Childs Gallery. Established Collections. Betty Herbert: America s Wars. Volume 4 August 2010

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1 Childs Gallery Established 1937 Collections Volume 4 August 2010 Betty Herbert: America s Wars

2 Childs Gallery Established 1937 Fine American and European Paintings, Prints, Drawings, Watercolors and Sculpture Richard J. Baiano, President Stephanie V. Bond, Executive Vice President D. Roger Howlett, Senior Research Fellow 169 Newbury Street Boston, MA fax childsgallery.com We encourage you to phone or us to reserve your work of art. If you are from Massachusetts, a 6 1/4 % sales tax will be applied. A small shipping and handling fee, depending on package size, will be applied. Visa, MasterCard, and American Express are accepted. Prices are subject to change without notice. Works shipped on-approval may be returned within ten days of receipt. Firm orders have priority. All works returned must be as sent: prepaid and insured. All works in this catalogue are unconditionally guaranteed to be as described. Your bill of sale acts as your certificate of authenticity, and we will refund your money at any time if on good authority our description should be shown to vary from the work at the time that it was sold. To Receive Our E-Catalogues: In addition to the Print Annual, the Painting Annual, Childs Gallery Collections, and the Childs Gallery Bulletin, we offer a series of specialized e-catalogues. These -based announcements are produced as single artist catalogues after having acquired significant new additions to the artist s work, or pertain to specific subject matter such as marine, still life, portraits, etc. Please provide your address including an indication of the artists or subjects that interest you. We hope you will let us know how we can shape this set of catalogues to serve you better. You can also register for e-catalogues at childsgallery.com. cover Revolutionary War Series: George Washington and His Troops, x 24 inches Collections Betty Herbert: America s Wars Editor: Richard J. Baiano Assistant Editor: Stephanie V. Bond Staff: Katya Adair, Gina Canning, Kathryn Fields, John Hamilton, and Sally Norton Photograhy: Darren Stahlman darrenstahlmanphotography.com Catalogue Design: Carlos Ridruejo caridossa.com 2010 Bond Baiano LLC / Childs Gallery All Rights Reserved.

3 Collections Volume 4 Betty Herbert America s Wars gallery Exhibition August 15 - October 30, 2010 Betty Herbert: America s Wars Childs Gallery Established Newbury Street Boston, Massachusetts

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5 contents Introduction 7 Betty Herbert: America s Wars Revolutionary War Series 8 Civil War Series 11 World War I Series 12 World War II Series 14 World Trade Center Series 18 Iraq Series 20 list of Works 22 Collections Childs Gallery Collections is the Childs Gallery Collections is the latest publication in a tradition of more than seventy years of gallery publications. The Childs Gallery Bulletin (begun 1950), the Print Annual (begun 1976) and the Painting Annual (begun 1980) have been firmly established and are represented in almost every fine arts library in the country. As early as the mid-1940s, however, Childs Gallery presented a publication entitled Currier and Ives Prints: A Collection, which represented the carefully considered collection of a single owner with Charles D. Childs commentary that we cannot recall that a representative collection of these lithographs has been shown in Boston for many years. We continue to celebrate collections, collecting, and collectors as a pivotal axis of the art world with this fourth volume of Childs Gallery Collections: Betty Herbert: America s Wars. Childs Gallery has represented Betty Herbert since 2008, introducing her with a solo exhibition: A Medieval Tapestry: The Ancestral Quest of Betty Herbert. With special thanks to R. Peter Mooz, Virginia Beach, Virginia. left World Trade Center Series: Burning Towers, x 20 inches Signed lower right. Betty Herbert: America s Wars 5

