Botticelli and the Search for the Divine: Florentine Painting Between the Medici and the Bonfires of the Vanities

October 19, 2016, 8:41 am

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Muscarelle Museum- College of William & Mary February 11, 2017 - April 6 2017
Museum of Fine Arts Boston April 18 2017-  July 9, 2017

Botticelli and the Search for the Divine:  Florentine Painting Between the Medici and the Bonfires of the Vanities is a major international loan exhibition organized by the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, Va., in partnership with Italy’s Associazione Culturale Metamorfosi.

Sandro Botticelli (Florence 1445 –1510), was one of the most original and creative painters of the Italian Renaissance. Today his name and images are known as widely as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who were his friends. Together with his deeply moving religious images, Botticelli is renowned as the unchallenged master of classical mythologies. In his time, he also replicated the central figure of his iconic Birth of Venus in the Uffizi gallery in Florence in paintings with dark backgrounds stripped bare of place and time, just displaying the solitary beautiful nude.

One of the only two such Venuses known today in the world, from the Galleria Sabauda museum in Turin, will be on view for the first time in America, together with many other works that have never previously traveled to the United States.

The exhibition will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston as its only other venue. The exhibition will open at the Muscarelle Museum on February 11, 2017 and run through April 6. The exhibition will open to the public in Boston on April 18 and will close on July 9.

Renato Miracco, cultural attaché for the Italian Embassy in Washington, D.C. has stated that the upcoming Botticelli and the Search for the Divine“will be the largest and most important exhibition of its type ever organized in the United States.” He added that “the exhibition catalogues by John Spike, a leading Italianist, have been outstanding works of scholarship.” The Botticelli show is the most recent of numerous cultural initiatives by the Muscarelle Museum to which the Italian Embassy has lent its support.

The restless, prolific and original genius of Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) will be explored in depth in this historic exhibition, which features sixteen of his paintings, most with life-size figures, from major museums and churches in six Italian cities, including Florence, Milan and Venice. Every phase of the artist’s long, tumultuous career is represented in the selection, by far the largest and most important Botticelli exhibition ever staged in the United States.

Also featured are six rare paintings, by Botticelli’s great master Filippo Lippi, the only pupil of Masaccio. The cultural milieu of Renaissance Florence will be represented by several paintings by Filippo’s son, Filippino Lippi, Botticelli’s most important student and a leading master in his own right; a painting and a bronze statuette of Hercules by Antonio Pollaiuolo; the death mask of Lorenzo the Magnificent; and a portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo.

By 1490, as the first Renaissance century drew to a close, Sandro Botticelli was reputed the greatest painter in Florence. Born in 1445, Botticelli’s path to success had been guided by the Medici dynasty headed by Lorenzo de’ Medici, Il Magnifico. Naturally willing to learn, Botticelli returned the favor with sensuous fantasies on the Birth of Venus and the Allegory of Spring inspired by the Medici passion for the beauty of ancient Greece and the exoticism of the Romans. Botticelli’s mythologies endure among the best-known images of the Renaissance and the most famous paintings in the world.
Sandro Botticelli’s idyllic life was changed forever when Lorenzo the Magnificent died unexpectedly in 1492.  His son and successor, Piero the “Unfortunate”, so thoroughly mismanaged affairs that the government of the city was ceded to Fra Savonarola, the fiery preacher and nemesis of the Medici.

Botticelli is the most prominent of the painters whose nudes and pagan subjects were thrown on the notorious Bonfires of the Vanities that took place on Fat Tuesday (mardis gras) of 1497 and 1498. Some authorities believe that Botticelli himself participated in the burning.

Sandro Botticelli, Madonna del Libro (Madonna of the Book), Tempera on panel

Sandro Botticelli,  Sant’ Agostino nello studio (Saint Augustine in the studio), Fresco, Chiesa di San Salvatore in Ognissanti, Florence.

Sandro Botticelli and workshop Venus Oil on canvas, transferred from wood panel Credit: Galleria Sabauda, Turin

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Max Beckmann in New York

October 19, 2016, 9:06 am

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art
October 19, 2016–February 20, 2017

Opening October 19, 2016, the exhibition Max Beckmann in New York at The Metropolitan Museum of Art will put a spotlight on the artist’s special connection with New York City. It will feature 14 paintings that Beckmann created while living in New York from 1949 to 1950, as well as 25 works, dating from 1920 to 1948, from New York collections. The exhibition assembles several groups of iconic works, including self-portraits; mythical, expressionist interiors; robust, colorful portraits of women and performers; landscapes; and triptychs. 

In late December 1950, Beckmann set out from his apartment on the Upper West Side of New York to see his  

Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket (1950), which was on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the exhibition American Painting Today. However, on the corner of 69th Street and Central Park West, the 66-year-old artist suffered a fatal heart attack and never made it to the Museum. The poignant circumstance of the artist’s death served as the inspiration for the exhibition.

During the late 1920s, Max Beckmann (1884–1950) was at the pinnacle of his career in Germany—his work was presented by prestigious art dealers; he taught at the Städel Art School in Frankfurt and moved in a circle of influential writers, critics, publishers, and collectors. After the National Socialists denounced his work as “degenerate” and confiscated it from German museums in 1937, Beckmann left the country and immigrated to Holland, where he remained for 10 years.

After the war, and after rejecting offers to teach in Berlin and Munich, Beckmann accepted a temporary teaching position in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1947. He made his move to America permanent in 1948, seeing his emigration as marking the end of his exile. In early September 1949 he moved to New York City, which he described as “a prewar Berlin multiplied a hundredfold,” and began teaching at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. He and his wife Mathilde “Quappi” Beckmann first lived at 234 East 19th Street, between Second and Third Avenues, moving in May 1950 to 38 West 69th Street, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. Life in Manhattan energized him and resulted in such powerful pictures as

Falling Man (1950)

and The Town (City Night) (1950).

Though Beckmann was new to the city, his work was not. Before his arrival, it had been known in New York for more than two decades through the efforts of two art dealers from Berlin, J. B. Neumann and Curt Valentin. Important paintings by the artist dating from the 1920s through the 1940s entered public and private collections in New York as a result of the close relationships Neumann and Valentin forged with collectors. Both dealers also befriended Alfred H. Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art from 1929 to 1943. With Barr, Neumann was instrumental in conceiving the museum’s exhibition German Painting and Sculpture in spring of 1931. Eight works by Beckmann dating from 1921 to 1929 were included in the exhibition. 

Among the first private collectors of his work was the German-born Dr. Hirschland, who, before 1930, acquired from Neumann the important

Self-Portrait on Yellow Ground with Cigarette (1923), which he bequeathed to the Museum of Modern Art in 1956.

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, one of the founders of the museum, in 1931 purchased  

Family Picture (1920) from Neumann; she then gave it to the Museum of Modern Art in 1935, where it was joined in 1942 by Barr’s purchase of the artist’s first triptych,

Departure (1932, 1933–35).

These early prominent collectors were followed by generations of others whose contributions will be on view in this exhibition at The Met.

Pictures with full credits:

1. Max Beckmann (German, Leipzig 1884–1950 New York)
Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket
1950
Oil on canvas
55 1/8 × 36 in. (140 × 91.4 cm)
Framed: 66 15/16 in. × 48 in. × 3 3/16 in. (170 × 121.9 × 8.1 cm)
Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May
SL.9.2016.24.1
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

2. Max Beckmann (German, Leipzig 1884–1950 New York)
Self-Portrait with a Cigarette
1923
Oil on canvas
23 3/4 × 15 7/8 in. (60.3 × 40.3 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. F. H. Hirschland, 1956
SL.9.2016.18.1
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

3. Max Beckmann (German, Leipzig 1884–1950 New York)
Self-Portrait with Horn
1938
Oil on canvas
43 1/4 × 39 1/4 in. (109.9 × 101 cm)
Neue Galerie New York and Private Collection
SL.9.2016.19.1
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn



4. Max Beckmann (German, Leipzig 1884–1950 New York)
Family Picture
1920
Oil on canvas
25 5/8 × 39.3 in. (65.1 × 100 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1935
SL.9.2016.18.2
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

5. Max Beckmann (German, Leipzig 1884–1950 New York)
Galleria Umberto
1925
Oil on canvas
44 5/8 × 19 13/16 in. (113.3 × 50.3 cm)
Framed: 52 × 27 1/8 in. (132.1 × 68.9 cm)
Private Collection, Courtesy Neue Galerie, New York
SL.9.2016.14.1
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

6. Max Beckmann (German, Leipzig 1884–1950 New York)
The Bark
1926
Oil on canvas
70 × 35 in. (177.8 × 88.9 cm)
Framed: 71 1/2 × 36 1/8 in. (181.6 × 91.8 cm)
Richard L. Feigen, New York.
SL.9.2016.9.1
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

7. Max Beckmann (German, Leipzig 1884–1950 New York)
The Old Actress
1926
Oil on canvas
39 9/16 × 27 3/4 in. (100.5 × 70.5 cm)
Frame: 44 × 32 1/2 in. (111.8 × 82.6 cm)
Private Collection, New York
SL.9.2016.23.1
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

8. Max Beckmann (German, Leipzig 1884–1950 New York)
Paris Society
1925 / 1931 / 1947
Oil on canvas
43 × 69 1/8 in. (109.2 × 175.6 cm)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
SL.9.2016.16.1
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn




9. Max Beckmann (German, Leipzig 1884–1950 New York)
Departure
1932-1933
Oil on canvas
Central panel: 84 3/4 × 45 3/8 in. (215.3 × 115.3 cm)
Left Panel: 84 3/4 × 39 1/4 in. (215.3 × 99.7 cm)
Right Panel: 84 3/4 × 39 1/4 in. (215.3 × 99.7 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously (by exchange), 1942
SL.9.2016.18.3
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

10. Max Beckmann (German, Leipzig 1884–1950 New York)
Quappi in Grey
1948
Oil on canvas
42 1/2 × 31 1/8 in. (108 × 79.1 cm)
Frame: 55 × 44 in. (139.7 × 111.8 cm)
Private Collection, New York
SL.9.2016.8.3
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

11. Max Beckmann (German, Leipzig 1884–1950 New York)
Beginning
1949
Oil on canvas
Overall: 69 x 125 1/2 in. (175.3 x 318.8 cm);
left (a): 65 × 33 1/2 in. (165.1 × 85.1 cm);
center (b): 69 × 59 in. (175.3 × 149.9 cm);
right (c): 65 × 33 1/2 in. (165.1 × 85.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876-1967), 1967
67.187.53a-c
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

12. Max Beckmann (German, Leipzig 1884–1950 New York)
Falling Man
1950
Oil on canvas
55 1/2 × 35 in. (141 × 88.9 cm)
Frame: 62 1/4 × 41 1/4 × 2 3/4 in. (158.1 × 104.8 × 7 cm)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mrs. Max Beckmann
SL.9.2016.13.1
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

13. Max Beckmann (German, Leipzig 1884–1950 New York)
Carnival Mask, Green, Violet and Pink (Columbine)
1950
Oil on canvas
53 3/8 × 39 9/16 in. (135.5 × 100.5 cm)
Framed: 61 3/8 × 47 3/4 × 1 3/4 in. (155.9 × 121.3 × 4.4 cm)
Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May
SL.9.2016.24.2
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Christie’s i November 15 Evening sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art in New York: Willem de Kooning’s 1977 masterpiece, Untitled XXV,Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild

October 19, 2016, 9:25 am

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Christie’s will present Willem de Kooning’s 1977 masterpiece, Untitled XXV, in its November 15 Evening sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art in New York. Estimated in the region of $40 million, Untitled XXV comes to the auction market for the first time since setting the world auction record for any example of Post-War Art in the very same saleroom exactly ten-years ago to the date.

Brett Gorvy, Chairman and International Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art, remarked: “Untitled XXV is an unequivocal Abstract Expressionist tour de force. We are very proud to be unveiling this work in London, where the extraordinary international presence of the Royal Academy’s Abstract Expressionist show has been so well received. Untitled XXV is a pinnacle picture from one of the most remarkable years in de Kooning’s career. Its vivid colors and painterly dynamism come together to form a totality of expression, resulting in a consummate example of the artist’s approach to abstraction.”

