Exhibition | Shakers and Movers
Now on view at AIC:
Shakers and Movers: Selections from the Collection of Dr. Thomas and Jan Pavlovic
Art Institute of Chicago, December 2015 — Fall 2017
For Shakers, work was a form of worship, and objects were expressions of their attempt to create heaven on earth. They employed unique techniques to build furniture that was like their faith: honest, simple, and humble. Featuring over 20 such objects generously loaned by collectors Thomas and Jan Pavlovic, this exhibition—the first of its kind at the Art Institute—shows the range of items made by the Shakers in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Presented within the chronology of the permanent collection galleries, the exhibition considers Shakers in the larger context of American furniture production, demonstrating the artistic exchange and innovation that defined the country’s early history.
Shakers were well known for their austere and rigid lifestyle. Believers lived in separate men’s and women’s dormitories and practiced celibacy and communal ownership. Their worship, however, could be quite lively; the name Shaker derives from the frenzied, whirling dancing that took place at services. Following the arrival of the first Shakers from England in 1774, the group peaked in the mid-19th century, boasting more than 6,000 members from Maine to Kentucky. Though only one Shaker community survives today, the impact of Shakers on American culture has endured, particularly in art and design. The Pavlovics’ collection—passionately assembled over the last 40 years—exemplifies the virtuosic craftsmanship synonymous with this influential utopian religious community.
New Book | American Silver in the Art Institute of Chicago
Due for a February release from Yale UP:
Elizabeth McGoey, ed., American Silver in the Art Institute of Chicago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 266 pages, ISBN: 978 0300 222364, $50.
The history of American silver offers invaluable insights into the economic and cultural history of the nation itself. Published here for the first time, the Art Institute of Chicago’s superb collection embodies innovation and beauty from the colonial era to the present. In the 17th century, silversmiths brought the fashions of their homelands to the colonies, and in the early 18th, new forms arose as technology diversified production. Demand increased in the 19th century as the Industrial Revolution took hold. In the 20th, modernism changed the shape of silver inside and outside the home. This beautifully illustrated volume presents highlights from the collection with stunning photography and entries from leading specialists. In-depth essays relate a fascinating story about eating, drinking, and entertaining that spans the history of the Republic and trace the development of the Art Institute’s holdings of American silver over nearly a century. Contributors include Debra Schmidt Bach, David Barquist, Jennifer Goldsborough, Judith Barter, Medill Higgins Harvey, Patricia Kane, Barbara Schnitzer, Janine Skerry, Ann Wagner, Gerald W. R. Ward, Deborah Dependahl Waters, Beth Carver Wees, and Elizabeth Williams.
Elizabeth McGoey is Ann S. and Samuel M. Mencoff Assistant Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Call for Papers | Design and Displacement: Graduate Student Symposium
From H-ArtHist:
Design and Displacement
26th Annual Parsons/Cooper Hewitt Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Design
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, 7–8 April 2017
Proposals due by 23 January 2017
The challenges faced by vast numbers of migrants and refugees worldwide—uprooted by war, persecution, or ecological crises or relocating in search of economic opportunity—are giving rise to innovative design solutions. Although often urgent, these crises are unfortunately rarely new. This symposium attempts to take a broader historical view of the relationship of design and decorative arts to the displacement and movement of people and populations since the Renaissance. From French Huguenot artisans emigrating to England in the early 18th century to artisans exiled in the wake of the 1848 revolutions to the Bauhaus’s re-establishment after its dissolution by the fascists to designers’ migrations all over the world, the movement of populations has spurred great change in the cultural landscape, including the creation of opportunities for new cross-cultural synthesis. Migrations also inspire architectural solutions, such as temporary housing for displaced persons during wartime or natural disasters or more substantial interventions into the landscape, such as buildings erected to accommodate the exponential growth of cities like Lagos or Rio de Janeiro. Papers might consider historical or contemporary designers or whole populations. The symposium also seeks to address issues of national and transnational identity as well as anti-immigrant sentiment.
