Enfilade

On view for a few more weeks at the Alte Pinakothek:

Vive le Pastel! Pastel Painting from Vivien to La Tour / Pastellmalerei von Vivien bis La Tour
Alte Pinakothek, Munich, 7 May — 23 October 2022

Joseph Vivien, Portrait of Charles, Duke of Berry (1686–1714), 1700, pastel on paper, 100 × 81 cm (Staatsgalerie im Neuen Schloss Schleißheim).

Often seen in art galleries or palaces, in magnificent ornamental frames and behind glass, their powdery surface making them seem as delicate as they are exquisite: pastels. They enjoyed considerable popularity in the 18th century when many works were created, especially in France. The colours are applied dry, using pastel sticks and covering the whole surface. The pastel painting technique was frequently used for lively, sensitively composed portraits in particular. But what are the reasons for the technique’s blossoming at the time? What advantages did pastels have over oil paintings? Who had their portraits painted in pastel? And how exactly were pastels created? These questions are explored in this special exhibition presented by the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen at the Alte Pinakothek.

The focus is on the two collections’ own holdings, in which such important names as Joseph Vivien, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Rosalba Carriera, and Jean-Étienne Liotard are represented. For the first time pastel paintings from the Alte Pinakothek are shown together with those from the state gallery in Neues Schloss Schleißheim. In addition, some rarely displayed works from the depot by anonymous artists, as well as a few selected loans are also exhibited. This unique combination of works makes it possible to compare artists and their approaches and invites visitors to discover the variety of different effects realised in these works.

There are two further reasons for this exhibition. Generous support provided by the Corona Fund of the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung has made it possible for urgently needed conservation and restoration work to be carried out on the Schleißheim pastels by a specialist. As a result, and due to examinations being carried out as part of a current research project on the French paintings, the works are temporarily in Munich. Before their return to the gallery in Schleißheim the opportunity is being taken to exhibit them in the Alte Pinakothek and, as such, within a larger context. At the same time, the presentation also celebrates a new acquisition—Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Philippe by Maurice Quentin de La Tour—donated by Mr Fritz Lehnhoff as a loan from the Museumsstiftung zur Förderung der Staatlichen Bayerischen Museen, that entered the collection in 2021.

A guide to the collection, covering the complete holdings of pastels from the late 17th and 18th centuries in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, accompanies the exhibition.

Elisabeth Hipp, ed., with an introduction by Bernhard Maaz and contributions by Bernd Ebert, Ulrike Fischer, Elisabeth Hipp, Xavier Salmon, and Herbert Rott, Pastellmalerei vor 1800 in den Bayerischen Staatsgemäldesammlungen (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2022), 136 pages, ISBN: 978-3422989009, 15€.

From The Frick:

The Eveillard Gift
The Frick Madison, New York, 13 October 2022 — 26 February 2023

In the summer of 2021, The Frick Collection announced the largest and most significant acquisition of drawings and pastels in its history, the generous promised gift of Elizabeth ‘Betty’ and Jean-Marie Eveillard. This promised gift of twenty-six works (eighteen drawings, five pastels, two prints, and one oil sketch) has inspired the museum’s major fall 2022 exhibition, which will be accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue and complementary public programs.

Over the past forty-five years, the Eveillards have assembled an outstanding collection of works on paper, ranging in date from the end of the fifteenth century to the twentieth century and representing artists working in France, Britain, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States. The Eveillards’ landmark promised gift draws upon some of their finest European acquisitions. Along with preparatory figurative sketches, independent studies, and portraits are two vivid landscape scenes. Fittingly for the Frick, artists represented in the gift include François Boucher, Edgar Degas, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Thomas Lawrence, and Jean-François Millet. The group also introduces to the Frick’s holdings works by artists not previously represented in the museum’s permanent collection, including Gustave Caillebotte, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Jan Lievens, John Singer Sargent, and Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Head of a Woman, 1784, pastel on paper, 12 × 10 inches (New York: Frick Collection, promised gift from the Collection of Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard; photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.).

Each of the twenty-six works—selected for their beauty, quality, and condition—either appreciably deepens the Frick’s current holdings of familiar artists or brings to the institution a work by an artist who is not—but should be—represented within the museum’s core areas of European Old Master art. In adding five pastels and an oil sketch, the gift also strengthens the Frick’s holdings in these media. Betty and Jean-Marie Eveillard have been deeply involved with the Frick for many years, both having served as Trustees. Betty is currently the Board’s Chair.

