After a landmark year that expanded the Museum’s focus to include modern and contemporary art, the Hyde Collection announced its 2018 exhibition schedule.
The lineup offers contrasts to historic Hyde House and the selection of modern art exhibited in Feibes & Schmitt Gallery, including the sinuous lines of art nouveau, graphic prints from an Adirondack artist, the works of female Impressionists, the annual High School Juried Show, and a much-anticipated showing of the Nuremberg Chronicle from the permanent collection.
The exhibits include:
• Alphonse Mucha: Master of Art Nouvea in the Wood and Whitney-Renz galleries, Jan. 14 to March 18.
The exhibition examines the pivotal role of Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) in shaping the aesthetics of French art nouveau at the turn of the 20th century. The artist’s posters and graphic style popularized this international movement. Later in his career, the Czech nationalist depicted the history of the Czech lands and people.
Master of Art Nouveau spans his career, including a panel from his Slav Epic series, and bank notes from his homeland. Mucha’s exploitation of the new medium of the advertising poster helped shape the aesthetics of French art at the turn of the twentieth century and formed the cornerstone of the international Art Nouveau movement.
• The Prints of Rockwell Kent: Selections from the Ralf C. Nemec Collection; A Life and Art of His Own: The Paintings of Rockwell Kent from North Country Collections in the Wood, Whitney-Renz, and Hoopes galleries, April 8 to July 22.
Complementary exhibitions celebrate Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), the American painter, printer, and illustrator, who settled in the Adirondacks in 1928. The print exhibition, organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, Calif., includes illustrations; images related to his love of wildernesses, including the Adirondacks; and works demonstrating his social activism, all drawn from the collection of Ralf C. Nemec, who has the world’s most extensive collection of Kent’s prints.
In addition, there will be a selection of ceramics also from Nemec’s collection, decorated with designs by Kent. In a complementary exhibition, guest curator Caroline Welsh has drawn together paintings from North Country collections, some seldom seen publicly.
Rockwell Kent was an architect, author, illustrator, painter, printmaker, and ceramicist. His paintings, woodcuts and prints showcase the natural wilderness, fascinating those who saw his works and were transported on his many adventures. As author and illustrator of popular accounts of his travels, he met with considerable commercial success.
• The High School Juried Show in the Feibes & Schmitt and Rotunda galleries, May 12 to June 10.
For the 27th year, some of the brightest talent in area high schools will be on display in the annual show. Students in Warren, Washington, Saratoga, Hamilton, and Essex counties are invited to submit works, from which a jury of local art professionals will select 100 to be displayed.
• Jane Peterson: At Home and Abroad in the Wood Gallery, Aug. 5 to Oct. 12.
In this exhibition organized by the Mattatuck Museum, the career of American female Impressionist Jane Peterson (1876-1965) is examined. With a look at her introduction to Impressionism and her development under the influence of Fauvism, the exhibition includes works derived from her travels in Europe, North Africa, and America. The artist was extremely popular among major art collectors of her time, especially John D. Rockefeller.
• Women Impressionists from the Thomas Clark Collection, Whitney-Renz Gallery, Aug. 5 to Oct. 12.
This exhibition looks at the work of at least 15 American female impressionist painters drawn from the collection of Thomas Clark, which focuses on American impressionist landscapes. The exhibition includes works from artists trained in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Europe.
• Nuremberg and Augsburg Chronicles, Hoopes Gallery, opens Nov. 2.
The Nuremberg Chronicle was the first major printed and illustrated work in Europe, telling the history of the world based upon the Bible and augmented with more recent histories from medieval sources.
The Augsburg Chronicle is perhaps the first example of copyright infringement in print. Published in a neighboring and competing German city, it was a smaller and cheaper “knock-off” of the Nuremberg Chronicle. The Hyde’s copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle is recognized as one of the finest in the country.