Enfilade

From the exhibition press release:

Strange and Wondrous: Prints of India From the Robert J. Del Bontà Collection
Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C., 19 October 2013 — 5 January 2014

Four Scenes from India. After Jacob van Meurs (ca. 1619–before 1680). Copperplate engraving with etching on paper. From a French copy of Pieter van der Aa (1659–1733), La Galerie Agréable du Monde (The Pleasurable Gallery of the World),vol. 19: Persia, Mogol, Chine, Tartaria (Leyden: Pieter van der Aa, ca. 1725). Robert J. Del Bontà collection, E1431.

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Strange and Wondrous: Prints of India From the Robert J. Del Bontà Collection, on view at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, presents 50 printed works that trace European and American documentation of Indian ascetics, deities and religious ceremony.

As global travel boomed from the 16th to the 20th century, Europeans and Americans became increasingly fascinated with Indian culture. Merchants, missionaries and soldiers alike documented their encounters in India and foreign lands through detailed texts and illustrations. These accounts—regularly edited, amended and reprinted in publications as varied as atlases, trading cards, memoirs and magazines—became the paradigm for all that Europeans and Americans found strange, exotic, repulsive or remarkable in India.

“Hindoo devottees of the Gosannee & Jetty tribes,” James Shury, after James Forbes (1749–1819). Drawn by James Forbes, 1780, and published by White, Cochrane & Co., June 1812. Engraving with etching on paper. From an English copy of James Forbes, Oriental Memoirs, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1834).

Created using a wide variety of techniques, such as engraving, aquatint, lithography and photogravure, these prints demonstrate how perceptions of Indian culture shifted through the centuries, from the European Enlightenment to the period of colonial expansion and into modernity.

“As a collector, Del Bontà not only pays immense attention to the subjects that captivated Europeans and Americans, but also to the multiple versions of popular prints as they travelled across countries, languages and time,” said Holly Shaffer, guest curator and Yale University doctoral candidate. “His collection allows scholars to trace how Europeans and Americans learned about India, and reminds us to always question the ‘truth-value’ of images that often have a very long train to their visual history.”

The spread of images represented in Strange and Wondrous led to broader knowledge and interest in Indian culture—but also to the creation and proliferation of negative stereotypes. Ascetics, or religious figures (often termed “yogis and “fakirs”), with their otherworldly, naked appearance and austere practices, were depicted as supernatural beings, devout penitents, militants, tricksters and beggars. Religious ceremonies, such as swinging from hooks (charak puja), were often interpreted in a Christian framework, rather than a Hindu one, leading to misconceptions of devotees as sinners and fanatics. Deities such as the Hindu god Shiva were cataloged as lovers and drug users feeding generalizations of India as a sensual, spiritual land.

American publications added another layer of satire to their interpretation of exotic cultural practices. A 1943 cover of the Saturday Evening Post illustrated by Norman Rockwell shows the beloved World War II character Willie Gillis outwitting an Indian ascetic with the children’s game “cat’s cradle,” a visual pun of the infamous “Indian rope trick.” Here an American GI has duped the once-powerful Indian yogi, and while it is perhaps a nod to American soldiers’ wily abilities during wartime, the stereotype of India remains intact.

Strange and Wondrous will be on view in conjunction with Yoga: The Art of Transformation—the world’s first exhibition on the art of yoga—also at the Sackler Gallery.

The 50 works on view in Strange and Wondrous are part of Del Bontà’s bequest of 100 printed works to the Freer and Sackler archives. The collection will be a resource for scholars and educators to evaluate and understand early European and American perspectives of Indian culture through print. Del Bontà—a polymath scholar, curator, collector and jeweler—began to collect prints related to India while completing his doctorate in South Asian art history at the University of Michigan in the 1970s. His extensive collection includes more than 2,000 loose prints and thousands more bound within books, spanning genres from Indian calendar prints, ephemera, painting and sculpture to British Raj-era publications and subjects such as ornament, flora and fauna, Indian ascetics, deities and religious ceremony.

From NYU’s Center for Irish and Irish-American Studies:

The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757: The Voice of an Irish Community Abroad
The Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University, 25 October 2013 — 1 April 2014

More than two hundred and fifty years ago—in the midst of the world’s first global war—an Irish wine ship returning home from the French port of Bordeaux was captured at sea by a British warship. In January 2011, the mailbag from that ship, the Two Sisters of Dublin, was discovered by a New York University professor. These letters, most of them only recently opened for the first time, are the basis of a major exhibition in the Mamdouha S. Bobst Gallery at New York University’s Bobst Library — The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757: The Voice of an Irish Community Abroad.