Giulio Dalvit, Aimee Ng and Xavier F. Salomon, The Eveillard Gift (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022), 168 pages, ISBN: 978-1913645281, £35 / $45.

Giulio Dalvit is the Frick’s Assistant Curator of Sculpture. He is a specialist of fifteenth-century Italian sculpture and painting, but his publications also span modern and contemporary art. Dalvit has held various lecture and research positions, most recently as an Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Aimee Ng is a Curator at the Frick, where she is a specialist in Italian Renaissance art. She has held academic and curatorial and positions at Columbia University and the Morgan Library & Museum, where, before joining the Frick, she served as Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Morgan’s Drawing Institute.

Xavier F. Salomon is the Frick’s Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. A noted scholar of Paolo Veronese, he has curated many exhibitions and written or contributed to countless publications. Previously, he was Curator in the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, before that, the Arturo and Holly Melosi Chief Curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Sunrise in Udaipur, ca. 1722–23, detail (Udaipur: The City Palace Museum, The Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation, 2012.20.0015).

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From the press release (29 August) for the exhibition:

A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur
Sackler Gallery, National Museum of Asian Art, Washington DC, 19 November 2022 — 14 May 2023
Cleveland Museum of Art, 11 June — 10 September 2023

Curated by Debra Diamond and Dipti Khera

The National Museum of Asian Art, in collaboration with The City Palace Museum in Udaipur, presents A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur, an exhibition that brings together 63 works on paper, cotton, and scrolls from collections across the world to reveal how artists sought to convey the sensory and lived experience of the lake city of Udaipur in Rajasthan, India. Many of the paintings have never been publicly exhibited or published. Curated by Debra Diamond (Elizabeth Moynihan Curator for South Asian and Southeast Asian Art at the National Museum of Asian Art) and Dipti Khera (associate professor at New York University), A Splendid Land will be on view in the museum’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. It is the first in a series of exhibitions that celebrate the National Museum of Asian Art’s centennial in 2023.

In the 18th century, the artists of Udaipur shifted their focus from small poetic manuscripts to large-scale paintings of the city’s palaces, lakes, mountains, and seasons. They sought to convey the bhava, the emotional tenor and sensorial experiences, that make places and times memorable. This was unlike anything else in Indian art. The paintings express themes of belonging and prosperous futures that are universal. A Splendid Land explores the environmental, political, and emotional contexts in which the new genre emerged. Udaipur’s economy depended on annual monsoons, extensive water harvesting, and securing the loyalty of nobles and allies. By celebrating regional abundance and courtly refinement, the paintings strengthened friendships in the changing political landscapes of early modern South Asia.

“The National Museum of Asian Art has a rich history of connecting visitors with South Asian arts and cultures,” said Chase Robinson, Dame Jillian Sackler Director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art. “Built upon a long-standing collaboration with Indian colleagues, the exhibition will allow the museum to bring extraordinary but little-known pieces to a global audience, enriching its understanding of a fascinating moment in India’s past.”

The National Museum of Asian Art has more than 1,200 objects in its South Asian collections. Sculpture, paintings, and manuscripts illuminate the subcontinent’s many religious and courtly traditions; photography is at the center of the contemporary Indian holdings. A Splendid Land includes 13 paintings from the National Museum of Asian Art; paintings from Udaipur are a strength of the collection.

The artworks featured in the exhibition reveal how painters developed a new genre centered upon the lived experience of local landscapes, lake systems, and palaces. The atelier became an incubator; over some 200 years, artists found ever-new ways to evoke ambience, trigger memories, and create feelings of connection. This departure in subject matter differs from the body-focused visual traditions of Indian art over two millennia. A Splendid Land is the first exhibition to examine closely this shift and how it expands people’s understanding of emotions and sensorial experience, as well as climate and natural resource management, in early modern India.

