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Eric G. Thompson: New Works

August 12, 2015 Matthews GalleryLeave a comment

Eric G. Thompson‘s new series of contemporary realist paintings arrived yesterday. As we pulled them from the box one by one, silenced by their cool gravitas, we saw them in a whole new way. First came a solitary bird in a tree, silhouetted against a pale sky. Was he watching the pensive girl strolling through the field that emerged from the package next? Perhaps she was headed to the barn in the following image, where she’d sit and munch on the late-summer pear in the still life. It was as though we were opening an intricate matryoshka doll, with each picture adding a new layer of details to the story.

Light flows across Thompson’s canvases and panels like meditative thoughts, revealing an endless array of materials with diverse textures and reflective qualities. As a self-taught artist, Thompson learned to capture all of these effects through looking, painting and looking again. When you come to the opening reception for Eric G. Thompson: New Works at Matthews Gallery this Friday, August 14 from 5-7 pm, make sure to take just as much care as you ponder each composition (and perhaps find connections between them). Here’s a special preview:

Eric G. Thompson, The Watch, Oil on Linen

Eric G. Thompson, Santa Fean Girl, Oil on Linen

Eric G. Thompson, Freshly Mowed, Oil on Linen

Eric G. Thompson, A Pair, Oil on Linen

Eric G. Thompson, Winter Bones, Oil on Canvas

Eric G. Thompson, Over Lattes, Oil on Panel

Eric G. Thompson, Perch, Oil on Linen

Eric G. Thompson, Grace, Oil on Linen

Eric G. Thompson, Cool Morning, Oil on Panel

Eric G. Thompson, Bosc, Oil on Linen

Click here to see more of Thompson’s work, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for more gallery news.

ERIC G. THOMPSON: (Im)perfection

July 25, 2015 Matthews Gallery1 Comment

A sun bleached rocking chair, the wind weathered facade of an old house, and a pair of muddy gardening clogs. To the average viewer, these objects warrant little more than a casual glance. Utah artist Eric G. Thompson captures them in stunning detail with oil, watercolor and egg tempera paint, guided by a centuries-old Japanese aesthetic.

“Objects have spirit. An old cup is like a person,” says Eric. Like the characters of the objects, figures and houses he paints, Eric’s technique was refined through life experience. He is completely self-taught, and believes this process has led him to find a unique voice and vision, through perseverance, trial and error. A painter since 1989, he now resides in Salt Lake City, Utah and has been selling his work professionally since 2002. He paints from his travels and the treasures discovered along the way, deftly switching mediums depending on the mood he wishes to convey.

Eric’s artwork possesses an elegant serenity that often stops our visitors in their tracks. The allure lies in the way he plays with light, illuminating beautiful details but also revealing hints of entropy and decay. This careful balance between order and chaos is drawn from the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, a major influence on Thompson’s work. The tradition encourages appreciation of imperfection, age and patina, often referred to as “flawed beauty.”

Come delight in Eric’s perfect imperfection at ‘Eric G. Thompson: New Works‘, opening Friday, August 14 and running through August 28. Click here for more information, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for more gallery news.

NEW LANDSCAPES, NEW VISTAS: Early Pueblo Pottery

May 16, 2015 Matthews Gallery2 Comments

The tale of our current exhibition NEW LANDSCAPES, NEW VISTAS: Women Artists of New Mexico begins twenty-three miles northwest of Santa Fe in the San Ildefonso Pueblo, population 458. The village has a long legacy of women potters, whose innovative ceramics techniques and designs inspired traditional and modernist artists who traveled to New Mexico in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. San Ildefonso is known as the epicenter of Pueblo pottery for good reason, as discussed by our guest blogger Steve Elmore. Elmore’s extensive pottery collection appears in the show.

From 1875-1925, the polychrome or multicolored pottery produced at San Ildefonso reached a distinguished peak in the creative history of Pueblo pottery in the Southwest. Indeed, the residents of this small Pueblo village on the Rio Grande, northwest of Santa Fe, are direct descendants of the prehistoric Pueblo peoples of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, whose tradition of potting spans a thousand years of human history.

Juana Leno, Acoma Polychrome Olla, c. 1965

San Ildefonso remains a small village. In 1900 there were only 30 households and in 1910 eight women are noted in the census as potters. We are fortunate to the know the names of these early potters. At the turn of the century, the most established potters were the husband and wife team of Martina Vigil (1856-1916) and Florentino Monotoya (1858-1918). Martina’s excellent molding combined with Florentino’s skilled painting produced many exquisite jars, including many fine large storage jars. Most are polychromes. Born in the 1850s, they were certainly potting by the 1870s if not earlier, and their joint efforts became a model for the production of San Ildefonso polychromes: a family effort involving both partners.

