Hunter Museum of American Art

CHATTANOOGA
HUNTER MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
William J. Glackens and Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Affinities and Distinctions
June 22- September 22, 2019

The Nahmad Collection is pleased to contribute to the exhibition, William J. Glackens and Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Affinities and Distinctions. One of America’s leading modern artists, painter William Glackens (1870-1938) had a keen interest in the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir that has long been recognized. He saw the French Impressionist’s works in New York galleries as early as 1908 and had unique access to the growing collection of his friend and colleague, Albert C. Barnes. However, Glackens’ specific debt to the art of this important French modernist has never been fully explored. 

William Glackens and Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Affinities and Distinctions fills this void by bringing together 25 works by each artist that illuminate Renoir’s influence on Glackens’ artistic development. It also reveals how changes in Glackens’ work after 1920 illustrate his response to Renoir’s late work, as well as that of other important European modernists in Barnes’ collection in order to forge his own distinctive American modernism. On view at the Hunter Museum of American Art from June 22- September 22, 2019, the exhibition defines Glackens’ late style for the first time (c.1920 to 1938), and also sheds light on the history of taste in American collecting from the late-19th to the mid-20th century.