Nine
photographs from the Seymour Adelman Collection will be lent to the Philadelphia
Museum of Art for its upcoming exhibition on Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins
(1844-1916). Among the group are formal portraits of Eakins and his wife, Susan
Macdowell Eakins, informal pictures of and by both of them, and Eakins's portrait
of Walt Whitman. Adelman had a long-standing friendship with Mrs. Eakins in
the 1930s, and many of the photographs are ones that he rescued from the family
home after her death. Most of them have never been shown or published. W. Douglass
Paschall, Research Associate in American Art and author of one of the exhibition
catalogue studies of Eakins's use of photography, says this about the photographs:
"The quality of the collection and the care so long taken in preserving
them from damage are the hallmarks of a connoisseur. The prints that Seymour
donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art are the undisputed gems of its photographic
collection, around which we strive to acquire comparable masterpieces. The dozens
he bequeathed to Bryn Mawr College are their equals in every respect, a trove
from which visitors and future exhibition curators will hope to draw the inspiration
that we have felt in their midst." Thomas Eakins opens at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art on October 7, 2001 and runs through January 6, 2002. The exhibition
then travels to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and The Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York.
Three volumes
from our collection of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts are being featured
in the exhibition Leaves of Gold: Manuscript Illumination from Philadelphia
Collections, a stunning show that opened this spring at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art. Bryn Mawr's contributions to the exhibition were a mid-fourteenth
century Constitutiones Clementinae (constitutions of Pope Clement V)
produced in Southern France; the Streeter-Picard Books of Hours from
Flanders, c.1440, featuring miniature paintings from the workshop of Nicholas
Brouwer; and the Lawrence Book of Hours, also produced in Flanders in
the 1440s. Bryn Mawr's involvement in this exhibition went beyond the loan of
these volumes. Retired Bryn Mawr Library Director and Professor of History James
Tanis curated the exhibition, and Katherine C. Luber, 1992 Bryn Mawr Ph.D. in
Art History, served as the Museum's leader on the project. The exhibition will
close in Philadelphia in mid-May, and then travel to the new Frist Center for
the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, where it will be on display throughout
the fall.
The
most sought after prints are the College's renowned Mary Cassatt color prints
for which the College has eight of a series of ten, executed in Paris circa
1891. They are from the Library of Lucy Martin Donnelly, Class of 1893, and
were the gift of Edith Finch, Class of 1922. Several of the College's Cassatt
prints were first seen in public alongside examples from the Cassatt family
and other museums at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1985. In the spring of
2000, the College's own Canaday Gallery hosted a brief show curated by History
of Art graduate student Kelly McCullough. This spring, five of the Cassatt prints
were exhibited at the Suzanne H. Arnold Art Gallery at Lebanon Valley College
in Annville, PA in a show curated by Dr. Leo Mazow, Gallery Director, with catalog
prepared by Clarence B. Sheffield, Jr., 1999 Bryn Mawr Ph.D. in Art History.Prints and drawings from the Scott Collection of contemporary women artists are regularly loaned to regional museums, such as in the recent exhibition Jane Piper and Her Circle, November 2000-January 2001 at The State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Archaeological objects have traveled to the Fogg Museum at Harvard, to Allentown Art Museum, and to Australia, and African objects from the Neufeld and Plass Collections have recently been shown in African Art in the Greater Philadelphia Area, in the Rotunda of the Community College of Philadelphia.
Finally,
our second most traveled painting, Romare Bearden's 1945 Madonna and Child,
is under consideration for inclusion in a major national exhibition of his work.
Bearden, one of the country's foremost Black artists, did this oil painting
as part of his Passion series. It may be Bearden's earliest Madonna and Child,
a subject that he repeated in many forms in his life's repertoire. This painting,
which looks like a stained glass window and harks to the artist's later collages,
is a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Roy R. Neuberger (Marie Salant Neuberger, Class
of l930) in 1948 when they recognized the importance of this emerging artist.
The painting has been shown at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1946, North
Carolina Central University at Durham in 1977, the Detroit Institute of Arts
in 1986, and the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1991.As gratifying as it is to be asked to share the College's treasures with the wider art world, it is important to remember that the objects continue to be important right here on campus. Students may examine with white gloves and magnifying glasses these same precious art items without being hampered by museum cases or security buzzers. Faculty members use the objects in their classes, and students rely on them for research papers and presentations. In a world that has become far too enamoured with virtual experiences, Bryn Mawr students are exposed to the real thing.