Contact: Maridith Geuder
For more than 90 Mississippi State students traveling Tuesday [March 30] to the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Alabama experience offers much more than an opportunity to view Renoir, Monet, Cassatt, and other Impressionist masterpieces.
Art history assistant professor Benjamin Harvey said the university majors in art, graphic design, interior design, and landscape architecture will experience pieces found only in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and other such venues.
With guided tours of the art and a behind-the-scenes gallery visit, they'll also learn how the famous works were created and how the exhibit came to be, added MSU Gallery director William Andrews.
"The exciting thing about this exhibition is that it represents the collection of a single individual," said Harvey, who this semester is teaching a course in "Visual Culture in France, 1850-1900." "Students will view art that someone actually lived with."
The great Impressionists intended for their works to be domestic art. "They were painted for the middle- and upper-middle class," Harvey observed.
Part of two collections now on display through April 11 at the BMA, "The Light of Impressionism" includes approximately 30 paintings and sculptures from the 19th and early 20th centuries. They represent the lifetime acquisitions of Philip Levin, a Manhattan lawyer and real estate developer who died in 1971, and his widow Janice who died in 2001.
Andrews said the collection previously was a part of the Levins' Fifth Avenue apartment. The bulk of the collection was kept intact as part of the Levin Foundation, which is sponsoring the national tour, he said.
Also on display in the Birmingham exhibition are more than 40 works from 17th century France featuring masters such as Georges de la Tour and Nicolas Poussin, among a group of Paris artists who created the Royal Academy that came to define French art.
The MSU museum tour is co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, art department and the University Honors Program.
In addition to seeing an historic collection, students in Andrews' gallery management class also will get a glimpse into daily operations of the popular downtown art repository that is one of the Southeast's largest.
"It's unusual to get a behind-the-scenes look," Andrews said. "Through the interactions with museum personnel, students will be exposed to that institution's structure and possible future jobs. If we didn't have an opportunity for this tour, students interested in gallery management might take their interest no further."
Harvey and Andrews agree that experiencing art firsthand--as opposed to seeing it in books or prints--also offers students a rare and special opportunity.
"Many visual elements are lost in the photographic translation," Harvey said. To encourage students to "see" the art, the teachers have assigned a two-page paper that describes things not always captured in a photograph: scale, texture, surface qualities, and color.