| September/October 2007 Sublime & Mundane, Wash Day By Rachel
Haynie Spartanburg
Art Museum Billowing across the Southern landscape until 20th century appliances rendered the evocative scenes mere memories, laundry symbolized a work ethic, family values, and a visual openness about what one owned and wore. In the first exhibit in the new Spartanburg Art Museum, a series of works depicting wash day in those romanticized days of the past have been generously loaned by collectors Susu and George Dean Johnson. On view through late this year, the pieces are totiching patrons' primal memories, recalling an every-week, sometimes every-day occurrence that cut across all social and cultural lines, as just-washed clothes were pinned to a taut clothes line. Among the artists who rendered visual recollections of wash day on the line are some of South Carolina's most revered. A number are associated with the Charleston Renaissance. Elizabeth O'Neill Verner, remembered through South Carolina awards bearing her name and by adoring collectors and patrons, was an integral member of the artists group credited with bringing about the Charleston Renaissance in the early 20th century. Through her drawings, etchings, and dry points, she captured and preserved for posterity the charm and uniqueness of her home town. In her golden years, she worked more in pastels, a less demanding medium, and one ideally suited for depicting Charleston. Alfred Hutty, although born in Grand Haven, Michigan, came to Charleston in mid-career and immediately cabled his wife: "Come quickly. Have found heaven." Oil and watercolor work prevailed throughout his career, but in Charleston he painted murals for several public buildings and took up etching seriously, helping found the Charleston Etcher's Club. His etchings still bring top bids in auction houses throughout the country, but especially in the region. William Aiken Walker, Charleston born, had his first one-man show at the South Carolina Institute Fair in 1850 and at Courtenay's Bookstore in Charleston. Perhaps the earliest artist in the South to be able to subsist by selling his work to tourists, he is best remembered for his paintings depicting emancipated slaves, especially cotton workers of the American South in post- Reconstruction years. Another Charleston artist whose work is represented in this inaugural show is Corrie McCallum. The work of others brings perspective to the chore of laundry from vantage points north. For instance, Amelia Watson, who painted in Tryon, North Carolina, makes laundry a lofty ambition, not merely a duty. Elliott Daingerfield, a long-time North Carolina resident highly recognized as a Southern painter, painted landscapes that symbolized, among other themes, the craggy terrain around Blowing Rock and Grandfather Mountain. Eugene Healon Thomason became known as the Ashcan Artist of Appalachia. These and other artists whose works in the collection evoke the spirit of Wash Day make the mundane mystical, sometimes nearly poetic. Curator Lauren Brunk, working with the Johnson collection, said the usually unglamorous work of airing the family's clean linens strikes a universal chord when captured on canvas. "Laundry in these landscapes makes statements of society. It reveals a work ethic and place in civilization. It also makes a statement about the connectedness of the households represented to urban standards of the time." Laundry's social implications represent an aspect of life to which everyone can relate. The visual cues to the tactile nature of laundry on a line is another reason the paintings chosen by Brunk and Harmony Haskins are eliciting such a moving response. Haskins also is with Johnson Development Corporation. The subject resonates with everyone," said Brunk, who was a private curator in New York before moving with her husband back to his home town of Asheville. The former Christie's and Sotheby's art specialist recalled the response of one staff member with Johnson and Associates. "When she saw the paintings depicting wash day, she recalled that on her family's drives to the coast when she was a child, she always saw something hanging on the lines in people's yards. She said the works reminded her of their times away." Brunk and Haskins were thinking ahead to the opening of the new Chapman Cultural Center, and to the prospects of partnering with Theresa Mann and the Spartanburg Art Museum, when the idea of an exhibition focusing on wash day emerged. "As we were working with the art in the collection, we noticed one or two pieces for which wash day was a theme. We thought, 'This is a great little group of things. Everyone can relate to this,' so we kept looking. Soon we realized we had at least thirteen to fifteen paintings relative to wash day." More have found their way into the collection and the exhibition since this theme was discovered. Encouraged by the response she got from Mann, Brunk started doing research, looking for similarities and differences ill the paintings. "Sometimes the laundry is nearly hidden, which makes a pretty profound statement about how people live," she said. Corrie McCallum's piece, for instance, depicts some laundry hanging, nearly obscured, from a second-story piazza at the corner of St. George Street. Spartanburg residents Susu and George Dean Johnson began collecting art about five years ago, and they are graciously sharing it through the museum. |