American Stories at the Met
From the Met’s press release:
American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 12 October 2009 – 24 January 2010
Ralph Earl, "Elijah Boardman," 1789 (NY: Met)
From the decade before the Revolution to the eve of World War I, many of America’s most acclaimed painters captured in their finest works the temperament of their respective eras. They recorded and defined the emerging character of Americans as individuals, citizens, and members of ever-widening communities. American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915 brings together for the first time more than 100 of these iconic pictures that tell compelling stories of life’s tasks and pleasures. The first overview of the subject in more than 35 years, the exhibition includes loans from leading museums and private lenders—and many paintings from the Metropolitan’s own distinguished collection. American Stories features masterpieces by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, John Sloan, and George Bellows, and notable works by some of their key colleagues.
The exhibition examines stories based on familiar experience and the means by which painters told their stories through their choices of settings, players, action, and various narrative devices. The artists’ responses to foreign prototypes, travel and training, changing exhibition venues, and audience expectations are examined, as are their evolving styles and standards of storytelling in relation to the themes of childhood, marriage, the family, and the community; the production and reinforcement of citizenship; attitudes towards race; the frontier as reality and myth; and the process and meaning of art making.
The exhibition is arranged in four chronological sections. The first—Inventing American Stories, 1765–1830—begins with artists who told stories through portraits. Serving their sitters’ self-conscious interest in how they appeared in the eyes of others, American portraitists often emulated British compositions. Although these artists focused on individuals and particular locales and relationships, the cleverest of them responded to broader narrative agendas and to the natural impulse to tell stories. In his portrait of his colleague Paul Revere (1768, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), John Singleton Copley embedded subtle narrative into a traditional single-figure format, with the silversmith’s gestures and gaze conveying volumes about the time in which he lived. As their patrons learned to read portraits for more than likeness and to appreciate artistic license, portraitists began to gratify their sitters by telling subtle personal stories in increasingly elaborate compositions. In his ingenious double-likeness of Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming (1788, National Gallery of Art, Washington), for instance, Charles Willson Peale implied the sexual bond that defined the Lamings’ marriage. Later in this period, some painters told grand stories in pictures produced for public exhibition, rather than purely for private enjoyment. In Gallery of the Louvre (1831–33, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago), Samuel F. B. Morse proposed that his compatriots must achieve cultural independence from Europe even while they learned from the Old World’s greatest artistic achievements.
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In addition to the materials contained at the Met’s website, there is an exhibition blog that’s updated regularly. The November 2009 issue of The Magazine Antiques includes an instructive article by Carrie Barratt and H. Barbara Weinberg, “American Artists as They Saw Themselves.”
Yinka Shonibare in DC
Yinka Shonibare, MBE
Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C., 10 November 2009 — 7 March 2010
Curated by Rachel Kent
Yinka Shonibare, "The Swing (After Fragonard)," 2001
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, "The Swing," 1767 (London: Wallace Collection)
This morning on NPR’s Morning Edition, Susan Stamberg profiled the Yinka Shonibare exhibition now on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (it was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney). Writing in The New York Times (17 June 2009) of the show when it was at the Brooklyn Museum this past summer, Deborah Sontag described Shonibare as an “erudite and wide-ranging” artist, whom
Rachel Kent
at 47, is a senior figure in the British art world but one who intentionally eludes easy categorization. A disabled black artist who continuously challenges assumptions and stereotypes — “That’s the point of my work really,” he said — Mr. Shonibare makes art that is sumptuously aesthetic and often wickedly funny. When he deals with pithy matters like race, class, disability, colonialism and war, he does so deftly and often indirectly. “I don’t produce propaganda art,” he said. “I’m more interested in the poetic than the didactic.”
While many of the works address contemporary issues through Victorian conventions, there are intriguing eighteenth-century references, too — including this reworking of Fragonard’s Swing.
Etc, Etc.
