Naar’s Work Purchased for Permanent Vassar Collection
Harry I. Naar’s drawing Tangled View was selected for purchase through the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Fund and has been accepted into the permanent collection of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. The black-and-white ink drawing was one of four works Naar was invited to display at the Academy’s Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts this spring.
Naar, a professor of Fine Arts in the Westminster College of the Arts and director of the Rider University Art Gallery, was one of just 30 artists from across the United States who were selected to participate in the Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts from March 10 to April 5. There, participants were considered for eight awards in art from the exhibit in the Academy’s New York gallery.
Now, because the Academy purchased Tangled View, the work will go on display in another American Academy of Arts and Letters exhibition opening May 20 entitled Works by Newly Elected members and Recipients of Honors and Awards before hanging in the Vassar collection.
According to the Vassar Web site, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center was founded in 1864 as the Vassar College Art Gallery and consists of more than 17,000 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, textiles, and glass and ceramic wares. Notable holdings include the Warburg Collection of Old Master prints, an important group of Hudson River School paintings given by Matthew Vassar at the college’s inception, and a wide range of works by major European and American 20th-century painters.
“We are very pleased to accept the drawing and we thank you and the committee for this lovely work,” wrote Patricia Phagan, the Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawing at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center in a letter to Virginia Dajani, executive director of the Academy. “The drawing looks like it will fit in quite beautifully with our permanent collection. I can especially see it having a fruitful ‘conversation’ with our numerous 19th-century landscape oils and watercolors.”
Naar was similarly enthusiastic, and justifiably proud. “The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is considered a major museum with a very important collection, not only of paintings and sculptures, but a major print and drawings collection,” he said. “There is a lot of prestige in this, not only for me, but for the University as well.”
The American Academy of Arts and Letters’ art awards and purchase program serves to acknowledge artists at various stages of their careers, from helping to establish younger artists to rewarding older artists for their accumulated body of work. Paintings and works on paper are eligible for purchase or placement in museum collections nationwide. Since the purchase program’s founding in 1946, the Academy has spent nearly $2.7 million to purchase more than 1,100 works that were subsequently donated to museums throughout the country.
The American Impressionist painter Childe Hassam (1859-1935) began this innovative program with a bequest of more than 400 of his works, with the stipulation that the accumulated income from their sale be used to establish a fund to purchase paintings and works on paper. Similar bequests were made by Academy members Eugene Speicher (1883-1962), Louis Betts (1873-1961), and Gardner Symons (1865-1935), for whom the Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Fund is named.
Selection for the Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts began with approximately 175 candidates nominated by the 250 members of the Academy. From that group, the 30 artists were then chosen by a rotating committee of artist-members to compete for eight awards in art. Those eight, as well as works selected for purchase, such as Tangled View, will be held over for the Academy’s Ceremonial Exhibition, which runs from May 20 to June 14.
Naar’s paintings and drawings have been shown in selected public collections, including the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, the Newark Art Museum, the Jersey City Art Museum, Johnson & Johnson corporate offices in New Brunswick, Bristol-Myers Squibb headquarters in New York, and the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C., among others.
Founded in 1898, the American Academy of Arts and Letters was established to foster, assist and sustain an interest in literature, music and the fine arts. Each year, the Academy awards more than $1 million to artists, architects, writers and composers, and its activities include the presentation of exhibitions of art, architecture and manuscripts, and readings and performances of new musicals.
