Art History News

To coincide with the 200th anniversary of the events of May 1808 and the start of the Spanish War of Independence, the Museo del Prado presented a major exhibition devoted to Goya, Goya in Times of War.

It focused on the two great canvases of the

2nd of May 1808

and

3rd of May 1808.

The exhibition included more than 65 paintings loaned from other institutions and private collections, including

Majas on the Balcony

and Portrait of the Marchioness of Montehermoso, both from private collections;

Friar Pedro de Zaldivia clubs Maragato the Bandit from The Art Institute of Chicago;

The Capture of Christ from Toledo Cathedral, and a group of nine works loaned by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. The latter were essential to the theme of the exhibition and were presented for the first time within the context of Goya's artistic development. Goya in Times of War was the largest exhibition devoted to the artist since the one held at the Prado in 1996.

The exhibition opened in the last years of the 18th century when Goya embarked on a new phase in his career, marked by greater creative freedom and by stylistic and conceptual advances. This phase would culminate with the series of etchings known as Los Caprichos of February 1799

One of Goya's 80 Caprichos - "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters"

¡Que se la llevaron! (They carried her off). Francisco Goya. Etching, aquatint. 1797. 8 7/16 x 5 7/8 inches. Plate number 8 from Los Caprichos.

and with the painting of The Family of Charles IV of 1800.

It concluded in 1819, the year in which Goya painted his last public work:

The Communion of Saint José de Calasanz.

With regard to the artist's personal life, during these years he suffered two serious illnesses. The one of 1792 to 1793 left him deaf, and was followed by a period of recovery in which Goya advanced towards greater artistic independence. The second illness of 1800 again brought him almost to the point of death, while politically this period coincided with Ferdinand VII's abolition of the Constitution in 1812.

These twenty-five years of Goya's life saw political changes in Spain that would be of enormous historical and social importance. On the international scene, the French revolution and its different phases, the Convention, the Terror, the Thermidorean reaction and the evolution towards the Consulate and the Empire profoundly affected Spain during the reign of Charles IV and María Luisa and their Chief Minister Godoy. With the exception of a brief period under Jovellanos, the latter was in power until the key year of 1808. The Spanish War of Independence was the leading event of the first third of the 19th century. In addition to the invasion of Spanish soil by foreign troops and the ensuing slaughter and famine, the war resulted in political and social liberalisation in the two Spains that emerged from the conflict: the free Spain, based in Cadiz following the proclamation of the Constitution in 1812, and the occupied Spain, based in Madrid under the enlightened government of King José Bonaparte and his pro-French collaborators. The return of Ferdinand VII in 1814 resulted in the abolition of the Constitution and in political repression under the king's new absolutist rule.

Between 1795 and 1819 Goya's art and life evolved from a court setting, fully confirmed by his appointment as First Court Painter in October 1799 - a post that placed his services at the disposition of the monarchy and the aristocracy - towards the freedom and independence of his later years when he was primarily interested in the study of human nature and its conflicts. The work he produced for the king and court evolved towards a more intimate type of output, increasingly focused on portraits of his friends and on independent paintings in which he openly expressed progressive or satirical ideas that criticised evil, human ignorance and society's defects and woes. During this crucial period Goya primarily focused on drawing and printmaking, producing print series such as Los Desastres de la Guerra, La Tauromaquia and Los Disparates, as well as drawings of a wide variety of subjects including the Inquisition and the repression as well as deception and madness, along with other more optimistic subjects that reflected the society around him.

The exhibition was divided into various sections which correspond to different phases of Spanish history during this period and which provide a framework for Goya's life and the evolution of his art. It brought together almost 200 works that have been carefully selected using the criteria of appropriateness for the subject in hand, outstanding artistic quality and state of conservation, as well as definite autograph status. Paintings in different genres, prints and drawings enabled the visitor to learn more about Goya at this period, particularly the ideas behind his images and the unique way that he conceived and formulated them.

The 2007-2008 exhibitionat the Prado, Madrdd, bought together 27 works by the artist in addition to 24 by 17 other artists with the aim of revealing the context in which the artist executed some of his most important paintings. Among the works by Velázquez to be seen in the exhibition were 12 loans including

The Rokeby Venus from the National Gallery in London, one of the artist’s most famous works no longer in Spain.

The 51 works in the exhibition depicted a variety of subjects from biblical history, mythology and the classical world with the intention of focusing on Velázquez’ originality in his approach to such themes, his remarkable technical versatility and the development of his art over the course of a career spanning more than four decades. With this aim in mind, the 27 works by the painter are juxtaposed with a further 24 by various artists which allow for an appreciation of Velázquez’ response to external creative stimuli.

Among the other artists in the exhibition are two sculptures by Martínez Montañés and Gregorio Fernández, paintings by earlier masters such as Titian and Caravaggio, and works by great Spanish painters of Velázquez’ own generation and the previous one such as El Greco, Ribera and Zurbarán. It also included examples of work by the leading non-Spanish artists of the day with whom the artist was familiar and who in some cases influenced his own painting such as the Flemish painter Rubens, the French artists Poussin and Claude Lorraine and the Italians Guercino, Guido Reni and Massimo Stanzione.

The group of works on display by Velázquez comprised his sacred and mythological compositions in the collection of the Prado as well as other important paintings on loan.

The latter included

Christ in the House of Martha and Mary,

The Immaculate Conception

and Saint John the Evangelist

from the National Gallery in London;

Saint Paul

from the MNAC in Barcelona;

The Supper at Emmaus

from Dublin;

Joseph’s blood-stained Coat brought to Jacob

from El Escorial

and The Temptation of Saint Thomas

from Orihuela.

Among the works by other artists represented in the exhibition special mention should be made of

Poussin’s The Triumph of David;
;

Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife by Guido Reni;

The Immaculate Conception by Alonso Cano;

and Rubens’ Heraclitus.

Catalogue

Published on the occasion cf the exhibition (2007), this catalogue brings together, for the first time, most of the artist's religious and mythological works. Here, specialists in Velazquez and in 17th-century culture examine his religious and mythological production from the standpoint of the painter's aesthetic interests, the key events in his life, the artistic, intellectual, and social context in which he moved, and the expectations of his public. Addenda includes a section of text entries for the color plate reproductions. Illus., 52 color plates; 103 text figures. 375p

Christie’s Old Master Paintings sale in New York on June 5 will present works from private collections and institutions, many of which are fresh to the market. With more than 100 works by great French, Italian, Flemish, Dutch and British masters of the 15th through the 19th centuries, the sale includes exceptional works by Gerrit van Honthorst, Pieter Brueghel II, and Jacques-Louis David among others.

The sale will be led by Gerrit van Honthorst’s

The Duet (estimate: $2,000,000-3,000,000), a significant work with an exceptionally distinguished Russian provenance, which includes the collection of Count Alexander Stroganov, art advisor to Catherine the Great, as well as the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Painted in 1624 at the height of Honthorst's career, this picture is one of the finest examples of scenes of nocturnal revelry for which the Dutch artist is celebrated. On display at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts for more than 40 years, the picture was recently restituted to the heirs of Bruno Spiro, who was forced to sell the painting during World War II.

Two major fresh-to-the-market works by Pieter Brueghel II will also be offered in the sale.

Pieter Brueghel II followed a tradition established by his artist’s father, who created the first

Wedding Dance in the Open Air

by creating some of his own:

Pieter Brueghel II's

The Wedding Dance In A Barn

Pieter Brueghel II's The Wedding Dance , up for sale, (estimate: $2,000,000-3,000,000) can be viewed as a record of daily peasant life in the 16th-century Netherlands, or as a genre scene rife with allegorical and symbolic meaning, with overtones warning against drinking, over-indulgence, and lust. The work depicts a bustling party in which a large group celebrates a newly married couple; whirling dancers occupy the foreground as the bride sits at the center with a crown atop her head, denoting her special status as “Queen for the day.” She watches as those surrounding her place pewter coins on a plate in front of her, while eager onlookers greedily survey the offerings.

The Drunkard pushed into the Pigsty (estimate: $500,000-700,000) is similarly meant to convey a moralizing message in its portrayal of a Flemish proverb. The combination of drunkenness, gluttony, and lust is referred to in the iconography of the work, as the pig has long been connected with excess. Despite the didactic meaning of the work, The Drunkard pushed into the Pigsty reflects Brueghel’s unique ability to project a sympathetic and humorous attitude toward human weakness and folly. This picture is one of only two extant autograph versions and the only one remaining in private hands.

Three exquisite Italian Renaissance works comprise the Property from the Art Institute of Chicago that will be offered, with Vincenzo Catena’s The Virgin and Child with a Female Saint highlighting the group (estimate: $200,000-300,000). Described by the art historian F. Heinemann as “la più bella composizione dell’artistá” (“the most beautiful of the artist’s compositions”), the work depicts a sacra conversazione, or “holy conversation,” a popular format of 16th-century Venice in which figures are shown engaging with each other before a pastoral landscape. Artists of the time, especially Giovanni Bellini, who Catena followed closely, were particularly drawn to this format, as it allowed them to depict biblical figures along with saints who lived at different times. The serenity of mood and idealization of the figures are typical of Catena’s works from the first decade of the 16th century. Also included in the Property from the Art Institute of Chicago is The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria from the studio of Francesco Francia (estimate: $40,000-60,000) and The Virgin Adoring the Christ Child with Saint John the Baptist by a follower of Domenico Ghirlandaio (estimate: $70,000-100,000), a wonderful tondo that features several symbolic elements. Saint Francis of Assisi is visible in the background receiving the stigmata, an allusion to Christ’s death on the Cross; the goldfinch serves a similarly symbolic purpose, as according to legend, the bird obtained its distinctive red spot when it plucked at Christ's crown of thorns on the road to Calvary and was stained by his blood.

The sale will feature seven works from the estate of the esteemed art historian John Michael Montias as well. Originally trained as an economist, Montias’ interests eventually led him to the study of economics of the art market in the 17th-century Netherlands. His research and subsequent publications examined the culture and context in which 17th-century artists and art collectors lived and worked, becoming a major influence in the discipline of art history. Among the works from his discerning collection is Matthäus Terwesten’s Pygmalion and Galatea, which illustrates the tale of a sculptor who falls in love with his creation (estimate: $10,000-15,000). With the story’s origin in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the idealized treatment of the figures, this picture testifies to Terwesten’s reputation as one of the most distinguished classicizing artists of the 17th-century Netherlands.

Painted in the early 1770s, the spirited, life-sized Portrait of Mademoiselle Guimard as Terpsichore (estimate; $400,000-600,000) marks the sparkling debut of the young Jacques-Louis David, the transformative genius who would re-imagine the art of painting in Europe for a new century. Renowned for her beauty, Mademoiselle Guimard was a celebrated dancer and courtesan who starred in the Paris Opéra for several decades, acquiring well-placed lovers and considerable wealth along the way. This ravishing portrait, which shows the charming naivete, pastel palette and rococo energy of David’s earliest work, depicts Mademoiselle Guimard as Terpsichore, the Muse of Dance, daintily executing a dance step as Cupid aims an arrow at her white satin slipper adorned with a pink rosette.

Edward Hopper (1882–1967), 1941 or 1942. Fabricated chalk and charcoal on paper; 11 1/8 x 15 in. (28.3 x 38.1 cm) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase and gift of Josephine N. Hopper by exchange 2011.65 © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Another Study for Nighthawks

Nighthawks (from the Art Institute of Chicago)

This spring, the Whitney Museum celebrates Edward Hopper’s achievements as a draftsman in the first major museum exhibition to focus on the artist’s drawings and working process.

Studies for Summertime

Summertime

Monograph/Catalogue

Along with many of his most iconic paintings, the exhibition, Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process is accompanied by a full-color, scholarly monograph, written by exhibition curator Carter Foster, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s curator of drawings, with contributions by Mark Turner and Nicholas Robbins, published in association with Yale University Press. The catalogue features groundbreaking research into the subjects of Hopper’s paintings, including new archival and photographic research. features more than 200 drawings, the most extensive presentation to date of Hopper’s achievement in this medium, pairing suites of preparatory studies and related works with such major oil paintings as New York Movie (1939), Office at Night (1940), Nighthawks (1942) and Morning in a City (1944).

Study for South Carolina Morning Charcoal on paper 8 1/2 x 11 inches 1955

South Carolina Morning, 1955

The show will be presented from May 23 to October 6, before traveling to the Dallas Museum of Art from November 17, 2013 to February 6, 2014 and the Walker Art Center from March 15 to June 22, 2014.

Edward Hopper study drawing for Morning Sun (1952) with numerous value notes

Edward Hopper Morning Sun (1952)

Culled from the Museum’s unparalleled collection of the artist’s work, and complemented by key loans, the show illuminates how the artist transformed ordinary subjects—an open road, a city street, an office space, a house, a bedroom—into extraordinary images. Carter E. Foster, the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawing at the Whitney, organized the show based on his indepth research into the more than 2,500 works on paper by Hopper in the Whitney’s collection.

Edward Hopper Study for Cape Cod Evening

Cape Cod Evening (National Gallery)

These pieces trace the artist’s process of observation, reflection, and invention that was central to the development of his poetic and famously uncanny paintings. The works on view will span the artist’s career, from early drawn exercises of his student days to Sun in an Empty Room (1963, private collection), one of the last paintings Hopper completed, and are concentrated on midcentury sheets related to his best-known oil paintings.

Edward Hopper Study for Rooms by the Sea, 1951

Edward Hopper Rooms by the Sea, 1951

“By comparing related studies to paintings, we can see the evolution of specific ideas as the artist combined, through drawing, his observations of the world with his imagination,” says Mr. Foster. “In other instances, his drawings provide a crucial form of continuity among thematically related paintings, a kind of connective tissue that allowed Hopper to revisit and re-examine ideas over time.”

Study for “Office at Night” (1940)/Courtesy the Whitney Museum.

Edward Hopper (1882–1967), Study for Office at Night, 1940. Fabricated chalk and charcoal on paper, 15 1/16 × 19 5/8in. (38.3 × 49.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.340

Office at Night (Walker Art Center)

While exhibitions and scholarly publications have investigated many aspects of Hopper’s art— his prints, his illustrations, his influence on contemporary art, to name a few—this exhibition will, for the first time, illuminate the centrality of drawing to Hopper’s work and allow a fresh look at his landmark contributions to twentieth-century art. His drawings help to untangle the complex relationship between reality—what Hopper called “the fact”—and imagination or “improvisation” in his work. They ultimately demonstrate his sensitive and incisive responses to the world around him that led to the creation of paintings that continue to inspire and fascinate.

Edward Hopper (American 1882-1967, Study for Morning in a City, 1944, conte crayon on paper, Whitney Museum of American Art, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest

Edward Hopper (American, 1882-1967, Study for Morning in a City, 1944, conte crayon on paper, Whitney Museum of American Art, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest

Edward Hopper (American, 1882-1967), Study for Morning in a City, 1944, conte crayon on paper, Whitney Museum of American,

Edward Hopper (American, 1882-1967, Morning in a City, 1944, oil on canvas, 44 5/16 x 59 13/16 inches, Bequest of Lawrence H. Bloedel, Class of 1923 (77.9.7)

Though the slowness and deliberation of Hopper’s creative process—and his relatively small output of oils—has long been noted, it is only through an examination of his drawings that we can understand the gestation of the artist’s ideas and the transformations they underwent from paper to canvas. However, the artist only occasionally exhibited or sold his drawings, retaining most of them for personal reference and using them throughout his career as he developed the lifelong themes and preoccupations of his major oil paintings.

Study for “New York Movie” (1938 or 1939)/Courtesy the Whitney Museum.

Edward Hopper (1882–1967), Study for New York Movie (Palace Theatre), 1938. Fabricated chalk on paper, 8 13/16 × 11 13/16in. (22.4 × 30cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.110

,New York Movie (MoMA)

Hopper’s education as an artist was fairly traditional, with intensive early training in drawing— particularly drawing the nude human figure. This included life drawing classes at the New York School of Art, where he studied from 1900 to 1906 with the celebrated exponent of modern American realism, Robert Henri. Early and formative travels to Paris and Europe between 1906 and 1910 produced an important body of work; the exhibition will include recently identified pages from his Paris sketchbooks, featuring lively and acute observations of street life and café culture. Later, in the 1920s, Hopper continued to hone his life drawing skills at the Whitney Studio Club (the precursor to the Museum), near his Greenwich Village studio. These skills served Hopper throughout his career, especially after the early 1930s, when he shifted from painting directly from nature to improvised subjects, deepening his drawing practice as he imagined ideas for his oils.

Edward Hopper Study for Gas, 1940 print

Gas, 1940

The exhibition opens with an overview of Hopper’s drawing career. As a draftsman, Hopper favored black chalk and the rich and subtle tone he was able to achieve with it. This section includes a number of highly finished sheets executed from life, as well as illustrations, portraits, and preparatory studies.

Drawing for Western Motel

Edward Hopper Western Motel

The exhibition continues with seven sections combining paintings with their preparatory studies and related works. One of the most significant of these brings together two of Hopper’s most important canvases, the Whitney’s Early Sunday Morning (1930) and Nighthawks (1942), lent by the Art Institute of Chicago. Nighthawks will, for the first time, be shown with all nineteen of its known drawn studies, including a highly finished sheet recently acquired by the Whitney for its permanent collection. These drawings show the development of every element of this iconic painting, from the massing of its oblique architectural space to the precise arrangements of figures around the nighttime coffee shop’s counter.

Edward Hopper (1882–1967), Study for Manhattan Bridge Loop, 1928. Crayon on paper, 8 1/2 × 11 1/16 in. (21.59 × 28.1 cm). Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; gift of the artist 1940.71

Edward Hopper Manhattan Bridge Loop, 1928

Shown together, Early Sunday Morning and Nighthawks will emphasize the artist’s interests in New York City’s shifting urban fabric, and the two pieces’ close conceptual relationship to one another as summations of his impressions of urban life. Groundbreaking archival research done in the course of the exhibition’s development has uncovered, for the first time, the precise building on Seventh Avenue on which Early Sunday Morning was based, as well as invaluable historic photographs of the Greenwich Village corners and architecture that inspired Nighthawks—questions that have puzzled historians of Hopper’s work for decades.

EDWARD HOPPER (1882 - 1967)
Study for “Four Lane Road”, c. 1956
Charcoal on paper
8 7/16 x 10 15/16 inches

EDWARD HOPPER Four Lane Road

The exhibition also showcases Hopper’s magisterial 1939 painting New York Movie (lent by the Museum of Modern Art) and the group of fifty-two preparatory studies Hopper made for this work, the largest number of drawings that exist for any painting in his oeuvre. These sheets trace Hopper’s nearly two-month long process of working through the idea for this piece, from his exploratory sketching trips in several Broadway movie palaces to a long and nuanced series of compositional studies for the dark, ornate interior depicted in the work, which he based on the Palace Theatre in Times Square. As with Early Sunday Morning and Nighthawks, photographic documentation of the actual sites that inspired the work will be included in the display.

EDWARD HOPPER, STUDY FOR ROUTE 6, EASTHAM

EDWARD HOPPER, ROUTE 6, EASTHAM

The exhibition will provide similar insight into the creation of many of Hopper’s other celebrated paintings, such as Soir Bleu (1914, Whitney Museum) (BELOW), Manhattan Bridge Loop (1928, Addison Gallery of American Art) (ABOVE) and

From Williamsburg Bridge (1928, Metropolitan Museum of Art),

Office at Night (1940, Walker Art Center),(ABOVE)

Conference at Night (1949, Wichita Art Museum),

Gas (1940, MoMA),(ABOVE)

Rooms for Tourists (1945, Yale University Art Gallery) and a number of others. These works will be paired and grouped to emphasize the artist’s interest in and revisiting of a relatively narrow set of themes and subjects over the course of his nearly seven-decade-long career.

Edward Hopper: Selected Images (Click on links for interesting audio)

Le Bistro or The Wine Shop, 1909

Soir Bleu 1914

East Side Interior, 1922

Self Portrait, 1925–30

The Sheridan Theater, 1937

Seven A.M.

A Woman in the Sun, 1961

Second Story Sunlight,

Hotel Lobby (Indianapolis Museum of Art),

Hotel Window (from a private collection),

Edward Hopper, Intermission, 1963; Collection SFMOMA, purchase in memory of Elaine McKeon, chair, SFMOMA Board of Trustees (1995–2004), with funds provided in part by the Fisher and Schwab Families; © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art; photo: courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

About the Whitney

The Whitney Museum of American Art is the world’s leading museum of twentieth-century and contemporary art of the United States. Focusing particularly on works by living artists, the Whitney is celebrated for presenting important exhibitions and for its renowned collection, which comprises over 19,000 works by more than 2,900 artists. With a history of exhibiting the most promising and influential artists and provoking intense debate, the Whitney Biennial, the Museum's signature exhibition, has become the most important survey of the state of contemporary art in the United States. In addition to its landmark exhibitions, the Museum is known internationally for events and educational programs of exceptional significance and as a center for research, scholarship, and conservation. Founded by sculptor and arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1930, the Whitney was first housed on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village. The Museum relocated in 1954 to West 54th Street and, in 1966, inaugurated its present home, designed by Marcel Breuer, at 945 Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side. While its vibrant program of exhibitions and events continues uptown, the Whitney is constructing a new building, designed by Renzo Piano, in downtown Manhattan. Located at the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets in the Meatpacking District, at the southern entrance to the High Line, the new building, which has generated immense momentum and support, will enable the Whitney to vastly increase the size and scope of its exhibition and programming space. Ground was broken on the new building in May 2011, and it is projected to open to the public in 2015.

In 2007 the Museo del Palacio de bellas Artes presented the largest Frida Kahlo exhibition titled Frida Kahlo 1907.2007. National Hommage, on view through August 19, 2007. This exhibition is part of the celebration for the centennial of Frida Kahlo’s birth in 1907. She is one of the greatest representatives of Mexican culture. The exhibition is a recognition of the importance of Frida’s work and what she gave to art. According to Roxana Velásquez, director of the MPBA, the exhibition includes a total of 354 works: 65 oil paintings, 45 drawings, 11 water colors, and 5 etchings. There are also around 50 letters, more than 100 personal photographs that reflect the social-political context that the artist lived in. A curatorial committee was formed for this exhibition with Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera, Roxana Velásquez, Salomón Grinberg, Cristina Kahlo, Américo Sánchez and Roxana Velásquez.

“A great effort was made to gather these works and to present the most complete Frida Kahlo exhibition that has ever been on view in Mexico or anywhere in the world. We had the collaboration of 69 institutions, national and international collections,” said Roxana Velásquez. To her Frida is a fascinating character who had “one of the most interesting lives for the different areas in which she worked in: artist, intellectual, social activist and politics, great writer and revolutionary,” she added.

Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait with Monkey, 1945, Museo Dolores Olmedo Collection.

Frida Kahlo, Frieda and Diego Rivera, 1931, Oil on canvas, 100 x 78 cm. San Francisco Museum of art. Albert M Bender Collection, Donated by Albert M Bender.

Frida Kahlo, Girl With Mask, 1938, Nagoya City Art Museum.

Frida Kahlo, The Broken Spine, 1944, Oil on masonite, 39.8 x 30.5 cm. Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño.

Frida Kahlo, The Bus, 1929, Oil on canvas, Museo Dolores Olmedo Collection.

Frida Kahlo, Two Fridas, 1939, Oil on canvas, 172 x 172 cm. Museo de Arte Moderno, CONACULTA, INBA.

Frida Kahlo, Thinking About Death, 1943, Oil on canvas, 44.5 x 37 cm. Private Collection.

On May 23 the Middlebury College Museum of Art opened Edward Hopper in Vermont, a rare and stunning exhibit of watercolors and drawings of Vermont subjects by the iconic American painter. In the more than 75 years since their creation, the majority of Hopper’s Vermont works have been shrouded in obscurity, and some have not been on view to the public in nearly fifty years. This exhibition, assembled from museums and private collections throughout the United States, reunites Hopper’s Vermont works and displays them together, in Vermont, for the first time. Arranged sequentially, without the interruptions of works painted elsewhere during the intervening years, these works illuminate Hopper’s process in translating into paint and paper his singular vision of the Vermont landscape.

Edward Hopper, Vermont Sugar House, 1938, watercolor on paper, 14 × 20 inches. Collection of Louis Bacon.

Edward Hopper, often characterized as the quintessential New York artist, traveled away from the city every summer, leaving behind the heat and concrete sidewalks in favor of more pleasant climes and fresh subjects to paint outdoors. His first sojourns were to Paris, the obligatory destination for American artists through the early years of the 20th century. After 1910, however, he—along with his wife Jo (Josephine Verstille Nivison), a fellow artist who was also his model, muse, record-keeper, and lifelong traveling companion—traveled primarily in New England, with occasional trips to Mexico and the western United States. In all of his travels, Hopper was searching for “beautiful things” and new places that would inspire him to paint. It was this quest that led him to Vermont. Indeed, despite the beauty of some of their other regular vacation spots, including a small house and studio the couple built on Cape Cod, Hopper periodically sought inspiration in Vermont when he found himself unable to discover it elsewhere.

Edward Hopper, Barn and Silo, Vermont, 1927, watercolor, gouache, and charcoal on paper, 13 7/8 x 19 7/8 inches. Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Lesley and Emma Sheafer Collection, Bequest of Emma A. Sheafer, 1973.

In 1927 Edward and Jo purchased their first car and, with its trunk packed with brushes and paints, palettes and easels, and paper for watercolors—a veritable traveling studio—began to explore Vermont. During five summer excursions to the state between 1927 and 1938, Hopper recorded more than two dozen drawings and watercolors of rural scenes.

Edward Hopper, Bob Slater’s Hill, 1938, watercolor on paper, 13 1/4 x 19 1/2 inches. Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, West Virginia. Gift of Ruth Woods Dayton, 1967.1.132

Hopper’s early Vermont paintings tend to include immediately recognizable architecture and scenery, the more vernacular views with barns and farm buildings rendered in bright light and color. Over the course of his subsequent visits to the state, however, his work evolved toward more momentary scenes finally culminating in a formalized series of works along the White River.

Edward Hopper, Windy Day, 1938, watercolor on paper. Collection of William S. Beinecke

Returning to Vermont in the late summer of 1935—following a seven year hiatus likely spurred by the widespread destruction resulting from the disastrous 1927 flood—and again in 1936, the Hoppers continued their regular practice of sketching and painting from their car. This allowed them to move around easily in search of views in which the landscape was desirably framed. By now Edward had eschewed much of the usual fare of Vermont artists—the covered bridges, steepled villages, and dramatic vistas of distant peaks that are emblematic of the Green Mountain State—in favor of grassy hillsides, meadows, mundane roadside scenes, and the pastures and rolling hills of the White River Valley. These later works, almost impressionist in nature, are unusual for Hopper in their nearly complete lack of architectural form or other signs of human presence.

Edward Hopper, White River at Royalton, Vermont, 1937, watercolor on paper, 22 x 29 5/8 inches. Collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. Bequest of Sheila Hearne.

At the core of these later paintings is a group of landscapes recorded along the White River during the summers of 1937 and 1938 when Hopper, by then nationally famous, made his last two protracted visits to Vermont, boarding with his wife for a month on each occasion as paying guests on Wagon Wheels Farm in South Royalton. His time there seems to have freed Hopper’s artistic expression allowing him to turn his focus on the river, very likely the subject that he was seeking all along in his explorations of Vermont. The result was a coherent series of seven watercolors, all painted within a few miles of South Royalton, between the towns of Bethel and Sharon. The paintings in this series—peaceful scenes that capture the quiet beauty of Vermont’s sky, water, mountains, and meadows, at various times of day and in different kinds of weather—are distinctive among Hopper’s watercolors in technique and palette. They record the nuances of light, color, and texture of the Vermont landscape in a manner that evinces his preoccupation with the more tranquil depictions of pastoral landscape scenes known to him through his longstanding interest in the works of American landscape painters from Homer Dodge Martin to Thomas Cole. Further, his clear interest in the various shapes and textures of the trees—perhaps a response to the style of his contemporary Luigi Lucioni, who was well known for his pastoral Vermont scenes—is likely evidence of an abiding fascination with the poetry of Robert Frost.

In her recently published book Edward Hopper in Vermont, which forms the nexus for this exhibition, Bonnie Tocher Clause writes, “[t]he watercolors and drawings that Edward Hopper made in Vermont record his visions of a particular place, a landscape with distinctive forms, colors, textures, and quality of light. These works reveal something of Hopper’s process in exploring a place that was new to him: first identifying subjects that he wanted to paint; then experimenting with perspective and composition, painting variations on a theme, whether barn or hillside; and finally moving on to what lay around the next bend in the road. They show us Hopper’s vision of Vermont, whether in a mundane scene along a roadside or in a more obviously lovely view along the White River.”

More good reading:

Edward Hopper in Vermont blog

More images:

First Branch of the White River, Vermont

At The National Gallery, London 27 June - 16 September 2007

For the first time ever, a major exhibition traced the development of Dutch portrait painting in the 17th century.

Following its independence from Spain in 1581, the Dutch Republic experienced an era of unprecedented wealth - the 'Golden Age'. Thanks to the successful activities of its merchants and entrepreneurs, a new middle-class elite emerged, which became the dominant force in local government and civic institutions. As a result, these people became the new principal patrons of the arts.

To establish and reinforce their social position, the bourgeoisie regularly commissioned portraits to commemorate the important moments in their lives: births, marriages, and professional and civic appointments. Artists were forced to find new solutions in portrait painting to satisfy the evolving demands of their clientele. The wide body of work they produced is the subject of Dutch Portraits: The Age of Rembrandt and Frans Hals.

The exhibition comprised around 60 works, all painted between 1599 and 1683. Rembrandt and Frans Hals were undoubtedly the greatest masters (the exhibition includes nine works by the former, and a dozen by the latter) but tens, if not hundreds, of other painters also worked in this genre.

Works by 29 different artists were featured in the exhibition, some by artists little known in the UK, such as

Jan van Ravesteyn (Hugo Grotius - Collection Frits Lugt, Institut Néerlandais, Paris)

and Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck (Andries Stilte as Standard Bearer - National Gallery of Art, Washington) - artists of enormous talent not then represented in UK public collections.

Exhibits ranged from small portraits meant for the private home to much larger portraits for and about the public sphere. Coming from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was the audacious marriage portrait Hals painted to celebrate the wedding of the wealthy merchant couple Abraham Massa and Beatrix van der Laen:

There were portraits of family groups

('Willem Kerckhoven and his Family' by Jan Mijtens - Haags Historisch Museum, The Hague),

charming portraits of children -

like the intimate portrayal of 'The Twins Clara and Aelbert de Bray' by Salomon de Bray from a private collection -

and history portraits, such as the splendid 'The Banquet of Antony and Cleopatra' by Jan de Bray, one of two loans from the Royal Collection.

One of the six rooms in the exhibition was given over to a selection of the large-scale group portraits of members of charitable institutions and civic guards. Notable paintings included

Thomas de Keyser's dashing 'Loef Vredericx' from the Mauritshuis, which had never been seen in the UK before,

and a remarkable militia portrait by Frans Hals and Peter Codde, 'The Meagre Company' (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), the largest work in the show at an imposing 209 x 429cm.

An undoubted highlight of Dutch Portraits was the rare loans of two of Rembrandt's most famous works:

'The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp' (Mauritshuis) and 'The Syndics' (De Staalmeesters) (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). The 1632 Anatomy Lesson, featuring Dr Tulp explaining the musculature of the arm to a group of fascinated medical professionals, had not been seen in the UK for more than 40 years.

'The Syndics' - often heralded as the artist's greatest group portrait - was last there in 1992.

'Dutch Portraits: The Age of Rembrandt and Frans Hals' surveyed the unprecedented range and variety of painted portraiture in the Netherlands at this time, and gave insights into the fashion, occupations and ambitions of this group of affluent 17th-century individuals.

The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery, London, and the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague - where it traveled after London (13 October 2007 - 13 January 2008).

Also in the exhibition:

Frans Hals, 'Willem Coymans', 1645
© National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Andrew W. Mellon Collection (1937.1.69). Image 2007 Board of Trustees.

Rembrandt (1606–1669), Double Portrait of Jan Rijcksen and Griet Jans (‘The Shipbuilder and his Wife), 1633. The Royal Collection © 2006, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (RCIN 405533).

Nicolaes Maes (1634–1693), Family Portrait, about 1676. © Courtesy Konrad O. Bernheimer of P. & D. Colnaghi, London and Richard Green, London (PND281).

Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656), Portrait of King Charles I with a Letter in his Hand, 1628. © By Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 4444)

February 15-May 12, 1998

The first major retrospective of the work of French master Fernand Léger (1881-1955) to be shown in New York in more than four decades opened at The Museum of Modern Art on February 15, 1998.

Comprising over 60 paintings and some 20 related drawings spanning the artist's entire career, this exhibition challenged stereotypical notions of Léger as a painter of circumscribed technique and reveals the true richness and diversity of his achievement as one of the century's greatest artists. Beginning with his first mature work of 1911 to his last paintings of construction workers done in the years just before his death, Léger confronted the burning aesthetic issues of his time with a unique directness and consistency, through a range of subjects from the industrial to the bucolic. The only major modern artist to choose modernity itself as his subject, Léger's unique ability to capture the epic quality of everyday experience has earned him recognition as the painter of the "heroism of modern life."

Organized for The Museum of Modern Art by Carolyn Lanchner, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, Fernand Léger was a collaboration between MoMA and the Musée national d'art moderne-Centre de création industrielle, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. The exhibition opened in Paris and traveled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, before coming to The Museum of Modern Art, its final venue. MoMA's showing differed from those of the other two venues in its greater selectivity.

The series Contrastes de formes (Contrasts of forms) of 1913-14 exemplifies Léger's pictorial strategies and demonstrates his vigor in addressing a central issue of modernism: the debate between abstraction and figuration. The earliest, executed in 1913, are secured in history as the first wholly abstract paintings to emerge from Cubism; although devoid of recognizable imagery, these paintings have the curious effect of soliciting the viewer to find representational readings.

Paradoxically, the paintings of the following year devoted to the traditional genres of still life, landscape, and the human form appear nearly abstract. This shifting relationship between realism and abstraction is largely generated by the artist's finesse in accommodating volumetric forms to a flattened surface. Although his methods were to change, the play between figuration and nonfiguration, planarity and depth announced in these paintings remained at the heart of his constructive tactics during his entire career.

In addition to defining Léger's concerns with illusionism and abstraction most explicitly, the canvases of the Contrastes de formes with their rough grounds and passages of painterly bravura most obviously illustrate a romance with paint that never lost its zest. Contrary to critical and popular opinion which has seen the post-1914 Léger as a painter of hard, precisely drawn contours and of smooth slick surfaces that conceal the trace of the brush, the canvases themselves belie this impression. "Léger was a painter in love with paint and almost every canvas exhibits his enjoyment of it," writes Ms. Lanchner in the catalogue accompanying the MoMA retrospective.

For example, in one of Léger's masterpieces, La Ville (The city) , 1919, which incorporates billboards, bright colors, simple signs and geometric human forms, instances of deliberate pentimenti (pictorial elements visible beneath the artist's overpainting) are multiple -- perhaps most immediately observable in the over-painting surrounding what seems to be a fragment of scaffolding in the upper right.

In a smaller painting from the same year L'Homme à la roue (Man with wheel) , scintillating color punctuated by small areas of shadowed hues is found with a thickly charged, roughly brushed yellow plane at the right. Léger had a sensualist's love of the world, of its tactility, light, and color; his pictures, as he never tired of saying, do not copy visible things, but exist as their physical equivalents in paint.

Léger's lifelong subject was the pulse and dynamism of contemporary life. "He believed that most people were caught in outworn prejudices that blinded them to the glories of the modern spectacle, and that his role was to enlist the power of art to reveal the beauty of the mechanized environment," writes Ms. Lanchner. As he increasingly felt the need for an art that would address the general public, he extended the formal language of modernism to such subjects as construction workers and popular recreation.

The artist's last great masterpiece, La Grande Parade, état définitif (The great parade, final state), 1954, shows circus performers moving in and out of free-floating arcs of green, red, and blue--derived from a theory of color inspired by the flashing lights of Broadway.

For Léger painting was open-ended, its competence as an expressive means without limits. More than any of his peers, he welcomed elements into his work from a wide range of the century's artistic movements from Fauvism to Social Realism, yet his work remained independent, indelibly his own. In 1954, at the end of his life, Léger declared, "My era was one of great contrasts, and I am the one who made the most of it. I am the witness of my time."

Publication

Fernand Léger, edited by Carolyn Lanchner, with essays by Ms. Lanchner, Jodi Hauptman, and Matthew Affron and contributions by Beth Handler and Kristen Erickson. 304 pages, 67 full color, 150 black-and-white illustrations. Published by The Museum of Modern Art.

October 12, 1997 to January 4, 1998

The emotionally charged art of Egon Schiele (1890-1918), the iconoclastic Austrian Expressionist whose innovative drawing style spawned a radical new pictorial form, was examined in an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art from October 12, 1997 through January 4, 1998. Comprising some 150 worksmost never before seen in the United States—Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna, traced the artist's brief but remarkably prolific career, from a tormented youth in search of artistic identity to a celebrated and influential artist at the time of his death at age 28.

Schiele's legacy, and his significance to contemporary artists, is an intensely personal figurative art that rejects conventional concepts of beauty in favor of exploring the psychological complexity of his sitters.

Part of the extensive collection of Dr. Rudolf Leopold, a prominent Austrian ophthalmologist who has devoted over four decades to amassing the world's finest private collection of the artist, the works in Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna were not on view again until the year 2002, when they were installed in the yet-to-be-completed Leopold Museum, part of the Museum Quarter in Vienna.

Organized by Magdalena Dabrowski, Senior Curator, Department of Drawings, the exhibition included oils, gouaches, watercolors, and drawings that represent all phases of Schiele's creative output—from the decorative
Self-Portrait with a Palette (1905), produced when he was 15 years old, to the moving

Edith Schiele on Her Deathbed (1918),

a portrait of his wife completed only four days before the artist's own death from the same influenza epidemic.

Much of the artist's oeuvre is autobiographical and self revelatory. Probing self-portraits dominate his work and his subjects include the people closest to him as well as landscapes that were a part of family history and personal experience. Death was a constant presence. Three of his siblings died before Schiele was born, a fourth when he was three years old, all victims of their father's syphilis. In 1904, when Schiele was only 14, his father succumbed to his untreated disease.

As a student, Schiele's early drawing style was skilled but unexceptional, as is evident in Portrait of a Young Girl (1906). In 1907 he met Gustav Klimt, the senior statesman of the Viennese art world who would become the younger man's mentor. Nude Boy Lying on a Patterned Coverlet (1908), with its ornamented drapery, clearly shows Klimt's influence.

The great change in the young artist's work came around 1909, when he began assimilating Auguste Rodin's special manner of "continuous drawing," newly developed near the end of the century. This technique, in which the artist draws without taking his eyes off the model, provided Schiele with the lively line, more emphatic than simple contour, that was to become his hallmark.

Schiele's most startling and evocative images—most often of male and female nudes in unabashedly erotic and contorted poses—challenged established conceptions of portraiture, and even the nature of beauty itself. These complex portraits were a marked departure from Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, and their Viennese counterpart, the Secessionist style, which emphasized the representation of the superficial aspects of beauty. He favored contorted bodies, strange, theatrical poses, and nervous, often jagged contours together with unusual color combinations.

"Schiele is, first and foremost, an exceptionally talented draftsman," remarks Ms. Dabrowski in her catalogue essay. "Even in his paintings the primary emphasis remains the structural element of the composition. His use of color is not for the purpose of modeling, but for the expressiveness."

While less well known than his drawings, Schiele's paintings and landscapes also reflect his own inner conflicts.

In Dead Mother I (1910),

for example, created after a vacation in Krumau, his mother's birthplace, darkness surrounds both the skeletal mother and an infant whose blood-red hands and lips betray Schiele's notion that birth was often synonymous with death.

His landscapes, also set in Krumau, are remarkable for their sober, yet highly expressive quality, in which a lack of color often conveys a bleak, nostalgic mood.

Schiele's most important creative years were between 1910 and 1915. His earlier work of this period includes drawings of the street children who visited his studio and provocative adolescent nudes. This era was dominated, however, by narcissistic and angst filled self-exploration, characterized by portraits of himself, sometimes masturbating.

