Hawkins at Columbus Museum of Art, OH
February 16 – May 20, 2018 Organised by the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, Columbus Museum of Art presents "William L. Hawkins: An Imaginative Geography". The exhibition explores the fascinating, self-taught genius with more than 60 important works, including some well-known and others rarely seen. "An Imaginative Geography" will also travel to Mingei International Museum in San Diego, the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, and the Columbus Museum in Georgia. Columbus Museum of Art
480 East Broad Street, Columbus, OH 43215
www.columbusmuseum.org
Cuban Outsider Art at Kunsthaus Kannen, Münster
February 4 – May 28, 2018 "Dibujos de Cuba, Outsider Art from Havana" presents drawings and objects created by five Cuban artists, depicting landscapes, people, cities and war. Featured artists: Federico Garcia Cortizas, Carlos Javier García Huergo, Ruben Gerardo Guerrero Garrido, Josvedy Jove Junco, Damian Valdes Dillas. Kunsthaus Kannen
Alexianerweg 9, 48163 Münster, Germany
www.kunsthaus-kannen.de
Maroncelli 12 at the Affordable Art Fair
January 26-28, 2018 Maroncelli 12 (Milan) will be at the Affordable Art Fair (booth E2) in Milan this weekend, presenting works by Paolo Baroggi, Shaul Knaz, Dan Miller, Pierre Soufflet and Stefan Todorov. View their online catalogue here. Superstudio Più
via Tortona 27, Milan, Italy
https:/affordableartfair.com
www.maroncelli12.it
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William Hawkins: The Last Suppers
Susan Mitchell Crawley takes a deep dive into the beloved American artist’s best-known series
Last Supper, 1986, enamel with cornmeal and collage on plywood, 48 x 48 ins. / 121.9 x 121.9 cm, courtesy of The Museum of Everything
A striking feature of William Hawkins’ (1895–1990) oeuvre is that he so consistently worked in series. During the almost 20 years in which he was most artistically active, he created several versions of favourite themes, including animal paintings such as his Tasmanian Tiger, Eagle and Snake and Rhinoceros; action scenes, such as Alligator and Lovers, Red Dog Running and Buffalo Hunter; and architecture, such as the Neil House Hotel, the Atlas Building and the Huntington Bank. Yet the subject he seems to have returned to most often lay in an area in which he was not prolific: religion. For, of the (very roughly) 25 religious-themed works Hawkins completed, no less than nine were versions of the Last Supper. Hawkins spent his adult life in Columbus, the state capital of Ohio,
in the Midwestern United States. His roots were about 200 miles from there, in late nineteenth-century Kentucky, as he declared in a bold signature on most of his paintings. Growing up on his family’s prosperous horse-breeding farm, he received little formal schooling. Instead, he broke horses, hunted and trapped, and absorbed the natural beauty of the rolling hills. After he moved to Columbus at the age of 21, he came to appreciate the man-made beauty of his adopted city, which he immortalised in many architectural paintings.
Last Supper #6, 1986, enamel with cornmeal and collage on Masonite, 24.5 x 48 ins. / 62.2 x 121.9 cm, collection of Robert A. Roth
Hawkins was raised in a typically Southern, church-going Protestant family. His early Christianity metamorphosed over time into a devout heterodoxy which, he claimed, encompassed all Protestant belief systems yet treated biblical pronouncements with skepticism. (1) After moving to Columbus, he stopped attending church regularly. Religious subject matter made up a small proportion of his output, which seems to have been determined primarily by what he thought would sell best. Before he caught the attention of the art world, he painted at least three versions of Moses and the Ten Commandments; later, he painted three versions of Jerusalem of the Bible, in which biblical subject matter intersected with architectural landscape. And more than once he painted the Adoration of the Magi and the Nativity, along with single versions of a few other
themes. In 1984, he turned his attention to a piece of iconography that would come to be intimately associated with him and would display most of the traits and innovations that defined his development as an artist. Over the next four years, Hawkins would create nine variations of the Last Supper, all of them remarkably diverse and imaginative.
Last Supper #5, 1986, enamel on board, 32 x 48 ins. / 81.3 x 121.9 cm, collection of Audrey B. Heckler
Only eight of Hawkins’ nine Last Suppers are numbered. One, now in the collection of the Museum of Everything, did not pass through his New York gallery, Ricco/Maresca, which maintained the numbering scheme, and remains unnumbered. Nor does there appear to have ever been a painting designated Last Supper #8. In this article, all but Last Supper #3 are shown. Formerly in the collection of Geoffrey Holder and Carmen de Lavallade, Last Supper #3 was sold at auction in 1995 to a European collector, and its current whereabouts are unknown – but the format, palette and media are most like those of Last Supper #4. The Last Supper, according to the Gospels, was the final meal Christ shared with his disciples before his Crucifixion, during which he revealed that his life was to be
sacrificed for the remission of human sin. During that meal, Christ identified bread with his body and wine with his blood, then instructed his disciples to eat and drink, thereby instituting the ceremony that became the sacrament of Communion in the Christian church.
Last Supper #9, 1987, enamel, collage and cornmeal modelling paste on Masonite, 43 x 48 ins. / 109.2 x 121.9 cm, New Orleans Museum of Art (gift of Dr Kurt Gitter and Alice Rae Yelen, 2011.59)
As anyone can see, the source of Hawkins’ Last Suppers series was Leonardo da Vinci’s famous mural, completed in 1498 for the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. Or was it? Read the rest of this article in Raw Vision 96, available now! Notes
1. Gary Schwindler, “William L. Hawkins: A Biography” (unpublished manuscript, [after 1990]), pp. 70–74, William Hawkins Collection, Archives, Ohio History Connection, Columbus.
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