Umberto Eco served as guest-curator for the Louvre’s current exhibition Vertige de la Liste (Vertigo of Lists), on view until December 13. The scholar’s celebrity status has garnered lots of attention for the show (in addition to being taken up by the Associated Press, it’s been covered by Spiegel, Salon, and L’Express). The publisher’s description of the book accompanying the show, calls Eco “a modern-day Diderot,” explaining that here he “examines the Western mind’s predilection for list-making and the encyclopedic.” With material ranging from ancient and medieval lists (Homeric catalogues and lists of saints) to early modern “catalogues of plants [and] collections of art,” the eighteenth century would seem like a crucial period, and there is apparently at least one painting by Panini included. Still, for all of the talk of lists, one that seems to be missing (even from the Louvre’s site) is an exhibition checklist. Those of us who are unable to see the show should, however, have a better sense of its contents soon enough; the English edition of The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay is schedule for publication on November 17.
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Vertige de la Liste
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2 November — 13 December 2009
The following account of the exhibition comes from Cristina Carrillo De Albornoz’s coverage in The Art Newspaper:
After Robert Badinter, Toni Morrison, Anselm Kiefer and Pierre Boulez, Umberto Eco is the next special guest curator of the Louvre. A noted historian and semiotician before he brought these sensibilities to bear on major novels such as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco has spent almost two years in residence at the Louvre. His chosen subject is “The Infinity of Lists”, a tour through art, literature and music based on the theme of lists and motivated by his fascination with numbers (until 13 December). “The subject of lists has been a theme of many writers from Homer onwards. My great challenge was to transfer it to painting and music and to see whether I could find equivalents in the Louvre, because frankly when I suggested the subject I had no idea how I would write about visual lists,” says Eco.
“The starting point for my ‘list of lists’ was Homer’s Iliad: firstly the creation of Achilles’ shield by Hephaestus, which not only symbolises perfect form but is in itself a work of art on which is engraved what is considered an allegory of the creation of the universe, an overall vision of Homer’s world. And secondly, the part where he lists all the ships leaving for the Trojan war.” Eco plays with these two opposing dimensions—perfect form and the list—in an attempt to rationalise the world. “The shield of Achilles is the epiphany of form, and every picture in an artist’s search for that form is a shield of Achilles,” concludes Eco. “Behind each list is the sense of ineffability.”
This impulse has recurred through the ages from music to literature to art. Eco refers to this obsession itself as a “giddiness of lists” but shows how in the right hands it can be a “poetics of catalogues.” From medieval reliquaries to Andy Warhol’s compulsive collecting, Umberto Eco reflects in his inimitably inspiring way on how such catalogues mirror the spirit of their times. . . .
For the full article, click here»
French Drawings in D.C.
It’s shaping up to be quite an autumn for French drawing exhibitions in the United States. In addition to the shows at the Getty, the Frick, and the Morgan, the National Gallery presents a sampling from its permanent collection. As noted in a press release from the museum’s website:
Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500–1800
National Gallery, Washington D.C., 1 October 2009 — 31 January 2010
Margaret Grasselli, ISBN 978-1848220430
Some 135 of the most significant and beautiful drawings made over a period of three centuries by the best French artists working at home and abroad and by foreign artists working in France will be on view in Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500–1800 in the Gallery’s West Building from October 1, 2009, through January 31, 2010. This is the first comprehensive exhibition and catalogue to focus on the Gallery’s permanent collection of French old master drawings, which is remarkable for its breadth, depth, and individual masterpieces. “One of the true glories of the National Gallery of Art’s holdings of graphic art is its outstanding collection of French old master drawings,” said Earl Powell, director, National Gallery of Art. “The exhibition Renaissance to Revolution and the accompanying catalogue celebrate the singular originality, elegance, and spirit of French draftsmanship.”
Antoine Coypel, "Seated Faun," 1700/1705, red and black chalk heightened with white chalk on blue paper, 16 x 11 inches (DC: NGA)
Among the National Gallery of Art’s extensive holdings of approximately 100,000 works on paper, the collection of 6,000 European drawings includes more than 900 French old master drawings which stand out as a particular treasure. The French group has deep roots in the earliest days of the museum’s existence, with the first of these works arriving in 1942, just a year after the Gallery opened its doors to the public. Over the next 67 years, thanks to the generosity of innumerable donors, the collection has evolved into one the Gallery’s strongest and most comprehensive, and one of the finest in the Western Hemisphere.
