Vassar Today

Special Exhibits at the Loeb Center

October 5 – December 20, 2000 
Humanizing Landscapes
Geography, Culture, and the Magoon Collection 


The exhibition looks through the interpretive lenses of cultural geography and art history to examine how 19th-century artists constructed the meaning of cultural sites and natural features ranging from Stonehenge and Loch Lomond to the Hudson River Valley. The 70 objects on view include oil paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings by, among others, William Bartlett, Frederic Church, Asher B. Durand, Sanford Gifford, John Frederick Kensett, William Trost Richards, Thomas Rowlandson, John Ruskin, Joseph Turner, and Joseph Wright of Derby. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided funding for the exhibit.

January 19 – March 11, 2001
The Power of Appearances
Renaissance and Reformation Portrait Prints

Under the direction of the National Lending Service of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, this exhibition comprises approximately 60 Renaissance portrait prints ranging in date from 1500 to 1601. The show features artists from northern Europe and Italy, including German artists Albrecht Durer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, the Dutch printmakers Lucas van Leyden and Hendrik Goltzius, and Italians Giorgio Ghisi and Agostino Carracci. In stimulating contrasts, the viewer is offered the opportunity to explore the impact of style and medium by comparing multiple images of the same sitter rendered by different artists, using different techniques.

April 6 – June 10, 2001
From Manet to Picasso
Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Prints and Drawings

This exhibition, drawn primarily from Vassar’s permanent collection, features some 60 works on paper created by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists in the second half of the 19th century and the earliest years of the 20th century. Artists include Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, and Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard of the Nabis. Etching, lithography, and monotype are well-represented among the printmaking processes, while charcoal and graphite figure prominently among the media in the drawings on view from this richly experimental era in French art.


June 29 – September 16, 2001
Summer Reading

Books and written language are the thematic inspiration, subject matter, or medium for the works in this show. Whether inventing physical permutations on the bound and printed volume (book artist Keith Smith), depicting books in their capacity as vehicles of historical and psychological content (photographer Abelardo Morell), or exploring the complex relationship between the written word and imagery (graphic innovator Saul Steinberg), the artists in Summer Reading call to the fore the visual dimension of an activity that is often taken for granted. The show will conclude with events marking National Literacy Month and is supported in part by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.