Exhibitions | Old Masters, Newly Acquired
Press release (2 May 2013) from The Morgan:
Old Masters, Newly Acquired
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 31 May — 11 August 2013
Joseph Ducreux (1735–1802), Portrait of a Gentleman, ca. 1802; black, brown, red, and white chalk (New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, Estate of Brooke Astor)
The Morgan Library & Museum’s collection of drawings from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century has grown dramatically over the last few years. During this period, important gifts, purchases, and bequests have both augmented and transformed the museum’s holdings. More than one hundred of these new additions are being featured in an exhibition titled Old Masters, Newly Acquired. On view through August 11, the show presents major gifts from such notable collectors as former Morgan Director Charles Ryskamp, Trustees Eugene V. Thaw and Brooke Astor, and long-standing supporter Joseph McCrindle. Also exhibited are other works that have entered the collection as gifts and bequests, as well as an important group of recent purchases, including a selection of those made on the Sunny Crawford von Bülow Fund.
Particularly significant is a selection of late-nineteenth-century French drawings by such artists as Manet, Cézanne, Vuillard, and Redon, which greatly strengthen the Morgan’s holdings in Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Symbolist works. More than forty Danish drawings form another important group, including sheets by several Golden Age masters, among them C.W. Eckersberg and Johan Lundbye. Outstanding watercolors by British artists, notably John Martin and Samuel Palmer, reveal their mastery of the medium and virtuosity of technique. Highlights among the purchases on view include a delicate sheet of studies by Perino del Vaga, a beautiful pastel by Benedetto Luti, and a dynamic compositional study by Charles-Joseph Natoire. (more…)
Conference and Festival | Encounters, Affinities, Legacies
From the conference website:
Encounters, Affinities, Legacies: The Eighteenth Century in the Present Day
The King’s Manor, University of York, 28-29 June 2013
As the field of eighteenth-century studies continues to boom within the academy, the eighteenth century – invoked around names like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Adam Smith – is becoming an increasingly frequent interlocutor in contemporary debates in the international media about society, democracy, human rights, and the economy. Whilst social and political commentators are reading our present in dialogue with our eighteenth-century past, cultural appetites for the eighteenth century on page, stage, and screen continue to grow: powerful suggestions that intertwined discourses like (E)nlightenment and modernity, central to so much eighteenth- and twentieth-century thought, remain vital to the social, political and cultural construction of our contemporary moment.
This interdisciplinary academic conference and arts festival seeks to explore the complex webs of interconnection between the long eighteenth century and the ‘long’ twentieth century, from 1900 to the present.
Over the course of two days, the historic King’s Manor in the centre of York will play host to leading academics, early-career scholars, and postgraduate students from around the world, as well as showcasing the work of exciting young artists, photographers, designers, and performers from across the UK.
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