NASHVILLE, TN.- To See as Artists See: American Art from The Phillips Collection features more than 100 works by 75 important artists, including outstanding paintings by Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Maurice Prendergast, John Sloan, Edward Hopper, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Stuart Davis, Jacob Lawrence, Adolf Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell. The exhibition will remain on view through May 6, 2012.
The paintings in the exhibition range in date from 1845–1965 and represent a magnificent survey of American painters and their work. The exhibition begins with great heroes of nineteenth-century American art, including Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins whose works set the course for modern art in the U.S. The exhibition concludes with works by the Abstract Expressionists whose efforts to create a new visual language in the 1940s caused the art world to turn its attention from Paris to New York and made American art a significant global force.
“Nashville first experienced The Phillips Collection in 2004, with From El Greco to Picasso: European Masterworks from The Phillips Collection, which has been one of the Frist Center’s most popular exhibitions,” said Frist Center Executive Director Susan H. Edwards, Ph.D., “and it is no wonder. The Phillips Collection is one of the nation’s museum jewels. Duncan Phillips was a collector without peer in his time and still has much to teach us about how to appreciate, enjoy and collect art.
“This is the first time The Phillips Collection has organized a comprehensive selection of its American treasures for exhibition outside the museum. The show has been an international sensation in Roverto, Italy; Madrid, Spain and Tokyo, Japan. Nashville is the first of only two U.S. venues to host the show before it returns to Washington, D.C. To be able to bring such magnificent art to the Southeast is a joy for us,” she concluded.
The paintings have been arranged in 10 thematic groups: Romanticism and Realism (with works by Edward Hicks, George Inness, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Albert Pinkham Ryder); Impressionism (Childe Hassam, Ernest Lawson, John Henry Twachtman, William Merritt Chase, Maurice Prendergast); Forces in Nature (Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, John Marin, Harold Weston); Nature and Abstraction (Arthur Dove, Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Kent, Marin, Max Weber); Modern Life (Robert Henri, George Luks, Walt Kuhn, Edward Hopper, Guy Pène du Bois); The City (John Sloan, John Marin, Charles Sheeler, Ralston Crawford, Edward Hopper,); Memory and Identity (Grandma Moses, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippin, Rufino Tamayo); Legacy of Cubism (John Marin, Karl Knaths, Stuart Davis, John Graham, Ilya Bolotowsky); Transition to Abstract Expressionism (Morris Graves, Jackson Pollock, Milton Avery, Alexander Calder); and Abstract Expressionism (Adolf Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston).
