One of the most salutary benefits and greatest riches of the frenzied program of temporary museum exhibitions that has been the norm for nearly twenty years is the number of occasions on which it has brought to the attention of the public an artist either all but forgotten or know only to a narrow circle of art world professionals - which are tantamount to being the same thing.
This is exactly what the idea of the museum exhibition is all about, of course. But in these days when Treasures of…and From the Collection of…shows are placing more of a premium on cultural sex appeal than enlightenment, it's been easy to forget.
Nonetheless, in recent years, the public has been the beneficiary of a number of exhibitions that have either made us see anew an artist we thought we were completely familiar with or brought to our attention one whose work had not been seen in its broadest compass. And interestingly, the feeling of revelation prompted by these exhibitions has occurred most frequently, and most profoundly, in the area of American art. Almost annually, the American museum public has been treated tone splendid exhibition after another. Marsden Hartley in 1980; Thomas Eakins in1982; Charles Burchfield in 1984; in 1986 the watercolors of Winslow Homer; and currently at the National Gallery in Washington, John Marin.
Albert Pinkham Ryder - another painter - is the latest artist whose work is now being laid before a public likely to be all too ignorant of his gifts, indeed his genius. The occasion is a retrospective, organized by Elizabeth Broun, Director of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, which is currently on view at that institution. (It later travels to the Brooklyn Museum.) In addition, there are two books on the artist; one being Elizabeth Broun's catalog to the show, the other a volume entitled Albert Pinkham Ryder; Painter of Dreams by the late Lloyd Goodrich, an expanded version of his 1959 monograph on the artist.
Too Murky
Both volumes do more than just recount the artist's life and discuss his art, as monographs commonly do. The circumstances of Ryder's career are too murky to allow such a straightforward approach. For one thing, Ryder, in common with many other artists (turner and Blake come to mind), wrote poetry, and both books include his poems. The Goodrich/Homer study goes even farther, reproducing correspondence, contemporary memoirs by people who knew him (Kenneth Hayes Miller and Marsden Hartley among them). And even the marvelous "Paragraphs From the Studio of a Recluse,' Ryder's own transcription of a 1905 interview.
And both books address the problem of forgeries. A slow, methodical worker, Ryder painted relatively few picture during his lifetime. Yet after his death, a number of pseudo-Ryders appeared, so it has now become necessary to separate the real from the fake.
Who was he? Born in 1847 (he died in 1917), Ryder was a contemporary of artists such as Eakins and homer, a painter who lived at the transitional phase of American art, just as old modes of expression were giving way to an incipient modernism. In fact, it is a comparison with Eakins that gives us the clearest picture of the artist. Eakins, the scrupulous realist, used every tool at his command - science,
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