Rosemary Hornak

Last updated
Rosemary Hornak
Born (1951-02-03) February 3, 1951 (age 73)
Mount Clemens, Michigan, U.S.
Education College for Creative Studies
OccupationVisual artist

Art Collector

Philanthropist
Relatives Ian Hornak (brother)
Eric Ian Spoutz (son)

Rosemary Hornak (born February 3, 1951) is an American visual artist, known for her late twentieth-century contributions to American Folk Art; art collector; philanthropist; the sister of founding Photorealist and Hyperrealist artist, Ian Hornak; and the mother of art dealer and historian, Eric Ian Spoutz [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Contents

Early life, education and family

Hornak was born in Mount Clemens, Michigan on February 3, 1951, to Frank Hornak, a gentleman farmer, and formerly a member of the United States Coast Guard; and Rose Hornak (née, Vagich), a homemaker, and formerly the owner of a confectionery in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Both of Rosemary Hornak's parents immigrated to the United States from Slovakia as Nazi tensions arose in Europe in the years preceding World War II. Before her emigration, Rose Hornak, who was American born, was educated in Prague. [6]

Rosemary Hornak had two older siblings, Michael Hornak, and Ian Hornak. Ian Hornak later became a prominent visual artist, one of the founders of the Photorealist and Hyperrealist movements, and a member of the New York School. Rosemary Hornak learned to paint as a child by watching and working alongside her brother Ian at the family farm in Michigan. Ian Hornak later recalled during an interview with Patsy Southgate in The East Hampton Star an idyllic childhood with his sister and described her as his “best friend” in both childhood and adulthood. [6] Hornak graduated from College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan with a degree in Advertising Design in 1978.

Career

Following her brother, Ian Hornak's relocation to New York City in 1968, and his subsequent relocation to the artists colony in East Hampton, New York where he purchased a large home and studio, he and his life-partner, Julius Rosenthal Wolf brought Rosemary Hornak out to their homes in New York City and East Hampton where they introduced her to their milieu which included, Andy Warhol, Alex Katz, Lowell Nesbitt, Claes Oldenburg, Fairfield Porter, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Rosemary Hornak exhibited her artwork in group gallery exhibitions primarily in New York, and Michigan. In 1993, she earned her first New York solo exhibition at the historically prominent Clayton Liberatore Gallery where her work captured the attention of leading New York art critic and craft proponent, Rose Slivka. While Hornak had largely exhibited mostly traditionally rendered landscape and still life paintings up until that point, at her brother Ian Hornak's urging, she chose to debut a series of paintings and pastel drawings that were derived from her exposure to Neo-expressionism in New York and had been quietly created between her studio in Detroit and her brother's studio in East Hampton over a period of many years. Perhaps the most distinctive element of those artworks was the support that they were executed upon—-antique American mirror frames. Slivka wrote in The East Hampton Star, “...the artist paints a lush and magic world of omniscient narural forces, flowers, and birds. Her work is somewhat reminiscent of that of her brother, Ian Hornak, but with a looser softer, freer stroke, and a spiritual, otherworldly, devotional focus that is more connected with outsider art with a folk and religious character.” [5] Of Hornak's technique, Slivka observed, “Working in a variety of media, including acrylic, oil, pastel, watercolor, and ink, Ms. Hornak creates a world amplified with mysterious knowledge reflected in explosions of color. Her later works are painted on the mirror sections of old Art Nouveau and Moderne-style dressers. She removes the mirroring and paints on the wood backing, including the frames.” [5] Of Hornak's subject matter Slivka stated, “The parrot, it’s gamut of color and form exaggerated, is a favorite theme. The artist who lives in Michigan, and often visits the East End, has two parrots of her own. She learns about color, she says, from them.” [5] Slivka concluded, “In their recognition of spheres of knowledge apart from human understanding, Ms. Hornak’s paintings have an innocence, passion, and obsession of the folk artist…. With an educated knowledge of her tools and materials, Ms. Hornak is nevertheless very much a folk artist, dazzled by the sheer excitement, mystery, and color of the world, and a secret knowledge of birds and flowers. Ultimately she tries to render the visual music of an evolving universe. Her work combines authenticity with corn, and an invincible coupling.” [5]

Hornak's artwork is owned by the permanent collections of the Detroit Historical Museum, and within the Ian Hornak Papers at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.

