Gregory Gillespie

Myself Painting a Self-portrait, 1980-81, Gregory Gillespie--one of his best.

Self-portrait Triumphant,
2000, Gregory Gillespie

One of the first things I look for when contemplating an artist for inclusion among the august group of creative minds I've expounded on here is a self-portrait. Very rarely do I not find one, though it's not a "deal-breaker" if I don't. A few artists are not "into" that sort of thing, and a few more simply aren't "up to" it. They know they're not portrait painters, so they don't even try. Occasionally I'll run into an artist having painted quite a number of self-images for me to choose from. With the possible exceptions of Rembrandt, van Gogh, and one or two others, very rarely do I come upon an artist who has painted as many self-portraits as Gregory Joseph Gillespie. One might almost come to the conclusion that he painted little else. In fact, his many self-portraits are probably the most interesting element in his work.

Bill, 1984, Gregory Gillespie
(Yes, that's a self-portrait in the corner.)

Self-portrait, 1990s, Gregory Gillespie

I've not the time nor inclination to count the number of self-portraits Gillespie has done over the years. I've culled a group of ten and there are easily that many more. His Myself Painting a Self-portrait (top) from 1980-81 may well be his best while Self-portrait Triumphant (above, right) from 2000, his most obnoxious. Judging from his many painted self-indulgences, I don't think the man even owned a shirt. Suffice to say the majority of his self-portraits depict him bare-chested. That's not to say he didn't in fact paint portraits of other people. And, as modern-day portrait painters go, he was what I'd term "fair." His Bill (above) from 1984, has a richness of character as well as texture somewhat uncommon in his painstaking, highly detailed, later work. Notice the unfinished self-portrait in the lower right corner.

English Landscape, 2000, Gregory Gillespie

Inhabited Landscape, 1997, Gregory Gillespie

Lest you get the idea that Gregory Gillespie painted only figures (mostly his own), his life's work also include a number of stylized landscapes (above) and still-lifes. He's often labeled a "Magic Realist" as his Inhabited Landscape (right) from 1997 might suggest, though I've never been comfortable with that term. I'd call him simply a Surrealist, in that even without the dream-like (or nightmarish) content usually associated with Surrealism, there remains an otherworldly element in nearly all his work associated with some of the less intense surrealist genre. However, when he wants to be, Gillespie can be just as Surrealistically "weird" as Dali, de Chirico, Magritte, or Ernst.

Back Entrance: Williamsburg, Massachusetts, 1972, Gregory Gillespie

Self-portrait on the Steps with Fran,
Gregory Gillespie

Gillespie was born in 1939 in Roselle Park, New Jersey. He studied at New York's Cooper Union and in San Francisco at the San Francisco Art Institute. He twice won Fulbright-Hayes grants allowing him to study in Europe the works of the Renaissance masters. He also won numerous other grants and fellowships, becoming a member of the National Academy of Design in 1994. The Hirshorn Museum owns fourteen of his works while others hang in numerous museums around the country, as well as in his own studio. There, on April 26, 2000, his wife, Peggy, found that he'd hung the ultimate self-portrait--himself.

Greg and Peg, 2000, Gregory Gillespie

 

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti Self-portrait, 1921

Walking Man I, 1960, Alberto Giacometti

The prices paid for paintings at auction in recent years have soared well past the $100-million mark. The current record holder is Austrian artist Gustave Klimt for his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer painted in 1907, which sold for $135-million in 2006. However persistent rumor has it one of Jackson Pollock's paintings may recently have sold for as much as $140-million. The record price for a work of sculpture is held by a Swiss sculptor named Alberto Giacometti (above). Care to take a guess as to the price tag on his 1960 Walking Man I (right)? If it helps any, it's the first in a series of six similar pieces, cast in bronze. It appears to be (nears as I can tell) about eight feet tall. If you guessed less than $100-million you guessed too low. The actual price attained in 2010 was $104,327,000. Giacometti was born in 1901 and died of heart failure in 1966 (a heavy smoker). Too bad he couldn't have brought that price during his lifetime, he could have used the money.

