Cleveland Art, July/August 2016
- Member Magazine
In this issue of the members magazine: Art and Stories from Mughal India; Elegance and Intrigue; A Strange Diana by Rubens; Ten Decades of Movies; Centennial Loans; Gallery Game.
Art and Stories
The inspiration for this major exhibition on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Cleveland Museum of Art was the December 2013 acquisition of works from the Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Ralph Benkaim Collection of Deccan and Mughal paintings. Made between the mid-1500s and mid-1700s, when th...
The 18th-Century Selfie
In The Optical Viewer, an etching and engraving made by Fréderic Cazenave around 1794, Antoine Danton and his stepmother, Sébastienne-Louis Gély, look at a stack of large prints using a novelty device that reflects and magnifies the images, perhaps as a fun way to enhance their experience of depth p...
A Strange Diana
Rarely does a professor have a “blink” moment in class, a sudden revelation that seems completely obvious once it enters your consciousness. This happened to me last year in the museum’s galleries while teaching a seminar on appropriation for Case Western Reserve University’s art history majors. We...
Ten Decades of the Art of Film
The motion picture industry is only 21 years older than the Cleveland Museum of Art. But the fledgling institution wasted little time before welcoming the new art form known as “the movies.” A look back through the earliest copies of the Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art (the progenitor of the...
The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 German animated movie seems to have been the first feature film shown at the museum, in 1936.
Centennial Loan: Kahlo
This summer, museum visitors can commune with the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo when her enigmatic 1937 self-portrait Fulang-Chang and I is displayed side by side with a mirror in a matching hand-painted frame that she intended would always be hung alongside the painting. Renowned for her intricate se...
Fulang-Chang and I, 1937 (assembled with painted frame and mirror after 1939). Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907–1954). Oil on composition board with painted frame; 56.5 x 44.1 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mary Sklar Bequest, 277.1987.a. © 2016 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D. F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Centennial Loan: Sargent
Generously talented, abidingly industrious, and socially adroit, John Singer Sargent was the go-to artist of his generation for fashionable patrons on both sides of the Atlantic who wanted themselves immortalized. For more than four decades, he produced portraits for an impressive number of sitters;...
Portrait of Helen Sears, 1895. John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925). Oil on canvas; 167.3 x 91.4 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Mrs. J. D. Cameron Bradley, 55.1116. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Centennial Loan: Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein is regarded as a key member of the groundbreaking 1960s Pop Art movement, a group of artists that also included Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Marisol. Many pop artists focused on popular culture and mass media, two subjects previously considered unworthy of fine art.
As an arti...
Little Big Painting, 1965. Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923–1997). Oil and acrylic on canvas; 172.7 × 203.2 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art 66.2. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Digital Image © Whitney Museum, New York
Centennial Loan: Adena Pipe
During the ancient Woodland Period, two related cultures flowered in the Ohio River valley: the Adena (400 BC–AD 100), known in part through their conical burial mounds, and the Hopewell (100 BC–AD 400), who left behind a legacy of large ceremonial enclosures defined by earthen perimeter berms. This...
Adena Effigy Pipe (front and rear views), 800 BC–AD 1. Stone (Ohio pipestone); 20.3 x 6.6 x 5.1 cm. Ohio Historical Society, Courtesy of the Ohio History Connection, AP-1492