The Nelson-Atkins Museum Features "Landscapes East/Landscapes West"

Written by Ian Rowbotham Wednesday, 24 August 2011 00:28

Kansas City, MO.- The Nelson-Atkins Museum is proud to present "Landscapes East/Landscapes West: Representing Nature from Mount Fuji to Canyon de Chelly" on view at the museum from August 27th through February 26th 2012. Artists have long been inspired to capture the beauty of nature in two-dimensional images, and Landscapes East/Landscapes West: Representing Nature from Mount Fuji to Canyon de Chelly explores the creative ways artists have responded to this universal theme. A collaboration among six curatorial departments at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the exhibition juxtaposes landscape paintings, drawings, prints and photographs by Chinese, Japanese, European and American artists from the 15th century to the present.

“It’s important to remember that in the light of our pressing concerns about the environment, landscape, and how humans interact with it is hugely relevant to us today,” said Colin Mackenzie, Senior curator, Early Chinese Art. “It is not just about the past, it is about the present and the future.” From early times in China, spiritual communion with the natural world inspired artists to master the techniques of landscape painting, termed in Chinese shanshui, “mountain and water.” By the end of the 10th century, landscape had become the backbone of Chinese painting, a role it continues to play today. Interest in landscape arose later in the West, where it was first used as a background for figures, often in Biblical settings. In 17th century Europe, however, landscape painting emerged as a distinct genre, and by the 1800s, it came to rival figure painting in importance.


During the middle of the 19th century photography, especially in America, embraced landscape as a central theme. Today, as environmental concerns become ever more pressing, nature has been reaffirmed as a universally relevant and enduring source of artistic inspiration. "We hope that visitors to the exhibition will sense the palpable spirituality that imbues many of these sublime images,” said MacKenzie. “The vastness of nature and the insignificance of the figures so vividly depicted here remind us of a grander, universal scheme of creation of which humankind is merely one part.” The exhibition includes representative works by revered artists of the past such as Shen Zhou, Claude Gellee, and Katushika Hokusai, as well as more recent ones such as Thomas Hart Benton, Ansel Easton Adams and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

When the massive Beaux Art Nelson-Atkins’ Building opened in 1933, newspapers nationwide reported visitors “amazed,” “gasping at its innovations and marveling at its luxury.”  Still, times being what they were in the Great Depression, operations were modest: only three telephones serviced the entire building; lights in the galleries were turned off when people left a room; at opening and closing times, a huge bell was rung manually. Though the Museum has grown its collection, its audience (and its telephones), just as in 1933, bringing people together with art is central to all current Museum endeavors. And that goes for the major campus transformation project, the new Bloch Building as its jewel. The Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City is recognized nationally and internationally as one of America’s finest art museums. The Nelson-Atkins serves the community by providing access and insight into its renowned collection of more than 33,500 art objects and is best known for its Asian art, European and American paintings, photography, modern sculpture, and new American Indian and Egyptian galleries. Housing a major art research library and the Ford Learning Center, the Museum is a key educational resource for the region.


The institution-wide transformation of the Nelson-Atkins has included the 165,000-square-foot Bloch Building expansion and renovation of the original 1933 Nelson-Atkins Building. The museum's European painting collection is also highly-prized. It include works by Caravaggio, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Petrus Christus, El Greco, Guercino, Alessandro Magnasco, Giuseppe Bazzani, Corrado Giaquinto, Cavaliere d'Arpino, Gaspare Traversi, Giuliano Bugiardini, Titian, Rembrandt, and Peter Paul Rubens, as well as Impressionists Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Vincent van Gogh, among others. It also has fine Late Gothic and Early Italian Renaissance paintings by; Jacopo del Casentino (The Presentation of Christ in the Temple), Giovanni di Paolo and Workshop, Bernardo Daddi and Workshop, Lorenzo Monaco, Gherardo Starnina (The Adoration of the Magi), and Lorenzo di Credi. It has German and Austrian Expressionist paintings by Max Beckmann, Karl Hofer (Record Player), Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Oskar Kokoschka (Pyramids of Egypt). The museum is distinguished (and widely celebrated) for its extensive collection of Asian art, especially that of Imperial China. Most of it was purchased for the museum in the early 20th century by Laurence Sickman, then a Harvard fellow in China. The museum has one of the best collections of Chinese antique furniture in the country. In addition to Chinese art, the collection includes pieces from Japan, India, Iran, Indonesia, Korea, and Southeast, and South Asia.

The American painting collection includes the largest collection open to the public of works by Thomas Hart Benton, who lived in Kansas City. Among its collection are masterpieces by George Bellows, George Caleb Bingham, Frederic Church, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent. It also has fine Contemporary Paintings and Creations in the Bloch Building by; Willem de Kooning, Fairfield Porter ("Mirror"), Wayne Thiebaud ("Bikini Girl"), Richard Diebenkorn, Agnes Martin, Bridget Riley, and Alfred Jensen. In 2006, Hallmark Cards chairman Donald J. Hall, Sr., donated to the museum the entire Hallmark Photographic Collection, spanning the history of photography from 1839 to the present day. It is primarily American in focus, and includes works from photographers such as Southworth & Hawes, Carleton Watkins, Timothy O'Sullivan, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, Homer Page, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Andy Warhol, Todd Webb, and Cindy Sherman, among others. Outside on the museum's immense lawn, the Kansas City Sculpture Park contains the largest collection of monumental bronzes by Henry Moore in the United States. The park also includes works by Alexander Calder, Auguste Rodin, George Segal and Mark di Suvero, among others. Beyond these, the park (and the museum itself) is well known for Shuttlecocks, a four-part outdoor sculpture of oversize badminton shuttlecocks by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. In addition, the museum also has collections of European and American sculpture, decorative arts and works on paper, Egyptian art, Greek and Roman art, modern and contemporary paintings and sculpture, pre-Columbian art, and the art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. As well, the museum houses a major collection of English pottery and another of miniature paintings. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.nelson-atkins.org

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