Dahesh Museum of Art
580 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10022
U.S.A.
Tel: (212) 759-0606
Fax: (212) 759-1235
info@daheshmuseum.org
http://www.daheshmuseum.org/

Located in New York City, at the corner of Madison Avenue and 57th Street, the Dahesh Museum of Art is the only institution in the United States devoted to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting works by Europe's academically trained artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Museum's goal is to present the works of these artists in the broader context of nineteenth-century visual culture and to offer a fresh appraisal of the essential role of academies. The Museum was named to honor Dr. Dahesh, the pen name of Salim Moussa Achi (1909–1984), a Lebanese author, philosopher, and champion of human rights whose passionate and prescient collecting of 19th- and early 20th-century academic art inspired the Museum's founding. The artworks he acquired after fifty years of collecting, starting in the 1930s, form the core of the Museum's collection, which continues to grow through acquisitions and gifts. Chartered in 1987 and opened to the public in 1995, the Museum has established an international reputation, collaborating and exchanging artworks and exhibitions with museums worldwide.
 

Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt

Extended to April 22, 2007.

Napoleon on the Nile focuses on the plates in Description de l'Egypte, the seminal twenty-three-volume work that remains the single most important European scholarly study of ancient and modern Egypt.

The Description was the work of Napoleon's savants—167 physicians, engineers, economists, mathematicians, zoologists, botanists, archeologists, translators, journalists, and artists who accompanied the army. Their task was to catalogue all of Egypt's wonders, from the architectural ruins of a still mysterious ancient civilization (some no longer extant) to indigenous flora and fauna. Their work and that of the 2,000 skilled draftsmen and typographers who drew the plates and composed the pages took twenty years to complete. The ten volumes of plates became a renowned image bank consulted by artists seeking authenticity in their own pictures.

Works drawn from the Dahesh Museum's permanent collection, by diverse artists such as Gustave Doré, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Charles-Théodore Frère, and Frederick Arthur Bridgman, will be displayed among the plates to demonstrate how the scientific vision was transformed into an artistic one, which, in turn, continues to shape many contemporary ideas of Egypt.

Fantasy and Faith: The Art of Gustave Doré

January 23 - April 29, 2007

This dossier exhibition of paintings, drawings, and books highlights the publication of Fantasy and Faith: The Art of Gustave Doré. The selected works on view here, though few in number, capture the range of both Doré's subjects and the genres in which he excelled, from caricature and book illustration, to grand allegories, biblical subjects, and documentary scenes of contemporary life.

During the second half of the 19th century, Gustave Doré (1832-1883) was one of the world's most famous artists. He was, and still is, best known as an illustrator of such classic works as Dante's Inferno, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Perrault's Fairy Tales, and, most famously, the great "Doré Bible." Not content with this success, Doré also sought, but unfortunately never achieved, recognition as a fine artist. Doré produced a large body of oil paintings, drawings, and sculptures over the course of his career and the products of his prodigious visual imagination went on to influence some of the titans of early twentieth-century popular culture, from Cecil B. DeMille to Walt Disney. Even today, Doré's legacy continues to assert itself in the realm of comic books and graphic novels.