From 3 July to 29 September 2013, the Städel Museum will feature the survey “Hans Thoma. ‘The German People’s Favourite Painter’”, devoted to the lifework of a painter and graphic artist celebrated in Germany in the period around 1900. The presentation will take a closer look at why Hans Thoma (1839–1924) – once referred to by the public and art critics alike as the “greatest German master” – attained such enormous popularity around the turn of the century, while also seeking explanations for his increasing reassessment after 1945. With the aid of more than one hundred works, the first Hans Thoma survey to be staged in a German museum in more than twenty years will show that Thoma was far more than just the painter of the picturesque Black Forest landscapes with which he is widely associated today. The rigour and precision of his works are disconcerting. His painting style combines realist and symbolist tendencies and anticipates important elements of both Art Nouveau and New Objectivity. His artistic diversity as well as his role as a key figure in “German art” around 1900 – an exploitation which continued until well into the National Socialist period – make him a phenomenon that demands re-evaluation. In the exhibition, Thoma's work – which is characterized by variety with regard to motif and media alike – and its unusual contemporary presentation will hold many surprises in store for the visitors.

Beside the collection of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, the Städel Museum has in its possession one of the most extensive Thoma holdings in the world, comprising more than eighty paintings and several hundred works on paper. The Städel's last monographic presentation of this artist took place in 1934. Since the Second World War, works from the museum's Thoma collection have been shown only on isolated occasions. One of the chief aims of the coming show is to take a critical look at Thoma's art and the history of its reception, which together represent a chapter in the history of German art as suspenseful as it is momentous. The chief focus will be directed towards gaining a new scholarly perspective on the museum's Thoma holdings. In keeping with this concept, no loans will be shown; instead, the attention will be directed solely towards the Städel's own Thoma works. The presentation will approach the artist's complex oeuvre from various angles, and shed light on what for many viewers is certain to be an unexpectedly large number of different facets. It will encompass paintings and prints, but also wall decorations, calendars, postcard books and children's primers. Thoma depicted religious and mythological scenes as well as motifs from the operas of Richard Wagner. With a wide range of pictorial genres and themes, he catered to a public that was hoping for an art that would provide it with values and contents suitable for establishing a national identity.

“Hans Thoma is a central figure in the history of German art and his work a fundamental element in the history of collecting at our museum. Our intention with this exhibition is to make the Städel's extensive Thoma holdings accessible to the public in all its breadth and to draw attention to the works' historical context”, comments Max Hollein, Städel Museum director.

In the process, the Städel Museum will also take a closer look at the history of its collection, for instance the fact that Hans Thoma was avidly supported and promoted by Henry Thode, who directed the institute from 1889 to 1891. Light will moreover be shed on the museum's purchasing policies during the 1930s, particularly in view of the fact that a large share of the Thoma holdings entered the collection in 1939.

Hans Thoma’s Vita

Born in Bernau in the Black Forest in 1839, Thoma already began painting portraits as well as the landscapes of his native region at an early age. In 1859 Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden awarded him a scholarship to attend the Grand Ducal art school in Karlsruhe. Among his teachers there were Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, Ludwig des Coudres and Hans Canon. Thoma completed his studies in 1866 and then – unsuccessfully – sought employment as a drawing teacher in Basel. In 1867 he moved to Düsseldorf, where he formed a friendship with the painter Otto Scholderer of Frankfurt. They travelled to Paris together in 1868 and saw an exhibition of the work of Gustave Courbet, whose painting made a deep impression on Thoma. Two years later Thoma moved to Munich and joined the circle around Wilhelm Leibl. His encounter with Arnold Böcklin inspired him to explore allegorical and mythological themes and engage with Italy and its art. He travelled to that country altogether five times and within that context made the acquaintance of Adolf von Hildebrand and Hans von Marées. In 1875 Thoma met Bonicella “Cella” Berteneder – his future wife – in Munich. She became his pupil and repeatedly posed for him as well. Thoma lived in Frankfurt from 1877 to 1899, first in Lersnerstrasse, later in Wolfsgangstrasse. In Mainzer Landstrasse he initially shared a studio with Wilhelm Steinhausen, who had been a fellow pupil in Karlsruhe. In Frankfurt Thoma found a circle of supporters and here he achieved his first artistic successes. He left the city when he was appointed to serve as director of the Großherzogliche Gemäldegalerie (Grand Ducal Painting Gallery; today the Staatliche Kunsthalle) Karlsruhe and professor at the Großherzoglich-Badischen Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Grand Ducal Baden Academy of the Fine Arts). His seventieth birthday was honoured with the opening of an annex to the Painting Gallery housing the Hans Thoma Museum and the Hans Thoma Chapel decorated by the artist himself and still on view today. Hans Thoma died in Karlsruhe on 7 November 1924.

A Tour of the Exhibition

The presentation on the upper floor of the exhibition wing will be divided into four sections. The first room and section will provide an overview of the artist and his work. There the visitors will be introduced to the diversity of Thoma's artistic oeuvre with regard to motif and media alike – an initial impression which will be expanded on in the following rooms. The spectrum will range from realistic works dating from the early years of Thoma's career, such as



Feeding the Chickens (1864),

to the fantasy motifs – for example



Riding on a Bird (1885)

– adopted by Thoma in the 1870s under the influence of his friendship to Böcklin. This first section of the show will also address the dissemination of his artistic work. “No other German artist ever attained such popularity within his lifetime”, points out Felix Krämer, head of the modern art department at the Städel and curator of the exhibition. Thoma produced prints, postcard books, calendars, war postcards and other media, all of which contributed significantly to increasing his renown around 1900. Another focus of this section will be the question as to what is “German” about Thoma's art – a theme encountered again and again in the reception of his oeuvre over the decades.

Chapter two of the presentation will be devoted to the landscapes executed by the artist primarily in the Black Forest and the Taunus, his portraits, and his genre depictions showing idyllic scenes of rural life. The displays here will include such works as



On the Glade (1876)



or the Portrait of Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse (1892).

Homeland, closeness to nature and the glorification of simple country life were the themes Thoma favoured most in this period. An important aspect in this context is the artist's encounter with the art of Courbet and the lasting impact it had on his own work, to which the Boy with Dead Deer (1868), for example, testifies.

This influence still makes itself felt in many of Thoma's later works, for instance the painting



In the Hammock (1876).

There are nevertheless distinct differences between the two artists: the life of the rural population is always cheerful in Thoma's scenes, free of hardship and social cruelty, and no trace of revolutionary pictorial themes is to be found. The beauty of the artist's native landscape and quiet domestic contentment are the focusses of his art.

From 1877 to 1899, Thoma lived in Frankfurt. The third section of the show will revolve around his time in the metropolis on the Main and feature likenesses of his patrons, among them the



Portrait of Henry Thode (1890)

executed by Thoma during the period of the art historian's Städel directorship.

During his time in this office, Thode tried to purchase paintings by Thoma for the Städel, but was prevented by the administration. Later as well, Thode continued his efforts to spread the fame of his friend Hans Thoma by means of publications and within the framework of his teaching activities at the Universität Heidelberg. This chapter of the exhibition will moreover present works by artist colleagues and friends of Thoma's in Frankfurt, among them Wilhelm Steinhausen, Otto Scholderer and Peter Burnitz.

Thoma's designs for Cafè Bauer on Hauptwache as well as paintings of local motifs such as



”Die Öd” View of Holzhausen Park (1883)

will also be on view. Although the recognition of Thoma's art increased steadily during his years in Frankfurt, it was not here that he made his artistic breakthrough, but in his former sphere of influence – Munich, whose Kunstverein staged an enthusiastically welcomed Thoma exhibition in 1890. Precisely his older works, and above all his landscape depictions – to whatever degree they had been regarded a provocative challenge to academic painting at the time of their execution – now jibed perfectly with the spirit of the times. Thoma's art suggested an idyllic world, whereas in real life the dark sides of industrialization were becoming visible everywhere.

In his Frankfurt years Thoma made the acquaintance of the wife of the composer Richard Wagner and attended the Bayreuth Festival several times. He designed wall decorations on Wagner's operas as well as a painting series on the Ring of the Nibelung; for the new production of that opera in 1896 he was moreover commissioned by Cosima Wagner to design the costumes. From this time onwards, Wagner had a permanent place in Thoma's oeuvre.

The fourth section of the exhibition will show, on the one hand, works inspired by Wagner operas, for example



The Gods Travelling to Valhalla (1880),

and on the other hand mythological and religious scenes as well as allegories. For Thoma, mythological figures such as satyrs or the



Three Merwomen (1879)

symbolized the primordial unity of man and nature. Motifs of this kind bear witness to the influence of Arnold Böcklin, with whom Thoma had cultivated contact since his Munich period, and who played a significant role in the artistic development of his younger German colleague. Whereas before his friendship with Böcklin there had been no works on mythological themes in Thoma's oeuvre, from the mid-1870s onwards putti, mermaids, equestrians and figures of the Grim Reaper regular populated his compositions. Religious themes also became more dominant in Thoma's works as time went on. A motif he devoted himself to repeatedly, for example, was the Flight into Egypt.



Flight into Egypt, 1879, oil on canvas, Städel Museum, Frankfurt/ Main, Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK, 115,8 x 160,5 cm.

Beginning in the 1880s, mythological and religious scenes came to account for the majority of his oeuvre, but did not arouse the same enthusiasm in the public as his early works had done.

In general, Thoma refrained from depicting modern life in his art. No contemporary architecture or examples of the technical achievements of the time are found in his compositions. On the contrary, his works permitted withdrawal from a world of technical progress and industrialization. “As a ‘man of the people’, Thoma was an ideal personification of the artist-prophet whose work promised cultural renewal through a return to the simple and elemental”, explains Nerina Santorius, who curated the show with Felix Krämer. Thoma's art presents timeless ideal states, and man and nature in unbroken harmony with one another.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Thoma was stylized as a model for the generation of artists active at that time. Particularly after his death in 1924, there was a great amount of interest in Thoma publications and exhibitions. A large percentage of the Städel's Thoma holdings came to the museum in the 1930s. After World War II, the perspective on Thoma's oeuvre became more critical. The exhibition developed by the Städel Museum will now offer an opportunity for a more nuanced look at this chapter in the history of German art, and invite visitors to share in an unbiased view of Thoma's work.

More images from the exhibition:



Hans Thoma (1839-1924), Siegfried, Postcard, 1914, Städel Museum, Frankfurt/ Main, Photo: Städel Museum.



Hans Thoma (1839-1924), The War, 1907, oil on canvas, Städel Museum, Frankfurt/ Main, Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK, 72 x 64 cm.



Hans Thoma (1839-1924), Under the Lilac, 1871, oil on canvas, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK, 74,5 x 62,5 cm.



Hans Thoma (1839-1924), Lonely Ride, 1889, Städel Museum, Frankfurt/ Main, Photo: U. Edelmann - Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK, 74,1 x 62,4 cm.



Hans Thoma (1839-1924), Wotan and Brunhilda, 1876, oil on canvas, Städel Museum, Frankfurt/Main, Photo: U. Edelmann - Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK, 74 x 61 cm.



Hans Thoma (1839-1924), Self-portrait in front of a Birch Forest, 1899, oil on canvas, Städel Museum, Frankfurt/ Main, Photo: Edelmann - Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK, 94 x 75,5 cm.

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669) is world famous to this day as a painter of exceptional portraits and history paintings. Yet there was another subject that also preoccupied him throughout his career: landscape. The Dutch painter addressed himself to this theme not so much in painting, but all the more intensively in drawing and printmaking. From 28 August to 24 November 2013, the Städel Museum will present this key aspect of his oeuvre in the exhibition “Rembrandt. Landscape Etchings from the Städel Museum”. The presentation in the gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings will feature altogether sixty-two works from the holdings of the Frankfurt Museum, including fortysix Rembrandt etchings. The artist’s pure landscape etchings will be supplemented in the show by further works. The latter include etched Rembrandt self-portraits, early etchings in which landscapes are depicted in connection with history motifs such as “St Jerome in the Wilderness”



or the “Flight into Egypt”,

and depictions of Arcadian pastoral scenes which Rembrandt encountered with a perceptible sense of humour. Other prints likewise to be presented in the show – engravings, woodcuts and etchings by such artists as Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525–1569) Domenico Campagnola (ca. 1500–1564), Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1616), Hercules Seghers (ca. 1590–ca. 1638) or Claude Lorrain (1600–1682) – will moreover place Rembrandt’s works into the context of his forerunners and contemporaries in the area of landscape in printmaking.

Rembrandt was not only a painter, but also the most prominent printmaker of his time. His etchings, which abound with special technical and artistic inventions, influenced art until well into the modern period, and have always been much sought after by connoisseurs and collectors. Rembrandt’s landscape etchings are among the rare prints by the artist. With only one exception, this workgroup is represented in the Städel Museum collection in its entirety. In view of the fact that he sold them reluctantly and produced only a relatively small number of proofs, the artist’s relationship to his landscape etchings seems to have been an exceptional and very personal one. The exhibition at the Städel Museum thus represents an invaluable opportunity to discover these precious works.

Rembrandt’s landscape etchings were carried out in two relatively brief phases – the first group between 1640 and 1645, and the second between 1648 and 1652. Around 1640, shortly after Rembrandt had purchased a stately house in Amsterdam and during the period in which his wife Saskia became severely ill and died, he began taking walks in the city’s immediate surroundings. He recorded his impressions en route in sketches which later served him in the studio for the conception of his etchings.

This direct study of nature was the point of departure for the etched landscapes. The latter, however, are not to be understood as topographically precise views. On the contrary, without exception, Rembrandt’s etchings are carefully calculated independent compositions. Even if some of the works depict real, locatable scenes (for example the



View of Amsterdam, ca. 1640/41),

others freely combine various views with one another, or merely hint at certain places. In the landscapes of the later phase, fantastic imaginary elements or those influenced by the landscape prints of other artists occasionally enhance Rembrandt’s pictorial world, as seen in the



Landscape with a Square Tower (1650)



or the Canal with a Large Boat and Bridge (1650).

On the one hand his landscapes have a typically Dutch quality about them – they take the everyday and commonplace as their point of departure –; on the other hand they are concerned primarily with specifically artistic issues and problems such as composition, the suggestion of breadth and depth, the reproduction of textures, and finally – and most especially – the representation of atmosphere and light. In his etchings Rembrandt explored nature’s myriad guises, for example foliage or plants, but also phenomena such as decaying old farmhouses



(The Omval, 1645;



The Windmill, 1641).

