Current and Upcoming Exhibitions
Spring 2013
Lit with Piercing Glances: Linocuts by James Mullen
January 6–May 19, 2013
James Mullen, Andalusian Still Life, 1968, linocut and fabric relief. Gift of James M. Mullen, 2006.17.
In the summer of 1963, James Mullen elected to take a break from his M.F.A. studies at Penn State to take a drive up to Boston. Stopping along the way in Oneonta, New York, he chanced upon the head of the art department from the town’s SUNY College. In need of a faculty member for the fall, she offered Mullen a position on the spot, and the rest, as they say, is history. Mullen went on to teach at Oneonta for well over thirty years, offering a variety of courses in art and art history and excelling in his own work as a printmaker.
This exhibition offers a retrospective look at Mullen’s preferred medium, the linoleum block print, or linocut, which he has found particularly suitable for his linearly reductive approach to the still life. The eighteen prints on view range from his earlier experiments in black and white to the more richly illuminated sheets he developed later in his career, which can feature as many as thirty-four distinct colors.
The title of the exhibition is drawn from Marianne Moore’s 1921 poem, “When I Buy Pictures,” in which she sets the parameters for the art she appreciates. Whatever kind of art it is, she concludes, it must be “lit with piercing glances into the life of things.”
"Varied and Untried": Early Twentieth-Century American Paintings from the James and Barbara Palmer Collection
January 13–May 5, 2013
Georgia O'Keeffe, Lake George, 1924, oil on canvas. Collection of James and Barbara Palmer.
Ashcan realists under the tutelage of Robert Henri and modernists in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz challenged the academic status quo in the early decades of the twentieth century. This exhibition highlights many of the American artists—Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Ernest Lawson, John Marin, Alfred Maurer, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Sloan, among others—who were willing to pursue subjects and styles both “varied and untried” as they charted largely untested terrain in a new century.
Committed to exploring independent points of view and spurred on by charismatic and opinionated “leaders,” the artists associated with Henri and Stieglitz provided new ways of looking at the everyday world by opposing the staid academicism of American art. Ashcan artists struck out in search of “life” as it was being lived by the people, as in Everett Shinn’s pastel rendering of a tenement district washerwoman in The Laundress, 1903, or Ernest Lawson’s scene from the urban outskirts, Boys and Canal Boat—Spuyten Duyvil, 1911–14.
In contrast, modernist artists turned inward, developing new visual languages that were expressive of the individual’s place within the modern world. Marsden Hartley’s Mountains in Stone, Dogtown, 1931, is a work influenced by avant-garde European precedents yet imbued with intense personal meaning. Georgia O’Keeffe’s simplified and pristine Lake George, 1924, was part of a group of breakthrough paintings she created while inspired by a landscape of deep private significance.
The exhibition accompanies the publication of A Gift from the Heart: American Art from the Collection of James and Barbara Palmer in spring 2013and is co-curated by museum curator Joyce Robinson and independent curator Molly S. Hutton.
Drawn to Paint: The Art of Jerome Witkin
February 26–May 5, 2013
Jerome Witkin, The Act of Judith, 1979–80, oil on canvas. Gift of the National Academy of Design, Henry Ward Ranger Fund, 83.45.
Inveterate visitors to the Palmer Museum are likely well familiar with the art of Jerome Witkin. The Palmer counts three important Witkin canvases among its holdings, including—much to the delight of thousands of schoolchildren who have roamed the galleries over the years—his portrait of the portly Jeff Davies, and the museum’s walls are seldom absent the artist’s presence. This spring, the museum is pleased to host a major retrospective of Witkin’s work, featuring nearly forty paintings and drawings that span more than four decades of his career.
Witkin has been widely acknowledged as one of the country’s leading figurative painters. His narrative canvases, often extending over multiple large panels, reference the grand European tradition of history painting while remaining relevant to their time through a penetrating examination of contemporary issues. With a concern for vulnerability as his basic theme, Witkin addresses the widest range of human anguish in his work, from the genocidal violence of the Holocaust, in paintings such as Entering Darkness and Beating Station, to the disintegration of personal relationships—Division Street, for example, records the dissolution of his parents’ marriage.
Although he has won praise for his superb drawing—the artist Mark Tansey has characterized him simply as the most skilled draftsman of the human figure he knows—Witkin is equally admired for his sense of color. Indeed, the expressionist flourish with which he applies his oils to the canvas often renders large passages in his compositions as deliciously daubed as a Willem de Kooning or a Lee Krasner.
Drawn to Paint, organized by the Syracuse University Art Galleries, celebrates a career that spans a half century. For more than forty of those years, since 1971, Witkin has been teaching painting at Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts.
Summer 2013
Suspended Contemplation: Drawings and Watercolors by Leon Kelly
May 21–August 11, 2013
Leon Kelly St. Sebastian and the Good Woman, Irene, 1940, watercolor and graphite. Gifts of Drs. Albert M. and Lorraine H. Kligman, 2011.37.
Drawn largely from the private collection of Albert and Lorraine Kligman, this exhibition includessurrealist-inspired compositions for which Leon Kelly is best known today, as well as numerous additional sheets that range from his early cubist studies to his neo-baroque experiments of the early 1960s.
La Manière Anglaise: Mezzotints from the Permanent Collection
May 28–August 25, 2013
Gerardo Belfiore, Mid-City, 1937, carborundum mezzotint. Transfer from The Pennsylvania State University Libraries Print Collection, 2009.17.
Although the mezzotint process flourished first in the Netherlands, by the 1750s the technique came to be known as “la manière anglaise”—the English manner. The prints in this exhibition range from Dutch and British efforts from the height of mezzotint production to examples by artists who revisited the process in the twentieth century as a means of generating original images.
From Your Town to Ours: Pennsylvania Prints from the O'Connor-Yeager Collection Revisited
June 4–August 11, 2013
William Wallace Denslow, Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, 1878, Viewed from Half Moon Hill, 1878, lithograph. Partial gift and purchase from John C. O'Connor and Ralph M. Yeager, 86.390.
From Your Town to Ours will be the first time in over twenty-five years that the full scope of the O’Connor-Yeager collection of Pennsylvania prints will be evident. In addition to the panoramic and bird’s-eye views of Pennsylvania towns and cities for which the collection is best known, the exhibition will also include an array of images that document historic events, the founding of Pennsylvania, and the growth and development of highways, byways, and railways across the state.
Fall 2013
American Block and Burin: Wood Engravings from the Permanent Collection
August 27–December 8, 2013
Recent Acquisitions
September 3–December 15, 2013
Uncanny Congruencies
September 10–December 15, 2013
