Director Kinney Frelinghuysen presented at the massive Architecture Boston Expo (ABX) last week on the Future of the Modern Past at Landmark Houses, one of three case studies. Our mission finds strength in numbers!
"Finding the right person to install your new tile floor can be difficult. Finding the right person to install your new leather floor? Nearly impossible. It was just one of the many challenged faced by Kinney Frelinghuysen, director of the Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio, when the museum's trustees decided it was time to replace the leather living room floor" writes Jennifer Huberdeau.Read the full article here.--and her companion article here describing the gifts made from repurposed leather tiles.
Stacey Silkey will demonstrate her charcoal and acrylic technique this Friday, August 26th beginning at 11am. Come and join the fun! Free with any admission.
In June, Google will be capturing the galleries of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas using its Street View technology and has selected Frelinghuysen's Glass and Bottle, 1948, as one of the artworks to be photographed using its ultra high resolution Art Camera. The Google Arts & Culture project has partnered with over 1200 museums all over the world to expand global access to artwork. Crystal Bridges Museum aquired the 30"x40" oil on board painting in 2015.
Watch the sold out OLLI adult education class from this spring. Join in with your own sketchpad see how easy and fun it is! Click here for day one.
After years of solar radiation, moisture, and the freeze/thaw cycle, the outdoor fresco painted by George L.K. Morris in the 1940's needed to be conserved. Cassie Myers, a conservator specializing in murals, is re-attaching the loose stucco which adheres to the base wall and is "in painting" the losses on the mural surfaces. She is retaining the integrity of the artwork in this painstaking process.
Staff member Rachel joined in to remove the leather floor in the Living Room. We are brainstorming ideas for gift shop items recycled from the orginal floor with local leather artist Michael King. Stay tuned for updates and images of the replacement leather floor.
"The place is startling even when you know it's coming. Part of the surprise stems from the location: the old and self assured village of Lenox, Massachusetts--the Berkshire Mountains summer seat of Gilded Age worthies who built estates..." CLICK HERE to read the full article.by writer Gregory Cerio and photographs by John Hall.
Watch the sold out OLLI adult education class from last spring. Click here to enjoy day two!
Watch author Hugh Howard's sold out slide lecture from this summer. Click here for a front row seat!
You didn't miss curator, author and archivist Eugene R. Gaddis' slide lecture on the Modernist dynamo Chick Austin.
Click here to view the pictures of his idiosyncratic house operated by the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut and hear the story of one of Modernism's unsung heros.
"The airy studio that the artist, writer, and collector George L.K. Morris built in 1931 on his family's 46-acre estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, looked nothing like the mansion he grew up in", writes Wendy Goodman for Departures Magazine. Read the full article here.
Vintage 1930's travel films, taken by the Berkshires' most creative couple. Click here to read the rest of the fabulous article and slideshow by Hilary Reid.
Read Jennifer Huberdeau's article in her weekly series detailing the history of the Berkshire Cottages and how FMH&S came to be. Click here to read the interesting article.
Modern Times--Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio welcomes art lovers by Kate Abbott and images by Gregory Cherin. Click here to read the rest of the informative and enjoyable article!
The National Register is the official list of American cultural resources worthy of preservation. All properties, from every state, are evaluated according to uniform standards from the Secretary of the Interior and are determined to contribute to an understanding of the historical and cultural foundations of our nation. Thank you to the professional and thorough surveyors and researchers who worked on our admission. Especially Virginia Adams, who unearthed new historical information!
A 1943 oil and collage on Masonite titled "The Ring" was sold by a collector at Bonham's Auction House last week for $56,250, above its $30-50,000 estimate.
FMH&S has been awarded a $10,020 grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve part of the 16mm film collection taken by George L.K. Morris in the 1930's. The NFPF grants target rare films such as silent films and films of sites receiving little media coverage. This grant covers 3 films from a Far East 1934 trip by Morris visiting China,Japan,Cambodia, Indonesia and Hawaii capturing historical and culturally valuable sights of colonial, pre-WWII life. The grant will enable FMH&S to preserve films deteriorating from vinegar syndrome that were too fragile to digitize and view by creating film-film copies of these three films, the best practice in the industry.
