Enfilade

Now on view at the Vatican:

Winckelmann: Masterpieces throughout the Vatican Museums
Winckelmann: Capolavori diffusi nei Musei Vaticani
Vatican Museums, 9 November 2018 — 9 March 2019

Curated by Guido Comini and Claudia Valeri

A ‘journey within the journey’ along the entire Vatican Museums tour itinerary, this ‘dispersed’ exhibition celebrates the great German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann, father of modern archaeology and precursor of today’s art historians. Preceded by and announced in May at the study day on the Montalto Collection in Villa Negroni, Winckelmann: Masterpieces throughout the Vatican Museums symbolically brings to a conclusion the many initiatives organized to honour the renowned archaeologist in the dual anniversary year of 2018—300 years since his birth and 250 since his tragic death in Trieste.

In the years of his ‘dazzling’ stay in Rome (1755–1768), the Vatican Museums as we know them did not yet exist, but Winckelmann already visited the Vatican Belvedere and returned repeatedly to admire the statues conserved there. Indeed, it was due to his favourable judgement that many antiquities that he studied during his visits to the monuments and collections of the Eternal City were then purchased by the pontiffs. The exhibition, curated by Guido Cornini and Claudia Valeri, is intended to highlight precisely this role of the Vatican collections as a cornerstone for the studies, theories, and writings of the renowned German archaeologist. All sectors of the museums have been involved in this impressive and original exhibition project that offers the visitor a thematic itinerary with pauses for in-depth analysis of 50 selected works—on the basis of the role Winckelmann attributed to them in the construction of his aesthetic thought.

Room XVII of the Pinacoteca is dedicated to the presentation of the figure and his age. The screening of a film and the display of some of his most important writings help explain the atmosphere and cultural climate of Rome around the mid-eighteenth century. Winckelmann arrived in 1755 for a brief stay and instead spent the rest of his life in Italy; enchanted by the grandiose beauty of the antiquities, he devoted all his attention and prodigious talent to them.

Guido Comini and Claudia Valeri, Winckelmann: Masterpieces throughout the Vatican Museums (Vatican City: Edizioni Musei Vaticani, 2018), 232 pages, ISBN: 978-8882714307, $58. Also available in Italian.

Utagawa Toyokuni, One Hundred Looks of Various Women, 1816
(Roger Weston Collection)

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Press release (4 October 2018) for the exhibition:

Painting the Floating World: Ukiyo-e Masterpieces from the Weston Collection
Art Institute of Chicago, 4 November 2018 — 27 January 2019

Curated by Janice Katz

The Art Institute of Chicago presents Painting the Floating World: Ukiyo-e Masterpieces from the Weston Collection, a collection formed by Roger Weston over the last twenty-five years which captures compellingly the beginning, major developments, and final flowering of ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) painting. Encompassing folding screens, hanging scrolls, handscrolls, and albums, these works are technically accomplished masterpieces by the most famous artists in Edo (present-day Tokyo) and beyond. Ukiyo-e comprises both paintings and prints, so it is especially meaningful that such a complete collection of paintings can be shown at a museum known for its significant holdings of prints.

Chobunsai Eishi, Woman Writing a Poem on a Fan, 1789/1801 (Roger Weston Collection).

The floating world (ukiyo) flourished in the bustling urban centers of Kamigata (Kyoto, Osaka) and Edo from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. People of all ranks shared in metropolitan amusements, including the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters and the kabuki theater. The extraordinary paintings in the exhibition, which focus almost exclusively on the beautiful people (bijinga) who were the celebrities of this milieu, offer a privileged, intimate view of the floating world and its many attractions. Ukiyo-e paintings were commissioned works executed by well-known artists, among them Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) and Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806). Lavish, one-of-a-kind objects, the paintings display the makers’ extraordinary technical skill and address a wide range of subjects, including actors, courtesans, geisha, musicians, and scenes of everyday life in Edo.

“When visitors walk away from this show, we want them to have an understanding that the floating world is full of individuals looking to forge a unique identity for themselves as urban, sophisticated, fashionable and trendy, just as we do in our modern-day society,” said Janice Katz, the Roger L. Weston Associate Curator of Japanese Art.

The exhibition, staged in the museum’s Regenstein Hall, will be the largest exhibition exclusively of ukiyo-e paintings in the U.S. With approximately 160 pieces of art on display, the sheer size of the exhibition is spectacular. Visitors can find parallels between ukiyo-e and present day culture—the exploration of fashion and celebrity, the desire to seek out unique experiences—as well as a thread of influence that can be traced though to the fantasy worlds of Japanese anime and manga.

The paintings are organized in chronological order throughout eight rooms, charting the birth of ukiyo-e and key moments in its evolution. To give visitors the ability to observe the skill of the artists up close, the glass cases housing the works will have a depth of just eight inches. The experience of the exhibition is further enhanced with dynamic maps of the city, educational videos, and digital tablets.

The Art Institute of Chicago will be the exclusive venue for this exhibition. A one-day international symposium will be held on November 15, 2018. In addition, a complementary exhibition in the Weston Wing and Japanese Art Galleries featuring prints and paintings from the Art Institute’s collection will be on view from October 6, 2018 to February 10, 2019. Painting the Floating World: Ukiyo-e Masterpieces from the Weston Collection is generously sponsored by Roger L. and Pamela Weston.

Janice Katz and Mami Hatayama, eds., Painting the Floating World: Ukiyo-e Masterpieces from the Weston Collection (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2018), 350 pages, ISBN: 978-0300236910, $65.

