Late winter is a perfect time to boost your art I.Q. From Cambodian sculpture to the controlled and lovely designs of William Morris, the Cleveland Museum of Art is highlighting a variety of artists and artistic styles.
Here are the museum’s ongoing and upcoming exhibits. All are free except Eyewitness Views: Making History in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Eyewitness Views: Making History in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Sunday, February 25- Sunday, May 20, The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall. Adults $12; seniors and college students $13; children 6–17 and member guests $6; children 5 and under and CMA members FREE
Eyewitness Views: Making History in Eighteenth-Century Europe showcases outstanding masterworks by revered artists who recorded some of the most newsworthy events and impressive spectacles of eighteenth-century Europe.
Whether depicting a triumphal procession, a joyous celebration, or the catastrophic eruption of a volcano, the vibrant, colorful, and often monumental paintings in Eyewitness Views re-create what it was like to witness these magnificent occasions.
Featuring nearly 40 richly detailed master paintings that utilize the impressive monuments of Venice, Rome, Paris, Warsaw, and other European cities as a backdrop, Eyewitness Views is the first exhibition to exclusively examine view paintings—faithful depictions of a given locale—as representations of contemporary (eighteenth-century) historical events.
While costumes and customs illustrated in the paintings may differ from those of today, the feelings of anticipation and excitement generated by witnessing a momentous event will resonate with every visitor to this beautiful and historic “time capsule” exhibition.
View paintings were regularly commissioned by rulers, princes, ambassadors, and religious dignitaries to commemorate key moments in their personal and professional lives. Master view painters such as Bernardo Bellotto, Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, and Giovanni Paolo Panini recorded events ranging from the spectacular pageantry of a Venetian regatta to the solemn ritual of a religious procession. In the process, they produced some of their most significant and beautifully detailed works.
Cleveland is the final destination for Eyewitness Views: Making History in Eighteenth-Century Europe, so this is the last opportunity to see these important masterpieces from collections around the world that recorded history as it happened.
This exhibition is co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Beyond Angkor: Cambodian Sculpture from Banteay Chhmar (exhibition extended), through Sunday, March 25, The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Gallery
At the turn of the 1200s, the Khmer Empire of Cambodia was one of the most powerful in the world. From 1181 to 1218, King Jayavarman VII ruled under the banner of Buddhism and expanded his dominions to include most of peninsular Southeast Asia. For centuries, Angkor was the official capital, but Jayavarman VII built a second political and religious center about 68 miles northwest of Angkor at Banteay Chhmar, his “Second Citadel.”
This exhibition features an unprecedented loan from the National Museum of Cambodia of a section from the sculpted enclosure wall of the great royal temple at Banteay Chhmar. Intricately carved in low relief, the wall depicts a unique, larger-than-life image of the bodhisattva of compassion––ten-armed Lokeshvara––surrounded by devotees.
Complementing the loan of the bas-relief from Banteay Chhmar, works from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s renowned collection of Cambodian art from the time of Jayavarman VII are on view, contextualized by photographs of the site by Jaroslav Poncar and digital reconstructions by Olivier Cunin. Thanks to the generosity of the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts of the Kingdom of Cambodia, visitors to the Cleveland Museum of Art have the opportunity to experience some of the grandeur of the temple at Banteay Chhmar.
Beyond Angkor: Cambodian Sculpture from Banteay Chhmar is organized in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts of the Government of the Kingdom of Cambodia.
Graphic Discontent: German Expressionism on Paper, through Sunday, May 13, James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Gallery | Gallery 101
The beginning of the 20th century brought a surge of challenges to the prevailing styles and procedures for art making in Europe. Many young artists in central Europe rejected traditional training in state-sponsored art academies and formed groups with other artists who shared their desire to depart radically from what they saw as art’s emphasis on outward appearances. The groups Die Brücke (The Bridge), founded by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Erich Heckel in Dresden in 1905, and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), founded by Vassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in Münich in 1911, experimented together with form and technique, leading to groundbreaking publications and exhibitions. These and other artists working in Vienna and Berlin—collectively called the Expressionists—employed a condensed, abstracted visual language to access highly charged emotional or spiritual states.
Prints and drawings were essential to the Expressionists’ quest for art that was direct, frank, and immediate. Drawn from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection, Graphic Discontent: German Expressionism on Paper plots the purpose and impact of the graphic arts within the wider German Expressionist movement.
Woodcuts—the most emblematic technique of the movement—were suited to the simplification and distortion of forms. New etching and lithographic techniques invited improvisation and promoted accidents in printing, while drawings revealed an artist’s impulse and urgency through direct marks on paper.
