Enfilade

From the Palace of Mosigkau website:

Teure Köpfe: Lisiewsky,​ Hofmaler in Anhalt und Mecklenburg
Schloss Mosigkau, Dessau Wörlitz, Germany, 29 August — 31 October 2010

Christoph Friedrich Reinhold Lisiewsky, "Portrait of Leopold III. Friedrich Franz von Anhalt-Dessau," 1762

Christoph Friedrich Reinhold Lisiewsky (1725-1794) zählt zu den bedeutendsten Porträtmalern des 18. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland. Als „das Resultat unermesslichen Fleißes und den Triumph der Prosa in der Malerei” bezeichnete sein berühmter Zeitgenosse, der Bildhauer J. G. Schadow, das Werk Lisiewskys. Ob Schadow mit seinem wohl ironisch gemeinten Urteil die künstlerische Leistung richtig einzuschätzen wusste, sei dahin gestellt. In der gemeinsamen Ausstellung der Kulturstiftung DessauWörlitz und dem Staatlichem Museum Schwerin werden erstmals die herausragenden Malqualitäten des Künstlers gewürdigt.

Lisiewsky überzeugt aus heutiger Sicht mit seiner neuartigen, ganz eigenständigen Darstellungsweise auch im Vergleich mit anderen großen Bildnismalern des 18. Jahrhunderts – wie Antoine Pesne zuvor und Anton Graff nach ihm. Seine Porträtauffassung löste sich allmählich von den barocken Stereotypen der Inszenierung und Idealisierung. Durch seinen realistischen, teils naturalistischen Vortrag praktizierte Lisiewsky frühzeitig den Übergang zum Klassizismus. Seine von Porträtierten beschriebene, sorgfältige und aufwendige Arbeitsweise, die brillant ausgearbeitete Stofflichkeit und die genaue Wiedergabe der charakteristischen Physiognomie, Körpervolumina und -haltung, führen zu einer nahezu greifbaren Präsenz des Dargestellten.

Palace of Mosigkau (Wikimedia Commons)

Lisiewsky entstammte einer polnischen Malerfamilie, die mehrere angesehene Mitglieder hervorgebracht hat. Von 1752 bis 1772 war der Künstler als Hofmaler in Dessau tätig. In dieser Zeit führte er auch Bildnisaufträge für einen bürgerlichen Kundenkreis wie Kaufleute, Universitätsprofessoren und Theologen in Berlin und Leipzig aus. 1778 wurde der Porträtmaler an das mecklenburgische Fürstenhaus nach Ludwigslust berufen, wo er 18 Jahre bis zu seinem Tod wirkte.

Information on exhibition programming is available here»

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Gert Bartoschek, et al., Christoph Friedrich Reinhold Lisiewsky (1725-1794), exhibition catalogue (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2010), 280 pages, ISBN: 9783422070363, $65.

The eighteenth-century painter Christoph Reinhold Friedrich Lisiewsky attained the realistic effect of physical presence in his portraits through a painting method that required many sessions. This richly illustrated catalogue is the first monograph on the painter.

The catalogue is available through artbooks.com.

The Messerschmidt exhibition noted in yesterday’s posting is currently in New York. From the Neue Galerie:

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, 1736-1783: From Neoclassicism to Expressionism
Neue Galerie, New York, 16 September 2010 — 10 January 2011
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 26 January — 25 April 2011

catalogue, ISBN: 9788889854549, $55

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt is the first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to this major late 18th-century Bavarian-born Austrian sculptor. It focuses on the artist’s so-called “character heads,” among the most important works of sculpture from their era. The exhibition is organized by Guilhem Scherf, chief curator of sculpture at the Musée du Louvre.

The show will be on view at the Neue Galerie New York from September 16, 2010, to January 10, 2011, then travel to the Louvre, where it will be on view from January 26 to April 25, 2011. This is the first collaboration between the Neue Galerie and the Louvre. It is accompanied by a full-scale catalogue, with essays by Guilhem Scherf, Maria Pötzl-Malikova, Antonia Boström, and Marie-Claude Lambotte.

Messerschmidt made his mark at first in Vienna, where he enjoyed a successful career, including several royal commissions. Working in a neoclassical vein, Messerschmidt produced some of the most important sculptures of the eighteenth century. He presented the individual features of his models in a way “true to nature,” in keeping with their age and without idealizing them. No other sculptor in Vienna at the time was similarly uncompromising when producing portraits.

