Tag: From the Collection

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Art Art News Events

What’s Happening at the Milwaukee Art Museum: Jan. 31-Feb. 6

Greetings Packers fans! For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with Museum news, the Museum has placed a friendly-but-serious wager on Super Bowl XLV, featuring your Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

The wager: If the Green Bay Packers win the Super Bowl, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh will loan its Renoir “Bathers with Crab” to the Milwaukee Art Museum. If the Steelers win, the Milwaukee Art Museum will loan its Caillebotte “Boating on the Yerres” to Carnegie for a few months. It’s French Impressionist v. French Impressionist for the Lombardi Trophy and bragging rights this Sunday, February 6.

But before that, come down to the Museum and see the Caillebotte in person! Thursday, Feb. 3 is Target Free First Thursday, and a great opportunity to head down to the lakefront.

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Art

From the Collection: Squirrel with Grapes Netsuke

View of three netsuke, Asian galleries

What’s the smallest thing on view in the galleries right now? These netsuke might just be it. In fact, they’re so tiny that you may have missed them the last time you were in the Asian Art Gallery. Don’t feel bad—just go back and visit them. They’ll be happy to see you. These quirky little figurines seem trivial and cutesy (a squirrel holding grapes?) but they actually served a very important purpose in Japanese society. Not too shabby for a little object no bigger than your thumb.

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Art Curatorial

From the Collection–The Newsboy

American (Pawtucket, Rhode Island), The Newsboy, 1888. Carved, assembled and painted wood with folded tin. Milwaukee Art Museum, The Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art. Photo by John Nienhuis.

The Museum often uses The Newsboy as a poster child for our spectacular Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art. The education department includes it on our Family Audio Tour, and the energetic boy has a place of honor on view in the Museum’s Folk & Self-Taught Galleries on the Upper Level. However, I personally didn’t know a thing about this wonderful….er.. sculpture? Statue? Sign? I didn’t even know what to call him!

For this “From the Collection” I thought it was time for me to learn more about this Museum treasure.

The Newsboy is a trade sign. An artful sculpture, certainly, but also an object that was made with a pragmatic purpose in mind. In 1888 Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where this trade sign was made by an unknown artist, a larger percentage of the population would have been illiterate. Merchants relied on eye-catching storefront signs like this one to grab the attention of passers-by without the need for words.

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Art Museum Buildings

From the Collection: Marble Through the Ages

Gaetano Trentanove, The Last of the Spartans, ca. 1892 (detail). Marble. Layton Art Collection, Gift of William E. Cramer. Photo by the author.

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!

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Ancient Mediterranean Art Art Collection Curatorial

From the Collection: Ancient Greek Vases

Niobid Painter Athens, Greece, active ca. 470–ca. 445 BC, Hydria (Water Jar), ca. 460 BC (detail).
Niobid Painter Athens, Greece, active ca. 470–ca. 445 BC, Hydria (Water Jar), ca. 460 BC (detail).

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.

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Art Curatorial

From the Collection–Rubens Peale “Apple and Two Pears on a Pewter Plate”

Rubens Peale (American, 1784–1865), Apple and Two Pears on a Pewter Plate, 1861. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, Layton Art Collection. Photo by John R. Glembin.

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.

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Art Exhibitions

From the Collection: Claude Mellan’s “The Sudarium”

Claude Mellan, The Sudarium, 1649, printed ca. 1720 (detail). Engraving. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of the Hockerman Charitable Trust. Photo by John R. Glembin
Claude Mellan, The Sudarium, 1649, printed ca. 1720. Engraving. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of the Hockerman Charitable Trust. Photo by John R. Glembin

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.

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Art Curatorial

From the Collection–Ettore Sottsass’ “Carlton” Bookcase

Ettore Sottsass, "Carlton" Bookcase/Room Divider, 1981. Milwaukee Art Museum, Centennial Gift of Gilbert and J. Dorothy Palay. Photo by John R. Glembin.

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.

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Art

From the Collection: Kees van Dongen’s “Woman with Cat”

Kees van Dongen, Woman with Cat, 1908 (detail). Gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley. Photo by Richard Eells. ©2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Kees van Dongen, Woman with Cat, 1908. Gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley. Photo by Richard Eells. ©2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

I’m just going to come right out and say it: I am consistently drawn to this painting because one of my cats looks just like Kees van Dongen’s long, lithe black feline in this painting. While thoughts of my beloved pet (and admittedly, attempts to push away considerations of my possible future as a cat lady) are initially what strike me as I approach this work, the reason I continue time after time to get up close and study it is not its subject, but that color.

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Art Collection Curatorial European

From the Collection–English Monteith

George Garthorne (English), Monteith, 1688. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, Virginia Booth Vogel Acquisition Fund. Photo by John R. Glembin.

‘Tis the spirit! There are spirits of Christmas past, jolly good tidings and spirits of the season, and then my favorite type of holiday spirits: The beer, liquors, and wines that keep us jolly through office parties and family reunions.

In what started as a playful nod to seasonal parties, I thought I’d highlight a late 17th-century silver monteith in the Museum’s Collection. But what started as a jolly excuse to talk about wine consumption then and now soon turned dark, as often happens when you dig deeper into the layered meanings of cultural objects.

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