ON MY MODERN MET'S TOP TEN LIST OF BEST CREATIVE BOOKS TO CELEBRATE THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF MOON LANDING
The moon―its face, color, and power―threads through the tapestry of American landscape painting, holding timeless allure for artists and beloved by viewers of paintings everywhere. The Hudson River Museum has organized The Color of the Moon: Lunar Painting in American Art―the first major museum examination of the moon in American visual arts from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries for a 2019 exhibition. This timely presentation also celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission when, in 1969, American astronauts first stepped onto the surface of the moon. 
From the romantic silvery moonscapes of nineteenth-century artists to the abstractions by artists of the twentieth century who explored the moon, the perfect orb, and tapped into its spiritual possibilities, this celestial body, closest to Earth, remains constant in our sky, though our relationship to it and our home planet changes, as technology extends our reach toward space. 
The Hudson River Museum, Fordham University Press, and the James A. Michener Art Museum are joint publishers of the lavishly illustrated catalog The Color of the Moon: Lunar Painting in American Art. In engaging essays, author Stella Paul maps the colors of the moon; catalog co-editors Bartholomew F. Bland and Laura Vookles explore Hudson River School and Modernist moonscapes and their cultural resonance; and curators Melissa Martens Yaverbaum and Ted Barrow sight the moon’s passage in art of both the Gilded and Space ages. 
The exhibition and catalog have been made possible by a generous grant by the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, Inc.
The Color of the Moon: Lunar Painting in American Art Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY | February 8 - May 12, 2019 James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA | June 1 – September 8, 2019

The Color of the Moon: Lunar Painting in American Art

Arts & Photography

Hudson River Museum

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Fordham University Press

The sinuous lines, abundant flowery carving, white marble and red plush that characterize Victorian Rococo furniture of the 1850's and 1860's are nearly always called to mind by the words" victorian furniture". But even as the Rococo revival reached the pinnacle of popularity in America's pre-Civil War parlors, the seeds of its downfall were being sown by a group of English design reformers, among them Charles Locke Eastlake, whose influence brought a "new look" of rectilinear simplicity to American furniture int he 1870's and 1880's. The relatively simple and functional lines of this new"art furniture" were in marked contrast to the curved shapes, heavy naturalistic carving and ostentatious decoration of earlier styles.

Eastlake-Influenced American Furniture, 1870-1890 : [catalogue of an exhibition] November 18, 1973-January 6, 1974, the Hudson River Museum

Madigan, Mary Jean Smith

Drip, Blow, Burn: Forces of Nature in Contemporary Art : February 12-June 20, 1999

Dreamscape: Five Animated Sculptures by Gregory Barsamian

Barsamian, Gregory

Keiter, Ellen J.

Maitinsky, Jean-Paul

Americans hunger for sweet things and twentieth-century mass marketing has turned American artists attention to candy, the forbidden fruit in the exhibition I WANT Candy: The Sweet Stuff in American Art organized by the Hudson River Museum. I WANT Candy examines the attractions and the tempting representations of a sweet tableau. 
 In her famous quote about the aesthetic joys of colored sugar, Simone de Beauvoir speaks to the enduring appeal of the food of decadence, frivolity, and abandonment: 
 I would stand transfixed before the windows of the confectioners' shops, fascinated by the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscope inflorescence of acidulated fruit drops -- red, green, orange, violet: I coveted the colors themselves as much as the pleasure they promised me. 
 That desire so inherent in Beauvoir s longing vision of sweets runs through most of the contemporary artworks in this exhibition. American artists fascination with the seductive lure of candy has increased dramatically since the 1960s when Pop Art began to challenge the severity of Modernism. Many of the works on view represent a return to figurative work and are indebted to Pop s embrace of kitsch. In Will Cotton s Candy Curls, 2005, a modern-day Marie Antoinette s headdress is literally transformed into a cornucopia of spiraling peppermint sticks topped by an ice-cream cone hat. 
 This easygoing decadence has not always pervaded American art. Perhaps uncomfortable with the sensual visual and gustatory pleasures of sugar, candy appears infrequently in 19 th-century still life. A few artists such as Raphaelle Peale and Joseph Decker incorporate the beauty of sugar into their work but always in keeping with their restrained aesthetic style, which does not suggest careless abundance to a somewhat puritanical American audience. 
 The menu has changed and so have artists perceptions. In paintings, watercolor and sculpture, I WANT Candy explores their work through the themes of Sweet Tableau: The Still Life Tradition; Candyland: The Innocence of Childhood; Sugar: The Food of Desire, Too Sweet: The Cavity of Consumerism and The Witch s Abode: Candy as Canvas. 
 Contemporary artists in the exhibition include:Becca Albee, Julie Allen, Peter Anton, John Baeder, Barton Lidice Benes, Mindy Best, Morgan Bulkeley, Neil Christensen, Orly Cogan, Sharon Core, Will Cotton, Cindy Craig, James Del Grosso, Marylyn Dintenfass, Dan Douke, Travis Conrad Erion, Emily Eveleth Janet Fish, Audrey Flack, Cara Wood Ginder, Ralph Goings, Susan Graham, Red Grooms, Kirsten Hassenfeld, Bruce Helander, Richard Hickam, Ruth Grace Jervis, Zane Lewis, Mary Magsamen &amp; Stephan Hillerbrand, Melissa Martens, Kim Mendenhall, Don Nice, Patricia Nix,Brendan O Connell, John Salvest, Masaaki Sato, Jessica Schwind, Beverly Shipko, Tjalf Sparnaay, Wayne Thiebaud, and Stephanie Jaffe Werner. 
 The exhibition is organized at the Hudson River Museum by Bartholomew F. Bland, Exhibitions Curator

