Art March 2023
French leaves
On “Promenades on Paper: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France” at the Clark Art Institute.
In 2017, Olivier Meslay, the director of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, had dinner with Corinne Le Bitouzé, the assistant director of the department of prints and photography of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. They discussed the library’s vast holdings of works on paper, especially the drawings, described by Le Bitouzé as “a small collection—only a few hundred thousand drawings” that, despite their importance, are “barely studied.” The conversation inspired the idea of a collaboration between the two institutions to make these works better known. A few years later, this wish was made a possibility by the Paper Project, a new grant program of the Getty Foundation designed to support institutions everywhere in maintaining and studying their works-on-paper collections, while training a new generation of curators specializing in the field....
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