Exhibition | The Van de Veldes: Greenwich, Art, and the Sea
Willem van de Velde the Younger, A Royal Visit to the Fleet in the Thames Estuary, 1672, detail, 1672–94, oil on canvas, 165 × 330 cm (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, BHC0299). More information is available here»
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Now on view at Greenwich:
The Van de Veldes: Greenwich, Art, and the Sea
Queen’s House, Greenwich, 2 March 2023 — 14 January 2024
Curated by Allison Goudie and Imogen Tedbury
In the winter of 1672–73, two celebrated Dutch artists arrived in London. Willem van de Velde the Elder (1610/11–1693) was renowned for his highly accurate drawings of ships and maritime life. He would even go to sea himself, paper in hand, to capture naval battles as they were raging. His son, Willem van de Velde the Younger (1633–1707), was a famed painter. From calm coastal scenes to fierce storms, his work captured the many moods of the ocean.
The Burning of the Royal James at the Battle of Solebay, 28 May 1672, tapestry designed by Willem Van de Velde the Elder, made by Thomas Poyntz, 1672 (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum).
King Charles II offered them a studio space at the Queen’s House in Greenwich and each a salary of £100 a year to create drawings and paintings of ‘Sea Fights’. Here they worked, creating magnificent paintings and tapestries, as well as thousands of detailed sketches, drawings, and designs. The National Maritime Museum has the largest collection of works by the Van de Veldes in the world, and now, 350 years on from their first arrival in England, the Queen’s House will once again become a home for these artists, whose work would inspire generations of marine painters, including J.M.W. Turner. The Van de Veldes: Greenwich, Art and the Sea follows the journey of these émigré artists and explores how they changed the course of British maritime art.
“The Van de Velde collection at Greenwich is remarkable not only for its sheer size but for what it reveals about how a 17th-century artist’s studio functioned,” says Dr. Allison Goudie, Curator of Art. “This exhibition celebrates this extraordinary aspect of the Van de Velde collection here, and the unique connection it now has with the Queen’s House, the location of the Van de Veldes’ studio for over 20 years.”
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Note (added 8 October 2023) — The posting was updated to include Dr. Goudie and Dr. Tedbury as the curators of the exhibition.
Exhibition | Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art
Charles Willson Peale, The Edward Lloyd Family, 1771, oil on canvas, 48 × 57 inches
(Winterthur Museum, 1964.0124 A)
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Having closed in March at the VMFA, the exhibition opens this month at the Frist Art Museum:
Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 8 October 2022 — 19 March 2023
Frist Art Museum, Nashville, 26 May — 13 August 2023
Curated by Leo Mazow
Explore the guitar as visual subject, enduring symbol, and storyteller’s companion. Strummed everywhere from parlors and front porches to protest rallies and rock arenas—the guitar also appears far and wide in American art. Its depictions enable artists and their human subjects to address topics that otherwise go untold or under-told. Experience paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and music in a multimedia presentation that unpacks the guitar’s cultural significance, illuminating matters of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and identity.
Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art is the first exhibition to explore the instrument’s symbolism in American art from the early 19th century to the present day. Featuring 125 works of art, as well as 35 musical instruments, the exhibition demonstrates that guitars figure prominently in the visual stories Americans tell themselves about themselves—their histories, identities, and aspirations. The guitar—portable, affordable, and ubiquitous—appears in American art more than any other instrument, and this exhibition explores those depictions as well as the human ambitions, intentions, and connections facilitated by the instrument—a powerful tool and elastic emblem.
The works in Storied Strings are divided into nine sections: Aestheticizing a Motif, Cold Hard Cash, Hispanicization, Parlor Games, Personification, Picturing Performance, Political Guitars, the Guitar in Black Art and Culture, and Re-Gendered Instruments. The exhibition also features smaller thematically arranged niche spaces, including The Blues, Women in Early Country Music, the Visual Culture of Early Rock and Roll, Hawaii-ana, and Cowboy Guitars.
Storied Strings is curated by Leo Mazow, the Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He has authored and coauthored a number of books, including Edward Hopper and the American Hotel, Thomas Hart Benson and the American Sound, and Picturing the Banjo.
Leo G. Mazow, Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022), 264 pages, ISBN: 978-1934351222, $40.
C O N T E N T S
Alex Nyerges, Director’s Foreword
Acknowledgments
Lenders to the Exhibition
Guitar Parts Diagram
1 Introducing the Guitar in American Art
2 An American Guitar Primer (Dobney)
3 Hispanicization
4 The Guitar in Black Art and Culture
5 Personification
6 Guitar-Wielding Women
7 Aestheticizing the Motif
8 Cold Hard Cash
9 Political Guitars (Nichols)
10 Wood, Strings, and Stories (Deloria)
Endnotes
Checklist of Works in the Exhibition
Selected Bibliography
Index
Exhibition | Connecting Worlds: Artists and Travel
Carlo Labruzzi, The Colosseum seen from the Palatine Hill, Rome, graphite, pen and brown and grey ink, watercolour.
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On view this summer at the Kupferstich-Kabinett of the SKD:
Connecting Worlds: Artists and Travel / Ferne, so nah: Künstler, Künstlerinnen und ihre Reisen
Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 8 July – 8 October 2023
Artists and travel have for centuries been intertwined where the desire to explore beyond the confines of one’s home has provoked a truly astonishing outpouring of creativity, much of which was captured through drawings and prints. Comprising over 100 such works, Connecting Worlds: Artists & Travel will be the first exhibition to approach the subject through the lens of artists’ experiences of travel from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. Select works by contemporary artists offer further inspiring perspectives on the topic of travel and connectivity.
Why did artists travel? What did they take with them? With whom did they travel and meet? How did they record their journey? Addressing such questions, the exhibition invites visitors on their own creative journey by confronting them with works by major artists, amongst them Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Maria Sibylla Merian, and Angelika Kauffmann, for whom travel expanded their artistic and intellectual horizons and circles of friendship.
Divided into three sections ‘On the Road’, ‘Destination Rome’, and ‘Dresden’, the exhibition begins by exploring artists on the road and what they regarded as important to record in sketchbooks and individual sheets. Primary amongst these are nature studies reflecting a fascination with the outdoors but also architecture and local inhabitants. The main destination was Rome, with its incomparable remains of antiquity and as the seat of the Catholic Church that celebrated its religious and institutional life through processions and public spectacle.
Upon returning to their homelands, artists often used their drawings as the source for prints and paintings, thereby disseminating knowledge of their experience to a wider audience. The exhibition ends with Dresden under Augustus the Strong, a center of glamorous festivities, ambitiously competing with other international courts. This last chapter of the exhibition explores a different kind of travel through images and stories of landscapes, plants, animals, and cultures previously unknown in Europe that were brought back by courtly and military expeditions. The visual recordings of distant worlds in books and prints allowed for imaginary travel and enabled a sense of connectivity with places and people from near and far.
This international exhibition project is a collaboration between the Kupferstich-Kabinett and the Katrin Bellinger Collection, London, and is made possible by the complementary strengths of the two collections: the Kupferstich-Kabinett, with its extensive holdings on the themes of travel and science in the early modern period, and the Katrin Bellinger Collection, with its focus on representations of artists engaged in the creative process. The project is supplemented by prominent loans from national and international collections.
The catalogue is published by Paul Holberton and distributed by The University of Chicago Press:
Anita Viola Sganzerla and Stephanie Buck, eds., Connecting Worlds: Artists and Travel (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2023), 274 pages, ISBN: 978-1913645489, £45 / $55.
Exhibition | Refugee Silver: Huguenots in Britain
From The Fitzwilliam:
Refugee Silver: Huguenots in Britain
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2 August 2022 — 30 July 2023
Silver gilt tea caddy, marked London, Aymé Videau, 1745–46 (Cambridge: The Fitzwilliam Museum, given by the estate of the late Olive and Peter Ward).
Escaping persecution in France, Huguenot silversmiths changed the visual arts in Britain and brought with them exciting new ideas and techniques. For more than a century from the late 1600s, these French Protestants made an immeasurable contribution to British cultural life.
Protestants living in Catholic France had long faced religious persecution. Its increase forced them to seek new lives in the Netherlands, Germany, South Africa, and North America. Between 1680 and 1720, more than 50,000 Huguenots sought refuge in Britain, introducing the word ‘refugee’ to the English language.
This display of silver, ceramics, sculpture, and ivories, reframes objects from the Fitzwilliam Museum’s historic collections through the lens of the migration of Huguenot refugees to Britain. Many were skilled craftspeople: metalworkers, sculptors, carvers, weavers, and printers, with the necessary skills to make luxury goods and a knowledge and understanding of French fashions. Huguenot silversmiths sometimes adapted their designs to suit British tastes although it was important that they retained distinctive elements of their modern and fashionable style. The results proved especially attractive to a growing British middle class. The Huguenots’ sophisticated techniques, dynamic forms, and intricate sculptural decoration were so widely imitated that eventually their style became dominant in Britain, transforming forever the appearance of silver and other decorative arts in this country.
The Burlington Magazine, April 2023
View of Fort Christiansborg [Christiansborg Castle, Osu] from the Shore, March 1764, ink and coloured wash on paper
(Danish National Archives)
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The eighteenth century in the April issue of The Burlington . . .
The Burlington Magazine 165 (April 2023)
A R T I C L E S
• Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “The Design of Cape Coast Castle and Dixcove Fort, Ghana,” pp. 378–93.
The first analysis of the design of two of the principal eighteenth-century British slave castles and forts of the Gold Coast reveals the Western engravings used as prototypes but also acknowledges these buildings’ engagement with African cultures and forms. Identifying the people who built them and assessing the forts’ association with the coastal African community challenges the popular misconception that they were no more than European transplants.
R E V I E W S
• Morlin Ellis, Review of the exhibition Spain and the Hispanic World: Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum and Library (Royal Academy of Arts, 2023), pp. 442–45.
• Simon Jervis, Review of the exhibition catalogue, Reinier Baarsen, Process: Design Drawings from the Rijksmuseum 1500–1900 (Rotterdam: 2022), pp. 456–58.
• Philip Ward-Jackson, Review of the exhibition catalogue, Yvette Deseyve, ed., Johann Gottfried Schadow: Embracing Forms (Hirmer Verlag, 2023), pp. 463–66.
• Thomas P. Campbell, Review of Helen Wyld, The Art of Tapestry (Philip Wilson Publishers, 2022), pp. 472–75.
• Charles Saumarez Smith, Review of András Szántó, Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects (Hatje Cantz, 2022), pp. 482–83.
• John Martin Robinson, Review of Dudley Dodd, Stourhead: Henry Hoare’s Paradise Revisited (Head of Zeus, 2021), pp. 484–85.
O B I T U A R I E S
• Christopher Wood, Obituary for Hans Belting (1935–2023), pp. 486–88.
