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Fairfield University Art Museum has started a new blog page to reflect our name change from the Bellarmine Museum. For future blog posts, visit us at https://fairfielduam.tumblr.com/!

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Direct from the Director, Spring 2018

           Art is life-enhancing, to paraphrase the maxim coined by the celebrated connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art, Bernard Berenson.  Museums around the world embrace and affirm that premise by presenting to the public works of art from myriad cultures and time periods in permanent gallery displays and special exhibitions.  This spring at the Fairfield University Art Museum, an extraordinary group of dazzling and historically significant works of Italian Baroque art are on view in our landmark exhibition The Holy Name. Art of the Gesù: Bernini and his Age. Headlined by a portrait bust by the great Gian Lorenzo Bernini of the towering Jesuit theologian Roberto Bellarmino (patron saint of Fairfield University)—known in his day as the “Hammer of the Heretics” for his steadfast defense of the church and the pope against all challengers—the exhibition recounts the epic first century of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in Rome and its glorious mother church, the Gesù, strategically sited in the very center of the city. Bernini’s sculpture, which has never before left Rome, is one of five great artistic treasures lent by the church itself, which have thrilled thousands of visitors to the museum these past months.  You have until May 19, when the exhibition closes, to experience for yourself just how life-enhancing great art can be.  

           Art can also function as a universal language—a mode of expression and communication that transcends barriers of language and culture.  That is the premise informing the striking and monumental series of prints by renowned contemporary South African artist William Kentridge, Universal Archive, on view in the museum’s Walsh Gallery, also through May 19.  

           And finally, among the many roles it plays in contemporary society, art can also provide avenues of conversation and reflection about challenging, disturbing, polarizing and inflammatory subjects.  One such subject confronting the country today is gun violence.  The charged debate it fuels is the impetus behind the powerful exhibition #UNLOAD: Guns in the Hands of Artists—our upcoming exhibition in the Walsh Gallery, opening on the evening of May 31 and on view through October 12.  As always, we are offering a rich roster of programming. Like the exhibition, the many lectures, conversations and other events, free and open to all, will serve to promote community engagement with the galvanizing and disturbing reality of gun violence in America.  

           I look forward to seeing you in the galleries!

                                                           Artfully yours,

                                                           Linda

Image: William Kentridge: Universal Archive at the Walsh Gallery, 2018.

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Direct from the Director, Winter 2017-18

Greetings!

            Rome is my favorite city, and home to some of my favorite artwork, so I am fortunate in being able to visit the Eternal City on occasion.  My most recent trip, in October, was to speak at a symposium on the history of collecting Raphael—the great High Renaissance painter who was all the rage for centuries. My topic was Raphael in America, a story that is mostly about copies: the first real painting by that great Raphael only arrived in America at the very end of the 19th century; before that, American collectors satisfied their hunger for works by the “Prince of Painters,” as Raphael was long known, with replicas--some good, some less so.  The first such copy to arrive on these shores was acquired by Thomas Jefferson, and untold hundreds entered American libraries, atheneums, universities and museums in the course of the nineteenth century. In fact, right here at Fairfield, we have copies of two of Raphael’s most famous compositions.  

           Just as Raphael, surprisingly, has a presence here, so, too, will one of the defining landmarks of Rome—if only briefly—beginning on February 2, when the Fairfield University Art Museum will open our ground-breaking exhibition: The Holy Name. Art of the Gesù: Bernini and his Age.  Located in the very center of the city near the ancient Roman forum, the Gesù is one of the city’s most beautiful and important churches, and it house some of most glorious artistic masterpieces of the Baroque period.  Five of these treasures, including a marble portrait bust by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the greatest artist of the period and one of the towering personalities in the history of western art, will be on view in our galleries.  None has ever before travelled to America (the Bernini has never even left Rome until now), so this is truly a historic moment.  The exhibition also presents over 50 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, rare books, documents and precious objects lent by major American museums and generous private collectors.  Together, the assembled works recount the fascinating stories of the foundation of the Jesuit order in Rome; the long and challenging road to construct and embellish it glorious mother church, the Gesù; and the creative, powerful and formidable personalities—artists, patrons, theologians--who made it all happen, headlined by Bernini, who was attached to the Jesuits and the Gesù for much of his long life.  After May 19, these treasures from the Gesù return to Rome.  Of course, you can always travel there to see the church and its artistic masterpieces, but I’m confident you won’t want to miss this extraordinary exhibition that brings them all to your own doorstep at the Fairfield University Art Museum.  And be sure to attend some of the marvelous lectures, gallery talks, and other events we’re offering during the run of the show.  As always, the exhibition and all our programs are free and open to the public.             