Around 1770, there was a rupture in Messerschmidt’s life. The artist was thought to have psychological problems, lost his position at the university, and decided to return to Wiesensteig, his native Bavarian town. From that period on, Messerschmidt devoted himself to the creation of his “character heads,” the body of work for which he would become best known. To produce these works, the artist would look into the mirror, pinching his body and contorting his face. He then rendered, with great precision, his distorted expressions. Messerschmidt is known to have produced more than 60 of these astonishing works before he died in 1783 at the age of 47.

Messerschmidt can be seen in relation to artists such as William Blake and Francisco Goya for his explorations of the dark side of the human soul. His “character heads,” in particular, are masterly works of sculpture, whose expressive intensity anticipates several later developments in art. This exhibition will extend the mission of the Neue Galerie, showing the roots of Expressionism and provide for a more complete understanding of the works in the museum collection.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Willibald Sauerländer writes about “Messerschmidt’s Mad Faces” for The New York Review Blog. His article on the artist will appear in the October 28 issue of The New York Review of Books . . .

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783) is one of those elusive eighteenth-century figures who confront us with the nocturnal side of the enlightenment. In the eyes of his contemporaries, he was not only a madman but also a mad artist. At the same time that he began to withdraw from society, he started to work on the project that would isolate him artistically as well, the Kopfstücke, or “character heads,” in which he concentrated his efforts to depict the passions and emotions of humanity. The trivial titles assigned to them by an anonymous writer ten years after Messerschmidt’s death—Afflicted by Constipation, A Hypocrite and Slanderer, The Incapable Bassoonist—are nothing but an attempt to resist their social illegibility.

The Neue Galerie’s exhibition of no fewer than twenty-one character heads displays the full spectrum of Messerschmidt’s studies of expression. Facial muscles contract, eyes squint, eyebrows rise, mouths contort. These distorted faces are disturbing because we cannot place them in any familiar social setting or assign them to any known psychic condition. . . .

The full essay is available here»

From the LACMA website:

Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2 October 2010 — 6 March 2011

Curated by Sharon Takeda and Kaye Spilker

Vest, France, 1789-94, Photo © 2010 LACMA

Man’s Suit, France, ca. 1760, Photo © 2010 LACMA

Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915 celebrates the museum’s groundbreaking acquisition of a major collection of European men’s, women’s, and children’s garments and accessories.The exhibition tells the story of fashion’s aesthetic and technical development from the Age of Enlightenment to World War I. It examines sweeping changes in fashionable dress spanning a period of over two hundred years, and evolutions in luxurious textiles, exacting tailoring techniques, and lush trimmings.

Highlights include an eighteenth-century man’s vest intricately embroidered with powerful symbolic messages relevant to the French Revolution; an evening mantle with silk embroidery, glass beads, and ostrich feathers designed by French couturier Émile
Pingat (active 1860-96); and spectacular three-piece
suits and gowns worn at the royal courts of Europe.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915, by Sharon Takeda, Kaye Spilker and Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, preface by John Galliano (Prestel, 2010), ISBN: 978-3791350622 $55.

Luxurious textiles, exacting tailoring, and lush trimmings abound in this glorious volume that celebrates the Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915 exhibition at LACMA. Fashion is in the details. Textiles, tailoring, and trimmings all work together in the creation of the finest pieces. Drawing on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s internationally known fashion collection, this gorgeous book tells the story–in words and beautiful pictures–of fashion’s aesthetic and technical development from the Age of Enlightenment to World War I, a period when fashionable dress underwent sweeping changes. Many remarkable examples of men’s, women’s, and children’s garments are featured here for the first time, including an extraordinarily rare 1790s man’s vest designed to promote sympathy with the French Revolution; a stunning 1845 black satin gown from the royal court of Portugal heavily embroidered with gold; and an 1891 evening mantle with silk embroidery, glass beads, and ostrich feathers designed by French couturier Aemile Pingat. An invaluable resource for anyone interested in the evolution of fashion, this generously illustrated book provides a rich visual history of the changes that occurred in fashionable dress spanning a period of more than two hundred years.