Exhibition | Coins, Medals, and the Rule of Law
Der Medailleur Jacques-Antoine Dassier setzte 1753 Charles de Montesquieu ins Medaillenrund. In dessen Hauptwerk De l’Esprit des lois von 1748 entfaltete er eine Theorie der Gewaltentrennung, die erheblichen Einfluss auf die Entwicklung des modernen Verfassungsstaates hatte (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Münzkabinett, ex Slg. Thomas Würtenberger / Karsten Dahmen)
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From the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin:
Ius in nummis: Die Sammlung Thomas Würtenberger
Bode-Museum, Berlin, 26 May 2023 — 7 April 2024
Eine Sonderausstellung des Münzkabinetts der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin
Ius in nummis: Die Sammlung Thomas Würtenberger ist in ihrer Breite einzigartig. Sie wurde über den Zeitraum eines halben Jahrhunderts zusammengetragen und umfasst mehr als 3.000 Objekte—vornehmlich Medaillen und einige Münzen—mit dem Fokus auf die neuzeitliche Rechtsgeschichte Westeuropas in zunehmend globaler Perspektive. Jedes Objekt erschließt dabei ein Stück juristischer Vergangenheit.
Iūs, iūris, n. bedeutet unter anderem Recht. Regeln und Gesetze ordnen und durchdringen seit Jahrtausenden den Alltag der Menschen. Recht und Gerechtigkeit bilden dabei dynamische Spannungsfelder. Rechtshandlungen und Rechtsauffassungen gehen von Individuen aus. Rechtsstaat und Unrechtsstaat oder Verfassungsstaat und Willkürherrschaft erinnern an die Konsequenzen gelebter Wertesysteme. Die Rechtsgeschichte erkundet mittels vielfältiger Quellen Ereignisse wie Rechtssetzungen und Rechtsakte, aber auch individuelle Rechtspersonen und Rechtskulturen.
nummus -ī, m. bezeichnet eigentlich Münzen und Geldstücke, doch hat es sich bewährt, auch ein verwandtes Medium unter diesen Begriff zu fassen: die Medaille. Für die Rechtsarchäologie bietet sie eine ergiebige Primärquelle. Von Moses bis zu den Menschenrechten eröffnet die Medaillenkunst ein weites Panorama der Inszenierung von Recht.
Die Ausstellung Ius in nummis: Ein Sammlungsüberblick in zwölf Segmenten
Das Münzkabinett hat es sich zur Aufgabe gesetzt, die Sammlung Würtenberger zu verwahren und zugänglich zu machen. Die digitale Erfassung seit 2020 ist die Voraussetzung der ersten systematischen Erschließung dieses Kulturguts. Ausstellung, Katalog und Begleitprogramm sind dicht am Puls laufender Forschungsarbeiten um diese wichtige Neuerwerbung angesiedelt. Präsentiert wird zunächst die Fragestellung der Spezialsammlung „Ius in nummis“. Weiterführend geht es aber nicht zuletzt um die Erkenntnispotenziale numismatischer Quellen für die Rechtsgeschichte.
Weitgehend geschlossen überliefert, zeigen numismatische Objekte das nahezu vollständige Bild einer erfolgreichen Kulturtechnik. Je nach Materialität und Auflage exklusiv oder für Jedermann halten sie Personen, Dinge und Ereignisse fest. Als mobile und beständige Medien können Medaillen über politische, religiöse und kulturelle Barrieren hinweg von Mensch zu Mensch gehen. Und bisweilen künden die Oberflächen dieser handlichen Denkmale von wechselvollen Objektgeschichten.
Die Ausstellung bietet innerhalb des thematisch, geografisch und diachron vielfältigen Bestandes eine erste Orientierung. Zwölf Segmente präsentieren anhand von Schwerpunkten einen Sammlungsüberblick. Von Symbolen, Individuen, Strukturen, Institutionen, bis hin zu Revolutionen und Verfassungsfragen werden dabei stets weiterhin aktuelle Themen im Medaillenrund vergleichbar.
Heutige Perspektiven auf Fragen von Recht und Gerechtigkeit
Eine eigens für Ius in nummis ins Leben gerufene Edition des Berliner Medailleurkreises flankiert die Ausstellung. Aktuelle Perspektiven auf die großen und kleinen Fragen von Recht und Gerechtigkeit kommentieren im Medaillenrund die Ausstellungsthemen. Beteiligt sind der Berliner Medailleurkreis sowie Mitglieder der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Medaillenkunst.
Zur Ausstellung wird ein Begleitband erscheinen.
Exhibition | Rear View
Urs Fischer, Divine Interventions, 2023, wax, based on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roman sculpture The Three Graces (second century CE), with a wax portrait in the foreground of Pauline Karpidas, the contemporary art patron who once owned the ancient work. Installation view of a gallery at LGDR, 2023.
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It’s not an eighteenth-century show, but I’m left wishing that it were: an exploration of where classicism(s) and Romanticism meet, with Rococo impulses in-between. The emotional tenor of works varies widely; Carrie Mae Weems’s photographs strike me as especially powerful. See Jason Farago’s review for The New York Times (20 April 2023). –CH. From the press release for the exhibition:
Rear View
LGDR, New York, 18 April — 1 June 2023
Spanning two floors of LGDR’s landmark Beaux-Arts-style townhouse, Rear View presents a transhistorical selection of over sixty paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and photographs that explore representation of the human figure as seen from behind—an enduring, wide-ranging paradigm that has exerted potent influence upon modern and contemporary artists. In addition to rare twentieth-century masterworks by Félix Vallotton, Edgar Degas, René Magritte, Francis Bacon, Egon Schiele, Paul Cadmus, Aristide Maillol, and others, Rear View brings together seminal works by a diverse group of living artists spanning generations.
Long before the term Rückenfigur was popularized in the nineteenth century by Caspar David Friedrich, painters and sculptors from as far back as antiquity deployed the human figure seen from behind as a conceptual and formal device. Rear View provides a lens onto this specific genre as it pertains to artists’ desire to capture a range of human states and emotions—contemplation, longing, voyeurism, refusal, fetishism, and defiance—while drawing our attention to the act of looking itself and to the viewer’s role in constructing meaning and identity.
Carrie Mae Weems, Passageway II, 2003 (Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and LGDR).
Many contemporary artists have engaged the Rückenfigur trope, deliberately harnessing its critical potential. In one of the most compelling examples, Carrie Mae Weems has photographed herself in canonical landscapes and charged historical sites over many years, as a means of addressing complex issues around race, gender, and class, while also subjecting the signature paradigm of Romanticism to radical, politicized revision.
From the idealized bodies celebrated in Hellenistic sculpture to the bathers glimpsed in snapshot-like paintings and drawings by Impressionists and early modernists, images of nude bodies portrayed from behind have been integral to the unfolding story of figuration in the West. Urs Fischer directly quotes the Classical origins of this art historical paradigm in a monumental new candle sculpture made specifically for Rear View. Divine Interventions (2023) reprises one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roman marble Three Graces (second century CE), turning the trio of iconic feminine paragons, Aglaia (Beauty), Euphrosyne (Mirth), and Thalia (Abundance), into ephemeral forms cast in wax. Admiring this sculptural group—and in essence joining the Graces—is a wax effigy of Pauline Karpidas, the legendary contemporary art patron who once owned the ancient work that the Met would come to acquire.
Installation view of Rear View at LGDR with work by Jenny Saville, Juncture (1994), top, and Domenico Gnoli, Back View (1968), below (Photo by Jason Schmidt).
The eroticism of ‘rear view’ images emerges not only from the frisson of nudity—the iconography of the human derrière emerges as a whole transhistorical subject onto itself—but from the narrative implication of intimacy between the depicted subject and the artist, the viewer’s fantasizing gaze and the sensuousness of the image on canvas. The trope of the mirror, the ritual of bathing, and the lounging or sleeping body are typical rear view scenarios taken up by artists across the centuries—from Edgar Degas to René Magritte, from Félix Vallotton to Barkley L. Hendricks, through to our present day. Fernando Botero’s painting The Bathroom (1989) features a woman, at once monumental and delicate, gazing at herself in the mirror, wearing only heels and a headband. The figure’s unselfconscious posture suggests she is unaware of the artist, invested only in herself.
By contrast, John Currin’s Nude in a Convex Mirror (2015) looks over her shoulder, presumably at the painter who is depicting the curves of her accentuated buttocks—but also at the viewer observing the action. The subject of Paul Cadmus’s ca. 1965 crayon drawing Standing Male Nude (NM 48) likewise peeks over his shoulder at the artist and the viewer, but with a loaded glance and flirtatious pose—one foot ever so slightly lifted to reveal its sole—that encode a sexual charge of mutual male gazes into an otherwise classical image. Jared French, who was part of the homosocial circle of artists around Cadmus, are represented in the exhibition by emblematic, dreamlike paintings populated uniquely by idealized male figures. The performative signifiers of masculinity emerge as an important subtheme of Rear View, evident in Giorgio de Chirico’s hyper-stylized Gladiatori (1928), Francis Bacon’s tormented figure in Study for Portrait of John Edwards (1986), and Andy Warhol’s abstracted depiction of a butch man’s hind quarters.
John Currin, Nude in a Convex Mirror, 2015, oil on canvas, 42 inches.
In their foreclosure of a complete picture, turned figures such as Currin’s nude also signal fetishism, another theme explored in Rear View. A number of works in the exhibition illuminate ways in which contemporary painting has absorbed the cinematic motif of the rear view, translating the camerawork of film noir and Hitchcockian thrillers like Rear Window (1954) into paint on canvas or rich black-and-white photographic images. Eric Fischl and Danielle Mckinney, for example, draw upon our collective cinematic imagination in composing their deeply narrative scenes, often populated by mysterious figures shown from the back and seemingly unaware of being observed. By contrast, but with no less enigmatic intensity, Harry Callahan’s mid-century rear-view photographs of his beloved wife, Eleanor, testify to the impact of cinematic vision when personalized to a single, deceptively simple subject.
In this context, another thematic trope of Rear View manifests in the work of Edgar Degas. Second only to his images of ballet dances, Degas’s voyeuristic bathing scenes dominate his vast oeuvre. On view in the exhibition, the artist’s delicate 1889–92 pastel Femme se peignant depicts a young nude female, seen from behind, combing her raven-colored tresses over her head. Degas’s scopophilic gaze focuses on the model’s flowing mane—a visual and psychological effect echoed by Domenico Gnoli’s sumptuous large-scale canvas Curly Red Hair (1969), which lingers over the texture of auburn curls cascading down a woman’s back. Tightly cropped to the subject at hand and denying the identifying details of the figure, this painting reveals Gnoli’s seeming uninterest in the body, except as a support for signifying ornament.
Félix Vallotton, Étude de fesses / Study of Buttocks, ca. 1884, oil on canvas, 38 × 46 cm (Private Collection).
The fragmented, fetishized human body emerged as a loaded trope in art history, according to esteemed feminist scholar Linda Nochlin in her study The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (1994). Spurred by the violence and social upheaval of the French Revolution, Nochlin notes, artists began to systematically deploy radical spatial cropping as well as isolating specific body parts, in order to explore the specific conditions of modern urban life—alienation, desire, suffering, obsession, ambiguous anonymous experiences. Nochlin’s observations find a contemporary echo in Issy Wood’s intimate canvas on view in the exhibition: Health and Hotness (2018) shows only the muscular back and bottom of a swimmer framed by her purple bathing suit. Wood’s enigmatic image is also a meditation on the impact of compressed and splitting planes and shapes—a study of the body as an abstraction.
Political refusal and personal irreverence also figure into art historical manifestations of the rear view. Six photographs from Anselm Kiefer’s polemical 1969 series Occupations (Besetzungen) take up this political mantle. In this series, the young artist photographed himself—often shown from behind, mimicking the heroic stance of Friedrich’s Rückenfigur—performing the Nazi salute in front of European monuments and natural sites. Of the series, controversial then as now, art historian Benjamin Buchloh remarked that it is “a real working through of German history. You have to inhabit it to overcome it.”
