Francisco Oller (Puerto Rican, 1833-1917). Hacienda La Fortuna, 1885. Oil on canvas, 26 x 40 in. (66 x 101.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Lilla Brown in memory of her husband John W. Brown, by exchange, 2012.19

Hacienda La Fortuna is the second Oller painting to enter a New York public collection—the first, his sublime still life Platanos Amarillos, was acquired by the Museo del Barrio in 2009. Brooklyn’s newest acquisition is, however, the only Oller hacienda painting (he executed six in total) to enter any collection, public or private, outside of Puerto Rico. Brooklyn acquired the Oller, as well as a colonial Mexican folding screen inlaid with mother-of-pearl, with funds from last year’s sale of Vasily Vereshchagin’s Crucifixion by the Romans. I am currently pursuing additional key acquisitions for the Museum’s European and Spanish colonial collections with these funds.

Francisco Oller (Puerto Rican, 1833—1917). Self-Portrait, circa 1889-92. Oil on canvas, 23 5/8 x 17 1/2 inches. Museo de la Universidad de Puerto Rico.

Francisco Oller was a privileged member of Puerto Rico’s upper middle class. As was common practice with young men of his social status, he traveled to Europe to complete his formal education, first in Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando and then in Paris in the studios of Thomas Couture and Charles Gleyre. In Paris Oller also studied informally at the Académie Suisse, where he painted and drew alongside Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne. It was in fact Oller who would later introduce Cézanne to Camille Pissarro, a fellow Caribbean-born painter of the Paris avant-garde. In France the young Puerto Rican painter exhibited at the Paris Salons as a “disciple of Courbet” and at the Salon des Refusés of 1875 before returning to San Juan, where he introduced Realism and Impressionism through several art academies he would establish in the island’s capital.

Oller is at his most Impressionistic in Hacienda La Fortuna, which he painted when the avant-garde movement was still at its height in Paris. Here, the artist deftly captures nature’s fleeting effects of light and atmosphere, including in the foreground the morning mist of a Puerto Rican winter, with quick, broken brushstrokes. Oller completed this painting in the winter of 1885 for the Barcelona émigré José Gallart Forgas, who had commissioned him to paint portraits of all five of his Puerto Rican sugar mill complexes. Oller completed only this one, and the local painter and freed slave, Pío Casimiro Bacener (1840-1900), painted three: La Reparada, La Luciana, and La Serrano. Oller’s early morning view of Hacienda La Fortuna features the planter’s colonial mansion, his warehouse at left, and his sugar mill with a smokestack at right. It was in such mills that sugar cane was semi-processed into raw sugar and then shipped off to Brooklyn, which since 1860 was the world’s leading center of sugar refining. Throughout the second half of the century New York’s “sugar barons” traded extensively with both Puerto Rico and Cuba, by then Spain’s only remaining colonies in the Americas. Puerto Rico and Cuba would remain colonies through the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Oller painted Hacienda La Fortuna in Puerto Rico in early 1885, thirteen years before the island was liberated from four centuries of Spanish rule. By October of that same year Gallart had taken the painting back with him to Barcelona, where it remained with his descendants through 2004. That year the family sold Oller’s hacienda painting through the Barcelona auction house Balcli’s, and Brooklyn acquired it from the private collector that had purchased it in that sale.

When you come to the Museum, you will be able to fully experience Oller’s Hacienda La Fortuna in both its French avant-garde and Spanish colonial contexts. The painting will first go on view June 6th on the Museum’s modern French landscape wall in the European gallery as a masterwork of high Impressionism. And in September 2013 it will join 160 works of art from several Brooklyn and New York collections in the Museum’s Behind Closed Doors Spanish colonial exhibition.

Stay tuned for more on Brooklyn’s future European and Spanish colonial art acquisitions.

Vasily Vereshchagin, (Russian, 1842-1904). A Crucifixion in the Time of the Romans, 1887. Oil on canvas, 116 x 156 in. (294.6 x 396.2 cm).