Sharon Sadako Takeda is the Senior Curator and Head, Costume and Textiles Department, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Kaye Durland Spilker is Curator, Costume and Textiles Department, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. John Galliano, one of the most influential fashion designers of our time, is the chief designer of the haute couture house Christian Dior. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell is a fashion-research scholar who writes and reviews books and exhibitions for Dress, Costume, and Woman’s Art Journal.

Press release from LACMA:

Eye for the Sensual: Selections from the Resnick Collection
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2 October 2010 — 2 January 2011

Curated by J. Patrice Marandel and Bernard Jazzar

Photo © 2010 Museum Associates/LACMA

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Eye for the Sensual: Selections from the Resnick Collection, which features more than 100 paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts from the collection of Lynda and Stewart Resnick, long-time patrons of the museum. Since the early 1980s, the Resnicks have collected in many areas ranging from European to American and modern art. This exhibition reflects their interest in European painting, sculpture, and decorative arts from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. Eye for the Sensual is one of three inaugural exhibitions to open the new Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, named in honor of the Resnicks’ generous donation to LACMA’s ongoing Transformation campaign. The exhibition — designed by Pier Luigi Pizzi– beautifully illuminates the Resnicks’ broad taste and great love for collecting.

Installation of "Eye for the Sensual" at LACMA, Photo © 2010 Museum Associates/LACMA

Charles-Antoine Coypel, "Portrait of Monsieur Dupillé," 1733 Photo © 2010 Museum Associates/LACMA

The Resnick collection is rich in eighteenth-century French paintings including portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and mythological scenes. François Boucher and his pupil, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, are particularly well represented with three paintings each. Two of the paintings by Boucher—both sensuous representations of Venus—were originally commissioned by the artist’s greatest patron, Madame de Pompadour, for one of her many residences. The third work, Leda and the Swan (1742), was known only through a second version at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm before the Resnicks acquired the original. Fragonard’s paintings display the artist’s versatile talent and reveal, in turn, a world of playful eroticism, deep passion, and domestic intimacy.

The feminine aspect of the Resnick collection has often been noted: on one hand, many of the paintings’ subjects, whether allegorical or mythological, glorify the female form. On the other, numerous female artists are represented in the collection: Anne Vallayer-Coster with a still life of flowers; Elisabeth Louise Vigée Lebrun whose imposing Portrait of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France (1783), commissioned by the sitter, evokes the doomed splendor of the last days of the French monarchy; and Marguerite Gérard, who, under the guidance of her brother-in-law Fragonard, achieved fame in late eighteenth century for her portraits and genre scenes. Two of the Gérard works on view are small, intimate portraits of sitters who belonged to the artist’s enlightened circle of friends. A larger genre scene shows a female artist in her studio, a personification of Gérard’s own success and social status in the changing art world of early nineteenth-century France.

The Resnick collection also includes important Italian, Flemish, Dutch, and French paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Francesco Guardi’s Ridotto at Palazzo Dandolo (1750s), a recent addition to the collection, is a vivid image of gambling and masquerade in eighteenth-century Venice that evokes the risqué world of Casanova. Among the Northern paintings, the vigorous Revel of Bacchus and Silenus (c. 1615) executed by Jacob Jordaens while still in his twenties exudes verve and passion, and a rare pair of decorative tondos by the little–known Dirk van der Aa reveals an unexpected aspect of late eighteenth-century Dutch painting. Two French masterpieces frame the core group of late eighteenth-century works: Simon Vouet’s dignified representation of the goddess Diana and her companions from around 1640, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s magisterial The Virgin with the Host (1860). Both paintings, in spite of being worlds apart, lend a note of pure and austere classicism to the collection.

European sculpture has been a long-standing interest of the Resnicks. The couple has assembled a collection that spans more than 400 years and includes Italian and French marble busts, English full-length neoclassical figures, French eighteenth-century terracottas, as well as bronzes dating from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Some of the best-known sculptors in the collection include Barthélemy Prieur, Giambologna, Claude Michel (Clodion), Jean-Antoine Houdon, and Aristide Maillol.

Eye for the Sensual also includes a selection of Art Deco furniture and decorative arts, a more recent interest of the Resnicks. The couple has favored the elegant creations of such artists as Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann and Jules Leleu, as well as numerous pieces by Italian designer Gio Ponti, whose ceramic plates and vessels include depictions of the female figure in various activities. These modern touches gracefully enhance the setting and set the stage for this engaging and evocative exhibition.