See you in the galleries!   

Artfully yours,                                                                         Linda 

Image: Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Bust of Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, 1623-24. Marble. Church of the Gesù, Rome. Photo © Zeno Colantoni.

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We’re excited to announce the publication of Dr. Philip Eliasoph’s new book, Adolf Dehn: Midcentury Manhattan, following the recent exhibition at the Fairfield University Art Museum, for which he was guest curator. The exhibition, which brought together more than two dozen of Dehn’s sketches, lithographs, and watercolors, created an opportunity for a critical reappraisal of this striking chronicler of mid-century urban life. With this monograph, published by the The Artist Book Foundation, the moment for that critical re-evaluation of Dehn’s place in American art history has arrived.

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Talking Turkey and John James Audubon

(Reposted from the New York Historical Society http://behindthescenes.nyhistory.org/talking-turkey-and-john-james-audubon/ - Guest post by Fairfield University Art Museum Advisory Board Member Roberta Olson, all images courtesy of the New York Historical Society)

Contrary to our notions of a Thanksgiving feast, the first harvest celebrated by the Pilgrims with the Wampanoag in 1621 did not focus on roast turkey. According to the one preserved written account, the menu pivoted around duck, venison, seafood, and corn. Turkey only became part of the annual Thanksgiving ritual after 1863, when Abraham Lincoln declared the national holiday.

Writing in the text for The Birds of America (1827–38), the legendary naturalist-artist John James Audubon sided with Benjamin Franklin supporting the Wild Turkey—the bird that we today associate with the holiday of Thanksgiving—as a better choice for the national symbol than the Bald Eagle:

[S]uffer me, kind reader, to say how much I grieve that it [the Bald Eagle] should have been selected as the Emblem of my Country . . . The opinion of our great Franklin on this subject, as it perfectly coincides with my own. (Ornithological Biography, volume 1, page 168)

He proceeded to paraphrase one of the versions of Franklin’s letter from Paris to his daughter Sally Bache. The recent selection of the Eagle as the national symbol and the poor design of the bird on the badge of the Society of the Cincinnati Medal—which Franklin noted looked more like a turkey—prompted the Philadelphia sage to humorously compare the two birds:

For my own part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labour of the fishing hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him. With all this injustice, he is never in good case, but like those among men who live by sharping and robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank coward: the little king bird not bigger than a sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district. He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America, who have driven all the king birds from our country, though exactly fit for that order of knights which the French call Chevaliers d’Industrie. (January 26, 1784, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, 29)

Franklin also noted that the turkey is not only more respectable but also an original native bird of America, whereas eagles are found in every country. No wonder that the immigrant “American Woodsman,” as Audubon fashioned himself, assigned the Wild Turkey the place of honor as the first plate in The Birds of America. That engraving was based on his watercolor model—one of 435 for The Birds of America that the New-York Historical Society purchased from the artist’s widow, Lucy Bakewell Audubon, in 1863 and that have subsequently been deemed national treasures. It became perhaps Audubon’s most famous image.

Audubon, who became a proud U.S. citizen in 1812, so identified with America that he used “the gobbler” for his personal seal, engraved in reverse with the motto “AMERICA MY COUNTRY,” as well as for his visiting card. “The great size and beauty of the Wild Turkey, its value as a delicate and highly prized article of food,” wrote Audubon in the Ornithological Biography, “render it one of the most interesting of the birds indigenous to the United States of America.” On over 19 pages he described the species’ complex behavior, including its “love- season” and “amatory intercourse,” noting the fowl’s “purring,” “notes of exultation,” “gobbling,” and “clucking.”