Untitled XXV comes from a remarkable series of large canvases that de Kooning made in a sudden burst of activity in the mid-1970s. In the spring of 1975, a comparatively long stretch of painterly inactivity for the artist suddenly came to an end. In a flood of creativity that lasted until 1978, de Kooning found himself once again reveling in the act of painting. Fresh and re-vitalized by his recent exploration into sculpture and rejuvenated by an ever-deepening love affair with a young woman, Emilie Kilgore, de Kooning was able to sustain this output for a period of nearly four years. "I made those paintings one after the other, no trouble at all," he said. "I couldn't miss. It's a nice feeling. It's strange. It's a man at a gambling table (who) feels that he can't lose. But when he walks away with the dough, he knows that he can't do that again.”

These years are now viewed by critics as the apex of de Kooning’s painterly oeuvre, and 1977 a particular highpoint amongst them. The celebrated critic, David Sylvester called this year de Kooning’s annus mirabilis, writing that the works from 1977 “belong with the paintings made at the same age by artists such as Monet and Renoir and Bonnard and, of course, Titian.”

The artist’s surroundings are often attributed in part to the fruitfulness of this period. When he had first moved to the Springs on Long Island, de Kooning had enjoyed the unique landscape of the area and this in many ways had entered and informed his work. However, in the mid-'70s he became increasingly preoccupied with his immediate environment, its light and topography as well as, in particular, the wateriness of the landscape around a spot called Louse Point.

At Louse Point, de Kooning spent hours observing the water and its effects. He became captivated by the shimmering surface of water and its ability to reflect and merge the imagery of the land, sky, figures and itself in a constantly shifting abstract surface of color and form. It was this mercurial effect that he began again to try to emulate in his paintings, attempting to translate these relationships into the equally fluid but more materially substantial and plastic medium of paint.

Untitled XXV is a joyous and heavily material painterly expression. Layer after layer of painted form and color is built up and overlaid within the square canvas to maintain a dynamic and tenuous balance. Somehow rooted in nature yet seemingly absent of any figurative appearance, the painting articulates a landscape of painterly form brought alive with a sense of the human through the length and scale, as well as the emotive power of the artist's vigorous brushwork and twisted painterly gesture.

Untitled XXV sold for the first time at Christie’s New York on November 15, 2006. At the time, it realized $27,120,000, setting a world auction record for both the artist and for any post-war work of art sold at auction.

The current auction record for Willem de Kooning is now held by Untitled VIII, 1977, which was sold for $32,085,000

at Christie’s New York in November 2013.

 

 

The record for a post-war work of art is now held by Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (in 3 parts), which sold for $142,404,992 at Christie’s New York in November 2013.

Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild from the Collection of Eric Clapton will be another highlight Christie’s November 15, Evening Auction of Post-War and Contemporary Art in New York (Estimate in the range of $20million). Dating from the artist’s most celebrated period of abstraction and one of the highlights of the fall season, Abstraktes Bild was acquired by the rock legend Eric Clapton at auction in 2001. The painting will be unveiled at Christie’s London, and on view to the public from October 1-6, 2016.

Francis Outred, Chairman and Head of Post War and Contemporary Art EMERI, remarked: ‘This series marks a moment of great professional triumph for Richter.  First exhibited at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1995 as a group of four paintings,

one of which is now in the joint collection of Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, the further three were acquired at auction by Eric Clapton from the collection of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch in 2001.



The first of Clapton’s Richters to come to auction achieved a world record price for the artist in 2012 when it realised a figure of £21.3 million. We are delighted to unveil this third painting in London, the city where it was first shown, before it goes on to star in Christie’s November auctions of Post-War and Contemporary Art.’

Abstraktes Bild is the second canvas in Richter’s monumental four-part series of works created in 1994, the third of which resides in the joint collection of Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland. A superlative example of the artist’s celebrated abstraction, Abstraktes Bild is a dazzling, prismatic explosion of opulent jewelled tones. Standing as the culmination of a three-decade-long investigation into the properties of paint and perception, the works produced by Richter during the late 1980s and early 1990s represent the first major abstract achievements since those of Abstract Expressionism. Revealing and obscuring in equal measure, Richter’s squeegee gave rise to unplanned textures and formations that shed new light on the complex relationship between abstraction and figuration. With its kaleidoscopic collision of jewel-like tones, Abstraktes Bild confirms Robert Storr’s assertion that ‘it is hard to think of [Richter] as anything other than one of the great colourists of late twentieth-century painting’.

Abstraktes Bild was first shown in 1995 at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London as part of the landmark exhibition Gerhard Richter: Painting in the Nineties. Following the artist’s career-defining retrospectives of 1991 and 1993-94, the show was a critical and commercial triumph, with works subsequently acquired by major museums across four continents. Three of the four paintings in the series were bought by the noted collectors Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch, from whom they were purchased by Clapton in 2001.

 Echoing the grid-like structures of Richter’s four-part Bach series (1992, Moderna Museet, Stockholm), and foreshadowing his six-part response to the work of John Cage (2006, Tate, London), the present work represents a chapter in the closely-entwined stories of music and abstraction. Indecipherable notations dance across its quivering horizontal planes, spawning a matrix of pounding rhythms, discordant harmonies, contrapuntal textures, interrupted cadences and chromatic inflections. In the clamouring polyphonic tremors of its surface, the work aspires to the condition of noise: a virtuosic rhapsody that strains to be heard.

The Shimmer of Gold: Giovanni di Paolo in Renaissance Siena

October 19, 2016, 9:50 am

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J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM

 October 11, 2016 –January 8, 2017 

 

 

 Branchini Madonna, 1427, Giovanni di Paolo, Italian, The Norton Simon Foundation, F.1978.01.P

Manuscript illuminator and panel painter Giovanni di Paolo (about 1399–1482) counts as one of the most distinctive and imaginative artists working in Renaissance Siena, Italy. The Shimmer of Gold: Giovanni di Paolo in Renaissance Siena, on view October 11, 2016 through January 8, 2017 at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, brings together several examples of his brilliantly colored paintings on both panel and parchment, including the work that scholars consider to be the artist’s masterpiece.

The exhibition centers on Giovanni’s most important commission, the Branchini Altarpiece, a multi-panel polyptych completed in 1427 for the Branchini family chapel in the church of San Domenico in Siena. The exhibition reunites—for the first time since it was dispersed sometime after 1649—the glorious, large central panel, representing the Virgin and Child surrounded by seraphim and flowers, with the altarpiece’s four surviving predella panels, smaller narrative paintings that decorated the lower register of the altarpiece.

“This exhibition had its beginnings, like many others at the Getty, in the conservation studio when a small panel painting by Giovanni di Paolo came to the Museum in 2012 for treatment thanks to the generosity of our Paintings Council,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “This opportunity gave our conservators and curators the chance to study the panel, compare it to other works by the same artist, and eventually develop an exhibition that presents Giovanni’s art in all its richness and complexity.”

The signed and dated central panel, the so-called “Branchini Madonna,” on loan from the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, was the only portion identified as part of the altarpiece until 2009, when scholars in Europe connected it with other works. When asked about the exhibition, Norton Simon Museum President and CEO Walter Timoshuk said, “The Getty Museum has presented a wonderful opportunity to learn more about our ‘Branchini Madonna,’ a highlight from our early-Renaissance collection, and we are delighted to see it exhibited in this revelatory way.”

The team at the Getty recently had the opportunity to study the panel from the Norton Simon when it came to the Museum for conservation, along with a small predella panel representing the Adoration of the Magi, which had been loaned for study and treatment by the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands. Technical analysis is still ongoing, but it seems to support what scholars had already suspected: that the Adoration of the Magi panel was indeed part of the Branchini Altarpiece, as were three other predella panels in the collection of the Pinacoteca Nazionale of Siena. All four surviving predella panels (there was a fifth panel, which is yet to be found) will be gathered together in the exhibition. “Other missing parts of the polyptych have not yet been found but technical analysis may help identify other works in the future,” says Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of Paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum and co-curator of the exhibition. Adds Yvonne Szafran, senior conservator of Paintings Conservation at the Getty Museum and co-curator of the exhibition: “Scientific analysis of art is becoming extremely sophisticated, and technological advances allow us to examine paintings more comprehensively than ever before. With the help of our colleagues at the Getty Conservation Institute, we can now discover material information about paintings that was previously hidden, in this case revealing links between panels that were separated long ago.”

The exhibition also brings into focus the highly decorative and richly colored painting technique, which included extensive use of gold leaf, that peaked in Italy in the early 15th century, and of which Giovanni di Paolo was a celebrated master. Over the course of his lengthy career, Giovanni received prestigious commissions from private individuals and families, patrons such as the Pope, guilds, and numerous religious orders, including the Dominicans and Augustinians. His brilliantly colorful paintings on both panel and parchment reveal him to be an artist whose style drew uniquely from Sienese and Florentine models.

Giovanni di Paolo: The Adoration of the Magi

The Coronation of the Virgin, about 1420, Gentile da Fabriano, tempera and gold

  In the 1420s, Giovanni di Paolo and fellow Sienese artists responded enthusiastically to the courtly splendor of the newly arrived painter Gentile da Fabriano, one of the most successful artists in Italy at the time, who traveled to Tuscany from northern Italy for numerous commissions, and who immediately worked with and sometimes under the supervision of Siena’s leading creative personalities.

Some scholars have suggested that the young Giovanni di Paolo may have worked on the Branchini Altarpiece with Gentile, who would have influenced Giovanni di Paolo’s technique, as many similarities in their painting methods are apparent. The sophisticated layering of paint and gold as well as the careful execution of elaborate and fine decorative details is evident in the work of both artists, and each were masters at depicting the luxury brocaded textiles and animal furs that were so valued during this period.

In the exhibition, leaves and cuttings from choir books illuminated by Sienese and Florentine artists underscore the shared working methods, itinerant travels, and – in particular – the prevalent use of gold in the religious imagery of the period; as well as explore Giovanni di Paolo’s influence on the painted arts in Renaissance Tuscany. “The illuminated choir book is one of the most significant art forms to demonstrate the combined efforts of multiple artists, a theme demonstrated through a grouping of miniatures lent by the Burke Family Collection and the Ferrell Collection,” says Bryan C. Keene, assistant curator in the department of Manuscripts at the Getty Museum, who also co-curated the exhibition.

The Shimmer of Gold: Giovanni di Paolo in Renaissance Siena will be on view October 11, 2016 – January 8, 2017 at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition is generously supported by the Museum’s Paintings Council who not only sponsored the conservation work on the predella panel from the Kröller-Müller Museum, but also provided funding for the exhibition.

Complementing the exhibition is a special show at the Italian Cultural Institute in Westwood. Unknown Monk– on view from October 7 through November 11, 2016 – features a series of small panels and a large oil painting on canvas which visually references the Giovanni di Paolo altarpiece by contemporary Italian artists Alex Folla and Elena Trailina.

Also on view at the Getty Center are The Art of Alchemy at the Getty Research Institute (October 11, 2016 –February 12, 2017) and Alchemy of Color in Medieval Manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum (October 11, 2016 –January 8, 2017). Drawn primarily from the collections of the Getty Research Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum The Art of Alchemy, portrays the critical impact of this arcane subject on artistic practice and expression from Greco-Egyptian antiquity to medieval Central Asia, and from the Islamic world to Europe during the Enlightenment and beyond. The Alchemy of Color in Medieval Manuscripts examines the significance of color, which was understood in the Middle Ages in terms of its material, scientific and medicinal properties.

Image Caption(s) and Credit(s)

Giovanni di Paolo (Italian, about 1403 - 1482)

The Presentation in the Temple, 1427

Tempera and gold on panel

Panel: 50 × 50.8 × 3.3 cm (19 11/16 × 20 × 1 5/16 in.)

Polo Museale Regionale della Toscana

Repro Credit:

Polo Museale della Toscana - Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena.

Giovanni di Paolo (Italian, about 1403 - 1482)

Initial A: Christ Appearing to David, about 1440

Tempera colors, gold leaf, and ink on parchment

Leaf: 20 × 18.6 cm (7 7/8 × 7 5/16 in.)

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. 29, recto

Giovanni di Paolo (Italian, about 1403 - 1482)

The Flight into Eygpt, 1427

Tempera and gold on panel

Panel: 50 × 50 × 1.6 cm (19 11/16 × 19 11/16 × 5/8 in.)

