Accompanying an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art last fall and now at the Dahesh Museum in New York, this catalog focuses upon the French drawings in Muriel Butkin's highly specialized collection which she has promised to the Cleveland Museum. To assemble her diverse yet nicely integrated set of drawings, Butkin started buying 18th-century French drawings when they were affordable. In the mid-1970s, with the guidance of art historian Gabriel Weisberg, she expanded her collection to include 19th-century French drawings. These drawings were counter to the mainstream impressionist and postimpressionist taste of the time and focused more on academic French subject matter such as life drawings, portraits, or compositional studies. In the preface, Butkin herself reinforces her taste by saying that drawings are much more personal and spontaneous than paintings, often demonstrating the artistic process. Foster, curator of drawings at the Cleveland Museum, and other scholars present a well-researched volume that contributes new information to a very specialized field of art history. It is greatly disappointing, however, that the bulk of the reproductions are in black and white, often missing the subtly colored tones in many of the drawings. Nonetheless, this is recommended for museum and academic libraries that support graduate programs in art history. 183 b/w illustrations
"For the Winthrop collection's international debut exhibition, curators at the Fogg Art Museum of the Harvard University Art Museums, headed by Stephan Wolohojian, organized the selection and invited more than sixty specialists to write on artworks in their particular area of expertise. Works include such highlights in their creator's oeuvre as Jacques-Louis David's sketchbooks for The Coronation of Napoleon and the Crowning of Josephine, Theodore Gericault's Mutiny on the Raft of the Medusa, Vincent van Gogh's The Blue Cart, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's Odalisque with the Slave, William Blake's illustrations for the Divine Comedy, Dante Gabriel Rosetti's Blessed Damozel, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Silver. In addition, an essay by Wolohojian provides a fascinating and informative description of Winthrop and the growth of his collection."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved