A remarkable private collection of 20th Century art makes its public debut

By: Frank Housh

Since its June 2023 reopening the Buffalo AKG Museum added a main entrance on Elmwood Avenue adjacent to the new, expansive green space that used to be a surface parking lot (the City of Buffalo LOVES surface parking lots. Nearly ⅓ of downtown is surface parking lots).

I prefer to enter from Lincoln Parkway, adjacent to the statue of young Lincoln where AKG construction continues. Chain link and orange safety fencing funnel the visitor past the iconic Nancy Rubens canoes sculpture and into Shohei Shigematsu’s fractal fantasy (below).

In order to find the Hemicycle Gallery which houses the recently opened “Quiet Elegance” exhibit, walk through the Town Square and make a hard right at the opposing wall. You will pay your fee to the lovely people behind the desk and they will give you a cardboard tag to clip to your shirt. You are now in the original, 1905 building. Walk up 22 marble steps and cross the threshold into the South Gallery, which houses the AKG collection of 18th and 19th Century paintings.

When I give AKG tours, we generally linger in the South Gallery examining Monet’s Towpath at Argenteuil, Winter (1875-76), Tissot’s Political Woman (1883-85), and then sneak into the 20th Century space to look at Helen Frankenthaler’s 1966 Tutti-Frutti, where I give tiresome speeches about how Frankenthaler’s genius was ignored by an art world which trivialized and fetishized female artists (e.g., The Buffalo AKG’s Marisol Retrospective, reviewed here).

When arriving in the South Gallery, take your first left and proceed (north) into the Lyke Family Sculpture Court. We are getting close to the Hemicycle, but close attention is still required. Turn left as soon as you enter the Sculpture Court and you will see doors leading to the original building’s classical colonnade overlooking the Buffalo State campus. Note the burgundy colored banner decorated with a hemicycle shape which both references the historic gallery and is an homage to the Ellsworth Kelly painting within. You have arrived at your destination.

“Quiet Elegance,” an anonymous bequest of a private collection, provides excellent examples of 20th Century art’s abandonment of tradition, embrace of experimentation, and its re-revaluation of art as representation of the world.

Picasso on Paper

Three prints by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), beautifully framed, anchor the exhibit. They are hung against the same burgundy background featured in the entrance banner and represent some of his finest late-period, lithographic work. “Venus and Cupid, after Cranach” (“Vénus et l’amour d’après Cranach”) (1949) (left in image above), is Picasso’s variation on Lucas Cranch the Elder’s painting (1525-1527) of Venus and Cupid.

“Woman at the Window” (“La femme à la fenêtre“) (1952) (center in above image), a study in cubist right angles, and Woman with a Flower Corsage” (“Femme au Corsage à Fleurs”) (1958) (right in above image) combine with “Venus and Cupid” to provide Western New York art lovers with access to three of the finest of Picasso’s 400 prints made over 25 years.

Holly E. Hughes, AKG Godin‑Spaulding Senior Curator for the Collection said:

“The artworks in ‘Quiet Elegance’ deepen the museum’s holdings by some of these artists but also fill some gaps within the museum’s fine art collection. The Picasso works on paper now serve as the best examples in our collection of his virtuosity as a print maker, and the Ellsworth Kelly is the first in our collection utilizing the green and white color combination, a pairing the artist revisited in a variety of compositions.“

Hard-Edge Painting and Dynamic Artistry

Pieces by Kelly and John McLaughlin provide some of the best examples of minimalist, hard-edge painting, and Alexander Calder’s wall-mounted “The Black Sieve” (1957) (other famous Calder pieces include “The White Sieve” (1963) and “The Red Sieve” (1957)) challenged the notion that pieces of art are static things, frozen in time.

A screenprint of Lee Krasner’s “Free Space” (1975) is representative of abstract expressionism’s spontaneous dynamism, with its riot of curvilinear shapes and blue color palette in conversation with the white background.

Brice Marden

Brice Marden, who passed away a year ago, was a part of the minimalist, color-field school pioneered by Kelly and McLaughlin. “Quiet Elegance” features some his fluid, late-period etchings in “After Botticelli 1-5” (1992-93). Inspired by Chinese calligraphy, these remarkable pieces are were conceived shortly after Marden’s “Cold Mountain” series.

The Marisol Retrospective is drawing the crowds to the Buffalo AKG this summer, and that is as it should be. That said, you would be well-served to include Quiet Elegance in your visit, a small but impressive collection filled with the dynamic beauty of the 20th Century.

“Quiet Elegance” is on display in the Buffalo AKG’s Hemicycle Gallery through February 24, 2025. You can find more information here.

Frank Housh is Managing Editor of The Buffalo Hive.