Every landscape is essentially a section of reality. Yet Rembrandt’s works always seem to be informed by Creation in its entirety. This is well illustrated, for instance, in what is perhaps the artist’s most well-known landscape etching, the



Three Trees of 1643.

There we discover the tiny figure of a draughtsman in the wild, devoting himself to the grandiose play of the light pouring onto a wide and multifariously animated landscape.

Employing various graphic strategies – overlapping hatching, certain line patterns, the multiple biting of the plate, manipulations of the plate’s surface, the use of “plate tone” and drypoint accents as well as the virtuoso distribution of light and shade – Rembrandt succeeded in producing a rich spectrum of tangible and intangible visual values which condense to allow exceptionally intensive perception. When we immerse ourselves in the contemplation of Rembrandt’s landscapes, we gradually gain a sense of their fine nuances and inner vibrancy.

Particularly from 1650 onwards, in his quest for new means of expression in printmaking, Rembrandt began making use of the drypoint technique – in addition to etching – in a previously unknown manner. This graphic method, which involves the simple scratching of the plate with a sharply pointed utensil, creates irregular, difficultto- control effects and significantly reduces the number of well-wrought proofs. Previously used primarily for small corrections and enhancements to the acid-etched plate, for Rembrandt drypoint became a printmaking technique in its own right. His search for a balance between the classical “bitten” etching and drypoint led to the steadily increasing use of the latter in proportion to the former, and ultimately to prints executed exclusively in drypoint. With this method he achieved depictions with entirely new light effects. The etched landscapes, in which he focussed on nature’s visual complexities, evidently served Rembrandt as an important means of experimentation in printmaking.

All of the works to be displayed come from the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, which will accordingly present a small but artistically delightful excerpt from its rich holdings of drawings and prints – comprising altogether more than 100,000 sheets – within the framework of the exhibition. Among the department’s holdings is an extensive and qualitatively high-ranking group of Rembrandt etchings consisting of some 350 works. The Städel Museum’s etchings by this Dutch artist were already the subject of an exhibition of the Department of Prints and Drawings once before (“Rembrandt. The Etchings in the Städel”, 2003). At that time, a crosssection of the holdings was presented with the aid of approximately seventy selected examples. For the most part, the Rembrandt holdings date back to the institution’s beginnings and the private collection of its founder Johann Friedrich Städel (1728– 1816). Amassed in the second half of the eighteenth century, and in part in the early nineteenth as well, the group of Rembrandt works belonging to the Department of Prints and Drawings includes extremely rare and superb prints. A number of additional works were acquired over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and present centuries, for example the rare proof of the



Sleeping Dog (ca. 1640)

in 2007, likewise to be placed on view in the show “Rembrandt. Landscape Etchings from the Städel Museum”.


More images from the exhibition:



Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669) - Self Portrait Leaning on a Stone Sill, 1639



Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669) - St. Jerome Reading in an Italian Landscape, c.1635



Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669) - Six’s Bridge, 1645(597kB)



Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669) - Landscape with a Road along a Ditch, c.1652



Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669) - Landscape with Trees, Farm Buildings and a Tower, c. 1651




Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669) - Landscape with a Cottage and Haybarn, 1641



Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669) - The Windmill, 1641



Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669) - The Goldweigher’s Field, 1651(

Two outstanding Impressionist paintings, Vincent van Gogh’s



Route aux confins de Paris, avec paysan portant la bêche sur l'épaule (Path on the outskirts of Paris, with a peasant carrying a spade) (1887)

and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s



Femmes dans un Jardin (Women in a Garden) (1873)

are now on view at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH. The paintings are located in the European Gallery, next to the Currier’s Claude Monet impressionist painting,



The Seine at Bougival (1869).

The van Gogh painting features a peasant in a field near a country lane. The city of Paris is visible in the distance. The painting reveals how the work of contemporary impressionist and neo-impressionist artists living in Paris influenced van Gogh. After he arrived in Paris, van Gogh changed from the drab, dark colors of his Dutch subjects, mostly peasants laboring in the field, to a warmer palette and subject matter. During his two years there, van Gogh experimented with new styles, subjects and techniques. He applied small dots of paint that visually combine to create a vibrant and sunnier atmosphere. This style of painting—called pointillism—is most closely associated with artists Georges Seurat and van Gogh’s close friend, Paul Signac.

While many know Renoir as a figure painter, this work is essentially a landscape. In the deep shadows of the painting stands a woman in a blue dress holding a white parasol and a bunch of freshly picked flowers. Behind her is another woman painted more darkly, emerging from the darkness of the trees. The contrasting pigment and especially the brightly “lit” parasol, instantly draw your eye deeper down the pathway to where the women are standing. The painting was likely done in the summer of 1873 when Renoir went to stay with Claude Monet, who was living in Argenteuil, about five miles northwest of Paris. It was probably painted outside and is wholly impressionistic. The flowers, shrubs and both women are made up of small dabs of color, blurring the distinction between the people and nature. The paintings are on loan to the Currier until the end of January 2014.

General Information

The Currier Museum of Art is located at 150 Ash Street, Manchester, NH. Open every day except Tuesday. The Currier is an active participant in the Blue Star Museum Program, providing veterans and their immediate families with free general admission throughout the year. More information: www.currier.org

This fall The Phillips Collection takes a fresh look at the artistic process of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). While recognized for the intensity and speed with which he painted, van Gogh also could work with careful deliberation, creating numerous versions of some of his most famous subjects. The first exhibition in Phillips Collection history devoted to the artist, Van Gogh Repetitions goes beneath the surface of some of his best-known paintings to examine how and why he repeated certain compositions during his 10-year career. More than 30 paintings and works on paper are on view at The Phillips Collection from Oct. 12, 2013, through Jan. 26, 2014.

The exhibition is the first to focus on van Gogh’s “repetitions”—a term the artist used to describe his practice of creating more than one version of a particular subject. He often began by sketching a person or landscape rapidly from life. Back in the studio, he would repeat the subject, reworking and refining his idea on a fresh canvas, in some cases many times. In contrast to the popular perception of van Gogh wielding his brush with wild abandon before nature, Repetitions shows how the artist was also methodical and controlled.

“This is a rare opportunity to get to know one of the world’s most recognizable artists in a fresh, new way,” said Dorothy Kosinski, director of The Phillips Collection. “He is such a beloved figure who has earned great renown, but there is still much more to be learned. Through a close examination of this fascinating but only partially understood aspect of his work, we can create a richer, more meaningful picture of his personal life and artistic production.”



Vincent van Gogh, The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy), 1889. Oil on fabric, 28 7/8 x 36 1/8 in. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund, 1947.



Vincent van Gogh, The Road Menders, 1889. Oil on canvas, 29 x 36 ½ in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Acquired 1949.

Van Gogh Repetitions is inspired by The Road Menders (1889) in The Phillips Collection and a painting of the same subject, The Large Plane Trees (1889), in The Cleveland Museum of Art. The exhibition reunites the two masterpieces—never before seen together in Washington—and invites deep, focused study of the similarities and differences between them, revealing some surprising facts about van Gogh’s process and motivation.

ANALYSIS REVEALS THE ARTIST’S PROCESS

Examples from 13 of van Gogh’s repetitions will be on view, in some cases reunited for the first time in many years. The exhibition reveals the vitality and persistence of this method across van Gogh’s career in significant locales in the Netherlands and in France, including Paris, Arles, Saint-Rémy, and Auvers. It brings together portraits and landscapes from some of the world’s most renowned collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The exhibition offers an exceptional opportunity to see masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, including



Vincent van Gogh, The Bedroom at Arles, 1889. Oil on canvas, 22 11/16 x 29 1/8 in. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Hervé Lewandowski / Art Resource, NY



and L’Arlésienne (1888).

VAN GOGH AND THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION

Museum Founder Duncan Phillips first expressed his desire to acquire “examples of the inventive genius of van Gogh” in 1926. In 1930,




Vincent van Gogh, Entrance to the Public Gardens in Arles, 1888. Oil on canvas 28 1/2 x 35 3/4 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Acquired 1930 (

—one of the first paintings by van Gogh in an American museum—entered the collection.

In 1949, Phillips acquired The Road Menders (1889) , which he ranked “among the best van Goghs,” and in 1952 added



House at Auvers (1890).

Phillips also purchased two van Gogh works on paper:



an etching of Dr. Gachet (1890)



and a pencil and ink drawing of Moulin de la Galette (1887).


CATALOGUE



A beautiful and groundbreaking catalogue, published by Yale University Press in association with The Phillips Collection and The Cleveland Museum of Art, accompanies the exhibition. It features 125 color illustrations, including numerous examples of Vincent van Gogh’s repetitions along with related works and technical studies. Essays by Phillips Chief Curator Eliza Rathbone and Cleveland Curator of Modern European Art William Robinson consider the many unresolved issues and controversies surrounding van Gogh’s repetitions, exploring their origins, development, and meaning in van Gogh’s art. Analyses of specific paintings by Rathbone, Robinson, Phillips Head of Conservation Elizabeth Steele, and Cleveland Paintings Conservator Marcia Steele make use of technical and analytical examinations to understand how the artist worked.

ORGANIZATION

Van Gogh Repetitions is co-organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, and The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio. After opening at The Phillips Collection, it travels to The Cleveland Museum of Art where it is on view March 2 through May 26, 2014.

More info and images on multiples here

More images:



Vincent van Gogh, Weaver, 1884. Oil on canvas, 24 5/8 x 33 1/4 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Tompkins Collection—Arthur Gordon Tomkins Fund



Vincent van Gogh, Le Moulin de la Galette, 1886. Oil on canvas, 15 x 18 1/4 in. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany



Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Camille Roulin, 1888. Oil on canvas, 16 x 12 3/4 in. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam



Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Marcelle Roulin, 1888. Oil on canvas, 13 3/4 x 9 3/4 in. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam



Vincent van Gogh, L'Arlésienne (Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux), 1888–89. Oil on canvas, 36 x 29 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Sam A. Lewisohn, 1951



Vincent van Gogh, The Postman Joseph Roulin, February–March 1889. Oil on canvas, 25 5/8 x 21 1/4 in. Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo



Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Joseph Roulin, 1889. Oil on canvas, 25 3/8 x 21 3/4 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William A. M. Burden, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Rosenberg, Nelson A. Rockefeller, Mr. and Mrs. Armand P. Bartos, The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, Mr. and Mrs. Werner E. Josten, and Loula D. Lasker Bequest (all by exchange). Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art /Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY



Vincent van Gogh, Madame Roulin Rocking the Cradle (La Berceuse), 1889. Oil on canvas, 36 1/2 x 29 1/2 in. Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection. The Art Institute of Chicago



Vincent van Gogh, Lullaby: Madame Augustine Roulin Rocking a Cradle (La Berceuse), 1889. Oil on canvas, 36 1/2 x 28 5/8 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of John T. Spaulding



Vincent van Gogh, L’Arlesienne, 1890. Oil on canvas, 23 5/16 x 19 3/4 in. Rome, National Gallery of Modern Art. By permission of Ministero dei Beni, delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo



Paul Gauguin, L'Arlesienne, Mme. Ginoux (The Woman from Arles, Madame Ginoux), 1888. Colored chalks and charcoal with white chalk on wove paper, 22 1/16 x 19 3/8 in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Memorial Gift from Dr. T. Edward and Tullah Hanley, Bradford, Pennsylvania



Interesting analysis here.

Paul Klee (1879-1940) was one of the most renowned artists to work at the Bauhaus and was both a playful and a radical figure in European Modernism. His intense and intricate work is the subject of a major new exhibition at Tate Modern from 16 October 2013, the UK’s first large-scale Klee exhibition for over a decade. Challenging his reputation as a solitary dreamer, it reveals the innovation and rigour with which he created his work and presented it to the public.

Bringing together over 130 colourful drawings, watercolours and paintings from collections around the world, Paul Klee: Making Visible spans the three decades of his career: from his emergence in Munich in the 1910s, through his years of teaching at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, up to his final paintings made in Bern after the outbreak of the Second World War. The show reunites important groups of work which the artist created, catalogued or exhibited together at these key moments in his life. Having since been dispersed across museums and private collections, Tate Modern is showing these delicate works alongside each other once again, often for the first time since Klee did so himself, in a unique chance to explore his innovations and ideas.

Born in Switzerland in 1879, Klee started out as a musician like his parents but soon resolved to study painting in Munich, where he eventually joined Kandinsky’s ‘Blue Rider’ group of avant-garde artists in 1912. Tate Modern’s exhibition begins with his breakthrough during the First World War, when he first developed his individual abstract patchworks of colour.

The many technical innovations that followed are showcased throughout the exhibition, including his unique ‘oil transfer’ paintings like



They’re Biting 1920,

the dynamic colour gradations of



Suspended Fruit 1921

and the multicoloured pointillism used in



Memory of a Bird 1932.

The heart of the exhibition focuses on the decade Klee spent teaching and working at the Bauhaus. The abstract canvases he produced here, such as the rhythmical composition



Fire in the Evening 1929,

took his reputation to new international heights by the end of the 1920s. The 1930s then brought about radical changes, as Klee was dismissed from his new teaching position by the Nazis and took refuge in Switzerland with his family, while his works were removed from collections and labelled ‘degenerate art’ in Germany. Despite the political turmoil, financial insecurity and his declining health, he nevertheless became even more prolific. Tate Modern brings together a group of his final works from the last exhibition staged before his death in 1940.

Although he saw his art as a process of spontaneous creativity and natural growth, exemplified by his famous description of drawing as “taking a line for a walk”, Klee actually worked with great rigour. He inscribed numbers on his works in accordance with a personal cataloguing system and wrote volumes on colour theory and detailed lecture notes. In grouping these works as Klee himself did, this exhibition presents an extraordinary opportunity to explore them in a new light and understand them as the artist intended.

Paul Klee: Making Visible is curated by Matthew Gale, Head of Displays, Tate Modern, with Flavia Frigeri, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern.



The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue from Tate Publishing and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.

Nice reviews here and here.

