Enfilade

Press release from Hampton Court:

The Empress and the Gardener
Hampton Court Palace, London, 28 April — 4 September 2016

Curated by Sebastian Edwards

A remarkable collection of watercolour paintings and drawings once owned by the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia will go on show at Hampton Court Palace this spring, as part of the nationwide commemorations marking the 300th anniversary of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s birth. Never displayed before, the exhibition of almost 60 intricately detailed views of the palace, park and gardens vividly captures Hampton Court during the time when Capability Brown served there as Chief Gardener to King George III. The intriguing history of this collection, which lay forgotten in the stores of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia for over two centuries, will be explored in The Empress and the Gardener.

Arguably Britain’s most famous landscape gardener, Capability Brown served as Chief Gardener to King George III at Hampton Court Palace from 1764 to 1783. The job came with a handsome salary and residence at the palace, but Brown, who famously transformed landscapes across the country, actually did very little to change the palace’s Baroque formal gardens, choosing instead to preserve them out of respect for his predecessors. Nevertheless, by the time he moved into royal service, he was already operating a busy landscaping business, and winning international acclaim as one of the most famous proponents of the ‘English Style’ of landscape design.

Famously a voracious consumer of foreign culture, Catherine the Great was a great admirer of all things English, declaring to the philosopher Voltaire that “Anglo-mania rules my plantmania.” She built herself an ‘English Palace’ and ‘English Park’ at her palace at Peterhof, with the help of British designers but was unable to find a Capability Brown of her own. Seizing a lucrative opportunity, a figure in the shadows, John Spyers, assistant to Brown, sold two albums of his detailed drawings from Brown’s home and workplace, Hampton Court Palace, to the Empress for the huge sum of 1,000 roubles.

Quite how Spyers managed to achieve this extraordinary coup remains a mystery, but ironically the Empress found herself the possessor of an album of drawings of a palace landscape which Brown himself had barely touched. The albums, which alone had cost Catherine a tenth the price of creating her new gardens, disappeared in her collection at the Hermitage (now the State Hermitage Museum) and lay forgotten for over two centuries before being rediscovered by Hermitage curator Mikhail Dedinkin in 2002.

Today, the Spyers views are a unique survival: the richest and most revealing record of how Hampton Court gardens looked when Brown was in charge. Together they are considered one of the most complete visual records of any historic landscape ever captured before the dawn of photography. From rare glimpses of the ordinary people who lived in or visited the palace and its gardens, to evocative details of Hampton Court’s celebrated courtyards, passageways and picturesque corners, they explore an almost-forgotten period in the palace’s history in vivid detail.

The Empress and the Gardener will see these rare works go on public display for the first time, in the very setting that inspired their creation. The exhibition will also feature contemporary portraits of Capability Brown and the Empress Catherine, previously unseen drawings of Catherine’s ‘English Palace’ in the grounds of Peterhof near St. Petersburg and several pieces of the famous ‘Green Frog’ dinner service, a triumph of British design created for the Empress by Wedgwood, featuring images of some of the celebrated landscapes where Brown worked across England.

Sebastian Edwards, exhibition curator, said, “We are thrilled to be able to present this remarkable window into a forgotten Georgian era in the palace’s past, in the year when garden lovers up and down the country are celebrating the 300th anniversary of Capability Brown’s birth. We hope that after enjoying The Empress and the Gardener our visitors will follow in John Spyers’s footsteps, out into Hampton Court’s magnificent gardens and discover how they have changed over the centuries.”

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From Artbooks.com:

Mikhail Dedinkin and David Jacques, The Hampton Court Albums of Catherine the Great, (London: Fontanka 2016), 160 pages, ISBN: 978-1906257224, £32 / $45.

This album publishes, for the very first time, 100 hitherto unknown watercolours/drawings of Capability Brown’s designs for Hampton Court Palace gardens. These were purchased by Empress Catherine the Great of Russia through her own gardener James Meader, a disciple of Capability Brown, and then forgotten in the Hermitage stores. John Spyers, the artist to whom the albums have been attributed by Hermitage curator Mikhail Dedinkin, was Brown’s surveyor. Catherine the Great paid the huge sum of 1,000 roubles for them in the early 1780s and they were clearly bought as Capability Brown drawings. Almost no other visual material about Hampton Court and its gardens and park at the period when Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was the resident Royal Gardener has survived, so the importance of these views, which have never been published or on exhibition before, cannot be overstated.

From the Monnaie de Paris:

Jannis Kounellis
Monnaie de Paris, 11 March — 30 April 2016

Jannis Kounellis, Libertà o Morte. W Marat W Robespierre, 1969.

At Monnaie de Paris (the Paris Mint), Jannis Kounellis has composed a dramatic sculpture throughout the thousand square metres of the 18th-century exhibition rooms of this Palace beside the Seine. Eminently present, concrete, irreducible, the new exhibition by Kounellis imposes a direct experience on visitors, without intermediaries.

“I come to Paris empty-handed, like an old painter.” This is what Kounellis said a few months ago in response to the invitation by Monnaie de Paris, which hosts this figure of contemporary art, at the origin of the Arte povera movement. As a painter, Kounellis designed his exhibition at Monnaie de Paris as a fresco. He had already, in 1972, crossed the boundaries of painting with Da inventare sul posto, a work accompanied by a dancer and a violinist.

In the 18th-century Monnaie de Paris salons, the paintings are staged through an installation of metal trestles. This army of cold metal will captivate visitors with its size and the contrast with the architecture and décor of the Palace: columns, marble, ornaments, gilt…

Jacques-Denis Antoine, Hôtel de la Monnaie, 1767–75
(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Jannis Kounellis offers a true experience to visitors. He had already positioned living energy alive, animal or human, at the centre of his work with the incomparable 12 live horses in 1969. But also in Nabucco in 1970 or quarters of hanging meat, or the Stommeln Pullheim Synagogue exhibition where fish evolved into a plate threatened with a knife in 1991.

Kounellis is inspired by Monnaie de Paris, the oldest company in the world and part of the heart of the last factory in Paris where know-how and industry intermingle to create his ‘new project’. The artist appeals to the visitor and raises the question of how a work is produced. It is in the technique, in the craft of the workshops, in the intuitive use of shapes and at the modelling stage that the artist’s project for Monnaie de Paris is born. The work Libertà o Morte. W Marat W Robespierre, 1969 will be presented in the exhibition as well as Da inventare sul posto which will echo the beating heart of the coin presses of Monnaie de Paris, embodying the strength, the rhythm, the orchestration.

A special public program will be performed by Etel Adnan with poetry and musical sessions on 17 March and 28 April at 7pm. Transmitted live on RAM Radioartemobile and broadcast on the Monnaie de Paris website, these rendez-vous will form part of a unique selection of radio archives.

Christophe Beaux, Jannis Kounellis, and Chiara Parisi, Jannis Kounellis (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2016), 64 pages, ISBN 978-3775741590, 30€. In French and English.

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From the Palladio Museum:

Jefferson and Palladio: Constructing a New World / Come costruire un mondo nuovo
Palladio Museum, Vicenza, 23 September 2015 — 28 March 2016

Curated by Guido Beltramini and Fulvio Lenzo

Visitors are introduced to the exhibition by a mirror reflecting the busts of Palladio and Thomas Jefferson. This raises the initial question in the show: how are forms and ideas ‘reflected’? Why, in this case, was an architect from a province in Northern Italy adopted as a model for the construction of the architecture of the New World?

Thomas Jefferson, Plan of the Rotunda of the University of Virginia (Charlottesville: Special Collections, University of Virginia Library)

The answer is linked to another fundamental question: what is Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), the man who drafted the Declaration of Independence and was the third president of the United States, doing in a museum of architecture? The reason is that he more than any other American shaped the face of the new nation through art, architecture and regional planning. Visionary but also pragmatic, he was both a man of action and an intellectual who knew Latin and Greek. And he was convinced that the New World could only be built through reason and beauty.

Jefferson and Palladio: Constructing a New World is the first-ever exhibition dedicated to the great American Palladian in Europe. It will enable visitors to explore Jefferson’s world, his art collections, architectural designs, dreams, and also his contradictions, through drawings, sculptures, precious books, architectural models, films and multimedia. The exhibition also features 36 photographs by Filippo Romano, the result of a photographic survey specifically conducted in Virginia in Spring 2014. There are also three precious original bozzetti (models) by Antonio Canova for a statue of George Washington, commissioned by Thomas Jefferson. Visitors can enhance their experience of the exhibition by downloading a free smartphone app with descriptions by the curators and so move through the rooms accompanied by their words.

