Museum accessions - National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC - Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

Magazine Antiques, March, 1994 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

The Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, Connecticut, has recently acquired a number of important twentieth-century American paintings, ranging from Arthur B. Davies's Protest Against Violence of about 1911 to 1912 to Arthur G. Dove's Approaching Snow Storm of 1934. The latter is illustrated here, along with Childe Hassam's Flag Outside Her Window, April, 1918, another recent acquisition.

Dove's canvas is representative of his work between about 1933 and 1938, when he lived on a farm in Geneva, New York, and drew his subjects from his rustic experiences and the rolling countryside of the Finger Lakes region, creating a rich interplay of natural imagery and abstract design. A superb colorist who mixed his own pigments, Dove excelled at using colors for their emotive qualities, as can be seen in Approaching Snow Storm in which he used burnt sienna, raw umber, gray, and white to suggest the power and cold of the impending storm.

Approaching Snow Storm is one of several paintings Dove worked on in the winter of 1933 and 1934 for an exhibition that opened in April 1934 at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery in New York City. The show received critical acclaim in a number of reviews, including one by Elizabeth McCausland, who wrote that Dove "sees life as an epic drama, a great Nature myth...he has an appreciation of the wonder and the mystery of color, the subtle and mystic relations of intimate tones."

The artist's son William chose Approaching Snow Storm as the only work by his father that he wished to keep, and it remained in his possession until it was acquired by the Atheneum.

Childe Hassam's series of flag paintings, most often thought of as depicting banners waving from the fronts of buildings along New York City's Fifth Avenue during World War I, also included three interior views. Until recently all three were unlocated, but The Flag Outside Her Window, April, 1918 has now come to light.

All three interior views portray women looking out a window, with a glimpse of a flag visible. As Ilene Susan Fort wrote in The Flag Paintings of Childe Hassam (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1988), "the figures represented the wives, girlfriends, and families who kept 'the home fires burning' as they waited for their men to return." Hassam considered such works an essential part of his patriotic statement.

The Flag Outside Her Window is also known as The Boys Marching By, making it clear that the young woman is watching one of the parades along Fifth Avenue that marked the anniversary of America's entry into the war. In preparing the canvas for the first exhibition of the flag paintings as a group, at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in New York City in November 1918, Hassam extended the canvas by an inch on all four sides and touched up some parts, adding vibrance to the reds and blues of the flag so as to match the others in the series.

ARTISTS WHO TRAVELED to New Mexico are usually divided into two stylistic groups. The first, the traditionalists, began arriving in the late 1890's, while the modernists moved in during and after World War I. One of the finest concentrations of work by both groups was collected by the late Arvin Gottlieb of Kansas City, Missouri, and has been given to the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. It comprises twenty-two paintings by seventeen artists.

Many of the early painters belonged to the Taos Society of Artists (1915-1927). Of these artists, most were from the Midwest and many were of German descent from poor but hard-working families. They often began their careers as illustrators or commercial artists who found patrons in the business world. E. Martin Hennings, for example, came to Santa Fe with the support of Carter Harrison, a mayor of Chicago, financier, and patron of the arts. Hennings's Riders at Sunset (illustrated below) exhibits the sound understanding of academic techniques found in the work of many members of the Taos school, but its angular shapes and discrete applications of color demonstrate an attraction to modern ideas also found in the watercolors of John Marin (1870-1953).

The limpid light, infinite vistas, and monumental scenery of New Mexico enchanted and inspired these painters from the East. Moreover, the well-preserved and actively inhabited Taos pueblo was a strong drawing card. As the painter W. Victor Higgins (b. 1884) noted, "There is in the mind of every member of the Taos art colony the knowledge that here is the oldest of American civilzations. The manners and customs and style of architecture...offer the painter a subject as full of the fundamental qualities of life as did the Holy Land long ago."