Displaying items by tag: yale center for british art

The Yale Center for British Art will reopen to the public on May 11, 2016, after completing the third phase of a major building conservation project. Visitors to the renovated building will experience a stimulating new installation of the Center’s unparalleled collection of more than five centuries of British art, largely the gift of the institution’s founder, Paul Mellon (Yale College, Class of 1929).

The Long Gallery, located on the fourth floor, will be wholly reconfigured, returning to the architect Louis I. Kahn’s original conception of a study gallery, with over two hundred works installed from floor to ceiling across seven bays.

New York should be grateful that the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven is closed for renovations. As a result, eight canvases by the inimitable English painter George Stubbs, one of the great artists of the 18th century, have been lent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Works by Stubbs are scarce in this town: The Met has one painting, and there’s a drawing at the Frick Collection. This makes “Paintings by George Stubbs From the Yale Center for British Art” a rare and thrilling treat.

The recently published Louis I. Kahn in Conversation: Interviews with John W. Cook and Heinrich Klotz, 1969–70 provides fresh insights into the philosophy and genius of one of America’s greatest twentieth-century architects. Transcribed from audio recordings of candid conversations that have never before been published in their entirety, these interviews with Kahn (1901–1974) were conducted by Heinrich Klotz, a young German architectural historian who was then a visiting professor at Yale University, and John W. Cook, who was teaching architecture at Yale Divinity School. The volume has been edited by Jules David Prown, Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Yale University and Senior Research Fellow at the Yale Center for British Art, and Karen E. Denavit, Information Analyst at the Center.

Someone apparently unfamiliar with the term “Romantic art” asked a Yale curator if Yale’s big, new exhibition would be ready for Valentine’s Day.

That’s curator humor, delivered politely of course, during the Wednesday preview of this beefy show, the first joint exhibition by the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art called, “The Critique of Reason: Romantic Art 1760-1860.”

Amy Meyers, director of the Yale Center for British Art, said artwork often has been lent from one side of Chapel Street to the other in past cooperation between the gallery and the Brit center, but never with the opportunity to bring the two collections together in this way, to examine this important period’s art in such context.

In 1215, Saher de Quincy, the Earl of Manchester, and 24 other barons forced King John of England to sign the Magna Carta, which limited the king's powers and protected their interests. Since the 1900s, statues of Quincy and other barons have stood in the chamber of the House of Lords in London, "as a reminder to all lords who sit below to keep an eye on the monarchy and make sure absolutism did not recur," said Michael Hatt.

The Quincy statue is in New Haven now, for a limited time, and Hatt couldn't be more delighted. "It's a real coup getting it here," he said.

“Bruce Davidson/Paul Caponigro: Two American Photographers in Britain and Ireland,” at the Yale Center for British Art, is a strange but memorable pairing. It joins the Magnum photojournalist Bruce Davidson, best known for his aggressive New York street and subway photography, to a spiritually minded landscape photographer in the mold of Ansel Adams and Minor White. And although its title suggests some shared expatriate experience, a split quickly develops.

The curators, perhaps acknowledging as much, divide the third-floor galleries neatly down the middle. At times, it seems as if Mr. Davidson and Mr. Caponigro are re-enacting a classic contest in 20th-century photography, a competition between the meticulously technical, landscape-driven Bay Area School of Adams and Edward Weston, and the spontaneous street photography of Mr. Davidson’s mentors, Cornell Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson (who is said to have remarked, “The world is falling to pieces, and all Adams and Weston photograph is rocks and trees.”)

In January 2015, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, will close for thirteen months in order to implement the second phase of the conservation of its iconic Louis Kahn-designed building. The structure, which opened in 1977, is located across the street from Kahn’s first major commission -- the Yale University Art Gallery. The Center, which was completed after the celebrated American architect’s death, was the first museum in the United States to incorporate retail shops in its design. It was Kahn’s final work.

Featuring an exterior of matte steel and reflective glass, the Center’s geometrical, four-floor interior is designed around two courtyards. Outfitted in natural materials such as travertine marble, white oak, and Belgian linen, the interior space is intimate, inviting, and filled with sunlight.

The final group of paintings, drawings and sculptures bequeathed to museums by Paul Mellon before his death in 1999 have at last begun to arrive. Hidden away for decades, many are rarities that had never been seen by curators.

The group includes more than 200 works — examples by such artists as van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin, Monet and Seurat — that were only recently removed from the walls of the Mellons’ many homes, where they were enjoyed by his widow, Rachel Lambert Mellon, who died in March at 103.

Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century is now on view at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT and explores the art created in Britain during the reign of King Edward II. The period, which is known as the Edwardian era, lasted from 1901 to 1910.

 Sandwiched between the rigid Victorian era and the devastation of World War I, the Edwardian era was a time of rapid technological growth, significant artistic development, shifting political and social structures, and increased consumption among the elite. Edwardian Opulence explores how all of these changes influenced the creation, consumption, and display of British art through a range of objects.

 Highlights from the exhibition include portraits by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931), diamond-studded tiaras, vivid Autochrome color photographs, bejeweled bell pushes by Carl Fabergé (1846-1920), and an extravagantly embellished gown that belonged to the American-born Vicereine of India.

The show is comprised of 170 works from public art museums and private collections. Lenders include Queen Elizabeth II, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Britain, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Musée d’Orsay. Edwardian Opulence will be on view through June 2, 2013.