High and "low" in Atlanta

My friend Laurie and I went to the High on Saturday. I had been before; I remembered being underwhelmed then, and I was underwhelmed this time as well. There are many holes in their collection. In the nineteenth-century American galleries, they have many Hudson River School landscapes, but very few by the big names from this group. In twentieth-century painting, they don't have a Pollock. They don't have a Johns. They don't have a Warhol. None that they were showing, anyway.

I did like this Morris Louis. It's different from his more representative works.

The visit was finally saved when I turned a corner and found this painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937).

It's called Etaples Fisher Folk (1923), and it exhibits Tanner's well-known facility with light. Below is a detail, which also shows how heavily impastoed the paint is.

Tanner was from Pennsylvania and studied under Thomas Eakins, but he lived most of his life in France, in the town of Etaples, in Normandy, where there was a circle of English-speaking painters. He is the first African-American to have a work in the collection of the White House (a seascape acquired during the Clinton administration). He lived briefly in Atlanta, and some of his works were bought by J. J. Haverty (1858-1939), the furniture guy who helped establish the High.


I was also struck by this landscape, by a woman named Cecilia Beaux.

I admit, I had never heard of this person, and "art" history has been notoriously remiss when it comes to including women in the canon, so it was nice to learn about this woman and see one of her works. Beaux (1855-1942) was also from Pennsylvania. This picture is called Half-Tide, Annisquam River (ca. 1905).


They also have this fun thing by Anish Kapoor, the same guy who did the bean in Chicago.

The next day, while walking the Beltline, Laurie took me to this cool place on Elizabeth Street. 

City Issue is a retro furniture store with an amazing collection of mid-century modernist works, plus some pretty cool paintings, many of which I affectionately classify as "motel art."

I really like this picture. A fellow named Kevin McQueen was manning the shop on Sunday, and he told me that this picture was painted by Paul Chelko, a painter who worked in Atlanta for many years. I told Kevin that I had just gone to the High the day before and I hadn't seen anything better than this. 


Laurie and I also came across this interesting collection at Atlantic Station.

They have a neat, clean interior . . .

. . . with a nice view of midtown Atlanta.

And there are very few holes in their collection of contemporary American "art."