{"id":3383,"date":"2013-08-26T15:29:56","date_gmt":"2013-08-26T20:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mam.org\/info\/pressroom\/?p=3383"},"modified":"2014-12-02T14:04:31","modified_gmt":"2014-12-02T20:04:31","slug":"thomas-sully-painted-performance-opens-october-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mam.org\/info\/pressroom\/2013\/08\/thomas-sully-painted-performance-opens-october-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Sully: Painted Performance Now On View"},"content":{"rendered":"

Museum premieres exhibition of theatrical paintings by Thomas Sully<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Milwaukee, Wis.<\/strong> \u2013 Continuing a yearlong celebration of American art and artists, the Milwaukee Art Museum will debut an original exhibition on the career of Thomas Sully (1783\u20131872). Thomas Sully: Painted Performance<\/em><\/a> is the first retrospective of the artist in thirty years, and the first to present both the artist\u2019s portraits and subject pictures. The exhibition opens October 11, 2013.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe exhibition provides a major new look at one of the most important nineteenth-century American artists, who expressed his lifelong love of the theatre and literature in paintings,\u201d said Daniel Keegan, Milwaukee Art Museum director. \u201cShakespeare, fairy tales, popular culture, and the movers and shakers and celebrities of nineteenth-century American society are all captured in Sully\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Painted Performance<\/em> brings together over seventy paintings from public and private collections and presents them thematically, in four sections: theatrical portraits of specific actors in a role; traditional portraits shaped by the artist\u2019s theatrical and literary imagination; fancy portraits, imaginary portraits as conceits or inspired by whimsy; and fancy pictures, narrative paintings based on literary or artistic sources or the imagination.<\/p>\n

Sully employed drama, theatricality, and a heightened sense of activity to great effect throughout his long career. In some of his grandest full-length portraits, Sully composed his figures as if they were literally onstage. Even in portraits that seemingly have nothing to do with the formal world of the theatre, his subjects act to directly engage the viewer.<\/p>\n

The artist brought a similar level of theatricality to his fancy pictures. An important and unexplored category of mid-nineteenth-century American painting, fancy pictures were a special kind of narrative art that targeted viewers\u2019 emotions and that often included social commentary. Sully\u2019s fancy pictures offer a window into the issues of the day, including questions about gender, race, and childhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cThomas Sully: Painted Performance reveals the full breadth of Sully\u2019s artistic imagination and celebrates his unique contribution to America\u2019s artistic and cultural life,\u201d said William Rudolph, exhibition co-curator and the Dudley J. Godfrey, Jr. Curator of American Art and Decorative Arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum.<\/p>\n

Thomas Sully: Painted Performance is on view October 11, 2013\u2013January 5, 2014, and is co-curated by William Keyse Rudolph, Dudley J. Godfrey Jr. Curator of American Art and Decorative Arts, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Carol Eaton Soltis, Project Associate Curator of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is accompanied by a 192-page, full-color and fully illustrated scholarly catalogue.<\/em><\/p>\n

The exhibition will travel to the San Antonio Museum of Art, February 5\u2013May 11, 2014.<\/p>\n

ABOUT MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM<\/strong>
\nCelebrating its 125th anniversary in 2013, the Milwaukee Art Museum houses a rich collection of over 30,000 works, with strengths in 19th- and 20th-century American and European art, contemporary art, American decorative arts, and folk and self-taught art. The Museum campus is located on the shores of Lake Michigan and spans three buildings, including the Santiago Calatrava-designed Quadracci Pavilion and the Eero Saarinen-designed Milwaukee County War Memorial Center. For more information, please visit mam.org.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Museum premieres exhibition of theatrical paintings by Thomas Sully Milwaukee, Wis. \u2013 Continuing a yearlong celebration of American art and artists, the Milwaukee Art Museum will debut an original exhibition on the career of Thomas Sully (1783\u20131872). Thomas Sully: Painted Performance is the first retrospective of the artist in thirty years, and the first to … Thomas Sully: Painted Performance Now On View<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mam.org\/info\/pressroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mam.org\/info\/pressroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mam.org\/info\/pressroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mam.org\/info\/pressroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mam.org\/info\/pressroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3383"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/mam.org\/info\/pressroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3676,"href":"https:\/\/mam.org\/info\/pressroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3383\/revisions\/3676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mam.org\/info\/pressroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mam.org\/info\/pressroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mam.org\/info\/pressroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}