Vanderbilt University shows Views from the Collection III

Written by James Bade Monday, 22 August 2011 21:36

NASHVILLE, TN  – The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Views from the Collection III, drawn from the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Collection. Views from the Collection III opens Thursday, April 3, and will be on view through June 30. This is the final installment 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, India, Papau New Guinea, Japan, China, and Africa.
 

Highlights of this exhibition will include examples from the Samuel H. Kress Collection of Renaissance paintings that showcase the period’s incredible devotion to Biblical narrative and symbolism. St. Louis of Toulouse, a tempura painting on panel by Venetian artist Vittore Crivelli, is a prime example, illustrating a full-length figure of a holy bishop in resplendent detail. Originally executed for a chapel or church, it is thought to have once belonged to a Francescan altarpiece, containing a companion painting of St. Francis of Assisi, which was completed by the artist concurrently.

Also included in the exhibition are two later works which have recently received conservation treatment. The first, by nineteenth-century French painter Jules Adolphe Goupil, is a flawlessly executed depiction of a Victorian lady. Seated in profile at a table of books—romantic and passive—she provides an excellent counterpoint to Portrait of a Gentleman, an oil on canvas by seventeenth-century Dutch painter Michiel van Müsscher, which seems to concern itself with a brutal, but no less elegant, world of regality and patriarchal power.
 
Picasso’s Le Vieux Roi (The Old King), a 1959 lithograph from one of the preeminent icons of western art, is included as well, picking up on Müsscher‘s theme of royalty but taking it to a much more playful place. Completed when the artist was in his eighties, it is drawn in a loose, smudgy, almost erotic style. It also exhibits one of Picasso’s primary themes from his later years – nubile young women being observed by aging and powerful men – in this case, a bearded king admiring his conspicuously nude maiden.
 
Other highlights of the exhibition include a selection of contemporary Japanese ceramics by masters of the medium such as Toshiko Takaezu and Hamada Shoji, a selection of etchings by the American master printmaker John Taylor Arms, and an unusual multiple by the American composer, philosopher, writer, and printmaker John Cage.
 
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.  The gallery is located on the first floor of the Fine Arts Building, also known as the Old Gym, at 23rd and West End Avenues, Nashville, Tennessee.  For more information, please visit the gallery’s website at www.vanderbilt.edu/gallery  or call 615-322-0605. Electronic images are available. Admission is free and the public is welcome to attend.

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