Electric Paris - Bruce Museum

May 23, 2016, 11:48 am

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May 14, 2016 - September 4, 2016

Paris had been known as the City of Light long before the widespread use of gaslight and electricity.  The name arose during the Enlightenment, when philosophers made Paris a center of ideas and of metaphorical illumination.  By the mid-nineteenth century, the epithet became associated with the city’s adoption of artificial lighting: in the 1840s and 1850s, gas lamps were first installed, while electric versions began to proliferate by the end of the 1870s.  Even as rivals, including Berlin, London, New York, and Chicago, increased the quantity of light in their rapidly electrified cities, Paris managed to maintain its reputation because of the beauty of its illuminations.  Light remained and remains to this day a key signature of the French capital. 

Alfred Maurer (American, 1868-1932) Nocturne, Paris, n.d.
Oil on board, 10 1/4 x 13 3/4 in.
Avery Galleries, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
Courtesy of Avery Galleries

Jean-Louis Forain (French, 1852-1931)
Dancer in Her Dressing Room, c. 1890
Oil on panel, 10 1/2 x 13 3/16 in.
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, 1955.738
Image © Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (photo by Michael Agee)

Alexandre Lunois (French, 1863-1916)
Le Magasin de Nouveautés (L’Exposition du “Bon Marché”), 1903
Color lithograph on wove paper, image: 18 1/8 x 21 1/16 in.
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, 1990.14
Image © Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (photo by Michael Agee)

John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925)
In the Luxembourg Gardens, 1879
Oil on canvas, 25 7/8 x 36 3/8 in.
Philadelphia Museum of Art: John G. Johnson Collection, 1917, Cat. 1080
Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Organized thematically into four sections––Nocturnes, Lamplit Interiors, Street Light, In and Out of the Spotlight––Electric Paris explores the ways in which artists responded to older oil and gas lamps and the newer electric lighting that began to supplant them around the turn of the twentieth century.  While artificially illuminated public spaces and private interiors appear frequently in works of art and popular depictions of contemporary life during this period, the different types of lighting that animate such spaces––and their distinctive visual properties––have not been considered in detail. 
Electric Paris will feature approximately 50 works––paintings, prints, photographs, and drawings––by such artists as Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Charles Marville, Jean Béraud, James Tissot, Childe Hassam, Charles Courtney Curran, Alfred Maurer, and Maurice Prendergast, among others.  

Theodore Earl Butler (American, 1860 - 1936 ) Place de Rome at Night, 1905 Oil on canvas ,  23 1/2 x  28 3/4 in. Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection Photography ©Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago 

Willard Metcalf (American, 1858 - 1925 ) Au Café, 1888 Oil on panel,  19 11/16 x  12 1/4 in. Terra Foundation for American Art,  Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.10 Photography ©Terra Foundation  for American Art, Chicago 
 
Electric Paris at the Bruce Museum is curated by Margarita Karasoulas; it is an expanded version of an exhibition first organized by the Clark Art Institute in 2013, curated by S. Hollis Clayson, who is exhibition advisor to this exhibition.

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Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms

May 23, 2016, 12:10 pm

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Tate Liverpool
18 May – 18 September 2016

Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (7 October 2016 – 8 January 2017)

Tate Liverpool presents the largest exhibition ever staged in the north of England of one of Britain’s greatest modern painters. Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms will be the first dedicated exhibition to survey an underexplored yet significant element of Bacon’s work.

Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992), the Irish-born British figurative artist, is considered a major figure of 20th-century art. Many of his iconic works feature an architectural, ghost-like framing device around his subjects. Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms will feature approximately 30 paintings alongside a group of rarely seen drawings and documents including some of Bacon’s most powerful works, surveying the variety of Bacon’s compositions united by this common motif.

An element introduced by the artist in the 1930s, Bacon used a barely visible cubic or elliptic cage around the figures depicted to create his dramatic compositions. It is these imaginary chambers that emphasise the isolation of the represented figures and bring attention to their psychological condition; the act of placing the sitters in ‘invisible rooms’ guides the focus of attention towards the complex human emotions that are felt but can’t be seen.

Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms traces the development of this architectural structure throughout his career; from the first indications of room-spaces in early works including 

 

Francis Bacon, Crucifixion 1933
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2016. Image courtesy Murderme Collection. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

Crucifixion 1933 (Murderme) 

 

Francis Bacon, 1909-1992
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion c.1944
Oil paint on 3 boards
Each: 940 x 737 mm
© Tate

and Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion c. 1944 (Tate); 

the 1950s, including Man in Blue IV 1954 (mumok, Austria) 

 Francis Bacon, Chimpanzee, 1955, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015

and Chimpanzee 1955 (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart); 

through to the 1980s, Untitled (Kneeling Figure) c. 1982 (Private Collection).

The exhibition demonstrates the ongoing development of the motif, which Bacon tested in different ways from its inception. A period of experimentation on paper in the late 1950s and early 1960s gave way to a greater spatial complexity in the late 1960s, 70s and 80s, where the cubic cages were transformed into theatrical spaces, demonstrated in 1967’s  

 

Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden).

Taking inspiration from a seminal essay by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation 1981, the exhibition highlights the role of Bacon’s approach to space, which Deleuze interpreted as one of the defining forces of his work.

Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms is curated by Kasia Redzisz, Senior Curator and Lauren Barnes, Assistant Curator, Tate Liverpool with Ina Conzen, Curator and Deputy Director, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Organised by Tate Liverpool in collaboration with Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. 

 

 

Francis Bacon, From Muybridge ‘The human Figure in Motion: Woman Emptying a Bowl of Water/Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours’ 1965
Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2016.

Francis Bacon, 1909-1992
Study for the Nurse from the Battleship Potemkin 1957
Oil paint on canvas
1980 x 1420 mm
© Estate of Francis Bacon. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2016. © Städel Museum - U. Edelmann – ARTOTHEK

Three Figures and Portrait 1975
Oil paint and pastel on canvas
1981 x 1473 mm
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2016. Image courtesy Tate. 

Francis Bacon, 1909-1992
Study for Portrait on Folding Bed 1963
Oil paint on canvas
1981 x 1473 mm
© Estate of Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, 1909-1992
Seated Figure 1961
Oil paint on canvas
1651 x 1422 mm
© Estate of Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, 1909-1992
Study for a Portrait 1952
Oil paint and sand on canvas
661 x 561 x 18 mm
© Estate of Francis Bacon. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2016

 

London Calling: Bacon, Freud, Kossoff , Andrews, Auerbach, and Kitaj

May 24, 2016, 12:48 pm

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J. Paul Getty Museum 
July 26 to November 13, 2016

From  the 1940s  through  the  1980s,a prominent group of London-basedartists developed new styles and approaches to depicting the human figure and  the landscape. These painters resisted  the abstraction, minimalism, and conceptualism that dominated contemporary art at the time, instead focusing on depicting  contemporary life  through  innovative figurative works.  

On view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from  July 26 to November 13, 2016,  London  Calling: Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Andrews,  Auerbach, and Kitaj  represents  the first  major American museum exhibition to  explore  the leaders of this movement,often called the “School of London,” as central to a richer and  ore complex understanding of 20th  century  painting . 

The exhibition includes 80 paintings, drawings , and prints  by Francis  Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, and R.B. Kitaj.  

 

Leigh Bowery, 1991. Lucian Freud (British, born Germany, 1922 - 2011). Oil on canvas. © Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Copyright Service. Tate: Presented anonymously 1994. Repro Credit: Photo © Tate, London 2016.
 

“The majority of paintings and drawing s in the Getty Museum’s collection  are fundamentally concerned with the rendition of the human figure and landscape up to 1900,” says  Timothy  Potts, director of the  J. Paul  Getty Museum and one of the exhibition curators.  “This  significant  exhibition shows an important part of  ‘what happened next,’  highlighting an  innovative group of figurative artists at a time  when abstraction dominated  avant -garde discourse  in the U.S. and much of Europe. Working with our partners at Tate in London, we havebroughttogethera fabulous  group of pictures that  exemplify the radical approaches tofigure and landscapepioneered by this influential coterie of artists, illuminating their crucial place in modern art history.”

London Calling is a collaboration between Tate and the J. Paul Getty Museum  andis curated by Julian Brooks, curator of Drawings at the  Getty Museum, Timothy Potts, and Elena Crippa,curator, Modern and Contemporary British Art at Tate.  

Drawn largely from the unrivaled holdings of Tate, the exhibition  has been enriched by a number of loans from other museums and private collectors.

 “By pursuing painting as an activity that records and revitalizes an intense sensory experience,  these artists  rendered  the frailty and vitality of the human condition, tr anslating life into art  and reinventing the way in which their surroundings could be represented,” said Brooks. “The  ‘School of London ’ artists  doggedly pursued forms of figurative painting at a time when it was  considered outmoded.  In recent decades the work ofthese artists has rightly been reassessed.  It is timely to look at them as a group and deepen our appreciation of their contribution.” 

Francis Bacon(1909 –1992) 

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 to English  parents. After traveling to Germany and France he  settled in London. He received guidance from an  older friend, the Australian artist Roy de Maistre, but was otherwise largely self -taught. In 1945, the showing of a number of his paintings at London’s  Lefevre Gallery established his critical reputation,  and he became central to an artistic milieu in Soho  that included Lucian Freud and Michael Andrews.  

 From the mid -1940s, he began taking  as a starting  point for his work reproductions of paintings,  sculpture, photographs, and film stills, mostlyrelating tothe imagery of angst that resonated with  both historical and personal circumstances. From 1962 he expanded the range of his photographic  sources by commissioning particular shots of models,mostly friends and lovers. For example, 

Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1966Francis Bacon(British, born Ireland, 1909 -  1992) Oil on canvas  © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved.  / DACS, London / ARS, NY 2016 . Tate: Purchased  1966.  Photo© Tate, London 2016 .   

 Portrait of  Isabel Rawsthorne,  1966 , on view in the exhibition, was  based on a photo of his friend and  regularsubject, the artist  Isabel Rawsthorne (1912–1992). 


A highlight of the exhibition,  

 Triptych — August 1972   

formspart of a series of so-called “Black  Triptychs,” which followed the suicide of Bacon’s longtime lover, George Dyer, in 1971. In the  composition,  Dyer appears on the left and Bacon himself is on the right. The image on the central panel is derived from a photograph of wrestlers by Eadweard Muybridge.

 Figure with Meat, 1954. © 2016 Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. / ARS, New York / DACS, London

Bacon’s well-known  Figure with Meat, 1954 

belongs to a large series of works based on  reproductions of 

Diego Velázquez’sPortrait of Pope Innocent X. 

In this version, Bacon depicts  the Pope between two halves of a hanging animal carcass, a motif relating to the first portrait of Bacon taken by the photographer John Deakin, in1952, in which the painter  is stripped tothe waist and holds a split carcass. In establishing a connection between the raw, butcheredmeat and human flesh, Bacon expresses a sense of emotional turmoil and reminds the viewerof the vulnerability of the human body.   