Family membership is only $75 and individual membership $40 allowing you unlimited visits to your favorite oasis in the heart of Lenox. Enjoy the tours, painting demos, workshops, or just the tranquility of the 46 acres of forest trails, flower gardens,and groomed lawns and vistas.
Gifts start at $5 for a leather keychain, repurposed from the living room leather floor, silk scarves for $35 made in the USA from Morris, Frelinghuysen, Slobodkina & Reinhardt paintings pictured above. Notecards, painting repros,an opera CD and colorful coasters are available too for under $15. Call 413-637-1066 or email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. to order.
You didn't miss noted architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson's standing room only slide lecture this summer! Click here and enjoy.
View the article on InCollect.com, a website for collectors. Click here!
Guides Sarah and Mary Elisabeth model our 100% silk scarves back in stock after selling out! They are designed from a painting in the collection and made in USA.
Carole Owens, well-known author of Berkshire Cottages, writes about the "Berkshire Cottage antithesis" in the Berkshire Edge. Click here!
Join Wanda Corn, author and award winning Stanford professor, this Saturday at 3pm in the Studio for a conversation about American art. Light reception follows.
Adult education classes through OLLI (berkshireolli.org) begin April 29, led by Director Kinney Frelinghuysen.Click here to view last Spring's sold out sessions!
Art New England's current Special Museums issue features FMH&S in its Destination Berkshires article. The colorful magazine is chock full of fabulous art adventures in New England. Click here to read!
Here are some headers: "Amazing little gem.." An absolute must-see.." "A must-see for those interested in architecture.." "A Modernist's Paradise.." "Unique historic site.." "Facinating.." "Small & interesting.."
Enjoy this serene snow scene peeking at the rear of the House from the garden.
Thanks for a great season! We're taking Group Tour reservations for 2020 and busy finishing the repairs to the Dining Room.
A small 1942 oil and collage on board titled "Composition 1942" sold at Bonhams Auction in New York City for $77,500 in November. The work measures 16"x12".
This 1937 painting by Sophie Taeuber-Arp was lent from the FMH&S collection to the major retrospective of her work at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Switzerland and then to the Bielefeld Museum in Germany. She is regarded as a pioneer of Modernism and her image is on the 50 Swiss Franc note.
Watch the three minute clip highlighting the House and Studio. Click here to view!
LENOX --"Kinney Frelinghuysen and Madalena Holtzman share a bond that's a privilege and a burden. Both are heirs to artists' estates." Read the full article
Our guide Kerry is wearing the new 100% silk scarf replicated from a George L.K. Morris painting. They just arrived from San Francisco--Made in USA!
We are featured as one of eight hotspots on Bentley Motors ideal drive through New England. See the beautiful images by clicking this link.
A 1944 Suzy Frelinghuysen titled "Hommage A Juan Gris" sold at Christie's Auction House NY on May 22nd for $56,250 reaching its high estimate. The 20"x16" oil on board resembles the large Juan Gris that is featured in the FMHS collection.
Reynolda House in North Carolina is exhibiting Morris' Indian Composition #8 in their Reynolda Moderns show until June 1.Each painting has a one minute video interpreting it.
A 1937 oil on canvas entitled “Alaska” by George L.K. Morris sold for $19,000, more than double the estimate at Clarke Auction Gallery March 16th. It features the interesting quality of a double sided canvas in which the verso abstract painting is protected by plexi.
Morris was an outspoken and important actor in the development and preservation of abstract art as a respected artform at the start of the modern movement. In 1937, his art magazine Plastique served as a platform for his addressing the critics of the new artists in the scope of art history. He eloquently defended
You didn't miss photographer Geoffrey Gross' Tomorrow's Houses:New England Modernism
Click below!
