Gift from The Alex Katz Foundation

Since 2010, the Alex Katz Foundation has donated more than fifty artworks to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. These generous gifts are part of a larger effort by the celebrated New York artist to support art museums in Maine and elsewhere. Having first spent time in Maine in 1949 when he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Katz purchased a home in Lincolnville several years later and has spent a part of every summer there. While some of these donated works are by Katz, many are by other artists whom he has known or long admired.

The Foundation has focused its philanthropy at Bowdoin on growing the Museum’s collection of artworks from the 20th and 21st centuries. In December the Foundation formalized its latest donation: the painting L’arc-en-ciel, La roulotte (or “The Rainbow, The Caravan”) by the French post-impressionist Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), and the drawing Hockende Fränzi (or “Squatting Fränzi”) by the German expressionist Ernst Kirchner (1880–1938). Neither artist was previously represented at the Museum, and this gift adds much to its collection of early twentieth century modernist artworks.

Bonnard’s L’arc-en-ciel, La roulotte was created around 1909 and exemplifies the artist’s reputation as a brilliant colorist and landscapist. One of the founding members of Les Nabis, a group of avant-garde painters who routinely added symbolism and spiritual metaphors to their representation of the natural world, Bonnard was a leading figure in Parisian art circles at the beginning of the twentieth century. Scholars often regard his work as an important link between late nineteenth-century French Impressionism and the advent of new modernist art movements at the start of the new century, including Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism. This painting comes from the moment when Bonnard began making lengthy stays in Saint-Tropez, in the south of France. Measuring 15 by 19 inches, it includes a horse-drawn caravan on a rural road with a colorful rainbow in the background.

Whereas Bonnard’s oil painting derives much of its power from the artist’s skillful use of exuberant colors, Kirchner’s drawing is equally impactful, though for a different reason. The spareness of Kirchner’s chalk lines and the informality of his female subject’s pose give this drawing its own unique force. Drawn in 1910, during the same period as Bonnard’s painting, and measuring 16 1/2 by 11 1/2 inches, Hockende Fränzi epitomizes the artist’s rejection of traditional academic styles. Born in Bavaria, Kirchner helped to establish Die Brücke or “The Bridge,” an artists’ group now famous for introducing new artistic styles and subjects in Germany. Two decades later, the Nazis branded Kirchner and others as “degenerate” artists and ordered the destruction of many of their artworks.

The Museum is tremendously grateful to Alex Katz and his colleagues at the Alex Katz Foundation for this wonderful donation. We look forward to placing these two works on view sometime soon.

Frank H. Goodyear
Co-Director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Illustration: Hockende Fränzi, 1910, chalk on vellum by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, German, 1880–1938. Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Gift of the Alex Katz Foundation. 2023.59.2