The Douanier Rousseau Archaic Candour

April 5, 2016, 11:14 am

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Musée d’Orsay, Paris  

Through 17 July 2016  

By comparing this artist’s painting with several of his sources of  inspiration: academic painting, new painting and the avant - garde artists who enthroned him as the father of  modernity,  The Douanier Rousseau. Archaic Candour exhibition will shed a critical light on his art by reflecting  on the notion of archaism. Works by Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Carlo Carrà, Diego Rivera, Max Ernst, as well as other lesser - known or anonymous artists will evoke the wealth of interconnections woven around the Douanier Rousseau, the catalyst who stimulated an original way of exploring modernity.

The  emphasis is on the Douanier Rousseau’s fundamental role in  asserting the Parisian and the international  avant - garde: Picasso, Delaunay, and the artists of the German avant - garde, at the forefront of which was Kandinsky. These artists not only admired  Rousseau’s work and took him as a source of inspiration for their own  work, but also  collected his  paintings.  

Moi - même, portrait - paysage [Myself, Landscape Portrait] (1889 - 1890, Prague, Narodni Galerie)

and the  Portrait  de Monsieur X (dit Pierre Loti) [Portrait of Monsieur X] [Pierre Loti] (1906, Kunsthaus Zürich)

announce, at the  start of the exhibition, the uniqueness of the work of the artist who asserts that he invented the “landscape - portrait” genre: in fact, this style goes back to the portraits of the old masters, demonstrated in

le Portrait  d’homme au bonnet rouge [Portrait of an Unknown Man with a Red Beret] by Vittore Carpaccio (Venice, Museo Correr);

this work would, in turn, influence several generations of artists such as Fernand Léger who took his  inspiration for  

Le Mécanicien [The Mechanic]  (Montréal, Musée des Beaux - Arts) from Portrait de Pierre Loti.

Designed around this dialogue between echoes of the past and anticipation of the future, the exhibition is set out along the recurrent themes in the painter’s work: still landscapes, populated with anonymous figurines and  “homage” to the new modernity of airplanes and airships, still lifes and portraits of solitary, and often  disturbing, children

( Pour Fêter bébé ! [To Celebrate the Baby!],1903, Wintherthur, Kunstmuseum),

which had made a deep impression on Picasso and Carrà in particular.  This “family” dimension in his art developed in parallel with his dreamlike images of a  ild and savage world :  masterpieces such as  

An extremely unusual painter, Henri Rousseau is a unique figure in the history of European art. His work is, however, in keeping with his time, the dawn of the 20th century.  Far from being yet another celebration of the Douanier Rousseau’s naïve style, the exhibition aims to show how much his work belongs within a western art  movement which, in both America and Europe, from the 16th century until the first decades of the 20th, adopted a stylistic model that was archaic, by setting  – consciously or otherwise  – an “anticlassical” painting against the  “official” painting of the various epochs. 

Henri Rousseau,  known as The Douanier Rousseau (1844 - 1910) Le Rêve [The Dream] , 1910,  oil on canvas, 204.5 x 298. 5 cm New York, The Museum of Modern Art,  gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 252.1954 © 2016. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence

 

Le Rêve [The Dream] (1910, New York, MoMA),

a fantasy vision heralding the atmospheres of Surrealism, will be displayed alongside   

Jungles (Le lion, ayant faim , se jette sur l’antilope)  [Jungles (The Hungry Lion throws itself on  the  Antelope],  Bâle, Fondation Beyeler).

“Enormous compositions in  which the grotesque goes together with the tender, the absurd with the magnificent”, as Ardengo Soffici wrote  in 1910, they remain a testimony to this visionary artist with “the innocent eye of  a child”.    

From an excellent Wall Street Journal review (images added):

...Rousseau’s ambitions were never circumscribed by his archaizing style, a poetic and simplified realist mode that eschewed such academic conventions as three-dimensional illusionism and one-point perspective. In

“The Representatives of Foreign Powers Coming to Salute the Republic as a Sign of Peace” (1907), which echoes in its staid format and subject the official art of his master Gérome, Rousseau aspired to create a history painting, still the most prestigious genre at the Salon. He hoped it would be acquired by the state. Instead, his canvas, ridiculed at the Salon but purchased by the dealer Ambroise Vollard, was eventually owned by Pablo Picasso. Picasso had already acquired

Rousseau’s 1895 “Portrait of a Woman,” a strangely disquieting, full-length frontal portrait of a flattened, collage-like figure. Picasso described it as “one of the most truthful French psychological portraits...”

The exhibition builds to a dramatic climax in later galleries, one of them commanded by

Rousseau’s “War” of 1894. In this terrifying allegory, perhaps spurred by memories of the Franco-Prussian conflict, the wild-haired war goddess Bellona, brandishing a sword and flaming torch, soars on a diabolical steed above a blasted landscape covered with mutilated corpses and ravenous crows under a lurid, blood-red sky. The painting’s visionary leap from the darkest corners of the artist’s imagination and its staggering originality, which the Russian modernist Wassily Kandinsky, the celebrated French writer André Malraux and countless others would herald, were unquestionable...

The siren call of

“The Snake Charmer” (1907)—an exotic fantasy commissioned by the painter Robert Delaunay’s mother and lauded by the Surrealist poet André Breton—clearly entranced, for example, the Romanian artist Victor Brauner. His eerie, phantasmic homage of 1946, “The Encounter of 2 bis rue Perrel,” suggests just how rich and unremitting the archaic aura was that now emanated from Rousseau’s art...

Publication

Exhibition catalogue, joint publication Musée d’Orsay / Hazan, 27.5 x 31 cm, 280 pages, 180 ill.,   

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Tate Britain announces major David Hockney retrospective in 2017

April 5, 2016, 12:23 pm

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Tate Britain
9 February – 29 May 2017

 

Tate Britain has announced the world’s most extensive retrospective of the work of David Hockney, opening February 2017. Widely regarded as one of the most successful and recognisable artists of our time, this exhibition will celebrate Hockney’s achievement in painting, drawing, print, photography and video. Following its presentation in London the exhibition, organised in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and The Metropolitan Museum, will tour internationally to Paris and New York.

David Hockney (b.1937) is unique in British art for the extent of his popular appeal. As he approaches his 80th birthday, this exhibition will offer an unprecedented overview of the artist’s work to date. Presented as a chronological overview, it will tracehis development from the moment of his prodigious appearance on the public stage as a student in 1961, through to his iconic works of the 1960s and 1970s, and on to his recent success at the Royal Academy and beyond.

The exhibition will show Hockney as an intelligent and profound interrogator of the essence of art. Over six decades he has questioned the nature of pictures and picture-making and challenged their conventions. His art is one of the great landmarks of post-modernism, using parody and self-reflection, and playing with representation and artifice.

The exhibition will review early works such as the Love paintings made in 1960 and 1961, with which he subverted the language of abstract expressionism into homoerotic autobiography

David HockneyThe Third Love Painting1960

 

 

David HockneyIn The Mood for Love 1961

The witty and brilliant invention of Hockney’s first two decades of work will be explored, including his portraits of family, friends and himself, for example  

Self Portrait with Blue Guitar 1977, as well as his iconic images of Los Angeles swimming pools. It will include Hockney’s celebrated Yorkshire landscapes of the 2000s and work made since his return to California in 2013.

Hockney is an artist who has frequently changed his style and ways of working, embracing new technologies as he goes. For the first time this exhibition will demonstrate how the roots of each new direction lay in the work that came before. For example, his radical ‘joiner’ assemblages of photographs, such as the famous 

Pearlblossom Highway 1986, informed the paintings of his Hollywood home and the Californian landscapes that he made then and after; and his abstract works of the 1990s influenced his perception of the Yorkshire Wolds and the Grand Canyon.

David Hockney said: ‘It has been a pleasure to revisit works I made decades ago, including some of my earliest paintings. Many of them seem like old friends to me now. We’re looking back over a lifetime with this exhibition, and I hope, like me, people will enjoy seeing how the roots of my new and recent work can be seen in the developments over the years.’

Alex Farquharson, Director, Tate Britain said: ‘David Hockney is without doubt one of Britain’s greatest living artists. His practice is both consistent, in its pursuit of core concerns, while also wonderfully diverse. Hockney’s impact on post-war art, and culture more generally, is inestimable, and this is a fantastic opportunity to see the full trajectory of his career to date.’

David Hockney opens on 9 February 2017 until Monday 29 May 2017 at Tate Britain. The exhibition is curated by Chris Stephens, Head of Displays & Lead Curator, Modern British Art, and Andrew Wilson, Curator Modern and Contemporary Art and Archives, with Assistant Curator Helen Little. This exhibition is organised by Tate Britain in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Paris and The Metropolitan Museum, New York. It will be accompanied by a major new catalogue from Tate Publishing and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.

Whistler - Prints

April 6, 2016, 10:02 am

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The Fine Art Society
 5 - 28 April 2016 

The Fine Art Society presents an exhibition of prints by James McNeill Whistler (1834 – 1903). Featuring over 80 works from across his career, including rare and significant pieces, the show is the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of his printmaking for over forty years. 

As The Fine Art Society celebrates its 140th anniversary in 2016, (founded in 1876), the exhibition presents one of the first and most illustrious artists represented by the gallery, whose printmaking was crucial in forging his career and reputation.

Gordon Cooke, Director of the gallery and specialist in 19th and 20th century British prints commented:  

“Whistler’s long association with The Fine Art Society makes this exhibition an appropriate way to mark the 140th anniversary.Whistler is one of the small group of artists whose work as a printmaker alone would ensure their importance in the history of art. He stands with Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya and Picasso in this respect.”

The exhibition will reflect all phases of the American born artist’s etching and feature early works, including studies of his family and prints from his first published set, the French Set (1857-58). There followed his etchings of the River Thames made in 1859 – the source of his first fame and reputation in London, 

‘The Venetian Mast’, 1879/1880 

  Images courtesy The Fine Art Society 

and from the First Venice Set, a series of 12 etchings commissioned by the gallery and published in 1880. 

‘Nocturne’,1878,


  Images courtesy The Fine Art Society

'Bridge ,Amsterdam’, 1889  Images courtesy The Fine Art Society

The exhibition features a number of rare works, including 9 from the Amsterdam series (1889), considered by the artist to be his greatest achievement as an etcher. Although Whistler and the gallery discussed publishing this set, it was never issued. 

 Images courtesy The Fine Art Society 

There are also three quite different impressions of The Wine Glass (1858), his only still life.

The show includes images of significant women in Whistler’s life including his first lover in Paris, Fumette, Venus (1859) and two lithographs of his wife, Beatrice Godwin, widow of E.W Godwin, architect of Whistler’s White House on Tite Street, London, who also designed the entrance to The Fine Art Society (1881).

Beyond his reputation as a painter and a pioneering printmaker, Whistler turned his exacting eye to all aspects of the design and display of his work. In 1883 Whistler presented ‘Arrangement in White and Yellow’ at The Fine Art Society. In stark contrast to the densely packed salon-style hang of the Royal Academy, Whistler oversaw the transformation of the exhibition format. The show consisted of 51 etchings displayed in white frames hung in a single line.The walls of the gallery were redecorated and covered in white felt, the paintwork and furnishings in bright yellow. The reception to the show was a sensation, described by the press as ‘perhaps the most original of Mr Whistler’s jests’ and yet the radical display became the model for displaying pictures, which still prevails today. 

‘Maud Standing’ 1876-8, 

 Venus’, 1859. 

The Duet

The Sisters

  Images courtesy The Fine Art Society

Master Engravings & Prints Swann Galleries April 28, Dürer, Rembrandt, Chagall, Picasso, Benton, Shahn, Lewis

April 8, 2016, 8:12 am

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On Thursday, April 28, Swann Galleries will hold an auction of Old Master Through Modern Prints.

 The auction provides a vast selection of works by old masters and more. Headlining the sale is

Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving St. Jerome in his Study. Rife with visual metaphors and religious imagery, this print is estimated at $120,000 to $180,000. St. Jerome in his Study is considered one of three meisterstiche (master engravings) by the artist;

another of the meisterstiche, the 1513 engraving The Knight, Death and the Devil, also included in the sale, is estimated at $80,000 to $120,000.

            Additional old master highlights include several works by Rembrandt van Rijn,

like landscape with Three Gabled Cottages beside a Road, a 1650 etching and drypoint ($50,000 to $80,000);

and Cottages Beside a Canal: A View of Diemen, etching, circa 1645 ($40,000 to $60,000).

The sale also features several of Rembrandt’s self portraits, including Self Portrait Open Mouthed, as if Shouting: Bust, a 1630 etching ($30,000 to $50,000).

Italian printmaker Giovanni B. Piranesi’s The Round Tower, etching, engraving and burnishing, circa 1749, is also being offered ($30,000 to $50,000).

Among the modern highlights is Der Tod im Krankenzimmer, an 1896 lithograph by Norwegian painter and printmaker Edvard Munch, based on his painting of the same name. One of the artist’s iconic images concerning death, suffering and grief, the lithograph is estimate at $70,000 to $100,000.

Also included are multiple works by Marc Chagall, like

Vava au Turban Rouge, a 1963 color monotype ($50,000 to $80,000);  and Violiniste, one of only four hand-colored épreuves de passé in the second state, 1930 ($40,000 to $60,000).

Pablo Picasso’s Grand Air, a 1936 etching, will also be on offer ($30,000 to $50,000).

            Highlights by American printmakers include Thomas Hart Benton’s Going West, a 1934 lithograph featuring a train powering through the prairie. The artist was particularly fond of locomotives, noting, “My first pictures were of railroad trains…To go down to the depot and see them come in, belching black smoke, with their big headlights shining and their bells ringing and their pistons clanking, gave me a feeling of stupendous drama.” Going West is estimated at $40,000 to $60,000.

Lithuanian-born American artist Ben Shahn’s Seward Park, a 1936 color lithograph, is also included ($30,000 to $50,000),

as is Martin Lewis’s 1931 drypoint Rainy Day, Queens ($20,000 to $30,000).

The auction will be held Thursday, April 28, beginning at 10:30 with A Collector’s Vision. The auction preview will be open to the public Saturday, April 23 from noon to 5 p.m.; and Monday, April 25 through Wednesday, April 27 from 10 p.m. to 6 p.m.

An illustrated auction catalogue is available for $40 from Swann Galleries, Inc., 104 East 25th Street, New York, NY 10010, or online at www.swanngalleries.com.

Three Centuries of American Prints from the National Gallery of Art

April 9, 2016, 8:30 am

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Frances Flora Bond Palmer
A Midnight Race on the Mississippi, 1860
color lithograph with hand-coloring on wove paper
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Donald and Nancy de Laski Fund

A new international traveling exhibition will explore major events and movements in American art through some 150 outstanding prints from the Colonial era to the present. On view in Washington from April 3 through July 24, 2016, Three Centuries of American Prints from the National Gallery of Art is the first major museum survey of American prints in more than 30 years.

