Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Current Exhibitions
Seeing and Believing: 600 Years in Europe
- Long-term installation opening Oct 14, 2007
- Bowdoin Gallery
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Seeing and Believing: 600 Years in Europe is a selective survey of some of Bowdoin's most important works of European art, from a Gothic carved head of a king from Chartres Cathedral to an early twentieth-century cubist landscape that was included in the 1913 Armory Show that introduced modern French painting to the United States. Between these poles are a lively variety of approaches, subjects and materials. The exhibition represents art that derives from myth, history, and religion, as well as that which increasingly became interested in recording the real world. The materials employed in these depictions are as varied as ivory, wood, bronze and stone, in addition to oil and tempera painting. Collectively, the objects demonstrate the continuing growth of the collection, starting from several pieces from James Bowdoin III's original bequest in 1811 through a gift in 2006. The title of the exhibition contests the oversimplified view that western art moved from Believing (choosing subject matter from myth, history and religion) to Seeing (a more objective analysis of the real world). Each of the works can be understood as distilling both a particular way of seeing the world and beliefs about the nature and meaning of the world.
