News Release

Media contact: C.J. Lind, 773.702.0176, cjlind@uchicago.edu

The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700–1900
February 10 – June 5, 2011
Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago

From the sacrifice of classical heroines to the grief of ordinary people, a new Smart Museum exhibition examines tragic emotion and asks, “How and why does art move us?”

The University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art presents The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700–1900, a new exhibition that investigates art’s power to express and elicit intense emotions. The exhibition examines two centuries of European works filled with darker emotions and explores the ways in which the visual representation of tragedy—as well as art’s cathartic power over new generations of viewers—has changed dramatically over time.

“The Tragic Muse asks basic questions about how we react to certain works of art, and it does so with the critical eye and interdisciplinary approach for which the University of Chicago is renowned,” said Anthony Hirschel, Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum of Art. “The result is a revelatory project filled with challenging ideas and emotional power.”

On view from February 10 to June 5, 2011, The Tragic Muse combines works from the Smart’s collection—both long-held treasures and new acquisitions—with important loans from national and international museums. Divided into four thematic sections, it includes nearly forty paintings, sculptures, and prints by artists including Edward Burne-Jones, Henry Fuseli, Édouard Manet, Anna Lea Merritt, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Richard Redgrave, Auguste Rodin, George Romney, and Benjamin West.

The Tragic Muse is curated by Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Mellon Program Coordinator. Leonard established the rich intellectual groundwork of the exhibition and accompanying catalogue by convening a yearlong series of workshops attended by nine University of Chicago faculty members from a range of departments—Art History, Classics, Germanic Studies, Music, Romance Languages, and Social Thought.

Exhibition Overview
For a complete checklist and high-resolution images of works in the exhibition, please contact C.J. Lind at 773.702.0176, cjlind@uchicago.edu, or visit smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/about/press.

Art is often appreciated for its ability to delight our eyes and refresh our minds. But it can also serve as a powerful vehicle for exploring darker emotions such as fear, sadness, and grief. And while these themes have a history dating back to the ancients, the ways in which they have been represented in art and received by the public has changed dramatically over time.

“Some of the works in the exhibition may strike visitors as being overly sentimental,” said curator Anne Leonard. “But studying them closely opens up a host of interesting questions. How is it that these supremely expressive paintings suffered such a decline in public esteem? If they fail today as vehicles for strong emotion, is that our fault or theirs? To what extent can they still move us?”

Rather than offer a comprehensive survey, The Tragic Muse exhibition provides an in-depth look at the central themes and shifts in approaches to tragedy across several distinct moments: the eighteenth century, when a close relationship existed between the expression of emotion in painting and larger-than-life stories from the Bible, classics, and theater; the Victorian age, when pictorial realism and the portrayal of more quotidian events invited closer emotional identification from viewers; and the years around 1900, when a new aesthetic focus emerged around the solitary figure as an emblem of universal human sorrow.

The majority of the thirty-six paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures on view are from the Smart Museum’s collection, with important loans coming from the Art Institute of Chicago, Folger Shakespeare Library, Milwaukee Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, Tate, Yale Center for British Art, and Yale University Art Gallery.

The Mellon Program
The Tragic Muse is the latest in the Smart Museum’s series of collection-based exhibitions rooted in the academic life of the University of Chicago. Generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the program has, since 1992, spurred new scholarship and fostered connections between the Smart and faculty, scholars, and students at the University. The program was recently bolstered by an additional gift from the Mellon Foundation—the single largest foundation gift in the Museum’s history—that has allowed the Smart to sustain, strengthen, and extend these unique interdisciplinary connections.

Under the aegis of the Mellon Program, The Tragic Muse exhibition and accompanying catalogue were developed over an extensive series of workshops attended by University of Chicago faculty members from an array of fields, in which participants looked at the works of art together and studied the philosophical underpinnings of tragedy by reading from the likes of Baudelaire, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The interdisciplinary campus connections also extend to many of the exhibition’s public programs and lectures.

Related Programs
Unless noted, all programs are held at the Smart Museum and are free and open to the public. For more information, visit smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/calendar.

Thursday, February 10, 5:30–7:30 pm
Opening Reception and Lecture
Join curator Anne Leonard for the introductory lecture “What They Saw, What We Feel: High Emotion in Old Master Art” followed by a reception and exhibition viewing.

Sunday, February 20, 1–4 pm
Family Day: Express Yourself!
Get creative while learning how artists use color and body language to express emotions in art. This fun family day features an actor-led workshop where kids can act out short scenes to discover how various gestures and poses help communicate mood. Other activities include making ready-to-wear masks and creating cut-paper collages that use colors to reveal different emotions.
All ages are welcome to this drop-in family workshop, though activities are designed for children 4–12. Children must be accompanied by an adult at all times.

Sunday, February 27, 2 pm
Concert: Emotion, Tragedy, and Catharsis
Listen to song settings and chamber pieces from the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras that explore feelings of sadness, loss, fear, or grief. Performed by students in the University of Chicago’s Chamber Music Program.

Thursday, March 17, 4:30–7:30 pm
Teacher Workshop: Capturing Emotion
Chicago Public Schools teachers—take part in a free interdisciplinary workshop about creatively connecting images with words in the classroom. Led by poet Eric Elshtain. CPDUs available.
To enroll, call 773.834.1066 or e-mail lisadavis@uchicago.edu.

Saturday, April 9, 10 am–3 pm
Workshop: Emotion and Abstraction
Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Avenue, and Midway Studios, 6016 South Ingleside Avenue
Explore feeling in art by making a series of works—simple representational sketches, collaged forms, and fully abstract paintings—around a single emotional state. This day-long adult workshop at the Smart Museum and the University of Chicago’s Midway Studios is led by Smart Museum Education Program Assistant Breck Furnas. All skill levels welcome. All materials provided.
Space is limited. RSVP to bfurnas@uchicago.edu or 773.702.2362.

Thursday, April 14, 5:30 pm
Lecture: “Art and Emotion: The Brain and Aesthetic Experience”
Cochrane-Woods Art Center, 5540 S. Greenwood Avenue, room 157
Get perspectives on looking, the brain, and emotional response during this lecture by Edward A. Vessel, a research scientist at New York University’s Center for Brain Imaging. Joel Snyder, Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Chicago, will serve as respondent.

Sunday, April 17, 2 pm
The Tragic Bard: Dramatic Readings from Shakespeare
Catch the Dean’s Men, the University of Chicago’s Shakespeare performance troupe, as they give voice to the Shakespearean characters and scenes depicted in The Tragic Muse. The staged readings include selections from King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet. Afterward, stay for an informal discussion about text and image in the related exhibition works, led by exhibition curator Anne Leonard.
Presented in collaboration with University Theater.

Friday, May 6, 12 pm
Lunch-hour Talk: “Tragedy or Melodrama? Art and the Death of a Child”
Cochrane-Woods Art Center, 5540 S. Greenwood Avenue, room 157
The wrenching deaths of the young and innocent were a favorite subject for nineteenth-century painters and writers. But do they strike us today as truly tragic, or as merely sentimental and faintly embarrassing?  This lunch-hour talk by Elizabeth Helsinger, the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of English Language and Literature and Art History at the University of Chicago, considers some famous child death scenes by novelists Charles Dickens and Walter Scott, examines related images in The Tragic Muse, and then looks at much more ambivalent short poems by Victorian women poets Christina Rossetti and Alice Meynell.

Thursday, May 19, 5:30–7:30 pm
Sketching at the Smart
Hone your figure drawing skills while sketching from a live, leotard-clad model. All skill levels welcome. All materials provided. The exercises will be led by University of Chicago MFA student Jacqueline Hendrickson.
Presented in collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts.

Thursday, May 26, 5:30 pm
Lecture: “Moving Beyond the Human: Paul Gauguin”
Cochrane-Woods Art Center, 5540 S. Greenwood Avenue, room 157
Dario Gamboni, Professor of Art History at the University of Geneva and 2010–2011 Fellow at the Clark Art Institute, discusses expression in the art of Paul Gauguin.
Professor Gamboni’s visit is organized in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sunday, June 5, 2 pm
Closing-day Tour
Meet curator Anne Leonard for a closing-day tour of The Tragic Muse.

Exhibition Catalogue
An accompanying catalogue draws on the work of several distinguished scholars to examine the richly varied representation of tragedy in the European artistic tradition over the course of two centuries. This catalogue is generously illustrated with full-color reproductions of all the works contained in the exhibition, and the fascinating contributions offer new insights into the approaches taken by the visual arts, as well as literature and drama, in expressing and eliciting strong emotions. By Anne Leonard, with contributions by Joyce Suechun Cheng, Glenn W. Most, Erin Nerstad, Sarah Nooter, and Thomas Pavel
The catalogue is published by the Smart Museum and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. Available in the Smart Museum Shop. $30.

Curator
Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Mellon Program Coordinator

Credits
The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700–1900 is one in a series of projects at the Smart Museum of Art supported by an endowment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that fosters interdisciplinary use of the Museum’s collections by University of Chicago faculty and students in both courses and special exhibitions. The Tragic Muse exhibition catalogue has received additional grant support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

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