Eye for the Sensual is curated by J. Patrice Marandel, LACMA’s Robert H. Ahmanson Chief Curator of European Art, and Bernard Jazzar, Curator of the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Collection. The installation for the exhibition was designed by the world-famous Studio Pier Luigi Pizzi-Massimo Pizzi Gasparon. Recognized as one of the leading designers of opera productions in the world, Pier Luigi Pizzi’s work has graced all of the great opera stages, including those of the Teatro La Fenice, Venice, and the Teatro alla Scala, Milan. Pizzi has designed many installations, such as those for the 2009 Florence Biennale and Seicento: La Peinture italienne dans les musées de France, a major exhibition of seventeenth-century Italian paintings in French museums held at the Grand Palais in 1992. The presentation for Eye for the Sensual will be the designer’s first project in Los Angeles.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Eye for the Sensual: Selections from the Resnick Collection, by Pierre Rosenberg, Scott Schaefer, and Bernard Jazzar with contributions by Antonia Boström, Anne-Lise Desmas and Anne Woollett (2010), $39.95.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Eye for the Sensual: Selections from the Resnick Collection at LACMA, this catalog presents a selection of eighty-three European paintings and sculptures from the renowned collection of Lynda and Stewart Resnick. Comprised of Old Master paintings and sculpture from the sixteenth century to the late nineteenth, each work is discussed in a scholarly entry. The emphasis of the collection is on French eighteenth-century paintings, including works by François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Nicolas Lancret, Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, and Marguerite Gérard. Other works by Flemish and Italian masters are also included: Jacob Jordaens, Hendrick de Clerck, Francesco Albani, and Francesco Guardi. Among the sculptures represented in the Resnick collection are Renaissance works by Giambologna and Barthélemy Prieur, eighteenth-century French figures by Jean-Antoine Houdon and Clodion and Neoclassical sculpture by John Gibson and Joseph Gott. Also included are photographs illustrating the works as they are displayed in the Resnick’s magnificent home in Beverly Hills.

Press release from the National Gallery in London:

Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals
National Gallery, London, 13 October 2010 — 16 January 2011
National Gallery, Washington D.C., 20 February — 30 May 2011

This exhibition presents the finest assembly of Venetian views, by Canaletto and all the major practitioners of the genre, to be held since the much-celebrated display in Venice in 1967. Remarkably, considering the dominant role of British patronage in this art form, Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals is also the first exhibition of its kind to be organised in the UK.

Additional information can be found here»

The following is an edited version of the UO press release:

Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome: Lasting Impressions from the Age of the Grand Tour
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, 25 September 2010 — 3 January 2011
Princeton University Art Museum, 2011

Curated by James Tice and James Harper

Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome: Lasting Impressions from the Age of the Grand Tour opens this fall at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon. Vasi was an eighteenth-century Italian engraver and architect who is best known for his cityscapes of Rome. The exhibition is curated by UO faculty members James Tice and James Harper. Tice is an architecture professor and a research fellow at Studium Urbis, an international study center in Rome devoted to study of the city’s urban history. Harper is associate professor of art history. He worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University before joining the UO faculty in 2000.

Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome is the first major exhibition to be devoted solely to Vasi’s work. Coinciding with the 300th anniversary of his birth, the exhibition combines graphic imaging technology with new research on how he observed and documented his city. Vasi lived and worked in Rome, where he was a contemporary of such other notable vedutisti as Giovanni Paolo Panini, his student Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and cartographer Giovanni Battista Nolli.

The exhibition traces the emergence of Vasi’s graphic chronicles within their cartographic and artistic traditions, and explores their impact on ways of seeing and interpreting the city as a work of art. Also featured in the exhibition is a new media component that builds on two websites designed by Tice and Erik Steiner, who was assistant director of the InfoGraphics Lab in the UO Department of Geography at the time he worked on the sites. The exhibition invites viewers to use touch screens and iPads to view Vasi’s work, compare them to those of other artists of the period and explore Rome, then and now, through georeferencing.

