Displaying items by tag: religious

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts presents "Telling Tales: Stories and Legends in 19th-Century American Art" through June 7, 2015, in the Center’s Upper-Level Galleries. The exhibition features paintings and sculptures that recount stories relating to American cultural aspirations and everyday life throughout the 19th century. Narrative landscapes by Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand of the Hudson River School, genre scenes by William Sidney Mount and Francis W. Edmonds and sculptures by John Rogers are among the highlights of the exhibition.

Assembled from the collection of the New-York Historical Society, Telling Tales integrates genre, historical, literary and religious subjects—through styles ranging from Neoclassicism to Realism—to paint a vivid portrait of American art and life during the country’s most formative century. The exhibition is organized into six sections: “American History Painting,” “English Literature and History,” “Importing the Grand Manner,” “Genre Paintings,” “Economic, Social, and Religious Division” and “Picturing the Outsider.”

The year 1534 was crucial to the history of the United States of America.

It was then that the first Act of Supremacy was instituted. These acts granted King Henry VIII royal supremacy over England and established the Church of England, thus severing all ties with Rome. It was in this legal, religious, governmental and cultural context that the Puritans came to be, including the ones who came on the Mayflower to what is now New England.

In England, the Pilgrims’ religious practices were considered sedition. They were forced to flee in secret to Holland, where they experienced the functional separation of church and state – which they imparted to one of our country’s three fundamental founding documents, the Mayflower Compact.

Hundreds of paintings were discovered in the 12th century Cambodian temple complex Angkor Wat hiding in plain sight.

Though thousands of people pass through the religious monument every day, nobody had ever noticed the ancient graffiti on the faded walls. Researcher Noel Hidalgo Tan first saw the red and black pigment on the walls of the monument when he visited and decided to investigate, Smithsonian Magazine reports.

The family of Msgr. Patrick J. Garvey, a Catholic priest who was once friendly with the realist painter Thomas Eakins, is trying to block the Archdiocese of Philadelphia from selling a valuable Eakins portrait of the monsignor through the auction house Christie’s.

The archdiocese said that the painting was given to the church decades ago, and that the sale of it, and several other paintings, is essential to boost the finances of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, where Monsignor Garvey had been rector and where the portrait hung for many years.

The Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington is trying to track down a group of visitors who recently vandalized a number of the institution’s works with stickers. The stickers, which feature some religious script and imagery, were placed on a number of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and an outdoor statue. Other stickers with a large red “T” were also placed on the paintings.

The vandals were captured on the museum’s security cameras, but attempted to hide their identities. The stickers have been successfully removed by a painting conservator, but the amount of damage done to the collection is unknown. The Delaware Art Museum has one of the most celebrated collections of Pre-Raphaelite art outside of Britain.

In March, the Delaware Art Museum announced that it would deaccession four works from its collection to pay off its $19.8 million bond debt and replenish its endowment. The institution has not specified which works it plans to sell.  

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is hosting the exhibition ‘Piero della Francesca: Personal Encounters,’ a focused presentation of the Early Renaissance painter’s devotional works. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with New York’s Foundation for Italian Art & Culture to celebrate the opening of the Met’s New European Paintings Galleries, 1250-1800.

‘Personal Encounters’ presents four devotional paintings by Francesca that have never before been exhibited together. ‘Saint Jerome and a Supplicant’ is on loan from the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice; ‘Saint Jerome in the Wilderness’ is on loan from the Gemaldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino loaned ‘Madonna and Child with Two Angels’; and the private Alana Collection in Delaware loaned ‘Madonna and Child.’  

‘Piero della Francesca: Personal Encounters’  will be on view at the Met through March 30, 2014.

Opening on October 2, 2013 at Tate Britain in London, Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm will be the first exhibition to explore the history of physical attacks on art in Britain from the 16^th century to the present day. The show will present famously marred works while exploring the religious, political and aesthetic motives that have provoked these violent acts.

The exhibition will include Statue of the Dead Christ (1500-20), which is being loaned to the Tate by London’s Worship Company of Mercers where the work was discovered beneath the chapel floor in 1954. The work was attacked by Protestants during the Reformation and is missing a crown of thorns, arms and lower legs. It is the first time that the Mercer has loaned the work since it was discovered nearly 60 years ago. John Singer Sargent’s (1856-1925) portrait of Henry James, which was attacked by a suffragette at the Royal Academy in 1914 with a knife, will also be on view. A less violently disgraced work is a portrait of Oliver Cromwell that was hung upside down by a devote monarchist. The work is on loan from the Inverness Museum in Scotland.

Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm will be on view at Tate Britain through January 5, 2014.

Two 10^th century statues that were looted from jungle temples have been returned to Cambodia by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met announced in May 2013 that they would send the Khmer sculptures known as Kneeling Attendants back to Cambodia after being displayed in the museum’s Asian Wing for 10 years.

Hab Touch, director general at the Ministry of Culture, said, “The return of the statues is a historic event for us.” Seven Buddhist monks blessed the life-size statues during a religious ceremony attended by officials from the government and the Met at the airport. Upon their return to Cambodia, the sculptures will be put on display at the Peace Palace in Phnom Penh and later kept at either the National Museum in the capital or at a museum in the northwestern city of Siem Reap.

The two statues were looted from the Koh Ker temple site in the early 1970s. At the time, Cambodia was being ravaged by a brutal civil war and looting was rampant. The works were donated piece by piece to the Met in the late 1980s and 1990s. Recent documentary research revealed that the statues were in fact looted from Cambodia.

On May 8, 2013, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston unveiled a number of transformed galleries including a new Dutch and Flemish gallery, which has opened to the public after almost a year of renovations. The Art of the Netherlands in the 17^th Century Gallery features seven paintings by Rembrandt (1606-1669) and other works by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), and Jacob van Ruisdael (1628-1682). There are approximately thirty paintings in the gallery including landscapes, genre scenes, portraits, and religious works. The paintings are accompanied by a collection of Dutch furniture, decorative art objects, silver, and Delft pottery.

A companion gallery of 30 works, the Leo and Phyllis Beranek Gallery, also opened this week. Besides their respective collections, the Beranek and the Art of the Netherlands galleries highlight loans from important collections such as the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo collection, a renowned grouping of Dutch and Flemish paintings.

Two 18^th century rooms from Great Britain have been reinstalled at the MFA as part of the Alan and Simone Hartman Galleries. A gallery for British Art, 1560-1830 complements the Newland House Drawing Room, which has been on view at the MFA since the 1970s, and the Hamilton Palace Dining Room, which features the Hartman Collection’s silver holdings. The Hartman Galleries feature British paintings, furniture, silver, ceramics, and works on paper.    

A 16^th century religious tapestry that was stolen from a Spanish cathedral in 1979 and sold at auction three years ago was returned to Spain on Wednesday, April 17, 2013 by the United States customs service. Special agents from the Homeland Security Investigations division of the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement seized the tapestry from the undisclosed Texas business that had purchased it for $369,000 in 2010.

The wool and silk tapestry, which depicts the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, was stolen from the Cathedral of Saint Vincent, Martyr of Roda de Isabena in northeastern Spain. After the work appeared in a Brussels art fair catalogue in 2010, Belgian, Spanish, and U.S. investigators pieced together that a Belgian gallery owner along with two partners from Milan and Paris had acquired the tapestry in 2008.

The tapestry was given to Madrid’s ambassador to Washington, Ramon Gil-Casares, on behalf of his nation at a ceremony at his residence.