Welcome to Princeton! 

September 14, 2011

Check out our lively and ever-changing Late Thursdays programming--we're open until 10 p.m. every Thursday. Join us this Thursday for the 3rd annual Nassau Street Sampler, with free food, giveaways, great art, and more--and bring a friend!

Must See in the Museum 

On view in The Life and Death of Buildings

Through November 6

In the 1970s, Lynne Cohen began photographing North American interiors that defined a zone between private and public, such as wholesalers' showrooms, laboratories, and classrooms. Cohen's images are often mistaken for staged scenes. They are not, although she concedes that the spaces that drew her attention resembled Duchamp's readymades, "loaded with meaning" and "incomprehensible." The unblinking eye of Cohen's camera catalogues the false-front surfaces (from Naugahyde to photo-mural wallpaper) of a culture torn between liberated self-reinvention and paranoid retrenchment.  

Visit the exhibition website. 

New on View 

On view in the Peter B. Lewis Gallery

September 17, 2011-January 8, 2012

The loan of Mark Rothko's 1949 painting, Magenta, Black, Green on Orange (No. 3/No. 13), from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, offers a rare opportunity in Princeton to view a masterwork from the beginning of the artist's mature period. Sublimity is pronounced in No. 3/No. 13, in which a sense of boundlessness and spatial plenitude triggers feelings of awe and wonder. This is a true must-see in the Museum's Peter B. Lewis Gallery.

Community Connections 

Princeton Symphony Orchestra

Rossen Milanov, Music Director and Conductor; Lara St. John, violin  

Sunday, October 2, 3-6 p.m.  

Richardson Auditorium, Alexander Hall; reception in the Art Museum to follow  

Charles Ives, Variations on "America"

Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Violin Concerto in D Major  

Antonín Dvořák, Symphony No. 9, From the New World  

See America through the eyes of composers and visual artists in the Princeton Symphony Orchestra (PSO)'s annual collaboration with the Art Museum. Join the PSO at the Art Museum after the concert for a reception and a free, self-guided tour focusing on American portraits and landscapes.

Purchase concert tickets by visiting princeton.edu/utickets or by calling University Ticketing at (609) 258-5000.

Memory and the Work of Art 

Things Go On

Thursday, September 22, 6 p.m.

The Lewis Center for the Arts, 185 Nassau Street; reception to follow

Renowned artist Christian Boltanski will discuss light, memory, and reconstructions of the past with Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Mark Stevens. Born in Paris in 1944, Boltanski creates mixed-media installations that explore the ephemera (and tenacity) of human experience. Autel Chases (currently on view in the Museum) includes class pictures taken at a Jewish school in Vienna in 1931, anonymous portraits hung like the panels of a medieval altarpiece. Lamps both illuminate and obscure the photographs--drawing our attention to unnamed victims of the Holocaust--and powerfully describe the challenge of representing wrenching trauma even as hope endures.  

Learn more about the MEMORY AND THE WORK OF ART Distinguished Lecture Series. 

MEMORY AND THE WORK OF ART is a collaborative investigation into the relationship between the arts and cultural memory.

Distinguished Lecture Series 

Exhibitions 

Performances and Concerts 

Readings and Lectures 

Credits (top to bottom):

Princeton University Art Museum. Photo: Bruce M. White.

Students line up to attend the Nassau Street Sampler at the Museum. Photo: Frank Wojciechowski  

Lynne Cohen, Canadian, born Racine, Wisconsin, 1944: Motel Room, 1979. Gelatin silver print, 19 x 24.5 cm. Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund (2010-70). © 1979, Lynne Cohen / photo: Bruce M. White. 

Mark Rothko, American, 1903-1970: No. 3 / No. 13, 1949. Oil on canvas, 216.5 x 164.8 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Bequest of Mrs. Mark Rothko through The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. (428.1981). © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 

Lara St. John / © Paul Clancy  

Christian Boltanski, French, born 1944: Autel Chases, 1987-88. Photographs, metal boxes, and electric lights, assembled: h. 222 cm., w. 290 cm. Gift of Patti and Frank Kolodny (2004-45 a-vv). © 1988, Christian Boltanski / image used with permission from the Marian Goodman Gallery. 

Reproduction of all images is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without written permission from the copyright holder. © 2011 Princeton University Art Museum