Kress Foundation and Collection
Three Renaissance Paintings Loaned to Dayton Art Institute
Italian Renaissance paintings on loan to the Dayton Art Institute are three examples of the contributions of Samuel H. Kress to the visual arts.
Appearing at Ohio's Dayton Art Institute through January 2008 is Samuel H. Kress and Cultural Democracy: The Renaissance of an American Philanthropic Act. It includes three Italian Renaissance religious paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Study Collection at the Georgia Museum of Art. They give one pause to reflect upon the contributions of this magnanimous benefactor of the visual arts.
Samuel H. Kress and His Foundation
Having opened a stationery and notions store in 1887, the successful enterprise of former Pennsylvania schoolteacher Samuel H. Kress (1863-1955) eventually expanded into the popular national chain of S.H. Kress & Co. Five- and Ten-Cent Stores. Soon after starting to collect Italian art in the 1920s, the lifelong bachelor established the Kress Foundation (1929). To this day, its aims clearly remain:
- the display and conservation of European works of art and architecture in museums and their original settings; and
- the support of academic resources, scholarships, professional fellowships, conferences and publications related to art history and conservation.
The foundation has also generously offered funding for the architectural preservation of Egyptian temples, Byzantine buildings, a French medieval donjon, Spanish Romanesque and German Gothic churches, the Ducal Palace in Mantua, Italy and Marie Antoinette's private apartment at Versailles, among many structures. A Venetian conservation laboratory was established under the Kress Foundation's aegis.
The Kress Collection
Although Mr. Kress was drawn primarily to works from the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance in Italy, his taste was not confined to these two great periods of Western art. The European continental schools (13th through early 19th Centuries) and some of their painters represented in the Kress Collection include:
- Italy: Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, Bernini, Tiepolo and Canaletto;
- France: Poussin, Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, David and Ingres;
- German-speaking regions: Dürer, Grunewald, Altdorfer, Holbein and Cranach the Elder and Younger;
- The Netherlands: Christus, Bosch and Memling; and
- Spain: El Greco, Zurbarán and Goya.
Including more than 3000 works of European art, the Kress Collection was disseminated to over 90 museums in 33 American states, Puerto Rico and France between 1927 and 1961. When Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art opened to the public in March 1941, among the works donated to it were 393 Italian paintings and sculptures dating from the 13th through 18th Centuries. It now proudly houses 376 European paintings, 94 sculptures, 1307 bronzes and 38 drawings acquired by Kress. His foundation continues to sponsor a symposium on illustrated European books and manuscripts, an art history professorship and fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and related research and resources at the NGA and other museums.
Samuel H. Kress and Cultural Democracy...
The Dayton Art Institute's exhibition displays three Italian Renaissance paintings donated by the Kress Foundation to the Georgia Museum of Art in 1961.
St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. John the Baptist (late 14th Century) by Giusto de' Menabuoi (act. 1349-ca. 1390) is a tempera on panel composition painted in the Italian Gothic style by the Florentine artist who worked largely in Lombardy and Padua. Its gold background, gilded architectural frame and rigid frontal character of the subjects are influences of the surviving Byzantine painting tradition still prevalent in northern Italy during the Trecento (14th Century).
Christ of Derision (ca. 1500) by Italian painter and illuminator Antonio Cicognara (act. ca. 1480-1500) depicts a mocked Savior from an episode in His Passion. The background's rolling hills include the turrets of a walled city from Cicognara's time.
Madonna and Child (ca. 1510) by Venetian painter Marco Basaiti (act. 1496-1530) shows the Virgin Mary cradling the infant Jesus against an open landscape as He gestures upward to heaven.
Source:
- The Samuel H. Kress Foundation. New York. 27 November 2007. http://www.kressfoundation.org.
 |
 |
 |
 |
