The Art Show, Presented by The ADAA

Schoelkopf Gallery is delighted to present fourteen paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by twentieth-century American modernists, both familiar and whose renown never matched their talent, on view at The Art Show Organized by ADAA, from October 29 to November 2, 2024. Drawn from The Estate of Mary Abbott and distinguished private collections including The Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall Collection, the gallery’s presentation spans three critical decades from the 1920s to the 1950s and features a diverse group of artists who developed important contributions to modernism that traverse genres, mediums, and modes of expression.

 

In the years leading up to World War II, Helen Wessells portrayed the symbolic role of women in local community and national patriotism, while Ida O’Keeffe and Georgia Engelhard investigated physical structures of institutional power. Other modernists, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Virginia Berresford, and Hedda Sterne, documented their studios and the natural world in jewel-like still lifes and landscapes informed by astute observation and personal creative lexicons. Similarly, Isabel Bishop experimented with layers of perception, choosing details to represent and omit in her portrait of a young woman, and Enid Bell’s distilled forms reveal the essence of two figures in an embrace, no more, and no less. In the post-war period, Mary Abbott and Alice Trumbull Mason experimented with the language of abstraction, both expressionist and geometric, creating compositions that oscillate with color and form.