More images from the exhibition:



Paul Klee 1879–1940
Steps 1929
Oil and ink on canvas
520 x 430 mm
Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden)



Paul Klee 1879–1940
Redgreen and Violet-Yellow Rhythms 1920
Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1984 (1984.315.19)
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Source: Art Resource/Scala Photo Archives



Paul Klee 1879–1940
Static-Dynamic Intensification 1923
Watercolour and transferred printing ink on laid paper with gray and green gouache and black ink mounted on light cardboard
381 x 261 mm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York



Paul Klee 1879–1940
Park near Lu 1938
Zentrum Paul Klee



Paul Klee 1879–1940
Fire at Full Moon 1933
Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany



Paul Klee 1879–1940
Comedy 1921
Watercolour and oil on paper
support: 305 x 454 mm
on paper, unique
Tate. Purchased 1946



Paul Klee 1879–1940 '
Fish Magic' (1925)
Philadelphia Museum of Art/ The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection

Masterworks of American Modernism are the cornerstones for the stellar line-up of paintings and sculpture to be offered at Christie’s sale of American Art on December 5 in New York. Early confirmed highlights of the sale include Edward Hopper’s masterpiece East Wind Over Weehawken, Charles Demuth’s In the Key of Blue, Oscar Bluemner’s Surprise (May Moon), and Milton Avery’s Mandolin with Pears.




EDWARD HOPPER | East Wind Over Weehawken
Estimate: $22,000,000-28,000,000

As the star lot of the sale, Christie’s will offer East Wind Over Weehawken by Edward Hopper (1882-1967), a 1934 streetscape of a New Jersey suburb. The work was created shortly after Hopper’s fall 1933 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at a pivotal moment in the artist’s career. With his studio based in New York City, Hopper would occasionally travel across the Hudson River to New Jersey in search of subject matter. He carried out eight preparatory sketches of the sleepy suburb of New York, along with extensive notes about color in the area, which all contributed to the finished streetscape. The perspective is as if one is looking through a car window, having come to an intersection in the residential neighborhood. The work, which sought to capture the realities of Depression-era America, is permeated by a sense of melancholy and loneliness, underscored by the gray sky and brooding colors of the buildings. This, combined with the sense of suspended narrative, is what differentiated Hopper from his Ashcan School contemporaries.

This painting hails from the prestigious collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and has not been on the market since having been acquired by PAFA in 1952. Since its creation, the painting has been exhibited at such renowned institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, São Paulo’s Museum of Modern Art, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid and the Grand Palais in Paris. As announced by PAFA, proceeds from the sale of East Wind Over Weehawken will be used to support the creation of a new endowment for the purchase of artworks to expand the renowned collection of the museum and school.



CHARLES DEMUTH | In the Key of Blue
Estimate: $1,800,000-2,400,000

Painted circa 1919-1920, In the Key of Blue was part of a new series of paintings that Charles Demuth had executed in tempera, all of which were much larger in scale than his previous watercolors. In the Key of Blue is a tour-de-force that demonstrates Charles Demuth at the height of his abilities. Here Demuth depicts buildings in a landscape set against planes of subtly modulated color in a composition that is simultaneously refined and dynamic. Most likely influenced by John Addington Symons’ 1893 essay on aesthetics, it is a dynamic Precisionist composition and meditation on light, form and color. Demuth juxtaposes the strong outlines of the planar forms with the softness of the tempera medium to create depth and suggest the effects of light on the scene. The influence of Cezanne is evident in the areas of exposed board, which Demuth has deliberately left bare and incorporated into the composition to add further texture and complexity. Executed circa 1920, In the Key of Blue is an important and rare tempera that is a direct precursor of masterworks such as My Egypt (1927, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York).



OSCAR BLUEMNER | Surprise (May Moon)
Estimate: $400,000-600,000

Surprise (May Moon) was executed by Oscar Bluemner in 1927, a key moment in the artist’s career, as he was experiencing an important shift in his style. Following the passing of his wife the previous year, Bluemner moved his family from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to South Braintree, Massachusetts. His artworks reflected this emotionally turbulent time and he focused on motifs of suns and moons, seeing them as symbols of God or a universal creator. Surprise (May Moon) is one of a series of eighteen extraordinary works known as Oscar Bluemner’s Sun and Moon series that offer a life affirming depiction of nature and its spiritual force. Here Bluemner masterfully utilizes color to shape and stimulate mood and to convey a range of powerful emotions in a single image. These important watercolors were the successors to Georgia O’Keeffe’s Evening Star series and a precursor to Arthur Dove’s exploration of similar iconography in the 1930s.



MILTON AVERY | Mandolin with Pears
Estimate: $600,000-800,000

An important figure in the American Modernist movement, Avery was largely self-taught and experimented with color planes and patterns, bridging the gap between Matisse’s vivaciously outlined canvases and the American color field artists of the 1950s. Mandolin with Pears was executed in 1945, after Avery had aligned himself with gallerist Paul Rosenberg. Rosenberg had encouraged Avery to replace his painterly techniques with denser areas of flat colors and delineated forms, resulting in visually striking abstract works, such as the present example. Mandolin with Pears exemplifies Avery’s unique ability to simplify a scene to its broadest possible forms while retaining tension and balance through color and shape.

Outstanding works by Matisse, Picasso, Van Dongen, De Vlaminck, Derain and many other contemporaries of theirs were seen in a magnificent display from 6 March 2010 to 17 September 2010 at the Hermitage Amsterdam in the exhibition Matisse to Malevich. Pioneers of modern art from the Hermitage. For this exhibition about 75 paintings have been selected from the Hermitage St.- Petersburg, which has one of the world’s finest collections of French painting of the early twentieth century. Apart from the world-famous French masters, such equally celebrated Russian contemporaries as Malevich and Kandinsky will be represented. These artists are seen as the pioneers of Modernism. Almost all the works exhibited are on permanent display in St.- Petersburg. Most come originally from the Moscow collections of Morozov and Shchukin. This is the first time that this extensive collection of avant-garde masterpieces has been seen in the Netherlands. The exhibition explores the origins of modern art as an art historical phenomenon, but also looks at the passion of the artists, when at a crucial moment in art history at the beginning of the last century they initiated a revolution in art.

Morozov and Shchukin

The Hermitage’s impressive collection originated with the famous Russian collectors Ivan Morozov (1871-1921) and Sergej Shchukin (1854-1936). Both were textile dealers, and they brought French art to Russia because they wanted to change the course of art in their homeland. They provided a tremendous stimulus. Shchukin was the most conspicuous collector of his time; no one else bought so many works by Picasso (51) and Matisse (37). Morozov and Shchukin dared to buy the revolutionary paintings – sometimes with the paint still wet – and during the turn of the century they dominated the art world in Moscow. What they bought was shown at regular intervals in their own house. This enabled the young Russian artists to see what was in vogue in France. With the outbreak of the First World War collecting came to an end. During the October Revolution of 1917 the two collections were confiscated, and in 1948 a large part of them was given to the Hermitage in St.- Petersburg.

A documentary presentation in one of the rooms of the Hermitage Amsterdam gave the visitor a picture of the lives of both collectors and an insight into their idiosyncratic and progressive collecting policy.

Artists like Matisse, Picasso, Derain, De Vlaminck and Van Dongen were searching for renewal, for liberation from nature and from the academic traditions in painting. They formed the first important avant-garde movement of the twentieth century, which arose in French painting around 1900 in reaction to Impressionism and Pointillism. Bright and contrasting colours, rough brushwork, simplified forms and bold distortions characterised the new art. Light and shadow were depicted without intermediate shades and without soft transitions. In traditional painting the artists still wanted to represent three-dimensional space. For the pioneers that was no longer important; that was what photography was for. Through their work they provoked emotional reactions. Matisse, the most gifted and influential of them, was the focus of a group of artists known as the Fauvists or ‘wild animals’. No less than 12 paintings and 4 sculptures by him were in the exhibition (including



The red room,



and Jeu-de-boules, ).

Picasso was represented by 12 paintings (including



The absinthe drinker,



and Table in a café.

Throughout his long and productive life he constantly experimented with new techniques, and from 1907 he laid the basis for Cubism: this new style developed from a harder and tighter manner of expression and the use of thick layers of paint.



Kandinsky (Winter landscape)

met Picasso and Matisse in Paris and was deeply impressed by the colour effect in their work, but was also influenced by music (Schönberg). He wanted to represent his own feelings and expression yet more, he heard the colours of the music and his colours evoked music.

Malevich went a step further, he had had experience of everything new in the twentieth century and finally brought everything – nature, life, ‘being’ – down to a geometrical plane.



(Black square).

John Marin: The Breakthrough Years – From Paris to The Armory Show will be on view at Meredith Ward Fine Art from November 8, 2013 through January 11, 2014. The exhibition celebrates Marin’s participation in The International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as The Armory Show, which marks its 100th anniversary this year. The 28 watercolors in the show, all produced between 1904 and 1914, offer a front row seat on the first decade of Marin’s professional career, as he evolved from an accomplished mainstream artist to a leading member of the American avant-garde. Coincidentally, this year is also the 60th anniversary of Marin’s death in 1953, by which time he had become one of the most successful and well-known artists in America. “It’s difficult for us to imagine how radical these works appeared to audiences back then,” said Meredith Ward, President of the Gallery. “Marin was experimenting with new ideas, working his way out from under the shadow of Whistler, and ultimately found an entirely new way of painting.”




John Marin (1870-1953)
Lower Manhattan, 1914
Watercolor on paper
15 1/2 x 18 5/8 inches
Signed and dated at lower right: Marin-14


Marin arrived in Paris in 1905 at a unique and transitional moment, when works by Cézanne and Matisse were uprooting familiar aesthetics; his paintings of the period show how he responded. His Tyrol watercolors, for example, display vitality, energy, and brightness, and push the limits of form and abstraction to new levels. Marin exhibited three of his Tyrol watercolors in the 1913 Armory Show of which one,



John Marin (1870-1953)
Mountain, The Tyrol, 1910
Watercolor on paper
15 1/2 x 18 5/8 inches
Signed and dated at lower right: Marin / 10

is included in the present exhibition. Other breakthroughs came later, when the full impact of his European experience became apparent. Watercolors done in the Berkshires, the Adirondacks, Castorland, New York, and New York City show his complete mastery of the medium, and that he had internalized modernist ideas and made them his own. With these works, we see Marin’s signature style emerging – an entirely new and distinct visual language that was perfectly suited to his native landscape. For Marin, the years from 1904 to 1914 were filled with struggle and breakthroughs – breakthroughs that ultimately produced some of the most iconic works of 20th century American art.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with an essay by Meredith Ward.

About Meredith Ward Fine Art:

Meredith Ward Fine Art opened in 2004 specializing in American art from the 19th century to the present. The gallery is the exclusive representative of the estate of John Marin. Meredith Ward Fine Art is located at 44 East 74h Street in New York City and is open to the public Monday through Friday, 10am to 5:30pm and Saturday noon to 5pm.

This autumn (5 October 2013 – 5 January 2014) Turner Contemporary presents its first historical exhibition since the blockbuster Turner and the Elements with a major showcase of works by JMW Turner, John Constable and their contemporaries. Bringing together 75 paintings from the Tate collection, the exhibition, organised by Compton Verney, explores the practice of oil sketching in the landscape in the fullest presentation of oil sketches from the Tate Collection to date. This approach to oil painting became increasingly fashionable during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These rarely shown works, radical for their time, demonstrate artists’ efforts to reflect direct experience of their environment, rather than a concern for careful composition.

The exhibition is organised around six principal landscape themes, reflecting interests and subjects common to artists of the period: sketching from nature; the city; the picturesque; the Thames, rivers and coasts; and rural nature. These themes are explored in the works of JMW Turner and John Constable as well as George Stubbs and John Sell Cotman, among others. Organised by Compton Verney in Warwickshire, the exhibition is curated by Michael Rosenthal, Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Warwick, one of the world’s foremost experts on the art of this period, and Anne Lyles, a leading authority on the art of John Constable.

The exhibition gives an insight into the different approach each artist used for oil sketching, illustrating how different artists approached similar subjects – at a time when oil sketching en plein air was still comparatively unusual.

The result is an exhibition which introduces visitors to the practice and techniques of sketching, and the often surprising connections that can be drawn between the artists involved. These stimulating comparisons prompt questions about the importance of oil sketching in this period and how finished works were planned, evolved and executed. The oil paintings have been chosen by the curators to represent six principal landscape themes: sketching from nature, the closer view, water, shapes and silhouettes, the shapes of landscape, rural nature, looking heavenwards. These themes are explored through the works of Turner and Constable alongside artists such as George Stubbs, John Linnell, William Henry Hunt, John Sell Cotman, John Crome, Francis Danby, Thomas Jones, George Robert Lewis and Augustus Wall Callcott.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated book, produced by Tate Publishing.

After being shown at Compton Verney, 13 July 2013 to 22 September 2013, Turner and Constable will be toured to Turner Contemporary in Margate (October 2013 - January 2014) and the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle (January - May 2014).

Images from the Turner and Constable: Sketching from Nature Exhibition:



JMW Turner, View of Richmond Hill and Bridge, exhibited 1808, Oil paint on canvas, support: 914 x 1219 mm, © Tate, London 2013



JMW Turner, Godalming from the South, 1805, Oil paint on mahogany veneer mounted onto cedar panel, support: 203 x 349 mm, © Tate, London 2013



John Crome, Moonrise on the Yare (?), c.1811-16, Oil paint on canvas, support: 711 x 1111 mm, © Tate, London 2013



John Constable, Malvern Hall, Warwickshire, 1809, Oil paint on canvas, 514 x 768 mm, © Tate, London 2013




JMW Turner, The Thames near Walton Bridges, 1805, Oil paint on mahogany veneer, support: 371 x 737 mm, © Tate, London 2013



John Sell Cotman, Seashore with Boats, c.1808, Oil paint on board, 283 x 410 mm, © Tate, London 2013



John Constable, Cloud Study, 1822, Oil paint on paper on board, support: 476 x 575 mm, © Tate, London 2013



Thomas Jones, Mount Vesuvius from Torre dell'Annunziata near Naples, 1783, Oil paint on paper on canvas, support: 381 x 552 mm, © Tate, London 2013



George Stubbs, Newmarket Heath, with a Rubbing-Down House, c.1765, Oil paint on canvas, support: 302 x 419 mm, © Tate, London 2013



William Henry Brooke, Lanherne Bay near the Nunnery, Cornwall, 1819, Watercolour on paper, support: 146 x 190 mm, © Tate, London 2013



John Constable, Dedham from near Gun Hill, Langham, c.1815, Oil paint on paper laid on canvas, 251 x 305 mm © Tate, London 2013



John Constable, The Sea near Brighton, 1826, Oil on paper laid on card, support: 175 x 238 mm, © Tate, London 2013

From October 12, 2013, to January 19, 2014, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presents an innovative interdisciplinary exhibition, exploring for the first time the important interrelationships that exist between the visual arts and music in the Venetian Republic, from the early sixteenth century to the fall of the Serenissima at the close of the eighteenth century, a period during which these art forms served the political ambitions of the state and civic institutions and became increasingly central to the economy of the Republic.