Traditionally, San Ildefonso pottery was decorated with black designs over a gray slip on a bulbous rounded form. The use of red clay was confined to the rim and a narrow band around the base of the jar. With arrival of the Santa Fe Railway in the region, potters at San Ildefonso began introducing red clay into the painted design on the main body of the jars. What prompted this introduction of red is unknown, but most scholars suggest that the arrival of thousands of travelers from the Eastern United States on the new railroad sparked the change. The tourists were eager to purchase pottery, and the polychrome wares of Acoma Pueblo quickly led the market. Acoma pottery, with precise four-color drawings on thin symmetrical jars, set the standards for the tourist trade.

Acoma Polychrome Olla

Certainly the innovators of their time, Montoya and Vigil might have been the first at San Ildefonso to use red with the black design. Perhaps a trader suggested it directly or merely showed them the brightly colored Acoma pieces which were their competition. By the early 1880s, hundreds of polychrome jars were being produced annually by the skilled potters of San Ildefonso for the tourist and museum trade. In response to this demand, and for almost fifty years thereafter, the potters of San Ildefonso created well molded pots traditionally decorated in black and red, whose size and beauty have not been surpassed.

Most traditional San Ildefonso water jars were painted with a mix of black geometric and floral patterns. With the addition of red paint, the drawings themselves begin to develop into elaborate flowing motifs covering the entire jar. The addition of red heightens the intensity of the black design and seems to urge the painter on to larger, more complex drawing. Previously simple designs are repeated in a larger and more intricate manner.

Nampeyo- Black on Red Hopi Seed Jar, c. 1900

Beginning in the 1880s, an amazing array of both realistic and abstract bird motifs are also introduced along with other pictorial elements. I suspect Nampeyo‘s Sikyatki Revival in Hopi pottery influenced this emphasis upon bird designs. Her seed jar form was clearly copied repeatedly by at least one San Ildefonso potter along with her curvilinear drawings. The shape of the San Ildefonso vessels also evolves, from bulbous jars with small necks to elegant tapered vases with small bases and flared out rims: the classic “Tunyo” form. For fifty years of San Ildefonso pottery making, we can study the steady growth and development of an art form as it crests into a peak!

As Pueblo pottery enjoyed increasing popularity with the American public, many distinguished potters took the polychromes to new heights of creativity and expression. Among these were Maria (1887-1980) and Julian Martinez (1879-1940), Maria’s sister Anna and her husband Crescencio, and Tonita and Juan Roybal. Montoya and Vigil were perfect role models for the younger Martinezes who built upon their success.

Maria and Julian Martinez, San Ildefonso Blackware Plate, c. 1925

This florescence of polychrome production was brought to an abrupt halt by the Martinezes’ invention of painted blackware around 1920. As Ruth Bunzel, author of The Pueblo Potter, observes, the attraction of the blackware is the minimized painted matte designs which emphasize a dominant polished slip. This subtle, monochromatic aesthetic is the exact opposite of the polychromes where intricate black and red designs were sharply contrasted against the midtone grey sip. In time the blackware style won the marketing war and by 1925 Bunzel could no longer find a single piece of polychrome ware in the village.

It is perhaps ironic that the Martinezes, known best for their blackware, themselves began as polychrome potters and were among the greatest of them. Although most of their output became blackware, Maria and Julian continued to produce occasional polychrome masterpieces up until Julian’s death in 1943. One cannot help but wonder if the bold artistic tradition of the polychrome pottery didn’t occupy a special place in their hearts. Martinez family members and other San Ildefonso potters have continued to produce the polychromes in limited numbers, particularly Popovi Da, his son Tony Da, and today, of course, Cavan Gonzales and Russell Sanchez.

Stay tuned for next week’s blog, where we’ll explore the links between early Pueblo pottery designs and modernist aesthetic innovations. See all of the artwork from NEW LANDSCAPES, NEW VISTAS on our homepage, and connect with us on Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest for daily gallery news.

AN INSIDER’S GUIDE TO BOHEMIAN PARIS in

April 4, 2015May 24, 2023 Matthews GalleryLeave a comment

Jaime Colson (1901-1975) was a teenager when he left his homeland of the Dominican Republic to study art in Spain. The talented young painter landed smack in the middle of the Spanish avant-garde, rubbing elbows with Salvador Dali and befriending Rafael Barradas and other artists. Colson lived there for six years and developed a surrealist style. His next move was to perhaps the only place that could be stranger than España surrealisto: 1920’s bohemian Paris.