Drawing on world-class collections of art and never-before-seen historical documents, the exhibition takes you back to a time when thriving communities of Irishmen played a prominent role on the European continent. The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters reconstructs the early years of the Seven Years’ War, tells the story of the fateful voyage of the Two Sisters of Dublin, and underscores the significance of the Irish presence in Europe and America. The heart of the exhibit is the extraordinary collection of letters discovered in 2011. Through them, the voice of an Irish community abroad comes alive, and we enter into a private and intimate world inhabited by ordinary men and women separated from their homeland by war.

From the exhibition press release:

Making It in America
RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, 11 October 2013 — 9 February 2014

Curated by Maureen O’Brien and Elizabeth Williams; designed by Thomas Jayne

Punch Bowl, 1785–1800, Porcelain with enamel (RISD Museum). The bowl depicts warehouses along the waterfront of the city of Canton, the only port open to foreign merchants, whom the Chinese government confined to the waterfront areas. The western proprietor of each warehouse (hong) was identified by his national flag; Denmark, Spain, France, America, Sweden, England, and Holland are pictured.

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More than 100 outstanding works of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts from the RISD Museum’s collection illuminate connections between American ambitions and the making of art in Making It in America. The exhibition is on view through Sunday, February 9, 2014.

“American art has played a central role at the RISD Museum since its earliest days, and we celebrate this legacy with Making It in America,” says Museum director John W. Smith. “Drawn exclusively from our phenomenal permanent collection, this show is our first in-depth exploration of this subject in many years.”

Making It in America liberates artworks from the Museum’s galleries, storage vaults, and the historic period rooms of its Pendleton House wing, repositioning them within the broader context of American styles. These exceptional pieces, created between the early 1700s and early 1900s, are presented as examples of both artistic processes and aspirations. Just as individual accounts of American life revolve around searches for freedom, fulfillment, and identity, these stories are also embedded in objects that comprise the history of American art.

“The title is a double entendre that asks our viewers to think about art making and about how American art demonstrates American ideas about success,” explain exhibition co-curators Maureen O’Brien, curator of painting and sculpture, and Elizabeth Williams, curator of decorative arts and design. John Singleton Copley’s grand manner portrait of Moses Gill, for instance, illustrates the escalating wealth, social standing, and political capital of the 30-year-old merchant and future Massachusetts lieutenant governor. The land of opportunity is seen in painter Thomas Cole’s striking depictions of the American wilderness unspoiled nature ripe with promise. Closer to home, finely designed furniture with hand-carved motifs from Newport’s Townsend and Goddard workshops rivaled European examples in the 18th century, while the glorious excess of monumental silver works by Providence’s Gorham Manufacturing Company represented the city’s ambitions into the 19th and 20th centuries.

John Singleton Copley, Portrait of the Honorable Moses Gill, Esq., 1764, oil on canvas (RISD Museum)

Making It in America also touches on a theme for which the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) is best known: the process of making art, a subtext of the show which provides a loose timeline of what happened in American art making and when. The exhibition’s intertwined threads of making art and representing achievement are woven into RISD and the RISD Museum’s own history. Inspired by the international display of art and commerce at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, the College and Museum were established in 1877 with the mission to train American designers and publicly promote American art. The Museum’s earliest ‘contemporary’ purchase, in 1901, was Winslow Homer’s thundering seascape On a Lee Shore (1900), soon followed by the acquisition of important colonial portraits and American landscape paintings. In 1906, the RISD Museum built Pendleton House, the country’s first museum wing devoted to the display of American decorative arts, thus elevating the importance of native craftsmanship in the study of material culture.

The co-curators note that this exhibition provides exciting opportunities for visitors to explore the Museum’s rich holdings, closely examining objects that may have been behind ropes in period rooms or held in storage. Williams, who joined the RISD Museum in January and has spent much of her first year exploring the diverse decorative arts collection, looks forward to presenting 60 pieces of silver, furniture, glass, ceramics, and jewelry—more than half of which haven’t been on view in decades.

“Although many of the works in Making It in America have been on view in galleries throughout the Museum, visitors who see discrete selections rarely get a sense of the scope and quality of our collections,” says O’Brien.

