Enfilade

Press release (20 September 2013) from the High Museum:

The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 3 November 2013 — 19 January 2014
Toledo Museum of Art, 13 February — 11 May 2014
Portland Art Museum, 14 June — 28 September 2014

Antoine Coysevox, Faun, 1709

The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden features more than 100 works, some of which have never traveled outside of Paris. These  include large-scale sculptures from the garden that were created in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries by sculptors including François-Joseph Bosio, Antoine Coysevox, and Aristide Maillol along with paintings, photographs, and drawings that depict the Tuileries. Thirty-five works in the exhibition are from the collections of the Louvre.

The exhibition also explores how the 63-acre garden influenced and inspired French and American Impressionists such as Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and Childe Hassam and photographers such as Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and André Kertész. As part of the exhibition’s presentation in Atlanta, the High has turned the museum’s piazza into a landscaped park, inspired by the Tuileries Garden.

The ‘Paris on Peachtree’ experience begins as visitors arrive on the High’s piazza to find a dozen holly trees in planter boxes similar to those in the Tuileries Garden, installed to create a path to the exhibition entrance. Two sculptures by Maillol have been placed among the trees. The immersive experience continues in the galleries, where six sculptures that have never before left France and for centuries resided in the Tuileries Garden will greet visitors on the first level of the exhibition. The High is also devoting an entire gallery in the exhibition to a video titled “A Day in the Tuileries Garden,” featuring footage from the Garden projected on three walls.

Key works featured in the exhibition include:
• Antoine Coysevox, Faun, 1709
• François Joseph Bosio, Hercules Battling Achelous as Serpent, 1824
• Édouard Manet, Children in the Tuileries Garden, ca. 1861–62
• Childe Hassam, Tuileries Gardens, ca. 1897
• Camille Pissarro, The Tuileries Gardens in the Snow, 1900
• Aristide Maillol, Mediterranean or Latin Thought/Contemplation, 1923–27
• Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Terrace and Tree-lined Path, 1975

The exhibition examines how the Tuileries, which extends from the Musée du Louvre to the Place de la Concorde, evolved from its beginnings as an outdoor museum for French royalty to its role as one of the first public gardens in Europe, after which it served as both subject and inspiration for artists working in Paris.

Presented on the occasion of the 400th birthday of André Le Nôtre (1613–1700), The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden also celebrates the man commissioned by Louis XIV in 1664 to expand and transform the Tuileries into a formal French garden. One of the first public gardens in Europe, the Tuileries Garden was originally created in 1564 by Catherine de Medici as the garden for the Tuileries Palace, a palace that was originally part of the Louvre but which was destroyed following the Franco-Prussian War. Each monarch who lived in the palace left his or her own indelible mark on the Tuileries. Under the reign of Louis XV, the garden became known for its monumental outdoor sculpture collection. In 1667, just three years after Le Nôtre was hired, the Tuileries Garden became Paris’ first public park. The garden is still open to the public today.

The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden is co-organized by the High Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Portland Art Museum, with the exceptional collaboration of the Musée du Louvre.

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From Yale UP:

Laura Corey, Paula Deitz, Guillaume Fonkenell, Bruce Guenther, Sarah Kennel, and Richard H. Putney, The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 176 pages, ISBN: 978-0300197372, $50.

The Tuileries Garden is a masterpiece of garden design and one of the world’s most iconic public art spaces. Designed for Louis XIV by landscape architect André Le Nôtre, it served the now-destroyed Tuileries Palace. It was opened to the public in 1667, becoming one of the first public gardens in Europe. The garden has always been a place for Parisians to convene, celebrate, and promenade, and art has played an important role throughout its history. Monumental sculptures give the garden the air of an outdoor museum, and the garden’s beautiful backdrop has inspired artists from Edouard Manet to André Kertész.

The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden brings together 100 works of art, including paintings and sculptures, as well as documentary photographs, prints, and models illuminating the garden’s rich history. Beautifully illustrated essays by leading scholars of art and garden studies highlight the significance of the Tuileries Garden to works of art from the past 300 years and reaffirm its importance to the history of landscape architecture.

Laura D. Corey is consulting curator at the High Museum of Art. Paula Deitz is editor of The Hudson Review. Guillaume Fonkenell is curator of sculpture and museum historian at the Musée du Louvre. Bruce Guenther is chief curator and Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Art Museum. Sarah Kennel is curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Richard H. Putney is an art historian and head of the Art Museum Practices program at the University of Toledo and Consulting Curator of Medieval Art at the Toledo Museum of Art.