1939: Exhibiting Black Art at the BMA

The Baltimore Museum of Art,
June 13–October 28, 2018

Dox Thrash. Griffin Hills, c. 1940. The Baltimore Museum of Art, BMA 1942.3

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In 1939, The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) presented one of the first major exhibitions in the U.S. to feature African American artists. Contemporary Negro Art served “as a declaration of principles as to what art should be in a democracy and as a gauge of how far in this particular province we have gone and may need to go,” wrote renowned philosopher and art critic Alain Locke in the exhibition brochure. Nearly 80 years later, the museum pays tribute to this exhibition with 1939: Exhibiting Black Art at the BMA.

 On view June 13–October 28, 2018, it features 14 prints and drawings by artists who were included in the 1939 show along with archival materials.



Dox Thrash. "Glory Be!"

The origins of this landmark exhibition date back to 1937, when BMA Board of Trustees President Henry Treide extended a city-wide survey to over 200 social, labor, and special interest groups in Baltimore, inquiring what they most wanted from a city art museum. The committee representing Baltimore’s African American community responded with a recommendation that the museum’s galleries begin to display artwork generated by and for the black community. As a direct result of the feedback, the BMA hosted an exhibition of 116 works by 29 black artists in February 1939. The Harmon Foundation, a New York-based organization dedicated to the patronage of black cultural production coordinated the loans of artworks to the exhibition, which it co-organized with BMA Acting Director Charles Ross Rogers and renowned Howard University philosopher Alain Locke. More than 12,000 visitors saw Contemporary Negro Art during its two-week presentation at the BMA that year.



James Lesesne Wells. "Looking Upward." 1928. Gift of Ruth & Jacob Kainen, Chevy Chase,

Highlights of 1939: Exhibiting Black Art at the BMA include the first work by a black artist to enter the museum’s collection, Dox Thrash’s watercolor Griffin Hills, as well as works by Jacob Lawrence, James Lesesne Wells, and Hale Woodruff. The exhibition also draws attention to behind-the-scenes figures who worked on the project through archival materials shown publicly for the first time. These include president of the Baltimore Women’s Cooperative Civic League Sarah Collins Fernandis, NAACP president Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson, and renowned Civil Rights lawyer and activist Clarence Mitchell, Jr.

This exhibition is curated by BMA Prints, Drawings and Photographs Curatorial Assistant Morgan Dowty.

Becoming a Woman in the Age of Enlightenment French Art from The Horvitz Collection

Hart Museum

October 6 - December 31, 2017 

 

Ackland Art Museum

26 January 2018 - 8 April 2018

 

Crocker Art Museum

May 13, 2018 — August 19, 2018

Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Seated Lady in a Garden

n.d. Oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 35 7/16 in. The Horvitz Collection.

This exhibition examines the many paths and stages of women's lives through the art of 18th-century France. Works by Fragonard, Boucher, Watteau, Greuze, and others, all drawn from the finest private collection of French art in the United States, show a variety of women, from court ladies to washerwomen, in their many societal roles. From the ancien régime to the Revolution and beyond, women's position and power were transformed. Organized thematically, the exhibition's 100-plus paintings, drawings, and sculptures explore cultural and literary archetypes that affected women's self-image, their development from childhood to old age, their romances, and their familial responsibilities. In addition to a new understanding of French 18th-century art, Becoming a Woman provides a new view of the feminine world at the dawn of modernity.

The Road to Fortune (detail), Pierre-Antoine Baudouin Courtesy the Horvitz Collection

Eighteenth-century France was the crucible for some of the most elegant, sophisticated, and refined art ever made. It was also a hotbed of philosophical and cultural reflection on many major issues, including what was known as the “woman question.” Against a backdrop of powerful conventional thinking that assigned women to limited and secondary roles based on the presumed dictates of biology, some voices began arguing for an alternative view, one that saw woman as the potential equal of man in intelligence, creativity, responsibility, and power. Women could have identities beyond beauty, motherhood, and emotional susceptibility.



