John Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum

February 18, 2014, 7:20 am

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The Princeton University Art Museum March 17 through June 10, 2012
Frist Center for the Visual Arts Nashville, TN June 22–September 30, 2012

This compelling, once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of 85 paintings, oil sketches, watercolors and drawings offers a rare insight into the revolutionary working processes of John Constable (1776–1837), England’s foremost landscape painter, who took his paint box out into the countryside, ultimately paving the way for the avant-garde French artists of the 1870s and changing the course of modern art. The Princeton University Art Museum was the first of only two North American venues for this exhibition, the most ambitious look at Constable’s work to be held in the United States in a generation.

John Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum traced the evolution of Constable’s brilliant, fluid landscape painting style, rooted in the artist’s meticulous observation of the British countryside he knew intimately from childhood. To faithfully capture shifting effects of color and light, Constable became a master of the quick oil sketch, painting rapidly outdoors on sheets of paper or scraps of canvas pinned to the lid of his paint box. He then used these sketches as source material for fully realized exhibition landscapes, painted in his London studio. Well aware of the new theories on the natural sciences emerging during the English Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century, Constable declared, “Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.” To this end, he generally inscribed his oil sketches with the exact date, location and weather conditions in which they were made.

But to think of these studies as merely provisional works of art is to misunderstand both their complexity and their revolutionary character as improvised works, brimming with color, open brushwork, and a sense of spontaneity that allows them to be seen as “modern” even in the 21st century. Indeed, in 1821, 53 years before the first French Impressionist exhibition in 1874, Constable wrote “But I should paint my own places best—painting is but another word for feeling.”

The exhibition began in 1800 with Constable’s first paintings of the lush farmlands of his boyhood home—the now-canonical “Constable Country” of Suffolk and Essex— and progresses through the artist’s career, presenting works grouped according to the locations he would come to immortalize—the Stour River valley, Hampstead Heath, the Salisbury plains, and Brighton beach—all seen through the lens of his close observations from nature.

At the heart of the exhibition were two vibrant full-scale studies for two of Constable’s most celebrated exhibition paintings:



The Hay Wain (1821)



and The Leaping Horse (1825).

Like the finished paintings, these sketches were painted on the grand scale of history paintings and measure over six-feet wide. They were recently cleaned, which enables us to see their original colors and tonalities for the first time in living memory. They are displayed side by side with one of the artist’s finished paintings,



Hampstead Heath: Branch Hill Pond,

and a spectacular selection of Constable’s small oil sketches. There are exquisite watercolors and drawings, which span from painstaking early works to the seemingly effortless later sketches that defined the now-canonical English landscape: the “Constable Country” of Suffolk and Essex, where the artist spent his childhood. In addition, there are views of Brighton, London, and Salisbury.

The oil sketches for The Hay Wain and The Leaping Horse at the center of this exhibition were first loaned to the V&A by Henry Vaughn, an important collector of Constable's work, and remained there until their bequest in 1900 made them a permanent part of the museum’s collection. The V&A’s collection of oil sketches and other works by Constable grew significantly in the later part of the nineteenth century with further extensive gifts from the artist’s daughter Isabel Constable and daughter-in-law Anna Constable. These donations made the entirety of Constable’s achievement, from rapid pencil drawings to oil sketches and finished paintings, accessible to the public for the first time and significantly enriched our understanding of the artist.

John Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by V&A Publishing.

The exhibition was organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Finished paintings:



The Hay Wain (1821)



The Leaping Horse (1825).


Outstanding review, more images including:



John Constable. The Valley of the Stour with Dedham in the Distance, ca. 1805–9. Oil on paper, later lined onto canvas, 19 1/4 x 23 1/2 in. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 321-1888. © Victoria and Albert Museum / V&A images



John Constable. Salisbury Cathedral from the South-west, ca. 1820. Oil on canvas, later lined, 9 7/8 x 11 7/8 in. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 319-1888. © Victoria and Albert Museum / V&A images



John Constable. Brighton Beach, with Fishing Boat and Crew, 1824. Oil on paper, 24 1/2 x 30 in. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 782-1888. © Victoria and Albert Museum / V&A images

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Thomas Sully: Painted Performance

February 18, 2014, 9:29 am

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Milwaukee Art Museum - October 11, 2013–January 5, 2014
San Antonio Museum of Art - February 8, 2014–May 11, 2014

Thomas Sully (1783–1872) was one of nineteenth-century America’s most prolific artists, painting over twenty-three hundred works during a career that spanned seventy years. In his portraits, the movers and shakers of the eighteen hundreds come to startling life—from the Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette, young Queen Victoria, and President Andrew Jackson to the stars of the international stage. Many of these works were created in Philadelphia, a crossroads for politics and culture at the time.

In addition to his voluminous portrait practice, Sully had a vigorous interest in subject pictures that centered on theatre, literature, and fairy tales. He often created these paintings—which have been all but forgotten—to offset the effects of the economy on his career and to extend his brand.

Thomas Sully: Painted Performance offers a new look at an American Old Master. The exhibition is the first retrospective of the artist in thirty years, and the first to explore the artist’s entire career in depth. Nearly eighty paintings from public and private collections across the U.S. and Great Britain celebrate the full range of Sully’s artistic imagination for a twenty-first century audience, including the lifelong love of the theatre and performance that permeates all his works.

Born into a theatrical family that had emigrated from England, Sully made his own debut on the stage in South Carolina as a child. His early commissions arose from his family connections in the theatre worlds of New York and Philadelphia. His images of famous actors and actresses in their most acclaimed roles made his reputation and kept his fame alive throughout his career. At the same time, he composed subject pictures drawn from well-known plays, novels, and even fairy tales, staging these painted scenes as if they were frozen moments from a play.

Whether painting a queen of the stage or a minister, a popular heroine from Charles Dickens or a member of his own beloved family, Sully created characters on canvas full of personality, drama, movement, and activity. Both Sully’s portraits and subject pictures reveal his intuitive understanding of William Shakespeare’s famous lines from As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players.”

Thomas Sully: Painted Performance is organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum. It has been co-curated by Dr. William Keyse Rudolph, the Museum's Dudley J. Godfrey Jr. Curator of American Art and Decorative Arts and Director of Exhibitions, and Dr. Carol Eaton Soltis, Project Associate Curator of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Images from the Exhibition:



Frances Anne Kemble as Beatrice, 1833
Oil on canvas, 30 _ 25 in. (76.2 _ 63.5 cm)
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Bequest of Henry C. Carey (The Carey Collection), 1879.8.24
Courtesy of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia




Major Thomas Biddle, 1818
Oil on canvas, 36 1⁄2 _ 28 1⁄16 in. (92.7 _ 71.3 cm)
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Bequest of Ann E. Biddle, 1925.8
Courtesy of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia





Cinderella at the Kitchen Fire, 1843
Oil on canvas, 50 _ 58 in. (127 _ 147.3 cm)
Dallas Museum of Art, gift of the Pauline Allen Gill Foundation, 2005.1



The Torn Hat, 1820
Oil on panel, 19 1⁄8 _ 14 5 ⁄8 in. (48.6 _ 37.2 cm)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Miss Belle Greene and Henry Copley Greene in memory of their mother, Mary Abby Greene (Mrs. J. S. Copley Greene), 16.104. © 2013, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston




Child on the Sea Side, 1828
Oil on canvas, 56 1 ⁄ 2 _ 36 1 ⁄ 2 in. (143.5 _ 92.7 cm)
The Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia, 1954.1885



Andrew Jackson, 1845
Oil on canvas, 20 3 ⁄8 _ 17 1⁄4 in. (51.8 _ 43.8 cm)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1942.8.34.
Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington



Little Nell Asleep in the Curiosity Shop, 1841
Oil on canvas, 44 _ 56 in. (111.8 _ 142.2 cm)
John Frederick Lewis Collection, Rare Book Department, The Free Library of Philadelphia



Sarah Esther Hindman as Little Red Riding Hood, 1833
Oil on canvas, 52 1 ⁄2 _ 32 1 ⁄2 in. (133.4 _ 82.6 cm)
The Maryland State Archives, MSA SC 4680-10-0096:
Photo by Harry Connolly">



Prison Scene from J. Fenimore Cooper’s “The Pilot”: Cecelia Howard and Katherine Plowden Arousing the Prisoner Edward Griffith from His Slumber, 1841
Oil on canvas, 37 _ 28 in. (94 _ 71.1 cm)
Birmingham Museum of Art, Museum purchase in honor of Richard Murray, former director, with funds provided by Dr. Walter Clark, EBSCO Industries, Mr. John Jemison, Jr., Dr. Cameron McDonald, Dr. John Poyner, Mrs. Alys R. Stephens, Mr. Elton B. Stephens, Jr., Mr. Crawford L. Taylor, Jr., and the 1984 Museum Dinner and Ball, 1984.67



George Frederick Cooke in the Role of Richard III, 1811–1812
Oil on canvas, 92 1/8 x 58 1/2 in. (234 x 148.59 cm)
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
Gift of friends and admirers of the artist, 1812.1


A nice review

The Voyage of Life - Thomas Cole

February 19, 2014, 8:53 am

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The Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute Museum of Art in Utica, New York is sending a collection of Thomas Cole paintings on an 18-month tour to four major art museums. “The Voyage of Life,” a series of four allegorical paintings depicting the different stages of life including “Childhood,” “Youth,” “Manhood,” and “Old Age,” will go to

the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, June 13–September 14, 2014
the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia,
the Saint Louis Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri,
and the Dickson Gallery & Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee.

