:::Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts::: Artists

Henry Glintenkamp ( 1887-1943 )

	The Unimproved Street - 1910 Oil on canvas 30 x 40 inches Signed (at lower right): Glintenkamp Signed and dated (on verso): Glintenkamp/ A-142/ -1910- Titled (on the top tacking margin): The Unimproved Street Print Click image for detailed view Contact the Gallery for more information

Provenance:

Estate of the Artist

Born in Augusta, New Jersey in 1887, Henry Glintenkamp began his artistic career at the National Academy of Design in New York, where he took classes from 1903 to 1906. From there, he moved to the progressive New York School of Art and studied for two years under the tutelage of the influential American modernists Robert Henri and John Sloan. Beginning in 1908, Glintenkamp shared studio space with Stuart Davis and Glenn O. Coleman, fellow artists with whom he partnered on a number of projects. The most important of these collaborations was the popular socialist journal The Masses. In addition to serving as the editorial board, Glintenkamp, Davis and Coleman, along with their mentor Sloan, contributed satirical illustrations to the publication from 1913 to 1917.

In 1910, the year this painting was produced, Glintenkamp’s work was included in the Exhibition of Independent Artists. A follow-up to the 1908 show of the Eight at the Macbeth Galleries, the exhibition featured paintings by Henri and Sloan as well as that of younger artists like Guy Pène du Bois and Rockwell Kent. Three years later, Glintenkamp’s work was displayed at the seminal 1913 Armory Show; the thought-provoking examples of European and American modernist painting shown there encouraged the innovative quality of the artist’s developing aesthetic. While his early work is indebted to the principle of an unabashed realism as promoted by Henri, Glintenkamp’s mature style, particularly after the Armory Show, was influenced by the vibrant color and bold brushstrokes of the Fauves and the German Expressionists.

Informed by his beginnings as an Ashcan school painter, Glintenkamp continued to look to his immediate surroundings for pictorial subject matter. Along with representations of the non-picturesque sides of New York City and its suburbs, rural landscapes and winter scenes comprise a large portion of his oeuvre. A regular traveler, the artist also delighted in depicting the vistas of the various countries he visited; in addition to images of Spain, England and Scandinavia, Glintenkamp created exotic portrayals of Mexico, where he resided for extended periods of time during the first two decades of the century.

The Unimproved Street illustrates the direction in which Glintenkamp’s style ultimately developed. Temporarily abandoning the dark palette of the Ashcan style but retaining its gritty realism, the artist employed a bright, vivacious color scheme, rendering the scene in an expressionistic manner. Framed at the left by two free-standing townhouses, the composition opens up into a nearly empty field, occupied exclusively by birds, that emphasizes the luscious materiality of the painting’s surface and the medium’s luminous quality over pictorial representation. On the street adjoining the buildings the artist inserted delightful vignettes of town life: leaning through the window of the first residence a woman chats with a passing pedestrian while next to the green house another woman stands sweeping. The meandering dirt paths that cross the open meadow draw the viewer’s eye to the dwellings in the distance, which are partially obscured by trees. The lively paint application, executed with a palette knife rather than a paintbrush, exudes a sense of energy and vivacity, which belie the realistic assessment suggested by the title.

Henry Glintenkamp’s paintings can be found in the permanent collections of several prominent public institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.