Displaying items by tag: san diego museum of art

The San Diego Museum of Art announced Monday the acquisitions of two major Spanish paintings and will celebrate with free public admission on the last weekends of January and February.

The two paintings are "St. Francis in Prayer in a Grotto" by Francisco de Zurbarán and "By the Seashore, Valencia" by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida. "St. Francis" will be on view beginning Jan. 21 and "By the Seashore" on Feb. 26..

The acquisitions were made possible by generous donations from Conrad Prebys and Debbie Turner, in the case of the Zurbarán, and the Legler Benbough Foundation, whose donation led to the acquisition of the Sorolla.

John Marciari first spotted the painting among hundreds of other works carefully filed in pullout racks in a soulless cube of a storage facility in New Haven, Connecticut. He was then, in 2004, a junior curator at Yale University’s renowned Art Gallery, reviewing holdings that had been warehoused during its expansion and renovation. In the midst of that task, he came upon an intriguing but damaged canvas, more than five feet tall and four feet wide, which depicted St. Anne teaching the young Virgin Mary to read. It was set aside, identified only as “Anonymous, Spanish School, seventeenth century.”

The San Diego Museum of Art on Friday announced the acquisition of a major painting by one of the most important Spanish artists of the 17th century.

The Museum said “The Visitation” by Juan de Valdés Leal will be a “transformative presence” in the European art galleries, where it joins an already world-renowned collection of Spanish paintings.

“We are thrilled to acquire this extraordinary painting, which is the first work by Juan de Valdés Leal to enter the collection. It builds on the existing strength of our holdings of Spanish art and raises the overall significance of the collection to a new level.” said Roxana Velásquez, executive director of the museum.

Sandra and Bram Dijkstra have given the Huntington its first two paintings by African-Americans: Charles White’s Soldier (1944) and Robert Duncanson’s Landscape with Ruin (c. 1853). This is a coup for the Huntington as the paintings had been on loan to the San Diego Museum of Art. Bram Dijkstra is an art historian who long taught at UC San Diego.

Chicago-born Charles White lived in L.A. for most of his career. Soldier is a relatively early work, made about when the artist was drafted at age 26. It was made the year after White’s most famous work, the Hampton University mural of The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America.

The Morgan Library and Museum announced today that it has tapped John Marciari to lead its department of drawings and prints. Mr. Marciari, who is currently an independent curator, previously worked as curator of European art and head of provenance research at the San Diego Museum of Art.

“I am delighted that John Marciari will be joining the talented team of curators in our department of drawings and prints,” William M. Griswold, the Morgan’s director, said in a statement. “John is a noted scholar and curator with an exceptional record of achievement in the areas of connoisseurship, collection-building, and public engagement.” (Mr. Griswold announced last month that he will leave the museum to become director of the Cleveland Museum of Art.)

Spanish Sojourns, which is currently on view at the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia, is the first exhibition dedicated to the Spanish paintings of Robert Henri, one of the must influential artists of the early 20^th century. A pioneer of the urban realist style that characterized the work of the Ashcan school, Henri was recognized both as a painter and as a teacher.

Between 1900 and 1926, Henri traveled to Spain 7 times and produced a number of works inspired by the country’s people and culture. His portraits depict everyone from dancers and bullfighters to gypsies and old peasants. Many of the works included in Spanish Sojourns are on loan from prominent museum collections including that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Spanish Sojourns, which was developed over the course of five years, will be on view at the Telfair through March 9, 2014. The exhibition will them travel to the San Diego Museum of Art and the Mississippi Museum of Art.