Saint Vincent College gallery to display 88 newly acquired paintings

Saint Vincent College will display a recent bequest of 88 paintings in its entirety in “Impressionist Legacies: The Michael and Aimee Rusinko Kakos Collection,” opening Sept. 7 in the Verostko Center for the Arts on the Unity campus.

A public reception is planned for 5 to 7 p.m. that evening in the gallery on the second floor of the Dale P. Latimer Library.

The exhibition features a selection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings given to the college on behalf of longtime philanthropists Michael and Aimee Rusinko Kakos of Latrobe and Winter Park, Fla.

Included are 61 lesser-known artists who worked alongside those whose names are synonymous with Impressionism and the modernist styles that followed.

The collection principally includes works from the 1880s through the 1930s, collected by the couple during more than 40 years of living in London.

The artists’ names would have been more familiar to their European contemporaries than to Americans, said Andrew Julo, the Verostko Center director and curator of the Saint Vincent Art & Heritage Collections.

“Some of the artists represented in the Rusinko Kakos Collection had their work first publicly exhibited in America at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh” as part of the Carnegie International exhibition series, he noted.

Approachable art

“Impressionist Legacies” is organized into four broad categories.

”Agrarian Idylls” features artists “working principally outside, picking up on the impulse of moving out of cities like Paris and London to record landscapes and people working in the landscape who are dependent upon agriculture,” Julo said.

“Along Water’s Edge” includes works that contemplate different bodies of water, exploring the reflective qualities of water and the difficulty in capturing them.

“Labor and Leisure” reflects Amy Kakos’ interest in collecting images by women artists and works about women and children, Julo said.

“It explores the ways in which European society was changing in response to the industrial revolution — new social norms, people gathering in public spaces, the evolution of women in society in general,” he said.

The final section, “Post-War Plein Air,” is not organized around a theme but rather is time-based, featuring artwork made after World War II in the dominant styles of abstract expressionism, surrealism and minimalism.

“(The collection) is a wonderful thing for us and a wonderful thing for the people of Southwestern Pennsylvania,” Julo said. “For those out there who don’t necessarily think of themselves as, quote-unquote, art people, these are very attractive paintings, very approachable paintings.”

In conjunction with the exhibition, a free lecture titled, “Beyond Paris: British Impressionists in the Rusinko Kakos Collection,” is scheduled for 7 p.m. Sept. 14 in the college’s Fred Rogers Center.

Jennifer Thompson, head of the European Painting and Sculpture Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will discuss the pre-World War I exploration of Impressionism by several prominent American and British writers responding to the international dissemination and adoption of painting techniques identified with French artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Using illustrations from the Rusinko Kakos Collection, Thompson will explore the ways in which British painters embraced Impressionism’s interest in color, fleeting sensations, visible brushwork and modern subject matter.

”We have here in Westmoreland County a lot of plein air artists, so I’m very excited to have Doctor Thompson come from Philadelphia,” Julo said. “She talks about the tradition of outdoor painting in the Commonwealth, specifically in places like New Hope.

“We’re excited to be part of those great collections throughout the state that are interested in this period of painting.”

“Impressionist Legacies” will continue through Nov. 17. Center hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fridays when fall semester classes are in session.

For more information or to make reservations for the lecture, visit verostkocenter.org.