March 1988: Making History at The Brooklyn Museum: John I.H. Baur, an exhibition of American oil paintings dedicated to the memory of the former Brooklyn Museum curator who died last year at the age of 78, will be on view in the first-floor Lobby Gallery from March 23 to June 20, 1988. It will feature 25 outstanding acquisitions dating from the 18th to 20th centuries made by Baur during his tenure as curator at the Museum from 1936 to 1952. Artists represented will include George Caleb Bingham, Ralph Earl, Martin Johnson Heade, Eastman Johnson, William Sidney Mount, and Raphaelle Peale.
Born in Woodbridge, Connecticut, Baur began his career as Supervisor of Education at the Museum in 1934 after completing a master’s degree in art history at Yale University. Two years later he assumed the post of Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, and initiated a series of seminal exhibitions of nineteenth-century art in 1937. From the beginning of his career, when American art scholarship was in its infancy, Baur’s connoisseurship, exhibitions, and publications were informed with his own rigorous research and keen eye.
This Curator’s Choice exhibition was selected and organized by Barbara Gallati, Associate Curator, and Teresa Carbone, Assistant Curator for Research in the Museum’s Department of Painting and Sculpture. It is the fifteenth in a continuing series that has been made possible, in part, by a grant from A&S.
A symposium exploring the methodological issues and impact of monographic study in American art will be held on Saturday, April 16, in the Museum’s third floor Lecture Hall. For further information call (718) 638-5000, ext.232.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1971 - 1988. 1988, 035.
