This is the fifth year that Spanierman Gallery, LLC has offered this popular exhibition featuring affordable art for those who wish to begin or add to their collections. As in the past, we were delighted to discover many affordable works by both well known and little known artists that we are happy to make available.

Landscape has always been a genre that has both intrinsically inspired American artists and served as a starting point for a great variety of expressive approaches. Among One of the earliest works in the exhibition, Samuel Colman’s Along the Arno, Florence, Italy (ca. 1860s-70s) and John William Hill’s White Water (1873) are watercolors is rendered with the crisp, meticulous detail and controlled brushwork characteristic of the Hudson River School. Charles Davis’s oil, Lake Gardner (Amesbury, Massachusetts) (1878) and Anna Tomlinson’s pastel, A Summer Garden (ca. 1910s-20s) demonstrate the way that American artists of the late nineteenth century took more subjective approaches to landscape, using their mediums to suggest the textures of their motifs and the moods that their scenes evoked. Artists used landscape to even more individualistic ends after the turn of the twentieth century, as demonstrated in Leon Dolice’s Chrysler Building (ca. 1920s-30s), in which a nocturnal urban scene has become the basis for a study in subtle color modulations, in Marion Huse’s Reverie in which she manipulated form and color, creating a unified surface in which she explored coloristic relationships, and in Alice Mattern’s Provincetown Factory (1935) and Hayley Lever’s Rye Beach (1943), in which architectural and natural forms, reduced to flat shapes, are arranged according to the artists’ own conceptions of pictorial space. Abraham Bogdanove developed a forceful, rugged brush handling through repeatedly painting directly from the rocky windswept shores of Monhegan Island, Maine, and Giovanni Martino used the inspiration of the scenery near his home in Manayunk, Pennsylvania, in works such as Summer Greens in July (ca. 1940s-60s) to explore the balance between the intuitive and intellectual aspects of the creative process. Artists of recent decades have used landscapes for highly individualistic explorations, as is demonstrated in the works of Pam Sztybel, where hazy forms of foliage, hovering at the edge of recognizability, are the medium for a consideration of the nature of cognition and memory, and in the art of Paul Ching-Bor, in which the bridges of New York have provided the artist with a means of using watercolor with a physical strength and rich chiaroscuro not generally associated with the medium to express his responses to life in the city.

Like landscape, still life has also been used with a variety beyond the concerns for verisimilitude often associated with it. In Still Life with Raspberries (ca. 1880s-90s), Carducius P. Ream heightened the appeal of a group of picked and perfect luscious red raspberries by setting them against the rich, dark greens of a natural setting. Many contemporary artists have been drawn to rendering still lifes as a way of probing the nature of themselves and of art. In Illumination (2005) Nancy Depew’s focuses with extreme detail on open and closed bearded irises set against a table stained from use, examining different types of light and ways of looking. In Terry DeLapp’s Dahlia, Iris, Carnation (2004), representation takes second place to impression, as the artist employed a light, gestural style to create an elegant, shimmering surface.

In portraying the figure, artists have often found a means of exploring social roles and interactions. One of the finest recorders of the Old West, Edward Borein created images of cowboys and Indians in action as a way of conveying the ideals of individualism and resilience associated with democracy in America. A fascination with cowboy life continues in the art created currently by William Matthews, who produces translucent watercolors, such as Cooling Off (2005), that capture the quiet and often lonely moments experienced by the ranch hands and wranglers of today. An artist who spent his career in Wisconsin, John Wilde brings figurative elements into his fanciful and enigmatic Surrealist works as a way of evoking and subverting the material world, calling into question perceived truths and the nature of realist painting.

In several of the works in the exhibition, artists such as Emil Bisttram, Hilaire Hiler, and George L. K. Morris used purely abstract forms to explore issues of the unconscious, of metaphysics, and of the artistic invention.

Art for the New Collector V reveals the rich and diverse aesthetic and philosophical explorations that have engaged American artists over the course of a century and a half, providing many opportunities for exciting and interesting discoveries in works that are within an affordable price range.