Thanks to outstanding loans from prestigious museums and collectors, visitors to the exhibition Spendore a Venezia: Art and Music from the Renaissance to Baroque in the Serenissima will discover the splendours of Venice through the musical scene: salons, where chamber music performances were featured, the elaborate carnevale, the theatre, street performances and the festive, costumed commedia dell’arte.

Featuring approximately 120 paintings, prints and drawings, as well as historical instruments, musical manuscripts and texts, this major exhibition paints a portrait of extraordinary artistic and musical creativity. This exhibition organized by the Museum brings together masterworks by many of the most renowned names associated with the city on the lagoon: visual artists directly associated with the musical life of the city include Titian, Tintoretto, Bassano, Giovanni Battista and Domenico Tiepolo, and Francesco Guardi, many of whom were also amateur musicians, as well as Bernardo Strozzi, Pietro Longhi and Canaletto, whose paintings record the role of music in Venetian life. The exhibition also includes manuscripts and publications by Venetian composers like the Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Albinoni, Lotti and Vivaldi, with several instruments.

“In Venice, in the same way that one cannot feel except in music, one cannot think if not in images,” wrote Gabriele D’Annunzio around 1900 in his flamboyant ode to Venice. As Museum Director and Chief Curator Nathalie Bondil explains, “At the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, it is now equally impossible to see without listening, to listen without seeing. Two years after the opening of the Bourgie Concert Hall – a heritage building that also possesses acoustic properties – music has found its place front and centre at the Museum. Music has already played an essential part in our audacious and original major exhibitions for the past few years. First conceived of five years ago, when Bourgie Hall was no more than a dream… here is our latest production. Rather than being treated as mere accompaniment, music is fully integrated as part of a multidisciplinary dialogue about both artistic and historical content. This combination – a fine arts museum housing a professional concert hall run by a resident music foundation – is entirely unique.”

Exhibition curator Hilliard T. Goldfarb, Associate Chief Curator and Curator of Old Masters at the MMFA and a specialist of the Italian Renaissance, developed the concept of this original exhibition produced by the MMFA under the direction of Nathalie Bondil. The exhibition’s musical accompaniment is being overseen by musicologist François Filiatrault. Extensive associated programming created by Isolde Lagacé, General and Artistic Director of the Arte Musica Foundation, includes a series of concerts with period instruments in the MMFA’s Bourgie Hall.

The works on loan for this major exhibition – including precious historical instruments – have been contributed by sixty_one prominent international collections in Canada and abroad, including: from the United States – the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library & Museum, the New York Public Library, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington); from Italy – the Palatine Gallery, Uffizi, Capitoline, Cini Foundation, Accademia (Venice), Museo Correr; from the rest of Europe – Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Madrid’s Thyssen_Bornemisza, London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery and National Gallery, and the Louvre. From the beginning, the Cité de la musique in Paris has contributed to this exhibition with its scientific expertise and by loaning major instruments.

This exhibition will be circulated by the MMFA to the Portland Art Museum in Oregon from March 7 to June 8, 2014.

Visual arts, music and politics from the early sixteenth century to the fall of the Serenissima

The visual arts and musical scenes during the extraordinarily creative period from Titian to Guardi and Willaert to Vivaldi were profoundly interconnected. The world’s first public opera house (1637) opened in Venice, which boasted no fewer than nine commercial opera houses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Modern music typography was invented in Venice, and it was there that the most important musical presses in Europe were located. Public musical concerts were crucial to the economic strength of Venice’s scuole (rich, powerful brotherhoods) and ospedali (establishments for the poor and orphans). Each year, a variety of processions were held in celebration of special occasions. These were recorded in the visual arts and celebrated in music, in turn serving its government, which sponsored the arts. Music and the visual arts also became central to state propaganda and the Republic’s state receptions and international profile.

EXHIBITION THEMES

The exhibition is organized along three broad conceptual themes reflecting specific, parallel and interrelated characteristics of art and music during this critical period of Venetian history.

Art and Music in the Public Sphere

For Venice, steeped in classical and Medieval culture, music symbolized universal harmony and, by extension, good government. Music contributed to the splendour of civic commemorations, official celebrations and religious rites, and its role in the ducal chapel, public processions, churches, scuole, ospedali and other places central to Venetian life was immortalized by painters, printmakers and draftsmen.

Ceremonies and Processions

Music accompanied the ruling doge in processions announced by a fanfare of brass. In the chapel, he was extolled by wind, string and keyboard instruments and large choirs. This section presents a wide range of works, including a rare print of the procession of the doge that is over 4 metres long,

a portrait by Titian of Doge Francesco Venier:



Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian
(about 1488–1576)
Portrait of Doge Francesco Venier
About 1554–56
Oil on canvas
113 x 99 cm
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Inv. 1930.116 (405)
Photo © Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Photo Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Museo Correr

depictions of events at Saint Mark’s Basilica and the church of San Zanipolo, such as

Canaletto’s Interior of San Marco, Venice:


Giovanni Antonio Canal,
called Canaletto (1697–1768)
Interior of San Marco, Venice
About 1760
Oil on canvas
44.1 x 31.5 cm
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Adaline Van Horne Bequest
Inv. 1945.871
Photo MMFA, Brian Merrett

and Guardi’s The Papal Visit of Pius VI in the Church of S. Zanipolo, (Similar):



Pope Pius VI Blessing the People on Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo

illustrating the role of the arts as interface between religion and politics.

Other objects include illuminated choir books, manuscripts and period instruments never before exhibited in North America, as well as costume pieces, including a corno ducale, the bonnet-like crown worn by doges on official occasions.

Scuole and ospedali

Venice was home to a network of scuole, rich, powerful brotherhoods that were sponsors and patrons of artists and musicians. Even more remarkable were the ospedali, establishments for the poor and orphans, renowned for their musical ensembles. Well known musicians like Vivaldi composed for these ensembles, enhancing their prestige. This section includes

Tiepolo’s The Coronation of the Virgin:



Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770)
The Coronation of the Virgin
About 1754
Oil on canvas
102.6 x 77.3 cm
Fort Worth, Texas,
Kimbell Art Museum
Inv. AP 1984.10

a rare oil sketch the artist used as a model for a ceiling fresco in the newly constructed church of the Pietà, Santa Maria della Visitazione, famed for its all-girl choir. Also on view:

Gabriel Bella’s concert scene Orphan Girls Singing for the Dukes of the North:



the first edition of The Four Seasons by Vivaldi, who taught violin at the Ospedale della Pietà, and

Canaletto’s wonderful Feast Day of San Roch, a special loan from the National Gallery in London:



Giovanni Antonio Canal,
called Canaletto (1697–1768)
Venice: The Feast Day of Saint Roch
About 1735
Oil on canvas
147.7 x 199.4 cm
London, National Gallery
Inv. NG937
Photo © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY

Art and Music in the Private Realm

In the private domain, music was the art of the courtier and the educated class. Nobles were often portrayed playing the lute or composing, and thus identified with the values associated with music: philosophical speculation, scientific inquiry, intellectual and spiritual elevation. Contrary to the lowly pipes played by shepherds in pastoral or allegorical scenes, the instruments of the elite symbolized culture and were frequently ornamented with precious materials, as seen in the exhibited lutes, theorbos and harpsichords.

Musicians

Venetian portraiture often explored the musician as subject. Depicted alone or in groups, in allegorical, mythological or genre scenes, the figures appear in attire and with attributes that literally and figuratively reflect their dedication to music.

Titian’s great painting The Concert, on loan from the Palatine Gallery in Florence:



Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian (about 1488–1576)
The Concert (The Interrupted Concert)
About 1511–12
Oil on canvas
86.5 x 123.5 cm
Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina
Inv. 1912 185
Photo Scala / Art Resource, NY

will feature prominently in this section. It is of particular interest as a masterpiece of Titian’s early maturity and for its art historical significance, which links the artist to his master, Giorgione.

Works like The Lute Player by Cariani, a disciple of Giorgione:



Giovanni Busi, called Cariani
(about 1485–after 1547)
The Lute Player
About 1515
Oil on canvas
71 x 65 cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg
Inv. 236
Photo Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg, photo M. Bertola


Self-portrait with a Madrigal of Marietta Robusti (La Tintoretta, the daughter of Tintoretto):



Marietta Comin (Robusti), called la Tintoretta
(1560–1590)
Self-portrait with a Madrigal
About 1580
Oil on canvas
93.5 x 91.5 cm
Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi
Inv. 1890, 1898
Photo Scala/Art Resource, NY


Annibale Carracci’s Portrait of Claudio Merulo:



and many other masterworks will illustrate the wide variety of styles and treatments.

Concerts

Music evolved on several fronts during the golden age of the Venetian Republic. Private concerts expanded to multiple instruments, and full orchestras were established to perform elaborate compositions. Venice was home to Europe’s leading music publishers, who thrived selling books of frottole (popular secular songs), lute tablatures and concerto scores for harpsichord, violin and other instruments. Songbooks like Ottaviano dei Petrucci’s extremely rare volume Odhecaton A (1501), the first musical score with movable type ever published and one of the greatest monuments in the history of publishing, promoted the practice of music and helped foster enlightened audiences. Venetian painters were distinguished by their passion for music, as seen in

Longhi’s Il Concertino:



Pietro Longhi (1701–1785)
The Concert
1741
Oil on canvas
60 x 49 cm
Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia
Inv. 466
Photo Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, NY

and other works in this section.

The love of all things musical is also evident in

A Still Life with Musical Instruments in an Interior by Evaristo Baschenis:



who is credited with inventing a new still_life genre featuring musical instruments (often Venetian_made) in pleasing arrangements.

Street Scenes

Music was not confined to the official, cultivated establishment. Lively popular songs were circulated by gondoliers and street performers, as captured in works like

Giacomo Franco’s Music on the Grand Canal

and Giovanni Battista Piazzetta’s The Singer:



Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1683–1754)
The Singer
About 1730
Oil on canvas
82.5 x 68.5 cm
Montpellier, Musée Fabre
Inv. 73.2.1
Photo Frédéric Jaulmes © Musée Fabre de Montpellier Agglomération


Manuscript songbooks for gondolas document the way various cultural communities influenced the repertoire. Music was also associated with carnevale, which transformed Venice into pure theatre in the Western imagination. The festive carnival spirit reigns in

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo’s Minuet:




Giandomenico Tiepolo
(1727–1804)
The Minuet
1756
Oil on canvas
80.7 x 109.3 cm
Barcelona, Museu Nacional
d’Art de Catalunya
Francesc Cambó Bequest, 1949
Inv. MNAC 064989
Photo Calveras / Mérida / Sagristà

Strozzi’s Street Musicians:



and other open-air scenes.

Art, Music and Mythology

The world’s first public opera house, the Teatro Nuovo di San Cassian, presented its first opera production in Venice in 1637, and by the eighteenth century, the city boasted no fewer than nine such venues. Opera composers, from Monteverdi to Handel and Vivaldi focussed their hopes on seeing their works produced and published in Venice. Opera became a staple of social activity, and its production, a driving force in the Venetian Republic’s economy, provided jobs for set builders, costumers, stagehands, performers and countless others. At the same time, the classical mythology that inspired the creation of many librettos emerged in music-related painting.

Mythology

Italian Renaissance painting conveys a classical heritage marked by allegory, myths and symbols. Apollo, Venus and other deities are frequently pictured, and scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses inspired Titian throughout his career. But in Venice, there was the added factor of music. Music features in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, one of the greatest publications of the Renaissance, created in Venice in 1499 by the publisher, editor and printer Aldus Manutius.

Tintoretto’s monumental ceiling painting for Pietro Aretino, The Contest between Apollo and Marsyas:



Jacopo Comin (Robusti),
called Tintoretto (1518–1594)
The Contest between Apollo and Marsyas
About 1545
Oil on canvas
139.7 x 240 cm
Hartford, Connecticut, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum
of Art, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund
Inv.1950.438
Photo Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY

is a superb example of the practice of combining themes associated with music.

The Concert of the Muses and other Goddesses, created as a painted harpsichord cover by Tintoretto,

as well as Sebastiano Ricci’s Vénus entourée de nymphes contemplant une ronde de cupidons, created for the same purpose:



will be presented.

Other works by Tintoretto, Tiziano Aspetti and

two wonderful Tiepolo paintings depicting the parting of Rinaldo and Armida:



Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770)
Rinaldo Abandons Armida
About 1753
Oil on canvas
39.6 x 61.9 cm
Berlin, Gemäldegalerie der Staatliche Museen,
Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz
Inv. 2000.1
Photo Jörg P. Anders


inspired by the poem Gerusalemme Liberata of Tasso, a popular opera subject of the period and borrowed from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and the Uffizi in Florence, will be featured in this section.

Opera

Under the guise of allegorical and mythological figures, opera explored and reflected contemporary themes and issues. The number of public theatres grew rapidly as audiences embraced the new form of entertainment designed for eyes and ears alike. This enthusiasm will be illustrated by paintings, prints, drawings and sketches of well known singers and composers. A lovely pastel portrait of the great soprano Faustina Bordoni, as well as a delightful group of caricatures of Farinelli, Caffariello, Antonio Campioni and other famous opera singers by the Venetian artist, critic, printmaker and collector Antonio Maria Zanetti the Elder, will add a special touch to the exhibition. These drawings, never before exhibited in North America, offer a humorous and less formal view of the opera world.

Splendore a Venezia: An Extraordinary Musical Experience

For the exhibition Splendore a Venezia, the MMFA has produced a musical audioguide that is being made available to the public free of charge. This audioguide features one or more pieces of music in connection with a particular work of art or instrument. It goes without saying that a musical soundscape in the galleries, along the lines of those seen in MMFA exhibitions like Warhol Live (2008), Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko (2009) and We Want Miles: Miles Davis vs. Jazz (2010), will complete this extraordinary musical experience.