MWPAI is producing a catalog to tour with the collection, which will include essays and notes as well as never-before-published material and research about the paintings.

Early in March of 1839, Thomas Cole was commissioned by the prominent New York banker and philanthropist Samuel Ward Sr., to paint an allegorical series of four paintings entitled "The Voyage of Life", the subject of which he had conceived in the fall of 1836.

Cole began work with great enthusiasm on the first of the series, named



"Childhood" in September 1839,

using as his guide a number of preliminary pencil drawings and oil sketches. Despite the unexpected death of his patron several months later, he continued working on this picture until early 1840 when it was in large measure complete.

Early in 1840, Cole began work on



"Youth", the second picture.



The third picture, "Manhood",

was painted in the summer and fall of 1840,



followed by "Old Age", the last picture of the series.

His great achievement in "The Voyage of Life" was his synthesis of three related ideas: life is a pilgrimage; a person's life can be divided into four distinct stages; and the course of a person's life can be metaphorically compared to a journey on a river that winds its way through a magical landscape. Cole invented a program that combined these three universal themes in simple pictorial terms.

Despite the unexpected death of Ward several months after Cole began the series, he completed the four paintings in 1840. Difficulties with Ward's heirs prompted Cole to paint a second full-size set in Rome during the winter of 1841-1842. The second set of paintings is now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.:



"Childhood"

Genius and Grace: Francois Boucher and the Generation of 1700

February 19, 2014, 10:42 am

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This spring, the verve, grace, and exuberance of 18th-century French drawings will be on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum. The Art Museum will show drawings by the talented group of artists responsible for an unprecedented level of artistic and cultural production in the France of Louis XV in an exhibition titled Genius and Grace: Francois Boucher and the Generation of 1700, on view February 14-May 11, 2014.

Francois Boucher, Charles-Joseph Natoire, Carle Vanloo and their contemporaries, born in or around 1700, executed virtuoso compositions whose refined elegance epitomizes the French grand manner. Along with Boucher, Natoire, and Vanloo, the exhibition will also celebrate lesser known but equally talented figures such as Louis-Gabriel Blanchet and Joseph Francois Parrocel, as well as several pastels, including a rare example by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. More than seventy master drawings, many of which have never before exhibited or published, will be on view.

This exhibition is organized by the Horvitz Collection in Boston—the preeminent private collection of early French art in the United States. Twenty-nine of the most distinguished artists of this period will be featured, along with a fully illustrated catalogue edited by Alvin L. Clark, Curator of the Horvitz Collection and the J.E.Horvitz Research Curator, Department of Drawings, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum.

The Cincinnati Art Museum venue for Genius and Grace: François Boucher and the Generation of 1700 is organized by Dr. Esther Bell, Curator of European Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture; it is the first old master drawings exhibition to take place at the Cincinnati Art Museum in more than thirty years. “These are some of the most beautiful and sexiest images the Old Masters ever produced,” commented Cincinnati Art Museum Director Aaron Betsky; “They are stunning in their display of talent and the sensuality they convey.”

Sixteen of the works on view were created by Francois Boucher, who an eighteenth-century critic called “the painter of voluptuousness and grace.” One of the artist’s drawings, Recumbent Nude,



François Boucher (1703–1770), Recumbent Female Nude, circa 1742–43. Red, white, and black chalk on cream antique laid paper. The Horvitz Collection, Boston.

depicts a luscious female figure. This may, at first, seem to be a provocative and erotically charged image, but it may have simply developed from a figure study intended to be used when painting a sea nymph or other historical subject.

Also part of the exhibition is



Carle Vanloo’s Saint Augustine Disputing with the Donatists,

which has never before been exhibited. This masterpiece is remarkable for its heavy contours and energetic forms encased within a scene of monumental Italian architecture.

According to Cincinnati Art Museum Curator Dr. Esther Bell, “A selection of master drawings was selected that best tell the story of the unfolding eighteenth century. Not only will visitors be able to enjoy the sumptuous forms of the high Rococo, but also the virtuoso drawings that resulted from rigorous academic training and the cool and classicizing manifestations of these artists’ Italian journeys.” Dr. Bell is a specialist of eighteenth-century French art.




Francois Boucher, "Venus Presenting Aeneas to Jupiter and Juno," 1747, black chalk, pen with brown ink, and brush with brown wash and touches of white gouache on tan antique laid paper. The Horvitz Collection, Boston



Francois Boucher, "Crowned Rocaille Escutcheon With Putti and the Order of the Golden Fleece," 1745, black chalk heightened with white chalk on tan antique laid paper, pricked for transfer. The Horvitz Collection, Boston



Francois Boucher, "Adoration of the Shepherds," pen with brown ink and brush with brown wash and touches of blue watercolor over red chalk on cream antique laid paper prepared with a red chalk wash. The Horvitz Collection, Boston



Charles-Antoine Coypel, "Head of Potiphar's Wife," ca. 1737, black chalk and pastel on discolored blue antique laid paper. The Horvitz Collection, Boston

Lasting Impressions of the Grand Tour: Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome

February 19, 2014, 11:04 am

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In the 18th century, the Grand Tour of Europe was an educational and social rite of passage for wealthy young men, particularly from England and Germany. The journey, which could last a year or more, might involve a number of stops. But Rome was the essential destination.

Rome’s wealth of classical art and architecture and the glories of its Renaissance and Baroque periods were considered the pinnacle of Western civilization by the cultural elite of the time. Modern Rome awaited discovery as well, for during this period the capital of the Papal States underwent a dazzling urban and artistic renewal, with the construction of new public and private monuments such as the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain. The Papacy also sponsored lavish festivals featuring elaborate fireworks displays accompanied by large amounts of food and wine. Aristocratic families, wishing to further elevate the manners, tastes and social standing of their sons through exposure to great works of art, fueled a phenomenon of cultural pilgrimage which became known as the Grand Tour, and eventually gave birth to more widespread tourism in the 19th century. In addition, the Grand Tour created a thriving market for prints of the great vedute, or views, of Rome and inspired generations of gifted artists skilled at capturing the sights and spectacles of the Eternal City.

The exhibition Lasting Impressions of the Grand Tour: Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome, at the Princeton University Art Museum from March 5 through June 12, 2011, revealed the rich variety of representations of 18th century Rome that were prompted by the intersection of a flourishing artistic community and the increasing demand for souvenirs of the Grand Tour. This phenomenon is examined through the particular lens of Giuseppe Vasi (1710 -1782), a prolific printmaker and architect who created a comprehensive, multi-volume series of more than 200 etchings of Rome for the tourist trade.

Born in Corleone, Sicily, Vasi lived and worked in Rome, where he was a contemporary of other notable vedutisti (view painters) such as Giovanni Paolo Panini and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Vasi’s student. Vasi’s work, renowned for its exacting topographical accuracy and lively social observation, is viewed here in the context of the artistic and cartographic traditions from which it emerged and which it, in turn, influenced. An understanding of Vasi’s particular vision and its impact on ways of seeing and interpreting the city as a work of art is enhanced by a strong contextual component, demonstrated by loans of paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Firestone and Marquand Libraries at Princeton University, as well as by several works from the Princeton University Art Museum’s own collections, that together create a compelling view of a great world capital in the age of the Grand Tour.

After an introduction to Vasi’s work as a whole, and in the context of late 17th and 18th century Roman cartography (including, most notably,



Giovanni Battista Nolli’s monumental Pianta Grande di Roma, 1748),

the exhibition situated a selection of Vasi’s Magnificenze (both individual plates and bound volumes) within the tradition of the Roman veduta by juxtaposing them with examples in different media by contemporaries including Canaletto, Panini and Piranesi. Finally, the exhibition concluded by presenting these popular images as souvenirs of the Grand Tour, complementing the prints with other collectibles, including a box of plaster casts and a reproduction of an ancient Roman bust of the emperor Caracalla. These, together with portraits and portrayals of identifiable Grand Tourists and Roman inhabitants by such artists as Nathaniel Dance, Pompeo Batoni and Giuseppe Ghezzi, create a compelling ensemble that brings the distant world of the Grand Tour and 18th century Rome closer to today’s spectator.




Frontspiece: Allegorical Scene with Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, from the series Delle Magnificenze di Roma antica e moderna (Book I), 1747.

“Lasting Impressions of the Grand Tour is an exhibition that highlights the significance of the Grand Tour as an important aesthetic and cultural phenomenon,” said Laura M. Giles, Heather and Paul G. Haaga, Jr., Class of 1970, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Princeton University Art Museum and curator of the exhibition at Princeton. “Vasi’s prints—of critical importance to historical studies in urbanism and architecture—serve as the springboard for a broad investigation into the representation of Rome and its impact on collecting practices and, indeed, on taste itself in the age of the Grand Tour. The exhibition also addresses the universal desire to capture a visual reminder of one’s journeys and experiences abroad. Before the invention of photography, Vasi’s etchings, either individually framed or displayed in bound volumes, served as souvenirs—high-end postcards—recalling the splendors visited after one returned home, and prompting others to embark on their own Grand Tour.”

