Enfilade

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Wikimedia Commons (20 July 2016).

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As Lonnie Bunch, the MNAAHC’s director, repeatedly says, the museum aims, by addressing black experiences and contributions, to expand conceptions of what American history and identities are for all visitors. Part of that necessarily requires seventeenth- and eighteenth-century objects and interpretations. There are slave shackles, even an early nineteenth-century slave cabin, but there are also sources documenting service in the Revolutionary War, Freemasonry objects, and a portrait by Joshua Johnson, the earliest documented professional African American painter. Writing for The New York Times (15 September 2016), Holland Cotter calls it “more than just impressive. It’s a data-packed, engrossing, mood-swinging must-see.” Press release (2 February 2016) . . .

Ledger of supply costs for eleven Revolutionary War soldiers, 1782.

The Smithsonian today announced that the National Museum of African American History and Culture will open to the public Saturday, September 24. The opening will be the focus of a week-long celebration that begins with a dedication ceremony. The celebration continues with extended visiting hours and a three-day festival showcasing popular music, literature, dance and film. Also planned are events co-hosted by other museums around the country and in Africa.

“After 13 years of hard work and dedication on the part of so many, I am thrilled that we now have this good news to share with the nation and the world,” said Lonnie Bunch, the museum’s founding director. “In a few short months visitors will walk through the doors of the museum and see that it is a place for all people. We are prepared to offer exhibitions and programs to unite and capture the attention of millions of people worldwide. It will be a place for healing and reconciliation, a place where everyone can explore the story of America through the lens of the African American experience.”

“We look forward to the opening of this enormously important new museum,” said David Skorton, Smithsonian Secretary. “The National Museum of African American History and Culture furthers the Smithsonian’s commitment to telling America’s story in all its dimensions.”

President George W. Bush signed the legislation establishing the museum in 2003. In 2009, the museum’s architectural team of Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroupJJR was selected, and in 2011 Clarke/Smoot/Russell was chosen as the construction firm. David Adjaye is the lead designer, and Phil Freelon is the lead architect. The landscape design is by the team of Gustafson Guthrie Nichol.

Joshua Johnson, Portrait of John Westwood, ca. 1807–08, oil on canvas (Washington, D.C.: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2010.25ab).

The Smithsonian broke ground for the museum 22 February 2012 on its five-acre site on Constitution Avenue between 14th and 15th streets N.W. The 400,000-square-foot building has five levels above ground and four below. The museum will have exhibition galleries, an education center, a theater, café, and store, as well as staff offices. Among the building’s signature spaces are the Contemplative Court, a water- and light-filled memorial area that offers visitors a quiet space for reflection; the Central Hall, the primary public space in the museum and the point of orientation to building; and a reflecting pool at the south entry of the museum, with calm waters meant to invite all to approach.

The museum also features a series of openings—’lenses’—throughout the exhibition spaces that frame views of the Washington Monument, the White House, and other Smithsonian museums on the National Mall. These framed perspectives remind visitors that the museum presents a view of American through the lens of the African American experience.

The museum will open with 11 inaugural exhibitions that will focus on broad themes of history, culture and community. The exhibitions have been designed by museum historians in collaboration with Ralph Appelbaum Associates. These exhibitions will feature some of the more that 34,000 artifacts the museum has collected since the legislation establishing it was signed in 2003. The museum’s collections are designed to illustrate the major periods of African American history. Highlights include: a segregation-era Southern Railway car (c. 1920), Nat Turner’s Bible (c. 1830s), Michael Jackson’s fedora (c. 1992), a slave cabin from Edisto Island, S.C. plantation (c. early 1800s), Harriet Tubman’s hymnal (c. 1876) and works of art by Charles Alston, Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, and Henry O. Tanner.

While under construction, the museum has had a gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Since 2009, the museum has opened seven exhibitions in the space including Through the African American Lens: Selections from the Permanent Collection (on view now), The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing the Promise, and Changing America: The Emancipation Proclamation, 1863 and The March on Washington, 1963. The museum’s first exhibition, Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Photographs, opened in 2007 at the International Center for Photography in New York and toured 15 cities.

