American landscape painting.(Current and coming)(Entitled Hudson River School Trilogy: A Focused Collection; Drawings from Dia; and Selections from the Permanent Collection)

Among the most American expressions of all the various movements in American art, works by Hudson River school landscape painters truly stand apart. While it was a landscape style practiced by many, each artist had his own interpretation of the majestic and unspoiled landscape, so that these works are rarely hackneyed or formulaic. An exhibition on view at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, until October 21, presents works by fourteen Hudson River school artists drawn from three distinguished collections. Entitled Hudson River School Trilogy: A Focused Collection; Drawings from Dia; and Selections from the Permanent Collection, it features thirty-seven paintings and drawings from three sources: the college's permanent collection (largely assembled by the Reverend Elias Lyman Magoon, who sold his collection to Matthew Vassar, founder of the college); the private collection of Maryann (Vassar class of 1955) and Alvin Friedman; and the Dia Art Foundation (largely put together by the late twentieth-century artist Dan Flavin).

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Thus, in three galleries the exhibition demonstrates how over the course of more than a century works by Hudson River school masters have appealed to a member of the clergy, a lawyer, and an avantgarde abstract artist. Magoon assembled a collection of more than thirty-eight hundred works in the 1850s and 1860s. In 1864 he sold his British and American holdings to Matthew Vassar, who installed them in one of the earliest college art galleries in the United States. Today more than three hundred paintings and works on paper comprise this part of the institution's collection.

Maryann and Alvin Friedman first became fascinated by American paintings at an exhibition held at Vassar in 1983. They determined that they wanted to form a ...