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2001
500 Years of Prints and Drawings
August 29 – December 30, 2001
Last fall, the Blanton initiated a series entitled 500 Years of Prints and Drawings, which features groups of exhibitions that highlight the Blanton's encyclopedic collection of works on paper. With works of art representing the 15th through the 20th centuries, the series draws exclusively from the Museum's own collection to present focused inquiries into artists, techniques, processes, or artistic trends particular to a period of time in the history of Western art. The first five of these focused explorations were:
From Idea to Object in Italian Renaissance Drawings
An intimate exhibition of twenty drawings, From Idea to Object allows visitors to explore how drawing developed into a system for conceiving and preparing works of art in 16th-century Italy. Drawings by the same artist at different stages offer insight into the principal stages and function of this system. A recently acquired model for an altarpiece by Bernardino Campi is among the works on display.
Rubens and His Engravers
The Blanton explores the significant work of the group of engravers employed by Peter Paul Rubens in the 17th–century, illuminating how the engravers fostered the distribution of Rubens' work and brought reproductive printmaking to unprecedented heights. This exhibition includes the finest impressions of these large–scale, highly detailed works and includes prints by Bolswert, Pontius, Vorsterman, Lauwers, Van Sompel, and other major figures of the group.
Early Aquatint from Saint-Non to Goya
Through fifteen works, this focused exhibition illuminates the development of the aquatint technique, from its invention as a means of reproducing wash drawings, to its realization by Goya as an agent of distinctive expression. This exhibition provides a platform for exploring the late-18th-century evolution of aquatint into one of the most significant and lasting variations on the intaglio printmaking technique.
The Image of Nature in Nineteenth-Century French Prints
Featuring works by Corot, Daubigny, and other 19th-century French printmakers, this exhibition examines how artists responded to the explosion of industrialization and urbanization in 19th-century France. The prints in this exhibition demonstrate how nostalgia for a less complicated past fueled the rise of the landscape from a lesser category at the beginning of the century to the central artistic theme by its end, reflecting a desire to preserve, if not nature itself, at least its image.
The Image of the City in Interwar American Prints
Prints from the 1910s to 1930s highlight the shift in American printmaking from images of idyllic rural life and landscapes to the realities of the swiftly expanding city, its constantly changing skyline, and the new forces at work within it. The common man's experience of the urban landscape is revealed in prints by artists such as George Bellows, Howard Cook, and Louis Lozowick.
Past Present Future: Notions of Time in Twentieth-Century Art
August 29 – December 30, 2001
Past Present Future: Notions of Time in Twentieth-Century Art features works from the Blanton's renowned collections of twentieth-century American and Latin American art, exhibited together for the first time. Focusing on art created between 1915 and the early 1980s, the exhibition explores the multiple ways that artists have questioned, interpreted, and reflected temporality in their art. The exhibition's design and content provide an innovative framework for considering a range of artistic developments in Latin America and the United States.
Past Present Future encompasses eight thematic sections revealing both literal and metaphorical representations of time, with works from various artistic movements, cultural environments, and chronological histories interspersed within the sections. Works by Thomas Hart Benton, Dorothea Lang, and other Depression-era artists from across America reflect a distinct historical moment, depicting the varied social conditions of the 1930s and 1940s, while Latin Americans Sara Grilo, Antonio Berni and others captured the upheaval of their lives as expatriates in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast, Latin American kinetic artists incorporated actual and perceived movement and time in their experimental works of art, and mid-century American gestural painting and sculpture and stained canvases reveal the evolutionary process of their creation. Further, Max Weber and Joaquín Torres-García adopted the role of visionaries, seeking to reflect new realities and imagine future worlds through artistic investigations. Other twentieth-century painters, as varied in style and technique as Marsden Hartley, Armando Morales, Mark Rothko, and Fernando de Szyszlo, drew upon the past as inspiration, referencing history, mythology, nostalgia, memory, and the unconscious to inform their abstracted views of nature.
Past Present Future begins an exciting new series of thematic exhibitions that will extend over the next three years. Both brand-new and much beloved works from the Museum's permanent collection will be joined by works on loan from leading private and public collections in the region. Past Present Future presents an analogy to the current circumstances at the Blanton. As the Museum expands its collection in preparation for a new facility, the Blanton Museum of Art itself is enjoying a transition period that spans past, present, and future.
Past Present Future: Notions of Time in Twentieth-Century Art was organized by Blanton curatorial staff Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Curator of American and Contemporary Art; Christina Harrison, Interim Curator of Latin American Art; and Stephanie Hanor, Assistant Curator of American and Contemporary Art. A color brochure will accompany the exhibition.
