Yalla Yalla! See You in Egypt - Exhibition @ Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Yalla Yalla! See You in Egypt

Teylers Museum, Haarlem

19 October 2024 - 9 February 2025

Willem de Famars Testas (1834-1896) 

Streetscape with coffee house in Cairo, ca 1860-1872.

Teylers Museum collection

Image courtesy Teylers Museum

At the exhibition 'Yalla Yalla! See You in Egypt', Teylers Museum puts the work of the nineteenth-century artist Willem de Famars Testas centre stage in a whole new way. The oldest museum in the Netherlands has plotted a journey in the exhibition, in collaboration with Dutch-Egyptian actor and theatre-maker Sabri Saad El-Hamus, prizewinning podcaster Tjitske Mussche and internationally known scenographer and maker Theun Mosk of studio Ruimtetijd. With Testas’s work as its guide, they take visitors along on a journey across the boundaries of time, space and cultures.

Willem de Famars Testas

In 1858, the young and as yet unknown artist Willem de Famars Testas (1834-1896) embarked on a long, life-changing journey to Egypt. The scents, colours, sounds, mosques, the povery, the climate – everything was different, as the diary he kept and the letters he sent also reveal: ‘The hustle and bustle of this place is quite strange: everywhere one meets camels, donkeys and horses, laden with all kinds of things, and also swarms of donkeys, which one sees everywhere with their boys.’ The scenery of this new world inspired him to make paintings, watercolours, sketches and drawings. Many of them are held in the collections of the Rijksmuseum, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Teylers Museum.

Terry van Druten and Sabri Saad El-Hamus 

at a burial chamber in Koerna, Thebe, February 2024

Photography: Tjitske Mussche

Journey to Egypt 2024

Scenes of distant countries were a popular feature of European art in the nineteenth century, but they also convey a certain stereotypical image. How relevant is Testas’s image of Egypt today, and what do we make of his descriptions now?

Curator Terry van Druten – a huge fan of Testas’s work for fifteen years – Sabri Saad El-Hamus and Tjitske Mussche travelled to Egypt in Testas’s footsteps last February. They visited places where Testas made drawings and looked to see how those places had changed. They spoke with Egyptians and with each other about Egypt then and now. Mussche processed their adventures into an audio travelogue focusing on multiple perspectives. Not only Testas’s view of Egypt, but also, for example, El-Hamus’s view of the Netherlands, foreign to him when he first arrived here as a ‘bearer of good fortune’ at the age of 21. Sabri Saad El-Hamus: 'When I read the travel diary, I was surprised by his view of the Egyptians. Sometimes he seems utterly out of touch, or plainly racist. Still, he also says things about Egypt that are true, even today. I also recognized something in him: I, too, had those feelings of alienation and homesickness when I came to the Netherlands as a young man in a completely new world.’

Exhibition

In Theun Mosk’s exciting space – with paintings, drawings, film footage and photographs – visitors to Teylers Museum can listen to dialogues between Van Druten and El-Hamus, and fragments from Testas’s diary, read out by actor Florian Myjer. The music was composed especially for this exhibition by the young composer Youssra El Hawary of Cairo. Testas’s work challenges visitors to make a voyage of discovery in Egypt and encounter ‘the other’ and themselves.

TEYLERS MUSEUM

Spaarne 16, 2011 CH Haarlem

teylersmuseum.nl

Millet: Life on the Land @ National Gallery, London

Millet: Life on the Land

National Gallery, London

7 August – 19 October 2025

The first UK exhibition in nearly 50 years dedicated to Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) will open at the National Gallery in autumn 2025. 

The show will coincide with the 150th anniversary of Millet’s death – by which time his works were well known in the UK and beginning to be eagerly collected by an enthusiastic group of British collectors, resulting in a significant body of his work in UK public collections.

Millet: Life on the Land will present around 13 paintings and drawings from British public collections. It will include the National Gallery’s The Winnower (about 1847‒8), and the exceptional loan of 'L’Angelus' (1857‒9) from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The exhibition will range from Millet’s last years in Paris through to his images of workers on the land during the 1850s following his move to the village of Barbizon in the Fontainebleau Forest in 1849, when he became one of the most significant painters associated with the 19th-century Barbizon school. Two drawings of shepherdesses from the Cooper Gallery (Barnsley) and the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge) will be shown together for the first time.

'The Winnower', which was acquired by the National Gallery in 1978, is one of Millet’s first paintings to treat the theme of rural labour. It was exhibited at the Salon of 1848 and was well received. However, later works exhibited at the Paris Salon produced extreme reaction. While Millet’s own political convictions are unclear, many critics appropriated his work for their own progressive agenda while others labelled him as subversive. Yet there is no doubt that he had sympathy with the workers around him and wrote in 1851 of the ‘human side’ that touched him most. 

In 'L’Angelus', a man and a woman are reciting the Angelus, a prayer which commemorates the annunciation made to Mary by the angel Gabriel. It is traditionally cited at morning, noon and evening, when it marks the end of the working day.  Never collected by its original commissioner, it followed an extraordinary journey through several collections and sales. The two quiet figures silhouetted against land and sky, the profound sense of meditation underscored by a beauty of light have turned it into a world-famous icon in the 20th century. 

Sarah Herring, Associate Curator of Post 1800 Paintings, says ‘Millet endowed rural labourers with dignity and nobility, depicting them in drawings and paintings with empathy and compassion.’ 

Nadar (French, Paris 1820-1910 Paris)

Jean-Francois Millet, 1856-58

Salted paper print from paper negative; Mount: 

15 7/8 in. — 11 5/8 in. (40.4 — 29.5 cm) 

Image: 10 9/16 — 8 3/8 in. (26.8 — 21.3 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 

Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012 (2013.159.46)

www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/306329 

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875)

Jean-François Millet was born at Grouchy (Manche) and was a pupil of Paul Delaroche in Paris by 1837. For some years he painted chiefly idylls in imitation of 18th-century French painters. Becoming, like Honoré Daumier, increasingly moved by the spectacle of social injustice, Millet turned to peasant subjects and won his first popular success at the Salon of 1848 with The Winnower. From the following year he was chiefly active at Barbizon and associated with the Barbizon school of landscape painters.

