Almost 90 years since its founding, the Nelson-Atkins museum is offering a retrospective exhibit (Aug. 14th 2021- March 6th 2022) featuring its early acquisitions. Through the artwork and texts, the exhibit walks you through the museum’s early history. The collection does well in highlighting these intriguing pieces that served as the backbone of the museum, while today they might be swamped by more famous companions in the Nelson.
At the entrance a display introduces the exhibit, “Through more than fifty objects–most of them acquired in the museum’s first ten years and from across time, culture, and media–this exhibition explores the origins of the Nelson-Atkins collection and the people behind it.”
The Nelson: if I need to savor my weekend just a little more than what sleeping-in grants or want to take a break after a jam-packed school day, I look up its hours. This newest exhibit, however, offers up more than the usual pleasure of new works. By delving into the Nelson’s past, I gained both a better appreciation for it and a greater investment in the life of the museum.
Rounding the corner into the first gallery, I was confronted by the tall and awesome painting Madonna the Magnificat of Botticelli, girded in a thick, gold frame. Its figures stretch towards Mary’s crown, as if by magnetism. I wondered how I could have missed the piece in the past. After examination of the work’s label, I found out that it was actually a copy of the original (produced by the Galleria Luigi Pisani)–something unusual for a museum today, but lauded by the Nelson’s founders and other curators at that time as a way to bring great art to the people.
The Nelson-Atkins did acquire many original portraits, mostly by English painters. What stands out the most in the exhibit’s portraiture display, however, is a small painting by the German Lucas Cranach the Younger (Portrait of a Man, 1538). The triangle of the sitter’s coat and collar and his rectangular face give the painting a geometric strength and order, while his black garb and the aqua blue background add to this sharpness. The sitter looks out into the distance, solemn and serene.
In addition to paintings, the Nelson also acquired sculptural and functional art, both through dealers and funding its own excavations. One of my favorite pieces in the collection is a pair of ceramic lions (雙獅) from the Qing dynasty. They are bright blue, with elegant, feather-like tails. Offsetting the fearsome expression of one of the pair is its baby, pawing and crying for attention.
One of the founders, William Nelson, preferred works by the “Old Masters,” and instituted a rule that all art purchased by the museum must be made by artists who had been dead for over thirty years, according to the exhibit. However, this decree only referred to what the museum bought itself, not gifts. It was through this loophole that a group of patrons gathered together to pay for the Thomas Hart Benton painting The Sun Treader. In it, a man sits at a piano, his sheet music bending and contorted like a swung beat.
Besides the “Origins” exhibit, a ticket (or membership) for the Nelson’s temporary exhibit grants you access to a “Castles, Cottages, and Crime” gallery, featuring frosted ceramic models with often morbid backstories. There is also a free temporary exhibit featuring artists of Kansas City’s African American Artists Collective until March 27th 2022.