In addition to exhibitions, the museum has also launched several education and research programs. Save Our African American Treasures was launched in Chicago in January 2008 and is one of the museum’s signature programs. Participants work with conservation specialists and historians to learn how to identify and preserve items of historical value, including photographs, jewelry, military uniforms, and textiles.

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Du Paquier Porcelain Manufactory, Elephant Wine Dispenser, ca. 1740 (New York: The Frick Collection, gift of the Melinda and Paul Sullivan Collection, 2016; photo by Michael Bodycomb).

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Press release from The Frick, via Art Daily (16 September 2016). . .

The Frick Collection announced a gift from Paul Sullivan and Trustee Melinda Martin Sullivan of porcelain produced by the Du Paquier manufactory in Vienna. The Sullivans generously permitted the Frick to choose fourteen superb examples from their collection, considered to be the finest private collection in the world from this important early Western manufactory. The objects, dating from about 1720 to 1740, perfectly complement the museum’s porcelain holdings, which have grown since Henry Clay Frick’s day to represent in depth some of the best productions of this prized material. Mr. Frick focused his porcelain collecting on Sèvres, which accompanied beautifully the eighteenth-century French paintings and furniture he acquired. In 1966, his collection of Chinese porcelain was augmented by some two hundred pieces through the bequest of his son, Childs. The museum’s holdings were again extended by recent and promised gifts of Meissen porcelain from Henry Arnhold. Now, the Sullivan’s gift of Du Paquier porcelain adds to the Frick’s already strong assemblage, which illustrates the Western fascination with Eastern models and represents the brilliant and distinctive tradition of porcelain production in Europe. Starting September 28, these stunning works will be on view in the Frick’s Reception Hall, remaining there through March of 2017.

Europe had long sought to duplicate the composition and physical qualities of the ceramics it imported from China; the feat was achieved only in the first decade of the eighteenth century at the Royal Meissen Manufactory outside Dresden, Germany, before being replicated by the Du Paquier manufactory in Vienna, then by the Sèvres manufactory in France, and elsewhere. In 1718, Claudius Innocentius du Paquier, an agent in the Imperial Council of War at the Vienna court, was granted a twenty-five year charter by Emperor Charles VI to operate a porcelain factory in Vienna. Although the secret of making porcelain by combining local clays containing kaolin with ground alabaster was jealously guarded by the Meissen manufactory, Du Paquier used his diplomatic connections to lure several key figures from Germany to Austria. These included Christoph Conrad Hunger, a porcelain painter; Just Friedrich Tiemann, an expert in kiln construction; and Samuel Stöltzel, the Meissen kiln master, who brought with him the formula for porcelain paste. Named for its founder, the Du Paquier manufactory produced a range of tablewares, decorative vases, and smallscale sculpture that found great popularity with the Hapsburg court and the Austrian nobility.

An early work of about 1725 testifies to the Viennese factory’s pride in its achievement. A tulip vase, part of a set of vessels called a garniture, features a fanciful view of Vienna and its spiritual center, St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Circling the frame of this scene is a Latin inscription that translates: “The bowls that Vienna formerly shipped here under a thousand perils of the sea, she now produces for herself.” The legend clearly signals the Du Paquier manufactory’s debt to Asian ware, which the Emperor Charles VI’s Ostend East-India Company had imported to the city since 1722.

A number of Asian motifs cover a Du Paquier tureen and stand of 1730–35, a form common in both European ceramic and silver dinner services of this period. Chinese-inspired handles in the form of leaping fish enliven the vessel. Its cobalt blue underglaze decorated with gold patterns and cherry blossoms reflect color combinations influenced by Imari ware, which was imported to Europe from Japan during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Within the fan-shaped cartouches, scenes of Chinese figures and temples have been adopted from German engravings published about 1720 in Amsterdam. The variety of sources and inventive adaptations characterize Du Paquier’s spirited production.

