For Boston College students, a short walk down Commonwealth Avenue is all that separates them from paintings that have been concealed from the public for two centuries.
The McMullen Museum of Art, located on Brighton Campus, will showcase three new exhibitions this fall, featuring art from the Middle Ages to the 20th century.
The exhibit featuring the oldest work, Medieval | Renaissance: A Dialogue on Early Italian Painting, will showcase pieces from the late 13th to 16th centuries. It will feature 18 pieces from the Frascione Collection in Florence, Italy.
It will pay close attention to the radical changes in artistic technique and social customs that make the time period so challenging to define, as it can be tricky to categorize Italian art from the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern periods under one umbrella.
“We thank the Frascione Collection for generously enabling the McMullen to present to visitors these fine and remarkably well-preserved Italian works—many unseen publicly since the nineteenth century—for study, teaching, and scholarly research,” said Nancy Netzer, Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director of the McMullen Museum and professor of art history, in a University press release.
The exhibition will uniquely confront viewers, challenging them to see the art through more than one historical lens.
The McMullen will also feature 19th-century works in its exhibit, A Fresh Vision: Landscape Painting in Belgium After Romanticism.
This exhibit largely features paintings from the School of Tervuren, a group of Belgian artists who painted landscapes. Similar to their American counterparts in the Hudson Valley School, they retreated, revering nature despite living in a time of urbanization.
This exhibition honors the gift of 36 School of Tervuren paintings given to the McMullen by Charles Hack and the Hearn Family Trust.
Along with the School of Tervuren paintings are seven American, French, and Dutch works. On a global scale, these artists were inspired by a Romantic appreciation for the natural world, and their works express this spirit in the artistic form of wonderful realism.
“The artists associated with the School of Tervuren shared the renewed passion for landscape painting that grew from Romantic and scientific interpretations of nature, building on the deep roots of Belgian and Flemish art history,” said curator Jeffery Howe, a professor emeritus of art history, in the release.
The most modern of the McMullen’s new exhibits is the eponymously named Martin Karplus: Moments and Monuments. It will exclusively display the work of the 20th-century photographer.
Karplus, who gifted 134 digital prints to the McMullen Museum before his death, used color and composition to portray a time of global anxiety and social unrest: the 1950s and 1960s.
“Rendered in vivid color, the photographs offer a rare and nuanced glimpse of everyday life across cities on three continents during two decades after the Second World War,” Netzer in the release.
The exhibit, featuring 55 digital prints, will follow Karplus as he travels through Europe and the Americas.
The exhibits will be open to BC students and visitors from Sept. 2nd until Dec. 7th.