American Folk Art Exhibitions

February 1, 2014, 9:32 am

American Primitive Paintings from the Collection of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch

Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art May 9 – July 11, 1954

More than 100 portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and genre paintings came from the Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch collection of early American paintings. Since 1944, Colonel and Mrs. Garbisch had assembled the largest private collection of American naive art, more than 1,800 examples, from the early 18th to the late 19th century. Their intention was that the collection would eventually be made available to the public through gifts and loans to museums here and abroad. This first exhibition of paintings was drawn from their first gift of 300 paintings and 200 miniatures. It was coordinated by William P. Campbell.

Robert Peckham, The Hobby Horse, c. 1840. Oil on canvas, 103.5 x 101.6 cm (40 3/4 x 40 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch.

Ralph Eleaser Whiteside Earl, Family Portrait, 1804, oil on canvas, Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1953.5.8

Catalog: American Primitive Paintings from the Collection of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, Part I. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1954.

One Hundred Eleven Masterpieces of American Naive Painting from the Collection of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch

111 paintings from the Garbisch collection were shown. For 25 years Colonel and Mrs. Garbisch had assembled a collection of 2,600 early American paintings for their country estate, "Pokety," in Cambridge, Maryland. 34 of the paintings that were exhibited had been given to the National Gallery, including

Linton Park, Flax Scutching Bee, 1885, oil on bed ticking, Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1953.5.26

General Washington on A White Charger,

and The Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks.

The exhibition was organized and circulated by the American Federation of Arts.

Catalog: American Naive Painting of the 18th and 19th Centuries: 111 Masterpieces from the Collection of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, preface by Lloyd Goodrich, introduction by Albert Ten Eyck Gardner. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1969.

Venues:

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, June 12 – September 1, 1969
Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, February 16–April 18, 1968
Amerika House, Berlin, May 3–June 10, 1968
Palazzo Collicola, Festival of the Two Worlds, Spoleto, June 28–July 14, 1968
Royal Academy of Arts, London, September 6–October 20, 1968
Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, November 7–December 29, 1968
Cason del Buen Ritiro, Madrid, January 15–February 16, 1969
Palacio de la Virreina, Barcelona, February 21–March 16, 1969
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, March 24–April 27, 1969
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, June 12–September 1, 1969
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, November 16, 1969–January 4, 1970
United States Military Academy Library, West Point, January 22–February 15, 1970

American Naive Paintings from the National Gallery of Art

Venues

Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut, January 17 through May 31, 1998.

From a review of the Old Lyme show (including images):

These lively and engaging paintings from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries include portraits, landscapes, history paintings, and scenes of daily life. Such well-known artists as Edward Hicks and Erastus Salisbury Field are represented as well as many painters whose names are not known. These works by largely self-taught artists demonstrate strong design in pleasing colors with a sense of vitality that is just as appealing today as when the works were created.

Farmhouse in Mahantango Valley, American 19th century

While their style has also been called "folk" or "primitive," these artists came from diverse backgrounds and demonstrated varying degrees of sophistication in their art. There were those who had some experience studying with academic painters or working with established studios such as Currier & Ives. Many were amateurs, drawing inspiration from instruction manuals or prints of the day. Several worked simultaneously as artisans in other fields. Others were successful itinerants, traveling through the rapidly growing towns, and countryside working predominantly in established population centers of the northeast.

Boy with Toy Horse and Wagon, William Matthew Prior

During the nineteenth century, the growing wealth and comfort of the American middle class created an expanding market of patrons interested in documenting their images for posterity. Before the spread of photography, they turned to such successful portrait painters as Joshua Johnson, Ammi Phillips, and William Matthew Prior. Many anonymous artists also produced records of family members, and a number of pictures in the exhibition relate to the history of Connecticut including a portrait of an early Stonington family by Denison Limner.

Elizabeth Denison, Denison Limner

While portraits represent the most popular and important segment of naive art, a variety of other themes are displayed in this exhibition including marine, still life, and genre paintings. In the aftermath of the Civil War, artists outside the academic tradition also interpreted historical and biblical events with fresh, expressive visions. Among those presented in the show are

Edward Hick's idyllic Penn's Treaty with the Indians (c. 1840-44).

American Folk Art from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Venues

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, March 2, 1999 - January 2, 2000

New York State Museum, Albany, Feb. 11 to April 23, 2000

The biggest names in American folk art -- Rufus Hathaway, Edward Hicks, Joshua Johnson and Ammi Phillips -- were featured in American Folk Art from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The more than 50 works from The Metropolitan Museum's distinguished collection of American folk art include portraits, landscapes and historical and religious scenes. Featured are such canonical works as

Lady with her Pets (1790) by Rufus Hathaway,

Peaceable Kingdom (ca. 1830-32) by Edward Hicks,

Falls of Niagara (1825) by Hicks

and Mrs. Mayer and Daughter (1835-1840) by Ammi Phillips.

The precise nature of folk art has long been the subject of debate among art historians, critics, folklorists and collectors. The artists may have acquired their skills through apprenticeship, observation or informal learning. Their work adheres to the aesthetic standards of the communities in which they worked.

This exhibition was organized by Carrie Rebora Barratt, Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture and Manager of The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

From a review of the New York City show (including images):

Rufus Hathaway (1770-1822) was only twenty years old when he painted Lady with her Pets (Molly Wales Forbes), one of the best-known portraits by an American country painter. There is no record of Hathaway having had any artistic training and his work shows very little stylistic development over time. Nonetheless, his oeuvre is memorable for its charm, a bold use of color, and mastery of two-dimensional design.

Paintings by Hathaway are rare after 1795, when he forsook this occupation to become a doctor. In Lady with her Pets - Hathaway's earliest known work - the attitude of the sitter, her herisson (or hedgehog-style coiffure), and the almost emblematic arrangement of her pets mimic contemporary French trends in fashion and portraiture, which Hathaway could have known through prints.

Orphaned at a very early age, Edward Hicks (1780-1849) was taken in by a family that raised him in the Quaker tradition. He was apprenticed to a coach maker and showed an early aptitude for painting, which led to employment as a painter of decorations on coaches and of street, shop, and tavern signs. Upon being accepted as a Quaker preacher - contemporary accounts note his extraordinary gifts in this regard - he felt compelled to give up these lucrative and worldly pursuits. He tried farming, but his debts mounted, his health declined, and he still had a family to support. Hicks resolved this dilemma by returning to painting, but focused solely on subject matter of a religious nature.

The Falls of Niagara, ca. 1825
Edward Hicks (American, 1780–1849)
Oil on canvas; 31 1/2 x 38 in. (80 x 96.5 cm)
Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1962 (62.256.3)

Hicks's 1825 painting of The Falls of Niagara shows the cataract from the Canadian side, along with the moose, beaver, rattlesnake, and eagle that have traditionally been used as emblems of North America. Inscribed around the border is an excerpt from Alexander Wilson's poem, "The Foresters." The painting, a sort of visual sermon, can be interpreted as a commemoration of Hicks's missionary work among Native American tribes in upstate New York.

Joshua Johnson (active ca. 1796-1824), Edward and Sarah Rutter, ca. 1805, Oil on canvas, 36 x 32 in. (91.4 x 81.3 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1965 (65.254.3)

Joshua Johnson (active 1796-1824) is the earliest African-American painter in the United States with a recognized body of work. Johnson (whose name is sometimes spelled Johnston) was brought to Baltimore in the 1790s as a slave for a family that was related to Charles Willson Peale, the celebrated portrait painter. Within a decade Johnson became a "freeman of color" and was earning his living as a portrait painter. Although early works show Peale's influence, Johnson soon developed a more personal and less academic style, in which facial features were idealized, while details such as fine lace overlaying another fabric received a very literal treatment. Johnson's affinity for bright, strong colors and precise details can be seen in the portrait of Edward and Sarah Rutter, whose air of stillness gives it an unreal, almost magical feeling.

Mrs. Mayer and Daughter, 1835–40
Ammi Phillips (American, 1788–1865)
Oil on canvas; 37 7/8 x 34 1/4 in. (96.2 x 87 cm)
Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1962 (62.256.2)

Ammi Phillips (1788-1865) was an itinerant portrait painter who settled in one community and then another along the Massachusetts-Connecticut border before moving on in search of commissions. In a career that spanned many years and underwent several stages of evolution and response to the influence of various artists, Phillips facilitated his work (by developing a formulaic approach to portraiture) at the same time that he personalized it (by imaginatively individualizing each one). The portrait of Mrs. Mayer and Daughter shows Phillips's combination of radically simple, elegant outlines with an assured coloristic refinement that borders on the urbane.

Works of art by nearly five dozen other named artists, as well as numerous pieces by unidentified makers, are also on view. Highlights include 27 scenes of city life by the tinsmith William P. Chappel (ca. 1800-1880), a work commemorating the first naval battle in the War of 1812 by Thomas Chambers (1808-after 1866), two religious paintings based on Biblical scenes and a portrait by Erastus Salisbury Field (1805-1900), a patriotic image of George Washington by Frederick Kemmelmeyer (ca. 1755-1821), and a watercolor portrait that was executed jointly by Ruth Whittler Shute (1803-?), who drew the likeness, and her husband Samuel Addison Shute (1803-1836), who painted it in.

Ambrose Andrews (ca. 1801-1877), The Children of Nathan Starr, 1835, Oil on canvas, 28 3/8 x 36 1/2 in. (72.1 x 92.7 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Partial Anonymous Gift, in memory of Nathan Comfort Starr (1896-1981), 1987 (1987.404)

John Bradley (active 1832-1847), Emma Homan, ca. 1844, Oil on canvas, 34 x 27 1/8 in. (86.4 x 68.9 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1966 (66.242.23);

Unidentified artist, Boy with Blond Hair, ca. 1840-50, Oil on canvas, 34 1/2 x 29 1/2 in. (87.6 x 75 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1973 (1973.323.5)

A Shared Legacy: FOLK ART IN AMERICA

Venues

American Folk Art Museum (New York, NY) December 13, 2014 - March 8, 2015
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, MO) March 28 - July 5
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (Memphis, TN) November 7, 2015 - February 28, 2016
Westmoreland Museum of American Art (Greensburg, PA) July 10 2016 - October 2 2016
Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO) October 27, 2016 - January 22, 2017
Society of the Four Arts (Palm Beach, FL) February 11 2017 - March 30 2017
Cincinnati Art Museum (Cincinnati, OH) June 10 2017- September 3 2017

"A Shared Legacy: FOLK ART IN AMERICA" highlights art created by artists in rural areas in New England, the Midwest, and the South between 1800 and 1925 - artists who did not always adhere to the academic models that established artistic taste in urban centers of the East Coast. Included are portraits; vivid still life, landscape, and allegorical paintings; commercial and highly personal sculpture; and distinctice examples of furniture from the German-American community. More than 60 works, including paintings on canvas, panel, and paper by some of the most admired 19th-century American painters; sculpture; and examples of American furniture and other household objects, exemplify the breadth of American creative expression during a period of enormous political, social, and cultural change in the United States.

Rooted in the family as well as the preservation of personal and cultural identity, art was one means by which Americans living far from their places of origin maintained a bond to the lives they had known. As communities were established and became prosperous, many people sought tangible evidence of their success. In Eastern cities, the well-to-do patronized trained artists who had studied at home or abroad. However, to meet the demand of customers who were living far from urban centers, self-taught or minimally-trained artists arose to create art for customers or for their own pleasure. A need for art in outlying areas fostered the emergence of several generations of artists who were responsible for a pivotal development in the history of American art.

"Ammi Phillips, James Mairs Salisbury, oil on canvas, c. 1840"

"Daniel McDowell, Still Life with Watermelons, c.1860, oil on canvas"

"Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom with the Leopard of Serenity, oil on canvas, 1846-48"

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Beckmann & America

February 3, 2014, 11:00 am

≫ Next: AN AMERICAN IN LONDON: WHISTLER AND THE THAMES

≪ Previous: American Folk Art Exhibitions

Also see: MAX BECKMANN

With more than 110 exhibits, including fifty paintings as well as numerous drawings, watercolors, printed graphic works, and sculptures, the show “Beckmann & America” (Frankfurt’s Städel Museum October 7, 2011 – January 8, 2012) offered a comprehensive survey of the fascinating last creative period of Max Beckmann (1884–1950).

After living and teaching in St. Louis from 1947 on, Beckmann finally moved to New York where he also accepted a teaching position and where he died walking through the city in 1950. From the point of view of the artist’s evolution, these years on American soil were decisive: marking a new beginning for and a further development in his work, they will be the subject of a monographic exhibition for the first time.

For Frankfurt am Main, where Beckmann lived, worked, and taught at the Städel School from 1915 to 1933, this project is of special importance: the Städel Museum boasts a rich collection of paintings, drawings, printed graphic works, and sculptures by the artist and has presented a series of exhibitions on specific aspects and periods of his oeuvre. A comprehensive exhibition dedicated to Beckmann was shown as early as 1947. Subsequent shows included, among others, exhibitions focusing on his triptychs (1981), his early paintings (1983), his Frankfurt years (1984), a retrospective (1990/91), as well as presentations of his printed graphic work (2001 and 2006).

The exhibition highlighting the artist’s American years thus concluded the sequence of shows exploring the individual stages of Beckmann’s career.

Max Beckmann lived and taught in the United States from the late summer of 1947 on. It was only after his ten-year exile in Amsterdam that the artist was able to realize his long-cherished plan to emigrate to the United States in 1947. He spent the last and extremely productive years of his life far from Europe. The new continent held numerous encounters with other people, journeys, and impressions in store for the painter. St. Louis, Missouri became his first home in America; he stayed for two years and held a guest professorship at the city’s Washington University.

In the fall of 1949, he moved to New York, where he taught at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Frequent shorter and longer journeys took him to the Midwest, to Chicago, to New Orleans, to Boulder, Colorado, but also to California and the West Coast, for example. The spatial expanses of the foreign continent – its coasts and the atmosphere of its “wild” landscapes, as well as the cosmos of its metropolises – were a new physical experience for Beckmann which became a perceivable source of inspiration for his art. In the midst of his new life, Max Beckmann suffered a heart attack and died on a street corner near New York City’s Central Park.

