(New York – September 9, 2015) Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to host a lecture and booksigning reception on Saturday, September 26 with author Stefan Banz. The event is in celebration of the new publication Eilshemius: Peer of Poet-Painters, published by KMD – Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp | The Forestay Museum of Art. It coincides with the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery exhibition, Naked at the Edge: Louis Eilshemius, on view Tuesday, September 8 through Saturday, October 31.
About Louis M. Eilshemius
Louis M. Eilshemius (American, 1864-1941) was a fascinating outsider of the New York art scene at the beginning of the twentieth century, and an artist whose entire oeuvre had remained practically unknown to the general public. Not until artist Marcel Duchamp discovered him—at the age of fifty-three—in the famous first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists at the Grand Central Palace in New York in 1917 did he attract the attention of the international art world. Following his discovery, Duchamp and patron of the arts Katherine S. Dreier organized Eilshemius’s first solo exhibitions at the now legendary Société Anonyme in New York (1920, 1924). Eilshemius’s name was suddenly on everyone’s lips: some of the most prominent art critics of the time wrote about him and some of America’s most influential collectors began to take an interest in his work. Eilshemius, himself, exhausted and frustrated by his years of failure and having grown increasingly eccentric - and perhaps also somewhat confused by the sudden change in the reception of his art - ceased painting in 1921. His works, on the other hand, received ever-greater recognition and was exhibited in the most reputable galleries of New York. Between 1932 and his death in 1941, there were more than thirty exhibitions of Eilshemius’s work.
On View at the Gallery: Naked at the Edge
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is proud to present its first solo exhibition featuring the work of Louis E. Eilshemius. Naked at the Edge: Louis Eilshemius includes fifteen major paintings, dating from c.1905 to c.1920. Known as an artist’s artist who painted romantic landscapes with nymphs and nudes, Eilshemius has been collected by art world masters, including Louis Nevelson, Jeff Koons and Ugo Rondinone. In a recent statement, commenting on the KMD publication and Michael Rosenfeld Gallery exhibition, Rondinone states, “The art world loves an overlooked genius, especially one of whom it can be said that he was ‘ahead of his time’, and in Louis M. Eilshemius, the Swiss artist and scholar Stefan Banz has picked a peach of a subject. He does an excellent job of putting right old unfairness’s by reinstating him to the pantheon of great late 19th-century landscapists. For whereas Turner and Constable gave their contemporaries a vision of England that tactfully harmonized the new and the old, Louis M. Eilshemius did something quite different for America. His landscapes are not only innocent of the signs and tokens of the industrial age, but they bear only a fleeting resemblance to what you might have seen if you had stood by his elbow at the moment of their making.”
Visuals available upon request.
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is located at 100 11th Avenue (at 19th Street), New York, NY, 10011. Gallery hours are Tuesday–Saturday, 10AM-6PM.
For additional information, please contact Marjorie Van Cura at 212.247.0082 or mv@michaelrosenfeldart.com.