant collection of American paintings and sculptures, many by the same artists on display at the R. W. Norton Art Gallery. Like the Norton, the Portland collection provides an overview of the history of American art. It exhibits early portraits by Gilbert Stuart, magnificent depictions of Mount Hood by Albert Bierstadt, and landscape paintings by many other great artists such as Thomas Moran and George Inness. The collection also includes works by American Impressionists Childe Hassam and J. Alden Weir, including paintings created during their visits to Portland in the early 1900s.
Word and Image/Word as Image, a special exhibition until November 29, examines the relationship between word and image and how they engage audiences in 500 years of prints--from the Renaissance to today. Assembled from the permanent collection as well as local private holdings, the exhibition features nearly seventy works by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Käthe Kollwitz, Georges Braque, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Miro, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
“Printed words and printed pictures have been associated in myriad ways. This exhibition presents some of the most salient ways in which they have been used together,” comments Annette Dixon, the museum’s curator of prints and drawings. “It explores how language affects the image’s meaning – supporting or enhancing it, contradicting it, or becoming the image itself – and these strategies’ impact on visual communication.”
The exhibition focuses on four groups of works. The section devoted to late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century prints includes a page from the renowned Nuremberg Chronicle, the most lavishly illustrated book of the late fifteenth century. Prints of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often present ambiguous messages, particularly in commentaries about society, as in works by Francisco de Goya.
With the emergence of Pop Art in the mid-twentieth century, prints drew from everyday subject matter and consumer culture in an attempt to communicate with the general public. Examples include Andy Warhol’s large-scale renditions of Campbell’s Soup cans and Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-book style portrayals of melodramatic subjects. Since the late twentieth century, artists have explored language as a subject and used words to express social concerns. Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays reflects voices in American society that range to the extremes of the political spectrum.
Portland Museum of Art: 1219 SW Park Avenue, Portland, Oregon 97205. Hours: Tuesday and Wednesday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday and Friday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday 12 noon to 5 p.m. Closed major holidays. Admission to the museum: $12.00 for adults; $9.00 for seniors and students; Free for Children 17 years and younger. For more information, call (503) 226-2811 or see http://portlandartmuseum.org.
Kristi Kohl, Staff Researcher
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