Art History News

In March of 1933, many of the banks in America were closed. The country was gripped by an economic depression and the emotional climate of the American people was also at an all time low. Art dealer Reeves Lewenthal chose this time in history to form the Associated American Artists organization.

The cover of Associated American Artists' (AAA) inaugural catalogue of prints, issued in October 1935, boldly and succinctly declared the corporation's primary objective: "Bringing American Art to Americans." Implicit in this statement were two important notions: 1) Collecting and appreciating serious art was now within reach of middle-class America and no longer the exclusive domain of the well-heeled; and, 2) Americans should collect American art. Promoting an egalitarian culture of art collecting was a marketing strategy that positioned AAA outside the dominant, traditional gallery system and capitalized on the period's popular perceptions of art galleries, dealers, and collectors. In the minds of many middle-class Americans the art world was elitist and peopled with blue-blooded connoisseurs and purveyors of the esoteric and rarefied. Associated American Artists craftily played on these prevailing sentiments, giving rise to a significant new class of collectors and creating a highly lucrative art merchandising machine.

Though the corporation's name suggests otherwise, Associated American Artists was the brainchild and operation of Reeves Lewenthal (1910-1987), a twenty-three year old former publicist and entrepreneurial wunderkind. In July of 1934, Lewenthal gathered a group of twenty-three artists in Thomas Hart Benton's New York City studio and pitched his proposal. He would pay the artists a flat fee of $200 to create a print, and they would produce the stone or plate from which the image would be printed. Lewenthal would be responsible for the printing, marketing, and distribution of the prints, which would be produced in editions of 250 and sold for five dollars each, initially in large department stores and later through mail order.

On October 15, 1934, amid a blitz of newspaper and magazine advertising, Lewenthal launched his vision in fifty American cities, where department store shoppers could view and purchase AAA's five-dollar prints. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and Lewenthal's efforts widely praised. Though AAA's ledgers showed a loss of $30,000 for 1934, largely because of startup costs, the corporation posted a $50,000 profit the following year after initiating mail order sales of the prints. By 1941, AAA had become what Time magazine characterized as "a $500,000-a-year business [that] drove many a frock-coated Manhattan gallery director furiously to think" and behind whose "rocketing rise lay one of the ablest promotion and distribution jobs the U.S. art world has seen."

Art By Subscription features more than 70 Depression-Era prints by such leading American artists as Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh, Peggy Bacon and Grant Wood. The prints were among the thousands commissioned and distributed by Associated American Artists, a business venture formed in 1934 by art agent and publicist Reeves Lewenthal. The prints were predominantly representational and regional in subject matter aimed at a patriotic American middle class as educational, affordable art.

Exhibition organized by the Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, Ohio. Tour management by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services, Kansas City, Mo.

Prints included:

Grant Wood, "March," 1939, lithograph

Grant Wood, Approaching Storm, 1940, Lithograph, Gift of Susan Wayne and Leslie Wayne Loftus,
Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, Ohio

Thomas Hart Benton,
I Got a Gal on Sourwood Mountain,1938, Collection of the Springfield Museum of Art

Thomas Hart Benton, Wreck of the Old '97, 1944, Lithograph

John Steuart Curry, John Brown, 1939, Lithograph

John Steuart Curry, Stallion and Jack Fighting, 1943

Reginald Marsh, Girl Walking, 1945, Lithograph, 10 1/2 x 8 inches. Collection of the Springfield Museum of Art.

Miguel Covarrubias, Rumba, undated

Tour dates:

Sept. 9–Nov. 10, 2013: Gustavus Adolphus College, Hillstrom Museum of Art, St. Peter, Minn.

Dec. 6, 2013–Feb. 2, 2014: Dane G. Hansen Memorial Museum, Logan, Kan.

The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) presents Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London, featuring about 50 masterpieces from this magnificent painting collection, many of which have never traveled to the United States. The exhibition is on view February 14 through May 19, 2013 and is organized by the American Federation of Arts and English Heritage.

This collection, known as the Iveagh Bequest, resides at Kenwood House, a neoclassical villa in London that Scottish architect Robert Adam remodeled in the eighteenth century. Set in beautiful landscaped parkland in the midst of Hampstead Heath, Kenwood House is one of the most magnificent visitor attractions in London. This elegant villa, houses a superb collection of paintings that includes masterpieces by Rembrandt van Rijn, Johan Vermeer, Joseph Mallord William Turner and Thomas Gainsborough, as well as the Suffolk collection of rare Jacobean portraits.

Donated to England by Edward Cecil Guinness, (1847–1927), the first Earl of Iveagh and heir to the Guinness Brewery, the collection was shaped by the tastes of the Belle Époque—Europe’s equivalent to America’s Gilded Age—when Lord Iveagh shared the cultural stage and art market with other industry titans such as the Rothschilds, J. Pierpont Morgan, and Henry Clay Frick. Lord Iveagh’s purchases, made mainly between 1887 and 1891, reveal a taste for the portraiture, landscape, and 17th-century Dutch and Flemish works that could typically be found in English aristocratic collections.

Among the works by Dutch and Flemish masters in the exhibition is

Rembrandt’s sublime Portrait of the Artist (ca. 1665), one of the artist’s last self-portraits and one of only a few of his many self-portraits that show him as a working painter. His barely articulated brushes and palette are painted in the same tones as his robe and seem like a natural extension of his arm. The prime focus of the painting is the artist’s face, illuminated by light and a bright white cap against an otherwise murky background.

There are several paintings by Gainsborough in the exhibition including the full-length portrait

Mary, Countess Howe (ca. 1764), in which Gainsborough has created both an image of aristocratic elegance against the natural setting of the English countryside and one of a landowner among her properties.

Such full-length portraits of ladies in nature were popular during this period, owing to a great admiration for the aristocratic portraits of Sir Anthony Van Dyck, royal painter to Charles I of England in the 17th century. Along with such aristocratic ladies, the collection’s “virtual harem” of English portraits features celebrity demimondaines including actresses and mistresses. Foremost among these are

Emma Hart—later Lady Hamilton—who served as George Romney’s muse,

and Kitty Fisher—one of the most celebrated courtesans in London society.

British portraits of 18th century gentlemen are often placed indoors in dignified settings that indicate their accomplishments or status as leisured aristocrats.

Van Dyck’s influence on such portraits is evident in a comparison of his James Stuart, 1st Duke of Richmond and 4th Duke of Lennox (ca. 1636)

to Gainsborough’s portrait of John Joseph Merlin (1781), which echoes Van Dyck’s 17th-century aristocratic portrait in its use of a seated pose, elegant hands, and bold, red fabric against a brown background.

The exhibition also includes two rare hunting scenes by Gainsborough and a thrilling Edwin Henry Landseer picture of a heron caught in the grip of a hawk.

While the exhibition is on tour, Kenwood House will be undergoing a major repair and conservation program. The work will make the roof wind and weather tight—protecting the magnificent interior and important art collection from serious leaks and damp—and will also repair and revive Kenwood’s beautiful exterior. The project will be complete in summer 2013.

The exhibition is organized by the American Federation of Arts and English Heritage. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities, with additional funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. In-kind support is provided by Barbara and Richard S. Lane.

ABOUT SEATTLE ART MUSEUM

Seattle Art Museum (SAM) provides a welcoming place for people to connect with art and to consider its relationship to their lives. SAM is one museum in three locations: SAM Downtown, Seattle Asian Art Museum at Volunteer Park, and the Olympic Sculpture Park on the downtown waterfront. SAM collects, preserves and exhibits objects from across time and across cultures, exploring the dynamic connections between past and present. SAM is committed to taking action to protect our environment and to finding creative ways to reduce our ecological footprint.

ABOUT AMERICAN FEDERATION OF ARTS The AFA is a nonprofit institution that organizes art exhibitions for presentation in museums around the world, publishes exhibition catalogues and develops educational materials and programs for children and adults. The AFA’s mission is to enrich the public’s experience of art and understanding of culture by organizing and touring a diverse offering of exhibitions embracing all aspects of art history. The AFA has organized or circulated approximately 3,000 exhibitions with presentations in museums in every state, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa that have been viewed by more than 10 million people. For more information about its programs, see www.afaweb.org.

ABOUT ENGLISH HERITAGE English Heritage is the government’s lead advisory body for the historic environment in England and is responsible for the national collection of historic sites and monuments, as well as their contents and archives. The collection comprises more than 400 historic places and spans 5,000 years of architecture, from prehistoric sites to nuclear bunkers. It includes Stonehenge and much of Hadrian’s Wall, the ruins of the greatest medieval abbeys, the world’s first iron bridge, Charles Darwin’s diaries and the Duke of Wellington’s boots. www.english-heritage.org.uk.

More info om artists and works.

IMAGE CREDITS

Rembrandt van Rijn. Portrait of the Artist, ca. 1665. Oil on canvas. 47 x 45 in. Kenwood House, English Heritage; Iveagh Bequest (88028836). Photo courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Thomas Gainsborough. Mary, Countess Howe, ca. 1764. Oil on canvas. 95 x 61 in. Kenwood House, English Heritage; Iveagh Bequest (88029039). Photo courtesy American Federation of Arts.

George Romney, Emma Hart as “The Spinstress," ca. 1784–85, oil on canvas, 68 5/8 x 50 5/8 in., Kenwood House, English Heritage; Iveagh Bequest (88028814). Photo courtesy American Federation of Arts

Kitty Fisher as “Cleopatra” Dissolving the Pearl, 1759, by Joshua Reynolds (English, 1723–1792, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 25 1/4 in.) Kenwood House, English Heritage; Iveagh Bequest (Photo: American Federation of Arts)

MORE IMAGES FROM EXHIBITION

Aelbert Cuyp. View of Dordrecht, ca. 1655. Oil on canvas. 39 3/8 x 53 1/4 in. Kenwood House, English Heritage; Iveagh Bequest (88028825). Photo courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Anthony van Dyck. Princess Henrietta of Lorraine Attended by a Page, 1634 Oil on canvas. 84 3/8 x 50 3/4 in. Kenwood House, English Heritage; Iveagh Bequest (88028826). Photo courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Frans Hals. Pieter van den Broecke, 1633. Oil on canvas. 28 x 24 in. Kenwood House, English Heritage; Iveagh Bequest (88028830). Photo courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Joseph Mallord William Turner. A Coast Scene with Fishermen Hauling a Boat Ashore ("The Iveagh Sea-Piece"), ca. 1803-04. Oil on canvas. 36 1/8 x 48 1/4 in. Kenwood House, English Heritage; Iveagh Bequest (88028820). Photo courtesy American Federation of Arts.

EUROPEAN MASTERS: THE TREASURES OF SEATTLE

Focusing on a great collector of the 19th century, the Treasures of Kenwood House also presents the perfect moment to reveal some of the extraordinary collecting of European painting that has been quietly taking place in Seattle over the last 20 years. The Treasures of Seattle exhibition features approximately 40 paintings, all from local collections, which will share the special exhibition galleries with the paintings from Kenwood House. The paired exhibitions will give visitors the opportunity to observe different approaches to collecting, the history of taste, and how the market has changed since Lord Iveagh began to form his collection in 1887. Featured artists include Vittore Carpaccio, Francisco de Zurbarán, J.A.D. Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, and Frans Hals.

Portrait of an Unknown Man, ca. 1660-1665 Oil on panel Frans Hals Dutch, 1581-1666 13 7/16 x 10 9/16 in. (34.2 x 26.8 cm) Mr. Richard Hedreen

This exhibition is organized by the Seattle Art Museum. Visionary Circle support is provided by Jeffrey and Susan Brotman, Barney A. Ebsworth, Jon and Mary Shirley, Virginia Wright, and Ann P. Wyckoff.

Presenting sponsor for the Seattle presentation is JPMorgan Chase & Co. Supporting sponsors are Melbourne Tower and Washington State Arts Commission/National Endowment for the Arts.

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde Premiered in San Francisco and Traveled to Paris and New York in 2011–2012

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906; Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Steins are responsible in many ways for the turn-of-the century revolution in the visual arts through their adventurous patronage, deep ties to leading minds of the era, and legendary Paris salon gatherings. As powerful tastemakers, they had a commitment to the new, a confidence in their inclinations, and a drive to build appreciation for the work they loved. From the moment they first dared to admire Matisse's scandalous

Woman with a Hat (1905)—the "nasty smear of paint"1 that gave the fauves their name—the foursome were staking claims for modern art that would heavily influence their peers and transform the careers of several of the most important artists of the century.

Marie Laurencin Apollinaire and His Friends 1909
Musee National d’Art Modern, Paris
Left to right: Gertrude, Fernande Olivier, unidentified, Apollinaire, Picasso Marguerite Gillot, Maurice Crmnitz, and Laurencin

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde reunited the unparalleled modern art collections of author Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael Stein, and Michael's wife, Sarah Stein. Jointly organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux-Grand Palais, Paris, this major touring exhibition gathered approximately 200 iconic paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and illustrated books not only by Matisse and Picasso, who were each represented by dozens of works, but also by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Henri Manguin, Francis Picabia, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Félix Vallotton, among others. The Steins Collect premiered at SFMOMA from May 21 through September 6, 2011, before traveling to Paris and then New York.

Matisse Study for Joy of life landscape collioure 1905

Supplemented by a rich array of archival materials—including photographs, family albums, film clips, correspondence, and ephemera—the exhibition provides a new perspective on the artistic foresight of this innovative family, tracing their enduring impact on art-making and collecting practices and their inestimable role in creating a new international standard of taste for modern art.

Sarah and Michael Stein's return to San Francisco with a cache of important Matisse works in 1935, the same year SFMOMA was founded, was particularly instrumental in the advocacy of modern art on the West Coast as well as the making of the museum's early collection; SFMOMA's presentation will underscore the Steins' deep connections to the Bay Area.

As American expatriates living in France, the four Steins were pivotal in shaping the city's vibrant cultural life. Leo Stein (1872–1947) and younger sister Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) were the first to leave the family home in Oakland, traveling to Paris along with millions of tourists to visit the 1900 World's Fair and then relocating to the city in 1902 and 1903, respectively. Sarah Stein (1870–1953) and Michael Stein (1865–1938) soon followed from San Francisco with their eight-year-old son, Allan, arriving in early 1904. The family established their apartments on rue de Fleurus (Leo and Gertrude) and rue Madame (Sarah and Michael) and quickly integrated into the intellectual circles of the Parisian avant-garde. Gertrude and Leo lived modestly off family investments and had to team up to afford their early purchases. "You can either buy clothes or buy pictures. It's that simple. . . . No one who is not very rich can do both," was Gertrude's legendary quote from Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.

The Steins also formed close friendships with the emerging artists they championed, particularly Matisse and Picasso, whose works they aggressively collected and promoted to their associates, almost single-handedly creating markets for their work outside Paris. They dined and vacationed regularly with Matisse and his family, counseled Fernande Olivier on her stormy relationship with Picasso, and made countless introductions. Sarah was instrumental in helping Matisse establish his art school and was among his devoted students.

Paul Cezanne, Bathers, 1898-1900; oil on canvas; 10 5/8 x 18 1/8 in. (27 x 46 cm); The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formedby Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland; Photo: Mitro Hood Photo: Sfmoma

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Striking-Woman-lies-at-heart-of-Steins-legacy-2371774.php#ixzz2LZbG17Lo

Along the way, the Steins covered their studio walls with cutting-edge paintings by the most controversial artists of the day and were soon overwhelmed with requests to see the collections. They eventually had to establish regular visiting hours so that Gertrude could attend to her writing in peace. Michael and Sarah decided to open their apartment on the same night of the week and so began the prestigious Saturday evening salons where the brightest artists, writers, musicians, and collectors of the day convened to discuss the latest developments. Anyone with a proper referral was welcome to strain their eyes to see the works by candlelight, as neither apartment was wired with electricity yet.

Following its SFMOMA debut, The Steins Collect traveled to the Grand Palais, Paris (October 3, 2011, through January 16, 2012) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (February 21 through June 3, 2012). The exhibition was cocurated by Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA; Cécile Debray, curator of historical collections at the Musée national d'Art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Rebecca Rabinow, associate curator and administrator, Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Chairman, Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A richly illustrated catalogue accompanied the exhibition, with new research and original essays from a range of French and American experts in the field.

The Steins Collect draws from prominent public and private collections worldwide and spans the family's entire collecting history. Among some 40 works by Picasso and approximately 60 by Matisse are such masterpieces as Matisse's Blue Nude (Baltimore Museum of Art), Woman with a Hat (SFMOMA), Self-Portrait (Statens Museum, Copenhagen), and Tea (LACMA); and Picasso's Lady with a Fan (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), Boy Leading a Horse (Museum of Modern Art, New York), Nude with Joined Hands (Museum of Modern Art, New York), and portrait of Gertrude Stein (Metropolitan Museum of Art), among many others.

Works were presented roughly chronologically by when they were originally acquired by the family, highlighting major themes and benchmarks of both art history and the Steins' parallel journey: the Paris art scene and Leo's early interests in Cézanne, Renoir, and Manet to the infamous 1905 Salon d'Automne; Leo and Gertrude's joint acquisitions and the rue de Fleurus; Michael and Sarah Stein's particular devotion to Matisse and the rue Madame; Gertrude's collecting patterns, from her complex relationship with Picasso and their artistic influence on each other through her later promotion of Gris, André Masson, and Picabia in the 1920s and '30s; and Michael and Sarah's history-making art advocacy in the United States, from a 1906 trip home, when they brought the first Matisse paintings to be seen on American soil, to their 1935 return to Palo Alto, California. The exhibition will also feature a special gallery devoted to the Académie Matisse, as well as a gallery conceived by SFMOMA project assistant curator Carrie Pilto devoted to the Steins' patronage of modern architecture with their commission of the Villa Stein-de Monzie by Le Corbusier.

Informed by new research, the exhibition expanded upon Four Americans in Paris: the Collections of Gertrude Stein and Her Family, an exhibition organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1970—the last and only significant occasion for which these collections were assembled. Additionally, The Steins Collect seeks to address the historical bias toward Gertrude, which has obscured the fact that the family comprised multiple, interlocking centers of gravity, each with a particular aesthetic and set of favored artists. "Married into a family of brilliant minds and self-mythologizers, Sarah was the one who stood out to Matisse as 'the really intellectually sensitive member of the family'—a patron in every sense of the word," says Bishop.

To accompany the exhibition, SFMOMA, in association with Yale University Press, published a lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue (cloth, 464 pages), featuring previously unpublished archival information and original essays by Isabel Alfandary, Janet Bishop, Emily Braun, Edward Burns, Cécile Debray, Claudine Grammont, Hélène Klein, Martha Lucy, Carrie Pilto, Rebecca Rabinow, and Gary Tinterow. A benchmark contribution to scholarship on the period, this authoritative volume also includes a complete timeline of the Steins' collecting activity created by Kate Mendillo and a catalogue of the family's holdings compiled by Robert McDonald Parker, who also annotates a selection of rare photographs depicting the changing configurations of works on the walls of the various Stein salons.

Paul Strand was an ardent proponent of photogravure, a laborious form of printing from etched metal plates. He chose the process for his seminal 1940 portfolio Photographs of Mexico and, twenty-seven years later, reissued it as The Mexican Portfolio. Comprised of twenty images, the portfolio depicts the indigenous peoples, landscapes, architecture, and religious objects he encountered in Mexico in 1932–33. It was created at the suggestion of close friends, and satisfied his own wish to offer high quality art to a wide audience. He carefully supervised the printing of these gravures, and, for the 1940 edition, even recruited a group of friends to complete the final lacquering of the prints.

This exhibition includes all twenty gravure plates from the 1967 edition of The Mexican Portfolio, which are drawn from the collection of the Paul Strand Archive of Aperture Foundation. The images, seen alone or sequenced in a film-like narrative, are a celebration of the subjects’ pride, dignity, and endurance, and are a clear testament to Strand’s belief that the photogravure process is capable of yielding the finest results achievable in photographic printmaking.

Contents:

The exhibition consists of twenty images from The Mexican Portfolio as well as several Ned Scott photographs from the making of Strand’s film Redes (The Wave). A DVD of Redes is included.

Images:

More images

Book:

Paul Strand in Mexico
11 3/8 x 12 7/8 in.
356 pages 435 tritone, four-color, and black-and-white images
Hardcover with DVD

Venues:

Bronx Museum of Art
1040 Grand Concourse
Bronx, NY
Friday, September 9, 2010–Sunday, January 2, 2011

Pensacola Museum of Art
407 South Jefferson Street
Pensacola, FL
Friday, January 28, 2011–Sunday, March 27, 2011

Bakersfield Museum of Art
1930 R Street
Bakersfield, CA
Thursday, September 13, 2012–Sunday, November 25, 2012

Art Museum of South Texas
1902 N. Shoreline Blvd.
Corpus Christi, TX
Thursday, September 12, 2013–Thursday, November 7, 2013

Berkshire Museum presents the special photography exhibition Ansel Adams: Masterworks from February 9 to June 2, 2013. An opening reception will be held Saturday, February 9, from 5 to 7 p.m. The exhibition features forty-eight works by Ansel Adams (1902 – 1984), about two-thirds of a selection Adams made late in his life to serve as a succinct representation of his life’s work. He himself felt these photographs were his best. The images are from the Collection of the Turtle Bay Exploration Park in Redding, CA.

Called “The Museum Set,” these works reveal the importance Adams placed on the drama and splendor of natural environments, from Yosemite National Park to a secluded grove of aspens; from the Sierra Nevada range to a barn in Cape Cod. Included are many of Adams’ most famous and best-loved photographs which encompass the full scope of his work: elegant details of nature, architectural studies, portraits, and the breathtaking landscapes for which he is revered.

The exhibition also includes a photo portrait of Ansel Adams by James Alinder.

In a career that spanned more than five decades Ansel Adams became one of America’s most beloved landscape photographers and one of its more respected environmentalists. There are few artists whose name and works represent the extraordinary level of popular recognition and artistic achievement as that of Ansel Adams. Adams profoundly influenced the course of 20th century photography not only through his sumptuous and technically precise images, but also by means of his devotion to advancing the cause of photography as an art form. As an artist, educator, innovator, and writer, he helped establish many of the institutions that have come to represent the highest aspirations of the medium of photography.

