Bruce Guthrie Photos: VA -- Richmond -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts -- What Remains and Love of Beauty exhibits

VA -- Richmond -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts -- What Remains and Love of Beauty exhibits -- Notes:

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Description of Pictures: What Remains of Edward Beyer's Blue Ridge: Landscapes of Salem and Liberty
October 15, 2012-December 30, 2013
In the 1850s, German artist Edward Beyer traveled throughout western Virginia and painted landscapes of many of the small towns in the Blue Ridge Mountains. These paintings are remarkable not only for their beauty but also their attention to detail. This exhibition uses Beyer’s landscapes as documents to compare the bustling communities of the middle nineteenth century with the Blue Ridge towns today.

For the Love of Beauty: The Collections of Lora and Claiborne Robins
March 12, 2012–February 11, 2013
This exhibition presents nineteenth-century landscape paintings, decorative arts, and colonial furniture collected by philanthropists Lora Robins (1912–2010) and her husband, E. Claiborne Robins (1910–1995). Structural and decorative elements—such as volute, splat, finial, scrolled acanthus leaves, and gadrooning—are explored and compared. All items in the exhibition were displayed in their home, Clear View, located in Richmond, Virginia. The Robins bequeathed the house and its contents to the VHS. This is the first time that this personal collection has been on public view.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by Bruce Guthrie who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the Creative Commons definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. If asked for permission in advance, I'll usually waive the non-commercial clause unless it's for people trying to sell the photos. A free copy of any printed publication using the photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from official signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Various Signs: American Art -- Mid-Twentieth Century:
The devastating stock market crash of 1929 ushered in a wave of socioeconomic crises that dramatically shaped American culture. Overwhelmed by poverty and unemployment, American artists turned inward, committing themselves to creating a home-grown "art for the people." Many adopted a realistic style and treated regional subjects as a means of exploring the unimPORT 216,15,33,197,134,119
continued to favor an international language of abstraction to express modern truths and utopian visions.
Founded in 1936 in the depths of the Great Depression, the state-owned Virginia Museum of Fin Arts enthusiastically embraced the nationalist call for a vital cultural scene. Many of the objects on view in this gallery, purchased directly from the museum's biennial exhibitions in contemporary American painting (called "the South's most heralded competition"), offer glimpses of institutional taste. In the post-World War II era, the two constants of figuration and realism continued to shape American production and reception. Nevertheless controversial exhibitions and purchases marked VMFA's increasing alignment with progressive national forces that favored nonrepresentational imagery. By the late 1950s, abstraction -- in its myriad variations -- was widely heralded at home and abroad as a dynamic "American" art.

European Art -- The Grand Manner: History Painting in Seventeenth-Century Europe:
History painting was a technical term used in the past to describe great and difficult subjects -- from the Bible, mythology, and history itself -- that were considered by critics to draw upon the artist's deeper powers to represent action and emotion convincingly. Implicit in this definition was the claim that such history paintings were of a higher order than landscapes still lifes, and portraiture. These lower genres, it was argued, were of less important because artists only had to reproduce things they saw with their own eyes. Histor ...More...
Wikipedia Description: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Virginia Museum of Fine arts, or ‘’’VMFA’’’ is an art museum in Richmond, Virginia. It is one of the first museums in the American South to be operated by state funds.

History:

The VMFA has its origins in a 1919 donation of 50 paintings to the Commonwealth of Virginia by Judge and prominent Virginian John Barton Payne. Payne, in collaboration with Virginia Governor John Garland Pollard and the Federal Works Projects Administration secured federal funding to augment state funding for the museum. The museum opened in 1936 on Richmond's Boulevard.

In 1947, the VMFA received a significant donations in the form of the Lillian Thomas Pratt Collection of jeweled objects by Peter Carl Faberg�, including the largest public collection of Faberg� eggs outside of Russia. The Museum also received in 1947 the "T. Catesby Jones Collection of Modern Art". Further donations in the 1950’s came from Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams and from Arthur and Margaret Glasgow.

Exhibits:

VMFA has made acquisitions with endowments provided by many private donors. The museum has assembled a wide-ranging collection of world art characterized by great breadth and critical aesthetic quality. It includes significant holdings of Classical art and African art; paintings by European masters such as Poussin, Goya, Delacroix and Monet, and American masters such as John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer; one of the world's leading collections of Indian and Himilayan art; an internationally important collection of fine English silver; holdings of Art Nouveau and Art Deco furniture, ceramics, glass and jewelry; a collection of Modern and Contemporary art; a collection of Faberg� imperial jeweled objects; and holdings of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, including original waxes and bronzes by Edgar Degas.

Expansion:

In 2003, a year after its selection of London-based architect Rick Mather, VMFA unv ...More...
Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. VMFARE_130209_001.JPG: The Peaks of Otter and the Town of Liberty: The town of Liberty (now Bedford) was established in 1782. Though it had been the county seat for more than seventy years, Liberty was just beginning to grow into a commercial center when Beyer arrived in 1855. The introduction of modern transportation in the 1850s, represented by the passenger and freight trains in the painting, led not only to the expansion of agricultural production in the county but also the growth of small industry. As a painter, Beyer was inspired by the surroundings as well as the town of Liberty, and he noted in the Description of the Album of Virginia that the "outlook from the Peaks of Otter surpasses anything I have seen before."
2. VMFARE_130209_027.JPG: What Remains of Edward Beyer's Blue Ridge: In 1848, the painter Edward Beyer and his wife left their native Germany, which was on the verge of political upheaval, and sailed for America. They traveled extensively from New York to Ohio. Along the way, he exhibited his work and continued to paint. Beyer visited Virginia based on the recommendation that its climate and natural springs might benefit his ailing wife. The mountain towns of Virginia would prove to be Beyer's greatest inspiration. Beyer's landscapes offer a vivid and accurate image of life in the rural communities of Virginia. His paintings capture individual structures with such accuracy that one can identify those that still survive. Some of these are immediately recognizable, but others are hidden under later additions. Although these mountain towns have undergone considerable change since he painted them more than 150 years ago, much remains of Edward Beyer's Blue Ridge -- if you look for it.
3. VMFARE_130209_032.JPG: Churches, Blacksmith Shop and College View of Salem Virginia in 1855: When Edward Beyer came to Salem, he found a flourishing little valley town. A half century of hosting travelers along the Great Wagon Road, the main route along the American backcountry from Pennsylvania to Georgia, had boosted Salem's stature and increased its wealth, and its citizens were eager to display the town's new prominence. A new college had recently been chartered, and the railroad now ran through town. Signs of growing wealth, such as new churches and stately homes, were a point of pride for the local gentry. Twenty of these men, including Col. HH Chapman, commissioned Beyer to paint a landscape of their town, which was hung prominently in the lobby of a local hotel as a reflection of that pride.
4. VMFARE_130209_090.JPG: The Old Mill Albert Bierstadt, 1858 Later renowned for large canvases that record spectacular scenery of the American West, Bierstadt first studied painting in Germany and Rome, which he toured in 1856 with fellow painters Worthington Whittredge and Sanford Gifford. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, Bierstadt worked drawings he had made in Europe into finished oil paintings. He had sketched The Old Mill in Westphalia (Germany).
5. VMFARE_130209_112.JPG: For the Love of Beauty: The Collections of Lora and Claiborne Robins: Lora and Claiborne Robins loved American art. They collected paintings by "Hudson River School" artists and colonial American furniture, as well as decorative objects of a wide variety. The art, furniture, and objects presented here were displayed in their Richmond home, Clear View. The house and its extensive collection were generously bequeathed to the Virginia Historical Society in 2010. "I just love beautiful things," Lora Robins would often say. Like so many of their contemporaries in the state, the Robinses developed a home in emulation of Virginia's great architectural heritage from the colonial era. Few did the job so well. Richmonders know that Lora Robins's love of beauty extended as well to flowers and to the natural world in general. She committed great interest and energy to the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, gave her name to the Lora Robins Gallery of Design from the Nature at the University of Richmond, and helped establish the sculpture garden at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
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2013 photos: So far, I'm mostly using my Fuji XS-1 camera but, depending on the event, I'm also using a Nikon D7000 and Nikon D600. Trips this year have been limited to a Civil War Trust conference in Memphis.
Photo Contact: Email Bruce Guthrie.