Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Viewfinder

Since 2019, television anchor and political commentator George Stephanopoulos has donated nearly 2,000 photographs to the Collections of Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Depicting some of the most important historical moments and artistic movements of the 20th century, the final installment of approximately 700 photos arrived at HWS last fall, bringing the appraised value of the Stephanopoulos Collection to nearly $5 million. Spanning politics, institutions and momentous events including the Great Depression, the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, many photos in the Stephanopoulos Collection have a “‘snapshot’ quality” that belies “the skill and artistic labor needed to make something seem effortless,” says HWS Visual Arts Curator Anna Wager ’09. The photos capture “powerful, poignant, un"inching images of people and places, some in really dangerous, damaging or damaged circumstances. There is a privilege and a duty in being able to view their lives in this way, and I look forward to working with our community in dissecting the webs that connect these artists and their works.”

HOMECOMING

Considered America’s first abstract painter, Arthur Dove, 1903, lived much of his life in Geneva, N.Y., where he took “as his subject matter the family farm and the local barnyard animals, as well as the rural landscapes and industrial areas nearby,” as the Skinner auction house noted in its listing of Cow V. The watercolor painting, which demonstrates “Dove’s impulsive, momentary response to nature through gestural lines and washes of color,” returned to Geneva last fall, arriving at its permanent home in the HWS Collections thanks to an anonymous donor.

Dove studied at Hobart for two years before transferring to Cornell. He later moved to New York and worked as an illustrator for magazines like Life and the Saturday Evening Post. Dove’s first solo exhibition in 1912 established him as a prominent abstract painter, and he spent the rest of his career developing his idiosyncratic style of formal abstraction and experimentation. His work is associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s circle of modern American artists, which included Georgia O’Keeffe, who credited Dove with inspiring her to experiment with abstraction.

The HWS Collections house five other works by Dove, and the Colleges pay tribute to his memory through the Arthur Dove Scholarship for Studio, Fine Art and Architecture, as well as the Arthur Dove 1903 Art Award. Established in 1980 by William B. Carr, the award is used to purchase a piece of art by an HWS student that best expresses the spirit and ideas that Dove sought in his works.

AT FACE VALUE

This winter, coinciding with the beginning of Hobart’s Bicentennial year, the Davis Gallery at Houghton House explored the “fraught and powerful nature of portraiture.” Featuring paintings and photos from the HWS Collections, including portraits of and by the Colleges’ own, the exhibit showcased the genre’s techniques and tropes, and what they suggest about the artists, their subjects and the viewer.