Exhibition: Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello
This exhibition looks intriguing for its subject alone, but even more interesting given that it’s the work (in partnership with Monticello) of a museum that doesn’t break ground until later this month. As reported by Brett Zongker of the Associated Press, the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) is organizing exhibits before the museum opens, in 2015, as a way to assess strategies for productively reaching large audiences with difficult subjects. -CH
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Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty
National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., 27 January — 14 October 2012
Atlanta History Center, 1 February — 7 July 2013
Missouri History Museum, St. Louis, 10 August 2013 — 2 March 2014
National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, 9 April 2014 — 4 January 2015
African American Museum, Dallas, 22 September — 31 December 2018 (extended to 21 January 2019)
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and Monticello will present Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty, an exhibition of artifacts from the Smithsonian’s collections and from excavations at Jefferson’s Virginia plantation. Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence and called slavery an “abominable crime,” yet he was a lifelong slaveholder. The exhibition will provide a look at the lives of six slave families living at Monticello alongside Jefferson and his family. Personal belongings and working tools will be on display, and visitors will have a chance to learn about the families’ connections to one another, their religious faith and their efforts to pursue literacy and freedom.
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Note (added 23 September 2018) — The posting was updated to include the four additional venues.
Exhibition: Royalists to Romantics
The following exhibition soon opens at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (in conjunction, artist-in-residence Celia Reyer will be creating a Brunswick traveling coat inspired by 18th-century fashion). -AH
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Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from the
Louvre, Versailles, and Other French National Collections
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., 24 February — 29 July 2012
Rose Adélaïde Ducreux, "Portrait of the Artist," ca. 1799 (Rouen: Musée des beaux-arts)
In keeping with its mission to rediscover and celebrate women artists of the past and demonstrate their continued relevance, the National Museum of Women in Arts (NMWA) presents Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from the Louvre, Versailles, and Other French National Collections. The exhibition features 77 paintings, prints, and sculptures dating from 1750 to 1850—many of which have never been seen outside of France. To develop the exhibition, NMWA spent months scouring the collections of dozens of French museums and libraries to cull rarely-seen works by women artists. Royalists to Romantics showcases these exceptional works and reveals how the tumultuous period that saw the flowering of the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the terrors of the French revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, and the restoration of the monarchy affected the lives and careers of women artists.
Featuring 35 artists, including Marguerite Gérard, Antoine Cecile Haudebourt-Lescot, Adélaïde Labille-Guillard, Sophie Rude, Anne Vallayer-Coster, and Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun, the exhibition explores the political and social dynamics that shaped their world and influenced their work. Some of these artists flourished with support of such aristocratic patrons as Marie Antoinette, who not only appointed her favorite female artists Élisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun and Anne Vallayer-Coster to court, but advocated their acceptance into the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture. The political upheavals of the French Revolution and the following decades brought a new set of challenges for women artists. Royalists to Romantics explores the complex ways that women negotiated their cultural positions and marketed their reputations in France’s shifting social, political and artistic environment.
Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from the Louvre, Versailles, and other French National Collections has been organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., with logistical support from sVo Art, Versailles.
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Laura Auricchio, Melissa Hyde, and Mary D. Sheriff have contributed essays to the catalogue:
Jordana Pomeroy, ed. Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from Versailles, the Louvre, and Other French National Collections (New York: Scala Publishers, 2012), 144 pages, ISBN: 9781857597431, $45.
This beautifully illustrated book examines eighteenth-century French theories of sexual difference and their influence on the ‘woman-artist question’; paradoxical Revolutionary attitudes toward women artists, who encountered as many new limitations as opportunities; and the complex ways that women marketed their reputations and managed their cultural positions in France’s intricate social and artistic hierarchy.
Exhibition: Shakespeare on Canvas at YCBA
From YCBA:
‘While these visions did appear’: Shakespeare on Canvas
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 3 January — 3 June 2012
Curated by Eleanor Hughes and Christina Smylitopoulos
Johann Heinrich Ramberg, "Olivia, Maria, and Malvolio, from 'Twelfth Night', Act III, Scene iv," 1789, oil on canvas (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund)
“While these visions did appear,” a selection of Shakespearian subjects drawn from the Center’s permanent collection of paintings, forms part of Yale’s university-wide celebration of the works of William Shakespeare (1564–1616). This display focuses primarily on depictions of Shakespeare’s comedies, but also draws on comedic elements from the tragedies and histories, and encourages consideration of the multifaceted ways—verbal and visual—in which Shakespeare’s plays have inspired painters and audiences alike.
Artists and patrons in the eighteenth century responded to and encouraged the assertion of Shakespeare as Britain’s foremost national playwright. Through the remarkable efforts of David Garrick, the actor and Drury Lane theater manager, the plays flourished on the stage, while the promotion of the playwright as the “immortal bard” was seized as an opportunity to foster a British school of history painting.
Combining commerce and connoisseurship, entrepreneurial publishers like John “Alderman” Boydell and James Woodmason commissioned works such as a scene from Twelfth Night by Johann Heinrich Ramberg, and Francis Wheatley’s scene from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, respectively, creating what amounted to a new genre: the Shakespearean conversation piece. Strategies of representation included the depiction of famous actors and actresses in favored roles, such as Benjamin van der Gucht’s portrait of actor Henry Woodward in the role of Petruchio in David Garrick’s adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, and James Northcote’s portrait of the child actor William Henry West Betty in the role of Hamlet. Other compositions, destined to be illustrations for new print editions of Shakespeare’s plays, depict characters in pivotal dramatic moments, such as Phillippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg’s portrait of Falstaff from Henry IV. (more…)
Small Exhibition: Women and Children in Prints after Chardin
From the Fitzwilliam:
Work, Rest and Play: Women and Children in Prints after Chardin
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 6 September 2011 — 4 March 2012
In 1733 the Parisian artist Jean-Siméon Chardin, who had made his name as a painter of ‘animals, cookware and various vegetables’, began to paint domestic interiors containing women, children and servants. The paintings were an immediate hit, and engravings reproducing certain works soon became available for purchase. This exhibition investigates the appeal of Chardin’s familial imagery for the 18th-century public, and takes a close look at the skill of the printmakers who interpreted his canvases into graphic art.
Charrington Print Room (16)
Exhibition: Piranesi at the Hermitage
From the Hermitage:
Ruins, Palaces and Prisons: Piranesi and Italian Eighteenth-Century Architectural Fantasies
State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, 7 December 2011 — 25 March 2012
Curated by A.V. Ippolitov, M.F. Korshunova, and V.M. Uspenskiy
Piranesi, Title page of the 'Carceri' series, 1749-1750
On December 7th, 2011, Saint Catherine’s day, the State Hermitage Museum welcomed an exhibition entitled Ruins, Palaces and Prisons: Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Italian Eighteenth-Century Architectural Fantasies, dedicated to the early period of Piranesi’s work. This exhibit is being held as part of the Year of Italy in Russia and Year of Russia in Italy 2011 program, which continues tradition of partnership and cooperation between the two countries in the fields of art and culture.
This exhibition, presenting about 100 drawings and prints from the collection of the Hermitage, is divided into two parts: the first is dedicated to Piranesi and will present the series entitled Prima Parte (“Prima Parte “), Grotteschi (“Grotesques”) and Carceri (“Dungeons”) in their rare original condition, which have never been published in Russia before. All of them are from the 1750 album Opere Varie, which was acquired by the Empress Catherine the Great in 1768 as part of the collection of Count Bruhl and became the basis of the graphic arts collection of the Hermitage. The Carceri is presented in two conditions; the early one, from the Bruhl
collection, and a later one which was extensively revised. This is the first
time this sort of juxtaposition has been presented in Russia.
