Cleveland Museum of Art 2014 Exhibitions

For more information, please contact:
Caroline Guscott, 216-707-2261, cguscott@clevelandart.org
Saeko Yamamoto, 216-707-6898, syamamoto@clevelandart.org

Cleveland Museum of Art 2014 Exhibitions
Opening year of exhibitions highlights masterpieces from around the world, innovative scholarship

CLEVELAND (May 17, 2013) – The Cleveland Museum of Art announces five major exhibitions scheduled for 2014, all of which draw upon its own exceptional comprehensive collection, considered to be one of the finest of its type in the country, and several that feature collaborations with peer institutions from the U.S. and across the globe.

“The 2014 calendar represents my vision and commitment for the Cleveland Museum of Art to be a leader in dynamic and engaging exhibitions programming,” said David Franklin, Sarah S. and Alexander M. Cutler Director. “As we celebrate the conclusion of the renovation and expansion project this year and approach our centennial in 2016, we are focusing on ground-breaking scholarship, fostering national and international partnerships and bringing world-class art to Northeast Ohio.”

The 2014 exhibition schedule marks a significant time in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s history. In December 2013, the museum will complete its transformational building expansion and collection reinstallation. The expanded facility now includes the museum’s two fully renovated architectural landmarks—the original 1916 Beaux-Arts building designed by Hubbel and Benes and Marcel Breuer’s 1971 addition—along with three new structures (east, west and north wings) and a soaring 39,000 square foot, glass-enclosed atrium, all designed by architect Rafael Viñoly. In total, nearly 39,000 square feet of additional gallery and special exhibition space has been added.

*Please note: The information provided below is a partial listing and is subject to change. Please confirm scheduling and details by calling Caroline Guscott at 216.707.2261 or by emailing cguscott@clevelandart.org.

Advance Schedule of Exhibitions
Remaking Tradition: Modern Art of Japan
February 16 to May 11, 2014

Van Gogh Repetitions
March 2, 2014 to May 26, 2014

Yoga: The Art of Transformation
June 22 to September 7, 2014

Surrealist Photography: Raymond Collection
October 5, 2014 to January 4, 2015

Exporting Florence: Donatello to Michelangelo
October 19, 2014 to January 18, 2015

Remaking Tradition: Modern Art of Japan
February 16 to May 11, 2014

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Portrait of Reiko, 1921. Kishida Ryusei (Japanese, 1891–1929). Oil on canvas; 48.25 x 55.88 cm. Tokyo National Museum (A-10568) 

The Cleveland Museum of Art will present Remaking Tradition: Modern Art of Japan which features over 50 masterpieces of modern Japanese art from the Tokyo National Museum. Exhibition highlights include six objects considered ‘Important Cultural Properties of Japan.’ These include Dancing Lady Maiko Girl by Kuroda Seiki and Portrait of Reiko by Kishida Ryusei as well as other important works in Japanese modern art history such as Mount Fuji Rising above Clouds by Yokoyama Taikan and Spring Rain by Shimomura Kanzan. This will be one of the largest exhibitions focused on Japanese modern art on view in the United States since World War II.

Modern Japanese artists re-formed and explored the visual presentation of the traditional arts from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, inspired by their cross-cultural explorations of Western art and its paradigms. The masterworks assembled in Remaking Tradition: Modern Art of Japan reflect a confluence of influences drawn from the Japanese traditional style of painting in concert with the emerging crafts tradition and Western styles of oil painting and sculpture. By reinterpreting tradition in Japanese modern art, they maintained the continuity between the pre-modern Edo period and the beginning of the Meiji period as well as integrating cultural influences from the West. Japanese artists invented new traditions for a new age employing a variety of mediums, including painting, crafts and sculpture.

To further cultural exchange and collaboration between the two institutions, the Tokyo National Museum will present Masterpieces from the Cleveland Museum of Art from January 15 to February 23, 2014, and will feature highlights of the Cleveland Japanese art collection. The most important works are from the Kamaura-Muromachi to the end of the Edo period, such as Dragon and Tiger by Shukei Sesson (a pair of folding screens). Also included in the exhibition are select works from the museum’s European collection. Masterpieces from the Cleveland Museum of Art will travel to the Kyusyu National Museum from July 8 to August 31, 2014.