The collection was donated to Turtle Bay Exploration Park, Redding, CA, by Dr. Fidel Realyvasquez in 2002. Turtle Bay Exploration Park is a 300-acre cultural complex located in Northern California on the Sacramento River. Its facilities include a museum with permanent, interactive exhibits and two large special exhibition galleries. The traveling exhibition is organized by Turtle Bay Exploration Park, Redding, CA, in association with Landau Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA.

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984), “Orchard”, Portola Valley, California, c. 1940. Gelatin silver print. Photo; Courtesy: Turtle Bay Exploration Park, Redding, CA. ©Ansel Adams Publishing Right

Oak Tree, Snowstorm

Trailer Camp Children

Rose and Driftwood

Siesta Lake

The Tetons and the Snake River

Road, Nevada Desert

Sand Dunes

June 29, 2013 – September 15, 2013 Delaware Art Museum
2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington, Delaware 19806
302.571.9590 | 866.232.3714 (Toll free)

This groundbreaking exhibition features 90 rare vintage prints from the golden age of French photography, 1900-1940. From the lyrical architectural views of Eugène Atget to the Surrealist inventions of Man Ray and Dora Maar, from the boyish wonder of Jacques-Henri Lartigue to the twilight-inspired moodiness of Brassaï, from the elegant still lifes of André Kertész to the sophisticated street theater of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ilse Bing, all major facets of French photography are surveyed and celebrated. This is a singular opportunity for those who appreciate photography to see these masterworks in one exhibition.

All works are from the collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg._This exhibition was organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions.

Brassaï, Fille de Montmartre Playing
Russian Billiards, Blvd. Rochechouart, 1932-33,

Kiki de Montparnasse, 1923
Man Ray (1890–1976)
11 x 8 3/4 inches
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
© 2012 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris

Hyères, 1932
Henri Cartier‐Bresson (1908–2004)
7 7/8 x 11 5/8 inches
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

Coronation of King George VI, London, 1938
Henri Cartier‐Bresson (1908–2004)
10 x 7 inches
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

Champ‐de‐Mars from the Eiffel Tower, 1931
Ilse Bing (1899–1998)
7 1/2 x 11 inches
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
© Estate of Ilse Bing. Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

Boulevard de Strasbourg, Corsets, 1912
Eugène Atget (1857–1957)
Printing‐out paper, 8 3/4 x 7 inches
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

A special exhibition that explored the evolution of documentary images through the work of three of the foremost photographers of the 20th century was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from February 5 through May 15, 2011. American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White presented Abbott (1898–1991), Walker Evans (1903–1975), and Margaret Bourke-White (1906–1971)—all taken between the years of 1929, when the stock market crashed, and 1941, when Pearl Harbor was bombed.

This exhibition not only showed, for the first time, the photographs of Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White in relation to one another, but it also chronicled how documentary photography had a hand in transforming modern art in America.

It was during this period, the 1930s, that photographers pushed the genre of documentary photography to the forefront of public culture in the United States and onto the walls of newly opened museums and art galleries. Photographic activity blossomed in America during the Great Depression, and the genre of documentary emerged as a primary mode of relaying and understanding contemporary events and the nation’s role in them. While the world was in a turbulent state—national and international economies were being severely tested, political systems were in flux, and Europe was preparing again for war—Americans recognized their own viable cultural heritage and sought to record and expand that history. Indeed, the country’s literary, artistic, and architectural expressions all flourished in the period’s explosion of popular literature, the founding of new art museums, and the establishment of New Deal government-funded arts programs. At the same time, advances in technology, production, and distribution transformed mass media in the United States: Americans enjoyed weekly picture magazines, radio broadcasts, and popular movies in unprecedented numbers.

Photography played an especially critical role in contemporary culture, appearing in books, newspapers, and magazines as well as being accorded exhibitions in art museums and galleries. It could be argued that it was during this decade that photography became a truly popular art, infiltrating every home and newsstand and captivating an anxious audience. And photography began redefining itself, crossing the boundaries between public and private use, impersonal documentation and expressive creation, and popular visual culture and fine art. American Modern examines the practice of documentary photography through the work of three of the most important photographers of the decade, each of whom contributed a fundamental, independent, and novel idea about documentary to the common pool of artistic practice.

For Berenice Abbott, who photographed the transformation of New York City into a modern metropolis, it was the notion that photography was a means of critical dialogue and communication. She always seemed to include a human element that suggested the sacrifice or promise of living alongside new buildings.

Walker Evans, who worked with the Farm Security Administration, shot some of the most iconic images from the Great Depression. He thoroughly investigated the idea that photography has a unique and essential relationship to time. Evans was not as captivated with the new urbanization as Abbott; he tended to photograph people within environments exhibiting a universal humanity, even amid a great deal of tragedy. As Evans said, at the time, "I'm doing this for the record alone."

Margaret Bourke-White—the first female photographer for Life magazine and the first female war correspondent—fused the logic and pageantry of modern industry with the drama and individual narratives of its subjects. Her images emphasized the diminution of humans framed by the colossus of industrialization, placing anonymous workers amid enormous gears, smokestacks, and turbines. Machinery became a heroic element, the people dwarfed by their scale if not the business of production itself. Together for the first time in the exhibition, these works offer a compelling glimpse of a moment of great transformation in the United States and suggest how documentary photography reframed artistic priorities across many media.

A scholarly catalogue, published by the University of California Press, accompanied the exhibition. The 213-page American Modern includes spectacular images by Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White, and features essays by co-curators Jessica May, Sharon Corwin, and Terri Weissman. It can be purchased in hardcover for $39.95 in the Museum Shop.

American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White was co-organized by the Amon Carter Museum and the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine. The exhibition is curated by Jessica May, assistant curator of photography at the Amon Carter Museum; Sharon Corwin, the Carolyn Muzzy Director and Chief Curator of the Colby College Museum of Art; and Terri Weissman, assistant professor of art history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The Chicago presentation is curated by Katherine Bussard, associate curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Images:

Walker Evans. Posed Portraits, New York, 1932. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mrs. James Ward Thorne. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Walker Evans (1903–1975) [Lunchroom Window, New York City], 1929. Gelatin silver print © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Arnold H. Crane, 1971, 1971.646.35

Margaret Bourke-White (1906–1971), (Iron Mountain, Tennessee), 1937. Gelatin silver print. © Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Margaret Bourke-White Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library.

Berenice Abbott Canyon, Broadway and Exchange Place, 1936 Gelatin silver print, 9 5/16 x 7 1/2 inches
National Gallery of Art, Gift of Marvin Breckinridge Patterson

Margaret Bourke-White (1906-1971). Delman Shoes, 1933. Gelatin silver print. Margaret Bourke-White Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. © Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Berenice Abbott (1898-1991). Hell Gate Bridge, 1937. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Norma B. Marin, Courtesy Meredith Ward Fine Art.

Berenice Abbott (1898-1991). Bread Store, 259 Bleeker Street, 1937. Gelatin silver print. Museum of the City of New York, 49.282.57.

Berenice Abbott (1898-1991). Manhattan Bridge Looking Up, 1936. Gelatin silver print. The Art Institute of Chicago, Works Progress Administration Allocation, 1389.1943.

Walker Evans (1903-1975). Penny Picture Display, Savannah, 1936. Gelatin silver print. Amon Carter Museum, P1987.4.1.

Berenice Abbott (1898-1991). Squibb Building with Sherry Netherland in Background, 1935. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Norma B. Marin, Courtesy Meredith Ward Fine Art.

Walker Evans (1903-1975). People in Downtown Havana, 1933. Gelatin silver print. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1952, 52.562.7. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Margaret Bourke-White (1906–1971) Chrysler Building, New York, ca. 1930–31 Gelatin silver print
© Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ford Motor Company Collection

Margaret Bourke-White: You Have Seen Their Faces: Little boy and hound dog, 1936 Gelatin silver print ©Time Inc.

Truck and Sign, 1930 Vintage gelatin silver print 16.3 x 22.3 cm Private collection (c) Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Note: This is the same exhibition held at the Tate and covered here with many beautiful images that won't be repeated here.

Combining rebellion, scientific precision, beauty, and imagination, the Pre-Raphaelites created art that shocked 19th-century Britain. On view from February 17 through May 19, 2013, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington—the sole U.S. venue—Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848–1900 is the first major survey of the art of the Pre-Raphaelites to be shown in the United States. The exhibition features some 130 paintings, sculptures, photography, works on paper, and decorative art objects that reflect the ideals of Britain's first modern art movement.

"The Pre-Raphaelites rejected the rigid rules for painting that prevailed at the dawn of the Victorian era to launch Britain's first avant-garde movement," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "We are thrilled to present this rare exhibition to our audiences and grateful to lenders, both public and private, as well as our generous sponsors. Notably, we have received a generous amount of loans from Tate Britain and the Birmingham Museums Trust in the United Kingdom."

The Pre-Raphaelites

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was founded in London in September 1848 at a turbulent time of political and social change. Many Victorians felt that beauty and spirituality had been lost amid industrialization.

The leading members of the PRB were the painters John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, young students at the Royal Academy of Arts. They all believed that art had become decadent, and rejected their teachers' belief that the Italian artist Raphael (1483–1520) represented the pinnacle of aesthetic achievement. Instead, they looked to medieval and early Renaissance art for inspiration. Whether painting subjects from Shakespeare or the Bible, landscapes of the Alps, or the view from a back window, the Pre-Raphaelites brought a new sincerity and intensity to British art.

Exhibition Highlights

The exhibition is organized into eight themes:

Beginnings: The Pre-Raphaelites were both historical and modern in their approach. While they borrowed from the art of previous centuries, they also listened to critic John Ruskin's call to observe nature and represent its forms faithfully. In balancing the past with the world they saw before them, the Pre-Raphaelites crafted a modern aesthetic. Some of their important early works—such as

Hunt's Valentine rescuing Sylvia from Proteus—Two Gentlemen of Verona (Act V, Scene iv) (1850–1851)

and Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (The Carpenter's Shop) (1849–1850)

—reveal the emergence of this new style.

History: Dramatic narratives from the Bible, classical mythology, literature, or world history had dominated European art since the establishment of art academies in the 17th century. The Pre-Raphaelites rejected these grand narratives to focus on intimate human relationships. Millais set the standard, adopting a precise style and drawing from British history and popular operas while emphasizing accuracy of dress and settings. The results—seen in

A Huguenot, on Saint Bartholomew's Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge (1851–1852)

and The Order of Release, 1746 (1852–1853)

—defied convention, provoked critics, and entranced audiences.

Literature and Medievalism: Pre-Raphaelitism was also a literary movement. The artists took subjects from Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, and other medieval tales, as in Millais's beloved painting Ophelia (1851–1852). Several wrote poetry, including Rossetti, who with Elizabeth Siddall (who served as Rossetti's muse, model, lover, and eventually wife) created intensely colored, intricate watercolors based on medieval manuscript illumination and themes of chivalric love, seen in his

The Wedding of Saint George and the Princess Sabra (1857).

Soon Rossetti's younger followers Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris incorporated medieval subjects in their designs for furniture, stained glass, and other decorative arts.

Salvation: The Pre-Raphaelites addressed morality and salvation in subjects drawn from both religion and modern life. Religious and moral thinking permeated everyday life, whether in regard to ideas of class and society, relationships between the sexes, or ideals of domesticity, which they examined in works such as

Hunt's The Awakening Conscience (1853–1854)

and Ford Madox Brown's Work (1863).

