ADVANCE SCHEDULE OF EXHIBITIONS - 2000

Nature As Metaphor: Paintings from China, Korea and Japan
July 10, 1999 through February 13, 2000 (Arthur M. Sackler Museum)

The Shape of Content: The Stephen Lee Taller Ben Shahn Archive
November 27, 1999 through March 26, 2000 (Fogg Art Museum)

Landmark Pictures: Ed Ruscha/Andreas Gursky
January 8 through April 23, 2000
(Busch-Reisinger Museum & Sert Gallery, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts)

Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times
February 5 through April 30, 2000 (Arthur M. Sackler Museum)

The Enlightened Eye: Gifts from John Goelet
February 12 through May 7, 2000 (Arthur M. Sackler Museum)

Recent Acquisitions Exhibitions
March 11 through September 24, 2000

Daido Moriyama
August 5 through October 29, 2000 (Fogg Art Museum)

Before and After the End of Time: Architecture and the Year 1000
August 26 through December 31, 2000 (Fogg Art Museum)

Dürer's Passions
September 9 through December 3, 2000 (Busch-Reisinger Museum)

Philip Guston: A New Alphabet
September 23 through December 17, 2000 (Fogg Art Museum)

Piet Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings
April 28 through July 22, 2001 (Busch-Reisinger Museum)

Long-term Installations in the Permanent Collection Galleries

Nature As Metaphor: Paintings from China, Korea and Japan
July 10, 1999 through February 13, 2000 (Arthur M. Sackler Museum)
This exhibition introduces a selection of later Chinese, Korean and Japanese paintings that feature the details of nature, rather than its vast panorama, as their principal subject matter. The paintings encompass a wide range of themes and styles but focus on the genre known as bird-and-flower painting. Nature as Metaphor was organized by Robert D. Mowry, curator of Chinese art and head of the department of Asian Art, and is supported with funds from the John M. Rosenfield Teaching Exhibition Fund.

The Shape of Content: The Stephen Lee Taller Ben Shahn Archive
November 27, 1999 through March 26, 2000 (Fogg Art Museum)
This exhibition features examples of Ben Shahn's (1898-1969) prints, drawings, and related ephemera culled from the extensive collection of the late Stephen Lee Taller, now located at the Fogg Art Museum and Fine Arts Library, Harvard University Art Museums. The prints, drawings, photographs, posters, and graphic designs in this exhibition span the artist's career, and illustrate the diversity and evolution of his vision from the social realism that dominated his work in the thirties to the more abstract and allegorical imagery that characterized his post war production. This exhibition also attests to the integral relationship between Shahn’s art and his life-long commitment to political activism.

Landmark Pictures: Ed Ruscha/Andreas Gursky
January 8 through April 23, 2000 (Busch-Reisinger Museum and Sert Gallery)
This exhibition explores the work of artists Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937) and Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955) and will be presented in two parts, the first at the Busch-Reisinger Museum (January 8 – March 19), and the second in the Sert Gallery (mid March – late April). Both artists are well known for their large-scale images of recognizable sites – Ruscha of the particular L.A. and Hollywood landscape and Gursky of German and international landscapes and sites. Landmark Pictures encompasses more than forty objects, including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and books and examines how each artist has reconfigured the traditional understanding of landscape by creating highly seductive, richly associative images that evoke landmarks that are at once foreign and familiar to viewers. The exhibition will also inaugurate the newly renovated space in the Corbusier-designed Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, adjacent to the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger Museums, which will be dedicated to contemporary art.

Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times (Traveling)
February 5 through April 30, 2000 (Arthur M. Sackler Museum) (Premier venue)
This nationally traveling exhibition will address a pivotal but little-examined body of work by Ben Shahn (1898-1969), one of the major American social realist artists of the twentieth century. Focusing on Ben Shahn’s 1930s photographs of New York, the exhibition will examine the artist’s experimentation with and contributions to the emerging field of social documentary practice; it will also highlight Shahn’s use of photography in his own works in other media in the context of the larger social and political climate of the Great Depression. Over 150 works by Shahn will be on display: photographs, ink drawings, easel paintings, major mural studies, and ephemera. A fully illustrated catalogue co published with Yale University Press will accompany the exhibition. Ben Shahn’s New York was organized by Deborah Martin Kao, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photographs at the Fogg, and Laura Katzman, assistant professor of American art and director of museum studies at Randolph-Macon Woman's College. The exhibition is supported with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities, dedicated to expanding American understanding of history and culture.

The Enlightened Eye: Gifts from John Goelet
February 12 through May 7, 2000 (Arthur M. Sackler Museum)
For over forty years, the Harvard University Art Museums have been the grateful beneficiaries of John Goelet’s discerning taste and generosity. In celebration, this exhibition will feature a selection of Mr. Goelet’s gifts of Islamic, Asian, and European works of art. Forty-three works from Ottoman Turkey, Mughal India, and Iran during the Timurid, Turkman and Safavid periods will be highlighted in the exhibition. Additional works on view will include examples of Ottoman ceramic tiles from the town of Iznik, Turkey, dating to the sixteenth century; an enormous military banner from late-seventeenth or early-eighteenth century Ottoman Turkey; the famous manuscript of the Divan (Collected Works) of Anvari from 1588, made for the Mughal emperor Akbar; a selection of calligraphies from Iran and Turkey; and some of the best known and finest paintings from Iran during the Timurid, Turkman, and Safavid periods.

