Elvehjem highlights donated works

A selection of artwork donated to the Elvehjem Museum of Art will be displayed July 6-Aug. 25 in Brittingham Galleries VI and VII.

The Elvehjem collection is enriched every year by donations of artwork or financial donations that allow the museum to expand its collection; no art is purchased with public money.

In celebration of these generous donations, the Elvehjem is exhibiting about 130 important works to come into the museum’s collection during the past three years. The works on view will range from the 16th through the 20th centuries and will include European old-master paintings, watercolors from Britain and Japan, prints and drawings from around the world, and sculpture by artists from the United States and Europe.

Sixteen new additions to the fields of painting, sculpture, and decorative art include a Renaissance choir book made for the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican.

The collection of 19th-century American and British painting was augmented with the generous bequest of Marion T. Fischer. A painting by Hugh Bolton Jones expands the museum’s offerings in American landscape painting of the second half of the 19th century.

Another group of recent acquisitions represents works purchased from or donated from recent exhibitions: a Judy Pfaff installation, Honey Bee, 1987; and several works by Peter Gourfain, including “Fate of the Earth Doors,” 1984-1997.

The museum also acquired several works from an exhibition by the founder of the studio glass movement Harvey K. Littleton. On view will be “Orange & Purple Implied Movement,” 1987, John and Carolyn Peterson Fund and Richard E. Stockwell Endowment Fund purchase.

Works on paper also make up a significant part of the exhibition (116 works), as they do of the collection. Nine old-master works on view will include two prints by Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471-1528) and four prints by Hendrick Goltzius (Dutch, 1558-1617).

In 1991, the Elvehjem began collecting British watercolors with support from a gift from the Frederick Leach Estate Fund in memory of Lucia J. Leach. Through generous endowment funds and gifts, the museum continues to add watercolors by such well-known artists as Henry Fuseli, whose “Themistocles at the Court of Admetus” may be an allusion to the defeated Napoleon’s plea for assistance from Britain, and Thomas Rowlandson, whose “A Charity Sermon” demonstrates his gift for trenchant satire.

Among seven new Japanese woodcuts on view will be four by Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797-1858); these include unusual and fine impressions of his earliest works, beautiful women or Bijin, purchases made possible by the John H. Van Vleck Endowment Fund

Another important figure of European art of the 20th century, Salvadore Dalí, is newly represented in the print collection with his work “Limp Skulls and Cranial Harp,” which with its melting clock and soft, distorted skull includes some of the fundamental iconography of Dalí’s art.

Five works from the 1950 print renaissance include an etching by David Smith (American, 1906-1965), Women in War, 1941, and an etching by Louise Nevelson (American, 1899-1988), Goddess from the Great Beyond (Figure Four Thousand), 1952.

The Elvehjem Museum of Art is open Tuesdays-Fridays 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; closed Mondays and major holidays.