22 October 2016 to 26 February 2017 Liebermann Villa am Wannsee, Berlin 19 March to 26 June 2017
Today, the world of sports penetrates almost every aspect of life. It is a critical element of modern lifestyle, a popular spectacle for the masses or an expression of social distinction. In Germany, the incredible success story of sports began more than a hundred years ago: Max Liebermann was the first German artist to preoccupy himself extensively with this subject.
The exhibition examines Liebermann’s preoccupation with leisure, recreation and sports within the context of art as well as the historical and social development of sport, with a special focus on horse riding, polo and tennis in art. Works by Degas, Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec illustrate the inspiration that Liebermann found in French painting and graphic arts. However, his depictions of tennis and polo players are unique in France and Germany.
The singularity of his motifs is illustrated through the juxtaposition with selected works by English and German contemporaries such as John Lavery and Max Slevogt. Liebermann primarily explores the subjects of horseback riding, tennis and polo motifs in the period between 1900 and 1914. These works convey an image of the Wilhelminian upper classes whose leisure activities were infused by the idea of the English sportsman.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Liebermann turned his attention to summer visitors at the North Sea. There he first painted bathers and horseback riders but soon focused on modern sports such as polo, horse racing and tennis which had been popular in England for some time.
Following the First World War, Liebermann’s sports motifs faded into the background. In the 1920s a younger generation of artists began to discover sports as a subject, particularly sports for the masses such as football and boxing.
Depictions of boxers by Willy Jaeckel, Renée Sintenis and Rudolf Grossmann reflected the change in interest from elegant lawn sports in the countryside to physical exertion in urban sports arenas.
The exhibition will present about 140 works from international museums and private collections from Washington, Jerusalem, Paris and Zurich as well as from the collection of the Kunsthalle Bremen.
Max Liebermann Reiter am Strand mit Foxterrier, 1911 Oil on canvas 70 x 100 cm Nationalmuseum Stockholm
Max Liebermann Reiter und Reiterin am Strand, 1903 Oil on canvas 72,5 x 101 cm Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Köln, Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, rba_c016036
Max Liebermann Polospieler in Jenischs Park, 1903 Oil on canvas 71 x 102 cm Private collection
Laurence Miller Gallery New York City November 10 – December 23, 2016
Weegee Summer, Lower East Side, ca. 1937
Laurence Miller Gallery is pleased to present WEEGEE: Mayhem, an exhibition of eight select images from this artist’s New York City street scenes from the 1930s and 40s. The portrays NYC in all it's range: from stark and gritty urban crime to the sponanteous humor and lyricism of it's street life.
Weegee was the pseudonym adopted by Arthur Fellig, born in 1899 in what is now part of the Ukraine. He and his family emigrated to New York in 1908, where he began working in a variety of photography-related odd jobs, until 1935, when he became a freelance photographer. He mostly covered crime scenes, fires, and emergencies, and had an uncanny ability to arrive at the scene before police and other emergency personnel. In the trunk of his car was a complete darkroom, to ensure that he could get his images out before other competing photojournalists.
Scene at Manhattan Police Headquarters, ca. 1940
His quickness on the scene gave him the opportunity to get the first and most sensational images, which he would then offer for sale to newspaper publications like the Herald-Tribune, the Daily News, the Post, and others. At the same time, his work began to be featured in fine-art venues as well, including exhibitions at MOMA and the New York Photo League.
On top of Empire State Building ca.1942
Weegee later pursued a career in the film industry, working in Hollywood from 1946 to the early 1960s – as a still photographer, film-maker, special effects consultant, and actor. He died in 1968 at the age of 69. Twenty-five years later, his widow donated the entire Weegee archive to the International Center of Photography in New York City.
The Royal Academy of Arts will present the first major exhibition of James Ensor’s (1860 - 1949) work to be held in the UK in twenty years. One of Belgium’s most prominent modernist artists, Ensor was widely considered to be an important precursor of Expressionism. Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans will bring together some 70 paintings, drawings and prints by the artist, the vast majority of which have been drawn from major Belgian collections. The exhibition will be curated by the renowned contemporary painter and one of Belgium’s foremost artists, Luc Tuymans, who will bring a fresh perspective to the selection and presentation of Ensor’s work.
A highly skilled draughtsman and painter, Ensor had a deep appreciation of the poetic possibilities of light and a lifelong devotion to the inherent creativity of the mind. His eclectic visual language drew upon a wealth of subjects from t he traditional to the fantastic, producing an extraordinary body of work that spanned poetic evocations of the Belg ian countr yside and coastline , to disturbing visions of imagined worlds.
James Ensor, Skeletons Fighting over a Pickled Herring, 1891
Ensor’s works have continued to baffle , intrigue and defy categorisation in equal measure, providing one of the most singular and distinctive bodies of work to be produced at the turn of the twentieth century.
James Ensor, Bathing Hut, 1876
Born in 1860 to an English father and a Belgian mother, Ensor was raised in the coastal town of Ostend , where his fam ily ran a curio shop which he described as “an inextricable jumble of assorted objects constantly being knocked over by a number of cats, deafening parrots, and a monkey...”.
It was this somewhat eccentric environment, as well as Ostend’s annual carnival and the archaeologic al excavations at the time, from which Ensor drew much of his later imagery such as masks, theatrical costumes and skulls. Referred to as “the painter of masks” by poet Émile Verhaeren in 1908, Ensor wrote: “The mask means to me: freshness of colour, extravagant decorations, wild generous gestures, strident expressions, exquisite turbulence.”
As a student at the Académie Royale des Beaux - Arts in Brussels, Ensor was an outsider who rebelled against traditional teachings and was drawn towards the avant-garde salons of artists and intellectuals at the time, an environment in which he flourished. Heartened by these encounters, Ensor returned to Ostend in 1880 where he remained for the rest of his life. In 1883 he co-founded the progressive artist group Les Vingt , yet even this once stridently avant-garde group proved too safe for Ensor who became increasingly isolated from the external world and remained committed , throughout a long and belatedly successful career, to his individual style.
Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans will include a selection of significant paintings, drawings and prints by the artist which span the brea d th of his entire career, some of which have never been exhibited in the UK. The exhibition will feature three of Ensor’s most important works :
The Intrigue, 1890 (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp), which depicts a newly - wed couple encircled by sinister masked figures,
The Skate, 1892 (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels), a powerful, enigmatic still life
and Self - portrait with Flowered Hat, 1883 (Mu.Zee, O stend), a humorous reference to
Peter Paul Rubens’ Portrait of Susanna Lunden (National Gallery, London) of 1622.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art November 20, 2016–March 26, 2017
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is pleased to present Renaissance and Reformation: German Art in the Age of Dürer and Cranach. Coinciding with the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, the exhibition brings to Los Angeles some of the greatest achievements of German Renaissance art. As the only U.S. venue of the exhibition, LACMA offers a unique opportunity to view masterpieces of this period, which have rarely been displayed outside of Germany.
The period under consideration (1460–1580) was marked by conflicts, civil wars, and complex relationships with neighboring countries, but it also witnessed a flourishing of many states and cities, reflected in the skills of their craftsmen. Additionally, the era was characterized by profound changes in thought, philosophy, science, and religion, spearheaded by Martin Luther’s writings, which in turn transformed the work of many artists of the day such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Hans Holbein, Mathias Grünwald, Tilman Riemenschneider, and Peter Vischer.
These revolutionary ideas and innovations played a transformational role in the development of modern Western ocieties.
Organized with the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen München, and made possible by the German Foreign Office, the exhibition comprises over 100 objects, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, arms and armor, as well as decorative arts.
Exhibition Background
The 1517 publication of Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses set in motion one of the greatest movements of ideas in European history. What began as a challenge to the Church for the practice of selling “indulgences,” or vouchers for reduced time in Purgatory, developed into a religious and political movement that reshaped the Western Christian world. Luther’s Reformation, while considered from a strictly theological viewpoint, should also be studied within the complex political realities of early 16th-century Europe that includes struggles for power from various sides: the German princes, the House of Habsburg, and the Roman Catholic Church. It can also be viewed as one of the early manifestations of the broad movements of ideas and reconsiderations of the world’s order that define the Renaissance. The Reformation’s insistence upon the individual is also a trait that will be at the center of many humanist writers’ works later in the century.
Martin Luther by Albrecht Dürer
Artists were affected by such changes. The structure of their profession was changing as the Church lost ground along with its sponsorship of artists. Some hinted in their works at a new attitude toward the divine. Others embraced neutral forms, such as the portrait, and gave it a new dimension.
Madonna and Child by Lucas Cranach the Elder
Exhibition Organization
Renaissance and Reformation is arranged in five major thematic sections which explore the fundamental changes that took place in art and society during the Reformation.
Jakob Muffel by Albrecht Dürer, 1526
Traditional Imagery and Devotion illustrates the changes to visual language brought about by the Reformation. From altarpieces via depictions of the saints to the iconography of Christ’s Passion, the themes and modes of representation explored in these works highlight the differences that set the conflicting religious doctrines apart. Some artists accepted commissions both from Protestant clients and those who adhered to the “old faith,” meaning that their works often carried political implications. Over time, objects of religious veneration gave way to works of sculpture intended for aesthetic value—a transformation that can be observed with particular clarity among the sculptural pieces represented in this section.
Propaganda and Polemics illustrates the extent to which developments in art, media, and politics were intertwined. The Reformation was the first movement to use propaganda techniques to foster its cause. Using words and images, the supporters of the new Faith benefited from the fairly recent invention of the moveable type by Johannes Gutenberg to produce numerous and inexpensive broadsheets. Those who could not read received the message from explicit images. Polemics were both religious and political, and the images used by the reformers were often crude, even vulgar, but could at the same time be easily understood by the masses. The Church and the Pope in particular, were the most frequent targets. Literally demonized, they were presented as the representatives not of God, but of Satan himself. Printmaking techniques such as woodcut and copperplate engraving developed apace and spawned further copies of images. Alongside book printing, they played a vital role in disseminating reformatory ideas—not least as part of the propaganda campaigns that accompanied hotly fought polemical disputes.
Arms and Armor: The Splendor of the Saxon Court explores the political dimensions of the Reformation, while illustrating the extraordinary cultural significance of the princely states embroiled in the conflict raging between emergent religious factions. Objects from the royal art treasuries recall the era’s exquisite craftsmanship, and feature weapons and armor that lend a glimpse into life at the royal court. Armor was particularly praised. Most of the armor presented in this section were made for jousting or worn in ceremonies. Immensely costly, these were considered works of art in themselves. Arms, such as pistols or daggers, were often ambassadorial gifts and were admired both for their functionality and refinement of execution. The art of the Dresden court exemplifies a Protestant principality’s efforts to project an image befitting the high prestige it enjoyed and the political influence it wielded within the Holy Roman Empire.
Landscapes, historical scenes, and figures from ancient mythology—the themes explored in Humanism and Reality—attest to new and transformed ways of looking at the world, incorporating both idealized visions of classical antiquity and fastidious observations of nature and people. Here, the focus is upon delicate drawings by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Hans Beham, Hans Schäufelin, and Albrecht Altdorfer, as well as a number of other artists. These rare works provide a glimpse of each artist’s hand. Furthermore, they serve as an expression of European Renaissance art and the heightened autonomy it accorded both artist and artwork alike.
Portraiture enjoyed great favor in European painting from the 15th century onward. As religious paintings were less in demand, commissions for individual portraits increased and the studios adapted themselves to the new demand. Furthermore, the insistence of the new Faith on the individual found an echo in the art of portraiture. Most sitters were prominent members of the new church or belonged to the upper echelons of society: wealthy merchants or civic leaders, among others. Portraits range from intense studies such as those painted by Dürer, whose sitters are often set in shallow spaces, inspiring the viewer to concentrate on their gaze, to figures represented against finely detailed landscapes. All, however, are meant to convey not only the exact features of the subjects but also their social rank and moral qualities. Particularly sensitive are the drawn portraits. Whether executed as studies for prints or as free-standing works of art, German artists often used a combination of techniques and crayons to render their subjects with surprising likeness. Their delicate approach to the medium remains one of the most spectacular achievements of the German Renaissance.
Catalogue
Renaissance and Reformation German Art in the Age of Dürer and Cranach by Stephanie Buck, Julien Chapuis, Stephan Kemperdick, Michael Roth, Jeffrey Chipps Smith, and Dirk Syndram. Edited by Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen München. Featuring more than 100 outstanding paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and treasures of the Age of the Reformation, this publication comprises masterpieces by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Lucas Cranach the Younger, Hans Holbein the Elder and Hans Holbein the Younger, Matthias Grünewald, and Tilman Riemenschneider, among others. By placing these works in their historical context, this beautifully illustrated book uses art as a prism through which to consider the religious, social, and political upheavals of the time. The volume includes insightful texts that discuss the key themes in the exhibition. Biographies of the artists, an extensive bibliography and a glossary of central terms concerning the German Reformation, make this a comprehensive study of a fascinating period in European art history.
There has been no exhibition exclusively devoted toManet in France since 1983, the date of the memorable retrospective produced by Françoise Cachin and Charles S. Moffett. In the ensuing twenty-five years, however, there has been much valuable research and fruitful reflection. A rejection of formalism and a return to history, personal as well as collective, characterise the best of this work, whether documenting Manet’s life story or analysing his work, how it was exhibited and received. Our understanding of French painting from the period 1840 to 1880 has at the same time become more refined and freed from over-Manicheistic interpretations. From these two developments, in which the musée d'Orsay continues to be involved, a new image of Manet and his generation has appeared.
This exhibition aims to demonstrate this in a most clear and attractive way. More than just a strictly linear, monographic retrospective, it constructs its premise around some nine questions, each one closely related to the historical process from which Manet cannot be separated.
Simplifying his modernity to an iconographic register or bringing it down to a few stylistic elements comes, as we know, from a reductive approach. Manet is modern primarily because he embraces, as much as Courbet yet differently, the changes in the media that marked his era, and the unregulated circulation of images; secondly because imperial France, the backdrop to his developing career, was modern. And finally because the manner in which he challenged the masters of the Louvre was modern, extending beyond his militant Hispanism.
It is clear that the aesthetic he forged after 1860 demands a broader definition of realism than is normally ascribed to him. With this objective in mind, the exhibition aims to revisit the many links, visual, literary or political, between Manet’s art and Romantic culture. It will focus on the teaching of Thomas Couture, Baudelaire’s support and encouragement, the reform of religious art, erotic imageryand its unresolved issues, etc. But the originality of an artist as unpredictable as Manet cannot bereduced to the sum of the sources from which he distils his art.
Other sections of the exhibition try to throw light on the art of the fragment(ed), his relationship with women painters (Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès), his decision to remain outside the main Impressionist movement and his complicity with Mallarmé at his darkest.
The final reminder of the exhibition at the Galleryde la Vie Moderne, the last one-man show, in 1880, of a painter obsessed by the Salon, raises the question of what “the freedom to create” meant to him. This means that “Manet, the Man who Invented Modernity” highlights later works that areless well known and, more importantly, little understood if regarded as simply a stage in the process towards “pure painting”.
Curator: Stéphane Guégan, curator, musée d'Orsay
Sections: - The Couture School - The Baudelaire Moment - On the Future of Christian Art - From the Prado to the Alma - “The Promises of a Face” - Impressionism trapped - 1879 - a turning point - Less is more? - The end of the Story.
There has been no exhibition exclusively devoted to Manet in France since 1983, the date of the memorable retrospective produced by Françoise Cachin and Charles S. Moffett. In the ensuing thirty years, however, there has been much valuable research and useful comment. We can no longer consider the painter’s “modernity” without a comprehensive approach that takes into account the diversity of his work, the versatility in his career and his active relationship with his own times. The “man of the world” that Zola praised in 1867, was “a painter inthe world”. The poetic and the political, in every sense that this republican gave these words, go hand in hand.
In a way, theexhibition came about through one painting,
Homage to Delacroix, that Fantin-Latour, one year after the great artist’s death, showed at the Salon in 1864.
In it, we can see Manet in good company, standing between Champfleury and Baudelaire. On the one hand, Courbet’s man; on the other, Delacroix’s champion: Manet was the troublemaker who brought Realism and Romanticism together and confused the issue. Fantin-Latour’s hypothesis onlyneeded some support.
This is what the nine sections of this exhibition propose to do by rescuing Manet from the unsound judgment of later generations. The reputed father of “Impressionism” or of “pure painting” is now an outdated idea. Manet’s dazzling success after 1860, his continued evolution until 1883, from militant Hispanism to unorthodox Naturalism, his determination to revolutionise history painting in the public space where it was meaningful, these perspectives are more relevant to the inventor of the “Modern”.
Manet was modern in the way he captured the life of his time in life-size images, brought the arsenal of the old masters up to date and exploited the resources of an era that profoundly redefined the distribution and commercial availability of images. A regular exhibitor at the Salon, no matter what, the Delacroix of “new painting” would have only one enemy, the old established concepts of form and the trivialisation of the senses.
In order to emphasise his radical approach even more, Manet’s first supporters cut him off from his roots. According to them, therefore, he would not have learnt anything or retained anything from his six years (late 1849 to early 1856) with Thomas Couture, the painter of Romans of the Decadence. Having failed to get into the Naval College in Brest, the young Manet nonetheless enrolled with enthusiasm in this prominent studio. Couture was then regarded asthe heir to Veronese and Rubens, as well as to Ribera and Géricault, and furthermore, was Academic... This friend of Michelet was also an official artist of the Second Republic. When Manet joined him, Couture was striving to complete an enormous patriotic scene,
The Enrollment of the Volunteers of 1792. The realistic vitality of this painting enlivened the student’s studies even more. Manet also appreciated the all-encompassing sincerity of the portraitist. Of course, it was not just Couture. The copies of Delacroix and his Boy with a Sword revealed other ambitions.
Manet and Baudelaire met around 1860. And a “strongaffinity” brought them together until the death of the author of theFlowers of Evil. Since his first articles on the Salon, Baudelaire had been trying to convert Romanticism into Modernity - he would be for the visual arts what Balzac had been for thenovel. It matters little in the end that Baudelaire never openly acknowledged Manet as “the painter of modern life”, the expression he applied to the illustrator ConstantinGuys. When Victorine Meurent suddenly appeared in his pictures, as a singer fallen on hard times or a shameless bather, Manet, the creator of Luncheon on the Grass found a way of painting in the present moment, of combining this new prosaicism ofsubject with the spontaneity of photography and the depth of classical painting. Animaginative world, and even a certain style of drawing, finally linked poet and painter. From Spanish dancers and the doomed woman to queens of the night, the continuity speaks for itself, and would stay with “the painter of the black cat” for a longtime.
In 1864, a year after the Salon des Refusés, there was another, more metaphysical shock : Manet exhibited his Dead Christ with Angels, and shook up the traditional practices of l'Art Saint-Sulpice,the art of the Catholic Church. He took his inspiration from Italy (Fra Angelico, Andrea del Sarto) and Spain (El Greco, Velazquez, Goya), following the example of Legros, a precocious rival. Baudelaire, a Catholic himself, as were they, supported their efforts in the more controlled genre of the female nude. In 1859, when speaking of Delacroix, the poet had written : “religion, being the highest fictionof the human spirit [...], requires the most vigorous imagination and the greatest effort from those who devote themselves tothe expression of its actions and its sentiments”. Manet, a friend of Abbot Hurel, took up this challenge : to reinvent, not revive, sacred art. Although not a pillar of the church, the painter of Olympiawas nonetheless respectful of the inviolable rights of individual faith and the teaching of the gospels. The 20thcentury would in the end find this religious phasesuspect, and would forget it ...
After the failure at the 1865 Salon of Jesus mocked by Soldiers and of Olympia, Manet went to Spain for the first time. His main aim was to see Velazquez’s paintings at the Prado. His direct encounter with the master sof the Golden Age, including El Greco and Goya, not to mention the wealth of Italian artists in Madrid, would affect him in a number of ways. In 1866, when
The Fife Player was rejected by the Salon jury, Zola noted the astonishing blend of sobriety and energy emanating from the paintings that Manet had produced on his return from Spain. With its harshness and dramatic tension, Dead Matador reached new heights. It is a fragment of a bullfighting scene that Manet had cut up in 1865. This was not an isolated case. Whether it was dissatisfaction or a desire to intensify the visual power of the paintings, this was a clever choice in view of the continual criticism from the press. Instead of producing ever more skilful compositions, Manet fragmented, telescoped and stimulated perception. His horse racing scenes acquired an unprecedented spirit and vitality.
Baudelaire commented on the interplay of desire and frustration running through the series of portraits of Berthe Morisot that started at the 1869 Salon with The Balcony. The model, a young woman who did not fit well into her upper class background, also a painter and future active member of the “Impressionist group”, spoke highly of this painting which reminded her of Guys and Goya : “His paintings, as always, create the impression of wild fruit, slightly unripe even. I really like them.” The Balcony is disturbing, as much for its suspension in space and colour contrasts as for the mystery and obstinate silence of the protagonists who ignore each other, looking outwards, disillusioned and fatalistic. Alongside Berthe Morisot, who sits like a fashion-plate model trapped in her own melancholy, Manet represented the violinist Fanny Claus and landscape artist Antoine Guillemet. Until 1874, when she married one of his brothers, the painter flirted with using different moods and settings to transform her image – an indication of how his art could make the illusory boundary between reality and fiction unstable and therefore visible.
In May 1874, Manet distanced himself from the first exhibition of the Impressionists, according to a comment by one scornful critic. Some, such as Degas, deplored this and spoke of desertion. The press was astonished. The painter of Luncheon on the Grass, the supposed champion of plein air painting, was considered their “leader”. The fact remains that Manet’s artistic idiom had moved on after the end of the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune, two events that closely affected him. He lightened his palette and his style became more vibrant. It would be wrong to put this down purely to the influence of his friends Monet and Renoir. This chromatic and formal liberation had revealed itself in the mid 1860s in his seascapes, his most sober, and closest to Whistler. Rather than adopting the emerging aesthetic, Manet adapted it for his own purposes, for which the Salon remained the ideal place. During those years, Mallarmé, who like Manet was a frequent visitor to Nina de Callias’ salon, came into his social circle and his art. Two illustrated books, somewhere between fantasy and the fantastic, sealed a friendship that only death would end.
The change of direction was initially political after the election of Jules Grévy. The atmosphere of the Salon altered too. These new circumstances accelerated Manet’s development, in form and content. At Père Lathuille’s, which delighted Huysmans at the 1880 Salon, Manet avoided the rather obvious moralising of Zola whose novels he very much enjoyed. However he had never aspired to judge contemporary morals from above. But he did, however, cultivate a relationship with the friends of the publisher Charpentier, whose success had given him the financial means to launch La Vie Moderne, both an illustrated review and a gallery open to the new painting of Renoir, Monet and Manet himself. In April 1880, Manet exhibited around twenty paintings and pastels. As well as being a summary, it was, as the Portrait of Constantin Guys indicates, a kind of small-scale manifesto. The numerous scenes of brasseries and music halls impressed his contemporaries, as did the fashionably dressed society women and demi-mondaines: Manet revealed himself here “in a completely new light - a painter of elegant women” (Philippe Burty).
Although quite numerous, a fifth of his entire oeuvre, Manet did not consider his still lifes in the way we do today, in thrall to an absurd relativism that scarcely gives Olympia any more importance than the artist’s first idealised piece of asparagus. In truth, he would have reacted furiously at our indifference to the categories that governed his work: primacy of the senses, impact on the imagination and the compositional imperative.
His best still lifes held a modest position in this hierarchy. Their raison d'être was first and foremost a practical one: while his figures did not sell, he increased the images of flowers, fruits and “set tables”. More than just decorative virtuosity, a direct homage to the old masters or the delightful intrusion of the accidental, it is their dramatic quality that saves them from banality. Around 1880, he started to use closer framing and smaller canvases. When stripped down to the minimum, with a flash of brightness on the rich impasted surface, small, insignificant things, which amused the painter, attained an unprecedented expansiveness.
Manet was always a history painter, a “universal” painter, from ambition and from a desire to record the political situation of the time. The first work he presented under his own name, in 1860, was a caricature of Émile Ollivier, published in Diogenes, a liberal, anti-clerical journal run by Ernest Adam. This friend of the Manet family, a young lawyer and republican parliamentary deputy, reminds us that they and their friends opposed the Second Empire. That Édouard then painted several controversial paintings, including the
Édouard ManetLa bataille du S.S. Kearsarge et du C.S.S. Alabama, 1864
Huile sur toile, 134 x 127 cmPhiladelphia, Museum of Art
The Execution of Maximilian, came as no surprise. When the Radicals came to power in 1879, it gave him a final boost. Decorative projects and portraits confirmed his commitment. The establishment of 14 July as France’s national day and the amnesty for the Communards prompted him to pay tribute to a "red", which was echoed in December 1880 by Monet’s comment: “I saw Manet, in good enough health, very much taken up with a sensational painting for the Salon - Rochefort escaping in a rowing boat on the open sea.” (Monet). Destined for the Salon, the unfinished canvas was both his
Barque of Dante (Eugene Delacroix)
and his Raft of the Medusa (Théodore Géricault).
Chronology of Édouard Manet
Extract from the exhibition album, The Danger of Manet, by Stéphane Guégan, Musée d'Orsay / Gallimard
1832 23 January, Édouard Manet is born in Paris into an affluent middle class family. His father, Auguste, is a high-ranking official in the Ministryof Justice; his mother, Eugénie-Désirée, also wealthy, a goddaughter of the King of Sweden (Bernadotte), is the daughter of a diplomat. Two brothers are born after him, Eugène (1833) and Gustave (1835).
1844-1848 After studying at the Poiloup Institute in Vaugirard, he enters the Collège Rollin (nowadays the Lycée Jacques-Decour), where he meets Antonin Proust (
1832-1905). Manet’s maternal uncle, Édouard Fournier, apparently takes him to visit the Musée du Louvre for the first time.
1848 22-25 February : revolutionary days. Proclamation of the Second Republic.
1848-1849 Rather than study law, Manet, chooses to go into the navy. However he fails the entrance exam for the Naval Academy. In December
1848, just before the election of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte as first president of the French Republic, he sets sail on a training vessel heading for Rio de Janeiro. During the voyage, he produces drawings and caricatures. On his return, he fails once more to be accepted into the Naval Academy. His parents allow him to take up a career in art.
1850 Manet joins the studio of Thomas Couture (1815-1879), in rue Laval. He stays there for almost six years. Suzanne Leenhof (1830-1906), his brothers’ piano teacher, becomes his mistress.
1851 2 December : coup d’etat by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Manet seems to have already demonstrated his opposition to the “gravedigger of the Republic”.
1852 29 January : Suzanne Leenhoff gives birth to an illegitimate son, Léon-Édouard Koëlla, called Leenhoff (1852-1927). Is he the painter’s son or half-brother? The question remains open. 2 December: proclamation of the Second Empire. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte becomes Napoleon III.
1852-1853 Manet makes a number of trips. He travels to Holland, Germany, Austria and Italy. In Venice and Florence he becomes friendly with Émile Ollivier (1825-1913), a young Republican lawyer whose father has been exiled. Copies the masters.
1855 Gustave Courbet sets up his Pavilion of Realism outside the Universal Exhibition.
1856 After leaving Couture, Manet moves into a studio inrue Lavoisier with the painter Albert de Balleroy (1828-1872).
1857-1859 Another trip to Italy. Manet meets Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and Degas (1834-1917).
1861 Manet moves into his studio in rue Guyot, in the vicinity of the Plaine Monceau. At the Salon he shows Portrait of Mr. and Mrs M[anet]and The Spanish Singer, which earns him an “honourable” mention. Starts exhibiting at the Martinet Gallery, 26 boulevard des Italiens.
1862 Manet exhibits some prints in Alfred Cadart’s gallery, 66 rue de Richelieu. Is one of the founder members of the Société des Aquafortistes (Society of Etchers) that aims to revive etching. First articles by Charles Baudelaire in which he mentions his friend Manet.
1863 March : exhibits fourteen paintings at the MartinetGallery, including Boy with a Sword, The Street Singer, The Gypsies and Lola de Valence, a work that includes a quatrain by Baudelaire. May : opening of the Salon des Refusés. Luncheon on the Grass [Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe], arouses the indignation of the critics with very few exceptions. August: Manet attends Delacroix’s funeral with Baudelaire. October: Manetmarries Suzanne Leenhoff.
1864 Fantin-Latour exhibits Homage to Delacroix at the Salon, with Manet in the centre. Manet himself exhibits The Angels at Christ’s Tomb (Dead Christ with Angels) and Episode from a Bullfight, the bottom part of which would become The Dead Man (The Dead Matador) after it was cut up. Moves to 34 boulevard des Batignolles. Paints The Battle of the ‘Kearsarge’ and the ‘Alabama’.During the summer makes his first visit to Boulogne-sur-Mer.
1865 At the Salon, Manet exhibits Olympia andJesus mocked by the Soldiers, which cause a scandal. Stays in Madrid for the summer. The Velazquez paintings in the Prado have a huge impact on him.
1866 The Fife Playerand The Tragic Actor are refused by the Salon. Émile Zola (
1840-1902) defends the painter with unusual vehemence. Manet moves to 49, rue de Saint-Pétersbourg. Frequents the Café Guerbois, in what is now the avenue de Clichy, a meeting place for writers and artists. Meets Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)and Claude Monet (1840-1926).
1867 Aiming to take advantage of the Universal Exhibition, Manet has a pavilion built near the Pont de l’Alma, where he displays fifty of his paintings and prints. As part of a collective strategy, Fantin-Latour exhibits his portrait of Manet, and Zola publishes a vitriolic brochure. However, there are few positive responses. September: Manet attends Baudelaire’s funeral. 29
1868 Exhibits his Portrait of Émile Zolaat the Salon. The writer dedicates his novel Madeleine Férat to Manet. Manet meets Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) and her sister, as well as Léon Gambetta (1838-1882).
1869 January-February : Manet is informed that he cannot exhibit The Execution of Maximilian or publish the lithograph taken from it. Zola denounces these two acts of censorship in the press. The Balcony,first appearance of his friend Berthe Morisot, andLunch in the Studio are presented at the Salon.
1870 May : exhibits the portrait of his pupil Éva Gonzalès at the Salon. 4 September: after the defeat at Sedan and the fallof Napoleon III, the Third Republic is proclaimed. The Prussians are at the gates of Paris. The siege begins. Manet joins the National Guard. After two months he leaves the artillery to join the general staff.
1871 January-February : ceasefire and preliminary negotiations for a catastrophic peace treaty resulting in a severe war indemnity for France, andthe loss of Alsace and Lorraine. Manet rejoins his family in Oloron-Sainte-Marie in the Pyrénées. March-May: The Paris Commune. Manet returns just after the “Bloody Week” (21-28 May). He would later create a permanent reminder of the event.
1872 Durand-Ruel buys twenty-four of Manet’s paintings. Manet once again exhibits The Battle of the ‘Kearsarge’ and the ‘Alabama’.Visits Holland (Haarlem and Amsterdam). The painter moves into his new studio at 4, rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, near the railway. He frequents the Café de La Nouvelle-Athènes, place Pigalle, along with Degas, Renoir, Monet and Pissarro.
1873 Exhibits Le Bon Bock, a patriotic allegory, at the Salon. At the home of Nina de Callias, he meets Stéphane Mallarmé (
1842-
1898), with whom he would develop a long friendship.
1874 The Salon jury only accepts The Railwayand the watercolour Polichinelle, a caricature of Mac-Mahon. They refuse The Swallows and Masked Ball at the Opera. Mallarmé responds to the insult in an article in La Renaissance Artistique et Littéraire. First ‘Impressionist’ exhibition, in which Manet chooses not to participate. During the summer he visits Monet, and does several portraits of him.
1875 Exhibits Argenteuilat the Salon. He arouses the anger of the press who label him the leader of the Impressionist school in a derisive and provocative gesture. Manet illustrates Stéphane Mallarmé’s French translation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven.Travels to Venice in October with his wife Suzanne and James Tissot (
1836-1902).
1876 In April, after his paintings are refused at the Salon, Manet displays his works in his studio. Another retaliatory article by Mallarmé, whose poemL’Après-midi d’un fauneManet had just illustrated.While staying with Ernest Hoschedé in the summer, Manet paints a large portrait of Carolus-Duran.30 Édouard Manet J-B Faure dans le rôle d'Hamlet,
1877 Yet another affront: only Faure as Hamlet is accepted at the Salon. As Nanais refused, it is displayed in the window of the art dealer Giroux, in the boulevard des Capucines. Huge success and very enthusiastic article by Huysmans.
1879 New studio at 77, rue d’Amsterdam, enormous, luxurious and much frequented. Exhibits Boating and In the Greenhouse at the Salon. Critical reception to his work is improving. Manet, suffering from locomotor ataxia, a conditionassociated with syphilis, leaves for a rest cure in Bellevue, near Meudon.
1880 Private exhibition in the galleries of La Vie Modernein April. A real critical success. Exhibits Portrait of Mr.Antonin Proustand At Père Lathuille’s, at the Salon. Manet’s health deteriorates. Another cure at Bellevue, where he paints the portrait of the singer Émilie Ambre who had organised the exhibition ofThe Execution of Maximilianin New York and Boston at the end of 1879.
