CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Museum of Art just purchased a flower tower of power. It’s an elaborate, 17th-century Dutch “Flower Pyramid,” made in tin-glazed earthenware.
Blue-and-white pottery from the city of Delft in the Netherlands, of which the flower pyramid is an example, was considered hot stuff by17th-century European collectors, especially English royalty. When stuffed with cut flowers, the tapering, six-tiered hexagonal ceramic would create a pyramid of flowers, as its name indicates.
Previous owners of the piece included the 20th-century fashion, royal portrait and war photographer Sir Cecil W.H. Beaton (1904–1980), who was played by actor Mark Tandy in the first two seasons of the Netflix series “The Crown.”
The museum announced the purchase as part of its latest round of acquisitions, along with drawings by 17th-century Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck; 19th-century French Symbolist Gustave Moreau, and 20th-century artists Fernand Léger, Joseph Stella and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
The museum bought the flower pyramid in March from Aronson Delftware Antiquairs, Amsterdam, at The European Fine Art Foundation, TEFAF, in Maastricht. The Aronson website called the 1690 work a masterpiece.
Aronson and the museum attributed the ceramic to Adrianus Kocx, owner of the Greek A factory, considered by the museum “the most prestigious of 34 workshops and potteries active in Delft at the end of the 17th century.”
The vase stands on “paw feet” with a hexagonal base with arches framing panels representing allegorical figures, including Faith, Hope and Love. The flower spouts are made of open-mouthed fantasy animals, Aronson said on its website.
Aronson and the museum said that the flower pyramid was installed at Beaton’s home, Reddish House, Wiltshire, England, from before 1957 until his death in 1980.
The museum’s other recent purchases include:
“Jonah Cast Out by the Whale onto the Shore of Nineveh,’’ 1566, by Maarten van Heemskerck
Jonah gets a reprieve after three days and nights in the belly of a whale, as depicted in this 1566 drawing by Maarten van Heemskerck, newly acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art.Cleveland Museum of Art
The pen-and-ink drawing depicts the climactic episode in which the Hebrew prophet Jonah was disgorged by a fish safely on shore, three days after having been tossed overboard by his shipmates and swallowed by the hungry creature.
Strongly influenced by the Italian Renaissance and van Heemskerck’s four-year sojourn in Italy in the 1530s, the drawing was a preparatory work for one of a four-part series of prints inspired by the biblical Book of Jonah, the museum said.
The three other drawings for the series are in museum collections in Boston and in the UK in Oxford and Cambridge. The “Jonah” drawing is the first by van Heemskerck to enter the museum’s collection, although the artist is already represented by his 1540-45 “Portrait of Machtelt Suijs,” one of the most impactful paintings on view in Gallery 118, devoted to Italian Renaissance art.
“The Good Samaritan,’’ circa 1865-70, by Gustave Moreau
“The Good Samaritan,” made in 1865–70 by Gustave Moreau, is the Cleveland Museum of Art’s first artwork by this important French Symbolist painter.Cleveland Museum of Art
Moreau is widely credited with having launched Symbolism, a late 19th-century movement in European art that veered away from realism to realms of the imagination. The “Good Samaritan” is the museum’s first work by the artist.
Moreau was widely known for his ornate, dreamlike pieces based on religion and mythology. His art featured strongly in the 1884 novel, whose title is translated as “Against Nature,” or “Against the Grain,” by J.K. Huysman, still considered the last word in French cultural decadence. The story profiles the eccentric life of an aesthete, who withdrew from the world to live among treasures, including paintings by Moreau and a jewel-encrusted tortoise that crawled on Persian rugs.
The museum’s drawing presents a scene from the Good Samaritan, a New Testament parable that tells the story of a traveler who is robbed, beaten and left for dead along the roadside. After being ignored by several passersby, he ultimately obtains aid from an unlikely source: a man from Samaria, whose beliefs and religion are ideologically opposed to his own. The story, as recounted by the museum, focuses on mercy and humanity.
“Free Horizontal-Vertical Rhythms,” 1919, Sophie Taeuber-Arp
“Free Horizontal-Vertical Rhythms,” 1919. by Sophie Taeuber-Arp, has joined the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.Cleveland Museum of Art
A painting in gouache on paper, the colorful work by Taeuber-Arp reflects the years immediately after World War I, when she explored color and geometry, building on her previous work alongside her husband, Jean Arp, and other members of Zürich Dada, a movement that brought together artists who were in exile in the Swiss city during the war.
“Still Life with Bottle,’’ 1923, by Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger created “Still Life with Bottle” in 1923, just a few years after his painting “The Aviator,” also in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.Cleveland Museum of Art
In the years after World War I, Léger became known for a particular brand of Cubism depicting the modern world as a realm of graphic signs and abstracted, mechanized bodies.
By 1920, as the museum notes, the French artist had developed Purism, the style for which he is best known today. “He focused on depicting recognizable imagery with pure and precise lines, using an objectivity that has been seen as responding to the chaos of war.”
The museum’s newly acquired “Still Life with Bottle” dates from the height of his exploration of Purism and follows by just a few years the museum’s 1920 “The Aviator,” also by Léger, on view in Gallery 223.
“Man Reading a Newspaper,’’ 1918, by Joseph Stella
Italian-American artist Joseph Stella, famous for his depictions of the Brooklyn Bridge, made his Cubist drawing/collage of a man reading a newspaper in 1918.Cleveland Museum of Art
Best known for his abstracted and atmospheric paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge, Joseph Stella was deeply influenced by the cavalcade of 20th-century “isms” — the movements in modern art that unfolded rapidly after 1900, including Cubism, Fauvism and Futurism.
Born in 1877, Stella immigrated to the U.S. in 1896 from Muro Lucano in the southern Italian province of Basilicata. He intended to study medicine, but soon became fascinated by art. He traveled in Europe before World War I, connecting with avant-garde figures, including Gertrude Stein. He returned to New York in 1913.
The museum calls “Man Reading a Newspaper” an “exceptional example of American Cubist collage” that shows his interest in immersing the viewer in sensations of urban life.
“The figure for which the work is titled is barely discernible in the jutting, planar ovals throughout the sheet, leaving him only to be identified by formal clues, such as his white collar, the brim of his hat and, most significantly, a piece of newspaper affixed to the sheet,” the museum said in its new release.
“The drawing exemplifies a technique that he worked in frequently for over three decades and termed Macchine Naturali or “natural machines.”
