April 1992: The Eight and Their Circle: Works on Paper, an exhibition drawn from The Brooklyn Museum’s rich holdings of prints, drawings, watercolors, and pastels, will accompany the major paintings exhibition Painters of a New Century: The Eight, both on view at The Brooklyn Museum from June 26 to September 21, 1992. The exhibition includes 52 works by seven members of The Eight and such associates as George Bellows and Jerome Myers.
The Eight were a progressive group of painters, which included Arthur B. Davies, William Glackens, Robert Henri, Ernest Lawson, George Luks, Maurice Prendergast, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan, whose controversial New York exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries in 1908 changed the course of modern American art. Many of the group worked as newspaper and magazine illustrators, responsible for recording contemporary life in quick sketches executed on the scene. Works on paper not only make up a large portion of the artists’ work but also often reveal the artists’ greatest technical experimentation. As in his paintings, each artist combined in his drawings and prints an individual view of urban American life and the European modernist aesthetic.
Works on view will include Everett Shinn’s Winter on 21st Street (1922), John Sloan’s Bandits’ Cave (1920), Arthur B. Davies’s Moonlight on the Grassy Bank (1920), and George Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s (1917), among others.
The exhibition was organized by Karyn Zieve, Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1989 - 1994. 01-06/1992, 086-87.
