Last week, Class 4 students went on an exciting visit to the Hirschl & Adler Galleries, which house collections of American and European paintings and decorative arts. Elizabeth Feld Herzberg, a Chapin alumna (Class of ’92) and Managing Director of the gallery, was thrilled to host the girls, who had the chance to see paintings in the closed galleries, discuss the artwork throughout and take part in a rousing scavenger hunt.
The difference between a painting in a gallery and a photograph in your possession is that you may only see that painting once, Debra G. Wieder, Associate Director of the Hirschl and Adler told a group. The girls were congregated in a back room of the gallery and reviewing several paintings of girls throughout history. Ms. Wieder asked the girls to guess which painting was the oldest and the most valuable. While a portrait by Jonathan Singleton Copley was the oldest in the room—painted anywhere from 1763-1766—the girls were astonished to find out that, at over a half million, a painting by the obscure artist, Jonathan Budington, was worth the most.
Ms. Wieder described the appraisal process, which involves looking at the artwork’s rarity, size and visual appeal. When considering buying a painting, she said, one should focus primarily on whether they love the art, and whether it is in good condition. To demonstrate how art appraisers go about determining the value of the artwork, Ms. Wieder pulled out a black light to reveal where restorers had touched up a piece. The girls gasped when the light revealed that time had worn some lines in the face of one of the female subjects.
In another room, the girls viewed paintings by Harold Reddicliffe and then got to work on some crayon drawings of their own. Another small group was in the next room busily completing a scavenger hunt, based on a sheet of tasks that Ms. Feld Herzberg had prepared. “Portrait. Still life,” one girl said confidently of one of the paintings. “Landscape,” another girl added about another painting. Ms. Feld Herzberg discussed the differences between these classifications when the girls returned from their art hunt. “There are no rules in painting,” she said. “You do what you want to do.”
The highlight of the girls’ experience at the gallery undoubtedly came from Larry Kagan’s “Steel and Shadow” exhibit, which featured steel, wall-hanging sculptures that created shadows of completely different objects, like a pipe, a chair, or an Apache helicopter. When their guide, associate gallery director Tom Parker, asked them to guess how the artist had managed to create these surprising images, one girl surmised, “He puts the steel at a certain distance from the wall.”
The piece that most captivated the girls from the steel exhibit was called “Coming and Going.” Once illuminated, what first looked like a jumble of small steel pieces revealed the image of a woman walking both away from and towards the viewer. “He was trying to stretch the bounds of art as we know it,” Mr. Parker said to the
girls. When the Class 4 girls returned to school, they took with them new ideas of how to think about art and create their own.
Click here to view more photos from the trip.