Remaking Tradition: Modern Art of Japan is organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Tokyo National Museum. This exhibition is made possible in part by The Japan Foundation.

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Van Gogh Repetitions
March 2, 2014 to May 26, 2014

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The Large Plane Trees, November–December 1889. Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890). Oil on canvas; 73.4 x 91.8 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund 1947.209

The Cleveland Museum of Art and The Phillips Collection have joined together to develop a ground-breaking exhibition that will present new insights into the art of Vincent van Gogh through a study of his “repetitions,” a term the artist used to describe a distinctive genre of works in his oeuvre. The exhibition will be shown at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D. C., from October 2013 to January 2014, and at the Cleveland Museum of Art from March 2014 to May 2014.

As the first exhibition to focus specifically on pairs or groups of works by Van Gogh that feature nearly identical compositions, this project seeks to make a valuable contribution to Van Gogh scholarship and to give broad audiences a new understanding of a fascinating aspect of the artist’s work. Originally inspired by the study of the close relationship between the Cleveland Museum’s Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy) and the Phillips Collection’s The Road Menders, both dating from late 1889, this exhibition seeks to explore, clarify and build on that research by bringing together other works that shed light on Van Gogh practice of producing repetitions.

Currently, there is considerable debate even among experts over how Van Gogh produced his repetitions. It is known that he used a perspective frame to compose some paintings, a squaring technique to enlarge painted compositions and Buhot paper to transfer some drawings to lithographic stone. The exhibition curators and conservators are working closely together to investigate the various means Van Gogh employed to produce repetitions.

Research for this project is ongoing and will be published in a richly illustrated catalogue containing essays by a team of curators and conservators from the Phillips Collection and the Cleveland Museum of Art, as well as other scholars in the field. An interactive web-based program will accompany the exhibition and make technical images and overlays accessible to the public. The exhibition will provide scholars and broad audiences with new insights into an artist they thought they knew.

Other Venues:
The Phillips Collection, October 12, 2013 to January 26, 2014,

Organizing Co-Curator:
Curator of Modern European Art, William H. Robinson, Ph.D.

Yoga: The Art of Transformation
June 22 to September 7, 2014

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Yoga Narashimha, Vishnu in His Man-Lion Avatar, c. 1250. South India. Bronze; h. 55 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Dr. Norman Zaworski 1973.187.

All over the world, millions of people—including sixteen million Americans—practice yoga for health benefits and to find spiritual calm. Practitioners and non-practitioners alike are aware of yoga’s origins in India. But very few know of yoga’s rich visual history, which reveals its profound philosophical underpinnings, its goals of transforming both body and consciousness, the diverse social roles yogic practitioners have played, and its transformations over time and across communities.

The Cleveland Museum of Art will present Yoga: The Art of Transformation, the world’s first exhibition about yoga’s visual history, will explore yoga’s meanings and transformations over time, including its entry into the global arena; yoga’s goals of spiritual enlightenment, worldly power and health and well-being; and the beauty and profundity of Indian art.

Works will include sculptural masterpieces of historical and divine yogis, exquisite Mughal paintings of militant yogis and romantic heroes, Islamic divination texts, fifteen-foot scrolls depicting the chakras (energy centers of the body), nineteenth-century photography and early films. Noteworthy objects include an installation that reunites for the first time three monumental stone yoginis from a tenth-century Chola temple; ten folios from the first illustrated compilation of asanas (yogic postures) from 1602, never before exhibited in the United States; and Hindoo Fakir by Thomas Edison, the first film on an Indian subject ever produced (1906).

Yoga: The Art of Transformation is organized by the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution with support from the Friends of the Freer and Sackler Galleries, the Art Mentor Lucerne Foundation and the Ebrahimi Family Foundation.

Other Venues:
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian, October 19, 2013 to January 26, 2014
Asian Art Museum, February 21 to May 25, 2014

Organizing Curator:
Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art, Sonya Rhie Quintanilla, Ph.D.