“String bottoms together in place of signatures for petition of peace.” This is how Yoko Ono described her infamous Film No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966–67)—an 80-minute montage of 365 human bottoms, featuring different genders, races, and body types. Marshaling her conceptual Fluxus rigor and sly humor into a powerful political protest against the Vietnam War, Ono’s provocative film retains its antiwar bite as well as its universalizing humanism today.
In the diptych that Francesco Clemente created for Rear View, Gold on Green, Green on Gold (2023), the artist slyly questions the front/back logic that underpins the exhibition as well as the binary thinking that governs so much of Western culture. Using gold leaf and a radically reduced palette, Clemente portrays ambiguous, gender-indeterminate figures that appear to be engaged in oral sex. The artist muses, “Maybe our mistaken ideas—based on duality, based on ‘us against them’—begin with the fact that we can only see half of what there is. We can only face one direction. We feel incomplete because we can never see completely ourselves. Painting may repair that, offering a vision of totality.”
As a pendant presentation to Rear View, Full Frontal (exhibited on the gallery’s second floor) explores the opposite art historical trope: frontal nudity. As the idiom of the title suggests, debates around moral propriety and censorship in art and popular culture often ascribe a confrontational value to front-facing nudes. While the naked body has always been present in visual culture, shifting social values have influenced representational approaches to the subject. Featured in Full Frontal are works by Miriam Cahn, Jenna Gribbon, and Barkley L. Hendricks, among others.
Exhibition | In a New Light: Paintings from the YCBA
J. M. W. Turner, Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed, detail, 1818, oil on canvas
(New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
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From the YCBA:
In a New Light: Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 24 March — 3 December 2023
More than fifty paintings from the Yale Center for British Art will be on view at the Yale University Art Gallery through December 3, 2023. The exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to engage with the YCBA’s collection while the museum is closed to the public for a building conservation project. The exhibition spans four centuries of British landscape and portraiture traditions, with works by Mary Beale, John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, William Hogarth, Gwen John, Angelica Kauffman, George Stubbs, and Joseph Mallord William Turner, among others. Several of these paintings were on view at the Gallery in 2015, where they were featured in The Critique of Reason: Romantic Art, 1760–1860, the first major collaborative exhibition between the two Yale art museums.
In a New Light will occupy the special-exhibition galleries on the fourth floor of the Gallery’s Kahn building, which opened in 1953 and was the architect’s first significant commission and the first modernist structure on Yale’s campus. Directly across the street, Kahn’s final building, the YCBA, was completed after his death and opened to the public in 1977.
Exhibition | Léopold and Aurèle Robert
From the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Neuchâtel:
Léopold et Aurèle Robert. Oh saisons…
Musée des beaux-arts, La Chaux-de-Fonds / Musée d’art et d’histoire, Neuchâtel, 14 May — 12 November 2023
The Neuchâtel artist Léopold Robert (1794–1835), who enjoyed European acclaim during his lifetime, embodies the myth of the Romantic painter, doomed to a tragic fate and shrouded in mystery.
Educated in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts and later in the studio of Jacques-Louis David, Robert moved to Italy in 1818. His genre paintings brought him great popular success during the first half of the 19th century but were less fulsomely received by the critics. The Musée d’art et d’histoire de Neuchâtel and the Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds have joined forces to pay tribute to the work of Léopold Robert and his brother Aurèle (1805–1871). The exhibition also re-examines Aurèle’s role, considering him not only as a ‘disseminator’ of Léopold’s oeuvre, but also as an artist in his own right. The joint exhibition focuses on Léopold Robert’s unfinished Seasons cycle and features works from both institutions as well as several prestigious loans. The exhibition in La Chaux-de-Fonds is given over to ‘Spring’, while Neuchâtel celebrates ‘Summer’ and ‘Winter’. The exhibition also explores how these masterpieces were produced and circulated, and examines their depiction of music, dance, and the beauty ideal. The exhibition is enriched by contributions from artist Gina Proenza that offer a direct, contemporary response to the historical works of Léopold and Aurèle Robert.