Lasting Impressions of the Grand Tour: Giuseppe Vasi’s Romewas organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon. Two University of Oregon faculty members, James Tice, professor of architecture and James Harper, associate art history, were the curators of the exhibition, and principal authors of



the fully illustrated catalogue published by the Schnitzer:

The catalogue for the exhibition Giuseppe Vasi's Rome: Lasting Impressions from the Age of the Grand Tour is the first to focus solely on this prolific artist, one of the most important printmakers of eighteenth-century Rome. Famous as the teacher of Piranesi, Vasi was a master in his own right, specializing in the depiction of the architectural monuments and urban spaces of the papal city. The exhibition highlighted all of Vasi's major works, including his ten volume Magnificenze di Roma, containing 240 detailed views of the city. Work by other artists, such as Nolli, Pannini, Vernet, Canaletto, and Piranesi, situate the artist's activity in several contexts, including the architecture of settecento Rome, cartography, social history, patronage, tourism, and the envisioning of the early modern cityscape. The richly illustrated catalogue celebrates the 300th anniversary of his birth and includes original essays by international Vasi scholars.

Manet: Portraying Life

February 20, 2014, 9:03 am

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Venues:

Toledo Museum of Art through Jan 1, 2013
Royal Academy of Arts Jan. 26–April 14, 2013

A contemporary of the Impressionists, Manet (1832–1883) painted his family, friends and the literary, political and artistic figures of his day, often in casual settings rather than traditionally posed portraits. His subjects come to life on canvas, making the viewer curious to know more about these people and their lives.

Among his works on display were:




Lady with a Fan (Jeanne Duval), 1862, from the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest;



The Railway, 1872–73, from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.;



The Monet Family in their Garden at Argenteuil, 1874, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art



Chez le Pére Lethuille (1879) , Courtesy of Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tournai



Portrait of Antonin Proust (1880) , Toledo Museum of Art



Édouard Manet, Mme Manet in the Conservatory, 1879 (The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo)



Madame Manet at the Piano (1868) , Musée d'Orsay, Paris



Eva Gonzalès (1870) , The National Gallery, London



Portrait of Emilie Ambre as Carmen (1880) , Philadelphia Museum of Art



Luncheon in the Studio



Music in the Tuileries Gardens,





Interior at Arcachon, 1871

From an outstanding review of the Royal Academy show (images added):

More relaxed is the 1880 impressionist portrait of Suzanne with a cat on her lap. Her illegitimate son appears in 1867's Boy Blowing Bubbles, a painting of wonderful plainness, with one hand raised as he blows a pendulous bubble from a pipe, the other proffering a bowl of soapy water.



Boy Blowing Bubbles (1867) , Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon

The work is as controlled as Chardin's paintings of the same subject. While the weightless bubble unbalances the entire composition, the whole thing is held in check by the little scrap of white rag or handkerchief peeking from the boy's pocket.

Such little details matter in Manet:



the flaring whiteness of the pith in the halved lemon in the portrait of Zacharie Astruc, with its coil of yellow peel spiralling out of the picture; the sexy peach in a bowl on a corner of Zola's desk;



Émile Zola, 1868, from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.



the zig-zag of grey smoke from poet Stéphane Mallarmé's cigar, his old man's finger pointing.

Manet didn't just paint life, he painted from life, so everyone who appears is a kind of portrait. From the outrageous Déjeuner Sur l'Herbe (the smaller of the two versions, belonging to the Courtauld Gallery, is here) to smokers and bubble-blowers, from portraits of eminent writers to one of a lion-hunter, everyone is someone – even the anonymous Street Singer, from 1862.



Édouard Manet, Street Singer, c.1862 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

She emerges from a doorway not singing, but stuffing her face with grapes, which are as round and full as her eyes. The model is Victorine Meurent, whose portrait Manet painted the same year. What strikes you is how clear her gaze is, how solid an object her head is. In the portrait, she is both thing and person, and declaratively made of paint. The same can be said of the two portraits of artist Berthe Morisot,




The Repose (Portrait of Berthe Morisot) (1870) , Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence




Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets, 1872. (Photograph: RMN (Musee d'Orsay)/Herve Lewandowski)

the later of which shows her in mourning. It is as if the first, beautiful portrait has collapsed, under not just the weight of her misery, but of paint itself. She seems to have imploded.

Catalogue:




Manet: Portraying Life by Maryanne Stevens, Stéphane Guégan, Carol M. Armstrong, Leah Lehmbeck, Colin B. Bailey and Lawrence W. Nichols

Metropolis: labor issues, class division, industrialization, mechanization, architecture, and the nature of modernity

February 20, 2014, 9:48 am

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University of Arizona Museum of Art
May 27, 2010 – October 31, 2010

Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, Metropolis, is justifiably famous for its iconic imagery and advancements in film technique. Although the plot itself is considered the weakest part of the movie, the themes presented in the film addressed important concepts being debated in the years between the two world wars: labor issues, class division, industrialization, mechanization, architecture, and the nature of modernity.

This exhibition explores works from both the UAMA Permanent Collection and the fine arts collection of the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) to see how artists addressed these themes, either in design or in meaning. The exhibition is divided into sections focusing on specific aspects of the film. The viewer will discover that the indecisive approach in the film’s plot to many of the issues of the day reflects the ambivalence and confusion of society as a whole to the unfolding future.

From a review of the show: (images added)

William Wolfson pays homage to heroic



"Asphalt Workers"

and "Rock Drillers" in two wonderful lithographs, from 1928 and 1932. The men in these black-and-white prints are proud of what they do—work that requires skill and brawn. They lean over their tasks in deep concentration, their backs forming beautiful curves. The rock-drillers are even posed like conquerors, laboring high on an elegant cliff sculpted into Art Deco lines.

But many of the pieces betray the era's anxiety about mass production and the isolation of the modern, anonymous city.



Edward Hopper's 1927 painting "The City"

is a bleak vision of New York from on high. A block of red rowhouses forms a barrier at one side; there's also a high-rise mansard-style apartment building. Only a few people walk in the public square below; most of them are alone. Beyond, on the horizon, is an endless cascade of buildings under a chilly winter sky.

Richard Aberle Florsheim's "Tests the Cities" is another view of an intimidating city, made several decades later, in 1951. In his black-and-white lithograph, one man stands front and center, his back toward the viewer. Before him is a scary city, with two lines of forbidding skyscrapers sloping downward to the vanishing point in the distant horizon. Inside the shadows cast by these monoliths are small, blurry figures. They could be the poor, the homeless and the ignored—or they could be soldiers defending the status quo, armed and ready to shoot…

A dramatic 1923 woodcut by noted German artist Käthe Kollwitz encapsulates the agony of workers who've become cogs in the machine. Ironically titled



"Die Freiwilligen"

— German for "the volunteers"—it's full of curves and bold shapes, printed in vivid black and white. Its workers are bound together in a row, their heads thrown back, their mouths open. They're screaming as they march forward, relentlessly, toward the end of the workday, toward their own death: The laborer at the head of the line has already turned into a skeleton. Even so, he keeps on keeping on, his bony hand held aloft.

The Swiss-American Herman Volz pictured what happened too often to laborers who tried to better their lot. In 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression, he made



"Lockout,"

a black-and-white lithograph of workers shut out of their jobs. A crowd of them gaze at the factory behind the wall, where a giant machine rises up, operating without them. Sketched in simple, rounded forms, the workers have lost their jobs because they tried to organize against The Man...

One whole wall of photos and prints in the show celebrated the beauty of the modern big city, and the sheer miracle of the Big Apple in particular.



Berenice Abbott's 1933 photo "Exchange Place, New York"

is an exuberant view of one of the city's "slot canyons," a narrow band of light and air between granite monoliths.

Several of the artists celebrate the architecture of industry.




Charles Sheeler's "Architectural Cadences"

is a lovely silkscreen in grays and blues from 1934. Its lively assemblage of rectangles and triangles adds up to a factory building, seen as a grand contributor to the nation's well-being.






Fernand Léger's "Les Constructeurs," 1950.

The French painter Fernand Léger celebrated not only architecture but labor in his 1950 "Les Constructeurs" (the construction workers). Two heroic workers are on the I-beams of a skyscraper under construction in this beautiful painting, a gouache on paper. Léger abandons the black and white of his pessimistic colleagues in the show, and moves into optimistic color. The beams, lightly colored in yellow, turquoise and pink, bounded in deep gray, dart across the paper in diagonals and verticals.

The two workers are perched high above the earth. A far cry from Lang's robot slave and underground workers, they're masters of their craft, masters of the city below. One sits astride the metal, while the other, lightly tethered to the beam by one hand, leans fearlessly out into the air.

Room for Art, in 17th Century Antwerp

February 20, 2014, 2:47 pm

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Venues

Mauritshuis, The Hague from 25 March until 27 June 2010
Rubens House, Antwerp from 28 November 2008 until 28 February 2010.

