Rediscovering a 'Lost' Poetic Painter
| By Christopher Volpe | | |  | Emil Carlsen, AFTERNOON LANDSCAPE, CA.1907 | Danish American artist Emil Soren Carlsen's (1853-1932) painting and especially his landscapes have a poetic quality that hovers between the sentimental and the mystical.
Carlsen painted during a golden age of American illustration, when artists such as Maxfield Parrish, Virginia Sterrett, and Howard Pyle brought visual flair to books of magical and imaginative stories and verse. Something of that genre's poetic sensibility informs his work, despite his disinterest in overt narrative content. His best landscapes seem as if softened by a shimmering veil.
|  | Emil Carlsen | — advertisement — |  | Wrapping up this week, Emil. Carlsen. : Private Collections was one of the largest New York exhibitions of Carlsens in nearly 50 years (it is at the Salmagundi Club and closes Sept. 30). All of the paintings exhibited were drawn from private collections as well as longtime dealers of his works. Carlsen's paintings were rarely collected by museums, unlike those of his peers in American Impressionism, such as Childe Hassam and William Merritt Chase. Approximately 95% of all Carlsen works are owned privately with less than 100 works in museum collections. |  | Emil Carlsen, Morning Sunlight, c. 1905 | Carlsen had a long, distinguished career and eventually won most of the important honors in American art. But he struggled financially for the first several decades, moving from studio to studio and city to city trying his luck but never quite selling enough. Initially he painted still lifes with a style harkening back to Old Masters such as Chardin and the chiaroscuro, or heightened light and shadow effects, of Velasquez and other painters of the Baroque period.
|  | Emil Carlsen, Copper Pot, 1901 | After marrying and moving into a studio in the famous 59th St. artist building in the early 1900s, he met fellow New York teaching artists John Twacthman and J. Alden Weir. Through these inspired men, he became interested in painting landscapes and marines, and Weir invited Carlsen out to his farm in Connecticut to paint and sketch.
Weir, who had traded a painting for the dreamy rolling hills of the property in rural Branchville, Connecticut, was a passionate convert to Impressionism. We recently wrote about him, and a bit about Twachtmen as well. |  | Emil Carlsen, Portrait of Dine Carlsen (the artist's son), 1914 | Financial necessity drove Carlsen to teach more than he wanted, and he became a popular, sought-after instructor. He taught the life class at the National Academy of Design from 1905 to 1909 and commuted from New York to Philadelphia to lecture at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for many years. His teaching career spanned 40 years.
Finally, the Macbeth Gallery opened in New York, one of the first willing to take a chance on the American Impressionists. His sales improved and for the first time he and his growing family were able to live comfortably without constant financial stress. |  | Emil Carlsen, Connecticut Hillside, c. 1920 | Through the years, Carlsen also paid multiple summer visits to the Ogunquit Art Colony in southern Maine. There he painted ocean scenes that one of this collectors, Duncan Phillips, remarked never failed to evoke "a certain trance-like mood."
|  | Emil Carlsen, 1924 (Bald Head Cliff, Ogunquit, ME) | In American Impressionism, William Gerdts wrote about Carlsen's transition from still life artist to landscape painter:
Carlsen was attracted to the beauties of the rolling hills and interpreted them in soft, pastel tones. Carlsen's landscape mode, however, is more completely of this century (than the Old Master-ish still lifes -cv), and it developed in the more decorative, somewhat naturalistic manner that characterized later Impressionism.
Meanwhile, those still lifes, which he'd never stopped producing, were at last being appreciated by the critics and coveted by eager collectors. Art writer Arthur Edwin Bye, in his 1924 survey of American still-life painting, lifted up Carlsen as, "unquestionably the most accomplished master of still-life painting in America today." |  | Emil Carlsen, Study in Gray, 1906 | Art historian Richard Boyle noted Carlsen's craftsmanship, praising his paintings as "beautifully crafted and delicate of surface." As an artist, "Carlsen was concerned with 'ideal beauty,'" he wrote, "as well as the beauty inherent in the subject, in texture and color," and his best compositions are at once meticulous and inspired.
Emil Carlsen was no radical innovator, but he was something of an unusual artist and would be so, were he alive today. He painted conventional realist subject matter feelingly in a distinctive, original, and poetic style that was neither wholly classical, modern, nor Impressionistic, but uniquely his own. |  | Emil Carlsen, The French Fan, 1922 | — advertisement — |  | An Exceptional Auction of Modern Masterworks |  | Gustav Klimt, Birch Forest, 1903. Undated photo via Christie's. | Paul G. Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, was strongly attracted to landscapes as "a way of looking outward," which may be why he felt moved to spend more than $40 million on Gustav Klimt's 1903 autumnal oil, "Birch Forest," in 2006.
"I'm always trying to figure out where the future's going," Allen said in an interview for the 2016 exhibition "Seeing Nature," which featured works from his blue-chip collection. "So maybe that's why I find landscapes interesting. It's as if they are windows onto different realities. In the Klimt, you can feel the stillness and the calmness and the eternal nature of a forest. Or you can have an artist trying to capture a volcanic eruption, which is not still at all.
"When you look at a painting," Allen continued, "you're looking into a different country, into someone else's imagination, how they saw it." The Klimt is one of more than 150 artworks from Allen's estate that will be sold at Christie's on Nov. 9 and 10 in an auction valued at more than $1 billion (with the proceeds going to philanthropy, as Allen directed). While the sale was announced in August, now, for the first time, the auction house has begun to divulge what those treasures are.
Aside from the occasional leak of information, regular grasping at clues and the rare outright announcement, the identities of buyers behind big art purchases typically remain confidential. For reasons of discretion or security, most collectors prefer not to disclose what they have. Even when the cloak of secrecy is finally removed, rarely does it reveal a collection as varied and expansive as Allen's, reaching across 500 years of art history.
In addition to the Klimt, a number of other important 20th and late 19th century works are to be sold. Among them are:
— Georgia O'Keeffe's "White Rose with Larkspur No. 1": An example of O'Keeffe's archetypical subject on a rare large scale, this is the largest flower painting to appear at auction since O'Keeffe's $44 million record in 2014. "White Rose with Larkspur No. 2" hung in O'Keeffe's bedroom before being acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. |  | Rose with Larkspur No. 2, 1927 Oil on canvas 40 × 30 in. MFA Boston. | — Georges Seurat's "Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version)": One of the rarest paintings in private hands in the category, estimated at more than $100 million, this pointillist work was owned by Alphonse Kann, the collector who was one of the inspirations for Charles Swann in Proust; John Quinn, the avant-garde champion who organized the 1913 Armory Show; and Henry P. McIlhenny, the Philadelphia collector.
— Vincent van Gogh's "Verger avec cyprès": Painted in Arles in 1888, from an important series of 14 orchard paintings by van Gogh, it is one of only five remaining in private hands and is estimated at more than $100 million. This work has rarely been seen in public during the past 60 years.
Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in The New York Times.
- Chris | | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment