CORAL GABLES.- “Reason And Fantasy In An Age Of Enlightenment”, an exhibition comprised of seventy-three European prints, drawings, watercolors, and rare books from the eighteenth century, will be on view at the Lowe Art Museum , University of Miami, through June 6, 2004. Featuring artists such as François Boucher , Jean-Honoré Fragonard, James Gillray, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, William Hogarth, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and Antoine Watteau. “Reason And Fantasy In An Age Of Enlightenment” is organized by the Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and drawn from the collection of the Ackland and the Rare Book Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Also on view at the Lowe Art Museum is the annual two-part exhibition, University of Miami Student Exhibition (April 10 - May 9), a juried exhibition featuring the artwork of UM students, and the University of Miami Master of Fine Arts Exhibition (May 14 - June 6), featuring the work of candidates for the MFA degree. “The Age Of Enlightenment” (also called the Age of Reason) is a name that has frequently been applied to the mainstream of thought in Europe and the United States during the hundred years between 1700 and 1800. An intellectual movement which began in England in the seventeenth century, the enlightenment spread to have eventual influence over all sections of the world.
The term "Enlightenment," rooted in an intellectual skepticism to traditional beliefs and dogmas, denotes an "illumined" contrast to the supposed dark and superstitious character of the Middle Ages. From its inception, the Enlightenment focused on the power and goodness of human rationality. Many of the most prominent thinkers of the century saw it as their goal to replace ignorance with knowledge and superstitious beliefs with rational thought. Yet, fantasy, whether in the form of creative imagination or irrationality, is as much a part of the eighteenth century as reason.
Again and again in the art of the time we see opposites confronting one another: common sense and folly, order and disorder, sanity and madness, logical deduction and creativity. Reason and Fantasy in an Age of Enlightenment explores the complexities and contradictions of the eighteenth-century spirit throughout the genres of narrative, architectural drawings, landscape, and representations of the human body assembled for the exhibition. The exhibition is organized around and explores several themes: the grotesque and arabesque; illusions created by artists and actors; physiognomy and gesture; representations of women; libertine philosophy; satire; exoticism; and the upheaval of the French Revolution.
The imagery is a potpourri of a culture almost impossible to define and includes Oriental designs, costumes, landscapes, satirical cartoons, botanical examinations, portraits, and domestic scenes.