A Splendid Land is organized as a journey that begins at Udaipur’s center and continues outward: first the lakes and lake palaces, then to the city, the countryside, and finally to the cosmos. An ambient soundscape by the renowned experimental filmmaker Amit Dutta (b. 1977, Jammu, India) underscores the sensorial elements in the paintings, inviting contemporary audiences to sense—and not just see—the moods of these extraordinary places and paintings. The installation will include 51 works on paper (roughly 3 feet by 4 feet), five monumental works on cotton (ranging in height from 5 feet to 10 feet), one scroll (9 feet in length) from the 17th through 19th centuries, and six photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries.

“The exhibition structure directly responds to the visuality of the paintings and the historical goals of the artists,” said Diamond, who is a specialist in Indian court painting. “Each gallery centers upon the emotions engendered by a particular place or season. The sequence of immersive moods will heighten the sensorial experience of place for museum visitors. I am grateful to the City Palace Museum for their partnership on this exciting project that allows our visitors to get a sense of Udaipur and its cultural heritage, and to co-curator Dipti Khera, whose groundbreaking work on historical emotions is central to the exhibition.”

Debra Diamond has curated numerous exhibitions with the National Museum of Asian Art, including Garden & Cosmos (2008–09), Yoga: The Art of Transformation (2013–14), and Body Image: Arts from the Indian Subcontinent, currently on view in the museum’s Freer Gallery of Art. Dipti Khera, associate professor in New York University’s Department of Art History and Institute of Fine Arts, has published extensively, foregrounding art that challenges colonial perspectives and global histories of the 18th and 19th centuries.

A Splendid Land will be accompanied by a robust program of public events, most notably a public symposium on the monsoon, past and present, and the ways that art reveals cultural attitudes towards natural resources and speaks to climate crises in South Asia that will bring perspectives of the past together with insights of the future. Additionally, the traditional Rajasthani music band Raitila Rajasthan will present Music of Splendid Land, featuring songs inspired from themes of Udaipur paintings showcased at the exhibition.

A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur is organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in collaboration with The City Palace Museum, Udaipur administered by The Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation.

Debra Diamond and Dipti Khera, eds., A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2022), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-3777439440, $60.

Opening this week at BGC:

Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 16 September 2022 — 1 January 2023

Curated by Emma Cormack, Ilona Kos, and Michele Majer

“I love lace for evening dresses … for a cocktail frock … or for a blouse… . When a fabric is fancy in itself it needs simplicity of design to show it to its best advantage.” —Christian Dior

Point de France needle-lace frelange with lappets, Orne, France, ca. 1695, linen (Textilmuseum St. Gallen, acquisition from the John Jacoby Collection, 1954,01246; photo by Michael Rast).

Lace—delicate, sumptuous, enigmatic—takes over the Bard Graduate Center Gallery this fall. Trace the development of European lace from its sixteenth-century origins to the present day. See more than 150 examples of lace from the renowned collection of Switzerland’s Textilmuseum St. Gallen, including some of the world’s finest examples of handmade needle and bobbin lace that were favored by the wealthy and powerful of Bourbon France and Habsburg Spain. Learn about the women who crafted this sought-after status symbol by hand and about the evolution of Swiss chemical lace, known as guipure lace, made on embroidery machines. Explore new innovations in lace production, like laser-cut and 3D-printed lace, used in contemporary haute couture.

Curated by Emma Cormack, associate curator, Bard Graduate Center; Ilona Kos, curator, Textilmuseum St. Gallen; and Michele Majer, assistant professor, Bard Graduate Center. Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen is organized by Bard Graduate Center and the Textilmuseum St. Gallen. The exhibition will open at Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York in September 2022 and will be available to tour after closing in January 2023.

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Emma Cormack and Michele Majer, eds., Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2022), 432 pages, ISBN: 978-0300263497, $75.

Tracing the history of lace in fashion from its sixteenth-century origins to the present, Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen offers a look at one of the world’s finest collections of historical lace. The book explores the longstanding connections between lace and status, addressing styles in lace worn at royal courts, including Habsburg Spain and Bourbon France, as well as lace worn by the elite ruling classes and Indigenous peoples in the Spanish Americas. Featuring new research, the publication covers a range of topics related to lace production, lace in fashion and portraiture, lace revivals, the mechanization of the lace industries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and contemporary innovations in lace. With a focus on lace techniques, women lace makers, and lace as a signifier of wealth and power, this richly illustrated book includes wide-ranging contributions by curators and experts from major museums and academic institutions.

