NEW HAVEN, CT.- Art for Yale: Collecting for a New Century, a survey of works acquired by the Yale University Art Gallery in the past decade, celebrates one of the most exuberant periods of growth in the 175-year history of the institution. On view from September 18, 2007, through January 13, 2008, the exhibition features more than 300 objects, selected from the nearly 15,700 works acquired since 1998.

Representing both the full scope and special strengths of the Gallery’s encyclopedic holdings, the selection includes works produced by the ancient cultures of Asia and the Mediterranean, masterpieces of African and early American art, Renaissance paintings and sculpture, and Impressionist and early modern art, as well as works reflecting the most recent developments in contemporary art. Highlights include works by Pontormo, Edgar Degas, Thomas Eakins, Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis, and Kurt Schwitters; a rare and important group of Japanese and Korean tea bowls; and selections from the Charles B. Benenson Collection of African art, one of the largest and most important single gifts in the Gallery’s history.

Art for Yale: Collecting for a New Century is organized by Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery; Susan Matheson, the Gallery’s Chief Curator and Molly and Walter Bareiss Curator of Ancient Art; and Joshua Chuang, the Marcia Brady Tucker Assistant Curator of Photography. The exhibition will be installed on the first and fourth floors of the Gallery’s recently renovated Louis Kahn building, with other objects installed in the permanent-collection galleries of its Egerton Swartwout building.

Mr. Reynolds stated: “While the Gallery has a long and storied history of attracting the support of generous and visionary donors, the last ten years have witnessed an unprecedented outpouring of gifts, both of artworks and of funds for new acquisitions. The bequest of the Charles B. Benenson Collection, for example, in one fell stroke transformed the Gallery into one of the nation’s major repositories of African art. This exhibition of recent acquisitions expresses our profound gratitude to the Gallery’s many supporters who have made this spectacular growth of Yale’s collections possible. It also pays tribute to the Gallery’s exceptional curators and educators, whose efforts and expertise have guided us to so many works of quality and importance.”

Ms. Matheson added: “The wealth of recent acquisitions immeasurably enhances the life of the Gallery not only as a public museum but also as teaching institution affiliated with one of the world’s most distinguished universities. Many of these objects have opened up new fields of research and study, while others are being incorporated into existing Yale University curricula in a wide range of academic disciplines.”

Among works featured in the exhibition are:

Asian Art
A group of five rare and historically important Korean and Japanese tea bowls, the promised gift of Peggy and Richard M. Danziger, is an outstanding addition to the Gallery’s renowned collection of Asian ceramics. Dating from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, they reflect the new aesthetic of simplicity and reverence for nature introduced into tea practices and implements by Sen no Rikyu (1522–1591), Japan’s most revered master of tea culture. A black Raku tea bowl, for example, attributed to Raku Chojiro, Sen no Rikyu’s allegedly favorite potter, is named Kaedegure (Twilight by the Maples) and features a dusted gold decoration evocative of autumnal maples at dusk. Another promised gift of the Danzigers’ is the early seventeenth-century screen Whose Sleeves? (Tagasode). Lush with geometric patterns and depictions of fans, the screen is thought to have been painted by the workshop of Tawaraya Sotatsu, the fountainhead of the Rimpa school, famous for their refined design. Other notable acquisitions of Asian art include a spectacular six-and-a-half foot long, fourteenth-century Japanese hanging scroll depicting The Death of the Buddha Sakyamuni (Nehan-zu); a Ming dynasty painting Eagle in a Landscape Setting; Five Tang Poems, a handscroll of Chinese calligraphy by Wang Duo from 1642; and a group of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese folding screens.

Early European Art
Among the Gallery’s most significant recent acquisitions in any category is a Virgin and Child by Florentine mannerist Jacopo Carucci, called Pontormo. Regarded as one of the most important finds of Renaissance art in decades, the panel has been identified as the only surviving portion of Pontormo’s Madonna del Libro (ca. 1545–46), one of the artist’s last and most influential works. Other additions to the Gallery’s acclaimed collection of Italian art include paintings by the Florentine masters Neri di Bicci and Jacopo Zucchi and by the late Sienese master Francesco Vanni, as well as stucco relief sculpures by Donatello, Italy’s greatest fifteenth-century sculptor, and his gifted follower Desiderio da Settignano. Recent acquisitions from other European schools include two panels from about 1505–7 by the anonymous German artist known as the Master of the Holy Kinship, and paintings by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Abraham Bloemaert and eighteenth-century French painter Pierre Paul Prud’hon.

American Art
Long recognized as one of the nation’s premier repositories of American art, the Gallery has recently acquired a number of pivotal works by leading nineteenth- and twentieth-century American painters. Prominent among them is American Realist Thomas Eakins’s watercolor John Biglin in a Single Scull (1873), a gift of Paul Mellon. One of several depictions of rowers that Eakins famously produced during the 1870s, the work is a study for the artist’s oil painting of the same subject, a treasured possession of the Gallery since 1897. Gerald Murphy’s Bibliothèque (Library) (1926), an elegantly abstracted still life of objects from his father’s library, is one of only seven surviving paintings by the artist—perhaps the epitome of the sophisticated “American in Paris”—whose style lies midway between realism and abstraction. Stuart Davis’s Combination Concrete #2 (1956–58), monumental in scale (approximately six by four feet) and featuring a boldly painted matrix of shapes, letters, and numbers, is an important late work by one of America’s most original pioneers of modernism. According to the artist, the title refers to an experimental form of music in which recorded sounds were cut, spliced, and recombined to create a composition. Also on view will be recently acquired works by John Brewster, Jr., Ralston Crawford, Sanford Gifford, Martin Johnson Heade, Winslow Homer, Walt Kuhn, Charles Sheeler, and Everett Shinn. The watercolor-on-ivory miniatures on view span the heyday of the art form in America. Among them are a portrait of statesman Elbridge Gerry by John Ramage, one of the most acclaimed miniaturists in the early republic.

Notable additions to the Gallery’s collection of American decorative arts, one of the most comprehensive in the world, range from a tankard by Jeremiah Dummer, America’s first native-born silversmith, from about 1610 to John La Farge’s magnificent stained-glass window, Cherry Blossoms against a Spring Freshet (1882–83).