Exhibition | Bed Furnishings in Early America
Now on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum:
Bed Furnishings in Early America: An Intimate Look
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, 26 September 2018 — 27 January 2019
Curated by Brandy Culp
Anna Tuels, Paper Template-pieced Quilt, Hourglass, 1785, New England, various worsteds, silk, and printed cottons, with a wool backing and wool batting (Wadsworth Atheneum, 1967.75).
From birth to death, the bed played a significant role in life’s daily cycles. Almost a room within a room, the bed was a place for sleeping as well as intimate activities, such as sex, childbirth, nursing, convalescence, and even death. From the seventeenth to early nineteenth century there was a bed in almost every room of the home. The ‘best bed’—today we call it the master bed—was usually located in either the distinguished parlor or ‘best’ bedchamber. These were public spaces, where guests were entertained and daily activities took place.
The fully-outfitted bedstead was one of the most expensive household items in Early America, regardless of one’s wealth. Bed hangings, counterpanes, coverlets, bed rugs, and quilts bear witness to the aspirations of their owners and makers. All are exceptional examples of handwork that reflect the skills of talented artisans, whether hired professional or homemaker, and mark the global intersections between people of various cultures. Bed Furnishings in Early America, An Intimate Look explores the evolution of privacy, intimacy, status, and global exchange through the bedstead, its textiles, and their placement within the home into the late nineteenth century.
Exhibition | Bouke de Vries: War and Pieces
Bouke de Vries, War and Pieces, 2012, 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century porcelain, plastic, sprayed plaster, acrylic, steel, aluminum, gilded brass, and mixed media (installation view at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2018).
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From the press release, via Art Daily:
Bouke de Vries: War and Pieces
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, 4 October 2018 — 6 January 2019
Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama, 2 February — 12 May 2019
For years, the work of celebrated artist Bouke de Vries has been shown all over Europe in museums, galleries, castles, and palaces. America won’t be left behind. Now and through the middle of 2019, several sculptures by Dutch-born de Vries will be making their stateside debut at museums in Hartford, Connecticut; Montgomery, Alabama; and Nashville, Tennessee. Foremost among them is his pièce de résistance: War and Pieces, a 26-foot-long installation inspired by the lavish decorative centerpieces of 18th-century European banqueting tables.
The first venue is the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, where de Vries is the featured artist in the 180th installment of the museum’s MATRIX contemporary art exhibition series, running from 4 October 2018 until 6 January 2019. “Because the Wadsworth Atheneum possesses such an outstanding collection of the very kind of porcelain figures and centerpieces that Bouke de Vries references in his monumental work,” observes Linda Roth, Senior Curator and Charles C. and Eleanor Lamont Cunningham Curator of European Decorative Arts, “featuring War and Pieces at our museum makes perfect sense.” Adds de Vries: “It is an honor to debut my most ambitious work at America’s first-ever museum of art, the Wadsworth Atheneum, in their longstanding and groundbreaking MATRIX series.”
From Hartford, War and Pieces travels South, to Alabama, where it will be on view at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts from 2 February to 12 May 2019.
Employing broken shards of various kinds of porcelain-ancient and modern—from Hummel thru blanc de Chine to IKEA—the artist has arranged them into apocalyptic vignettes of orchestrated destruction. Dead center is a towering nuclear mushroom cloud. Six mano-a-mano battle scenes flank the cloud, fought by armour-clad figures molded from 18th-century embodiments of Mars and Minerva by England’s Derby factory. The sugarcoated warring figures are mutating into cyborgs with colorful bionic limbs and weaponry from Transformer toys. The striking diversity among the sugar, porcelain and plastic underscores the tension between the handmade and the industrial. De Vries’s masterwork is an unforgettable commentary on the follies of war and is perhaps the most startling tablescape since Judy Chicago’s landmark Dinner Party, 1979.
