Exhibition Talk with Daniella Berman, PhD on Julien Lignier (1872-1932)
On view from January 22 – March 8. 2025
Victoria Munroe Fine Art will present an exhibition of over 30 natural history watercolors by French artist and mycologist Julien Alphonse Lignier (1872-1932). Lignier was a French career military commander who applied his talents in drawing and watercolor to an extensive project of depicting myriad fungi, including mushrooms, molds, and spores and growths on flowers, bark, plant leaves, and herbs. From his retirement in 1922 until his death in 1932, he produced thousands of these detailed watercolors and drawings each with scientific inscriptions, a feat which earned him the nickname “the portraitist of mushrooms” from fellow amateur mycologists. The Botanical Library of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle – Jardin des Plantes in Paris acquired 5,000 sheets in 1975.
Daniella Berman is an art historian, curator, and researcher based in New York City. She holds a B.A. from Yale University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Daniella has contributed to many publications and exhibitions, including Horace Vernet, (Château de Versailles, 2024), and Jacques-Louis David: Radical Draftsman, (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022). She is co-editor of Duke House and the Making of Modern New York: Lives and Afterlives of a Fifth Avenue Mansion (Brill, 2022). She’s had fellowships and positions at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, the National Gallery of Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to her position as Head of Special Projects and Strategic Initiatives for The Drawing Foundation, Berman serves as Vice President of the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) and an at-large board member for the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA).
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This event is organized by Victoria Munroe Fine Art in association The Drawing Foundation and Master Drawings New York 2025.
Image: Julien Lignier, 1768. Aecidium Berberidis, 1925. Watercolor, ink on paper.
Registration is NOT required for this event.