C O N T E N T S

Director’s Foreword, Susan Weber
Editor’s Note

Introduction, Emma Cormack and Michele Majer

The Emergence of Lace in Early Modern Europe
1  Barbara Karl — Lace and Status: Luxury, Power, and Control in Early Modernity
2  Femke Speelberg — Putting a Name to Lace: Fashion, Fame, and the Production of Printed Textile Pattern Books
3  Paula Hohti Erichsen — ‘Monstrous’ Ruffs and Elegant Trimmings: Lace and Lacemaking in Early Modern Italy
4  Frieda Sorber — Antwerp, A Center of Lace Making and Lace Dealing, 1550–1750

Lace in Spain and the Americas, 1500–1800
5  Amalia Descalzo Lorenzo — The Triumph of Lace: Spanish Portraiture of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
6  Mariselle Méléndez — ‘A desire of being distinguished by an elegant dress is universal’: Clothing, Status and Convenience in Eighteenth-Century Spanish America
7  James Middleton — A Prodigious Excess: Lace in New Spain and Peru, ca. 1600–1800
8  Laura Beltrán-Rubio — ‘Covered in much fine lace’: Dress in the Viceroyalty of New Granada

The Dominance of France, 1660–1790
9  Denis Bruna — Lace and Economy under Louis XIV
10  Lesley Miller — Lace à la Mode, ca. 1690–1790

Mechanization and Revivalism: The Nineteenth Century Lace Industries
11  Emma Cormack and Michele Majer — Fashion and the Lace Industries in France, Belgium, and England, 1800–1900
12  Annabel Bonnin Talbot — Ahead of the Curve: A. Blackbourne & Co. and the Late-Nineteenth Century British Lace Industry
13  Emily Zilber — Italy to New York: Making Historic Textiles Modern at the Scoula d’Industrie Italiane
14  Anne Wanner-JeanRichard and Ilona Kos — Imitation and Inspiration: The Leopold Iklé Collection in St. Gallen

Innovations in Lace, 1900 to Today
15  Catherine Örmen — Fashion and Lace since 1900
16  Annina Dosch, Interview with Tobias Forster, Hans Schreiber, and Martin Leuthold — Lace in St. Gallen Today: Tradition and Innovation at Forster Rohner and Jakob Schlaepfer

Illustrated Checklist of the Exhibition
Glossary, compiled by Kenna Libes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index

Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard, A Centurion Begging for Protection from Marc Antony during a Seditious Revolt, ca. 1800, black ink and black and gray wash, probably over graphite, framing lines in black ink, on off-white antique laid paper (laid down), 20 × 48 cm (Harvard Art Museums, 2018.210).

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Opening this week at Harvard:

Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, 16 September 2022 — 15 January 2023

Curated by Elizabeth Rudy and Kristel Smentek

See how the graphic arts inspired, shaped, and gave immediacy to new ideas in the Enlightenment era, encouraging individuals to follow their own reason when seeking to know more.

What role did drawings and prints play during the Enlightenment era, from roughly 1720 to 1800? Dare to Know explores many nuances of this complex time—when political and cultural revolutions swept across Europe and the Americas, spurring profound shifts in science, philosophy, the arts, social and cultural encounters, and our shared sense of history. Indeed, the Enlightenment itself has been described as a “revolution of the mind.” Novel concepts in every realm of intellectual inquiry were communicated not only through text and speech, but in prints and drawings that gave these ideas a visual, concrete form. They made new things visible—and familiar things visible in powerful new ways. They wielded the potential to visually articulate, reinforce, or contradict beliefs as well as biases, while also arguing for social action and imagining new realities.

In 1784, in response to a journal article asking “What Is Enlightenment?,” German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that the Enlightenment’s main impulse was to “dare to know!”: to pursue knowledge for oneself, without relying on others to interpret facts and experiences. But is this ever truly possible?

Bringing together 150 prints, drawings, books, and other related objects from Harvard as well as collections in the United States and abroad, this exhibition offers provocative insights into both the achievements and the failures of a period whose complicated legacies reverberate still today. Dare to Know asks new and sometimes uncomfortable questions of the so-called age of reason, inviting visitors to embrace the Enlightenment’s same spirit of inquiry—to investigate, to persuade, and to imagine.