1881 Exhibits Portrait of Mr.Pertuiset andPortrait of Henri Rochefortat the Salon, where he is awarded a second-class medal. In early summer, the artist leaves to convalesce in Versailles. November-December: Antonin Proust is appointed Minister of Fine Arts, and Manet is made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.
1882 Exhibits Jeanneand A Bar at the Folies-Bergèreat the Salon. September: as his state of health is deteriorating,Manet draws up his will, appointing Suzanne as his sole legatee and Léon as his heir, after the death of his mother.
1883 Exhibits at the École des Beaux-arts in Paris, Lyon, New York and Boston. After having his left leg amputated, Manet dies on 30 April. He is buried in the cemetery in Passy.
List of works
Section 1.The choice of couture
Henri Fantin Latour
,
Hommage à Delacroix
, 1864, huile sur toile, 160 x 250 cm
Paris, musée d'Orsay
Édouard Manet
,
La Barque de Dante
, d'après Delacroix, 1854, huile sur toile , 38,1 x
48 cm, Lyon, Musée des Beaux Arts de Lyon
Édouard Manet
,
La Barque de Dante
, vers 1859, huile sur toile, 33 x 41 cm
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Édouard Manet
,
Le Petit Lange
, 1861-62, huile sur toile, 115 x 72 cm
Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe
Édouard Manet
,
Le Jeune garçon à l'épée
, 1861, huile sur toile, 131.1 x 93.4 cm
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Thomas Couture
,
Portrait de Henri Didier
, 1843, huile sur toile, 202 x 117 cm,
Compiègne, Musée Antoine Vivenel
Thomas Couture
,
Portrait de Henri Didier (tête)
, 1844, huile sur toile
Marseille, Musée des Beaux Arts
Thomas Couture
,
Portrait de Henri Didier (tête)
, 1844, crayon noir, 33 x 27 cm
Paris, Collection Prat
Thomas Couture
,
Portrait d'Amédée Berger
, 1852, huile sur toile, 55 x 46 cm
Rouen , Musée des Beaux Arts
Thomas Couture
,
Prince S. T.
, 1852, huile sur toile, 52 x 43 cm
Bordeaux, Musée des Beaux Arts
Édouard Manet
,
Portrait d'homme
, 1855-56, huile sur toile, 56 x 47 cm
Prague, National Gallery
Édouard Manet
,
Portrait de Roudier
, vers 1860-1863, sanguine, 19,7 x 15,7 cm
Paris, musée d'Orsay
Édouard Manet
,
Portrait de Roudier
, 1860, huile sur toile, 61,4 x 50,4 cm
Otterlo, Kröller Müller Museum
Thomas Couture
,
Esquisse pour L'Enrôlement des volontaires de 1792
, 1848
huile sur toile, 21 x 37 cm, Beauvais, Musée départ
emental de l'Oise
33
Thomas Couture
,
Deux volontaires : le noble et l'ouvrier
, 1848, huile sur bois, 100,5
x 83 cm, Beauvais, Musée départemental de l'Oise
Thomas Couture
,
Cavalier au cheval cabré
, entre 1815 et 1879, huile sur toile, 84 x
75 cm, Beauvais, Musée départemental de l'Oise
Thomas Couture
,
Homme vu de dos
, entre 1815 et 1879, huile sur toile, 81 x 75 cm,
Beauvais, Musée départemental de l'Oise
Édouard Manet
,
Tête d'homme étendu,
mine de plomb, 21,7 x 26,9 cm
Paris, musée d'Orsay
Thomas Couture
,
Étude en pied pour Mme Bruat
, 1856, huile sur toile, 65 x 81 cm
Compiègne, Musée national du château de Compiègne
Édouard Manet
,
Main gauche avec deux alliances,
crayon et craie blanche, 18,2 x
26,9 cm, Paris, musée d'Orsay
Édouard Manet
,
Guerrier tenant une lance,
mine de plomb, aquarelle, 28,9 x 21,1
cm, Paris, musée d'Orsay
Édouard Manet
,
Figure debout
,
drapée, tenant glaive,
mine de plomb, 28,9 x 21,1
cm, Paris, musée d'Orsay
Édouard Manet
,
Figure debout, drapée portant deux vases
, vers 1852-1858,
sanguine, 29,8 x 21,9 cm, Paris, Musée d'Orsay
Édouard Manet
,
Homme debout, drapé
, vers 1852-1857, sanguine, 28,9 x 21,9 cm
Paris, musée d'Orsay
Édouard Manet
,
Chrysippos
, vers 1862, sanguine, 22,8 x 14,2 cm
Paris, musée d'Orsay
Édouard Manet
,
Deux personnages debout, en pied, dont l'un drapé,
non daté
sanguine et pierre noire, 28,9 x 21,1 cm, Paris Mus
ée d'Orsay
Édouard Manet
,
Monsieur et Madame Auguste Manet
(Portrait des parents de
Manet), 1860, huile sur toile, 110 x 90 cm, Paris,
musée d'Orsay
Édouard Manet
,
Portrait du père de l'artiste
, eau-forte
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Édouard Manet
,
Portrait des parents de Manet
, 1859-1860, sanguine, 31 x 25 cm
Paris, musée d'Orsay
Édouard Manet
,
Portrait du Tintoret par lui-même
, 1854, huile sur toile, 64 x 50 cm
Dijon, Musée des Beaux Arts de Dijon
Section 3. A suspect catholicism ?
Édouard Manet
,
Silentium
, 2e état (état définitif), Planche n°10 de l'album
At the core of this winter’s sale is a group of ten paintings of impressive quality from the collection formed by Sir William Forbes, the 7th Baronet of Pitsligo (1773–1828), a Scottish banker who gave much of his fortune to various charitable establishments in Edinburgh. All of the works in the sale were acquired in Italy by the art dealer James Irvine on Forbes’ behalf between May 1827 and November 1828 and have never appeared on the market since then.
Leading this group is a Portrait of two boys, said to be members of the Pesaro familypainted by Titian (1485/90 - 1576) with some assistance from his studio, probably in the early 1540s. This striking work is a rarity in the genre of portraiture for it is one of the first and very few double portraits in Renaissance painting. Its originality also lies in its intensely expressive representation of childhood, rarely seen in Titian’s oeuvre which only comprises a small group of portraits of children. Not until the following century would something comparable be attempted by Rubens when painting his sons (est. £1 - 1.5 million).
From the same collection is a stunning Portrait of an architect by Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556), a recently discovered addition to the artist's œuvre and one of some forty-odd surviving portraits, nearly all of which are now in public collections. Lotto’s portraits are among the most inventive and expressive of the first half of the 16th century and often break with conventions in portraiture. Probably painted in the 1540s, this work is remarkable for the sparseness of its composition, as well as the pose and expression of the sitter who engages directly with the viewer (est. £200,000-300,000).
TWO MAGNIFICENT ITALIAN GOLD-GROUNDS
The sale is further distinguished by a fine selection of early Italian Renaissance paintings, and most notably two magnificent 15th- century Italian gold-grounds which have been in the collection formed by the famous German painter Franz von Lenbach (1836- 1904) for over a century. Both works beautifully exemplify the artistic production in two of the principal cities in Tuscany in the late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance.
The first is one of the most arresting gabella panels ever created. Gabelle are inextricably linked to the history of Siena which was already a fully-functioning democracy in the 15th century. These small painted panels, produced between the mid- 13th century and the last quarter of the 17th century, served as file covers for the officials leaving office after their six-month fixed term in the Republic (when they had to make all their paperwork public as an anti-corruption requirement). These files and their covers were then hung on the city walls so that the population might have access to them.
A work of considerable rarity, this Flagellation was made in 1441 by the Master of the Osservanza, now recognised as Sano di Pietro (1405–1481), one of the most prominent Sienese artists of the first half of the 15th century. Today, most Gabelle covers are in Siena, and a handful are scattered among museums. With its highly inventive design, the present work is therefore one of the very few and most stunning Gabella panels still in private hands outside Italy (est. £400,000-600,000).
The other major gold-ground in the sale is a luminous work by Bicci di Lorenzo, one of the most important painters of early 15th- century Florence. Painted in the early 1430s, thisNativity is a fine example of Bicci's distinctly traditionalist style that ensured a long- lasting demand for his paintings (est. £300,000-500,000).
DUTCH AND FLEMISH MASTERWORKS FROM THE "GOLDEN AGE"
Following the auction record set for a still life by Jan Brueghel the Elder in London in July
Still Life of flowers in a stoneware vase, the sale will feature a magnificent flower painting by another pioneer in the genre, Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder. Bosschaert was wholly responsible for the sudden outburst of flower painting in the Netherlands at the start of the 17th century and this beautifully preserved Still life of tulips, wild roses, cyclamen, yellow ranunculus, forget-me-not and other flowers, in a glass beaker is a very fine example of his early works. Dating from circa 1608–1610, it is little known, having only been exhibited once, in 1970, and only ever published in the catalogue of that exhibition (est. £800,000-1,200,000).
The sale will also provide a fascinating insight into the extraordinary impact that the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569) had upon Netherlandish landscape and genre painting in his own century, and equally how his influence was still being felt in the following century, as witnessed by the work of his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1637/8) and his contemporaries, including Maerten van Cleve (c. 1527-1581).
The highlight of this section is one of the finest known versions of Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s Return from the Kermesse, a composition that enjoyed great popularity during the artist’s lifetime and which appears to have been entirely of his own design. Its beautiful state of preservation allows us to fully appreciate the superb draughtsmanship, understanding of gesture, colour, composition and story-telling that have ensured for Brueghel a lasting reputation (est. £2-3 million). Previous sale.
At the culmination of Christie’s 250th anniversary year and as a major highlight of Classic Week, The Monarch of the Glen (circa 1849–51, estimate on request) by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, R.A. (1802-73) will lead the Old Master Evening Sale (8 December 2016), alongside important works by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Bernardo Bellotto and Edward Lear. The auction will mark the fourth occasion that The Monarch of the Glen has commanded Christie’s saleroom, having last been offered precisely a century ago, in 1916.
The painting is one of the most celebrated works of British art and an icon of 19th-Century European painting. The Monarch of the Glen was originally commissioned in 1849 for the Refreshment Room in the House of Lords. It presents a majestic portrait of a stag posed before a Scottish mountain landscape, monarch of all he surveys, and is realised with Landseer’s complete knowledge of anatomy and texture. The work will be exhibited at Christie’s New York (4-15 November 2016) and Hong Kong (24-28 November 2016), before being on view in London (2-8 December 2016) during Classic Week.
John Stainton, Deputy Chairman of Christie’s Old Master and British Paintings Department: “Following this year’s record-breaking Old Master sales which include Rubens’s ‘Lot and his Daughters’ and, via private treaty, two Rembrandt Portraits and the iconic ‘Armada Portrait’, there is perhaps no more fitting a conclusion to our 250th anniversary than the return of Sir Edwin Landseer’s ‘The Monarch of the Glen’ to Christie’s King Street. The sales in 1884 and 1892, prompted Landseer to become known as the ‘king of the salerooms’ and in 2016 Landseer’s masterpiece will lead Christie’s December Classic Week.”
SIR EDWIN HENRY LANDSEER, R.A. (LONDON, 1802-73)
The Monarch of the Glen was originally commissioned in 1849 as one of three works planned for the Refreshment Room in the House of Lords and was exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1851. The work was purchased from the artist by the sportsman Lord Londesborough for 350 guineas, it was then offered at Christie’s on three occasions; first by his widow, Lady Otho Fitzgerald, in 1884 for 6,200 guineas; then again in 1892 for 6,900 guineas, with other notable works by the artist that had been acquired by H.W. Eaton, Lord Cheylesmore; and lastly exactly one century ago, in 1916, when it was bought by Sir Thomas Dewar, of John Dewar & Sons, one of Scotland's largest whisky companies.
Inspired by his visit to Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford in 1924, Landseer spent much time hunting and shooting in Scotland, where he was a popular guest of his wealthy patrons and the royal family. Landseer began painting narrative scenes, vivid landscape sketches, and deer subjects for which he would become famous. His artistic vision was carefully considered, reflecting his exhilaration and deep connection with nature, as well as his romantic notion of life and sport in the Highlands. In The Monarch of the Glen, Landseer elevates animal painting to high art, creating a grandiose canvas celebrating the splendour of both the stag and the landscape it inhabits.
OLD MASTER HIGHLIGHTS
Clementine Sinclair, Head of Christie’s Old Master Evening Sale: “The Old Master Evening Sale brings together a remarkable array of works from some of the most sought-after artists in the European tradition. From Jordaens and Bellotto to Goya and Landseer, the exceptional line-up offers global collectors a number of important works, many of which have outstanding provenance and are presented for sale for the first time in several generations.”
Further notable highlights of the Old Master Evening Sale include the sketch by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) of A Woman with two Boys by a fountain (estimate: £4,000,000-6,000,000) from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. This beautifully-preserved work is closely associated with the most important Spanish Royal commission of its time when, following his appointment as Painter to the King in June 1786, Goya was commissioned to produce large painted cartoons for tapestries to decorate the dining room of the heir to the throne, Carlos, Prince of Asturias, in El Pardo Palace, Madrid. Carlos III had requested designs of light-hearted subjects and a principal theme of the Four Seasons was agreed. The full-scale cartoons are all preserved in the Prado, Madrid, while the smaller sketches for these designs are dispersed in major international museums including, the Museo Lazaro Galdiano, Madrid; the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Prado, Madrid. This sketch and only one other from the series of six principal designs
(Spring, or The Flower Seller) remain in private hands. The rapid brushwork, luminous palette and numerous pentimenti in this sketch are remarkably well preserved, revealing Goya’s evolving design for the final cartoon. In the end, as a consequence of the death of Carlos III the following year, the tapestries woven from Goya’s designs were never hung in El Pardo and the sketches remained in Goya’s possession. This sketch was acquired from the artist in 1798 by the Duke and Duchess of Osuna.
Following the landmark sale of Sir Peter Paul Rubens’s Lot and his Daughters for £44.9 million earlier this year, this season Christie’s will present a work by another celebrated Northern Baroque artist, Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678), who succeeded Rubens as the leading painter in Antwerp following the latter’s death in 1640.
The Holy Family with an angel (circa 1625-6, estimate: £500,000–800,000) is an important and intimate early work by the artist, and a subject that Jordaens frequently returned to throughout his career. This painting was completed at a time when Jordaens produced some of his finest work, including the monumental Saint Peter Finding Money in the Mouth of a Fish (Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst), and it was these works which established his reputation. The composition is articulated with expressive gestures and glances. Christ’s fate is made explicit by the rosary clasped in His hand and the grapes held by the angel as a symbol of the Eucharist. Jordaens may have used portraits of his son, Jordaens the Younger, and wife, Catharina, for the figures of Christ and the Virgin in this picture. His use of realistic models, the rustic presentation of religious subjects and his dramatic use of light and shade point to Caravaggio’s influence.
Bernardo Bellotto (1721-80) will be represented in the sale with The courtyard of the Fortress of Königstein with the Magdalenenburg (circa 1760; estimate: £2,000,000–3,000,000), an impressive and rare view of the Saxon castle, once in the collection of the Counts Potocki, Lańcut Castle, Poland.
Having established himself as an artist of the highest order, being paid more than any previous Court Painter, Bellotto was called to Dresden in 1747. Here he began to work on his renowned series of views of the city for Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland (1696-1763), along with full-scale replicas for the chief minister, Graf Heinrich von Brühl (1700-63). The Elector also commissioned five views of his castle at Königstein, which were never delivered to Augustus III and were later dispersed. This painting depends on a picture from the original series, which is now in Manchester City Art Gallery. Bellotto remained in Dresden until 1758, when he travelled to Vienna and Munich, before returning to Dresden in 1761. His celebrated renderings of the major capitals of Northern Europe, including Dresden, Vienna, Munich and Warsaw, hold an important place in European topographical painting.
The sale also includes a spirited en plein air sketch of Beaching a Boat, Brighton (estimate: £500,000 – 800,000) by John Constable, R.A. (1776-1837), which was used in the preparation for
one of the artist’s famed ‘Six-Footers’ showing Chain Pier, Brighton, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1827 (London, Tate Britain). The sketch was kept in the artist’s studio until his death in 1837 when it passed to his daughter Isabel, before being offered for sale at Christie’s in 1892. It later formed part of the distinguished Chéramy and Hatvany collections, when it was heralded as anticipating Impressionism in its truth to nature and in the spontaneity of its brushwork.
