Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum February 15, 2003 to September 12, 2004 Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati Art Museum logo
A Word from P&G - Overview of Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati Painters and the Big Picture - discusses how Cincinnati Artists fit into a larger art historical perspective The Works from The P&G Collection - themed galleries of the works in the show Index by Artist Name - a list of all the artists represented in the show and the works they completed Go back to the Cincinnati Art Museum Home page
   Histories of American painting of the early twentieth century omit the vast majority of the nation’s painters, whose efforts perpetuated late-nineteenth-century style and taste. Instead they concentrate on the few daring innovators who embraced modern, abstract painting. The latter artists congregated in New York City, the new century’s dynamic cultural leader. The rest of the country, however, largely favored Impressionism, sometimes enlivened by the higher-keyed colors of the Post-Impressionists.
   The roaring energy of New York was first expressed in the early 1900s in the works of the Ashcan School of painters, so-called for their gritty urban subjects. The group rallied around influential teacher and Cincinnati native Robert Henri. Henri, well represented in this collection, rebelled against what he saw as the saccharine quality and irrelevance of American painting. Like Duveneck earlier, he admired the vivid paint handling and rich palette of the seventeenth-century masters, and he preached their appropriateness for suggesting the vitality of modern life. However, Henri’s realist approach was soon eclipsed by abstract painting. The famous Armory Show staged in New York in 1913 opened young painters’ eyes to a wide range of modern European art—Cubism, Futurism, Fauvism, Expressionism—that rejected the centuries-old representational tradition. Most American painters, however, were mystified, even offended, by the new painting.
   The painters in Cincinnati, like most throughout the country, remained fundamentally conservative. Adored by students and colleagues, Duveneck remained the dominant force in the city even after his death in 1919. His followers, such as Herman Wessel, Bessie Hoover Wessel, John Weis, and Dixie Selden perpetuated his love of the tactile qualities of paint and energetic brushwork. Selden, who continued her studies with William Merritt Chase, specialized in outdoor scenes with brilliant hues and fresh, lively surfaces. James Roy Hopkins’ work represented a different facet of Cincinnati taste. The two works by Hopkins in this collection well suggest his refined techniques and the range of his subjects, from decorative women in interiors, often with Japanese robes and motifs, to rugged Kentucky mountaineers.
   In 1930s Cincinnati late Impressionism merged with what became known nationally as paintings of the American Scene. Midwestern artists such as Kansan John Steuart Curry and Iowan Grant Wood rejected the elitism and Europeanism of the New York avant-garde. They promoted paintings rendered in a comprehensible realist style that celebrated ordinary Americans and characteristic aspects of local life. Most painters living in Cincinnati were already, in a sense, painters of the American Scene.
   Modernism came late to Cincinnati. The late 1930s saw the emergence of a group of devotees of abstract painting who founded the Modern Art Society. The enthusiasm would build through the 1940s, when Ralston Crawford and Joseph Albers taught briefly at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and mentored young art students. The Procter & Gamble Collection concludes with the paintings of Herbert Barnett, an admirer of Paul Cézanne, often considered the father of modern art. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and trained in Boston and Rhode Island, Barnett educated several generations of Cincinnati painters.
Dixie Selden (1870–1935)
Return of the 147th, 1919
oil on canvas
19 x 15 1/2 in.