This exhibition, by turns charming and challenging, shows for the first time how art and artists explored all sides of this debate, from stunningly refined portrayals of beautiful young women to depictions of idyllic family life, from mythological scenes of ideal or despicable female behavior to evocations of women’s creative prowess, and from touching images of romance and marriage to respectful presentations of maturity and old age.

 

With over 100 paintings, sculptures, and especially drawings, selected from one of the world’s best private collections of French art, Becoming a Woman includes works by not only some of the era’s most famous names—such as Francois Boucher, Jean-Honore Fragonard, and Jacques-Louis David—as well as a full spectrum of lesser-known talents, represented by works of the highest aesthetic quality. A number of women artists are represented, including Anne Vallayer-Coster, Adelaide Labille-Guiard, and Pauline Azou.

Louis-Léopold Boilly, "Conversation in a Park." ©The Horvitz Collection

Becoming a Woman is curated by Melissa Hyde, Professor of Art History, University of Florida Research Foundation Professor, University of Florida, and the late Mary D. Sheriff, W.R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Art History, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is organized by Alvin L. Clark, Jr, Curator, The Horvitz Collection and The J.E. Horvitz Research Curator, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg.



An illustrated catalog with an essay by the curator will accompany the exhibition.

Spain: 500 Years of Spanish Painting from the Museums of Madrid

San Antonio Museum of Art
June 23–September 16, 2018

 Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664), Saint Isabel of Portugal, ca. 1635, Oil on canvas, h. 72 7/16 in. (184 cm); w. 38 9/16 in. (98 cm), Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid P01239 © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

EL GRECO. VELÁZQUEZ. GOYA. SOROLLA. PICASSO. These are just some of the Spanish masters whose paintings are included in Spain: 500 Years of Spanish Painting from the Museums of Madrid. This summer, the San Antonio Museum of Art will present a dramatic survey of five hundred years of Spanish painting, stretching from the union of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand in the late fifteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century. Spain will contain more than forty works of art, the majority from major museums in Madrid, and very few of which have previously been on view in the United States.
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Organized in celebration of the Tricentennial of the city of San Antonio, the exhibition will convey the splendor of Spanish artistic traditions. This rich heritage is an aspect of what makes San Antonio one of the most distinctive places in the United States.

The Museo Reina Sofía will lend Torerillos de pueblo (young village bullfighters, 1906) by Ignacio Zuloaga 

Spain traces the continuity of specific Spanish pictorial traditions, including portraiture, landscape from the earliest hints of naturalism to the impressionist and expressionist movements of the late nineteenth century, devotional painting, and still life.


Organized by Dr. Katherine Crawford Luber, the Kelso Director, and Dr. William Keyse Rudolph, Chief Curator and The Marie and Hugh Halff Curator of American Art, Spain will only be on view in San Antonio.  

Spain features works by iconic artists El Greco, Diego Velázquez, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Jusepe de Ribera, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, and Pablo Picasso. It also celebrates the artistic achievements of many other Spanish masters, such as Juan de Flandes, Luis de Morales, Luis de Madrazo y Kuntz, Antonio María Esquivel, and Ignacio Zuloaga.“Spanish artistic traditions are part of the formative influences upon the culture of San Antonio," says Dr. Luber. "With this exhibition, our residents and visitors will have the chance to engage with extraordinary works of art.”

The exhibition checklist includes masterpieces from some of the most important museums in Madrid:

• Museo Nacional delPrado
• Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, including the personal collection of the Countess Thyssen-Bornemisza
• Museo Nacional Centro de Arte ReinaSofía
• Museo LázaroGaldiano
• Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de SanFernando
• MuseoCerralbo
• Museo delRomanticismo
• MuseoSorolla

Key loans from the Cleveland Museum of Art; the McNay Art Museum; the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts add to the distinguished international mix, as well as tell the further story of the active collecting of Spanish painting by American museums.

