Darkness Revisited: A Collection of Private Pleasures

September 7 – December 5, 2010

Organized by University of Chicago students, this intimate exhibition of prints from the Smart Museum's collection revisits the themes of The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 and offers a new look at the shadowed interiors and private introspections of late nineteenth-century art.

In these works, which date between 1850 and 1920, artists demonstrated a willingness to experiment with interior-focused and sometimes taboo subject matter. The small scale of the objects is appropriate to the domestic space—where they could be contemplated at leisure—and they touch on private experience and darker subject matter such as nostalgia, suffering, love, adultery, and drug addiction. The works are loosely grouped into several sections: views of the city, artist portraits, images of women, and seduction and its consequences.

Curators: The exhibition is organized by University of Chicago students in the course Public and Private in Nineteenth-Century Art—Hannah Bracken, Erica Fagin, Samantha Hill, Max Koss, Tatiana Natzke, Allison Perelman, Emma Stein, Sara Wichner, and Mai Yamaguchi—under the guidance of Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Mellon Program Coordinator.

This exhibition is one in a series of projects at the Smart Museum of Art which has been generously endowed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Presented in the Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery for Works on Paper.

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