Exhibition | Shakespeare in Soane’s Architectural Imagination
Press release for the exhibition on view now at Sir John Soane’s Museum:
‘The Cloud-Capped Towers’: Shakespeare in Soane’s Architectural Imagination
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 21 April – 8 October 2016
Curated by Alison Shell
Louis-François Roubiliac, Bust of William Shakespeare (modern replica), 1742 (London: The Garrick Club).
A new exhibition coinciding with the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare will open at Sir John Soane’s Museum on 21st April. ‘The Cloud-Capped Towers’: Shakespeare in Soane’s Architectural Imagination focuses on Soane’s extensive Shakespeare collections, including his ownership of the first four Folios of Shakespeare’s collected works, the way Soane and his family participated in the eighteenth-century Shakespearean revival, and the influence of the Bard on Soane’s architecture. Guest-curated by Dr Alison Shell of UCL, the exhibition will largely consist of Soane’s own collection, supplemented by important loans from The Garrick Club. Whilst Soane’s fascination with Shakespeare is evident throughout his house-museum, this is the first time the elements have been drawn together to provide a cohesive study of the way Shakespeare influenced Soane. It is also a rare opportunity to see Shakespeare’s first our Folios displayed together in one exhibition.
Robert Adam, Adam’s interior of the Drury Lane Theatre from Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1779.
The first room of the exhibition introduces the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, setting it in the context of the 200th anniversary celebrations in 1816, and discusses the intersection between literature and architecture with a particular focus on David Garrick, the celebrated actor-manager of the Drury Lane Theatre who was so instrumental in the popularisation of Shakespeare in Georgian London.
The Garrick Club has loaned two paintings: David Garrick between the Muses of Tragedy and Comedy, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, and John Philip Kemble as Hamlet, from the studio of Sir Thomas Lawrence. These are instantly recognisable portraits of two of the greatest actors of the eighteenth century, famed for their interpretations of Shakespeare. The Adam brothers’ designs for Drury Lane Theatre will also be on display, as well as a rare coloured edition of The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam.
The second room in the gallery goes on to consider Shakespeare in Soane’s architectural imagination. In 1788–89 ‘The Shakespeare Gallery’, only the second purpose-built art gallery in England, was built in Pall Mall to designs by George Dance the Younger, Soane’s first architectural teacher and mentor. These in turn influenced Soane’s later designs for the Dulwich Picture Gallery—itself the first public art gallery in Britain.
The exhibition closes with a selection of Soane’s large-scale Royal Academy lecture drawings, allowing access to these appealing and striking images which can usually be viewed only by appointment.
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Catalogue available through Sir John Soane’s Museum:
Frances Sands, Alison Shell, Stephanie Coane, and Emmeline Leary, ‘The Cloud-Capped Towers’: Shakespeare in Soane’s Architectural Imagination (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2016), 48 pages, ISBN: 978-0993204128, £10.
This book of essays, ‘The cloud-capped towers:’ Shakespeare in Soane’s Architectural Imagination, is published to coincide with an exhibition with the same title to be shown at Sir John Soane’s Museum in 2016 as part of the nationwide commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the death of the great English playwright William Shakespeare.
Sir John Soane (1753–1837) was a highly literary architect, who appears to have valued Shakespeare for the architectural pictures he conjured up, and also as a moral teacher. He had a deep knowledge of Shakespeare’s work, quoting (and misquoting) it often, notably in his Royal Academy lectures. His fascination with Shakespeare is evident both in his library and in the Shakespearian references throughout his house-museum, the most obvious being the Shakespeare Recess, a shrine to the Bard on the staircase.
The four essays in this volume look at the influence of Shakespeare on Soane’s architecture, against the wider background of the eighteenth-century Shakespearean revival; at Soane as a ‘bardolator’ and bibliophile; and at contemporary performance and theatre-going, with a particular focus on the plays seen by Soane and his wife Eliza. The essays are illustrated by a number of illustrations in full colour, the majority drawn from Soane’s own collection.
