Didn’t make it to Europe this summer to soak in the art and culture? A visit to the Georgia Museum of Art’s reinstallation of its Samuel H. Kress Gallery is sure to transport you through time and place.
Unveiled at the beginning of the fall semester, the reinstallation resulted from the diligence of staff and one summer intern.
Many of the works in the refreshed space came to the museum’s collection as gifts of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in 1961. Its founder was an American retail magnate with a passion for both art and education. Born in 1863 in eastern Pennsylvania, he was a schoolteacher for several years before opening his first store in 1887. His empire of five-and-ten-cent general goods stores thrived in the early 20th century, including in Athens, where the store’s distinctive architecture can still be seen downtown at 153 Clayton Street.
In 1929, he established the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to donate works by European artists from his considerable collection to American public museums, including paintings, sculptures and furniture. His aim was to share these powerful and historic works of art with everyday Americans, a goal shared by the Georgia Museum of Art.
Katherine Rabogliatti, a doctoral student at the University of Maryland who studies early modern Italian art with a focus on gender and identity, worked behind the scenes at the Georgia Museum of Art this summer as a Daura Center Graduate Intern. Rabogliatti said she was looking for something that would enable her to exercise her academic knowledge in a practical environment, and she spent much of the summer working on the reinstallation of the Kress Collection under the direction of Nelda Damiano, the museum’s Pierre Daura Curator of European Art.
Deeply committed to sharing her love of early modern art with a broad audience, Rabogliatti said her experience writing the labels and wall text helped her refine her ability to speak to a variety of viewers about Italian Renaissance art and society. She also discovered the collaborative nature of curatorial work and staging an exhibition. She hopes that the new gallery “captures viewers’ attention and gives them a meaningful experience with the past.”
Eleven paintings the museum received from the Kress Foundation are now on display in the gallery. These include works by artists such as Marco Basaiti (ca. 1470 – 1530), Ambrogio Borgognone (ca. 1460 – 1523) and Salvator Rosa (1615 – 1673). One piece, “Madonna and Child with Saints” by Simone dei Crocifissi, was recently restored at New York University’s Kress Program for Painting Conservation.
Alongside these works are several recent acquisitions of the same period and region, an oil-on-copper painting from the studio of woman artist Lavinia Fontana, fine maiolica pottery and crafted wood furniture as well as long-term loans of baroque paintings from the Parker Foundation. The installation offers a rare opportunity to engage with objects of tremendous age and history that bring the past to the present.
This piece appears in the Autumn 2024 issue of Facet. View the issue: https://online.flippingbook.com/view/490476419/
Authored by:
Kelsey Schoenbaum
