Master of the Dresden Prayer Book and workshop, “Annunciation with Tree of Jesse,” about 1500. Clowes Fund Collection. TR10965/4.

Unknown artist (Flemish), “Deposition,” about 1410-1420. Clowes Fund Collection. TR10965/2.

Conducting research on a French Book of Hours from the early 15th century (not currently on view), I had the opportunity to hold the small book (less than 8” long x 6” wide) in my hands. Turning the vellum pages slowly, “listening” to the delicate book as I went, I tried to imagine myself in the place of the original owners. Medieval users of Books of Hours were expected to say the entire cycle of the book’s prayers at eight prescribed times a day—hence the name “Book of Hours.”

Unknown artist (French), “Virgin and Child in hortus conclusus,” about 1430. Clowes Fund Collection. TR10965/3.

Painted miniatures such as the Virgin and Child in a Garden above were designed to guide prayer by helping medieval users visualize the sacred stories and figures. Studying this miniature, I marveled at how precise the hand of the unknown artist had been, from the tiny, long-limbed Christ Child—somehow appearing both squirmy and serene—to the rendering of each rose petal and each feather on the angel’s wing. The thicket of rose bushes behind the figures mirrors the swirls of densely packed, stylized ivy that borders the miniature. Roundels with smaller angels playing medieval instruments also decorate the margins. Robed in gold, orange, white, and pink, the angels sport green and red wings.

Equally striking is how beautiful the pages without painted miniatures are. The gothic script of the French and Latin text is itself a work of art. Though the script is even and fluent, the moments when the scribe re-inked the quill are evident.  Red pencil marks, faintly visible below each line of text, would have helped guide the scribe. The text is not without mistakes, either: at one point, a forgotten word is added in scrunched gothic lettering above a line. Notes scribbled in the margins were presumably added by the book’s original owner. Every page includes an ivy border dotted throughout with tiny flowers, leaves, and berries. Peacocks, storks, and little mint-green birds populate the ivy.

The two sumptuous Flemish Books of Hours currently on display in the Clowes Library were likewise made with great skill and created for similarly wealthy individuals. The early 15th century Hours features miniatures of graceful, elongated figures against flat, patterned backgrounds:

Unknown artist (Flemish), “Flagellation,” about 1410-1420. Clowes Fund Collection. TR10965/2.

In contrast, the early 16th century example pairs religious miniatures with fanciful border scenes from contemporary—albeit idealized—courtly life. The full-page decoration demonstrates a new interest in naturalistic detail. The organic designs along the margins are no longer strictly stylized ivy but instead appear like picked flowers pressed into the book.

Master of the Dresden Prayer Book and workshop, “Salvator Mundi,” about 1500. Clowes Fund Collection. TR10965/4.

Claude Monet's Home and Garden in Giverny in Spring. Photo by Ariane Cauderlier

Frederick Carl Frieseke, Richard E.Miller and Louis Ritman, whose paintings you can admire in the American Impressionist Gallery of the IMA, lived in France in the early twentieth century. They settled in the Normandy countryside town of Giverny, which had become a colony of artists attracted by the quiet living and beautiful landscapes revealed twenty years before in Claude Monet’s paintings.

 In France, these painters would participate in local exhibitions and develop a network of friends and buyers. They were part of the “Société internationale de peinture et sculpture”and of the “Groupe des peintres et sculpteurs américains de Paris,” which exhibited in Parisian galleries such as the Galerie Georges Petit, Galerie Knoedler, or Galerie Dewambez. Foreign artists were also promoting themselves in societies such as the American Art Association of Paris and the Société Artistique de Picardie. And they frequently exhibited at the Salon, which was the best exposure an artist could dream about in the early twentieth century. Louis Ritman and Frederick Frieseke even became members of the prestigious Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

In addition to their commercial success, they also received official honors from the French state: Miller and Frieseke were made Knights of the Legion d’Honneur, Miller received a gold medal at the 1900 Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, and paintings by these two artists were bought by the French state and are still part of the French national collection. Although a lot of their works were shipped to the U.S. where dealers such as Macbeth galleries would sell them, these artists found in France a real exposure and official recognition for their art.

Obviously, showing their works exposed them to critics. French art journalists would often praise the lightness, femininity and the bright colors of their works, focusing on the delicacy of their color harmonies. For example, one reviewer [1] highlighted the “light variations of a muffled daylight” [2], and the “subtle richness of the tones set” [3] in Frieseke’s paintings.

