Art Exhibitions

▪ 1995

Introduction

Art

      Venice, the incomparable Italian city of art, was both the subject and the venue of several of the outstanding art exhibitions of 1994. "The Glory of Venice, 1700-1800," at the Royal Academy in London in the autumn, was devoted to 18th-century Venetian art. It was a companion show to "The Genius of Venice, 1500-1600," which 10 years previously had centred on artists of the 16th century. The 60 artists represented included Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Francesco Guardi, Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto, Antonio Canova, and, of course, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. A wide range of subject matter—religious scenes of Tiepolo, genre paintings of Pietro Longhi, and cityscapes of Canaletto and Bellotto—created a picture of life in the city in all its diversity. Prints, drawings, and sculptures as well as paintings were represented.

      The year 1994 was the 400th anniversary of the death of the great Venetian painter Jacopo Tintoretto, and the occasion was marked by his home city, which designated itself Città del Tintoretto, an initiative that included the publication of various Tintoretto walks for visitors to enjoy. Associated were two exhibitions that, although not large, illustrated the extent of his talents. The shows were held at the church of San Bartolomeo ("Tintoretto: Sacred Representations in the Churches of Venice") and at the Accademia Gallery ("Jacopo Tintoretto: Portraits") and subsequently appeared in Vienna at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. There were 13 religious paintings drawn from various Venetian churches on view at San Bartolomeo and at the Accademia 41 portraits lent by European and American public collections. Many of Tintoretto's paintings hang in other public buildings in Venice, including the Ducal Palace, and at over 20 churches, and the two small exhibitions thus complemented the great permanent displays always present in the city. The exhibition at the Accademia was by far the largest such show ever devoted to the artist's work and comprised approximately 25% of his surviving portraits. The portraits were characterized by expressive heads, many of whose subjects were influential elderly men, painted for official purposes, but there were also several relaxed family portraits. A self-portrait of the artist from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London was loaned for inclusion in the show.

      A major show devoted to the architecture of the Italian Renaissance was mounted at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Titled "The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture," it concentrated on exhibits that served to bring architecture alive. The immense show had as a centrepiece the massive wooden model of an unbuilt design for St. Peter's Basilica in Rome by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, done in 1539-46, which stood some 4.5 m (15 ft) high. Newly restored, the model dominated the courtyard of the Palazzo Grassi, allowing visitors to walk around and view it from all angles. A smaller, partial model of Michelangelo's design for half of the drum and dome was suspended dramatically over the palace's main staircase, showing by contrast how he had simplified and monumentalized the design.

      The show included a further 29 wooden models illustrating projects from the 15th and 16th centuries as well as drawings, documents, and portraits of architects. Many of the models could be appreciated as works of art in themselves. Ironically, the exhibition was not particularly comprehensive, focusing on surviving models, and Venetian architecture was virtually unrepresented, as was the work of Palladio. Three hundred examples of architectural drawings were included, however, and there was also a fascinating section devoted to templates used for carving decorative details ("modani"), a few of which had actually been used to reproduce moldings, cornices, and other ornamentation. The show filled 37 rooms, some devoted to general topics and others to single buildings. The exhibition comprised two distinct phases, with some of the exhibits being replaced at the halfway point by others, which was intended to protect the works on paper from too much light.

      An exhibition devoted to Islamic works of art taken from Italian collections was shown at the Ducal Palace in Venice, an ideal venue because of the city's long history of Eastern connections. Despite shortcomings in the mounting of the exhibition and problems with loans being canceled at the last minute, the show generally offered much of interest. Objects on display included Persian pottery, Syrian silver work, and Egyptian textiles. Objects collected by the Medici, the Borgias, and the Estensi, including inlaid metalwork and hard-stone pieces, were notable. Ottoman textiles were especially well represented. Also at the Ducal Palace a large loan exhibition entitled "Normanni" surveyed Norman culture and its European and Middle Eastern conquests for the period 1030 to 1200. A charming exhibition in Florence at Fort Belvedere, entitled "Views of Florence," comprised views of that city as depicted by both foreign and Italian artists from the 14th to the 19th century, including photographs and representations of the city in the backgrounds of nonlandscape paintings.

      An exhibition devoted to 20th-century art of the Low Countries appeared in the early summer at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. The survey divided its presentation of Dutch art into separate shows, one devoted to the earlier "historic" period and another to contemporary works, with the contemporary works actually being shown first. The subtitle of the exhibition ("From van Gogh to Mondrian") was slightly misleading, as some 19th-century Symbolist paintings were also included. The exhibition was theme-based and included landscape, portraiture, and abstraction. One room was devoted to architectural and design aspects of De Stijl and included studio photographs as well as decorative items. The star of the show was undoubtedly Mondrian, whose preeminent originality was unmistakable. The Belgian avant-garde was the subject of a show entitled "Impressionism and Post Impressionism in Belgium 1880-1900," which was devoted to that short, productive period. The two aesthetic groups Les Vingt and its successor La Libre Esthetique were represented. An exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris explored the cultural links between France and Sweden in the 18th century and included among the items on display French paintings from Swedish collections, as well as works by French artists working at the Swedish court. Furniture and architecture were also represented. The title of the show was "The Sun and the North Star."

