On Feb. 11, the Bruce Museum opens its newest exhibition, “Canvas and Cast: Highlights from the Bruce Museum’s Art Collection.” Featuring 35 paintings and seven sculptures from the museum’s growing collection, the show celebrates long-time favorites and many recent acquisitions representing significant moments in the history of art from the 16th through the 20th centuries. This exhibition, organized by Peter C. Sutton, The Susan E. Lynch Executive Director, and curated by Courtney Skipton Long, Zvi Grunberg Postdoctoral Fellow 2016/17 at the Bruce Museum, examines art historical themes including sculpted and painted portraits, narrative scenes and statues, landscapes, still lifes, and genre scenes.
Canvas and Cast explores artists’ handling of different media – bronze, marble, oil, pastel, acrylic and collage – through examples of 16th-century Dutch portraiture, 19th-century American figural sculpture, academic style painting, and French and American landscapes from the turn of the 20th century.
This exhibition also focuses on the treatment of form and composition across time. For instance, Canvas and Cast looks at the refined handling of the human form in William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s painting Faun and Bacchante (1860) and Auguste Rodin’s bronze-cast sculpture The Kiss (1886). This pairing is juxtaposed with the work of Expressionist and Abstract Expressionist artists, such as Jack Levine and Robert Rauschenberg, who questioned traditional notions of formal composition almost a century later. Levine’s Mars Confounded (1946) evokes a traditional Classical landscape with reclining nudes, but renders them in a satirical fashion. Likewise, Rauschenberg’s Greyhound Nightmare (1981) incorporates recognizable, representational imagery, but reconfigured in fantastical juxtapositions.
“Canvas and Cast: Highlights from the Bruce Museum’s Art Collection” runs through June 11.