Rejecting traditional religious imagery, the Pre-Raphaelites painted biblical scenes with unprecedented realism. Hunt was so committed to truthful representation that he traveled to the Holy Land, where he painted the actual settings of biblical events, seen in

The Shadow of Death (1870–1873).

Nature: The Pre-Raphaelite artists developed a fresh and precise method of transcribing the natural world in oil paint, based on direct, up-close observation and working out of doors. At a time of debates about evolution and the history of the earth (Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859), Pre-Raphaelite landscape paintings reflected the artists' interest in the natural sciences, geology, botany, meteorology, and even astronomy. Groundbreaking works such as

Brown's An English Autumn Afternoon, Hampstead—Scenery in 1853 (1852–1855)

and "The Pretty Baa-Lambs" (1851–1859) newly emphasized rendering precise detail and natural light.

Beauty: Around 1860, the Pre-Raphaelites turned away from realist depictions of history, literature, modern society, religious themes, and nature scenes to explore the purely aesthetic possibilities of painting. The female face and body became the most important subjects, in erotically charged works that had little precedent. Beauty came to be valued more highly than truth, as Pre-Raphaelitism slowly shifted into the Aesthetic Movement. Rossetti was the dominant force as his work became more sensuous in style and subject, seen in

Bocca Baciata (1859), Beata Beatrix (c. 1864–1870), and Lady Lilith (1866–1868, altered 1872–1873).

Paradise–Decorative Arts: Inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites and the medieval past, Morris established a decorative arts firm in 1861 with partners Rossetti, Brown, and Burne-Jones. In 1875 Morris reorganized the company under his sole direction as Morris & Co. aiming to erase the distinction between the fine and applied arts. The firm produced tiles, furniture, embroidery, stained glass, printed and woven textiles, carpets, and tapestries for both ecclesiastical and domestic interiors. Several examples are on view, from stained glass, furniture painted with medievalized themes, and a three-fold screen with embroidered panels of heroic women on loan from Castle Howard, to popular tile, textile, and wallpaper designs, including the iconic Strawberry Thief (1883). In the last decade of his life, Morris founded the Kelmscott Press for the production of high-quality, hand-printed books. This room also includes two stunning tapestries designed by Burne-Jones and Morris from the series based on the Arthurian story of the Holy Grail.

Mythologies: Late Pre-Raphaelite paintings reflect a fascination with the world of myth and legend. Rossetti and Burne-Jones embraced imagination and symbolism, focusing on the human figure frozen in a drama. Both found inspiration in Renaissance art after Raphael, concentrating on sensuous Venetian color and the sculptural forms of Michelangelo, seen in

Rossetti's La Pia (1868–1881) and Burne-Jones' Perseus series (1885–1888). Hunt adhered more closely to the initial realist Pre-Raphaelite style, which he brought to his late masterpiece, The Lady of Shalott (c.1888–1905).

Curators and Exhibition Catalogue

Diane Waggoner, associate curator of photographs, National Gallery of Art, is the curator of the exhibition. The exhibition at Tate Britain was curated by Alison Smith, Lead Curator, Nineteenth-Century British Art at Tate; Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University; and Jason Rosenfeld, Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College, New York.

The exhibition Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris, appeared at the de Young Museum in San Francisco June 11 through October 9, 2011. This exhibition of 150 important paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings created by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was drawn from the permanent collection of the Musée National Picasso, Paris, the largest and most significant repository of the artist’s work in the world, and comes to the de Young as part of an international tour. The artwork was touring because the Musée was closed and undergoing a multi-year renovation expected to last through 2012. Ranging from informal sketchbooks to finished iconic masterpieces, this unique collection of “Picasso’s Picassos” provides significant proof of the artist’s assertion that “I am the greatest collector of Picassos in the world.”

The exhibition, co-organized by the Musée National Picasso and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, is part of a world tour that began in 2008 with stops at museums in Madrid, Helsinki, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Seattle, Richmond (VA), San Francisco and Sydney.

The Musée National Picasso’s collection preserves the highly personal works that Pablo Picasso kept for himself with the intention of shaping his own artistic legacy. Exhibited chronologically, covering all the phases of the modern master’s expansive eight-decade-long career and featuring the various media in which he worked, this meticulously assembled presentation included:

One of his earliest Paris works—The Death of Casagemas (1901)

The Blue period—La Célestine (1904)

The Rose period—The Two Brothers (1906)

African-inspired proto-Cubist work —studies for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Three Figures Under a Tree (1907)

Analytic Cubism—Man with a Guitar (1911)

Synthetic Cubism—Violin (1915)

The Neoclassical period—Two Women Running on the Beach (1922)

Surrealism—The Kiss (1925)

The war years—The Weeping Woman (1937),

and the sculptures Bull’s Head (1942) and Death’s Head (1943)

Work from his late period including the self-portrait The Matador (1970)

Picasso developed a unique personal style for each new woman in his life, and remarked, “How awful for a woman to realize from my work that she is being supplanted.” The exhibition chronicled Picasso’s tempestuous relationships with three of the significant women in his life and demonstrates how his work changed with each relationship:

His first wife Olga Khokhlova, realistically depicted in Portrait of Olga in an Armchair (1918)

Mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, whose affair with Picasso began when she was 17, portrayed in voluptuous curves, pastel colors and soft sinuous volumes in

Reclining Nude (1932) and a series of five bronze busts created in 1931 that range from recognizable representations to the nearly abstract.

Mistress Dora Maar, the photographer whose passionate and emotionally charged relationship with Picasso was represented in works characterized by hard-edged, jagged lines, angular forms and acidic colors, such as

Portrait of Dora Maar (1937).

Sculpture played an important part in the exhibition, demonstrating Picasso’s aesthetic three-dimensionally and featuring work that spans Picasso’s career, including an early bust, The Jester (1905); Figure (1907), a roughly hewn wooden piece inspired by Picasso’s fascination with African tribal art; Head of a Woman (1909), widely considered the first Cubist sculpture; the relief construction Guitar and Bottle of Bass (1913); a multimedia assemblage, The Violin (1915); the Bull’s Head (1942), constructed from a cast-off bicycle seat and handlebars; the iconic bronze The Goat (1950); and the life-sized, six-piece figurative series created during a summer in Cannes, The Bathers (1956).

“I haven’t got a style,” Picasso claimed, but over the course of his long and prolific career, he created revolutionary works that laid the foundations of modern art.

About the Musée National Picasso

The Musée National Picasso, which opened in 1985 in the 17th-century Hotel Sale in the Marais District of Paris, serves as the repository for nearly 3,600 works from the artist’s personal collection that passed to the French government following his death in 1973.

Also in the exhibition:

Grand Nature morte au guéridon
(Large Still Life with a Pedestal Table)
Oil on canvas. 1931
Musée National Picasso, Paris
© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Paul en Arlequin (Paul as Harlequin)
Oil on canvas. 1924
Musée National Picasso, Paris
© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

L’Acrobate (The Acrobat)
Oil on canvas. 1930
Musée National Picasso, Paris
© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

La Lecture (Reading)
Oil on canvas. 1932
Musée National Picasso, Paris
© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Autoportrait (Self-Portrait)
Oil on canvas. 1906
Musée National Picasso, Paris
© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Chat saisissant un oiseau (Cat Catching a Bird)
Oil on canvas. 1939
Musée National Picasso, Paris
© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Le Baiser (The Kiss)
Oil on canvas. 1969
Musée National Picasso, Paris
© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Les Baigneuses (The Bathers)
Oil on canvas. 1918
Musée National Picasso, Paris
© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Nature morte au pichet et aux pommes
(Still Life with Pitcher and Apples)
Oil on canvas. 1919
Musée National Picasso, Paris
© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Rembrandt’s Century examines a wide range of artworks from the 17th-century. Complementing the upcoming Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis, this exhibition sheds further light on the Dutch Golden Age and the remarkable artistic achievements of Rembrandt and his peers. At its core is a selection of etchings by Rembrandt van Rijn—arguably his generation’s most influential artist. Both Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis and Rembrandt’s Century will be on view in the Herbst Exhibition Galleries at the de Young Museum in San Francisco from January 26–June 2, 2013.

Rembrandt Van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669), Self-Portrait Drawing at a Window, 1648. Etching, drypoint, and engraving. 15.7 × 12.9 cm (6 3⁄16 × 5 1⁄16 inches) Courtesy of the Bruno and Sadie Adriani Collection, 1959.40.19 © Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Rembrandt’s Century examines a time when printmaking was becoming of particular cultural importance. Exhibition Curator James Ganz notes, “More than any other fine objects, prints circulated extensively throughout the 17th-century art world, broadcasting artistic, political, and scientific development far and wide.” The exhibition illustrates the wide-ranging contributions Rembrandt, his predecessors, and followers made in the form of printed images that were produced in Holland and internationally. It explores the rich print culture of the era, through portraiture, still life, natural history, scenes of daily life, landscape, and subjects drawn from mythology and religion.

Works by painter-printmakers such as Adriaen van Ostade, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, and Jusepe de Ribera are balanced by the contributions of specialized graphic artists such as Jacques Callot, Wenceslaus Hollar, and Lambert Doomer. Virtuosic engravings, ambient etchings, ink drawings, watercolors, and more illustrate the enormous range and appeal of printmaking and drawing techniques during the time of Rembrandt.

About Rembrandt van Rijn

Rembrandt was both a teacher and a student. While his work was among the most vigorously collected during this period, he too was a collector. Like the sea shells and other natural wonders he collected, depictions of which are shared in this exhibition, Rembrandt collected knowledge, which he disseminated to his students and followers. Championing etching as an original form of artistic expression, and technically experimenting with each stage of the etching process, Rembrandt inspired artists around the world for generations to come.

About the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts

Rembrandt’s Century provides an opportunity for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts to present hidden treasures from its own collection, a number of which have never before been displayed. Beginning as a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Moore Achenbach given to the City of San Francisco in 1948, the Achenbach Foundation has grown to be the most comprehensive collection of works on paper in the western United States. Carefully selected primarily from this collection, in complement to Girl with a Pearl Earring, Rembrandt’s Century reveals the astounding and wide-ranging artistic excellence of the 17th century.

Exhibition Catalogue

This exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, Rembrandt’s Century, published by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and DelMonico Books Prestel. Author and curator James Ganz explores the era’s vibrant print culture in a series of thematic sections focusing on depictions of the artist, portraiture, natural history, daily life, landscape, mythology and religion, and the art of darkness. In the process, he sheds light on the rich holdings of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s world-renowned collection of graphic arts. 164 pages. Hardcover $34.95/$31.46 members. Available at the Museum Stores or online at famsf.org/store.

Images:

Rembrandt van Rijn Landscape with Three Trees, 1643,

Cornelis Visscher’s The Large Cat

Lambert Doomer (Dutch, 1624–1700), Salt Flats at Le Croisic, ca. 1671–1673. Brown ink and brown and gray washes on ledger paper mounted on cream laid paper.

Adriaen van Ostade. Village Romance 1652.Etching.