Frances Sands is Curator of Drawings and Books at Sir John Soane’s Museum. Alison Shell is a professor in the Department of English, University College London. Emmeline Leary is an independent scholar. Stephanie Coane is Senior Librarian is Senior Librarian, College Library, Eton College and Honorary Librarian to Sir John Soane’s Museum.
Exhibition | Noble Prospects: Capability Brown and Yorkshire
Now on view at The Mercer Art Gallery, with more information from the Capability Brown Festival:
Noble Prospects: Capability Brown and the Yorkshire Landscape
The Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, North Yorkshire, 25 June — 11 September 2016
The great landscape gardener Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716–1783) changed the face of eighteenth-century English parkland, creating a magical world of woods, water and swathes of green that lives on until this day in Yorkshire. This Mercer Art Gallery exhibition is the first ever dedicated to the Yorkshire landscapes of this legendary designer to mark the 300th anniversary of his birth, devised in partnership with the Yorkshire Gardens Trust.
Installation view of the exhibition “Noble Prospects: Capability Brown and the Yorkshire Landscape,” The Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, North Yorkshire, 2016. Photo by Simon Miles.
Capability Brown is the creator of some of Yorkshire’s most admired landscapes, which include Burton Constable, Harewood, Roche Abbey, Scampston, Sledmere and Temple Newsam. This unique exhibition brings together an intriguing collection of artworks, which reveal more about the designer and his designs. Drawn largely from Yorkshire collections the show features portraits of Capability Brown and his Yorkshire clients, original plans, drawings and documents by Brown, paintings of his creations as well as works of art that inspired his landscapes.
Capability Brown was the leading landscape designer of the second-half of the eighteenth century and there are thought to be 20 sites in Yorkshire associated with him. He rejected the very formal geometric French style of gardening and concentrated on echoing the natural undulations of the English landscape in his plans. The landscape garden is recognised as one of Britain’s greatest artistic achievements and the designs of Brown and his contemporaries have influenced gardens across the world.
Noble Prospects: Capability Brown and the Yorkshire Landscape is supported by The Landscape Agency, Saffery Champness, Savills, Coutts, Harrogate Borough Council, The Capability Brown Festival 2016, Art Fund, Natural England, The Calmcott Trust, The Friends of the Mercer Art Gallery, Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Historic Houses Associations Yorkshire Friends, Mr and Mrs J. Samuel and private donors. The Yorkshire Gardens Trust, an educational charity founded in 1996, works to help conserve, protect and promote Yorkshire’s rich heritage of parks, gardens and designed landscapes.
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From the Yorkshire Gardens Trust:
Karen Lynch, Noble Prospects: Capability Brown and the Yorkshire Landscape (Yorkshire Gardens Trust, 2016), 72 pages, £12.
The development of a new natural style of laying out parks in the eighteenth century is acknowledged to be one of the greatest artistic achievements in British history. One man’s name is indelibly linked with the profession of landscape gardening: Lancelot Brown. Achieving great renown in his own lifetime he became universally known by his affectionate nickname ‘Capability’, and whilst fashions in design have come and gone, his fame remains great three hundred years after his birth. This new publication celebrates Capability Brown’s work in Yorkshire and is the culmination of two years of research to identify just what Brown did in this vast county. It features contemporary views by artists such as J.M.W. Turner and Paul Sandby as well as works by amateur artists who admired the landscapes they visited. Also illustrated are designs by Brown and portraits of the man and his Yorkshire clients. Stunning newly commissioned photography by artist Simon Warner shows the parks as they look today.
New Book | A Guide to Eighteenth-Century Art
From Wiley-Blackwell:
Linda Walsh, A Guide to Eighteenth-Century Art (Hoboken, Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 288 pages, (hardcover) ISBN: 978-1118475577, $90 / (paperback) ISBN: 978-1118475515, $40.
A Guide to Eighteenth-Century Art offers an introductory overview of the art, artists, and artistic movements of this period, and the social, economic, philosophical, and political debates that helped shape them. It uses an innovative framework to highlight the roles of tradition, modernity, and hierarchy in the production of artistic works during this influential era.
