The Lightner Museum will be the first venue for a major new touring exhibition, “The Triumph of Nature: Art Nouveau” from the Chrysler Museum of Art.
The exhibition marks the culmination of the museum’s 75th anniversary celebration and will be on view from Nov. 17 through March 15. The museum will host an opening night reception on Nov. 17, providing guests with an exclusive first look at the exhibition. The Art Nouveau-inspired event will feature live music from Miami’s French Horn Collective. Tickets for the reception will go on sale on Sept. 1.
Featuring the organic furniture of Louis Majorelle, the alluring posters of Alphonse Mucha and the luminous works of Louis Comfort Tiffany, “The Triumph of Nature: Art Nouveau” from the Chrysler Museum of Art presents a dazzling selection of ceramics, furniture, glass, jewelry, paintings, posters, prints, sculpture and textiles from one of the finest and largest U.S. collections of Art Nouveau.
The exhibition will be displayed in the grand ballroom gallery of the Lightner Museum. Completed in 1889, the space is contemporary with the origins of Art Nouveau and provides an ideal context for these notable works of art.
Art Nouveau was an exuberant, radical style that blithely trampled many of the Victorian era’s traditions of art and design. Celebrating beauty and nature while embracing new technologies and incorporating international influences, Art Nouveau exploded age-old orthodoxies with its fanciful approach to art, architecture and design.
Taking inspiration from the vitality of nature, the pioneers of Art Nouveau created sensuous, decadent works of art dominated by sinuous, undulating lines, stylized organic forms and bold asymmetric compositions. On the brink of a new century, these artists and designers rejected adherence to past styles, challenged social and cultural norms and sought to create a vocabulary of design for the modern age.
“The Triumph of Nature: Art Nouveau” from the Chrysler Museum of Art is organized by the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, and toured by International Arts & Artists, Washington, D.C.
Support for the “Triumph of Nature: Art Nouveau” from the Chrysler Museum of Art comes from the Crisp-Ellert Fund at the Community Foundation for Northeast Florida; Bank of America; The Treasury on the Plaza; the St. Augustine Alligator Farm; THE PLAYERS Championship; the Florida Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture; the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Chrysler Museum of Art is one of America’s most distinguished mid-sized art museums, with a nationally recognized collection of more than 30,000 objects, including one of the great glass collections in America. The core of the Chrysler’s collection comes from Walter P. Chrysler Jr., an avid art collector who donated thousands of objects from his private collection to the museum.
International Arts & Artists in Washington, D.C., is a nonprofit arts service organization dedicated to increasing cross-cultural understanding and exposure to the arts internationally, through exhibitions, programs and services to artists, arts institutions and the public.
