Tag: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Two American indie classics from Jim Jarmusch

Post author By Addison Engelking
Post date January 5, 2012

Don’t let his impeccable indie-film cred or his shock of Einstein-like white hair fool you: Writer-director Jim Jarmusch is no hipster. He’s too curious, too open-minded, and too smart to deserve that pejorative-to-some. It’s far more flattering and accurate to call Jarmusch one of America’s greatest living filmmakers. This week, you have a chance to check out two of his best films, 1995’s Dead Man and 1986’s Down By Law, which will be shown at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

Dead Man, Jarmusch’s funny, bewildering period Western, is also his masterpiece. It’s the story of a mousy accountant (Johnny Depp) who, after suffering numerous insults and humiliations in the Pacific Northwest town of Machine, takes a bullet to the chest. While staggering aimlessly in the woods, Depp falls under the watchful eye of a portly, pithy Native American named Nobody (Gary Farmer, in one of the best performances of the 1990s), who helps guide him through to his final resting place. Jarmusch’s apocalyptic imagery is inspired by the William Blake proverbs Nobody constantly quotes, but the film’s sudden, ugly outbursts of violence and its matter-of-fact portrayal of American grotesques — menacing industrial barons who appear out of thin air, incestuous cannibal bounty hunters, cross-dressing hillbilly preachers — also connect it to early Cormac McCarthy novels like Suttree and Blood Meridian.

In contrast to Dead Man‘s novelistic scope and subject matter, Down By Law, made a decade earlier, feels like a warm-up. Down By Law (its title is slang that’s supposed to express a close relationship between friends) is part fable, part blues lyric, and part tall tale. The film follows the luckless travails of three marginal men (John Lurie, Tom Waits, and Roberto Benigni) who meet in a New Orleans jail cell, kill some time, escape from prison, and eventually steal away on a less-traveled road straight out of a Bob Frost poem.

Down By Law is easily one of the peaks of American independent film. Time has caught up with Jarmusch’s style as well: His stubborn, stoned long takes now feel like the last remnants of classical technique, and his actors’ perennial understatement now looks like the blueprint for most modern indie-film performance. Similarly, Robby Muller’s exquisite black-and-white cinematography for both films looks better than ever.

Dead Man

Thursday, January 5th

7 p.m.

Down By Law

Saturday, January 7th

2 p.m.

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

$8 or $6 for museum or Indie Memphis members

Tags Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Art Art Feature

Mavericks

Post author By Carol Knowles
Post date September 29, 2011

True to its title, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s current exhibition “Monet to Cézanne/Cassatt to Sargent: The Impressionist Revolution,” is about courage and upheaval.

Eighty-five masterworks from the Brooks, the Dixon, and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art tell a story of a group of 19th-century and early 20th-century artists who broke so sharply with aesthetic, cultural, and religious tradition that their blasphemous and dangerous works were described by contemporary critics as “chambers of horror.”

The Brooks exhibition includes some of the Impressionists’ most accomplished paintings, such as Claude Monet’s stunningly observed Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil.

The exhibition also records what happened after the revolution. As these artists realized they were their own arbiters of beauty and could channel a more personal spirituality, they became more daring.

With compelling after compelling example, the show tracks the Impressionists’ and Post-Impressionists’ march toward work that was increasingly mystical, expressive, and abstract. Don’t miss the shimmering interiors by Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.

You’ll find a pivotal moment in the history of art in Paul Cézanne’s Trees and Rocks, Near the Chateau Noir. As Cézanne moved beyond Impressionism to search for the building blocks of reality, he created an increasingly geometric body of work that culminated in Cubism.

Even Renoir provides intimations of things to come in a show that includes not only that artist’s signature full-figured women but also The Wave, which brings to mind the passionate brushwork of the Abstract Expressionists.

Through October 9th

Fast forward 100 years. The spirit of the maverick lives on in the work of Memphian Greely Myatt, who is noted for unorthodox and highly original works of art that often pay homage to modern and postmodern masters. Without losing any of his iconoclastic edge, Myatt’s David Lusk exhibition “Just Sayin’,” also contains some of the most graceful and philosophical works of his career.

Standing at over seven feet, Volume II is an interactive steel sculpture with a hinged binding that allows viewers to open the pages of a book. Empty thought bubbles and speech balloons welded into each page create a graceful steel filigree that allows us to see all the storylines simultaneously. In one of his slyest and most strikingly beautiful works, Myatt encourages us to experience the world from new perspectives. We can fill in our own text and become an omnipotent observer (in thought bubbles Myatt welded at the top of a page) or the poet speaking from his/her gut (in speech balloons welded into the bottom of the work).

Myatt pays tribute to a couple of his favorite artists in List, a tall, weathered slab of steel on a Styrofoam base back-dropped by a large sheet of aluminum. Traces of color in a small slit that divides the polished aluminum from top to bottom conjures up one of Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings recast in metal.

As viewers approach the installation and stop to assure themselves that Styrofoam can, indeed, support a slab of steel, List also becomes a wry nod to sculptor Richard Serra.

The largest work in the show and one of Myatt’s most apropos alter-egos yet is I Like the Way You Dance, a 10-by-10-by-10-foot sculpture of speech balloons made out of mop handles, plastic, and steel.

The size of the work and the empty balloons allow us to join in the dialogue and step into a dance that blurs the distinction between high and low art and the boundaries between genres. This gracefully arcing work of interlacing speech balloons could be a couple moving in perfect sync and who remind us that what we say is less important than our attitude, body language, and the give-and-take of our conversations.

Or this could be the multifaceted mind of a sculptor whose seamless syntheses of pop/folk/conceptual/abstract art in a show titled “Just Sayin'” speak to universal truths, in a Southern vernacular, and to the history of art.

Through October 1st

Tags David Lusk Gallery, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Film Features Film/TV

The debut films of New Wave titan François Truffaut

Post author By Addison Engelking
Post date July 21, 2011

During the last interview he gave before his death in 1984, filmmaker François Truffaut was asked why the French New Wave was an artistic success. “As far as I was concerned,” he said, “it never occurred to me to revolutionize the cinema or to express myself differently from previous filmmakers. I always thought that the cinema was just fine, except for the fact that it lacked sincerity. I’d do the same thing others were doing, but better.”

This month, the Brooks Museum is giving moviegoers a chance to revisit Truffaut’s first two features — 1959’s The 400 Blows and 1960’s Shoot the Piano Player — so they can appreciate just how much better his work was, and is, than most of what has been made since.

The 400 Blows is an autobiographical drama about a kid trying to claim his own psychic space. Antoine Doinel (12-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, in a crafty, enormously charming performance) is a shy, restless, sensitive boy who spends most of the film attempting to escape his crowded school classroom and his parents’ cramped apartment for the open-air liberation of Paris’ sidewalks, shop windows, and cinema houses. Although Doinel lies, plagiarizes Balzac for an essay, steals his father’s typewriter, and sneaks off to the movies whenever he can, his high jinks are not indicative of a latent mental disorder, nor are they signs of frustrated genius. He’s just scrabbling for any way out of the psychological and physical violence assailing him from every direction.

A lyrical and expansive work, The 400 Blows is more formally conservative than Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, another French New Wave landmark released the same year. Godard trimmed scenes to see how much he could remove and still have a movie; Truffaut went in the other direction. He embraced the naturalistic long takes espoused by film critic and mentor André Bazin, and Truffaut’s willingness to watch events play out is particularly rewarding in the lively classroom scenes. His proclivity for longer takes also intensifies the film’s sudden changes in mood and tempo, notably throughout the tense scene when Antoine’s parents arrive at school after he tells his teacher that his mother has died. Truffaut would continue to follow the Doinel character through four additional films, but The 400 Blows’ famous final freeze-frame still evokes the pity and terror of great tragedy.

Shoot the Piano Player, Truffaut’s adaptation of American writer David Goodis’ crime novel, is a fanciful, digressive work that may also be his best. It’s set up as a typical crime story about a small-time piano player (Charles Aznavour) with a checkered past, but that story is ultimately overrun by dozens of entertaining, self-consciously trivial vignettes and asides that rejigger the film into a bittersweet meditation on man’s inability to understand women. Although Raoul Coutard’s cinematography constantly quotes the best films noir of the 1950s, the characters’ affectionate and unpredictable humanism eventually free it from genre constraints. Like The 400 Blows, it exemplifies the ecstatic, personal expression palpable in the best works of art.

Films of François Truffaut

The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

The 400 Blows

Thursday, July 21st, 7 p.m.; $8 or $6 for museum and Indie Memphis members

Shoot the Piano Player

Sunday, July 31st, 2 p.m.; $8/$6

Tags Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Music Music Features

Sound + Vision at the Brooks

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date June 2, 2011

Film and live music come together next week at the Brooks Museum of Art, which is hosting two screenings of the experimental feature Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, both showings accompanied by live music from Brendan Canty (of D.C. punk legends Fugazi) and members of the band Bitter Tears.

