Exhibitions

The collection galleries on the Zimmerli's lower level were refurbished and reinstalled in 2011, featuring selections from the Zimmerli's collection of Old Master paintings and a more extensive presentation of its nineteenth-century French holdings that focus on the museum's strength in portraits and caricatures, graphic arts, Japonisme, and works related to the popular culture of fin-de-siècle Paris. Several of the museum's signature works, including two important Italian Renaissance paintings, 36 sculptural caricatures comprising Honoré Daumier's Celebrities of the Juste Milieu, and a puppet theater were cleaned and conserved for the new installation. One section of the galleries features changing selections from the collection, primarily from the museum's holdings of nineteenth-century French prints and drawings. 

The renovations for the galleries for European art, including a new state-of-the-art climate control system, is funded by Rutgers University. The conservation and presentation of the objects, is supported by the Estate of Victoria J. Mastrobuono. 

John Taylor Arms (1887–1953), an American etcher who specialized in the depiction of architecture, created prints that astonished viewers with his extraordinary skill in capturing detail. Originally an architect and a great admirer of Gothic architecture, Arms began in 1923 his ambitious project of documenting Europe's major churches through a series of prints. Selected from the Zimmerli’s collection, this exhibition features 26 prints dating between 1919 and 1940. Highlights include remarkable prints of the cathedrals of Chartres and Rouen, and the gargoyles of Notre Dame in Paris; exquisite architectural views of Venice; charming glimpses of picturesque Italian and French towns; and the skyline of New York City as it was in 1935.

Organized by Marilyn Symmes, Director of the Morse Research Center for Graphic Arts and Curator of Prints and Drawings

In the twentieth century, sculptors explored many options offered by abstract or nonrepresentational styles. The range of these styles is vast, from the severity of Louise Nevelson’s black modular wall relief to the organicism of Martha Walker’s tendril-like composition poetically titled Aphrodite. The expressive potential of sculptural abstraction is also seen in Herbert Ferber’s large cage-like structure, in which the implied movement of its twisting calligraphic beams contrasts with the rigor of the geometric framework.

The two- and three-dimensional hybrids of Jesús Rafael Soto and John Goodyear demonstrate the visual dynamics of Op Art. Both artists use solid, but essentially linear, elements moving in front of painted geometric patterns to create eye-teasing optical illusions. Abstracted reality finds an oblique presence in a few works, including Dorothy Dehner’s vertical wood structure, which alludes to a landscape viewed through a window. Mel Edwards arranges metallic planar forms to suggest a book on a lectern; this piece is a maquette for a large outdoor sculpture on the Livingston Campus of Rutgers.

Perhaps the most extreme technique for sculptural composition on view here involves the use of chance. Jean Arp was a major figure of Dada and Surrealism, early twentieth-century styles that encouraged semicontrolled techniques such as doodling, random placement, and acceptance of accidental effects. Alan Saret was associated with the “antiform” and “process art” styles that emerged in the 1960s. His Arc Fountain allows looped wire, a material of inherently chaotic structure, to seek its own arrangement with minimal intervention from the artist.

George Segal (1924–2000) has been acclaimed as one of the major American sculptors of the late twentieth century. Born in New York City, Segal moved with his family to South Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1940. His father started a chicken farm, an occupation that Segal continued on land he purchased across the road from his father’s property (Segal’s family still resides at that location). After turning to art as a profession, Segal converted the chicken coops to studio space, where he developed his methods and ideas during a career spanning over 50 years. From 1942 to 1946, Segal took several humanities courses part time at Rutgers University, though his early training in art and art education occurred at Cooper Union, Pratt Institute of Design, and New York University. Segal received his master of fine arts degree from Rutgers in 1963 followed by an honorary doctorate in 1970.

While painting, drawing, and printmaking were always important aspects of the artist’s production, Segal’s international reputation was built on his sculpture. His best known works feature human figures cast in plaster directly from models, arranged in combination with objects, backdrops, and settings. His environmental works often depict relatively large “slices of life,” usually incorporating actual pieces of furniture or other artifacts—for example, an entire wall of a gas station or a section of a real New York City subway car.

Segal developed his subjects and techniques during the late 1950s and early 1960s, chronologically parallel to the rise and recognition of Pop Art. In 1959, Segal’s colleague and friend Allan Kaprow used Segal’s property as a location for “happenings,” free-form performance events that were among the significant sources for the Pop sensibility. However, Segal maintained an ambiguous relationship to Pop Art, and stated, “I feel detached from the phrase Pop Art and yet I have a fondness for it.” What separates his work from Pop Art is Segal’s unremitting emphasis on, and empathy with, human relationships and feelings, replacing Pop’s ironic or consumerist tendencies with a serious attempt to plumb human emotions and elicit profound reactions from the viewer.

