THE ILLUSION OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

October 19, 2015, 10:53 am

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 http://www.museothyssen.org/microsites/prensa/2015/Oeste/imagenes.html

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza i
 From 3 November 2015 to7 February2016
Curator: Miguel Ángel Blanco

This autumn the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid) is presenting an exhibition which, for the first time in Spain, sets out to trace the footsteps of the artists who explored the American West in the nineteenth century, taking up the challenge of showing its unknown and exotic scenery and depicting the American Indians’ ways of life that were disappearing before their eyes as a result of an ideological, political, military and colonising effort. These artists very soon helped create an ‘illusion’ of the Wild West, combining Romantic enthusiasm and genuine admiration with the clichés, prejudice and expectations that clouded the white man’s gaze. This image shaped the myth of the savage Indian living on the prairies in communion with nature –a far cry from the vision that was popularised years later by movies, which focused on showing the point of view of the colonisers and the hardship and dangers they had to contend with. 

Through a selection of paintings and photographs by artists such as Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, Henry Lewis, Albert Bierstadt, Edward S. Curtis and Carleton E. Watkins, among others, the exhibition explores this fascinating chapter in art history, which is little known in this country. A few of the canvases belong to the permanent collection of the Museum –the only one in Spain that owns works by these painters –and reflect Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza’s love of stories of the West in literature, films and art. The show begins with an introduction on the Spanish explorers who first came into contact with the tribes back in the sixteenth century and includes a number of ethnographic objects which are distributed throughout the layout, as well as books, comics, film posters and other items that attest to the dissemination of legends of the Wild West in the twentieth century.

Lastly, the exhibition’s curator, the artist Miguel Angel Blanco, who has been interested in American Indian culture for years, presents a selection of book-boxes from his Library of the Forestcrafted from materials collected during his travels across the plains and canyons of the United States. Mapping fantasyThe United States’ colonisation of the Wild West in the nineteenth century was preceded by the Spanish expeditions from Florida and New Mexico between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. These expeditions were initially guided by the wish to find imaginary riches and resulted in a precarious but long-lasting presence in the southwest and, for several decades, throughout the Mississippi basin. Few artistic testimonies of this period remain, but there are maps that allow us to trace the routes, settlements, missions and garrisons, as well as the contact and friction points with the Indian tribes.

 The maps selected for the exhibition are furthermore of great aesthetic interest and some include drawings of figures and tepees.Towards the Wild West: the American SublimeThe trails to the West were blazed by trappers and fur trading companies and later on by scientists and soldiers, who were accompanied on their long journeys by artists from very early on. These artists illustrated their discoveries or, more ambitiously, painted or photographed the landscapes and their original settlers. The railroad facilitated access to a ‘paradisiac’ nature–soon to become a tourist attraction –which, with the great help of artists, came to be protected through the innovative system of national parks. Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon are some of the landscapes shown in the exhibition. Depicting this boundless, magnificent nature setting required a conceptual and visual framework that befitted its vastness and lack of human references.

 Painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Hill, using a markedly Romantic language, created works that enjoyed great significance in art history; and photographers such asCarleton E. Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson established a model for landscape photography that remains valid to this day and hugely influenced the image Americans had of the West in their time.  

Anonymous.Map of the Mississippi  River, dedicated to the Duke of Jovenazo by Don Armando de Arce, Baron of Lahontan, 1699. Archivo General de Indias, Seville Thomas Hill.View of the Yosemite Valley, 1865. Courtesy of The New York Historical Society, NewYork. Gift of Charles T. Harbeck 

The first artists who set foot in the West in the 1830s were not landscapists but portraitists and –with varying degrees of scientific rigour –ethnographers. George Catlin, with his extraordinary Indian Gallery, and Karl Bodmer, with the precise graphic documentation of anthropologist Maximilian zu Wied-Neiwied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, provide in-depth knowledge of Indian camps, buffalo hunting and the rituals of many tribes, as well as their physical appearance and dress. They gave way to an idealised but melancholic vision of Indian life that is a blend of landscape and figures, fantasy and ethnography.  

By the second half of the century, these themes had become a subgenre of painting with great popular appeal, associated with history or genre painting and found in the output of artists such as Charles M. Russell, Charles Wimar and Frederic Remington, among others.

The figure of the Indian chief fascinated all the painters and photographers who had the chance to observe these leaders. These paintings and photographs show in detail the headdresses, body paint and objects of power they each bear. 

George Catlin. Shón-ka-ki-he-ga, Horse Chief. Grand Pawnee Head Chief, 1832. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.. Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr 

For the first time in Spain, visitors can see the famous portraits made by Bodmer and Catlin and the photographs of legendary chiefs taken years later by Adolph Muhr and Edward S. Curtis. 

In these last decades of the nineteenth century the chiefs themselves were even concerned with immortalising their image, such as Sitting Bull, Geronimo and Joseph during their travels around the eastern United States to attend meetings and negotiations, by which time their tribes had been confined to reservations.

Dating from this period is Curtis’s monumental photographic and publishing venture entitled The North American Indian, a controversial yet highly valuable artistic and ethnographic series, much of it no longer extant, from which several images have been selected.

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Colour Unleashed Modern Art in the Low Countries 1885-1914

October 20, 2015, 8:53 am

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Gemeentemuseum 3 October 2015 – 3 January 2016

In the brief period between 1885 and the outbreak of war in 1914 painting in the Low countries experienced a modern Renaissance. Colour was liberated from the chains of visual reality. Suddenly, grass could be a cool blue, a face could be bright purple, and trees turned red. Colour had become an autonomous means of expression. This was one of the most important developments in modern art history. The inspiration came from the French Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, but the artists of the Low Countries added their own flavour. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag is to bring these Dutch and Belgian masters together to reveal the interaction between the two countries, which included both pronounced differences and similarities. This unique exhibition has been made possible thanks partly to the current renovation of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, as a result of which some of the top items in its collection can now travel to other museums. From the French ‘godfathers of colour’ – Claude Monet, Paul Signac,

 Henri Matisse, Landscape at Collioure, 1905, oil on canvas, 38.8 x 46.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.


Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne and the like – to the masters of the Low Countries, such as Leo Gestel, Jan Toorop, Piet Mondrian, James Ensor, Jan Sluijters, Henry van de Velde and Rik Wouters: they will all be brought together in a true feast for the eye.

The story of the modern Renaissance in the Low Countries began in 1883 at artists’ society Les Vingt in Brussels. There, artists including Theo van Rysselberghe, Jan Toorop and Henry van de Velde first encountered the Impressionism and Pointillism of French fellow artists Claude Monet, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and others. This made a deep impression on the Belgian and Dutch artists. They then developed from followers of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism into the founders of modern art, in which the medium of colour was separated from visual reality. Thanks to Toorop, modern art spread via Brussels to The Hague and Amsterdam, where it gave rise to Amsterdam Luminism. Influenced by the work of Vincent van Gogh, artists like Mondrian, Sluijters and Gestel used colour and form as a means to express their own personal perceptions. This resulted in powerful and sensational colour combinations, as in

Mondrian’s Windmill in Sunlight



or Sluijters’ Moonlit Night II, Laren.

It was no coincidence that this modern Renaissance took place at such a tumultuous time. The period 1885-1914 was full of optimism and continual discovery. Confidence in the future, enthusiasm, but also the uncertainty that is always associated with innovation typify the art of the period. Take for example

Jan Sluijters'Bal Tabarin, a tribute to the newly invented electric light.

With over 100 magnificent artworks – combined with photographs, letters and other archive material – Colour Unleashed will recount how developments followed each other in rapid succession until the First World War brought everything to a standstill.

Rik Wouters

The exhibition will include a special focus on Belgian artist Rik Wouters (1882-1916). In his short life, this painter and sculptor produced an exquisite body of work. His paintings, many of them featuring his wife Nel, vibrate with colour and light. He is a great favourite with the Belgian public, but in the Netherlands he has never received the attention his work deserves. An entire gallery will therefore be devoted to him during the exhibition.

Restoration project

In preparation for Colour Unleashed the Gemeentemuseum has worked on a project that has included a technical study and restoration of a number of important paintings from the collection. The team of restorers focused on the original colours in the paintings, which had changed over the years due to dirt and discoloration. The varnish was removed and the paint surface cleaned to reveal the original layers of paint, allowing the paintings to glow as the artists intended. For instance, the somewhat gloomy

Baby’s Bedroom by Jan Sluijters suddenly dazzles in pink and yellow,

and the green in Little House in Sunlight by Piet Mondrian turns out to consist of many shades of blue,

while the flowers in the garden in Jan Toorop’s Trio Fleuri bloom in full colour once more. A number of works on loan have also been specially restored for the exhibition.

The exhibition is being staged in close collaboration with the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp and is part of a special year of events celebrating the cultural ties between the Netherlands and Flanders.

Kees van Dongen, Portret van Dolly, 1909.

A catalogue with contributions from Frouke van Dijke, Doede Hardeman, Anita Hopmans, Hans Janssen, Caroline Rodenburg and Herwig Todts is to be published in Dutch in conjunction with the exhibition.

Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh”

October 21, 2015, 1:03 pm

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This fall, the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) will present the first major exhibition in 50 years to explore the legacy and widespread influence of the revolutionary French painter Eugène Delacroix. “Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh” features 75 seminal paintings—including 30 works by Delacroix—to reveal the artist’s indelible impact on French painting and how his radical example led to the rise of modern art.

The exhibition also examines Delacroix’s role as mentor and archetype during his lifetime and how his work shaped the styles and predilections of many modern artists, including Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others. Organized in partnership with the National Gallery, London, “Delacroix’s Influence” will be on view at the MIA from October 18, 2015, through January 10, 2016, and draws on works from the MIA’s robust 19th-century holdings, as well as loans from 45 prestigious public and private collections worldwide.

“Eugène Delacroix was the very engine of revolution that helped transform French painting in the 19th century,” said Patrick Noon, the MIA’s Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator and Chair of Paintings, and organizing curator of the exhibition. “Kept at arm’s length by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, he was an artist who was truly ahead of his time, whose work and critical writings resonated deeply with his peers and helped shape the trajectory of art history. This exhibition will examine Delacroix as the bridge—in practice and in theory—between Anglo-French Romanticism and Impressionism.”

“Delacroix’s Influence” demonstrates how Delacroix redefined the possibilities of capturing the unique interplay between light and form, as well as his fascination with optical effects, bold use of color, and passion for the exotic. These innovations subsequently inspired the spontaneity of the Impressionists, the dreamlike allusion of the Symbolists, and the saturated color palette made famous almost a century later by such artists as Renoir and Matisse.

Organized according to four thematic sections—Emulation; Orientalism: Imagined/Experienced/Re-Imagined; Narrative Painting at a Crossroads: ‘Truth in Art’; and Delacroix’s Legacy: In Paint and Prose—the exhibition features a broad swath of paintings by Delacroix and his admirers, including works by Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Redon, Renoir, and Signac, among others.

Notable works in the exhibition include:

• Delacroix’s Convulsionists of Tangier (1837-38), widely considered one of the artist’s foremost masterworks and a cornerstone of the MIA’s 19th-century collection. The painting depicts a frenzied scene that Delacroix witnessed during his travels to North Africa in 1832, in which members of the Aïssaouas, a fanatical Muslim sect, crowd the streets. Delacroix’s use of vivid colors and vigorous brushstrokes represent the artist’s signature style and ability to expertly capture the turmoil and urgency of his subject.

• Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1861), one of three Lion Hunt paintings Delacroix produced for dealers and private collectors between 1855 and 1861. This final picture differs markedly in its spatial definition from the flat composition of the earlier pictures—capturing a greater sense of depth and clearly articulated narrative while also maintaining intense and expressive brushwork.

• Édouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862), the artist’s first major work depicting modern urban life. The painting features a band playing for a fashionable crowd that includes several portraits of Manet’s friends—the poet Baudelaire, painter Henri Fantin-Latour, poet and novelist Théophile Gautier, and composer Jacques Offenbach—as well as his brother, Eugène, and the artist himself. To capture these portraits, Manet used photographs as his source of imagery, a technique often employed by Delacroix to underscore a distinct contemporary sensibility in his work.

• Paul Cézanne’s Standing Nude (c. 1898), a representation of a nude in an interior setting that evokes the traditional theme of a woman or goddess at her toilet. Although Cézanne frequently depicted female bathers in an outdoor landscape, the artist admired Delacroix’s The Morning Toilet (or Woman Combing Her Hair) (1850), which he copied shortly after it was exhibited in the 1885 Delacroix retrospective at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

• Paul Gauguin’s Christ in the Garden of Olives (1889), one of several religiously inspired paintings Gauguin created, in which a vulnerable Christ is depicted in isolation prior to his impending martyrdom—a pose derived from  Delacroix’s Christ Shown to the People (1850). The work’s dark colors and gloomy tonality severely contrast against Christ’s flaming hair, further emphasizing the sense of alienation in this overt personification of the artist.

• Van Gogh’s Olive Trees (1889), one of 15 canvases of olive trees van Gogh created while housed in the asylum of St-Paul in St-Rémy in southern France. In his correspondence with his brother, van Gogh wrote of the olive tree: “It’s too beautiful for me to dare paint it or be able to form an idea of it…if you want to compare it to something, [it is] like Delacroix.” It was during this period that the artist created many of his most renowned works, and the vibrant yellow and orange hues in this painting suggest it was produced during the autumn.

