Spanierman Gallery, LLC, is pleased to announce the opening on September 22, 2005 of Art and the Garden, an exhibition of paintings, works on paper, and sculpture, curated by the noted art critic Ronny Cohen.  Representing abstract, realist, and conceptual treatments of the garden, the paintings and works on paper consist of over fifty examples by thirty postwar and contemporary painters, including Jennifer Bartlett, Jim Dine, and Joan Mitchell.  The twenty sculptures, ranging in date from the 1890s to the 1940s, include works by such prominent American sculptors as Edward Henry Berge, Frederick MacMonnies, and Janet Scudder.  Mostly figures and fountains inspired by the Beaux-Arts tradition or early twentieth-century modernism, the sculptures were originally intended to be placed in the garden.

Among the other participating painters are Norman Bluhm, Warren Brandt, Dan Christensen, Daria Deshuk, Doris Downes, Jimmy Ernst, Stephen Farthing, Connie Fox, Dora Frost, Simon Gaon, Elaine Grove, Lee Krasner, Jane Martin, Roy Nicholson, Betty Parsons, William Rayner, Paul Resika, Dan Rizzie, Christina Schlesinger, Hunt Slonem, Billy Sullivan, Karen Tompkins, and Esteban Vicente.  All of the painters included share a link to eastern Long Island, where the garden is one of the area's ubiquitous features. Their works belong to three main thematic categories: natural forms that grow in the garden; the garden as symbolic space; and the garden as daily experience.  

A highlight of the show is Joan Mitchell's Sunflowers (1990-91), a triptych painting in which the signature dynamic brushwork of this leading second-generation Abstract Expressionist conveys the sentient essence of a plant that flourishes on Long Island.  Did Joan Mitchell first come by her appreciation of sunflowers during her stays in East Hampton in the 1950s before she moved to France? All of the painters in the exhibition share a link to eastern Long Island where the garden is one of the area's ubiquitous features.  Jim Dine painted on Long Island during the 1960s, at the peak of his fame as a leader of the Pop Art movement.  Dine's Long Island experience may have opened a path to the garden, his focus of recent decades, seen here in a compelling group of paintings and works on paper featuring spirited depictions of individual plants and wild tangles of flowers.  One of the painters currently with a home on Long Island, Jennifer Bartlett is represented by four pastels from her Amagansett series, demonstrating the in-depth exploration of the garden subject that she began over twenty-five years ago.

Works by John Button and Robert Kushner are based on observations of gardens made during visits to the Hamptons.  Some of the painters are, or were, avid gardeners.  Robert Dash, the creator of the world famous gardens at Madoo in Sagaponack, is one of Long Island's legendary gardeners.  His large, impressive painting The Terrace (1975) comments on the cultural ramifications inherent in the activity of viewing the garden.

The sculptures on view also reflect the three categories of garden experience.  Among the key works is Frederick MacMonnies’s Boy and Duck (1895), a marvelous composition, exuberant in its rendering of movement, by one of the leading American sculptors of the turn of the twentieth century.  MacMonnies’s student and one-time studio assistant, Janet Scudder produced numerous garden sculptures, which can be spotted throughout Southampton.  Her enchanting Tortoise Fountain (1908) is a charming, playful work that reveals her typical lively and rhythmic treatment of form.  Allegorical sculptures by Edward Henry Berge, Richard Brooks, Edith B. Parsons, Atillio Picirilli, Brenda Putnam, Lucy C. Richards, Caroline Everett Risque, and Wheeler Williams similarly express a zestful delight in the joy of life, a quality traditionally associated with the garden.  These timeless works evoke a magical presence, ideally suited to the lush settings of today's East End homes.