A painting owned by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait’s The Life of a Hunter: A Tight Fix, will be included in a coming traveling exhibition that also includes works from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago and the Louvre Museum in Paris. The collaboration is the second of four planned exhibits among the participating institutions.
The aim of the collaboration is to instigate a global conversation about American art, and so far, it seems to be working.
The High, Terra and the Louvre have worked together on various projects since 2003. The first collaboration to include works from Crystal Bridges was American Encounters: Thomas Cole and the Birth of Landscape Painting in America, which premiered in January at the Louvre. After a stop at the Crystal Bridges museum overthe spring and summer, the six-piece exhibition moved to the High, where it will remain through Jan. 6.
The next installation, American Encounters; Genre Painting in Everyday Life, will also open at the Louvre, on Jan. 17. Genre painting is defined as painting of scenes from everyday life, of ordinary people in work or recreation, depicted in a generally realistic manner.
In addition to the oil-oncanvas work by Tait, the newfive-piece installation will include Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South provided by the High, and George Caleb Bingham’s The Jolly Flatboatmen on loan from Terra.
The Louvre’s two contributions exemplify American genre painting’s European sources: Dutch artist Jan Steen’s Festive Family Meal and Englishman William Mulready’s Train Up a Child.
American genre painting began to emerge in the first half of the 19th century, “when the young nation sought images and narratives to define and bolster its developing identity,” officials from the Louvre said in a release.
“This was the heyday of American genre painting, when paintings told stories about who we are,” said Kevin Murphy, curator of American art at Crystal Bridges. Tait’s painting depicts two hunters engaged in a fight with a bearin the snow. Murphy said, “It’s going to confirm the stereotype that people have about us as ‘the rugged American.’”
“It’s a great example of the rough and ready outdoorsman, the male who goes out into the wilderness and tries to tame the wilderness,” Murphy added. The central figures in the painting are similar to what one would see today in an advertisement on a local billboard for Cabela’s, a bigbox sporting goods store inthe area.
“That’s a big part of our culture. It goes to the image of camping, hunting, fishing. We still try to get to that primal feeling of being out in untouched wilderness, for good or for bad,” Murphy said.
The smaller exhibitions can be more challenging to assemble than much larger projects, Murphy said, because each one of the objects in the paintings becomes essential to the bigger ideas the curators want the exhibition to convey.
“There’s no room for ‘filler,” he said. “The paintings also have to relate to each other really well, each becoming a link in a chain of meaning, which is difficult when you have to choose so narrowly. And then there are four institutions involved, each with very different strengths in their collection, adding another layer of challenge.”
Officials with the Louvre said visitors to the current exhibition are familiarizing themselves with American painting and appear hungryfor more. The exhibition will run in Paris through April 22, at Crystal Bridges from May 11-Aug. 12 and at the High from Sept. 14-Jan. 14, 2014.
“I hope that visitors to the Louvre will feel as enriched through their experience of American painting as I am by the riches of European art I can see there,” Murphy said. “Genre and narrative painting have a long tradition in Holland, France, Italy and Spain, so it’s great to have American art enter into that conversation and demonstrate a slightly different perspective.
“These paintings are often about average, everyday folks living their lives, which I think speaks across cultures and history,” he added.
The third collaborative effort will deal with portraiture, Murphy said. The last is still under discussion, and there will likely be more and bigger projects formulating among the institutions, he said.
“We’re very interested in working with each other,” Murphy said.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 11/14/2012