• Odilon Redon’s Pegasus and the Hydra (1905), one of several depictions of ancient myths showcasing the artist’s increasing fascination with monster slayers. Influenced by Delacroix’s treatment of similar subjects—in this case, his Apollo Slaying Python (1851)—Redon conceived this work as a metaphor for the artist as an ostracized genius eventually vanquishing chaos and adversity.


Delacroix’s posthumous influence persisted undiminished for nearly five decades and over several generations of avant-garde artists, each of whom, however divergent their own aesthetic programs, discovered something of value in the legendary artist’s oeuvre and dynamic personality. Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists, Symbolists, and Fauves borrowed Delacroix’s ideas as deduced from his varied and accessible painted works and profuse writings.


“Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh” is co-organized with the National Gallery, London, where it will be on view from February 10 through May 15, 2016.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, which comprises lead essays by Patrick Noon, Curator and Chair of Paintings at the MIA and organizing curator of the exhibition, and Christopher Riopelle, Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London.

About Delacroix:

Orphaned at the age of sixteen, Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) quickly abandoned his classical academic training at the Lycée Impérial in favor of self-study. He gleaned early insight and direction by copying old master works in the Musée du Louvre, as well as from his friendship with Théodore Géricault, a pioneer of the Romantic movement in French painting. Géricault, who advocated for individual over formulaic expression, profoundly influenced the development of Delacroix’s first publicly exhibited painting, Barque of Dante (1822), which was celebrated for its acute sentiment and imaginative composition. The work was immediately acquired for the Luxembourg Palace— establishing him as the next prodigy of French Romanticism—and became the most copied of Delacroix’s paintings during the 19th century.

By the time of his death, Delacroix had established himself as a champion of the avant-garde and was one of the most revered artists in Paris. His paintings continued to be distinguished by their expressive, improvisational brush strokes, which challenged the traditional techniques and attitudes of the period’s preeminent Grand Style and paved the way for younger artists’ stylistic experimentation and creative innovation.

From an excellent review in Mpls.St.Paul Magazine(Images added):

In the first gallery alone—a section called Emulation—are paintings by Cezanne, Manet, Gaugin, Sargent, and several others, all arranged around the exhibition’s signature painting, a rare self-portrait of Delacroix himself. Among these are Manet’s famous Music in the Tuileries Gardens, as well as a remarkable copy of

Delacroix’s The Jewish Wedding in Morocco

done as an exercise by Renoir to tease out some of the Master’s secrets.

The following section, Orientalism, explores Delocroix’s travels to North Africa and other artists’ fascination with this new territory, recently colonized by the French.

Among the delights to be found here are

Delacroix’s Combat of the Giaour, a classic horses-in-the-heat-of-battle painting,

and The Convulsionists of Tangier, a familiar painting from Mia’s collection. Both evoke the furious energy and violence that mesmerized painters in Paris, convincing many of them to travel to Morocco in order to experience for themselves the quality of the sun in that part of the world, as well as the barbarity that, if Delacroix’s paintings were to be believed, apparently ran amok in the streets there.

From another good review: 

The very last painting Delacroix painted before his death in 1863, “Arabs Skirmishing in the Mountains.”

Ornament & Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice

October 22, 2015, 11:51 am

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Carlo Crivelli, Saint George Slaying the Dragon, 1470, tempera, gold, and silver on panel, 94 x 47.8 cm, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston will be the sole venue for the first ever monographic exhibition dedicated to Carlo Crivelli in the United States. Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice opens Oct. 22 and runs through Jan. 25, 2016.

Carlo Crivelli (about1435–about1495) is one of the most important–and historically neglected –artists of the Italian Renaissance. Distinguished by radically expressive compositions, luxuriant ornamental display, and bravura illusionism, his works push the boundaries between painting and sculpture.

Crivelli manipulated the surface of each one with rare mastery of his medium, crafting visionary encounters with the divine, forging the modern icon, and offering a powerful alternative to new models of painting associated with Florence.

The exhibition brings together 23 paintings and the artist’s only known drawing. Newly cleaned and restored, the Gardner’s iconic Saint George Slaying the Dragon is the focal point for a two-part installation. The first reunites four of six surviving panels from

 Crivelli’s Porto San Giorgio altarpiece, 

of which the Gardner painting is a fragment. The second part introduces visitors to the artist’s repertoire of dazzling pictorial effects with some of his most important works in Europe and the United States.

Included in Ornament and Illusion are unprecedented loans from 

 La Madonna della Rondine (The Madonna of the Swallow) from Altarpiece from S. Francesco dei Zoccolanti, Matelica

 

Predella of La Madonna della Rondine

The above paintings were part of a single altarpiece. Complete in its original frame, it is one of only three large Italian Renaissance pictures in the National Gallery to retain their original frames. The gilded frame is striking for its 'all'antica' form and rich variety of colour simulating porphyry, granite and marble. It was commissioned in March 1490 by Ranuzio Ottoni, Lord of Matelica, and Giorgio di Giacomo, guardian of the local Franciscan convent. The altarpiece represents the Virgin and Child enthroned with Saint Jerome and Saint Sebastian, but it is named after the swallow ('rondine' in Italian) perched above, which may be intended as a symbol of the Resurrection. It comes from San Francesco in Matelica and bears the arms of the Ottoni family. It was commissioned in March 1490 by Ranuzio Ottoni, Lord of Matelica, and Giorgio di Giacomo, guardian of the local Franciscan convent. Crivelli signed himself 'Miles' (Latin: knight), a title he received in 1490. The central scenes of the predella, the lower section of the altarpiece, relate to the main figures above. They are, from left to right, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, the Nativity at Night, and the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. At either end are Saint Catherine of Alexandria, with her traditional attribute of a wheel, and Saint George in combat with the dragon.

The National Gallery, London; 

 The Virgin Annunciate

the Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie,  Frankfurt; 

Madonna della Passione

the Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona; 

Madonna and Child Enthroned with Donor

"Remember me, O Mother of God. O Queen of Heaven, rejoice." These words, taken from an Easter psalm sung in the Virgin's honor, appear on the golden arch at the top of Carlo Crivelli's Madonna and Child Enthroned with Donor. The donor, the Albanian ecclesiastic Prenta di Giorgio, kneels in prayer near the Virgin's crown. Crivelli's painting originally constituted the central section of a polyptych in the parish church at Porto San Giorgio, near Fermi. The crisp, sculptural forms reflect Crivelli's probable training in the humanist center of Padua. Yet the manner in which Crivelli's figures are modeled in light and shade also expresses a broader Renaissance concern with direct observation of nature.

 

the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and 

This emotionally charged image of the Pietà probably comes from the uppermost tier of an altarpiece Crivelli painted for the church of San Domenico at Ascoli Piceno in the Marches. Known as the Demidoff altarpiece, it is widely considered Crivelli's masterpiece; the principal panels are in the National Gallery, London. Crivelli's art contrasts ornamental effects with details of extreme realism—such as the wounded hand hanging over the tomb’s edge. The fine seventeenth-century frame was made for it by the Barberini family in Rome whose emblem—the bee—adorns each corner.

the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. 

Together, the works assembled in Boston reveal the artist’s astonishing skill, encompassing artistic vision, and relentlessambition, restoring Crivelli to his rightful place in the pantheon of Renaissance painters.

Crivelli was esteemed in his own time as a painter of rank and status. Born in Venice, he trained locally and joined a workshop in the mainland city of Padua, learning from the same master as the celebrated artist Andrea Mantegna (1430/1–1506). Exiled for adultery shortly after returning to Venice in 1457, Crivelli then embarked on a peripatetic career. Early successes on both sides of the Adriatic led to prestigious commissions in the Marches, a mountainous region of northeast Italy defined by its religious and ethnic diversity and ruled by competing feudal lords. He signed the immense high altarpieces for the cathedrals of Ascoli Piceno, in 1473, and Camerino, around 1490. Recognized for his remarkable artistic accomplishments with the aristocratic title of “knight,” Crivelli died around 1494.

The exhibition is organized b y guest co-curator Stephen J. Campbell (Henry and Elizabeth Wiesenfeld Professor, Johns Hopkins University), guest co-curator Oliver Tostmann (Susan Morse Hills Curator of European Art, Wadsworth Athenaeum), and Nathaniel Silver (Assistant Curator of the Collection,Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum). 

Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice is accompanied by a catalog edited by Stephen J. Campbell. Seven essays challenge the prevailing view of Crivelli as a provincial artist working in an anachronistic “gothic” style, investigate the facture of his paintings, and shed new light on his rediscovery by collectors. Catalog entries deliver new insights and up-to-date bibliography for each work in the exhibition. Contributing authors include C. Jean Campbell (Emory University), Francesco De Carolis (Università di Bologna),Thomas Golsenne (École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Nice), Gianfranco Pocobene (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), and Alison Wright (University College London).

Städel Museum: sixty-five masterpieces from the world’s most renowned museums

October 22, 2015, 12:01 pm

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For its two-hundredth birthday the Städel Museum is expecting eminent guests: from 7 October 2015 to 24 January 2016, selected Städel works will host sixty-five masterpieces from the world’s most renowned museums for an anniversary exhibition entitled “Masterworks in Dialogue”. The outstanding Städel works will represent a cross-section of the museum’s history while at the same time offering insights into a collection that has evolved over two- hundred years. Companions from far and wide will join them in temporary partnerships and long-awaited unions. Planned by all of the Städel’s curators, the show will be the first ever to spread throughout the galleries of the museum’s collections. 

Loans from the Albertina in Vienna, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Tate in London, the Vatican Museums, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and elsewhere will travel to Frankfurt am Main for this special occasion. 

The superb “anniversary guests” will allow viewers to draw surprising art-historical references and to illuminate and examine the Städel holdings – spanning seven-hundred years of art – anew. “Masterworks in Dialogue: Eminent Guests for the Anniversary” will be accompanied by a series of lectures given by the Städel curators on the history of the museum; the writer Daniel Kehlmann will deliver the introductory talk at the exhibition opening. 

The anniversary exhibition will spread out on all four floors and in all areas of the Städel collection. The visitor embarking on a tour of the museum will encounter, for example, prominent “anniversary guests” by such artists as Jan van Eyck, Fra Angelico, Johannes Vermeer or Nicolas Poussin bearing close relationships to works from the Städel’s Old Masters collection. 

Masterworks by Edgar Degas, Max Liebermann, Pablo Picasso and Franz Marc will sojourn in the Modern Art collection, and examples by Martin Kippenberger, Georg Baselitz, Thomas Struth, Daniel Richter and Corinne Wasmuht will await discovery in the collection of Contemporary Art. 

The Department of Prints and Drawings will present opera magna by Adam Elsheimer, Edgar Degas, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann and Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn side by side with Städel treasures. The thematic pairs and groups thus formed – numbering forty in all – will be displayed on specially designed coloured pedestals serving not only to explain the ensuing dialogues but also to give them special prominence within the collection presentations.

Dialogues in the Old Masters Collection

In the Old Masters gallery, for instance, the  

Jan van Eyck (1390-1441)
Annunciation, around 1434/1436
Oil on canvas, transferred from panel painted surface, 90,2 x 34,1 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W. Mellon Collection Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington

Annunciation(ca. 1434/36) by Jan van Eyck (1390–1441) from the National Gallery of Art in Washington 

Lucca Madonna, 1437
Mixed technique on oak, 65.7 x 49.6 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Photo: Städel Museum - U. Edelmann -

will encounter the same artist’s Lucca Madonna (1437) from the Städel. 

The two paintings are among the most beautiful and, in terms of content, most complex Marian images by the most well-known Early Netherlandish artist. Works distinguished by their stunning realism of detail and elaborate spatial and temporal structures, they are still admired for their exquisite artistic rendering today, nearly six hundred years after their execution. Until 1850, both belonged to the splendid Old Masters collection of King William II of the Netherlands; now they will be on view side by side for the first time again in 165 years. 

Two portraits of women, one of the fifteenth and one of the nineteenth century, will come together in no less spectacular a meeting: 

Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1444/45–1510)
Idealised Portrait of a Lady (Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as a Nymph), ca. 1480/85 Mixed technique on poplar, 81.8 cm x 54.0 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Photo: Städel Museum – U. Edelmann – ARTOTHEK

Sandro Botticelli’s (1445–1510) Idealized Portrait of a Lady (Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as a Nymph) of ca. 1480/85 from the Städel 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)
Fazio’s Mistress (Aurelia), 1863 (revised by the artist in 1873) Oil on mahogany, 43.2 x 36.8 cm
Tate, London
Photo: Tate, London 2015

and Fazio’s Mistress (Aurelia) (1863) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) from the London Tate will form companion pieces. 

Not only will one of the most famous works from each of these museums’ collections thus be united, but the direct comparison will shed light on astonishing similarities despite the temporal distance of nearly four centuries. The complex manner in which the painting by the Pre-Raphaelite Rossetti reflects on Botticelli’s Simonetta, compositionally speaking, has hitherto gone unrecognized and will now become strikingly evident in the joint display. Both paintings bear a relation to a literary and artistic discourse on the ideal image of female beauty that was revived by the Pre-Raphaelites in the context of studying the works of their Italian idols.

