March 13 - April 30, 2006 MAIN AND UPPER GALLERY Legacy A Tradition Lives On The history of art is complicated. In every era, countless styles and techniques jostle for position, tracing historical patterns that more closely resemble starbursts than the straight arrows suggested by textbooks. This exhibition explores one such ray within a particularly brilliant explosion of talent—the Maroger Group, which emerged in late nineteenth-century France alongside Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau. The artists of the Maroger Group, united by their extraordinary technical facility, now extend across four generations. The group's origins lie in fin de siècle Paris. There Louis Anquetin broke off relations with his Modernist contemporaries in order to pursue more traditional techniques. He sought the anatomical knowledge of Michelangelo and the oil painting materials and techniques of Rubens, whose luminous surfaces Anquetin greatly admired. Although he failed to discover the old masters' secrets, his student and collaborator, Jacques Maroger, made important discoveries while working as a restorer at the Louvre. In 1929 Maroger identified an oil painting medium that he believed had been used by Jan van Eyck, the celebrated Flemish painter active in the fifteenth century. Maroger shared his knowledge with Anquetin and such prominent artists as Raoul Dufy and Roger Fry. In 1939 Maroger moved to the United States and a year later joined the faculty of the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Joseph Sheppard, an American artist and instructor active in Italy, attended the Maryland Institute from 1948 to 1952. He studied with Maroger and brought that artist's method into wider use during his fifteen years of teaching at the Maryland Institute. All the painters, sculptors, and printmakers who studied with Sheppard received a rigorous training in painting, anatomical study, and figure drawing. The exhibition features work by all four generations of artists: the influential artist-instructors Louis Anquetin, Jacques Maroger, and Joseph Sheppard, as well as eleven of Sheppard's students—Nina Akamu, Nilda Maria Comas, Daniel Graves, Malcolm Harlow, Douglas Hofmann, Michael Molnar, James Earl Reid, Robert Seyffert, Mark Tennant, Evan Wilson, and David Zuccarini. The exhibition is made possible at the Picker Art Gallery through the generous support of Patricia K. and Michael J. Batza, Jr. '63. Please join us for a related lecture and reception on March 30.

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