Edward Lear’s (1812-88) monumental The Forest of Bavella (circa 1878-88; estimate: £600,000-800,000) is also among the highlights. The work is the largest of only three known oil paintings that he executed of the forests of Southern Corsica following his expedition to the island during the winter of 1867-68. It illustrates Lear’s unparalleled skill at capturing a sense of grandeur and an epic depth of scale, with soaring pines, and cavernous ravine set against a mountainous backdrop. Using a combination of vivid, quickly-applied brushstrokes with carefully delineated details, Lear demonstrates his supremacy as a topographical draughtsman.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art December 4, 2016–May 7, 2017
Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes May 31 to September 10, 2017
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),with Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, presents Picasso and Rivera: Conversations Across Time an exhibition that examines moments of intersection in the formation of modernism both in Europe and Latin America, and asks how Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera—towering figures of the 20th century—both exchanged ideas in Paris about avant-garde paintings and later engaged with their respective ancient Mediterranean and Pre-Columbian worlds.
Theexhibition compares the artists’ trajectories beginning with their similar academic training to their shared investment in Cubism and their return to an engagement with antiquity from the 1920s through the 1950s.
More than 100 paintings and prints by both artists are in dialogue with oneother and with dozens of ancient Greco-Roman, Iberian, and Aztec objects, Picasso and Rivera aims to advance the understanding of the artists’ practices, particularly in how their contributions were influenced by the forms,myths, and structures of the arts of antiquity. Picasso and Rivera’s radical approach to understanding ancient art was in many ways subversive: by doing that they also rewrote art history—greatly enlarging the recognition of artistic contributions of ancient civilizations. Ancient art became essential for their sense of the future, both personally and politically.
By placing masterworks by Picasso and Rivera alongside Greco-Roman, Etruscan,and Iberian works as well as Mesoamerican sculptures and ceramic figurines, the exhibition weaves together distant geographies and worlds to blur the frontiersof time and space,” said Diana Magaloni. “Picasso and Riveraviewsboth artists as inventors of a new visual realityin the first decades of the 20thcentury.Diego Rivera brought the Pre-Columbian world to the forefront by showing that the art produced by these cultures was for the Americas what traditional Greek and Roman art was for Europe.”
“LACMA thinks about art history along a continuum,” said Michael Govan. “Rather than perpetuating historical or cultural hierarchies, we seekt o create dialogue, particularly given our location in a city that stands at an international crossroads with both Latin America and the Pacific Rim. This exhibition is a product of an Americas viewpoint, where our ancient indigenous heritage proposes a novel worldview that can interface with classical Western traditions, bringing both a diversity of viewpointsand a profound convergence ofhuman and artistic values.” .
Exhibition Organization
This exhibition is presented in five thematic sections, highlighting the moments of interaction and divergence between the two artists.
The Academy looks at Picasso and Rivera’s training in their respective national academies—Picasso in Spain and Rivera in Mexico—which they both entered as child prodigies. They studied within the rigorous curriculum of neoclassicism, where copying of the antique and a ruthless adhesion to the principles it had come to represent were the chief means to a successful career.
Cubsim and Paris (1908–16)examines the period between 1908 and 1916 when both artists moved to Paris and became active participants of the avant-garde movement. The two met in early1914 when Picasso invited Rivera to his studio before camaraderie yielded to rivalry in 1915. Both artists prolifically created Cubist worksincluding
Picasso’s The Poet (Le poète) (1912)
and Rivera’s Sailor at Lunch (Marinero almorzando) (1914).
This period of experimentation became critical for both artists, foreshadowing a unique approach to composition and to ancient art in their future practices.This section also provides a rare opportunity to view Picasso’s Cubism through Rivera’s eyes. Picasso and Rivera both traveled to Italy (in 1917 and 1920, respectively) and, following the war, embraced a revalorization of the classical tradition
Return to Order and Indigenismo addresses the post-WWI desire for order and stability that permeated the Parisian avant-garde. Picasso and Rivera’s monumental paintings of the 1920s capture their reinterpretations of antiquity, be it Greco-Roman for Picasso, or ancient Mesoamerican for Rivera. Picasso’s first monumental neoclassical painting,
Three Women at the Spring (1921)—an exceptional loan from the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA)—recasts the classical group of three women, usually appearing as Graces and Fates, into sculptural forms and ona monumental scale.
Meanwhile, in Flower Day (Día de Flores) (1925), Rivera transforms figures of Mexico’s indigenous peoples into icons inspired by Chalchiuhtlicue, the Aztec water goddess. This gallery also includes portions of Rivera’s personal holdings of ancient Pre-Columbian ceramic and stone sculptures, a collection that has never previously traveled outside of Mexico. This will be the first time that Flower Day will be shown alongside the ancient Chalchiuhtlicue sculptures that Rivera often used for his compositions.The subsequent two galleries focus on the artists individually rather than in direct dialogue.
Rivera and Pre-Columbian Art demonstrates how Rivera vigorously engaged with European modernism only to abandon abstraction for didactic figuration—enriched by references to Mexico’s ancient civilizations—and focusing his attention on public murals that emphasized the national and ideological above the personal. By the 1930s Rivera had already formed his own style where the ancient Mesoamerican sculptures were transformed into everyday living people, creating in this manner a representation of the idealized mestizo race in Mexico.
In The Flowered Canoe (La Canoa en Florada) (1931), Rivera creates two worlds:the mestizos, influenced byWestern culture, enjoy a day at Lake Xochimilco, while an oarsman, clearly an indigenous man, represents the force of tradition.
The gallery dedicated to Picasso and Mythology explores how the artist shaped the foundations of 20th century art through formal experimentation with the art of the past, creating images that were at once deeply personal and universal.
In Studio with Plaster Head (Atelier avec tête et bras de plâtre) (1925), for example, Picasso summarizes his views on thedialectic relationship between ancient Greek and Roman tradition with Western painting and the beginning of modernism.
Modernism was often conceived as a total break with the past;however, Picasso perceived itas part of a continuum. By showing classical figuration in the artist’s studio,Picasso implies that itisthe responsibility of the artist to create something new out of tradition. In this way,he presents an artistic lineage that goes from ancient Greece to Cubism.
Exhibition Catalogue
Picasso and Rivera: Conversations Across Time is accompanied by a fully illustrated cataloguepublished by Del Monico Books/Prestel.
Examining the artistic development of Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera, two towering figures in the world of modern art, this generously illustrated book tells an intriguing story of ambition, competition, and how the ancient world inspired their most important work. Picasso and Rivera: Conversations Across Time explores the artistic dialogue between Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera that spanned most of their careers.
The book showcases nearly 150 iconic paintings, sculptures, and prints by both artists, along with objects from their native ancient Mediterranean and Pre- Columbian worlds. It gives an overview of their early training in national academies; important archaeological discoveries that occurred during their formative years; and their friendly and adversarial relationship in Montparnasse. A series of essays accompanies the exquisitely reproduced works, allowing readers to understand how the work of each artist was informed by artworks from the past. Picasso drew upon Classical art to shape the foundations of 20th-century art, creating images that were at once deeply personal and universal. Meanwhile, Rivera traded the abstractions of European modernism for figuration and references to Mexico’s Pre-Columbian civilization, focusing on public murals that emphasized his love of Mexico and his hopes for its future.
Offering valuable insight into the trajectory of each artist, this book draws connections between two powerful figures who transformed modern art.
The 304-page volume is edited by Michael Govan and Diana Magaloniwith contributions by Émilie Bouvard, Lilly Casillas, Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera, Michael Govan, Michele Greet, Patricia Leighten, Diana Magaloni, Camille Mathieu, Itzel A. Rodríguez Mortellaro, James Oles, and Jennifer Stager.
Museum of Modern Art November 21, 2016–March 19, 2017
Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction is the first major exhibition in the U.S. to encompass the full range of Picabia’s audacious, provocative, and profoundly influential career. MoMA’s first-ever monographic exhibition of the artist, Francis Picabia brings together some 200 works in multiple mediums to explore the artist’s critical place in the history of 20th-century art.
Among the great modern artists, Francis Picabia (French, 1879–1953) remains one of the most elusive; he vigorously avoided any one singular style or medium, and his work encompassed painting, performance, poetry, publishing, and film. Though he is best known as one of the leaders of the Dada movement, his career ranged widely—and wildly—from Impressionism to radical abstraction, from Dadaist provocation to pseudo-classicism, and from photo-based realism to art informel. Picabia’s contributions to a diverse range of artistic mediums, along with his consistent inconsistencies, make him especially relevant for contemporary artists, and his career as a whole challenges familiar narratives of modernism.
Francis Picabia—conceived in partnership with the Kunsthaus Zürich, where its presentation is scheduled to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire, in 1916—assembles key selections and bodies of work, ranging in date from the first decade of the 20th century through the early 1950s. Picabia’s work as a painter—albeit one whose oeuvre consistently contests the term—will be represented, along with his activities as a publisher and contributor to vanguard journals, and his forays into screenwriting and theater. The core of the exhibition comprises some 125 paintings, along with approximately 45 key works on paper, one film, and a carefully chosen selection of printed matter.
Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Kunsthaus Zürich.
Organized by Anne Umland, The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, and Cathérine Hug, Curator, Kunsthaus Zürich; with Talia Kwartler, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA.
Brandywine River Museum of Art, October 29, 2016 through January 22, 2017
Across Country:The Power of Place in American Art, 1915-1950, High Museum of Art, Atlanta. February 12 through May 12, 2017
Rural Modern: American Art Beyond the City, a major new exhibition opening at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, will provide an innovative view of avant-garde art from the 1920s through the 1940s, exploring the surprising contribution of artists working outside major urban centers in the expansion and acceptance of modernist styles in the United States. Modernism spread outward from New York, Boston, and Chicago—the first points of contact—to coastal New England, small-town Pennsylvania, Midwestern farms, and other rural regions. On view from October 29, 2016 through January 22, 2017, the exhibition will feature 60 works by iconic artists such as Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and Grant Wood along with Ralston Crawford, Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, N.C. Wyeth, and Andrew Wyeth.
These stunning paintings are drawn from renowned private and museum collections such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and Whitney Museum of American Art.
“In selecting the works for this exhibition, I sought to connect the mainstream American modernists with both their well-known counterparts in American Regionalism and other artists of the period deserving of attention. Through the conceptual framework of ‘rural modernism,’ a new paradigm for investigating the modernization of American art is offered,” says the exhibition’s curator Amanda C. Burdan.
Included are artists such as Marsden Hartley and N. C. Wyeth working in Maine and Horace Pippin and Charles Demuth working in Pennsylvania. Each developed such distinct visual styles of painting and experienced such vastly different lives that comparisons of their work have rarely been undertaken. Through the lens of ‘rural modernism,’ each can be seen as contributing to a shared expression of American modernity.
“Rural Modern provides a fascinating new examination of some of the 20th century’s best-known American artists who left the city behind and found subjects not usually associated with modernism,” said Thomas Padon, director of the Brandywine River Museum of Art. “This exhibition, one of the museum’s most ambitious, follows these artists throughout the country from Maine to New Mexico and examines their individual responses to new subjects—vast open landscapes, industrial buildings, and figures far from the urbane. As the migration of artistic talent continued, modern art was transmuted from a European-inflected approach practiced mainly by those living in the largest cities towards one that was national and distinctly American.”
The exhibition is divided into three sections. “Rural Modern Landscape” features sweeping vistas and the architecture of rural America. The artists of rural modernism continued the long-standing tradition of American pastoral landscape, giving great attention to scenes that emphasized the idealized landscape and humanity’s place within it.
Barns of all shapes and sizes—in the sun and in the snow (by Georgia O’Keeffe), old and crumbling or shiny and new (by Dale Nichols), traditional red or stark, clean white (by Ralston Crawford)—provide a common reference in this regard.
Marvin Cone’s Stone City Landscape (1935) plays up the peaceful, charming, and orderly landscape of the American heartland and is matched by equally distinct regional scenes by other artists—from
Marsden Hartley’s Hurricane Island, Vinalhaven, Maine, (1942, Philadelphia Museum of Art),
to Georgia O’Keeffe’s Lake George, Autumn (1922, Collection of Jan and Marica Vilcek),
to Stuart Davis’s New Mexican Landscape (1923, Amon Carter Museum)—in a visual national anthem.
The “Rural Modern Life” section features the countless country types who appear in rural modern painting. The farmers, farm workers and farm families are matched equally by fishermen, mine workers, lumberjacks and all manner of people who work the land. Grandma Moses’s 1938 painting Bringing in the Maple Sugar (Private Collection) (below) revels in the sense of community engendered in rural living. Her paintings, and others by self-taught artists, became increasingly popular in the New York art market in the period, reflecting the expanding nature of American modernism.
In several works, life in rural areas is shown as inherently dependent on the land; however a number of works specifically depict an older generation with a suggestion of the passing of their way of life.
Several still lifes and interior scenes, including two highly important examples by Charles Sheeler (see one below) depicting his home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, give further insight into life in rural American as glimpsed through an artist’s eye.
In “Rural Modern Gothic” both subject matter and style show the darker side of American life between the world wars. In this section are artists who depicted the environmental and economic crises that impacted all parts of the country in the period using the visual imagery of the Dust Bowl, the encroachment of industrialization on previously pristine landscapes, and the Depression.
Paintings such as Charles Demuth’s End of the Parade Coatesville, Pa. (1920, Collection of Deborah and Ed Shein), (below) rendered in the boldly modern style of Precisionism, reflect on the industrialization of small town America.
A major work by the Texas Regionalist Alexandre Hogue entitled The Crucified Land (1939, Gilcrease Museum) keys on the devastation of American farmland during the 1930s,
while works such as Ben Shahn’s Farmers (1943, University of Kentucky Museum of Art), concentrate on the psychological weight of the crises borne by the American people.
Catalogue
In addition to providing a full visual document of the works in the exhibition, the accompanying catalogue for Rural Modern, published by Skira Rizzoli, will explore in-depth topics related to the exhibition’s themes. Along with a major essay by Amanda C. Burdan, the catalogue includes insightful texts by Betsy Fahlman (Arizona State University), Christine B. Podmaniczky (Brandywine River Museum of Art), Jonathan Frederick Walz (The Columbus Museum), and Catherine Whitney (Philbrook Museum of Art). The essays provide a broad spectrum of approaches to the exhibition’s theme including concentrations on individual artists, specialized styles of American modernism, regional identity, and important social issues affecting artists in rural America.
The book is an essential look at American modernism as seen through the landscape painting of Thomas Hart Benton, Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe, Grant Wood, Andrew Wyeth, and many others. Paintings of New England coastlines, small-town Pennsylvania, Southwestern canyons, Midwestern farms, and other evocative landscapes fill the pages of Rural Modern. More than sixty modernist works, created between the wars, present an important and often overlooked history: how American painters adapted avant-garde styles like Cubism and Fauvism to reimagine familiar landscapes and develop a distinctively American modernist vernacular. Richly illustrated and with insightful essays by noted scholars, Rural Modern traces this development through a broad range of works by both lesser-known and widely celebrated artists, including Arthur Dove, Dale Nichols, Grant Wood, N. C. Wyeth, Charles Sheeler, Charles Burchfield, Marsden Hartley, and Stuart Davis. As important as the marvel of the twentieth-century city was to modernist artists such as these, many sought respite and even refuge in quieter, rural areas of the country, and soon helped to confirm modernism’s enduring nature.
Rural Modern: American Art Beyond the City is organized by the Brandywine River Museum of Art in collaboration with the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. After opening in Chadds Ford, the exhibition will travel to Atlanta, where an expanded presentation, including murals and photography of the period, opens under the title Cross Country:The Power of Place in American Art, 1915-1950, and will be on view from February 12 through May 12, 2017.
Dale Nichols (1904-1995) Spring Turning, 1946, oil on canvas, Collection of Paul and Diane Guenther, Courtesy of D. Wigmore Fine Art, New York
Charles Demuth (1883-1935), End of the Parade, Coatesville, Pa., 1920, Tempera and pencil on board, 19 7/8 x 15 3/4 in. Collection of Deborah and Ed Shein
Roger Medearis (1920-2001), Godly Susan, 1941, Egg tempera on board, 27 5/8 x 23 5/8 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Roger and Elizabeth Medearis, 1992.84
N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945) The Drowning, 1936 Oil on canvas, 43 x 48 1/8 in. Brandywine River Museum of Art Bequest of Carolyn Wyeth, 1996
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), New Mexico Landscape, 1919-20. Oil on canvas, 30 x 36 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), Staircase, Doylestown, 1925, Oil on canvas, 25 1/8 x 21 1/8 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Smithsonian Institution, Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1971
The Frick Art Museum, Pittsburgh October 29, 2016–May 14, 2017 This fall the exhibition galleries at The Frick Art Museum are being taken over by the permanent collection for the first exhibition in eight years to focus exclusively on the works of fine and decorative art in the Frick Art & Historical Center’s own collection. The Frick Collects: From Rubens to Monet celebrates the works of fine and decorative art at the heart of the Frick experience. It will be on view from October 29, 2016–May 14, 2017.