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Mario Valmarana, the still greatly cherished professor at the University of Virginia who devoted his life to creating bridges between Palladio’s Veneto and Jefferson’s Virginia. Sponsored by Roberto Coin, the exhibition has been made possible thanks to the support of the Regione del Veneto, the Fondazione Cariverona and Dainese, and is the result of collaboration with the Fondazione Canova di Possagno and the Stiftung Bibliothek Werner Oechslin, Einsiedeln, Switzerland. The exhibition is also part of a joint project developed with the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, which in October 2014 staged the photographic exhibition Found in Translation: Palladio-Jefferson, A narrative by Filippo Romano.

The exhibition has been curated by Guido Beltramini and Fulvio Lenzo, with the support of an Advisory Committee, chaired by Howard Burns (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), and composed of James Ackerman (Harvard University), Bruce Boucher (University of Virginia), Travis C. McDonald (Corporation for Jefferson’s Poplar Forest), Damiana Paternò (IUAV, Venice), Mario Piana (IUAV, Venice), and Craig Reynolds (University of Virginia). The catalogue (available in English or Italian) is published by Officina Libraria. The exhibition layout has been designed by Alessandro Scandurra.

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The catalogue is available from Artbooks.com:

Guido Beltramini and Fulvio Lenzo, eds., Jefferson and Palladio: Constructing a New World (Milan: Officina Libraria, 2016), 176 pages, ISBN: 9788897737780, $30.

The catalogue offers an opportunity to acquire a deeper understanding of Jefferson’s architecture and, at the same time, leads to a clearer understanding of Palladio himself. Jefferson looked to Palladio because he was the architect of one of Europe’s few republics in which administrative power was in the hands of landed gentlemen who avoided the ostentation of princely manners and spent long periods of time in the countryside.

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), a cosmopolitan figure with rural roots, was a master of the knowledge of his time. He drafted The Declaration of Independence (1776), and thus founded a new view of the proper relation between governed and government. Jefferson was the architect of the new America, not just in a political sense, but in a literal sense as well. Architecture had an important place in his personal and public agenda. A self-taught architect, Jefferson buildings are among America’s most famous: Monticello, the Virginia State Capitol, and the University of Virginia are the starting points of American classical architecture. Jefferson was guided by his admiration for Palladio’s Four Books on Architecture, which provided him with key architectural forms and ideas. Palladio showed him how the admired building types of the ancient Romans could be adapted to modern purposes and provide a rational, harmonious framework for living and for building a new society.

Guido Beltramini is Director of the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Vicenza. Fulvio Lenzo is Associate Professor in the history of architecture at the Universita IUAV di Venezia, Venice.

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C O N T E N T S

Palladio in America, James Ackerman
Jefferson and Palladio, Guido Beltramini
Jefferson: Architecture and Democracy, Fulvio Lenzo
Photographing Jefferson, Filippo Romano
Palladianism in America Before Jefferson, Bruce Boucher
The National Survey Grid and the American Democracy, Catherine Maumi
Jefferson’s Creation of American Classical Architecture, Richard Guy Wilson
Jefferson and the First Public Statues in the United States, Giovanna Capitelli
Canova and the Monument to George Washington, Mario Guderzo
Palladio: Materials and Building Techniques Damiana, Lucia Paterno
Jefferson Builder, Travis McDonald

Enrtries for Monticello, Virginia State Capitol, President’s House, Poplar Forest, Bremo, Barboursville, University of Virginia

Bibliography
Exhibition Checklist

The exhibition closes in Paris this weekend:

Faces of Terror: Violence and Fantasy from David to Delacroix
Visages de l’effroi: Violence et Fantastique de David à Delacroix
Musée de la Vie Romantique, Paris, 3 November 2015 — 28 February 2016
Musée Municipal, La Roche-sur-Yon, 19 March — 19 June 2016

With a collection of more than 100 paintings, drawings and sculptures by David, Girodet, Gericault, Ingres and Delacroix, Faces of Terror presents French forms of fantastical Romanticism. This darker part of 19th-century art reveals a certain strength of spirit and provides a fascinating perspective on imagination during the romantic period.