Catalogue


 

Offering a fresh account of developments that have since characterized postwar British painting, this catalogue focuses on Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, R. B. Kitaj, and Leon Kossoff— artists who worked in close proximity as they were developing new forms of realism. If for many years their efforts seemed to clash with dominant tendencies, reassessment in recent decades has afforded their work a central position in a richer and more complex understanding of postwar British art and culture.

Rigorous and gorgeously illustrated, the essays reflect on the parallel yet diverse trajectories of these artists, their friendships and mutual admiration, and the divergence of their practice from the discourse of high modernism. The authors seek to dispel the notion of their work as a uniquely British endeavor by highlighting the artists’ international outlook and ongoing dialogue with contemporary European and American painters as well as masters from previous generations.
 

Swann Galleries June 9, auction of American Art: Sheeler, Dove, Gifford, Wiggins

May 24, 2016, 1:05 pm

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On Thursday, June 9, Swann Galleries will hold an auction of American Art featuring works of early American modernism and a recently discovered Hudson River School painting.

             Headlining the sale is New York #3–Study, a 1950 gouache and pencil on paper by American modernist painter and photographer Charles Sheeler. The painting is characteristic of Sheeler’s work around 1950, which reduced objects and buildings to colorful, planar forms. New York #3–Study depicts an abstracted Rockefeller Center, with attention paid to the shadows on 30 Rockefeller Center and the International Building; it is estimated at $100,000 to $150,000.  

Patent Cereals Company, Geneva, New York, a watercolor, circa 1938, by Sheeler’s fellow modernist Arthur Dove, is also part of the sale. It is estimated at $30,000 to $50,000.

             Another highlight is a recently discovered canvas by second-generation Hudson River School painter Sanford Robinson Gifford, Study of the Parthenon, oil on canvas, 1869. Gifford painted the Athenian temple both en plein air and after sketches he made during an 1869 visit to Greece. The study relates to a larger painting of the same subject,  

Ruins of the Parthenon, which resides in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Study of the Parthenon is estimated at $20,000 to $30,000.

             Also included is Mexican painter and illustrator Miguel Covarrubias’s At Leroy’s, circa 1924.  This watercolor, pen and ink piece went on to be illustrated as plate 42 in Covarrubias's 1927 book Negro Drawings, depicting his perceptions of the Harlem Renaissance. A black and white study for this piece, titled The Last Jump, is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and was on view in America is Hard to See, the inaugural exhibition at the museum’s new building. At Leroy’s is estimated at $30,000 to $50,000.

             The sale also includes a run of works by New York artist Guy C. Wiggins. Known for his paintings depicting snowy street scenes in New York, the Wiggins works in this auction include  

Chicago Blizzard, oil on canvas, 1920s ($40,000 to $60,000);  

Fifth Avenue Storm, oil on canvas board ($30,000 to $50,000);

and Winter Along Central Park, oil on canvas, 1930s ($30,000 to $50,000); among others.


Other paintings in the sale featuring the city that never sleeps include two works by John Marin:

City Movement, New York, watercolor, 1925 ($15,000 to $20,000);

and Sunset, Manhattan, colored pencil and pencil ($8,000 to $12,000).

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Windows on the City: The School of Paris, 1900 –1945

May 26, 2016, 8:24 am

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From April 22 to October 23, 2016, t he Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presentsWindows on the City: The  School of Paris, 1900  –1945,  an exhibition  of more than 50 masterpieces from the collection of the Solomon  R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. This exhibition isthe firstsince the renewal of the management  agreement with the Guggenheim Foundation, signed in December 2014 and valid for 20 years. The  agreementprovides for a range of new initiatives that will broaden the partnershipand emphasizestheSolomon R. Guggenheim  Museum’s commitment to present  an exhibition ofkey, iconic works from its collection every two years  at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.   

Windows on the City: The School of Paris, 1900  –1945  includes some of the most influential paintings and  sculptures of the last century, created by artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque, Robert  Delaunay, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso.  In the early twentieth century, Paris was the capital of the avant-garde. Artists from around the world  settled in the City of Light, where they created new forms of art and literature and responded to the rapid  economic, social, and technological developments that were fundamentally transforming city  life.  It was in Paris thatPicasso and Braque radically overturned the conventions of painting, Delaunay composed  harmonious  visions of color, Kandinsky pursued new directions in abstraction, and Brancusi reimagined how sculptures could be present in space. 

The title of the exhibition, which refers  to a series by Delaunay,  illustrates  how the modern city became a backdrop and  an inspiration for artistic production. Spanning from the first years of the twentieth century through World War II , the exhibition chartsthe key movements of modernism  —from Cubism to Orphism to Surrealism—and the artists who came to be known  as the École de Paris  (School of Paris). 

Among the masterpieces featured are 

Picasso’s Le Moulin de la  Galette (1900,

Modigliani’sNude(1917),  

and Marc Chagall’s Green  Violinist (1923  –24).

Though diverse,the artistic visions represented in this exhibition manifest a common impulse to eschew  conservative  aesthetics and transform perceptions of everyday life in a modern city.  The rise of Fascism and the occupation  of France  during  World War  II ultimately ended the School of Paris, as the artists who had once sought political, spiritual, and creative refuge in the city were forced to leave.  

A tour through the exhibition

Cubism  was  one of the most important artistic innovations that emerged in Paris  in the  first  half of the  twentieth  century. This  revolutionary approach to painting, developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque between 1907 and 1914, challenged  the conventions of visual art and the very nature ofrepresentation.  This gallery includes key works that exemplifyAnalytic Cubism, an intellectual style in which  form and space are “broken  down  ;”  

Braque’s  Piano and Mandola(1909–10)  

 and Picasso’s Bottles andGlasses(1911–12)  

feature many characteristics of this approach, including a muted palette. While  still  recognizable in these paintings, objectare fractured into multiple planes, as is the  background.  

In the years leading up to and following World War  I, artists used the visual vocabulary of Cubism to achieve various ends, such as exploringpure abstraction and  modern science, and  infusing contemporary  experience with the  spiritualityof folk traditions.

Robert Delaunay
Red Eiffel Tower (La tour rouge), 1911–12
Oil on canvas
125 x 90.3 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, 46.1036

Robert Delaunay
Circular Forms (Formes circulaires), 1930
Oil on canvas
128.9 x 194.9 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, 49.1184

Robert Delaunay’s depictions of Parisian life andlandmarks,  are exemplified in works such as Red Eiffel Tower (1911-  12), while his later abstract painting,Circular Forms(1930)  showcases his interest in contemporary developments in optics.

In this gallery, visitors can also observe Green Violinist (1923) (above) by Russian  artist  Marc Chagall, who produced this painting upon his return to Paris after having spent much of World War  I in his home  country. The work merges the  Cubist fragmentation of  space with colorful imagery inspired by Russian and  Jewish folklore, conveying the artist’s nostalgia for the religious festivals and popular celebrations of hisyouth.  

The work of Constantin Brancusi, who traveled from his native Romania to settle in Paris  in 1904, rejectsthetheatrical, narrativeimpulse of much nineteenth centurysculpturein favor of radically simplified,  abstract formsand the unadorned presentation of wood, metal, and other  materials.  Brancusi  never identified the specificsources or meanings of his works, but  The Sorceress(1916–24) might relateto asupernatural figure from  Romanian legends.  

Gallery  307  

After the First World War, Paris once again became a  center of  cultural  production. During that time, the  adherents of Surrealism—a movement inaugurated  with André Breton’s1924  manifesto  —were  also  counted  as part of the School of Paris. Drawing on the theories of Sigmund Freud, these writers and artists  attempted  to  articulate and  give form to repressed desires, dream imagery, and other  elements of the  unconscious. Some, like YvesTanguy  juxtaposed  incongruous images and objects;  others,like Jean Arp and Joan Miró, experimented with automatism, creating drawings without a premeditated composition orsubject  in order to bypass the conscious mind. Infl  uenced by Arp and Miró, American  sculptor Alexander  Calder created a language of  movement  and balance with his famous mobiles and wire sculptures includingRomulus and Remus  (1928).  

Vasily Kandinsky, who made significant advances in abstract painting while living in Germany and Russia during the 1910s and ‘20s, settled in  Paris in 1934. In his works fromthisperiod, including  

Yellow Painting(1938) and  

Around the Circle(1940),

Kandinsky combines  free-playing  forms  similar to those from his  earliest  abstractions  withthe more geometric and biomorphic shapes he  developed while teachingat the Bauhaus.  

Didaktika  

The exhibition includes an educational area  that  aims to transport visitors toturn-of-the -century Paris through a “time tunnel” that provides a historical, political, economic, and social context of the time. An  icon  of modernity and the avant -garde, Paris is, in a way, a co-star of the exhibition. Focusing  on four  major  expositions  that took place in Paris  during the first half of the twentieth century  —  the 1900  Universal Exposition, the 1925  International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts,  the  1931 International Colonial  Exhibition, and the 1937  International Exposition  of Art and Technology in  Modern Life —the contents of the Didaktika are presented through texts, large photomurals, videos, and audio recordings that evoke the vibrancy  of  the City of Light. 

Georges Braque
Violin and Palette (Violon et palette), September 1, 1909Oil on canvas
91.7 x 42.8 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 54.1412 © VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016 

Marc Chagall
The Soldier Drinks (Le soldat boit), 1911–12
Oil on canvas
109.2 x 94.6 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, 49.1211
© VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016

Juan Gris
Newspaper and Fruit Dish (Journal et compotier), March 1916
Oil on canvas
46 x 37.8 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, By gift, Estate of Katherine S. Dreier, 53.1341

Vasily Kandinsky
Around the Circle (Autour du cercle), May–August 1940
Oil and enamel on canvas
96.8 x 146 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, 49.1222
© VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016

Fernand Léger
Nude Model in the Studio (Le modèle nu dans l'atelier), 1912–13
Oil on burlap
128.6 x 95.9 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, 49.1193
© VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016

Joan Miró
Landscape (The Hare) (Paysage [Le lièvre]), autumn 1927 Oil on canvas
129.6 x 194.6 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 57.1459
© 2016 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Amedeo Modigliani
Nude (Nu), 1917
Oil on canvas
73 x 116.7 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift, 41.535

Piet Mondrian
Still Life with Gingerpot II (Stilleven met gemberpot II), 1911–12 Oil on canvas
91.5 x 120 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, L294.76
© 2007 Mondrian / Holtzman Trust

Pablo Picasso
Le Moulin de la Galette, autumn 1900
Oil on canvas
88.2 x 115.5 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,
Thannhauser Collection, Gift, Justin K. Thannhauser, 78.2514.34 © Sucesión Pablo Picasso. VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016

Pablo Picasso
Carafe, Jug and Fruit Bowl (Carafon, pot et compotier), summer 1909
Oil on canvas
71.8 x 64.6 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection,
By gift, 37.536
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso. VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016

Pablo Picasso
Mandolin and Guitar (Mandoline et guitare), 1924
Oil with sand on canvas
140.7 x 200.3 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 53.1358 © Sucesión Pablo Picasso. VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016

Yves Tanguy
There, Motion Has Not Yet Ceased (Là ne finit pas encore le mouvement), 1945 Oil on canvas
71.1 x 55.5 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Bequest, Richard S. Zeisler, 2007.47 © 2016 Estate of Yves Tanguy / VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016

CARAVAGGIO AND THE PAINTERS OF THE NORTH

May 25, 2016, 11:52 am

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Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

21 June to 18 September 2016

From 21 June to 18 September 2016, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza will be presenting Caravaggio and the Painters of the North, an exhibition that focuses on Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Milan, 1571 – Porto Ercole, 1610) and his influence on the northern European artists who were fascinated by his painting and disseminated his style. Curated by Gert Jan van der Sman, professor at the University of Leiden and amember of the Istituto Universitario Olandese di Storia dell’Arte in Florence, the exhibition analyses the artist’s legacy and the wide variety of responses that his work provoked. On display will be 53 paintings, twelve of them by Caravaggio, loaned from private collections, museums and institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the church of San Pietro in Montorio in Rome.

