TRAVELING EXHIBITION OF THE HORVITZ COLLECTION OF FRENCH DRAWINGS OPENS AT HARVARD ART MUSEUMS IN DECEMBER

Contact: Kate McShea Ewen
Released: November 16, 1998

Cambridge, Massachusetts-The traveling exhibition Mastery and Elegance: Two Centuries of French Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz will debut at the Harvard University Art Museums on December 5, 1998. Organized by the Fogg Art Museum, the exhibition will be on display at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum through January 31, 1999.

Over the past decade, Jeffrey E. Horvitz, a private investor, has assembled the most comprehensive private American collection of early French drawings. For the first time Mastery and Elegance will present a selection of 115 works from this collection dating from the early-seventeenth to the early-nineteenth century by seventy artists. This presentation follows years of scholarly research on these drawings that, combined with the exhibition catalogue, will make a significant contribution to this relatively understudied field. Mastery and Elegance is organized by Alvin L. Clark, Jr., Jeffrey E. Horvitz Research Curator, Department of Drawings, Fogg Art Museum, and William W. Robinson, curator of drawings, Fogg Art Museum. The Sackler Museum is located at 485 Broadway.

Due to the comprehensive nature of the Horvitz Collection, Mastery and Elegance will present the viewer with an encyclopedic survey of French draftsmanship from the beginning of the seventeenth through the beginning of the nineteenth century. This includes sections on Late Mannerism (1600-40); Lyricism: Simon Vouet and His Circle (1630-50); Parisian Atticism (c. 1640-60); French Classicism (Poussin, Claude and Le Brun, c.1650-1700); the period referred to as the Transition (c.1685-1720); Rococo (c. 1710-50); Reform (c. 1750-80); and Neoclassicism (c.1780-1815). In addition to remarkable drawings by such well-known draftsmen as Simon Vouet, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Le Moyne, François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and Jacques-Louis David, the exhibition will include superb examples of the work of lesser-known figures such as Grégoire Huret, Louis Galloche, Jean-Laurent Legeay, Gabriel-François Doyen, Joseph-Benoît Suvée, François-André Vincent, Marie-Gabrielle Capet, and Carle Vernet. Their subject matter includes history, mythology, allegories, portraits, landscapes and genre scenes.

In the early seventeenth century, when the exhibition begins, the fluidly blended Mannerism of the many French, Italian, and Flemish artists active from c. 1530 to c. 1610 in the first and second Schools of Fontainebleau continued to dominate figural expression. In these lively and sophisticated works, the elongated proportions and exaggerated gestures of the often densely intertwined and overlapping figures reflect the refined taste of the small circle of patrons at the French and Lorrainese courts that supported these artists. Their work continued to influence artists well into the 1640s. This influence is seen in drawings such as Jacques-Charles Bellange's St. Sebastian Tied to a Tree and Georges Lallemant's Standing Man in an Elaborate Costume. However, a few well-informed and well-traveled artists began to pull away from these often fantastic works, as they developed the more realistic manner seen in Daniel Dumonstier's Jean-Jacques de La Grange, Marquis d'Arquien and Jean Boucher de Bourges's Kneeling Male Nude with Arms Crossed.

In 1627, Simon Vouet returned from Italy with a new figural and compositional language that was grounded in the Romano-Bolognese Baroque mode of Caravaggio, the Carracci, and Lanfranco. Vouet wisely and subtly blended these new elements with references to the sumptuous and painterly art of Venice and the courtly art of France that preceded him.

He can be seen working out this new style in Esther and Ahasuerus, a recently rediscovered drawing-one of Vouet's rare extant composition studies-which depicts an episode from the Old Testament Book of Esther. Often considered the founder of the early modern school of French art, Vouet's enormous success resulted from his development of a gracious and somewhat tempered parallel to the Italian Baroque; his expansive and well-drawn figures decorated the palaces, hôtels particuliers (townhouses), and chateaux in and around the French capital in the years of renewed prosperity after the cessation of the Wars of Religion. His role as a teacher insured the continuation of aspects of his style in the works of Michel Dorigny and the early works Eustache Le Sueur and Charles Le Brun through the 1650s.

At the height of Vouet's success, Nicolas Poussin returned to Paris at the request of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu (1640-42). Poussin's gradual evolution of a more restrained approach to figure and composition, seen in his drawing Satyr and Nymphs, was viewed by many artists born in the first two decades of the seventeenth century as a viable alternative to the rarefied and somewhat planar elegance of Vouet and his circle. After working in a more exuberant Baroque manner akin to that of Vouet, Poussin's great friend, Jacques Stella and others such as Le Sueur, La Hyre, and Sébastien Bourdon, all began to work in a refined, pseudo-classical manner often referred to as Parisian Atticism. Executed in black chalk with heavily reinforced contours and emphatic gestures, their sober and well-modeled figure studies are set into compositions generated with either chalk or ink with brown or gray wash. These compositions, such as Stella's drawing Assumption of the Virgin Witnessed by St. Francis of Paola, often open to landscapes in the background revealing the simultaneous influence of the ethereal and seamless vistas of Claude Lorrain, such as that in his View of the Roman Campagna.