The exhibition will travel to the National Gallery in Prague from October 4, 2016 through January 5, 2017, followed by Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City from February 7 through April 30, 2017.

Timed to coincide with the National Gallery of Art's 75th anniversary, the exhibition is drawn from the Gallery's renowned holdings of works on paper, and features more than 100 artists such as Paul Revere, James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, George Bellows, John Marin, Jackson Pollock, Louise Nevelson, Romare Bearden, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Chuck Close, Jenny Holzer, and Kara Walker.


Exhibition Highlights

Organized chronologically and thematically through nine galleries, Three Centuries of American Prints reveals the breadth and excellence of the Gallery's collection while showcasing some of the standouts: exquisite, rare impressions of

James McNeill Whistler's Nocturne (1879/1880),

captivating prints by Mary Cassatt,

a singularly stunning impression of John Marin's Woolworth Building, No. 1 (1913),

and Robert Rauschenberg's pioneering Booster (1967).

The exhibition is bracketed by

John Simon's Four Indian Kings (1710)—stately portraits of four Native American leaders who traveled to London to meet Queen Anne—

and Kara Walker's no world (2010), which recalls the disastrous impact of European settlement in the New World. Both prints address the subject of transnational contact, a theme that runs through the history of American art.

Three Centuries of American Prints features works intended to provoke action, such as

Paul Revere's call for moral outrage in The Bloody Massacre (1770).


Others lean more strongly toward visual concerns, such as

Stuart Davis's striking black-and-white lithograph, Barber Shop Chord (1931),

Richard Diebenkorn
Green, 1986 spitbite aquatint, soapground aquatint, and drypoint
plate: 114.3 x 89.5 cm (45 x 35 1/4 in.)
sheet: 135.9 x 103.5 cm (53 1/2 x 40 3/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Eugene L. and Marie-Louise Garbaty Fund and Patrons' Permanent Fund
© The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

and Richard Diebenkorn's resplendent Green (1986).

This duality between prints designed to exhort or teach and ones more weighted to artistic matters is an undercurrent of both the exhibition and the history of American prints.

Catalogue

Three Centuries of American Art in Prints
Judith Brodie, Amy Johnston, and Michael J. Lewis

Three Centuries of American Art in Prints distinguishes itself as the first major survey of its kind presented by an American museum in more than 20 years. In lively albums and insightful texts it offers a comprehensive view of American art through masterful prints that range from the colonial period to the present, from Paul Revere to Martin Puryear.

The exhibition catalogisconceived and edited by Judith Brodie, with coauthors Amy Johnston and Michael J. Lewis. Published by the National Gallery of Art, the fully illustrated scholarly catalog provides a vantage point from which to assess the rich terrain of American prints. Drawing on the keen eyes and insightful points of view of 15 emerging and established scholars—experts in American art or history generally, not only in prints—the catalog offers a fresh range of interpretations. Biographies of the artists and a glossary of printmaking terms are additional features.

Major movements in American print history are highlighted in the selection of approximately 140 works by 95 artists. These movements extend from the colonial period and the Revolution to early landscapes of the New World; from the etching revival inspired by the prints of James McNeill Whistler to gritty urban views of New York by the Ashcan artists; from the lighthearted satire of the American regionalists to government-sponsored art of the Depression era; from the influx of European modernism around the Armory Show to postwar, hard-edge abstraction; from the rise of pop art and the American graphic workshops in the 1960s and 1970s to prints of the 21st century.

Since its founding, the National Gallery of Art has assiduously collected American prints with the help of numerous donors. Its extensive holdings were recently transformed by the acquisition of an extraordinary group of 5,200 American prints brought together by Reba and Dave Williams.
304 pages | 235 illustrations | 9.625 x 11.5 inches


More images from the Exhibition:

John Simon after John Verelst
Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, King of the Maquas, after 1710 mezzotint
sheet: 41 x 25.4 cm (16 1/8 x 10 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Paul Mellon Fund

John Hill, after William Guy Wall
View from Fishkill Looking to West Point, 1821-1825 hand-colored aquatint and engraving
image: 35.7 53.7 cm (14 1/16 21 1/8 in.)
sheet: 47.3 65.7 cm (18 5/8 25 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Donald and Nancy deLaski Fund

Robert Havell Jr., after John James Audubon
American White Pelican, 1836 hand-colored etching and aquatint
image: 89.5 60.0 cm (35 1/4 23 5/8 in.)
sheet: 100.4 x 67.6 cm (39 1/2 x 26 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mrs. Walter B. James

Mary Cassatt
Woman Bathing, 1890-1891 drypoint and aquatint
plate: 36.5 x 26.6 cm (14 3/8 x 10 1/2 in.)
sheet: 47.9 x 31.2 cm (18 7/8 x 12 5/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mrs. Lessing J. Rosenwald

George Bellows
A Stag at Sharkey's, 1917 lithograph
image: 47.6 60.6 cm (18 3/4 23 7/8 in.)
sheet: 55.6 70.2 cm (21 7/8 27 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W. Mellon Fund

Louis Lozowick
New York, 1923 lithograph
image: 29.2 x 22.8 cm (11 1/2 x 9 in.)
sheet: 40.1 x 28.9 cm (15 13/16 x 11 3/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Jacob Kainen

Grant Wood
Shrine Quartet, 1939 lithograph
image: 20.3 30.2 cm (8 11 7/8 in.)
sheet: 30.5 40.6 cm (12 16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Florian Carr Fund and Gift of the Print Research Foundation

Roy Lichtenstein
Sweet Dreams, Baby!, 1965 screenprint
image: 90.5 x 64.9 cm (35 5/8 x 25 9/16 in.)
sheet: 95.6 x 70.1 cm (37 5/8 x 27 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein
© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

Jasper Johns
Flags I, 1973 screenprint
sheet: 69.9 x 90 cm (27 1/2 x 35 7/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Robert and Jane Meyerhoff
Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Sotheby’s Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art 9 May 2016: Paul Signac ,André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck’s

April 14, 2016, 11:56 am

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 On 9 May 2016, Sotheby’s Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art in New York will feature a   striking Pointillist painting of Saint-Tropez by Paul Signac(estimate $8/12 million*). Inscribed Op.237, the painting heralds from an important period for the artist, during which he designated his works with ‘opus numbers,’ much as a composer would name a masterful musical composition.

Painted in 1882 – his first year visiting the coastal town, to which he would return many times over the years –  

Maisons du port, Saint-Tropez was created at the peak of Signac's time as the leader of the NeoImpressionist painters. Having never appeared at auction,  Maisons du port, Saint-Tropez has remained in the family collection of Ambassador John Langeloth Loeb, Jr. since his parents acquired it in July 1958. It comes to auction this May with an estimate of $8/12 million.*

“The separated elements will be reconstituted into brilliantly colored lights.” — Paul Signac
Jeremiah Evarts, Head of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sales in New York, said: “With its effusive color and exquisite orchestration, Maisons du port, Saint-Tropez is a true manifesto of Pointillism. It was created at a time when Signac was inheriting the mantle of his friend and fellow Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat, who passed away soon before this work was painted. Through this stunning view of Saint-Tropez, Signac is searching for the musicality and beauty in the world around him, and the resulting ‘Opus’ is the greatest we have seen come to auction in almost a decade.”

In April of 1882, Signac set sail on his boat Olympia from Concarneau to the south of France, in search of restorative sunlight and happier times following the death of his friend Georges Seurat the prior year. When he arrived at the port of Saint-Tropez, which at the time could only be accessed by boat, the visual splendor of the terracotta roofed houses made a lasting impression. The area continued to be a source of fascination for the artist over the next several decades, during which he produced several variants on the scene of the port.

The term ‘Neo-Impressionism’ was coined at the 1886 Impressionist group exhibition by the critic Félix Fénéon when referring to the paintings of Signac, Georges Seurat, and Camille and Lucien Pissarro. As the inheritors of the Impressionist tradition, these artists continued to depict the visual splendor of the modern world. Their approach, however, was decidedly more scientific, relying upon harmonious use of color and a precise application of paint known as Pointillism.

Spearheading this innovative technique in the late 1880s and the early 1890s, Signac was well-regarded as the leading spokesperson for this innovative style of painting. The present work, created when Signac’s technique was at its peak, epitomizes his bold stylistic innovation. It is rooted in a careful study of geometry, with particular focus on the horizontality of the port's architecture and its shimmering reflections on the water.

Maisons du port, Saint-Tropez is further distinguished by its exceptional provenance. Formerly in the collection of French writer and renowned collector Denys Cochin, it was acquired by the parents of Ambassador John Langeloth Loeb, Jr. in July 1958. John Langeloth Loeb, Jr. is a businessman, art collector, philanthropist and former United States Ambassador to Denmark (1981-1983). In addition to his innumerable contributions to society in the realm of politics and education, Ambassador Loeb is also a great patron of the arts. He served for nearly 30 years on the board of the Museum of the City of New York and has amassed what is arguably the greatest private collection of masterworks by Danish artists. Signac’s Maisons du port, Saint-Tropez has provided a centerpiece of his family’s collection for almost 60 years.

Two masterpieces by art history’s “Wild Beasts” will also appear at auction for the first time in Sotheby’s Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art on 9 May 2016 in New York. Together, 

André Derain’s Les Voiles rouges (estimate $15/20 million*) 

and Maurice de Vlaminck’s Sous-bois ($12/18 million) embody the explosive Fauvism movement of the early-20thcentury. The term was coined in 1905, when the critic Louis Vauxcelles derided the colorful canvases of Vlaminck, Matisse and Braque on display at the Salon d'Automneas the work of ‘les fauves’(wild beasts). 

These radical artists continued toflood their compositions with bold, expressive color for another two years, creating an aesthetic that would influence artists for decades to come. Both paintings were acquired in 1954 by art patron and philanthropist Sarah Campbell Blaffer of Houston, Texas, and have remained in her family’s collection since.

Only four major Fauve paintings have sold at auction since 2010, when Sotheby’s set a new benchmark price for the movement: Sotheby’s London sale of Impressionist & Modern Art that June featured 

a 1905 work by Derain, Arbres à Collioure, which sold for £16.3 million ($24 million), marking auction records for both the artist and for any Fauve painting. 

The present is the finest Fauve work to come to auction since. Simon Shaw, Co-Head, Worldwide, Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Department, said: “Fauvism liberated color and the brushstroke – a seismic shift that changed painting forever. Truly seminal examples are available only rarely, so to offer two in one season is extraordinary. Both pictures are coming to auction for the first time, and enjoy an exquisite provenance from one of the great American collections.” 

Vlaminck executed Sous-bois (Paysage)in the summer of 1905, only months before the Salon d'Automne. The canvas resonates with a passion and exuberance that characterizes the early Fauve paintings. Of all of the Fauve painters, Vlaminck was one of the most vocal about the expressive impact of vibrant color. He would frequently use musical and visual qualifiers interchangeably in his descriptions ofhis art, enabling him to express the powerful, multi-sensual experience he attempted to convey in his paintings. His fascination with brilliant, vibrant colors is beautifully reflected in Sous-bois, which depicts a scene near Chatou, along the Seine from Paris, where Vlaminck lived at the time. 

He drew inspiration for his early landscapes from this region, many of them characterized by the red-tiled roofs typical of the surrounding villages. It was in Chatou, the birth place of André Derain, where the two artists met by chance in1900, and subsequently formed a partnership that became the core of the Fauve movement. Vlaminck and Derain shared a studio, and over the following years regularly painted together, often depicting the same views of the local landscape.


In 1906 Derain traveled to London. He was a mere 25 at the time, and was encouraged to make the journey from Paris to London by his dealer, Ambroise Vollard. Roughly 30 canvases were painted during Derain’s stay in London. Most of these compositions depicted recognizable sights such as the Palace of Westminster, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Charing Cross and the Tower Bridges; the present work, however, shows a wide section of the River Thames at Greenwich, featuring a traditional Thames sailing barge painted in a highly-keyed color palette. 
                                                                                                                                                                                      
                                                                                              

When Modern Was Contemporary: Selections from the Roy R. Neuberger Collection

April 14, 2016, 12:07 pm

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Mississippi Museum of Art April 9 – October 30, 2016

Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, Florida, (December 2, 2016–January 29, 2017); 

Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania,  (February 26–May 21, 2017); 

Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, New Mexico, (September 30–December 31, 2017)

Revealing the pursuits of one of the twentieth century’s most important collectors, the American Federation of Arts (AFA) and the Neuberger Museum  of Art present When Modern Was Contemporary: Selections from the Roy R. Neuberger Collection, the first traveling exhibition of this groundbreaking collection of American modern art in over forty years. Roy R. Neuberger was a devoted champion ofthe art of his time, and he acquired works by a remarkable selection of modern masters,  including Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Marsden Hartley, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and numerous others. 

With paintings and sculptures from 52 of the era’s most influential artists, When Modern
Was Contemporary illuminates the artistic transformations that took place in the U.S.
during the first half of the 20th century, while also exploring Neuberger’s considerable role
as a collector of and advocate for the work of his artistic contemporaries.

Born in Connecticut, financier Roy R. Neuberger (1903–2010) developed his passion for
art while in Paris in the 1920s. After reading Vincent van Gogh’s biography, he was struck
by the fact that Van Gogh died in poverty, yet after his death the artist’s paintings achieved
ever higher prices. Neuberger’s credo, “the contemporary world should buy the work of
contemporary artists,” would guide him as a collector, and he often purchased works soon
after their creation.

Neuberger returned to New York in 1929 and went to work for a Wall Street brokerage
firm before founding his own firm in 1939. He once noted, “I have not collected art as an
investor would, I collect art because I love it.” By 1950, the center of the avant-garde art
world had shifted from Paris to New York, and Neuberger was the most important collector
focusing on contemporary American art in the country.

Concentrating on the patronage of living and often under-recognized artists, Neuberger
was far ahead of his time in appreciating the talents of soon-to-be canonical figures such
as Jackson Pollock, and his practice of donating works to museums ensured that both
emblematic and lesser-known, though important, artists could be viewed in public
collections. Committed to making contemporary art more accessible, Neuberger joined
the AFA in 1946, and served as president of the Board of Trustees from 1958 to 1967. In
1969, he gave much of his valuable collection to the State University of New York to found
the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College.

Exhibition Overview

Drawing from the collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art, When Modern Was
Contemporary: Selections from the Roy R. Neuberger Collection surveys the
development of modern art in the U.S., from representational modes in the early years of
the 20th century through the Abstract Expressionist revolution at mid-century. The
exhibition begins with works by artists who built upon European precedents, including
paintings such as

Weber’s La Parisienne (1907), with sinuous lines inspired by Matisse,

and Joseph Stella’s Gas Tank, Pittsburgh (American Landscape) (1918), which
freely samples from Cubism and Futurism to depict the vibrancy of an American city.

