Rare 20th and 21st Century Masterpieces in The Masters: Art Students League Teachers and Their Students Opening in October

Hirschl & Adler, 511 Projects, and The Art Students League of New York
 Co-Curate an Exhibition of Works from O’Keeffe to Rosenquist and Beyond

(New York) A “subway series” painting by Mark Rothko; the fourteen Stations of the Cross by George Tooker; the bronze sculpture, Titanic Memorial, by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney; and Modiste, a full-length portrait of a young Spanish woman by Robert Henri are among the never- or rarely-publicly-viewed masterpieces that are included in The Masters: Art Students League Teachers and Their Students, which will open on October 18^th at Hirschl & Adler in New York City.  

The Hirschl & Adler exhibition leads this ground-breaking, three-venue collaboration with 511 Projects, a curatorial-based salon-style project space in Chelsea; and the Art Students League of New York, one of the oldest and most important art schools in America. The installation of The Masters at 511 Projects, featuring works on paper, opens October 28. The League hosts recent works by The Masters beginning November 1.

The Masters will present seventy-five artworks by fifty major artists, from 1900 to the present, who studied, taught, or studied and taught at the Art Students League. On view will be works by the school’s early leaders such as Frank Vincent DuMond and Robert Henri; then early students including Georgia O’Keeffe, George Bellows, Norman Rockwell and Guy Pène du Bois; and then their “offspring,” including Reginald Marsh and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Subsequent generations of artists whose works will be included in the show are Isabel Bishop, Fairfield Porter, David Smith, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Lee Krasner, Stuart Davis, Philip Guston, Paul Jenkins, Will Barnet, James Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenberg, Knox Martin, and Norman Lewis, among many others.

The Art Students League began as an atelier, or studio-based, school that diverged from traditional American art academies.  It immediately attracted both men and women and offered women access to study from the nude, first in gender-segregated classes and later alongside men. From the 1920s through the present, the school has served as a haven for immigrant artists–students and teachers–from countries in turmoil, oppressive regimes, and impoverished conditions. George Grosz, Mark Rothko, Miguel Pou Becerra, Celeste Woss y Gil, Vaclav Vytlacil, Philip Guston, John Graham, Lee Bontecou, Arshile Gorky, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Ai Weiwei, and Zhang Hongtu are a few of the contributors to the amazing cauldron of cultures, ages, races, and ethnicities that has been at the core of the Art Students League’s practice and community. Many of these artists will be represented in The Masters.

The Masters is a celebration of this unique art institution and of the students and teachers who are central to its history and its impact on art-making, art history, and the American tradition of openness and acceptance of diverseness.  A portion of the proceeds of opening night sales at Hirschl & Adler will go to benefit the Art Students League.

The Masters takes place at the three differing venues, with staggered openings. Hirschl & Adler, on Thursday, October 18, at 6 p.m. will exhibit paintings and sculptures by major 20^th century Art Students League master artists.  On Sunday, October 28, 511 Projects in Chelsea opens a show of drawings, prints, oils and watercolors by many of the same artists. On Thursday, November 1, the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery at the Art Students League opens its exhibition of works from the last years of the 20^th century through the present by master teachers and students.

A scholarly, full-color catalog will accompany this exhibition.

About Hirschl & Adler
Founded in 1952 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Hirschl & Adler moved in 2018 to a new gallery space in The Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street, on the corner of Madison Avenue, where the gallery continues to specialize in American and European paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculpture from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries; American prints of all periods; and American decorative arts from 1810 to 1910. Its contemporary arm, Hirschl & Adler Modern, focuses on Modern, Postwar and contemporary European and American masters and Outsider art including paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints. www.hirschlandadler.com

About 511 PROJECTS
511 GALLERY AND 511 PROJECTS is a salon-type gallery (open to the public) of contemporary art in The Chelsea Mercantile Building on Seventh Avenue. 511 Gallery represents twelve artists, international as well as American, who work in the media of painting, photography, sculpture, and site-specific art. 511 Projects has two distinct practices: a secondary market, or “backroom” practice in the deaccessioning and acquisition of American and European art of the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries – with particular expertise in the genres of American Impressionism, American Modernism, Hudson River School, and Photography – on behalf of public and private collections; and a curatorial practice in which exhibitions are organized for museums, art centers, and corporate venues. The primary mission of both 511 Gallery and 511 Projects is to place great artworks in public institutions and public spaces.http://www.511gallery.com

About the Art Students League of New York

The Art Students League of New York is one of America’s premier art schools.  It was founded in 1875 by artists, for artists, to provide affordable studio-based art education of the highest quality. Great artists have trained, taught, and exhibited at the League throughout its rich history. Classes, lectures, workshops, exhibitions, and professional development programs continue the League’s legacy of supporting students who intend to make art a profession, and cultivating a spirit of community among artists. Among its prominent instructors and students, the League counts Thomas Eakins, Frederic Remington, Reginald Marsh, Georgia O’Keeffe, Norman Rockwell, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Jacob Lawrence, Louise Nevelson, and Ai Weiwei, among many others. Today, thousands of students each year study drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking and mixed media at the League.  www.theartstudentsleague.org