Louisville Magazine

FEB 2012

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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list of the great collections of the United States. "Te Dixon Gallery and Gardens is a real gem of a museum," Venable says. "I first visited it about 30 years ago and was most impressed. Like the Speed, it has a very high-quality collection, but unlike us, it is exceptionally strong in Impressionist paint- ings. Because their collection is the yin to our yang, I thought a show that combined the best of both museums would be a great (one). Luckily, Kevin Sharp, the Dixon's director, also thought it would be a good idea, and we ended up working out an ar- rangement where the Speed's Old Master paintings would go to Memphis and their Impressionist collection would come to Louisville." And, yes, these Impressionist blockbust- ers are good for business. Te one two years ago attracted 20,000 patrons to the Speed. For comparison, an attractive exhibit of the work by internationally renowned portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh drew 6,600. Nationwide, there's no better draw in the art world. One exhibit of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in the late 1980s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art attracted some 5,400 visitors a day. Te Dixon Gallery owes its eminence to a Memphis couple, Hugo and Margaret Dixon, collectors and philanthropists, who had the money (through cotton trading) and the stamina to acquire paintings from the 1940s through the 1960s and the good sense to engage as advisor John Rewald, one of the leading authorities on French Impres- sionism and author of the standard text on the subject, Te History of Impressionism. Certainly, if provenance and name-drop- ping are your concerns, this exhibition is bliss: Henri Fantin-Latour, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, William Singer Sargent, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro, Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne are among the superstars represented in the Dixon Gallery contribu- tion, and the Speed can add its own recently acquired Sisley, its Cézanne, a Cassatt and much else. Also, there is one special and re- cent Speed acquisition that will be on view for the first time: Le Pont des Saints-Pères, by a lesser-known master named Henri-Joseph Harpignies, showing an 1870 view from the Right Bank's Tuileries Garden to the old bridge (since replaced by the concrete Port du Carrousel) and, beyond, the dome of the Institut de France. Te year 1870 was dominated by the Franco-Prussian War: a period of military humiliation, public suffering (the Siege of Paris was a horror) and a true dent in the image of la gloire de la France. Yet, oddly, the Impressionists seem to have ignored this watershed in French history. In Cloudman's words: "Scholars occasionally comment on Full Speed Ahead The show runs from Feb. 3 through the Sunday after Derby. If you are in- clined to take the venerable Speed a bit for granted, go to that peer- less artistic resource, YouTube, and search for "Speed Art Museum Vir- tual Tour." You'll be taken through the architects' computer-generated model for the proposed expan- sion and renovation of 200,000 square feet. You can also access this from the Speed's own website: speedmuseum.org. how the Impressionists did not deal with France's defeat, but rather emphasized the beauty and richness of the French landscape, France's bustling cities, its middle class en- joying their vacations and leisure, et cetera." A subtext to the exhibition is how the color palette of the Impressionists and Post- Impressionists changed over time, of which Venable says: "Above all, it is the light col- or palette that we find so appealing, rather than the dark colors that our grandparents loved." Another instructive subtext of the show is to see artists painting against style. If you are inclined to stand in the middle of a room and mentally name the artists to prove your artistic literacy, you may be stumped by a few oddities. Tere is a coarsely painted por- trait of Te Visitor by the normally genteel Cassatt. Tere is the vividly colored Ballet Scene by Degas in violent stylistic contrast to the pastel-like Dancer Adjusting Her Shoe, Opposite: Le Pont des Saints-Peres, Henri-Joseph Harpignies (1870); Dreamer, Marc Chagall (1945); View Through a Window, Nice, Raoul Dufy (c. 1925); Speed Museum director Charles Venable with John Singer Sargent's Interior of Santa Sophia, Constantinople (1891). Above: Dancer Seated on a Pink Divan, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1884); The Joyous Festival, Gaston La Touche (c. 1906). and the Renoir of Te Wave seems uncharac- teristic for the beloved master of rural scenes and country idylls. Visitors will be charmed to see represent- ed some painters whom we do not usually consider mainstream Impressionists. Te layout of the exhibition will show a progres- sion from the wispy colors of the early Im- pressionists to such bolder figures as Raoul Dufy, represented by a superb View Trough a Window in Nice and by Marc Chagall, 2.12 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE [35]

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