I came across the Art Digest article in our file on the painting, and was surprised that little had been written on Harpo as an art collector. I had always loved the Marx Brothers (and highly recommend “Duck Soup” (1933) to the readers of this blog), but had never thought of any of them as the “gallery gazing” type. My curiosity was sparked, and I set out to find out more about Harpo’s collection. Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking to Harpo’s son, Bill Marx, about his father’s interest in art.

LF: I’m curious to hear more about the Benton painting. It was in your family for so long, I’m guessing that you have some stories about it.

WM: Not really. There weren’t really stories. Dad and Mom were collectors, and they happened to consider Benton an important artist at the time. They collected—eclectically I might add—they had everything from Benton to Dalí to George Grosz and early LeRoy Neiman. Basically, they were interested in American artists.

LF: In your book, Son of Harpo Speaks!, you mention that your father painted as well. Could you tell me a little more about that?

WM: Dad started painting when he was in his thirties, and then he stopped painting because he had a lot of work. And then he had a heart attack, so went back to painting again and he painted numerous, numerous paintings for hospitals and charities. His stuff is all over the country. He went back to performing again, and then he had his second heart attack, and so he went back to painting. I do feel that it was a lifesaver for Dad. He would go into his studio for seven hours, and come out, and just had the best time. He had to have a creative outlet, and so he was pretty much always involved in the arts. He was painting all the way up to the very end.

LF: In your father’s autobiography, Harpo Speaks!, he mentions that he met Salvador Dalí. Do you know if he ever met Thomas Hart Benton when he was out in Hollywood?

WM: Now I can’t speak to that. Hang on. I’m going to send you something that will knock your socks off.

While still on the phone, Bill began emailing me images from his own personal archive—newspaper clippings about Harpo’s purchase of the painting, family photos of the work hanging over the fireplace at “El Rancho Harpo,” and (what really knocked my socks off!) a pen & ink study for the painting that Benton had sent to Harpo after the sale. The drawing was one of a series that Benton had made for a Kansas City newspaper to document a devastating 1937 flood.

Spring on the Missouri over the fireplace at “El Rancho Harpo.”

Before my e-mail to Bill, he had not known where the painting ended up (it had been sold after Harpo’s death in 1964) and he was delighted that it had found a home in a museum. Since its acquisition by the NCMA in 1977, Spring on the Missouri has become a favorite stop for visitors and school groups in our American art galleries. (I’ve noticed that on tours this work is the one that really gets people talking. The picture tells a story, and visitors—school children in particular, though adults as well—want to tell you what they think that story is.)

WM: That’s phenomenal. I never knew where it went, and to have kids come in and benefit from Benton’s extraordinary ability, it warms my heart. It keeps the world from going crazy.

To learn more about Harpo’s collection or to see examples of his own paintings, visit Bill’s website at “Harpo’s Place”.

Laura Fravel, GSK Curatorial Fellow

Home is the sailor, home from the sea

In the summer of 1997, I was invited by Norman and Judith Topper to visit their home at Fearrington Village. Originally from New York, the Toppers had embraced the Triangle and especially the Museum. Both were dedicated, enthusiastic docents at the NCMA. They invited me over that August morning to talk about their art collection and specifically if there was anything of interest to the Museum.

Their collection was modest, mostly European and Japanese prints and Chinese export porcelain. While not for us, they would be welcome in the collections of several local museums, and I gave the Toppers names and phone numbers of the curators. However, there was one item that I very much coveted. Leaning on a shelf was a bronze portrait medallion of the Scottish poet Robert Louis Stevenson by the American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. That was a keeper! The Toppers happily offered to leave the portrait to the Museum in their wills. The next day Norman called to say that he and Judith had changed their minds: they wanted to donate the portrait right away. In such moments curators are allowed to be giddy.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) is arguably the finest American sculptor of the 19th century, famed for his heroic monuments to Civil War heroes. His most celebrated works are the gilded equestrian statue of General Sherman at the bottom of New York’s Central Park and the incomparable memorial to Col. Robert Gould Shaw and the heroic African American soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry on Boston Common. Saint-Gaudens was also the unsurpassed master of the demanding art of relief portraiture. Working within a shallow plane, he managed to convey an illusion of space and a complexity of design as well as a vivid and personable likeness. The Stevenson portrait is regarded as one of the sculptor’s great triumphs.

