''Jane Street Corner of Hudson,'' from 1931, is a cityscape done in the Precisionist style, intended to convey an ideal streamlined quality in modern life. George Ault is represented by two paintings done 15 years apart. That same year George Bellows, who had already done boxing works, painted a zesty ''Mountain Farm,'' the kind of spirited work that makes Bellows' early death, three years later at the age of 42, all the more regrettable. His most interesting foray into the major abstraction of his day is the 1922 work, ''Barns and Corner Porch,'' in which the bucolic cloud-filled image is radically sliced up. World War I turned a lot of assumptions about beauty on their head, and the first really daring artist to settle in Woodstock was the German-born Konrad Cramer, who worked in many media. But, in 1912, Andrew Dasburg, who later moved to New Mexico and adapted boxy adobe architecture to Cubism, painted the popular artists' haunt Monhegan Island in Maine in the bright colors of Synchromism. Birge Harrison, was a Tonalist, and John Carlson painted forest scenes.
The works in the exhibition from the first decade are poetic landscapes. (Most of the paintings in the exhibition are lent by the association.) But in the seclusion of their studios the artists forged their own often alluring painterly idioms. The Woodstock Artists Association, founded in 1919 was supported by both the traditionalist and modernist camps. Woodstock saw a lot of group activity the Art Students League, for example, had a summer school there from 1906 to 1922. Woodstock has the earmarks of other art colonies, including an aggregate of studios and houses on a hundred acres of land below the face of Mount Overlook called Byrdcliffe.
Many were determined to Americanize avant-garde styles developed in Europe, but others, using Woodstock as a refuge from the city, painted pleasant landscapes, though often with a twist.
Sturges soaked up the lingering heady and haunting atmosphere is conveyed in his incisive wall text.Īrtists who gravitated to the town in the Catskills painted in a wide range of styles. Sturges spent summers in Woodstock with his parents the force of the colony may have been ebbing by then, but that Mr. Work from that period is the focus of an affecting exhibition at the Bruce Museum, whose curator is the museum's executive director, Holister Sturges.īeginning in 1951 Mr. But its golden age was from 1902 to the 1950's. WOODSTOCK will always conjure up a rock festival, but away from the clamor Woodstock means something else - a community of artists that exists to this day.
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