Three thematically independent exhibitions – “Beckmann & America” in the Städel Museum (October 7, 2011 – January 8, 2012), “Max Beckmann. Face to Face” in the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig (September 17, 2011 – January 22, 2012), and “Max Beckmann. The Landscapes” in the Kunstmuseum Basel (September 4, 2011 – January 22, 2012) – offered the unique opportunity to explore Max Beckmann’s manifold oeuvre in a profound manner.

Curator: Dr. Jutta Schütt (Städel Museum) Assistant: Dr. des. Karoline Feulner (Städel Museum)

From a review (some images added):

Beckmann died suddenly in New York in 1950. About half of the 85 paintings he made during his productive last three years are in this exhibition. Like many of his earlier pieces, they often concentrate on brightly coloured, elongated and sometimes cartoonish human figures, frequently drawn from mythology, history or religion.

Max Beckmann Argonaute 1949-50 205,8 x 122 cm

One of the stars of the show is Beckmann's last triptych, “The Argonauts” (1949-50, pictured), a play on a Greek myth that had intrigued him since he was an exile in Amsterdam.

But there are also earlier works on show, many of which anticipate his arrival in America, the land of his dreams, while also reflecting his traumatic time in Germany and his loneliness in Amsterdam.

“The Liberated One”, a self-portrait painted in Amsterdam in 1937, shows a distressed Beckmann, with the word “Amerika” just decipherable in the bottom left-hand corner. What a contrast to the 1947

“Self-portrait with Cigarette”

in which the painter's fine clothing and the cigarette in his left hand exude self-confidence, despite his rather grim expression.

Max Beckmann Departure, triptych. from the MoMA 2.15 x 3.15 m

The same expression can be seen in a photograph, taken in 1947, of Beckmann in front of his triptych “Departure” (1932-1935). It was the earliest of nine triptychs he painted during his career, and was acquired by New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1942. As soon as he got to New York five years later he visited the painting. In his diary on September 11th 1947 he wrote, “Tomorrow I am supposed to get photographed. Nonetheless I have a rather dark look into the future.” Having lived through the horrors of Hitler's Germany—the left and right panels of the triptych show figures being tortured—and the traumas of exile, his face in the photograph is tight-mouthed, like an Easter-island sculpture, facing the world and waiting for the challenges to come.

More Images

The Descent from the Cross (1917)

was the first of Beckmann’s paintings to enter the collection of the Städtische Galerie at the Städel, having been purchased by former Städel director Georg Swarzenski directly from the artist’s studio in 1919. It was confiscated by the Nazis in 1937 and presented in the exhibition “Degenerate Art.” Today, it is part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Max Beckmann (1884-1950), Backstage, 1950. Oil on canvas, 101 x 127 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2011.

Max Beckmann (1884-1950) The Town. City Night, 1950 Öl auf Leinwand, 164,5 x 190,5 cm Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2011

Max Beckmann Cabin 1948 140,5 x 190,5 cm

Max Beckmann San Francisco 1950 102 x 140 cm

Max Beckmann (1884-1950), The Beginning, 1946-49, Oil on canvas, central panel: 175 x 150 cm; left and right panel: 165 x 85 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Photo: © bpk | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2011.

More images here

Catalogue:

A substantial catalogue with approximately 280 pages and 220 color and 55 black-and white illustrations will be published by Hatje Cantz to accompany the exhibition. Edited by Jutta Schütt, the catalogue will comprise an introduction by Max Hollein and texts by David Anfam, Karoline Feulner, Ursula Harter, Lynette Roth, Stefana Sabin, Jutta Schütt, and Christiane Zeiller. German and English editions.

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AN AMERICAN IN LONDON: WHISTLER AND THE THAMES

February 3, 2014, 12:07 pm

≫ Next: The Sunflowers (Vincent van Gogh)

≪ Previous: Beckmann & America

The Addison Gallery of American Art, located on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., opens its winter exhibition season February 1 with a trio of new shows. An American in London: Whistler and the Thames, which runs through April 13, headlines the winter season, accompanied by two permanent collection exhibitions, Industrial Strength: Selections from the Collection and Eye on the Collection: Artful Poses.

An American in London is the first major exhibition to focus on Whistler’s time in London, during which the artist explored a radical new aesthetic approach to the subject of the city and the river, challenging the art establishment of the time. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1834, James Abbott McNeill Whistler trained in art both in the United States and throughout Europe. After settling in London in 1859, Whistler immersed himself in the life of the city, with a particular focus on the bridges that crossed the Thames as it flowed through the center of London. Taken with the bustling industrial neighborhoods, he depicted the workers and women who frequented the riverside wharves and pubs, the barges that navigated the perilous passage under the bridges, and the steamboats and wherries crowded with daytrippers that paddled up and down Battersea Reach.

Wapping, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

An American in London brings together more than 70 paintings, prints, and drawings from this pivotal period in Whistler’s career, providing a detailed examination of his approach to composition, subject, and technique. Throughout the exhibition, historical photographs and portraits of Whistler and his patrons complement Whistler’s work, bringing to life the neighborhood and people of his world and adding depth to the stories he depicted during this time.

Susan Faxon, Interim Director of the Addison, notes, “Although Whistler has been the subject of many exhibitions, An American in London provides the first focused examination of this important period in his career. We are delighted that the Addison’s

Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge,

which was one of the first paintings Whistler completed after moving to London, will be shown in the context of his other extraordinary work exploring life along the Thames in the Victorian era.”

An American in London, curated by Margaret MacDonald, Professor Emerita of Art History, and Dr. Patricia de Montfort, both from the University of Glasgow, is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

The exhibition, first shown at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, will also travel to the

Freer Gallery of Art | Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (May 2–August 14).

Key lenders to the exhibition include the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Metropolitan Museum of Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Musée d’Orsay; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the British Museum.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Whistler with a Hat (1859). Etching © The Trustees of the British Museum

An American in London is organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, and the Freer Gallery of Art | Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Links to more images and information

From a review: (some images added)

A portrait of The Adam and Eve is a chance to witness remnants of Old Chelsea around the inn as a central subject, as well as a demonstration of Whistler’s evolving specialism.

Horizons are clear and strong, then disappear altogether behind spooky mists. The contrast between the densely-stilted details of

The Last of Old Westminster, from 1862,

and Blue and Gold, the gloom-smothered oil of barely discernible features which provoked such disdain from Ruskin, represents two remarkable views of the river’s past.

Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge, James Abbott McNeill Whistler ©Tate, London 2012

The former painting was shown at the Royal Academy to acclaim. Whistler would draw Battersea Bridge – a difficult one to navigate, and a place where drownings were not uncommon – from the shore and boats.

He described his nocturnes, which are almost uniformly grey and gold, or dark green on a warm summer night, as his attempts to solve puzzles within paintings, and would have first been inspired by Japanese paintings during the late 1850s, the country having been closed to trade before then.

As a complement to An American in London, the exhibition Industrial Strength: Selections from the Collection, on view through April 13, gathers works from the Addison’s permanent collection by artists, who like Whistler, have found inspiration in the industrial landscape. The work in the exhibition explores all aspects of the industrial scene, including laborers, factories, transportation, and infrastructure, through both series of works and individual pieces. Including a range of media and time periods, as well as abstract works that play with hard-edged forms and industrial materials, Industrial Strength features artists as diverse as Edward Hopper, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, O. Winston Link, Peter Vanderwarker, and Siah Armajani.

The exhibition Eye on the Collection: Artful Poses rounds out the Addison’s winter shows and runs through March 30. Featuring works from the 18th through 21st centuries, Artful Poses explores the many ways that portraits both capture the presence of an individual and reveal the shifting social and artistic contexts in which the works have been created. The gaze, garments, furnishings, and well-placed accoutrements—a flower held by a young girl, an open book, a ship in the background—all attest to the status, ambitions, and aspirations of the 18th-century sitter. Portraits from the 19th century, such as Henry Inman’s rosy-faced newsboy and Winslow Homer’s country school teacher, are set in a framework of time and place in scenes that transcend the physical attributes of the sitter. In the 20th century the primacy of photography freed artists in all media to use the portrait for artistic and social purposes. Diane Arbus’s awkward boy with a toy hand grenade and Roy DeCarava’s white-gowned graduate in the gritty urban backyard are tough, touching commentaries on the complexities of American life. Recent self-portraits by Chuck Close and Red Grooms that are both two- and three-dimensional use the idea of portraiture to create intriguing and playful works.

About the Addison Gallery of American Art

Devoted exclusively to American art, the mission of the Addison Gallery of American Art is to acquire, preserve, interpret, and exhibit works of art for the education and enjoyment of all. Opened in 1931, the Addison Gallery has one of the most important collections of American art in the country that includes more than 17,000 works by prominent American artists such as George Bellows, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock, as well as photographers Eadweard Muybridge, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and many more. The Addison Gallery, located on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, offers a continually rotating series of exhibitions and programs, all of which are free and open to the public. For more information, call 978-749-4015, or visit the website at www.addisongallery.org.

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The Sunflowers (Vincent van Gogh)

February 4, 2014, 1:36 pm

≫ Next: Max Beckmann Exhibitions

≪ Previous: AN AMERICAN IN LONDON: WHISTLER AND THE THAMES

National Gallery London
25 January – 27 April 2014

Two versions of Vincent van Gogh’s iconic 'Sunflowers' are being reunited in London for the first time in 65 years in 2014 – giving visitors to the National Gallery a unique opportunity to compare and contrast these much-loved masterpieces side by side, while also exploring research about the artist’s working practices.

From 25 January 2014 (until 27 April) the paintings from the

National Gallery, London,

and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam,

can be seen in Room 46 of the Trafalgar Square gallery.

This free display will also include the results of scientific research into the two paintings carried out by both institutions. These investigations have revealed insights into how Van Gogh painted his 'Sunflowers' and what materials he used – giving us a deeper understanding of the making and meaning of these works of art, and of their relationship to each other.

The paintings are two of the five versions of 'Sunflowers' that are now spread around the world (the others currently residing in

Tokyo, - ( January, 1889
Sompo Japan Museum of Art )

Munich (1888, Neue Pinakothek- New Pinakothek)

and Philadelphia - (1888 or 1889 - Philadelphia Museum of Art ).

The series dates from 1888, when Van Gogh left Paris to paint in the brilliant sunshine of the South of France. He rented a house in Arles – ‘The Yellow House’ – and invited Paul Gauguin to come and join him so the two artists could paint together. Waiting for Gauguin to arrive, Van Gogh painted a series of pictures of sunflowers to decorate his friend’s bedroom. They were meant as a sign of friendship and welcome, but also of Van Gogh's allegiance to Gauguin as his artistic leader.

Vincent wrote to his brother Theo in August 1888:

"I am hard at it, painting with the enthusiasm of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse, which won't surprise you when you know that what I’m at is the painting of some sunflowers. If I carry out this idea there will be a dozen panels. So the whole thing will be a symphony in blue and yellow. I am working at it every morning from sunrise on, for the flowers fade so quickly. I am now on the fourth picture of sunflowers. This fourth one is a bunch of 14 flowers... it gives a singular effect."

Van Gogh had been deeply influenced by Japanese art – the simplicity of the design and the bright, flat colours with bold contour lines were things that he sought in his own work. Colour itself came to have special symbolic meanings – yellow, in particular, referred to warmth and friendship. The dying flowers are built up with thick brushstrokes (impasto), which evokes the texture of the seed-heads. Where there are petals, they are often painted with a single, soft, yellow brushstroke.

Van Gogh and Gauguin worked together throughout autumn 1888 – but it ended very badly at the close of the year when Vincent seemed to have a nervous breakdown, famously cut off part of his ear and entered an asylum.

The National Gallery bought its 'Sunflowers' in 1924 directly from the artist’s family. From that time it has steadfastly remained one of the most popular paintings in the collection, with the image consistently the most purchased postcard and poster.

This unprecedented loan from the Van Gogh Museum is testament to the long and fruitful history of collaboration between the two institutions. The National Gallery 'Sunflowers' was recently seen in Amsterdam in the exhibition 'Van Gogh at Work' (opened 1 May 2013), which marked the re-opening of the Van Gogh Museum following an extensive renovation.

National Gallery Director, Dr Nicholas Penny, said:

"This exhibition is designed to help those for whom the paintings by Van Gogh are compelling images to understand how they were made – and made again – and out of what materials. It will deepen every visitor’s appreciation of the artist. We are very grateful to the Van Gogh Museum for making this possible."

Van Gogh Museum Director, Axel Ruger, added:

"We were honoured to be able to show Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' from the National Gallery side by side with our own version of this painting in our anniversary exhibition 'Van Gogh at Work'. This unique combination offered our audience the opportunity to compare these two famous icons in great detail. I am therefore glad to be able to offer the visitors to the National Gallery this special opportunity as well."

Nice review

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Max Beckmann Exhibitions

February 3, 2014, 12:38 pm

≫ Next: Kazimir Malevich Exhibitions

≪ Previous: The Sunflowers (Vincent van Gogh)

See also Max Beckmann and Beckmann & America,

Max Beckmann, Exile in Amsterdam, 1937-1947
Pinakothek der Moderne Munich
September 13, 2007-January 6, 2008

Max Beckmann (1884-1950) is widely regarded as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. In his use of colour, spatial composition and levels of symbolism Beckmann exerted a major influence on modern art in Germany and beyond. Beckmann himself drew inspiration from the work of the Flemish Primitives and Vincent van Gogh, among others. Above all, it was his daring use of colour that ranked Beckmann alongside Matisse and Picasso as one of the most sensational artists of the first half of the twentieth century. Beckmann succeeded in expressing the mysteries of life like no other painter. He created his own entire lexicon of images, with which he communicated his dreams and fears by means of a highly personal symbolism. The question of the meaning of existence is a dominant presence in his work. Beckmann came to the conclusion that man is not free, but is shackled by earthly chains. He looked on life as a play or a masquerade, in which each person plays their own role.

In 1937 Max Beckmann fled the Nazi terror in Germany to settle in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where he was to live for the next ten years. The immediate cause for his flight was the speech Hitler held at the opening of the Haus der deutschen Kunst (House of German art), just one day before the opening of the Degenerate Art show on 19 July 1937. This speech, in which Hitler clearly threatened modern artists, was broadcast on the radio. Beckmann heard it and immediately packed his bags. Beckmann painted over a third of his entire oeuvre while in the Netherlands. This period may thus justifiably be identified as his most productive. It was here that he produced five of his nine monumental triptychs. These spectacular works of art, comprising a central panel with flanking wings, rank among the icons of modern art. In 1947 Beckmann was given a visa for the United States, where he died after just three years.