London-based, de Vries first worked in fashion with John Galliano, Stephen Jones, and Zandra Rhodes before switching careers. Since then the 57-year-old artist has worked as a conservator of ceramics and glass, in addition to his pursuits as an artist since 2010. Ironically, the skills he deploys as a restorer went in a totally opposite direction for War and Pieces. Instead of reconstructing shattered porcelain, he deconstructed it, inaugurating a new status while creating new virtues. Says de Vries: “I have dreamed of sharing my approach to art—especially War and Pieces—at such prestigious museums around the United States.”
In addition, from 2 February until 9 June 2019, as part of Derived from the Decorative: Works by Faig Ahmed, Beth Lipman and Bouke de Vries at Nashville’s Cheekwood Estate and Gardens, other works by de Vries will be making their American bow. Peacock 1 and Glass Cloud are also both constructed of broken pieces of historic ceramic and glass. Bouke de Vries is represented in the United States by Ferrin Contemporary in North Adams, Massachusetts.
Exhibition | Thomas Gainsborough: Drawings at the Clark
Thomas Gainsborough, Landscape with Herdsman Driving Cows and Distant Buildings, mid to late 1780s, black chalk over brush and gray wash with lead white on beige laid paper, fixed with gum (Williamstown: The Clark Art Institute, gift of the Manton Art Foundation in memory of Sir Edwin and Lady Manton, 2007.8.77).
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From The Clark:
Thomas Gainsborough: Drawings at the Clark
The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1 December 2018 — 17 March 2019
Though recognized as one of the most fashionable portrait painters of the eighteenth century, Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) made hundreds of drawings of the English landscape. Abounding with foliage, cottages, and pastoral figures—shepherds driving flocks of sheep and cows drinking from pools or streams along meandering paths—Gainsborough’s landscapes present an idealized view of country life. Rather than depicting specific locales, these lyrical sheets evoke the gentle woodland and heath of his native Suffolk, in the east, and later, the mountainous Lake District of Cumbria, in the northwest. Thomas Gainsborough: Drawings at the Clark reveals the artist’s fascination with mixed-media technique: graphite, chalks, ink washes, watercolor, and oil paints intermingle on toned papers. Together, the sixteen drawings on view in the Clark’s Manton Gallery for British Art demonstrate how Gainsborough championed an imaginative approach over naturalistic detail and reveal his fascination with mixed-media technique.
Exhibition | Secret Tiepolo
Seven frescoes by Giandomenico Tiepolo are on public view for the first time in Vicenza:
Secret Tiepolo / Tiepolo Segreto
Palladio Museum, Vicenza, 3 November 2017 — 31 December 2018
Curated by Guido Beltramini and Fabrizio Magani
Sette straordinari affreschi di Giandomenico Tiepolo (1727–1804) da oltre cinquant’anni anni erano conservati nelle residenze dei proprietari che coraggiosamente li salvarono dalle distruzioni belliche. Oggi gli eredi, convinti dell’opportunità di un godimento pubblico di tali capolavori, li hanno destinati al Palladio Museum. Ad essi viene dedicata una mostra, realizzata grazie alle competenze e alla collaborazione della Soprintendenza di Verona diretta da Fabrizio Magani, che la cura insieme al direttore del Palladio Museum, Guido Beltramini.
In questa vicenda s’intrecciano più storie. Quella della straordinaria arte dei Tiepolo, in grado di trasformare dalla radice la tradizione frescante veneta. Quella della difesa del patrimonio artistico negli anni cupi della seconda guerra mondiale. Ma esiste una terza storia che lega in modo indissolubile gli affreschi di Palazzo Valmarana Franco agli studi palladiani: essi infatti sono realizzati due decenni dopo la straordinaria decorazione di Villa Valmarana ai Nani, per il figlio del committente, Gaetano Valmarana. Nella dimora suburbana a poca distanza dalla Rotonda palladiana, per il padre Giustino Valmarana, i Tiepolo celebrano la naturalezza di una vita ‘moralizzata’ in campagna. Vent’anni dopo, in città, a poca distanza dal Teatro Olimpico, il registro è completamente diverso: Tiepolo concepisce per il figlio una riedizione in pittura della magnificente scena del teatro all’antica di Palladio adottando non più il registro lieve e scherzoso della vita agreste ma il linguaggio aulico, monocromo ma nondimeno guizzante, della vicina architettura palladiana.