The diversity of moods inherent in the self-portraits is represented in several examples from the Leopold Collection:

Kneeling Male Nude (Self- Portrait) (1910) is an almost grotesque depiction of an emaciated youth;

Grimacing Self-Portrait (1910) depicts an angry, unkempt, almost depraved visage;

Self Portrait in Shirt (1910) explores the more gentle side of his personality.

The death of Schiele's father and the rejection by his uncle resulted in the creation of double portraits, such as

Self-Seer II (1911) in which Schiele provides a second self—doppelgänger—in the guise of a protector or imaginary companion.

The years 1911-12 saw the creation of some of the most provocative female nudes, such as

Black-Haired Girl with Raised Skirt (1911). This period of liberated eroticism coincided with the start of his relationship with a sexually experienced young woman named Valerie Neuzil ("Wally"), who would be his companion and primary model until his marriage in 1915.

The artist's fascination with sex, sexuality, and their repression reveals more of the character of turn-of-the-century bourgeois Vienna than of any personal deviance or perversion. Ms. Dabrowski notes, "Schiele's probing of his psyche situated itself within a more general context of Viennese society's preoccupation with sex, the self, and with his own psychological state as it related to the current Freudian theories of psychoanalysis." His powerful nudes, whose explicit poses suggest sexual invitation and arousal, also spoke to the hypocrisy and censorship that were pervasive in the Viennese establishment.

By 1914 Schiele's fortunes started to change for the better. Professionally, he gained both collectors and commissions. Personally, after his marriage in 1915, his works began to feature more mature, fullbodied women, typified by his wife, Edith. Less erotically aggressive, these models exhibit a new tenderness. Manipulation of the body, however, remains the primary expressive technique, visible in such drawings as Lovers (1914), in which the two figures are almost painfully intertwined.

Despite his short career, Schiele has particular resonance for the contemporary viewer. According to Ms. Dabrowski, "His was an art of individuality and creative originality, focused on communicating the depth of human emotions and the force of human experience. The radicality of his art and his rebellion against the traditional attitudes toward such taboos as sex and sexuality make his art relevant to and appreciated by today's young artists and the public at large."

Publication

Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna, by Magdalena Dabrowski and Rudolf Leopold. 364 pages, 152 color plates, 45 black-and-white illustrations. This is an expanded English language version of a book on the subject. Published by DuMont Buchverlag in association with The Museum of Modern Art

The first comprehensive survey ever assembled of the portraiture of Pablo Picasso opened at The Museum of Modern Art on April 28, 1996. Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation was the first exhibition to study Picasso's career solely from the perspective of his portraits. Comprising 130 paintings and some 100 works on paper, the exhibition traces Picasso's life through his development of the modernist portrait. Intimate portrayals of his family, lovers, friends, and colleagues illuminate the remarkable range of the artist's styles and reveal the connection between his personal relationships and his work.

Drawn from public and private collections throughout the world, as well as from the Museum's own extensive holdings, the exhibition included many works that have never been shown in the United States and a substantial number that have never been exhibited publicly. The exhibition was organized by William Rubin, Director Emeritus, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, in dialogue with Hélène Seckel, Chief Curator, the Musée Picasso, Paris, and in collaboration with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris. The exhibition had its only United States showing at MoMA; a smaller version opened at the Grand Palais, Paris, in October, 1996.

Mr. Rubin, who also organized Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective, the Museum's unprecedented 1980 exhibition of approximately 1,000 works, commented, "Understanding Picasso is fundamental to the understanding of twentieth-century art in general. The current exhibition focuses on a relatively unstudied aspect of his enormous oeuvre, enabling us to explore the rich panorama of invention, symbolism, and emotion that drove this artistic genius. The assembled works demonstrate that Picasso redefined the parameters and possibilities of portraiture more than any other painter in the modern era." He continued, "Picasso took the genre to a new level, redefining the portrait as the artist's personal response to the subject. He transformed the portrait from what had long been considered a primarily objective document into a frankly subjective one."

The Exhibition

Picasso and Portraiture focused on the multiple portrayals of the people central to Picasso's life and concludes with a survey of self-portraits from his adolescence through his last years. Because Picasso's view of his subjects was invariably filtered through his personal associations with them, his portrayal of a particular sitter could change radically during the extent of their relationship, ranging in style from primitivist, Surrealist, and Cubist to Neoclassical, among others. In order to fully illustrate the transformations applied to each subject, Picasso and Portraiture was, in effect, organized as a series of miniexhibitions, in which works are grouped according to sitter, as opposed to a purely chronological arrangement. Photographs (often by prominent artists such as Man Ray) and brief biographies of the major subjects accompanied the different portrait groups. In addition, new research revealed the identities of some subjects who were unknown or thought to have been invented.

The exhibition opened with Picasso's early portraits of his family and a series of portraits painted of his childhood friend and later secretary Jaime Sabartés. From there, it explored two early groups of portraits in which the artist began to develop a schematic, sculpturally precise, conceptual style influenced in part by the simplification of features in ancient Iberian sculptures. This style is exemplified in the head of

Woman Plaiting Her Hair (1906), a portrait of Picasso's first love, Fernande,

and in the reworked face in

Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906).

Olga Khokhlova, the Russian ballerina who was Picasso's first wife, was the inspiration for many of his paintings from 1917 through the 1920s, a period when the artist began to counterpoint his abstract Cubist representations with more realistic Neoclassical images. The complex relationship between the two styles was revealed in the highly abstract 1920 painting

Woman in an Armchair.

Confirming Mr. Rubin's research, an infrared scan of the painting performed in The Museum of Modern Art's conservation laboratory uncovered a Neoclassical painting of Olga in the same position underneath; many of the contours of the finished Cubist work were carried over directly from the Neoclassical under-painting, including the curve of Olga's chin, her right shoulder and arm, and almost the entire outline of the chair.

In the early years of the artist's relationship with Olga, the portraits of her are gentle—the colors subdued and the drawing graceful. As the marriage deteriorated, Picasso's portrayals of Olga became harsher and more transformed. In the cold, monochromatic

Seated Bather (1930), for example, a Surrealist figure inspired by Olga is made up of largely angular, hard, and unyielding forms, and has a head with a sawtooth, steel-trap mouth.

In stark contrast to Seated Bather,

Bather with Beach Ball (1932), a Surrealist portrayal of Picasso's then secret companion Marie-Thérèse, depicts a carefree, soft, rounded, seemingly weightless figure frolicking with a beach ball.

Picasso's long, intense relationship with Marie-Thérèse, who is now recognized as the primary subject in the artist's work of the 1930s, inspired his most erotic style of painting, exemplified by a group of sumptuous nudes including

The Mirror and

Sleeping Nude, both of 1932.

Still Life on a Pedestal Table (1931), although not a portrait in any traditional sense, envisions her poetically through the metaphor of still life. It contains sexually suggestive forms that allude to Marie-Thérèse as the subject: the curved contour of the pitcher is associated with the representation of her breasts and torso from earlier works.

Picasso's relationship with Marie-Thérèse overlapped with his involvement with the Surrealist painter-photographer Dora Maar, which began late in 1936. Portraits of the two women in similar reclining positions, both painted from memory on the same day, in the same setting, and on canvases of the same shape and size, reveal Picasso's different and complex feelings toward them. Marie-Thérèse is depicted in sympathetic terms, her large blue eyes dominating the soft curves of her naturalistically colored face. Dora's portrait reveals a more conflicted visage in which her boldly colored angular figure is set against a background of varying patterns and colors, expressing Dora's energy and passion.

Exhibited together for the first time were a series of Neoclassical portraits from 1923 that had long been thought to be a generic depiction of classical beauty. Mr. Rubin has recently revealed that the portraits depict an actual person—the wealthy American socialite Sara Murphy, whom F. Scott Fitzgerald used as the model for his heroine in Tender Is the Night. Picasso fell in love with Sara in 1923, although it is not known how deeply they were involved. Her countenance is visible in several works in which the artist insinuated her features and hairstyle into portraits of Olga. Sara has also been identified as the subject of many drawings and three portraits on sand from the summer of 1923, which culminated in the celebrated

Woman in White(1923).

Picasso and Portraiture featured an exceptionally rich group of some twenty-one works of Picasso's last wife, Jacqueline Roque, whom he met in 1952. The Jacqueline portraits constitute the largest single group within his portraiture and dominate the artist's work in his seventies and eighties. Ranging from very large-scale oils in one gallery to linoleum prints and charcoal sketches in others, the Jacqueline portraits show the most stylistic variety and the widest range of mediums in any group. Some of the other subjects included in the exhibition were Picasso's art dealers

Ambroise Vollard,

Wilhelm Uhde,

and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler;

the poets

Max Jacob,

André Salmon, and Guillaume Apollinaire; and his children Paolo, Paloma, Claude, and Maya.

The exhibition concluded with a striking selection of self-portraits representing a period of more than eighty years. Included are the brooding, soulful

1901 self-portrait from the Blue Period; the Iberianstyle

Self-Portrait with Palette (1906), a raw image of the man as the lone worker-painter; and several self-portraits executed in 1972 shortly before Picasso's death at age ninety-one:

Publication

The first book ever published on the subject of Picasso's portraiture accompanied the exhibition. Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation was edited by William Rubin, who has also written the introductory essay and a chapter exploring the Jacqueline portraits. Other scholars and curators who have contributed essays to the lavishly illustrated volume are Kirk Varnedoe, Chief Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art; Anne Baldassari and Brigitte Léal, Curators, and Hélène Seckel, Chief Curator, Musée Picasso, Paris; Pierre Daix; Michael C. FitzGerald; Marilyn McCully; and Robert Rosenblum. Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, it contains 496 pages, 216 color illustrations, and 541 black-and-white illustrations. _

The first monographic survey of Dosso Dossi's work included some 60 paintings carefully chosen to reflect the richness and quality of the artist's achievement. On view January 14 through March 28, 1999 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dosso Dossi, Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara featured rarely lent masterpieces from collections in America and Europe — above all, the Borghese Gallery in Rome — and offered a unique opportunity to experience the full scope of Dosso's work, not seen since the dispersal of Ferrara's artistic treasures following the end of Este rule in the late 16th century.

The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali (Gallerie Nazionali di Ferrara, Bologna e Modena), the Comune di Ferrara/Civiche Gallerie d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, and The J. Paul Getty Museum.

More About the Artist

Dosso Dossi's exquisite depictions of religious subjects, allegories, and mythological scenes exemplify 16th-century court painting in its highest form. Consummate expressions of aesthetic poetry and artistic eccentricity, these paintings are also records of the refined taste and style of one of the great centers of Renaissance Italy.

In Orlando Furioso— the most widely read epic poem of the 16th century — Dosso is listed alongside Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Titian as one of the great figures of his age by the renowned Renaissance poet Ludovico Ariosto, who likely admired Dosso's poetic and subtle — indeed enigmatic — representations of myth and allegory. Dosso's paintings have long been appreciated as celebrations of pictorial freedom and artistic invention, characterized by a rich palette, brilliant contrasts of light and shadow, and by the enduring echoes of joyousness, wit, and sensual delight. With the devolution of the Ferrarese court into the papal states in 1598, virtually all of Dosso's oil paintings were dispersed to collections in Rome and Modena, removing them from the elaborate context for which they were created. In this exhibition, they are reunited after 400 years and their original context newly reinterpreted.

An extraordinarily accomplished painter of nature, Dosso set most of his compositions outdoors, incorporating vibrant depictions of forests, flowers, and animals into verdant and exotic landscape vistas. Although he painted exceptionally powerful altarpieces and other religious works, his most remarkable canvases are the secular scenes painted to amuse, inspire, and delight the highly refined sensibilities of his patrons at the ducal court. Combining literary allusion, humor, and fantasy with lush color, dramatic atmospheric effects, and expressive brushwork, Dosso created beguiling visions of poetry in paint.

More About the Exhibition

Dosso Dossi, Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara included many of the artist's masterpieces. Among the highlights of the exhibition were the Metropolitan's own

The Three Ages of Man (ca. 1514-15),

the lyrically beautiful Jupiter, Mercury, and Virtue (ca. 1523-24, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna),

as well as the sophisticated Allegory with Pan (ca. 1529-32, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles).

Seven rhomboid-shaped panels painted for Duke Alfonso's bedroom depict such allegories as

Anger (ca. 1515-16, Palazzo Cini, Venice),

Drunkenness (ca. 1521-22, Galleria Estense, Modena),

Love (ca. 1525-26, Estense), and Seduction (ca. 1525-28, Estense) with characteristic insight and wit.

Melissa (ca. 1515-16), a splendid work on loan from the Borghese Gallery in Rome, is thought to portray Ariosto's benevolent enchantress undoing the spell cast by the evil Alcina, by turning a beautifully rendered dog back into a knight, whose armor lies nearby. With its heroically scaled figure, luminous palette, and wonderful sensitivity to the play of light on metal, fabric, and foliage, this is one of the artist's most memorable images.

The exhibition featured several canvases —

Aeneas in the Elysian Fields (ca. 1522, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa),

The Sicilian Games (ca. 1522, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, England),

Scene from a Legend (Aeneas and Achates on the Libyan Coast) (ca. 1517-18, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) —

commissioned for Alfonso's camerino, or private quarters within the castle. Among the most renowned commissions of the Renaissance, the camerino was undertaken by Alfonso to rival the great art collections of other rulers, including his sister Isabella d'Este in Mantua. Originally meant to include works by the most celebrated artists from various artistic centers, it eventually became a showcase for Venetian art by Bellini, Titian, and Dosso.