A Decade of Collecting: Recent Acquisitions from the Harvard University Art Museums
Beginning in March 2000, the Harvard University Art Museums will embark on a series of exhibitions showcasing a decade of recent additions to the collections. The exhibitions will showcase masterpieces of Asian art, Old Master and contemporary prints and drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs, covering virtually every area of the institution’s collecting and offering a rare examination of the collecting practices of the nation’s leading teaching and research museum. The six exhibitions will open in succession beginning in March 2000 and will be held throughout the three Harvard University Art Museums: the Fogg Art Museum, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, and the Busch-Reisinger Museum. These new acquisitions exhibitions will focus on the following areas of the collections:

A Decade of Collecting: Recent Acquisitions of Asian Art,, March 11– September 24, 2000, Arthur M. Sackler Museum

• A Decade of Collecting: Recent Acquisition of Prints and Drawings, Part I: 1400-1945: March 25 – June 18, 2000, Fogg Art Museum; Part II: 1945-Present: June 3–August 27, 2000, Arthur M. Sackler Museum
• A Decade of Collecting: Recent Acquisitions by the Busch-Reisinger Museum, April 15 – July 9, 2000, Busch-Reisinger Museum
• A Decade of Collecting: Recent Acquisitions of Photographs, April 29 – July 9, 2000, Fogg Art Museum
• A Decade of Collecting: Recent Acquisitions of Islamic and Later Indian Art, June 8 – September 3, 2000, Arthur M. Sackler Museum

Daido Moriyama (Traveling)
August 5 through October 29, 2000 (Fogg Art Museum)
Organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition explores the work of Moriyama, an important Japanese photographer and features nearly two hundred black-and-white images and a major Polaroid piece that together examine the relationship of postwar Japanese society to Western, and in particular to American, influences. Moriyama’s photographs detail the streets of Japan’s major cities; among his city images are those shot in underlit bars, clubs, streets and alleyways where the subject’s movement creates a blurred suggestion of form rather than a distinct figure. Following its presentation at the Fogg Art Museum, the exhibition will travel to other North American and European venues.

Before and After the End of Time: Architecture and the Year 1000
August 26 through December 31, 2000 (Fogg Art Museum)
Organized by Christine Smith, Marion and Robert Weinberg Professor of Architectural History at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, this exhibition looks at the beginning of Romanesque architecture in Western Europe shortly after the year 1000 A.D. This revolutionary period in Christian architecture resulted from the millennial expectation of the coming of the City of God on earth. Heavenly building stones – gems such as emerald and lapis lazuli – will be on view along with twelfth-century architectural fragments and sculptures from France and Spain. Harvard's contribution to the rediscovery of this moment in architectural history will also be addressed in the exhibition. Photographs and drawings by archeologist-professors A. Kinsgley Porter and Kenneth J. Connant, who conducted many of the excavations that brought to light the remains of early Romanesque churches and monasteries, and by Harvard graduate Henry Hobson Richardson, who based his mature architectural style on surviving Romanesque structures he studied in Europe, will also be presented.

Dürer's Passions
September 9 through December 3, 2000 (Busch-Reisinger Museum)
Organized by Jordan Kantor, doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, this exhibition focuses on several series, drawn and printed, of the Passion of Christ by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). This German painter and printmaker was one of the greatest artistic figures in Germany before the modern era. His working life spanned the introduction of Renaissance art into Northern, Gothic Europe and the first years of the Protestant Reformation, and he repeatedly turned to the Passion as a subject for art and spiritual exploration. Prints from the Harvard University Art Museums’ collections will be supplemented by the loan of priceless drawings from the British Museum and several German museums, to trace Dürer's exploration of the Passion theme through his life's work.

Philip Guston: A New Alphabet
September 23 through December 17, 2000 (Fogg Art Museum)
This exhibition focuses on the year 1970, when Guston stunned the art world by leaving abstraction for a simple, cartoon like style of figuration that he maintained until his death in 1980. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a wall of small panel paintings in which he proposed a new visual "alphabet." These paintings were executed in 1968-69 and will be installed much as they were in Guston's studio. The context for the shift in Guston’s aesthetic will be provided by several paintings from the early 1960s – gray abstractions in which head like forms begin to emerge in Guston's art – as well as several paintings from 1969 and after, which feature images of Ku Klux Klansmen, his personal response to the political turmoil of the times.