“Siamo orgogliosi di poter contribuire alla cultura della nostra città—dichiarano Camillo e Giovanni Franco, proprietari degli affreschi—con una parte della storia della nostra famiglia.” Fu fra l’altro Fausto Franco, zio dei generosi proprietari e Soprintendente ai Monumenti, a seguire il salvataggio degli affreschi di famiglia nel 1945. Dieci anni dopo lo stesso Franco, insieme—fra gli altri—a Rodolfo Pallucchini, Anthony Blunt, Rudolf Wittkower e André Chastel, fu fra i tredici fondatori del primo Consiglio scientifico del Centro palladiano, coordinato da Renato Cevese.
Tiepolo Segreto (Vicenza, Palladium Museum, 2018), 80 pages, ISBN: 978-8899765781, 17€.
Exhibition | Luxury in Silk: Fashion in the 18th Century
From the GNM:
Luxury in Silk: Fashion in the 18th Century / Luxus in Seide: Mode des 18. Jahrhunderts
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, 5 July 2018 — 6 January 2019
Sacque (sack-back gown or robe à la française), ca. 1760 (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum).
In 2017, the GNM was able to acquire a remarkable object: a one-piece silk dress from the period around 1760 with a hooped skirt from about the same time. The colours of the silk fabric are extremely well-preserved; the pale blue background with the colourful flower decoration has hardly faded at all—which is extremely rare in textiles from this period.
But what did one wear with a dress of this kind? In the exhibition, splendid jewellery, accessories, and ‘fancies’ such as headpieces and collars, fans and gloves, silk stockings and shoes complete the picture of a lady ‘à la mode’. Contemporary portrayals and excerpts from historical literature also give a deep insight into the enormous skill that went into making such elaborate clothing and accessories. With around 100 items on display, the exhibition offers a fascinating insight into luxury clothing of the 18th century and also examines various issues within historical textile and clothing research.
Exhibition | Museo del Prado, 1819–2019: A Place of Memory
Now on view at the Prado:
Museo del Prado, 1819–2019: A Place of Memory / Un lugar de memoria
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 19 November 2018 — 10 March 2019
Curated by Javier Portús
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Portrait of José Álvarez de Toledo, Marquis of Villafranca and Duke of Alba, 1795, oil on canvas (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado).
This exhibition launches the extensive programme organised by the Prado to mark the 200th anniversary of its foundation. It offers a survey of the museum’s history, focusing on the dialogue between the museum and society; heritage policies in Spain; the trends that have guided the growth of the museum’s collection; and its transformation into a place that has allowed Spanish and foreign writers, intellectuals, and artists to reflect on the country’s past and its collective identity.
Organised around the art and documentary collections at the Prado (both visual and sound archives), which shall be exhibited alongside works by artists who have come into contact with the museum over the last two centuries, the exhibition presents a total of 168 original works, 34 from different Spanish and foreign institutions, together with a variety of complementary materials including documents, maps, pictures, photographs, and audiovisual installations.
Exhibition | Art of Native America: The Diker Collection
Press release for the exhibition:
Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection
The Met Fifth Avenue, New York, 4 October 2018 — 6 October 2019
Opening October 4 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection will feature 116 artworks from more than 50 cultures across North America. Ranging in date from the 2nd to the early 20th century, the diverse objects are promised gifts (first announced in spring 2017), donations, and loans to The Met from the pioneering collectors Charles and Valerie Diker. The collection has particular strengths in sculpture from British Columbia and Alaska, California baskets, pottery from southwestern pueblos, Plains drawings and regalia, and rare accessories from the eastern Woodlands.
