VISUAL ARTS

The first historic exhibition in the Hostetter Gallery in the Gardner Museum's new Renzo Piano-designed wing presents new international scholarship about Anders Zorn, considered one of the most significant artists of the Belle Epoque. Although highly esteemed by contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, Zorn is little known in the U.S. today.

Anders Zorn: A European Artist Seduces Americainvestigates how Zorn became an international artist who set the groundwork for modern art, reveals his rapidly developing style from 1890 to the early 1900s, and his variety of subjects. The exhibition is organized in five different segments, including “Zorn and Gardner,” “Society Portraits,” “In the City,” “Country Life,” and “Artist’s Studios.” Twenty-four paintings are featured together with twenty-two drawings, photographs, letters, and gifts that Anders Zorn gave Isabella Gardner in 1894.

Highlights include Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice (1894) and distinguished loans that have never been shown in America, such as Night Effect (1895), on loan from Gothenburg Museum of Art, Göteborg, Sweden, and The Ice Skater (1898), on loan from Zornmuseet, Mora, Sweden. Additionally, major paintings have come together for the first time, including objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Art Institute, Chicago. The exhibition centers on strong holdings in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, highlighting the central role of Gardner as a most influential patron of Anders Zorn in America.

You can see more works by Anders Zorn in the historic building. Please visit the Blue Room (1st floor) for oil portraits and the Short Gallery (2nd floor) for etchings.

Anders Zorn: A European Artist Seduces America is the first exhibition to be curated and organized by Oliver Tostmann, William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection, who joined the curatorial staff of the Isabella Gardner Museum in April 2011.