SEATTLE, WASHINGTON.- Nearly 60 paintings and sculptures from the 19th and early 20th centuries, representing such European masters as Degas, Monet, Cézanne, Kandinsky and Picasso, will be on view in the Seattle Art Museum’s Gates Gallery through Sept. 15, 2002. Traveling to eight venues while the organizing institution is closed for renovation and expansion, Corot to Picasso: European Masterworks from the Smith College Museum of Art provides a rare opportunity to view one of the nation’s preeminent college art museum collections.
Although the Smith College Museum of Art began in 1879 as a collection of contemporary American works (one of the first acquisitions was a painting by Thomas Eakins), the museum’s first director, Alfred Vance Churchill, expanded the collecting focus in the early 20th century. One of his first European acquisitions in 1914 was Rodin’s small bronze Children with a Lizard (c. 1881), which is included in the exhibition. When asked by the Smith College Board of Trustees to develop a collecting policy, Churchill devised the “concentration plan,” which enabled him to focus on “not a nation or school but a topic – the Development of Modern Art,” starting with the French Revolution.
Among the highlights of Corot to Picasso are Gustave Courbet’s Preparation of the Dead Girl (c. 1850-55); two landscapes by Claude Monet, including La Seine à Bougival, painted in 1869 at the nascence of Impressionism, and one of his Rouen Cathedral paintings, unique in the cathedral series as it shows a view other than the façade; Picasso’s blue-period Figures by the Sea (1903); an early Auguste Rodin masterpiece, Man with a Broken Nose (1863-64); and Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner’s highly acclaimed Dodo and Her Brother (1908-1920).
“We’re so pleased to have the opportunity to present this impressive collection in Seattle,” says Chiyo Ishikawa, Chief Curator of Collections/Curator of European Painting and Sculpture. “Thanks to the vision of Smith College’s early museum directors, the collection is a classic view of art history told through brilliant works of art that are the envy of many larger museums.”
Corot to Picasso has been exhibited at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (Feb. 13-April 30, 2000), the Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College, Iowa (June 30-Sept. 17, 2000), the Cummer Museum, Jacksonville, Fla. (Nov. 1, 2000-Jan. 21, 2001), the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Fla. (March 10 – May 27, 2001), Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Calif. (July 11-Sept. 30, 2001), and the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio (Nov. 12, 2001-Jan. 20, 2002). Prior to its presentation in Seattle, Corot to Picasso is on view at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (Feb. 16-May 11, 2002).
