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2005 Exhibitions
Famous Views: Japanese Landscape Prints by Hiroshige
Dec. 2, 2005 – Jan. 29, 2006
Hiroshige (1797-1858), the great Japanese master of color woodblock prints, achieved his first fame as a landscape artist with his Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (1831-34), a series depicting the way-stations along the highway connecting Edo (Tokyo) with Kyoto. The exhibition features prints from this and other renowned series, including the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and Famous Places in the Sixty-Odd Provinces.
Urban Pastimes: New York at Play in Early Twentieth-Century Art
Sept. 30 – Nov. 20, 2005
Urban life — including street fairs, city parks, burlesque shows, and boxing matches — provided lively subjects for many American artists of the early twentieth century such as John Sloan, Reginald Marsh, George Bellows, Jerome Myers, and Isabel Bishop. This exhibition features works from the Ken Ratner Collection (on long-term loan) as well as from the permanent collection of University of Saint Joseph Art Gallery.
Thursday, Sept. 29
5 – 6 p.m. – Champagne Preview for Friends of the University of Saint Joseph Art Gallery
6 – 7:30 p.m. – Opening Reception
Saturday, Oct. 15
Teachers Workshop (K-12) – Call 860.231.5367 for information
Rolph Scarlett Paintings and Works on Paper
June 10 – Sept. 17, 2005
Timed to coincide with Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Rolph Scarlett Paintings and Works on Paper traces the artist’s development as a non-objective painter working in a variety of idioms. It includes geometric abstractions, “lyrical” abstractions, gestural drip paintings, and hard-edged geometric works. For Scarlett, painting was an “attempt to reach for universal order” through the aesthetics of form, color, and rhythm.
The exhibition was drawn from several private collections, and includes works never before exhibited publicly. “Rolph Scarlett is one of several artists active in the 1930s and 40s whose work is finding renewed interest among scholars and collectors,” said Ann Sievers, director of the University of Saint Joseph Art Gallery and curator of the exhibition. “This is an opportune moment to examine his contribution to American painting and present his work to a wider public.”
Two special events were planned to correspond with the exhibition: the Art Gallery offered a bus trip to the Guggenheim Museum on Wednesday, June 29, featuring a private tour of Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim. The trip also included a visit to the renovated and expanded Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
On Sunday, July 10 at the University of Saint Joseph Art Gallery, Ann Sievers presented a gallery talk on the exhibition and a conversation with one collector of Rolph Scarlett’s work, who is a major lender to the exhibition.
Protect and Conserve: Caring for Works of Art on Paper
April 1 – May 21, 2005
Using examples from the permanent collection, this exhibition explores the effects of light, humidity, and other agents that over time can damage works of art on paper, and demonstrates museum techniques for displaying and protecting these works. It will include an array of watercolors and prints, many of which have been conserved recently through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library services, a federal agency.
To End All Wars: Kerr Eby’s World War I Prints
Jan. 14 – March 12, 2005
The First World War (1914-1918), often called “The War to End All Wars,” changed the face of Europe. Some of the bloodiest battles of the war were fought in the towns and fields of northeastern France, where Kerr Eby served in the 40th Engineers, Artillery Brigade, Camouflage Division, which protected artillery at the front. His unit participated in major American offensives of 1918 that prevented the Germans from pushing further toward Paris through northeastern France.
After the war, Eby began making prints based on his wartime sketches, returning to this theme repeatedly throughout his life. Whereas his first prints appear to record vignettes observed, the later prints assume increased symbolic force, sometimes incorporating explicitly Christian references. In 1935, concerned about the threat of another war in Europe, Eby exhibited most of his World War I prints accompanied by an essay that is an eloquent anti-war statement based on his personal experiences. Eby’s last World War I prints show increasingly graphic scenes of death. His final etching on the subject presents Mars, the Roman god of war, as an obese and voracious destroyer, the embodiment of Eby’s belief that “lawful, not to say sanctified, wholesale slaughter is simply slobbering imbecility.”
This exhibition features 27 drypoints, etchings, and lithographs, many of them trial proofs on loan from two private collections.