In both his watercolor model and plate 1 of The Birds of America, Audubon’s majestic bird crowds the double-elephant-size paper, while the tips of its tail feathers are cropped to increase the illusion that it is striding forward through the cane, which grows on the riverbanks of the southeastern United States. The bird, which reputedly weighed 28 pounds, measured: “Length 4 feet 1 inch, extent of wings 5 feet 8 inches; beak 1 ½ inches along the ridge . . . Such were the dimensions of the individual represented in the plate, which, I need not say, was a fine specimen.” One of the people who witnessed the artist painting the watercolor commented, “Audubon . . . spent several days sketching it . . . till it rotted and stunk—I hated to lose so much good eating.” To convey the textures and tonalities of its plumage, Audubon lavished a wide spectrum of media on his depiction, including metallic pigment, most likely gold.

With the Wild Turkey as its focus, the New-York Historical Society’s intimate Audubon’s Birds of America Gallery takes flight on November 10. It offers visitors a once-in-a-lifetime experience of viewing John James Audubon’s spectacular watercolor models for the 435 plates of The Birds of America with their corresponding plates from the double-elephant-folio series, engraved by master printmaker Robert Havell Jr. Other works from the collection—the largest repository of Auduboniana in the world—illuminate the artist’s creative process, and bird calls courtesy of Macaulay Library of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology further animate the environment. In this inaugural exhibition, Audubon’s watercolor model will be joined by the copper plate used to print the Wild Turkey (held by the American Museum of Natural History) and the New-York Historical Society’s impression of plate 1 for The Birds of America. They will be reunited for the first time since 1827!

Why does Audubon’s life-size male turkey turn in contrapposto and look backwards? Was it only to allow the bird to fit onto the 40-inch-high paper? Five years before painting the male, the artist portrayed its mate sprinting with her nine poults (chicks) in tow. Therefore, Audubon’s male exhibits a characteristic species behavior as a pater familias, looking over his shoulder protectively at his family following behind. That this was Audubon’s intention is supported by no less than three oil paintings in which he portrayed the entire turkey family.

At times during Audubon’s stays in England to supervise the production of The Birds of America and to solicit subscribers, he was invited to dine in stately homes. Audubon dressed the part as the American Woodsman in buckskin attire, his long hair tamed with bear grease. Over port, he was frequently asked to produce turkey calls, owl hoots, and Indian war cries.

Conservation Status of the Wild Turkey

Heavily hunted since the earliest days of European occupation destroyed huge swaths of its range by logging and land clearing, Wild Turkeys reached a nadir in the early 1930s with a population of about 30,000 birds. Already Audubon had noted their declining numbers during his lifetime. Today, after a massive trap-and-transfer effort spanning over a quarter of a century, about seven million wild turkeys strut and gobble around the country. This inspiring story in the history of wildlife conservation involved the National Turkey Federation. While Wild Turkey numbers are stable, biologists in many southeastern states—a turkey stronghold—are concerned that populations have been tumbling, in some areas shrinking more than half with the quantity of poults dropping steeply. This suggests that there are underlying problems with their habitats that need attention.

Wild Turkeys on Long Island

Wild Turkeys and turkey rafts (one name for turkey groups) on Long Island have delighted me for many years and have taught me why Audubon painted the species in the poses he selected for plates 1 and 6 of The Birds of America. Turkey families are frequent guests to my house, and they have laid errant eggs on my patio and in my shrubs. Five years ago, walking down the driveway to the road, there was a male Wild Turkey in the grass on the right median which was turned in contrapposto gazing over his shoulder in the exact pose of the male in Audubon’s watercolor. His attention was riveted on his family trailing behind, and he proceeded to nod his head 21 times as his extended family members crossed the road to join him! In late August of this year, a turkey couple with their brood flew over the fence close to the house. In a case of nature imitating art, there were nine poults with mom in the running posture against a backdrop of foliage, just like Audubon painted his hen and chicks. When dad saw me, he proceeded to fan-open his magnificent tail feathers as in the photograph below. . . These 21st-century anecdotes about the Wild Turkey prove that Audubon was a nearly cinematic observer of avian behavior and lived up to his credo, which he frequently inscribed on his watercolors: “Drawn from Nature.”

—Roberta J.M. Olson, Curator of Drawings   New York Historical Society

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Collection Highlights Tours, Wednesdays @ 2pm

Think you’ve seen our entire collection? Come check out what you may have missed during a Collection Highlights Tour with Curator of Education Michelle DiMarzo!

