Cleveland Museum of Art Announces New Acquisitions

Louis Hayet, Banks of the Oise at Dawn

One of the artist’s finest paintings and a superb example of neo-impressionism

Louis Hayet painted Banks of the Oise at Dawn (1888) in the radically new style of neo-impressionism, also known as pointillism or divisionism, during the early years of the movement. First developed around 1885–86 by Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro and others, neo-impressionism aimed to bring more order, clarity and luminosity to impressionism by painting in a systematic manner using scientific color theory. The neo-impressionists invented a technique of applying color in small dots or dashes, theorizing that the divided tones would optically unite into a single, powerful hue when viewed at a normal distance. 

Hayet was born and raised in Pontoise, a small town about 25 miles north of Paris along the Oise River. Signs of neo-impressionism are evident in Hayet’s paintings as early as 1886, and his technique was well developed by 1888, the year he painted Banks of the Oise at Dawn. The painting’s surface is covered with a network of small, delicate strokes of color ranging from the complementary contrast of blue and orange in the foreground to the whites, pinks and blues in the sky. 

Hayet was deeply involved in contemporary theoretical debates and researched color theory. He developed a color chart that incorporated gray tones, an original idea for which he received considerable critical praise. He also saw parallels between color harmonies and music, and he used color to evoke a range of emotional moods in his paintings. Scholars consider Banks of the Oise at Dawn an outstanding example of Hayet’s method of combining complementary colors with gray tones. 

This painting enriches the CMA’s overall representation of 19th-century French landscape painting, forming both a complement and an instructive comparison to works by Eugène Boudin, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh. Banks of the Oise at Dawn is on view in gallery 222, Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Gallery of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Art.

Jenny Holzer, Laments: Death came and he looked like . . . 

An artwork created in response to the AIDS epidemic from her iconic Laments series

Jenny Holzer is internationally renowned for integrating language and sculpture to address current events. Laments: Death came and he looked like . . . belongs to one of the artist’s most powerful, poignant and iconic sculpture series, Laments. First displayed at Dia:Chelsea in New York in 1989–90, the Laments are based on 13 texts written by Holzer that she has described as “voices of the dead.” The focus on death was a response to the AIDS epidemic, which was rampant at the time. Each text was realized in two forms: as colored light flowing between the ceiling and floor on LED signs and as engravings carved into the tops of sarcophagi made of different types of stone. The CMA’s newly acquired work is one of those pairs.

Initially using printed media to circulate her politically engaged texts, Holzer soon began utilizing LED signs—a technology typically found in advertising—to broadcast her messages, intentionally overlapping art and mass media. As Holzer was exploring the capacities of LED signs in the 1980s, she also turned to the classical tradition of engraved stone, etching her writings into a series of benches and, later, sarcophagi. Laments: Death came and he looked like . . . combines these old and new modes of textual expression. 

Laments: Death came and he looked like . . . is on view in gallery 229C, Toby’s Gallery for Contemporary Art. This work is displayed near Robert Gober’s Untitled (1990) and Felix Gonzales-Torres’ Untitled (March 5th) #2 (1991), which also refer to the impact of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Gober represents a person through a body fragment as a reminder of the lives that were lost, and Gonzales-Torres portrays a couple through a quietly extinguishing pair of lightbulbs. Together Holzer, Gober and Gonzales-Torres form a powerful trio revealing the way the AIDS crisis ushered in new materials and visual metaphors that continue to resonate.

Thirteen Photographs by Modern American Masters

Works gifted by generous longtime patrons Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann

Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann began collecting art in the early 1970s, when fine art photography first became popular. Since then they have assembled what is deemed today as one of the most significant groupings of American pictorialism and modernism—and the transition between the two movements—in private hands. 

One of the works is Alfred Stieglitz’s own lifelong copy of The Steerage. In this photograph, Stieglitz transformed a scene of impoverished immigrants returning to Europe into a study of shape and form; the image sparked his evolution from a pictorialist into a modernist. Reflecting on his career in 1942, Stieglitz proclaimed the image, shot in 1907, to be an achievement of modern art that anticipated cubism. The print was displayed at the First Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. This hallmark image in the history of photography is accompanied by an 1892 example of street photography, The Ragpicker, making it the CMA’s earliest work by Stieglitz.

In addition, the gift includes three key modernist images by Edward Weston, as well as other modernist masterworks such as an innovative solarized portrait of Georges Braque by Man Ray (1933) and a luscious early print of Imogen Cunningham’s treasured Magnolia Blossom (Tower of Jewels) (1925).

This gift also contains the museum’s first example of a rare process strongly identified with Edward Curtis: a haunting orotone, in its original frame, of his most popular image, The Vanishing Race (1904). A moody 1910 landscape by Edward Steichen and a nocturnal New York street scene by Karl Struss round out the pictorialist works. Later photographs include Walker Evans’ view of a circus show bill (c. 1930), Weegee’s distorted portrait of Marilyn Monroe (c. 1960) and Richard Avedon’s disarming 1975 portrait of sculptor June Leaf, who is married to photographer Robert Frank.