Past Exhibitions: 2007
February 1 – May 20, 2007 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions
Cosmophilia: Islamic Art from the David Collection, Copenhagen
Cosmophilia—literally "love of ornament"—examined one of the most characteristic and attractive features of Islamic art. Covering a millennium of Islamic history in regions extending from Spain to India, this comprehensive exhibition surveyed the extraordinary range and visual virtuosity of one of the world's great artistic traditions. Organized visually by theme, as opposed to chronologically or historically, the objects in the exhibition were grouped into five sections—figures, writing, geometry, vegetation-arabesque, and hybrids. The sections traced how artisans used major types of decorations and how these themes developed in different times and places. Drawn from the David Collection in Copenhagen, Denmark, Cosmophilia offered a rare opportunity for audiences in the United States to study one of the finest collections of Islamic art, both secular and religious.
Curator: Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, Norma Jean Calderwood Chairs of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College. The Smart Museum presentation was overseen by Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Mellon Curator, and Richard Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator, in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions.
This exhibition was organized in honor of Norma Jean and Stanford Calderwood by the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, in collaboration with the David Collection, Copenhagen. Major support was provided by the Calderwood Charitable Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Patrons of the McMullen Museum. This exhibition was also supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
The Smart Museum's presentation of the exhibition was made possible by the generous support of the University of Chicago Women's Board and The Alsdorf Foundation. Significant additional funding was provided by the Smart Family Foundation and the Smart Museum's Board of Governors Exhibition Fund. In-kind support was provided by SAS Cargo.
March 17 – June 10, 2007 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery for Works on Paper
Exported Visions: Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Woodblock Prints
When the traditional art of the Japanese color woodblock print was pushed near extinction at the turn of the twentieth century, a few enterprising young artists and publishers revived the old-fashioned art form. These shin hanga or "new prints" maintained traditional methods and depicted traditional birds, flowers, and landscapes, but this long-established art found a new audience in Western collectors attracted by the powerful and alluring images of Japan. Wildly popular in Europe and the United States, many of these prints were created for sale abroad and even designed with foreign tastes in mind. This exhibition brought together a selection of fūkeiga (landscapes) and kachōga (bird and flower) shin hanga from the Smart Museum's collection, many of which were recent acquisitions that had never been shown before.
Curator: Irene Backus, Smart Museum curatorial intern and University of Chicago Ph.D. candidate in Art History.
April 24 – October 21, 2007 | Edward A. Maser Gallery for Art Before 1900
Majestic Nature/Golden History: German Romantic Art from the Crawford Collection and the Smart Museum of Art
While the German-speaking lands in nineteenth-century Europe remained divided into a host of sovereign political entities, their artists and writers championed cultural unity by reviving and celebrating the art of their past. The nascent Romantic and Nazarene movements stood in contrast to the Neoclassicism of an earlier generation. Rejecting the formal ideals and aesthetic principles of antiquity, German artists turned inward to local sources, Gothic art, and the Renaissance masters Dürer and Raphael. Landscape scenes were no longer based on the Arcadian idyll of the Italian countryside, but rather sublimely depicted the natural, sometimes wild, and varied topography of the German lands themselves. This exhibition of paintings, drawings, and prints from the private collection of Stephen and Elizabeth Crawford and from the Smart Museum surveyed these artistic currents in the first half of the century.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
The exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of the Feitler Family Fund. Related programs are presented in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Chicago.
June 7 – September 16, 2007 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions
Living Modern: German and Austrian Art and Design, 1890–1933
Modernism was not only an innovative aesthetic recognized by its crisp forms and progressive use of materials, but it was also a way of thinking about contemporary life. Amid a backdrop of industrialization, urbanization, world war, and reconstruction, many progressive German and Austrian artists and designers dreamed of a better world. Several common themes and aspirations emerged from this Utopian vision, but forms and subjects varied remarkably. While some artists and designers appealed to traditional forms of representation and modes of production, others emphasized innovative expressions and technologies. This exhibition looked at the “Modernisms” that together contributed to the richness of life in Germany and Austria during a remarkable period of cultural redefinition, social transformation, and political reorganization. More than one hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, and household designs from the Smart Museum’s collection represented several major artistic and design movements of the period: the Symbolism and Jugendstil aesthetics of the 1890s; the Expressionist tendencies before World War I; and the Constructivist and Bauhaus designs of the turbulent 1920s.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
The exhibition was made possible by the generous support of the Feitler Family Fund, and was presented in collaboration with the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Austrian Consulate General in Chicago.
June 16 – September 8, 2007 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery for Works on Paper
The World Writ Small: Early Northern European Prints
The diminutive engravings and woodcuts made by northern European artists in the first half of the sixteenth century may not be monumental in scale, but they contributed to nothing less than a revolution in printmaking. This flowering of activity, close on the heels of Johann Gutenberg's invention of printing in Mainz in the 1450s, was centered in Germany and the Low Countries. The dominant figures—Albrecht Dürer, Albrecht Altdorfer, Lucas van Leyden—continued to exert influence on artists even centuries afterward and are still viewed as giants of Western printmaking. With dozens of examples drawn from the Smart Museum's collection, this exhibition gathered together works of immense complexity—created with virtuosic networks of engraved or woodcut lines—in detailed prints, some as small as postage stamps.