Object Credit:

Polo Museale Regionale della Toscana

Repro Credit:

Polo Museale della Toscana - Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena.

Giovanni di Paolo (Italian, about 1403 - 1482)

The Crucifixion, 1427

Tempera and gold on panel

Panel: 49.5 × 52.2 × 1.6 cm (19 1/2 × 20 9/16 × 5/8 in.)

Polo Museale Regionale della Toscana

Repro Credit:

Polo Museale della Toscana - Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena

Georg Baselitz The Heroes

October 19, 2016, 5:57 pm

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FROM 30 June to 23 October 2016, the Städel Museum is presenting Georg Baselitz’s famous “Heroes” in a comprehensive monographic special exhibition fifty years after the paintings’ making. Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) definitely ranks among the most influential painters and sculptors of our time. His powerful workgroup of “Heroes” and “New Types” is regarded as a key achievement of 1960s German art all over the world. In the exhibition curated by Max Hollein, it is being shown on a large scale for the first time.

Some seventy paintings and works on paper are on view: their aggressively and defiantly painted monumental figures have lost nothing of their ambiguous, portentous and vulnerable quality to this day. Baselitz’s “Heroes” are raddled soldiers, resigned painters, marked by their latent failure as well as by their uncertain future. The fragility and contradictory nature of the “Heroes” in terms of contents find their formal equivalent. The consistently frontal depiction and central placement of the clearly outlined figures contrast with the wildness of the artist’s palette and the vehemence of his painting style.

Loans from important international museums and private collections offer the public a wide-ranging view of these icons of German postwar art conceived by the only twenty-seven-year old artist in a spurt of explosive productivity in 1965 and 1966. After its début at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, the major exhibition will travel to the Moderna Museet Stockholm, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

“The ‘Heroes’ are both a landmark and a fervent pivot in Georg Baselitz’s oeuvre. They have sprung from a deep, inner necessity in a deliberate confrontation with pressing, charged subjects and unfold a timeless reflection on the artist’s existence as such. Giving expression to strikingly visualized and self-felt isolation, uprooting, and lack of orientation, the works render the artist’s precarious state of experience in a broken world, establishing a paradigmatic image of his condition”, says Max Hollein, curator of the show.

In 1965, Georg Baselitz found himself faced with an order destroyed in multiple ways: twenty years after the end of World War II, ideologies and political systems, as well as artistic styles, were up for discussion. This lack of systems of order was very much in keeping with the artist’s own nature: appropriation through artistic categorization is something that has remained foreign to him throughout his life.

Fundamentally skeptical, Baselitz emphasized the equivocal aspects of his time. Breathing failure and resignation, his monumental “Heroes” in their tattered battle dress evince an accordingly contradictory character. That the artist devoted himself to the subject of “Heroes” or “Types” at all at that time was a provocation in itself. (Male) heroism and its one-time exponents had been called into question by the war and the postwar period. Figures from a presumably buried past are brought back to life, picturing a reality which was anything but welcome in the German Federal Republic’s success story of the economic miracle – and this in the supposedly obsolete form of figurative painting.

Yet the artist was concerned with far more than general issues of society. In numerous role depictions – the spectrum includes the “New Type”, the rebel/partisan with historical/political connotations, the spiritual shepherd and the painter adopting a position – Baselitz visualized his individual stance and his personal path as a painter. In a staggering act of self-assertion and identity definition that ran contrary to the prevailing currents of the time, he reflected on his own position vis-à-vis the society in which he lived. “I’ve carried out a lot of experiments in fifty years. But I don’t think the ‘Heroes’ require any further coaching”, comments Georg Baselitz on the “Heroes” and “New Types” workgroup.

“The Städel’s exhibition is presenting Baselitz’s ‘Heroes’ across two floors of its Exhibition Building in an interplay of empty spaces and zones of concentration,” says Eva Mongi-Vollmer, co-curator of the exhibition. Special emphasis has been placed on the impact of the individual paintings and drawings. Thanks to the varied wall colors and the strongly rhythmical – and frequently surprising – presentation, a visit to the exhibition heightens the perception of the works and sensitizes the viewer.

Baselitz’s “Heroes” and “New Types” with their colossal bodies and extremely small heads are always positioned in the very center of the picture. They stagger or, sometimes clumsily, sometimes in complete control, stalk through the pictorial space. In accordance with their maltreated bodies, their bleak surroundings suggest devastation: houses on fire, trees stripped of their leaves, thrown-up mounds of earth. The vagrant “Heroes” are furnished with a repertoire of recurring objects they carry with them: field packs, palettes and brushes or instruments of torture. Despite the repetitive format of 162 × 130 centimeters, each of the works strikes us with an expression all of its own, which strongly depends on the chosen method of painting and the colors employed. The loose chronological sequence of works in the presentation testifies to Baselitz’s gradual breaking away from his motif. It is only a short way from there to his later inversion of the subject.

Baselitz began the “Heroes” and “New Types” workgroup during the period he spent at the Villa Romana in Florence on a grant. After returning to West Berlin, he continued developing the theme. The much-discussed history of Baselitz scandals that had begun in 1963 with the show at the Galerie Werner & Katz was now drawing to a close. Within the œuvre of the artist’s early years, the “Hero” paintings represent a special turning point and can today be regarded as a historical document. These works did not fall into line with the artistic tendencies of their time – whether the ZERO group’s vision of the future, the French or American approaches to abstraction or the variations on German post-war Informel. Even twenty years after the end of the war, they did not content themselves with a superficial feeling of a new beginning. And even if the “Heroes” and “New Types” adhere to recurring elements in terms of motif, they are monstrous, damaged and forceful in their painterly formulation. They represent an important stance within post-1945 German art.

The exhibition is being accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue published by Hirmer, in which editor Max Hollein explores painting as a means of liberation in his introduction, while Alexander Kluge’s texts create an impressive, very special space of perception; Uwe Fleckner deals with the postheroic hero, the art historian Richard Shiff gives a lively impression of lost heroes, and Städel curator Eva Mongi-Vollmer focuses on the years Baselitz’s “Heroes” date from.

The audio guide to the exhibition (also available on the Städel app) is spoken by Georg Baselitz and Alexander Kluge. Starting on Wednesday, 15 June 2016, an elaborately designed “digitorial” – available at baselitz.staedelmuseum.de – will provide comprehensive insights into key premises and works of the exhibition.

GEORG BASELITZ

Born in Deutschbaselitz in eastern Saxony on 23 January 1938, Georg Baselitz began his studies at the College of Fine Arts in Berlin-Weissensee (East). After he had been expelled from the school because of “sociopolitical immaturity” after two semesters, he continued his studies in Berlin-Charlottenburg (West) in 1957. First travels abroad led him to Amsterdam and Paris.

1961 saw the beginning of his exhibition activities together with Eugen Schönebeck in an unoccupied house, on the occasion of which the first “Pandemonium Manifesto,” as it came to be called, was published. The following gallery shows were controversially received. In 1966 Baselitz left Berlin for a town in Rhine-Hesse near Worms.

He painted his first picture showing its motif upside down in 1969 – a decision he remained true to throughout his further career. As he became more and more renowned, he increasingly presented his works in exhibitions abroad; in 1980 he and Anselm Kiefer were invited to represent the Federal Republic of Germany at the 39th Venice Biennale. Much-acclaimed exhibitions in various countries such as Great Britain and the United States followed. Baselitz continued his teaching activities, which he had begun in Karlsruhe in 1978, in Berlin from 1983 to 1988 and from 1992 on. Numerous retrospectives, honors, awards, and honorary professorships still pay tribute to the outstanding relevance of his work.

CATALOGUE:

A catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be published by Hirmer. Edited by Max Hollein and Eva Mongi-Vollmer, it comprises a foreword by Max Hollein and contributions by Uwe Fleckner, Max Hollein, Alexander Kluge, Richard Shiff, and Eva Mongi-Vollmer. German and English edition, 172 pages..





Georg Baselitz (*1938)
A New Type, 1966
Oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm
Privately owned
Photo: Frank Oleski, Köln
© Georg Baselitz 2016

Georg Baselitz (*1938)
The Tree, 1966
Oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm
Privately owned
© Georg Baselitz 2016
Photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin

Georg Baselitz (*1938)
The Shepherd, 1965
Oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm
Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna, loan of the Österreichische Ludwig-Stiftung, since 1993
© Georg Baselitz 2016
Photo: Frank Oleski, Köln

Georg Baselitz (*1938)
The Shepherd, 1966
Oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm
Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden
© Georg Baselitz 2016
Photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin

Georg Baselitz (*1938)
The Modern Painter, 1965
Oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm
Privately owned
© Georg Baselitz 2016
Photo: Frank Oleski, Köln

Georg Baselitz (*1938)
The New Type, 1966
Oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, donation: Franz Dahlem
© Georg Baselitz 2016
Photo: Kim Hansen, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek

Georg Baselitz (*1938)
The Great Friends, 1965
Oil on canvas, 250 x 300 cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
© Georg Baselitz 2016
Photo: Frank Oleski, Köln

Georg Baselitz (*1938)
A New Type, 1965
Gouache, ink wash and crayon on paper, 48,7 x 31,7 cm
Privately owned
© Georg Baselitz 2016
Photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin

Georg Baselitz (*1938)
With Red Flag, 1965
Oil on canvas, 163 x 131 cm
Private collection courtesy of Art Agency, Partners
© Georg Baselitz 2016
Photo: Frank Oleski, Köln

Georg Baselitz (*1938)
Rebel, 1965
Oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm
Tate: purchased 1982, London
© Georg Baselitz 2016
Photo: Friedrich Rosenstiel, Köln

Georg Baselitz (*1938)
Blocked Painter, 1965
Oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm
MKM Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg, Collection Ströher
© Georg Baselitz 2016
Photo: Archiv Sammlung Ströher

Watteau. The Draughtsman

October 20, 2016, 11:22 am

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Städel Museum
19 OCTOBER 2016 TO 15 JANUARY 2017

Teylers Museum in Haarlem 
2 February to 14 May 201


FROM 19 OCTOBER 2016 TO 15 JANUARY 2017, the Städel Museum will present a comprehensive exhibition on one of the most outstanding draughtsmen in the history of French art – Antoine Watteau (1684–1721). The show in the Exhibition Gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings will bring together fifty drawings by Watteau, enhanced by six of his paintings and a small selection of drawings by contemporaries and successors. Organized in cooperation with Teylers Museum in Haarlem, Holland, the exhibition “Watteau. The Draughtsman” will be the first monographic presentation of the artist’s work in Germany for more than thirty years. It will moreover be the first in this country devoted specifically to the phenomenon of Watteau in all his many facets as a draughtsman. Drawings served him as a basis for his painterly work. He drew continually and habitually, and in the most varied situations. The Städel has in its holdings altogether seven works from different phases of his career – and thus one of the most prominent Watteau collections in Germany. The precious sheets from the two institutions will form the exhibition’s core, and be supplemented by loans of high quality from collections in Germany, Holland, France and other European countries. Following its presentation at the Städel, the exhibition will be on view at Teylers Museum in Haarlem from 2 February to 14 May 2017.

“Already the spectacular purchase of the painting The Embarkation for Cythera (ca. 1709–1712) in 1982 prepared the ground for the scholarly investigation of the works of Antoine Watteau at the Städel Museum. Our present comprehensive special exhibition on Watteau as an eminent draughtsman provides us with an opportunity to address ourselves to a further central aspect of his œuvre”, comments Dr Martin Sonnabend, curator of the exhibition and head of the Städel’s department of prints and drawings to 1750.

