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| A 17th-century marble bust of a young woman. |
The Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College—the only
museum housing a comprehensive permanent art collection within The City University of New York—last month opened a “Director’s Choice” exhibition demonstrating the extraordinary quality and breadth of its 3,000-work collection.
Offering everything from a 1932 oil by Milton Avery to an 18th-century drawing by Antonio Zanetti, the exhibition boasts a highly eclectic potpourri of some of the most eminent artists in history: Rembrandt, Klee, Maillol, Rauschenberg, Goya, Gris, Calder, Gorky, Reni, Dürer, Piranesi, and Toulouse-Lautrec, to name a few. Equally wide-ranging are the media represented, from a fan and a dagger to cardboard-and-acrylic constructions, bronzes, old master oils and drawings, a painted silk and paper scroll, color lithographs, and woodcuts.
Featuring 173 works, including non-Western pieces from Africa, Asia, and the Native American northwest coast, the exhibition offers “a fascinating overview of art through the ages,” said Dr. Amy Winter, the Museum’s director and the curator of the show. She added that it also provides an overview of the collection itself, “a remarkable story of collecting and patronage.” The show, which is free, will run until December 20.
Founded by art historian Frances Godwin and the noted art restorer Joseph
Ternbach, the museum had its genesis in the Queens College Art Collection,
which was begun in 1957. It was officially established as the Godwin-Ternbach
in 1980, and was soon attracting such distinguished patrons of art as
Norbert Schimmel, Jack and Belle Linksy, Charles Rodgers, and J.B. Neumann
(a close friend of Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum
of Modern Art). In 1999, the Lannan Foundation gave the Museum a large
group of Spanish and Latin American works. The exhibition is in Klapper
Hall on the Queens College campus (hours M-Th 11 a.m.to 7 p.m.). For
further information, phone 718-997-4747.The Museum’s web site is
www.qc.edu/art/gtmus.html.
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| A detail from a color woodcut by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (left) and Andy Warhol's "Tomato-Beef Noodle O's" (right) |
