Welcome to the Frick

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.

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October 23, 2004 - January 2, 2005

On October 23, 2004, the Frick Art & Historical Center presents an exhibition of sixty-six European master drawings assembled exclusively from a small number of public and private collections in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh Collects: European Drawings, 1500 to 1800 presents a range of approaches to the art of drawing and shows the wide variety of uses to which drawings were put from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries in Italy, France, England, and the Netherlands. Many of the works have rarely been seen in public and several have not been published. The exhibition, which is organized by the Frick Art & Historical Center, remains on view at The Frick Art Museum through January 2, 2005.

Included in the exhibition are sketches and first impressions; various types of preparatory studies involving the human figure; drapery; the landscape; resolved ideas for compositions; and studies of architectural elements taken from life or the cityscape. Featured artists include, among others, Antonio Canal (called “Il Canaletto”), Jacopo Robusti (called “Tintoretto”), Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Jean-Baptiste Pater, Hubert Robert, Anthony Van Dyck, and Thomas Rowlandson.

“While the Frick has presented a number of exhibitions of outstanding master drawings from collections in Europe, Asia and other parts of the United States, Pittsburgh Collects features important works from collections that lie literally within our reach,” says Frick Art & Historical Director Bill Bodine, “We are pleased to share this aspect of Pittsburgh’s heritage with our audiences and are grateful to the lenders who made the exhibition possible.”

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Figurative drawings make up the majority of the works in Pittsburgh Collects. By drawing from the figure, the artist’s intention was to relay the human form as believably as possible and to capture on the sheet the gesture, attitude, movement, and expressiveness of the character to be portrayed in the painting.

Studio drawings helped train the hand and eye of the artist in representing the human form. Guglielmo Cortese’s (1628-1679) Standing Male Nude, for example, depicts in a naturalistic mode a twisting nude seen slightly above eye level. Probably an academic study not intended for use in the painting process, this sheet reveals an artist wrestling not only with the pose of a figure turning in space, but also with the distorting effects of foreshortening.

Beyond an academic lesson, drawing was also an intermediary step in the creation of works in other media, usually oil paintings or frescoes. Tintoretto’s (1519-1594) sheet Study of a Downward Flying Figure, for example, is an energetic, aggressive study of a figure for a ceiling painting, while Bartolomeo Cesi’s (1556-1629) Two Studies of Music-Making Angels for the perimeter of a ceiling dome fresco indicates the uses of drapery to emphasize the turn of the figure. This is one of several works in the exhibition that show artists making use of draperies to conceal nude figures and yet not subdue their dynamism and vitality.

Simone Cantarini’s (1612-1648) Virgin and Child with Infant St. John is an example of primo pensiero – an initial pen sketch – in which the artist explores the expressive potential of a composition in an oval format involving four figures. Other drawings similarly illustrate how artists resolved challenges posed by assembling a group of figures in a composition and having them serve its formal requirements, while advancing the narrative dimension of the subject.

The landscapes on exhibit comprise a range of modes to describe either the particularities of a location or the experience of a place. In the exquisitely rendered View of the Porta Pinciana, Stefano della Bella (1610-1664) uses only line to describe what could be seen, as well as what might be sensed, in the rendered landscape. It gives as much an impression of an experience as it records a road leading to a city gate.

Pittsburgh Collects also includes works whose purposes, beyond serving as preliminary studies for paintings and frescoes, are preparatory drawings planned for execution in another media. Abraham Bloemaert’s (1566-1651) Study of Hands, for example, was to be copied in a more precise manner prior to being engraved. Other drawings, such as Anthonie Waterloo’s (1609-1690) Wooded Landscape with Figures, were intended as finished drawings or works of art in their own rights.

Beyond their immensely individual characters, the works in Pittsburgh Collects demonstrate the timeless quality that a fine drawing possesses in which agility of line and subtlety of tone are expressions of the thoughts of artists who lived half a millennium ago.

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Pittsburgh Collects: European Drawings, 1500 to 1800 is accompanied by a fully-illustrated color catalogue, which includes a foreword by Frick Art & Historical Director Bill Bodine, and an introduction by Tom Smart, exhibition curator and the Frick’s Director of Collections and Exhibitions. Many of the catalogue entries were originally written in 1997 by graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh who participated in Professor Ann Sutherland Harris’ seminar on European drawings from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in Pittsburgh collections. Babette Bohn, Associate Professor of Art History at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, and Sarah Cantor, who assisted the Frick with the preliminary organization of the exhibition and is now a graduate student in Art History at the University of Maryland, also contributed entries.

The catalogue will be distributed by University of Pittsburgh Press and will be available at the Frick’s Museum Shop for $29.95.

EXHIBITION LENDERS AND SUPPORT
Private lenders to Pittsburgh Collects: European Drawings, 1500 to 1800 include Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Imbriglia, Professor Ann Sutherland Harris and other collectors who wish to remain anonymous. The Carnegie Museum of Art is lender of the largest group of drawings in the exhibition.

This exhibition and catalogue are made possible, in part, by a generous grant from the Woodmere Foundation. Exhibitions at The Frick Art Museum are made possible, in part, by annual operating support grants from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and the Allegheny Regional Asset District.

THE FRICK ART MUSEUM
Part of the Frick Art & Historical Center in Pittsburgh, The Frick Art Museum contains the fine and decorative art collection of Helen Clay Frick, daughter of Henry Clay Frick. In addition to exhibiting its permanent collection, which concentrates on Italian Renaissance and French eighteenth-century works, the Museum has an active program of temporary exhibitions.

Admission to The Frick Art Museum is free to the public. Free, docent-led tours of Pittsburgh Collects: European Drawings, 1500 to 1800 will be offered every Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. Group tours (for groups of five or more) and tours of the permanent collection are available at a cost of $5 per person. Group tours and permanent collection tour reservations must be made one to two weeks in advance.

GENERAL INFORMATION
The Frick Art & Historical Center is located at 7227 Reynolds Street in Point Breeze. Free parking is available in the Frick’s off-street lot, or along adjacent streets. Hours of operation are Tuesday – Sunday, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. The site is closed Mondays and major holidays.

For information and reservations, call 412-371-0600, 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., Monday through Sunday.

For further information or images, please contact Greg Langel at the Frick Art & Historical Center at 412-371-0600, ext. 524, or at glangel@frickart.org.

Jan Van Goyen (1596-1656), Wooded River Landscape with Boats near a Dock, n.d. Black chalk, gray wash, 6 1/2 x 101/2 inches. Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Imbriglia, Pittsburgh, PA. Photograph by Richard Stoner.

Abraham Bloemaert (1566-1651), Studies of Hands, n.d. Red and white chalk, with brown ink framing lines, 5 5/8 x 63/16 inches. Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Imbriglia, Pittsburgh, PA. Photograph by Richard Stoner.

Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi, Called Il Bolognese (1606-1680), Large Vertical Landscape, c.1660. Brown ink lead or metal point on cream paper, 15 x 8 13/16 inches. Collection of Professor Ann Sutherland Harris, Pittsburgh, PA. Photograph by Richard Stoner.

Pompeo Batoni (1708-1787), Drapery Study, n.d. Red chalk, 11 3/4 x 8 5/16 inches. Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Imbriglia, Pittsburgh, PA. Photograph by Richard Stoner.

Ludovico Carracci (1555-1619), Standing Boy in a Landscape, Dated on cartello to left: 1585. Red chalk on cream paper, 8 1/8 x 5 1/8 inches. Private collection. Photograph by Richard Stoner.