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

Salon Thursdays at the Dahesh

It looks like the season has started – we just received word from the Dahesh Museum of Art Gift Shop with the schedule of their third season of Salon Thursdays.  These wonderful events are completely free to the public, and start at 6:30 PM.  They are conducted in the lovely gift shop itself, located at 145 Sixth Avenue, on the corner of Dominick Street, one block south of Spring Street.  The events are wheelchair accessible.

Since opening its richly appointed gift shop in 2012, the Dahesh has used the new location as a home for Salon Thursdays lectures, featuring both history and insight from leading arts scholars.   Attendees can also look through the new store, which includes beautiful things for the home, reproduction prints and posters, and an impressive collection of scholarly books on the Classical tradition.

The 2013 Autumn/Winter Salon Thursdays looks as if the new season is even more ambitious than the last.  Next on the calendar are:

Thursday, October 3: Exhibiting Biblical Art in the Age of Spectacle -- In recent years, the idea that modernity is defined by secularity has begun to break down. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the continued relevance of religious subject matter in modern art, but also in the relationship between religion and the practices of exhibition. Using examples like the World’s Fairs, Holy Land reconstructions, and the evolution of the modern gallery, Sarah Schaefer explores the ways in which religion and exhibition have informed each in the past two centuries.

Sarah Schaefer is a PhD Candidate in Art History at Columbia University, and a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the 2013-2014 academic year. She previously worked at the Morgan Library and Museum, and has presented her work in New York, Los Angeles, England, and Germany. Her dissertation examines the biblical art of Gustave Doré, arguing that these images were significant for negotiating modern forms of biblical representation.

Thursday, November 7:  Seeing through Paintings -- How does one restore an art work from the damages of time or natural disaster?  How can collectors distinguish a real work of art from a fake?  Artists, collectors, museums, and galleries often call on conservator Rustin Levenson. Find out what she does and how she does it during her illustrated talk, and stay for a book signing.

Rustin Levenson is the President and Founder of Rustin Levenson Art Conservation Associates of New York and Miami: she has B.A. Wellesley College; a Diploma in Paintings Conservation, Fogg Art Museum, and Harvard University. She served on the Conservation staff of the Fogg Museum (1969-1973), the Canadian Conservation Institute (1973-1974); The National Gallery of Canada (1974-1977); and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1977-1980). She has co-written with art historian, Andrea Kirsh, Seeing Through Paintings: Physical Examination in Art Historical Studies and written chapters for The Expert vs. the Object.

December 5:  The Other Orient: China in the Nineteenth Century -- If China had represented the “Orient” in the eighteenth century, the Islamic world usurped that role in the nineteenth. But, throughout the nineteenth century, the interest in China and Chinese art remained vivid, yet the meaning they held for the West changed. This changed meaning, in the larger context of nineteenth-century Orientalism, is the focus an illustrated lecture by the distinguished scholar Dr. Petra Chu, PhD.

Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu, PhD is Professor of Art history and Museum Studies at Seton Hall University where she co-Founded and directed the MA Program in Museum Professions., She has two doctorates one from Columbia University, NY and the other from Utrecht University, Holland. The recipient of numerous fellowship and awards, and was most recently named a Fellow Getty Research Institute. She helped found and served as Managing Editor for Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (www.19thc-artworldwide.org) and was the president and board member of the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art.  Among her many publications,  Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Art  (co-edited with Laurinda S.Dixon) is considered a landmark in art history.

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 19th and early 20th 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.