Milwaukee Art Museum announces 2006-07 Exhibition Schedule
MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM
EXHIBITION SCHEDULE AS OF MAY 2006
All exhibitions and dates are subject to change; please call to verify before publication. Images available upon request.
FEATURE EXHIBITIONS IN QUADRACCI PAVILION –
ON VIEW IN BAKER/ROWLAND EXHIBITION GALLERIES
Biedermeier: The Invention of Simplicity
September 16, 2006-January 1, 2007
Francis Bacon in the 1950s
January 27-April 15, 2007
Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape
June 9-September 9, 2007
ON VIEW IN KOSS GALLERY
Géricault to Toulouse-Lautrec: Nineteenth-Century French Prints
May 25-September 4, 2006
In Living Color: Photographs by Saul Leiter
September 28, 2006-January 7, 2007
Currents 33: Gregor Schneider
February 16-May 6, 2007
Adolph Gottlieb Prints: 1933-1946
May 24-August 19, 2007
ON VIEW IN DECORATIVE ARTS GALLERY
Paper Trail: Prints from the Chipstone Collection
May 18-September 10, 2006
Currents 32: Gord Peteran: Furniture Meets its Maker
October 5, 2006-January 7, 2007
Pathways: Seventeenth-Century English Furniture-Making Traditions in New England
February 8-May 27, 2007
Going out of Style: 400 Years of Changing Tastes in Furniture
June 21-September 30, 2007
ON VIEW IN BRADLEY GALLERIES
Bradley Collection of Modern Art
Ongoing
SPECIAL INSTALLATION
Crèche
November 17, 2006-January 8, 2007
FEATURE EXHIBITIONS IN QUADRACCI PAVILION –
ON VIEW IN BAKER/ROWLAND EXHIBITION GALLERIES
Biedermeier: The Invention of Simplicity
September 16, 2006-January 1, 2007
This is the first exhibition on the Biedermeier period in North America and in Europe. The exhibition focuses on the “invention of simplicity” in the Biedermeier period in Central Europe. Biedermeier brings together for the first time 300 outstanding examples of German, Austrian, and Eastern European furniture, related decorative arts, works on paper, and paintings that document the truly innovative character of the Biedermeier period from 1815 to 1830. Many of these works have startling affinities with designs of today. Among the exhibition highlights are paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, Eduard Gaertner, Georg Friedrich Kersting, and Karl Friedrich Schinkel and numerous outstanding examples of sofas, chairs, secretary desks, porcelain, glass, wallpapers, and textiles. The exhibition provides a survey of the Biedermeier period and examines the works as precursors of modernism and contemporary art.
The term “Biedermeier” is often assumed to be the surname of a cabinetmaker of the period, but it is actually an imaginary character-a pseudonym that played on the German adjective “bieder,” meaning plain and unpretentious, and “Meier,” a common German surname. The furniture, decorative arts, ceramics, glass, and paintings of the period reflected the taste of the newly emerging bourgeoisie. Emphasizing less extravagant means, a new standard of beauty was created through proportion, simplicity, utility, and elegance.
This exhibition is organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Albertina in Vienna, and the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. It is curated by Laurie Winters, curator of earlier European art at the Milwaukee Art Museum, in collaboration with a team of international scholars. After its showing in Milwaukee, the exhibition will travel to the Albertina in Vienna February 1-May 13, 2007; to the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin June 8-September 2, 2007; and finally to the Louvre in Paris October 15, 2007-January 15, 2008. The Milwaukee exhibition sponsored by the Argosy Foundation, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A 400-page catalogue with approximately 375 full-color images and six essays by leading experts in the field will accompany the exhibition.
Francis Bacon in the 1950s
January 27-April 15, 2007
Francis Bacon in the 1950s is the first exhibition to look in detail at this extraordinarily fertile decade in Bacon’s life and affords the viewer unprecedented insight into the artist’s imaginative powers as well as his constantly evolving sources and techniques. Although the most fruitful years in Bacon’s career, they were also the most tumultuous and tortured in the artist’s unsettled existence; Bacon was regularly without a fixed address, borrowing rooms and changing studios with bewildering frequency.
By the 1950s, Bacon had acquired sufficient technical prowess to forcefully express his vision, but he was still not fully in command of his disturbing images, which appear to rise from a dark well of the unconscious. Yet the rawness and sense of urgency exhibited in these pictures transcend any pictorial problems that Bacon eventually did come to resolve with experience and technical ability.
