A Panorama of Pittsburgh
at the Frick through 10/5
Learn about Pittsburgh's past by viewing more than 130 printed views of the city.
Meissonier masterpiece
now on view at the Frick
1806, Jena is on view at the Frick through May 31, 2009.
This Sunday is
RADical Day at the Frick
Visit the Frick on 10/5 for a full day of activities and fun!
Rob Rogers discusses
political cartooning on 10/12
The Post-Gazette's award-winning editorial cartoonist will discuss his experiences covering the 2008 presidential campaign and conventions.
Music for Exhibitions
begins new season 11/18
Join Katherine Soroka and Chatham Baroque for an evening of memorable music.
View photos from the 2008 H. C. Frick Horseless Carriage Tour
Twenty-six teams of drivers made it a day of fun.
Sign up for the
Frick e-newsletter
Each month, receive the latest information about exhibitions; programs for adults, families, children, and teachers; events; specials at The Café and the Museum Shop; and more.
at the Frick through 10/5
Learn about Pittsburgh's past by viewing more than 130 printed views of the city.
Meissonier masterpiece
now on view at the Frick
1806, Jena is on view at the Frick through May 31, 2009.
This Sunday is
RADical Day at the Frick
Visit the Frick on 10/5 for a full day of activities and fun!
Rob Rogers discusses
political cartooning on 10/12
The Post-Gazette's award-winning editorial cartoonist will discuss his experiences covering the 2008 presidential campaign and conventions.
Music for Exhibitions
begins new season 11/18
Join Katherine Soroka and Chatham Baroque for an evening of memorable music.
View photos from the 2008 H. C. Frick Horseless Carriage Tour
Twenty-six teams of drivers made it a day of fun.
Sign up for the
Frick e-newsletter
Each month, receive the latest information about exhibitions; programs for adults, families, children, and teachers; events; specials at The Café and the Museum Shop; and more.
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June 8, 2001 - August 12, 2001 |
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During the last half of the nineteenth century, the French academic painter Jean- Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) became one of the most celebrated and sought-after artists in both Europe and the United States. His extraordinary popularity was due not only to the realistic style and theatrical subject matter of his canvasses, but also to the variety of reproductions of his works that were made and sold worldwide by the art publisher Adolphe Goupil (1806-93). The two men were involved in a long and remarkably profitable partnership, which resulted in the sale of some 337 of Gérôme's paintings, 122 of which were the subject of nearly 370 editions. This historic and pioneering collaboration, which revolutionized the marketing of art and artists, is examined in Gérôme & Goupil: Art and Enterprise, on view from June 8 through August 12, 2001, at The Frick Art Museum, Frick Art & Historical Center, Pittsburgh. The exhibition features approximately twenty paintings, spanning Gérôme's entire working life and range of subjects, displayed alongside some 100 of Goupil's prints and photographs of them, selected to demonstrate the remarkable range of size, price, and reproductive techniques that the publisher offered his clients. Garnered from private and public collections in Europe and the United States, the paintings selection includes many of the artist's most famous-and widely reproduced-works, including The Prisoner, Duel After the Ball, and Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down), the gladiatorial scene that inspired Ridley Scott's Oscar-winning film The Gladiator. DeCourcy McIntosh, executive director of the Frick Art & Historical Center, says, "By examining the partnership of a celebrated Salon painter and an enterprising publisher of prints, Gérôme & Goupil illuminates the ways in which art, business, and the technological developments of the industrial revolution combined to help create the international art market, especially in the United States. Moreover, the exhibition explains the development of habits of patronage that led to the founding of this country's first major art museums." Gérôme & Goupil has been organized by the Frick Art & Historical Center, the Musée Goupil, Bordeaux, and the Dahesh Museum of Art, New York City. The curator is Hélène Lafont-Couturier, director of the Musée d'Aquitaine and founding director of the Musée Goupil, in Bordeaux. Exhibition coordinators are Pierre-Lin Renié, attaché du conservation, Musée Goupil, and Mr. McIntosh. The Pittsburgh showing of the exhibition is supported in part by a generous grant from The Isaacson-Draper Foundation. Additional support has been provided