Proposals are welcome from graduate students at any level in fields such as art history, history of design, design studies, fashion studies, history of the decorative arts, urban studies, cultural anthropology, history of architecture, consumer studies, design and technology, media studies, museum studies, food studies.
The symposium’s Catherine Hoover Voorsanger Keynote speaker will be Jeremy Aynsley, professor of design history at the University of Brighton (UK) and chair of the Design History Society. Professor Aynsley’s research interests concern late-19th- and 20th-century design in Europe and the United States, with a particular focus on design in modern Germany, which he has explored in major exhibitions and academic publications including Nationalism and Internationalism in Design in the 20th Century (1994), Graphic Design in Germany 1890–1945 (2000), and Designing Modern Germany (2009). He is especially interested in the phenomenon of the migration of Modernism and is currently working on a project about German graphic designers in the United States on the eve of World War II. The keynote address will be given on Friday evening, April 7, 2017, and the symposium sessions will be held in the morning and afternoon of Saturday, April 8.
To submit a proposal, send a two-page abstract, one-page bibliography, and a CV to Ethan Robey, Associate Director, MA Program in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies, robeye@newschool.edu.
The symposium is sponsored by the MA History of Design and Curatorial Studies program, offered jointly by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Parsons School of Design.
Exhibition | Making Nature: How We See Animals
Press release (23 September 2016) from the Wellcome Collection:
Making Nature: How We See Animals
Wellcome Collection, London, 1 December 2016 — 21 May 2017
Curated by Honor Beddard
The question of how humans relate to other animals has captivated philosophers, anthropologists, scientists, ethicists and artists for centuries. Making Nature brings together over 100 objects from literature, film, taxidermy, and photography to examine what we think, feel, and value about other species and the consequences this has for the world around us. It will include works by contemporary artists including Allora and Calzadilla and Phillip Warnell and asks how and why we look at animals and what we see when we do.
From the formalisation of natural history as a science, through the establishment of museums and zoos, to lavish contemporary wildlife documentaries, Making Nature reveals the hierarchies in our view of the natural world and considers how these influence our actions, or inactions, towards the planet. The exhibition—organised around four themes: ordering, displaying, observing, and making—opens with Marcus Coates’s Degreecoordinates, Shared Traits of the Hominini (Humans, Bonobos and Chimpanzees), 2015. This recent work questions the definitions of difference between species and establishes this as an idea that runs throughout the exhibition.
Attempts to categorise the natural world in the 18th century will be introduced through the work of Carl Linnaeus and the publication of Systema Naturae in 1735. His efforts to record, describe, and classify the animal kingdom solved the practical problem of identifying species but introduced a manmade ranking system. Similarly, Charles Bonnet’s Scale of Natural Beings 1783 provided a ladder of the animal kingdom with humans placed at the top. Such views are challenged by the depictions of animals—and human-like animals—in Jonathan Swift’s satire of man, Gulliver’s Travels.
Making Nature questions the approach of ‘learning through looking’, including artists such as herman de vries, a trained botanist interested in the challenge of objectivity, and Edwina Ashton who explores the politics of representation. The importance of listening is also examined by artists Allora and Calzadilla in The Great Silence (2014). This film installation is a depiction of endangered parrots paired against footage of the Arecibo Observatory, the world’s largest telescope, in Puerto Rica.
The exhibition also charts changing fashions of museum displays alongside society’s changing attitudes to nature, from overstuffed cabinets in Victorian institutions to elaborately staged dioramas from natural history museums in the 20th century. Contemporary photographers Richard Ross and Hiroshi Sugimoto expose the complexities of successive attempts to give visitors an authentic representation of the animal in a museum setting, revealing works of art as yet another form of mediation. Roger Fenton’s 1855 image of an unnaturally upright gorilla skeleton next to a human one, taken during his time as the British Museum’s documentary photographer, interrogates the idea that natural history displays may not necessarily represent an objective truth.
