The Grey Art Gallery in New York Shows Four Centuries of French Drawings

Written by Kathleen Dyer Saturday, 17 March 2012 23:17

New York, NY.- New York University's Grey Art Gallery is pleased to present "Storied Past: Four Centuries of French Drawings from the Blanton Museum of Art" until  July 14th. Organized by The Blanton, and comprising fifty-eight works drawn primarily from the museum’s Suida-Manning Collection, the exhibition explores the expressive and technical range of French drawing through preliminary sketches, compositional studies, figure studies, and finished drawings from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Among the artists included are Jacques Callot, François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-Louis Forain, and Théophile Alexandre Steinlen.

Storied Past is particularly strong in examples from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries- a period in which the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture) in Paris became one of the most dominant cultural and political institutions in Europe. The 1666 founding of its affiliated institution in Rome, the Académie de France (French Academy), provided French art students an opportunity to study and to absorb classical art and architecture. There, the formal and very rational French aesthetic soon became infused with the more passionate and emotional sensibilities of the Italians- a style that came to be known as Italianate. Included in the exhibition are several such examples by Charles-Joseph Natoire (who served as director of the French Academy in Rome from 1751-55), Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and others.

The social and political landscape of nineteenth-century France is examined through the work of Théodore-Alexandre Steinlen, Jean-Louis Forain and others. During this period of industrial and artistic transformation, French artists abandoned idealism and classical iconography for a more realist approach. Scenes of everyday life were favored over the religious and heroic scenes of the previous generation. The “Storied Past” of the exhibition title refers not only to the narrative subjects favored by French artists but also to the individual stories of the objects themselves. Extensive research by curators and conservators has shed new light on the drawings, many of which have never before been published.  Works thought to have been lost were newly identified and others reattributed, contributing significantly to the scholarship of this genre.


The Grey Art Gallery is New York University's fine arts museum, located on historic Washington Square Park in New York City's Greenwich Village. As a university art museum, the Grey Art Gallery functions to collect, preserve, study, document, interpret, and exhibit the evidence of human culture. While these goals are common to all museums, the Grey distinguishes itself by emphasizing art's historical, cultural, and social contexts, with experimentation and interpretation as integral parts of programmatic planning. Thus, in addition to being a place to view the objects of material culture, the Gallery serves as a museum-laboratory in which a broader view of an object's environment enriches our understanding of its contribution to civilization. Demolished in 1894, the original building was replaced by the building that now stands, NYU's Silver Center. Here was located, from 1927 to 1942, A. E. Gallatin's Museum of Living Art, NYU's first art museum and the first institution in this country to exhibit work by Picasso, Léger, Mirò, Mondrian, Arp and members of the American Abstract Artists group. Gallatin aspired to create a forum for intellectual exchange, a place where artists would congregate to acquaint themselves with the latest developments in contemporary art. In 1975, with a generous gift from Mrs. Abby Weed Grey, the Museum's original space was renovated, offices and a collection storage facility were added, and the doors were reopened as the Grey Art Gallery. Exhibitions organized by the Grey Art Gallery encompass aspects of all the visual arts: painting, sculpture, drawing and printmaking, photography, architecture and decorative arts, video, film, and performance. In addition to originating its own exhibitions, some of which travel throughout the United States and abroad, the Gallery hosts traveling exhibitions. The New York University Art Collection, of which the Grey Art Gallery is now guardian, was founded in 1958 with the acquisition of Francis Picabia's "Resonateur" (c.1922) and Fritz Glarner's "Relational Painting" (1949–50). Today the collection (which includes approximately 6,000 objects) is primarily composed of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century works, ranging from Pablo Picasso's monumental public sculpture Bust of Sylvette to a Joseph Cornell box, Chocolat Menier, from 1952. The collection's particular strength is American painting from the 1940s to the present, with works by such well-known artists as Romare Bearden, Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Kenneth Noland, and Ad Reinhardt. European prints are also well represented, with works by Henri Matisse, Joan Mirò, and Pablo Picasso, to name a few. A unique part of NYU's holdings is the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art, which includes works by artists from countries ranging from Israel to Japan. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.nyu.edu/greyart

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