North Carolina Museum of Art | Untitled » Valentiner http://ncartmuseum.org/untitled The NCMA Blog Fri, 10 May 2013 20:38:53 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc Rembrandt: A Sense of the Soul http://ncartmuseum.org/untitled/2011/10/rembrandt-a-sense-of-the-soul/ http://ncartmuseum.org/untitled/2011/10/rembrandt-a-sense-of-the-soul/#comments Sun, 30 Oct 2011 18:08:47 +0000 Larry http://ncartmuseum.org/untitled/?p=2706 Over half a century ago, a fledgling art museum mounted its first major exhibition: Rembrandt and His Pupils. Near the end of his remarkable career, a towering figure in the history of American museums and scholarship, W. R. Valentiner, its first director, exerted his vision on shaping a collection, and in a short time the institution was on its way from infancy to becoming a major art museum.

We are reminded of the story of our beginning at the North Carolina Museum of Art today as we open Rembrandt in America 55 years after that first exhibition. With nearly 30 paintings by the master himself, the show assembles the largest number of authentic Rembrandt paintings from American collections ever.

I believe the genius of Rembrandt is readily apparent in this exhibition. It’s the miracle of the human being that begins to be communicated with a sense of the soul, the artistic expression of not only the body but of the soul. It’s easy for us to engage with that, and to come away with an elevated soul of our own after experiencing this stunning collection.

This exhibition represents our Museum at its finest. Our own Dennis Weller, curator of Northern European Art, co-curated the exhibition as well as co-authored the catalogue, also titled Rembrandt in America. Museums and private collectors all over the country have lent works to this important exhibition that has been years in the making.

Rembrandt in America is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that you simply must not miss. I invite you to come early and return often. When you visit, take your time, study the details, and feel the awe of being in the presence of one of the greatest Old Masters—right here at the NCMA.

]]> http://ncartmuseum.org/untitled/2011/10/rembrandt-a-sense-of-the-soul/feed/ 2 The Valentiner Files: Art and Nature http://ncartmuseum.org/untitled/2011/02/the-valentiner-files-art-and-nature/ http://ncartmuseum.org/untitled/2011/02/the-valentiner-files-art-and-nature/#comments Wed, 23 Feb 2011 17:19:34 +0000 John http://ncartmuseum.org/untitled/?p=2381 One of the truly heroic figures in the history of the North Carolina Museum of Art is William R. Valentiner, our founding director.  Dr. Valentiner lived many lives.  He was a renowned scholar of European art, particularly the art of Rembrandt and other Dutch and Flemish masters.  He was a German soldier on the Western Front during the First World War.  He was a forceful champion of modern art, who commissioned mural paintings from Diego Rivera and promoted the works of avant-garde German painters in the United States.  And he was perhaps the most distinguished American museum director of his generation, overseeing art museums in Detroit, Los Angeles, and Raleigh.  Throughout his long and varied career, Valentiner wrote about art as both a scholar and a poet.  Art and artists remained for him a source of deep inspiration and an abiding mystery.

In the fall of 1944 in the fifth year of the Second World War Valentiner wrote an essay in the Art Quarterly on the reclusive visionary artist Morris Graves.

Our whole existence has been weighed down by the horrors of war to such a degree that we have forgotten how necessary to the balance of our life is the aspect of untouched nature, of nature unaware of and unconcerned with human struggle.  There is only one thing that can save man from himself—his contact with nature. When we look up from our work at a bright moment nothing grips our heart more than a glimpse of the splendor of her colors and her forms, than the awareness of the power of her growth.  It does not need to be a glance into the crater of a Mount Vesuvius….  It is sufficient to become conscious that in the beauty of a flower, in the song of a bird, there is something more wonderful than all the mechanization of the world of which we are so proud.  But we people of the cities where wars are conceived, believe this truth only if it is explained to us by the artist-prophets who with their deeper insight into nature speak so convincingly that we cannot help but listen.

W.R. Valentiner, “Morris Graves,” The Art Quarterly 7 (Autumn 1944), 251.

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