This sense of tonal harmonies is obvious in works like Early Morning Sunshine by Louis Ritman, or Afternoon – Yellow Room by Frieseke. In this work, he created a subtle pastel harmony of green, pink and white that envelopes the woman’s calm meditation. The model’s dress, so close to the fabric of the armchair, shows the painter’s ability to paint a subtle variety of whites, that led a journalist to call Frieseke ”the virtuoso of white.” [4]

Frederick Carl Frieseke, "Afternoon-Yellow Room," 1910. James E. Roberts Fund. 29.71.

It is interesting to read all of these comments about subtle color harmonies and pastel hues, knowing that Fauvist paintings were exhibited in Paris for almost a decade by then.  There’s a clear contrast in the vocabulary critics employ to describe the shocking colors used by Henri Matisse, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, perceived as wild and aggressive, compared to Miller, Frieseke and Ritman’s soft tonalities.

This taste for beautiful colors depicting pretty women in rich sunlit interiors is what American Impressionists were most appreciated and reproached for at the same time. In an article from 1910, the reviewer for L’Art et les Artistes comments on the frivolity and lack of meaning in a Richard Miller painting, writing it is “one more occasion for this clever artist to arrange pretty things, to paint a pretty dress…” [5]

Indeed, if American artists adopted the high key palette of Monet and Pissarro, American Impressionism isn’t similar to French Impressionism. Without being political, French Impressionism shows the society in its modernity: the urban life, the train stations, the smoking chimneys of the factories. This depiction of the modern world is totally absent from the images of women having tea, reading or looking at their mirror reflection painted by Frederick Frieseke, Louis Ritman and Richard Miller in Giverny.

Louis Ritman, "Early Morning Sunshine," about 1913. Partial and Promised Gift of Jane and Andrew Paine. 1997.5.

A journalist for La Gazette des Beaux-Arts summarizes that idea when writing about Louis Ritman’s work: “colors are solid and souls untroubled.” [6] Commenting on the serenity of the figures, he also expresses the lack of depth in the American Impressionist subject matters. Only interested in the color arrangements and the formal aspect of their works, the artists of the Giverny Group never minded with the psychology of their figures or with social concerns. By doing so, they were promoting both a vision of society and a way of painting that reassured conservative critics and Salon jury, along with the bourgeois clientele.

Frank Weston Benson, "Sunlight," 1909. John Herron Fund; 11.1

The coast of North Haven is where Frank Benson (1862-1951) executed the paintings he is most famous for – he went there every summer from 1898 to the 1920′s with his wife and children, who were his favorite models. Sunlight, the luminous painting owned by the IMA, makes no exception, representing the artist’s daughter Eleanor in a landscape not far from Wooster Farm, the Bensons’ vacation house. You will recognize her silhouette, bathed in sunlight, amongst other paintings in the exhibition Impressionist Summers: Frank W. Benson’s North Haven, if you have the chance to go to the Farnsworth Art Museum this summer.

In North Haven, Frank Benson found a way to convey atmospheric effects in his art, creating his most impressionist works. Indeed, the sunlight is the first thing we perceive of this painting, as we are dazzled by the bright whiteness of the girl’s dress and the clear blue summer sky around her. This will to represent the human figure in natural outdoor light is, of course, eminently impressionist. This is what Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir were seeking when they were painting together in 1869 at La Grenouillère, the famous restaurant on the Seine where Parisians went to spend their Sundays, bathing and boating.

But Frank W. Benson was American and painted Sunlight forty years later, in 1909, in a specific context that led him to this impressionist yet conservative style. Born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1862, Frank Benson studied in Boston, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where he became friends with the artists Edmund Tarbell (1862-1939) and Robert Reid (1862-1929), both represented in the collection of the IMA. He is known for his successful academic career:  he exhibited regularly at the Boston Art Club and at the National Academy of Design in New York, he taught at the Portland School of Art in Maine and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Frank Benson is also famous for his participation in the Group of The Ten American Painters and their first exhibition in 1898, which represented a renewal of American painting. Their main influence was Impressionism, which they could have seen at the exhibition the famous French Impressionists dealer Paul Durand-Ruel showed in New-York in 1886, or by travelling to Paris, like Tarbell or Hassam. Benson was also one of these: in 1883 he traveled to the French capital and studied at the Académie Julian, where many foreign artists came to learn under the academic and conservative teaching of Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. This studio was way more accessible than the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and filled with artists from all over Europe and America.