      The work of Frank Lloyd Wright was celebrated by a major retrospective mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City from February to May. A wide range of Wright's activity was covered by the exhibition, illustrating his technological innovations and his interest in the relationship between architecture and landscape. The exhibition comprised a well-chosen selection of models, photographs, drawings, and artifacts, along with several full-scale wall constructions. Wright's designs for New York's Guggenheim Museum formed the subject of a small show at that museum in the summer. (See also Architecture .)

      Another architectural exhibition was devoted to Augustus Pugin at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The show was entitled "Pugin: A Gothic Passion." Pugin, often considered the founder of the Gothic Revival, was best remembered for his work at Westminster Palace (Houses of Parliament), but he was a prolific architect, designing 6 cathedrals and over 40 churches and many other religious buildings, including convents, as well as major secular buildings. On display were many designs and objects, as well as drawings of architectural subjects, textiles, and wallpapers, along with examples of his writings. The exhibition was particularly rich in examples of furniture, church plate, ceramics, and jewelry, much of which had never before been on public view, and the various facets of his work were well shown in the analytic and scholarly show.

      An exhibition devoted to the work of William Morris and his group, entitled "Morris and Co.: Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement in South Australia," was seen at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide in the spring. European and American enthusiasts of Morris may have been surprised to learn that from the early 1880s until the early 20th century, Adelaide was a major market for his works, owing to the interests and activities of the Barr-Smith family and their circle. Many of the furnishings and fabrics supplied to houses owned by the family had now been acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia and formed the subject matter of this exhibition.

      Several major exhibitions took the work of Pablo Picasso as their subject in 1994. "Picasso and the Weeping Women," comprising approximately 40 paintings and works on paper that depicted Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar between 1932 and 1942, was featured at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and later at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sculpture was the subject of the exhibition at London's Tate Gallery entitled "Picasso: Sculptor/Painter." The exhibition focused on three-dimensional aspects of all of Picasso's work, including painting, and demonstrated as well the interactions between his painting and his sculpture. Picasso created nearly 1,000 sculptures in his life, using such diverse media as paper, metal, wood, plaster, and pottery, most of which he kept for himself and neither showed nor sold. Many of the items on display had been retained by the artist throughout his life and influenced his work at later stages. The show at the Tate Gallery included a variety of works in all media, including the 1909 "Head of a Woman (Fernande)" in the original plaster as well as in the bronze and painted iron ("Woman in a Hat") made from it in 1961-63. The influence of primitive sculpture and ethnographic objects on Picasso's paintings and sculpture was well illustrated, and his Spanish roots as a source of inspiration were also apparent. Many important items were lent by the Musée Picasso in Paris.

      On a more contemporary theme, sculpture by the artist Richard Wentworth was seen at the Serpentine Gallery in London and also in Bristol, England, at the Arnolfini Gallery and later in the spring in 's-Hertogenbosch, Neth., and Calais, France. Wentworth assembled familiar objects in an unfamiliar manner; one "sculpture," for example, comprised a dictionary between the pages of which were interleaved candy-bar wrappers. An exhibit entitled "Mercator" featured overlapping corrugated iron sheets, a reference to the system of map projection, and an installation entitled "Drift" encouraged the viewer to move among floor-mounted cages in which various unrelated objects were to be seen, with mirrors and reflecting lenses giving the installation a series of reflections.

      An exhibition entitled "Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away . . . " was selected by the English artist Damien Hirst to explore diverse themes of the past three decades. The work of 15 English, German, French, and U.S. artists was included in the show, which was seen at the Serpentine Gallery, the Nordic Arts Centre in Helsinki, Fin., and the Kunstverein in Hanover, Germany, and which was due to travel early in 1995 to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The exhibition included work in various media, including sculptures and photographs. One exhibit, entitled "Solomon Island Shark" by the American Ashley Bickerton, comprised a large black shark made of rubber, festooned with coconuts and bags of detergent, the whole being suspended from the ceiling of the gallery and being subject to numerous and diverse interpretations. An interest in the morbid combined with a perverse sense of humour seemed to unite a number of the works in the show.