Dialogues in the Modern Art Collection

Hardly any of the Städel Museum’s paintings is as well-known to the public as 

Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein’s (1751–1829) portrait of Goethe in the Roman Campagnaof 1787. 

Surrounded by testimonies to antiquity, the “prince of poets”, wrapped in a travelling cloak, reposes contemplatively in an ideal Arcadian landscape. On the occasion of the show, this centrepiece of the Frankfurt collection will be presented along with several preliminary studies. What is more, works making reference to the painting will once again bear witness to the popularity of the iconic, world-famous portrait of Goethe. Tischbein began the portrait in 1786, when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was sharing living quarters with him and other artists in Rome during his travels in Italy. In later depictions the painting was quoted again and again – now reverently, now tongue-in-cheek – for example in a proposal by Adolf von Donndorf (1835–1916) for the Goethe monument in Berlin and in 

Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) silkscreen of 1982, which has been in the Städel collection since 2000.


Three closely interrelated works by the Expressionist artists 

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) Forest Scene (Moritzburg Lakes), 1910/25 Oil on canvas, 78 cm x 89 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), 

Max Pechstein (1881–1955) Forest Scene, 1910
Oil on canvas, 68 x 79.5 cm Private Collection
© 2015 Pechstein Hamburg / Tökendorf Photo: Private Collection
Otto Dix (1891-1969)
The Artist’s Family, 1927
Oil on wood, 80 cm x 50 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V. Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK

Max Pechstein (1881–1955)

Erich Heckel (1883–1970)
Group Outdoors, 1910
Oil on canvas, 80 x 95 cm
Merzbacher Kunststiftung
© Nachlass Erich Heckel, Hemmenhofen Photo: Merzbacher Kunststiftung

and Erich Heckel (1883–1970) 

will also be assembled in the Modern Art gallery. The three bathing scenes were presumably executed in 1910 during a joint excursion to the Moritzburg Ponds near Dresden. Painted in a synchronous working process, they represent a kind of contest among equals in which each of the painters had a chance to measure his own potential against that of his colleagues. Kirchner’s version, later reworked, is on a canvas painted on both sides and was only discovered in 2010. Within the framework of the exhibition, the works are being shown together for the first time, thus offering a unique opportunity for what promises to be a suspenseful comparison between the protagonists of the Brücke group.

Dialogues in the Collection of Contemporary Art

By assembling the works  

Sex with Dumplings (1963) 

and Big Night Down the Drain (1962/63) (loans from private collections) 

with the painting Field (1962) from the Städel Museum holdings, 

the exhibition will present the early work of the painter Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) as an important window on the history of West German painting of the twentieth century. The three works to be shown within the framework of the “Masterworks in Dialogue” were all featured in Baselitz’s first solo exhibition in 1963. Owing to their radical painterly qualities they sparked a scandal that would prove legendary. The debate even took on a political dimension: works such as Big Night Down the Drain (1962/63) were confiscated. The ideological controversy over abstract versus representational painting in the young Federal German Republic culminated in Baselitz’s provocative compositions in which carnality took centre stage – both formally and with regard to content – and the sensitivities of the German post- war period seemed mirrored. A striking encounter with Georg Baselitz’s epoch- making early phase will here be made possible.

Another group of works to be placed on view in the Contemporary Art collection in the Städel’s anniversary year will address the topic of the museum as an institution. From the perspective of the photographer Thomas Struth (b. 1954), the museum is not just a place for the preservation of art but also one in which art is created. On the occasion of the bicentennial exhibition, the photo Louvre 3, Paris 1989 (1989) from the Städel holdings will be joined by five further works (loans from the Atelier Thomas Struth) from his Museum Photographs series photographed in the National Gallery in London, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Art Institute of Chicago. The series focusses on the visitors’ behaviour and their relationship to the art on exhibit. The spectrum of scenes ranges from the indifferent attitudes of tourist groups to the meditative immersion of an individual art viewer seen, for example in Kunsthistorisches Museum 3, Vienna of 1989. The juxtaposition makes the works’ serial character particularly evident.

Dialogues in the Department of Prints and Drawings

In the gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings, the exhibition will bring together a number of outstanding drawings, paintings and prints. Among the encounters, for example, will be two works by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), an engraver and draughtsman highly admired in the late sixteenth century – works that testify to the astounding development in Goltzius’s mastery of the drawing technique within just a few years. 

Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617)
Portrait of Gillis van Breen,1588
Black, red, brown and yellow chalk, 376 x 292 mm Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Photo: Städel Museum – U. Edelmann – ARTOTHEK

Städel Museum · Schaumainkai 63 · 60596 Frankfurt am Main · Telefon: +49(0)69-605098-0 · www.staedelmuseum.de

The virtuoso Portrait of Gillis van Breen drawn by Goltzius in coloured chalk in 1588 was already in the collection of the museum’s founder Johann Friedrich Städel. 

Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617)
Portrait of Giambologna, 1591
Black and red chalk, partially gone over with a damp brush; brush and brown and brownish green ink, 370 x 300 mm Teylers Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands
Photo: Teylers Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands

The Portrait of Giambologna from the Teylers Museum in Haarlem,executed three years later, provides evidence of the amazingly painterly effect Goltzius was capable of achieving with the sparsest of means.


Two graphic works by the exceptional artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) will likewise enter into dialogue. The artist made reference to his eventful and productive life with depictions of his alter ego: the Minotaur, which he staged in drawings and prints. He was captivated not so much by the myth as by the figure’s masculine creatureliness, which he conveyed now as brutish, libidinous, and powerful, now as tender and needy. The two prints from the Suite Vollard on view at the Städel will offer a superb illustration of the dichotomy between strength and weakness in Picasso’s Minotaur. 

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman, 1933
Drypoint on ribbed laid paper, 299 x 365 mm / 339 x 450 mm Private Collection
© Succession Picasso / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015
Photo: Private Collection 

In the Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman of the year 1933, on loan from a private collection, the beast kneels before a peacefully slumbering female figure, bending his muscular body over her. The threatening look of the bull’s head contrasts with the disconcertingly gentle gesture with which he touches the woman’s hand. This work will be placed on display with the  

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
Blind Minotaur guided by a young girl at night, 1934
Aquatinta, drypoint, etching needle on ribbed laid paper, 247 mm x 347 mm / 336 x 441 mm Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
© Succession Picasso / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015
Photo: Städel Museum – U. Edelmann – ARTOTHEK

Blind Minotaur Being Led through the Night by a Young Girl (1934), a print from the Städel collection which, from the point of view of technique, is one of the artist’s most ambitious prints. Reminiscent of a theatre stage, the composition is borne by the contrast between light and dark.

Catalogue: 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue published by Wienand Verlag and edited by Max Hollein. With a foreword by Max Hollein and texts by Jana Baumann, Bastian Eclercy, Martin Engler, Anna Helfer, Felicity Korn, Felix Krämer, Kristina Lemke, Eva Mongi- Vollmer, Maureen Ogrocki, Susanne Pollack, Almut Pollmer-Schmidt, Annabel Ruckdeschel, Jochen Sander, Jutta Schütt, Martin Sonnabend, Fabian Wolf and Daniel Zamani. In German and English, 280 pages.

 More images from the exhibition:

Willem van Haecht (1593–1637)
Apelles Painting Campaspe, ca. 1630
Oil on wood, 104.9 x 148.7 cm
Mauritshuis, Den Haag, The Netherlands
Photo: Mauritshuis, Den Haag, The Netherlands 

Quentin Massys (1465/66–1530)
Portrait of a Scholar, ca. 1525–1530
Mixed technique on oak, 68.8 cm x 53.3 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Photo: Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, ARTOTHEK 

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) (1591–1666)
The Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1620
Oil on canvas, 88 x 70 cm
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Preußischer Kulturbesitz Photo: Volker-H. Schneider

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) (1591–1666)
Madonna and Child, ca. 1621/22
Oil on canvas, 64 cm x 50 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, acquired in 2010 as a gift from Barbara and Eduard Beaucamp Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK 

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669) 
The Blinding of Samson, 1636
Oil on canvas, 206 cm x 276 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK 

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–ca. 1653)
Judith slaving Holofernes, 1612/13
Oil on canvas, 158.8 x 125.5 cm (left side noticeably trimmed)
Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte
Photo: Fototeca della Soprintendenza Speciale per il PSAE e per il Polo Museale della Città di Napoli e della Reggia di Caserta

Edgar Degas (1834–1917)
Orchestra Musicians, 1872 (1874–1876 reworked) 
Oil on canvas, 63.6 cm x 49 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Photo: Städel Museum – U. Edelmann – ARTOTHEK

Edgar Degas (1834–1917)
The Ballet Scene from Meyerbeer's Opera Robert Le Diable, 1876 Oil on canvas, 76.6 x 81.3 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, London 

Daniel Richter (*1962) 
Dog Planet, 2002
Oil on canvas, 280 x 351 cm
Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig, permanent loan © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015
Photo: Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin, Jochen Littkemann 

Daniel Richter (*1962)
The Gaggle, 2007
Oil on canvas, 280 cm x 450 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, acquired in 2007 with funds provided by the Städelkomitee 21. Jahrhundert, Property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2015
Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK 

Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) 
The Geographer, 1669
Oil on canvas, 51.6 cm x 45.4 cm Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK 

Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675)
A Lady Writing a Letter, with her Maid, approx. 1670
Oil on canvas, 71.1 x 60.5 cm
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, acquired in 1987 as a gift from Sir Alfred and Lady Beit (Beit Collection) Photo: National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Maxfield Parrish and the Power of the Print

October 23, 2015, 8:20 am

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Maxfield Parrish, Edison Mazda Lamp Works Calendar featuring Dawn, 1918. Lithographic reproduction of original oil painting, printed by Forbes Lithography Co. Private collection. Photograph: David Putnam.

Maxfield Parrish was one of the most popular American artists of the early 20th century. Known for his unique artistic style blending realism and fantasy, Parrish created images that were enjoyed by both elite collectors and the American public. His paintings and illustrations were often distributed as high quality color lithographic reproductions, and included on advertisements, posters and calendars. More than fifty prints of Parrish’s most famous work, as well as a number of original oil paintings, will be on view in Maxfield Parrish: The Power of the Print, a focus exhibition at the Currier Museum of Art, October 9, 2015 through January 10, 2016.

Maxfield Parrish, (Philadelphia, PA, 1870-1966, Windsor, VT), Edison Mazda Lamp Works Calendar featuring Lamp Seller of Bagdad, 1923. Lithographic reproduction of original oil painting (1922) printed by Forbes Lithography Co.36 x 17 inches. Private Collection. Photo by David Putnam.


“Maxfield Parrish combined the creativity and virtuosity of a fine artist with the keen business sense of a commercial artist,” said Samantha Cataldo, exhibition curator. “His figural and landscape paintings were masterfully rendered and greatly appealing, but it was his engagement with the emerging printing technology of the time that catapulted him to fame. His images became staples in homes and business across America.”

Parrish’s work appeared in magazines and books since the 1890s and his paintings were distributed as prints as early as 1904. It was between the 1910s and the early 1930s that Parrish created some of his most enduring images, which were disseminated in various forms. His most famous artwork,

Daybreak (1922)

was a painting that Parrish created specifically to be reproduced using high-quality color lithography. Daybreak’s popularity was so great that within just a few years some estimates claimed that 1 in 4 American homes owned a copy of this print.

Prometheus

Between 1917 and 1932, Parrish created art calendars for General Electric’s Edison Mazda Lamp division that featured figural, fantastic scenes—more than 20 million of these calendars were produced. These calendar prints are often considered the best print examples of Parrish’s work, and all of these stunning images will be on view in the exhibition.

Spirit of the Night

While the public consumed his prints, private collectors purchased his paintings. In a move that was ahead of its time, Parrish wisely maintained the copyright on all of his images, allowing him to collect royalties for reproductions and making him one of America’s most financially successful artists.

Egyptian Night

Today, Parrish’s popularity remains strong, particularly here in New Hampshire, the artist’s adopted home of more than 60 years. In 1999, the Currier presented Maxfield Parrish: 1870-1966, a traveling retrospective organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. It remains one of the highest-attended shows in the Museum’s 85-year history. A more focused exhibition, The Power of the Print aims to explore how and why Parrish became, and remains, such a popular American artist.

 Primitive Man

About the Exhibition

This focus exhibition features vintage lithographic prints, ads, posters, magazines, books, greeting cards and calendars that feature Parrish’s works. The exhibition is largely drawn from private collections, but also includes work from the Currier’s collection, as well as from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. It also features several Parrish paintings, including the Currier’s visitor favorite,

Freeman Farm: Winter (1935).

About Maxfield Parrish

Maxfield Parrish was born Frederick Parrish in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1870 to Elizabeth Bancroft Parrish and Steven Parrish, a noted engraver and painter. He studied architecture at Haverford College, and art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as well as at Drexel Institute, where he audited courses with famed illustrator Howard Pyle (1853–1911). In 1898, Parrish moved to Plainfield, New Hampshire, near Cornish, where he built his home and studio, which he named “The Oaks” after the distinguishing trees on the land. He lived there until his death in 1966.

