OMAHA, NE.- Swann Joslyn Art Museum’s collection is not only known and admired by those in Omaha who consider the museum their own, but is respected by institutions worldwide. A quick look at the itinerary of the Museum's most popular works over the past years would make even the most seasoned traveler jealous — requested for over three dozen exhibitions, objects from the Joslyn collection have toured from coast to coast as well as to Europe. Joslyn Treasures: Well Traveled and Rarely Seen reunites these familiar and important favorites with highlights from the vaults to showcase forty works from antiquity through the twentieth century. The exhibition is on view at Joslyn from June 4 through August 28.
The earliest “treasure” is a black-figure amphora dating to the sixth century BCE that was recently featured in the exhibition Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece, organized by the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The namesake vase of the Omaha Painter, it is the centerpiece of Joslyn’s highly regarded collection of Greek pottery. Veronese’s Venus at her Toilette, ca. 1582, traveled to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Louvre Museum in Paris as part of a major exhibition of Venetian painting, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice. Our own Titian, Giorgio Cornaro with a Falcon, 1537, was on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles after being cleaned and restored by their conservation laboratory.
Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Grief of the Pasha, 1882, was included in a retrospective organized by the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, while a quintet of Impressionist masterpieces by Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Mary Cassatt have traveled the globe in a number of exhibitions. Works by American painters Eastman Johnson, Thomas Moran, and John George Brown also returned to the galleries, among them Brown’s The Card Trick, ca. 1891–92, which was part of the exhibition American Stories: The Painting of Everyday Life: 1765–1915 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
These well-traveled veterans are joined in the exhibition by rarely seen treasures in the collection, including Portrait of a Man, ca. 1650, by Nicholaas Maes, a renowned master of Dutch portraiture and student of Rembrandt van Rijn. Thomas Jones Barker’s The Studio of Salvator Rosa in the Mountains of Abruzzi, 1865, is a dramatic Victorian tableau mingling history and anecdote. The American painter Alfred T. Bricher’s seascape, Off Newport, ca. 1885–95, conveys the idyllic charm of this popular vacation retreat, an eastern counterpoint to western artist Frederic Remington’s A Half Hour’s Halt, 1893, depicting a group of soldiers lounging at rest with their mounts. The exhibition concludes with a selection of rarely seen twentieth-century works on paper, among them a watercolor of Venice by John Singer Sargent; a collage by the installation artist Christo related to his Valley Curtain project in Rifle Gap, Colorado, 1970–72; a gunpowder drawing by Pop artist and Omaha native Ed Ruscha; and photographs by Duane Michals and Jerry N. Uelsmann.
