In this episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, examines the life and work of French painter François Boucher, with a focus on “A Lady on Her Daybed.” Discover why Boucher was said to epitomize the taste of the eighteenth century.
This week’s complementary cocktail has a kick: the potent French 75, named after the powerful French 75mm field gun.
There’s more to Kansas than its wide-open spaces and endless skies might indicate. From aviation pioneers to civil rights heroes fought back. and from Laura Ingalls Wilder documenting life on the prairie and a fictional young girl dreaming of a life “Over the Rainbow”, enjoy this soaring tour through the Sunflower State.
In this episode of “Travels with a Curator,” we visit the world-famous Westminster Abbey in London, with Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. Xavier shares connections between Westminster Abbey and the Frick through an examination of the life of General John Burgoyne, a playwright, parliamentarian, and military officer buried in the Abbey’s north cloister. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Burgoyne was acquired by The Frick Collection in 1943.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is one of the most admired painters of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Known for his powerful, dramatically lit compositions, Caravaggio depicted violence and the human form with a degree of realism unprecedented at the time. He was among the most famous painters in Rome—but not only because of his skill as an artist.
Caravaggio was also notorious for his wild life and shocking temper. After being sentenced to death for murder, he fled Rome and died in exile at age 38 . Three biographies written in the decades after his death constitute nearly all that is known about the enigmatic artist.
In this episode, Getty curator and expert on Italian painting Davide Gasparatto discusses Caravaggio and the role these early biographies, by Giulio Mancini, Giovanni Baglione, and Giovanni Pietro Bellori, played in defining Caravaggio’s legacy.
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) Meditation, small model, type I version
Rodin travelled to Italy in 1875, a trip described by the late art historian Kirk Varnedoe as, ‘one of the seminal events in modern art’.
Here, in his mid-thirties, he fell under the spell of the Renaissance master, Michelangelo. His monumental, exaggerated nude figures would have a deep and lasting influence on the artist. ‘My liberation from academicism was via Michelangelo,’ Rodin later recalled. ‘He is the bridge by which I passed from one circle to another.’
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is renowned for breathing life into clay, creating naturalistic, often vigorously modelled sculptures which convey intense human emotions: love, ecstasy, agony or grief. Breaking the rules of academic convention and classical idealism, Rodin ushered in a new form of highly expressive sculpture that went on to influence generations of artists that followed.
In this episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, discusses the French port city depicted in J. M. W. Turner’s painting “Harbor of Dieppe: Changement de Domicile,” and how the artist’s extensive travel throughout Europe helped to develop his affinity for harbors. The complementary cocktail is the Widow’s Kiss, a French drink traditionally given to women who had lost their husbands at sea.
“Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines” and prepare to be whisked away over Indiana’s famous racetrack and the Golden Dome, vast cornfields and large quarries, and bustling metropolises and a city of ruins. Here in the Hoosier State, Abraham Lincoln became a man, basketball became an obsession, and the nation nearly doubled in one of the biggest land grabs in U.S. history. This aerial tour captures the beauty, spirit, and stories of Indiana as seen from above.
In this episode of “Travels with a Curator,” we travel to Warsaw, Poland, with Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. Xavier enchants us with the romantic Łazienki Park and Palace, also known as the Palace on the Isle. The idyllic gardens and ornately decorated interior spaces are similar in many ways to our own Frick mansion. One of the Frick’s Rembrandt paintings, “The Polish Rider,” once hung in the royal apartments on the second floor.
There is an unhappy irony in the fact that five hundred years after Raphael died of a fever at the age of only thirty-seven, the global covid-19 pandemic has brought to a premature end so many of the exhibitions that have been staged to mark the anniversary.