A scientific book

To accompany this exhibition, the MMFA’s Publishing Department is publishing a full-colour exhibition catalogue, in English and French editions. The catalogue features essays by leading international experts in Venetian art, culture and music, under the general editorship of Dr. Hilliard T. Goldfarb: Tiziana Bottecchia, Dawson Carr, Francesca del Torre, Joël Dugot, Iain Fenlon, Caroline Giron, Jonathan Glixon, Sergio Guarino, Eugene Johnson, Piero Lucchi and Ellen Rosand. This publication serves as a reference work that makes an ongoing contribution to the body of knowledge on music and the visual arts in the private and public realms of the Venetian Republic. It is distributed by Hazan (French edition) and Yale University Press (English edition).

A Venetian layout designed by Guillaume Lord, including a gondola from the Guy Laliberté Collection

The layout of this exhibition was conceived by Guillaume Lord, a designer and creator of sets and props for the theatre, who has been active in his profession for some fifteen years both in Quebec and abroad in the fields of theatre, dance, circus, variety shows and musical comedies.

In this exhibition, where music is an essential part of the circuit, he has re_created an environment evoking the visitors’ journey in both time and space as they discover the legendary sights of Venice. Along the way they meet “Donatella” from the Guy Laliberté Collection and loaned for the occasion, traditional Venetian gondola crafted in the late-20th century by Pietro Amadi, composed of various woods, stainless steel and brass. On one side can be read the following inscription: In barca vien con mi (Embark with me).

The gondola, whose origins are lost in Venetian antiquity, is the traditional, flat-bottomed Venetian rowing boat that provides the ideal way to travel about the Venetian Lagoon. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is estimated that between 8,000 and 10,000 of these watercrafts filled the Lagoon. Originally, gondolas could be painted different colours, but after 1562 they were restricted to black. In Canaletto’s time, the prow was lower and there were usually two rowers. The modern profile was developed in the nineteenth century by a builder whose descendants still construct these vessels. The city prohibited any further modification in the last century. Gondolas are now composed of 280 pieces made from 8 different types of woods. The left side (24 cm longer than the right side) is curved more to balance against the forward stroke of the oar at right that turns the vessel left. By regulation, all gondolas are exactly 10.87 metres long, 1.42 metres wide and weigh 700 kilograms (1,500 pounds). They are all entirely handmade.

An incredibly diverse musical programming presented in connection with the Exhibition

The MMFA and the Arte Musica Foundation, in residence at the Museum, combine their expertise and resources to present about 140 concerts in the Bourgie Concert Hall each year, welcoming an average of 45,000 spectators. Isolde Lagacé says: “The exhibition presented by the MMFA is the ideal occasion to make a foray into the incredibly rich world of Venetian music. From October to January, the Arte Musica Foundation will present 20 concerts in Bourgie Hall covering five centuries of music, both instrumental and vocal, sacred, profane and traditional.” She adds: “Although the exhibition focusses on the Renaissance and Baroque periods, the time limits have been pushed back to include the nineteenth century – with a literary and musical performance – and the twentieth century – with a soirée to pay tribute to two sons of Venice, Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna – and the twenty-first century – with the creation of a musical fairytale for children with giant marionettes, Le Chat et le gondolier.”

The concerts include majestic choral works by Monteverdi and Gabrieli performed by the Studio de musique ancienne de Montréal; traditional songs for voice and lute with the Italian ensemble Accordone and the tenor Marco Beasley, who sang on the soundtrack of the film Tous les soleils; music for two organs; Italian arias and concertos performed by renowned Montreal ensembles and soloists; as well as two major works by Vivaldi; the Montreal premiere of the oratorio Juditha Triumphans with the Ensemble Caprice; and The Four Seasons with soloists and musicians from the OSM.

Credits and presentation of the exhibition

This exhibition has been developed, produced and circulated by Nathalie Bondil and its exhibition curator Hilliard T. Goldfarb. The Museum would like to thank the sixty_one lenders from Canada and abroad who contributed to this exhibition, which is presented under the high patronage of His Excellency Mr. Giorgio Napolitano, President of the Italian Republic.

The layout of this exhibition was conceived by Guillaume Lord under the direction of Sandra Gagné, Head of Exhibitions Production at the MMFA. Music is an integral part of the exhibition thanks to a specially designed original soundscape developed in close co_operation with the Arte Musica Foundation and François Filiatrault. Isolde Lagacé, also developed a special programme of lectures and concerts in connection with the exhibition for Bourgie Hall.

Also in the exhibition:



Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto
(1697–1768)
The Bucintoro Returning to the Molo on Ascension Day
1760
Oil on canvas
58.3 x 101.8 cm
Dulwich Picture Gallery
Inv. DPG599
Photo By Permission of The Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery




Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto
(1697–1768)
The Bucintoro at the Molo
on Ascension Day
About 1745
Oil on canvas
114.9 x 162.6 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The William L. Elkins Collection, 1924
Inv. E1924-3-48
Photo The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY





Antonio Codognato (active 2nd half of the 18th c.)
View of the Magnificent Scenery and Lighting of the Teatro San Samuele
1753
Engraving
Sheet: 36.7 x 51.6 cm
Venice, Fondazione Musei Civici, Museo Correr,
Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe
Inv. ST. Correr 1081
Photo Scala / Art Resource, NY

Abbeville Press
Slipcased, 496 pages
342 full-color illustrations, 4 gatefolds
Published 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7892-1145-3
Not Yet Published
Due in: 11/26/2013
$185.00

You may be familiar with Abbeville’s series of books exploring the histories of iconic cities, including



The History of Venice in Painting,



The History of Paris in Painting and



The History of Rome in Painting.

The newest book in the series, The History of Florence in Painting, recounts the most important events in the history of Florence as captured by some of the greatest artists in the Western world, the story tellers of their time. Interest in the history of Florence has increased lately, thanks to Dan Brown’s Inferno and the book chronicles the lives of the denizens of Florence. These stories range from luminaries such as Dante and Giotto to the Medici and religious orders like the Poor Clares to inhabitants of the Santo Spirito, or residential zone for employees of the ducal palace.

In the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, Florence served as the primary destination in Italy for merchants and artists from all over Europe and the city flourished as a prototype of the modern state as well as serving as the intellectual and cultural center of Italy. This legacy endured as the city served as the trail head of the Grand Tour, a rite of passage for intellectuals, artists, and nobility as they explored the continent.

Located at the heart of the Italian peninsula, Florence was already a center of commerce and fine craftsmanship by 1252, when it began to mint its own currency, the gold florin, the “dollar of the Middle Ages.” The great wealth amassed by the Medici, the Strozzi, the Pitti, and other merchant and banking families was in some part responsible for the flowering of the arts, literature, philosophy, and science in the period that followed, a phenomenon that even then was recognized as, and called, a renaissance. The legacy of this great epoch, both tangible and spiritual, ensured that Florence would remain a beacon of culture through its succeeding centuries of ducal rule.

And Florence was all along a city of painters, whose works not only record and interpret its history—its sights; the likenesses of its leaders and luminaries; its battles, civic myths, and patron saints—but are also an integral part of that history themselves. In this magnificent volume are assembled a wide variety of artworks, both familiar and rarely seen, that, interwoven with an authoritative text, chronicle the changing fortunes of Florence—from the age of Cimabue and Giotto, through the High Renaissance of Leonardo and Michelangelo, to the Mannerism of Vasari and Bronzino, and even to the era of modern travelers like Sargent and Degas.

The History of Florence in Painting is a feast for the eyes and the intellect. It's a magnificent, absolutely huge book, a coffee table book itself as big as a coffee table. It's a worthy companion to the previous volumes in this series, which present the histories of Venice, Paris, and Rome in painting.

Authors::

- Antonella Fenech Kroke, Editor, is a historian of Renaissance art, specializing in Giorgio Vasari, and a member of the Centre d’Histoire de l’Art de la Renaissance in Paris.

- Cyril Gerbron, an art historian, teaches at the Sorbonne.

- Stefano Calonaci is a historian of the city of Florence.

- Neville Rowley is currently a visiting professor of art history at the University of Campinas, Brazil.

In their first major themed exhibition together, from 24 October 2013 to 27 January 2014 the Berlinische Galerie and the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere will show key works of modern art from Vienna and Berlin ranging from the Secessions via Expressionism to New Objectivity.

Masterpieces from both collections will combine with lesser-known specimens to create a panoramic insight into the vibrant exchange between these two metropolitan hubs in the early 20th century.



Much is already known about the links between these two cities in the fields of literature, theatre and music, but the dialogue between Vienna and Berlin around classical modernism in art has rarely been explored. This themed exhibition of some 200 works seeks to redress the oversight. It opens with the formation of the Secessions, whose champions turned their backs on academic style to negotiate new positions between art nouveau and late impressionism.

The dawn of modernism is reflected on both sides in a quest for new tools of expression, but while the Berlin Secessionists around Max Liebermann took a growing interest in everyday reality and made a theme of the urban experience, Viennese artists around Gustav Klimt and Koloman Moser sought their style in ornamental forms, often associated with the language of symbolism. Nevertheless, it is evident from the many exhibitions of the day that there was a constant flow of exchange and that they were well aware of each other’s work.

In the 1910s, as a new generation of Expressionists emerged in the form of artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the Danubian capital was gradually ousted from its leadership role in the fine arts by its recent but aspiring German counterpart. Young Austrian artists such as Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele stepped out of Klimt’s shadow, presenting their avant-garde work to a more open-minded yet critical audience in Berlin. Art dealers and essayists such as Paul Cassirer, Herwarth Walden and Karl Kraus were equally at home in the art communities of both cities and built a close network of contacts, enabling many artists to settle in Berlin, especially after the Great War.

With the post-war decline of the Danubian monarchy and the death of important artists like Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, the Viennese art world faded from international view during the 1920s and 1930s. While Dada, Verism and New Objectivity rigorously confronted new political and social realities in Berlin, such engagements were now rare in the Austrian capital.

At the same time, Vienna witnessed quite independent phenomena, such as kineticism with its utopian visions and avant-garde idiom. There were also some specifically Austrian interpretations of New Objectivity, largely but unjustly ignored in the past. While they reflect links with Berlin and the work of an Otto Dix or George Grosz, they are influenced just as much by the Viennese tradition of psychological art.

When Friedrich Kiesler organised his “International Exhibition of New Theatre Technology” in 1924, the Austrian capital once again became a magnet for the avant-garde. Finally, tribute is paid to exhibition organiser and art historian Hans Tietze, a historic figure almost unknown in Germany, whose call for “lively art history” inspired the exhibition “Vienna Berlin:The Art of Two Cities”.

Artists (selected) Hans Baluschek, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Carry Hauser, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner, Erika Giovanna Klien, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Broncia Koller-Pinell, Max Liebermann, Jeanne Mammen, Ludwig Meidner, Koloman Moser, Max Oppenheimer, Emil Orlik, Christian Schad, Egon Schiele, Max Slevogt.

The exhibition architecture was created by Canadian architect David Saik.



The exhibition will be accompanied by a bound catalogue to be published by Prestel Verlag. 392 pages, 300 colour illustrations.

Images from the exhibition:



Egon Schiele Eduard Kosmack, 1910 Belvedere, Wien, © erloschen



Christian Schad Portrait des Schriftstellers Ludwig Bäumer, 1927 Berlinische Galerie_© Christian Schad Stiftung Aschaffenburg/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013, Reproduktion: Kai-Annett Becker



Franz Lerch Mädchen mit Hut, 1929_© Belvedere, Wien



Jeanne Mammen Revuegirls, 1928/29 Berlinische Galerie_© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2013, Reproduktion: Kai-Annett Becker



Otto Friedrich Elsa Galafrès, 1908 Belvedere Wien_© erloschen



Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Frauen auf der Straße, 191 Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal_© erloschen



Gustav Klimt Johanna Staude (unvollendet), 1917/18 Belvedere, Wien, © erloschen



Otto Dix Der Dichter Iwar von Lücken, 1926 Berlinische Galerie_© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013, Reproduktion: Kai-Annett Becker



Josef Engelhart Eine Wiener Straßenfigur (Der Pülcher), 1888, Belvedere, Wien (Leihgabe des Vereins der Museumsfreunde, Wien), © erloschen



Lotte Laserstein Im Gasthaus, 1927_© Privatsammlung, Foto: Studio Walter Bayer

The Museum of Fine Arts’ (Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest) exhibition titled Caravaggio to Canaletto The Glory of Italian Baroque and Rococo Painting, 26 October 2013 - 16 February 2014 will present the leading styles, outstanding artist figures as well as the extraordinary wealth of genres, techniques and themes of 17th- and 18th-century Italian painting through more than 140 works by 100 masters, includingnine paintings – the highest number by a single artist included in the displayed material – by the period’s prominent painter genius, Caravaggio.

The backbone of the selection is formed by the 34 principal works from the internationally highlyacclaimed Italian Baroque and Rococo collection of the museum’s Old Masters’ Gallery, which willbe complemented by 106 masterpieces arriving in Budapest from sixty-two collections of elevencountries, such as the national galleries in Washington and London, the Musée du Louvre in Paris,the Museo del Prado and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Galleria Borghese in Rome. The material commands international attention since such a large-scale, comprehensive exhibition surveying the entirety ofItalian painting as the one in Budapest has not been put on for decades anywhere in the world.

Some years ago the Museum of Fine Arts set itself the ambitious goal of presenting 15th-18th-century Italian painting in two consecutive exhibitions, unprecedented in its scope in Hungary. The first one, titled Botticelli to Titian, held in 2009-2010, attracted 230 thousand visitors, and thus became one of the most successful shows in the history of the museum.

The next, representative exhibition devoted to 17th-18th-century Italian painting opened in October and will be the closing event of the Italian-Hungarian Cultural Season 2013 in Hungary. The two centuries of Italian art surveyed by the exhibition were determined by the Baroque style, which prevailed during the period all over Europe.

The early Baroque, which had started at the end of the previous century continued in 17th-century seicento, which saw the rise of the naturalism of Caravaggio and his followers, as well as the Bolognese School of Classicism linked to the Caracci.