Exhibition designer Thomas Jayne is a renowned decorator, decorative arts historian, and principal of Jayne Design Studio—specializing in interior decoration and product development. Jayne, who trained in the Winterthur Museum’s graduate program for American material culture, incorporates historic—and unexpected—patterns and colors to create a stunning installation that highlights the evolution of color and pattern in American design. Jayne’s previous clients include Winterthur; Edith Wharton’s country home, The Mount; the Brick House at the Shelburne Museum; and private collectors. Jayne was recently honored with the 2013 Arthur Ross Award for Interior Decoration from the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. Drawing upon the past, he seeks details that deepen and enliven a room, exquisitely connecting history and place.

From the Prado:

Rome in Your Pocket: Sketchbooks and Artistic Learning in the Eighteenth Century
Roma en el bolsillo: Cuadernos de dibujo y aprendizaje artístico en el siglo XVIII
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 15 October 2013 — 19 January 2014

José del Castillo, Allegory of the Arts, Italian sketchbook I, p. 3, 1762
(Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado)

Curated by José Manuel Matilla, Head of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Museo del Prado, Studying Rome focuses on a group of artists’ sketchbooks that the Museum has acquired over the past few decades, produced by a series of Spanish artists including Goya and José del Castillo during their formative years in Rome in the last quarter of the 18th century. These sketchbooks allow for a study of the type of training experienced by young Spanish artists in Italy as they used them to set down their artistic interests. On occasions they also include later works directly inspired by the motifs that they studied.

The exhibition includes 6 of the small sketchbooks that accompanied these artists in Rome and 23 more from various Spanish and international institutions, in addition to 22 independent drawings that offer a complete overview of the artistic practice that was common to European culture at this period. As such, this material provides a source of first-hand information for understanding the artistic and personal context of the period.

The exhibition also provides a unique opportunity for seeing the complete contents of the sketchbooks belonging to the Prado through electronic screens sponsored by Samsung, which visitors can consult in the exhibition space.

Press release from the British Library:

Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain
British Library, London, 8 November 2013 — 11 March 2014

Curated by Moira Goff

A view of the first Bridge at Paddington, and the
 Accommodation Barge going down the Grand Junction
Canal to Uxbridge © The British Library Board

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Exploring the changing lives of the middle classes, from homes and gardens to entertainment and celebrity, Georgians Revealed will explore the myriad ways in which the Georgians influenced modern Britain between 1714 and 1830 and marks 300 years since the period began. Through over 200 fascinating and rare Georgian artefacts from the Library’s rich collections and other UK cultural institutions, the exhibition will reveal the roots of today’s popular culture as we know it, from theatre-going and a fascination with fashion, to celebrity scandals and gambling.

Curated by specialists from the History and Classics team at the British Library, the exhibition will feature iconic artworks and artefacts from the Georgian period, such as Jeremy Bentham’s violin and Joseph van Aken’s ‘An English Family at Tea’, alongside never before seen rare books, magazines and everyday objects, from the first fashion magazines to exquisite illustrations and designs of British landmarks and buildings still standing today, including the Brighton Pavilion and Sir John Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Moira Goff, lead curator of the exhibition, says: “We’re excited to uncover these objects that shed light on daily life in such an exciting time for cultural development. The parallels we can draw between Georgian Britain and today are astonishing and we’re delighted to be able to share these with a wider audience.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by an eclectic range of events celebrating the legacy of the Georgian period, including talks by celebrated chef Heston Blumenthal and historian and author Lucy Inglis.

The 300th anniversary of the accession of George I will be celebrated throughout the UK during 2014 with displays at Kensington Palace, the Handel House Museum and the Foundling Museum among other cultural institutions.

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E V E N T S

Historic Heston Blumenthal
Friday 8 November, 18.30-20.00, £10/£8 concessions
Heston Blumenthal, whose name is synonymous with cutting-edge cuisine, nonetheless finds one of his greatest sources of inspiration from the original and creative recipes from Britain’s rich culinary past. Join Heston for an evening exploring the lasting impact made during the Georgian era on the culinary history of Britain and to discover their influence on some of his creations.

The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour: The Romantics
Tuesday 12 November, 18.30-20.00, £7.50/£5 concessions
Josephine Hart’s passion for poetry and commitment to having it read live electrified the evenings she hosted at the British Library. The events continue on an occasional basis, with no less capacity to move and inspire. Tonight’s programme will be devoted to the great Romantic poets: Keats, Byron and Shelley.