The classicizing tendencies of Parisian Atticism grew to new proportions in the full-blown and energetic Baroque classicism evident in the works of Charles Le Brun, who informed the model and theories of Poussin with the decorative genius of Rubens in drawings such as Return from Flanders. Together with artists such as Le Sueur, François Perrier, and Bourdon, he founded the Académie royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1648, hereafter referred to simply, as the Académie. As director of that institution and first painter to Louis XIV, Le Brun trained and influenced two generations of painters and sculptors born from the early 1630s through the 1660s, many of whom assisted him with the enormous decorative campaigns at the royal Château de Versailles. These painters adopted and varied Le Brun's somewhat heavy and decorative mode of classicism through the first decade of the eighteenth century. Such variations can be seen in drawings such as Noël Coypel's Assumption and Michel Corneille's Arrival of Aesculapius in Rome.

Although it remains understudied, the roughly thirty-year period between the late 1680s and 1720, often referred to as the Transition, was one of the most inventive, fertile, and diverse moments in the history of French drawings. Some of Le Brun's contemporaries, collaborators, and students, such as Charles de La Fosse, Louis de Boullogne, and Pierre Mignard as well as La Fosse's young pupils, like Louis Galloche and Charles Parrocel, began to move away from the heavy and robust classicism of Le Brun. They turned toward a coloristic manner that gave either equal importance, or even precedence, to the works of Rubens. This current eventually led to debates at the Académie on the merits of color versus line. During this period, artists began to experiment with colorful combinations of black and white chalk on blue paper (Standing Male Nude with Raised Arm by Louis de Boullogne), and with the trois-crayons technique, the mixture of black, red, and white chalks. This technique can be seen in drawings such as Three Female Nudes by Charles de la Fosse. The resulting softness of the forms was gradually combined with a heightened appreciation for the delicate and ornamental work of artists like Claude Gillot, who is represented in the exhibition with his drawing Burial of a Satyr.

This lighter and more supple approach inspired many artists and was pivotal for the young Jean-Antoine Watteau. The sensitive nature of his talent, his evocative use of line combined with his full exploitation of the trois crayons technique in drawings such as Standing Man in Persian Costume Seen from Behind and Couple Seated on the Ground, brought a seemingly effortless, harmonious elegance, and a refined delicacy of touch to the French tradition. Watteau's only documented pupil and his most faithful imitator, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Pater, is represented in the exhibition with his drawing Seated Woman with Hand Studies. As this sheet attests, in his studies of women, Pater's rapid accents are often more decorative than functional, and his contours tend to be more nervous and fluttery than those of his teacher. The two studies of hands are among the finest Pater ever made.

The remarkably talented generation of artists born around 1700 took the French school to its early maturity in what we now refer to as the Rococo style. The high level of accomplishment during this period is evident in the works of artists such as the silversmith Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier, the sculptors Edme Bouchardon and Michel-Ange Slodtz, and the painters Pierre Subleyras, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, Michel-François Dandré-Bardon, Charles-Joseph Natoire, Jacques Dumont le Romain, François Boucher, and Carle Vanloo. Their work led to the hegemony of French art and culture in Europe that would match her new political and military might. Meissonnier's modello, St. Aignan in Prayer Before the Altar with Two Angels, for a silver bas-relief intended to adorn a reliquary in the royal church of St. Aignan in Orléans, is unique in the artist's oeuvre-which consists primarily of architectural and ornamental design-because of the visual impact of the large figures. Bouchardon's Recumbent Putto with Raised Arms is a figure study for the allegorical bas-relief representing Autumn in his Fountain of the Four Seasons (one of the two most important works of Bouchardon's career) on the rue de Grenelle in Paris.

The urbane, sophisticated, and curvilinear elegance of the Rococo manner popular during most of the reign of Louis XV, and the often bright and elaborate media and techniques associated with it were criticized by a growing number of artists born in the 1730s and 1740s. By the 1750s and 1760s, artists began to temper what they considered to be the frivolous excesses of their immediate predecessors in more sober works that looked back to seventeenth-century French classicists like Poussin and Le Sueur. This style, often referred to as the Reform (c. 1750-80), is seen in works such as Jean-Baptiste Greuze's allegorical drawing Boat of Misfortune, a frank evocation of his marriage with Anne-Gabrielle Babuti, and Joseph-Marie Vien's Bust of St. Eloi. It existed concurrently with the end of the Rococo, which fell from favor in the last years of the reign of Louis XV and the early years of the reign of Louis XVI. The Reform also comprised experimental works by more independent talents whose media-rich sheets attempt to move away from the Rococo in a less restrained and more inventive way. This is seen in Gabriel - François Doyen's Cybele Tormented by the Elements and Jean-Baptiste Deshays's Tobit Directing the Buriel of the Dead, both composed with ink, wash and gouache.

