The Amon Carter Museum, Not Just For Cowboys Anymore

The Dallas Fort Worth area is rich with fine art institutions. Each city boasts of more than three major museums and are also fortunate to have many galleries, community art centers, outdoor sculptures of merit and artist studios. Of all the treasure troves of possible destinations, my personal favorite is the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, TX.

This gem of an American museum opened its doors in 1961 through the generosity of the Amon G. Carter estate (Fort Worth philanthropist) and his family.

Mr. Carter collected art that epitomized his love of the west. It has been said that early on in his collecting, the idea of a future museum for his beloved Fort Worth began to form. Originally the museum opened as the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art and housed Amon G Carter’s original collection of 60 works by Frederick Remington and 250 works by Charles Russell. The museum’s collection has grown in the last nearly fifty years, thanks to a large part by the museum’s driving force, Ruth Carter Stevenson and her teams of dedicated museum scholars and administrators. The museum currently holds nearly a quarter million objects ranging from 19th and 20th century American paintings, sculpture, drawings and watercolors, photography (including archival and monographic collections), and prints; each and every one of them a masterwork of the highest aesthetic standards. The museum strives to place western art as well as important American artworks with themes of American exploration and expansion, views of settlement, and depictions of cowboy and ranch life in the larger context of American art, culture, and politics that were happening concurrently throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Recently, the museum has acquired several new acquisitions of note, a box assemblage by Joseph Cornell (American, 1902-1972), Soap Bubble Set, 1959, and two oil paintings -a meticulous American Pre-Raphaelite example Woodland Glade, William Trost Richards (American, 1833-1905), 1860 and an example of a pre-World War II American modernist, Conversation – Sky and Earth, Charles Sheeler (American,1883-1965), 1940. With the addition of the Charles Sheeler painting, the Amon Carter Museum increases its collection of Precisionist paintings and enhances its already notable collection of Modernists holdings.

The Sheeler painting is a great preview to a year-long theme that the museum plans in 2010 – “The Carter Gets Modern”. The museum is planning three special exhibitions this year. The first is American Moderns on Paper: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, February 27 through May 30, 2010 which includes works on paper created from 1910 and 1960 by artists that include Georgia O’Keeffe, Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper and Charles Demuth. Next is Constructivist Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s, June 26 through September 5, 2010. This exhibition will be the first international exhibition of modernist art that the Amon Carter Museum has hosted. The exhibition will chronicle personal and conceptual ties that link artists working in North and South America in the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning October 2, 2010, a photography exhibition organized by the Carter, American Modern: Abbott, Evans and Bourke-White, will explore how these three photographers transformed documentary photography from a reform genre into a recognized facet of modern art. It will be an exciting year for the museum and its patrons.

If you think of the Amon Carter Museum as the museum with "cowboy art”…..you are right, there is still plenty of great examples of western art. A new Remington and Russell study area opened last spring. However, the museum’s interior displays many pleasant surprises that go way beyond American western art. If you haven’t been to the Carter in a while, I strongly urge you visit again. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed!

Submitted by,
Christine Guernsey, ISA AM
Guernsey and Associates, Fine Art Appraisals

What Is "Outsider Art"? (Part 2)

As part of the larger anti academic trend of the European avante garde which was gaining more appeal, self taught artists were found in almost every country after WWI. In the US there was the Pittsburg house painter John Kane, admitted in 1927 to the Carnegie International Exhibition. In 1932, the MOMA in NYC held a landmark exhibition “American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America 1750-1900”, which looked admiringly to the self taught artists of the pre-industrial past for their ingenuity, innocence and simplicity of expression. There was of course Grandma Moses, one of the most successful and famous artists in America, who had her first one woman show in NYC in 1940. Completely untrained, Grandma Moses became hugely popular through American radio, tv and heavily marketed publications, even having successful shows in Europe and Japan. Self taught art waned in popularity through the mid-20th century, as art critics and dealers became more attracted to the growing Abstract Expressionist movement. However it should be noted that in 1982, the Corcoran Gallery in D.C. held the exhibition “Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980”.

Over the years, the definitions of folk art in twentieth century America have been wide ranging, including everything from tin men advertising a sheet metal store to weather vanes and ceramic jugs to painters like Grandma Moses to quirky outdoor environments made by singular individuals in their own backyards,(of which many still exist).
So where did the term “Outsider Art” come from? In 1972, British art historian Roger Cardinal in his survey of Art Brut or “raw art”, coined the term as the title for his book of the same name. For the Europeans with their strong art academies and art traditions, coining the terms art brut, naive art, and outsider art made sense, separating these new recognized art forms from the past. However, here in the United States, with no art schools in existence until the late 19th century, the dividing lines between academic and non-academic art, and Art Brut (Outsider) and naïve art have not been so distinct nor appreciated. Similarly, although Dubuffet’s Art Brut is now housed in its own museum in Lausanne Switzerland, the art of the mentally challenged has never gained much appeal in the US.