Georgia O’Keeffe, in her Lake George by Early Moonrise (1930), and

Arthur Dove, exploring shape and color in his Holbrook’s Bridge to the Northwest (1938),

are inspired by organic forms in the American landscape, while industry is celebrated in paintings such as Ralston Crawford’s At the Dock (1941) and Charles Sheeler’s The Web (1955), a
conceptual view of industrial structures. 

The collection’s masterworks of Abstract Expressionism include Jackson Pollock’s Number 8, 1949, an exemplary “drip” painting, and Willem de Kooning’s Marilyn Monroe (1954), the only named figure in the artist’s groundbreaking Woman series.

Neuberger selected each work for the collection himself, taking artists and artworks on
their individual merits, a fact evidenced by the notable diversity of the artists he supported.

Works by exceptional masters such as Marsden Hartley, represented by the
iconic Fishermen’s Last Supper, Nova Scotia (1940–41), and

Horace Pippin, represented by a classic Cabin in the Cotton (1944),

as well as significant sculptures by Harry Bertoia, Alexander Calder, David Smith, and others, are among numerous highlights.

When Modern Was Contemporary also exhibits rarely seen archival material, including
contributions made by artists to albums presented to Neuberger for his fiftieth and
seventy-fifth birthdays and receipts for purchases of artworks, offering unique views into
the development of the collection, the artist-patron relationship, and the workings of the


About the Curator

Tracy Fitzpatrick is Director of the Neuberger Museum of Art and an Associate Professor
of Art History at Purchase College, SUNY. She is responsible for the Museum’s first in-
depth study of the Roy R. Neuberger collection. Fitzpatrick has written, curated, and
taught widely on American art of the 20th century. 

Catalogue

The fully illustrated publication is the first comprehensive catalogue of the Roy R.
Neuberger collection. Both a companion to the exhibition and a valuable resource for
scholars, it includes an essay by Tracy Fitzpatrick, large illustrations and detailed
scholarly entries for works in the exhibition, and a selected checklist of the Neuberger
Collection.

The exhibition is organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Neuberger
Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY.

Jackson Pollock, Number 8, 1949, 1949. oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas. 34 x 71 1/2 in. (86.4  x 181.6 cm). Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Gift  of Roy R. Neuberger, 1971.02.11 © 2015 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS),  New York. Photo: Jim Frank. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Marsden Hartley, Fishermen’s Last Supper, Nova Scotia, 1940-41. oil on canvas. 30 1/8 x 41 1/8 inches. Collection Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Gift from the Estate of Roy. R. Neuberger, EL 02.2011.67. Photo: Jim Frank. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Joseph Stella, Gas Tank, Pittsburgh (American Landscape), 1918. oil on canvas. 40 x 30 1/8 inches.
(101.6 x 76.5 cm). 1975.16.42. Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Gift of Roy R. Neuberger, 1975.16.42. Photo: Jim Frank. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Ralston Crawford, At the Dock, 1940. oil on canvas. 22 3/8 x 16 3/8 inches. Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Gift of Roy R. Neuberger, 1975.16.07. © Ralston Crawford Estate. Photo: Jim Frank. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Charles Sheeler, The Web (Croton Dam), 1955. oil on canvas. 22 ¼ x 24 in. (56.5 x 61 cm). Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Gift of Roy R. Neuberger, 1972.04.12. Photo: Jim Frank. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Milton Avery, Walker by the Sea, 1961. oil on canvas. 24 x 18 in. (61 x 45.7 cm). Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Gift of Roy R. Neuberger, 1973.08.08. © 2015 The Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jim Frank. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Forrest Bess, Before Man, 1952-53. oil on canvas, with artist’s original frame. 10 x 23 5/8 in. (25.4 x 60 cm) (framed). Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Gift of Roy R. Neuberger, 1986.10.08. Photo: Jim Frank. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Alexander Calder, The Red Ear, 1957. painted sheet metal and wire. 50 x 73 x 3 in. (127 x 185.4 x 7.6 cm). Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Gift of Roy R. Neuberger, 1975.16.50. © 2015 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jim Frank. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Willem de Kooning, Marilyn Monroe, 1954. oil on canvas. 50 x 30 in. (127 x 76.2 cm). Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Gift of Roy R. Neuberger, 1971.02.06. © 2015 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jim Frank. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Helen Frankenthaler, Mount Sinai, 1956. oil on canvas. 30 1/8 x 30 in. (76.5 x 76.2 cm). Collection
Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Gift of Roy R. Neuberger, 1969.01.13. © 2015 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.  Photo: Jim Frank. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Lee Krasner, Burning Candles, 1955. oil, paper, and canvas on linen. 58 1/8 x 39 in. (147.6 x 99.1 cm)Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Gift of Roy R. Neuberger, 1969.01.16. © 2015 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jim Frank. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Jacob Lawrence, In the evening evangelists preach and sing on street corners, 1943. gouache on paper. 25 x 17 in. (63.5 x 43.2 cm). Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Gift of Roy R. Neuberger, 1975.16.25. © 2015 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jim Frank. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Lake George by Early Moonrise, 1930. oil and gouache on canvas. 24 x 36 in. (61 x 91.4 cm). Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Gift of Roy R. Neuberger, 1970.02.26. © 2015 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jim Frank. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Mark Rothko, Old Gold Over White, 1956. oil on canvas. 68 x 46 in. (172.7 x 116.8 cm). Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Gift of Roy R. Neuberger, 1969.01.20. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jim Frank. Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Exhibition Opening at the Farnsworth N.C. Wyeth: Painter

April 14, 2016, 2:03 pm

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(Rockland, ME) On Saturday, May 21, the Farnsworth Art Museum will open an exhibition of paintings by N.C. Wyeth entitled N.C. Wyeth: Painter. This exhibition will be on display at the museum’s Wyeth Center, on the corner of Union and Grace Streets in Rockland through December 31, 2016.

Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945) is best known as one of America’s foremost book and magazine illustrators of his era. Born and raised in Needham, Massachusetts, N.C. Wyeth learned drafting at the Mechanics School and then studied at the Massachusetts Normal School (now Massachusetts College of Art and Design). He was advised by one of his teachers to become an illustrator, and he soon followed two of his student friends to study illustration in 1902 under the renowned American illustrator Howard Pyle in Wilmington, Delaware. In February 1903, Wyeth got his first commission, from Saturday Evening Post.  This was the beginning of a long and successful career in which he illustrated more than a hundred books, among them many popular novels for Scribner’s, including Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robin Hood, The Last of the Mohicans, Robinson Crusoe, and Rip Van Winkle.

His fame and success as an illustrator notwithstanding, Wyeth also wanted to be known as a painter, an artist whose skills went beyond the requirements of adhering to the narratives for which his illustrations were commissioned. Over the course of his career, in fact, he did more than 200 landscapes, 30 still lifes, and 60 portraits and other private subjects. This exhibition focuses on some of his more ambitious independent landscape and seascape paintings, ranging in date from 1917 to 1941. These works were done in and around his two homes, his primary residence in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and a summer home in Port Clyde, Maine.

N.C. Wyeth, Portrait of a Young Artist, 1936, oil on canvas, 32 x 40 1/4 inches, museum purchase, 1963.1285

N.C. Wyeth (American, 1882-1945) The Harbor Herring gut, 1925
Oil on canvas
43 x 48 1/8 inches
Private Collection

N.C. Wyeth (American, 1882-1945) My Grandfather’s House, c. 1929 Oil on canvas
42 1/8 x 48 inches
Private Collection

N.C. Wyeth (American, 1882-1945)

Portrait of Ann Reading, c. 1930 Oil on canvas
48 1⁄4 x 52 3/16 inches
Private Collection

N.C. Wyeth (American, 1882-1945)
Fisherman’s Family, c. 1933/1934
Oil on canvas 591⁄4 x 71 inches
Private Collection

N.C. Wyeth (American, 1882-1945) Herring!, c. 1935
Oil on canvas
48 1/8 x 52 1/8 inches
Private Collection

N.C. Wyeth (American, 1882-1945) Ridge Church, 1936
Oil on canvas
36 x 40 1/8 inches

N.C. Wyeth
(American, 1882-1945)
Bright and Fair - Eight Bells, 1936 Oil on canvas
42 3/8 x 52 1/4 inches
Museum Purchase, 1989.13

N.C. Wyeth
(American, 1882-1945)
Maine Headland, Black Head, Monhegan Island, c. 1936-1938
Oil on canvas
48 1/4 x 52 1/4 inches
Bequest of Mrs. Elizabeth B. Noyce, 1997.3.59

N.C. Wyeth
(American, 1882-1945)
The Morris House, Port Clyde, c. 1937 Oil on canvas
34 x 52 x 7/8 inches
Bequest of Mrs. Elizabeth B. Noyce, 1997.3.60

 
N.C. Wyeth (American, 1882-1945)
Black Spruce Ledge (Time and Tide), 1941 Oil and egg tempera on hardboard
45 x 52 inches
Private Collection

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Christie's New York Evening Sale of Post-War & Contemporary Art | 10 May 2016 - Rothk, Basquiat

April 15, 2016, 5:16 am

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Leading Christie’s Evening Sale of Post-War & Contemporary Art on May 10, is Mark Rothko’s pivotal 1957 canvas, No. 17 (estimate: $30-40million). With its vibrant, verdant hues, No. 17 is emblematic of the experiential nature of Rothko’s art—a manifestation of what one critic called the “immediate radiance” of the paintings from this period of the artist’s career. One of the artist’s rare “blue” canvases, this work belongs to a select group that marked the culmination of a short period during which he executed a number of brightly hued works and just a few months before he embarked on a series of paintings that have become widely regarded as the pinnacle of his career, the Seagram Murals (Tate Gallery, London).

This painting was featured in the vital 1961-1963 Rothko retrospective, which traveled across Europe championing the cause of Abstract Expressionism and confirming Rothko’s status as one of its vanguards. The retrospective’s first stop in Europe was the seminal exhibition at The Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, which was where much of the British Public first encountered Rothko’s work.
Following the retrospective, No. 17 was acquired by an important private Italian collection, where it remained unseen by the public for the next several decades. However, it reemerged into the public eye in 2001 when it appeared as a central part of a major exhibition mounted by the Fondation Beyeler. It was there that the curator described No. 17 as “a fine example of…his virtuoso paint handling…” Following the exhibition, the paintingwas acquired by a private collection, where it has remained until today.

Brett Gorvy,International Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art,remarked:
"No. 17, is a strikingly beautiful canvas that comes with an exhibition history that places it within the canon of Rothko’s most important paintings of the late 1950’s. We are particularly pleased to be presenting this work to the marketplace at a time when there is such tremendous demand for examples by Rothko of this remarkable quality. With its vibrant, enveloping surface, and its freshness to the auction market, we are confident that No. 17 will appeal to a broad global audience."

No. 17 is being sold on the heels of the tremendously successful sale of

Rothko’s 1958 painting, No. 10, which realized $81,925,000 against a high estimate of $60 million at Christie’s New York, in May 2015.No. 10’s strength at auction demonstrated the tremendous demand for works of this quality by Rothko in the global marketplace, which continues to exist in full force today.

No. 17 was produced at the height of Rothko’s painterly powers.

•  Produced at the dawn of his mature period, and just a short time before he embarked on what would become his magnum opus, the Seagram Murals, this painting encapsulates all of the drama and psychological intensity of an artist who became one of the most celebrated and influential artists of the twentieth century.
• Sandwiched between both these blocks is a strip of high-keyed azure blue, the active edges of this thin strip increasing their impact by bleeding into the neighboring areas with intoxicating results. Rothko always insisted that it was here, where the edges of his painterly passages meet, that the true essence of his paintings could be witnessed.
•  This painting encapsulates all of the drama and psychological intensity of an artist who became one of the most celebrated and influential artists of the twentieth century.          

 No. 17 was exhibited in the retrospective of Rothko’s work that was organized by the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The retrospective travelled widely throughout Europe from 1961-1963. The first stop was the seminal 1961 exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (one of the artist’s first solo shows in Europe). This was the exhibition that introduced Rothko to the British Public.

• Following Whitechapel, the retrospective traveled to Amsterdam, Brussels, Basel, Rome before finishing at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in January 1963.
• Visitors to the exhibition described their reaction to the artist’s paintings as “Shocked… Spellbound… Transformed” (quoted in “How Rothko Won Over Britain,” Huffington Post, February 2, 2012 [accessed March 23, 2016])
• A current curator at the Whitechapel, Nayai Yiakoumaki, called this exhibition one of the artist’s most significant. “This exhibition is very important because it introduced his work to the British public for the first time, in such a large volume and a public gallery… [From] this exhibition on, the art world was captivated by Rothko and subsequently, [Tate Director] Norman Reid, approached the artist to discuss a purchase of works…culminating with the substantial donation of eight of the Seagram Murals to the Tate in 1970” (N. Yiakoumaki, ibid.).

Following Rothko’s European retrospective, No. 17 spent several decades out of the public realm in a private European collection before making a triumphal appearance in 2001 when it was publicly exhibited for the first time in over 30 years.

• In 2001, No. 17 (also in the past known as Green on Blue on Blue) appeared at a major exhibition mounted by the Fondation Beyeler in 2001.
• During its time out of public view, the painting was an important part of a private Italian collection and its exhibition in Basel was the first time the work had been on public display for nearly thirty years.

Also featured in Christie’s  May 10 Evening Sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art is Jean-Michel Basquiat’s explosive tour de force, Untitled, 1982, which is estimated to realize in excess of $40 million. Executed in Modena, Italy in the prime year of Basquiat’s meteoric career, Basquiat’s Untitled is an epic painting, with its monumental size and visceral energy marking it as one of the artist’s most seminal works. As well as having been chosen for the cover of the artist’s Catalogue Raisonné, Untitled has been included in every major Basquiat retrospective and contains Basquiat’s heroic portrait of himself as a fiery black devil rising amidst an explosion of paint that has been thrown onto the canvas in the manner of Jackson Pollock. It is the dynamism and spontaneity with which Basquiat constructs his painterly surface that distinguishes this work as a masterpiece, especially considering this ambitious work was painted when the artist was only 22 years old.

Brett Gorvy, Christie’s International Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art, remarked: “We are very proud to lead our evening sale with this truly exceptional work by Basquiat. Untitled is a remarkably powerful canvas, which instantly engulfs any viewer standing in its monumental presence. Untitled is  among the top three paintings from the tremendously important body of work that the artist executed in 1982 while in Modena, Italy, which would go on to shape the rest of his career. It is also the cover image of the artist’s Catalogue Raisonné. Due to its striking visual impact, its demonic central figure and its significance within the cannon of Basquiat’s career, we are confident that its supreme quality and rarity will command tremendous interest from the world’s leading international collectors and it is set to realize one of the highest prices for the artist at auction.”  

