Egyptomania Hits the Dahesh

Yesterday the Dahesh Museum Gift Shop in Hudson Square played host to a capacity crowd for the debut of Bob Brier’s new book, Egyptomania.  Brier is, of course, the celebrated egyptologist who has written eight books, including The Murder of Tutankhamen, and was host of television’s The Great Egyptians and The Mummy Detective. 

Though an academic with multiple degrees (including actually getting a medical degree to better understand the underlying cause of death of the mummies he has examined), Brier brings to his field of expertise an infectious sense of fun and a true sense of wonder.  Rarely have I laughed so much at a lecture, nor can I remember having been regaled with stories by an expert who is as much entertainer as academic. 

Brier’s book chronicles our three thousand year obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs, and provides a wonderful juxtaposition between the learned (his chronicle of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, complete with a retinue of savants to provides what might be history’s first ethnographic study) and the commercial, cataloging “mummy” sheet music, Cleopatra cigarettes and mummy movies featuring everyone from Boris Karloff to Peter Cushing.

Brier argues that no ancient civilization compares to Egypt for its romantic hold on our imagination.  He thinks this is a mixture of our fascination with mummies (here – easily recognizable – are human beings who walked the earth thousands of years ago); the art of Egyptian hieroglyphics; and, of course, what he calls “the Indiana Jones effect.”  Egypt has inspired exotic adventure fiction from pens as diverse as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sax Rohmer and H. Rider Haggard – and this touch of exotica continues in the films of Steven Spielberg and Stephen Sommers.

Your correspondent had the pleasure of interviewing Brier at his home in the Bronx, which is crammed with enough Egyptian artifacts to gladden the heart of Indiana Jones.  That interview, along with a more detailed review of his book, will follow in a few weeks.

In other Dahesh news, the country’s premiere museum-without-walls, has taken the remarkable step of purchasing Frederic, Lord Leighton’s imposing Star of Bethlehem, to expand the scope of the current exhibition, Sacred Visions: Nineteenth-Century Biblical Art from the Dahesh Museum Collection, on view until February 16, 2014 at the Museum of Biblical Art.  Curators and directors from each institution immediately agreed to add the painting to the current installation, as this presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the Leighton alongside other like-themed treasures.  The exhibition traces the renewed interest in Biblical myths following the expansion of biblical archeology and the advent of photography, which produced travel books with pictures of the Holy Land.

Curator Alia Nour said last night, “We decided to remove two smaller paintings to make room for this very large one and started to work on a new label. We deemed it worthwhile to give visitors access to one of the most powerful biblical works Leighton produced during the 1860s.”

New Yorkers who have not yet seen the show now have added impetus, and those who have already seen it an added reason to see it once again.  The Museum of Biblical Art is at 1865 Broadway at 61st Street, and admission is free.  For more information, call 212.408.1500.

Sacred Visions: Nineteenth-Century Biblical Art from the Dahesh Museum Collection

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Proving once again that they are the country’s premiere museum-without-walls, the Dahesh makes its treasures available to New Yorkers in one of the most stunning shows I have seen in years.

Housed in the Museum of Biblical Art, Sacred Visions: Nineteenth-Century Biblical Art from the Dahesh Museum Collection features some 30 works from the Dahesh collection, all masterful pictures by leading 19^th Century French academicians.  The exhibition traces the renewed interest in Biblical myths following the expansion of biblical archeology and the advent of photography, which produced travel books with pictures of the Holy Land.

As co-curator Sarah Schaefer of the Dahesh (with Alia Nour) writes in her exhibition notes:  One very important way that artists modernized the representation of biblical subjects was by creating what they considered more historically “authentic” images, stimulated by popular interest in the Holy Land beginning in the late eighteenth century.  As travel and communication to the Middle East became more feasible and desirable, artists explored Egypt, Jerusalem, Hebron, and other significant sites in order to produce more “objective” representations of the Bible.  Some sought to depict biblical monuments in their contemporary form, while others saw the people of the Holy Land as living relics of a distant past.  … For those artists who were unwilling or unable to visit the Holy Land, there were countless travel accounts, prints, and eventually photographs that documented the region.  It was thus possible to create what the public considered a “true” image of the biblical past without having actually seen the sites mentioned.

The show, which opens today, is has many stunning pieces.  Oddly, most of them are not the ‘showcase’ pieces, but, rather, things that are remarkable in-and-of themselves.  More important, this exhibition demonstrates how essential the male nude was to the academic tradition, and how drawing the figure led to virtuosic, finished work. 

Very interesting is Alexandre Cabanel’s (1823-1889) Death of Moses.  But while this picture is quite remarkable, more interesting still is the drawing hung along side of it, which is a graph drawing of the finished painting, blocked out in grids for final painting on the massive canvas.  Cabanel actually changed God’s pose from the test drawing to finished painting, and it is a fascinating insight into the creative process.

