collection Distinguished Folk Art Collection Coming to WAM
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his summer we were delighted to learn that longtime WAM supporters Barbara and David Krashes have gifted their distinguished collection of American folk art to the Worcester Art Museum. Carefully and lovingly gathered over six decades, the more than 40 works are remarkable for their cohesiveness, distinctiveness, and quality. Representing the most important and notable names in American folk art from the post-revolutionary period—including such artists as Sturtevant Hamblin, Edwin Plummer, Rufus Porter, and William Matthew Prior— this extraordinary gift places the Museum at the forefront of museums with such collections. After recognizing that many of the portrait painters they collected originated from or worked in Central Massachusetts, the Krashes began to understand the sensibility that develops between artists and a place. Thus, their collection of American folk art provides a unique opportunity to study art making and artistic styles typically perceived as “outside” the field of mainstream art. It reflects the larger social transformations taking place in the region at that time, such as economic expansion, immigration, and the emergence of a middle class. The Krashes began collecting in 1965, at a time when American folk art—a broad category encompassing everything from samplers to duck decoys, quilts and painted furniture, oil paintings and whirligigs—was thought unworthy of art historical attention. Newly married, the couple purchased an empty 18th-century farmhouse in Central Massachusetts. With limited funds to furnish their new home, the Krashes attended an auction and purchased an antique two-drawer maple blanket chest at an astonishingly low price. From that moment, the Krashes began their lifelong passion for collecting early Americana, attracted to
the strong forms, rich colors, and diverse textures of the works, as well as regional craftsmanship that operated outside of fine art schools “with little regard to the ultimate value of things.”1 Slowly, they developed a keen connoisseur’s eye by going to auctions and working with notable dealers and collectors of American folk art, such as Roger Bacon and Nina Fletcher Little. Learning through example, the Krashes surrounded themselves with objects of New England’s past, creating inviting interiors in their farmhouse through a kaleidoscope of color and texture. Trailblazers in the burgeoning field of Americana, the Krashes are alongside such 20th-century luminaries as Electra Havemeyer Webb, Clara Endicott Sears, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Henry Francis du Pont, and Malcolm Karolik, who established preeminent American folk art collections that now constitute the foundation of several museums. With no widely accepted criterion of what constituted folk art, these collectors followed their intuition in preserving what they felt was beautiful and extraordinary. For instance, Electra Havemeyer Webb, who would later found Shelburne Museum in Vermont, defied her family’s passion for French Impressionism to “collect something that nobody else was collecting.”2 In recognizing the value in objects often overlooked or discarded, these pioneers ushered in and helped form the loose parameters of the field of American folk art. The Krashes operated in these circles, quietly seeking out superb examples of early Americana and folk art from New England. Their collection of 20 paintings, 11 works on paper, five sculptures, four pieces of furniture, and one textile—with an emphasis on works made in post-revolutionary agrarian New England—serves as an excellent study of folk art collecting in the 20th century.
William Edmondson, Squirrel, early 20th century, limestone, Gift of David and Barbara Krashes The Krashes’s only departure from collecting folk art of New England was acquiring four freestanding animal sculptures— three birds and one squirrel—by William Edmondson (1874-1951). The son of freed enslaved people, Tennesseeborn Edmondson worked as a janitor, railroad and manual laborer until later in life, when he felt a spiritual call to begin stone carving. Using discarded limestone blocks and chisels from railroad spikes, he carved tombstones and eventually progressed to abstracted animals and figures.
The addition of the Krashes’ collection of American folk art to WAM is an exciting moment in the Museum’s history. We are honored to take over the stewardship of these works—cherished and cared for by David and Barbara for nearly their entire married life—and look forward to sharing them with future generations of WAM visitors. —Erin Corrales-Diaz, Ph.D., Assistant Curator of American Art 1 David Krashes, “Introduction,” in American Folk Art, Lovingly Collected, by Paul S. D’Ambrosio (Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum 2015), 11. 2
Town & Country 113 (1959): 98.
Opposite: William Matthew Prior, Eliza C. Allen, signed 1846, oil on board, Gift of David and Barbara Krashes
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