When Frank van der Velden of the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, first phoned me to suggest a new exhibition on the19th-century Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, I hesitated. Back in 1996, I had been involved in the first major Alma-Tadema retrospective since the artist’s own day, at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery and Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum.
That was a groundbreaking project and my first significant experience as a curator. How could I put together another show, 20 years on, that would not repeat the previous one?
However, Van der Velden is a persuasive man and his enthusiasm piqued my interest. When I learned that we would be able to collaborate with Peter Trippi, with whom I co-curated an exhibition on John William Waterhouse in 2008-10, I was sold. The exhibition took shape as a collaboration (also involving the Amsterdam film historian Ivo Blom) and collaboration is also the key word for the story that the exhibition and catalogue tell.
The Fries Museum, in Alma-Tadema’s hometown of Leeuwarden, wanted to celebrate its local boy, but it agreed that we needed to tell a new story. In 1996, we presented this pre-Raphaelite artist as “the archaeologist of artists”, the painter of ancient everyday life informed by new findings from the excavations being made in the 19th century. This time around, we didn’t neglect that story, but we wanted to avoid a simplistic presentation of Alma-Tadema’s pictures as “Victorians in togas”.
We began with germs of ideas that at first seemed oddly assorted. The Fries Museum has a new building with cinema facilities and the curators there were interested in exploring the influence that Alma-Tadema’s paintings were known to have had on European cinema and Hollywood.
The museum also had a bequest from the painter’s daughters that included numerous items from the family’s two London studio-houses. That chimed with a growing interest among curators and art historians in looking at the artist’s studio as a laboratory for art-making. And it had always been known that Alma-Tadema’s second wife, Laura Theresa Epps, was a practising artist in her own right; only with the rise of feminist art history did this begin to seem important. From these disparate germs intriguing questions emerged.
What if the studio-houses were not just signs of the success of the male artist? What if they could be described as collaborations between Epps and Alma-Tadema that resulted not so much in luxury houses as “total works of art” – spaces for art-making and artistic experience? And what if it was that approach to lived experience – being surrounded by, and moving through, an artistic space – that was inspirational for the creators of early cinema?
Those questions guided the exhibition, with different emphases at each venue: in Leeuwarden we juxtaposed film clips with paintings and at the Belvedere in Vienna we emphasised the family’s connections to artists in Europe.
Now in London, the exhibition comes home – not to the Alma-Tadema family’s own houses, which no longer exist, but to the house of their good friend Lord Frederic Leighton, now run as Leighton House Museum, in west London. There the collaborative spirit of the Alma-Tadema family lives on.
Elizabeth Prettejohn is a professor of art history at the University of York. Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity is at Leighton House Museum, London, until 29 October
That was a groundbreaking project and my first significant experience as a curator. How could I put together another show, 20 years on, that would not repeat the previous one?
However, Van der Velden is a persuasive man and his enthusiasm piqued my interest. When I learned that we would be able to collaborate with Peter Trippi, with whom I co-curated an exhibition on John William Waterhouse in 2008-10, I was sold. The exhibition took shape as a collaboration (also involving the Amsterdam film historian Ivo Blom) and collaboration is also the key word for the story that the exhibition and catalogue tell.
The Fries Museum, in Alma-Tadema’s hometown of Leeuwarden, wanted to celebrate its local boy, but it agreed that we needed to tell a new story. In 1996, we presented this pre-Raphaelite artist as “the archaeologist of artists”, the painter of ancient everyday life informed by new findings from the excavations being made in the 19th century. This time around, we didn’t neglect that story, but we wanted to avoid a simplistic presentation of Alma-Tadema’s pictures as “Victorians in togas”.
We began with germs of ideas that at first seemed oddly assorted. The Fries Museum has a new building with cinema facilities and the curators there were interested in exploring the influence that Alma-Tadema’s paintings were known to have had on European cinema and Hollywood.
The museum also had a bequest from the painter’s daughters that included numerous items from the family’s two London studio-houses. That chimed with a growing interest among curators and art historians in looking at the artist’s studio as a laboratory for art-making. And it had always been known that Alma-Tadema’s second wife, Laura Theresa Epps, was a practising artist in her own right; only with the rise of feminist art history did this begin to seem important. From these disparate germs intriguing questions emerged.
What if the studio-houses were not just signs of the success of the male artist? What if they could be described as collaborations between Epps and Alma-Tadema that resulted not so much in luxury houses as “total works of art” – spaces for art-making and artistic experience? And what if it was that approach to lived experience – being surrounded by, and moving through, an artistic space – that was inspirational for the creators of early cinema?
Those questions guided the exhibition, with different emphases at each venue: in Leeuwarden we juxtaposed film clips with paintings and at the Belvedere in Vienna we emphasised the family’s connections to artists in Europe.
Now in London, the exhibition comes home – not to the Alma-Tadema family’s own houses, which no longer exist, but to the house of their good friend Lord Frederic Leighton, now run as Leighton House Museum, in west London. There the collaborative spirit of the Alma-Tadema family lives on.
Elizabeth Prettejohn is a professor of art history at the University of York. Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity is at Leighton House Museum, London, until 29 October
