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Publié par
Date de parution
02 septembre 2014
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9781611175110
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
14 Mo
A product of the industrialized New South, Eugene Healan Thomason (1895-1972) made the obligatory pilgrimage to New York to advance his art education and launch his career. Like so many other aspiring American artists, he understood that the city offered unparalleled personal and professional opportunities—prestigious schools, groundbreaking teachers, and an intoxicating cosmopolitan milieu—for a promising young painter in the early 1920s. The patronage of one of the nation's most powerful tycoons afforded him entrance to the renowned Art Students League, where he fell under the influence of the leading members of the Ashcan School, including Robert Henri, John Sloan, and George Luks. In all, Thomason spent a decade in the city, adopting—and eventually adapting—the Ashcan movement's gritty realistic aesthetic into a distinctive regionalist style that utilized thick paint and simple subject matter.
Eugene Thomason returned to the South in the early 1930s, living first in Charlotte, North Carolina, before settling in a small Appalachian crossroads called Nebo. For the next thirty-plus years, he mined the rural landscape's rolling terrain and area residents for inspiration, finding there an abundance of colorful imagery more evocative—and more personally resonant—than the urbanism of New York. Painting at the same time as such well known Regionalists as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, Eugene Thomason embraced and convincingly portrayed his own region, becoming the visual spokesman for that place and its people.
Publié par
Date de parution
02 septembre 2014
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9781611175110
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
14 Mo
FROM NEW YORK TO NEBO
FROM NEW YORK TO NEBO
THE ARTISTIC JOURNEY OF EUGENE THOMASON
MARTHA R. SEVERENS
THE JOHNSON COLLECTION IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
The Johnson Collection, LLC
The Johnson Collection PO Box 3524, Spartanburg, South Carolina 29304-3524 864.585.2000 thejohnsoncollection.org
David Henderson, Director Sarah Tignor, Collection Manager Registrar Lynne Blackman, Public Relations Publications Coordinator Aimee Wise, Collection Assistant Holly Watters, Collection Assistant
All rights reserved. Unless otherwise noted, all images are by Eugene Healan Thomason (1895-1972) and are the property of the Johnson Collection, LLC. All vintage photographs included in this volume are courtesy of the Thomason Family Archive in the possession of Lavinia Thomason Sauter.
Copublished in partnership with the University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, South Carolina 29208. 800.768.2500. www.sc.edu/uscpress
Editor: Lynne Blackman Design: Gee Creative, Charleston, South Carolina Photography: Tim Barnwell Photography, Asheville, North Carolina; Rick Rhodes Photography Imaging, LLC, Charleston, South Carolina Production: Printed in Canada by Friesens
ISBN 978-1-61117-510-3 (hardbound) - ISBN 978-1-61117-511-0 (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This volume accompanies the exhibition of the same title. Exhibition venues include: Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, North Carolina Mint Museum Randolph, Charlotte, North Carolina
Cover: Self-Portrait , 1959, oil on masonite, 30 25 inches (detail) Frontispiece: Three Chimneys , 1939, oil on canvas, 20 24 inches (detail) Back: Autumn , oil on canvas, 30 36 inches
CONTENTS
Foreword
Acknowledgments
From New York to Nebo
The Johnson Collection
Annotations
Index
FOREWORD
Not long after I arrived at the Mint Museum in 2006, I received a letter from the Charlotte Observer s longtime arts writer Richard Maschal suggesting that I might find it interesting to learn more about a late Charlotte artist named Eugene Thomason. As a newcomer to the region, I was not familiar with Thomason s work and welcomed the opportunity. Through Maschal s introduction, I spent an eye-opening morning with one of the artist s relatives who lives just outside the city. During that visit, I saw some fine examples of Thomason s work and heard first-hand reports of his career and character. Subsequent research in the museum s files revealed that Thomason had no fewer than three solo exhibitions at the Mint during his lifetime. The first, which took place in early 1937, occurred less than a year after the museum opened its doors; the next was in 1959, and the third in 1964.
Boy with Chrysanthemums , circa 1936-1937, oil on canvas, 41.38 32.25 inches (detail). Collection of The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina. Gift of Dr. A. Everette James, Jr. and Jeannette Cross James. See also page 58 .
Throughout his career, Thomason most frequently has been linked to his mentor George Luks, a rough-and-tumble member of the group of artists in Robert Henri s circle known as The Eight or the Ashcan School. The impact of the time that Thomason spent in New York collaborating with such artists as Luks (who became a close friend) can be seen in his embrace of everyday subjects painted quickly from life with vigorous brushwork and thickly-applied paint. These qualities are evident in the Mint s one Thomason canvas, Boy with Chrysanthemums ( page 58 ), and, as it happens, they factored into its creation. According to his late wife Thomason completed the picture in approximately half an hour after convincing the boy, whom he had found on his doorstep, to pose for him. Perhaps because of the spontaneity of the situation, Thomason did something that he was known, on occasion, to do: he used a canvas upon which he had already begun another painting. This fact was discovered only when Boy with Chrysanthemums underwent conservation treatment in 2008 in preparation for its reinstallation in the museum s new uptown facility in 2010.