After Alfonso's death in 1534, Dosso continued to work for his son, Duke Ercole II, albeit on a diminished scale and often in collaboration with his brother and chief assistant, Battista Dossi. A section of the exhibition was devoted to these collaborative works as well as those by Battista alone.

Born near Mantua about 1486, Dosso's early style was formed in Venice, under the spell of Giorgione's poetic vision. Like Giorgione, Dosso was among the first painters to improvise on canvas. Rather than following careful preparatory drawings, he composed and recomposed as he painted — a remarkably free process that is revealed in new x-ray and infrared photographs, taken as part of a major technical study of Dosso's oeuvre conducted for this exhibition. Dosso worked alongside Titian on important commissions in Ferrara, is mentioned in Raphael's correspondence, and studied Michelangelo's work in Rome. While his work shows his appreciation of their prodigious talents, their influence is always reinterpreted to create something that is uniquely Dosso's.

By the time Dosso Dossi arrived in Ferrara in 1513, the city already had a long history of court painting in which artistic imagination and individuality were highly prized. Almost immediately, Dosso became court painter to Duke Alfonso I, frescoing in his beloved villas, known as "delizie", and designing theater sets, tapestries, ephemeral works. In a period that is noted for both the cultural refinement and political audacity of its leaders, Duke Alfonso I was one of the most colorful figures. He took an enormous interest in the artistic endeavors of his court and often participated in them — creating his own ceramics, musical instruments, and artillery. That so legendary a patron, whose family's collection included works by Mantegna, Bellini, and Titian, as well as Northern European artists such as Rogier van der Weyden, would choose Dosso Dossi as his principal painter is an indication of the esteem in which the artist's vision and style were held.

Publication

The exhibition was accompanied by an illustrated catalogue published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The 328-page catalogue features 103 color plates and 105 black-and-white illustrations and includes essays on the artist's life and work, as well as technical observations on each painting derived from the recently conducted research. Also included in the publication are a chronology and bibliography.

A major component of the catalogue reports on the extensive technical research into Dosso's painting technique and materials that was conducted over the past three years and has resulted in a critical reassessment of much of the artist's oeuvre. Some 90 works attributed to Dosso have been carefully studied and have revealed the artist's unique working method, in which the compositions of his paintings were often thought out directly on the canvas. In a large number of the artist's works, major compositional changes can be seen in the successive layers of paint. X-ray photographs of both Melissa and Allegory with Pan reveal that figures were added and subtracted, drastically altering the final look and content of the paintings from their initial conceptions. This research — presented here for the first time — has also assisted scholars in resolving issues of authorship for several problematic works previously attributed to Dosso.

Prior to the Metropolitan's presentation, the exhibition was on view in Ferrara at the Palazzo dei Diamanti. It was on view at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from April 27 through July 11, 1999.

An exhibition of 98 images by Carleton Watkins (1829-1916), America's greatest landscape photographer, was on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art October 5, 1999 - January 9, 2000 in Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception. The first large-scale examination of an often under-recognized artist, the exhibition included more than 85 mammoth prints, including work from his famous series of the pristine and then virtually unknown Yosemite Valley, as well as many other lyrical views of the American West.

Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and with special cooperation from the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California.

At the height of his career, Watkins was a leader in his field. His photographs helped convince Abraham Lincoln to sign the Yosemite Bill in 1864 — a tacit recognition of the necessity of natural conservancy in a climate of rampant development, and an important precedent in establishing the present system of national parks. The photographs were exhibited at the 1867 Paris International Exposition, where they were awarded a first-prize medal, and were later seen by Napoleon III. More than a century later, his images still create a visceral impact, effectively pulling the viewer into the scene by means of artistic devices such as radical framing, deep-space perspective, and intruding foreground objects — the same devices used contemporaneously by modernist painters such as Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne.

The photographs in the exhibition were drawn from museum, corporate, and private collections throughout North America. In addition to Watkins's large-format prints, the exhibition included several immense panoramic pictures — works made of large prints placed side-by-side to orchestrate a vast sweep of visual terrain — and many stereo views. Stereographs — two small photographs mounted together that, when placed in a special binocular view, give the illusion of three-dimensional depth — were displayed in the exhibition not only in original Victorian-era stereoscopes, but also and more extensively in a novel interactive computer presentation.

More about Carleton Watkins

Born and raised in Oneonta, New York, Carleton Watkins settled in San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush, taking up the still-new medium of photography in the mid-1850s. On the East Coast, reports of the massive California landscape had taken on mythic proportions, and accounts of colossal mountains, giant trees, expansive deserts, and a vast ocean were considered improbable by many. Watkins himself was struck by the immensity of the Western landscape, and aspired to capture the vastness and grandeur of its space and scale. As confirmation of stories emerging from the West — and to help render comprehensible the size and proportions of the trees, rock formations, mountains, and waterfalls in his photographs — statistical measurements of these natural wonders often accompanied his images or were included in their titles.

In the early 1860s, Colonel John Frémont, the explorer who mapped the American West with his friend Kit Carson, enlisted Watkins to photograph his land and mines. It was this association with Frémont that first led Watkins to photograph Yosemite, resulting in some of his most famous work. Recognizing that the scale of the valley required exceptional preparations, Watkins had a cabinetmaker fashion a huge camera capable of holding negatives 18 by 22 inches in size. The resulting pictures were lush in detail, visually coherent, and psychologically compelling. By December 1862 the views were the talk of New York. There, and in San Francisco, they were displayed in galleries and collected by scientists, investors, mining engineers, homesteaders, and tourists.

Carleton Watkins, Yosemite Falls (River View), 1861
Albumen print from wet-collodion negative
Private Collection, Montecito, California

Three Brothers, Yosemite National Park

Half Dome, 4967 feet, Yosemite

View from Camp Grove, Yosemite, 1861, Vintage Albumen Print, 15-¼ x 20-¾", The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.

In 1867 the photographer traveled to Portland, Oregon, and up the Columbia River, making several images that have since become icons of Western landscape photography. Views such as Cape Horn near Celilo (1867) express the faith of Watkins's generation of Americans in the continuing westward advance of civilization. More than just an illustration of Manifest Destiny of the local railroad's route, it achieves an artful balance between the valley etched by the river and the railroad laid down alongside it, recognizing the providential harmony of nature and man in this particular place.

Through his childhood friend Collis Huntington, he became the unofficial photographer for the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads in the 1870s and 1880s and was allowed to travel free along their lines. As the rampant laying of railroad tracks penetrated the continent, Watkins aligned his photography with the changing perceptions the train brought to the landscape.

With increased competition and the economic crash of the mid 1870s, Watkins's financial fortunes turned. In the wake of his bankruptcy he spent long periods on assignment out of San Francisco, traveling to Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Agricultural assignments in Sonoma, the San Gabriel Valley, and Kern County resulted in such memorable images as Arbutus Menziesii Pursh (1872-78) and Late George Cling Peaches (ca. 1887-88), both of which document the thriving new industry made possible by irrigation farming in areas serviced by new rail lines.

He continued to expand the range of his activity in the 1880s, and his abstract vision found new, unconventional subjects for a broadening audience. One of his last commercial projects involved documenting the new dams and waterways of the Golden Gate and Golden Feather mines in Butte County, California, in 1891. For these final images he returned to his trademark mammoth camera and wet-plate negatives.

Golden Feather Mining Claim, No. 12; Feather River, Butte County, Cal.

One of the views stands out as a remarkable symbol of the intrepid Watkins: at the foreground of

Gold Feather Mining Claim, No. 9 (1891),

silhouetted by the bright sun, is the shadow of the photographer himself in a rare self-portrait with his giant camera.

Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception was curated by Douglas R. Nickel and Maria Morris Hambourg.

Publication

Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception was accompanied by a catalogue featuring over 100 tritone plates — including four gatefolds illustrating Watkins's rarely reproduced panoramas — and 20 duotone illustrations. An introduction by Maria Morris Hambourg, a scholarly essay by Douglas R. Nickel, Associate Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and biographical material by Peter E. Palmquist, an independent scholar and Watkins biographer, are included.

The exhibition originated at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and subsequent to its New York viewing was shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from February 6 through April 30, 2000.

Multnomah Falls Cascade, Columbia River, 1867
Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829–1916)
Albumen silver print from glass negative

View on the Columbia, Cascades, 1867
Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829–1916)
Albumen silver print from glass negative

Organized by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and culled entirely from the recently-acquired Hallmark Photographic Collection, the Developing Greatness, The Origins of American Photography exhibition on view June 9- December 30, 2007 explored the artistic and cultural importance of the first generation of American photography, from 1839 to 1885. The exhibition featured almost 300 works, from one of the earliest known daguerreotypes to one of the first hand-camera snapshots. Important sections of the exhibition are devoted to the Civil War, pioneering Western landscapes, and portraits of the era’s leading personalities.

Organized chronologically and then subdivided into major themes, the exhibition took a fresh perspective on a period of great expansion and enterprise in American history. Photography was the cutting-edge imaging technology of the day, a radical new means to both record and invent the world. Photographers responded accordingly: many were dedicated documentarians, while others explored the medium’s expressive and artistic possibilities. Together, they fashioned an endlessly rich collective image of both the facts and the spirit of the age.

The exhibition explored the broad cultural applications of photography. It was used not only by professional portraitists, but by artists, scientists, adventurers, and, eventually, by the amateur public. Images by all major photographers of the period are represented, including Southworth & Hawes, America’s first masters of the daguerreotype;

Albert Sands Southworth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, ca. 1843, Daguerreotype, ¼ plate, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.

Mathew Brady, the flamboyant portraitist of the rich and famous; Alexander Gardner, Brady’s assistant who went on to produce some of the most powerful images of the Civil War;

Carleton Watkins, the greatest landscape photographer of the era;

Carleton Watkins, View from Camp Grove, Yosemite, 1861, Vintage Albumen Print, 15-¼ x 20-¾", The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc., P5.406.002.05.

and many more.

Unknown Maker, Clown, ca. 1855. Daguerreotype, 1/6 plate, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.

Charles Fredricks, Fredrick’s Photographic Temple of Art, 1857, Salt Print, 16-1/8 x 13-¾ inches, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc., P5.390.001.95.

J. D. Edwards, Steamships at Cotton Wharf, New Orleans, detail, ca. 1858, Salt Print, 5-¼ x 7-7/8", The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.

The exhibition’s earliest works, from the first months of photography’s development, in 1839-40, reflected the uncertain excitement of discovery. As the technology swiftly advanced, these pioneers went on to capture the diversity of America’s people, cities, and landscapes. Portrait photography became common around 1843, as studios opened in the major cities and self-taught entrepreneurs traveled the nation’s back roads. The result was an unparalleled vision of the nation’s people, from its richest citizens to the working class. Outside the studio, Americans made landscape photographs for the purposes of both art and science, from the White Mountains of New England to the Yosemite valley in California, and as far afield as Egypt and the Arctic.

The Civil War of 1861-65 was recorded in truly unprecedented detail — from portraits of the soldiers themselves, to graphic images of the bloody battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg.

Timothy O’Sullivan, Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter at the Battle of Gettysburg, detail, 1863. Albumen Print, 6-¾ x 8-7/5", The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.

At the forefront of the nation’s expansion west, photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan

Timothy O’Sullivan, American (1842-1882). Cottonwood Lake, Wasatch Mountains, Utah, 1869. Albumen print. Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc., 2005.27.3280.

and William Henry Jackson:

worked with official government survey projects to bring back images of the unexplored territories of the West.

The exhibition explored American places, events, and ideas, as well as the diversity of the American people. Race, gender, occupation and social status are a few of the focal points of the extensive collection of portraits — seen in the form of both daguerreotypes and paper photographs. Beginning in the mid-1850s, paper photography reduced the cost of images, further democratizing the process. Photographers captured ordinary men and women in the studio, and at home, and at work. Many aspects of nineteenth-century popular culture — such as phrenology, spirit photography, and the tradition of making portraits of the deceased — are touched on in the exhibition.

The camera played a key role in the rise of mass modern communication and the cult of celebrity. In the early 1850s, daguerreotypes were made of dramatic and newsworthy events, and then often reproduced in the nation’s illustrated papers. By 1860, inexpensive paper photographs were being produced in volume for a mass public: portraits of celebrities, public events, and scenic views. The exhibition included pictures of many notable figures of the day, from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jenny Lind, and Frederick Douglass, to Tom Thumb, General William T. Sherman, and Abraham Lincoln. Also well represented were 3-D stereographic images. While these relatively small images have received little attention as works of art, they were some of the most popular and widely circulated images of the period. The parlor stereoviewer was, in essence, the television of its day — a means of bringing virtual images of the larger world into the living room.

The Origins of American Photography: From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate, 1839–1885, written by Keith F. Davis for the Hallmark Foundation and designed by Malcolm Grear Designers accompanied the exhibition titled Developing Greatness: The Origins of American Photography, 1839–1885 organized by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and culled entirely from its recently acquired Hallmark Photographic Collection. With over six hundred tritone and color illustrations, many never before published, this three hundred and sixty page book was designed to be the definitive guide on early American photography, from the earliest known American daguerreotypes to the introduction of dry-plate photography printed on paper.

Some 50 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings and drawings that had never before been lent from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, were the centerpiece of an exhibition devoted to the extraordinary art collection formed by Dr. Paul-Ferdinand Gachet (1828-1909), the physician who cared for Vincent van Gogh in the months prior to his suicide in 1890, and who was immortalized in several renowned portraits by the artist.

The exhibition, which featured more than 130 works in all, includes an additional 40 paintings and works on paper from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and other collections in Europe and America that also once belonged to the legendary Dr. Gachet, who was both friend and patron to the artists — Monet, Pissarro, Guillaumin, Renoir, Sisley, and above all, Cézanne and Van Gogh — whose works he collected.

