The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is pleased to present Bodies and Shadows: Caravaggio and His Legacy, an exhibition devoted to the legacy of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 – 1610), one of the most influential painters in European history. The exhibition was co-organized by LACMA, the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, under the auspices of FRAME (French Regional American
Museum Exchange), an international consortium to which all four museums
belong.
Caravaggio’s striking realism, violent contrasts of light and darkness,
and ability to express powerful emotions were as surprising to his
contemporaries as they are to us today. In this exhibition many of the
innovations introduced by Caravaggio were adopted by painters from
different countries, backgrounds, and influences. In this exhibition an unprecedented eight paintings by Caravaggio himself will be shown together
for the first time in California. Fifty more paintings document his
influence on a host of painters from France, Spain, and the Netherlands,
including Georges de La Tour, Gerrit van Honthorst, Velázquez, and Simon
Vouet.
“The four-hundredth anniversary of Caravaggio’s death in 2010 triggered
many exhibitions throughout the world. These have generated new
scholarship, reattributions of paintings and an ongoing fascination with
Caravaggio and the Caravaggesque painters,” says J. Patrice Marandel, the
Robert H. Ahmanson Chief Curator of European Art at LACMA, “Our exhibition
has benefited from this new research and will present to the public
unexpected aspects of the subject.”
Bodies and Shadows: Caravaggio and His Legacy first opened simultaneously in two French venues, the Musée Fabre in Montpellier and the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse (both on view June 23–October 14, 2012). Following
LACMA’s presentation, an edited version of the exhibition will travel to
the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (March 8–June 15, 2013).