Media Contacts: Anne Edgar, Anne Edgar Associates, 646-­‐336-­‐7230, [email protected] Amanda Young, Wadsworth Atheneum, Museum of Art, 860-­‐838-­‐4082 [email protected] FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 2015 A RESTORED AND REIMAGINED WADSWORTH ATHENEUM REOPENS ON SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 New European Galleries are Centerpiece of Grand Reopening Hartford, CT — When the nation’s oldest art museum unveils its newly transformed European Galleries on Saturday, September 19, there will be more art to see than ever before and new sparks of connection to be made among the grand masterpieces and unexpected gems that define the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The Grand Reopening will unveil new European Galleries in the Morgan Memorial Building for the first comprehensive showing of the European collections in more than 20 years. With the completion of a five-­‐year-­‐long renovation that has repaired and renewed four historic structures, all the museum’s galleries will be open for the first time in 50 years. High points include the Early Baroque Gallery, where the museum’s new treasure, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-­Portrait as a Lute Player (1616 – 18), goes on exhibition for the first time; a Cabinet of Art and Curiosities packed with fine 17th-­‐century objets d’art, naturalia, and other rarities; and an imposing Great Hall, where 24-­‐foot-­‐high walls will be hung in a tight salon style, as if by a Gilded Age tycoon. “The Morgan Memorial is largest of our five buildings, built a century ago by the financier J. Pierpont Morgan. I am thrilled that it will tell a story of art, culture, and taste that only the Wadsworth Atheneum can tell—about Europe coming to Hartford, of cultural encounters, and of unexpected, richly productive juxtapositions,” says Susan L. Talbott, Director and CEO of the Wadsworth Atheneum. 2 Every space within the Morgan Memorial has been restored to tell that story. Its renovation has uncovered windows, reopened skylights, carved out new galleries, provided custom casework, and seen to the refurbishment of architectural details. In the Morgan Memorial’s marble foyer alone, a set of Caldwell & Company light fixtures has been recreated from original drawings and a magnificent Heinigke & Bowen stained glass laylight has been completely taken apart and reassembled. The Wadsworth Atheneum was founded in 1842, some 28 years before the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and 30 years before the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Says David W. Dangremond, President of the Board of Directors, “I am proud of what we at the Wadsworth Atheneum have achieved by focusing on the reinstallation of our collections and renovation of our campus of historic buildings. Now, at last, the public can fully experience the richness of our remarkable history.” THE EUROPEAN GALLERIES The new and sweeping transformation of the Wadsworth Atheneum sees masterpieces by Caravaggio, Zurbarán, Poussin, Artemisia Gentileschi and other early 17th-­‐century painters framed against blood-­‐red walls and bathed in natural light for the first time in a decade, thanks to the repair of a central skylight. In the Early Baroque Gallery, Zurbarán’s St. Serapion (1628) will be of more than usual interest. Following a grant from The Executive Committee of The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF, Maastricht), the masterpiece has been restored by the museum’s conservation lab to its original integrity—and intensity. The new `European’ rooms have been reconceived by a museum team led by Oliver Tostmann, Susan Morse Hilles Curator of European Art, and Linda Roth, Senior Curator and Charles C. and Eleanor Lamont Cunningham Curator of European Decorative Arts. Tostmann, who came to the museum a year and a half ago from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, notes: “I’ve been astounded by the unexpected finds I’ve come upon in the museum’s holdings and fascinated by a kind of portrait the European collections paint of Hartford as a place of a quintessentially American ambition and curiosity.” 3 At the top of the Morgan Memorial’s marble staircase, double doors open onto the Cabinet of Art and Curiosities, featuring 200 Wunderkammer objects, including many drawn from J. Pierpoint Morgan’s own collection. Nautilus shells, glass, rock crystal, and a turned wooden nesting cup—so thin and fragile that its inner cups have not been handled—are among the objects residing in three cases at the heart of the cabinet. Here, touch screens provide the visitor a chance to study the group in a very intimate way. The objects on the bottom shelf will be eye level when the visitor is seated, and those on the middle shelf approximately eye level for those standing. Says Linda Roth: “In designing the Cabinet, we’ve sought to capture the thirst for knowledge that inspired the first examples. And although our display may seem to put many different kinds of objects together in a haphazard fashion, it actually restores them to their proper historical context. Here they are organized as the first avid arts patrons in Europe would have presented them.