Painting in Germany.(CURRENT and coming)

The influence of Germans on American art during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the focus of two exhibitions currently on view at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. The larger of the two, The Munich Secession and America, organized to commemorate the anniversary of the Munich Secession exhibitions in New York and Chicago in 1909, celebrates the key artistic innovations of the group: symbolism, German impressionism, and Jugendstil. Among the highlights are several works that were shown at the Secession's inaugural exhibition in Munich in 1893, all exhibited in galleries at the Frye that have been transformed to mirror the original installation--spare, with large expanses of white wall space between artworks and a golden frieze designed by the symbolist Franz von Stuck--which revolutionized the presentation of art in Europe and the United States.

The smaller companion exhibition, Transatlantic: American Artists in Germany, focuses on works by American painters such as Albert Bierstadt, William Merritt Chase, Frank Duveneck, George Luks, and John Twachtman who, for various reasons, bucked the popular nineteenth-century trend of studying in Paris in favor of the German art academies. For the German-born Bierstadt, who came to the United States at ...