Designed to bring renewed attention to the depth and breadth of the Frick’s collection—from bachelor purchases by Henry Clay Frick, through his daughter Helen’s work to ensure the creation of The Frick Art Museum and the preservation of Clayton, and to more recent museum acquisitions, The Frick Collects: From Rubens to Monet features many of the museum’s most significant objects and tells the story of the Frick today and how it has evolved from its founding collections.
THE FRICK PITTSBURGH STORY: THE FORMATION OF THE COLLECTION The Frick Pittsburgh’s story is a multifaceted one. It is a family story; it is a story about Pittsburgh; and it is a story about life at a time when Pittsburgh was the industrial heart of the United States. It is also a story about aspirations—aspirations to create a place of beauty, and for learning about history, and above all to provide public access and enjoyment of fine art and beautiful objects. The collection at the Frick begins with the foundation of industrialist and world‐renowned art collector Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919)—his early collecting, his taste, and his roots in Pittsburgh, and continues through his daughter Helen Clay Frick (1888–1984), adding to his legacy her interest in preservation and her own particular love of 18th‐century French art and early Italian Renaissance painting. The earliest acquisitions in the collection date to Henry Clay Frick’s bachelor days. Before his marriage (and for the first months after his marriage) he lived in downtown Pittsburgh at the fashionable Monongahela House. Mr. Frick bought his first paintings and decorative objects for his rooms there: an elaborate rococo revival clock and candelabra set purchased through Tiffany’s, an ebonized cabinet, and his first documented painting purchase, a landscape by Pittsburgh artist George Hetzel. When they moved into Clayton, Henry Clay Frick and his wife furnished it as many young couples do— most of the purchases were new, fashionable and of the period. Frick had met his wife, Adelaide
Howard Childs (1859–1931) in February 1881. Adelaide was the sixth daughter of the wealthy Pittsburgh Childs family, who were manufacturers and importers of shoes and boots. For young couples during America’s Gilded Age like the Fricks, art collecting was not simply a way to exercise taste and create a suitable environment—although these were important considerations. More subtly the right objects gave their owner a sense of history and pedigree. Collecting was a personal pleasure and an indicator of status, discernment and good taste. The rise in American collecting of this period also coincided with the establishment of the first museums in the country, including the Wadsworth Athenaeum of Hartford, Connecticut in 1842, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1870, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1872, and in 1896, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute. As the century progressed, forming collections and bequeathing them to the public became one way to put wealth and the accumulation of a collection to public service. Although the Frick Pittsburgh is the direct legacy of Helen Clay Frick, it is also, by extension, the legacy of Henry Clay Frick. After his death, the family’s New York home and its contents were transformed into The Frick Collection. The family’s other homes, Clayton and Eagle Rock (in Prides Crossing, Massachusetts), were eventually inherited by Helen, and Clayton remained a Pittsburgh touchstone for the family, even after 1905, when their main residence was in New York. The paintings and decorative arts from Clayton and Eagle Rock form a unique reflection of Henry Clay Frick’s development as a collector. Any consideration of Henry Clay Frick as a collector must take into account his collection in Pittsburgh. Helen Clay Frick’s vision led to the restoration of Clayton as a house museum and the construction of The Frick Art Museum, which was opened to the public in 1970. Helen even had the family cars and carriages carefully preserved and brought back to Pittsburgh from the family’s Massachusetts summer estate. When The Frick Art Museum opened it was devoted to Helen’s greatest interests—early Italian Renaissance paintings and 18th‐century French fine and decorative art. Since Helen’s death in 1984, the collection has continued to develop—through generous donations and acquisitions that reflect the same quality as that evinced by the founding collection. One of the first gifts after Helen’s death came from the estate of a close friend of hers, Katherine McCook Knox. Knox had grown up nearby, the daughter of Willis McCook, one of Henry Clay Frick’s lawyers, and as an adult she had worked with Helen at the Frick Art Reference Library, developing an expertise in American painting.
It is fitting then, that her gift to Helen Clay Frick’s Pittsburgh museum was an iconic American genre painting by Eastman Johnson, The Wounded Drummer Boy, which will be on display as part of the exhibition for the first time since 2014. The Frick Art Museum also owns significant pieces of contemporary art, including a Sèvres porcelain Madame de Pompadour soup tureen designed by Cindy Sherman, featuring the artist’s characteristic role‐playing with a self‐portrait in the guise of arts patron, porcelain lover, and mistress to Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour. Contemporary art has also been supported through The Frick Art Museum’s exhibition program, which since the year 2000 has periodically invited artists to make work inspired by the collections and experiences of visiting the multi‐acre site. ABOUT THE EXHIBITION The exhibition, which includes 42 paintings, 26 decorative arts pieces, nine pieces of furniture, six works on paper, and three examples of sculpture, is organized by acquisition date, allowing visitors to perceive the development of the collection, from Henry Clay Frick’s earliest purchases to recent museum acquisitions. Thematic sections include: From Apartment to Starter Home: The Collecting Begins, covering the years 1881 to 1892; The Confident Collector, encompassing purchases made through the 1890s to around 1906; Collecting with Ambition, which includes important purchases made from other collections and covers the years when Frick was purchasing with the intention of creating a public gallery; Her Father’s Daughter, which elucidates Helen Clay Frick’s collecting interests; and, Expanding the Legacy, which includes the establishment of The Frick Art Museum and acquisitions made since the museum’s founding. A selection of the Frick’s extraordinary works on paper by Jean‐François Millet will be included in the exhibition. These fragile works in pastel and charcoal are displayed rarely and for limited time to avoid handling and light exposure. Here, the Millets from a collection within the collection, and connect to Frick’s other acquisitions by artists of the Barbizon school. Millet’s late‐life pastel landscapes show him embracing color and atmosphere, closely connecting his approach to that of the younger Impressionist artists who emerged a decade later.
NEW GUIDE TO THE COLLECTION
The Frick Pittsburgh: A Guide to the Collection, Scala Arts Publishers, Inc., 2016 Accompanying The Frick Collects: Rubens to Monet is a new published guide to the collection, produced in collaboration with Scala, specialists in museum publications. The guide features an introduction by Frick Director Robin Nicholson, and contextual essays by Director of Curatorial Affairs Sarah Hall and Associate Curator of Decorative Arts Dawn Reid Brean.
Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Charlotte-Marguerite de Montmorency, Princess of Condé, c. 1610. Oil on canvas. Frick Art & Historical Center.
Claude Monet (1840–1926) Banks of the Seine at Lavacourt (Bords de la Seine a Lavacourt), 1879. Oil on canvas. Frick Art & Historical Center
Arthur Devis (1712–1787), Sir Joshua Vanneck and His Family, 1752. Oil on canvas. Frick Art & Historical Center.
Francesco Guardi (1712–1793), View on the Grand Canal at San Geremia, Venice, 1760–1765. Oil on canvas. Frick Art & Historical Center.
Master of the Scrovegni Chapel Presbytery (Paduan, early 14th century)Madonna and Child with Saints, Scenes from the Life of Christ and the Life of the Virgin, 1308. Tempera on panels
Bernardo Daddi, Madonna and Child with Saint Francis and a Saint-Bishop; Saints Peter and Paul; the Crucifixion; 1330s. Triptych: tempora on panels
Giovanni di Paolo, Nativity, 1428-1440. Oil on canvas
Sassetta, The Virgin of Humility Crowned by Two Angels, 1440s. Tempera on panel
Sargent: The Watercolours 21 June – 8 October 2017
In June 2017 Dulwich Picture Gallery will present the first major UK exhibition of watercolours in nearly 100 years by the Anglo-American artist, John Singer Sargent (1856- 1925), since 1918
A key selection of works from over 30 lenders, including The lady with the umbrella, 1911, on display in the UK for the first time, will offer an alternative perspective on Sargent, demonstrating a technical brilliance and striking individuality.
'Sargent: The Watercolours'will bring together nearly 80 works from arguably Sargent’s greatest period of watercolour production between 1900 and 1918. Renowned as the leading portraitist of his generation, Sargent mastered the medium of watercolour during his painting expeditions to Southern Europe and the Middle East, where he developed a distinctive way of seeing and composing. Whilst these watercolours have often been dismissed as simple travel souvenirs, they were an integral part of Sargent’s artistic production.
Arranged thematically, the exhibition will showcase Sargent’s landscapes, architectural structures and figurative scenes. It will draw attention to the most radical aspects of his oeuvre, in particular his use of the close-up to focus attention on a specific motif, his unusual use of perspective and the arresting and dynamic poses of his figures. The show will also serve as a startling reminder of Sargent’s mastery of the visual complexities of light, the effects of which are present in almost every one of his works.
Richard Ormond, co-curator of the exhibition, said:
“In Sargent’s watercolours we see his zest for life and his pleasure in the act of painting. The fluency and sensuality of his paint surfaces, and his wonderful command of light, never cease to astonish us. With this exhibition we hope to demonstrate Sargent’s mastery of the medium and the scale of his achievement”.
Sargent practiced the art of watercolour from a young age and continued to use it throughout his career, his style developing in tandem with his work in oils. By 1900, aged 44 and at the height of his career, he had grown restless, seeking escape from the confines of his studio and the pressures of portrait commissions. Working en plein air he explored subjects of his own choosing, travelling to remote spots where he could work undisturbed. For this purpose, he regularly turned to watercolour, a medium that allowed him to paint, rapidly and without much preparation, a scene that caught his eye.
The show will open with some of the best examples of Sargent’s ‘fragments and close-ups’. Sargent rarely painted buildings as complete and coherent entities; his sliced angles and perspectives and the unorthodox viewpoints require the spectator to imagine their complete form.
John Singer Sargent, An Architectural Study, Rome graphite and watercolour on paper 34.9 x 50.2 cm Bradford Art Galleries and Museums, Bradford UK
In Rome: An Architectural Study, c. 1906-07, Sargent records a corner of a building, concentrating on the effect of daylight on the stone using contrasting warm and cool tones.
In The Church of Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, c. 1904-1909, the domes of the great church are obscured by the rigging of ships in the canal so that they become part of a pictorial pattern.
The show will go on to explore Sargent’s depictions of cities, in particular, his paintings of everyday life in Venice, which he often captures from canal level - the city seen from the gondola perspective. Works also depict the less glamorous side canals, with their narrow passageways, their strange geometries and the mysterious play of light and shade. Painting some of the most famous sites in other cities, Sargent only gives a glimpse of their grandeur, concentrating more on the pattern and form surrounding
as in the earlier work, Constantinople, 1891, in which he depicts a strikingly horizontal view of the historic center of Istanbul.
After the turn of the twentieth-century, Sargent painted more landscapes than any other subject. His scenes are often unconventional, opting for closely cropped details rather than full, panoramic views. Instead Sargent focused on form and surface pattern, particularly in his mountain landscapes such as Bed of a Torrent, 1904. He transforms mossy rocks and flowing brooks into a complex arrangement, rejecting distance and scale. Similar to photographic snapshots, his landscapes, with their informal compositions and abrupt cropping, capture a moment in time.
The exhibition will culminate with a selection of Sargent’s figurative paintings, including depictions of his travel companions and fellow artists and pictures of working people as in Spanish Soldiers, 1903. In many of these works Sargent rejects the primacy of the figure. In The lady with the umbrella, 1911, for example, his subject is foreshortened and contorted, an avoidance of the obviously pretty and picturesque.
The show will be curated by Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, widely accepted as the UK reigning experts in this field. Richard Ormond is Sargent’s grand-nephew. He was previously director of the National Maritime Museum, London. Elaine Kilmurray is an art historian, author and curator. She has worked with Richard on numerous publications and co-curated exhibitions on Sargent’s work in London, Washington, D.C., Boston, Ferrara and Los Angeles.
Loans will come from UK institutions including Tate, The British Museum, The Fitzwilliam, The Imperial War Museum and The Ashmolean, alongside works rarely seen from numerous private collections. Key loans will also come from European institutions; Museu de Montserrat, Abadia de Montserrat, Barcelona; the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon and the Petit Palais, Musee de Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated colour exhibition catalogue and will feature fascinating new research into Sargent’s watercolour oeuvre with lead essays from the curators.
ThePhillips Collection October 8, 2016- January 8, 2017
This fall, all 60 panels of the masterworkThe Migration Series by renowned African American 20th-century artist Jacob Lawrence will be on display at ThePhillips Collection in People on the Move: Beauty andStruggle in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. A powerfulvisual epic, The Migration Series (1940–41) documents thehistoric movement of millions of African Americans fromthe rural South to the urban North more than a centuryago. Reuniting 30 panels owned by the Phillips with 30panels on loan from the Museum of Modern Art,Lawrence’s complete series will be on display beginningOctober 8, 2016, and will run until January 8, 2017.
This exhibition builds on the museum’s rich and meaningful history with the artist over the course of decades in exhibitions and internationally recognized educational initiatives.
“Since the time Duncan Phillips first acquired the odd-numbered panels of Lawrence’s series in 1942, The Migration Series has remained a cornerstone of our permanent collection and a force in our educational work with international communities,” said Director Dorothy Kosinski. “In panel 60 of The Migration Series, Lawrence leaves us with the message, ‘And the migrants kept coming,’” said curator Elsa Smithgall. “During a time when record numbers of migrants are uprooting themselves in search of a better life, Lawrence’s timeless tale and its universal themes of struggle and freedom continue to strike a chord not only in our American experience but also in the international experience of migration around the world.”
“While Jacob Lawrence’s masterpiece was created more than 70 years ago, it continues to resound powerfully with the global plight of migrants today. I look forward to the Phillips continuing its leadership role in usingThe Migration Seriesto stimulate dialogue and reflection on global challenges in the 21st century.”
The American avant-garde played an important role in the creation of a modernist visual culture on both sides of the Atlantic in the first decades of the twentieth century. Many American artists resided in Paris during these years. There they encountered firsthand the innovations of their contemporaries Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, whose radical experiments in color and form epitomized modernism in Europe.
In the United States modernism initially found its strongest expression in the eclectic activities of the group of artists, writers, and critics who gathered around the photographer Alfred Stieglitz at his gallery "291" in New York. The full scope of the modernist movement became evident in 1913 with The International Exhibition of Modern Art, known as the Armory Show. This display of well over a thousand American and European paintings and sculptures introduced the American public to cubism, abstraction, and other recent artistic developments.
The twenty works by nineteen artists that form the Shein Collection offer a concise, nuanced account of the first American avant-garde. The various shifting, intersecting alliances of the early modernist period are represented, including the painters associated with Stieglitz such as Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Georgia O'Keeffe; practitioners of New York Dada such as Duchamp and Man Ray; the synchromists or color painters, Patrick Henry Bruce and Stanton Macdonald-Wright; precisionists such as Charles Demuth, Morton Schamberg, and Charles Sheeler; and the transatlantic modernists, Bruce, Duchamp, Man Ray, and John Storrs. Looking at the history of early American modernism through the lens of the Shein Collection offers a timely opportunity to consider the contributions made by American artists during the advent of modernism a century ago.
Marsden Hartley, American, 1877–1943, Pre‑War Pageant, 1913, oil on canvas, 100.3 x 81 cm (39 1/2 x 31 7/8 in.), Collection of Deborah and Ed Shein
Stanton Macdonald‑Wright, American, 1890–1973, Still-Life Synchromy, 1917, oil on canvas, 56.4 x 76.2 cm (22 1/8 x 30 1/4 in.), Collection of Deborah and Ed Shein
Patrick Henry Bruce , American, 1881–1936 , Painting (Still Life), c. 1919 , oil and pencil on canvas , 59.7 x 93.7 cm (23 1/2 x 36 7/8 in.) , Collection of Deborah and Ed Shein
Max Weber , American, 1881–1961 , The Fisherman, 1919 , gouache on canvas , 58.7 x 43.2 cm (23 1/8 x 17 in.) , Collection of Deborah and Ed Shein
Charles Demuth , American, 1883–1935 , End of the Parade: Coatesville, Pa., 1920 , tempera and pencil on board , 50.5 x 40 cm (19 7/8 x 15 3/4 in.) , Collection of Deborah and Ed Shein
Georgia O'Keeffe , American, 1887–1986 , Dark Iris No. 2, 1927 , oil on canvas , 81.3 x 53.3 cm (32 x 21 in.) , Collection of Deborah and Ed Shein
Arthur Dove, American, 1880–1946, Sunrise I, 1936, wax emulsion on canvas, 63.5 x 88.9 cm (25 x 35 in.), Collection of Deborah and Ed Shein
John Marin , American, 1870–1953 , The Written Sea, 1952 , oil on canvas , 55.9 x 71.1 cm (22 x 28 in.) , National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Deborah and Ed Shein
Charles Sheeler , American, 1883–1965 , Composition around White, 1959 , oil on canvas , 76.2 x 83.8 cm (30 x 33 in.) , Collection of Deborah and Ed Shein
Stuart Davis, American, 1892–1964, Unfinished Business, 1962, oil on canvas, 91.5 x 114.3 cm (36 x 45 in.), Collection of Deborah and Ed Shein
The Frick Collection February 23 through May 14, 2017
J.M.W. Turner Harbor of Dieppe: Changement de Domicile, exhibited 1825, but subsequently dated 1826 Oil on canvas 68 3/8 x 88 3/4 inches The Frick Collection, New York Photo: Michael Bodycomb
J.M.W. Turner Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet-Boat: Evening, exhibited 1826 Oil on canvas 66 3/8 x 88 1/4 inches The Frick Collection, New York Photo: Michael Bodycomb\
Exploring a turning point in the career of Britain’s greatest land- and seascape painter of the nineteenth century, a major exhibition at The Frick Collection will illuminate Joseph Mallord William Turner’s (1775–1851) distinctly modern approach to the theme of the port. Opening in winter 2017, Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports: Passages Through Timecenters around the Frick’s grand-scale Harbor of Dieppe and Cologne, both painted by the artist in the mid-1820s, and unites them for the first time publicly with a closely related yet unfinished work from Tate, London, that depicts the harbor of Brest, in Brittany.
