Albany Museum of Art

Albany, Georgia

912-439-8400

http://www.albanymuseum.com/index.html



 

Pride in Place: Landscapes by The Eight in Southern Collections

 

The Albany Museum of Art in Albany, Georgia is pleased to announce an exciting landmark exhibition, Pride in Place: Landscapes by The Eight in Southern Collections. This exhibition, the first to focus on landscapes by the group of painters known as The Eight, is comprised of 40 landscapes drawn from 17 Southern museum collections. The exhibition opens at the Albany Museum of Art in January 2000 and then will travel to three other Southern museums through October of 2000. An essay by Dr. William Gerdts, the noted scholar of American art, is included in the full-color catalogue that accompanies this exhibition. (left: Ernest Lawson (1873-1939), Segovia, 1916, oil on panel, 12 x 16 1/8 inches, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Athens, Georgia. Eva Underhill Holbrook Memorial Collection of American Art,Gift of Alfred H. Holbrook, GMOA 45.59)

The Eight were a group of American artists in New York City who held a well-publicized exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York in February, 1908. It comprised Arthur Bowen Davies,Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, Robert Henri, John Sloan, and George Luks. Men of widely different tendencies, they were bound by common opposition to academism. As a group they were primarily devoted to the depiction of urban activities or, as in the case of Henri, their leader, to single figural imagery of what he termed "My People." A core group within The Eight (Henri, Sloan, Shinn, Glackens, and Luks) had earlier been active in Philadelphia, primarily as newspaper illustrators, before migrating to New York, where they began to tackle sometimes tough and brutal urban Realist themes. Yet, some of the artists were, in fact, drawn for various reasons to pure nature, while all of them absorbed the relatively new categories of the urban and recreational landscape into their oeuvres. (right: William Glackens (1870-1938), The Lake, 1918, oil on canvas, The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Jacksonville, Florida)

The forty works in Pride in Place show mountain scenery, coastal scenes, foreign landscapes, rural and suburban scenes, recreational landscapes, and urban landscapes. Dr. William Gerdts remarks, "This exhibition is the first to focus on the achievements in landscape of the Eight. Their landscapes resonate with a sense of identification with their subjects that carry them beyond the pure objectivity of Realist observation. (left: Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928), Summer, n.d., oil on canvas, on loan from the Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, Alabama; Gift from the estate of Henry Mordecai Rosenberg)

Pride in Place: Landscapes by The Eight in Southern Collections will be on display at the Albany Museum of Art of Albany, Georgia, through March 12, 2000. It then travels to Montgomery Museum of Art, Montgomery, Alabama, where it will be exhibited from April 1 to May 13, 2000. From June 15 to August 13, 2000 the exhibition will be on display at Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Laurel, Mississippi. Cheekwood Museum, in Nashville, Tennessee will be the final host for the exhibition from August 31 to October 15, 2000.

Read more about the Albany Museum of Art in Resource Library Magazine.

For further biographical information on selected artists cited above please see America's Distinguished Artists, a national registry of historic artists.

rev. 12/23/10


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