ANNOUNCING A MAJOR EXHIBITION IN TWO PORTSMOUTH, NH LOCATIONS:
Russell Cheney—A New England Master
Paintings of Northern New England 1910-1945
Portsmouth Athenaeum, Randall Gallery
June 1–September 6, 2008
“The Art of the Domestic" Paintings of Kittery and southern Maine
This show will draw on the many paintings of his Kittery home, garden and friends, views across the nearby Piscataqua River and its tributaries and landscapes of neighboring southern Maine towns. www.portsmouthathenaeum.org
Portsmouth Historical Society
June 1–October 31, 2008
“From Impressionism to Yankee Modernism" Portsmouth and the New Hampshire Coast
Works from his early years painted in Maine, Connecticut and Vermont will be contrasted with his works in the 1930s and ‘40s depicting riverscapes, townscapes and portraits of Portsmouth and New Castle, New Hampshire.
Guest curator; Richard M. Candee, PhD
www.portsmouthhistory.org
Lecture: July 8, 2008
Richard Candee will speak on Russell Cheney painting in Southern Maine at the Ogunquit Museum of Art as part of the museum's summer lecture series.
Symposium on Russell Cheney & Yankee
Modernism in Maine
Kittery Point, ME August 2, 2008
A one-day symposium Aug. 2, 2008 sponsored by the Kittery Art Association in conjunction with the Portsmouth Athenaeum exhibit will explore "Yankee Modernism in Maine" of the inter-war decades of the 1920s and 30s. Painters from the Ogunquit art schools, Russell Cheney, Marsden Hartley, and writer F. O. Matthiessen and his friends took a characteristically New England approach to the Modern movement.
The day includes five lectures, a cold lunch, tour of the Cheney Studio, contemporary exhibits at the Kittery Art Association and a reception at the Athenaeum. For more information: www.portsmouthathenaeum.org
Rediscovering Levi Noble
In 2002 when researching a book about early mining engineers and geologists in the Death Valley region Miriam Romero happened upon a photo of “Portrait of a Geologist” on the cover of USGS Open-File Report 02-422 titled “Levi Noble: Geologist.” Russell’s portrait of his Yale classmate had gone missing years ago. After four years of dead-end leads, Romero finally tracked the painting down to a descendant of Noble, who has since donated it to USGS in Reston, VA, where it will be part of a larger exhibit planned in honor of Noble, the father of Death Valley geology.