The search for an authentic encounter with nature will be further examined through our ever more ambitious attempts to get closer to animals—in zoos, national parks, and on screen—while simultaneously hoping to preserve their wildness. The New Architecture and The London Zoo (1936), a film by László Moholy-Nagy, and Casson Condor’s architectural photographs from the 1970s provide examples of how the designs of zoo enclosures are used to frame animals. The phenomena of the ‘zoo-pet’, or mascot, is explored through cases like Jumbo the elephant, adored by Victorian audiences and subject of a public outcry when he was sold to P. T. Barnum’s Circus in 1882. Souvenirs and toys will show how zoo animals have frequently been anthropomorphised in popular culture.
Depictions of animals on film include, Woodpeckers 1954, the first documentary to use new camera technologies to film a family of woodpeckers from within their nest. When broadcast on the BBC, it was second in popularity only to the Queen’s coronation that year and set the precedent for natural history documentaries that remain popular today. The exhibition also features an extract from Seal Island (1948), part of Walt Disney’s True-Life Adventures series of nature films promoted as entertainment.
Phillip Warnell’s film installation Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air (2016) explores the true story of Antoine Yates, who lived in a high-rise New York apartment with a tiger called Ming and a large alligator. Combining documentary with recreated scenes, Warnell offers new insights on the human/animal relationship and the question of representation.
The final section of the exhibition is curated in collaboration with the Center for PostNatural History, Pittsburgh, USA, the only organisation to solely collect organisms that have been intentionally altered by humans. Specimens, paintings, literature, and scientific models—many on loan from the Center’s museum—will chart a relationship to animals that is bound up with the history, and future, of human civilisation. This includes the breeding of domesticated pigeons by Charles Darwin that helped to inform his theories of natural selection and the genetic modification of mosquitos in the fight against disease spread. Further case studies comprise dog breeding, the origins of laboratory mice and rats, and a history of songbirds as told by musicologist Ian Nagoski. Unlike traditional natural history collections, the significance of postnatural organisms lies in the role they play in human culture.
Making Nature is the first part of a year-long exploration of our relationship with the natural world in the past, present, and future. The exhibition is curated by Honor Beddard, and the exhibition design is by AOC.
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Tim Dee and Anna Faherty, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Organising Nature: A Picture Album (London: Wellcome Collection, 2016), 112 pages, ISBN: 978 095 7028593, £13.
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral celebrates the beauty and strangeness of the very early ‘infographics’, charts, and ordering systems devised in an age that transformed how we see and understand nature. These are the tools created by pioneering European naturalists, artists, scientists, housewives, and explorers in the 18th and 19th centuries in an attempt to better understand (and control) a teeming and shifting natural world: the original big data challenge. In a collision of science, art, and imagination, these images and objects range from intricate specimen illustrations, taxonomy charts, and animal distribution maps, to lavish colour dictionaries, and more. Together, they attest to the deeply human desire to order and identify the world around us—and a restless quest to find our own place in it.
New Book | William Hogarth: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings
From Yale UP:
Elizabeth Einberg, William Hogarth: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2016), 432 pages, ISBN: 978 030 0221749, £95 / $150.
William Hogarth (1697–1764) was among the first British-born artists to rise to international recognition and acclaim and to this day he is considered one of the country’s most celebrated and innovative masters. His output encompassed engravings, paintings, prints, and editorial cartoons that presaged western sequential art.
This comprehensive catalogue of his paintings brings together over twenty years of scholarly research and expertise on the artist and serves to highlight the remarkable diversity of his accomplishments in this medium. Portraits, history paintings, theater pictures, and genre pieces are lavishly reproduced alongside detailed entries on each painting, including much previously unpublished material relating to his oeuvre. This deeply informed publication affirms Hogarth’s legacy and testifies to the artist’s enduring reputation.
