The Salmagundi Club in New York, one of the nation’s oldest arts organizations, began life in 1871 as a regular get-together among a group of artists who sketched alongside one another, each offering his friends advice and constructive criticism. Such origin stories are not unusual, though they run counter to the image fostered by popular culture of the artist as lone wolf—painting furiously in the solitude of an atelier, or camped atop a lonely hillside with easel, brushes, and canvas.
A forthcoming exhibition at the Salmagundi Club, Lineage: Generations of Realism, hopes to demonstrate that great art is most often the fruit of shared knowledge and insight. “Starting in the twentieth century, the tendency has been to emphasize an artist’s singularity—as if each of us sprang forth fully formed, like Athena,” says Patricia Watwood, the Salmagundi member artist who conceived and co-organized the show. “We’re offering a counterpoint narrative: that all art develops in community and through communication, and that great ideas, traditions, and creativity arise out of collaboration.”
The exhibition will present works by artists from the generation that founded the Salmagundi Club— most, but not all, of them members—alongside those by artists from the generation they taught, and from artists the second generation tutored in turn. There will be paintings on view from some of the most eminent artist/educators of the nineteenth century. They include William Merritt Chase—who taught George Bellows, Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, and Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, among many others—and Thomas Anshutz, who was a student of Thomas Eakins and succeeded him as chief instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he went on to teach John Sloan, Charles Sheeler, Robert Henri, William Glackens, and more.
Salmagundi member John Varriano, a teacher at New York’s Art Students League, was tasked with gathering artworks that represent the pedagogical lineage of Frank DuMond, who taught at the ASL for more than fifty years. His pupils included Georgia O’Keeffe, Norman Rockwell, John Marin, and Frank Herbert Mason—who took over for DuMond at the ASL and was Varriano’s own instructor. As a teacher, Varriano upholds the same honorable tradition as his predecessors. “Art at its most essential is poetic craft,” he says, “and if you have that knowledge and skill it’s not yours alone. It’s imperative to pass it on.”
Lineage: Generations of Realism • Salmagundi Club, New York • November 20 to December 10 • salmagundi.org