The full force of the artist’s energy can be witnessed across every inch of this vast canvas. From the lavishly fashioned demonic figure in the center of the canvas, to his brazen use of painterly drips, splashes and impulsive brushwork, the surface of Untitled acts as a totem to Basquiat’s unencumbered talent. Painted during his trip to Modena in Italy, Untitled belongs to a significant group of paintings that helped to forge his reputation as one of the most exciting and radical artists of his generation. 

Basquiat’s dramatic figure dominates the canvas, with a face that displays the full force of his painterly prowess. This central subject has often been identified as a self-portrait of the artist. In contrast to the precise definition of the devil figure, Basquiat orchestrates a flurry of loose drips and splashes of paint set amidst of expressionistic brushstrokes that shows him to be a phenomenal colorist.

Untitled is the largest in a series of paintings which Basquiat undertook during two periods he spent in Modena, Italy in the spring of 1981 and 1982. He was initially invited to Europe by Emilio Mazzoli to participate in his first ever one-man show after the dealer saw the artist’s work in January 1981 at the legendary New York/New Wave show at New York’s P.S. 1. After the initial trip he returned again in March 1982 and it was during this stay that he painted Untitled, as well as

Profit 1

and Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump,

which are widely considered to be the artist’s three most important paintings of this prime period.

1982 was a marquee year for Basquiat as it saw him continue his meteoric rise within the New York art world as he was rewarded with his first solo show at Annina Nosei's gallery. He also made an important trip to Los Angeles where he was introduced to—and proved to be a major hit with—influential collectors such as Eli and Edythe Broad, Douglas S. Cramer and Stephane Janssen. He was also the youngest of 176 artists to be invited to take part in Documenta 7 in Germany.
Basquiat’s work found favor with many influential critics who had been yearned for the return of ‘the expressive’, ever since the triumph of Minimalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. In Basquiat they found a new champion who clearly reveled in the joy of the artist’s hand.  As Italian curator Luca Marenzi, once observed: “Basquiat is art’s answer to Jimi Hendrix…” (L. Marenzi, ‘Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/Set that on Fire,’ in Basquiat, exh. cat., Museo Revoltella, Milano, 1999).


Top  Five Prices for Basquiat at auction include: 

1. Dustheads, acrylic, oilstick, spray enamel and metallic paint on canvas, 1982
Estimate: $25-35million | Price Realized: $48,843,752
Sale of: Christie's New York: Wednesday, May 15, 2013

2. The Field Next to the Other Road, acrylic, enamel spray paint, oilstick, metallic paint and ink on canvas, 1981.
Estimate: $25-35million | Price Realized: $37,125,000
Sale of Christie's New York: Wednesday, May 13, 2015

3. Untitled, acrylic, oilstick and metallic spray enamel on canvas, 1981
Sale of: Christie's New York: Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Estimate: $20-30m | Price Realized: $34,885,000

4. Untitled, acrylic and oilstick on wood panel, 1982
Sale of: Christie's New York: Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Estimate: $25-35m | Price Realized: $29,285,000

5. Untitled (diptych), diptych-acrylic and oilstick on panel, 1982
Sale of Christie's London: Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Estimate on Request | Price Realized: £18,765,876 ($28,928,434)


More From Sotheby's:

Jean-Michel Basquiat

UNTITLED (JULIUS CAESAR ON GOLD)

Estimate

7,000,000— 9,000,000

USD

LOT SOLD. 6,885,000 USD

Jean-Michel Basquiat

CAMPAIGN

Estimate

3,000,000— 4,000,000

GBP

LOT SOLD. 4,405,000 GBP

Jean-Michel Basquiat

TENOR

Estimate

3,800,000— 4,800,000

GBP

LOT SOLD. 4,338,500 GBP
Also see:

Top 10 Jean-Michel Basquiats at Sotheby's

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty

April 15, 2016, 1:33 pm

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With the major exhibition Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty, The Museum of Modern Art brings new focus to Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas’s (French, 1834–1917) extraordinary and rarely seen monotypes and their impact on his wider practice. On view March 26 through July 24, 2016, it is the first exhibition in the U.S. in nearly 50 years to examine these radical, innovative works—and MoMA's first monographic exhibition of the artist.

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty features approximately 120 monotypes along with some 60 related works, including paintings, drawings, pastels, sketchbooks, and prints. Organized by Jodi Hauptman, Senior Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints;with Karl Buchberg, Senior Conservator;and Heidi Hirschl, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art;and Richard Kendall, independent art historian and curator. MoMA is the sole venue for the exhibition.

A towering figure in 19th-century art, Degas is best known as a painter and chronicler of the ballet. Yet his work as a printmaker reveals the true extent of his restless creativity, as he mixed techniques with abandon in his studio and shared recipes with colleagues for producing unconventional effects.

The monotype process involves drawing in black ink on a metal plate that was then run through a press, typically resulting in a single print. Captivated by the medium’s potential, Degas made more than 300 monotypes during two discrete bursts of activity, from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s, and again during the early 1890s. Taking the medium to new and radical ends, Degas abandoned the academic drawing of his youth, inventing a new repertoire of mark-making that included wiping, scraping, scratching, fingerprinting, and rendering via removal. Enigmatic and mutable forms, luminous passages emerging from deep blackness, and a heightened sense of tactility characterize the resulting works.

The freedom Degas found in such techniques is an important theme of the exhibition, and the presentation links his efforts in monotype—the way he moves the printer’s ink with ease across the slick metal plate, resulting in a more liberated form of description—to works in other mediums.

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty unfolds chronologically, from Degas’s introduction to monotype in the 1870s through his enthusiastic embrace of the medium. The exhibition offers a sense of his immersion, discoveries, experiments, and innovations, and investigates the broader consequences of his engagement with monotype.

Modern Life

For Degas, who was always searching for new means to describe new subjects, monotype proved to be the perfect medium to capture the essential features of modern urban life. 

The exhibition highlights Degas’s views of passers by on city streets, their faces blurred 

(Heads of a Man and a Woman, c. 1877–80),

and bustling street scenes as figures cross paths 

(On the Street, 1876–77),

 along with signs of the era’s industry and commerce

(Factory Smoke, 1877–79),

the repetitive and arduous labor of Ironing Women (c. 1877–79),

and the costumes of women lingering scandalously solo at cafés 

(Young Woman in a Café, c. 1877).

Of Degas’s urban subjects in monotype, it was the ballet and the café concert that offered the perfect melding of subject and means. In these works, Degas focused on fundamental aspects of the modern experience in an era of expanded entertainment, illumination, and motion. Degas once said that drawing dancers was just “a pretext for rendering movement,” a pictorial challenge that monotype gave him the means to address.

While Degas’s images of the ballet take place on the stage as dancers leap into the air, as seen in

Pas battu (c. 1879),

they reflect the velocity and tempo of city life. For late-19th-century urban dwellers experiencing the advent of 24-hour lighting, the city was always illuminated—and always in motion.

Degas used the technical possibilities of the monotype to foreground the lighting of the ballet and café concert—gaslight and the new electric light. In works like

Dancer Onstage with a Bouquet (c. 1876) 

or Café Singer (c.1877–78),

footlights transform the performer’s body, catching the translucency of tutus or turning faces into masks.

In his café scenes, lighting is endlessly refracted in the theater’s mirrors and gilded architecture, creating an enchanted spectacle. 

In Backstage at the Ballet 

 and in the Brothel

Degas used small scale plates to portray the backstage at the ballet and the interiors of brothels in monotype.

The exhibition includes a group of illustrations for The Cardinal Family, a collection of stories about theamorous adventures of two young ballerinas, written by Degas’s friend Ludovic Halévy. Much of the action takes place backstage or in the theater’s wings, and Degas depicts the flurry and flux of backstage spaces by deploying gestural marks and smudges to suggest hustle and bustle, reflections in mirrors, and kaleidoscopic swirls of legs and arms, and by cropping bodies with the plate’s edge to imply motion. Seen together, these monotypes show Degas’s ever-active eye shifting from long views to close-ups, focusing on the empty centers of waiting rooms, and pressing close to the dancers as if taking on the vantage point of their male admirers.

Although Degas’s illustrations were not used for the book’s initial publication, they demonstrate that narrative was a springboard for experimentation.

Degas’s monotypes depicting prostitutes in brothel interiors are also on view in the exhibition—including several owned by Pablo Picasso—to explore how and why Degas treated this subject in monotype. For Degas, monotype served this subject in key ways: his gestural marks convey a space of flux and financial exchange, and his free brushwork encouraged caricature. The addition of pastel on some monotypes allowed Degas to further describe these scenes. Degas’s  



Two Young Girls 

and Waiting for the Client (both c. 1877–79) 

portray women sitting unselfconsciously and inelegantly, apparently unconcerned about prospective clients, who in contrast often appear unsure of themselves, apprehensively looking in from the margins.

Bathers 

Degas’s most daring application of monotype is in his depictions of female bathers in intimate settings. In these works, he deploys radical compositional and technical innovation, portraying private acts of washing and grooming and dramatically illuminating bodies and surroundings. Degas contorted these bathers into awkward, unusual, and seemingly impossible poses. Degas’s renderings are tactile, rough, and unresolved, with ambiguous contours blurring distinctions between body and environment. 

Degas created these images primarily by subtraction—laying down a curtain of ink on the plate, he drew by removal, conjuring an image out of darkness by wiping the ink away with a process that has come to be known as the “dark-field” technique. Broadening his tool kit, he used brushes with dry, hardened bristles to create striated patterns, a hard-pointed implement to incise into the ink, sponges or cloths to dab or smoothly move the ink around, his hands to sculpt his subjects, his thumb and palm prints to impress texture, and his fingernails for contour, all of which can be seen in The Fireside (c. 1880–85), one of Degas’s largest monotypes. In focusing on how Degas uses monotype, the exhibition calls attention to the way this medium allows the artist to access and express private moments in a deeply visceral way.

Landscapes

After a hiatus of several years, Degas returned to producing monotypes in 1890. Followingan excursion though the Burgundy region of France, Degas sought to capture the experience of the landscape. Using oil paint instead of black printer’s ink, he created a series of abstract landscapes—exemplified by MoMA’s  

Forest in the Mountains (c. 1890)

 —that are among the most radical works of their time. Inspired by experience or imagination, these landscapes allude to the natural world or conjure meteorological effects, while undermining any sense of the earth’s solidity and stability.The use of oil paint in monotype was a key innovation, introducing color as well as an element of unpredictability:the fluid paint ran under the pressure of the press, and Degas experimented with rollers, cloths, fingerprints, and coarse wiping. 

 On top of these washes of color, Degas often added pastel for emphasis—as seen in his 

1892 Landscape with Rocks (Paysage avec rochers)

—highlighting particular geologic formations or adding in hedges or  trees,resolving his indistinct compositions into landscapes that took familiar and more recognizable form. Degas exhibited a group of these works at a Paris gallery in 1892, where they were enthusiastically received as examples of Symbolism, a trend in art and literature of that time, which rejected the industrialized world and its faith in scientific progress in favor of the fantastic, mystical, and dreamlike.

Consequences

The exhibition shows how Degas’s monotype practice impacted his works in other mediums. Degas’s experiments with the essential qualities of monotype—repetition and transformation, mirroring andreversal, tone and tactility—enriched his working drawing and painting. Understanding that something singular can spark multiple variations and that an image can always be reworked, revised,and recrafted, his approach—especially in his last decades—was characterized by his unceasing pursuit and modification of key subjects across mediums. Degas traced, inverted, and recombined figures into different arrangements, applying pastel or charcoal on paper, or layering oil paint on canvas to further transform his subjects. The resulting chains of images representing ballerinas and bathers demonstrate how Degas saw iteration as an end in itself rather than a series of steps toward something final or finished.

The lessons of monotype also encouraged a new freedom, leading to a more liberated handling of charcoal, pastel, and oil paint and the visible presence of fingerprints. Degas also incorporated many compositional strategies first seen in his dark-field bathers, using his own fingerprints to render figures or their environments and depicting the body in unusual and seemingly impossible positions. The layered washes of the landscape monotypes in particular provoked a productive reliance on tone, resulting in ambiguous and amorphous grounds.

In his monotypes, Degas is at his most modern, capturing the spirit of urban life, depicting the body in daring ways, liberating drawing from tradition, and engaging the possibilities of abstraction. Whether focused on method or theme, Degas’s insistent searching resulted in what the poet Stéphane Mallarmé saw as “a strange new beauty.” Reflecting a spirit of relentless invention and restless improvisation, a deep curiosity about the behavior of materials, a penetrating eye, an affinity for strategies of repetition and seriality, and an incisive understanding of the history of art, Degas’s efforts in monotype not only bridge the fin de siècle, but look forward to developments in the 20th century and beyond.

PUBLICATIONS:

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue edited by Jodi Hauptman, with essays by Carol Armstrong, Jonas Beyer, Kathryn Brown, Karl Buchberg, Hollis Clayson, Samantha Friedman, Richard Kendall, Laura Neufeld, Stephanie O’Rourke, Raisa Rexer, and Jill de Vonyar. The publication presents approximately 120 monotypes alongside related works in other mediums, and explores the creative potency of Degas's rarely seen monotypes and their impact on his widerpractice. 224 pages, 230 illustrations. Hardcover.

The exhibition is also accompanied by a new children’s book, What Degas Saw, written by MoMA assistant curator Samantha Friedman,with illustrations by Cristina Pieropan and reproductions of artworks by Degas. The story looks at the world through the artist’s eyes as he walks through the streets of Paris, and provides insight into his creative process. What Degas Saw encourages young readers to carefully observe their surroundings and to create their own art about the people and places around them. 40 pages, illustrated throughout. 

Excellent review with lots of images

 Good review

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY STAGES FIRST MAJOR EXHIBITION OF PICASSO PORTRAITS FOR TWENTY YEARS

April 21, 2016, 9:04 am

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The National Portrait Gallery is to stage a major exhibition of portraits by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) this autumn.

Picasso Portraits (6 October 2016-5 February 2017),  in association with the Museu Picasso, Barcelona, will include over 75 portraits by the artist in all media, ranging from well-known masterpieces to works that have never been shown in Britain before.

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, autumn 1910 by Pablo Picasso, 1910; Art Institute of Chicago
   Copyright: Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2016; 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York

The latter include the extraordinary cubist portrait from 1910 of the German art dealer and early champion of Picasso’s work, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, loaned by the Art Institute of Chicago;

and from a private collection the exquisite portrait executed in 1938 of Nusch Eluard, acrobat, artist and wife of the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard.