The exhibition will offer a survey of Caravaggio’s career from his Roman period to the moving dark paintings of his final years, shown alongside a selection of works by his most important followers in Holland (Dirk van Baburen, Gerrit van Honthorst and Hendrick Ter Brugghen), Flanders (Nicolas Régnier and Louis Finson) and France (Simon Vouet, Claude Vignonand Valentin de Boulogne).

Between 1600 and 1630 more than two thousand artists settled in Rome, of whom a third were foreigners who transformed the city into an artistic melting-pot. To an equal or even greater extent than the Italians, the northern European painters opted to follow Caravaggio’s style for two principal reasons: the lesser importance of the classical element in the northern pictorial tradition, and the suitability of Caravaggio’s style for application outside the traditional context of a studio or drawing academy.

In the Low Countries and Germanic regions working from life through the observation of visible elements taken from the surrounding context was a firmly-rooted tradition. This established a link with the manner of working characteristic of Caravaggio, whose Lombard origins predisposed him to paint ad vivum, an approach that artists with a classical training considered inadequate in that it represented an obstacle to achieving perfection in art. In addition, most of the Dutch, Flemish and French painters who settled in Rome had received a basic training in drawing and painting in their native regions and were particularly interested in rapidly capturing and assimilating new ideas. Caravaggio’s art thus appealed to them, not only for the possibility of working from life but alsofor its emphasis on the use of light, shadow and colour.

The foreign painters were able to assimilate this style into their own without the restrictions implied by a study program. Caravaggio and the Painters of the North transports visitors to the era of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and the decades following his death, a period particularly rich in masterpieces of painting and when his fame was still at its height.

The exhibition opens with two galleries devoted to works by Caravaggio executed during his time in Rome and which reveal his multi-faceted career. The following galleries show works by painters from north of the Alps who saw Caravaggio’s works at first hand. The result of their impressions was manifested in the widest variety of ways, given that each brought their own contribution while also seeking out new modes of expression in both religious and secular art. The last two galleries are devoted to the work of Caravaggio and his foreign followers in Naples and southern Italy. Caravaggio in Rome (1592 - 1606)

During his early years in the city Caravaggio executed paintings that were sold by art dealers for modest sums. These were genre scenes and still lifes with fruit and flowers, a speciality that he brought with him from Lombardy. 

With Boy bitten by a Lizard of around 1593-95 the artist astonished his contemporaries both for the mimetic qualities of the vase of flowers and the youth’s melodramatic expression. His depictions of characters typical of Roman street life, such as  

The Fortune Teller of 1595-96  attracted the attention of painters and collectors. 
 

The artist’s first patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, offered him lodgings in the Palazzo Madama where Caravaggio painted 

The Musicians of 1595-96

and Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 

revealing the rapid evolution of his technique from the brilliant and colourful palette of the former to the pronounced chiaroscuro of the latter.

Caravaggio’s ability to bypass conventions and approach traditional themes with surprising originality is evident in  

David with the Head of Goliath of around 1598-99.

The years 1596 and 1597 marked a turning point in the artist’s career with the commission of two canvases – 

The Calling of Saint Matthew 

and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew

- for the Contarelli chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, in which Caravaggio combined his preference for painting from life and the depiction of popular figure types with a moving sense of drama. 

From the moment the work was displayed in public, during the Jubilee of 1600, Caravaggio became the artist most in demand in Rome, resulting in both public and private commissions for clients such as Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII, for whom the artist painted 

Caravaggio. The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1603 Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florencia

 

The Sacrifice of Isaac in 1603

and the banker Ottavio Costa, who commissioned 

Saint John the Baptist in the Desert of 1602.

Earliest admirers in Rome: Adam Elsheimer and Peter Paul Rubens In 1600, when the German painter Adam Elsheimer (Frankfurt am Main, 1578 – Rome, 1610) settled in Rome, Caravaggio was completing his canvases for San Luigi dei Francesi. Peter Paul Rubens (Siegen, 1577 – Antwerp, 1640) arrived in the city a year later, by which time Caravaggio had already become widely known. Elsheimer and Rubens were the first northern European painters to make direct contact with his art. 

Caravaggio’s influence is evident in Rubens’s first official commission in Rome to paint the altarpieces for the basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. His interest in Caravaggio is revealed in the powerful lighting of some elements inthe compositions. In addition, Rubens made use of the Caravaggesque figure type of the seductive youth with black curly hair in his  

Head of a young Man of 1601-02. 

During his second period in the city, from 1605 to 1608, he painted 

The Adoration of the Shepherds in 1608 using a pronounced chiaroscuro in the area that includes the angels. Rubens also played a key role in the acquisition of the controversial 

Death of the Virgin for the Duke of Mantua’s collection. Caravaggio’s painting had been rejected by the Carmelite nuns of Santa Maria della Scala due to the realism employed in the depiction of the Virgin. 

Following his return to Flanders, Rubens was again inspired by Caravaggio’s paintings on various occasions, including his celebrated free copy of 

The Entombment of Christ, of which a drawing is included in the exhibition (cat. 13).  

Artists and art lovers: Quadri da stanzaand quadri d’altare

In addition to owning fifteen works by Caravaggio, the brothers Benedetto and Vincenzo Giustiniani assisted numerous foreign painters to obtain commissions. They also offered accommodation in their house to Gerard van Honthorst (Utrecht, 1592-1656), David de Haen (Rotterdam, 1597(?) – Rome, 1622) and Nicolas Régnier (Maubeuge,ca.1588 – Venice, 1667). Dirck van Baburen (Wijk bij Duurstede, ca.1594 – Utrecht, 1624) was also fortunate in finding a patron shortly after his arrival in Rome, the Spaniard Pedro Cosida, Philip III’s ambassador in the city, whose patronage culminated in the decoration of his chapelin San Pietro in Montorio. 

One of Van Baburen’s most admired works of his Roman period is  

 

The Entombment of Christ of 1617and it is possible that the artist met his patron through José de Ribera who, like him, had arrived in the capital after passing through Parma. 

Hendrick ter Brugghen and the Utrecht School 

Hendrick ter Brugghen (The Hague (?) – Utrecht, 1629) was the first of the Dutch painters who, following a period in Rome, returned in 1614 to his native country where he introduced Caravaggio’s characteristic subjects and stylistic formulas. In 

The Supper at Emmaus of 1616 and  

The Calling of Saint Matthew of around 1617-19 (cat. 29) Ter Brugghen adopted Caravaggio’s compositional format using a brilliant palette notable for its subtle gradations of colour and the painstaking depiction of the wrinkles of the skin, drapery folds, tones of the headdresses and the reflection of light on objects. 

The return to Utrecht between 1620 and 1621 of Gerard van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen influenced Ter Brugghen’s stylistic evolution and a healthy rivalry arose between these painters which resulted in an intention to emulate or surpass each other in works such as Boy playing a Recorder(cat. 30) and  




The Flute Player, both of 1621, which Ter Brugghen painted as a response to Baburen’s half-length figures of musicians such as 

Young Man singing of 1622. Over time Honthorst’s palette became more brilliant and colourful, as evident in paintings such as his  

Merry Company of 1622 

The French painters in Rome

This gallery displays work by French artists active in Rome between 1610 and 1630, representing a particularly interesting group due to their social and cultural diversity. Among the foreign painters living in the city Simon Vouet (Paris, 1590 – 1649) enjoyed a more privileged position than most. Son of a court painter, he grew up in Paris and had access to the court from an early age. Following a brief period in Venice, he settled in Rome in 1613/14 where he received a regular stipend from the French court. The official nature of his residence in Rome brought him notable prestige in artistic circles and the favour of leading collectors, for whom he executed works such as David victorious over Goliath of 1621. 

Claude Vignon (Tours, 1593 – Paris, 1670) also came from a prosperous background as the son of a valet de chambre. Vignon was born in Tours, a habitual place of residence of the French monarchs, and grew up in Paris. Having arrived in Rome in 1609/1610, in 1616 to 1617 he went to Spain and Paris and it is likely that he painted his impressive  

Martyrdom of Saint Matthew of 1617 (cat. 36) in France. Vignon’s friendship with Vouet helped his career in Rome. 

The situation of these two painters contrasts with the struggle for success on the part of Valentin de Boulogne (Coulommiers, 1531 – Rome, 1632). Some years would pass before the artist found a committed patron in the form of Francesco Barberini. Boulogne’s biographer Giovanni Baglione associated his manner of painting from life with his dissolute lifestyle. Like Caravaggio, Boulogne executed large compositions by painting directly on the canvas. Despite the complexity of his creations, such as  

David with theHead of Goliath and two Soldiers of ca.1616-18, there is no evidence that he prepared his compositions with preliminary drawings or studies. Caravaggio and his followers in Naples and southern Italy.

Among the foreign painters living in Naples and influenced by Caravaggio, two are particularly outstanding: Louis Finson (Bruges, ca.1580 – Amsterdam,1617) and Matthias Stom ((?) ca.1600 – northern Italy (?) after 1649). The former is the only northern Caravaggesque painter who probably knew the artist in person, while Stom was the last of his followers, producing an oeuvre that reveals Caravaggio’s influence until around 1640. Finson settled in Naples in 1605 where he began to collaborate with Abraham Vinck, a painter specialising in portraits. It is thought that Caravaggio made friends with both of them and when he left for Malta in 1607 he entrusted them with two of his paintings, 

Judith and Holofernes  

and The Madonna of the Rosary. 

In 1612 Finson settled in the south of France where he enjoyed considerable success painting in the style of Caravaggio. He died in Amsterdam in 1617 in the house of his friend and associate Vinck. The paintings that the two took home were the first (and only) originals by Caravaggio that could be seen in the Low Countries. 

Twenty years after Finson left Naples, Stom settled in that city. It is not known whether he was born in Amersfoort (near Utrecht) or in Flanders. It is possible that one of Stom’s masters was Gerard van Honthorst who passed on to him his interest in candle-lit scenes. 

Stom’s paintings depicting figures in the immediate foreground were among those that brought him success in Naples, where he ran his own studio from 1635 to around 1639. In the 1630s Stom’s technique became more fluid and his colours brighter. He moved to Sicily where he executed various important public commissions. 

