PAST EXHIBITION
Corps Exquis
January 19, 2008—August 31, 2008

Press Release

Organized by CFAM director Luanne McKinnon, this ambitious exhibition (pronounced kor ekskee) celebrates the genre of the human figure with examples ranging from the Baroque to the Post-modern era.  Drawings, etchings, lithographs, mixed and new media works of art describe the "exquisite body" - a central theme in art for centuries - as interpreted by Pablo Picasso, KiKi Smith, Paul Cézanne, Ida Applebroog, Vanessa Beecroft, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Duncan Grant, among many others.  The exhibition is comprised of many works from the museum's permanent collection including recent acquisitions and important loans from private collectors, galleries, and artists.

On view for the first time at the Cornell is Paul Cézanne's The Large Bathers, a recent acquisition.  Cézanne treated the subject of the bather in more than two hundred works over the course of twenty years, and approached this most conventional of figurative themes in a radically unconventional manner.  At the insistence of the Parisian art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, the artist created The Large Bathers, his most elaborate print, after his 1876-77 painting of the same composition (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia; variation in Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva).

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