Current Exhibitions
The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs
May 22–Sept. 6, 2010
Boone Gallery
The first major exhibition of furniture and decorative art by the American craftsman and designer Charles Rohlfs (1853–1936), “The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs” brings together more than 40 pieces from 10 museums and several private collections to survey Rohlfs’ career as a furniture designer. With roots in the Aesthetic movement and an art-for-art’s sake sensibility, Rohlfs’ style relates to the abstract naturalism of Art Nouveau but draws on precedents from Asian and Moorish as well as English and German designs. While his work influenced the pared-down oak forms that became hallmarks of the Arts and Crafts movement, Rohlfs preferred the term “artistic furniture” to identify his designs not as part of a specific style or movement but rather as an expressive art made by a single individual. Organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Chipstone Foundation, and the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation with new scholarship based on the Rohlfs family archives and newly discovered primary sources, “The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs” concludes its national tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the fall of 2010. More >
“California Landscapes: Gifts to the Huntington’s Art Collections”
May 15–Sept. 6, 2010
Scott Galleries, Chandler Wing
The landscape of California as depicted by a variety of 20th-century artists will be explored in a small exhibition of paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, and photographs from The Huntington’s art collections. Acquired as gifts over the past 50 years, these portrayals of the state’s dramatic vistas—rocky coastlines, barren deserts, vast agricultural fields, suburban hillsides, and forested Sierra Nevada mountains—complement the Library’s extensive holdings of materials relating to the history of California and the West. The display includes works by Guy Rose, Marion Wachtel, and Percy Gray—artists who employed Impressionist and Tonalist styles to portray sun-kissed California landscapes—as well as Modernists such as Edward Weston, Paul Landacre, and Rinaldo Cuneo, who present an abstracted view of nature, often concentrated on effects of light. More >
Picturesque to Pastoral: British Landscape Prints from The Huntington’s Art Collections
July 31–Nov. 1, 2010
Huntington Art Gallery, Works on Paper Room
Many of the greatest practitioners of landscape painting in Britain also were actively engaged in printmaking. “Picturesque to Pastoral” explores the graphic side of landscape in British art from the 18th through the 20th century. From the rustic countryside depicted by Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) to the visionary dreamscapes of Graham Sutherland (1903–1980), this focused installation of about a dozen prints showcases the variety of techniques the medium affords—wood engraving, etching, aquatint, drypoint, and mezzotint—as well as the many ways the view of landscape changed over time. In their shift from rural to urban subjects and from poetic description to interior vision, these rarely seen items from The Huntington’s art collections reveal how artists reworked this subject matter to express their own sensibilities. View prints in the exhibition >