Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays on the American collecting of Italian Baroque paintings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Looks at the influence of art exhibitions and exhibition catalogues on the understanding and popularity of Italian Baroque art.
Trade Review“Furthers understanding of dealers, critics, conservators, art historians, and others who contributed to this web of relationships and impacted aesthetic interests, collecting activities, exhibitions, and scholarship over the past century.”
—J. Decker Choice
“It took the major museums in America a long time to realise how essential Baroque painting is to the history of European art, which is why the stories told in these ten essays have a broader lesson.”
—Keith Christiansen Burlington Magazine
“This substantive and important contribution on the collecting of Italian Baroque paintings in this country provides insights into the vagaries of American taste and the exciting dynamics of museum politics, collecting, scholarship, and showmanship. The informative essays by ten eminent scholars suggest that despite a longstanding lack of interest in Italian Baroque paintings in the U.S., a few prescient individuals acquired key works that later provided the core collections for major American museums.”
—Babette Bohn,author of Ludovico Carracci and the Art of Drawing
“The wealth of Italian Baroque paintings in America is the outcome of an extraordinary twentieth-century collecting phenomenon. But it was effected by a relatively small group of enthusiastic and inspired individuals—curators, museum directors, art historians, private collectors, and art dealers. Their efforts, often in the face of entrenched tastes colored by religious and critical biases, are treated in this volume of essays by both participants in and beneficiaries of this rich cultural legacy.”
—Robert Simon,president of Robert Simon Fine Art
“Bursting at the seams with fascinating, otherwise unfindable information about this important chapter in the history of taste and collecting, this excellent group of essays is essential reading for anyone interested in the way in which networks of collectors, art dealers, museum curators, and academics collaborated to form America’s rich bounty of Italian Baroque paintings in public and private collections.”
—David M. Stone,co-editor of Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions
“A set of ten informative and well-written essays that provide the reader with a sampling of personalities, acquisition strategies, and collections that many Europeans may not know.”
—Judith Mann The Art Newspaper
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Critical Fortunes of Italian Baroque Painting in America
Edgar Peters Bowron
1 Italian Baroque Paintings at the Ringling Museum: The Legacy of John Ringling and Chick Austin
Virginia Brilliant
2 The Atheneum to the Fore: Hartford and the Italian Baroque
Eric Zafran
3 The American View of the “Forgotten Century” of Italian Painting: Reminiscences of an Art Dealer and Curator
Marco Grassi
4 An Invisible Web: Art Historians Behind the Collecting of Italian Baroque Art Richard Spear
5 Baroque in the Caribbean: Luis A. Ferré and the Museo de Arte de Ponce
Pablo Pérez d’Ors
6 Dealing and Scholarship: The Heim Gallery, London, 1966–1995
J. Patrice Marandel
7 The Detroit Institute of Arts and Italian Baroque Painting
Andria Derstine
8 The Bob Jones University Collection of Italian Baroque Paintings
Ian Kennedy
9 Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., and His Collection of Italian Baroque Paintings
Eric Zafran
10 Better Late than Never: Collecting Baroque Painting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Andrea Bayer
References
List of Contributors
List of Artists
Index