His work was influenced by Dutch paintings of the 17th century and by the work of Jean-Siméon Chardin and was influential in Holland on Jozef Israëls and on the early style of Vincent Van Gogh.

Barbizon school

The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement toward Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name from the village of Barbizon, France, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where many of the artists gathered. Most of their works were landscape painting, but several of them also painted landscapes with farm workers, and genre scenes of village life. Some of the most prominent features of this school are its tonal qualities, colour, loose brushwork, and softness of form.

The leaders of the Barbizon school were: Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Jules Dupré, Constant Troyon, Charles Jacque, and Narcisse Virgilio Díaz. Jean-François Millet lived in Barbizon from 1849, but his interest in figures with a landscape backdrop sets him rather apart from the others.

NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan @ MFAH, Houston

Meiji Modern 

Fifty Years of New Japan 

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

July 7 – September 15, 2024

Japan’s Meiji era (1868–1912) was a period of unprecedented cultural and technological transition. Over these remarkable decades, the country experienced radical social and political shifts, which propelled the historically inward-facing society into a new modern, global era. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presents a fresh look at the art of this transformative era with the landmark exhibition Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan.

Following over two centuries of near-total isolation, the archipelago of Japan was thrown into chaos with the arrival of the American Commodore Perry in 1853; following a series of international trade agreements, the feudal fiefdoms of Japan were transformed into a modern nation-state, with the Emperor “restored” to the throne. Through more than 150 extraordinary objects borrowed from over 70 public and private collections, the exhibition reveals the profound cross-cultural impact of the country’s developing relationships with the wider world.

Paintings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and fine examples of enamel, lacquer, embroidery, and textiles all evidence a blending of cultures and techniques and the innovative interchange of old and new. Uniquely, the exhibition features a diverse selection of both export wares and items made for display in Japan, reflecting the diversity of tastes and aesthetic discourse in the Meiji period. The exhibition also features several recently discovered masterpieces of Japanese art, many of which have never been shown publicly.

Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan is organized into five thematic sections that reveal the varied cross-cultural influences on Japanese history and identity over the course of the Meiji period.

• Crafting a Modern State highlights the emergence of a country opening up to the outside world through prints, and other objects depicting Western scenes and motifs. Depictions of Meiji rulers in Western clothing and portrayals of American dignitaries in Japanese clothing underscore these new international connections. This also illustrates the importance of art and artwork both as industry and as a tool of diplomacy to the fledgling Meiji state.

• Navigating Changing Seas demonstrates the continued cultural importance of the sea in Japanese art, conveying its role in bringing the outside world to Japan, and bringing Japan to the outside world. A massive bronze masterpiece, nearly life size, of the Dragon King of Sea presenting a warrior with a magical tide-controlling jewel, the most significant piece of Meiji Period metalwork in the United States, is one of the highlights of this section.

• Fashioning the Self assesses the emergence of a new Japanese identity as a non-white, modern nation-state, and considers the changing gender roles of the period, the end of samurai status, the creation of a Meiji bureaucracy, and the growing embrace of modern conveniences as seen in clothing items and prints such as Telephone Call: A Merchant’s Wife. This section also highlights the unprecedented new social freedom enjoyed by women, using a series of woodblock printed illustrations from women’s magazines, a new genre that emerged during the period as women in Japan achieved widespread literacy for the first time. Another highlight of this section is a bowler hat by Hayakawa Shōkōsai I, woven entirely out bamboo reeds.

• Making History, Enshrining Myth examines the importance of a national religion, traditions, and myths to the formation of a modern nation-state, and considers how a self-conscious reinterpretation and re-articulation of the past helped inform a contemporary nation and its global future through unique new expressions. Crucially, this section also considers the role of China and the appreciation of Chinese art and culture during the Meiji Period and includes a rare and important two-sided painted screen by Noguchi Shōhin, one of the few female painters of the Meiji Period.

• Cultivating a Modern Aesthetic shows the traditional themes of plants and animals as the motifs and subject matter most eagerly embraced by foreigners, and therefore commonly made for export. Such artistic production translated to diplomatic soft power as well as a lucrative way to fund industry. It also fueled Western expectations for and definitions of “Asian tradition,” setting precedents for cultural and geopolitical relations and tensions that continue to unfold in the global arena today. This section features several important painted screens that have not been shown publicly for over 100 years and an imposing but beautiful ceramic painted made by Itaya Hazan, the father of Japanese studio ceramics. This vessel, the only known work by the artist in North America and one of only a handful outside of Japan, was acquired directly from the artist by Henry Walters in 1915, and is one of many such works in the exhibition that were purchased during the Meiji Period as contemporary art, highlighting Japan’s importance and might on the world stage by the end of these tumultuous five decades of new Japan.

Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan has been organized by the Japanese Art Society of America. The exhibition is co-curated by Bradley Bailey, the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Curator of Asian Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Chelsea Foxwell, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Chicago. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated scholarly catalogue with essays and entries, published by Yale University Press.

Meiji Modern

Fifty Years of New Japan

by Chelsea Foxwell and Bradley M. Bailey

Published by Yale University Press, 2023

272 Pages, 11.30 x 9.25 in, 275 color illustrations

Gary Tinterow, Director and Margaret Alkek Williams Chair at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, noted, “Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan provides a fascinating window onto this transformative era, a collision of culture and identity that forged newly modern approaches to esthetics, trade and statehood in Japan. It also shows to great effect the unprecedented achievements of Japanese artisans and artists, culminating centuries of technical perfection. We are pleased to partner with Japanese Art Society of America, on their 50th anniversary, to bring this unprecedented exhibition to the MFAH.”

“Late-19th-century Japan represents an early and compelling chapter in the history of global modern art, as Japan became one of the first non-Western nations seeking to repel colonization by making the case for the integrity of its art and culture,” commented Bradley Bailey. “While seemingly opposed, these two ambitions intertwined to produce a distinct form of expression that helped to define Japan’s classical past as well as its global future.” 