This exhibition focused on a unique genre of painting: cabinet pictures known as ‘kunstkamers’. This genre originated in Antwerp, and the paintings depict rooms filled to the brim with artworks, like tiny fanciful museums. Three works by Willem van Haecht (1593-1637), one of the genre’s most important founders, will form the core of the exhibition Room for Art. This is the first time all three known paintings by the master, from the Mauritshuis, the Rubens House and a private collection, were shown together. Alongside Van Haecht’s exceptional paintings, the exhibition also included masterpieces from other international museums and private collections. Together, the sixteen works in the exhibition offer an unrivalled survey of seventeenth-century Antwerp’s fascinating art world.

Art about Art

In the seventeenth century, the room in the house where a collector kept his most beautiful artworks was known as a ‘constcamer’. This term was also used to describe paintings of these rooms. ‘Constcamers’, or kunstkamer depictions, are paintings bursting with artworks, tiny museums for lovers of fine art. Expensive paintings line the walls and copies of famous antique sculptures cover the floor. There are albums of prints and drawings on display, together with antique coins, globes, porcelain and natural artefacts such as shells and flowers. The figures in these kunstkamers are art lovers, artists and distinguished guests. The subjects of the most important paintings-in-the-painting were chosen quite deliberately to contribute to the underlying meaning of the picture .

Willem van Haecht

The paintings of Willem van Haecht (1593-1637) are undoubtedly among some of the most remarkable kunstkamer depictions of the seventeenth century. Van Haecht was born into an Antwerp family of artists and art dealers. His father was the landscape painter Tobias van Haecht (Verhaecht), the first teacher of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). After a year-long trip to Paris and Italy, Van Haecht returned to Antwerp in 1626, where he took up residence with Cornelis van der Geest (1555-1638), a leading art collector and patron of Rubens. It was presumably in consultation with this art collector that Van Haecht painted a trio of kunstkamers that combine fantasy and reality. Nearly all the pictures he included in his kunstkamers were existing works by famous masters, though they may not always have been part of the same collection. As a result, his paintings beautifully illustrate the variety and richness of art collecting in seventeenth-century Antwerp, while the narrative elements point to artistic and cultural life in the city.





Willem van Haecht Apelles painting Alexander's consort Campaspe The Hague, Mauritshuis



Willem van Haecht The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest Antwerp, Rubens House



Willem van Haecht Interior of the Salon of the Archduchess Isabella of Austria

Development of the Genre

The painted kunstkamer originated shortly after 1610 in Antwerp, and it remained a specialty of Antwerp throughout the seventeenth century.

One of the first artists to practise the genre was Frans Francken de Jonge (1581-1642). His output was extremely varied: together with small-scale history pieces, allegories and encyclopaedic still lifes, he regularly painted the figures in the interiors or landscapes of other masters. In 1612, Francken painted his first own interior, the earliest known kunstkamer.



Frans Francken the Younger



Frans Francken the Younger



Frans Francken the Younger, Kunstkamer, 1636. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Rubens plays an important part in the kunstkamer depictions of Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625). Alongside Brueghel’s painted copies of Rubens’s famous paintings, Rubens himself also contributed by painting the figures in Brueghel’s painted interiors. After the death of his father, Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601-1678), and later nephew Jan van Kessel (1626-1679), continued the family tradition.




Jan van Kessel 1626-1679), Kunstkamer with Venus, c. 1650-60 Paris, Galerie d'Art St. Honoré

David Teniers (1610-1690) was the first to export the genre from Antwerp, shortly after 1650. As court painter to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, Teniers painted a series of monumental works depicting the archduke’s collection of paintings. He also published a catalogue of Leopold Wilhelm’s Italian paintings, entitled Theatrum Pictorium. This book is of particular importance to art history as it was the first illustrated catalogue of a collection of paintings.



David Teniers, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Picture Gallery in Brussels (1651)

A group of kunstkamer paintings dating from the late seventeenth century, which were sometimes worked on by more than twenty different Antwerp masters, represents the final flowering of the Antwerp kunstkamer. Under the direction of Gonzales Coques (1614/1618-1684), dean of the Guild of St Luke, each painter added his own original painting to the ensemble, thereby creating a sample sheet of nearly all the prominent artists working in Antwerp around 1670.

Catalogue



A fully illustrated catalogue, compiled by curators Ariane van Suchtelen (Mauritshuis) and Ben van Beneden (Rubens House), accompanied the exhibition. The catalogue is available in Dutch and English.

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Picturing Power: Capitalism, Democracy, and American Portraiture

February 21, 2014, 7:34 am

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The portrait collection of the New York Chamber of Commerce, assembled over a two-hundred-year period beginning in 1772, captured with aesthetic and symbolic power the giants of American business to become one of the most significant examples of institutional portraiture in the nation's history. Picturing Power: Capitalism, Democracy, and American Portraiture, held exclusively at the Princeton University Art Museum from March 9 through June 30, 2013, gathered fifty of the best portraits from the now dispersed collection in a dense, Salon-style installation evoking its original majestic setting in the Great Hall of the Chamber’s ornate Wall Street headquarters. Featuring images of business titans (J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt), military and political leaders (George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant), and great Americans such as Samuel F.B. Morse, the exhibition recreatedd the most impressive corporate display of portraits in American history while demonstrating the varied and fascinating uses to which portraiture has been put in the service of institutions.



Daniel Huntington (1816-1906), The Atlantic Cable Projectors, 1895. Oil in canvas, 87 x 108 ¼ in. New York State Museum

Picturing Power drew attention to a fundamental predicament of American art: namely, how to portray power in a democracy, where the fundamental ideals of equality conflict with the inherently aggrandizing act of commissioning, posing for, and collecting portraits. “Americans’ shifting and ambivalent relationship to commerce situates these portraits at the intersection of enduring and critical contests in American life—between self-interest and the greater good, between equality and the social hierarchies that wealth engenders,” said Karl Kusserow, curator of American art at the Princeton University Art Museum.



Matthew Pratt, American, 1734–1805: Cadwallader Colden, 1772. Oil on canvas, 196.2 x 118.7 cm. New York State Museum, Albany.

Picturing Power: Capitalism, Democracy, and American Portraiture gathered together fifty-one of the best portraits from the now-dispersed collection in a dense, Salon-style installation evoking their former majestic display at the Chamber of Commerce Building near Wall Street. Interpreting the collection in terms of its changing function and meaning within and beyond its institutional setting, the exhibition explores the ways in which portraiture was used by a wealthy and powerful group to fashion an identity that promoted its corporate, civic, and ideological agendas while also reflecting, through its evolving use, the successive concerns of the organization, its members, and the wider world they inhabited.



From its inception in 1768, the Chamber regulated and codified commercial practice, provided business concerns with a unified means of forming and advancing their interests, and consolidated and elevated the status of its members and of business, generally. By linking commercial development to social and cultural progress, portraiture did much to support these ends.



Fedor Encke, German, 1851–1926: John Pierpont Morgan, 1903. Oil on canvas, 127 x 101.6 cm. Credit Suisse, New York

As a result of its unusually long history, the Chamber of Commerce portrait collection has produced a singularly rich legacy of uses and meanings. The exhibition offered a rich and stimulating analysis of how the wealthy and powerful leaders of American commerce employed portraiture to fashion an identity that promoted their corporate, civic, and ideological agendas—while reflecting their evolving concerns and those of the wider culture they inhabited.

Picturing Power departs from standard art-historical approaches in considering, for the first time, not only the straightforward growth of a large and important collection, but also the ways that its function and meaning changed over time, as the institution it served and the world around it also changed. Arranged in six parts throughout the Museum’s Sterling Morton Gallery—the Museum’s central gallery and itself a public gathering place, akin to the Chamber’s Great Hall—the installation created a narrative that charts the evolution of the Chamber from a young and struggling institution to a major civic (and ultimately national) force, as well as its subsequent decline and the portraits’ final revitalization, in a new setting, as iconic sources of power and prestige.



The exhibition was accompanied by Kusserow’s book Picturing Power: Portraiture and Its Uses in the New York Chamber of Commerce (Columbia University Press) which was the inspiration for the exhibition and will appear this spring. More than a decade in preparation, the 424-page volume features additional contributions by David L. Barquist (Philadelphia Museum of Art), Elizabeth Blackmar (Columbia University), Daniel Bluestone (University of Virginia), and Paul Staiti (Mt. Holyoke College).

American Moderns, 1910–1960: From O'Keeffe to Rockwell

February 21, 2014, 12:34 pm

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American Moderns, 1910–1960: From O'Keeffe to Rockwell presents fifty-seven artworks from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum in an exploration of the myriad ways in which American artists engaged with modernity. Ranging widely in subject matter and style, the fifty-three paintings and four sculptures were produced by leading artists of the day, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Milton Avery, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Rockwell Kent, Joseph Stella, Elie Nadelman, and Norman Rockwell. Significant works by these and other artists in the exhibition exemplify their unique contributions to modern culture.

Drastic social, political and economical changes during this time period challenged artists to define what could be considered “modern” from a wide variety of definitions. From abstraction and cityscapes to realism and nature, these works selected from the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection offer a new perspective on American modern art.

