February Issue 2002
Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, NC, Features Art from the Smithsonian
The exhibition The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, will be on view at Charlotte, NC's Mint Museum of Art through Apr. 21, 2002, provides an insightful look, through 60 art masterpieces, of the era in which America assumed a leading role on the world stage.
The term the gilded age came from the popular 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, a parody of the shallow materialism of the nation's nouveau riche following the Industrial Revolution in contrast with the golden age of Greece. America's Gilded Age, the three decades prior to World War I, was a period of conspicuous consumption by 1% of Americans who owned 50% of the country's wealth. But it was also an age of prairie Populism, mass immigration and organizing labor that combined with the growth of capital and personal wealth in creating the start of what best-selling author Harold Evans called The American Century.
"The United States became the world's leading economic, military and cultural power, surpassing the great empires in its relentless inventiveness and optimism," wrote Evans. "It was a triumph of its faith in its founding idea of political and economic freedom."
"Great ambition characterized this period in America," said Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. "Artists and patrons rose to new heights in collaboration, as the 1876 Centennial engendered a strong sense of national pride and eagerness to match Europe's aristocracies."
John Singer Sargent
The Gilded Age
is one of eight exhibitions in Treasures to Go from the
Smithsonian American Art Museum, touring the nation through 2002.
The Principal Financial Group® is a proud partner in presenting
these treasures to the American people. The exhibition's Charlotte
venue is made possible by generous underwriting from Bank of America.
Additional support comes from the Charlotte Observer and
SouthPark Mall. A heightened sophistication permeates the portraits
in the exhibition. Society portraitist John Singer Sargent posed
Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler (1893), whose family was heir
to John Jacob Astor's fortune, in his London studio, flanked by
old-master paintings. Cecilia Beaux portrayed her brother-in-law
Henry Sturgis Drinker, a hard-driving corporate railroad lawyer,
as relaxed and casual in Man with the Cat (1898), resplendent
in a cream-colored suit and pink shirt.
This was also an international age, when artists and their patrons
traveled widely to visit exotic cultures. Louis Comfort Tiffany's
Market Day Outside the Walls of Tangiers, Morocco (1873)
signals this interest and foreshadows the artist's later development
of opulent interiors. Near Eastern subjects were popular for their
lush color and languorous sensuality, as in Frederick Arthur Bridgman's
Cafe at Biskra, Algeria (1884) and H. Siddons Mowbray's
intimate Idle Hours (1895).
Vast fortunes amassed led to a wave of elegant townhouses, and these were settings for fine collections and decorations. Apollo with Cupids (1880-82), a decorative panel by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and John La Farge, once adorned the dining room of Cornelius Vanderbilt's Fifth Avenue mansion in New York City. The work is embellished with African mahogany, hammered bronze, colored marbles, mother-of-pearl and ivory.
American sculptors mastered the art of bronze casting during this period, learning to use its sleek surfaces and rich patinas to great decorative effect. Twelve bronzes are in the exhibition, ranging from Daniel Chester French's patriotic and restrained Concord Minute Man of 1775 (modeled in 1889) to Adolph Weinman's moody Descending Night and exuberant Rising Sun (1914-15). The most famous sculptor of the period was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, represented in this exhibition by several works, including an early model for the Diana (1889) that once graced the top of New York's Madison Square Garden. Four rare paintings by the visionary artist Albert Pinkham Ryder are in the exhibition, each a story of betrayal and redemption based on literary sources. Flying Dutchman (completed by 1887) portrays the legendary "phantom ship" with the glowing color, dramatic composition, and complex layered painting technique that made Ryder a favorite among collectors. The same complex technique causes his paintings to be unusually fragile, so the Smithsonian rarely lends his works. Special humidity controlled packing and shipping technology allows these works to be shared throughout America.
Winslow Homer, like Ryder, probed beneath the glitter of the Gilded Age to explore undercurrents of anxiety. High Cliff, Coast of Maine (1894) is among the greatest of Homer's late seascapes, a canvas filled with waves pounding on a rocky shore. These opposing forces of nature resonated in a society struggling with economic instability, labor unrest, and controversial new theories of Darwin and Freud.
The intimate world of women and children at
home, seen in An Interlude (1907) by William Sergeant Kendall,
offered refuge. Yet danger could invade even the sanctuary of
the home, as portrayed by J. Bond Francisco in "The Sick
Child" (1893), in which a mother keeps watch as her son hovers
between life and death.
Abbott
Handerson Thayer
Artists and their patrons shared an ambition
to present American civilization as having grown past its earlier
provincialism to full maturity, equal to Europe's much-admired
culture. Evocations of music abound, as in Childe Hassam's woman
at a piano called Improvisation (1899) and Thomas Dewing's
allegorical Music (about 1895), where a prevailing gold
palette evokes a musical tonality. Spiritual themes - countering
fears that Americans were overly materialistic---appear in Abbott
Thayer's four paintings in the exhibition, including the ever-popular
Angel (1887). Overall, the ambitions of individual artists and
patrons, and of the nation at large, combined to make the period
of the 1870s through the 1910s one of enormous achievement in
the visual arts. An illustrated book, The Gilded Age: Treasures
from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, authored by Elizabeth
Prelinger and co-published with Watson-Guptill Publications, a
division of BPI Communications, accompanies the exhibition. The
book, priced at $19.95, includes fifty color illustrations with
short discussions of each artwork.
More information and full itineraries for Treasures to Go
can be found on the Smithsonian American Art Museum web site at
(http://www.AmericanArt.si.edu).
For additional info on the Smithsonian American Art Museum or the Treasures to Go series, contact Lynn Gutter at 202/275-1591.
The Mint Museum of Art will present Fashions from the Gilded Age as a complement to the Smithsonian exhibition, on view through Feb. 24, 2002 in the Dickson Gallery. Ten costumes and accessories will showcase the variety of women's fashions of the period, ca. 1870 - 1914, from the museum's extensive costume collection.
For more information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the museum at 704/337-2000 or on the web at (http://www.mintmuseum.org).
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