Today, the Schorr Collection, named for the family of Hannah Lewis, numbers more than 500 works, ranging from tender 15th-century devotional images through to 19th-century French impressionist landscapes and 20th-century Modern Masters. Rather than sequester the treasures of their collection away in private galleries, the Lewis family shares works from the Schorr Collection, one of the largest private collections in the United Kingdom, with public museums on a long-term basis.

A recipient of long-term loans from the Schorr Collection in 2013, Phoenix Art Museum will now welcome an additional 30 paintings. This significant group will include a full-length 17-century portrait by Anthony van Dyck from his Genoa period and the great Death of Seneca (c. 1625), by Gerrit van Honthorst. 

Yayoi Kusama’s You Who Are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies is one of the artist’s more whimsical works. Inspired by a Japanese folktale about a person in a field with 10,000 fireflies, Kusama’s work brings the fairy tale to life. Beginning with drawings and paintings, Yayoi Kusama’s work transformed from 2-D pieces to large-scale installations, symbolic of the obsessive and massive nature of her ideas. Subsequently, Kusama’s art began to take large forms and often covers and utilizes entire rooms and spaces.

The piece is a dark room lined with mirrors on every surface and strands of looping LED lighting suspended from the ceiling. This deceptively small room feels as if it’s a vast, infinite galaxy of lighting and allows the viewer to enter and be surrounded, or obliterated by Kusama’s fireflies. 

American Scenes/Americas Seen features works spanning the 1930s and 1940s by celebrated muralists and abstract artists including Diego Rivera, Alfredo Ramos Martinez, Carlos Mérida, Alice Trumbull Mason, Doris Rosenthal, and others.

During the thirties and forties, many artists reacted against the abstract styles favored by the first generation of American moderns, dismissing non-objective art as “un-American.” Favoring representational modes, artists on both sides of the border pursued variations on several period styles variously called in the United States as the American Scene, Regionalism, and Social Realism.

In Mexico, the Mural Movement shaped by the utopian fervor of the Revolution was initially a state-sponsored project to bring public art to the masses, translating nationalist ideologies into visual form. Some celebrated muralists like Diego Rivera also created easel paintings of idealized peasants marketed to foreign tourists, and Alfredo Ramos Martinez’s heroic paintings of indigenous peoples were in great demand during his sojourn in California in the late thirties.

Many US artists, however, continued to pursue modern styles, and in 1936 a group of them founded the Abstract Artists of America to exhibit together and to educate the public. Alice Trumbull Mason, a founder of the AAA, declared “I was completely joyful not to be governed by representing things anymore.” Nevertheless, the majority of Mexican artists continued the Muralists’ emphasis on figuration and social themes during this period. Though initially active in the Mural Movement and the Taller de Gráfica Popular (The Peoples Print Workshop), Carlos Mérida was one of the first artists in Mexico to experiment with abstraction. He paved the way for others to explore abstract styles in the ensuing decades.

Early American Modernism: The Decade of the Armory Show features works spanning the first decades of the twentieth century by American artists experimenting with modernism, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Konrad Cramer,  Arthur Bowen Davies, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Marguerite and William Zorach, Alice Trumbull Mason, and others.

American art underwent radical changes in the first decades of the twentieth century. The romantic urban realists, popularly known as “The Ashcan School” embodied a major shift in subject matter. More radical were those embracing European modernism who represented a revolution in style, with parallel cultural developments in literature, music, and theatre. The New Woman and the suffragists signaled substantial social shifts as well.

A significant group of American artists responded enthusiastically to the new aesthetic possibilities they saw, including Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, and pure abstraction. They could see experimental work at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, “291,” beginning in 1908. The landmark Armory Show in New York, an ambitious display of nearly 1400 works, showed modernism on a large scale in 1913. Those able to travel to Europe saw the newest styles in Paris, Berlin, and Munich. New York was the center of the American avant-garde The artists who gravitated to its bohemian center in Greenwich Village found support and confirmation for their new directions. Gradually more galleries were established and patrons began to collect their work.

Landscape remains one of the most popular subjects for artists visiting and residing in Arizona. Philip C. Curtis, while not known as a landscape painter, draws extensively on that subject. Curtis came to the state in 1937 to establish the Phoenix Federal Art Center under the Federal Art Project, a New Deal program. He left two years later to head a similar facility in Des Moines, Iowa, but returned to Arizona in 1947. Settling in Scottsdale, he painted surreal compositions, with figures in Victorian costumes set in the desert. Arizona’s landscapes were a rich source of inspiration for him, and while his canvases do not portray any recognizable geological features, his work may be contextualized within the work of a broad spectrum of artists who came to the state. Curtis saw the desert through a lens of magic realism. This differed from Maxfield Parrish, Eugene Berman, and other artists who preferred more representational modes.

Spurred by the artists from the North East who comprised the Hudson River School, landscape painting was one of the most popular subjects in nineteenth-centuryAmerica. Pushed ever westward by expansionist notions of Manifest Destiny, a belief that such territorial expansion was inevitable and pre-ordained. Painters were also part of government initiatives to survey the vast region, particularly in regards to potential railroad routes and to learn about the indigenous populations they encountered. 

Various locations around Scottsdale and the greater Phoenix area.