GENERAL DESCRIPTION
Waterfall is a remarkable product from one of the most innovative periods of Henrietta Shore’s long career. These “semi-abstractions,” as she called them, visually interpreted the natural world into its most essential and abbreviated forms and were an attempt to convey in a symbolic way the underlying spiritual forces she sensed rather than a literal transcription of the visual phenomena she observed. In Waterfall, pure line and an interplay of positive and negative shapes laid down with the sheer application of pigment are the means the artist employed to render visible the dynamic power of the eternal. Color is the emotional key she wielded to unlock the visual impact of the whole.
Born in Toronto, the majority of Shore’s artistic training was acquired in the United States, most significantly under Robert Henri in New York. After several years in California, she returned to New York City in 1920 and, forsaking narrative subject matter and the loaded-brush paint application she had learned from Henri, developed the stripped-down modernist approach demonstrated in Waterfall. When her semi-abstractions debuted in a New York gallery in January of 1923, they were widely discussed by critics who compared them with—and at times preferred them to—works by Georgia O’Keeffe then on view at another gallery across town.
Adapted from
Sue Canterbury, DMA Label copy, 2015
NOTES
TMS record has been reviewed.
c. 1922
P.J. Karlstron, S. Ehrlisch, Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956 Santa Barbara, 1990, p. 151, fig 29, illus.
"...[When Henrietta Shore] returned to New York in 1920 for a three-year sojourn, she developed a semi-abstract style given to nature symbolism. In accord with current modernist trends, she pared forms down to essentials and flattened them on the picture plane. Typically, as in...Waterfall large, planar figurations flow or pulse on the surface in ways that suggest elemental forces.
While synopsizing the forces of nature, these pulsant forms also serve as vessels of thought and desire. As such, they convey feelings of wonder, awe for the vast expanse of the cosmos, esteem for the swelling power of water...the surging white form in Waterfall, shaped like a petal and painted as densely as the mountain, implies the oneness of plants, water, and earth. Indeed the artist conceived nature's forms, and thus her abstractions of them, as independent and unified: To be true to nature one must be abstract. Nature does not waste her forms. If you would know the clouds - then study the rocks. Flowers, shells, rocks, trees, mountains, hills - all have the same forms within themselves." (p. 150-151)
Check file for- Roger Aiken, Henrietta Shore, A Retrospective Exhibition: 1900-1963, exh cat (Monterrey, CA: Monterray Penninsula Museum of Art, 1986)
Impact on the Collection:
Stemming from the most illustrious part of the artist’s career, Waterfall would make a commanding statement in the DMA’s presentation of American Modernism. Much as her rediscovery expands the canon of the role of women artists in American Modernism, addition of the work to the museum’s collection will expand that canon within the minds of our visitors. Waterfall will also provide a provocative comparison to our other modernist works that are associated with the Stieglitz Circle—particularly those of
Georgia O’Keeffe.
Condition:
The work is in very good condition and the original canvas remains unlined. The paint surface is well preserved with inpainting confined primarily to the edges of the work, at lower right and at center top. There is a small horizontal line of inpaint at lower left with a corresponding patch on the reverse. A very small area of drying cracks is located in the top of the black triangular form at lower center.
Frame:
The work is framed in a simple, slightly worn reverse-profile, silver-gilt molding.
Market Value:
Henrietta Shore’s working methods were painstaking and, consequently, her oeuvre is not vast. Her canvasses of the early 1920s are extremely rare to the market and none of the records preceding this sale possess the abstraction and symbolic power of Waterfall.
The highest price garnered at auction was for the very expressionistic Cypress Trees, Point Lobos, ca. 1930, which far outstripped its estimate (Estimate, $100K – $150K; $687,750, with buyer’s premium, realized).
1 - Susan Landauer, “Searching for Selfhood: Women Artists of Northern California,” in Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945, ex. cat., Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press (1995), p. 27.