Romanticism, although often reduced to a feeling of discontentment among the people of the 18th century that was generated by the upheavals of the time, without a doubt expresses the feeling of disenchantment of a whole generation, built on the ruins of the Ancien Régime and the tumult of the French Revolution. In the overflow of extreme emotions these artists skilfully found subjects for a new kind of aesthetic, exploring the dark side of the human soul, at a time when dreams and the irrational were emerging from the latency of Reason and the spirit of the Enlightenment period.

From the end of the 18th century, the form of Neoclassicism adopted by the greatest artists depicted the death of heroes and portrayed the violence of tragedies from ancient history, simultaneously justified by both moral values and academic proprieties. Terror, political upheaval and Napoleonic war generated a much more blatant perspective of horror that was no longer the prerogative of historical paintings. During the period of the Restoration of the monarchy, the development of the mainstream press led to broadcasts of reports of bloody violence across the country, which became topical issues for artists.

The Romantic period focuses on the supernatural and sometimes morbid, and depicts—thanks to an abundant but often unknown production of works of art—a crude reality as well as the strange, dusky figures of spectres and devils from the literature and poetry of the time. This dialogue with the supernatural is notably depicted in representations of the myth of Ossian, or in the success of Dante’s work with the torment of the condemned.

Jérôme Farigoule and Hélène Jagot, eds., Visages de l’effroi: Violence et fantastique de David à Delacroix (Liénart, 2015), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-2359061475, 26€.

Mantua purportedly worn by Helena Slicher for her marriage to Aelbrecht baron van Slingelandt on 4 September 1759
(Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum)

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Now on view at the Rijksmuseum:

Catwalk, 1625–1960
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 20 February — 16 May 2016

Curated by Bianca du Mortier; designed by Erwin Olaf

For the first time, the Rijksmuseum presents a large selection of its diverse fashion collection in an exhibition designed by world-renowned Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf.

From February 20 through May 16 2016, six galleries of the Philips Wing will be dedicated to fashion of the Dutch from 1625 to 1960. Starting with garments worn by members of the Frisian branch of the house of Nassau in the Golden Age, the exhibits will feature vibrantly coloured French silk gowns and luxurious velvet gentlemen’s suits of the eighteenth century, classically-inspired Empire dresses, and bustles of the Fin de Siècle—culminating in twentieth-century French haute couture by Dior and Yves Saint Laurent.

Wedding dress, 1759; photo by Erwin Olaf, model is Ymre Stiekema.

As Rijksmuseum Curator of Costumes Bianca du Mortier explains, “The garments presented in this exhibition reflect the stories of the people who wore them. In fashion, the choices of the wearer count—they make him or her a trendsetter or a follower. Even today the clothes of the very rich and powerful always convey a conscious or unconscious message. In that respect, nothing has changed over the last 330 years. These choices are restricted by such factors as budget, opportunity, age, social status, climate, personal likes and dislikes and so forth. And when presented in a museum, there is a final selection: the selection of the Rijksmuseum.”

The exhibition is designed by world-renowned Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf. He states, “The challenge and honour of designing this exhibition . . . for the most extraordinary museum in the Netherlands came at exactly the right moment for me. For several years now I’ve been exploring alternative ways to present my photographic work and to integrate it in installations, sound, video and films as means to immerse viewers in a world that fires and challenges their personal imaginations and, ultimately, sparks a stimulating dialogue between the viewer and the work on view.

Highlights include
• A pair of underpants belonging to Hendrik Casimir I, Count of Nassau Dietz (1612–1640)
• The widest dress in the Netherlands: Helena Slicher’s (1737–1776) wedding gown or mantua, which she supposedly wore at her marriage to Aelbrecht baron van Slingelandt (1732–1801) on 4 September 1759
• An exceptionally precious and fragile dress of blonde silk bobbin lace (1815–1820)
• A silk taffeta cocktail dress by Cristóbal Balenciaga (1951–1952)

The Rijksmuseum’s fashion collection totals some 10,000 items , with men’s, women’s and children’s attire and accessories spanning the period from 1700 until 1960. In addition, the History Department owns the earliest Dutch costumes, worn in the seventeenth century by the Frisian branch of the Nassau family and by the Stadtholder and King William III. Being the oldest costumes collection in the country, having begun in 1870, acquisitions initially emphasized on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but over time gradually expanded to include the first half of the twentieth century. All of the garments comes from the wardrobes of upper-class Dutch men and women, but they were not necessarily made in the Netherlands. Foreign fashion houses and fabrics from all the leading textile-manufacturing countries around the world are amply represented. Acquisitions for the collection are based on historical significance, such as a post-war dress made of silk RAF pilots maps; design relevance, such as Yves Saint Laurent’s 1965 ‘Mondrian dress’; and costume-historical importance, such as a silk taffeta cocktail gown by Cristóbal Balenciaga (1951–1952). Most items were donated or bequeathed, supplemented with purchases.

