The Woodstock story told through paintings, photography, sculpture, and ceramics at D. Wigmore Fine Art

NEW YORK, N.Y.- D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc. announces its current exhibition, The Woodstock Story: Told Through Paintings, Photography, Sculpture, and Ceramics, on view through January 28. Woodstock, America’s second oldest and most successful art colony, began with the founding of the Arts and Crafts colony Byrdcliffe in 1902. Examples of White Pines pottery, photography, and furniture renderings from Byrdcliffe are on view. The Art Students League in New York City expanded the colony when it began to bring 200 students each year for its summer program in 1906. The focus of the exhibition is on works created after the New York Armory Show of 1913 which caused both traditionalists and modernists in Woodstock and across America to reevaluate their approaches to artmaking. The Armory Show moved art in Woodstock beyond Impressionism and Tonalism into a period of great diversity as artists appropriated ideas from Cubism and Expressionism. Woodstock’s creative population exchanged ideas, took advantage of its serious course of instruction, and used its variety of first rate facilities to experiment and develop personal voices in new styles of art. Between 1920 and 1945 Woodstock artists expanded Impressionism in the New Realist style, participated in the birth of the Studio Movement, evolved a form of Precisionism, found a fusion of folk art and modernism, and took part in the American Scene movement; all of which incorporated abstract ideas into realism. The exhibition tells the Woodstock story through paintings, sculpture, photography, and ceramics executed by resident artists of national stature.

The national stature of Woodstock’s artists can be seen in the number of paintings shown at museum invitational and solo exhibitions in the 1920s through 1940s. George Bellows (1882-1925) may be the most famous of the colony’s artists, though his time in Woodstock was cut short by his early death. He spent the summers of 1920 through 1924 working in a landscape style which was somewhere between a broadened Impressionism and a tamed Fauve style. He is represented in the exhibition by two paintings: Children and Mountain (1920) and Mountain Orchard (1922). Leon Kroll (1884-1974) was a close friend of Bellows and another developer of the New Realism style. Kroll is represented by After the Concert (1922) exhibited at the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1924 and a oneman exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1925. His AshCan subject Riverside Drive in Winter (1925) and large portrait Barbara (1930) are also on view. Woodstock paintings shown at the Carnegie International in 1931, 1947, and 1948 respectively are: Charles Rosen’s (1878-1950) Hudson Riverboat, Georgina Klitgaard’s Bear Mountain, and Louis Bouché’s Judgment of Paris. Ernest Fiene (1894-1965) was one of a number of artists who developed a Woodstock Precisionist style. Included in The Woodstock Story is his painting Entrance to the Village, 1925, exhibited at the Whitney Museum’s annual in 1926.

Konrad Cramer is strongly featured in The Woodstock Story with his 1930s photography and five paintings selected to show his mastery of Cubism, Folk Art-infused Modernism, and Precisionism. The Cubist-inspired Fish for Lunch, 1936 first shown at the Corcoran Biennial in 1937 and then at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 is one example of Cramer’s use of modern techniques such as stenciling. In the Precisionist painting Willow Post Office, 1934, two new cars stand still on the periphery of a small mountain town’s post office. As a collector of Folk Art and Hudson River School paintings, Cramer had a great appreciation for the past. This is expressed in the Victorian details of the post office’s façade, yet Cramer’s own style is much like the carscutting edge and cosmopolitan. Willow Post Office demonstrates Cramer’s ability to fuse old and new in his personal style, which includes jazzy angles, collage-like layering, and a touch of Surrealist emptiness to express man’s ambivalence to progress.

In addition to paintings and photography, sculptural forms presented through traditional and innovative materials are also on view. Sculptors as different as John Flannagan and William Hunt Diederich felt at home in the Woodstock art colony because of the mix of arts and craftsmanship provided by the presence of both Byrdcliffe and the Art Students League summer school. The Woodstock Story features Hunt Diederich’s metalwork with Peasant Boy Leading Horse Firescreen, c.1925 last shown at the Whitney Museum’s Diederich exhibition in 1991, as well as a rare find, Playful Dogs Balustrade. One can also see the hand-chased bronze Pelican, 1941 included in John Flanagan’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942. Further examples of sculpture in plaster, papier mâché , and ceramic include works by Paul Fiene, Eugenie Gershoy, and Carl Walters.

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