exhibitions

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Exhibition Charts Rembrandt's Printmaking Mastery

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Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 - 1669), is known in popular memory for his emotionally charged portraits as well as for paintings of historical, mythological, and religious subjects, which exemplify the heights of Baroque drama and narrative. He was also a consummate draftsman and skilled printmaker. At the Worcester Art Museum through February 19, an impressive survey of the artist’s etchings shows off Rembrant’s talents and offers audiences an opportunity to learn about the thrilling qualities of printmaking as an artform.

Rembrandt: Etchings from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen features some seventy works on paper by the exhibition’s titular artist as well as ancillary artworks by those who studied directly under him or found themselves in his circle. The Museum states that the exhibition is one of the largest focused on the artist’s etchings to visit the United States. A remarkable show in many respects, the exhibition is exciting for those interested in the history of the print as well as in the history of Dutch art. It also illustrates the way in which Rembrandt leveraged the power of the print to rise to the apex of popular culture in his own day.

A detail of Rembrandt’s Christ Blessing the Children and Healing the Sick, from about 1648.

One of the throughlines found in many of the pieces on view in the exhibition is Rembrandt’s keen sense of draftsmanship. His drawing skills naturally come across in his printmaking and even the subtlest of images bears this out. In some of the prints, tiny landscapes with minute figures read as larger vistas and in others the personalities of sitters are captured by Rembrandt’s distinctive portraiture. Close-looking unveils the artist’s facile hand and refined use of line and cross-hatching to create illusionistic and complex images.

Rembrandt’s Landscape with Square Tower, from 1650. A shaped plate gives this print its undulating edge.

Recurring favorites are found in multiple richly inked and dark prints. One can imagine the ways in which the candle-lit murk of the Dutch seventeenth century impacted Rembrandt’s way of making images and nocturnes or sparsely lit interiors are some of the exhibition’s most enthralling examples of what printmaking can do in the hands of a great practitioner.

A 1642 etching of Saint Jerome in a Dark Chamber shows off Rembrandt’s mastery of light and dark.

Another of the assets of this exhibition is its underlying focus on technique. With so many examples of work on display, the show also includes paper samples, explanations of tools and printmaking methods, as well as plates. A central space in the show is dedicated to the steps of making prints, which will give even a consummate print-lover things to consider. For those who are newer to etchings or to printmaking in general, this aspect of the show will provide a new appreciation for the uniqueness of prints. In their own day and now, these artworks are sometimes wrongly considered secondary to painting or sculpture.

A central component of the exhibition highlights the tools and techniques behind the prints on view.

While he is rightly renowned for his skills as a painter, the sensitivity of Rembrant as a person does not lose any of its impact in the etchings presented in this show. Frail and thoroughly human bodies, full of fleshy corporealness, come up again and again in Rembrandt’s work and they are present here. Faces that bear the deep lines of laughter and tears are also present and bring viewers nose-to-nose with their long-dead counterparts. To look at these prints is to be confronted with human experience in all of its rich complexity.

An image of a Head of a Bald Man Right, dated 1630, exemplifies Rembrandt’s sensitivity to the human experience.

For those who love Rembrant, Etchings from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen will reassure them of Rembrandt’s distinctive voice and impressive expertise as an image-maker. For those who are new to the Baroque, to printmaking, or to Rembrandt, the show has the potential to be revelatory. Either way, it is a joy to be immersed in the world of Rembrandt’s masterful etchings.

Rembrandt: Etchings from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is on view at the Worcester Art Museum through February 19, 2024. The Museum is located at 55 Salisbury Street in Worcester and is open Wednesdays through Sundays from 10am - 4pm. Learn more at www.worcesterart.org. See additional views of the show below.

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Review: Douglas Breault at Carole Calo Gallery

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Photography, grief, and memory are linked. Joan Didion, in her autobiographical chronicle The Year of Magical Thinking shares the advice that in order to get over the death of a family member one must “let them become the photograph on the table”. For photographer and mixed media artist Douglas Breault, his art practice often centers on the elegiac, and beyond that on the mournful quality of memory that can embed itself in the photographic image. A solo exhibition of Breault’s photo-based work at Stonehill College’s Carole Calo Gallery allows viewers to experience the artist’s immersive use of photography to probe these potent themes in ways that are beautiful and deeply affecting.

Breault’s exhibition, evocatively titled who decides where a roof ends, includes straightforward photographs exhibited alongside works that blur the bounds of photography, sculpture, and assemblage. In addition to photographs, Breault employs found objects: a whistle, a pane of glass, a clamp, a block of wood with a nail jutting out. The sum of all these parts is a collection that probes ideas of home, memory, grief, and the ways in which vision and remembrance are shaped.

One of the through lines in Breault’s work is light, both in specific forms - like a lamp or a flame - and the general light which acts as the foundational tool in all photography. The lights in Breault’s work feel like demarcation points but also hint at the ephemeral nature of all things. Times change, passages occur, lights are snuffed out. Much of Breault’s art is connected to his own experience of familial grief and the expressive and poetic elements of his visual work have a magnetic quality for others with similar experiences.

Breault describes his exploration of loss in his statement by saying, “My curiosity questions the limitations of a photograph to accurately depict a life, contemplating how an image can be unfolded or obscured to describe a person or place that is paradoxically missing.”

Breault is one of the most promising photographic practitioners in the Northeast. In addition to his work as an artist, he is also the Exhibitions Director at Gallery 263 in Cambridge and has also taught art at area colleges, including at Bridgewater State University, Babson College, Holyoke Community College, and the Rhode Island School of Design. He earned his BA from Bridgewater State and his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. I previously interviewed Doug for my Fine Art Insights podcast, and he also exhibited work in the exhibition Housewarming at my Project Space in Providence.

For emerging artists studying art at Stonehill, and for those who are able to visit Breault’s show at the Carole Calo Gallery, his work offers an exciting alternative to the staid and static interpretations that photographers regularly present. In a world full of images, often consumed through cold screens as social media content, the engaging and inventive way in which Breault manipulates photography to make it real and present merits recognition. His photographs go beyond the expected and break out of the frame to become something entirely new.

Breault’s solo exhibition at Stonehill College is one of the best shows to see right now in New England and offers a chance to fundamentally change the way viewers read photography.

Douglas Breault’s exhibition, who decides where a roof ends, continues through January 26, 2024 in the Carole Calo Gallery at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. Learn more about Breault’s work at his website www.douglasbreault.com, or follow his studio work on Instagram at @dug_bro. Click on the images below for expanded installation views.

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Review: Impressionism Explored at Worcester Art Museum

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Impressionism remains one of the most revered movements in Western art history. The soft focus paintings of Monet continue to hold sway with contemporary audiences sheerly through their unbridled beauty. The divergent influences and aftereffects of the Impressionist movement are less well-known by audiences but are no less worthy of exploration. In a current exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum, some of the complex realities of this art historical moment are explored, resulting in new insights that go beyond a popular aesthetic.

The entrance to the exhibition is a wall-spanning tribute to the Worcester Art Museum’s prized Monet Waterlilies.

Fronters of Impressionism, curated by Claire C. Whitner and Erin Corrales-Diaz, aims to unpack the nuances of artmaking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On view through June 25, the show probes the world as it was when Impressionism arrived and shares works produced by concurrently occurring artistic movements. The narrative the exhibition unfolds will give many museum visitors their first broad readings of a period that is often characterized in the popular imagination as being dominated by the likes of Renoir or Cassatt.

The exhibition of course has fine examples of European paintings like Claude Monet’s 1908 Waterlilies, which was purchased by WAM within just a couple years of its creation. This is the kind of image that springs to mind when the term Impressionism is raised. But alongside Monet, the exhibition also contextualizes movements like the Barbizon School or later Pointellist creations and does an excellent job of illustrating how artists outside of Europe digested and influenced the avant-garde ideas of the Impressionist vanguard.

Corot’s A Fisherman on the Banks of the Pond, created between 1865-70, is a prototypical Barbzon artwork, and the type that would inspire generations of American landscape painters.

Works by Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller y Cestero (1833-1917) are featured in the exhibition, highlighting an artist who was intimately involved in the zeitgeist of the turn of the century and who had friendships with peers like Pissarro. In a small painting from 1864, Oller y Cestero captures his friend Paul Cézanne painting out of doors, documenting one of the more important strategies of boundary-breaking artists in the nineteenth century. Where the powerful French Academy of Fine Arts demanded that polished artworks be produced in the studio, young artists rejected this and painted “finished” works en plein air, giving life to a tradition that continues today.

Both a product and document of the Impressionism moment, Francisco Oller y Cestero’s painting of his friend Cézanne depicts the technique behind the avant-garde plein air painters.

Artists of the United States also make up a sizable component of the show. A fine example by landscapist Edward Mitchell Bannister is shown alongside portraits by John Singer Sargent and Cecilia Beaux. One of the best paintings in the show is by fellow American Edmund Charles Tarbell (1862-1938). Titled The Venetian Blind and produced in 1898, the painting was another early acquisition by WAM and has been owned by the museum since 1904. A award-winning work in its day, Tarbell’s figure is bathed in diffused golden light and interior elements like the titular shades bear his distinctive and painterly hand. It is at once a romantic and modern image, hinting at European precedents while tackling a contemporary subject in a novel way.