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Constable at auction

Sotheby’s Old Masters Evening Sale on 6 December 2017

 

John Constable ( 1776 - 1837 ) is one of Britain’s best - loved and most significant landscape painters. A key figure in the British Romantic movement of the early 19th century, Constable, together with J.M.W. Turner, changed the course of European landscape painting forever. This winter, Sotheby’s London will present a recently rediscovered landscape by the British artist which is without question one of the most exciting and important additions to Constable’s oeuvre to have emerged in the last fifty years. Painted between 1814 and 1817,

Dedham Vale with the River Stour in Flood belongs to a small group of Constable’s early Suffolk paintings remaining in private hands. The work will be offered in Sotheby’s Old Masters Evening sale on 6 December, with an estimate of £2 - 3 million.

Julian Gascoigne, Senior Specialist, British Paintings at Sotheby’s said:

“Constable’s views of Dedham Vale and the Stour valley have become icons of British art and define for many everything that is quintessential a bout the English countryside. Dedham Vale with the River Stour in Flood was long mistakenly thought to be by Ramsay Richard Reinagle (1775 - 1862), a friend and contemporary of Constable’s, but recent scientific analysis and up - to - date connoisseurship has unanimously returned the work to its rightful place among the canon of the great master’s work and established beyond d oubt its true authorship . It is without question one of the most exciting and important additions to Constable’s oeuvre to have emerged in the last fifty years”. 

“Constable Country”

“ I should paint my own places best – Painting is but another word for feeling. I associate my 'careless boyhood' to all that lies on the banks of the Stour. They made me a painter...” John Constable

This rare masterpiece depicts the area of the Stour Valley around Dedham Vale, on the border between Suffolk and Essex where Constable spent his boyhood years and which has become synonymous with the great painter.

Famously known around the world today as 'Constable Country', the area has inspired the artist’s most famous paintings, from
 
 The White Horse, 1819 (Frick Collection, New York) to


The Haywain, 1821 (National Gallery, London)
 
and The Leaping Horse, 1825 (Royal Academy, London).
 
The works belongs to a group of paintings similar in size and style that Constable painted between 1814 and 1817, all of which are views of the Stour Valley and the area surrounding East Bergholt. These works were painted partly on the spot and show the artist’s commitment to naturalism at its most faithful.

The Fitzhugh Commission

Whilst the painter’s later works tended to be purchased either by Constable’s great friend John Fisher or by patrons or dealers with metropolitan or international connections, the earlier Suffolk paintings tend to have closer associations with patrons or friends in the local area. This painting is thought to have been commissioned by Thomas Fitzhugh as a wedding present for his future wife, Philadelphia Godfrey, the daughter of Peter Godfrey who lived at Old Hall, East Bergholt and was a near neighbour and friend of the artist's family. The view is taken from the bottom of her parent’s garden, looking out over the valley with the river in flood, a symbol of fecundity, and was intended as a memento of her childhood home for her new married life in London.

Among the highlight s in the sale are two recently rediscovered landscapes by John Constable (1776 – 1837). The first, Dedham Vale with the River Stour in Flood is one of the most exciting and important additions to the artist’s oeuvre to have emerged in the last 50 years. Painted between 1814 and 1817, the work belongs to a small group of Constable’s early Suffolk paintings remaining in private hands and will be offered with an estimate of £2 - 3 million.

Video:

http://www.sothebys.com/en/news-video/videos/2017/experience-the-captivating-beauty-of-constable-country.html

The second work by Constable is the first sketch for one of the artist ’s most celebrated paintings,  

 
The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, today in the collection of Tate Britain. Previously thought lost, the work, dating from circa 1819 – 20, depicts a rare view of London by the artist and presages Monet’s famous series of views of Waterloo Bridge created almost a century later (est. £1 - 1.5 million). 

 Christie's 2016
 

John Constable, R.A. The full-scale six-foot sketch for View on the Stour Near Dedham

 Cristie's 2012

 

 

‘The Lock’ by John Constable. 

