In Dialogue: Cecilia Beaux’s “Twilight Confidences”
This exhibition marks the first in a series of installations in which the Georgia Museum of Art’s curators create focused, innovative conversations around a single work of art from the permanent collection. The series brings these familiar works to life by placing them in dialogue with works of art by influential peers, related sketches and studies or even objects from later periods. The inaugural presentation of “In Dialogue” highlights Cecilia Beaux’s “Twilight Confidences” — an important recent addition to the museum’s collection and the artist’s first major exercise in plein-air painting, which she produced during a summer in the French seaside village of Concarneau. In the exhibition, “Twilight Confidences” appears alongside three studies for the picture in various media and techniques (all on loan from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts), in order to show the rigorous yet experimental process Beaux followed in producing this important picture. Although Beaux would not paint out-of-doors again after leaving France in 1889, the lessons of “Twilight Confidences” — light and color as both constructive and expressive elements in painting, and white as a container of all colors — would inform her figure paintings for decades afterward.
Drama and Devotion in Baroque Rome
Rome has long been a key destination for artists. At the beginning of the 17th century, painters from across Europe flocked to the Eternal City to see the revolution caused by painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 – 1610). Everyone copied his stark contrast of light and dark, powerful realism and dramatic sense of staging. The works presented in this exhibition, all from the Museum and Gallery at Bob Jones University, celebrate how Caravaggio shaped the Italian Baroque and galvanized numerous followers. One of the main highlights is a Crucifixion by Peter Paul Rubens, who spent more than eight years in Italy.
Curator: Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, curator of American art
Cecilia Beaux (American, 1855–1942), “Twilight Confidences,” 1888. Oil on canvas. Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Museum purchase with funds provided by the William Underwood Eiland Endowment for Acquisitions made possible by M. Smith Griffith and the W. Newton Morris Charitable Foundation. GMOA 2018.117.
Curator: Nelda Damiano, Pierre Daura Curator of European Art
Peter Paul Rubens (b. Siegen, 1577; d. Antwerp, 1640), “Christ on the Cross,” ca. 1610. Oil on panel, 45 x 30 3/4 inches. Museum and Gallery at Bob Jones University, Greenville, SC.
Recognizing Artist Soldiers in the Permanent Collection
Every summer, the Georgia Museum of Art participates in the National Endowment for the Arts’ Blue Star Museums program, which offers free museum admission to military families from Memorial Day to Labor Day. This year’s version of the
program was canceled due to COVID-19, so we created an online exhibition focusing on artists’ military service and how it related to their art. This exhibition is a living thing that will grow and change as needed.
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