Organized chronologically, Renaissance to Revolution presents a visual journey through the development of drawing in France, from its first flowering during the Renaissance through its neoclassical incarnation during the political and social upheavals of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Lorrain, and Antoine Watteau, as well as many less well-known artists. All major stylistic trends and many of the greatest and best-known artists from these centuries are represented by a rich array of works executed in a variety of styles and media and covering a wide range of functions, subjects, and genres. . . .
François-André Vincent, "The Drawing Lesson," 1777, brush and brown wash over graphite, 13 x 15 inches (DC: NGA)
Within the exceptionally rich collection of eighteenth-century drawings, the major artists—Boucher, Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Hubert Robert, and Watteau, among others—are each represented by several works of outstanding quality. Some magnificent pieces by less familiar masters are featured as well, including François-André Vincent’s Drawing Lesson (1777), arguably the most perfect representation of eighteenth-century French elegance, taste, and gallantry; Étienne-Louis Boullée’s monumental neoclassical design for a metropolitan church from 1780/1781; and a large and beautiful pastoral scene executed in pastel and gouache, Shepherds Resting by a Stream (1779) by Jean-Baptiste Pillement. Also noteworthy is a striking group of portraits by several of the leading pastellists of the period, including outstanding examples by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour and Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, as well as a particularly dashing portrait of a young woman by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard from 1787. One of the youngest drawings in the exhibition is the neoclassical portrait Thirius de Pautrizel (1795) by David, an active participant in the revolution, made when he was imprisoned for his radical politics.
A particular strength within the Gallery’s collection of French drawings is the genre of book illustration. This is represented throughout the exhibition beginning with the work by Poyet and includes distinctive pieces by such famous masters as Boucher, Fragonard, Jean-Michel Moreau the Younger, and Saint-Aubin, as well as outstanding examples by other supremely gifted but less widely known artists, such as Hubert-François Gravelot and Charles Eisen.
Margaret Morgan Grasselli, curator of old master drawings, National Gallery of Art, is curator of the exhibition. Published by the National Gallery of Art in association with Lund Humphries, Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500-1800 features an introductory essay and comprehensive entries on the exhibited drawings with 260 full-color illustrations.
On Sunday, 13 December 2009, at 2pm, Grasselli will deliver the lecture Playing Favorites: A Personal Selection of French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art and sign copies of the catalogue.
Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection at the Frick
From the Frick’s website:
Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection
Frick Collection, New York, 6 October 2009 – 10 January 2010
Colin Bailey, Susan Grace Galassi, Mària van Berge-Gerbaud, $60
Frederik Johannes Lugt (1884–1970) was a Dutch art historian, connoisseur, and collector. His fame in scholarly circles derives from two pioneering publications, still in use today: his Les marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes, published in 1921, which identifies the collectors’ marks found on Old Master prints and drawings, and the Répertoire des catalogues de ventes publiques intéressant l’art ou la curiosité, a comprehensive listing of nearly 90,000 auction catalogues from sales occurring between 1600 and 1925, published in four volumes between 1938 and 1987.
Frits Lugt, as he was known, was a born collector. By the age of eight, he had sold his shell collection to the natural history department of Amsterdam’s Royal Zoo; at fifteen, he acquired his first drawing. In his thirties, he began to collect in a more serious and systematic way, specializing in Dutch and Flemish drawings and prints, always his chief interest. During the 1920s, the decade in which he made his most important acquisitions, he also bought fifteenth-century Italian drawings and eighteenth-century French sheets.