Curated by Elizabeth M. Rudy, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, Harvard Art Museums, and Kristel Smentek, Associate Professor of Art History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With special thanks to Heather Linton, Curatorial Assistant for Special Exhibitions and Publications, Division of European and American Art, and Christina Taylor, Associate Paper Conservator, Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. Research contributions by Austėja Mackelaitė, Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellow (2016–18), and by PhD candidates in Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture and former graduate interns in the Division of European and American Art: J. Cabelle Ahn, Thea Goldring, and Sarah Lund.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Support for the exhibition is provided by the Melvin R. Seiden and Janine Luke Fund for Publications and Exhibitions, the Robert M. Light Print Department Fund, the Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Support Fund, the Catalogues and Exhibitions Fund for Pre-Twentieth-Century Art of the Fogg Museum, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. The accompanying catalogue was made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Publication Funds, including the Henry P. McIlhenny Fund. Related programming is supported by the M. Victor Leventritt Lecture Series Endowment Fund.

The catalogue is distributed by Yale UP:

Edouard Kopp, Elizabeth Rudy, and Kristel Smentek, eds., Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums, 2022), 334 pages, ISBN: 978-0300266726, $50.

Are volcanoes punishment from God? What do a fly and a mulberry have in common? What utopias await in unexplored corners of the earth and beyond? During the Enlightenment, questions like these were brought to life through an astonishing array of prints and drawings, helping shape public opinion and stir political change. Dare to Know overturns common assumptions about the age, using the era’s proliferation of works on paper to tell a more nuanced story. Echoing the structure and sweep of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the book contains 26 thematic essays, organized A to Z, providing an unprecedented perspective on more than 50 artists, including Henry Fuseli, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Francisco Goya, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, William Hogarth, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and Giambattista Tiepolo. With a multidisciplinary approach, the book probes developments in the natural sciences, technology, economics, and more—all through the lens of the graphic arts.

Edouard Kopp is the John R. Eckel, Jr., Foundation Chief Curator at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston; Elizabeth M. Rudy is the Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; and Kristel Smentek is associate professor of art history in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

With contributions by J. Cabelle Ahn, Elizabeth Saari Browne, Rachel Burke, Alvin L. Clark, Jr., Anne Driesse, Paul Friedland, Thea Goldring, Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Ashley Hannebrink, Joachim Homann, Kéla Jackson, Penley Knipe, Edouard Kopp, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Heather Linton, Austėja Mackelaitė, Tamar Mayer, Elizabeth Mitchell, Elizabeth M. Rudy, Brandon O. Scott, Kristel Smentek, Phoebe Springstubb, Gabriella Szalay, and Christina Taylor.

R E L A T E D  E V E N T S

Dare to Know: An Introduction
15 September 2022, 5.30pm

Join us for a series of brief presentations and a discussion about the special exhibition Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment, with curators Elizabeth Rudy and Kristel Smentek, along with several contributors to the exhibition catalogue.

Exhibition Tours by Elizabeth Rudy
18 September, 2 and 23 October, 11 December, and 15 January, noon

Join exhibition co-curator Elizabeth Rudy for a tour of the exhibition. She will share insights about how works on paper played a critical role in the 18th century, wielding the power to visually articulate, reinforce, or contradict beliefs as well as biases.

Gallery Talk by Morgan Grasselli
22 September 2022, 12.30pm

Join Margaret Morgan Grasselli for a discussion about the 18th-century invention of the multicolor, multiplate printing technique that laid the foundation for today’s CMYK process.

Gallery Talk by Sam Nehila
30 September 30, 2022, 12.30pm

Join Sam Nehila, curatorial assistant in the Division of European and American Art, for a discussion of William Hogarth’s print series The Four Stages of Cruelty.

Printed by James Phillips, Description of a Slave Ship, 1789, engraving (Harvard University, Houghton Library, Gift of O. Peck, 1845, p EB75 A100, TL42422.5).

Gallery Talk by John Overholt
25 October 2022, 12.30pm

Join Houghton Library curator John Overholt for a discussion of one of the most important and consequential prints of the 18th century, Description of a Slave Ship.

Gallery Talk by Joachim Homann
27 October 2022, 12.30pm

Join curator Joachim Homann for a discussion about a rare, intact example of French inventor Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle’s multi-sheet drawings on translucent paper. The work was originally attached to rollers, lit from behind with candles, and unfurled for a captive audience.

