Displaying items by tag: princeton university

Princeton University has announced the largest gift in its history: a trove of rare books valued at nearly $300 million, including a Gutenberg Bible, an original printing of the Declaration of Independence, all four of Shakespeare’s Folios and significant musical manuscripts written by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Wagner.

The Scheide Library, named for the family of the philanthropist and scholar William H. Scheide, has been housed in a special room in Princeton’s Firestone Library since 1959, when Mr. Scheide, who died last November at age 100, moved it there from his family home in Titusville, Pa. The bequest makes Princeton the permanent home of what the university’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, called “one of the greatest collections of rare books and manuscripts in the world today.”

It has been over a hundred years since abstraction was adopted in Western painting, and we’re still trying to make sense of it. Despite the rather clunky subtitle and the fact that the exhibition is drawn from a single collection, “Rothko to Richter: Mark-Making in Abstract Painting from the Collection of Preston H. Haskell” offers an excellent, compact survey of some of the key arguments.

One thing highlighted at the beginning of the show, which includes works by 23 painters, is that, along with the rise of abstract art, our concept of traditional art history — how one movement or artist invariably influences the next generation — has changed.

Samuel Hunter, professor of art and archaeology, emeritus, at Princeton University and a renowned modern and contemporary art scholar, died of natural causes on July 27 in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 91.

"Sam came to Princeton in 1969 as a well-established historian of modern and contemporary art who had by that time played a prominent role in his field for more than 20 years as a professor, curator, museum director, editor and critic," said Michael Koortbojian, the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Art and Archaeology and chair of the Department of Art and Archaeology.

The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, owner of 72 works of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, has launched a website (www.pearlmancollection.org) to make its collection readily available to the public. The site allows visitors to explore individual artists and works, create their own galleries from the collection, and to save those galleries privately or share them socially.

At the core of the Pearlman Collection are 33 works by Paul Cézanne including 16 watercolors that are rarely exhibited because of their sensitivity to light. The collection also includes works by Vincent Van Gogh, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar Degas.

Henry Pearlman, the founder of Eastern Cold Storage, collected from the mid-1940s up until his death in 1975. The Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection is on long-term loan to The Princeton University Art Museum, where many of the major works are on display. A five-city tour of the collection’s masterpieces – organized in conjunction with Princeton – is planned for 2014-15. While individual works are often loaned to special exhibitions around the world, the collection has not been seen outside of the New York area for more than 35 years.

Gifts from three families affiliated with the Princeton University Art Museum have established the John Wilmerding Curatorship of American Art. The endowed curatorship honors John Wilmerding, an esteemed scholar, curator, collector and Professor of American Art, Emeritus at Princeton University. Karl Kusserow, the museum’s current curator of American art, has been named the inaugural Wilmerding curator.

An anonymous donor with long-standing ties to Princeton made the first gift towards the curatorship. The Sherrerd family, who previously established two funds in support of scholarship and programming in American art at Princeton, and the Anschutz family, which includes one of Wilmerding’s former students, made additional contributions.

Wilmerding, who assumed emeritus status in 2007 and retired from Princeton last spring, has been reappointed by President Obama to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. He is a trustee of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Wyeth Foundation of American Art. Kusserow, who joined the Princeton University Art Museum in 2005, previously held positions at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has organized numerous important exhibitions and his articles and reviews have appeared in American Art, Drawing, Folk Art and The Journal of American History.

James Steward, director of the Princeton University Art Museum, said, “This endowed curatorship not only honors one of the most eminent and versatile scholars of our time, and one of the Museum’s greatest friends, John Wilmerding, but also recognizes the Princeton University Art Museum’s excellence in American art and visual culture. The very first work of art to enter Princeton’s collection in the 1750s was, in fact, an American painting. With this endowment, our work in American art can go forward with confidence and assure Princeton’s leadership in the field of American studies.”