The exhibition showed masterpieces from this Amsterdam period, including the three impressive triptychs

Max Beckmann, Carnival (Triptych), 1942-43, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City.

Max Beckmann, The Actors 1942, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts,

and Perseus.

His paintings bear witness to his interest in the world of the cabaret, Dutch landscape and life in Amsterdam. Through his diary, letters, photographs and an impression of his studio, the visitor to the exhibition is given an insight to the life Beckmann lived in Amsterdam.

From an outstanding review: (some images added)

Felix Nussbaum’s Self in Concentration Camp (1940),

a painting included in the exhibition Max Beckmann: Self-Portrait With Horn at the Neue Galerie, is as bleak as the title implies. Wearing a wool cap, a tattered jacket and a lean beard, the artist looks askance with steely distrust. In the background, a figure defecates into a large metal can. There’s barbed wire, a sky the color of steel wool and an air of Boschian portent.

Bosch’s hell couldn’t compare with Hitler’s. While studying in Rome, Nussbaum, a German Jew, heard Hitler’s minister of propaganda advocate for the Nazi ideal of art; Nussbaum realized soon enough that neither he nor his paintings fit the standard. Nussbaum spent the majority of the war in hiding, continuing to paint, and ultimately died in Auschwitz at the age of 39. Self in Concentration Camp has the awful clarity of a foregone conclusion

Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait with Horn, 1938, Oil on canvas, 43-1/4 x 39-3/4", Collection Dr. and Mrs. Stephan Lackner, Santa Barbara, California.

Nussbaum’s painting is diverting enough to make one curious as to what else he did. It’s included in the Neue Galerie exhibition to provide a sense of social and artistic context. There are paintings, drawings and prints—all portraits—by other Beckmann contemporaries as well, but none can equal the brooding power of Self-Portrait with Horn, not even the magisterially detached

Self-Portrait in Front of Red Curtain (1923) by the man himself.

Catalogue

Schulz-Hoffmann, Carla, Christian Lenz, Beatrice von Bormann and Reinhold Baumstark. MAX BECKMANN: Exile in Amsterdam. 440 pp., 231 color and 42 b&w illustrations. 4to, cloth. Osfildern, HatjeCantz, 2007.

More images from the exhibition:

Max Beckmann, Dream of Monte Carlo (1939), 1940-43, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait in Black, 1944, Pinakothek der Moderne, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006

Max Beckmann, Resting Woman with Carnations, 1040-42, Sprengel Museum, Hanover.

Max Beckmann, Death, 1938, Staatliche Museen, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Max Beckmann. The Landscapes
Kunstmuseum Basel
09.04.2011–01.22.2012
Curators: Bernhard Mendes Bürgi & Nina Peter

Max Beckmann (Leipzig 1884 – 1950 New York) is one of the titans of modernism, even though he saw himself as the last Old Master. He never joined any of the avant-gardist schools of the twentieth century, but the experiences of Impressionism, Expressionism, New Objectivity, and abstract art left their traces in his oeuvre. Beckmann was long perceived as a typically German artist, and only in the past few years has his importance been fully appreciated on the international stage, with retrospectives in Paris, London, and New York. Against the modernist tendency to dissolve the traditional genres, Beckmann remained a lifelong defender of classical genres: the depiction of the human figure—in the form of portraits, mythological tableaus, and acts—the still life, and the landscape. Famous as a painter of the human condition, he also renewed the genre of landscape painting with outstanding and haunting works that are virtually without equal in twentieth-century art.

The comprehensive special exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel now turns the focus on the artist’s oeuvre in landscapes, showing seventy paintings, among them masterworks such as

The Harbor of Genoa from the St. Louis Art Museum

and the Seashore ("Meeresstrand") from the Museum Ludwig, Cologne,

but also sublime works from numerous private collections that have rarely been on public display.

From a review:

Highlights of the exhibition include "Meeresstrand" from the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, painted in 1935. "The Harbor of Genoa" (1927), on loan from the St. Louis Art Museum, is a quite dark and melancholic work, especially when compared with the later "Promenade des Anglais in Nizza" (1947).

Max Beckmann (1884–1950)
Promenade des Anglais in Nizza, 1947
Oil on canvas
80.5 x 90.5 cm
Göpel 741
Museum Folkwang, Essen
© ProLitteris, Zürich

Beckmann’s landscapes allow the beholder to trace the development of his art in its purest form. Less shaped by allegorical layers of meaning, they directly reveal his magnificent qualities as a painter. Beckmann’s reserved view of the landscape remains striking: vistas framed by windows, curtains, parapets, columns, and elevated vantage points often mediate the distance between the inhabited world and the boundless expanses of nature. Private objects from Beckmann’s possessions frequently appear in the foregrounds of these landscapes as vestiges of the still life, giving the beholder a sense of the painter’s presence. The dramaturgy of these vistas is evidence that Beckmann fuses an abstractly conceived image of the landscape with the recollection of the impression he received from a particular scenery that is the foundation of each painting. The gaze he fixes on nature helps clarify his standpoint and places him in a relationship with the world. Landscapes from different phases of his life illustrate how this relationship evolves.

Catalogue:

More images from the exhibition:

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) Das Nizza in Frankfurt am Main, 1921 Öl auf Leinwand
100.5 x 65 cm Göpel 210 Kunstmuseum Basel, mit einem Sonderkredit der Basler Regierung erworben, 1939
Foto: Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler © ProLitteris, Zürich

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) Riviera-Landschaft mit Felsen, 1942 Öl auf Leinwand 55.5 x 96 cm Göpel 594 Privatbesitz Foto: Peter Schälchli, Zürich © ProLitteris, Zürich

Max Beckmann, Small Landscape, Viareggio (Kleine Landschaft, Viareggio) September 1925 Frankfurt, Germany
Nice review, more images

Two other exhibitions formed perfect complements, offering visitors an unparalleled opportunity to study Beckmann’s oeuvre: Max Beckmann. Face to Face at the Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig (September 17, 2011–January 22, 2012)

and Beckmann & America at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt (October 7, 2011–January 8, 2012).

Max Beckmann. “Face to Face”
Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig,(September 17, 2011 – January 22, 2012)

Max Beckmann (Leipzig 1884 – New York 1950) is regarded as one of the great mavericks of modern art. His life’s work includes a large number of different portrait types: individual and double portraits, family and group depictions and also “hidden” portrayals in the allegorical works. In his portrait painting, Beckmann reflects a very personal fabric of relationships – with his family, his wives and to a wide circle of friends and acquaintances.

Max Beckmann. “Face to Face” presents on the one hand a classic portrait gallery, a “Who’s Who” of Beckmann’s life; on the other hand, it shows all the pictures in which the artist integrated portraits, whereby he cast his family and friends in roles within his allegorical world theatre.

Max Beckmann, Quappi in Blue, 1926, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2011

From a review of another show:

Four paintings by the German artist Max Beckmann (1884-1950) are the centerpiece of the exhibition and suggest the qualities the collectors look for . A contemplative image of the artist's second wife Quappi, one of his friend the Alsatian engraver Sabine Hackenscmidt, and the two reproduced here.

A fiercely thoughtful gaze aimed straight at the viewer belies the height of his successful career, and hints at the middle-aged Beckmann's attempt to understand the mystical aspects of life.

The Oyster-Eaters provides a challenge of another sort. Quappi Beckmann lifts the oyster to her lips as Sabine Hackenschmidt looks on, eyebrow arched enigmatically. A white-jacketed waiter stands behind. What is last-noticed is an ominous gray face looming in the background that seems to represent all that came after the pinnacle of 1926 for these people.

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Kazimir Malevich Exhibitions

February 6, 2014, 11:55 am

≫ Next: Art Surpassing Nature: Dutch Landscapes in the Age of Rembrandt and Ruisdael

≪ Previous: Max Beckmann Exhibitions

Kazimir Malevich – The World as Objectlessness
1 March 2014 - 22 June 2014 | Kunstmuseum

In 1927, the Bauhaus’s publishing arm brought out a book in which Kazimir Malevich, creator of
the Black Square, which has long been an icon of modernism, laid out his vision of the “World
as Objectlessness.” In a carefully orchestrated blend of text and illustrations, the book, which
remained Malevich’s only piece of writing to be published in a Western language in his lifetime,
entices the reader into a world beyond the visible, though the approach is initially far from
straightforward. Starting with the square—at first glance, a simple, even almost banal image—
Malevich elaborates the Suprematist vision of a world in which nothing but pure sensation
prevails. Once the sensation that has temporarily come to rest in the square is set in motion, a
circle emerges; division yields a cross or a rectangle; more complex forms evolve to render the
sensations of flight, flow, magnetism, or the universe. Although the titles of the illustrations
relate them to concrete realities, Malevich’s driving purpose was to eliminate any resemblance
with visible things. The Suprematist square—which is actually not a geometrically exact square
but a quadrilateral—manifests this rejection of mimesis.

For the first time in a long while, the Kunstmuseum Basel’s Department of Prints and Drawings
presents the drawings from its collections that served as masters for the book. The
accompanying catalogue, to be published in separate German and English editions, includes a
new translation of the artist’s illustrated essay (earlier German and English translations
rendered the title, less than accurately, as “The Non-Objective World” or “The World as Non-
Objectivity”) and meticulously reconstructs the history of the work’s genesis: when and where
did Malevich create the illustrations and texts, and which moment in his evolution as an artist do
they reflect? Malevich’s World as Objectlessness is thus revealed to be a fluid vision of a world
and a snapshot in time of a boundless artistic universe.

A new translation of Malevich’s Bauhaus publication with extensive commentary on the history of its creation

This volume offers a new translation of the artist’s illustrated text along with fundamental research on the preliminary drawings, now in the possession of the Kunstmuseum Basel, made for the Bauhaus publication. The rigorous exploration of these works of art provides new insight into the history of the creation of the work: when and where were the illustrations done, and which juncture in Malevich’s artistic career do they reflect? Malevich’s The World as Objectlessness is a snapshot in time of a boundless artistic universe. (German edition ISBN 978-3-7757-3730-2)

KAZIMIR MALEVICH AND THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE

The Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn
11 March – 22 June 2014

Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935) is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. In the West the painter, theoretician and teacher is best known as the originator of Suprematism, an art movement based on pure, nonobjective abstraction. But his oeuvre is rooted at the crossroads between abstraction and figuration, between a universal idea of what it is to be human and the declared ambition to create a new world through art. Presenting a wide selection of paintings, prints and sculptures totalling more than 300 works, the exhibition sheds light on the key phases of Malevich’s career, from the Symbolist beginnings through his pioneering abstract works to the figurative paintings of his later years.

Unprecedented in its scope, the exhibition draws on the support from numerous international lenders. It is the first retrospective to present large groups of works from the collections put together by Nikolai Khardzhiev and George Costakis, housed today at the Khardzhiev-Chaga Cultural Foundation / Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. The exhibition is prepared in cooperation with the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Tate Modern in London.

Catalogue

Images from the exhibition:

Kazimir Malevich Suprematist Painting (with Black Trapezium and Red Square) 1915 Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Kazimir Malevich Self-Portrait 1909–1910 Gouache, watercolor and pencil on paper, varnished_European private collection

Kazimir Malevich Self-Portrait 1908–1910 Watercolor and gouache on paper The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow collection

Kazimir Malevich The Mower 1912 Oil on canvas Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum, Nizhny Novgorod (RU)

Kazimir Malevich In the Grand Hotel c. 1913 Oil on canvas Samara State Museum of Fine Arts, Samara (RU)

Kazimir Malevich Adam and Ewe 1903_Gouache on paper_Vladimir Tsarenkow

Kazimir Malevich_Costume Sketches for the opera „Victory over the Sun”_Enemy_1913_Pencil, watercolor and Indian ink on paper_St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music, St. Petersburg

Kazimir Malevich More Costume Sketches for the opera „Victory over the Sun”

Mondrian + Malevich

From 20 November 2003 to 25 January 2004 the Fondation Beyeler presented a series of works by Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935), two of the fathers of geometric abstraction. Although their paths never crossed and their careers developed quite independently, a comparison was tempting. What Mondrian and Malevich shared in common was a utopian belief in a new, all-encompassing art that would contribute to shaping a new, aesthetic society. While the Russian artist described this faith as “Suprematism, the cosmic union of nothingness and whole,” the Dutch artist christened it “Neo-Plasticism,” a symbol of a universal harmony. Based on a small but significant selection of about 20 paintings each by Mondrian and Malevich, supplemented by a group of drawings, the essential steps in the development of these two pioneers on the path to abstraction are traced.

While Mondrian is well represented in the collection, with seven works that provide an overview of his development, Malevich is one of the “great absentees.” The stature of a private collection derives not only from a consciousness of quality but from a concentration on certain emphases. The pairing of “Mondrian + Malevich” underscores the importance attached to abstract art in the collection, which contains a fine record of three different approaches to non-objectivity in the form of Cubism, the strong presence of Monet’s late work, and the offshoot represented by Kandinsky.

Synthetic Cubism, developed by Picasso and Braque in Paris in 1912, influenced Mondrian in Western Europe, and by way of the Shtshukin Collection, Malevich in Moscow. From this common art historical point of departure, each launched on a completely original path to abstraction. In the exhibition eight pre-Cubist, neo-primitive and Cubo-Futurist paintings reflect Malevich's development. Without first passing through a process of gradual abstraction, Malevich surprised the world in 1915 with the all-negating plane of Black Square on a White Ground. From this elementary form Malevich then derived, through rotation, the circle, then the cross and a range of other shapes, which he placed on a monochrome ground. The exhibition includes a replica made by the artist in 1923 of his triptych of 1915, from the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.

If Malevich achieved a new level of abstraction by way of a revolution, Mondrian chose a more evolutionary path. In his case, Synthetic Cubism initially inspired a Cubist facetting of the pictorial space. By way of various types of composition which led, around 1920, to a synthesis of line and color field, Mondrian finally arrived at a complete transcendence of subject matter. His pictorial means, reduced entirely to rectangular color fields and straight black lines, now appeared on the painting surface entirely divested of objective reference.