“ The newly installed Great Hall is both a showstopper and subtle reminder of how art is received and recalibrated over time. Here, the sacred and profane mingle as liberally as in Giovanni Paolo Panini’s The Picture Gallery of Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga (1749) on the north wall. Tintoretto meets John Trumbull. Nicolaes Maes’s decorous Dutch interior meets Edwin Landseer’s flamboyant otter hunt. And an avowed masterpiece like Luca Giordano’s Saint Sebastian (c.1660) shares the stage with a late 19th-­‐century copy of the once ubiquitous Madonna della Sedia by Raphael. The new hang presents a number of major Baroque paintings in the manner they were intended to be seen, high up on the walls, and brings to light many paintings not exhibited in decades. “In America’s first public art galleries in the late 19th century, the history of art aligned “imperfectly,” but imaginatively, to European standards. I believe it makes perfect sense to see works of art installed in this way today in our Great Hall,” says Tostmann. The Great Hall is flanked by small galleries, to the south leading to Asian artifacts, many of which have been unseen for decades, and to the north to such objects as antiquities, Greco-­‐
Roman glass, and Coptic textiles. A gallery of medieval art the size of a monk’s cell frames Donatello’s Madonna and Child and a nearby gallery showcases masterworks by Piero di 4 Cosimo, El Greco, Sebastiano del Piombo, Lucas Cranach and other early Renaissance masters. Up the stairs, newly illuminated by natural light will be the museum’s French Impressionist holdings, including Degas’s psychologically complex Double Portrait: The Cousins of the Painter, a self portrait by van Gogh, Renoir’s picture of Monet at work in his Argenteuil garden and paintings by Manet, Monet, Pissaro, Cézanne, and Gauguin. A few other high points among many on the second floor include a gallery dubbed “1789,” where Elizabeth-­‐Louise Vigée Lebrun’s portrait of The Duchesse de Polignac in a Straw Hat holds court; romantic and realist paintings by Courbet, Ingres, Delacroix and Rousseau; and a small gallery with the sharp juxtaposition of Gustave Klimt’s Two Girls with Oleander and William Holman Hunt’s The Lady of Shalott, both next to a Bugatti-­‐designed chair. AN ARCHITECTURAL SLEIGHT OF HAND Smith Edwards McCoy Architects of Hartford is the architect for the $33 million renovation that will open all the museum’s galleries for the first time in 50 years. Revived are four of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s five interconnected buildings: the original structure, designed by Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis as a Gothic Revival stone castle (1844); the Colt Memorial wing in the Tudor Revival style (1910); the Morgan Memorial Building, designed by Benjamin Wistar Morris in the Renaissance Revival style (1915); and the Goodwin building, designed in a late modernist style (1969). Addressed in a future renovation will be the Avery Memorial designed by Robert O’Connor and notable as the first American museum interior created in the modern International Style (1934); “The Wadsworth Atheneum is a crazy quilt of architectural styles that has been rationalized and meticulously renovated by Jared Edwards and his team at Smith Edwards McCoy,” notes Talbott. Smith Edwards McCoyis known for the complete historic preservation of Old State House in downtown Hartford and the historic Long Walk buildings at the heart of the Trinity College campus. 5 SPONSORSHIP/FUNDING CREDIT Major funding for the 2008 – 2014 renovation of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art was provided by the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development and other generous supporters. ABOUT THE WADSWORTH ATHENEUM MUSEUM OF ART Founded in 1842, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is the oldest continuously-­‐
operating public art museum in the United States. The museum’s nearly 50,000 works of art span 5,000 years, from Greek and Roman antiquities to the first museum collection of American contemporary art. The museum is located at 600 Main Street in Hartford, Connecticut. Hours: Wed – Fri: 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.; Sat & Sun: 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.; First Thursdays: 11 a.m. – 8 p.m. Admission: $5 – 10; discounts for members, students and seniors. Public phone: (860) 278-­‐2670; website: http://thewadsworth.org. ###