ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, August 8, 1996 TAG: 9608080007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
For the next two months, the Art Museum of Western Virginia will be just what it longs to be.
The walls of its upstairs galleries will shine with American masterpieces by the likes of John Singer Sargent, Thomas Cole and Winslow Homer. People - perhaps many from outside the region - will visit and be dazzled.
The museum will be, in short, a small gallery of American classics. A place that doesn't pretend to have everything - but that has some very fine things, indeed.
Such a place is the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, N.H. - an industrial hub about the size of Roanoke.
The Currier has sent much of its collection on the road while its galleries are being renovated. The exhibit has stopped at Orlando and Palm Beach, Fla., and is now in Roanoke - where it is the stuff of dreams.
"We brought it down as a sort of inspiration," said Joanne Kuebler, director of the museum at Center in the Square. "I think it's a superb collection of American art collected in a short time."
The Currier's rise to prominence was accomplished by purchasing a few works of very high quality, which in turn attracted valuable gifts, Kuebler said.
The Roanoke museum would love to do the same.
Museum visitors, meanwhile, can see in the 84-piece Currier exhibit something like the Art Museum's wish list. Included are not only masterpieces of American painting, but also elaborate hand-tooled furniture and other examples of the decorative arts.
The Currier - which is named for an early benefactor - emphasizes American art from Colonial days to the early 20th century. The museum also has paintings by such overseas masters as Claude Monet, John Constable and Pablo Picasso, which are not part of the exhibit.
Featured here are 200-year-old cabinets, chairs and desks, as well as glass and silver work. There is an array of silver pots and cups - including some made by silversmith Paul Revere, famed for his midnight ride, and his less well-known father, Paul Revere I. There are glass vases from the studio of Louis Comfort Tiffany, founder of the famed Tiffany Glass Company.
There is a bronze sculpture of a bronco-busting cowboy, by the Eastern-bred artist of the Wild West, Frederic Remington, and an elegantly posed and naked bronze "Diana" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The "Diana" is a 21-inch version of a 1,500-pound figure by Saint-Gaudens that once stood atop Madison Square Garden.
Kuebler said placing the art works among the furniture pieces - which are of course artistic accomplishments themselves - reveals them as they were meant to be seen. "These works were really made for homes, and they were intended to be seen together."
The exhibit ranges over several rooms in the museum's upstairs galleries, and the works are arranged by period, museum officials said.
Lovers of American painting should not be disappointed. Included among the 30 or so canvasses are some of the most famous names in American art - including Sargent, Homer, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam and John Singleton Copley. The nature painters of the Hudson River School - one of the Roanoke museum's own areas of interest - are represented by its founder, Thomas Cole, as well as Frederick Church, Jasper Frances Cropsey, Albert Bierstadt and Asher B. Durand.
The Roanoke museum purchased its own Durand - "View Near Catskill with Round Top" - a year ago and has hung the landscape with the Currier collection for the duration of the exhibit.
Fans of Homer, meanwhile, who missed recent exhibits in Abingdon, Radford and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., may console themselves with "In the North Woods (Playing Him)," a watercolor of a man fishing from a canoe, painted by Homer in the Adirondack Mountains in 1886.
The exhibit also includes the last completed work by John Singer Sargent - a 4-foot-high oil of a haughty-looking but bewitching English aristocrat, Grace Elvina, Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston.
Sargent agreed to do the painting only after repeated requests, apparently for fear the woman's hypercritical husband would not like it. Sargent finally consented on condition Lord Curzon not see the painting until it was done.
When it was finally unveiled, Lord Curzon was said to be thrilled, saying, "I could not wish for anything better." Museum visitors may say the same after viewing the painting, which concludes the show.
On earlier stops, the exhibit has drawn high praise.
"The Currier Gallery of Art is one of those American surprises - a middle-sized museum in a middle-sized city with big-time art," wrote The Palm Beach Post.
"This collection not only offers the rich flavor of American art from a bygone era," wrote The Orlando Sentinel. "It shows how distinctive and important a regional museum can become if its collection is built through clear purpose."
The Roanoke museum has remodeled for the show. The stairway from the lower gallery, where the City Art Show is on exhibit, has been walled off, as have the windows upstairs flanking the main doors. Regular visitors may be in for a surprise - as the museum, which usually only asks for a donation, will charge $5 for admission to the Currier exhibit.
Meanwhile, the museum is waging a marketing campaign that includes newspaper ads in several cities, in an effort to capitalize on the exhibit. "This is our 15 minutes'' of fame, Kuebler said. "We hope to draw a crowd from the East Coast."
Museum officials also are hoping the excitement generated by the show will produce a major donation - enabling them to buy another top-notch 19th-century American painting for the permanent collection here, Kuebler said.
Speakers from the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., will give lectures on the Currier collection in September.
The exhibit is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Federation of Arts and First Union.
LENGTH: Long : 114 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. John Singer Sargent painted ``Grace Elvina,by CNBMarchioness Curzon of Kedleston'' three months before his death in
1925. John Singleton Copley's ``John Greene'' (detail, inset) is a
portrait of a young Boston merchant circa 1769. 2. On the reverse of
Winslow Homer's watercolor on paper, "In the North Woods (Playing
Him)," is inscribed, ``This is not so bad W.H. 1894.'' 3. ``The
Goldfish Window'' (1916) is an oil painting by Childe Hassam. 4.
This maple chest-on-chest-on frame, circa 1785, is attributed to The
Dunlap Family. color.