On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art May 25 through August 15, 1999, Cézanne to Van Gogh: The Collection of Doctor Gachet offered a unique overview of this fascinating assemblage, including major examples of these artists' work, copies made after them by Gachet and other amateur artists in his circle, and an interesting array of souvenirs, such as artists' palettes, tubes of paint, and various props, that record Gachet's close relationship with these 19th-century masters.

The exhibition also offered a detailed look not only at Dr. Gachet, but also his son and heir, Paul Gachet fils (1873-1962), who, following his father's death, kept the collection virtually hidden from sight in the family house in Auvers for more than half a century — frustrating art historians and, given the Gachets' practice of copying, raising questions about the authenticity of several key works — before donating a major portion of the collection to the French state over a period of years beginning in 1949.

The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Réunion des musées nationaux/Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

About Doctor Gachet

Paul-Ferdinand Gachet maintained a medical practice in Paris, however, he spent most of his time at his country house in Auvers-sur-Oise, some 20 miles from the capital, where he became acquainted with a number of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters who worked in the area, including C#&233;zanne, Pissarro, and Guillaumin. The house was filled with works of art, most of which were tokens of friendship and souvenirs of artistic interchange, as well as assorted antiques, a printing press, and an infamous menagerie of animals. Here, Céézanne made a series of still-lifes based on vases and other objects in the Gachet household; Pissarro, working nearby in Pontoise, painted landscape motifs drawn from the environs; and several artists — among them Amand Gautier, Norbert Goeneutte, and Van Gogh — painted portraits of Dr. Gachet.

Though he was a physician by profession, Gachet — a fascinating, multifaceted, and eccentric individual — was also an artist in his own right under the pseudonym Paul van Ryssel ("Paul of Lille"), a name he adopted from the Flemish name for his hometown. His son Paul Gachet fils became an artist as well, adapting the name Louis van Ryssel. The artistic efforts of father and son extended from Dr. Gachet's avant-garde etchings and prints to the canvases they painted in an Impressionist idiom, and the copies both made after pictures that they owned by Cézanne, Pissarro, Van Gogh, and others.

Exhibition Highlights

Cézanne to Van Gogh marked the first time since a 1954-55 Paris exhibition commemorating the gift by Paul Gachet fils that an exhibition focused on the collection and the first time ever that the Gachets' artistic endeavors have been presented alongside the work of the masters they copied. The exhibition featured nearly 60 paintings, including approximately ten works each by Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Guillaumin, with a representative selection of paintings by Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and the Gachets themselves. Adding further context to this presentation, the various artists' "souvenirs" — vases that appear in Cézanne's still lifes and Van Gogh's flower paintings, the white visor cap that Dr. Gachet wears in Van Gogh's celebrated oil portrait and the copper plate used for the artist's etched portrait of Dr. Gachet, as well as other related objects — were displayed adjacent to the works of art.

Highlights of the paintings in the exhibition included

Cézanne's A Modern Olympia (1873-74)

and Guillaumin's Sunset at Ivry (ca. 1872-73),

which Dr. Gachet lent to the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.

Other paintings by Cézanne included

Green Apples (ca. 1872-73),

Dr. Gachet's House at Auvers (1872-73),

and Bouquet in a Small Delft Vase (1873). The Delft vase depicted was among the souvenirs on view.

Pissarro was represented by several exceptional canvases, including

Chestnut Trees at Louveciennes (c. 1871-72),

which Van Gogh admired and described in a letter to his brother Theo,

and Road at Louveciennes (1872).

Guillaumin's Reclining Nude (ca. 1872-77)

also caught the attention of Van Gogh when he visited Dr. Gachet's house.

Van Gogh's own works on view included the famous Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890),

as well as his haunting Self-Portrait (1889),

one of the last made before his suicide.

Of his landscapes in the exhibition, the intimate view of

Dr. Gachet's Garden (1890),

with its profusion of riotous flora,

contrasts markedly with the expansive vista of

Thatched Huts at Cordeville, Auvers (1890),

yet both reveal Van Gogh's characteristically exuberant brushwork and brilliant palette.

Among the paintings by Dr. Gachet are the still-life Apples, a copy after Cézanne's A Modern Olympia, and a copy after Pissarro's Study at Louveciennes, Snow, a work that Gachet never owned, but had borrowed from Pissarro for the purpose of copying. An indication of the degree to which Dr. Gachet's house was a vortex of artistic interchange is revealed not only in the copies that amateurs such as the Gachets made of the artists' paintings, but in the copies that the artists themselves made of each other's works.

The exhibition included Cézanne's etching, Sailboats on the Seine at Bercy (after Guillaumin) as well as his still-life painting (here is a similar painting):

The Seine At Bercy Paintings After Armand Guillaumin by Paul Cézanne

Bouquet with Yellow Dahlia (1873), which incorporates the same tablecloth and similar motifs found in a Guillaumin still-life that was also painted in Gachet's house at around the same time.

Van Gogh's painting Cows (after Van Ryssel and Jordaens)

is an oil copy of a Gachet etching of a Jordaens oil. Continuing this tradition, Paul Gachet fils, painting as Louis van Ryssel, was also inspired by the works in his father's collection, making oil and watercolor copies of many paintings. In other works, he adopted the style and palette of Van Gogh to paint works of his own conception, including a portrait of Van Gogh's mother, which the younger Gachet presented to Vincent's nephew (also named Vincent van Gogh) in 1905.

Among the more than 50 works on paper were drawings by the masters and the Gachets and other amateurs, about 25 watercolor copies of paintings, and a selection of prints made in Dr. Gachet's attic studio by Cézanne, Pissarro, Van Gogh, and the Gachets. The only etchings ever created by Cézanne

Guillaumin au pendu (Salomon 2 ii/ii). Original etching, 1873. Edition unknown (c. 1000 unsigned impressions).

The poet and painter Armand Guillaumin was Cezanne's friend and probably introduced him to etching. Here we see him siitting beneath the sign of the inn, Le Pendu / The Hanged Man

Paysage à Anvers (Salomon 5). Original etching printed in color, 1873. Edition: 600 impressions pulled in1914 for Homage to Cezanne.

and Van Gogh were made in Dr. Gachet's house, and the exhibition included impressions of all five prints by Cézanne and the sole etching of Van Gogh's career —

Portrait of Dr. Gachet (The Man with a Pipe)

— shown in four differently colored prints in addition to the original copper plate. Another rarely exhibited treasure, Van Gogh's sketchbook from his Auvers period, was also featured in the exhibition.

The watercolors on view included a selection of works copied from Van Gogh's oil paintings in the Gachet collection that were made by Blanche Derousse (1873-1911), a local seamstress, amateur artist, and friend of the Gachet family in Auvers. Originally intended to illustrate a never-realized catalogue of Dr. Gachet's collection of Van Gogh canvases, these intimately scaled works offered an enlightening overview of the scope and quality of the works once owned by Dr. Gachet, before they were dispersed through sales and donations made by his son.

Perhaps the most poignant example in the exhibition of the bond between Dr. Gachet and Van Gogh was Gachet's charcoal portrait of the artist on his deathbed. Further testament of the high esteem in which artist and doctor held one another is a letter from Vincent to his brother Theo, describing Dr. Gachet and his new surroundings in Auvers. Two letters sent by Dr. Gachet to Theo include the urgent note that Vincent had shot himself and imploring Theo to come to Auvers. The second letter, written after Vincent's death, in which Dr. Gachet characterizes the artist as a "giant" and a "philosopher" and writes of his profound appreciation for Van Gogh's paintings, had only recently been rediscovered after being lost for decades. Several photographs of the Gachet household, detailing how the collection was displayed during their lifetimes, were also on view.

During those decades in which the works were sequestered in the Gachet house — most had never been photographed or exhibited prior to their donation — speculation swirled around the collection, the Gachets' intentions for its disposition, and the veracity of the younger Paul Gachet's accounts of the family's interaction with these now-celebrated artists. The exhibition provided a unique opportunity to compare great paintings by Cézanne and Van Gogh with copies made by the Gachets and others in their circle and to reassess, in light of new technical and documentary findings, those works — such as the Orsay version of Portrait of Dr. Gachet — that have been the subject of particular controversy. Most of the copies had never before been exhibited and visitors to the exhibition could evaluate for themselves whether either Gachet had the impetus or, more importantly, the artistic ability to convincingly fake the work of the masters.

Organizers

The exhibition was co-organized by Susan Alyson Stein, Associate Curator of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Anne Distel, Chief Curator, Musée d'Orsay. Andreas Blühm, Head of Exhibitions, and Sjraar van Heugten, Curator of Drawings and Prints, both of the Van Gogh Museum, are responsible for coordinating the exhibition in Amsterdam.

Catalogue

The fully illustrated catalogue that accompanied the exhibition addresses these issues and others in historical and technical essays and entries that include a wealth of information that has newly come to light. The catalogue, published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, also documents the contents and history of the entire Gachet collection — beyond what was donated to the French state — in essays, as well as a checklist of artists and works in the collection, a summary catalogue of approximately 150 works, and an illustrated checklist of copies. Featuring 500 illustrations, including 117 in color, the 328-page catalogue is available in both hardcover and paperback.

Travel Information

Cézanne to Van Gogh: The Collection of Doctor Gachet premiered at the Grand Palais, Paris (January 30 through April 26, 1999), and, following the Metropolitan's presentation, was on view at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (September 24 through December 5, 1999).

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of French artist Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), The Metropolitan Museum of Art presented a major exhibition fom June 1 to August 22, 1999.It was the largest retrospective of Moreau's work ever shown in the United States — featuring masterpieces from every phase of his distinguished career. Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream included nearly 175 works — some 40 paintings and 60 watercolors in addition to drawings and preparatory studies, lent primarily from the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris, with other works drawn from public and private collections in Europe and America.

Best known for his mysterious and complex allegorical paintings based on classical, literary, and biblical sources, Moreau was much admired in his own day. His fantastic, dream-like imagery and emphasis on the personal and intuitive nature of artistic creation profoundly influenced later 19th- and 20th-century artists — not only his students Georges Rouault, Albert Marquet, and Henri Matisse, but also the Symbolists and Surrealists. Spanning 50 years of this remarkable artist's career, the exhibition included the majority of Moreau's most celebrated Salon paintings, as well as many watercolors and drawings that had not previously been exhibited or even published.

The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Réunion des musées nationaux, and The Art Institute of Chicago.

About the Artist

Organized chronologically, Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream clearly revealed an extraordinarily original and imaginative artist who, free from financial constraints and concerns of the marketplace, was able to pursue his own artistic vision. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Moreau was less concerned with the external visual world than with profound and hidden truths; these he often sought in the realm of imagination and dreams. He was not "a painter of modern life" — the Impressionists' mandate — but of traditional subjects and enduring universal themes, which he reinterpreted in unique and novel ways. A man of elegance and erudition, Moreau reinvigorated the tradition of history painting by adding a new, imaginative, and poetic dimension to it. His mysterious and evocative treatment of classical mythology and religious subject matter inspired many late-19th-century Symbolist painters and writers. Later, Surrealists such as André Breton found strong encouragement in Moreau's fearless declaration that "I have allowed my imagination free play, and have not been led astray by it."

Like other artists and writers in the mid-19th century, Moreau found the culture of his time to be overly materialistic and indifferent to religion and art. He looked to the art of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, 17th-century France, and non-Western cultures to develop a form of expression that offered spiritual guidance in what he believed to be an age of confusion. He traveled to Italy for a prolonged trip in 1857, where, alongside his friend Edgar Degas, he copied the pictures in museums and churches. While works of the Italian masters left a lasting impression on Moreau, his art continued to evolve in unpredictable directions.

His early paintings are imbued with the beauty and passion of Romantic art, while those of the 1860s and 1870s make epic statements by fusing classical erudition with ever-increasing technical mastery. In these works, the dramatic overtones of Romantic painters such as Delacroix and Géricault are deftly combined with the exquisitely precise draftsmanship of Poussin and Ingres. Also evident in the artist's richly textured canvases and watercolors are the intricately detailed surfaces and shimmering fabrics that betray his admiration for the exoticism and precise rendering seen in Persian and Indian miniatures.

Exhibition Highlights

Two major salon paintings by Moreau — the Metropolitan's own

Oedipus and the Sphinx(1864)

and the Art Institute of Chicago's Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra (1869-76)

— were the centerpieces of two special dossiers within the exhibition.

Oedipus and the Sphinx established Moreau's artistic reputation when it caused a sensation at the Salon of 1864, earning a medal for the artist. The large-scale painting, which depicts an intense moment of confrontation in the Greek myth, also has a more universal interpretation, as Moreau explained: the moment when "a man of mature age wrestles with the enigma of life." The exhibition placed the work in the context of more than 20 preparatory drawings and watercolors, as well as several caricatures after the picture, revealing Moreau's development of the composition and the public's reaction to the painting.

Another of Moreau's carefully conceived paintings, Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra, exhibited at the Salon of 1876 along with the equally acclaimed

Salome— on view in the same gallery of the exhibition — was the focus of a dossier that features nearly 40 paintings, watercolors, and drawings that include life studies of models, compositional sketches, drawings of snakes from life and scientific texts, tracings, and cartoons.

Many of Moreau's late works may well surprise viewers to the exhibition. These paintings and watercolors from the late 1870s, '80s, and '90s reveal the artist as one of the first to explore the expressive qualities of color in what appear to be abstract compositions. Generally conceived as color studies or sketches in preparation for other paintings, these works were never exhibited or sold during the artist's lifetime. Since they were first encountered by audiences in retrospectives held in the early 1960s, these works have been the focus of considerable discussion, particularly in terms of defining Moreau's potential relationship or perceived affinity to 20th-century artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Clifford Still, and other Abstract Expressionists.

