The Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design Shows Contemporary British Art

Written by Stephen Franklin Monday, 09 April 2012 20:16

Providence, RI.- The Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design is highlighting its collection of contemporary British art (one of the largest in the world) in a major exhibition this fall. "Made in the UK: Contemporary Art from the Richard Brown Baker Collection" richly captures Britain's contemporary art scene as it emerged from World War II to become a prominent force on the world stage today. Made in the UK opens on September 23rd and remains on view through January 8th 2012. "Made in the UK" celebrates works by British artists from the 1950s through the present and includes such major figures as Tacita Dean, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, Anish Kapoor, Jim Lambie, Julian Opie, Bridget Riley, and Yinka Shonibare.

Many of the artists in the exhibition are represented at the Tate and other important British collections, but are not seen in depth in American museums. This exhibition of approximately 100 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, and more, focuses on Baker’s collecting, decade by decade — revealing important British contributions to and the international nature of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Geometric Abstraction, Optical Art, and Photorealism. It culminates in conceptual works by the Young British Artists (YBAs) — including Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread — who took the art world by storm in the 1990s and are still highly influential today. "Made in the UK" is co-curated by Jan Howard, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, and Judith Tannenbaum, Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art. Baker (1912-2002), a Providence native, member of the Museum’s Fine Arts Committee, and important collector of contemporary American and European art was renowned in the arts as a “collector’s collector” (New York Times). Based in New York after 1952, his reputation was built by quietly supporting emerging artists, many of whom have become the most influential artists of their time.  “He never lost the thrill of discovering new talent, and, as he could afford it, continuing to support those whose work he had previously collected,” says Howard. “Because the British works would be separated from the bulk of his collection, he was eager that they be judged of importance as a group.”

Baker, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford who later lived in London during World War II, donated approximately 135 works of British art to RISD, so that the Museum now has one of the strongest collections of modern and contemporary British art in this country. In his diaries he wrote, “As I obtained my Rhodes Scholarship from Rhode Island, I feel that I am making a kind of gesture to England and to my native city by this gift.”  RISD Museum curators continue to collect in the spirit of Baker through the Richard Brown Baker Fund for Contemporary British Art, which enables the Museum to purchase paintings, sculpture, and drawings by living British artists. Recent purchases underscore the tremendous diversity of contemporary British culture and include works by Fiona Banner, Martin Boyce, Dean, Emin, Mona Hatoum, Roger Hiorns, Hirst, Shirazeh Houshiary, Kapoor, Lambie, Hew Locke, Richard Long, Opie, Kathy Prendergast, and Shonibare. A gift from Baker in 2000 established the Museum's Contemporary Art department and endowed the curator's position.

Rhode Island School of Design Museum is a prominent art museum in Providence, Rhode Island affiliated with the well-known Rhode Island School of Design. The museum was founded in 1877 and is the 20th largest art museum in the United States. The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (The RISD Museum) contains a broad range of works from around the world, including Egypt, Asia, Africa, ancient Greece and Rome, Europe, and the Americas. It also features many notable works by a range Rhode Island artists such as 17th century Newport furniture makers Goddard and Townsend and nineteenth century Rhode Island painters, such as Anglo-American impressionist John Noble Barlow and portraitist Gilbert Stuart.


The museum also features prominent international and American artists such as Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Paul Revere, and Andy Warhol. The RISD Museum houses over 80,000 works of art. Created in 2000, the department of Contemporary Art oversees an eclectic collection of painting, sculpture, video, mixed media, and interdisciplinary work, dating from 1960 to the present. In addition, the department regularly organizes exhibitions that highlight important issues, trends and individual explorations in recent art. Represented in the collection are significant paintings by Richard Anuszkiewicz, Sam Francis, David Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Ronnie Landfield, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly, Wayne Thiebaud, Larry Rivers, and Andy Warhol, among others. The collection also includes important sculptural work by Richard Artschwager, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, Tom Otterness, Lucas Samaras, and Robert Wilson. The museum’s video collection features experimental works by such pioneers in the field as Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, Richard Serra, and William Wegman.

The Nancy Sayles Day Collection of Latin American Art includes contemporary paintings by such important artists as Luís Cruz Azaceta, Fernando Botero, José Bedia, Claudio Bravo, Wifredo Lam, Jesús Rafael Soto, Joaquín Torres Garcia, and Roberto Matta Echuarren. The department has a natural and strong connection with Providenceís contemporary art community, and numerous RISD faculty and alumni and local artists are represented in the collection. Among them are Howard Ben Tré, Jonathan Bonner, Richard Fleischner, Ruth Dealy, Richard Merkin and Bunny Harvey. The Painting and Sculpture collection contains more than 2,500 works of European and American art from the medieval period to 1960. The Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods are represented by the work of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Lippo Memmi, Jacopo Sansovino, Alessandro Magnasco, and others. The collection also includes major work by such northern European masters as Tilman Riemenschneider, Hendrick Goltzius, Joachim Wtewael, Salomon van Ruysdael, and Georg Vischer. 17th- and 18th-century masterpieces include paintings by Francisco Collantes, Sebastien Bourdon, Gabriel-Jacques de Saint-Aubin, Nicolas Poussin, Angelica Kauffmann, and Joshua Reynolds. Early 19th-century European art is represented by Thomas Lawrence, Hubert Robert, Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont, Joseph Chinard, Théodore Géricault and others. The department has excellent examples of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism schools by such artists as Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. There is important work by 19th-century French sculptors Auguste Rodin, Charles Henri Joseph Cordier, Jules Dalou, and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. Among the 20th-century European painters in the collection are Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Fernand Léger, and Oskar Kokoschka. The 18th- and 19th-century American collection is particularly strong, with important examples by such artists as John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Cole, Winslow Homer, William Merritt Chase, Martin Johnson Heade, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and Edward Mitchell Bannister, an African-American landscapist who spent his career as a painter in Rhode Island.

Significant works by George Wesley Bellows, Robert Henri, Charles Sheeler, Maxfield Parrish, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Twachtman, Hans Hoffman, Paul Manship, and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, among others, represent American artistic achievements of the early 20th-century. The department of Prints, Drawings + Photographs oversees approximately 18,000 European and American works on paper from the 15th century to the present. Included in the collection are important examples of Old Master drawings and prints, among them works by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt and Goya. The department has one of the largest collections (over 800) of British watercolors in the country. Included among them are fine examples by J.M.W. Turner, George Chinnery, John Sell Cotman, William Blake and Thomas Rowlandson. The collection of French prints and drawings includes work by Nicolas Poussin, Hubert Robert, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Honoré Daumier, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso and others. Notable in the collection of American watercolors and drawings is work by Benjamin West, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, Maurice Prendergast and Maxfield Parrish. Among the important 20th-century artists represented in the collection are Franz Kline, James Rosenquist, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Jennifer Bartlett, Eric Fischl, Wayne Thiebaud, Kara Walker and Francesco Clemente. The history of the art of the book is represented, in one of its earliest forms, by the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), a masterpiece of Renaissance illumination. In later centuries, work by masters of printing and illustration provides a link between the earliest books and twentieth-century “artists’ books” that push limits and challenge traditional interpretations of the form. A summary of the history of photography is provided by 5,000 photographs, among them significant works by Gustave Le Gray, Julia Margaret Cameron, Nadar, Frederick Sommer, Carrie May Weems, and former RISD professors Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan. The department also oversees the Aaron Siskind Center for the Study of Photography, which is open to photography students and Museum visitors alike. Visit the museum's website at  ... http://www.risdmuseum.org

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