These graphic media suited the Expressionists’ emphasis on the mystery and spontaneity of emotions. More than 50 prints and drawings from the early 20th century present artists’ responses to urban life, the nude, landscape, and war. Together the works show how the Expressionists’ new graphic language disrupted and distorted traditional artistic themes to describe both a modern utopia and a hell on earth.
Brett Weston: Photographs, through Sunday, May 6, Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery | Gallery 230
“Nature is a great artist. The greatest,” said photographer Brett Weston, who made it his primary subject matter. Drawn from the museum’s collection, this exhibition surveys four decades of his work and debuts more than 40 photographs from the Brett Weston Archive donated to the museum in 2017 by collector Christian Keesee.
Wherever Weston photographed—California, Hawaii, Mexico, or Europe—his way of seeing remained constant, and the resulting images hovered between abstraction and representation. “It seems to me,” this usually laconic man wrote, “that this powerful duality, this combination of the abstract, in the emphasis upon form, and the sense of presence, in the rendering of light and substance, is something only photography can do.”
From the 1920s through the 1950s, Weston was a photographer’s photographer, admired for his formalist inventiveness and technical virtuosity, but little known outside the then insular field. Among those he influenced was his father, the eminent photographer Edward Weston. Although still anchored in representation, Brett moved even as a young artist toward boldly graphic, rhythmic compositions that verged on the abstract. His experimental vigor linked him to avant-garde practitioners in Europe and America.
In the 1960s and 1970s, as fine art photography entered the mainstream art world and captured popular imagination, Weston finally gained fame and fortune. His were the lyrical yet formally adventurous nature photographs emulated by thousands of amateurs and professionals. His was the vision that helped shape how many of us see the natural world.
Heritage: Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell, through Sunday, February 25, Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery | Gallery 010.
Inspired by the Cleveland Museum of Art’s recent acquisition of Wadsworth Jarrell’s Heritage (1973), a painting of great significance, this exhibition examines the work and enduring legacy of multidisciplinary artists Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell, who now call Cleveland home.
Featuring 15 works from the mid-1960s to the present, the exhibition is a stunning array of colorful paintings, sculptures, and textiles. The Jarrells’ work engages music, the family, and many cultures from the African continent as cornerstones of pride and communal identity. Taking the form of an intimate dialogue between husband and wife, the exhibition celebrates these two artists and illustrates the couple’s keen ability to incite change by “[focusing] on our heritage instead of protesting injustice meted out by mainstream America.”
Rodin—100 Years, through Sunday, May 13, Gallery 218.
In 2017 major museums in Europe and America celebrated the centennial of Auguste Rodin’s (1840–1917) death with traveling exhibitions, permanent collection installations, and educational activities. Unified under #Rodin100, and joining a worldwide series of major Rodin projects, these exhibitions and accompanying public programs bring together new information about the artist and his enormous impact on the history of modern sculpture.
The Cleveland Museum of Art marks the centennial of Rodin’s death with a display of works from the museum’s permanent collection. During World War I, while the museum’s original building was still under construction, trustee Ralph King began negotiations to acquire works from Rodin. The first work to enter the collection was a monumental Thinker, acquired by King in 1916 and donated the following year. Rodin also agreed to cast a special version of his great breakthrough sculpture The Age of Bronze for the museum. Other lifetime casts were donated by civic-minded Clevelanders, and one by Rodin himself. The museum eventually acquired more than 40 works spanning the artist’s career in a wide variety of materials, including the magnificent, larger-than-life plaster sculpture Heroic Head of Pierre de Wissant: One of the Burghers of Calais. The monumental Thinker, one of the museum’s signature works, has graced the south entrance since 1917 and was severely damaged by a bomb in March 1970.
William Morris: Designing an Earthly Paradise, through Sunday, November 11, Arlene M. and Arthur S. Holden Textile Gallery | Gallery 234
William Morris devoted his life to creating beautiful and useful objects using the highest-quality materials under fair labor conditions. His richly varied patterns have been reproduced without interruption since his death in 1896, testifying to their timeless appeal. The Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection includes woven and block-printed textiles spanning each stage of Morris’s vibrant career; they are joined in this exhibition by a generous loan from the Cranbrook Art Museum of an embroidery by William Morris’s daughter May.
Also showcased are magnificent volumes from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s nearly complete collection of books printed by the Kelmscott Press. Morris’s meticulously designed books were his final labor of love; indeed, they exhibit the same delight in organic forms and time-tested craftsmanship visible in his textiles. The voices of May Morris, Kate Faulkner, Walter Crane, and Edward Burne-Jones also feature among the projects that Morris so passionately brought to fruition. With Morris & Co. wallpaper and carpet reproductions, the exhibition Designing an Earthly Paradise brings to life Morris’s striking, revolutionary designs.
