The Peacock Room Comes to America

The Peacock Room Comes to America
April 9, 2011–Spring 2013
Freer Gallery of Art
Washington, DC

For the first time, the Freer Gallery's renowned Peacock Room has been restored to its appearance in 1908, when museum founder Charles Lang Freer used it to organize and display more than 250 ceramics he had collected from throughout Asia. As the first special exhibition held in the room since it underwent conservation in 1993, The Peacock Room Comes to America highlights Freer's belief in "points of contact" between American and Asian art and the aesthetic relationships to be found among the museum's diverse collections.

The Peacock Room was originally designed by architect Thomas Jeckyll for British shipping magnate Frederick Leyland, who wanted a place to showcase his blue-and-white Chinese porcelain collection in his London home. When American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler redecorated the room in 1876 and 1877 as a "harmony in blue and gold," he was inspired by the delicate patterns and vivid colors of the Chinese porcelains. Their slick surfaces, however, did not appeal to Freer, who favored complex surface textures and subtly toned glazes. After he purchased the Peacock Room and moved it from London to his mansion in Detroit in 1904, Freer filled the shelves with pots he had acquired from Egypt, Iran, Japan, China, and Korea. The current presentation of works is based on photographs taken in Freer's Detroit residence in 1908.

Much like the room's arrangement in Detroit more than a century ago, this exhibition underscores Freer's belief that "all works of art go together, whatever their period." That faith in cross-cultural aesthetic harmonies achieved its ultimate expression in the Freer Gallery of Art, which opened to the public in 1923. Whistler's imaginative interior, now fittingly located between galleries of Chinese and American art, embodies the meeting of East and West. Enjoy the Peacock Room as Charles Lang Freer did by making unexpected aesthetic connections between art and decoration, paintings and ceramics, and America and Asia.

http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/peacockRoom.asp

http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online/peacock/default.htm

Calder’s Portraits: A New Language - at the National Portrait Gallery

Calder’s Portraits: A New Language

March 11 through August 14, 2011

Best known for his abstract mobiles and stabiles, Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was also a prolific portraitist. Throughout his career Calder portrayed entertainment, sports, and art-world figures, including Josephine Baker, Jimmy Durante, Babe Ruth, and Charles Lindbergh, as well as colleagues Marion Greenwood, Fernand Léger, and Saul Steinberg, to name a few. Typically, Calder worked in the unorthodox medium of wire, a flexible linear material, which he shaped into three-dimensional portraits of considerable character and nuance. Suspended from the wall or ceiling, the portraits are free to move; because of this mobility, they seem—like their subjects—to have a life of their own. This unprecedented exhibition will feature Calder’s work alongside contemporary documents—photographs, drawings, and especially caricatures by such artist-illustrators as Paolo Garretto, Miguel Covarrubias, and Paul Colin—and will pose questions regarding the line between fine-art portraiture and caricature. The exhibition will also shed light on an often overlooked aspect of Alexander Calder’s career, as well as on broader narratives of American culture of the twentieth century. Barbara Zabel is the guest curator for this exhibition.

http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/calder/index.html

http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/exhcalder.html

This Summer @ The Corcoran Gallery of Art

Washington Color and Light

Reopens June 25–August 14, 2011

Washington Color and Light presents major works by the artists associated with the Washington Color School and their contemporaries. These works are united by an exploration of the language of abstraction, a desire to experiment with materials, and a love of color. The exhibition reveals the artistic innovations and individual approaches that shaped new directions in abstract painting and sculpture from the 1950s through the late 1970s. Living and working in Washington, D.C., Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Morris Louis, Howard Mehring, Kenneth Noland, and Paul Reed first displayed works together in an exhibition called Washington Color Painters in 1965. While these six artists never thought of themselves as a group, the Color School title became synonymous with local abstract painting of the time. Washington Color and Light includes galleries dedicated to the monumental stripe paintings of Gene Davis; meditations on color and space by Thomas Downing; and hard-edge abstract paintings by Howard Mehring, Kenneth Noland, and Paul Reed. In addition, the exhibition includes sculptures by Rockne Krebs, Ed McGowin, and Anne Truitt, as well as glorious color-saturated paintings by Willem de Looper, Sam Gilliam, and Alma Thomas.

http://www.corcoran.org/colorandlight/index.php

Paul Gauguin at the National Gallery of Art

Gauguin: Maker of Myth

February 27–June 5, 2011

Paul Gauguin's sumptuous, colorful images of Brittany and the islands of the South Seas are some of the most appealing paintings in modern art. They will be represented among nearly 120 works by Gauguin in the first major look at the artist's oeuvre in the United States since the blockbuster National Gallery of Art retrospective of 1988–1989, The Art of Paul Gauguin. Organized by Tate Modern, London, in association with the Gallery, Gauguin: Maker of Myth brings together self-portraits, genre pictures, still lifes, and landscapes from throughout the artist's career. It includes not only oil paintings but also pastels, prints, drawings, sculpture, and decorated functional objects. Organized thematically, the exhibition examines Gauguin's use of religious and mythological symbols to tell stories, reinventing or appropriating narratives and myths drawn both from his European cultural heritage and from Maori legend.

Gauguin (1848–1903) was the ultimate global traveler, sailing in the South Pacific and living in Peru, Paris, Martinique, and Tahiti, among other places. The exhibition features many of his iconic paintings, on loan from around the world—ranging from scenes of religious life near the artist's colony of Pont-Aven in Brittany to the colorful, exotic canvases depicting the people and the tropical flora and fauna of the islands of French Polynesia, where he moved to escape European civilization. In Tahiti, he immersed himself in its fast-disappearing Maori culture to invest his art with deeper meaning, ritual, and myth, a fusion that continues to mesmerize audiences worldwide.

Organization: Organized by Tate Modern, London, in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/gauguininfo.shtm