Christie’s American Art on May 22 will offer Hopper, Hassam, Sargent, Avery, Inness, Cassatt

May 7, 2014, 9:25 am

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Coast Guard Boat I’s detail and emphasis on light, embodies Edward Hopper's aesthetic from the summer of 1929, as the majority of his work from the period was in watercolor (estimate: $1,000,000-1,500,000). Hopper preferred to use watercolor for his New England works as this medium was conducive to working en plein air and provided him a freedom not afforded by oil paint. As is the case with Coast Guard Boat I, Hopper often used water in his work as a means of introducing an element of motion into a scene that is otherwise dominated by stillness. The beauty of Coast Guard Boat I lies in the contradiction between weightlessness and heft, motion and stillness. This tension is echoed by the ropes, which tether the boat to the shore. At once wanting to be of the sea yet firmly harnessed creates a sense of restlessness and even agitation to the otherwise serene, idyllic image.

Milton Avery’s The Mandolin Player (estimate: $800,000-1,200,000) is just one of the six works from his collection to be included in the sale of American Art. The highly saturated palette of greens, blues, oranges and pinks is representative of Avery’s works from the mid-1940s, as is his rendering of expressive figures through a contained, plastic two-dimensional design. The interconnectedness of music and the formal components of visual art had been explored by American Modernists such as Arthur Dove and Georgia O'Keeffe in the 1910s and 1920s and were championed by European abstract painter, Wassily Kandinsky. Avery had likely been exposed to Kandinsky's work while exhibiting at the Valentine Gallery on 57th Street in 1935. Avery explored the topic in a more literal approach, demonstrating his ability to blend modern themes and broader European influences while remaining committed to a familiar subject, thus creating his own style.

George Inness’s (1825-1894) treatment of the landscape, particularly in his later work, is marked by a more subjective and ultimately more modern aesthetic than that of his contemporaries. The innovative brilliance of his art eventually brought him high acclaim--particularly for the later landscapes of which Summer, Montclair of 1887, is a notable example (estimate: $600,000-800,000). In Summer, Montclair, Inness presents a pastoral scene with a village church spire on the horizon and stream and grazing cattle in the distance. Beginning in 1884, Inness was able to achieve a complete synthesis of his innovative formal means and his goal of poetic expression. The central component of this synthesis was color, which he described as ‘the soul of a painting.’ Forms, on the other hand, though still based in the observation of nature, were softened by atmosphere and dissolved by light. Inness relished in capturing the colors of dawn, dusk, twilight, moonlight, the colors of all seasons and of all hours of the day. However, unlike the Impressionist painter Monet, Inness did not focus on the implied optical effects of motion or action, he instead created a dreamy stillness giving a sense of calmness.

Childe Hassam's stunning Impressionist work, Evening in the Rain, ( estimate: $1,000,000-1,500,000) captures a picturesque moment on a rain drenched sidewalk of lower Fifth Avenue. Hassam's passion for capturing the cityscapes that surrounded him immediately found direct expression in the works he produced, and critics quickly came to associate him with New York. In order to capture the ever-changing scenes around him, Hassam often executed quick sketches while seated in a cab or standing on the street. From the vantage point of the viewer, it seems entirely likely that Hassam sketched the composition for Evening in the Rain while out on one of his many jaunts around the city. The work includes all of the hallmarks of Hassam's celebrated works from the 1890s. Reflecting his fascination with his urban surroundings and the people that he encountered, Hassam pays homage to the city and captures the spirit of the end of the century in New York.

Hailing directly from a descendant of the sitter, John Singer Sargent’s Mrs. William George Raphael (estimate: $4,000,000-6,000,000) was painted in London in 1906 at the height of Sargent’s unparalleled level of success and when he had reached a mastery of his craft. Mrs. William George Raphael is a grandiose and engaging painting that is a masterwork of Sargent's later portraits. Following Sargent's enormous success in the United Kingdom and the United States by 1900, the artist had gained international celebrity and his clientele expanded upward from the high bourgeoisie to the aristocratic who now sought to have their image captured by the top portraitist of the Gilded Age. As is typical in Sargent's best portraits, Mrs. William George Raphael conveys the sitter's character as a forceful presence, combined with a quality of elegance and social ease.

Also in the sale:

Mary Cassatt’s Girl in a Hat with a Black Ribbon (estimate: $400,000-600,000).

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An American in London: Whistler and the Thames

May 7, 2014, 1:20 pm

≫ Next: Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting

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An American in London: Whistler and the Thames,” opening May 3 at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, is the first major exhibition devoted to American artist James McNeill Whistler’s early period in London, and it is the largest U.S. display of his work in almost 20 years. The exhibition showcases changing views of the capital city’s iconic riverbanks and waterways, revealing how Whistler emerged as one of the most innovative and original artists of the 19th century while London evolved into a modern city.

“Whistler was one of the most influential painters of his time, and now in a single show we’re able to look at the transformation of his work and the transformation of a city,” explained Julian Raby, The Dame Jillian Sackler Director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art. “This is a huge opportunity for the U.S. public to celebrate one of their greatest artistic figures.”

On view through Aug. 17, the exhibition features more than 80 works from major museums in the U.S. and Britain, including 20 important oil paintings of Chelsea and the Thames, masterful prints and rarely seen drawings, watercolors and pastels. The exhibition culminates with an ensemble of the artist’s famous Nocturnes, including the iconic

“Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge.”

Other highlights include the daytime industrial landscape

“Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge,”

the schooners at rest captured in “Wapping” (below) and selections from the Thames Set, an early series of etchings depicting the river’s seedy dockyards and dubious characters.

The Sackler’s presentation is the final venue of a three-city tour (previously at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Massachusetts) and will be enhanced by the addition of nearly 50 masterpieces from the Freer Gallery of Art, which holds the world’s largest and finest collection of the artist’s work, including the famous Peacock Room. Museum founder Charles Lang Freer met Whistler in London in 1890 and became his most important patron. This is the first time since the Freer Gallery opened in 1923 that these works will be on view with Whistlers from other institutions.

Changing Art for a Changing City

“An American in London” focuses on the period during the 1860s and ’70s when Whistler (1834–1903) adapted the realist style he developed in Paris into a more personal aesthetic: “art for art’s sake.” He transformed scenes of gritty contemporary life, especially along the Thames riverbank, into moody and poetic views of the city, layered with color and atmosphere. It was during this time that he started to give his works musical titles such as “arrangement,” “symphony” and “nocturne” and drew inspiration from the composition and flattened forms of Japanese prints, some of which will be on view.

“Whistler developed radically new modes of expression as a response to the changing world outside his window in London’s Chelsea neighborhood,” said Lee Glazer, curator of American art at the Freer and Sackler galleries. “Through the visual poetry of his ‘arrangements’ and ‘nocturnes’ he reasserted the value of beauty, providing aesthetic compensation for the loss and alienation many Victorians associated with modern life.”

During this time, London was in a near-constant cycle of destruction and rebuilding. Historic landmarks—such as Battersea Bridge, a Whistler favorite—were altered or torn down to make way for mansions, factories and other modern structures. The river, however, maintained its central importance both as Whistler’s subject and as part of the lifeblood of the city itself.

“An American in London” also features portraits of Whistler and his associates, bringing to life the personalities surrounding the artist during this crucial time in his career, as well as historic photographs and maps that detail the London neighborhoods where he lived and worked.

Organization

“An American in London” is organized by the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Dulwich Picture Gallery and Addison Gallery of Art, and is co-curated by Margaret F. MacDonald, professor emerita, and Patricia de Montfort, lecturer, at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Exhibition support is provided by the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts and the Friends of the Freer and Sackler Galleries. Additional support for programming is provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Catalog

A beautifully illustrated catalog, “An American in London: Whistler and the Thames,” ($40, softcover, $60, hardcover; Philip Wilson Publishers, 2013, 191 pp.) contains detailed analysis of several of Whistler’s most important works.

Venues:

Dulwich Picture Gallery London, U.K. October 16, 2013 – January 12, 2014

Addison Gallery of American Art  Phillips Academy, Andover, MA  February 1 – April 13, 2014

Freer and Sackler Galleries Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. May 2 – August 17, 2014

Reviews:

The Financial Times. A review of the London show: (some images added)

In grand oils, Whistler became a French-inflected painter of modern London life. His girlfriend Jo Hiffernan – hair “a red not gold but copper, as Venetian as a dream!” – stars in

“Wapping” (begun 1860) as a dockside tart, perched with smoking sailors on a balcony above passing ships painted impressionistically in fresh, bright hues...

In “The Last of Old Westminster” (1862), an impressionist flurry recording the reconstruction of the old bridge, each labourer is a dab of cream, each wooden pile a single luscious downward grey stroke.

By the fluid, sombrely tonal “Grey and Silver: Old Battersea Reach” (1863)

and “Grey and Silver: Chelsea Wharf” (1864-8), cool criss-crossed thin silver marks enlivened by the rusty brown of a few moored barges, narrative is banished and the Whistler of subdued, abstracted colour harmonies is triumphant.

Outstanding review

Also in the exhibition:

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Pink and Silver - Chelsea, the Embankment

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Vauxhall Bridge

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Battersea Reach from Lindsey Houses

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Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting

May 8, 2014, 1:52 pm

≫ Next: MEN IN ARMOR: EL GRECO AND PULZONE FACE TO FACE At The Frick

≪ Previous: An American in London: Whistler and the Thames

30 April – 21 September 2014

This spring, the National Gallery presents the first exhibition in Britain to explore the role of architecture in Italian Renaissance painting of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries.

Domenico Veneziano, ‘Saint Zenobius Bishop of Florence restores to life a widow's son in Borgo degli Albizzi, Florence', about 1442-1448 © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

'Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting' aims to increase visitors' appreciation and understanding of some of the most beautiful and architectonic paintings by Italian masters such as Duccio, Botticelli, Crivelli and their contemporaries. Visitors will be encouraged to look in new ways at buildings depicted in paintings, and to investigate how artists invented imagined spaces that transcended the reality of bricks, mortar and marble.

With a record-breaking six million visits during 2013, the National Gallery remains committed to researching and showcasing its extraordinarily rich permanent collection. As a result of the research partnership between the National Gallery and the University of York, this exhibition offers a fresh interpretation of some of the National Gallery’s own Italian Renaissance collection. In addition, Building the Picture will include the Venetian master

Sebastiano del Piombo's'The Judgement of Solomon' (Kingston Lacy, The Bankes Collection, National Trust),

on display in London for the first time in 30 years,

and 'The Ruskin Madonna' by Andrea del Verrocchio (National Gallery of Scotland).

In Renaissance Italy, art and architecture were closely interconnected and the boundaries between all the arts were fluid. An important reason for this was that there was no specific educational programme or apprenticeship for architects. The Florentine architect Brunelleschi, for example, trained as a goldsmith, while Michelangelo was a painter and sculptor before he designed buildings.
Five short films commissioned to coincide with this exhibition demonstrate how contemporary practitioners and thinkers are again blurring the boundaries between media and forms of practice. The films provide modern perspectives on real and imagined architecture from award-winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, film-maker Martha Fiennes, art historian T J Clark, film historian John David Rhodes and computer game cinematic director Peter Gornstein.

Caroline Campbell, Curator of Italian Paintings Before 1500 at the National Gallery, said:

''This exhibition provides a wonderful opportunity to think about how pictures can achieve an architectural sort of beauty. We can look beyond perspective to appreciate the imagined and fantastical spaces created by architecture. And how the sense of mass, scale and three-dimensionality introduced by buildings changes the balance and feel of a painting.''

Building the Picture explores the roles played by architecture in painting and how it affects the viewing process. Architecture within paintings has often been treated as a passive background or as subordinate to the figures. This exhibition shows how, on the contrary, architecture underpinned many paintings, and was used to design the whole picture from the very start. This was the case in

Sandro Botticelli's'Adoration of the Kings',

where the ruins in the picture were planned first and still dominate the composition. Renaissance paintings are full of arches, doorways and thresholds, like those in

Carlo Crivelli's'Annunciation, with Saint Emidius'

that invite the viewer into the picture and encourage us to begin a visual journey. Architecture could also be designed to tell a story, articulating the plot, deepening our understanding of the narrative and helping us to engage with the events.

In Domenico Veneziano's 'Saint Zenobius Bishop of Florence restores to life a widow's son killed by an ox cart in Borgo degli Albizi, Florence' from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the compressed perspective of the street heightens the emotion of the desperate mother whose son has just died.

More images from the exhibition:

Duccio , The Annunciation, 1311, © The National Gallery, London

Antonello da Messina, Saint Jerome in his Study, about 1475,© The National Gallery, London

Ercole de’ Roberti, Nativity, about 1490-93, © The National Gallery, London

Bramantino, The Adoration of the Kings, about 1500, © The National Gallery, London

Vincenzo Catena, Saint Jerome in his Study, probably about 1510, © The National Gallery, London

Marcello Venusti, The Purification of the Temple, after 1550. Oil on wood, 61 x 40 cm. Bought, 1885© The National Gallery, London.

'Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting' is also an online catalogue produced by the National Gallery to accompany the exhibition. Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery, said:

''I am delighted that this catalogue will be permanently accessible on the National Gallery website, where it can be read and enjoyed by a very wide audience.''

Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting is curated by Dr. Amanda Lillie, Reader in History of Art at the University of York; and Caroline Campbell, Curator of Italian Paintings before 1500; with Alasdair Flint, CDA PHD student, University of York/National Gallery.

↧

MEN IN ARMOR: EL GRECO AND PULZONE FACE TO FACE At The Frick

June 6, 2014, 5:16 am

≫ Next: Thomas Hart Benton’s Epic Mural America Today on View at Met Museum Beginning September 30

≪ Previous: Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting

August 5 through October 26, 2014

El Greco (1541–1614)

Vincenzo Anastagi, c. 1575

Oil on canvas

74 x 49 ⅞ inches

The Frick Collection, New York

Photo: Michael Bodycomb

El Greco’s Vincenzo Anastagi, acquired a century ago by Henry Clay Frick, is one of The Frick Collection’s most celebrated paintings and one of only two full-length portraits by the master. It was executed during the artist’s six-year stay in Rome, before he moved to Spain, where he spent the rest of his career. Much of the force of this work emanates from the resplendent half-armor worn by Anastagi. Rich highlights applied with broad brushstrokes accentuate the steel, its metallic sheen contrasting with the velvety texture of Anastagi’s green breeches and the dark crimson curtain.

Scipione Pulzone (c. 1540/42–98)

Jacopo Boncompagni, 1574

Oil on canvas

48 x 39 ⅛ inches

Private collection, courtesy of Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd.

Photo: Michael Bodycomb

To mark the 400th anniversary of El Greco’s death, the Frick will pair Vincenzo Anastagi with the rarely seen Jacopo Boncompagni by the artist’s Roman contemporary Scipione Pulzone. With its gleaming, highly detailed polish, Pulzone’s portrait of Boncompagni, on loan from a private collection, epitomizes the elegant style that dominated high-society portraiture in Rome during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. El Greco’s painterly portrayal of Anastagi stands in stark contrast, underscoring the artist’s innovative departures from convention. The exhibition, held in the Frick’s East Gallery, is organized by Jeongho Park, Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow.

MASTER OF PORTRAITURE: EL GRECO IN ROME

El Greco was born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in 1541 on the Greek island of Crete, which had been under Venetian rule since 1212. One of the few surviving records from his early years indicates that he was already an established painter of icons by 1566. He relocated to Venice in 1567, probably dissatisfied with his career as a Byzantine icon painter. There he absorbed Venetian Renaissance painting and began his transformation into an Italianate painter. As an aspiring artist, it was necessary for El Greco to master portrait painting. During the sixteenth century, portraiture grew in popularity in Europe, and portraitists enjoyed increasing recognition and esteem. A well-painted likeness was an effective way to win the favor of a prospective patron and become a court painter. Once associated with a court, an artist would enjoy not only economic stability but also the elevated status of a courtier.

In 1570 El Greco moved to Rome, where a recommendation written for him by the miniaturist Giulio Clovio led to his acceptance into the household of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Clovio introduced El Greco as a pupil of Titian and wrote specifically of a marvelous “self-portrait that astonished the painters in Rome.” Unfortunately, this painting has not survived. Clovio’s claim about El Greco’s mastery of portraiture is confirmed by the artist’s portrait of him (Museo di Capodimonte, Naples), completed about 1571. In this work, El Greco demonstrates his remarkable ability to depict psychologically penetrating likenesses with exacting naturalism. Although not officially hired by the cardinal, El Greco spent the next year and a half focusing on portraits for the circle of learned men who gathered at the Farnese Palace. In 1572, for reasons that are unknown to us, El Greco was expelled from the Farnese household. His execution of the portrait of Vincenzo Anastagi was no doubt part of his effort to draw the attention of powerful men and to secure much-needed patronage after his expulsion.

A PROMISING SUBJECT FOR SELF-PROMOTION: VINCENZO ANASTAGI

Anastagi was born into a noble family in Perugia around 1531 and became a Knight of Malta in 1563. He was most famous for his contribution to the victory against the Ottomans during the Siege of Malta in 1565. He was also known as an expert in fortifications, and his biography is included in a book published in 1578–79 about famous people from Perugia.

As a middle-ranking nobleman, Anastagi would not have been a promising patron. He was not particularly interested in paintings and was therefore unlikely to commission further works. He was, however, connected to a very eminent personage: Jacopo Boncompagni, the natural son of Pope Gregory XIII. Born in Bologna in 1548, Jacopo was legitimized almost immediately by his father. He moved to Rome in March 1572, when his father was elected pope, and in that year assumed the offices of governor of Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo and head of the papal army. In 1575 Boncompagni named Anastagi sergeant major of the Castel Sant’Angelo; it was probably on this occasion that Anastagi commissioned his portrait. The close connection between the two men may well have motivated El Greco. It could be expected that the portrait would be shown to Boncompagni and possibly even to Pope Gregory XIII. Since Boncompagni was known to be a great patron of the arts, El Greco’s portrait of Anastagi was an ideal means of self-promotion.3

For his portrayal of Anastagi, El Greco would have looked to examples of military portraits, the most recent, successful likeness of this type being Pulzone’s portrait of Boncompagni. Pulzone was at this time the most sought-after portrait painter in Rome, having portrayed dignitaries of the highest rank, including Pope Pius V, Pope Gregory XIII, and Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. The artist also enjoyed personal relationships with powerful patrons; his first son, Giacomo, was Boncompagni’s godchild.

CONSIDERING PULZONE’S JACOPO BONCOMPAGNI

El Greco undoubtedly would have been aware of Pulzone’s splendid likeness. The three-quarter-length portrait communicates Boncompagni’s high status with the detailed depiction of his opulent armor, meticulously groomed beard, and elegant hands. According to the inscription on the piece of paper in the sitter’s right hand, the portrait was executed in 1574, only about one year before El Greco painted Vincenzo Anastagi. In his left hand, Boncompagni holds a wooden letter case, which suggests that the painting was probably commissioned when Jacopo was sent on a diplomatic mission to Ferrara to greet Henri de Valois, the future French king, Henry III.

In the portrait, Pulzone achieves lifelike qualities through painstakingly rendered details. Traces of brushwork are suppressed in order to gain a highly finished surface that adds to the portrait’s sense of refinement. Boncompagni’s dazzling armor displays techniques of embossing, damascening, bluing, and gilding. Pulzone’s depiction of the breeches—woven with gold and silver threads—shows an equal degree of precision. The light bouncing off the breastplate lends tactile effect to the polished surface of the metal. Pulzone’s masterful depiction of the play of light in the smallest details, such as on the fringe of the curtain, enhances the illusionistic effect.

THE PORTRAYAL IN ARMOR TO PROMOTE ONE’S IMAGE

As a newcomer to Roman noble society, Boncompagni would have felt the need to actively propagate his image, and a portrayal in armor would serve this purpose. Armor had gradually become obsolete in the sixteenth century, after firearms replaced swords and lances as the principal weapons of warfare; paradoxically, the loss of its utilitarian function served only to enhance its prestige, and it was seen as a symbol of masculinity, military valor, wealth, social status, and antique lineage. Pulzone’s portrayal of Boncompagni in such ostentatious armor reflects the sitter’s important positions as governor of Castel Sant’Angelo and head of the papal army.

The figure of Saint Michael on the breastplate refers not only to Castel Sant’Angelo but also to Boncompagni’s role as the protector of the Church. Militant spirit is accentuated in the prominent display of the figure of Mars on the helmet and the armored glove placed on the table. Lining the golden bands that twine the breastplate and shoulder and arm defenses are various trophies that represent military feats. More specific than the spoils are the depictions of captive Turks along the center band of the breastplate and the base of the helmet, which commemorate the recent victory over the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. In addition to the martial motifs, there are symbols of wealth and prosperity—such as cornucopias and grotesque figures carrying jars of fruit—meant to convey Boncompagni’s eminent status.

When El Greco portrayed Anastagi, both the painter and the sitter would have been keenly aware of the prestige associated with armor, but the trappings El Greco could use in his depiction were limited by the sitter’s rank of sergeant major. Unlike Boncompagni, who wears highly decorative parade armor, which was reserved for ceremonial occasions, Anastagi is portrayed in field armor, which was used in battle. Regardless of the degree of opulence, however, armor itself was perceived as a status symbol. In the sixteenth century, even merchants would have themselves portrayed in armor. In this sense, Anastagi’s desire to be depicted in armor and with a rapier reflects not only his wish to make known his profession but also to aggrandize himself. El Greco’s use of the full-length format further emphasizes the sitter’s ambition. Anastagi was from a noble family, but his status did not approach that of the kings, generals, and grandees for whom full-length military portraits were customarily reserved.

EL GRECO FAVORS INNOVATION AND ARTISTRY OVER TRANSCRIPTION OF REALITY

For El Greco, representing Anastagi in armor would have presented an excellent opportunity to display his artistry. Contrary to previous studies that assume this work is a literal depiction of reality, research undertaken in preparation for this exhibition indicates that the painter went beyond a faithful description of the symbolic objects. Most striking is El Greco’s drastic abbreviation of the details of Anastagi’s armor, prioritizing instead a blaze of light reflected on the metal surface. During the Renaissance, the painted representation of reflective armor was considered to be a powerful means of demonstrating a painter’s virtuosity and was often offered as proof of painting’s superiority over all other artistic genres. El Greco certainly would have been aware that the artistic skill necessary to imitate the glittering armor would draw much praise.

El Greco’s innovations were not limited to the representation of armor. The painter appears to have taken careful measures to render the unusual form of the curtain, which emphasizes the most important elements in the portrait, the sitter’s face and armor. As can be seen in the pentimento, El Greco moved the contour of the right edge of the drape upward in order to align it closer to the sitter’s left forearm. Also, the X-radiograph taken during the painting’s treatment in 1958–59 indicates that El Greco shortened the curtain to achieve a tighter focus on the sitter’s upper body, which allows the viewer to appreciate the painter’s ability to depict the different textures of various materials.

Showcasing his artistic invention, the painter achieves a sense of verisimilitude quite distinct from that of Pulzone’s meticulously executed portrait. It is as though El Greco’s intent was to emphasize Anastagi’s military career and personal traits over his status. The sunburnt face and strands of gray hair, rendered with short, powerful brushstrokes, bear witness to his career on the battlefield—these are not the idealized features of an elegant courtier. White hose accentuate the athletic, muscular calves befitting an infantry officer. Anastagi’s sense of self-possession is enhanced by the placement of his arms, which frame his torso. In the sixteenth century, this pose was associated with aggressive masculine virtues. The pentimento to the sitter’s left reveals that El Greco made an inventive change in the depiction of the sword. By shifting its orientation without altering the position of the hand, the painter directs the viewer’s attention to the gilded hilt and to the scabbard, so that the weapon seems almost an extension of the sergeant’s powerful forearm.

El Greco’s likely intention was to honor Anastagi while simultaneously displaying his own artistic invention. The painter has been described as a proud man who felt a keen sense of rivalry with other artists of his time. Although there is no evidence documenting El Greco’s opinion of Pulzone, a compelling case can be made for the catalytic effect that the most successful portraitist in Rome had on the Cretan artist. A link emerges between the magnificent verisimilitude of Pulzone’s Jacopo Boncompagni (as well as the acclaim it brought him) and El Greco’s ambition to surpass Pulzone in terms of fame and artistry, which prompted the creation of the highly original Vincenzo Anastagi.

PUBLICATION

Men in Armor: El Greco and Pulzone Face to Face is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue that features an essay by Jeongho Park, the exhibition’s guest curator. The book (softcover, 64 pages, 35 illustrations; $14.95, Member price: $13.46) will be available in the Museum Shop or can be ordered through the Frick’s Web site (www.frick.org) or by phone at 212.547.6848.

FRICK EXTENDS ITS FOCUS ON EL GRECO INTO FALL AND WINTER

The Frick will extend its focus on El Greco through the fall and winter with an installation organized in conjunction with El Greco in New York, opening in November at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Frick will unite its three remarkable El Greco paintings—

Purification of the Temple

and portraits of Vincenzo Anastagi and

St. Jerome

—for the first time showing them together on one wall of the East Gallery. El Greco at the Frick, runs from November 4, 2014, through February 1, 2015.

↧

Thomas Hart Benton’s Epic Mural America Today on View at Met Museum Beginning September 30

July 28, 2014, 5:05 pm

≫ Next: Kandinsky: A Retrospective September 26, 2014–January 4, 2015

≪ Previous: MEN IN ARMOR: EL GRECO AND PULZONE FACE TO FACE At The Frick

Thomas Hart Benton (American, 1889-1975) City Activities with Dancehall from America Today, 1930–31. Mural cycle consisting of ten panels. Egg tempera with oil glazing over Permalba on a gesso ground on linen mounted to wood panels with a honeycomb interior. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of AXA Equitable, 2012
Exhibition Dates: September 30, 2014–April 19, 2015

The exhibition Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today Mural Rediscovered celebrates the gift of Thomas Hart Benton’s epic mural America Today from AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in December 2012. Missouri native Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) painted the 10-panel mural cycle in 1930–31 for New York’s New School for Social Research to adorn the boardroom of its International Style modernist building on West 12th Street. It was commissioned by the New School’s director, Alvin Johnson, who had fashioned the school as a center for progressive thought and education in Greenwich Village. Depicting a sweeping panorama of American life during the 1920s, America Today ranks among Benton’s most renowned works and as one of the most significant accomplishments in American art of the period.

“This exhibition is the culmination of an extraordinary partnership between the Metropolitan and AXA, which donated the mural to the Museum and also serves as the exhibition’s sponsor. For this, we are tremendously grateful,” stated Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum. “The Metropolitan’s presentation of Benton’s great mural will shed new light on this visually and intellectually stimulating landmark in American art of the early 1930s, especially as the Museum will display the mural as the artist originally intended it to be seen. Positioning the mural’s new home in the context of the Metropolitan’s diverse collections, the exhibition also tells a unique story rooted in New York’s own cultural history.”

“The Department of Modern and Contemporary Art is thrilled to debut AXA’s great gift of Benton’s remarkable America Today mural in the American Wing, where the artist’s expansive vision of life in the United States will resonate deeply with John Vanderlyn’s grand panorama, 19th-century genre painting, and Thomas Cole’s philosophical landscapes, among other treasures,” said Sheena Wagstaff, the Museum’s Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art. “The exhibition will also remind visitors that the key themes of Benton’s mural—the heroic proletariat and modern industry—were greatly significant for artists in a contemporary international context, not only in the United States, but also in Mexico, and in France between the world wars.”

The exhibition is made possible by AXA.

America Today was Benton’s first major mural commission and the most ambitious he ever executed in New York City. The exhibition will demonstrate how the work not only marked a turning point in Benton’s career as a painter—elevating his stature among his peers and critics—but in hindsight stands out even more as a singular achievement of American art of the period, one that, among other effects, served to legitimize modern mural painting as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Arts Project in the 1930s. Stylistically bold, America Today stands midway between the artist’s early experiments in abstraction, signs of which are still evident in the mural, and the expressive figurative style for which he is best known today. Thematically, the mural evokes the ebullient belief in American progress that was characteristic of the 1920s, even as it acknowledges the onset of economic distress that would characterize life in the following decade. The commissioning of America Today also marked an important episode in international modernism; the great Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco was commissioned to paint a mural in the New School at the same time, and the two
artists worked on their projects concurrently.