Previous Venues:

Asia Society, New York, October 3, 2023 – January 7, 2024

Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, March 21 – June 9, 2024

MFAH - MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS / HOUSTON

1001 Bissonnet, Houston, Texas 77005

www.mfah.org

Best of German & Pop Art Auction @ Ketterer Kunst, Munich - 70th Anniversary Auction

Best of German & Pop Art 

Ketterer Kunst, Munich 

Anniversary Auction June 7/8, 2024 

The seventieth anniversary of KETTERER KUNST is celebrated with a sensational array of works. The highest estimate price tag in the house’s history has been put on Alexej Jawlensky’s marvelously elegiac "Spanische Tänzerin" in a blazing red dress, called up in the Evening Sale on June 7. Made in 1909, the pivotal work from the formative years of German Expressionism, in private hands for over ninety years, had only been known from a black-and-white photograph. Estimated at 7 to 10 million euros, it is particularly convincing for the fact that it is new to the market, as well as for the highly stylized Murnau landscape study it boasts on its reverse. A second market sensation is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's "Tanz im Varieté" from 1911, a time when the artist group "Brücke" set out to revolutionize the art world from its new base in Berlin. With unknown whereabouts for a long time, its existence was only documented by a black-and-white photo. Family-owned for eighty years, it is now up for sale at an estimate of 2 to 3 million euros.

Traditionally, German Expressionism is among Ketterer Kunst's core fields of expertise. Accordingly, the strong range of works in both our Evening Sale and Day Sale (June 8) featuring key works of Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein, Heinrich Campendonk and Gabriele Münter, most of which are priced in five- to six-figure realms. In addition, the auction also includes works on paper from the legendary Hermann Gerlinger Collection, which Ketterer Kunst has sold over the past three years.

Savvy collectors and informed investors alike will find plenty of reasons to make a purchase in this anniversary auction, reflecting on the singularity of an artwork even in challenging times and duly assessing its quality, provenance and novelty on the market. And eventually seize the opportunity. Needless to say this is also true for works of post-war and contemporary art, works like those of Ernst Wilhelm Nay from the 1960s as well as Konrad Klapheck's machine paintings (an artist for whom Ketterer Kunst set a new price record in the last auction). There is still more, for example, a large-scale "Finger Painting" by Georg Baselitz from 1972 and a portrait that Gerhard Richter made of his artist friend Günter Uecker in a grayish sfumato in 1964.

In addition to a number of Kirchner objects, a remarkable private collection compiled with intellectual focus and curiosity, includes a series of Henry Moore sculptures. In the course of a lengthy relationship with the artist, Dr. Theo Maier-Mohr has acquired 'Sheep Pieces' that include maquettes and large outdoor sculptures, as well as prime pieces of Moore's 'Family Groups', hence covering and honoring the central themes that drove the great sculptor.

This time around, we also put a strong focus on American Pop Art, however, rather in terms of quality than quantity. The key piece in this array is a monumental, ironically provocative motif by James Rosenquist ("Playmate", 1966), while Andy Warhol's complete series of ten color silkscreens "Flowers" from 1970 and an impressive wall sculpture by the late Pop veteran Frank Stella follow suit. Robert Rauschenberg, a decidedly flexible maverick among the pop art rebels, quickly found his own path. The evidence we provide in our auction is the bicycle ("Bicycloid VII", 1992) with colored neon tubes, which is now doing its rounds in an auction for the very first time. 

Highlights Contemporary Art

James Rosenquist 

Playmate, 1966 

Oil on canvas in four parts, wood, metal wire 

Estimate price: € 1,000,000 - 1,500,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Rare on the auction market: Striking eroticism in an over-sized format from the heyday of American Pop Art. The work "Playmate" (1966) by James Rosenquist - the protagonist of American Pop Art with a great sense of humor – was part of the legendary "Playboy" magazine campaign "Playmate as Fine Art" in 1967. Other contributing artist were, among others, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and George Segal.

Andy Warhol 

Flowers (10 sheets), 1970 

10 color silkscreens 

Estimate price: € 800,000 - 1,200,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Andy Warhol's ten-part series "Flowers" is another icon of American Pop Art and rarely comes to the market as matching set. 

Georg Baselitz  

Finger Painting - Birch, 1972 

Oil on canvas.

Estimate price: € 800,000 - 1,200,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Georg Baselitz's "Finger Painting - Birch" from 1972 is one of his early works with the characteristic "upside down" motif. Works from this pioneering creative phase are extremely rare.

Henry Moore 

Working Model for Sheep Piece, 1971 

Bronze with green-brown patina.

Estimate price: € 600,000 – 800,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

One of Henry Moore's rare large-scale outdoor sculptures on the auction market. Further casts of our work can be found in museum collections in California, Michigan and Japan. Part of the same German private collection since its creation. Further works from the Dr. Maier-Mohr Collection are offered in the Evening Sale and the Contemporary Art Day Sale on Friday, June 7, 2024, as well as in our Modern Art Day Sale on Saturday, June 8, 2024 (see extra catalog "A Private Collection - Dr. Theo Maier-Mohr"). 

Gerhard Richter 

Herr Uecker, 1964 

Oil on canvas.

Estimate price: € 450,000 – 650,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Gerhard Richter's sought-after early black-and-white paintings from the 1960s are based on photographs. Richter subsequently "inpainted" his motifs in the moist paint enlarged to the dimensions of the canvas, dissolving the contours into soft blackand-white modulations. The famous painterly blur that would become his artistic trademark, first appeared in Richter's paintings of the early 1960s. Gerhard Richter's portrait of his fellow artist and friend Günther Uecker, the important "ZERO" protagonist, was created in the context of a small series of portraits that Richter created on the initiative of the legendary Düsseldorf gallery owner Alfred Schmela for his first solo exhibition in September 1964. "Herr Uecker" is one of the last early Richter portraits still in German private ownership.

Ernst Wilhelm Nay 

Ene mene ming mang. 1955 

Oil on canvas 

Estimate price: € 400,000 – 600,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Ernst Wilhelm Nay's painting "Ene mene ming mang" is of museum quality, showing a particularly harmonious color scheme in a large format from the group of the famous "Scheibenbilder" (Disk Paintings). As early as in 1957, Nay showed two works from this series in the exhibition "German Art of the Twentieth Century" at the Museum of Modern Art. Comparable works can be found in, among others, the Museum Folkwang, Essen, the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 

Frank Stella 

The Pequod Meets the Rosebud (D-19, 1X), 1991 

Mixed media on aluminum 

Estimate price: € 200,000 – 300,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

As an important representative of Minimal Art and Abstract Expressionism, Frank Stella's work "The Pequod Meets the Rosebud (D-19, 1X)" from the important Moby Dick series unfolds an overwhelming expansive monumentality with an explosion of form and color.