Colson arrived in the City of Lights in 1924, at the height of Gertrude Stein‘s reign as a powerful salonnière and premiere champion of modernism. In Paris, Colson met Picasso and Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Leger. He soaked up modernist innovations—and quite a lot of absinthe—like a sponge. Four years later, as a full-fledged Parisian, Colson painted the latest addition to our collection:

Colson’s Cubist Still Life offers an essential review of the original vie bohème, a painted guide to the colorful, booze-soaked existence of the Lost Generation. Its skewed lines and wild patterns capture all the dynamism of a moveable feast, and the pall of the “green fairy” hangs over its heart. Without further ado, here are seven details that set the roaring scene…

Colson painted Cubist Still Life in 1928, the same year Rene Magritte made his famous Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The pipe that appears near the center of the composition is at once an homage to Magritte’s French surrealism and a nod to Colson’s Spanish surrealist past.

Pernod Fils was the reigning brand of absinthe in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The anise-flavored, bright green spirit was formulated in Switzerland, and its distillery in Pontarlier, France churned out as much as 30,000 liters of absinthe per day. Knock-offs abounded (Pernot, Perriot and Parrot among them), some of which contained toxic substances and were cheap enough to appeal to many a town drunk. In 1910, the French consumed 36 million liters of absinthe in a year, but by 1915 the drink had been demonized and banned.

After World War I, Pernod Fils introduced a new, lower-proof liqueur d’anise, which is the drink Colson would’ve encountered during his Paris years. However, the famous absinthe pictures by Picasso, Lautrec, van Gogh and the like hail from the golden age of the beverage, before the ban. Perhaps the ghostly bottle of Pernod Fils and the empty glass below it are Colson’s tribute to a madcap age that his contemporaries remembered with longing.

A cubistic guitar and a trompe-l’œil glimpse at the French newspaper Le Journal refer to modernist art forms Colson was exposed to in Paris. In 1912, Picasso began experimenting with collage, incorporating scraps of fabric and other materials into his oil paintings. Picasso’s Still Life with Chair-Caning, one of the first fine art collages ever made, is on an oval canvas and features a scrap of furniture material. Picasso’s close collaborator Braque soon followed suite, using glue to attach wood-grain papers to his cubist canvases. Colson replicates similar patterns and textures using oil paint in Cubist Still Life.

In late 1912, Picasso made artworks using clippings from Le Journal, and also created three dimensional collages called art assemblages, including a cardboard guitar. These are Colson’s strongest references to his modernist contemporaries in the painting, directly addressing Picasso’s tendency to weave real-world events into his works and distort objects in groundbreaking ways.

Colson lived in Paris until 1934. After a short stint in Cuba and another stay in Europe, he returned to the Dominican Republic with a head full of revolutionary ideas. He began blending his European influences with Dominican subject matter, creating images of the rich central American culture the likes of which had never been seen before. Along with Yoryi Morel and Dario Suro, Colson is known as one of the founders of the modernist school of Dominican painting, and is considered one of the great Latin American masters of the 20th century.

Learn more about Jaime Colson on our homepage, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest for daily gallery news.

SPRING OF MODERNISM: The Circle

March 14, 2015March 14, 2015 Matthews Gallery4 Comments

Mabel Dodge Luhan and Georgia O’Keeffe

If you visit our SPRING OF MODERNISM show this month, two things will become abundantly clear about the 20th century artists in the exhibition. Firstly, they’re all linked, in one way or another, to the 1913 Armory Show in New York City. Secondly, they are all tied to each other. In fact, the modernists of the Santa Fe and Taos art colonies are so intertwined that we tried and failed to create a chart of their relationships. There are so many connections, it reminds us of Gertrude Stein’s Paris! Here’s just one line of the friendship chain, which begins with Stein herself:

Jan Matulka, Surrealist Landscape, 1935, Gouache on Paper

MATULKA

Jan Matulka (1890-1972) was born in Austria-Hungary, now the Czech Republic. He moved to New York City in 1907 and enrolled at the National Academy of Design soon after. A Joseph Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship enabled him to visit the Desert Southwest in 1917, where he was inspired by the cultures of the Pueblo Native American Tribes. He maintained studios in Paris and New York during the 1920s, befriending Gertrude Stein, Andre Lhote and Max Weber.

Andrew Dasburg, April Snow, 1967, Pastel on Paper

DASBURG

Andrew Dasburg (1887-1979) also knew Stein. He was born in Paris and emigrated to New York City in 1892. He studied at the New York Art Students League and spent time in Paris with Stein, Henri Matisse and Morgan Russell as a young man. In 1913, he exhibited Lucifer (above) at the Armory Show, and was later invited to New Mexico by Mabel Dodge Luhan. He moved to Taos in 1921, and was part of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz’s circle here.