Piranesi, "Drawbridge," A page from the 'Carceri' series, 1749-1750
The second part consist of drawings by Italian artists of the 18th century who worked as scene decorators, designers and architects and created the unique genre of imaginative Veduta, which is important for understanding the style of the settecento, as the 18th century is called in Italian, a unique and complex phenomenon. Imaginative Veduta is represented by the work of the Galli Bibiena family, G. Valeriani, Pietro Gonzaga, G. Barbari, G. Mannocchi, many of which are being published for the first time. The phenomenon of Piranesi’ early fantasies is put in the context of a unique genre, and is examined at this exhibit as original sources, as is the influence of the Piranesi phenomenon on the later development of imaginative Veduta.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) has an enduring place in the history or art as an artist who defined European art in the mid 18th- early 19th century. Piranesi is acknowledged as a reformer of public taste and one of the progenitors of neoclassicism, which might be called the Avant Garde of the 18th century, and as such his name is associated with this movement. However, while the series of etching entitled Carceri (dungeons), a procession of frightening, inexplicable and obscure images was not well known in the artist’s life, was many decades ahead of its time. Carceri become of the works of art most beloved by modernism. This series, which was not particularly popular during Piranesi’s life, a rediscovery of Romanticism attracted writers, architects, directors then and continues to do so now not only with its unusual subject matter, but also with its unusual spatial construction, which reminds one not of real architecture, but of the unreal space of a dream or hallucination. (more…)
Exhibition: Herculaneum at the Hermitage
From the Hermitage:
Herculaneum Antiquities
State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, 16 December 2011 — 12 February 2012
Curated by Stefano de Caro, Anna Trofimova, and Elena Borisovna Ananich
"Architectural Landscape," fresco from the Augusteum in Herculaneum, 65-79 (National Archaeological Museum of Naples)
On 17 December 2011, as part of the Year of Italy in Russia and Year of Russia in Italy, an exhibit entitled Herculaneum Antiquities opened in the State Hermitage Museum in the General Staff Building; it was jointly organized by the State Hermitage Museum, the Ministry for the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage of Naples and Pompeii with the support of the Italian embassy in Moscow, and Consulate General in St. Petersburg. This is the first exhibit to give the Russian public a chance to view these world-famous works of classical sculpture, discovered at the ancient city of Herculaneum, which like Pompeii and Stabia, perished during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, and was also well preserved.
All of these artifacts, which once decorated the so-called Basilica or Augusteum (a building for ceremonies of the Imperial cult), are now held in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. At this exhibit, they have been brought together in one place, as a united whole, with additional cartographic materials, reconstructions, data from archaeological and historical research, which make it possible to get a sense of how Augusteum might have looked two thousand years ago and in what sequence and part of the building the exhibit items were placed. (more…)
Exhibition: Eighteenth-Century Verona — Tiepolo, Cignaroli, Rotari
The following comes from the Comune di Verona website. There’s also a fine site dedicated to the exhibition.
Il Settecento a Verona: Tiepolo, Cignaroli, Rotari
Palazzo della Gran Guardia, Verona, 26 November 2011 — 9 April 2012
Curated by Fabrizio Magani, Paola Marini, and Andrea Tomezzoli
La mostra è incentrata sulle peculiarità che la cultura e la tradizione pittorica assunsero nel Settecento a Verona, città che riuscì a mantenere sempre autonomia e originalità rispetto alle correnti dominanti nella vicina Venezia.
Sono esposti 150 capolavori tra dipinti, disegni, stampe e documenti, provenienti da importanti musei stranieri come l’Ermitage di Pietroburgo, il Prado di Madrid, il Victoria and Albert di Londra, la Gemäldegalerie di Dresda, il Kunsthistorisches di Vienna, lo Szépmuvészeti di Budapest, oltre che dai principali musei italiani.
Ampio spazio sarà dedicato a due importanti artisti veronesi: Pietro Antonio Rotari, definito il “pittore della corte russa” per aver lavorato a lungo a servizio degli zar e dell’imperatrice Elisabetta, e Giambettino Cignaroli, fondatore dell’Accademia di Pittura che porta il suo nome. I due furono emblemi di un classicismo di grande innovazione e modernità che, grazie al patrocinio di un altro grande veronese, Scipione Maffei, ha dominato la pittura dell’intero secolo.
Le sezioni della mostra daranno conto anche della ricchezza e della varietà dei risultati conseguiti a Verona nell’età dei Lumi, nonché della rete di committenti prestigiosi – anche internazionali (del calibro di Stanislao Augusto Poniatowsky di Polonia, dei principi di Sassonia, di Clemente Augusto di Baviera o Carlo Firmian, plenipotenziario di Maria Teresa) – che richiesero opere veronesi.