Gallery Talk by Horace Ballard
3 November 2022, 12.30pm

Join curator Horace Ballard for an exploration of the observation and documentation of astronomical events in the 18th century as exemplified in a drawing by British artist Paul Sandby.

Gallery Talk by Ben Sibson
5 November 2022, 12.30pm

Join Ben Sibson, PhD candidate in Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, for a discussion about the depiction of the human body in selected works on view in the exhibition.

Gallery Talk by Paris A. Spies-Gans
6 November 2022, 12.30pm

Join art historian Paris A. Spies-Gans, of the Harvard Society of Fellows, for a discussion about works of art made by women in the exhibition. Spies-Gans will examine objects by a range of artists, with particular attention given to Marguerite Gérard and Marie-Gabrielle Capet.

Unidentified artist, American, Lottery Ticket: The Endless Knot, ca. 1785–95, woodcut (Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Walter S. Poor, Class of 1905, M20297).

Gallery Talk by Casey Monahan
8 November 2022, 12.30pm

Join curatorial assistant Casey Monahan for a discussion of a dynamic display of ball invitations, advertisements, trade cards, and currency notes in the exhibition. Monahan will share insights about the acquisition of these small prints and the story behind their creative installation.

Gallery Talk by Joachim Homann
10 November 2022, 12.30pm

Join curator Joachim Homann for a discussion of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s drawing The Girls’ Dormitory.

Gallery Talk by Sarah Mallory
20 November 2022, 12.30pm

Join Sarah Mallory, PhD candidate in Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture, for a discussion of the emergence of the modern notion of ecology in the 18th century as articulated in selected works in the exhibition.

Gallery Talk by Yi Bin Liang
6 December 2022, 12.30pm

Join conservation technician Yi Bin Liang for an exploration of 18th-century methods and techniques of book binding in a close examination of works on view.

Closing this month at The British Museum:

Feminine Power: The Divine to the Demonic
The British Museum, London, 19 May — 25 September 2022

Curated by Belinda Crerar and Lucy Dahlsen

The first exhibition of its kind, Feminine Power takes a cross-cultural look at the profound influence of female spiritual beings within global religion and faith. Explore the significant role that goddesses, demons, witches, spirits and saints have played—and continue to play—in shaping our understanding of the world.

How do different traditions view femininity? How has female authority been perceived in ancient cultures? For insights, the exhibition looks to divine and demonic figures feared and revered for over 5,000 years. From wisdom, passion and desire, to war, justice and mercy, the diverse expression of female spiritual powers around the world prompts us to reflect on how we perceive femininity and gender identity today.

Worship of Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes, reveals how her destructive capacity is venerated alongside her ability to create. The Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, who transcends gender and is visualised in male form in Tibet and female in China and Japan, uncovers the importance of gender fluidity in some spiritual traditions. And the terrifying Hindu goddess Kali, depicted in art carrying a severed head and bloodied sword, is honoured as the Great Mother and liberator from fear and ignorance.

Porcelain Figure of Guanyin, China, 18th century, 41 cm high (London: The British Museum, 1980,0728.93).

Enhanced by engagement with contemporary worshippers, faith communities and insights from high-profile collaborators Bonnie Greer, Mary Beard, Elizabeth Day, Rabia Siddique, and Deborah Frances-White, the exhibition considers the influence of female spiritual power and what femininity means today.

Bringing together sculptures, sacred objects and artworks from the ancient world to today, and from six continents, the exhibition highlights the many faces of feminine power—ferocious, beautiful, creative or hell-bent—and its seismic influence throughout time.

Belinda Crerar, Feminine Power: The Divine to the Demonic (London: The British Museum, 2022), 272 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0714151304, £30 / $45.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  Forces of Nature
2  Passion and Desire
3  Evil
4  Justice and Defence
5  Compassion and Salvation
Conclusion

Notes and Bibliography
Acknowledgements and Credits

Henry Fuseli, Sophia Fuseli, Her Hair in Large Rolls, with Pink Gloves, in Front of a Brown Curtain, detail, 1790
(Kunsthaus Zürich, Collection of Prints and Drawings)

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From The Courtauld:

Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism
The Courtauld Gallery, London, 14 October 2022 — 8 January 2023
Kunsthaus Zürich, 24 February – 21 May 2023

One of the most original and eccentric artists of the 18th century, Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) will be the subject of a new exhibition at The Courtauld, opening 14 October 2022.