2 - Catalogue of an Exhibition of Paintings by Henrietta Shore. Ex. cat., Worcester Art Museum, March 18 – April 15, 1923. Unpaginated. Waterfall is #18 in the exhibition checklist.
Sue Canterbury, Acquisition proposal, April 2015
Waterfall reveals Henrietta Mary Shore's astounding ability to reduce visual information to its most essential elements. The abbreviated and semi-abstracted forms, and the manner of their combination, express nature’s power with an elegance that is both powerful and sensual in its visual impact. Shore visually interpreted the natural world in a symbolic way, conveying the underlying spiritual forces she sensed rather than a literal transcription of the visual phenomena she observed. In Waterfall, pure line and an interplay of positive and negative shapes laid down with the sheer application of pigment are the means the artist employed to render visible the dynamic power of the eternal. Color is the emotional key she wielded to unlock the visual impact of the whole. The visual strength of this and other works earned Shore several solo exhibitions in New York and beyond. In 1923, Waterfall was one of 27 of her works shown at the Worcester Art Museum.
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Shore, Henrietta Mary (American, born Canada, 1880-1963)
Cultures
Geography
Place of origin: New York (New York/United States): TGN: 7007567
Process/materials
Historical periods
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
n.d.: Henrietta Shore
By 1986- d. 2001: Richard Lorenz (d. September 9, 2001), San Francisco, CA
From 2001: The Estate of Richard Lorenz
As of 2015: Bonhams, April 28, 2015, Lot 132, from a Private Collection, San Francisco, CA
From 2015: Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, Dallas, TX purchased from the above [1]
[1] The Foundation for the Arts is a non-profit corporation created as a title-holding entity to serve the people of Dallas but to operate independently of the City. The Dallas Museum of Art (at its own cost) is responsible for the care, storage, insurance, conservation and maintenance of the collection, and agrees to maintain the highest museum standards in the management and handling of the Foundation’s collection. The title to all works of art purchased or otherwise acquired by the Foundation for the Arts is retained by the Foundation.
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General Description
Waterfall is a remarkable product from one of the most innovative periods of Henrietta Shore’s long career. These “semi-abstractions,” as she called them, visually interpreted the natural world into its most essential and abbreviated forms and were an attempt to convey in a symbolic way the underlying spiritual forces she sensed rather than a literal transcription of the visual phenomena she observed. In Waterfall, pure line and an interplay of positive and negative shapes laid down with the sheer application of pigment are the means the artist employed to render visible the dynamic power of the eternal. Color is the emotional key she wielded to unlock the visual impact of the whole.
Born in Toronto, the majority of Shore’s artistic training was acquired in the United States, most significantly under Robert Henri in New York. After several years in California, she returned to New York City in 1920 and, forsaking narrative subject matter and the loaded-brush paint application she had learned from Henri, developed the stripped-down modernist approach demonstrated in Waterfall. When her semi-abstractions debuted in a New York gallery in January of 1923, they were widely discussed by critics who compared them with—and at times preferred them to—works by Georgia O’Keeffe then on view at another gallery across town.
Adapted from
Sue Canterbury, DMA Label copy, 2015
Fun Facts
Archival Resources
Web Resources
Notes
TMS record has been reviewed.
c. 1922
P.J. Karlstron, S. Ehrlisch, Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956 Santa Barbara, 1990, p. 151, fig 29, illus.
"...[When Henrietta Shore] returned to New York in 1920 for a three-year sojourn, she developed a semi-abstract style given to nature symbolism. In accord with current modernist trends, she pared forms down to essentials and flattened them on the picture plane. Typically, as in...Waterfall large, planar figurations flow or pulse on the surface in ways that suggest elemental forces.
