The Philadelphia Museum of Art is beginning the new year in ripe rococo fashion, presenting a princely German view of splendor in ”Art and Nature:
German Printmaking 1750-1850.”
Opening Saturday, the show includes 125 prints by 50 artists. It reaches deep into the German past of folk tales and myth, embracing both Gothic fantasy and neo-classical Greek and Roman influences.
As a companion piece, the museum is also showing off one of its newest acquisitions, the sybaritic (indeed, Bacchanalian) masterpiece, ”Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus Would Freeze” (1602), by 16th Century Dutch draftsman Hendrick Goltzius.
Snapped up by Emperor Rudolf II almost immediately after its completion, the oil on linen work is based on an ancient play by Roman comic dramatist Terence and explores the theme that only with wine and food will love flourish.
Purchased with money from its Walter Annenberg and Henry McIlhenny Funds, the picture is being exhibited along with other of Goltzius` works on loan from major European museums.
The print show contains numerous works representing the turn by early 19th Century Germans to their medieval past, after the trauma of the Napoleonic Wars.
The influence of master draftsman Albrecht Durer (1472-1528) is seen here. Also to be found are the Gothic works by Emil Grimm, whose brothers Jacob and Wilhelm wrote those macabre fairy tales.
There are romantic works as well-though none so lascivious as Goltzius`
”Bacchus”-including Karl Friedrich Schinkel`s ”Gothic Church in an Oak Grove.”
The show also includes pieces by realist Adolf Menzel, noted for depicting soldiers and war in less than imperial and glorious fashion.
The print show concludes March 29. The Goltzius will be on view through Feb. 2.
– Washington`s National Portrait Gallery is also staging a grand print exhibition-”Collecting Portrait Prints: Washington Print Club Biennial”-
through May 17.
The 13th biennial show embraces four centuries of fascination with the printed portrait.
Included are Anthony Van Dyke`s depiction of his artist friend Lucas Vorsterman and Honore Daumier`s notoriously satirical rendering of King Louis Philippe of France, as well as Jim Dine`s high contemporary self-portrait in a bathrobe and Red Grooms` hilarious lithograph of Elvis Presley in front of a big pink Cadillac.
– Starting Jan. 18 and running through Feb. 10 at the College Art Gallery of the State University of New York at New Paltz, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service will be staging a show devoted to the recent, tumultuous events in Europe and the former Soviet Union as interpreted and commented upon by poster artists from Bulgaria, Byelorussia, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia and Yugoslavia.
Titled ”Art as Activist: Revolutionary Posters from Central and Eastern Europe,” the exhibit presents art as living history. Most of the works were completed in 1989 and 1990, when the liberation of what for so long were Iron Curtain countries was still in its revolutionary stage and cultural media were still largely under the control of state authorities.
Organized by Marta Sylvestrova, curator of the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and graphics expert Dana Bartelt of Raleigh, N.C., the exhibition will travel extensively throughout the U.S. during the next two years. It will be sent to Hope College in Holland, Mich., in October 1993.
– The 180-voice Choral Arts Society of Washington, under the direction of Norman Scribner, provided the most grandly traditional moments of the capital holiday season with three concerts at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
With Debra Lawrence as soloist, the famed symphonic chorale performed Bach, Schubert and Daniel Pinkham`s 20th Century Christmas cantata ”Sinfonia Sacra,” as well as German, Spanish, French and English carols and traditional favorites.
Much awaited now is the group`s Feb. 19 world premiere of composer Theodore Morrison`s ”War and Reconciliation,” based on the poetry of Walt Whitman.