Personal life

In 1978, Hornak married Carl Spoutz, a Mayflower descendant, and the scion of a commercial real estate development family that was active in the Midwestern and Southwestern United States mostly during the early to middle portion of the twentieth-century. Hornak and Spoutz had one child, Eric Ian Spoutz in 1983, who was his uncle, Ian Hornak's namesake, and later became an art dealer, historian, and executor of his uncle, Ian Hornak's estate. Hornak and Spoutz divorced in 1993. [2]

Art collection

Rosemary Hornak became the sole beneficiary of her brother, Ian Hornak's estate upon his death in 2002, in accordance with his Will. Hornak inherited her brother's real estate holdings in East Hampton, New York; his personal property and effects; his collection of fine art; a collection of his own artwork; and his entire library of intellectual property rights. Her son Eric Ian Spoutz was appointed as executor of his uncle's estate in 2003. In addition to the artwork she inherited from her brother's estate, Hornak amassed a collection of artwork with a focus on American artists active in New York during the second half of the twentieth-century. In addition to her ownership of the largest collection in the world of artworks by Ian Hornak, she is also the owner of the largest collection in the world of artworks by Lowell Nesbitt, to whom she was introduced by her brother in the early 1970s. [3]

Philanthropy

Using both her own personal collection, and many objects from her brother's estate, Hornak has been responsible as majority lender, along with her son as co-curator, of exhibitions at museums and organizations throughout the United States including at Indiana University's Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, the and the Forest Lawn Museum Museum. In 2013, Hornak loaned a collection of her brother's artwork to Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System where it was co-curated by her son, and Stephen Bennett Phillips into a major Ian Hornak retrospective placed on display in the Eccles Building on the occasion of Barack Obama's second Presidential Inauguration, with an accompanying monograph written by the co-curators, and published by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Systems. Hornak's collection has been the subject of numerous catalogues and monographs published by museums and American federal government organizations. the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, the Kinsey Institute, [7] and the Anton Art Center. [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mount Clemens, Michigan</span> City in Michigan, United States

Mount Clemens is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 15,697 at the 2020 census. It is the seat of government of Macomb County.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Photorealism</span> Genre of art

Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium. Although the term can be used broadly to describe artworks in many different media, it is also used to refer specifically to a group of paintings and painters of the American art movement that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Hornak</span> American painter

Ian Hornak was an American draughtsman, painter and printmaker. He was one of the founding artists of the Hyperrealist and Photorealist fine art movements; credited with having been the first Photorealist artist to incorporate the effect of multiple exposure photography into his landscape paintings; and the first contemporary artist to entirely expand the imagery of his primary paintings onto the frames.

College for Creative Studies (CCS) is a private art school in Detroit, Michigan. It enrolls more than 1,400 students and focuses on arts education. The college is also active in offering art education to children through its Community Arts Partnerships program and its Henry Ford Academy: School for Creative Studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Johnson Heade</span> American painter (1819–1904)

Martin Johnson Heade was an American painter known for his salt marsh landscapes, seascapes, and depictions of tropical birds, as well as lotus blossoms and other still lifes. His painting style and subject matter, while derived from the romanticism of the time, are regarded by art historians as a significant departure from those of his peers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Rosenberg (art dealer)</span> French art dealer (1881–1959)

Paul Rosenberg was a French art dealer. He represented Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse. Both Paul and his brother Léonce Rosenberg were among the world's major dealers of modern art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marshall Fredericks</span> American sculptor

Marshall Maynard Fredericks was an American sculptor known for such works as Fountain of Eternal Life, The Spirit of Detroit, Man and the Expanding Universe Fountain, and many others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hyperrealism (visual arts)</span> Genre of painting

Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture resembling a high-resolution photograph. Hyperrealism is considered an advancement of photorealism by the methods used to create the resulting paintings or sculptures. The term is primarily applied to an independent art movement and art style in the United States and Europe that has developed since the early 1970s. Carole Feuerman is the forerunner in the hyperrealism movement along with Duane Hanson and John De Andrea.

Thomas Leo Blackwell was an American hyperrealist of the original first generation of Photorealists, represented by Louis K. Meisel Gallery. Blackwell is one of the Photorealists most associated with the style. He produced a significant body of work based on the motorcycle, as well as other vehicles including airplanes. In the 1980s, he also began to produce a body of work focused on storefront windows, replete with reflections and mannequins. By 2012, Blackwell had produced 153 Photorealist works.

Lowell Blair Nesbitt was an American painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor. He served as the official artist for the NASA Apollo 9, and Apollo 13 space missions; in 1976 the United States Navy commissioned him to paint a mural in the administration building on Treasure Island spanning 26 feet x 251 feet, then the largest mural in the United States; and in 1980 the United States Postal Service honored Lowell Nesbitt by issuing four postage stamps depicting his paintings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edith Halpert</span> American art dealer

Edith Halpert or Edith Gregor Halpert was a pioneering New York City dealer of American modern art and American folk art. She brought recognition and market success to many avant-garde American artists. Her establishment, the Downtown Gallery, was the first commercial art space in Greenwich Village. When it was founded in 1926, it was the only New York gallery dedicated exclusively to contemporary American art by living artists. Over her forty-year career, Halpert showcased such modern art luminaries as Elie Nadelman, Max Weber, Marguerite and William Zorach, Stuart Davis, Peggy Bacon, Charles Sheeler, Marsden Hartley, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, William Steig, Jacob Lawrence, Walter Meigs, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and many others. Halpert later expanded her business to include American folk art, and certain nineteenth-century American painters, including Raphaelle Peale, William Michael Harnett, and John Frederick Peto, whom she considered to be precursors to American modernism.

Louis K. Meisel is an American author, art dealer and proponent of the photorealist art movement, having coined the term in 1969. He is also the owner of one of the earliest art galleries in SoHo at 141 Prince Street. In addition to Photorealism, Meisel is responsible for the resurgence of interest in the sub-set of American illustration identified as "Pin-up", and is the largest collector of original art of both genres. Louis and Susan Meisel own the largest collections of Photorealism and pin-up art in the world.

Susan Tepper was an American Neo-Expressionist and Figurative painter.

Dante Raphael Giglio, better known as Giglio Dante, was an Italian-born American painter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Ian Spoutz</span> American art dealer

Eric Ian Hornak-Spoutz is an American art dealer, historian and museum curator. Spoutz has owned art galleries in Detroit, Michigan, Cape Coral, Florida, Palm Beach, Florida, and Los Angeles, California.

Julius Rosenthal Wolf (1929–1976) was an American casting director, producer, theatrical agent, art collector, art dealer, and the vice president of General Amusement Corporation, then the second largest talent management agency in the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martha Jackson</span> American dealer and collector

Martha Jackson was an American art dealer, gallery owner, and collector. Her New York City based Martha Jackson Gallery, founded in 1953, was groundbreaking in its representation of women and international artists, and in establishing the op art movement.

Rosemary Ellen Rutherford was a British artist notable for her paintings and stained glass designs.

References

  1. ↑ Tom Watts, "Harrison Township art dealer is quick study," Macomb Daily, Feb. 15, 2012
  2. 1 2 Jameson Cook, "Dual depictions presented of a prominent art dealer gone bad," Macomb Daily, Feb. 14, 2017
  3. 1 2 Stephen Bennett Phillips, "Ian Hornak Transparent Barricades," exhibition catalogue, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Fine Art Program, Washington D.C., 2012
  4. ↑ Ken Johnson, "Ian Hornak, 58, Whose Paintings Were Known for Hyper-Real Look," New York Times, December 30, 2002
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Slivka, Rose (December 2, 1993). "From the Studio". The East Hampton Star. p. II-7.
  6. 1 2 Patsy, Southgate (November 20, 1997). "Ian Hornak: Creating An Art Apart". The East Hampton Star.
  7. ↑ Marci Creps, "On Exhibit: Jan 19, 2014" Hoosier Times, Jan. 19, 2014
  8. ↑ Maryanne MacLeod, "Art Center showcases revolutionary exhibit: Nationally celebrated Ian Hornak retrospective," Macomb Daily, Jun. 26, 2014
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.