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Newsletter - Fall 1999
Current Exhibitions

The Moon and the Stars:
Afterlife of a Roman Empress
4 September - 19 December 1999

In 1997 a marble portrait head of Annia Galeria Faustina, wife of the 2nd century Roman emperor Antoninus Pius, came on the art market in New York. This extraordinary sculpture, previously unknown to the scholarly community, had been in private hands since the 18th century and was in a fine state of preservation. A high-quality Roman work of this type - and one with a solid provenance - had been the goal of a decades-long search on the part of museum staff members. After months of study and research, the portrait was acquired and shipped to South Hadley where it has been on view in the museum's Evan's Gallery.

Faustina the Elder (so designated to distinguish her from her daughter, Faustina the Younger, wife of Marcus Aurelius) thus became the subject of intense scrutiny by art history professor Bettina Bergmann, curator Wendy Watson, and the students who took part in Bergmann's seminars in 1997 and 1998. Riding the wave of enthusiasm generated by the students, Bergmann and Watson worked with director Marianne Doezema to develop plans for a "focus show" that would feature the portrait bust, along with other works of art from the museum's collection and from institutions across the country including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art. A coveted grant from Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities helped to make the exhibition and related programs possible.

Faustina's untimely death in 141 C.E. stimulated an unprecedented number of coin issues, architectural dedications, and portraits in various media. The present exhibition considers why Faustina's likenesses were so abundant after her demise and the cultural significance of their reappearances and reverberations in western art and culture through several centuries. Among the objects in the show are a marble portrait of the emperor Antoninus Pius, sculptures depicting anonymous ancient women emulating Faustina's hairstyle, etchings by Piranesi showing the temple in the Forum dedicated to the deified empress, drawings by contemporary American architect Eric Fulford chronicling the history of that temple, a spectacular ancient gold coin necklace, and individual coins bearing the empress's portrait and symbols of her virtues. The title of the exhibition, The Moon and the Stars, is based on a coin bearing the image of a crescent moon and seven stars or planets. In this context, the moon and the stars are celestial symbols signifying aeternitas, that timeless sphere of the gods from which Diva Faustina could ensure the well-being of the empire.

Fifty-three Views of the Floating World:
Japanese Woodblock Prints
11 September - 5 December 1999

Drawn from the museum's collection, the exhibition comprises an introduction to ukiyo-e woodblock prints. The term "ukiyo-e," literally meaning "images of the floating world," refers to the prints, paintings, and drawings of certain Japanese artists active from the 1640s through the end of the 19th century. The floating world might refer to any changeable social entity, but in practice the reference was to the world of the theater and the brothel, especially the courtesans of the Yoshiwara district of Edo (now Tokyo). Prints selected for the exhibition represent the three major phases of ukiyo-e printmaking: the early period, from the mid 17th through the mid 18th centuries; the classic period, in the late 18th century; and the 19th century, when some of the most elaborate and decorative prints were produced.

A substantial portion of the prints included in the exhibition were gifts to the museum from Helene Brosseau Black (class of 1931), a generous benefactor of Mount Holyoke College. Born in 1908 in Revere, Massachusetts, Helene Brosseau majored in art history and minored in French at Mount Holyoke. An entry in her college yearbook seems to have predicted her passion for a variety of enthusiasms, including art: "She belongs to a world of her own, and the most we can do is to leave her there and wonder from afar." Her interests were abetted by the collecting zeal of two spouses, her first husband, Louis Black, as well as her second husband, Myron, who was Louis's brother.

Helene Black's most substantial gifts to the college came by bequest in 1990 including about 2,800 volumes designated for Williston Library and approximately 1,100 works for the art museum. This group augmented previous gifts of more than 600 works on paper, including a large group of Japanese woodblock prints.