In the US, self taught art, outsider art and folk art have a tendency to be lumped together as products of individuals with their own aesthetic tastes. This lack of defined terminology can be quite confusing to the American collector who wants to set perimeters for his collection. Where does one go for clarity? Self taught art is still a relatively new field in art. It is not listed in too many art history books. It isn’t listed with the other “ Isms” in art—Impressionsism, Abstract Expressionism, Fauvism, Minimalism, Surrealism, etc. The history of self taught art is being written as we speak.

If you are interested in finding out more, the US has a number of museums dedicated to self taught art and it’s past, current and evolving future role in the history of art.

American Folk Art Museum
45 West 53rd Street
NY, NY 10019
http://www.folkartmuseum.org/

American Visionary Art Museum
800 Key Highway
Inner Harbor
Baltimore, MD 21230
http://www.avam.org/

Smithsonian American Art Museum
8th and G Streets, NW
Washington DC 20560
http://www.si.edu/

High Museum of Art
1280 Peachtree Street NE
Atlanta, GA 30309
http://www.high.org/

Submitted by:

Kim Kolker, ISA AM

Shango Galleries

for Guernsey and Associates, Fine Art Appraisals

What Is "Outsider Art"? (Part 1)

Who creates it? What exactly is it outside of? In a general sense, Outsider art is created on the fringes of society without regard for traditional visual genres. To bring more clarity to the issue, we have to go back to the artist and collector who was one of the first champions of “outsider art.” Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) famous French artist from the 20th century, was disillusioned with the established, mainstream art world and found great creative energy within the art of the mentally challenged and those who created art on the fringes of culture and society. In 1945, he coined the term “Art Brut”, (or “raw art”) for those artists who were not conditioned by academic training, museums, and society about what art should look like. Dubuffet noted: “It may be that artistic creation, with all that it calls for in the way of free inventiveness, takes place at a higher pitch of tension in the nameless crowd of ordinary people than in the circles that think they have the monopoly of it. It may even be that art thrives in its healthiest form among these ordinary people, because practiced without applause or profit, for the maker’s own delight; and that the over-publicized activity of professionals produces merely a specious form of art, all too often watered down and doctored.”1


It should be noted that Jean Dubuffet was only one of many European avant-garde artists who looked for forms of expression outside of the academic tradition. His interest in self-taught painters was echoed by the Cubist interests in tribal art, the Surrealists interest in Oceanic art and the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist interest in Japanese prints. Many of you may not be aware that Henri Rousseau, whose paintings you are most likely familiar with, was a self taught painter who caught the eye of the avant-garde, specifically Picasso. Henri Rousseau worked as a toll booth collector to earn a living. His coworkers, knowing his passion for art, and believing in the power of his work, used to let him leave work early so that he could work on a painting.

To make matters more complicated, Rousseau is best considered as a naive painter, as opposed to brut. Naive painters are self-taught, but live within the bounds of culture and society. Brut painters know nothing of society, nor are they concerned with it. They paint their inner world. Naïve painters typically have had no exposure to art. However, sometimes based on religious fervor, sometimes due to a personal trauma, they pick up a paintbrush or sculpting tool one day and then never put the tool back down until they’ve created thousands of works. Driven by pain or passion, they find something in their creative endeavors that enlivens them.

As you encounter paintings that don’t fit a particular style, notice how they are categorized by critics and art historians. The ubiquitous term “folk art” can mean many things—from naïve styled New England portraits of the middle class in the 1700s, to wooden decoy ducks, to weather vanes to paintings by the mentally challenged or even to simple pastoral scenes painted in bright and flat colors.

Similarly, outsider art may contain many forms of art that would appear as complete visual opposites. As the term has evolved over the last fifty plus years, one can only guess what might be included in its future definition.
How, for instance, do you classify an outsider artist who becomes extremely popular, enough to where corporations are paying the artist for his pieces, and thousands of posters are being made of his work? What is this artist outside of any longer? Can the term still be used?

(To be continued.)

1. Thevoz, Michel Art Brut, Editions d’Art Albert Skira S.A., Geneva, 1995, p. 5.

Submitted by,
Kim Kolker, ISA AM
Shango Galleries, Dallas, Texas

for Guernsey and Associates, Fine Art Appraisals