Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

Estate of the artist

Kraushaar Galleries, New York, 1953

Private collection, New York

Exhibited:

New York: As They Saw It, Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts, The International Fine Art Fair, Park Avenue Armory, New York, May 13-18, 2005, p. 20, illus., p. 24.

Born in 1870 in Philadelphia, William Glackens began his career in art as a commercial illustrator, often alongside his contemporaries George Luks, John Sloan and Everett Shinn. These artists would later study with Glackens's friend, the painter Robert Henri, who taught his students to concentrate on the grittier aspects of urban life, using a dark palette and a painting technique consisting of swift, muscular strokes, in an effort to make art with a sense of spontaneity. This technique met with criticism and even sneering derision by the established art world in New York. In 1907 the National Academy of Design refused to include the work of Glackens and his contemporaries in an important exhibition there. In response, eight artists (including Glackens, Luks, Shinn and Sloan) formed a group show at the MacBeth Gallery in 1908. It proved to be a seminal exhibition and helped to establish the participants, who came to be known as "The Eight" and later by one disapproving critic, "The Ashcan School."

Glackens had earlier studied for a short time at the Pennsylvania Academy with Thomas Anshutz, but, like the other members of The Eight, he found academic art to be moribund. His early works display many of the qualities that Henri had taught, of which Storm over the Beach is a fine example. Glackens continued his work as an illustrator concurrently with his painting and produced many superb works, filled with vigor and a sense of immediacy. It was not until 1919 that he stopped illustration and, encouraged by his friend Henri, devoted himself fully to painting.

Glackens made his first trip to Europe in 1895, accompanied by Henri. The work of Edouard Manet and the Dutch Masters had a powerful impact on Glackens. He would continue traveling to Europe throughout his lifetime, and each trip resulted in new variations in his own style. By 1910, the influence of Pierre Renoir is quite evident in Glackens’s technique and palette. His later works are far removed from the earlier Realist style of The Eight; they are more closely attuned to the work of the French Impressionists, especially Renoir. In 1912, he was entrusted with $20,000 from his school time friend Dr. Albert Barnes for an art collecting trip in Europe. Glackens's purchases of works by Impressionists and Post-Impressionists created the core of what became the acclaimed Barnes Foundation in Merion, PA.

Storm over the Beach predates most of the European inspirations; it is a painting fully in the spirit of The Eight. Probably sited at Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York (the site of other urban seascapes by the artist), Glackens presents a scene full of tension, with an impending, ominous storm threatening the figures in the foreground. Those figures are rendered with numerous quick strokes of thickly applied paint in a variety of subdued colors. The sky and sea are painted in wider, equally vigorous horizontal strokes, primarily in grey/brown, although Glackens has dared to use small touches of lighter hues including salmon, pink and lime green. What at first seems an extremely dark (and almost monochromatic) painting, slowly reveals its brilliant strategic use of many colors. The result is a painting filled with raw and nervous energy, a marvelous evocation of the moment before the break of a storm.