 

Twilight over Berlin: Masterworks from the Nationalgalerie, 1905-1945

October 23, 2015, 8:45 am

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Anchoring the second half of the Israel Museum’s 50^th anniversary year, Twilight over Berlin: Masterworks from the Nationalgalerie, 1905-1945 brings together seminal examples of works by German artists, whose avant-garde creativity was foundational to Israel’s modernist visual vocabulary in a range of creative disciplines. 

On view October 20, 2015–March 26, 2016, the exhibition features works by masters of the German Expressionist movement, among them Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, together with such Weimar period innovators as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee.

Twilight over Berlin continues the Israel Museum’s celebratory collaborations with sister institutions worldwide throughout its 50^thanniversary year and marks its special partnership with the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, also honoring 50 years of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany.

Featuring artworks created between 1905 and 1945, Twilight over Berlin examines the flourishing of the visual arts from pre-World War I years, and through its struggle against oppression and persecution through Hitler’s ascent to power and World War II.  
Among the exhibition’s highlights are: 

• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Potsdam Square(1914), one of a series of paintings by the artist that focused on street life in the modern metropolis of Berlin. Depicting two prostitutes with mask-like faces, the work reflects the influence of “primitive art” on this seminal German Expressionist.

 

 
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Potsdam Square, Acquired 1999 with support from the Kulturstiftung der Länder (Cultural Foundation of the Federal States), the Federal Government, the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung, the Deutsche Bank Cultural Foundation et al. 

• Otto Dix’s The Skat Players (1920), an anti-militarist collage marking the artist’s transition from Dada to the socially critical New Realism, depicting three hideously disfigured officers in a café playing skat, a popular three-handed German card game.

 

• Among the paintings included in the historic 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, Emil Nolde’s Christ and the Sinner(1926), illustrates a scene from the Gospel of Saint Luke in a dramatically compressed pictorial frame in which the Pharisees condemn the prostitute Mary Magdalene as Jesus Christ embraces her.

​

• George Grosz’s Pillars of Society(1926),a denunciation of German society and the Weimar Republic through four allegorical figures: the ear-less legal expert with a swastika on his tie and fencing weapon; a journalist with a chamber pot hat carrying a hypocritical palm frond; a politician whose brain is filled with steaming excrement; and a red-faced military chaplain in robes.

 

• Christian Schad’s Sonja(1928), an iconic portrait of an androgynous office worker, dressed in fashionable clothes and smoking a Camel cigarette, alluding to the notion of the new independent woman.

 Great review

Exhibition Organization

Twilight over Berlin: Masterworks from the Nationalgalerie, 1905-1945 is co-curated by Dr. Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, David Rockefeller Curator, The Stella Fischbach Department of Modern Art at the Israel Museum, and Dr. Dieter Scholz, Curator, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

WATTEAU’S SOLDIERS: SCENES OF MILITARY LIFE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

October 26, 2015, 5:27 am

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At the Frick July 12 through October 2, 2016 

  It would be difficult to think of an artist further removed from the muck and misery of the battlefield than Jean - Antoine Watteau (1684 – 1721), who is known as a painter of amorous aristocrats and melancholy actors, a dreamer of exquisite parklands and impossibly refined fêtes . And yet, early in his career , Watteau painted a number of scenes of military life, remarkable for their deeply felt humanity and intimacy. These pictures were produced during one of the darkest chapters of France’s history, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701 – 14). 

But the martial glory on which most military painters of the time trained their gaze — the fearsome arms , snarling horses , and splendid uniforms of generals glittering amid the smoke of cannon fire — held no interest for Watteau, who focused instead on the most prosaic aspects of war : the marches , halts, encampments, and bivouacs that defined the larger part of military life. Inspired by seventeenth - century Dutch and Flemish genre scenes , t he resulting works show the quiet moments between the fighting, when soldiers could rest and daydream , smoke pipes and play cards.   

Watteau produced about a dozen of these military scenes, but only seven survive. Though known primarily only to specialists, they were once counted among the artist’s most admired works and owned by such prominent figures as Catherine the Great and the Prince of Conti. 

Presented exclusively at The Frick Collection in the summer of 2016, Watteau’s Soldiers is the first exhibition devoted solely to these captivating pictures, introducing the ar tist’s engagement with military life to a larger audience while offering a fresh perspective on the subject. Among the paintings, drawings, and prints are four of the seven known paintings — with the Frick’s own 

·         Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) The Portal of Valenciennes (La Porte de Valenciennes), ca. 1711−12 Oil on canvas, 12 3/4 x 16 inches The Frick Collection; purchased with funds from the bequest of Arthemise Redpath, 1991 Photo: Michael Bodycomb

Portal of Valenciennesas the centerpiece — as well as the recently rediscovered  

 

·         Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) The Supply Train (Escorte d'équipages), ca. 1715 Oil on panel, 11 1/8 x 12 3/8 inches Private collectio

Supply Train, which has never before been exhibited publicly in a museum. 

Also featured are about twelve studies of soldiers in red chalk, many directly related to the paintings on view. The works on display offer a rare opportunity to study the drawings and paintings together and probe Watteau’s complex and remarkable working methods. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Watteau did not proceed methodically from compositional sketches, studies, and full - scale models to the final painting. Ins tead, his process followed the whims of his imagination and the demands of the moment. He began by drawing soldiers from life, without a predetermined end in mind. These drawings provided him with a stock of figures, often used multiple times, that he would arrange in an almost spontaneous fashion on the canvas. As a result, figures previously isolated in his sketchbook were brought together and juxtaposed in new social relationships on the canvas, producing the ambiguous, dreamlike effects that make hi s paintings so intriguing. 

The exhibition is rounded out by a selection of works by Watteau’s predecessors and followers: the Frick’sCalvary Camp by PhilipsWouwerman, a typical example of the seventeenth - century Dutch paintings after which Watteau modeled his own; a study of a soldier by Watteau’s follower Jean - Baptiste Pater, from the Fondation Custodia , Paris ; and a painting of a military camp by his other great follower, Nicolas Lancret, from a private collection. These works shed light on the ways in which Watteau transformed the painting of military life in Europe, demonstrating his pivotal influence on the genre

Published by The Frick Collection in association with D Giles, Ltd., London, the book accompanying the exhibition includes an essay by Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow Aaron Wile , and is the first illustrated catalogue of all Watteau works related to military subjects.  

More images from the upcoming exhibition:

Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) The Line of March (Défilé), ca. 1709−10 Oil on canvas, 12 3/4 x 16 inches York Art Gallery, England

Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) Two Recruits, ca. 1712 Red chalk, 6 3/8 x 6 1/8 inches Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Everett V. Meeks, B.A. 1901, Fund Photo: Yale University Art Gallery

Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) Foot Soldiers, a Drummer, and Two Cavaliers (verso), ca. 1709–10 Red chalk, 6 ¼ x 7 5/8 inches National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh Photo credit: Scottish National Gallery

 Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) Two Standing Soldiers, ca. 1710 Red chalk on aged-toned paper, 5 5/8 x 3 1/8 inches Collection Professor Donald Stone, New York; promised gift to the National Gallery of Art, Washington Photo: Michael Bodycomb

    Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) Three Studies of a Soldier, One from Behind, ca. 1713–15 Red chalk, 6 x 7 ¾ inches Fondation Custodia, Paris Photo credit: Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris

  Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) The Halt (Alte), ca. 1710–11 Oil on canvas, 12 5/8 x 16 ¾ inches Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid Photo credit: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

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The Women of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka

October 30, 2015, 12:24 pm

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Belvedere 

22 October to 28 February 2016

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the traditional relationship between the sexes was challenged by a series of sweeping social, economic and philosophical changes. The incipient move toward gender parity provoked vehement counter-arguments on the part of popular theorists such as Otto Weininger. On the other hand, to the extent that both men and women wished to escape from the confining moral taboos of the nineteenth century, sexual liberation may be viewed as a shared goal. The more forthright acknowledgment of male and female sexual desire sent thrills and chills through early twentieth-century Austrian art, infusing the work of the nation’s leading artists with a mix of terror and exhilaration. 

Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka each approached what was then commonly known as the “woman question” in slightly different, albeit overlapping, ways. The Women of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka explores these differences and similarities in depth, in the process providing new insights into early twentieth-century gender relations and the origins of modern sexual identity. Organized both chronologically and thematically, the exhibition focuses on four principal subject groupings: portraiture; mothers and children; couples; the nude. 

It is easy to understand why Klimt’s portraits—sumptuous, elegant and brilliantly colored—were popular with Viennese society ladies. But the artist’s richly ornamented surfaces almost completely obscured the sitters’ personalities. Schiele and Kokoschka turned this decorative formula inside out, thrusting their subjects into a pictorial void. In the process, they forced a confrontation with the existential anxiety that had been concealed by Klimt’s horror vacui. Defying the then-prevalent contention that women lack souls, Schiele and Kokoschka forged a new, modern form of psychological portraiture.

The mother and child, one of the oldest subjects in Western religious art, was likewise transformed by the pressures of fin-de-siècle sexual politics. In the popular imagination, females were categorized either as “Madonnas” (chaste and maternal) or “whores” (sexually voracious predators). Klimt and Schiele subverted this dichotomy by depicting pregnant nudes and naked mothers, thereby explicitly linking motherhood to female sexuality. Kokoschka, on the other hand, seemed really to imagine that maternity “cured” a woman of sexual promiscuity. He obsessed about fathering a child with his lover, Alma Mahler, and in his art repeatedly allegorized her as the Virgin Mary. 

Judging from their work, Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka shared a belief in romantic love: a union of soul-mates sealed by erotic passion. But whereas Klimt, in his paintings of couples, placed the subject on a lofty allegorical plane, the two Expressionists allowed personal experiences to inflect their work. Indeed, Schiele’s and Kokoschka’s evocations of relationships gone sour are often more emotionally compelling than their renderings of idealized, happy lovers. Becausemales and females were at the time deemed opposites, the two could not be comfortably joined. 

Traditionally, the goal of the female nude in Western art has been to control and subdue the subject’s innate eroticism through a process of ordering and idealization. At the beginning of the last century, men’s fear of female sexuality was expressed in the concept of the femme fatale, one of Klimt’s recurring subjects. While these brazen, provocative women were controversial in their day, overall there is little in the artist’s work to upset the primacy of the male gaze. Klimt’s nudes are seductively beautiful, and in many of his most explicit erotic drawings they are passive almost to the point of unconsciousness. 

By comparison, Schiele’s and Kokoschka’s nudes are far more abrasive. Angular lines subvert their inviting curves, and erratic cropping creates an aura of unease. Unlike classical nudes, these women often seem aware that they are being watched, and at times they appear none too pleased. Most radical of all is Schiele’s propensity for depicting recumbent women vertically, fostering a sense of confrontational engagement entirely at odds with the aesthetics of the traditional nude. Schiele’s and Kokoschka’s nudes, like Klimt’s, convey an undercurrent of fear. It would not be accurate to call any of these artists feminists. Nevertheless, all three acknowledged female sexual autonomy to a degree that was at the time unprecedented. 

 
Egon Schiele, The Embrace (Lovers II), 1917
Oil on canvas
100 x 170 cm
© Belvedere, Vienna

Egon Schiele, Kneeling Girls, 1911
Gouache, watercolour and pencil on paper
47.2 x 31.5 cm
© Private Collection, Courtesy Richard Nagy Ltd., London

 

Egon Schiele, The Red Host, 1911
Watercolour and pencil on paper
48.2 x 28.2 cm
© Private Collection, Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York

Egon Schiele, Edith Schiele in striped dress, 1915
Oil on canvas
180,2 x 110,1 cm
© Collection of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

Egon Schiele, Reclining woman with green stockings, 1917
Guache and black coal on paper
29.4 x 46 cm
Private Collection © Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York

Egon Schiele, Seated Woman in Violet Stockings, 1917
Gouache and black crayon on paper
29.6 x 44.2 cm
© Private Collection, Courtesy Richard Nagy Ltd., London

Egon Schiele, Mother with two children III, 1917
Gouache and black chalk on paper
150 x 159,8 cm
© Belvedere, Vienna

 
Egon Schiele, Portrait Gerti Schiele,1909
Oil, silver, gold-bronze paint, and pencil on canvas
139.5 x 140.5 cm
© 2015. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

 

Egon Schiele, Cardinal and Nun, 1912
Oil on canvas
70 x 80,5 cm
© Leopold Museum, Vienna

 

Egon Schiele, Portrait of the Artist's Wife, Edith Schiele, 1918
Oil on canvas
139.8 x 109.8 cm
© Belvedere, Vienna

 

Gustav Klimt, Goldfish, 1901/02
Oil on canvas
181 x 67 cm
© Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Dübi-Müller-Stiftung, 1980

 

Gustav Klimt, Fritza Riedler, 1906
Oil on canvas
153 x 133 cm
© Belvedere, Vienna

Gustav Klimt, Eugenia (Mäda) Primavesi, 1913/14
Oil on canvas
140 x 85 cm
© Toyota Municipal Museum of Art

Oskar Kokoschka, Elisabeth Reitler, 1910
Oil on canvas
65 x 54 cm
Photo: Medienzentrum, Antje Zeis-Loi / Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal, © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/ Bildrecht, Vienna, 2015

 

Oskar Kokoschka, Standing Female Nude (Alma Mahler), 1918
Oil on paper and canvas
180 x 85 cm
Private Collection, © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka / Bildrecht, Vienna, 2015, Photo: © Courtesy of Caroline Schmidt Fine Art LLC

 

Oskar Kokoschka, Martha Hirsch, 1909
Oil on canvas
88 x 70 cm
Private Collection, © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/ Bildrecht, Vienna, 2015

Oskar Kokoschka, The Slave Girl, 1921
Oil on canvas
110.5 x 80 cm
Saint Louis Art Museum, © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/ Bildrecht, Wien, 2015, Photo: © Saint Louis Art Museum
 

 
Oskar Kokoschka, Lovers with cat, 1917
Oil on canvas
93,5 x 130,5
© Kunsthaus Zürich, © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/ Bildrecht, Wien, 2015, Photo: © Kunsthaus Zürich

Oskar Kokoschka, Dancing young girl in a blue dress, 1908
Watercolor, tempera and pencil on paper
44.8 x 31.5 cm
Private Collection, © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/ Bildrecht, Vienna, 2015

Sotheby's November 4- 5 2015: The Collection of A. Alfred Taubman - Impressionist & Modern Art

October 30, 2015, 1:05 pm

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A dedicated evening auction of property from the Estate of A. Alfred Taubman will be led by a selection of rare examples of Impressionist & Modern Art, foremost among them

Amedeo Modigliani’s outstanding Paulette Jourdain,

Pablo Picasso’s exceptional Femme assise sur une chaise,

and an important pastel by Edgar Degas, Danseuses en blanc.

