Art History News

This autumn, 9 October – 12 January 2014, the National Gallery presents the UK’s first major exhibition devoted to the portrait in Vienna - Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900.

Portraiture is closely identified with the distinctive flourishing of modern art in the Austrian capital during its famed fin-de-siècle: artists worked to the demands of patrons, and in Vienna modern artists were compelled to focus on the image of the individual.

Iconic portraits from this time – by Gustav Klimt , Egon Schiele, Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka and Arnold Schönberg are displayed alongside works by important yet less widely known artists such as Broncia Koller and Isidor Kaufmann.

In contrast to their contemporaries working in Paris, Berlin and Munich, and in response to the demands of their local market, Viennese artists such as Klimt remained focused on the image of the individual. Portraits therefore dominate their production, enabling this exhibition to reconstruct the shifting identities of artists, patrons, families, friends, intellectual allies and society celebrities of this time and place.

Paintings from major collections on both sides of the Atlantic, including those that hardly ever leave the walls of the Belvedere in Vienna and MoMA in New York are shown next to rarely seen, yet remarkable images from smaller public and private collections. Most works are on canvas, though visitors will also see drawings and the haunting death masks of Gustav Klimt (1918); Ludwig van Beethoven (1827), Egon Schiele (1918) and Gustav Mahler (1911), all on loan from the Wien Museum Karlsplatz. A family photograph album belonging to Edmund de Waal, acclaimed author of 'The Hare with Amber Eyes' (2010) will also be exhibited. De Waal’s family were once a very wealthy European Jewish banking dynasty centered in Vienna; this photograph memoir has been described as an ‘enchanting history lesson’.

Highlight paintings include:

'The Family (Self Portrait)' by Schiele (1918, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna)

'Nude Self Portrait by Gerstl' (1908, Leopold Museum, Vienna)

'Portrait of a Lady in Black' by Gustav Klimt (about 1894, Private collection)

Also on show is

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Hermine Gallia (1904, The National Gallery, London)

the haunting image of a Jewish patron of art and design whose family would be driven from Vienna by anti-Semitism in the 1930s. It is the only painting by this seminal Viennese artist in the National Gallery’s collection.

The exhibition also features a room devoted to the portrait as a declaration of love and commemoration of the dead while a final display looks at unfinished or abandoned works that failed to meet the expectations of artists or patrons.

'Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900' explores an extraordinary period of the multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-faith city of Vienna as imperial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867–1918). The exhibition looks back at middle-class Vienna in the early 19th century, the so-called Biedermeier period, as represented by artists like Frederich von Amerling and Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, whose portraits were ‘rediscovered’ by the city’s modern artists in 1900. It then moves to the 1867 – 1918 period to consider images of children and families, of artists, and of men and women in their professional and marital roles.

The period began with liberal and democratic reform, urban and economic renewal, and religious and ethnic tolerance, but ended with the rise of conservative, nationalist and anti-Semitic mass movements. Such dramatic changes had a profound impact on the composition and confidence of Vienna’s middle classes, many of them immigrants with Jewish roots or connections. Portraits were the means by which this sector of society - the ‘New Viennese’ - declared its status and sense of belonging; portraits also increasingly served to express their anxiety and alienation.

'Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900' is curated by Dr. Gemma Blackshaw, Associate Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture at Plymouth University and guest curator at the National Gallery. The project was conceived by Christopher Riopelle, Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery.

'Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900' is organised by the National Gallery, London.

From a fascinating review:

Egon Schiele’s Erich Lederer, 1912, the pose as elegantly Dyckian as any Stuart fop

This is an exhibition that from beginning to end loses its way. The year 1900 is its proposed focus, yet it roams far back to the age of Schubert and bogs down in an examination of the middle classes of his day, with the clutter of Biedermeier furniture, the clank and clunk of the German fortepiano and the whiff of tobacco in a Meerschaum pipe, and then offers, in only 73 exhibits, a threadbare patchwork history of Viennese portraiture from 1827 to 1918. Even with so little to show, the exhibition is diminished rather than enhanced by diversions into the Viennese fascination with death — so many of its citizens had taken to the Danube, the razor, the revolver and the rope that the city was known as “the suicide zone of Europe” (and what has that to do with portraiture?) — into women artists of the day (have we not had enough of gender politics in art?), and into “Imaging the Jew” — this last illustrated by one of the most beautiful portraits in the exhibition,

Isidor Kaufmann’s Young Rabbi of 1910.

The exhibition is far from being “a portrait of Vienna itself”, as Nicholas Penny puts it in his Director’s Foreword; it could hardly be that without some focus on the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte (craft workshops) — though some trifle by Kolomon Moser appears on the shelf behind Maria in Auchentaller’s portrait of 1912.

The exhibition comes to life with Klimt, aged 38 in 1900. We see an earlier Klimt, his Lady in Black of c.1894,(above) a thing of startling light, clarity, tone and silhouette, every detail of textile, stitching and jewellery, of ear, hair, eye, lips, double chin and hand caught to perfection in and against the light, every aspect of its brilliance quite astonishing. Ten years on we encounter Hermine Gallia of 1904, (above) a portly Jewess dissolving in a Whistlerian drift of faintly coloured tone, anchored in pattern but all other details suggested, not defined. In it we can nevertheless see roots of the highly coloured, ornately detailed tricks and mannerisms that were, within a decade, to make Klimt’s work so utterly seductive —

his posthumous (and unfinished, for he too died) portrait of the dancer Ria Munk of 1917-18, makes the point.

.

From another excellent review:

Schiele Egon Schiele's Portrait of Albert Paris von Gütersloh, 1918 Photograph: Schiele/Minneapolis Institute of Arts

The stars of the show are undoubtedly Schiele and Klimt. Schiele's portraits, especially those of himself, are a bit frightening and grotesque, and deliberately, provocatively so. I am immune to Schiele. Klimt, who began as an extremely proficient and conventional portraitist, did at least develop in interesting ways, and wasn't just bludgeoning us with his ego. There was a sense of inquiry in his work, even at its most decorative, an interest in form and surface that at its best becomes almost oceanic.

Gustav Klimt's portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl, 1917-18. Photograph: National Gallery

Perhaps the real ending to the show comes not among the death masks or the portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph, lain out for the undertaker, but in Klimt's 1917-18 portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl, which hangs alone on a dark wall. Klimt died before finishing the painting. It seems complete without his usual decorative excess. I am held by the painting's symmetry, the way that Zuckerkandl looks directly at us. Apart from her head and bust, the rest is vagueness. Later, she was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. Here, she still has something of a life to live, which makes this painting's incompleteness painful and expressive in ways the artist could never have intended or envisaged.

And from still another review (images added):

For example, if like me you’d always thought of Schiele’s or Kokoschka’s twisted and tormented portraits as visual manifestations of Freud’s writings about neurosis and hysteria, just take a look at the work of one of their predecessors, the surpassingly strange Anton Romako, who died in 1889. His pendant portraits of the newspaper man

Christoph Reisser and

his wife Isabella

are so unsettling that on first seeing them I found I’d inadvertently taken a step backwards. Husband and wife are seen from head on, as though caught in the beam of a headlamp. Dressed to the nines, Isabella smiles as she knows she must. But what a smile:self-conscious and tearful, she bares her white teeth as if she might bite us. Christoph, by contrast is a big powerful man who crumples that day’s newspaper in one hand. Assured, calm and self -confident, he could be a psychiatrist, she his patient.

Compare this to Kokoschka’s double portrait of the young art historian Hans Tietze and his wife Erica Tietze-Conrat of 1909, where the husband lowers his eyes and bites his lower lip hard enough to draw a drop of blood. If he is eaten up with anxiety his wife stares vacantly into space with the unfocused eyes of a person in shock.

And that portrait is mild stuff compared to Kokoschka’s dying Count Verona, where on the wall behind the tubercular sitter is a palm print made with the blood he has just coughed up and wiped from his mouth and chin.

Publication

'Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900' is published by National Gallery Company to accompany the exhibition. The foreword to the accompanying book, edited by Dr. Blackshaw, is written by Edmund de Waal.

For the first time in Italy, an exhibition dedicated to Francisco de Zurbarán, one of the main charachters of the XVI Century in Spain - a contemporary of Velázquez, Murillo, Rembrandt and Hals. A selection of his masterpieces will show his great art, with traditional images linked to modern inventions.

September, 14th, 2013 – January, 6th, 2014
Ferrara - Palazzo dei Diamanti - Corso Ercole I d'Este, 21

This Spanish painter was a contemporary of Velázquez and Murillo, as well as famous artists from the Netherlands, as Rembrandt and Hals. During his life, Zurbarán was well-known for his very own way of interpreting religion, and a personal poetic naturalism. Soon afterwards, his fortune eclipsed, to rise only during the Nineteenth Century. From the first decades of the Nineteenth Century, many artists got their inspiration from his masterpieces. His contribution to Baroque art history is of great importance.

A great opportunity to get to know this artist, the exhibition will host many works of art from both public museums and private collections, from all over Europe.

The gallery will be divided into themed sections, to underline the strength of this painter, who was able to re-interpret in a very modern way many traditional themes as religious figures, still life, everyday scenes.

Catalogue:

Excelent review, in Italian

Images from the exhibition:

Agnus Dei, c. 1635-40,San Diego Museum of Art

Fra' Jerónimo Pérez, c. 1632, Madrid, Museo de la Real Accademia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando

San Francesco, c. 1634, Milwaukee Art Museum

La casa di Nazaret, c. 1644-45, Madrid, Fondo Cultural Villar Mir

Cristo crocifisso con un pittore, anni Cinquanta del Seicento, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

Santa Casilda, c. 1635, Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Vergine Bambina addormentata, c. 1655-60, Jerez de la Frontera, Capitolo della Cattedrale

Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin
Fri 13 September 2013 - Sun 12 January 2014

Pablo Picasso–Women, Bulls, Old Masters from Gestalten on Vimeo.

Picasso created the most important oeuvre in 20th-century art not only in his capacity as a painter and sculptor, but also and above all as a draughtsman and printmaker. The Kupferstichkabinett's collection of 180 works by this giant of modernism is one of the oldest Picasso collections held by a public museum. Featuring 120 prints and drawings selected from the Kupferstichkabinett's own holdings and supplemented by an additional 40 loans - including paintings, coloured works on paper, posters, and ceramics - this retrospective survey cuts across seven decades in an extraordinary body of work. It ranges in style from Picasso's early ascetic figuration, through nuances of Cubism, Neoclassicism, and Surrealism, to the vibrant expressivity of the late period, all the while depicting his transformative plurality of style.

Pablo Picasso: Portrait of a Young Girl after Cranach the Younger II, Cannes, 4.7.1958
© Succession Picasso / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett / Jörg P. Anders

This portrait, made in July 1958, was Picasso’s first independent linocut. It was based on a postcard sent to him by his dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler of a painting by Lucas Cranach the Younger. Cranach’s painting of 1564 is delicately modelled and coloured, making it an unexpected choice for turning into a linocut. Adopting the conventional technique for colour linocuts, Picasso cut a different linoleum block for each different colour in the print. Registering each block correctly was complicated, hence the slight overlaps and gaps between the colours.

The exhibition is divided into ten thematic chapters that adhere to Picasso's motto that 'the drama of the man' was the most crucial motivation behind his art. Starting with the early work peopled by jesters and acrobats and interspersed with portraits of his contemporaries, the exhibition moves on to the core themes of his homages to women - lovers and partners - and the relationship between artist and model. Also highlighted are Picasso's lifelong fascination with bullfighting as an allegory of the battle of the sexes and his appropriation of the myth of the Minotaur of Crete, the half-bull, half-man, which he depicted as his alter ego. Other thematic sections illustrate the artist's politically motivated works (for example prints produced against the Franco regime, and the dove of peace) and his reinterpretation of works of literature and old masters like Rembrandt, Cranach, and Goya.

Catalogue:

Over the seven decades of Pablo Picasso’s artistic career, there were subjects to which he returned again and again. These include women, bulls, and the Old Masters as well as political and literary themes, circus people, mythical creatures, and interiors. In order to further explore his changing personal perspective on these subjects,this large format, 300-page book showcases Pablo Picasso’s graphic work in chapters structured according to these recurring themes. Women, Bullfights, Old Masters presents 200 graphic prints, lithographs, drawings, and collages from Pablo Picasso’s artistic beginnings in the early 1900s to his late works from the 1960s. Ranging from black and white to colorful, the artwork represents his various styles from classic to cubistic to surrealistic. The included texts not only examine the work in a historical context, but also reevaluate it from a contemporary point of view. This book juxtaposes a selection of Pablo Picasso’s graphic works with the classical paintings that inspired them. The visual dialog that results reveals interesting parallels and the clear influence of Old Masters such as Rembrandt, Cranach, and Goya on Picasso’s work. Women, Bullfights, Old Masters is rounded out by a biographic chronology, a detailed list of Pablo Picasso’s artworks, and a bibliography.

Pablo Picasso: Studie zu „Die Opfergabe“ (Étude pour„L’ offrande“), 1908 Aquarell und Bleistift, 47,5 x 62,5 cm – © Succession Picasso / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013; SMB, Kupferstichkabinett / Jörg P. Anders

Jordaens: the Pride of Antwerp

19 September 2013 – 19 January 2014

Petit Palais

Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678)
The Painter’s Family, 1621-1622
© Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

Backed up by superb scenography and numerous loans of remarkable works from leading French and International museums, this retrospective will restore Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678) to his rightful place as the pride of Antwerp. Still hard at work more than thirty years after Rubens’ death in 1640, Jordaens’ long career and the ability to turn out sizable, dazzling canvases with the assistance of a rigorously organised workshop, saw him provide a whole section of Europe with altar paintings and large, mythological compositions. At a time when Antwerp was in decline as the Continent’s economic capital, Jordaens kept its prestige alive with the sheer abundance and colourfulness of his artistic output.

Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678)
Sainte Famille, vers 1620
© Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire, UK/ The Bridgeman Art Library

On loan from collections not only in Belgium, but also in Russia, America, Sweden, Hungary, Jerusalem, Madrid and Vienna, the 120 works on show at the Petit Palais are an eloquent testimony to the extent and variety of his inspiration: from family portraits to large religious works, from the famous Flemish Proverbs series to banquet scenes, such as The King Drinks and tapestry cartoons. Here, we see a bourgeois man who hardly ever left his home city drawing on a host of sources ranging from Rubens to Caravaggio, the Venetian Renaissance masters and the heritage of antiquity, and combining them with the personal verve that won him international renown.

Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678)
Adoration des Bergers, 1616-1617
© Musée de Grenoble

The exhibition is punctuated by information points which provide visitors access to the stories behind the works and to the painter’s ‘trade secrets’.

It is also accompanied, by a detailed, splendidly illustrated catalogue.

From an excellent review: (image added)

The influence of Rubens is crucial to any interpretation of Jordaens, but to call him Rubens’ successor is too strong. An ink sketch for Rubens’ The Deposition of Christ, produced by Jordaens while working in the master’s studio, demonstrates the younger artist’s vigorous grasp of composition, characterised by the tightly packed curves and counter-curves of figures tumbling over each other to be noticed. The subject of the painting becomes little more than a device, a clockwork key for this carnival of forms and movement.

This can also be seen in Jordaens’ version of Rubens’ The Adoration of the Shepherds,(Adoration des Bergers,, above) where figures pile precariously above the virgin and child. Faces are contorted, arms flail – and the rigid head of a huge bovine protrudes into the centre of the painting. This bathetic addition is a particular idiosyncrasy of Jordaens’ and reaches its apex with the

Abduction of Europa,

in which the artist’s concentration on fleshy nudes is almost outdone by his ardent depiction of the attendant herd of cows.

The exhibition also presents Jordaens’ lavish tapestries, and his scene decoration, showing an artist who thrived under bourgeois requirements for ostentation. A painter who inspired Delacroix with his studies of heads, Cezanne with his nudes, and Van Gogh with his cows, Jordaens is a figure worthy of re-evaluation. This exhibition offers a sensitively tuned approach, its honesty of appraisal enlivened by a lightness of touch.

Excellent review in French with lots of images

Even more images!

Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678)
Le Sacrifice d’Isaac, vers 1625-1630
Huile sur toile
© Milan, Pinacothèque de Brera

Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678)
Servante avec une corbeille de fruits et un couple d’amoureux, vers 1628-1630
©CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection

Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678)
Le satyre et le paysan, vers 1645
© Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles/Photo J.Geleyns / www.roscan.be

Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678)
Les Filles de Cécrops découvrant l’enfant Erichthonios, 1617
Anvers, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten
© Lukas-Art in Flanders vzw/photo Hugo Maerten

Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678)
Adam et Eve (La Chute de l’Homme), vers 1640
© Photography Incorporated, Toledo,
Etats-Unis

Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678)
Mercure et Argus, vers 1620
© Lyon MBA-Photo Alain Basset

Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678)
Le Roi boit, vers 1638-1640
© Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Bel-gique,
Bruxelles/Photo J. Geleyns / www.roscan.be

Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678)
Les Quatre évangélistes, 1625-1630
© RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/René-Gabriel Ojéda

Jacob Jordaens,
‘Le Repos de Diane’, c. 1640 /
© Stéphane Piera / Petit Palais / Roger-Viollet

Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678),
Autoportrait de l’artiste avec sa femme Catharina van Noort, leur fille Elisabeth et une servante dans un jardin, 1621-1622,

Rogier van der Weyden (ca. 1400–1464). The Virgin and Child, ca. 1460, oil on panel transferred to canvas transferred to masonite, 19 1/2 × 12 1/2 in. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

Rogier van der Weyden (ca. 1400–1464) Portrait of Philippe de Croÿ, ca. 1460, oil on panel, 20 × 12 1/2 in. The Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. Photo © Lukas Art/Koninkijk Musuem voor Schone Kunsten.

An exhibition of 29 paintings by Renaissance luminaries such as Domenico Ghirlandaio, Hans Memling, Pietro Perugino, and Rogier van der Weyden, complemented by six rarely exhibited illuminated manuscripts, has been organized by The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens and is on view in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery from Sept. 28, 2013, through Jan. 13, 2014. Accompanied by a book of the same title, “Face to Face: Flanders, Florence, and Renaissance Painting” explores the relatively little-known fact that Flemish painting helped make possible the innovative, sophisticated, and beautiful works of the Italian Renaissance.

While many exhibitions have shed light on the beauty of 15th-century Flemish painting, and even more have celebrated the glory of Italian Renaissance painting, “Face to Face” (inspired by the 2008 exhibition “Firenze e gli Antichi Paesi Bassi 1430–1530,” presented at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence) is the first in the United States to examine the theme, showing the results of artistic contact between the creative centers in Flanders (specifically those located in present-day Belgium) and Florence.

“Face to Face” marks the first time viewers in the Los Angeles area will be able to see The Huntington’s acclaimed Virgin and Child (ca. 1460) by Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden (ca. 1400–1464) displayed alongside its companion diptych panel. Portrait of Philippe de Croÿ, on loan from the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, was originally the right half of the two-panel painting hinged to open and close like a book—a common format at the time that enabled the works to stand open on a table or altar.

With paintings from the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others, the exhibition juxtaposes Flemish and Italian works in thematic groupings, addressing the form of the diptych, the depiction of the face of Christ, the evolution of portraiture, the elements of landscape painting, and the virtuosic rendering of materials and objects.

“Face to Face” is co-curated by Catherine Hess, chief curator of European art at The Huntington, and Paula Nuttall, author of From Flanders to Florence: The Impact of Netherlandish Painting, 1400–1500 (2004, Yale University Press) and Face to Face: Flanders, Florence, and Renaissance Painting, published by The Huntington on the occasion of this exhibition. Her recent book includes a new essay on the topic and reproduces all of the works included in the display.

The Connection Between Flanders and Florence

Flanders was a wealthy region encompassing parts of present-day Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, and it was ruled by the dukes of Burgundy, whose magnificent court attracted leading artists. These factors led to the flourishing of art and culture in this region. It was in Flanders, argues Nuttall, that in the first decades of the 15th century “a new pictorial language based on the observation of reality” was developed, notably by Jan van Eyck (ca. 1380/90–1441) and Van der Weyden.

Florence also had a prosperous mercantile economy and was an important cultural and artistic center in the 15th century. And since the late Middle Ages, a colony of Florentine merchants and bankers had settled in Flanders to facilitate banking and trade.

Through these commercial connections, Flemish painting became known in Florence, where it was admired for its emotional intensity and awe-inspiring realism. By the end of the 15th century, influential art patrons, including the Medici family, displayed works by Flemish artists in Florentine churches and homes.

The lessons learned from Flemish painting enriched and transformed the art made in Florence. Even Michelangelo commented on the realism of Flemish painting by noting that the painting of Flanders “will cause [the devout] to shed many tears,” and “in Flanders they paint with a view to deceiving the eye.”

A particularly striking example of the impact of Flemish work on a Florentine artist is Hans Memling’s (ca. 1430–1494)

Man of Sorrows Blessing,

an intensely moving Flemish devotional painting that promoted private prayer and the contemplation of Christ’s humanity rather than his divinity. The painting was owned by a Florentine and must have arrived in Florence soon after it was painted, generating a host of copies. Outstanding among these is the copy by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494) that is so faithful to its model that it was long thought to be by Memling himself. Both works are on view in “Face to Face” for visitors to compare:

Left: Hans Memling, "Man of Sorrows Blessing," ca. 1480-90, oil on panel, 22 x 13 7/8 in. Musei di Strada Nuova, Palazzo Bianco, Genoa. Photo © Musei di Strada Nuova, Genoa. Right: Domenico Ghirlandaio, "The Man of Sorrows Blessing," ca. 1490, tempera on panel, 21 3/8 x 13 1/4 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection. Photo courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Glory of Renaissance Painting

Masterworks gathered together for “Face to Face” include

Memling’s Portrait of a Man with a Coin of the Emperor Nero from the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp

A celebrated cornerstone of Western art, Portrait of a Man with a Coin of the Emperor Nero displays elements typical of Memling’s portraits that were popular with Italians in Flanders, including the fanciful landscape in the background and an especially refined execution. The painting may depict an Italian patron, an idea supported by the Roman coin in his hand.

and his Saint Veronica from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.,

Saint Veronica is a sensitive rendering of the saint kneeling within an expansive landscape and holding a veil imprinted with the image of Christ’s face. This Flemish panel originally formed half of a diptych—with Memling’s Saint John the Baptist, now in Munich—that was owned by Bernardo Bembo, the Venetian ambassador to Burgundy and subsequently the Venetian ambassador to Florence.

as well as Gerard David’s (ca. 1455-1523) Virgin with the Milk Soup from the Palazzo Bianco in Genoa,

An image of intimate domesticity, Virgin with the Milk Soup is a masterful rendering of objects of daily life—including the child’s transparent linen shirt, a basket and prayer book under the window, and the elements of a meal on the table in the foreground—a characteristic of Flemish painting prized by Florentine painters and patrons.

Pietro Perugino’s (ca. 1446/1450–1523) Portrait of Francesco delle Opere from the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence,

and Filippino Lippi’s (ca. 1457–1504) Portrait of a Musician from the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.

Portrait of a Musician is a remarkable Italian portrait that shows a young man, a bow tucked in his elbow, tuning a lira da braccio (a Renaissance stringed instrument), with other instruments and books on the shelf behind him. The domestic setting, the window with a vista, and virtuosic details in this Italian picture were undoubtedly inspired by Flemish models.

Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494). Left: "Portrait of a Man," ca. 1490, tempera on panel, 20 3/8 x 15 5/8 in. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Right: "Portrait of a Woman," ca. 1490, tempera on panel, 20 3/8 x 15 5/8 in. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

From a wonderful review:

Hans Memling (ca. 1430-1494), "Christ Blessing," 1481
oil on panel, 13 1/8 × 9 7/8 in.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of William A. Coolidge.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Upon approaching, "Christ Blessing," I was struck by its immense emotional subtlety. The face of Christ has a naturalistic softness that transmits a sense of knowing sadness: It moved and impressed me. But then I lowered my eyes and took in a detail that made the work come even more completely alive: Christ's hand rests on the edge of the frame in a virtuoso display of illusionistic oil painting.

Detail: Hans Memling (ca. 1430-1494), "Christ Blessing," 1481

The image of the hand really got to me: It was an epiphany that alerted me not only to the genius of Memling but also to the "moment" that this show represents. A few short decades before Leonardo completed the, "Mona Lisa," it is clear that his artistic predecessors in the north were doing the hard work that cleared the way for the astonishing presence of his art. The power of that subtle hand -- resting on the edge between illusion and reality -- strikes me as every bit as brilliant and memorable as the, "Mona Lisa," smile. It breaches the barriers between Memling's world and ours and demolishes time...

I was very charmed by Gerard David's, "Virgin With the Milk Soup." Apparently Flemish collectors were too as there are some seven versions of this image which carries iconographic suggestions of salvation and redemption. She is the serene prototype of the window-lit secular beauties that Vermeer would paint two centuries later.

David's, "Virgin," struck me as containing a host of paintings within a painting. His sensitive rendering of the milk soup and bread has the candor of Chardin still life. The tiny vase of flowers on the shelf above the Virgin -- the flowers are meant to denote both sorrow and compassion -- is an image that will bloom into full complexity and become a genre in the hands of later Dutch masters. The gated village scene -- visible through the window -- is like a tiny John Constable landscape.

About the Book

Face to Face: Flanders, Florence, and Renaissance Painting
Written by: Paula Nuttall (Introduction by Catherine Hess)
Available worldwide
Format: Cloth, 96 pages, 8 × 10 inches, 80 color illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-87328-258-1
$29.95
Release: Sept. 2013
Huntington Library Press

This lavishly illustrated catalogue accompanies an exhibition of the same name at The Huntington (Sept. 28, 2013 to Jan. 13, 2014). Co-curator and scholar Paula Nuttall explores the transmission of ideas, techniques, and modes of artistic rendering that first developed in the Burgundian court and became hugely influential in southern Europe—notably on painting in Florence, usually considered the artistic epicenter of Renaissance Europe. Nuttall treats the thematic groupings of the exhibition, exploring the diptych as an art form, the portrayal of the face of Christ, the development of portraiture, and the virtuosic renderings of materials and textures.

American art with the opening of the major exhibition Exploring the many meanings and interpretations of eating in Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine on view from November 12, 2013 through January 27, 2014 at the Art Institute of Chicago —brings together 100 paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts from the 18th through the 20th century to demonstrate how depictions of food have allowed American artists to both celebrate and critique everything from the national diet to society and politics.

Following its premiere at the Art Institute, Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine will travel to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas (February 22–May 18, 2014).

