Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Edward Hopper’s New York

 

Edward Hopper’s New York, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from October 19, 2022, through March 5, 2023, offers an unprecedented examination of Hopper’s life and work in the city that he called home for nearly six decades (1908–67). The exhibition charts the artist’s enduring fascination with the city through more than 200 paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings from the Whitney’s preeminent collection of Hopper’s work, loans from public and private collections, and archival materials including printed ephemera, correspondence, photographs, and notebooks. From early sketches to paintings from his late in his career, Edward Hopper’s New York reveals a vision of the metropolis that is as much a manifestation of Hopper himself as it is a record of a changing city, whose perpetual and sometimes tense reinvention feels particularly relevant today.

Instantly recognizable paintings featured in the exhibition, such as Automat (1927), Early Sunday Morning (1930), Room in New York (1932), New York Movie (1939), and Morning Sun (1952), are joined by lesser-known yet critically important compositions including a series of watercolors of New York rooftops and bridges and the painting City Roofs (1932).

“Edward Hopper’s New York offers a remarkable opportunity to celebrate an ever-changing yet timeless city through the work of an American icon,” says Adam D. Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum. “As New York bounces back after two challenging years of global pandemic, this exhibition reconsiders the life and work of Edward Hopper, serves as a barometer of our times, and introduces a new generation of audiences to Hopper’s work by a new generation of scholars. This exhibition offers fresh perspectives and radical new insights.”

Edward Hopper’s New York is organized by Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints, with Melinda Lang, Senior Curatorial Assistant, at the Whitney.

Edward Hopper and New York City
Born in the Hudson River town of Nyack, New York, in 1882, Hopper first visited Manhattan on family day trips. After completing high school, he commuted to the city by ferry to attend the New York School of Illustration and the New York School of Art. In 1908 he moved to the city, and he spent the majority of his life, from 1913 until his death in 1967, living and working in a top-floor apartment at 3 Washington Square North in Greenwich Village. He was joined there by his wife, the artist Josephine (Jo) Verstille Nivison, following their marriage in 1924. Jo played a crucial supportive and collaborative role in Hopper’s practice, serving as his longstanding model and chief record-keeper. A selection of Jo’s watercolors, capturing their Washington Square home, are included in Edward Hopper’s New York.

“Hopper lived most of his life right here, only blocks from where the Whitney stands today,” says Conaty. “He experienced the same streets and witnessed the incessant cycles of demolition and construction that continue today, as New York reinvents itself again and again. Yet, as few others have done so poignantly, Hopper captured a city that was both changing and changeless, a particular place in time and one distinctly shaped by his imagination. Seeing his work through this lens opens new pathways for exploring even Hopper’s most iconic works.”

Over the course of his career, Hopper observed the city assiduously, honing his understanding of its built environment and the particularities of the modern urban experience. During this time, New York underwent tremendous development—skyscrapers reached record-breaking heights, construction sites roared across the five boroughs, and the increasingly diverse population boomed—yet Hopper’s depictions remained human-scale and largely unpopulated. Deliberately avoiding the famous skyline and picturesque landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building, Hopper instead turned his attention to unsung utilitarian structures and out-of-the-way corners, drawn to the collisions of new and old, civic and residential, public and private that captured the paradoxes of the changing city.

Edward Hopper’s New York: The Exhibition
Organized in thematic chapters spanning Hopper’s entire career, the installation comprises eight sections including four expansive gallery spaces showcasing many of Hopper’s most celebrated paintings and four pavilions that focus on key topics through dynamic groupings of paintings, works on paper, and archival materials, many of which have rarely been exhibited to the public.

Edward Hopper’s New York begins with early sketches and paintings from the artist’s first years traveling into and around the city, from 1899 to 1915, as he grew from a commuting art student to a Greenwich Village resident. In Moving Train (c. 1900), Tugboat with Black Smokestack (1908), and El Station (1908) he observed the ways people occupied and moved through space within a dramatically developing urban environment.

Although Hopper aspired to recognition as a painter, his first successes came in print through his illustrations and etchings, an important history featured in a section of the exhibition titled “The City in Print.” His artworks for illustrations and published commissions for magazines and advertisements often featured urban motifs inspired by New York—theaters, restaurants, offices, and city dwellers—that would become foundational to his art. During this early period, he also consolidated many of his impressions of New York through etchings like East Side Interior (1922) and The Open Window (c. 1918–19), which preview the dramatic use of light that has become synonymous with Hopper’s work.

“The Window,” the next section, focuses on this enduring motif for Hopper—one that he explored with great interest in his city scenes. While strolling New York’s streets and riding its elevated trains, Hopper was particularly drawn to the fluid boundaries between public and private space in a city where all aspects of everyday life—from goods in a storefront display to unguarded moments in a café—are equally exposed. In paintings on view such as Automat (1927), Night Windows (1928), and Room in Brooklyn (1932), Hopper imagines the unlimited compositional and narrative possibilities of the city’s windowed facades, the potential for looking and being looked at, and the discomfiting awareness of being alone in a crowd.

Edward Hopper’s New York presents, for the first time together, the artist's panoramic cityscapes, installed as a group in a section of the exhibition titled “The Horizontal City.” Early Sunday Morning (1930), Manhattan Bridge Loop (1928), Blackwell’s Island (1928), Apartment Houses, East River (c. 1930), and Macomb’s Dam Bridge (1935), five paintings made between 1928 and 1935, all share nearly identical dimensions and format. Seen together, they offer invaluable insight into Hopper’s contrarian vision of the growing city at a time when New York was increasingly defined by its relentless skyward development.

“Washington Square” highlights the importance of Hopper’s neighborhood as his home and muse for nearly 55 years. Paintings like City Roofs (1932) and November, Washington Square (1932/1959) show Hopper’s fascination with the city views visible from his windows and his rooftop, and a rare series of watercolors—a practice he generally reserved for his travels to New England and elsewhere—reveals how attuned he was to the spatial dynamics and subtleties of the city’s built environment. As documented in the exhibited correspondence and notebooks, the Hoppers were fierce advocates of Washington Square, and they argued tirelessly for the preservation of their neighborhood as a haven for artists and as one of the city’s cultural landmarks.

“Theater,” a particularly revealing gallery in the exhibition, explores Hopper’s passion for the stage and the critical role it played as an active mode of spectatorship and source of visual inspiration. This section includes archival items like the Hoppers’ preserved ticket stubs and theatergoing notebooks and highlights the ways that theater spaces and set design influenced Hopper’s compositions through works like Two on the Aisle (1927) and The Sheridan Theatre (1937). Additionally, the presentation of New York Movie (1939) and a group of its preparatory studies along with figural sketches for other paintings reveal the Hoppers’ collaborative scene staging, in which Jo played an active part as model.

Throughout his career, Hopper explored the city with sketchbook in hand, recording his observations through drawing, a practice highlighted in this section of the exhibition. A large selection of his sketches and preparatory studies on view in “Sketching New York” chart Hopper’s favored locations across the city, many of which the artist returned to again and again in order to capture different impressions that he could later explore on canvas.

Finally, in “Reality and Fantasy,” a group of ambitious late paintings, characterized by radically simplified geometry and uncanny, dreamlike settings, reveal how New York increasingly served as a stage set or backdrop for Hopper’s evocative distillations of urban experience. In works such as Morning in a City (1944), Sunlight on Brownstones (1956), and Sunlight in a Cafeteria (1958), Hopper created compositions that depart from specific sites while still tapping into urban sensations, reflecting his desire, as noted in his personal journal “Notes on Painting”, to create a “realistic art from which fantasy can grow.”

For more information about the artworks included in this exhibition, please see Conaty’s catalogue essay Approaching a City: Hopper and New York.

Edward Hopper and the Whitney Museum of American Art
Edward Hopper’s career and work have been a touchstone for the Whitney since before the Museum was founded. In 1920, at the age of thirty-seven, Hopper had his first solo exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club. He was included in a number of exhibitions there before it closed in 1928 to make way for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which opened in 1931. Hopper’s work appeared in the inaugural Whitney Biennial in 1932 and in twenty-nine subsequent Biennials and Annuals through 1965, as well as several group exhibitions. The Whitney was among the first museums to acquire a Hopper painting for its collection. In 1968, Hopper’s widow, the artist Josephine Nivison Hopper bequeathed the entirety of his artistic holdings–2,500 paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings–and many of her own works from their Washington Square studio residence. Today the Whitney’s collection holds over 3,100 works by Hopper, more than any other museum in the world.