The influence of Vien and his students-Jacques-Louis David and François-André Vincent-led to what we now refer to as the Neoclassical style with which Mastery and Elegance concludes. Although this mode was more austere than the manner that preceded it, any generalization fails to capture the rich diversity of the works produced by Neoclassical artists: the painterly drawings of Jacques Gamelin, the subtleties of Pierre-Jean-François Peyron, and the sumptuous and gentle sfumato of Pierre-Paul Prud'hon were as essential to this period of revolutionary political and artistic upheaval as the stark chiaroscuro of Françcois-André Vincent, Etienne-Barthélemy Garnier, and Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard, and the radical, emphatic linear rigor seen in the works of David and Girodet. Drawings by all of these artists, such as Gamelin's media-rich Hector at the Palace of Paris and Girodet's Head of a Young woman with an "Antique" Coiffure, which reflect their unique styles, can be found in this section of the exhibition.

Jeffrey E. Horvitz
Jeffrey E. Horvitz was born in 1950 and grew up in Cleveland. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 with both a BA and masters degree in sociology, he went on to earn a masters in psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles from 1974 to 1980, then became a real estate executive in Hollywood, Florida. He now lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts, where he is a private investor.

Although he is unabashedly acquisitive and collects drawings at a hectic pace-more than four hundred during the past four years alone-Mr. Horvitz is the least impulsive of collectors. He engages the art market methodically, carefully evaluates the cost of every acquisition, and ponders the contribution of each new drawing to the shape and content of the collection. When contemplating his purchases, he thinks of three intersecting sets of criteria, one representing works that he likes, the second standing for drawings esteemed by scholars and other experts, and the third comprising sheets that are priced reasonably. An appropriate acquisition should fall within the intersection of these three sets. In the end, the aesthetic appeal of the object, rather than its rarity or art-historical significance, is his primary criterion for selection.

Exhibition Catalogue
The fully-illustrated catalogue, Mastery & Elegance: Two Centuries of French Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz, has been written by a team of thirty-five international scholars.

It comprises two essays, an interview with the collector, extensive catalogue entries for the 115 works in the exhibition and biographies of the artists. The essay titles are "On Some Collectors of Eighteenth-Century French Drawings in the United States," written by Marianne Roland Michel, and "Academicism and Anti-Academicism: Drawing in France in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," written by Alain Mérot and Sophie Raux-Carpentier. The catalogue will also include a forward by Pierre Rosenberg de l'Académie française. All of the exhibited drawings will be illustrated in color, and there will be approximately 375 black-and-white essay and comparative illustrations. In addition, there will be a partially-illustrated appendix listing the pre-1800 drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz that are not included in the exhibition.

The catalogue was edited by Alvin L. Clark, Jr., with Margaret Morgan Grasselli (curator of old master drawings, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), Jean-François Méjanès (conservateur-en-chef au Département des Arts Graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris) and William W. Robinson.

Exhibition Tour

Art Gallery of Ontario
Toronto, Ontario, CANADA
February 20 through April 18, 1999

Musée Jacquemart-André
Paris, FRANCE
May 1 through June 25, 1999

National Gallery of Scotland
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
July 9 through September 5, 1999

National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts
New York, New York
October 8 through December 12, 1999

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles, California
January 30 through March 25, 2000

Related Exhibitions
Lines of Inquiry: Ancien Régime Book Illustration from the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, through December 11, 1998
Contact: (617) 495-2444

French Prints from the Age of the Musketeers
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through January 10, 1999
Contact: (617) 396-3540

Diversity and Order: French Science in Print, 1600-1740
Burndy Library, Bidner Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, through January 1999
Contact: (617) 258-9302

Opening Reception and Lectures
Friday, December 4, 1998, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 4:30 to 8:00 p.m.
$20; $15 for Friends of the Art Museums

Advance registration is required, please call (617) 495-4544 to register.
Pierre Rosenberg de l'Académie française, Président-Directeur, Musée du Louvre, Paris, will deliver the keynote address. His presentation will be followed with talks by Jeffrey E. Horvitz and Louis-Antoine Prat, chargé de mission au Département des Arts Graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris, who is also a distinguished collector of French drawings.

M. Victor Leventritt Symposium

French Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Drawings, Prints and Book Illustration
Saturday, December 5, 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Arthur M. Sackler Museum lecture hall
Free admission, complimentary parking available.

Presented on the occasion of the opening of Mastery and Elegance: Two Centuries of French Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz and in conjunction with Lines of Inquiry: Ancien Régime Book Illustration from the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts at Harvard's Houghton Library, and French Prints from the Age of the Musketeers, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the symposium will bring together French, British and American scholars to discuss: the work and careers of such major artists as Abraham Bosse, Charles de la Fosse, François Boucher, Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jean-Baptiste Greuze; the connections between fine art and popular imagery; and the interrelationships of drawings, prints, and book illustrations.

Speakers include: Victor Carlson, senior curator of prints and drawings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Alvin L. Clark, Jr., Jeffrey E. Horvitz Research Curator, Department of Drawings, Fogg Art Museum; Carter Foster, assistant curator of drawings, Cleveland Museum of Art; Carl Goldstein, professor of art history, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Margaret Morgan Grasselli, curator of old master drawings, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Jo Hedley, curator of paintings before 1800, The Wallace Collection, London; Suzanne Folds McCullagh, curator of earlier prints and drawings, The Art Institute of Chicago; Jean-François Méjanès, conservateur-en-chef au Département des Arts Graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris; Edgar Munhall, curator, The Frick Collection, New York; Perrin Stein, assistant curator of drawings and prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Maxime Préaud, conservateur-en-chef de la Réserve, Département des Estampes, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; Beverly Schreiber, art consultant and independent scholar; Sue Welsh Reed, associate curator of prints and drawings, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Xavier Salmon, curator of drawings and eighteenth-century French paintings, Musée et château de Versailles.

The M. Victor Leventritt Lecture Fund was established through the generosity of the wife, children, and friends of the late M. Victor Leventritt, Harvard class of 1935. The purpose of the fund is to present outstanding scholars of the history and theory of art to the Harvard and greater Boston communities.

Symposium Reception
Saturday, December 5, 5:30 to 7:00 p.m., Houghton Library, Quincy Street, Cambridge, free
Following the symposium French Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Drawings, Prints and Book Illustration the public is invited to a reception in the Houghton Exhibition Room to view Lines of Inquiry: Ancien Régime Book Illustrations from the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts.

Gallery Talks
Gallery talks are free to the public with the price of Art Museums' admission. Admission is free on Wednesdays and Saturday mornings. Hearing assists are available for gallery talks; arrangements should be made beforehand by phoning (617) 495-8286. To request a sign language interpreter, the public should call (617) 495-2397 using Massachusetts Telephone Relay Service 1-800-439-2370, preferably three weeks in advance of the gallery talk.

Saturday, December 12, 2:00 p.m. Arthur M. Sackler Museum
with Alvin L. Clark, Jr., Jeffrey E. Horvitz Research Curator, Department of Drawings.

Saturday, January 9, 11:30 a.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum
with James Harper, 1998-1999 Lynn and Philip A. Straus Intern, Department of Drawings.

Saturday, January 23, 11:30 a.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum
Ann Leonard, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History of Art and Architecture, and graduate student assistant, Department of Drawings.

Related Lecture

Tyrannus or La Mode: Fashion in the Age of the Musketeers
Sunday, December 6, 3:00 p.m., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Remis Auditorium, free
Please pick up free tickets from the Remis Box Office one hour before the program.
Nicola J. Shilliam, independent scholar

The origins of Paris as the fashion capital of the Western world are rooted deep in the past. In Tyrannus or La Mode (1661), the English writer John Evelyn observed about fashion and the French: "It is plainly in their interest and they gain by it. Believe it, La Mode de France feeds as many bellies as it clothes backs." During the seventeenth century, the French court became the most fashionable in Europe, and the French crown encouraged the textile and fashion industries as important contributors to the national economy. This talk explores the elegant and romantic clothing depicted by the artists of the period and suggests its continued inspiration for later fashions and the cinema.-Made possible by the Lowell Institute.

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The Harvard University Art Museums' facilities are wheelchair accessible. For general information, please call (617) 495-9400. World Wide Web: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu. For press information or photographs, please contact Kate McShea Ewen at (617) 495-2397. For more information on events, please contact the Friends, Fellows, and Special Programs Office at (617) 495-4544.

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The Harvard University Art Museums comprise three museums (Busch-Reisinger Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum), all located on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, MA, at the intersection of Quincy Street and Broadway, adjacent to Harvard Yard. 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

holidays. Admission is $5.00; $4.00 for senior citizens; $3.00 for students; free under 18, on Saturday mornings and all day on Wednesdays. For special tour reservations, please call (617) 496-8576. General tours are offered Monday through Friday from September through June; Wednesdays only in July and August. The Fogg tour is at 11:00 a.m.; the Busch-Reisinger tour is at 1:00 p.m.; and the Sackler is at 2:00 p.m. The Harvard University Art Museums is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

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