Category: Exhibitions

Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism explores the intersections of art, gastronomy, and national identity in late 19th-century France. Beginning with the 1870 Prussian siege of Paris and the resultant food crisis and continuing through the 1890s, Farm to Table showcases the work of artists such as Rosa Bonheur, Gustave Courbet, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro, who captured the nation’s unique relationship with food, from production to preparation and consumption.

Featuring approximately 50 paintings and sculptures, the exhibition’s portrayals of farmers in fields and gardens, bustling urban markets, and chefs and diners in the age of grand banquets and a burgeoning café scene underscores connections between urban and rural life while capturing changing notions of gender, labor, and class.

Explore the opulence and glamour of the Edwardian age – the period between the Victorian era and the First World War.

Visitors will learn about the lives and tastes of two of Britain’s most fashionable royal couples – King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and King George V and Queen Mary – from their family lives and personal collecting to their glittering social circles and spectacular royal events.

More than 300 objects from the Royal Collection will be on display – almost half for the first time – including works by the most renowned contemporary artists of the period, including Carl Fabergé, Frederic Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, Laurits Tuxen, John Singer Sargent and William Morris.

In order to mark the 400-year anniversary of the birth of Carlo Maratti (Camerano 1625 – Rome 1713) and the release of a critical catalogue of his works, the exhibition “Carlo Maratti and Portraiture: Popes and Princes of the Roman Baroque” by Simonetta Prosperi, Valenti Rodinò and Yuri Primarosa, showcases a little-known feature of this Marche artist’s production: his portraiture of the Roman nobility.

Although today he is mainly known for his paintings of religious subjects and his decoration of Roman churches, Maratti was famous throughout Europe for his portraiture. His studio rose to prominence also thanks to his drawn and painted effigies, securing Maratti’s place as a trendsetter of taste on the Roman art scene for over half a century.

Organised by the future Lusail Museum in collaboration with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Seeing Is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme features nearly 400 works, drawing extensively from the future Lusail Museum’s unparalleled collection of Orientalist art, including European depictions of the MENASA region spanning the 16th through 19th centuries. It also includes significant loans from Qatar Museums’ General Collections and prestigious institutions worldwide such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Islamic Arts Museum, Malaysia. New works commissioned from artists including Babi Badalov (b. 1959, Azerbaijan) and Nadia Kaabi-Linke (b. 1978, Tunisia) will reinterpret Gérôme for the 21st century.

One of the most famous and commercially successful European artists of the 19th century, Gérôme was heralded in his own time as a history painter and a visual storyteller, bringing the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome to life. Yet it was as a chronicler of the modern cultures and peoples of North Africa and the Middle East that he made his greatest impact. Travelling repeatedly to Egypt and Turkey and making many other stops in the region between 1855 and 1880, Gérôme created some of Orientalism’s most enduring images and themes. His depictions, at once fancifully imaginative and faithfully naturalistic, played a major role in defining the MENA world for Europe, America and Britain. Since 1978, his work has been the subject of critical scrutiny by art historians including Linda Nochlin, who famously read his paintings as part of a larger and more disturbing colonial plan. Seeing Is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme presents new and more wide-ranging interpretations of the artist, without ignoring the contributions of these scholars, or of Edward Said’s groundbreaking book, Orientalism.

In recent years, renewed interest in the artist has led to a fresh look at the multiple in the painter's studio. While the contemporary view of artistic creation most often leads to a pyramidal vision centered on an original and copies, the reality is very different. Reni's main biographer, Malvasia, reports that the painter's studio could gather up to 60 or even 200 people from all over Europe. The exhibition in Orléans presents the workings of the studio in all its richness and multiplicity, with several paintings studied in a new light thanks to reflections on the painter's production and restorations. An important section of the presentation will be devoted to David Contemplating the Head of Goliath by Reni and his collaborators, exploring the birth, development and legacy of a composition that was one of the most influential in 17th-century Western European art .

Approximately ten years separate the two paintings, which are two different interpretations of the so-called "Madonna of the Milk", a highly successful iconography that was created to tangibly visualise Mary's role as the mother of Christ. 

Gentileschi's painting bears witness to the novelty of Caravaggio's revolution and of painting "from nature", which transforms the sacred theme into an intimate, everyday moment. [...]

Van Dyck, on the other hand, following in the footsteps of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance, reinterprets the theme with a strong symbolic density, placing it in the context of the Nativity. [...]

The exhibition seeks to show how the dynamic interrelationship between art and life not only inspired Velázquez’s dazzling and enigmatic portrait of Mariana but also shaped the worldview of the queen as she fashioned her new political role. Exhibited on the West Coast for the very first time, Velázquez’s monumental image will be installed alongside an international group of artists whose works were collected by the Habsburg court. Paintings by Nicolas Poussin, Guido Reni and Peter Paul Rubens, all highlights of the Norton Simon Museum’s collections, evoke Mariana’s quotidian access to remarkable works of art, and they invite comparisons between Velázquez and artists he knew and admired. Mariana: Velázquez’s Portrait of a Queen will be displayed in proximity to the Museum’s paintings by Jusepe de Ribera, Bartolomé-Esteban Murillo and Francisco de Zurbarán, offering a rare opportunity to experience this essential quartet of 17th-century Spanish painters under one roof.

The Wadsworth Atheneum’s rich collection of European drawings, watercolors, and pastels is little-known and rarely seen. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the museum has acquired by purchase and gift a diverse group of nearly 1,250 European drawings of impressive quality. Paper, Color, Line showcases about sixty to seventy highlights on view for the first time in decades. This long overdue exhibition provides a unique survey of artists engaging with the medium over a span of more than five hundred years.

The museum’s holdings are particularly strong in works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Renowned drawings by Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec will be included in this exhibition, as well as highlights by Egon Schiele, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró. The collection is additionally noted for its theatrical designs, particularly its material linked with the Ballets Russes, which encompasses sheets by Pablo Picasso, Léon Bakst, and Natalia Gontcharova. Significant drawings from the Renaissance to the Rococo by artists such as Giorgio Vasari, Carlo Maratti, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze emphasize the timeless appeal of the medium and will complement the overview.

Recognized for her sophisticated approach to color, composition, and technique, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet (1865–1947) was part of a successful network of artists in Giverny, Rouen, and Paris during the first half of the twentieth century, although she is most often recognized for her relation to Claude Monet, her stepfather and one of France’s most famous painters. Having come of age at the center of the Impressionist movement, Hoschedé-Monet grew up surrounded by the modern masterpieces in the collection of her father, Ernest Hoschedé, who was a patron of such renowned artists as Édouard Manet, Monet, and Auguste Renoir. Her family’s move to Giverny in 1883 prompted her to take up painting in earnest. With Monet as her mentor, she developed a distinct style that favored carefully framed points of view and landscapes painted en plein air. As the first monographic exhibition of her work in the United States, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet in the Light brings together over forty paintings which attest to Hoschedé-Monet’s unique vision and ambitions as an artist in her own right. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue, with contributions by Nicolas Bondenet, Nancy Mowll Mathews, Galina Olmsted, Haley Pierce, and Philippe Piguet, constitute a definitive account of Hoschedé-Monet’s life and art.

The exhibition looks back at the ideological and methodical offensive waged by the Nazi regime againstmodern art, notably through the infamous Entartete Kunst exhibition held in Munich in 1937. By shedding light on this dark chapter in art history, the exhibition offers an enriched reflection on the attacks on the artistic avant-garde, through emblematic works and an in-depth historical context.

Curated by Johan Popelard, head of the conservation and collections department, and François Dareau, researcher at the Musée Picasso, this exhibition recalls the scale of the Nazi regime's persecution of the arts. More than 20,000 works, including those by figures such as Vincent Van Gogh, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso, were confiscated, destroyed or sold. Major artists such asOtto Dix, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee were stigmatized as representatives of this so-called "degenerate art", culminating in Entartete Kunst, which brought together over 600 works by around a hundred artists.

Following the path offered by the texts of Giovan Battista Marino (1569-1625), the exhibition traces a journey through the great Renaissance and Baroque art, from Titian to Tintoretto, from Correggio to the Carracci, from Rubens to Poussin, celebrating the greatest Italian poet of the 17th century and his 'marvelous' passion for painting.

Curated by Emilio Russo, Patrizia Tosini, and Andrea Zezza, the exhibition focuses on the golden age of the Baroque in painting and literature, a period during which the relationship between the two arts finds perhaps its highest expression in the life and works of the poet.

Known for his poem Adone (1623), centered on the love story between Adonis and Venus, Giovan Battista Marino is also the author of La Galeria (1619), a collection of 624 poetic compositions dedicated to an equal number of works of art, divided between Paintings and Sculptures, Fables and Histories. This collection was crafted with a play of reflections and a continuous expressive challenge between poetic texts and works of art, real or imaginary.