1924
INVITATION
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The Concord Art Association The President and Directors Request the Honour of Your Presence At The Private
View of In The Art
Centre, Saturday Evening, May 3rd 1924 From Eight to Ten O’Clock |
Patronesses [1924]:
| Mrs. D. Dana Bartlett | Mrs. G. Hollis Blake |
| Mrs. Frederick A. Bosley | Mrs. Charles E. Brown |
| Mrs. Benjamin R. Bulkeley | Mrs. H. Robert Bygrave |
| Mrs. Frederic H. Chase | Mrs. Smith Owen Dexter |
| Mrs. Allen French | Mrs. Winthrop T. Hodges |
| Mrs. Herbert B. Hosmer | Mrs. Loren B. MacDonald |
| Mrs. B. Stewart Murphy | Mrs. Rossell Robb |
| Mrs. Thomas Mott Shaw | Mrs. Herbert B. Smith |
| Mrs. Thomas W. Surette |
REVIEW
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Boston, May 4, 1924 The Sunday Herald In the World of Art. Concord’s National Art Show Coburn, F. W. . Art Work Featured with the Review: Antonia du Gallega, By Ignacio Zuloaga. The eighth annual exhibition of the Concord Art Association was opened at the Art centre, Lexington road, last evening with a reception and private view. The exhibition will continue until July 1, open daily, with free admittance. Last summer’s attendance during three successive exhibitions at the Art center, amounted to more than 5300. Awards of the Concord Art Association’s medal of honor for 1924 have been announced as follows: In sculpture, to C. Paul Jannewein for his “Cupid and Crane”; in painting, to George Bellows for his picture, “Miss Ruth.” Honorable mention with the association’s certificate was awarded: In sculpture to Frederick Victor Guinzbury for “Bobby”; in painting, to Chauncey F. Ryder for his “Hills of North Branch.” Placing the Concord exhibition in the present sector of the calendar has enabled the exhibition committee of the Art Association to bring to New England some of the best pieces from the Philadelphia and New York exhibitions of the winter. This year, for the first time the entire collection has been invited. Jury service has been eliminated. Herein is a policy that makes the work of selection easier, the expenses of handling much less and the aftermath of hard feelings less evident. Its quality is higher, one must believe, than at any previous Concord exhibition. No assemblage, indeed, of paintings and sculptures like the one now on view in Concord is attempted in Boston. Nowhere else in New England, furthermore, is such a catalogue undertaken, one so replete with biographical and critical data, as that which the secretary of the association, Miss Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts, has prepared, with what labor only those know who have sat in on similar compilations. A documented catalogue is rightly held at Concord to be an essential part of a local association’s educational work. Many of the visitors at the Art centre will be people who have never had time or opportunity to become acquainted even with the names of the principal figures of contemporary art. The information which which Miss Roberts has supplied about each and every contributor and his contribution is a model of completeness and accuracy. And many exhibition catalogues, one regrets to say, are shabbily inaccurate, even in the matter of spelling the artists names. The painters from whom works were obtained for the Concord exhibition are
Among the admirable paintings hung in the main gallery the Zuloaga portrait of Antonia la Gallega holds a central place, and deservedly. It is one of the very handsome Zuloaga--a gypsy or Basque dancer at full length in stiffly floreate garments, standing against faintly suggested theatrical flats. It has much of the same sombre beauty that El Greco and Rivera disclosed in their depictions of the human figure. Just to see it would make the trip to Concord well worth while; and before several other works of the collection one makes a similar ejaculation. Were one to pick out for special notice another painting at Concord choice must fall on Mr. Ryder’s great landscape, of a vast hillside scene beyond four gaunt trees. Every patch and passage from foreground to sky has been made interesting. It feels even more vividly than it looks like the land of wide open spaces in south Wilton and Temple. |
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Saturday, May 10, 1924. Boston Evening Transcript ILLUSTRATED IN THE SUNDAY MAGAZINE Elegant in Design. “Cupid with Crane” A Bronze by C. P. Jennewein Which Received First Honors Among Sculptures at the Concord Exhibition. Token of Approval. Medal of Honor. The Concord Art Association’s New Medal, Designed by Albert Laessle and Bestowed This Year for the First Time for Meritorious Works in Current Exhibition. Honored in Concord Exhibition. “Miss Ruth” Painting by George Bellows Awarded the Medal of Honor at the Eighth Annual Exhibition of the Concord Art Association Now in Progress.
