FOGG ART MUSEUM WILL HOST LECTURE SERIES TO CELEBRATE GIFT OF OVER 100 DUTCH DRAWINGS FROM THE COLLECTION OF MAIDA AND GEORGE ABRAMS

Cambridge, MA—September 1999—The Fogg Art Museum was recently given 110 drawings from the Maida and George Abrams Collection of seventeenth-century Dutch drawings, the finest and most comprehensive private collection of such works in the world. In celebration of this gift and the long-standing relationship between the Abramses and the Harvard Art Museums, a series of lectures will be presented this fall on Dutch art of the seventeenth century, and on the twentieth-century Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. As a finale to this series, William Robinson, the Maida and George Abrams Curator of Drawings, will join George Abrams in sharing their experiences with these extraordinary works and the development of the collection over a period of more than 40 years.

Advanced registration for the series is required. $30; $25 for Friends of the Art Museums. Please call the Friend’s Office at (617) 495-4544 for registration information.

Vermeer, Art, and Love
Ivan Gaskell, Margaret S. Winthrop Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts
Tuesday, October 5, 6 p.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 485 Broadway

This lecture will demonstrate that in Vermeer’s painting Woman Standing at a Virginal, we see the late fruit of Renaissance ideas about love, art, desire, and transcendence. Vermeer adhered to popular Neoplatonic and sensationalist notions concerning the perception of beauty and the role of love in the functioning of art. His innovation was to convey such abstract ideas by means of the representation of a plausible contemporary reality alone.

Nicolaes Maes and Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting
William Robinson, Maida and George Abrams Curator of Drawings
Tuesday, October 12, 6 p.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 485 Broadway

U.S. museums have recently mounted exhibitions devoted to the Dutch genre painters Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, and Jan Steen; their contemporary, Gerard Dou, will be the subject of a forthcoming exhibition this spring at the National Gallery. In 2002, the Fogg will present a retrospective of the work of Nicolaes Maes, a pupil of Rembrandt who ranked among the outstanding genre and portrait painters active in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century. This lecture will survey Maes’s paintings of everyday life and place his achievement in the context of Dutch genre painting of the period.

ADRIANVS FRIES HAGIENSIS BATAVVS FECIT: Technical Observations on Bronzes by Adriaen de Vries, Imperial Sculptor of Rudolph II
Francesca Bewer, associate curator for research, Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies
Tuesday, October 19, 6 p.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 485 Broadway

Dutch-born Adriaen de Vries (1556–1626) had worked alongside the illustrious sculptors Giambologna in Florence and Pompeo Leoni in Milan before he served as imperial sculptor to Emperor Rudolph II of Prague. Following Rudolph’s death in 1612, he continued to produce sculptures for major continental courts. Over the course of his career, de Vries increasingly loosened his modeling, distorted the human anatomy, and integrated features that clearly refer to the casting process—singular elements for his time. This lecture will present current technical research on de Vries’s bronzes in order to understand better the relationship between his style and sculpting technique, and what is unique about it.

Mondrian’s Transatlantic Paintings in the Laboratory: Technical Examinations and Art Historical Implications
Harry Cooper, associate curator for modern art, and Ron Spronk, associate curator for research, Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies
Tuesday, November 2, 6 p.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum

Between his arrival in New York in October 1940 and his death there in February 1944, Piet Mondrian revised seventeen paintings he had finished in Europe several years earlier, explaining that the revisions gave the works "more boogie woogie," and inscribing each with a double date to record the odd circumstances of this double completion. This group of works will be the subject of an exhibition at the Fogg in spring 2001, focusing upon the findings from technical examinations of the paintings. In a joint presentation, the coorganizers of this exhibition will address Mondrian’s working methods, the place of the Transatlantic Paintings in his oeuvre, and the findings of the technical examinations, which involved X-radiography, infrared photography and reflectography, UV, stereo-microscopy, instrumental analyses, and digital image processing techniques, as well as the art historical implications.

A Singular Passion: The Maida and George Abrams Collection of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Drawings
George Abrams and William Robinson, Maida and George Abrams Curator of Drawings
Friday, November 5, 6 p.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum

The research presented by curators and scholars in this series testifies to the commitment of the Art Museums’ staff to the visual culture of the Netherlands, and the Abramses’ gift is intended to foster that commitment. As Mr. Abrams commented, "We want to continue to encourage future generations of scholars and, through them, spark the interest of the public in appreciating Dutch drawings and art." For more than twenty-five years, William Robinson, Maida and George Abrams Curator of Drawings, has studied and written about the Abramses’ drawings and has developed a close friendship with the couple. The finale in this series, this lecture will offer the opportunity to explore the past, present, and future of these exceptional drawings.

The Harvard University Art Museums
The Harvard University Art Museums comprise the Fogg Art Museum (founded in 1891, opened in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (founded in 1902, now housed in Werner Otto Hall), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (opened in 1985). The Straus Center for Conservation is located in the Fogg. Through their collections and professional practice programs, as well as a wide array of special exhibitions, scholarly programming and publications, loans, and educational initiatives and programs, the Art Museums serve Harvard University as a catalyst for instruction and scholarship, as a training ground for future academic art historians and museum professionals, and as a general resource for its diverse and growing national and international audiences.

The collections of the Art Museums consist of more than 150,000 objects in all media, with works ranging from antiquity to the present and from Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. The collections are divided among ten curatorial areas (Ancient and Byzantine Art and Numismatics; Architecture and Design; Asian Art; Busch-Reisinger Museum; Drawings; Islamic and Later Indian Art; Modern and Contemporary Art; Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts; Prints; and Photographs) and are comprehensive within their areas. Developed with an emphasis on their value for teaching and research, these holdings are a unique resource in terms of breadth and quality, and are enhanced continually through gifts and acquisitions. Together, they comprise one of the finest university art collections in the world, with resources rivaling those of many major public museums.

The Art Museums are open Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m., and Sunday, 1:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. Closed national holidays. Admission is $5.00; $4.00 for senior citizens; $3.00 for students; free to children under 18 and to all individuals on Saturday mornings, 10:00 a.m.-–noon, and all day on Wednesdays.

For general information, please call (617) 495-9400. All groups of 8 or more must schedule in advance. Please call (617) 496-8576. Web site: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu. The Harvard University Art Museums are supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.