BUTTERSWORTH, BOLOTOWSKY AND TORNER

BUTTERSWORTH, BOLOTOWSKY AND TORNER

by Joan K. Yanni

Two paintings have been acquired to augment the American collection.

James E. Buttersworth's The Clipper Ship "Flying Cloud" off the Needles, Isle of Night (89.71) has been hung in the 18th century American gallery.  Beside it is a smaller painting by the same artist, Fleetwing Loses Six Men Overboard (17.79).  The subject of both is the clipper ship, the artist's specialty.

"Flying Cloud" was the most famous clipper ship in maritime history.  She was made in Boston, the masterpiece of shipmaker Donald McKay; and her design was unsurpassed in speed, weatherliness, and beauty.  In 1854 she set a record of 89 days for a trip around Cape Horn—a record which stood until 1989, when broken by "Thursday's Child," which made the passage in 80 days!

Buttersworth (1817-1894) was born in England and came to the United States around 1850.  He was well known to his contemporaries because many of his paintings were reproduced in lithographs done by the popular Currier and Ives.

Ilya Bolotowsky

The second new work, Untitled (Relational Painting), by Ilya Bolotowsky, is a non-objective painting which shows the artist's skill in using primary colors and the grid motif.

Born in Russia, Bolotowsky (1907-1983) was influenced by the Russian constructivists, by Mondrian,  and by the Dutch de Stijl school.  When he came to the United States in the 1930s, he took Mondrian's color and space and developed them further in rhymes and complicated patterns.  Our painting is pure design, typical of experiments into what came to be known as "neo-plasticism," an attempt to reduce art to its purest essentials and to show that formal elements can create movement and vitality.  To quote curator Patti Junker, "Color and tone project space and spatial relationships, lines suggest direction and rhythm, the shape of the canvas suggests a design motif in and of itself."

Gustavo Torner

Earth and Gold, the exciting gold leaf and polyvinyl work hanging in the 20th-century gallery, was painted by Gustavo Torner, a Spanish painter and sculptor born at Cuenca in 1925.

Self-taught in art—he had studied forestry engineering as a career—he collaborated with two other artists in founding the Cuenca Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in 1963.  He first worked in the style of lyrical abstraction, emphasizing contracts between smooth surfaces and coarse materials.  Later he turned to geometrical abstraction and sculptural constructions made of stainless steel combined with wood and other materials.  He is represented in the museums of Cologne, Prague, and in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City.

As any child can tell you (and many already have), our work represents the brilliant sun shining on rough, pale earth.