Saint-Gaudens requested and received permission to create the portrait during Stevenson’s visit to the United States in 1887. As the artist recalled in his autobiography:

I began the medallion at [Stevenson’s] rooms in the Hotel Albert … not far from where I lived on Washington Place. All I had time to do from him then was the head, which I modeled in five sittings of two or three hours each. These were given me in the morning, while he, as was his custom, lay in bed propped up with pillows, and either read or was read to by Mrs. Stevenson.

The artist modeled the poet’s thin, elegant hands several months later. In the finished relief, he filled the background with Stevenson’s verse.

The Stevenson portrait achieved immediate and enduring success, and the sculptor had editions cast in several sizes.

The portrait arrived from the Toppers without a frame. We looked at examples of frame designs favored by the sculptor and initially tried a hexagonal design in dark walnut. That proved unsatisfactory. This past year Chief Conservator Bill Brown and I revisited the frame problem. This time we were inspired by an arts and crafts design frequently used by Saint-Gaudens for other casts of the Stevenson portrait. Instead of a dark wood molding, this design featured splined oak boards, decorated only by a carved bead border circling the inset relief and by three carved rosettes at the bottom, echoing motifs in the relief. We brought in local furniture craftsman Evan Lightner, who had earlier fabricated the imposing architectural surround for our mural study by John Singer Sargent. We showed Evan photographs of our chosen design. He then researched frame making of the period and came back to us with drawings. He also proposed using a tricky 19th-century technique to impart a rich golden tone to the wood by fuming the boards with ammonia—a process that required trial and error. Though lengthy, Evan’s description of the frame-making process makes interesting reading:

Once the design was agreed upon, I sourced lumber in the dimensions necessary to fulfill the specs of the frame—plus another plank for backup. As with most American arts and crafts furniture from that period, quartersawn white oak was utilized for its stability and uniform grain. Initial milling of my planks yielded grain directions and cosmetic characteristics. I selected the lengths with the straightest grain and lack of inclusions for the frame body. These were cut from the plank, remilled, surface scraped, and left to acclimate.

At the Museum a template of the bronze medallion was traced, noting its attachment points, depth, and deviations. Back at the shop, the frame sides were planed to thickness, ripped to width, and cut to length. These lengths were then mitered at 45 degrees. I then used the template to rout into the frame the exact ever-so-slightly oblong shape of the artwork.

At this point I temporarily assembled the frame. With a razor tool, I then scribed the two lines around the inside perimeter that would comprise the channel for the carved pea molding. Taking the frame apart into its four sections allowed me to carve the double row of inset 1/8-inch peas into the channel as well as the rosettes at the frame bottom. When completed, I glued the four corners of the frame together. A segmented ledge was installed in the frame interior to enable attachment of the relief.

Several rounds of finish sanding prepared the frame for coloring and sealing. I constructed a plastic tent to envelop the frame, leaving about 3 inches of airspace around it. Before sealing the tent, I poured one cup of 28% aqueous ammonia into a pie dish located in the center of the frame. After two hours of exposure to the ammonia fumes, the frame had darkened substantially. Following a light surface sanding, I applied three coats of a polymerized linseed oil based on a 19th-century coachmakers recipe. Once cured, a coat of paste wax was applied and buffed to a satin sheen.

In the meantime Bill Brown had cleaned the surface of the portrait relief and applied a thin protective wax to the surface. The original patination of the bronze had likely suffered over the years from overpolishing—think a polished doorknob. Bill used a colored French wax, Pâte Dugay, to impart a slightly darker overall tone and to highlight the subtle textural differences hidden within the shallow picture plane. When the frame arrived, Bill carefully set the relief into the recess, attaching it with bronze screws. The result is an elegant presentation: a frame that does not call attention to itself but only enhances the quiet beauty of the portrait.

The framed portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson was reinstalled to the American Galleries on January 28, paired with Thomas Eakins’s portrait of Dr. Albert Getchell.

John W. Coffey

This loan is one in a series of paintings Warhol made by screen-printing the image of Elvis Presley 28 times onto a roll of silver-painted canvas in different combinations—singles, doubles, triples, and superimposed images. He created the work for a show at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1963 and sent the entire roll of printed canvas with a set of variously sized stretchers to the gallery. He left it up to the gallery to cut the canvas to fit the stretchers, resulting in five single images, six superimposed images, and two diptychs of paired images, including this one. Melding high and low, Warhol used a mechanical silkscreening process to make these works, intentionally creating what he called “an assembly-line effect.” He presents Elvis life-size and dressed as a cowboy (from a publicity still for the 1960 movie Flaming Star) and multiplies his star power by four.

