amamblog:

Happy 273rd Birthday to Joseph Mallard William Turner! To celebrate the birth of one of the preeminent English painters, and artist of one of the masterworks in the Allen Memorial Art Museum collection, we are sharing the entry from our recent collection catalog:

“J. M. W. Turner’s stunning View of Venice, one of the most important paintings in the AMAM collection, brilliantly captures the mood and atmosphere of a sun-drenched Venetian day. Rising to prominence first as a topographical watercolorist, then as a painter of historical, sublime landscapes, Turner was the most important British landscape painter during the first half of the nineteenth century. 

This painting epitomizes Turner’s light, airy palette of cadmium yellows, whites, and the occasional touches of deep red. It was made for Turner’s friend, the sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey, R.A., and was first exhibited in 1841 at the Royal Academy in London. Reviews of the 1841 exhibition praise Turner’s Venetian pictures for “the clearness of air and water” and as being “a glorious example of colour, leaving, as usual, much to the fancy of the spectator; and absolutely extorting applause.” Here the mouth of the Canale della Giudecca-with carefully placed gondolas- dynamically leads toward the horizon, with the Doges’ Palace (Palazzo Ducale) and the Riva degli Schiavoni in the center, and the Piazzetta San Marco with the Campanile and the Libreria Sansoviniana to their left. The domed church of San Giorgio Maggiore dominates the right middle ground. Oberlin’s painting, brilliantly executed in three layers over white ground, is in excellent condition with impasto and glazes still intact. 

Art dealer Joseph Duveen sold the Turner painting to Elisabeth Severance Prentiss in 1925. ” 

amamblog:

The Sunday Object Talk series returns from spring break this Sunday. At 2pm, Sarah Riecke  (OC ‘13) will be discussing Baldassare Peruzzi’s painting The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine from 1502-3. Talks are always free and open to the public. 

There will be four more Sunday Object Talks at the museum before the end of the spring semester: on April 22, senior Alison Eby will discuss Tilmann Riemenschneider’s Bust of St. Urban; on April 29, Jeremy Rubenstein will talk about the Italian Marquetry Chest with Geometric Pattern and Architectural Perspectives from 1500. Then, on May 6, Briggin Scharf will present on Robert Longo’s drawing Men Trapped in Ice (Studies for Reliefs). The final talk will take place on Sunday, May 13, when Nico Alonso discusses Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Three-Way Plug.

Hope to see you at one or more of the talks!

amamblog:

Spring is here again! If you are in Oberlin, hope you are enjoying this beautiful first day of the new season. To celebrate, we’re posting one of our favorite spring-like paintings from the collection, Auguste Renoir’s Landscape with Cagnes (Renoir’s Garden) from 1914. You can come visit the real thing, currently on view in the museum’s central Sculpture Court. 

amamblog:

AMAM Masterpiece Spotlight: Hendrick ter Brugghen’s Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene.

This work -one of the most important Northern Baroque paintings in the United States - is a strikingly sensitive vision of physical suffering. The third-century Saint Sebastian, shot with arrows by his fellow guardsmen for having converted to Christianity, was tended by the Roman widow Irene and her maidservant; none of the arrows had pierced a vital organ and they were able to bring him back to health. Here, left for dead, with his now gray, bloodless arm tied by a leather strap to a tree, he slumps forward as the women, fully absorbed in their work, tenderly begin to nurse him. 

Pierre Rosenberg, former director of the Louvre, published the painting in 2006 in his book Only in America: One Hundred Paintings in American Museums Unmatched in European Collections. Having conducted a survey of curators and art historians, Oberlin’s painting was found to be cited more often than any other as meeting that extremely high standard-and, as a result, it is the book’s front cover image. The AMAM owes its purchase to the connoisseurship of the museum’s former director Charles Parkhurst, who first saw the work at a dealer in New York in the spring of 1953. After discussion with Oberlin art professor Wolfgang Stechow, he agreed to move forward on the purchase. The dealer was then in touch with Samuel Kress, for whom it had been reserved, to gain his approval. The painting might equally have gone when it was earlier in the hands of another dealer to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam or to the museum in Utrecht. The Rijksmuseum, however, did not have available dollar funds while the Utrecht museum did not act quickly enough, due in part to a misdirected letter.  

amamblog:

Our month-long celebration of Black History Month continues today with Horace Pippin.

Pippin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on 22 February 1888. Three years later his family moved to the resort town of Goshen, New York. Pippin left school at age fourteen (in 1902) to help support his family, and by 1912 had moved to Paterson, New Jersey, where, over the next five years, he held various jobs as a laborer. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Pippin enlisted in the U.S. Army’s 369th Colored Infantry Regiment. He fought along the front lines under French command, and was wounded in October 1918. After his discharge from the Army, he received the French Croix de Guerre in 1919; a Purple Heart was awarded him retroactively in 1945.

In 1920, Pippin married and settled in West Chester. As therapy for his injured right arm, he began drawing and, in 1925, burning images onto wood panels with a hot poker. He expanded to oil paints in 1928 and completed his first painting in 1930. His paintings were first exhibited locally in 1937; a solo exhibition immediately followed, and in 1938, four of his paintings were shown at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Over the next few years, Pippin’s national reputation grew, riding the crest of enthusiasm for self-taught folk artists. His works were sought after by such renowned collectors as Albert C. Barnes (of the Barnes Foundation), and he became a significant figure in the mainstream New York art world. Pippin died of a stroke on 6 July 1946.

Hailed as exemplar and chronicler of African-American life, Pippin possessed an instinctive genius for color, composition, and form. His bold and forthright paintings—genre scenes, biblical and religious scenes, interpretations of historical events, landscapes, portraits, and still lifes—are both emotionally complex and thematically sophisticated.

“Discovered” by the art establishment in the 1930s, Pippin was championed by art collector Dr. Albert C. Barnes, among others. This work was purchased the year it was painted by Enid Bissett, one of the inventors of the Maidenform bra, who with her husband left twenty-four important paintings and drawings to the AMAM collection.

Image:

Horace Pippin (American, 1888–1946)
Harmonizing, 1944
Oil on canvas
Gift of Joseph and Enid Bissett, 1964.26

Professor of Ark Erik Inglis ‘89 showcases some of the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s “greatest hits” as selected by his intro art history class students’ final papers.

Pictured above is Alexej von Jawlensky’s Head of a Woman.

amamblog:

Welcome back to those students returning to campus for Winter Term - and for those who are away, and perhaps in a different climate, this work hints a little at what you are missing…

Image:

Anton Mauve (Dutch, 1838–1888)
Snow Storm, ca. 1880
Oil on canvas
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Morse Woodbury
AMAM 1966.17