The French artist Antoine Watteau is one of the great masters of draughtsmanship. He was born in 1684 in the Flemish city of Valenciennes, which had been conquered by the troops of Louis XIV only shortly beforehand. Nothing is known about his early artistic training. In about 1702 he went to Paris, where he eked out a living for several years as an assistant to various artists, interior decorators and art dealers. It was around 1709 that he began to call attention to himself as a painter of works of his own. In 1712 the Paris academy admitted him to its ranks. From that time onward, he was highly successful above all with bourgeois connoisseurs and collectors, for whom he carried out paintings – for the most part small in format – of a novel subject, the fête galante (courtship party). The compositions show gatherings of young, elegantly dressed women and men in park-like landscapes, conversing, making music or contemplating nature. With their mix of reality and ideality, they catered to the taste of a generation that no longer found artistic appeal in the ponderous history paintings of the age of Louis XIV, works designed to represent the interests of the state. In Watteau’s courtship scenes, arcadian themes and traditions of Dutch genre painting join with motifs taken from the theatre of the artist’s time to create a reality considered free, indebted to sensory perception, and as immediately real as it was permeated with artistry. It took the generation following Watteau – who died of tuberculosis at the young age of thirty-six – to develop his approach further into the art that later came to be called “Rococo”.

Drawings were the prerequisite for Watteau’s artistic production. His ability to capture his observations rapidly and confidently in red chalk enabled him to amass an extensive repertoire of motifs – primarily figural studies, but also landscape drawings and copies of works by other artists –; he then drew from this rich stock to devise the compositions of his paintings. Over time, by employing white and black chalk in addition to the red, he developed a virtuoso technique of stunning painterly effect. The immediacy of drawing provided him with an essential means of recording the fine nuances of reality that found their way into his scenes of courtship gatherings. Already his contemporaries recognized this special quality and collected Watteau’s drawings. His innovative style, characterized by a combination of precise observation, spontaneity, facility and intimacy, contrasts distinctly with the rigorous tradition to which the academically oriented artists of his time adhered. With its psychological sensitivity, the new, virtuoso art reflected the spirit of the incipient Enlightenment. The French Romanticists and the Impressionists considered Antoine Watteau one of their forerunners, and to this day we are amazed by the modernity of his works – especially his drawings.

The Städel Museum has in its painting collection the earliest version of the famous The Embarkation for Cythera (ca. 1709–1712) which – also thanks to the other two versions in the Louvre and Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin – is presumably the artist’s single most famous composition.

“Watteau. The Draughtsman” will enhance this work with five further paintings and fifty selected drawings. The presentation will begin with early drawings by Watteau showing figures from the realm of theatre as well as fairs and folk festivals. His early theatre studies of ca. 1709 to 1712 bear a direct thematic connection to the The Embarkation for (or Pilgrimage to) Cythera.

In addition to the Städel Museum painting, this section will also feature preliminary studies of male and female models in pilgrims’ costumes. Watteau also devoted himself to other popular themes of his time, as seen in his soldier and hunting scenes. His drawings of members of a Persian delegation that visited Paris in 1715 testify to the draughtsman Watteau’s sublime mastery of the “three-chalk” technique. It was also around this time that he made his studies of the “Savoyards”, destitute street performers and merchants of the French capital.

Following a section presenting Watteau’s drawings after works by other artists, the show will return to the most important theme in his œuvre. After first appearing in the The Embarkation for Cythera, the subject of the fête galante continued to play a decisive role, characterizing Watteau’s work to such an extent that it came to be closely associated with his name. In his paintings he also turned his attention again and again to theatre as a medium that can present the world of feelings without the constraints imposed by societal or natural reality, and as an element combining the artificial and the real. The reflection on emotional events that already played a role in the artist’s investigation of theatre is also the theme of a further section of the exhibition. Here the focus is on drawings in which Watteau captured the gazes, thoughts and feelings of his models.

The show “Watteau. The Draughtsman” will conclude with thirteen drawings by successors to the artist – among them Antoine Coypel (1661–1722), Nicolas Lancret (1690–1743), François Boucher (1703–1770) and Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) – from the Städel Museum holdings. A publication of the years 1726–1728 containing 350 etchings after Watteau drawings (by, among others, François Boucher) will also be on display.

A catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be published by the Hirmer Verlag with a foreword by Philipp Demandt and Marjan Scharloo. The publication will offer an introduction to the art of Watteau by Martin Sonnabend. Michiel Plomp (Teylers Museum, Haarlem) will investigate the artist’s exploration of the works of those “Old Masters” he chose – in the context of the drawing medium – as examples to emulate, and the Watteau expert Christoph Martin Vogtherr (Wallace Collection, London and designated director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle) will analyse various aspects of the specific strategies Watteau pursued as a draughtsman, which differed distinctly from the practices otherwise common in his day.

Antoine Watteau, (1684-1721)
The Embarkation for Cythera, ca 1709–1712
Oil on canvas, 44.3 x 54.4 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Photo: Städel Museum - U. Edelmann – ARTOTHEK
Joint Property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

Antoine Watteau, (1684-1721)
Sitting persian, 1715
Red and black chalk, 25.0 x 21.2 cm
Teylers Museum, Haarlem
Photo: Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Antoine Watteau, (1684-1721)
Standing girl with bare feet, lifting her skirt, ca 1715–1717
Red, black and white chalk on reddish beige paper, 26.2 x 14.0 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Foto: Städel Museum – U. Edelmann – ARTOTHEK

Antoine Watteau, (1684-1721)
Sitting young child, ca 1715–1716 or ca 1720
Red, black and white chalk on beige paper, 17.7 x 12.2 cm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Antoine Watteau, (1684-1721)
Hunting party, ca 1713
Red chalk, 40.3 x 54.1 cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Photo: Städel Museum – U. Edelmann – ARTOTHEK

Antoine Watteau, (1684-1721)
Woman with a veil, ca 1717
Red and black chalk, 15.4 x 13.2 cm
Amsterdam Museum, legaat C.J. Fodor

Christie’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in New York November 16: Claude Monet’s Meule (Grainstack)

October 20, 2016, 1:05 pm

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On November 16, Claude Monet’s Meule (Grainstack) will be among the highlights of Christie’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in New York. This important painting is recognized as one of the culminating and finest examples of Monet’s Grainstack series. Meule will be on display to the public at Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries beginning November 5. In advance of the November 16 sale, Christie’s will exhibit this painting for the first time in Asia at Christie’s Hong Kong October 17-19 and then at Christie’s London October 24-25.

Jussi Pylkkänen, Christie’s Global President, remarked: “In recent years we have been extremely aware of the growing passion for classic Impressionist paintings amongst our leading Asian Collectors. This work is simply a masterpiece by Monet the genius of plein air painting, and we unveil it in Asia for the very first time. It is an honour to bring this great Monet to Hong Kong.”

The Grainstack series – some twenty-five canvases in all – was the most challenging and revolutionary endeavor that Monet, then fifty years old, had ever undertaken.  While he had experimented during the later 1880s with depicting a single landscape subject under different lighting and weather conditions, never before had he conceived of painting so many pictures that were differentiated almost entirely through color, touch, and atmospheric effect. The present painting is among the most formally adventurous of all the Grainstacks – part of a trio of canvases in which a single conical meule is seen close up and cropped by the painting’s edge, transcending naturalism in form and color alike.

Conor Jordan, Deputy Chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art, comments: “Claude Monet’s Meule, a work of shimmering beauty, is one of the last remaining examples in private hands of the artist’s momentous series of Grainstack paintings executed over the winter of 1890-1891. A rhapsody of twilight atmosphere, Meule is rendered with a weft of jewel-like color that evokes both radiant glory of a moment and the universal qualities of the passage of time in nature.”

Monet needed only to walk out his door at Giverny, to a field known as the Clos Morin that lay just west of his home, to find his motif. He set up his easel near the boundary wall of his garden, looking west across the field toward the hills on the far bank of the Seine. There, following the harvest, local farmers piled hundreds of sheaves of bound grain stalks into tightly packed stacks, rising from fifteen to twenty feet in height and capped with thatched conical roofs. These served as storage facilities, protecting the crop from moisture and rodents until spring, when the grain could be more easily separated from the chaff. The grainstacks represented the local farmers’ livelihood – the fruits of their labors and their hopes for the future.

Monet and his art dealer Durand-Ruel exhibited fifteen Meules in May 1891 to great acclaim and by the close of 1891, all but two of the Grainstacks had left the artist’s studio. The present painting is one of five from the series that the American-based dealer Knoedler selected from the artist in September 1891, and the only one from that group to remain today in private hands.

A majority of the Grainstacks series are housed in major art museums around the world, including the Musée d'Orsay, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Scotland, while few are held in private collections. In recent years, prices for exceptional examples of Monet’s work have soared, driven by demand from collectors worldwide for masterpiece quality works by the greatest master of the Impressionist period.

The top price at auction for any Monet painting is $80.4 million for Le Bassin aux nympheas from 1919, sold at Christie’s London in June 2008 against an estimate of $35-47 million.

Van Gogh: Into the Undergrowth

October 20, 2016, 1:43 pm

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Cincinnati Art Museum

October 15–January 8, 2017

Centered on Vincent van Gogh’s Undergrowth with Two Figures, the Cincinnati Art Museum’s new exhibition, Van Gogh: Into the Undergrowth, will take visitors up close with celebrated woodland landscapes from October 15, 2016–January 8, 2017.

This exhibition—presented only at the Cincinnati Art Museum—brings an important group of artworks on loan from around the world together for the first time.

Exploring the works of the Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries, the exhibition traces the evolution of the Dutch artist’s love of the natural world, powers of observation and mastery of detail through this special group of landscape paintings spanning his career.

This exhibition is the first to take a close look at Van Gogh’s poetic depictions of the forest floor, known as sous-bois, the French term for “undergrowth.” These odes to nature were a reaction to the increasing industrialization and urbanization of society.

The exhibition allows visitors to compare Van Gogh’s treatment of this theme with examples by those who influenced and inspired him, including Théodore Rousseau, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin. Twenty artworks are borrowed from museum collections in Canada, The Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Japan and more, and are joined by works from the Cincinnati Art Museum’s own important collection of French paintings and works on paper.

Since the Cincinnati Art Museum’s acquisition of 

Undergrowth with Two Figures in 1967, the museum has made this treasure available in major exhibitions around the world. It will travel to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2018.

In Van Gogh: Into the Undergrowth, the painter is brought to life for visitors with his own words about the intimate relation between nature and art and the artists he admired, extensively quoted from his voluminous correspondence with his brother Theo. These letters serve as inspiration for the exhibition’s interactive activity, which involves a hands-on letter-writing experience. Another interactive will employ Google technology to allow visitors to explore Undergrowth with Two Figures on a touch screen, revealing the texture and brushstrokes of the painting in greatly enlarged detail.

With this exhibition, the Cincinnati Art Museum is leading the way with original scholarship in one of the few areas of Van Gogh study that remains to be explored.

The accompanying catalogue, also titled Van Gogh: Into the Undergrowth, examines Van Gogh’s engagement with the sous-bois subject from various perspectives. Co-published by D Giles Limited, it will be available for sale at the Cincinnati Art Museum and online this fall. Cornelia Homburg, art historian and one of the world’s foremost Van Gogh experts, is among the authors.

To shed further light on Van Gogh’s artistic milieu, the exhibition will also include Unlocking Van Gogh’s World, a rich display of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist prints from the Cincinnati Art Museum’s collection.

In addition to Van Gogh, Artists Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Camille Pissarro, James McNeill Whistler and others will be included in this supporting exhibition.

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Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, JC Orozco and vanguards

October 20, 2016, 1:54 pm

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Musée National d’Art, INBA and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux - Grand Palais.

05 October 2016 to 23 January 2017

Galeries nationales

Since its independence won from the Spanish monarchy in 1821, Mexico has never ceased to assert its willingness for change and its spirit of modernity.

Diego Rivera, Río Juchitán, 1953-1955 - Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA Asignación al Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes a través del Sistema de Administración y Enajenación de Bienes de la Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público, 2015 ©Jorge Vertíz Gargoll

  José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), Les Femmes des soldats 1926. Huile sur toile. México, INBA, Collection Museo de Arte Moderno. Photo © Francisco Kochen © Adagp, Paris 2016.

With painting, sculpture, architecture, urbanism, music, literature, film and the applied arts the country has forged its identity. The exhibition, which was desired by the highest French and Mexican authorities, is the largest event dedicated to Mexican art since 1953.

Offering a panorama of famous artists such as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Rufino Tamayo, the exhibition tour is a testament to the vibrant artistic creativity of the country throughout the twentieth century.

This exhibition is organised by the Musée National d’Art, INBA and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux - Grand Palais.