On view starting September 30 in the Museum’s Erving and Joyce Wolf Gallery in the American Wing, the exhibition will be organized into three sections: the first will feature a large selection of Benton’s studies for the mural; the second will present the mural installed in a facsimile of its original space at the New School; and the third will feature related works by other artists, all from the Museum’s collection.

America Today Rediscovered
The keystone of the exhibition—the mural—will be installed in a reconstruction of the 30-by-22-foot boardroom as it existed at the New School in 1931, allowing viewers to experience the mural cycle as Benton conceived it. A highlight of this extraordinary opportunity to view the reconstructed mural in its nearly original setting is the incorporation of elements that were part of the architect Joseph Urban’s modernist aesthetic for the New School building, such as the black and red color scheme he used for the room. Among the mural’s most distinctive features are the aluminum-leaf wooden moldings, which not only frame the mural but also create inventive spatial breaks within each large panel. When the mural was installed at the New School, these moldings echoed the Art Deco details of Urban’s building design.

The 10 panels—most of which loom to a height of seven-and-a-half feet—depict a panoramic sweep of rural and urban life on the eve of the Great Depression. They capture the tension of early modern America, with allusions to race relations and social values, while simultaneously celebrating the themes of industry, progress, and urban life. An array of pre-Depression types—flappers, farmers, steel workers, stock market tycoons, and others representing a cross section of American life—will surround visitors in the mural space and can be further explored in the adjacent galleries, which will present many of the studies Benton made during his travels around the United States in the 1920s and to which he referred for the mural project.

The Mural Studies
The second section of the exhibition, featuring Benton’s studies for America Today, illuminates the deliberative nature of his working process. Besides the impressions Benton captured during his travels around the U.S. in the 1920s, the studies on view will include character studies in pencil for figures that appear in the mural, as well as painted compositional studies for individual mural panels.

Related Works
The final section of the exhibition includes works that relate to Benton’s America Today drawn from the Metropolitan Museum’s Departments of Modern and Contemporary Art, Photographs, and European Paintings. Highlights of this section are other works by Benton; renowned photographs by Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, and Lewis Hine; and, of particular interest, Jackson Pollock’s Pasiphaë (1943). During the time Benton was painting America Today, Pollock was his student and served as a model for his teacher’s mural. The inclusion of Pollock’s abstract painting in the exhibition provides opportunities to consider the complex personal and artistic relationship between the two artists.

From the New School to the Metropolitan
After more than 50 years in the boardroom of the New School, a space that was subsequently used as a classroom, America Today proved difficult for the school to maintain in perpetuity. In 1982, the school announced the sale of the mural cycle to the Manhattan art dealer Maurice Segoura, with the condition that it would not be re-sold outside the United States or as individual panels. But the work was a great challenge to sell as a whole, increasing the likelihood that the panels would be dispersed.

America Today was acquired by AXA (then Equitable Life) in 1984, in support of efforts on the part of then-Mayor Edward I. Koch and others to keep it intact and in New York City. Two years later, after extensive cleaning and restoration, America Today was unveiled to critical acclaim in AXA’s new headquarters at 787 Seventh Avenue. When the company moved its corporate headquarters again in 1996, to 1290 Avenue of the Americas, America Today was put on display in the lobby. There it remained until January 2012, when the company was asked to remove it to make way for a renovation. The removal triggered AXA’s decision to place the historic work in a museum collection, and in December 2012, AXA donated the mural to the Metropolitan Museum. This transformative gift was facilitated by H. Barbara Weinberg, Curator Emerita, The American Wing, and Pari Stave, Senior Administrator in the Museum’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art.

More information about the 2012 gift can be found in the Press Room on the Museum’s website.

Exhibition Credits
Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today Mural Rediscovered is organized by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, the Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, and Randall Griffey, Associate Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, both of the Metropolitan Museum.

Related Programs
A variety of education programs will take place in conjunction with the exhibition. These include gallery talks, a one-day symposium on March 2, 2015, a Sunday at the Met lecture, and a scholars’ day workshop event. A Musical Tribute to Thomas Hart Benton with jazz pianist Orrin Evans and the Captain Black Big Band will take place on February 20, 2015.

Related Publication
The exhibition will be accompanied by a Bulletin published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Featuring essays by curators Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Randall Griffey, it will be available in February 2015.

↧

Kandinsky: A Retrospective September 26, 2014–January 4, 2015

July 29, 2014, 4:57 am

≫ Next: Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots

≪ Previous: Thomas Hart Benton’s Epic Mural America Today on View at Met Museum Beginning September 30

Kandinsky Retrospective Brings Modern Masterworks from the Centre Pompidou–Paris to the Frist Center

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts presents Kandinsky: A Retrospective, an exhibition celebrating a lifetime of work by Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) in the Center’s Ingram Gallery from September 26, 2014–January 4, 2015. Chronicling four decades of artistic evolution—from early figurative works to exuberant experiments in abstraction and color—this exhibition invites visitors on an extraordinary stylistic journey of one of the most innovative modern art masters of the twentieth century.

Kandinsky: A Retrospective is drawn largely from the collection of the Centre Pompidou–Paris, and features more than 100 paintings, drawings and other works. A majority of these stunning works were part of the artist’s personal collection and were given by the artist’s widow, Nina. Additional paintings from the Milwaukee Art Museum, including works by Gabriele Münter, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, further an appreciation of the artist in the context of his contemporaries.

Organized chronologically and spanning the artist’s periods in Russia, Germany and France, the exhibition begins with paintings from the early 1900s including landscapes, painted folk tales and figurative works. “These works show how the young artist was influenced by major styles such as Art Nouveau, Impressionism, Symbolism, and Post-Impressionism,” says Frist Center Chief Curator Mark Scala. In a period of experimentation and movement towards more symbolic work, Kandinsky and other like-minded artists founded Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider) in 1911, a group of artists based in Munich who emphasized the expression of extreme psychological conditions in their art. “Kandinsky made a radical move away from recognizable subject matter in the belief that painting’s most important property was its capacity to dissolve the outside world and evoke inner conditions,” says Mr. Scala.

Kandinsky felt that music has the capacity to induce spiritual feelings within listeners through its formal arrangement of melodic sounds, harmonies and rhythms. He believed that “painters could similarly ‘orchestrate’ the elements of art—color, form, and line—to trigger pure emotional experiences,” says Mr. Scala. In the theoretical treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky wrote that “color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer, while the soul is a piano of many strings. The artist is the hand through which the medium of different keys causes the human soul to vibrate.”

In 1914, Kandinsky returned to Russia, his country of birth, and married Nina Andreevskaya in 1917. Facing financial hardship and material shortage during World War I and the Russian Revolution, his artistic output was somewhat limited. However, the paintings that Kandinsky did complete, some marking a return to Impressionism, further demonstrated his belief that art should comfort and convey inner meaning rather than provoke and express political views, as other avant-garde Russian artists believed.

Back in Germany during a period of heady intellectualism in the 1920s at the Bauhaus, a highly influential German art school, Kandinsky favored geometric works and created monumental decors, including the large scale mural panels he and his students designed for the Juryfreie Kunstschau—Berlin (Non-juried Art Exhibition—Berlin). The panels, built for a never-realized museum lounge, were intended to immerse the viewer in a complete aesthetic experience. A 1977 reconstruction of this room is a highlight of this exhibition, and as Kandinsky initially desired, lets “the viewer ‘stroll’ within the picture.” In stark contrast with the rigid geometry of the Bauhaus period, Kandinsky’s paintings from the end of his life and career in France are recognized for their joyful use of biomorphic forms, which reflect the influence of Parisian light and nature as well as Surrealism.

Exhibition Credit
Kandinsky: A Retrospective is organized by the Centre Pompidou—Paris and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Sponsor Acknowledgment
Platinum Sponsor: The HCA Foundation on behalf of HCA and TriStar Health
Silver Sponsors: Anne and Joe Russell
Hospitality Sponsor: Union Station Hotel
This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts is supported in part by the Metro Nashville Arts Commission, the Tennessee Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Exhibition Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a 202-page illustrated catalogue distributed for the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Milwaukee Art Museum by Yale University Press.

Related Public Programs

Friday, September 26
Community Opening: Kandinsky: A Retrospective and Helen Pashgian: Light Invisible
10:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.
Free

Celebrate the opening of two new exhibitions, Kandinsky: A Retrospective and Helen Pashgian: Light Invisible, during our Community Opening. This event is free and open to the public. A cash bar and hors d’oeuvres will be available in the Frist Center’s Grand Lobby from 6:00–8:30 p.m. Remarks will begin at 7:00 p.m. in the Frist Center Auditorium. RSVP by Monday, September 15 by calling 615.744.3987 or membership@fristcenter.org. Join us!

Friday, September 26
Curator’s Perspective: Kandinsky: A Retrospective Presented by Angela Lampe, curator, Centre Pompidou
Frist Center Auditorium
12:00 p.m.
Free
There are not many artists who successively adopted three nationalities during their lives.Wassily Kandinsky was born in Russia, achieved renown as a pioneer of abstraction and as a teacher at the Bauhaus art school in Germany, and settled in Paris where he was buried as a French citizen in 1944. In each country, in each context, he found new inspiration for his art. This lecture provides a journey through the life and work of one of the great masters of modern art. Kandinsky: A Retrospective is on view in the Ingram Gallery from September 26, 2014–January 4, 2015.

Tuesday, October 7
Lecture Series: “Food for Thought”
11:30 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Lunch begins at 11:30 a.m. with lecture to follow at noon.
Frist Center Auditorium
Free with advance registration; lunch and gallery admission included. Registration for this lecture opens Tuesday, September 16; call Vanderbilt University at 615.322.8585 to register.
In partnership with Vanderbilt University’s Office of Community, Neighborhood, and Government Relations, “Food for Thought: Kandinsky―Exploring Connections between Music and the Visual Arts,” is a three-part lecture series presented by Vanderbilt professors, Frist Center curators, and members of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. This series provides the community at large with an opportunity to build challenging intellectual connections to the exhibition Kandinsky: A Retrospective. Mark your calendars for our next lectures on Tuesday, November 4 and Tuesday, December 2. Visit http://www.fristcenter.org for lecture details. Kandinsky: A Retrospective is on view in the Ingram Gallery from Friday, September 26, 2014, to Sunday, January 4, 2015.

Thursday, October 9
Curator’s Tour: Kandinsky: A Retrospective Presented by Mark Scala, chief curator, Frist Center
12:00 p.m.
Meet at exhibition entrance
Gallery admission required; members free
Join Frist Center Chief Curator Mark Scala on a tour of Kandinsky: A Retrospective as he explores the work of this influential Russian painter and art theorist throughout his long career.

Sunday, October 19
Artful Tales: “Little Logan Golden Eye”
2:00–3:00 p.m.
Frist Center Auditorium/Studios
Free; seating is first come, first seated
Artful Tales is a FREE family program geared toward everyone ages three and up! Listen and play along as an art-related story comes to life. Then, head upstairs to the art studio and make an artwork that relates to the story.
Enjoy this gentle, original story about a long-awaited child, a magical fiddle, and the power of believing in yourself and the gifts that you are given. Afterwards, make paintings that explore the connections between color and music. This program complements the exhibition Kandinsky: A Retrospective.

Tuesday, November 4
Lecture Series: “Food for Thought”
11:30 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Lunch begins at 11:30 a.m. with lecture to follow at noon.
Frist Center Auditorium
Free with advance registration; lunch and gallery admission included. Registration for this lecture opens Tuesday, October 14; call Vanderbilt University at 615.322.8585 to register.
In partnership with Vanderbilt University’s Office of Community, Neighborhood, and Government Relations, “Food for Thought: Kandinsky―Exploring Connections between Music and the Visual Arts,” is a three-part lecture series presented by Vanderbilt professors, Frist Center curators, and members of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. This series provides the community at large with an opportunity to build challenging intellectual connections to the exhibition Kandinsky: A Retrospective. Mark your calendars for the final lecture on Tuesday, December 2. Visit http://www.fristcenter.org for lecture details. Kandinsky: A Retrospective is on view in the Ingram Gallery from Friday, September 26, 2014, to Sunday, January 4, 2015.

Thursday, November 6
Lecture: “Understanding Kandinsky in His Early Twentieth Century Context” Frist Center Auditorium Presented by Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Ph.D., David Bruton, Jr., Centennial Professor in Art History and Regent’s Outstanding Teaching Professor, The University of Texas, Austin
6:30 p.m.
Gallery admission required; members free

Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky was one of the major pioneers in the emergence of totally abstract painting—art without recognizable subject matter. Kandinsky believed that, by communicating through color and form rather than by subject matter, art could achieve a higher level of spirituality. In an effort to have a transformative artistic effect upon his audience, Kandinsky grounded this quest in contemporary scientific ideas and discoveries such as radioactivity. This lecture, presented in conjunction with the exhibition Kandinsky: A Retrospective, will explore the cultural context in which Kandinsky worked and place the artist within this important historical moment. Find more lecture details at http://www.fristcenter.org.

Friday, November 14
ARTini: Kandinsky: A Retrospective
7:00 p.m.
Meet at exhibition entrance
Gallery admission required; members free
Are you curious about art? Do you want to learn more about the content and concepts behind an artist’s work? If you answered yes to either of those questions, then the ARTini program is for you! ARTinis are designed for everyone—from the novice to the connoisseur—and include informal and insightful conversations that offer a deeper understanding of one or two works of art in an exhibition. Join Frist Center Associate Curator of Interpretation Megan Robertson as she explores a few of the works of this influential Russian painter and art theorist.