Crucifixion by the Romans is a wonderful example of Vereshchagin’s passion for late 19^th-century European academic painting. Theatrically staged in 1^st-century A.D. Jerusalem, the picture is typical of the dramatic historical spectacles—here of capital punishment under the Roman Empire—that wowed period audiences across Europe and America. Today the painting continues to impress the viewer with its monumentality and academic exoticism or Orientalism, which Vereshchagin learned firsthand in Paris from the style’s principal exponent, Jean-Léon Gérôme. In preparation for the painting, Vereshchagin completed a series of architectural and ethnographic studies on site in Palestine; this endowed his work with an awesome sense of realism.

Crucifixion is not, however, an example of Russian avant-garde painting—the focus of Brooklyn’s collection— which in Vereshchagin’s own lifetime meant critical depictions of modern Russian society or Critical Realism. (The Museum owns two iconic Critical Realist paintings by Vereshchagin of the Russo-Turkish War, A Resting Place of Prisoners and The Road of the War Prisoners, both now on view in Russian Modern.)  Crucifixion by the Romans is a powerful expression of Vereshchagin’s foray into Orientalism, and as such it merits greater study and exposure than it could get here, where it was last on view in 1932.

Vasily Vereshchagin (Russian, 1842-1904). The Road of the War Prisoners, 1878-1879. Oil on canvas, 71 1/2 x 110 1/2 in. (181.6 x 280.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Lilla Brown in memory of her husband John W. Brown , 06.46

Cultural institutions are evolving, thanks to the constant examination, reassessment, and ultimately refinement of their holdings. When an object enters a museum collection, it is officially accessioned and registered and “deaccessioning” is art-world speak for officially removing an object from the collection. After an object is deaccessioned, it is normally disposed of, most often by transfer to another institution, sale, or trade. This is a normal and, frankly, healthy part of collection management; it allows an institution’s scarce resources to be concentrated on the care of remaining works that continue to fulfill their original purpose to the collection. According to the professional practice guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), “deaccessioning and disposal can be a legitimate part of the formation and care of a collection and, if practiced, should be intended to refine and improve the quality and appropriateness of the collection.”

Brooklyn’s Russian collection is first and foremost avant-garde. In evaluating and reconfirming this collection strength, it was determined that Vereshchagin’s Crucifixion was not appropriate for the focus of our holdings. However, only our Board of Trustees can make the decision to deaccession a work from the collection. The Board does this on the recommendation of our Collections Committee, who in turn is presented with a recommendation from the curators and Director. The curator’s recommendation is informed by a careful study of the object in question and its relationship to the collection as a whole. Discussions with scholars, curators, and collectors, in this case of 19th-century Russian painting, further inform the curatorial recommendation. By complying with this rigorous process of checks and balances, we avoid exposing ourselves to unnecessary risk and mismanagement of the collection.

All three Brooklyn paintings by Vereshchagin were included in the artist’s landmark 1891 sale in New York, and all three entered the Museum’s collection in 1906 as gifts—without restrictions—from Mrs. Lilla Brown, who donated them in memory of her husband John W. Brown.  In keeping with standard US museum guidelines for deaccessioning, Mr. and Mrs. Brown will be acknowledged on the credit line of any artwork purchased with the proceeds from its sale. At this time the Brooklyn Museum has not identified a specific work of art for acquisition. The decision to sell Crucifixion by the Romans is based principally on the painting’s incongruity with the Museum’s avant-garde Russian holdings.

I welcome your questions about the Museum’s decision to sell this painting.