“Given Hopper’s status in the Whitney's history and within the ranks of American art history, this periodic reconsideration and regular reckoning is imperative and a critical obligation,” says Weinberg.



Catalogue




An accompanying exhibition catalogue, Edward Hopper’s New York, published by the Whitney and distributed by Yale University Press, features essays by curator Kim Conaty, writer and critic Kirsty Bell, scholar Darby English, and artist David Hartt. Alongside these essays are four focused texts that draw upon the resources made newly available through the Museum’s Sanborn Hopper Archive. These contributions are authored by Whitney staff members who have been working closely with the archive, including Farris Wahbeh, Benjamin and Irma Weiss Director of Research Resources; Jennie Goldstein, Assistant Curator; Melinda Lang, Senior Curatorial Assistant; and David Crane, former Curatorial Fellow. The publication features more than three hundred illustrations and fresh insights from authoritative and emerging scholars. Copies are available for purchase online and in the Whitney Shop ($65.00).

Images




 Edward Hopper, Tugboat with Black Smokestack, 1908. Oil on canvas, 20 3/8 × 29 5/16 in. (51.8 × 74.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.1192. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society




Edward Hopper, The El Station, 1908. Oil on canvas, 20 1/4 × 29 5/16 in. (51.4 × 74.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.1182. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society



 Edward Hopper, Blackwell's Island, 1911. Oil on canvas, 24 3/8 × 29 5/16 in. (61.9 × 74.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.1188. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society





 Edward Hopper, New York Interior, c. 1921. Oil on canvas, 24 5/16 × 29 3/8 in. (61.8 × 74.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.1200 © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society



 Edward Hopper, Night Shadows, 1921. Etching, 12 × 15 15/16 in. (30.5 × 40.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.1047. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society









Edward Hopper, Manhattan Bridge Loop, 1928. Oil on canvas, 35 × 60 in. (88.9 × 152.4 cm). Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy Art Resource, NY



 Edward Hopper, Apartment Houses, East River, c. 1930. Oil on canvas, 35 1/16 × 60 1/8 in. (89.1 × 152.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney 70.1211 © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society




Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning, 1930. Oil on canvas, 35 3/16 × 60 1/4 in. (89.4 × 153 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney 31.426 © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society





Edward Hopper, Room in Brooklyn, 1932. Oil on canvas, 29 1/8 × 34 in. (74 × 86.4 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Hayden Collection—Charles Henry Hayden Fund. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society

 Photograph by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 





 Edward Hopper, City Roofs, 1932. Oil on canvas, 29 × 36 in. (73.7 × 91.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest P.2016.11. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society



Edward Hopper, The Sheridan Theatre, 1937. Oil on canvas, 17 × 25 in. (43.5 × 64.1 cm). Newark Museum of Art, NJ; Felix Fuld Bequest Fund. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy Art Resource


Edward Hopper, New York Movie, 1939. Oil on canvas, 32 1/4 × 40 1/8 in. (81.9 × 101.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art; given anonymously. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy Art Resource


Edward Hopper, Morning Sun, 1952. Oil on canvas, 28 1/8 × 40 1/8 in. (71.4 × 101.9 cm). Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Museum Purchase, Howald Fund. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York



Edward Hopper, Sunlight on Brownstones, 1956. Oil on canvas, 30 3/8 × 40 1/4 in. (71.1 × 101.6 cm). Wichita Art Museum, KS, Roland P. Murdock Collection. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York




Edward Hopper, Sunlight in a Cafeteria, 1958. Oil on canvas, 40 3/16 × 60 1/8 in. (102.1 × 152.7 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York





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Tuesday, August 23, 2022

Modernist Diaspora: Immigrant Jewish Artists in Paris, 1900-1945,

 


In the early 20th century, there was perhaps no greater source of creative vitality than the artistic communities at work in the city of Paris, France.

Among the most profound and prolific were a cohort of young Jewish immigrants, who arrived with varying levels of training and contact with their artistic traditions, yet who created among the most innovative and stunning examples of contemporary art.



Their experiences are the subject of Modernist Diaspora: Immigrant Jewish Artists in Paris, 1900-1945, a new book by historian Richard Sonn.

