Enfilade

The Cincinnati Art Museum has just announced two appointments: Serena Urry as Chief Conservator and Esther Bell as Curator of European Painting, Sculpture and Drawings. Bell completed her Ph.D. at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, writing on “Charles-Antoine Coypel: Painting and Performance in Eighteenth-Century France,” under the direction of Mariët Westermann and Mark Ledbury. The press release as noted at ArtDaily (30 October 2012) . . .

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The Cincinnati Art Museum announced Serena Urry as Chief Conservator. Before coming to the Cincinnati Art Museum, Serena served as Senior Conservator of Paintings at the Barnes Foundation, preparing its Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection for the historic move to downtown Philadelphia. Prior to that, Serena was Conservator of Paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts where she conserved paintings ranging in date from the 14th to the 20th century. Among the exhibitions she worked on were American Beauty (2002-2004) and Masterpieces from the Detroit Institute of Arts at TEFAF in 2005.

Serena has a B.A. from Tufts University, and a M.A. in art history and a diploma in Conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. She was awarded a residency by the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio in 1996, and a fellowship by Save Venice in Venice in 1999-2000. She has lectured and published about many of the conservation projects she has undertaken. “We are so excited to have somebody of Serena’s experience and insights joining the Art Museum. She will be able to build on the terrific work past Chief Conservators have done to make our art shine forth in all its beauty,” says Cincinnati Art Museum Director Aaron Betsky. Serena grew up in the Boston area and holds dual American and Italian citizenship. She has six nephews and nieces in an extended family that stretches from East cost to the West. Serena looks forward to exploring all that Cincinnati has to offer.

The Cincinnati Art Museum also announced Esther Bell as Curator of European Painting, Sculpture and Drawings. Esther received her doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University with a specialization in 17th- and 18th-century European art. She received a Masters in the history of art at Williams College and a bachelor of arts from the University of Virginia. With over ten years of experience in some of the nation’s finest museums, Dr. Bell has worked at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Morgan Library & Museum, New York. At the Morgan, she recently organized exhibitions such as Ingres at the Morgan and Rembrandt’s World: Dutch Drawings from the Clement C. Moore Collection.

Dr. Bell lived extensively in Paris during her graduate work; she was a Fulbright Scholar with an affiliation at the Musée du Louvre, Paris and a Theodore Rousseau Fellow in Paris in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has delivered lectures in many distinguished international venues such as the University of St. Andrews, Scotland; the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and she has published numerous articles and exhibition catalogues. “Esther brings an enthusiasm to her art history that is positively electrifying. She combines thorough knowledge and expertise with the desire to have everybody share her love of art, and we look forward to her contributions here,” says Cincinnati Art Museum Director Aaron Betsky. Esther is a self-proclaimed “foodie” and enjoys travel, reading fiction, and yoga. She will move to Cincinnati with her husband, Jason, and they look forward to exploring Blue Grass music, Graeter’s, and the local contemporary art scene.

After years of hearing that museums couldn’t provide high resolution reproductions of works in their collections because people might make t-shirts with them, we now learn that the Rijkmuseum is inviting us to do precisely that . . . and more. -CH

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As a prelude to its reopening 13 April 2013, one of the world’s leading museums, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, will launch Rijks Studio, a ground-breaking new online presentation of 125,000 works in its collection. Rijks Studio invites members of the public to create their own masterpieces by downloading images of artworks or details of artworks in the collection and using them in a creative way. The ultra high-resolution images of works, both famous and less well-known, can be freely downloaded, zoomed in on, shared, added to personal ‘studios’, or manipulated copyright-free. Users can have prints made of entire works of art or details from them. Other suggestions for the use of images include creating material to upholster furniture or wallpaper, or to decorate a car or an iPad cover for example.

To celebrate this digital milestone, the Rijksmuseum is asking leading international artists, designers and architects to become pioneers of Rijks Studio by selecting one work from the collection and using it creatively to create a new artwork. These will be released in the run up to the reopening of the museum. The first work to be unveiled, by Droog Design, is a tattoo inspired by a flower painting in the collection called Still-Life with Flowers by Jan Davidszn. de Heem and Rachel Ruysch from the 17th century.

Taco Dibbits, Director of Collections, said: “The Rijksmuseum is a museum for and of everyone, and with the launch of Rijks Studio we are excited to share the extensive collection with art lovers around the world using the latest digital technology. We created Rijks Studio based on the belief that the collection of the Rijksmuseum belongs to us all. The collection inspires, we want to unleash the artist in everyone.”

Ethan Lasser, the new curator of American Art at the Harvard Art Museums, completed his dissertation at Yale in 2007, writing on “Figures in the Grain: The Enlightenment of Anglo-American Furniture, 1660-1800.” Press release (dated 15 August 2012) . . .

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The Harvard Art Museums are pleased to announce the appointment of Ethan Lasser as Margaret S. Winthrop Associate Curator of American Art, effective September 18, 2012. Lasser will join the Art Museums’ Division of European and American Art.