Nell’esposizione avrà un posto speciale la sezione dedicata ai vedutisti come Bernardo Bellotto, così come il nucleo di opere realizzate per la città scaligera da Giambattista e Giandomenico Tiepolo. Con modalità assolutamente innovative, grazie all’ausilio delle nuove tecnologie, il pubblico avrà il privilegio esclusivo di scoprire il lavoro di recupero che ha portato alla restituzione virtuale del soffitto dipinto da Giambattista Tiepolo per Palazzo Canossa a Verona, andato in parte distrutto al termine della seconda guerra mondiale.
La mostra sarà integrata da itinerari che guideranno il visitatore alla scoperta, da un lato, di opere d’arte sacra conservate nelle chiese di Verona, dall’altro, di straordinari interventi pittorici realizzati per palazzi e ville signorili della città e della provincia che sveleranno il secolo d’oro della decorazione delle ville venete.
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Three of the five lectures associated with the exhibition took place in October and November. Two more take place in January and February. Click on the image to the right for more information.
31 January 2012, 5:30
Giuseppe Pavanello (Fondazione Giorgio Cini), Il “Monumento funerario di Maria Cristina d’Asburgo-Lorena” di Antonio Canova: dal patetismo alla compassione
28 February 2012, 5:30
Catherine Whistler (Ashmolean Museum), Fantasia e realtà: Giambattista Tiepolo a Würzburg, Verona e Madrid
Exhibition: Microscopes from the Golub Collection
Eighteenth-century news from an airport press release? A first for everything. This exhibition of sixty microscopes looks like a fine way to pass an hour or two during a layover. From the San Francisco Airport:
A World Examined: Microscopes from the Age of Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century
SFO Museum, San Francisco International Airport, 24 December 2011 — 24 June 2012
Curated by Steven Ruzin
George Adams, detail of New Universal Microscope, ca. 1746
(The Golub Collection, University of California, Berkeley)
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The microscope is a relatively young invention. Although magnifiers and “burning glasses” are referenced in ancient Chinese texts and in the first-century CE writings of Roman philosophers, the use of an optical instrument for observing microscopic specimens dates only to the sixteenth century when European scientists first used lenses to magnify objects. Englishman Robert Hooke, one of the most important scientists of his age, modified the compound microscope in the mid-seventeenth century and documented his observations in vivid descriptions and extraordinary copper-plate illustrations of dozens of minuscule phenomena—animal, vegetable, mineral, even man-made objects such as the point of a needle or a razor’s edge. His work stands as a remarkable testament to the keen and curious minds operating at the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment.
John Marshall, Great Double Microscope, London, 1710. Wood, brass, cardboard, leather, and gilt (The Golub Collection, University of California, Berkeley)
From mid-seventeenth-century simple microscopes to the modern compound optical devices by German makers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these are the instruments that revealed the long-held secrets of the natural world—the existence of microorganisms, the structure of biological cells, and the composition and operation of a variety of previously unseen life forms. Nearly 350 years after Robert Hooke introduced a “newly visible world,” we continue to rely on the microscope in our eternal quest to better understand the world we inhabit and the challenges posed by that which remains invisible to the unaided eye.
A World Examined: Microscopes from the Age of Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century is located pre-security in the International Terminal Main Hall Departures Lobby, San Francisco International Airport. The exhibition is on view, free of charge, to all Airport visitors from December 24, 2011 to June 24, 2012.
This exhibition was guest curated by Steven Ruzin, Ph.D., Director of the CNR Biological Imaging Facility and Curator of The Golub Collection at the University of California, Berkeley. A selection of images are available here»
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SFO Museum was established by the Airport Commission in 1980 for the purposes of humanizing the Airport environment, providing visibility for the unique cultural life of San Francisco, and providing educational services for the traveling public. The Museum has been accredited by the American Association of Museums since 1999, and has the distinction of being the only accredited museum in an airport. Today, SFO Museum features approximately twenty galleries throughout the Airport terminals displaying a rotating schedule of art, history, science, and cultural exhibitions, as well as the San Francisco Airport Commission Aviation Library and Louis A. Turpen Aviation Museum, a permanent collection dedicated to the history of commercial aviation.