Image: Andy Warhol, Elvis I and II, 1963; 1964 (?), silkscreen ink and spray paint (silver canvas), silkscreen ink and acrylic (blue canvas) on linen, 208.3 x 208.3 cm (each of two panels), Collection Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift from the Women’s Committee Fund, 1966, © 2012 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Don’t miss a special Art in the Evening celebrating Elvis I and II on Friday, January 11, at 6 pm.

What I didn’t expect was to be equally, if not more, amazed by the artist’s wooden sculptures.

Like his metal pieces, Anatsui’s wooden works are intricate, beautiful, and imbued with a profound symbolism that relates not only to African culture but to humanity as a whole. I was most awed, however, by the way they echo the wall hangings’ sense of movement and dynamism. Wood loses all of its stiffness and takes on an energetic, lifelike quality: the sculptures that refer to cloth appear to crumple and fold, and another, titled Imbroglio, seems to be actually writhing.

These wooden treasures excited me in a way that sculptures rarely had before. I now have a more open mind about art and look forward to taking many more non-Western courses. I also recognize how important it is to take a deeper look into an artist’s body of work, because sometimes your favorite piece may not be the most well known. Finally, I see how even the most unexpected materials can be turned into something incredibly beautiful—and this, I think, was exactly El Anatsui’s goal in the first place.

—Elana Hain, an art history student at UNC–Chapel Hill and a curatorial intern at the NCMA, is working this summer on research for upcoming contemporary art exhibitions.

Image: El Anatsui, When I Last Wrote to You about Africa, 1986, wood, Private collection, Germany

In some ways Rhythms of the Heart: The Illustration of Ashley Bryan is an ideal exhibition for the NCMA, allowing viewers to make associations between it and El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa. Both are retrospectives of the careers of prolific men—one from North America, the other from Africa. Both El Anatsui and Ashley Bryan are true artistic masters with firm grasps of very different mediums. In El Anatsui’s case, visitors can explore wood sculptures, metal wall sculptures, and drawings, noting that the artist understands and has talent for each mode of creation; Ashley Bryan’s illustrations shine whether made from construction paper cutouts, linoleum prints, or poster paint. And finally, both artists share a deep connection to Africa, which comes across in the colors, subject matter, and design in each of their works.

While you’re visiting these exhibitions, don’t forget to ponder how these exhibitions connect to our permanent collection in West Building, too—the African Gallery and the Modern and Contemporary Galleries provide great starting points for comparison.

Have you visited Rhythms of the Heart yet? What other connections to our permanent collection or Spring–Summer 2012 exhibitions can you make? Leave us a comment below.

Jennifer Dasal is associate curator of contemporary art.

Rhythms of the Heart: The Illustration of Ashley Bryan is organized by the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature. This exhibition is made possible, in part, by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources; the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.; and the William R. Kenan Jr. Endowment for Educational Exhibitions.

Image: Ashley Bryan, Mountain View, 1967, from Moon, for What Do You Wait? (Atheneum, 1967), linoleum print, 16 ½ x 8 in., Courtesy of the artist, © 1967 Ashley Bryan

Israel and the Law is part of an ambitious cycle of murals created by Sargent to decorate a palatial hall in the library. Titled “The Triumph of Religion,” the murals chart the evolution of Western religious thought from polytheist beginnings in Egypt and Mesopotamia to the “enlightened” monotheism of modern times. A central theme of the cycle is the dialogue between Judaism and Christianity carried out in corresponding paintings that occupy the spandrels of the vaults, three on each lateral side of the hall. In Israel and the Law, a cowled Jehovah, his face unseen, crouches on a mountaintop teaching the Divine Law to the boy Israel. The pair is protected by a ring of warrior angels.

Judging by the number of drawings made for Israel and the Law, Sargent worried over this painting more than any of his other murals.  In addition to the drawings, now at Harvard, he made two full studies in oil. The Museum’s painting is most likely the first of the two. Close examination reveals clear evidence of the artist fine-tuning the composition. For example, in the group of angels at right, one can see under the buildup of paint where Sargent adjusted the placement of the winged figures. The other study, in the collection of London Royal Academy of Arts, has few editorial changes. It was probably made for exhibition, whereas the Museum’s painting is a true study, all the more interesting for showing the artist at work.