      A large exhibition devoted to the work of R.B. Kitaj, entitled "R.B. Kitaj: A Retrospective," was first shown at the Tate Gallery, then traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and was scheduled to be shown in New York in 1995 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kitaj (born in 1932), whose work was largely figurative, defied classification, but he was undoubtedly a major artist of the mid-20th century. The show was his first British retrospective and comprised a variety of paintings, pastels, and drawings, the installation of which was partially supervised by the artist. It was one of three Kitaj exhibitions in London, the others being a print survey at the Victoria and Albert Museum and an exhibition of recent pictures at Marlborough Fine Arts.

      In 1994 there were a number of exhibitions in London devoted to aspects of 19th-century art of German-speaking countries, a relatively little-known area in Britain. The British Museum mounted "German Printmaking in the Age of Goethe." The museum has a strong collection of German prints of the 19th and 20th centuries, which the organizers of the exhibition were able to draw on for the comprehensive show. The exhibition covered the period around 1800, a time of considerable importance for printmaking because of the emergence of a variety of new techniques. Both scholarly and visually exciting, the exhibition put the art and practice of printmaking in Germany into context and illustrated particularly the enormous scale of the industry in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Leading centres of printmaking represented included Berlin, Munich, and Vienna, and themes covered both cultural and political subjects.

      The influence of Goethe on the arts was also the subject of a show entitled "Goethe and Art," a major loan exhibition at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Weimar, Germany. The exhibition had previously been seen in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. "Printmaking in the Renaissance," an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, focused on early European printmaking and included works by Dürer and Mantegna.

      A show entitled "Treasures from Heaven" was the first important exhibition devoted to illustrated and illuminated manuscripts of Armenia to be held in the United States. It was on display at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City in the summer and later at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Md. The 88 items on show were drawn entirely from public and private collections in North America and provided a chronological survey of the different periods and schools of the Armenian tradition. The items showed a variety of styles ranging over a period from 966 to the early 19th century. The rich and varied exhibition entitled "Egyptomania," which was seen at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in the summer, had previously been on view at the Louvre in Paris and was also scheduled to be seen in Vienna. The show explored the influence of Egyptian art on the decorative and fine arts of Europe and North America from the mid-18th to the early 20th century.

      The National Gallery in London mounted the major exhibition "Claude: The Poetic Landscape." Although small (28 paintings, 53 drawings) and with all but one drawn from British collections, it comprised a splendid survey of the artist's work and a fine introduction to the subject. Most of the pictures on display were drawn from the early part of Claude Lorrain's career, the 1630s and '40s. The interaction of subject and landscape was preeminent, and the exhibition focused on the narrative content of his landscapes and included drawings hung next to their connected or related paintings.

      A show in the autumn at the Grand Palais in Paris was devoted to Claude's contemporary Nicolas Poussin and included almost all of his major works that were not considered too delicate to travel. The exhibition was an in-depth survey and was to be seen in a reduced version in London early in 1995. Associated shows were mounted at Chantilly, near Paris, at the Louvre, and at the Villa Medici in Rome.

      The creativity of the artist was the main theme of a major exhibition devoted to the work of the Spaniard Francisco de Goya entitled "Goya: Truth and Fantasy," which was shown in the winter at the Prado Museum in Madrid and in the spring at the Royal Academy in London before traveling to the Art Institute of Chicago. This charming show offered visitors the chance to enjoy works rarely assembled or not usually publicly available; included were many portraits and miniatures.

      "A Gift to America" was an assembly of 54 of the most important old-master pictures donated by merchant S.H. Kress and the Kress Foundation to public museums throughout the United States. The show included works by artists such as Titian, Goya, El Greco, and Van Dyck and toured a number of museums, including the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh and museums in Houston, Texas, Seattle, Wash., and San Francisco.

      "The Age of Rubens" was billed as the first U.S.-mounted international loan exhibition survey of Flemish Baroque painting, a subject not usually popular with U.S. audiences. The exhibition was seen at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and subsequently at the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art. Its aim was to enhance the appreciation of the subject among contemporary museum visitors, and as such the exhibition was a delight to the eye. Peter Paul Rubens was well represented by 33 canvases, approximately one-quarter of the total number on show. Other artists represented were Van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, and Jan Bruegel the Elder. A particularly attractive group of oil sketches, studies for larger projects, were also included; some of them had never before been on public view.

      Noteworthy exhibitions in Japan included, at the Metropolitan Teien Museum in Tokyo, the first of a series of shows that would assemble works from museums throughout the country. This first show concentrated on the introduction of oil painting to Japan and contrasted the medium as used by Japanese artists of the 20th century with its use by Western artists. "Scream Against the Sky" at the Yokohama Museum of Art surveyed Japanese art of the post-World War II period, with 180 exhibits representing the work of 60 artists. At the Fuji Art Museum in Tokyo, an exhibition commemorating the museum's 10th anniversary focused on Napoleon and his period and included works by the French artists Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Jacques-Louis David. (SANDRA MILLIKIN)

      This updates the articles painting, history of (painting, Western); sculpture, history of (Western sculpture).