Max Hollein, the Museum’s Director, commented: “The presentation in the American Wing of these exceptional works by Indigenous artists marks a critical moment in which conventional narratives of history are being expanded to acknowledge and celebrate the contributions of cultures that have long been marginalized. The extraordinary gift of the Diker Collection has forever transformed The Met’s ability to more fully display the development of American art, enabling an important shift in thinking.”
The exhibition is made possible by The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund, the Enterprise Holdings Endowment, and the Walton Family Foundation.
A ceremonial opening of the exhibition involving contemporary Native American artists will be accompanied by a robust series of public programs.
Shoulder bag, ca. 1780; Anishinaabe, probably Ojibwa; possibly made in Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Ontario; native-tanned leather, porcupine quills, dye, metal cones, deer hair, vegetal fiber, and wool yarn (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Promised Gift of Charles and Valerie Diker, L.2018.35.70).
Art of Native America will be the first exhibition of Indigenous American art to be presented in the American Wing since it was established in 1924. Originally focused on Colonial and early Federal decorative arts and architecture, the Wing’s collecting areas have continued to evolve.
Sylvia Yount, the Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing, said: “We are committed to exploring thoughtfully and sensitively the entangled histories of contact and colonization from both Native and Euro-American perspectives. The Met takes seriously its curatorial responsibility to share with our broad audiences—in a variety of displays and contexts—the cultural endurance and creative continuity of Indigenous American artists.”
Art of Native America will highlight production from seven distinct regions: Woodlands, Plains, Plateau, California and Great Basin, Southwest, Northwest Coast, and Arctic. Featured works cover all of the major artistic forms by both identified and unrecorded Native Americans: paintings, drawings, sculpture, textiles, quill and bead embroidery, basketry, and ceramics. Highlights include a ca. 1800 shoulder bag made from finely tanned and dyed deerskin hide embellished with porcupine quills by an Anishinaabe woman, possibly from Ontario, Canada; a striking ca. 1895–1900 ceramic jar depicting the Butterfly Maiden spirit being (Palhik Mana) by renowned Hopi-Tewa potter Nampeyo from Hano Village, Arizona; a monumental 1907 woven basket by Washoe artist Louisa Keyser from Carson City, Nevada; a masterfully carved 1820–40 Tsimshian headdress frontlet with abalone shell inlays from British Columbia; and an elaborate ca. 1900 dance mask by a Yup’ik artist from Hooper Bay, Alaska.
A core group of works from the Diker Collection will remain on view in the American Wing’s Erving and Joyce Wolf Gallery, while light-sensitive works will be rotated annually. Displays of Native and non-Native art—historical and contemporary—will also be organized in response to the Diker Collection.
The Met is collaborating with a range of advisors on the exhibition, including: Kathleen Ash-Milby (Diné/Navajo), Associate Curator, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, New York; Bruce Bernstein, Executive Director, Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone), Professor of History and American Studies, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; Steven C. Brown, independent scholar, Olympic Peninsula, Washington; Elizabeth Hutchinson, Associate Professor, Art History, Barnard College and Columbia University, New York; and Brian Vallo (Acoma), Director, Indian Arts Research Center, School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Gaylord Torrence, with contributions by Ned Blackhawk and Sylvia Yount, Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), 232 pages, ISBN: 978-1588396624, $50.
Exhibition | Artistic Encounters with Indigenous America
From The Met:
Artistic Encounters with Indigenous America
The Met Fifth Avenue, New York, 3 December 2018 — 13 May 2019
Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin, Osage Warrior (detail), 1805–07, watercolor and graphite on off-white wove paper, 18 × 16 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 54.82).
This exhibition will explore how European and American artists represented Indigenous North Americans in drawings, prints, watercolors, photographs, and popular ephemera from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Through forty-five examples from The Met collection, the display will trace the evolution of this complex imagery over time, highlighting the ways in which it contributed to the creation and dissemination of myths and misconceptions about Native peoples, often justifying their dispossession, cultural destruction, and genocide. From formulaic depictions of so-called savage warriors and Indian princesses to romanticized representations of a ‘vanishing race’, these works reveal the pervasive influence of Indigenous America on the Euro-American imagination.
