— (Alex Mann) "Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass" is an exhibition about the city of Venice
and why it was a destination for so many tourists, especially Americans, in the late 19th century —
a destination for artists from around the world and for art lovers.
We hope that visitors will experience this exhibition as a sort of tour and trip to Italy.
So imagine that you are arriving; enjoy the pictures around you to get a sense of the city.
And as you go deeper through the exhibition, you will be going into this web
of streets and canals, meeting some of the makers of local craft products like glass and lace.
And then as you finish the show, you'll be returning to the United States
and seeing how Americans brought Venetian glass and decorative arts objects back to this country
and displayed those in homes, in museums, and in other public settings.
John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler were two of the most internationally
famous American artists of their moment. They are perfect foundations for this exhibition
because of the importance of Venice within their overall careers.
Whistler was only there for about 14 months in 1879 to 1880,
but that was one of the most productive periods of his career.
Whistler is remembered for going back up into these alleys and for looking for little vignettes of the city,
like a particular doorway or two women standing in sort of a narrow tunnel passage.
John Singer Sargent, on the other hand, visited Venice many times throughout the course of his life.
He was actually born in Italy because his parents were traveling and spent most of their lives
as expatriates moving around Europe.
But much like Whistler, Sargent is often doing some images of the city that are not the postcard views
but something that's very individual and unique.
He gives you the sense that you might be just by yourself
strolling through the canals and the alleys and discovering your own little moments of the city.
One of the fun things about this show is its size, its breadth, its range.
We have over 140 objects. We have paintings, prints, watercolors, pastels,
visual art, two-dimensional art of every medium imaginable,
and works of glass, but glass in many different forms that you might not necessarily expect.
So we have blown glass objects. We have mosaics, which are made of glass tiles.
We have glass beads, and we have other craft products from Venice in this time period,
including jewelry and lace.
At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, we are interested in rethinking and expanding
and challenging what we know about the history of American art by thinking about global conversations
and how the visual identity of this country is the product, in many ways, of travel, of exchanges of ideas.
And this show is about those conversations and interactions and influences that go in both directions.
So in that way, I think it's a perfect show for our audience and for our identity as a museum.
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