The grittier side of life was on display in the exhibit Painting the People: Images of American Life from the Maimon Collection, July 11 through October 18, 2009 at the James A. Michener Art Museum. Regional collectors Barbara and Lee Maimon have amassed a formidable number of paintings that explore the uniquely American art forms known as American Scene painting (or Regionalism) and Social Realism. Organized by the Michener, Painting the People allows us to view the everyday lives of ordinary people, as seen through the eyes of artists who looked closely at the reality around them—from mine workers to burlesque dancers to regular folks worn down by life—and painted what they saw.

Beginning around the turn of the 20th century and fueled by the often-appalling social conditions of the age, this movement reached its peak in the 1930s when American artists strove to be free of European artistic influences. Many of these painters had experienced first-hand the privations and suffering of the Great Depression, enabling them to produce work that was edgy and thought-provoking—realism with a purpose.

Many of these paintings are bright and colorful, drawing in the viewer with their vibrancy. On closer inspection, however, social messages become apparent. The plight of the poor, homeless, and hopeless is depicted and celebrated—the couple that spends evenings in a bar, smoking cigarettes and talking; the fishermen whose yellow slickers shine with brine as they struggle to bring in their catch; the tired slouch of office workers heading home on the subway, noses buried in the day's paper; and the hopelessness of half-clothed female burlesque dancers.

"Proper works of art were not supposed to remind people that their world was squalid and dirty. Artists weren't supposed to be empathic toward the unfortunate," says Brian H. Peterson, Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest Chief Curator at the museum, speaking of the tradition of narrative and history painting that had dominated Western art in previous centuries. "While our focus is on the landscape tradition at the Michener, we feel it's important to share this honest look at the human condition with our audience, especially given the economic turmoil we've all been experiencing."

One of the grittier, more impressive pieces in the exhibit was Miner's Lunch painted in 1948 by James Turnbull. Two miners hunch over tin lunch pails and hold sandwiches illuminated by the orbs of their miner's headlamps. Their torn, dirty clothing and filthy faces etched with lines of exhaustion tell us these men are weary and resigned to a life with no hope. Yet, the honesty of this work turns their tragic lives into something beautiful.

"This painting grabs you and forces you to feel what these miners felt," explains Peterson. "This is what these painters did so skillfully. They were not amateurs; they were professionals who chose to devote their lives and work to helping others. They produced paintings that reveal the struggles and triumphs of their age, but also reach beyond their age to touch our common humanity."

The passion, energy and empathy exhibited in these paintings are what drew Barbara and Lee Maimon to them. "We like pictures that are true to the human experience, that give us a glimpse of people's lives," says Barbara Maimon.

A companion book by Peterson titled Painting the People: Images of American Life from the Maimon features twenty-one color plates as well as biographies of each artist in the exhibition

The James A. Michener Art Museum is an independent, non-profit institution dedicated to preserving, interpreting and exhibiting the art and cultural heritage of the Bucks County, Pennsylvania region. In addition to hosting a changing schedule of exhibitions from around the country, the Museum is home to the largest public collection of Pennsylvania Impressionist paintings. The Museum offers a diverse program of educational activities that seek to develop a lifelong involvement in the arts. The Museum is located at 138 South Pine Street in Doylestown. For current Museum hours and admission information, visit website at www.MichenerArtMuseum.org

Images

Philip Evergood (1901-1973), The Dog Bite Clinic 1933, oil on canvas, H. 40 x W. 50 inches, Collection of Lee and Barbara Maimon © Estate of Philip Evergood

Francis Luis Mora (1874-1940), Evening News 1914, oil on canvas, H. 48 x W. 36 inches, Collection of Lee and Barbara Maimon

Simka Simkhovitch (1893-1949), The Prizefighter and His Girl 1940, oil on canvas, H. 34 x W. 40 inches, Collection of Lee and Barbara Maimon

Albrecht Dürer, Praying Hands, 1508
brush and gray wash heightened with white on blue prepared paper
Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) is widely considered the greatest German artist. From March 24 through June 9, 2013, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria, will lend to the National Gallery of Art 118 works on paper by Dürer for a magnificent exhibition that will be on view only in Washington. Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina features nearly all of Dürer's finest watercolors and drawings from the collection of the Albertina, Vienna, as well as 27 of the museum's related engravings and woodcuts. The exhibition also includes 19 drawings and prints from the Gallery's own collection.

Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina is a culmination of decades of acquisition, study, and exhibition of early German art at the Gallery. In 1999, the Gallery presented From Schongauer to Holbein, a splendid survey exhibition of early German drawings based on the collections of the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and the Kunstmuseum Basel. This loan from the Albertina, Vienna is the only other exhibition from a single collection of similar visual impact, quality, and importance.

"The generosity of the Albertina, Vienna in lending their superb works on paper by Albrecht Dürer is overwhelming, and augmented by our own works, this exhibition allows the Gallery to present a fresh and compelling look at Dürer's practice of drawing," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art, Washington. "We offer our visitors the opportunity to share in the knowledge, appreciation, and pleasure of this extraordinary artist's work."

Exhibition Highlights

Dürer's paintings are highly prized, but his most influential works are his drawings, watercolors, engravings, and woodcuts, executed with his distinctively northern sense of refined precision and exquisite craftsmanship.

The exhibition is organized chronologically in 14 thematic groups that convey Dürer's talent as a draftsman as well as his artistic life, interests, and development. From detailed renderings of the natural world and investigations of proportion and the human body to family members and official portraits, landscapes, religious and allegorical themes, intensely personal reflections, and even studies of drapery and designs for decorative arts, the 137 works by Dürer on view give insight into his artistic development and creative genius. Finished compositions that functioned as independent works of art, colorful watercolors of nature and costumes, as well as quick sketches and studies for paintings and prints, woodcuts, engravings, and etchings all illustrate the full range of his subjects.

The exhibition includes many of the artist's most breathtaking works on paper, such as the watercolor

The Great Piece of Turf (1503), a sublime nature study of the Renaissance;

the chiaroscuro drawings

An Elderly Man of Ninety-Three Years (1521)

and The Praying Hands (1508), (above) surely one of the most famous drawings in the world;

and the amazingly precocious silverpoint

Self-Portrait at Thirteen (1484), possibly the earliest self-portrait drawing by any artist.

Such complete and finished works are balanced by quick sketches of, for example, his young bride-to-be or the Antwerp harbor.

In drawing, with the possible exception of colored chalks, Dürer used the complete range of traditional techniques to record convincing details of nature, people, and places as well as to re-create historical and mythological events and fantastic visions. In printmaking Dürer revolutionized the art of woodcut to achieve ranges of subject and scale, light, and form. He created engravings not only powerful in image but also unparalleled in craftsmanship and technique, and he experimented with etching and drypoint.

Albrecht Dürer and the Albertina

Albrecht Dürer was the reigning genius of the Renaissance in northern Europe, just as Leonardo da Vinci was for the Renaissance in Italy. Born in Nuremberg in 1471, Dürer grew up in an environment of late Gothic courtly grace and religious intensity as the city, a center of imperial politics, economics and trade, scholarship and culture, was being transformed by new influences. He traveled to Italy twice to pursue the new learning and artistic advances surging there.

The collection of Dürer's drawings and watercolors at the Albertina, Vienna is unequaled. It is not only one of the largest collections of works by Dürer in the world, but it is also distinguished by the number of the artist's greatest masterpieces. The Albertina's works by Dürer have been acquired over many years, but the museum's ability to amass such a collection of world masterpieces results from primary sources that go back directly to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Dürer was his favorite artist. Rudolf II used imperial ambassadors and the machinery of state to succeed in his purchases, including acquisitions from the Imhoff family in Nuremberg, whose works were among Dürer's personal estate. In 1588 the emperor offered Willibald Imhoff's family an entire domain of Bohemia in exchange for being able to acquire these works.

Exhibition Curator and Catalogue

The exhibition curator is Andrew Robison, A. W. Mellon Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings, National Gallery of Art.

Published by the National Gallery of Art and DelMonico Books, an imprint of Prestel Publishing, the fully illustrated catalogue presents the Albertina's magnificent collection of Dürer's watercolors, drawings, and prints, as well as the Gallery's related works.

The volume features essays by Robison; Klaus Albrecht Schröder, director of the Albertina, Vienna; and Ernst Rebel, former professor at the School of Arts, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, as well as entries by scholars such as Berthold Hinz, former professor for the history of art, Kunsthochschule Kassel; Alice Hoppe-Harnoncourt, research associate, Picture Gallery, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Matthias Mende, former chief curator of the graphic art collection and Dürer's House, Museen der Stadt Nürnberg; Christof Metzger, curator of German drawings and prints, Albertina, Vienna; Eva Michel, curator of Netherlandish drawings and prints, Albertina, Vienna; Anna Scherbaum, associate at the Kunst- und Kulturpädagogisches Zentrum der Museen in Nürnberg; Karl Schütz, former director of the Picture Gallery, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Maria Luise Sternath, deputy director and chief curator, Albertina, Vienna; Heinz Widauer, curator of French drawings and prints, Albertina, Vienna; and Jutta Zander-Seidel, chief curator, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.

Images in Exhiibition:

The Satyr's Family, 1505
engraving

The Expulsion from Paradise, 1510
woodcut

Knight, Death and Devil, 1513
engraving

Christ on the Mount of Olives, 1515
etching on iron

Antwerp Harbor, 1520
pen and brown ink

The Last Supper, 1523
woodcut

The Adoration of the Magi, 1524
pen and gray and black ink;

The Virgin and Child, 1512
charcoal

Agnes Dürer as Saint Ann, 1519
brush and gray, black, and white ink

The Montclair Art Museum (MAM) celebrates the centennial of the famous and controversial 1913 Armory Show with a major exhibition that opens exactly 100 years to the day from the original. The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913 will be the first exhibition to focus primarily on the American artists represented in that show. It is on view February 17 – June 16, 2013 and is co-curated by Gail Stavitsky, MAM chief curator, and guest curator Laurette E. McCarthy. Works in the exhibition are drawn from a wide range of museum collections, including MAM’s, and from important private collections and galleries.

The International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as The Armory Show, held at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue at East 25th Street in Manhattan, giving the show its unofficial name, comprised more than 1,200 works of art by American and European artists. While American art constituted two-thirds of the work on view, it was the European art that caused a stir and that has dominated discussion of the Armory Show ever since. Special attention centered on the European avant-garde artists Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, and Henri Matisse. It was their works that the press focused on, whipping their readership into a frenzy and igniting overwhelming curiosity, consternation, and concern among the public. Nevertheless, a significant number of the contemporaneous accounts were decidedly mixed and nuanced, yet over time, the emphasis on the foreign art in the show and denigration of the American as provincial and imitative became the dominant narrative. This exhibition challenges that myth.

In presenting mainly the American artists who contributed to the Armory Show, the exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum spotlights the diverse range of American art that was exhibited. It features 36 American artists and nearly 40 works in various media: paintings, sculptures, prints, watercolors, and other works on paper. The exhibition includes works by wellknown artists like Edward Hopper, Robert Henri, and John Marin, as well as works by artists such as Manierre Dawson, Kathleen McEnery, and E. Ambrose Webster, who, despite their talents, remain at the periphery of mainstream American art history.

The Armory Show is famously considered the first to expose American audiences to Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism on a large scale; however, the styles represented range quite broadly, from Ash Can School realism in works by William Glackens, Robert Henri, and John Sloan to Manierre Dawson’s highly abstract Untitled (Wharf Under Mountain).