Canaletto at Auction

Sotheby’s Sale of Master Paintings on 1 February 2018 

The February auction offers an impressive pair of Venetian views by Canaletto, whose inimitable success in capturing the architecture of 18th -century Venice has made him the undisputed leader of the genre (estimate $3/4 million). Most likely completed in England in the 1740s, the pair offers waterfront views of two of the most recognizable façade in La Serenissima: 
 
the Church of the Redentore 

and the Prisons of San Marco. 
 

While there are other known views of the Church of the Redentore by Canaletto, the present view of the Prisons of San Marco is a unique composition for the artist of which no other version is known. 

 

Sotheby’s Old Master & British Paintings Evening Sale on 3 December 2014 

‘Venice, The Piazza San Marco Looking East Towards The Basilica’.  

Estimate 5,000,000 — 7,000,000

GBP

LOT SOLD. 5,458,500 GBP

Sotheby's 2012 

 

Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto

VENICE, A VIEW OF THE CHURCHES OF THE REDENTORE AND SAN GIACOMO, WITH A MOORED MAN-OF-WAR, GONDOLAS AND BARGES

Estimate

5,000,000 — 7,000,000

USD

LOT SOLD. 5,682,500 USD

Christie's 2015

 

Canaletto, The Piazzetta: Looking East, with the Ducal Palace.

Christie's 2014

Giovanni Antonio Canal, il Canaletto (Venice 1697-1768)

Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi, on the Grand Canal, Venice

Price realised

GBP 1,314,500

Estimate

GBP 800,000 - GBP 1,200,000

Christie's Old Master & British Paintings Evening Sale

London 2 July 2013

 

Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto...

The Molo, Venice, from the Bacino di San Marco

PRICE REALIZED

GBP 8,461,875

Christie's 2008

 

Giovanni Antonio Canal, Il Canaletto (Venice 1697-1768), The Piazzetta di San Marco, Venice, looking west, with the Liberia, oil on canvas, 18½ x 30¾ in.

 

 

Christie's 2000

 

Giovanni Antonio Canal, il Canaletto (1697-1768)

The Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, with the West End of the Church and the Scuola di San Marco

Price realised

GBP 7,703,750

Estimate

GBP 3,000,000 - GBP 4,000,000

"Delacroix" opens on September 17 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Delacroix to Open September 17

Exhibition Dates: September 17, 2018–January 6, 2019 Exhibition Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, The Tisch Galleries, Gallery 899, 2nd Floor Press Preview: Wednesday, September 12, 10 am–noon

French painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was one of the greatest creative figures of the 19th century. Through his choice of daring subjects and compositions, a vibrant palette, and bold brushwork, he set into motion a cascade of innovations that changed the course of art. As Van Gogh wrote in 1885: "What I find so fine about Delacroix is precisely that he reveals the liveliness of things, and the expression and the movement, that he is utterly beyond the paint." Although Delacroix is celebrated as the embodiment of the Romantic era, much remains to be understood about his life and prolific career. Delacroix, which opens on September 17 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will be the first comprehensive retrospective in North America devoted to the artist. Visitors will discover a protean genius who continues to set the bar for artists today. The monumental exhibition will illuminate Delacroix's restless imagination in all its complexity through approximately 145 paintings, drawings, and prints—many of which have never been shown before in the United States. In addition to works from The Met collection, the exhibition will include exceptional loans from the Musée du Louvre and more than 60 museums and private collections throughout Europe and North America. Delacroix is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée du Louvre. Exhibition Overview  The exhibition will feature the three main phases of Delacroix's career, which spanned more than four decades. The first section will be devoted to his formative years during the 1820s, when his ambitious paintings exhibited at the annual Paris Salons won him public recognition. The second section will focus on his exploration of historical themes, often on a grand scale, informed by public commissions from the 1830s onward. The third section will present an overview of the artist's final years, marked by his triumph at the Universal Exposition of 1855 and his growing interest in nature. The presentation will enable visitors to explore the diversity of themes that preoccupied Delacroix throughout his life. For example, he engaged with the art of the past; had a lifelong fascination with literary, historical, and biblical themes; and made transformative contributions to printmaking and book illustration. The exhibition will spotlight Delacroix's interest in the world beyond Europe, including his own epochal voyage to North Africa in 1832. The variety of works will reveal Delacroix's creative process and his progressive mastery of materials, including oil paint, watercolor, and graphic media. Among the highlights will be Delacroix's landmark works   Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826), The Battle of Nancy (1831),  and Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834).    Visitors will have the first opportunity in a generation to examine closely Christ in the Garden of Olives (1824–27), removed from its perch high on the wall of the Parisian church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis and cleaned especially for the exhibition. Delacroix's genius as a lithographer will be demonstrated in the 1828 French edition of Goethe's Faust. The book will be paired with never-before-exhibited proof impressions for its illustrations, along with preparatory drawings for individual plates.  The Met's Department of Paintings Conservation has completed a yearlong treatment of the seminal still life Basket of Flowers (1848–49), removing a scrim-like layer of old varnish to reveal Delacroix's full coloristic brilliance.   Saint Sebastian Tended by the Holy Women (1836)  and Medea about to Kill Her Children (1838) will convey the grandeur and gravitas of the artist's maturity,  while his anthropomorphic approach to animal subjects will be on full display in Young Tiger Playing with Its Mother (1830) and The Lion Hunt (1855). Exhibition visitors will come away with a broadened appreciation for Delacroix's remarkable oeuvre and its enduring appeal. Delacroix is organized by Asher Miller, Assistant Curator in the Department of European Paintings at The Met, in collaboration with Sébastien Allard, Director of the Department of Paintings at the Musée du Louvre, and Côme Fabre, Curator in the Department of Paintings at the Musée du Louvre. The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue offering a fresh take on Delacroix's complex character.

French Pastels: Treasures from the Vault - Updated

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 
June 30, 2018 through January 6, 2019 

Jean-François Millet, Dandelions, 1867–68. Pastel on tan wove paper. Gift of Quincy Adams Shaw through Quincy Adams Shaw, Jr., and Mrs. Marian Shaw Haughton.

(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

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The fragility of powdery pigment and the light sensitivity of the paper on which it rests mean pastels can rarely be exhibited—typically for only a few months per decade. French Pastels: Treasures from the Vault at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), provides an opportunity to see nearly 40 masterworks by 10 avant-garde artists who reinvigorated the challenging medium in the 19th century, from depictions of rural life by Jean-François Millet to portrayals of ballerinas by Edgar Degas.

Drawn primarily from the MFA’s holdings and supplemented by key loans from a private collection, the exhibition is organized thematically, showcasing artists’ use of the colorful sticks of ground pigment to capture the ephemeral—fleeting expressions of the face, the movement of fabric or atmospheric effects—and beauty in the mundane. Pastel, which required none of the drying time of oil paint, was perfectly suited to these aims. New and bold colors, made possible by the advent of synthetic dyes, encouraged experimentation in the mid-19th century, and Millet and Degas were among the leading innovators. In addition to exploring their techniques and artistic processes, the exhibition also highlights works by their contemporaries: Mary Cassatt, Léon-Augustin Lhermitte, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Odilon Redon, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Johan Frederik Thaulow. 

French Pastels: Treasures from the Vault is on view from June 30, 2018 through January 6, 2019 in the Charlotte F. and Irving W. Rabb Gallery.

“To really appreciate how astonishing these pastels are—the extraordinary variety of surfaces and marks achieved with this beautiful, colorful dust—you really have to spend time with them, up close and in person, and that’s a very rare opportunity to have,” said Katie Hanson, Assistant Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe.

Millet developed his pastel practice in the mid-1860s, producing luminous, evocative views of shepherds, farmyard and country themes that employed the versatile medium to dazzling effect. His depictions of flowers and grass present them from the point of view of a bug or small animal, intimate in their proximity, lush in their details and color.

Pastel covers the sheet in Dandelions (1867–68), showing no glimpse of sky save for the bright patches of light touching the grass and the little white blossom at lower left.



