: "Michelangelo of the Menagerie: Bronze Works by Antoine-Louis
Barye" will be on view at Brooklyn Museum's second-floor
Mezzanine Gallery from April 29 to July 24.
The exhibition features approximately 70 works from the Brooklyn
Museum's holdings of bronzes and watercolors by the French artist
Antoine-Louis Barye (1795-1875), one of the foremost Nineteenth
Century animalier sculptors.
Dubbed the "Michelangelo of the Menagerie" by the contemporaneous
art critic Théophile Gautier, Barye devoted his career to animal
subjects, from sweet groupings of woodland creatures to violent
encounters between predator and prey to mortal combats between
the fantastic monsters of ancient myths. He blended the romantic
taste for the exotic and the sublime power of nature with the
scientific exactitude of a flourishing modern zoology, lending an
air of accuracy to every claw, fang and scale.
Trained as a goldsmith, Barye began his career working on animal
subjects as minute embellishments for functional, if sumptuous,
decorative objects. After military service in the Napoleonic
army, he began formal studies in the fine arts. Throughout his
life, Barye frequented menageries in and around Paris - most
notably, the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes. He also attended
dissections of animals at the Museum of Natural History, where he
served as the master of zoological drawing from 1854 until his
death.
At the outset of his career, Barye submitted works to the
state-sponsored annual salon and won raves in the early 1830s for
plaster models of his predatory scenes, including "Tiger
Devouring a Gavial," 1831, and "Lion Crushing a Serpent," 1833 --
works included in this exhibition as bronze casts. This success
brought princely private commissions from the house of Orléans
and prestigious public ones from the state.
After his early success, Barye's critical fortunes were mixed:
avant-garde writers praised his sculptures, which challenged the
hierarchy of the genre with their monumentality and verve, while
traditionalists lamented the lack of overt educational or moral
value in his work. Scholars have since suggested that the
violence in Barye's scenes is evocative of the bloody Napoleonic
wars and the turbulence of the French political scene.
After a refusal from the salon in the late 1830s, Barye
concentrated on the fabrication of small bronze works for a
broader commercial market.
This relatively large-scale serial production of affordable
bronzes popularized Barye's work in both Europe and the United
States. The wealthy American investment banker Cyrus J. Lawrence
collected the vast majority of the works displayed in this
exhibition. At his death, the entirety of Lawrence's collection
of Barye bronzes and watercolors was auctioned in 1910 and
acquired as a set by the Brooklyn Museum with funds donated as
part of a special subscription.
The Brooklyn Museum is at 200 Eastern Parkway. For
information, 718-501-6331.
