Wild Exuberance

Early in his career, critics and collectors widely recognized that Harold Weston (1894-1972), was capturing and saying something unusual in his paintings. “There is a young American painter,” wrote Duncan Phillips, “who stirs in me the hope for a re-birth on this new soil of something that was not lost to the art of painting with the passing of Vincent van Gogh.”

Along with 104 color and ten black-and-white plates of Weston’s works, the catalog includes essays that cover myriad aspects of Weston’s life and art. The Adirondack Museum’s chief curator Caroline M. Welsh explores nature and wilderness preservation as themes in twentieth-century art and places Weston in the context of his contemporaries who painted the Adirondacks. The biographical essay by the exhibition’s guest curator Rebecca Foster follows the unfolding of a career in parallel to the unfolding of a life. Weston’s rich technique is explored by Stephen Bennett-Phillips, curator at the Phillips Collection, in an analysis of the painting. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., curator of American art at the Fogg Art Museum, provides an introduction to the catalogue.