‘An Eye for Detail’ encourages MAC visitors to look closer

In Lucas Cranach the Elder’s “Henry VI the Devout, Duke of Saxony, Margrave of Meissen,” the subject of the painting holds a sword against their chest, looking serenely but determinedly off into the distance.

In Jan Josef Horemans the Younger’s “The Mussel Vendor,” a group of people are gathered around the titular subject as roosters peck at the ground.

But a closer look at these paintings reveals even more, like the hundreds of painstakingly drawn lines making up Henry VI’s chain mail or leaves on a tree.

Paying attention to those small details is what the newest exhibit at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture is all about. “An Eye for Detail: European Paintings 1500-1900” opens Saturday and runs through Aug. 23.

The exhibit features 19 oil paintings on loan from a private collection in Spokane from such artists as Hans Baldung Grien, Thomas Gainsborough and Jan Steen. Meredith Shimizu, a professor in the department of art and design at Whitworth University, served as guest curator alongside Rachel Allen, the MAC’s curator of modern and contemporary art.

Shimizu and Allen were assisted by four of Shimizu’s art history students: Sophia Anderson, Maura Carrillo, Carissa Cary and Courtney Mankiller.

MAC Executive Director Wes Jessup met with the collectors a few years ago and was immediately taken with the quality of the collection. Allen was also impressed, saying one would typically have to go to a big metropolitan museum to see such a collection.

Jessup asked the collectors if they’d consider sharing the artwork with the community and they agreed. From there, it was a matter of finding a time that worked for all involved.

Shimizu, who has presented art history lectures at the MAC for several years, was interested in working on this exhibition because of the quality of the collection as a whole but also because of the artists represented in the collection.

She was also excited to extend the opportunity to her students.

“As I work with art history students, knowing their interests, I thought this would be an amazing opportunity for them to really see what it’s like creating an exhibition …” she said. “It was never even a question in their mind.”

The work started last fall, when Shimizu, her students and Allen began meeting to review images of the pieces in the collection, narrow down which paintings they wanted to include in the exhibition and identify themes they wanted to develop.

“When you work with any private collection and you’re picking objects from that, you’re working with what the taste of the collector is,” Allen said. “That’s a fun experience. ‘What drew them to these paintings? How are these paintings similar?’ ”

As the exhibition title suggests, the group focused on the finer details of each painting, as Shimizu said artists from the time period these pieces were painted would use details to reveal more than a quick glance would give viewers.

“(Viewers) are invited to look really closely at those details and think about what it is that they convey,” Shimizu said. “After really deciding that that was the one thing that really tied all of these paintings together, then it was a matter of figuring out how to tell that story and how to invite patrons or visitors to really take those longer looks.”

Through looking at those details, they decided to group the paintings into sections. One features genre paintings, or paintings of everyday life.

On the surface, these paintings look fairly straightforward, showing scenes of people chatting in the street, a school room or inside a home, but by looking a little closer, Shimizu said viewers can see the artist’s larger ideas, sometimes a moralistic message or a joke, something the painter wanted viewers to think about.

“In that section, in the label text, we’re trying to give viewers just enough information to invite them to look at those things and try to track those little moralistic messages,” Shimizu said.

Another section focuses on portraits. There are narratives to portraits, Allen said, and by paying attention to the details of these paintings, including a subject’s clothing and posture, viewers get a better sense of who they were.

The third section relates to the art market and the way these artists would create.

“A lot of the artworks in our exhibition, we don’t have detailed information about these paintings, but we know enough about these artist workshop practices, we can anticipate the practices that we’re seeing in these particular artworks,” Shimizu said. “It becomes another more nuanced way of thinking about how these painters tried to create paintings that would be very popular or attractive to potential buyers.”

Along with selecting the pieces in the collection, Shimizu’s students also wrote the information cards that are displayed next to each painting, helped layout the collection as it would be displayed and created an “I Spy” activity for patrons.

Student participation was always part of the plan for this exhibition, Jessup said. While attending school in southern California, he had a lot of access to art museums but there isn’t as much access in Spokane. With “An Eye for Detail,” he was able to give students hands-on experience with each element of creating an exhibition.

Allen sees “An Eye for Detail” as containing multiple levels of education. The first was for the Whitworth student interns, who were able to partake in, as Allen called it, the job of art history, which is to look closely and learn and make assertions based on the visual evidence presented in the artwork.

Then, the general public will learn something through the labels the students wrote. By pointing out at least one detail in the painting, the curators hope visitors feel encouraged to spend more time with the painting and see what other small elements catch their attention.

The third level of education comes from the interactive element of the “I Spy” activity that encourages guests to take note of other details within the exhibition. Allen hopes the satisfaction that comes from looking for and finding something small stays with the guests long after they’ve left the MAC.

“That is the practice of looking and finding things and using your eyes and your critical thinking to engage with the world in the paintings, in the gallery and then outside the gallery wall,” she said. “How can we be more observant and what does that tell us about our world?”