The Corcoran Gallery of Art presents Joan of Arc

Devoted to one of the most fascinating and best known figures of the Middle Ages, the exhibition and accompanying publication explore the life and times of this amazing person and present the history of her image in France and in America over 500 years. The first exhibition on this theme, Joan of Arc features more than 200 works in a wide variety of media. The exhibition will be on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., from November 18, 2006 - January 21, 2007.

Joan of Arc, otherwise known as "Jehanne la Pucelle" or "Joan the Maid," has been admired for centuries in France and around much of the world. The story of her transformation-from an illiterate provincial peasant girl, to a victorious army commander, to a martyr condemned of heresy and burned at the stake, to Catholic saint-remains singular and compelling to a wide international audience.

Central to the exhibition are two treasures from the Corcoran's permanent collection created during the height of Joan of Arc's popularity by the great French artist-illustrator Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel (1850-1913). He created a series of six highly decorative oil and gold-leaf paintings based on the life of Joan of Arc and a brilliantly illustrated deluxe picture book, Jeanne d'Arc (1896). These works inspired the curators of the exhibition, Laura Coyle, art historian and independent curator, formerly at the Corcoran, and Nora M. Heimann, Associate Professor of Art History at The Catholic University, to investigate the complex historical, social and artistic contexts for a range of Joan of Arc representations, including those found in paintings, sculpture, illustrated books and manuscripts, textiles and popular art.

Images of Joan of Arc range from icons of martial ascendancy and nationalist unity to paragons of humble piety and maidenly purity. Her likenesses have been deployed not only as symbols for the power of the people, but also to support the divine right of kings. A model of female fortitude, Joan has contrarily been represented as defiantly androgynous. She has further personified sentiments as varied as independent-minded patriotism and saintly devotion to the Church. Representations of Joan on view in the exhibition vary in scope and purpose from a doodle in the margin of a fifteenth-century manuscript chronicling Joan's lifting of the English siege of Orleans, to major nineteenth-century paintings for the Paris Salon calculated to appeal to specific, often politically powerful, audiences, to documents such as photographs, postcards, programs and other memorabilia related to the elaborate processions and pageants in France and the United States celebrating Joan's canonization in 1920.

Organized chronologically, the exhibition begins with some of the earliest known images and descriptions of Joan. These images include illustrated manuscripts and rare books from the collections of the Library of Congress, Bryn Mawr College, Columbia University and Harvard University. Also on view are facsimiles and partial translations of the earliest surviving trial transcripts. These revealing, detailed documents record two trials, the first, the condemnation or inquisition trial that sentenced Joan to death for heresy in 1431, and the second, the rehabilitation trial, held twenty-four years later, which overturned the earlier verdict. The trial transcripts are the main primary source of information about Joan of Arc and the reason we know so much about her life.

Laura Coyle, one of the exhibition's curators, said, "Joan of Arc was without a doubt one of the most intriguing women who ever lived, and her image is as varied as it is powerful." Ms. Coyle continued, "Not long after her death, literary and visual representations of her began to circulate widely and set important precedents for how she would be portrayed in the centuries to come. The bold warrior; the pious Catholic; the fashionable courtier; the loyal subject; the doomed prisoner-Joan appears in each of these guises time and again. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new types of portrayals joined more traditional ones. These representations included Joan of Arc as a willing martyr, a robust peasant, a courageous patriot, and a resolute adolescent. Interest in Joan of Arc was and is universal, but the meaning of her image is specific, inflected by its time and place."

Nora Heimann, the exhibition's co-curator, said, "In tracing the many representations of Joan of Arc's image over time, it is evident that her persona has served as a resonant site of symbolic meaning. In assessing the achievement of Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel in describing this remarkable young woman's life, it seems clear that the artist and illustrator's greatest achievement was in recognizing the complexity and richness of her enduring symbolic potential, at the same time that he celebrated her very real humanity."

