Joslyn Art Museum Presents Masterpieces from NOMA

Written by Shawna Scher Monday, 21 February 2011 23:00

Omaha, NE – Arguably the most important art museum in the American South, the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) is sharing 89 of its finest works of European and American art from a 300-year period spanning four centuries — works that survived the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that ensued — for this rare exhibition opportunity. Spared from the Storm comprises some of NOMA’s most prized works from the 17th through mid 20th century. Among them are paintings and sculpture by François Boucher, William Adolphe Bouguereau, Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, Claude Monet, Georgia O'Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, John Singer Sargent, and Giambattista Tiepolo. Spared from the Storm: Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art will open at Joslyn Art Museum on June 16 and continue through October 21.

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans with unprecedented fury, forever altering the lives of its citizens. NOMA is located between the badly flooded Mid-City and Lakeview areas, but its placement on a high ridge saved it from the surrounding flood waters. Incredibly, the collection of 40,000 artworks survived largely unharmed, but the building and adjacent five-acre sculpture garden, including notable works by such artists as Kenneth Snelson and George Segal, sustained more than $6 million in damage. Isolated and exposed to looting, NOMA was occupied by eight staff members and their families who chose to remain in the building to ensure the safety of the collections. As National Guardsmen ordered the holdouts to evacuate the Museum, a French insurance company, AXA, which had a contract with NOMA, sent security guards to participate in preserving from harm NOMA’s treasures.

The catastrophe had a devastating impact on NOMA, forcing it to close its doors for six months and lay off 85% of its staff. Even today, the Museum has not returned to full operation. Its staff is 40% of its original size and attendance is only 15% of pre-Katrina levels. To aid this sister institution during its continued renovation and repair, a portion of the proceeds of the exhibition at Joslyn will go to benefit NOMA.

Story of the Exhibition

Following Hurricane Katrina, the French-founded Wildenstein & Company of New York, one of the world’s premier art galleries, hosted an exhibition of European and American paintings, sculptures, and drawings from NOMA that included a two-night benefit for the Museum’s Katrina Recovery Fund. The exhibition, titled The Odyssey Continues: Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art and from Private New Orleans Collections, featured works spanning a more than 600-year period (1360 to 1996) and was held from November 17, 2006, through February 9, 2007, at Wildenstein.

Joslyn director J. Brooks Joyner, good friends with NOMA director John Bullard, was aware of the Wildenstein exhibition and of Bullard’s willingness to loan important and rare works from their collection to other museums in return for much-needed funds. Joslyn took the opportunity to be the first museum to partner with NOMA, and arrangements were made for Spared from the Storm. The unique exhibition features 60 of the nearly 100 works that were part of the earlier show at Wildenstein, along with 29 additional works that were not shown in New York. In early November, Spared from the Storm will travel to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and, after that, likely a venue on the West Coast.

Exhibition Highlights

Spared from the Storm features 62 paintings, a dozen sculptures, and more than a dozen works on paper, from an outstanding painting by Dutch landscapist Abraham Bloemaert, Saint John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness (ca. 1625-30), to modern works as recent as 1960.

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Of particular note are paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Edgar Degas, who was Louisianian through his mother and had stayed there almost six months to visit his family and seek new subjects for his artwork; a 10-foot-tall ca. 1788 state portrait of Queen Marie Antoinette by the greatest woman artist of the 18th century, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun; and a bronze cast of Auguste Rodin’s life-size Age of Bronze, one of NOMA’s finest sculptures. Modeled in 1875-76 and cast during the artist’s lifetime, it is the first of Rodin’s full-length figures to have survived to the present day. The show also includes Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky’s sketch for Several Circles (1926), a study for the final work, now in New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Spanish artist Joan Miró, generally considered a member of the Surrealist movement based in Paris between the two World Wars, is one of the giants of 20th-century art; Spared from the Storm includes two Miró paintings. Spain’s Pablo Picasso is represented by sculpture, painting, and drawing in the exhibition, including his 1960 painting Woman in an Armchair. The model was his lover at the time, Jacqueline Roque, whom he depicted in at least 70 portraits. A splendid pen-and-India ink study of leafy branches (ca. 1884-86) by Pierre Auguste Renoir represents the artist’s classical period of the mid 1880s, when he abandoned the more spontaneous style of his earlier work. A similar drawing of trees from this precise moment in Renoir’s career is in the National Gallery of Art.

Other exciting artwork highlights:

• A 1670 portrait of Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” for whom Louisiana was named, is the work of a major French portraitist, Claude Lefebvre.
• Works by two of the most important American painters of the 18th century, John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West, are featured.
• Italian Giambattista Tiepolo’s easel painting Boy Holding a Book (ca. 1747-50) was likely a portrait of the artist’s youngest son, Lorenzo Baldissera Tiepolo, who later became one of 18th-century Europe’s preeminent pastellists.
• The Surprise (1730-32) by the foremost painter of the Rococo, François Boucher, is a playfully erotic example of the artist’s early genre paintings.
• Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Turkish Bashi Bazouk Mercenaries Playing Chess in a Market Place (ca. 1870-73) is an outstanding example of 19th-century Orientalist genre painting.
• French artist Pierre Bonnard is represented by a preparatory watercolor and gouache study for his Nabi masterpiece, an 1894 poster advertising the influential Parisian literary journal La Revue Blanche.
• A formal portrait of Flora Wertheimer (ca. 1898) is the work of American John Singer Sargent, the ultra-fashionable portraitist of Edwardian society. Sargent also painted Flora’s husband, a successful London art dealer, and their 10 children.
• Georges Braque’s Landscape at L’Estaque (1906) is one of the jewels of NOMA’s early modern art collection.
• Cozad, Nebraska, native Robert Henri’s 1909 monumental painting The Blue Kimono reflects the artist’s interest in the Japonisme movement launched by James McNeil Whistler and was part of NOMA’s inaugural exhibition in 1911.
• Jackson Pollock’s Composition (White, Blue and Red on White) (1948) is one of the artist’s drip paintings that were executed on paper rather than canvas between 1948 and 1949. Pollock produced about 25 such works.

Related Book

For their exhibition, Wildenstein & Company produced a fully illustrated catalogue entitled The Odyssey Continues: Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art and from Private New Orleans Collections. Written by Joseph Baillio, a distinguished scholar of French art and native of Louisiana, and Eliot Rowlands, the publication includes an informative history of the city of New Orleans and is an exemplary reference for 60 of the 89 works in Joslyn’s exhibition. It retails for $44.95 in Joslyn’s Hitchcock Museum Shop.

About the New Orleans Museum of Art

The New Orleans Museum of Art, one of the United States’ major metropolitan cultural institutions, holds the largest and most comprehensive fine arts collection in the Deep South. The 1911 Greek Revival building is the city's oldest fine arts institution, boasting a magnificent permanent collection of more than 40,000 objects. The collection is noted for its extraordinary strengths in French and American art, photography, glass, and African and Japanese works. The five-acre Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden at NOMA is one of the most important such installations in the United States. Featuring 50 sculptures, the garden opened in November 2003. Sadly, this was the part of NOMA’s collections that sustained the most damage from Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing flood. NOMA’s Montine McDaniel Freeman Director is E. John Bullard. The Museum’s fourth director, Bullard assumed the post in April 1973. He had previously held curatorial positions at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the National Gallery of Art.

Visit Joslyn Art Museum

2200 Dodge Street, Omaha, Nebraska 68102 Phone: 402-342-3300 Fax: 402-342-2376 www.joslyn.org