Pablo Picasso is coming to Ball State University. Artistically speaking, of course.
Nineteen paintings and four sculptures of European modernism works were published for the first time as a collection Thursday at the Museum of Art.
"Collecting Modernism: European Masterworks of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute." The paintings include works from Picasso, Juan Gris, Piet Mondrian and Salvador Dali, as well as other artists who represented the modernist movement.
"These are the great innovations in 20th century art that have parallels in science and literature, music, theatre, statesmanship and adventures, et cetera," Peter Blume, director of Ball State's Museum of Art said.
The exhibit is on loan from Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, N.Y. where Mary E. Murray, curator of modern and contemporary art worked to publish the collection.
Ball State's Museum of Art exhibits the collection because Peter Blume, director of Museum of Art, is on the advisory committee at MWP and supported the exhibit since its inception, Murray said in an interview Nov. 9.
MWP is known for its American collections and publishing a European collection for the museum is unusual, Murray said. The collection wouldn't have been published if it were not for the prominence of its American collection, she said.
"The collection was formed as sort of to be a European modernist history," she said.
The European works provide a context to the American work at MWP by showing audiences the inspiration American artists had for their works, she said.
Out of its element, at Ball State, the exhibit still makes sense, she said.
"I think a visitor coming to Ball State's museum will get a good understanding, with just these very few works, 24 pieces, of what was happening in Europe between 1910 and 1950," Murray said. Works produced today are influenced in some way from the European works from about 100 years ago, she added.
Blume said the exhibit works well with the Museum of Art's collections.
"It complements our collection. We have great strengths in the more conservative American and European art of this moment and very little avant garde since 1950," he said.
During the 1950s, MWP purchased European works that became available. The exhibit is presented in order of when the museum acquired the piece. The institute did not have the money and resources larger museums had, so the museum relied on the correspondence of its workers and a little bit of luck to acquire pieces that represented the European movement, Murray said.
The artists focused more on form than content in the paintings, Murray said, but the subject matter still holds relevance.
Juan Gris' "Still Life (Bottle and Glass)" features a bottle abstracted that represents cafe life during wartime. Many works during the 1910s were about cafe life and used people as objects, Murray said.
"Because it's in the middle of the war and people are dying by the hundreds of thousands, cafe life is not a part of the theme at this time of the war," she said about the painting.
de Chirico's painting also displays discomfort during time of war, she said.
Adding to the European collection would be "unusual," Murray said, unless the painting was a gift, but MWP did add a work by Marcel Duchamp this year.
"We were able to buy a piece with some Picasso and Matisse in Duchamp," she said. "Marcel Duchamp is probably the third most important of these French artists because he is considered the father of conceptual art."
Murray would like to tour her museums sculptures in the future and her boss at MWP would like to do a 19th century American drawings exhibit, she said.
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