Piet Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings
April 28 through July 22, 2001 (Busch-Reisinger Museum)
This exhibition will present approximately fifteen late paintings borrowed from major museums throughout Europe and America by Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872-1944), the master of modernist abstraction. These works were started by Mondrian in Europe and finished after his arrival in New York, with syncopated accents of color, extra black lines, and thickly brushed white paint added to give the works, in his words, "more boogie woogie." The exhibition will present the results of two years' technical research into the methods by which Mondrian revised these works – research that has not only uncovered earlier states of the paintings in question but added greatly to the understanding of Mondrian's art. A computer kiosk will allow visitors to explore Mondrian's working process by taking a virtual tour through the layers of several paintings, and an illustrated catalogue will present the findings in detail. This exhibition is the result of a collaboration between the Fogg Art Museum and the Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation.

LONG-TERM INSTALLATIONS IN THE PERMANENT COLLECTION GALLERIES

The Art of Ancient Rome: Roman Gallery Reinstallation
Arthur M. Sackler Museum
This important teaching collection includes a number of stone masterpieces, including the monumental statue of Emperor Trajan (2nd century), and the late-second-century sarcophagus depicting the battle between the Greeks and the Amazons, as well as dozens of smaller household objects in bronze, glass, terracotta, and bone. The exhibition was organized into thematic groups – Portraiture, Everyday Life, Funerary Arts, and Gambling, Spectacles & the Taste for the Exotic – to place the objects in context. Used on a daily basis by students and scholars from around the world, this collection serves as an important resource for the study of classical art and culture at Harvard and beyond. The exhibition opened in September 1999.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Sketches in Clay
Fogg Art Museum
In one of its most important purchases ever, in 1937 the Fogg acquired twenty-seven terracotta sculptures, fourteen of which can be associated directly with Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), the greatest sculptor of the Roman Baroque. A fifteenth was added in 1995. These works are studies for some of Bernini's most important projects and cover nearly the whole of the artist's career. They include saints and allegorical figures, and the extraordinarily vivid angels, seemingly descending directly from a heavenly realm in swirls of flowing drapery. The installation, which marks the quatercentenary of Bernini's birth (1998), was organized by Ivan Gaskell, Margaret S. Winthrop Curator, and Colette Czapski Hemingway, 1996-1998 Andrew W. Mellon Intern, Department of Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts, with contributions by Jeannine O'Grody, 1995-1996 National Endowment for the Arts Intern. The exhibition opened February 28, 1998.

Wall Drawing #830: Four Isometric Figures with Color Ink Washes Superimposed
Arthur M. Sackler Museum lobby
This major wall drawing by conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, one of our generation's premier draftsmen, occupies four walls in the lobby of the Sackler Museum. Comprising four large-scale geometric shapes on fields of primary colors, the drawing dramatically amplifies and energizes the Sackler's double-height entry space. The project was organized at the Art Museums by James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, and opened in 1997.

The Art of Identity: African Sculpture from the Teel Collection
Fogg Art Museum
This installation brings together selections of African sculpture from the William E. and Bertha L. Teel Collection, an extraordinary group of works from sub-Saharan Africa that was amassed over nearly thirty-five years. This diverse collection of sculptures illustrates the complexity of art traditions in Africa and offers a unique opportunity to examine issues of identity in African art. The Art of Identity was co curated by Suzanne Blier, professor of fine arts, Harvard University with Aimée and Mark Bessire. Support for the installation was provided in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency; it opened in 1996.

Harvard University Art Museums
The Harvard University Art Museums is one of the leading arts institutions in the United States and the world. It is distinguished by the range and depth of its collections and its groundbreaking exhibitions and original research. For more than a century it has been the nation's premier training ground for museum professionals and scholars, and is renowned for its seminal and ongoing role in the development of the discipline of art history in this country.

The three Harvard University Art Museums – the Fogg Art Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum – are all outstanding institutions in their respective fields. The Fogg also houses the Straus Center for Conservation, a leader in the research and development of scientific and technology-based analysis of art. The 150,000 objects in the Art Museums' collections range in date from ancient times to the present, and come from Europe, North America, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. Each Museum also has an active program of special exhibitions that promotes new scholarship in its respective areas of focus.

As an integral component of the Harvard University community, the Art Museums serve as a resource for all students, adding a special dimension both to their specific areas of study and to their lives at and after Harvard. The Art Museums welcome members of the public to experience its collections and special exhibitions, as well as to enjoy its lectures, symposia, and other programs.

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 and encyclopedic within their areas. Developed with an emphasis on their value for teaching and research, these holdings are unique in their 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.

Visitor Information
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 under 18 and for individuals on Saturdays until noon and all day on Wednesdays.

For general information, please call (617) 495-9400. All groups of 7 or more must be scheduled in advance, please call (617) 496-8576. Web site: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu. The Harvard University Art Museums is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

EDITORS: The information in this Exhibition Schedule is current as of January 20, 2000 and dates are subject to change. The thematic installations in the permanent collection galleries usually hang for one to three years. Please confirm information with the Public Relations Office, (617) 495-2397, prior to publication. Thank you.