 

Standing Figure with Face, 1947, Alberto Giacometti

Diego in a Cloak, 1954,
Alberto Giacometti

As you might have already noticed from his self-portrait (top) Giacometti's paintings look nothing like his sculptures. They do, however, bear a certain resemblance to his drawings as seen in his Standing figure with Face (above) dating from 1947. Alberto Giacometti came from a whole family of artists. His father, Giovanni Giacometti was an Impressionist painter, both he and his work bearing a strong resemblance to Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh was about fifteen years older. Giovanni and his wife Annetta had a daughter and three sons, Alberto, Diego, and Bruno. Alberto and Diego both became sculptors (their work quite similar) while Bruno became an architect. Alberto often used his friends and family as models. His brother, Diego in a Cloak (left, 1954) is an example. It went for a mere $27-million at auction. A painting by Alberto of his brother recently sold for $33-million.

Make Room, 1948, Alberto Giacometti--stick figures now worth millions.

Surrealist Table, 1933, Alberto
Giacometti (his sister).

Alberto Giacometti studied first at the School of Fine Arts in Geneva, then moved on to Paris to study sculpture under Antoine Bourdelle former student of Rodin. Initially, he dabbled in Cubism, then fell in with the Surrealists, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, and of course, their leader, Andre Breton. Before long however, Giacometti became disillusioned with the Surrealists and their unconscious and subconscious dreams, and sexual imagery. He denounced them as mere parlor games. He decided to pursue a much deeper reality and to work from models once again. The Surrealists, particularly Breton, was aghast at such a betrayal. They kicked him out of their group. Many of them never spoke to him again. The break cost him dearly in terms of commissions and sales of his work as he began to concentrate on expressionistic heads and to turn to existentialism. His works grew larger, but also thinner, a style that was to become his trademark.



Dog, 1958, Alberto Giacometti (I'll bet he thought long an hard about that title.)

Skeletal Giacometti Sculpture on Parisian
Street, 1951, Alberto Giacometti,
Photo by Gordon Parks

What might have been his big break, a chance to gain a reputation in the International world of art, came in 1958 when the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York commissioned him to create a sculpture to go in front of their new skyscraping headquarters. Alas, after several attempts, Giacometti was unable to match his sculptural image of the female figure he envisioned with the actual site, which seemed totally foreign to him. He never completed the work. It wasn't until four years later when he won a gold medal at the 1962 Venice Biennale, along with the prestige and publicity that went along with it, that Giacometti's work began to bring the respectable prices foreshadowing the enormous sales figures paid today for his monumental bronze stick figures.

Giacometti at work in his studio around 1954.
He often painted his mental images before sculpting them.

 

Alekandr Gerasimov

Guarding the Peace. Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, 1938, Alexandr Gerasimov.



Aleksandr Gerasimov Self-portrait

Every great leader needs a great painter. Napoleon had his Jacques-Louis David. Charles I of England had his Anthony van Dyck. Washington had his Gilbert Stuart. Lincoln had his George Healy. Pope Innocent X had his Diego Velasquez. Stalin had Aleksandr Gerasimov. In none of the relationships above do we blame or credit the artists for the sins or sincerity of their subjects...except perhaps in the case of Comrade Gerasimov. Some have called him Stalin's Velasquez, and figuratively speaking that may be true, though Gerasimov was in no way the equal of Velasquez as an artist. Like Stalin, Gerasimov was a Communist and a Soviet Communist at that, probably the worst kind. Of course, had they not seen eye-to-eye politically they wouldn't have been eye-to-eye artistically. And, we can always excuse Gerasimov by considering the fact that if he hadn't been Joseph Stalin's favorite artist, it would have been someone else--Mikhail Bozhi, perhaps.

 

Apple Tree Garden, 1930s, Aleksandr Gerasimov, some lingering Monet in his
spare time between "Heroic Realism" portraits of Communist leaders.

Lenin at thePulpit, 1930,
Aleksandr Gerasimov,
painted after Lenin's death.

Gerasimov was a Social Realist born in 1881 in Kozlov (now Michurinsk, south central Russia) of peasant stock. Until the age of twenty-two he worked for his father selling cattle. Before Russia's cataclysmic WW I defeat and the subsequent revolution, Gerasimov studied painting at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, influenced by the work of Anders Zorn and Claude Monet. He graduated in 1915 with two degrees--painting and architecture. During the war, he served in the army then returned to his hometown where he worked as a theatrical designer until 1925. That was the year he went back to Moscow and set up a studio where he began painting Vladimir Lenin and other Soviet leaders in a style he termed "Heroic Realism." It was really little more than a somewhat baroque version of Social Realism, but in any case, he became a rising figure in the rarified world of Russian art at a time when the really great artists of the country such as Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Chagall, Soutine, Lipchitz, and many others were abandoning "Mother Russia" in droves, heading for the U.S. and the artistic freedom that, like everything else in the Russia at the time, was beginning to be in short supply.

