Jean-Marc Nattier "Portrait of Madame de Maison Rouge"

From: Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Limited Edition: 35
Exhibition: Eye for the Sensual: Selections from the Resnick Collection
Material: Printed vinyl
Dimensions: 35" x 96" (88cm x 243cm)

Hanging Hardware Included

Summary

One critic called it tacky wallpaper, but really, Pier-Luigi Pizzi, world renowned Italian stage designer and designer of LACMA's Eye for the Sensual, selected hand-woven Venetian fabric as a back drop to the exhibition paintings. With extensive experience designing opera house sets, Pizzi brought an operatic, theatrical quality to this exhibition of famous, and not so famous, European artists and sculptors.

Using mirrors and the 18th century tradition in English and Italian country houses of cloaking walls with fabric, Pizzi captured the jocular, dreamy, and sometimes mythological style of many of the featured works. He also designed the very different, concurrent exhibition, Fashioning Fashion.

Description

Eye for the Sensual featured more than 100 European paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts from the 16th through early 20th century. The exhibition included works by many several important 18th century French painters – including François Boucher, Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard – as well as Italian, Dutch, English, and Flemish artists and sculptors. Nudes and sparsely covered models along with mythological figures prevailed in both two- and three-dimensions.

Eye for the Sensual was one of three inaugural exhibitions of LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion, which opened its doors in 2010. One of the other inaugural exhibitions was called Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail 1700-1915, the banner seen here. The other exhibition, Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico will be available later this year .

The image on the banner used to promote Eye for the Sensual is Jean-Marc Nattier’s oil painting, Portrait of Madame de Maison Rouge, 1757. The subject was Mademoiselle Belot, the third wife of Etienne de Maison Rouge, a French Finance Receiver General. She was one of two female models Nattier used between 1730 and 1760 whom he painted in formal attire or in loose and revealing clothing, and in sometimes allegorical poses. Their hair was often worn short or tightly coifed, lightly powered, and adorned with flowers.

In another painting entitled Madame de Maison Rouge as Diana (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Nattier employed the same model posing as Diana, the goddess of the hunt. Like the other items in the exhibition, Portrait of Madame de Maison Rouge, 1757 is a selection from the private collection of Lynda and Stewart Resnick. .

The image appears on the front side of the banner with the banner vendor name and telephone number in small, white letters at the bottom. The subject’s left side continues onto the back side of the banner with “Eye for the Sensual” in white, sideways vertical letters. The LACMA logo and “10.2.2010-1.2.2011” appear at the bottom.

Provenance

This banner was used to promote the LACMA exhibition Eye for the Sensual and was displayed around the Los Angeles area between October 2, 2010 and January 2, 2011.