Robert Gwathmey: Master Painter
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts - PAFA, Philadelphia
June 17 - August 13, 2000
This compelling traveling exhibition, for which the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts will serve as the only East Coast venue and its final stop, surveys the career of Robert Gwathmey (1903-1988).
One of the most committed social realists of his generation, Robert Gwathmey received a degree from the Pennsylvania Academy in 1930. A native Virginian, he was highly regarded during the postwar period for his sensitive observations of rural life in the American South, painted in a modernist idiom of geometric forms and bold colors largely inspired by Pablo Picasso. This retrospective of more than 60 paintings and graphics explores the life and work of a complex man, deemed one of the first white artists to produce unsentimental depictions of African-American life.
Organized chronologically and thematically, the exhibition focuses on five decades of Robert Gwathmey's production, from the late 1930s to the early 1980s. This survey highlights the artist's changing perspective from a moralist-particularly in his incisive look at the stark structure of Southern society, defined by race and caste-to that of a social satirist, in his pointed takes on social relations, excessive materialism, and the pop and op art movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Dubbed by the New York Times, at the time of his death from Parkinson's disease, an "artist of social passions and style," Robert Gwathmey always viewed himself as an observer, dually committed to art and civil action.
After a year of artistic study at Baltimore's Maryland Institute of Design, a sojourn that marked Robert Gwathmey's first trip North (although he had visited Europe the previous year), he trained at the Pennsylvania Academy from 1926 to 1930. Working primarily with Franklin Watkins and Daniel Garber, Robert Gwathmey had yet to settle on his distinctive cubist-derived style and social subject matter. Nevertheless, his formative years in Philadelphia would shape his future practice on a variety of levels.
Robert Gwathmey received his greatest acclaim in the 1940s. By this time, he was largely based in New York, where he maintained an active presence in the gallery scene and his work was collected by major museums. In 1942, he joined the faculty of the Cooper Union as a drawing instructor, a position he held until 1968. An inspiring teacher who encouraged his students to concern themselves with ethics and morality in both aesthetic and social terms, Robert Gwathmey influenced many younger artists. (The contemporary African-American artist Faith Ringgold credits Robert Gwathmey for her interest in fusing aesthetic and life experiences in her multimedia production.)
During the 1950s, Robert Gwathmey's figurative work, along with that of his colleagues Philip Evergood, Ben Shahn, and Jacob Lawrence, was overshadowed by the critical dominance of abstract painting. By the 1960s, a decade of civil unrest, his art of social protest was again back in fashion. In 1973, Robert Gwathmey was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and, in 1976, he became an associate member of the National Academy of Design. The so-called Robert Gwathmey house-a collage of cubistic forms-quickly became a landmark in American residential architecture.
Robert Gwathmey: Master Painter is organized by the Butler Institute of American Art.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts - PAFA
Broad and Cherry Streets, Philadelphia, PA 19102