Videos:

 

At Home in Holland. Vermeer and his Contemporaries from the British Royal Collection

October 21, 2016, 1:59 pm

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"The Music Lesson" by Johannes Vermeer returns to the Netherlands this autumn for the first time in twenty years. This masterpiece, part of the British Royal Collection, was last on display in the Mauritshuis in 1996, as part of the major Johannes Vermeer exhibition. The painting will be the highlight of this autumn’s exhibition At Home in Holland: Vermeer and his contemporaries from the British Royal Collection. The exhibition opened to the public on the 29th of September. 

"The Music Lesson" by Johannes Vermeer is installed at the exhibition At Home in Holland. Vermeer and his Contemporaries from the British Royal Collection that will open to the public 29 September 2016, Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016. Photographer: Piet Jacobson

"The Music Lesson"

 

"The Music Lesson" by Johannes Vermeer, Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016.

"The Music Lesson" is one of the rare 36 surviving works by Johannes Vermeer. This painting dates from 1660-1662, and shows a woman and a gentleman beside a virginal. Above the instrument hangs a mirror, which reflects the foot of Vermeer's easel. The The painting was acquired by King George III of England in 1762, when it was attributed to Frans van Mieris the Elder. Only later was it recognised as a masterpiece by Vermeer.

Mauritshuis itself has three works by Vermeer

Diana and her Nymphs,  

View of Delft

and Girl with a Pearl Earring,

 but its collection lacks a genre piece by the artist. That’s why the museum is delighted to have the opportunity of showing a fourth Vermeer for a time.

The exhibition at The Mauritshuis contains works by masters such as Gerard ter Borch, Gerrit Dou, Pieter de Hooch, Gabriël Metsu and Jan Steen, which are regarded as some of the most important Dutch genre paintings in the Royal Collection.

Produced during the Dutch ‘Golden Age’, when the Netherlands was at the forefront of commerce, science and art, these works represent a high point in ‘genre painting’ –  ordinary scenes of everyday life rendered in extraordinary detail.  Renowned for their exquisite depiction of space and light, Dutch artists of the period also included humorous or moralising messages in their work for the contemporary viewer to decode.

Johannes Vermeer is perhaps the most highly regarded genre painter of his generation, despite only 34 paintings being attributed to him today.

In Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman, early 1600s, Vermeer uses the horizontal grid of the floor tiles to create the illusion of depth within the painting.  The viewer's eye is drawn into the room, where a woman stands with her back to the observer and a man at her side appears to sing.  Their relationship is ambiguous and has been the subject of much debate. However, clues such as the inscription on the lid of the virginal – music is a companion in pleasure, a remedy in sorrow – suggest that there might be a romantic association between the figures.

The shared pleasures of music and love underlie the subject-matter of

Gabriel Metsu’s The Cello Player, c.1658, in which a female figure is greeted adoringly by a pet dog, while her suitor tunes his cello.

The Neglected Lute, c.1708, by Willem van Mieris presents a similar theme, but this time in the form of a seduction.  A woman in a sumptuously decorated room eats oysters and drinks from a delicate glass, while a lute, an erotic symbol to a contemporary audience, rests on the floor at her side.

Jan Steen, A Woman at her Toilet, 1663, Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016

By contrast, Jan Steen's A Woman at her Toilet, 1663, contains a moralising message.  The viewer takes on the role of voyeur, observing through an archway a young woman on an unmade bed in a state of undress.  A lute with a broken string, a skull, and a candle with its flame extinguished carry the warning that yielding to sensuality could lead to ruin.

Scenes of provincial Dutch life, in taverns and cottages and at village fetes, were popular subject-matter for artists.

Adriaen van Ostade's The Interior of a Peasant's Cottage, 1668, is a sympathetic image of peasant family life, with a mother cradling her baby and an older child eating obediently at a table, while their doting father looks on.  The perspective of the composition leads the viewer's eye into the depths of the room, where other figures appear from the shadows.

A Girl Selling Grapes to an Old Woman, c.1658, by Frans van Mieris the Elder, shows a young girl selling produce door to door from a wheelbarrow.  The rich variety of fruit and vegetables on offer advertises the fertility of the Dutch soil and reflects the development of horticulture during the Golden Age.

In one of Pieter de Hooch’s early works, A Courtyard in Delft, c.1657, a woman sits spinning in shadow while another crosses from sunlight into the shade carrying a jug, a dramatic bright-blue sky overhead.  The artist skilfully records all aspects of the scene, from the patchy whitewash on the brickwork to the two towers in the background. 

The quiet, contemplative character of De Hooch's composition contrasts with the strange artificiality of

Ludolf de Jongh's A Formal Garden: Three Ladies Surprised by a Gentleman, c.1676, in which the four foreground figures appear to be actors in a play.

The importance of trade in the Netherlands during the Golden Age is reflected in

Gerrit Dou's The Grocer's Shop: a Woman Selling Grapes, 1672.  Here two women busily weigh goods in a shop selling exotic imported items such as lemons and sponges.  As if caught in an unguarded moment, another in the background, holding a coffee pot, looks directly at the viewer.  In Willem van Mieris's An Old Man and a Girl at a Vegetable and Fish Stall, 1732, beneath the baskets of dried herrings, walnuts and gingerbreads, a rat nibbles an apple unnoticed by the figures in the shop, providing a humorous touch for the viewer.  

Gerard ter Borch (Zwolle 1617-Deventer 1681)A Gentleman pressing a Lady to drink  c.1658-9,, Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016.

BELLOWS AND THE BODY - THE REAL, THE IDEAL AND THE NUDE

October 22, 2016, 7:38 am

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The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, UK
21 OCTOBER 2016 – 22 JANUARY 2017

In February 2015 the Barber announced an important new acquisition –

Nude, Miss Bentham (1906), an early masterpiece by one of the most significant American painters of the early 20th century.


This compelling nude study is only the second painting by George Bellows (1882 – 1925) in a British public collection and the first outside London. Bellows was a major figure in the ‘Ashcan School’: a loose grouping of artists who shared an interest in expressing the modernity of their urban environment– specifically New York City – and a social commitment to realism.

George Bellows, Nude Girl - Miss Leslie Hall, 1909, © Terra Foundation for American Art

Focusing on the human figure, this exhibition features key loans from the US and the UK, including the Terra Foundation for American Art’s comparable oil of 1909, Nude Girl: Miss Leslie Hall, last shown alongside Nude, Miss Bentham in 1910. 

The role of the body in the work of other artists associated with the Ashcan School, both within and outside the Life Class, is also explored. Displayed adjacent near the Barber’s outstanding collection of late 19th-century French paintings – important precursors for Bellows – the show offers visitors a unique opportunity to get to know a remarkable artist, who, although canonical in the States, is still unfamiliar across the Atlantic.

Helen Levitt: In the Street

October 22, 2016, 7:58 am

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The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

September 13, 2016, to January 2, 2017

Milwaukee Art Museum  

2017

Helen Levitt: In the Street is an exhibition featuring more than 40 works by the renowned photographer Helen Levitt. Recording the theater of New York City streets, the exhibition features black-and-white and color photographs spanning the artist’s career from the late 1930s to the mid-1980s as well as a short film by Levitt from the 1940s.

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York, ca. 1940
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the Telfair Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Robert O. Levitt
© Estate of Helen Levitt

A lifelong New Yorker, Levitt frequented the Lower East Side, Spanish Harlem, and other working-class neighborhoods of the city where life played out on the stoops and sidewalks. Using a handheld Leica camera outfitted with a right-angle viewfinder that allowed her to look in one direction but snap photographs in another, Levitt often passed unnoticed by her subjects, capturing unguarded instants of joyful play and meditative melancholy that constitute the mystery and poetry of everyday lives.

Showcasing the honest, humorous and inventive works of prolific documentary photographer Helen Levitt, this exhibition will feature 30 works by Levitt from the collections of the High and the Telfair Museums (Savannah, Ga.). One of the best-known street photographers of the 20th century, Levitt (American, 1913-2009) documented the everyday dramas of New York City. Working from the 1930s through the 1990s, Levitt roamed the Lower East Side, Spanish Harlem and other urban neighborhoods, capturing the story of city life.

Her photographs portray mothers hovering as their children play, pedestrians making their way along busy sidewalks, and neighbors visiting on stoops, among other scenes. Rarely do any of the figures in Levitt's work, child or adult, engage directly with the photographer or strike a premeditated pose; much more frequently they seem to be occupied completely in their own worlds.

Her photographs, first in black and white and later in color, observe people of every age, race and class without attempting to impose social commentary. Sojourns in New Hampshire and Mexico added variety to Levitt's portfolio, but New York City remained at the heart of her work. 

The exhibition is supplemented with nine images from the Museum’s collection, including three captivating photographs that record the fears and fantasies of children as expressed in their exuberant chalk drawings on the city’s pavement and walls. Also on view is Levitt’s 1948 short film In the Street, her directorial debut. The 16-minute black-and-white film, shot in Spanish Harlem, is a cinematic version of her earlier photographs of children.

“Throughout her long career, Levitt wielded the camera not as a tool of social reform or photojournalism tethered to a historical moment or political movement, but rather as a crystal ball through which to peer into the enduring nature of the human spirit,” commented Malcolm Daniel, Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at the MFAH. “The same unassuming modesty that allowed Levitt to portray her subjects so authentically also kept her from receiving the widespread recognition that she deserves. For many Museum visitors, this may be a first introduction to one of photography’s great artists.”

About the Artist

Born in Brooklyn, Helen Levitt (1913–2009) learned the fundamentals of camera and darkroom practice at a young age, leaving high school a semester before graduation to work for a commercial portrait studio in the Bronx.

It wasn’t until a meeting with the young French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1935, though, that she was introduced to the 35mm Leica camera and shown a new model of what it might mean to be an artist in photography.

She nurtured her vision over the next few years in New York’s museums and cinemas, and through the friendship of Walker Evans, with whom she shared a darkroom.

By 1940, Levitt’s seemingly artless photographs merited inclusion in the inaugural exhibition of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art, followed by the first of three solo shows there three years later.

Levitt left still photography behind by the late 1940s, working instead as a full-time film editor. Her own film In the Street (shot in 1945–46 and first released in 1948) brought her subjects of a few years earlier to life. Then, beginning 1959 with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a new medium—color photography—Levitt once more rediscovered the enchanting cast of characters that inhabited the sidewalks of the city.

Helen Levitt: In the Street is organized by Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia.

Also see:

Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950

October 20, 2016, 1:54 pm

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The Philadelphia Museum of Art, in partnership with the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, will present a landmark exhibition that takes a new and long overdue look at an extraordinary moment in the history of Mexican art. Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950 will explore the rich and fascinating story of a period of remarkable change. It will be the most comprehensive exhibition of Mexican modernism to be seen in the United States in more than seven decades and will feature an extraordinary range of images, from portable murals and large and small paintings to prints and photographs, books and broadsheets. In this country, Paint the Revolution, will be seen only in Philadelphia before traveling to Mexico City in 2017.

Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and CEO, Philadelphia Museum of Art, stated: “The contributions of Mexico during this period are central to the development of modern art, and yet its achievements have been largely understood through the work of a small group of great talents, among them Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, along with Frida Kahlo and Rufino Tamayo. In this exhibition, visitors will be introduced to these artists through the presentation of many of their finest works, but also, and more importantly, to the broader panorama of Mexican art during this period and the historical context in which the visual arts played an enormously important role. We are especially grateful for our partnership with the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, without which it would not be possible to have organized an exhibition of such depth.”

Miguel Fernández Félix, Director of the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, stated: “The exhibition will present this fascinating story in unprecedented detail and will benefit from the work of a young generation of scholars who have broken new ground in their research. Together with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has long been dedicated to the acquisition and display of modern Mexican art, we are pleased to expand the public’s understanding of this important era, including its broader connections to both Europe and the United States. Visitors will witness a spectacular range of work by artists who are well known in Mexico but who will become fresh discoveries for most Americans.”

Paint the Revolution spans four momentous decades. It will begin by surveying modern art in Mexico City during the revolutionary decade of the 1910s, clearly demonstrating that while many artists engaged with international avant-garde styles, such as Impressionism, Symbolism, and Cubism, they also infused their work with facets of ancient and modern Mexican culture. The exhibition will also explore the artistic experimentation and social idealism of the early post-Revolutionary period, when painters rallied to support the government’s program of national reconstruction and there was growing international recognition of Mexico’s cultural importance. It will also consider the principal avant-garde groups—such as the Stridentists and the Contemporaries—active in Mexico City during this period who pursued alternative directions in post-revolutionary culture, turning away from folkloric and historical subjects and focusing on themes of modern urban life.