This trio of port scenes is accompanied by more than thirty of Turner’s oil paintings, watercolors, sketchbooks, and prints, among them other contemporary views of France, Germany, and England, as well as imagined scenes set inancient Carthage and Rome. A longstanding subject in art, the port is a space of arrival and departure that links the city interior and the open water beyond, evoking a sense of journey and the passage of time. Whether portraying the ancient world or encapsulating contemporary life in a specific region, Turner returned to this time-honored theme to explore the relationship of past and present and, conscious of his own place in history, showcase his artistic innovations, chief among them his dazzling treatment of light and color.
Comments Susan Galassi, “As with so many of our exhibitions, this show is built around major works in our collection and provides the occasion to bring fresh perspectives through new scholarship and engaging programming.
The Frick’s harbors of Dieppe and Cologne, purchased more than a hundred years ago by Henry Clay Frick, are restricted from travel and have not been exhibited elsewhere for the past century. We are thrilled to provide our audiences insight into Turner’s masterful technique and process by reuniting the Frick’s ports, which themselves have never before been the focus of an exhibition, with a third harbor scene from the Tate on a similar scale, along with other port scenes—both imagined and set in the present—in oil and watercolor that reveal how the artist developed this subject over time.” Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports: Passages through Time was organized by Susan Grace Galassi, Senior Curator, The Frick Collection; Ian Warrell, independent curator and Turner specialist; and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow, The Frick Collection. It will be accompanied by a catalogue published with Yale University Press.
TURNER AND TRAVEL
The central decades of Turner’s career coincided with political, technological, and cultural developments that created a new context for his depictions of ports. With Napoleon’s decisive defeat at Waterloo in 1815, a new era of tourism began. Travel restrictions between England and France that had been in place since 1797 were lifted, and contact with the Continent was renewed. British artists, writers, and the public at large crossed the Channel in droves to rediscover the continent and to see how their neighbors had fared during the interim. English ports that had only recently served as the country’s defensive borders were now being transformed into commercial hubs and seaside resorts. The advent of the steamboat and high speed carriages as well as improved roads made travel easier and more accessible to a larger segment of the population, including the middle class. A market developed for images of the picturesque sights that travelers had seen or planned to visit. As an insatiable traveler and the foremost topographical artist of the period, Turner was well equipped to meet this demand. On his extensive trips through the British Isles and, after 1817, the Continent, Turner filled notebooks with sketches of land formations, architecture, ships, and people in regional costumes at both work and play.
THE FRICK COLLECTION’S DIEPPE AND COLOGNE
During these years, Turner moved beyond the idealized naturalism and earth-toned palette that had gained him acclaim to a new form of poetic topography. As fusions of land-, sea-, and townscapes, ports offered fertile ground for experimentation and innovation in both oil and watercolor. Turner’s focus turned increasingly to the representation of light and color, a preoccupation that continued to the end of his career. In the 1810s, he seized on the new high-keyed colors that had just become available—chrome yellow and chrome orange—applying them, with other light-colored hues, to canvases primed with white to create works of surprising (and, for the time, shocking) luminosity. During his first trip to Italy, in 1819, he experienced firsthand the warm glowing tones of the southern climate, which contributed to the increased brilliance of his paintings, a direction that the public and critics found disturbingly unnatural and eccentric.
The Frick Collection’s Harbor of Dieppe: Changement de Domicile can be seen as a major statement of Turner’s direction in the mid-1820s. For this marine view depicting the everyday life of the French port city, Turner adopts the grand scale traditionally reserved for historical or religious subjects. He borrows his compositional scheme from the renowned harbors of Claude Lorrain, placing his work in an artistic lineage with the master who set the standard for the motif. In Dieppe, as in many of Claude’s ports, two “arms”—comprised of piers, buildings, boats, and people—reach out from a vanishing point on the horizon to embrace a central body of water that extends to the bottom edge of the painting. The mirror image of the sun’s orb and reflections of the boats are suspended in the water’s ruffled surface. A pale-blue sky takes up more than half of the canvas, in which Turner gives priority to light and water over solid substance.
Working from sketches made on two trips to Dieppe, in 1821 and 1824, and drawing from memory and imagination, Turner filled his sun-drenched vista with a cast of some two hundred figures who interact in scenes of daily life: moving house, lounging aboard ships, and jostling each other in the broad streets as they go about their business. At the right, a row of meticulously rendered eighteenth-century houses lining the quay (most still standing today) serves as the backdrop for Turner’s loosely rendered vision of the town’s teeming life and spectacular setting. On the horizon at the vanishing point of the painting, the tower and dome of the church of St. Jacques, Dieppe’s spiritual center, anchors the scene, set off by the sun’s radiance.
In Dieppe, Turner transcended the limits of topographical representation to present his subjective view of the place. When the painting debuted at the Royal Academy, both critics and the public were quick to point out that its golden atmosphere had little or nothing to do with the temperate climate of northern France and its characteristic gray skies. To one critic, Dieppe was as “vicious a specimen...of mingled truth and falsehood.” Turner also took poetic license by excluding any sign of the transformation the town was then undergoing from a sleepy fishing port to a modern resort, with tourists arriving by steamboat, presenting instead a nostalgic, idealized vision of the port that was on the verge of disappearing.
In Dieppe’s companion piece, Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet-Boat: Evening, Turner turns his attention to the historic city and pilgrimage center on the banks of the Rhine, replacing the sun-filled harbor in Dieppe with an evening scene in which life appears suspended in time. The deep recession of space that characterizes Dieppe is blocked in Cologne by the two packet boats that approach the shore. The Claudian reference of the former work is replaced here by allusion to the peaceful, domestic river scenes of the Dutch masters, in particular, Aelbert Cuyp. Light again establishes the emotional register of the painting, conveying a mood of reverie through the diffused, shimmering pink and violet tones that fill the water and expansive sky and collect around the spire of the church of Gross St. Martin, the highest point in the painting. Carefully delineated foreground details, such as the abandoned fishing apparatus half submerged in water, the peasant women lugging lumber, and the lone dog drinking at the water’s edge, as well as the defensive medieval walls and towers that bar entry into the city, contribute to a sense of frozen time. Yet, encroaching on the shore aboard the packet boat, about to disrupt the spell, is a lively band of tourists in fashionable attire, ambassadors from the modern world. The contrast of past and present, often subtly evoked in Turner’s harbor scenes, is represented here as two vastly different spheres on a collision course.
As is the case with Dieppe, Turner’s view of Cologne is nostalgic, emphasizing the grandeur of the past. In his painting, he kept the city’s medieval face intact, although a number of its walls and towers had been torn down over the course of his visits to make way for the expansion and modernization then underway. Here too, Turner’s exaggerated tonal range met with hostility from critics, one of whom complained of the “glitter and gaud of colors” while conceding that it is “impossible to shut our eyes to the wonderful skill, and to the lightness and brilliance which he has effected.”
UNITING THREE RELATED SCENES
Dieppe and Cologne will be presented at the Frick with a third monumental port, The Harbor of Brest: The Quayside and Château. This scene, approximately the same size as the Frick canvases, was most likely painted between 1826 and 1828, but was left unfinished. Identified in 1997 by Ian Warrell, the exhibition’s co-curator, as a view of the Breton city, this work has long been connected with the Frick paintings, although they have never before been exhibited together. Recent technical analysis carried out by Rebecca Hellen, Painting Conservator at the Tate, revealed that the grounds of the three canvases were prepared in the same way
and that the same type of paint was used in all of them, confirming that the paintings were conceived and developed as a series.
The Harbor of Brest presents an unparalleled opportunity to observe Turner’s painting process arrested in a molten state. Large masses of diluted blue, orange, brown, and yellow oil establish the major forms of the composition, creating a glowing effect similar to that of watercolor. In parts of the canvas, crowds of figures and boats and buildings are given definition through modeling in light and dark. Further work would have brought Brest up to the level of finish of the Frick paintings. Left in this state, the canvas, with its luminous blurred forms, seems to anticipate the less resolved and more abstracted character of Turner’s later work.
ANCIENT PORTS IMAGINED
Following Dieppe, Cologne, and Brest, Turner returned to the motif of the port in the late 1820s, now as a setting for subjects from the ancient world. The theme of the rise and decline of civilizations had long preoccupied Turner, and his second trip to Italy, in 1828, reinvigorated his love of antiquity. The three ancient ports included in the exhibition complement his modern views, works rooted in on-the-spot observation of the setting and local populace and filtered through the artist’s imaginative recollection. In his classical harbors, accounts from ancient history, literature, and myth are the departure points for the works, which Turner filled with details of everyday life that lend the scenes the immediacy of his modern ports.
In Regulus, painted and exhibited during his second trip to Italy, in 1828, then reworked and shown again in London in 1837, Turner depicts an episode from the life of a third- century Roman general, Marcus Atilius Regulus, a model of stoic virtue and self-sacrifice. According to literary sources, the Roman general, captured by the Carthaginians, was sent to Rome to negotiate a treaty. On failing to do so, he kept his vow to return to Carthage, where his eyelids were cut off and he was forced to stare at the sun until blinded, before being executed. Here, as in Dieppe and Brest, the glaring sun and its reflection in the water occupy the center of the
painting, with figures grouped along the sides and in the foreground. Within the scene, the hero is reduced to a few pale brush strokes and displaced to the right side of the canvas—nearly impossible to find. Through this imaginative conceit, Turner forces the viewer to confront head on the painting’s blazing light while searching for the protagonist, taking up the position in front of the sun that Regulus himself endured. In Regulus, Turner not only defies the norms of history painting, but makes use of the classical narrative to slyly respond to criticisms of his work, which had been described as “blinding” and “almost [putting] your eyes out.”
WATERCOLOR AND OIL, A DIALOGUE
Turner’s lifelong obsession with the representation of light and atmosphere found an ideal outlet in watercolor, a medium to which he brought an array of unconventional methods to create heightened visual effects. In his atmospheric water-filled scenes of ports, medium and motif formed a perfect union. Whereas his experimental mid- career oils were met with controversy, his watercolors were universally praised. Turner’s watercolors, many of which were made for British topographical serial print publications, celebrated the country’s richness of notable sights. They provided him with a steady source of income and earned him widespread recognition as the greatest contemporary watercolor artist. Working alternately in oil and watercolor and often treating the same subject in both, Turner deliberately blurred distinctions between the two mediums, enriching each with aspects of the other. In some of his watercolors, for example, he employed the same compositional structures as in his grand-scale canvases, while in his oils he achieved a sense of transparency usually associated with watercolor. To some of his vociferous critics, Turner’s monumental port scenes in oil were essentially blown-up watercolors.
The exhibition includes some two dozen watercolors depicting picturesque ports on the British coast and up and down its rivers, as well as images from northern France and the Rhineland, along with a selection of prints. Showcasing the diversity and beauty of the English landscape and seascape, Turner depicted every type of port: naval strongholds, fashionable resorts, industrial harbors, anchorages in major cities, and remote river landings, some seen from the shore and others looking back from the water. He embellished his images with historical references and allusions to contemporary issues and expressed an often ambiguous attitude to the “progress” of industrialization.
In Dover Castle from the Sea, Turner takes as his subject one of England’s oldest and most strategically important ports, the departure point for the cross-Channel ferry service. He plunges the viewer into the scene as if on board a ship in the foreground, pitching and heaving in roiling waves as it attempts to make shore. Other wind-tossed fishing boats arrive and depart, while townspeople spill over the piers. In a characteristic pairing of past and present, Turner includes in the flotilla of sail boats a steam-powered ferry, a symbol of modernization cutting a steady path through the waves and trailing a plume of sooty smoke. Presiding over this maritime scene is Dover’s ancient castle and fortifications atop its white cliffs, a reference to England’s enduring power.
In Shields, on the River Tyne, painted for a print series, Turner again makes use of a Claudian composition, evoking the weight of tradition and Arcadian subject matter for his extraordinary night scene, emphatically set in the present of England’s industrial hub in the northeast . The full moon, reflected in water, serves as a spotlight that allows for the around-the-clock labor of workers shoveling coal onto small boats that carry it to the waiting ships for transport to manufacturing centers. Competing with the moon’s eerie brilliance is the burning glow of an industrial furnace at right, set against the overall blue tonality of the painting. Turner’s pitting of man against nature within the setting of a modern port is made all the more eloquent through the unfamiliar, almost surreal, beauty he achieves in his watercolor, charting new aesthetic territory. With this small work, like the other mid-career oils and watercolors included in the show, Turner expanded the boundaries of landscape art, leaving behind strict adherence to naturalistic representation for a more poetic treatment of light and color that gave form and meaning to a world transforming before his eyes.
PUBLICATION
In the accompanying catalogue, the Frick paintings and a wide selection of works by Turner from the 1820s and 1830s, depicting both modern and ancient harbors, are examined in various contexts. Drawing from contemporary travel accounts, literary and visual sources, and critical reviews, as well as new technical analyses of Turner’s work, the five essays present a fresh perspective on the middle years of the artist’s career. The book features essays by the show’s curators as well Gillian Forrester, Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings, Yale Center for British Art; and Rebecca Hellen, Conservator of Paintings, Tate Britain. Among the topics addressed are the radical changes in the social and economic structures of Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century; the rediscovery of the Continent by the British after Waterloo following two decades of war with France; the rise of mass tourism; Turner’s involvement in producing watercolors for various print series; and the interconnection between his manner of painting in various media. Published by Yale University Press in association with The Frick Collection.
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OIL PAINTINGS
J.M.W. Turner Harbor of Dieppe: Changement de Domicile, exhibited 1825, but subsequently dated 1826 Oil on canvas 68 3/8 x 88 3/4 inches The Frick Collection, New York Photo: Michael Bodycomb
J.M.W. Turner Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet-Boat: Evening, exhibited 1826 Oil on canvas 66 3/8 x 88 1/4 inches The Frick Collection, New York Photo: Michael Bodycomb\
J.M.W. Turner Ancient Italy—Ovid Banished from Rome, exhibited 1838 Oil on canvas 37 1/4 x 49 1/4 inches Private collection
WATERCOLORS
J.M.W. Turner Cologne from the River, 1820 Watercolor on paper 12 1/8 x18 1/4 inches Seattle Art Museum; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Louis Brechemin (70.70) Photo Paul Macapia
J.M.W. Turner Sun-Rise: Whiting Fishing at Margate, for Marine Views, 1822 Watercolor on paper 16 3/4 x 25 1/2 inches Private collection
J.M.W. Turner Grenoble Bridge, ca. 1824 Transparent and opaque watercolor with scraping over traces of graphite 20 7/8 x 28 1/4 inches The Baltimore Museum of Art; Purchase with exchange funds from Nelson and Juanita Greif Gutman Collection (BMA 1968.28) Photo Mitro Hood
J.M.W. Turner Brighthelmston, Sussex, for Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England, ca. 1824 Watercolor on paper 5 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove; Purchased 2012 with assistance from The Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund and the Royal Pavilion & Museums Foundation (FA104132)
J.M.W. Turner Mont-St-Michel, Normandy, for The English Channel, ca. 1827 Watercolor on paper 7 x 10 1/16 inches The Hecksher Family Collection Image courtesy Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photo: Randy Dodson
The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, FL December 17, 2016 through April 17, 2017.
