Yale University Art Gallery Photos
There is an interesting conversation going on at the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) this month, and it’s going to last through the spring.
It started in 2013, when the Gallery became the beneficiary of the Arthur Ross Collection, a grouping of some 1,200 works on paper that had belonged to New York philanthropist Arthur Ross until his death until 2007. It continued as curators Suzanne Boorsch and Heather Nolin navigated the ins and outs of the kind of exhibition that comes with a big gift: contracts, mock ups, more mock ups, revisions, catalogue edits. Last Friday, it opened its discursive doors to the wider New Haven public, who will, in the best of circumstances, become a lively part of it.
“Meant to Be Shared: Selections From the Arthur Ross Collection” bridges the delicate divides between art historian, curious student, and lifelong museum-goer in a productive and satisfying way, offering a 200-object trip back to 18th-century Italy and 19th-century France and Spain that both delights in the canon and pushes beyond it, finding relevance in this year’s confounding visual and political landscape.
The exhibition runs from now through April 24, 2016.
On its surface, “Meant to Be Shared” is exactly what it sounds like: A deliberate and impressive sampling from a big, still-shiny new gift, and a rare look into the mind of a voracious collector. But Boorsch and Nolin, with the help of many interns, graduate students and former YUAG staff members that they affectionately refer to as “worker bees,” have done it very right, privileging visual cohesion and educational potential in a way that acknowledges but does not cave to the collection’s connoisseur-scented bent.
On the fourth floor, a series of prints guides viewers through the 18th-century Grand Tour of Italy. Scenes from Mortimer Menpes’ lush, sepia-kissed Venice, Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s wistful Rome, Canaletto’s fantastic Vedute, and Filippo Morghen’s Paestum are indulgent against farm-raised-salmon pink and very orange terra cotta walls intended to reflect Italian light. Around one corner, a giant plan of Rome in the style of Giovanni Battista Nolli, a spectacular art historical and geographic specimen, beckons; around another, Piranesi’s staggering Antichità romane (Roman Antiquities), a volume of etchings, promises to bring out the inner classicist lurking within all of us.
Meanwhile, on the first floor, a sort of “greatest hits,” grouped by Ross’ chronology of collecting, brings the thesis of the show home. While showcasing Ross’ ambitions as a collector, the display ultimately finds its strength as a dialogue about how artists interact with the world around them and with each other, across oceans, geographic barriers, and centuries. On the first few walls, selections from Goya’s magnificent tauromaquia sidle up to Pablo Picasso’s eponymous series, showing what of artistic and technical quotation outlasts the tests of time and memory. Deeper into the exhibition, Piranesi’s inventive, fantastical Carceri converse unexpectedly with Marvin E. Newman’s photographs of the built environment in late 20th-century New York. Other works speak directly to a sort of timeless timeliness — the palpable anxiety with which Goya rendered his Bobalicón and Disparate femenino; the anxious, transitional masculinity that surfaces in Honoré Daumier’s caricatures of literary women; and the “political belly,” Paul Gauguin’s exoticist woodcuts.
“It’s not that different from the world today — you’re anxious about something and you can’t quite put your finger on it,” Boorsch said at a press preview of the show last week.
True to its title, the exhibition is all about the exchange of visual ideas. Over the next years, it will travel in full to the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida and to the Syracuse University Art Galleries. Part of it will visit the Smith College and University of Texas at Austin museums of art, ultimately coming home in late 2017. How lucky we are, that we get to see it first.
To read more about the Yale University Art Gallery, visit the organization’s website.
