New York City - An important exhibition and catalogue devoted to the art of Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, (1724–1780) co-organized over a seven-year period by The Frick Collection and the Musée du Louvre, Paris, has its exclusive North American showing in New York in the fall of 2007 (opening in Paris in late February 2008, running through May).  This will be the inaugural exhibition on this artist to include masterpieces from European and North American collections.  The show will break major new ground as a work of international scholarship and bring long overdue recognition to one of the European Enlightenment’s most original and innovative artists. Although highly esteemed by scholars and admirers of eighteenth-century French art, Saint-Aubin is little known to the general public.  The exhibition will present a selection of Saint-Aubin’s prolific and varied oeuvre in the media of painting, drawing, and etching.

The selection of drawings in particular, will reveal the artist’s achievement in a variety of thematic areas as well as highlight Saint-Aubin’s extraordinary response to virtually every aspect of life and thought in eighteenth-century Paris—itself a microcosm of the life and thought in Europe during the Enlightenment.  The exhibition will provide visitors with the opportunity to glimpse Paris as it was two hundred and fifty years ago, through appealing depictions of the city’s architecture, theater, the Salon, domestic life, and popular entertainment, each a subject that Saint-Aubin rendered in an immediate, impressionistic style that anticipates that of artists of the late nineteenth century.

Major funding for Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724–1780) has been provided by The Florence Gould Foundation. Additional generous support has been provided by The Christian Humann Foundation and The Grand Marnier Foundation.

IMPORTANT COLOR-ILLUSTRATED REFERENCE ON THE ARTIST

The exhibition catalogue, the first monographic color publication on the artist, is a collaborative effort spanning the Atlantic.  The principal organizers of the exhibition, Pierre Rosenberg, Honorary Director, Musée du Louvre; Colin B. Bailey, Chief Curator, The Frick Collection; Kim de Beaumont, Guest Curator, The Frick Collection; and Christophe Leribault, Chief Curator in the Department of Drawings, Musée du Louvre, will also contribute pioneering essays on the artist, as will Suzanne Folds McCullagh, Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searle Curator of Earlier Prints & Drawings, The Art Institute of Chicago.  Perrin Stein, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will catalogue a selection of the artist’s etchings.  The book will offer the general public and scholars with an updated resource on this master, particularly important given that the primary reference work on Saint- Aubin, Émile Dacier’s monograph and catalogue raisonné (1929–1931), was published nearly eighty years ago.

Many of Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s works have not been reproduced in color before, and this well-illustrated publication will convey the sheer beauty, impressive scope, and highly personal charm of Saint-Aubin’s art.  The 2007-2008 exhibition will be the foundation for future decades of Saint-Aubin appreciation and research.

The Frick Art Reference Library is esteemed worldwide by scholars and students. Information about the facilities and services of this great repository for the study and advancement of art history can be found on this website, and you may also log onto FRESCO, the online catalogue.

On exhibition October 30, 2007, through January 27, 2008.

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