Cady Wells, Taos 1947, Ink and Watercolor on Paper

WELLS

Cady Wells (1904-1954) knew Luhan and O’Keeffe and studied under Dasburg. He grew up in Southbridge, Massachussets and traveled extensively as a young man, studying music and the visual arts before deciding to become an artist in his late 20s. He moved to New Mexico in 1932, where he found an enthusiastic mentor in Dasburg and drew inspiration from the rich culture of the Desert Southwest. The Smithsonian American Art Museum writes:

Portraying the Southwestern landscape in watercolor, Wells moved through various modernist idiots. His early work incorporated gestural, calligraphic lines suggestive of Chinese ideograms. Later he investigated the structure of natural forms [and the] pattern-like appearance of the landscape. Influenced by Dasburg, Raymond Jonson and Georgia O’Keeffe, Wells developed a personal semi-abstract style that brought considerable praise from his peers.

Raymond Jonson, Oil No. 12, 1958, Oil on Canvas

JONSON

Wells’ friend Raymond Jonson (1891-1982) was born in Chariton, Iowa and grew up in Portland, Oregon. He attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Chicago Art Institute as a young man, but his true artistic breakthrough came when he attended the 1913 Armory Show and saw the artwork of early abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky.

Jonson traveled to New Mexico for the first time in 1922, and moved here two years later. Here he founded the Atalaya Art School and took a teaching position at the University of New Mexico.

Along with his friends Emil Bisttram, Agnes Pelton and others, Jonson formed the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) in 1938. The collective was inspired by early abstract artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, as well as Theosophy, Zen Buddhism and Dynamic Symmetry. The TPG only lasted a few years, disbanding in 1942 because of World War II. However, the collective’s influence endures in the Southwest and beyond. Some consider the group an heir to Russian Constructivism, Gino Severini and the Bauhaus.

Emil Bisttram, After the Blizzard, 1956, Oil on Panel

BISTTRAM

Jonson’s friend Emil Bisttram (1895-1976) was born in Hungary and immigrated to New York City with his family at 11. It wasn’t until his mid-30s that he visited Taos, but he fell in love with the area and would become a major player in the art colony when he moved there a year later.In 1933 Bisttram helped open the first modern art gallery in Taos and in 1938 he co-founded the Transcendental Painting Group. He promoted the ideas of the collective through the Emil Bisttram School for Transcendentalism, where Janet Lippincott was one of his students.

Janet Lippincott, Llano Ridge, 1959, Oil on Canvas

LIPPINCOTT

Bisttram’s student Janet Lippincott (1918-2007) was born in New York City to a wealthy family, and spent part of her childhood in Paris. There she learned about the aesthetic innovations of Picasso and Matisse. Back in New York, she took classes at the New York Art Students League as a teenager.During World War II, Lippincott enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps and was wounded. She pursued art studies in Colorado and San Francisco on the GI Bill, and also attended the Emil Bisttram School for Transcendentalism in Taos in 1949 and the Alfred Morang Academy of Fine Art. In 1954, she moved to Santa Fe permanently and lived here for over five decades.Lippincott was considered part of a “second wave” of New Mexico modernists, who ventured to the Southwest after WWII. She is known as an abstract expressionist, but her early modernist influences in Paris stuck with her, as evidenced in her career-spanning series of figurative prints.

Alfred Morang, Blue Mountain, Yellow Sky, Ink and Watercolor on Paper

MORANG

As a young man, Lippincott’s teacher Alfred Morang (1901-1958) suffered from tuberculosis. He left his home in Portland, Maine in 1937 and came to New Mexico to recover in a dryer climate. The reports vary, but when Morang got off the train he was met by Randall Davey or Raymond Jonson, two of the city’s most established modernist artists. Morang’s bohemian manner quickly charmed the Santa Fe art world, and the City Different became his permanent home.

Late in his life, Morang moved to a Canyon Road studio just behind Claude’s Bar. Just across the street was an artist and writer’s compound run by Agnes Sims.

Agnes Sims, Dance Rattles, Watercolor on Paper

SIMS

Morang’s Canyon Road neighbor Agnes Sims (1910-1990) was born in Devon, Pennsylvania. She managed a marionette theater and worked as a textile designer in Philadelphia before moving to Santa Fe in 1938 and founding a Canyon Road artist’s compound. In New Mexico, she took an interest in the ancient petroglyphs of New Mexico’s Native American Pueblos, and received a grant to study and sketch them. Her archaeological work inspired a series of paintings and sculptures in which she developed her own semi-abstract symbolism.

Sims’ longtime partner was the literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and helped popularize Truman Capote‘s work. Capote was friends (and sometime enemies) with Georgia O’Keeffe. And so the circle comes back around to Andrew Dasburg!