Image credit: Sleeping Nymph, Satyr and Eros (Italian, 16th century). Agate, onyx, and gold. 8.4 x 5.2 cm. On loan from University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

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Art in Focus Series

Thanks to those who joined us for our inaugural Art in Focus event to discuss Carlo Maratta’s Bacchus and Ariadne! You can check out a brief video on our Facebook page.

Upcoming Art in Focus events:

October 26: After Raphael, Transfiguration, 19th century

November 16: Hiroshige II, Soto Beach in Mutsu Province, 1859

December 14: Martin van Meytens II, Portrait of a Boy, ca. 1750

Register now at Eventbrite!

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Bringing the Ledger Art of the Plains Indians to Life: Lecture by Dr. Ross Frank

On September 26, Dr. Ross Frank will present a lecture entitled "Picturing History: Plains Indian Ledger Drawings as World View” in conjunction with the exhibition Picturing History: Ledger Drawings of the Plains Indians, opening that evening in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries. Dr. Frank is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is also Director of the Plains Indian Ledger Art Digital Publishing Project, which promotes preservation, research, and public access to the Ledger Drawings.

For centuries, Plains Indian men kept historical records of their tribes by creating petroglyphs and pictographs on rock walls and painting on buffalo hides. Historical communal narratives as well as individual visions and experiences were also painted on tipis and personal garments.  The tradition of painting on buffalo hide diminished after the 1850s, when Americans began the deliberate destruction of buffalo herds and other game animals across the region. Ledger art appeared shortly thereafter, during the early 1860s, deriving its name from the accounting ledger books that were used as a source of paper. As both the exhibition and Dr. Frank’s lecture demonstrate, the narrative drawings and paintings made by Plains Indians using this medium represent both an extension of earlier biographic and pictographic work as well as a new artistic form for the Plains Indian tribes.

The lecture will take place Tuesday, September 26, at 5 p.m. in the Diffley Board Room in Bellarmine Hall. Register now on Eventbrite.

Image: Attributed to Chief Killer, Chief Killer among the Turkeys on the Canadian River, ca. 1875-78. Crayon, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8 ½ x 11 inches. Courtesy of Donald Ellis Gallery, New York.

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FUAM’s New Curator of Education Introduces Art in Focus

Greetings! As a Fairfield alumna (class of 2007), I’m delighted to be returning to the university as FUAM’s Curator of Education.

When I was an undergraduate (in a time when the elegance of the Bellarmine Hall Galleries was a mere gleam in the university’s eye), Fairfield inspired my passion for the arts. After graduating, I pursued a Ph.D. in Art History at Temple University and spent two years living la dolce vita as a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, where I wrote my dissertation on the Venetian Renaissance painter Titian. I enjoy being in both the museum and the classroom, and my role as Curator of Education happily involves a bit of each.

On that note, I’m pleased to announce a new gallery series offered by FUAM, Art in Focus; during each event in the series, one painting, print, or sculpture in the museum’s collection will take center stage for an hour of close looking and informal discussion.

The first Art in Focus event will take place on Thursday, Sept. 28 at 11 a.m. in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries, when we’ll look together at Carlo Maratti’s Bacchus and Ariadne (ca. 1680), on loan from a private collection. In this scene, drawn from Greco-Roman mythology, Maratti depicted the moment of encounter between Ariadne, a beautiful princess abandoned by her lover, and Bacchus, the god of wine, fertility, and madness. Join us for the opportunity to engage deeply with a work of art in a relaxed atmosphere. The event is free, but registration is requested. Reserve your seat now on Eventbrite!

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Direct from the Director — Fall 2017

The impulse to depict (a word whose Latin origin means to paint a picture)—to pick up an implement, be it a pen, a brush, a crayon, a stylus, a piece of charcoal, a stick—is universal.  The ancient Roman writer Pliny the Elder attributed the origins of painting, or depicting, to the tracing of shadows cast on a wall, a visual phenomenon that is, like the act of depicting itself, known to people of all cultures throughout human history.  Some periods are well known for their great painters and draftsmen—we need think only of the brilliant triumvirate of the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael—while others, going far back in time, produced artists of consummate skill whose names and identities are not preserved in the annals of history, such as Paleolithic cave painters.  

