Thomas Moran, Asher B. Durand, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Hart Benton, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley…those are the kind and caliber of artists whose names have been associated with the collection being assembled by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. You can see the images here.
Here’s another, and it was a bit of a surprise to me: Walton Ford.
This week, the museum announced that it had purchased his 2009 work called The Island, described as a “writhing pyramidal mass of Tasmanian wolves (thylacines) grappling with each other and a few doomed lambs.”
Size helps: it’s 8 ft by 11.5 ft.
As the press release continues:
The violent extermination of the thylacines, which were hunted to extinction in the early 20th century, calls into question who is hunter and hunted in this savage tableau.
“Thylacines were mysterious terrifying phantoms in the minds of Tasmanian settlers,” Walton Ford said via email. “I wanted to create a delirious image that suggested the thylacine’s doom. The painting could be interpreted as the hallucination of either the man or the beast.”
According to the museum’s website, Alice Walton has purchased a few other contemporary works — one each by James Turrell, Mark di Suvero and Ted Jones.
And so the Crystal Bridges tale gets more and more interesting. Contemporary artists and art dealers could use a big, new, deep-pocketed buyer at the moment; maybe they have a stealth one.
Photo Credit: © 2009 Walton Ford. Photo by Christopher Burke Studio, Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum