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UK exhibit beautifully showcases Kentucky's master painters

By Heather Castro Contributing Art Writer

With everything going on in today's world, sometimes it's nice to sit back, relax and remind ourselves that Kentucky is a beautiful, enriching place to live.

"We are a nice place to be," says recently returned Kentuckian Estill Curtis Pennington. "I live on a back road — there's no place else to go if you're driving down it."

A 1972 graduate of the University of Kentucky, Pennington has spent the past 30 years becoming an internationally known expert on Southern American art. He has studied pieces in the Archives of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the New Orleans Art Museum and is the founding curator of the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Ga. His work has led him across the world and back to Bourbon County, where he organized the latest exhibition for the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky, Master Works by Kentucky Painters, 1819-1935.

"We have a much broader and deeper understanding of objects and artists now," says Pennington, who participated in the museum's last Kentucky masters exhibition, in the 1980s. "Finding things then was a matter of getting in the car to drive and look — there were no databases."

The rise in scholarly interest in Kentucky art history has not only led to relative ease in locating pieces and information, but it resulted in a renewed take on the development of art in the commonwealth.

"These painters were not isolated," says Pennington. "They were very informed about what was going on" in the art world. "National ideas were brought to Kentucky."

Master Works reflects this awareness not merely through showcasing impressive and important homegrown talent, but by delineating influential international art movements within Kentuckians' works.

A cultural portrait

The exhibit starts with early 19th-century portrait works, with notable pieces by John James Audubon and Matthew Harris Jouett. Single portraits, family groups and even a house portrait by Edward Troye show the growth of arts in the rural frontier as initiated by the era's most lucrative and marketable art genre.

With the rise of Louisville and Lexington as cultural destinations of the South, European influences begin to be seen, as in Lexington artist William Edward West's 1852 work Elizabeth Henrietta Young and Anna Elizabeth Mercer.

This double portrait expresses more than a hint of European Romanticism through the two hoop-skirted women sitting together in a heavily patterned room. The face of the younger woman, identified as Mercer and dressed in white, has an unearthly pallor, and the elder subject, dressed in black accented with white cuffs and a bonnet, looks to the right of the viewer. West (1788-1857) hints at the haunting European Romantic spirit in the work through the folded golden glasses that Mercer attempts to hand to Young, a gesture that Young cannot see because of the true meaning of the work as a memorial portrait — Mercer had died of tuberculosis a few months earlier.

Not all the exhibit's works are so dramatic. Four pieces by Paul Sawyier (1865-1917) deserve to be viewed outside the mythology that surrounds him today.

"He's so overexposed that people don't see him as a painter but as an illustrator," Pennington says. "Paul Sawyier is not a quaint artist. He is a profound Impressionist. He was a brilliant brusher, very painterly."

Other works ask the viewer to see outside the box. Patty Prather Thum (1853-1926) was one of Kentucky's most influential female artists. Her work Lady of the Lilies, circa 1920, presents a sumptuous view of a Victorian lady among her flowers but also marks the influence that photography had on painting. The clearly demarcated cropped edges of the viewfinder also define the painter's view.

Exploring new ideas

Modern movements are also represented, including Kentucky's take on the traditions of American Realism, also known as the Ashcan School. The double portraits of artist Paul Plaschke — one a self-portrait and the other a painting completed by fellow artist John Bernard Albert — show the infiltration of American artists' interest in the realities of the working man. As presented by Albert, Plaschke (1880-1954) is seen at work over his desk, warmly placed over the radiator, staring off for the inspiration of the next stroke of his pen. The later self-portrait reveals the artist older but still hard at work, with rolled up sleeves and hat at the ready.

Together, the two pieces tell volumes about Kentucky artists' motivation — always ready to absorb new ideas and provide their own take on contemporary movements.

"We have a lot of good painters and a lot of history" in Kentucky, says Pennington, whose book on the exhibition will be out later this fall. "Becoming aware of our art is becoming aware of our cultural profile — it's nice to remember that amid the basketball and wonderful landscape we have a sophisticated history, too."