calendario eventi  :: 

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16/2/2013

Two exhibitions

National Gallery of Art, Washington

Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop
February 17–May 5, 2013

Washington, DC—The National Gallery of Art presents the first major exhibition devoted to the art of photographic manipulation before the advent of digital imagery. Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop will be on view in the West Building's Ground Floor galleries from February 17 through May 5, 2013, following its debut at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (from October 11, 2012, through January 27, 2013). In June it travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

"Following in its tradition of exhibiting and collecting the finest examples of photography, the Gallery is pleased to present some 200 photographs from the 1840s through the 1980s demonstrating the medium's complicated relationship to truth in representation," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "We are grateful to the many lenders, both public and private, who have generously shared works from their collections—especially the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the largest lender and the organizer of this fascinating exhibition."

Exhibition Organization and Support

The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

This exhibition is made possible by The Exhibition Circle of the National Gallery of Art. It is also supported by the Trellis Fund. Additional support has been kindly provided by the Ryna and Melvin Cohen Family Foundation, Neil and Marcella Cohen, Diane and Howard Zack, and Mark and Theresa Cohen.

The Exhibition

This is the first major exhibition devoted to the history of manipulated photography before the digital age. While the widespread use of Adobe® Photoshop® software has brought about an increased awareness of the degree to which photographs can be doctored, photographers—including such major artists as Gustave Le Gray, Edward Steichen, Weegee, and Richard Avedon—have been fabricating, modifying, and otherwise manipulating camera images since the medium was first invented. This exhibition demonstrates that today's digitally manipulated images are part of a continuum that extends back to photography's first decades. Through visually captivating pictures created in the service of art, politics, news, entertainment, and commerce, Faking It not only traces the medium's complex and changing relationship to visual truth, but also significantly revises our understanding of photographic history.

Organized thematically, the exhibition begins with some of the earliest instances of photographic manipulation—those attempting to compensate for the new medium's technical limitations. In the 19th century, many photographers hand tinted portraits to make them appear more vivid and lifelike. Others composed large group portraits by photographing individuals separately in the studio and creating a collage by pasting them onto painted backgrounds depicting outdoor scenes. As the art and craft of photography grew increasingly sophisticated, photographers devised a staggering array of techniques with which to manipulate their images, including combination printing, photomontage, overpainting, ink and airbrush retouching, sandwiched negatives, multiple exposures, and other darkroom magic.

The exhibition presents a superb selection of manually altered photographs created under the mantle of art, including 19th-century genre scenes composed of multiple negatives, stunning pictorialist landscapes from the turn of the 19th century, and the predigital dreamscapes of surrealist photographers in the 1920s and 1930s. A section of doctored images made for political or ideological ends includes faked composite photographs of the 1871 Paris Commune massacres, anti-Nazi photomontages by John Heartfield, and falsified images from Stalin-era Soviet Russia. The show also explores popular uses of photographic manipulation such as spirit photography, tall-tale and fantasy postcards, advertising and fashion spreads, and doctored news images.

The final section features the work of contemporary artists—including Duane Michals, Jerry Uelsmann, and Yves Klein—who have reclaimed earlier techniques of image manipulation to creatively question photography's presumed objectivity. By tracing the history of photographic manipulation from the 1840s to the present, Faking It vividly demonstrates that photography is—and always has been—a medium of fabricated truths and artful lies.

Curator and Catalogue

Organized by Mia Fineman, assistant curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Gallery's presentation of Faking It is curated by Diane Waggoner, associate curator of photographs, National Gallery of Art.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, 296-page catalogue written by Mia Fineman, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and distributed by Yale University Press. The hardcover is available for purchase ($60) in the Gallery Shops. To order, please visit http://shop.nga.gov; call (800) 697-9350 or (202) 842-6002; fax (202) 789-3047; or e-mail mailorder@nga.gov.

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First Major Exhibition on Pre-Raphaelite Art and Design in United States on View at National Gallery of Art, Washington
February 17–May 19, 2013

Washington, DC—Combining rebellion, scientific precision, beauty, and imagination, the Pre-Raphaelites created art that shocked 19th-century Britain. On view from February 17 through May 19, 2013, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington—the sole U.S. venue—Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848–1900 is the first major survey of the art of the Pre-Raphaelites to be shown in the United States. The exhibition features some 130 paintings, sculptures, photography, works on paper, and decorative art objects that reflect the ideals of Britain's first modern art movement.

"The Pre-Raphaelites rejected the rigid rules for painting that prevailed at the dawn of the Victorian era to launch Britain's first avant-garde movement," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "We are thrilled to present this rare exhibition to our audiences and grateful to lenders, both public and private, as well as our generous sponsors. Notably, we have received a generous amount of loans from Tate Britain and the Birmingham Museums Trust in the United Kingdom."

Exhibition Organization and Support

The exhibition was organized by Tate Britain in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Sally Engelhard Pingree and The Charles Engelhard Foundation.

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

The Pre-Raphaelites

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was founded in London in September 1848 at a turbulent time of political and social change. Many Victorians felt that beauty and spirituality had been lost amid industrialization.

The leading members of the PRB were the painters John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, young students at the Royal Academy of Arts. They all believed that art had become decadent, and rejected their teachers' belief that the Italian artist Raphael (1483–1520) represented the pinnacle of aesthetic achievement. Instead, they looked to medieval and early Renaissance art for inspiration. Whether painting subjects from Shakespeare or the Bible, landscapes of the Alps, or the view from a back window, the Pre-Raphaelites brought a new sincerity and intensity to British art.

Exhibition Highlights

The exhibition is organized into eight themes:

Beginnings: The Pre-Raphaelites were both historical and modern in their approach. While they borrowed from the art of previous centuries, they also listened to critic John Ruskin's call to observe nature and represent its forms faithfully. In balancing the past with the world they saw before them, the Pre-Raphaelites crafted a modern aesthetic. Some of their important early works—such as Hunt's Valentine rescuing Sylvia from Proteus—Two Gentlemen of Verona (Act V, Scene iv) (1850–1851) and Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (The Carpenter's Shop) (1849–1850)—reveal the emergence of this new style.

History: Dramatic narratives from the Bible, classical mythology, literature, or world history had dominated European art since the establishment of art academies in the 17th century. The Pre-Raphaelites rejected these grand narratives to focus on intimate human relationships. Millais set the standard, adopting a precise style and drawing from British history and popular operas while emphasizing accuracy of dress and settings. The results—seen in A Huguenot, on Saint Bartholomew's Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge (1851–1852) and The Order of Release, 1746 (1852–1853)—defied convention, provoked critics, and entranced audiences.

Literature and Medievalism: Pre-Raphaelitism was also a literary movement. The artists took subjects from Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, and other medieval tales, as in Millais's beloved painting Ophelia (1851–1852). Several wrote poetry, including Rossetti, who with Elizabeth Siddall (who served as Rossetti's muse, model, lover, and eventually wife) created intensely colored, intricate watercolors based on medieval manuscript illumination and themes of chivalric love, seen in his The Wedding of Saint George and the Princess Sabra (1857). Soon Rossetti's younger followers Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris incorporated medieval subjects in their designs for furniture, stained glass, and other decorative arts.

Salvation: The Pre-Raphaelites addressed morality and salvation in subjects drawn from both religion and modern life. Religious and moral thinking permeated everyday life, whether in regard to ideas of class and society, relationships between the sexes, or ideals of domesticity, which they examined in works such as Hunt's The Awakening Conscience (1853–1854) and Ford Madox Brown's Work (1863). Rejecting traditional religious imagery, the Pre-Raphaelites painted biblical scenes with unprecedented realism. Hunt was so committed to truthful representation that he traveled to the Holy Land, where he painted the actual settings of biblical events, seen in The Shadow of Death (1870–1873).

Nature: The Pre-Raphaelite artists developed a fresh and precise method of transcribing the natural world in oil paint, based on direct, up-close observation and working out of doors. At a time of debates about evolution and the history of the earth (Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859), Pre-Raphaelite landscape paintings reflected the artists' interest in the natural sciences, geology, botany, meteorology, and even astronomy. Groundbreaking works such as Brown's An English Autumn Afternoon, Hampstead—Scenery in 1853 (1852–1855) and "The Pretty Baa-Lambs" (1851–1859) newly emphasized rendering precise detail and natural light.

Beauty: Around 1860, the Pre-Raphaelites turned away from realist depictions of history, literature, modern society, religious themes, and nature scenes to explore the purely aesthetic possibilities of painting. The female face and body became the most important subjects, in erotically charged works that had little precedent. Beauty came to be valued more highly than truth, as Pre-Raphaelitism slowly shifted into the Aesthetic Movement. Rossetti was the dominant force as his work became more sensuous in style and subject, seen in Bocca Baciata (1859), Beata Beatrix (c. 1864–1870), and Lady Lilith (1866–1868, altered 1872–1873).

Paradise–Decorative Arts: Inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites and the medieval past, Morris established a decorative arts firm in 1861 with partners Rossetti, Brown, and Burne-Jones. In 1875 Morris reorganized the company under his sole direction as Morris & Co. aiming to erase the distinction between the fine and applied arts. The firm produced tiles, furniture, embroidery, stained glass, printed and woven textiles, carpets, and tapestries for both ecclesiastical and domestic interiors. Several examples are on view, from stained glass, furniture painted with medievalized themes, and a three-fold screen with embroidered panels of heroic women on loan from Castle Howard, to popular tile, textile, and wallpaper designs, including the iconic Strawberry Thief (1883). In the last decade of his life, Morris founded the Kelmscott Press for the production of high-quality, hand-printed books. This room also includes two stunning tapestries designed by Burne-Jones and Morris from the series based on the Arthurian story of the Holy Grail.

Mythologies: Late Pre-Raphaelite paintings reflect a fascination with the world of myth and legend. Rossetti and Burne-Jones embraced imagination and symbolism, focusing on the human figure frozen in a drama. Both found inspiration in Renaissance art after Raphael, concentrating on sensuous Venetian color and the sculptural forms of Michelangelo, seen in Rossetti's La Pia (1868–1881) and Burne-Jones' Perseus series (1885–1888). Hunt adhered more closely to the initial realist Pre-Raphaelite style, which he brought to his late masterpiece, The Lady of Shalott (c.1888–1905).

Curators and Exhibition Catalogue

Diane Waggoner, associate curator of photographs, National Gallery of Art, is the curator of the exhibition. The exhibition at Tate Britain was curated by Alison Smith, Lead Curator, Nineteenth-Century British Art at Tate; Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University; and Jason Rosenfeld, Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College, New York.

From Tate Publishing in association with the National Gallery of Art, the exhibition catalogue features essays by Smith, Barringer, Rosenfeld, with contributions by Waggoner and Elizabeth Prettejohn, Professor of History of Art at the University of York. The catalogue is available in softcover and hardcover for purchase in the Gallery Shops in February 2013. To order, please visit http://shop.nga.gov/; call (800) 697-9350 or (202) 842-6002; fax (202) 789-3047; or e-mail mailorder@nga.gov.

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Pre-Raphaelite Books and Illustrations in Library Exhibition at National Gallery of Art, Washington
February 17–May 19, 2013

Washington, DC—Artists of the Pre-Raphaelite circle were deeply engaged with integrating word and image throughout their careers. Pre-Raphaelites and the Book showcases 35 volumes and illustrations from the Gallery's Library and the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, on loan to the University of Delaware, from poetry by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris to wood engravings and material related to the Kelmscott Press. On view from February 17 through May 19 in Gallery G-21 on the Ground Floor of the West Building, the installation has been organized to complement Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848–1900.

The Pre-Raphaelites involved themselves not only in book design and illustration, but were also highly regarded poets in their own right. John Everett Millais and Edward Burne-Jones were sought-after magazine and book illustrators, while Rossetti devoted himself equally to poetry and the visual arts.

In 1891, after years of publishing his works elsewhere, Morris founded the Kelmscott Press to print books "with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty." He designed all aspects of the books—from typefaces and ornamental elements to layouts, where he incorporated wood-engraved illustrations contributed by Burne-Jones. Beautifully illustrated books from this press are displayed alongside Morris' elaborate ornament designs and his own manuscript illumination inspired by medieval volumes.

The installation also includes rare copies of The Germ and The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine—short-lived periodicals with poetry, illustrations, essays, and short stories created to promote the ideas of the Pre-Raphaelites—as well as the Moxon Tennyson, an illustrated edition of Alfred Tennyson's poetry that was among the first commissions of the Pre-Raphaelite artists. A selection of pencil and ink caricatures by Burne‑Jones depicting his family life and other members of the circle is also on view.

In addition to works by the Pre-Raphaelites, influential volumes by critic and later Pre-Raphaelite advocate John Ruskin are included, such as Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice.

Image: J.C. Higgins and Son, Man in bottle, c. 1888. Albumen print, 13.5 x 10 cm. Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Susan and Thomas Dunn Gift, 2011

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The Gallery is closed on December 25 and January 1

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