Publication

Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream was accompanied by a catalogue. Published by The Art Institute of Chicago, the 320-page book features 291 illustrations, including 162 in color.

Organizers

At the Metropolitan, the exhibition was organized by Rebecca A. Rabinow, Research Associate, Department of European Paintings.

The exhibition premiered at the Grand Palais, Paris, and was also on view at The Art Institute of Chicago prior to the Metropolitan's presentation.

More Moreau

The Apparition

Galatea

Salome Dancing before Herod

Thracian Girl Carrying the Head of Orpheus

The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, on view at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University from March 28 to June 17, 2001, captured the brilliance of turn-of-the-century society and a new current of sophistication in America. The exhibition includes 60 major artworks by the most important artists of the day, including Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent. "Great ambition characterized this period in America," said Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. "Artists and patrons rose to new heights, as the 1876 Centennial engendered a strong sense of national pride and eagerness to match Europe's aristocracies."

The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum was one of eight exhibitions in Treasures to Go, touring the nation through 2002.

Mark Twain wrote a popular novel in 1873 in which he described the period, The Gilded Age, as America's "golden road to fortune." He contrasted the shallow materialism of the turn-of-the-century with the golden age of Greece. The Gilded Age, more than any other time in America, pointed to European ideals of aristocracy and patronage with a heretofore unknown collaboration between wealthy American patrons and artists.

A heightened sophistication permeates the portraits in the exhibition. Society portraitist John Singer Sargent posed

Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler (1893),

whose family was heir to John Jacob Astor's fortune, in his London studio, flanked by old master paintings.

Cecilia Beaux portrayed her brother-in-law Henry Sturgis Drinker, a hard-driving corporate railroad lawyer, as relaxed and casual in

Man with the Cat (1898), resplendent in a white suit and pink shirt.

This was also an international age, when artists and their patrons traveled widely to visit exotic cultures.

Louis Comfort Tiffany's Market Day Outside the Walls of Tangiers, Morocco (1873)

signals this interest and foreshadows the artist's later development of opulent interiors. Near Eastern subjects were popular for their lush color and languorous sensuality, as in

Frederick Arthur Bridgman's Oriental Interior (1884) and

H. Siddons Mowbray's intimate Idle Hours (1895).

Vast fortunes amassed during the Industrial Revolution led to a wave of elegant townhouses, and these were settings for fine collections and decorations.

Apollo with Cupids (1880-82), a decorative panel by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and John La Farge, once adorned the dining room of Cornelius Vanderbilt's Fifth Avenue mansion in New York City. The work is lavishly embellished with African mahogany, hammered bronze, colored marbles, mother-of-pearl, and ivory.

American sculptors mastered the art of bronze casting during this period, learning to use its sleek surfaces and rich patinas to great decorative effect. Twelve bronzes were in the exhibition, ranging from Daniel Chester French's patriotic and restrained Concord Minute Man of 1774 (modeled in 1889) to Adolph Weinman's moody Descending Night (modeled about 1915) and exuberant Rising Sun (1914-15). The most famous sculptor of the period was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, represented in this exhibition by several works, including an early model for the Diana (1889) that once graced the top of Madison Square Garden in New York.

Four rare paintings by the visionary artist Albert Pinkham Ryder were in the exhibition, each a story of betrayal and redemption based on literary sources.

The Flying Dutchman (about 1887)

portrays the legendary "phantom ship" with the glowing color, dramatic composition, and complex layered painting technique that made Ryder a favorite among collectors. The same complex technique causes his paintings to be unusually fragile, so the museum rarely lends his works. Special humidity-controlled packing and shipping technology allows these works to be shared throughout America.

Winslow Homer, like Ryder, probed beneath the glitter of the Gilded Age to explore undercurrents of anxiety.

High Cliff, Coast of Maine (1894) is among the greatest of Homer's late seascapes, filling the canvas with waves pounding on a rocky shore. The opposing forces of nature resonated in a society struggling with economic instability, labor unrest, and controversial new theories of Darwin and Freud.

The intimate world of women and children at home, seen in

An Interlude (1907) by Sergeant Kendall, offered a comforting refuge. Yet danger could invade even the sanctuary of the home, as portrayed by

J. Bond Francisco in The Sick Child (1893),

in which a mother keeps watch as her son hovers between life and death.

Artists and their patrons shared an ambition to present American civilization as having grown past its earlier provincialism to full maturity, equal to Europe's much-admired culture. Evocations of music abound, as in

Childe Hassam's woman at a piano called Improvisation (1899)

and Thomas Dewing's allegory of Music (about 1895), where a prevailing gold palette evokes a musical tonality.

Spiritual themes—countering fears that Americans were overly materialistic—appear in Abbott Thayer's four paintings included in the exhibition, including the ever-popular

Angel (about 1889).

Overall, the ambitions of individual artists and patrons, and of the nation at large, combined to make the period of the 1870s through the 1910s an era of enormous achievement in the visual arts.

An illustrated gift book The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, authored by Elizabeth Prelinger and co-published by Watson-Guptill Publications, a division of BPI Communications, accompanied the exhibition. The book includes fifty color illustrations with short discussions of each artwork.

Master Drawings from the Smith College Museum of Art was on view at The Frick Collection through August 12, 2001, before traveling to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, where it was on view from October 16, 2001 through January 6, 2002. The exhibition was organized by the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts.

The Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts, is widely acknowledged to have one of the most important college art collections in America, and one of its extraordinary strengths is its renowned collection of master drawings. New York audiences had the opportunity to view a superb selection of these works on paper - spanning some six centuries of draftsmanship - when Smith lent an important selection of these works to The Frick Collection, the only North American venue on an international tour.

Master Drawings from the Smith College Museum of Art

Images clockwise from the top left:

A Faun Carrying a Basket of Grapes. (1747). Natoire, Charles Joseph. red chalk heightened with white chalk on brown antique laid paper. 14 7/16 x 9 1/4 inches.

A Monumental Stair Hall. (c.1900s). Bibiena, Giuseppe Galli. pen and dark brown ink with brush and grey ink over black chalk. 11 1/2 x 7 9/16 inches.

Chrysanthemum. (c.1921-1925). Mondrian, Piet. black and brown chalks with stumping on gray laid paper. 24 3/4 x 15 1/8 inches.

The Commemoration (L’Anniversaire). (1886). Fantin-Latour, Ignace Henri. black crayon with white heightening, the composition bordered by a ruled framing line in black crayon, on beige tracing paper. 25 1/4 x 19 inches.

The exhibition featured sixty-eight sheets. Numerous European and American artists and subjects are represented, arranged chronologically from a late 15th-century Netherlandish silverpoint portrait attributed to Dieric Bouts to the mid-20th-century abstract watercolor "Echo" by American Mark Tobey. Media and degree of finish vary greatly, from the cursory graphite sketch of Jacques-Louis David's dramatic "The Sabine Women" (c.1795-96) to the exquisite contrast between colors and textures seen in James Jacques Joseph Tissot's highly finished gouache and watercolor "Young Woman in a Rocking Chair" (1873).

Among the other artists represented in the exhibition are Northern European masters Matthias Grünewald, Jan van Goyen, Adoph von Menzel, Piet Mondrian, and Paul Klee. Italian artists include Fra Bartolommeo, Rosso Fiorentino, Federico Barocci, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Francesco Guardi. Represented are many artists who worked in France, among them Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Théodore Géricault, Edgar Degas, James Tissot, Pierre-August Renoir, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Georges Pierre Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Marc Chagall, and Henri Matisse. Featured English masters include Paul Sandby, Thomas Gainsborough, Aubrey Beardsley, and Henry Moore, while Elihu Vedder, Maurice Prendergast, Charles Burchfield, Arthur Dove, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman are among the Americans.

Maurice Brazil Prendergast
St. John's, Newfoundland 1858-1924
New York South Boston Pier, 1896
18 1/4 x 14 (46 x 35.4 cm.)
Brush and watercolor and graphite on wove paper
Smith College Museum of Art,
Purchased, Charles B. Hoyt Fund, 1950
Photograph: Stephen Petegorsky

Smith College was founded in 1875 to instruct young women in various fields including the Useful and Fine Arts, as set forth in the will of Sophia Smith, the benefactor of the institution. Drawing was a cornerstone of art studies at Smith, and in keeping with standard art instruction practices of the day, students learned by copying from paintings and sculptures by the great masters. Most of the works of art procured early by the college were acquired for this specific purpose. Over the years, philosophies changed, and they began to be acquired for their own merits. Today, the collection contains substantial holdings of works on paper, with more than 1,700 drawings, 10,000 prints, and 5,800 photographs.

Catalogue

An exciting array of artistic styles awaits the reader in this impressive catalog of 86 selections from the Smith College collection. Smith curators Sievers, Muehlig (who edited the related catalog Masterworks of American Painting and Sculpture from the Smith College Museum of Art, LJ 2/15/00), and Rich have produced an extremely well-researched and illustrated publication.

The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University showcased an exhibition of masterpieces from one of the world's foremost collections of Hudson River School paintings from October 8, 2003 to January 18, 2004. This selection of 55 paintings includes 10 by Thomas Cole, 11 by Frederic Church, and five by Albert Bierstadt. The exhibition Hudson River School: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art continues through at Stanford, then travels to six other museums across the U.S., including:

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh - Feb-May 2004
Tacoma Art Museum - October 2, 2004 - January 16, 2005
Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville (September 23, 2005 - January 8, 2006)

The exhibition was organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, from its permanent collection.

The core of this Hudson River School collection was formed by two major patrons of American artists who lived in Hartford, Connecticut: Daniel Wadsworth (1771–1848), a devoted traveler, amateur artist and architect, and founder of the Wadsworth Atheneum, and Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt (1826–1905), widow of arms manufacturer Samuel Colt. Many works were commissioned for their personal enjoyment. Due to their patronage, the Wadsworth Atheneum's collection reflects the evolving aesthetic sensibilities of two generations of Hudson River School painters. In turn, the works reveal the emerging sense of an American national identity, which was also evident in the writings of 19th-century authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Fenimore Cooper.

Thomas Cole, “View in the White Mountains” 1827

The origins of the Hudson River School traditionally are attributed to Thomas Cole, who was born in England and raised in Ohio before arriving in New York City in 1825. Cole was a more cerebral painter than his predecessors, and he used his art as a moral as well as aesthetic platform. Breaking from the traditional European taste for manicured pastoral views, Cole depicted the virginal, primeval wilderness of the American northeast. It was a paradise already lost, however, for Native Americans had been chased from their lands, white settlements had been long established, and tourism was beginning to boom.

Wadsworth introduced 17-year-old Hartford native and aspiring artist Frederic Church to Thomas Cole, who made Church his sole apprentice. Wadsworth then purchased Church's first mature painting, Hooker and Company Journeying Through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford in 1636 (created in1846), for $130, acquiring it for the newly founded Wadsworth Atheneum. Church was then 20 years of age. Later, during the Civil War, Church advised Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt in assembling an impressive private picture gallery for her mansion, Armsmear, in Hartford. He introduced her to Albert Bierstadt, William Bradford, John Kensett, Sanford Gifford, and others, from whom she commissioned paintings.

Related article and images

Figure 1, Thomas Cole, Kaaterskill Falls, 1826. Oil on canvas; 251⁄4 x 365⁄16 in.
Bequest of Daniel Wadsworth, 1848.14

Figure 2, Thomas Cole, Landscape Composition, St. John in the
Wilderness, 1827. Oil on canvas; 36 x 29 in. Bequest of Daniel
Wadsworth, 1848.16

Figure 3, Thomas Cole, Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans”:
Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund, 1827. Oil on canvas,
253⁄8 x 35 in. The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
Bequest of Alfred Smith, 1868.3

Figure 4, Thomas Cole, View on Lake Winnipiseogee, 1828. Oil
on canvas; 193⁄4 x 261⁄8 in. Bequest of Daniel Wadsworth, 1848.13

Figure 5, Thomas Cole, View of Monte Video, the Seat of Daniel
Wadsworth, Esq., 1828. Oil on canvas; 193⁄4 x 261⁄16 in. Bequest of
Daniel Wadsworth, 1848.14

Figure 6, Thomas Cole, Mount Etna from Taormina, 1843. Oil on canvas, 78 5⁄8 x 120 in.
The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Museum Purchase, 1844.6

Figure 7, Frederic E. Church, Hooker and Company Traveling
through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford, in 1636,
1846. Oil on canvas, 401⁄4 x 60 in. The Wadsworth Atheneum
Museum of Art, Museum Purchase, 1850.9

Figure 8, Frederic E. Church, Grand Manan Island, Bay of Fundy,
1852. Oil on canvas, 2113⁄16 x 31 in. The Wadsworth Atheneum
Museum of Art. Gallery Purchase Fund, 1898.6

Figure 9, Frederic E. Church, Coast Scene, Mount Desert, 1863.
Oil on canvas; 361⁄8 x 48 in. Bequest of Clara Hinton Gould,
1948.178

Figure 10, Frederic E. Church, Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica, 1867.
Oil on canvas, 485⁄16 x 84 in. The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
Bequest of Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt, 1905.21

Figure 11, Asher B. Durand, View Toward the Hudson River
Valley, 1851. Oil on canvas, 331⁄8 x 481⁄8 in. The Wadsworth
Atheneum Museum of Art. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary
Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1948.119

Figure 12, Albert Bierstadt. In the Mountains, 1867. Oil on
canvas, 363⁄16 x 50 in. The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

Figure 13, Albert Bierstadt, Toward the Setting Sun, 1862. Oil on
canvas; 73⁄4 x 14 in. Gift of Mr. J. Harold Williams, in memory of
Edith Russell Wooley, 1977.74

Figure 14, John F. Kensett, Coast Scene With Figures (Beverly
Shore), 1869. Oil on canvas, 36 x 60 3⁄8 in. The Wadsworth
Atheneum Museum of Art. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary
Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1942.345
by Kensett’s Coast Scene

Catalogue

Hudson River School - Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
180 p., 9 1/2 x 12
34 b/w + 67 color illus.
ISBN: 9780300101164

* Introduction by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser; Catalogue by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Amy Ellis, with Maureen Miesmer

This book features fifty-seven major Hudson River School paintings from the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, recognized as the most extensive and finest in the world.