           A little known, but extraordinarily compelling, school of drawing is the subject of our fall exhibition in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries.  Picturing History: Ledger Drawings of the Plains Indians presents over fifty drawings by Native American artists, some known by their names or glyph-signatures, others given descriptive monikers by way of delineating an otherwise unknown artistic personality.  Records of their indigenous cultural practices and rituals, epic battles, and, inevitably, interaction, exchange and conflict with Euro-Americans, these fascinating works on paper were made by artists of considerable talent who, like their European and non-Western counterparts, were seized by the urge to draw.  Little known other than to specialists of Native American art and culture, they are a revelation, and the exhibition is not to be missed.  

           In our ongoing resolve to expand our presentation of a wide range of cultures and time periods, a number of Chinese, Korean and Islamic works of art will be on view in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries beginning in September, generously placed on long-term loan from Columbia University’s rich collection of art properties.  In addition to deities of recognizably human form, a number of these works, produced over a period of centuries, share a preference for lyrical, almost abstract floral and decorative motifs.  Across time and space, these find a resonant echo in the haunting and melodic, biomorphic paintings and watercolors of contemporary Connecticut-based artist Richard Lytle, whose distinguished career is the subject of a retrospective presented in the Walsh Gallery.  

           As always, a visit to the Fairfield University Art Museum never disappoints, and new discoveries await.  See you in the galleries!

Artfully yours,

Linda  

Image:  Attributed to Howling Wolf (Southern Cheyenne, Central Plains),   Cheyenne Attacking a Pawnee Camp (Ledger Drawing), ca. 1875-78.  Watercolor, graphite and colored pencil on paper; 8 ½ x 11 ¼ inches. Private collection, courtesy of Donald Ellis Gallery, New York.

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“ekphrasis v” Provides a Wonderful Opportunity for Collaboration across the Curriculum

Beginning on June 6, the museum will exhibit creative writings in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries in ekphrasis v. Using the ancient technique of responding to visual works of art through the written word ("ekphrasis"), this display provides a unique platform for alumni of Fairfield University's MFA in Creative Writing program to showcase "ekphrastic" works of poetry and prose created in response to the museum’s current exhibition.

This program, begun in 2011 by former museum director, Dr. Jill Deupi, is the fifth presentation of ekphrastic writings at the museum. ekphrasis v highlights the work of alumni of the MFA program who are responding directly to the works in the exhibition, Michael Gallagher — Sketching the Landscape: A Plein Air Journal. The writers engage with Gallagher’s landscape paintings and pen their own creative responses. Deupi said of the program’s launch in 2011: "Such writings give voice to a very personal aesthetic experience, which in turn provides our visitors with new points of departure for their own interpretations and musings.” For example Sally Nacker writes of a Gallagher landscape painting of a Maine winter scene:

           … Perhaps, in a roomful of framed seasons,            This is what draws            Me to your snow: the memory of the beauty            I once wrote in, and about; your penciled trees           Offering their vast, brown shadows

Such evocative language encourages us to focus on details in the painting we might otherwise overlook, and to think anew about how visual artworks such as paintings can evoke other senses and sensory memories. These poems similarly remind us of the close ties that have bound the literary and the visual arts throughout history; above all, during antiquity. Perhaps most importantly, ekphrasis provides the Fairfield University Art Museum with a wonderful opportunity to collaborate across the curriculum.

English Professor Michael White, has concurred, noting: "The museum is an untapped resource permitting our students [and former students] not only the pleasure of viewing, but the inspirational vehicle to enter into the creative act themselves."

The MFA alumni poems will be in the museum's galleries near the objects they address. They will also be posted on the museum's website together with images of the relevant works. ekphrasis v continues through September 8, 2017. A poetry and prose reading by the contributing writers will take place on September 7 at 6:15 p.m. in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries. For further information, please see www.fairfield.edu/museum. To register for this event visit fuam.eventbrite.com.

