In this illustrated conversation, arborist/writer William Bryant Logan and painter/horticulturist Rebecca Allan discuss the intertwined labors of Nikolai Astrup’s life—farming and painting—as a model for re-establishing an intimate connection between people and the land.
In conjunction with the opening of Dürer & After, exhibition curator Anne Leonard, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, examines the inspiration that artists of Albrecht Dürer’s time—and continuing long afterwards—found in his incomparable print corpus. Running the gamut from meticulous copying to free interpretation and from respectful tribute to outright piracy, the methods and motivations of Dürer’s imitators offer a distinctive lens through which to view his remarkable artistic legacy.
The rhinoceros has been called a surrealist animal due to its associations with the work of Eugène Ionesco, Salvador Dalí, and François-Xavier Lalanne. Exhibition curator Kathleen Morris explores the ways these artists used the captivating mammal in their work. She focuses particularly on François-Xavier Lalanne, who repeatedly employed the animal as a subject, including mounting an exhibition in 1980 called “Le Rhinocéros dans tous ses états”.
Modernist artist, innovative printmaker, talented horticulturalist, ambitious garden designer, and committed conservationist, Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928) devoted his career to the celebration of a relatively remote region of Western Norway. Enthralled by the majesty of its mountainous landscape, its lush vegetation, its folk and mythic traditions, and its distinct atmosphere, seasons, and light, Astrup drew upon childhood memory, acute observation of nature, and European modernisms to forge his own visual language that spoke to a sense of Norwegian identity.
Beinecke Fellow Glenn Peers presents, “The Mandylion’s Marital and Martial Message Machines.” Byzantine precursor to the Veronica, the Mandylion was a self-portrait believed to be made by Jesus and sent to Abgar, king of Edessa (now Urfa in southeastern Turkey), with the apostle Thaddaeus. By the tenth century, the focus of this talk, the Mandylion was a message of the media dominance of representation under the new Christian dispensation. Wedding veil, battle mask, weapon of mass destruction, and?king maker, it was these things and more as the material, figural media of earthly power and of union with the divine.
