NASHVILLE, TN – The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Views from the Collection I, a show of work from the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Collection.  Views from the Collection I opens Thursday, August 17, will be on view through October 1, 2006.  All events are free and open to the public.

This is the first in a three-part series of exhibitions of art from the permanent collection.  The current show will feature a cross-section of work from Europe, the United States, and Asia.

Highlights will include Italian panel paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Study Collection that illustrate developments in painting from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance.  Also on view will be smaller objects used in late medieval private worship, such as the fourteenth-century carved ivory Crucifixion, which was once used by its well-to-do owner for personal devotions.  A page from a thirteenth century French illuminated manuscript, with a small image of King David accompanying the text, came from a Bible that was also likely a private commission.  The theme of religious devotion continues in Old Master prints, one example of which is the woodcut executed in 1500 by German artist Albrecht Dürer In this scene of mourning over the dead Christ, Dürer interpreted a traditional religious image with a profoundly humanistic, emotional tone more typical of the Renaissance.

After the Renaissance, artists continued to represent religious subjects, but they used increasingly naturalistic forms in three-dimensional space.  An engraving by the late sixteenth-century Dutch artist Hendrick Goltzius shows Biblical scenes enacted by large figures that occupy believable architectural settings.  By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European artists used even more natural, human forms to represent religious figures, as seen in the terracotta sculpture of St. Jerome, who is shown as a partially nude elderly man in a reclining pose.  A similarly naturalistic sculpture is the playful group of a nymph and two cupids, also in terracotta.  This lighthearted subject reflects the growing appeal of mythological figures in amusing, sensual scenes. 

The natural landscape was an important subject in nineteenth-century European and American painting, and this exhibition will feature paintings and prints by major artists known for their treatment of nature.  The French Barbizon School was one of the most prominent groups of landscape painters, and the scene by Théodore Rousseau is representative of the Barbizon painters’ focus on the wooded countryside.  An American interpretation of the natural world is seen in Jasper Cropsey’s canvas, which shows a vision of agrarian activity in a sweeping, bucolic setting.  These mid-nineteenth-century landscapes by Rousseau and Cropsey contrast the slightly earlier, more romantic mountainous scenery of J. M. W. Turner, whose print of Mount Saint Gothard evokes the poetic grandeur common to early nineteenth-century landscapes.

The Vanderbilt collection includes an impressive ensemble of early modern work by artists whose names are synonymous with the major artistic movements of the first half of the twentieth century.  Marc Chagall’s print of Adam and Eve is a modernized treatment of a traditional religious subject, using saturated colors and abstracted forms.  Work featured in this exhibition by Man Ray, André Masson, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Roy Lichtenstein will illustrate the innovations of Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Pop Art, respectively.

Part of this show will focus on examples of nineteenth-century wood-block prints and ceramics from Japan.  Prints by such artists as Katsushika Hokusai, Ando Hiroshige, and Utagawa Kunisada inspired western artists and collectors with their views of Japanese cities, courtesans, and natural scenery.  A portion of Vanderbilt’s collection of Japanese kutani porcelain will also be on display.  With its bold imagery in striking colors on a gray-white ground, kutani has been considered one of the most quintessentially Japanese ceramic wares.  Views from the Collection I has been scheduled to coincide with the debut of the Department of History of Art to showcase the high quality and historical range of the Vanderbilt collections and the broad teaching and research competencies of departmental faculty.

The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee, is a leading collegiate art gallery.  The permanent collection consists of more than 5,500 works, including Asian and African art; nineteenth and twentieth-century European and American paintings and sculpture; Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art; medieval sculpture; early Italian Renaissance paintings; and an extensive collection of historic and contemporary works on paper.

Visit the gallery’s website at : www.vanderbilt.edu/gallery