January 14, 1998
Van Dyck’s Master Portraits in The Frick Collection
Susan Johnston Barnes, Independent Art Historian and Curator
Van Dyck’s great portraits in The Frick Collection, the focus of this talk, spann his relatively brief career and represent the pinnacle of his achievement. They demonstrate how his genius developed with the changing clientele as he moved from bourgeois Antwerp to patrician Genoa and finally to the court of Charles I in London.
February 18, 1998
The Architect’s Dream
A.A. Tait, University of Glasgow
The lecture examined how the eighteenth-century architect, especially Robert Adam, organized and invented a drawing style to sell his vision to clients. Based primarily on drawings in the Adam exhibition, of which Professor Tait is guest curator, it studied the contrast between the highly personal Adam sketch and the striking watercolors and perspectives produced in the Adam office.
March 11, 1998
The Impudence to Sing in Rome Publicly: Robert Adam’s
Little-Known Interest in Music
Jane Clark, Independent Scholar and Musician
Robert Adam was a keen amateur singer who wrote interesting and entertaining letters home to his family from Italy. Excerpts from these letters and recordings of the music he mentions form the basis for this lecture, which seeks to bring the architect vividly to life.
April 22, 1998
“The Master of the Beautiful Bosom”: Augustin Pajou and
His Busts of Women
James Draper, Metropolitan Museum of Art
A fresh look at Pajou’s female portraiture in light of the current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid special attention to The Frick Collection’s bust of Madame Hall.
May 20, 1998
Rembrandt as Jupiter: The Frick Self-Portrait and its Pendant
Leonard J. Slatkes, Queens College of the City University of New York
Although scholars have associated the introspective character of the Frick Self-Portrait with Rembrandt’s financial difficulties, there have been few attempts to see this important work as more than yet another of his many painted self-likenesses. New technical data, however, combined with a close study of Rembrandt’s artistic sources, suggest that the Hammer Museum’s Juno was intended as a pendant to the Frick canvas.
June 24, 1998
Drawing the Experience of the New: German Artists in the Age of Goethe
Françoise Forster-Hahn, University of California at Riverside
The exhibition Fuseli to Menzel: Drawings and Watercolors in the Age of Goethe provides the starting point for this talk, which takes as its theme Philipp Otto Runge’s dictum: “Art of all periods teaches us that humanity changes, and that a period, once past, never returns.”
September 30, 1998
Monet’s Paintings at Vétheuil: The Artist’s Turning Point
Carole C. McNamara, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor
Among the less well-known paintings of Claude Monet are those he executed in the small town of Vétheuil, northwest of Paris, in the years 1878-81, during which he suffered the death of his wife Camille, financial difficulties, and unfavorable critical reception. Pivotal to this period is the group of works, seen as among his first attempts at a serial manner of painting, that he executed of the frozen Seine during the severe winter of 1879-80, including The Frick Collection’s Vétheuil in Winter. From this brief period, Monet’s paintings began to sell, and he moved steadily toward the series as his preferred way of portraying landscape.
November 17, 1998
What is This? Where Did It Come From? Why Is It Here?
Three Questions to Ask of Any Work of Art
James Fenton, Author
In a lecture that considered the enduring legacy of the history of taste, connoisseurship, dealing, and collecting, James Fenton discussed the experiences of viewing and acquiring art. What distinguishes a visit to the Louvre in Paris from a visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington? Why are the experiences of seeing great individual collections such as the Frick, Wallace, or Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum so distinct from one another?
Mr. Fenton is Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His new book, Leonardo’s Nephew: Essays in the History of Art and Artists, will be published this month.
This inaugurated a new occasional series of free evening lectures by writers, poets, and artists.
This lecture was made possible through the generosity of the Fellows of The Frick Collection.
December 2, 1998
Sex, Drugs, and Death in Fairyland
Charlotte Gere, London Author and Nineteenth-Century Specialist
Where did the Victorians find their fairyland? This lecture looked at art, science, dreams, halucinations, opium addiction, and the newly revealed realms of spiritualism to discover the sources of Victorian fairy painting.
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