WILLEM DE KOONING UNTITLED XXI Estimate  25,000,000— 35,000,000

This distinguished collection also features stunning paintings and sculptures from the most influential figures in Contemporary and American Art: from Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock, to Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Roy Lichtenstein, the Contemporary works in the Taubman Collection chart the course of artistic innovation in the 20th century.

MARK ROTHKO

UNTITLED (LAVENDER AND GREEN)

Estimate  20,000,000— 30,000,000

 

Spanning three centuries, the architecture of the human form is among the themes that emerge within the A. Alfred Taubman collection of Modern and Contemporary art.  The works in this sale also show the collector’s focus on exquisite draughtsmanship from some of the greatest Modern masters of line: Picasso, Matisse, Schiele, Miró, Klimt, Degas, and Manet.

Whether a large scale oil by Paul Gauguin or a sinuous Salvador Dalí nude line drawing on sandpaper, the superlative quality of the works offered transcends any one style or time period, with examples from a delicate pastel from 1856 by van Gogh's idol, Jean-François Millet, to a lushly textured Wayne Thiebaud oil just painted in 2014.  Examples of the radical shifts in art history taking place in the 1910's make for particularly fascinating comparisons and contrasts.

Vincent van Gogh

JARDIN PUBLIC À ARLES

Estimate

1,800,000— 2,500,000

From Max Pechstein's bold Expressionist figures to Pierre Bonnard's brightly colored Nabis canvas of women, from Giocomo Balla's Italian Futurism to Alexander Rodchenko’s Suprematism, from Pablo Picasso's Cubism to an array of works by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, many works represent the best and brightest of this most explosive decade in the history of modern art, when figuration gave way to abstraction.

Modernism seamlessly transitions to Abstraction with highlights including Alexander Calder’s elegant and delicate standing mobile White Discs on the Pyramid, John Chamberlain’s bright, powerful sculpture Captain Cooke and Mark Di Suvero’s outdoor work Pasta.


Themes of figuration and form reveal themselves in the Contemporary works highlighted by

Tom Wesselmann’s Great American nude, No 61,

Antony Gormley’s Measure III

and the deep and impressive collection of Robert Graham sculptures.

Sotheby’s 18 November Auction of AMERICAN ART: Andrew Wyeth

October 30, 2015, 1:05 pm

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Sotheby’s will offer three works by Andrew Wyeth from the collection of Hollywood legend Charlton Heston and his wife, Lydia Heston, as part of its American Art auction in New York on 18 November 2015. 

A longtime admirer of the Wyeth family and of Andrew’s work in particular, Charlton Heston began a correspondence with the artist in the 1980s that quickly grew into a friendship, which included visits with Andrew and his family in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania – a location that served as the inspiration for so much of the Wyeths’ oeuvre. Charlton later narrated a documentary on Andrew’s work titled The Helga Pictures Study, and wrote multiple articles on Wyeth for publications such as the National Review.

 

Charlton Heston’s first acquisition of Andrew Wyeth’s work was 

the mesmerizing watercolor Ice Pool (estimate $150/250,000), which he purchased as an anniversary gift for Lydia Heston. 

In 1988, Charlton acquired 

Flood Plain (estimate $2/3 million), a work that exemplifies the skillful combination of medium, composition and subject that has made Wyeth one of the most significant American artists of the 20th century. 

In 1989, Charlton Heston’s son, Fraser Heston, directed him in an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The two decided that N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations from the 1911 edition of the book would serve as inspiration for the production design. Andrew Wyeth allowed the Hestons to create large-scale blow-ups of his father’s work. As a thank you, the Hestons held a screening of the film at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, which houses much of the Wyeth family’s work. 

Just before Christmas of 1991, a box marked ‘A. Wyeth’ arrived at the Heston’s house. Charlton waited until Christmas morning to open the package, which contained Study for ‘Flood Plain’ (estimate $20/30,000). In a thank you note to Wyeth, Heston wrote “I haven’t been so excited about a Christmas gift since I was ten years old... You’ve given our family not only a piece of your work, which is both your livelihood and your life, but a part of the process... a private part of your working insides.”

The Greats: masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland

October 31, 2015, 9:12 am

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Sir Henry Raeburn Reverend Robert Walker skating on Duddingston Loch c1795, oil on canvas;

Sandro Botticelli The Virgin adoring the sleeping Christ child ('The Wemyss Madonna’) c1485 (detail), tempera, oil and gold on canvas. Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh © Trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland

The Greats: masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland is one of the most significant collections of European old master paintings ever seen in Australia and is presented as part of the Sydney International Art Series 2015-2016.

Spanning a period of 400 years from the Renaissance to Impressionism, The Greats includes works by the most outstanding names in Western art, including Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Velázquez, Poussin, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Turner, Monet, Degas, Gauguin, and Cézanne.

This richly presented exhibition brings together over 70 of the greatest paintings and drawings from the National Galleries of Scotland, based in the beautiful capital city of Edinburgh.

The Greats marks the first time these artworks have been exhibited in Australia, with the exception of

Rembrandt’s A woman in bed (c1647)

and Seurat’s La Luzerne, Saint-Denis (1884–85).

Botticelli’s Virgin adoring the sleeping Christ child (c1485) has not been exhibited outside of the United Kingdom in 169 years.

Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Michael Brand, said it is a tremendous privilege to host such a fine collection of masterpieces in Sydney and that the Art Gallery of NSW is extremely grateful to the National Galleries of Scotland for their generosity and collegiality.

“The Greats is a statement of unequivocal artistic excellence – each piece in this exhibition is of extraordinary quality. We are excited to provide Australian audiences the rare opportunity to come face to face with such unique and masterful artworks,” Brand said.

“Approaching the entrance to the Art Gallery of NSW, we are reminded of Sydney’s historic aspirations for viewing the creations of European old masters, with names such as Titian, Rembrandt and Botticelli adorning the Gallery’s sandstone facade.

It is with great pleasure that we now welcome incredible works by these artist to our interior walls, into a sublime exhibition space that promises a moving and absorbing experience for all visitors,” Brand added.

Visitors to The Greats will experience the Scottish National Gallery’s famous interior with part of the exhibition space inspired by the Edinburgh gallery’s octagonal rooms with fabric walls of a sumptuous red – the traditional colour on which to hang old master paintings. This installation will serve to accentuate the grandeur of the paintings and foster an intimate experience with each of the artworks.

More images from the exhibition:

 Paul Gauguin, Three Tahitians, 1899. Oil on canvas. Scottish National Gallery

• Diego Velázquez, An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, 1618. Oil on canvas. Scottish National Gallery
   
  • John Singer Sargent, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892. Oil on canvas. Scottish National Gallery

   

• Camille Pissarro, The Marne at Chennevières, ca.1864–1865. Oil on canvas. Scottish National Gallery
   
  • Edgar Degas, Diego Martelli, 1879. Oil on canvas. Scottish National Gallery

   

Claude Monet Poplars on the Epte, 1891 (detail)

_______________________________________________________________________________

A beautifully designed, fully-illustrated publication featuring an essay by Michael Clarke, produced by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, will accompany the exhibition.

Sotheby's Modern & Post-War British Art Evening Sale London, 17 November 2015: Lucian Freud, Girl and Self Portrait

October 31, 2015, 9:20 am

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Lucian Freud, Girl and Self Portrait (1947/48), pen & ink, heightened with coloured crayon, on paper21.5 by 29.5cm; 81/2by 111/2inches (est. £600,000-800,000)

Sotheby’s London has announced the sale of an outstanding rediscovered drawing by Lucian Freud in its Modern &Post-War British Art Evening Sale on 17 November 2015. Girl and Self Portrait is the only self-portrait drawing by Freud known to feature his muse Kitty Garman, who was to become his first wife and whom he had painted devotedly from early 1947. 

Unveiled to the public for the first time in almost 70 years, Girl and Self Portrait was gifted between 1947 and 1948 shortly after it was drawn by the artist to the late Sonia Brownell( 1918-1980), second wife of George Orwell. The drawing now comes to the market for the first time with an estimate of £600,000-800,000.

Lucian Freud gifted the drawing to Sonia, who was almost certainly the inspiration for the heroine of George Orwell’s seminal novel 1984, the ‘girlf rom the fiction department’, with whom the book’s protagonist Winston Smith falls in love, changing the course of the storyline. Sonia and Lucian were close friends during the late 1940s, having met when they both worked at the highly regarded literary journal Horizon.It was Freud to whom Sonia turned when she needed help transporting Orwell to a Swiss sanatorium, in a last ditch attempt to save his life –although he died of tuberculosis a few days before the scheduled departure.

Girl and Self Portrait is testament Sonia’s famed loyalty as a friend. Indeed, despite her financial need later in life, Sonia kept the drawing to the end. During the seven decades that the drawing remained in her homet he work was only lent once for exhibition, shortly after she received the gift, for Freud’s now historic 1948 show at the London Gallery.

This arresting pen and ink drawing, heightened with coloured crayon, was initially intended to illustrate a reproduction of Flyda of the Seas: a Fairy Tale for Grown Ups, a book by Princess Marie Bonaparte, Sigmund Freud’s disciple and patron. It was Marie Bonaparte’s idea to commission Freud’s grandson to do the illustrations for her book in 1947 when translated from the French by John Rodker’s Imago Publishing Company, thoughhis illustrations did not end up being included in the edition. As a gift the drawing couldn't have been more suitable for the ‘girl from the fiction department’-an image created initially to accompany a text, but one that pulsates with the emotional intensity between the artist and model/lover, a theme that Freud was to explore for the next 60 years.

Hieronymus Bosch - Visions of Genius in the city where he was born

November 3, 2015, 1:15 pm

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Noordbrabants Museum, ’s-Hertogenbosch, from 13 February until 8 May 2016.

With an expected 20 paintings (panels and triptychs) and 19 drawings on display, 'Visions of Genius' will be the largest retrospective of the work of Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450 - 1516) ever. The exhibition will be an unparalleled homage to the most important medieval artist Holland has produced: never before have so many works by this ‘master of devilish perfection’ been brought together in a single exhibition.

For one time only, the majority of his oeuvre will be returning to ’s‑Hertogenbosch, the city where he was born as Jheronimus van Aken, where he painted his masterpieces and from which his artistic name of Bosch is derived. The exhibition will be the highlight of the Jheronimus Bosch 500 event year that will be celebrated in 2016 on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death.

Exceptional number of works on loan

The dozens of works on loan originate from prominent museums around the world, including the Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam), Gallerie dell'Accademia/Palazzo Grimani (Venice) and Metropolitan Museum (New York). The loans include such works as

The Haywain (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid)

and The Temptation of St. Anthony (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid)

the Ship of Fools (Musée du Louvre, Paris),

the Death and the Master (National Gallery of Art, Washington)

and The Hermit Saints (Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice).

The exceptional number of works on loan to the exhibition will offer visitors the unique opportunity to closely study the revolutionary and highly imaginative visual language of Hieronymus Bosch.

Hieronymus Bosch

Typical for Bosch are the monsters, diabolical figures, angels and saints that populate his drawings and panels. His characteristic work, full of illusions and hallucinations, peculiar freaks and nightmares, inimitably represents the major themes of his time: temptation, sin and reckoning. Created in the period around 1500, the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Bosch’s paintings and drawings mysteriously reflect the relationship between the individual, his surroundings and his creator. Bosch is considered a brilliant artist who shows worlds in his works that his contemporaries never believed possible. He is an artist who ranks among the absolute world masters, whose work inspired the generations that followed and continues to inspire new artists to this very day.

