Lead support for Portraits from the École des Beaux-Arts comes from Canson. Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Robert Lehman Foundation, Ildeko and Gilbert Butler, Catherine and Arthur Williams, Diane Nixon, David Tobey, Elizabeth Eveillard, the Kress Family Foundation, and Jill Newhouse.
The Drawing Center has commissioned artists Ryan and Trevor Oakes to use the exhibition Portraits from the École des Beaux-Arts Paris as a platform to further explore the genre of portraiture.
For eight consecutive Thursdays during May 7–June 25th, 2015 from 12–8 PM, the artists are in residence in the Main Gallery.
This exhibition explores four hundred years of portrait drawings, emphasizing work from live models. Each week, The Drawing Center presents a different set of four portraits from different centuries and with different formal qualities hung "in dialogue" with each other in a specially-built room located in the center of The Drawing Center’s Main Gallery. Forty portraits have been chosen from the Beaux-Arts de Paris' collection based on diverse criteria such as the male and female gestures, caricature, frontal gaze, social class, and profession of the model. The room is inspired by the intimate gallery at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome where Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X (c.1649) hangs, which only accommodates a small number of visitors at a time and was designed to provide a space for close viewing and contemplation without crowds. The remaining thirty-six portraits in the exhibition hang on the gallery's back wall and are visible to the visitor throughout the exhibition's run.
This unique exhibition explores the notion of drawn portraiture and provides alternative readings of this important genre of art making within a contemporary context. The selection of works is extensive, ranging from seventeenth-century to the present. Highlights include never-before-exhibited drawings by nineteenth-century luminaries Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Charles Garnier to the work of modern and contemporary masters Henri Matisse and Georg Baselitz to portraits by recent graduates of the Beaux-Arts de Paris.
Co-curated by Emmanuelle Brugerolles, Curator of the Drawings collection at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center.
Lead support for Portraits from the École des Beaux-Arts comes from Canson. Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Robert Lehman Foundation, Ildeko and Gilbert Butler, Catherine and Arthur Williams, Diane Nixon, David Tobey, Elizabeth Eveillard, the Kress Family Foundation, and Jill Newhouse.
Image: Jacob Ferdinand Voet, Portrait de femme vue de face, 1639-1700, Colored pencil on blue paper. 22.5 X 16 cm
Co-curated by Emmanuelle Brugerolles, Curator of the Drawings collection at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center.