The Darker Side of Light Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Auguste Rodin, Figure of a Woman "The Sphinx", model early on 1880s, carved 1909, marble, Gift of Eugene and Agnes Eastward. Meyer, 1967.thirteen.6
Introduction
For almost, the fine art of the late nineteenth century means impressionism, an art of the open air and the café-concert, evoking the pleasures of the landscape and the radiance of Paris, metropolis of light. But there is a less familiar side to the story—a realm of sober contemplation, of recherché, sometimes enigmatic and often melancholy subjects that explore an birthday different dimension of experience. Art of this kind was fabricated for collectors who kept their prints and drawings stored away, compiled in albums and portfolios; who mounted bronze medals in cabinets, placed a statuette on a table in a corner or set up information technology above the shelves in the stillness of the library. These works of fine art were not an axiomatic role of one'southward day-to-day surround, similar a picture on the parlor wall. Rather, they were subject field to more than purposeful written report on chosen occasions, much similar taking a book downwardly from the shelf for repose enjoyment.
Because prints in particular were handled more discreetly than most works of art, they encouraged the investigation of suggestive, sometimes agonizing subject matter, including circuitous states of mind and expressions of deep social tension: opium dreams, the obsessions of a lover, the abject despair of an impending suicide, meditations on violence, the fear of death. According to the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, the technique of etching itself seemed to compel an artist to the most intimate degrees of self-revelation. Because of its association with interiority, the print medium drew the attention of many artistic camps—academic painters, realists, impressionists, and symbolists alike. The desire for private aesthetic experience and the fine art made to satisfy it constitute an important affiliate in a long history of collecting as a secluded endeavor. This representation of prints, drawings, sculptures, and illustrated books seeks to re-create that sensibility.
The Darker Side of Light Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Félicien Rops, Gaspard de la Nuit, 1868, carving, Rosenwald Collection, 1946.11.189
First published in 1842, the year following the author Bertrand's death, the text is a compilation of fanciful Gothic fables in a romantic mode that after inspired piano compositions by Maurice Ravel.
The Darker Side of Lite Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Adolphe Appian, Pêcheur en Canot, au bord d'une Rivière (Fisherman in a Gunkhole), 1887, etching with monotype on china newspaper, Gift of Jacob Kainen, 2002.98.371
The Darker Side of Light Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Félix Bracquemond, Birds Nailed to a Befouled Door (Le haut d'united nations battant de porte), 1852, etching, State iii/4, Rosenwald Drove, 1944.8.5
An inscription added in the fifth land of this print reads:
Hither, hanging pitifully you encounter
Rapacious and lustful birds...
To their kin it is a lesson
That to soar and to steal are not the same…
(Ici, tu vois tristement pendre
Oiseaux pillards et convoiteux...
A leurs pareils c'est pour apprendre
Que voler et voler sont deux...)
The Darker Side of Lite Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Max Klinger, Siesta I: pl.3, 1879, etching on laid paper, State iv/iv, Gift of the Epstein Family Collection, 2001.132.40
The Darker Side of Light Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Charles Meryon, Le stryge (The Vampire), 1853, etching on green paper, State five/ten, Gift of R. Horace Gallatin, 1949.ane.27
The inscription (trans. Adele Yard. Holcomb) reads:
Eternal Lust above the city broods,
Clamorous vampire, coveting its food
The Darker Side of Calorie-free Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Fernand Khnopff, Memory of Flanders: A Culvert, c. 1904, conté crayon over graphite, Hearn Family Trust
A Walk in Bruges
Phantom city, mummified city, vaguely preserved. It smells of death, of the Heart Ages, Venice, in blackness, the customary ghosts and the graves...
(Charles Baudelaire, "Pauvre Belgique!" 1864/1866)
The Darker Side of Light Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne, 1878, lithotint, Rosenwald Collection, 1943.3.8664
And when the evening mist wearing apparel the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole urban center hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us.