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REVIEW
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Boston. Monday, May 5, 1924 The Christian Science Monitor Lively Spring Show of Concord Art Association. E. C. S. Art Work Featured with the Review: Frederick J. Waugh’s “Spring Freshet” In the Eighth Annual Concord Art Association Show. Concord, Mass. Special Correspondence. Besides Having more of an influence on stand-pat painters than they are willing to admit, in bringing back color and increased feeling for form, modernist art influences are unquestionably having an effect on the persons who visit exhibitions frequently. That such persons continue to make the rounds of the galleries is proof in itself, perhaps, that the decrease of literalism and the increase of emotion is in line with the taste of times. Otherwise art exhibitions would not have reached their present state of being more heavily attended than ever before. Probably the Concord Art Association’s eighth annual exhibition which has just been opened, will draw more visitors even than last year to the Colonial mansion which has been artfully made over for use as the Concord Art Center. All the works this year were invited, and the selections were evidently made by a committee seeking pictures that had not been seen in Boston shows of the year. Unquestionably gallery trotters now seek less to be soothed with the placid pictures of yesterday than to be stirred by some vigorous emotional element in a canvas, an element that is due as much to the personal expressiveness of the artist as to the choice of subject. J. Waugh, the painter has been so moved by the thrust and overturning of nature’s busting of the bounds of winter that the inanimate trees on the banks of the boiling torrent of the brook seem to share in the writhing incident to release. How deepseated is the painter’s color is proved by the tonal beauty of this canvas, a beauty often made familiar by Mr. Waugh’s marines. Pretty women have so largely occupied the attention of fashionable painters that there is always a welcome for the man who discovers that beauty which is more than skin deep. George Bellows is such a man, and to his “Miss Ruth” goes the medal of honor for painting in this year’s Concord show. Against a background of Bellows’ green the figure of a woman of middle age is modeled, with a strong feeling for the volumes within the brown dress. A sort of braided purple rope hanging from the neck, with glints of blue and yellow enamel at the waist, are the only minor accents of color. Nor would one say Zuloaga saw nothing more than the personable aspects of “Antonia La Gallega,” although this canvas is so thoroughly in the general style of many others by this accomplished Spanish artist that it will be of chief interest to those to whom his picture came as novelties. Characteristic in style, too, are “Early Snowfall,” by Gardner Symons; “Little Girl With Fan,” by Robert Henri, and “Weatherby’s Oak,” by Daniel Garber. Admirable canvases, these, but they mean little to the hardened gallery trotter. He has seen so many of their twin brothers and sisters that they provide no new impressions. So to the casual picture hunter, upon whom these familiar painters will have their just effect, these pictures may be commended, along with “Village by the Sea,” by Harry Leith Ross; “Moonlight, Dorset, Vt., “ By George H. Hallowell; “Portrait of Lieut.-Col. A. Piatt Andrew,” by Cecilia Beaux; “Portrait of Joseph Pennell at His Press,” by Wayman Adams; “Study in Black and White,” by Gertrude Fiske, and works representing Henry O. Tanner, Catherine Wharton Savage, Eugene Savage, Alice Ruggles Sohier, Carl Lawless, Victorine van Roekens, George Harding, W. L. Lathrop, John Lillie, Clarence Rudolph Johnson, and William M. Paxton. One never tires of the witty and colorful patternings of Jane Peterson or of the tasteful facility of Felecie Waldo Howell. Ben Foster captures the essence of great spaces in “In Wyoming,” and there is elemental decorativeness and singing color in E. L. Blumenschein’s “October.” Delicacy of viewpoint and execution combine in the Beatric How’s “Petites Bretonnes.” There is human vividness in Ethel Blanchard Collver’s “Summer, North Washington Square.” Wayman Adams makes one feel the primitive in “Old Peon and His Wife.” Frederick W. Bosley, in “Kennebec River,” has done something out of his usual line, catching the essential nature of his scene for those who know Maine. Charles W. Hawthorne shows two sketches that embody fleeting aspects of summer days, and also “Twilight,” a charming painting of a wistful girl in Hawthorne blue. There is a brilliant example of Antonio Mancini’s strangely glowing painting, “The Violinist,” and a sparkling marine by Eric Hudson, “Going Out,” in which the clear, clean yellows and whites of the schooner’s sail and the sky contrast with the limpid browns, blues and reds of the dories the schooner is towing. There is the fascination of multiple rhythmic movement in John C. Johansen’s “The Hunters.” and the charm of elegance in still lifes by Nickolai Fechin and Hermann Dudley Murphy. A winter scene by Victor Charreton, lent by Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts , gives the show further variety, together with several Impressionist pictures lent by