Georgian Londoners: Into the Streets
Sunday 17 November, 14.00 – 15.15, £7.50/ £5 concessions
In 2009 historian Lucy Inglis began her award-winning blog on the lesser-known aspects of London during the eighteenth century. Monarchs, politicians and aristocrats grab the historical limelight, but Lucy’s Georgian Londoners are the men and women who rode the dawn coach to work, opened shops bleary-eyed and hung-over, fell in love, had risky sex in side streets, realized the children had head lice again, paid parking fines, cashed in winning lottery tickets, fought for good causes and committed terrible crimes. In this talk based on her new book, Lucy takes a journey back to a time that through fantastic highs and desperate lows, changed expectations of what life could be.

LATE at the Library: Vice and Virtue
Friday 6 December, 19.30 – 23.00, £12.50
An evening of decadent pleasure and entertainment awaits. Celebrate the legacy of the Georgian era with guest DJ sets, live performance, circus, installations, bar and food and a late night opening of the exhibition. Join the rogues and gents, vamps and ladies for a night of splendour and spectacle.
In association with Georgian Townhouse Parties and Circus Space

Though primarily a nineteenth-century show, this exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will appeal to many readers; it comes on the heels of Landscape, Heroes, and Folktales: German Romanticism at The British Museum last year. From the press release:

The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 21 September — 29 December 2013

Curated by John W. Ittmann

Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the Elder, Large Oak Tree Enclosed by a Plank Fence, ca. 1802–4, etching with masked plate tone, 13 x 17 inches, in the manner of the Dutch artist Anthonie Waterloo, 1609–1690 (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, prints became widely available to growing and increasingly enthusiastic audiences throughout Europe and the United States. The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints tells an important chapter in this story. This exhibition, comprising 125 etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts, will explore prints by artists from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from 1770 to 1850, and how printmaking reflected the profound cultural changes that swept across the German-speaking regions of Central Europe during this period. The works in the exhibition represent the many artistic enthusiasms of the age: the Romantic fascination with wild, untamed landscapes teeming with life; the intimate pleasures of family scenes and friendship portraits; the rediscovery of ancient Nordic sagas and traditional fairy tales; and the synthesis of visual art, poetry, and music. The Museum’s encyclopedic collection of prints from this period is the finest in the country and includes rare prints unseen even in the finest European collections.

German Romantic Prints will feature major prints by important artists of the German Romantic era such Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the Elder, and Philipp Otto Runge. The revival of interest in regional folk culture and fairy tales provided a rich source of material for artists of the time, including Ludwig Emil Grimm, the younger brother of the famous Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. His print The Boy Turned into a Fawn, Comforted by His Sister and Watched over by an Angel (1819) was used as the frontispiece of an early edition of his brothers’ famous tales. By the 1830s advances in technology allowed for the printing of large editions, and local art societies began to issue annual prints for members. Two large and elaborate etchings by Eugen Napoleon Neureuther illustrate the tales of Sleeping Beauty (1836) and Cinderella (1847) and attest to the continuing popularity of these stories throughout the era.

Caspar David Friedrich, one of the most important German artists of his generation, made only a handful of prints in his career. German Romantic Prints will include his rare woodcut, Woman Seated under a Spider’s Web (1803–4), a quintessential image of the Romantic era: a young woman seated between a pair of barren trees in dense undergrowth, seemingly lost in melancholy meditation on the brevity of life.

In the early 1800s, German artists and art lovers flocked to Dresden to admire Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, a painting represented in this exhibition by an engraving that was once as widely admired as the painting itself. The Sistine Madonna provided the inspiration for Runge’s visionary masterpiece, The Times of Day (Morning, Day, Evening, Night) (1805). This ambitious allegorical series depicting the cycle of life was originally conceived of as a set of mural-sized painted panels, but was realized only in the form of four large etchings, a rare first edition of which will be displayed. These large prints are bordered by delicate ornamental arabesques composed of intricate plant forms, music-playing infants, and cherubs.

An overview of a vital chapter in the history of European printmaking, German Romantic Prints illuminates one of the richest yet least known areas of the Museum’s collection. A selection of prints presented in display cases will permit enjoyment of the more finely detailed prints up close.