The book spans a broad range of topics from the trade and craft of art; the hierarchy of genres; and the emerging public for artistic works; through to the relationship of art to wider cultural developments of the Enlightenment; art and morality, and much more. It also explores the relationship between western art and the growth of colonialism. In examining the art of the period, Walsh reflects the latest research and insights from contemporary scholars. Complete with numerous illustrations and supported by online resources, A Guide to Eighteenth-Century Art offers illuminating insights into the dramatic artistic achievements that transpired between the waning days of the Baroque and the Age of Revolution.
Linda Walsh is a former Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Open University. An established scholar of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art, Walsh is the author of numerous articles and chapters on topics that include Canova and neoclassical theory; paintings by David, Watteau, and Chardin; eighteenth-century academies; art criticism; and British landscape art.
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C O N T E N T S
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Companion Website
Introduction: Style, Society, Modernity
1 Institutional Hierarchies: Art and Craft
2 Genres and Contested Hierarchies
3 Markets, Publics, Expert Opinions
4 Taste, Criticism, and Journalism
5 Seeking a Moral Order: The Choice between Virtue and Pleasure
Conclusion
References
Index
New Book | The Anatomical Venus
From Distributed Art Publishers:
Joanna Ebenstein, The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death & the Ecstatic (New York: DAP, 2016), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1938922916, $35.
Of all the artifacts from the history of medicine, the Anatomical Venus—with its heady mixture of beauty, eroticism and death—is the most seductive. These life-sized dissectible wax women reclining on moth-eaten velvet cushions—with glass eyes, strings of pearls, and golden tiaras crowning their real human hair—were created in eighteenth-century Florence as the centerpiece of the first truly public science museum. Conceived as a means to teach human anatomy, the Venus also tacitly communicated the relationship between the human body and a divinely created cosmos—between art and science, nature and mankind. Today, she both intrigues and confounds, troubling our neat categorical divides between life and death, body and soul, effigy and pedagogy, entertainment and education, kitsch and art. The first book of its kind, The Anatomical Venus, by Morbid Anatomy Museum cofounder Joanna Ebenstein, features over 250 images—many never before published—gathered by its author from around the world. Its extensively researched text explores the Anatomical Venus within her historical and cultural context in order to reveal the shifting attitudes toward death and the body that today render such spectacles strange. It reflects on connections between death and wax, the tradition of life-sized simulacra and preserved beautiful women, the phenomenon of women in glass boxes in fairground displays, and ideas of the ecstatic, the sublime and the uncanny.
Joanna Ebenstein is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, writer, lecturer and graphic designer. She originated the Morbid Anatomy blog and website, and is cofounder (with Tracy Hurley Martin) and creative director of the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, New York.
New Book | Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe
From Routledge:
Jennifer Germann and Heidi Strobel, eds., Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Routledge, 2016), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1472456311, $150.
Art history has enriched the study of material culture as a scholarly field. This interdisciplinary volume enhances this literature through the contributors’ engagement with gender as the conceptual locus of analysis in terms of femininity, masculinity, and the spaces in between. Collectively, these essays by art historians and museum professionals argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between objects and subjects in gendered terms. The objects under consideration range from the quotidian to the exotic, including beds, guns, fans, needle paintings, prints, drawings, mantillas, almanacs, reticules, silver punch bowls, and collage. These material goods may have been intended to enforce and affirm gendered norms, however as the essays demonstrate, their use by subjects frequently put normative formations of gender into question, revealing the impossibility of permanently fixing gender in relation to material goods, concepts, or bodies. This book will appeal to art historians, museum professionals, women’s and gender studies specialists, students, and all those interested in the history of objects in everyday life.
Jennifer G. Germann is Assistant Professor of Art History, Ithaca College.
Heidi A. Strobel is Associate Professor of Art History, University of Evansville.
