From the Louvre to The Frick Collection:
Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds
Through January 25, 1998
With extraordinary generosity, the Musée du Louvre agreed to lend The Frick Collection for a period of four months one of the most celebrated icons of French art: Nicolas Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds. This image of four shepherds solemnly meditating over the inscription they have discovered on a tomb — Et in Arcadia Ego (“Even in Arcadia [there] am I”) — has come to be regarded as the quintessence of the art of Poussin (1594-1665). It has been copied, imitated, and evoked by numerous artists, and discussed by connoisseurs, historians, and writers since it was acquired by Louis XIV for the French royal collections in 1685. This masterpiece hung in the West Gallery of The Frick Collection near others by some of Poussin’s greatest contemporaries: Velazquez, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and Vermeer
Robert Adam — The Creative Mind:
From the Sketch to the Finished Drawing
December 16, 1997 through April 5, 1998
Sixty-six drawings and watercolors by the renowned eighteenth-century architect Robert Adam, his brother and partner James, and artists employed in their office were on view at the Frick Collection from December 16, 1997, through April 5, 1998. The works were selected from the 9,000 Adam drawings acquired by Sir John Soane in 1833, virtually all of the surviving sheets that were kept by Robert and James Adam themselves. Preserved in the volumes in which they were placed by their sisters after Robert Adam’s death, these works, ranging from rapid sketches to brilliantly colored presentation drawings, have not faded in the intervening years. They were displayed to the public for the first time in the fall of 1996 at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, where the exhibition originated.
The show included drawings for some of Adam’s most celebrated buildings — including Culzean Castle in Strathclyde, Home House in Portland Square, London, and Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire — as well as those that display lesser-known aspects of his work. The aim of the exhibition was to demonstrate the character and range of Robert Adam’s creativity and the vital connection between his drawings and his buildings. An illustrated scholarly catalog, written by Professor A.A. Tait of Glasgow University, guest curator, accompanied the exhibition.
The show was supported by the Fellows of The Frick Collection.
Fuseli to Menzel: Drawings and Watercolors in the Age of Goethe
June 23 through September 6, 1998
The age of Goethe, Beethoven, and Kant was also a brilliant period for the visual arts in Germany. This exhibition — culled from the holdings of the Winterstein family of Munich, the world’s most comprehensive and important private collection of German drawings and watercolors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — afforded viewers an opportunity to study fine works by forty-nine artists from the greatest period of German drawing.
Consummate draftsmen such as Caspar David Friedrich, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Johann Georg von Dillis, Henry Fuseli, and Adolf Menzel were represented in depth, as was the romanticism of Philipp Otto Runge and his contemporaries and architectural studies by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Leo von Klenze. Among the varied subjects were portraits (especially of artists), landscapes, and the phenomenon of the English garden.
The exhibition, which was organized by the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard and traveled after its Frick venue to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, was accompanied by a fully illustrated color catalogue, the most comprehensive publication on the subject available in English. The show was on view in the lower-level temporary exhibition galleries and main-floor cabinet gallery.
Claude Monet's Vétheuil in Summer from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
August 4 through October 4, 1998
Continuing its series of single-picture loan exhibitions, The Frick Collection had on display for two months Claude Monet's Vétheuil in Summer from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, hanging near the Collection's own Monet oil Vétheuil in Winter. The juxtaposition in the North Hall of these two contemporary works depicting the same site viewed from across the Seine in summer and in winter followed the highly successful run of the exhibition "Monet at Vétheuil" presented earlier this year at the University of Michigan Museum of Art and elsewhere. The Toronto picture was featured in that exhibition, but the Frick canvas was not. A leaflet concerning Monet's two views of Vétheuil was available, as was the catalogue of the larger exhibition.
Victorian Fairy Painting
October 14, 1998 through January 17, 1999
Critically and commercially popular during the nineteenth century was the intriguing and distinctly British genre of Victorian fairy painting, the subject of an exhibition that comes this fall to The Frick Collection. The paintings and works on paper, roughly thirty in number, were selected by Edgar Munhall, Curator of The Frick Collection, from a comprehensive touring exhibition – the first of its type for this subject. The original exhibition was organized by the University of Iowa Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Record attendance and catalogue sales throughout the tour of Victorian Fairy Painting signaled the public’s avid and continuing absorption with this subject.
Fairy painting brought together many opposing elements in the collective psyche and artistic sensibility of the time: rich subject-matter, an escape from the grim elements of an industrial society, an indulgence of new attitudes towards sex, a passion for the unknown, and a denial of the exactitude of photography. Drawing on literary inspiration from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream to Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, as well as the theater, the dance, and music, fairy painters exercised their magic with the precision of the Pre-Raphaelites, aided too by experiments with drugs and spiritualism.
Artists represented in the exhibition include such acknowledged masters of fairy painting as Richard Dadd, John Anster Fitzgerald, Daniel Maclise, and Sir Joseph Noël Paton, but also such surprises as Sir Edwin Landseer, Sir John Everett Millais, and J. M. W. Turner. The works were drawn from private collections, museums, and other institutions throughout England and the United States, and a fully-illustrated catalogue by Charlotte Gere, Jeremy Maas, Pamela White Trimpe, and others continues to be available.
For more information, see the press release for this exhibition.
For information about the catalog please visit the Museum Shop.
Support for the exhibition came in part from the National Endowment for the Arts, United Airlines, and United Airlines World-Wide Cargo. Presentation in New York of Victorian Fairy Painting was made possible, in part, through the generosity of the Fellows of The Frick Collection.
Figurative Invention: Drawings from the Permanent Collection
December 22, 1998 through January 3, 1999
This exhibition presented drawings from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries that display several modes of depicting figures. Some were drawings of figures or costumes copied from life, intended as preparatory studies for painted compositions. Others were individual or grouped figures that spring from the artist’s imagination or are based on his observation of the world around him. Whether compositional studies or finished works of art, all the drawings focused on the figure as a means of exploring form, narrative, or individual spirit.
These works also displayed a variety of drawing media and their wide range of expression. Titian’s Landscape with a Satyr evinces a more vital, freer pen stroke than Pisanello’s linear handling of the medium in his Studies of Men Hanging. This varied manipulation of the same medium was tied in many ways to the subject of the compositions — one based upon imagination and the other studied from life. Rembrandt’s Farmyard with Trees and Figures, Claude Lorrain’s Jacob, Rachel, and Leah at the Well, and Goya’s The Anglers displayed the remarkable tonal variations created by the addition of colored washes, which warmly evoke the effects of light and shadow. These drawing techniques and modes of figural depiction engage us more intimately in the artist’s observation and practice, which lie at the heart of his invention. |
