PRESS RELEASE
November 7, 2002
Levitine Celebration Features Reception and
Lecture by Art History Prof. Arthur Wheelock, Jr.
The University of Maryland, College Park, Libraries will sponsor a Celebration of the George Levitine Collection, housed in Hornbake Library, on Thursday afternoon, November 14, featuring a lecture by UM Art History Professor Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., who is also curator of Northern Baroque painting at the National Gallery of Art. His topic will be: “Written Words and Their Painted Images in Dutch Art.”
The program will begin with Professor Wheelock’s lecture at 5:30 p.m. in the Maryland Room of Hornbake Library, followed by a reception at 6:30 p.m. in the Hornbake Library Lobby. The public is invited to attend both events.
Mrs. Eda Levitine generously donated the 2,000-volume collection of her late husband Dr. George Levitine, distinguished scholar of art history and founding chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Maryland. The Art Library and Special Collections in Hornbake Library share this magnificent collection of valuable rare books, which features early works on French art, artists, cultural analysis, and the discussion of matters of tastes and esthetics.
An expert on seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art,
Professor Wheelock
has received numerous grants, including one from the
National Endowment for the Humanities. He has received a number of distinctions
throughout his career, and has been named a Knight Officer in the Order
of Orange-Nassau by the Dutch government. He is author of Perspective,
Optics and Delft Artists around 1650, Jan Vermeer, Vermeer and the Art
of Painting, and Dutch Painting of the Seventeenth Century.
Professor Wheelock has written numerous articles and reviews in prominent art journals. A noted authority on Vermeer and Rembrandt, he also has lectured widely on those two masters. Among the exhibitions Professor Wheelock has organized for the National Gallery are Gods, Saints and Heroes, Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt, Dutch Painting of the Golden Age from the Royal Picture Gallery, Mauritshuis, Frans Hals, Anthony Van Dyck, Johannes Vermeer, and Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller. He is currently preparing a catalogue of Flemish Paintings at the National Gallery of Art.
“Celebration of the George Levitine Collection” is the fifth activity in the Libraries’ ongoing Hornbake Showcase celebrating the valuable and unique Special Collections located there. More information on other Showcase programs is available at: www.lib.umd.edu/HBK/showcase. For more information about the Celebration, contact Douglas McElrath, Curator, Marylandia & Rare Books, at 301-405-9210.
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