Although both employed a geometric language, Mondrian and Malevich’s compositional principles reflected quite different aesthetic systems. While Mondrian’s solution was line and structure, Malevich selected the plane. In his Suprematist pictures the separate forms seem to hover above the white ground. The effect of Mondrian’s paintings is quite different, every element being locked in a dynamic grid of vertical and horizonal lines. As a result of this grid structure and compositional equilibrium, no element appears in isolation, and every part of the picture is brought into the same plane.

Although there were a number of early Malevich exhibitions, as in Bern, 1959, and Winterthur, 1962, his oeuvre and its links with icon painting were not properly appreciated in the West until the 1970s. The true rediscovery of his late work, which recurred in the late 1920s to objectivity as a result of Stalinist repression, came in the 1990s. It is represented in the present exhibition by a key work, Red Cavalry. Unlike Malevich, Mondrian received an uninterrupted reception that made him a seminal influence on the emergence of a new world art.

Despite the great Malevich retrospectives on tour through Paris, Berlin, New York and Houston, it proved possible to bring works of his to Riehen. The great majority of the Malevich loans on view came from the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, followed by six major works from the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, one painting from the Art Museum in Tula, Russia. Four Mondrian paintings were provided by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, two by the Max Bill Estate, and two by the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague.

Kasimir Malevich
The Woodcutter, 1912
Oil on canvas, 94 x 71.5 cm
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

The catalogue to “Mondrian + Malevich” was published in a bilingual edition (German and English) by Verlag Minerva, Wolfratshausen, and contains an essay by Markus Brüderlin. 102 pages with 51 full-color plates .

The supplementary volume to the catalogue was published in a bilingual edition (German and English), followed at a later date by a French and Italian edition, by Verlag Minerva, Wolfratshausen. It contains detailed descriptions of approx. 25 works. 56 pages with 25 full-color plates.

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Art Surpassing Nature: Dutch Landscapes in the Age of Rembrandt and Ruisdael

February 6, 2014, 1:18 pm

≫ Next: Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice

≪ Previous: Kazimir Malevich Exhibitions

29 October 2012 – 20 January 2013
National Gallery of Ireland

Art Surpassing Nature brought together some 30 works from the Gallery’s outstanding collection of Dutch landscape paintings and drawings, comprising iconic pieces by

Jacob van Ruisdael (The Castle of Bentheim, 1653),

Meindert Hobbema (A Wooded Landscape, 1663),

Hendrick Avercamp (Scene on the Ice, c.1620), and

Rembrandt van Rijn (Landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1647).

Dutch artists were the first to paint naturalistic images of their own countryside. They did not create their works outside on an easel, however. As paints needed to be prepared in the studio, artists produced their landscapes indoors with the help of sketches. They also made use of their imagination to improve on nature. Jacob van Ruisdael, for example, exaggerated the elevation of the hill in The Castle of Bentheim, to make the fortress look more impressive than it is in reality.

Dr. Adriaan Waiboer, curator of the exhibition, says: “Dutch landscapes are notable for their variety. In addition to views of Holland’s green pastures, winter scenes enjoyed considerable popularity. Such paintings allowed artists, such as Hendrick Avercamp, to depict ice skaters having fun. Some painters represented landscapes by night, as exemplified by Rembrandt’s nocturnal masterpiece in the collection, which is one of just nine known painted landscapes by the artist.”

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Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice

February 7, 2014, 1:09 pm

≫ Next: Looking East: Western Artists and the Allure of Japan

≪ Previous: Art Surpassing Nature: Dutch Landscapes in the Age of Rembrandt and Ruisdael

19 March – 15 June 2014
The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London

See also Veronese’s Allegories: Virtue, Love, and Exploration in Renaissance Venice

'Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice' is devoted to one of the most influential artists of the 16th century. This exhibition of 50 of his works, many of which are travelling to London from across the globe, is the most significant collection of masterpieces by the artist ever to be displayed in the United Kingdom.

Paolo Caliari (1528–1588), known as Veronese, was one of the most renowned and sought-after artists working in Venice in the 16th century. His works adorned churches, patrician palaces, villas and public buildings throughout the Veneto region – and are inseparable from our idea of the opulence and grandeur of the Republic of Venice at that time.

'Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice' brings together works from every aspect of the artist’s oeuvre: portraits, altarpieces, allegorical decorations and mythological works. Paintings in this exhibition represent the very peak of the artist’s output at every stage of his career.

Important loans to the exhibition include works from churches and art galleries across Europe (Austria, France, Italy and Spain) and the USA.

The exhibition displays many of Veronese’s most celebrated works, including

'The Martyrdom of Saint George' (about 1565)

on loan from the church of San Giorgio in Braida, Verona,

and 'The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine' (1565-70, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice).

Neither of these great altarpieces has previously been seen in the United Kingdom. The exhibition will enable visitors to compare them with Veronese's most accomplished secular painting of the same period, the magnificent

'Family of Darius before Alexander' (1565–7),

which was among the first great works acquired by the National Gallery in mainland Europe.

Highlights of the exhibition include the display of three of the artist’s most beautiful portraits from the period of his arrival in Venice:

'Portrait of a Gentleman' (about 1555, Palazzo Pitti, Florence),

the 'Portrait of a Woman, known as the 'Bella Nani'' (about 1555–60, Musée du Louvre, Paris)

* Paolo Veronese (1528-1588)
Portrait of a Lady, known as the “Bella Nani”, about 1560-5
Oil on canvas, 119 × 103 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris (R.F. 2111)
© RMN (Musée du Louvre)/All rights reserved

and the 'Portrait of a Gentleman' (1560-65, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles).

Works are reunited in the exhibition for the first time in hundreds of years.

'Mars and Venus United by Love' (about 1570-1575, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

leaves the USA for the first time since 1910 for the exhibition and is reunited, for the first time since the 18th century, with

the National Gallery’s 'Four Allegories of Love' (about 1575):

Allegory of Love I Infidelity

Paolo Veronese (1528-1588)
Allegories of Love II – Scorn, about 1570-75
Oil on canvas
186.6 ×188.5 cm
© The National Gallery, London (NG 1324)

Allegory of Love III Respect

Allegory of Love IV The Happy Union

Two companion altarpieces painted for the church of San Benedetto Po near Mantua:

'The Virgin and Child with Saints Anthony Abbot and Paul the Hermit' (1562, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia)

and the National Gallery’s own 'Consecration of Saint Nicholas' (1562),

are displayed together for only the second time since the 18th century.

The Gallery’s 'Adoration of the Kings' (1573),

painted for the church of San Silvestro in Venice, long one of the artists most admired paintings and recently cleaned, will be shown beside

an altarpiece of the same subject, painted in the same year for the church of in Santa Corona, Vicenza.

These pictures have never been seen together since they were in the artist’s studio.

Born in Verona in 1528, the son of a stonecutter, Veronese entered into the workshop of Antonio Badile in 1541. Working in Verona, he completed important commissions for churches and aristocratic families such as the Canossa and Bevilacqua.

In the early 1550s, Veronese moved to Venice, a city he rarely left. It was here, endorsed by Titian, and working alongside Jacopo Sansovino and Andrea Palladio, that he was established as one of the leading artists in Europe. His posthumous reputation has been as consistently high as his influence has been strong. The work of Van Dyck, Rubens, Watteau, Tiepolo and Delacroix depend upon his example.

'Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice' is curated by Xavier F. Salomon, Curator of Southern Baroque at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

More images from the exhibition:

Paolo Veronese (1528-1588)
Christ and the Centurion, about 1570
Oil on canvas
192 × 297 cm
© Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado (P00492)

Paolo Veronese (1528-1588)
Perseus and Andromeda, 1575-80
Oil on canvas
260 × 211 cm
Musée des Beaux – Arts, Rennes

Excellent Review

Organisation

'Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice has been organised in association with the Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona, to complement its exhibition 'Paolo Veronese' (5 July – 5 October 2014).

Publication

'Veronese'
By Xavier F. Salomon
Hardback ISBN 9781857095531
Paperback ISBN 9781857095548
Published by National Gallery Company
Distributed by Yale University Press_Gentleman_in_a_Lynx_Fur_-_WGA24981.jpg" />

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Looking East: Western Artists and the Allure of Japan

February 8, 2014, 9:33 am

≫ Next: Toulouse-Lautrec and La Vie Moderne: Paris 1800-1910

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Looking East: Western Artists and the Allure of Japan, on view in the Frist Center for the Visual Arts’ Ingram Gallery from January 31 through May 11, 2014, celebrates the cultural and aesthetic influences of Japanese art and culture on the Western imagination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Premiering at the Frist Center, this traveling exhibition reveals aspects of the fruitful exchange by presenting works and objects by influential Japanese artists alongside those of Western luminaries such as Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, John La Farge,

Claude Monet,

Edvard Munch, Alfred Stieglitz, Vincent van Gogh, Frank Lloyd Wright among many others.

Visitors to the Frist Center already fond of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces such as Postman Joseph Roulin (1888) by Van Gogh and Under the Horse-Chestnut Tree (1895) by Cassatt may be surprised by their direct connections to Japan highlighted in this exhibition. “There have only been a few exhibitions on this subject and it is exciting for the Frist Center to be the first venue for this one,” says Frist Center Curator Trinita Kennedy. “Because of the presence of Japanese companies, Nashville is the perfect place to celebrate this important moment of artistic exchange between East and West.”

Louis Dumoulin (French), Carp Banners in Kyoto, 1888: Oil on canvas, 18 1/8 x 21 3/8 in., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1986.582. photograph: 2013 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The exhibition, which will coincide with the city’s Cherry Blossom Festival, will later be seen throughout Japan and then at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec and San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.

Drawn from and organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—world renowned for their Japanese, American, and European collections of this period—Looking East consists of more than 170 objects, including arms and armor, decorative arts, paintings, prints and drawings, and textiles.

When Japan opened its ports to international trade in the 1850s and emerged from centuries of self-imposed isolation, a craze for all things Japanese set in among European and North American collectors, artists and designers. The phenomenon, dubbed japonisme by the Parisian critic Philippe Burty in 1872, created a radical shift in Western tastes toward Japanese aesthetic principles, and is evident in major movements including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Art Nouveau.

Kikugawa Eizan, Japanese, 1787–1867, Otome, from the series Eastern Figures Matched with the Tale of Genji Edo period, about 1818–23 (Bunsei 1–6) Publisher Mikawaya Den'emon,

Kikugawa Eizan, Otome, from the series Eastern Figures Matched with the Tale of Genji, ca. 1818–23.Woodblock print, 14.75″ x 9.9″

Utagawa Hiroshige I. Mariko [written "Maruko"]: Famous Tea Shop, first state, from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road, also known as the First Tōkaidō or Great Tōkaidō, ca. 1833–34, Woodblock print, 9.8″ x 14.8″

Utagawa Hiroshige I. Bamboo Yards, Kyôbashi Bridge,from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, Japanese, Edo period. Woodblock print, 14 9/16 x 9 15/16 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, William Sturgis Bigelow Collection,11.26350. Photograph © 2013 MFA Boston

Many Western artists first learned about Japanese aesthetics through color woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world” that typically depicted scenes from Kabuki theater, red-light districts and other fashionable and fleeting pleasures. “Artists were eager to demonstrate their curiosity about the wider world and Japan was particularly appealing,” says Ms. Kennedy. “Everything about Japan—from the way people dressed and ate and how artists looked at the world—would have been novel to Western artists.”

Looking East is organized into five segments, starting with an introductory section, followed by the themes of city life, women, nature and landscape. For each thematic subject, Japanese objects are paired with American or European works to represent a particular stylistic or technical influence. For example, regarding landscapes, “Instead of using shadows to create convincing three-dimensional forms, the Japanese employed contrasts in color, the repetition of shapes, and a focus on essential features to animate views of such iconic sites as Mount Fuji,” says Ms. Kennedy. “A number of these pictorial devices became part of the Western repertoire.”

Signaling their own cosmopolitanism, Western artists staged their compositions with elegant oriental props; Japanese fans, kimonos, lanterns, screens, umbrellas, and vases, for example, are especially common in French paintings. “The French Impressionist Claude Monet looked to his collection of more than 200 Japanese prints as a source of inspiration, and even based the gardens at his country home in Giverny, France on ukiyo-e landscapes,” explains Ms. Kennedy. Characteristic Japanese flora and fauna motifs such as chrysanthemums and butterflies are also incorporated in Western decorative arts as seen in this exhibition’s elaborately decorated inkstand (1876) by the French designer Paul Legrand:

Manufactured by the firm of Frédéric Boucheron after a design by Paul Legrand, Inkstand, 1876, Silver, partial gilt, champlevé, basse-taille, cloisonné enamels, 9″ x 13″

The japonisme influence even extended to architecture, furniture design and book illustrations, examples of which are also on view in this exhibition.

From an outstanding review (some images added):

Vincent van Gogh, Postman Joseph Roulin, 1888: Oil on canvas, 32 x 25 3/4 in., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of Robert Treat Paine, 2nd, 35.1982. photograph 2014 MFA, Boston

Van Gogh borrowed freely from ukiyo-e portraits of Kabuki actors to create paintings such as Postman Joseph Roulin from 1888. In this well-known work, Van Gogh depicts the subject’s face as a vibrant mask that seems to hover over his body, while his body language and hand gestures are directly reminiscent of those used in Kabuki drama.

Mary Stevenson Cassatt, Under the Horse-Chestnut Tree, ca. 1895, Drypoint and color aquatint, 19″ x 15″

American painter Mary Cassatt was inspired by the intimate depictions of women and children found in ukiyo-e to create many of her signature works such as Maternal Caress from 1902, which shows a young child embracing her mother. It is an intimate snapshot of home life not often found in prior Western painting.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec took cues from ukiyo-e prints as well, depicting city life and leisure activities—subjects that would have traditionally been deemed frivolous by the academy. In The Jockey from 1899, the viewer is in the midst of the action at the racetrack as two horses hurtle furiously toward the finish line—an image that has much in common stylistically and thematically with

Totoya Hokkei’s Painted Horse Escaping from Ema from 1834.

Paul Gauguin, Landscape with Two Breton Women, 1889, Oil on canvas, 28.5″ x 36″

The rage for Japanese arts extended to architecture, furniture, and graphic design as well. In one particularly stunning print in the exhibition, Kinryuzan Temple, Asakusa from Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, a winter view of a snow-covered temple compound is framed by a red door post on the left and a brilliant red lantern in the upper right. The brilliance and modernity of the print are derived from the spare color palette and the dynamic, off-center composition. A Western corollary to this work is found in

Charles Herbert Woodbury’s poster The July Century from 1895

where vertical elements frame an audience in silhouette as yellow lanterns tumble across the picture plane and fireworks light up the sky.