Elizabeth Einberg is a senior research fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and former curator at Tate Britain.
Exhibition | The Frick Collects: From Rubens to Monet
Arthur Devis, Sir Joshua Vanneck and His Family, 1752, oil on canvas, 146 × 142 cm
(Pittsburgh: Frick Art & Historical Center, 1984.24)
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Now on view at The Frick Pittsburgh:
The Frick Collects: From Rubens to Monet
Frick Art & Historical Center, Pittsburgh, 29 October 2016 — 14 May 2017
Take a look at the Frick in a new way in this exhibition, which, for the first time tells the story of the Frick through its collection. From Henry Clay Frick’s early purchases, to his daughter Helen’s collecting interests, through to the acquisitions that have been made by the museum in recent years, visitors will see and learn about the enduring legacy of the Frick family as art collectors. Objects will be brought together to tell a unified story—a story that doesn’t stop with Henry Clay Frick’s early purchases for Clayton, but continues, looking at both Henry and Helen as the collectors who have shaped the Frick Art & Historical Center’s holdings.
The earliest acquisitions in the collection date to Henry Clay Frick’s bachelor days. Before his marriage (and for the first months after his marriage) he lived in downtown Pittsburgh at the fashionable Monongahela House. He bought his first paintings and decorative objects for his rooms there: an elaborate rococo revival clock and candelabra set purchased through Tiffany’s, an ebonized cabinet, and his first documented painting purchase, a landscape by local artist George Hetzel.
When they moved into Clayton, Henry Clay Frick and his wife furnished it as many young couples do—most of the purchases were new, fashionable and of the period. Frick had met his wife, Adelaide Howard Childs (1859–1931) in February 1881. Adelaide was the sixth daughter of the wealthy Pittsburgh Childs family, who were manufacturers and importers of shoes and boots. For young couples during America’s Gilded Age like the Fricks, art collecting was not simply a way to exercise taste and create a suitable environment—although these were important considerations. More subtly the right objects gave their owner a sense of history and pedigree. Collecting was a personal pleasure and an indicator of status, discernment and good taste.
The rise in American collecting of this period also coincided with the establishment of the first museums in the country, including the Wadsworth Athenaeum of Hartford, Connecticut in 1842, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1870, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1872, and in 1896, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute. As the century progressed, forming collections and bequeathing them to the public became one way to put wealth and the accumulation of a collection to public service.
It was Helen Clay Frick’s vision that led to the restoration of Clayton as a house museum. The Frick Art Museum, which was opened to the public in 1970 just a block south of Clayton, was built primarily for the collection she developed, rather than the one she inherited. Helen even had the family cars and carriages carefully preserved and brought back to Pittsburgh from the family’s Massachusetts summer estate.
The Frick Art Museum opened in 1970 with its main galleries devoted to Helen’s greatest interests: early Italian Renaissance paintings and eighteenth-century French fine and decorative art. Since Helen’s death in 1984, the collection has continued to develop—through generous donations and acquisitions that reflect the same quality as that evinced by the founding collection. Through the foresight of Helen Clay Frick who valued Pittsburgh, and who understood that her youth at Clayton was one of unique privilege—not simply financially, but aesthetically—these collections are the heart of the experience at the Frick Pittsburgh.
The Frick Collects is accompanied by a new, fully-illustrated guide to the collection published by Scala, specialists in working with museums to produce beautiful publications. The publication is generously underwritten by The Richard C. von Hess Foundation.
Robin Nicholson, Sarah Hall, and Dawn Reid Brean, The Frick Pittsburgh: A Guide to the Collection (New York: Scala, 2016), 120 pages, ISBN: 9781785510717, $15.