We see clearly in Benson’s painting the gathering of academic principles and impressionist ideas. This mixing of traditional design technique and composition matters, highly important to Benson all throughout his life, and of impressionist touch, colors and subject matter is omnipresent in Sunlight. The figure is surrounded by atmospheric effects, but doesn’t melt in them, her outline stays solid. The composition is strongly fixed with the straight lines of the hill and of the horizon, inside the vertical and narrow format of the canvas, which emphasizes the straightness of the figure. Inside this rigorous design, the apparent brushstrokes and the use of high-key colors testify to the artist’s impressionist technique.

Benson painted many pictures out nearby Wooster Farm, where he could use the old barn as a studio. When he worked there, the artist would often take photographs of outdoor scenes to use as tools and composition models, in order to complete his paintings in the studio afterwards. A photograph representing the almost exact same composition as Sunlight (taken of Eleanor Benson in North Haven, Maine from 1909, and located in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts), along with other photographs very similar to some of his paintings, were found in Benson’s family albums.

Frank Weston Benson, "Summer," 1909. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design.

Interestingly, this is to be linked with Benson’s use of the same motive again and again in different compositions, as explained by Faith Andrew Bedford (Frank W. Benson, ”The Divided Paintings,” American Art Review, Vol. VII, no.4, 1995). Photographs of models posing could be assembled in many different combinations on the canvas. For instance, the isolated figure of Eleanor in Sunlight is part of the group represented in Summer (1909, oil on canvas, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, bequest of Isaac C. Bates), and other figures of this painting exist individually in other paintings: Portrait of Margaret Strong (1909, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.), and Elizabeth and Anna (1909, oil on canvas, private collection). Benson even painted a horizontal version of Sunlight, called Eleanor on the Hilltop (1912, oil on canvas, private collection).

The Farnsworth Art Museum exhibition will be a great chance to observe this, and to try and find links between the different paintings.

This morning, in a room at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, I joined a group of museum colleagues (representing 151 institutions, from 40 countries!) and journalists for the launch of the next iteration of the Google Art Project. For those of us who worked on the project, this was our first look at the results of an all-hands-on-deck effort to prepare images and gather contextual information about the works in our respective collections. Each participating museum’s logo flashed on the screen as the revved up to the big reveal. Sorry for the blurry photo, but I got a little excited at this moment!

The big reveal

Google has made an incredible 30,000 + high-res images available in this wave of the project. At the IMA, we selected over 200 works from our collection to feature – a number that will continue to grow as we add more to the site. For us, this opportunity came at a moment when we were beginning to re-assess the content that’s available on the collection pages of our own website, coinciding perfectly with a major effort to expand this information and re-think the layout of these pages (more to come on this later!).

Art Project organizer Amit Snood revealed a number of features throughout the site demo, including search options that allow users to browse by artist’s name, artwork, type of art, museum, country, collections and the time period. To highlight the cross-collection capabilities, Amit walked us through a search he did for Van Gogh’s The Bedroom, which revealed not only the three versions on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, Van Gogh Museum and Musée d’Orsay, but also pulled in an artist he was previously unfamiliar with named Kyung Min Nam, who was inspired by Van Gogh’s work.

Search functionality demonstration

Users have the capability to create their own collections by saving their favorite works into galleries, adding comments, and sharing with friends.  Amit also featured the expanded street view and gigapixel options with a view of the galleries below us at the Musée d’Orsay:

Street view of the Musée d'Orsay

Of course, as soon as the demo was over we all made a beeline to the computers in the hallway to check it out, necks craning over shoulders to scope out our neighbor’s museum and our own.

Exploring the site for the first time, plus another shameless IMA plug

I’m looking forward to delving into the site further to look at the IMA’s collection in context with other works of art across the globe. Looking around the room this morning, Google’s goal of developing connections and providing access seems to be off to a pretty good start. Take a look and see what you think.

The IMA on Google Art Project

The Pont-Aven School formed around Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard in the 1880s and 1890s in the French province of Brittany. The artists in this circle were attracted to the rugged landscape and the colorful traditions of the Breton people served as inspiration. While the Pont-Aven artists are mostly known for their Breton scenes, they also reveled in the intellectual and social life of Paris. They visited galleries, attended concerts and plays, and gathered in the cafés and cabarets frequented by other artists, writers, and philosophers.