Art and Appetite takes a new approach to American paintings of food, contextualizing them to rediscover the meanings they held for their makers and their public. Despite the prevalence of such works, research has rarely focused on the cultural significance of the objects depicted in these paintings, nor has it addressed how these paintings embodied changing ideals throughout the nation’s history. Thematically and chronologically organized, Art and Appetite breaks with the traditional histories of the genre to explore how it illuminates American attitudes about patriotism and politics, identity and gender, progress and history, and production and consumption.

The exhibition examines the agricultural bounty of the “new world,” Victorian-era excess, debates over temperance, the rise of restaurants and café culture, the changes wrought by 20th-century mass production, and much more—all represented in American art spanning 250 years. A wealth of fascinating materials are also showcased in the exhibition, including menus, cookbooks, advertisements, and decorative arts.

From the earliest years of the United States, American artists such as Raphaelle Peale used stilllife painting to express cultural, political, and social values, elevating the genre to a significant aesthetic language. Later, in antebellum America, depictions of food highlighted abundance, increasing wealth, and changing social roles, while elegant decanters of wine and spirits in stilllife paintings by John F. Francis reflected the prevalence of drinking and the mid-century debates over temperance. During the Gilded Age, despite the implications of the term, American artists moved away from excess and eschewed high Victorian opulence in favor of painting the simple meal. Many artists, such as William Harnett or De Scott Evans, also used food pictures to serve up biting political commentary that addressed the social and economic transformations of the 1880s and 1890s.

In the 20th century new ways of eating and socializing began to change depictions of food in art. Restaurant dining—still novel in the United States in the late 19th century—became a common subject in the works of William Glackens, John Sloan, and others. Café and cocktail culture, described in the work of Stuart Davis and Gerald Murphy, became increasingly important even as Prohibition banned the consumption of alcohol. Modernist artists employed food in their radically new explorations of pictorial form, all the while challenging national ideals of family and home. Finally, during the 1950s and 1960s, Pop artists, among them Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, addressed the ways in which mass production and consumption dramatically altered the American experience of food. Hamburgers, fries, and cakes were depicted as objects of mass-produced comestibles without human referent. Artists employed new means to explore the visual power of advertising, the standardization of factory-produced meals, and the commercialization of American appetites.

Today, as professional and home chefs increasingly turn toward local, organic food and American society ponders its history as a fast-food nation, this exhibition on the historical art of eating is highly relevant, offering visitors the chance to look at depictions of American food and culture with new meaning and fresh eyes.

From a nice review:

The exhibit opens with a timely ode to what is perhaps the most food-centric holiday in American culture: Thanksgiving. Here, the oft-seen Norman Rockwell painting Freedom from Want occupies pride of place in a testament to the American values of abundance and prosperity in a postwar era.

Barter takes viewers on a journey across two centuries of culinary pictorial history in the following galleries. On display are paintings by the pioneering American artist Raphaelle Peale, whose still lifes reflect the bounties of the earth and the native beauty of the new Republic. While the moral overtones in his work are few, relative to his European counterparts, Peale nonetheless imbues his paintings with allusions to the themes of self-sustainment and Republican virtue. It is worth a visit to the exhibition for the sole purpose of viewing the still lifes, since the highly realistic depictions are enough to make your mouth water.

The exhibit also showcases new ways of eating as a reflection of the changing times. On view are several representations of picnic parties set in nature. At a time when urban centers saw marked growth, the pastoral repast represented a retreat from the hustle and bustle of city life. As the urban population grew, so too did the culture of dining out. In

Renganeschi’s Saturday Night,

John Sloan offers a look at the new restaurant culture that offered the newly affluent the chance to see and be seen and the changing role of women in the early twentieth century.

And from another review: (some images added)

From this country’s earliest years, American artists have used still-life painting to express cultural, political and social values, elevating the subject to a significant artistic language. The topic of food allowed American artists both to celebrate and critique their society, expressing ideas relating to politics, race, class, gender, commerce, and how these categories define American identity.

Art and Appetite includes many iconic works such as

Nighthawks (1942) by Edward Hopper,

Campbell’s Soup (1965) by Andy Warhol.

Food City by Richard Estes (b. 1932)

Fishermen’s Last Supper, Nova Scotia, 1940-41 by Marsden Hartley (1877-1943)

And from still another review:

Doris Lee, "Thanksgiving" (1935)

"It may be hard to fathom today how Lee's colorfully cheerful depiction of food preparation was offensive... . The picture was popular with the public, as was Grant Wood's more famous American Gothic, purchased by the Art Institute in 1930. Both pictures represent historical themes using the imagery of ordinary people and farm life; both enshrined with irony and humor an American past fast disappearing. But by 1935 the depiction of Thanksgiving as a rustic social gathering seemed boorishly common." (Art and Appetite catalog p. 41)

I love the kitchen in this picture with all the activity of many women cooking, except for the one who has obviously just arrived and is taking off her hat. I love the little kids, the dog under the stove, and the cat under the table. The preparation for each traditional element of Thanksgiving dinner is wonderful: the turkey being basted, pie dough being rolled out, vegetables in a basket, pots simmering on top of the old black stove, dishes being taken from a high shelf where no doubt they spend most of the year.

Alice Neel, "Thanksgiving" (1965)

"... the bird collapses in the kitchen sink, looking as though it had just been thrown from the guillotine. Its legs splayed akimbo, its body bloody and pimply, it drains alongside Ajax, sponges, soap, and the breakfast dishes. Neel said of her picture that she painted it while the bird ... ws thawing in the sink and that it was her answer to Pop Art." (Art and Appetite, p. 51)

My own feeling is that this image of an absolutely typical kitchen from the 1960s is now as much nostalgic as the famous Norman Rockwell grandmother and grandfather with a turkey or the painting by Doris Lee above. Who hasn't seen the exact water faucet, Ajax can, and metal cabinet handles along with the white porcelain of mother's or grandmother's or aunt's kitchen sink?

More images from the exhibition:

James Peale’s “Still Life: Balsam Apple and Vegetables,”

William J. McCloskey. Wrapped Oranges, 1889. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Acquisition in memory of Katrine Deakins, Trustee, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 1961-1985.

Wayne Thiebaud. Salad, Sandwiches and Dessert, 1960. Lent by the Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NAA-Thomas C. Woods Memorial. © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Roy Lichtenstein’s turkey

The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) opens an exhibition that demonstrates why Impressionism continues to fascinate and intrigue over a century later. With more than 90 paintings, prints, models and photographs, Impressionists on the Water tells the story of how living near France's waterways and oceans influenced one of the world's most enduring artistic movements. The sparkle and play of light on water proved irresistible to key Impressionists. Rippling seas, dancing reflections and sailboats propelled by strong winds animate the art of Manet, Monet, Renoir, Caillebotte, Pissarro, Sisley, Seurat, Signac and many others on view at PEM from November 9, 2013 to February 17, 2014.

Through this exhibition, we gain an appreciation for the inherent sensitivity that Impressionist artists showed for both the qualities of water and the appearance of the boats. Not weighed down by history, they painted what they saw and articulated it as a wholly modern subject. The juxtaposition of paintings and models allow us to observe how the artists interpreted forms of specific boats, as well as appreciate how that interpretation varied from more traditional maritime art of the day.

Examination of the Impressionists’ engagement with boating as both pastime and artistic subject is at the heart of the exhibition. In the countryside west of Paris new patterns of life, including the idea of middle-class leisure, reflected the social and economic energies of an emerging modern world. Artistic innovations such as painting out of doors developed to capture the spirit and quick pace of recreational activities. The Impressionists’ brushwork suggests both the atmospheric effects and the sensations of movement that contribute to the invigorating experience of boating.

Artists and sailors

The faithful representation of watercraft - apparent despite the freehandedness of technique - owes much to the artists' accomplishments as sailors and yachtsmen spending many hours at sea, on riverboats, leisure craft and floating studios.

Among the most skilled was Gustave Caillebotte. A sailor, boat designer and successful racer, he depicted the watercraft and nautical conditions he experienced at his family's estate on the banks of the Seine. Caillebotte is considered France's most successful yachtsman-artist of the 19th century, responsible for the design and creation of nearly 25 boats. He depicted his boating prowess in his 1893 work, Regatta at Argenteuil - himself at the helm, striking a nonchalant pose as he steers the sailboat's tiller with remarkable ease, using just a fingertip.

Inspired by the example of Charles-François Daubigny's floating studio, Monet built his own studio boat in the mid-1870s to be ever closer to the water. The vessel, depicted at its mooring in his 1874 painting, gave the artist a near-waterline perspective of the landscape, and the atmospheric conditions of the river environment. That singular perspective - a framing of light, water and sky - is celebrated throughout this exhibition.

CATALOG

An unprecedented new book celebrating the Impressionist themes of water and boats including works by the movement’s most renowned artists, such as Manet and Monet, Renoir and Seurat. Plein-air painting allowed the Impressionists to capture a vibrant outdoor world with startling immediacy; and water, boats, and all things nautical provided natural fodder for these artists, many of whom were sailors and yachtsman themselves. This unprecedented new volume, coinciding with a major exhibition organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, traces the history of these delightful, light-infused water scenes within the social context of the latter nineteenth century. A new and expansive exploration of Impressionist themes of water and boating, this catalogue examines the changing depictions of water from pre-Impressionism (Corot, Daubigny) through Impressionism (Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Caillebotte) to neo- and post-Impressionism (Cézanne, Seurat, Signac). Throughout, connections to contemporary life, such as the literature of Zola and Maupassant and the growing use of boats as leisure craft at yacht clubs and locales such as the famously depicted Argenteuil, clarify the social and cultural implications of the nautical themes embraced by the Impressionists. This handsomely designed book will be a welcome addition to the libraries of water-farers everywhere and will appeal to scholars and connoisseurs of one of the most beloved periods of art history.

CURATORIAL CREDIT

Organizing co-curators for Impressionists on the Water are Christopher Lloyd, former Surveyor of Queen Elizabeth II's collection; Phillip Dennis Cate, former director of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University; and Daniel Charles, author and historian of marine technology. Daniel Finamore, PEM's Russell W. Knight Curator of Maritime Art and History, is coordinating curator.

EXHIBITION CREDITS

Impressionists on the Water is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Paintings on loan from prestigious international collections, including the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and private collections will be joined by paintings and works on paper from the Fine Arts Museums’ own holdings.

The exhibition will move to San Francsco June 1–October 13, 2013 at The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, coinciding with San Francisco's hosting of the America's Cup races this summer.

From a great review (images added):

The show has sections dedicated to “Harbors and Coasts,” to “Rivers — Paris and Environs,” and “Open Ocean.” Amid an abundance of prints by the likes of Signac and Eugene Delatre, and a smattering of photographs by Gustave le Gray, there are standout paintings by

Ludovic-Napoleon Lepic (“Boats on the Beach at Berck”),

Alfred Sisley (“Banks of the Loing”),

(Charles-Francois)Daubigny (“The Village of Gloton”) and

Renoir (the marvelous “Oarsmen at Chatou”)(below).

But the real reason you would be mad to miss this show — its ace in the hole — is the gallery dedicated to the paintings and boat designs of Gustave Caillebotte.

There are three points to make about Caillebotte. The first is that he was a marvelous, long underrated painter. He could be plodding at times, and he was certainly not as devoted to Impressionist flux as the likes of Monet and Sisley. His pictures, although bright and light-loving, are heavily worked and fastidiously composed. But he painted many masterpieces, including

the Musee d’Orsay’s “The Floorscrapers” and

the Art Institute of Chicago’s “Paris Street, Rainy Day.”

Two years ago, recognizing Caillebotte’s quality (and the scarcity of available works by him), the Museum of Fine Arts sold works from its collection by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, and Gauguin, to buy a single Caillebotte:

“A Man at His Bath.”

In this show,

“Skiffs on the Yerres,” and

“Regatta at Argenteuil” (below) are almost — but not quite — in the same category.

The second point about Caillebotte is that he was respected and well-loved by his Impressionist confreres. He was the glue that kept the group together.

Born into wealth, he bought paintings by his comrades, he convened gatherings at his house, and he organized several of the later Impressionist exhibitions, renting the galleries, designing the catalogs, and financing the advertising. When he died, he gave a great slab of his superb collection to the French state.

The final thing about Caillebotte, and the most germane in the context of this show, is that he was mad about yachting.

From another good review:

Boating was a favored pastime for these artists as well as a great subject for many of them. Sailboats, racing scenes, and various ocean and water scenes appear, representing Brittany, along the western coast of France, and such vacation spots as Argenteille, along the Seine about 30 minutes from Paris. The exhibition does a wonderful job of displaying the progressive Impressionists and Post-Impressionists' aim of capturing color and light, as well as portraying these middle-class pastimes and everyday moments -- la vie quotidienne -- that they are so well known for.

Johan Barthold Jongkind, “Honfleur,” 1864, watercolor on paper, 6 3/4 x 8 1/4 in. Collection of Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University

Gustave Caillebotte, "Boating on the Yerres (Perissoires sur l'Yerres)," 1877, oil on canvas, 40 3/4 x 61 3/8 in. Milwaukee Art Museum

For example, in the work "Périssoires sur l'Yerres" (1877), by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), we focus on the main subjects of the men in boats, with bright highlights on the backs of their hats, but we can't ignore the brilliant reflections on the water. These reflections were a fascination for the artists, always moving, invigorating, and lively, almost dancing on the surface with lights and darks, sun and shadow. The gestural use of these lights and darks in this work, with horizontal, slightly thicker brushstrokes next to one another on the water, are an example of the radical new brushstrokes in works from this time. The areas of high contrast where the bright yellow light meets the darker greens of the reflection of the trees in the water bring our eyes to another area of interest in the work and show a mastery and deep understanding of waterscapes. Indeed, the paintings can be enjoyed for their obvious subjects as well as for their use and portrayal of light.

