William J. Glackens: A Modernist in the Making
September 3, 2015 to February 28, 2016
Lynes, Barbara
The question struck senior curator Barbara Buhler Lynes last year, when the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale plunged into its archives and unveiled the first retrospective of artist William Glackens in about 50 years. How did a Francophile with a devotion to masters like Renoir and Degas decide to paint something distinctly American and modern?
The answer, Lynes points out on a recent tour of the museum, lies in two portraits hanging side-by-side in the second-floor gallery. One is 1903's Portrait of Charles FitzGerald, a somber painting of a friend and art critic, made with a slurry of blacks and grays that pays tribute to the dark European palette he encountered often on visits to Paris. The other, painted 15 years later in 1918, is Artist's Daughter in Chinese Costume, a cheerier, brighter painting of Glackens' daughter Lenna, standing indoors against red rugs and carpets.
"That was the thing. He thought he was too dependent on French modern paintings in his early work," Lynes says. "So I wondered how Glackens got to that place in his art. He's going through a shift to create this national American identity."
Lynes zeroes in on that moment of transformation in William J. Glackens: A Modernist in the Making, which opened September 3, 2015. A collection of 44 paintings and drawings, the show is a sequel of sorts to the retrospective that originated at NSU Art Museum and went on to tour the Parrish Art Museum in New York and the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania
Glackens, born in Philadelphia, is credited with leading an early American wave of modern art starting in the early 1900s. He held associations with a group of avant-garde painters called the Eight, later the Ashcan School, which included fellow realist Maurice Prendergast, the man who ended up becoming his next-door neighbor in Manhattan.