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Direct from the Director — Spring 2017

Greetings! It is a sure sign of spring that Fairfield’s resident wild turkeys have returned to campus. When you come to the museum, you will see them strutting across the lawn outside Bellarmine Hall or sauntering across the street, blithely ignoring the crosswalks and happily bringing traffic to a standstill.  Turkeys are not typically a source of artistic inspiration, but at least one artist—the late Renaissance sculptor Giambologna—thought otherwise: his bronze sculpture of a turkey has long delighted visitors to the Bargello museum in Florence.   A more universal subject for artists across time is landscape—sweeping topographic views or microscopically focused snapshots of forests, oceans, rocks, skies, and flora, captured in different seasons, at varying times of day, and under different lighting conditions.  From April through September, visitors to the Bellarmine Hall Galleries will have an opportunity to view some fifty landscape watercolors by Michael Gallagher that together form a decades-long chronicle of responses to the poetic and pictorial qualities of landscape in its many manifestations and geographic locales.   Landscape—observed from the soaring height of an airplane cockpit rather than intimately from the ground—also provided inspiration to Swiss Artist H. A. Sigg, whose abstract images suggestive of rivers, mountains and plains are on view in the Walsh Gallery through mid-June.  

If nature has seduced artists and adventurers throughout the centuries, so too has shopping long been a favorite human pastime.  Our modern-day malls were preceded in antiquity by the public marketplace, and this subject also found its way into art.  Beginning in April, visitors to the FUAM will be able to see an ancient Roman mosaic from Antioch (modern-day Turkey) depicting the the Abundance of the Marketplace (Agora), generously placed on long-term loan by the Worcester Art Museum and augmenting our presentation of art of the ancient world. As always, many surprises and delights await visitors to the museum.

See you in the galleries!

Artfully yours, Linda

Image: Floor Mosaic of Personification of Agora (Abundance of the Marketplace), Antioch, Roman, late 4th century, cubes of marble, limestone and glass embedded in lime mortar, 80.6 x 98.4 cm (31 3/4 x 38 3/4 in.), Worcester Art Museum (MA), Excavation of Antioch and Vicinity funded by the bequests of the Reverend Dr. Austin S. Garver and Sarah C. Garver, 1936.29. Image © Worcester Art Museum, all rights reserved. 

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A Discussion of H. A. Sigg

By Kaitlin Boyle, Museum Intern

“Have you also learned that secret from the river, that there is no such thing in time? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past not the shadow of the future.”                                                                 -Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

"Sigg’s work is at one moment energetic, the next calming and meditative, yet his imagery always speaks to the soul.                                                                      -Jason Shaiman (Curator of Exhibitions, Miami University Art Museum)

             When we think of Swiss artists we may call to mind the existential sculptures of Alberto Giacometti, the surreal paintings of Paul Klee, or perhaps even the parallelism of Ferdinand Hodler’s subjects. Amongst these names remains Hermann Alfred Sigg, known professionally as H. A. Sigg, who we know for his abstract aerial panoramas featuring thoughtful colors, meditative shapes, and tranquil rivers.

           Sigg was born in Oberhasli, Switzerland in 1924 to a farming family. Rather than choosing a life on the farm, he pursued art and studied in Zurich and Paris, where he was inspired by the art of French Nabi painter Pierre Bonnard. Although his paintings of the 1950s remain influenced by Post-Impressionist and second-generation Cubist masters, Sigg’s style underwent a major transition when he was invited by Swissair to fly as "artist in residence in the sky” in 1968. As he journeyed through the skies of Southeast Asia, he sketched the landscapes and rivers below from his view in the cockpit. These images became the inspiration for his paintings of geometric abstractions and gently drifting rivers.

           Those who have traveled know the sensation of a plane’s descent, the anticipation of land appearing beneath them, the ground gradually becoming recognizable as shapes and forms appear. We see bridges, buildings, bodies of water, rivers, and with that familiarity comes the anticipation of adventure and self-discovery. To Sigg, the river is a symbol of the search for inner enlightenment. As an audience we may see the gentle twists of his subjects as a metaphor for life’s course, and in them find tranquility and enchantment.

The Fairfield University Art Museum is proud to present H. A. Sigg: Abstract Rivers at the Walsh Gallery, on view from March 24 to June 10, 2017. The exhibition presents over 25 paintings and sculptures by this acclaimed painter.

 Image: H. A. Sigg, The Bend, 2004. Acrylic on canvas, 46 x 34 inches.

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The Fairfield University Art Museum (Bellarmine Hall Galleries and Walsh Gallery) will be closed on Thursday, February 9, due to inclement weather.  All classes and programs scheduled to take place at the University, including the lecture by Dr. Stephan Wolohojian, “Leonardo Cremonini: Obstacles, Journeys and Reflections,” are cancelled.  We are hoping to reschedule this event.  Please check back for updates.

