Renee Conforte
McKee (class of '62) and her husband David are well known in the
New York art world. Their gallery features work by some of the
finest modern and contemporary artists, and since the McKees opened
their doors 30 years ago, collectors from all over the world have
crossed their threshold. For more than two decades, the McKees
have kept the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum clearly in their
sight, not only by giving important works of art to the collection,
but also by offering internships and employment to students and
young alumnae setting out on art careers. Because
of the McKees' generosity, the museum's collection has grown incrementally
since 1983 to include paintings by Philip Guston, Katherine Porter,
Jake Berthot, Sean Scully, and Harvey Quaytman. The holdings in
modern works on paper have also increased through their donations
of drawings by Robert Motherwell and Stuart Diamond, as well as
prints by Pablo Picasso, Ad Reinhardt, and Vija Celmins (who also
participated in a Mount Holyoke printmaking workshop in 1987). The year
2003 brought with it yet another significant contribution from
the McKees-thirteen paintings, prints, drawings and photographs
which will substantially enrich the museum's teaching capabilities.
Among them are La Mariée, a 1934 aquatint and etching
by Jacques Villon and Marcel Duchamp which echoes the composition
of one of Duchamp's most renowned works, The Bride Stripped
Bare by her Batchelors, Even (1913).
Villon,
born Gaston Duchamp, was the eldest of three brothers who became
major 20th-century artists, including Raymond Duchamp-Villon and
Marcel Duchamp. Having begun to learn engraving at age sixteen,
Villon became one of the most important printmakers of the modern
era. The prominent British artist Stanley Hayter once called him
"the father of modern print-making" with respect to
his innovative cubist engravings of the second decade of the 20th
century. The newly-acquired aquatint also shows Villon's important
contributions to this revived medium, at the same time reproducing
Duchamp's famous image of the dynamic movement of a figure in
space. The McKees
have long been devotees of Philip Guston, one of the modern masters
whom they represent in their Fifth Avenue gallery. In 1983, the
first works by Guston entered the museum's collection, thanks
to their gift of two large lithographs which represent the radical
shift in Guston's style in the late 1960s, from muted, nearly
monochromatic abstract compositions to an almost grotesque cartoonlike
manner influenced by Pop Art. In the artist's purposefully unsettling
narrative works of his later career, he depicted everyday elements
like shoes, cigarettes, and bottles as well as bewhiskered, one-eyed
heads and Ku Klux Klan figures. Also in the 1960s, he painted
a series of small panels that he hung on the walls of his Woodstock,
New York, studio, each with brightly colored elements of what
came to be his new pictorial alphabet. The McKees, agents for
Guston's estate, helped shepherd a gift of two of these, Untitled
(Pink Boot) and Pink Book, in the direction of the Mount Holyoke
College Art Museum in 1992. Additional works of art that came to the museum this year, thanks to Renee and David McKee, are a drawing by Jake Berthot, which joins three significant paintings by the artist; a series of six etchings by Katherine Porter; a painting on paper by Harvey Quaytman; and prints by James Rosenquist and Francisco Goya. A photographically-derived landscape with text by Annette Lemieux and an oil-on-offset composition by the expatriate Russian artist Leonid Lerman represent the first works by these artists to enter the collection.
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