'Gods and heroes'

Epic show traces roots of aesthetics

A title doesn’t get much more epic than “Gods and Heroes.”

But, it aptly describes the upcoming exhibit at the Portland Art Museum, a collection of paintings from école de Beaux-Arts, the original school of fine arts in Paris and repository for work by Europe’s renowned 17th-century artists.

Opening June 13 and closing Sept. 13 at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave. (www.portlandartmuseum.org), the exhibit of some 140 paintings, sculptures and works on paper date from antiquity through the 19th century, and it focuses on themes of courage, sacrifice and death.

Featured works include paintings by Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Anne-Louis Girodet and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, sculptures by Antoine-Louis Barye, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Jean-Antoine Houdon and Francois Rude, and drawings by Simon Vouet, Antoine-Jean Gros and Théodore Géricault.

You’ll look at art and be transported back in time, with the carefully delineated anatomy, expressive faces and convincing architectural and landscape settings — the tenets of success for painters, sculptors and sketch artists at école, an ideology rooted in the study of idealized human form.

Deeds of gods and heroes are depicted, from Biblical times and the works of Homer, in which academicians drew inspiration.

“’Gods and Heroes’ will offer unique insight into the development of an aesthetic ideology that fostered some of the western art’s most magnificent achievements,” the Portland Art Museum states.

The exhibition also will feature works that served as models for the students, including ancient sculpture, a drawing by Raphael and prints by Albrecht Durer and Rembrandt van Rijn.

To appreciate the exhibit more, Emmanuel Schwartz, guest curator from école, has written a major essay within a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue.

There’ll be public tours, starting this month: 3 p.m. June 13 and 14, June 20, June 28; and 1 p.m. June 25.

There is a Curator in Conversation talk scheduled for 2 p.m. June 14, involving Schwartz, as well as Dawson Carr, The Janet and Richard Geary curator of European Art at PAM, and Michelle Hargrave, curator of exhibitions for the American Federation of Arts.

Kathleen Nicholson, professor emeritus in the Department of the History of Art & Architecture at the University of Oregon, talks about female, art and academy influences in France in “Making a Case for Goddesses and Heroines,” 2 p.m. July 26.

There’ll be walking tours at 10 a.m. Aug. 1 and 8, and music by Chamber Music Northwest, noon July 2. The film “Jason and the Argonauts” will be shown in the museum’s courtyard at dusk July 16.