Taft Museum of Art Season Announcement - 2008-09

Upcoming exhibitions at the Taft Museum of Art bring contemporary China and Elizabethan England to Cincinnati audiences

Images available at www.taftmuseum.org/exhibitions/season0809.htm

CINCINNATI (April 18, 2008) –The art featured in the new season of special exhibitions at the Taft Museum of Art offers a window onto other cultures and times. From contemporary Chinese paintings to opulent Elizabethan costumes, these exhibitions offer an escape from the ordinary and a chance to connect with the extraordinary.

The exhibition Views from the Uffizi: Painting the Italian Landscape continues into the fall, offering regional audiences their only chance to view dramatic landscapes from one of the most famous museums in Italy. The artists featured in the show, including Botticelli, Guercino, Poussin, Claude Lorrain and Canaletto, inspired later works by European masters included in the Taft’s collection.

In November, Brush, Clay, & Wood: The Nancy and Ed Rosenthal Collection of Chinese Art presents works by contemporary Chinese artists —many never before publicly exhibited in the United States—which are all usually housed in the Rosenthals’ Cincinnati home. The exhibition traces developments in Chinese art, with Neolithic pottery and Ming dynasty furniture presented alongside contemporary paintings by artists trained just after the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Among the artists represented in the collection are Chen Yifei, Mao Yan, Xue Song, Pan Maokun, He Datian and Zhang Hongtu.

You won’t want to miss the chance to see the historic house decorated for the holidays and celebrate with friends and family during Antique Christmas. This beloved holiday tradition returns in time for Thanksgiving. This year, visitors will find dazzling ornaments, delicate paper decorations, and fun activities for the whole family.

Oscar season will be in full swing at the Taft this year when Fashion in Film: Period Costumes for the Screen opens. This exhibition from the Trust for Museum Exhibitions in cooperation with Cosprop, Ltd., features costumes worn by Cate Blanchett, Julie Christie, Gwyneth Paltrow, Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and many others. The sumptuous costumes span four centuries of clothing design and four decades of filmmaking, with the represented films, including Titanic, Evita, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Ever After.

The season concludes with The Last Emperor’s Collection: Paintings from Liaoning, China. These rare and beautiful centuries-old scroll paintings, which were sold in the early 20th century by the last emperor, Pu Yi, have been painstakingly reassembled by the Liaoning Provincial Museum. This exhibition provides an extraordinary opportunity to see some of these treasures in the United States.

Through October 12, 2008

Views from the Uffizi: Painting the Italian Landscape

Tranquil, stormy, or the setting for dramatic stories, landscape painting can take on many moods. A selection of 40 landscape paintings from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, surveys the evolution of landscape painting in Italy over three centuries, from the Renaissance through the 18th century. Included are works by such great painters as Botticelli, Guercino, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and Canaletto.

The earliest paintings are from the late 15th century, when landscape often served as a backdrop for sacred and historical subjects. The exhibition then progresses to the great period of the development of pure landscape, the 17th and 18th centuries. The arrival in Italy of Northern European artists such as Paul Bril, Claude Lorrain, Nicholas Poussin, Jacob Pynas and Adrien van de Velde helped to stimulate the new genre. Italian artists contributed to this evolution, too: Filippo Napolitano of Naples, Alessandro Magnasco of Genoa and Giovanni Antonio, called Canaletto, from Venice introduced original and influential new forms of landscape. Altogether, the landscapes painted in Italy formed the basis of the European landscape tradition, as seen in the Taft Museum of Art’s own collection.

The exhibition curator, Antonio Natali, is the former head of the department of late Renaissance–17th-century art at the Uffizi and recently assumed the directorship of the renowned museum. The exhibition organizers are Contemporanea Progetti in Florence and the Trust for Museum Exhibitions, Washington, D.C.

November 7, 2008–January 11, 2009

Brush, Clay, & Wood: The Nancy and Ed Rosenthal Collection of Chinese Art

Residents of Cincinnati, Nancy and Ed Rosenthal have been collecting Chinese art for twenty years. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see a selection of the treasures that fill their private home. Among the approximately 70 works on view will be:

·       Outstanding pieces of Ming furniture—chairs, tables, desks, and chests—carved from gleaming dark woods.

·       Ceramic objects spanning the history of Chinese pottery, ranging in date from the Neolithic period
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