To coincide with the exhibition, the Rijksmuseum is publishing a richly illustrated ‘Collection Book’ – Costume & Fashion, authored by Curator of Costumes Bianca du Mortier, with contributions from the museum’s textile restorers, fellow conservators, and a specialized colour analyst. The photography is by Rijksmuseum photographer Carola Van Wijk in collaboration with Frans Pegt. Various activities will be organized in conjunction with the exhibition, including a series of lectures by the catalogue’s authors and external experts.

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Symposium | Fashion in Museums: Past, Present, and Future
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 21–22 April 2016

Not only the curator’s and conservator’s point of view will be presented, but also the administrator’s—who is often unfamiliar with costume and fashion’s different requirements and has to be convinced of the steep costs of a fashion exhibit. Experts from leading national and international institutions will present their insights: a conference not to be missed!

Over the past two decades most of the blockbuster fashion exhibitions around the world have centered around present day fashion designers and were more or less offered to the respective institutions as a complete package including the extensive marketing and publicity apparatus of the fashion brand. This is a far cry from Diana Vreeland’s original concept (1983–84) of a museum celebrating a contemporary designer—in her case Yves Saint Laurent—by presenting a retrospective curated by the museum and presented by them.

In a speech delivered by renowned fashion journalist Suzy Menkes (International Vogue Editor) at the Rijksmuseum in June 2015 she called for a return to museum curated exhibitions based on in-depth research of their own collections which hold so many amazing yet unexplored treasures. With the exhibition Catwalk, Fashion at the Rijksmuseum, the museum puts a renewed step in this direction by presenting a cross-section of its costume collection—the oldest in the country—in a setting designed by renowned Dutch photographer, Erwin Olaf.

Speakers
• Gieneke Arnolli (Fries Museum, Leeuwarden)
• Ninke Bloemberg (Centraal Museum, Utrecht)
• Bianca du Mortier (Rijksmuseum)
• Johanna Hashagen (Bowes Museum, UK)
• Johannes Pietsch (Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich)
• Ellinoor Bergvelt and Christine Delhaye (University of Amsterdam)
• Angelika Riley (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg)
• Alexandra Bosc (Palais Galliera, Musée de la mode de la Ville de Paris)
• Mila Ernst (Digitaal platform Modemuze)
• Sue-an van der Zijpp (Groninger Museum)

Details are available here»

Thomas Jones, The Bard, 1774, oil on canvas, 14.5 x 168 cm
(Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum, NMW A85)

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From the Princeton University Art Museum:

Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills: The British Passion for Landscape
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, 23 December 2014 — 5 April 2015
Frick Art and Historical Center, Pittsburgh, 7 May — 2 August 2015
Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, 27 August — 13 December 2015
Princeton University Art Museum, 23 January — 24 April 2016

Organized by the American Federation of Arts and Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales

From the Musée Cognacq-Jay:

Jean-Baptiste Huet, le plaisir de la nature
Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris, 6 February — 5 June 2016

Curated by Benjamin Couilleaux

Although he belonged to an important line of 18th-century artists, Jean-Baptiste Huet (1745–1811) has never before been the subject of a monographic exhibition. The Cognacq-Jay Museum will pay tribute to his alluring talent through a selection of paintings and graphic works. Jean-Baptiste Huet, who spent the majority of his career in Paris, was first trained in his family environment. He then received instruction from the animal painter Charles Dagomer and encouragement from Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, a talented student of Boucher. Benefitting from these influences, Huet developed a naturalistic and graceful style. He excelled in works of pastoral scenery depicting tales of the tender romances of shepherds, painted rustic landscapes with poetic notes and depicted the animal world with frankness and sympathy. He was admitted to the Académie in 1769, had regular exhibitions at the Paris Salon and was entrusted with decorative cycles. Huet’s art met with great success in various mediums. In 1783, Oberkampf, founder of the royal manufacture of Jouy-en-Josas, requested his services in creating printed patterns. His early creations were light, still in the Rococo style, then later gave way to straighter and more orderly shapes in the wake of Neoclassicism. Even up to his very last expressions, Huet’s work constitutes a tremendous tribute to the beauty of nature, with aspects of both reverie and fascination.