As the renown of the Du Paquier manufactory spread, commissions came from capitals throughout Europe; the emperor and members of his court also sent these prized objects as diplomatic gifts to their counterparts in foreign lands. A magnificent tureen—one of more than forty from an extensive service created in 1735 for Czarina Anna Ivanovna—illustrates porcelain’s role in cementing political and dynastic ties. In 1726, Austria and Russia had signed a treaty of mutual defense against military threats from the Ottoman Empire and subsequently were allies during the War of Polish Succession (1733–35). It is likely that to strengthen this alliance, Charles VI sent Anna Ivanovna the Du Paquier service, most of which is still in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The Russian imperial arms are emblazoned in the center of the tureen’s lid, beneath the finial, a gilded statuette of a cross-legged, turbaned man. These two features perfectly illustrate Du Paquier’s brilliant integration of flat, painted decoration with three-dimensional applied forms. Circling the body of the tureen is a modeled garland held in the mouths of grotesque masks, its brightly painted flowers popping from the surface. In contrast, geometrical bands of a type called Laub- und Bandelwerk accent the bottom of the tureen and the lid. This decorative motif consisting of infinite variations based on patterns of trelliswork, angled strapwork, and stylized foliage became a virtual signature of the Viennese porcelain. Painted in a distinctive palette of iron-red with purple, blue, and green, the designs highlight the factory’s use of exuberant colors.

While sculptural forms like fish handles and seated-man finials are a hallmark of Du Paquier’s production, some works take these features to the highest level. One of the most charming is a tankard of 1735–40, the handle of which is in the shape of a cooper. Identified by the leather apron he wears under his coat, the craftsman specialized in making barrels like that which forms the shape he holds. Designed to contain beer, Du Paquier tankards often had lids, but the cooper’s hands grasp the rim, preventing a top from being added. The lively expression of the man, the bold pattern of flowers set off by bands of Laub-und Bandelwerk, and the tankard’s exceptionally large size make it a superb example of these drinking vessels.

Among the rarest of Du Paquier’s sculptural vessels is the elephant wine dispenser featured on the front of this release, one of three known to survive. A colorfully glazed version, in the Hermitage, is part of an elaborate centerpiece made about 1740 for Anna Ivanovna. That elephant stands above a rotating silver platter on which eight dancing figures hold cups ready to receive wine from the elephant’s trunk. The elephant is ridden by a figure of Bacchus, who can be lifted to fill the cavity with wine. The pure white surface of the Frick elephant allows the animal’s sculptural details to be clearly seen. Although it is possible that it was prepared as a spare in the event of breakage during firing, close observation reveals that the figure was once cold-painted (meaning paint was applied to the surface of the object, but it was not fired afterward). Elephants were favorites of the Czarina, who received one as a gift from Persian emissaries in 1736 and who featured a full-size model in a festival she staged on the frozen Neva River in 1740.

The elephant wine service was among the last of the great works produced by the Du Paquier manufactory. By 1744, its founder was overcome with debt and was forced to sell the factory to Empress Maria Theresa. Over its three-decade history, Du Paquier produced a body of work that was inventive and often whimsical, a truly distinctive voice in the evolution of European porcelain.

Comments Frick Director Ian Wardropper, “It gives me great pleasure to see these works come to the Frick. In 1993, while I was the Eloise W. Martin Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, Melinda and her sister, Joyce Hill, offered to fund an acquisition in honor of their mother, Eloise. Several suggestions were made, one of which was a group of three exquisite pieces of Du Paquier porcelain that the department was very interested in acquiring. Melinda was smitten with these objects, and—after purchasing the group for the Art Institute—she and her husband, Paul, began to acquire their own Du Paquier works. As their collection grew, so too did their interest in the history of the manufactory and its production, which led them to underwrite the research for and publication of Fired by Passion, a definitive three-volume monograph released in 2009. To celebrate its publication, as the head of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I initiated an exhibition drawn from the Sullivan’s and the Met’s collection (Imperial Privilege: Vienna Porcelain of Du Paquier, 1718–44). We are now honored to have this exceptional selection of porcelains enter The Frick Collection owing to the Sullivans’ extraordinary generosity.”

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