Professor Emeritus Organizes Two European Exhibitions
by Suzanne Wayne

Two traveling art exhibitions curated by George Mauner, distinguished professor emeritus of art history and a fellow emeritus and former director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, are currently on display in Europe.

Cuno Amiet: From Pont-Aven to Brücke originally opened in Bern, Switzerland at the Kunstmuseum Bern. A large catalog from the exhibition with both French and German editions includes essays by Mauner and others. The exhibition is now at the Musée Rath in Geneva through January 7, 2001. For more information, see http://www.karaart.com/rath/index.html.

Cuno Amiet is one of the precursors of modernism in Switzerland. In 1892, he joined a group of artists associated with Gauguin in Pont-Aven. In 1906, he was invited to join "Die Brücke," an artistic fraternity newly founded in Dresden. As the only painter attached to both movements, Amiet developed a style between naturalism and abstraction. The exhibition’s nearly 150 pieces date from 1892 to 1920, and demonstrate Amiet’s evolution as a painter spanning French and German modernism.

The second exhibition, Manet: The Still Life Paintings, opens October 11 at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and will run through January 7, 2001. It will then move to the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland to run from January 30 to April 22.

For more information, see http://www.musee-orsay.fr:8081/ORSAY/orsaygb/HTML.NSF/By+Filename/mosimple+index?OpenDocument
and http://www.thewalters.org/.

Manet attached great importance to still-life, which he considered to be the "touchstone of the painter." He also said, "A painter can say everything he has to say with flowers, fruit, and even clouds. You know, I would like to be the Saint Francis of still life." This exhibition, for the first time, brings together a number of Manet’s still-lifes.

George Mauner is a specialist in the modernist area and has published numerous works on and curated exhibits of painters such as Cuno Amiet, the Giacommetti family, Vuillard, and the Nabis. His many publications include The Nabis, Their History and Their Art (Garland Press), Manet, Peintre-Philosophe (Penn State Press), Cuno Amiet (Zurich), and Cuno Amiet: Hoffnung und Vergänglichkeit (Aarau). Exhibitions that he conceived and for which he wrote the catalogues include Three Swiss Painters: Cuno Amiet, Giovanni Giacometti, Augusto Giacometti (Penn State, Williams-Munson-Procter Museum, Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum) and Cuno Amiet und die Maler der Brücke (Zurich and Berlin).

Last spring Mauner was director of Cocteau’s World, a symposium organized by the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, and the executive producer of the world premiere of Jean Cocteau’s unproduced music drama Paul et Virginie. After premiering in State College, the play traveled to venues in New York City and Washington, D.C.