Stephen Hannock ’76, H’09 stands before his painting “Oxbow for Bowdoin College,” a gift from the artist on the occasion of the Museum of Art’s renovation and re-opening in 2007.
Acclaimed artist Stephen Hannock ’74, H’09, internationally known for his luminous and atmospheric landscape paintings of flooded rivers, as well as his depiction of the Connecticut River Oxbow, has been selected for inclusion in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Masterpiece Paintings, a new volume that celebrates the greatest and most historically important paintings from the Met’s collections.
Hannock is celebrated especially for the innovative techniques of inserting collaged elements as well as text into his imagined vistas, and for his signature technique of polishing his paintings’ surfaces — with a power sander.
The Oxbow: After Church, After Cole, Flooded (Flooded River for the Matriarchs E. & A. Mongan), Green Light, 2000, Acrylic, alkyd and oil glazes with collage elements on canvas — one of eight works by Hannock currently in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The honor of being selected for this volume is said to be all the more significant for the fact that only a small percentage of the chosen works are by living artists.
Hannock’s work is found in public collections, including at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, England; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and in numerous other collections.