Durand-Ruel. Honorable mention with the association’s certificate was awarded in sculpture to Frederic Victor Guinzburg for “Bobby”; in painting, to Chauncey F. Ryder for his “Hills of North Branch.” In sculpture the medal of honor was awarded to C. Paul Jannewin for “Cupid and Crane,” a small bronze highly finished in the surfaces and handled in a decorative manner, with the bird’s tail feathers curving inward between its legs and forming a circular design that fits in well with the action. In “Evangelist Felix,” by Charles Grafly, one feels that the sculptor has let loose all his art, free to tell what he sees and thinks about his subject. The result is a true portrait, finding beauty in its truthfulness rather than in slick externals. Edward Berge’s “Poppy” is touched pleasantly with symbolism, with its slim figure of a melancholy girl crowned by a floppy leaf. There is something of formal classicism in the decorative “Harvest” shown by Isidore Konn. At the opposite pole is Malvina Hoffman’s study of a man scrubbing a floor which has a startling touch of lifelikenss, and is further surprising in that the subject isn’t the expected woman. If this is feminism, we are in favor of it, together with such vital works as “Slave,” by Abastenia St. Leger Eberle and “Flower of Earth,” by Nana Mathews Bryant. Chester Beach seems feminine by contrast with his suave “Surf.” Something of individuality is to be found also in the sculpture of Hazel Brill Jackson, Lindsay M. Sterling, Walker Hancock and Ontonio Salemme. E. C. S. |
REVIEW
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Saturday, May 10, 1924 Lowell Courier Citizen I commend to the attention of motorists and others the eighth annual exhibition of the Concord Art Association which is current at the Art centre, on Lexington road, through this month and June. Here is a chance to see such an exhibition of American paintings and sculpture as is not yet annually provided in Boston; and the chance is right in our own backyard. Concord, in general, is one of the privileges of living hereabout--our ancient shiretown, with its wealth of historic reminiscences and its pretty residences. As a place where the arts of design are shown seasonally, and are admired by literally thousands of visitors, Concord may not be so well known to all who read regularly this department of the Courier-Citizen. Hence my excuse for this art chat. ___________________ May I begin by paying a tribute to the public spirit, taste and personal initiative of the woman who more than all others in the Concord Art Association [and I know I shall arouse no jealousies by that statement] has made the Art centre a very real shrine, a place of pilgrimage comparable with the battle Ground, the Old Manse and the Alcott House? Miss Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts, daughter, if I remember aright, of a late president of the Pennsylvania railroad, a New Hampshire Wentworth on her mother’s side, a well trained painter with Parisian years behind her, settled in Concord a decade or so ago and there began to make herself felt in the community as an influence in behalf of the arts of design. Concord is, of course, an easier place than some towns of our country in which to be that kind of influence. I say that, however, not in any way to detract from the credit of Miss Robert’s achievements. She has started something that may cause the Concord of the early 20th century to be remembered for its art, just as we associate the Concord of the 19th century with literature and philosophy. Her undertaking--I persist in calling it hers, though she may chide me for not terming it the association’s--is one which I commend as utilitarian as well as ornamental. At Concord, certainly, the one thing plays with the other. The registry of the Art centre shows that last summer, in its first season, it was visited by upwards of 5200 persons. Some came, of course, primarily to see the exhibitions, three of them given in succession. Others, who were sightseeing over the Lexington-Concord route, just drifted in. Expressed in terms of doughuts bought, art has become a Concordian asset. Every tradesman in town is a beneficiary. ___________________ I remember, back in the war days, one of the earliest of the Concord exhibitions to which on a glum November day I motored via the Bedford trolley. I found the committee hanging a really [im . .?] collection of works in the classic interior of the town hall. In fine rooms, but not meant by the builders for a picture gallery. I listened then a bit skeptically to expressions of hope for the new association’s future. Our whole national future seemed at the time possibly dubious, and I wondered if a little art society in a small town would be able to acquire its own home and do the other ambitious things which were predicted in the spring of1922. The period of holding the exhibition having been shifted from November to May and June, I was taken to see an old colonial house which the association had just purchased and was about to remodel. A year ago the pictures and small sculptures of which the annual exhibition is composed were shown for the first time at this Art centre. To the second exhibition held in the association’s own home folk of this neighborhood are now bidden welcome. ___________________ If you were in New York when the national Academy of Design was holding an exhbition, in Philadelphia when the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts swung out its inviting sigh, or in Washington during one of the biennial art shows of the Corcoran Art Gallery you would very likely happen in for an hour. At Concord is a collection of works of art selected as especially fine example of pictures and sculptures shown in last winter’s national exhibits. We in New England ordinarily see little of American art as it is developing in the Middle states and the West. In this respect, as in so many others, we are cooped up in our out of the way corner of the country, and the big stuff, to speak Americanese, is happening elsewhere. “Cultured Boston?” Oh, yes; that is all right especially as there are several pretty good artist chaps down the line. Even these, however, send their best work outside of New England for its urst showing and, haply, its selling. I cite these circumstances to show what an opportunity it is that the Art centre at Concord presents to people in our country--especially to the kind of people who like to know what is going on. “Many of our visitors, I found in the first years of our exhibitions, have never heard of some of the foremost living artists,” Miss Roberts said to me the other day in explanation of the associatoin’s well documented catalog. “Very intelligent people, informed on a variety of subjects, have often been outside the current of art interest, and are a little dazed as they look around at a collection of paintings. That is why we have adopted a policy of issuing a catalog that tells something about each exhibitor. Two women, apparently school teachers from the Middle West, told me this morning how much more interesting the catalog had made the exhibitions to them.” I, who believe thoroughly that a museum of art or natural science should be a collection of well written labels with something behind them am, naturally, favorably impressed by the issuance at Concord of such a catalog, compiled with such labor as only those who have written catalogs can understand. People like to be told things. That is why lecture recitals of classic music have such vogue. That is why in art galleriles if there isn’t a catalog the visitors will sometimes draw forth a newspaper clipping, to read what one of the critics has said even while surveying, and sometimes before observing, the exhibited works of art. I am somewhat of a seasoned gallery-goer, myself, but I found myself looking at the numbers in Miss Robert’s catalog almost simultaneously with my glance at the picture. ___________________ It is a collection, that at Concord, which will show you about where we are just now in paint and clay. I am tempted to write a few generalities on our whereness, but I will forbear. Let me rather particularize about a few of the pictures and sculptures. ___________________ If you have ever wondered how Joseph Pennel looks, the belligerent Philadephia Quaker whose letter of insult to Americans so greatly aroused the late Governor Curtis Guild at the dedication of our Whistler House, you may have your curiosity gratified in presence of Wayman Adam’s portrait of the begrimed etcher at his press. A valuable man Pennell has been, at his press; and Adams, a Hoosier, who started his studies in Indianapolis and who was with Robert Henri in Spain, has concentrated his energy upon a very virile likeness of Whistler’s biographer. ___________________ I was emotionally affected by the big Zuloaga painting of a gypsy dancing lady which has been included in the exhibition. This Basque painter, one of the strong personalities of our time, has made few figures that are more striking and more dignified than this lady of the floreate gown and the long, dark, shapely bare right arm. In my castle in Spain I would like to have a sombre stone-walled room made somewhat cheerful by a collection of Zuloaga pictures. A Connecticut-born chap, who now-adays paints in the country familiar to many Lowell people, that of WIlton and Temple, N.H., sent to Concord a picture which stands up and takes no back talk from anything in the gallery--not even from the Zuloaga. Chauncey F. Ryder who painted the “Hills of North Branch,” has achieved a remarkable fine landscape; just a bare gaunt mountainside against which four tree trunks are thrust in the foreground. Every part of it is alive with light and color, and it has the quality of arousing a longing for trampling over the WIlton and Lyndeboro hills as so many of us did in boyhood. It is a picture of large physical dimensions and ought, I should predict, to add much to Mr. Ryder’s already high reputation. He has become, I suppose, the artist to patron saint of a summer colony that includes the promising young painter, Stanley Woodward, Carl Peirce, the violinist, my kinsman, Dr. Fordyce Coburn, and his literary wife, and many others. ___________________ A work by an international celebrity that interested me was the “House of Joan of Arc,” by Henry Ossawa Tanner. As a picture it carries the subdued muted tones which are characteristic of all Tanner’s work. My Negrophile spirit is perpetually appealed to by evidences of this man’s professional success. I have a southern friend who insists against the facts that no Negro can do