Venues

Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma, September 27, 2012–January 6, 2013



Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, February 15, 2013–May 12, 2013



The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida, June 14, 2013–September 8, 2013



Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, October 11, 2013–January 5, 2014



Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, February 7, 2014–May 4, 2014




Michele & Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts, June 6, 2014–August 31, 2014




Wichita Art Museum, Kansas, October 3, 2014–January 4, 2014




Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, February 6, 2015–May 3, 2015








2 Yellow Leaves (Yellow Leaves), 1928.
Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986).
Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 1/8 in. (101.6 x 76.5 cm).
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Georgia O’Keeffe



Handsome Drinks, 1916
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943)
Oil on composition board, 24 x 20 inches
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Milton Lowenthal



Abraham Walkowitz, 1907
Max Weber (1881-1961)
Oil on canvas, 25 1/4 x 20 1/4 inches
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Abraham Walkowitz



The Sand Cart, 1917
George Wesley Bellows (1882-1925)
Oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 44 1/16 inches
Brooklyn Museum, John B. Woodward Memorial Fund



Synchromy No. 3, 1917
Stanton Macdonald-Wright (American, 1890-1973)
Oil on canvas, 39 x 38 in. (99.0 x 96.5 cm).
Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal


Between 1910 and 1960, both American society and art underwent tumultuous and far-reaching transformations. The United States emerged as an international power of economic, industrial, and military might, while also experiencing two world wars and the Great Depression. New technologies fundamentally changed the pace and nature of all aspects of modern life. America’s increasingly diverse and mobile population challenged old social patterns and clamored for the equality and opportunities promised by the American dream. Art witnessed similarly dramatic changes as many artists rejected or reformulated artistic traditions, seeking new ways to make their work relevant in a contemporary context.

The range of works in the exhibition provides the opportunity for a flexible installation of interpretive groupings by themes such as the city, the body, landscape, still life, and Americana. The American city was a common motif in art of this period as artists found new iconographic and aesthetic possibilities in the architectural forms and gridded geometries of the modern metropolis. Other works address the human experience of the city—the vast diversity of urban populations; the hustle and bustle of urban living; and the sociological effects of alienation, lack of privacy, and increasing female independence. Artists captured the nation’s self-confidence in heroic depictions of the muscled, active bodies of laborers who fueled the economy and of athletes who embodied the new cult of physicality.

The conventional artistic genres of landscape and still-life painting also enjoyed revitalization: both nature and everyday objects were the focus of creative experimentation with new styles, decorative compositions, and the formal properties of line, color, and space. In addition, the natural beauty of the seaside, rural locales, and the Southwest inspired many artists to explore universal and spiritual concerns. As a counterpoint to works that address the modern and the new, the exhibition includes images steeped in nostalgia, which evoke the past and simpler ways of life. This highly popular imagery fostered American nationalism and suggested the continuity of cherished traditions during times of war, economic depression, and social change.




Vision of New York, 1926
Newell Connors (N.C.) Wyeth (American, 1882-1945)
Oil on canvas, 48 ¼ x 32 3/8 in.



Flat Surfaces, 1946
Arthur G. Dove (American, 1880-1946)
Oil on canvas, 27 x 36 in.



Green Yellow and Orange, 1960
Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in.



The Virgin, 1926
Joseph Stella (American, born Italy, 1877-1946)
Oil on canvas, 39 11/16 x 38 in.



Summer Clouds and Flowers, 1942
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Oil on fabricated board, 22 x 28 in.

The exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and co-curated by Karen Sherry, former Associate Curator of American Art, and Margaret Stenz, former Curatorial Associate, American Art.



Published in conjunction with a traveling exhibition of works from the world-renowned collection of the Brooklyn Museum, American Moderns, 1910–1960: From O’Keeffe to Rockwell explores the myriad ways in which American artists engaged modernity. Featured are 53 paintings and 4 sculptures, ranging widely in subject matter and style, by such artists as Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, and Max Weber, leaders of American modernism; Precisionists George Ault and Francis Criss; Social Realists Reginald Marsh and Raphael Soyer; and the folk-art icon Grandma Moses. The book’s introduction sets the stage for six thematic sections, each with an introductory essay—Cubist Experiments, The Still Life Revisited, Nature Essentialized, Modern Structures, Engaging Characters, and Americana—tracing the period’s dominant artistic developments. Interpretive text for each object and reproductions of comparative works provide further insight into how these artists shaped modern art.

Delacroix and the Matter of Finish

February 22, 2014, 6:21 am

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Venues

Santa Barbara Museum of Art October 27,2013 through January 26, 2014
Birmingham Museum of Art February 22, 2014 through May 18, 2014

Delacroix and the Matter of Finish, organized by Eik Kahng, assistant director and chief curator at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, features the dramatic work of the leader of the French Romantic Movement, who is often heralded as the “father of impressionism.”






Eugène Delacroix, The Fanatics of Tangier, 1857. Oil on canvas, 18 _ x 22 1/16 in. Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario (62.5).



Eugène Delacroix, Collision of Arab Horsemen (Collision of Moorish Horsemen), 1843-44. Oil on canvas, 32 x 39 in. Walters Art Museum,
Baltimore, Bequest of Henry Walters, 1931 (37.6).





Delacroix, Christ on the sea of Galilee



Delacroix, Nereid, Copy after Rubens

Comprised of 25 paintings and 20 works on paper, the exhibition will highlight Delacroix’s unparalleled coloristic surface effects, his famously vigorous brushwork, his troubled collaboration with his studio assistants, his journey to North Africa, and the brilliant palette of his late works.

This important and beautiful international loan exhibition marks the first presentation on the celebrated French artist Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) in the United States in over a decade, and the first major monographic show devoted to the Romantic artist on the West coast.

Delacroix is typically associated with Romanticism and thought of as its primary exponent _ i.e. the leader of an art movement that dominated French painting in the first half of the 19th century, characterized by the representation of extreme states of emotion through an expressive use of bold color in dynamic compositions. The artist’s most beloved images include the so-called “Orientalist” pictures, featuring exotic subjects such as The Fanatics of Tangier (above), featured in the exhibition, as well as his more overtly political allegories, the most famous of which is



Liberty On the Barricades (1830–31, Musée du Louvre).

Yet the artist was also drawn to dramatic moments in Greek and Roman history, and demonstrated a life-long fascination with the Stoic Roman philosopher-emperor, Marcus Aurelius.

Featuring 27 paintings and 18 works on paper, the exhibition also showcases a previously unknown and unpublished version of Delacroix’s dramatic masterpiece, The Last Words of Marcus Aurelius, which recently surfaced in a Santa Barbara private collection. After several years of scholarly and technical study, the painting has now been authenticated by Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) Assistant Director and Chief Curator, Eik Kahng:



Eugène Delacroix, The Last Words of Marcus Aurelius, n.d. Oil on canvas, 25 5/8 x 31 3/4 in. The van Asch van Wyck Trust.

(original):





Eugène Delacroix, preparatory drawing for The Last Words of Marcus Aurelius, circa 1844, black chalk on paper


Delacroix’s allegiance to classical subjects was the consequence of his deep admiration for the greatest art of the past, which the ambitious artist strove to surpass, especially in his public, large-scale decorations. At the same time, his restless search for the technical means to convey the vividness of the hallucinatory scenes of human drama played out in his mind’s inner eye_whether plucked from the pages of history, Homer, or the poetry of Lord Byron_make him one of the most innovative artists of the 19th century.

In the accompanying exhibition catalogue, curator Eik Kahng offers an extensive iconographic study of the sources for the subject of The Last Words of Marcus Aurelius, thereby reassessing the artist’s relationship to Romanticism’s supposed antithesis, Neoclassicism, and to artists such as Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) and Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), painters with whom Delacroix is not often compared.

Problems of attribution have long plagued Delacroix studies, particularly given the artist’s reliance on students as collaborators to support the most ambitious of public commissions, which included vast decorative cycles for the ceiling and walls of the Palais Bourbon and the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. Delacroix and the Matter of Finish is the first exhibition to invite side-by-side comparison between Delacroix’s paintings and the so-called “sketch-copies” by his closest students, Pierre Andrieu (1849–1935) and Louis de Planet (1814–1876), revealing a gulf in technical skill . The exhibition also offers a snapshot of the evolution of Delacroix’s painterly touch over the course of his rich career, from the relatively tight brushwork of




Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to his Daughters (ca. 1827-28, Kunsthaus Zürich)

to the explosive and almost abstract colorism of the last decades, as instanced by Winter (below). The artist’s willingness to allow for the “completion” of his “rough” painterly idea in the imagination of the viewer is a hallmark of the Romantic aesthetic and yet another play on the various connotations of the word “finish” in the exhibition’s title.

The 27 lenders for this exhibition include museums and private collectors throughout America, as well as distinguished institutions in Canada and Europe, including the Art Gallery of Ontario; the Honolulu Museum of Art; the Kunsthaus Zürich; the Kunstmuseum Basel; the Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris; the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon; the Musée du Vieux-Toulouse; the Musée national Eugène Delacroix, Paris; the Musée Fabre, Montpellier; and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.


Catalogue



The accompanying, groundbreaking publication centers on a previously unknown variation of Eugène Delacroix’s (1798–1863) dramatic masterpiece The Last Words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, published here for the first time. This book offers a compelling reassessment of the relationship of the artist, widely considered a primary exemplar of Romanticism, to Neoclassical themes, as demonstrated by his life-long fascination with the death of Marcus Aurelius. Through this investigation, the authors reinterpret Delacroix’s lineage to such fellow artists as Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825). Playing on the various interpretations of the word “finish,” the book also offers a fascinating account of Delacroix’s famously troubled collaboration with his studio assistants, his conflicted feelings about pedagogy, and his preoccupation with the fate of civilizations. The catalogue features essays by Dr. Kahng; Marc Gotlieb, Director of the Graduate Program and Class of 1955 Memorial Professor of Art, Williams College; and Michèle Hannoosh, Professor of French, University of Michigan.