An exhibition of Frida Kahlo’s paintings and drawings, together with her personal photograph collection, will open to the public at The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, FL on December 17, 2016 and continue through April 17, 2017. Kahlo’s works have achieved monumental importance in art and popular culture. Her dreamlike work suggests that love and suffering create a new sense of beauty. Kahlo’s art and storied life stir immense public interest.
Frida Kahlo at The Dali will be Florida’s first solo exhibition showcasing the extraordinary career and life of the acclaimed 20th century artist. The exhibit will feature a collection of more than 60 Kahlo pieces including 15 paintings, seven drawings and numerous personal photographs from the celebrated female artist and influential icon. The exhibition will extend outdoors where a special collection of flowers and plants representative of those in Kahlo’s own garden at Casa Azul, her home in Mexico, will grace the grounds of the Museum’s Avant Garden.
Co-organized by The Dali and the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City and featuring the Vicente Wolf photographic collection, the exhibition is an intriguing exploration of the life of Kahlo, her striking artwork and her fascinating psyche. Together with the exclusive photographs of family, friends and lovers, the exhibition gives a complete view of Kahlo’s world along with the joys, passions and obsessions of this remarkable artist.
“With her dreamlike images, Kahlo has stirred huge public interest beyond the traditional art audience. In a way, Kahlo created a persona that serves as a contemporary feminine ideal – both tender and fierce,” said Dali Museum Executive Director, Dr. Hank Hine. “Much like Dali, she constructed an eccentric identity through the iconography in her paintings and then dressed and carried herself as the personality she created in her art. Painting by painting, she becomes a heroic figure of struggle and perseverance.”
Kahlo and Dalí each created artistic autobiographies and their personalities loom behind their paintings, generating a presence that both shapes and overshadows their works of art. While Kahlo largely rejected the term ‘Surrealism’ and felt that her works were as real as her life, Andre Breton, known as the founder of Surrealism, took great interest in her work and described her painting as ‘a bomb wrapped in a ribbon.’ “It’s a natural fit for The Dali to present an exhibition of Frida Kahlo.” said Kathy Greif, Chief Marketing Officer of The Dali. “We’ve been broadening the scope of our exhibitions, presenting works from famed artists and icons like Warhol, Picasso and Walt Disney – all whom have a connection to Dali– but this is the first renowned female artist to grace our halls in some time, we are honored to share Kahlo’s incredible art and complex life story with the world.” Frida Kahlo at The Dali has been co-organized by The Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, FL and the Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City. The exhibit also features works from the Vicente Wolf photographic collection. Frida Kahlo at The Dali is curated for The Dali by Dr. Hank Hine and Dr. William Jeffett.
In fact, for this exhibition the gallery is divided into parts, one of which features Kahlo’s work that parents might not want their children to experience. One is a painting titled
"A Few Small Nips” showing a dead woman lying naked on a bed with a man standing over her. The woman’s body is covered with knife wounds. Blood spills onto the floor and even onto the frame of the painting. It was, Jeffett said, Kahlo’s response to a news story about domestic violence.
Read more here: http://www.bradenton.com/entertainment/arts-culture/article121418743.html#storylink=cpy
The Baltimore Museum of Art: October 23, 2016-January 29, 2017 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art:March 11-May 29, 2017
Co-organized with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) October 23, 2016 –January 29, 2017, Matisse/Diebenkorn brings together 92 objects—including 36 paintings and drawings by Matisse and 56paintings and drawings by Diebenkorn—drawn from museums and private collections throughout the U.S. and Europe.
These extraordinary artwork reveals the lasting power of Diebenkorn’s firsthand experiences of the French artist’s work and present a new view of both artists. The BMA is the only East Coast venue for this ticketed exhibition.
“While much has been written about Matisse’s influence on Diebenkorn, this is the first major exhibition to illustrate the powerful influence of Matisse’s work on one of America’s most significant artists,” said Senior Curator of European Painting & Sculpture Katy Rothkopf. “We have carefully selected works by Matisse that Diebenkorn would have known, providing visitors to the BMA’s exhibition with the unprecedented opportunity to discover Matisse through Diebenkorn’s eyes.”
Throughout his long and successful career, Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) was more inspired by Henri Matisse (1869-1954)than any other artist.
Organized chronologically through Diebenkorn’s career, the exhibition illuminates how this influence evolved over time through different pairings and groupings of both artists’ work.
The exhibition begins in the 1940s with some of the first Matisse works that Diebenkorn saw in the Palo Alto home of Sarah Stein, one of the French artist’s first patrons. Following that introduction, hesought every opportunity to see Matisse’s work. While stationed at Quantico, Virginia, during World War II, Diebenkorn pursued a serious study of Matisse’s paintings in East Coast museums, including The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.,The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the BMA. These seminal examples introduced Diebenkorn to the motifs, palette, and techniques that would later have a tremendous resonance inhis own paintings and drawings.
The exhibition also features outstanding examples of Diebenkorn’s Urbana and Berkeley abstractions (1953-55) that demonstrate the significant impact of his visit to a Matisse retrospective in Los Angeles in 1952. A rich selection of exceptional paintings and drawings from the artist’s representational period (1955-67) illustrate his shift from abstraction towards identifiable subject matter and are paired with some of Matisse’s own compositions that were of particular relevance.
Diebenkorn saw extensive collections of works by Matisse in the State Hermitage Museum and the Pushkin Museum during a trip to the Soviet Union in 1964. This was followed by a visit two years later to a major Matisse retrospective in Los Angeles, where he saw over 300 artworks. Two highly significant Matisse paintings that Diebenkorn saw in the 1966 retrospective are featured in the exhibition.
Diebenkorn returned to abstraction in 1967, soon after moving to Southern California and establishing a studio in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica, where he created his most celebrated works—large-scale, color and light-filled abstractions.
The exhibition will conclude with nine of these luminous Ocean Park paintings (1968-80) juxtaposed with a selection of Matisse’s most influential works.
Exhibition Catalogue
A fully illustrated catalogue includes essays that examine Diebenkorn’s interactions with Matisse’s work throughout his long career by Matisse/Diebenkorn co-curators Katy Rothkopf, BMA Senior Curator of European Painting & Sculpture,and Janet Bishop, SFMOMA Thomas Weisel Family Curator of Painting and Sculpture.
It also includes an introductory essay by John Elderfield, Allen R. Adler Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum and Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, who has curated groundbreaking exhibitions on both artists. Jodi Roberts, Halperin Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University contributes an essay regarding the relationship between Matisse’s drawings and Diebenkorn’s drawings.The exhibition catalogue will be co-published with DelMonico Books/Prestel.
HENRI MATISSE
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is revered as a master of color and form. Along with Pablo Picasso, he is considered one of the two foremost artists of the first half of the20th century. Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrésisin northern France on December 31, 1869. The son of middle-class parents, he practiced law as a young man, but took up painting while recovering from appendicitis in 1890. Two years later, after much deliberation, Matisse gave up his law career and moved to Paris to study art.
Matisse first studied with the academic painter Adolphe-William Bouguereau and then at the École des Beaux-Arts with Gustave Moreau, where he met many other young painters who later gained prominence with him in the Fauvist movement. Early in his career, Matisse copied Old Master paintings at the Louvre and studied contemporary art, especially the Impressionists.
In 1899, he was drawn to the work of post-Impressionists Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Cézanne, whom he called a “god of painting.” Later Matisse became influenced by the pointillism of Paul Signac and Georges Seurat.
As time went by, Matisse began to experiment with form and color, earning a reputation as a rebellious member of his studio classes.While visiting the Mediterranean coastal village of Collioure in 1905, Matisse began using pure primary color as a significant structural element. During that same year, he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne with his artist companions André Derain and Mauricede Vlaminck. Together, the group exploded onto the art scene and was dubbed les fauves (literally, "the wild beasts") because of their use of vivid colors and distorted shapes, and their evocative, sensual approach. While he was regarded as a leader of the radical Fauvist movement, Matisse began to gain the approval of a number of influential critics and collectors, including the American expatriate writers Gertrude and Leo Stein and their friends Claribel Cone and Etta Cone, and Russian collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov.
Following the demise of Fauvism, Matisse continued to use color to communicate his emotions in bold patterns and striking decorations. He experimented with expressive abstraction and bold distortions, but rejected cubism in orderto develop his own ideas.In the winter of 1917, Matisse traveled to Nice, a city on the French Riviera, and became enchanted by the unique light and atmosphere of the location. Though he continued to travel throughout Europe, northern Africa, and Tahiti, the artist remained on the Riviera for most of his life, painting a series of odalisques and interior subjects then later abandoning conventional forms in favor of dramatically simplified areas of pure color, flat shape, and strong patterns.
The Cone Collection’s great strength focuses on this remarkably prolific period of Matisse’s career. In addition to being an accomplished painter, Matisse worked across different media to further explore his complex ideas about form. His early sculpture reveals an interest in Antoine-Louis Barye, Auguste Rodin, and African art. Matisse also designed costumes and sets for the ballet,and illustrated books for writers Stéphane Mallarmé (1932) and Charles Baudelaire (1944), among many others.
When he was nearly 80, Matisse volunteered to decorate the Dominican nuns' chapel at Vence, France. In 1941, Matisse was diagnosed with cancer and became permanently confined to a wheelchair. It was in this condition that he completed the magnificent Chapel of the Rosary in Vence. Often bedridden during his last years, he occupied himself with decoupage, creating works of brilliantly colored paper cutouts arranged on a canvas surface.
Matisse died in Nice in November1954. Unlike many artists, he was internationally popular during his lifetime, enjoying the favor of collectors, art critics, and the younger generation of artists. The largest collections of Matisse's works are in The Baltimore Museum of Art; Musée Matisse in Nice, France; Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia,Pennsylvania; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia.
RICHARD DIEBENKORN
Richard Clifford Diebenkorn, Jr.(1922-1993) is one of the most acclaimed American post-war artists with a fluid and luminous style that encompassed both representational and abstract compositions. He was born in in Portland, Oregon, but when he was two years old, his father relocated the family to San Francisco.
Diebenkorn took classes in studio art and art history at Stanford University from 1940-42 and served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1943-45. While stationed in Quantico, Virginia, he visited a number of important collections of modern art, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He was particularly inspired by the paintings of Henri Matisse and Paul Cezanne. He especially admired Matisse’s technique of structuring space through planes of color and merging indoor and outdoor space.
Returning to San Francisco in 1946, Diebenkorn enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts, where he studied with David Park, an expressionist artist from the Bay Area. Awarded a fellowship the same year, he moved to Woodstock, New York, and made many contacts while visiting New York City.
After returning to San Francisco, where he soon became a leading Bay Area artist, he was appointed to the faculty at the California School of Fine Arts in 1947, a position he held for two years. Diebenkorn had his first one-person show in 1948 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, a major accomplishment for such a young artist.
After receiving a degree from Stanford University in 1949, he was awarded an M.F.A. from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1951. He briefly taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana 1952-53, settling shortly thereafter in Berkeley, California. Diebenkorn often titled his works after places that provided him with inspiration, such as his Berkeley paintings.
Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, Diebenkorn followed a distinctive abstract vocabulary of forms, stylistically rooted in the New York School, placing him firmly within the ethos of American modernism. However, in 1955 he shifted from abstraction to a more representational mode, making reference to observed subjects.
In 1964 he was invited to visit the Soviet Union on a Cultural Exchange Grant from the U.S. State Department. On that trip, he was able to see the great Matisse paintings at the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, which had been unavailable to most of the world for decades. Until 1967, when he returned to abstraction, Diebenkorn executed still-lifes, landscapes,and interior figure paintings that present his finely tuned sense of color and structure.
From 1955 to 1973, Diebenkorn taught at several California arts institutions, including a position at UCLA (1966-73) while he worked in a studio in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica. There he created his last representational works, but returned to abstraction with his large-scale Ocean Park paintings. This series is characterized by broadly brushed surfaces of luminescent and atmospheric color, affirming the artist’s continuing concern with formal issues. These brilliantly colored abstract works—both paintings and drawings—elicited great acclaim.
In 1976–77, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, organized a major retrospective exhibition that traveled to Washington, DC, New York City, Cincinnati, Los Angeles,and Oakland.
By the 1980s, Diebenkorn was generally regarded as a well-established American master. His association with California would always remain, but his stature as a world-class modern artist was secure. In 1987, he and his wife left Santa Monica and moved to Healdsburg in the northern part of the state, where he worked on small-scale compositions.
In late 1988, Diebenkorn’s works on paper were organized into a major traveling exhibition with a catalogue by the Museum of Modern Art’s curator John Elderfield. This was a landmark event for the artist and his public, as it included the entire range of his stylistic journey through the late 1980s. Diebenkorn remained a prolific artist until his death in Berkeley, California, in 1993.
Henri Matisse Sarah Stein1916 Oil on canvas 28 1/2 x 22 1/4 in. (72.4 x 56.5 cm.)San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sarah and Michael Stein Memorial Collection, gift of Elise S. Haas, 1954
Richard Diebenkorn Urbana #4, 1953 Oil on canvas 66 x 49 in. (167.6 x 124.5 cm.)Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, gift of Julianne Kemper Gilliam, 1977.20
Henri Matisse Studio, Quai Saint-Michel1916 Oil on canvas58 1/4 x 46 in. (148 x 116.8 cm.)The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1940, 1307
Richard Diebenkorn Urbana #2 (The Archer)1953 Oil on canvas64 1/2 x 47 1/2 in. (163.8 x 120.7 cm.)Private collection
Richard Diebenkorn Urbana #6, 1953 Oil on canvas 69 1/4 x 58 in. (175.9 x 147.3 cm.)Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, museum purchase, Sid W. Richardson Foundation Endowment Fund, 1996.01.P.P
Henri Matisse Interior at Nice 1919 or 1920 Oil on canvas 52 x 35 in. (132.1 x 88.9 cm.)The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman, 1956.339
Richard Diebenkorn, Urbana #5 (Beach, Town), 1953, Oil on canvas, 68 x 53 1/2 in. (172.7 x 135.9 cm.), Collection of , Joann K. Phillips,
Richard Diebenkorn , Berkeley #5, 1953, Oil on canvas, 53 x 53 in. (134.6 , x 134.6 cm.), Private c, ollection,
Henri Matisse, Landscape: Broom, 1906, Oil on panel, 12 x 15 5/8 in. (30.5 x 39.7 cm.), San, Francisco Museum of Modern Art, b, equest of Elise S. Hass, 1991,
Richard Diebenkorn, Berkeley #23, 1955, Oil on canvas, 62 x 54 3/4 i, n. (157.5 x 139 , cm.), San F, rancisco Museum of Modern Art, g, ift of the Women’s Board, 1958,
Richard Diebenkorn , Berkeley #22, 1954, Oil on canvas, 59 x 57 in. (149.9 x 144.8 cm.), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,, Washington, D., C., Regents Collections Acquisitions Program, 1986,
Richard Diebenkorn , Berkeley #7, 1953, Oil on canvas, 47 3/4 x 43 in. (121.3 x 109.2 cm.), Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, g, if t of Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., 1962,
Richard Diebenkorn, Berkeley , #47, 1955, Oil on canvas, 58 7/8 x 65 7/8 in. (149.5 x 167.3 , cm.), The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled (View from Studio, Ocean Park), 1969, Gouache, charcoal, and ink on paper, 17 x 13 3/4 in. (43.2 x 34.9 cm.), The Grant Family Collection,
Henri Matisse, Seated Pink Nude, 1935-, 36, Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 28 3/4 in. (92 x 73 cm.), Musée national d'art modern, e/Centre de création industrielle, Centre , Georges , Pompidou, Paris, gift 2001, AM 2001,215,
Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #6, 1968, Oil on canvas, 92 x 72 in. (233.7 x 182.9 cm.), Smithsonian, American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., gift of Arthur J. Levin in , memory, of his beloved wife Edith, 1999.17,
Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #29, 1970, Oil , and charcoal on canvas, 100 , 1/8 , x 81 , 1/8 in. (254.3 x 206.1 , cm.), Dallas Museum of Art, gift of the Meadows Foundation, Incorporate, d, 1981.106,
Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #27, 1970, Oil , and charcoal on canvas, 100 x 80 in. (254 x 203.2 cm.), Brooklyn Museum, gift of the Roebling Society and Mr. and Mrs. Charles H. Blatt , and Mr. and Mrs. William K. Jacobs, Jr., 72.4,
Henri Matisse, Large Reclining Nude, 1935, Oil on canvas, 26 1/8 x 36 3/4 in. (66.4 x 93.3 cm.), The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel , Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland, , BMA 1950.258,
Henri Matisse, Two Girls, Red and Green Background, 1947, Oil on canvas, 22 1/8 x 18 1/4 in. (56.2 x 46.4 cm.), The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed, by Dr. Claribel Cone and , Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland, , BMA 1950.264,
Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #54, 1972, Oil and charcoal on canvas, 100 x 81 in. (254 x 205.7 cm.), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, g, ift of Friends of Gerald Nordland, , 1972,
Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #79, Oil and charcoal on canvas , 93 x 81 in. (236.2 x 205.7 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art, purchased with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts , and with funds contributed by private donors, 1977, , 1977-, 28-, 1
Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #105, 1978, Oil and charcoal on canvas, 100 1/8 x 93 1/8 in. (254.3 x 236.5 cm.), Mo, dern Art Museum of Fort Worth, museum purchase, Sid W. Richardson , Foundation Endowment Fund and The Burnett Foundation, 1991.12, .P.P.,
Henri Matisse, French Window at Collioure, 1914, Oil on canvas, 45 , 7/8 x 35 1/8 , in. (116.5 x 89, .2 cm.), Musée national d'art moderne/Centre de création industrielle,, Centre Pompidou, Paris, gift 1983,, AM 1983, -508,
Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #9, 4 , 1976, Oil and charcoal on canvas, 93 1/8 x 81 1/8 in. (236.5 x 206.1 cm.), Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Stanford, California, g, ift of , Phyllis G. Diebenkorn, 1998.142 ,
Richard Diebenkorn, Sink, 1967, Ink, charcoal, , and watercolor on paper, 24 , 3/4 , x 18 3/4 in. (62.9 x 47.6 , cm.), The Baltimore Museum of Art: Thomas, E. Benesch Memorial Collection, BMA 1969.2,
Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #93, 1976, Oil on hardboard, 29 x 21 in. (73.7 x 53.3 cm.), The Grant Family Collection,
Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #122, 1980, Oil and charcoal on canvas, 100 1/4 x 81 1/4 in. (254.6 x 206.4 cm.), San , Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Charles H. Land Family Foundation Fund purchase, , 1980,
Philadelphia Museum of Art March 1–May 14, 2017 Americans learned to love watercolor in the years between 1860 and 1925. The work of the two most influential American watercolorists, Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, is centerstage in the remarkable transformation of the reputation and practice of the medium in the United States. American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent examines how watercolor became a powerful and versatile “American” medium.
