INTRODUCTION
“Tell me the company you keep, …” the proverb says.
Exchanging ideas with mentors and peers—fellow students, friends, studio mates, travel companions, or collaborators—has always been a significant source of inspiration for artists. In the second half of the nineteenth century, painters such as Sanford Gifford, John Frederick Kensett, and Worthington Whittredge or watercolorists such as Winslow Homer and John La Farge developed deep and lasting friendships, not only interacting socially, but also going on sketching trips together. The relationship of others, like Arthur Wesley Dow and Alvin Langdon Coburn, was that of teacher and student. For some, who met in their youth, their encounter was formative, as was the case with William Merritt Chase and Frank Duveneck, who were fellow students at the Academy in Munich and embarked on a nine-month sojourn in Venice together. For others, who crossed paths later in life, it was transformative, as was the case with Maud Morgan, who began collaborating with Michael Silver at the age of ninety-one.
In the twentieth century, as art academies and formal movements gradually lost momentum and artists set out to explore their deeply personal aesthetic concerns and forge their distinct visual vocabularies, forming associations with fellow artists became even more important in the development of their practice and outlook. More recently, collaborative artists’ projects have emerged as a significant thread of contemporary art; portfolios such as Lee Friedlander and Jim Dine’s Photographs and Etchings and Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta’s Pietre/Foglie, for example, embody the interpretive possibilities of pairing the sensibilities of two artists working in different media or assuming different perspectives, yet exploring similar visual motifs. Several examples of works by creative pairs in the exhibition illustrate the range of relationships, from teacher/student to collaborators and from intellectual kinship to romantic liaisons. Regardless of the specific nature of these associations, the works in this exhibition—drawn from the Addison's rich permanent collection—are examined in the contextual framework of artistic inspiration, influence, and exchange.