Kinney Frelinghuysen of the Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio makes an appeal to state legislators at the Berkshire Museum during a 'listening tour' on art, culture and tourism. Read the full article
"Looking at abstract art can feel like drifting at sea, without a recognizable object, landscape or figure to cling to.
The Frelinghuysen Morris House gives landmarks.
George L.K. Morris was the child of a wealthy New England family, and Suzy Frelinghuysen was a high-society girl talented enough to sing with the New York City Opera.
And they were both talented artists -- members of the American Abstract Art movement who championed the cause of Cubism long after its heyday.
In their house and studio, Kinney Frelinghuysen, Suzy's nephew and curator of the museum,
Tour the house and experience Exploring Shapes which views the role shapes play in the creation of modern art. Simple visual exercises on the tour shift the visitor away from verbal tendencies to discover the artistic language in the paintings.
A small painting by the late George L.K. Morris was sold for $9,375 at Doyle NY Auction Galleries on May 8th, double the price it fetched 10 years earlier at Christie's and double its pre-sale estimate. Titled, "Spatial Perspectives 1953", the oil on canvas measures 16x13 inches and features Morris' interest in surface rotational planes. Morris' auction record of $169,000 was set in May 2008.
La Montagne, the 4500 pound monumental cement sculpture by Gaston Lachaise,was successfully moved indoors to prevent further deterioration. She has resided in a wooded grove on the grounds since her 1934 commission by George L.K. Morris.The approximately 4'x8' reclining woman was placed on 6 cement posts, six feet high.
La Montagne is the culmination of a series begun in 1913 by Lachaise in New York. The work represents at once a landscape and the figure of Isabel Dutaud Nagle, the artist's muse, model and eventual wife. Lachaise envisioned a piece that was "great and solemn." "You are the Goddess I seek to express in all my work," he wrote to her in 1915-16.
This veritable Mother Earth, mature and abstracted, looking East to the rising sun, offers a rewarding contemplation for people in motion.
E. E. Cummings once likened Lachaise's work to a "slow arrow of beauty vigorously expressing something of a civilization of which speed seems to be the god." Lincoln Kirstein, a friend of the artist's and a founder of the School of American Ballet, described La Montagne as "the balance of breathing sumptuousness, a mountain raised into air, earth sharing the shape of clouds." (MoMA Retrospective, 1935).
"Richmond Mountain Road twists through dense forest that envelopes it like a drooping canopy. As you drive its undulating path in the Berkshires, the whirl of thickly entangled trees and branches whiz by as if fragmented lines in an abstract painting", writes Albany Times-Union.
A 1957 painting by the late George L.K. Morris was sold for $104,500 at Christie’s Auction House, New York, in their “Important American Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture” sale May 20th. The price was well above Christie’s estimate of $50-70,000 but still below Morris’ auction record of $169,000 reached last May at Sotheby’s Auction House.
Titled, “Labyrinth”; the painting measures 49x36 inches. It was sold by The Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey to benefit their Acquisition Endowment fund. The museum had acquired it directly from the artist in 1974, the year before his death.
Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio Director Kinney Frelinghuysen commented that "it is unfortunate for such a beautiful painting to be removed from public view" as it will now go into a private collection.
Morris’ paintings, sculptures, frescoes and archives and those of his wife Suzy Frelinghuysen, can be viewed at the Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio in Lenox, MA in their International-style house, along with their collection of Master Cubist paintings. The house-museum is opens June 25 for hourly guided tours Thursday-Sunday.
You didn't miss the enriching lectures at FMH&S. Click below to experience the first lecture by Clark Art History Professor, Kristina Wilson.
Click on the vimeo icon to view the other four lectures.
Using newly restored and edited films from Morris' 1934 Far Eastern voyage and a selection of Morris' late work, viewers are encouraged to make plausible connections between the paintings and films, and to arrive at possibly one avenue of interpretation.
Click on the vimeo icon to view more films.