Israel and the Law is unique in our American collection for being essentially a work of civic art, not intended for a private home or even a museum. It was composed for a grand public space and meant to be viewed from below. This posed a challenge for us. The painting arrived at the Museum in a handsome gilt frame that made the picture “behave” as though it were any easel picture circa 1900. That was clearly the wrong message. As a corrective, we looked back to the practice of American mural painters of Sargent’s generation. We found that it was common for artists to paint small versions of a proposed mural for approval by a client or architect. Some of these paintings were framed in elaborately constructed and painted frames that would give the client a suggestion of the architectural context for the final mural. One such frame was designed by the artist Elihu Vedder for his study for Rome, or the Art Idea. Using that frame as inspiration, we asked Raleigh furniture maker Evan Lightner to build a frame for Israel and the Law. The design incorporated some of the beaux-arts architectural features found in Sargent Hall at the Boston Public Library. We then asked decorative painter Rosa Patton to paint the frame using marbled colors matched to those in Sargent Hall. The resulting frame endows Sargent’s mural study with appropriate majesty and distinguishes it from the rest of the American paintings.

On February 24 Israel and the Law was unveiled in a special single-painting exhibition in West Building in the space immediately preceding the Judaic Art Gallery.

And all of this followed from one phone call.

NOTE: “Israel and the Law: The Key to a Missing Keynote,” is the subject of a public lecture by Yale University Professor Sally M. Promey to be presented as 12^th annual Abram and Frances Pascher Kanof Lecture, Sunday, March 25, at 2 pm in the Museum Auditorium.  The lecture is free to the public. More info

Who would have imagined that treasures of English Judaica would end up in North Carolina? In mid-January we placed on display in the Judaic Art Gallery a major new acquisition: Torah ornaments from the Orthodox Synagogue of Plymouth, England. Consisting of silver and gilt finials (rimmonim) and matching pointer (yad), these superb pieces are among the earliest complete sets of English Torah silver.  How did they come to North Carolina?  Therein lies a tale. But first, some background.

The Orthodox Synagogue in Plymouth lays claim to being “the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in the English-speaking world still in regular use.” Founded by German and Dutch immigrants, the synagogue was built in 1762 by carpenters and other artisans from the nearby shipyards of the Royal Navy. Though never large, the Plymouth Jewish community attained a degree of prosperity that is reflected in the sophistication of the synagogue furnishings and ceremonial art.

About 1783—the year the American colonies won their independence—an unknown member of the Plymouth community went to London and commissioned a pair of finials and pointer from John Robins, a silversmith with a fashionable clientele. Robins responded with pieces that in their refined proportions and playful elegance typify the best of Georgian silversmithing. A respected authority on English silver has judged the finials to be “one of the two most effectively original pairs of rimmonim of pure English character made in London in the 18th century.” Whether intended or not, the bulbous shapes of the finials suggest the origin of the term rimmonim—pomegranates. Gilded bells dangle from three tiers of fancifully designed brackets, adding a celestial tinkle to the procession of the Torah scroll during religious services. Topping each finial is a very English hooped crown, symbolizing the sovereignty of the divine word.

For 226 years the Robins-made finials and pointer played a central role in the ritual life of the Plymouth synagogue. However, in recent decades the once-thriving community has declined, so that today it reportedly numbers about 50 people. “We are a dying community,” admitted one of the leaders of the synagogue to a reporter for the London Times in 2009. She was explaining why the congregation took the drastic decision to sell 23 silver items, including the Robins-made finials and pointer. She further confessed that “we don’t use the items, and we are very short of funds. I’m not sad to see them go …There is no point keeping silver in the bank that we are not using.”

The decision to sell the Torah ornaments sparked a brief furor. Besides the Times, the story was reported by the BBC, London’s Jewish Chronicle, and as far afield as the Jerusalem Post and New York’s Jewish Daily Forward. Inevitably, voices were raised decrying the loss to Jewish—and English—heritage. Even so, despite the ruckus, no one stepped forward to assist the Plymouth Synagogue, and the objects were consigned to auction at Bonham’s in London in November 2009. Nicholas Shaw of Bonham’s praised the Plymouth silver as “the earliest and rarest set of English ritual Torah furnishings to have come up for auction.” Interest was high among collectors of Judaica. Some people expected London’s Jewish Museum to bid on the finials and pointer in an effort to “rescue” them for England.  In the end no rescue materialized, and the pieces were bought by a respected London dealer in antique silver and jewelry. After some minor conservation—primarily replacement of a few lost bells—the finials and pointer were offered to the North Carolina Museum of Art for our Judaic Art Gallery.