Women artists represented nearly 20% of the almost 200 Americans in the show, and several appear in MAM’s exhibition, including Katherine S. Dreier, Grace Mott Johnson, Ethel Myers, and others. The featured artists include those who had established reputations such as Maurice Prendergast as well as young emerging artists like Stuart Davis.

Works by Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse reveal the influence and context of European modernism. Special efforts have been made to recreate details of the original installation, including burlap wall coverings, decorative pine trees, and yellow-hued streamers overhead, forming a tentlike canopy for the exhibition space.

A significant part of the Armory Show story is the work of its artist-organizers, principally Arthur B. Davies, Walt Kuhn, and Walter Pach, who worked feverishly and under crushing deadlines to bring about and publicize this exhibition of unprecedented scope. A related exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum features works from MAM’s permanent collection by the artist/organizers of the show.

The Montclair Art Museum has also collaborated with the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art on a gallery devoted to rare and unique primary documents pertaining to the Armory Show. These include personal letters, an early floor plan, sales records, entry forms, catalogues, buttons, and invitations, as well as reproductions of the original installation. The Archives holds the largest accumulation of primary source material, ranging from official records produced by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which organized this landmark exhibition, to the firsthand—and often irreverent—accounts by visitors to the show. Since their discovery in the middle of the last century, these resources have enriched our understanding of the Armory Show’s indelible impact on American art.

Representative Works in the Exhibition

William Glackens (1870–1938)
Family Group, 1910/1911
Oil on canvas
71 15/16 x 84 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ira Glackens 1971.12.1,
Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Marsden Hartley (1877–1945)
Still Life No. 1, 1912
Oil on canvas
31 _ x 25 5/8 in.
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Gift of Ferdinand Howald, 1931.184

Robert Henri (1865–1929)
The Spanish Gypsy, 1912
Oil on canvas
40 _ x 33 in.
Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1914 (14.80)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA
Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Image source: Art Resource, NY

Edward Hopper (1882–1967)
Sailing, 1911
Oil on canvas
24 x 29 in.
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James H. Beal in honor of the Sarah Scaife Gallery, 72.43

John Marin (1870–1953)
St. Paul's, Lower Manhattan (Broadway, St. Paul's Church), 1912
Watercolor on paper
18 1/4 x 14 3/4 in.
Delaware Art Museum, Gift of John L. McHugh, 1957
© 2012 Estate of John Marin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Kathleen McEnery (Cunningham) (1885–1971)
Going to the Bath, ca. 1905-1913
Oil on canvas
50 1/8 x 31 1/4 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Peter Cunningham and Joan Cunningham Williams

Walter Pach (1883–1958)
The Wall of the City, 1912
18 x 24 in.
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954)
Nude in a Wood (Nu dans la forêt; Nu assis dans le bois), 1906
Oil on board mounted on panel
16 x 12 _ in.
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of George F. Of, 52.150
© 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Artists in the Exhibition

Florence Howell Barkley (1880-1954)
Chester Beach (1881-1956)
Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938)
Daniel Putnam Brinley (1879–1963)
Patrick Henry Bruce (1881-1936)
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Arthur B. Carles (1882-1952)
Gustav Cimiotti (1875-1969)
Leon Dabo (1868-1960)
Jo Davidson (1883-1952)
Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928)
Stuart Davis (1892-1964)
Manierre Dawson (1887-1969)
Katherine Dreier (1877-1952)
Abastenia St. Leger Eberle (1878-1942)
William Glackens (1870-1938)
Marsden Hartley (1877-1945)
Robert Henri (1865-1929)
Edward Hopper (1882-1967)
Grace Mott Johnson (1882-1967)
Jonas Lie (1880-1940)
Elmer MacRae (1875-1955)
Edward Middleton Manigault (1887-1922)
John Marin (1870-1953)
Henri Matisse (1869-1954)
Kathleen McEnery (Cunningham) (1885-1971)
Ethel Myers (1881-1960)
Jerome Myers (1867-1940)
Walter Pach (1883-1958)
Van Dearing Perrine (1869-1955)
Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924)
Charles Sheeler (1883-1965)
John Sloan (1871-1951)
Allen Tucker (1866-1939)
Hilda Ward (1878-1950)
E. Ambrose Webster (1869-1935)

Lenders to the Exhibition

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Arthur A. Anderson
The Angerman Collection
Brooklyn Museum
Carnegie Museum of Art
Columbus Museum of Art
Corcoran Gallery of Art
Earl Davis
Delaware Museum of Art
Robert di Domizio/Stillwell Fine Art and Antiques
Barry and Helene Downes
Everson Museum of Art
Greenville County Museum of Art
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Mr. and Mrs. Hurdle Lea
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Mint Museum of Art
Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale
Museum of the City of New York
The Museum of Modern Art
Patty and Jay Baker Naples Museum of Art
National Gallery of Art
Francis M. Naumann Fine Art
Francis M. Naumann and Marie T. Keller
Norton Museum of Art
Parrish Art Museum
Harry Ransome Center, The University of
Texas at Austin
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Spanierman Gallery, LLC
Lazar Spasovic
Staten Island Museum
Whitney Museum of American Art
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Yale University Art Gallery

Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue, distributed by the Penn State University Press for the Montclair Art Museum. The catalogue includes an introduction by Gail Stavitsky and essays by Laurette E. McCarthy on the American artists in the show and on the art collectors. An essay by Charles H. Duncan, collections specialist at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, presents the history of the Armory Show’s primary sources. It will be available in The Store at MAM for $29.95. Hardcover: 8 1/2 x 11 inches, 160 pages, 60 color/40 black-and-white illustrations.

Related Exhibitions

Redefining American Art: Organizers of the 1913 Armory Show in MAM’s Collection

This exhibition is drawn from MAM’s permanent collection and features works by the organizers of the 1913 Armory Show. It is curated by Kimberly Fisher, MAM curatorial assistant.

Representative works:

Robert Henri (1865-1929)
Jimmie O’D, ca. 1925
Oil on canvas
Museum Purchase; Picture Buying Fund
1926.1
Courtesy of the Montclair Art Museum

Walter Pach (1883-1958)
After Cézanne, ca. 1921-32
Oil on canvas
Gift of Francis Naumann
2012.3
Courtesy of the Montclair Art Museum

Maurice Brazil Prendergast (1858-1924)
Still Life: Fruits and Flowers, ca. 1910-1913
Oil on canvas
Museum Purchase; Lang Acquisition Fund
1954.20
Courtesy of the Montclair Art Museum

Oscar Bluemner’s America: Picturing Paterson, New Jersey

Oscar Bluemner (1867–1938)
Hackensack River, ca. 1912
Oil on canvas
20 x 30 ¼ in.
Collection of the Naples Museum of Art, Naples, FL. 2000.15.011. Museum purchase made
possible by William J. and Suzanne V. von Liebig.

This exhibition features 29 works created between 1910 and 1917 by the modern painter
Oscar Bluemner of Paterson, New Jersey, a once-thriving manufacturing center that became a center of social, political, and economic upheaval in the early 20th century. One work by Bluemner, Hackensack River (ca. 1912, Naples Museum of Art), is included in The New Spirit.

Although best known for introducing European avant-garde painting and sculpture to the American public, the direct influence of “The Armory Show” exhibition on American artists was varied. Some artists were inspired to explore greater abstraction and dramatic variations in palette while others incorporated more modest elements in their work.

Figuratively Considered will run from March 1st through April 6th, 2013 at the Kraushaar Galleries 74 East 79th Street, Suite 9B New York, NY 10075.

The exhibition presents the work of twenty artists who were moderately or profoundly influenced by this “modern” art.

John Sloan, Miss Hallroom probably

John Sloan (1871 – 1951) and William Glackens (1870 – 1938) were affected by what they saw but their works on paper remained more traditionally figurative. Stuart Davis (1892 – 1964), John Marin (1870 – 1953) and Marguerite Zorach (1887 – 1968) would become important participants in the American Modernist movement. New York City itself will be represented by a circa 1913 park scene by George Luks (1867 – 1933) which is an exciting contrast to John Marin’s 1925 drawing of the New York Stock Exchange and

watercolor of Nassau Street.

A self portrait by Jerome Myers (1867 – 1940), one of the organizers of The Armory Show is complemented by a thoughtful circa 1915 male portrait by Joseph Stella each of which are in sharp contrasts to Alfred Maurer’s bold 1928 double portrait and two 1946 circus figures by Walt Kuhn (1877 – 1949), another show organizer.

Oscar Bluemner (1867 – 1938), not typically thought of as a figurative artist, is humorously represented by his Red Buildings with Statue, and the figures of William Zorach (1887 – 1966), best known for his sculpture, are horses in a landscape.

Four of the few women exhibitors will be included, Mary Cassatt (1844 – 1926), Gwen John (1876 –1939), Ethel Myers (1881 – 1960) and Marguerite Zorach (1887 – 1968).

The American photographer William Eggleston (born 1939) emerged in the early 1960s as a pioneer of modern color photography. Now, 50 years later, he is arguably its greatest exemplar. At War with the Obvious: Photographs by William Eggleston at The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents the work of this idiosyncratic artist, whose influences are drawn from disparate if surprisingly complementary sources—from Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson in photography to Bach and late Baroque music. Many of Eggleston’s most recognized photographs are lush studies of the social and physical landscape found in the Mississippi delta region that is his home. From this base, the artist explores the awesome and, at times, the raw visual poetics of the American vernacular.

The exhibition celebrates the fall 2012 acquisition of 36 dye transfer prints by Eggleston that dramatically expanded the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of this major American artist’s work. It added the entire suite of Eggleston’s remarkable first portfolio of color photographs, 14 Pictures (1974), 15 superb prints from his landmark book,

William Eggleston’s Guide (1976), and seven other key photographs that span his career.

Eggleston wrote that he was “at war with the obvious,” a statement well-represented in works such as Untitled [Peaches!] (1970)—a roadside snapshot of rocks and half-eaten fruit thrown atop a sunlit corrugated tin roof capped with a sign announcing “PEACHES!”

The exhibition features a number of the artist’s signature images, including

Untitled [Greenwood, Mississippi] (1980), a study that takes full advantage of the chromatic intensity of the dye-transfer color process that, until Eggleston appropriated it in the 1960s, had been used primarily by commercial photographers for advertising product photography;

and Untitled [Memphis] (1970), an iconic study of a child’s tricycle seen from below. It was the cover image of the artist’s seminal book William Eggleston’s Guide, which accompanied his landmark show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976.

As much as Eggleston was influenced by various sources, he, too, has proved influential. His inventive photographs of commonplace subjects now endure as touchstones for generations of artists, musicians, and filmmakers from Nan Goldin to David Byrne, the Coen brothers, and David Lynch.

At War with the Obvious: Photographs by William Eggleston is organized by Jeff Rosenheim, Curator in Charge in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Images from 14 Pictures (1974):

Images from William Eggleston’s Guide (1976),

More images here

Shadows

From 10 February to 17 May 2009 at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

The aim of this exhibition was to offer a broad overview of the concepts, issues and solutions involved in the depiction of shadows in art from the Renaissance to the present day. The exhibition was organised into two closely related sections.

First, it presented a comprehensive survey of the work of artists and movements who have depicted and used the element of shadow in various ways from the Renaissance to the late 19th century. These range from symbolic connotations and the way that Renaissance artists studied and used perspective to the representation of light and shade in Impressionism, also looking at the spectacular way that tenebrist Baroque painters used this element as well as its incorporation as a crucial narrative element in the Romantic and post-Romantic periods.

The second part, opened with a section on “lights and shadows in modern art” and analysed these elements were represented during the 20th century. This section pays special attention to the manner in which they were projected in Surrealist games and their important role in German Expressionism.

Selected images from the exhibition:

Pablo Picasso The Shadow on the Woman, 1953 The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Lent by Sam Ayala and Sam Zacks, Toronto, Canada

Joseph Benoit Suvee, The Invention of the Art of Drawing, 1791. Groeningemuseum, Bruges

Lorenzo Lotto, Commiato di Cristo dalla Madre. Oil on canvas, 126 X 99 cm. Gemaldegalerie Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Georges de La Tour (attributed), San Sebastian Tended by Irene, early 1630s. Oil on canvas, 104.8 X 139.4 cm. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Felix Vallotton, Nu sur fond jaune, 1922. Oil on canvas, 100 X 73 cm. The Barrett Collection, Dallas

Edouard Vuillard, Deux Femmes sous la Lampe, Oil on canvas mounted on board, 33 X 41.5 cm. Centre Pompidou, Paris. Musee National d’art Moderne / Centre de Creation Industrielle. Legs Georges Grammont 1959 pour le Musee de l’Annonciade a Saint Tropez

Giorgio de Chirico, La Matinee angoissante, Oil on canvas, 81 X 65 cm. Rovereto MART

Salvador Dali, Metamorphose de Narcisse, 1937. Oil on canvas 51.1 X 78.1 cm. Tate

Rene Magritte, La liberte de l’ esprit, 1948. Oil on canvas, 100 X 80 cm. Collection Musee des Beaux-Arts de Charleroi

Andy Warhol, The Shadow, 1981. Lithograph on paper with powder diamond, 96.5 X 96.5 cm. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

Man Ray, Noire et Blanche, 1926. Gelatin silver on paper 21.9 X 29.4 cm. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

The Middlebury College Museum of Art presented “Camera Work: Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, and Company”
September 4—October 28, 2012, an exhibition highlighting three luminaries of American photography: Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand, along with lesser-known artists in their circle. Camera Work: Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, and Company was organized for the museum by Charles A. Dana Professor of History of Art and Architecture Kirsten Hoving and students in her 2011 course “Camera Work: Alfred Stieglitz and Photography.” With more than twenty photogravures, the installation also includes issues of the pioneering journal Camera Work, which was published by Stieglitz between 1903 and 1917. Ultimately featuring articles on the revolutionary new art of European masters Rodin, Picasso, and Matisse, the publication was originally inaugurated by Stieglitz to demonstrate that photography was indeed a fine art, a goal it achieved through the reproduction of images by the most significant photographers of the day.

Responding to the emergence of haphazard snapshots created by vast numbers of amateur photographers using Kodak box cameras, Camera Work set a standard for photography as an art form by featuring portfolios of exquisitely printed photogravures. Each image was produced under the supervision of Stieglitz—or by the artist himself—by etching the photograph onto a copper plate, which was then inked and run through a printing press. While complete issues of the magazine are still in existence—and some libraries possess full sets of the publication—many more of them have been dismantled, with individual images appearing as unique prints for sale at auctions and online.

The photogravure process lent itself especially well to work in the pictorialist style popular at the turn of the century. Characterized by soft focus, delicate contrast, and distinctive painterly qualities, the images by Steichen and Stieglitz himself, among other artists in their circle, compare favorably with the style and sensibility of American painting of the same period. Thus were the photographers able to establish their images as works of art in their own right.

As European modernism came to the United States after the first decade of the century, Stieglitz turned his attention to newer styles of art. After the pictorialists, the final issues of Camera Work contained images by Paul Strand that demonstrated a brutally direct, unmanipulated or “straight” style of photography. These show the transition to a new style of vision, while yet maintaining the high standard of photogravure reproduction that the magazine had promoted.

Images:

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976), New York, Bridge Shadow from Camera Work XLIX/L, June 1917, photogravure on paper, 6 7/8 x 8 5/8 inches. Collection of Middlebury College Museum of Art, purchase with funds provided by the Fine Arts Acquisition Fund, 2007.019 (Photo: Tad Merrick)

Alfred Stieglitz, Two Towers, New York
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946), Two Towers—New York from Camera Work XLIV, 1911, published 1913, photogravure on paper, 11 x 7 7/8 inches. Collection of Middlebury College Museum of Art, purchase with funds provided by the Walter Cerf Art Fund, 2008.030 (Photo: Tad Merrick)

Alfred Stieglitz, The Hand of Man
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946), The Hand of Man from Camera Work I, c. 1903, photogravure on paper, 6 1/8 x 8 3/8 inches. Collection of Middlebury College Museum of Art, purchase with funds provided by the Fine Arts Acquisition Fund, 2004.045

Edward Steichen, The Flatiron, Evening
Edward Jean Steichen (American, b. Luxembourg, 1879–1973), The Flatiron—Evening from Camera Work XIV, 1904, published 1906 tritone on paper, 8 3/8 x 6 5/16 inches. Purchase with funds provided by the Walter Cerf Art Fund, 2008.026 (Photo: Tad Merrick)

From 9 June to 20 September 2009 the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza presented the exhibition Matisse: 1917-1941, comprising a survey of the artist’s work during the central period of his career. 74 paintings, sculptures and drawings, most of which have never been previously exhibited in Spain, were loaned from about fifty museums and collections world-wide.

Matisse: 1917-1941 aimed to analyse Matisse’s work over a lengthy period that has until now been of less scholarly interest than the start and end of his career. Marked by the shadow of World War I and the forebodings of the next world war, for modern art this was a period of rapid ascent and growing public acceptance. Together with Picasso, Matisse occupied a central role in this flourishing period and it was precisely in order to attain this position that he decided to move away from Paris, isolate himself in Nice, and submerge himself in a systematic process of research of the characteristics of the new painting.

1917 and 1941: two key dates in the life and career of Matisse

Interior at Nice c. 1919 St. Louis Art Museum

In 1917 Matisse signed a new contract with his gallery, Bernheim-Jeune. At that moment the end of the war was in sight and it was evident that the artistic scene prior to the war, based around the early avant-garde movements, had disappeared and would never return. For Matisse, the war had resulted in the loss of his Russian clients for whom he had previously worked for more than a decade. The large-scale canvases that he had painted for them (such as The Dance of 1909-1910) had been conceived for specific architectural settings and the artistic issues that they involved were similar to those of mural painting (like that of Giotto, an example whom Matisse aimed to follow). Now, by contrast, in order to direct himself at the anonymous public who would be the potential collectors of modern art, he was obliged to shift his field of investigation into that of easel painting. It was in order to embark on this undertaking that he moved to Nice, a city in the south of France that was sufficiently far from Paris, as well as enjoying optimum conditions of natural light and an agreeable climate.

Images

Interior with a Violin Case, 1918-1919. The Museum of Modern Art, Nueva York. L.P. Bliss Collection, 1934.

The Yellow Hat, 1929. Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation Collection.

Odalisque with a Turkish Chair, 1927-1928. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

With this return to easel painting, Matisse’s interest in its historical precedents was revived, primarily through the work of the Impressionists, but also through that of Manet, Courbet, Chardin, Rembrandt and Vermeer. The attraction of Islamic decorative art, which had played a key role in his pre-war mural paintings, now led him towards an Orientalism that explicitly involved the influence of Ingres and Delacroix. As in his previous period, in this new phase Matisse continued to focus his attention on the essential resources of the pictorial idiom. Firstly colour, as this was the area in which he felt most comfortable, and line, on which he increasingly concentrated his efforts and whose study he complemented with the practice of sculpture. At the same time this new period of reflection increasingly led him to consolidate a formalist aesthetic (as was the case with many other creative figures of this period such as Bonnard, Morandi, Valery and Montale), inspired by a reading of the two founding poets of modernity, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and focused on the idea of the autonomy of art in relation to life and that of form in relation to emotion.

Nonetheless, as the years passed, the uncertainties and isolation implied by this quest weighed ever more on Matisse and from 1927 his output decreased. In order to emerge from this crisis in 1930 he undertook a lengthy trip to Tahiti during which he practically ceased to paint. After this he received a new mural commission from Alfred Barnes, an American businessman who had assembled a unique collection of Impressionist and modern paintings in which Matisse occupied a central position along with Cézanne and Renoir. For this new commission Matisse decided to return to the theme of The Dance of 1909-1910, although now translated into a more epic, abstract mode. This project involved more than three years’ work.

By the time Matisse returned to easel painting in 1934 the modern art market had practically disappeared in Europe due to the economic crisis of 1929, while the political and historical conditions that had previously encouraged it had also deteriorated. This decline was accelerated by the rise to power of Hitler in Germany, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and finally World War II. When the Germans occupied France in 1941 and the Petain government accepted the armistice, Matisse, in contrast to other modern artists and writers who emigrated to the US, decided to remain in Nice. In the meantime his health deteriorated and he was obliged to undergo an operation that almost resulted in his death. Matisse never fully recovered, but his illness did not prevent him from submerging himself once more in his work, concentrating on an admirable series of drawings that he entitled Themes and Variations, which were executed in extreme isolation. The present exhibition concludes with this undertaking, which marks the end of the central period of Matisse’s career in which painting prevailed, before the onset of a new phase characterized by his paper cut-outs.

The exhibition was organized into the following sections:

1. Painting and Time

This brought together paintings executed during Matisse’s early years in Nice. One of the prevailing themes is that of the window, a motif that had been considered a paradigm of painting itself since the Renaissance. In addition, music (referred to through the violin, an instrument that Matisse enjoyed playing) is presented as a reflection on artistic creation. The light of southern France reflected on the sea illuminates a room, sometimes empty or occupied by remote female figures in repose. Their crystalline tranquility echoes the painting of Vermeer.

2. Landscapes, Balconies and Gardens

The exhibition continued with a room devoted to the exploration of exterior space through paintings of landscapes and gardens, sometimes seen from above, from a balcony or window. The use of distance emphasises the artificiality of artistic creation, the insurmountable barrier that separates art from life.

3. Intimacy and Ornament

In the third section a number of still lives were juxtaposed with interiors painted with the doors or windows closed. The models are sometimes seen deep in thought or sleeping. Flowers, mirrors, silks and jewels attract the viewer’s gaze. The arabesque of the brushstroke conceals desire, prostration or sadness.

4. Background and Figure

Increasingly focused on the human figure, Matisse’s pictorial quest settled on the issue of its representation in relation to the background against which we see it. As had been the case in the first decade of the century (Blue Nude, Recollection of Biskra, 1907) Matisse looked to Michelangelo, and in some of his paintings of interiors we can detect the white outline of the Dying Slave. The weight and volume of the figure and its solidity counteract the two-dimensionality of an oppressive background. The artist returned to his reflection on Islamic art (textiles), which had been crucial to his work since the first decade of the 20th century.

Conversation Under the Olive Trees, 1921. Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza on deposito in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza de Madrid.

The Inatentive Reader, 1919. Tate: Bequeathed by Montague Shearman through the Contemporary Art Society 1940. Interior with a Violin, 1917-1918.

The Moorish Screen, 1921. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copehhage. J. Rump Collection Philadelphia Museum of Art. Bequest of Lisa Norris Elkins, 1950.

5. Form. The Nude

The female nude was the principal focus of Matisse’s attention. For the artist it was the mirror that helped him to study all the issues of painting and the very paradigm of its form (and of the beauty to which it aspires). Matisse studied the female nude in a systematic way, in painting, drawing and sculpture, and he used the same variants to be found in the work of the classical Greek sculptors: lying down, seated or standing. Matisse caused surprise when he frequently disguised his real quest with the use of absurd, tacked-on costumes, but beneath this persistent endeavour lay a growing restlessness and dissatisfaction.

In 1930, with the commission of a large mural painting for the Barnes Foundation, his register abruptly changed. From the lyrical tone of his domestic interiors, Matisse jumped to the opposite extreme of the monumental, heroic nude. This jump leads us on to a situation dominated by tension between two polarities: the static nude takes shape sculpturally in Nude seen from behind IV (1931), while the painted nude in movement is expressed in The Dance for the Barnes Foundation.

6. Une sonore vaine et monotone ligne

In the second half of the 1930s while darkness fell around him, Matisse became ever more isolated and focused increasingly on painting. He returned to easel painting although allowing himself to be influenced by the abstraction that he had achieved in The Dance for the Barnes Foundation and in Nude seen from behind IV. His figures seem ever more self-absorbed, nocturnal and unobtainable. The colour becomes increasingly weightless and the form is reduced to line or to a flowing sign: “Une sonore, vaine et monotone ligne” (a monotonous, vacuous and resonant line), in the words of a line from L’après-midi d’un faune. Matisse, who took Mallarmé’s poem in the first decade of the century as the subject for one of his finest mural paintings and illustrated it in a book of 1930, returned to this theme from 1935 onwards in a large-format painting that remained unfinished. The drawings that the artist grouped together under the title Theme and Variations (1942) thus constitute the end of this period and of the exhibition.

More Images from Exhibition:

Henri Matisse, Still Life with a Sleeping Woman, 1939-1940. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon Collection.

Henri Matisse, Large Cliff: the Two Rays, 1920. Oil on canvas, 92,7 x 73,7 cm. Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida.

Henri Matisse, Interior with a Violin, 1918. Oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

Henri Matisse, Young Woman on a Divan. Black Ribbon, 1922. Oil on canvas, 47 x 56,1 cm. Nahmad Collection, Switzerland.

Henri Matisse, Young Women in the Garden, 1919. Oil on canvas, 54,5 x 65 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.

Henri Matisse, Mlle. Matisse in a Scottish Plaid Coat, 1918. Oil on canvas, 95 x 75 cm. Mr. y Mrs. A. Alfred Taubman Collection.

Henri Matisse, Odlisque with a Tambourine, 1925-1926. Oil on canvas, 74,3 x 55,6 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Henri Matisse, Small Blue Dress before a Mirror, 1937. Oil on canvas, 64 x 49 cm. The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

Carlos Schwabe (1866-1926), La Mort et le fossoyeur Watercolor, gouache, graphite, 76 x 56 cm Paris, musée d’Orsay, RF 40162

After opening at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main, the exhibition The Angel of the Odd – Dark Romanticism from Goya to Max Ernst will travel to the Musée d’Orsay. It brings together around 200 works: paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures from the late 18th century to the early 20th century, as well as twelve films from the inter-war period.

It was literary critic and art historian Mario Praz who first used the term “Dark Romanticism”, thus naming a vast swathe of literature and artistic creation, which from the 1760s onwards exploited the shadows, excesses and irrational elements that lurked behind the apparent triumph of enlightened Reason. Dark Gothic novels first appeared in England at the end of the 18th century and were instantly a great success. Although set in the contemporary world, they were mainly concerned with mystery and heightened emotions that could make the reader shiver with fear as well as pleasure, and explored not only the terror we all have of the unknown, but also our fascination with the sadistic and the grotesque.

Painters, engravers and sculptors from all over Europe, London and Paris, Madrid and Dresden, striving to compete with poets, playwrights and novelists, expressed this dark side visually in a multitude of ways, plunging the viewer into a dizzying spectacle of the horrific and the grotesque: Goya and Géricault presented us with the senseless atrocities of war and the superstitions of their time, Fuseli and Delacroix produced their passionate interpretations of the works of Dante, Milton, Shakespeare and Goethe by giving substance to the ghosts, witches and devils in them, whereas C.D. Friedrich and Carl Blechen cast the viewer into enigmatic, gloomy landscapes.

Serafino Macchiati, Le Visionnaire, 1904, © Musée d’Orsay/ Patrice Schmidt

It was from these incredibly diverse and fertile European sources that the more sombre offshoots of Symbolism first appeared in the 1880s. Seeing the vanity and ambiguity that lay behind the belief in progress, many artists turned to the occult, reviving myths and exploiting the new ideas about dreams.

"Les Sirenes" by Gustave Morea

After the horror stories of Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier and Villiers de L’Isle- Adam, they deliberately asked difficult questions in order to bring Man face to face with his age-old fears and contradictions: the savagery and depravity hidden in every human being, the risk of mass degeneration, the harrowing strangeness behind the deceptive reassurance of daily life.

While artists like Khnopff, Spilliaert and Klinger used silence to blur the boundary between dream and reality, the work of Ensor, Stuck and Rops, right in the middle of the second industrial revolution, presented fantastical, clamorous hordes of witches, sniggering skeletons, shapeless devils, lecherous Satans, Medusas and Sphinxes, which, far from signifying a deliberately obscure withdrawal into the past, expressed a clear, defiant, carnivalesque disillusionment with the present and affirmed the desire for creative freedom in the face of the rigid constraints of bourgeois society.

Dark Romanticism regained its momentum when Europe finally emerged from the nightmare of the First World War. Long familiar with the malevolent fairies and creatures of Goya, German Romanticism and Symbolism, the Surrealists took the driving forces of the unconscious, of dreams and of intoxication as the basis for artistic creation, completing the triumph of the imagination over the principle of reality, and thus, putting the finishing touches to the spirit itself of Dark Romanticism. At the same time, the cinema seized on Frankenstein, Faust and other masterpieces of this genre whose unforgettable scenes have firmly established them in the collective imagination.

By calling forth the visionary creations of Goya, Fuseli, Blake, Delacroix, Hugo, Friedrich, Böcklin, Moreau, Stuck, Ensor, Mucha, Redon, Dali, Ernst, Bellmer, Klee and numerous other artists and film makers, the exhibition also enables us to reassess and gain new insight into the literary and artistic sources of the world of dark fantasy which continues to have a significant influence on the films, video games and musical works of today

Exhibition curators:

Côme Fabre, Painting curator at the Musée d’Orsay Felix Krämer, curator at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main Exhibition organised by the Musée d'Orsay, Paris and the Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Publication

Exhibition catalogue, joint publication Musée d'Orsay – Hatje Cantz, 304 pages, 289 illustrations €45

Flaming June, Lord Leighton. Museo de Arte de Ponce.

For the first time in Spain the Museo del Prado presented a selection of 19th-century English paintings from the Museo de Arte de Ponce. Entitled The Sleeping Beauty. Victorian Painting from the Museo de Arte de Ponce, the exhibition offers the visiting public a unique opportunity to see works of the stature of Flaming June by Frederic, Lord Leighton and Edward Burne-Jones’ monumental masterpiece, The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon.

For historical reasons, 19th-century British art is one of the least well represented areas in Spanish collections, including that of the Prado, which has very few examples of Victorian painting. For this reason the Museo del Prado has decided to organise the present exhibition, which offers a carefully chosen selection of English paintings. They are loaned by the Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico, which is temporarily closed for re-modelling, and include The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon by Edward Burne-Jones, and Flaming June by Frederic, Lord Leighton. Both paintings will travel to the Prado after their display at Tate Britain.

The exhibition comprised 17 works in total, of which 10 are paintings and 6 are drawings and a watercolour. It allowed the public to become acquainted with both 19th-century English painting and with highlights of the museum founded in Ponce.

The exhibition also included paintings by artists such as John Everett Millais (1829-1896), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), Thomas Seddon (1821-1856) and William Holman Hunt (1827-1910). They were painted during the various different phases of the movement known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which was founded in 1848 with the initial aim of reforming English painting, at that date governed by the conservative strictures of the Royal Academy. The Pre-Raphaelites based themselves on a new vision of nature and on their quest to rediscover the aesthetic innocence of the Early Renaissance painters.

Among the outstanding works to be seen in the exhibition was Burne-Jones’ masterpiece, The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon. Prior to being seen at Tate Britain it has remained in Puerto Rico since Luis Ferré acquired it in the 1960s due to its importance for his collection and the difficulties involved in transporting a work that measures more than 6 metres wide. Burne-Jones devoted the last years of his life to this painting, which reflects his fascination (shared with fellow artists such as Rossetti and William Morris) for the legend of King Arthur. He constantly re-worked the composition up to the day before his death. Exhibited alongside this great work was a series of preliminary sketches and preparatory drawings that will help the visitor to appreciate the evolution of this dreamlike image.

The exhibition includes outstanding examples of works by the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Miss Gladys M. Holman Hunt by William Holman Hunt, the artist who remained most faithful throughout his career to the group’s motto of “Truth to Nature”; Escape of the Heretic, 1559 by John Everett Millais, which is a characteristic example of the use of imaginary anecdotes as a means of expressing universal human sentiments; and The Roman Widow by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a work that forms part of a lengthy series of enigmatic, half-length female portraits that were in part influenced by the Venetian Renaissance portrait.

Other works in the exhibition:

Edward Coley Burne-Jones, The Sleeping Beauty from the small Briar Rose series. Oil on canvas, 60 x 115 cm. San Juan de Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce.

William Holman Hunt, Miss Gladis M. Holman Hunt (The School of Nature). Oil on panel, 122.5 x 982 cm. San Juan de Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce.

John Everett Millais, The Escape of a Heretic. Oil on canvas, 106.2 x 76.2 cm. San Juan de Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce.

Edward Coley Burne-Jones, The Prince enters the Wood from the small Briar Rose series. Oil on canvas, 60 x 127.5 cm. San Juan de Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Roman Widow (Dîs Manibus). Oil on canvas, 103.7 x 91/2 cm San Juan de Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce

Associated American Artists Art by Subscription: Benton, Marsh, Curry, Wood

Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London,

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde

Paul Strand: The Mexican Portfolio

Ansel Adams: Masterworks

FRENCH TWIST: MASTERWORKS OF PHOTOGRAPHY FROM ATGET TO MAN RAY

American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White

Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design

Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso

Rembrandt's Century

Painting the People: Images of American Life

Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina

The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913

WORKS ON PAPER BY ARTISTS WHO EXHIBITED IN THE 1913 “INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF MODERN ART”

At War with the Obvious: Photographs by William Eggleston

The depiction of shadows from the Renaissance to the present day

Camera Work: Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, and Company

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The Angel of the Odd Dark Romanticism From Goya to Max Ernst

The Sleeping Beauty. Victorian Painting from de Museo de Arte de Ponce