The 71-minute film, which has already screened at venues ranging from the Museum of Modern Art to the Sundance Film Festival, tells the true story of Leonard Wood, a Kentucky man who responded to his wife’s cancer diagnosis by forming the couple’s house into a crazy-quilt-style “healing machine.”

The gambit didn’t save her, of course, but Wood kept working on the project for years after his wife’s death, until poor health and age finally drove him from the home.

“The guy who bought the house knocked it down because it was the only house on the block that didn’t look like every other house on the block,” filmmaker Brent Green laments in an online preview of the film.

But in adapting the story, Green — who also directed, wrote, scored, animated, and narrated what is his first feature film — reconstructed the house on his own Pennsylvania property.

“I built a whole town in my backyard — five houses, a handmade working piano, a huge glowing moon, and a giant, wooden, fully functioning God,” Green writes in his notes accompanying the preview trailer.

The film’s blend of live-action stop-motion and handcrafted mise-en-scène inspired the Village Voice to label Green “an emerging Orson Welles of handmade experimental cinema.”

The film will screen twice at the Brooks — at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. — on Thursday, June 9th, with Canty & Co. providing a live score using Theremin, cello, horns, and other sound effects.

The screenings are co-sponsored by Indie Memphis, which has illustrated how rewarding live musical accompaniment with a film screening can be with recent festival bookings of Boston’s Alloy Orchestra, which provides live scores to silent-film classics.

Advance tickets for the Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then screenings are available through Wednesday, June 8th, and are $10 for Brooks and Indie Memphis members and $12 for nonmembers. Admission at the door on the night of the screenings will be $12 for members and $15 for nonmembers.

Hi-Tone Roots

Roots-music fans can look forward to a couple of special shows at the Hi-Tone Café this week.

On Friday, June 3rd, English keyboardist Ian McLagan — a member of classic-rock bands the Small Faces and the Faces and a former sideman with the Rolling Stones — will return to town. Doors open at 9 p.m. with a $12 admission ($10 in advance) with local performer Richard James opening. McLagan will stick around for a “meet and greet” after the show.

Then, on Sunday, June 5th, the Memphis Blues Society will host a showcase concert at the Midtown club. The headliner is third-generation (at least) bluesman Michael Burks, who honed his craft at his father’s Arkansas juke joint and turned to blues as a full-time career about a decade ago, releasing a string of acclaimed modern blues albums for the Alligator label, including 2001’s made-in-Memphis Make It Rain. Filling out the bill are a couple of excellent but very different local acts: solo artist Valerie June, whose acoustic sound and idiosyncratic vocals put a personal spin on traditional music that touches on blues, folk, country, and gospel, and Vince Johnson & the Plantation All-Stars, an electric blues band that performs with grit and charisma. Doors open at 5 p.m. Admission is $10.

Tags hi-tone-caf, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Art Art Feature

Charged Objects

Post author By Carol Knowles
Post date April 14, 2011

Part Pop artist, part shaman, Willie Cole takes household objects and so charges them with danger and talismanic power, they become ego-shattering icons as well as riveting works of art. The artist’s best-known work, Stowage, was showcased at Cole’s 1998 solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. It also serves as the centerpiece for his Brooks exhibition, “Deep Impressions.” A long, slim projectile covered with tiny white dots lies near the center of this nearly black woodcut. Surrounding the projectile are a series of circles, each imprinted with a single iron-scorch. As we step in closer to this wall-filling work, we realize we’re looking at the layout of an overcrowded British slave ship ingeniously re-created with a blackened image of an ironing board and iron scorches. We’re staring through the ship’s portals into the stark lean faces of African tribesmen about to be sold into slavery.

At the edge of abstraction, Cole’s iron-scorched paperwork Raid looks like rusted hulls of ships ramming into one another. Or these could be blood-stained spears flashing in combat. Its emotional energy feels as sudden, unexpected, up close and personal as the melees that occur when slave traders “raid” African villages.

The right panel of the triptych Man Spirit Mask contains another evocative image. For this work, a photo etching of the artist’s face has been elongated, cropped, turned upside down, and jammed into the sole plate of a Proctor Silex steam iron. Like Stowage and Raid, this strikingly original and unsettling work is filled with seemingly endless asides about the callousness and cruelty that occur when humans are treated like chattel, jammed into cargo ships, and consigned to the drudgery of planting/harvesting/hauling cotton and cooking/cleaning/ironing.