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More information on the exhibition, including a history of the formation of the collection and photographs of the installation at SFO Museum, are available via The Golub Collection website.
Exhibition: Chess Sets from the Past
Thanks to all of you who have helped make 2011 such a good year for Enfilade. I’m taking a few days off, but postings will resume soon. Happy holidays, and I hope the next few days bring plenty of tasty food, some extra sleep, time with friends and family, and maybe even some games around a table. -CH
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From the World Chess Hall of Fame:
Chess Masterpieces: Highlights from the Dr. George and Vivian Dean Collection
World Chess Hall of Fame, St Louis, 9 September 2011 — 12 February 2012
John Style Chess Set, India
Late 18th century, polychromed ivory
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Chess Masterpieces: Highlights from the Dr. George and Vivian Dean Collection celebrates the Deans’ 50th year of collecting together and uses outstanding selected works to trace the development of the game of chess and the design of fine chess sets from the tenth to the early twentieth century. Sets come from Austria, Cambodia, China, England, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Kashmir, Morocco, Persia, Russia, Syria, and Turkey. Among the works on display are ones owned or commissioned by Catherine the Great, Napoleon, Czar Nicolas II, and the British royal family.
Chess has been called ‘The Royal Game’ not only because it originated in such royal courts but also because, across all eras and cultures, chess sets have been created from gold, silver, ivory, gemstones, crystal, and other opulent materials by the world’s finest craftsmen. The world-renowned Fabergé, Meissen, and Wedgewood workshops and many others were eager to join ranks with generations of elite anonymous craftsmen who worked for their ruler, church, or wealthy civil patrons to craft chess sets recognized as consummate works of art.
Just as the world’s finest craftsmen devised ever-more ingenious chess set designs, chess players plotted and planned ever-more innovative and elegant styles of play. Hence, each chess set in this exhibition is shown in a famous middle game or problem position from approximately the same timeframe and locale as the set. This enables one to view the pieces as they were intended to be viewed – in play, with the visual beauties of the designs complimented by the strategic brilliancies of the games. Hopefully, looking at pieces in the middle of a period game will bring one a step closer to the original experience of both the chess set and chess play of the time. These games were researched by curator Larry List with the help of chess scholar Myron Samsin of the Ken Whyld Association and noted chess teacher and author, Fred Wilson.
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Information on the John style set pictured above, from the exhibition checklist:
The theme of this style set is the opposition of native Indian troops to the John Company soldiers (often British mercenaries). These soldiers enforced the English control of Indian provinces and guarded the lucrative trade of the British East India Company. Such highly detailed decorative sets were made for display, not play. They were bought from skilled carvers in Berhampur by the British soldiers and traders as mementoes of their time in India serving the Crown. This prime example of the figurative polychromed designs uses the earliest Indian chess color scheme— red vs. green, with red-suited Brits facing off with green-clothed Indians.
Reviewed: ‘Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance’
Recently added to caa.reviews:
Cassandra Albinson, Peter Funnell, and Lucy Peltz, eds., Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance, exhibition catalogue (New Haven and London: Yale Center for British Art, National Portrait Gallery, London, and Yale University Press, 2011), 280 pages, ISBN: 9780300167184, $70.
Reviewed by Bruce Redford; posted 17 November 2011.
‘How various he is!’ Thomas Gainsborough’s tribute to Joshua Reynolds applies equally well to their successor in grand-manner portraiture. It is one of the signal achievements of ‘Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance’ that it removes any lingering traces of the negative stereotype: Lawrence the slick, formulaic sycophant who prostituted his gifts in the service of a decadent Regency elite. In its place this wide-ranging exhibition and thoughtful catalogue substitute a dynamic, probing, and inventive explorer of human psychology—one who is keenly attentive to the interplay of surface and depth, social mask and private self. Even Lawrence’s most public statements create a form of co-extensive space: not by breaking the picture plane, as in Caravaggio for instance, but by drawing the viewer into an
electric zone of intimacy. . . .
The full review is available here» (CAA membership required)
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