European Prints of the Late Renaissance The style today known as Mannerism became the common currency of artists across Europe in the last decades of the sixteenth century. Characterized by elegantly drawn figures, complicated compositions, exquisite grace, and perhaps, above all, by an extraordinary degree of artistic self-consciousness, Mannerism has rightly been labeled “the stylish style”. One modern critic compared…

The Museum’s Collection Revisited The new presentation of these paintings is intended to reflect a broader campaign of new research on SDMA’s collections. Late in 2008, the Museum’s galleries of European art underwent their first major rotation in over a decade. The new installation highlights some of the museum’s familiar masterpieces—Giorgione’s Portrait of a Man (ca. 1506), or Juan Sánchez…

Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece Heroes have played an integral part in all cultures since ancient times. Whether heroes  are superhuman protagonists of Greek myths or average individuals who rise above the ordinary, they are admired, emulated, and sometimes even worshipped. This exhibition, organized by the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, features more than 100 objects from European and…

This exhibition brings together an impressive group of paintings by the Mexican artist Raúl Anguiano and explores the artist’s use of symbolic imagery. Pre-Columbian history, contemporary indigenous populations of Mexico, and women reverberate in the artist’s canvases. Portraits of women form the central core of the artist’s oeuvre. In his powerful portraits, Anguiano expressed a sense of intimacy and evoked the…

Selections from the Baldwin M. Baldwin Collection Artist, aristocrat, and colorful chronicler of the Belle Époque, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) was one of the greatest artists of the late nineteenth century. For the first time in 20 years, more than 100 works by Toulouse-Lautrec will be shown together at The San Diego Museum of Art. Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris: Selections from the…

Photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt Alfred Eisenstaedt was born in the West Prussian town of Dirschau (present-day Tczew, Poland) and served in the German Army during World War I. It was in Berlin between the wars that he began working as a freelance photojournalist. Armed with his 35mm Leica camera, he captured the first meeting between Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini…

Time and Place Time and Place explores the most recent work of Sir Howard Hodgkin (born 1932), one of Great Britain’s most renowned painters of the later 20th century.  Celebrated for almost half a century, Hodgkin’s art is characterized by integrity and rigor. Time and Place, however, is emphatically about the here and now. Hodgkin’s work plays with the notion…

In a spectacular array of 12 paintings by Sir Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), this exhibition explores the ways that women, art, and fashion came together to contribute to a new sense of women’s roles in society in the mid to late eighteenth century.  Gainsborough was noted in his day as an unparalleled master of brushwork, and his representations of women seem…

250 Years of Japanese Woodblock Prints This landmark exhibition, on view at both the Museum and the University of San Diego, unveils prime examples of Japanese print treasures drawn from the Museum’s rarely seen collection. Spanning the history of Ukiyo-e and beyond from the 17th- to 20th- century, the exhibition is arranged thematically within a chronological framework, and includes important…