Tuesday, November 18
ARTini: Kandinsky: A Retrospective
12:00 p.m.
Meet at exhibition entrance
Gallery admission required; members free
Are you curious about art? Do you want to learn more about the content and concepts behind an artist’s work? If you answered yes to either of those questions, then the ARTini program is for you! ARTinis are designed for everyone—from the novice to the connoisseur—and include informal and insightful conversations that offer a deeper understanding of one or two works of art in an exhibition. Join Frist Center Associate Curator of Interpretation Megan Robertson as she explores a few of the works of this influential Russian painter and art theorist.

Thursday, November 20
Performance: “Blue-Yellow-Red” Presented by Robbie Hunsinger and Missy Raines
6:30 p.m.
Rechter Room
Gallery admission required; members free
Seating is first come, first seated
Interdisciplinary artist and transmedia performer Robbie Lynn Hunsinger will present an original composition inspired by the art and writings of Wassily Kandinsky that explores synesthesia and the interconnectedness of music, visual art and the senses. Hunsinger’s multimedia concert piece complements the motives and visual materials of her concurrent interactive installation, Blue-Yellow-Red, on view in the Frist Center’s Rechter Room from November 13–21, 2014. Virtuoso bassist Missy Raines will join multi-instrumentalist Hunsinger for this premiere performance of “Blue-Yellow-Red” for acoustic instruments, laptop, and projector.

Tuesday, December 2
Lecture Series: “Food for Thought”
11:30 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Lunch begins at 11:30 a.m. with lecture to follow at noon.
Frist Center Auditorium
Free with advance registration; lunch and gallery admission included. Registration for this lecture opens Tuesday, November 11; call Vanderbilt University at 615.322.8585 to register.
In partnership with Vanderbilt University’s Office of Community, Neighborhood, and Government Relations, “Food for Thought: Kandinsky―Exploring Connections between Music and the Visual Arts,” is a three-part lecture series presented by Vanderbilt professors, Frist Center curators, and members of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. This series provides the community at large with an opportunity to build challenging intellectual connections to the exhibition Kandinsky: A Retrospective. Visit http://www.fristcenter.org for lecture details. Kandinsky: A Retrospective is on view in the Ingram Gallery from Friday, September 26, 2014, to Sunday, January 4, 2015.

↧

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots

August 5, 2014, 10:37 am

≫ Next: "EGON SCHIELE: PORTRAITS" OPENS AT NEUE GALERIE NEW YORK

≪ Previous: Kandinsky: A Retrospective September 26, 2014–January 4, 2015

Tate Liverpool: Exhibition

30 June – 18 October 2015

Jackson Pollock
Yellow Islands 1952
Oil on canvas
support: 1435 x 1854 mm
Presented by the Friends of the Tate Gallery (purchased out of funds provided by Mr and Mrs H.J. Heinz II and H.J. Heinz Co. Ltd) 1961
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2014
View the main page for this artwork

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) is widely considered to be one of the most influential and provocative American artists of the twentieth century.

Pollock famously pioneered action painting, a process that saw him drip paint on canvases resting on the studio floor. Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots presents the first exhibition in more than three decades of Pollock’s paintings made between 1951 and 1953, shedding light on a less well known but extremely influential part of his practice and departure from his signature technique.

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots brings together the most significant showing of this widely debated body of work in a public institution since 1980. These paintings had a profound impact on the language of contemporary art, with noted art historianMichael Fried commenting that it was while Pollock was making his Black Pourings that he was ‘on the verge of an entirely new and different kind of painting … of virtually limitless potential’.

Created after nearly four years of colourful, lyrical, decorative, non-figurative paintings, the Black Pourings marked a major turning point in Pollock’s style. Feeling compelled to re-invigorate himself and his practice during a difficult period in his life, it was a deliberate move from his defining ‘drip’ technique to a new ‘pour’, anticipating the arrival of post-painterly abstraction in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

This exhibition will take visitors on a journey through the artist’s practice, starting with a room featuring a selection of paintings from 1947–49 as an introduction to the innovative directions represented by the Black Pourings period. Exhibiting works from the peak of the artist’s fame juxtaposed with his lesser known work offers the opportunity to appreciate Pollock’s broader ambitions as an artist and better understand the importance of the ‘blind spots’ in his practice.

Presented alongside the Black Pourings will be drawings from the same period, regarded as his most important and productive as a draughtsman, as well as a number of virtually unknown and rarely seen sculptures. With an immense material power beyond their tiny scale, these enigmatic works will be a surprising discovery for many and, along with his paintings, reveal Pollock’s extensive practice.

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots explores this immensely rich and relatively neglected body of work and will provide new insights into this pivotal artist’s contribution to and influence on post-war art.

This exhibition is a collaboration between Tate Liverpool and the Dallas Museum of Art, where it will then be on display 15 November 2015–20 March 2016.

↧

"EGON SCHIELE: PORTRAITS" OPENS AT NEUE GALERIE NEW YORK

October 7, 2014, 11:42 am

≫ Next: Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis 

≪ Previous: Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots

On October 9, 2014, Neue Galerie New York will open "Egon Schiele: Portraits," a special exhibition devoted to portraiture created by the masterful Austrian artist Egon Schiele. This is the first exhibition at an American museum to focus exclusively on portraiture in Schiele's work. The show will be on view through January 19, 2015. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Egon Schiele (1890-1918) is considered one of the twentieth century's most important artists. A protégé of Gustav Klimt, Schiele is celebrated for his singular style of draftsmanship, unusual use of color, and physically raw, often sexually provocative depictions of his sitters. Schiele's expressive style and controversial subject matter played an important role in the advancement of modernism in Europe.

"Egon Schiele: Portraits," organized by Schiele scholar Dr. Alessandra Comini, will be shown on the third floor galleries of the museum, and will include approximately 125 paintings, drawings, and sculpture. Designer Federico de Vera is responsible for the exhibition installation, which will borrow from design principles popular in Austria during the early twentieth century. The Neue Galerie is the sole venue for the exhibition.

The show focuses on six groupings of the artist's work: Family and Academy; Fellow Artists; Sitters and Patrons; Lovers; Eros; and Self-Portraits and Allegorical Self-Portraits. In addition, there will be a special display highlighting a traumatic and pivotal period in Schiele's life: his arrest and imprisonment during the spring of 1912. The exhibition documents an evolution of the artist's style, both pre- and post-imprisonment. Schiele's controversial achievements and untimely death at the age of 28 add a mythic quality to his abbreviated career.

Several extraordinary loans have been assembled for this exhibition, from both American and European museums and private collections. These include

Portrait of Gerti Schiele (1909) from The Museum of Modern Art;

Portrait of Johann Harms (1916) from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum;

Portrait of the Artist's Wife, Standing (Edith Schiele in Striped Dress) (1915) from the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; and

Self-Portrait with Peacock Waistcock, Standing (1911) from the collection of Ernst Ploil, Vienna.

The work of Egon Schiele is central to the mission of the Neue Galerie, which holds the finest collection of paintings and drawings by the artist in the United States. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue, published by Prestel, which features contributions from scholars Christian Bauer, Alessandra Comini, Lori Felton, Jane Kallir, Diethard Leopold, and Ernst Ploil.

↧

Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis 

October 7, 2014, 12:56 pm

≫ Next: Allen Jones at the Royal Academy of Arts

≪ Previous: "EGON SCHIELE: PORTRAITS" OPENS AT NEUE GALERIE NEW YORK

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) presents Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis, the first retrospective of the American modernist Peter Blume (1906-1992) since 1976, on view November 14, 2014 – April 5, 2015.

Nature and Metamorphosis will dazzle and surprise with gorgeous allegorical paintings and virtuoso drawings that explore rebirth and transformation. The retrospective will include 159 objects, including 56 paintings and 103 drawings from 1924 through 1990, spanning Peter Blume’s entire career. From jarring early works inspired by the machine age and growth of cities through profound ruminations on the power of nature, Blume’s work helped define American modernism. The retrospective is curated by Robert Cozzolino, PAFA Senior Curator and Curator of Modern Art.

While best known as a painter, Blume was a virtuoso, dynamic draftsman, and his drawings show a dynamic, surprising range. Several focus sections in the exhibition will reveal Blume’s working methods, tracing the development of ideas in extraordinary, dynamic drawings and small paintings leading up to major works. Among the works featured are

South of Scranton (1930-31),

which caused a scandal when it won first prize at the 1934 Carnegie International;

The Eternal City (1934-37),

Blume’s notorious anti-fascist political work;

The Rock (1944-48),

a dramatic allegory of the creative and destructive capacity of nature; and

Tasso’s Oak (1957-60),

Blume’s largest painting, inspired by Italy, and not seen in public since 1961.

“Blume was critical to the development and reception of modernism in America. His work played a key role in disseminating avant-garde ideas in the U.S. art world using a method that resembled Flemish art transposed through the lens of Cubism and the unconscious. Politically-engaged and willing to tackle difficult subjects, Blume was among the first Americans to use Surrealist methods, but remained independent of groups all of his life. His work will be a revelation to viewers; he made some of the most startling and absorbing paintings of the 20^thcentury,” says Robert Cozzolino.

A European émigré, Blume was born into a Russian Jewish family that came to the U.S. from what is now Belarus. He studied at New York’s Educational Alliance Art School alongside Chaim Gross and the Soyer brothers who formed his first close artistic circle. Later, he studied briefly at the Art Students League where he befriended Alexander Calder. By the age of 18, Blume was exhibiting professionally at one of the leading modernist galleries in the country, and was deeply immersed in the creative life of Greenwich Village in New York City. After 1930, Blume lived in Sherman, Connecticut, where he was eventually in the center of a community that included Surrealist artists who came to the U.S. during World War II.

Between 1939 and 1966, Blume exhibited in PAFA’s annual exhibitions of contemporary art eight times, and in 1953 he served as a juror.

Nature and Metamorphosis will consider the political background of Blume’s imagery, as well as his relationships with an international community of artists and writers. A hallmark of Blume’s work from all periods of his career is its capacity to carry multivalent meanings, always rooted in human experience, but privileging the transformative power of the imagination.

A fully illustrated catalogueedited by Robert Cozzolino accompanies the retrospective, with essays by Cozzolino on The Rock, surrealism, and automatism; a piece by Samantha Baskind on Blume’s early intellectual circles and his Jewish identity; Sergio Cortesini on The Eternal City and its reception both in the U.S. and Fascist Italy; David McCarthy on Fracture Ward and the U.S. army’s patronage of artists during World War II; Sarah Vure on Blume’s place in early modernism; and new perspectives on Tasso’s Oak and South of Scranton (1930-31). An edited, previously unpublished interview with Blume and a selection of the artist’s writings will shed light on Blume’s enduring legacy in the postwar world.

Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis will travel to the Wadsworth Atheneum, where it will be on view July 3 – September 20, 2015.

EXHIBITION-RELATED PROGRAMS:

PAFA is hosting a variety of exhibition-related programs. A selection of programs is listed below; full list to be announced soon.

CURATORIAL LECTURE: PETER BLUME December 2, 2014, 7-8 p.m.

Curator Robert Cozzolino introduces Peter Blume’s career as a significant American modernist and narrative painter. Blume’s large-scale works often highlight themes of creative process, regeneration, political power, and cultural memory in mid-century America. (This program is preceded by a members-only talk.)

FAMILY ARTS ACADEMY: NATURE TRANSFORMS November 23, 2014, 2-4 p.m.

Using an accordion book-folding process, transform nature right before your eyes. Inspired by Peter Blume, fold and draw a seasonal art book.

↧

Allen Jones at the Royal Academy of Arts

October 8, 2014, 8:55 am

≫ Next: Michelangelo: Quest for Genius

≪ Previous: Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis 

This autumn the Royal Academy of Arts will present the first major exhibition of Allen Jones’ work in the UK since 1995. As one of the UK’s most influential and celebrated living artists, this will be a long-overdue appraisal of Jones’ comprehensive contribution to British Pop art. Allen Jones RA will span the artist’s entire career from the 1960s to the present. Comprising over 80 works, the exhibition will feature examples of Jones’ paintings and sculpture, including the iconic furniture works from the late 60s, and new works created especially for this exhibition.

Rarely-seen drawings will also be displayed to showcase Jones’ exceptional skills as a draughtsman, and the important influence of the medium of drawing on his practice as a whole. Moving away from a traditional chronological approach, the works will be grouped into key sequences, to allow connections and common themes to emerge and to promote a comprehensive understanding of Jones’ wide-ranging artistic practice.

Allen Jones is a key figure in British Pop art whose reputation was established in the 1960s at the Royal College of Art, London, where he studied alongside celebrated artists David Hockney RA, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips RA and Ron Kitaj amongst others. This cohort of students was catapulted into the spotlight of the British art scene with a new visual language, firmly rooted in contemporary culture, and with the human figure often central to their work.

Stand In, 1991/2. Oil on plywood and fibreglass, 185 x 185 x 63 cm. Banbury, Private Collection. Image courtesy of the artist. © Allen Jones

Fascinating Rhythm, 1982-3. Enamel on plywood, 205 x 143 x 98 cm. Banbury, Private Collection. Image courtesy the artist. © Allen Jones

Interesting Journey, 1962. Oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cm. London, Private Collection. Photo: Private Collection. © Allen Jones

Curious Woman, 1965. Oil, plaster and epoxy resin on wood, 121.9 x 1016 x 20 cm approx. New York, Private Collection. Image courtesy of the artist. © Allen Jones.

The female figure has remained an enduring interest for Jones, who has continually found fascination in popular culture’s prolific and differing depictions of femininity, ranging from the erotic to the seductive and the glamorous. Allen Jones RA will present examples of portraits of cultural icons, for example a painting of Darcey Bussell and a new work of Kate Moss, reflecting the strong impact of cult images from 1960s America on his work.

The exhibition will place a focus on Jones’ sculptural depictions of the female figure, featuring perhaps his most famous and controversial works Hat Stand (1969):

Hat Stand, 1969. Mixed media, 191 x 108 x 40 cm. London, Private collection. Image courtesy the artist. © Allen Jones

Table (1969) and

Chair (1969):

but also more recent examples, such as

Refrigerator (2002) and

Light (2002).

