Enfilade

Now on view at the Fondazione Maria Cosway in Lodi, in the nineteenth-century rooms of the Collegio delle Grazie, the girls’ school that Cosway founded in 1812 (with additional information available here) . . .

Maria Hadfield Cosway
Fondazione Maria Cosway, Lodi, 23 September — 27 November 2022

Curated by Monja Faraoni and Laura Facchin with Massimiliano Ferrario and Maria Cristina Loi

Oltre cinquanta opere tra dipinti, lettere, spartititi musicali e sculture che ripercorrono la vita di Maria Hadfield Cosway (1760–1838) sono esposti a Lodi nella mostra a lei dedicata visitabile fino al 27 novembre.

Il visitatore sarà accompagnato nel percorso da pannelli esplicativi e didascalie che mettono in luce le fasi essenziali della biografia dell’artista e filantropa, nonché i personaggi e gli eventi della “Grande Storia” che segnarono le diverse fasi della sua vita. L’artista e donna di cultura è molto nota sia a Londra che negli Stati Uniti d’America per la sua amicizia con Thomas Jefferson, terzo Presidente USA. Un periodo della sua vita lo trascorse anche a Lodi, dove morì nel 1838.

La sua profonda convinzione nell’importanza dell’educazione per i giovani portò Maria Cosway ad aprire proprio a Lodi, nella sede dell’ex convento dei padri Minimi, il collegio della Beata Vergine Maria delle Grazie, destinato alle bambine dai 6 ai 12 anni, che ospiterà anche Vittoria Manzoni.

La mostra è stata organizzata dalla Fondazione Maria Cosway e vede la collaborazione di diverse realtà locali tra cui due istituti lodigiani, il liceo artistico Callisto Piazza e la Fondazione Luigi Clerici. Studenti ed insegnanti sono stati coinvolti nella creazione del catalogo e dell’allestimento delle diverse tappe dell’esposizione, visitabile presso la sede della Fondazione di via Paolo Gorini 10.

Monja Faraoni, Laura Facchin, Massimiliano Ferrario, and Maria Cristina Loi, eds., Maria Hadfield Cosway (Lodi: Fondazione Maria Cosway, 2022), 444 pages, ISBN: 979-1280950208.

S O M M A R I O

Presentazioni istituizionali

Maria Cosway tra Firenze, Londra, Parigi e Lodi: Le Ragioni della Mostra

• L’educazione in età napoleonica — Mario Riberi
• Maria Cosway in London, 1780–1790 and 1794–1801 — Stephen Lloyd
• ‘I am susceptible and everything that surrounds me has great power to magnetise me’: Maria Cosway e l’ambiente romantico — Massimiliano Ferrario
• Maria Cosway et l’ambiente artistico-letterario femminile fra la fine dell’Antico Regime e la Restaurazione — Laura Facchin
• Maria Cosway, Leonardo e Giuseppe Bossi: fra teorie artistiche e appunti figurativi — Rosalba Antonelli
• La musica nella vita e nel progetto educativo di Maria Cosway — Patrizia Fiorio
• Una storia ancora da raccontare: la biblioteca della Fondazione Maria Cosway — Francesco Laghezza e Beatrice Porchera
• La moda nella Parigi et nella Milano di Maria Cosway — Silvia Mira
• La vita di Blevio — Laura Facchin e Massimiliano Ferrario
• Un titolo nobitare per Maria Cosway — Luca Marcarini
• Gaetano Manfredini: ‘volente scultore pei quale l’ingiusta sorte non ha benigni sorris!’ e l’eterno volto di Maria Cosway — Beatrice Bolandrini

Catalogolo delle opere

Maria Cosway et gli Stati Uniti, a cura di Maria Cristina Loi

• ‘But that immense sea, makes it a great distance’: note sui carteggio Maria Cosway–Thomas Jefferson — Maria Cristina Loi
• Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway in Paris: art and affection — Susan R. Stein

Catalogo delle opere

L’allestimento della mostra Maria Hadfield Cosway — Elena Amoriello, Luca Armigero, Annalisa Aversa, Maria Teresa Carossa, Chiara Lupi, Susanna Marinoni e Angela Mento

Bibliografia
Indice dei nomi
Credit fotografici

On view for a few more weeks at the Alte Pinakothek:

Vive le Pastel! Pastel Painting from Vivien to La Tour / Pastellmalerei von Vivien bis La Tour
Alte Pinakothek, Munich, 7 May — 23 October 2022

Joseph Vivien, Portrait of Charles, Duke of Berry (1686–1714), 1700, pastel on paper, 100 × 81 cm (Staatsgalerie im Neuen Schloss Schleißheim).

