Tag Archives: Albert Bierstadt

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Link: over the falls without a barrel

11 Comments

Thomas Moran, "Shoshone Falls on the Snake River," 1900. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

By Bob Hicks

One of the things on our mind today is the great 19th century American painter Thomas Moran. Why? Because his iconic 1900 painting Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, all 12 feet wide of it, opens Saturday in a single-oil show at the Portland Art Museum. It’s on loan from the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Mr. Scatter wrote about the show and the painting in this morning’s A&E section of The Oregonian. The main story, Window on the West, is about Moran and how he developed from a very good Hudson River School painter depicting scenes mainly in Pennsylvania into a grand-scale chronicler of vistas from the rugged West.

The second story, PAM chief sees multiple facets of one-piece show, is a lengthy interview with Brian Ferriso, the museum’s executive director, about Moran and the painting and the idea behind one-painting exhibits (which aren’t really solo shows: this one includes a half-dozen smaller Moran watercolors, plus a terrific, six-foot-wide photo of the falls taken in the 1880s). The online interview is a fair amount longer than the print version, and gets into some interesting areas you might like to see.

A nice bonus is this 14-photo gallery by Amiran White of the painting’s installation at PAM. It tells its own intriguing story.

A teaser from the Ferriso interview, this one about Moran’s fellow painter of the West Albert Bierstadt, whose 1869 painting of Mt. Hood is a treasured piece in the Portland museum’s American collection:

… Bierstadt in particular understood the marketplace. He would very much create idyllic scenes, sort of these manufactured landscapes that were compositionally well-shaped. The Mount Hood that we have that Bierstadt did, there is no such place. You can’t go to that place, because the lake that he depicted doesn’t exist. He’s added it.

I once gave a tour to some visitors when I was overseeing a Hudson River School show, and one of them said, “Now this is the kind of art I like. It’s real. It’s a real place.” And I said, “Well, don’t be too sure, because it’s not real. It’s a fabricated view. Don’t be fooled by what you see.”

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Bringing it all back home: Steven Grafe at Maryhill

1 Comment

Queen Marie of Romania dedicating the still unfinished Maryhill Museum of Art in a 1926 ceremony.

Queen Marie of Romania dedicating the still unfinished Maryhill Museum in 1926.

Eventually the world seems to show up on the doorstep of the Maryhill Museum of Art.

Which is a funny place for the world to show up, in this isolated concrete mansion overlooking the Columbia River Gorge in the semi-desert landscape of Klickitat County, Washington.

But look at the evidence. Marie, the bohemian queen of Romania, and Loie Fuller, the American dancer who was the toast of European arts circles around the turn of the twentieth century, were vital figures in the founding of the museum.

One of the museum’s signature collections is the ornate scenes of Theatre de la Mode, the post-World War II tableaux of design that helped get the French high-fashion industry back in gear and that features fantasies by, among others, the incomparable Jean Cocteau. Another important collection is the museum’s icon paintings, many from eastern Europe and Russia. It’s a long story, and worth hearing, but not right now.

Maryhill with spring lupine. Photo: Nyland WilkinsPartly because of weather and isolation, Maryhill is a seasonal museum, and it takes its annual break Nov. 15 before starting up again in spring, on the ides of March. That gives you a couple of weeks to make the drive out the Gorge: It’s a little more than 100 miles east of Portland, about the same distance as Eugene, but a much more interesting drive.

When Lee Musgrave arrived as curator of art from Los Angeles 14 years ago he brought a vision for contemporary art to amplify and complement the museum’s historic collections, which ranged from outright curios to engaging oddities such as a collection of global chess sets to some very good Rodins. Works by the likes of Red Grooms, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons started popping up on the museum walls, plus pieces by a whole lot of contemporary Pacific Northwest artists.

Musgrave retired this summer, and his replacement, Steven L. Grafe, is just getting his feet dry. I’d say “wet,” except it doesn’t rain much at the Maryhill end of the Gorge, and Grafe already knows a lot of the territory.

Grafe arrives at Maryhill after almost six years at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, where he was curator of American Indian art. It was a good stop for a specialist in Native American art and culture. But Maryhill is very close to home.

Steven Grafe, Maryhill's new curator

Grafe earned his masters and doctoral degrees in art history from the University of New Mexico, where his doctoral dissertation was on pre-1880 beadwork from the southern Columbia River Plateau — an area of deep interest, not coincidentally, in the Maryhill collection. And he put in a couple of years as chief curator of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles, in addition to curatorial stops at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado and Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina.

He grew up in Salem, got his bachelor’s degree in studio art at Oregon State University, and has deep Northwest roots. His father’s family is from the Santiam area east of Salem, his mother’s family is from around Zigzag near Mt. Hood, and his wife went to Madison High School in Portland.

“She’s wanted to live at the east end of the Gorge since she was in high school,” Grafe said a couple of weeks ago when he was in town for a museum marketing meeting.

Continue reading Bringing it all back home: Steven Grafe at Maryhill →