More images from the exhibition:

Gustave Caillebotte, Regatta at Argenteuil, 1893. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photograph © Comité Caillebotte, Paris

Claude Monet, Boats Moored at Le Petit-Gennevilliers (Barques au repos, au Petit-Gennevilliers) (traditionally Sailboats on the Seine, 1874. Oil on canvas. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Gift of Bruno and Sadie Adriani, 1962.23

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Oarsmen at Chatou (Les Canotier à Chatou, 1879. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of Sam A. Lewisohn, 1951.5.2

Claude Monet, The Seine at Argenteuil (La Seine á Argenteuil, 1874. Private Collection

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Passenger from Cabin 54—On a Cruise (La passagère du 54—Promenade en yacht, 1896. Color lithograph poster with brush, crayon, and spatter. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Bruno and Sadie Adriani Collection

Camille Pissarro, Harbor at Dieppe (Le port de Dieppe, 1902. Oil on canvas. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Mildred Anna Williams Collection, 1940.52

Gustave Caillebotte, Sunflowers along the Seine (Soleils, au Bord de la Seine, about 1885 -1886. Oil on canvas. Private Collection

Claude Monet, , The Coast of Normandy Viewed from Sainte-Adresse (La côte de Normandie vue de Sainte-Adresse), ca. 1864. Black chalk on off-white laid paper. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Memorial gift from Dr. T. Edward and Tullah Hanley, Bradford, Pennsylvania, 69.30.141

Paul Signac, Saint-Tropez, the Red Buoy

National Gallery, London 19 February – 11 May 2014

'Beauty: a combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, which please the aesthetic senses, especially the sight'

Oxford English Dictionary, 2013

What exactly makes a work of art beautiful? And how can this perception radically alter due to the changing world its viewer is living in? These are the intriguing questions being posed by 'Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance' at the National Gallery this spring.

This collection-focused exhibition takes a fresh look at paintings, drawings and prints by well-known artists such as Hans Holbein the Younger, Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach the Elder – examining the striking changes in the ways these works were perceived in their time, in the recent past, and how they are viewed today.

More than 30 loans from UK collections will help visitors explore these fascinating themes. Key works coming to 'Strange Beauty' include the

Matthias Grünewald drawing of 'An Elderly Woman with Clasped Hands' (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), (2nd from the left)

the renowned Holbein miniature of 'Anne of Cleves' (Victoria & Albert Museum, London),

'Portrait of Young Man with a Rosary' by Hans Baldung Grien (Royal Collection Trust on behalf of Her Majesty the Queen)

and a collection of fine drawings and prints by Holbein, Dürer and Altdorfer (British Museum, London).

The German Renaissance was part of the cultural and artistic awakening that spread across Northern Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. German artists such as Dürer developed an international reputation, their fame reaching all parts of Europe, while renowned humanist scholars such as Erasmus of Rotterdam, the patron of Hans Holbein the Younger, played a leading role in reviving the study of classical texts in the service of Christianity.

Paintings such as

'The Ambassadors' by Holbein, '

Christ taking Leave of his Mother' by Albrecht Altdorfer,

'Cupid complaining to Venus' by Lucas Cranach the Elder,

'Portrait of a Man' by Hans Baldung Grien

and 'Saint Jerome' by Albrecht Dürer

were highly valued in the 16th century for qualities such as expression and inventiveness. However, by the 19th and early 20th centuries German Renaissance art was receiving a very mixed reception. Some viewers admired the artists' technical mastery and their embodiment of a perceived German national identity; others perceived these works of art as excessive or even ugly, particularly when compared to works of the Italian Renaissance.

Views such as these – alongside the shifting attitudes towards the German nation in the UK following the First and Second World Wars – were to have a direct effect on the formation and growth of the Gallery, and indeed all the UK national collections.

This was strongly evidenced in 1856 when the Trustees of the National Gallery sold the Krüger Collection – the only time in its entire history that the Gallery has had an Act of Parliament passed to de-accession and sell pictures. This group of 64 early Westphalian paintings from the 15th and 16th centuries was acquired for the Gallery by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Gladstone, in 1854. However just three years later, 37 works were sold as they did not fit in with the 'present state of the Gallery' (as National Gallery Trustees Minutes noted at the time). Rarely publicly displayed contemporary documents from the National Gallery archive will be featured in the exhibition in order to illustrate this episode.

A highlight of the exhibition will be, for the first time ever, a reconstruction of the Liesborn altarpiece.

This work was created after 1465 and originally formed the high altarpiece in the Benedictine Abbey of Liesborn in Germany. In 1803, on the suppression of the monastery, it was dismembered, sold and scattered across the globe – eight pieces remain at the Gallery as part of the Krüger Collection. Now for the first time, visitors will be able to visualise the completed altarpiece as it might have looked during the 15th century.

The first room of 'Strange Beauty' introduces the types of paintings that were admired in 1824, when the Gallery was founded. Room 2 presents some of the German Renaissance painting acquisitions finally made by the National Gallery during the 19th and early 20th centuries – not all of which were immediately appreciated or admired. The third room focuses on the qualities of expressiveness and technical and stylistic invention which are so important within German Renaissance art. The masters of this genre, Holbein, Dürer and Cranach, will be exhibited in Room 4, highlighting their distinctive style. Past letters and documentation continue to reveal the historic reception to these paintings. Room 5 discusses themes of beauty and nature, examining the distinctive interpretation of these concepts by German Renaissance artists.

The final room of 'Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance' will be an interactive experience, inviting today’s visitors to comment, and vote, on their reactions to German painting.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco present Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter, November 9, 2013–February 2, 2014, bringing together one hundred of the artist’s oil paintings, watercolors, etchings, and sculptures. Anders Zorn (Swedish, 1860–1920) was one of the world’s most famous living artists at the turn of the twentieth century, known for his virtuoso painting and printmaking techniques. Although he was a hugely successful portrait painter in this country—depicting captains of industry, members of high society, and three U.S. Presidents—there has been only one other major American retrospective in the last century examining Zorn’s work.

During the 1880s and 1890s Zorn lived in London and Paris, where he became acquainted with key figures of the Belle Époque, including James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and Auguste Rodin, as well as many of the French Impressionists. Zorn was described by a contemporary in Paris as “at home here, as he was everywhere, just like a fish in water.” Ambitious and entrepreneurial, he used his connections to gain commissions and befriend prominent collectors such as Isabella Stewart Gardner, who would become an important patron. Zorn’s painting,

Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice (1894, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston)

appears in this exhibition.

Altogether, Zorn made seven trips to the United States, where he was in great demand as a painter of society portraits. Like his friendly rival John Singer Sargent, Zorn portrayed many of the most significant figures of the Gilded Age, including the industrialist Andrew Carnegie and President William Taft, in a portrait that still hangs in the White House today. A noted bon vivant, Zorn traveled throughout the country, visiting San Francisco during the winter of 1903–1904, where he declared the nightlife “particularly appealing from a male point of view.”

Trained at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, where his watercolors brought him to the attention of King Oscar II, Zorn would remain closely tied to his native country throughout his career. In 1896 Zorn moved back to his hometown of Mora, where he painted scenes of the Swedish countryside and subjects that celebrated the country’s folk culture. One such work in this exhibition,

Midsummer Dance (1897, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm),

has long been considered one of Sweden’s national treasures, and it rarely leaves the country.

Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter reintroduces to American audiences an important artist who is less well known in this country than he once was. Loans from the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; the Zornmuseet, Mora; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; and many other public and private collections provide a comprehensive view of this vibrant artistic personality.

Exhibition Organization

This exhibition is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Zornmuseet in association with the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Exhibition Catalogue

The richly illustrated catalogue of the same title explores the life and work of a masterful painter who was born in a small Swedish village and rose to international acclaim. Four authors present a detailed portrait of Zorn’s life and work, his career in the United States, his oeuvre in the context of Nordic art, and his printmaking activity. Also featuring a comprehensive chronology and historical photographs, this book reveals a painter traditional yet modern; cosmopolitan yet indelibly connected.

From an excellent review: (Some images added)

Zorn watercolors such as

"Lapping Waves" (1887),

"In the Port of Hamburg"(1890)

and even the brisk, tiny "Sea Study" (1894)display his prodigious ability to render transient sensations and unify light effects across a page. He clearly kept rivalrous eyes on what his Impressionist contemporaries were doing.

Things got more complicated and intriguing whenever Zorn turned his attention to portrait and anecdotal subjects.

"Castles in the Air" (1885), a dreamy watercolor of (his wife) Emma with sunlight filtering through the open parasol over her shoulder, shows how Zorn's focus on fidelity to a face could unbalance his attention to a figure's other proportions.

With "The Thorn Bush" (1886),

a deftly worked watercolor of two women possibly on a forest picnic, a note of erotic mischief surfaces.

The woman walking in the foreground pauses as she finds a spiky branch snagging and lifting her skirt. That branch, of course, is a Zorn brushstroke.

The subtext of erotic preoccupation rises and submerges again throughout the exhibition, culminating in Zorn's late photographs and drawings of giggling nude models descending into the cabin of his yacht.

More images from the exhibition:

Anders Zorn, Self-Portrait in Red, 1915. Oil on canvas. Zornmuseet, Mora. Photograph by Patric Evinger.

Anders Zorn, Reveil, Boulevard Clichy, 1892. Watercolor. Private Collection. Photo courtesy Bukowskis, Stockholm

Anders Zorn, Midsummer Dance, 1897. Oil on canvas, 55 1/8 x 38 9/16 in. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Photo © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Anders Zorn, The Little Brewery, 1890. Oil on canvas, 18 _ x 30 11/16 in. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Photo © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Anders Zorn, River under Old Stone Bridge, 1884. Watercolor. Zornmuseet, Mora. Photograph by Lars Berglund

An exceptional loan from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Artemisia Gentileschi’s shocking Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1620), comes to the Art Institute of Chicago as the centerpiece of Violence and Virtue: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes, on view from October 17, 2013 through January 9, 2014. The rare loan from Florence was organized with the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture (FIAC) and coincides with the celebration of the Year of Italian Culture in the United States.

Image: Artemisia Gentileschi. Judith Slaying Holofernes, c. 1620. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. 1567.

The exhibition draws on the rich holdings of the Art Institute and on private collections in Chicago, putting Artemisia Gentileschi’s extraordinary work together with paintings, objects, and works on paper by such artists as Lucas Cranach, Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Jacopo de’ Barbari, and Felice Ficherelli, thereby enhancing this rare presentation of this truly pioneering and compelling artist.

Renowned for her skill in her own day, Artemisia is famous today as a bold and courageous woman who made her own powerful statement as a painter. Among the first women artists to achieve success in the 17th century, she brought to her work an electric sense of narrative drama and a unique perspective that both celebrated and humanized strong women characters.

Rediscovered by feminist art historians in the past few decades, Gentileschi has inspired a spate of books, both scholarly and popular, and a number of films. The daughter of painter Orazio Gentileschi, Artemisia trained in her father’s workshop and quickly earned acclaim, completing her first signed painting, a dramatic yet sensitive rendering of Susanna and the Elders, when she was just 17. Her style bears some resemblance to that of her father, who was a follower of Caravaggio, but Artemisia’s paintings stand out for their theatricality—the raw emotional intensity of a few figures daringly arranged.

The younger Gentileschi’s work is also distinctive in its focus on powerful heroines, capturing both their vulnerability and strength, a feature many attribute to events in Gentileschi’s own life. While still 17, she was raped by one of her father’s colleagues, Agostino Tassi. He was convicted in a trial a year later after Artemisia was tortured to “confirm” her testimony, but Tassi was never punished. Within months of the conclusion of the trial, Artemisia was quickly married and moved to Florence with her new husband.

Contemporary critics have often interpreted the brutal depiction in Judith Slaying Holofernes as a painted revenge for the rape. The story of the biblical heroine Judith, who saved the Jewish people from an invading army sent by King Nebuchadnezzar, has received an extraordinary range of interpretations over the centuries, emphasizing justice, seduction, or civic and personal virtue. Gentileschi chose to paint the biblical story’s gruesome climax, producing a picture that is nothing short of terrifying. As the heroine decapitates the enemy general Holofernes, her brow is furrowed in concentration, her forearms are tensed, and blood spurts from her victim’s neck. The startling naturalism of the scene owes much to the influence of Caravaggio; Artemisia followed his technique of painting directly from life and employing sharp contrasts of light and dark. The power of the scene, however, is all her own, and the painting endures as a masterpiece of Baroque art.

Violence and Virtue: Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes” is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture.

The presentation is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue written by Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, former Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture before 1750 at the Art Institute, now Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs/Senior Curator of Collections at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts. The catalogue features 19 color illustrations and provides insights into the creation of the extraordinary painting in Florence around 1620. The catalogue is published by the Art Institute of Chicago and distributed by Yale University Press.

