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18/12/2011

Two exhibitions

Metropolitan Museum of Art - MET, New York

The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini
Exhibition Location: Special Exhibition Galleries, second floor

December 21, 2011, through March 18, 2012

The first great age of portraiture in Europe, both north and south of the Alps, took place in the 15th century. For the first time since antiquity, portraits were used to record the features of a family member for future generations, celebrate a prince or warrior, extol the beauty of a woman, or make possible the exchange of a likeness among friends. The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from December 21, 2011, through March 18, 2012, will celebrate the Italian contribution to this rediscovery of the individual in art. It will bring together approximately 160 works—by artists including Donatello, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, Pisanello, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, and Antonello da Messina— media ranging from painting and manuscript illumination to marble sculpture and bronze medals, testifying to the new vogue for and uses of portraiture in 15th-century Italy.

The exhibition is made possible by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund, the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund, and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.

The exhibition was organized by Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

During the early Renaissance, artists working in Florence, Venice, and the courts of Italy created magnificent portrayals of the people around them—from heads of state and church to patrons, scholars, poets, and artists—concentrating for the first time on producing recognizable likenesses and expressions of personality. The rapid development of portraiture was linked closely to Renaissance society and politics, ideals of the individual, and concepts of beauty. The object may have been to commemorate a significant event—a marriage, death, the accession to a position of power—or it may have been to record the features of an esteemed member of the family for future generations.

Featuring many rare international loans, The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini will present an unprecedented survey of the period and provide new research and insight into the early history of portraiture. The exhibition will be divided into three sections and will span a period of eight decades. Beginning in Florence, where independent portraits first appeared in abundance, it moves to the courts of Ferrara, Mantua, Bologna, Milan, Urbino, Naples and papal Rome, and ends in Venice, where a tradition of portraiture asserted itself surprisingly late in the century.

In Florence, the most striking innovations occurred first in sculpture and were then taken up in painting. In the courts, thanks in large measure to the genius of Pisanello, the medal became the preferred means of recording a likeness. The medals, which were durable, could be produced in multiple casts, and were easily exchanged among the social elite. In Venice the painted portrait held sway, thanks to the achievements of Antonello da Messina and Giovanni Bellini, whose portraits resolutely abandoned the dominant Italian convention for the profile to present the sitter turned three-quarters, his or her distant gaze and delicately modeled features expressing hints of an interior life.

As Leon Battista Alberti declared in his treatise on painting, composed in 1435: “Painting possesses a truly divine power in that not only does it make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later, so that they are recognized by spectators with pleasure and deep admiration for the artist.”

The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue edited by Keith Christiansen and Stefan Weppelman, with essays by Patricia Lee Rubin, Beverly Louise Brown, Peter Humfrey, and Rudolf Preimesberger; and contributions by Andrea Bayer, Francesco Caglioti, Eleonara Luciano, and Stephen K. Scher. It is published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press, and is available in the Museum’s book shops (hardcover, $65).

The exhibition catalogue is made possible by the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, Inc.

An audio tour, part of the Museum’s Audio Guide Program, will be available for rental ($7, $6 for Members, $5 for children under 12).

The Audio Guide is sponsored by Bloomberg.

A variety of education programs will accompany the exhibition, including gallery talks and a Sunday at the Met lecture program on March 11, 2012. Unless otherwise noted, all programs are free with Museum admission. Program details and more information about the exhibition can be found at www.metmuseum.org.

The Sunday at the Met event is made possible in part by the Italian Cultural Institute.

The wall colors for the exhibition are provided by Farrow & Ball.

The exhibition is co-organized by Keith Christiansen, John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Stefan Weppelman, curator of early Italian and Spanish painting at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.

Prior to its showing at the Metropolitan Museum, The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini was on view at the Bode Museum, in Berlin.

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Duncan Phyfe: Master Cabinetmaker in New York

Exhibition Location:
The Erving and Joyce Wolf Gallery and The Israel Sack Galleries, The American Wing

Renowned in his lifetime for his elegant designs and superior craftsmanship, Duncan Phyfe (1770–1854) remains to this day America’s most famous cabinetmaker. Opening December 20 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition Duncan Phyfe: Master Cabinetmaker in New York—the first retrospective on Phyfe in 90 years—will serve to re-introduce this artistic and influential master craftsman to a contemporary audience. On view will be furniture produced in Phyfe’s Fulton Street workshops that once stood on the site of the former World Trade Center. The full chronological sweep of his long and distinguished career will be featured, including examples of his best-known furniture from the period 1805-20, which was influenced heavily by early English Regency design; his more opulent, monumental, and archaeologically correct Grecian style of the late 1810s and 1820s, sometimes referred to as American Empire; and his sleek, minimalist late work of the 1830s and 1840s known as the Grecian Plain style, based largely on French Restauration furniture design.

The exhibition is made possible by Karen H. Bechtel.

Additional support is provided by The Henry Luce Foundation, Dr. and Mrs. Paul Cushman, the Americana Foundation, Mr. Robert L. Froelich, and Mr. Philip Holzer.

It was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The exhibition brings together nearly 100 works from private and public collections throughout the United States. Highlights of the exhibition include some never-before-seen documented masterpieces and furniture that has descended directly in the Phyfe family, as well as the master cabinetmaker’s own chest of woodworking tools.

Exhibition Overview
Organized chronologically, the exhibition will present the life and work of the noted early 19th-century New York City cabinetmaker Duncan Phyfe through furniture, drawings, documents, personal possessions, and furniture. Portraits of his clients and contemporary depictions of New York City street scenes and domestic interiors will provide a glimpse into Phyfe’s milieu.

A poor immigrant when he arrived in America in the early 1780s from his native Scotland, Phyfe acquired wealth and fame through hard work and exceptional talent both as a craftsman and a businessman. Throughout the first half of the 19th century he made neoclassical furniture for the social and mercantile elite of New York, Philadelphia, and the American South. His personal style, characterized by superior proportions, balance, symmetry, and restraint, became the local style for at least two generations in New York. Many apprentices and journeymen exposed to this distinctive style by serving a stint in the Phyfe shop or by copying the master cabinetmaker’s designs helped to create and sustain this local school of cabinetmaking. Demand for Phyfe’s work reached its peak around 1815–1820, when he was in such demand that he was referred the “United States rage.” He remained the dominant figure in his trade into the 1840s and his eventual retirement in 1847 at the age of 77. The fires of Phyfe’s fame were briefly extinguished after his passing in 1854, but rekindled in the early 1900s by a passionate amateur historian, who was himself once a New York cabinetmaker, and a coterie of scholars, collectors, and connoisseurs who lionized Phyfe once again. This renewed fame culminated in the first-ever monographic exhibition held in an art museum on the work of a single cabinetmaker, Furniture from the Workshop of Duncan Phyfe, which opened at the Metropolitan in November of 1922.

Because Phyfe’s furniture was seldom signed, yet was widely imitated, it is sometimes difficult to determine with accuracy which works he actually made. The exhibition breaks new ground by matching rare bills of sale and similar documents with furniture whose history of ownership is known, thereby codifying his style over time.

A video featuring some of the techniques used in the Phyfe workshop to create his furniture masterpieces, including relief carving and turning will be shown within the exhibition.

Publication and Related Programs
An illustrated catalogue by Peter M. Kenney, Michael K. Brown, Frances F. Bretter, and Matthew A. Thurlow will accompany the exhibition. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press, the book will be sold in the Museum’s book shops.

The exhibition catalogue is made possible by The William Cullen Bryant Fellows of the American Wing.

A variety of education programs will be offered, including a Sunday at the Met on January 22 that examines Phyfe in the context of contemporary furniture artists and craftsmen; exhibition tours; a special Friday afternoon gallery workshop focused on craftsmanship, featuring short discussions with three Metropolitan Museum furniture conservators; and an interactive teacher workshop on March 10. Unless otherwise noted, programs are free with Museum admission.

A special feature about the exhibition will appear on the website of the Metropolitan Museum (www.metmuseum.org).

The exhibition is organized by Peter M. Kenny, Ruth Bigelow Wriston Curator of American Decorative Arts and Administrator of the American Wing, and Michael Brown, Curator of American Decorative Arts at Bayou Bend, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Exhibition design at the Metropolitan is by Michael Langley, Exhibition Design Manager; lighting is by Clint Ross Coller and Richard Lichte, Lighting Design Managers; and graphics are by Sue Koch, Graphic Design Manager, all of the Museum’s Design Department.

Following its presentation at the Metropolitan Museum, the exhibition will be shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

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Press Preview: Monday, December 19, 10 a.m.–noon

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street - New York
Hours: Tuesday–Thursday: 9:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Friday and Saturday: 9:30 a.m.–9:00 p.m. Sunday: 9:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Admission: Adults $25 Seniors (65 and older) $17 Students $12*
Members (Join Now) Free
Children under 12 (accompanied by an adult) Free

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