Together, Blue Grass, Green Skies and Photo-Secession present a unique dialogue between painting and photography in new Salt Lake City exhibitions. On view through December 29, 2024.
Blue Grass, Green Skies + Photo-Secession
on view through December 29, 2024
Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City
The seventeen paintings on view in Blue Grass, Green Skies: American Impressionism and Realism from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art showcase an essential snapshot of LACMA’s notable Impressionism collection, but the show’s small size posed a space challenge for the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. How would the museum fill its remaining temporary exhibition space? UMFA’s senior curator Alisa McCusker found the solution in art2art Circulating Exhibitions’s Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography.
On view through December 29, 2024, the UMFA’s concurrent presentation of the two exhibitions offers a unique dialogue between painting and photography. This exclusive pairing showcases how photographers and painters of the late-19th and early-20th centuries influenced one another, with photographers emulating painterly effects and painters capturing the immediacy of photography.
The captivating collection of paintings on view in Blue Grass, Green Skies highlights the journey of a once-controversial art movement 150 years after the first infamous Impressionist exhibition in Paris. Around the same time, the Photo-Secessionists, led by Alfred Stieglitz, were working to elevate photography into a respected art form.
“Blue Grass, Green Skies will transform our large special exhibition gallery into a jewel box of American Modernist painting from the late-19th and early-20th centuries,” says McCusker. “The selection of paintings represents life from a period of significant change by artists working in Europe and across the United States, including such major figures as Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, and George Bellows,” she continues.
The paintings, ranging from serene landscapes to vibrant urban scenes, illustrate how American artists interpreted their rapidly changing world through experimental painting techniques. McCusker notes that Impressionist compositions depicting motion and light in new ways were undoubtedly inspired by photographers revealing movement and optical blur in their work.
Both shows will part ways upon their December 29, 2024 closure. Visitors should enjoy the dialogue between the two exhibitions while they can.
Blue Grass, Green Skies is organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with generous support from the Art Bridges Foundation. Their contributions made it possible to bring this extraordinary collection to the UMFA, allowing Utah’s art-loving community to engage with iconic works of American art. “We are honored to be working with the Art Bridges Foundation and supporting their unique mission to bring art from more collection-rich institutions to regional museums just like the UMFA,” says Gretchen Dietrich, the Marcia and John Price executive director of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. The UMFA’s presentation of the exhibition is sponsored locally by ESRR Impact Endowment Fund and Toni F. Bloomberg.
Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography is from the collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. The exhibition was organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions and presented locally by ESRR Impact Endowment Fund.
umfa.utah.edu
instagram / facebook
sponsored by
