Art News

The Chrysler Museum Shows "Portraits of a City: Views of Norfolk by Kenneth Harris"

artwork: Kenneth Harris - "Lambert Point Docks", 1951 - Watercolor on paper. Courtesy of the Chrysler Museum of Art On view in "Portraits of a City: Views of Norfolk by Kenneth Harris" from August 1st until February 1st 2012.


Norfolk, VA.- The Chrysler Museum of Art is proud to present “Portraits of a City: Views of Norfolk by Kenneth Harris” from August 1st through February 1st 2012. In 1950 the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences commissioned a series of views of Norfolk, and tasked one of the region’s most gifted watercolorists, Kenneth Harris, with the job. Harris responded by painting not only the city’s historical landmarks, but its downtown, docks, and coal yards—the city’s commercial and industrial heart. The resulting series of 30 watercolors proved to be an aesthetic triumph and an invaluable historical document, capturing both the look, and the feel, of Norfolk at the time. After being exhibited at the Museum in 1952, the watercolors traveled to museums and galleries in the Southeast until 1954. By the time the paintings returned, several of the sites depicted had already been demolished in urban renewal projects. The new exhibition offers a modern-day audience the chance to revisit Norfolk of the early 1950s by recreating this historic exhibition.

Though Kenneth Harris was born in Pennsylvania, his life unfolded largely in the southeastern United States. Harris was raised in North Carolina and Tennessee, pursued an architectural degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and in 1926-27 studied painting at the Cincinnati Art Academy. Returning to Atlanta, he embarked on a career in commercial advertising, which provided financial security but little in the way of personal or aesthetic fulfillment. “Advertising,” he later observed, “is the prostitution of art and literature for the prostitution of public taste.” In 1943 Harris left advertising for good to become a painter, and after perfecting his craft as a watercolorist in Galveston, Texas, and Wilmington, North Carolina, he and his wife, Irene, settled in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1949. In the late 1940s Norfolk became the first city in the country to participate in the newly founded Federal Housing Act, which had been designed to replace decaying urban buildings with new construction. (By 1940 the city had already established a Housing Authority to take advantage of government funds for low-cost public housing.)

artwork: Kenneth Harris - "East Freemason and Fenchurch Streets, I Remember- I Remember", 1950 Watercolor on paper - 53 x 73.7 cm. -  Courtesy of the Chrysler Museum of Art

By the early 1950s, Norfolk was in the throes of wholesale “urban renewal,” which involved the razing of decaying neighborhoods, the construction of public housing, and a massive redesign of the city’s commercial core. Norfolk’s redevelopment project would constitute the most sweeping instance of urban demolition in post-World War II America. Such large-scale civic redevelopment initiatives ultimately gave rise to the historic preservation movement, which crystallized in the controversy surrounding the destruction of New York’s Pennsylvania Station in the mid-1960s. Arriving in Norfolk in the midst of its transformation, Harris began to make watercolors of both the “slums and grandeur in the old port city” (The Virginian-Pilot, May 17, 1983). Customarily working out of doors, directly before his subjects, he quickly caught the attention of local residents, including John David Hatch, then director of the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences. Hatch realized that Norfolk possessed relatively little visual material documenting its history, and hoping to rectify that oversight, in 1950 he commissioned Harris to create a series of contemporary topographical views of the city. (Hatch paid for the project with the Museum’s Norfolk Newspapers’ Art Trust Fund, which had been established to purchase historic matter relating to the town.) During the next year and a half Harris produced a portfolio of watercolor views, from which thirty works, were selected for the series and purchased by the Museum. Entitled Portrait of a City, the watercolors were exhibited to great acclaim at the Norfolk Museum in the summer of 1952 and then traveled to twelve other museums and galleries in the Southeast, returning to Norfolk two years later.

Harris’s series depicts not only Norfolk’s architectural landmarks, coal piers, and railroad yards, but also several of the urban neighborhoods then slated for demolition. His view of East Freemason and Fenchurch Streets, for example, records what was then one of the city’s oldest sections, an area of handsome nineteenth-century brick row houses that had fallen into disrepair. By 1954 the neighborhood was being leveled. In East Main Street Looking West, Harris portrays another section of nineteenth-century townhouses that had once been part of a fine residential district but that by 1950 had become an economically marginal area of small shops and taverns; Harris himself described it as Norfolk’s “Bowery.” Main Street’s bars would be demolished in 1961. Thus, while Portrait of a City continues an American tradition of documentary urban views begun in 1800 with William and Thomas Birch’s Views of the City of Philadelphia, its emphasis on the impending loss of much of Norfolk’s historic fabric lends it a poignancy that is distinctive within the genre. The series, Harris stated, was meant “to represent Norfolk as it appeared in 1950 or thereabouts. The paintings are documentary in the strictest sense-each is a literal transcription of an actual scene as I saw it. Whatever artistic merit they possess is the result of an honest desire to reflect the truth.” Despite its focus on topographical realism, Portrait of a City is indeed artful and often hauntingly poetic. Harris’s touch is consistently deft, his palette rich and nuanced, and his stately compositions shaped through a masterful interplay of light and atmosphere.

artwork: Kenneth Harris - "Oyster Plant", 1951 - Watercolor on paper. Courtesy of the Chrysler Museum of Art - On view until February 1st 2012.

The history of the Chrysler Museum starts with more than a century of hard work and dedication by many, many residents of Hampton Roads who believed in the civic virtue of art and art education. Those rewarding efforts moved to an entirely different level 40 years ago, with what is now considered one of strongest and most varied gifts ever made in American history to a single museum by a single person. Walter Chrysler, Jr., scion of the automotive company founder, donated nearly 10,000 objects as part of an arrangement where the Norfolk Academy of Arts and Sciences became the Chrysler Museum of Art. The story of his gift goes far beyond the sheer numbers. It’s what his collection contained that remains breathtaking to this day. A late, legendary New York Times art critic called Chrysler the most underrated American collector of his time, and it’s easy to see why. As a young man he met the top avant-garde artists of Paris (including Pablo Picasso) and was soon purchasing works by them all. He spent his summers in American artist colonies (such as Provincetown, Mass.), and bought works from many future art stars well before they way famous. He was known for buying against fashion, as he had confidence that the special qualities he saw in various pieces would gain acceptance later.  Perhaps what’s most remarkable is the almost impossible-to-define sense of knowing which one to buy; that is, if you can have only one example of a certain style, if you can have only one item from a certain artist, which one would you pick and why? Such judgments are completely subjective, of course, but a lot of art experts believe Walter Chrysler had the knack for getting the right one. By 1976, the city of Norfolk had added 20 galleries to hold the works. There were further building additions in the 80s, including the George and Linda Kaufman Theatre. Walter Chrysler chaired the Museum Board of Trustees until 1984, and he died in 1988 after a long battle with cancer. In the history of the Museum, donations from collectors such as Edgar and Bernice Chrysler Garbish, Emile Wolf, Goldsborough Serpell, Erwin and Adrianne Joseph and the family of Joel  Cooper have dramatically enriched the Museum’s collection. Members of the Mowbray Arch Society have contributed great works to the Chrysler, and the Norfolk Society of Arts remains active to this day. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.chrysler.org