Vasily Vereshchagin (Russian, 1842-1904). A Resting Place of Prisoners, 1878-1879. Oil on canvas, 71 7/8 x 119 1/8 x 2 1/4 in. (182.6 x 302.6 x 5.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Lilla Brown in memory of her husband John W. Brown , 06.45

In 1926, following this series of successful Russian exhibitions, Brooklyn embarked on its most ambitious representation of international (including Russian) modern art to date. International Exhibition of Modern Art, organized by the Société Anonyme and headed by Katherine S. Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Wassily Kandinsky, was the U.S.’s first significant show of western modernism since the 1913 Armory Show; among the highlights was Marcel Duchamp’s recently completed The Large Glass, 1915-23 (today Philadelphia Museum of Art). By devoting an entire section of the exhibition to the Russian avant-garde, the curators demonstrated Russia’s integral role in the development of modern art across the globe. Today Russian Modern, which opens fittingly in the Museum’s European gallery, builds on Brooklyn’s proud history of showcasing modern Russian art in a broad international context.

Aleksandr Yakovlev (Russian, 1887-1938). Model Washing Her Hair, 1929. Tempera on linen, 21 5/8 x 23 in. (54.9 x 58.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Martin Birnbaum, 44.220 © artist or artist's estate

Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866-1944). Stubborn (Hartnäckig), 1929. Oil on paperboard, 27 3/4 x 19 1/8in. (70.5 x 48.6cm). Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of William K. Jacobs, Jr., 1992.107.19 © artist or artist's estate

Boris Anisfeld (Russian, 1879-1973). Clouds over the Black Sea--Crimea, 1906. Oil on canvas, 49 1/2 x 56 in. (125.7 x 142.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Boris Anisfeld in memory of his wife, 33.416

Boris Grigoriev (Russian, 1886-1939). Old Trombola, 1924. Oil on canvas, 29 x 23 1/2in. (73.7 x 59.7cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. W. Murray Crane, Morton E. Goldsmith, Boris Grigoriev, and The New Gallery, 25.90. © artist or artist's estate

Russian Modern will feature thirteen paintings (twelve from the Museum’s permanent collection and one from the collection of Jurii Maniichuk and Rose Brady) spanning one hundred years of modern Russian art history. Among the avant-garde painters represented are Vasily Vereshchagin, Boris Anisfeld, Abraham Manievich, Chaim Soutine, Max Weber, Aleksandr Yakovlev, Boris Grigoriev, and Wassily Kandinsky. The paintings range in scale and subject-matter from small cabinet pictures of Russian peasant life to large-scale pacifist paintings of imperial Russian warfare, from abstracted landscapes of Crimea and the Ukraine to classicizing, “return to order” portraits from the years following the first World War.

Russian Modern is now on long-term view in Brooklyn’s third-floor European gallery.

All thirteen paintings are accompanied by wall texts written in both English and Russian. They will remain on long-term view in the Museum’s third-floor European gallery as testaments to our commitment to presenting avant-garde Russian art as a major force in the development of international modernism.

Stay tuned for a post on my collection review of Brooklyn’s Russian holdings, which led to this installation as well as the deaccession of a painting from the permanent collection.

Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917). Nude Woman Drying Herself, ca. 1884-1886. Oil on canvas, 68 1/4 x 93 1/4 x 3 1/2 in. (173.4 x 236.9 x 8.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Carll H. de Silver Fund, 31.813

Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917). Woman Drying Her Hair, ca. 1889. Pastel and graphite on brown wove paper mounted on board, 33 1/8 x 41 1/2 in. (84.1 x 105.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Museum Collection Fund, 21.113

Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917). Seated Nude Woman Drying Her Hair, ca. 1902. Pastel on translucent paper mounted on paperboard, 39 x 46 x 2 3/4 in. (99.1 x 116.8 x 7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Leo Smith, 54.54

Degas first broke with the academic tradition of depicting the female bather as a passive, eroticized nude in the 1870s. Inspired by the new aesthetic of naturalism, which encouraged artists to redefine beauty in contemporary urban terms, he created drawings and monotypes of women bathing, washing, and drying themselves for the first three Impressionist exhibitions. His unmannered models engaged in quotidian actions—reaching for a towel or drying their hair—in recognizable middle-class Parisian interiors. Stripped of mythological and allegorical trappings, Degas’s bathers were naked—not nude—and at home amid their private, daily routines.

Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867-1947). The Bath, Second Version, ca. 1925. Lithograph on laid China paper, 14 3/8 x 10 5/8 in. (36.5 x 27 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Designated Purchase Fund, 74.35

By the end of the 1880s, Degas’s innovations had caught the eye of the Paris critics, who praised him as the leading vanguard artist of the nude. His bathers in particular were singled out for their “total realism” and described as “the woman who doesn’t know she is being looked at, as one would see her hidden behind a curtain or through a keyhole.” Degas’s frank representations inspired and at times cowed his fellow artists, among them Paul Gauguin, who in 1888 wrote to the art collector Émile Schuffenecker about the paralyzing grip of his influence. In the 1920s Bonnard was still learning from Degas, embracing—as we see here in his lithograph The Bath (74.35)—the master’s direct approach and elevated viewpoint.

Gerrit Dou (Dutch, 1613-1675). Self-Portrait, ca. 1631. Oil on panel, 6 3/16 x 4 15/16 in. (15.7 x 12.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the executors of the estate of Colonel Michael Friedsam, 32.784

Recently discussed in the New York Times as a rediscovered treasure, Brooklyn’s tiny portrait—its oak panel support measures only 6 x 5 inches—entered the Museum’s collection in 1932 as an early self-portrait, completed by Dou in Leiden around 1631 when he was 18 and training under Rembrandt. (Rembrandt would leave Leiden later that year for greener, richer pastures in Amsterdam.) Several decades later, in the early 1990s, opinions about the painting, the painter, and the sitter shifted. Scholars demoted Dou’s Self-Portrait to a contemporary copy after a Dou self-portrait.

x-ray, CONS.32.784_1963_xrs.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 1963

The inferior attribution remained until January 2011, when Dou scholars descending on New York for Old Master Paintings Week revisited the Brooklyn panel and unanimously returned it to Dou’s body of work. Last week Professor Chapman confirmed the sitter’s identity: a teenage Dou thinned in the face by the artist himself with a few strategically placed brushstrokes. (X-radiographs of the panel confirm a slightly plumper youth lurking underneath.)

The Brooklyn painting—Dou’s earliest surviving self-portrait—is now on view for the first time since 1945 in the Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court. Also on view in New York, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Dutch galleries, is Dou’s mature self-portrait, painted again in Leiden but over forty years later at the height of the artist’s career.

Joseph Stella (American, born Italy, 1877-1946). The Virgin, 1926. Oil on canvas, 39 11/16 x 38 3/4 in. (100.8 x 98.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Adolph Lewisohn, 28.207. © artist or artist's estate

Pairing works from different geographical regions and historical periods promotes new perspectives on familiar themes and compositions. Such cross-cultural juxtapositions are found in select galleries throughout the Museum.

Here, for example, visitors encounter three female saints, all painted half-length and accompanied by their principal attributes: a crucifix, lilies, and a jar of ointment. The source for all three works is the New Testament, but the technical execution of each is unique, reflecting the artist’s individual training and zeitgeist.

In the 1920s, after numerous trips to Italy, Joseph Stella painted a series of archaizing Madonnas in the style of the early Renaissance masters, among them Giotto and Piero della Francesco. Stella once confessed to a friend: “The beauty which smiles all around Italy from innumerable masterpieces spurs me to create a new beauty equal in power to the old one.” Framed by a festoon of brilliant birds and fruit, The Virgin stands before the Bay of Naples, a nod to the painter’s native region. She appears both medieval and modern in her simplicity and highly saturated color.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was born in London, where he attended Henry Sass’s Drawing Academy and the Antique School of the Royal Academy. Bored with the Academy’s traditional program, he joined the progressive studios of Ford Madox Brown and later William Holman Hunt. In September 1848 Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais challenged the Royal Academy’s hold on young artists by founding the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters seeking to revive the simplicity and realism of early Italian Renaissance art. Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite pictures were criticized for their crude design, proof according to critics of the painter’s lack of technical training. Fearing future censure, Rossetti vowed to never exhibit publicly in London again, and by 1852 the original Brotherhood had ceased to exist.