I WANT Candy: The Sweet Stuff in American Art

Bartholomew F. Bland

Michael Botwinick

The catalogue of this exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of the Pattern and Decoration Movement (P&amp;D) and an exploration of its enduring contribution to the American art scene. 
 P&amp;D flourished as an alternative in American art, in contrast to the painterly abstraction championed by critics such as Clement Greenberg. The energetic work of its artists challenged the status quo of Minimalism, Formalism, and Conceptualism. They valued the bold pattern, craft, and ornament that was prompted in the 1960s and 70s by a new regard for the Women s Movement and women s esthetic drive, non-western art, and artists travels in Europe, Mexico, North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The artists drew from the diverse subject matter they saw for their elaborate and eccentric images. The guest curator for the exhibition, Dr. Anne Swartz, comments: 
 P&amp;D is an interesting counterweight to claims of uni-directional cultural influence and arrogance that America sends out but does not acknowledge the importation of cultural forms and motifs. Arguably, P&amp;D is the first postmodern art movement because its artists utilized a broad array of source material and embraced the impermanent, the common, and the excluded in forming their content and images. 
 The exhibition explores the work of artists prominent within the P&amp;D Movement in the 1970s Cynthia Carlson, Brad Davis, Valerie Jaudon, Jane Kaufman, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnel, Tony Robbin, Miriam Schapiro, Ned Smyth, and Robert Zakanitch. Responsive to non-western art and folk art as well as textile design and wallpaper, their work has, in turn, influenced many quarters of the art world. 
 A fully illustrated catalogue is being published in conjunction with the exhibition. It includes an introduction by Arthur Danto, art critic for The Nation; essays on the role of feminism in P&amp;D by art historian Temma Balducci, assistant professor of art history at Arkansas State University; essays on the legacy of P&amp;D by critic John Perrault; and, a major study on the scope, reception, and history of P&amp;D by Guest Curator Anne Swartz , professor of art history at the Savannah College of Art and Design. 
 The rediscovery of Pattern and Decoration places it as a principal cultural movement of the late 1960s and 70s. It was in this period that the Hudson River Museum dramatically expanded under the then director Richard Koshalek. The Museum provided a platform for some of the larger scale artworks of this period that led to site-specific installations by Dan Flavin and Red Grooms, artists far removed from the P&amp;D Movement. The Hudson River Museum had previously looked at some of the figures in P&amp;D in its influential exhibition A New Beginning 1968-1978, one of the earliest attempts to reevaluate the art of that tumultuous decade. Brad Davis, Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnel, and Ned Smyth were all featured. The Museum brought to attention the appeal of both Robert Kushner and Miriam Shapiro, highlighting them in its 1998 exhibition Hanging by a Thread. Robert Zakanitch s P&amp;D work is one of the strengths of the Museum s permanent collection.

Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art

Arthur C. Danto

John Perreault

Anne Swartz

Temma Balducci

The first major museum exhibition devoted to the glittering themes of café society will be presented in Andrew Stevovich: The Truth About Lola, organized by the Hudson River Museum and curated by Bartholomew F. Bland. 
 Andrew Stevovich, a noted contemporary figurative painter, depicts a world infused with colorful characters that gamble with demons and fate. Ordinary men and women in everyday situations and locations, restaurants and bars, at the beach, and on public transportation show us a mysterious world imprinted on their stylized faces, and ask that their stories be considered, whether melancholy, romantic, violent, or lurid. 
 Although Stevovich's paintings are set in the contemporary world, his crisp design, brilliant color, and meticulous surface finishes recall Renaissance works. .Stevovich paints in oil and pastel and is also an accomplished printmaker and etcher. Stylistically, many critics have commented on the relationship of Stevovich s work to that of the early Italian painters. Growing up in Washington, DC, he often visited the National Gallery of Art where he internalized the Italians bold colors and repetition of shape and form. Not surprisingly, almost all his paintings are boldly colored portraits with stylized figures, many sensuous lipped, like those in early Roman sculpture and Renaissance painting. He has never truly embraced landscape or still life. 
 Among the 75 works in The Truth About Lola is Popcorn, on view for the first time. A major new work, it provides insights into the artist s technique. Stevovich says, I work backwards. First I draw the faces and foreground objects, rather than beginning in the more traditional way by blocking colors. To increase the luminosity of color, Stevovich keeps his canvas as white and pure as possible, before applying color, At times, the disenchantment beneath the surface of many of Stevovich s paintings bursts into the open. Scenes of overt violence make up a comparatively small but distinct group of works in his repertoire. Discord contains one of the artist s few crowd scenes where everyone engages with each other, except the central female figure, who clutches her chest in bewilderment. The bottom of the panel is a rare instance in which Stevovich show a man threatening a woman. The man extends his fists like a boxer and the woman holds up a defensive hand. In the top left hand corner, another woman, in anguish, presses her hands to the side of her heard, recalling Munch s The Scream. This very German Expressionist-influenced work echoes the chaos depicted in canvases from the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, which the artist intriguingly combines with Renaissance-like painting. 
 Stevovich holds degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design and the Massachusetts College of Art. Recent solo and group exhibitions include the Danforth Museum of Art, New Britain Museum of Art, and the Portland Museum of Art. Stevovich s work is in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 
 The show, organized by the Hudson River Museum, is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Andrew Stevovich: The Truth About Lola

Andrew Stevovich

Winfred Rembert: Amazing Grace Images on Leather at the Hudson River Museum The work of Winfred Rembert, a self-taught artist, who documents his life and the tumultuous moments of the American Civil Rights Movement, is on view at the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, January 21 through May 6, 2012. 
 In more than 50 works on hand-tooled leather stretched, stained, and etched Rembert constructs scenes from the rural Southern town where he was born and raised, and peoples it with characters working the fields, joyous at church meetings, and enjoying its pool hall, jazz club, and café. His images are alive with figures and color, and dense with pattern. Some, more somber, convey the strife and grief of his own experiences of a near lynching and prison life. 
 Growing up in 1950s rural Georgia, Rembert did backbreaking labor in the cotton fields. A young man, he was arrested during a 1960s civil rights march, and survived a near lynching. A prisoner serving an unjust seven-year sentence, he learned to make pattern and design on leather by watching a fellow inmate create tooled leather wallets. Years later, adding color on tanned leather, Rembert conjured a world of incredible brutality and close personal ties existing in discomforting proximity. The exhibition s riveting themes include the Cotton Field series, where cotton balls snake relentlessly through rows of toiling field hands: Rembert said, curved [cotton] rows make a beautiful pattern. But as soon as you start picking, you forget how good it looks and think how hard it is. There just isn t anything you can say about cotton that is good. 
 Amazing Grace, the first major museum exhibition of Rembert s work, incorporates historical photographs of places in Georgia, a documentary of his life by noted filmmaker Vivian Ducat, and gospel music both recorded and performed by Rembert in the Hudson River Museum galleries on several dates. Music, pivotal in Rembert s life and art, and has contributed to his success as a mentor to young people. 
 Rembert, who now lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, has shown his art at the Yale University Art Gallery alongside Hale Woodruff, a mid-20th century artist who also chronicled rural Georgia.. Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale Art Gallery said, I found myself captivated by the work of an entirely self-taught artist who was unaware of the strong affinities of form, subject matter, and narrative that he shared with Hale Woodruff and other towering figures of African-American Art such as Horace Pippin, Jacob Lawrence, and Romare Bearden. 
 Organized by the Hudson River Museum and curated by Bartholomew F. Bland, the show, is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue of essays by Bartholomew Bland, Director of Curatorial Affairs; Roger Panetta, History Professor, Fordham University; Ellen Keiter, Curator of Contemporary Art, Katonah Museum of Art; Fordham University Ph.D. candidate Clifton Watson, and Irma Watkins-Owens, Associate Professor, African and African American Studies, Fordham University.

