CLEVELAND — The next time you head to the Cleveland Museum of Art, you’ll notice new pieces of art added to the museum’s diverse collection, including a rare Korean knife sheath, a painted Andean drum and a contemporary painting from a groundbreaking artist who achieved fame very late in life.
1. Carmen Herrera’s Mardi Soir
The first new piece of art acquired by the museum is a contemporary painting from a Cuban-born artist who was under-appreciated for much of her life, largely due to her gender. She did not achieve commercial success until her 90s, and her first major museum retrospective occurred at the age of 100.
Carmen Herrera began painting abstract work in the 1940s before spending time in Paris and settling in New York in the 1950s. It’s in New York where she honed her trademark minimalist aesthetics. The Cleveland Museum of Art said her work of angular forms in the 1960s and 1970s blossomed and she continued this work until her death. Her paintings from this period are most highly prized by museums and collectors today.
Because of her notoriety and success later in life, few paintings by Herrera survived. Mardi Soir was saved in the artist’s personal collection after her death at the age of 106 in 2022.
2. Knife Sheath
The Goryeo dynasty (918-1392) is celebrated in Korean Art as the golden age of sophisticated artistry. Due to frequent invasions and Korea's modern colonial history, many of the works from this dynasty were lost or destroyed. The gilt-silver knife sheath, which was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art, is only one of about 10 well-preserved 12th-Century Goryeo period knife sheaths known to still exist today.
This knife sheath will be displayed in the center of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Korean gallery.
3. Two Standing Apostles
The acquisition of these 15th-Century sculptures build on the museum’s collection of medieval art. The statues were part of an altarpiece most likely with the crucified Christ in the center. The apostles have lost their attributes and hands, but still are among the few examples of alabaster sculpture from the 1400s. The Apostles are examples of work from the so-called International Gothic style of the 1400s.
The statues will be featured in an upcoming exhibition that opens in the Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery on Mach 6, 2023.
4. Painted Drum
The museum said it's exceedingly rare for an object made of perishable materials to survive from the years 500-1000 A.D. During the time of Spanish conquest, music was so important to Indigenous Andean ceremonial life that the Spaniards destroyed thousands of musical instruments to hasten their conversion to Christianity. While both men and women played drums, the museum said that based on the small size of it, the drum likely belonged to a woman.
Except for a small, gold flute, the CMA’s collection contains no Andean musical instruments. This drum is a key contribution to representing Andean art production.
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