Beaux’s Art: High Five for the High

CultureGrrl readers know I’ve been hard on the High (here and here). Atlanta’s recently expanded High Museum of Art has been in the forefront of a problematically proliferating phenomenon: the willingness of certain institutions to buy a higher profile by spending huge rental fees for shows from sister institutions that should treat them as colleagues, not cash cows.
But now the High has a different sort of show in the works—one that is high on CultureGrrl‘s wishlist: The museum’s own curator of American art, Sylvia Yount, will mount the first exhibition in 30 years devoted to American painter Cecilia Beaux. I had just mused about such a show (albeit one that would also include comparisons to Cassatt and Morisot) in my review of the Metropolitan Museum’s “Americans in Paris” exhibition.
Now, I know I’m powerful, but I can’t claim that the High suddenly dreamed up this idea in response to my designating Beaux as “the discovery of the [Met’s] show.” Nevertheless, from the description in the press release, it sounds pretty close to what I had wished for:
“Cecilia Beaux, American Figure Painter” will illuminate Beaux’s work by exploring issues of gender, class and the importance of place in relation to Beaux’s identity and reputation as the leading female artist working in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century. The exhibition features approximately 85 works, including oils, works on paper and decorative objects, and will be on view in Atlanta from May 12 through September 9, 2007, before traveling to the Tacoma Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
COMING NEXT: The high stakes of high-rent exhibitions.