The catalogue (in French) is distributed by ACC Art Books:
David Lemaire and Antonia Nessi, eds., Léopold & Aurèle Robert (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2023), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-3858818874, £45.
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Note (added 26 October 2023) — The posting was updated to correct the dates of the exhibition (here originally given as 15 May — 15 October).
Exhibition | Finding Family
William Hogarth, The Graham Children, 1742, oil on canvas, 161 × 181 cm
(London: National Gallery)
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From the press release for the exhibition:
Finding Family
Foundling Museum, London, 17 March — 27 August 2023
One word, with many meanings: family lies at the heart of all our lives and is considered one of the most important units of society. The exhibition Finding Family, now on view at the Foundling Museum, explores the idea of family through art from the 17th century to the present day. Uncover and explore new perspectives on what family is and can be through this original, insightful exhibition. Involving participants of Tracing Our Tales, the Foundling Museum’s award-winning programme for young care leavers, Finding Family also includes their creative responses to works of art and the exhibition’s themes, from the context of their own lived experience, with challenging, moving, and surprising results.
Le Nain Brothers (Antoine, Louis, and Mathieu), Four Figures at a Table, ca. 1643, oil on canvas, 45 × 55 cm (London: National Gallery).
Is it Blood?
Is it Connection?
Is it Bond?
Is it Love?
Through these four themes, the exhibition presents a series of historic and contemporary works that explore blood relations, social bonds, personal connections, and love—to look at the ways in which artists have represented and responded to ideas of family, past, and present. The show encourages an exploration far beyond the idea of family in a nuclear sense, suggesting a broader, more inclusive definition that also invites us to consider where our own sense of connection and identity lie.
“Our family is always going to form in our hearts because we need role models, connection, and a sense of identity—so we learn to seek family in other places and things, like pets, fashion, friends, culture.” –Tracing Our Tales participant
“Family is very much what you make it. It doesn’t have to be those who you share the same blood with, but those who you share the same interest with.” –Tracing Our Tales participant
Thomas Gainsborough, The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, ca. 1756, oil on canvas, 114 × 105 cm (London: National Gallery).
In partnership with The National Gallery, the exhibition includes three large-scale masterpieces from the Gallery’s collection, by Hogarth, Gainsborough, and the Le Nain Brothers. Objects from the Foundling Museum’s collections and creative responses from the Tracing Our Tales participants invite visitors to look afresh at these well-loved paintings and to question their assumptions. Works by contemporary artists who have responded to the theme of family, as well as newly commissioned pieces, further enrich the exploration of the themes, revealing changes and continuities over time. Contemporary artists loaning work include Matthew Finn, Sunil Gupta, Chantal Joffe, Gillian Wearing, and Hetain Patel, alongside Mark Titchner, Annabel Dover, Tamsin van Essen, Harold Offeh, and Helen Barff who have created new work.
As a charitable home for children whose mothers could no longer keep or care for them, the Foundling Hospital was an alternative to family for the 25,000+ children who were admitted between 1741 and 1954. Without family, foundlings were forced to find connections elsewhere—through their foster families, peers, teachers, and places of employment. Within the context of the Museum’s historic story of care, Finding Family challenges the social construct of family and asks important questions about who and what defines who we are, how we interact with one another, and how we perceive others. The exhibition also showcases the ongoing power of art to challenge, question, and encourage us to see the world with new eyes.
“Writing poetry whilst being in the Foundling Museum is important because we get a sense of how we would feel in the foundlings’ shoes. We have a lot to relate to, especially if you’ve been in care.” –Tracing Our Tales participant
Enfilade 
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