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Crossing Boundaries :
Modern Landscapes in the Permanent Collection

Wadsworth Gallery
August 11 – December 13, 2008

The history of modern art often reads as a travelogue, describing forays into exotic territories following winding trails blazed by aesthetic explorers. The record shows a near constant push away from the borders of conventional motifs and styles since the early 19th century. Many of those explorations, aptly, took place across one of the most traditional of genres, landscape painting. As artists reexamined the natural world, their works reflected modern society’s changing ideas of its beauty and man’s place in it. Whether a celebration of rural life in the face of technological change, or an embrace of progressive transformation, the landscape offered a broad platform for a wide range of expression.

Featuring a selection of paintings and watercolors in the permanent collection, Crossing Boundaries provides a panoramic view of the ways that modern artists have responded to their environment. Often depicting the places the artists knew best, at other times recalling the discoveries of their travels, these explorers in paint altered the ways we perceive our surroundings. Included in the exhibition are works by American painters Walter Anderson, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe, alongside European counterparts, Pierre Daura, Henri Joseph Harpignies, and Edmond Petitjean, among others. On view in the Noel and Kathryn Dickinson Wadsworth Gallery, the exhibition includes several new acquisitions and older works rarely on display.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986)
Small Hills Near Alcalde, 1930, oil on canvas
Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn University;
Advancing American Art Collection