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March Issue 2003
McMaster Gallery in Columbia, SC, Offers Works by H. Robert Bonsack
The centenary of H. Robert Bonsack (1903-1987) is being remembered in the exhibition, Robert Bonsack: A Centenary Celebration, being presented at McMaster Gallery of the University of South Carolina's Art Department in Columbia, SC. This exhibition of twenty-seven locally owned paintings and drawings, on view from Mar. 1 - 30, 2003, was organized by art historian Charles Mack.
That this German artist is being honored in Columbia is not inappropriate since four of the works on exhibit were painted while Bonsack was visiting the capital city in 1973 and two previous exhibits of his work took place in the city, in 1975 at the Columbia Museum of Art and in 1979 at the University of South Carolina's McKissick Museum.
The works displayed in the McMaster Gallery afford the public an excellent opportunity of savoring a distinctly Germanic approach to painting as well as insight into several of the major artistic tendencies of the past century. Unfortunately, Bonsack's art only can be experienced for the last thirty years of his career, from 1954 to 1981, when an accident halted his productivity. Almost all of his pre-war paintings were destroyed in an Allied bombing raid on Berlin in 1943. What Bonsack created in the post-war years is well documented in the show, however, moving stylistically from the figurative to the purely abstract to finally conclude with a very personal distillation of form and composition. Thematically, much of the imagery reflects the continuum of German classicism and the artist's own enduring fascination for the physical and emotional struggles recounted in the ancient saga of Homer's Iliad.
The paintings on canvas and panel and the several drawings in ink, chalk, and watercolor on exhibit in Columbia are amplified verbally by the catalogue essay that accompanies the show and through quotations from the artist's letters to Dr. Mack which are interspersed with the art works. In his essay, Dr. Mack expresses his hope that "those viewing (the show) will find them as intriguing as I do and will share my appreciation for a remarkable and still relevant artist deserving of a wider recognition." Mack concludes his written comments by noting that Bonsack's "instrument of visual choice was the human figure and the eternal moment chosen, because of its dramatic resonance, was the Classical and Homeric." At the time in which Bonsack was at work, Mack notes, "such an approach was, unfortunately, not acceptable to the art establishment. Had he still been painting a few years later, it might have been otherwise."
For more info check our SC Institutional Gallery listings, contact Mana Hewitt, Gallery Director at 803/777-7480, e-mail at (mana@sc.edu).
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