Enfilade

From the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe:

Fragonard: Poetry and Passion / Poesie und Leidenschaft
Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, 30 November 2013 — 23 February 2014

You could say that the drawings are the diary of his imagination.
–Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1865

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, La Surprise, ca. 1771
(Musée des Beaux-Arts, Angers)

The work of Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) is the embodiment of elegance and expressiveness. The French artist was one of the outstanding masters of the 18th century; and yet his name is relatively unfamiliar to many in Germany today. Born in Grasse, Fragonard spent most of his life in Paris, where he was a pupil of François Boucher. Despite initial successes in the Paris Salon exhibition, he embarked on a path outside the Academy and found his main audience among wealthy private collectors.

First monographic exhibition in Germany of Fragonard’s work

The Karlsruhe exhibition principally features a selection of Fragonard’s drawings, enriched by several oil studies and paintings. With some 80 works in all, the display gives an insight into the dazzling versatility of an oeuvre that includes scenes of cheerful social gatherings, landscapes, narrative scenes, and intimate depictions of great sensuality. The exhibition captures and reflects the artist’s delight in experimentation, his vitality of imagination, and boldness in formal composition. In the same breath, Fragonard demonstrates both how firmly rooted he was in the artistic tradition of the 17th century and his skill in being able to vary and reinterpret the repertoire of forms and subjects of that tradition. Through his handling of chalk and brush, he created compositions of sparkling imagination and great passion.

The exhibition has been made possible thanks to the generous support of international lenders, including the Louvre in Paris, the Albertina in Vienna, the British Museum in London, and the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, as well as several private collectors.

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From Artbooks.com:

Juliane Betz, ed., Fragonard: Poesie und Leidenschaft (Munich, Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2013), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-3422072145, $68.50.

The current exhibition at Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe focuses on drawings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, one of the finest French artists of the 18th century. They are juxtaposed against selected paintings that reveal links between his graphic and painterly works. Fragonard developed a unique pictorial idiom, which made use of both painterly and graphic elements and elevated unworked sections of bare paper into a core compositional element.

From Apollo Magazine:

Apollo Magazine’s 2013 Exhibition of the Year
Houghton Revisited at Houghton Hall, Norfolk

There have been some great international blockbuster shows this year: Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 at MoMA and Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum at the British Museum. At Apollo, we also like to celebrate focused exhibitions that enlighten us with the exceptional intelligence of their curation on a smaller scale: Piero della Francesca in America at the Frick Collection brought together most of the panels of the Sant’Agostino altarpiece, while the Ashmolean Museum’s Francis Bacon/Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone tuned into a conversation between two artists that few had previously heard with such clarity. At the St Louis Art Museum, and later the National Gallery in London, Barocci: Brilliance and Grace provided revelations about one artist’s restless inventiveness; while The Springtime of the Renaissance, at Palazzo Strozzi and now the Louvre, brought superb loans together in sharp and surprising ways.

But one exhibition ran away with the laurels this year. Once-in-a-lifetime is a phrase that gets bandied about too much—but this was not just a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition, but something we may have to wait another two and half centuries to see again. It reunited many of the works from Robert Walpole’s magnificent collection, including many simply audacious loans from Russia and elsewhere, recreating their original hang at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, and bringing 114,000 visitors through the doors. I am delighted to present this award to curator Thierry Morel and Lord David Cholmondeley for Houghton Revisited.

From the Wallraf-Richartz Museum:

Piranesis Antike: Befund und Polemik / Piranesi’s Antiquity: Findings and Polemics
Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, 25 October 2013 — 26 January 2014

‘Rome or Athens?’ In the eighteenth century, this simple and yet so complex question was at the heart of a vehement dispute concerning the exemplary function of classical antiquity for contemporary art. One major advocate of Rome was the artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). Over a period of about 30 years, he produced more than 130 large-format etchings with views of ancient and modern Rome, as well as of buildings from the immediate surroundings. These etchings were compiled into a self-contained series under the title Vedute di Roma. Piranesi uses dramatic perspectives, strong contrasts between light and dark, and gigantic enlargements of sections of ancient buildings in order to convince his contemporaries of the importance of classical Rome.

Some 20 of these fascinating works can now (25 October 2013 to 26 January 2014) be seen in Cologne at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum’s Department of Drawings and Prints under the title Piranesi’s Antiquity: Findings and Polemics.

One of the most versatile Italian artists of the eighteenth century, Piranesi still fascinates us today with his extensive œuvre. During his lifetime he produced more than 1,000 etchings and thus left us impressive witnesses of his age. In addition to his graphic work, Piranesi also wrote numerous theoretical treatises, defending Roman civilization against the claims of Greek culture. The exhibition in Cologne shows how, in the large-format Vedute or views of Rome, the multifarious and contradictory ways in which classical antiquity was appropriated by the eighteenth century are superimposed. Meticulous archaeological investigations stand alongside market-oriented production of prints, and a polemical debate on the true legacy of antiquity (Rome versus Athens). By selling his views of Rome to foreign visitors to the city, Piranesi made a fortune and became well known throughout Europe.

