Exhibition Highlights

Untitled (Summer)

Although known mostly for the sculptures he produced later in life, William Zorach created remarkable modernist oil paintings during his early years. This extremely rare double-sided painting by Zorach belongs to a series of allegories created in 1912-14 on the themes of spring and summer.

The Young Mechanic
Allen Smith, Jr. (American, 1810-1890). 1848. Oil on canvas. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of the American Art Council and Mr. and Mrs. J. Douglas Pardee.

Smith brought to Cleveland a New York City-cultivated talent for making genre scenes. This kind of figure painting often explored current social problems, as in the work of more famous artists of the day like William Sidney Mount (1807-1868).

The White Dam
Raphael Gleitsmann (American, 1910-1995). 1939. Oil on canvas. Private Collection.

Appearing on the Ohio art scene in the 1930s, Raphael Gleitsmann became known as an inventive painter who fused modernist and regionalist imagery. The White Dam is an entirely invented subject that combines industrial machines and bizarre distortions of scale to create a disturbingly surreal vision of modern life.

Ella's Hotel, Richfield, Ohio
Otto Bacher (American, 1856-1909). 1883-85. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

The summer after his return to Cleveland from Munich, Bacher founded an art colony in Richfield, where he began almost two years of work on this strikingly composed view from a hotel porch.

The Spirit of '76

Of all of the compositions conceived in Cleveland in the 1800s, this is the one that earned the greatest national fame. Willard painted it many times throughout his career.

Church Bells Ringing
Charles Burchfield (American, 1893-1967). Rainy Winter Night, 1917. Transparent watercolor, opaque watercolor, and graphite on two sheets of paper The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Louise M. Dunn in memory of Henry G. Keller 1949.544.

A masterpiece of American modernist art, this painting depicts a church in Burchfield's hometown of Salem, Ohio. The artist described it as a visionary effort to recreate a childhood experience.

Apocalypse '42
Viktor Schreckengost (American, born 1906) 1942. Earthenware. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., Gift of the artist

This ceramic sculpture was created within months of America's entry into World War II.

Flying Ponies, Euclid Beach Park
Carl Gaertner (American, 1898-1952). 1932. Oil on canvas. Carol and Michael Sherwin Collection.

Euclid Beach Park, located along the shores of Lake Erie at E. 156th Street, was the city's most popular amusement center during its existence from 1894 to 1969.

The Monkey Picture

Church poked fun at the conventions of still-life painting by unleashing two banana-pursuing monkeys upon this arrangement. Both the urban cop in pursuit and the cage to which he seeks to return the monkeys had topical significance when the artist (a lifelong resident of Chagrin Falls) conceived his subject, for Cleveland's first zoo was built in the 1880s.

"Art Deco" Screen
Rose Iron Works, Inc., designer Paul Feher (Hungarian, 1898-1990). 1930. Wrought iron and brass with silver and gold plating. Loaned from the Rose Family Collection.

Since the early years of this century the Rose Iron Works, a Cleveland supplier of architectural ornament, has produced distinguished decorative metalwork. The company's founder, Martin Rose, was born in Austro-Hungary and studied ornamental metalsmithing in Vienna prior to immigrating to Cleveland in 1902.

Playhouse Square, Cleveland
Lawrence Blazey (American, born 1902). 1935. Transparent watercolor, opaque watercolor and graphite with collage. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Joseph M. Erdelac 1992.191.

Like Bourke-White's photograph of Public Square seen from the Williamson Building, this colored drawing of Playhouse Square documents modern urban life from a dramatically high vantage point.

Jazz Bowl
Viktor Schreckengost (American, born 1906). 1931. Earthenware. Cowan Pottery Museum, Rocky River Public Library, Rocky River, Ohio.

Commissioned by Eleanor Roosevelt to celebrate her husband's re-election as governor of New York, this bowl by Viktor Schreckengost was made at Cowan Pottery in Rocky River, Ohio.

The Cleveland Grays on Public Square

Commissioned as a gift for the uniformed militia company known as the Cleveland Grays, shown parading in the foreground, this townscape of the northwest quadrant of Public Square represents a harmonious gathering of marchers and crowds at the young town's symbolic center.