In Primroses (1867–68), the cowslip primroses glow, brilliant yellow amid the dense darkness of the forest floor, while a slug with a glistening antenna moves along the rough earth.



In Shepherdess with her Flock and Dog (1863–65), the artist imbues a sense of monumentality to the contemplative figure of the young shepherdess, delicately balancing luminous pastel with dark conté crayon to convey sunlight peeking from behind the clouds above, illuminating the herd yet leaving the peasant’s downturned face in shadow.

Nearly all of Millet’s late pastels were commissioned by Emile Gavet, an architect and arts patron who provided him with a monthly stipend and drawing supplies. Following Gavet’s financial downturn, his collection of nearly 100 pastels by Millet was sold at the Hôtel Drouot in June 1875. Twelve of the works on view in the exhibition were included in this historic auction, which was a revelation for artists at the time. “When I entered the room at Hôtel Drouot where they were exhibited,” wrote the awe-struck Vincent van Gogh, “I felt something akin to: Put off thy shoes, for thou standest on holy ground.”

Degas also experimented boldly with pastel, using processes that still elude explanation. In the exhibition, works from across more than three decades of his career highlight his inventiveness. They include four pastels depicting his most famous subject—ballerinas, whose lives he explored and portrayed on stage, in rehearsals and backstage in private moments. Degas achieved a great range of effects in these works.



In Dancers Resting (1881–85), he rendered the glints of light on the ballerinas’ hair with small, linear strokes, the opaque outer skirts with broader, heavier strokes, and the puffy underskirt by rubbing the medium diffusing the pigment either with his hand or a rag.



In Dancers in Rose (about 1900), however, the encrusted pastel takes on the appearance of a dense fabric, rather than a light airy powder. Degas also often worked in a cumulative way, changing the scale of the page with strips of paper before having it mounted onto a firm surface.

In Seated Dancer (1895–1900, Isabelle and Scott Black Collection), he revised his composition as he worked—viewers can note the repositioning of the dancers’ legs and the modification of the size and shape of the paper itself, with strips added at both sides. These pastels bring visitors close to the artist’s process through their visible strokes and seams.

While renowned as a great portrayer of people and urban entertainments, Degas was also a landscapist. The exhibition includes two of his distinctive color monotype landscapes, created in an unusual process. The artist applied paint or printers’ ink onto a metal plate, placed a dampened sheet of paper on top of it, and ran it through a printing press. Degas left some of his monotypes as they came off the printing press, but enhanced and modified the two works on view with pastel once the printed matrix had dried. The exhibition also includes landscapes by Monet, from an early moment in his career when he was just beginning to work en plein air, and his Norwegian friend Thaulow, who used pastel to depict the powdery blowing snow, harmonizing medium with motif.

Johan Frederik Thaulow, Cottages in the Snow, 1891. Pastel on canvas. Bequest of David P. Kimball in memory of his wife Clara Bertram Kimball.

Additional notable works on view include Pissarro’s Poultry Market at Gisors (1885), which hovers between the effect of painting and drawing and was given by the artist to Monet in exchange for one of his canvases, as well as the work of Mary Cassatt, shown alongside a box of pastels once used by the artist.

Good review, lots more images
 

James M. Reed Print Collection.

The Fairfield University Art Museum in Fairfield, Connecticut, announces the major gift of the James M. Reed Print Collection. Assembled over several decades by artist, collector and master printer James Reed, the collection, which will be given in its entirety, consists of over 1,500 prints spanning the 16th through the early 21st centuries. The great strength of the Reed collection is 19th-century French etching and lithography. Géricault, Delacroix, Daumier, Manet, Redon, and Fantin-Latour are among the major artists of the period represented. Over 30 old master prints dating from the 16th-18th centuries are also included.