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C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Material Culture and the Gendered Subject, Jennifer G. Germann and Heidi A. Strobel
I. Transgressive Objects
1 Men and Hunting Guns in Eighteenth-Century France, Amy Freund
2 Taste a-la-mode: Consuming Foreignness, Picturing Gender, Freya Gowrley
3 Gendered Souvenirs: Anna Amalia’s Grand Tourist Vedute Fans, Christina K. Lindeman
4 Majas, Mantillas, and Marcialidad: Fashioning Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Spain, Tara Zanardi
II. Gender and Domesticity
5 Place and Possession: Emma Hamilton at Merton, 1801–05, Amber Ludwig
6 A Gentlemen’s Pursuit: Eighteenth-Century Chinoiserie Silver in Britain, Elizabeth A. Williams
7 Sexing Sovereignty: The Material Culture and Sexual Politics of Queen Marie Leszczinska’s Bed, Jennifer G. Germann
III. High Art in Low Places
8 ‘Idleness Never Grew in My Soil’: Mary Delany’s Flower Collages, Gender, and the Moral Authority of ‘Nature’ in Eighteenth-Century England, Felicity Roberts
9 Pocket Museums: The Display of Art in Women’s Almanacs during the First French Empire, Ryan Whyte
10 Stitching the Stage: Mary Linwood, Thomas Gainsborough, and the Art of Installation Embroidery, Heidi A. Strobel
Selected Bibliography
Index
Exhibition | Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo: Master Drawings
Domenico Tiepolo, A Centaur Playing with Punchinellos, ca. 1770 (Bloominton Indiana: The Anthony Moravec Collection of Old Master Drawings, Eskenazi Museum of Art)
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From the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University:
Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo: Master Drawings from the Anthony J. Moravec Collection
Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1 October 2016 — 5 February 2017
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, 29 October 2017 — 4 February 2018
Curated by Adeheld Gealt
This fall, the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University will showcase a series of Italian master drawings, in an exhibition that highlights a major gift of art in the museum’s 75-year history. Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo: Master Drawings from the Anthony J. Moravec Collection will present a collection of works on paper by the Venetian masters Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo—a father and son who are widely considered two of the most notable Italian draftsmen of their era—along with works by contemporaries Ubaldo Gandolfi and Giuseppe Bernardino Bison, as well as their predecessor Jacopo Palma il Giovane. Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo marks the first time that the Eskenazi Museum has comprehensively exhibited the collection of Anthony J. Moravec, an Indiana philanthropist and civic leader who spent five years building the collection in concert with Dr. Adelheid Gealt, the museum’s director emeritus, before donating his holdings to the Eskenazi Museum in 2010.
Domenico Tiepolo, Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: The Second Prayer, ca. 1785, pen and brown ink wash over black chalk on paper (The Anthony Moravec Collection of Old Master Drawings, Eskenazi Museum of Art, 2010.118).
On view from October 1, 2016 through February 5, 2017, the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue will provide new scholarship and curatorial insight on Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo, two of the most important artists in the Old Masters canon. The exhibition will center on a set of 12 New Testament drawings by Domenico Tiepolo, part of a now-scattered cycle of 320 drawings that is regarded as the most exhaustive and sustained visual exploration of the subject by any artist in history. Domenico’s large pen, brush, and ink drawings were dispersed after his death in 1804, and entered many public and private collections where they were prized as outstanding drawings. However, the actual series to which these individual drawings belonged was not known until two scholars— Adelheid Gealt and George Knox, professor emeritus of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver—spent 10 years piecing the series back together and publishing it as a newly discovered New Testament cycle in 2006. Following Moravec’s 2010 gift, which was the largest private collection of New Testament drawings to enter a public collection in recent history, the Eskenazi Museum has become the world’s third-largest repository of works from Tiepolo’s New Testament series, after the Museé du Louvre and the Morgan Library and Museum.
In addition to works from Domenico’s New Testament series, the Moravec collection also includes important works on paper by his father, Giambattista Tiepolo, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest draftsmen of the 18th century. Works by Ubaldo Gandolfi and Giuseppe Bernardino Bison round out the collection, along with a drawing by Jacopo Palma il Giovane—a previously unidentified study for his painting St. John the Baptist Preaching, which was acquired by the museum in 1964. In total, 24 works on paper will be displayed in Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo, which will be a major highlight of the Eskenazi Museum’s 75th-anniversary season.
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The catalogue will be available in October from Indiana University Press:
Adeheld Gealt, with George Knox, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 136 pages, ISBN: 978-0253022905, $50.
Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo documents an important collection of master drawings donated by an individual to the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, including five drawings by the celebrated Venetian genius Giambattista Tiepolo and sixteen drawings by his most famous son, Domenico Tiepolo. Twelve of the sixteen form part of Domenico’s most important drawing series—his exhaustive visual exploration of the New Testament. Also included are two drawings discovered after the 2006 publication of Domenico Tiepolo: A New Testament and seen here for the first time. Gealt and Knox are world-renowned experts on the Tiepolos and this book will serve as a useful reference to understanding their work as draftsmen. This beautiful illustrated volume will appeal to art lovers, biblical scholars, and those who value the unique work of the Tiepolos.
Adeheld M. Gealt is Director Emerita of the Eskenazi Museum of Art. Her research has concentrated on reconstructing the lost serial narratives of the Venetian draftsman Domenico Tiepolo (1727–1804). She is editor (with George Knox) of Domenico Tiepolo: Master Draftsman (1997) and Domenico Tiepolo: A New Testament (2006).
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C O N T E N T S
Foreword, David Brenneman
Preface and Acknowledgments
Structure of the Catalogue
An Interview with the Collector, Anthony J. Moravec and Adelheid M. Gealt
A Brief History of Venetian Drawing
Giambattista Tiepolo, a Brief Biography
Development as a Draftsman
Flight into Egypt
Holy Family
Caricatures
Domenico Tiepolo, a Brief Biography
St. Anthony of Padua
Satyrs and Centaurs
Punchinello
New Testament
Palma Giovane
Ubaldo Gandolfi
Giuseppe Bernardino Bison
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Note (added 29 October 2017) — The posting was updated to include the Crocker Art Museum as a venue.
New Book | The Rise and Fall of the Fine Art Print
From the University of Toronto Press:
W. McAllister Johnson, The Rise and Fall of the Fine Art Print in Eighteenth-Century France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 472 pages, ISBN: 978-1442637122 , $85.
Sanctioned by France’s Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and struck primarily in order to disseminate the works of the Academy’s members, the eighteenth-century fine art print flourished only briefly. Yet it set into motion the interdependence of graphic and pictorial media. Here, W. McAllister Johnson distills a lifetime of research into an essential study of this seminal phenomenon and chronicles the issues, decisions, and practicalities inherent in making copperplate engravings as articles of art and commerce. His exceptional erudition makes this an unparalleled resource for the study of visual culture and of all aspects of printmaking before the French Revolution.
W. McAllister Johnson is a professor emeritus in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto. His most recent book is Versified Prints: A Literary and Cultural Phenomenon.
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C O N T E N T S
Preface
1 The Full Statement of the Question
2 Orienting Concepts
3 Prints as Information
4 The Fine Art Print Defined
5 Pendant Prints
6 The Académie as Catalyst and Regulator
7 The Académie and the Artist
8 Creative Issues
9 Response Time
10 Career Calculus
11 Reputation and Reflected Glory
12 Commercial Ploys and the Art of the Annonce
13 Prints and Paintings on Exhibition
14 Engraved, Not Engraved
15 Criticism, Controversy and Censure
16 Greuze Prints, including the Salon
17 The Clash of Genres
18 Conclusion
Appendix A: The Mercure’s Editorial Policy regarding Prints (1728)
Appendix B: Problems of Engraving and Collecting Prints (1754)
Appendix C: Wille’s Appreciation of Jean Daullé (1763)
Appendix D: An Oudry Portrait for the Book Trade (1767)
Appendix E: A Greuze ‘Lost to France’ multiplied by a Print (1767)
Appendix F: The Art Market : Paintings, Pendants and Petits Sujets (1780)
New Book | The Piranesi Effect
From New South Books:
Kerrianne Stone and Gerard Vaughan, eds., The Piranesi Effect (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2015), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1742234267, $60.
This book publishes a conference convened in February 2014 on the global impact of Piranesi: Piranesi and the Impact of the Late Baroque, presented in collaboration with the State Library and the Baillieu Library.
The work of Italian printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) has captivated artists, architects and designers for centuries. Although contemporary Australia is a long way from eighteenth-century Rome, it is home to substantial collections of his works, the largest being at the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne.