This presented an opportunity that would not come twice. In strengthening the Judaic art collection, a top priority has been to extend the geographical range of the collection in order to represent the variety of interpretations of ceremonial art across the Jewish Diaspora. Our collection had no English Judaica. And we had few pieces of any kind from the 18th century. Then, too, our goal has always been to acquire only Judaic art of superb artistry. After all, we are an art museum. The Plymouth ornaments were not only historically important; they were also visually dazzling. We had to have them.

The price, however, even after considerable bargaining, was high, and the resources then available in the Judaic Art Fund were substantial but not enough. The dealer in London granted us time to raise the remaining funds. An appeal went out to the Friends of the Judaic Art Gallery, and happily several North Carolinians stepped forward with generous contributions that completed the purchase.

Plymouth’s loss is certainly North Carolina’s gain, but we do not intend to ignore, much less forget, where these beautiful objects came from. So many pieces in our Judaic art collection—and in the Museum’s other collections—have lost their histories as they have passed from one hand to another, sometimes with war intervening. With these Torah ornaments, we have the full and very human story: objects created to honor God and enhance communal pride, cherished by 10 generations of Plymouth’s Jews, and finally, sadly sacrificed as the Plymouth community dwindles. The story is well worth sharing.

Images: John Robins, Torah Finials and Pointer, 1783–84, silver: hollow-formed, repoussé, cast, chased, partly gilded, velvet crown caps; finials: H. 14 1/2 in., pointer: L. 11 in., Purchased with funds from Wendy and Mike Brenner, Alice and Daniel Satisky, Phyllis Shavitz and Family in Memory of Stanley Shavitz, and other Friends of the Judaic Art Gallery

Related: Join the Friends of the Judaic Art Gallery on Saturday, March 11, for Purim Madness!

In all honesty I must begin my comments on Rembrandt in America with the admission that I am really not a Rembrandt person. Clearly Rembrandt stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries during the Dutch “Golden Age,” and it goes without saying I would be thrilled to have an autograph Rembrandt painting come to the Museum (unfortunately, the three we thought we had have all been de-Rembrandted!). My interests have centered elsewhere in the field, however—specifically Frans Hals and painters in his circle, among them Jan Miense Molenaer. Readers might recall the Molenaer exhibition I did at the NCMA in 2002. So, naturally, one might wonder why a “non-Rembrandt” person would agree to devote most of the last three years of his life to a large and complex Rembrandt exhibition.

The answer lies in the fact you can’t really function as a 17th-century Dutch painting curator without dealing with Rembrandt. The long shadow he casts over Dutch art touches nearly everyone, and one can argue that his popularity has never been stronger than it is today. Certainly much of this interest centers on the lingering controversies over whether a particular painting was painted by Rembrandt or by one of his assistants. So, as one deals with the myth, reality, and especially the marketability of Rembrandt, I asked myself, what is the glue that could hold these concepts together? More important, how do these concerns relate to the North Carolina Museum of Art? The answer was simple—William Valentiner, the NCMA’s first director.

As one of the world’s foremost authorities on Rembrandt during the first half of the 20th century, Valentiner was largely responsible for expanding the accepted number of Rembrandt paintings. His flawed accounting would eventually embrace more than 700 works. This expansion happily coincided with a huge appetite for Rembrandt paintings by American collectors, an interest that began just after the Civil War. These “Gilded Age” collectors—many were often described as “robber barons” (or “the 1 percent,” to use today’s terminology)—snagged some of Rembrandt’s greatest masterpieces. Others, however, bought studio works, imitations, and even outright forgeries. To their credit, though, many eventually gifted their “Rembrandts” to American museums.

Thus, it was my idea to link Valentiner with Rembrandt and the collecting of his paintings in America. Since collecting history has long been of interest to me (note my Sinners and Saints exhibition), I was returning to a comfort zone as I considered the viability of Rembrandt in America. With the help of my co-curators, we created a project that was intellectually sound, visually exciting, and certainly worth pursuing. Long story short, we successfully made our case to the museums and individuals who agreed to lend works to the show. So while I am exhausted, I couldn’t be prouder of the exhibition, its installation, and the accompanying catalogue. And yes, I guess I have become a Rembrandt person!