PHOTOGRAPHY

      A mood of looking back, summing up, and attempting to redefine both the photographic medium and the work of individual photographers who shaped it found expression in a number of impressive retrospective exhibitions in 1994.

      In Washington, D.C., the National Gallery of Art opened "Robert Frank: Moving Out, 1944-94," a major overview of the work of the reclusive but influential photographer-cinematographer. The Swiss-born Frank, who moved to the U.S. in 1947, powerfully influenced postwar photography with the publication in 1958 of The Americans. In that seminal book Frank recorded with gritty, tilted-frame, snapshot casualness a haunting iconography of empty roads and lonely people and a bleakly pessimistic view of society. The exhibition displayed 150 of those and other Frank photographs, many never before shown. A program of his innovative cinematic work included 21 films and videos and the premiere of his recently completed Moving Pictures.

      Richard Avedon and his work, featured in a high-powered media blitz during 1993, continued to be energetically promoted in 1994 as the photographer pursued his monumental project of producing a series of major exhibitions and books. The keynote event was "Richard Avedon: Evidence 1944-1994," which opened at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art. Covering the full range of Avedon's black-and-white photography over a half century, the exhibition revealed an astonishing versatility, a wildly innovative imagination, and a complexity of emotion that transcended the insouciant fashion work for which Avedon first became famous. The collection included charming street photographs taken in New York and Italy during the late 1940s and '50s and heretofore unpublished harrowing images of Vietnamese women burned by napalm. His compelling but disturbing portraits of Isak Dinesen as—in the words of one reviewer—a "skull attached to a fur coat," Ezra Pound sunk in despairing madness, a half-naked beekeeper crawling with insects, and a ravaged, broken-toothed Oscar Levant raised questions about the status of photographic portraiture and the ethical relationship between photographer and subject.

      Perhaps the most unusual exhibition of the year was "Talking Pictures: People Speak About the Photographs That Speak to Them" at New York's International Center of Photography, in which viewers listened to recorded comments from people both unknown and famous about the images being viewed. "André Kertész: A Centennial Tribute" at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, Calif., exhibited 50 pictures, including rare vintage prints made by the greatly admired Hungarian-born master. An exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, "Dorothea Lange: American Photographs," displayed 220 photographs, about one-fourth not previously shown, documenting the Great Depression, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and later photo essays.

      News of one of the most amazing photographic finds of recent times was made public: the discovery of 143 paper-negative images taken in 1852 by German photographer Ernest Benecke during extensive travels in Africa and the Near East. Unlike most early travel photographers, who dwelled on landscapes and ancient ruins, Benecke frequently photographed people in a surprisingly modern, casual style, thereby qualifying as one of the first ethnographic photographers. The collection, which was acquired by German collector Werner Bokelberg, was estimated to be worth $1 million.

      The subject of controversy for 60 years, a blurred, grainy, and much reproduced photograph purporting to show the Loch Ness monster was revealed to be a fake. The prankster, 90-year-old Christian Spurling, confessed to Scottish researchers before he died. He shaped Nessie's plesiosaur-like neck and head out of a modeling compound applied to the conning tower of a small toy submarine, which he then photographed in the shallows of Loch Ness.

      The 1994 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography was awarded to Paul Watson of the Toronto Star for his picture of a U.S. soldier being dragged through the streets in Somalia. Free-lance photojournalist Kevin Carter (see OBITUARIES (Carter, Kevin )) received the Pulitzer for feature photography for his picture of a starving Sudanese child under the patient gaze of a waiting vulture. At the 51st Pictures of the Year competition sponsored by the National Press Photographers Association and the University of Missouri School of Journalism, free-lancer Anthony Suau was named Magazine Photographer of the Year, while Lucian Perkins of the Washington (D.C.) Post took the title of Newspaper Photographer of the Year. At the 37th Annual World Press Photo contest, the Press Photo of the Year award was given to Larry Towell, a Canadian photographer associated with Magnum, for his photograph of "Children of the Intifada" in Gaza. The primary W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography went to Helen Binder for "Russia" and the secondary award to Viviane Moos for "The Girls of Brazil." Both recipients were New York-based free-lancers.

      Robert Doisneau (see OBITUARIES (Doisneau, Robert )) died at 81 in Paris, a city whose spirit he captured in many lighthearted and gently humorous images of its street life, parks, lovers, and children during the post-World War II years.

      (ARTHUR GOLDSMITH)

      See also Auctions and Collections ; Motion Pictures ; Museums .

      This updates the article photography (photography, history of).

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