The exhibition begins with Michelangelesque nudes, including a figure after his Last Judgment attributed to the artist's friend Danele da Volterra. Following Michelangelo's lead, Bolognese artists reintroduced the nude in religious subjects, represented here by a Crucifixion by Bartolomeo Passarotti and continuing into the seventeenth century with the Roman artist Giovanni Angelo Canini's Saint Sebastian. Erotic and Classical subjects become especially important in these years, as well as episodes from literature like Giuseppe Cades's Rinaldo and Armida.

Italian influence is felt in the Netherlands, where artists who had studied in the country, like Benvenuto Cellini's pupil Willem van Tetrode, imported a love for the human figure evident in the intertwining nudes of his Design for a Silver Plate. By the mid-seventeenth century, a fascinating dialogue develops as this influence is incorporated into a mature, specifically Northern style by artists like Rubens' pupil Jacob Jordaens. Where these artists were inspired by Classical literature, allegorical Rococo works such as Jacob de Wit's Reasonable Love in the eighteenth century show the later development of the human figure in the Netherlands.

In France, the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, founded in 1648, emphasized life drawing as one of the paths to artistic excellence. From dramatic nudes by the Academy's director Charles Le Brun to the nineteenth-century drawings of Chassériau, the live model posing with the aid of studio props became a separate subject. Such drawings brought a new naturalism to Classical art, from Le Brun's pupil François Verdier's Forge of Vulcan to Jacques-Louis David's Neoclassical Funeral of a Hero.

Like the Netherlands, Germany was influenced by Italian traditions, which is masterfully evident in Dürer's Female Nude with a Herald's Wand , drawn soon after the artist's return from Venice. Individual artists like Hans Rottenhammer and Anton Raphael Mengs also brought Italian style and ideas to Germany. By the nineteenth century, with German academies emphasizing life drawing as well, the synthesis of native and ideal was complete, here epitomized by Fellner's Hagen and the Rhine Maidens, an episode from the national epic poem the Niebelungenlied.

The Language of the Nude: Four Centuries of Drawing the Human Body is a rare opportunity for American audiences. It has been many years since a drawings exhibition examined the nude, and nearly fifteen since a selection of Crocker drawings has been seen outside Sacramento. The Crocker exhibition, by tying together studio practice and artistic culture, will provide new insights into both. Where drawings offer direct evidence of the artist's working process, they also show an intellect at work in interpreting the body and its context.

—WILLIAM BREAZEALE, CURATOR

SCHOLARLY PUBLICATION
A scholarly catalogue accompanies the exhibition, and is available for purchase at the Cooley Gallery. It includes essays on figure drawing in Europe and its reflection in the Crocker's collection, an overview of each country, and full entries for each of the drawings, many published here for the first time and all reproduced through state-of-the-art digital photography. The catalogue includes essays and entries by William Breazeale, Associate Curator at the Crocker Art Museum; Susan Anderson, Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; Christiane Andersson, Samuel H. Kress Professor of Art History at Bucknell University; and Christine Giviskos, Assistant Curator of Drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum.


 

ABOUT THE COLLECTION
The drawings collection at the Crocker Art Museum is well known to scholars as a hidden treasure. Its core collection of 1344 master drawings was purchased between 1869 and 1871 by Edwin Bryant Crocker and his family during a trip to Europe, while acquisitions have expanded the collection to around 1411 since that time. Since the 1930s, when the collection was visited by scholars such as Agnes Mongan, its most famous drawings have participated regularly in monographic exhibitions, but the collection as a whole has remained unknown to the public—the last selection that travelled outside Sacramento was shown in Flint, Michigan in 1992. The Language of the Nude: Four Centuries of Drawing the Human Body is a first for the Crocker, exploring drawings technique and content across the main European schools in an independent exhibition.


THE LANGUAGE OF THE NUDE IS CURATED BY WILLIAM BRAEZEALE, ASSOCIATE CURATOR AT THE CROCKER ART MUSEUM, SACRAMENTO, CA; AND IS ORGANIZED FOR THE DOUGLAS F. COOLEY MEMORIAL ART GALLERY BY STEPHANIE SNYDER, DIRECTOR AND CURATOR, AND DANA KATZ, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY, REED COLLEGE.

THE COOLEY GALLERY'S PARTICIPATION IN PICA'S 2009 TBA FESTIVAL HAS BEEN CURATED BY STEPHANIE SNYDER, AND KRISTAN KENNEDY, VISUAL ART PROGRAM DIRECTOR, PICA.

PROFESSOR DAVID ROSAND'S VISIT HAS BEEN ORGANIZED BY DANA KATZ, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY, REED COLLEGE.