SYRACUSE, NY.- The Everson Museum of Art presents the long awaited exhibition, Fantasies and Fairy-Tales: Maxfield Parrish and the Art of the Print will open to the public on Thursday, April 29, 2010. The exhibition will remain on view through July 11, 2010.
During the height of Maxfield Parrishs popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, he was the most reproduced American artist of his era. Disseminated through magazine covers, book illustrations, calendar pads, advertisements and color reproductions, Parrishs images occupied a ubiquitous presence in popular visual culture.
While recent exhibitions of Parrish have focused mainly on his original oil paintings, Fantasies and Fairy-Tales represents the first comprehensive sampling of Parrishs work in a variety of printed media, said Steven Kern, Everson Museum of Art Executive Director. These whimsical works, based on fairy-tales and nursery rhymes, made Parrish a critical success in his own lifetime, and still delight audiences of all ages.
Isolated from many of his fellow artists due, in part, to his enormous commercial success, Parrish developed an original and individual style that defies categorization. His career represented a challenge to the traditional artistic divide between commercial and fine art. Fantasies and Fairy-Tales testifies to the ability of Parrish to live with a foot in both worlds, simultaneously enjoying the fruits of commercial and critical success while delighting audiences of all ages.