Reservations required
Hear inspiring insights into The Triumph of Nature from its organizing curator, Dr. Lloyd DeWitt, who also contributed to the exhibition’s catalogue. He will discuss the curves, natural motifs, and refined elegance of Art Nouveau art, furniture, decorative objects, and graphic works, and examine the influence of economy, trade, and culture in France that led to this brief, but intense, artistic movement. Dr. DeWitt is a graduate of the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada) and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and earned his doctorate at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is currently the Richard and Janet Geary Curator at the Portland Art Museum, where he oversees the Museum’s works of European and American art before 1930.
Art Nouveau was an international style of art, architecture, and decorative arts that flourished from 1890 to 1910 and was characterized by asymmetrical lines, curvilinear forms, and elaborate patterns inspired by nature. The Triumph of Nature includes approximately 120 Art Nouveau treasures — furniture, paintings, sculpture, mosaics, books, posters, prints, lamps, and glass — from the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, which is known for its Art Nouveau collection.