In recent weeks the Vero Beach Museum of Art has seen its collection grow in quality as well as quantity with the addition of four significant works. Two of the works are by American women, Elizabeth Catlett and Karen LaMonte.
“We’re very interested in having the work of well-known women in the collection,” says curator Jay Williams, speaking also for the museum’s executive director, Lucinda Gedeon.
They couldn’t have done better than the current picks of Catlett’s “Triangular Woman” of 1994, a tour de force in white-veined amber onyx; and LaMonte’s “Reclining Dress Absence,” a life-size figure in luminous cast glass. Those works fill the bill in more ways than one: Not only are they outstanding examples of each artist’s signature style, they also represent their creators’ distinct viewpoints on femininity.
“Triangular Woman” is not new to Gedeon. It was included in a 1998 retrospective of Catlett’s sculpture at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York, when Gedeon was executive director there. At that time the sculpture was owned by a collector in Palm Beach.
Gedeon and Williams homed in on the Catlett at New York City’s Armory Art Fair in February, when they were looking for artworks to present for the Athena Society selection in April. Although they both agreed the onyx sculpture was a rare target of opportunity for the Athena Society, the dealer could not keep it out of circulation long enough for the society to vote on it.
Luckily for the Vero museum’s collection, longtime supporters Mr. and Mrs. Whitney MacMillan came forward with a gift of funds to purchase “Triangular Woman” in honor of Gedeon’s tenure. Gedeon recently announced she is retiring this fall.
Elizabeth Catlett, who was born in 1915 and died just four years ago, was raised in Washington, D.C. Her undergraduate years were spent at the historically black Howard University. Her postgraduate work at the University of Iowa included studies with Grant Wood, then one of the most famous artists in the country for his 1930 painting “American Gothic.”
Catlett reminisced about Grant in an interview late in life. “He would tell his students, ‘Paint what you know. ”
She, for one, made the most of that advice. Through her art Catlett celebrated the lives of African-Americans with a particular focus on black women and children. Working in the Modernist tradition of abstracted figuration, she used a variety of traditional media to realize her works: sculptures in stone, bronze, terracotta and wood.
After moving to Mexico in 1946, Catlett became a noted graphic artist in the popular Mexican media of social commentary, lithography and linoleum block printing.
Recognized by art historian Melanie Herzog as “the foremost African-American woman artist of her generation,” Catlett lived, worked and taught in Mexico for the rest of her life.
The glowing, ghostly presence of Karen LaMonte’s “Reclining Dress Absence” of 2005 is sure to be a crowd pleaser in Vero Beach. Its wow factor can be attributed to its medium – colorless cast glass with a satin-textured finish – and to its large size: 63 inches in length.
“I can’t think of anyone doing anything else quite like this,” Williams marvels. “I think that she is going to be seen as one of the most important glass artists of this era.”
There is more to this artwork than stuns the eye, however. Williams says the work has antecedents in classical sculpture (think of the reclining goddess from the east pediment of the Parthenon frieze), as well as contemporary feminist art theory and gender studies.
Purchased with funds from four named acquisition endowments, the sculpture was bought to commemorate the museum’s 30th anniversary.
Two other copies of “Reclining Dress Absence” exist in the permanent collections of the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va.
LaMonte remarked in an email to this writer that each museum has provided a unique setting for the artwork that enriches viewers’ understanding of it.
“At the Chrysler Museum the sculpture is installed in front of an ancient Etruscan sarcophagus. The similarities of the poses and drapery together with the contrasting materials enrich the universal themes of both the classical and contemporary works,” she wrote.
At the Vero museum, the sculpture is placed on a sarcophagus-like plinth at the front of the Stark Gallery, providing a welcome foil to Jim Dine’s monumental bathrobe painting, “The Red March Forward,” on the gallery’s back wall.
Like that painting, “Reclining Dress Absence” appears at first blush to be an empty dressing gown; no human anatomy shows beyond the garment’s neckline, sleeves or bottom edge. But unlike the stiff folds of Dine’s prosaic cover-up, LaMonte’s frock – a glamorous negligee – is plumped out by the contours of a distinctly female form.
The work is sensuous, but contains a subtle commentary on feminine fashion and the way dress identifies and categorizes people, notes Williams.
Or, as the artist’s website puts it, LaMonte “probes the disparity between our natural skin and our social skin.”
The museum started off the year with the acquisition of an impressionist beach scene by Edward Potthast titled “Baby Carriage at the Beach.”
Those who visited the Debra Force Fine Art booth at the Palm Beach Jewelry, Art & Antique Show in February may have seen and admired the work there, a standout not only among that gallery’s offerings, but at the fair as a whole. It was purchased for the museum’s collection with funds provided by Laura and Bill Buck.
This time, it is Williams who has previous experience with the piece. When he was curator of Edison Community College’s Gallery of Fine Art in Fort Myers, it was owned by Merrill Gross, a collector of some 60 Potthast works. During Williams’ tenure at Edison, Gross lent his collection for a much-cited exhibition in 1990.
“Baby Carriage at the Beach,” at a fraction larger than 12 inches tall and 16 inches wide, “reads much bigger than it is,” Williams says. It will soon be rehung in the Stark Gallery to take advantage of its power to draw viewers in from a distance.
The latest addition to the collection is an Emil Bisttram painting from 1930 titled “Eagle Nest Lake, New Mexico,” purchased two weeks ago with funds from the Athena Society. The annual donations of the group of museum patrons have added works to the collection since 2003.
Selected by ballot over paintings by Jacob Lawrence, Paul Jenkins and Louis Ritman, the Bisttram work was a “clear winner” at the Athena Society’s annual dinner, says Williams.
Jim Carney, an Athena Society member who sits on the art museum’s board of trustees and collections committee, agrees.
“There was a great deal of enthusiasm for this piece,” he says. “It’s striking, handsome, clear and resonant for anyone who has been struck by the magical quality of New Mexico’s light.”
The painting was executed on Bisttram’s first visit to New Mexico in the summer of 1930. The artist would make Taos his permanent home in 1932, bringing an increasingly abstract vision to his canvases. He notably promoted his ideas through founding his Taos School of Art and by helping to found the Transcendental Painting Group.
