Montana Gallery

The Yellowstone Art Museum is honored to be among the participating museums to feature New Beginnings: An American Story of Romantics & Modernists in the West, a traveling exhibition with works on loan from Tia Collection. This presentation, our second collaboration with Tia, focuses on Taos and Santa Fe area artists who began to experiment with interpreting the West through a modern lens. Like the early Montana Modernists, these artists pushed boundaries, adapted new ways of thinking and seeing, and found their own version of place-based Modernism. Many had national influence and a direct impact on our own region.

Artists include Joseph H. Sharp, who set up a studio on the Crow Agency, not far from Billings, Montana. John Marin and John Sloan directly influenced Montana Modernist Isabelle Johnson. Post-Impressionist, Jozef Bakos, like Johnson, strove to imbue his paintings with an emotive quality that went beyond pictorial landscape. They expressed the harsh realities of their often hostile environment in a manner that is not only visually stunning, but evokes the feeling of sublime space.

Tia Collection has assembled tremendous examples of well-known Taos and Santa Fe painters and lesser-known New Mexican painters. We are grateful to the Tia Collection and thrilled by the opportunity to share these treasures with our patrons.

Image credits from top to bottom — Beulah Stevenson, Camino del Monte Sol, 1947; Gustave Baumann, Santuario, Chimayo, 1924; William Herbert Dunton, Mountain Mirror, 1930; Raymond Jonson, Spanish Quarters, 1922.

 

exhibition sponsors

title sponsor:
Stockman Bank

supporting sponsors:
Deborah Anspach & Dr. John Hanson
Charles M. Bair Family Trust

community sponsor:
Wipfli