Art News

The Georgia Museum of Art Presents a Dale Nichols Retrospective

artwork: Dale Nichols - "The Last Load", 1966 - Oil on canvas - 24" x 29 3/4" - Collection of the Arkansas Art Center Foundation. On view at the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, in "Dale Nichols: Transcending Regionalism" through February 27th 2012.


Athens, Georgia.- The Georgia Museum of Art is proud to present “Dale Nichols: Transcending Regionalism” on view through February 27th 2012. Organized by the Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art in David City, Nebraska, this retrospective exhibition presents Nebraska native Dale Nichols’ nostalgic images of rural America. Paintings dating from 1935 to 1972 establish Nichols not only as a regionalist in the company of such great artists as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, but one who transcended the confines of the genre to achieve universal success. This exhibition represents a recollection of Nichols’ years on the farm in Nebraska but manifests those memories in a variety of styles and places. Nichols held firm to his midwestern roots while he traveled the world in search of adventure and truth. Imbued with the inherent problems of isolation, poverty and inequality within American society, Nichols’ art references and upholds an American agrarian ideal.

Dale Nichols (1904–1995), also published under his full name, Dale William Nichols, was an American visual artist whose works included illustrations, paintings, lithographs, and wood carvings. He is best known for his work as a rural landscape painter. Nichols’ work is often classified with that of other regional American landscape artists, including Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. Nichols was born on July 13, 1904 in the small town of David City, Nebraska, and began his career as an artist while studying at The Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago. He spent the greater part of the 1920s and 1930s in Chicago, later becoming the Carnegie Professor in Art at the University of Illinois. Nichols would then take a position in 1943 as the Art Editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Upon leaving his post at Britannica, Nichols spent the remainder of his life traveling, splitting the majority of his time between Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alaska, and Guatemala.

artwork: Dale Nichols - "Big City News", 1935 - Oil on canvas - 30" x 40" - Private collection. At the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, in "Dale Nichols" until February 27th 2012.

He died in Sedona, Arizona on October 19, 1995, at age 91. In September 1939, Nichols’ was featured in Time Magazine. Said one Time reviewer in that issue, “Subjects he prefers are the prairie landscapes of his youth, usually snowed under. These famed smooth snow effects Artist Nichols gets by laying on his oils in a thin film with watercolor brushes.” More recently, his art was published on postcards sold by the United States Postal Service in 1995. Three of Nichols’ paintings are now listed in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Museum of Nebraska Art features four of his large oil paintings, along with four lithographs, and four sketches.

The Georgia Museum of Art, on the campus of the University of Georgia, in Athens, is both an academic museum and, since 1982, the official art museum of the state of Georgia. The permanent collection consists of American paintings, primarily 19th- and 20th-century; American, European and Asian works on paper; the Samuel H. Kress Study Collection of Italian Renaissance paintings; and growing collections of southern decorative arts and Asian art. From the time it was opened to the public in 1948 in the basement of an old library on the university’s historic North Campus, the museum has grown consistently both in the size of its collection and in the size of its facilities. Today the museum occupies a contemporary building in the Performing and Visual Arts Complex on the university’s burgeoning east campus. There, 79,000 square feet house more than 8,000 objects in the museum’s permanent collection—a dramatic leap from the core of 100 paintings donated by the museum’s founder, Alfred Heber Holbrook.Much of the museum’s collection of American paintings was donated by Holbrook in memory of his first wife, Eva Underhill Holbrook. Included in this collection are works by such luminaries as Frank Weston Benson, William Merritt Chase, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Jacob Lawrence and Theodore Robinson. Over the years it has been impossible to separate the history of the museum from the story of Holbrook’s generosity.

artwork: Dale Nichols - "Cardboard Mountains", 1944 - Oil on canvas - 26" x 40" - Private collection. On view at the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, in "Dale Nichols: Transcending Regionalism"

Numerous museum exhibitions have traveled to national and international venues. When “Adriaen van Ostade: Etchings of Peasant Life in Holland’s Golden Age” was exhibited at the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam, the catalogue quickly sold out, becoming a text for the study of 17th-century Dutch printmaking in classrooms across the United States. This exhibition also reflected the importance of prints and drawings in the programming of the museum, which houses one of the finest collections of works on paper in the Southeast. The collection includes Old Master prints, Parisian prints of the 1890s and American prints and drawings of the early 20th century. Exhibitions from international museums such as the National Gallery of Scotland, the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, the Rembrandt House and the San Carlos National Museum in Mexico City have all been displayed in the galleries of the museum over the past decade. The museum also offers traveling exhibitions formed from its permanent collection to other museums and art institutes around Georgia and the Southeast. Since the early 1970s the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art, a support group of more than 1,200 members, have hosted fundraisers and openings for exhibitions and have sponsored exhibitions and educational programs at the museum. In April 1996, the Georgia Museum of Art opened a new building on the East Campus of the university as part of the Performing and Visual Arts Complex, which also includes the School of Music, the Performing Arts Center, and, now, the Lamar Dodd School of Art. The new building allowed for larger and more ambitious exhibitions and a new emphasis on professional practices, trends that will continue to hold true in 2011 and beyond. The museum has become a leader, in particular, among university museums, and its educational programs have been the most tangible example of the balance it strives to achieve among state, local, and university audiences as it seeks to fulfill its trifold mission of teaching, research, and service. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.georgiamuseum.org