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Are you ready for some Art?

Published January 28, 2011 Arts & Letters Live , Center for Creative Connections , Collections , European Art , Exhibitions 1 Comment
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It’s no secret that Super Bowl hysteria is sweeping the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. On February 6, people from around the nation will be gathering in Arlington to watch the Steelers take on the Packers. But what are some of the best things to do in Dallas leading up to the Super Bowl? Below is a Dallas Museum of Art checklist for a super week for the sports fan and art critic in you. How many will you do?

Big New Field: Artist in the Cowboys Stadium Art Program

  1. Big New Field: Artists in the Cowboys Stadium Art Program is an exhibition of work by the artists featured in the Cowboys Stadium Art Program. While exploring the exhibition, try to figure out which artist’s work from the Cowboys Stadium belongs to the work at the DMA. Pick up Cowboys Stadium: Architecture, Art, Entertainment in the Twenty-First Century from the Museum Store if you need some help.
  2. See the former head coach of the 2006 World Champion Indianapolis Colts Tony Dungy and his wife, Lauren, on Saturday, February 5, at 3:00 p.m., part of Arts & Letters Live BooksmART. They will discuss their new children’s book You Can Be a Friend and you can stick around to meet the Dungys after this free event. Be sure to reserve your seats at https://www.tickets.DallasMuseumofArt.org/public/ or call 214-922-1818.
  3. Have you ever wanted to meet a room full of former NFL players? On Saturday, February 5, the NFL Players Association will hold the annual Jazz Brunch and Art Auction Smocks & Jocks in the Dallas Museum of Art’s Atrium at 10:30 a.m. Mingle with former and current NFL players while discovering their artistic talents. For more information on the event, click here.
  4. Explore the Center for Creative Connections and soak up some inspiration before you stop by the Art Studio to create your own work of art, maybe even a special football-inspired trophy sculpture.
  5. If you are looking for a break from football, travel to Europe without leaving the Museum through a bite-sized tour of four recent acquisitions in our new European galleries.

Discovering a Romney

Published January 6, 2011 Behind-the-Scenes , Collections , European Art , Installation Closed
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You might have heard about the recent discovery of a George Romney painting in the Museum’s collections. Olivier Meslay, Senior Curator of European and American Art and The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art at the DMA, shared the story about the discovery with us last month. You can visit the painting in person in the European Galleries on Level 2. To read more about George Romney and Young Man with a Flute, click here.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p83xkbLgrQQ]

Celebrating the Silver: The Reves Collection at Twenty-Five

Published November 24, 2010 Behind-the-Scenes , Collections , Curatorial , Decorative Art and Design , European Art , Fashion Closed
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We just celebrated the silver anniversary of the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection and ever since its opening twenty-five years ago, it has been one of our most visited galleries. Featuring more than 1,400 European artworks and decorative objects, including masterpieces by Renoir, Manet, Degas, and Pissarro, this remarkable gift from the Wendy & Emery Reves Foundation, Inc. on behalf of Wendy’s late husband, Emery, transformed the Museum’s collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century European art and European decorative art.

What’s also amazing is that visitors see this collection in a 16,500-square-foot wing made specifically for it.  Built in 1985, this is not the run-of-the mill gallery space. These rooms are a faithful reproduction of the couple’s villa in the South of France. Named La Pausa, it was built in 1927  for that ultimate fashionista Coco Chanel, who directed its design. For example, the patio and the hall were built specifically to remind “Mademoiselle” of the Romanesque convent outside Paris where she boarded as a child. Many of the furnishings in the Museum’s Reves wing, including a chair in the living room, were part of Chanel’s original décor of the villa.

DMA architect Edward Larrabee Barnes meticulously re-created the library, dining room, salon, bedroom, hall, patio, and central courtyard from this  luxurious—and historically fascinating—Mediterranean retreat.

On this silver anniversary here’s a look back:

Today, visitors to the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection can access a DMA smARTphone tour of highlights from the collection. On it, Wendy Reves shares memories of life at Villa La Pausa and of her and her husband’s passion for collecting art.

Martha MacLeod is the European and American Art Curatorial Administrative Assistant at the Dallas Museum of Art.

A Curator’s Best Days

Published August 24, 2010 Behind-the-Scenes , Curatorial , European Art 6 Comments
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The best days in a curator’s professional life are often the days spent in the conservation lab. That’s where we get to spend quality time with works of art and talk to conservators, the fantastically knowledgeable people who can look through a microscope or infrared scope and tell you the life history of an object. I was lucky enough to spend several hours in the painting conservation lab of the Midwestern Art Conservation Center (MACC), a private conservation center housed at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA). I was there to confer with conservator David Marquis just before he begins cleaning an important painting in the DMA’s collections, Paul Gauguin’s Under the Pandanus, also known by its Maori title I Raro Te Oviri.

Gauguin painted Under the Pandanus in 1891, a few months after he arrived in Tahiti for the first time.  Sometime later, possibly the next year, he painted a second version of the composition, and that picture is now in the collection of the MIA. When I got to the MACC lab, they had brought both paintings to the lab and removed them from their frames so that we could do a thorough comparison. Ours is on the right, the MIA version on the left.

Last year we began to look closely at the condition of our painting, and earlier this summer we sent our painting to the MACC for technical analysis. Once the two versions of the painting were placed side by side, the differences become more and more obvious . . . and intriguing.

Though the technical study had just begun, David Marquis immediately pointed out how dirty the surface of the DMA canvas was, and how discolored the old layer of varnish had become. This yellowed varnish layer and surface layer of grime radically changed the appearance of the painting. MIA Associate Curator of Paintings, Sue Canterbury, described it as being like looking at the painting through a double-amber filter—not exactly what Gauguin had intended! The MIA version, which was cleaned within the last ten years, gives us a much better sense of what our painting must have looked like when it was first completed.

Once we decided to take off these two “amber filters,” David Marquis began by making “cleaning windows,” that is, cleaning small areas of the canvas. This is the first window he opened, in an area of the horizon near the right edge of the painting.

The results are pretty amazing! The white surf is actually so much brighter and cooler in tone than it appears in the dirty areas. Now that he knew what the cleaning might reveal, David opened some windows in other areas. When I got to the lab to take a look, several areas of the canvas had been cleaned, revealing a whole new palette of colors.

Once David’s cleaning of the varnish and grime is complete later this summer, we’ll have a much better sense of the choices Gauguin made while he was working on our painting, as well as how the painting has changed over time and the extent of work done by earlier conservators. We’re just at the beginning of this important project, so stay tuned for future updates about the results of our study of Under the Pandanus, and look for it to be back in the galleries, and looking better than ever, next year.

Heather MacDonald is The Lillian and James H. Clark Associate Curator of European Art at the DMA.

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