Charles-Nicolas Cochin, "Portrait of Pierre-Jean Mariette," Graphite with stumping, 1756
Lugt was among the founders and principal supporters of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD), the institute devoted to the study of Netherlandish art and artists, established in The Hague in 1930. In 1947, he created the Fondation Custodia in Paris, to care for and to add to his collection of 6,000 Old Master drawings and 30,000 prints. The Frits Lugt Collection is widely regarded by specialists as one of the finest of its kind, but it is less well known to the general public.
Curators at The Frick Collection were invited to select for the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue Lugt’s finest eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French drawings, and the sixty-four works featured in the exhibition illuminate both Lugt’s taste and that of his successors. Included are drawings and watercolors by well-known masters of the French School such as Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, David, Ingres, and Degas, as well as by important figures who are less familiar to the general public. This is the first time that a group of French master drawings from the Fondation Custodia has traveled to New York.
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Stijn Alsteens (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY), Frits Lugt: Connoisseur and Collector of Drawings
Wednesday, 18 November 2009, 6pm
Colin Bailey (Frick Collection), Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from The Frits Lugt Collection
Saturday, 9 January 2010, 2pm
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The show’s illustrated checklist (available here) includes more than thirty eighteenth-century drawings. The Frick’s website also includes podcasts on the exhibition by Colin Bailey and Susan Galassi.
A Dutch Collection in New York
Dutch New York between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 18 September 2009 — 3 January 2010
Edited by Deborah Krohn and Peter Miller with Marybeth De Filippis, $75
This autumn the Bard Graduate Center will participate in a state-wide celebration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage and the legacy of Dutch culture in New York with a landmark exhibition, Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick. Organized by the BGC and the New-York Historical Society and curated by Marybeth De Filippis and Deborah Krohn, Dutch New York will make a major contribution to the quadricentennial and to the scholarship of colonial New York by focusing on the life and times of a woman who during the seventeenth century lived in the rural village of Flatbush on eastern Long Island, a neighborhood still known by that name in the borough of Brooklyn today. The exhibition helps elucidate what the historian Russell Shorto has called the “forgotten colony” in his book The Island at the Center of the World. Indeed, the British roots of New York City are recognized far more widely than the Dutch, despite the city’s visible connections to the Dutch founders, most evident in street names such as Amsterdam Avenue and Varick Street.
Covered Bowl from Batavia (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia), early 18th century, silver (Gemeentemuseum, The Hague)
Dutch New York offers an innovative approach to exhibition practice by using the probate inventory of Margrieta van Varick’s possessions compiled in 1696 as a means of examining life and culture in colonial New York. Born in Amsterdam in 1649, Margrieta spent several years at the other end of the Dutch colonial world in the Far East, primarily in Malacca (present day Malaysia) before returning to The Netherlands with her minister husband Rudolphus. In 1686 Margrieta and her family crossed the Atlantic to settle in Flatbush where Rudolphus was minister of the Dutch Reform Church and where she opened a textile shop, having brought with them an astonishing array of Eastern and European goods.
This exhibition is organized in five sections, each delineating a theme relevant to Margrieta van Varick’s life as well as exploring the wide range of goods in her possession when she died in late 1695. The exhibition first examines the inventory as a document of historical research and curatorial practice. A digital film (also available online) features an interview with renowned historian Natalie Zemon Davis in which she considers the various challenges confronting historians who use inventories for research purposes, as well as the role of women in the seventeenth century.
For the full description of the exhibition, click here»
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Lecture — Inventory: Text and Context, Bernard Herman
Thursday, 19 November 2009, 6-8 pm ($25 / $17)
RSVP required to 212.501.3011, programs@bgc.bard.edu
What can an inventory tell us? How can we use an artifact of the legal system to tease out relationships between people and their relationship to things? How does such a document translate into an exhibition? Bernard Herman, a leading scholar of American material culture, will draw on his vast knowledge of both things and people in a conversation with cultural historian Catherine Whalen and exhibition co-curator Deborah Krohn. The conversation will be followed by an exhibition viewing and reception. Bernard Herman is Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor of Art History, University of Delaware. Deborah Krohn is associate professor and coordinator for history and theory of museums at the Bard Graduate Center as well as co-curator of the Dutch New York exhibition. Catherine Whalen is assistant professor at the Bard Graduate Center.
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Study Day — Reflecting on Silver: Manufacture, Markets, and Meaning in Early New York
Friday, 20 November 2009 ($125 / $100 discount)
RSVP required to 212.501.3011, programs@bgc.bard.edu
This study day will focus on silver in New York in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as an object signifying wealth, cultivation, and mastery. Concentrating on works by silversmiths Benjamin Wynkoop, Cornelius Kierstede, and Peter Van Dyck, curators Marybeth De Filippis, Beth Carver Wees, and Debra Schmidt Bach will consider aspects of stylistic influence, marketing of silver, and workshop practices. A visit to the studio of master silversmith Ubaldo Ubaldo “>Ubaldo “>Vitali in Maplewood, New Jersey, will provide an examination of the technical knowledge and cultural influences surrounding the production of silver through the centuries. Admission to the study day includes lunch and round-trip transportation to the Ubaldo Vitale studio. Marybeth De Filippis is assistant curator of American art at the New-York Historical Society as well as co-curator of the Dutch New York exhibition. Beth Carver Wees is curator in the Department of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Debra Schmidt Bach is assistant curator of decorative arts at the New-York Historical Society and a PhD candidate at the BGC. Ubaldo Vitali is a fourth-generation Roman silversmith, conservator, and art historian.
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A helpful article about the exhibition written by Marybeth De Filippis appears in the September issue of The Magazine Antiques.
Strawberry Hill
The Walpole show at the YCBA opened yesterday in New Haven with a lecture by Michael Snodin (Senior Research Fellow at the V&A). From the museum’s website:
Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 15 October 2009 — 3 January 2010
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 6 March — 4 July 2010
Ed. by Michael Snodin (Yale University Press), $85
Horace Walpole (1717–1797) was the youngest son of Robert Walpole, first earl of Orford and prime minister under both George I and George II. Horace’s birthright placed him at the center of society and politics, and of literary, aesthetic, and intellectual circles. His brilliant letters and other writings have made him the best-known commentator on social, political, and cultural life in eighteenth-century England. In his own day, he was most famous for his personal collections, which were displayed at Strawberry Hill, his pioneering Gothic-revival house on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham, outside London, and through which he constructed narratives of English art and history.
This groundbreaking exhibition seeks to evoke the breadth and importance of Walpole’s collections at Strawberry Hill by reassembling an astonishing variety of his objects, including rare books and manuscripts, antiquities, paintings, prints and drawings, furniture, ceramics, arms and armor, and curiosities. These will be drawn frominternational public and private collections as well as those of the Center and Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut.
Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill has been organized by the Center, The Lewis Walpole Library, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with contributions by an array of distinguished international scholars. The Center is the only U.S. venue. The exhibition has been generously supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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Michael Snodin, Discovering Strawberry Hill
Wednesday, 14 October, 5:30pm
Peter Inskip, Revealing Strawberry Hill House
Tuesday, 20 October, 5:30pm
Cynthia Roman, Works of Genius: Amateur Artists at Strawberry Hill
Wednesday, 11 November, 5:30pm
Recapping the Récamier Exhibition and Colloquium in Lyon
By HEATHER BELNAP JENSEN
Juliette Récamier, muse et mécène
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, 27 March – 29 June 2009
Colloquium: Historiennes et critiques d’art à l’époque de Juliette Récamier, international colloquium organised by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, 26 June 2009
J. Chinard, "Portrait of Juliette Récamier," 1805-06 (Lyon: Musée de Beaux-Arts)