“Bosch is the most important and most original medieval artist our country has ever produced. It is fantastic that, in the year 2016, the majority of his oeuvre can be seen in his hometown of ’s-Hertogenbosch. A fabulous opportunity for a new generation to also get acquainted with this work, which is unique in every respect.”

Charles de Mooij, Director of Het Noordbrabants Museum

The preparation work for the exhibition in Het Noordbrabants Museum began in 2007. The foundation for the exceptional loans was laid with the Bosch Research and Conservation Project (BRCP), an ambitious and large-scale international art history study developed together with the Jheronimus Bosch 500 Foundation and Radboud University of Nijmegen. A team of international experts, united in the BRCP, have spent the past six years intensively and systematically studying and documenting virtually the entire oeuvre of the master Bosch worldwide, something never done before. In continuation of that research and preparations for the exhibition in 's-Hertogenbosch, a large number of paintings were also restored. The results of the Bosch Research and Conservation Project form the basis of the exhibition in 2016.

Bosch year in 2016

The city of ’s-Hertogenbosch, residents and visits are commemorating from 2010 up to the 500th anniversary in 2016 the death of Holland’s most important medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch (approx. 1450-1516) with the multiannual international cultural event Jheronimus Bosch 500. With Hieronymus’ work as the inexhaustible source of inspiration, his time and themes will be resurrected in a wide range of festive events: unique music, dance, theatre and circus productions, exhibitions, projects in public spaces, light presentations, books, games and apps. All of this is being done for (and with) a broad and diverse audience of all ages from around the world. Jheronimus Bosch 500 is bringing the city’s most famous son back to where he conceived and created everything, back to ’s-Hertogenbosch.


From a great , must read article:

Not so much as a sketch by the city’s most famous son now remains in ’s-Hertogenbosch. The first museum De Mooij approached was immediately struck by the grandeur of reuniting all his works, and the National Gallery in Washington volunteered to loan its fabulous Death and the Miser...

A few of the paintings are in too poor condition to even consider moving, but the one De Mooij knew he would never get was the artist’s single most famous work,

The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Instead, the Prado is sending The Haywain (which will leave Madrid for the first time in 450 years). But the Garden triptych has been in Spain since the 16th century, moving from the royal collection to the Prado in 1939. De Mooij says that asking to borrow it would be like ringing up the Rijksmuseum and asking to borrow Rembrandt’s Night Watch – it was never going to happen.

More images from the exhibition:

Hieronymus Bosch, “The Pedlar” c. 1494–1516), oil on panel, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Christie’s American Art Auction - November 19, 2015

November 5, 2015, 5:48 am

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Christie’s American Art auction on November 19 will offer fresh to the market works from various private collections, with artists including Norman Rockwell, Thomas Moran, Georgia O’Keeffe, Stuart Davis, Frederick Remington, George Bellows, and Milton Avery,  among others.
In addition, Christie’s Digital Sales will host America Illustrated: Norman Rockwell and his Contemporaries, which runs November 13 – 24, and offers a wonderful variety of 20^th century American Illustration, from holiday-themed works to images of America’s favorite pastimes, with estimates ranging from $400 to $100,000.

ILLUSTRATION


The top lot of the American Art auction on November 19, will be

Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Editor, estimated at $10-15 million. This major, large-scale work belongs to an important series of works Norman Rockwell completed for The Saturday Evening Post at the height of his career in 1946. The painting is being sold by the National Press Club Journalism Institute, with the approval of the National Press Club, and the proceeds from the sale will benefit both nonprofit organizations.

Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Editor appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on May 25, 1946. It was subsequently gifted to the National Press Club, an occasion later commemorated when Rockwell spoke at the Club on July 25, 1967. For the better part of the past seventeen years, the National Press Club Journalism Institute has kept the painting on public display in the space that it shares with the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The work has also been loaned often and generously as part of the Club's stewardship, and most recently was on long-term loan to a museum.

Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Editor depicts a scene at the Monroe County Appeal, a small town newspaper founded in 1867 and located in Paris, Missouri. The painting is among Rockwell’s series of pictorial reports capturing the artist visiting various places, including a country school, the doctor, and the country editor. A highly complex composition, the work depicts nine characters, each uniquely articulated with Rockwell’s signature charm, bustling in the offices of the newspaper.  The paper’s editor, Jack Blanton, is seated at the typewriter and at the far right of the composition Rockwell is seen striding through the door with his portfolio firmly wedged under his arm.

Christie’s Digital sale of Illustration art features an exciting and diverse array of works with highlights from Charles E. Sigety’s renowned collection, from important artists such as Norman Rockwell, Joseph Christian Leyendecker, Dean Cornwell, Ludwig Bemelmans and John Falter.

COLLECTIONS
 
Property from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph H. Davenport, Jr.

This collection of 14 lots includes fresh to the market examples of 19^th century, American Impressionist and Modernist works, including important examples by William Merritt Chase, Martin Johnson Heade, George Wesley Bellows, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mary Cassatt, and Edward Hopper, among others.

Property from the Collection of Dr. Herbert Kayden and Dr. Gabrielle Reem

In addition to the 17 lots offered in American Art, the collection also includes works in the Post-War & Contemporary Art Day sale on November 11 and the Impressionist & Modern Art sales on November 12-13. American artists represented in this sale include Stuart Davis, Charles Sheeler, Arthur Dove, Max Weber, John Marin and O. Louis Guglielmi, among others.

Stuart Davis (1892-1964) Ways & Means Oil on canvas 24 x 32 in. (61 x 81.3 cm.) Painted in 1960 Estimate: $2,000,000-3,000,000 

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Carrefour, signed ‘Stuart Davis’ (lower right), oil on canvas, 15 x 21 3/4 in. (38.1 x 55.2 cm.), Painted in 1928. Estimate: $700,000–1,000,000,. © Estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Fernand Léger (1881-1955) Le vase noir Oil on canvas 28.1/2 x 36 in. (72.4 x 91.4 cm.) Painted in 1938
Estimate: $1,000,000-1,500,000“

Inadvertent Collection II: Property from the Doris Bry Trust

An icon of the American Art community, Doris Bry was the leading authority on the works of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz and she wrote monographs on the two artists. Bry began working with O’Keeffe when she was 26 years old and she became integral to the sale of O’Keeffe’s artworks and the creation and organization of her record binders. Works on paper by O’Keeffe comprise a large portion of this collection of 27 works, many of which were gifted to Bry and appear on the market for the first time. In addition to O’Keeffe, artists in the collection include Alfred Stieglitz, Arthur Dove, and Joseph Stella. The sale of this group, with estimates for works on paper by O’Keeffe beginning at $8,000, presents an exceptional opportunity for admirers of the artist to begin a collection.

WESTERN ART 

Thomas Moran (1837-1926)
Jupiter Terrace, Yellowstone oil on canvas
20 x 30 in. (50.8 x 76.2 cm.)
Painted in 1893
Estimate: $4,500,000 – 5,500,000

Thomas Moran was awestruck by the magnificent and rugged topography of the West and through his splendid paintings of Yellowstone, such as Jupiter Terrace, Yellowstone, was able to captivate the American public by transcending the limitations of written language to convey in his art the majesty and grandeur of the place.  Moran’s field studies proved to be invaluable not only to the painter, but also to the nation, as they were instrumental, along with the photographs of his fellow traveler William Henry Jackson, in Congress' decision to make Yellowstone America's first National Park on March 1, 1872.

Frederic Remington (1861-1909)
Ghost Stories
oil on canvas
20 x 26 in. (50.8 x 66 cm.)
Painted circa 1905-06
Estimate: $1,500,000 – 2,500,000

Frederic Remington is the story teller of the American West at the turn of the century. Ghost Stories characteristically conveys the drama of the old West, and is representative of his mature abilities as a painter.   

More images and information

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Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer

November 5, 2015, 5:52 am

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This fall the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA),will debut Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, the first exhibition to look at 17th-century Dutch paintings through the lens of the social classes. Including 75 paintings from collections both in the US and abroad, the exhibition—on view from October 11, 2015–January 18, 2016—will feature major works by artists including Rembrandt and Vermeer as well as Jan Steen, Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch, Gerard ter Borch and Gerrit Dou, among others. Loans from Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Budapest and London—many never before seen in the US—will complement those coming from other public and private collections in North America and Europe.

Galleries in the exhibition will be devoted to the three broad social classes—upper, middle and lower—and the last room will include paintings dedicated to where the classes met. Princes, regents and milkmaids figure in the thematic groupings within the classes, reflecting the social status of people—and the importance their class had —in the new Dutch Republic. The fine detail in the pictures will encourage close looking, inspiring the viewer to differentiate between a mistress and a maid or to distinguish a noble from a social-climbing merchant. The exhibition offers the rare opportunity to see works by Vermeer in Boston, in addition to featuring many subjects that are unusual in 17th-century Dutch painted depictions.  
 
To further illustrate the distinctions among the classes, three tables in the final room of the exhibition will feature similar decorative art objects that would have been used by each of the classes—distinct in material and decoration—including linens, salt cellars, beakers and mustard pots. On view in the MFA’s Ann and Graham Gund Gallery, this groundbreaking exhibition is accompanied by a publication with essays by exhibition curator Ronni Baer, the MFA’s William and Ann Elfers Senior Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe, as well as other Dutch scholars.

“These carefully selected paintings allow us to glimpse the ways rank and status are expressed pictorially. For example, is the sitter’s dress made of silk or coarse wool? Is the subject serving or being served? Does the figure stand upright or is he stooped?  Even the person’s behavior—snoring in a pub or riding a horse—indicates his social class. Details like these encourage us to form a sharper and more nuanced picture of 17th-century Dutch life and society,” said Baer.

The Upper Classes

In the 17th century, the Princes of Orange were the “stadholders”—the de facto rulers of the Netherlands. They were responsible for selecting municipal officials and commanding the army and navy of the Dutch Republic. Paintings of successive stadholders on view will include

Michiel van Mierevelt’s Maurits, Prince of Orange (1607, Museum Het Prinsenhof, Delft);

Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of Maurits’ half-brother Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange (about 1631–32, The Baltimore Museum of Art);

and a small history painting of Frederik Hendrik’s grandson, The Arrival of King-Stadholder William III in the Oranjepolder on 31 January 1691 (1692, Mauritshuis, The Hague) by Ludolf Bakhuizen.

This section of the exhibition will also feature an album of 102 watercolors by Adriaen van de Venne, open to a page featuring a miniature of  The Winter King and Queen (1625-26, The British Museum, London) on horseback, (preceding a mounted Frederik Hendrik and his wife, Amalia van Solms. The album describes the political and personal ties of Bohemia’s Winter King (who lived in exile in The Hague) to his uncle, Frederik Hendrik.

“Nobles and Aspiring Nobles” explores images of the landed nobility as well as families who aspired to the noble lifestyle. Many nobles in the Dutch Republic—who enjoyed privileges that distinguished them from other classes—lived on income from land, tithes, rents and other inherited rights. Often they commissioned portraits merely to document their lineage, marking their family genealogy rather than asserting their taste and social standing.

One exception is

Jan Steen’s Portrait of Jacoba Maria van Wassenaer, known as “The Poultry Yard” (1660, Mauritshuis, The Hague),

which imaginatively depicts the young noble, Jacoba Maria van Wassenaer, in front of Lokhorst Castle. The property and coat of arms in the painting signal her kinship in the lineage that defined the noble’s place in the social hierarchy. The newly wealthy without a noble heritage could buy estates and titles. Their aspirations were expressed in paintings whose forms were typically reserved for royalty and high nobility, such as equestrian and hunting portraits.

Paintings of “Regents and Wealthy Merchants” represent the country’s urban elite, who benefitted from the economic growth and prosperity that emerged as Holland became a global power in the 17th century. Regents—drawn from the Republic’s prosperous merchants—were men who held civic administrative or political appointments.

Rembrandt’s portrait of Andries de Graeff (1639, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel,) depicts a confident member of the Amsterdam ruling class who amassed one of the largest fortunes in the city.

Frans Hals’ Regents of the St. Elisabeth Hospital in Haarlem (1641, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem) reflects the social prestige attained by wealthy administrators of charitable organizations.

Vermeer’s A Lady Writing (about 1665, National Gallery of Art, Washington) portrays a privileged woman engaged in the art of letter writing—associated in 17th-century Holland with a certain degree of education and wealth. The painting offers a look at the luxurious, protected life of the women of the Dutch urban elite.

Belonging to the same world, Vermeer’s The Astronomer (1668, Musée du Louvre, Paris) represents a wealthy “gentleman amateur,” engaged in scientific inquiry that had relevance to the maritime navigation crucial to the mercantile interests of the young country.

The Middle Classes

The broad swath of the middle classes can be divided into professionals and educated businessmen—like goldsmiths, ministers and notaries—and the lower-ranking shopkeepers, craftsmen and tradesmen who ran their own small operations.  Portraits like

Rembrandt’s  Jan Rijcksen and His Wife, Griet Jans, known as “The Shipbuilder and His Wife” (1633, British Royal Collection)

were commissioned by successful and wealthy professionals, while genre scenes like

Quiringh van Brekelenkam’s Interior of a Tailor’s Workshop (about 1655-60, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)

were purchased on the open market, likely by those who came into regular contact with such tradesmen.