As a retrospective survey, Allen Jones RA will trace Jones’ development as an artist. The selection of paintings will explore how the early influences of European painting traditions, seen in

Bikini Baby (1962)

and Hermaphrodite (1963),

gave way to the influence of Abstract Expressionism. Jones made frequent and prolonged visits to America where he came to admire the pictorial innovations of his contemporaries Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann in New York, and Ed Ruscha and Mel Ramos on the West Coast, with this inspiration clearly visible in First Step (1966):

First Step, 1966. Oil on canvas, 92 x 92 cm. London, Private Collection. Image courtesy of the artist. © Allen Jones

The influences of city life, transport, advertising, music and cinema all provide equally fascinating subject matter for Jones to exploit and explore. For example,

2nd Bus (1962)

evokes the energy and movement of people on a mode of transport which was to become a cultural icon for London. Matching Jones’ expansive world view is his ability to work with a wide variety of media, which is very much underpinned by his accomplished skills as a draughtsman.

Drawing has played a key role throughout his career, and examples on display will explore the relationship between Jones’ drawings and finished works. Borrowing freely from other forms of expression, Jones frequently employs storyboarding techniques to imbue his work with a cinematic sense of action and atmosphere. The result is a highly developed sense of performance, as seen in

Hot Wire (1970) and

Three-Part Invention (2002).

Allen Jones was elected a Royal Academician in 1986 and his work has been exhibited around the world in both solo and group exhibitions. Jones also designs for stage and television, with productions including Oh Calcutta! (Kenneth Tynan), Männer wir kommen (West Deutsche Rundfunk), Satie/Cinema (Ballet Rambert) and Signed in Red (Royal Ballet, London). Jones lives and works in London and Oxfordshire.

Organisation

Allen Jones RA has been organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in close collaboration with the artist. It is curated by Edith Devaney, Curator and Head of Contemporary Projects at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Catalogue

The exhibition will be accompanied by a 96-page fully illustrated catalogue with contributions from Natalie Ferris, Marco Livingstone and Sir Norman Rosenthal.

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Michelangelo: Quest for Genius

October 8, 2014, 9:07 am

≫ Next: Gerald Peters Gallery: American Art 1850-1950

≪ Previous: Allen Jones at the Royal Academy of Arts

Michelangelo Buonarroti (b. 1475), one of the world’s most celebrated artists, pays a visit to Toronto this fall at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Despite his enduring fame, Michelangelo was dogged by relentless struggle, disappointment and even defeat throughout his 77-year career. Due to the fickle demands of important patrons, many of his most ambitious projects remained unfinished. Revealed through a selection of rare drawings, Michelangelo: Quest for Genius tells the story of a Renaissance master and the frustrations of his creative process. Michelangelo: Quest for Genius opens in Toronto on Oct. 18, 2014, and runs until Jan. 11, 2015.

Organized by the AGO in collaboration with the Casa Buonarroti, Florence, whose collection is formed from Michelangelo’s own, the exhibition centres on a loan of 30 drawings by Michelangelo’s hand. These drawings are among the best of the esteemed Casa Buonarroti’s collection and represent the range of Michelangelo’s work. Dating from before and after the completion of the Sistine Chapel, the works on display include preliminary drawings — both architectural and figural sketches — as well as presentation drawings.

Michelangelo: Fortifications for the Porta al Prato in Florence, c 1529. Photo courtesy Casa Buonarroti via the AGO

"Madonna and Child," a drawing by Michelangelo from the collection of Casa Buonarroti in Florence, Italy)

Organized thematically, the exhibition takes a critical look at the notion of the genius at work, locating the creative search at the axis of ambition, exploration, frustration, defiance and unrealized dreams. Drawings will be grouped according to these issues. Developed by Lloyd DeWitt, curator of European Art at the AGO, and David Wistow, interpretive planner, Michelangelo: Quest for Genius will feature computer animations that bring to life some of Michelangelo’s most ambitious and ultimately unfinished designs.

“This exhibition offers a direct and personal encounter with extraordinarily rare works that almost never travel by this great artist’s own hands,” said DeWitt. “We are thrilled and honoured to work with the Casa Buonarroti to bring these precious works on paper to Canada and to tell the real story behind their making, debunking the myth that genius is easy and great work untroubled. What they tell us about the motivations of a genius and the creative process is incredibly revealing.”

“The drawings are an inspiration. Creativity is a basic human activity,” said Wistow. “No matter what our background we can relate to the blood, sweat and tears behind Michelangelo’s masterpieces.”

The exhibition also examines the significant influence that Michelangelo had four centuries later on the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (b. 1840). For Rodin, whose greatest works were routinely rejected by the press and public alike, Michelangelo represented a spiritual and artistic father figure. Rodin was 36 when he produced his first major sculpture, inspired by Michelangelo’s evocative and emotional presentation of the human body. Nine sculptures from the AGO’s collection will be on display, including representative works from the Burghers of Calais(1884-1917) and his final commission, the work for which he suffered the most criticism, Balzac (1898).

↧

Gerald Peters Gallery: American Art 1850-1950

October 8, 2014, 12:28 pm

≫ Next: Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010 at the Tate

≪ Previous: Michelangelo: Quest for Genius

Gerald Peters Gallery presents American Art 1850-1950, an exhibition tracing the aesthetic development of the fine arts in the United States from the Hudson River School, the first self-conscious artistic movement to crystalize in the United States, through the end of American Modernism, when American art emerged as the leader in the global art world.

Thomas Anschutz, Near Cape May, 1894, watercolor on paper, 10 x 14 3/8 inches

This exhibition includes

John Frederick Kensett’s Lake George,

which gave visual form to the pervasive cultural ideals of Emersonian philosophy, and Albert Bierstadt’s Sunrise on the Platte (Scotts Bluff),
which provided a window onto the frontier as the concept of Manifest Destiny gained traction in the nineteenth century.

William Merritt Chase’s society portraits, represented by

Miss J (Content Aline Johnson),

documented the emergence of the robber barons, many of whom helped send the next generation of artists to Europe.

John Henry Twachtman and his contemporaries returned from abroad to translate the theories and techniques of Europe’s emerging avant garde into a new American idiom. Twachtman’s Barn in Winter and Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s Purple and Green are masterpieces of American Tonalism that introduced a level of abstraction into American art that developed in the twentieth century into several strains of American Modernism.

Max Weber’s Joel’s Café

and Marsden Hartley’s Flowers in a Vase

are just two examples that show the energy, inquisitiveness, and innovation that pervaded American art in the first decades of the twentieth century and that sowed the seeds for the artistic revolution that made the United States the center of art at mid-century.

American Art (1850-1950) is the first historical exhibition that Gavin Spanierman has organized since joining Gerald Peters Gallery, New York, as Managing Director in 2014. It combines Spanierman Fine Art’s rich inventory of Hudson River School and American Impressionist works with Gerald Peters Gallery’s holdings of American Modernism. The exhibition draws on Gavin Spanierman’s vast knowledge of American art and his fierce commitment to promoting those works by the paragons of American Art history that continue to define our cultural and artistic heritage, and to fostering interest in works by lesser-known, but no less talented, artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

American Paintings 1850-1950 can be seen at Gerald Peters Gallery, 24 East 78th Street, New York, NY 10075, from October 10 through November 21, Monday through Friday, 10am-5pm, or Saturday noon to 5pm. A catalogue of the exhibition will be available for purchase at the gallery.

Similar images:

The Oregon Trail - Albert Bierstadt

Winter Landscape with Barn - John Henry Twachtman

Woman in Purple and Green by Thomas Wilmer Dewing,

↧

Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010 at the Tate

October 9, 2014, 12:06 pm

≫ Next: Velázquez: National Gallery, London 18 October 2006 - 21 January 2007

≪ Previous: Gerald Peters Gallery: American Art 1850-1950

Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) is one of the most experimental artists of recent times. Alongside Gerhard Richter and Blinky Palermo, Polke was a key figure in the generation of German artists who first emerged in the 1960s. This autumn Tate Modern presents the first full retrospective of Polke’s career, bringing together paintings, films, sculptures, notebooks, slide projections and photocopies from across five decades, and including works which have never before been exhibited.

Sigmar Polke, Polke as Astronaut (Polke als Astronaut) 1968

Polke as Astronaut (Polke als Astronaut) 1968
Private Collection
© The Estate of Sigmar Polke / DACS, London / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Sigmar Polke, Untitled (Quetta, Pakistan) 1974-1978

Untitled (Quetta, Pakistan) 1974-1978
Glenstone Foundation (Potomac, USA)
© The Estate of Sigmar Polke / DACS, London / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010 is the first exhibition to fully encompass the enormously varied range of materials with which the artist worked. Polke explored ideas of contamination and transformation, working with antiquated and sometimes poisonous pigments, extracting dye from boiled snails, and using materials as varied as gold leaf, meteorite powder, bubble wrap, potatoes, and soot. Photographs were made by exposing the paper to uranium, while paintings were created by brushing photosensitive chemicals onto canvas. The exhibition includes several films where Polke played with double-exposure, just as paintings would have layers of transparent imagery.

Polke was born in Silesia (in present day Poland) in 1941. As the Second World War ended, Polke’s family fled to East Germany, and then to West Germany in 1953. In the 1960s, while a student at the influential Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, he created sharp critiques of the growing consumer society of West Germany, transcribing by hand the cheaply printed images he found in mass media to create such works as Girlfriends (Freundinnen) 1965/1966:

Sigmar Polke Girlfriends (Freundinnen) 1965/66

Sigmar Polke (1941 - 2010)
Girlfriends (Freundinnen) 1965/66

Political and social commentary was a constant thread throughout Polke’s work, from The Sausage Eater 1963 to

Police Pig (Polizeischwein) 1986.

His irreverent attitude and ironic humour was a product of the cynicism with which he viewed all forms of authority, and he often confronted the remnants of National Socialism in his imagery, for instance in his haunting series of Watch Towers from the mid-80s which evoke the structures on the perimeters of concentration camps.

The radical cultures of the 1970s played a role not only in Polke’s art but also in his eccentric and unconventional lifestyle. He experimented with hallucinogenic substances and made many works featuring mushrooms. In 1973, he moved to a farm to live and work collaboratively with family, friends and other artists. He also travelled extensively and works in the exhibition will reveal the impact of his visits to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Brazil, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and New York.

Polke became even more experimental towards the end of his career, pushing the boundaries between different media right up until his death in 2010. The exhibition will show how he used photocopiers to make new distorted compositions, while the Lens Paintings made in the 2000s attempt to emulate holograms in their use of semi-transparent layers of materials.

Alibis: Sigmar Polke is curated at Tate Modern by Mark Godfrey, Curator of International Art and Kasia Radzisz, Assistant Curator. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue from Tate Publishing and a programme of events in the gallery. The exhibition is organised by Kathy Halbreich, Associate Director, The Museum of Modern Art, with Mark Godfrey and Lanka Tattersal, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition is organised by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, with Tate Modern,London.

More images from the exhibition"

SIGMAR POLKE (German, 1941–2010)
The Illusionist (Der Illusionist)
2007
Gel medium and acrylic on fabric
86 5/8 × 118 1/8" (220 × 300 cm)
Jennifer and John Eagle and The Rachofsky Collection

SIGMAR POLKE (German, 1941–2010)
Telephone Drawing (Telefonzeichnung)
1975
Gouache, ballpoint pen, and felt-tip pen on stained paper with cutouts
27 1/2 x 39 5/16" (69.8 x 99.8 cm)
Kunstmuseum Bern, Sammlung Toni Gerber, Bern, Schenkung 1983, 1. Teil

SIGMAR POLKE (German, 1941–2010)
Dr. Berlin
1969-74
Dispersion paint, gouache, and spray paint on canvas 59 1/16 x 47 1/4" (150 x 120 cm)
Private collection

More images

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Velázquez: National Gallery, London 18 October 2006 - 21 January 2007

October 9, 2014, 12:15 pm

≫ Next: Kunsthaus Zürich presents Egon Schiele

≪ Previous: Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010 at the Tate

More than 40 paintings by the celebrated Spanish master.

Described as 'the show of the decade' (The Times) and 'an experience not to be missed by anyone who cares about art' (The Observer), this was the first time there has been a Velázquez show of this scale and importance in the United Kingdom.

'Velázquez' has drawn crowds from Europe and beyond - more than 235,000 people have seen the exhibition so far.

Highlights included an unprecedented eight loans from the Museo del Prado, Madrid (including the imposing

'Apollo at the Forge of Vulcan'

and the sensitive portrayal of the dwarf

'Francisco Lezcano')

and a trio of rarely lent royal portraits from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. There are also loans from galleries as far afield as Texas, St Petersburg and São Paulo.

Renowned for his physical and psychological naturalism, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599–1660) is considered one of the greatest painters to have ever lived. Official court painter to King Philip IV (1605–1665), he created astounding effects of illusion in his minimalist and elegantly composed works––which range from genre and history scenes to portraits. His paintings had an enormous impact on 19th- and early-20th-century artists such as Degas, Renoir, and Picasso, and Manet famously first described him as “the painter’s painter.”

Sunday Times art critic, Waldemar Januszczak, presents an exciting vodcast on the Velazquez exhibition at the National Gallery in London.

From an interesting report on the show: (images added)

Nearly four centuries ago, Diego Velázquez painted the gods of the classical world as if they were real people. He portrayed

Mars, god of war,

Venus, the goddess who loved him,

and Vulcan, her cuckolded husband, as if they were characters in a tragicomic novel, with compassion for their foibles. Perhaps his ability to imagine so acutely the failures of divinities came about because, as painter to the king of Spain, he lived close to the melancholy and ironies of royal existence. His portraits of

Philip IV and

his minister Olivares, of infantas and dwarves, see a weakness in royal and humble faces alike, a humanity and a pathos that have rightly made Velázquez one of the most honoured of all artists.

He is one of the most natural painters who ever lived, someone who apparently never needed to be taught - and who shared with certain other 17th-century artists, most of all Caravaggio and Vermeer, an uncanny and apparently spontaneous ability to reproduce the appearance of the world. Yet he is more like his baroque contemporaries, Rembrandt and Rubens, in his desire to rise to the level of "history painting", the serious representation of great stories or myths. It is this tension between down-to-earth realism and an ethereal grandeur that sets Velázquez apart. What's great about this exhibition is that it so clearly shows how he developed from a street painter in Seville to a philosopher-artist.

Kitchen Scene with Christ at Emmaus (1618)

Publication

With over 150 illustrations and an in-depth chronology, this beautifully produced and comprehensive book surveys Velázquez’s entire career and explores his universal popularity. Fascinating essays by world-class Velázquez scholars address the artist’s life and technique, examining his studies in Seville and Italy to his final great works at the court of Philip IV. They also place his works in the context of 17th-century European painting and discuss how and why his works have resonated so strongly with the generations of Post-Impressionist and modernist artists.

↧

Kunsthaus Zürich presents Egon Schiele

October 10, 2014, 11:40 am

≫ Next: Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends

≪ Previous: Velázquez: National Gallery, London 18 October 2006 - 21 January 2007

The Kunsthaus Zürich is exhibiting the work of Egon Schiele (1890–1918) from 10 October 2014 to 25 January 2015.

While previous exhibitions have mostly placed Egon Schiele in his historical context, here the aim is to explore similarities and distinctions between his work and that of a contemporary painter. Schiele’s works are presented in a loose chronological sequence within the exhibition.

In an oeuvre spanning slightly less than a decade, Schiele repeatedly returns to the self-portrait, sometimes as nude.

Although Schiele too employs a precisely modelled, even plastic chromatic structure, for him line and contour continue to guide his artistic perception.

Despite their usually small format, the 35 paintings and 55 works on paper by Schiele create an impact that is every bit the equal of others' giant creations. Grouped together in selected themes, they reveal an artistic intensity that does not shy away from extremes.

The exhibition features some works that have seldom been lent out before. The Leopold Museum in Vienna has exceptionally agreed to loan Egon Schiele’s

‘Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant’

and the ‘Portrait of Wally Neuzil’

– his companion for many years – which accompanies it.

The Belvedere, Vienna has permitted Schiele’s seminal

‘Death and Maiden’

to travel outside Austria for the first time in more than 25 years.

SCHIELE AND ZURICH

Using documents from the museum archive, the exhibition also sheds light for the first time on Egon Schiele’s close ties to the Kunsthaus Zürich. In 1915, at the height of World War One, the Kunsthaus’s then director Wilhelm Wartmann attempted to organize a solo show that would have been among Schiele’s first museum exhibitions. Schiele profiled himself as an artist-curator dedicated to promoting the young art of his time, the ‘most extreme’, and whose primary aim was to ‘make people see’. His preserved letters and additional source material are providing new insights into his work.

↧

Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends

October 10, 2014, 11:48 am

≫ Next: Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art October 20, 2014–February 16, 2015

≪ Previous: Kunsthaus Zürich presents Egon Schiele

The National Portrait Gallery has announced, that it will stage a major exhibition in 2015 of works by one of the world’s most celebrated portrait painters, John Singer Sargent. Organised in partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the exhibition will bring together, for the first time, a collection of the artist’s intimate and informal portraits of his impressive circle of friends, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin.

Curated by Richard Ormond CBE, co-author of the John Singer Sargent catalogue raisonné, the exhibitionSargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends (12 February – 25 May 2015) will explore the artist as a painter at the forefront of contemporary movements in the arts, music, literature and theatre, revealing the depth of his appreciation of culture and his close friendships with many of the leading artists, actors and writers of the time.

Bringing together remarkable loans, some rarely exhibited, from galleries and private collections in Europe and America, the exhibition will follow Sargent’s time in Paris, London and Boston as well as his travels in the Italian and English countryside. Musée Rodin, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Musée d’Orsay, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts are amongst the institutions that are lending works.

Sargent’s portraits of his friends and contemporaries were rarely commissioned and allowed him to create more experimental works than was possible in his formal portraiture. His sitters are depicted in informal poses, sometimes in the act of painting or singing, resulting in a collection of highly-charged, original portraits. These paintings form a distinctive strand in Sargent’s work which is noticeably more intimate, witty and radical, and, when brought together in the exhibition, will challenge the conventional view of the artist.

Key exhibits include the only two surviving portraits Sargent painted of his friend and novelist Robert Louis Stevenson:

which will be displayed together for the first time since they were painted in the 1880s.

Also reunited in the exhibition will be Sargent’s portraits of the Pailleron family, drawn from collections in Paris, Washington DC and Iowa.

The bohemian writer Édouard Pailleron

and his wife were among Sargent’s earliest French patrons, and to whom the young artist owed much of his early success. Their individual portraits will be displayed alongside

Sargent’s portrait of their children, Édouard and Marie-Louise,

for the first time in over a century.

Other exhibition highlights include Sargent’s important portrait of his master

Carolus-Duran (1879),

which played a pivotal role in the development of his career after it was praised in the 1879 Paris Salon;

his charcoal drawing of the celebrated poet William Butler Yeats (1908);

and three of his greatest theatrical portraits painted between 1889 and 1890:

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth,

Edwin Booth and

La Carmencita, the wild Spanish dancer.

Two sections in the exhibition will focus on the portraits and plein-air figure scenes he painted during time spent in the artistic community in the village of Broadway in rural Worcestershire, and those he painted after 1900 on his travels to the Alps and southern Europe. Sitters include Sargent’s familiars such as the artists Jane and Wilfred de Glehn who accompanied him on his sketching expeditions to the continent and often feature as a pair in his work. In these paintings Sargent explored the making of art (his own included) and the relationship of the artist to the natural world.

John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925) was the son of an American doctor and was born in Florence. He studied painting in Italy and France, and in 1884 caused a sensation at the Paris Salon with his painting of Madame Gautreau. The scandal caused Sargent to move to England, where he subsequently established himself as the country’s leading portrait painter. He made several visits to the USA where, as well as portraits, he worked on a series of decorative paintings for public buildings such as the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts.

Curator Richard Ormond CBE says:

‘Sargent’s enthusiasms were all for things new and exciting. He was a fearless advocate of the work of younger artists, and in music his influence on behalf of modern composers and musicians ranged far and wide. The aim of this exhibition is to challenge the conventional view of Sargent. As a painter he is well known; but Sargent the intellectual, the connoisseur of music, the literary polymath, is something new.’

Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, says:

‘John Singer Sargent is widely considered to be one of the greatest of portrait painters and I am delighted that the National Portrait Gallery is staging a major exhibition of the artist’s work. Extraordinary and rare loans are coming together for the first time to demonstrate Sargent’s talent in a new way.‘

Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends is organised in partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it will tour to in June 2015. Richard Ormond CBE has curated the exhibition with advice from Barbara Weinberg, an accomplished Sargent scholar and formerly the Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Richard Ormond CBE is an art historian and the former Director of the National Maritime Museum from 1986 – 2000 and formerly Head of the Picture Department from 1983. He was the Nineteenth Century Curator and latterly the Deputy Director of the National Portrait Gallery from 1975 until 1983. Ormond is a Victorian painting specialist and the author of books on Sargent and Lord Leighton, and is co-author of the Sargent catalogue raisonné.

Barbara Weinberg is the recently retired Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum since 1990 and was elected the Alice Pratt Brown Curator in 1998. From 1972 to 1990 she was a professor of Art History at Queens College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She has organised a number of major loan exhibitions and written numerous Metropolitan Museum catalogues, independent books, and has received honors that include the 2007 Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

For more information please visit www.npg.org.uk/sargent

SARGENT: PORTRAITS OF ARTISTS AND FRIENDS

12 February - 25 May 2015, at the National Portrait Gallery, London www.npg.org.uk

TICKETS: Adults £14.50 / Concessions (seniors, children aged 12-18, students) £13.00

TOUR

Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends will tour to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (29 June–4 October 2015).

PUBLICATIONS

A fully illustrated catalogue by exhibition curator Richard Ormond, with essays by other leading Sargent scholars, features 90 beautifully reproduced key portraits from major international public and private collections and will be available to purchase from National Portrait Gallery Shops. RRP £40 (special Gallery price £35).

John Singer Sargent: Painting Friends by Barbara Dayer Gallati includes over thirty full-page images from the exhibition, offering an accessible introduction that will appeal to newcomers discovering Sargent, as well as to those who are familiar with his work. RRP £10.

↧

Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art October 20, 2014–February 16, 2015

October 13, 2014, 11:35 am

≫ Next: American Impressionism

≪ Previous: Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends

Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art will be the most important exhibition of the essential Cubists—Georges Braque (French, 1882–1963), Juan Gris (Spanish, 1887–1927), Fernand Léger (French, 1881–1955), and Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973)—in more than 30 years.

The exhibition and accompanying publication will trace the invention and development of Cubism using iconic examples from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection, with its unparalleled holdings in this foundational modernist movement. The exhibition will mark the first time that the Collection, which Mr. Lauder pledged to the Museum in April 2013, is shown in its entirety.

The exhibition, which opens October 20, 2014, will present 79 paintings, works on paper, and sculpture: 17 by Braque, 15 by Gris, 15 by Léger, and 34 by Picasso. Rich in modernist pictures by Picasso and Braque, the exhibition will also include an unprecedented number of papiers collé by Juan Gris and a stunning array of Léger’s most famous series, his Contrasts of Forms.

Over the past 40 years, Leonard Lauder has selectively acquired masterpieces and seminal works to create the most important collection in private hands of works by the four preeminent Cubist artists: Mr. Lauder made his first two Cubist acquisitions in 1976 and continues to add to the Collection, which is distinguished by its quality, focus, and depth.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication edited by the co-curators of the exhibition—Emily Braun, Curator of the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection and Distinguished Professor of Art History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Rebecca Rabinow, the Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Modern Art and Curator in Charge of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum. The publication will serve as an essential resource for the study of these four artists and their role in inventing and extending the definitions of Cubism. It includes 22 essays by 17 preeminent scholars in the field, who have used the works in the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection as the basis for new discoveries and interpretations. It will also publish 25 years of sustained research on the works in the Collection – their provenance, exhibition history, and inclusion in earlier canonical studies of Cubism.

Cubism was the most influential art movement of the 20th century: it radically destroyed traditional illusionism in painting, revolutionized the way we see the world (as Juan Gris said), and paved the way for the pure abstraction that dominated Western art for the next 50 years. Led by Picasso and Braque, the Cubists dismantled traditional perspective and modeling in the round in order to emphasize the two-dimensional picture plane. Cubist collage introduced fragments of mass-produced popular culture into pictures, thereby changing the very definition of art.

More than half of the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection focuses on the six-year period, 1909-14, during which Braque and Picasso—the two founders of the Cubist movement—collaborated closely. Their partnership began in earnest in the fall of 1908, when the visionary dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler exhibited Braque’s most recent paintings in his Paris gallery. Henri Matisse is known to have disparaged Braque’s pictures as “painting made of small cubes;” the term Cubism first appeared in print in Louis Vauxcelles’s review of the Kahnweiler exhibition.

The Collection includes two landscapes from this historic show:

The Terrace at the Hôtel Mistral (1907),

which marks Braque’s transition from Fauvism to Cubism, and the iconic

Trees at L’Estaque (1908),

which inaugurates Cubism.

By 1909 Braque and Picasso were inseparable. As Picasso later recounted, “Almost every evening, either I went to Braque’s studio or he came to mine. Each of us HAD to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other’s work. A canvas wasn’t finished until both of us felt it was.”

A pair of identically sized paintings from 1911 in the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection—

Braque’s Still Life with Clarinet (Bottle and Clarinet) and

Picasso’s Pedestal Table, Glasses, Cups, Mandolin

— exemplify a pivotal moment in the history of Cubism, when the two artists began to picture objects from different points of view in an increasingly shallow space. Only a few clues were retained to help viewers decode the picture, the profile of an instrument or the tassel of a curtain. As the works hovered on the brink of illegibility, Braque and Picasso began to introduce “certainties,” as Braque called them: painted letters and words and, soon after, actual pieces of rope, newspaper, sheet music, and brand labels. They inspired other artists to incorporate all kinds of unorthodox materials into works of art.

The Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection contains such landmark paintings as Picasso’s landscape

The Oil Mill (1909),

which was one of the first Cubist pictures reproduced in Italy. After seeing it in the December 1911 issue of the Florentine journal La Voce, the Italian Futurists were inspired to modernize their style and engage in a rivalry with their French peers.

Picasso’s Still Life with Fan: “L’Indépendant” (1911),

in the Collection, is one of the first works in which he experimented with painted typography, in this case the gothic type masthead of L’Indépendant, the local newspaper of Céret in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Braque’s Fruit Dish and Glass (1912),

the very first Cubist papier collé (paper collage) ever created, is also in the Collection. Collages were a revolutionary Cubist art form in which ready-made objects were incorporated into fine art. In the summer of 1912, while vacationing with Picasso in the south of France, Braque saw imitation wood-grain wallpaper in a store window. He waited until Picasso left town before buying the faux bois paper and pasting it into a still-life composition. Braque’s decision to use mechanically printed, illusionistic wallpaper to represent the texture and color of a wooden table marked a turning point in Cubism. Braque later recounted, “After having made the papier collé [Fruit Dish and Glass], I felt a great shock, and it was an even greater shock for Picasso when I showed it to him.”

Braque and Picasso shared an interest in aviation, which extended to Braque’s nickname, “Wilb[o]urg” (after Wilbur Wright). The most famous example of their aviation puns is

Picasso’s The Scallop Shell: “Notre Avenir est dans l’Air” (1912).

This oval-shaped painting is simultaneously a representation of a tabletop and a blatantly flat canvas. The still-life elements of the work include a trompe l’oeil rendering of a pamphlet that had been issued by the French government in February 1912 to raise public support for military aviation. Picasso included it as a witty reference to his and Braque’s daring, groundbreaking Cubist enterprise.

Picasso’s synthetic Cubist masterpiece

Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair (1913-14)

is one of the artist’s most radical and imposing paintings. This provocative and highly eroticized image was hailed by André Breton in his seminal text Surrealism and Painting (1928).

Additionally the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection holds examples of two key Cubist sculptures: a rare cast of Picasso’s Head of a Woman (Fernande) (1909), which introduced the analytic Cubist style into three dimensions, and The Absinthe Glass (1914), which signaled the end of traditionally modeled sculpture. Each of the six casts in the edition was hand-painted by Picasso and includes an actual perforated tin absinthe spoon, thus blurring the boundaries between a multiple and a unique work of art.

Still lifes with flutes, guitars, mandolins, violins, and sheet music are indicative of Braque’s and Picasso’s personal pastimes as well as their enthusiasm for popular vaudeville tunes. Their word play and images combine ribald jokes and erudite references, high and low, as well as allusions to the Cubist movement and commentary on world events. In

Violin: “Mozart Kubelick” (1912),

for example, Braque indulged in a double entendre by including the name of the famed Czech violinist Jan Kubelik (1880-1940). The first three letters of his name (“KUB”) were those of a common bouillon cube, a foodstuff widely advertised on posters of the period, much to the delight of Braque and Picasso, who appreciated the pun on the word “Cub”ism. Violin: “Mozart/Kubelick” was one of three pictures by Braque that Kahnweiler sent to the New York Armory Show of 1913, the exhibition that introduced European modernism to the American public. It became one of the most caricatured Cubist images in the American press, which delighted in pointing out that Braque had put the “cube in Kubelik” and also that he had misspelled the maestro’s name.

Legend has it that, a few years earlier, on his way to visit Picasso at the Bateau-Lavoir, the rundown artist complex in Montmartre, Kahnweiler had glanced into the open window of Juan Gris’s studio and asked to see his work. In late 1912, the dealer began representing Gris. Whereas Braque and Picasso exhibited exclusively with Kahnweiler, Gris sent work to the annual Salon displays, bringing wider visibility to the new Cubist style. The Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni, for example, was directly influenced by

Gris’s Head of a Woman (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother)

after he saw it at the spring 1912 Salon des Indépendants. Gris took the analytic Cubism of Braque and Picasso and made it his own with precisely delineated compositions, flattened planes, and rhythmic surface patterns that prefigure the synthetic Cubism of the war years.

The Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection contains an unparalleled selection of six painted collages that Gris created during the first half of 1914. Several of them incorporate wry references to the fictional criminal mastermind Fantômas, the subject of a wildly popular crime series. The shadowy

Man at the Café (1914)

hides his face behind a newspaper, made up of an actual clipping whose headline pointedly reads: “Bertillonage/ One will no longer be able to fake works of art.” Gris alludes to the criminal identification systems, or Bertillonage, of Alphonse Bertillon, one of the fathers of forensic science, whose methods were featured in the storylines of the Fantômas films. With mock suspense, Gris suggests that, having read about the latest criminal detection methods in the newspaper, the man at the table will escape the authorities once again—as will the Cubist masterminds in their games of visual deception.

In 1913, Kahnweiler added Fernand Léger to his stable of artists. Like Gris, Léger developed Cubism into a distinctive and influential style, in which dynamic intersections of spherical, cylindrical, and cubic forms evoked the new, syncopated rhythms of modern life. The Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection features several important works from Léger’s seriesContrasts of Forms, wherein Léger worked out his primary oppositions of light and dark, angled and curved planes, color and line. The jaunty image of

The Smoker (1914),

with its body reduced to basic geometric parts, anticipates the dehumanization that Léger would experience first-hand during World War I. Gris and Picasso, both Spanish citizens, remained in France during the war. Picasso’s political sentiments are evident in the Collection’s

Playing Cards, Glasses, Bottle of Rum: “Vive la France” (summer 1914; partially reworked 1915).

Braque and Léger were among the many French artists who were mobilized to the Front. Léger was injured and after more than a year’s hospitalization he began working on

Composition (The Typographer) (1918-19):

one of the largest Cubist works ever painted. Its mural-like size anticipates his collaboration in the 1920s with the architect Le Corbusier.Composition (The Typographer), the definitive version of a series of three, reflects the affinity Léger felt toward the anonymous working man and his fascination with the trappings of modern Paris, from advertisements to architecture. Léger drew on his background as an architectural draftsman in celebrating the beauty of machines and in this way led Cubism into a new modernist machine aesthetic.

Exhibition Credits

Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection is organized by Rebecca Rabinow, the Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Modern Art and Curator in Charge of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum, and Emily Braun, Curator of the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection and Distinguished Professor of Art History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Exhibition design is by Michael Langley, Exhibition Design Manager; graphics are by Connie Norkin, Graphic Design Manager; and lighting is by Clint Ross Coller and Richard Lichte, Lighting Design Managers, all of the Museum's Design Department.

Related Programs

A variety of education programs are planned in conjunction with this exhibition, including a teen program focusing on collage on October 18; a studio workshop, “Collage and Mixed Media: Cubist-Inspired Explorations” on November 16 and 23; a "Friday Focus" lecture by Emily Braun on December 5; a Sunday at the Met on January 25, 2015; film screenings on January 30; exhibition tours and gallery talks; and a Met Escapes art-making workshop for visitors with dementia.

Life & Times, a series of ticketed talks by curator Rebecca Rabinow, will take place on December 2 and December 9, 2014 shedding light on different aspects of the Leonard A. Lauder Collection. The first in the series, Cubist Confetti, considers the Cubists’ colorful stippling during the prewar years as a sophisticated means of introducing formal qualities of texture and light into their art, while referencing popular culture and artistic movements such as Pointillism. Games Cubists Play explores the impact of the games, jokes, and puns that define and characterize prewar Cubist masterpieces.

There will be a special lecture in The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium on February 11, Leonard Lauder, Collecting Cubism. Leonard A. Lauder will discuss the early influences that drew him to Cubism, the choices he made in acquiring works, and his criteria for assembling a world-class collection.

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American Impressionism

October 15, 2014, 9:34 am

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Exhibition organised by the musée des impressionnismes Giverny and the Terra Foundation for American Art, in collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland and the Museo Thyssen‐ Bornemisza. With the generous support of the Terra Foundation for American Art.

This autumn, 4 November 2014 to 1 February 2015, the Museo Thyssen‐Bornemisza is presenting the first exhibition in Spain on the dissemination of Impressionism in the United States. Curated by Katherine Bourguignon, curator at the Terra Foundation for American Art and an expert in late 19th‐ and early 20th‐ century French and American art, the exhibition, which has already been seen at the musée des impressionnismes Giverny and the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, will include nearly 80 paintings that allow for an analysis of the way in which North American artists discovered Impressionism in the 1880s and 1890s and its subsequent development around 1900.

While artists such as Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent had spent some years living and exhibiting their work in France and enjoyed close relations with painters such as Degas and Monet, it was not until 1886 with the exhibition of French Impressionism in New York organised by the art dealer Paul Durand‐Ruel, that American painters began to make use of the new brushstroke, brilliant colours and themes of modern life characteristic of the French movement, in some cases even visiting Paris to discover it at first hand.

The works by Cassatt, Sargent and Whistler on display in the exhibition reveal their role in the development of Impressionism in Europe, while those of Theodore Robinson and Childe Hassam, among other artists who also travelled to France to discover Impressionism, reveal a more gradual assimilation of the new technique. This was also the case with the American painters who, without any direct contact with the Impressionists and from a wide range of different viewpoints, were capable of adapting its ideas and style to national themes and thus captivate a new public. All these works are shown in the galleries of the exhibition alongside canvases by Monet, Manet, Degas and Morisot, which set them in context and establish an interesting dialogue.

John Singer Sargent. Dennis Miller Bunker Painting at Calcot, 1888. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Daniel J. Terra Collection;

Mary Cassatt. Summertime, 1894. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Daniel J. Terra Collection;

For the American painters who wished to be part of this new, European modernity it was essential to spend time in Paris in order to visit the Louvre and the annual Salon and in some cases to take classes at one of the growing number of studios and academies. James McNeill Whistler was one of the first, followed by Mary Cassatt. In 1874, at the time when Paris was recovering from the Franco‐Prussian War, a second wave of American painters arrived, among them John Singer Sargent and Theodore Robinson.

Cassatt, Sargent and the Impressionists

Mary Cassatt and Sargent experienced and were involved in the first wave of Impressionism and had fundamentally European careers. Due to her relations with Degas and Morisot, Cassatt was invited to take part in four of the Impressionist exhibitions between 1879 and 1886: as the only American representative, she received a warm welcome for her paintings of upper middle‐class women and children. She also knew Monet, and owned important works by all the Impressionists. Although she had exhibited in previous years at the official Salon, she ultimately shunned it and completely embraced Impressionism, becoming one of the first representatives of the French style on the other side of the Atlantic.

Born in Italy to American parents, John Singer  Sargent spent all his life in Europe. In 1883 he  began to experiment with a loose brushstroke  and less structured compositions and would pursue this direction over the following years, when his friendship with Monet and his visits  to Giverny encouraged his increasingly evident  application of the new technique, use of  themes from modern life and brighter colours.  Sargent was notably influenced by the  Impressionist exhibitions and played a genuine  role in the movement. However, his case is  different to that of Cassatt in that he never  exclusively opted for the new style and in his  commissioned portraits he maintained a  smoother and more highly finished treatment  of the figures, albeit with an occasional Impressionist touch. In addition, after exhibiting for the first time at the official Salon in 1877, he continued to send works there every year.

Americans in Giverny

In the 1880s, other American artists who worked in France at this period began to explore the potential of Impressionism and to paint outdoors in the Forest of Fontainebleau, on the Brittany coast and in Giverny, where they could work close to the master Monet, although the latter only allowed a few of them to set up their easels next to his own. One of them was Theodore Robinson who, during these plein air sessions, began to use lighter colours and to study the changes of light and shadow at different times of the day, although maintaining an academic rigour and meticulous finish in his figures. Robinson also started to use a high viewpoint, particularly in his views of the village, and was fascinated by the effects that this produced. Until 1892, by which date the Giverny colony had grown considerably, he returned there every year from spring to the start of the winter.

Mary Cassatt. Autumn, 1880. Museé des Beaux Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais, Paris

John Singer Sargent. Two Women Asleep in a Punt under the Willows, c. 1887. Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisboa

John Leslie Breck, another regular visitor to Giverny between 1887 and 1891, included innovative elements in his works such as coloured shadows and even produced a series of haystacks directly based on Monet’s.

Urban views. New York, Boston, Chicago

Around 1890, various American artists who had returned from Europe began to make use of Impressionism’s new subjects, compositions and colours in their works. The public for their paintings was now different to the one that greeted those of their French forerunners twenty years earlier and the movement had evolved in Europe towards new concepts through the work of artists such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat and Signac. More wide‐ranging in its references and deploying greater liberty, their paintings no longer represented a unified pictorial style but rather individual starting points.

Childe Hassam spent three years studying and painting in France between 1886 and 1889 and although he avoided the Impressionist circle, this period had a considerable influence on his technique. His compositions of these years, painted in the studio, already reveal his interest in the effects of light. Hassam only fully committed himself to the new style after his return to the United States in 1889 when, like William Merritt Chase, he painted numerous urban views and garden scenes.

Chase, who was one of the key painters in the development of Impressionism in the United States, had received a classical training in New York and Munich. In the 1880s he nonetheless began to make use of lighter colours, modern subjects and innovative compositional structures. His works from this period, set in the public parks of New York and Brooklyn, mark a fundamental change in his career and allowed him to regain the support of critics and collectors.

Whistlerian Impressionism

Whistler spent much of his life in Europe, working in London, Venice and Paris, but he always considered himself American. Although his style corresponds more closely to the approach of the previous generation, his works were admired by many members of the Impressionist group. In the United States, Whistler was always considered a modern, rebellious artist who did not conform to academic norms.

James McNeill Whistler. Nocturne: Blue and Silver ‐ Chelsea, 1871. Tate, London, Bequeathed by Miss Rachel and Miss Jean Alexander

His muted, almost monochrome palette, simplified brushstroke and lack of interest in painterly finish relate his Nocturnes to the Impressionists, although he never exhibited with them. More than any other American artist, Whistler was the forerunner of a generation that he inspired and which saw his style as a model to follow.

Theodore Robinson. Blossoms at Giverny, 1891‐1892. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Childe Hassam. Horticulture Building, World’s Columbian Exhibition, Chicago, 1893. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Daniel J. Terra Collection

At the end of the century, John Henry Twachtman and Thomas Wilmer Dewing produced works that can be located on the margins of Impressionism, making use of a soft brushstroke and more muted colours that encourage almost mystical interpretations. For these artists, Impressionism was not limited to sun‐filled scenes depicting members of the bourgeoisie at leisure, as was the case with their contemporaries, and they considered that it could also encompass these near‐abstract landscapes inspired by Whistler, whom Twachtman had met in Europe in 1880.

American scenes and landscapes

During the 1890s an increasing number of American artists responded to the growing popularity of Impressionism which, by the end of the century, had become one of the prevailing styles; following the advice of art critics, these painters adapted modern art to national themes.

Chase began to spend his summers on Long Island in order to paint the Atlantic coast at first hand, adopting many of the Impressionist ideas such as the observation of nature and the changing effects of light. Scenes of this type also brought success to Childe Hassam who returned from France and focused on plein air painting in a brilliant, Impressionist style, spending numerous summers on the Isles of Shoals opposite thecoasts of New Hampshire and Maine. These works were extremely popular with collectors.

Around 1890, Dennis Miller Bunker and Theodore Robinson began to be interested in authentically American landscapes. The two artists had started to experiment with the new technique at around the same time but in different contexts: Robinson worked alongside Monet at Giverny, and Bunker with Sargent in Calcot during the summer of 1888. On his return to Boston, Bunker decided to repeat the experience and went to paint outdoors in an area near the city that resembled the English countryside. Here he succeeded in combining European pictorial techniques with American themes. Having returned from France in 1892 on the encouragement of Monet, Robinson also followed the critics’ advice to paint typically American views and went to Vermont and to the north of New York State to paint.

John Henry Twachtman. Winter Landscape, 1890‐1900. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Frank Weston Benson. Sunlight, 1909. Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianápolis, Indiana, John Herron Fund

Also in the 1890s, Edmund C. Tarbell and Frank W. Benson produced a series of depictions of women and children bathed in sunlight in gardens or by the sea. While they used family members or friends as  models, these images were more than just portraits  and the women came to represent a new American  ideal.