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7 Betty Herbert: America s Wars Betty Herbert: America s Wars features works depicting soldiers and battlefields from Revolutionary times to presentday Iraq. Primarily self-taught, Herbert channels a war correspondent s on-scene intimacy in her expressionistic evocative paintings that capture the heart and heat of battle. Herbert draws inspiration from critical moments in America s history in this case war and national celebration and creates works of art that are highly personal interpretations of those events. The Historial de la Grande Guerre, France s World War I museum in Péronne, has few works of modern art in its permanent collection. But the oft-visited institution made an exception for Betty Herbert s visceral paintings and sculptures honoring the multinational troops who fought and died in the Great War. At the opening of Herbert s exhibition in 2008, museum curator Marie- Pascale Prévost Bault said of the then 79-year-old artist, The power of her work resides in the fact that she does not hide her subject behind style. With rapid strokes, she highlights the soldiers sacrifice, the battle s violence, the artillery fire, as if she had lived through them. And therein lies the magic of Herbert s highly personal oeuvre. The folk art portraits of war are intimate and affecting not through any first-hand experience, but because Herbert is so moved by the bravery, valor, and horrors of battle. Though each of her War Series has its own signature look and color palette, the little moments of tender humanity are consistent throughout. It was the pain of her husband s becoming seriously ill that led Herbert to first pick up a paintbrush at age 54 to give her life a renewed sense of purpose. A local teacher showed her how to work with oils, then she feverishly began to paint alone at home. Encouraged by the results, Herbert spent a month working alongside many talented artists at the respected Vermont Studio Center. Her final critique was a simple sentence: Just keep on painting, as her teachers feared academic training might discourage Herbert s spontaneity, raw emotion, and bold coloration, with little regard for conventional perspective or representation. Subjects were free thrown from my head without conscious awareness of what I was doing. Images appeared whenever I looked into the canvas as though already there and I simply revealed them gladly. After her husband s death, Herbert began what would become a series of paintings focusing on Americans at war. I have a real ability to feel empathy for people who are suffering. I wanted to do something to remind people of that, she says solemnly. Her first subject was World War I. Herbert s ancestors actually once owned a home on the site of the Historial de la Grande Guerre museum in France, where prophetically, her work would soon be on permanent display. I took a trip there. It was indescribably horrible what went on in the trenches - soldiers seeing their mates and unable to reach them, the moaning and yelling. Completely different in feeling is Herbert s exuberant treatment of the Revolutionary War, with many celebrated battles having been fought near her hometown of Norfolk, Virginia. I think there s more of a sense of playfulness in the Revolutionary War paintings because I knew we won, says the lifelong Southerner. It s been so glorious. We stood up to such a strong nation. In contrast World War I destroyed generations of the French and British. It took so much out of Europe, like pumping blood out of a corpse. And it set up the need of the Germans for World War II. But alongside the brilliantly hued canvases of epic Revolutionary battles are smaller moments, like Washington Slept Here (2002,) showing the General undressing near his makeshift cot. He slept in no real bed for six years, says Herbert. I tried to humanize Washington while he was vulnerable. Humanizing the unthinkable is what Herbert does best in her paintings of more recent conflagrations, such as 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once again, there are snapshots of normalcy amidst the horror, such as troops playing Baseball in the Desert (2005,) or an American soldier casually napping on Saddam s Sofa (2003) in the fallen dictator s abandoned palace. richard j. baiano left World War I Series: Gas Man, x 12 inches Betty Herbert: America s Wars 7

8 Revolutionary War Series 1 1 Battle of Great Bridge, Chesapeake, Virginia x 24 inches 8 Childs Gallery collections

9 2 2 George Washington and His Troops at Valley Forge, 2002 Oil on Linen 30 x 40 inches 3 Washington Slept Here x 20 inches 3 Betty Herbert: America s Wars 9

10 Revolutionary War Series 4 4 The Battle of Sullivan s Island: Shelling by the British (Charleston, SC) x 40 inches 5 French and English Ships Off Yorktown, Virginia x 24 inches Signed lower right Childs Gallery collections

11 Civil War Series 6 6 Blue at Bay x 60 inches Signed lower right. Betty Herbert was honored with a solo exhibition: Deep Dreams of Peace War: Civil and Uncivil, July 8th 19th, 1997, the Rotunda of the Cannon House of Representatives Office Building, Washington, D.C. The exhibition included works from the Crusades, the One Hundred Years War, the American Civil War, World War I and World War II. Herbert says that these paintings, much like the well-detailed records kept from various wars, express the brutalities men and women have endured through a storyline of their own. Betty Herbert: America s Wars 11

12 World War I Series 7 7 Over the Top II x 24 inches Signed lower right. Exhibited Deep Dreams of Peace War: Civil and Uncivil, July 8th 19th, 1997 at the Rotunda of the Cannon House of Representatives Office Building in Washington, D.C. 8 8 Americans at Choley, France x 24 inches Signed lower right. Exhibited Deep Dreams of Peace War: Civil and Uncivil, July 8th 19th, 1997 at the Rotunda of the Cannon House of Representatives Office Building in Washington, D.C. 12 Childs Gallery collections

