NEW YORK, Dec. 18 -- A blockbuster exhibit of paintings and sculpture focusing on five fundamental human emotions will be the centerpiece of the Olympics Arts Festival in Atlanta next summer, the brainchild of the National Gallery of Art's former director, J. Carter Brown. Brown, who headed the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., for 22 years before retiring in 1992, said designing a show to accompany the Olympics wasn't easy. 'We had to find a concept that would be truly global,' Brown said Monday at a presentation of his plan in New York to Olympics backers. 'The subject we chose was suggested by the five rings the Olympic Games uses as its symbol.' The rings were matched with ruling human passions -- love, anguish, awe, triumph and joy -- under the title 'Rings: Five Passions in World Art.' The exhibition will include 125 paintings and sculpture spanning 75 centuries that depict these emotions. The exhibition will open July 4 at Atlanta's High Museum of Art, a sleekly modern showcase noted for its light, airy interior. It will run through Sept. 29, occupying two entire floors of the museum. Brown said the art was drawn from almost every part of the world and will include Mexican ceramics, Eskimo art, and Polynesian spirit figures as well as works by such well-known Western artists as Rembrandt van Rijn, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Caspar David Friedrich, Edvard Munch, Auguste Rodin, Vincent van Gogh, Constantin Brancusi, and Henri Matisse. Most works will be on loan from museums.
The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, is sending one of its most prized possessions, Matisse's huge 'Dance (II),' hidden away as degenerate art during the Stalinist era, to be exhibited in the section of the show illustrating joy. In the love section, the act of kissing will be depicted in works as varied as Rodin's 'The Kiss' from the Musee Rodin in Paris and Brancusi's 'Kiss' from the Craiova Museum in Romania to a 10th century Chinese scroll painting from the Palace Museum in Taipei and an 11th century sculpture from India loaned by the Cleveland Museum. The section on anguish will include Munch's 'The Scream,' a crucifixion from Mexico, and a sculpture by the contemporary Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz. In the section devoted to triumph, there will be an original Greek Olympics prize jar decorated with a picture of an athlete being crowned by the goddess Nike, who represented victory. American art will be represented by a variety of works, including one of Frederic Edwin Church's expansive 19th century landscapes in the awe section, black artist William H. Johnson's painting, 'Jitterbugs,' and a video installation by Bill Viola. The show will have its own soundtrack put togther by Leon Botstein, a noted orchestral conductor and educator, which can be heard on a rented audiotape. 'There is no stronger way of reinforcing emotions than with music,' Brown said, adding that visitors also will be provided with free pamphlets containing basic information about each art object. 'Rings' has been curated by Ned Rifkin, director of the High Museum, and produced by the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games Cultural Olympiad on a budget of $3 million. 'The show will bring togther works of truly exceptional artistic power and beauty -- not simply a loose assemblage of important or famous objects, but an exhibition emboyding the spirit of the occasion,' Brown said. 'The excitement of the enterprise to me has been the opportunity that the arts allow us of arching over our differences, not only in space but in time, over the millenia. As far as we know, this is the first major exhibition ever to be organized according to the varieties of emotional impact evoked by works of art,' he said. 'Rings' will be one of 22 exhibitions, 225 performances and other events comprising the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival. The High Museum's downtown branch will mount an exhibition of 200 photographs reflecting the history and culture of the southern United States from the Civil War era to the present, titled 'Picturing the South.'
