Glackens - MOAFL

William Glackens
February 23, 2014 – June 1, 2014

This is the first comprehensive survey of the artist in over 45 years

NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale announces William Glackens, the first comprehensive exhibition since 1966 of this key American artist. William Glackens is organized and presented in collaboration with the Parrish Art Museum and the Barnes Foundation, where the exhibition will also travel. The show spans the artist’s career, with works from the mid-1890s to the late 1930s. Glackens’s oeuvre will be examined through more than 85 of the most important paintings and works on paper from some of America's finest private and public collections, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Several works will be on view to the public for the first time since 1966. This long-overdue survey will introduce the artist to a new generation of viewers and aims to further scholarship on this pivotal figure in the history of American art.

Curated by noted independent writer and art historian Avis Berman, the exhibition focuses on Glackens’s most distinctive and adventurous works to present the full breadth of his oeuvre. “Glackens combined an enchanting zest for life with an arsenal of sophisticated techniques. Yet, with no comprehensive survey of his work in nearly fifty years, a thorough reassessment of this key figure in American art is long overdue. This exhibition takes a much-needed look at the artist’s estimable career and reveals him as a modern artist of ambition and spirit,” Berman states about the artist and the exhibition.


This exhibition explores the wide range of motifs that run throughout Glackens’s work. In addition to a fascination for the urban spectacle of New York City, a love for travel led him to sunny landscapes and shorelines. A gifted painter and draftsman, he also successfully mastered portraits, figure studies and still lifes, all genres that will be presented in the exhibition. The audio tour will feature commentary from Avis Berman, Judith Dolkart, Alicia Longwell, Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator at the Parrish Art Museum


NSU Museum of Art’s current holdings include more than 500 works that cover the full spectrum of Glackens’s career and represent the largest collection of his work. More than two-dozen paintings, drawings and prints from NSU Museum of Art’s collection will be incorporated in this comprehensive exhibition. The audio tour will feature commentary by Avis Berman, Judith Dolkart, the Deputy Director of Art and Archival Collections and Gund Family Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, and Alicia Longwell, Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator at the Parrish Art Museum.