The Piranesi Effect is a collection of exquisitely illustrated essays on the impact of Piranesi’s work throughout the years. The book brings together Australian and international experts who investigate Piranesi’s world and its connections to the study of art and the practice of artists today. From curators and art historians, to contemporary artists like Bill Henson and Ron McBurnie, the contributors each bring their own passion and insight into the work of Piranesi, illuminating what it is about his work that still inspires such wonder.
Kerrianne Stone is the Curator, Prints, at the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne repository of the first Paris edition of Piranesi’s work. She has worked with several collections across museums and galleries in Melbourne. Gerard Vaughan is Director of the National Gallery of Australia. For 13 years he was director of the National Gallery of Victoria, before retiring to take up a research professorship in The Australian Institute of Art History at Melbourne University. He has a special interest in the rise of neoclassicism in late eighteenth-century Europe.
New Book | Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life
From the University of Pennsylvania Press:
Catherine Kelly, Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0812248234, $50.
Since the early decades of the eighteenth century, European, and especially British, thinkers were preoccupied with questions of taste. Whether Americans believed that taste was innate—and therefore a marker of breeding and station—or acquired—and thus the product of application and study—all could appreciate that taste was grounded in, demonstrated through, and confirmed by reading, writing, and looking. It was widely believed that shared aesthetic sensibilities connected like-minded individuals and that shared affinities advanced the public good and held great promise for the American republic.
Exploring the intersection of the early republic’s material, visual, literary, and political cultures, Catherine Kelly demonstrates how American thinkers acknowledged the similarities between aesthetics and politics in order to wrestle with questions about power and authority. Judgments about art, architecture, literature, poetry, and the theater became an arena for considering political issues ranging from government structures and legislative representation to qualifications for citizenship and the meaning of liberty itself. Additionally, if taste prompted political debate, it also encouraged affinity grounded in a shared national identity. In the years following independence, ordinary women and men reassured themselves that taste revealed larger truths about an individual’s character and potential for republican citizenship.
Did an early national vocabulary of taste, then, with its privileged visuality, register beyond the debates over the ratification of the Constitution? Did it truly extend beyond political and politicized discourse to inform the imaginative structures and material forms of everyday life? Republic of Taste affirms that it did, although not in ways that anyone could have predicted at the conclusion of the American Revolution.
Catherine E. Kelly is Associate Professor and L. R. Brammer Jr. Presidential Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. She is author of In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women’s Lives in the Nineteenth Century.
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction: The American Republic of Taste
1 Learning Taste
2 Aesthetic Entrepreneurs
3 Picturing Race
4 Looking Past Loyalism
5 Waxing Political
6 Political Personae
Epilogue: The Nation’s Guest in the Republic of Taste
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Exhibition | Highest Heaven: Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Art
Now on view at the San Antonio Museum of Art:
Highest Heaven: Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Art
of the Roberta and Richard Huber Collection
San Antonio Museum of Art, 11 June 2016 — 14 September 2016
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, 23 October 2016 — 22 January 2017
Worcester Art Museum, 12 March — 9 July 2017
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, 2 March — 3 Jun 2018
Curated by William Keyse Rudolph and Marion J. Oettinger
Our Lady of Candlemas with Donors, Bolivian, Potosí, 1799, oil on canvas (Roberta and Richard Huber Collection; photograph by Graydon Wood, Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Highest Heaven explores the paintings, sculpture, furniture, ivories, and silverworks of the Altiplano, or high plains, of South America in the 18th century. Through the work of both well-regarded masters and lesser-known artists, Highest Heaven highlights the role of art in the establishment of new city centers in the Spanish Empire and the propagation of the Christian faith among indigenous peoples. Drawn exclusively from the distinguished collection of Roberta and Richard Huber, the exhibition highlights the distinct visual language created by the cultural and creative exchanges that occurred between Spain and Portugal and their South American colonies. The exhibition will remain on view through September 4, 2016, before traveling to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California in October, and to the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts the following March.
