Euro American Artists

One century ago, an intimate group of artists made crucial life decisions together. Many sought Peggy Guggenheim’s patronage in search of both fame and financial security.

Now many artists of color are recreating classic European artworks in new forms. Their art takes advantage of their iconic status to challenge values that maintain them as masterpieces.

Robert Weir

The work of the Weir art dynasty represents many of the significant shifts in American painting in the 19th century as it responded and expanded on European traditions. Additionally, this exhibit shows how Robert Walter Weir, John Ferguson Weir and Julian Alden Weir studied extensively abroad – their experiences having an effect on their careers both as artists and art instructors in America.

Weir is best-known as a member of the Hudson River School and for his painting “Embarkation of the Pilgrims,” which hangs in the United States Capitol rotunda. Additionally, Weir taught drawing at West Point Military Academy in New York State.

Robert Weir and his younger brother John would travel frequently to Europe for informal training – studying museums, sketching en plein air and taking lessons from local artists. Flora by Weir shows his ability to combine an expressionist nod towards impressionism (thick paint on flowers) with academic painting techniques (facial modeling).

John Weir

Weir is a master manipulator in the world of private espionage. But his paranoia and distrust make him an isolated individual; when one of his jobs goes awry, Weir becomes suspicious that someone may be trying to manipulate him and will do anything necessary to uncover the truth.

This exhibition’s works illustrate the significant influence that travel and study in Europe had on American art during the 19th century. Robert Walter Weir encouraged his sons John Ferguson Weir and Julian Alden Weir to travel there for further artistic training.

Charles Dance and Meta Golding star as series stars in Rabbit Hole. Dance plays Weir’s father Ben who organized Weir’s fake suicide. Both actors possess excellent comedic timing that perfectly compliment Kiefer Sutherland.

Beauford Delaney

Beauford Delaney was an independent self-taught painter from Knoxville who first started drawing at age seven. His initial success as a portraitist and his subsequent works in Harlem fuelled his ambition, yet they also left him deeply divided between being gay and being Christian Southerner – the stress from these dual identities contributing to mental deterioration that ultimately resulted in him taking his own life in Paris in 1979.

While leaving behind his figurative compositions in New York, Delaney made significant aesthetic shifts as he immersed himself in Paris’ cultural life and took in its influences of European modernism. This exhibition provides a small survey of Delaney’s works from Paris; including both his abstract paintings as well as those that first gained critical acclaim in America.

Delaney painted Paris abstracts around 1960 that capture his brushwork bristling with vibrating bristles to capture an artist in an exalted state of being. Other pieces evoke sunset light as he painted its soothing brightness to soothe his troubled soul.

Bob Thompson

After struggling with alcoholism and mental illness, Thompson turned his life around through art. He earned fame as a painter of Renaissance and Baroque art – offering bolder takes on Old Masters paintings with sexually charged themes and vibrant color schemes than their predecessors.

At his early New York shows, Thompson’s peers often criticized him for oversaturating himself with European masterpieces; an opinion which now seems misplaced given Kehinde Wiley and Boots Riley who use visual traditions more for social commentary than continuity.

Once in New York, Thompson quickly immersed himself in its vibrant avant-garde scene, associating with figures such as Sam Gilliam and Red Grooms as well as jazz musicians frequenting Five Spot Cafe such as Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). Over time he perfected his mature style by adapting Old Master compositional structures into contemporary allegories alternating between hot and violent images and cool and dark moods.