The dossier de presse de l’exposition is available as a PDF file here»

Benjamin Couilleaux, Jean-Baptiste Huet, le plaisir de la nature (Paris Musées, 2016), 176 pages, ISBN: 978-2759603145, 30€.

The exhibition, which opened in December 2014, is on view through November 2016. The catalogue has just been published by the University of Oklahoma Press:

Donna Pierce and Julie Wilson Frick, Companion to Glitterati: Portraits and Jewelry from Colonial Latin America at the Denver Art Museum (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-0914738756, $15.

During the Spanish Colonial period in Latin America (1521–1850), precious gold and silver were crafted into elegant jewelry, then embellished with emeralds from Colombia, coral from Mexico, and pearls from Venezuela. To demonstrate their wealth and status, people were painted wearing their finest dress and elaborate jewelry. Selecting from its permanent collection, the Denver Art Museum installed the long-running exhibition Glitterati: Portraits and Jewelry in Colonial Latin America in its Spanish Colonial galleries in December 2014. This lavishly illustrated publication serves as a companion to the Glitterati exhibition and, on a larger scale, to the collection of Spanish Colonial jewelry and portraiture at the museum.

The Spanish Colonial collection at the Denver Art Museum is the most comprehensive of its kind in the United States and one of the best in the world with outstanding examples of painting, sculpture, furniture, decorative arts, silver and goldwork, and jewelry from all over Latin America during the time of the Spanish colonies. The Stapleton Foundation of Latin American Colonial Art, made possible by the Renchard family, gifted art acquired by the intrepid Daniel C. Stapleton between 1895 and 1914, when he worked in Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela overseeing plantations and emerald mines. Frederick and Jan Mayer worked closely with museum curators to build a collection of Mexican colonial art rich in many subjects and media, notably portrait paintings. Examples from both of these major collections are augmented by other pieces of jewelry and portraiture from the museum’s permanent collection in the Glitterati exhibition and in this volume.

Donna Pierce is Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of Spanish Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum and Head of the New World Department.
Julie Wilson Frick is the Mayer Center Program Coordinator and Junior Scholar in the New World Department at the Denver Art Museum.

Paul-César Helleu, Madame Helleu Looking at the Watteau Drawings in the Louvre, ca. 1896, drypoint, 38.8 × 51 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, 59.599.19)

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Goya is the the important eighteenth-century offering here: Ivins was responsible for those acquisitions. Press release (21 January 2016) from The Met:

The Power of Prints: The Legacy of William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 26 January 26 — 22 May 2016

Curated by Freyda Spira

The history of the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of works of art on paper—now one of the most important and most comprehensive in the world—began 100 years ago with the unlikely and astonishing story of its first two curators, neither of whom was trained as an art historian. Together, they challenged convention, engaged the public, and revolutionized the study of these works. Organized to commemorate the department’s centennial, the exhibition The Power of Prints: The Legacy of William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor sheds light on the fascinating careers of its founding curators and reveals how, from the very beginning, they artfully composed the print collection as a visual library: a corpus of works of art on paper—from the exceptional to the everyday. The story of this great American collection will be told through prints by Andrea Mantegna, Albrecht Dürer, Marcantonio Raimondi, Jacques Callot, Rembrandt van Rijn, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Honoré Daumier, James McNeill Whistler, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Mary Cassatt, Edward Penfield, and Edward Hopper, among others.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Garroted Man (El agarrotado), ca. 1778–80, etching, 32.7 x 21.4 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1920, 20.22)

In 1916, William Mills Ivins (1881–1961) abandoned a successful law career to accept the job of founding curator of the Met’s Department of Prints. Although he was hired specifically to acquire the works of well-known 19th-century artists and old masters, Ivins set out instead to amass examples of technical, social, and historical interest as well. Notably, he championed the works of Goya, whose challenging and sometimes gruesome imagery was not appreciated in America at that time. Ivins first encountered these works as a student in Paris; the brutal images of war affected him profoundly and, in time, changed the course of his life. Almost all of the Met’s collection of nearly 300 Goya prints—one of the largest anywhere—was acquired by Ivins.

