Visual Education
Exhibit Dates
Visual Education will be presented at Goucher College's Silber Art Gallery in the Athenaeum fromSaturday, September 12, through Sunday, October 18, 2009. This exhibit, which is free and open to the public, can be viewed Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
About the Exhibit
The exhibition is composed of 10 pieces on loan from Sidney and Jean Flah Silber and 35 works from Goucher’s art collection.
The exhibit includes several prints from the Silber collection that illustrate a range of techniques and stylistic approaches in original printmaking from the late-19th to the mid-20th century. One print, a large lithograph by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, served as the front and back cover of “L’Estampe originale,” a portfolio of original prints by various artists from 1893. Two of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s lithographs from 1904 will be on display, one of which is a portrait of his son Claude. An etching of a woman’s head by Amadeo Modigliani and its metal etching plate will help viewers understand the etching process.
Prints on display from the Silber collection include works by Spanish artist Joan Miró and Russian artist Sonia Delaunay-Terk that characterize early-20th-century modernist abstraction. Also two 16th-century maps—one of Asia, the other of the world—will demonstrate the use of maps and other visual material in educational and aesthetic contexts.
The exhibition will also feature a variety of prints from Goucher’s collection. The prints—which include engravings, woodcuts, lithographs, silk screens, and photographs—are works by Francisco Goya, Stanley William Hayter, Robert Indiana, Lucas van Leyden, Jean-Francois Millet, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Robert Rosenquist, and Garry Winogrand.
Works on display from Goucher’s collection range from an Egyptian mummy mask donated by Dr. John Franklin Goucher to a set of etchings by American artist Louise Nevelson that was donated by Frieda Bradlow ’54.
Five works donated by Ethel Steuer Epstein ’21 will also be on display. Epstein, the former labor secretary to New York Mayor Fiorella La Guardia, was an important collector of modern and contemporary art, as well as a noted philanthropist and activist for labor and social issues. Two of her donated works that will be on display are Alexej von Jawlensky’s Still Life with Figurine (1909/1912) and Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic XXV-B (1953). Jawlensky, a Russian-born artist, was associated with Die Blaue Reiter, a seminal group of expressionist artists in early-20thcentury Germany. Motherwell was an important American abstract expressionist.
Goucher’s contribution to the exhibit also features these works of non-Western art: two Egyptian artifacts donated by Dr. John Franklin Goucher, a 17th-century Southeast Asian gilt-bronze figure of a female Buddhist goddess of longevity, an 18th-century Japanese gold lacquer statue of Buddha, and a West African Mende helmet mask.