(James McNeill Whistler, "The 10 O'Clock Lecture," London, February xx, 1885)
The Darker Side of Light Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Max Klinger, Abduction (Entführung), 1878/1880, carving and aquatint in black on chine collé, Land i/v (proof), Bearding Gift, 1995.82.9
In 1878, in Berlin, the twenty-ane-twelvemonth-erstwhile artist exhibited a series of drawings under the championship "Fantasies regarding a discovered glove, dedicated to the adult female who lost information technology." The drawings were preliminary studies for this series of etchings, Klinger'due south most beguiling pictorial essay, which envisions a lover'southward obsession with a fetish that undergoes a myriad of transformations over the course of ten images.
Klinger meditated for some time about the individual titles and the ordering of the compositions, and pencil annotations on the National Gallery's prepare of proof impressions record his evolving thoughts on the matter. They indicate, for instance, a two-office prelude, followed by a dream sequence culminating with the loss of the glove and the lover's awakening. Although manifestly allegorical, the tragicomic tone of the cycle seems too to have had a ground in the artist's personal feel.
The Darker Side of Low-cal Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Edgar Degas, Woman by a Fireplace, 1880/1890, monotype on heavy laid newspaper, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1985.64.168
The Darker Side of Lite Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Anders Zorn, An Irish Girl, 1894, etching, Rosenwald Drove, 1943.3.8840
The Darker Side of Light Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Eugène Carrière, Slumber, 1897, lithograph, Rosenwald Drove, 1943.3.2733
The Darker Side of Light Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Edvard Munch, Girl at Window (Madchen im Hemd am Fenster), 1894, carving, State v/vi, Rosenwald Collection, 1943.3.9022
The Darker Side of Light Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Albert Besnard, Morphine Addicts (Morphinomanes), 1887, carving, Rosenwald Collection, 1943.three.1480
The Darker Side of Light Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Käthe Kollwitz, Woman with Dead Child (Frau mit totem Kind), 1903, engraving and softground carving retouched with blackness chalk, graphite, and metallic gold paint on heavy wove paper, State four/x (trial proof), Gift of Philip and Lynn Straus, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1988.67.1
The Darker Side of Light Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Manor Lady or the Omen (La chatelaine ou le tocsin), 1895, lithograph in turquoise and light blue [poster], Country A, Rosenwald Collection, 1952.8.455
Also known equally La Châtelaine, or the Lady of the Estate, this poster was commissioned as a newspaper ad for Jules de Gastyne's novel Le Tocsin (The Alarm or The Omen).
The Darker Side of Low-cal Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Odilon Redon, Cain and Abel, 1886, etching on wove paper, Gift of Ruth Cole Kainen, 2006.57.27
The Darker Side of Low-cal Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Käthe Kollwitz, Scene from Germinal (Szene aus Germinal), 1893, etching, State iii/four, Rosenwald Collection, 1943.3.5258
But Catherine had seen: and in spite of herself she screamed, from the heart, surprising fifty-fifty herself as though she had just admitted a preference she didn't even know she had.
"Watch out! He's got a knife!"
(Emile Zola, Germinal, 1885, trans. Roger Pearson)
The Darker Side of Light Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 Edouard Manet, Civil War (Guerre civile), 1871, lithograph, State 2nd tirage, Rosenwald Drove, 1943.3.5758
This print commemorates the victims of the Paris Commune of 1871, a popular insurgence against the provisional French government immediately following the disastrous Franco-Prussian War. The composition suggests that Manet's sympathies lay with the brutally suppressed Communards. Although Manet must have made his sketch for information technology in 1871, no doubt because of its political sensitivity the lithograph was not published until three years afterward.
On October 4, curator Peter Parshall presented a lecture about the exhibition followed past a catalogue volume signing. Two Sunday Concerts and two midday concerts in September and October offered music in award of the exhibition.
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