Robert Rauschenberg 

Posse Stir (Galvanic Suite), 1989 

Mixed media. Acrylic and lacquer on galvanized steel 

123,5 x 306 cm, incl. the original frame.

Estimate price: € 200,000 – 300,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Robert Rauschenberg 

Bicycloid VII, 1992 

Bicycle, with colored neon tubes on aluminum base. 151 x 190 x 56 cm.

Unique piece from a series of 7 bicycle sculptures.

Estimate price: € 100,000 – 200,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

Robert Rauschenberg's collaged compositions realized in silkscreen were groundbreaking for Pop Art. Our Evening Sale includes both a large-format radiant work from Rauschenberg's important "Galvanic Suite" (1988-1991) as well as the bicycle sculpture "Bicycloid VII", a futuristic hybrid between ready-made and neon sculpture. Both works were acquired directly from the artist through the Swiss gallery Jamileh Weber and have been part of an important southern German private collection since.

Konrad Klapheck 

Die Technik der Eroberung, 1965 

Oil on canvas 

Estimate price: € 180.000 – 240.000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

'Die Technik der Eroberung' is a masterful presentation of a surreal puzzlement as a symbol of a sensual-erotic quest. Konrad Klapheck tells a story of seduction in subtle colors with surprising accents in green and red. The work has featured in several important Klapheck exhibitions since 1966 

Highlights Modern Art

Alexej von Jawlensky 

Spanische Tänzerin, 1909 

Oil on cardboard

Estimate price: € 7,000,000 – 10,000,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

"Spanische Tänzerin” (Spanish Dancer) - An ecstatic and exuberant expressionist masterpiece by Alexej von Jawlensky. In 1909, he was at the absolute peak of his creativity. Paintings from this short and colorful creative phase are almost exclusively owned by international museums today. A powerful avant-garde double strike: the radiant, highly stylized oil study on the reverse is reminiscent of the painting "Murnauer Landschaft" from 1909, created in a smaller format the same year, it is part of the collection of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich today. Shortly after it was made, the painting found a home in the renowned modern art collection of Josef Gottschalk in Düsseldorf, and remained in the family for over nine decades. 

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 

Tanz im Varieté, 1911 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 2,000,000 – 3,000,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst

Spectacular rediscovery: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's "Tanz im Varieté" has been hidden in a German private collection for 80 years. Until now, the work was only known from a black-and-white photograph. The grand painting from the best "Brücke" period was part of the seminal "Brücke" exhibition at the Fritz Gurlitt Art Salon in Berlin (1912) shortly after it was created.

Heinrich Campendonk 

Landschaft mit Tieren, around 1913 

Oil on cardboard, laid on fiberboard and mounted on the stretcher

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

Heinrich Campendonk's "Landschaft mit Tieren" (Landscape with Animals), around 1913, dates from the artist's most innovative creative period: he showcased his talent in exhibitions of the "Blue Rider" and the Rhenish Expressionist in 1911 and 1913. In dialog with Franz Marc, he developed his distinctive pictorial language. This largeformat work was presented in major exhibitions at the leading galleries of the time (Walden and Flechtheim) and is now offered with an estimate price of € 600,000 - 800,000.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 

Im Wald, 1910 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 400,000 – 600,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

Erich Heckel 

Zwei Menschen im Freien, 1909/10 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 400,000 – 600,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

A rare opportunity! Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein spent the summer of 1910 at the Moritzburg Ponds with a number of friends and models, painting in the woods and by the ponds. In the forests and lakes around Moritzburg, the artists occasionally set up their easels in a row to capture one and the same scene, which explains why the naked couple in Kirchner's painting "Im Wald" is also depicted in Heckel's "Zwei Menschen im Freien".

Hermann Stenner 

Kaffeegarten am Ammersee, 1911 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 90,000 – 120,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

From the Hermann-Josef Bunte Collection: This auction puts Stenner in the foreground with 14 important works from a total of 27 lots from the Bunte Collection. In addition, works by other artists from the Hölzel circle are also on offer. Ackermann, Kinzinger, Graf, Eberhard, as well as works by Sagewka and Böckstiegel again.

In "Kaffeegarten am Ammersee", Stenner boldly combined impressionist lightness and bright colors with highly concentrated surfaces. This works should become one of his most accomplished paintings from the summer sojourn in Dießen on Lake Ammer.

Highlights 19th Century Art

Max Liebermann 

Die Colomierstraße in Wannsee, 1917 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 200.000 - 300.000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the house on Wannsee, hidden in the picture on the right, became Max Liebermann's artistic retreat. This was where he created his most sought-after works. Our painting also boasts an important provenance: it was part of the estate of Albert Janus, important collector and patron of the Folkwang Museum. In 2010, it was exhibited on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Liebermann Villa on Wannsee.

Max Liebermann 

Wannseegarten - Haus mit roten Stauden, 1926 

Oil on canvas

Estimate price: € 400,000 – 600,000 

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

In his celebrated paintings of the garden at his Wannsee villa, Max Liebermann liberated form and color in an unprecedented way. Wannsee paintings of this luminosity are extremely rare on the auction market.

Franz von Stuck 

Der Engel des Gerichts, around 1922 

Oil on panel

Estimate price: € 100,000 – 150,000

Photo courtesy of Ketterer Kunst 

For over 20 years, Franz von Stuck's " Der Engel des Gerichts" (The Angel of Judgement) was on permanent loan at the Künstlerhaus am Lenbachplatz in Munich. A fascinating interpretation and daring modernization of the age-old motif in the rebellious zeitgeist prevailing at the turn of the century. The work has been privately owned since its creation and is now available on the auction market for the first time.

DATES

June 7, 2024 Contemporary Art Day Sale, Evening Sale in Munich

June 8, 2024 19th Century, Modern Art Day Sale in Munich

Until June 15, 2024 Online Sale - parallel to the saleroom auction

Preview Shows of the Top Lots in Munich

Ketterer Kunst, Joseph-Wild-Str. 18, 81829 Munich

June 1, 2024 12 - 6 p.m.

June 2, 2024 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.

June 3 - 4, 2024 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.

