Happy Birthday, Salvator Rosa!

        Salvator Rosa was an Italian Baroque painter, poet and printmaker born (June 20) in 1615 best known for being a proto-Romantic. Initially, his father had wanted Rosa to become either a priest of lawyer, and entered him into the convent of the Somaschi Fathers. Rosa, however, felt that art was his calling and began secretly working under the tutelage of his uncle to learn about painting. He then moved on to study under his brother-in-law who was, in fact, a pupil of Jusepe de Ribera, an eminent Spanish Tenebrist painter, before coming under the apprenticeship of either Aneillo Falcone or Ribera himself. It was during his apprenticeship that his father died, leaving the family destitute and Rosa without financial support.

        Rosa earned money by selling his paintings cheaply through private dealers as he moved back and forth between Rome, Naples, and Florence. During this time he began producing the forerunners of Romantic paintings. Picturesque views of mountains and beaches were among his early landscapes for which he became well known. As well as painting, Rosa also wrote multiple satirical plays which gained him both favor and enemies, including Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the sculptor who originally designed the famous Trevi Fountain in Rome.

        Rosa continued to paint and write until his final days, having fallen ill with dropsy, and he died in 1673. His legacy was, most prominently, the beginning stages of romantic painting, evinced by the picturesque works of J.M.W. Turner, who arrived in the art world about a century later. It is almost poetic, in fact, that Rosa should be remembered as one of the fathers of the romantic painting style, as his birthday just so happens to fall on the first day of the summer equinox. If you’d like an up close and personal example of Rosa’s work, especially today, the GMOA happens to have one of his paintings within the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Collection. 

Salvator Rosa--Saint Simon the Apostle

Kress Project entries

We just hit 73 entries with the most recent, from Meredith Lachin, of Winterville, a wonderful oil portrait that responds to "Portrait of Giulio Romano." Click here to view all the Kress Project entries. If you know creative folks, please encourage them to enter. Questions? Email kressprojectgmoa at gmail.com and someone will respond to you quickly!

More Kress Project Entries

We're up to 58 Kress Project entries, with four coming in over the weekend. Our latest batch comes from Adel Gorgy (above), who reworks existing images with digital technology, then prints them at a large scale. Click here to see all the entries (now sorted with the most recent ones listed first).

Family Day photos

If you missed our last Family Day ("The Kress Collection"), then check out the slideshow above. It was great fun for everyone there, and the kids made amazing picture frames with hand-tooled details. Thanks to our intern Mary Bowden Green for taking these pics, and mark your calendar for the next Family Day ("Abstract Adventures"), scheduled for Aug. 13.

Georgia Museum of Art announces the Kress Project and solicits international call for entries

Georgia Museum of Art announces the Kress Project, a two-year initiative celebrating the 50th anniversary of the museum’s Samuel H. Kress Study Collection.

The Kress Project is soliciting responses to the 12 Italian Renaissance paintings in the museum’s Kress Collection through early 2012. Submissions may include a wide variety of forms, such as academic essays, visual art, choreography, fashion design or even a recipe inspired by a work in the collection.

GMOA encourages all ages and education levels to participate in the Kress project, and is soliciting entries from both within the United States and internationally. There is no fee to submit a response. The deadline for submissions is Feb. 1, 2012 and should be submitted via www.georgiamuseum.org/kressproject. The GMOA website will post entries throughout the year, and judges will select 24 winners. Each winner will receive a $500 prize and have his or her work published in a multimedia book.

The primary goal of the Kress Project is to promote the study of and response to these objects by the public at large and explore new ways to interpret the collection. The project will also be among GMOA’s most prominent efforts to enlarge and diversify the museum’s audience during its reopening year.

“We are excited at the opportunity to demonstrate the continued relevance of these paintings to a contemporary audience. We hope the array of different responses will surpass our imaginative limits of what is possible,” said Lynn Boland, GMOA Pierre Daura Curator of European Art.

Other aspects of the Kress Project include a family guide to the Kress Collection, available for free in the gallery, and an upcoming Family Day on Saturday, July 16. Relevant films, a lecture, a Senior Citizens Outreach program and a public and K–12 teaching packet are also forthcoming. An audio tour of the Kress Collection will be available this fall for download from the Kress Project website and will be accessible via smartphone while in the museum or on iPods available for checkout in the museum. The project also incorporates the museum’s biennial Trecento Symposium on early Italian art, which honors the memory of the late art historian Andrew Ladis, and will be held in the fall of 2012.

The project commemorates the gift of the paintings, in 1961, by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Since its arrival in Athens, and especially since the early 1990s, the Kress Study Collection has been the key motivation for GMOA’s research in early Italian art, including its most recent publication on the subject, the Corpus of Early Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections: The South.

Today, the Kress Gallery prominently features 12 Italian paintings from the Trecento and Baroque periods, as well as drawings from the Giuliano Ceseri collection and paintings, sculpture and period furniture from the High Museum of Art’s Kress Collection, all on extended loan to GMOA.

The Kress Foundation was founded in 1929 by Samuel H. Kress as a part of his own initiative to distribute his collection of more than 3,000 works of art to museums across the nation. The Kress Foundation strives to provide greater access to works in the collection outside of major urban centers. The foundation is a generous sponsor of the Kress Project.

For details on how to submit entries, images of paintings and more information about the project, visit www.georgiamuseum.org/kressproject.