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Direct from the Director - Winter 2017

Happy New Year from all of us at the Fairfield University Art Museum, where 2016 closed on a high note!  Some marvelous works of art entered the permanent collection as year-end gifts, among them a photograph by the renowned 20th-century American photographer Berenice Abbot of the Irish novelist James Joyce, and three striking contemporary Japanese ceramic pieces.  In addition, thanks to our Patrons Circle members and a generous friend of the museum, we were able to purchase a magnificent 19th-century Japanese lacquer writing box.  These new acquisitions are all on view in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries, as are a selection of prints and medals that also entered the collection during the past year and a beautiful 16th-century French enamel pax (a liturgical object used in the celebration of mass), on long-term loan from a New York collection.

Last year ended with our first Annual Appeal, launched in November.  We asked for your support and many of you responded, for which we are immensely grateful!  If you had intended to make a year-end gift but just didn’t get to it in the flurry of the holiday season, fear not—it’s never too late to make a contribution to help sustain the museum and our program!  (See our website for information: www.fairfield.edu/museum.) With your continued support, your visits to see our exhibitions in the Bellarmine Hall and Walsh Galleries and our ever-growing permanent collection, and your participation in our many events and programs, 2017 promises to be another stellar year!  And did I mention that some exciting surprises lie ahead? I’ll tell you more in the next issue….

Artfully yours,

Linda Wolk-Simon Director and Chief Curator 

Image: Michikawa Shōzō, [Twisted Pot, White Kohiki Glaze], 2009. Gift of Carol and Jeffrey Horvitz, 2016. Photography by Ben Bocko.

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Met Curator to Lecture on Leonardo Cremonini

The Fairfield University Art Museum is pleased to host Dr. Stephan Wolohojian, Curator of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, who will present a lecture entitled Leonardo Cremonini: Obstacles, Journeys and Reflections on Thursday, February 9 at 5 p.m. in the Diffley Board Room in Bellarmine Hall.

Previously the Landon and Lavinia Clay Curator and head of the division of European and American Art at the Harvard Art Museums, Dr. Wolohojian is the recipient of a Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome and was recently a visiting Fellow at I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence.

This lecture is part of the Edwin L. Wiesl, Jr. Lectureship in Art History, funded by the Robert Lehman Foundation.

A gallery talk on Leonardo Cremonini entitled Leonardo Cremonini: Timeless Monumentality by Dr. Linda Wolk-Simon, Frank and Clara Meditz Director and Chief Curator, will take place on Tuesday, January 31 from 5-6 pm in the Walsh Gallery, Quick Center for the Arts.

Image: Leonardo Cremonini, Obstacles, parcours et reflets (Obstacles, Routes, and Reflections), 1975-1976. Courtesy of The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation Inc.

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Upcoming Lecture on Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo

On October 24, 1503, Leonardo da Vinci received the key to the “Hall of the Pope” in the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella to use as a workshop in which to execute the preparatory cartoon for his giant fresco of the Battle of Anghiari. Intended for the most prestigious of locales -- the Palazzo Vecchio, seat of the republican government -- Leonardo's mural was to be the artist's greatest public triumph in his native city. In the following year, his ambitious younger rival Michelangelo was commissioned to undertake his own monumental battle scene on the same wall of the town hall's grand council chamber. Neither painted vision now survives. Dr. Dennis Geronimus, Associate Professor of Art History, New York University, discusses the fascinating history behind these works -- Leonardo's and Michelangelo's greatest "successful failures" -- in a lecture, “Climax/Anticlimax: The Palazzo Vecchio Battle Frescoes by Leonardo and Michelangelo, Revisited," on February 23, 2017 at 5 p.m. in the Diffley Board Room in Bellarmine Hall.

Dennis Geronimus is a specialist in Italian Renaissance art and in 2015 guest curated the National Gallery of Art’s exhibition on Piero di Cosimo. His current book project is Jacopo da Pontormo: Altered Grace, Human and Divine to be published by Yale University Press.

This lecture is part of the Edwin L. Wiesl, Jr. Lectureship in Art History, funded by the Robert Lehman Foundation.

Image: Peter Paul Rubens, The Battle of Anghiari after Leonardo da Vinci, 1603.