In the 1920s and 1930s the development of a vibrant support network and a robust market for modern art in the United States drew Mexican artists northward. The exhibition will follow a number of Mexican painters during their American sojourns, highlighting images with both Mexican and U.S. themes, and focusing on works that dramatized the encounter between south and north, between Hispano- and Anglo-America. Paint the Revolution will conclude with the renewal of socially and politically oriented art in Mexico from the mid-1930s through the aftermath of the Second World War.

The exhibition takes its title from an essay called "Paint the Revolution" by the American novelist John Dos Passos who traveled to Mexico City in 1926-27 and witnessed the murals created by Diego Rivera that celebrate the ideals of the Mexican Revolution. In order to represent Mexican muralism and share with visitors masterpieces by Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, the exhibition will present in digital form three important murals created by these three artists—often called los tres grandes (the three great ones)—in Mexico and the United States.

Publication

Paint the Revolution will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue, published in English and Spanish editions, which offers a comprehensive treatment of Mexican art during four decades that transformed the country’s cultural life and marked its emergence as a widely watched center for modern art. Published jointly by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes (with the English version distributed by Yale University Press), this richly illustrated publication will present full-color reproductions of the works in the exhibition as well as fourteen essays that contain a wealth of new research, by Mexican and U.S. scholars, on mural and easel painting, printmaking, photography, film, and architecture; diverse artists’ groups; and the involvement of the Mexican state in culture during this rich period. It promises to become the text of record for this subject.


Mexican Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Museum’s rich collections of Mexican art have served as the inspiration for Paint the Revolution, the largest examination of modern Mexican art to be hosted in the United States since Mexican Art Today, the ground-breaking exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1943.The Museum’s holdings in this field are among the most important in the United States. They range from pre-Columbian sculptures to colonial-era paintings and ceramics and to such twentieth-century masterpieces as Self-Portrait with Popocatépetl (1928) by Dr. Atl, Three Nudes (1930) by Julio Castellanos, Bicycle Race (1938) by Antonio Ruiz, War (1939) by David Alfaro Siqueiros, The Mad Dog (1943) by Rufino Tamayo, and two portable frescoes – Liberation of the Peon and Sugar Cane (both from 1931) – by Diego Rivera. The Museum also houses a significant number of works on paper from this period, including drawings and photographs as well as an extensive collection of prints, many of which were featured in the 2006 exhibition Mexico and Modern Printmaking: A Revolution in the Graphic Arts, 1920 to 1950.

Also see: http://www.realclearlife.com/2016/08/22/diego-rivera-frida-kahlo-among-masters-of-mexican-modernism-to-be-displayed-in-philadelphia/

Optic Parable, 1931, by Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Philadelphia Museum of Art: 125th Anniversary Acquisition. The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001-62-35)
© Colette Urbajte/Asosciacion Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

Our Lady of Sorrows, 1943, by María Izquierdo (Private Collection, USA).

Self-Portrait on the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States, 1932, by Frida Kahlo (Colección Maria y Manuel Reyero, New York) © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Woman of Tehuantepec, c. 1929, by Tina Modotti (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carl Zigrosser, 1968-62-40)

Proletarian Hand, 1932, by Leopoldo Méndez (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Anne d’Harnoncourt in memory of Sarah Carr d'Harnoncourt, 2003-228-1)
©Leopoldo Mendez/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City  

Barricade, 1931, by José Clemente Orozco (Museum of Modern Art, New York: Given anonymously, 468.1937) © José Clemente Orozco/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico

The Epic of American Civilization (detaild), 1932–34, by José Clemente Orozco (Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College: Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College)
© Jose Clemente Orozco/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City 

Mexico City, 1949, by Juan O’Gorman (Acervo CONACULTA–INBA, Museo de Arte Moderno)
© Juan O’Gorman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City

Portrait of Martín Luis Guzmán, 1915, by Diego Rivera (Fundación Televisa Collection) © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Dance in Tehuantepec, 1928, by Diego Rivera (Colección Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires), © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Liberation of the Peon, 1931, by Diego Rivera (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris, 1943-46-1) © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Peasants, c. 1913, by David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1896 – 1974, Pastel on paper, Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA© David Alfaro Siqueiros/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City  

Zapata, 1931, by David Alfaro Siqueiros (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund from the Carl and Laura Zigrosser Collection, 1976-97-122) © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City  

Homage to the Indian Race, 1952, by Rufino Tamayo (Acervo CONACULTA–INBA, Museo de Arte Moderno)

Adriaen van de Velde: Master of the Dutch Golden Age

October 25, 2016, 8:16 am

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Dulwich Picture Gallery

12 October 2016 - 15 January 2017 
 

Adriaen van de Velde, Panoramic summer landscape with a horseman and a post wagon, 1661, Oil on panel, Private Collection

In collaboration with the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Dulwich Picture Gallery will host the first-ever exhibition devoted to the painter and draughtsman Adriaen van de Velde (1636 - 1672), one of the finest landscape artists of the Dutch Golden Age.

Over a career of less than two decades Van de Velde produced a varied body of paintings and drawings that earned him tremendous posthumous fame in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when he was one of the most sought-after names among collectors in Germany, France and England.

Van de Velde was born in Amsterdam, the son and brother respectively of the marine painters Willem van de Velde the Elder and Willem van de Velde the Younger. Adriaen van de Velde, however, pursued an independent career as a landscape painter to focus on tranquil landscapes that depict both typically Dutch and Italianising views populated by figures in peaceful harmony with animals and the surrounding landscape.

Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape (12 October 2016 – 15 January 2017) will bring together 60 of his most accomplished works, including landscapes and beachscapes as well as an extraordinary selection of exquisite preparatory studies, many of them in red chalk. Displayed alongside the artist’s paintings, these studies offer a rare glimpse of a seventeenth-century landscape painter at work, from conception to completion. The show will also include pen-and-ink drawings and watercolours that stand alone as works of art in their own right, revealing the extent of the young artist’s talent.

The exhibition opens with Van de Velde’s most accomplished paintings, made when the artist was still in his early twenties. Blissful scenes such as the masterly

Beach at Scheveningen, 1658 (Oil on canvas, 52.6 x 73.8 cm, 

© Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister.

introduce Van de Velde’s highly individual style, in which everything stands out in the pure light of a summer’s day. 

Especially in his later work Van de Velde succeeded in incorporating the sun-drenched atmosphere of Italianate painters such as Karel Dujardin in his works, but brought a refinement to his subjects that was rarely matched by his contemporaries. Van de Velde probably never travelled outside Holland; the mountainous scenery and Italianate character of some of his landscapes and drawn studies sprung from the imagination and were inspired by the work of fellow artists. Examples include the Pastoral scene from the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, and the preparatory composition drawing for this painting from the Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

There are few artists whose working procedures can be illustrated as well as in the case of Van de Velde, making it possible to follow precisely the various phases of his creative process. For the first time Van de Velde’s famous painting of 

Adriaen van de Velde,

The Hut, 1671,

Oil on canvas, 76 x 65 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The Hut (Rijksmuseum)  will be displayed alongside the drawn studies that the artist made in preparation for the painting, providing insight into the work’s genesis.

Such studies include Seated woman with basket and 

Resting cow with three sheep (both Amsterdam Museum), as well as a drawing from a private collection depicting the hut that lends the picture its name. These and other studies in the exhibition reveal Van de Velde’s almost obsessive attention to detail and how he proceeded from a rough composition sketch in pen and ink to separate studies of animals and figures from life, often executed in the medium of red chalk.

Few seventeenth-century Dutch landscapists devoted so much time and energy to sketching from models in the studio and the exhibition will showcase some of the artist’s remarkable figure studies, including a sheet with Two Studies of a Reclining Shepherd (Rijksmuseum), which in its elegance and exquisite use of red chalk prefigures the work of eighteenth-century French artists such as Antoine Watteau and François Boucher.

Van de Velde excelled in the depiction of the human figure and their integration into a landscape and was frequently asked to paint the staffage in the landscapes of his contemporaries; his figures can be found in works by artists such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema, and, for example, in

 Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Two Churches and a Town Wall (1660s) by Jan van der Heyden, which will feature in the exhibition.

The exhibition includes a selection of the artist’s cabinet-sized works and concludes with his larger paintings. Together they illustrate the enormous variety of subject-matter in Van de Velde’s oeuvre, from panoramic views to hunting scenes, pastoral subjects or depictions of winter. 

The larger works include the monumental 

Portrait of a Family in a Landscape (Rijksmuseum) a

Adriaen van de Velde,

Landscape with cattle and figures

1664, Oil on canvas, 125.7 x 167 cm,

© Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

nd the idyllic Landscape with cattle and figures (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). 

Together these works show a Dutch Arcadia as it was imagined by this exceptionally refined artist.

Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape is curated by Bart Cornelis, former Deputy Editor of The Burlington Magazine, London, in collaboration with Marijn Schapelhouman, Senior Curator of Drawings at the Rijksmuseum.

The exhibition includes works from over 20 lending institutions and private collections, including the Royal Collection, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, Musée du Louvre, Paris, and The National Gallery, London.

Biography:

Adriaen van de Velde was baptised in Amsterdam on 30 November 1636. He was the son of the famous marine painter Willem van de Velde the Elder (1611-1693) and brother of the equally renowned marine painter Willem van de Velde the Younger (1663-1707). Adriaen van de Velde was most probably first taught by his father. On 5 April 1657 he married Maria Ouderkerk in Amsterdam, where he most probably remained for the rest of his life. His wife was Catholic and their children were all baptised in clandestine Catholic churches in Amsterdam. He died at the age of 35 and was buried on 21 January 1672 in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam.

 

Adriaen van de Velde,

The Angel appearing to the Shepherds

, Brush and brown ink over

black chalk, 17.2 x 20.2 cm, © The Trustees of The British Museum

Adriaen van deVelde,

Herdsman and herdswoman with livestock by a stream

, Pen in

brown and black grey wash, 17.7 x 17.7 cm, Teylers Museum, Haarlem, The

Netherlands

Adriaen van de Velde

, Figures in a deer park

c. 1665, Oil on panel, 21.1 x 28.6 cm, 

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Edward and Sally Speelman Collection, TR:1644-2005.

 

Adriaen van de Velde,

Figures on the beach at Scheveningen

1660, Oil on canvas, 38.2 x 50cm,

Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015

Adriaen van de Velde,

Seated woman with basket

, Red chalk, 28.3 x 20 cm, Private Collection

Adriaen van de Velde,

Panoramic summer landscape with a horseman and a post wagon

1661, Oil on panel, 37.8 x 49 cm, Private Collection.

Carriage on the Beach at Scheveningen, Adriaen van de Velde 1660. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Adriaen van de Velde,

Two studies of a reclining shepherd, 1666-1671, 

red chalk over asketch in black chalk, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 

Purchased with the support of theVereniging Rembrandt

LARGEST EVER HOCKNEY RETROSPECTIVE

October 25, 2016, 8:43 am

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Tate Britain 
 February 2017 - 29 May 2017.

Tate Britain’s upcoming retrospective of David Hockney will bring together six decades of the artist’s work for the first time. Major loans from private collections – including works never displayed in public before – will be united with iconic paintings from museums around the world. It will be the most extensive survey ever staged of one of the most successful and recognisable artists of our time. This once-in-a-generation show will offer an unprecedented overview of Hockney’s work in paint, drawing, photography and video.

Highlights will include a double portrait of renowned novelist Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy, painted in 1968, shown in the UK for the first time in over two decades. Isherwood and Bachardy were one of Hollywood’s first openly gay couples and regularly opened up their home to entertain artists, actors and writers. This work was the first of Hockney’s celebrated double portraits, which he painted in the late 1960s and 1970s. Tate Britain will reunite many of this series, including  

American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) 1968;  

Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott 1968-9;  

Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy 1970-1;

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 1971;

 and My Parents 1977.