The exhibition features work in a variety of media. Of particular interest are authentic fifteenth-century arms (Metropolitan Museum of Art); rare illuminated manuscripts and illustrated books (Library of Congress, Bryn Mawr College Library, National Gallery of Art); several illustrated volumes of Voltaire's provocative and satirical epic poem, La Pucelle (The Maid; Library of Congress and private collection); rare nineteenth-century French toile textiles with Joan of Arc motifs (Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution); paintings, including William Hamilton's Joan of Arc and the Furies (1789; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Art Center, Vassar College), based on Shakespeare's vitriolic portrayal of Joan, and Alphonse Mucha's art nouveau masterpiece of the American star of the stage, Maude Adams, as Friedrich Schiller's Maid of Orleans (1909; Metropolitan Museum of Art); posters by Eugène Grasset of French actress Sarah Bernhardt as Joan of Arc in Barbier's Paris production (Courtesy the Trustees of the Boston Public Library); a recently restored, gilded reduction of Emmanuel Frémiet's monument in Paris (Bryn Mawr College); documentation relating to Anna Hyatt Huntington's famous bronze equestrian monument of Joan of Arc erected in 1915 in New York City (Maier Museum of Art, Library of Congress, The Hispanic Society of America), a site that became a rallying place during World War I in support of the allied troops; war bond posters and anti-German propaganda (Library of Congress); and French and American memorabilia related to Joan's beatification in 1909 and canonization in 1920 (Columbia University, Boston Public Library, Catholic University).

In addition, an entire section is devoted to the Joan of Arc watercolors (Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester), illustrations, books and paintings by Boutet de Monvel. Included are breathtaking, rarely exhibited watercolor studies for the artist's Jeanne d'Arc. Although Boutet de Monvel is under-recognized today, he was one of the most talented artists of his generation and was widely admired in the United States, as well as in France. Senator William A. Clark (1839-1925), one of the Corcoran's great patrons and one of the most important collectors of French art in America during the Gilded Age, commissioned the Joan of Arc paintings (now at the Corcoran) directly from the artist to hang in the smoking and billiards room of his mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Now, with the groundbreaking exhibition on this subject, the Corcoran presents its impressive Boutet de Monvel holdings in a fresh and thought-provoking light and offers an opportunity for audiences to understand better the life and times of the historical Joan of Arc and the lasting power of her image.

BIOGRAPHY OF JOAN OF ARC

Joan of Arc's life and deeds are very well documented, mainly because of her testimony at her Trial of Condemnation in 1431, and the testimonies of many of her contemporaries at her Trial of Rehabilitation in 1455-56, have been preserved. Born to Jacques D'Arc and Isabelle Romée in about 1412 in the small village of Domremy in eastern France, Joan grew up surrounded by the constant skirmishes and violent raids of the Hundred Years War between the French Armagnacs and the English, who were allied with the French Burgundians. Joan and other members of her village were fierce partisans of the Armagnacs. In 1418, their weak leader, the Dauphin Charles, fled English-occupied Paris for Chinon, a town south of the Loire.

Joan began to hear voices in about 1424 that ultimately urged her to perform two deeds: first, to raise the siege of Orleans, laid by the English against the French Armagnacs on October 12, 1428, and second, to bring the Dauphin to the Cathedral in Rheims to be properly crowned Charles VII, King of France. The besieged city of Orleans, on the Loire River, was crucial strategically because it was the last major city still held by the French between the river and the Mediterranean. Bringing the Dauphin Charles to be crowned Charles VII at the Cathedral was also significant because the coronation would bestow much needed legitimacy on his claim for the throne.

Although Joan was a peasant who could neither read nor write, she convinced the King's agent in Vaucouleurs, a town near Domremy, to provide her with horses and escorts to go to Chinon. From that time on, she donned men's clothing and kept her hair cropped short, in the style of a fashionable young man. She arrived in Chinon in March 1429, met with the Dauphin and by the end of the next month she had left with an army for Orleans. After several battles, Joan and her soldiers drove the English from Orleans, lifting the siege. After more successful campaigns, Joan convinced the Dauphin to travel with her and her army through enemy territory to Rheims, rightly predicting that the sites along the way held by the English would fall as they approached. The coronation of Charles VII took place on July 17, 1429. This was the highpoint of Joan's success.