This exhibition is being held to mark the 625th anniversary of the foundation of Cologne University. Together with teachers and students of art history and classical archaeology, the works were selected and researched from among the holdings of the university archives. The archive has 46 views of Rome by Piranesi, an unusual wealth of material for a university collection. It is the result of a donation by the university’s first Professor of Greek Philology, Dr Joseph Kroll.

Information on the exhibition symposium is available here»

Orangerie, Kassel
(Wikimedia Commons, November 2005)

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While this exhibition of wallpapers in Kassel addresses primarily the nineteenth century, there are eighteenth-century examples, and it’s useful to draw attention to the collection of the German Wallpaper Museum (Deutschen Tapetenmuseums), which includes some 23,000 objects. With plans for a new home in the works, the current exhibition is mounted in Kassel’s Orangerie, which itself dates to the opening decade of the eighteenth century. From the exhibition description:

Aufgerollt. Tapeten: Vom Entwurf an die Wand
Westpavillon der Orangerie, Kassel, 13 September 2013 — 12 January 2014

Jeder kennt sie, fast jeder hat sie: Tapeten. Seit dem 18. Jahrhundert begeistern die in allen nur denkbaren Farben und Motiven gedruckten Wanddekore. Ob geometrisch oder malerisch, farbenfroh oder dezent, ob im 18. oder im 21. Jahrhundert entstanden: Bevor die Tapete ihre Wirkung als Wandschmuck entfalten kann, sind zahlreiche Arbeitsschritte notwendig, die von der Inspirations- und Entwurfsphase, über die Produktion bis hin zur Vermarktung reichen. Die Sonderausstellung des Deutschen Tapetenmuseums zeigt Objekte aus dem reichen Schatz der Sammlung, die dieses faszinierende Thema insbesondere für das 19. und frühe 20. Jahrhundert beleuchten. Gezeigt wird eine Vielfalt an Vorlagewerken, Tapetenentwürfen und Handdruckmodeln ebenso wie das fertige Produkt Tapete. Musterbücher und Werbebilder mit gesamten Wandabwicklungen lassen die Möglichkeiten der Vermarktung von Tapeten lebendig werden.

Das Schaufenster bietet einen Einblick in die fantastische Sammlung des Deutschen Tapetenmuseums, die mit fast 23.000 Objekten nahezu lückenlos die Geschichte der Tapete dokumentiert. Von 1976 bis 2008 im Hessischen Landesmuseum ausgestellt, wurde die Sammlung 2010 in ein fachgerechtes Depot verlagert. Ein Museumsneubau ebenso wie eine neue Dauerausstellung sind in Planung.

This is the last week for a small exhibition I worked on with one of my exceptional students, Paula Manni (having graduated with her B.A. in May, she’s currently an intern at the Detroit Institute of Arts). Pedagogically, the project was immensely gratifying and provided more evidence for me of just how much one can do with online projects at basically no (economic) costs whatsoever. While we developed the online component primarily for a popular audience (iPads were available in the gallery), I was thrilled to receive—just one week after the exhibition opened—an email from a UK museum that owns several prints from the same Prodigal Son series and to learn that their images have been manipulated and combined with other prints in really interesting ways, further highlighting the interactive character of these sorts of perspective views. The bibliography for the exhibition provides a useful starting point for anyone working on zograscopes and vue d’optique prints generally. Paula and I shall continue to update the site occasionally , so I would welcome suggestions for sources we should add. As is typically the case with any project involving Google, there are terrific, telling measures of assessment: search for ‘Remondini’ and ‘Prodigal’, and among the top results will be the Prodigal Son among the Harlots. -CH

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A Prodigal Story for the Marketplace: The Remondini and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture
The Center Art Gallery, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1 November — 17 December 2013

Curated by Craig Ashley Hanson and Paula Manni with Joel Zwart

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Founded in the mid-seventeenth century, the Remondini publishing firm produced prints and books on a massive scale for nearly two hundred years, marketing their paper commodities not only across Europe but also in the American colonies and parts of Asia. Based in Bassano, Italy (45 miles northwest of Venice), the firm targeted a large, popular audience. By offering a wide array of printed materials, ranging from religious pictures and texts, to genre scenes, to sweeping landscape views (often copying the works of others without permission), the firm appealed to the interests—and budgets—of an emerging middle class audience.

Highlighting Calvin College’s own Prodigal Son series of six etchings produced by the Remondini firm in the 1780s—copies after a series first published by Georg Balthasar Probst around 1770—this exhibition situates the prints within the visual culture of the period. While there is a tendency to address eighteenth-century prints as ‘art’ simply because of their age, exploration of the original publishing context allows us to see these pictures as both belonging within and contributing to an expanding popular culture that conflated entertainment, religion, and the marketplace. Most of the items included in the exhibition were never intended to be framed (much less hung on a gallery wall) but were instead expected to be handled and seen through perspective-enhancing viewing devices—variously described as diagonal mirrors, optical pillar machines, or (most commonly today) zograscopes.