The retrospective will include vibrant new paintings of the artist’s home and garden in Los Angeles, which will be united for the first time with earlier works depicting the same subject across 35 years. Hockney first moved to this home in 1979 and soon afterwards created  

Hollywood Hills House 1980, a colourful work showing both the interior and the garden.

20 years later he painted Red Pots in the Garden 2000, which features the same banana-leaf palm and gently curving pool from another perspective. New paintings of the garden, created following Hockney’s recent return to California after a decade at his Yorkshire home, will also be shown for the very first time.

The exhibition will cover the full scope of Hockney’s artistic practice, from small scale, intimate works to vast, immersive canvases. Highlights will include rarely seen works exploring tender and personal themes, from his early series of Love paintings and  

We Two Boys Together Clinging 1961 to delicate drawings of the artist’s friends and family, including designer Celia Birtwell, poet W H Auden, artists Andy Warhol and R B Kitaj, and Hockney’s own parents. More recent works, such as his acclaimed landscape paintings of the Yorkshire countryside and his pioneering experiments with digital drawing and filmmaking, will also be showcased.

David Hockney opens at Tate Britain on 9 February 2017 and runs until 29 May 2017. The exhibition is curated by Chris Stephens, Head of Displays & Lead Curator, Modern British Art, and Andrew Wilson, Curator Modern and Contemporary Art and Archives, with Assistant Curator Helen Little. It is sponsored by the Blavatnik Family Foundation with additional support from the David Hockney Exhibition Supporters Circle. This exhibition is organised by Tate Britain in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Paris and The Metropolitan Museum, New York.

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Van Gogh Inspires: Matisse, Kirchner, Kandinsky: Highlights from the Merzbacher Collection

October 25, 2016, 12:20 pm

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Van Gogh Museum 
24 August to 27 November, 2016 

The paintings in the exhibition Van Gogh Inspires: Matisse, Kirchner, Kandinsky: Highlights from the Merzbacher Collection show the impact Vincent van Gogh had on the most important artists of the early twentieth century. Masterpieces by the likes of Henri Matisse, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Wassily Kandinsky are being shown in the Netherlands for the first time. The private art collection assembled by Werner and Gabrielle Merzbacher is considered one of the finest in the world. The works are presented on the third floor of the Van Gogh Museum.

Fourteen masterpieces in the Netherlands for the first time

The focus of the exhibition Van Gogh Inspires: Matisse, Kirchner, Kandinsky: Highlights from the Merzbacher Collection is on the way Van Gogh influenced the French Fauvists and German Expressionists. Fourteen works from the Merzbacher Collection are being shown at the Van Gogh Museum, representing the most important Fauvists (including Matisse, Derain, De Vlaminck and Braque) and German Expressionists (such as Kirchner, Kandinsky, Jawlensky and Pechstein).

The selection includes Interior at Collioure (Afternoon Rest) by the Fauvist Henri Matisse,

Autumn Landscape with Boats by the Blaue Reiter artist Wassily Kandinsky,

and the expressive Girl with Cat, Fränzi by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner of the group Die Brücke.

Each is an iconic example of the respective artist’s oeuvre. The private art collection assembled by Werner and Gabrielle Merzbacher is considered one of the finest in the world. All the loans are being shown in the Netherlands for the first time.

Van Gogh: ‘the father of us all!’

Vincent van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother Theo that ‘painters being dead and buried, speak to several following generations through their works’. Van Gogh did indeed become a shining example for generations of artists after him. Beginning in 1905, the Fauvists in France and the German Expressionists of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter looked for ways to heighten the evocative power of their works.

Alexej von Jawlensky, Dark Blue Turban (Helene with Dark Blue Turban), 1910, oil on cardboard mounted on wood, 72 x 69 cm, Merzbacher Kunststiftung

Van Gogh’s colourful, animated and emotionally charged paintings offered them a source of inspiration. The vitality of his work encouraged both the Fauvists and the Expressionists in their need to express their emotions through their art. These innovative artists took Van Gogh’s pursuit of freedom in form and colour to a new level. Or, as the Brücke artist Max Pechstein later declared: ‘Van Gogh was the father of us all!’

Special loan

Since the new presentation of its permanent collection in November 2014, the Van Gogh Museum has set out to place Vincent van Gogh’s works and the story of his life and art in the wider context of his time. This includes a focus on past artists he admired, contemporaries and the artists who were inspired by him.

The Van Gogh Museum regularly updates the permanent display through acquisitions and temporary presentations. Loans from museum and private collections are used to extend Van Gogh’s story into the twentieth and even the twenty-first century. The loans from the Merzbacher Collection offer an insight into the ongoing influence exerted by Van Gogh’s work.

Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade

October 25, 2016, 12:46 pm

≫ Next: Sotheby’s November 14 2016 Impressionist & Modern Art in New York: Munch, Picsso, Van Gogh, Lempicka, Diego Rivera

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February 12 – May 7, 2017 | St. Louis Art Museum
June 24 – Sept. 24, 2017 | Legion of Honor, San Francisco

Best known for his depictions of Parisian dancers and laundresses, Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) was enthralled with another aspect of life in the French capital—high-fashion hats and the women who created them. The artist, invariably well-dressed and behatted himself, “yet dared to go into ecstasies in front of the milliners’ shops,” Paul Gauguin wrote of his lifelong friend.

Edgar Degas, The Milliners, about 1882 - before 1905. Oil on canvas, 59.1 × 72.4 cm (23 1/4 × 28 1/2 in.). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Degas’ fascination inspired a visually compelling and profoundly modern body of work that documents the lives of what one fashion writer of the day called “the aristocracy of the workwomen of Paris, the most elegant and distinguished.” Yet despite the importance of millinery within Degas’s oeuvre, there has been little discussion of its place in Impressionist iconography.

Next year the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will bring new light to the subject with the presentation of Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade, a groundbreaking exhibition featuring 60 Impressionist paintings and pastels, including key works by Degas—many never before exhibited in the United States—as well as those by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and 40 exquisite examples of period hats.

At the Milliner's. Artist: Edgar Degas,  The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“This groundbreaking exhibition will provide a stunning experience for visitors while advancing scholarship of a little known but important part of Degas’ legacy,” said Brent R. Benjamin, the Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum. “Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade will complement Impressionist works in our permanent collection, while giving proper context to Degas’ The Milliners, which the Saint Louis Art Museum acquired in 2007.”

At the Milliner ca. 1882 – 1885  Edgar Degas French, 1834 – 1917 Oil on canvasCollection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon 2001.27,  Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

The exhibition will be the first to examine the height of the millinery trade in Paris, from around 1875 to 1914, as reflected in the work of the Impressionists. At this time there were around 1,000 milliners working in what was then considered the fashion capital of the world. The exhibition will open at the Saint Louis Art Museum on Feb. 12, 2017 and at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor on June 24, 2017.

At the Milliner's Edgar Degas (French, Paris 1834–1917 Paris) 1881 Pastel on five pieces of wove paper, backed with paper, and laid down on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“This exhibition underlines the many facets of our extensive collection, which comprises not only  extraordinary paintings and drawings of French Impressionism but also exquisite hats of the same period,” says Max Hollein, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “The show presents a highly important part of Degas’ work in its extraordinary artistic but also social and historical context. It will be a revelation for many!”

1882 Chez la Modiste (At The Milliners), by Edgar Degas

Works from the collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will be supplemented by loans from many international lenders.

Edgar Degas, French (1834-1917). Little Milliners, 1882. Pastel on paper, 19 1/4 x 28 1/4 inches. Purchase: acquired through the generosity of an anonymous donor, F79-34.The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Ari.

The exhibition is curated by Simon Kelly, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Saint Louis Art Museum and Esther Bell, curator in charge of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Exhibition Catalogue

Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade will be accompanied by a scholarly, full-color catalogue  edited by Kelly and Bell. The 296-page catalogue includes contributions by the exhibition curators, as well as Susan Hiner, Françoise Tétart-Vittu, Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Melissa Buron, Laura Camerlengo and Abigail Yoder.

Though best known for his depictions of dancers and bathers, Edgar Degas repeatedly returned to the subject of millinery over the course of three decades. In masterpieces such as The Millinery Shop (1879-86) and The Milliners (ca. 1898), he captured scenes of milliners fashioning and women wearing elaborate, colorful hats. Featuring sumptuous paintings, pastels, and preparatory drawings by Degas, Cassatt, Manet, Renoir, and Toulouse-Lautrec, among others, this generously illustrated book surveys the millinery industry of 19th-century Paris. Peppered throughout with photographs, posters, and prints of French hats, this book includes essays that explore Degas's particular interest in the millinery trade; the tension between modern fashion and reverence for history and the grand art-historical tradition; a chronicle of Parisian milliners from Caroline Reboux to Coco Chanel; and examples of how the millinery trade is depicted in literature. Brilliantly linking together the worlds of industry, art, and fashion, this groundbreaking book examines the fundamental role of hats and hat-makers in 19th-century culture.Published in association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Sotheby’s November 14 2016 Impressionist & Modern Art in New York: Munch, Picsso, Van Gogh, Lempicka, Diego Rivera

October 27, 2016, 9:48 am

≫ Next: Théodore Rousseau. Unruly Nature

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Edvard Munch’s stunning Pikene på broen (Girls on the Bridge) will lead Sotheby’s has announced that November 2016 auctions of Impressionist & Modern Art in New York.

Munch painted Girls on the Bridge in 1902, during an emotionally-turbulent yet highly-productive period of his life. The lyrical work ranks as one of the most powerful paintings of his career, and has twice set a new world auction record for the artist at Sotheby’s.

Girls on the Bridge will come to auction on 14 November with an estimate in excess of $50 million.

Simon Shaw, Co-Head of Sotheby’s Worldwide Impressionist & Modern Art Department, commented:
“Edvard Munch’s importance to the full breadth of 20th century art cannot be overstated. From the Expressionists to Fauvism and Pop Art, his oeuvre is increasingly prized for its lasting influence on the art of recent times. Munch pioneered the art of the self: recent museum shows pairing his work with that of artists ranging from Vincent van Gogh to Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol – among many others – have illustrated that his genius burns brighter today than ever. Our team has been privileged to present some of the artist’s most exceptional works at auction, each of which has caused great excitement in the market, and Girls on the Bridge is no exception.” 

Sotheby’s has been the stage for two decades of market-defining moments for the work of Edvard Munch, beginning with the 1996 sale of the present painting for a then-record $7.7 million. In 2006, Sotheby’s London held a historic sale of eight works by Munch from the collection of his patron Thomas Olsen, which together achieved nearly $30 million and established a new record when  

Summer Day sold for $10.8 million. 

Sotheby’s broke the artist’s record twice in 2008: first (and again) with Girls on the Bridge (sold for $30.8 million), followed just six months later by Vampire (sold for $38.2 million). In 2012, Sotheby’s had the great privilege of auctioning one of four versions of 

Munch’s iconic The Scream, which brought a world auction record price for any work of art: $119.9 million. 

The rich symbolism of Girls on the Bridge relates to Munch’s Frieze of Life, which takes the stages of a young woman's development from puberty to maturity as one of its themes. Girls on the Bridge continues Munch's exploration of the themes of both sexual awakening and mortality. The image of a cluster of young women, huddled in a secretive mass between two points of land, resonates with explosive tension. 

The present work has formed an integral part of several famed collections. It was first brought to the United States by Norton Simon in the 1960s. Wendell and Dorothy Cherry acquired Girls on the

Bridge from Norton Simon in 1980, adding to an extraordinary collection that included seminal works by Degas, Klimt, Modigliani, Sargent, Soutine and Picasso. Wendell Cherry passed away in 1991 and Girls on the Bridge remained with his widow Dorothy until 1996, when it was sold at Sotheby’s New York. 

Additional works offered at the auction are led by Pablo Picasso’s Le Peintre et son modèle, with an estimate of $12/18 million. Painted in 1963 and measuring more than five feet across,the painting exemplifies the dynamic force of the artist’s late work on a magnificent scale. Here Picasso depicts the powerful relationship between artist and model, one of the greatest recurring motifs of his late career. In this striking example, the male figure – a recognizable amalgamation of self-portraits – paints a female nude reminiscent of the female subjects of Rubens and Ingres. Le Peintre et son modèle is entirely fresh to the market, having descended through the Oestreich family since it was acquired in 1968 from Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris. 