Alfred Stevens, Meditation, ca. 1872, Oil on canvas, 16" x 12.75"

Exhibition Credit

Looking East: Western Artists and the Allure of Japan was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue produced by MFA Publications at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Toulouse-Lautrec and La Vie Moderne: Paris 1800-1910

February 10, 2014, 7:48 am

≫ Next: Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953–1966

≪ Previous: Looking East: Western Artists and the Allure of Japan

Venues

Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV) November 2 2013 - January 19, 2014

Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, OH) February 8 2014 - May 18 2014

Foothills Art Center (Golden, CO)June 7 2014- August 17 2014

Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton, Alberta) September 6 2014- November 16 2014

Society of the Four Arts (Palm Beach, FL) December 5 2014- January 11, 2015

Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, CA) January 31 2015 - April 26 2015

Arlington Museum of Art (Arlington, TX) May 16 2015 - August 16 2015

Louisiana State Univ. Museum of Art (Baton Rouge, LA) September 5 2015 - November 15 2015

"Toulouse-Lautrec and La Vie Moderne: Paris 1800-1910" celebrates the work of avant-garde artists living in Paris at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, when the city was the center of creative activity as well as a favorite subject for artists. The work of the Naturalists, the Symbolists, the Incohérents, and the Nabis presented fresh visions of life and society during this important 30-year period of "Modern" French art.

This is the first exhibition to present a kaleidoscopic view of the work of a generation of artists who continued the battle for artistic liberation from Academic standards fought by the Impressionists and Post Impressionists and by artists such as Seurat, Gaugin, and van Gogh.

The exhibition puts the innovative art of these better-known artists into context, revealing that they did not work in isolation. Domestic scenes by Mary Cassat, Paul Helleu and Eugène Carrière are included, along with landscapes by Emile Schuffenecker and Charles Lacoste, Sybolist works by Aristide Maillol and Fernand Khnopff, and cafè scenes by Juan Gris and Jacques Villon. Turn-of-the-century artists like Pierre Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec also found alternative means to bring their art to a broad public by illustrating journals, books and theatre programs.

Drawn from Dutch private collections, this groundbreaking exhibition includes 185 works, including paintings, watercolors and drawings; rare zinc shadow puppet silhouettes; illustrated programs for the famous Chat Noir cabaret shadow theatre; and key ephemera for Parisian theatres, circuses, cabarets and cafè-concerts documenting the activities of avant-garde artists.

Images from the exhibition:

"Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Divan Japonais, lithograph, 1983"

"Henri Gabriel Ibels, The Clown, c.1895, crayon on paper, private collection."

"Henri Gabriel Ibels, Mere Moderne (Modern Mother), oil on canvas, 1893"

"Charles Guilloux, Notre Dames, view from the Quais, c.1895, oil on cardboard, private collection."

"Mary Cassat, Etude de Jeune Fille (Study of a Young Girl), 1888, pencil on paper, private collection."

"Felix Vallotton, Charles Maurin, oil on canvas, 1886"

"Alphonse Mucha, Sarah Bernhardt, charcoal on paper, 1898"

"Louis Legrand, Bar scene, Portrait of Prince K, oil on paper, 1909"

"Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Program for Le Theatre Libre The Free Theatre presentation of Une Faillite The Bankruptcy lithograph 1893"

"Louis Legrand, Dancer seated, watercolor on paper, c. 1900"

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Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953–1966

February 10, 2014, 9:27 am

≫ Next: Léger – Laurens. Tête-à-Tête

≪ Previous: Toulouse-Lautrec and La Vie Moderne: Paris 1800-1910

Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953–1966, was on view at the de Young Museum from June 22 through September 29, 2013, was the first exhibition to explore in-depth the work produced by Diebenkorn between 1953 and 1966, when he lived in Berkeley, California. The presentation included over 130 of the artist’s paintings and drawings assembled from collections across the country, many of them rarely or never before seen in public exhibitions. Diebenkorn’s engagement with the unique settings of the Bay Area, along with his personal history, tied this exhibition deeply to the region.

Diebenkorn underwent a remarkable metamorphosis during what is now known as his “Berkeley period,” beginning with an abstract phase influenced by the Bay Area's natural environment, and then moving to figurative works, including figures, interiors, and still lifes. Fiercely independent, Diebenkorn continued to explore his shifting conceptions of abstraction and figuration over these years, and rejected allegiances to schools or movements.

His challenge to prevailing orthodoxy also helped to elevate Diebenkorn’s national profile. As contemporaries like Willem De Kooning and Jackson Pollock wrestled publicly with Abstract Expressionism, Diebenkorn’s work offered another important perspective in the critical conversation of the time. His appearance in Life magazine, as well as an article titled, “Diebenkorn Paints a Picture” in ARTnews magazine, both published in 1957, further expanded the painter’s influence.

“It was during this period that Diebenkorn really became Diebenkorn,” says Timothy Anglin Burgard, the Ednah Root curator-in-charge of American art. “His artistic integrity rendered him immune to external pressure to conform to either abstract or figurative styles, and set a liberating example that seems remarkably prescient given the inclusive nature of the contemporary art world.”

Diebenkorn was profoundly influenced by the nature and culture of the Bay Area, and many of these works are saturated with light and atmosphere, as well as the deep reds, greens, and ochres of the region. Although born in Portland, Oregon, Diebenkorn grew up in San Francisco’s Ingleside Terraces neighborhood, attended Stanford University and UC Berkeley, and was both a student and an instructor at the California School of Fine Arts (today the San Francisco Art Institute.)

Diebenkorn’s very first solo museum exhibition was held at the Legion of Honor in 1948, and Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953-1966 continued the Fine Arts Museums’ long engagement with the artist’s work. Though Diebenkorn would also make significant contributions to the modernist tradition through his work in New Mexico and Southern California—work celebrated in other recent exhibitions—Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953-1966 was a story rooted in the Bay Area, an exploration of one of the most complex and interesting chapters in postwar American art.

Exhibition Organization and Sponsors

The exhibition was organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, in collaboration with the Palm Springs Art Museum.

From an outstanding review:

Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)Berkeley #44, 1955 Oil on canvas, 59 x 64 in. (149.9 x 162.6 cm) Private collection © 2013 The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation. All rights reserved.

Even when Diebenkorn was flinging paint or applying it with some degree of frenzy there is always a sense of schematic restraint in his compositions. Diebenkorn's works lack the elevated confidence of fanaticism and the finesse of charlatanism. His relatively even tempered "Berkeley" canvases are tempered by a sense of intellectual and emotional reticence that is lacking in De Kooning's oedipal tantrums and Still's brutal crags. To put it another way, Diebenkorn appears to have had some principled doubts about action painting, but he gave it a try and his work gained confidence and vitality from his engagement with it.

Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)"Figure on a Porch," 1959, Oil on canvas, 57 x 62 in. (144.8 x 157.5 cm)Oakland Museum of California, gift of the Anonymous Donor Program of the American Federation of the Arts, A60.35.5© 2013 The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation. All rights reserved.

Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)
Interior with Doorway, 1962, Oil on canvas, 70 3/8 x 59 1/2 in. (178.8 x 151.1 cm)
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Henry D. Gilpin Fund, 1964.3
© 2013 The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation. All rights reserved.

One of the joys of the de Young show is to scan the surface of paintings like "Interior with Doorway" of 1962 and to see how the painting fell into place when the artist's final edits -- such as the dark fields of negative space around the folding chair -- cause the composition to lock into place. I couldn't stop looking at the gorgeous hints of colors pulsing through the chair's legs: they are traces of something beautiful that will never be fully revealed.

Some of the paintings in "The Berkeley Years" show the mixed results that occurred as Diebenkorn felt free to experiment with his subject matter. There is a very odd painting of a cluttered table with a Guston-like hand holding a cigarette reaching towards it. There is also a stunning picture of a studio utility sink that is a masterpiece of zen brushwork. Diebenkorn's confident and masterful rendering of the zig-zagging drainpipes under the sink has more abstract vitality than most Franz Kline paintings...

Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad, 1965, Oil on canvas, 73 x 84 in. (185.4 x 213.4 cm)Private collection© 2013 The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation. All rights reserved.

After returning from a trip to Russia 1964 where he viewed the incomparable Matisse paintings on view at the Pushkin Museum and at the Hermitage Diebenkorn indulged in a final artistic apprenticeship, painting homages to Matisse including "Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad." Diebenkorn learned a great deal from this final deep exploration and was especially sensitive to the stylizations and abstract tendencies in Matisse's works. By 1966 Diebenkorn -- who knew when not to linger -- had absorbed what he needed to and was ready to move on...

To the left of the doorway was a lovely but fussy painting of the artist's wife: "Seated Figure with a Hat." To the right of the door was a brave but awkward figure of a standing female nude: "Nude on Blue Ground." The two paintings seemed to say the same thing: Diebenkorn had taken the figure towards two dead ends.

From another good review: (some images added)

Richard Diebenkorn. Berkeley #22, 1954; oil on canvas. Collection: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Regents Collections Acquisition Program, 86.5886. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. © 2013 The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

For example, Berkeley #22 (1954), one of the earlier works on view, instantly invokes the impression of a rising hillside whose tall horizon is topped by a darkening sky. It takes several moments to settle into the painting’s actual vernacular: an abstract composition of thick brushstrokes roughly applied in crosshatched patterns and bright colors muddied by contrasting hues emanating from above and beneath. The painting is an accumulation of gestures that seem to put line at odds with shape, the artist allowing neither to assert itself fully. But it is abstract only in peering closely at each mark or block of color; the moment one takes in the canvas as a whole, a landscape immediately snaps back into view...

Richard Diebenkorn, Seawall, 1957. Oil on canvas, 20 x 26 inches. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Phyllis G. Diebenkorn, 1995.96 © 2013 The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

Diebenkorn, Richard, Cityscape I (Landscape No. 1), 1963, Oil on canvas, 60 1/4 x 50 1/2 in, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Even at their most representational, the paintings here don’t cohere into declarative statements on landscape or figure. So, in looking at Seawall (1957) or Cityscape, Landscape 1 (1963), the impression that one is gazing at a view of the cliffs at Point Reyes or Potrero Hill gives way to the cognizance of how the stacked planes of color in each painting refuse to coalesce into neat representations of physical terrain.

And from still another interesting review:

Berkeley No. 13, 1954, oil on canvas.

The earliest works in the exhibition are indeed abstract, graffiti like ink drawings, influenced by the abstract expressionists, specifically de Kooning. As time passes Diebenkorn’s work, much praised by the art community for its energetic, abstract qualities, becomes more figurative.

Chabot Valley, 1955, oil on canvas.

In 1955 he created “Chabot Valley” his first representational landscape. His shift to figurative work shocked the art world. In 1957 Diebenkorn wrote, “Temperamentally perhaps I had always been a landscape painter.” He further commented, “Abstract literally means to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract… a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.”

Woman in Profile, 1958, oil on canvas.

Throughout these years Diebenkorn returns to drawing from the figure. His 1958 piece “Woman in Profile” uses energetic layers of impasto to describe a woman. Diebenkorn paints the organic shapes of the figure and juxtaposes them to the landscape outside; the grid pattern of the windows unites the two worlds.

Another good review with quite a few more images

Catalogue

Burgard, Timothy Anglin. RICHARD DIEBENKORN: The Berkeley Years, 1953-1966. 255 pages, including 150 color plates. 4to, boards. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013.

↧

Léger – Laurens. Tête-à-Tête

February 10, 2014, 10:55 am

≫ Next: THE IMAGE OF THE EUROPEAN CITY FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT

≪ Previous: Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953–1966

Fernand Léger and Henri Laurens:Tête-à-Tête at the Museum Frieder Burda
Extraordinary works from the Centre Pompidou in Paris directly to Baden-Baden

Also see Fernand Léger

Under the title “Léger – Laurens. Tête-à-Tête“, a total of about 80 works by these two renowned artists were presented from 23 June to 4 November, 2012. The works by Fernand Léger (1881 - 1955) and Henri Laurens (1885 - 1954) are defining for modernism. The artists were dedicated to two different fields: Léger brought out the main points in paintings, and Laurens created sculptures that still serve as role models nowadays. The works by the two contemporaries Léger and Laurens are contrasted for the first time at the Museum Frieder Burda. Similar themes, common interests as well as the friendship between the two artists are worked out in the presentation. This exceptional exhibition provides an opportunity for discovering two iconic figures of classical modernism from a completely new angle.

More than 20 significant works came from the Centre Pompidou in Paris for the Tête-à-Tête between Léger and Laurens in Baden-Baden. Some of them will be exhibited in Germany for the first time. Among them the monumental work by Fernand Léger ”Composition aux deux perroquets – Composition with two Parrots“ (1935–39), created in a completely new style. The impressive, four meters by nearly five meters painting is one of the most significant works of modernism.

The selection was completed by additional works from large European museums and private collections, among them the Art Museum Basel, the Museum of Modern Art Trust Ludwig Wien and the Art Collection Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.

Fernand Léger: Bright colors that break loose from shapes

Fernand Léger, born in 1881 in Argentan in the Normandy region, is one of the extraordinary modernist artists of the early 20th century. After having worked as an architectural draftsman for several years, Léger went to Paris around 1900 and took numerous classes at the École des Art Décoratifs. Like his friends Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, in his works he deals with his times and during his cubistic phase he creates pictures with intense colors (blue, white, yellow, green) that he calls ”form contrastings“ . At the same time as Henri Laurens (whom he met in 1910), Marc Chagall, the author Guillaume Apollinaire and others, Léger had a studio in the well known Paris artist neighborhood ”La Ruche“.

Machines play an important roll in his world. Under the influence of war machines, his “période mécanique“ (mechanical period) begins in which the experimental movie ”Le ballet mécanique“ is created. Léger himself nearly dies during World War I. From then on, the human being is included in his subjects in a rather formulistic manner, it is presented as an anonymous object. After his “période mécanique“ Fernand Léger’s works are dominated by monumentality. The artist paints large format pictures like

“Composition aux deux perroquets – Composition with two Parrots“ (1935–39), a masterpiece from this period. During World War II Fernand Léger works in New York where he exerts great influence on American art. He now uses intense and clear colors that soon break free from forms they actually belong to. A new world comes into appearance. The artist designs a dynamic space in which the human being – as an acrobat, cyclist or scuba diver – now moves closer to the focus of the picture.