High Baroque, which lasted more than fifty years, was characterised equally by the dynamic style of the so-called master decorators, Baroque Classicism and early Romanticism.

We can talk about the Late Baroque period from the last decades of the seicento, when the tradition of the great masters was carried on in a somewhat empty, routine-like way. The Baroque Era ended in the 18th century with the luxurious Venetian Rococo, while in the middle of the century, also referred to as settecento, the beginnings of Neoclassicism started to appear. The artists of the various painting schools and styles of the 17th and 18th centuries were driven by the same desire: to imitate reality, strive for realistic depiction and create the illusion of tangibility, for which theyhad the whole range of artistic means at their disposal.

The exhibition will survey the period in eight chapters, starting with Caravaggio, whose activity in Rome brought radical change to painting, going on to the Baroque replacing Mannerism, and ending with the development of Rococo and Classicism, and the introduction of their masters.

The opening section will display two early works by Caravaggio – one of them



Caravaggio: Boy with a Basket of Fruit, ca. 1593 Roma, Galleria Borghese © 2013. Photo Scala, Florence,

which will be followed by some religious compositions of Caravaggist painting, including two versions of Caravaggio’s Salome:





The third section will showcase classicising Baroque linked to the names of Lodovico, Agostino and Annibale Carracci, while the fourth unit will present the spreading and flourishing of Baroque art.

The fifth section will give an overview of the bourgeoisgenres of the still-life, the landscape, the portrait and the genre portrait, followed by the part devoted to the main stylistic trends of the 18th century.

The last two sections will provide a glimpseinto 18th-century painting in Venice and introduce the veduta (townscape), which became a populargenre at that time, through four Venetian townscapes by Canaletto.

The exhibition is curated by Zsuzsanna Dobos, art historian at the Old Masters’ Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts.

Images from the exhibition:



Caravaggio: St John the Baptist, ca. 1600 © Pinacoteca



Canaletto: The Molo towards the Riva degli Schiavoni, ca. 1738 Milano, Castello Sforzesco © 2013 Photo Scala, Florence



Caravaggio San_Giovanni Battista

From 21 February 2013 / 21 July 2013 the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, exhibited Chagall - Between War and Peace.

Marc Chagall was nearly a hundred when he died in 1985. He had crossed most of the 20th century, living through one revolution, two wars and a period of exile, and rubbing shoulders with some of its most avant-garde artists. His personal experience of History, the memory of people he knew, his travels and his homeland shine through in his work.

Twentieth-century art largely repressed allegory and narrative. It was because Chagall did not follow the rules and codes (or even dogma) of modernist thought, while drawing nourishment from it, that he was able to stay figurative and bear witness to his time. He borrowed some of the forms of the avant-garde movements (Cubism, Suprematism, Surrealism) and sometimes seems to come close to them, but in the end remained independent. The parallel between the images of war and the images of peace reveals the complexity of an oeuvre which can never be reduced to a particular genre, but enfolds events, situations and the artist’s feelings. Depending on the circumstances, Chagall comes back to a few themes, enriching them each time with a personal dimension: his home town of Vitebsk, the Jewish traditions of his childhood, episodes from the Bible, including the Crucifixion, the couple and family life.

Opening with the outbreak of the First World War, the exhibition seeks to illustrate four key periods in Chagall’s life and work:

* Russia in wartime

After three years in Paris, Chagall went back to Vitebsk to join his beloved Bella, whom he married in 1915. The war took him by surprise. Although he was far from the front, he reported the brutal reality of wartime: troop movements, wounded soldiers, and Jews driven out of their villages. In the same way, he depicted his childhood surroundings, which he felt to be doomed, and painted a series touching on his relationship with Bella.

* Between the wars

In 1922, Chagall turned his back definitively on Russia. After a period in Berlin, he returned to Paris where he had to make his name as a painter all over again. On the request of the publisher, Ambroise Vollard, he illustrated a number of books, including the Bible, a text with which he had been so familiar since his childhood that he later said: "I did not just see the Bible, I dreamed it." As well as landscapes, portraits and circus scenes, he painted hybrid creatures, half man-half beast, –perfect illustrations of the Chagallian bestiary –and many pictures of the couple as a metaphorical expression of his love of life.

* Exile in the United States

In 1937, the Nazi authorities seized Chagall’s works in public collections in Germany and three of his paintings were shown in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. Political events forced Chagall to leave France. With Bella and Ida he moved to New York, where he found several other Jewish artists and poets in exile. Although far from the theatre of war, Chagall was well aware of the acts of barbarity devastating Europe and his native land. War, persecution, refugees, burning villages haunted his paintings and a sombre tonality invaded his work. He used the theme of the Crucifixion as a universal symbol of human suffering. His oeuvre in this period was particularly fertile and still shows the need to return to his roots. He pays tribute to his wife Bella, who died in 1944.

* The post-war years and the return to France

Chagall moved back to France in 1949 and settled first at Orgeval and then Vence. Putting the past behind him, he worked on major cycles such as the series of Paris monuments, and explored other techniques (stained glass, sculpture, ceramics, mosaic, various engraving techniques). His use of colour changed perceptibly and his paintings from this period radiate with a blend of astonishing light and expressive tonalities.

This dialectic of war and peace in the broadest sense highlights the essential aspects of Chagall’s work. By exploring the decisive episodes in his life, it helps us understand the link between his vision of the human condition and his sincere, sensitive pictorial technique, which, thirty years after his death, is still strikingly innovative.

The exhibition was organised by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais.

From an excellent review: (images added)

The show has the advantage of showing his works that have explicit references to the war: black and white drawings (The Salute,



The Wounded Soldier, and



Departure for War, all from 1914) and paintings with darker tones, such as



War, painted in 1943, with its dirty whites, yellows, and reds, and an almost transparent figure lying on the ground, arms outspread. But the compositions constantly draw from Chagall’s personal life, including works of his wife Bella, and of the Russian culture of his childhood. His numerous references to Judaism are more related to his illustrations of biblical scenes



(Abraham Mourning Sarah, 1931) than to a perspective on denouncing the atrocities of the time: In Chagall’s work, contemporary suffering is essentially evoked through allegory with the recurring crucifixion theme.

More images from the exhibition:



The dance; 1950-1952; Oil on linen canvas, 238 x 176 cm; Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’Art moderne / Centre de création industrielle, dation en 1988, en dépôt au musée national Marc Chagall à Nice; © ADAGP, Paris 2013 / CHAGALL ® © RMN-Grand Palais / Gérard Blot



Lovers in green 1916-1917; oil glued to a canvas backing, 69,7 x 49,5 cm; Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’Art moderne / Centre de création industrielle, dation en 1988, en dépôt au Musée national Marc Chagall, Nice © ADAGP, Paris 2013 / CHAGALL ® © RMN / Gérard Blot



The red horse; 1938-1944; oil on canvas, 114 x 103 cm; Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’Art moderne / Centre de création industrielle, dation en 1988, en dépôt au musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes; © ADAGP, Paris 2013 / CHAGALL ® © RMN-Grand Palais / Gérard Blot



“Au-dessus de Vitebsk”, 1915-1920 – © ADAGP, Paris 2013 / CHAGALL ® © The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence



Obsession," 1943 (detail)© ADAGP, Paris 2013 / CHAGALL ® © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN / Philippe Migeat



“Couple de Paysans, Départ pour la Guerre” (1914). © ADAGP, Paris 2013/CHAGALL ® © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN/Philippe Migeat



“Le Rêve” (1927). © ADAGP, Paris 2013/CHAGALL ® © Musée d’Art Moderne/Roger-Viollet



Songe d'une nuit d'été, 1939, Huile sur toile, Don de l'artiste en 1951 © ADAGP © Musée de Grenoble

Also see the following for more images and commentary on Chagall:

1. Chagall: Modern Master at Liverpool Tate

2. Chagall Retropective

3. Chagall: Love, War, and Exile

An exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris 12 October 2011 to 26 February 2012

Curator: Guido Messling

Although Cézanne (1839-1906) is usually associated with Provence, he cannot be confined to the south of France. He spent more than half of his time as a painter in Paris and its environs. He travelled between Aix en Provence and Paris over twenty times, although, of course, not for the same reasons when he was twenty as when he was sixty. When he was already an elderly man and still racked with doubts (“I am making slow progress,” he wrote at the end of his life) he painted in secluded spots on the banks of the Marne or near Fontainebleau, or made portraits of an art dealer or a critic and often his wife. He was no longer the young man eager to “conquer” Paris, wanting to be admitted to the fine art school and show his works in the Salon. In Paris, he came up against both tradition and modernity. He worked out “formulas” that he later used in Provence. He shuttled back and forth between Provence and the Ile de France although the rhythm of his journeys changed. After 1890, critics, art dealers, and collectors started to take an interest in his work. Cézanne longed for recognition which could only come from Paris. More than any other artist, he left his stamp on modern art: avant-garde artists from the postimpressionists to Kandinsky looked on him as a forerunner, “the father of us all” as Picasso said.

The exhibition of about 80 works was divided into five sections:

1- Following Zola to Paris

Encouraged and supported by Zola, a school friend from his days at the College Bourbon in Aix, who was already living in Paris, Cézanne defied his father and went to the capital, in 1861, to become an “artist.” He attended the Swiss Academy where he met and made friends with other painters such as Pissarro and Guillaumin. The Salon imposed the academic style at the time and Paris was a ferment of revolt and avant-garde thinking. During his formative years, Cézanne explored ancient and modern traditions: his sketchbooks record his attentive observation of the great masters in painting (Rembrandt, Poussin, Delacroix…) and antique, classical and baroque sculpture (copies of Michelangelo and Puget mainly). He also dabbled in Impressionism without really adhering to the movement. Although Paris was crucial to his development as a painter and he returned regularly to the capital until 1905, Cezanne seldom painted the city. And when he did, he did not choose its famous sites but the view from his window or over the rooftops. With one notable exception: the Rue des Saules. Cézanne set up his easel in a street near Montmartre, but it was deserted




La Rue des Saules à Montmartre, 1867-1869 Huile sur toile — 31,5 × 39,5 cm Courtesy of the artist & Musée du Luxembourg. © Collection particulière

2 - Paris, the City beyond the Walls, near Auvers

Once in Paris, Cézanne was restless (he lived at nearly twenty different addresses) and often left the city. Wanting to paint from nature, he worked on landscapes, learning from artists like Pissarro and Guillaumin, who were involved in the Impressionist movement. They wanted to further the landscape tradition developed by Courbet, Corot and the Barbizon artists, who sought to use the countryside around Paris to express a certain idea of Frenchness. Very quickly Cézanne emerged as a leader, making “Impressionism a solid, lasting thing like museum art.” The painting of Maincy Bridge is emblematic of his work in the 1880s.



The Bridge at Maincy 1879 Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France

3 – The Temptation of Paris

Like Courbet and Renoir, Cézanne was preoccupied by the nude. He painted the



Temptation of St Anthony

between 1870 and 1877, probably after reading Flaubert. In those same years he produced many erotic paintings:



Modern Olympia,



Orgy,



Struggle of Love…

Later, the art dealer Vollard revealed that Cézanne was working on a large painting of “bathers” at the time he painted his portrait in 1899: he was no longer exploring the erotic aspects of the body but constructed a new way to express the nude and invented his own pictorial language.

4 – Pose like an Apple. Still Lifes and Portraits

For Cézanne, a still life was a motif like any other. It was the equivalent of a human body or mountain, and lent itself particularly well to an investigation of space, the geometry of volumes, and the relationship between colour and form: “When the colours are really rich, the forms are fulsome,” he used to say. Nearly two hundred of his thousand known paintings are still lifes. Sometimes associated with erotic themes or portraits, they tell us as much about Paris as a landscape would. Among his portraits, often with wallpaper in the background, we find emblematic friends from his time in Paris: Victor Chocquet, his first collector, or Ambroise Vollard, “the” art dealer who organised his first exhibitions.

5 – The Paths of Silence

After 1888, Cézanne stayed several times in the Paris region following an extended period in Provence (1882-1888). Although he spent a summer painting at Montgeroult, near Auvers, and visited Monet at Giverny in 1894, his favourite spots in the 1890s were the banks of the Marne in the vicinity of Maisons-Alfort and Créteil, and around Marlotte and Fontainebleau. He was enchanted by the river, enjoying its peaceful coolness and his canvases captured the “silence” of nature. In Paris, his palette settled into calm blues and greens while in Provence he worked on a symphony of golden colours around Mont Sainte-Victoire. Once he had won his place in the capital and mastered his craft, he withdrew permanently to his property in Provence to which he was increasingly attached.


An exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg organised by the Rmn-Grand Palais, in collaboration with the Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris. With special support from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.


More images from the exhibition:













Catalogue



IPad app

From November 12, 2008 - February 15, 2009 the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University presented “Dürer to Picasso,” the first in a yearlong series of exhibitions spotlighting the museum's collection. With 100 works from the Renaissance to WWII, “Dürer to Picasso” represented the top tier of art acquired through gift, purchase, and bequest since the museum's reopening in 1999, after a closure forced by the 1989 Lomia Prieta earthquake.

Major paintings and sculptures formed the central axis of the installation.

François-André Vincent's late-18th-century painting of



Zeuxis choosing his models,

greeted visitors at the exhibition entrance.

This showed an artist at work in a scene drawn from classical text, and the composition centers on the artist, his canvas, and his models.

“Summer Landscape,” (below)a bucolic view of the nation's still sparsely populated agrarian land, is by Asher B. Durand, an eminent 19th-century landscape painter of the United States.

Pablo Picasso's painting of a young woman,



“Courtesan with Hat,” 1901,

presents its subject with bold patterns and colors.

Hans Arp's smooth, elegant white marble sculpture “Silent,” 1942, with its biomorphic forms, carries abstraction further still.

Works on paper completed the exhibition. Sixteen engravings by Albrecht Dürer, the greatest painter and printmaker of the Northern Renaissance, revealed his humanist insights expressed through rare technical virtuosity. Other groupings of prints included etchings after Pieter Breughel the Elder of mountainous landscapes, lithographs of John James Audubon's animated quadrupeds, and symbolist visions by Odilon Redon.

Edvard Munch's color woodcut,



“Evening (Melancholy)” of 1902

is haunting in its depiction of solitude, which for the artist often verged on despair. Munch's use of simplified forms and wood grains make his work fresh and expressive. The new directions of 20th-century art can be seen in a cubist still life by Georges Braque, the fragmenting world of Wassily Kandinsky, and the surrealism of Kurt Seligman.

