BURLINGTON, VT.- The Fleming Museum of Art is presenting three outstanding paintings on loan from the Hood Museum of Art. While the Hood Museum, located on the campus of Dartmouth College, is closed for expansion and renovation, the institution will be traveling nearly fifty key works from their permanent collection to more than a dozen North American museums.
On loan to the Fleming are paintings by American artists Georgia O’Keeffe, Alex Katz, and Ivan Albright. The works will be on view for three years beginning Tuesday, April 12, 2016.
“We’re thrilled to bring these masterpieces of modern and contemporary American art to Burlington, and are grateful to our colleagues at the Hood for making it possible,” says Janie Cohen, Fleming Museum director. “Installed in our galleries, they augment our own collection in compelling ways.”
Featured in the the Fleming’s European and American Gallery will be Georgia O’Keefe’s Taos Mountain, New Mexico, painted in 1930. O’Keeffe’s mastery of vibrant color and sensuous brushwork is on full display in this small painting. The artist became enamored with the landscape of the Southwest on her first visit in 1929, and she moved there permanently in 1949. She painted Taos Mountain, New Mexico during her second summer there. One can see in O’Keeffe’s work the simplification of form, at times verging on abstraction, that made her one of the most important American modernists of the twentieth century.
Also on view in the genre section of the European and American Gallery is Supper (1974) by Alex Katz. The monumental painting is typical of the artist’s style, in which figures are depicted in a simplified realist manner. Katz bases his portrayals on members of his social circle of artists and intellectuals. His wife Ada, a frequent subject throughout his career, appears at right in black. The familiar scene, several friends gathered for a casual dinner at home, is nonetheless revealed as a kind of social ritual.
The third painting on loan is titled The Vermonter (If Life Were Life There Would Be No Death) (1966-77) by Ivan Albright who moved to Woodstock, Vermont, in 1965 after four decades spent in Chicago. This painting was the first major work he started in his new home and depicts his neighbor Kenneth Harper Atwood, who graduated from the University of Vermont in 1912. Albright believed in uniting the spiritual and the physical in his art. The pulsating, concentric rings of color are meant to represent the vitality of his subject’s life force, even as his body deteriorates in old age.