Gorgeously and amply illustrated, the book includes paintings by all the major figures of the Hudson River School. Each work is beautifully reproduced in full color and is accompanied by a concise description of its significance and historical background. The book also includes artists’ biographies and a brief introduction to American nineteenth-century landscape painting and the Wadsworth Atheneum’s unique role in collecting Hudson River pictures.

About the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art:

The quality and range of fine and decorative arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum place it among the dozen greatest art museums in the United States. Its world-renowned collections include Old Master paintings, modernist masterpieces, 19th-century French and Impressionist paintings, Meissen and Sevres porcelains, costumes and textiles, American furniture and decorative arts of the Pilgrim Century through the Gilded Age, and the vanguard of contemporary art.

The Wadsworth Atheneum is named for its founder, the arts patron and philanthropist Daniel Wadsworth (1771–1848), and after the Athenaeum in Rome (itself named for Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom). Established in 1842, the Wadsworth Atheneum is America's oldest public art museum, preceding the founding of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston by three decades. It was the first American museum to acquire works by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Frederic Church, Salvador DalÌ, Joan Miro, Alexander Calder, Piet Mondrian, Joseph Cornell, and Max Ernst.

Fiery passion and the warm, festive atmosphere of Mexico define an exhibition opening on June 1 at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Masterpieces of Modern Mexico from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection showcases more than 100 paintings, sculptures, photographs and drawings collected by the Gelmans in their adopted homeland of Mexico.

“When the Don Hall Initiative was created at the beginning of my tenure with the Nelson-Atkins, we hoped to bring exhibitions here that would reverberate in the community,” said the Mexico City-born Julián Zugazagoitia, CEO and Director. “The Gelman Collection has universal appeal but is so close to my personal history that we are thrilled to present these masterpieces to Kansas City.”

Jacques Gelman, a Russian-born film production mogul, and Natasha, his Czechoslovakian-born wife, became Mexican citizens in 1942 following the couple’s marriage in 1941. Over the next five decades, the Gelmans supported generations of internationally renowned Mexican artists. They established friendships with and collected art by such icons of Mexican modernism as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, and Gunther Gerzso, among others.

The Gelman Collection is the realization of an intimate collaboration spanning more than 40 years; it was the predominant passion of Jacques and Natasha. The collection began in 1943 with Rivera’s portrait of Natasha Gelman and continued to grow even after Jacques’ death in 1986. The couple collected art without hesitation. They acquired the canvases of Kahlo and Rivera when there were only a handful of collectors in Mexico.

Although their styles were radically different, Kahlo and Rivera were similarly captivated by painting’s potential to explore the human condition. Rivera painted massive murals depicting the heroic struggle of Mexican society forging its future; Kahlo explored the inner workings of her soul, which reflect the female condition today, in a series of self-portraits that revealed her tragic medical history and affirmed her Mexican identity.

The Gelman collection is, in and of itself, a work of art. It is also a work in progress. Owing to the enthusiasm they felt for Mexican art, the Gelmans desired that their collection be kept up to date. Works by significant contemporary artists such as Paula Santiago, Betsabeé Romero, Francis Alÿs and Gabriel Orozco have recently entered the Gelman collection. Thanks to the discerning eye of its president, Robert Littman, the collection continues to grow and evolve according to the forward-thinking couple’s wishes.

The exhibition includes key images by Kahlo such as

Self Portrait with Monkeys,(1943)

and Self Portrait as a Tehuana or Diego in My Thoughts, (below)

and the major work by Rivera, Calla Lily Vendors1943).

Reflecting the Gelmans' personal tastes, their collection of Mexican art includes many portraits of themselves, such as

Rufino Tamayo's Portrait of Mrs. Natasha Gelman (1948)

and Ángel Zárraga's Portrait of Mr. Jacques Gelman (1945).

Throughout the post-World War II artistic boom in Mexico, the Gelmans befriended a long list of renowned artists, including Kahlo, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Consequently, their collection of Mexican works reveals not only their passion for art, but also their blossoming relationships with such artists.

The paintings are supplemented by a display of the rarely-seen photographs by Frida Kahlo' s father Guillermo Kahlo (1872-1941) depicting churches and cloisters around Mexico City and Tepotzlan, alongside views from the Palace in Chapultepec Park. Their inclusion allows, for the first time in this country, the work of Frida Kahlo to be placed alongside and put into context with the two most important men in her life.

The exhibition is further extended with a selection of photographs by another key artistic couple who offer a significant glimpse of Mexico's cultural history, the photographers Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902-2002) and Lola Álvarez Bravo (1905-1993). Manuel famously photographed the Mexican Muralists, and his cinematic images of Mexico speak of the mystery of everyday life and contemporary political and social problems. Lola began taking photographs under the influence of her husband in the 1920s and worked in a number of photographic genres such as nudes, still life, landscape, photomontage and portraits. She was a close friend of Frida Kahlo, and hosted Frida's first solo exhibition in Mexico in her gallery (Galería de Arte Mexicano) in 1953.

Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Masterpieces of Modern Mexico from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection runs through Aug. 18 at the Nelson-Atkins and showcases an exceptional private collection that not only highlights the rich and vibrant artistic traditions of the Mexico of yesterday, but underscores the inventiveness and vitality of Mexican art today.

Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907–1954). Diego en mi pensamiento (Diego on My Mind), 1943. Oil on Masonite, 29 7/8 x 24 inches. The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art. The Vergel Foundation. Conaculta/INBA. © 2013 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1886–1957). Retrato de la Señora Natasha Gelman (Portrait of Mrs. Natasha Gelman), 1943. Oil on canvas, 45 1/4 x 60 1/4 inches. The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art. The Vergel Foundation. Conaculta/INBA. © 2013 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Carlos Mérida (Guatemalan, 1891–1984). El mensaje (The Message), 1960. Painted board, 28 x 34 5/8 inches. The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art. The Vergel Foundation. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City.

Interesting article

This exhibition has been organized by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art with the Vergel Foundation. Support has been received from The Keith and Margie Weber Foundation, Belger Cartage Service, Inc., the Campbell-Calvin Fund and Elizabeth C. Bonner Charitable Trust for exhibitions and our generous donors to the Annual Fund.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

The Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City is recognized nationally and internationally as one of America’s finest art museums. The Nelson-Atkins serves the community by providing access and insight into its renowned collection of more than 33,500 art objects and is best known for its Asian art, European and American paintings, photography, modern sculpture, and new American Indian and Egyptian galleries. Housing a major art research library and the Ford Learning Center, the Museum is a key educational resource for the region. The institution-wide transformation of the Nelson-Atkins has included the 165,000-square-foot Bloch Building expansion and renovation of the original 1933 Nelson-Atkins Building.

The Nelson-Atkins is located at 45th and Oak Streets, Kansas City, MO. Hours are Wednesday, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.; Thursday/Friday, 10 a.m.–9 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Sunday, Noon–5 p.m. Admission to the museum is free to everyone. For museum information, phone 816.751.1ART (1278) or visit nelson-atkins.org.

Catalogue

The first retrospective of the work of French painter Pierre Bonnard to be shown in New York since 1964 appeared at The Museum of Modern Art June 21-October 13, 1998. One of the most enigmatic of the great artists of the twentieth century, Bonnard (1867-1947) is perhaps best known for his extraordinary colors and sensuous nudes. As this comprehensive exhibition makes clear, however, Bonnard is not simply a painter of hedonistic beauty, but one of the great masters of structure and composition, who reconfigured pictorial space to convey complex emotional states.

By focusing on interiors, still lifes, landscapes, and figure paintings, including the famous bath paintings of his enigmatic wife, Marthe, as well as the remarkable self-portraits, this exhibition emphasized the consistency of Bonnard's preoccupation with the physical as modified by color and light, and showed how he was able to keep reshaping the familiar through compositions of increasing complexity, daring, and originality. Comprising some 80 works, Bonnard concentrates on the artist's foremost period of innovation, beginning in the mid-1910s. It presents celebrated works from public collections and little-known works in private hands, some of which had never been seen in the United States before. The exhibition also brought together the largest number of Bonnard selfportraits to be shown in one place, concluding with the stark and moving images of the artist's last years.

Bonnard occupied eight galleries. The first two showed the unfolding of Bonnard's art from around 1890 until the late 1920s. The remaining six galleries showed his later paintings grouped according to subject matter. Japanese prints and the work of Paul Gauguin influence early works like

Intimacy (1891)

and The Croquet Game (1892),

in which Bonnard's fascination with how patterning can be used to hide things in a painting, slowing one's perception of them, is already evident. By 1900 Bonnard's subject matter had become moments of perception--he wanted to convey what it was like to come upon something unexpectedly for the first time. Bonnard surprised the viewer by making things strange: Everyday objects are oddly shaped, of uncertain texture or incredible color, hard to decipher, hidden in unlikely corners or reflected in mirrors, and so on. Having stopped a moment of time, he asks for our participation in unpacking the complexity of detail to be found there.

By 1920, Bonnard's mature style was formed and, while it did change as the years passed, the stylistic changes are finally less important than how Bonnard treated his key subjects--still life, landscape, bathers, interiors, and self-portraits.

Like all of Bonnard's mature works, his still lifes were painted on lengths of canvas tacked to the wall, some of them large enough to accommodate more than one picture. Bonnard would often crop the painted area slightly to square off the work, but he sometimes left raw canvas around the edges, as in

Basket of Fruit Reflected in a Mirror (1944-46).

In either case, he paid particular attention to the edges of a painting, often reserving his most enigmatic or fragmentary imagery for the margins. This is most evident, perhaps, in the

Provençal Jug of 1930,

which shows the hand and arm of an unseen figure on the right. Bonnard's landscapes form a distinct group within his oeuvre. He made a point of leaving his own garden relatively untended, and his landscape paintings delight in the natural disorder of nature. They are, by far, the densest and most continuously patterned of his works. The range of markings is extraordinary: Dots, lines, bands, patches, scribbles, and streaks of multiple colors configure a strikingly active visual realm, a flat but dynamic map-making that opens into depth beneath the viewer's gaze.

Bonnard's early images of female bathers were unquestionably influenced by the work of Edgar Degas--but eschew Degas's uncomfortably stressful poses for a mixture of frank domestic realism and a note of idealization taken from classical sculpture.

The three late bathtub paintings that were on view--

Nude in the Bath (1936),

The Large Bath, Nude (1937-9),

Nude in the Bath and Small Dog (1941-6)

--are widely considered the culmination of Bonnard's career. Returning to the image of immersed bathing in a 1925 painting, the artist makes what had been, in part, tomblike into something closer to a shrine--suggesting not only mortality but also the commemoration and celebration of things carnal. (In fact, Marthe died in 1942, while Nude in the Bath and Small Dog was in progress.) The figure of Marthe--whose likeness appears in some 380 of Bonnard's works--is at once iconic in a grand, distant way and an all-too-proximate fleshy substance, both peacefully floating and seeming to dissolve. The bathroom tiles form a iridescent screen that glitters and sparkles brilliantly.

Bonnard's interiors are often presented as luminous spaces filled with familiar objects that become more unfamiliar the longer you examine them. The artist was often drawn to the same interior, as if trying to unravel its mystery. MoMA's magnificent

Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (The Breakfast Room) (1930-1), for example,

and Still Life in Front of the Window (1931)

show the same room at Arcachon, near Bordeaux;

Large Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (1934-5)

and Table in Front of the Window (1934-5)

depict the same room in a rented villa near Deauville;

and The French Window (1932)

and The Breakfast Table (1936)

are from the same room in Bonnard's house at Le Cannet.

The most daring of Bonnard's self-portraits make it clear that they are mirrored representations. In most of these late works the subject is transparently Bonnard's own mortality, and in two works,

Portrait of the Painter in a Red Dressing Gown (1943)

and Self-Portrait (1945),

this is metaphorically expressed by the wartime blackout curtain depicted next to the artist's image. They are among the most poignant self-representations in Western art: querulous apparitions, despairing, frightened, selfeffacing. Bonnard died in January 1947. Some fifteen months later, in May 1948, MoMA opened its first retrospective exhibition of his work; a second was held in 1964. This third Bonnard retrospective at the Museum celebrated a career that ended more than half a century ago but remains as vital and challenging as any in contemporary art.

Bonnard was organized by the Tate Gallery, London, in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art. It was curated by Sarah Whitfield, independent Art Historian, for the Tate Gallery, in consultation with John Elderfield and art historian and critic David Sylvester. It was coordinated for and installed at The Museum of Modern Art by Mr. Elderfield, who also contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue, and refined the selection of works for the New York showing.

Bonnard was shown at the Tate Gallery, London (February 12-May 17, 1998) prior to opening at MoMA, its final venue.

PUBLICATION

Bonnard, by Sarah Whitfield and John Elderfield. 270 pages; 273 illustrations (115 in color). Clothbound published in the United States and Canada by Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,

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