Max Beckmann' s Blind Man's Buff

February 24, 2014, 10:20 am

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Minneapolis Institute of Arts
November 19, 2013-March 1, 2014




Max Beckmann (German, 1884 – 1950), Blind Man's Buff, 1945, oil on canvas, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Donald Winston, 55.27a-c. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.


Of Max Beckmann’s nine triptychs, Blind Man’s Buff is the largest and arguably the most important. The work was painted during Beckmann’s exile in Amsterdam between September 1944 and October 1945, under difficult wartime circumstances. In his journal, Beckmann refers to air raids and lack of food, coal, and electricity; in fact, much of the triptych was painted by candlelight

More Max Beckmann:


Max Beckmann

Beckmann & America,


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

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

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

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




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



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



and Perseus.

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

From an outstanding review: (some images added)

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

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

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



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

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



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

Catalogue




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

More images from the exhibition:




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



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



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



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


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

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

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



The Harbor of Genoa from the St. Louis Art Museum



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

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


From a review:

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



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

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


Catalogue:


More images from the exhibition:




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



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



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

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

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




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

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

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




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


From a review of another show:

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





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



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

A Country House in New York: Highlights from The Frick Collection

February 24, 2014, 11:49 am

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Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery, The Hague
5 February through 10 May 2015

Over 30 masterpieces from the celebrated Frick Collection were seen outside New York for the first time as part of a special exhibition at the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague in 2015.

A Country House in New York: Highlights from The Frick Collection was the first major exhibition to be displayed in the new wing of the Mauritshuis following the opening exhibition of the museum in 2014. The exhibition gave visitors to the Mauritshuis a fascinating insight into the history of The Frick Collection and its founder, wealthy American steel magnate Henry Clay Frick (1849—1919). The works selected for the exhibition are masterpieces from the 13th to 19th centuries, which include not only paintings, but also drawings, sculpture and decorative arts, reflecting the outstanding quality and diversity of The Frick Collection. They perfectly complemented the Mauritshuis’s own collection which focuses on Dutch art of the Golden Age.

The Frick only lends works of art acquired after the death of its founder Henry Clay Frick. A Country House in New York: Highlights from The Frick Collection included significant works of art by such renowned artists as Cimabue, Van Eyck, Memling, Liotard, Reynolds and Gainsborough.



John Constable’s spectacular The White Horse,

a key work in the oeuvre of the artist,

and his spontaneous studies of clouds are highlights of the exhibition.

French Classical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres is represented with a masterpiece that has become an icon of The Frick Collection:



the enchanting portrait of the Comtesse d’Haussonville.

There are few or no works by artists such as Ingres, Cimabue, Van Eyck and Liotard on display in Dutch museum collections, making these loans of significant interest for the Dutch public.



Jan van Eyck and workshop, Virgin and Child, with Saints and Donor, c.1441-43, panel, 18 5/8 x 24 1/8 inches, The Frick Collection, New York; photo: Michael Bodycomb



Hans Memling (ca. 1430/40-1494), Portrait of a Man, ca. 1470
The Frick Collection, New York (photo: Michael Bodycomb)

Along His Own Lines A Retrospective of New York Realist Eugene Speicher

February 25, 2014, 8:30 am

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Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art
State University of New York at New Paltz, New Paltz, NY
February 5 – July 13, 2014




Eugene Speicher, Girl in a Coral Necklace, c. 1935, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 in., Private collection

New York painter Eugene Speicher (1883-1962) was one of the foremost American realists of his generation, closely associated with George Bellows, Robert Henri, Leon Kroll, and Rockwell Kent. Born in Buffalo, NY, Speicher first garnered national recognition in the 1910s for his incisive portraits of actors, artists, and friends, which were collected by many prominent American museums. Splitting his professional time between New York City and Woodstock, NY, Speicher expanded his repertoire to include still life, nudes, and landscape. Along His Own Lines will be the first Speicher museum survey since 1963. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue will explore Speicher's role in the Woodstock art colony and the New York art world and reevaluate his place in the canon of early twentieth-century American art.

Speicher is now best remembered as a portrait painter, for his association with Robert Henri, George Bellows, and Leon Kroll, and other New York realists, and for his involvement with the Woodstock art colony. From the 1920s on, Speicher's paintings were highly sought after by collectors and major American museums, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. He presented critically acclaimed solo exhibitions, and received many prestigious awards and numerous portrait commissions. From the vantage point of mid-career, Speicher's reputation seemed assured.

However, at the height of his success in the mid-1920s he largely abandoned the commissioned portraiture for which he was known in favor of painting likenesses of his own choosing, flower still lifes, and landscape subjects that resulted in a substantial body of work dedicated to the latter two genres. The new direction in his art, combined with the later onset of a riptide of change in the art world, left his style of painting out of favor. He had never been considered a modernist, and modernism and abstraction quickly assumed the progressive forefront.



Eugene Speicher, Portrait of a Young Girl, 1923, oil on canvas, Courtesy Lois Wagner Fine Arts, Inc.


The issues of artistic identity, professional success, and the current progressive aesthetic that Speicher confronted remain as relevant in our time as they were in his. A new generation of artists and audiences will find his art and life unexpectedly instructive. Through a review of Speicher's work the development of realist painting in America in the twentieth century can be reconsidered.




Eugene Speicher, . Kingston, New York, 1935 Oil on canvas mounted on Masonite 28 x 35 3⁄4 in.
Collection of Neil Scherer

Curated by Valerie Ann Leeds

Fascinating review, more images

Catalogue

Along His Own Lines
A Retrospective of New York Realist Eugene Speicher


Valerie Ann Leeds - Author
Tom Wolf - Author
Daniel Belasco - Author
Sara J. Pasti - Author
Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art
Price: $20.00
Paperback - 105 pages
Release Date: February 2014
ISBN10: N/A
ISBN13: 978-0-615-86102-9


The first scholarly exhibition catalogue of the work of Eugene Speicher (1883–1962), one of the foremost American realists of his generation, who was closely associated with George Bellows, Robert Henri, Leon Kroll, and Rockwell Kent.

Called “America’s greatest living painter” by Esquire magazine in 1936, Speicher (1883–1962) was one of the foremost realists of his generation, closely associated with George Bellows, Robert Henri, and Leon Kroll. The exhibition catalogue examines Speicher’s oeuvre, including his artistic development, subject matter, choice of models, influences, and the critical reception of his work. The catalogue contains three essays. The primary essay by curator Valerie Ann Leeds consists of a general assessment and critical review of Speicher’s career and his place in the art world of his day. Another essay authored by Tom Wolf explores Speicher and his relationship to Woodstock. A third essay, by Daniel Belasco, surveys Speicher’s drawings. The catalogue is the first to present a significant body of Speicher’s work in color.

Valerie Ann Leeds is an independent curator and scholar, and a renowned expert on Robert Henri and American art. Tom Wolf is Professor of Art History at Bard College and specializes in American art, with an emphasis on the art and artists of the Woodstock art colony. Daniel Belasco is Curator of Exhibitions and Programs at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Sara J. Pasti is Neil C. Trager Director of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

Théodore Géricault - Museum of Fine Arts Ghent

February 25, 2014, 12:27 pm

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Venues

Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt October 18, 2013, to January 26, 2014 (Click link for many more images and more info.)
Museum of Fine Arts Ghent 21 February to 26 May 2014




Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, the Argus View), 1818-19. Brown ink on paper, 21 x 26.8 cm Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts© RMN – Grand Palais | Philippe Bernard, Paris.

In 1908, the Friends of the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent acquired a painting by Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) for a bargain price at a Parisian auction. Entitled The Mad Murderer, the local press speculated at the time as to who would be fool enough to hang such a picture in his living room! The painting – which in fact depicts a kleptomaniac – forms part of a series of portraits that Géricault painted of mentally ill patients in the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. These include, amongst others,




Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon)



and Portrait of a Kidnapper (Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts).

In 1819, Théodore Géricault presented his large historic painting, The Raft of the Medusa, which elicited public admiration but also repelled many precisely because of the tragic circumstances in which the ship sank. Moreover, the canvas denounced the government’s political bungling, which did not sit well at all with the existing powers. Géricault’s monumental composition represented a new direction in painting and sounds more contemporary than ever as it echoes recent events around Lampedusa. Soon after, Géricault produced a series of portraits of mental patients, deciding to abandon the conventional ways of depicting madness and rather highlighting the personality and humanity of his subjects.

The exhibition aims to show that far from being a painter of tragic and insane subjects, Géricault, above all, desired to represent the margins of everyday life with a profound empathy and compassion for the protagonists of his paintings. Various international museums have also lent their paintings, drawings and prints by Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Francisco Goya, Johan Heinrich Füssli and Adolf Friedrich Menzel for this exhibition.

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Degas, Renoir, and Poetic Pastels

February 25, 2014, 1:26 pm

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Degas, Renoir, and Poetic Pastels at the Cincinnati Art Museum, October 26, 2013—January 19, 2014, gave viewers the opportunity to contemplate a special conversation with



Renoir’s thoughtful and glamorous portrait of “Jeanne Samary”

and to admire the petals on one of the flowers in



Odilon Redon’s simple and joyful “Blue Vase with Flowers”.