 Woman in a Hat (Olga) by Pablo Picasso, 1935; Centre Pompidou, Paris. Musée national d’art modern  Copyright: Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2016 Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Rights reserved;

All phases of the artist’s career will be represented, from the realist portraits of his boyhood to the more gestural canvases of his old age. It is the first large-scale exhibition devoted to his portraiture since Picasso and Portraiture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Grand Palais, Paris in 1996.

Portrait of Olga Picasso by Pablo Picasso, 1923; Private Collection  Copyright: Succession Picasso/DACS London,  2016; 

Because Picasso did not work to commission and depicted people in his intimate circle, he enjoyed exceptional freedom as a portraitist and worked in different modes as well as many different styles. Formal posed portraits coexisted with witty caricatures, classic drawings from life with expressive paintings created from memory reflecting his understanding of the sitter’s identity and character.
The exhibition includes a group of revealing self-portraits as well as portraits and caricatures of Picasso’s friends, lovers, wives and children.  Guillaume Apollinaire, Carles Casagemas, Santiago Rusiñol, Jaume Sabartés, Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, Fernande Olivier, Olga Picasso, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Françoise Gilot and Jacqueline Picasso are among the people visitors will encounter.  Complementing these images of Picasso’s intimates are portraits and caricatures inspired by artists of the past – Velázquez and Rembrandt among them – with whom he identified most closely.

The Museu Picasso, Barcelona is lending most generously to the National Portrait Gallery.  Other lending institutions include: the British Museum; Tate;  Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Musée national Picasso, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris;  Musée national d’art moderne de la ville de Paris; Museum Berggruen, Berlin; Fondation Hubert Looser, Zurich; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Iceland.  The exhibition also benefits from important loans from the artist’s heirs and other private collectors.

The copiously illustrated catalogue provides an original, broadly based account of Picasso’s portraiture and analysis of every work on display.  Among the issues explored in detail are the artist’s sources of inspiration, differences between his approach to portraying men and women, and the complex motivation behind his switches of mode and style and defiance of representational norms.

Picasso Portraitsiscurated by Elizabeth Cowling, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh.  Her publications include Picasso: Style and Meaning (2002) and Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose (2006). She has co-curated several exhibitions, including Picasso Sculptor/Painter (1994), Matisse Picasso (2002–3), and Picasso Looks at Degas (2010–11). 

From The Guardian:

In one portrait a young Pablo Picasso paints himself as a well-dressed teenager in the 19th-century realist tradition;

Self Portrait 1972, 

in another, aged 90, he has a cartoonish skull looking like a boulder about to topple from the mountain.

“It is a remarkable work, looking in the mirror and looking death in the face,” said art historian Elizabeth Cowling of Self Portrait 1972,which will be part of a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery this autumn.

The work, from a private collection, is in stark contrast to the self-portrait Picasso painted in 1896, aged 14. That polarity of styles will feature over and again in what is the first major exhibition of Picasso portraits for 20 years...

 Self-Portrait with Palette by Pablo Picasso, 1906.
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 Self-Portrait with Palette, 1906. Photograph: Succession Picasso/DACS

CHRISTIE’S IMPRESSIONIST AND MODERN ART EVENING SALE ON MAY 12: Monet, Picasso, Modigliani, Magritte, Kahlo, Braque, Matisse, Renoir

April 22, 2016, 7:14 am

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Christie’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on May 12 will feature an exceptional selection of 52 works by the most revered artists of the early 20th century. Led by outstanding paintings by Monet, Picasso, and Modigliani, many of which have not been on the market for decades, including Frida Kahlo’s dream like love scene of Dos Desnudos en el bosque.

Le bassin aux nymphéas by Claude Monet (1840-1926) (estimate: $25,000,000-35,000,000) leads the sale and belongs to the artist’s most popular and arguably influential series, which lent inspriation to generations of subsequent artists in the twentieth century. This work is part of a sequence of 14 paintings that Monet most likely began in the spring or summer of 1918 and finished by late 1919, when he dated and sold the canvas to the Impressionist dealer Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in 1919. It was then bought by Henri Canonne, a Parisian pharmaceutical tycoon and major collector of Impressionism in 1928. Canonne owned more than forty paintings by Monet, including seventeen canvases from the Nymphéas series. The painting has been in the present collection for 20 years.

Monet’s Au Petit-Gennevilliers (estimate: $12,000,000-18,000,000), belongs to another celebrated series from Monet’s early career, when he painted various scenes of Argenteuil in 1874. The site itself is widely linked with the birth of Impressionist painting and provided endless inspiration for Monet and the other impressionists at that time. This painting will be on the market for the first time since 1899. It was purchased by the famed American collector Henry Osborne Havemeyer in 1901 and has remained in the family ever since.

Also featured is Amedeo Modigliani’s (1884-1920) Jeune femme à la rose (Margherita) (estimate: $12,000,000-18,000,000) painted in 1916. This portrait is a quintessentially modern painting of the female figure painted in Modigliani’s signature style- with a patrician long neck and oval face, large eyes and small, red lips. Here he adds the uncoventional, and alluring adornment of a rose in the subject’s décolletage, further heightening her seductive allure. It is the finest of a series of three paintings from 1916 recorded by Ambrogio Ceroni that takes a dark haired and brown-eyed young woman as its subject. It has been suggested that the model is the artist’s older sister Margherita.

Highlighting the modern section is Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) Homme assis, 1969 ( estimate: $8,000,000-12,000,000) from the Collection of Kenneth and Susan Kaiserman. The colorful portrait of an exuberant swordsman derives from the critical group of Picasso’s famed late mousquetaire works and was exhibited at the famous 1970 Avignon exhibition at the Palaisdes Papes.

The sale also showcases important works on paper by Picasso from the Francey and Dr. Martin L. Gecht Collection, including

La Minotauromachie, 1935 (estimate: $2,000,000-3,000,000),

La Femme qui pleure, 1937, (estimate: $1,800,000-2,500,000),

and La Femme au Tambourin, 1939 (estimate: $800,000-1,200,000).

The sale presents Frida Kahlo’s (1907-1954) Dos desnudos en el bosque (La tierra misma), 1939, (illustrated left, estimate: $8,000,000-12,000,000). This small and exquisite surrealist painting depicts a dreamlike scene between two nude women in a forest alluding to Kahlo’s sexuality and identity. Gifted by the artist to Dolores del Río, the celebrated Mexican and American actress from the 1920s, the painting was last seen at market in 1989. This masterpiece has been both highly published and exhibited and last shown at Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life at The New York Botanical Garden, May-November 2015.

Works by René Magritte (1898-1967) are led by Les profondeurs du plaisir, painted in 1947 (estimate: $4,500,000-6,500,000), a work that Magritte considered one of his masterpieces. The idea for this painting came to Magritte when his wife Georgette stood and looked out the window one summer evening.

Another painting by Magritte is L’explication, 1962 (estimate: $1,000,000-2,000,000), from a series where he locates the mystery in ordinary objects—the bottle morphs into a carrot.

On a related theme, Femme-bouteille, executed circa 1941 (estimate: $500,000-800,000) is from a series of works where Magritte transformed bottles into other objects--a nude woman with her hair cascading down the back of the bottle. The first owner of the present bottle was the surrealist artist Paul Delvaux who acquired the work from Magritte. The present owner acquired the work at auction in 1972.

Magritte at Auction: History
Part II

Other celebrated artists in the sale include works from The Ducommun Family Collection. Their collection includes

Georges Braque’s (1882-1963) Mandoline à la partition (Le Banjo), 1941, (estimate: $7,000,000-9,000,000) one of Braque’s greatest late career still-lifes;

and Henri Matisse’s (1869-1954) Nu couché III, conceived in Nice in 1929 and cast in 1931, (estimate: $1,000,000-1,500,000), an early cast from the edition of 10.  Both works have been in same American collection for over forty years.

Leading a selection of several works by Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), 

Madame de Galéà, la méridienne painted in 1912 (estimate: $8,000,000-12,000,000) is a sumptuously clad and bejeweled Madeleine de Galéa, the great love of the legendary modern pictures dealer Ambroise Vollard. This is one of the largest paintings from Renoir’s late career and has been in a private collection since 1984.

Two further works by the artist from The MGM Resorts International Collection includeFemme en bleu, painted in 1909 (estimate:$1,000,000-1,500,000),

and La Balayeuse, painted in 1889 (estimate: $1,000,000-1,500,000).

Renoir at auction

Joan Miró. La forza della materia

April 22, 2016, 11:04 am

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The Fundació Joan Miró organizes in Milano, Italy, the exhibition Joan Miró. La forza della materia, a show that brings together a total of 114 works by the artist.

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Joan Miró. La forza della materia highlights the will of Miró of  reaching the purity of art by  exploring beyond conventional painting. The show illustrate the constant experimentation with techniques ,  media and  different procedures that led him  to the development of a  new culture of matter. Under the direction of Rosa Maria Malet, the  Fundació Joan Miró in  Barcelona organizes this exhibition, which has sixty - six works  from  its collection. The show  includes paintings, drawings , sculptures  and  graphic works made between 1931 and 1981 . The exhibition will be open from March 25 to September 11, 2016 at  the MUDEC, Museo delle Culture, Milano, Italy.

"Matter ,  the instrument gives me the technique , a means to  give life to one thing [ ...]  In my painting ,  a small line with a thick shape at the end is a surprise . I'm as  surprised [... ]  More than the picture itself , what counts  is what brings out  into the air ,  what  diffuses . " With these words , collecte d by  Yvon Taillandier in an interview in 1959 at Xxe Siècle , Joan  Miró reflects on the importance of experimentation with matter in his  work and on the freedom and its creation effects in various media .

Joan Miró. La forza della materia includes a broad  representation of this  experimentation with matter, through 114 works of their funds and private collections,  presented in four rooms. In the first one, paintings and drawings from 1931 and 1944  are exhibited, most of which produced under the influence of  the Spanish Civil War and  World War II. Thus, these works synthesize the tragedy of this period and show the new  symbolic language that Miró configured.

The move of Joan Miró in 1956 to Palma de Mallorca, where his friend, the  architect Josep Lluís Sert, had designed a studio , is the starting point of the exhibits in  the second room .  The paintings of this space show how Miró, with the desire to reach an increasingly anonymous artistic expression ,  releases his gesture. At maturity of his  career, a  continuin g interest in matter and its possibilities lead him to work with profusion bronze sculpture ,  also represented in this room. Miró uses the lost - wax process to give life to new beings by the assembly of objects, mainly from natural and popular environment.

The third room presents a series of works of the seventies in which Miró continued questioning the ultimate meaning of the painting without ever leaving it. W ith  the intention of removing all illusory elements of his painting , he underwent it to the  most unorthodox practices  - for example,  burning the canvases - while uses or reuses the  most unusual medias, wood , sandpaper, paintings  pompier  style , etc.  Destroying and creating both , the artist  provokes the viewer and questions the economic value of the  artwork .

The last section of the exhibition focuses on the sculptural and graphic works of Miró , modalities  with immense technical possibilities enhanced by collaborative work with artisans .  In this room are remarkable his works with carborundum  - an  artificial abrasive made from  powder of carbon and silicon - ,  that allows him to  enrich the matter  and enhance the line of the engravings .  In each of these disciplines , Joan  Miró challenges the technique  seeking the freedom of expression that he  achieved with  painting.

Joan Miró. La forza della materia is organized by the Fundació Joan Miró in  Milano, Italy at the MUDEC, Museo delle Culture, a cent er dedicated to the  interdisciplinary research on the world cultures. Taking inspirations from the civic  ethnographic collections and in partnership with our communities, MUDEC intend to  create a place where to dialogue on contemporary themes by the medium o f visual,  performing and sound art, design and costume.

Joan Miró Personnages et oiseau Figures and bird 1937 Indian ink and watercolour on paper 25 x 32 cm Private collection

Joan Miró Personnages, oiseau, étoiles Figures, bird, stars 1942 Pencil, watercolour, gouache, Indian ink  and pastel  on paper 66 x 51 cm Private collectio

Joan Miró Femme au clair de lune Woman by moonlight 1970 Gouache, Indian ink and wax  crayon on paper 99 x 61 cm  Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

Joan Miró Poème Poem 1974 Oil on canvas 130 x 97 cm Private collection

Joan Miró Les Deux Amis Two friends 1969 Etching, aquatint and carborundum 71,5 x 106,5 cm Fundació

Joan Miró Pantagruel 1978 Etching, aquatint, carborundum and  grattage 10 6,8 x 74,7 cm Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

Joan Miró Mambo 1978 Etching and aquatint 114,3 x 73,9 cm Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

Edvard Munch and the Sea

April 22, 2016, 12:50 pm

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Edvard Munch and the Sea, will be on view exclusively at Tacoma Art Museum April 9 through July 17, 2016. This is your opportunity to dive deep into Munch’s powerful works, rarely exhibited in the Pacific Northwest, with26of his exceptional prints and a key painting. TAM has brought these dynamic works to Tacoma from major institutions across the country, including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, deYoung Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and from private collectors.

While he’s best known for his iconic work The Scream, Munch explored a host of other subjects. This exhibition focuses on the sea as a profound element in his work. He used the sea as the subject of landscapes, as a backdrop for human interactions, and as a metaphor for love, longing, grief, joy, and other tumultuous emotions.

He sought to live and work by the sea, often painting outdoors in the Norwegian landscape. 

The Honorary Norwegian Consul Kim Nesselquist connected TAM’s curators with art collector Sally Epstein, who has amassed the largest private Munch print collection outside of the Munch Museumin Oslo, Norway.A core group of the prints in the exhibition are from her collection. Epstein’s persistent interest in Munch took her to his homeland multiple times as she sought to learn more about the artist and his work.Af ascinating person in her own right, Epstein has lectured on Munch at the National Gallery and other institutions. 

A leading artist of the expressionist and symbolist movements, Munch often used the sea to convey emotions and moods. His depictions of women are complex as well, revealing his experiences with relationships, loss and griefin scenes played out on rocky shores and sinuous coastlines. 

Munch was a person who experienced life intensely, who felt deeply, and his images reflect that. These are very strong images with many layers of meaning, Neutralia for example isn’t just two women happily picking apples in the springtime. It is about joy in nature, but it is more importantly a political statement. There is a boat in the background being overwhelmed by waves, a ship going down, which represents Europe. He’s telling us that he was not happy that Norway remained neutral in World War I, going on with daily life,while the rest of Europe was struggling.

In 2012, Munch’s famous 1895 pastel The Scream became the world’s most expensive work of art ever auctioned (at the time)at Sotheby’s. Although The Scream won’t be on view,the print Angst features the same setting –the Åsgårdstrand pier at sunset –and mask-like fraught faces. Both images are raw expressions of Munch’s lifelong battles with anxiety and loneliness. Several other prints in the exhibition include elements of The Scream, as Munch liked to work and rework the same motifs. 

