Enfilade

Press release:

Princely Treasures: European Masterpieces, 1600 – 1800
The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 24 September 2011 — 9 January 2012

François Boucher, "Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour," 1758 V&A: 487-1882 ©Victoria and Albert Museum

The Art Gallery of Western Australia is hosting its second major international exhibition of the year ‐ a treasure trove of European decorative art from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Princely Treasures: European Masterpieces 1600 – 1800 from the Victoria and Albert Museum comprises more than 90 magnificent artworks and objects, rarely seen on Australian shores. Coming exclusively to Perth, this significant and highly visual collection includes painting and sculpture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and furniture, textiles and tapestries, personal adornment and dress, armoury, prints and drawing. Many of these pieces are coming to Australia for the first time and were originally acquired by European men and women of power, wealth and taste between 1600 and 1800. Made by Europe’s finest artists and craftsmen, and using precious materials from around the world, these masterpieces originate from all corners of the continent – from Britain and France, Italy and Germany, Russia and Spain, Austria and Belgium, Holland and Sweden.

The exhibition is the second in the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s Great Collections of the World series and will open on 24 September 2011 and run until 9 January 2012. This exclusive WA showing will give Perth residents and visitors an unprecedented opportunity to experience first‐hand the opulence and splendour of these rare treasures. Stefano Carboni, Director of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, said Princely Treasures was an exhibition with wide public appeal and a major coup for Perth. “I am proud to host such a colourful and rich collection which will not only delight visitors young and old including art lovers, history buffs and antique enthusiasts, it will also provide an intimate view into the lives of the wealthy and powerful in Europe past,” he said. “The rich textiles, truly opulent furniture and stunning clothing and personal apparel are a wonder, as is the outstanding craftsmanship, use of dazzling materials and historical nature of many of the pieces such as the suits of armour. I would encourage all Western Australians to take this rare opportunity to experience the beauty and richness of these stunning artworks and historical objects while we are lucky enough to have them on our shores,” Mr Carboni said.

The Princely Treasures exhibition is to be presented in five different themes, encapsulating important aspects of courtly life in Europe at that time.

• Princely Patronage presents the key figures who were the great patrons of the arts in Europe between 1600 and 1800, and some of the most sophisticated objects that circulated around European courts.
• Power and Glory explores how representations of war were used to decorate objects commissioned for courtly use, from armour and weapons to tapestries and paintings.
• Religious Splendour reveals the nature of objects made for worship, commissioned by secular or ecclesiastical patrons for public or private devotional use.
• Display and the Domestic Interior presents furniture, textiles and ceramics made for use in the home, either for decorative or social purposes.
• Fashion and Personal Adornment reveals the care and attention aristocratic men and women took to dress in fashionable style from head to toe.

From the Brooklyn Museum:

Matthew Buckingham: The Spirit and the Letter
Brooklyn Museum, 3 September 2011 — 8 January 2012

Curated by Elizabeth Sackler

Matthew Buckingham, Still from "The Spirit and the Letter," 2007, continuous video projection with sound, electrified chandelier, mirror.

Matthew Buckingham’s installation The Spirit and the Letter is an homage to Mary Wollstonecraft, the eighteenth-century writer and philosopher. Comprised of a video projection and sculptural components,  Buckingham’s work questions the role that social memory and historical representation play in contemporary life, encouraging viewers to question how they hear and see what is most familiar to them. Excerpts from Wollstonecraft’s writing, compiled and edited by Buckingham, are spoken as a monologue in the video. The text is primarily drawn from  Wollstonecraft’s important A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she passionately asserted the equality of the sexes and demonstrated through her own intellectual rigor that women are not inferior to men. The essay, the earliest known treatise on the subject, has been viewed as the foundation of the modern women’s rights movements in the Western world.

From the MFA:

Passion and Precision in the Age of Revolution
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 20 August 2011 — 13 May 2012

European art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is dominated by two powerful artistic movements: Neo-classicism and Romanticism. Neo-Classicism is marked by purity, austerity, clarity, and an almost abstract obsession with the linear. The style was stimulated by the recent archaeological discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum and by pageants and festivals of the French Revolution that referred back to Republican Rome. By contrast, Romanticism was an art of extremes, of melodrama: the dramatic interplay of light and shadow rather than linear purity. Romantic artists believed in nature—whether wild landscape, wild beasts, or the animal impulses of humankind—as an uncontrollable force, inspiring awe and terror. “Passion and Precision in the Age of Revolution” features about forty-five works by artists including Ingres, Delacroix, Desprez, Prud’hon, Turner, Blake, Gericault, Girodet, Flaxman, and Schinkel.

Press release from Dulwich Picture Gallery in London:

Thomas Gainsborough, "Elizabeth and Mary Linley," ca. 1772 (Dulwich Picture Gallery)

Known in their times as the ‘nightingales’, Elizabeth and Mary Linley were the most beautiful and talked-about young girls in Bath’s society in the 1770s. From a musical family, they were applauded on the theatre stages of Bath and London, as much as they appeared in the newspapers of the day as society figures. They were portrayed together, in 1772, by Thomas Gainsborough, who was a close friend of their father’s, and their neighbour in Bath. The painter had seen Elizabeth and Mary grow before his eyes and tenderly represented them in their magnificent large canvas known as The Linley Sisters, now at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

In the same year as the Dulwich painting was finished by Gainsborough, Elizabeth eloped to France with the young playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, causing a great scandal. A year later, in 1773, the two were married. Elizabeth did not expect the marriage to be an unhappy one, constantly marked by Sheridan’s infidelities. Elizabeth gave up singing and supported her husband in his career as a writer and politician.

Thomas Gainsborough, "Mrs. Elizabeth Richard Brinsley Sheridan," 1785-87 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery)

Gainsborough was to portray Elizabeth at different points in her life. This is his last image of her – aged thirty-one- only a few years before her untimely death of tuberculosis in 1792. Elizabeth sits under a tree in the open countryside – a windswept valley so different from the delicate violets and primroses of the earlier double portrait at Dulwich. Elizabeth’s entire figure is transformed by the romantic wind in the canvas, just as passion swept her short life. After her death, William Jackson noted that “as a singer she is perished forever, as a woman she still exists in a picture painted by Gainsborough.”

Earl A. Powell III, the Director of the National Gallery of Art Washington, said: “We are delighted that Gainsborough’s Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan will represent the National Gallery of Art at the Bicentenary celebrations of Dulwich Picture Gallery.” The masterpiece will be on display from 6 September – 2 October 2011.

From The McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Ontario:

This fall, explore 18th-century art and its ongoing influence in five concurrent exhibitions of historical and contemporary art. Rising to the Occasion is mounted in conjunction with and as a complement to the McMaster University John Douglas Taylor Conference The Immaterial Eighteen Century, October 27-29.

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Rising to the Occasion: The Long 18th Century
The McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario, 3 September — 5 November 2011

Rising to the Occasion: The Long 18th Century is the governing title for exhibition-episodes that explore facets of culture and society in the 18th century—ideas, rather than attempts to tell the story of art as history. But art has a value in a historical reckoning—it does rise to the occasion, and allows both a mirror and lens perspective.

The choice of exhibition works interweaves the historical and the contemporary in order to open up different discussions—the legacies of the 18th century—enlightenment, empiricism, revolution and innovation and the instability of these ideas, as they speak to our unstable time. The keynote episode is borrowed directly from the title of Rebecca Belmore’s Rising to the Occasion. The original occasion was Belmore’s response to the Duke and Duchess of York’s official visit to Canada in 1987; she cobbled together and wore a hybrid-material dress in the manner and style of the 19th century. The new context is the inclusion of John Verelst’s so-described “Four Indian Kings” paintingswhich were commissioned by Queen Anne in 1710. The now disembodied Belmore dress as object-artifact has a resonance with Jean-Antoine Houdon’s 1767 life-sized plaster flayed figure—sculpted to show the body muscles—and in turn George Romney’s portrait with an écorché figure.

Paintings by Jean-Joseph Taillasson and Angelica Kauffmann, draw their subject matter from the classical world to send messages to their “18th-century present.” Taillasson’s audience was the new social order of post-Revolutionary France; for Kauffmann, a subject that could appeal to the heroic—in the wake of the first “global” Seven Years War—and her metatext on the role of women. A contemporary counterpoint is Tony Scherman’s monumental Napoleon painting, from his About 1789 series, which Scherman describes as a forensic portrait. Likewise, John Massey’s 1985 photo-collage serigraph Versailles is another forensic moment and constructed embodiment; an arm of collaged gold that cannot rise, gripped by the arm of the artist. Angela Grauerholz’s black and white photograph Voltaire’s Study (Voltaire was one of the great writer and humanists of the 18th century) has a subtle counterpoint in Taillasson’s painting, as Jiri Ladocha’s suite of Voltaire portraits have with the Houdon figure. Ladocha worked with a mould from Houdon’s Voltaire portrait bust, reconstructed as if it were a Cubist vision—the deep past, the historical modern, and the present.

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From the YCBA:

Adapting the Eye: An Archive of the British in India, 1770-1830
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 11 October — 31 December 2011

Curated by Holly Shaffer with Gillian Forrester

Organized to complement the Center’s major exhibition on Johan Zoffany, who spent six productive years in India, Adapting the Eye explores the complex and multifaceted networks of British and Indian professional and amateur artists, patrons, and scholars in British India in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and their drive to create and organize knowledge for both aesthetic and political purposes. Selected from the Center’s rich holdings, the exhibition includes a diverse range of objects from both high art and popular culture, including albums, scrapbooks, prints, paintings, miniatures, and sculpture, demonstrating how collecting practices and artistic patronage in India during that period constituted a complex intersection of culture and power.

The starting point and central focus of the exhibition is a remarkable and little-known archive in the Center’s collection assembled by Charles Warre Malet and the British artist James Wales. Warre Malet was the East India Company’s Resident in Pune between 1785 and 1798. He and Wales commissioned over a hundred works on paper by British and Indian artists, which are included in the archive together with extensive manuscript material and vivid sketches of landscape, architectural sites, scenes from everyday life, and diplomatic ceremonial events. An extensive selection of drawings from the archive, complemented by other works from the collections, provides a unique window into central India at a critical historical moment. A pivotal figure in this rich cultural interchange was the highly accomplished Indian draftsman and sculptor Gangaram Tambat, who drew on both indigenous and European artistic conventions; his remarkable hybrid drawings are juxtaposed with works by British artists, including William Hodges, William and Thomas Daniell, Robert Mabon, and James Wales.

From a Getty press release:

Luminous Paper: British Watercolors and Drawings
At the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles, 19 July — 23 October 2011

Curated by Julian Brooks

Thomas Girtin, "Durham Cathedral and Castle," ca. 1800 watercolor over pencil heightened with gum Arabic (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum)

Watercolor is one of the most challenging artistic techniques—capable of extraordinary luminosity but often resistant to control. Luminous Paper: British Watercolors and Drawings presents more than 25 works of the 1700s and 1800s by some of the greatest masters of the medium, many on view for the first time.

Featuring the work of some of the most famous British artists, including J.M.W. Turner, William Blake, and Samuel Palmer, this exhibition reveals their multifaceted innovations in the field of drawing and watercolor painting. From Turner’s use of his thumbprint to roughen the texture of wash in a whirling seascape, to the reflected and re-reflected light built in layers by John Sell Cotman, the medium of watercolor was transformed beyond recognition. Other artists experimented with novel subject matter or new modes of representation, playing important roles in the development of European drawing and watercolor painting.

“Key works have been added to the Getty’s collection in the last few years as part of an ongoing initiative to build our holdings of British drawings and watercolors to better represent the wider European tradition,” said Associate Curator Julian Brooks, who curated the exhibition. “Many of these works have been recently acquired and we’re thrilled to be publicly displaying them for the first time in generations.”

Among the recent acquisitions is Durham Cathedral and Castle (about 1800) by Thomas Girtin, a dramatic view of a medieval cathedral and castle set on a rocky outcrop above the water, amid the moving light of a bright, cloudy sky. Girtin died of tuberculosis at the age of 27, two years after making this drawing. His rival J.M.W. Turner is reputed to have said “Had poor Tom lived, I would have starved.” Another is View of the Church of Our Lady of Hanswijk, Mechelen (1831) by Thomas Shotter Boys, a central figure in Anglo-French artistic exchange of the period, and one of the most sophisticated practitioners of watercolor. He excelled in capturing effects of atmosphere and mood. (more…)