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Prendergast in Italy (Part of An American Season)

Presented by Museum of Fine Arts, Houston at Museum of Fine Arts - Audrey Jones Beck Building

February 14-May 9, 2010

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Encounter five exhibitions by four intriguing artists during "An American Season" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The work of Maurice Prendergast, John Singer Sargent, Alice Neel, and Charles M. Russell comes together in a uniquely American gathering of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and more. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) presents the exhibition Prendergast in Italy (Part of An American Season), on view Sunday, February 14 - Sunday, May 9, 2010 at the Audrey Jones Beck Building.  This exhibition brings together for the first time the unparalleled bodies of work that American Impressionist Maurice Prendergast (1858—1924) produced during two trips to Italy, in 1898 and 1911.

For centuries, aspiring artists flocked to Italy to study the art and architecture of the ancient world and the work of the Old Masters of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. In the 19th century, American artists were especially attracted to what writer Henry James called the "time-mellowed harmonies" of Italy, and of Venice in particular. For Prendergast, the sites of Venice provided a spectacle of color and pattern that he transformed into stunning and bold modernist artworks, catapulting him into the front ranks of American artists.

Prendergast in Italy will feature approximately 70 watercolors, plus monotypes and related oils, sketchbooks, letters, and Japanese prints, drawn from a number of public and private collections, as well as from the Williams College Museum of Art (home of the Prendergast Archive and Study Center) and the Terra Foundation of American Art (the second-largest repository of Prendergast holdings). The presentation will demonstrate Prendergast´s ranking in American art as a technically superb watercolor artist. The vivid palette and liveliness of his work disguise the rigor and bold aesthetic approach to his subjects in works that continue to charm new generations of museum goers.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published in English and Italian by Merrell Publishers in London.

Prendergast in Italy is curated by Nancy Mowll Mathews, Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Art, Williams College Museum of Art; and Elizabeth Kennedy, Curator of Collection, Terra Foundation for American Art. Emily Ballew Neff, Curator of American Painting and Sculpture at the MFAH, will organize the Houston presentation of the exhibition, following its showings at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) July 18 — September 20, 2009, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, October 9, 2009 — January 3, 2010.

Pictured:  Maurice Prendergast, Grand Canal, Venice, c. 1898—99, Williams College Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast.