CO-CURATOR ELIZABETH COWLING TO LECTURE AT VENTFORT HALL
ON “PICASSSO LOOKS AT DEGAS”
LENOX – Art historian Elizabeth Cowling, co-curator of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute’s major summer exhibition, “Picasso Looks at Degas”, will give a visual presentation of the exhibition and its origins at Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum on Monday, June 14. The 4:00 pm lecture will be followed by a Victorian Tea at which Cowling will autograph copies of the show’s catalogue.
Cowling will describe the evolution of the Clark’s new exhibition which opens June 13 and the discoveries she and co-curator Richard Kendall, curator-at-large at the Clark, made in the course of organizing it. Picasso acquired twelve of Degas’s much-admired monotypes in the late 1950s and in 1971 made a series of etchings directly inspired by them.
This part of the story is familiar to Picasso aficionados. But the exhibition shows that this episode was in fact the climax of a complex, frequently renewed dialogue with Degas’s work and personality that goes back to the turn of the 20th century when Picasso first encountered contemporary French art and sought to transform himself into a “Painter of Modern Life” in the Parisian mold.
Cowling will illustrate key moments in this dialogue when, for instance, Picasso made his variations on Degas’s notorious masterpiece “L’Absinthe” and took up Degas’s signature themes of women at their toilette and ballet dancers resting or performing. She will also explore the remarkable affinities between their goals and methods as artists, including their lifelong dedication to drawing, acute sense of the heritage of Western art, ambition to reinvent sculpture and printmaking and, last but not least, obsession with the female body.
Cowling states, “By the time Picasso – nearing his 90th birthday – made his suite of etchings in which Degas appears in person, it is no exaggeration to say that the Frenchman had become the Spaniard’s alter-ego.”
The exhibition, drawing from the Clark’s collections and those of numerous international museums and private collectors, is the first time in which the artists’ works have been presented and considered in this context.
Cowling is Professor Emeritus of History of Art at Edinburgh University, where she began teaching in 1979. Her specialty has been European art of the first half of the 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism, but in recent years she has focused on Picasso, publishing essays and catalogues on various aspects of his work. Her monograph “Picasso: Style and Meaning” won the British Academy Book Prize in 2003. She was co-curator of “Matisse Picasso”, which was shown in London, Paris and New York and dealt with another of Picasso’s long-term artistic dialogues.
Tickets for the Cowling lecture and tea are $16 per person for nonmembers and $14 for members. Reservations are highly recommended as seating is limited. For information or reservations call Ventfort Hall at 413-637-3206 or visit www.GildedAge.org. The historical mansion is located at 104 Walker Street in Lenox.
An Official Project of Save America’s Treasures, Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum offers tours of the historic mansion, as well as lectures, concerts, teas, theater and other programs. This elegant Elizabethan-Revival Berkshire “cottage,” listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is open to the public year-around and is available for private rental. Built in 1893 for George and Sarah Morgan (sister of the financier, J. P. Morgan), Ventfort Hall has undergone substantial restoration, which continues.