The selection of works from the Cincinnati Art Museum’s permanent collection highlighted the achievements of the French artists who worked with pastels in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Rarely on display because of their sensitivity to light, works in the exhibition include five masterpieces by Edgar Degas featuring his preferred subject of the ballet dance. Also on display was



Rosa Bonheur’s Sheepfold by Moonlight in the Pyrenees,

measuring four-and-a-half by six feet.

The exhibition placed the works by these renowned artists in their historical context while also addressing issues of conservation and materials.



Alfred Sisley, "Approach to the Railway Station," 1888, pastel, 15 1/8 x 18 1/8 in. Cincinnati Art Museum

In the first exhibition of what we now know as the Impressionists, in 1874, one critic praised the pastels and said they were “full of light and vigor” and “delicious.” Pastel, derived from the Latin word pasta, or “paste,” has been a preferred medium for artists since the fifteenth century. It is a chalky colored powder, modeled into a stick by combining pigment (such as an aquamarine), filler (often white chalk), and a binder such as gum tragacanth (a weak adhesive that holds the materials together). Artists such as Degas, Renoir and their contemporaries, were able to use pastel faster without the fuss of wet paint that might take up to a year to dry. These works, with their saturated hues and dense layers of velvety pigment, are some of the greatest achievements produced in newly industrialized and artistically fertile nineteenth-century France.

From a review of the show:

Both Renoir and Sisley have admirable works on display, but serious artists such as Redon, Cassatt, and Millet are under served by less than quality examples of their work, while pastel paintings such as Sheepfold By Moonlight in the Pyrenees by Rosa Bonheur (above) are long on public-friendly content but lacking in artistic merit.

The real treasures in the show come from the hand of Degas. Here we see five fine works, all depicting the ballet. These pieces appear both ancient and startlingly modern: ancient because although the Ballet is the “subject”, the works really point at more universal concerns of physicality, gesture and the unspoken realm of body language. Like other great draftsmen such as the cave painters of Chauvet, Michelangelo, Ingres, or Kitaj more recently, Degas is able to conjure a physical and emotional response to his works. The movement of the bodies, diversity of touch, and brilliance of pictorial invention activate and provoke us as viewers. Degas used pastel in a free way, constantly changing his approach to suit the needs of a particular work. In the masterpiece



Dancer In Her Dressing Room,

Degas has mixed the pastel with paint to rich effect. The pastel blooms caresses and skitters across the image in a way that mimics the diversity and unpredictable nature of the real world.

My favorite work in the show is the gripping late work



Three Dancers In Yellow Skirts from 1900.

The powerful contrasting poses of the dancers pull and wrench across the picture plane. The monumentality of Degas’ suggestion here, whether a result of failing eyesight or the urgency of old age, renders the figures as solid and solemn as Egyptian statues, yet the work is gutsy and risky. As death approached, Degas pulled no punches.

Face to Face: The Neo-Impressionist Portrait, 1886-1904

February 26, 2014, 11:32 am

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Venues

ING Cultural Centre, Brussels, February 19, 2014, to May 18, 2014, under the title TO THE POINT
Indianapolis Museum of Art, June 15 through September 7, 2014

The first exhibition devoted solely to portraits of the Neo-Impressionist movement will open at the Indianapolis Museum of Art on June 14, 2014, the only U.S. venue for the exhibition. Face to Face: The Neo-Impressionist Portrait, 1886-1904 will feature more than 30 paintings and 20 works on paper by artists including Paul Signac, Henri- Edmond Cross, Maximilien Luce and Vincent van Gogh. Face to Face will be on view June 15 through September 7, 2014.

Rooted in recent discoveries in optics and perception, Neo-Impressionism was developed in late 19th-century Paris by French painter Georges Seurat. While his use of brilliant color and pointillist brushwork is largely associated with landscapes, seascapes and scenes of modern life, the approach also produced arresting portraits of unusual beauty and perception. Face to Face represents the first major museum exhibition to examine this significant facet of the Neo- Impressionist movement.

“Perhaps because Neo-Impressionism is so linked to the pursuit of natural light and brilliant color, the primary vehicles for analyzing the technique have been landscapes and other outdoor scenes,” said Ellen W. Lee, The Wood-Pulliam Senior Curator at the IMA and co-organizer of the exhibition. “This exhibition reveals the Neo-Impressionists’ ability to invest psychological intensity and vivid expression into that most natural of subjects—the human face.” The exhibition features 15 painters from France, Belgium and The Netherlands. The earliest followers of Seurat, artists such as Paul Signac, Lucien Pissarro and Albert Dubois-Pillet, are represented. The exhibition also will introduce under-recognized figures such as Henri Delavallée and Achille Laugé to American audiences.

Highlights of the exhibition include:



• Albert Dubois-Pillet, Mlle. B.; a striking portrait of a seated woman, recognized through research for this exhibition as the earliest Neo-Impressionist portrait



• Henri-Edmond Cross, Madame Hector France; a life-size portrait and the first Neo- Impressionist painting by one of Seurat’s most important followers.




Vincent van Gogh, Self-portrait, Spring 1887 , oil on cardboard Dimensions 42 × 33.7 cm (16.5 × 13.3 in), Art Institute of Chicago


• Théo van Rysselberghe, a stunning trio of full-length portraits of the three sisters of the Sèthe family, painted by Belgium’s most distinguished Neo-Impressionist portraitist:



Alice Sethe, 1888



Maria Sethe at the Harmonium, 1891



Irma Sethe, 1894

Neo-Impressionism was developed decades after photography made realistic images widely available. While physical resemblance remained an important aspect of portraiture, artists of the era were also free to emphasize individual technique, their pursuit of psychological or spiritual identity, and their own emotional connection with their subjects. These subjects were often drawn from the circles of the artists’ families and friends, and their portraits record in vivid color some of the era’s most intriguing and influential personalities. Exquisite drawings also play a prominent role in the exhibition, demonstrating the expressive potential of black and white pencil and crayon portraits.

Drawn from museums such as the Musée d’Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, libraries and private collections throughout Europe and the United States, the exhibition presents a variety of engaging images, offering fresh insight into the aesthetics and character of one of the era’s most fascinating chapters.

The Neo-Impressionist Portrait, 1886-1904 is organized by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Exhibition curators are Ellen W. Lee, The Wood-Pulliam Senior Curator at the IMA, and Professor Jane Block, Ph.D., of the University of Illinois, a specialist on turn-of-the century Belgian art and culture. Before coming to the IMA, the exhibition will premiere at the ING Cultural Centre in Brussels, a city whose artists made significant contributions to Neo- Impressionism. The exhibition will be presented there from February 19, 2014, to May 18, 2014, under the title TO THE POINT.

Exhibition catalogue



The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue, The Neo-Impressionist Portrait, 1886-1904, published by Yale University Press in association with the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The authors are exhibition curators Jane Block and Ellen W. Lee, with contributions by French scholars Marina Ferretti Bocquillon and Nicole Tamburini. The book will appear in February 2014 and will be the first comprehensive survey of Neo-Impressionist portraiture.

Renaissance Impressions Chiaroscuro woodcuts from the Collections of Georg Baselitz and the Albertina, Vienna

February 26, 2014, 12:15 pm

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Royal Academy
15 March—8 June 2014

This exhibition features the beautiful art of Chiaroscuro woodcuts in works from two of the finest collections in the world. Conceived as independent works or based on the designs of the greatest Renaissance artists such as Parmigianino, Raphael and Titian, this pioneering 16th-century printing technique breathed new life into well-known biblical scenes and legends; from Perseus slaying the Medusa to Aeneas Fleeing Troy, and the Miraculous Draught of Fishes.

150 of the rarest and most exquisite examples of this forgotten art form, with a focus on the craftsmanship of its proponents in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, demonstrate how the chiaroscuro method was used to create the first colour prints that make dramatic use of light and dark.

Created by established artists for a wider public, they were collected and appreciated both as mementos of famous works in other media and in their own right for their sheer technical brilliance and visual power.




Hendrick Goltzius, Bacchus, c. 1589-90, Chiaroscuro woodcut printed from two blocks. Collection Georg Baselitz Photo Albertina, Vienna



Ugo da Carpi, 'Diogenes', early sixteenth century,
Chiaroscuro woodcut; four blocks (green and blue); first state. 47.8 x 34.3 cm. Private Collection, Photo Albertina, Vienna



Ugo da Carpi, after Raphael, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, c. 1523-27, Albertina, Vienna Photo Albertina, Vienna



Hendrick Goltzius, Hercules Killing Cacus, 1588, Collection Georg Baselitz. Photo Albertina, Vienna



Andrea Andreani, after Giambologna, Rape of a Sabine Woman, 1584, Collection Georg Baselitz. Photo Albertina, Vienna



Domenico Beccafumi, 'Group of Men and Women', c. 1545-47. Engraving with two woodcut tone blocks, in pale blue and blue. 14.3 x 22.2 cm. Albertina, Vienna. Photo Albertina, Vienna.