Often seen in art galleries or palaces, in magnificent ornamental frames and behind glass, their powdery surface making them seem as delicate as they are exquisite: pastels. They enjoyed considerable popularity in the 18th century when many works were created, especially in France. The colours are applied dry, using pastel sticks and covering the whole surface. The pastel painting technique was frequently used for lively, sensitively composed portraits in particular. But what are the reasons for the technique’s blossoming at the time? What advantages did pastels have over oil paintings? Who had their portraits painted in pastel? And how exactly were pastels created? These questions are explored in this special exhibition presented by the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen at the Alte Pinakothek.

The focus is on the two collections’ own holdings, in which such important names as Joseph Vivien, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Rosalba Carriera, and Jean-Étienne Liotard are represented. For the first time pastel paintings from the Alte Pinakothek are shown together with those from the state gallery in Neues Schloss Schleißheim. In addition, some rarely displayed works from the depot by anonymous artists, as well as a few selected loans are also exhibited. This unique combination of works makes it possible to compare artists and their approaches and invites visitors to discover the variety of different effects realised in these works.

There are two further reasons for this exhibition. Generous support provided by the Corona Fund of the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung has made it possible for urgently needed conservation and restoration work to be carried out on the Schleißheim pastels by a specialist. As a result, and due to examinations being carried out as part of a current research project on the French paintings, the works are temporarily in Munich. Before their return to the gallery in Schleißheim the opportunity is being taken to exhibit them in the Alte Pinakothek and, as such, within a larger context. At the same time, the presentation also celebrates a new acquisition—Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Philippe by Maurice Quentin de La Tour—donated by Mr Fritz Lehnhoff as a loan from the Museumsstiftung zur Förderung der Staatlichen Bayerischen Museen, that entered the collection in 2021.

A guide to the collection, covering the complete holdings of pastels from the late 17th and 18th centuries in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, accompanies the exhibition.

Elisabeth Hipp, ed., with an introduction by Bernhard Maaz and contributions by Bernd Ebert, Ulrike Fischer, Elisabeth Hipp, Xavier Salmon, and Herbert Rott, Pastellmalerei vor 1800 in den Bayerischen Staatsgemäldesammlungen (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2022), 136 pages, ISBN: 978-3422989009, 15€.

From The Frick:

The Eveillard Gift
The Frick Madison, New York, 13 October 2022 — 26 February 2023

In the summer of 2021, The Frick Collection announced the largest and most significant acquisition of drawings and pastels in its history, the generous promised gift of Elizabeth ‘Betty’ and Jean-Marie Eveillard. This promised gift of twenty-six works (eighteen drawings, five pastels, two prints, and one oil sketch) has inspired the museum’s major fall 2022 exhibition, which will be accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue and complementary public programs.

Over the past forty-five years, the Eveillards have assembled an outstanding collection of works on paper, ranging in date from the end of the fifteenth century to the twentieth century and representing artists working in France, Britain, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States. The Eveillards’ landmark promised gift draws upon some of their finest European acquisitions. Along with preparatory figurative sketches, independent studies, and portraits are two vivid landscape scenes. Fittingly for the Frick, artists represented in the gift include François Boucher, Edgar Degas, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Thomas Lawrence, and Jean-François Millet. The group also introduces to the Frick’s holdings works by artists not previously represented in the museum’s permanent collection, including Gustave Caillebotte, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Jan Lievens, John Singer Sargent, and Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Head of a Woman, 1784, pastel on paper, 12 × 10 inches (New York: Frick Collection, promised gift from the Collection of Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard; photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.).

Each of the twenty-six works—selected for their beauty, quality, and condition—either appreciably deepens the Frick’s current holdings of familiar artists or brings to the institution a work by an artist who is not—but should be—represented within the museum’s core areas of European Old Master art. In adding five pastels and an oil sketch, the gift also strengthens the Frick’s holdings in these media. Betty and Jean-Marie Eveillard have been deeply involved with the Frick for many years, both having served as Trustees. Betty is currently the Board’s Chair.

Giulio Dalvit, Aimee Ng and Xavier F. Salomon, The Eveillard Gift (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022), 168 pages, ISBN: 978-1913645281, £35 / $45.

Giulio Dalvit is the Frick’s Assistant Curator of Sculpture. He is a specialist of fifteenth-century Italian sculpture and painting, but his publications also span modern and contemporary art. Dalvit has held various lecture and research positions, most recently as an Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Aimee Ng is a Curator at the Frick, where she is a specialist in Italian Renaissance art. She has held academic and curatorial and positions at Columbia University and the Morgan Library & Museum, where, before joining the Frick, she served as Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Morgan’s Drawing Institute.

Xavier F. Salomon is the Frick’s Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. A noted scholar of Paolo Veronese, he has curated many exhibitions and written or contributed to countless publications. Previously, he was Curator in the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, before that, the Arturo and Holly Melosi Chief Curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Sunrise in Udaipur, ca. 1722–23, detail (Udaipur: The City Palace Museum, The Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation, 2012.20.0015).