A comprehensive catalog (publisher Hatje Cantz) with color pictures of all exhibited works as well as numerous texts, biographies and explanations was published.

Nice review

More images from the exhibition:

Fernand Léger, Composition I, 1930, 141 x 291 cm, oil on canvas, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Photo: Cantz Medienmanagement, Ostfildern, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012.

Fernand Léger, Composition aux trois figures, fond bleu, (Composition with three figures, blue background), 1932, 71 x 89 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection, France, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012.

Fernand Léger, Composition aux trois soeurs, Etat définitif, (Composition with three sisters, last condition), 1952, 162 x 130 cm, oil on canvas, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012.

Fernand Léger, Contraste de formes (Contrast of forms), 1914, 80,7 x 65,2 cm, oil on canvas, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf , © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012.

Fernand Léger, L'homme à la pipe (Man with the pipe), 1920, 91 x 65 cm, oil on canvas, Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012, Musée d'Art Moderne / Roger-Viollet.

Fernand Léger, Femme tenant un vase (Woman with vase), 1924-27, 130,6 x 89,5 cm, oil on canvas. Kunstmuseum Basel. Donation Dr. h.c. Raoul La Roche 1963. Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012.

Fernand Léger, La Baigneuse (Bathing woman), 1932, 98 x 130 cm, oil on canvas, Musée National Fernand Léger, Biot, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012, bpk / Gérard Blot

Fernand Léger, Le pont du remorqueur 1er état (The bridge of the tug 1st condition)
1920/21 73 x 92 cm 93 x 112 cm (framed) oil on canvas Private Collection Switzerland
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

↧

THE IMAGE OF THE EUROPEAN CITY FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT

February 11, 2014, 6:15 am

≫ Next: German Expressionism: A Revolutionary Spirit

≪ Previous: Léger – Laurens. Tête-à-Tête

From February 8th to May 18th 2014
Museo Correr, Venice

The fascinating context of the European city from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment is evoked in this exhibition through an extraordinary iconographic repertory comprising over a hundred paintings, prints and drawings from prestigious public and private, Italian and foreign collections.

Ever since the Middle Ages, towns have been a favoured subject in European painting and a means for a state to promoate itself and show off its virtues. The exhibition brings together those global images of an especially high quality that for centuries were the only or most persuasive means for showing off the beauty and wealth of Europe’s leading cities. The exhibition starts with Italy, the first to introduce the imago urbis thanks to the invention of perspective in the early years of the 15th century, providing a fascinating manifesto of the ambitions of popes, princes and sovereigns.

Following a chronological and geographic itinerary, the visitor can then travel virtually through cities transformed by time, which for the most part no longer exist in the same way.

Bernardino Zambaiti Veduta di Trento da sud, 1703

Pierre Antoine Demachy Vue panoramique de Tours, 1787

Peter Tillemans London from Greenwich Park, 1718

Jacopo de Barbari Veduta di Venezia a volo d’uccello (particolare), 1500

Scientific coordination Gabriella Belli
Curated by Cesare De Seta
Layout by Daniela Ferretti

↧

German Expressionism: A Revolutionary Spirit

February 11, 2014, 11:07 am

≫ Next: Edvard Munch: Symbolism in Print, Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art, New York

≪ Previous: THE IMAGE OF THE EUROPEAN CITY FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) presents a compelling overview of one of the most visually arresting art movements of the 20th century. German Expressionism: A Revolutionary Spirit, on view January 29 -September 14, 2014, features more than 35 vivid paintings, prints, watercolors, drawings, and sculpture by Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, and others who contributed to this creative zeitgeist (spirit of the time). The exhibition includes rarely seen works from the BMA and select loans from private collections. It is curated by BMA Associate Curator of European Painting & Sculpture Oliver Shell.

German Expressionism emerged as a result of the country’s extraordinary industrial growth and modernization in the late 19th century. Two groups with similar ambitions formed to liberate themselves from the older generation, revolutionize art, and bring about a universal spiritual rebirth. Die Brücke (The Bridge) began in 1905 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and several architecture students in Dresden. Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was organized in 1911 by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in Munich. Inspired by exhibitions of works by Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and others, both groups explored increasingly subjective forms of representation. They also shared a vital sense of celebration and an eagerness for invention, especially in the graphic arts. They were soon joined by Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and other like-minded spirits who believed that art could herald a renewal of society.

The exhibition explores two major themes embraced by this new generation of artists. Some showed a fascination with modern cities and mass entertainment, creating works such as

Otto Dix’s print Woman with Heron Feather (1923)

and Pechstein’s painting The Circus (1920),

while others demonstrated a concern with nature and folk traditions or were inspired by the kind of authenticity they found in non-European “primitive” art.

Many of these artists experimented with woodcut printing techniques that had flourished in the 16th century, creating intensely colored prints like

Kandinsky’s The Archer (1908-1909)

and Kirchner’s Fir Trees (1919).

Other highlights include

Alexei Jawlensky’s Head of a Woman (c. 1911)

and important precursors to Expressionism such as

Gustav Klimt’s painting Pine Forest II (1901).

The last section of the exhibition includes intense psychological portraits by Dix, Max Beckmann, and others whose artwork reflects the change in mood caused by the devastation of World War I and Germany’s economic and political collapse. By 1933, the era of Expressionism was largely over.

From an outstanding review: (Images added)

This is especially apparent beside Ernst Kirchner’s “Fir Trees,” from 1919, (above) which takes the bucolic mysticism out of Klimt and replaces it with the long, arching shadows and ominous uncanniness that foreshadows The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which was released the following year.

Kirchner is, perhaps, the dominant figure in the show, with seven works, each of which takes a different tone and style. He has a quick drawing of women at a café, a lithograph of dancing girls, a woodcut of a woman putting on her shoe. Then there is the wildly modern woodcut “Three Bathers by a Lake” with its Christ-like central figure, or the stunning, Fauve-influenced pink oil-painted sky of “Flower Beds in the Dresden Gardens”:

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Flower Beds in the Dresden Gardens. c. 1910. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Gift of Curt Valentin Gallery, Inc., BMA 1953.33

And the “Head of Ludwig Schames” is simultaneously deeply classical and highly modern. Kirchner is a fascinating figure, one of the founders of the Die Brücke movement, a nudist, proponent of free love, and general all-around Bohemian who has a lot to say to our own time. If this show were to do nothing more than reintroduce him to Baltimore, it would be a great success...

If the show is divided into pre-war and postwar sections,

Lovis Corinth’s terrifying “The Black Hussar”

stands at the fulcrum between them. The cold, sadistic look on the World War I cavalry officer is as imperious as his kinky black uniform, painted with angry strokes (the background is a mash of abstract colors that conveys an ominous emotional intensity). His expression is that of the leaders of Europe who felt this war would be like the ones which came before it—when instead, these haughty cavalrymen and their horses were sawed in half by machine guns...

Beckmann’s “In the Street Car” places the viewer in a streetcar across from three people: In the center a man, most likely a war veteran, glowers at you from above the bandage that covers a missing nose; to his left a woman looks down in tired sorrow; and to his right a William Burroughs-looking fellow sucks his thumb. The people are physically close but infinitely distant, alienated. The work shares the fascination with the urban life of Kirchner’s dancing women or Max Pechstein’s “The Circus” (above) while primarily reflecting the loss that comes with modern life rather than the gains.

Otto Dix’s 1914 “The Cannoneer” captures the madness, fury, and fear that came with Dix’s enlistment in that same year...

Käthe Kollwitz’s “Battlefield” comes from 1907, but it is the darkest work, both literally and metaphorically, in this dark show.

↧

Edvard Munch: Symbolism in Print, Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art, New York

February 11, 2014, 12:39 pm

≫ Next: Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: The Hawaii Pictures

≪ Previous: German Expressionism: A Revolutionary Spirit

Venues

North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, 23 September – February 10, 2013
Princeton University Art Museum from February 8 through June 8, 2014

Revered as one of the most emotionally powerful painters in modern art, Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is also considered among the greatest printmakers of the modern period. Edvard Munch: Symbolism in Print, Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art, New York traces the artist’s process of translating his personal meditations on the anxieties of life, sexuality, and death into graphic form in arresting etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts, often experimenting with the same image in more than one technique. The exhibition, which includes twenty-six of Munch’s signature prints, will be on view at the Princeton University Art Museum from February 8 through June 8, 2014.

“The repercussions of Munch’s achievement—his incisive commentary on the psychological tolls of modern life—continue to be felt throughout visual art and culture,” said Museum Director James Steward. “This exhibition reminds us that it is in his prints that we may find most forcefully the raw, unfiltered emotion of his images.”

A poetic visionary and master of the idiom, Munch was influenced by the emotional insights of Vincent van Gogh as well as the vibrant color and symbolic forms of Paul Gauguin, whose Tahitian woodcuts provided inspiration for Munch’s innovative development as a printmaker. Yet while Gauguin’s woodcuts evoked an imagined Polynesian idyll, Munch turned his prophetic vision inward, capturing what he perceived to be universal experiences of modern life and often drawing from personal memories of his often tragic past. In this way, Munch might incarnate better than any other artist the tenets of Symbolism, a movement that argued that art must reject rational naturalism and move beyond physical reality to embrace the imagination, dreams, and freedom from artistic convention. Best known for his painting The Scream (1893), seen by many as the perfect embodiment of modern-day psychic distress, Munch was in turn instrumental to the development of early twentieth-century European Expressionism. His vividly haunting images have resonated for more than a century, growing more relevant to contemporary sensibilities.

Often derived from his paintings, Munch’s prints concentrate on intensely remembered moments in his life, compelling viewers to confront themes of loneliness, lust, despair, and death. As Munch explored the emotional terrain of his life, he experimented with printmaking, unafraid to break the rules in order to more sharply realize his artistic vision. Because of the bare honesty of his imagery and his relentless inventiveness, Munch is acknowledged as one of the pioneering masters of modern art whose influence continues to be felt by artists today.

Munch has achieved rock star status with the recent sale of The Scream for almost $120 million. But he is “much more than the painter of a ludicrously expensive pop icon,” insists John Coffey, deputy director for art at the NCMA. “Munch is one of the towering image makers of modern times. His works probe the turbulent, even taboo reaches of the human heart with unflinching candor and compassion.”

Describing his artistic inspirations, Munch stated, “Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.” The artist’s anxious relationships—with his family, his lovers, and society as a whole—generate images that transcend one man’s experience and speak to universal human concerns.

Utterly consumed by his subject matter, Munch often created several versions of the same image. For example, the exhibition features two works titled The Kiss, depicting lovers in an embrace. One print is an etching; the other a woodcut. In the woodcut, the two figures are fused into a single identity—a terrifying notion to Munch. In a pair of woodcuts titled The Lonely Ones, Munch uses the same printing block carved with an image of a couple gazing out to sea. However, each print is inked in different colors, dramatically altering the emotional “temperature” of the scene.

Edvard Munch: Symbolism in Print is organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, by Chief Curator Emerta Deborah Wey and Starr Figura, The Phyllis Ann and Walter Borten Associate Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books. The exhibition is curated at Princeton by Calvin Brown, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Princeton University Art Museum.

From a review of the North Carolina show:

Many of the prints featured in Symbolism in Print, explore an apprehension towards women which began to emerge in the later half of the 19th century.

Kvinnen II (The Woman II),

depicts three women who represent the three stages of a woman’s life: the naïve virgin, the brazen temptress and the regretful mother. This work ultimately represents the misogynistic understanding of the sexual evolution of women...Although not a stranger to a sordid love affair, the promiscuity of the female sex for Munch was both magnetic and a source of internal despair. His woodcut,

Kiss IV,

visually represents this despair as he depicts himself and his married lover losing physical features as the emptiness of the endeavor begins to take its toll. Refusing to part with his paintings, which he viewed as “his children,” his prints were his source of financial income and were often of his paintings.

1. Edvard Munch, Attraction I (Tiltrekning I), 1896, lithograph, composition (irreg.): 19 x 14 3/8 in., Publisher: the artist, Paris; Printer: Auguste Clot, Paris; Edition: more than 100; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. J. Hall Collection, © 2012 The Munch Museum / The Munch-Ellingsen Group / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

2. Edvard Munch, Ashes II (After the Fall), 1899, lithograph with watercolor additions, composition: 13 15/16 x 18 in., Publisher: the artist, Kristiania (present-day Oslo), Norway; Printer: Petersen and Waitz, Kristiania (present-day Oslo), Norway; Edition: approximately 50–100; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. J. Hall Collection, © 2012 The Munch Museum / The Munch-Ellingsen Group / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

3. Edvard Munch, Anxiety, 1896, lithograph, composition: 16 5/16 x 15 3/8 in., Publisher: Vollard, Paris; Printer: Auguste Clot, Paris; Edition: 100; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund, © 2012 The Munch Museum / The Munch-Ellingsen Group / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

From another review of that show:

(W)e learned that Munch was a sickly child who was intensely sensitive and fearful of the world around him. He was drawn to themes of sex (how one is swallowed up) and death (how it lurks behind life), and eventually devoted his later years to studying these topics through his artwork. As he studied and created art, he focused on expressing not simply a snapshot of what he thought, but the feelings that permeated these thoughts. He desired to capture the fear, pain, disgust, and sorrow that under-girded various moments.

The print above, for example, is titled "The Lonely Ones," and reveals very simply the distance between two (possible lovers) even though they stand next to each other, and the distance they feel between themselves and the world. They contemplate this pervasive loneliness at the edge of the sea, by moonlight.

Still another excellent review:

Detail from Edvard Munch's "Det syke barn I (The Sick Child I)" (1896), lithograph, 16 5/8 x 22 7/16 in.© 2011 The Munch Museum/ The Munch-Ellingsen Group/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Munch's "The Sick Child" served this purpose. It depicts his sister Johanne Sophie on her deathbed, pale and drawn from tuberculosis. Painfully frail in profile against a white pillow, a shock of her red hair sticks up. Their mother sits by the bed, slumped over the child's hand.

