Art Connects

The Dixon Gallery and Gardens offers a new, thematic look at its permanent collection.

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Art often gives us something intangible. When you see a work that speaks to you, it can inspire, transport you in time or place, or perhaps most importantly, provide a glimpse at our connection to nature, animals, and each other. With a closer look at processes, styles, and artists’ ideas, we’ll see, too, that art connects to art.

The current exhibition, “Eye to Eye: A New Look at the Dixon Collection,” on view at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens through April 14th, shows us — with about 150 pieces from the Dixon’s permanent collection, including paintings, prints, sculptures, porcelain, and more — how the many subjects that have inspired artists have done so through the course of time. And how the stories we’ve longed to tell through art have, in some ways, gone unchanged.

For the third time in 12 years, the Dixon is exhibiting its permanent collection throughout its galleries. This time, works are organized by theme, juxtaposing pieces that wouldn’t normally be shown side by side to demonstrate the connectedness of things that have influenced artists across generations and around the world.

While some visitors may be familiar with the gallery’s permanent collection, many of the pieces on view have been kept away in storage, and those and others can now be seen in a different light via the thematic organization. “You may remember the individual works themselves,” says curator Julie Pierotti, “but seeing them in these groupings will help place them in a larger context.

“Often, we talk about impressionism as this moment, but not always do we say the themes that these artists embrace — they weren’t just created in a vacuum,” she continues. “Artists were inspired by people who came before them, and then they, in turn, inspired artists a generation younger than them. And there’s this kind of cross-pollination between fine art and decorative art that happens all the time. So getting a chance to see works with their ‘cousin’ works of art from different time periods helps tell a larger story about the history of art and the themes artists flock to over time.”

An example can be seen in the section of works portraying women and femininity. Portrait of Mrs. Richard Crofts was painted in 1775 by Sir Joshua Reynolds and shows Mrs. Crofts — dressed in a flowing gown, her long hair fixed in an elegant updo — holding a fan. The work is displayed next to an 1888 Henri Gervex pastel on paper, Young Woman with a Fan, in which the woman wears a sleeveless dress, her neck also bare with her hair clipped atop her head.

“They’re separated by over 100 years, but there are so many similarities in them,” Pierotti says. “Even though the standard of beauty had really changed over the course of that 100 years, there are elements that speak to each other in both of those paintings.”

One of Pierotti’s collection favorites, Mother Boudoux at Her Window (1876) by Adolphe-Félix Cals, can also be seen in this section. “It’s not always out,” she says. “Every once in a while I sneak it onto the walls. It’s a sweet image of an old woman sitting by a window with the windows open, and you can look out onto the rooftops that are nearby her home. I think it’s an underdog painting in our collection, and I just love it.”

Other themes presented include country life (landscapes), entertainment (theater, horseback riding, card games), animals, waterways and seascapes, agriculture and farming, and men and masculinity.

A section on family life depicts mother-and-child scenes across history and mediums and visitor-favorite sentimental portraits of children. In that section is a selection of prints by Honoré Daumier, “funny images from the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s that show how people kind of bumbled their way through parenthood,” says Pierotti. “And they’re still doing it. We think of ourselves as struggling to balance it all, but people have been doing that for centuries, and artists have been poking fun at that, I think, for centuries.”

One such image is Crrrrrr...Woman! To leave a man alone, an 1838 lithograph on newsprint by Daumier. A man holds a screaming baby as two other screaming children flank him. “I love that print because it’s so timeless,” Pierotti says. “And I love how engaging that work of art can be and how visitors can kind of chuckle when they see it and maybe make a connection with their own family experiences.”

Another themed section, winter wonderland, features works with snowscapes and snow scenes. “Impressionists really took that up as a theme and wanted to make realistic images of snow and how it affects the landscape,” Pierotti says. “We happen to have a few really nice images like that in our collection.”

The exhibition concludes with a section on Italy that demonstrates, Pierotti says, “how specifically Venice but areas all over Italy are a huge draw for artists all over the world. The landscape, these fabulous cosmopolitan cities, and the people that live there, too, are a source of inspiration.”

Two pieces entitled Venice — an 1895 oil on panel by Eugène Louis Boudin and a mid-eighteenth-century oil on canvas by William James — show two very different artistic approaches (one incredibly detailed, the other less so) to the same subject matter, with gondolas floating through the Grand Canal against the backdrop of the city’s architectural beauty.

Throughout “Eye to Eye,” Pierotti says, “We’ve been able to incorporate works of art that are normally in storage. Our space for showing our permanent collection is small, so most of the time we reserve that space for the works that our visitors know and love — our Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Matisse.”

She continues, “It’s tiny but mighty — but we have a lot of depth in our collection, and it was really fun for me to find those connections.”

“Eye to Eye: A New Look at the Dixon Collection” can be seen now through mid-April, and Dixon director Kevin Sharp says it’s a wonderful opportunity for visitors to view the gallery collection in full and revisit old favorites in a new context. “We usually only show our permanent collection in the Dixon residence, and that’s maybe 30 paintings. Here we’ve got out just about everything,” he says. “And then matching, thematically, paintings with sculpture with porcelain with pewter with drawings with prints — it’s interesting. Julie [Pierotti] did a great job of finding these kind of evocative pairings and groupings. This is a treasure that is here for the people of Memphis.”