Léopold Flameng after Eugène Delacroix, St. Sébastien secouru, ca. 1870s. Etching. Fairfield University Art Museum, Gift of James Reed, 2017. (2017.35.668)

The second concentration of the collection is a significant group of over 50 German Expressionist prints, including woodcuts and lithographs by Emil Nolde, Ernst Kirchner, and Max Beckmann among others. James Reed has also collected modern prints by iconic names including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine, as well as lithographs, etchings and woodcuts by established contemporary printmakers, many of whom he has collaborated with as master printer at Milestone Graphics, the fine printmaking studio he owns and directs and which is an important institution for artists working in Connecticut and the Northeast. This part of the collection includes examples of Mr. Reed’s own work as an artist and printmaker, which is represented in more than 20 public collections around the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library. The modern and contemporary prints in the James M. Reed Print Collection are promised to the museum as a bequest.

Linda Wolk-Simon, Frank and Clara Meditz Director and Chief Curator of the Fairfield University Art Museum, called the gift of the James Reed Print Collection “truly transformative.” Explaining its significance for the museum she noted, “Unlike our peer institutions, whose foundational holdings typically comprise rich collections of prints—long an important resource in the teaching of art history in addition to being artworks to display on the walls—Fairfield has lacked a collection of works on paper. Though we have made small strides to rectify this, acquiring a handful of old master and contemporary British prints since our founding seven years ago, this lacuna seemed hopelessly insurmountable. The situation has changed, literally overnight, with the glorious gift of the James M. Reed Collection, which provides an endlessly rich font of marvelous works on paper for both display in the museum and for teaching across multiple disciplines. We are profoundly indebted to James Reed for this truly historic gift, and for the extraordinary generosity of spirit it represents.”

An exhibition celebrating the gift of the James M. Reed Print Collection and featuring some 50 highlights drawn from the full range of old master, 19th-century, German Expressionist, and modern and contemporary prints will open in the museum’s Walsh Gallery on March 14, 2019 and remain on view through June 8. Several programs will be organized in conjunction with the exhibition, including a conversation and printing demonstration with James Reed, and an exhibition publication will be produced. The exhibition and programs are free and open to the public; dates and other information will be posted on the museum’s website in the coming months (fairfield.edu/museum). As a long-term project, the museum plans to catalogue the entire collection as part of the online collections database.

James Reed has taught printmaking as an adjunct professor of fine arts for over 30 years. He studied at the University of Missouri, Kansas City; San Francisco State University; Tamarind Institute; and the University of New Mexico, and had a curatorial and conservation internship at the Achenbach Foundation in San Francisco. He was a curatorial assistant for the print collection at San Francisco State University and is currently Manager and Curator of the Gabor Peterdi International Print Collection at Silvermine Art Center in New Canaan, Conn. Mr. Reed has received a Ford Foundation Fellowship and a Rockefeller Research Grant. His art has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Institute Tecnólogico in Monterey, Mexico, the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, and Goat Shed Gallery in Brooklyn, and he has participated in more than 150 invitational group exhibitions in the United States, Latin America and France.

Jan Bruegel the Elder at Auction

Sotheby’s Sale of Master Paintings on 1 February 2018 

A Wooded River Landscape with a Landing Stage, Boats, Various Figures and Village Beyond is a stunning work by 17 th -century Flemish master Jan Bruegel the Elder, and stands as one of the finest river landscapes by the artist in private hands (front page, middle, estimate $2.5/3.5 million). A primary example of his work on copper, the painting’s vibrant colors, intact glazes and thick impasto are evidence of its remarkable condition, and its meticulous attention to detail further contributes to the captivating jewel -like effect so prized in works by the major Flemish master. 

 

Sotheby's Old Master & British Paintings Evening Sale

08 July 2015

 

Jan Brueghel the Elder

THE VISION OF SAINT HUBERT

Estimate

200,000 — 300,000

GBP

LOT SOLD. 245,000 GBP

 

Sotheby's Old Master & British Paintings Evening Sale

09 July 2014

 

 

 

Jan Brueghel the Elder

THE GARDEN OF EDEN WITH THE FALL OF MAN

Estimate

2,000,000 — 3,000,000

GBP

LOT SOLD. 6,802,500 GBP