Sophie's death in 1877, when she was just 15 years old and Munch a year younger, became his central trauma. Munch barely survived childhood tuberculosis himself and kept the chair his sister died in in his studio his whole life as both a talisman against death and a reminder of its constant proximity.

Symbolism in Print presents three versions of "The Sick Child," including the quintessential red lithograph from 1896 (as well as an image of the family gathered in sorrow entitled "Death in the Sickroom"). Rehearsing the excruciating tension of waiting for a loved one to die, as well as his sorrow and survivor's guilt, Munch completed six paintings of this image over a 40-year span. The 1885–86 version proved transformative. Munch scratched off and repainted his sister's face many times, trying to transfer the depth of his feelings into the image. Both the rawness of his expression and the effectiveness of his repetitive process were revelatory.

The three prints show Munch's adjustments. An 1894 drypoint includes a sketched landscape in a separate panel at the bottom. A tiny etching and drypoint from 1896 crops out Munch's mother, zooming in on Sophie's expressionless face against the pillow. In the red lithograph, which Munch considered his most successful print, his sister faces in the opposite direction from the other two prints.

More images from the exhibition:

Edvard Munch, Norwegian, 1863–1944:Two Women on the Shore, 1898. Woodcut. Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchase (1190.1968). © 2013 The Munch Museum / The Munch-Ellingsen Group / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Edvard Munch, Madonna, 1895–1902, lithograph and woodcut, composition: 23 13/16 x 17 1/2 in., Publisher: Edvard Munch, Berlin; Printer: M. W. Lassally, Berlin; Edition: approximately 150 in several color and compositional variations; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. J. Hall Collection, © 2011 TheMunch Museum / The Munch-Ellingsen Group / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: The Hawaii Pictures

February 12, 2014, 6:41 am

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Venues

Honolulu Museum of Art, July 18, 2013 through Jan. 12, 2014.
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, February 7, 2014 through September 14, 2014.

Organized by Theresa Papanikolas, Honolulu Museum of Art’s curator for European and American Art, this exhibition will bring together for the first time works inspired by the natural beauty of Hawaii as uniquely experienced by each artist. The show will run from

Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams are two of America’s most influential modernists, each celebrated for their interpretations of particular places: O’Keeffe, the American Southwest and Adams, Yosemite National Park; both are revered for their ability to capture and translate their experience of natural beauty onto paper for their audience.

The two met in 1929 in Taos, New Mexico and developed a lifelong friendship through a mutual admiration and devotion to the natural world.

The exhibition includes works from O’Keeffe’s trip to Honolulu and neighboring islands in 1939, commissioned by The Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now the Dole Company). On her two month stay she visited Hawaii’s vast array of natural wonders, isolating single forms and creating modern, abstracted compositions based on observation of the natural world. O’Keeffe went beyond painting the popular stereotypical Hawaii, approaching each piece with an original perspective drawn from her well-established practice of landscape and still-life painting.

“O’Keeffe was an experienced colorist; she also deployed a dramatic palette to intensify the exotic beauty of specific landscapes and flowers she encountered in the islands,” said Carolyn Kastner, Curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

O’Keeffe unveils the subject in her own authentic and personal response, exposing the inescapable beauty of the form itself. Each piece is sophisticated in palette, it reflects and reinforces her characteristically modernist dissection of landscape and botanical life.

Ansel Adams’ photographs of Hawaii were also commissioned, first in 1948 for the Department of the Interior, and in 1957 for a commemorative publication for Bishop National Bank of Hawaii (currently First Hawaiian Bank). Like O’Keeffe, Adams sought to reveal a nontraditional view of the islands, aiming to capture a sense of place with his unique style and showing the viewer the connection between the land and its inhabitants.

In a letter written by Adams in 1938 he explains, “If I have any niche at all in the photographic presentation of America, I think it would be chiefly to show the land and the sky as the settings for human activity.”

The exhibition showcases Adams’ abilities as a modern photographer to offer penetrating and revelatory insight about his subjects with absolute technical mastery of the photographic process.

“The exhibition builds on the concept of the 2008 exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities to analyze how each artist responded to an unfamiliar tropical environment, despite an initial hesitation and the predominance of tourist imagery,” said Kastner. “

As pointed out by exhibition organizer Theresa Papanikolas, curator of the Honolulu Museum of Art, neither artist followed the familiar clichés of ‘moonlit seas, swaying coconut palms, and the ubiquitous profile of Diamond Head,’ which defined the islands in the popular visual culture of the time.”

A catalogue of essays written by Theresa Papanikolas and Anne Hammond will accompany the exhibition, comparing and contrasting the artists’ personal approach to their craft. The essays explore how O’Keeffe and Adams avoided popular stereotypes in formulating their artistic expressions of how they experienced Hawaii. Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: The Hawai‘i Pictures was organized by the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Ansel Adams'"Buddhist Grave markers and Rainbow, Paia, Maui, Hawaii," 1956, ;Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. Photo: ©First Hawaiian Bank

Ansel Adams'"Sanchez Family, Wailuku Plantation, Maui," 1957, Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Photo: ©First Hawaiian Bank

Ansel Adams'"On the Island of Molokai, Hawaii," c. 1957, ;Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Photo: ©First Hawaiian Bank

Ansel Adams'"Fish pond at dawn near Kaunakakai, Molokai," 1958, Plate 17 from "The Islands of Hawaii," ;Collection First Hawaiian Bank, Photo: ©First Hawaiian Bank

Ansel Adams'"Roots, Foster Garden, Hawaii," 1948, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry B. Clark, Jr., 1989 Photo: ©2013 The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Georgia O'Keeffe's oil painting ;"Waterfall—No. III—Iao Valley," 1939, ;gift of Susan Crawford Tracy to the Honolulu Museum of Art. Photo: Honolulu Museum Of Art

Georgia O'Keeffe's "Heliconia—Crab Claw," 1939, is part of a private collection.
Photo: © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society

Georgia O'Keeffe's "Black Lava Bridge, Hana Coast No. 2," 1939, gift of the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, 1994 Photo: Honolulu Museum Of Art

Georgia O'Keeffe's "White Bird of Paradise," 1939, was a gift of Jean H. McDonald to the O'Keeffe Museum. Photo: © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society

Georgia O'Keeffe's "Pawpaw (Papaya) Tree, Iao Valley, Maui," 1939, gift of Susan Crawford Tracy, 1996 Photo: Honolulu Museum Of Art

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“Léger. A vision of the contemporary city 1910-1930”

February 12, 2014, 8:10 am

≫ Next: 500 Years of Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum

≪ Previous: Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: The Hawaii Pictures

Venues

The Philadelphia Museum of Art (Title: Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis) October 14, 2013–January 5, 2014

Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Museo Correr, 8th February to 2nd June 2014

“If pictorial expression has changed, it is because modern life has required it...
The view from the window of a railway carriage and car travelling at speed has altered
the customary appearance of things. A modern man registers a hundred times more
sensorial impressions than an artist of the 18th century…
The compression of a modern painting, its variety, its decomposition of forms, are the
result of all this”.
Fernand Léger, 1914

These were the words used by Fernand Léger (1881–1955) on the eve of the outbreak
of the First World War to comment on the radical transformations the spread of the
second Industrial Revolution was bringing to every sphere of everyday life, in which an
increasingly frantic, or more modern, rhythm in life was changing art and its rules.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia are
dedicating a major exhibition to Léger and his extraordinary career within the
European artistic avant-garde, to be hosted in the rooms of the Museo Correr.
This important event, open from 8th February to 2nd June 2014, will be the first
major exhibition about the French artist’s work to be held in Italy, and will focus
on the theme of the depiction of the contemporary city.

Divided into five sections (The metropolis before the Great War, The painter of the city,
Advertising, The performing arts, Space), ‘Léger. A vision of the contemporary city
1910 - 1930’ is curated by Anna Vallye with the scientific direction of Gabriella
Belli and Timothy Rub, director of the PMA in Philadelphia and exhibition project
by Daniela Ferretti, in the wake of the success at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
“Léger. A vision of the contemporary city 1910-1930” presents over 100 works,
of which more than 60 by Léger himself. The selection includes the outstanding
‘La Ville’, a painting that led the way to the most experimental and Cubist/Futurist
experimentation of his production, and which has exceptionally been loaned by the
Philadelphia together with a group of another 25 important works.

Painted by Léger in 1919 on his return to Paris after serving at the Front during the First
World War, this large picture would influence an entire generation of artists, becoming
a manifesto of painting dedicated to the subject of the contemporary city. The
painting’s subject is the city and its frantic activity, its architecture of Cubo-Futurist
assemblages, and its inhabitants: mechanical, almost robotic men, harmoniously
integrated into the dynamism of the new “urban machine”.

This extraordinary work, constituting the incipit of the exhibition, will be flanked by a series
of important works from public and private European and American collections
(Tate Liverpool, the Avery Art and Architecture Library of Columbia University in New
York, the Dansmuseet of Stockholm, the Centre Pompidou of Paris, the Musée National
Fernand Léger in Biot, the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio and the Fondation Beyeler of
Basel, to mention a few), enabling the visitor not only to compare Léger’s picture with
many other innovative compositions by the same artist, all linked to the theme of the
modern city and some of them virtually unknown in Italy (such as his work for
theatre design and advertising, and sets for theatre and cinema), but also to explore
the links between his own work and that of other exponents of this fruitful avant-garde
season.

His rich production, which explored almost every field of artistic endeavour, from
advertising and cinema to graphic design and theatre, will be compared in the
exhibition with other masterpieces by leading artists of the period, friends and
travelling companions in experimentation, among whom Duchamp, Picabia, Robert
Delaunay, El Lissitzky, Mondrian, Le Corbusier; all artists who, like Léger himself,
have contributed to renewing the notion of how to depict the city, each using the form
best suited to his personal aesthetic interests but falling within one of the many ‘isms’ of
the early 20th century, from Cubism to Futurism, Constructivism to the Neoplasticism
of De Stijl.

The quantity and variety of the works and projects displayed – from the first urban
landscape of all, “Smoke over rooftops” of 1911, to the so-called mural pictures executed
between 1924 and 1926; from the costumes and choreographies for the “Ballets
Suédois” to such famous works as “The typographer” (1919), “Man with a cane” (1920)
and “Mechanical element” (1924), and Marcel L’Herbier’s film “L’inhumaine”, for which
he helped with the sets and which constitutes a celebration of cinema as synthesis of
the arts – will enable visitors to judge the artistic results of those crucial two
decades between 1910 and 1930 with their multifarious facets, when Paris was
truly the world’s capital for art, culture, trade and society, before the stock market
crashes caused its inexorable decline. And it was in Paris that Léger and the avant-garde
artists, responsive to the stimuli originating from that extraordinary “forge” of stimuli
and innovation that was the modern metropolis, played a leading role in redefining the
place of art within society.

Léger’s work in this field was truly pioneering – and the exhibition stresses the fact
– both for his multi-disciplinary conception of art and for his striving to change the
forms of painting, thereby meeting the demands of the new urban reality, in line with a
phenomenon that after the Second World War would be dubbed mass communication.
Reworking his style, which was first influenced by Picasso’s Cubism and his
contacts with leading exponents of the European avant-garde, like Robert Delaunay,
Jacques Lipchitz and Juan Gris, Fernand Léger gradually formed a wholly personal
manner, and from the period immediately after the Great War began to impose himself
as a major architect of painting. His “realism”, attuned to urban life, was certainly the
most interesting result of the cross-fertilisation between the various forms of art and
the style of the first mass media.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Skira-Milan, 2014.

Fernand Léger will be remembered in an exhibition, which takes place almost simultaneously with
the one of Correr Museum, held at the Musée National Fernand Léger in Biot, France.

Fernand Léger: reconstruct the real

March 1st to June 2nd, 2014

Musée National Fernand Léger (Biot, France)

“Fernand Léger: reconstruire the réel, 1924-1946” is an exhibition that, from 1st March to 2nd
June 2014, will shed light on part of artist’s career which is still little explored by investigating hisrelationship with the principles of a movement that, at first sight, was far from being his formation: Surrealism.

—
FERNAND LÉGER - BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Fernand Léger lived through a period of great change that transformed everyday life. He witnessed the transformation from candles to gas and electricity, from horse-drawn carts to cars and the airplane, and from a prevalently rural society to an increasingly urban one. His generation also saw the birth of new means of communication, such as the cinema, telegraph and radio.

Born in 1881 at Argentan, Normandy, after an apprenticeship in architecture at Caen, he entered the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1903. After destroying most of his early works, in 1908 he began to develop a personal style, influenced by Cubism and Picasso’s work.

In 1914, he was called up and served during the First World War in the trenches of the Ardennes and Verdun; it was an experience that was to mark him for life. At the end of the war, he worked on painting, murals, tapestries, mosaics, sculpture and ceramic; he also collaborated in sets and costumes for theatrical shows. In 1924, he produced an avant-garde film called “Ballet mécanique”. And he also worked for ballet, being responsible for the costumes and sets of Darius Milhaud’s “La création du monde”.

His art enjoyed increasing success in various exhibitions in France, Switzerland and the United States. Between 1940 and 1945, he moved to New York, where he produced a number of huge mural paintings.
He died on 17th August 1955 at Gif-sur-Yvette in France.

From a NY Tinmes review of the Philadelphia show:

For example, in the exhibition’s prologue, where we see Léger formulating his personal fusion of Cubism and Futurism in the years leading up to the war, don’t miss Mondrian’s “Composition No. VI, Compositie 9 (Blue Facade),”

Composition No.VI, Compostion 9 (Blue Façade)
Oil on canvas, 95.5 x 68 cm
Photo: Peter Schibli, Basel

an implied still life/building that seems partly composed of beakers of blue sky. It is on loan from the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland.

From a Washington Post review of the Philadelphia show: (images added)

Early paintings by Léger hang nearby, and the juxtaposition is striking. A

1913 painting, “Houses under the Trees,” seems to show an urban landscape seen from on high,

while a 1911 canvass, “Smoke over Rooftops,”

appears to show the world from multiple perspectives, not quite focused and in motion, as if bits and pieces of a film scene have been sliced together into a single, static image.... Compare his 1926

“Homage to the Dance” with advertisements and poster art of the same period, and you see where Léger’s real affinities lay. Léger’s painting shows two legs, one in black and the other in white, seemingly spinning on a turntable in bold red and yellow. The combination represents both time (with the legs serving as the hands of a clock) and the magical encoding of information in the phonographic disk; but for all these references to time and motion and noise, the image is stationary, sedate and silent. It entices because, like a product on offer in a shop window, it seems to contain legion of possibilities, pent up energy, the promise of dance, music and life.

