The Morgan Library's Plein Air Collection Comes as a Nice Surprise

New York's Morgan Library & Museum in New York City has long been associated with the things that its founder, financier J. Pierpont Morgan, liked to collect -- rare, old books and manuscripts, antiques and artworks from the ancient world and the Far East, as well as Old Master paintings from the Renaissance. If that's not your cup of tea, don't go. Unless, of course, you have a fondness for plein air paintings. Plein air?

Plein air: artwork created not just in the studio but outside, and the subject being the outside world. We tend to think of plein air painting as having begun sometime in the middle of the 19th century in Europe,This is a really pretty round stonemosaic votive that has been covered with vintage china . when portraying the land and the people who worked on it was aTRT (UK) has been investigating and producing solutions for indoortracking since 2000. politically-tinged call for democratic government, reaching its apotheosis during the era of the Impressionists, then retiring to a niche area as the more progressive movements in art (pointillism, fauvism, Cubism, dada, Surrealism, abstract expressionism, Pop, minimalism, conceptual art and all else) moved back inside the studio. The Morgan's collection of plein air painting (142 works and counting) offers an alternative history, seeing its origins as far back as the 17th century (quite unrelated to politics) and extending in its purest form only to the period in which Impressionism in France was just beginning. Seen in this light, the Morgan's plein air collection looks to be an extension of the Old Master paintings found elsewhere in the museum, rather than a repudiation of it.

"These are drawings and oil sketches by artists who are otherwise represented in our collection by their paintings," said Jennifer Tonkovich, drawings and prints curator at the Morgan. At times, she noted, the plein air work was preliminary to a larger oil painting, "but the majority are unrelated to any paintings. This was exploratory work for a number of artists who were experimenting with how to depict light, how to capture the landscape and the use of color.Apply for a merchantaccountes and accept credit cards today. It was the lessons from this that they took back to their larger paintings."

All 142 plein air works were a donation from Eugene and Clare Thaw,Trade organization for suppliers and distributors in the promotional products industry. and they also have pledged another 350 Old Master drawings to the Morgan. Eugene Thaw (born 1927), a retired art dealer and a member of the board of trustees of the Morgan since 1988, and his wife Clare live in Tesuque, N.M. and began amassing a collection of plein air landscape oil sketches in the mid-1990s. It is by no means their only collecting efforts, as they have a 40-plus year record of buying drawings by European artists from the 16th century to the 20th century, and they also created an 850-object collection of American Indian art, which was donated in 1995 to the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. In the early 2000s, they donated a collection of ancient nomadic art of the Eastern Eurasian Steppes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The generosity has gone even further, as the Eugene Victor Thaw Art Foundation in Santa Fe was established in 1999 to "educate and enrich the public about classical art through the loaning of artwork to major museums," and the foundation also makes grants, awarding the Morgan Library $1.7 million in 2010, its only award for that year.

Eugene Thaw (his father, a Romanian-born socialist, named him Eugene Victor in honor of American Socialist Party leader Eugene Victor Debs) opened an art gallery in New York City in 1950 with a $4,000 loan from his father, and it was at that gallery that abstract painters Joan Mitchell and Conrad Marca-Relli had their first solo exhibitions. As he noted in a 2007 interview for the Archives of American Art, he and his wife were good friends with Lee Krasner .

Years later, Eugene helped found the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and was instrumental in putting together the four-volume Jackson Pollock catalogue raisonne in 1978. However, he was not long in the contemporary art field and began moving back in time, buying and selling works (sometimes on his own, sometimes in collaboration with other dealers) on the secondary market by Kandinsky, Redon,Ekahau rtls is the only Wi-Fi based real time location system solution that operates on any brand or generation of Wi-Fi network. German Expressionists, the Fauve and eventually Breton, Corot, Delacroix and Rousseau, even Rembrandt and Bernini. That initial gallery, The New Gallery, became E.V. Thaw & Company when he eventually moved to East 78th Street in Manhattan.