Robert Bateman retrospective at Joslyn Art Museum

Written by Frank Drayton Thursday, 07 April 2011 23:19

Omaha, NE – The exhibition The Art of Robert Bateman at Joslyn Art Museum is a major tribute to Canadian artist Robert Bateman, whose wildlife art has earned him an international reputation and following. Bateman's paintings, while rendered in a realistic style, are essentially a celebration of wild things and wild places.

His work avoids sentimentality yet evokes the beauty of the world around him. Though ostensibly known as a wildlife painter, and recognized by peers world-wide as the most influential one of our time, Bateman's oeuvre encompasses subjects ranging from architecture, the human figure, land- and seascapes, still lifes, and portraiture. The Joslyn exhibition, opening November 24 and continuing through February 3, is designed to exemplify the breadth and depth of Bateman’s artistic output and consists of signature paintings as well as works on paper, personal sketchbooks, and sculpture.

Born in Toronto in 1930, Robert Bateman was first enrolled in art classes at the age of eight at the Royal Ontario Museum where, under the tutelage of watercolorist Terence Shortt, he learned to make watercolor field sketches. In the early 1960s, Bateman began to develop the style that would make him one of the most celebrated wildlife artists in the world, with an enormous following in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. In 1981, the Governor General of Canada commissioned a work by Bateman as the wedding gift to Prince Charles from the people of Canada.

Companion Exhibition

From its permanent collection, Joslyn Art Museum presents Karl Bodmer’s Animals, a companion exhibition to The Art of Robert Bateman. Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, who accompanied the German naturalist Prince Maximilian of Wied on an expedition to North America in 1832-1834, is one of the forerunners of American western art. Bodmer is known today almost exclusively for his watercolor portraits of the American Indians they met and his views of the extraordinary Missouri River Valley landscape through which they passed. Over the course of the three years, Bodmer produced finely executed and wonderfully detailed studies of the variety of animals the expedition encountered. Sometimes drawn from the wild, but as often rendered from creatures shot as specimens, these works are given the same attention and care as Bodmer's other paintings. Not as well known as the portraits and landscapes, these works were nevertheless a valuable record of the journey. A selection of animal studies from Joslyn's extensive Maximilian-Bodmer Collection is on view in conjunction with Robert Bateman's wildlife paintings.

Visit Joslyn Art Museum at : www.joslyn.org/