Before joining the Museum in 1932, Alpheus Hyatt Mayor (1901–1980) had studied modern languages, literature, and poetry, and worked as an arts critic, teacher, and occasional actor. Like Ivins, he was also an avid bibliophile with wide-ranging interests, a voracity for knowledge, and passion for social history. Brought on to assist Ivins and, eventually, to continue his legacy, Mayor expanded on Ivins’s foundational work by adding a new focus on lithography and popular prints. Pushing the boundaries of what had traditionally been collected as printed matter, he acquired for the Museum some of the most renowned American collections of popular prints. To Mayor, these items had value, because of the information they contained about all aspects of culture. He also recognized their future potential for research in diverse fields, from anthropology to urban planning.

As a result of Ivins’s and Mayor’s prescient collecting, the department now houses innumerable unique masterpieces, lauded for their exceptional artistry, as well as popular prints such as posters and trade cards that were printed in large numbers and never intended to last. By employing a conversational and colloquial tone in texts they drafted to describe these works, Ivins and Mayor transformed the way information about art objects was written. Excerpts from the writings of Ivins and Mayor will be included on labels throughout the exhibition.

To a certain extent, the history of the department is also the history of a series of extraordinary gifts and purchases of works of art. The gift of some 3,500 prints by paper manufacturer Harris Brisbane Dick led to the hiring of Ivins, to oversee them. An early gift of 10 prints by the artist Mary Cassatt came from Ivins’s friend Paul J. Sachs, assistant director at the Fogg Museum at Harvard University. (Sachs’s brother—also a friend of Ivins—gave an additional seven.) Engravings, woodcuts, and two woodblocks by Dürer entered the collection through gift and purchase from Junius Spencer Morgan, a noted collector of the artist’s works. Between 1949 and 1962, Mayor purchased more than 16,000 engravings, woodcuts, and mezzotints from Franz Joseph II, prince of Liechtenstein. The American sculptor Bessie Potter Vonnoh donated her entire collection of French and American posters of the 1890s. From Jefferson R. Burdick, the Museum received 300,000 examples of printed ephemera from the late 19th to the mid-20th century.

Just as Ivins and Mayor did, the exhibition will consider printed matter as the entrée to the information age, recognizing prints as functional objects that spread information to an ever-expanding audience and reflect a changing society. In the age of digital photography and the Internet, the power of prints, or the ability to disseminate images in identical form to a mass market, has special relevance to how we see, understand, and engage with works of art.

Arranged thematically and by technique, the exhibition has four parts. In the first section, the idea of taste is addressed in terms of Harris Brisbane Dick’s foundational gift of French, British, and American etchings and how it affected the collecting of etchings by the likes of Rembrandt and Goya. The second section considers engravings, amassed from the beginning with a focus on Renaissance artists such as Mantegna and Dürer. The third section shows the use of printed images in the spread of knowledge. Several rare early books, illustrated by woodcuts will be displayed. The books represent firsts of their kind on topics as diverse as costume, anatomy, and architecture. The final section features examples by Daumier, Toulouse-Lautrec, and other 19th-century artists whose works entered a truly mass market in the form of lithographs. Also in this section will be selected popular prints and ephemera from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Power of Prints: The Legacy of William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor is organized by Freyda Spira, Associate Curator in the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Drawings and Prints. Exhibition design is by Zoe Alexandra Florence, Exhibition Designer; graphics are by Ria Roberts, Graphic Designer; and lighting is by Clint Ross Coller and Richard Lichte, Lighting Design Managers, all of the Museum’s Design Department.

An illustrated checklist is available here»

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The catalogue is distributed by Yale UP:

Freyda Spira and Peter Parshall, The Power of Prints: The Legacy of William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1588395856, $35 / £25.