Through May 8th

You’ll find powerful portraits of architectural facades as well as faces in David Lusk’s current show, “Jared Small: Small World.” Over a Cup explores the boundary between the everyday and the sublime and finds transcendence in unexpected places. Dressed in his Sunday-best white shirt and suspenders, an older man sits in a small, clean, well-worn kitchen. The Hopperesque square of light shining through the window and framing his face suggests this is a holy place where a senior sips coffee and reflects on a hard but honest life.

Small’s portrait Lena stands on its own as a moving character study as well as serving as part of a large mural depicting another biblical parable the Good Samaritan. As Lena turns on her fine black leather heels to walk away, she looks back at an injured person who lies just outside the picture plane. She doesn’t see the storm clouds racing across the sky, a building fraying/dripping/dissolving, or the pitch-black shadow hovering close to this beautiful, oh-so-busy young professional who serves as poignant reminder that everyone’s place in the world, sooner or later, comes undone; that all of us eventually will need a helping hand.

In a Row takes us from radiance to decay to total dissolution. Though the wooden frames of three shotgun houses are worn, the middle home’s lemon-yellow paint job is breathtakingly beautiful in sunlight. The cement walkways at the bottom of the painting liquefy and spill into what looks like a chasm. In light of recent earthquakes, tsunamis, and threats of nuclear meltdown, Small’s beautiful, ephemeral worlds feel more visionary than surreal.

Through April 30th

Sculptor and painter Anton Weiss witnessed World War II, spent his childhood in a concentration camp, and, after the war, relocated to the United States, where he studied Abstract Expressionism with Hans Hofmann. In his L Ross exhibition “Remnants,” Weiss’ life comes full circle as he captures the chaos and the potential for change that occurs when citizens of the world rise up against tyranny.

Weiss takes the long view — planets float in deep space, and loosely knit, irregular rectangles look like city-states coalescing and decaying, like civilization rising and falling. Weiss weds the inventive shapes of Abstract Expressionism with Surrealism’s cosmic mystery with Dada’s absurdist humor and anti-war sentiment. At the top of Remnants 003, a half-moon cradles a dwarf sun. Near the center of the work, several hammered, weathered metal strips resemble a military jacket — torn in two, brown with age, and stripped of all indices of rank.

After the war, Weiss vowed to stay away from the dark side. And so throughout his career he refused to paint black or nearly black works of art. In what Weiss describes as a “personal as well as aesthetic breakthrough,” the artist has created works that while very dark are also some of the most insightful and life-affirming pieces in the show. Measuring 48-by-24 inches, Remnants 007 feels figurative, personal. The work’s deep charcoal grays conjure up soot generated by industry or artillery fire, or, perhaps, this is the dark night of the soul.

In Weiss’ layered and scumbled acrylic surfaces and in his hammered and weathered metal fragments, you’ll glimpse shadows of the psyche, foibles of the human heart, and nearly indecipherable scripts that read like hieroglyphs in an ancient tomb or fingernail scratches on a prison wall.

Through April 30th

Tags David Lusk Gallery, L Ross Gallery, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Art Exhibit M

Bleed Bleu, Blanc et Rouge

Post author By Hannah Sayle
Post date July 14, 2010

CREDIT: Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel

Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent HouÃ«l
Prise de la Bastille

Happy Bastille Day, art lovers! Take this opportunity to revisit the work of some of your favorite French artists.

The Dixon Gallery has an extensive collection of French Impressionists like Chagall and Cezanne, as well as the work of more obscure French artists like Jean-Louis Forain (the Dixon is now a major international repository of Forain’s work.)

And in honor of Bastille Day, the Brooks Museum is offering a guided tour of its French collection tomorrow, Thursday, July 15th at 6 p.m.. Follow it up with a tasting of French wines at 6:30 and a screening of Mondovino at 7:30. For reservations, call 544-6242.

Tags Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, The Dixon Gallery & Gardens

Film Features Film/TV

Born from $5 Cover, Flipside Memphis carries on.

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date July 8, 2010

From high-powered airboats skimming the surface of the Mississippi River to young adults dancing ecstatically to electronic music late at night to kids and their parents rocking and romping around the grounds of the Dixon Gallery & Gardens, the latest batch of short films from the Flipside Memphis series depicts Memphis as a vibrant, diverse place.

That’s the idea and, as the series’ producers at Live From Memphis will tell you, it’s also the reality.

Flipside Memphis — a series of short documentary films on local people, places, activities, and events created by Live From Memphis in partnership with the Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau — began as a companion piece to Craig Brewer’s MTV $5 Cover series.

“That’s what sparked it,” says Live From Memphis’ Brad Phelan, who took the reins of the project midway through its initial 35-episode “season” and has been the primary producer for the 15-episode second season, which debuts in total this weekend at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

“$5 Cover was a reality show in a way but still scripted. Flipside Memphis started as documentary vignettes about people and places that $5 Cover highlighted,” Phelan says. The first batch featured many $5 Cover-connected topics, such as Java Cabana, the Hi-Tone Café, drummer Paul Taylor, and Memphis Roller Derby.

“But we took it further, also featuring things [not in the $5 Cover universe], and the CVB thought it was a great idea. These 15 episodes don’t have anything to do with $5 Cover.”

Among the topics covered in the new season of Flipside Memphis are activities (Shelby Farms, Rock-n-Romp), businesses (Underground Art tattoo parlor, Royal Studios), personalities (Jerry Lawler), and performers (Beale Street Flippers, Wiseguys Improv).

The series, which is housed at its own blog site, FlipsideMemphis.com, is aimed at both external and internal audiences.

“The whole purpose for the CVB is to showcase the city to people looking to come in, whether for vacation or conventions or to move here or start businesses,” Phelan says. “But we’ve found that it really hits a chord with Memphians who may not know about some of these things. It’s a way to help people learn about their own city. There are people who live here and think there’s nothing to do in Memphis, but they don’t know about some of this stuff. I know I’ve learned more about the city by [doing the Flipside series].”

In addition to the local people, places, and enterprises captured on camera, Flipside Memphis also uses all-local music as its soundtrack, with artists such as the River City Tanlines, Tunnel Clones, Blair Combest, and Organ Thief featured in the current crop of episodes.

The showing this weekend at the Brooks will feature Flipside Memphis subjects off-screen as well as on, with members of Wiseguys Improv emceeing the event and additional live entertainment provided by DJs from Electrocity and members of the Memphis Roller Derby.

Flipside Memphis Season 2

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Saturday, July 10th

1 p.m.; free

Tags Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Art Exhibit M

Who Shot Rock?

Post author By Hannah Sayle
Post date June 25, 2010

CREDIT: Michael Randolph, Executor to the Estate of: William "PoPsie" Randolph

Jimi Hendrix and Wilson Pickett, Prelude Club, Atlantic Records release party.

William “PoPsie” Randolph
Jimi Hendrix and Wilson Pickett, Prelude Club, Atlantic Records release party.

Gail Buckland is both the author of the book and guest curator of the exhibit, Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History 1955 to the Present, opening at the Brooks Museum tomorrow, Saturday, June 26th. Buckland is a veteran photographic historian, curator, author, and professor, and she was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about the upcoming exhibit. In addition to the exhibit opening party for members this evening, there will be a curator talk open to the public at 2 p.m. on Saturday followed by a book signing.

Why music photography in particular?

I’ve been around long enough to know that at different times, different genres are embraced into the larger history of photography. There was a time when fashion photography was not considered art, and museums would never show it. Then all of a sudden maybe 10 or 15 years ago you started seeing museums doing fashion exhibitions and having serious discussions about its importance. I go far enough back that I remember when Richard Avedon was not exhibiting in museums because he was considered a commercial photographer.

All of that is a preface to say that I recognized that there are brilliant, important photographs of musicians and of the entire musical revolution that we know of as rock and roll. Most of the attention has always been on the people who make the music. Not incorrectly— we should celebrate those people. But I felt the time had come that the people who gave rock its image also need to be acknowledged.

How do you define the relationship between rock and roll and photography?

The revolution that we know of as rock and roll was a bipartite revolution. It was sound and image. The music alone could not create the revolution. The kids were reacting to the clothes and the hairstyles and the body language. And the people who gave rock its image are very important because revolutions have to be documented to be believed. It’s the photographers who were bringing back the message that kids were going wild in mosh pits in Seattle. It was like photographing the front line and sometimes you came back with your battle scars. But especially for young people, it’s so important that there are people out there thinking like them and looking like them and loving the same music, so the image of rock is really important.

What was the relationship like between the musicians and photographers?

A lot of the photographers when they picked up their cameras they were every bit as passionate taking the photographs as any guitarist plucking his strings. This is a burning passion in them and they often felt that when they were shooting they were almost playing along with the music. This is the opposite of paparazzi. There are no stolen images in my shows. Most of these photographs were taken in collaboration and with mutual respect—no exploitation. A lot of the photographers stopped photographing when they started to be controlled by the labels — when the hair stylists and the people with clothes and the PR people became more important than just the musician and the photographer interacting and trying to do something together. It wasn’t fun anymore. What was fun was creative artists working together to come up with something.

Albert Watson, Los Angeles, 1992
Jagger/Leopard

Tags Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Art Art Feature

Beautiful Creatures

Post author By Carol Knowles
Post date April 29, 2010

Christopher St. John’s passionately painted, endlessly inventive exhibition “Icarus Transformed” at Harrington Brown re-envisions the Greek myth in which a boy fails to heed his father’s warning, flies too close to the sun, melts his wax-and-feather wings, falls into the sea, and drowns. Instead of being doomed by hubris, St. John’s protagonists — feminine versions of Icarus — defy their limitations, spread their wings/arms/fins/paws, and attempt to soar again and again and again.

Many of St. John’s creatures, as in A Strange Angel, survive the fall but have not quite worked out all the kinks. This bald, baby-faced angel with one white and one red wing, bright-pink genitalia, and a huge left arm (sprouting blue fur and industrial-grade fingernails) looks out at us with an ecstatic or perhaps maniacal smile.

In what looks like natural selection at warp speed, St. John’s oils on panel and more than 300 drawings mix and match seemingly endless permutations of species that stretch like pulled taffy in Melt the Wax, swell to the point of bursting in Severing Point, and flow like founts of blood in The Filter.

Naked except for lush pubic hair and with heads that look like lampshades joined at the cheek, two Icaruses sing in unison in Paper Dolls Sing Your Praise. Their wings have morphed into multiple and very full teets. Their foreheads sprout horns like a unicorn, another mythic creature noted for its beauty, purity, and faithfulness. Unashamed, uncensored, unabashedly inventive and alive, Paper Dolls, like all St. John’s creatures, suggest the most fatal flaw (and surest prescription for defeat), instead of hubris, is failure of the imagination.

Closing reception, Friday, April 30th

At Harrington Brown through May 4th

A wide range of genres depicting both grandeur and everyday pathos in “Venice in the Age of Canaletto,” the masterworks exploring often conflicting loyalties — to God, country, family, business, and pleasure — make Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s current exhibition a powerful meditation on what it means to be human in this or any other century.

The inspiration for the exhibition, The Grand Canal from the Campo San Vio by master scene painter Canaletto, creates the impression we are strolling along the campo. With deft strokes and telling details, Canaletto captures the attitude and physiognomy of strong, svelte seamen hoisting their sails, hauling in their nets. A brawny man in tattered clothing, perhaps a former seaman himself, stares out to sea. An invalid makes the most of a beautiful day by resting in the sunlight against a deteriorating palace wall. A master of perspective as well as architectural and figurative detail, Canaletto paints grand domed churches, the Customs House, more palaces along the banks of the canal, and dozens of ships in the far distance.

To further deepen our understanding of 18th-century Venice, a wide range of textiles, furniture, prints, and paintings have been gathered from museums and galleries across the country.

Beneath grand statuary, back-dropped by a serenely majestic body of water, a wealthy young couple dance The Minuet in Tiepolo’s oil on canvas on loan from the New Orleans Museum of Art. Crowds of revelers, of all ages and from all stations of life, pair off for pleasures more abandoned than the courtly minuet. Masqueraders at the center of Tiepolo’s carnival wear the tall conical hats and beak-nosed masks of Punchinello, a popular comedic character described in the show’s catalog as “embodying humanity’s cruelty and deceit” and “evoking the sorrows and poignancy of existence.”

While all the show’s mythological, historical, and religious paintings are masterfully executed, the most moving works, like The Minuet, possess a moral complexity that goes beyond the pursuit of pleasure, beyond the conquest of heaven and earthly principality.

Intended to be displayed as a pair, Sebastiano Ricci’s pendant paintings involve choices. In his dramatically staged, richly colored Jephthah and His Daughter, a Israelite general will keep his promise to God — to offer up the first living creature to emerge from his house upon his victorious return — though this means sacrificing his only child. In The Finding of Moses, in order to save a child, a daughter defies her father’s decree that all newborn sons of the Hebrews be slain.

At the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through May 9th

Tags Memphis Brooks Museum of Art