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Top Scene of Presepio
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Holiday Celebrations
December
6 (Tree preview party, December 5)
With
an 18th-century Italian village and Yul Brynner dancing with his
Anna, holidays at the museum should please everybody. The theme for the five Christmas trees that
fill the Hall of Architecture this year is musicals, and includes The King and I, Peter Pan, and a few
surprises. The ornaments are
handmade by the Women’s Committee of Carnegie Museum of Art, a project that
generally takes about six months.
“Grown-ups and kids will love these, because we’re all familiar with
them,” says Myrna Hackney, co-chair along with Vange Beldecos of the tree
decorations.
Also
in the Hall of Architecture, the Neapolitan Presepio has been an annual holiday
treat since 1957. Handcrafted
between 1700 and 1830, superbly modeled figures recreate the Nativity in an
Italian village setting.
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Boar’s head tureen with lid, ca. 1760
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What’s in Your
Tureen: Soup, Stew or Ragoût?
August
18 through August 11, 2002
Tureens
make a grand entrance upon the dinner table, lending importance not only to
their contents but also to the guests deemed worthy of an extravagant
setting. Dating to the 17th
century, tureens may have derived from large covered dishes used in France, but they quickly became an indispensable part
of the formal dinner table setting.
By the end of the 19th century, fancy tureens began to
disappear as dining fashions changed.
This
exhibition includes a number of tureens from the 18th to the 20th
centuries, and each case contains an appropriate historical recipe, from
Russian nettle soup to oyster ragoût.
The tureen shown here dates from about
1700, and was a convenient stand-in for the severed boar’s head
traditionally paraded around the banquet hall after a victorious hunt. Inspired by reality, this tureen, when
filled with hot stew, produced billows of steam from the beast’s jowl. In this way, guests received the full
benefit and drama of the hunt, even when the trophy was only rabbit.
La Pereaux En Ragoût (Ragoût of Rabbit)
You
can Fricasée rabbits in the same way as chickens or sauté them in a frying
pan with a little flour mixed with butter, put them to cook gently with
good stock and season them with capers, orange or lemon juice, and a
bouquet garni or scallions, then serve.
Le Cuisinier françois
Francois
Pierre De La Varenne
French,
active ca. 1615 – 1678
Treasure Hunt: Recent Acquisitions of Works on Paper
December 15, 2001-June 2, 2002
Works
on Paper Gallery
“We have a large collection of prints, drawings
and photographs,” says Linda Batis, associate curator of fine arts, “And
only a fraction is on view at any one time.” This exhibition of works on paper
contains treasures such as Old Master prints, 20th-century
American drawings and watercolors, works by Russian avant-garde artists, and
prints by such masters of modern printmaking as Pissarro, Gauguin, and
Bonnard. “Works in the collection date back to 1450,” Batis says. “In our collecting, we strive both to
complement works the museum already owns and to add works by artists who
are as yet unrepresented.” This
exhibition will survey the museum’s acquisitions of graphic arts over the
last decade.
New Curator of Contemporary Art
Joins the Museum
 Laura J. Hoptman joins Carnegie
Museum of Art as curator of contemporary art in November, and will begin
organizing the 2004 Carnegie International.
Hoptman was most recently assistant curator of the Department of
Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, and has served as guest curator at
the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago as well as curator of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York. Richard Armstrong, The Henry J.
Heinz II director of Carnegie Museum of Art, says Hoptman is “among the
most capable and globally informed curators of her generation.”
“The opportunity to organize a Carnegie
International is one of the great challenges of the curatorial profession,”
says Hoptman, “and I am honored and exhilarated to have the chance to do
it."
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