Painting from the Collection of the Sheldon Museum of Art ed. by Brandon K. Ruud, Gregory Nosan (review)

Museum catalogs can be tedious reviews of objects united merely by virtue of their physical proximity. Painting from the Collection of the Sheldon Museum of Art belies that stereotype as a coherent, informative, thought-provoking, and resplendent publication.

The Sheldon Museum of Art houses works from the Sheldon Art Association and the University of Nebraska. A major donation to the university in 1929 facilitated the acquisition of first-rate works by such contemporary American artists as Aaron Douglas, Reginald Marsh, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Max Weber, and Edward Hopper; these works now form the core of the museum’s impressive collection.

The catalog begins with Benjamin West’s The Golden Age (c. 1776) and then proceeds to represent every major period and school of American art. Highlights include George Ault’s hypnotic The Pianist (1923), Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s incandescent Dragon Forms (1926), Georgia O’Keeffe’s haunting New York, Night (1928–29), and Jacob Lawrence’s exquisitely calculated Paper Boats (1948). Works by Nebraskan natives Weldon Kees and Dan Christiansen and long-time resident Charles Rain are seamlessly intermingled.

Another asset of the catalog is the quantity (20 percent) of outstanding works by women artists, including Elizabeth Nourse, Lilian Westcott Hale, Loïs Mailou Jones, Kay Sage, and Isabel Bishop. Gladys Marie Lux’s Inflation (1934–35) celebrates an attempt, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, to break the world altitude record by launching an enormous test balloon into the atmosphere. Lux, a native Nebraskan, witnessed the event with her father; her interpretation is both historically valuable and beautifully constructed. Works by contemporary artists Patssi Valdez, Hung Liu, and Carmen Herrera extend this tradition. They also underscore the collection’s transnationalism—its reflection of reciprocal influences among cultures.

Editors Brandon K. Ruud and Gregory Nosan assembled a splendid team of scholars to write catalog essays on the 125 works, each of which is treated to full-page color reproduction. The commentaries provide a wealth of new information. A few occasionally hit a sour note—John Singer Sargent and Henry James were already friends by 1887 (40)—and some of the descriptions and reproductions do not exactly jibe. Also, the book would have profited from a detailed history of the collection and short biographies of the artists, some of which have yet to receive sufficient scholarly attention. Finally, given the museum’s location and the multicultural tenor of its collection, it might have included more paintings by Native American artists. But these are small matters and nearly lost among the catalog’s textual and illustrative riches.

Painting from the Collection of the Sheldon Museum of Art is a superb addition to the history of collection catalogs. It shines new light on the Sheldon’s collection and anchors it on a “must-see” list for anyone with even a passing interest in American art.