"THE EXPRESSIVE VOICE: SELECTIONS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION"
The Danforth Museum of Art
123 Union Avenue
Framingham, Massachusetts
November 20, 2011 - February 26, 2012
by Meredith Cutler (for Artscope Magazine)
Article excerpt:
In the suburban margins of Boston, a modest museum sits patiently, its yellow brick façade betraying no hint of the legacy housed within its unique permanent collection. This is the Danforth Museum — and the secret is out.
Thanks to the persistence of museum director Katherine French, the Danforth is recognized as the go-to institution for the exhibition, housing and exploration of artworks related to Boston Expressionism, a sprawling movement itself thriving in the margins of 20th century American art history.
Preceding and informing the success of its better-known nemesis, Abstract Expressionism, the Boston school grew out of a deep respect for the work of Oskar Kokoschka (whose 1914 lithograph “Oskar Kokoschka” is currently on view), Max Beckmann and other Expressionist painters caught up in Europe’s perilous political landscape. Karl Zerbe, a German refugee painter who brought European Expressionism to Boston, hit a nerve with his protégées at The Museum School, many of them immigrants of the Jewish Baltic diaspora struggling to contextualize their secular identities in a modern America.
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Image: Hyman Bloom, "Seascape II", 1974, oil on canvas, 55" x 72".
