Maxim Karolik folk art

Magazine Antiques, April, 2001 by Carol Troyen

Karolik also eagerly acquired the work of Joseph H. Davis, "the left-handed painter," whose gaily patterned interiors and landscapes were populated by stalwart New Englanders, generally shown in profile. Karolik admired the work of Eunice Pinney, who provided handsome memorials for her Windsor, Connecticut, neighbors. Pinney's beguiling Three Women Standing beside a Funerary Monument is as much a Fashion plate as a solemn memorial. The memorial she created for herself when (as she wrote on the back) she was "disponding," is a masterpiece of the genre (Pl. VIII). Pinney's color is soft and elegant. The slender brushstrokes imitating feathery stitches in the foliage and the pinpricking on the dresses evoking the texture of crepe demonstrate the cross-over between embroidered memorials and watercolor designs in the early nineteenth century.

The most intriguing concentration of folk works on paper in the third Karolik Collection is the group of ten watercolors by the early nineteenth-century painter Mary Ann Willson. Her highly original fanciful heads (see Pl. IX), floral decorations, birds and animals, biblical and historical subjects, and figurative subjects of her own devising were constructed according to her own notions of scale, anatomy, and composition. The artist's forms are firmly outlined, and she juxtaposes intense flat colors with areas of busy repetitive patterns.

In 1944 a New York dealer displayed a newly discovered portfolio of twenty of Wilson's watercolors. Four years later, Karolik bought ten of them, by far the largest group to be acquired by a single collector. [12] Along with the ten watercolors came a letter, apparently written at mid-century by "An Admirer of Art," which provided the principal account of Willson's career:

The Artist Miss Willson & her friend Miss Brundage...[who had] a romantic attachment for each other...came from one of the Eastern States and made their home in the town of Greenville Green[e], C[degrees] N. Y....One was the farmer and cultivated the land...while the other Made pictures which she sold to farmers and others as rare and unique 'works of art'....The writer of this little sketch does not mean to compare these [pictures] of fantastic taste--with the more modem artistic works of a Cole,--Durand, Huntingdon [sic] & others--but simply as the work of a native artist--uneducated of course, but a proof of the unnecessary waste of time under old Masters; and Italian travel. [13]

Karolik, who repeatedly railed against the denigration of native efforts in favor of art heavily influenced by Europe, would have agreed.

The M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Watercolors and Drawings 1800-1875 opened to great fanfare on October 17, 1962. The press saluted it as "a delightful mass hayride into the American past," "a wonderful kaleidoscopic [vision] of a nation that was," [14] and "the nucleus for the study of American art." [15] Featuring both French champagne and down-home fruit punch in the tapestry gallery with nineteenth-century figures made of strawflowers lining the grand staircase, the preview was attended by more than two thousand guests. Karolik, who in 1958 had been named Honorary Curator of American Arts, [16] did not attend. He received the warm wishes of fellow art enthusiasts at home in Newport, Rhode Island.