Winfred Rembert: Amazing Grace

Ellen Keiter

Irma Watkins-Owens

Clifton Watson

Roger Panetta

Winfred Rembert

About the Author\nBartholomew F. Bland is Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Hudson River Museum, where he has organized a number of exhibitions related to the art and history of the Hudson Valley Region including, Westchester: The American Suburb and Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture. He also curated A Field Guide to Sprawl for Arts Westchester, which examined of the impact of the suburban lifestyle on the physical environment, an exhibition that traveled to Yale University. Among his survey exhibitions for the Museum related to the Hudson River School are Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspiration from Cole to Wyeth and Greener Pastures: Images of Arcadia at the Hudson River Museum. 
Pat Hardy practiced for many years as a City civil litigator before completing a Ph.D. in 2008 at the Courtauld Institute on 19th-century British art. She has subsequently worked as Assistant Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, Curator of Works on Paper at National Museums Liverpool and is currently Curator of Paintings, Prints and Drawings at the Museum of London. Most recently she co-curated the Dickens and London exhibition at the Museum, contributed an essay Dickens and the Social Realists to the exhibition catalogue Dickens and the Artists, Yale University Press, 2012, and is currently writing a book on the imagery of emigration. 
Tara Dawson is a freelance research assistant who works at the Hudson River Museum in the Public Relations and Curatorial departments. In 2011 she conducted research for the Museum s exhibition Elihu Vedder: Voyage On the Nile and its exhibition catalogue. Tara holds a Masters in Museum Studies from New York University, 2010, and a Bachelor s from the University of Rhode Island, 2008. 
Geoff Snell is currently writing his doctoral thesis, A Forest of Masts: The Image of the River Thames in the Long Eighteenth Century, an exploration of the visual representation of the Thames and how it evolved to reflect changes in London as the city grew into a major port and center of a commercial empire. He has been collaborating with and supported by the National Maritime Museum, London, the University of Sussex, and the Arts & Humanities Research Council. In 2011, Snell won a Visiting Scholarship from the Yale Center for British Art, where he undertook a comparative study of Thames-related works by 18th-and early 19th-century artists represented in the Paul Mellon Collection, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington. 
Laura Vookles is Chief Curator of Collections at the Hudson River Museum. She has been a curator and essayist for the Museum s publications The Old Croton Aqueduct: Rural Resources Meet Urban Needs; Next Stop Westchester! People and the Railroad; Westchester: The American Suburb, Dutch New York: the Roots of Hudson Valley Culture, and Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspiration from Cole to Wyeth. In the 25 years that she has served at the Hudson River Museum, she has focused much effort on Glenview, the Museum s 1877 Hudson River home for which she completed numerous furnishing, conservation, and interpretation projects.

The Panoramic River: the Hudson and the Thames

Pat Hardy

Laura L. Vookles

Geoff Snell

Tara Dawson

Strut: The Peacock and Beauty in Art explores our fascination with that most glamorous of birds.The peacock, strutting in its sapphire-blue and emerald-green plumage, symbolizes all things vain and beautiful in centuries of painting and sculpture, in books, and on clothes that swirl and shine like the iridescent bird itself.Intrigued by the exotic art of Asia that prized and portrayed the peacock and its trail of an emblazoned train of feathers, Western artists in the 1890s chose the bird as a symbol of design on their canvases and for objects in the home.Though striking Gilded Age peacock imagery escalated in fin-de-siècle French Art Nouveau and the Art Deco of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression of 1929 quelled the idea of beauty for its own sake; art now needed to be more than beautiful― it should serve, first, the social good. While in the aftermath of the Depression and a world war Americans of the ’50s looked, again, for luxury, modernism gave rise to the ethos “Less is more.” The peacock’s profile changed once more, this time into a symbol of drama and decadence.Today, as the contemporary art world renews its embrace of visual beauty, the peacock in form, color, and association resurges.The first major scholarly examination of the peacock in visual arts in the United States, England, and France, from the nineteenth century’s Gilded Age to today, Strut, organized by the Hudson River Museum, has assembled paintings and decorative arts from museums and private collections throughout the United States.Contributing essays to the catalog Strut: The Peacock and Beauty in Art by Bartholomew F. Bland; Penelope Fritzer; Kirsten M. Jensen; Melissa J. Martens; Ellen E. Roberts; and Laura L. Vookles.

Strut: The Peacock and Beauty in Art

History & Criticism

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