In the 17th century, women in the Dutch Republic had a relatively high degree of independence, both inside and outside the home. To be good wives, young women were trained in domestic work, as seen in

Pieter de Hooch’s Interior with Women beside a Linen Cupboard (1663, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

In the painting, a mother instructs her daughter in the proper care of one of the household’s most valuable assets: the linens.

 In the same artist’s Courtyard of a House in Delft (1658, The National Gallery, London),

a servant and child hold hands as they go about their chores, which evidently included washing and sweeping, as implied by the pail and broom momentarily resting in the foreground.

The Lower Classes

Despite the fact that it was among the most common sights in contemporary society, depictions of poverty and hard physical labor are rare in 17th-century Dutch painting. An exception is

The Knife Grinder’s Family (about 1653, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen,  Berlin) by Gerard ter Borch,

who painted an urban laborer sharpening a scythe on a turning grindstone, powered by a barely visible horse or mule in the depths of the shed. The specificity of the grinder, his process and equipment, and the many details of the setting suggest that the artist might have observed an actual workplace like this in his native Zwolle.

The only known Dutch group portrait to focus on the poor is

Jan van Bijlert’s Portraits of the Men from the St. Job Inn in Utrecht Collecting Alms (about 1630–35, Centraal  Museum, Utrecht).

Residents of what was essentially an old men’s home are depicted with the institution’s steward, courier and warden in a painting that likely hung in the governors’ meeting room, where it would have served as a reminder of the importance of charity. The majority of 17th-century Dutch works featuring the poor tends to be satiric or ironic, or such images may have simply been made for their picturesque qualities, such as

Pieter Duyfhuysen’s Seated Boy Eating Porridge (mid-1650s, Maida and George Abrams Collection, Boston, MA).

Where the Classes Meet

The final room of the exhibition explores the places and situations that brought the various classes together. The distinction between public and private, between urban space and the domesticity of the home, was marked by the threshold of the house.

Jacob Ochtervelt’s Street Musicians at the Door (1665, Saint Louis Art Museum)

—the cover of the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue—depicts a marble-floored voorhuis of an elegant townhouse where a maid, holding the hand of an excited young child, opens the door to a fiddler and hurdy-gurdy player (instruments associated with the lower classes). The elegantly dressed woman of the house surveys the scene from the side. Through the open door can be seen the tower, facades and streets of the city to which the itinerant musicians belong. Through a play of hands, the artist suggests that the maidservant guides the child to take the coin proffered by her mother. It follows that the well-bred little girl will fulfill her duty to give the contribution to the visitors. The patrician obligation of providing charity to the less privileged—and the education of the young to meet these responsibilities—is a recurring theme when the classes meet in Dutch painting.

Hendrick Avercamp’s Winter Scene on a Frozen Canal (about 1620, Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

highlights the pleasure the Dutch took from meeting one another on the ice and the leisure activities they pursued in winter. Locals mix with gypsies; the wealthy are transported by fancy sled while the less well-off push makeshift conveyances.

In addition to paintings, this room will feature a selection of decorative arts laid on three tables—one for the upper, one for the middle, and one for the lower class. Three examples of each type of object—from pitchers to drinking vessels to eating utensils—will all be on view. Glasses (flutes) for example, will include a clear engraved glass on the upper class table, a tall glass with prunts (raised decorations) on the middle class table, and a green glass marked with rings—indicating a drinking game—on the lower class table.  The upper-class candlesticks are of silver and, while the middle and lower class candlesticks have the same form, one is of brass and the other of earthenware.  Each table will also feature linen appropriate to that class, as even the lower classes covered their dining tables with linen for meals

More Works by Rembrandt and Other Dutch Masters

One of the MFA’s grandest spaces is the gallery dedicated to Art of the Netherlands in the 17th Century, on the second floor of the Art of Europe galleries. Featuring approximately 30 paintings, this fall the space also includes four major works—by Rembrandt, Dou, Gerrit van Honthorst and Aelbert Cuyp—on loan from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection. In total, five works by Rembrandt will be on view in the gallery (in addition to four in Class Distinctions).

Honthorst’s A Merry Group behind a Balustrade with a Violin and a Lute Player (about 1623),

displaying his debt to Caravaggio, will be installed in the United States for the first time in late October, juxtaposed with the artist’s more courtly and monumental

Triumph of the Winter Queen: Allegory of the Just (1636).

The latter canvas, also on loan to the MFA, depicts Frederick V and his beloved wife, Elizabeth Stuart, the King and Queen of Bohemia—known as the “Winter King and Queen” for the brevity of their reign—surrounded by their 13 children. (The couple can also be seen in the exhibition’s album of watercolors by Adriaen van de Venne.)

Complementing the paintings are decorative art objects, including Dutch furniture, Delft pottery and silver. Smaller-scale Dutch and Flemish paintings are on view in the adjacent Leo and Phyllis Beranek Gallery, which features a “collector’s cabinet” display of seven works—six of which are loans from the Van Otterloo Collection—by artists such as Avercamp, Gerrit Berckheyde and Jacob van Ruisdael. These works hang across from three additional paintings on loan from the collectors—a family portrait by Jan Baptist Weenix, flanked by superb still lifes by Willem Heda and Willem Kalf. The renovation of the Art of the Netherlands gallery (2013) was made possible by Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo.

The MFA has a notable collection of 17th-century Dutch paintings. Boston collectors have long acquired works by many of the era’s most celebrated artists and have, over the generations, generously donated them to the Museum.

Rembrandt’s early Artist in his Studio (about 1628)

is a highlight of the collection, representing an image of the artist confronted with the enormity of putting ideas into paint on panel. Works on view in the gallery illustrate the full range of art production in the Netherlands.

WILLEM DE KOONING LEADS PHILLIPS 20TH CENTURY & CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING SALE IN NEW YORK - 8 November 2015

November 5, 2015, 7:05 am

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Phillips sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art in New York will be led by  

Willem de Kooning’s Untitled XXVIII, 1977.

Rendered in creamy yellows, crisp whites and sky blues, the work perfectly captures the artist’s absorption in the natural world of Springs, East Hampton, New York. The painting is estimated to sell for $10 million to $15 million.

Willem de Kooning spent his entire artistic career exploring the lustrous tactility of oil paint—pushing, pulling and scraping paint in search of the perfect moment, one of balanced tension and retention. The mid-1970s saw de Kooning produce a body of work that captured his absorption in the natural world of Springs, East Hampton, New York. Untitled XXVIII, 1977 seizes a glimpse of the landscape in an inspired attempt to hold onto the temporal chaos of the sand, wind, and sky. It fuses the anthropomorphic and the natural, the abstracted landscape containing incipient human shapes. The underpinning of every canvas, every visceral brush stroke, whether figural or natural, reveals de Kooning’s impulsive painterly actions. De Kooning’s life-long affair with his landscape is undeniable throughout the 1950’s and 60’s, culminating with this miraculous series of landscapes of 1977 in which the present lot is included.

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO
Gladiateurs au Repos, 1928-29
Estimate $4,000,000 - 6,000,000

Gladiateurs au Repos is a large-scale, historical painting by Giorgio de Chirico, dating from 1928-29, celebrating the gladiators who had become one of his key pictorial themes. This painting, with its armed figures looming larger than life and full of color, was one of three that dominated the celebrated Hall des gladiateurs in the home of de Chirico's dealer, Léonce Rosenberg, the founder of the famous avant-garde Galerie de l'Effort Moderne. The room featured a total of eleven canvases by the artist; of this group, several are now in museum collections.

Gladiateurs au Repos has a distinguished history, featuring in a wide range of exhibitions and publications. The picture has seldom changed hands: it was acquired by the writer and diplomat Filippo Anfuso in the 1930s, and remained in the collection of his heirs until just over a decade ago. By the time de Chirico painted Gladiateurs au Repos, he was living in Paris, having returned there after a sojourn in Italy. De Chirico had returned to Paris in part because of the enthusiasm the Surrealists had shown his pictures. De Chirico's paintings tapped into a mysterious universe, in which the past appeared vivid and real, continuing to unfold parallel to our own existence.

LE CORBUSIER
Femme rouge et pelote verte, 1932
Estimate $4,000,000 - 6,000,000

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret 1887-1965) is known, without a doubt, as one of the most influential and famous architects of the 20th century. What the general public knows very little about, however, is that in reality he was a painter and plastic artist in search of aesthetic perfection all his life. Between 1918 and 1927 Le Corbusier and the painter Amédée Ozenfant created Purism, a response to Cubism which forged a vital link between avant-garde practices in early 20th-century painting and architecture through its return to clear, ordered forms expressive of the modern machine age.

The Purist works set the stage for the exploration of the canvas as a space rather than a surface, and after this period Le Corbusier moved away from simplification and transparency towards more complex pictorial arrangements. This movement can be seen in his work beginning in 1927 with the loosening of the Purist syntax and the introduction of what he referred to as objets à réaction poétique. From this point onward he turned to both natural and mythic subjects in addition to machine-inspired iconography, and began incorporating the female figure into his paintings. Femme rouge et pelote verte reveals his interest not only in objets à réaction poétique, but also his fascination with the female form.

ALEXANDER CALDER
Untitled, 1941
Estimate $3,500,000 - 4,500,000

Alexander Calder, as both a painter and a sculptor, was rooted in the Abstraction-Création movement alongside Jean Arp and Piet Mondrian, and was truly a pioneer of kinetic art. As the artist recounts in 1920s Paris, responding to Mondrian’s geometric forms on canvas, “I suggested…that perhaps it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate and he, with a very serious countenance, said: ‘No, it is not necessary, my painting is already very fast…’ This one visit gave me a shock that started things.” The shock resulted in the creation of the “Mobile,” a term coined by the father of Dada, Marcel Duchamp, turning Calder’s early sculptures into even more dynamic forms, central to the artist’s influence, one that extends well beyond early-20th century Paris.

The present lot Untitled 1941 embraces the essential characteristics of Calder’s mobiles with biomorphic forms and kinetic presence in a sculpture that is both colorful and dynamic. This standing mobile is firmly rooted to the ground on a three-legged base, a common feature of Calder’s works from the early 1940s, which then extends upwards into two delicate sides of graceful, elemental movement.

CHRISTOPHER WOOL
Untitled (P271), 1997
Estimate $3,000,000 - 4,000,000

Christopher Wool's Untitled (P271) presents visually arresting panoply of signifiers and found decorative motifs, realized on a large-scale aluminum panel in stark black and white. The work radiates with its layers of half-meditated, half-improvised patterning, including flowers, fleurs-de-lis, hatchings, and undulating lines. The painting's surface reveals the energetic process of its facture, riddled with white pentimenti and the inky remnants of Wool's screening process. The aluminum pane is roughly bisected across its middle, traced with the outline of the many frames used to create its composition.

Wool approximately replicated the patterns in either segment, creating a dizzying double image. Through this process, he invokes the multiple legacies of American Post-War painterly abstraction, Pop Art, and Minimalism, consciously addressing the challenges that face contemporary image making. Wool invokes - through overprinting, clogging and silkscreen slippage - a unique grittiness and intensity less prevalent in Warhol's paintings. In Untitled (P271), Wool also embraces pentimenti, engaging with erasure by using white semi-opaque paint. The work becomes a complex field of decorative elements partially obscured, yet rendered more intriguing.

 

JOHN CHAMBERLAIN
Bullwinkle, 1961
Estimate $2,500,000 - 3,500,000

An icon of 20th century American sculpture, John Chamberlain has utterly radicalized the way in which form, modeling, and composition are arranged in the sculptural canon. His metal works, produced from castoff automobile components and other industrial rubble, are archetypal of the power of sculpture to preserve organic composition and the immense painterly shapes. Chamberlain’s admittance to the lionized exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961, aptly titled “The Art of Assemblage,” enabled his work to find context among heavy-hitters such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp.

The present lot was constructed the year of the show, and it is evident that 1961 was particularly significant to the formation of his oeuvre and the understanding of his materials. The genius of Bullwinkle lies not just in the sheer marvel of the metal, contorted and bound, almost weightlessly suspended, but in Chamberlain’s innate ability to transform an act of ruin into an act of creation. Bound to a wall, the present lot commands the room in which it is installed, exerting equal if not greater power as Chamberlain’s sculptures in the round. ]
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ROBERT GOBER
The Sad Sink, 1985
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000

Robert Gober’s early and seminal work from 1985, The Sad Sink, is a profound realization of the artist’s emotional, formal, and conceptual investigations within his nearly four decade long art practice. Through his depiction of seemingly mundane objects such as a sink, crib, chair, along with isolated body parts, Gober explores themes of family, religion, sexuality, alienation and memory, both collective and private. With painstaking and meticulous detail he renders these thought-provoking sculptures by hand to build a universe that investigates the psychological and symbolic power of the objects in our everyday lives.

