Warren Buffet once told his shareholders that he and his team “enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.” That may be hard to believe for anyone not enjoying his fortune, but the truth is, no matter what the endeavor, it is better to travel hopefully than arrive. With The Dance of Life: Figure and Imagination in American Art, 1876–1917, the Yale University Art Gallery not only focuses on the work of American Renaissance artists (Edwin Austin Abbey, Daniel Chester French, Violet Oakley, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, among others), but explores the planning, procedures, and strategies that led to the final product.
Study for The Hours in the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg by Edwin Austin Abbey (1852–1911), c. 1909–1910. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial Collection.
The American Renaissance was a period in which artists and architects turned to academic classicism to express the nation’s emerging cultural confidence, articulated most assertively in impressive public spaces. Incorporating an array of preparatory works, the exhibition sprang from a review of the gallery’s enormous collection of Edwin Austin Abbey material, which came its way in 1937. “Looking through the three thousand works of art in his estate with my colleague Lisa Hodermarsky, Sutphin Family Curator of Prints and Drawings, we shared admiration for Abbey’s remarkable and varied studies for public commissions and felt they offered the foundation of a compelling exhibition,” says the show’s organizer, Mark D. Mitchell, the Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture.
Study for Lincoln at Gettysburg—The Preservation of the Union in the Senate Chamber, Pennsylvania State Capitol by Violet Oakley (1874–1961), c. 1911. Pennsylvania Capitol Preservation Committee, Harrisburg; photograph courtesy the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and the Yale University Art Gallery.
Abbey, who began his career as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly, later executed large-scale murals for public buildings, including the Boston Public Library and the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg. His twelve-foot, round study for The Passage of the Hours, a ceiling mural in the capitol building, is a key work in the show. Viewed alongside other records of this project, it reveals the conceptual and aesthetic trajectory of the artist’s design.
“If you look at Abbey’s oil studies for The Hours,” Mitchell observes, “you can see him reversing the orientation of the figures in one study, feet in, to expand the energy of the composition centrifugally. Or you could look at his initial ideas for the composition as a frieze, rather than a circle. Every stage was heuristic for Abbey—he thought by doing.”
Studies of African American soldiers’ heads for Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), 1883–1893, cast 1965. Yale University Art Gallery, gift of the William Platt family.
Readying Abbey’s work for exhibition involved more than a dusting off. Almost every painting in the show required conservation treatment, notes Kelsey Wingel, postgraduate associate in paintings conservation, who worked closely with Cynthia Schwarz, senior associate conservator of paintings, to prepare these works for display. “Many of Abbey’s canvas paintings were unstretched and stored for decades,” Wingel says. “We worked to relax canvas deformations caused by rolling and to stretch each painting on to custom-built stretchers. Because Abbey’s studies came directly from his studio and most have never been exhibited, the painted surfaces are beautifully preserved and contain many traces of his thoughts and revisions. Using new cleaning and consolidation methods, we aimed to preserve the freshness and immediacy of Abbey’s preparatory paintings, while repairing damages that occurred over time. Treating Abbey’s paintings was a beautiful experience. Spending so much time studying the products of his thought, skill, and creativity, you come to a greater knowledge and appreciation of his artistic goals and spirit.”
The Dance of Life: Figure and Imagination in American Art, 1876–1917 • Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut • to January 5, 2025 • artgallery.yale.edu
