Meadows Museum, SMU,

Meadows Museum, SMU, announces 2022-2023 upcoming exhibitions featuring Dali/Vermeer, Velazquez, holy women, and famed Spanish abstract works.

Masterpiece in Residence: Velázquez’s King Philip IV of Spain from The Frick CollectionSept. 18, 2022 through Jan. 15, 2023

The portrait King Philip IV of Spain (1644), by the Spanish court painter Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, will travel from The Frick Collection in New York City to the Meadows Museum as part of the ongoing loan program titled Masterpiece in Residence and organized by the Meadows, featuring some of the most important works of Spanish art in U.S. collections. Beginning September 18, 2022, the portrait will be displayed with Meadows Museum’s own three paintings by this influential artist. The Meadows’s bust-length Portrait of King Philip IV (c. 1623–24), likely Velázquez’s first portrait of his king and patron, will be joined by The Frick’s 1644 portrait, which is considered among the most important Spanish paintings in an American collection. The differences in execution between the two portraits painted just over two decades apart highlight the evolution of Velázquez’s technique and his mastery of looser, more fluid brushwork, which demonstrates the impact of his study of Venetian masters, both in the Spanish royal collections and in Italy, as he developed a style all his own. The Meadows’s Portrait of Queen Mariana (c. 1656) and Female Figure (Sibyl with Tabula Rasa) (c. 1648), offer further evidence of his artistic growth over his career and will be installed in the same gallery as the two portraits of the king.

This exhibition has been organized by the Meadows Museum and is funded by a generous gift from The Meadows Foundation.

Picturing Holy Women in the Spanish Empire, 1620–1800
Sept. 18, 2022 through Jan. 15, 2023

Picturing Holy Women in the Spanish Empire, 1620–1800 will be the first exhibition organized by the Meadows Museum to explore the momentous and varied roles that female biblical figures, saints, and monastics played in early modern Spain and its empire. The exhibition relies on images of influential holy women to explore the complex history of how the Catholic Church and Spanish monarchy sought to control women’s movement in public and, ultimately, to separate them from the outside world. Drawings, prints, and rare books offer insight into the special role of images in the promotion of idealized models of female piety while also revealing that, despite the patriarchal society in which they lived, some women became active spiritual leaders, authors, and patrons. Visual representations of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, Saint Teresa of Ávila, and Saint Rosa of Lima, among others, will be featured.

Largely drawn from the collection of SMU’s Bridwell Library, the exhibition is curated by the Meadows Museum’s Center for Spain in America (CSA) Curatorial Fellow, Miranda Saylor. Highlights include an extraordinary engraving representing Saint Teresa preaching (1679), a frontispiece featuring the Mexican nun Sor Sebastiana Josefa de la Santísima Trinidad (1765), and a rare 18th-century pictorial manuscript commissioned for the Convent of Santa Clara in Palma de Mallorca (c. 1780–1800). These will be joined by works from the Meadows’s collection, as well as loans from SMU’s DeGolyer Library and a private collection.

This exhibition has been organized by the Meadows Museum and is funded by a generous gift from The Meadows Foundation.

In October, the Meadows will present a side-by-side display of work by Salvador Dalí and Johannes Vermeer, tracing the latter’s influence on the former. The Meadows will host Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter (c. 1663), which will travel to Dallas from the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands. It will be displayed as never before, alongside Dalí’s The Image Disappears (1938), his unique interpretation of the Dutch painting.

Dalí/Vermeer: A Dialogue

Oct. 16, 2022 through Jan. 15, 2023
Spanish Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí’s appreciation for the 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer will be explored in the exhibition Dalí/Vermeer: A Dialogue, opening October 16, 2022. In 2016, the Meadows exhibition catalogue Dalí: Poetics of the Small, 1929–1936 shed new light on Dalí’s long obsession with Vermeer’s work. This new exhibition brings together two paintings for the first time: Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter (c. 1663), from the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, and Dalí’s The Image Disappears (1938), his Surrealist transformation of Vermeer’s composition, from the Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali, in Figueres, Spain, who displays the painting in the Teatro-Museo Dalí. Thanks to a side-by-side display of the two paintings, this focused exhibition offers the extraordinarily rare opportunity to see work by these two artists together and trace the ways Dalí infused his own unique artistic vision with themes and techniques borrowed from the Dutch painter. A selection of Dalí’s prints from the Meadows Museum’s permanent collection will also be featured in the galleries.

This exhibition has been organized by the Meadows Museum and is funded by a generous gift from The Meadows Foundation.

Finally, in Spring 2023, an extraordinary selection of over 40 paintings and sculptures from the celebrated Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca, Spain, will journey to Dallas for its only stop in the United States, giving American visitors a unique opportunity to view these major works of Spanish abstraction from the 1960s to 1980, many of which are leaving Spain for the first time.

Thank you,

Glenda, Charlie and David Cates