LECTURE SERIES
2007-2008
This year's free lecture series examines some of the important people, places, cultures, and ideas that Louis Comfort Tiffany encountered during his lifetime. Programs take place in the McKean Pavilion, 161 West Canton Avenue (just behind the Museum), and are followed by a reception. Please see detailed listings below for dates and times.
A VISIT TO BARCELONA — ART, ARCHITECTURE, AND DESIGN
November 28, 2007, 2:30 p.m.
Laurence J. Ruggiero, Director, Morse Museum, Winter Park, Florida
Dr. Ruggiero provides comments and observations about the art, architecture, and design of Barcelona, one of the world’s capitals of Modernism. The director and his family visited Barcelona in 2006.
Highlights of a visit to Barcelona are, of course, the landmarks of Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí, including the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia and the palace and public park created for industrialist and art patron Eusebi Güell. But the Spanish cultural center also boasts Modernist monuments by such important architects as Domènech i Montaner, whose work enjoys interesting parallels to that of Tiffany. The Picasso Museum is a main attraction as is the Joan Miró Foundation, and the National Art Museum of Catalonia.
Dr. Ruggiero holds his master’s and doctoral degrees in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in Finance and Accounting from Boston University. Before beginning his career in museum administration at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he was an assistant professor of art history at the University of Illiniois in Chicago. Dr. Ruggerio came to the Morse in 1992.
CULTURE VS. CrAFT AND THE Transformation of the American Art Museum
January 16, 2008, 2:30 p.m.
Kathleen Curran, Associate Professor of Fine Arts, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
In her lecture, Dr.Curran examines the intellectual origins of American municipal art museums — such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Chicago Art Institute — and the transformative effect that so-called "cultural history" had on them. Cultural history, which posited that objects (paintings, sculpture, decorative arts) be studied as reflections of the cultures or "periods" that produced them, had wide impact on American museums.
This idea affected the planning and organization of museums, as well as their display practices, which included period rooms. It replaced the older classification systems and display practices that characterized the so-called craft museums such as London's South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Museum), which American museums had earlier used.
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| OLANA, SOUTH FACADE |
Olana: The IDEAL Home of LandSCAPE PAINTER Frederic Church
February 13, 2008, 2:30 p.m.
Evelyn D. Trebilcock, Curator, The Olana Partnership, Hudson, New York
Frederic Church (1826-1900) was arguably the most renowned artist of the Hudson River School, celebrating America with his grand canvases Niagara (The Corcoran) and Twilight in the Wilderness (The Cleveland Museum of Art). Olana, the Persian-style villa Church designed with architect Calvert Vaux and the surrounding landscape that Church planned, is his most personal creation. Built between 1870 and 1891, the house is a wonderful early example of an Aesthetic movement interior. Olana holds Church’s collections, including pre-Columbian artifacts; Middle Eastern textiles; Chinese ceramics; Old Master paintings; as well as many of his own finished paintings and oil sketches for his masterpieces, Niagara and Heart of the Andes (The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Masterfully arranged by the artist, Olana — house, landscape, and collections — is truly a work of art.
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| BRIAN T. ALLEN |
Orientalism in American Painting, 1860-1900
April 16, 2008, 7:30 p.m.
Brian T. Allen, Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts
One of the most enigmatic aspects of American art in the 19th century is Orientalism. Beginning with Frederic Church in the 1860s, American artists traveled and imagined the vast areas from Morocco to India, providing exquisite paintings for an enthusiastic audience of collectors. For Church, the Orient had profoundly religious connotations, less as something foreign than something seminal, the birthplace of Christianity. For artists of the next generation, including John Singer Sargent, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Edwin Lord Weeks, Sanford Gifford, and Frederic Bridgman, the region evoked a fantasy world of illicit pleasures and idle days, a world devoid of the West’s passion for time, rectitude, logic, and progress. American Orientalism was, of American art movements in the nineteenth century, probably most indebted to a French prototype practiced with such sureness and suavity by, among others, Jean-Leon Gérôme. Yet American Orientalism often expressed less about the subject depicted than the mood of America. Orientalism in American Painting, 1860-1900 considers the many visions of Orientalism among American artists, exploring one of the most rarely studied and understood aspects of this country’s cultural development in the nineteenth century.
2008 PUBLIC LECTURE
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| JOSEPH ROSSANO |
The Morse is pleased to present, in association with Arts at Rollins College, artist Joseph Rossano as our Public Lecture speaker in 2008.
Mr. Rossano's lecture, "In Tiffany's Steps — A Contemporary Glass Artist's Journey," will be held Tuesday, March 11, at 7:30 p.m. in the Tiedtke Concert Hall on the Rollins College campus. A free reception will immediately follow the lecture.
In his evolution as an artist, Mr. Rossano has worked with such contemporary glass masters as Lino Tagliapietra and Dale Chihuly and for such famous glass workshops as Waterford Crystal in Ireland. These experiences influenced his own approach to glassworking, and yet it was Louis Comfort Tiffany's glass that first impressed Rossano as a boy. Rossano, who grew up in Long Island, New York, today walks in the steps of Tiffany and the succession of glass artists who have continued the progression and acceptance of glass as an art form. Rossano will share his personal journey as an artist, providing anecdotes and perspective from the places he has worked, the personalities he has known, and the ideas that have shaped him.
The lecture will take place in John M. Tiedtke Concert Hall on the Rollins campus; parking is available the SunTrust Parking Garage in Winter Park, which is accessed via Lyman or Comstock avenues off of Park Avenue.
The Arts at Rollins College brings together the nationally recognized Annie Russell Theatre, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Winter with the Writers, and Winter Park Bach Festival Society with the college's programs in art, dance, film, music, theater and writing.
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