Soviet artists, Brodsky, Gerasimov, and Katsman at Stalin’s Dacha, 1951,
by Aleksandr Gerasimov. (The fourth figure is unidentified.)

Portrait of Olga Lepeshinskaya,
1939, Aleksandr Gerasimov

Gerasimov didn't paint only grandiose, heroic portraits of Soviet leaders. He sometimes painted landscapes, such as his Apple Tree Garden (above) done sometime in the 1930s and his Communal Bath (bottom) from 1938. With the rise of Stalin in the 1920s, Gerasimov's Soviet star likewise ascended, though his work had descended into pompous portraits such as his Guarding the Peace, Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, dating from 1938. Both it and his 1930 Lenin at the Pulpit (above, left) won numerous awards both inside the Soviet Union and when it was displayed in international competitions. Gerasimov's status as the number one painter in Russia also brought him opportunities to paint celebrities such as Olga Lepeshinskaya (left) from the country's performing arts alongside communal farm workers as seen in his Feast on a Collective Farm (below) from 1936. His 1951 feast with Stalin and three fellow artists (above) is somewhat more refined.

Feast on a Collective Farm, 1936, Aleksandr Gerasimov

When Joseph Stalin died in 1953, so did Gerasimov's dominance of the Soviet world of painting. Nikita Khrushchev brought with him to the Kremlin what came to be known as "De-Stalinization." Gerasimov's widely displayed works gradually went into museum vaults and Gerasimov, likewise went into storage. Gerasimov termed it as being "In Oblivion. Like Rembrandt." As in the case with his earlier comparison with Velasquez, figurative speaking, he might be right. Artistically...not even close.



Stalin at the 18th Party Congress,
1939, Aleksandr Gerasimov

Stalin's Funeral, 1953, Aleksandr Gerasimov--the end of an era, the end of a career.

Communal Bath, 1953, Aleksandr Gerasimov--rank has its privileges.

 

Art and Jesus--His Burial

The Deposition, 1435, Mathias Grunewald,

Entombment of Christ, 1450,
Rogier van der Weyden

The story of Jesus Christ did not end with his crucifixion, either in the gospel accounts or in the visual images provided us by artists. Within hours of his death, the body was taken down from the cross. In 1435, Germany's Mathias Grunewald, as he did with so many other moments in the life of Jesus, depicted this effort with his usual intimate, gruesome honesty in his Deposition (above). A few years later, in 1450, one of his countrymen, Rogier van der Weyden painted a similar scene titled The Entombment of Christ (left). In that they are closely related as to style and content, together the two paintings provide an almost moment-by-moment narrative of the mournful aftermath following Jesus' crucifixion.



Christ Carried from the Tomb,
1560, Tintoretto

Entombment, ca. 1500,
Michelangelo

Michelangelo, about 1500, also began, but did not complete, his version of the event (above, right). As we've seen before in the work of Tintoretto, his depiction, Christ Carried to the Tomb, (above, left) is a darkly dramatic scene full of mannerist diagonals and complex masses.

Descent from the Cross, 1611-14, Peter Paul Rubens

Descent from the Cross,
1634, Rembrandt.

Peter Paul Rubens' Descent from the Cross (above) from 1611-14, portrays in great detail the difficulty in handling the awkward weight of a dead body by Jews adverse to even touching it. The altarpiece was painted for the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp, Belgium. Rembrandt's version by the same title (left), dating from 1634, is similar but much darker and less highly populated with struggling figures. He painted a second version around 1652.

My own depiction, The Burial (bottom) borrows elements from both the descent from the cross and various depictions of the burial. It is no less realistic (I'm told the flesh tone is exactly right for a dead body). However, the use of only the arms and lower bodies of Jesus' attendants avoids the distraction of so many faces, figures, and background.



Copyright, Jim Lane

The Burial, 1999, Jim Lane

Joy Garnett

Castle Bravo, 1998, Joy Garnett (from the Bomb Project).

Joy Garnett, 2013

Can human tragedy or catastrophic natural events be the source or artistic beauty? Is an artist permitted to take a photo from a newspaper, magazine, or the Internet and use it as the basis for a work of art? If you're like most people, even most artists, you would probably hedge your answers to both questions with a thoughtful "that depends." Of course, that's no answer at all but simply begs more questions, principally, "on what?" And when pressed, that's where everything gets complicated, murky, legalistic, even criminal. Those are both questions posed by painter Joy Garnett (left) through her work. Joy is among the very few artist younger than I am whom I have written about. She was born in 1965. I'm not in the business of making or breaking the careers of living artists. Moreover, whatever you or I think of her work is not the point. It's the questions raised by her work that make this attractive young artist important.

Plume 2, 2005, Joy Garnett--powerful, dynamic, beauty or horrible death and destruction?

The first question is relatively easy when it comes to the "on what" part. Creating beauty from catastrophic or tragic events depends mostly on the skill of the artist, both technically and intellectually. Garnett's Castle Bravo (top) depicts a nuclear detonation based upon government photos obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. I guess if you like really "hot" colors you could call it beautiful, but only if you can divorce the painting itself from the image content. Nuclear weapons would not be deemed "beautiful" in any sane subjective context. Garnett's Plume 2 (above) presents a different dilemma. That's not one tornado but appears to be three or four, and they're not "test tornado." People are dying. The lives and livelihoods of those not killed are, nonetheless, being destroyed, given the damage such "plumes" leave in their wakes. Can, and perhaps more importantly, should artists and viewers attempt to separate the painting from its content? Should artists even create such work? Is it morally obnoxious? Is the freedom of expression claimed by artists broad enough to encompass such works? If you look at art history, the answer has to be, yes. Artists have been painting human tragedies since the first painting of Eve biting into the apple. However, few have tried to make such works into things of beauty. Beauty being in the "eye of the beholder" probably makes that a moot question.


Rise, After Bosch (Superdome), 2006, Joy Garnett. Here, the two questions meet.

It's in Garnett's Rise, After Bosch (Superdome) (above) from 2006, that the two questions posed at the top begin to meet. Though noticeably short on the intensely colorful, eye-catching "beauty" seen in the other two works, there is a sort of poignant beauty, knowing as we do the story of human suffering that occurred in this massive "shelter" and in seeing it deserted, the sun rising, shining down on the wreckage representing the hope of a new day. Beyond that though, this painting, is based upon a, no doubt copyrighted, news photo. What Garnett has done rests on the legal concept called "fair use." I've not seen the original photo but I'm guessing she did not use the entire photo, probably didn't replicate the original colors (it's pretty drab and low-contrast for that to have been the case). It's obviously an Expressionistic piece, making no attempt whatsoever to actually copy the photo, and in all likelihood changing it significantly as to size. She no doubt left out details and perhaps even adding some on her own. In other words, she's probably safe from a lawsuit.

Molotov, 2003, Joy Garnett
(from the "Riot" exhibition)

That wasn't the case in 2003 when Garnett posted her painting Molotov (left) on her Website. It hadn't been there very long before Joy got a nasty little letter from lawyers representing photojournalist, Susan Meiselas, demanding she "cease and desist" and threatening a lawsuit if she didn't. The painting was based upon a news photo taken by Meiselas during the Nicaraguan Sandinista Revolution (left) in 1979. Caution being the better part of good sense, Joy removed the image from her Website. Though Meiselas had originally demanded Garnett transfer all rights to the painting, once it was removed online, the matter was not pursued.



The original Meiselas photo used by Garnett.

Interesting story, but it doesn't end there. A rogue Internet Website, which had been following the controversy, posted the offending image and soon the were dozens of others doing the same, some mirroring Joy Arnett's entire Web page as it had been before she removed the painting. Some years before there had been a big copyright infringement battle between eToys.com and another site, eToy, which came to be called the "Toywar." Joy's case was dubbed, "Joywar." In little more than a week, Joy found her cause (and her painting) had spread to protesting Websites around the world. Sometime later, Susan Meiselas and Joy Garnett met face to face at a conference dealing with the legal problems of fair use. Their differences had to do with context. Meiselas objected to the historic context of her photo being stripped away while Garnet argued that one artist should not seek to censor another using copyright laws. As can be seen above, the painting did not utilize the entire Meiselas photo and omitted background details, its cropping serving to create a totally new structural composition. There was no lawsuit; Meiselas neither lost nor gained financially from the whole affair.