Curator: Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Mellon Program Coordinator.
This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Feitler Family Fund.
September 15 – December 16, 2007 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery for Works on Paper
Objects of Inquiry: The Buckley Collection of Japanese Art
Between 1886 and 1892, Edmund Buckley assembled an extensive collection of Japanese religious objects and artworks while teaching in Kyoto. The collection formed the basis for Buckley’s doctoral work at the University of Chicago and was exhibited on campus in one of the first systematic displays of Japanese religious objects in the West. Buckley’s academic interest in foreign cultures and religions coincided with Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and the ground-breaking Parliament of World’s Religions, in which Buckley took part. By examining the Japanese art and artifacts of the Buckley collection—including paintings, sculpture, woodblock prints, temple maps, sutras, and religious talismans—this exhibition not only delved in to the history of museum collections, religious studies, and the University of Chicago, but also offered insight into the place of ethnicity and religion in late nineteenth-century popular culture.
Curators: Hans Thomsen, Chair of the East Asia Department, Institute of Art History, University of Zurich, and James Ketelaar, University of Chicago Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, in consultation with Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
This exhibition was the culmination of a University of Chicago Art History seminar taught by the curators in Spring 2007.
October 4, 2007 – January 6, 2008 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions
Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery
Whether made as preparatory studies or stand-alone works, drawings offer an intimate glimpse at an artist's personality and talents. They reward close examination for their insight into the various stages of the creative process. This exhibition, organized by the Yale University Art Gallery and traveling to the Smart Museum of Art, provided a compelling survey of European draftsmanship, with masterworks by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Edgar Degas, Guercino, Jacob Jordaens, and Jean-Antoine Watteau, among many others. The selections came from the Yale University Art Gallery’s substantial collection of European drawings and included examples of nearly every artistic movement and drawing technique used by European artists from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. Organized chronologically, the works represented all types of drawings—not only finished sheets, but also studies for paintings and other preparatory works meant for a variety of purposes. While tracing the history of European drawings, the exhibition showcased the distinguished collection of the Yale University Art Gallery.
Curators: Suzanne Boorsch, the Robert L. Solley Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, and John Marciari, the Nina and Lee Griggs Associate Curator of Early European Art, both of the Yale University Art Gallery. The Smart Museum’s presentation was overseen by Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Mellon Program Coordinator.
The exhibition and its attendant publication were made possible by the Florence B. Selden Fund and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, with additional support provided by Mr. and Mrs. Bruce B. Dayton and Dr. and Mrs. Edmund P. Pillsbury.
The Smart Museum's presentation was generously supported by the Smart Family Foundation, Tom and Janis McCormick, Nuveen Investments, Mrs. George B. Young, and the members and friends of the Smart Museum.
November 6, 2007 – March 23, 2008 | Edward A. Maser Gallery for Art Before 1900
Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France
Audiences in different eras look at art and listen to music in dramatically different ways. The experience of looking or listening is not historically constant, but rather varies with social settings, technologies, and trends. During the nineteenth century, the habits and fashions associated with looking and listening changed rapidly. The proliferation of mechanically reproduced images (and later, recorded sound); the rise of museums, galleries, and concert halls; and the burgeoning science of psychology all transformed how people encountered the arts. Further, they altered how artists sought to capture the attention of their viewers and listeners. Incorporating a mix of works from the Smart Museum's collection and selected loans, this exhibition combines prints, paintings, drawings, sculptures, as well as music from nineteenth-century France. Looking and Listening cuts to the heart of debates about art and its function, and examines just what it is that attracts and secures an audience's attention in visual and musical works.
Curators: Martha Ward, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, and Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Mellon Program Coordinator.
Exhibition Catalogue is available from the Smart Museum Shop
Looking and Listening in Nineteenth Century France is part of a series of projects generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The exhibition and related programs have been made possible in part by the Smart Family Foundation, the Rhoades Foundation, the France Chicago Center and the Office of the Provost, University of Chicago, and are presented in partnership with the Consulate General of France in Chicago. The exhibition catalogue has been supported by a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
December 22, 2007 – March 16, 2008 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery for Works on Paper
Drawn from the Home of Henry Darger
For forty years, the self-taught artist Henry Darger lived and worked in a cluttered one-bedroom apartment on Chicago’s North Side. Teeming with objects of all sorts—from balls of string and Pepto Bismol bottles to coloring books and art supplies—the room revealed Darger’s treasured collections and aesthetic sensibility. In the room, Darger cocooned himself within the imagery of his art, collecting and cataloguing the children’s books, comics, and magazines that he used to illustrate the fantastical scenes of his massive epic known as In the Realms of the Unreal. Anchored by two double-sided collage and watercolor drawings from the Smart Museum’s collection, this exhibition also includes a selection of Darger’s source materials and art supplies as well as archival photographs of the apartment from Intuit – The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. Together, these materials give an intimate glimpse into Darger’s working process and artistic achievements.
Curators: Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Curatorial Assistant and Curator of the Henry Darger Room Collection at Intuit – The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.