The works in this gallery (as well as Bus Shelter, on view on the museum’s entry level) exemplify the many media and subjects Segal used over his lifetime. Old Testament Moon represents the earliest years of his career, when he produced expressionist figurative paintings. The remarkable seven-part Pregnancy Series, Segal’s only foray into serial sculptural imagery, records the external changes of a woman’s torso over time as it reflects the internal development of a child in her womb. The Zimmerli Art Museum gratefully acknowledges the generosity of the George and Helen Segal Foundation, which donated the painting and sculptures in this gallery.

This exhibition marks the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. A companion exhibition, organized by the Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II, is on view in the Alexander Library’s Gallery ‘50.

Born in 1879, Edward Steichen and his family emigrated from Luxemburg to the United States when Steichen was a small child. Settling in rural Michigan, Steichen began taking photographs as a teenager and continued to do so for the duration of his life.

Between World War I and World War II, Steichen became known as a photographer of the American heartland. Having petitioned the Navy to admit him as an official wartime photographer, the 62-year-old Steichen—a successful commercial and portrait photographer, as well as decorated World War I Army veteran—finally joined the air station at Floyd Bennett Field on Long Island in 1941. Late in the year, he was commissioned by the Navy to tell the story of naval aviation. The Navy records state that they “desperately needed Steichen’s photographs to recruit new pilots.” In addition to recording facts, Steichen wanted to prove that photography could be a powerful instrument for showing the human side of complex events. “The camera,” wrote Steichen in 1947, “serves as an instrument for waging war and as a historian in recording that war.” 

Fourteen 19th-century French and American paintings and ceramics exemplify the powerful influence of traditional Japanese art on Western artists. This stunning selection from the Zimmerli’s renowned collection of Japonisme (European and American artworks inspired by the art of Japan) highlights the achievements of some of the key artists and decorative designers of the Japonisme movement.

Featured are several pieces from the celebrated 1866 Rousseau porcelain dinner service adorned with designs by Félix Bracquemond inspired from Japanese prints. The great success of the Japonisme-styled Rousseau service encouraged artists and craftsmen across Europe to create works incorporating Japanese motifs and aesthetics. Joseph-Théodore Deck’s tour-de-force ceramic figure La Japonaise (1867) and Charles Caryl Coleman’s Night Owl (1879) reflect the West’s fascination with Japanese subjects and styles. This display also includes ceramics designed by Emile Gallé, a founder of the Art Nouveau style, and the Bordeaux-based ceramics manufactory, J. Vieillard & Cie.

Organized by Christine Giviskos, Associate Curator of European Art

Into the Garden: Painted Paper Constructions by Takayo Noda presents complete illustrations and selected preparatory materials for Song of the Flowers by children’s book author and illustrator Takayo Noda.

Examples of the illustrator’s preparatory materials provide insight into the illustrator’s creative process in which imaginative landscapes, flower and insect forms are realized as bold painted-paper relief sculptures.

Organized by Gail Aaron, Assistant Curator of Original Illustrations for Children's Books

Inspired by the innovations of the Russian avant-garde, Soviet nonconformist artists took a step further by abandoning conventions that kept word and image in separate categories. This can be seen as an example in the continuation of the strong connection between visual artists and poets particularly in Moscow. Many conceptual artists worked in literary forms while poet-conceptualists appropriated forms typical of visual arts, such as book-objects or card-poems. Nonconformist artists, trained as book designers and illustrators, created word/image art in the form of hand-produced books and journals. More generally, artists explored the relation between form and meaning in the production of texts as images, and texts in relation to images. In some cases, as in the works of Ilya Kabakov and Victor Pivovarov, words and images are of equal visual impact and importance; in others, as in the work of Leonid Lamm and Rimma Gerlovina, the text itself constitutes the entire image.

For the Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century, crossing the border between visual and verbal was an important element in their quest for artistic freedom. As a result, artists and poets often collaborated closely on books that abound with pictures in dialogue with the text.

In the 1920s, when such media as photomontage and photography rapidly advanced, political texts entered a close relationship with visual arts. Promoting the concepts of function and communication, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Gustav Klutsis, and other constructivist artists designed all forms of printed matter, including posters, books, and catalogues. These artists introduced radical new ideas and forms to graphic design – notably, the value of the diagonal as a dynamic device, the effect of layering letters over each other, and a combination of different fonts.