Henry Fuseli, Half-length Figure of a Courtesan with Feathered Head-dress, ca. 1800–10 (Kunsthaus Zürich, Collection of Prints and Drawings).

Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Fuseli spent a formative period in Rome in the 1770s before settling in London, where he was elected Professor of Painting at The Royal Academy and served for 21 years as Keeper of the RA Schools, working and living at Somerset House in what is now The Courtauld Gallery.

While Fuseli was famous in his lifetime for stylised paintings depicting fantastic and supernatural scenes drawn from his imagination and literature, The Courtauld’s exhibition explores an altogether different dimension to his art. Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism will reveal the artist’s secret lifelong obsession with the female figure through fifty of his strange and striking private drawings, many of which depict the spectacularly extravagant hairdos and fashions of the day. The exhibition will explore Fuseli’s fascination with female sexuality and the modern woman—as a figure of mystery, transgression, and dangerous allure—and provides an insight into late 18th- and early 19th-century anxieties about gender, identity, and sexuality during a transformative period in European history.

Organised in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich, the exhibition will showcase drawings brought together from international collections. Following its presentation at The Courtauld, the exhibition will travel to Zürich, the city where Fuseli was born.

The catalogue is published by PHP and distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

David Solkin, ed., with contributions by Jonas Beyer, Mechthild Fend, and Ketty Gottardo, Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022), 168 pages, ISBN: 978-1913645298, £30 / $40.

Best known for his notoriously provocative painting The Nightmare, Fuseli energetically cultivated a reputation for eccentricity, with vividly stylised images of supernatural creatures, muscle-bound heroes, and damsels in distress. While these convinced some viewers of the greatness of his genius, others dismissed him as a charlatan, or as completely mad.

Fuseli’s contemporaries might have thought him even crazier had they been aware that in private he harboured an obsessive preoccupation with the figure of the modern woman, which he pursued almost exclusively in his drawings. Where one might have expected idealised bodies with the grace and proportions of classical statues, here instead we encounter figures whose anatomies have been shaped by stiff bodices, waistbands, puffed sleeves, and pointed shoes, and whose heads are crowned by coiffures of the most bizarre and complicated sort. Often based on the artist’s wife Sophia Rawlins, the women who populate Fuseli’s graphic work tend to adopt brazenly aggressive attitudes, either fixing their gaze directly on the viewer or ignoring our presence altogether. Usually they appear on their own, in isolation on the page; sometimes they are grouped together to form disturbing narratives, erotic fantasies that may be mysterious, vaguely menacing, or overtly transgressive, but where women always play a dominant role. Among the many intriguing questions raised by these works is the extent to which his wife Sophia was actively involved in fashioning her appearance for her own pleasure, as well as for the benefit of her husband.

By bringing together more than fifty of these studies (roughly a third of the known total), The Courtauld Gallery will give audiences an unprecedented opportunity to see one of the finest Romantic-period draughtsmen at his most innovative and exciting. Visitors to the show and readers of the lavishly illustrated catalogue will further be invited to consider how Fuseli’s drawings of women, as products of the turbulent aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, speak to concerns about gender and sexuality that have never been more relevant than they are today.

The exhibition showcases drawings brought together from international collections, including the Kunsthaus Zürich, in Zurich, the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand, and from other European and North American institutions.

David Solkin is Emeritus Professor at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Jonas Beyer is Curator of Drawings at the Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich.
Mechthild Fend is Professor of Art History at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.
Ketty Gottardo is Martin Halusa Curator of Drawings at The Courtauld Gallery, London.

I’m sorry to have missed notice of this exhibition earlier. There is an excellent ‘digitorial‘ component, and the catalogue is still available. –CH

Renoir: Rococo Revival
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, 2 March — 19 June 2022

Curated by Alexander Eiling, Juliane Betz, and Fabienne Ruppen

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) was one of the outstanding painters of French Impressionism—and far more than that. For the first time the Städel Museum addressed the surprising references in his art to Rococo painting in a large-scale special exhibition. Whereas Rococo painting was considered frivolous and immoral after the French Revolution, it underwent a revival in the nineteenth century and was widely visible in Renoir’s lifetime.

