Robert Gwathmey: Master Painter, PAFA, Philadelphia - Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

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

www.pafa.org

Andy Warhol: Social Observer at PAFA, Philadelphia

Andy Warhol: Social Observer 
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
June 17 - September 21, 2000

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts presents Andy Warhol: Social Observer. This major exhibition examines an aspect of Warhol's work and career that has never been fully explored in a museum setting: the depth and variety of the artist's critical observations of American society, and the ways in which his strategies of observation changed over the course of his career.

Andy Warhol: Social Observer focuses on what the artist looked at, how he looked at those subjects and, in certain situations, how he himself was perceived by the society so inclined to keep its media trained on him. The exhibition is divided into seven sections: disguise, death and humanity, politics, advertising, cover stories, celebrity, and symbolism. Organized thematically, the sections highlight Warhol's engagement with what he perceived as the socially relevant in art and life. An artist famous for having promoted himself as apathetic, vacuous, and superficial, Warhol will be seen as having been socially active and politically concerned.

In addition to 86 paintings, prints, photographs, and one film, the exhibition features archival material borrowed from The Andy Warhol Museum. This includes selections from the artist's collection of photographs, newspaper articles, and promotional materials that figured prominently in the production of his art. One of Warhol's "Time Capsules," compiled for posterity, will also be on view to provide a glimpse into a rarely examined aspect of his infatuation with the stuff of popular culture.

Andy Warhol: Social Observer gathers together extraordinary examples of the artist's journalistic reportage, including selections from his series devoted to "Electric Chairs," "Car Crashes," "Most Wanted Men," and "Race Riots." The exhibition also goes beyond the early years associated with this Disaster imagery to delve deeper into the complexity and range of Warhol's production by featuring works that suggest new ways to understand this artist who is best known as an originator of Pop art. Whereas many Warhol exhibitions have focused primarily on the artist's early output, Social Observer takes stock of the full expanse of his life's work. By examining both the medium and the message, it offers fresh insights and makes significant advances in the scholarship of this preeminent post-war American artist.

Andy Warhol: Social Observer runs concurrently with Robert Gwathmey: Master Painter, a retrospective of the work of the PAFA graduate and mid-century social realist renowned for his role as an observer of Southern rural life. As a complementary pair, the exhibitions will examine the documentary currents of social realism, which had its origins in the 1930s, and explore their connections to the photographic and mass-media based art-making techniques employed by Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol: Social Observer is organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The exhibition is funded in part by a grant from the Mellon Financial Corporation Foundation, with additional funding from the Women's Committee of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

A variety of adult and family educational programming-an artists' panel, film series, lectures, and gallery talks-will accompany the exhibition's presentation, as well as a fully illustrated catalogue authored by Assistant Curator Jonathan P. Binstock, the exhibition's organizer, with essay contributions by both Maurice Berger, distinguished art historian and Senior Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics of the New School for Social Research in New York City, and Trevor Fairbrother, Deputy Director and John and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern Art at the Seattle Art Museum.

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Broad and Cherry Streets | Philadelphia, PA 19102
pafa.org