Past Exhibitions
The Jane and Raphael Bernstein Collection
A Legacy for LearningA Legacy for Learning: The Jane and Raphael Bernstein Collection comprises a series of exhibitions that individually and collectively celebrate the Bernstein family's gifts to the collection of the Hood Museum of Art over four decades. These shows present photography, paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture by European, Japanese, and North American artists.
In spring and summer 2021, the museum features the Bernstein Collection installations Pinpricks and Pomposity: The Inventiveness of English Visual Satire, Landscape(d): Modern Photography and the Environment, and Lyrical Journey: Toko Shinoda.
In August 2021, the installations change over to Inuit Art | Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, Both Sides of the Lens: Portrait Photography, and Mystic Peak: Selections from the Bernstein Collection of Japanese Art, through January 2022.
Society Engraved
The prints in this exhibition reflect William Hogarth’s (1697–1764) pointed, shrewd, and satirical social and political commentary. His work appealed to a broad public, but this popularity prompted questions into the ethical issues around the production and distribution of prints, the right to profit from artistic labor, and the nature of what constitutes an original work of art.
The Stahl Collection
The Hood Museum of Art's striking installation of thirty prints, drawings, and ceramics from the recently donated Stahl collection presents a wonderful opportunity to learn from art objects chosen by passionate, discerning collectors. Assembled over a period of sixty years, these highlights include bold, socially critical German Expressionist prints by Max Beckmann, Ludwig Meidner, and Emil Nolde, complemented by early twentieth-century American works on paper in a social realist mode. A cornerstone of the Stahl collection, assembled over decades, is Georges Rouault’s poignant series of eight aquatints titled The Circus (Le Cirque), 1930. The installation also features late twentieth-century works by New Hampshire artists, including James Aponovich and pioneering ceramicists Gerry Williams and Edwin and Mary Scheier. These highlights are drawn from the 118 works donated by Susan E. Hardy, Nancy R. Wilsker, Sarah A. Stahl, and John S. Stahl, the children of the original collectors, the late Barbara J. and David G. Stahl, Dartmouth Class of 1947. The high quality of the works, combined with their strong thematic links to a wide range of academic fields, makes these new acquisitions prime candidates for the interdisciplinary, object-based teaching that is central to the Hood Museum of Art’s mission.
An Exhibition in Honor of Adolph Weil Jr.
Canaletto's Vedute Prints
Although the Italian eighteenth-century artist Antonio Canaletto is best known for his luminous, sweeping views of the Grand Canal and Piazza San Marco, the Vedute, a portfolio of prints made in the early 1740s, reveal another side of Venice. These scenes are intimate in scale and contain an extraordinary variety of subject matter, encompassing both real and imaginary views, from urban portraits to bucolic landscapes. This exhibition presents the full range of Canaletto’s Vedute project and celebrates the legacy of Adolph J. “Bucks” Weil, Class of 1935, an astute and generous collector who over his lifetime amassed one of the most impressive collections of Old Master prints in the country.
The City as Memory Machine
Life in the city is lived in daily patterns of mobility. Each day, most of us stroll past the same shops and cafés, or distractedly gaze across receding rooftops from the vantage of an elevated train. We often think of time spent in transit as lost time, life on the periphery of real living. But as the French anthropologist Marc Augé has shown us, traveling through the city is a practice of history and memory. Instead of life lost, cities unfold at the stop-and-go pace of a crowded bus line. Along the way, monuments to the city’s collective history spark personal, individualized memories. In those fleeting moments, as the bus rolls along, we may be struck by the memory of a childhood trip to Central Park or suddenly recall a moment of heartbreaking loss. On the commute, the past and the present intermingle in barely recognized flashes of illumination, all in the time it takes to glance up from the morning newspaper.
An Exploration of the Reclining Female Nude
Goddesses, Models, & Prostitutes
The reclining female nude has been a recurring theme in Western art since the 1500s. It began with erotic images portraying an idealized woman (often in the guise of a goddess) for the pleasure of the male viewer. Through her passive, reclined pose, she offers her body for our gaze; her recumbent nudity implies that she is sexually available. She represents sensuality, beauty, and desire. As the subject of the female nude became canonized, artists began to expand the ways in which it was represented. She can be depicted alone or with guests and companions. With each incarnation of the reclining female nude, the tradition continues to grow and change.