The collections at The Frick Pittsburgh are the combined legacy of famed art collector and industrialist Henry Clay Frick and his daughter Helen. Two essays tell the story of Frick’s early collecting and his daughter’s interest in continuing his mission to purchase great art and make it publicly accessible. The book also provides a photographic tour of Clayton, the Frick family’s historic Pittsburgh home, which is now a house museum.
Collection highlights presented include fabulous examples of early Renaissance Italian painting, eighteenth-century French painting, furniture, and decorative arts, spectacular Chinese porcelains, and masterpieces by artists like Rubens, Guardi, Boucher, Gainsborough, Fragonard, Millet, and Monet. The entirety of the Frick’s collections—spanning the thirteenth century to the present—are displayed at The Frick Art Museum, Clayton, and the Car and Carriage Museum—all located on the Frick’s five-plus acres of landscaped grounds.
Robin Nicholson has been Director of The Frick Pittsburgh since 2014. Sarah J. Hall began working at The Frick Pittsburgh in 1994 and has been Director of Curatorial Affairs since 2007. Dawn Reid Brean joined the Frick as Associate Curator of Decorative Arts in 2015.
Exhibition | Winckelmann, Florence, and the Etruscans
Winckelmann turns 300 next December 9th. In anticipation of the event, the National Archaeological Museum presents this exhibition:
Winckelmann, Florence, and the Etruscans: The Father of Archeology in Tuscany
Winckelmann, Firenze e gli Etruschi: Il padre dell’archeologia in Toscana
Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Florence, 26 May 2016 — 30 January 2017
Anton von Maron, Portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 1767, oil on canvas, 136 × 99 cm (Weimar: Stadtschloss).
Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), the Prussian art scholar who was superintendent of antiquities of Rome, had a purpose behind his stay in Florence: to broaden knowledge of the Etruscan civilization. From 1758 to 1759, Winckelmann lived in Florence, where he hoped to complete his work. Ahead of the three hundredth anniversary of his birth—and while waiting to celebrate more widely with a conference in 2017—the Archaeological Museum of Florence presents the exhibition Winckelmann, Firenze e gli Etruschi (Winckelmann, Florence and the Etruscans), from May 26 to January 30, 2017.
Winckelmann’s studies of classical works, particularly his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (The History of Art in Antiquity) of 1764, promoted the aesthetics of neoclassicism and created a sensibility and a taste that influenced all of late eighteenth-century Europe; furthermore, the Winckelmann methodological approach provides the basis of modern art history. The exhibition, installed on the ground floor of Florence’s Archaeological Museum, consists of three sections. The first addresses the study of antiquities and private collecting in mid-eighteenth-century Florence. The second section is more specific to Winckelmann’s Florentine studies, including his cataloguing of Baron von Stosch’s collection of gems, of which casts are on exhibit. Finally, the third section shows the cultural legacy that Winckelmann left to the Grand Ducal city and the whole of Europe, with the neoclassical style born from this man’s notes and publications.
Visitors are welcomed to the exhibition by the large, late-Etruscan bronze sculpture of The Orator (Aulus Metellus). It must be remembered, however, that in Winckelmann’s opinion, Etruscan art was not at the level of Greek art because of the Etruscans’ inability to detach themselves from their passions. After visiting this exhibit, visitors can continue on to the Museum to admire other masterpieces of Etruscan art, including the Chimera and the Idolino.
Barbara Arbeid, Stefano Bruni, Mario Iozzo, eds., Winckelmann, Firenze e gli Etruschi: Il padre dell’archeologia in Toscana / Winckelmann, Florenz und die Etrusker: Der Vater der Archäologie in der Toskana (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2016), 347 pages, ISBN: 978 8846745187 (Italian) / ISBN: 978 8846745194 (German), 28€.
New Book | Taste and the Antique
Forthcoming from Brepols:
Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny / Eloisa Dodero and Adriano Aymonino, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900, revised and extended edition (Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2016), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-1909400252, $130.
Taste and the Antique offers a comprehensive and accessible overview of the reception and afterlife of the most famous ancient statues discovered in Rome and Italy from the Renaissance to the close of the nineteenth century. Before Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, sculptures like the Laocoön, the Apollo Belvedere, or the Medici Venus set the taste of artists, connoisseurs, and the educated elites of the West for almost five centuries. Reproduced in every possible media for gardens and palaces throughout Europe, celebrated by poets and writers from Marino and Byron to Proust and Dickens, they served as sources of inspiration for artists as diverse as Michelangelo, Rubens, and Turner.
Originally published in 1981, Taste and the Antique was hailed by Ernst Gombrich as a thought-provoking work that met a “long-felt want.” Reprinted five times since with minor alterations, Haskell and Penny’s book has become a classic of art history that is still used as the standard reference by scholars and anyone interested in the reception of the classical tradition. This new edition offers a complete revision of the original text to incorporate updates and new information on the single statues and their context in the light of research undertaken in the field over the past three decades.
Note (added 7 May 2018) — It’s still forthcoming, with publication now expected in 2019.
Exhibition | Charles III and the Dissemination of Antiquity
The exhibition is one of several held to mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of King Charles III of Spain:
Charles III and the Dissemination of Antiquity / Carlos III y la difusión de la antigüedad
Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, 15 December 2016 — 18 March 2017
Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples, 15 December 2016 — 18 March 2017
Academia de San Carlos, Mexico City, 15 December 2016 — 18 March 2017
Curated by José María Luzón Nogué, Valeria Sampaolo, Elizabeth
Fuentes Rojas, and María del Carmen Alonso Rodríguez
The exhibition uses virtual reality and 3D technology to enable it to be viewed simultaneously from three different venues in Naples, Mexico City, and Madrid. With the aid of the most advanced digital technology, it shows the highly significant role played by Charles III (1716–1788) in disseminating the heritage of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiae, as it was he who, as king of Naples, gave orders for the excavations at one of the most important historic sites ever discovered.
The dissemination of the archaeological finds at Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiae is explained in three rooms in three different museums in three different countries: Italy, Spain, and Mexico. All three rooms are equipped with a similar installation and share the same purpose: to underline the role played by Charles III in making known antiquities in the eighteenth century. These rooms are interconnected in real time by means of live streaming and use virtual reality, augmented reality and 360-degree photos, which make it possible for people visiting one of the museums to fully appreciate the extent of the work carried out three hundred years ago using other means.
Owing to its unique characteristics, the exhibition relies on the technical support of several companies specialised in virtual recreation and 3D images. It employs cutting-edge technology and aims to be the first step towards designing a model for virtual exhibitions that establish interconnections between museums and their collections in different countries.
The main group of antiquities, which had been discovered by the time Charles III departed for Spain in 1759, came from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, though other antiquities had been found at Pompeii and the villas of the former Stabiae. They were initially used to adorn Portici Palace and to establish the Herculaneum Museum there.
Naples
The bronzes and paintings of Herculaneum were disseminated under the auspices of the king through Le antichità di Ercolano Esposte, a publication on which excellent eighteenth-century illustrators and engravers worked. The king made gifts of this work to scholars of the period, artists, members of the nobility and European universities that requested it. The copper-plates and their prints make up an interesting chapter in the history of archaeological documentation and its role in disseminating new discoveries.
Madrid
Back in Spain, Charles III asked Bernardo Tanucci, Secretary of State of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, to send him plaster copies of the antiquities he liked so much. These plaster copies were installed in the Buen Retiro Palace until 1776, when, at the request of the instructors at the Royal Academy of the Three Noble Arts, the king agreed to donate them so that they could be used to train architects, sculptors and painters. The collection of casts sent from Naples remains in the academy to this day and is of great historical and documentary interest.
Mexico City
Later, when King Charles III founded the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico, a selection of casts from the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid was sent there in 1780, including copies of the casts from Naples. The busts from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum and a few others from Pompeii and Stabiae thus crossed the Atlantic to be used as models by the students of the Academy of San Carlos.