Many of the avant-garde artists of Paris focused on the cafés and dance halls of Montmartre, the working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of the city that became the heart of a lively, bohemian, racy entertainment industry that lured thrill-seeking audiences. Cheap rents in the neighborhood attracted up-and-coming artists and performers to move there, and find their subjects there. Raucous Montmartre—with its unbridled, tawdry, garish, provocative energy—was both their lifestyle and their artistic subject.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901), "At the Moulin Rouge: A Rude! A True Rude!," 1893. Lithograph. Gift of Phillipa Hughes, 2004.166

Born into an aristocratic family, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec began to draw at an early age and after injuries and disease left him partially disabled and socially marginalized, he embarked on a career as an artist. He moved to Montmartre in 1886, where he concentrated on documenting the characters of bohemian Paris. In paintings, prints, and drawings, he excelled at capturing people in their working environment, and at capturing crowd scenes populated by highly individualized figures. His compositions strip individuals down to their most salient physical characteristics in a manner that is both sympathetic and dispassionate.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901), "May Milton," 1895. Color lithograph. Gift of Frances B. and J. William Julian, 2003.110.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s bold poster designs secured lasting fame for an intriguing assortment of café-concert performers in Paris.  In fact, the fame of the English dancer May Milton rests almost entirely on Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster. According to critics, Milton, known as the “English Miss,” was short on both talent and physical beauty. Rather than idealize her appearance, Toulouse-Lautrec highlights her unusual physical features as a means of creating a visual identity for the dancer, so that her strong jaw and high kicks are instantly recognizable.

The artists of the Pont-Aven School were influenced not only by Toulouse-Lautrec’s subject matter, but also by his style. Their Parisian prints share Toulouse-Lautrec’s caricature-like treatment of faces, swiftly sketched contour lines, flattened forms, and layering of light and dark forms in order to create a sense of space and depth.

Armand Séguin may have met Toulouse-Lautrec through their mutual friend and colleague Emile Bernard. However the artistic contact came about, Séguin’s café themes are indebted to Toulouse-Lautrec.

Armand Séguin (French, 1869-1903), "The Café," 1893. Etching, aquatint and roulette. Gift of Samuel Josefowitz in tribute to Brett Waller and Ellen Lee, 1998.219.

A distinct difference in style exists between Séguin’s prints of Paris themes and his Pont-Aven subjects (see Primavera and Evening or The Gleaner, among other examples in the IMA’s collection). Paul Gauguin had commented on this stylistic difference, criticizing that the Paris works were too much like posters or caricatures.[1] In Séguin’s The Café, flat patterns silhouetted against each other create convoluted, twisting forms. The exuberant drawing style and caricatural features of the figures are reminiscent of works by Toulouse-Lautrec. The women who populate Séguin’s cafés are lightly flirtatious, but the looming dark forms and the sense of agitation created by the rhythmic lines render the atmosphere of the scenes vaguely sinister.

Printmakers in the Cafés of Paris is on view in the Jane H. Fortune Gallery through August.

vase; Marblehead Pottery; 1910-1920; Harold Victor Decorative Arts Fund; 1994.81

Viking-inspired motifs adorned the arts and crafts of Scandinavia, particularly Norway and Sweden, in the latter half of the nineteenth-century. This style of ornamentation, called Viking Revival or Dragon Style, developed from a collective enthusiasm for the Icelandic eddas and sagas in the Nordic countries and Great Britain. Studies of this heroic literature began in the seventeenth-century and gained considerable momentum during the nationalistic fervor of the nineteenth-century. Archaeological excavations near the Oslofjord in Norway unearthed the Tune (in 1867), Gokstad (in 1880), and Oseberg (in 1904-05) Viking ships, which further encouraged popular interest in the intrepid seafarers and provided material evidence of their technological advancements as shipwrights.

In America, Nordic studies were stimulated by Rasmus Bjørn Anderson (1846-1936), a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Building on the scholarship of Dane Carl Christian Rafn (1795-1864), Anderson wrote an alternate history of America’s discovery and reminded his audience that Leif Erikson preceded Christopher Columbus by nearly five hundred years. Anderson’s narrative appealed to recent Scandinavian immigrants, as well as long-established residents, who preferred the tale of Leif Erikson’s harmonious arrival to Columbus’ more controversial conquest (see J. M. Mancini’s “Discovering Viking America”). Anderson’s text encouraged others, such as Professor Eben Horsford (1818-1893) of Harvard, to investigate America’s Viking origins. Citing place-names akin to Old Norse and archaeological “discoveries” in the area, Horsford made the dubious assertion that Erikson had settled in the Charles River Basin in Massachusetts, instead of Newfoundland.