Juliette Récamier: Muse et mécène, recently mounted by the Musée de Beaux-Arts in Lyon, was surely one of the highlights of this past summer’s exhibition season. Thoughtfully conceived and beautifully executed, this show did much to restore Récamier to her rightful place as a key arbiter of taste in post-Revolutionary France. Upon entering the foyer, one was immediately transported to the refined and graceful realm of this cultural luminary. Art, fashion, and furnishings were disposed so as to emphasize her various powers. This exhibition compellingly argued that Récamier not only inspired some of the most enchanting art of the period (one thinks immediately of the portraits of this figure by Jacques-Louis David and François Gérard—neither of which were able to travel, unfortunately), but that she also figured as a formidable patron of the arts. The most exquisite space in this show was the re-creation of Récamier’s salon, as detailed in François Louis Dejuinne’s painting of 1826. To see in conversation some of the most iconic paintings of the age, including Anne-Louis Girodet’s Portrait of Chateaubriand, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s Portrait of Mme de Staël as Corinne, and Gérard’s Corinne at Cape Miseno, was a truly captivating experience. Attesting to the enduring interest in the figure of Recamier was the 1928 film of Gaston Ravel that played in an adjacent room, along with the twentieth-century works by René Magritte that paid homage to ‘la dame au sofa’. The accompanying catalogue (available here via Amazon.ca) was as exquisitely crafted as the exhibition, with contributions by the curator, Stéphane Paccoud, as well as other notable French and American scholars including Laura Auricchio. The essays attest to the complexities of Récamier’s roles as muse and patron and point to the need to reconsider conventional characterizations of such well-positioned women in the fashioning of artistic sensibilities. In sum, I must concur with Didier Rykner’s assessment of the exhibition made in La Tribune de l’Art: it did indeed approach perfection.
Robert Smirke, "Chambre de Juliette Récamier,” 1802 (London: Royal Institute of British Architects Library)
In conjunction with the exhibition, Historiennes et critiques d’art à l’époque de Juliette Récamier, a colloquium dedicated to the women writing about the arts in France, c. 1800, was held on June 26 in Lyon. This international colloquium was sponsored by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art and convened by Mechthild Fend (University College, London), Melissa Hyde (University of Florida), Anne Lafont (INHA), and Stéphane Paccoud (MBA-Lyon). Many of the presenters discussed the place of individual figures in the construction of the post-Revolutionary art world. American scholars were well represented. Mary Sheriff (University of North Carolina) argued for Vigée-Lebrun’s position as an art historian and addressed her Souvenirs as a critical historical enterprise. Susan Siegfried (University of Michigan) gave careful consideration to the role of la presse féminine in the formation of female subjectivity, and Sarah Betzer (University of Virginia) engaged Marie d’Agoult’s critical work. In my own paper, I discussed the significance of Julie Candeille’s activities as critic and agent in the career of Anne-Louis Girodet. That no one treated the contributions made to art writing by the uncontested doyenne of the era, Germaine de Staël, was much commented upon. The lively discussion that ensued after the presentations testified to the need for a continued dialogue regarding women as art historians and critics at this historical juncture. There are plans to publish the proceedings.
Heather Belnap Jensen received her Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Kansas. She is currently assistant professor of art history at Brigham Young University. For more information about her recent scholarly activities, click here». Images are drawn from the exhibition website; other HECAA members who participated in the exhibition or colloquium are indicated with bold type.
Tiepolo in Motion at the Kimbell
Director Philip Haas (Angels & Insects, Blood Oranges, and Up at the Villa) partnered with the Kimbell for the current series of installations. From the Kimbell’s website:
Butchers, Dragons, Gods, & Skeletons: Film Installations by Philip Haas Inspired by the Works in the Collection
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX, 18 July – 25 October 2009
"Butchers, Dragons, Gods & Skeletons: Film Installations by Philip Haas" with an essay by A. S. Byatt, $24.95
Commissioned by the Kimbell, Philip Haas’s film installations interpret and elaborate upon selected works in the Museum’s permanent collection:
- Douris, Red-Figure Cup Showing the Death of Pentheus (exterior) and a Maenad (interior), ca. 480 BCE
- Arhat Taming the Dragon, Yuan dynasty, early fourteenth century
- Annibale Carracci, The Butcher’s Shop, 1580s
- Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Apollo and the Continents, ca. 1739
- James Ensor, Skeletons Warming Themselves, 1889.
