Enfilade

The first major collaborative exhibition between the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, The Critique of Reason offers an unprecedented opportunity to bring together treasures of the Romantic art movement from the collections of both museums. The exhibition comprises more than three hundred paintings, sculptures, medals, watercolors, drawings, prints, and photographs by such iconic artists as William Blake, Théodore Géricault, Francisco de Goya, and J. M. W. Turner. This broad range of objects challenges the traditional notion of the Romantic artist as a brooding genius given to introversion and fantasy. Instead, the exhibition’s eight thematic sections juxtapose arresting works of art that reveal the Romantics as attentive explorers of their natural and cultural worlds as well as deeply invested in exploring the mysterious, the cataclysmic, and the spiritual. The richness and range of Yale’s Romantic holdings will be on display, presented afresh for a new generation of museumgoers.

The Critique of Reason: Romantic Art, 1760–1860 has been co-organized by the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. The curators are, at the Center, A. Cassandra Albinson, Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, and Nina Amstutz, Postdoctoral Research Associate, and, at the Gallery, Elisabeth (Lisa) Hodermarsky, Sutphin Family Senior Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings, and Paola D’Agostino, Nina and Lee Griggs Assistant Curator of European Art; and Izabel Gass, Graduate Research Assistant, is at the Center and Gallery. The exhibition has been made possible by the Art Gallery Exhibition and Publication Fund and the Robert Lehman, B.A. 1913, Endowment Fund, as well as by funds from the Yale Center for British Art Program Endowment.

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Note (added 30 March 2015) — In connection with the exhibition, Yale is hosting a two-day symposium, The Romantic Eye, 1760–1860 and Beyond, 17–18 April 2015. More information is available here»