Mitchell Merling

Mitchell Merling is the Paul Mellon Curator of European Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, succeeding Pinkney L. Near in that position in 2005.^[1] In the Mellon Collection he oversees European art from the Middle Ages to the late 19th century, along with French, British sporting art, and American art. In addition, he is the curator of the Gans collection of English silver and oversees the acquisition of the Frank Raysor collection of around 10,000 European and American prints. He previously served as Curator of European Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.^[2][3]

Education

Merling's undergraduate study was at Vassar College. He received his Master of Arts in 1986 and PhD in 1992 from Brown University, and he is a lifelong member of the Brown Alumni Association (BAA).^[4] He held predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. While at the National Gallery he contributed to the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue "Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries",^[5] a volume on Italian Baroque painting as well as to the "Glory of Venice" exhibition catalogue, co-produced with London's Royal Academy.^[6]

Major exhibitions

In 2014 his exhibition catalog for Catching Sight: The World of the British Sporting Print was written with Malcolm Cormack and Corey Piper and published by the VMFA.^[7][8]

The renowned Fabergé collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Art^[9] was shown in Richmond and shared on an international tour with other museums,^[10] including the Palace Museum in Beijing, China.^[11] The Fabergé collection returned to the VMFA in 2017.^[12]

In 2013, the exhibition Van Gogh, Manet, and Matisse: The Art of the Flower was curated by Dr. Merling and Heather MacDonald, the Lillian and James H. Clark Associate Curator of European Art at the Dallas Museum of Art. The exhibition was supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and included not only the art of Vincent van Gogh, Édouard Manet, and Henri Matisse but also other artists using the subject of flowers. Other artists included Odilon Redon,^[13] With over 60 paintings by more than 30 artists, this was the first large American exhibition to consider "the French floral still life across the 19th century."^[14] Discussing the exhibition as a collective endeavor, Merling said, "The exhibition was first proposed by me at a FRAME annual meeting, where I was approached by Heather [MacDonald] first as a possible lender (ultimately, DMA loaned six works to the exhibition) and then also as a possible collaborator." He added that the third venue would be at the Denver Art Museum which is also a FRAME member museum, and that, "Many of the loans — especially the earliest core group — came from FRAME museums, including masterpieces by Fantin-Latour from Musée de Grenoble and by Bazille from Musée Fabre, as well as a selection of paintings from the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon that form an entire section of the exhibition."

Museum outreach, public lecturing, and student mentoring

Curating: Fralin Museum of Art at University of Virginia, programming supported by The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. "The story of World War I and the emotions it elicited are told through prints by British and American artists such as Muirhead Bone, Kerr Eby, Childe Hassam, James McBey and Claude Shepperson. The works depict scenes of combat in France and the Near East, life on the home front in the United States and England, and the war’s aftermath and its commemoration. All of the prints come from the Frank Raysor Collection.^[15] Working with students at Mary Washington University.^[16] and Randolph–Macon College.^[17] How to curate a Edna Andrade show at University of Richmond's Harnett Museum of Art. Merling with Jeffrey Allison, Richard Waller, and Christy Williams, assistant vice president of Sotheby's museum services.^[18] He was actively engaged in public outreach press interviews and curatorial statements.^[19] Dr. Merling was a speaker in the series of memorial lectures honoring art historian and former VMFA curator Pinkney L. Near at Richmond's Art6 gallery.

A partnership between VMFA and Google began in 2015 when the museum joined the Google Art Project as part of ARTShare, an open-access initiative which aims to expand opportunities for digital learning, gigapixel images via Google as outreach for the museum. Today a total of 234 high-resolution images from VMFA’s collection are on the Art Project site. Another project under consideration by Merling and the VMFA staff is "Google Gallery View". which allows visitors to take a virtual tour of the museum.^[20]

In 2017 for the statewide Request Program lecture series offered by the VMFA, Dr. Merling's topic was The New 19th Century presenting the past seven years of acquisitions of 19th-century academic and salon paintings featuring the Impressionist paintings in the collections of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.^[21] Rachel "Bunny" Mellon gave her own collection to the VMFA, including everything from baskets, wooden walking sticks and topiaries to paintings by Van Gogh and contemporary art by Rothko to silver pill boxes and elaborate jewelry designs by Jean Schlumberger.^[22] The Mellons donated works by Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Pierre Bonnard to the museum as well as the Mellon collection of British Sporting Art, now the largest public collection of British Sporting Art in the world.

Also in 2017, Merling was a speaker at the Science Museum of Virginia, where he discussed the exhibition of the art, science, and life of Leonardo da Vinci.^[23]

References

External links

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