One of the exhibitions most interesting pieces, Edmund Tarbell’s The Venetian Blind, produced in 1898, presages the type of figurative artwork that has only recently returned to vogue in the twenty-first century.

Through the show, viewers will be able to follow the influences of Impressionism through to their various conclusions. The reality is that the ways in which these intrepid artists shaped the works made by ensuing generations are hard to define. But Frontiers of Impressionism provides a great sampler, and in doing so promises to encourage visitors to find new connections between individual artists, discrete schools, and varying periods.

Towards the end of the exhibition, some of the more radical offspring of the changing art world are shown. A vivid and lush Paul Signac painting from 1896 shows off a technicolor Pointellist technique. Capturing the Golfe Juan in the South of France, the image of a pink horizon over the seaside is scintillating and celebratory. Nearby, Georges Braque’s Olive Trees from 1907 tackles another landscape subject with similar zeal. While Signac’s coastal scene is a coalescence of painted dots, Braque’s tree is a disintegration of limbs executed in utterly unnatural tones. Looking at it, the thrilling modernisms of the twentieth century that owe so much to their nineteenth century predecessors can be seen and felt in the distance.

Georges Bracque’s 1907 Olive Trees heralds the excitement of forthcoming modernisms that would define art in the twentieth century.

Frontiers of Impressionism is on view now through June 25, 2023 at the Worcester Art Museum. After the exhibition concludes in Worcester it will travel to the Tampa Museum of Art, the Tokyo Museum of Art, and other venues. Learn more about the exhibition and plan your visit while it is on view in New England at www.worcesterart.org.

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Why I’m Starting a Project Space

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I have spent the majority of my professional life in gallery work. Managing gallery spaces, organizing exhibitions, and guiding artists through the process of sharing their work are core elements of what I do. So, when the opportunity arose to take on a space to mount my own personal curatorial projects outside the context of my day job, I jumped at the chance. Through this new venture, I hope to expand my own practice as an independent curator and advisor and give emerging artists novel opportunities to share their work while testing and improving gallery practices.

My new Project Space is located at 1 Meeting Street in Providence on the second floor. This is just around the corner from RISD and Brown, and is less than a five minute walk to the Providence Amtrak Station. Domestic in scale, this space lends itself to small and medium sized artworks that could easily find their way into home environments. I plan to host my first exhibition, a group show titled Housewarming, in the coming month or so.

When considering how I would like to utilize this exhibition venue, my first thought is to make it a laboratory. We often get bogged down in the status quo of gallery practices, so trying out new ideas and seeing where they lead sounds like an opportunity to learn and grow. Agility is an important quality and one that seems easier to grasp in a project-based format.

I am interested in pursuing a variety of curatorial goals with this space but at this early stage I think two are most worth noting. The first is that I plan to use this physical venue to continue and expand upon my series of online juried shows begun during the pandemic. These virtual exhibitions allowed me to connect with artists throughout the United States and beyond, and by adding a physical component to the digital I can continue to offer artists opportunities to exhibit in themed group exhibitions with improved depth and reach.

Second, but no less important, I plan to center much of my work in this space around emerging artists. That term can mean a lot of things but to me it primarily means artists in the early part of their career. Mentorship is important and I have benefited greatly from the support of numerous colleagues. I would like to use this space to cultivate new generations of artists and to continue to build on my network to form connections between artists and those who are interested in art.

Alongside featuring new artists, engaging with new collectors is an equally critical task. Creating a welcoming and accessible environment for individuals new to support artists is something I will strive to do in this venue as well.

As with my online exhibitions, there will be some restrictions in the way I use my Project Space. To avoid conflicts of interest, I will not be featuring the work of current members of the Providence Art Club, where I’ve served as gallery manager since 2014. I also do not anticipate maintaining a stable of artists or acting as a representative for individual creatives, but rather will focus on curated group exhibitions with occasional smaller format or solo shows thrown into the mix.

I hope this brings some clarity at the outset of this exciting initiative. I am looking forward to what I can create in this space. Thanks are due to the many individuals who have supported and encouraged my varied projects thus far and I hope to have your support in this special endeavor too. As things develop, I will share news here on my blog as well as on my social media channels.

For questions about my Project Space, please feel free to email me at michael@michaelrosefineart.com.

To share your interest in participating in future group shows in the Project Space, please fill out my quick and simple Google form.