Joan of Arc continued to fight the English, but she lost several battles and eventually was captured and held for ransom, a very common practice. King Charles VII, however, refused to pay for her release. After spending eight months in various prisons, she was transferred to the tower of Rouen in 1430 on Christmas Day and to the custody of Bishop Cauchon for an inquisition trial, begun in January 1431. The trial lasted for months, and finally, completely exhausted and threatened with death by fire, she signed a retraction she could not read and was sentenced to prison for life. One of her crimes was wearing male apparel. Within a few days of the verdict, Joan put on men's clothing that was left in her cell. The court ruled she was a relapsed heretic, and the next day, May 30, 1431, she was burned at the stake.

Twenty-four years later she was exonerated in a Trial of Rehabilitation. She was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1920.

BIOGRAPHY OF LOUIS-MAURICE BOUTET DE MONVEL (1850-1913)

"To see on paper a representation of Joan of Arc that matches the image the heart makes of her, one must open the book by Boutet de Monvel." (1913) Jean-Louis Vandoyer, who wrote Boutet de Monvel's obituary for a major French journal, was writing about the captivating illustrations in his book Jeanne d'Arc (1896), an enormously popular picture book written and illustrated by Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel (1850-1913), that by the time of the artist-illustrator's death had been translated into several languages. One of the most influential illustrators of children's books, Boutet de Monvel was also a successful painter. He studied with a number of the leading artists of his day, including Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889) and Charles Emile Auguste Carolus Duran (1838-1917), and beginning in 1874 he often participated in the annual Paris Salon. In 1881, he illustrated his first publication, a book about France and its history intended for French schoolchildren, Le France en-zigzag by Eudoxie Dupuis. From that time on, he drew winsome illustrations for children's books such the fables of La Fontaine (1888) and for numerous French and American magazines. Boutet de Monvel's one-person exhibition in 1899 of more than 90 works at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was a tremendous critical and popular success, and he was a highly sought-after portrait painter at home and abroad. He is best known, however, for his works about Joan of Arc, which include extraordinary watercolors (1895), trade and luxury editions of Jeanne d'Arc, a picture book (1896), a 22 1/2 foot long mural with life-sized figures depicting Joan of Arc appealing to the Dauphin Charles VII (1899; now lost), and the finely executed cycle of six paintings in oil and gold leaf (1905-1911) at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

The enormous mural, which won a gold medal at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900, was intended to be one of several for a new basilica dedicated to Joan of Arc near her village of Domremy. Boutet de Monvel was forced to give up the project because of his failing health, but in 1905 he accepted a commission to paint a cycle of six paintings about Joan of Arc from American millionaire "Copper King," Senator William A. Clark of Montana. Clark's paintings decorated the Gothic-style "Great Hall" for smoking and billiards in his mansion of more than 130 rooms on Fifth Avenue. Exhibited as they were completed at the Salon to rave reviews, the Joan of Arc paintings for Clark were installed in Clark's enormous French-inspired pile in 1912. When Senator Clark died in 1925, he left his collection to the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Since the paintings went on view in 1928 with the opening of the Clark Wing, they have remained among the most popular and unusual works in the Corcoran's collection.

The titles of the Joan of Arc paintings at the Corcoran are: The Vision and the Inspiration (c. 1907 - early 1909), Her Appeal to the Dauphin (1906), On Horseback: The Maid in Armor (c. 1908 - late 1909), depicting Joan of Arc and her army setting out to raise the siege at Orleans, The Turmoil of Conflict (c. late 1909 - early 1913), featuring the Battle of Patay, The Crowing at Rheims of the Dauphin (1907) and The Trial of Joan of Arc (c. late 1909 - early 1910).

The luxury edition book is Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel, Jeanne d'Arc, no. 77, Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie. (1896). Each of the 48 pages is a separate color lithograph; the lithographs are housed in a folding, fabric-covered cardboard portfolio, tied with a silk ribbon. The Corcoran also owns several early French- and English-language trade editions of this publication.

By www.corcoran.org