WEST PALM BEACH, FL.- The Norton Museum of Art, recognized nationally for its important collection of modern American and European art, recently accessioned into the collection nine significant works of art. These works range from Italian Old Master paintings and paintings by Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud to contemporary works by Jenny Saville and Lynda Benglis. These works add important dimension and depth to the museum’s European art collection and expand the museum’s growing contemporary collection.
“The impact of these gifts of art—especially when they are as notable as those recently donated—cannot be overstated,” said Norton Museum of Art director Hope Alswang. “The Museum’s permanent collection has been profoundly enhanced because of the generosity of collectors Anne Berkeley Smith, Damon Mezzacappa, Beth Rudin DeWoody, and our Friends of Contemporary Art. These collectors follow in the tradition of our founder, Ralph Norton, continuing and expanding a legacy of generosity.”
The European Art Collection, which represents many major art movements from the Renaissance through Impressionism and Modernism in Europe, received major additions from Damon Mezzacappa. The Palm Beach resident has given the museum three Italian Old Master paintings from the 16th and 18th centuries by MarcAntonio Franceschini, Lorenzo Lotto, and Gaetano Gandolfi, at the height of their careers. Those paintings include Adam and Eve with the Infant Cain and Abel (1705) by MarcAntonio Franceschini, a rare example of this artist’s work held in a public collection in the United States; Saint Onuphrius of Egypt (1545-1550) by Lorenzo Lotto, a Venetian painter whose work represents an important transition stage to the first Florentine and Roman Mannerists of the 16th century; and Jacob Stealing Isaacs’s Blessings (1780s)by Gaetano Gandolfi, a Bolognese painter known best for his fluid draftsmanship.
The new accessions also include three important works by 20th-century masters Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud donated by trustee and long-time supporter of the Norton Anne Berkley Smith, including Diebenkorn’s Mission Landscape (1962) and Landscape with Figure (1963) and Thiebaud’s still life, Neapolitan Pie (1963), an iconic representation of the artist’s oeuvre and an important example of the Pop Art movement.
Beth Rudin DeWoody, long-time supporter of the Norton, donated …of Prosperity (2011) by Mary Sibande. The sculpture, the artist’s self portrait as a domestic worker clad in a voluminous blue uniform, addresses issues of her native, post-apartheid South Africa.
The Norton Museum’s Contemporary and Modern Art Council, a group comprised of Norton donors dedicated to building the contemporary art collection raised the funds to acquire two works by leading artists Jenny Saville and Lynda Benglis. The first, Mnemosyne I (2012) by Jenny Saville is monumental, complex charcoal drawing which reinterprets the traditional theme of Madonna and Child. The work is of particular significance to the Norton given the major 2011 retrospective of Jenny Saville organized by the Norton to inaugurate its Recognition of Art by Women (RAW) series. The second, Cocoon (1971), by Lynda Benglis, is an early classic work that exemplifies the artist’s daring use of unorthodox materials and demonstrates how she blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture.
The new acquisitions are the first examples of paintings and sculptures by each of these artists in the Norton’s collection. The new works are currently on display in the museum’s permanent collection galleries.