Artistic Encounters with Indigenous America complements the exhibition Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection, on view at The Met Fifth Avenue from 4 October 2018 through 6 October 2019.
Exhibition | Magnificent Venice!
Now on view at the Grand Palais (and also worth noting that the Royal Collection exhibition on Canaletto opens in Dublin in December) . . .
Magnificent Venice! Europe and the Arts in the 18th Century
Grand Palais, Paris, 26 September 2018 — 21 January 2019
Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Palazzo Ducale, Venice, 23 February — 9 June 2019
Curated by Catherine Loisel
Venice fascinated Europe in the 18th century. Its site, on islands transformed into a monumental city, its political regime, its artistic and musical traditions, and its carnival made it attractive and unique. At the time, the Republic of Venice, with its rich history, was among the key powers in Europe. But throughout the century, the city also suffered a series of crises, both economic and social, which led to its decline and precipitated its fall in 1797 at the hands of Bonaparte’s armies. Despite this difficult context, the city’s arts scene still displayed an exuberant vitality. Painters, sculptors, decorators, and designers were among the most illustrious on the Italian stage. Composers, playwrights, instrumentalists and singers were famous throughout Europe. It is this last golden age that the exhibition aims to recount, with an emphasis on the influence of Venetian artists in England, France, Germany, and Spain. It also evokes the power of the myth reflected in their works inspired by the joyful and decadent Serenissima. In addition to fine art, the exhibition also seeks to recreate the atmosphere of these last flames of a civilisation. To this end, the scenography has been entrusted to Macha Makeïeff, a set designer renowned for her lively inventiveness.
Catherine Loisel, Éblouissante Venise! Les arts et l’Europe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Les éditions Rmn-Grand Palais, 2018), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-2711870714, €45.
The exhibition booklet, in English, is available as a PDF file here»
Exhibition | De Vouet à Boucher
Now on view at Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans:
De Vouet à Boucher, au cœur de la collection de Motais de Narbonne
Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, 15 September 2018 — 13 January 2019
Curated by Olivia Voisin and Viviane Mesqui
Le musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans présentera du 15 septembre 2018 au 13 janvier 2019 l’intégralité de la collection d’Héléna et de Guy Motais de Narbonne dans une exposition originale plongeant au coeur de l’univers des collectionneurs : entre culture muséale et connoisseurship, les Motais de Narbonne ont rassemblé 80 tableaux des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, italiens et français, résolument tournés vers l’histoire.
Leur collection, qui par ses artistes et par ses sujets entre en résonnance avec la collection de peintures anciennes du musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, sera montrée pour la première fois au public dans son intégralité, en dialogue avec des oeuvres de collections publiques ou privées.
Cette exposition se place sous le parrainage de Pierre Rosenberg, membre de l’Académie française et grand connaisseur de la collection Motais de Narbonne, en collaboration avec de nombreux historiens de l’art. Tout au long du parcours, le visiteur pénétrera dans l’intimité d’une collection privée vivante, rythmée par les histoires et les coups de coeur qui ont conduit à sa constitution. Les Motais de Narbonne partagent avec cette exposition non seulement l’exceptionnelle collection qu’ils ont rassemblée, mais également une part de l’histoire intime qui se tisse entre un amateur et un tableau. L’émotion, les motifs insolites et surprenants occupent ainsi une place particulière dans le coeur d’Héléna et de Guy Motais de Narbonne, stimulant leur regard et générant parfois une acquisition. De même, leur vif intérêt pour les musées, qui a joué un rôle déterminant dans la formation de leur regard et de leur goût, ponctue le parcours par des rapprochements avec des peintures qui les ont inspirés.
The press kit (dossier de presse) is available here»
Viviane Mesqui and Pierre Rosenberg, De Vouet à Boucher, au coeur de la collection Motais de Narbonne (Heule: Snoeck, 2018), 263 pages, ISBN: 978-9461614742, $50.
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