Go for Baroque

Entering the Baroque Impressions exhibit felt a little like stepping through the back of the wardrobe into Narnia. The harsh concrete and gloomy clouds outside Cheever Hall melted into a warm, gently-lit gallery with soft strains of Mozart playing overhead. Art students in elegant black weaved through a crowd of people discussing cross-hatching and hand-coloring techniques. Trays of delicate cheeses and cookies were juxtaposed with brocaded walls and centuries-old prints.

The professor who organized the project, Todd Larkin, PhD, only enforced this fairy-tale impression in our conversation. Every three years, Larkin teaches Origins of the Modern Art Museum, a 500-level class for Masters’ students in art history. The class focuses on practicum and requires students to create an exhibit of their own. One of the biggest challenges in the past for Larkin has been getting students to familiarize with works of historical art. He believes that “students learn better with proximity to original works,” and he wanted to promote this within his class.

Royce Smith, Dean of the College of Arts and Architecture, said that the goal of the exhibition was to “enhance student learning through connecting and dialoguing with art. [The Dean’s Gallery] is all about students leaving more educated than before they came.”

Larkin’s catalyst for the exhibition came when he found a pair of lithographs of the Rubens and Van Dyck Rooms in Windsor Castle in the back of his closet at home. This example of royal collecting in the early modern era inspired Larkin to begin developing the exhibit in the summer of 2018. Larkin decided to focus on reproductive etchings and engravings after the major master works of Rubens and Van Dyck. He reached out to print dealers in New York and Belgium, who collaboratively negotiated to allow Larkin to obtain the right components for an exhibition with “wonderful thematic coherence.”

Once Larkin acquired the works, the hard part began. With dozens of engravings, Larkin knew that his three officially-enrolled graduate students and two recruited undergraduates would need some help in putting together the exhibit. Accordingly, he called in the big guns. Like a pair of retired police chiefs, two alumni answered the call for one last job. “It’s a very cohesive group,” Larkin said. “We have unity within diversity.”

Throughout October, the team worked tirelessly to curate and design the exhibit. The first step was reading up on the two Baroque masters whose paintings formed the inspiration for Larkin’s prints. Larkin joked that he “checked out every single book about Rubens and Van Dyck through Inter-Library Loan and piled them up in [his] house.” He went on to say that, “The students and I texted back and forth all the time like, ‘Do you have this source? What does this information mean?’”

Next, the team divided up the tasks for the display. The prints had to be catalogued, labeled and organized, and the Dean’s Gallery had to be completely transformed. The team needed to revolutionize the space to make it feel more Baroque without causing any damage, and they had to ensure that the dean and his team could work throughout the exhibition. This process was alumnus Dani Huvaere’s favorite part of the exhibition. “In the end, we created a relaxed space where people can come hang out with the prints and get inspired, and I think that’s really incredible.”

The team’s construction resulted in a well-planned, beautifully-organized space. Every engraving or etching has a specific place on the walls, and all the objects compliment each other. In addition, everything in the exhibit is purposeful, down to the opening date. The two focal points are Van Dyck’s court portraits and Rubens’ paintings of religious narratives, so Larkin chose to open the gallery on Nov. 2, All Souls’ Day. “I mean, we have a print of the Fall of the Damned — we had to have it on All Souls’ Day,” Larkin commented.

In the future, the team will expand the exhibit catalogue to create the College of Art and Architecture’s first publication. This publication will consist of the engravings alongside their original painting, a short biography of the creators and the size and dates of the works. For now, however, the team is proud of what they have created within the Dean’s Gallery and its impact on the MSU campus. Larkin added, “We’re all very intellectually and emotionally invested in this project.”

The Dean’s Gallery in Cheever Hall is hosting the Baroque Impressions exhibit from Nov. 2 to Dec. 28. Admission is free, and faculty and students are encouraged to attend. Even if you have no background in art whatsoever, the exhibit is a wonderful way to experience some very rich and interesting works