An American impressionist shines again

A search for the paintings of Charles Courtney Curran took a Memphis, Tenn., curator two years and a trip to the artist’s long-ago home, where she discovered a small, undocumented piece now part of a retrospective on view starting Friday.

“It’s a lovely landscape,” said Jane Faquin, guest curator for “Seeking the Ideal,” a 58-piece collection of the American artist’s work at the Columbia Museum of Art.

Faquin considers Curran (1861-1942) to be an impressionist painter. Not everyone would agree.

Still, the accomplished artist built his career on the natural light, color and beauty of the French movement that changed the art world and remains the most popular style among the average museum visitor today.

The images, gathered from about 40 lenders across the country, will overwhelm audiences with their beauty, offering “a glow and a polish” as if the scene were being viewed at the ideal moment in time, said Will South, chief curator of the Columbia Museum of Art, which partnered in the exhibition.

“It’s beauty on steroids. It’s not just beautiful women; they’re surrounded by flowers and blue skies,” he said.

“The women, the clothing, the atmosphere, the floral environment – there isn’t anything that isn’t rendered with sensitivity and beauty.”

Faquin’s interest in Curran grew out of a project on another artist, Helen Maria Turner. When Faquin began exploring Turner’s work at the Cragsmoor Art Colony in New York state, she became interested in Curran, a skilled painter who had influenced Turner.

Curran was popular and prolific, creating 2,500 to 3,000 works. He also did illustrations and book covers. And he was an accomplished water-colorist, though not many of those survived, Faquin said.

“He lived such a long time that his style of painting had gone out of fashion by the time he died” during World War II, she said. Critics were no longer interested in his work, though he was still painting portraits and making money.

“People just forgot about him,” Faquin said.

That made him a perfect subject for research.

In January 2012, Faquin, who spent 20 years as curator of education with the Dixon Gallery & Gardens in Memphis, began a hunt for Curran’s paintings.

“He’s everywhere and nowhere in particular,” she said. “It’s amazing. Lots of museums have examples of his work, but most of them are in storage because they bought them a long time ago.

“But we were able to borrow from all over the country, really, and he’s very popular with individual collectors.”

The Columbia Museum of Art, in fact, had three Currans in storage, acquired through a gift in 1996. One has been touring with the exhibition and a second, newly restored painting was added to the collection mounted here in Columbia, said museum director Karen Brosius.

Faquin said Curran’s work is not unique, because many other artists painted the same subjects at approximately the same time.

But he experimented with an incredible number of styles in the first 10 or 15 years of his career, she said. And it’s the variety she tried to reveal through the retrospective.

“We were very careful not to overload the show with girls in pretty white dresses,” she said. “There were probably as many as 400 or 500 of those, if you added them all up.”

She did include her favorite among them: “On the Heights.”

“You need to go see it,” Faquin said. “It, to me, represents what he was trying to get across, that these were the new women in America, and they were young; they had opportunity; they represented all the best that American women would strive to achieve, and you can see that if you see that painting.”

Faquin’s quest to create a retrospective put her in contact with as many as 200 institutions, people and gallery dealers, she said.

“It was like a treasure hunt.”

She found all sorts of references to Curran’s paintings on the Internet, but they often included too little information — no title or date — to allow her to track them down. Online auction records were more helpful.

“One painting in the show I found on the ‘Antiques Roadshow,’” she said. “There were several I couldn’t find; I knew they had come up for sale.”

One Curran painting she saw in a book about American gardens. She tracked down the author of the book, who put her in touch with an ex-husband with a gallery in New York. The art dealer gave Faquin contact information for the couple in Hollywood who had bought the painting from him.

After all that, they didn’t want it to be in the show, she said. “They didn’t want to go without their painting” for a year.

About half of the 58 works came from individual homes, Faquin said.

Her research also put Faquin in touch with two of the painter’s grandchildren, now up in years. One of them is expected at the opening of the exhibition in Columbia, Brosius said.

Columbia, where the show will remain on display through May 17, is the third and final stop on the tour of Curran’s retrospective. The collection has been shown in Memphis and at the Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh.

The three institutions partnered on the project, which Brosius called “the most definitive exhibition of his work that’s been mounted.”

Brosius and South said the exhibition adds to the knowledge of American art, with Curran’s message being one of beauty for its own sake, an opportunity to experience a world “in absolute bliss,” as South put it.

South considers Curran’s work to be “a mixture of impressionism and realism, with an academic skill.”

Curran faded from public awareness, but Faquin has done her part to push his work back to the forefront. Said Brosius: “She’s really uncovered for the American public an artist who should be better known because his work is so exquisite and beautiful.”

This story was originally published February 19, 2015 at 11:20 AM with the headline "An American impressionist shines again ."