Date: Fri 02-Jul-1999

Publication: Ant

Author: JUDIR

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Wadsworth-acquisition-Castello

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Wadsworth Acquires Works

HARTFORD, CONN. -- Masterpiece paintings by the American modernist Marsden

Hartley ("Down East Young Blades") and the Italian Baroque artist Valerio

Castello ("St Genevieve of Brabant Discovered by Her Husband") are among six

important recent acquisitions made by Wadsworth Atheneum.

"The art market is very robust at the moment, but our resourceful curators

have managed to purchase several outstanding works of art," noted Peter C.

Sutton, director.

"Although the atheneum is undercapitalized in terms of endowment for its

operations, we are blessed with endowed purchase funds which are restricted to

acquisitions. This means that when great works of art come available we can

add to our world-class collections."

Hartley's "Down East Young Blades," considered one of the artist's late

masterworks, was painted in Corea, Me., about three years before his death in

1943. Looming large in the foreground are three young lobstermen depicted as

"mythic, heroic youths with fiery red faces, vacant blue eyes, broad

shoulders, and bear-like hands that grip their trophies from the sea,"

according to Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, the chief curator and Krieble

curator of American painting and sculpture. "In these late works Hartley

consciously declared himself the painter of Maine."

The work is a noteworthy addition to the museum's American modernist

collection, which includes Hartley's early masterpiece "Military," a key image

in his 1913 series of German paintings celebrating pre-World War I military

pageantry, and "Movement No. 8, Provincetown," one of an abstract series of

"movements" painted in 1916 on Cape Cod.

The atheneum is planning a Marsden Hartley retrospective for 2002.

Castello's "St Genevieve of Brabant Discovered by Her Husband," dating from

the Genoese artist's mature period (circa 1650), is an addition to the

atheneum's collection of Seventeenth Century Italian masters.

The subject of the large dramatic painting is the medieval legend of

Genevieve, the faithful wife of Siegfried of Treves, who was falsely accused

of adultery by an evil courtier and sentenced to death. Her life spared by a

pitying executioner, Genevieve fled to a mountain cave with her son, where

they were nourished by deer for several years.

Siegfried eventually learned of the courtier's treachery, and was led by a

stag to his wife's hiding place. The painting illustrates their joyous

reunion.

The atheneum has also purchased "Portrait of William B. Odgen" by Anders Zorn,

Sweden's leading painter of the Nineteenth Century. Zorn rivaled John Singer

Sargent and Giovanni Boldini as a portraitist of the fashionable and wealthy

in the United States, England and France. His American sitters included

Isabella Stewart Gardner and President Taft.

The 1895 portrait of Ogden, a dashing bon vivant from a prominent Chicago

family, will be on view in "Here's Looking at You: Portraits from the

Collections" at the atheneum, August 20 to December 6.

The atheneum has three significant paintings by Andy Warhol, and now it has a

print series, "Ladies and Gentlemen," a portfolio of ten screenprints in their

original frames as exhibited in "Portraits of the 70s" at The Whitney Museum

of American Art in 1979.

"`Ladies and Gentlemen' was a major body of work executed by Warhol in 1975

and represents an important departure," said Nicholas Baume, the Emily Hall

Tremaine curator of contemporary art. "It was his first major portrait series

after the portraits of Chairman Mao of 1972 and the first in which he used

photographs that he had taken rather than appropriated from the media.

"The series introduced a new level of technical sophistication in graphic and

printing technique that Warhol would explore in much later work. And the

subjects -- black drag queens -- are intriguing contrasts to the commissioned

portrait subjects of the same period."

The print series is a key component of "About Face: Andy Warhol Portraits,"

organized by Wadsworth Atheneum and planned for September 24 to January 30,

2000.

Also purchased was "Faun Holding An Infant Faun," a terra-cotta by the

Eighteenth Century French sculptor Jacques Francois Joseph Saly. It is an

unusual rendering of an adult faun tenderly embracing his child, who is

greedily devouring a handful of grapes.

The museum has acquired a highly unusual cream jug in the shape of a ram's

head, gilded to resemble bronze with a faux granite vase, made at the Sevres

porcelain factory in 1813. Drawings for the cream jug, called "Pot a Creme

Tete de Belier," remain in the Sevres factory archives.

The cream jug was part of a tea set comprising an egg-shaped teapot with a

snake handle, a sugar bowl in the form of a pineapple, and a cup and saucer in

a lotus leaf design that was presented to the comtesse de Beauveau on New

Year's Day, 1814.

"The originality of the design can be credited to Sevres director Alexandre

Brongniarat and his vision for a revitalized Sevres factory after the ravages

of the French Revolution," said Linda Roth, curator of European decorative

art.

"The virtuosity of the carving and finishes is a testament to the technical

achievements, particularly in the development of hard-paste and hard-paste

colors, attained by the factory in the first decade of the Nineteenth Century.

"A well-preserved and unrestored chest casts new light on our cupboard," notes

Thomas Andrew Deneberg, Richard Koopman associate curator of American

decorative arts. "The brand adds the exciting possibility of being able to

identify an unknown Seventeenth Century shop tradition."