Dennis P. Weller is the NCMA’s curator of Northern European art and co-curator of Rembrandt in America.

It’s that time of year again, dear readers! With the change of the seasons comes a new edition of our billboards project, Park Pictures. We’ve been promoting Park Pictures here on Untitled for more than two years now, and we’re still going strong! As you may recall, our Pictures are three “billboards” installed along the paved walking trails, commissioned by the Museum to encourage visitors to explore the art available in the Museum Park. These billboards change regularly to feature new works by different artists, both from North Carolina and elsewhere.

Last spring Anthony Goicolea created three billboards in conjunction with his solo exhibition Alter Ego: A Decade of Work by Anthony Goicolea. This time around we’ve commissioned three works by California-based artist Carolyn Janssen, who completed her master of fine arts degree at UNC–Chapel Hill in spring 2011. Janssen’s works are digitally crafted worlds created by the expert superposition of images from Janssen’s own daily environment, including multiple representations of herself. This consistent layering allows the artist an element of control as she focuses on the process itself. “I used individual objects in the same way I would use a single brushstroke,” Janssen notes, “building each scene mark by mark.” Janssen’s knowledge of art shines through in her works, which are reminiscent of traditional landscape painting as well as the complex scenes of Bosch and Breughel. The images also refer to video game worlds and science fiction tableaux, which keep Janssen’s works rooted in pop culture.

The subject matter of Janssen’s billboards pertains to an imaginary dystopic society populated solely by Amazon-esque women who, the artist notes, “question and commandeer the landscape, engaging in narratives and mini-dramas, in which they build, fight, kill, and rest. At times calm, at times acting in apprehension to a present or past disaster, the figures reflect on a landscape broken, uncertain, and strange.”

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

Recent visitors to the Museum will have noticed a new addition to the paintings in the American galleries. Dock Builders by George Bellows is the latest promised gift of Ann and Jim Goodnight. Bellows (1882–1925) was one of the most influential and beloved American artists of the early 20^th century. He dropped out of college to play semiprofessional baseball before pursuing a career as a painter in New York. There Bellows studied under Robert Henri and through him fell in with a group of young urban artists. The “ashcan school” advocated painting contemporary American society in all its gritty reality. Though more famous today for his boxing pictures, Bellows painted a wide variety of subjects, capturing the bustle of life around him.

Painted in 1916 during a summer in Camden, Maine, Dock Builders is one of a series of pictures depicting the hard laboring lives of Down East people. It gives a noble dimension to men and horses struggling to move logs into position. Bold, slashing brushstrokes give a sense of movement to this otherwise carefully ordered composition. Bellows’s painterly gusto spills out along the rocks at the bottom as his thick, churning splashes of color encrust the sunlit shoreline. There is a playfulness in Bellows’s handling of the brush. Perhaps the relaxed atmosphere of coastal Maine and the joy of working outside encouraged him to paint more freely. In a letter to Henri, he wrote, “I have done a number of pictures this summer which have not arrived in my mind from direct impressions but are creations of fancy arising out of my knowledge and experience of the facts employed.” Whether it was the sea air or a desire to try new things, it is exciting to see an artist enjoying himself in this “creation of fancy.”

For all the freedom of Dock Builders, Bellows was also experimenting with a systematic approach to composition. The smoothly contoured figures are carefully arranged in an underlying structure of intersecting diagonals. Also, along with several other members of the ashcan school, Bellows was intrigued by the color theories of Hardesty Maratta. Maratta devised a system that assigned each color to a corresponding musical note. He then directed artists to combine colors at prescribed intervals, using “chords” to achieve a harmonious effect. We do not know if Bellows used a color keyboard [see image below] when he was painting in Camden, though it seems likely that he had the balanced triads of the Maratta system in mind.

Combining freedom and restraint, Dock Builders adds something new to the Museum’s galleries. Celebrating men at work, the vibrant colors and innovative technique showcased in this landscape represent a pivotal moment in the history of American art.

Laura Fravel, Curatorial Intern

Hardesty G. Maratta’s color keyboard. From The Maratta Scales of Artists’ Oil Pigments, 1916. John Weichsel Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Image: George Wesley Bellows, Dock Builders, 1916, oil on canvas, Promised gift of Dr. and Mrs. James H. Goodnight