Though based on deep research into the original artists and cultures, Haas’s films are poetic and sensuous in approach rather than factual like a documentary. Between seven and twenty minutes in length and running continuously, they are projected on screens of various unconventional formats and configurations. All are accompanied by original music, and several appear in elaborate architectural and sculptural sets, further immersing the viewer in the experience. The installations complement a full display of the Kimbell’s permanent collection, each occupying a space near the work to which it relates.
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Apollo and the Continents is probably a sketch for a large fresco ceiling at the Palazzo Clerici in Milan; the ceiling was commissioned by Antonio Giorgio Clerici to celebrate his impending marriage. In the most elaborate and technically challenging of his installations, Haas combines filmed images projected on both walls and ceiling with real architectural elements, responding in his own terms to the spectacular, playful illusionism of a Tiepolo ceiling: “My intention has been to create the film installation as if it were designed and directed by Tiepolo himself, translating painterly trompe-l’oeil into cinematic visual effect.” On one of the walls we see Tiepolo with a young assistant in the studio. Occasionally he looks across to other walls, where models are posing for him.
The models are played by the actresses Anna Walton — as a reclining Venus — and Rachael Stirling. Above, we see classical figure groups come to life as Tiepolo has visions, piece by piece, of a grand ceiling decoration in splendidly theatrical style. It is an assembly of the divinely beautiful, the strong, and the statuesque: Venus and Mars, Jupiter and Hebe, Juno, Ceres, river gods, and a host of numerous personages from classical myth and allegory. Finally Apollo the sun god appears, hovering in the center of the whole, breathtaking ensemble that has come together over our heads. Meanwhile Tiepolo has been working on a portrait of a betrothed couple. The climax of the piece is an apotheosis in which, through the power of the artist’s imagination, the couple become classical figures themselves and ascend into the heavens.
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The Butcher’s Shop appeared at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 2008.
A six-minute video clip with Malcolm Warner and Philip Haas summarizing the project is available via YouTube (posted by WRR101FM). It supplies a useful sense of the project, though it, unfortunately, doesn’t address the Tiepolo installation.
N.B. — One of the models for Apollo and the Continents, the actor Rachael Stirling — perhaps best known for her role in Tipping the Velvet — holds, incidentally, a B.A. in art history from the University of Edinburgh. Proof of the utility of the major for undergraduates? Comments are especially welcome from anyone who’s seen the installation at the Kimbell.
Delany Exhibition Is Here!
The highly anticipated Delany show opened earlier this week. Mark Laird (Harvard University) kicked things off on Wednesday with a talk on Delany as “A Lady of Singular Ingenuity.” Alicia Weisberg-Roberts will speak on October 7 (see below for programming details). The following description is drawn from the press release from the Yale Center for British Art:
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Mary Delany: Mrs. Delany and Her Circle
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 24 September 2009 — 3 January 2010
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 19 February — 1 May 2010
Curated by Alicia Weisberg-Roberts and Mark Laird
Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 416 pages, ISBN-10: 030014279X
At the age of seventy-two, Mary Delany, née Mary Granville (1700–1788), a botanical artist, woman of fashion, and commentator on life and society in eighteenth-century England and Ireland, embarked on a series of one thousand botanical collages, or “paper mosaics.” These were the crowning achievement of a life defined by creative accomplishment. The delicate hand-cut floral designs, made by a method of Mrs. Delany’s own invention, rival the finest botanical works of her time.
An ambitious exhibition, Mrs. Delany and her Circle, at the Yale Center for British Art, is the first to survey the full range of Mary Delany’s creative endeavors, revealing the complexity of her engagement with natural science, art, and design. Her prolific craft activities served to cement bonds of friendship and allowed her to negotiate the interlinked artistic, aristocratic, and scientific networks that defined her social world. A range of approximately 130 objects, including drawings, collages, embroidered textiles, shells, botanical specimens, and manuscripts related to her interest in landscape gardening, will reflect the variety of her activities. The exhibition will also feature a floral display inspired by Mrs. Delany’s designs, as well as a site-specific installation by London-based artist Jane Wildgoose.
