![]() ![]() ![]() Stella showed his five panels throughout the 1920s and 1930s. It was his altarpiece to the city, which to him was the defining ingredient of the modern world. His Voice of the City comprised a massive five-part ensemble more than twenty-two feet long (Fig. The Italian-born Stella was the leading voice of Italian futurism in American art. The most ambitious modernist painting acquired by the museum in its early years was Joseph Stella’s Voice of the City of New York Interpreted of 1920 to 1922. The Dana spirit which it was my privilege to imbibe in the early years of life is deeply and eternally implanted in my heart.”3 As he wrote to Dana’s successor, Beatrice Winser, in 1939: “I am proud of being represented in your museum. Dana’s influence on Weber’s career stayed with the artist. In 1986 the museum purchased an early cubist painting, The Blue Vase, to represent the kind of work that would have been in that landmark installation. Interestingly, his work was displayed alongside the watercolors of a prominent Japanese artist Soken Ito, demonstrating Dana’s interest in presenting a global vision of contemporary art.Īlthough the museum would subsequently acquire a number of Weber paintings, supported by trustee Felix Fuld, none of these was from this first exhibition. Weber was referred to as “an exponent of the modern movement in American art” in the museum’s annual report. That same year, one of the first one-man museum exhibitions by a living American artist was held in Newark, when the paintings of Max Weber were shown. The museum continued its promotion of living American artists, mounting an exhibition of “American paintings by twenty living artists” in early 1913. This was the first Lawson acquired by a museum in the Northeast, and would establish Newark’s early role as a champion of the “art of today.” The Lawson was one of three oil paintings by contemporary artists acquired in that year, all offered by trustee Frederick Keer from his art gallery on Broad Street. Good to their word, Dana and his trustees purchased their first painting in 1910, Harlem River by Ernest Lawson (Fig. “Art has always flourished where it was asked to flourish, and never elsewhere,” he wrote.1 The first official fine arts exhibition in the Newark Museum was of “paintings and bronzes by American artists” in 1910, although the library’s museum committee had been mounting exhibitions since its establishment in 1904.2 Oil on canvas, 32 by 25 5/8 inches.ĭana was troubled by the dominance of European art in American museums and felt strongly that an American museum needed to support American artists. 7 The Good Shepherd by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), 1922. The newborn museum was housed in a large suite of galleries on the fourth floor of the library’s palatial Renaissance revival building on Washington Park in the heart of Newark’s industrial downtown.įig. Among the museum’s art-loving trustees were a varnish magnate (Franklin Murphy, who would also serve as New Jersey’s governor), a department store mogul (Louis Bamberger), and a gallery owner (Frederick Keer). When the Newark Museum was founded in 1909, its first director was John Cotton Dana (1856-1929), who was also the director of the city’s library system. ![]() It is twelve minutes from New York’s Penn Station. You will be impressed you will be surprised you will want to go there. Newark is still first in many ways as you will see. ![]() More than one hundred years later this radical agenda is now mainstream, but Newark was there first and with a kind of conviction that still goes much deeper than fashion. But this is Newark-not a destination for many out-of-town museumgoers (though it should be), so Ulysses Dietz has done the next best thing: he has introduced us in these pages to one of this country’s most important and original museums-describing it from its inception in 1909, when Charles Henry Dana boldly rearranged the hierarchies of art’s great chain of being, to its present moment as a model for institutional creativity and community involvement.ĭana’s adventure began by welcoming the arts of Asia and Africa, the arts of the everyday, folk art, and modernism. In a better world we would all be thronging the doors of the Newark Museum in the best of worlds Ulysses Grant Dietz would be there to meet us, taking us through the galleries with fellow curators Christa Clarke and Katherine Anne Paul. ![]()
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