Metropolis: Traveling the World
July 31, 2010 - September 19, 2010
Artists have always traveled – to study, to vacation and in search of inspiration and their works have inspired others to travel, too. Metropolis: Traveling the World presents 30 alluring images of some of the world’s major cities by American artists from The Museum’s Permanent Collection. Nineteenth-century artists depicted the colorful, romantic and exotic aspects of international locales in highly detailed, realistic images that often served as souvenirs for affluent travelers on the Grand Tour of Europe, as seen in works by George Loring Brown, John Linton Chapman and Samuel Colman. Later painters inspired by the Impressionists, like Charles Webster Hawthorne and Robert Hallowell, focused more on light and atmosphere than physical description. Other twentieth-century artists responded to new sights with more avant-garde styles, ranging from the early modernism of Georgia O’Keeffe and George Biddle to the abstract styles of Jules Olitski, Betty Parsons and Vincent Pepi. Works by William Merritt Chase and John Taylor Arms will also be included in this exhibition, as will five lively prints from Risaburo Kimura’s Great Cities of the World series, seen here in exuberant images of Paris, Venice, Madrid, Shanghai and Bangkok.
