For the first time since moving into the Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court in 2003, Brooklyn’s renowned Euro

For the first time since moving into the Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court in 2003, Brooklyn’s renowned European collection addresses six centuries of identity making in the Old World in various media: painting, sculpture, and now works on paper. Europeans expressed their sense of self and their place in world through their things. Here, we explore four such avenues of self-fashioning and representation: flesh (The Nude), faith (The Sacred: Religious Art), fashion (The Secular: Portraiture), and a sense of place (The Tranquil Landscape and The Menacing Landscape).The Western nude is a subject that has been mined by predominantly male European artists since Antiquity. Paul Gauguin completed this one in pastel in Paris around 1894 shortly after his return from the then French territory of Tahiti. His model was not the patron (she didn’t pay for the drawing), but rather the object of Gauguin’s eroticizing gaze. Indeed, he emphasized the curves of her body—echoed in the curves of the green breadfruit leaf suspended nearby—revealing colonial fantasies of “exotic” people and things, here flora. Gauguin bought into a long-standing convention in art history: equating women—especially indigenous women—with nature.Swing by our refreshed European Art galleries and see six centuries of European expression and representation.Posted by Serda YalkinPaul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903). Tahitian Woman, ca. 1894. Brooklyn Museum -- source link

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