Thomason s oeuvre is a fascinating one, and the Johnson Collection s publication and companion exhibition offer us the chance to reassess both its importance and its place in American art history. Rather than being considered an offshoot or country version of the Ashcan sensibility, I believe that Thomason and his work might more accurately be understood as a part of what Henri, Luks, and their colleagues made possible: the emergence of American Scene painting (often called Regionalism ) as a viable artistic practice. This movement was taking shape just as Thomason returned to his boyhood hometown of Charlotte in the early 1930s and as he turned his attention to the people around him (like the boy in the Mint Museum s painting or, later, to his neighbors in the Nebo area) as subject matter. Thomason s homecoming coincided with a particularly rich moment in Charlotte s cultural history, for despite the fact that the city was still struggling to recover from the Great Depression, it was also undergoing what one newspaper writer called a cultural Renaissance. This reawakening was led by artists like Thomason who invigorated Charlotte s art scene by encouraging aspiring local artists and facilitating large group exhibitions of their work, and by visionaries like Mary Myers Dwelle, who led the charge to repurpose the United States Mint building as the state s first art museum. Period newspaper articles, many cited by Martha Severens in her insightful essay here, document the burgeoning artistic activity in the city in the mid-1930s and the community s growing appetite for the arts. Considering this history, and Charlotte s continued emergence as one of the region s most significant cultural centers, it is particularly fitting for the Mint to be involved with this exhibition which takes place nearly eighty years after Thomason s work was first shown here in 1937.
Jonathan Stuhlman, PhD Senior Curator of American, Modern, and Contemporary Art The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to acknowledge and thank the many individuals who have contributed to the production of From New York to Nebo: The Artistic Journey of Eugene Thomason. First and foremost are the people at the Johnson Collection who have shepherded the project with tact and grace. The generous support and vision of Susu and George Johnson have guided the development of the collection, which is now an outstanding representation of art of the American South. Under the avid leadership and acquisitive acumen of David Henderson, the collection has grown exponentially in both quality and quantity. Sarah Tignor coordinates myriad details with great care and finesse, and her colleague Lynne Blackman is a sensitive editor, concerned for every aspect from word choice to design. Collection assistants Aimee Wise and Kate Conner were ever ready to assist with a variety of administrative tasks that lightened my load.
The book would not have been possible without the considerable interest of Thomason s daughters. Lavinia Thomason Sauter is passionate about her father s work, has assembled a significant collection, and serves as the guardian of his archive of clippings, photographs, and miscellanea. Her sister, Jean Thomason Turner, is also keenly interested, as is Virginia Montgomery McMahan, Thomason s stepdaughter, who is a great raconteur. A niece of Thomason s wife, Katherine Gaston, provided additional illuminating insights. To all four, I owe a deep debt of gratitude.
In my research, I have benefited from the expertise of many, and I am grateful. Dr. A. Everette James, Jr., who was the first to study and write about Thomason, has been supportive and helpful. Edward Phifer was kind enough to introduce me to Helen Norman, a meticulous historian living in the Lake James area, who toured me around Nebo and tracked down specifics about the Thomasons properties. Stephanie Cassidy at the Art Students League in New York was graciously forthcoming with information about Thomason s studies, as was Jan Blodgett, the archivist at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. Staff members of the South Carolina Room at the Greenville County Library System, the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, and Patti Holda in the Abe Simmons Genealogy and North Carolina Room at the McDowell Public Library in Marion, North Carolina, were helpful with interlibrary loans, directories, obituaries, and census records. Matthew Wayman, Head Librarian of the Ciletti Memorial Library at Pennsylvania State University, provided elusive details about George Luks mural at the Necho Allen Hotel.
At museums, my research was furthered by the assistance of Kevin Grogan, Director, Morris Museum of Art; Jon Stuhlman, Senior Curator of American, Modern, and Contemporary Art, and Joyce Weaver, Librarian, Mint Museum; Cindy Connor, Registrar, Columbia Museum of Art; Ronni Smith, Registrar, Hickory Museum of Art; Frank Thomson, Curator, Asheville Art Museum; and Rachel Young, Registrar, Mobile Museum of Art. In addition, Jane Harper Hicklin and Robert M. Hicklin, Jr., of the Charleston Renaissance Gallery provided access to their extensive files. I appreciate the collegiality of all of them and their willingness to share information.
Conservator Colin Post of Asheville and his assistant Elizabeth Sanchez shared discoveries about Thomason s technique. Also of Asheville, photographer Tim Barnwell mastered the challenging task of capturing Thomason s paintings for reproduction. I am grateful to them all, and also to Steve Hankins, De