anything notable in any of the arts. Yet Tanner has made a name for himself among the French who are so much more hospitable to able men of his color than we Americans are. The sight of Joan’s house reminded me that 28-odd years ago Tanner was for a very brief period a resident of Concord, the town where his picture is now shown. He had returned to this country of his birth thinking to settle somewhere where his color would not count too heavily against his mingling as a man-among-men--with such good society as Paris had accustomed him to. By advice of a fellow artist from Boston Tanner tried Concord, but he discovered that even in a centre of New England liberalism a Negro is socially persona non [? . .?], and he went back to Eruope disgusted with this free republic. ___________________ The sculptures at Concord admirably suppliment the paintings. I find that many educated people have little idea of the vigor and vitality that modern scuptors are showing in their work. What could be discerned from mostly unreadable paragraph: An exquisite piece of modeling . . . . . the Concord Art Association . . . Daniel Chester French named in our family geneaology, and I trust correctly, is one of the descendants of the Edward . . . . John Webb’s house in [1669?]. Miss Robert’s account says well: “In his [49?] years of productiveness, never has Mr. French . . . . with fluctuating interests in the plastic arts; nevertheless his works are popular through . . . . and his power of expression in many and varied themes. With precisely the feeling of the old Greeks, he suppresses the immaterial and goes to the centre of his thought. His constructive imagination does the rest. His earliest work, which brought him prominence, is the statue of the “The Minute Man” in Concord.” ___________________ One of the king pieces of sculpture, to which has been awarded a medal of honor of the Concord Art Association, is the “Cupid and Crane” of Carl Paul Jennewein, who studied scupture at the Art Students League of New York and at the American Academy in Rome. “His work is archaic in character, strongly resembling that of Paul Manship, but with fewer mannerisms. His bronzes are wonderful in conception and finish, with a beautiful sense of proportion and grace. These qualities are especially noticeable in the OCupid and Gazelle’ in the Metropolitan museum and in OCupid and Crane’ in our current exhibition.” A charming little figure, “Elizabeth,” is by Evelyn Beatrice Longman Batchelder, whose Wells memorial is one of the artistic and emotive monuments of our Lowell cemetery. The biographical data given by the catalog concerning this sculpturor may give details not known, or forgotten by many who have admired her monuemtn on the slope of Fort Hill: “Evelyn Longman, now Mrs. Batchelder, was born in Winchester, Ohio, in 1874. Her early life was spent in Chicago. When at the age of 14, self-support became necessary, and she occupied a clerical position in a wholesale house, she had already determined to become an artist. It was at Olivet college, in 1896, that she first began to model in clay, and realized that in sculpture she could find her truest expression. Like many other artists, Miss Longman turned to New York as offering the widest field for endeavor. She worked in turn in the studios of Herman A. McNeil, Isidore Konti, and assistant to Daniel C. French, which last position she held for four years until 1906. The earliest of Miss Longman’s noteworthy pieces of sculpture is the colossal statue called OVictory,” bronze reductions of which are in the possession of many of the leading art museums. It is also used as a trophy of the Atlantic fleet of the U.S. navy. The bronze doors for the chapel of the U.S. Naval academy at Annapolis, and those of the library at Wellesley are her work. In 1916 she was selected to execute the statue which surmounts the building of the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. In addition to the statues already mentioned, Miss Longman’s work includes many portrait busts and reliefs. Since her marriage in 1920, she has lived at Windsor, Connecticut, where she has built a studio and continues the practice of her profession.” ___________________ The friendliness of the invitation to all the world to see the works of art at the Art centre impresses me. A jaunty swinging sign indicates the house just beyond the ancient burying ground at the municipal centre. Inside the door one turns to the water color room to the right and to a room full of the association’s permanent collection to the left. Then directly upstairs is the main gallery, lighted by a huge roof window let in along the ridgepole. The house was built about 1750, evidently by substantial people. The custodianship rests with the officers of the Art association who, besides Mr. Daniel Chester French, president, and Miss Roberts, secretary, are: Vice president, George S. Keyes; counsel, Frederic H. Chase; treasurer, Grace R. Keyes; directors, Cecilia Beaux, Stedman Buttrick, Elizabeth S. G. Elliott, Allen French, Charles Hopkinson, Alicia M. Keyes, Russell Robb, Charels H. Pepper. This directorate surely has reason to be proud of what has been accomplished during Miss Robert’s secretaryship which includes general management. F. W. C.
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