More images by Artemisia Gentileschi:

Conversion of the Magdalene

Judith and Her Maidservant, Detroit Institute of Arts

earlier Judith and Her Maidservant from Florence

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco present David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition, on view at the de Young Museum from October 26, 2013 through January 20, 2014. Assembled by Hockney exclusively for the de Young, this exhibition marks the return to California of the most influential and best-known British artist of his generation. More than 300 works will be shown in 18,000 square feet of gallery space, making this the largest exhibition in the history of the museum.

This first comprehensive survey of Hockney’s work since 2002 covers one of the most prolific periods of the artist’s career. Hockney’s book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters was published in 2001, revealing his discovery that artists had used optical devices in their working processes centuries earlier than had been previously thought. The next decade saw an explosion of activity for Hockney, including a period of two years when he worked intensively and exclusively in watercolor for the first time, followed by painting en plein air, experimentation with the iPhone, iPad drawings, oil paintings on a grand scale, and digital movies.

David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition builds on the success of a recent exhibition organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in London, but encompasses a much larger scope, and includes many portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. In addition to watercolors, charcoals, oil paintings, and works in other media, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will also be the first to exhibit and publish The Arrival of Spring in 2013 (twenty thirteen). This work consists of 25 charcoal drawings, finished in May of this year, and has been described by Hockney as capturing “the bleakness of the winter and its exciting transformation to the summer.”

David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition includes some of Hockney’s grandest works both in terms of size and concept, such as The Bigger Message, his 30-canvas re-working of Claude Lorrain’s The Sermon on the Mount. Also included are more intimate works, like the artist’s portraits depicting friends, colleagues, and family members. These reveal the artist’s personal and intimate relationships, and illustrate a particularly tender understanding of his sitters. Hockney's most recent portraits—done in charcoal—will be exhibited and published for the first time by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

This exhibition highlights Hockney’s ability to engage with—and gain mastery of—a wide variety of tools and media. Works range from simple pencil drawings on paper, to Bigger Yosemite, five drawings created on the iPad that capture the majesty of the American West. “Like an artist alchemist, in one minute Hockney uses a fancy digital device to make a colorful iPad drawing; in the next he shows us that he is one of our greatest draftsmen by rendering an exactingly detailed charcoal drawing of a forest scene in East Yorkshire,” notes Richard Benefield, deputy director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and organizer of the exhibition.

Also worthy of special mention are the exhibition’s “Cubist movies.” These are made using as many as 18 separate digital cameras, mounted on a grid and recording the action simultaneously, resulting in a movie with as many as 18 perspectives. In making them, Hockney has addressed a challenge first taken up by Picasso: How to display multiple perspectives in one work of art.

Over a career lasting more than 60 years, David Hockney has consistently displayed a passion, as Lawrence Wechsler writes in his essay for the exhibition catalog, “to look deeper and see more.” David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition displays the artist’s constantly searching curiosity, his desire to always move forward, and his unique genius for seeing. “The de Young is thrilled to bring this major exhibition of David Hockney’s work to a U.S. museum,” says Benefield. “It’s clear from the pace at which Hockney continues to produce such important work—and the fearless nature of his innovation—that he has conceded nothing to his 76 years.”

Exhibition Organization

The exhibition is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in collaboration with the artist. The exhibition is curated and designed by Gregory Evans. Director’s Circle: David Davies and Jack Weeden, Bequest of Dr. Charles L. Dibble, The Michael Taylor Trust, and Diane B. Wilsey. Curator’s Circle: Marissa Mayer and Zachary Bogue, and Ray and Dagmar Dolby. Patron’s Circle: Hope Shuttleworth Herndon. Media Sponsor: San Francisco Magazine.

Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition, published by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Published on the occasion of this major exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and produced in collaboration with the artist’s studio, the catalogue is filled with a lavish selection of recent work and rare in-progress photographs. It showcases one of the most diverse and prolific chapters in David Hockney’s career, and is replete with fascinating discoveries of a consummate artist at work.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture

As mentioned above, from 21 January 2012 - 9 April 2012 the Royal Academy of Arts presented David Hockney: A Bigger Picture the first major exhibition in the UK to showcase David Hockney’s landscape work. Vivid paintings inspired by the Yorkshire countryside, many exhibited here for the first time, are shown alongside related drawings and digital video. Over 150 works were on display, the majority of which have been created in the last eight years. The exhibition also included a selection of works dating as far back as 1956, which places the recent work in the context of Hockney’s extended exploration of and fascination with landscape. The exhibition took the visitor on a journey through Hockney’s view of the world.

Initially, the exhibition addressed the various approaches that Hockney has taken towards the depiction of landscape throughout his career. Past works included

Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians, 1965 (The National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh),

Garrowby Hill, 1998 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and

A Closer Grand Canyon, 1998 (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek).

Hockney’s exploration of the depiction of space is traced from work dating to his time as a student, through his photocollages of the 1980s and the Grand Canyon paintings of the late 1990s, to the recent paintings of East Yorkshire, frequently made en plein air .

The exhibition revealed the artist’s emotional engagement with the landscape he knew in his youth, as, in a series of galleries each dedicated to a particular motif, he examines daily variations in light and weather conditions and the cycles of growth and decay as the seasons change. Since undertaking this exhibition in 2007, Hockney’s intense observation of his surroundings has become manifested in a variety of media. Highlights included three groups of new work made specifically for this exhibition.

Firstly, a series of paintings inspired by Claude Lorrain’s painting The Sermon on the Mount, 1656 (The Frick Collection, New York) in which Hockney explores its unusual treatment of space, culminating in the monumental painting: A Bigger Message, 2010.

Secondly, new digital videos featuring motifs familiar from Hockney’s paintings are displayed on multiple screens; filmed simultaneously using nine and eighteen cameras, they provide a spellbinding visual experience.

Hockney’s in-depth engagement with the works of the Old Masters and the historical use of optical aids was made clear in his book Secret Knowledge (2001). Hockney too has always embraced new technologies for the purposes of image making, most recently the iPad.

The exhibition culminated in the largest of the Royal Academy’s galleries, with the immersive work The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven). Hockney’s glorious homage to nature is dominated by a painting on 32 canvases, surrounded by over fifty large-scale iPad drawings printed on paper, which chronicle the advancing season in breathtaking detail. Hockney has found in landscape the ultimate subject for ‘A Bigger Picture’.

Born in Bradford in 1937, David Hockney attended Bradford School of Art before studying at the Royal College of Art from 1959 to 1962. Hockney’s stellar reputation was established while he was still a student; his work was featured in several of the annual Young Contemporaries exhibitions, one of which heralded the birth of British Pop Art. He visited Los Angeles in 1964 and settled there soon after. He is closely associated with southern California and has produced a large body of work there over many decades. David Hockney was elected a Royal Academician in 1991. David Hockney has recently been appointed a member of the Order of Merit by the Queen.

ORGANISATION

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture was organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. The exhibition was curated by the independent curator Marco Livingstone and Edith Devaney, the Royal Academy of Arts.

EXHIBITION TOUR

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao: 14 May – 30 September, 2012

Museum Ludwig, Cologne: 29 October, 2012 – 4 February, 2013

CATALOGUE

The David Hockney: A Bigger Picture exhibition was accompanied by a sumptuous fully illustrated catalogue. This includes a number of essays, with an introduction by Marco Livingstone exploring the artist’s engagement with landscape painting in the context of Hockney’s illustrious career. Writers as notable as Margaret Drabble, Tim Barringer, Martin Gayford, Xavier Salomon and David Hockney himself address the artist’s place in the landscape tradition, his recent video works and his delight in new technologies.

Works Included in the London Exhibition:

Winter Timber, 2009. Oil on 15 canvases, 274 x 609.6 cm. Private Collection. © David Hockney.

A Closer Winter Tunnel, February - March, 2006. Oil on 6 canvases, 182 x 365 cm. Collection Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased with funds provided by Geoff and Vicki Ainsworth, the Florence and William Crosby Bequest and the Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation 2007. © David Hockney / Collection of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

The Road Across the Wolds, 1997. Oil on canvas, 121 x 152 cm. Private Collection. © David Hockney.

Woldgate Woods, 21, 23 & 29 November 2006, 2006. Oil on 6 canvases, 182 x 366 cm. Courtesy of the Artist. © David Hockney.

The Big Hawthorne, 2008. Oil on 9 canvases, 275.5 x 366 cm. Courtesy of the Artist. © David Hockney. Photo: Richard Schmidt.

'Pearblossom Hwy', photographic collage of a Californian highway from 1986

'Three Trees near Thixendale, Winter 2007' Photo: (C) David Hockney

Green fingers … Under the Trees, Bigger (2010-11), Photo: Richard Schmidt/David Hockney

David Hockney ‘The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) – 2 January’ iPad drawing printed on paper, Courtesy of the artist Copyright David Hockney

Fascinating article, more images

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is presenting American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic Worldy , an extensive exhibition charting the rise and spectacular success of contemporary history painting in the 18th century through the lives and experiences of two colonial American innovators: Benjamin West (1738–1820) and John Singleton Copley (1738–1815). West and Copley—initially friends and eventually bitter rivals—gained phenomenal fame from their theatrical paintings that romanticized current events and captured the imaginations of the art-viewing public. American Adversaries is on view from October 6, 2013, to January 20, 2014.

American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World traces the ambitious, competitive and highly successful lives of West and Copley through oil paintings, works on paper, sculptures and artifacts. At the core of the exhibition are two paintings that catapulted West and Copley into international fame: West’s The Death of General Wolfe (1770; 1779 version) and Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778). The paintings have not been presented together in more than 60 years and never before in this context.

John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark 1778, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ferdinand Lammot Belin Fund. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art

Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe 1779, oil on canvas, Ickworth, National Trust, Suffolk. Hamilton Kerr Institute, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge

Both born in the same year (1738) in the American Colonies of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of international fame and fortune. London, the cultural and political capital of the empire, attracted and swayed both artists to stay to develop their careers as history painters and neither returned home to America.

West and Copley established a new genre of painting known as contemporary history painting with The Death of General Wolfe and Watson and the Shark. These dramatic large-scale canvases featured compositional elements derived from antique and Old Master sources, yet instead of portraying biblical, mythological or literary heroes, they depicted real people from contemporary life. This exhibition examines these paintings and the period in which they were painted to animate a past that is unfamiliar to many today. It restores the dynamism and modernity of this particular artistic moment as it happened, rather than through the lens of what we later have come to know. These works point to a world informed by the powerful agency of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy in the Great Lakes region; the scientific and imperial exploration of the seas; the rising role of the media and its relationship to history painting; and the stagecraft involved in managing the perception of a successful artistic career in 18th-century London. In the exhibition, the two key paintings are joined by works of art from all over the Atlantic World, which give them greater context and meaning.

A fully illustrated catalogue, published by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, distributed by Yale University Press and designed by Studio Blue, accompanies the exhibition and features essays by international scholars.

From an informative review: (image added)

One painting by West deserves its own paragraph. Death on the Pale Horse (1796)

Benjamin West, Death on the Pale Horse 1796, oil on canvas, Detroit Institute of Arts, USA / Founders Society Purchase, R.H. Tannahill Foundation fund. Detroit Institute of Arts, USA / The Bridgeman Art Library

just demands that you stare at its ghastly shapes for several minutes, there’s even a couch nearby. A little larger than a sideways movie one-sheet the images conjure rapture and death. At the bottom of the right side are a dead bird and snake. At the center is a naked man with his right arm extended to the heavens. All around him is a cavalcade of death, warriors on horseback chased by demons, innocents about to be torn apart by wild beasts. The eyes of all the animals and humans (and demons) seem to be glistening with either fright or delight. Maybe West was aware of his contemporary Goya since some of the imagery would be appropriate in that Spaniard’s work, although there’s also the possibility that it was West who influenced Goya.

An extremely informative review with many, many images, each with a story

John Singleton Copley, Head of a Negro, 1777-78, oil on canvas, Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Gibbs-Williams Fund

Gilbert Stuart, Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), 1785, oil on canvas, the British Museum, London. The Trustees of the British Museum

John Singleton Copley, Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard (Alice Delancey), 1775, oil on canvas, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Edward Ingersoll Brown Fund

Ah, Belle Époque Paris, the effervescent city of boulevards, Les Halles, the circus, cinema, theater, salons d’artistes, gardens, and world fair! With its incomparable art and entertainment, thanks to Le Chat noir, the Moulin rouge, the Lumière brothers, Sarah Bernhardt, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Rodin, there’s nothing like the City of Lights!

Visitors could explore this rich and exciting world through Paris on Stage: 1889–1914, a spectacular exhibition on display June 19, 2013, to February 2014, at Québec City’s Musée de la civilisation. Paris on Stage was an immersive exhibition plunging visitors into the bustle, effervescence, and energy of Belle Époque Paris. Staged to conjure up the Paris of our dreams, it used space, sound, and light to involve virtually all the senses. Equipped with audioguides, visitors became strollers promenading the wide boulevards where there’s so much to see.

They entered the skin of a Belle Époque Parisian, marveling at the newness and creativity, and delighted by the many expressions of popular culture and new leisure opportunities. Along the way, they heard a chanson from a café or sidewalk orchestra, marvelled at the view through a peephole, experienced the moving sidewalk from the 1900 Universal Exhibition, or soaked up the view from the Eiffel Tower’s first level.

