A modernist painting collection. (Current and Coming).(exhibit Living with Art: Early American Modernism from the Baker/Pisano Collection of the Heckscher Museum of Art)

The collection of American modernist paintings and works on paper formed by Ronald G. Pisano and D. Frederick Baker and donated over many years to the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, is a revealing and highly personal assemblage. It was formed by a pioneering art historian in concert with his partner, an inquisitive and knowledgeable amateur in the best sense of that word. Pisano, who died in 2000, spent much of his career as an art historian focusing on the works of William Merritt Chase and his students, many of whom, taking Chase's cue, were our country's first champions of modernism. In the early 1970s, when Pisano was mining pertinent documents, he was one of a select few who were rediscovering, reassessing, and purchasing works by these painters, while others played it safe by acquiring works by name-brand artists.

In 1975, only about three years after the collection was begun, Pisano and Baker made their first donation to the Heckscher Museum, demonstrating an early commitment to this institution and ensuring the preservation of these works of art. Over the years they donated nearly three hundred examples in a variety of mediums including sculpture, paintings, drawings, watercolors, and monotypes. The works range from nineteenth-century paintings by Chase and his contemporaries, among them, John Singer Sargent, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and Elihu Vedder, to examples by well-known modernists such as Charles Demuth, Arthur B. Carles, and Rockwell Kent, and their less well-known contemporaries, including George Biddie, Louis Bouche, and Konrad Cramer:

The Heckscher Museum is a fitting repository, for it was there that Pisano was awarded a research grant following his first ...