From Metroactive: (Images added)

Even as styles vary from the 15th-century realism of Dürer to the 20th-century abstractions of Arp and Miró, a thread of technical mastery links many of the pieces. It took the hands of a master like Rembrandt to create the exquisitely dense, smoky drypoint etching



The Star of the Kings: A Night Piece;

just as impressive is the woodcut Melancholy (Evening) , an equally black-ink-suffused landscape with a single musing figure in the foreground by Munch. Of course, talent alone isn't enough, Félix Bracquemond's 1884 etching King David With an Angel of Inspiration is technically adept but borders on kitsch.

Dürer is represented by a large and scary engraving of



The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

(whose hoofbeats seem to be thundering loudly these days)

and a suite of miniature prints depicting the passion of the Christ. The magnifying glasses provided reveal an astonishing level of detail.



The Harrowing of Hell

is crowded with demon heads, while a swollen-bellied dragon drapes himself across a ruined arch, all in a space no bigger than 3-by-5 inches. It's no wonder that the artist liked to mark his bravura pieces with a confident monogram—a D tucked under a stately, architectural A.

Just as anxiety inducing is an etching from Goya's Los Proverbios series. In



One Way to Fly; Where There's a Will, There's a Way,

men with flexible wings attached to their arms glide through a night sky—are they products of a fevered imagination or portents of things to come?

Odilon Redon's 19th-century lithograph illustrations for Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony are full of curious phantoms: an eye on a fleshy stalk, a chimera with a hood like a cobra about to strike, a one-legged monstrosity known as a skiapod. Both artists display an uneasy familiarity with the realm of nightmares.



Even an 1801 portrait from nature by English engraver William Ward traffics in menace. A huge Dragon Arum blossom with a single black spadex, or spike, jutting from a deep-crimson leafy sheath against a lightning-filled sky looks more like a scene from the Book of Revelations than a botanical illustration. By comparison, the teeth-bearing squirrels in John T. Bowen's large lithographs taken from Audubon paintings seem almost domesticated.

Forgoing hair-by-hair detail for vividness of impression, Canadian artist Sybil Andrews' color linocut



Skaters

features two dashing athletes pushing so hard that they look ready to burst out of the frame; their cocked arms and bent knees are all pointy angles. Two four-block linocuts by English artist Claude Flight use the technique's sharp edges and bright color to almost Cubist effect.

The calmest piece was



Summer Landscape (1854) by Asher B. Durand,

one of the leading proponents of the Hudson River School. The large landscape depicts a broad swath of still water in front of a distant mountain. Ruminating cows, always a sign of rustic contentment in paintings, amble along the banks; some canoers glide by in the middle ground. Mankind is perfectly integrated into this tranquil vision of nature.

Daumier (1808-1879): Visions of Paris at the Royal Academy, London, to Jan 26; will be the first major exhibition of the prolific artist and social commentator, Honoré Daumier, to be held in Britain for over fifty years. Admired by the avantgarde circles of 19th century France and described by Baudelaire as one of the most important men ‘in the whole of modern art,’ the exhibition will explore Daumier’s legacy through 130 works, many of which have never been seen in the UK before, with a concentration on paintings, drawings, watercolours and sculptures.

Daumier lived and worked through widespread political and social change in France during his lifetime, which encompassed the upheavals of the revolutions to establish a republic, in the face of continued support for the monarchy.


Daumier (1808-1879): Visions of Paris will be displayed chronologically, spanning the breadth and variety of his often experimental artistic output and exploring themes of judgement, spectatorship and reverie. One of Daumier’s favourite subjects became the silent contemplation of art, as seen in



The Print Collector, 1857-63 (The Art Institute of Chicago)

and in the terrified performer alone on the stage in What A Frightful Spectacle c.1865 (Private Collection).

Daumier’s extraordinary visual memory allowed him to recall and portray many facets of everyday life in both sympathetic and critical observations.


Daumier (1808-1879): Visions of Paris will exhibit works depicting his working class neighbours on the Quai d’Anjou on the Ile Saint-Louis, as well as topical issues such as fugitives of the cholera epidemics or the experience of travellers in



A Third Class Carriage, 1862-64 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

Daumier also drew parallels between the abuse of power by lawyers in



The Defence, c. 1865 (The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London)

and the silent vulnerability of those on the margin in



Clown Playing A Drum, 1865-7 (British Museum, London).

A staunch Republican, Daumier was particularly renowned for his daring and uncompromising caricatures of the manners and pretensions of his era, including the corruption of the government of Louis-Philippe, the King of France from 1830-1848. Drawn with an unforgettable energy and expressiveness, the majority of these works were published as lithographs in newspapers. At the end of Daumier’s life he created scenes and allegories of the link between nationalism and military action: the ideal female figures of France and Liberty, contrasted with the jester or Don Quixote, two characters Daumier closely identified with.

Daumier believed artists should ‘be of their times’, and his work drew praise from his contemporaries Delacroix and Corot, and those of the next generation, Degas, Cézanne and Van Gogh.

BIOGRAPHY

Honoré Daumier was born in 1808 to a working class parents in Marseilles. In 1815 the family joined his father, by now an aspiring writer, in Paris, where Daumier began work as a bailiff’s assistant and bookkeeper’s clerk. Daumier received little formal artistic training as a painter. In 1822 he briefly took lessons with father’s friend, the artist Alexander Lenoir and met other painters and sculptors at the Academy Suisse and Academy Boudin where he attended untutored life drawing classes during the 1820s. In 1825 he was apprenticed to Zepherin Belliard, a specialist in lithographic portraiture.

The start of Daumier’s career as a press caricaturist coincided with a freedom of press law in 1830, but by 1832 Daumier found himself imprisoned for his uncompromising lithographs of King Louis- Philippe and his government. Over the course of forty years, he contributed on a weekly basis to the satirical journals edited by Charles Philipon, La Caricature and Le Charivari. Daumier became famous for his humorous caricatures of subjects political and - during times of strict censorship – social.

Daumier made a memorable group of small sculpted busts as models for caricatures in the mid- 1830s and began painting in the 1840s. In 1846 Daumier married the seamstress Marie-Alexandrine Dassy and they lived in the Quai d’Anjou, where they remained until c.1861. Neighbours included Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier and artists who were good friends, such as Camille Corot and Adolphe-Victor Geoffroy-Dechaume. He exhibited paintings in the Salons of 1849 and 1850/51, however, his work as a fine artist was shown very little in his lifetime and he was perpetually in debt.

In 1870 Daumier was nominated for the Légion d’honneur, which he declined to accept. Daumier died, nearly blind, at his house in Valmondois, in the Ile-de-France region on February 10, 1879. His total output of 4000 lithographs, 1000 drawings for woodcuts and a remarkable body of paintings, drawings and watercolours, has been continually reappraised since his death, most especially by artists.

ORGANISATION



Daumier (1808-1879): Visions of Paris has been organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The exhibition has been curated by Catherine Lampert, independent Curator and Art Historian with Ann Dumas, Curator, Royal Academy of Arts.

CATALOGUE



The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with contributions from Catherine Lampert, Michael Pantazzi, T.J. Clark, John Berger and others.

From a review in The Guardian (and see links to more images):

Daumier barely survived as the greatest cartoonist of his age – hired, fired, censored, atrociously underpaid; he never thought to sell his sculptures and painted almost as a private experiment. This gives a freedom to his pictures that cannot be found among many of his contemporaries.

Take Man on a Rope, in which the eponymous man dangles in thin air, neither up nor down, with no context to limit the freedom. The figure – high energy embodied in a form unqualified by anything so distracting as face or hair – is like Spider-Man contained in his outline. And the picture has been scraped, gouged, scratched and generally assaulted like some Anselm Kiefer canvas. Nobody seeing it in the Royal Academy could fail to be startled.



Man on a Rope, c.1858: ‘the eponymous man dangles in thin air, neither up nor down, with no context to limit the freedom’. Photograph: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Tompkins Collection - Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund

Most moving of all are the mother and child to whom Daumier returns over and again, each time with increasing empathy. She is a laundress with a terrible load, pressing on through life and labour. The child holds on to the woman, the woman struggles to hold up the immense burden of her laundry, while clearly talking to the child, day after day and into the long night. It would be impossible to overstate the mounting pathos of these works.



The Laundress, 1861-63. Photograph: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence.

Daumier is a master of light and dark. There are patches of pure light – a lit stage, a distant window, a glowing doorway to freedom – and obliterating darkness. Don Quixote has become fused with his own horse: a dark giant wandering through the blackest hell. A man lugging a sack on to a boat is Sisyphus on a gangplank in the fog. These figures pass into the proverbial, but they always retain their own personalities no matter how close to archetype.

More images from the exhibition:



Honoré Daumier, Lunch in the Country, c. 1867-1868, Oil on panel, 26 x 34 cm, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, Photo © National Museum of Wales



Honoré Daumier, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, c. 1855, Oil on oak, 40.3 x 64.1 cm, The National Gallery, London. Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917

Another excellent review with links to images.

Cima da Conegliano Master of the Venetian Renaissance

An exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris 5 April 2012 / 15 July 2012



Curator
Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa, Professor of the history of modern art and musicology, University of Bergamo

Giovanni Battista Cima (1459-1517), born in a small town in Venetia, is one of the leading representatives of Venetian painting in the late 15th and early 16th century. In contact with the greatest artists in Venice, he developed a refined style and perfect technique which distinguish him from all others. His deftly balanced compositions glow with colour and are set in poetic landscapes inspired by his native land.

Through more than thirty works, the exhibition traced the chronology of Cima da Conegliano’s career and the evolution in his art. It brought out the fundamental role he played in Venetian and European painting in the late fifteenth century.

Rise to Fame

Nothing in his background predestined Giovanni Battista Cima to fame in Venice. He was not born there, but grew up in the hinterland, in a small town called Conegliano at the foot of the Dolomites. His father was a textile manufacturer so the family was comfortably off and the boy received an excellent education. But an extraordinary destiny awaited Cima in Venice: he quickly made his name as an excellent master, despite fierce competition. Along with Giovanni Bellini (1425-1516) and Vittore Carpaccio (1460-1526), Cima is regarded as one of the great Venetian painters. In the late 15th century, when the city was one of the most brilliant centres of the Italian Renaissance, his painting was appreciated there and sought after by a discerning clientele.

Great Mastery

Cima owes his success to the perfection of his art, based on meticulous drawing and his mastery of oil painting (a relatively new technique at the time), as well as the intensity of his palette. His virtuosity gave him exceptional precision in the representation of details: fine work on a piece of jewellery, the shimmering texture of drapery. But it was above all his striking way of depicting faces, expressions and an often melancholic gaze, which make his paintings so deeply human.

A Painter in Phase with His Time

Cima’s success was also due to his receptiveness to new ideas and his extraordinary powers of assimilation. He started his career in the footsteps of Antonello da Messina (1430-1479) and Giovanni Bellini. Later he proposed new models to which artists such as Bellini or Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) were receptive. The masters of the following generation, such as Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556) or Titian (1490-1576), found ideas in them for their own compositions.

At the height of his career, Cima influenced Giorgione’s tonal painting and became the master of the generation of Lorenzo Lotto, Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo. There was therefore a constant dialogue between several generations of artists around Cima.

New Impetus

In his painting, Cima explored new compositional effects combining nature and architecture. He introduced asymmetry and unexpected vistas and made surprising openings. His paintings reveal his love of wide-open spaces, bathed in light and surrounded by hills and mountains reminiscent of his native countryside. Never before had anyone painted Venetia so poetically.

The exhibition Cima da Coneglianio: Master of the Venetian Renaissance brings together exceptional works, including large altarpieces shown outside Italy for the first time. It gives the public an opportunity to see the work of an artist in phase with his time and to take a new look at the prestigious history of Venice.

Few eras in French history witnessed the same degree of radical social and political changes as those of the eighteenth century. The efflorescence of the ancien régime and its eventual downfall provide the backdrop to a period of remarkable artistic vitality and variety that subtly chronicled the many changes taking place in France. It is this dynamic period in French art history that was the subject of Rococo and Revolution: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings.

On view from October 2, 2009 through January 10, 2010 at The Morgan Library & Museum, the show featured more than eighty exceptional drawings almost exclusively from the Morgan’s renowned holdings from this era. Artists represented in the exhibition include Antoine Watteau, Jacques-Louis David, François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Claude Gillot, Nicolas Lancret, Hubert Robert, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Anne-Louis Girodet, and Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, among others.

The royal court and wealthy Parisian merchants defined the artistic sensibility of the century’s early decades. This exuberant style, called Rococo, eventually assimilated the burgeoning classicism of the Enlightenment. Later, with the triumph of “reason” and the stirrings of the Revolution, a more formally austere Neoclassicism developed.

The Rococo initially flourished during the waning years of the reign of Louis XIV (r. 1661–1715), and serves as a starting point for the exhibition. Works by artists active at the French Academy in Rome during its greatest years, coinciding with the rule of Louis XV (r. 1715–1774), documented drawing’s robust role in artistic practice during mid-century. The exhibition concluded with works executed during the last decades of the ancien régime, under Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792), and the onset of the Revolution, as artists embraced the rigorous Neoclassical style. Contextually, the exhibition also touched on concurrent developments in Parisian patronage, fashion, theater, and literature.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

During the opening years of the eighteenth century, academic traditions yielded increasingly to a preference for spontaneity, charm, and subjects that celebrated the pleasures of love and everyday life. The first and greatest master of this new sensibility, later dubbed the Rococo, was Antoine Watteau (1684–1721).




Among the several Watteau drawings in the exhibition was a drawing of a seated young woman executed in trois crayons—a technique revived by the artist that would remain popular throughout the eighteenth century in which red, black, and white chalks are used to produce images of striking vivacity and immediacy.

The exhibition also included a lively pair of chalk figure studies by Nicolas Lancret (1690–1743), Watteau’s closest contemporary.

