A little bit of everything

Seeing the same paintings day after day for years could get boring, but for Christine Montgomery, repetition is a way to catalog the hundreds of art pieces housed in the State Historical Society of Missouri.

Montgomery, a photograph specialist for the society, used her familiarity with the society’s permanent collection to pull pieces she liked for “Contemporary Works from the Collection,” an exhibit on display in the society’s main gallery through Sept. 23.

In the storeroom, Montgomery would often come across a piece she wanted to display but couldn’t find a place for in other exhibits.

“I would see something and think ‘Oh! That would look good in the gallery,’” she said.

The exhibit, which shows pieces produced mostly during the mid- to late 20th century, features only Missouri artists. “A lot of our contemporary collection is donated by the artists,” Montgomery said.

“I think it has to do with being an artist in Missouri, where there’s such a rich history in art that people want to be a part of.”

Because the gallery usually features one body of work by a single artist, a lot of single pieces get left out of its exhibits.

What’s more, the collection isn’t limited to one medium or style. It features woodcut prints, pen and ink drawings, serigraphs, oil pastels, watercolors and charcoals. While some works are abstract, others, like the portrait by Lee Wallas called “Window No. 3,” show more realistic images. Though the oldest known piece, the brightly colored woodcut print “Mississippi Bluffs,” was made in 1954, Montgomery believes some of the others missing dates are even older. The most recent piece is Philip Slein’s “Listing,” an oil on canvas piece, which was painted in 1996.

Much of the show features local artists like Notley Hawkins, a Columbia resident, who has one painting in the exhibit. His photographs will also be shown at the society in 2007. Hawkins, 42, said it’s an honor to be part of the show.

“I’m younger than a lot of the other artists, and lot of them are no longer living and are really well-known,” he said.

Hawkins, who has a master’s degree in art from MU, now focuses primarily on photography. “Painting is a lot of hard work, and you have to make time for it,” he said. “The fact that I do have a day job doesn’t let me make time to paint, so I lost interest.”

Despite this waning interest, he was glad to donate the painting, and plans on giving more to the society in the future. “I donated the painting 15 years ago when Sid Larson was still there,” Hawkins said. “He was a teacher of mine at Columbia College.” Larson, who worked at the society for 40 years, was also a close friend of Thomas Hart Benton, whose “Tom Sawyer” illustrations are also being featured at the exhibit.

Montgomery thinks the two exhibits make good counterparts. Arranged in chronological order, the Benton illustrations tell a detailed visual story, she explains.

“At first, I wasn’t going to arrange the contemporary paintings in chronological order, but they look disjointed any other way. It’s indicative of what was going on in painting during that time and ends up being a story, too.”