Gallery's anniversary show is 'our best yet'

FRIDAY, JAN. 13: Turner, Homer, O’Keeffe, Webster, Moore and Driver — they are artists who introduced the world to Bermuda and Bermuda to the world.

Their work has helped to educate us about our heritage and history and contributed to shaping movements in art.

They are among the artists being exhibited as part of Masterwork’s 25th anniversary exhibition A Rock & An Ocean and the gallery’s most treasured works of Bermuda-related art are being displayed together for the first time.

The show, which has taken weeks of deliberation and organization by gallery founder and director Tom Butterfield and curator Elise Outerbridge, opens to the public this evening from 5:30pm to 7:30pm at the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art at the Botanical Gardens. They had the daunting task of whittling their collection of 1,200 pieces of art down to just 70 to be featured in the show. There is also a timeline of Masterwork’s history.

Treasures

As well as the greats, the show includes other treasures they deemed relevant to the subject of the show including an old compass, a board game invented by Butterfield’s grandfather and even an illusion peep box.

“This exhibition is part really serious treasures, part frivolity and part engagement,” Butterfield told the Sun. “We will never, ever be a static museum. If someone says ‘you have massacred the Winslow Homer by having a hog on the one side or a map on the other’, they can take a bite of my behind!

“I hope, like us, people feel that this is the best exhibition we have ever had.“

The show includes works by our most revered artistic visitors who used the island as their muse. Most art-lovers will have heard of Winslow Homer and Georgia O’Keeffe, but not everyone may know such visionaries as photographer Alfred Stieglitz. He owned the Gallery 291 where Pablo Picasso and George Brock first exhibited cubism in America, and he was the first to display the works of Rodin, Cezanne and Matisse in the States. He is also known for marrying O’Keeffe.

Some of the artists he displayed are in Masterwork’s permanent collection including Albert Gleizes and Marsden Hartley.

 “I went to a show recently in New York featuring him and his artists and it was stunning exhibit,” recalled Butterfield. “It was then, having seen that, that it washed over me what we have done here in Bermuda— we have a number of these artists here in our own collection who had used the Bermuda muse.

“We had long planned to have them in the show but when I walked in and saw it up, I was tripping the light fandango.”

The exhibition itself is broken up into several “layers” — each representing various aspects of the island and the gallery’s history. “The title of the show reflects Bermuda and its relationship to the ocean,” explained Outerbridge. “That is one layer of the show. The second layer is the development of the Masterworks collection and the third layer comes in little groupings of paintings. There are little vignettes that you can look at as a unit and then look at it all as a whole and then tie it in together with the timeline of how Masterworks developed.”

The “vignettes” include “On the Dock of the Bay” which explores our relationship with the sea and houses a little boat called BooBoo donated by Austin Talbot (of the legendary Talbot Brothers). Adults and children alike are welcomed to clime aboard.

“The Big Three” are the most historically relevant pieces and were all restored back to health from near ruin. It includes Thomas Driver’s depiction of a ship departing out of St George’s showing what island life was like in 1821 and another painting called Fitted Dinghies showing boats racing in the Great Sound back in the days when families would compete against one another.

“You could just spend hours with each one of these paintings,” said Outerbridge.

The show is seeped in history — the 12 artworks that Butterfield bought to open the gallery in 1987 are hung in a sub-section section called “The 12 Apostles” — which he Christened them.

He had a choice of buying one painting for $60,000 (a Georgia O’Keeffe) or 12 paintings for $60,000 — his mother told him he was better off getting 12 “and she was right,” he said.

“She more or less said to me ‘look smart ass, just because you know Georgia O’Keeffe it doesn’t mean the whole world does — so if you want to a sell concept you’ve got to broaden it out’. That was good advice.”

The gallery ended up getting the O’Keeffe anyway later down the road.

The “Apostles” include a pencil drawing by George Ault of a park in St George’s, a watercolour by Ogden Pleissner of Shinbone Alley, St George’s and a Ross Turner watercolour of Fairylands.

There are other sections on artists — “E. Ambrose Webster”, “Stieglitz 291”, “Houghton Cranford Smith” as well as “The Lure of Bermuda” — a collection of vintage posters designed to attract tourists to the island.

Accompanying the exhibition is a timeline of the history of Masterworks but it does not only focus on the great collection of art accumulated over the years.

“The timeline highlights some of the developments of Masterworks weaving in notable purchases and gifts,” explained Outerbridge.

“But there is also a focus on our educational programmes and how they began because we really want to be looked at not just as a museum of art but a Bermudian cultural centre.”

On the mezzanine floor opens an exhibition called A Wonderful World in Watercolour showcasing the works of Winslow Homer, Ross Sterling Turner and Ogden Pleissner. In the Rick Faries Gallery opens a new exhibition format called 4+4=1 featuring four artists working together with four perspectives to produce one show. The opening show features Rhona Emmerson, Chris Marson, Molly Godet and Charles Knight.