Metropolitan Museum curators William M. Ivins and his protégé A. Hyatt Mayor not only assembled a vast collection of prints, from Renaissance masterworks to ephemeral works, but also expanded the appreciation of prints as aesthetic objects, socio-historical documents, and tools of communication. More radically, by discussing these prints in accessible language, they changed our notions of how art reaches the wider public. Drawing on previously unpublished material, including personal letters and departmental records, this is the first comprehensive exploration of the lives, careers, theories, and influence of Ivins and Mayor. Also included are 120 exceptional prints that represent the breadth and depth of their acquisitions, including works by Dürer, Rembrandt, Callot, Goya, Whistler, Cassatt, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Freyda Spira is associate curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Peter Parshall was formerly the Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art History and the Humanities at Reed College and curator and head of the Department of Old Master Prints at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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From the National Gallery of Art:

Hubert Robert (1733–1808), un peintre visionnaire
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 7 March — 30 May 2016
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 6 June — 2 October 2016

Known fondly as ‘Robert des ruines’ because of his penchant for painting ancient ruins, Hubert Robert was regarded during his lifetime as one of France’s most successful and prominent artists. In the first monographic exhibition showcasing Robert’s full achievement as a draftsman and painter, some 50 paintings and 50 drawings will chart his development in Rome and subsequent high level of accomplishment after his return to Paris. The exhibition will also focus on Robert’s lasting contribution to French visual culture and the fundamental role he played in promoting the architectural capriccio (caprice or fantasy), an art form in which famous monuments of antiquity and modernity were imaginatively combined to create striking and novel city scenes and landscapes.

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The English edition catalogue is published by Lund Humphries:

Margaret Morgan Grasselli with contributions from Yuriko Jackall, Guillaume Faroult and Catherine Voiriot, Hubert Robert (London: Lund Humphries, 2016), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1848221918, £45.

Known fondly as ‘Robert des ruines’ because of his penchant for painting ancient ruins, Hubert Robert (1733–1808) was one of France’s most successful and prominent artists during his lifetime. This outstanding publication, which accompanies the first monographic exhibition of his work, illuminates Robert’s remarkable artistic achievements and his lasting contributions to French visual culture.

Robert’s skills were manifold—he enjoyed great success as a painter, draftsman, interior decorator and garden architect. During his time in Rome, he fostered close professional bonds with artists such as Piranesi, Panini and Fragonard, while in Paris he flourished under the patronage of several wealthy French supporters including the Marquis de Marigny, brother of the famed Madame de Pompadour. Robert’s work later addressed the demise of this glittering society through both ominous scenes of disaster and representations of vandalized royalist monuments. Upon his own release from imprisonment following the French Revolution, Robert completed a series of meditative variations on the Grande Galerie of the Musée du Louvre, of which he had been appointed curator in 1784.

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The French edition catalogue is published by Somogy:

Guillaume Faroult, ed., Hubert Robert (1733–1808) : un peintre visionnaire (Paris: Somogy, 2016), 544 pages, ISBN: 978-2757210642, 49€.

Hubert Robert fut l’un des créateurs les plus séduisants du siècle des  Lumières. Artisan de cet art de vivre poli, galant et souriant qui paraît l’une des quintessences de l’esprit français au XVIIIe siècle, l’artiste attire  d’emblée la sympathie. Il parvint à s’introduire dans les cercles les plus brillants de son temps,  édifiant une carrière exemplaire dans la France de l’Ancien Régime jusqu’au règne de Napoléon.

Formé à Rome vers le milieu du siècle, en pleine fièvre antiquaire, Robert  s’impose dès son retour à Paris comme « peintre d’architecture ». Le  philosophe Denis Diderot célèbre aussitôt la «poétique des ruines » du jeune artiste. La production de Robert fait preuve au cours de sa carrière d’une exceptionnelle dynamique d’amplification: les œuvres, les projets, les charges y atteignent une dimension considérable. L’artiste devient très recherché pour la production de vastes ensembles de décors peints. Il se lance enfin avec succès dans une forme d’« art total » en tant que créateur de jardins, dont le parc de Méréville (de 1786 à 1793) fut sans doute le chef-d’œuvre.

Frappé par le bouleversement historique de la Révolution française, il en consigne les premières manifestations en représentant, dès l’été 1789, La Bastille dans les premiers jours de sa démolition. En 1795, il réintègre sa fonction de conservateur du «Muséum national », c’est-à-dire du musée du Louvre qui vient d’ouvrir ses portes, et dont il avait préparé activement la création. Sans aucun doute, l’œuvre de Robert est parcourue par un sens de l’écoulement inexorable du temps et, par-delà, par une conscience de la marche de l’histoire, tour à tour triomphante ou déplorable, qui en constitue l’impressionnante grandeur.