François Boucher (1703–1770), who succeeded Watteau as the most fashionable Rococo painter, was a prolific draftsman, once boasting that he had produced some 10,000 drawings. He favored a drawing style that emphasized sinuous contours, exploiting Watteau’s technique of using multiple chalks. Boucher’s technique and mastery of a variety of media are seen to brilliant advantage in



Adoration of the Shepherds, a richly worked, tender Nativity scene;



Four Heads of Cherubim, a quintessential study of cherubic heads for a painting;



Thatched Mill Cottage and Shed with Two Trees at the Edge of a Stream, a picturesque landscape;

and the sumptuously decorative Design for Frontispiece.

Drawings by Boucher’s contemporary and rival—and a key figure at the French Academy in Rome— Charles Joseph Natoire (1700–1777), included a dynamic figure study of a Camel Driver, and a pair of sheets depicting the picturesque views from the upper and lower portions of the cascade at the Villa Aldobrandinini, Frascati.

Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), Boucher’s and Natoire’s protégé, was the last great artist of the ancien régime. His works are notable for their engaging subject matter and seemingly effortless execution. Two attractive red chalk drawings of a young woman seated in a garden are from a series of sketches he produced of fashionably dressed young women.

Two lush landscape drawings by Fragonard—one in gouache,



Interior of a Park: The Gardens of the Villa d’Este



and the other in brown ink washes, Landscape, with Flock and Trees—

document his expert command of the brush and knowledge of the old masters.

The exhibition also included several exceptional landscape studies by Fragonard’s close friend and sketching companion, Hubert Robert (1733–1808). Among these works is an extraordinary sketchbook from Robert’s sojourn in Rome, containing several drawings depicting both actual monuments and architectural fantasies.

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724–1780) worked almost exclusively as a draftsman and printmaker and was the great “society reporter” of pre-Revolutionary Paris. The show included his



small, vivid sketch of a demonstration in the Hôtel des Monnaies by the chemist Balthasar Georges Sage.

Also by Saint-Aubin is a



lively drawing of a ballet dancer dressed as Momus, the god of banter, holding a scroll advertising costume designs for a ball at the royal residence of St. Cloud.

The Enlightenment informed literature and the fine arts throughout the century. One of the most influential thinkers was Denis Diderot (1713–1784), author of the Encyclopédie. He was an advocate of rationalism and embraced the resurgence of classical history themes. In his reviews of the annual exhibitions known as the Salon, he reserved highest praise for the work of Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725– 1805), whose life-size portrait of the philosopher is included in the show.

Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), whose deft diplomacy enabled him to survive the Revolution and its aftermath, was France’s preeminent Neoclassical artist. David broke away from the Romanticism of his early works to define the new austere Classicism, both formally and iconographically. The exhibition featured an album by David containing eighty-three sketches, ranging from studies of antique sculpture to Italian landscapes, which was assembled in his studio by his sons. David’s sketches were an important source of inspiration for his paintings and document his close study of art and nature. A drawing of a quintessential Revolutionary subject, the Roman Brutus sentencing his sons to death:



"Brutus Returning Home after Having Sentenced His Sons for Plotting a Tarquinian Restoration and Conspiring against Roman Freedom; the Lictors Bring their Bodies to be Buried.

exemplifies the artist’s paradigmatic Neoclassical style.

David’s influence on eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century draftsmanship was profound. Among his many pupils and followers was Anne-Louis Girodet (1767–1824). Girodet’s luminous and dramatic scene



Phaedra Confesses Her Love for Hippolytus to Oenone

was produced as an illustration to a volume of Racine’s classical themed plays, which were revived and embraced by the Neoclassicists.

The turbulent years of the Revolution (1789–1799), the heroic years of the First Empire (1804–1815), and the corresponding shift in patronage are reflected in the work of Pierre-Paul Prud’hon (1758– 1823). Prud’hon’s close association with Napoleon and Josephine is evident from his numerous portraits of members of the imperial household throughout his career.



Prud’hon’s sensitive portrait of a pensive Josephine and a depiction of the lush garden at her home at Malmaison are among the works produced for the empress during this period.

Rococo and Revolution: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings was organized by Cara Dufour Denison, Curator Emerita, Department of Drawings and Prints at The Morgan Library & Museum.

MORE IMAGES AND CREDITS



Etienne Louis Boullée (1728–1799)
Interior of a Library
Pen and black and some brown ink, gray wash, over traces of black chalk;
compass point at center; ruled borders in pen and black ink

(above)

Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (1767–1824)
Phaedra Confesses Her Love for Hippolytus
to Oenone
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened
with white, over graphite

(above)

Gabriel Jacques de Saint-Aubin (1724–1780)
The Lesson of the Chemist Sage at the Hôtel des
Monnaies, 1779
Black chalk with some stumping and graphite,
point of brush and brown ink, gray wash, some
bodycolor

(above)

Pierre-Paul Prud’hon (1758–1823)
Study for a Portrait of Empress Joséphine, 1805
Black chalk, stumped in some areas, heightened with white, on
blue paper
9 3/4 x 11 7/8 inches (248 x 302 mm)



Hubert Robert (1733–1808)
Draftsman in an Italian Church, 1763
Red chalk
12 15/16 x 17 5/8 inches (329 x 448 mm)



Baptiste Oudry (1686–1755)
Rally at the Carrefour du Puits du Roi, Compiègne Forest, or The Booting of
the King for the Hunt, ca1733
Pen and point of brush and black ink and gray wash, over black chalk,
heightened with white, on blue paper faded to light brown
12 9/16 x 20 9/16 inches (213 x 522 mm)



Nicolas Hüet (1770–1828)
Study of the Giraffe Given to Charles X by the
Viceroy of Egypt, 1827
Watercolor and some gouache, over traces of black chalk
10 1/16 x 7 5/8 inches (254 x 194 mm)



Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761–1845)
Portraits of the Artist’s Family and Servants
Black and white chalk, on light brown wove paper
17 13/16 x 11 11/16 inches (450 x 297 mm)

(above)

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806)
Interior of a Park: The Gardens of Villa d’Este
Gouache on vellum
7 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches (197 x 242 mm)



Louis Nicolas de Lespinasse (1734–1808)
View of the Banks of the Seine, Paris
Pen and brown ink and watercolor, heightened with white, over preliminary drawing in graphite
12 7/8 x 24 13/16 inches (326 x 630 mm)




Jacques Rigaud (1681–1754)
Les Dômes, 1730
Black chalk, pen and gray ink, gray wash
8 5/8 x 18 5/8 inches (220 x 473 mm)

(above)

François Boucher (1703–1770)
Adoration of the Sheperds, ca 1761–62
Pen and brown ink, brown and red wash, brown and black chalk,
heightened with white chalk, worked wet, over traces of black
chalk, on pink-prepared paper
11 3/8 x 14 5/8 inches (289 x 371 mm)

(above)

Gabriel Jacques de Saint-Aubin (1724–1780) Momus, 1752 Red and black chalk, with touches of white chalk 13 7/8 x 9 1/2 inches (353 x 242 mm)



Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) Anacreon in His Old Age Crowned by Love,Pen and black ink, touches of brown ink, black wash, heightened with white tempera, over graphite, on brown paper, 314 x 407 mm, Bequest of Therese Kuhn Straus in memory of her husband, Herbert N. Straus; 1977.57

(above)

Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), Seated Young Woman, ca. 1716, Black, red, and white chalk, 255 x 172 mm, Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1911; I, 278a.



Jacques-André Portail, (1695-1759), Lady Sketching at a Table, Black and red chalk, brush and gray wash, with touches of pink and blue watercolor, 255 x 212 mm, Purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1907; III, 98a.

Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art September 25, 2013 – January 12, 2014, explores the origins and permutations of the French artist’s focus on felines and the dark side of childhood.

Balthus’s lifelong fascination with adolescence resulted in his most iconic works: girls on the threshold of puberty, hovering between innocence and knowledge. In these pictures, Balthus mingles intuition into his young sitters’ psyches with an erotic undercurrent and forbidding austerity, making them some of the most powerful depictions of childhood and adolescence committed to canvas. Often included in these scenes are enigmatic cats, possible stand-ins for the artist himself.

The exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is organized chronologically and focuses on the early decades of the artist’s career, from the mid-1930s to the 1950s, and features 34 paintings, as well as 40 ink drawings for the book Mitsou that were created in 1919, when Balthus was 11 years old—thought to be lost, these drawings have never before been on public display.

Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski, 1908-2001) and his elder brother, Pierre (1905-2001), were born in Paris into an artistic and intellectual milieu. Their father, Erich Klossowski (1875–1946), was an art historian and painter whose family had escaped from Poland in 1830 during an unsuccessful revolt against Russia and who obtained German citizenship in East Prussia. The boys’ mother, Elisabeth Dorothea Klossowska (1886–1969), was also a painter and was known as Baladine.

As an eight-year-old, in 1916, Balthus had posed with his pet cat for a watercolor by his mother. Three years later he worked his adventures with a stray cat he called Mitsou into 40 pen-and-ink drawings. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a family friend—who not long after became Baladine’s lover—was so enchanted by these drawings that he arranged for them to be published in 1921 in the book Mitsou, for which he provided a preface in French. At Erich Klossowski’s request, the cover of the book gave the young artist’s name as “Baltusz,” as he then spelled his nickname—which was a shortened version of his given name, Balthasar. At Rilke’s suggestion, Balthus signed his work from then on with this childhood nickname, at some point changing the spelling to “Balthus,” as we know it today. Rilke played an important role in Balthus’s life, as a crucial creative influence and also as a surrogate father following Baladine and Erich’s separation.

Cats remained a force and presence in the artist’s work and life beyond his Mitsou drawings. In 1935, when Balthus was 27 years old, he painted his self-portrait The King of Cats. In it, he stands with his right hand on his hip, his left hand gripping his lapel, as a tiger cat rubs its head against his right knee. Later in his career, in the large decorative panel The Cat of La Méditerranée (1949), the artist includes a self-portrait of himself as a happy cat on whose plate a rainbow of fish lands.

Between 1936 and 1939, Balthus painted the celebrated series of 10 portraits of Thérèse Blanchard (1925-1950), his young neighbor in Paris. They are regarded as his most perceptive and sensitive portrayals of a young sitter and are among his finest works. At this point in Balthus’s career, the artist was chafing under the burden of portrait commissions, which he resented. So his neighbor’s youth must have been a welcome respite. But then, Balthus always felt a kinship with children; even as a child himself, he had been conscious of childhood’s importance. The portraits of Thérèse show her reading or daydreaming, posing alone, with her cat, or with her brother Hubert. In his first portrait of Thérèse of 1936, the artist used the same palette for the 11-year-old as for his portrait commissions: dark brown, ocher, and black, with a flash of red in the piping on her collar. But the mood is certainly very different from that of the adult portraits.

Thérèse became the inspiration of the leitmotif in his oeuvre until the years toward the end of his life, as the artist found other models and muses. In Balthus’s work, all of the girls who play with cats peer into mirrors, read, daydream, or appear completely self-absorbed. Their ostensibly unself-conscious postures sometimes suggest sensuality and languor, sometimes ungainliness—a contradiction that is perfectly in keeping with the phenomenon of puberty. Balthus rendered his young models with as much dignity and importance as someone their own age would have perceived them. The exhibition traces Balthus’s progression and the evolution of his chosen subject matter, ending with The Moth in 1959, the artist’s only night scene.

Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations is organized by Sabine Rewald, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Curator for Modern Art in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The last exhibition on Balthus’s work in the U.S. was held in 1984 at the Metropolitan Museum.



The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.



Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) (French, 1908–2001)
The King of Cats_1935_Oil on canvas_30 11/16 x 16 5/16 in._Fondation Balthus, Switzerland_© Balthus



Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) (French, 1908–2001)_Thérèse_1938_Oil on cardboard mounted on wood_39 _ x 32 in._Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of Mr. and Mrs. Allan D._Emil, in honor of William S. Lieberman, 1987_© Balthus



Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) (French, 1908–2001)_Thérèse Dreaming_1938_Oil on canvas_59 x 51 in._The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998_© Balthus



Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) (French, 1908–2001)_Thérèse_1939_Oil on canvas_27 7/8 x 36 in._Private collection_© Balthus



Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) (French, 1908–2001)_The Salon I_1941-43_Oil on canvas_44 _ x 57 _ in._Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The John R. Van Derlip Fund and William Hood Dunwoody Fund_© Balthus



Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) (French, 1908–2001)_The Golden Days_1944-46_Oil on canvas_58 _ x 78 3.8 in._Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute,_Washington DC, Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1966_© Balthus



Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) (French, 1908–2001)_The Cat of La Méditerranée_1949_Oil on canvas_50 x 72 7/8 in._Private collection_© Balthus



Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) (French, 1908–2001)_The Game of Patience_1954_Oil on canvas_34 13/16 x 34 1/16 in._Collection Bettina Rheims_© Balthus



Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) (French, 1908–2001)_Girl at a Window_1955_Oil on canvas_77 1/8 x 51 3/8 in._Private collection_© Balthus


Interesting reviews:

1. http://shrimppeelsandhair.com/this-cat-has-cankles-balthus-the-met-and-more/

2. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/arts/design/the-mets-balthus-cats-and-girls-is-strangely-refreshing.html?_r=0

3. http://www.northjersey.com/arts_entertainment/art/225683651_Art_review___Balthus__Cats_and_Girls_-_Paintings_and_Provocations__at_the_Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art_with_females_and_felines.html?page=all: (image added)

One gallery is devoted entirely to paintings of Thérèse Blanchard. She was 11 at the outset of the series, a serious-looking girl with chiseled features. By the time she is 13 she looks bored or moody, or is in some off-balance position that suggests the awkwardness of adolescence. In "Thérèse," she is twisted around in a chair, legs crossed, like a woman in conversation at a cocktail party. This is the birth of Balthus' archetype, the child-woman.

The nymphet in "The Golden Days" looks like a character in a dream. She reclines on a chaise, her bodice slipping off one shoulder, her shapely legs exposed. Underscoring the mood of overheated passions is a man at the fireplace, stoking an already blazing fire.



The model for "Girl in Green and Red" was said to be Balthus' wife, who was in her 30s but looks about 15 years younger here. She assumes the pose of a Tarot-card magician, a cape draped over one shoulder, an array of objects in front of her on the table, the painting imbued with an enticing sense of mystery.

And always the cats, peering out of the bottom or the corners of pictures with knowing or sphinxlike faces. In "The Game of Patience," a girl leans intently over a game of solitaire while a cat beneath the table pokes at a ball with similar concentration. Balthus identified with felines, titling his long-legged self-portrait "The King of Cats."