Location: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
Date: Open Monday - Sunday, 10am - 8pm, enter via School Entrance 4 Feb 2012 – 2 Dec 2012
Institution: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
Ticket Price: Admission is free
Contact Telephone: 01603 593199
Contact Website: http://www.scva.ac.uk/
Attendees: All welcome
The First Moderns is the first in a series of spectacular displays of works from the Sainsbury Centre's permanent collections that will explore the importance of design, particularly in the European context in the 19th and 20th centuries. Treating art nouveau as the first modern design movement, The First Moderns explores the progression of the style from natural to more abstract, geometric forms.
Drawing on the Sainsbury Centre's permanent collections, The First Moderns highlights the role of artists and designers of the art nouveau style in the rise of modernism. The display offers an opportunity to see the Centre's Anderson Collection of Art Nouveau in a new way, comparing the naturalistic vitality of Rene Lalique's jewellery, and glass by Emile Galle, with the controlled style of Louis Majorelle and the geometric forms of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Josef Hoffman.
The display places the movement within its historical context, engaging with late 19th and 20th-century philosophical debates and reflecting the influence of science and nature on design, as a precursor to abstraction.
The First Moderns features loans from public institutions such as the V&A and Glasgow School of Art, and a number of private collections. It is also a first chance to see acquisitions to the Sainsbury Centre collections of significant works by Josef Hoffman and Alphonse Mucha.
The First Moderns: Art Nouveau, from Nature to Abstraction is curated by a team led by Professor Paul Greenhalgh.
