The Tile Club: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting The Tile Club | Page 7

Director’s Foreword
Tile Club: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting
is a living example of the Chazen Museum of Art’s
mission. The museum brought together the objects,
scholarship, a donor and collector, and an ambitious
doctoral candidate to illuminate a little-known but
important club comprising artists who would go on
to become household names later in their careers. The
result is the exhibition and its companion catalogue.
We are again grateful to our generous friend Fred
Baker who provided the topic and the objects for the
exhibition, as he has frequently done throughout his
long association with his alma mater and the museum.
The works in the exhibit are drawn from promised and
realized gifts from the Baker/Pisano Collection to both
the Chazen and the Heckscher Museum of Art
(Huntington, NY ). The Baker/Pisano Collection
represents the lifework of Mr. Baker and his late partner,
Ronald Pisano. We further appreciate the opportunity
to reprint Mr. Pisano’s original research and essay on
the Tile Club, which engagingly tells the story of this
little-known club that, while it lasted just a few short
years, brought together young artists who would go on
to make emphatic marks in the art world.
No exhibition is the result of a single person’s vision
or work, and special acknowledgment must go to the
talented people who make up the staff here at the Cha-
zen Museum of Art. Every one of them contributes
their thoughtful expertise to bringing exhibitions such
as this to our visitors, both virtual and real.
This exhibition provided a rare opportunity for PhD
candidate Ann Glasscock to curate the exhibition and
contribute to the catalogue and the scholarship on the
works. As part of a major research university, the Chazen
welcomes opportunities to facilitate original research
by students and scholars. Ms. Glasscock’s work not only
contributed to the exhibition and catalogue, it also
provides information on the artists and the artworks
upon which future scholars can build.
We look forward to seeing you here soon.
Amy Gilman
Director
Chazen Museum of Art
Special thank you’s must be extended to the gen-
erous lenders to this exhibition. In addition to works
from the Heckscher and Mr. Baker, the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, Century Association,
Guild Hall Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,
and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art also have
provided key loans from their collections.
Decorative Age or Decorative Craze? 1