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From the press release (29 August) for the exhibition:

A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur
Sackler Gallery, National Museum of Asian Art, Washington DC, 19 November 2022 — 14 May 2023
Cleveland Museum of Art, 11 June — 10 September 2023

Curated by Debra Diamond and Dipti Khera

The National Museum of Asian Art, in collaboration with The City Palace Museum in Udaipur, presents A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur, an exhibition that brings together 63 works on paper, cotton, and scrolls from collections across the world to reveal how artists sought to convey the sensory and lived experience of the lake city of Udaipur in Rajasthan, India. Many of the paintings have never been publicly exhibited or published. Curated by Debra Diamond (Elizabeth Moynihan Curator for South Asian and Southeast Asian Art at the National Museum of Asian Art) and Dipti Khera (associate professor at New York University), A Splendid Land will be on view in the museum’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. It is the first in a series of exhibitions that celebrate the National Museum of Asian Art’s centennial in 2023.

In the 18th century, the artists of Udaipur shifted their focus from small poetic manuscripts to large-scale paintings of the city’s palaces, lakes, mountains, and seasons. They sought to convey the bhava, the emotional tenor and sensorial experiences, that make places and times memorable. This was unlike anything else in Indian art. The paintings express themes of belonging and prosperous futures that are universal. A Splendid Land explores the environmental, political, and emotional contexts in which the new genre emerged. Udaipur’s economy depended on annual monsoons, extensive water harvesting, and securing the loyalty of nobles and allies. By celebrating regional abundance and courtly refinement, the paintings strengthened friendships in the changing political landscapes of early modern South Asia.

“The National Museum of Asian Art has a rich history of connecting visitors with South Asian arts and cultures,” said Chase Robinson, Dame Jillian Sackler Director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art. “Built upon a long-standing collaboration with Indian colleagues, the exhibition will allow the museum to bring extraordinary but little-known pieces to a global audience, enriching its understanding of a fascinating moment in India’s past.”

The National Museum of Asian Art has more than 1,200 objects in its South Asian collections. Sculpture, paintings, and manuscripts illuminate the subcontinent’s many religious and courtly traditions; photography is at the center of the contemporary Indian holdings. A Splendid Land includes 13 paintings from the National Museum of Asian Art; paintings from Udaipur are a strength of the collection.

The artworks featured in the exhibition reveal how painters developed a new genre centered upon the lived experience of local landscapes, lake systems, and palaces. The atelier became an incubator; over some 200 years, artists found ever-new ways to evoke ambience, trigger memories, and create feelings of connection. This departure in subject matter differs from the body-focused visual traditions of Indian art over two millennia. A Splendid Land is the first exhibition to examine closely this shift and how it expands people’s understanding of emotions and sensorial experience, as well as climate and natural resource management, in early modern India.

A Splendid Land is organized as a journey that begins at Udaipur’s center and continues outward: first the lakes and lake palaces, then to the city, the countryside, and finally to the cosmos. An ambient soundscape by the renowned experimental filmmaker Amit Dutta (b. 1977, Jammu, India) underscores the sensorial elements in the paintings, inviting contemporary audiences to sense—and not just see—the moods of these extraordinary places and paintings. The installation will include 51 works on paper (roughly 3 feet by 4 feet), five monumental works on cotton (ranging in height from 5 feet to 10 feet), one scroll (9 feet in length) from the 17th through 19th centuries, and six photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries.

“The exhibition structure directly responds to the visuality of the paintings and the historical goals of the artists,” said Diamond, who is a specialist in Indian court painting. “Each gallery centers upon the emotions engendered by a particular place or season. The sequence of immersive moods will heighten the sensorial experience of place for museum visitors. I am grateful to the City Palace Museum for their partnership on this exciting project that allows our visitors to get a sense of Udaipur and its cultural heritage, and to co-curator Dipti Khera, whose groundbreaking work on historical emotions is central to the exhibition.”

Debra Diamond has curated numerous exhibitions with the National Museum of Asian Art, including Garden & Cosmos (2008–09), Yoga: The Art of Transformation (2013–14), and Body Image: Arts from the Indian Subcontinent, currently on view in the museum’s Freer Gallery of Art. Dipti Khera, associate professor in New York University’s Department of Art History and Institute of Fine Arts, has published extensively, foregrounding art that challenges colonial perspectives and global histories of the 18th and 19th centuries.

A Splendid Land will be accompanied by a robust program of public events, most notably a public symposium on the monsoon, past and present, and the ways that art reveals cultural attitudes towards natural resources and speaks to climate crises in South Asia that will bring perspectives of the past together with insights of the future. Additionally, the traditional Rajasthani music band Raitila Rajasthan will present Music of Splendid Land, featuring songs inspired from themes of Udaipur paintings showcased at the exhibition.

A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur is organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in collaboration with The City Palace Museum, Udaipur administered by The Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation.

Debra Diamond and Dipti Khera, eds., A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2022), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-3777439440, $60.