For WLD at SHFAP January 18 – February 12, 2017
January 16, 2017
For WLD
works from The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation
January 18 – February 12 2017
Opening Reception: Wednesday, January 18th, 6-8 pm
steven harvey fine art projects
208 Forsyth Street New York NY 10002
Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects presents a loan exhibition entitled For WLD, an homage to William Louis-Dreyfus, an extraordinary collector who passed away in September 2016. The exhibition includes 18 objects on loan from The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation, many of which were acquired by him from Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects. Artists included in the show are: Lennart Anderson, Gideon Bok, Chuck Bowdish, James Castle, Susanna Coffey, Tara Geer, Alison Hall, Kurt Knobelsdorf, Stanley Lewis, Sangram Majumdar, Raymond Mason, Catherine Murphy, Graham Nickson, Stephanie Pierce, Eleanor Ray, E.M. Saniga, Beatrice Scaccia, and Stuart Shils. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with texts by Steven Harvey, Fred Bancroft, Alison Hall, Beatrice Scaccia and Eleanor Ray. The exhibition has been organized by Steven Harvey and Fred Bancroft.
William Louis-Dreyfus was described by Karen Wilkin in Hyperallergic, “as a passionate lover of art, an eager collector, a published poet, a committed supporter of the underprivileged, a defender of social justice, a lover of trees, an ecologist, a fruit farmer, a maker of excellent preserves, and a plain-spoken, unpretentious man of ineffable, self-deprecating charm – among many other things.”
Dreyfus was born in Paris in 1932. He moved to America with his mother in 1940. He studied law at Duke University. He was the Chief Executive Officer of the Louis-Dreyfus Group. He began collecting art in the early 1960s, gathering works that were diverse yet encyclopedic. Today, his collection includes over 3,500 objects by some 170 different artists. His collection is held in a beautifully renovated warehouse in Mount Kisco open to visitors by appointment. One of the missions of the Foundation is to teach visitors the importance of finding new, emerging, and self-taught artists. In 2014, Dreyfus was awarded the Robert Mills Architect Medal from The Smithsonian American Art Museum. Also during that year he received an Advancement of American Art Award from the National Academy Museum and School.
The works in this exhibition consist primarily of small format paintings and drawings, many of the which were acquired by Dreyfus from Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects. Dreyfus believed in the continuing relevance of traditional subjects in contemporary art including the figure, still life, interior, and landscape. The works chosen here expand the conception of what is traditional and what is new in contemporary painting. They are characterized by the obsessive observational work and a lush painterly quality apparent in Gideon Bok, Sangram Majumdar, Catherine Murphy, and E.M. Saniga. Elements of visionary art are evident in Chuck Bowdish’s tiny figure by the shore watercolor and James Castle’s ragged farmhouse interior. Dreyfus’s interest in contemporary landscape may be seen in Stuart Shils’s vaporous Italian hilltown, Graham Nickson’s early 70’s roman sunset, Eleanor Ray’s snowy window scene and Stephanie Pierce’s fragmentary window sill.
The gallery will be closed on January 20th in observation of the J20 general strike, acknowledging William Louis Dreyfus’s anti-voter suppression activism.
Please contact the gallery at info@shfap.com or 917-861-7312 for further information or images.