Also:

PABLO PICASSO

LA SUITE VOLLARD

Estimate: 2,000,000— 3,000,000

Bursting with vivid hues of red, orange and yellow, Nature morte: vase aux glaïeuls exemplifies the genius of Van Gogh during one of the most transformative periods of his career (estimate $5/7 million). When the artist first arrived in Paris in 1886, he had never seen an Impressionist picture, as works by Monet, Degas, Pissarro and the other Impressionists were not exhibited in the Netherlands until 1888. Teeming with newfound coloration, Nature morte: vase aux glaïeuls is one of the earliest examples of the vibrant floral still-lifes that would come to define Van Gogh’s work. Early ownership of the painting includes Théodore Duret, the renowned French journalist and art critic, and Paul Cassirer, the German art dealer who played a significant role in the promotion of the French Impressionist & Post-Impressionist artists.

Tamara de Lempicka's sexy, bold and ultra-stylized Portrait de Guido Sommi illustrates the sleek aesthetic of the Roaring Twenties, and is a rare depiction of a male subject within the artist’s career (estimate $4/6 million). The work comes to auction this November from the collection of Kenneth Paul Block, one of the most influential fashion illustrators of the 20th century, and Morton Ribyat, a noted textile designer who ran the design departments at two major firms. As the chief features artist for Women’s Wear Daily, Mr. Block was well-known for his sophisticated drawings of the latest styles and the women who wore them. For decades he drew the collections of major American and European designers – from Norell, Halston and Galanos, to Balenciaga, Chanel and Saint Laurent.


The Evening Sale will offer a number of works by artists fundamental to the birth of abstract art in the early-20th century, including László Moholy-Nagy, František Kupka and Wassily Kandinsky. The selection features two works by Moholy-Nagy that were most recently on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, as part of the acclaimed retrospective Moholy-Nagy, Future Present. 

Conceived in 1922 and executed in1923, EM 1 Telephonbild is a masterwork of 20th-century conceptual art (estimate $3/4 million). In the early 1920s, Moholy-Nagy fervently sought a new mode of expression that would place him at the forefront of the avant-garde. In addition to Duchamp and the readymade, Moholy-Nagy turned to the ideal of the engineer-artist and joined in the Constructivist and Productivist belief that easel painting was dead. In its place, industrial technologies could make prototypes of art that would later be produced for the masses. Despite his interest in this avant-garde means of production, the Telephonbild enamel series was Moholy-Nagy’s only painting executed solely by machine.

Presented this season as part of the Impressionist & Modern Art sales is iconic Mexican artist Diego Rivera’s Sans titre (composition cubiste), painted circa 1916 (estimate $500/700,000). As a young artist, Rivera traveled to Europe to continue his artistic training. He lived in Paris for over a decade, where he was immersed in the world of other young artists who had gathered from all over the globe. Rivera’s cubist works from this period – of which Sans titre is a prime example – are often compared to those of Pablo Picasso, with whom he formed a strong friendship after meeting in 1914.

Théodore Rousseau. Unruly Nature

October 27, 2016, 11:23 am

≫ Next: Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape

≪ Previous: Sotheby’s November 14 2016 Impressionist & Modern Art in New York: Munch, Picsso, Van Gogh, Lempicka, Diego Rivera

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Glyptotek
13.10.2016 – 8.1.2017

Théodore Rousseau (1812–67) stands among the great figures of mid-19th century French painting. This autumn’s major special exhibition at the Glyptotek showcases Rousseau’s richly varied life’s work, where landscape painting became fertile soil for wild innovation. Featuring 56 paintings and drawings from 29 museums and private collections and from the Glyptotek’s own collection, this exhibition is the first large-scale presentation of Rousseau ever in Scandinavia, and the first of its kind in Europe since 1967.

Out of the shadows

Despite his considerable significance, Rousseau has long stood in the shadows of the subsequent generations of French painters – particularly the Impressionists, whom he can be said to have anticipated with his dawning abstraction and daring brushstrokes. Similarly, his role as standard bearer for the so-called Barbizon school has dimmed later generations’ appreciation of the full importance of Rousseau’s groundbreaking painting. Flemming Friborg, director of the Glyptotek, says: “Rousseau is much more than a warm-up act for Monet & associates. He is very much his own artist. This exhibition specifically aims to set him free from the constraints of preconceived categories, presenting him as what he is: one of the great innovators of landscape painting.”

Unruly landscapes

Rousseau entered the art scene at a time when landscape painting became recognised as one of the most popular and experimental genres around. Up until this point, landscapes had led rather quiet lives on the outskirts of the art of painting, serving mainly as the backdrop of scenes from literature and history. But now a new generation of artists began working with pure landscapes. Landscapes offered infinite painterly potential with their array of natural phenomena, capricious weather and changing light. Rousseau soon proved himself to be an artist of great scope and range. But to him landscapes were more than just nature. Painting became a prism through which he could merge sober observations of nature with his own feisty artistic temperament. Clear-headed renditions of details are combined with voluptuous brushstrokes to great effect in scenes from nature where the Romantic credo about the sublime is given unbridled visual expression.

Covering two floors, the exhibition demonstrates the sheer range of Rousseau’s oeuvre. Arranged in chronological order, the works on display demonstrate how Rousseau’s experiments cut across different techniques and formats, and especially how he utilized the synergy between drawing and painting. Open, receptive and explorative, Rousseau’s life’s work emerges as an extremely fruitful combination of fascination with nature and technical skill that helped formulate an entirely new vocabulary of expression within the landscape genre.

An unruly artist

The story of Rousseau’s career is of such stuff as myths are made on. Having been repeatedly met by chilly reception and rejections from the Paris Salon, Rousseau chose, in 1841, to entirely boycott this uppermost tier of the official art scene in France. A daring move that would usually have tripped up any artistic career. Yet things turned out differently for Rousseau. His absence became synonymous with the growing dissatisfaction with the Salon, and he was soon celebrated as “le Grand Refusé”. With political winds blowing in his favour, Rousseau was able to make a carefully staged comeback, casting him as a heroic martyr who not only conquered the art scene, but also won a seat on the Salon jury. Demand for his art rose rapidly soon afterwards – and did so at a time when the commercial art market began emerging in earnest. Soon his works were sold at dizzying prices, and far into the 20th century his artworks were among the most highly sought-after among museums and private collectors.

”Théodore Rousseau. Unruly Nature” has been co-organized with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which showed the exhibition from 21 June to 11 September 2016.

Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue (in English) that offers an overview of and insights into Théodore Rousseau’s rich and varied landscape painting. Featuring articles by the exhibition curators: Scott Allan (J. Paul Getty Museum), Édouard Kopp (Harvard Art Museums) and Line Clausen Pedersen (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek).

Unruly Nature: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau. Publisher: J. Paul Getty Museum
209 pages, lavishly illustrated

Théodore Rousseau Images

Mont Blanc Seen from La Faucille, Storm Effect, begun 1834
Uvejr over Mont Blanc, påbegyndt 1834
Oil on canvas / Olie på lærred
143 × 240 cm
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, MIN1783

(SMK 3269)

Farm in les Landes, 1844-1847
Avlsgård i Les Landes, 1844-1847
Oil and charcoal on canvas / Olie og kul på lærred
64 × 98 cm
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, SMK 3269
Photo: Ole Haupt

Forest of Fontainebleau, Cluster of Tall Trees Overlooking the Plain of Clair-Bois at the Edge of Bas-Bréau, c. 1849-52
Fontainebleauskoven, en gruppe høje træer ved Clair-Bois-sletten i udkanten af Bas-Bréau, ca. 1849-52
Oil on canvas / Olie på lærred
90.8 × 116.8 cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2007.13

View of Mont Blanc, Seen from La Faucille, c. 1863-67
Mont Blanc set fra La Faucille, ca. 1863-67
Oil on canvas / Olie på lærred
91.4 × 118.4 cm
Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Putnam Dana McMillan Fund
Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art

Also see an interesting article: 
 Théodore Rousseau’s View of Mont Blanc, Seen from La Faucille

Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape

October 27, 2016, 12:10 pm

≫ Next: The Spectacular Second Empire 1852 – 1870

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Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, USA from 19 February to 26 May 2016
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh from 25 June to 2 October 2016 
Van Gogh Museum from 21 October 2016 to 29 January 2017


The exhibition highlights the crucial role the French artist Charles François Daubigny played as an innovator of nineteenth-century landscape art and a trailblazer for the Impressionists. There are a great number of works to be seen by Daubigny, Vincent van Gogh and Impressionists like Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, from more than thirty-five international museums and private collections. Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh takes a new look at the origins of Impressionism; placing Daubigny’s oeuvre in the context of this movement restores his role as a ground-breaking artist and a source of inspiration to its rightful position.

Charles François Daubigny, The-Harvest,1851-Paris Musee-dOrsay

Father of the Impressionists

Charles François Daubigny (1817 - 1878) was one of the leading French landscape painters of the nineteenth century. He created an impressive oeuvre, taking painting in new directions. His fondness for painting landscapes in the open air and his innovative, sketchy painting technique paved the way for the work of the Impressionists. Daubigny’s studio home in Auvers-sur-Oise became a place of pilgrimage for countless artists, Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890) among them.

Daubigny Landscape with Harvesters 1875 Museum Gouda The Netherlands

And yet today Daubigny is almost unknown to the general public. He is one of the many early nineteenth-century artists who were overshadowed by the success of the Impressionists. The Van Gogh Museum is putting this situation to rights in Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape.

Progressive and Free

Daubigny’s personal approach to the landscape made a great impression on the young painters who would later be drawn to Impressionism. His threatening skies and impressive sunsets on the Normandy coast were emulated by Claude Monet (1840-1926), while Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was inspired by his orchards in bloom. Daubigny was not only a source of inspiration: he also used his position and contacts in the Parisian art world to help this new generation of artists forge a career.

Paintings by Monet and Pissarro show how Daubigny inspired the young Impressionists in the 1860s.

In the 1870s Daubigny, like the Impressionists, started to experiment with brighter colours and capturing fugitive impressions of nature. One striking example is the painting

Setting Sun near Villerville (1874, The Mesdag Collection, The Hague), which hangs side by side in the exhibition with

Monet’s Sunset on the Seine near Lavacourt, Winter Effect (1880, Petit Palais, Paris).

Claude Monet's"Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil"(1873)

The Coming Storm Early Spring, 1874 - Charles-Francois Daubigny

Le Botin Studio Boat

Daubigny sailed his studio boat Le Botin along French rivers so he could record the landscape from midstream. These trips generated original compositions and atmospheric river views that brought him fame and commercial success and found a following among the Impressionists. The Van Gogh Museum is presenting a modern multimedia variant of Daubigny’s studio boat created especially for the exhibition; visitors can experience painting on water for themselves through film, audio and various artefacts.

Van Gogh and Daubigny

Van Gogh admired the way the French master strove for realism and infused his landscapes with personal feeling. In 1890, Van Gogh spent the last months of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise, where Daubigny had lived and worked. Like the French artist, Van Gogh painted the traditional village houses and the nearby cornfields. He made several paintings in the garden of Daubigny’s former house that can be regarded as a homage to the artist, among them

Daubigny’s Garden (1890, Rudolf Staechelin Collection).

Drawing the Landscape

Daubigny Seascape 1874-Private Collection-Jon Landau

In the mid-nineteenth century more and more artists went outside to draw the landscape. They drew their inspiration from nature and seized on the increasing quality and variety of drawing materials. This is evident in the atmospheric nature scenes of the Barbizon School, and Vincent van Gogh’s expressive fields. In parallel to Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape, the finest drawings of the French landscape in the Van Gogh Museum’s own collection will be on display in the Print Room.

Daubigny Orchard in Blossom 1874 Scottish National Gallery

International Collaboration

Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape is a collaboration between the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, The Mesdag Collection in The Hague, The Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati and The National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. The exhibition includes loans from more than thirty-five museums and private collections in Europe and the United States, among them the Tate and The National Gallery in London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Musée d’Orsay and Petit Palais in Paris.

Publication

A lavishly illustrated book in Dutch and English about the interaction between Daubigny and the Impressionists, his innovative approach and his influence on Van Gogh is being published to coincide with the exhibition: 176 pages.