The exhibition features more than 100 works, including religious paintings, carved and gilded wooden sculptures, intimate ivories, and silverwork, originally housed in ecclesiastical and private collections throughout the former colonial possessions of Spain and Portugal. The majority of these works were created for functional purposes, as articles of faith or symbols of civic order, and were displayed in a manner that enhanced religious understanding, brought social order, and spurred conversion among colonial populations. Highest Heaven examines these uses, focusing in particular on the translation of Christian imagery to the colonies and the ways in which these works and objects worked to establish an ordered society and were integrated into religious life. The exhibition includes approximately 20 recent acquisitions by the Hubers, many of which have never before been seen in a museum exhibition.
“A central component of our mission is to examine and communicate the historic and cultural contexts of artworks, along with the objects themselves. Highest Heaven is an exciting opportunity to not only investigate the aesthetic beauty of this art, but also the significant role that it played in the cultural, religious, and social lives of these peoples,” said Katherine Luber, The Kelso Director of San Antonio Museum of Art. “We are grateful to Roberta and Richard for their collecting vision and the chance to share this incredible collection with our audiences. San Antonio is a city rich in history and diversity, and we look forward to engaging our community with this work, which we think will have a particular meaning here.”
Pax Depicting the Ecce Homo, Peruvian, 18th century, silver (Roberta and Richard Huber Collection; photograph by Graydon Wood, Philadelphia Museum of Art)
The exhibition is co-curated by William Keyse Rudolph, Mellon Chief Curator and Marie and Hugh Halff Curator of American Art, and Marion J. Oettinger Jr, Curator of Latin American Art. Unlike many previous exhibitions of Colonial Art, which have arranged objects by media, Highest Heaven will be organized according to iconography. After an introductory section that explores a group of objects made for secular life, the exhibition considers the art works religiously, from the angels and archangels that foretold the coming of Jesus Christ, through imagery dealing with the life of Christ and spread of the gospel, to the importance of the Virgin Mary and the saints. Each section of the exhibition contains a mixture of works of art in all media, from paintings to sculpture to silverwork and ivories.
The Altiplano stretches from northern Argentina to the flatlands of Peru, and much of the exhibition focuses on works produced by workshops in the major cities of Cuzco and Lima in modern day Peru and Potosi in modern day Bolivia, where both European and native artists practiced. Paintings and sculpture served primarily to disseminate Christian images and faith to the New World, while works in ivory and silver underscored the wealth and prosperity of the growing Empire. Paintings also frequently depicted major colonial cities to both capture their urban fabric and educate those back home on the appearance and existence of the colonies.
With the extensive growth of trade across the Empire, works of art took on a range of styles that represented European traditions and local idioms. In some instances, European aesthetics and subjects were replicated directly. In others, European saints, idols, and figures took on the appearance of native populations, enhancing their relevance and influence. Yet, in other work, Christian symbols were incorporated into scenes of local rural and urban life. Together, these distinct yet interrelated approaches, created a new visual culture that represented the expansiveness of the Empire, and spoke to the integration of a diversity of peoples into a single faith.
“In contrast to other areas of Spanish colonial scholarship, such as New Spain (present-day Southwestern United States, Mexico, and Central America), much less is known about the artists, workshop practices, and even the names of South American artists,” said Luber. “Collectors are often the first to blaze the trail of discovery, and then the scholarship follows. A show like Highest Heaven opens up avenues of investigation. We are producing a catalogue that we hope will spur additional scholarship in the field. That’s part of what is so exciting about this exhibition.”
New York-based collectors Roberta and Richard Huber developed the collection of colonial South American art over the last 40 years. The Hubers continue to discover new artists and works, building on their holdings for personal enjoyment and public education and making their collection a living and evolving one. They first discovered the art and antiquities of the Spanish Empire when Richard Huber was relocated for work to Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1962. His and Roberta’s love for the period grew as they traveled and lived in other areas of South America. Today, they are committed to enhancing understanding of the diversity, depth, and intricacy of art produced by artists across the Altiplano during Spanish rule.
Erin Kathleen Murphy and William Keyse Rudolph with contributions by Thomas B. F. Cummins, Katherine Moore McAllen, and Katherine Crawford Luber, Highest Heaven: Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Art from the Roberta and Richard Huber Collection (San Antonio: San Antonio Museum of Art, 2016), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1883502225, $40.
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