Giovanni Gallo, after Marco Pino, 'Perseus with the Head of Medusa', 1570s. "Chiaroscuro woodcut printed from four blocks, the tone blocks in orange and reddish brown. 35.1 x 22.8 cm. Albertina, Vienna. Photo Albertina, Vienna.




Hans Burgkmair the Elder, 'Hans Paumgartner', 1512, Chiaroscuro woodcut printed from three blocks, the tone blocks in violet. 29.1 x 24.1 cm. Albertina, Vienna. Photo Albertina, Vienna.



Hendrick Goltzius, 'Landscape with Trees and a Shepherd Couple', c. 1593-98, "Chiaroscuro woodcut printed from three blocks, the tone blocks in pale green and green. 11.7 x 15.3 cm. Collection Georg Baselitz. Photo Albertina, Vienna. Organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London and the Albertina, Vienna.




Hans Burgkmair the Elder, 'St George and the Dragon', c. 1508-10.""Chiaroscuro woodcut printed from two blocks, the tone block in beige. 31.9 x 22.5 cm. Collection Georg Baselitz. Photo Albertina, Vienna. Organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London and the Albertina, Vienna."

Anders Zorn at the National Academy Museum, NYC

February 27, 2014, 8:48 am

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Venues

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter, November 9, 2013–February 2, 2014, (click on link for lots more information and images)
National Academy Museum 1083 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128 February 27 through May 18, 2014

The National Academy presents a major retrospective of Anders Zorn (1860-1920), one of the greatest Swedish painters at the turn of the 20th century. A virtuoso watercolorist, bravura painter, and etcher, Zorn rose from humble beginnings in the Swedish countryside to travel the world, captivate American artists and politicians alike, and paint some of the most-sought after portraits of America’s Gilded Age.

Featuring 90 rarely seen works, oil paintings, watercolors, etchings, and sculptures, drawn from public and private collections throughout Europe and the United States, this major retrospective, on view February 27 through May 18, 2014, reveals the vibrant artistic personality of Sweden’s master painter.

A truly international artist, Zorn’s traveled early in his career to Spain and Algeria where the intense color and light inspired this skillful watercolorist to perfect his craft. Later in Paris, influenced ̶ by the Impressionists, he chronicled modern life, while in America he rivaled John Singer Sargent as the most sought-after portraitist of high society. During his seven trips to the United States, he portrayed bankers, and industrialists including Andrew Carnegie, and even three presidents - Presidents Grover Clevand, Theodore Roosevelt, and, in a portrait that still hangs in the White House today, William Howard Taft. Back in Sweden he painted scenes of the Swedish countryside, his native folk culture and the beauty and serenity of the Nordic landscape.

The illegitimate son of a Bavarian brewer, Zorn was born into humble circumstances in 1860. Raised by his mother on his grandparents’ farm in Mora, Sweden, Zorn’s artistic virtuosity blossomed early. At the age of fifteen, he was accepted into the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. Soon after, one of his paintings was purchased by King Oscar II of Sweden.

In 1881, Zorn met his future wife, Emma Lamm, who hailed from a wealthy Jewish family. During the four years of their secret engagement, Zorn worked diligently to achieve success in the art world, and thus secure a future with Lamm. After gaining international recognition with work accepted for the Paris Salon and garnering commissions as a portrait painter, Zorn and Lamm wed. Her intelligence and social connections contributed to a powerful partnership, and his respect for her is seen in one of his earliest oil paintings,

Emma Reading.

Zorn travelled the globe, finding inspiration in Stockholm, Madrid, Algiers, Constantinople, London, Paris, Venice, New York and Chicago. His subject matter ranged as widely as his travels: from Swedish peasants at work to American presidents including Grover Cleveland, William Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt, and from high society ladies poised in their finest clothing to voluptuous nudes frolicking the countryside. It was fitting that one of Lamm’s cousins called Zorn “a hybrid between a gentleman and a farmer.”

Zorn temporarily relocated to Paris just in time for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, a breakthrough moment his work as a painter. He was shortly thereafter decorated with the Legion d’Honneur, the most prestigious order in France.

Over the course of seven extensive visits to the United States, Zorn became one of the most sought-after portraitists of the Gilded Age—rivaling John Singer Sargent in popularity. He painted in an elegant, assured style that captivated wealthy, influential members of society: American bankers, industrial magnets, and politicians. His involvement with the Swedish section of the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893 led to his meeting with many members of American high society, including influential art collectors Charles Deeving and Isabella Stewart Gardiner, whom he went on to paint and etch.

In 1896, Zorn resettled in his hometown of Mora, where he painted scenes of rural and urban life during a time when Sweden was transforming itself from a primarily agrarian society into one more dependent on industry. His painting

Midsummer Dance,

which revels in rural traditions, is considered one of Sweden’s national treasures.

The Great War in Portraits

February 28, 2014, 8:14 am

≫ Next: Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection

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The Great War in Portraits

27 February-15 June 2014, National Portrait Gallery, London 

    * First national exhibition of the First World War centenary commemorations  

    * 80 paintings, photographs, sculpture, films and drawings show the human experience of war

    * British and German Battle of the Somme propaganda films shown together for the first time

    * Portraits of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Edith Cavell, Mata Hari and Winston Churchill

    * Works by Beckmann, Kirchner, Orpen, Tonks,  Rosenberg and Epstein

    * Portraits of facially injured soldiers by Henry Tonks shown for the first time alongside harrowing medical photographs of the men he depicted

The exhibition strikingly brings together for the first time German expressionist masterpieces by Lovis Corinth and Max Beckmann and 

Ludwig Kirchner’s painting Selbstbildnis als Soldat(Self-portrait as a Soldier)

with Harold Gillies’ rarely shown photographs of facially injured soldiers from the Royal College of Surgeons.

'Self-portrait' by Sir William Orpen', 1917

Showing how the First World War was depicted and reported with a degree of visual detail unprecedented in the history of conflict, the exhibition includes photography and film as well as formal portraits. Rather than presenting a military history of the War, the Gallery aims to focus on its human aspect, concentrating on the way the Great War was represented through portraits of those involved, an approach never previously adopted.

The Great War in Portraits takes an international perspective. As well as iconic portraits of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Winston Churchill, the exhibition reflects the war experience of those from all social classes who served from throughout the Commonwealth. 

Highlights also include 

Jacob Epstein’s The Rock Drill,

one of the great early modernist works related to the War; a contrasted pairing of British and German films devoted to the Battle of the Somme never previously seen together; and a rare photograph by Jules Gervais Courtellemont depicting a deserted, battle-scarred landscape. The only work in the exhibition not to depict people, this poignant image is, in effect, a portrait of absence.

Starting with the eve of war, the exhibition includes imposing formal portraits of the heads of state of the participating nations, evoking those countries that would be drawn into the conflict in 1914. Such grand images are brought into sharp contrast with an understated press photograph of a pathetic-looking Gavrilo Princip, the 19-year-old student whose opportunistic assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on 28 June 1914 precipitated the First World War.

The Great War in Portraits shows how, following the declarations of war throughout Europe, power devolved from the heads of state to the military leaders of each country. Power-portraits of Haig, Blumer, Foch, Hindenburg and others, are contrasted with portraits of the ‘followers,’ by Sickert, Orpen and other war artists. 

In the central section titled ‘The Valiant and the Damned’, Portraits portraits of Victoria Cross holders, medal-winners, heroes and aces are shown juxtaposed with depictions of those whose lives were marked in different ways: casualties, those disfigured by wounds, prisoners of war, and those shot at dawn for cowardice. The idealised language of formal portraits, used as celebration and eulogy, is brought into violent discord with those images, such asnotably a selection of Henry Tonks's pastels of servicemen grotesquely disfigured by wounds, that reveal individual suffering and the human cost of war. 

An installation of 40 photographs in a regular grid formation presents a range of protagonists from medal winners and heroes to the dead and the executed, interspersed with artists, poets, memoirists and images representing the roles played by women, the home front and, the Commonwealth.

Key loans have been secured from Imperial War Museums, Tate, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, Allen Memorial Art Museum, the Royal Airforce Museum, Hendon, Oberlin College, Ohio, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

The exhibition is curated by Paul Moorhouse, Curator of Twentieth Century Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London. He says: ‘The Great War in Portraits explores a complex range of human experience. Evoking different roles, responsibilities and destinies, it illuminates the way war was represented through portraits of individuals – each caught up in events beyond reason or control.’

The exhibition is complemented by a fully-illustrated book by Paul Moorhouse with an essay by Sebastian Faulks.


From an excellent review:
 

^{Grid: Photographic portraits of World War I protagonists, at the National Portrait Gallery}
The show’s centrepiece is a vast, 40-photo grid of all manner of Great War participants. Some are familiar (Wilfred Owen; Baron von Richthofen; Mata Hari); others less so. We meet Walter Tull, the first black officer in the British army; Billie Nevill, the captain who kicked a football across No Man’s Land; Maria Botchkareva, leader of Russia’s women-only Battalion of Death; and Harry Farr, the shell-shocked private executed for desertion in 1916 (and officially pardoned in 2006).
Their grouping underscores the indiscriminate way the Great War sucked people from all backgrounds into its vortex.
Undoubtedly the most moving images on show, though, are the pastel drawings by Henry Tonks of facially disfigured soldiers awaiting reconstructive surgery back in Blighty.

Lots more images and information