UNDER THE ROOFS OF PARIS: AMAZING COLLECTIONS

Paris on Stage: 1889–1914 also showcased outstanding artistic, technical, and historical pieces from the collections of leading Paris museums. In all, close to 250 artifacts and works of art attesting to the creativity of the period were on display, including paintings by Jean Béraud, Abel Truchet, posters—some extremely rare—by Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha, sculptures by Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, items that belonged to the divine Sarah Bernhardt, theater costumes, photos, period film clips, automata, and objects illustrating technical advances, such as a “voiturette” from the first series of automobiles made by the Renault brothers, a model of a tramway, bicycles, a cinematograph, a telegraph, and more.

One star attraction was

Léon Lhermitte’s Les Halles,

a monumental 4 m by 6.3 m painting that has not been removed from the vaults of the Petit Palais since 1930. The painting has now been restored, thanks to the patronage of Rungis Marché International, and the Québec public will have the chance to see it first before it returns to Paris.

Musée de la civilisation has also drawn on its own national collections to illustrate scientific advances of the day, as well as the presence of Québec artists in Paris, including Alfred Laliberté, Charles Huot, and Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté. It also enlisted its Québec and Canadian museum network partners to round out the display.

IN PARIS STREETS

Paris on Stage is built around a street scene evoking the City of Light’s celebrated boulevards, which reflect a society in transition. A symbol of a new mass culture blending leisure, entertainment, and consumerism, the grands boulevards of Paris provide a wealth of insight into this golden age. The various exhibition themes will be highlighted in special, partially enclosed spaces that provide a unique visitor experience.

At the entrance, a gigantic fresco depicting Les Halles transports visitors to this iconic bustling market that Zola dubbed the “belly of Paris.” Then, as they amble along the Paris streets, visitors can explore the many exhibition themes and spaces. The carnivalesque Fête Foraine, which was at its peak in the Belle Époque, will let Musée visitors relive the fun, thrills, and sounds of this typical Parisian carnival, which thrilled audiences of all ages and social classes. Cinema was a huge hit too, found at café-concerts, music halls, department stores, and even the circus before the emergence of dedicated movie theaters. In this period, café-concerts, cabarets, and music halls were a mainstay of modern sociability, contributing to the legendary image of “gay Paris.” Parks and gardens, with their walkways and footpaths, ponds, streams, and waterfalls, were meant to provide ideal locales for strolling and unwinding. The theater—the most popular form of entertainment in the 19th century—moved Parisian audiences to laughter and tears. A wealth of repertoire existed, from traditional pieces with the great Sarah Bernhardt to vaudeville and avant-garde works. Salons d’artistes were devoted to promoting academic art, providing artists seeking to make names for themselves with opportunities to show—and be paid for—their work. August Rodin, the iconic father of modern sculpture, presented a selection of his works at the Alma pavilion, a refuge of quietude and beauty specially built for the occasion. Paris also hosted five world’s fairs in the 19th century. These huge celebrations of modernity marked an essential step in the evolution of mass leisure, culminating in the 1900 World Exhibition and the construction of a massive amusement park.

BEYOND THE EXHIBITION

As a complement to the Paris on Stage exhibition, the Museum will treat visitors to guided tours, including a fascinating iPod tour for children, as well as a wide variety of cultural activities such as the captivating “Paris découvertes” series of talks.

The Museum, in collaboration with Beaux Arts magazine, will publish a book featuring contributions by numerous well-known experts. The work is being distributed nationally and internationally, in both French and English.

Nearly 100 works by Canadian icon Alex Colville (1920-2013) will be presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) this summer, marking the largest exhibition of the late artist’s work to date. Curated by Andrew Hunter, the AGO’s curator of Canadian art, the exhibition will honour Colville’s legacy and explore the continuing impact of his work from the perspectives of several prominent popular culture figures from film, literature and music. Opening in August 2014, the exhibition will run to January 2015.

Known for painting decidedly personal subject matter, Colville’s painstakingly precise images depict an elusive tension, capturing moments perpetually on the edge of change and the unknown, often imbued with a deep sense of danger.

Featuring works assembled from museums and private collections nationwide, many of which have never been shown publicly, the exhibition spans Colville’s entire career, including iconic paintings such as:

Horse and Train, 1953;

To Prince Edward Island, 1965;

and Woman in Bathtub, 1973;

Born in Toronto in 1920, Colville was a painter, printmaker and veteran who drew his inspiration from the world around him, transforming the seemingly mundane figures and events of everyday life into archetypes of the modern condition. He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1982 and won a Governor General's Visual and Media Arts Award in 2003. The AGO has 89 works by Colville in its collection, including seven paintings currently on display. The Gallery last presented a retrospective of his works in 1983.

Biography, lots of images

Albertina : 14 February to 18 May 2014

The American painter, graphic artist and sculptor Eric Fischl is one of
the most important representatives of contemporary figuration. His work is characterised
by a style linked with American realism. The compositions, which capture scenes like
snapshots, convey the impression of a film clip. The just completed or immediately
imminent action is thus often only implied.

Eric Fischl's motifs are often derived from domestic contexts. They describe the everyday
and the ordinary, show people in constellations as couples or in interaction, usually scantily
clad to nude in an atmosphere dominated by sexuality. The viewer is incorporated into this
pictorial world created by Fischl in the role of the voyeur.

The exhibit in the Albertina concentrates on Eric Fischl's graphic works and encompasses a
cross-section of his work. In addition to print graphics, works on glassine and chrome coat
paper, including Eric Fischl's well-known bathing and beach scenes, several bronze
sculptures of the artist are on display and complement the posing figures of the
watercolours.

Eric Fischl was born in 1948 in New York and grew up on Long Island. He commenced with
his artistic training at the Junior College in Phoenix, Arizona, where he had moved with his
family in 1967. He continued his studies at Arizona State University and finally moved to the
California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where he graduated in 1972. Fischl then moved to
Chicago, where he worked as an attendant at the Museum of Contemporary Art and came
into contact with the artistic avant garde. In 1974 Eric Fischl accepted a position as an art
instructor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. In 1978 he moved to New
York, where he lives and works today, in addition to at his residence at Sag Harbor.

Eric Fischl
The Critics, 1979
Oil on glassine paper
© Courtesy of the artist and Jablonka
Galerie, Cologne

Eric Fischl
Study for Floating Islands, 1985
Oil on Chromecoat paper
© Courtesy of the artist and Jablonka Galerie, Cologne

Eric Fischl
Scenes and Sequences: Man, 1986
Monotype on paper
© Courtesy of the artist and Jablonka Galerie, Cologne

Scences and Sequences: Dream, 1986
Eric Fischl
Monotype on paper
© Courtesy of the artist and Jablonka Galerie, Cologne

Review of earlier show, with lots of bathing and beach scene images

The Städel Museum’s major special exhibition “Dark Romanticism. From Goya to Max Ernst“ was on view from September 26th, 2012 until January 20th, 2013. It was the first German exhibition to focus on the dark aspect of Romanticism and its legacy, mainly evident in Symbolism and Surrealism. In the museum’s exhibition house this important exhibition, comprising over 200 paintings, sculptures, graphic works, photographs and films, will present the fascination that many artists felt for the gloomy, the secretive and the evil. Using outstanding works in the museum’s collection on the subject by Francisco de Goya, Eugène Delacroix, Franz von Stuck or Max Ernst as a starting point, the exhibition also presented important loans from internationally renowned collections, such as the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée du Louvre, both in Paris, the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the Art Institute of Chicago.

The works on display by Goya, Johann Heinrich Fuseli and William Blake, Théodore Géricault and Delacroix, as well as Caspar David Friedrich, conveyed a Romantic spirit which by the end of the 18th century had taken hold all over Europe. In the 20th century artists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte or Paul Klee and Max Ernst continued to think in this vein. The art works speak of loneliness and melancholy, passion and death, of the fascination with horror and the irrationality of dreams.

After Frankfurt the exhibition, conceived by the Städel Museum, traveled to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The exhibition’s take on the subject was geographically and chronologically comprehensive, thereby shedding light on the links between different centres of Romanticism, and thus retracing complex iconographic developments of the time. It is conceived to stimulate interest in the sombre aspects of Romanticism and to expand understanding of this movement. Many of the artistic developments and positions presented here emerge from a shattered trust in enlightened and progressive thought, which took hold soon after the French Revolution – initially celebrated as the dawn of a new age – at the end of the 18th century. Bloodstained terror and war brought suffering and eventually caused the social order in large parts of Europe to break down. The disillusionment was as great as the original enthusiasm when the dark aspects of the Enlightenment were revealed in all their harshness. Young literary figures and artists turned to the reverse side of Reason. The horrific, the miraculous and the grotesque challenged the supremacy of the beautiful and the immaculate. The appeal of legends and fairy tales and the fascination with the Middle Ages competed with the ideal of Antiquity. The local countryside became increasingly attractive and was a favoured subject for artists. The bright light of day encountered the fog and mysterious darkness of the night.

The exhibition was divided into seven chapters. It began with a group of outstanding works by Johann Heinrich Fuseli. The artist had initially studied to be an evangelical preacher in Switzerland. With his painting

The Nightmare (Frankfurt Goethe-Museum)

he created an icon of dark Romanticism. This work opens the presentation, which extends over two levels of the temporary exhibition space. Fuseli’s contemporaries were deeply disturbed by the presence of the incubus (daemon) and the lecherous horse – elements of popular superstition – enriching a scene set in the present. In addition, the erotic-compulsive and daemonic content, as well as the depressed atmosphere, catered to the needs of the voyeur. The other six works by Fuseli – loans from the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Royal Academy London and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart – represent the characteristics of his art: the competition between good and evil, suffering and lust, light and darkness. Fuseli’s innovative pictorial language influenced a number of artists – among them William Blake, whose famous water colour The Great Red Dragon from the Brooklyn Museum :

William Blake (1757-1827)
The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun
c. 1803-1805
Watercolor, graphite and incised lines
43.7 x 34.8 cm
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of William Augustus White

was on view in Europe for the first time in ten years.

The second room of the exhibition was dedicated to the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya. The Städel displayed six of his works – including masterpieces such as

The Witches’ Flight from the Prado in Madrid

and the representations of cannibals from Besançon.

A large group of works on paper from the Städel’s own collection was also shown. The Spaniard blurs the distinction between the real and the imaginary. Perpetrator and victim repeatedly exchange roles. Good and evil, sense and nonsense – much remains enigmatic. Goya’s cryptic pictorial worlds influenced numerous artists in France and Belgium, including Delacroix, Géricault, Victor Hugo and Antoine Wiertz, whose works were presented in the following room. Atmosphere and passion were more important to these artists than anatomical accuracy.

Among the German artists – who were the focus of the next section of the exhibition – it is Carl Blechen who is especially close to Goya and Delacroix. His paintings are a testimony to his lust for gloom. His soft spot for the controversial author E. T. A. Hoffmann – also known as “Ghost-Hoffmann” in Germany – led Blechen to paint works such as

Pater Medardus (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin)

– a portrait of the mad protagonist in The Devil’s Elixirs.

The artist was not alone in Germany when it came to a penchant for dark and disturbing subjects. Caspar David Friedrich’s works, too, contain gruesome elements: cemeteries, open graves, abandoned ruins, ships steered by an invisible hand, lonely gorges and forests are pervasive in his oeuvre. One does not only need to look at the scenes of mourning in the sketchbook at the Kunsthalle Mannheim for the omnipresent theme of death.

Friedrich was prominently represented in the exhibition with his paintings

Moon Behind Clouds above the Seashore from the Hamburger Kunsthalle and

Kügelgen’s Grave from the Lübecker Museums,

as well as with one of his last privately owned works,

Ship at Deep Sea with full Sails.

Friedrich’s paintings are steeped in oppressive silence. This uncompromising attitude anticipates the ideas of Symbolism, which will be considered in the next chapter of the exhibition. These ‘Neo-Romantics’ stylised speechlessness as the ideal mode of human communication, which would lead to fundamental and seminal insights.

Odilon Redon’s masterpiece

Closed Eyes,

a loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, impressively encapsulates this notion.

Paintings by Arnold Böcklin, James Ensor, Fernand Khnopff or Edvard Munch also embody this idea. However, as with the Romantics, these restrained works are face to face with works where anxiety and repressed passions are brought unrestrainedly to the surface; works that are unsettling in their radicalism even today. While Gustave Moreau, Max Klinger, Franz von Stuck and Alfred Kubin belong to the art historical canon, here the exhibition presented artists who are still to be discovered in Germany: Jean-Joseph Carriès, Paul Dardé, Jean Delville, Julien-Adolphe Duvocelle, Léon Frédéric, Eugène Laermans and Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer.

The presentation concluded with the Surrealist movement, founded by André Breton. He inspired artists such as Ernst, Brassaϊ or Dalí, to create their wondrous pictorial realms from the reservoir of the subconscious and celebrated them as fantasy’s victory over the “factual world”.

Max Ernst vehemently called for “the borders between the so-called inner and outer world” to be blurred. He demonstrated this most clearly in his forest paintings, four of which have been assembled for this exhibition, one of them the major work

Vision Provoked by the Nocturnal Aspect of the Porte Saint-Denis (private collection).

The art historian Carl Einstein considered the Surrealists to be the Romantics’ successors and coined the phrase ‘the Romantic generation’. In spite of this historical link the Surrealists were far from retrospective. On the contrary: no other movement was so open to new media; photography and film were seen as equal to traditional media. Alongside literature, film established itself as the main arena for dark Romanticism in the 20th century. This is where evil, the thrill of fear and the lust for horror and gloom found a new home.

