Emile-René Menard, Homer, detail, ca. 1885, Oil on canvas. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Purchase, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Davidson, 1980.4. |
Contrasting and Comparing, Looking and Listening |
Honoré Daumier, Monsieur Babinet prévenu par sa portière de la visite de la comète [Mr. Babinet warned by his housekeeper of the arrival of the comet], from the series The Comet, September 22, 1858, Lithograph on original newsprint. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions.
Pierre Bonnard, illustration for Le petit solfege illustre, 1893, Printed book, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions, 2007.106.
Eugene Medard, A Patrol, St. Cloud, September 1870, ca. 1870-72, Oil on canvas. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Purchase, The Cochrane-Woods Collection, 1977.9. |
Smart Museum of Art Audiences in different eras look at art and listen to music in dramatically different ways. The experience of looking or listening is not historically constant, but rather varies with social settings, technologies, and trends. During the nineteenth century, the habits and fashions associated with looking and listening changed rapidly. The proliferation of mechanically reproduced images (and later, recorded sound); the rise of museums, galleries, and concert halls; and the burgeoning science of psychology all transformed how people encountered the arts. Further, they altered how artists sought to capture the attention of their viewers and listeners. Incorporating a mix of works from the Smart Museum's collection and selected loans, this exhibition combines prints, paintings, drawings, sculptures, as well as music from nineteenth-century France. Looking and Listening cuts to the heart of debates about art and its function, and examines just what it is that attracts and secures an audience's attention in visual and musical works. The exhibition includes work by: Ménard studied at the Academy Jullian from 1880 after having been a student of Baudry, Bouguereau, and Henri Lehmann. He participated in the Salon of the Secession in Munich, and the Salon de la Libre Esthétique in Brussels during 1897. Several personal exhibitions were also devoted to him at the Georges Small Gallery. In 1921 he exhibited in the Twelfth Salon along with Henri Martin and Edmond Aman-Jean. Galleries in Buffalo, New York and Boston, Massachusetts exposed Menard and his art to the United States. However, the numerous commissions that Ménard received from the French government crowned his career; for example, the cycle for the Hautes Etudes à la Sorbonne, the Faculté de Droit, and the fresco Atoms for the Chemistry institute, and finally the Caise des Dépôts in Marseilles. Honoré Daumier (February 26, 1808-February 10, 1879, Marseille, France) was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter, sculptor, and one of the most gifted and prolific draftsmen of his time. Daumier showed in his youth an irresistible inclination towards the artistic profession, which his father vainly tried to check by placing him first with a huissier, and later, with a bookseller. Having mastered the techniques of lithography, Daumier began his artistic career by producing plates for music publishers, and illustrations for advertisements. This was followed by anonymous work for publishers, in which he emulated the style of Charlet and displayed considerable enthusiasm for the Napoleonic legend. Pierre Bonnard (b. Fontenay-aux-Roses, France, October 3, 1867-January 23, 1947) was a painter and printmaker, who led a happy and careless youth as the son of a prominent official of the French Ministry of War. At the insistence of his father, Bonnard studied law, graduating and practicing briefly as a barrister. However, he attended art classes on the side, and soon decided to become an artist. In 1891 he met Toulouse-Lautrec and began showing his work at the Salon des Indépendants. His first show was at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1896. In his twenties he was a part of Les Nabis, a group of young artists committed to creating work of symbolic and spiritual nature. Other Nabis include Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis. He left Paris in 1910 for the south of France. Bonnard is known for his intense use of color, especially via areas built with small brushmarks and close values. His often complex compositions—typically of sunlit interiors of rooms and gardens populated with friends and family members—are both narrative and autobiographical. His wife Marthe was an ever-present subject over the course of several decades. She is seen seated at the kitchen table, with the remnants of a meal; or nude, as in a series of paintings where she reclines in the bathtub. He also painted several self-portraits, landscapes, and many still lifes which usually depict flowers and fruit. Curators of the exhibition are Martha Ward, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, and Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Mellon Program Coordinator. |
Gustave Leheutre, The Duet (Le Duo), detail, 1896, Color drypoint on laid paper. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions, 2005.22. |
