Solé Scott Photos.
Inside SCSU’s quiet art gallery, a portal to another time awaits.
Bright lights shine overhead. The floor below stretches out like an invitation. On the walls, quiet scenes of woods and winter wait for a viewer to come closer. There’s a sense of calm, the world stilling. Each drawing is meticulously selected, each placed with intention.
These drawings come from the 20th-century artist Oscar Klein, whose work is on display at the gallery through March 25. Tucked inside the basement of Buley library, the gallery offers a calm contrast to the busy hallways and classrooms outside. Throughout, Klein evokes a stillness that is quiet, understated, and deeply worthy of a close look.
“Oscar Klein was Czechoslovakian, and he had some early success,” said Art Director Cort Sierpinski, who has been working at the university for over 30 years.
Rebecca Fowker with artwork by 20th-century artist Oscar Klein.
According to pamphlets written by student employee Rebecca Fowker, Klein was an artist who fled from his homeland to New York City, where he ultimately opened a successful gallery. A longer exhibition text in the gallery explains that Klein was interested in artmaking from an early age, a passion that ultimately led him to the Prague Academy of Art long before the United States was ever on his horizon.
While Klein was initially able to work in his home country—his 1928 painting Tree of Freedom was actually in the collection of President Tomáš Masaryk, although it was destroyed in the Second World War—he moved to New York to escape the rise of Fascism in his home country. By 1944, he was painting flowers on silk, and later "became an energetic art dealer and opened his own gallery in midtown Manhattan," according to a label.
Fowker, a senior, is an artist and art history major who was excited to help on the exhibition. She said she is enthralled by the passion and creativity of Klein’s work and newly sought-out style of drawing landscapes.
“As an artist, it's you imagining what it might be like to be in your home country,” Fowker said.
Sierpinski added that there is a close connection between Klein and Southern, which explains the presence of so many of his drawings in the collection. Barnard art history professor Julius Held, the father of SCSU Professor Anna Held Audette, was a notable art historian and a friend of Klein’s.
“So, when the artist passed away in 1985, between the father and the faculty member here, Anna Audette, they organized the donation of this whole collection to the university, so that's how we acquired it,” Sierpinski said.
Cort Sierpinski with artwork from Michelangelo's studio.
For Sierpinski, planning and protecting artwork is a serious and time consuming job on its own, and one that involves careful storing in the art gallery’s archives. It’s there, through the doors that blend right in with the dark colored walls, that all of SCSU’s pieces of artwork live until they are featured in an exhibition.
“We have a pretty good pre-Columbian ceramic collection; some of those pieces date back to around 1200 B.C.,” Sierpinski said. The cool temperature in the archive is adjusted to prevent damage and maintain the historical integrity of each artwork.
Other historical pieces stored in the archive include original historical prints, paintings and two power figures from the Songye tribe of the Democratic Republic of Congo, amongst other African sculptures. The biggest collected artwork that the university has acquired is three large triptych pieces by relatively unknown Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez. The university owns her largest artwork ever produced.
“I like being in spaces that kind of hold really different collections, like the African collection is just an amazing collection, but I like the fact there is a diversity and inclusion of the voices that can be heard within this space,” Fowker said.