Having grown up in a Catholic household, Gober was deeply involved in the proceedings of the Church, an experience which has heavily influenced the symbology throughout his oeuvre. Just as Gober may have felt cornered by the competing psychological draws of his familial history and religion against his own sexuality, the sink sits silently and remotely unto itself. With no faucets, no water, it is useless as a sink, and yet, in its silence, the power of the object and the artist’s intent reverberates stridently from the corner outward. The viewer cannot help but think of the young child, caught guilty and sent to contemplate and reflect on the transgression in the corner, back to the room, face to the wall.



JOHN CURRIN
Birthday, 1999
Estimate $1,500,000 - 2,500,000

Ever exploring the connotations within creating, John Currin's Birthday is replete with emblems notably absent from historically-rooted, narrative paintings. Portraiture serves as Currin’s primary vehicle to establish an array of symbols, taking shape in subtle transformations and dialogues between the minute and the monumental. Almost nowhere more so is this evident in his oeuvre than in the present lot, with the jarring curve of our subject’s smile, the dimples hugging its edge, the cheeky curl of her lip just beneath her nose.

Contemporary culture has directed our tendencies to search for meaning in narrative or in subject, and yet Currin asks us to revisit our strategy. In Birthday, we immediately appraise a woman in the throes of a celebratory toast, candle light dancing against the black of her festive attire. Her gaze is cast elsewhere, a frozen moment capture with an unbridled sense of joy that is almost off-putting in its candor. The restaurant in which she dines is draped in richly textured curtains, with a floral still-life arrangement atop a nearby table, as if plucked straight from Rococo tableaux. This pastiche of excess holds up a mirror to the decadence of the generation in which Currin grew as a painter—an America of gluttony, exorbitance, and overindulgence.

MORRIS LOUIS
Para IV, 1959
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000

In the late 1950s, Morris Louis forged a bold new direction for abstract painting by focusing on the unadulterated force of pure color on a truly epic scale. Acclaimed as a leader of the Color Field movement, Louis drenched his large-scale canvases in diaphanous veils of color that envelop the viewer. Turning away from the gesture-laden and heavily encrusted surfaces that characterized so much of Abstract Expressionist painting, Louis created compositions that allowed the color to flow and breathe across open expanses of white canvas. Para IV 1959 is a luminous example of this radical new direction, and is a masterpiece of Louis' mature style.

Louis' investigation of pure color and light places him in an art historical lineage that can be traced back to the experiments of the French Impressionists, and even further back to Turner. In the present work, he focuses on the contrasting force of plumes of brilliant colors, which seem to explode from within the core of the canvas. Using thin washes of Magna, a type of new acrylic resin paint, Louis imparted an extraordinary luminosity to his canvases. His paint, which soaked into the weave of the fabric, seems to become one with the surface and retains both the paint's original coloration and its fluid character. Rejecting the gestural painting style of the Abstract Expressionists, Louis is considered a profoundly intellectual painter, focused exclusively on color and texture.

KAZUO SHIRAGA
Untitled BB64, 1962
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000

Kazuo Shiraga is one of the leading artists in the Gutai Art Association, founded by the painter Jiro Yoshihara in 1954 in the area around Osaka and Hyogo prefectures in western Japan. Gutai enlisted approximately sixty painter-members during its 18 years of existence and led the postwar Japanese art scene to avant-garde innovations truly contemporaneous to the spirit of experimentation shared by artists around the world. Shiraga became the poster-child of this group with his sensational action painting using his bare feet, a method he had already begun to experiment with prior to joining the group in 1955.

Untitled BB64, which is being sold as part of Phillips’ Provenance: Japan selection, is an exemplary work from Shiraga's mature period, a time when he achieved capturing the balance between the beautiful and the grotesque. His long-time interest in classic hero stories such as the action-filled Suikoden (Water Margin), a fourteenth-century Chinese novel about 108 outlaws, formed his belief that painting must carry force and individualism as strong as those represented by the characters.

The thick impasto of his painting was then created by the artist boldly stepping onto blobs of oil paint on an un-stretched canvas laid flat on the floor; after depositing a large amount of paint directly from paint tubes onto the canvas. Shiraga, then, holding onto a rope hung from the ceiling, swung around in the paint as it oozed out from under his feet. As he slipped and turned, his feet created a swoosh of calligraphic lines, turning the colors’ entanglement and merging with little care for human intention. In Shiraga’s work, the paint as material became both the subject of the work and an agent of the artist's body reviving his presence in mind each time it is seen by the viewer.


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ANDREW WYETH: A Survey

November 5, 2015, 12:38 pm

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October 30th – November 20th, 2015 Presented by Gerald Peters Gallery Hosted by Goodwin Fine Art
1255 Delaware Street
Denver, CO 80204 

Gerald Peters Gallery is  presenting a survey of work by Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2007). Featuring a selection of temperas, watercolors, and drawings, this comprehensive exhibition surveys four decades of work by one of America’s best- known twentieth century artists. 


Among those works on view will be a number of Wyeth’s compelling Helga series, including the tempera

 Heat Lightning(1977)

 and the drybrushWinfields (1977) 

that immediately preceded it. The closely guarded secret that both paintings are of Helga with her identity concealed heightens their intrigue and historical significance. Wyeth worked in a process of private concentration to produce an extensive period of studies, often for a single image. Several Helga studies are included in the exhibition as well, among them 

the alluring pencil study for  On Her Knees (1975), in which the pose for Heat Lightning and Winfields originated. 


Wyeth’s artistic process demanded an intimate knowledge of his subject, as his fifteen year commitment to Helga as a model is a testament. His close relationship to his subject matter is not only evident in his figurative work, but also in his intensely personal landscapes as well. Born in Chadds Ford, PA, Wyeth began painting at a young age under the tutelage of his father, famed illustrator and artist NC Wyeth. Over the course of an artistic career that spanned seven decades, with studios in both Chadds Ford and Cushing, Maine, Wyeth remained committed to the familiar landscapes of his youth. 

Included in the exhibition are 

 The Studio (1966),  

Smoke at Kuerner’s (1976), 

and After Christmas (1971), 

all three paintings demonstrate a deep connection to the surrounding areas of his boyhood. Ordinary images of a spare shuttered window, a simple wisp of smoke, and a stark snow filled field, are transformed into something deeply meditative and introspective in the hands of this American master. 

Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic

November 6, 2015, 1:18 pm

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Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is hosting a new exhibition, Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic, on view November 7, 2015 – January 18, 2016. 

Crystal Bridges is the only U.S. venue to host Picturing the Americas, the first exhibition to explore the evolution of landscape painting from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century in an inclusive, hemispheric context.  Picturing the Americas was organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. The exhibition arrives at Crystal Bridges from the Art Gallery of Ontario and will then travel to the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.

The exhibition was co-curated by Peter John Brownlee, Curator of the Terra Foundation for American Art; Valéria Piccoli, Chief Curator of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; and Georgiana Uhlyarik, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Associate Curator of Canadian Art.

Picturing the Americas invites viewers to traverse a vast and magnificent land mass that extends from Canada’s Arctic to the icy tip of Argentina and Chile to see the landscape anew through more than 100 oil paintings, watercolors, and prints. The exhibition includes works by well-known American landscape painters, Frederic E. Church, Martin Johnson Heade, and Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as masters from both North and South America, such as Jose Maria Velasco (Mexico), Juan Manuel Blanes (Uruguay), Lawren Harris (Canada), and Tarsila do Amaral (Brazil).  Landscape imagery from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century shows connections and continuities through shared history and land, while also celebrating distinctions.

“This exhibition brings together iconic works from different parts of the hemisphere, causing us to pause and consider what it means to be “American” in the most-expansive sense of the word,” says Crystal Bridges Curator, Mindy Besaw.

Highlights of the exhibition include, from South America, a depiction of Rio de Janiero, 

Félix-Émile Taunay’s Baia de Guanabara Vista da Ilha das Cobras, c. 1830; 

from the U.S., Albert Bierstadt’s Yosemite Valley, 1868; 

and Emily Carr’s Inside a Forest II, 1929-1930,  from Canada.

“Throughout the journey, visitors will see how landscape painting across the Americas corresponds with emerging settler nations asserting their independence. As the colonies matured into nations, artists moved toward painting more personal representations of the landscape.  The exhibition also helps us reflect on ways nature has shaped our identities and confronts a history of contentious colonization,” says Besaw.

 More image from the exhibition:

• Alfred Thompson Bricher,The Sidewheeler “The City of St. Paul” on the Mississippi River, Dubuque, Iowa, 1872;
  
  
• Thomas Cole,Landscape with Figures: A Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans”, 1826;
  
  
  
  
• Sanford Robinson Gifford,Hunter Mountain, Twilight, 1866;
  
  
  
  
• Martin Johnson Heade,Newburyport Marshes: Approaching Storm, c. 1871;
  
  
  
  
• George Josimovich,Illinois Central, 1927 (São Paulo, Brazil, only);
  
  
  
• Worthington Whittredge,Indian Encampment, between 1870 and 1876.

Two Hummingbirds with an Orchid, 1875, by Martin Johnson Heade. Oil on canvas.

 
Cartão Postal (Postcard), 1929, by Tarsila do Amaral (Brazil). Oil on canvas.

Catalogue:

 

 280 p., 9 x 11
260 color illus.
ISBN: 9780300211504

Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life

November 7, 2015, 8:12 am

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October 27, 2015–January 10, 2016

This fall, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a major exhibition surveying nearly two centuries of the most intimate, intricate, and varied genre of painting practiced in the United States. Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life will explore the nature and development of still-life painting in this country from the days of the early American republic to the emergence of Pop Art in the early 1960s, providing a fresh perspective on the evolution of this genre over time and the various ways in which it has reflected our history and culture. Nearly one hundred artists will be represented, ranging from Philadelphia’s Peale family of painters and masters of trompe l’oeil such as William Michael Harnett to modern masters like Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Roy Lichtenstein.

Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer, said, “Still life is an important subject that continues to fascinate us today. It can be a meditative study of a single, small object and yet also serve as a metaphor for the world. The story of American still life begins in Philadelphia, and we are delighted to have an opportunity to share this exhibition with our audiences. This is the first major show of its kind in more than thirty years and brings together works of great beauty and historical significance from collections around the country.”

The exhibition surveys the history of American still life. The earliest section addresses the interest of late 18th and early 19th-century painters, a period interested in precise visual description. In their efforts to understand and categorize nature, art and science were linked in the minds of such leading figures of this period as

John James Audubon, whose Carolina Parrot (about 1828)

depicts a species now extinct and provides a signal example of the combined artistic and scientific ambition that motivated his celebrated Birds of America. The exhibition also explores the pleasures of the senses and sensuality that became the primary focus of American still-life painters at the beginning of the Victorian era. The works of this period exemplify a spirit of newfound prosperity and abundance, as can been seen in

Severin Roesen’s vivid floral still lifes and in tables overflowing with nature’s bounty, such as

Andrew J. H. Way’s Oysters in Half Shell(1863).

Discerning appetites and distinctions of the affluent after the Civil War, as recorded in images such as

The Blue Cup (1909) by Joseph DeCamp

will be highlighted along with works that address the technological and psychological preoccupations of early 20th-century American artists.

Visitors will encounter audio and visual representations of the iconic 20th Century Limited locomotive, the subject of



Charles Sheeler’s classic Rolling Power (1939).

Signaling the reach of a burgeoning media culture, the installation will dramatize how masterfully the artist evoked power and modernity, extending the idea of what still life could be. The exhibition concludes with a selection of Pop Art icons, including

Roy Lichtenstein's Still Life with Goldfish (1974).

The exhibition will evoke the different ways of looking that American still-life painters have explored of the course of more than two centuries, immersing visitors in fully developed environments. The still lifes of the mid-19th century, for example, were typically created for parlors and dining rooms. A re-created Victorian parlor will invite visitors to appreciate these semipublic social settings, where educated and erudite conversations were sparked by artworks such as

Edward A. Goods’s Fishbowl Fantasy (1867).

 The artworks themselves will be arranged in small groups to encourage comparison and discussion among visitors, as they did for their early audiences. The exhibition will also include evocations of Theodore Stewart’s famous New York City saloon, which drew crowds from nearby City Hall and around the world to admire

William Michael Harnett’s large-scale After the Hunt (1885),

which was displayed there in its own theatrical setting for many years. Themes such as music, literature, popular media, and science—including tangible ephemera such as bird specimens, magazines, and pocket watches—will bring forward the immediate inspirations and contemporary contexts of the art.

The impact of the Philadelphia region on the emergence and development of American still life is a theme that spans the entire exhibition. Mark D. Mitchell, the Associate Curator of American Art and Manager of the Center for American Art, said: “We examine not only still life’s development in America—motivated as much by wider cultural dynamics as by artistic taste—but also the distinctively regional association of American still life as a Philadelphia story.”

More images from exhibition:

Three Jugs, 1928, by Max Weber (The Hevrdejs Collection)

Reminiscences of 1865, 1904, by John Frederick Peto (Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The Julia B. Bigelow Fund by John Bigelow

Raphaelle Peale’s Blackberries (c. 1813). (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd)

Two Calla Lilies on Pink by Georgia O'keeffe

Catalogue

A fully illustrated catalogue, with essays by Bill Brown (University of Chicago), Carol Troyen (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Katie Pfohl (Harvard University), and Mark D. Mitchell (Philadelphia Museum of Art) will accompany the exhibition and be distributed by Yale University Press.