by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Artist Although Gérôme was an almost exact contemporary of the pioneering French artist Edouard Manet, their work could hardly be more different: Unlike that of Manet, Gérôme's art exemplified the official and popular taste of the time, which called for precisely modeled, highly finished forms, as well as subjects inspired by history and the classical world. A brilliant technician, tireless researcher, and consummate storyteller, Gérôme brought a new and compelling sense of drama and realism to the traditions of so-called "academic" painting. Although his first success came as a painter of subjects from ancient Greece and Rome, during the mid-1850s, following the first of many trips to Egypt, he began to excel in scenes portraying life in the exotic East. Depicted with almost photographic realism, and often unabashedly erotic, these Orientalist works were the source of the artist's greatest fame and fortune, in both America and Europe. Throughout his long painting career-he exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1847 to 1903-Gérôme was also one of France's most influential art teachers. His students, which numbered about 2,000, included many Americans, among them Thomas Eakins. While Gérôme's reputation was later eclipsed by the twentieth-century preference for Impressionism, he has recently been the subject of renewed and enthusiastic interest by scholars and collectors alike. The Entrepreneur In 1859, when Gérôme's professional collaboration with Goupil began, the artist was already the rising star of academic painting in France. Yet it is unlikely that he would have achieved global acclaim had it not been for the innovative and often inspired promotional activities of Goupil, who acted as both Gérôme's dealer and the sole purveyor of reproductions of the artist's work for the next fifty-eight years. Goupil was one of the most successful art dealers and publishers of nineteenth-century France. From its modest beginn's clients, both in Europe and America (the latter of whom would eventually be of major importance to him and include such wealthy collectors as William H. Vanderbilt and William Walters). The exhibition concludes with a representative selection that includes an 1869 etching after Gérôme's Rembrandt Etching a Plate in his Atelier (1860); Louis XIV and Molière (1862); and a number of works devoted to the life of Napoleon, then as now a source of endless fascination to the French. Conclusion Gérôme's virtuosity, acute sense of public taste, and willingness to please clients made him, in many ways, the ideal collaborator for Goupil, and their partnership made art accessible to a wider public than ever before. Inevitably, the frankly commercial nature of the enterprise incurred the criticism of more purist sensibilities. "Mr. Gérôme works for the House of Goupil," noted Zola. "He makes a painting in order for it to be reproduced through photos and engravings and to be sold in thousands of copies. Here the subject is all, the painting is nothing..." Such concerns about virtual versus original art continue to be hotly debated today. Gerome & Goupil: Art and Enterprise offers a compelling historical perspective on the economic, technological, social, and aesthetic origins of this phenomenon. The exhibition was on view at the Musée Goupil, Bordeaux, from October 12, 2000, to January 14, 2001. A version then opened on February 6 at the Dahesh Museum of Art, New York City, where it is on view until May 5, 2001. The Frick Art Museum is the final venue on the exhibition tour. Catalogue Gérôme & Goupil is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published in French and English by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, with essays by Gerald Ackerman, a leading authority on Gérôme's work and consultant to the exhibition; Hélène Lafont-Couturier, Director of the Musée Goupil and exhibition manager; Régine Bigorne, art historian; Stephen R. Edidin, curator of the Dahesh Museum of Art; Mr. McIntosh; and Florence Rionnet, attachée de conservation du patrimoine, Musée de Dinard. The English-language edition is available at The Frick Art & Historical Center Museum Shop for $45. The Frick Art & Historical Center is located at 7227 Reynolds Street, in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Free, off-street parking is available adjacent to the Museum in the Frick Art & Historical Center lot. The Frick Art Museum is open Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m., Sunday, 12:00 - 6:00 p.m. Admission is free. Free, docent-led tours are offered Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. Visit the Frick online at www.frickart.org. |
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