Exhibition | Carlos III: Majestad y Ornato
The exhibition is one of several held to mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of King Charles III of Spain:
Carlos III: Majestad y Ornato en los Escenarios del Rey Ilustrado
Palacio Real de Madrid, 6 December 2016 — 31 March 2017
Curated by María Pilar Benito García, Javier Jordán de Urríes, and José Luis Sancho Gaspar
El próximo 6 de diciembre, en el Palacio Real de Madrid, se abre al público la exposición Carlos III. Majestad y Ornato en los Escenarios del Rey Ilustrado, con la que se conmemora del tercer centenario de este monarca y que permanecerá abierta hasta el 31 de marzo de 2017.
Soberano ilustrado y, como tal, mecenas de las artes, el monarca constituye el referente más indiscutible en la fértil relación que han mantenido la Corona y la Cultura en España durante la Edad Moderna. Su gobierno, además de las grandes obras públicas que promovió, supuso la intervención estatal en aspectos estéticos a una escala amplia y variada. Pero sin duda donde con más claridad se perciben tales innovaciones es en el propio entorno del monarca, en el arte cortesano creado bajo su directo mecenazgo, y que pone en valor esta exposición.
Estas obras artísticas, que servían para la vida cotidiana del rey y su familia, estaban pensadas tanto para fines funcionales, como ornamentales y representativos: su calidad, su magnificencia y suntuosidad, su tono cosmopolita constituían toda una declaración de poder. Expresaban no sólo la majestad del rey, sino la de la vasta monarquía simbolizaba en su persona. En sus palacios –tanto el de Madrid como el de los cuatro sitios reales donde la corte pasaba cada estación del año- se expresaba esta alianza entre el poder y la ilustración mediante todas las bellas artes: la pintura con figuras como Giambattista Tiepolo, el ya mencionado Mengs y todos sus discípulos españoles, entre ellos el incipiente genio de Francisco de Goya; las artes decorativas merced a las Reales Fábricas de tapices, de porcelana y piedras duras, de cristales y de relojes, y a los talleres dirigidos por diseñadores como Mattia Gasparini.
Reconocibles aún en los palacios, pero en gran medida dispersas debido a la misma evolución de la vida cortesana y a los avatares históricos, las obras ornamentales creadas para expresar la magnificencia de Carlos III constituyen uno de los tesoros culturales de España. Patrimonio Nacional plantea aquí una nueva lectura de esta página esencial en el acervo estético español, presentando obras emblemáticas y programas decorativos que no podían verse de forma conjunta desde el siglo XVIII, así como otras obras no mostradas al público en los últimos años o procedentes de colecciones extranjeras de difícil acceso. Asimismo, será la primera vez que se muestre el Retrato de Carlos III, pintado por Mengs y regalado por el monarca al rey Federico V de Dinamarca, que nunca se ha expuesto en España.
Los comisarios de esta exposición son Dña. María Pilar Benito García, D. Javier Jordán de Urríes y D. José Luis Sancho Gaspar.
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The catalogue is available from ArtBooks.com:
Pilar Benito Garcia, et al., Carlos III: Majestad y Ornato en los Escenarios del Rey Ilustrado (Madrid: El Viso, 2016), 392 pages, ISBN: 9788471205216, $62.
To commemorate the 300th anniversary of the birth of King Charles III (1716–1788), Patrimonio Nacional (National Heritage) has organised a show especially focused on studying the courtly art created under his direct patronage at Madrid’s Palacio Real. The catalogue assembles the complete renovation of all of the Royal Sites promoted by Charles III. The works that adorned the Royal Chamber, the mural paintings that decorated the archs of the royal palaces, as well as the most delicate works elaborated by the royal ateliers of workwood, bronze, and embroidery can be admired.
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