Surrealist Photography: Raymond Collection
October 5, 2014 to January 4, 2015

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The Doll, 1936. Hans Bellmer (German, 1902–1975). Gelatin silver print; 7.8 x 11.8 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund 2007.27. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

In 125 photographs and illustrated books, the Raymond collection tells two stories: one of a radical moment in early twentieth century art and the other of an impassioned collector whose adventurous spirit and vision harmonized perfectly with his subject. Beginning in the 1990s, art collector and filmmaker David Raymond judiciously sought out vintage prints from the 1920s through the 1940s that reflect the eye in its wild state (l’oeil a l’etat sauvage), remaining true to the spirit of Andre Breton, founder of the first surrealist group in Paris. Raymond’s holdings of surrealist and modernist photography were distinguished by their quality, breadth and rarity of subject matter. In 2007, the Cleveland Museum of Art made a major, transformative acquisition by acquiring that collection, one of the most important holdings of twentieth century Surrealist photography that remained in private hands.

Vertiginous camera angles, odd croppings and exaggerated tones and perspectives are hallmarks of the two principal photographic movements of the period, surrealism and modernism. As with surrealist efforts in other media, artists making photographs also aimed to explore the irrational and the chance encounter—magic and the mundane—filtered through the unconscious defined by Sigmund Freud. Eventually, photography became a preeminent tool of surrealist visual culture.

Photographs from several nations, representing diverse artistic pathways and divergent attitudes toward photography, come together in this collection. Many of the photographs reflect Parisian circles, with masterful works by Man Ray, Brassaï, Maurice Tabard and Roger Parry. Soviet Russia is represented by Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky; Germany by László Moholy-Nagy and Erwin Blumenfeld, among others. In addition to these notable artists, the collection features many photographers whose work is not as well known in the United States, including Horacio Coppola of Argentina, Emiel van Moerkerken of Holland and Marcel-G. Lefrancq of Belgium. A highlight of the collection is a grouping of 23 works by Dora Maar, a female photographer with a strong voice in surrealist Paris.

Organizing Curator:
Curator of Photography, Barbara Tannenbaum, Ph.D.

Exporting Florence: Donatello to Michelangelo
October 19, 2014 to January 18, 2015

Image

Julius Caesar, 1455–60. Mino da Fiesole (Italian, 1429–1484). Marble with traces of gilding and limestone with traces of polychromy; 83 x 84 x 25 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund 2009.271. 

By the beginning of the 15th century, Florence was establishing itself as a city celebrated for its art and renowned for its artists. Brunelleschi’s Dome, one of the great architectural achievements of the age, towered above the Cathedral and cast its shadow over the city. Artists like Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Donatello, Botticelli and Verrocchio developed innovative approaches to painting, sculpture and architecture. Nurtured by civic and private patrons and fuelled by rivalry among themselves, these and other artists transformed the physical fabric of the city, laying the foundation for a remarkable epoch in art history.

With Florentine territory expanding, many of these same artists were called to produce work that would visibly connect these new dependencies with the city. Works of art forged within the city’s burgeoning arts scene were exported beyond Florentine territory, exchanged as diplomatic gifts, and valued as commodities in which the visual arts emerged as a valued currency. By the early 16th century, Florence and its artists were recognized as accomplished in courts and cities well beyond the confines of Florentine territories. Major commissions followed, exporting Florentine political ideals and artistic inventions well beyond the Arno River Valley. This exhibition examines the work of Florentine artists abroad through a select group of major works and commissions, considering what it meant to be “Made in Florence.”

Other Venues:
Dallas Museum of Art, March 1 to June 7, 2015

Organizing Curator:
Director and CEO, David Franklin, Ph.D.

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About the Cleveland Museum of Art

The Cleveland Museum of Art is renowned for the quality and breadth of its collection, which includes almost 45,000 objects and spans 6,000 years of achievement in the arts. Currently undergoing an ambitious, multi-phase renovation and expansion project across its campus, the museum is a significant international forum for exhibitions, scholarship, performing arts and art education. One of the top comprehensive art museums in the nation and free of charge to all, the Cleveland Museum of Art is located in the dynamic University Circle neighborhood.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is supported by a broad range of individuals, foundations and businesses in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. The museum is generously funded by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. Additional support comes from the Ohio Arts Council, which helps fund the museum with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, educational excellence and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans. For more information about the museum, its holdings, programs and events, call 888-CMA-0033 or visit www.ClevelandArt.org.