ISBN:  Unavailable

Category: Art / Sculpture & Installation

Page count: 48

<p> p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana} </p><p>In just three years, between 1893 and 1896, Frederick William MacMonnies’s <i>Bacchante and Infant Faun</i> evolved from a clay sketch in the artist’s Paris studio to the most controversial sculpture in the United States. Perceptions of the sculpture, which depicts an over life-size dancing woman who gleefully holds an infant in one arm and grapes aloft in the other, still range from provocative to innocuous. This <i>Bulletin</i> provides a close examination of <i>Bacchante and Infant Faun</i>, a work most frequently associated with the scandal that led to its acquisition: the public uproar over the impropriety of the figure’s nudity and her apparent inebriation spurred its original owner, architect Charles McKim, to withdraw it as a gift to the Boston Public Library and give it to The Met instead. While earlier studies focused almost exclusively on the controversy, this <i>Bulletin</i> takes a fresh look at one of the icons of the American Wing, from its origins in the artist's Beaux-Arts training to its place in the rich tradition of the bacchante as a subject of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art.</p><p></p>