Mrs. Delany’s tools from needlework pocket-book, given by Queen Charlotte to Mrs. Delany, 1781, satin, colored silks, and enamelled gold (The Royal Collection)
While Mrs. Delany is best known for her botanical collages, she created bold new garden designs, decorated her home and garden with shell decoupage, fashioned paper silhouettes, and was an accomplished embroiderer who produced elaborate designs for dresses and furnishings. The exhibition will reunite a significant number of Mrs. Delany’s textiles. Among her most extraordinary designs was a court dress embroidered with a cascade of naturalistic flowers on black satin, ca. 1739–40. This garment was disassembled and preserved by Mrs. Delany’s heirs and represents a marriage of art and nature that vividly foreshadows her later accomplishments. Pieces of the dress, reunited here for the first time, will be accompanied by didactic material that allows visitors to understand the garment as a whole and explains the equally interesting story of its survival. Also on view will be embroideries by Mrs. Delany and her circle that demonstrate the importance of the art of the needle to eighteenth-century female society.
Mary Delany, Pancratium maritinum, 1778, collage of colored papers, with bodycolor and watercolor on black ink background, British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, © Trustees of the British Museum
The exhibition will show thirty of Mrs. Delany’s “paper mosaics,” generously lent by the British Museum, which houses nearly one thousand of her works. Unlike most botanical illustrations, these collages were created from hundreds of tiny pieces of cut paper. Horace Walpole called them “precision and truth unparalleled,” and Sir Joshua Reynolds admired their “perfection and outline, delicacy of cutting, accuracy of shading and perspective, and harmony and brilliance of color” (Ruth Hayden, Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers, London: British Museum Press 2000).
Through comparison with the works of her contemporaries the exhibition will explore the context of Mrs. Delany’s striking collages and the relationship between her close attention to the natural world and the visual culture of natural history. Mrs. Delany and her Circle will feature works by professional botanical artists, including Georg Dionysius Ehret and Barbara Regina Dietzsch, as well as amateur botanical artists such as Mary Capel Forbes. Also on view will be objects representing the wider world of eighteenth-century collecting and classifying, ranging from mineralogy to conchology. Through drawings, maps, and topographical paintings, the exhibition will evoke the design and experience of gardens Mrs. Delany knew well, including those at Kew and Bulstrode, the remarkable estate of Margaret Cavendish Holles Harley Bentinck, Duchess of Portland (1715–1785), with whom Mrs. Delany lived and worked. The Duchess was one of the most important collectors of naturalia of the eighteenth century. Their friendship was one of the defining relationships of Mary Delany’s life.
Mrs. Delany and her Circle has been organized by the Yale Center for British Art and Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (where it will be on display from 18 February — 1 May 2010). The curators are Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, Assistant Curator of 18th- and 19th-Century Art, Walters Art Museum, and Mark Laird, Senior Lecturer, Department of Landscape Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design. Elisabeth Fairman, Senior Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Center, has served as the organizing curator for Jane Wildgoose’s installation, Promiscuous Assemblage. New Haven is the only North American venue for the exhibition.
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Tuesday, September 29, 12:30 pm
Mary Delany: A Woman Begins Her Life’s Work at the Age of 72
A thirty-minute gallery talk led by Molly Peacock, poet and non-fiction author.
Wednesday, September 30, 5:30 pm
Musical Tastes in Eighteenth-Century London as Seen by Mrs. Mary Delany, Horace Walpole, and Their Friends
Lecture and performance by Nicholas McGegan, renowned baroque music specialist and conductor.
Tuesday, October 6, 12:30 pm
Mrs. Delany’s Flowers: Entrance
A thirty-minute gallery talk led by Jason Siebenmorgen, landscape architect
Wednesday, October 7, 5:30 pm
‘She who bless’d the friend and grac’d the page’: Friendship and Self-fashioning in Mrs. Delany’s Circle
Lecture by Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, Assistant Curator of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- Century Art, The Walters Art Museum
Enfilade 
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