An on-line news service devoted to museums and exhibitions in New York City and vicinity. John Hammond, Editor Emeritus • Jonathan Slaff, Publisher • copyright © 2007
KINDRED SPIRITS:
Asher B. Durand & the American Landscape
At the Brooklyn Museum
By Glenn Loney
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn.
718-638-5000
Opening March 30, 2007/Closing July 29 2007Just in case Durand’s Iconic Painting, Kindred Spirits, looks familiar to you, it is the same one recently sold-off at auction by the New York Public Library, to raise more money to pay Inflated Salaries to its Chief Officers.
Well, not exactly: that was not the Official Excuse for de-accessioning a Gift to the NYPL, but it might certainly make you think twice about leaving them anything in your Last Will & Testament.
[Two years ago, I was going to make a gift to the NYPL of all my INFOTOGRAPHY™ photo-archives''over 300,000 images, all organized into several hundred albums, labeled, & computer-indexed''but the gift was refused as the Library didn’t, at that time, have enough money to open on Mondays!]
Kindred Spirits''which shows two Famous Americans on a rocky-ledge, looking over a Primal American Wilderness scene''was sold to Fay Walton, one of the fabulously rich Wal-Mart Heirs. Now it will briefly return to New York from its new home in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, located in historic Bentonville, Arkansas!
Asher Durand was the quintessential painter of the American Wilderness, so it’s good that the Brooklyn Museum own some of his works, as well as those of Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, and other 19th century painter-poets of American Scenes.
Durand’s The First Harvest in the Wilderness has been transferred to the Brooklyn Museum from the Brooklyn Institute of Arts & Sciences.
