NEW YORK.- The Dahesh Museum of Art presents today “Charles Bargue: The Art of Drawing,” on view through February 8, 2004. Artist Charles Bargue’s Cours de Dessin, a drawing course published in France in 1868-1870, instructed several generations of artists, including Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso, in the idealistic representation of the human form. This exhibition features virtually the entire course of ca. 200 lithographs from the Musée Goupil, Bordeaux, as well as a selection of Bargue’s most important oil paintings and drawings. This exhibition is organized by the Dahesh Museum of Art.
The Dahesh Museum of Art serves its growing audience by examining these academic artists in the broader context of 19th-century visual culture and by offering a fresh appraisal of the role academies played in reinvigorating the classical ideals of beauty, humanism, and skill. Through its innovative exhibitions and acquisitions of important artworks, the Dahesh is reclaiming academic art for the enjoyment and edification of the public. Partnerships with colleagues worldwide are generating new discoveries and broadening the canon of 19th-century art history.