Displaying items by tag: yale university art gallery

Leave it to a former professional studio potter to organize a wide-ranging exhibition of postwar ceramics that’s relatively free of hangups about form and function. The Ceramic Presence in Modern Art: Selections from the Linda Leonard Schlenger Collection, currently on view at the Yale University Art Gallery, demonstrates connections of various sorts between works in clay and paintings, drawings, and other forms of sculpture from the period.

Paintings by the Hudson River School artist Jasper Cropsey reside in the White House, the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and museums at Yale and Princeton, but the best place to commune with Cropsey’s glorious 19th-century landscapes is in an oasis in Hastings-on-Hudson.

Not far from the rush of Metro-North trains on the Hudson Line, behind a commuter parking lot, is the Gallery of Art, which houses roughly 75 paintings spanning the career of an artist who idolized Thomas Cole and taught himself to paint well enough to join the likes of John Frederick Kensett and Frederic Edwin Church in the Hudson River School’s top tier.

A group of 17 wall drawings by Sol LeWitt were unveiled on 18 July at the Botín Foundation in Santander, northern Spain (until 10 January 2016). Many of the works have not been seen since they were made in the 1970s, and it is the first time one of them—Wall Drawing 7A (1969-2015)—has been fully installed. 

Benjamin Weil, the artistic director of the private foundation, is the co-curator of the exhibition along with John Hogan, Yale University Art Gallery's director of Installations and Archivist of wall drawings.

Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the Yale University Art Gallery are acquiring the Meserve-Kunhardt Collection, one of the nation’s most historically significant photographic collections and the definitive assemblage of portraits of Abraham Lincoln.

“With this remarkable acquisition, Yale has secured its place as the premier institution for the study of American photography from the Civil War to the Gilded Age,” says Yale President Peter Salovey. “I am delighted that faculty, students, and scholars from around the country and around the globe will have the opportunity to study this collection, learn from it, and share that knowledge.”

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.

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.”

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.

A federal judge has dismissed the claims of a Russian man who said that he was the rightful owner of Vincent van Gogh’s “The Night Cafe.” The painting, which was created in 1888, has been on display at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, for around 50 years.

Pierre Konowaloff, who claimed that the work was stolen from his family during the Russian revolution, asked Yale for the return of the painting or $120 million to $150 million in damages. Yale sued in 2009 to assert its ownership rights and to prevent Konowaloff from claiming the work. Judge Alvin Thompson sided with the University, citing the Act of State doctrine, which says that every sovereign state is bound to respect the independence of every other sovereign state, and that courts will not criticize another government’s acts done within its own territory.

Konowaloff claimed that his great-grandfather purchased “The Night Cafe” in 1908 and that his property was nationalized by Russia during the Communist revolution. The painting was later sold by the Soviet government.

Yale received the van Gogh painting through a bequest from alumnus Stephen Carlton Clark, who had purchased the painting from a New York City gallery in 1933 or 1934. 

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA has selected New York-based Ennead Architects to design their $200 million, 175,000-square-foot expansion. The project is part of the museum’s comprehensive, $650 million Advancement Campaign, which was announced in 2011. The goal of the Campaign is to celebrate outstanding artistic and cultural creativity in ways that transform people’s lives. Besides the expansion, which will include galleries, a restaurant and additional space for public programs and education, the endeavor includes reinstalling the museum’s collection, several infrastructure improvements and other initiatives.

Ennead Architects previously designed the renovation and expansion of the renowned Yale University Art Gallery. The firm has also worked on projects at the Brooklyn Museum, Natural History Museum of Utah and the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History.

Groundbreaking for the Peabody Essex Museum’s expansion project is expected to commence in 2015 and the new wing is slated to open in 2019. The museum will remain open throughout the renovation process until the final months, when the collection will be reinstalled.