‘Four Bathers by Degas and Bonnard’ and other shows at the Brooklyn Museum

The US based Brooklyn Museum presents a famous and interesting body of work, entitled ‘Four Bathers by Degas and Bonnard’. The monumental series ‘ offers an intimate look at bathing scenes by Edgar Degas (1834–1917) and Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) completed in France between 1884 and 1925.

This focused installation of four works drawn from the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection unites for the first time two rarely seen pastel drawings and one massive unfinished canvas by Degas with a lithograph by Bonnard from his celebrated series of female bathers in full-length bathtubs.

Considering the light-sensitive nature of these extremely popular objects, Four Bathers by Degas and Bonnard will be on view for a limited time. This installation has been organized by Rich Aste, Curator of European Art, Brooklyn Museum. It’s being showcased at at Norman M. Feinberg Entrance, Lobby South, 1st Floor

In a curious antidote, ‘Lorna Simpson: Gathered’ presents works that explore this Brooklyn-born artist’s interest in the interplay between fact and fiction, identity and history. Through works that incorporate hundreds of original and found vintage photographs of African Americans that she collects from eBay and flea markets, Lorna Simpson undermines the assumption that archival materials are objective documents of history.

The exhibition also includes examples of Simpson’s series of installations of black-and-white photo-booth portraits of African Americans from the Jim Crow era and a film work. Equally watchable is ‘Ghosts’, Sam Taylor-Wood’s photographic exploration inspired by Emily Brontë’s classic Victorian novel Wuthering Heights, whose famously atmospheric descriptions of the bleak, wild landscape almost turn that locale into the novel’s third major character.

For many years Taylor-Wood kept a country house in the same West Yorkshire region where Emily Brontë and her literary and artistic family lived. In the ten images from the series being shown at the Brooklyn Museum, Taylor-Wood captures the stark and haunting character of the windswept moors and gray skies surrounding Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse and the alleged setting of Wuthering Heights.

(Information courtesy: The Brooklyn Museum)