Exhibitions, Fall 2011

Figure Study
The Fourteenth Street School and the Woman in Public
August 26 - December 23

		Kenneth Hayes Miller. American, 1876-1952 City Street, 1939 Oil on canvas, 54 3⁄4 x 72 in, 139.07 x 182.88 cm Museum Purchase, 1978.4 © Estate of Kenneth Hayes Miller

Curated by Melissa Ragain, Guest Curator

Drawing on the University of Virginia Art Museum's collection and significant loans, Figure Study: The Fourteenth Street School and the Woman in Public exhibits paintings, prints, and drawings by members of the "Fourteenth Street School." This group of American realists, active between the World Wars, all lived and worked in New York's Union Square neighborhood and studied or taught at the Art Students League (asl). Together, these artists created a typography of urban dwellers, depicting them in various public and private activities with the casual relish of the voyeur.

Through these urban types, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Isabel Bishop, Guy Pène du Bois, Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer, and Moses Soyer catalogued the changes in social and sexual politics that took place in the first half of the twentieth century. The painters of the Fourteenth Street School situated their modernity in this fluctuating social landscape, even though their painterly ideal was grounded in the art of the sixteenth century. Members of the group modeled contemporary womanhood on the physical types of Titian, Raphael, and Rubens—their interest buttressed by the ASL's emphasis on life drawing courses for both male and female students. Yet, unlike the abstract painters who were also beginning to inhabit the neighborhood, these painters depicted rapid social change through the enduring subject of the human form, especially the emergence of women in the business and artistic arenas of modern life.

The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Albemarle Magazine, Arts$, B. Herbert Lee '48 Endowed Fund, The Hook, and Ivy Publications LLC's Charlottesville Welcome Book.

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Members' Preview Reception
Thursday, August 25
5:30-7:30 pm
In the Museum

Final Friday Receptions
August 26, September 30 & October 28
5:30-7:30 pm
In the Museum

Special Lecture
The Fourteenth Street School: Art, Vision, and the Urban Scene
by Carmenita Higginbotham
September 15
5:30 pm
Campbell 153

Aptly titled the 14th Street School, this 1930s group of artists that lived near Union Square in NYC envisioned a fresh perspective of urbanism. Led by Kenneth Hayes Miller, the painters Isabel Bishop, Raphael Soyer, and others redefined the transitional space of the interwar city. This lecture will center on the Depression-era images by this eclectic group, and will situate their transformation of urban art against the backdrop of America's shifting social, economic, and artistic investments.

Saturday Special Tour
by Melissa Ragain
September 24
2-3 pm
In the Museum

Family Art JAM
Figuring Out the Figure
Saturday, November 19 & Sunday, November 20
1-3 pm & 3-5 pm
RSVP 434.243.2050