Preview Gala
December 5, 2024
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Featuring loans from two important private family collections never before seen together, along with pieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, this bijoux exhibition of cars, sculpture, and furniture will illuminate the multigenerational ambition and creativity of the Bugatti. Among the highlights are eight bronze sculptures from the Arsidi-Scuderi Collection of Lugano, Switzerland, and five rare Bugatti cars from an Eastern Shore collection: two grand prix race cars, two Type 57 touring cars, and a miniature “Baby.”

The exhibition will explore the rich artistic and technological legacies of the peripatetic Bugatti family, beginning with patriarch Carlo Bugatti (1856-1940). His fin-de-siècle furniture designs, which debuted at international expositions in London, Paris, Milan, and Turin, are noteworthy for their fanciful combination of materials: ebonized wood inlaid with copper, brass, ivory, mother-of-pearl, and vellum, which he often decorated with leather tassels, geometric marquetry, and painted designs. Sons Ettore (1881-1947) and Rembrandt (1884-1916) inherited their father’s artistic passion but pursued different paths. Rembrandt had a tragically brief career as a sculptor, producing deeply empathetic and impressionistic portraits of animals. Ettore, meanwhile, became a celebrated automobile designer. Although he famously declared, “Perfection is never reached,” he pursued it throughout his career. The cars that he and his elder son, Jean (1909-1939), designed came to epitomize the speed and dynamism of modernity. But the cars were much more than machines. As automotive scholar and guest curator Ken Gross has observed, “Everything about Bugatti was artistic: the cars, their advertising, and the enduring joie de vivre associated with the marque.”

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