A 200-page catalogue features essays from Mario Bevilacqua, Vincent Buonanno, Allan Ceen, Adrianne Hamilton, Read McFaddin, John Moore, John Pinto, and the curators. In conjunction with a series of educational programs, the museum will host a symposium on November 12; “Una Roma Visuale: New Research on Giuseppe Vasi and the Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Rome” will bring together scholars to address the topics of prints, painting, sculpture, architecture, urbanism and cartography. John Pinto will deliver the keynote address.

Following its presentation at the Schnitzer Museum, the exhibition will be on view at the Princeton University Art Museum.

It’s interesting to see the politics of the Enlightenment play out two centuries later. From the the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden:

Art of the Enlightenment
National Museum of China, Beijing, 1 March 2011 — 31 March 2012

Georg Desmarées "The Artist with His Daughter, Antonia," 1750-1774 © Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen München

The Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen Munich are to collaborate in presenting the largest exhibition on European art from the Enlightenment period ever to go on show in Asia. In the spring of 2011 the three museums will be exhibiting more than 350 works of art in an area covering 2,700 square metrers at the National Museum of China. The focus will be on major works of art which demonstrate the great ideas of this period, their influence on the fine arts and the history of their reception from the artistic revolutions of the 18th century down to the present day.

The exhibition presents the image world of a period on the threshold of modernity, the ideas of which are of programmatic significance for art today. Paintings, drawings, prints, costumes, furniture and spatial art, sculptures and books will bring all the various facets of the Enlightenment period and its reception history to life for a Chinese audience. Among the masterpieces on display will be works by Watteau, Boucher, Pesne, Piranesi, Chodowiecki, Hogarth and Goya, thus illustrating the wide range of works and the themes which informed the culture of this era, from the Ancien Régime to the Modern period.

The catalogue, which will be published in Chinese and English, will present the latest research findings concerning the art of the Enlightenment and other aspects of this period. This joint exhibition is being financed primarily by the German Foreign Office. It marks the high point of the programme of German-Chinese cultural exchange that was agreed in 2005.

The exhibition Art of the Enlightenment at the National Museum of China will be on display for 18 months. The National Museum on Tiananmen Square in Beijing is currently being refurbished and expanded according to plans drawn up by the Hamburg firm of architects Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp). When completed, it will have a total floor area of approximately 200,000 square metres. With its redesigned building, the museum is intended to become a centre for the world’s cultures, a venue in which outstanding guest exhibitions from all over the world will be presented.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

One hint of the politics at work surrounding the exhibition (at least on the German side) can be gleaned from the efforts of Stiftung Mercator (for information on the group, see below) . . .

Stiftung Mercator is currently planning a series of events to officially accompany the “Art in Enlightenment” exhibition which is to be shown in the National Museum of China in Beijing in 2011. In cooperation with the Berlin State Museums, the Dresden State Art Collections, the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich and the Federal Foreign Office, Stiftung Mercator will be organizing a series of events entitled “Enlightenment in Dialogue” within the framework of the National Museum of China exhibition “The Art in Enlightenment” in Beijing.

The events will comprise a number of dialogue blocks which will continue for the entire duration of the exhibition. The dialogue blocks will take place in parallel to the exhibition, addressing various facets of a contemporary examination of the subject of enlightenment. Each dialogue consists of a lecture and a panel discussion.

The objective of the series of events is to perceive enlightenment as part of a universal “global heritage of ideas” and to stimulate an open dialogue on the importance of enlightenment in modern times. Stiftung Mercator wishes to bring together Chinese and European scholars, writers and artists and, in particular, to highlight the value of enlightenment for key questions relating to identity and the future.

As described on the foundation’s website:

Stiftung Mercator is one of the largest private foundations in Germany. It pursues clearly defined objectives in its thematic clusters of integration, climate change and arts education and it achieves these objectives with a combination of socio-political advocacy and practical work. Stiftung Mercator implements its own projects and supports external projects in its centres for science and humanities, education and international affairs. It takes an entrepreneurial, professional and international approach to its work.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

This recap comes from ArtDaily.com (note added 1 April 2012) . . .

With a joint ceremony on March 25th 2012, Cornelia Pieper, Minister of State in the Foreign Office, and Zhao Shaohua, Deputy Minister of Culture for the People’s Republic of China, officially concluded the exhibition The Art of the Enlightenment at the National Museum of China. For the past year the exhibition has been on view in Beijing. So far, more than 450,000 visitors have attended. . . .

The full article is available here»