Also beautiful is Joseph’s Coat Brought Back to Jacob (1841) by Jules Ambroise Francois Naudin (1817-1876), which is a masterful painting combining both the historic and neoclassic strains of art.  The figures are clearly and cleanly depicted, and the emotion telegraphed beautifully, but it is rather cold in the final analysis.

More captivating is what might be the most interesting piece in the exhibition, The Last judgment, a drawing by Paul Chenavard (1808-1895).  Chenavard was an Enlightenment Era freethinker, so his feelings for religious paintings must always be interpreted.  This massive drawing, which must be about 40x80, will happily reward hours of study.  In many ways a meditation on Michelangelo’s Judgment Day painting on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, Chenavard spins his own take on the Christian cosmos.  Christ is paramount, and, like Michelangelo’s Christ, this is a beardless, curiously human Jesus.  (There is no halo.)  In the lower corner of the picture is a crowned figure entwined with a giant serpent.  Is this Satan?  Or the Archangel Michael?  The figure is ambiguous and multi-faceted.  While speaking with co-curator Alia Nour, she told me that “Chenavard delighted in ambiguity.  Being a humanist, he drew very human figures, and it is left to the educated viewer to interpret the meanings of his cosmos.”

For this viewer, however, the most beautiful picture in this exhibition is Abel’s Offering by Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857-1942), dated 1908.  This picture alone is worth going to this stunning show.  In it, Brendekilde depicts Abel leading a long train of sheep along a sunlit landscape.  On the pyre before him is a sacrifice to God; the sheep watch as he gesticulates towards heaven and the smoke lifts the remains on a fellow lamb towards the heavens.  It is a stunning, pagan note to add to a Biblical exhibition; though created in the early days of the 20^th Century, it is a wonderfully pagan piece of art.  It cuts deep to the heart of a primal paganism, and the composition perhaps borrows something from the painters of the American West, Charles Marion Russell, in particular.

The exhibition was hung and designed with a sure hand by Dean Ebben.  Ebben restored and re-stretched and re-framed the massive Christ and the Children (1894) by Franck Kirchbach (1859-1912), which is a large-scale painting of a type seldom seen today.  It is a wonderful piece of work and a heroic installation.

Sacred Visions: Nineteenth-Century Biblical Art from the Dahesh Museum Collection is the first exhibition under the auspices of the museum’s new Director, Richard P. Townsend, an accomplished art historian and museum professional.  Townsend has previously held curatorial and leadership positions in the Museum of Latin American Art and Price Tower Arts Center.  If the show is an indication of his tenure-to-come, The Museum of Biblical Art has chosen wisely and well.

We here at the Jade Sphinx have had a special relationship with the Dahesh.  Mainly, this is because we share a similar vision: that the artist is the creator of beautiful things, and that art is the celebration of beauty.  It is a position out-of-tune with Modernists and Post-Modernists, but beauty always will win out over time.  Be part of the avant garde and return to the past of Academic portraiture.

The Museum of Biblical Art is at 1865 Broadway at 61^st Street, and admission is free.  For more information, call 212.408.1500.

Joseph's Coat Brought Back to Jacob

Encountering the Orient: Masterworks from the Dahesh Museum of Art

Jaffa, Recruiting of Turkish Soldiers in Palestine

It is not often that a show comes to New York that is thematically rich, expertly curated and deftly presented, but that is the case with Encountering the Orient: Masterworks from the Dahesh Museum of Art, presented at Christie’s at 20 Rockefeller Plaza, here in New York.  If you can only make one show this season, this should be it.

Though most New Yorkers know Christie’s primarily as an auction house, this venerable institution is not just for New York’s financial elite.  Great works of art are to be seen by the public, whether they are on the auction block or museum walls.  Christie’s is very welcoming to aesthetes of all stripes, and anyone who loves art should become familiar with their galleries.  For Christie’s to host the Dahesh show is an indication of their commitment to the greater artistic community, and is to be appreciated by all.  Diana Bramham, Assistant Vice President, Specialist 19^th Century European Art Old Master & 19^th Century Art at Christie’s, worked closely with the Dahesh to make this splendid show a reality.

Encountering the Orient remains on view until April 15, 2013.  The show celebrates the 19^th Century rediscovery of the East by Western artists, and offers a fresh approach to Orientalism as a complex, highly contextual, cross-cultural encounter.

Curated by Alia Nour, Associate Curator of the Dahesh, Encountering the Orient is a compact, stunning tour de force for the perpetually travelling museum.  Encountering the Orient touches upon many fascinating themes to be found in 19^th Century Orientalism, including the hold Egypt (and perceptions of Egypt) have over the Western mind, the role of women in North Africa and the Middle East, and the tradition of swashbuckling artists who ventured into then-exotic places with little more than paint and palette.

Readers of the Jade Sphinx will appreciate that there is something profoundly moving in standing before a great work of art and just … gazing.  I was deeply touched by many of the works, all of which were colored with a deep strain of romance.  It is a show I intend to see more than once.

Though filled with fine works, perhaps the centerpiece is Jaffa, Recruiting of Turkish Soldiers in Palestine, painted in 1888 by Gustav Bauernfeind (1848 - 1904).  Bauernfeind was a German painter who studied architecture at the Polytechnic Institute in Stuttgart and later worked in the architectural firm of Professor Wilhelm Bäumer.  He journeyed to the Levant from 1880 to 1882, and he became increasingly interested in the Orient and returned again and again. In 1896 he moved with his wife and son to Palestine and subsequently settled in Jerusalem in 1898. He also lived and worked in Lebanon and Syria, and is considered to be one of the most notable Orientalist painters from Germany.

On April 7, the Dahesh hosted a lecture on this stunning work by Dr. Roger Diederen, Director of the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich.  Dr. Diederen detailed how Bauernfeind was enamored of Jaffa, and in an 1885 letter to his sister he described several aspects included in this painting: . . . what I saw here during the departure of the military conscripts, with the women chasing after them in dinghies far out into the sea, and holding up their infants so that they often could be rescued only at extreme peril; or the scene in the streets where aged fathers wanted to embrace their sons for the last time, and were beaten off with cudgels by the rough soldiery—would also furnish material for some interesting pictures.

This enormous picture fully dominated a whole wall of the exhibit, but it is not the only thing to see.  Also on hand are masterworks by Rudolf Ernst, Ludwig Deutsch and Frederick Arthur Bridgman.

Kudos to the Dahesh and Christie’s for putting together such a dynamic show, and for hosting comments from Dr. Diederen.  Both institutions are working to keep our artistic heritage intact, and are in the forefront of the revival of 19^th Century Art. 

The Dahesh Unveils 2013 Lineup of Salon Thursdays

Since opening its richly appointed gift shop at 145 Sixth Avenue in New York last autumn, the Dahesh Museum of Art has used the new location as a home for Salon Thursdays, a stimulating series of lectures where leading arts scholars provide free programs starting at 6:30 PM.   The new site also houses the offices of the Dahesh, allowing museum administrators to better work together on travelling shows and creating a tentpole in Hudson Square to possibly reopen the museum downtown.  The new store also includes beautiful things for the home, reproduction prints and posters, and an impressive collection of scholarly books on the Classical tradition. 

The 2013 Winter/Spring Salon Thursdays program has just been announced, and it looks as if the new season is even more ambitious than the last.  Next on the calendar are:

February 7: Frick Buys a Freak: Dagnan-Bouveret and the Development of the Frick Collection, presented by Ross Finocchio, PhD, celebrated scholar of the Frick Collection.  He will explain how Henry Clay Frick’s one purchase changed American taste and the art market of his day.

Mach 7: 19^th Century Commercial Photography in Egypt: Inside Pascal Sebah’s Studio, presented by Alia Nour, Assistant Curator at the Dahesh, who will discuss the life and work of Pascal Sebah, who supplied Cairo’s tourists and local elites with images of a romantic east more than 100 years ago.

April 4: The Invention of Comics, presented by Pat Mainardi, PhD, traces the origins of comics and graphic novels to late 19^th Century Europe in what promises to be a fascinating show.

May 2: Inspired by Landscape: Women of the Hudson River School, presented by art historian Jennifer C. Krieger, introduces the 19^th Century woman who painted the magnificent scenery of the Hudson River Valley despite prevailing prejudices.

June 6: Multiple Images: Reproducing Academic Art 1850-1900, presented by Donato Esposito, PhD, outlines how methods of art reproduction evolved and made academic painting among the most well-known of all images in the 19^th Century.

Your correspondent is a great believer in the Dahesh and its mission.  It is the only institution in the United States devoted to academic art of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  The genesis of the collection was assembled by Salim Moussa Achi (1909-1948), who envisioned a museum of academic European art.  Perhaps one day the dream will become a reality once again.  For the past several years the Dahesh has been a museum without walls, as significant portions of this important collection have traveled the world in various shows and exhibitions.  In conjunction with the new store location, the Dahesh has completely revamped their Web site, and readers are urged to visit it to learn about the collection and travelling shows: http://www.dahesh-museum.org/.  For further details about Salon Thursdays and the gift shop, call the Dahesh at 212.759.0606.