Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 3, 1993 TAG: 9303030007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRIS GLADDEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
VERSATILE ARTIST NEGLECTED NO MORE
DIANE Lesko, curator of collections at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Fla., was like a lot of people a few years back. Though an art expert, Lesko had never heard of Gari Melchers, who died at his Falmouth, Va., home in 1932.Then she swapped a book she had written on Belgian artist James Ensor for a book on Melchers written by her friend Joseph Dreiss for Belmont, Melchers' Virginia home, which now serves as a museum.
Lesko was an instant convert.
She says that Melchers was not only a good painter but that his pictures capture humanity at its best.
When she learned that no Melchers retrospective had been mounted since 1938, she sallied forth to produce one. It turned out to be an extremely popular exhibit that traveled to four other museums including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1990 and 19991.
Southwestern Virginians are now getting a chance to see the kind of art that so impressed Lesko.
The Art Museum of Western Virginia in Roanoke's Center in the Square has pulled together its own Melchers exhibit from private collections and the large holdings of Belmont, the Gari Melchers Estate and Memorial Gallery near Fredricksburg.
Museum executive director Ruth Appelhof says it's one of the more important exhibitions that the museum has ever mounted.
"It's that right combination. It pushes the right buttons," she says.
"Certainly, he is well-renowned and his collection remains in Virginia. . . . This is a wonderful combination of an artist who settled in Virginia and whose work will appeal to a broad spectrum of our audience."
The title of the show is "Gari Melchers: An Impressionist in Virginia."
Though his Impressionist period extended into his Virginia years, Melchers continued to paint in a variety of styles throughout his life, Lesko says. The exhibit reflects this diversity and includes paintings influenced by Academic realism, symbolism and impressionism. There are 39 paintings in the Roanoke exhibition, which came about somewhat in the serendipitous manner of the St. Petersburg exhibition.
Museum board member Anne MacFarlane, whose family has a collection of Melchers paintings, encouraged the museum. And then Appelhof was visiting the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., when she bumped into David Berreth, a former classmate from Syracuse University. He happens to be the curator at Belmont, and the exhibit took life then and there.
Melchers, by all accounts, was a modest, kind and sweet man, Lesko says. But he was also honest enough about his stature in the art world to note that he had won every major award in the art world by the time he was 30.
From the very beginning, Melchers was immersed in art. He spent his early years in Detroit, where his father was an artist who taught the young Melchers.
At 17, Melchers began his formal training at Dusseldorf's academy. By the age of 22, he had achieved an early success with "The Letter," which now hangs in the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Melchers was studying art at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris when he painted this picture of two peasant women opening a letter. It marked the beginning of a long string of honors throughout his career. In 1889, he shared the top prize in the American painting category with John Singer Sargent.
Melchers spent much of his career in Europe but he traveled back and forth to America. He had studios in Paris, New York City and Holland, where he particularly liked to paint.
His subjects were varied: landscapes, religious scenes, depictions of everyday life, nudes. One of his favorite themes was the relationship between mother and child, though Melchers and his wife, Corinne, were childless. A sure-fire crowd pleaser in the Roanoke exhibition shows a mother holding a child who is holding an orange.
"The clarity, honesty and straight-forward quality of his work reflects American art," Appelhof says.
In her catalog entry, Lesko writes that Melchers' art, like the man himself, was unaffected.
"Sentiment, when present, never deteriorates into sentimentality," she notes.
That unaffectedness can be seen in one of the few self-portraits Melchers painted. A bearded man with somewhat sad blue eyes stares directly out of the canvas. In his hand is a statuette of Eve, representing creativity.
By 1914, the dogs of war were loose in Europe, and the Melcherses were feeling the effects. They moved to New York City in 1915 and to the Belmont estate in 1916.
Melchers liked life away from the city and found the Virginia countryside fertile ground for his art. The new Virginians also became good citizens. Melchers joined the Virginia Arts Commission. After his death, Corinne served out his term and was involved in establishing the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She also saw to it that Belmont would go to the state after her death.
Lesko believes Melchers, though famous in his lifetime, has been unjustly neglected in subsequent decades.
"His art appeals to all ages and types," she says.
"Gari Melchers: An Impressionist in Virginia" is on view at the Art Museum of Western Virginia in Roanoke's Center in the Square through May 16.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***