Shepard Fairey's Hope poster based on the AP photo at left
--significant changes, but not significant enough to avoid legal "hot water."

Joy Garnett was not the first artist to become enmeshed is such legal entanglement. A New York street artist named Shepard Fairey nearly went to jail as a result of his Hope poster painting of Barack Obama derived from an Associated Press news photo he'd "Photo-shopped" as the basis for a well-known campaign poster. Though such cases would normally be limited to civil suits, Fairey's sin was that of anticipating such a lawsuit and destroying the photographic working papers he'd used in creating the painting. That's called destroying evidence. A plea agreement allowed him to avoid jail time but cost him $25,000 in fines and 300 hours of community service. The civil case was settled out of court.

Air Strip, 2003, Joy Garnett--the joy of Joy.

 

Thomas Gambier Parry

Thomas Gambier Parry's angelic decoration high up in the lantern
of the Octagon Tower of England's Ely Cathedral

Artists seldom become wealthy. More often, if they have money, they've inherited it. This often causes them to fit into a peculiar class of artists, not beholden to clients or public acceptance of their work. Paul Cezanne fell into this group. The same could be said of Impressionist Frederick Bazille, Edouard Manet, and Gustave Caillebotte, to name just a few, all of whom were French. Across the channel in England we might include John Constable, Peter Tillemans, and Joshua Reynolds in such a group. However, a British artist who perhaps best fits this category is Thomas Gambier Parry (a name which should be hyphenated but isn't).



Highnan Court and gardens, ancestral home of the Gambier-Parry family.

Thomas Gambier Parry ca. 1850

The Gambier Parry family fortune derived from the artist's father and grandfather who had both been directors of British East India Company. Thomas was born in 1816 in the Surrey region of England. Both his parents died when Thomas was quite young, causing him to be raised by two aunts from his mother's family (the Gambiers). He was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he apparently studied art, though there seems to be little or no mention of his art training in any biography I could find. However, in judging his work, I can see little evidence of his being self-taught. In any case, at the age of twenty-one, he purchased his own country manor house, Highnam Court (above) in Gloucestershire. He spent the rest of his life (he died in 1888) restoring it and creating an appropriately English garden setting for his estate and the nearby village.

 

Gambier Parry's Church of the Holy Innocents, 1849-51,
Highnan, Gloucestershire, England--tall, slender, and quick.

In 1839, Thomas Gambier Parry married Anna Maria Isabella Fynes-Clinton, the daughter of an English historian and writer. They had six children but only two survived childhood. In 1848, Isabella Gambier Parry died of tuberculosis shortly after childbirth. Wishing to properly memorialize his beloved wife (and later their deceased children), the wealthy landowner and artist hired architect Henry Woodyer and ordered the construction of a parish church for the nearby community of Highnam, which he called, The Church of the Holy Innocents. Never in the history of English churches of any size did such a Gothic structure go up so fast--a mere twenty-one months (followed shortly thereafter by a parish house and a school). Once the church was finish, Gambier Parry set about decorating the interior himself with frescoes.

 

Thomas Gambier Parry' highly decorated Gothic frescoes, Church of the Innocents.

The nave of the Church of the Holy
Innocents. Gambier Parry's fresco
(above) is just above the arch.

It is for these Frescoes which Thomas Gambier Parry is most well known as an artist. And while they are quite beautiful, it was not so much what he painted as how. In general, England tends to be too damp and humid for true frescoes to survive their usual centuries of carbonatated beauty. Therefore, perhaps forever marking himself as a better chemist than painter, Thomas Gambier Parry invented a new kind of Fresco painting, not too unlike what Leonardo da Vinci had unsuccessfully attempted during the Renaissance.

 

There was nothing simple about it. Gambier Parry combined with his pigments a spirit medium for use on specially prepared plaster or canvas ground. Originally it used beeswax, Spike lavender oil, lavender, turpentine, elemi resin and copal varnish. It was quite a complex ordeal both in preparing the wall surface and applying the paint. In 1862 Gambier Parry published his recipe. Once the technique of painting with such a noxious mixture became popular with other artists, the whole process was simplified as it became commercialized. Later, Gambier Parry painted six large sections of the vault of Ely Cathedral using his successful concoction.