Edmund Charles Tarbell. Three Sisters – A study in June Sunlight, 1890. Milwaukee Art Museum.

In the Orchard made Tarbell one of the leaders  of Impressionism in the United States: the work is  clearly indebted to the French movement but the  female figures represent this new ideal in their  gestures, poses and elegant dress. For his part, in 1901 Benson began to spend his summers on an  island opposite the coast of Maine. His academic t raining is evident in his skilled draughtsmanship and  respect for the figures, while his interest in  Impressionism is reflected in the increasingly lively  palette, the manner of applying the pigment and a growing preference for outdoor scenes.

In late 1897, Tarbell and Benson left the Society of American Artists to join a break‐away group known as the Ten American Painters, which promoted the principles of modern art and individual artistic expression.

American Impressionism venues and dates:

Giverny, musée des impressionnismes Giverny, 28 March to 29 June 2014;
Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland, 19 July to 19 October 2014;
Madrid, Museo Thyssen‐Bornemisza, 4 November 2014 to 1 February 2015.

Curator: Katherine Bourguignon, Curator at the Terra Foundation for American Art Coordinator: Clara Marcellán, Department of Modern Painting, Museo Thyssen‐Bornemisza Number of works: 77

Publications: Catalogue with texts by Richard Brettell, Frances Fowle and Katherine Bourguignon, published in Spanish; digital publication from the Thyssen Kiosk app for tablets and smartphones, in Spanish and English (free).

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Louvre Abu Dhabi Opens with Spectacular Loans

October 15, 2014, 12:16 pm

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Louvre Abu Dhabi aspires to be a universal museum that highlights interconnections, exchanges and conversations between civilizations and the similarities and differences between their artistic traditions. When the museum opens, approximately half of the art works displayed will be from its own collection and half will be loans from leading French museums. Both acquisitions and loaned works have been chosen and assembled with two criteria in mind: their intrinsic merits and their relevance to the narrative thread of the exhibition itinerary.

Some of the most remarkable items loaned by French museums are presented below.

Woman Portrait, also called La Belle Ferronnière

Leonardo da Vinci

Milan, Italy, 1495-1499

Wood (noyer)

Musée du Louvre, Paintings Departement

Leonardo da Vinci is probably one of the most famous and popular artists in the history of art. Louvre Abu Dhabi will have the opportunity to display one of his most attractive works - a portrait of an elegantly dressed young woman painted when the artist was based in Milan. Thematically, this picture will illustrate Renaissance artists' quest for naturalism with the aid of the new technique of oil painting. It will echo Louvre Abu Dhabi's own Bellini’s Madonna and Child, also painted in oil on wood, another head-and-shoulders portrait in which the figure is depicted behind a parapet and against a dark background.

Woman with a Mirror

Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian

Venice, Italy, c. 1515

99.0 x 76.0 cm

oil on canvas

Musée du Louvre, Paintings Department

The softness and new sensuality with which Titian depicted his human subjects represent a crucial turning-point in the history of European art. Like the Da Vinci portrait, this painting, loaned by Musée du Louvre, will be located in a section focusing on the new naturalism in Renaissance painting.

Napoleon Crossing the Alps

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825)

France, 1803

Oil on canvas

267.5 x 223 cm

Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon

This portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte on horseback is an iconic image. This remarkable painting that illustrates the genius of the most important painter of the time captures also an important moment in history. Louvre Abu Dhabi's itinerary includes a section about the turning-point of the late 18th century when the American and French Revolutions and the rise of Napoleon sparked a feeling that individuals could change the course of history. Louvre Abu Dhabi has acquired a portrait of George Washington which fits also perfectly in this theme.

The Fife player

Edouard Manet (1832-1883)

France, 1866

161 x 97 cm

Oil on canvas

Musée d’Orsay

Manet's work epitomizes the sensibility of modern artists in search of new sources of inspiration. Fascinated by Velasquez'Pablo de Valladolid, which he first saw in the Museo del Prado in 1865, Manet borrowed several features from it in The Fife-player, painted the following year - notably the disappearing background, which especially struck him, and which he compared to air surrounding the figure. Manet chose a subject from everyday life - an anonymous boy soldier whom he turned into a monumental figure like a Spanish grandee, set in an indeterminate space. He also used a simplified language, a limited palette, and colours applied in flat blocks. Alongside The Bohemian, with its quintessentially Spanish subject, The Fife-player illustrates in a different and complementary way the influence of paintings from the Spanish Golden Age on Manet's work.

La gare Saint-Lazare

Claude Monet (1840-1926)

France, 1877

75.5 x 104 cm

Oil on canvas

Musée d’Orsay

With this totally new subject, utterly in tune with changes taking place in the society, Monet offers more evidence of the modern sensibility. The subject of the station - a place of constant movement, with trains arriving and departing, and a temple of technology, with its glass and steel architecture, is in itself a symbol of modernity and modern life. Monet depicts the steam from the trains and the passengers against the backdrop of Haussmann's Paris. In places, the subject is subsumed by colour, resulting in an almost abstract vision. The Saint-Lazare Station provides a superb foil to another scene from modern life, Gustave Caillebotte's The Game of Bezique, from Louvre Abu Dhabi's collection.

Self-portrait

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)

France, 1887

Oil on canvas

44 x 35.5 cm

Musée d'Orsay

This self-portrait was painted in autumn 1887, during Van Gogh's Paris period (February 1886 – February 1888). As this self-portrait shows very clearly, this period is very significant in the development of the artist's work since he discovered Impressionism at this time. His palette, which had previously been dominated by dark, blackish-brown ochre, became permanently lighter. In addition, the pure, expressive colour placed in separate, juxtaposed strokes expresses his fiery temperament. The fast painting method and spare use of materials makes this self-portrait exceptionally expressive.

Les Deux péniches

(Two barges)

André Derain (1880, Chatou – 1954, Garches)

1906

Oil on canvas
80 x 97,5 cm
Bought in 1972
Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris
Musée national d’art moderne - Centre de création industrielle

Les Deux pénichesis an important painting of Derain, one of the Fauvism movement protagonists with Matisse. It is one of the masterpieces of the National museum of modern Art’s collection. It was part of the exhibition “Masterpieces” of the Centre Pompidou Metz. Painted in London, where Derain worked in the footsteps of Monet, the composition is audacious: seized from a plunging view, the motif is reduced to two barges, one of which is partially truncated by the edge of the canvas, and to the stretch of water on which they seem to be slipping. The "photographic" framing recalls the cropping of certain Japanese prints. Furthermore, the composition that suppresses the skyline increases the frontality of the painting. Regarding color, Derain’s Fauve repertoire is evident: the pure color, the high contrasts, the wide and animated strokes used for water. Although he turns later in time to sobriety and the measure, this painting definitely represents his "youthful turbulences", as mentioned by Apollinaire in 1916.

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Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist

October 16, 2014, 11:21 am

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In the early 1620s Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640) designed a series of 20 tapestries celebrating the glory of the Roman Catholic Church for the Spanish governor-general of the Netherlands, the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia (1566– 1633). Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharistreunites Rubens’s exuberant oil sketches painted for this commission with the monumental original tapestries, the largest number of works for the Eucharist series assembled in over half a century. The exhibition presents an unrivaled opportunity to experience the Baroque master’s extraordinary impact on both an intimate and a monumental scale.

On view at the Getty Museum October 14, 2014 through January 11, 2015, Spectacular Rubens features six spirited painted modelli from the collection of the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid; four of the original tapestries, among the most celebrated treasures of the nearby Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales (Convent of the Barefoot Royals), in a rare loan from the Patrimonio Nacional; and several other paintings related to the Eucharist series by Rubens from local and national collections.

The Madrid modelli have recently been conserved at the Prado with the support of a grant from the Getty Foundation through its Panel Paintings Initiative. The exhibition was organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Museo Nacional del Prado in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and in collaboration with the Patrimonio Nacional.

The Victory of the Eucharist over Idolatry, about 1622-25. Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577 - 1640). Oil on panel. 25 9/16 x 35 13/16 in. Image courtesy of the Photographic Archive, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The Triumph of the Eucharist tapestries were commissioned by the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia as a gift to the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales (Convent of the Barefoot Royals) in Madrid and have been in regular use there for almost 400 years. They decorated the convent church on two important events marked by elaborate ceremony—Good Friday and the Octave of Corpus Christi—and were sometimes displayed for other special circumstances. On select occasions they may even have been hung on the outside of the building.

Designing the Triumph of the Eucharist Tapestries

“Rubens’s creative exhilaration radiates from the energetic brushwork of the preparatory oil sketches and within each of the huge tapestries,” says Anne Woollett, curator of paintings at the Getty Museum and curator of the exhibition. “The Eucharist series reveal the enormous powers of invention of one of the most learned painters of the period. Rubens drew on a wide range of classical and Christian iconography and traditional allegories of Good versus Evil to express the spiritual victory of the Catholic Church over its foes.”

The 20 tapestries Rubens designed together formed a complex illusionistic decoration for the interior of the convent church in Madrid. Remarkably, he devised the series in his Antwerp studio based on second-hand descriptions of the church. The tapestries portray a splendid architectural setting in which small angels hang fictional tapestries depicting dramatic Eucharist subjects. The exact arrangement of the tapestries in the church is unknown. However, two different viewpoints within the compositions and a sketch by Rubens for the choir wall suggest the large hangings were intended to be installed in two levels, one atop the other.

The Triumph of the Church, about 1622 - 1625. Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577 - 1640). Oil on panel. 32 3/8 x 49 x 1 15/16 in. Image courtesy of the Photographic Archive, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Powerful figures in motion, rich color, as well as the narrative of angels unfurling fictive “tapestries” connect individual compositions. Playful illusions and spatial ambiguities appear in many scenes, as Rubens created different levels of reality in the main scenes of the Eucharistic subjects themselves, as well as the illusionistic architecture, stone framework, garlands and angels.

The 20 pieces that constituted the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia’s gift to the convent may have been woven over a span of several years, from about 1625 to 1633. The tapestries were woven in Brussels by two of the most prominent tapestry workshops, headed by Jan Raes I and Jacob Geubels II, with the assistance of two other weavers.

Rubens was a leading tapestry designer, and the Eucharist series was the third and largest series of his career. Making no concessions to the weavers, Rubens designed complex scenes with illusionistic effects in the manner of large-scale paintings. Large expanses of bare flesh, often in dynamic, foreshortened poses, challenged weavers to create volume with gradations of delicate hues for modeling. His demanding compositions advanced tapestry production toward a more pictorial effect.

The Patron

The Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia was the eldest and favored child of Philip II (1527–1598) and Isabel of Valois (1545–1568). Raised at the Spanish court, she had a profound sense of religious obligation and familial duty from an early age. She was also exposed to the extraordinary art collection of Philip II, who favored Titian and Flemish painting.

She and her husband Cardinal-Archduke Albert of Austria (1559–1621) ruled the Southern Netherlands (a region corresponding roughly to the country of Belgium today) as co-sovereigns, establishing a solid Catholic state after decades of conflict and suffering. Following Archduke Albert’s death in 1621, Isabel Clara Eugenia exchanged her court dress for the habit of a pious nun (in the manner of “Poor Clare”) and stayed in Brussels as Governor-General. For the remaining twelve years of her life, she assiduously waged military and diplomatic campaigns to secure peace in the Thirty Years’ War and success for the Spanish crown. Tremendously popular, she was mourned at her death in 1633 as a model of virtue.

Isabel Clara Eugenia with Magdalena Ruiz, 1585 – 1588. Alonso Sánchez Coello (Portugese, active in Spain, 1531 - 1588). Oil on canvas. 92 x 61 13/16 x 3 3/8 in. Image courtesy of the Photographic Archive, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

At the time of the commission for the Eucharist tapestries, Rubens was at the height of an illustrious career. After early training in Antwerp and eight years in Italy and Spain, he accepted the generous terms of Archduke Albert and Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia to become their court painter in 1609. Painting intense devotional works as well as captivating mythologies, among many other subjects, Rubens gave form to the values of the cultured Brussels court. After Albert’s death in 1621, he also served the Infanta in a diplomatic capacity and was rewarded for his success with a knighthood by Philip IV. Patron and painter shared a deep spiritual conviction that infuses the Eucharist series.

The Triumph of the Church, 1626 – 1633. Woven in Brussels by Jan Raes I (Flemish, 1574 - 1651) after designs by Peter Paul Rubens

(Flemish, 1577 - 1640). Image courtesy of the PATRIMONIO NACIONAL, Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales, Madrid. Photograph

by Bruce White.

The Victory of the Eucharist over Idolatry," by Peter Paul Rubens. Tapestry.

Panel Paintings Conservation

The oak panels of the six modelli for the Eucharist series in the collection of the Museo Nacional del Prado were painstakingly conserved between 2011 and 2013 to address the cracks and distortions caused by centuries-old alterations. With a grant from the Getty Foundation through the Panel Paintings Initiative, expert panel conservators completed structural treatment of the paintings as part of a program for panel specialists. Once the stabilization was complete, the pictorial surfaces were treated. This project is the second partnership with the Museo del Prado, and the only Panel Painting Initiative project to be featured at the Getty Museum.

Prior to the Getty’s presentation, the exhibition was on view at the Prado Museum in Madrid from March 25, 2014 through June 29, 2014. After the Getty, the exhibition will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from February 15, 2015 through May 10, 2015.

Also on view

Concurrent to Spectacular Rubens, the Getty Museum will present Drawing in the Age of Rubens on view October 14, 2014 through January 11, 2015. Featuring Flemish drawings from the Museum’s collection, the exhibition bears witness to the flourishing of artistic culture in the southern Netherlands from the 16th to 17th centuries, and will include drawings by Rubens and his pupils, predecessors and contemporaries. The survey includes landscapes, figural studies and religious subjects.

Related Publication

In relation to the exhibition, a lushly illustrated volume of the same title, co-produced by Getty Publications and the Museo Nacional del Prado, provides new insight and information about the series. The book presents stunning photography of the paintings and tapestries, which are testaments to the brilliance of this master artist of the Baroque period.

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