Four New Exhibitions Make Art a Summer Experience

The Greenville County Museum of Art opens a new summer showcase on Saturday, June 28, providing Upstate residents and visitors with a full schedule of exhibitions that emphasize the very best in American art. The showcase includes three new exhibitions that feature work by Jasper Johns, Andrew Wyeth, and William H. Johnson, along with a traveling exhibition that examines abstract expressionism on an intimate scale.

Jasper Johns: Image Duplicator!! reflects Greenville’s focus on works by the world’s foremost living artist. An exhibition of fifteen lithographs, silkscreens, and intaglios, Image Duplicator!! explores the artist’s use of several characteristic motifs, including the classic flag, the illusionist double face or vase, and a cross-hatched image derived from Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. The exhibition’s title refers simultaneously to the fact that Johns repeats or duplicates images and to the fact that printmaking is an art form of multiples.

The Greenville County Museum of Art is one of only a few in the world with a career survey of work by Johns, a South Carolinian who has been personally supportive of a campaign to expand this unique collection. The Museum also owns representative works from every phase of the career of American painter Andrew Wyeth, and visitors will be able to explore those works in breadth this summer. Andrew Wyeth: The Greenville Collection includes classic Wyeth paintings such as The Liberal, Cranberries, The Blonde, and The Letter, among others. The schedule also features the continuing exhibition Masters of Watercolor: Andrew Wyeth and His Contemporaries, which offers thematic and stylistic comparisons to Wyeth among such painters as Hubert Shuptrine, Henry Casselli, Anna Heyward Taylor, and Charles Burchfield.

A new selection of work by the South Carolina modernist painter William H. Johnson offers a contrasting note within this list of summer exhibitions. An African American, Johnson departed the South to pursue his career in New York, then settled for several years in Europe, where he fell under the spell of artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch. William H. Johnson contrasts the artist’s European period with the more politicized vision he presented after returning home to America. The exhibition includes a new view of the harbor in Kerteminde, Denmark, in a painting recently loaned to the Museum by the Wayne and Carolyn Jones Charitable Foundation. Completed circa 1937, it complements harbor views from 1931 and 1934 to offer a compact study of the artist’s development during this crucial period in his career.

The development of abstract expressionism was the revolution that transformed American art in the years following World War II. Exuberant and forceful, it proclaimed the importance of paint as a medium that conveys emotion through color, texture, and gesture. The exhibition Suitcase Paintings provides insight into the main tenets of this movement through fifty-seven small-scale examples that empower the viewer to embrace its breadth. Organized by Art Enterprises, Ltd., and TMG Projects of Chicago, the exhibition includes works by the first generation abstract expressionists such as Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Philip Guston, and samples the paintings and collages of their students and followers—artists such as Robert Richenburg, Elaine de Kooning, and Melville Price. Jasper Johns: Image Duplicator!!, Andrew Wyeth: The Greenville Collection, and William H. Johnson will be on view through October 5. Suitcase Paintings continues through August 24.

The summer schedule also includes an exhibition of historic paintings and sculptures, Stone Cold Classics, and Joshua Shaw: A Paradise of Riches, which includes the first-known painting of Greenville in 1820.

Thursday evening programming in July includes a gallery talk on abstract expressionism on July 10 and a video on the site-specific sculptor Christo on July 24. Enjoy Beach Music with the Royal Scotsmen on August 14 and take part in a discussion about Jasper Johns and abstract expressionism on August 21. All of these events take place at 6:30.

The Museum is open every Thursday until 8:00 to accommodate the scheduling needs of families and working people. The programs are free and open to the public. Participants are encouraged to dress comfortably.

The Greenville County Museum of Art is located on Heritage Green, at 420 College Street in downtown Greenville. Galleries are open at 11:00 Tuesday through Saturday and at 1:00 on Sunday. The Museum closes at 5:00 except on Thursdays. Admission is always absolutely free.