 

The Strand block of London's Somerset House, which today houses the
Courtauld Institute of Art and Thomas Gambier Parry's former art
collection, was once the home of Britain's Royal Academy of Art. 

Quite apart from his limited portfolio of church decoration, and his novel paint chemistry, having great wealth has tended to overshadow Gambier Parry, the artist. Besides becoming a very generous philanthropist he was also a very astute expert on Medieval and Renaissance art history, all of which was reflected in his highly refined collection of such art. Today, his collection is part of the that of the Courtauld Institute of Art housed in the Strand block of London's massive Somerset House overlooking the Thames. The institute is the place to go for students wishing a degree in art history and also the place to go for anyone else simply wanting to see art history (mostly Italian) at its finest. Thomas Gambier Parry married a second time and fathered a second family of six children, all of whom survived into adulthood. Several of Thomas Gambier Parry's sons made notable contributions to the fine arts in the areas of music, painting, writing, and architecture. This later generation has also had the good sense to insert a proper British hyphen in between the family names.

Highnan's Church of the Holy Innocents makes a beautiful
central focus for the estate's English gardens.

 

The New Woman



A Storms Approaching, 2012, Sally Edelstein

Women in the Arts

Many, whom we might term "history challenged," tend to think of "The Feminist Movement" sometimes termed the "Women's Movement," or in slang, "Women's Lib," as a product of the 1970s when female baby boomers came of age and hit the streets in mass numbers. Even many women today think in terms of such a limited perspective. Those giving the matter a bit more thought might hearken back to the "Women's Suffrage Movement" in the U.S. which resulted in women gaining the right to vote in 1920. But so-called "Women's Rights" did not just happen overnight. Though there was some American movement in that direction during the late 1800s, mostly it all began to take shape after the turn of the century. The year 1900 is a convenient place to start. In terms of the arts, there had long been women artists, always painting in the shadow of their male counterparts and hardly even noted by art historians until it became socially incumbent upon them to do so in the past fifty years. Although women from all walks of life and virtually all professions (with the possible exception of urologists) had a part in this revolution, it's safe to say women artists were in the forefront demanding gender equality.

 

Wilhelmina Weber Furlong ca. 1910

I think this is a painting by Wilhelmina
Weber Furlong, but the signature is
indistinct and her work is virtually
invisible on line.

Working women in the field of illustration such as Jennie Augusta Brownscombe, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Rose O'Neill, Elizabeth Shippen Green, and Violet Oakley often found themselves manning the battle lines during this period. Of course the "war" didn't end with the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Two real wars had an impact as well. Any number of women painters could be cited as having been important in trying to gain for their gender an equal standing in the arts. One in particular, Wilhelmina Weber Furlong stands apart from the others. She was the wife of Thomas Furlong, who was an unexceptional Realist painter of murals born in 1886, making him eight years younger than his wife (born in 1878). Both were active with New York's Art Students League where Wilhelmina had been a student during the 1890s. Her husband taught at New York University.
 

Jackson Pollock and wife, Lee Krasner, another Modernist couple from the early days.

Weber Furlong (as she came to be known) further stands apart as an artists because of her affiliation with the American Modernist movement, first Impressionism, then Expressionism, and finally, after the death of her husband in 1952, Abstract Expressions. As anyone familiar with the New York School before and after its rise to prominence in the postwar era knows, it was (especially in the early, formative years) overwhelmingly, unabashedly, exceedingly, excessively MALE. There were a few exceptions, especially among the second generation of the movement (above), but in the beginning, Weber Furlong was pretty much alone. Her impact and influence was not so much in what she painted but in what she taught...for fifty-six years. She and her husband established an artist colony in upstate New York in 1921 near Bolton Landing, which they called Golden Heart Farm (below). There they entertained the likes of John Graham, Willem de Kooning, David Smith, Dorothy Dehner, Jean Charlot, Edward Hopper, Alexander Calder, Rockwell and Sally Kent, Thomas Hart Benton, Allen Tucker, Max Weber (no relation), and Kimon Nicolaidies. Artists came and went. Some taught, some were taught. Weber Furlong died in 1962, as did her Bolton Landing artists' colony. Nonetheless, the Furlong's Golden Heart Farm was what we might call the "incubator" for the Modernist movement in the U.S.


Thomas and Weber Furlong's Golden Heart Farm, 1921, Bolton Landing, New York