Minnesota Marine Art Museum goes modern with its latest acquisitions

Above: Giorgio de Chirico's "Cavallo Fuggente" (1938) is one of four new acquisitions at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum.

The Minnesota Marine Art Museum and its collecting partners Bob Kierlin and Mary Burrichter unveiled four new paintings last weekend at the riverfront museum in Winona.

The pieces, by modern artists Giorgio de Chirico, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde and Edward Mitchel Bannister, are all on long-term loan to the museum from Kierlin and Burrichter.

The watery paintings of de Chirico and Bannister are on view now, but visitors will have to wait until an as-of-yet unnamed exhibition in fall 2020 to catch the Pechstein and Nolde works.

"We are excited to see the collection grow," said MMAM executive director Nicole Chamberlain-Dupree in a statement. "As the range and diversity of the artworks grow, we can offer something for everyone to make a personal connection to."

The four paintings come from a broad range of backgrounds. The grand painting "Cavallo Fuggente" (1938), by Greek-born Italian painter de Chirico, portrays a racing white horse with a yellow sheet falling from its back, racing forward against a backdrop of rippling blue water, murky grayish skies and a three-columned building.

The other three works focus more on water, which is the requirement for any art entering the collection. (The museum's tagline is "Great art inspired by water.") German-Danish painter Nolde's 1910 work "Autumn Sea XII (Blue Water, Orange Clouds) is an oil on jute painting portraying exactly that. German Expressionist Pechstein's 1922 "Great Mill Ditch Bridge" captures a tilted scene of a bridge crossing over a river with bright red buildings in the background. Inspired by Vincent Van Gogh, Pechstein developed an interest in Expressionism.

"Rhode Island Afternoon" (1898), by African-Canadian-American artist Bannister, is a pastoral scene depicting people sitting in a field while two cows wander by a creek. Bannister was determined to become an artist despite intense racial discrimination during his lifetime. After reading an article in the New York Herald in 1867 that bashed the ability of black artists to make meaningful work, he committed even harder to his career, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 1867 he became the first African-American artist to win first prize at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. He made a life for himself in Providence, R.I., and died in 1901 while attending a prayer meeting at his church.

This is the 23rd unveiling of new acquisitions by the museum since it opened in 2006. One previous unveiling revealed works by Edward Hopper, Toulouse-Lautrec and Josepfh Stella, and another showed off the prized acquisition of artist Emanuel Leutze's famous American historical painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware."

Located on the banks of the Mississippi in southeastern Minnesota, the museum currently holds more than 1,000 works of art, including artworks by Picasso, Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Manet and O'Keeffe. Winona is a city of about 27,000 people that grew through its railroad and steamboat industries. Before non-Natives arrived in 1851, Winona was originally named Keoxa, home to a Mdewakanton band of eastern Sioux.

Above: Emil Nolde, "Autumn Sea XII (Blue Water, Orange Clouds)," 1910. Oil on jute.

Above: Edward Mitchel Bannister, "Rhode Island Afternoon," 1898. Oil on canvas.

Above: Max Pechstein, "Great Mill Ditch Bridge," 1922. Oil on canvas.