Anne Whitney, "Leif, the Discoverer," 1887.

According to J. M. Mancini and others, New Englanders embraced this discovery theory in the literary and visual arts. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow penned the famous poem “The Skeleton in Armor” (1841) after armor-clad human remains (purportedly belonging to a Norse settler) were found in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1832. Civic leaders memorialized Viking explorers in public statuary, such as Anne Whitney’s Leif, the Discoverer (1887) erected in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, and Viking imagery adorned architectural and interior designs in New England. Tobacco heiress Catherine Lorillard Wolfe (1828-1887) commissioned a Viking-inspired decorative program from William Morris (1834-1896), Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), and Walter Crane (1845-1915) for her Newport summer estate, appropriately called Vinland (now Salve Regina University’s McAuley Hall). A paperweight (1919; Museum of Fine Arts Boston) created Paul Revere Pottery of the Saturday Evening Girls Club (1908-1942) further attests to the ubiquity of Viking iconography in American home décor. The work, which is reminiscent of the IMA’s Marblehead vase, bears the design of a single longship.

Paper weight; Paul Revere Pottery of the Saturday Evening Girls Club, active 1908-1942; Decorated by Celia Goodman; Brighton, Massachusetts, U.S.; 1988.9; Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

All of this furor was very much a product of a time and place, when America strongly wanted to associate itself with Nordic history and folklore.  Consequently, the longship and similar motifs became emblems of nationalism in the United States. However, this would not have happened had there not been some underlying basis.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, "The Fifth Plague of Egypt," 1800. Gift in memory of Evan F. Lilly; 55.24.

John Ruskin (1819-1900) labeled J. M. W. Turner’s The Fifth Plague of Egypt (1800; IMA) “a total failure” in his magnum opus Modern Painters (1843-1860). Ruskin, who is often remembered as Turner’s greatest champion, delivered this harsh criticism on the grounds that the painting’s “awkward resemblances to Claude [Lorraine] testify the want of [Turner’s] usual forceful originality.” Modern Painters, a five volume polemic, held that Turner’s chief works shed the influence of the Old Masters, particularly Claude (ca. 1604-1682), Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), and Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), whose visual formulas and adherence to naturalism held sway well into the nineteenth-century. Ruskin dismissed the artist’s early landscapes as derivative and, as a result, unconvincing. He continued his literary assault on the composition, stating: “…the pyramids look like brick-kilns, and the fire running along the ground bears a brotherly resemblance to the burning of manure.” Ruskin’s knowledge of the motif likely derived from the mezzotint after The Fifth Plague of Egypt, which was included in the Liber Studiorum (“Book of Studies,” published in 1808), and not the original painting. Nevertheless, the sentiments expressed in Modern Painters reflect Ruskin’s bias.

Ruskin’s opinion did not represent the general consensus among contemporary viewers.  The debut of The Fifth Plague of Egypt at the Royal Academy’s 1800 exhibition was met with the approval of art critics, who applauded the painting’s ability to elicit an intense emotional response from its audience. The aesthetic treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), penned anonymously by the British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797), informed the public’s taste for landscape painting. Burke argued that scenes of terror produced a stronger visceral reaction than the pleasure derived from beauty. Here, Turner uses monumental scale, a swirling vortex of clouds, and chiaroscuro to dramatic effect in his depiction of the seventh plague’s destructive hail and fire. (The public overlooked Turner’s mistitling of the subject.) Jerrold Ziff’s article “Turner and Poussin” (1963) discussed the resemblance between The Fifth Plague of Egypt and Poussin’s similarly tempestuous Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (1650-51; Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt), and he proposed that a version of this earlier composition may have served as a model for Turner’s work. In addition, Barry Venning (Turner; 2003) aptly observes that the painting’s debt to Poussin and Richard Wilson (ca. 1713-1782) would have been commonly understood. Contrary to Ruskin’s supposition, Claude was a less obvious source for this particular work because his landscapes typically convey tranquility. The success of a painting in an academic context hinged on its fulfillment of established criteria and not, as Ruskin would later advocate, on the originality of its execution.

Artistic considerations aside, The Fifth Plague of Egypt was cast in a somewhat unusual role as the subject of a Super Bowl bet. That fortuitous intervention of the power of American football transported this famous painting to Louisiana in late March 2010. Claude’s Ideal View of Tivoli (1644) hung alongside The Fifth Plague of Egypt at the New Orleans Museum of Art for three months. The short-term loan was the result of a wager proposed by arts blogger Tyler Green and encouraged by then directors Maxwell L. Anderson of the IMA and E. John Bullard of NOMA. Juxtaposing the two paintings offered viewers complementary aesthetic models of landscape painting – the Sublime (the Turner) and the Beautiful (the Claude) – as initially discussed by Greek literary critic Longinus (1^st century CE) and expanded upon by Burke in the eighteenth-century. Modern audiences were, thus, better equipped to appreciate the qualities noted by attendees of The Fifth Plague of Egypt’s 1800 exhibition.

This pairing also rebutted Ruskin’s critique by elucidating Turner’s reasons for emulating seventeenth-century landscapes. Turner was determined to elevate the category of landscape painting in the hierarchy of genres, which he achieved by reinterpreting the Old Masters and imbuing his own works with greater historical or literary detail. As a stipulation in Turner’s will, London’s National Gallery received the gift of his paintings Dido Building Carthage; or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire (1815) and Sun Rising through Vapour (1807) on the condition that they hang in perpetuity next to Claude’s Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca (1648) and Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (1648), which are also historical landscapes. In my opinion, the outcome of the Super Bowl XLIV wager – a comparison of NOMA’s Ideal View of Tivoli, a pure landscape painting, and the IMA’s biblical Fifth Plague of Egypt – improves on Turner’s original plan.

Paul Gauguin, "Still Life with Profile of Laval," (1886). Samuel Josefowitz Collection of the School of Pont-Aven, through the generosity of Lilly Endowment Inc., the Josefowitz Family, Mr. and Mrs. James M. Cornelius, Mr. and Mrs. Leonard J. Betley, Lori and Dan Efroymson, and other Friends of the Museum. 1998.167

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) presented a painting to his friend and colleague Charles Laval (1862-1894) in 1887. The work, Still Life with Profile of Laval (1886), reinvigorates the longstanding European tradition of painters exchanging Freundschaftsbilder – pictures that demonstrate friendship and, often, artistic allegiance. Yet, in the article “Japan as Primitivistic Utopia: Van Gogh’s Japonisme Portraits” (1984), Tsukasa Kōdera credited van Gogh (1853-1890) with resuscitating this practice in 1888, a year after Gauguin’s gift to Laval. Van Gogh imagined Japanese artists living and working in a fraternal community, which he sought to emulate. He envisioned developing a similar artists’ cooperative in Arles, his new home and a place he called the “atelier du Midi.” Kōdera cites correspondence between Gauguin and the Dutch artist (specifically, a letter [now lost] dated September 1888) as evidence that van Gogh proposed a portrait exchange to foster the Gemeinschaft (sense of community) between himself and fellow artists Gauguin, Laval, and Émile Bernard (1868-1941). However, Van Gogh’s role as progenitor of the modern Freundschaftsbild is debatable. His inspiration to exchange portraits was derived from a false impression that Japanese artists participated in the same activity. According to Kōdera, Self-Portrait: Les Misérables (1888; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) represents Gauguin’s first contribution to the genre. Van Gogh reciprocated the gesture with his Self-Portrait as Bonze (1888; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, Cambridge, MA).

Paul Gauguin, "Self-Portrait with Portrait of Bernard (Self-Portrait: Les Misérables)," 1888. Oil on canvas, 45 x 55 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Vincent van Gogh, "Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin (Self-Portrait as Bonze)," 1888. Oil on canvas, 59.5 x 48.3 cm. Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA.

These portraits, which are rendered in new artistic idioms, announce the painters’ collective denial of naturalism and simultaneous entrée into the international Symbolist movement. Interestingly, Still Life with Profile of Laval (1886), which predates van Gogh’s request to swap portraits and Gauguin’s rejection of Impressionism, has not yet been discussed in these terms.

Gauguin and Laval cultivated their friendship at another artists’ colony – Pont-Aven, in northwest France – during the summer of 1886. Still Life with Profile of Laval probably dates to Gauguin’s residency in Paris the following winter. Here, he worked in close proximity to Laval in an intimate studio on rue Lecourbe. (Laval’s own studio was located at 150 boulevard Pereire.) Through his work with Gauguin, Laval shed the practices of his formal instruction under Léon Bonnat (1833-1922) and Fernand Cormon (1845-1924), and took up Impressionism. Still Life with Profile of Laval depicts the eponymous figure examining an amorphous vase. The stoneware vase (now lost), fired by Ernest Chaplet (1835-1909), is the handiwork of Gauguin. He may have even conceived of the vase as a symbolic self-portrait. Gauguin’s Self-Portrait Vase with a Severed Head (1889; Designmuseum Danmark, Copenhagen) would create a literal association between creator and object some three years later. If read in this way, Still Life with Profile of Laval functions as a double portrait.

Paul Gauguin, "Self-Portrait Vase in the Form of a Severed Head," 1889. Stoneware ceramic. Designmuseum Danmark, Copenhagen. (via http://blog.tate.org.uk/?attachment_id=1955)

In Gauguin’s painting, the bespectacled figure also scrutinizes an assortment of produce, which may allude to the Impressionists’ regard for visual perception. Still Life with Profile of Laval does not endorse the mere transcription of nature; in fact, the work subverts the established emphasis on verisimilitude in art. Portraits of artists in their studios, such as Christen Købke’s (1810-1848) Portrait of Landscape Painter Frederik Sødring (1832; Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen), traditionally include a mirror – a reference to the Platonic conception of art as a reflection of nature. (A point underscored in the viewer’s glimpse of one of Sødring’s landscapes, hanging opposite the mirror.)

Christen Købke, "Portrait of Landscape Painter Frederik Sødring," 1832. Oil on canvas, 42.2 x 37.9 cm. The Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen. (via http://www.hirschsprung.dk/Image.aspx?id=24&col=5)

In contrast, Gauguin purposely obscures a form (the mysterious blue rectangle at center) that might be read as a mirror. He was particularly inspired by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), who employed new compositional strategies to interpret his subject matter. The brushstrokes and mottled fruit in Still Life with Profile of Laval reference Cézanne’s still lifes. Gauguin’s Landscape near Arles (1888; IMA), executed upon his arrival at van Gogh’s atelier du Midi, exhibits a lingering debt to Cézanne. Edgar Degas (1834-1917), another artist he admired immensely, is honored in the unusual cropping of Still Life with Profile of Laval. This painting, as a Freundschaftsbild, demonstrates shared artistic ideology, derived from the experiments of Cézanne and Degas. Two years later, Gauguin would dispense with naturalism altogether, concentrating on interior vision instead. It is at this time that he formulated the artistic language of Synthetism with Bernard in Fall 1888. At the request of van Gogh, he painted another Freundschaftsbild – Self-Portrait: Les Misérables – to commemorate this shift in their artistic aims.

The IMA acquired numerous Egyptian artifacts in 1928, including this bronze sculpture:

The Goddess Neith, 664BCE - 332BCE; Emma Harter Sweetser Fund; 28.224.

In addition to archeological successes, America’s revitalization and construction boom of the 1920’s was nationwide and Indianapolis was no exception. The economy had mostly recovered after WWI and hadn’t yet fallen into depression. A time of industry, it was a decade of heavy construction in Indianapolis. On Monument Circle alone, the Columbia Club, Guaranty Building, Test Building and Circle Tower still stand today as a tribute to the roaring twenties.

As industry grew, so did the height of the built environment. Skyscrapers were born during this era (the Empire State Building was begun in 1929).  At the time, Indiana’s tallest skyscraper was Merchants National Bank topping out at seventeen stories, and remained the tallest building in Indiana until 1962.  As competition for height soared, so did the demands of decoration.

Art Deco was the most popular decorative art style of the 1920’s, originating in Paris. It is a hybrid art form, combining quotations from empirical civilizations (Egypt) and a hunger for the innovation of the machine industry.  It mainly features linear symmetry and geometric shapes in its design.  Natural and circular forms are limited, or simplified during this time period. Notice the geometric designs of this ancient headdress compared with this purse created in the 1920’s:

Mummy Mask, 332-30 B.C.; Emma Harter Sweetser Fund; 28.243.

Purse, early 1900s. Gift of Stella and Fred Krieger; 2009.312.

Art Deco and traditional Egyptian figural art both feature flat two-dimensional characteristics, as can be seen on Circle Tower. The building is also a nod to Aztec influence – note the stair-stepped design below.

Circle Tower is one of many existing Art Deco building in Indianapolis.  It particularly features intricately designed bronze ornamentation of Egyptian workers. Bronze was similarly popular in the ancient world, as it was a symbol of man’s achievement. (Bronze is an alloy that must be combined through human effort and is not found in nature). The Tower’s main structure is Indiana limestone.

Circle Tower is fourteen stories with a two story tower. It was the first building on the circle to feature “set back” construction in order to comply with the controversial 1905 height restriction ordinance. This ordinance stated that no building could be higher than 86 feet, so as to obstruct the Soldiers and Sailor’s Monument from sight.  So the main part of Circle Tower is 86 feet, but the additional tower is set back, in order to achieve height and carefully comply with the rules.

These bronze elements on Circle Tower show Egyptian iconography through representing figures at work.  Also, on the elevator doors in the interior lobby are similar figures, except they are portrayed as helping pull the elevator ropes and cranks to move the elevator from floor to floor.

So next time you stop at Starbucks on Monument Circle, (a current occupant of Circle Tower) make sure you check out the many unique details of the building (and some not covered in this blog) and next time you are at the IMA , be sure to catch the  Egyptian artifacts on the third floor!

My first weeks at the museum have been filled with introductions.  In addition to meeting new coworkers, there were plenty of new places to get to know as part of the job.  Work-related travel has included a day trip to the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana to examine furniture in storage, condition checking the Mary Miss installation FLOW: Can You See The River? in 100 Acres, and a behind-the-scenes tour of the historic Oldfields-Lilly House and Gardens.

My introduction to the museum’s collection of African Art, however, is proving to be the most complicated. One of my main responsibilities at the IMA is to help prepare that collection for reinstallation early next year. This will involve months of surveying, testing and treating objects in that collection, as well as consulting on matters of storage and display. To begin to tackle this project, I wanted to assemble a list of the objects in the IMA’s collection of African Art, in order to ensure that my survey is thorough.

That practical, seemingly simple, request led me straight into questions of how African Art is defined at the IMA. If the answer seems apparent–that African Art is defined as art that comes from Africa–then consider the following example. The IMA owns two works by the living artist El Anatsui, who was born in Ghana and currently works in Nigeria. One work, Sacred Comb, is on display in the Eiteljorg suite of African Art. However, the other piece, Duvor (Communal Cloth) is displayed in the museum’s Contemporary Art galleries.

Which artwork by El Anatsui is classified as African Art at the IMA?

Because these two curatorial departments use different criteria to define their collections (geography vs. time period), both can claim either work.  Furthermore, the IMA’s department of Textiles and Fashion Arts uses still different parameters for defining their collection–those of medium and use.  As a work that references traditional West African strip-woven textiles, Duvor (Communal Cloth) is actually catalogued as part of the Textiles and Fashion Arts collection.

Does it matter for the objects that the IMA holds Egungun masker’s garments in both Textiles and Fashion Arts and in African Art?  Or that wooden masks, which are also used as part of the Egungun masquerade, are only held in the African Art collection and not associated with Textiles and Fashion Arts?

The context of the collection certainly shapes how the objects are discussed in wall texts and displayed in the galleries, with different emphasis on the aesthetic or functional qualities of the works.

During my internship, only works held in the collection of African Art will be surveyed.  Therefore, these African pieces will receive different treatment than those in other collections. For example, as a first step in the reinstallation, pre-program intern Nicole Peters, and I have been conducting x-ray fluorescence testing (XRF) on objects in the African galleries.

IMA intern Nicole Peters and IMA fellow Kristen Adsit conduct XRF testing of a face mask from the We culture in the Eiteljorg suite of African Art.

This analytical method reveals the elemental composition of the surface tested. We have been using it to look for traces of inorganic pesticides, which may have been applied historically to objects in the African collection, including remnants of toxic heavy metal compounds. Though African works held in the Textiles and Fashion Arts collections may also have been treated with these compounds, they are not included in this survey and will not be tested at this time.

Classifications can also help identify historical treatment of an object, since works in the same collection are likely to share a certain amount of history.  In contrast to the African and Textiles collections, it is unlikely that contemporary works by African artists would have been treated with heavy metal pesticides, as they have been made after such compounds have been widely replaced with organic ones.

The IMA is among many major art museums grappling with these issues.  Far from theoretical, how collections are defined at an institution raises practical questions that must be addressed thoughtfully as part of our daily work.