Coming of Age at Dulwich Gallery

Coming of Age , American Art, 1850 to 1950. I was looking forward to the arrival of this exhibition to Dulwich gallery and having now visited it three times, I thought I'd put down my personal views. Overall I expect it tries to do what it suggests and give a broad view of American Art over this period, however I thought it was rather disappointing. Perhaps because it tried to cover to much ground in a small exhibition. In most cases there was only one painting by each artist, and in a few cases they were not nearly the best of that artists output. There were two Homer Winslow's but I felt only one of them captured the best of his painting. The Singer-Sargeant was one of the best paintings in the exhibition, but it would have been nice to have had one of his portraits. This and the great Childe Hassam painting showed how much American painting was influenced by the Impressionists, Though like Whistler, Sargeant was more of a European painter than an American. I'm afraid that Edward Hopper does nothing for me, however I was very struck by the Man Ray landscape, I realize that it was an early work and so it would have been nice to compare it with something that he did later. I was aware of Charles Sheeler as a great photographer, but the painting on display whetted my appetite to see more of his paintings. I did not think that the Georgia O'Keefe was that typical of her work and one of her flower abstracts would have been more representative. In the next room there was one painting which I thought one of the best in the exhibition. It was by Alfred Maurer, a painter of whom I had never heard. I had to look him up on the internet to find more details and found that early on his career he had been very successful, but after going to France and meeting and studying with Picasso and Matisse he had assimilated the changes that they had brought to art, but was completely ignored by the American public till after his suicidal early death. I thought that the way he had used the devices of cubism and his modern approach to colour to make a very interesting still life. This room also contained a very nice Franz Kline . However this again was not typical of his more famous black and white works, whereas Joseph Alders who is more famous for his colour filled 'Homage to the Square' paintings was represented by a black and white geometrical painting. Finally in the last room we were treated to some works by the abstract expressionists. I was really looking forward to seeing a good Hans Hoffman, whom I consider one of the most important influences on American painting, but this again did not seem to be very typical of his best work. There were also some very nice modern sculptures in this room by Gabo and Moholy-Nagy. Overall I found it was an exhibition that promised much but failed to deliver. How much better if they had concentrated on fewer painters and given us a representative collection of each. The show that they did a few years ago on Homer Wimslow was so much better .