Brandywine Landscape I, ca. 1918

Description:

William Sommer’s Brandywine Landscapes
At one point William Sommer seemed destined to go down in history as one of America’s great Modernist painters, yet on a national level his name has maintained a level of relative obscurity. One possible explanation for this omission is that Sommer inadvertently alienated a portion of his audience by refusing to fully commit to one mode of image making. Sommer’s non-binary approach to representation and abstraction is perhaps most evident in his paintings of Brandywine, Ohio, in which Sommer approaches traditional, even mundane subject matter from a Modernist standpoint, saturating Brandywine’s sprawling hills with Fauve-like color and altering the natural landscape to create enchanting distortions in perspective.