The Chrysler Museum of Art transports art lovers to the 19th and early 20th centuries and highlights the impact of Spanish art and culture on American painters with Americans in Spain: Painting and Travel, 1820-1920. Co-organized by the Chrysler Museum of Art and Milwaukee Art Museum, the show is on view at the Chrysler in Norfolk, Virginia, Feb. 12-May 16, 2021. Visitors to the Milwaukee Art Museum can enjoy the exhibition June 11-Oct. 3, 2021.
Americans in Spain explores a pivotal moment in the 19th and early 20th centuries when American artists and their European counterparts flocked to Spain to capture its scenic charms and customs. The first major exhibition to present this important aspect of American art to a wide audience, it brings together more than 100 artworks, including paintings from the 17th-20th centuries, photographs, prints and travel guides. It showcases works by American artists Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, John Singer Sargent and others alongside their Spanish contemporaries and Spain’s old masters. A newly documented painting by Cassatt that has never been shown in the U.S. is one of the highlights. Visitors will be able to access a 3D Visualization of the Prado Museum in Madrid and an Interactive Artist Travelers Project using their mobile devices to visit the Prado Museum and other famous sites in Spain.
“At a moment when global movement has been severely curtailed, this exhibition highlights the critical role that international travel and exchange played in shaping American art,” said Corey Piper, Ph.D., Brock curator of American art at the Chrysler Museum of Art and co-curator of the exhibition. “Like most tourists, American painters arrived in Spain with preconceived ideas about the sights and people they would encounter. The works they created in Spain and after journeying onward reveal the many exciting and sometimes unexpected ways in which their experience of the art, culture and people of Spain transformed their own perspectives and the larger course of American painting.”
The exhibition draws upon the Chrysler Museum’s collection of American and old master works and the Milwaukee Art Museum’s holdings of realist paintings, specifically by the Ashcan Circle and the Eight. Old master paintings by Diego Velázquez and Claudio Coello, given to the Chrysler by Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., as well as an early Spanish themed canvas by Édouard Manet feature prominently in the exhibition. The Chrysler’s extensive photographic holdings, including Spanish subjects by Jean Laurent, Charles Clifford and Francis Frith, also are on view. In addition to major works by Robert Henri, Milwaukee’s collection of old master prints by Francisco de Goya and Manet contribute to the exhibition’s narrative. Other works come from a wide range of national and international collections, including the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain; Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; Musée d’Orsay in Paris, France; Getty Museum in Los Angeles; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
“Americans in Spain is a wonderful reminder of our nation’s ongoing engagement with the world. The exhibition tells compelling stories about the American artists who drew inspiration from the great Spanish artists, landscapes and monuments,” said Erik Neil, director of the Chrysler Museum of Art. “It is an honor to partner with the Milwaukee Art Museum to bring these stories to our visitors.”
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