Past Exhibitions: 1999
November 19, 1999 – March 12, 2000 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Surrealism in America During the 1930s and 1940s: Selections from the Penny and Elton Yasuna Collection
This exhibition inaugurated the Smart Museum's new Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery. Featuring artists such as Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Man Ray Kay Sage, and Dorothea Tanning, Surrealism in America showed the pervasive influence of European surrealism in America while demonstrating artists' diverse responses to it. The early history of abstract expressionism, with surrealism as a catalyst, was explored through works by Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and others. Works by some European surrealists such as Max Ernst, Andre Masson, and Yves Tanguy, who fled to America during World War II, were also presented.
Curator: Organized by the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. The Smart Museum presentation was coordinated by Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Associate Curator.
November 19, 1999 – February 29, 2000 | Art Before 1900 Gallery and the Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
The Place of the Antique in Early Modern Europe
This exhibition, the first to be held in the newly renovated Old Master Gallery and Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery, explored the early modern impulse to find inspiration in the ancient past. This intimate exhibition presented paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, works on paper and books from fifteenth- to early nineteenth-century Europe, drawn from the museum's collection and supplemented by loans from important public and private collections.
Curator: Ingrid D. Rowland, University of Chicago Associate Professor of Art History, in consultation with Elizabeth Rodini, Smart Museum Mellon Projects Curator.
This exhibition was made possible by a multi-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.