From the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, artists in Kyoto and Edo (now Tokyo) captured the metropolitan amusements of the floating world (ukiyo in Japanese) through depictions of subjects such as the beautiful women of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters and performers of the kabuki theater. In contrast to ukiyo-e prints by artists such as Katsushika Hokusai, which were widely circulated, ukiyo-e paintings were specially commissioned, unique objects that displayed the maker’s technical skill and individual artistic sensibility. Featuring more than 150 works from the celebrated Weston Collection, the most comprehensive of its kind in private hands and published here for the first time in English, this lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched volume addresses the genre of ukiyo-e painting in all its complexity. Individual essays explore topics such as shunga (erotica), mitate-e (images that parody or transform a well-known story or legend), and poetic inscriptions, revealing the crucial role that ukiyo-e painting played in a sophisticated urban culture.

Janice Katz is Roger L. Weston Associate Curator of Japanese Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Mami Hatayama is curator of the Weston Collection.

Installation view of The Claggetts of Newport: Master Clockmakers in Colonial America (Newport: Redwood Library & Athenaeum, photo by Michael Osean).

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Press release (via Art Daily) for the exhibition:

The Claggetts of Newport: Master Clockmakers in Colonial America
The Redwood Library and Athenæum, Newport, 13 December 2018 — 21 April 2019

Curated by Gary Sullivan and Benedict Leca

In an era when it emerged alongside New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston as one of the five main port cities of the American Enlightenment, Newport famously distinguished itself by its uniquely progressive society, but also by its cultural refinement, exemplified as much by the Redwood Library—America’s first purpose-built library and earliest public neoclassic building—as by the masterpiece clocks produced by the Claggett dynasty. The Claggetts of Newport: Master Clockmakers in Colonial America features 35 clocks, the largest assemblage of Claggett and Wady clocks ever brought together—many never exhibited publicly. It examines the range of the Claggetts’ clock production in terms of their technical sophistication, decorative finesse, and context of fabrication.

“As the pinnacle of what was often the most expensive item in an elite colonial home, these clocks reflect the cultural aspirations of early Americans, and the role that Newporters played in fashioning an American style that contrasted with European fashions,” said Redwood Executive Director and exhibition co-curator Benedict Leca.

Drawn from a full roster of public and private collections, the exhibition includes pieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brown University, The Preservation Society of Newport County, Old Sturbridge Village Collection, and the Rhode Island Historical Society. It features twenty clocks by William Claggett, including his masterpiece: the arch-dial, eight-day quarter-striking clock in japanned case belonging to the Redwood. Thomas Claggett is represented by eleven clocks, while James Wady—to whom only eleven clocks are ascribed—by four clocks, including one using a convex block-and-shell pendulum door, a feature that typified Newport clocks. Among other highlights is a table clock with japanned surface by William Claggett; a trio of Thomas Claggett clocks in related, uniquely regional cases, one a dwarf clock and another a musical clock by him; and two uncased eight-day time and strike movements enabling visitors to peer into the mechanics of a working clock.

The exhibition includes many clocks borrowed from private collections that feature significant provenance information. Preserved by Rhode Island families, some for 300 years, the identities of the original owners of several examples are documented and early family histories are known for others, shedding light on the value, details of construction and the circumstances governing commissions.

“This is an unprecedented presentation of clocks that is unlikely ever to be duplicated. With the recent book devoted to the Claggetts by Fennimore and Hohmann, the Claggetts’ achievement as a highpoint of early American craftsmanship can now be comprehensively appreciated,” said exhibition co-curator Gary Sullivan, the leading authority on early American clocks.

Organized by the Redwood Library & Athenæum—the sole venue—The Claggetts of Newport: Master Clockmakers in Colonial America juxtaposes significant early square dial clocks with later, highly elaborate clocks featuring japanned cases and complex movements indicating the day, tides, and phases of the moon. The clocks’ increasing technical and decorative elaboration over the course of the eighteenth century coincided with the growing prosperity of Newport’s merchant class, whose patronage fueled the city’s emergence as a major colonial artistic center.

The exhibition charts a complex narrative that teases out the three distinct personalities that comprise the Claggett dynasty—William Claggett (1694–1748), his assumed relative Thomas Claggett (d. 1797), and William’s son-in-law James Wady (ca. 1706–1759). As well, the show offers insights on the network of sub-contracted specialist case makers, brass founders and glaziers that the Claggett workshop relied on to produce their clocks.

The technical expertise required to produce a clock, whereby founders cast brass parts that clockmakers filed into the finished movement and positioned inside custom casework made these more than “a great ornament to [a] Room.” The Claggett’s ascendency as clockmakers coincides with the entry of science into public discourse through newly-formed philosophical societies, such as Newport’s Literary and Philosophical Society (1730), the group integral to the founding of the Redwood Library, whose members met to discuss current political and scientific issues. William Claggett himself experimented with electricity, and evidence abounds that clocks were conceived as far more than time pieces: in a 1725 pamphlet Benjamin Franklin compares God’s regulation of the world to the movement of a clock, a metaphor used and critiqued later by the philosopher George Berkeley.

The Claggetts of Newport: Master Clockmakers in Colonial America is co-curated by Gary R. Sullivan and Benedict Leca. The Redwood gratefully acknowledges support from the Edward W. Kane and Martha J. Wallace Family Foundation, and by several donors who wish to remain anonymous. Further support for the gallery presentation comes from Cornelius C. Bond and Ann E. Blackwell, and an in-kind donation by Sandra Liotus Lighting LLC. A catalog recording the exhibition will be available in 2019.

Donald Fennimore and Frank Hohmann, with an Introduction by Dennis Carr, Claggett: Newport’s Illustrious Clockmakers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0300233797, $65.