Having trained as a porcelain painter, Renoir was intimately acquainted with the imagery of artists such as Antoine Watteau, Baptiste Siméon Chardin, François Boucher, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. He shared the Rococo’s predilection for certain subjects, among them promenaders in the park and on the riverbank, moments of repose in the outdoors, and the garden party. Renoir also frequently devoted himself to the depiction of domestic scenes and family life as well as intimate moments such as bathing, reading, or making music. Yet he not only took orientation from the motifs of the Rococo, but also particularly admired its loose and sketchy manner of painting as well as its brilliant palette, aspects that would have a formative influence on him and many other artists in the Impressionist circle.

Trenchant juxtapositions of Renoir’s art with works of the eighteenth century as well as his own contemporaries—Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Berthe Morisot—provided an overview of Impressionism’s intense artistic examination of the Rococo. The exhibition showed a total of some 120 outstanding paintings, works on paper and handcrafted objects from international museums such as the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, as well as private collections.

Curators
Dr. Alexander Eiling (Head of Modern Art, Städel Museum), Dr. Juliane Betz (Deputy Head of Modern Art, Städel Museum), Dr. Fabienne Ruppen (Research Assistant, Modern Art, Städel Museum)

Alexander Eiling with Juliane Betz and Fabienne Ruppen, eds, Renoir: Rococo Revival (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2022), 328 pages, ISBN 978-3775751346 (English edition), ISBN 978-3775751339 (German edition), €50. Text by Michela Bassu, Juliane Betz, Alexander Eiling, Guillaume Faroult, Marine Kisiel, Matthias Krüger, Mary Morton, Astrid Reuter, and Fabienne Ruppen.

From MUSEC and Skira:

Japan—Arts and Life: The Montgomery Collection
Museo delle Culture, Lugano, 10 February 2022 — 8 January 2023

Japan—Arts and Life, a major exhibition dedicated to the Jeffrey Montgomery Collection, is now on view at the Museo delle Culture in Lugano. At home in Lugano for over fifty years, it is one of the largest and best-known collections of Japanese art outside Japan. With this project, MUSEC celebrates a passion for collecting and a heritage of great artistic and cultural value—a heritage that brings prestige to Lugano, consolidating the Ticino city’s historic ties with Swiss and international private art collecting.

Installed throughout two floors of the Villa Malpensata, home of MUSEC, the exhibition presents 170 works dating from the 12th to the 20th centuries—including textiles, furniture, paintings, religious and everyday-objects—each carefully selected from the over one thousand objects collected over a lifetime by Jeffrey Montgomery.

Known worldwide, the Montgomery Collection displays an extraordinary richness and a singular substance. The experience and sensitivity of the collector are at the heart of the project developed by MUSEC and mark its originality, compared to the way in which the collection has been interpreted until now. As Francesco Paolo Campione, director of MUSEC, writes in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, “art collections can only have meaning and deep value if they are linked to an existential dimension and the human experience of those who wanted, planned, and consolidated them around themselves. The collector is indispensable to the collection: not only because he created it, but also because he guarantees its originality, interpreting the spirit of the times.”

Paolo Campione teaches Cultural Anthropology at the University of Insubria and is the Director of MUSEC. Moira Luraschi, anthropologist, is curator of the Japanese collections and the photographic collection of the Yokohama School at MUSEC.

Francesco Paolo Campione and Moira Luraschi, eds., Japan—Arts and Life: The Montgomery Collection (Milan: Skira, 2022), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-8857247724, $54.

Essays
• Francesco Paolo Campione — An Impermanent Journey between Art and Life
• Matthi Forrer — Collecting Japanese Art Objects
• Rossella Menegazzo — The Other Side of Japan: The Jeffrey Montgomery Collection between Art, Crafts, and Folklore
• Giorgio Amitran — Japan, the Beautiful, and Ourselves
• Imogen Heitmann — The Museographical Display as a Creative ‘Meta-work’

Catalogue Entries
• Paintings
• Woven Objects
• Hooks and Counterweights
• Ceramics
• Fabrics
• Lanterns
• Masks
• Furniture
• Signs
• Kettles and Pourers
• Sculptures
• Lacquers

Bibliography
Author Biographies