The exhibition begins with the creation of the American Watercolor Society, founded in 1866 to promote the medium and unite artists of all ages, styles, and backgrounds. Their movement created stars—Homer, William T. Richards, Thomas Moran, John La Farge, Edwin Austin Abbey—who would remain dedicated to watercolor for decades. Other artists, such as Thomas Eakins and George Inness, rode the wave through its peak in the 1880s, until a new generation, including Childe Hassam and Maurice Prendergast, rose in the 1890s. Together, their work produced a taste for watercolor among younger artists and eager collectors that would endure into the twentieth century. The legacies of Homer, Sargent, and their contemporaries would influence the next generation—artists such as Charles Demuth, John Marin, Charles Burchfield, and Edward Hopper—who made watercolor a national idiom. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue produced by the Museum and distributed by Yale University Press.
A Tent in the Rockies, 1916, by John Singer Sargent (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, P3w17)
Diamond Shoal, 1905, by Winslow Homer (Private Collection)
Guide Carrying a Deer, 1891, by Winslow Homer (Portland Museum of Art) Additional works in the exhibition:
William M. Hart First Snow, Grafton, Maine 1867 14 × 16 15/16 inches (35.6 × 43 cm) Mat (in original mat): 14 × 17 inches (35.6 × 43.2 cm) Framed (estimated): 23 1/2 × 32 1/4 inches (59.7 × 81.9 cm) Watercolor on paper Albany Institute of History and Art, New York
James David Smillie On the Ausable 1869 9 1/2 × 12 7/8 inches (24.1 × 32.7 cm) Framed (estimated): 18 × 21 inches (45.7 × 53.3 cm) Watercolor and gouache on green-gray wove paper Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Samuel Colman The Harbor of Seville 1867 12 3/8 × 27 9/16 inches (31.5 × 70 cm) Framed (estimated): 21 × 36 inches (53.3 × 91.4 cm) Watercolor and gouache on paper National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The American Pre-Raphaelites
Ellen Robbins Autumn Leaves c. 1865-1870 Sheet: 21 7/16 × 29 9/16 inches (54.5 × 75.1 cm) Framed: 29 1/2 × 37 3/8 × 3/4 inches (74.9 × 94.9 × 1.9 cm) Watercolor on paper Philadelphia Museum of Art
William Trost Richards Red Clover with Butter-and-Eggs and Ground Ivy 1860 6 3/4 × 5 5/16 inches (17.2 × 13.5 cm) Framed: 21 1/4 × 16 1/4 inches (54 × 41.3 cm) Watercolors with selectively applied glaze over graphite on paper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
Thomas Charles Farrer Three Eggs c. 1865 5 × 10 inches (12.7 × 25.4 cm) Framed: 10 1/2 × 15 1/2 inches (26.7 × 39.4 cm) Watercolor on paper Private Lender
Henry Roderick Newman Anemones 1876 18 × 11 3/4 inches (45.7 × 29.8 cm) Framed (estimated): 26 × 20 inches (66 × 50.8 cm) Watercolor heightened with gum glaze over graphite on paper Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
Henry Roderick Newman Grapes and Olives 1878 26 × 18 13/16 inches (66 × 47.8 cm) Mat: 34 × 26 inches (86.4 × 66 cm) Framed (estimated, per Brooklyn info): 29 × 37 inches (73.7 × 94 cm) Watercolor with touches of watercolor varnish and graphite pencil underdrawing on paper Brooklyn Museum, New York
John William Hill West Nyack, New York 1868 12 × 16 3/8 inches (30.5 × 41.6 cm) Framed: 20 1/4 × 24 5/16 inches (51.4 × 61.8 cm) Transparent watercolor with small applications of opaque watercolor over graphite on cream, medium weight, wove paper with J. Whatman watermark lined to secondary paper Brooklyn Museum, New York
Robert Pattison Mountain View 1862 Sheet: 20 13/16 × 29 13/16 inches (52.8 × 75.8 cm) Framed (estimated): 29 × 38 inches (73.7 × 96.5 cm) Watercolor with graphite and touches of gouache and scraping on paper Cleveland Museum of Art
John William Hill Fawn's Leap, Catskill Mountains 1867 13 13/16 × 17 15/16 inches (35.1 × 45.6 cm) Framed (estimated): 22 × 26 inches (55.9 × 66 cm) Watercolor on paper Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Henry Farrer Winter Scene in Moonlight 1869 11 7/8 × 15 3/16 inches (30.2 × 38.6 cm) Framed (estimated): 20 × 24 inches (50.8 × 61 cm) Watercolor and gouache on white wove paper Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Charles Herbert Moore Mount Washington 1872 6 5/16 × 9 1/16 inches (16 × 23 cm) Framed (estimated): 15 × 18 inches (38.1 × 45.7 cm) Watercolor and touches of graphite on cream wove paper Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey
John Henry Hill Natural Bridge, Virginia 1876 21 1/4 × 14 1/8 inches (54 × 35.9 cm) Mat: 28 × 22 inches (71.1 × 55.9 cm) Framed (estimated, per Brooklyn info): 31 × 25 inches (78.7 × 63.5 cm) Watercolor over graphite on cream, very thick, slightly textured wove paper mounted to a secondary paper Brooklyn Museum, New York
Landscape in the 1870s
William Trost Richards A High Tide at Atlantic City 1873 8 7/16 × 13 15/16 inches (21.4 × 35.4 cm) Framed: 16 3/8 × 21 1/4 inches (41.6 × 54 cm) Opaque watercolor on cream, moderately thick, moderately textured wove paper Brooklyn Museum, New York
William Trost Richards Lake Squam from Red Hill 1874 8 7/8 × 13 9/16 inches (22.5 × 34.4 cm) Framed (estimated): 17 × 22 inches (43.2 × 55.9 cm) Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on light gray-green wove paper Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
William Trost Richards A Rocky Coast 1877 28 1/8 × 36 1/4 inches (71.4 × 92.1 cm) Framed (estimated): 37 × 35 inches (94 × 88.9 cm) Watercolor and gouache on fibrous brown wove paper Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Thomas Moran Big Springs in Yellowstone 1872 9 1/4 × 19 1/4 inches (23.5 × 48.9 cm) Framed (estimated): 18 × 28 inches (45.7 × 71.1 cm) Watercolor and Chinese white on paper Private Lender
Thomas Moran The Upper End of Little Cottonwood Canyon, Wasatch Range, near Ogden, Utah, August 13, 1879 1879 10 3/16 × 14 5/8 inches (25.9 × 37.1 cm) Framed (estimated): 19 × 23 inches (48.3 × 58.4 cm) Brush and watercolor, white gouache, graphite on gray laid paper Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York
George Inness The Dolomites c. 1873 9 1/16 × 11 3/4 inches (23 × 29.8 cm) Framed (estimated): 18 × 20 inches (45.7 × 50.8 cm) Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut AWC-109
Henry Farrer Sunset, New York Bay 1875 12 × 18 1/2 inches (30.5 × 47 cm) Framed (estimated): 20 × 27 inches (50.8 × 68.6 cm) Watercolor on paper Private Lender
Albert Fitch Bellows Coaching in New England c. 1876 24 7/8 × 35 7/8 inches (63.2 × 91.1 cm) Mat: 30 × 40 inches (76.2 × 101.6 cm) Framed: 29 5/8 × 40 1/2 inches (75.2 × 102.9 cm) Transparent and opaque watercolor with touches of gum varnish over black chalk on cream, moderately thick, rough-textured wove paper Brooklyn Museum, New York
Alfred Thompson Bricher Dory on Dana's Beach, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts 1879 Sheet: 14 1/2 × 20 1/2 inches (36.8 × 52.1 cm) Watercolor and gouache on paper Private Lender
llustrators and Figure Painters
John La Farge Trionfo d'Amore c. 1866-1879 5 7/8 × 3 5/8 inches (15 × 9.2 cm) Framed (estimated, from Princeton image): 11 × 9 inches (27.9 × 22.9 cm) Graphite and gray, white, brown, and ivory wash, on a prepared uncut woodblock Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey
Winslow Homer Boys in a Dory 1873 9 3/4 × 13 7/8 inches (24.8 × 35.2 cm) Framed (estimated): 18 × 22 inches (45.7 × 55.9 cm) Watercolor washes and gouache over graphite underdrawing on medium-rough textured white wove paper Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Winslow Homer Gloucester Harbor 1873 Image: 9 1/4 x 14 inches (23.5 x 35.6 cm) Wood engraving Philadelphia Museum of Art 1941-53-105
Thomas Eakins John Biglin in a Single Scull 1873 Image and sheet: 16 7/8 × 23 15/16 inches (42.9 × 60.8 cm) Framed: 24 1/2 × 31 1/2 × 1 1/8 inches (62.2 × 80 × 2.9 cm) Watercolor on paper Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
Winslow Homer A Flower for the Teacher 1875 Sheet: 7 5/8 × 6 3/16 inches (19.4 × 15.7 cm) Framed: 19 1/4 × 17 1/2 × 2 inches (48.9 × 44.5 × 5.1 cm) Watercolor with gouache over graphite on off-white wove paper mounted on hardboard Georgia Museum of Art, Athens
Winslow Homer The Trysting Place 1875 12 × 8 1/16 inches (30.5 × 20.5 cm) Framed (estimated): 20 × 17 inches (50.8 × 43.2 cm) Watercolor and gouache over traces of pastel and graphite on cream wove paper Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey
Winslow Homer Young Woman Sewing 1876 Sheet: 9 3/4 × 7 7/8 inches (24.8 × 20 cm) Framed (estimated): 18 × 16 inches (45.7 × 40.6 cm) Watercolor over graphite on wove paper National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Enoch Wood Perry A Month’s Darning 1876 20 × 15 3/4 inches (50.8 × 40 cm) Framed (estimated): 28 × 24 inches (71.1 × 61 cm) Watercolor, gouache, and gum arabic on off-white wove paper Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Thomas Eakins Seventy Years Ago
1877
15 11/16 × 10 13/16 inches (39.8 × 27.5 cm) Framed (estimated): 24 × 19 inches (61 × 48.3 cm) Watercolor and gouache on cream wove paper with graphite border Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey
Impressionism
Winslow Homer
Gloucester Harbor
1873 Image: 9 1/2 × 13 1/2 inches (24.1 × 34.3 cm) Framed (estimated): 18 × 22 inches (45.7 × 55.9 cm) Watercolor and gouache on paper Private Lender
National Portrait Gallery 6 October 2016 - 5 February 2017
Picasso Portraits will include over 75 portraits by the artist in all media, ranging from well-known masterpieces to works that have never been shown in Britain before. All phases of the artist’s career will be represented, from the realist portraits of his boyhood to the more gestural canvases of his old age. It is the first large-scale exhibition devoted to his portraiture since Picasso and Portraiture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Grand Palais, Paris in 1996.
The exhibition includes a group of revealing self-portraits as well as portraits and caricatures of Picasso’s friends, lovers, wives and children. Guillaume Apollinaire, Carles Casagemas, Santiago Rusiñol, Jaume Sabartés, Jean Cocteau, Olga Picasso, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Françoise Gilot and Jacqueline Picasso are among the people visitors will encounter. Complementing these images of Picasso’s intimates are portraits and caricatures inspired by artists of the past – Velázquez and Rembrandt among them – with whom he identified most closely.
Picasso Portraitsiscurated by Elizabeth Cowling, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include Picasso: Style and Meaning (2002) and Visiting Picasso: TheNotebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose (2006). She has co-curated several exhibitions, including PicassoSculptor/Painter (1994), Matisse Picasso (2002–3), and Picasso Looks at Degas (2010–11).
Denver Art Museum June 12, 2016 - Sept. 25, 2016 Mint Museum,Charlotte, NC Oct 22, 2016 - Jan 22 ,2017 Palm Springs Art Museum Feb. 18, 2017 - May 29, 2017
Organized by the Denver Art Museum and curated by Gwen Chanzit, Women of Abstract Expressionism brings together 51 paintings to examine the distinct contributions of 12 artists who played an integral role in what has been recognized as the first fully-American modern art movement. On view June 12, 2016 through Sept. 25, 2016, the exhibition presents a nuanced profile of women working on the East and West Coasts during the 1940s and ’50s, providing scholars and audiences with a new perspective on this important chapter in art history.
The exhibition focuses on the expressive freedom of direct gesture and process at the core of abstract expressionism, while revealing inward reverie and painterly expression in these works by individuals responding to particular places, memories and life experiences. Women of Abstract Expressionism also sheds light on the unique experiences of artists based in the Bay Area on the West Coast where they were on a more equal footing with their male counterparts than those working in New York. The featured artists include Mary Abbott, Jay DeFeo, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Gechtoff, Judith Godwin, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Deborah Remington and Ethel Schwabacher.
Lee Krasner, who often lived in husband Jackson Pollock’s shadow, is one notable Abstract Expressionist painter featured in the exhibition. Seven of Krasner’s works will be on view, showing the breadth of her artistic development and her responses to the natural world around her. This is visible in prominent works such as
and Charred Landscape (1960). Elaine de Kooning is another artist whose work will be placed in a context independent from her husband, and well-known contemporary, Willem de Kooning. Elaine de Kooning was a skilled draughtswoman and abstract painter as shown in her monumental canvas
A lesser-known artist featured in Women of Abstract Expressionism, Sonia Gechtoff, experienced a career that spanned both coasts. Her artistic contributions are pivotal in understanding the situation for women during the Abstract Expressionist movement. Gechtoff had much success in the Bay Area, but was surprised to experience gender bias in New York.
“Women of Abstract Expressionism, for the first time, positions this expanded group of painters within the context of abstract expressionism and its cultural milieu,” said Gwen Chanzit, curator of modern art at the DAM. “The exhibition will contribute to a more complete understanding of this important mid-20th century movement by presenting artists beyond the handful of painters who have previously defined the whole in textbook accounts. It also will present these female artists together for the first time. While visitors discover the significant role of women in the formation of abstract expressionism, they will be treated to a powerful presentation of remarkable paintings.”
An original video made for the exhibition will include some of the few living artists from the Abstract Expressionist movement—including Mary Abbott, Sonia Gechtoff and Judith Godwin—and a few children of the painters, sharing memories of their mothers. This account will highlight exciting journeys, as well as trials and tribulations, women experienced during the 1950s. Women of Abstract Expressionism will span the entire level 4 of the Hamilton Building, with the video being shown inside the gallery’s Fuse Box.
A fully illustrated catalog, edited by Joan Marter and published by Yale University Press in association with the DAM, will serve as a permanent record of Women of Abstract Expressionism. Essays by leading scholars of abstract expressionism will be included in the catalog, as well as an extensive compilation of artist biographies of women featured in the exhibition and some additional 30 artists whose work paralleled the movement.
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