Oklahoma City Museum of Art to cover “Turner to Cezanne” in special exhibit
Claude Monet, “Waterlilies,” 1906 (Photo courtesy American Federation of Arts)
From Wednesday’s Life section of The Oklahoman.
Works by van Gogh, Renoir, Monet accent city exhibit
Masterpieces by the likes of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh will be on view in the Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s new special exhibition opening Thursday.
“Turner to Cézanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales” offers a look at the diversity and scope of 19th and early 20th century European painting. The exhibit includes about 60 paintings and works on paper by Edouard Manet, James Abbott McNeil Whistler, Jean-François Millet and more.
“Turner and Cezanne were two of the most important artists of the 19th century,” said Oklahoma City Museum of Art Associate Curator Alison Amick. “They really used those two artists to kind of provide bookends. … It’s really a wonderful sampling of many of the key artists of the period.”
The exhibit represents many of the artistic movements of the 1800s and early 1900s, including realism, symbolism and Impressionism. It follows artistic trends from J.M.W. Turner’s romantic naturalism works to Paul Cézanne’s post-Impressionism paintings.
“You will really be able to get a sense for how artistically diverse the period of the 19th century was when you come into this exhibition,” Amick said.
The exhibit features a painting from Monet’s iconic “Waterlilies” series and van Gogh’s “Rain-Auvers,” which dates to just days before the Dutch artist’s 1890 suicide.
“(It’s) the chance to see many of these household names from a collection that’s very interesting and important and from a place that many people probably have not visited,” Amick said. “It’s also a collection that really doesn’t travel, so this is a very unique chance to see some treasures.”
The exhibit also includes a painting by Walter Sickert, whom novelist Patricia Cornwell has accused of being Jack the Ripper.
Many of the paintings in “Turner to Cezanne,” organized by the American Federation of Arts and National Museum Wales, have rarely been exhibited outside Wales. The prestigious museum has put the works on tour while its galleries undergo renovation.
“It offers visitors an opportunity to enjoy works not generally accessible in the community. The National Museum of Wales wholeheartedly shares this goal (with AFA) and was therefore delighted that the Oklahoma City Museum of Art became a venue for the exhibition,” said Oliver Fairclough, keeper of art at National Museum Wales, in an e-mail.
The exhibit represents a fraction of the 260 paintings and works on paper in the renowned Davies Collection. In the early 1900s, Welsh sisters Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, grandchildren of famed industrialist and philanthropist David Davies, traveled Europe collecting artwork.
They were among the first to buy works by Camille Corot, Honoré Daumier and Millet. Their collection also includes important British artists such as Turner, Sickert, Augustus John and Robert Bevan.
The sisters spent by 1913 what amounts today to $12 million building their collection, but stopped buying art when the World War I broke out, focusing instead on charitable ventures. They later turned their Welsh mansion Gregynog, purchased in 1920, into a forum for arts and culture.
“‘Turner to Cezanne’ is an introduction to modernism in art from the 1830s to the 1910s, but also the story of two extraordinary women,” Fairclough said.
On exhibit
“Turner to Cézanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales”
When: Thursday-Sept. 20.
Where: Oklahoma City Museum of Art, 415 Couch Drive.
Information: 236-3100 or www.okcmoa.com.
-BAM
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Замечательная статья, спасибо. Но я думаю, что надежда все-таки есть.