Dr. Elizabeth Kennedy
Inspired by the Louvre: American Artists and the Louvre
Today, Americans are the largest number of foreign visitors to the Louvre, and they tour the museum as if its collections were their own national treasure. Dr. Elizabeth Kennedy illustrates how Americans began their love affair with the Louvre two centuries ago when the newly created museum first welcomed foreign visitors, especially artists, to its galleries. For artists the opportunity to study, sketch, and paint created, in effect, an unofficial art academy that is still in practice.
As a monument of stability within the artistic turmoil of the past two hundred years, the Louvre was and is American artists' first stop on their art pilgrimages abroad. For some, it is an obligatory destination; for most, a visit to the Louvre is made in homage to the canonical heroes of art history and to the museum's legendary support of artistic education as witnessed in Samuel F. B. Morse's unforgettable Gallery of the Louvre, 1831-33. Dr. Kennedy shares examples of America's most famous painters who studied in the Louvre, including turn-of-the-century notables such as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Mary Cassatt and, more surprisingly, modernists such as Maurice Prendergast, Thomas Hart Benton and Edward Hopper.
Elizabeth Kennedy is the Curator of Collection at the Terra Foundation of American Art in Chicago. As curator at the Terra Museum of American Art from 2000 to 2004, Dr. Kennedy curated numerous exhibitions, authored essays, and organized Chicago Modern, 1890-1945, Pursuit of the New, the seminal show exploring modernism in painting in America's heartland.
In 2006 Dr. Kennedy co-organized the groundbreaking exhibition, American Artists and the Louvre, the first exhibition of historic art of the United States (colonial era to the 1940s) to ever be shown at the Louvre in Paris. The following year Dr. Kennedy was on the curatorial team of the Terra and Guggenheim Foundations, who organized Art in America: Three Hundred Years of Innovation, an unprecedented survey of American art exhibited at two venues in China, the National Art Museum of China Beijing and the Shanghai Museum. Currently, she is working on an exhibition project that will introduce early American modernism to an international audience in Venice, Maurice Prendergast in Italy.
When and where to hear this lecture: Thursday, November 13, 2008, at Lakeview Museum, 1125 W. Lake Ave., Peoria, Illinois.
Other programs in the Fine Arts Society's 2008-2009 Lecture series: "The Genius of Mark Twain" with Dr. Elliot Engel, "Pre-Raphaelite Modernism" with Dr. Elizabeth Helsinger, "A Journey through the Art of India" with Kristan McKinsey, "Now Your Colors Sing: Chagall and the School of Paris" with Miranda Hofelt, "Munch's Modernity" with Dr. Peter Chametzky and "Arts and Anthropology - Crossing Cultural Fences" with Dr. Cindy Ott.
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