From the screaming heads and snarling chimpanzees of the late 1940s through the early Popes and portraits of van Gogh to the anonymous figures trapped in tortured isolation of some ten years later, Bacon created many of the most central and memorable images of his entire career during this time. Also making an appearance were dogs, owls, and elephants; sphinxes, children, and naked women; heads of William Blake, self-portraits, and portraits of friends. For this painter whose imagination so rarely strayed beyond the walls of a dark, claustrophobic interior, there were even glimpses of the African and French landscape.
An exhibition catalogue will be available. The exhibition was initiated by the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK with funding from the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Charitable Trust. Curated by Michael Peppiatt, and coordinated at the Milwaukee Art Museum by Chief Curator Joseph D. Ketner II. The exhibition will be on view at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, October-December, 2006. From Norwich the exhibition will travel to the Milwaukee Art Museum, January 27-April 15, 2007; then on to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, May 5-July 30, 2007.
Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape
June 9-September 9, 2007
This exhibition will explore the remarkable transformation of Camille Pissarro’s landscape paintings over the course of an important decade in his career, from 1864 to 1874. During this time, he moved from being a student of the Barbizon school to becoming one of the leaders of the emerging Impressionist movement. This critical period of his evolution as an artist laid the groundwork for an entire generation of painters, many of whom were influenced by his experimental techniques and vision. The exhibition will include approximately 50 paintings, ranging from his Salon compositions from the 1860s to a selection of his entries for the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. Through these canvases, visitors will be able to see the development of Pissarro’s painting technique, palette, and subject matter during a brief, yet intense period of his long and fruitful career. An exhibition catalogue will be available. The exhibition is organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art and curated by Katy Rothkopf, Curator of European Painting and Sculpture. The exhibition is coordinated at the Milwaukee Art Museum by Laurie Winters, curator of earlier European art.
ON VIEW IN KOSS GALLERY
Géricault to Toulouse-Lautrec: Nineteenth-Century French Prints
May 25-September 4, 2006
Along its path to becoming a modern democratic nation, nineteenth-century France experienced a number of political and cultural upheavals. Among them were the avant-garde exhibitions and private galleries that emerged in response to the conservative government-sponsored Salons. These new venues afforded artists greater artistic freedom just when many artists were in search of new ways to express the transformations of modern life. As a result of advances in technology and modern commerce, printmaking thrived. Unlike paintings, prints were an affordable and sophisticated form of art that was accessible to the growing bourgeois class, a new class of art-buying patrons eager to prove their importance in the burgeoning art market. Artists enjoyed the income and fame that print editions brought them, and nearly all experimented in the graphic arts.
Drawn primarily from the Museum’s Permanent Collection, Géricault to Toulouse-Lautrec: Nineteenth-Century French Prints surveys this explosion of printmaking activity, beginning with the work of Romantic artists Géricault and Delacroix, through Barbizon artists such as Corot and Millet, to the modern innovations of Toulouse-Lautrec. The exhibition presents a host of themes, styles, and techniques that characterize the trends of nineteenth-century printmaking in France. There are 61 prints in the exhibition.
This exhibition is organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum and curated by Brooke Mulvaney, curatorial assistant of prints, drawings, and photographs.
In Living Color: Photographs by Saul Leiter
September 28, 2006-January 7, 2007
Like other New York street photographers of the 1940s and 1950s, Saul Leiter was adept at translating the mood and atmosphere of urban life into photographic form. What makes him unusual is his exceptional talent for composing images in color. Grounded in the subtle hues and muted tones of daily life, Leiter’s stunningly lyrical images recall the Abstract Expressionism of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Richard Pousette-Dart. By presenting familiar urban structures as yawning swaths of color and transforming pedestrian attire into patterned Pointillist compositions, Leiter was able to stake new aesthetic territory with color images grounded in the reality of the contemporary world.
Leiter’s sustained dedication to color photography in the 1950s and early 1960s occurred at a time when making photographic prints in color was expensive and not accessible to the average artist. As a result, most of his color work existed only in the form of 35-millimeter slides until about ten years ago. Originally, Leiter presented his works as slide shows in which the scale of the images approached that of contemporary painting. In order to demonstrate this aspect of his work, a room in the exhibition will be devoted to a digital “slide show” of his images. The exhibition will present some sixty-five color prints, along with an introductory selection of Leiter’s black-and-white street photographs.
Organized by Lisa Hostetler, assistant curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Milwaukee Art Museum, this will be the first major museum exhibition of the artist’s color photographs, which are widely admired in the field but not well known to the general public. A booklet with an essay and checklist will be produced, and a tour schedule is in development.
Currents 33: Gregor Schneider
February 16-May 6, 2007
German artist Gregor Schneider (b. 1969) uses the images and materials of domestic architecture to express ideas of life, death, and desire. Schneider is best known for his monumental project Dead House ur , begun in the mid-1980s when the artist was still in his teens. Over the course of several years, Schneider compulsively renovated the interior of a non-descript house in the German city of Rheydt, replicating, on a smaller scale, his actual apartment. In 2003, Schneider turned Barbara Gladstone Gallery’s pristine exhibition space into a dank, blind alley charged with an unnerving sense of danger. Then, last June for a commission by Artangel, Schneider remade the interiors of two identical neighboring houses in East London to exhibit a disturbing domestic space replete with a strange smell, low ceilings, locked rooms with peep holes, and inhabitants who were also part of the voyeuristic experience.
Somewhat lesser known is Schneider’s work in sculpture, photography, and video. These works refer to his larger architectural installations. His photographs and videos include various buildings as their subject. His sculptures often incorporate plaster, lathe, and other building materials. These materials also link Schneider with the artists of the Italian Arte Povera movement of the 1960s, who preferred “anti-elitist,” often ephemeral materials for their work, and with Joseph Beuys, who used non-traditional materials in his sculptures, believing they could forge new relationships between “art” and “life.” Schneider’s most recent sculpture features human figures cast from his own body or that of his young son’s. These haunting works are the physical manifestations of the greatest fears implied, but not seen, in his unnerving architectural spaces-the hidden secrets behind those ordinary domestic facades.
In close collaboration with the artist, this exhibition will feature a selection of sculpture, photographs, and video works and, possibly, a small-scale installation space-works that, in many ways, complete Schneider’s larger architectural installations. The exhibition is organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum and curated by Margaret Andera, associate curator of contemporary art.
Adolph Gottlieb Prints: 1933-1946
May 24-August 19, 2007
Adolph Gottlieb began making etchings in 1933 and produced several images over the next thirteen years in his home in Brooklyn. These prints document the shift in Gottlieb’s thinking from stylized figurative work, through surrealism, to his Pictographs of the 1940s. The scale of Gottlieb’s prints underscores their intimacy-the images range from as small as a few inches to as large as a foot or more. This exhibition consists of thirty-nine of the forty images Gottlieb is known to have printed between 1933 and 1946.
The exhibition is organized by The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, curated at the Milwaukee Art Museum by Sarah Fayen, assistant curator, Chipstone Foundation.
ON VIEW IN DECORATIVE ARTS GALLERY
Paper Trail: Prints from the Chipstone Collection
May 18-September 10, 2006
While Polly and Stanley Stone are best known for their American furniture and British ceramics, they also amassed a collection of significant eighteenth and nineteenth-century prints. The upcoming exhibition will use Chipstone’s collection as the basis for exploring how the North American colonies and the new United States were presented and invented in print media.
This exhibition is organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum and coordinated by Sarah Fayen, assistant curator, Chipstone Foundation, and guest curated by Meghan Doherty. Doherty is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Currents 32: Gord Peteran: Furniture Meets its Maker
October 5, 2006-January 2007
One of the most innovative young artists working in North America today happens to be a woodworker. Toronto’s Gord Peteran has launched a boundary-crossing career, opening up the category of furniture to an unprecedented range of psychological and conceptual content. Sometimes his means are disarmingly simple: His work A Table Made of Wood is cobbled together, seemingly at random, from scraps lying on his workshop floor. At other times, he employs craftsmanship of the highest order, as in 100 , a precisely machined occasional table that disassembles into a carrying case like that used for a rifle. Other works suggest specimen cabinets, seesaws, and game tables, all twisted into new relevance through subtle manipulation. In all cases, Peteran’s work addresses the specific conditions of furniture even as it subverts those conditions.
This exhibition is organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Chipstone Foundation with generous support from the Windgate Charitable Foundation. It includes a national tour and is guest curated by Glenn Adamson, head of Graduate Studies, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and coordinated at the Milwaukee Art Museum by Sarah Fayen, assistant curator at the Chipstone Foundation and adjunct assistant curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Pathways: Seventeenth-Century English Furniture-Making Traditions in New England
February 8-May 27, 2007
This exhibition will feature thirty pieces of the most important surviving furniture made by early English settlers in the North American colonies. Guest curator Donald P. White III introduces the concept of “craft-kinship networks” as a new way to understand the experiences of America’s first furniture makers.
Pathways examines seven distinctive pathways that shaped the movement of English craft traditions to early New England. Featuring the finest examples of chests, chairs, and tables drawn from the Chipstone Foundation, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and several private collections, Pathways challenges the conventional theory that seventeenth-century New England furniture can be neatly assigned to regional “schools” or shop traditions. Instead, a complex matrix of personal and professional relationships within the family, community, and business played a primary role in the arrival and dissemination of English furniture-making traditions into New England.
When English families arrived on this unfamiliar continent, they reacted in different ways to new surroundings and needs. The furniture on view provides the best clues about which “pathways” or trajectories each group of craftsmen followed while they adjusted to their new situation. One group of oak chests and boxes made in Marshfield, Massachusetts, in the 1690s suggests that several families of craftsmen brought distinct habits of construction and design. Once living and working together on American soil, they combined specific elements of each tradition to make a new type of furniture. In contrast, a folding table made in Boston was made by a craftsman who altered his habits once he arrived in the city because a single family already dominated furniture production. These different “pathways” followed by furniture makers helped define the aesthetic landscape of early American towns and cities.
This exhibition is organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Chipstone Foundation, is guest curated by Donald P. White III, independent scholar, and coordinated at the Milwaukee Art Museum by Sarah Fayen, assistant curator at the Chipstone Foundation and adjunct assistant curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Going out of Style: 400 Years of Changing Tastes in Furniture
June 21-September 30, 2007
The study of historic design has largely focused on the ideal principles of specific styles. The linear geometry of Art Deco, for example, was praised in the early twentieth century as the paradigmatic embodiment of the new urban lifestyle. Similarly, eighteenth-century writers embraced asymmetrical Rococo carving as the physical complement to their new libertine freedoms. These and other glowing endorsements of particular styles at the height of their popularity have dominated historians’ investigations into the history of design. Artists and critics often reserved their most colorful language, however, for fashions in decline. More than just old-fashioned, styles on their way out were often seen as immoral, low-class, connected to an out-of-favor political regime, or simply ugly. This exhibition will pair exemplars of specific styles with written critiques that reveal more than just the whimsy of fluctuating tastes but also important shifts in aesthetic and cultural theory over four hundred years of European settlement in America.
This exhibition is curated at the Milwaukee Art Museum by Sarah Fayen, assistant curator at the Chipstone Foundation and adjunct assistant curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
ON VIEW IN THE BRADLEY GALLERIES
Bradley Gallery of Modern Art
Ongoing
Thirty years ago the inauguration of the Bradley Galleries garnered the attention of the international art world and became a source of great pride for Milwaukeeans. The new installation of Mrs. Bradley’s Collection reflects the particular art movements and artists that interested her. The groups of work are arranged according to the periods of art that attracted her attention: the art of France, the German Expressionists, post-WWII art in Europe, and the post-war painting in the United States from the 1960s and 1970s.
Mrs. Bradley began collecting in 1950 when she fell in love with the painting In Drydock (1942) by Georges Braque that she saw in a New York gallery window. Over the next twenty-five years, she assiduously acquired over four hundred works of modern art. With a sense of great civic pride and duty, she and her husband began almost immediately to donate important works to the Milwaukee Art Center, culminating in the donation of the Bradley legacy in 1975.
Mrs. Bradley followed her personal taste when collecting, unencumbered by advisors or the fashion of the moment. Fortunately for the city of Milwaukee, she had impeccable taste. Her collection demonstrates her personal predilection for colorful, expressionistic works of art. It is remarkable to think that this woman, who was initially motivated by the colorful French fauve s and German Expressionists such as Georges Braque and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, could easily move into the difficult post-war Color Field and Minimal art.
SPECIAL INSTALLATION
Crèche
European Gallery #4
November 17, 2006-January 8, 2007
During the holiday season, the Milwaukee Art Museum will display a traditional Neapolitan Crèche. The origin of the popular Christmas tradition of restaging the Nativity is usually credited to Saint Frances of Assisi in 1223. The custom reached its artistic height, however, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Naples. Local families vied to outdo each other in presenting theatrical crèche displays with elaborate figures clothed in luxurious and colorful costumes. Not only would the Holy Family be depicted but also, in many cases, angels, putti, shepherds, the Magi, and a host of barnyard animals. The crèche is a gift of Loretta Howard Sturgis.
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