13 9 9 The Gallipoli Campaign, An Attempt to Capture Constantinople, Turkey x 24 inches Signed lower right Exhibited Deep Dreams of Peace War: Civil and Uncivil, July 8th 19th, 1997 at the Rotunda of the Cannon House of Representatives Office Building in Washington, D.C. Betty Herbert was honored in an exhibition of 31 of her works on the First World War: Betty Herbert, un regard américain sur la Grande Guerre, February 7 April 27, 2008 at the Historial de la Grand Guerre, Péronne, France. The Conseil Artistique des Musées Nationaux, the agency that oversees the national museums in France, has included the exhibited works as part of the official French collections. Betty Herbert: America s Wars 13

14 World War II Series King George and Queen Elizabeth in London during the Blitz x 20 inches Signed lower right The Royal Air Force x 16 inches Ticonderoga Hellcat x 10 inches Signed lower right. 14 Childs Gallery collections

15 13 13 USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor x 24 inches Signed lower right. 14 Sea Power, the Pacific Fleet Steams to Japan x 40 inches Signed lower right. 14 Betty Herbert: America s Wars 15

16 World War II Series The Dunkirk Evacuation, The Allies versus Germany x 40 inches 16 Moscow Counterattack x 40 inches Childs Gallery collections

17 17 17 D-Day Americans x 20 inches 18 D-Day British x 20 inches Signed lower right. 18 Betty Herbert: America s Wars 17

18 World Trade Center Series Childs Gallery collections

19 20 19 First Hit x 40 inches. 20 Collapsing Buildings x 40 inches 21 Night Excavation x 40 inches 21 Betty Herbert: America s Wars 19

20 Iraq Series 22 Shock and Awe I x 24 inches Road to Baghdad x 20 inches Saddam s Sofa x 10 inches Signed lower right Childs Gallery collections

21 25 Iraq Explosions x 24 inches 26 Skittles x 24 inches Signed lower left Oil Burn x 10 inches Signed lower left 27 Betty Herbert: America s Wars 21

22 Title Image Page Retail Iraq Series: Baseball in the Desert Back cover $3,500 list of works Iraq Series: Iraq Explosions $8,000 Iraq Series: Oil Burn $3,200 Iraq Series: Road to Baghdad $6,500 Iraq Series: Saddam s Sofa $3,200 All available works are listed in title order. Works illustrated in this catalogue include an image number and page number. Iraq Series: Shock and Awe I $8,000 Iraq Series: Skittles $7,500 Revolutionary War Series: Battle of Great Bridge, Chesapeake, Virginia 1 8 $8,000 Revolutionary War Series: Blue at Bay 6 11 $35,000 Revolutionary War Series: French and English Ships Off Yorktown, Virginia 5 10 $8,000 Revolutionary War Series: George Washington and His Troops Front cover $9,500 Revolutionary War Series: George Washington and His Troops at Valley Forge 2 9 $15,000 Revolutionary War Series: The Battle of Sullivan s Island: Shelling by the British (Charleston, SC) 4 10 $12,500 Revolutionary War Series: Washington Slept Here 3 9 $6,000 World Trade Center Series: Burning Towers 4 $8,000 World Trade Center Series: Collapsing Buildings $18,000 World Trade Center Series: First Hit $18, World War III Series: Afghan Rebels x 10 inches World Trade Center Series: Night Excavation $18,000 World Trade Center Series: Third Month from World Trade Center Ground Zero Inside back cover $18,000 World War I Series: Americans at Choley, France 8 12 $8,000 World War I Series: Gas Man 6 $3,200 World War I Series: Over the Top II 7 12 $8,000 World War I Series: The Gallipoli Campaign 9 13 $8,000 World War II Series: D-Day Americans $6,500 World War II Series: D-Day British $6,000 World War II Series: King George and Queen Elizabeth in London during the Blitz $6,500 World War II Series: Moscow Counterattack $12,500 World War II Series: Sea Power, the Pacific Fleet Steams to Japan $12,500 World War II Series: The Dunkirk Evacuation $15,000 World War II Series: The Royal Air Force $3,800 World War II Series: Ticonderoga Hellcat $3,000 World War II Series: USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor $8,500 World War III Series: Afghan Rebels $3, Childs Gallery collections

23 Betty Herbert American (born 1929) World Trade Center Series: Third Month from World Trade Center Ground Zero, x 40 inches Childs Gallery Established 1937 Fine American and European Paintings Prints, Drawings, Watercolors and Sculpture 169 Newbury Street, Boston, Massachusetts info@childsgallery.com childsgallery.com

24 Betty Herbert American (born 1929) Iraq Series: Baseball in the Desert, x 12 inches Childs Gallery Established 1937 Fine American and European Paintings Prints, Drawings, Watercolors and Sculpture 169 Newbury Street, Boston, Massachusetts info@childsgallery.com childsgallery.com