TAM has also arranged to have on view

Andy Warhol’s 1984 screen print tribute The Scream(after Munch). 

Munch was a master printmaker, advancing new techniques and mastering all aspects of his craft.TAM has highlighted the Northwest’s passion for printmaking innumerous exhibitions and the Munch exhibition continues the museum’s interest in exploring the artistry of printwork. By his own estimations, the prolific Munch created some 30,000 impressions of his prints. This exhibition reflects the vast influences of Edvard Munch on printmakers and artists today.


Image Credits: 

Edvard Munch(1863-1944), Neutralia (Girls Picking Apples), 1915. Color lithograph, 22½ × 2013/16inches. Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester: Marion Stratton Gould Fund, 72.12. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Edvard Munch(1863-1944), Angst, 1896. Color lithograph, 16½ × 15⅛ inches. Epstein Family Collection, EFC061.0. Photo by Philip Charles.© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Edvard Munch(1863-1944), On the Waves of Love, 1896. Lithograph, 12¼× 16½ inches. Epstein Family Collection, EFC073.0. Photo by Mark Gulezian. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Summer Evening, 1895. Aquatint and drypoint, 9¾ × 12½ inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection, 1994, 1994.14.53. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Attraction II, 1896. Lithograph, 1911/16× 25⅜ inches (sheet). National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Epstein Family Collection, 2013, 2013.10.1. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

GAUGUIN’S WORLDS

April 23, 2016, 7:23 am

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EXHIBITION: 15.04. – 28.08.2016

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) cannot be ignored. Not in the realm of art history, nor at Glyptoteket, which is home to one of the world’s finest collections of the artist’s work. This spring’s special exhibition adds new layers to the story of this French artist, presenting his experimental explorations of ‘the primitive’.



Wide scope

Featuring more than seventy works spanning every media employed by the artist, the exhibition offers an overview of Gauguin’s wide-ranging life’s work while also focusing on particular highlights. The exhibition traces Gauguin’s unwavering endeavours to build and express his very own concept of ‘the primitive’; a concept that cuts across different cultures and geographical locations.

‘The primitive’

Gauguin’s stubborn pursuit of the primitive in the face of personal and financial difficulties was not fuelled by an interest in ethnographic matters, but sprang from an artistic vision. A vision that took on its own distinctive form across different cultures, ages and religions, making no concessions to established norms for artistic creativity and use of media. The exhibition explores the journey that led towards Gauguin’s personal, original artistic idiom. This includes the physical travels that took him to Denmark, Brittany, Arles, Martinique and Polynesia, but also the inner voyage where he constantly, his mind fuelled by countless different impressions and sources, invented and reinvented the primitive in imaginary worlds.

Gauguin’s prism

 Gauguin’s world of motifs and imagery draws on many sources of inspiration, but always relates to the primitive as a concept. As the exhibition shows, Gauguin’s take on ‘the primitive’ can be understood as something universal, something eternally rooted in human nature, but also as a carefully managed artistic brand that blends fiction and reality at every turn. Despite garnering only limited acclaim in his own day, Gauguin was very aware of tapping into his own era’s fascination with the ‘New’ world, even if he always captures that world through a deeply personal and complex prism.

A well-rounded collection

The exhibition demonstrates the huge potential inherent in Glyptotekets’ collection. Most of the works on view come from the museum’s own collection, supplemented by carefully selected loans – some major highlights, others curiosities – from other museums and private collections. With its clear narrative and themed presentations, the exhibition covers Gauguin’s work from his early years to his late production. It also documents his immense appetite for working with different media and materials. Here visitors will find paintings, prints, drawing, ceramics, woodcarvings and rarely-seen examples of Gauguin’s furniture and jewellery design.

This event is based on the exhibition “Gauguin – Tales from Paradise”, which Glyptoteket curated in the autumn of 2015 for MUDEC – Museo delle Culture in Milan.

Paul Gauguin
Hyrdepige fra Bretagne
Breton Girl  1889
Oil on canvas 71.5 x 90.5 cm
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

Paul Gauguin
Liggende tahitikvinder
Reclining Tahitian Women 1894
Oil on canvas 60 x 98 cm
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

Paul Gauguin
Tahitikvinde med en blomst
Tahitian Woman with a Flower 1891
70,5 x 46,5 cm
Olie på lærred/Oil on canvas
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

Paul Gauguin
Skøjteløbere i Frederiksberg Have
Skaters in Frederiksberg Gardens 1884
65 x 54 cm
Olie på lærred/Oil on canvas
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

Paul Gauguin
Portræthoved i uglaseret stentøj af kvinde fra Martinique med hovedtørklæde
Portrait-Head in unglazed Stoneware of Martinique Woman with Kerchief 1887-88
22,5 x 13 x 17,5 cm
Uglaseret stentøj, dekoreret med lervælling /Unglazed stoneware, decorated with slip
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

Paul Gauguin
Pape moe
Pape moe (Mysterious Water) 1894
81,5 x 62 x 5 cm
Egetræ, bemalet /Oak, painted
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

Paul Gauguin
Landskab fra Tahiti
Landscape from Tahiti 1893
49 x 54 cm
Olie på lærred /Oil on canvas
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

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Degas: A New Vision

April 23, 2016, 3:42 pm

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National Gallery of  Victoria  24 June  – 18 September 2016
 
In June 2016, an exhibition of one of the world’s most loved artists, Edgar Degas, will  open to the public. The  world - first exhibition Degas: A New Vision  will offer the most  significant international survey of Degas’ work in decades, presenting more than 200  works which showcase the artist’s talent in a new light; not only as a great master of  painting, but also as a master of drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photography. The National Gallery of Victoria and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will each stage this major retrospective, which has been developed by both institutions in association with Art Exhibition s Australia.   

 Rehearsal hall at the Opera, rue Le Peletier, 1872, by Edgar Degas. (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)

Degas: A New Visionwill provide audiences with a rare  experience to truly  be immersed in the creativity and originality of  his art, giving visitors a deeper and richer understanding of his brilliance.’ Degas: A New Vision  will be presented  thematically,  grouping together the subjects which Degas continually returned to throughou t his career, including not only his famous ballet scenes but also arresting portraits, the nude, horse - racing, the social world of Parisian nightlife, and  women at work and leisure. 

Edgar Degas The Arabesque 1877 oil and essence, pastel on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Lemoisne 418 (RF 4040) © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais /Patrice Schmidt

The exhibition will also explore the great technical, conceptual and expressive freedoms that  Degas achieved in his later years, and reveal his experiments with a range of mediums including sculpture and photography. This approach will emphasize Degas’ obsessive and highly creative working methods, and allow visitors to  enjoy the development of Degas’ art from its beginnings. 

Edgar Degas, The little fourteen-year-old dancer 1879–81, bronze with cotton skirt and satin ribbon, 99.0 cm (height), Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Assis Chateaubriand, Donated by Alberto José Alves, Alberto Alves Filho and Alcino Ribeiro de Lima (426 E)

Degas was fascinated by aspects of modern life  – voraciously painting Paris’ dance halls and cabarets, cafés, racetracks,  opera and ballet stages. He also s tudied the simple, everyday gestures of working women: milliners, dressmakers, and  laundresses. He was drawn to explore movement that was precise and disciplined, such as that of racehorses and ballet dancers, and absorbed a diverse range of influences from Japanese prints to Italian Mannerism.

Edgar Degas, The song rehearsal 1872–73 oil on canvas 81 x 64.9 cm Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington D.C

 BIOGRAPHY 

Edgar Degas was born in 1834 into a wealthy banking  family. Unlike many of his contemporaries, his family were  supportive of his artistic talent and desire to become an artist. Degas resisted being  labelled an ‘Impressionist’ yet  was at  the core of the movement’s most important manifestations. Classically trained, Degas initially aspired to be a painter of historical narratives. 

Edgar Degas, A cotton office in New Orleans 1873 oil on canvas 73 x 92 cm Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau Lemoisne 320, © RMN-Grand Palais / Michèle Bellot / Madeleine Coursaget

As he matured, however, he made the depiction of daily life the central focus of his art. He was  drawn primarily to the human figure engaged in movement and work, sketching on the spot then working up his finished  compositions indoors in his studio. 

Degas’ obsession with the theatre and ballet in particular enabled him to explore his fascination with artificial light, which set him apart from the other  Impressionists who preferred to work out - of - doors capturing the transient effects of natural daylight. Degas absorbed many diverse influences, from Japanese prints to Italian  Mannerism, and reinterpreted them in innovative ways. 

Degas obsessively revisited and experimented with his favourite  themes which saw him fashion varied and unusual vantage points and asymmetrical framing. His depictions of ballet  dancers alone number in the hundreds. Such endeavours helped him to achieve the innovative and distinctive style which  will be explored in Degas: A New Vision. 

Degas served in the Franco - Prussian War of 1870 – 71 and began to experience  eyesight deterioration by the late 1880s. He increasingly took up sculpture as his eyesight weakened. In his later years, he  w as preoccupied with the subject of women bathing unselfconsciously and developed an expressive use of colour and line  that may have arisen due to his deteriorating vision. 

Degas continued working to as late as 1912. He died five years later in  1917, at the age of eighty – three.

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THE OPEN-AIR STUDIO The Impressionists in Normandy

April 26, 2016, 11:51 am

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Musée Jacquemart-André 

18 March - 25 July 2016

This spring, the Musée Jacquemart-André is presenting an ensemble of some fifty or so prestigious artworks—from both private collections and major American and European museums—that retrace the history of Impressionism, from the forefathers of the movement to the Great Masters.

The 19th century saw the emergence of a new pictorial genre: ‘plein-air’ or outdoor landscape painting. This pictorial revolution, born in England, would spread to the continent in the 1820s and over the course of a century, Normandy would become the preferred destination of many avant-garde painters. The region’s stunning and diverse landscapes, coupled with the wealth of its architectural heritage, had much to please artists. 

Furthermore, the growing fashion for sea-bathing attracted many wealthy individuals and families who could easily access Normandy by either boat or stage-coach, and later by train. Its popularity was also increased due to its enviable location—halfway between London and Paris, the two art capitals of the period.

Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, British landscape artists such as Turner, Bonington, and Cotman travelled to Normandy, with their boxes of watercolours, while the French—Géricault, Delacroix, Isabey—made their way to London to discover the English school. 

From these exchanges, a French landscape school was born, with Corot and Huet at the helm. In their wake, another generation of painters would in turn explore the region (Delacroix, Riesener, Daubigny, Millet, Jongkind, Isabey, Troyon), inventing a new aesthetic. This artistic revolution truly began to take form at the beginning of the 1860s, the fruit of lively discussions and exchanges at the Saint-Siméon Farm in Honfleur on Normandy’s Flower Coast, increasingly popular with the crème de la crème of this new school of painting. These included Boudin, Monet and Jongkind—an inseparable trio—but also their friends: Courbet, Daubigny, Bazille, Whistler, and Cals...And of course, Baudelaire, who was the first to celebrate in 1859, the ‘meteorological beauties’ of Boudin’s paintings. 

Not far away, in the hedgerows and woodlands of the Normandy countryside, Degas painted his first horse races at Haras-du-Pin and Berthe Morisot took up landscape painting, while at Cherbourg, Manet would revolutionize seascapes. For several decades, Normandy would be the preferred outdoor or ‘plein-air’ studio of the Impressionists. Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Boudin, Morisot, Caillebotte, Gonzales, and Gauguin would all experiment with their art here in a constant quest for originality and innovation.

The aim of this exhibition is to evoke the decisive role played by Normandy in the emergence of the Impressionist movement, through exchanges between French and British landscape painters, the development of a school of nature and the encounters between artists at Saint-Siméon. From a historical to a geographic approach, the exhibition then shows how the Normandy landscape, especially the quality of its light, were critical in the attraction that the region had on the Great Impressionist Masters

For a long time, the history of Impressionism has been understood as having a relatively short chronology, beginning in 1863 with the Salon des Refusés and ending in 1886 with the 8thExposition Impressioniste. This approach assigned a crucial role to Paris and the Île-de-France region but very little to other areas of France and to foreign influences.

Research carried out over the past thirty or so years has led us to reconsider the history of the movement and to situate it within a longer time frame which puts the origins or roots of Impressionism at the beginning of the 1820s. This new approach also underlines the influence of the English School in the birth of a French Landscape School and assigns Normandy a decisive role in the emergence of the Impressionist movement.

Several factors may explain why Normandy was the birthplace of Impressionism 

• its geographical location, half-way between London and Paris, the two artistic epicentres of the time 

(Courbet, L’Embouchure de la Seine also known as Vue prise des hauteurs de Honfleur, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille).

• the region’s rich architectural heritage at a time when artists played an active role in its preservation and promotion 

(Corot, Jumièges, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton) ; 

in 1820 Isidore Taylor published his Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, with the first two volumes devoted to Normandy. In 1825, Victor Hugo published an essay on the preservation of French patrimonial monuments entitled Guerre aux démolisseurs.

• the fashion for sea-bathing, imported from England, which became popular in Dieppe circa 1820, before spreading along the Channel coastline.

• the beauty and diversity of the region’s landscapes, as well as the subtlety and versatility of the light, in an era when landscape painting became a genre in its own right and when painters began to leave their studios to paint nature as they saw it, outdoors and in natural light.

(Monet, La Charrette. Route sous la neige à Honfleur avec la ferme Saint-Siméon, Musée d’Orsay, Paris).

• ease of access by river and later by train. Railway lines between Paris and the Normandy coast were amongst the first to be created, facilitating the growing popularity of seaside resorts.

 William Turner (1775-1851) Lillebonne, 1823 Watercolour, gouache, brown and black ink13,4 x 18,5 cm Oxford, The Ashmolean Museum. Presented by John Ruskin, 1861© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

The Open-Air Studio The Impressionists in Normandy

The coastline was traditionally the preserve or domain of fishermen. This was where they unloaded their cargo or mended their nets, or where their wives would wash laundry or collect shellfish.

(Boudin, Marée basse à Trouville, pêcheurs de crevettes, Association Peindre en Normandie, Caen).

With the fashion for sea-bathing, the coastline was transformed into a beach, a place now shared between the workers of the sea and summer holidaymakers at seaside resorts.

(Monet, Sur les planches de Trouville, hôtel des Roches noires, collection particulière). 

On the one hand, there existed a working class that was increasingly sidelined, and on the other hand, an aristocracy and upper middle class who came to the Normandy coast to take advantage of the fresh air and sea-bathing, with a social life akin to the capital’s. Hence the creation of promenades (the famous wooden boardwalks in Trouville and Deauville); race tracks 

(Degas, Course de gentlemen. Avant le départ, Musée d’Orsay, Paris); 

bandstands where concerts were held; casinos for betting, and attending operettas or plays. Soon tennis clubs based on the English model would open up all along the coast. All of these venues were places of conviviality and a means of social segregation.

