Italian Masterworks from the BAM/PFA Collection On View

Written by Kevin O'Donell Wednesday, 06 July 2011 22:22

BERKELEY, CA.- When the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive was founded in the mid-1960s, among the earliest and most important works acquired were paintings and works on paper by Italian artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These have remained enduring cornerstones of the collection. In celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Italian Republic, we present Rome, Naples, Venice: Italian Masterworks from the BAM/PFA Collection. The exhibition brings together striking Mannerist and Baroque works by Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Giambattista Tiepolo, Carlo Maratta, Giovanni Caracciolo, and Guiseppe Cesari (called Il Cavaliere d’Arpino), among others, reflecting a vibrant range of artistic innovation from three of Italy’s great cities. On exhibit 6 July through 15 October.

The Roman Mannerist artist D’Arpino, for example, was distinguished as a brilliant colorist, as is evident in his striking Judith with Head of Holofernes (1603–1606). For a short period in the early 1590s, D’Arpino employed the young Caravaggio, newly arrived in Rome, to paint flowers and fruit. Caracciolo, a Neapolitan follower of Caravaggio, helped to popularize the dramatic and naturalistic Caravaggesque style, as in The Young Saint John in the Wilderness (1610–1620). Nearly a century later in Venice, Tiepolo became renowned for his grand fresco paintings. In his large-scale commissioned works as well as his intimate drawings and studies, Tiepolo excelled at a luminosity and fluidity of color associated with the Venetian region. Flying Female Figure (c. 1744) is one of numerous drawings he carried out in preparation for his religious paintings. This simple, graceful ink-and-wash drawing does not definitively relate to a particular figure, but typifies Tiepolo’s exquisitely concise draftsmanship and dramatic evocation of the human form in space.

Rome, Naples, Venice is curated by BAM/PFA Chief Curatorial Director of Collections and Programs Lucinda Barnes.

The mission of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is to inspire the imagination and ignite critical dialogue through art and film.The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is the visual arts center of the University of California, Berkeley. Through art and film programs, collections and research resources, aspires to be locally connected and globally relevant, engaging audiences from the campus, community, and beyond.

One of the largest university art museums in the United States, BAM/PFA opened the doors of its distinctive Modernist building on the south side of the UC Berkeley campus in 1970. BAM/PFA’s diverse exhibition programs and its collections of more than 16,000 objects and 14,000 films and videos are characterized by themes of artistic innovation, intellectual exploration, and social commentary, and reflect the central role of education in BAM/PFA’s mission.

The museum was founded in 1963 following artist and teacher Hans Hofmann’s donation of forty-five paintings and $250,000 to the University; today BAM/PFA’s collection of work by this important Abstract Expressionist artist remains the largest in any museum internationally. Visit : http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/

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