The exhibition, which presented the Romantic as a mindset that prevailed throughout Europe and remained influential beyond the 19th century, was accompanied by a substantial catalogue.

As is true for any designation of an epoch, Romanticism too is nothing more than an auxiliary construction, defined less by the exterior characteristics of an artwork than by the inner sentiment of the artist. The term “dark Romanticism” cannot be traced to its origins, but – as is also valid for Romanticism per se – comes from literary studies. The German term is closely linked to the professor of English Studies Mario Praz and his publication La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica of 1930, which was published in German in 1963 as Liebe, Tod und Teufel. Die schwarze Romantik (literally: Love, Death and Devil. Dark Romanticism).

The exhibition “Dark Romanticism. From Goya to Max Ernst“ traveled to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (4th March until 9th June 2013).

More images:

Ernst Ferdinand Oehme (1797-1855)
Procession in the Fog
1828
Oil on canvas
81.5 x 105.5 cm
Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

Samuel Colman (1780-1845)
The Edge of Doom
1836-1838
Oil on canvas
137.2 x 199.4 cm
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Laura L. Barnes

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
Dream caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Awakening
1944
Oil on wood
51 x 41 cm
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

Edvard Munch (1863-1944)
Vampire
1916-1918
Oil on canvas
85 x 110 cm
Collection Würth
Photo: Archiv Würth
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

René Magritte (1898-1967)
Sentimental Conversation
1945
Oil on canvas
54 x 65 cm
Private Collection
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

Paul Hippolyte Delaroche (1797-1856)
Louise Vernet, the artist’s wife, on her Deathbed
1845-46
Oil on canvas
62 x 74.5 cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes
© Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes

Gabriel von Max (1840-1915)
The White Woman
1900
Oil on canvas
100 x 72 cm
Private Collection

On December 22, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), will present The Age of Impressionism: Great French Paintings from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, showcasing the Clark’s renowned holdings of French Impressionist painting. The exhibition features 73 paintings by artists such as Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, as well as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Jean-François Millet, Jean-Léon Gérôme, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard, among others. The exhibition will be on view at the MFAH from December 22, 2013, through March 23, 2014.

The Clark launched its collection tour in early 2011 at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, coinciding with a three-year expansion of its Williamstown, Massachusetts facility. The MFAH is only the second U.S. museum to host the exhibition, with lead corporate funding provided by TMK IPSCO. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, initially the exclusive American venue, displayed it in spring 2012. Houston was recently added as a final U.S. site following the conclusion of the Asian leg of the tour. To date, the tour has been viewed by more than 1.6 million people around the world.

Most of the works in the collection were acquired by Sterling and Francine Clark between 1910 and 1950. Sterling Clark, an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, began collecting art in Paris after a distinguished career in the United States Army. The couple assembled their collection based on their personal tastes, amassing paintings, silver, sculpture, porcelain, drawings and prints for their homes in Paris and New York. In 1950, the Clarks decided to create a permanent, public home for their collection. Drawn by the setting of the surrounding Berkshires and the appeal of its proximity to the academic community of Williams College, they settled on a 140-acre site in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute opened in 1955. Since its inception, the Institute has pursued a dual mission as both a museum and a center for research and higher education in the visual arts.

From a review well worth reading of an earlier showing: (Images added)

It is a jolt to discover that so many Renoirs can cast a pink pall (flecked with blue and turquoise) so intense that the early Pissarro of a snow-laden landscape, Piette's House at Montfoucault,(below) in a limited palette of grays, is visual relief. But it's one that doesn't last long. Just as quickly, the pink-hued light of Claude Monet's luxuriant seascape

The Cliffs at Étretat:

Claude Monet, The Cliffs at Etretat, 1885, oil on canvas, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

brings the viewer back to the rosy-hued world so popular among the impressionists and the Clarks.

But the exhibit is not all pastel prettiness. There are struggles and evolutionary gears grinding on the walls. The transition to impressionism and beyond was a time of great experimentation.

Barbizon school painter Théodore Rousseau worked on

Farm in the Landes

for more than 25 years, calling the experience "bittersweet." By the time he had finished his sun-flecked landscape of giant oaks, this style of meticulous observation had become passé. It is worth irritating the museum guards to get as close as possible to see the detail in this lovely work.

The oddly shaped Degas,

Dancers in the Classroom:,

Edgar Degas, Dancers in the Classroom, c.1880, oil on canvas, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

twice as long as it is tall, plays with panorama and perspective. It was never exhibited by Degas, and he kept it in his studio, working and reworking the figures. The outstretched leg of one ballerina was repositioned as many as nine times. While it was a constant problem for him, eventually it became one his most iconic works.

Two paintings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the Clark collection are revelations. They were painted after his academic training and before his avant-garde posterization of Parisian night life that became his most recognizable style. These two works, of the beautiful redhead

Carmen

and of a pensive woman sitting alone in a cafe,

Waiting,

are beautifully modulated paintings that easily could be mistaken for works by Degas.

From another review (images added):

The Age of Impressionism represents all the important types of painting that the Impressionists practiced, from landscapes to figure compositions and still lifes. Their near-‐magical mastery of effects of natural light comes through strongly in

Monet’s springtime view of Tulip Fields at Sassenheim, near Leiden or

Pissarro’s Piette’s House at Montfoucault, a winter scene:

Camille Pissarro, Piette's House at Montfoucault, 1874, oil on canvas, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

The Clark Renoirs are virtually an exhibition within the exhibition, representing the range of his subject matter and the evolution of his style from the 1870s to the 1890s. They include some of the most sensuous and seductive of all his works—such unabashed celebrations of youth and beauty as Girl with a Fan and Sleeping Girl. Among the other masterpieces of Impressionist figure painting in the exhibition is one of the most beautiful of Degas’s behind-‐the-‐scenes paintings of the ballet, Dancers in the Classroom, its off-‐centered composition reflecting the artist’s love of Japanese woodblock prints. Grouped near the beginning of the exhibition, paintings such as Gérôme’s Fellah Women Drawing Water give a sense of the high level of technical “finish” practiced by older painters and beloved of more conservative taste during the Impressionist era.

And another review of the earlier show:

It is a beautiful show, and the best part is that it just keeps on going. Paintings wrap around and fill the Kimbell’s large exhibition hall, and there is literally a masterpiece around every turn.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, "Onions", 1881
Oil on canvas, 15 3/8 x 23 7/8 in. © Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.

“Onions” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted 1881 was one gem of the show. The deliberate and quick brushstrokes from the artist seem to rain down in parallel diagonals and almost collide with the curvature of the onions, garlic and cloth atop the table. As with most of the paintings in the exhibition, from afar a delicate and moving scene is rendered, but the closer the viewer gets, the more the canvas seems to disintegrate into swaths of color; it is no great mystery these artists and these very works were the inspiration for the pointillist movement that followed.

Another favorite piece by Renoir was “Sunset”, c. 1879.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, "Sunset" c. 1879, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 © Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.

The oil on canvas measuring 18 by 24 inches pays homage to Claude Monet’s famous 1872 painting “Impression Sunrise”, the painting which lent the movement its name when Parisian art critic Louis Leroy mockingly referred to it with the phrase, ‘not a painting, just an impression’. Like Monet, Renoir’s seascape is a captured moment, an instantaneous impression depicted quickly on the canvas. With bright and dark blues, subtle yellows and vivid pinks the artist’s hand is evident in every stroke. As one looks at the piece, it is difficult to comprehend how the colors maintained their clarity and didn’t collide into a quagmire of brown or purple.

The piece is a masterful display of layered color and balancing line to create movement; the water moves at the mercy of the wind and current as the sun sets in the background, all targeted around a small black sail boat in the center of the canvas.

The numerous Renoir pieces are almost like a show within a show, clearly giving the viewer an overview of the artist’s evolution from the 1870s to the 1890s. Be sure to see his

“Self Portrait” from 1875

in which the artist portrays himself in a black suit with a fancy colorful collar; the portrait is intense in expression, depiction and emotion.

Great review, lots more images!

More images

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, A Box at the Theater (At the Concert), 1880, oil on canvas, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Henri Fantin-Latour, Roses in a Bowl and Dish, 1885, oil on canvas, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Seated Nude ,1884, oil on canvas, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919). Venice, the Doge's Palace, 1881. Oil on canvas, 21 1/2 x 25 7/8 in. (54.5 x 65.7 cm). Acquired by Sterling and Francine Clark, 1933

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), The Bath, 1885–86. Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 28 7/8 in. (92.1 x 73.3 cm). Acquired by Sterling and Francine Clark, 1949

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), The River Oise near Pontoise, 1873. Oil on canvas, 18 1/8 x 21 7/8 in. (46 x 55.7 cm). Acquired by Sterling and Francine Clark, 1945

Paul Gauguin's 'Young Christian Girl,' 1894

Pierre Bonnard, Women with a Dog, 1891

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, c. 1879, oil on canvas. © Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.

The 73 paintings by 25 artists to be exhibited span 70 years and not only tell the story of the Clarks' devotion and passion for collecting but of painting in nineteenth-century France, from the Orientalist works of Gérôme to the Barbizon paintings of Corot and Rousseau to the Impressionist masterpieces of Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro, and concludes with the early modern output of Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard. Portraits, landscapes, marines, still lifes and scenes of everyday life are all represented.

Catalogue
A catalogue to accompany the exhibition is published by Skira Rizzoli, with editions in at least five languages. The 240-page publication features 131 color illustrations with essays by James A. Ganz and Richard R. Brettell.

Exhibition Schedule
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston December 22, 2013 – March 23, 2014
• Shanghai Museum September 19 – December 1, 2013
• Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe June 8 – September 1, 2013
• Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo February 9 – May 26, 2013
• Montreal Museum of Fine Arts October 8, 2012 – January 20, 2013
• Royal Academy of Arts, London July 7 – September 23, 2012
• Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth March 11 – June 17, 2012
• Fundación "La Caixa," Barcelona November 17, 2011 – February 12, 2012
• Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny July 13 – October 31, 2011
• Palazzo Reale, Milan March 2 – June 19, 2011

Jointly organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Matisse from SFMOMA brings together the work of Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954) from both institutions’ collections for a nearly yearlong presentation at the Legion of Honor. The single-gallery exhibition features 23 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from SFMOMA’s internationally acclaimed Matisse collection, alongside four important paintings and drawings from the Fine Arts Museums’ holdings, and two works from private local collections. On view from November 9, 2013 through September 7, 2014, Matisse from SFMOMA traces four decades of Matisse’s career, celebrating the Bay Area’s early and long-standing enthusiasm for the artist.

Matisse’s expressive canvases were first introduced to San Francisco shortly after the 1906 earthquake, shocking the arts community with their startling colors and brushwork. Since then, the Bay Area has maintained a fervent connection to the artist’s work, resulting in SFMOMA’s rich collection, which showcases pieces from Matisse’s early career, and continues through the 1930s.

Matisse from SFMOMA includes important examples from the artist’s Fauve period, along with other significant paintings, drawings, and bronzes. Iconic works such as

Sketch from “The Joy of Life” (1905‒1906),

The Girl with Green Eyes (1908):

Henri Matisse, La fille aux yeux verts (The Girl with Green Eyes), 1908. Oil on canvas, 26 x 20 in. (66.1 x 50.8 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, bequest of Harriet Lane Levy. © Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Don Myer

and portraits of the artist’s early patrons

Michael and Sarah Stein (1916)

are featured along with major sculptural studies that include Madeleine, I (1901), The Serf (1900–1903), and Large Head: Henriette II (1927).

Also on view are pre-Fauve still lifes and landscapes, as well as

The Conversation (1938), a later decorative interior.

Selections from the Fine Arts Museums’ collection include the vibrant and patterned

Young Woman in Pink (1923) :

Henri Matisse, Young Woman in Pink (La Jeune Femme en Rose), 1923; Oil on canvas; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, memorial gift from Dr. T. Edward and Tullah Hanley, Bradford, Pennsylvania; © 2013 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: courtesy Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

and an early nude painted in the academic manner Faith, the Model (ca. 1901), which was formerly owned by the Steins and displayed in their Paris apartment, as were many of the works in SFMOMA’s holdings.

The exhibition is organized by Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture, SFMOMA, and Melissa Buron, assistant curator of European painting, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, with assistance from Jared Ledesma, curatorial assistant, SFMOMA.

Matisse from SFMOMA is jointly organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Major support is generously provided by the Walter and Elise Haas Fund.

Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition will be accompanied by a 40-page, illustrated catalogue, Matisse and San Francisco, published by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and available in November 2013.

In celebration of the rare loan of The Frick Collection’s Don Pedro, Duque de Osuna by Spanish master Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828),

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746–1828)
Don Pedro, Duque de Osuna, c.1790s
Oil on canvas
54 1/4 x 43 x 4 in. (137.8 x 109.2 x 10.2 cm)
The Frick Collection; photo: Michael Bodycomb

the Norton Simon Museum presents the exhibition Unflinching Vision: Goya’s Rare Prints, Dec. 6, 2013–March 3, 2014. While the majority of the artist’s prints were published posthumously, this exhibition presents a selection of works that Goya himself worked on during his lifetime. More than 30 working proofs, trial proofs and published prints made under his supervision are on view, as well as a small selection of posthumous examples from his later numbered editions. With exceptional examples from his series Los Caprichos, The Disasters of War, La Tauromaquia and Los Proverbios, these artworks demonstrate Goya’s mastery of printmaking and, most significantly, his care in meaningfully capturing the spirit of his time.

