Now On View

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  Loan on View through Early July: Adolphe Monet in the Garden of Le Coteau at Sainte-Adresse

  March 18, 2013 — July 1, 2013

  One of Claude Monet’s most celebrated, early paintings -- Adolphe Monet in the Garden of Le Coteau at Sainte-Adresse  --  is now on view in the Currier’s European Gallery. It depicts the artist’s father reading a newspaper under a canopy of shade trees. The center of the composition iprovides a vista into a sunlit, flowering garden on the estate Le Coteau in Sainte-Addresse, a town along the Normandy coast.  The painting,  which has been on public view only twice, remained in the artist’s family until 2004. It will return to its owner in early July, so make your plans soon to visit the Currier.

  Adolphe Monet in the Garden of Le Coteau at Sainte-Adresse dates to the summer of 1867, when Monet was only 27 years old. It was painted two years before the Currier’s own important early Monet, The Seine at Bougival, and a full seven years before the term Impressionism was coined in 1874 by a French art critic.

  The seeds of Impressionism, nonetheless, are clearly evident in both paintings. In the painting of Monet’s father, Adolphe, the palette is bold, the brushstrokes are expressive, and the focus is on broad areas of light and shadow rather than the objects themselves. In the Currier’s Seine at Bougival, the artist expresses the fleeting quality of sunlight passing through dappled clouds, and the brushstrokes have become more pronounced and the application of paint thicker and more dynamic. 

  Impressionism reached its full maturity in the 1880s, and was the dominant style for another decade in much of Europe. “This is a rare opportunity for visitors to experience the incredible talent one of the greatest French Impressionists just as he began to emerge as an innovator and before he became a seminal figure” said Susan Strickler, CEO and Director of the Currier. “Come take advantage of this moment.”

   

   Image credit: Claude Monet, French, 1840-1926, Adolphe Monet in the Garden of Le Coteau at Sainte-Adresse, 1867,Oil on canvas, 32 ½ x 39 5/8 in., Private Collection.

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  Abigail Anne Newbold: Crafting Settlement

  March 30, 2013 — July 14, 2013

  Contemporary Connections
  Abigail Anne Newbold: Crafting Settlement
  Organized by the Currier Museum of Art in collaboration with the artist

  Abigail Anne Newbold melds a mastery of traditional craft techniques with a modern design aesthetic to create thought-provoking installations centered on themes of domesticity, self-sufficiency, and artisanal production. The Currier will host Newbold’s first solo museum exhibition, Crafting Settlement, which will transform the museum’s Scheier Gallery into a showroom of unique and finely made products for living on the fringes of organized society. Newbold’s survival line of handmade and modified found objects will feature modular timber-frame dwelling structures, textile garments, elegantly crafted tools of wood and metal, and a covered wagon pulled by a bicycle. Evocative of high-end retail display and traditional museum period room tableaus, Newbold’s installation will complicate the romantic vision of a self-sufficient lifestyle by including impractical and at times humorously absurd objects, such as a fashionable cropped fur jacket and a hand pump-powered fire hose. Synthetic materials will be prominent among the customized and handcrafted objects on display, overturning the notion of craft production as independent from industrialized society. Newbold’s installation stages one visionary possibility for living within our complex socioeconomic environment and invites visitors to imagine their own.

  Currently based in Massachusetts, Newbold has recently exhibited at the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Newbold received a 2012 Artist Award from the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts and a 2009 Kresge Artist Fellowship, among other distinctions. Newbold earned a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston and an MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.

  The Contemporary Connections series features new work by early- and mid-career artists from New England made in dialogue with the Currier’s collection, architecture, and regional histories and location. These projects offer museum visitors expanded perspectives on contemporary art making and invite them to consider the dynamic linkages between past and present art practices and cultural histories.

  This exhibition is supported by the Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation.

  Save the date for the upcoming event with Abigail Anne Newbold at the museum:
  First Thursday LIVE! with Abigail Anne Newbold
  June 6, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
  
  ^{Images: Copyright CarolynBates.com}

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  Poster Mania! Leisure, Romance and Adventure in 1890s America

  May 24, 2013 — Sept. 2, 2013

  Edward Penfield created his first art poster 120 years ago to announce the April 1893 issue of Harper’s monthly magazine. Magazine and book publishers rushed to follow Harper’s lead producing a flood of bold and dazzling placards to announce their latest offerings. These artful, witty, often humorous graphic images inspired the poster mania that gripped the nation in the mid-1890s. The eager public clamored to collect, trade, display and critique the dramatic, ever changing designs. Artists became famous overnight for their personal styles, and they competed in poster competitions. One of America’s most popular artists of the early twentieth century—Maxfield Parrish—first emerged as an award winning poster designer and is represented in the exhibition by several works, including two he did for the state of New Hampshire.

  Posters captivated the booming urban middle class and their interest in leisure activities like reading, bicycling, golf and sailing. Competing publishers and their fashion conscious designers helped introduce the public to the avant-garde European art styles of the day. Posters by Edward Penfield and Will Carqueville reflected the influence of French post-impressionists in their use of areas of bold, contrasting color. The sinuous lines and elaborate patterns of designs by Will Bradley and Louis John Rhead were inspired by the trendy new styles of French art nouveau and English arts and crafts. Female artists like Ethel Read and Blanche McManus struck a chord with the rapidly growing population of women readers. Even paintings by artists like Frederick Remington and Everett Shinn were reproduced as posters.

  This selection of more than 90 posters from the Currier’s collection includes some of the most popular and sought after posters from the 1890s. Many are from the collection of Manchester resident Orien Dodge, who gave the Currier Museum 280 original posters in 1943.
  
  ^{Images: Ethel Reed, The Boston Sunday Herald - Ladies Want It Feb. 24, 1895, lithograph, 18 x 12 1/2inches, Gift of Orien B. Dodge, 1943.10.195; Will L. Carqueville, Lippincott's January, 1895, lithograph, 19 1/8 x 12 1/2inches, Gift of Orien B. Dodge, 1943.10.234; Charles Arthur Cox, Bearings For Sale Here, 1896, lithograph, 16 1/16 x 11 1/8 inches, Gift of Orien B. Dodge, PC D 208 (234).}