Rich with examples from period art, Sonn reveals the critical role of intellectual and cultural exchange among the city’s Jewish immigrant artists in creating the vibrancy of Parisian modernism. By tracing the experiences of Jewish artists who made their way to Paris in the years between the beginning of the 20th century and the end of the World War II, the author gives readers a close look at a unique cultural and social environment that was key to the work of a generation of artists who “produced the greatest efflorescence of art in the long history of the Jewish people.”

At the heart of the book is the left-bank neighborhood of Montparnasse, where Jewish painters and sculptors gathered amidst the rising tide of antisemitism and nationalism in Europe. The works of great artists such as Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and Sonia Delaunay-Terk were created here, made possible by the diverse, cosmopolitan society of Paris and the swirling artistic trends of the 20th century.

“The matrix of modernism granted immigrant artists the right to innovate freely and independently, while the artists’ colony allowed its denizens to live differently, in ways that challenged prevailing attitudes toward racism, antisemitism and militarism,” Sonn said.

The last chapter explains how these artists responded personally and artistically to the Holocaust, with the lucky ones finding exile in the U.S. and Switzerland, and others going into hiding in the south of France. More than a hundred were deported, of whom only a handful returned to Paris.

Published by Bloomsbury, Modernist Diaspora: Immigrant Jewish Artists in Paris, 1900-1945 includes 60 illustrations, most in color.

Richard Sonn is professor of history at the University of Arkansas, where he specializes in modern European and modern French history and is active in the university's Jewish Studies program. His previous work has emphasized cultural and intellectual history in France, with a keen interest in the emerging modernist milieu of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His previous books include Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin-de-Siècle France, published by University of Nebraska Press; Anarchism by Twayne Publishers; and Sex, Violence, and the Avant Garde: Anarchism in Interwar France, by Penn State University Press.

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Wednesday, August 17, 2022

A Time of Toil and Triumph: Selections from the Shogren-Meyer Collection of American Art




Grohmann Museum, Milwaukee

Sept. 9, 2022—Feb. 26, 2023 

As a part of its 15th anniversary celebration, the Grohmann Museum is organizing a blockbuster exhibition from one of the premier collections of American industrial art—The Shogren-Meyer Collection. A collection focused primarily on the art of the 1930s and 40s, it also includes many fine examples from the surrounding decades, with many created during the depression era—a time of both toil and triumph.


A grand opening event will be held for A Time of Toil and Triumph on Friday, Sept. 9 from 5 to 8 p.m. The free event will include a Gallery Talk with the collectors, Dan Shogren and Susan Meyer at 6:30 p.m.


Now making their home in the Twin Cities, Shogren and Meyer met while in college at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where both majored in history. It was at that time they took a keen interest in the era on which the collection is based, the “interwar period,” a time of American reinvention—economically, socially, and artistically.


They have since built one of the finest collections of American Art concentrated on this time. Selected from the hundreds of works in their collection, A Time of Toil and Triumph will include dozens of paintings and photographs by Aaron Bohrod, Margaret Bourke-White, John Steuart Curry, Walker Evans, Lewis Hine, Edmund Lewandowski, Dorothea Lange, Thornton Oakley, and Isaac Soyer, among many others.




John Stockton De Martelly (1903-1979), Whiskey Going into Barrels to Age (Marking the Casks), 1946, Oil on canvas, 36 x 33 in.



Robert Gilbert (1907–1988) Industrial Composition, 1932, Oil on canvas, 47 x 34 in.



Joe Jones (1909–1963), Levee, 1933, Oil on canvas, 30 x 41 in.



Edmund Lewandowski (1914-1998), The Waterfront (Buoy Tenders), 1935, Oil on canvas, 32 x 47 in.



Thornton Oakley (1881-1953), The Wonderland of Oil, ca.1942, Pastel and gouache on paper, 30 x 40 in.



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Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Vermeer’s Secrets

 National Gallery of Art 

October 8, 2022-January 8, 2023

Rijksmuseum, 

February 10–June 4, 2023


Johannes Vermeer, "Girl with the Red Hat"

Johannes Vermeer
Girl with the Red Hat, c. 1666/1667
oil on panel
painted surface: 22.8 x 18 cm (9 x 7 1/16 in.)
support: 23.2 x 18.1 cm (9 1/8 x 7 1/8 in.)
framed: 40.3 x 35.6 x 4.4 cm (15 7/8 x 14 x 1 3/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W. Mellon Collection

Vermeer’s Secrets will unveil new findings about him and his process. The exhibition offers a behind-the-scenes look at how National Gallery curators, conservators, and scientists investigated the museum’s four treasured paintings by and attributed to Vermeer—as well as two 20th-century forgeries—to understand “what makes a Vermeer a Vermeer.”

Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) is one of the most significant artists of the 17th century, yet much of the Dutch painter’s life and practice remain a mystery. On view at the National Gallery of Art from October 8, 2022,  through January 9, 2023 

Building on a half-century of technical study, National Gallery researchers took advantage of the museum’s COVID-related closures in 2020/2021 to examine these paintings, which are rarely taken off view. Using advanced imaging techniques that virtually penetrate layers of paint to visualize what lies beneath in combination with microscopic examination of the paintings’ delicate surfaces, these experts now have a clearer understanding of Vermeer’s process, materials, and compositional changes and are eager to share these revelations with the public.

There are around 35 known paintings by Vermeer in the world. As the National Gallery’s research team examined and compared the museum’s four works, one of their goals was to evaluate whether one of them—Girl with a Flute (probably 1665/1675), whose authorship has been long debated—is in fact by Vermeer. Exact findings of the team’s studies will be announced ahead of the exhibition’s opening.

In 2021, the team shared preliminary findings that enhance our understanding of Vermeer’s process. Chemical imaging visualized layers beneath the surface of Woman Holding a Balance (c. 1664), revealing quick, spontaneous, sometimes textured brushstrokes in the underlayers—radically different from the precise finished composition, where individual brushstrokes are barely perceptible. This discovery brings into question the common assumption that the artist was a painstakingly slow perfectionist.

Vermeer’s Secrets will also be the final opportunity for visitors to experience the National Gallery’s paintings by Vermeer before the works travel to Amsterdam for inclusion in an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, February 10–June 4, 2023.

Exhibition Overview

Vermeer’s Secrets will offer visitors an inside look at how the National Gallery’s curators, conservators, and scientists work together to understand artists’ techniques, materials, and processes. In this instance, an intensive study of four paintings by and attributed to Johannes Vermeer yielded surprising information about the paintings which will be shared for the first time in the exhibition. The exhibition also includes two 20th-century forgeries, The Lacemaker (c. 1925) and The Smiling Girl (c. 1925), which were attributed to Vermeer when they first entered the museum’s collection in 1937 as part of Andrew Mellon’s original bequest, but were later determined not to be by the artist. Juxtaposing these two non-Vermeer works with paintings firmly attributed to the Dutch artist—Woman Holding a Balance (c. 1664), A Lady Writing (c. 1665), and Girl with the Red Hat (c. 1666/1667)—will demonstrate how curators utilize research from a range of disciplines to evaluate works of art and determine attributions, as well as the qualities that make a Vermeer a Vermeer.

The exhibition incorporates vivid technical images made using innovative technologies pioneered by two leaders in the field of scientific imaging, the National Gallery’s senior imaging scientist John K. Delaney and imaging scientist Kathryn A. Dooley. Using hyperspectral reflectance imaging techniques first developed to map minerals for remote sensing of the earth and subsequently the moon and Mars, as well as X-ray fluorescence imaging spectroscopy, Delaney and Dooley are able to identify and map pigments and also reveal what lies beneath the surface of a painting. While earlier technical examination (magnified examinations of the paintings, analysis of microsamples, and X-ray fluorescence spot analysis) allowed Melanie Gifford and Lisha Glinsman to hypothesize the stages in Vermeer’s working methods, these advancements in imaging technologies provided the opportunity to try and visualize those stages. The resulting images allowed the team to analyze the distribution of pigments across the paintings, distinguish compositional changes, and in the case of the Girl with the Red Hat, reveal more details about an earlier unfinished bust-length portrait of a man with a wide-brimmed hat.


“Vermeer’s Secrets encourages visitors to play the role of art detective, inviting them to join our art historians, conservators, and scientists in studying the works and learning what stories paintings tell about the hand that made them,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art. “The National Gallery’s paintings by Johannes Vermeer are some of the jewels of our collection, and thanks to this talented team of collaborators and their cutting-edge research, we have a greater understanding of this Dutch master and his process.”

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art.

The exhibition is curated by Marjorie E. Wieseman, curator and head of the department of northern European paintings, and Alexandra Libby, associate curator, department of northern European paintings, both of the National Gallery of Art.




Johannes Vermeer Woman Holding a Balance, c. 1664 oil on canvas painted surface: 39.7 x 35.5 cm (15 5/8 x 14 in.) stretcher size: 42.5 x 38 cm (16 3/4 x 14 15/16 in.) framed: 62.9 x 58.4 x 7.6 cm (24 3/4 x 23 x 3 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Widener Collection 

Johannes Vermeer A Lady Writing, c. 1665 oil on canvas overall: 45 x 39.9 cm (17 11/16 x 15 11/16 in.) framed: 68.3 x 62.2 x 7 cm (26 7/8 x 24 1/2 x 2 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Harry Waldron Havemeyer and Horace Havemeyer, Jr., in memory of their father, Horace Havemeyer


Attributed to Johannes Vermeer Girl with a Flute, probably 1665/1675 oil on panel painted surface: 20 x 17.8 cm (7 7/8 x 7 in.) framed: 39.7 x 37.5 x 5.1 cm (15 5/8 x 14 3/4 x 2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Widener Collection 


Research Team

Research for the exhibition was conducted by:

Marjorie E. Wieseman, curator and head of the department of northern European paintings

Alexandra Libby, associate curator, department of northern European paintings

Dina Anchin, associate paintings conservator

E. Melanie Gifford, former research conservator of painting technology

Lisha Deming Glinsman, former conservation scientist

Kathryn A. Dooley, imaging scientist

John K. Delaney, senior imaging scientist


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Thursday, August 4, 2022

Dutch Drawings: highlights from the Rijksmuseum

 


Etched self portrait of Rembrandt as a young man with curly hair, wearing a cap, with a surprised expression on his face
CREDIT

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), Self-Portrait in a Cap, Wide Eyed and Open Mouthed, 1630. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

On Saturday 16 July 2022, the exhibition Dutch Drawings: highlights from the Rijksmuseum opened at the National Gallery of Ireland. Forty-eight works by 31 different artists who worked during the seventeenth century will go on display. This historic and important exhibition will give Irish audiences the unique opportunity to view, at close quarters, drawings and prints by seventeenth-century Dutch artists from the Rijksmuseum's collection. The works in the exhibition give intimate insights into life in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, from a child taking its first steps, to a captive monkey.



Anne Hodge, curator of the exhibition, commented: "Shakespeare’s well-known lines ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players …’ encompass the diversity of subject matter contained within these works on paper chosen from the Rijksmuseum’s renowned collection. All of life is here, from studies of plants and animals to portraits of loved ones, and records of conflagrations and comets, architecture and landscape."

The exhibition will complement the Gallery’s strong collection of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, and will be a must-see for visitors who have a familiarity with and fondness for Dutch art.

This exhibition will include works in a wide variety of media and techniques: graphite, ink, watercolour, chalks, etching and woodcut. Although predominately comprised of drawings, the exhibition also includes a small number of delicately executed prints by Rembrandt. Notable artists include Hendrik Avercamp, Nicolaes Berchem, Jan van Goyen, and Jacob van Ruisdael.

The drawings in this exhibition were produced for a multitude of reasons: as part of the process of making a painting, to practice drawing skills, to record a likeness, to mark an unusual event, to describe to science a plant from a far-off land, or to hang framed on a wall. They illustrate how artists strove to understand the world around them. Drawing, with its portable and inexpensive media and supports, was the tool that allowed artists to experiment and translate ephemeral images into lasting works of art.

The exhibition gives a sense of what life was like in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century and the real importance of drawing at that time. This display of exquisitely skilful works on paper emphasises the ever-lasting importance of drawing within the wider world of art.

Ilona van Tuinen, Head of the Rijksmuseum Print Room, added: “This promises to be a wonderful exhibition, thoughtfully curated by Anne Hodge. I am delighted that the Irish public will be able to enjoy and admire some of our best works on paper. It is equally thrilling that our drawings and prints will benefit from the stimulating new context provided by the National Gallery of Ireland’s rich holdings of Dutch seventeenth-century paintings.”

Dutch Drawings: highlights from the Rijksmuseum is on display at the National Gallery of Ireland from 16 July, closing on 6 November 2022. 



A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue and a programme of learning events will complement the exhibition.

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