From royal portraiture to scenes in a bullring, Goya infused his keen vision of the observed world with his own creative impulses. This delicate dance is visible throughout the artist’s incredible output of prints. Goya began to experiment with printmaking well after he had established himself as a successful painter to the royal court in Madrid. He started, tentatively, etching a few religious subjects, yet rather quickly he began his first ambitious series of etchings: 11 copies after masterpieces by the father of Spanish painting, Diego Velázquez. Goya’s skill as a draftsman is pronounced in these prints, as is his facility with working on a copper plate, for it is in this series that he first experiments with aquatint, a technique that allows the artist to create subtle tonal areas in the image rather than just scratched lines. “Un Infante de España,” on view in this exhibition, not only presents the formality of Velázquez’s composition but also exhibits Goya’s growing skill with intaglio techniques. Though aquatint is used here primarily in the background, Goya came to master its use, harnessing its subtlety to create depth and even to draw entire compositions.

By the mid-1790s, Goya began to work on Los Caprichos, the first of four major print series that came to define his career as a printmaker. Images of people, witches and imagined creatures identifying specific social and cultural problems, with titles carefully narrating the scenes, make up this series. An early working proof of plate 6, “Nobody Knows Himself,” presents Goya’s concerns with deception and artifice, and it shows the print before numbering and with the title handwritten in ink. In plate 20, “There They Go Plucked (i.e. Fleeced),” prostitutes sweep out their customers, cowering and pathetic, as the women prepare for the next group of clients who hover above. The drama of the scene is enhanced by the contrast between completely uninked areas and the various gradations of aquatint that define recessional space, but as the edition was printed, this contrast was lost as the aquatint faded nearly completely. Exhibiting the working proof alongside the first, second and eighth editions of the same plate highlights this degradation.

While Los Caprichos describes a time before the turn of the century, when the French monarchy fell and Napoleon rose to power, Goya’s next series tells of the grueling six-year war between France and Spain that began in 1808. In addition to its cruel, disorganized and prolonged combat (the term “guerilla” warfare was coined from this war), it caused a disastrous famine. Many of its battles and events, including torture and starvation, are depicted brutally in the 82 plates of Goya’s print series The Disasters of War. “One Can’t Look,” plate 26, is a triumph of Goya’s compositional acumen. Men and women cower, plead and surrender in desperation within a web of dramatic shadows, and only the tips of the executioners’ bayonets reveal the reason for their suffering.

Perhaps due to the sensitivity of the subject, Goya decided not to publish an edition of The Disasters during his lifetime. Turning instead to a public project that was more benign, Goya prepared a series of bullfighting scenes, equally brilliantly executed and known ultimately as La Tauromaquia.

This group of 33 prints traces the history of bullfighting in the country and can be read as being both respectful and critical of the pastime. In plate 20, the theatrical physical feats accomplished by a torero are on display. Yet, in the following plate, Goya reminds us of the deadly nature of the sport. His interest in the popular subject matter and its connection to his national identity were further illuminated when Goya was living in exile in Bordeaux, France. There, in 1825, he used lithography for the first time. The technique is very similar to drawing, and Goya was immediately able to create lively compositions with greater ease than aquatint, in a series of four prints with the same theme, known as The Bulls of Bordeaux.

Whereas the two intaglio series—La Tauromaquia and The Disasters—depict real-life events, Goya continued to create wildly imaginative scenes that comment on contemporary behavior as in Los Caprichos. In the group of 18 prints gathered together and sold as Los Proverbios upon their first publication in 1864, Goya magnificently illustrates a number of human follies. Two-headed women, animals, giants and monsters are all situated in a world with no setting, no real context. The scenes are executed with brilliant technical facility: etched lines creating dynamic scenarios set off against the rich darkness of a field of aquatint, as in “A Way of Flying,” a fantastical illustration of the idea that “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Unflinching Vision: Goya’s Rare Prints is organized by Curator Leah Lehmbeck. It is presented in conjunction with The Frick Collection’s loan of Goya’s Don Pedro, Duque de Osuna, and in anticipation of the scholarly catalogue Goya in the Norton Simon Museum, to be published in 2014.

All works by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746–1828):

Los Caprichos: There They Go Plucked (i.e. Fleeced), c. 1798, Etching and aquatint, The Norton Simon Foundation

Los Caprichos: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1799, Etching with watercolor, The Norton Simon Foundation

The Disasters of War: One Can’t Look, 1814-20, Etching, Norton Simon Art Foundation

La Tauromaquia: The Agility and Audacity of Juanito Apiñani in [the Ring] at Madrid, 1816, Etching and aquatint, Norton Simon Art Foundation

Los Disparates: Where There’s a Will There’s a Way: A Way of Flying, 1864, Etching with aquatint, The Norton Simon Foundation

Copies After Velázquez: Un Infante de España [Infante Don Fernando], c. 1778-79, Etching with burnished aquatint and drypoint, Norton Simon Art Foundation

More on The Norton Simon Museum Presents an Installation of the Portrait of Don Pedro, Duque de Osuna, by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, on Loan from The Frick Collection, New York

Major figures in the Spanish Enlightenment, don Pedro Alcántara Téllez-Girón y Pacheco, the 9th Duque de Osuna (1755–1807), and his wife, Doña María Josefa de la Soledad Alfonso Pimentel y Téllez-Girón, Condesa-Duquesa de Benavente y Osuna (1752–1834), promoted liberal causes in politics, science, agriculture and industry and were equally progressive in their taste in art. From 1785 to the end of the century, they commissioned portraits of themselves and their children as well as some of Goya’s most imaginative genre scenes, and they amassed a large collection of his prints. Galassi explores the Frick portrait, carried out at the end of the century, in the context of the long, mutually beneficial relationship between Goya and his primary patrons of the time.

About Goya and the Duque de Osuna

Norton Simon’s fascination with Goya is understandable in the context of his own collection and the artist’s position in the timeline of the history of art. Goya’s formative style was greatly guided by his Spanish forebears and others, especially Velázquez, Tiepolo, Mengs and Corrado Giaquinto, as well as his teacher and brother-in-law, Francisco Bayeu. In turn, this long-lived artist undeniably influenced 19th-century French artists, from the Romantics to the Realists, such as Courbet and Manet, who were clearly drawn to the master’s freedom of style as well as his satirical commentary on society, religion and politics. Given his placement in this chronology and the fact that he was born at mid-century, Goya is often called the “last Old Master”; the first 20 years of his career were largely devoted to tapestry design and religious fresco work. However, his politics, social conscience, brushwork and shift toward portrait and genre painting by the mid-1780s place him soundly in the 19th-century arena, and it is not without reason that he has also been seen in this context as the “first modern artist.” His repertoire of portraits started relatively late in his artistic career, as he was nearing his 40th year. The commission for the Frick portrait came about a decade into this part of his oeuvre, in the mid-1790s, as his renown as a portrait painter attracted the attention of royalty and aristocrats alike, including the ilustrado Don Pedro Téllez-Girón, 9th Duque de Osuna (1755–1807), who was one of Goya’s most important clients and loyal patrons.

Both the duke and his wife, María Josefa Pimentel, 15th Countess of Benavente (1752–1834), continued the tradition upheld by their aristocratic families as major patrons of the arts, as supporters of humanist exploration and as generous hosts of salons at their palace in Madrid and their French-inspired country estate known as “El Capricho de la Alameda de Osuna.” Perhaps the countess-duchess surpassed even the duke in her enthusiasm for intellectual stimulation and culture and in her taste for all things French. Her gatherings of liberal writers, botanists, artists, scientists and bullfighters vied with those of her closest female counterpart, the renowned 13th Duchess of Alba, who was also a pivotal presence in Goya’s life.

Over the course of 15 years, the duke and his wife provided Goya with commissions for nearly 30 paintings, including decorative panels for their home and portraits of themselves and their family. They were also avid collectors of his prints. The Frick portrait was the third known likeness of the duke to be executed by Goya, and most scholars date it to the mid-1790s. Unlike the first portraits of the duke and his wife (1783–85), which were very tightly painted in the academic tradition, the Frick’s portrait is surprisingly informal. The duke is shown standing, in three-quarter profile against a plain, dark background, with long hair and wearing a subdued silk tailcoat, the cut and color of which are in a combination of the more reserved French and British styles that were in vogue. Except for the flourish of his jabot, the silver buttons and the sheen of his waistcoat, there is very little hint of extravagance, and there is a noted absence of medals and honorific decorations that Osuna was known to have received by 1795, after serving in several campaigns against the French. He stands in a relaxed pose, his balance checked jauntily by a walking stick, and his other hand grasps a partially unfolded letter, dedicated to him from the artist himself: El Duque de Osuna. Por Goya. The letter reminds us of Goya’s own prodigious practice of letter writing and especially of a missive that he wrote to the duchess of Osuna, reminding her that he had not yet been paid for work he had produced for them. In the Frick painting, the duke’s countenance is pleasant, his dark eyes have a bemused, familiar regard, and he appears to be smiling or about to speak. Had the latter been the case, his words would have most likely gone unheard by the painter, as Goya had lost his hearing in 1793 after a serious illness.

This grand, mysterious portrait remained with the Osuna family until the profligate reign of the 12th duke, who was forced to sell most of the ducal collection in 1896. The painting was later in the possession of the financier/philanthropist J. Pierpont Morgan, and it finally came to reside in the Frick Collection in 1943, where it joined three other dramatic late paintings by Goya that were purchased in 1914 by Henry Clay Frick.

Bernardo BELLOTO, Venice 1722-1780 Warsaw, ARCHITECTURAL CAPRICCIO WITH A SELF PORTRAIT in the costume of a Venetian Nobleman, c1762-65, oil on canvas.

A major exhibition of Italian paintings will open at the 22 East 80th Street gallery of Otto Naumann Ltd. on January 6 and remain on view until February 15.

“LOOKING SOUTH: Three Centuries of Italian Paintings” will feature more than forty Renaissance and Baroque masterworks dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, including several important discoveries never before publicly exhibited.

According to Otto Naumann, “The rich history of the collecting of Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting in America has been explored in several recent books and exhibitions. This past September the Frick Collection sponsored a two-day conference “Going for Baroque; Americans Collect Italian Paintings of the 17th and 18th Centuries.” It was at this event that the idea for “Looking South” was born.”

Attending the conference were Otto Naumann and Robert Simon, both Old Master painting dealers with a passion for Italy and Italian art who began their careers as art historians. During the lunch break they lamented the fact that there had been no major commercial exhibition of Italian paintings in New York for many years – this despite a resurgent interest among collectors and museums for paintings of the period. They decided to combine their resources and expertise in order to mount “Looking South.”

The exhibited works range from portraits to still-lifes, from mythological subjects to mysterious allegories, from intimate devotional paintings to grand altarpieces. Paintings by some of the greatest names of Italian art will be featured, including Titian, Palma Vecchio, Ribera, Baglione, Crespi, Cavallino, Mattia Preti, Ceruti, and Bellotto. These have all been carefully conserved and meticulously researched, a process that draws on the academic backgrounds of the two organizers as well as their decades of experience in the connoisseurship of Old Master paintings.

Otto Naumann received his M.A. from Columbia in 1974 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1979 and was a Professor of Art History at Boston University and the University of Delaware before leaving academe. His catalogue of the paintings of Frans van Mieris is the standard work on the artist; as a dealer he has handled works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Rubens and Velazquez.

Robert Simon’s 1982 doctorate is from Columbia. He was a Research Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum and has published and lectured widely on Bronzino, the subject of his thesis, and numerous aspects of Italian painting. He was involved in the recent discovery of Leonardo da Vinci’s lost painting Salvator Mundi and is currently writing a book about its history and recovery.

Robert Simon adds that, “While Renaissance and Baroque art continues to attract enthusiastic audiences in museums, the exhibition hopes to highlight the availability of major works accessible to collectors who have become devotées of Italian painting.”

All works in the exhibition are for sale. A brochure and digital catalogue will be available on January 6 at www.ottonaumannltd.com or www.robertsimon.com. Otto Naumann Ltd is located at 22 East 80th Street. Exhibition hours are from Monday to Saturday, 11 to 5.

Among highlights in the exhibition will be a major painting by

Titian, “St. Sebastian,”

painted for his patron Federico Gonzaga, oil on canvas 74 ¾ by 37 ¾ inches,

Giovanni Battista Beinaschi’s altarpiece the “Martyrdom of Saint Peter,” oil on canvas 116 ¼ x 76 inches,

and a spectacular “Still-Life with Musical Instrument” by Evaristo Baschenis, oil on canvas 38 x 57 1/7 inches.

Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900

Zurbarán (1598-1664)

Pablo Picasso Women - Bulls - Old Masters

Jordaens: the Pride of Antwerp

Face to Face: Flanders, Florence, and Renaissance Painting

Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine

Impressionists on the Water

Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance

Anders Zorn: Sweden's Master Painter

Violence and Virtue: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes

David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition

American Adversaries: West and Copley

Paris on Stage. 1889-1914

Alex Colville

Eric Fischl

Dark Romanticism. From Goya to Max Ernst

The Age of Impressionism: Great French Paintings from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Matisse from SFMOMA

Unflinching Vision: Goya’s Rare Prints and Masterpiece: Don Pedro, Duque de Osuna

LOOKING SOUTH: Three Centuries of Italian Paintings