Some Summer Exhibits in the US

Some enticing exhibits in the US this summer. Here are but a few:

PITTSBURGH, PA
Frick Art & Historical Center
May 14 - September 5

Small but Sublime: Intimate 19th Century American Landscapes at the Frick Art & Historical Center. 22 small-scale paintings and drawings by 18 American artists, ranging from the realistic style of Hudson River School to the American Impressionists. Admission is free.



NEW YORK, NY
The Morgan Library & Museum
May 18 - September 12
Eight extraordinary drawings by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) demonstrate the variety and dynamism of his draftsmanship. Dürer, master of the German Renaissance, transformed drawing in Northern Europe. Using his unrivaled talent as a draftsman and the force of his powerful artistic personality, Dürer tirelessly promoted drawing as a medium, creating works of exceptional beauty and remarkable technical skill.


Exhibitions focused on Dürer’s drawings are rare, and this marks the first time in more than twenty years that the Morgan’s outstanding Dürer holdings will be displayed together. Also included are prints and treatises by the artist.In his pursuit of beauty, Dürer devoted careful attention to every aspect of artistic production. On view in the exhibition are a woodcut, its associated woodblock, and a letter to the patron for whom it was made. In the letter Dürer wrote, “Please let it be as it is. No one could improve it because it was done artistically and with care. Those who see it and who understand such matters will tell you so.”

The Morgan Library & Museum
May 21 - August 29
Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design gives us scenic vistas, winding paths, bucolic meadows, rustic retreats suitable for solitary contemplation and other alluring naturalistic features of gardens created in the Romantic spirit.

The Romantics looked to nature as a liberating force, a source of sensual pleasure, moral instruction, religious insight, and artistic inspiration. Eloquent exponents of these ideals, they extolled the mystical powers of nature and argued for more sympathetic styles of garden design in books, manuscripts, and drawings, now regarded as core documents of the Romantic Movement. Their cult of inner beauty and their view of the outside world dominated European thought during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The exhibition features approximately ninety influential texts and outstanding works of art, providing a compelling overview of ideas championed by the Romantics and also implemented by them in private estates and public parks in Europe and the United States, notably New York’s Central Park.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
12 May-15 August
An Italian Journey: Drawings from the Tobey Collection, Correggio to Tiepolo presents 72 extraordinary works of the 16th-18th centuries, from a preeminent private collections of Italian Old Master drawings. Masterpieces by historically important draftsmen—principally Italian masters but also artists whose careers brought them south of the Alps—among them Correggio, Parmigianino, Bernini, Poussin, Guercino, Canaletto, and Tiepolo.

CALIFORNIA
J. Paul Getty Museum, LA
May 18 - October 17
Printing the Grand Manner: Charles Le Brun and Monumental Prints in the Age of Louis XIV features eleven large prints intended to evoke the grandeur of Le Brun’s large-scale paintings and tapestry designs that illustrate events from the exemplary lives of ancient rulers such as Alexander the Great and Constantine the Great. Examines the prints' rich vocabulary and illuminates the context in which they were made between the mid-1660s and the mid-1680s.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
May 22 - September 6
The de Young Museum hosts the Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, which includes approximately 100 paintings from the Musée d’Orsay’s permanent collection. Highlights the work of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, among others.

The Musée d’Orsay is lending their most beloved paintings while it undergoes a partial closure for refurbishment and reinstallation in anticipation of the museum’s 25th anniversary in 2011.
Birth of Impressionism will be followed in the fall of 2010 by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Beyond: Post–Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay. The de Young will be the only museum in the world to host both exhibitions.