Lasser’s innovative work as a curator and academic experience align well with the Art Museums’ teaching and research mission. From 2007 to the present, Lasser has been curator of the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a research institute committed to advancing progressive scholarship in American art through exhibitions, publications, teaching, and public programming. In 2008, he reinstalled the foundation’s permanent galleries at the Milwaukee Art Museum, a 13,000-square-foot exhibition space for American paintings and decorative arts. He has also served as adjunct professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he initiated the Object Lab, a summer program for undergraduates focused on teaching American art and craft history through hands-on research with artifacts. Lasser is currently developing two new exhibitions—The Practice and Poetics of Repair and Makers: Craft and Industry in American Art—both of which explore his interest in art-making processes and materiality. Lasser, who graduated magna cum laude from Williams College, has a PhD in art history from Yale University. (more…)

Thanks to Courtney Barnes for passing along this press release from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (dated 3 August 2012) . . .

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has agreed to purchase the exceptional mahogany dressing table that has been on loan to the Museum for 36 years. Made in Philadelphia in the late 1760s or early 1770s, the table is the mate to the Museum’s monumental high chest, which was donated in 1957 by Amy Howe Steel Greenough. The dynamic carved decoration on both the high chest and the dressing table depicts a scene from Aesop’s fable of “The Fox and the Grapes” on their central drawers. The impressive proportions of these remarkable examples of 18th-century craftsmanship echo the architectural framework of the bedchamber for which they were made. Together, they epitomize the elegance and sophistication that distinguish Philadelphia furniture as the finest produced in British colonial North America.

“The Museum has now realized its cherished dream of keeping ‘The Fox and the Grapes’ dressing table together with its companion high chest,” said Timothy Rub, the Museum’s George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer. “The two anchor our galleries of early American art; and now that their future together is secure, we can continue to display and interpret them as superlative artistic achievements.”

The high chest was known to Museum curators early in the 20th century when it was borrowed from Mary Fell Howe for the 1924 exhibition Philadelphia Chippendale. Lauded for its stately presence, highly figured mahogany, abundant carved ornament, and the rare depiction of a narrative from one of Aesop’s fables, the high chest also generated curiosity about whether or not its companion piece—the dressing table—was still in existence. “The Fox and the Grapes” dressing table was soon discovered and made its debut in William MacPherson Hornor, Jr.’s 1935 publication The Blue Book of Philadelphia Furniture: William Penn to George Washington. Joseph Kindig, Jr., the preeminent York, Pennsylvania, furniture and gun dealer, purchased the dressing table from Miss Eliza Davids in the late 1930s. Though Kindig was an antiques dealer, the dressing table was not offered for sale. Instead, it remained in the Kindig’s private home. Mr. Kindig died in 1971, and soon thereafter a friend of the Museum alerted curators to the whereabouts of the coveted “Fox and Grapes” dressing table. The Kindigs agreed to lend the dressing table so it could be displayed next to its high chest in 1976 for Philadelphia: Three Centuries of American Art, the great survey celebrating American art exhibited at the Museum during the bicentennial year. The two looked superb together—each had found its accompaniment—and after the exhibition closed, the dressing table remained on loan to the Museum. (more…)

The following petition, written by Jeffrey Hamburger, Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture at Harvard University, voices concerns for the exhibition fate of Old Masters at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. The German text is available at the petition website. Kate Connolly reported on the story for The Guardian (12 July 2012).

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We write to you to ask that you reconsider the current plan to empty the Gemäldegalerie to make room for a display of twentieth-century art from the Pietzsch collection.

We understand that Mies van der Rohe’s Nationalgalerie provides inadequate space for Berlin’s growing collections of modern art, and we welcome the prospect of a permanent home for them.

However, finding that space in the Gemäldegalerie at the expense of one of the world’s premier collections of Old Master paintings, without also making concrete plans to display that collection concurrently in its entirety, would be a tragedy. In the current plan, it appears that once again the past is being asked to make way for the present without sufficient attention to its future. The disappearance into storage of whatever paintings cannot be displayed in the Bode Museum – which we call on you to disclose — is not acceptable, even for only six years. In the current political and economic climate, and with stiff competition for funding from politically more expedient, if culturally more dubious, plans to rebuild the Stadtschloß, we fear that six years could easily become a decade or more.

All too often, it seems, great works of art in Berlin serve as pawns in a seemingly endless chess game, to be moved about and sacrificed at the will and whim of politicians. Germany is fortunate in that culture remains a focus of political and public concern. That concern, however, would best be expressed by finding a reasonable solution, one that respects a legacy that barely survived the centuries and that deserves better than to be rendered invisible for an indeterminate length of time.

We therefore write to ask, not that you shelve your plans for the Pietzsch collection, but rather that you complement them with an adequate strategy that will do justice to the whole of Berlin’s extraordinary collections. We believe that the Old Master collection should be moved to make way for the Pietzsch collection only after space on the Museuminsel has been found to accommodate it – hardly a rash proposal.

Yours sincerely, Jeffrey Hamburger, Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture, Harvard University

To add your name to the petition, click here»