We could do this for ages, but you get the point. The New Mexico art community was a western frontier of avant-garde innovation, forged by a group of passionate friends whose efforts gave birth to the Land of Enchantment of today. And thank goodness for that!

Click here to see all of the artwork in our Spring of Modernism show, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr for daily gallery news.

NEW ARMORY: Modernism’s Western Frontier

March 4, 2015 Matthews Gallery4 Comments

A severe sculpture by Andrew Dasburg, which appeared in the 1913 Armory Show,

contrasts with his soft pastel snow scene that will appear in SPRING OF MODERNISM.

The 102nd annual Armory Show opens in New York City this weekend. Its history stretches back to 1913, when the exhibition introduced the European modernist movement to the United States. Featured artists included Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Vincent van Gogh Gogh and other Europeans. The show also included American artists such as Randall Davey, John Sloan, Paul Burlin, Andrew Dasburg, Edward Hopper, Marsden Hartley and more who had been influenced by the artistic revolution taking place across the Atlantic.

Not-so-coincidentally, we’re launching a modernism show of our own this Friday, and it features several New Mexico artists who participated in the original Armory show. During the first half of the 20th century, Davey, Sloan, Dasburg and a great variety of their East Coast contemporaries ventured to New Mexico and reshaped the Taos and Santa Fe art colonies into Western outposts for bold aesthetic innovation. The Taos Moderns, the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) and other collectives engaged with new developments in the movement, gaining an influential presence on the international art stage.

Our SPRING OF MODERNISM exhibition will follow every twist and turn of New Mexico’s modernist movement through significant artworks by Davey, Dasburg, Max Weber, Doris Cross, Russell Cowles, Howard Schleeter, Rolph Scarlett, Paul Burlin, Cady Wells, Jan Matulka, Dorothy Brett and others. It features TPG mavericks Raymond Jonson, Emil Bisttram and William Lumpkins, Taos Moderns such as Beatrice Mandelman, and pivotal Santa Fe modernists including Alfred Morang and Janet Lippincott.

The scope of the show is as ambitious as its title suggests— we’re highlighting 50 transformative years of New Mexico modernist history. SPRING OF MODERNISM shows how New Mexico’s art community became one of the largest and most influential in the nation.

Look below for some of our favorite works from the exhibition, and check out a special preview on our website. Also, make sure to attend the opening on Friday, March 6 from 5-7 pm!

Emil-Bisttram- Orbs and Arrows- Encaustic- Matthews Gallery Blog

Emil Bisttram, Orbs and Arrows, encaustic on paper, 1941.

Jan Matulka -Landscape - 1923- Watercolor- Matthews Gallery Blog

Jan Matulka, Landscape, watercolor, c. 1923.

Doris Cross- Untitled- Mixed Media- Matthews Gallery Blog

Doris Cross, Untitled, Mixed Media on Paper.

Alfred Morang- Untitled Landscape- Matthews Gallery Blog

Alfred Morang, Untitled (Landscape), Oil on Board.

Howard Schleeter, Untitled (Pueblo), gouache and wax on paper, 1949.

Randall Davey- Leaving Paddock- Lithograph

Randall Davey, Leaving the Paddock, Lithograph.

Beulah Stevenson- Place Of Drums- New Mexico - 1940-5- Matthews Gallery Blog

Beulah Stevenson, Place of the Drums, New Mexico, 1940-45.

Paul Burlin- Look-No Fish- Oil on Canvas- 1949- Matthews Gallery Blog

Paul Burlin, Look—No Fish, oil on canvas, c. 1949.

Thomas Benrimo, Nymph of the Sea, oil on board, 1949.

Andrew Dasburg- April Snow- Pastel- Matthews Gallery Blog

Andrew Dasburg, April Snow, pastel on paper, 1967.

Make sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for more gallery news, and stayed tuned for information on our modernism-themed dinner at Coyote Cafe!

PICTORIALISM: From Stieglitz to Curtis

February 21, 2015May 24, 2023 Matthews Gallery1 Comment

It was 1901 in New York City, and photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was busy preparing an exhibition that would shake the foundations of the art world. He had worked for years—often to the point of physical exhaustion—to elevate photography to the stature of fine art. A series of juried photography shows, judged mostly by painters, had popularized the aesthetic of pictorialism. Pictorialist photographers approached their art like a painter or illustrator, playing with focus and exposure in innovative ways and even marking the surfaces of their images. The idea was to “make” an image rather than “take” it, projecting emotions into the scene and onto the viewer.