Under the Second Empire (1852 – 1870), a period of industrialization during which many families amassed large fortunes, the concept of summer holidays became hugely popular. New seaside resorts sprung up all along the Flower Coast (Côte Fleurie) between Deauville and Cabourg. The emergence of a ‘lifestyle of leisure’ chronicled by the painters of the time was a godsend to many artists who had previously struggled to sell their ‘seascapes’ and who could now command high prices for their ‘beach scenes’. This genre, invented by Eugène Boudin in 1862 would be imitated by all of his Impressionist friends 

(Boudin, Crinolines à Trouville, collection particulière).

Claude Monet(1840-1926) Sur les planches de Trouville, hôtel des Roches noires, détail 1870 50 x 70 cm, oil on canvas Collection particulière © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images

Rooms 2 & 3

Beaches, leisure and society life

The coastline of the English Channel, with its tumultuous tides and impressive storms, had long inspired a romantic vision of the sea, as skilfully depicted in the work of both Eugène Isabey and William Turner. However as seaside resorts grew, painters devoted themselves to a new vision of their marine environment. They became less interested in the sea itself and more in its natural and human environment 

(Pissarro, Avant-port de Dieppe, après-midi, soleil, Château-Musée de Dieppe). 

With its ports teeming with boats, stretching from Tréport to the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel, and its sheer cliffs, where the whiteness of the chalk contrasted with the verdant grass covering, the Channel coastline offered an infinite variety of subjects and motifs to be painted 

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) Le Port de Dieppe, around 1885 60,2 x 72,3 cm, oil on canvas Manchester, Royaume-Uni, Manchester City Galleries© Manchester Art Gallery, UK / Bridgeman Images

(Gauguin,Le Port de Dieppe, Manchester City Galleries).

Dieppe, which was the first seaside resort to be created in the 1820s, attracted many of the leading figures of this new style of painting (Monet, Renoir, Degas, Boudin, Pissarro and Gauguin) following the War of 1870, as well as artists Blanche, Gervex and Helleu, referred to as ‘society painters’ (one should of course pay little heed to such artificial classifications). It also attracted other unclassifiable artists like Eva Gonzalès, Manet’s only student and last but not least, a large number of Anglo-Saxon artists

room 4

From ports to cliffs – Dieppe

For artists in search of subject matter to paint, Normandy’s Alabaster Coast provided plenty of examples of stunning natural architecture: immense panoramas, a rugged coastline of estuaries and valleys, and huge white chalk cliffs, eroded by the sea and the wind. Maupassant would compare the natural cliff arches of Manneport d’Étretat to an ‘enormous cave through which a ship with all its sails unfurled could pass’ and the Porte d’Amont to ‘the huge figure of an elephant’s trunk plunged into the waves’.But above all what Courbet, Monet, Renoir and Berthe Morisot sought in this section of the coast were the incredible chromatic variations of the sea and the sky, connected to the ebb and flow of the tides, the passing wind and the clouds, and the sea spray. These continuous atmospheric changes were for them a powerful stimulus to work quickly, without getting too bogged down in detail, so as to be able to render the smallest nuances in the light 

(Monet, Falaises à Varengeville also known as Petit-Ailly, Varengeville, plein soleil, Musée d’art moderne André Malraux, Le Havre).

The central place given to the treatment of the light would bring Courbet, in 1869, to experiment with the process of making series of paintings, depicting for example the cliffs at Étretat in different light 

(Courbet, La Falaise d’Étretat, Van der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal). 

In the 1880s and 1890s, Monet would also use this process, painting numerous depictions of cliffs, from those at Petites-Dalles in Fécamp to ones at Étretat, Varengeville, Porville and Dieppe 

Claude Monet Etretat, la porte d’Aval, bateaux de pêche sortant du port, around1885 60 x 80 cm, oil on canvas Dijon, Musée des Beaux-Arts© Musée des beaux-arts de Dijon Photo François Jay

room 5

From ports to cliffs - The Alabaster Coast

Towards the middle of the century a new means of transport appeared: the train, which would completely revolutionize travel. Railway lines between Paris and the Normandy coast were amongst the first to be created. The Paris-Rouen line was opened in 1843, extended to Le Havre in 1847, to Dieppe the following year, and in 1856 to Fécamp. In the 1860s, trains stopped at Deauville-Trouville and all the other seaside resorts along the Flower Coast. In their advertising campaigns, railroad companies highlighted the fact that travellers could reach the coast in two to three hours. There were even special trains running for certain events, such as the naval battles of the American Civil War fought off the coast of Cherbourg, attended by Manet in 1864.The train was not only used by Parisian artists (Morisot, Degas, Manet, Caillebotte, etc.) seeking to leave the capital and to soak up the fresh sea air at the coast in their quest for new subject matter to paint. It was also used by painters from Normandy (Boudin, Monet, Dubourg, Lépine, Lebourg, etc.) who travelled to Paris to exhibit their work at the Salon, visiting exhibitions, meeting with fellow artists, as well as art dealers and collectors during their stay.

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) La Plage des Petites-Dalles, around 1873 24,1 x 50,2 cm, oil on canvas Richmond, Virginie, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Collection of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts/Katherine Wetzel

room 6

The railroad

Claude Monet(1840-1926) Barques de pêche, Honfleur, around 1866 46 x 55 cm, oil on canvas Collection particulière© Collection particulière

Like the Alabaster Coast, the ports and coastline stretching from Le Havre to Cherbourg would equally captivate Boudin, Monet and Pissarro, as well as Berthe Morisot, Degas, Signac, Seurat and many other landscape artists. Amongst them, was a practically unknown painter: Charles Pécrus, converted by his friend Boudin to the art of landscape painting and whose very lively port scenes would owe a lot to Boudin’s influence (Pécrus, Le Port de Honfleur, Association Peindre en Normandie, Caen).Towards the end of his life, Boudin would adopt an even brighter palette and an even bolder and freer brushstroke. Pursuing his passionate quest for light, he would focus on the shimmering reflections of the water, the vibrations of the air, and the clouds as they raced across an enormous sky  (Entrée du port du Havre par grand vent, Collection particulière, Courtesy Galerie de la Présidence, Paris).

This sensitive, delicate art is completely removed from the vigorous representations—heralding the Expressionist and Fauvist movements—which Monet, at the beginning of his career, would produce of fishing boats moored in the port of Honfleur (Barques de pêche, collection particulière, et Bateaux de pêche, Muzeul National de Arta al României, Bucarest). 

To capture the comings and goings of the boats and the strollers, Pissarro and Berthe Morisot preferred to make use of slightly plunging perspectives, from an elevated viewing point. Berthe was especially interested in the effects of perspective, which she skilfully mastered (L’Entrée du port de Cherbourg, Yale University Art Gallery), while Pissarro attempted to capture the passage of time and atmospheric variations, delivering a superb series of port views of Le Havre which form part of his artistic legacy (L’Anse des Pilotes et le briselames est, Le Havre, après-midi, temps ensoleillé, Musée d’art moderne André Malraux, Le Havre).

room 7

From ports to cliffs - From Le Havre to Cherbourg

If throughout the course of the 19thcentury, Rouen attracted so many landscape painters from Turner, Boninton and Corot to Monet and Pissarro, it was because of the town’s remarkable architectural heritage. Rouen was celebrated by Victor Hugo as the ‘city of a hundred bell towers’ and was immortalized by Monet (La Rue de l’Épicerie à Rouen, Collection particulière, courtesy of the Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny). The destination was made even more attractive due to its topography, which Flaubert compared to an amphitheatre. Nestled between the river and the surrounding hills, the town not only offered ‘the most splendid landscape that a painter could ever dream of’ (Pissarro) but above all, the effects of fog and rain and the constant atmospheric variations proved to be a source of great pleasure to all those in search of the ephemeral. The liveliness of the port and its industrial landscape, where the tall factory chimneys on the left bank echoed the bell towers on the right bank, would draw Pissarro to make this enthusiastic comparison: ‘It’s as beautiful as Venice’ (Le Pont Boieldieu, Rouen, effet de pluie, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, room 7). Many of the Impressionist masters (Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Gauguin) would stay in Rouen. This, coupled with the presence of several important collectors (François Depeaux, Léon Monet, Eugène Murer) would favour the birth of a Rouen School to cite the expression of art critic, Arsène Alexandre. Monet in Giverny Claude Monet lived for 43 years in his house in Giverny from 1883 to 1926. Passionate about gardening, he designed his gardens as veritable paintings. In 1893, he put in a pond which he had covered with lily pads and created a Japanese-style garden ‘for the pleasure of the eye but also with the intention of providing subject matter for painting’. Until his death, his garden proved to be his most fertile source of inspiration. Indeed, he once said : ‘My most beautiful masterpiece is my garden’.

Monet began painting waterlilies in 1895 and his Japanese bridge would be the object of some fifty canvases. Taking out the horizon and the sky, he narrowed his focus on the bridge, the water and the reflections. From 1918 onwards, the pictorial elements or details would give way to an explosion of colours, with the density of the brushstrokes bordering on abstraction. The water and the sky seem to merge and under these fireworks of colour, the bridge appears little by little, providing a landmark or a point of reference to the composition.

As Daniel Wildenstein, author of the catalogue raisonné of the artist, would say, the exceptional series of the Pont japonaisrepresents the culmination of Monet’s oeuvre where the vibration of the colour is enough to evoke a world of sensation and powerful emotion

Room 8

Along the Seine, from Rouen to Giverny

If throughout the course of the 19^th century, Rouen attracted so many landscape painters from Turner, Boninton and Corot to Monet and Pissarro, it was because of the town’s remarkable architectural heritage. Rouen was celebrated by Victor Hugo as the ‘city of a hundred bell towers’ and was immortalized by Monet (La Rue de l’Épicerie à Rouen, Collection particulière, courtesy of the Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny). The destination was made even more attractive due to its topography, which Flaubert compared to an amphitheatre. Nestled between the river and the surrounding hills, the town not only offered ‘the most splendid landscape that a painter could ever dream of’ (Pissarro) but above all, the effects of fog and rain and the constant atmospheric variations proved to be a source of great pleasure to all those in search of the ephemeral. The liveliness of the port and its industrial landscape, where the tall factory chimneys on the left bank echoed the bell towers on the right bank, would draw Pissarro to make this enthusiastic comparison: ‘It’s as beautiful as Venice’ (Le Pont Boieldieu, Rouen, effet de pluie, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, room 7). Many of the Impressionist masters (Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Gauguin) would stay in Rouen. This, coupled with the presence of several important collectors (François Depeaux, Léon Monet, Eugène Murer) would favour the birth of a Rouen School to cite the expression of art critic, Arsène Alexandre. 

Monet in Giverny 

Claude Monet lived for 43 years in his house in Giverny from 1883 to 1926. Passionate about gardening, he designed his gardens as veritable paintings. In 1893, he put in a pond that he had covered with lily pads and created a Japanese-style garden ‘for the pleasure of the eye but also with the intention of providing subject matter for painting’. Until his death, his garden proved to be his most fertile source of inspiration. Indeed, he once said: ‘My most beautiful masterpiece is my garden’. Monet began painting waterlilies in 1895 and his Japanese bridge would be the object of some fifty canvases. Taking out the horizon and the sky, he narrowed his focus on the bridge, the water and the reflections. From 1918 onwards, the pictorial elements or details would give way to an explosion of colours, with the density of the brushstrokes bordering on abstraction. The water and the sky seem to merge and under these fireworks of colour, the bridge appears little by little, providing a landmark or a point of reference to the composition.

As Daniel Wildenstein, author of the catalogue raisonné of the artist, would say, the exceptional series of the Pont japonais represents the culmination of Monet’s oeuvre where the vibration of the colour is enough to evoke a world of sensation and powerful emotion(Pont japonais, Collection Larock-Granoff, Paris).

Louis Anquetin (1861-1932) La Seine près de Rouen, 1892 79 x 69 cm, oil on canvas Collection particulière© Collection particulière / Tom Haartsen

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) Le Pont Boieldieu, Rouen, effet de pluie,1896 73 x 92 cm, oil on canvasKarlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle© BPK, Berlin, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Image Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen

COMPLETE CREDITS

RENOIR Pierre-Auguste  (1841-1919)  La Côte près de Dieppe - 1879 - Oil on canvas - 49,5 x 60,6 cm Montclair, New Jersey, Kasser Mochary Foundation © Photo Tim Fuller © Kasser Mochary Foundation, Montclair, NJ 

 CAILLEBOTTE Gustave  (1848-1894)  Régates en mer à Trouville - 1884 - 60,3 x 73 cm - Oil on canvas - Toledo, Ohio. Lent by the Toledo  Museum of Art. Gift of The Wildenstein Foundation © Photograph Incorporated, Toledo 

MONET Claude (1840-1926)  Etretat, la porte d’Aval, bateaux de pêche sortant du port -  around 1885 - Oil on canvas - 60 x 80 cm - Dijon,  Musée des Beaux-Arts © Musée des beaux-arts de Dijon. Photo François Jay 

RENOIR Pierre-Auguste  (1841-1919)  La Cueillette des moules - 1879 - Oil on canvas - 54,2 x 65,4 cm - Washington D.C., National Gallery  of Art. Gift of Margaret Seligman Lewisohn in memory of her husband, Sam A. Lewisohn © Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

GAUGUIN Paul  (1848-1903) Le Port de Dieppe - around 1885 - Oil on canvas - 60,2 x 72,3 cm - Manchester, Royaume-Uni, Manchester  City Galleries © Manchester Art Gallery, UK / Bridgeman Images


 SIGNAC Paul  (1863-1935)  Port-en-Bessin. Le Catel - around 1884 - Oil on canvas - 45 x 65 - Collection particulière © Collection particulière 

 CALS Félix  (1810-1880)  Honfleur, Saint-Siméon -1879 - Oil on canvas - 35 x 54 cm - Caen, Association Peindre en Normandie  © Association Peindre en Normandie

BOUDIN Eugène-Louis  (1824-1898)  Scène de plage à Trouville  - 1869 - 28 x 40 cm - Oil on panel - Collection particulière. Courtesy Galerie  de la Présidence, Paris © Galerie de la Présidence, Paris 

MONET Claude (1840-1926)  Camille sur la plage à Trouville  - 1870 - Oil on canvas - 38,1 x 46,4 cm - New Haven, Yale University Art  Gallery, Collection of Mr. and Mrs John Hay Whitney, B.A. 1926, Hon. 1956 © Photo courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery 



PISSARRO Camille  (1830-1903)  Avant-port de Dieppe, après-midi, soleil - 1902 - Oil on canvas - 53,5 x 65 cm Dieppe, Château-Musée © Ville de Dieppe - B. Legros 

