Current and Upcoming

Colby College Museum of Art

Master Prints from the Lunder Collection
March 29, 2016–January 8, 2017

From Dürer to Van Gogh, Master Prints from the Lunder Collection features four hundred years of the finest achievements in printmaking. Inspired to create works of exceptional quality and technical mastery, printmakers have produced some of the most celebrated, evocative, and dramatic images in the history of art. Drawn primarily from recent acquisitions, this installation focuses on aesthetic trends, technical innovations, and the variety of working methods used by printmakers from the Renaissance to the dawn of the twentieth century. Works on view include Dürer’s largest engraving, St. Eustace from 1501; Rembrandt’s most well-known landscape, The Three Trees from 1643; a rare 1799 first edition bound copy of Goya’s Los Caprichos; selections from Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, published between 1856–59; works from Whistler’s “Amsterdam Set” of 1889; and Van Gogh’s only etching, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, completed shortly before the artist’s death in 1890.

The Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

Peacock Room Remix:
Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre
May 16, 2015–January 2017
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

Filthy Lucre, an immersive interior by contemporary painter Darren Waterston, reinterprets James McNeill Whistler’s famed Peacock Room as a resplendent ruin, an aesthetic space that is literally overburdened by its own excesses—of materials, history, and creativity. The title riffs on The Gold Scab: Eruption in Frilthy Lucre (The Creditor), Whistler’s vengeful caricature of his patron and erstwhile friend, Frederick Leyland, the originally owner of the Peacock Room. Like the original source of inspiration, Filthy Lucre invites viewers to consider the complex relationships among art, money, and creative work. Filthy Lucre will be accompanied by an ensemble Waterston’s working studies as well as Whistler’s obsessive portrayal of his patron and the Leyland family, which culminating with The Gold Scab. Peacock Roome REMIX: Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre

The Lost Symphony: Whistler and the Perfection of Art
January 16–May 30, 2016
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery 

The Three Girls would have been a seminal work in the stylistic development of American artist James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903)—if he had completed it. He intended to hang the large painting opposite his Princess from the Land of Porcelain in the dining room of his patron Frederick Leyland, but after they quarreled over the cost of the Peacock Room, Whistler destroyed the work. As part of Peacock Room REMIX, this exhibition reconstructs how Whistler’s unrealized quest for “the perfection of art” intersected with less-rarified concerns about patronage, payment, and professional reputation.

Chinamania
July 9, 2016–January 2, 2017
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

Chinamania, the craze for Chinese blue-and-white ceramics, swept London in the nineteenth century and still endures in the West. Contemporary artist Walter McConnell, inspired by his travels in China and the kilns as Jindgzhen, interrogates this phenomenon through his reinstallation of Kangxi porcelains similar to those originally displayed in the Peacock Room. The show also includes two monumental ceramic stupas from McConnell’s The Theory of Everything series.