The Heckscher Museum of Art’s collection spans 500 years with particular emphasis on art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. American landscape painting and work by Long Island artists, past and present, are particular strengths, as is American and European modernism.
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Leaper
Don Perlis began his career in the late 1960s after studying at the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts in New York, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Most artists at the time worked in abstract styles, particularly Abstract Expressionism, but a group of artists, including Perlis, began working in a more traditional realist mode recognized by The Whitney Museum of Art in 1970 in an exhibition titled 22 Realists. The artist’s early work focused on the nude, but he soon began creating large-scale, multi-figure narratives that reflected his traditional education in their dramatic perspectives and complex compositions.
A native New Yorker, Perlis explored the “urban chaos” he experienced while living in the City in his work of the 1980s. His narratives are observations on the moral decay and social malaise of contemporary urban life, often focusing on threats such as lawlessness, racial strife, and homelessness. In Leaper, the artist captures a scene in a subway station as a rider leaps over the turnstile onto the platform while passengers look on seemingly unconcerned. Their reaction demonstrates the apathetic attitude of city dwellers who were accustomed to a certain level of disorder and disregard for the law. By the 1990s, the City was changing and so was Perlis’ style, transitioning to a less threatening, more personal world, often depicting scenes from literature and theater.