In the 1860s, while painting his first pictures of single female figures, Rossetti fell under the spell of Titian, Palma Vecchio, and the great Venetian masters of voluptuous female flesh. His brushstrokes broadened, replacing what he had described as the “stipple in the flesh” of his earlier, painstakingly detailed Pre-Raphaelite compositions. His head-and-shoulders portraits in chalk like Silence sold well, and by 1870 he was devoting himself almost entirely to representations of the ideal woman, often in the form of Jane Morris. Rossetti’s later works were embraced by the Symbolist painters, who shared his interest in painting dreamy, introspective women lost in silent meditation and mystical inwardness.

Portraits of Jane Morris (1839-1914), by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and J. R. Parsons, From an album of photographs posed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1863. V&A 1738 & 1741-1939.

Jane Burden Morris (1839-1914), the face of Silence, inspired numerous works by Rossetti and his friends, among them the painter-poet William Morris whom she would marry in 1859. Jane was a remarkable beauty, destined to play a major role in Rossetti’s idealized and symbolic portraits of “stunners”—beautiful women shown at close range in often exotic settings.  In 1869, the American writer Henry James described her as having “a thin pale face, a pair of strange, sad, deep, dark Swinburnish eyes [a reference to the poems of the late Victorian writer Algernon Charles Swinburne], with great thick black oblique brows, joined in the middle and tucking themselves away under her hair.” Jane, the daughter of a humble stableman, was discovered by Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones in an Oxford theater. Thanks to her captivating looks, she was spared a life of poverty and a future in domestic service. Through Morris she was educated privately, mastering French and Italian as well as the piano.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (British, 1828-1882). Silence, 1870. Dry pigment (pastel or chalk) on two sheets of joined wove paper, 41 7/8 x 30 3/8 in. (106.4 x 77.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Luke Vincent Lockwood, 46.188

In Silence, Rossetti captures Jane’s beauty as well as her character; she was, according to contemporary accounts, an unusually silent woman.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (British, 1828-1882). Silence, 1870. Dry pigment (pastel or chalk) on two sheets of joined wove paper, 41 7/8 x 30 3/8 in. (106.4 x 77.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Luke Vincent Lockwood, 46.188

The Pre-Raphaelite painter-poet described Silence, a large scale drawing of a beautiful brunette deep in thought, in a letter to his model-and rumored mistress-Jane Morris: “Silence holds in one hand a branch of peach, the symbol used by the ancients; its fruit being held to resemble the human heart and its leaf the human tongue. With the other hand she draws together the veil enclosing the shrine in which she sits.”  In Victorian England, the abstract idea of silence was often linked to mysticism, Neoplatonic philosophy, and even death (Eternal Silence), themes that preoccupied Rossetti later in life, particularly after 1862 when his wife and principal model Elizabeth Siddal took her life with an overdose of laudanum.

In 1865 Rossetti commissioned a series of photographs of Jane Morris posing in the garden of his London home, Tudor House. Three years later, he began a series of formal drawings of her, often for future paintings. Silence, however, was executed in 1870 as a finished, independent work of art. In 1872 the drawing was sold behind Rossetti’s back while he was convalescing from a breakdown in Scotland. Four years later he bought back Silence and sold it for £210 (today $6,500). By 1946 it was with one Luke Vincent Lockwood, who presented it to the Brooklyn Museum, where it was last exhibited in 1971.

For the next six months, New Yorkers will have a rare opportunity to see a Rossetti masterpiece on paper, nestled in the Beaux-Arts Court’s north wall between paintings of equally reflective women-Mary Magdalene and Catherine of Siena-from Renaissance Europe and America. (In 1870 Rossetti was looking at Renaissance portraits of Venetian women for inspiration.)  Because of the sensitive nature of the drawing’s medium (dry, crumbly pastel or colored chalk) and support (two sheets of horizontally joined wove paper), Brooklyn’s Senior Paper Conservator Toni Owen has approved the presentation of Silence in the Court for no more than six months; it will be shown under significantly dimmer lights than those employed for paintings.