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Dallas Museum of Art Discovers George Inness Painting in the Collection

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In October 2012, the Dallas Museum of Art announced the reattribution of a painting to the artist George Inness, widely admired as one of America’s greatest landscape painters. The work of art has been in the Museum’s collection for eighty years, entering in 1931 as part of a bequest by Cecil A. Keating. At the time of the painting’s acquisition, the unsigned work carried the title of In the Woods and was believed to be by the hand of Asher B. Durand, a leading figure of the first generation of the Hudson River school painters in the mid-19th century.

At some point during the next forty years, doubts as to the authorship of the painting were raised and the attribution was downgraded to possibly being by Durand, which held until August of this year. Sue Canterbury, The Pauline Gill Sullivan Associate Curator of American Art, viewed the painting in the Museum’s art storage area and was intrigued by its strong composition and competent execution, as well as by the questions surrounding its authorship. After an examination of the spatial organization and the techniques used in the painting, a number of artists, including Durand, were eliminated as possible creators of the work. Close scrutiny of the early works of Inness yielded the greatest degree of parity in matters of execution. Canterbury’s suspicions of Inness’s authorship were clinched, however, when she suddenly came across a pen and ink drawing from the Princeton University Art Museum that contained the key compositional elements of the Dallas work. Of these similarities, the most eye-catching is the pointing trapezoidal rock that appears in the center of both drawing and painting.

Stream in the Mountains is on view in the DMA’s American Art galleries on Level 4, alongside Asher B. Durand’s Wooded Landscape, which is presently on loan to the DMA from the Jean and Graham Devoe Williford Charitable Trust. Read the full release here.

Images: George Inness, Stream in the Mountains (formerly: In the Woods), c. 1850, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, bequest of Cecil A. Keating, 1931.6; George Inness, Woodland Scene, 1845–55, pen and brown-black ink, brush, and brown wash heightened with white gouache over traces of graphite on brown wove paper, Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. x1943-27

A Closer Look at Pierre Bonnard’s The Street in Winter

 Pierre Bonnard_The Street in Winter

Pierre Bonnard’s painting The Street in Winter of 1894 entered the Dallas Museum of Art’s collection in 1985 as part of The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection. Earlier this year, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs Olivier Meslay chose to highlight this masterwork of European art in a new installation within the Museum’s replica of the Villa La Pausa on Level 3. In this petite yet impressive painting, Bonnard captures a moment of everyday life in the streets of Paris.

Pierre Bonnard was a member of the Nabis (Hebrew for “prophet”), a group of predominantly French artists active in Paris around 1888 to 1900. Founded by Paul Sérusier, the circle included many influential artists such as Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Henri-Gabriel Ibels, Edouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, and Aristide Maillol. The Nabis followed the synthetist precedent set by Paul Gauguin, which explored the ways in which feeling and thought could be integrated with the appearance of natural forms.

The provenance history of The Street in Winter begins with two art critics who had collections of works from various art movements that originated in France, including the Nabis group.The painting first belonged to Thadée Natanson, an important French critic and collector who strongly supported the Nabi movement. In 1891 Thadée, along with his brother Alexandre, founded the Revue Blanche, a journal that promoted Bonnard and his contemporaries and celebrated their innovative aesthetic. In 1908, when Natanson sold his collection of art, The Street in Winter came into the possession of the influential dealer, art critic, and collector Félix Fénéon. Like Natanson, Fénéon was active in the literary community of Paris. He contributed to numerous magazines and co-founded his own journal, Revue Indépendante, in 1884.
  

New Collections Handbook Highlights Recent Acquisitions across Museum’s Encyclopedic Collection and Showcases DMA’s Transformative Growth Since Its Founding in 1903

GUIDE TO THE COLLECTION 2012

The Dallas Museum of Art celebrates more than one hundred years of benefaction from its major donors with the release of a new collection handbook, documenting the Museum’s transformative growth since its founding in 1903. The 368-page, full-color publication provides an overview of the quality, breadth, and depth of the Museum’s encyclopedic collection and emphasizes the tremendous impact of the Museum’s longtime patrons, who enabled the Museum to grow from a regional resource into one of the nation’s leading arts institutions. With an introduction by former Museum director Bonnie Pitman, the guide highlights more than four hundred works of art with new photography and scholarship, and showcases in particular recent gifts and major acquisitions from the past fifteen years. Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection is available in the Museum Store and online at shopDMA.org.
 

The Quality Instinct: Seeing Art Through a Museum Director’s Eye by  Maxwell L. Anderson Provides Readers with Insights and Anecdotes on How to See and Judge Art

The Quality of Instinct

Maxwell L. Anderson, the newly named Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art and former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, enters the fray with The Quality Instinct: Seeing Art Through a Museum Director’s Eye. Part personal memoir, part thinking person’s guide to the museum, The Quality Instinct is filled with wit, humor, anecdotes, and insights from the author’s thirty years in the highly competitive, often contentious art world. Anderson takes us on a grand tour of ancient and contemporary art, sharing five simple metrics of quality that help us increase our “visual literacy” as we learn to see, not simply look—and yes, to judge.

All proceeds from the sales will go directly to the Dallas Museum of Art.