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August Issue 2008
Greenville County Museum of Art in
Greenville, SC, Offers Exhibitions to Make Art a Summer Experience
The Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, SC, is providing Upstate residents and visitors a full schedule of exhibitions that emphasize the very best in American art. The showcase includes three new exhibitions that feature work by Jasper Johns, Andrew Wyeth, and William H. Johnson, along with a traveling exhibition that examines abstract expressionism on an intimate scale.
Jasper Johns: Image Duplicator!!, on view through Oct. 5, 2008, reflects Greenville's focus on works by the world's foremost living artist. An exhibition of fifteen lithographs, silkscreens, and intaglios, Image Duplicator!! explores the artist's use of several characteristic motifs, including the classic flag, the illusionist double face or vase, and a cross-hatched image derived from Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece. The exhibit's title refers simultaneously to the fact that Johns repeats or duplicates images and to the fact that printmaking is an art form of multiples.
The Greenville County Museum of Art is one of only a few in the world with a career survey of work by Johns, a South Carolinian who has been personally supportive of a campaign to expand this unique collection.
The Museum also owns representative works from
every phase of the career of American painter Andrew Wyeth, and
visitors will be able to explore those works in breadth this summer.
Andrew Wyeth: The Greenville Collection, on view through
Oct. 5, 2008, includes classic Wyeth paintings such as The
Liberal, Cranberries, The Blonde, and The Letter, among
others.
The schedule also features the continuing exhibition Masters
of Watercolor: Andrew Wyeth and His Contemporaries, on view
through Sept. 28, 2008, which offers thematic and stylistic comparisons
to Wyeth among such painters as Hubert Shuptrine, Henry Casselli,
Anna Heyward Taylor, and Charles Burchfield.
A new selection of work, on view through Oct. 5, 2008, by the South Carolina modernist painter William H. Johnson offers a contrasting note within this list of summer exhibitions. An African American, Johnson departed the South to pursue his career in New York, then settled for several years in Europe, where he fell under the spell of artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch. William H. Johnson contrasts the artist's European period with the more politicized vision he presented after returning home to America. The exhibition includes a new view of the harbor in Kerteminde, Denmark, in a painting recently loaned to the Museum by the Wayne and Carolyn Jones Charitable Foundation. Completed circa 1937, it complements harbor views from 1931 and 1934 to offer a compact study of the artist's development during this crucial period in his career.
The development of abstract expressionism was the revolution that transformed American art in the years following World War II. Exuberant and forceful, it proclaimed the importance of paint as a medium that conveys emotion through color, texture, and gesture. The exhibition Suitcase Paintings, on view through Aug. 24, 2008, provides insight into the main tenets of this movement through fifty-seven small-scale examples that empower the viewer to embrace its breadth. Organized by Art Enterprises, Ltd., and TMG Projects of Chicago, the exhibition includes works by the first generation abstract expressionists such as Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Philip Guston, and samples the paintings and collages of their students and followers - artists such as Robert Richenburg, Elaine de Kooning, and Melville Price.
For further information check our SC Institutional
Gallery listings, call the Museum at 864/271-7570 or visit (www.greenvillemuseum.org).
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