Milwaukee Art Museum Blog
After a highly successful and much-raved-about run, European Design Since 1985 has closed, and now the Museum looks forward to its next feature exhibition, Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic Architecture for the 21st Century. Stay tuned here for more information about this extraordinary look at “America’s greatest architect.”
The Museum Collection contains endless stories. Our paintings hold narratives of mythological legends; decorative art objects tell us of life way-back-when; contemporary art puts our finger on the pulse of what is going on now. But have you ever traced a story through the Collection? There are many ways to do this: you could follow an artist’s work through his or her lifetime, a collector’s vision (Mrs. Bradley, Mr. Layton, the list goes on…), or you could really veer off the beaten track and follow the story of a material—you know, what an art object is made out of. One of our super-star materials? Marble!
The Milwaukee Art Museum may have a small collection of ancient Mediterranean art, but we have some great pieces!
Take, for instance, our two ancient Greek Hydria. Walk into Gallery 1, and you will see them in the free-standing case on the right.
What is so exciting about Greek vases? Well, for one thing, they are some of the only artwork that we have remaining from this important ancient civilization. In particular, their decorations are the only hint that we have of what ancient Greek painting looked like. Practically all ancient painting has been destroyed due to its fragility. Greek vases survived because they were put into tombs and sanctuaries as offerings. In fact, the accident of their survival has made them more important to us than to the Greeks, who for the most part did not seem them as great art and used them as everyday objects.
In the American Collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum is an example of the long-standing artistic tradition, the still life painting. Apple and Two Pears on a Pewter Plate (1861) by Rubens Peale, speaks both to the history of the still life genre and the Peale family’s American artistic dynasty.
Historical origins of the still life trace back to antiquity, but it was not until the Renaissance that still life painting rose and flourished as a distinct tradition, when painters throughout Europe explored the art of painting a carefully arranged assemblage of objects.
Edmund Charles Tarbell (1862 – 1938), the famed American Impressionist painter, completed Three Sisters – A Study in June Sunlight in 1890. The painting, having stirred excitement and debate in the art world from its first appearance, was acquired not long after its completion by Mrs. Montgomery Sears.
Born to a wealthy family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mrs. Montgomery Sears was a prize-winning artist and respected photographer in her own right. An art patron and student of the arts, she studied under Tarbell at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and counted, among others, Tarbell, Mary Cassatt, and Alfred Stieglitz as personal friends. With their guidance, she eagerly collected the work of Edgar Degas, Edward Manet, Maurice Prendergast, Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and more. (Today, most of her collection resides in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)
So, how did Three Sisters find its way from one of the most important art collections of the early twentieth century to a fledgling art institute in the Midwest?
Happy Holidays to you and yours!
As indoor activities become more important, the Milwaukee Art Museum reminds you that children 12 and under are FREE everyday at the Museum. See below for a complete list of holiday hours.
This afternoon I had to run a quick errand to the Museum’s George Mann Niedecken archives (formerly Prairie Archives) and decided to take a camera, and you blog readers, along for the trip.
As we prepare for the upcoming Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic Architecture for the 21st Century exhibition, we are going through our own rich design holdings to see what we have that supplements the Wright drawings coming from the collection of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona.
So your family members (or out-of-town friends, or in-laws, take your pick!) are in town for the holidays, presents have been opened, feasts eaten, and now you need to entertain them. Naturally, you bring them to the Museum, knowing that you’ll be able to impress them with the architecture, a work of art in and of itself. But you want to impress them in the galleries, too; you want to show them something so incredible that it’ll even stun the know-it-all of the group.
The new exhibition Framing a Decade has opened to rave reviews and the newest acquisition by the Museum, a work by Ludwig Meidner, will be installed in the exhibition on Tuesday, so be sure to stop in this week and see just a small sampling of the over 3,000 prints and drawings that the Museum has acquired since 2001.
Postmodern design is a difficult thing to pin down or describe concisely. It refers to all manner of playful, ornamented, subversive, and/or heady things. The aesthetic is often likened to 1980s popular objects like Swatch wristwatches, but the designer’s meaning often runs much deeper.
For instance, Ettore Sottsass’s Carlton bookcase (1981) doesn’t immediately convey its rich meaning. When we first see it standing boldly outside the 20th-century Design gallery at the Museum, we see that it is brightly colored. We think it seems impractical for book storage. We might find the stick figure silly. Why is this a design classic? Why is it so important that the Museum keeps it on view?
Maybe because Carlton breaks a lot of rules? It is shockingly unconventional for a bookcase.