An excellent review of the Venice show

The City, 1919. Fernand Léger, French, 1881 - 1955. Oil on canvas, 7 feet 7 inches x 9 feet 9 1/2 inches (231.1 x 298.4 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, A. E. Gallatin Collection, 1952. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Disks, 1918. Fernand Léger, French, 1881 - 1955. Oil on canvas, 105 1/2 × 81 7/8 × 1 9/16 inches (268 × 208 × 3.9 cm). Musée d'Art Modern de la Ville de Paris.

Composition with Hand and Hats, 1927. Fernand Léger, French, 1881 - 1955. Oil on canvas, 97 3/4 x 73 inches (248.3 x 185.4 cm). Centre Pompidou, Paris Musée national d'art moderne/Centre de création industrielle.

Design from Décors de Théâtre, 1930. Alexandra Exter, Russian (born Ukraine), 1882 - 1949. Pochoir print, 20 1/2 x 13 inches (52.1 x 33 cm) Framed: 29 1/2 × 23 1/2 × 1 1/4 inches (74.9 × 59.7 × 3.2 cm). Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Animated Landscape, 1924, Fernand Léger, oil on canvas. (Image courtesy Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris)

The Woman and The Child, 1922, Fernand Léger.

Three Women, 1921, Fernand Leger

Fernand Léger
La bandiera, 1919
New York, Collection
Mr. e Mrs. Howard e Nancy Marks
© Fernand Léger by SIAE 2014

Fernand Léger
Progetto di sipario per Skating Rink, 1922
Dansmuseet Stockholm © Dansmuseet – Musée Rolf de Maré Stockholm
© Fernand Léger by SIAE 2014

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500 Years of Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum

February 12, 2014, 12:48 pm

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Over 100 masterworks—accompanied by new research and fresh insights—from the Princeton University Art Museum’s distinguished collection of Italian drawings from the 15th through the early 20th centuries will be on view in 500 Years of Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum. Rarely seen highlights by such artists as Barocci, Bernini, Carpaccio, Annibale Carracci, Guercino, Michelangelo, Modigliani, Parmigianino, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo, Tintoretto, and Veronese will be included in the exhibition, which runs from Jan. 25 through May 11, 2014.

Curated by Laura Giles, the Heather and Paul G. Haaga Jr., Class of 1970, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Princeton University Art Museum, 500 Years of Italian Master Drawings highlights a broad spectrum of works, ranging from the early Renaissance to early Modernism. Beyond its chronological and stylistic sweep, this panoramic exhibition provides dazzling examples of the pivotal role played by drawing, or “disegno,” in the Italian design process, encompassing both the mental formulation and the physical act of creation—with a particular emphasis on the human figure.

The exhibition, which is organized thematically, represents the results of new scholarship on a significant portion of the Museum’s renowned collection of over 1,000 Italian drawings, and is accompanied by a major scholarly catalogue, Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum.

“Princeton’s superb collection of Italian drawings is an outstanding visual resource that deserves to be more widely known,” said Museum Director James Steward. “This major project is a glorious opportunity to share with the public, through both the exhibition and the catalogue, masterpieces that bring to life the immediacy and dynamism of Italian draftsmanship over the centuries.”

Many of the drawings in the exhibition have benefited from new discoveries concerning attribution, iconography, date, function, and provenance. Among the many noteworthy findings is the discovery, first made in the 1990s, of an architectural sketch by Michelangelo on the reverse side of a study of heads that had been tentatively associated with the artist. The ground plan for an unrealized chapel was revealed through infrared reflectography.

The catalogue is authored and edited by Giles, with major contributions by Princeton University Lecturer in the Department of Art & Archaeology Lia Markey and independent writer and scholar Claire Van Cleave, with additional contributions by other leading specialists in the field. The publication is the first since 1977 to focus on the Museum’s expansive collection of Italian drawings and received major funding from the Getty Foundation.

In addition to the publication, the Museum’s online collections catalogue will be updated with new research and high-resolution images, providing unlimited access to the Museum’s significant holdings of Italian drawings.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Italian, 1598–1680: Seated Male Nude, ca. 1618–24. Red chalk, heightened with white, on buff laid paper. Museum purchase, Laura P. Hall Memorial Fund and Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund (2005-128). Photo Bruce M. White

Amedeo Modigliani, Italian, 1884–1920, Anadiomena, 1914, Graphite with embossed and incised lines, on thin white wove paper, 33.9 x 26.5 cm. (13 3/8 x 10 7/16 in.), Bequest of Dan Fellows Platt, Class of 1895, x1948-390

Marcantonio Raimondi, Italian, 1470/80–1527/34, after Albrecht Dürer, German, 1471–1528, Adam, c. 1501-08, Pen and brown ink on light tan laid paper, 19.5 x 10.9 cm. (7 11/16 x 4 5/16 in.), Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr., x1945-47

Gaetano Previati (Italian, 1852–1920), The Monatti (illustration to Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi), ca. 1895–99. watercolor, heightened with white gouache, on light brown wove, 23.2 x 32.2 cm. Museum purchase, Felton Gibbons Fund (2007-16)

Vittore Carpaccio (Italian, ca. 1460/66– 1525/26), Two Standing Women, One in Mamluk Dress, 1501–8. Brush and brown ink with brush and gray-brown wash, heightened with white gouache, over black chalk, on light brown laid paper, 23.2 x 12.1 cm. Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. (x1944-274)

Luca Cambiaso, Sibyl Attended by a Genius Seated on a Cloud, mid-1550s, Brown ink, Gift of Dan Fellows Platt, Class of 1895. Courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino, Man Reading a Book, ca. 1640, Brown ink on beige paper, Gift of Dan Fellows Platt, Class of 1895. Courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum

More images

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Gustav Klimt in the Sign of Hoffmann and the Secession

February 14, 2014, 12:08 pm

≫ Next: Matisse’s Marguerite: Model Daughter

≪ Previous: 500 Years of Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum

Venues

Museo Correr, Venice," Gustav Klimt in the Sign of Hoffmann and the Secession" 24 Mar 2012 - 8 Jul 2012
Belvedere, Vienna "150 Years Gustav Klimt - Jubilee Exhibition" from Jul 13, 2012 until Jan 27, 2013

After a century of his acclaimed participation at the Venice Biennale (1910), Gustav Klimt returned to the lagoon as the protagonist of a remarkable exhibition to be held in the rooms of the Museo Correr. A glorious occasion to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth (1862-2012), the exhibition is a joint production of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and the Belvedere Museum of Vienna, in collaboration with 24 ORE Cultura – Gruppo 24 ORE and Arthemisia Group. The curator of the exhibition is Alfreid Weidinger, one of the leading experts on the Austrian artist.

Gustav Klimt in the Sign of Hoffmann and the Secession – the title chosen for the Venetian event – will display an exceptional cycle of paintings, rare and precious drawings, furniture and elegant jewelry, but also elaborate reconstructions and interesting historical documents, whose purpose is to introduce the visitor to the genesis and evolution, in both architecture and painting, of Klimt’s work and of those who gave rise to the Viennese Secession, an instance of that European Modernism that witnessed among its key players such figures as Minne, Jan Toorop, Fernand Khnopff, Koloman Moser, and above all the companion of many intellectual ventures and projects, Josef Hoffmann.

Precisely his collaboration with Josef Hoffmann, architect and interior designer, whom Klimt met in Vienna while the first buds of the Sacred Spring were blooming, is one of the main themes of the exhibition, which seeks to show how in a very short time these two remarkable figures, the artist and the architect, were capable of sharing commissions, clients, friends; but above all, it reveals their spasmodic tension towards the Gesamtkunstwerk, that is, “the total work of art”. The highest point of the utopian realization of this concept can be seen in the

Beethoven Frieze (1901-1902)

and in the decorations for Brussels’ Stoclet Palace, both of which will be showcased at the Venice exhibition.

The exhibition thus told the story of the fertile liaison between these Pioneers of the Modern, for whom architecture, painting and the applied arts were combined and became inseparable from one another.

On display in the rooms of the Correr, alongside the cycles mentioned above, were the

Judith I (1901)

and the Judith II (Salome) (1909),

together for the first time, which were acquired at the 1910 Biennale for the Galleria Nazionale Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro, alongside some of the masterpieces from the Vienna Belvedere, the institution owning the largest collection of Klimt’s oils on canvas, and others from public and private collections, including the

Lady by the Fireplace

Portrait of Hermine Gallia (1904),

The Kiss, 1908.

Fritza Reidler, 1906

From a nice review of the Venice show:

My favourite detail of Klimt's "Judith II" was how he drew the hands. I couldn't find a good quality picture of this detail but if you'll ever see this masterpiece please remember my words and pay attention to those magnificent brushstrokes!

The exhibition features a giant facsimile of the Beethoven Frieze, painted by Klimt in 1902 and now on display at the Vienna Secession Building. (above)

I don't think this work needs any introduction, I'm just quoting the exhibition's caption: "The artist leads us into an ideal realm, the only place where we can find pure joy, pure happiness, pure love".
This painting is a metaphor of human condition and it examines the pursuit of happiness, the collision with evil forces, the final discovery of joy and love...

The last canvas is Klimt's "Sunflower", an anthropomorphic form with a symbolical flower in place of the head.

The exhibition also features pieces of jewellery made by Hoffmann and some Secessionist fittings.

I am keen on Klimt and Art Nouveau so I just loved this exhibition. I didn't know I was going to see "Judith I", one of my favourite paintings, so it was an even more pleasant experience!

More images from the exhibition:

Gustav Klimt. Moving Water (1898). Olio su tela. Colelzione privata, courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York.

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Matisse’s Marguerite: Model Daughter

February 18, 2014, 5:43 am

≫ Next: John Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum

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The Baltimore Museum of Art presented a special exhibition of prints, drawings, paintings, and sculptures that provide a fascinating glimpse of Henri Matisse’s relationship with his only daughter, Marguerite. On view September 18, 2013 – January 19, 2014, Matisse’s Marguerite: Model Daughter brings together more than 40 works from the BMA and other public and private collections to show Marguerite over the course of 45 years. Matisse made more portraits of his daughter than of all the other members of his family combined. He often shows a strong personal absorption with the character of his daughter—and reveals something about himself in the process of creating his art.

The exhibition was organized by BMA Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs Jay Fisher and presented in the Cone Collection galleries.

“Matisse approached these portraits of Marguerite with an intimacy that’s not necessarily seen in his other works,” said Jay Fisher, BMA Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs. “Most of his models were often shown preoccupied, looking off into a different direction away from the viewer. They aren’t as much the subject of the painting as they are in service to other artistic ideas. Matisse was much more direct and sensitive to Marguerite’s features and character.”

Born in 1894, Marguerite soon appears in sketches of a little girl of 6 or 7. By the time she was 12, she was a frequent participant in the life of his studio and would often take on important roles in major paintings. Many portraits of her were breakthrough works like

Marguerite (1916)

that reveal an advance in Matisse’s artistic vision, but she also appeared in pictures of family life and with other models such as

Two Women in a Landscape, Vallée du Loup (1922).

Matisse brings much of himself and his own feelings to the portraits of his daughter. Sometimes she appears younger than she is, as if Matisse were reliving her childhood, and sometimes older, as if he were anticipating her aging.

Marguerite shielded her father from many of the distractions that could bring him away from his art. She was most often the contact to Matisse’s collectors.

From an intgeresting post:

Henri Matisse, Portrait of Marguerite Asleep, 1920. oil on canvas, Private Collection

In Portrait of Marguerite Asleep, she is oblivious of her surroundings, possibly taking a nap while on a summer visit to the Normandy coast with Matisse where the painting was executed in 1920. A few years later she married art critic Georges Duthuit and essentially ended her creative collaboration with her father.

Then, during World War II, Marguerite worked for the French resistance and was eventually arrested by the Gestapo. After being imprisoned and tortured, she was deported to a concentration camp but escaped en route. In spite of her ordeal, Marguerite survived to the age of 87; she was in the process of completing an extensive catalgoue of Matisse’s art just before she died.

From another review: (some images added)

Henri Matisse's "Little Girl, Flowered Blouse," 1920

Matisse depicted his daughter for the final time in 1945, after her ordeal during the war (Matisse died in 1954).

Whether depicted as a girl or a chic woman of the 1920s

("Marguerite Wearing a Hat," a 1918 painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a gem in the exhibit),

Marguerite comes across as a vibrant, endearing character — sometimes charming, sometimes solemn, always full of nuances and possibilities.

The ribbon she wore around her neck to cover up the tracheotomy scar is a haunting feature of these earlier works.

In the 1945 portraits, Marguerite has the look of a woman who has experienced much — too much of the bad in the world — yet still exudes a powerful life force. No wonder Matisse felt compelled to draw her.

In his book "Matisse Portraits," John Klein suggested that the artist explored an aspect of himself in portraying Marguerite, "as if she gave him access to something of himself that he could not apprehend more directly. … By affirming her individuality, he could also reflect on and amplify his own."

In a bittersweet corner of the exhibit hang a couple of Marguerite's surviving paintings, which reveal an eye for color and form. After learning that some people mistook her work for her father's, she destroyed most of what she had created.

From still another interesting review:

His Marguerite appears in his works at age 6. As a sickly child, she required a tracheotomy, becoming a captive model for her father, who he drew with a ribbon around her neck to conceal the scar. As a teenager, she became a constant presence in his studio, dressing a model in “La Toilette” (1905)and serving as a muse herself in “Marguerite Writing” (1906).

He later depicts her as a grown woman in more famous portraits including “Marguerite” 1916, and “Marguerite Wearing a Hat” both on loan from the Met. More than a muse, she was a manager of his studio and the conduit to his most important patrons, corresponding for decades with Gertrude Stein and Etta and Claribel Cone, the Baltimore-based sisters who donated 500 of their 3,000 Matisse works to the BMA.

From the Museum of Modern Art:

Interior with a Young Girl (Girl Reading)

Matisse turned this intimate scene of his daughter, Marguerite, reading into a riot of color—her hair is painted in nearly as many colors as the fruit in the foreground. The artist developed this bold palette in the summer of 1905 in the southern port town of Collioure, France.

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