Detail: Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904); “Annie G.” galloping, Animal Locomotion, pl. 627, 1884-86; Collotype, sheet: 19 1/8 x 24 1/4 in.; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA, Gift of the Commercial Museum, Department of Commerce, Philadelphia, PA

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926); The Barefooted Child, ca. 1896-97; Drypoint and aquatint in colors, sheet 13 3/8 x 17 1/16 in. Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY, Bequest of Mary T. Cockcroft, 46.103

Introduction

This exhibition explores the complex relationship between American art and the new medium of film at the beginning of the twentieth century. Featured objects include approximately 80 paintings, photographs, prints, and drawings shown alongside 40 films that demonstrate the fascinating influences these media had upon one another during this period. Organized by Nancy Mowll Mathews, Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator at the Williams College Museum of Art, the exhibition will also travel to the Grey Art Gallery of New York University (September 13–December 9, 2006) and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (February 17–May 20, 2007). Funded in part by The Henry R. Luce Foundation, the Eugénie Prendergast Trust, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Williams College Center for Technology in the Arts and Humanities (CTAH), H.H. Powers Fund, and the Orrin Simons Fund.

The exhibition was organized by the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA, and made possible by the Henry R. Luce Foundation and by an award by the National
Endowment for the Arts.

Comments by Betsy Main Babcock Curator of American Art at Reynolda House
Thomas Denenberg

Reynolda House will present a groundbreaking look at turn-of-the-century visual culture this spring when we host Moving Pictures, an exhibition organized by the Williams College Museum of Art. Moving Pictures is an elegant and stimulating project with a two-fold mission. It first looks at the ways early filmmakers employed nineteenth century aesthetic traditions—from portraiture to landscape painting—to develop their new art. The show then explores how the new media of film impacted visual artists in the early twentieth century—why, for example, did Ashcan school artists depict the city as if it was a film set?

Until recently, an exhibition like Moving Pictures would have been a technological impossibility. With the advent of flat screen monitors and DVD players, however, the exhibition can present early film clips side by side with paintings, drawings, prints, and historic photographs to create a beautiful and sophisticated look at the way Americans came to see their world in the early twentieth century. The exhibition will display works by well-known artists, including Maurice Prendergast, William Morris Hunt, George Luks, John Sloan, John Singer Sargent, George Bellows, and Robert Henri as well as by inventors such as Thomas Edison and Eadweard Muybridge. With approximately eighty works of art and forty monitors sequencing films, Moving Pictures will be a feast for the eyes when it is featured in the new Mary and Charlie Babcock Wing this spring.

NM: I started this project about ten years ago. These kinds of things take a long time.

WCMA: What makes this exhibition so special or different from other exhibitions you’ve curated in the past?

NM: The biggest difference from my past research and exhibitions is working with film, which is an entirely new medium for me. I had to learn not only a whole new history of visual culture at the turn of the century but a new vocabulary and a new set of issues in exhibiting this medium in a gallery.

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Curator Nancy Mowll Mathews Biography

Nancy Mowll Mathews is the Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of 19th and 20th Century Art at the Williams College Museum of Art. She directs the Prendergast Archive and Study Center at WCMA, conducting ongoing research and organizing exhibitions and publications on the Prendergasts and their era (1850-1950). She is the co-author of two catalogues raisonnés: Mary Cassatt: The Color Prints (1989) and Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonné (1990) and is currently president of the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association.

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Media Requests
For a Moving Pictures exhibition press release and accompanying images,
Click Here or call (336) 758-5580.