While synopsizing the forces of nature, these pulsant forms also serve as vessels of thought and desire. As such, they convey feelings of wonder, awe for the vast expanse of the cosmos, esteem for the swelling power of water...the surging white form in Waterfall, shaped like a petal and painted as densely as the mountain, implies the oneness of plants, water, and earth. Indeed the artist conceived nature's forms, and thus her abstractions of them, as independent and unified: To be true to nature one must be abstract. Nature does not waste her forms. If you would know the clouds - then study the rocks. Flowers, shells, rocks, trees, mountains, hills - all have the same forms within themselves." (p. 150-151)
Check file for- Roger Aiken, Henrietta Shore, A Retrospective Exhibition: 1900-1963, exh cat (Monterrey, CA: Monterray Penninsula Museum of Art, 1986)
Impact on the Collection:
Stemming from the most illustrious part of the artist’s career, Waterfall would make a commanding statement in the DMA’s presentation of American Modernism. Much as her rediscovery expands the canon of the role of women artists in American Modernism, addition of the work to the museum’s collection will expand that canon within the minds of our visitors. Waterfall will also provide a provocative comparison to our other modernist works that are associated with the Stieglitz Circle—particularly those of
Georgia O’Keeffe.
Condition:
The work is in very good condition and the original canvas remains unlined. The paint surface is well preserved with inpainting confined primarily to the edges of the work, at lower right and at center top. There is a small horizontal line of inpaint at lower left with a corresponding patch on the reverse. A very small area of drying cracks is located in the top of the black triangular form at lower center.
Frame:
The work is framed in a simple, slightly worn reverse-profile, silver-gilt molding.
Market Value:
Henrietta Shore’s working methods were painstaking and, consequently, her oeuvre is not vast. Her canvasses of the early 1920s are extremely rare to the market and none of the records preceding this sale possess the abstraction and symbolic power of Waterfall.
The highest price garnered at auction was for the very expressionistic Cypress Trees, Point Lobos, ca. 1930, which far outstripped its estimate (Estimate, $100K – $150K; $687,750, with buyer’s premium, realized).
1 - Susan Landauer, “Searching for Selfhood: Women Artists of Northern California,” in Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945, ex. cat., Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press (1995), p. 27.
2 - Catalogue of an Exhibition of Paintings by Henrietta Shore. Ex. cat., Worcester Art Museum, March 18 – April 15, 1923. Unpaginated. Waterfall is #18 in the exhibition checklist.
Sue Canterbury, Acquisition proposal, April 2015
Waterfall reveals Henrietta Mary Shore's astounding ability to reduce visual information to its most essential elements. The abbreviated and semi-abstracted forms, and the manner of their combination, express nature’s power with an elegance that is both powerful and sensual in its visual impact. Shore visually interpreted the natural world in a symbolic way, conveying the underlying spiritual forces she sensed rather than a literal transcription of the visual phenomena she observed. In Waterfall, pure line and an interplay of positive and negative shapes laid down with the sheer application of pigment are the means the artist employed to render visible the dynamic power of the eternal. Color is the emotional key she wielded to unlock the visual impact of the whole. The visual strength of this and other works earned Shore several solo exhibitions in New York and beyond. In 1923, Waterfall was one of 27 of her works shown at the Worcester Art Museum.
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Shore, Henrietta Mary (American, born Canada, 1880-1963)
Cultures
Geography
Place of origin: New York (New York/United States): TGN: 7007567
Process/materials
Historical periods
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
n.d.: Henrietta Shore
By 1986- d. 2001: Richard Lorenz (d. September 9, 2001), San Francisco, CA
From 2001: The Estate of Richard Lorenz
As of 2015: Bonhams, April 28, 2015, Lot 132, from a Private Collection, San Francisco, CA
From 2015: Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, Dallas, TX purchased from the above [1]
[1] The Foundation for the Arts is a non-profit corporation created as a title-holding entity to serve the people of Dallas but to operate independently of the City. The Dallas Museum of Art (at its own cost) is responsible for the care, storage, insurance, conservation and maintenance of the collection, and agrees to maintain the highest museum standards in the management and handling of the Foundation’s collection. The title to all works of art purchased or otherwise acquired by the Foundation for the Arts is retained by the Foundation.
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