MONET Claude  (1840-1926) L’Église de Varengeville à contre-jour - 1882 - Oil on canvas - 65 x 81,3 cm - Birmingham, The Henry  Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham © The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham 

BONINGTON Richard Parkes (1802-1828) Plage de sable en Normandie - around 1825-1826 - Oil on canvas - 38,7 × 54 cm - Trustees  of the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery Bedford (The Higgins Bedford) © Trustees of the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford  

  MONET Claude (1840-1926)  Falaises à Varengeville  also known as  Petit-Ailly, Varengeville, plein soleil  - 1897 - Oil on canvas - 64 x 91,5  cm - Le Havre, Musée d’art moderne André Malraux © MuMa Le Havre / Charles Maslard 2016 

BOUDIN Eugène-Louis (1824-1898)  Entrée du port du Havre par grand vent - 1889 - Oil on canvas - 46 x 55 cm - Collection particulière.  Courtesy Galerie de la Présidence, Paris © Galerie de la Présidence 

COURBET Gustave ( 1819-1877)  La Plage à Trouville - around 1865 - Oil on canvas - 34 x 41 cm - Caen, Association Peindre en  Normandie © Association Peindre en Normandie 

MONET Claude  (1840-1926)  La Rue de l’Épicerie à Rouen  - around 1892 - Oil on canvas - 93 x 53 cm - Collection particulière. Courtesy  Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny (Suisse) © Claude Mercier photographe 

ANQUETIN Louis (1861-1932)  La Seine près de Rouen - 1892 - Oil on canvas - 79 x 69 cm - Collection particulière © Collection  particulière / Tom Haartsen

MORISOT Berthe  (1841-1895) La Plage des Petites-Dalles -  around 1873 - Oil on canvas - 24,1 x 50,2 cm Richmond, Virginie, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Collection 
 

Turner's Whaling Pictures at The Met May 10–August 7, 2016

April 27, 2016, 12:13 pm

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J.M.W. Turner's Quartet of Whaling Paintings United for First Time in New Exhibition

Turner's Whaling Pictures, opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 10, will be the first exhibition to unite the series of four whaling scenes painted by the great British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) near the end of his career. The quartet of paintings—comprising

Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775-1851). Whalers, ca. 1845. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1896 

The Met's Whalers (ca. 1845)  and its three companions from Tate Britain—were among the last seascapes exhibited by Turner, for whom marine subjects were a creative mainstay. The topic of whaling resonated with some of Turner's favorite themes: modern maritime labor, Britain's global naval empire, human ambition and frailty, and the awe-inspiring power of nature termed the Sublime.

Shown in pairs at the Royal Academy in London in 1845 and 1846, the whaling canvases confounded critics with their "tumultuous surges" of brushwork and color, which threatened to obscure the motif; yet the pictures earned admiration for the brilliance and vitality of their overall effects.

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851

Whalers

Date Exhibited 1845

 Oil paint on canvas

From the Tate: This is the first of two whaling subjects Turner exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1845 (followed by two more in 1846), probably painted in the hope of selling them to his patron Elhanan Bicknell, an investor in the whaling industry.

The four pictures were inspired by Thomas Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839), with this painting based on an account of the pursuit of a whale in the North Pacific. At the right the creature has been harpooned and is bleeding, while men in three boats stand with their arms raised to strike again.

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851

Whalers (Boiling Blubber) Entangled in Flaw Ice, Endeavouring to Extricate Themselves

Date Exhibited 1846

Oil paint on canvas

From the Tate: The last of Turner’s whaling paintings shows the boiling of blubber for processing into oil. The creature laid out on the ice at the right of the picture may have been based on a whale caught in the Thames in 1842, as well as on images by other artists.

As the title makes clear, the success of the whalers is threatened by the frozen water. A reference to this incident is made in the companion to this painting which shows the Erebus, a boat the Admiralty had promised, but failed, to send to rescue ships trapped in the ice. 

Turner's Whaling Pictures will offer a unique opportunity to consider the paintings as an ensemble and to contemplate their legacy, including their possible impact on Herman Melville's epic novel Moby–Dick, published months before Turner's death in 1851. It is not certain that Melville saw the paintings when he first visited London in 1849, but he was unquestionably aware of them. Aspects of Melville's novel are strikingly evocative of Turner's style.

In addition to the four paintings that will be on view, a selection of related watercolors, prints, books, and wall quotes will also be displayed and will offer insight into Turner's paintings and their possible relationship with Melville's text.

A whaling harpoon, on loan from the South Street Seaport Museum, and whale oil lamps from The Met's collection will also be on view. This focus exhibition will allow viewers to engage closely with the output of these two great 19th–century artists, and to assess for themselves whether the British painter inspired one of the crowning achievements of American literature.

Turner's Whaling Pictures is organized by Alison Hokanson, Assistant Curator, and Katharine Baetjer, Curator, both of the Metropolitan Museum's Department of European Paintings.



Image: Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775-1851). Whalers, ca. 1845. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1896

SOTHEBY’S AUCTION OF MASTER PAINTINGS IN NEW YORK ON 26 MAY: Gabriel Metsu

April 29, 2016, 3:02 pm

≫ Next: Stuart Davis: In Full Swing

≪ Previous: Turner's Whaling Pictures at The Met May 10–August 7, 2016

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Sotheby’s New   York   auction of Master  Paintings  on  26  May  2016  will feature one   of   the   finest Dutch   genre   scenes   remaining in private hands:

Gabriel Metsu’s An Officer Paying Court toaYoungWoman (estimate   $6–8   million).

This refinedinteriorstandsasalastingachievement of painting in the Golden Age of the mid-17th century, when Metsuandhispeers  –  including  Johannes  Vermeer,  Gerrit  Dou  and  Frans  van  Mieris  –  were  creating  vivid  scenes of everyday life. The work is further distinguished by the many historical labels on its reverse, which tell its fascinating journey through one of the most momentousperiods in recent history. 

The picture entered  the  Viennese Rothschild  family’s  legendary collection  by  1866,  and  descended in the family for decades. The contents of the family’s palace in Vienna were targeted and seized by Nazi authorities in 1938, and the collection – including the Metsu – was removed to the central depot of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The RothschildMetsu was  one  of  the  masterpieces  selected  for  the  grandiose  museum  that  Hitler planned  to  construct  in  Linz.  When this  treasure  trove  was in  danger  of Allied  bombing,  the  Metsu  and some 6,500  other  paintings  –  including Jan  van  Eyck’s Ghent  Altarpiece  –  were moved  for  safekeeping  to  the  salt  mines  in  Altausee.   

 The Allied  Forces’  celebrated  Monuments  Men  later recovered these works, thwarting a plan by the Nazi district leader to destroy the mines in response to Hitler’s   Nero   Decree.   After   having   been   inventoried,   photographed   and   identified   by   the   Monuments  Men  as  the  property  of  the  Rothschild  family,  the present  picture  was  returned  to  Vienna in November 1945. At  this  time,  the  Baroness  von  Rothschild  was  determined  to  recover  her  collections  and  export  them  to  her  new  home  in  the  United  States.  She  was  granted  export  licenses  for  the  bulk  of  the works, but  only  on  the condition that she donate  a  number  of  her  most  important  pieces to  the  Austrian  state.  In  1948,  some  250  highlights  from  the  family collection  entered  the  inventories of Viennese  museums,  with  The  Rothschild  Metsu  returning  to  the Kunsthistorisches  Museum  –  the very museum where it had previously been held after its original seizure from the family palace.

Under  the  restitution  laws  introduced  in  Austria  in  1998,   the  Rothschild  family  was  able  to  reclaim  the  paintings  they  had  unwillingly  donated  in  1948.  And  so  it  was  that  The Rothschild  Metsu  was returned to the family, and sold at auction in 1999 to the present owner.

Christopher Apostle, Head of Sotheby’s Old Master Paintings Department in New York, said:“Gabriel Metsu ranks as one of the most important painters of his day, and An Officer Paying Court to a Young Womanis both  a  beautiful  and  quintessential example  of  his  best work.  The  painting  represents  a  near  perfect  distillation  of  the  class  Golden  Age  genre  scene,  containing  many  of  the  hallmarks  of  this category: two elegant people dressed in rich fabrics, a dog – representing fidelity, or in this case a lack thereof – jugs and wine glasses, all set in a typical Dutch interior space. No finer work by the artist  has  ever  been  offered  at  auction,  making  our  May  sale  a  rare  opportunity  for  collectors  to acquire such a masterpiece.”

Painted circa 1658-60, An Officer Paying Court to a Young Woman is a testament to the time in which time  Metsu  was  at  the  peak  of  his  artistic  powers  and  commercial  popularity.  Having  begun  his  career  at  the  age  of  14  in  his  native  Leiden,  he  soon  established  himself  as  a  master  in  his  field  and  became a founding member of the painter’s guild in 1648. His early technique was influenced greatly by  Gerrit  Dou,  whose  transformational  style  ushered  in  a  taste  for  small  scale,  minutely-detailed pictures featuring an excess of genre subjects.

Once  Metsu   moved   to   Amsterdam   in   1654,   he   found   himself   gravitating   towards   portraying   elegantly-dressed  upper  class  subjects,  shifting  away  from  large-scale  historical,  allegorical  and  religious  subjects  –  at  the  time  dominated  by  Rembrandt  and  his  followers.  In  Amsterdam,  Metsu  discovered  a  rapidly  expanding  market  for  this  underrepresented  collecting  category,  and  was  able  to carve out his niche as the preeminent genre painter. 

An  OfficerPayingCourttoaYoung  Woman is  a  quintessential  example  of  the  artist’s  unique  style,  drawn from the very best elements of Dutch genre painting. Set in a quiet moment inside of a tavern, the painting depicts a silent exchange between an elegantly dressed man and woman. Of particular beauty are the figure’s luxurious costumes, which mirror Metsu’s meticulous application of paint to mimic the play of light. 


Sotheby's 2009

Gabriel Metsu A WOMAN SELLING GAME FROM A STALL
Estimate   1,200,000 — 1,800,000  GBP
 LOT SOLD. 1,161,250 GBP

Stuart Davis: In Full Swing

April 30, 2016, 7:35 am

≫ Next: Abstract Expressionism at the Royal Academy of Arts, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

≪ Previous: SOTHEBY’S AUCTION OF MASTER PAINTINGS IN NEW YORK ON 26 MAY: Gabriel Metsu

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Whitney Museum of American Art June 10 through September 25, 2016

National Gallery of Art from November 20, 2016 through March 5, 2017

De Young Museum in San Francisco from April 8 through August 6, 2017

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, from September 16, 2017 through January 8, 2018.

Stuart Davis: In Full Swing features 100 artworks by an artist whose formal brilliance and complexity captured the energy of mass culture and modern life. The exhibition is unusual in its focus on Davis’s mature work, from his paintings of consumer products of the early 1920s to the work left on his easel at his death in 1964, and in exploring Davis’s habit of using preexisting motifs as springboards for new compositions. The exhibition departs in significant ways from earlier presentations of the artist’s work. The exhibition omits Davis’s decade of apprenticeship to European modernism (following his introduction to it at the 1913 Armory Show) in favor of the series of breakthroughs he made beginning in 1921 with his paintings of tobacco packages and household products, and continuing into his last two decades in which he employed abstract shapes, brilliant color, and words to evoke the ebullience of popular culture.

“Stuart Davis has been called one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century and the best American artist of his generation, his art hailed as a precursor of the rival styles of pop and geometric color abstraction,” remarks Barbara Haskell. “Faced with the choice early in his career between realism and pure abstraction, he invented a vocabulary that harnessed the grammar of abstraction to the speed and simultaneity of modern America. By merging the bold, hard-edged style of advertising with the conventions of avant-garde painting, he created an art endowed with the vitality and dynamic rhythms that he saw as uniquely modern and American. In the process, Davis achieved a rare synthesis: an art that is resolutely abstract yet at the same time exudes the spirit of popular culture.”

Co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.,

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Odol, 1924. Oil on cardboard, 24 x 18 in. (60.9 x 45.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mary Sisler Bequest (by exchange) and purchase, 1997. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Percolator, 1927. Oil on canvas, 36 x 29 in. (91.4 x 73.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1956. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), New York Mural, 1932. Oil on canvas, 84 x 48 in. (213.4 x 122 cm). Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; purchase, R. H. Norton Trust. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Visa, 1951. Oil on canvas, 40 x 52 in. (101.6 x 132.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of Mrs. Gertrud A. Mellon, 1953. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

 

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Colonial Cubism, 1954. Oil on canvas, 45 1/8 x 60 1/4 in. (114.6 x 153 cm). Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1955. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

 

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Fin, 1962–64. Casein and masking tape on canvas, 53 7/8 x 39 3/4 in. (136.8 x 101 cm). Private collection. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Owh! in San Pao, 1951. Oil on canvas, 52 3/16 × 42 in. (132.6 × 106.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 52.2. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

 

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Town Square, c. 1929. Watercolor, gouache, ink, and pencil on paper, 15 1/2 x 22 7/8 in. (39.4 x 58.1 cm). The Newark Museum; purchase 1930, The General Fund. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Salt Shaker, 1931. Oil on canvas, 49 7/8 x 32 in. (126.7 x 81.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of Edith Gregor Halpert, 1954. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

 

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Tropes de Teens, 1956. Oil on canvas, 45 1/4 x 60 1/4 in. (114.8 x 153 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph by Cathy Carver

 

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), The Paris Bit, 1959. Oil on canvas, 46 1/8 × 60 1/16 in. (117.2 × 152.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art 59.38. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

 

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Place Pasdeloup, 1928. Oil on canvas, 36 3/8 × 29 in. (92.4 × 73.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney 31.170. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

 

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Report from Rockport, 1940. Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in. (61 x 76.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection, bequest of Edith Abrahamson Lowenthal, 1991. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

  

 

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Semé, 1953. Oil on canvas, 52 x 40 in. (132 x 101.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art; George A. Hearn Fund, 1953. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

 

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Swing Landscape, 1938. Oil on canvas, 86 3/4 x 173 1/8 in. (220.3 x 400 cm). Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington; museum purchase with funds from the Henry Radford Hope Fund. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

 
 

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), American Painting, 1932/42–54. Oil on canvas, 40 x 50 1/4 in. (101.6 x 127.7 cm). Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha; on extended loan from the University of Nebraska at Omaha Collection. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

 

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Egg Beater No. 2, 1928. Oil on canvas, 29 1/4 x 36 1/4 in. (74.3 x 92.1 cm). Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Lucky Strike, 1921. Oil on canvas, 33 1/4 x 18 in. (84.5 x 45.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of the American Tobacco Company, Inc., 1951. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY