Saturday, May 10 at 2:00 pm
Gertrude abercrombie: the whole World is a mystery
Sarah Humphreville
Lunder Curator of American Art
Colby College Museum of Art
Catalogue cover for Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World is a Mystery
From the exhibition catalogue: “Chicago artist Gertrude Abercrombie was a critical figure in the midcentury Chicago art and jazz scenes. A creative force of singular vision, Abercrombie produced enigmatic paintings full of personal significance. With a deft hand, a concise symbolic vocabulary and a restrained palette, she produced potent images that speak to her mercurial nature and her evolving psychology as an artist. Cats, owls, doors, moons, barren trees, seashells and searching female figures all converge in her mysterious works, which suggest a life of purposeful introspection and emotional struggle. Drawing consistently on her dreams as source material, Abercrombie said, "The whole world is a mystery.”
The artist’s first retrospective since 1991 is at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh through June 1, 2025 then opens at the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine on July 12 and travels to the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2026.
Saturday, May 10 at 4:00 pm
The ever-experimental work of Emil Bisttram
Claire Mosier
Registrar
American Museum of Western Art—The Anschutz Collection
Emil James Bisttram, Great Western Sky, 1930, oil on canvas. Courtesy of American Museum of Western Art – The Anschutz Collection.
Emil Bisttram (1895-1976) started his art career in New York at a time when modernism was becoming popular. He brought modernist sensibilities with him to the American Southwest in the 1930s, establishing himself as an avant-garde artist and teacher. Throughout his career Bisttram experimented with visual styles and art media, exploring how best to represent intellectual and theological concepts as well as the world around him. He is still renowned for his skill with representative, abstract, and non-objective works, as well as artistic exploration.
Sunday, May 11 at 2:00 pm
Sargent and PARIS
Stephanie L. Herdrich
Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Drawings
The American Wing, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
John Singer Sargent, Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1884, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
From the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website:
“Sargent and Paris explores the early career of American painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), from his arrival in Paris in 1874 as a precocious 18-year-old art student through the mid-1880s, when his infamous portrait Madame X was a scandalous success at the Paris Salon. Over the course of one extraordinary decade, Sargent achieved recognition by creating boldly ambitious portraits and figure paintings that pushed the boundaries of conventionality”.
Sunday, May 11 at 4:00 pm
Lecture & Book preview
The Enigmatic Expatriate: Julius LeBlanc Stewart, Artist of Belle Époque Paris and His American Legacy
Valerie Ann Leeds
Independent Curator and Scholar
From the press release for The Sweet Life: Julius LeBlanc Stewart and Painting the Belle Epoque: “An entirely new exploration of the life and career of the expat American artist Julius LeBlanc Stewart (1855-1919), who spent nearly all his life in Paris, and whose oil paintings feature in private collections and those of many major museums on both sides of the Atlantic.
Stewart’s paintings are highly engaging and attractive, covering a broad cross-section of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American Expat Parisian high society, its genteel past-times, and travel, in a style of painting that was uniquely his own, and that was lauded in both Europe and America. This new volume presents over seventy major paintings, pastels and drawings across thematic sections, with a new introduction to Stewart’s life, career, and world through essays by major specialists on nineteenth and early twentieth century American art and history.
The authors look variously at Stewart’s early career and training at the École des Beaux-Arts, his later tutelage under French and Spanish masters, Eduardo Zamacoïs, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and Raimundo Madrazo, his family's involvement in the production of sugar; then the world of the American Expat society in which Stewart circulated, and the evolution Stewart's later style, in the mid 1880s towards multi-figured, narrative scenes of his family, friends and meticulous depictions of their costumes; then for a brief period later the sensuous Arcadian nudes bathed in sunlight, celebrating the attributes of Diana and the Bachenates. Collectively these provide the first major exploration of Stewart's world and work with, new contribution to our understanding of the importance and legacy of his art, and his advocation for his community of fellow American artists in France”.
Admission to the Fair and lectures is complimentary; seating
is on a first-come basis.