June 5, 2024 10 a.m. - 8 p.m.

June 6, 2024 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.

KETTERER KUNST

www.kettererkunst.com

Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism @ Cleveland Museum of Art

Degas and the Laundress: 

Women, Work, and Impressionism 

Cleveland Museum of Art

October 8, 2023 –January 14, 2024

Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)

Woman Ironing, begun c. 1876, completed c. 1887. 

Oil on canvas; 99 x 82.5 cm. 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 

Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1972.74.1

The Cleveland Museum of Art presents Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism, on view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Gallery. The first exhibition to explore Impressionist artist Edgar Degas’s representations of Parisian laundresses, the groundbreaking show includes the largest selection of these works seen together to date, only in Cleveland. The artworks from this series—revolutionary in their emphasis on women’s work, the strenuousness of such labor, and social class—were featured in Edgar Degas’s most significant exhibitions, where they were praised by critics as epitomizing modernity. The nearly 100 works exhibited from over 30 European and American collections reveal that depictions of laundresses by the artist and his contemporaries featured some of the most striking formal innovations of the time.  

“Degas carried out some of the most striking experimentation of his long career throughout his laundress series,” said Britany Salsbury, curator of prints and drawings. “The subject fascinated him beginning as a young man in the 1850s and continuing until his final decade of work as an artist. The images that he created of these women are fascinating for their emphasis on labor itself rather than the stereotypes that persisted about them throughout popular culture. The women who undertook work ironing and washing often did so because they lacked other options, and they endured tremendously difficult working conditions.”

A visible presence in the city, ironing in shops open to the street or carrying heavy baskets of clothing, laundresses undertook some of the most difficult and poorly paid labor at the time, leading some in the industry to supplement their income through sex work. The depictions of these women featured in Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism provide a surprising contrast to more familiar Impressionist representations of upper-middle-class leisure.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)

The Laundre [La Blanchisseuse]ss, 1877–79. 

Oil on canvas; 80.8 x 56.6 cm. 

Art Institute of Chicago, 

Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1947.102

Edouard Vuillard (French, 1868–1940)

Woman Ironing, 1892

Oil on board; 21.4 x 25.4 cm. 

The Cleveland Museum of Art, 

Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift, 2020.119

Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867–1947)

The Little Laundress, from Album des peintres-graveurs, 1896. 

Color lithograph on China paper; image: 29 x 19.7 cm; sheet: 45.4 x 33.7 cm. 

The Cleveland Museum of Art, 

Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift, 2020.151

Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism contextualizes Edgar Degas’s laundress series with paintings, drawings, and prints of the same subject by the artist’s contemporaries—including Gustave Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard—as well as painters that Edgar Degas influenced and was influenced by, from Honoré Daumier to Pablo Picasso. It also presents ephemera, such as posters, photographs, and books, that reveals the widespread interest that Parisians of all social classes had in the topic of laundresses during the late 1800s.

“The extraordinary works assembled for this exhibition reveal a new and exciting aspect of an otherwise well-known art historical movement,” said William Griswold, director and president of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “The Cleveland Museum of Art’s exceptional holdings of 19th-century French art situate us to present such an inventive exhibition, and we look forward to sharing works of impressive quality—from Degas’s private sketchbooks to some of his most celebrated canvases alongside those by his colleagues—that have never before been seen together.”

Degas and the Laundress

Women, Work, and Impressionism

Exhibition Catalogue

Britany Salsbury ed.

Published by The Cleveland Museum of Art

ISBN: 978-0-300-27322-9

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication featuring thematic essays by scholars of art history, French studies, literature, and history. The 256-page catalogue is the first publication to examine and document Edgar Degas’s portrayals of Parisian laundresses. Edited by Britany Salsbury with contributions by Aleksandra Bursac, Michelle Foa, Gretchen Schultz, Charles Sowerwine, Richard Thomson, and Claire White.

CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART

11150 East Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44106

www.clevelandart.org

Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris @ The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
June 15 - September 14, 2014

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will present Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris, the first major exhibition in the United States devoted to the 19th-century French artist Charles Marville. The exhibition explores the beauty, variety and historical poignancy of his art through nearly 100 photographs that span his entire career. At the heart of the show are compelling views of Paris both before and after many of its historic neighborhoods were razed to make way for broad boulevards, monumental buildings and manicured parks. The accompanying publication is the first scholarly catalogue about Charles Marville and presents recently discovered, groundbreaking scholarship on his art and life.

“This show allows us to see Paris through the eyes of one of photography’s early masters, to witness the ‘City of Light’ taking shape—and of course we feel pangs of nostalgia for what would soon be lost,” said Gary Tinterow, Museum director. “This groundbreaking exhibition was met with praise at the National Gallery in D.C. and is highly anticipated in New York. We’re excited and honored to bring these photographic treasures to Houston this summer.”  

The presentation in Houston is organized by Malcolm Daniel, recently appointed Curator in Charge of the Department of Photography. “Marville’s work has long been admired by photography aficionados,” remarked Daniel, “but this exhibition affords the broad public its first chance to see the full extent of this artist’s work through prints carefully selected for their perfectly calibrated compositions, exquisite technique and exceptional state of preservation. Most appealingly, many of Charles Marville’s photographs show Paris at the very moment of its transformation from a city of narrow streets and medieval buildings into the most modern of European capitals.”

Recent Discoveries

Charles Marville has long remained a mystery partly because documents that would shed light on his biography were thought to have disappeared in a fire that consumed Paris’s city hall in 1871. The whereabouts of other documentation was simply unknown. However, new research has helped National Gallery of Art curator Sarah Kennel and exhibition researcher Daniel Catan reconstruct Charles Marville’s personal and professional biography.

The son of a tailor and laundress, Charles-François Bossu was born in Paris in 1813. In a double act of self-invention, he jettisoned his given name (bossu means hunchback in French), assuming the name Marville around 1832, and became an artist. He embarked on a career as an illustrator in the early 1830s but turned to the young discipline of photography in 1850. Although he continued to be known as Marville until his death in 1879, he never formally changed his name, which is the reason many of the legal documents pertaining to his life have gone unnoticed for decades. The exhibition catalogue establishes Marville’s biography, including his parentage and his relationship with a lifelong companion, and uncovers many significant details that illuminate the evolution and circumstances of his career.

The Exhibition and Artist’s Background

Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris reveals an artist of broader talent than previously recognized, beginning with a compelling series of intimate self-portraits and portraits of friends and colleagues that provide a fascinating glimpse into Charles Marville’s personal life and professional ties. Featured works from his early career, beginning in 1850, also include landscapes, cityscapes, studies of sculpture and striking architectural photographs made in Paris, across France and in Germany along the Rhine. In Houston, the selection of early works will include a charmingly picturesque view of the half-timbered home of Francois I in Abbeville and a graphically powerful image of Ehrenbreitstein Fortress, both from the Museum’s Manfred Heiting Collection.  

Among the most poetic works in the exhibition are a series of cloud studies that Charles Marville made in the mid-1850s from the rooftop of his Paris studio. Using collodion-on-glass negatives, a more rapid and sensitive process than the paper negatives he had earlier used, the artist captured delicate, luminous cloud formations on the city’s horizon.

Charles Marville’s first patronage from the City of Paris came in 1858, a commission to photograph the newly refurbished Bois de Boulogne, a royal park on the edge of Paris that had been transformed under the emperor Napoleon III into a site of bourgeois leisure and pleasure. The park’s highly orchestrated mix of natural and man-made is seen in The Emperor’s Kiosk and other views. Arguably his first important body of work conceived and executed as a systematic series, the Bois de Boulogne is represented in the exhibition by nine large prints and two albums on loan from France’s Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library).

At the heart of the exhibition are the images for which Charles Marville has been most celebrated: rigorously composed, beautifully detailed prints that he made beginning in the early 1860s as “official photographer” for the City of Paris.  Known as the Old Paris album, the 425 photographs that Charles Marville made for Paris’s agency of historic works (under the aegis of urban planner Georges-Eugène Baron Haussmann) document the narrow streets and crumbling buildings of the pre-modern Paris and, in many cases, serve as the only visual record of sites that have long since vanished. Often working just one step ahead of the wrecking ball, Charles Marville recorded not only buildings slated for destruction, but also a disappearing way of life as age-old working-class neighborhoods were replaced with broad boulevards and new apartment buildings for a new rising middle class. In a view of the Passage Saint-Benoît, for instance, an attentive viewer finds an intriguing display of mismatched glassware in a café window, a charming hand-painted sign literally pointing to a seller of wood and charcoal, the decorative over-door panel of an already vacated wine store and other time-worn details of life in Paris. Other pictures include glistening cobblestones, the traces of torn-down buildings left on neighboring walls and advertising for such new-fangled items as a folding umbrella and photography itself.

The exhibition concludes with an exploration of the emergence of modern Paris through Charles Marville’s photographs. Even before completing the Old Paris series, Charles Marville began to photograph the city that was coming into being, from massive construction projects, renovated churches and broad boulevards to a host of modern conveniences, such as the elegant new gas lamps and the poetically named vespasiennes (public urinals) that cemented Paris’s reputation in the 1860s as the most modern city in the world. Charles Marville also explored the city’s edges, where desolate stretches of half-finished construction suggest the physical displacements and psychic costs of modernization. Sharp-edged, beautifully detailed and brilliantly composed, Charles Marville’s photographs present the French capital as at once glamorous and alienating.  

By the time of his death, Charles Marville had fallen into relative obscurity, with much of his work stored in municipal or state archives. This exhibition, which marks the bicentennial of Charles Marville’s birth, explores the full trajectory of the artist’s photographic career and brings to light the extraordinary beauty and historical significance of his art.

This exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

More than a third of the works presented in the exhibition are on loan from the Musée Carnavalet, Paris, the city’s history museum. Conservation and preparation of the loans from the Musée Carnavalet has been undertaken by the Atelier de Restauration et de Conservation des Photographies de la Ville de Paris (ARCP).

Curators and Catalogue

Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Sarah Kennel, associate curator of photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., is the curator of the exhibition. At the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Malcolm Daniel, curator in charge of the department of photography, will be the coordinating curator of the exhibition.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue written by Sarah Kennel; Peter Barberie, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Anne de Mondenard, Center for Research and Restorations of the Museums of France; Françoise Reynaud, Musée Carnavalet; and Joke de Wolf, University of Groningen.

THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON

1001 Bissonnet Houston, Texas 77005

www.mfah.org

Robert Seldon Duncanson: Acquisition announced by the Amon Carter Museum, Texas

Amon Carter Museum of American Art Announced Acquisition of its First Painting by 19th-Century Artist Robert Seldon Duncanson

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art announced last month the acquisition of a major painting by 19th-century landscape artist ROBERT SELDON DUNCANSON (1821-1872), the first African-American artist to achieve international acclaim. The work, titled The Caves, painted in 1869, was originally owned by Cincinnati Abolitionist Richard Sutton Rust (1815-1906), and it remained in his family until the Amon Carter purchased it in late 2012. Because it has been in a private collection for nearly 150 years, the painting will be accessible to the public for the first time beginning May 4, when it is displayed in the Amon Carter’s galleries.

“Duncanson is an immensely important figure in American art,” says Andrew J. Walker, director of the Amon Carter. “He was a self-taught, black artist from Cincinnati and a leading landscape painter of his time, which was a monumental accomplishment during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. Owning a work by this esteemed artist greatly enriches our collection.”

Impressive in scale, the painting is approximately 3 feet tall and is in magnificent condition. The Caves is painted in the Hudson River School tradition, which was an inspiration to Duncanson after he viewed works by Thomas Cole and other Hudson River School artists at Cincinnati’s Western Art Union in the late 1840s. The scene depicts an intimate view of the wilderness, with unusual geographic features of steep ravines and sandstone cliffs perforated by a canopy of evergreens and a trio of caverns.

“At first glance, the scene suggests a documented view of untouched nature,” says Rebecca Lawton, curator of paintings and sculpture. “But then we notice three figures making their way up a steep incline toward the mouths of the caves.

“This painting is a fine example of Duncanson’s mature style,” Lawton continues. “His extraordinary powers of transcription are evident; and although the exact location of the painting is not confirmed, we believe it’s the area known today as Hocking Hills State Park in Ohio. The work beautifully synthesizes mid-19th-century concerns for nature as an expression of cultural and national identity.”

Robert Seldon Duncanson’s paintings seldom overtly depict the political and cultural issues of the years surrounding the Civil War, such as slavery and discrimination, according to Margi Conrads, deputy director of art and research. Instead, the artist may have included subtle cues in his landscapes that conveyed his anti-slavery position.

“His depiction of caves poses intriguing questions about whether the painting includes references to the abolitionist movement or the role of African-Americans in everyday society,” says Conrads. “Caves were among the safe havens for runaway slaves through the Civil War. Additionally, both before and after the War, African-Americans guided tourists through caves, and it’s possible Duncanson is referencing this in his painting through the figure at the cavern’s mouth. Regardless, the painting is a beautiful testimony of an artist dedicated to depicting the essential natural world.”

Four watercolors from the museum’s permanent collection by Adrien Mayers (1801?-1833) will be exhibited near the Duncanson painting through September 4, 2013. The watercolors portray an early view of Cincinnati, Robert Seldon Duncanson’s adopted hometown and the place that nurtured his career.

“It’s a wonderful and distinctive moment for the museum to exhibit the works of three prominent black artists from three different centuries,” says Walker. “We are honored to show this exceptional American art to our visitors.”

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art's website: www.cartermuseum.org

Toulouse-Lautrec: The Human Comedy, SMK - National Gallery of Denmark

Toulouse-Lautrec: The Human Comedy 

SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhague 
17 Septembre 2011 - 19 February 2012

A cripple descended from aristocratic stock who became the controversial chronicler of modern-day Paris. The story of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec can very easily simply become the oft-told tale of this quirky artist who, for better or worse, became as one with his own art and circle of motifs. A major exhibition at the Royal Collection of Graphic Art at the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) moves out of the shadow of the mythology surrounding the artist. Featuring more than 130 works, the exhibition presents a sharply focused image of an artist whose depictions of the Parisian entertainment scene dissected and commented on modern existence by means of striking and groundbreaking effects. 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) 

Toulouse-Lautrec as Pierrot, Photograph, 1894

Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi, France

Toulouse-Lautrec: The Urban Scene - Paris

More than any other artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) stands as the enfant terrible of French late 19th century art. Over a brief but intense period of slightly more than 15 years the artist infiltrated the city’s entertainment scenes, interpreting virtue and vice across boundaries of class and social distinction without compromise. The city, which was described in Lautrec’s own day as a stage, became the starting point of his art. And the entertainment industry was the microcosm he used to record how the players on the urban scene staged themselves and their desires, regardless of gender and class.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s circle of motifs focuses on theatres, circuses, brothels, cafés, and dance halls, particularly in Montmartre. Here he created a repertoire of figures that comprised dancers, singers, actors, prostitutes, and their audiences and clients. Exercising his keen eye for tragic comedy this gallery of characters became an obvious source of subject matter in his work on decoding urban existence. The exhibition offers a veritable parade of such portrayals, demonstrating how Lautrec used caricature as a way of making shrewd observations of the social games being played; games which were set against the backdrop of a growing consumer culture and often centred on sexuality and desires. 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)

La Clownesse, seated, Mademoiselle Cha-U-Kao (From the album Elles)

1896

Lithograph, 525 x 403 mm

Image courtesy of the SMK

Toulouse-Lautrec: A pioneer

Toulouse-Lautrec’s artistic identity and anti-bourgeois attitude prompted him to transgress the boundaries between popular and highbrow culture, prefiguring aspects of 20th century avant-garde art. Parallel to his purely artistic work he also created illustrations and advertisements marketing a range of products and experiences. 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)  

La Chaîne Simpson - The Simpson Chain / Advertisement 

Designmuseum Danmark, The Prints and Drawings Collection 

Photo: Pernille Klemp 

1896

Poster, lithograph, 876 x 1247 mm

The exhibition focuses attention on Lautrec’s graphic works and on selected drawings. It shows how he, with his keenly honed sense for the commercial market and mass communication, found his own radical and innovative idiom, particularly within the graphic medium – which includes his groundbreaking posters. In his graphic experiments he employed simplification, stylisation, and exaggeration to achieve a hitherto unseen form and effect that had a strong impact on the public conscience – an idiom which means that his artistic takes on the human condition remain as fresh and mischievous today as when they were created.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 - 1901)

Cover for the album Yvette Guilbert

1894

Lithograph, 407 x 388 mm
Image courtesy of the SMK

At the exhibition: Themes, guide, app and film Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre

The exhibition differs from conventional retrospectives by opting out of the typical mode of chronological presentation. Rather, the many works are arranged by themes, focusing on the various scenes and players featured in Lautrec’s universe. The exhibition is accompanied by an informative guide, and visitors can also – before, during, and after their visit – access other materials such as apps for their smartphones and iPods. The latter can be borrowed from the ticket desk. Also, the film Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre is shown every day in the exhibition and in the Gallery’s cinema. 

Toulouse-Lautrec. The Human Comedy: Exhibition Catalogue 

On the occasion of this exhibition The National Gallery of Denmark also publishes with Prestel the catalogue Toulouse-Lautrec. The Human Comedy. Main article by Birgitte Anderberg and Vibeke Vibolt Knudsen, preface by Karsten Ohrt. 176 p, 24x30, richly illustrated. Available in Danish, and German.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 

Die menschliche Komödie 

Prestel, 2011 

SMK - Statens Museum for Kunst 
Solvgade 48-50
DK-1307 Kopenhagen

Website: www.smk.dk

The exhibitions at the Royal Collection of Graphic Art are sponsored by Oak Foundation Denmark

Beauty and Bounty: American Art in an Age of Exploration - A survey of great 19th and 20th-century American landscape paintings and photographs presented by the Seattle Art Museum

Beauty and Bounty

American Art in an Age of Exploration 

SAM - Seattle Art Museum 

June 30 - September 11, 2011

The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) presents a survey of great 19th and 20th-century American landscape paintings and photographs in the exhibition BEAUTY AND BOUNTY: AMERICAN ART IN AN AGE OF EXPLORATION. Through more than 100 works, including an in-depth presentation of the Seattle Art Museum’s painting Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast (1870) by Albert Bierstadt, Beauty and Bounty shows American artists’ responses as they encountered the North American continent’s ever-expanding vastness of natural beauty and nature’s bounty and provides a rare opportunity to view great works of American art from private collections, which have rarely – or never – been seen by the public. 

In the late 19th to early 20th centuries, painters including Sanford Gifford, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran gave form to landscapes of once unimaginable character, as they crossed the continent on expeditions through the plains and the mountains of the Great West. Beauty and Bounty includes about 45 of these majestic works – many of which are held in private collections and were previously unknown to the public. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a gallery devoted to one painting: Albert Bierstadt’s Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast (1870), which is dramatically displayed to convey its 19th-century context, alongside objects that the artist himself had collected during his travels and used as source material for the painting. 

Also included in the exhibition are approximately 60 landscape photographs, including mammoth plate images by pioneers of the western photography, including Carleton Watkins, Edward Muybridge, and Timothy O’Sullivan. 

“Many would be surprised by the wealth of important American landscape paintings and photographs that exist in private collections in the Seattle area,” said PATRICIA JUNKER, the Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art at SAM. “We are so grateful for the generosity of these collectors who have loaned their works, allowing our visitors to deepen their understanding of the American experience, through the eyes and experiences of some of our country’s greatest 19th and early 20th-century artists.” 

The paintings and photographs on view demonstrate that it was often these artist-explorers who were raising important questions about humankind’s place in the world and how best to respond to a continent that many at the time viewed as a divine blessing of beauty and bounty from nature. Naturalists John Muir and Gifford Pinchot had close relationships with painters during this period, and the works of art in the exhibition suggest the distinct philosophical ideals of preservation and conservation promoted by these influential men. 

AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PAINTING

Visitors to Beauty and Bounty begin by moving through a suite of galleries filled with nearly 45 grand landscape paintings by some of the late 19th-century’s greatest American artists. This was a time of great fascination with and optimism about westward expansion in the United States. While artists discovered the vast beauty of nature throughout the growing nation, the west – and the Pacific Northwest in particular – was viewed as the “next great thing” for the United States – a land of unspoiled beauty and seemingly boundless natural resources. A number of artists traveled west, where they sketched the largely untouched landscapes they found, often returning to their studios on the East Coast to produce their large-scale oil paintings to be shared with the public. In paintings such as Albert Bierstadt’s Sunrise, Yosemite Valley (1865), Sydney Laurence’s Mount McKinley (1914) and many others, the artists placed themselves – and, subsequently their viewers – right in the middle of these majestic landscapes. Through their paintings, these artists brought home with them the mystique of fabled places such as Yosemite and Yellowstone, the Columbia River and the Pacific coast of Washington State, to be experienced by lay-people across the country. 

The exhibition includes both oil sketches created on-the-spot within these natural surroundings and highly finished works from the artists’ studios. Also on view are a number of partings of landscapes from the eastern half of the United States, such as John Frederick Kensett’s paintings Narragansett Bay (1861) and Lake George (ca. 1865), and Winslow Homer’s An Adirondack Lake (1870). 

ALBERT BIERSTADT’S PUGET SOUND ON THE PACIFIC COAST

The presentation of landscape paintings in Beauty and Bounty culminates in a deep exploration of the Seattle Art Museum’s own grand painting, Albert Bierstadt’s Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast (1870). New research by SAM curator Patricia Junker has revealed insights into the painting that allow a deeper understanding of the artist’s intent, as well as what the painting would have meant to his American audiences back on the East Coast. Bierstadt, Junker has learned, traveled through Oregon and up the coast of the Washington Territory in 1863, sketching and gathering source material that would inform this painting and others. Including field sketches, native artifacts from Bierstadt’s personal collection, photographs, and popular prints, this gallery brings together much of the material that fueled Bierstadt’s imagination and helped shape his composition. 

Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast will be installed in a manner reminiscent of how it would have been experienced in 1870. At that time, patrons would have visited Bierstadt’s studio to see the painting and learn about the natural wonders he witnessed on his travels. Viewers would spend a large amount of time looking deeply at the image, the artist meticulously walking them through the story and the details of the painting. At SAM, the painting will be accompanied by an audio feature that replicates this experience, using descriptive text taken from nineteenth-century commentary on the painting. 

Rather than a traditional exhibition catalogue, Beauty and Bounty will be accompanied by a book that outlines Patricia Junker’s new findings about this painting from SAM’s collection. Albert Bierstadt’s Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast: A Superb Vision of Dreamland is co-published by the Seattle Art Museum and the University of Washington Press and was produced by Marquand Books, Seattle. It has been underwritten by the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, Inc. 

AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY

By the late-nineteenth century, the role of photographers as artists, as well as documentarians, was firmly established. Much like their counterparts working in paint, landscape photographers grappled with how to portray the vast landscapes they encountered. They also struggled with similar philosophical issues, as they witnessed the pull between those who desired to maintain the integrity of these pristine natural landscapes and those who felt a balance could be struck between conservation and management of the natural resources these areas harbored. Mammoth plate photographs from the 1880s by Frank Jay Haynes, for example, present stunningly beautiful views of Yellowstone’s canyons and waterfalls, while a series of equally beautiful photographs by Darius Kinsey from the turn of the 20th century document the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest and its toll on the land and forests of the region. Other large-scale photographs on display include works by William Henry Jackson, Carleton E. Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan and more. 

The exhibition also includes a gallery of stereograph images by Edward Muybridge, Charles Bierstadt and others, as well as a rare, 1853 Daguerreotype by Platt Babbitt of a view at Niagara Falls. 

Beauty and Bounty: American Art in an Age of Exploration has been organized by Patricia Junker, the Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art at the Seattle Art Museum. 

This exhibition is organized by the Seattle Art Museum. Members of the Visionary Circle (Thomas W. Barwick, Jeffrey and Susan Brotman, Barney A. Ebsworth, Jon and Mary Shirley, Virginia and Bagley Wright, Ann P. Wyckoff) have provided crucial funding to make that exhibition possible. Presenting Sponsor is Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. Exhibition Sponsors are Christie's and The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, Inc. Additional support is provided by SAM's American Art Endowment and contributors to the Annual Fund. Media Sponsor is King 5 Television. Airline Sponsor is Alaska Airlines/Horizon Air. 

SEATTLE ART MUSEUM 

SAM Downtown, Fourth Floor, Simonyi Special Exhibition Gallerie

www.seattleartmuseum.org