The Flagellation of Christ of around 1640 is an extremely dynamic composition in which the life-size figures are illuminated in an exceptionally dramatic manner. Dominated by the chiaroscuro, this is an extremely theatrical presentation in which the idealised nude Christ contrasts with the rough appearance of his torturers in a final echo of Caravaggio. 

The exhibition concludes with  

Caravaggio.The Martydom of Saint Ursula, 1610 Colección Intesa Sanpaolo. Gallerie d'Italia - Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, Náp

The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula of 1610, in which Caravaggio depicted himself holding a lance at the moment when the King of the Huns wounds the saint with an arrow. Painted a few weeks before his death, it marks the high point of this final section of the exhibition.

Freeman’s American Art & Pennsylvania Impressionists Auction: Wyeths, Henri, Shinn, du Bois, Redfield, Lewis

May 30, 2016, 2:18 pm

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With paintings from three generations of Wyeths, two members of The Eight, and representatives of the New Hope School among others, Freeman’s American Art & Pennsylvania Impressionists auction touches on important genres and subjects of great American art, in short a collector’s dream. The June 5 auction includes 125 lots and begins at 2pm.

After selling four works of illustration art by N.C. Wyeth within the past year for a total of $1.3 million, another exceptional illustrative work by Wyeth comes to auction at Freeman’s.

“After the Day’s Work  (Arriving Home)” (Lot 80, est. $150,000-250,000) is an idyllic illustration of a man retiring home to his family, reminiscent of Norman Rockwell’s iconic style. The painting was initially published in an English textbook in 1926, but it is possible that it may date to as early as 1921 (presently dated to ca. 1924-1926). This fresh to market painting has been in private hands since it was acquired in 1993.

Other works from the Wyeth family include several sketches and a watercolor by Andrew Wyeth (Lots 81-83). The watercolor (Lot 81, est. $30,000-50,000) is a thank you note of sorts presented to the graphic designer who laid out Betsy Wyeth's book, Christina's World: Paintings and Prestudies of Andrew Wyeth, published in 1982. It will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné of the artist's work.

Two paintings of pastoral life by Jamie Wyeth,

“Two Stayed Home” and

“Fallen Tree” (lots 84 & 85 both est. $30,000-50,000), feature the artist’s signature technique and distinctive imagery.

Two works from the Ashcan School are also among the auction’s highlights with Robert Henri’s “Manolita Marequis" (Lot 27, est. $120,000-180,000) being one of the standouts. Robert Henri is best known as the most prominent and celebrated member of the group known as The Eight. Henri frequently traveled to Spain, particularly between 1900 and 1926. During that time he painted a large and significant amount of works depicting Spanish people and their everyday life. The 1908 piece “Manolita Marequis" is an excellent example of a privately owned work that embodies Henri's fascination with Spanish subjects, including dancers. Her striking red and black floral dress and vivid rose in her hair are matched only by her commanding expression. An exotic beauty, her bold features immediately demand the viewer's attention and the dark background and animated brushstrokes add to the painting's appeal.

Also from the Ashcan school, “The Plaza Looking Northeast at 59th Street” (Lot 29, est. $50,000-80,000) by Everett Shinn. According to a label in Shinn's handwriting verso, the painting depicts the "first sketches made for the decorations in the Hotel Plaza bar. These changed to more serious presentation. E.S." Three murals by Shinn adorn the walls of New York City's Plaza Hotel and were recently restored in 2010.

A student of Robert Henri and producing artwork during the Jazz Age, Guy Pène du Bois depicted the café life and culture around him.
Pène du Bois’s “Locked Jury” (Lot 42, est. $40,000-60,000) is another notable piece in the sale. The color palette and stylized figures shows a number of various social interactions occurring as small vignettes throughout the composition. Of particular note is the woman in pink—the only female in the painting—on whom most of the color is concentrated, and who immediately draws the eye through her appearance of isolation and contemplation. Each encounter seems to be a separate engagement unto itself. The title, "Locked Jury", indicates a sense of disagreement and stalemate; the dark, almost smoky appearance of the room adds to the somber, yet intense sentiment exuding from the canvas. This painting was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.






From the Pennsylvania Impressionists, there is a selection of landscape paintings, including

Edward Willis Redfield’s “House in Point Pleasant” (Lot 115, est. $60,000-100,000), which boasts an impeccable provenance as it was passed directly from the artist through his family to the present owner.

The smaller scale piece by Redfield, “The Hill Country” (Lot 117, est. $80,000-120,000) abounds with brightness and life; the vivid, luminous colors of spring cover the canvas and invite the viewer into the scene. The painting will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné of Redfield's work compiled by Dr. Thomas Folk.


Other notable paintings by Pennsylvania Impressionists coming to auction include Fern Isabel Coppedge’s“Harbor Scene” (Lot 96 est. $40,000-60,000); George William Sotter’s“The Neighbor’s House” (Lot 99, est. $40,000-60,000); and Walter Elmer Schofield’s“May in Cornwall” (Lot 116, est. $25,000-40,000.

Additional Lots of Interest in Freeman's June 5 Auction American Art & Pennsylvania Impressionists 

Lot 1 Martin Lewis “Glow of the City" est. $30,000-50,000

Sotheby’s June Impressionist & Modern Art Evening 21 June 2016

June 6, 2016, 12:10 pm

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Cubism is considered to be Pablo Picasso’s most important contribution to Modern art, and 

Femme assise of 1909 is one of the artist’s greatest Cubist portraits. It comes from the series of canvases that revolutionised Picasso’s working methods and established his path to Cubism.The painting will lead Sotheby’s June Impressionist & Modern Art Evening sale in London.

Femme assise was painted in the summer of 1909 when Picasso travelled to his native Spain to the remote village of Horta de Ebro which could only be accessed by mule. Here Picasso created a series of canvases based on the features of his lover Fernande Olivier, over a period described as ‘the most crucial and productive’ in the artist’s career. 

Following his major breakthrough in 1907 with

 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon– considered the single most influential painting created in the 20th Century - Picasso continued on his path towards a purer pictorial language of Cubism. This progression,  seen to spectacular effect in Femme assise , radically redefined the representation of form. Femme assise is among a small number of portraits from this series remaining in private hands, with most of the others held in prestigious international museum collections.

Last sold at auction in 1973 at Sotheby’s in London, Femme assise has remained in a private collection for over forty years, during which time it has featured in some of the most important international exhibitions of Picasso’s work.

Pablo Picasso’s major works sold at auction:

Pablo Picasso ’s Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) , 1955, sold for $179,354,992 in May 2015 

Pablo Picasso ’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, 1932, sold for $106,482, 496 in May 2010 

Pablo Picasso ’s Dora Maar au chat, 1941, sold for $95,216,0 00 in May 2006 

Pablo Picasso ’s Garçon à la Pipe (Le jeune apprenti), 1905, sold for $104,168,000 in May 2004 

A Loving Tribute to his Eternal Muse: One of the Finest Portraits by Modigliani in Private Hands 

Amedeo Modigliani’s Jeanne Hébuterne (au foulard)  will be offered alongside Pablo Picasso’s Cubist masterpiece  of  his lover  Fernande  Olivier. This elegant and lyrical work is among the most beautiful portrait s Amedeo Modigliani painted of his lover Jeanne Hébuterne – revealing a tender moment between a pioneer in the world of modern art and his most loyal muse. The painting brings together the very best of the highly refined aesthetic that Modigliani had developed in the last few years before his premature death whilst giving the viewer a glimpse into one of the most poignant love stories in 20 th - century art history . Having been in a private collection since 1986, this exquisite work is expected to fetch in excess of £28m (in excess of $40m ) as part of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening sale on 21 June 2016 .

Modigliani forged a uniquely evocative style, inspired by a fascination with the Old Masters of his native Italy and the influence of the avant - garde artists he had met in Paris , including Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brancusi. Jeanne Hébuterne (au foulard) powerfully synthesises all of the most iconic characteristic traits associated with the artist’s late portraits – from the geometric simplification of the female form and the flowing melodic lines and to the elo ngated neck and face so heavily reminiscent of his stone carvings ( such as the exceptional Tête , which sold at Sotheby’s New York for a record $ 70.7 million in November 2014) . H is lover is given a pair of piercingly blue eyes, contrasting with his usual ‘almond’ vacant eyes, endowing the sitter  ith a dominant sense of personality and draw ing the viewer in. She is also shown here seated in full three - quarter length splendour in a vibrant coral interior , her arms draped elegantly over of the back of her chair, her scarlet silk scarf knotted around her swan - like neck. 

The final years of Modigliani’s life were marked by tragedy. but resulted in many of his most celebrated works. Modigliani moved to Paris in 1906 and within a year, he had cultivated a reputation as a drunk and voracious drug user . However, his escalating intake of drugs and alcohol may have been a means by which he masked his tuberculosis – those who had the illness were feared and ostracised and Modigliani’s penchant for camaraderie meant that he could not bear to be isolated. Jeanne met Modigliani in 1917, when she was a young art student, and for the next three years she was his constant companion and source of inspiration. The two were devoted to each other – with Modigliani even pledging to marry her, despite her family’s protestations. Indeed, it is the portraits of Jeanne painted during the last years of his life are his most refined and accomplished works. 

In January 1920, after not hearing from him for several days, a neighbour checked on the family and found Modigliani in bed delirious and holding onto Jeanne . Not long after, Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis. Following the funeral, a twenty - two year old, and reputedly heavily pregnant, Jeanne was taken to her parents' home. There, inconsolable, she committed suicide by leaping from an upstairs window. A single tombstone at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris now honours them both. His epitaph reads, "Struck down by Death at the moment of glory, hers "Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice". 

The serene calm of Jeanne Hébuterne (au foulard) is in sharp contrast to the tales of Modigliani’s notorious drunkenness and bohemianism. The richness yet subtlety of the colours attest to an emotional and psychological dimension found in the portraits of Jeanne, but rarely seen in his other works.  

Amedeo Modigliani at Auction and at the National Gallery of Art 

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Jheronimus Bosch

June 6, 2016, 12:48 pm

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The Museo del Prado and Fundación BBVA are marking the 5th centenary of the death of Jheronimus Bosch with the first monographic exhibition to be devoted to the artist in Spain, the most complete and the one of the highest quality organised to date. In addition to the Prado’s own holdings of the artist’s work, which are the largest and best in the world, including works such as the triptychs of

The Garden of Earthly Delights,

The Haywain

and The Adoration of the Magi,

the exhibition will feature loans such as  

The Saint Anthony Triptych from the Museo Nacional de Arte Antigua in Lisbon,

Christ carrying the Cross from Patrimonio Nacional,  

The Crowning with Thorns from the National Gallery in London,

and the drawing of the Man-Tree from the Albertina in Vienna, which is one of the artist’s great masterpieces.

Documentary Bosch. The Garden of Dreams:

 

 

America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s

June 8, 2016, 1:18 pm

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The Art Institute of Chicago (06/05/16–09/18/16) 

Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris (10/15/16–01/30/17)

Royal Academy of Arts, London (02/25/17–06/04/17)

Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrE5K5sS-Vo&feature=youtu.be

During the Great Depression, American artists visualized national culture in the context of the economic depression at home, civil war in Spain, and rising fascism in Europe. This exhibition argues that the 1930s, bookended by the economic crash of 1929 and the US’s entry into World War II in 1941, was one of the most vital artistic periods for American artists in the whole of the twentieth century. Featuring approximately 50 paintings—drawn from the holdings of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as from more than 25 public and private collections—it tells the story of this economically, politically, and aesthetically turbulent decade by surveying the varied works of artists such as

Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton, Ben Shahn, Philip Evergood, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Grant Wood.

Collectively, the aesthetically and politically varied works produced in the 1930s paint a revealing portrait of the nation’s evolving psyche. Edward Hopper’s reflective, melancholy approach to homegrown subjects is quite different from the bold romanticism of Thomas Hart Benton and his fellow Regionalists, who sought to create a national art that glorified America. Painters such as Philip Evergood and Ben Shahn used social realism to protest political attitudes of the time, highlighting the plights of migrant sharecroppers, Jewish immigrants, and other marginalized members of society.

Racial issues also came to the fore:

Joe Jones chillingly depicted a lynching in American Justice,

while Aaron Douglas inserted a more inclusive vision of black culture into the heroic histories of the United States. History, in fact, was frequently used to speak to present times; realist Charles Sheeler linked the earlier, spare American aesthetic of Shaker objects to his exploration of the contemporary, while Grant Wood took on the country’s founding myths in works such as

Parson Weems’ Fable.
 
At the same time, other artists reinvigorated the revolt against representational style, championing nonobjective art as a form that spoke deeply to modern concerns. The Park Avenue Cubists continued to evolve a European-based abstraction, and modernists such as Stuart Davis and Charles Demuth applied a precise, geometric vocabulary to American architecture and advertising.

Bringing these diverse works of art together, America after the Fall tells the story of a nation’s fall from grace and irrevocable changes to the American dream. Following its installation at the Art Institute, the exhibition travels to the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris and London’s Royal Academy, marking the first time many of these iconic American works—including Grant Wood’s American Gothic—have journeyed beyond North America. For French and British audiences, this traveling exhibition offers an unprecedented opportunity to experience these masterpieces firsthand. For all the show’s visitors, the presentation affords a trailblazing look at the turbulent economic, political, and aesthetic world of the 1930s and the critical and dynamic process of rethinking modernism that it fostered.

Catalogue

America after the Fall Painting in the 1930s

August 9, 2016
204 pages, 9 3/8 x 12
105 color + 15 b/w illus.
ISBN: 9780300214857
Hardcover: $50.00 
 

Impressionism: American Gardens on Canvas

June 9, 2016, 5:09 am

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The New York Botanical Garden continues to explore the connections between the plant world and the arts through captivating flower shows and fine art in its upcoming exhibition, Impressionism: American Gardens on Canvas, from May 14 through September 11, 2016. During this Garden-wide exhibition, visitors will experience the horticultural inspiration behind American Impressionism as well as view more than 20 Impressionist artworks.

In the Seasonal Exhibition Galleries of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, visitors will stroll through an American Impressionist garden inspired by the paintings of iconic artists, including William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, and John Singer Sargent. The horticultural exhibition is designed by Francisca Coelho, the Garden’s Vivian and Edward Merrin Vice President for Glasshouses and Exhibitions, who has re-imagined gardens for NYBG exhibitions, including Emily Dickinson’s Victorian garden in Amherst, Massachusetts; Claude Monet’s flower and water gardens in Giverny, France; and Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul garden in Coyoacán, Mexico.

Coelho’s American Impressionist garden will feature an ebullient mix of the old-fashioned flowers depicted in paintings of the gardens of Florence Griswold, Celia Thaxter, John Twachtman, and other celebrated gardeners of the era. Under Coelho’s direction, NYBG horticulturists will plant tens of thousands of cornflowers, larkspur, hollyhocks, peonies, columbines, and hundreds of other cheerful bulbs, annuals, biennials, and perennials in beds and borders lining the walkways. Visitors will stroll beneath trellises adorned with morning glories, through grassy meadows dotted with poppies, and along beds of irises of every color of the rainbow. They will be encouraged to sit on chairs on the porch of a charming New England cottage with views of the whole colorful ensemble.

The LuEsther T. Mertz Library’s Art Gallery at NYBG will exhibit a complementary display of more than 20 paintings and sculptures by Chase, Hassam, Sargent, and their contemporaries that captures the colors, shadows, and ephemeral quality of light the artists observed in the natural world and infused in their distinctive imagery.

The garden of Florence Griswold, the doyenne of the Old Lyme, Connecticut artist colony, is depicted in

Edmund William Greacen’s In Miss Florence’s Garden (1913).

Chase’s Landscape: Shinnecock, Long Island (ca. 1896)

and Park in Brooklyn (1887) portray luscious landscapes of familiar East Coast sites.

Sargent’s The Fountain of Oceanus (1917) features a sculpture at Kykuit, the John D. Rockefeller Estate in Pocantico Hills, New York.

Childe Hassam’s Horticulture Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago (1893) depicts a social scene in front of a Victorian glasshouse similar to NYBG’s Haupt Conservatory.

Three bronze sculptures are also included in the exhibition, most notably Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington’s grand Diana of the Chase (ca. 1922), which at 99 inches tall will be on display in the Library Gallery Rotunda. Impressionism: American Gardens on Canvas is guest curated by Linda S. Ferber, Ph.D., Senior Art Historian and Museum Director Emerita of The New-York Historical Society.

American Impressionists in the U.S. created an identity unique from their French peers by painting self-consciously American subjects: notably, the American garden. Many American Impressionists and their spouses were avid gardeners, and parallels were often made between gardening and Impressionism. In a departure from other exhibitions on this artistic period, Impressionism: American Gardens on Canvas will examine exclusively American gardens as a compelling subject for American Impressionists during an era of vibrant gardening culture, evoking this period through a garden designed and created in the Haupt Conservatory for visitors to experience.

On the Verge of Insanity. Van Gogh and His Illness

June 10, 2016, 12:38 pm

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Van Gogh Museum

15 July–25 September 2016

Why did Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear? What was the precise nature of his illness? And why did he commit suicide? With the forthcoming exhibition On the Verge of Insanity, the Van Gogh Museum is focusing for the first time specifically on Van Gogh and his condition.

Some 25 paintings and drawings from the final year and a half of the painter’s life tell the story of his battle with illness. They include several important loans from international museums, such as

the portrait he made of his doctor, Félix Rey, a masterpiece from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, which is being shown at the Van Gogh Museum for the first time. Original letters and exceptional documents will also be exhibited, including the police report and the petition signed by local residents in Arles in 1889 calling for the artist’s confinement to a mental hospital. The exhibition runs from 15 July until 25 September 2016.

Severed ear and suicide

The exhibition centres on the questions of how Van Gogh’s illness manifested itself, how he himself coped with it, how others responded, what he wrote about it in his letters, and how his mental state influenced his work. The severed ear and the circumstances of his suicide have been a constantly recurring subject of debate in the 126 years since his death, and have significantly shaped the Van Gogh myth. These events are explored in depth in the exhibition, taking in the wide-ranging interpretations of his illness and death, including the many diagnoses put forward by doctors over the years.

Van Gogh’s battle with his illness

The ‘ear incident’ through which Van Gogh’s illness manifested itself in December 1888, while he was living in the southern French town of Arles, is reconstructed through eyewitness testimonies and letters. The paintings he completed immediately after returning from the hospital, such as the  

 

Portrait of Dr Rey (Pushkin Museum, Moscow)

and the Still Life with a Plate of Onions (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo),

show how he tried to pick up the threads of his life. Several important documents from the Arles municipal archives, never previously exhibited elsewhere, give an insight into Van Gogh’s mental state at the time, and how the people around him reacted. Local residents, for instance, organised a petition to have him confined, and compulsory hospitalisation was considered. Van Gogh eventually decided to have himself voluntarily admitted to the asylum in Saint-Rémy.

Paintings and drawings from this period, such as  

The Garden of the Asylum

and The Enclosed Wheatfield After a Storm

 (both Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), reveal him wrestling with his illness and show how his work had become his only lifeline.


The final section of the exhibition includes the last painting made by Van Gogh,  

Tree Roots (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) and focuses in detail on the circumstances of his suicide in Auvers-sur-Oise on 29 July 1890.

Symposium on Van Gogh’s diagnosis

The Van Gogh Museum will hold an expert meeting on Wednesday 14 September, at which international medical specialists and Van Gogh experts will join forces in an attempt to formulate a diagnosis of the artist’s illness. The conclusions of the meeting will be presented at a public symposium in Amsterdam the next day, Thursday 15 September. The potential role played by his illness in the creation of his art will also be discussed, and his case will be compared with that of other artists.

Catalogue

 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated book: On the Verge of Insanity. Van Gogh and His Illness, by Nienke Bakker, Louis van Tilborgh and Laura Prins, with the assistance of Teio Meedendorp and Bregje Gerritse. Publisher: Mercatorfonds, Brussels. Available in Dutch, English and French. International distribution: Yale University Press, Actes Sud.

CHRISTIE"S 29 and 30 June: BACON AND FREUD; WARHOL AND LICHTENSTEIN’; GERHARD RICHTER, JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

June 13, 2016, 1:56 pm

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Post-War and Contemporary Art in June: Defining British Art: Bacon, Freud, Warhol and Lichtenstein's First Moments in Pop - Gerrard Richter and Jean-Michel Basquat from the collection of Johnny Depp

Christie’s will bring together a selection of international names in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Auctions on 29 and 30 June at London’s King Street. This season’s auctions are complemented by a strong core of Post-War and Contemporary art in Christie’s 250th anniversary sale Defining British Art, including  

Francis Bacon’s landmark canvas Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe (1968) 

 and Lucian Freud’s Ib and her husband, (1992).

Previous sales: 

Sotheby's 2006

Francis Bacon

VERSION NO. 2 OF LYING FIGURE WITH HYPODERMIC SYRINGE

Estimate

9,000,000— 12,000,000

LOT SOLD. 15,048,000 USD

 Christie's 2007
Lucian Freud’s Ib and her husband, (1992).

Price Realized $19,361,000

Early works by Pop icons Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein lead the evening auction and are joined by a central group of the next-generation of American artists including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mike Kelley, Glenn Ligon, and Kelley Walker. A major highlight of the sale will be a capsule selection of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat from the collection of celebrated actor Johnny Depp. Giants of European painting feature firmly with Gerhard Richter’sAbstraktes Bild (811-2) leading the line-up of modern masters.

Warhol and Lichtenstein’s First Moments in Pop 

Two Dollar Bills (1962; Estimate: £4,000,000-6,000,000) stands in his oeuvre as amongst the very first silkscreens that Warhol ever produced, initiating the iconic serial method that would dominate his art for the next 25 years. Executed between March and April 1962, the work is based on drawings Warhol made on acetate, the series consisted largely of single images of the front or back of one- or two-dollar bills. Two Dollar Bills is among the largest of only 10 that were made in serial or group format, two others of which are held in the renowned international collections of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The present work is the only frontal group of two-dollar bills in existence. 

 

Roy Lichtenstein’s Mustard on White (1963; Estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000) is his first work on Plexiglass, and was originally owned by the legendary American collectors Victor and Sally Ganz. Executed in 1963 the work is inspired by 1960s diner culture and takes its place in a series of fewer than 15 paintings executed between 1961-63 depicting quotidian comestibles – hot dogs, cherry pies, Swiss cheese, coffee and ice-cream soda. Both works have most recently been held in museums and are early high-points in each artists’ signature techniques.

Jean-Michel Basquiat from the Collection of Johnny Depp 
 
Another highlight of the auction, Christie’s will present a time-capsule group of nine works by Jean-Michel Basquiat from the collection of the celebrated actor, producer and musician Johnny Depp. This carefully curated selection of Basquiat paintings and drawings attests to Depp’s understanding and engagement with one of the most acclaimed icons of 20th-century painting.

Having been in dialogue with Johnny Depp since the start of the year, and following momentum in the Basquiat market since the auction record-breaking success of Untitled (1982) in May, this group of works from the early 1980s are set to be a focal point of both the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening and Day Auctions. Depp has described his relationship with Basquiat’s work: "Nothing can replace the warmth and immediacy of Basquiat's poetry, or the absolute questions and truths that he delivered. The beautiful and disturbing music of his paintings, the cacophony of his silence that attacks our senses, will live far beyond our breath." Published in E. Navarra, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 2000, pp. 16-17. 

Assembled over the course of more than 25 years, the works date, almost exclusively, from 1981: the year that saw Basquiat’s transformation from clandestine street artist to global superstar. Channelling the creative energy that fuelled the musical and artistic underbelly of post-punk New York, the works give a glimpse into this meteoric period in Basquiat’s career. Together, they bear witness to the birth of a revolutionary visual language – gestures, words and symbols – that characterised Basquiat’s work at the height of his career in 1981 and 1982. Widely exhibited in many of the artist’s most important retrospectives, they stand together as a survey of the moment that launched Basquiat’s stratospheric career. Since the 1990s, Depp has cultivated a detailed appreciation of Basquiat’s works, seeking out pieces that resonate with his understanding of the artist.



Gerhard Richter
With rhythmic pulses of horizontal and vertical action, Gerhard Richter pulls curtains of deep sapphire and verdant malachite across his canvas of 

 

Abstraktes Bild (811-2), (1994, Estimate on Request) sliding wet paint into wet paint to create streaks of rich marbling and blooming chromatic fusion. Initially established as flat layers of paint, cavities and canyons melt away to reveal kaleidoscopic fissures of teal, emerald and burgundy; gleaming swathes of tonal contrast create a sense of depth and time in the work’s successive levels, the eye tripping off the material as it descends to a hand-painted stratum beneath, with iridescent echoes of the aurora borealis or of dark European pine forests. A trio of sharp- edged bands gleam lime green at their edges, betraying the trace of the artist’s unmistakable squeegee technique, which he famously employed to remove the artist’s hand from his compositions. This method was to find its purest articulation between 1989 and 1994 with large-format paintings such as Abstraktes Bild 811-2. Deconstructing the relationship between figure and ground, Richter embraced the contingency of his medium, enjoying the chance effects of his confident application of paint.

Picasso: The Artist and His Muses

June 16, 2016, 8:26 am

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Vancouver Art Gallery June 11, 2016 – October 02, 2016
 
The exhibition ‘Picasso: The Artist and His Muses’ will explore the significance of Pablo Picasso’s six most prominent muses: Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot and Jacqueline Roque in the development of his work. For the first time, this exhibition will examine the six women who were most important to Picasso’s artistic development – who for the purpose of this exhibition we have chosen to define as muses – as well as exploring in depth the idea of the artist-muse relationship in the catalogue. The exhibition will highlight the women behind the portraits and tell their stories while also tracing the ways they inspired and shaped Picasso’s artistic development.

The ancient Greek muse topos of the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne sought to give name to the artistic impulse and artistic inspiration. Only figurative art had no muse-aegis, being regarded as little more than physical labour. Paradoxically, the concept of the muse is to the modern mind most readily linked to painting, from the pre-Raphaelite depictions of Elizabeth Siddal to Lucien Freud’s ’Sue the Benefits Worker Sleeping’.

Cultural critic Germaine Greer has said that the modern muse is engaged in a reverse penetration of the male artist, bringing forth creativity from the ‘womb of his mind’. But could these relationships be seen as essentially egotistical, a means by which an artist seeks to understand and give expression to his own feelings and impulses in relation to the muse, rather than the depicting muse herself?

For Pablo Picasso this principle seems to be true, the very number of women recognised in this exhibition as his muses attesting to it. None stands above the others as an archetypal muse, and each contributed profoundly to his artistic direction. After Picasso met the young Marie-Thérèse Walter, his marriage to Olga Khokhlova began to break down and he eventually left the marital home. However, Olga Khokhlova’s numerous nervous breakdowns connected to his infidelity and the collapse of their relationship inspired a new direction in Picasso’s work. Diametrically opposed to Olga Khokhlova was Dora Maar, an artist in her own right who also influenced him politically in a relationship that was much more ambiguous in its mutual creative osmosis.

In order to show the significance of Pablo Picasso’s six muses in the development of his work, the exhibition will feature – in six corresponding sections – works spanning almost his entire career from 1906 to the early 1970s. In contrast to the other women who modelled for the artist, these relationships were extraordinarily fecund for Picasso’s creativity and had a significant long-term influence on the development of his style. In Picasso discourse they have therefore become eponyms for his artistic periods: from the période Fernande to the période Jacqueline.

Femme au collier jaune, by Pablo Picasso, oil on canvas. (© Picasso Estate / SODRAC (2016) Left photo: Patrick Goetelen, Right: Cathy Carver)

 Nu assis dans un fauteuil by Pablo Picasso.
"We really wanted to tell the stories behind the portraits and put the focus on the women."

Claude et Paloma, 1950, oil and ripolin on panel. . (© Picasso Estate/SODRAC (2016) Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery)

This piece captures a period of family life when Picasso was in a relationship with Françoise Gilot, who gave birth to his two children

Femme couchée lisant, 1939, oil on canvas.  (© Picasso Estate/SODRAC (2016) Image: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY Photo: J.G. Berizzi)

This subject in this piece is Picasso's last wife Jacqueline Roque.
In addition to 27 paintings, a selection of  35 sketches, drawings, prints and sculptures will demonstrate the varied media Picasso worked in, accompanied by photographs and biographical information.

Curator: Katharina Beisiegel

Catalogue

Taking a fresh approach to discussions around one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, Picasso: The Artist and His Muses examines the significance of the six women who were most important to Picasso’s artistic development, as well as exploring in depth the notion of the artist/muse relationship.

Featuring texts by some of the world’s leading female art writers, this publication covers work that spans most of Picasso’s entire career, from 1906 through to the early 1970s. Focusing on the prominent muses throughout his life—Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot and Jacqueline Roque—this book makes clear the impact that these women had on Picasso’s creativity and their significant long-term influence on the development of his work.

Catalogue Editor: Katharina Beisiegel

Catalogue in preparation with Black Dog Publishing, London. Language: English

Contributing authors: Dr. Cécile Godefroy (Art Historian and Associate Researcher to the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte, Bruxelles), Laurence Madeline (Chief Curator, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, formerly Musée Picasso, Paris), Dr. Catherine Soussloff (Professor of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at University of British Columbia, Vancouver), Vérane Tasseau (Art Historian), Dr. Gertje Utley (Independent Art Historian and Author of ’Picasso: The Communist Years’, New York 2000), Diana Widmaier Picasso (Art Historian).

Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné

June 16, 2016, 8:44 am

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Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné is a landmark publishing event that presents the entire oeuvre of Bacon’s paintings for the first time and includes many previously unpublished works. The impeccably produced five-volume, slipcased publication, containing each of Bacon’s 584 paintings, has been edited by Martin Harrison, FSA, the pre-eminent expert on Bacon’s work, alongside research assistant Dr Rebecca Daniels. An ambitious and painstaking project that has been ten years in the making, this seminal visual document eclipses in scope any previous publication on the artist and will have a profound effect on the perception of his work.

Containing around 800 illustrations across 1,538 pages within five cloth-bound hardcover volumes, the three volumes that make up the study of Bacon’s entire painting oeuvre are bookended by two further volumes: the former including an introduction and a chronology, and the latter a catalogue of Bacon’s sketches, an index, and an illustrated bibliography compiled by Krzysztof Cieszkowski. Printed on 170 gsm GardaMatt Ultra stock in Bergamo, Italy at Castelli Bolis, Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné are boxed within a cloth- bound slipcase, and supplied within a bespoke protective shipping carton.

In addition to the 584 paintings, the catalogue will contain illuminating supporting material. This includes sketches by Bacon, photographs of early states of paintings, images of Bacon’s furniture, hand-written notes by the artist, photographs of Bacon, his family and circle, and fascinating x-ray and microscope photography of his paintings.

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Several major exhibitions on Bacon are scheduled for 2016–17. Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms runs from 18 May until 18 September 2016 at Tate Liverpool, and from 7 October 2016 until 8 January 2017 at Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. Martin Harrison is the curator of Francis Bacon, Monaco et la culture française which runs at Grimaldi Forum, Monaco from 2 July 2016 until 4 September 2016 and Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez which runs at Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao from 30 September 2016 until 8 January 2017.

45-06 Study for a Figure, c.1945

Oil on canvas
48 × 41 in. (122 × 104 cm) (Alley a3)

Alley considered this to have been a ‘first idea’ for the figure in the left panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 (44-01), but a slightly later date is more likely. It is painted on canvas, not fibreboard, and the dialogue between the head and the bowl of flowers is not otherwise present in Bacon’s work until Figure Study I, 1945–46 (46-01); (but see also 44-02). 

It is significant that Bacon chose one of the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion to rework at a larger size, and on canvas, for he appears to have been experimenting with a more painterly expression than in his Picasso-esque biomorphs. The shuttered ground in Study for a Figure is painted in eau-de-nil and buff, but show-through in the pigmentation at many points confirms that it was originally painted cadmium orange, like the Three Studies. The painting remained in Bacon’s studio until 1951, and it is possible, therefore, that the curtains were added later than 1945. 

Study for a Figure is in many respects an advance on Three Studies. The figure’s body, hair and the roses are all virtuoso performances in colour and texture. In concentrating on the substance and expressive qualities of paint, Bacon is turning his attention away from Picasso and towards Rembrandt and Velázquez. 

 

63-12 Three Studies for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1963

Oil on canvas
Triptych: each panel 14 × 12 in. (35.5 × 30.5 cm) Delivered to Marlborough Fine Art 6 November 1963 (Alley 221)

This was the last of Bacon’s paintings to be documented by Ronald Alley. 

In a photograph of Bacon taken by Derek Bayes on22 October 1963, the completed centre and left panels are visible. Alley noted that the studies ‘were painted partly from life’. If that is correct, it was possibly the last occasion on which Bacon painted from a live model. In all probability John Deakin’s photographs of Moraes were also used as aides-mémoire. 

The pointed head and flattened nose in the left panel are quoted from Honoré Daumier’s bronze bust of Baron Joseph de Podenas (c.1833, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), and possibly also his lithographs of Luigi Filippo. Bacon would return to Daumier’s caricatural distortions several times during the next three years. 

Three Studies for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes marked Bacon’s consummation of the small triptych format that he had initiated with Study for Three Heads, 1962 (62-07) and which he continued to utilise until 1983. The restricted palette of mainly crimson and white on a textured black ground is masterly, as are the energy and motion of the brushstrokes and smearing of the wet pigment. Indeed Bacon’s execution has a power, skill and confidence that he scarcely ever surpassed in this format. 

65-02 After Muybridge – Woman Emptying a Bowl of Water and Paralytic Child on All Fours, 1965

Oil on canvas
78 × 58 in. (198 × 147.5 cm)

(Among the paintings by Bacon that were habitually mistitled, this has been misrepresented most frequently. Caution is advised regarding the incorrect titles in many of the foregoing publications.) 

Bacon’s images of extreme situations often seem to be subjects he might have dreamed of, but if that is the case the dream he painted here must have been triggered by consulting Muybridge, a pictorial source acknowledged in the title. 

It amalgamates the paralytic child he had painted in 1961 (see 61-04) with and an image suggested by Muybridge’s sequence ‘Woman Throwing a Basin of Water’, extensively modified by Bacon into the contorted stooping pose she has been obliged to adopt on the rail. 

Against a ground of stridently clashing red, orange and violet, the circular rail is exceptionally prominent, emphasising the circular motion of the two protagonists in their pointless, interminable activities. The flat planes of colour intensify Bacon’s portrayal of nihilistic exasperation, expressed in the furious painting of the deformed figures. Deleuze read the figures as a mother and child, which if correct would raise the possibility that Bacon identified with the child.

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Surreal Encounters: Collecting the Marvellous

June 23, 2016, 11:17 am

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SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART
4 June – 11 September 2016

Masterpieces from four of the finest collections of Dada and Surrealist art ever assembled will be brought together in this summer's major exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA). Surreal Encounters: Collecting the Marvellous will explore the passions and obsessions that led to the creation of four very different collections, which are bound together by a web of fascinating links and connections, and united by the extraordinary quality of the works they comprise.

Surrealism was one of the most radical movements of the twentieth century, which challenged conventions through the exploration of the subconscious mind, the world of dreams and the laws of chance. Emerging from the chaotic creativity of Dada (itself a powerful rejection of traditional values triggered by the horrors of the First World War) its influence on our wider culture remains potent almost a century after it first appeared in Paris in the 1920s.

World-famous works by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, René Magritte, Leonora Carrington, Giorgio de Chirico, André Breton, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Yves Tanguy, Leonor Fini, Marcel Duchamp and Paul Delvaux will be among the 400 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, artist books and archival materials, to feature in Surreal Encounters.

The exhibition has been jointly organised by the SNGMA, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, where it will be shown following its only UK showing in Edinburgh.

Dalí's The Great Paranoiac (1936), Lobster Telephone (1938)

Salvador DALI (1904-1989)

Impressions d'Afrique (Impressions of Africa), 1938

Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 117.5cm

Collection: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (Formerly collection of E. James),

Purchased with the support of The Rembrandt Association (Vereniging Rembrandt), Prins Bernhard Fonds, Erasmusstichting, Stichting Bevordering van Volkskracht Rotterdam and Stichting Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen 1979

© Salvador Dali, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, DACS, 2015

and Impressions of Africa (1938);

de Chirico’s Two Sisters (1915);

Ernst's Pietà or Revolution by Night (1923)

and Dark Forest and Bird (1927), and 

Magritte’s The Magician’s Accomplice (1926) and  

 

René MAGRITTE (1898-1967)

La reproduction interdite (Not to be Reproduced), 1937

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam © Beeldrecht Amsterdam 2007.

Photographer: Studio Tromp, Rotterdam

© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2015

Not to be Reproduced (1937) will be among the highlights of this exceptional overview of Surrealist art. The exhibition will also tell the personal stories of the fascinating individuals who pursued these works with such dedication and discernment.

The first of these - the poet, publisher and patron of the arts, Edward James (1907-84) and the artist, biographer and exhibition organiser, Roland Penrose (1900-84) - acquired the majority of the works in their collections while the Surrealist movement was at its height in the interwar years, their choices informed by close associations and friendships with many of the artists.

James was an important supporter of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte in particular, while Penrose was first introduced to Surrealism through a friendship with Max Ernst. The stories behind James’s commissioning of works such as

Dalí’s famous Mae West Lips Sofa (1938) and

Magritte’s The Red Model III (1937)

and the role of PUne Semaine de Bonté (1934) will demonstrate how significant these relationships were for both the artists and the collectors.

enrose in the production of Ernst’s seminal collage novel

Other celebrated works on show that formed part of these two profoundly important collections include

Tanning’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943);

Magritte’s On the Threshold of Liberty (1937);

Joan MIRÓ (1893-1983)

Tête de Paysan Catalan [Head of a Catalan Peasant], 1925
Oil on canvas, 92.4 x 73 cm
Collection: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Purchased jointly with Tate, with the assistance of the Art Fund 1999

Miró’s Head of a Catalan Peasant (1925); and The House Opposite (c.1945) by Leonora Carrington.

While the Penrose and James collections are now largely dispersed, the extraordinary collection of Dada and Surrealist art put together by Gabrielle Keiller (1908-95), was bequeathed in its entirety to the SNGMAon her death in 1995, the largest benefaction in the institution’s history. Keiller devoted herself to this area following a visit to the Venice home of the celebrated American art lover Peggy Guggenheim in 1960, which proved to be a pivotal moment in her life. She went on to acquire outstanding works such as Marcel Duchamp’s La Boîte-en-Valise (1935-41),  Alberto Giacometti’s Disagreeable Object, to be Thrown Away (1931)

and Girl Born without a Mother (c.1916-17) by Francis Picabia.

Recognizing the fundamental significance of Surrealism’s literary aspect, Keiller also worked assiduously to create a magnificent library and archive, full of rare books, periodicals, manifestos and manuscripts, which makes the SNGMA one of the world’s foremost centres for the study of the movement.

The exhibition will be brought up to date by the inclusion of works from the collection of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch, who have spent more than 40 years in their quest to build up an historically balanced collection of Surrealism, which they have recently presented to the city of Berlin, where they still live.  The collection features many outstanding paintings by Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, André Masson, Leonor Fini, Ernst, Tanguy, Magritte and Miró; sculptures by Hans Arp and Hans Bellmer; and works by André Breton, the leader of the Surrealists. Highlights include Masson’s Massacre (1931), Ernst’s Head of ‘The Fireside Angel’ (c.1937),

 

Pablo PICASSO (1881–1973)

Femme aux arabesques (Arabesque Woman), 1931

Oil on canvas, 100 x 81cm

Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg/ Pietzsche Collection

Picasso’s Arabesques Woman (1931) and Arp’s sculpture Assis (Seated) (1937).

The exhibition’s curator in Edinburgh, Keith Hartley, who is Deputy Director of the SNGMA, has said, “Surrealist art has captured the public imagination like perhaps no other movement of modern art. The very word ‘surreal’ has become a by-word to describe anything that is wonderfully strange, akin to what André Breton, the chief theorist of Surrealism, called ‘the marvellous’. This exhibition offers an exceptional opportunity to enjoy art that is full of ‘the marvellous’. It brings together many important works which have rarely been seen in public, by a wide range of Surrealist artists, and creates some very exciting new juxtapositions.”

“The four collections represented here have different origins and trajectories, different historical contexts and come out of different creative urges.  But what they all display is a high level of quality, aesthetic discernment, dedication and commitment, and the collectors themselves, while passionate about their private visions, were and are always mindful of contributing something to the public good. It is therefore not surprising that the ways in which Surrealist art has been collected display many of the idiosyncratic passions of Surrealism itself.”

Surreal Encounters will be accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue, with contributions from Dawn Ades, Richard Calvocoressi, Désirée de Chair, Elizabeth Cowling, Hubertus Gaβner, Annabelle Görgen, Keith Hartley, Saskia van Kampen-Prein and Antony Penrose.  240 pp, 200 colour illustrations.


Also see Surrealism, two private eyes:  the Nesuhi Ertegen and Daniel Filipacchi Collections.

Over the course of almost five decades, famed magazine publisher Daniel Filipacchi and record producer Nesuhi Ertegun assembled the most important grouping of Surrealist art in private hands. This extraordinary two-volume set captures the full range, paradoxical nature and fascinating aspects of Surrealism. Featuring works by leading figures of the movement such as Giorgio de Chirico, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dal', Max Ernst, Rena Magritte, Man Ray and Yves Tanguy, this slipcased set is comprised almost entirely of full-page, full-color reproductions. Major paintings, sculpture, photographs, works on paper, rare books and off-the-cuff ephemera appear alongside complementary texts, creating a complete guide to one of the most intriguing movements in art history.

Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape

June 29, 2016, 9:18 am

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Rijksmuseum
24 June to 25 September 2016 

This summer the Rijksmuseum is staging the first ever major retrospective of work by Adriaen van de Velde (1636-1672), one of the greatest landscape painters of the Golden Age. The exhibition features sixty paintings, preliminary studies and drawings by the talented artist, who died tragically young. They come from private collections and from museums including the Louvre, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Kassel, Museo Thyssen Bornemisza Madrid, the Mauritshuis and the British Museum.

Unsurpassed master

For much of his short life – he died when he was just thirty-five – he was regarded as one of the greatest artists of the seventeenth century. During his lifetime he was known as an outstanding painter of people and animals. His posthumous fame endured until the mid-twentieth century. Today, the public is barely aware of his name, and the Rijksmuseum and the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London have decided to rectify this situation.

A landscape painter from a family of seascape painters

Son of the famous marine painter Willem van de Velde the Elder and brother of the equally famous Willem van de Velde the Younger, child prodigy Adriaen became a landscape painter – and a phenomenal draughtsman. His figure and animal studies – usually drawn in red chalk – are regarded as sublime examples of the genre. His drawings reveal that he made meticulous preparations for his popular painted landscapes. Other artists also regularly asked him to paint figures in their landscapes and townscapes.

Unique look at working methods

By reuniting Van de Velde’s refined paintings with their preliminary drawings, the exhibition presents a representative idea of his oeuvre and gives visitors a unique insight into Van de Velde’s working method: many of the motifs in the detailed drawings appear in his paintings. Like no other artist of his time, Van de Velde enables viewers to follow every stage of the creative process.

Special loans

The sixty works in the exhibition – thirty-seven drawings and twenty-three paintings – come from public and private collections in the Netherlands and abroad. Works of special note include The Beach at Scheveningen, a work he painted when he was twenty-one, on loan from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Kassel, and the wooden panel of a beach scene, dating from 1660, a rare loan from the Louvre. The Rijksmuseum is represented by five paintings and ten drawings.

Publication

A lavishly illustrated book accompanies the exhibition. It is the first commercially-available publication about Adriaen van de Velde. An introduction to the artist’s life, career and artistic background is followed by some forty entries, describing all of the more than sixty works. As in the exhibition, the focus is on the visual richness of the work and the artist’s working method. Visitors to the exhibition and readers of the book will feel that they are looking over the artist’s shoulder.
Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape | JUNE 2016: Hardback, 280 x 245 mm, 228 pages, 250 colour illus. PRICE: £34.95 ISBN: 978 1 907372 96 4

Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape runs from 24 June to 25 September 2016 in the Philips Wing of the Rijksmuseum. The exhibition is staged in collaboration with the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, where it can be seen this autumn.

 

 

Couple in a Landscape, Adriaen van de Velde, 1667. Rijksmuseum Collection. On loan from Amsterdam City Council (A. van der Hoop bequest)

Christie’s 250th anniversary sale, Defining British Art, 30 June 2016

June 29, 2016, 10:45 am

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Infatuation with arresting beauty has always compelled artists to produce masterpieces and four superb works are included in Christie’s 250th anniversary sale, Defining British Art, to be held in London on the evening of 30 June 2016.

Keats influenced his contemporaries and successors on the symbols and sentiments that ignited a revival in a new romanticism through intense realism and beauty in art. Never previously offered for sale,

Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Portrait of Lucy Long, Mrs. George Hardinge (1820) encapsulates that of a ‘society beauty’, being one of the finest works by the artist to come to the market in a generation (estimate: £2,000,000-3,000,000). Accompanied by her spaniel in the foreground of the canvas, Lucy Long’s stoic and elegant demeanor is captured as she gazes pensively onwards, producing an informative portrait of an esteemed figure in 19th century Britain.



Nonetheless, it was Dante Gabriel Rossetti who pioneered a new aesthetic evident in his depictions of his enigmatic muse, Jane Morris. As depicted in  

Portrait of Jane Morris, bust-length (circa 1870), her unusual appearance was strikingly at odds with any conventional notion of feminine grace, yet Rossetti captured her with an unprecedented, tasteful and irresistible intensity - providing a breathtaking portrait of his flawless lover. Formerly part of a significant collection owned by L.S Lowry and was sold by his heirs, this coloured chalk on light green paper is estimated at £300,000-500,000.

After the compelling purity of Rossetti’s Jane Morris is Frederic Leighton’s flirtatious and alluring  

Pavonia (circa 1859).  Producing a work of art contrasting to that of his contemporaries, Leighton captures a sensuality in the serene but confident sitter. Focusing solely on the physicality and subject of his striking Mediterranean model, Nanna Risi, we are not desensitised by exaggerated foregrounds or additional features, but gripped by her exotic beauty, juxtaposed with the magnificent display of a peacock fan, a timeless symbol of vanity (estimate: £1,500,000-2,500,000).


The fourth muse replaces the colour and seduction of her predecessors for a quaint charm which is as wholly appealing and mesmerising.

Lucian Freud’s A Girl (Pauline Tennant) (circa 1945), conveys an obvious stillness in its depiction. Pauline Tennant, portrayed truthfully to her rather unconventional personality and described as “a true bohemian aristocrat” (Phillip Hoare, The Independent) appears carefully delineated upon a muted canvas but animated in both beauty and psyche (estimate: £2,000,000-3,000,000).

RUBENS AND COMPANY: FLEMISH DRAWINGS FROM THE SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY

June 29, 2016, 10:51 am

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18 June – 28 August 2016
Scottish National Gallery

The greatest Flemish artist of the seventeenth century, Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), will be at the centre of the exciting new display of master drawings at the Scottish National Gallery this summer. Rubens and Company will celebrate the Gallery’s outstanding selection of Flemish drawings and prints, with masterpieces by Rubens, Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678) and Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), shown alongside rarely-seen works by Flemish contemporaries such as Cornelis Schut (1597-1655) and Frans Wouters (1612-1659).

Rubens is considered the towering figure of the Flemish Baroque – the period between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries – and one of the greatest artists of all time. In the seventeenth century Flanders, together with Brabant, was the most prominent province of the Southern Netherlands, which were then under Spanish control; today it marks the northern, Dutch-speaking part of modern Belgium.

The display includes Rubens’s 

beautiful sketch Hero and Leander, c.1600-3, and Eight Women Harvesting, c.1635, which was probably drawn outdoors and from life. Rubens’s work shows the strong influence of classical sculpture, and of Italian Renaissance artists such as Raphael and Michelangelo. As a painter of religious pictures, mythological scenes, classical and modern history and portraits, Rubens was a prominent figure on an international stage and had a broad impact on other artists, including Van Dyck and Jordaens.

Sir Anthony van Dyck

Study for the Portrait of Nicolas Lanier (1588 - 1666), 1628

Drawing (black chalk): 39.20 x 28.50 cm

Scottish National Gallery

Van Dyck’s Study for the Portrait of Nicholas Lanier (1588-1666), a delicate black chalk drawing from 1628, will be displayed in the exhibition, as well as Jordaens’s beautiful Female Nude (1641) and

Jacob Jordaens

The Adoration of the Magi, 1644

Drawing (black chalk): 47.50 x 34.70 cm

Scottish National Gallery. William Findlay Watson Bequest.

The Adoration of the Magi (1644).

Among the highlights of the display will be some new discoveries made during research for the exhibition, including a rare drawing for one of the most important commissions Rubens ever received.  

Workshop of Peter Paul Rubens

Saint Gregory of Nazianzus Subduing Heresy, 1620

Drawing (red and white bodycolour): 22.9 x 38.5 cm

Scottish National Gallery

Saint Gregory of Nazianzus Subduing Heresy, which dates from 1620, was previously regarded as a copy after a lost painting by Rubens; new research, however, suggests this drawing was made in the artist’s studio, under the master’s supervision. 

Frans Wouters

Diana and Actaeon, c.1654-56

Oil on panel: 8.00 x 39.50 cm

Scottish National Gallery. Bequeathed by George Watson throught the Art Fund 2015.

An oil sketch after Titian’s world-famous Diana and Actaeon, which is part of the Scottish National Gallery collection, was previously attributed to David Teniers the Younger and is now considered to be by Frans Wouters, a member of Rubens’s extensive studio. This oil sketch was acquired in 2015 through the Art Fund.

Rubens and Company will comprise 28 works in total. Many of these are preparatory drawings or studies which offer a fascinating insight into the function of drawings as well as studio practice; some of them have rarely, in some cases never, been displayed before.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a beautifully illustrated catalogue, which provides a lively panorama of Flemish draughtsmanship in the seventeenth century, its subjects and techniques. The publication has been supported by the General Representation of the Government of Flanders in the UK. This catalogue includes an in-depth discussion of the twenty-eight works in the exhibition as well as an introductory essay highlighting the paintings by Rubens and Van Dyck in the collection of the Scottish National Gallery

Tamayo: A Solitary Mexican Modernist

June 29, 2016, 10:59 am

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The National Gallery of Canada (NGC) presents, from June 25 to October 10, 2016, Tamayo: A Solitary Mexican Modernist, an exhibition that celebrates the work of Rufino Tamayo, whose paintings, prints and sculptures brought international attention to 20th-century Mexican art. This is the first solo-exhibition dedicated to the artist ever presented in Canada.

 

Rufino Tamayo, The Great Galaxy (detail), 1978, oil on canvas. Collection Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Internacional Rufino Tamayo / INBA / Mexico. © D.R. Rufino Tamayo/Herederos/ México/2015/Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo, A.C / SODRAC (2016) 

 

Tamayo is one of Mexico's most significant modernist artists, recognized for having achieved his own individual style despite the domination of his contemporaries, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, who were uncompromising in their allegiance to the social and political ideals that formed the basis of Mexico’s post-revolutionary art. Younger than they by ten years, Tamayo, looked to the future and the modern world, as well as finding inspiration in Mexico’s past traditions.

 

Commemorating the 25th anniversary of Tamayo's death, the exhibition presents 18 paintings plus a series of 12 lithographs on loan from various Mexican institutions and one work from the National Gallery’s Collection, together covering roughly 60 years of the painter’s artistic production. Marisol Argüelles, deputy director at Mexico’s Museum of Modern Art, is the curator of the exhibition, with the support of Erika Dolphin, Associate Curator to the Chief Curator at the National Gallery of Canada.

 

The National Gallery of Canada thanks the following institutions who made the presentation of Tamayo: A Solitary Mexican Modernist possible: the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, the Secretaría de Cultura, AMEXCID, and the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes of Mexico as well as the Museo de Arte Moderno, the Museo Nacional de Arte, and the Museo Tamayo.

 

“Mexican modernist art holds an important place in the vanguard movements of the twentieth century and will be of great interest to Canadians,” said the National Gallery of Canada Director and CEO Marc Mayer. “We are pleased to present this exhibition, a fine introduction to the outstanding work of Rufino Tamayo, to coincide with the North American Leaders’ Summit being held at the Gallery on June 29.”

 

“One of Mexico’s foremost modernist painters, Rufino Tamayo drew inspiration from Pre-Columbian art forms and our country’s rich history and popular art. His first solo-exhibition in Canada, to be held at the National Gallery on the 25th anniversary of his death, is a celebration of Mexican-Canadian cultural ties,” commented the Mexican Ambassador to Canada, his Excellency Agustín García-López.

 

To celebrate the exhibition of Tamayo works at the National Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada Foundation will host a special reception at the Gallery on Friday, June 24.

 

Foundation Chair, Thomas d’Aquino, said, “We are honoured to receive the works of this Mexican master on the eve of the State Visit to Canada of the President of Mexico and in advance of the historic North American Leaders’ Summit which will be proudly hosted at the National Gallery of Canada.”

 

About Rufino Tamayo (August 25, 1899 – June 24, 1991)
 

Born in Oaxaca, Tamayo was orphaned at age twelve. Under the guardianship of his aunt, he moved to Mexico City and secretly attended night classes in drawing. The environment of his early years would be a recurring motif throughout his work. Although his art reveals many aesthetic pursuits, one in particular stands out above all: a sense of freedom that allowed him – unlike artists of previous generations – to incorporate a set of formal codes from folk art and pre-Columbian Mexican mythology such as the use of colour and monumental forms. These coexisted in his work with the vocabulary of international art, confirming early on his universal vision of art.

 

Today Rufino Tamayo's work appears in many public and private collections around the world. He created the mural entitled Fraternity (1968), which was donated by Mexico to the United Nations Headquarters in New York in 1971. As part of Mexico’s artistic heritage, the National Institute of Fine Arts has an unrivaled collection of Tamayo’s work, mainly on deposit at the Museum of Modern Art. The personal collection belonging to the artist and his wife, which emphasizes paintings and sculpture from Europe, the United States, Latin America and Asia from 1945 to 1975, formed the foundation of the Rufino Tamayo Museum of International Contemporary Art, founded in 1981.

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