Current Exhibitions
Central Avenue and Beyond: The Harlem Renaissance in Los Angeles
Oct. 24, 2009 - Feb. 8, 2010Library, West Hall
During the 1920s and 1930s, African American arts and culture flowered throughout the United States. African Americans found new ways to explore black history, thought, culture, and arts in urban centers nationwide. Much of the activity of this movement took place in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, and its flourishing there became known as the Harlem Renaissance.
This exhibition will focus on the extraordinary artistic, cultural, and intellectual expressions and accomplishments of African Americans in Los Angeles, on Central Avenue and beyond. The show will include material from both The Huntington Library and the Mayme A. Clayton Library, a new cultural and education institution founded by Avery Clayton to house and make available his mother’s extraordinary collection of African Americana gathered during her forty-year career as a librarian in Los Angeles.
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Drawn to Satire: John Sloan’s Illustrations for the Novels of Charles Paul de Kock
Oct. 24, 2009–Mar. 29, 2010Scott Galleries, Chandler Wing
From 1903 to 1905, American artist John Sloan created 53 etchings to illustrate comic novels by French author Charles Paul de Kock. The books—satires of French society in the first half of the 19th century, full of slapstick violence—were a perfect subject for Sloan’s lively etching style of short, expressive lines and loose cross-hatching. The project also seemed to inspire Sloan to look at 20th-century New Yorkers with the same satirical eye that de Kock trained on Parisians of the previous century. In the years that followed, Sloan produced a number of etchings featuring humorous vignettes of life in the busy metropolis. A selection of Sloan’s etchings as well as related prints, drawings, and books will be on view, inviting close study of Sloan’s working methods as he was becoming a prominent member of the band of urban realists known as the Ashcan school.
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The Color Explosion: Nineteenth Century American Lithography from the Jay T. Last Collection
Oct. 17, 2009–Feb. 22, 2010
Boone Gallery
When a young German playwright named Alois Senefelder developed a new printmaking process in the 1790s, little did he know that his discovery would start a communication revolution. Lithography, or flat-surface printing, transformed the exchange of information and the behavior of everyday life for the next century and beyond. This technique brought art, literature, music, and science to the masses; gave rise to product advertising and consumer culture; educated a growing middle class; and turned commercial printing from a craft into an industry. Lithography also colorized a predominantly black-and-white print world.
The Color Explosion presents more than 200 examples of 19th-century American lithography from The Huntington’s Jay T. Last Collection of Lithographic and Social History. Advertising posters, art prints, calendars, certificates, children’s books, color-plate illustrations, historical views, product labels, sales catalogs, sheet music, toys & games, and trade cards are just some of the artifacts that will be included in this comprehensive exhibition.
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British Watercolors of the Eastern Mediterranean
July 18–Nov. 30, 2009Huntington Art Gallery, Works on Paper Room
By the end of the first quarter of the 19th century, watercolor paintings of the western European landscape had become familiar to British collectors, who began to seek new and different imagery with which to decorate their houses. Artists were eager to supply this demand. Improvements in transportation across Europe and the Mediterranean opened up new areas for artistic exploration, such as Eastern Europe, Greece, and the Near East. The fashion for exotic and orientalized subjects meant that British watercolorists who traveled there found a ready market for their works at home. The 15 pictures from The Huntington’s permanent collection on display in “British Watercolors of the Eastern Mediterranean” illustrate the great variety of style and the vastly different approaches employed by artists such as Edward Lear (1812–1888), John Frederick Lewis (1804–1876), and David Wilkie (1785–1841).