Displaying items by tag: American Paintings

Rarely seen American paintings from a private family collection in Maryland will be going on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The museum said Thursday that Thelma and Melvin Lenkin of Chevy Chase, Maryland, are lending 19 major paintings to the museum for display April 17 through Aug. 16.

The Lenkin collection includes masterworks of American impressionism and from the Ashcan school, portraying scenes of daily life in New York.

The National Gallery of Art has added 6,430 works from the Corcoran Gallery of Art to its collection in a historic effort that improves its standing as Washington’s flagship art institution while attempting to preserve the legacy of what was the city’s oldest private art museum.

The acquisitions — described by curators as dazzling, stunning and transformative — will dramatically alter the National Gallery’s holdings of contemporary art, sculpture, American paintings and works on paper. And because they are rich with works by women and African Americans, the pieces diversify the National Gallery’s collection.

Julie Aronson's story of how Grant Wood's iconic "American Gothic" came to be at the Cincinnati Art Museum this fall is a lesson in not censoring yourself while brainstorming.

"This is something I always thought, 'Gee, wouldn't it be amazing?' said the museum's curator of American paintings, sculpture, and drawing. "I thought this was just a pipe dream, that it would never happen."

"American Gothic," at the Art Institute of Chicago since it was first exhibited in 1930. It rarely travels.

Modern Dialect: American Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman Collection, a striking new exhibition, opened at the Columbus Museum of Art June 6. The exhibition, on view through August 31, showcases American Modernist paintings from the 1920s to the beginning of World War II, a period marked by significant change and compounded by the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The more than sixty artists featured in Modern Dialect hail from all parts of the United States, and painted wherever they found inspiration. These artists adhere to a common interest, more than to a single style, in portraying their realities in a decidedly modern fashion. The exhibition reveals the scope of the American modernist aesthetic in the early 20th century, and the vision and integrity each artist brought to the representation of the American experience – from rural landscapes to modern industrial cities (and the people who inhabit them) to purely abstracted compositions.

Las Vegas billionaire Frank Fertitta III is suing a respected Swiss curator accused of standing behind the authenticity of a Mark Rothko painting that turned out to be a fake. Feritta acquired “Untitled (Orange, Red and Blue)” from New York’s disgraced Knoedler gallery in 2008. He paid $7.2 million for the canvas.

Oliver Wick, a Swiss Rotko expert and specialist in American paintings, received $300,000 for the sale. According to court documents, Wick “was aware of substantial evidence that the painting was a forgery” and “conducted no independent research into the authenticity of this fake Rotko.” The painting had been exhibited at the Fondation Beyeler museum in Basel, Switzerland, where Wick was a curator.

Knoedler, which closed in 2011, has been accused by multiple clients of selling forged paintings. The forgeries, which were presented as authentic works by Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning, had been painted by a Queens-based Chinese artist and sold to Knoedler by Glafira Rosales, a Long Island art dealer. Rosales pleaded guilty to nine charges, including wire fraud, tax fraud, and money laundering, last September. During her 15-year scheme, Rosales swindled unsuspecting customers out of over $80 million.

American art connoisseurs John and Susan Horseman have assembled a collection of American paintings that are being traveled by the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee. The exhibition, Modern Dialect: American Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman Collection, brings together sixty-eight paintings from the collection to explore artists and the works they created in the tumultuous years surrounding the two World Wars.