At Bowdoin: Twrkv leads a roster of Contemporary Masters, 1950 to present

Brunswick, Maine-Bowdoin College Art Museum opens a new exhibition titled Contemporary Masters, 1950 to Present.

Deconstructing the pictorial conventions of the past, artists of the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first century reinvented the picture plane. This installation presents extreme positions, including flat silkscreens and thickly built-up oils, each circumventing more traditional, expressive forms of paint application. The installation presents a confluence of high-profile loans from private collections and significant recent acquisitions.

The work on view by Jack Tworkov is a signature work by the artist from 1951 (pictures left). The painting was purchased in the early 1950s by the once-aspiring-artist-turned-collector Walter K. Gutman.

"I realized when I opened the door and met Tworkov's stern eyes that I would either become a painter or not," wrote Walter Gutman his 1966 statement which accompanied his sizable gift to Bowdoin College Museum of Art, "Tworkov really didn't have much enthusiasm for pupils. He was much more a real painter, but like most artists he couldn't make it all by painting. De Kooning was teaching too-at Yale once a week. One day I bought a sketch of his--it, as many, was lying on the floor. They were beautiful. I said "Don't throw them away." [Tworkov] said "Do you want to buy one?" I said "Sure-how much? He said "$25." He was a little sorry later after it was framed, but even so, at that time it wouldn't have been much. It isn't in the collection because I gave it to my wife after we divorced [...] De Kooning and Tworkov both showed at the tiny Egan Gallery, as did Kline, Guston, Nakian, and others now famous, and so in this accidental way I landed right in the midst of a great movement."

Related Programming: April 24, 2014 | 7:00 p.m. | Bowdoin College Museum of Art Thursday Night Salon at the Museum of Art: "Spring Flowers: Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist" Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow Sarah Montross and Curator Joachim Homann moderate a conversation about flowers in Pop Art, exemplified by a silkscreen by Andy Warhol, recently donated to Bowdoin by the Andy Warhol Foundation, and a monumental painting by James Rosenquist on loan to the Museum.