Stieglitz and his friends saw the need for yet another leap forward in this new era of photography. They would mount a show composed entirely of photographs, and judged only by photographers. Or rather, it would be judged by one photographer: Stieglitz himself. He put together the show in two months and dubbed it the Photo-Secession, intending to secede from old conceptions of both photography and fine art. The exhibition was an enormous success, and gave Stieglitz the momentum to launch a photography journal and gallery to promote his ideas.

From left: View of Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo Secession, which opened in 1905;
Edward S. Curtis in his adventure clothes.

Thousands of miles away in Seattle, Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) was just beginning his photography career. Curtis grew up in Wisconsin and built his first camera when he was a teenager. At 17 he apprenticed in a photography studio in St. Paul, Minnesota, and when his family moved to Seattle in 1887, he bought a partnership in a portrait studio. Over the next few years, he began photographing Native American people of the Washington territory, some of them relatives of Chief Sealth and other important leaders. These early portraits and genre scenes inspired a 30-year adventure through the American West, during which Curtis and his team recorded the lives of over 80 tribes in photographs, writings, recordings and sketches.

Curtis’ expeditions, which he recorded in a series of volumes called The North American Indian, kept him far away from the epicenter of the American avant-garde where Stieglitz resided. “He was an outsider, too far removed from the photographic salons to court or count on ready shows and reviews that had instituted pictorialist photography,” writes Gerald Vizenor in an essay on Curtis. However, it’s this aesthetic that ties Stieglitz and Curtis together in art history.

“Curtis kept abreast of national, even international, trends in photography—and in the visual arts more generally,” writes Mick Gidley. “His early writings for Seattle magazines reveal that he absorbed much from Pictorialism in photography, including the example of Alfred Stieglitz, the founder of the Photo-Secession.” Curtis’ earliest photographs of Native peoples feature the soft focus and sepia tone of some classic pictorialist images, and present his subjects as stoic archetypes of a vanishing culture. In his many adventures, Curtis often posed his subjects and manipulated images to fit his vision of the tribes he was portraying. These techniques have earned Curtis praise as a pictorialist, but have also stirred up controversy. Curtis called himself an ethnologist, but the aesthetically powerful images he created didn’t always aim for scientific accuracy.

In the collection of photographs below, we’ve reunited Curtis with his pictorialist roots, placing some of his most iconic images among significant works by Stieglitz and his contemporaries. As you view the images, ponder Curtis’ position as an outsider during his lifetime, and his new place as a pictorialist in the art history books…

Edward S. Curtis, Girl and Jar, Photogravure

Adolph de Meyer, Marchesa Casati, 1912

Edward S. Curtis, Apache Medicine-Man, Photogravure

Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away, 1858

Edward S. Curtis, The Rush Gatherer, Photogravure

Alvin Langdon Coburn, Spiderwebs, 1908

Edward S. Curtis, Waiting in the Forest— Cheyenne, Photogravure

Paul Haviland, Doris Keane, 1912

Edward S. Curtis, The Storm-Apache, Photogravure

Alfred Stieglitz, The Terminal, 1893

Click here to learn more about Edward S. Curtis, his adventures and the rediscovery of his work in the 1970’s, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for daily gallery news.

SPRING OF MODERNISM

February 6, 2015February 7, 2015 Matthews GalleryLeave a comment

We’ve had some unseasonably warm days after last weekend’s snowstorm, and it’s making us excited for the end of winter. It’s the perfect time to release our spring exhibition schedule, which is a period of exciting growth at Matthews Gallery.

In light of Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s brilliant Modernism Made in New Mexico exhibition and New Mexico Museum of Art’s recent emphasis on Southwestern modernists, we’re declaring a ‘Spring of Modernism’ in Santa Fe. It begins with our exhibition of influential New Mexico modernists, and features women artists of new mexico, rare artifacts from legendary artists’ studios and much more. Check it out:

Spring of Modernism: Seminal New Mexico Modernists
March 6-31, Opening Reception: Friday, March 6, 5-7 pm

Matthews Gallery declares a “new spring” of modernism, as this rich period in New Mexico art history returns to the spotlight. Featured artists include Emil Bisttram, William Lumpkins and Raymond Jonson of the Transcendental Painting Group, Alfred Morang and Randall Davey of the Santa Fe art colony, and Beatrice Mandelman of the Taos Art Colony.

Collector’s Forum Workshop
April 17, 6:30 pm

We offer an inside look at art collecting for this special Art Matters event. The workshop is for anyone who’s ever considered buying, selling or caring for fine art and has questions about the inner workings of the art world. Forum participants will get an inside look at every step of the process from one of Santa Fe’s top galleries. The event is free but seating is limited, so give us a call if you’d like to participate – 505-992-2882. Read about our past Collector’s Forum workshops here and here.

New Landscapes, New Vistas: Women Artists of New Mexico
May 8-31, Opening Reception: Friday, May 8, 5-7 pm

In the first half of the 20th century, a number of women artists who were frustrated by a lack of the recognition on the East Coast packed up and left everything behind. In New Mexico’s isolated art colonies, they found the freedom and social acceptance to excel. Matthews Gallery presents the stories and artwork of Janet Lippincott, Agnes Sims, Doris Cross and other women who found a powerful voice in the Land of Enchantment.

The Artist’s Toolkit: New Mexico Artists at Work
June 4-10, Opening Reception: Friday, June 5, 5-7 pm

This special exhibition features rare artifacts of legendary New Mexico artists alongside their work, giving visitors insight into the complex process of conceptualizing, mixing and applying color. Visitors will get a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view Tommy Macaione’s paint palette, John McHugh’s brushes, Alfred Morang’s notes on color, Hilaire Hiler’s color wheel and other behind-the-scenes ephemera from Santa Fe private collections.

Widening the Horizon: New Mexico Landscapes
June 12-30, Opening Reception: Friday, June 12, 5-7 pm

New Mexico’s endless vistas offer an opportunity and a challenge to artists. Matthews Gallery looks back at legendary artists’ attempts to capture and reimagine the High Desert horizon, from early Santa Fe and Taos art colonists including Datus Myers and William Vincent Kirkpatrick, to modernists including William Lumpkins and Beatrice Mandelman, who evoked the spirit of the landscape through the language of abstraction.

Learn more about our exhibition schedule here, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest for daily gallery news.

COLLECTOR’S FORUM: Conservator Matt Horowitz

October 4, 2014October 4, 2014 Matthews Gallery4 Comments

Fine art conservator Matt Horowitz will appear at our COLLECTOR’S FORUM workshops
on October 17 and 24. The free events are for anyone who’s ever considered buying, selling or caring for fine art and has questions about the inner workings of the art world. To reserve a seat, make sure to contact us!

Conservator Matt Horowitz with a 17th century painting he restored for Matthews Gallery

“I came in and they gave me a de Kooning,” says Matt Horowitz. He’s telling the story of his arrival in Manhattan at 24 years old to work for a famed art restoration firm. If he failed this audition, there would be dire art historical consequences.

“A piece of the white paint had chipped away, which is the hardest thing to match, because white is never really white,” Horowitz says, nervously twisting the ring on his finger. “I was like, ‘You don’t even know who the hell I am, and you just gave me a de Kooning and you want me to fix it.'” At the end of the painstaking task, Horowitz had a new job. Eight years later he sits in Matthews Gallery’s front room among paintings he’s restored for us, with a budding reputation as a rare young master in his field.

Horowitz grew up in Santa Fe, where his father Marty founded Goldleaf Framemakers in 1988. One summer in high school he got bored with the family business and asked local art conservator Steven Prins to teach him the tricks of the trade.

After receiving his BFA in painting and drawing at the University of New Mexico, Horowitz returned to Santa Fe to work with Prins, but he’d always dreamed of living in New York. When he got a job offer from Lowy Frame & Restoration Company in Manhattan, he took the leap.

Horowitz at work

“I didn’t go and get my masters degree in conservation because I went for a ‘apprenticeship to working commercially’ route,” Horowitz says. “I prefer it because when you go to school it’s a very different environment. It’s very intellectual.” At Lowy he got hands-on experience with diverse museum-quality work: paintings by Degas, Dali and other legends.

Horowitz had a great job and an apartment in Manhattan, but he was far away from his family. “Things had gotten really rough after the recession,” he recalls. “My dad calls and says, ‘Would you be interested in coming back and helping your old man out?'” It was a difficult decision, but Horowitz left New York behind.

His first winter back in Santa Fe was hard work. Horowitz lived in the family shop and turned out beautifully restored artwork on tight deadlines, building a successful new wing of the business. It’s been four years since his return and a decade since he started working as a professional art conservator, and business is booming.

Untitled still life by Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer, impeccably restored by Horowitz

“Now that I’ve been doing it for 10 years, I really push that,” Horowitz says. “I’ve definitely come up against the ageism, and the people who say, ‘How could you know what you’re doing? You’re too young.'” That’s why he jumped at the chance to collaborate with us on our Art Matters event, COLLECTOR’S FORUM. During our free workshops on October 17 and 24, he’ll discuss the fine points of maintaining and restoring artwork in your collection and tell fascinating stories from his career, including the tale of restoring one of Matthews Gallery’s oldest works of art.

“It’s kind of like being a detective,” he says. “It’s exciting. Something comes in and it’s not always totally straightforward, there’s a combination of things. It can be stressful but it’s exciting. You have to follow the clues and figure it all out.”

Learn more about COLLECTOR’S FORUM on our exhibition page, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for daily gallery updates.

FAMILIAR STRANGERS: Be a Voyeur, Detective, Surrealist, Humanist!

May 3, 2014May 24, 2023 Matthews Gallery2 Comments

Untitled, Unknown

“A photograph is usually looked at—seldom looked into,” said Ansel Adams. When it comes to the pictures in our upcoming show, there’s no other option but to dig a little deeper.

FAMILIAR STRANGERS: Vernacular Photography, opening Friday, May 16, is not your typical Matthews Gallery show. The artists who created our collection of found photographs never got the recognition that Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec or Renoir did, but there’s no denying their aesthetic sensibilities.

That’s what has kept us digging through estate sales, thrift shops, antique stores and attics for years. We’ve amassed quite the collection of vernacular photographs, also known as “found” or “orphan” photos, and we’re not alone in our scavenging habits. Our friends on social media understand the great allure of the hunt.

“Looking at so many old and found photographs I often think that, ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,'” writes Paul Jackson, who maintains the Flickr group Found Photographs. “The person behind the camera has seen these things, lived that life..you know, we can sometimes almost taste it.” We asked several other photo finders what they love about the pursuit, and they all had equally passionate answers.

Vernacular photography presents unique challenges to the viewer, asking us to shift between different roles to grasp what we’re seeing. Our first impulse is often voyeuristic. We can’t resist a peek at someone’s intimate moment, and we swiftly draw conclusions about what’s going on. In the image above a baton girl gawks open-mouthed at a band boy, but he looks resolutely away. Is this a tale of unrequited love?

Society often slaps us on the wrist for our voyeuristic tendencies. In his brilliant essay on found photography Dr. Barry Mauer of the University of Central Florida says this instinct is something we should indulge.

“At first sight, most of these pictures are hilarious or tragic or both,” writes Mauer. “Voyeurism allows me to experience these reactions from a comfortable distance.” However, Mauer cautions against stopping there. Voyeurism often comes hand-in-hand with judgment and categorization. Stereotyping these mysterious individuals cuts us off from a rich world of visual mysteries. Time to pull out the magnifying glass.

Untitled, Unknown

If we act as detectives, this simple portrait holds a lot of hints about the bicyclist and her photographer. Did you notice the bandages on her knee and arm? If those are recent wounds, perhaps she’s just learning how to ride. It’s difficult to tie a forearm bandage on your own. Maybe the person behind the camera is her teacher and medic? On the other hand, the bags on the handlebars hint at a different adventure. One of them looks like a canteen. Could the other hold snacks for a picnic?

Teasing out these details is invigorating. To take it one step further, note the composition of the photograph. The front wheel is cut off and part of the path is visible behind the girl. This perspective, when combined with the subject’s bent posture and excited face, lends the photo a sense of forward movement. Our mysterious photographer has imbued a picture of a static bike with surprising dynamism. Was that his or her intention?

Untitled, Unknown

Of course, in the end we’ll probably never know if our inferences are correct. Who better to help us surmount our fear of the unknown than the surrealists? André Breton and his friends were inspired rather than daunted by impenetrable mysteries. They sought out fragments of culture, watching films from between their fingers to try to catch discreet details and writing stories based on dreams they had about real experiences.

Both techniques allowed them to focus on details they otherwise would’ve ignored. In the photo above, our interest in the group in the foreground distracts from the odd figure standing in the far background. Cropping the photo brings up a whole array of new questions.

Detail of previous photo

In a broader context the entire photo is a fragment. The man in the foreground’s stern expression stands alone, isolated from what happened before or after. Perhaps he cracked a smile a moment later, but this short glimpse of his day at the pool has a foreboding air to it.

“The surrealists used fragmentation as a means to knowledge, discovering significance in the fragment that had been concealed in the contextualized whole,” Mauer writes. It’s not hard to trace the progression of this thinking to Marcel Duchamp’s use of found objects, or to the Dada artists’ repurposing of vernacular photos in collages (more on all of that in an upcoming blog post).

In the end analyzing and relating to the “characters” in these photographs helps develop our skills in another field: humanism. It’s amazing how connected we can feel to a person we’ll never meet, and how powerful our feelings of empathy and sympathy can be when we exercise them. Look long enough, and you’ll start to imagine that these familiar strangers are looking right back.

Step into the shoes of a voyeur, detective, surrealist and humanist at FAMILIAR STRANGERS: Vernacular Photography, opening Friday, May 16. Also, make sure to check out our fascinating interview with four found photography collectors and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr for more gallery news!