Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms i

February 7, 2017, 9:48 am

New-York Historical Society New York, NY
June – August 2018

The Henry Ford Museum Dearborn, MI
October – December 2018

Venue announcement pending Washington, DC
February – April 2019

Norman Rockwell Museum Stockbridge, MA
June – August 2019

National Constitution Center Philadelphia, PA
October – December 2019

Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX
February – April 2020

Mémorial de Caen Normandy, France
June – October 2020

Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms is the first comprehensive
traveling exhibition devoted to Norman Rockwell’s iconic depictions of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want,
and Freedom from Fear. It illuminates both the historic context in which FDR articulated
the Four Freedoms and the role of Rockwell’s paintings in bringing them to life for millions
of people, rallying the public behind the War effort and changing the tenor of the times.
In telling the story of how Rockwell’s works were transformed from a series of paintings
into a national movement, the exhibition also demonstrates the power of illustration to
communicate ideas and inspire change.

In addition to his celebrated paintings of the Four Freedoms, the exhibition brings together
numerous other examples of painting, illustration, and more, by both Rockwell and a broad
range of his contemporaries—from J.C. Leyendecker and Mead Schaeffer, to Ben Shahn,
Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks, among others—as well as historical documents,
photographs, videos, and artifacts; interactive digital displays; and immersive settings. While
exploring the response of an earlier generation to the plea for defense of universal freedoms,
the exhibition also resonates with our own time.

ORGANIZATION

Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms and its international tour
are organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA. The exhibition is
co-curated by Stephanie Plunkett, Deputy Director/Chief Curator, Norman Rockwell
Museum, and James Kimble, Associate Professor of Communication, Seton Hall University.

Freedom of Speech, Norman Rockwell. 1943. Oil on canvas, 45 ¾” x 35 ½” Story illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, February 20, 1943 From the permanent collection of Norman Rockwell Museum ©1943 SEPS: Licensed by Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis, IN

Freedom of Worship, Norman Rockwell. 1943. Oil on canvas, 46” x 35 ½” Story illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, February 27, 1943 From the permanent collection of Norman Rockwell Museum ©1943 SEPS: Licensed by Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis, IN

Freedom from Fear, Norman Rockwell, 1943.; illustration for
The Saturday Evening Post (c)SEPS, Curtis Licensing. Norman Rockwell Museum Collection
Freedom from Want, Norman Rockwell. 1943. Oil on canvas, 45 ¾ x 35 ½” Story illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, March 6, 1943 From the permanent collection of Norman Rockwell Museum ©1943 SEPS: Licensed by Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis, IN

The Problem We All Live With
Norman Rockwell


Year	1964
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	91 cm × 150 cm (36 in × 58 in)
Location	Norman Rockwell Museum^[1], Stockbridge, Massachusetts

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American Prints of Urban Life

February 7, 2017, 11:44 am

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National Gallery of Art, Washington
February 26 through August 6, 2017

American artists of the early 20th century sought to interpret the beauty, power, and anxiety of the modern age in diverse ways. Through depictions of bustling city crowds and breathtaking metropolitan vistas, 25 black-and-white prints on view in The Urban Scene: 1920–1950 will explore the spectacle of urban modernity. Prints by recognized artists such as Louis Lozowick (1892–1973) and Reginald Marsh (1898–1954), as well as lesser-known artists including Mabel Dwight (1875–1955), Gerald Geerlings (1897–1998), Victoria Hutson Huntley (1900–1971), Martin Lewis (1881–1962), and Stow Wengenroth (1906–1978), are included in this exhibition.

The Urban Scene will be on view in the West Building from February 26 through August 6, 2017.

"During the past decade the Gallery has acquired extraordinary groups of prints from the Reba and Dave Williams Collection, the Corcoran Collection, and the collection of Bob Stana and Tom Judy," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "We are thankful for the generosity of these donors and for the opportunities that have allowed the Gallery's American print holdings to grow in both richness and depth."

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

The black-and-white prints that comprise The Urban Scene, most of which were acquired in the last ten years, often highlight the unprecedented scale of urban architecture and the impact of industry and technology on city life. From one perspective, skyscrapers, bridges, and other technological marvels projected wealth, opportunity, and invoked the sublime, but from another these structures could be interpreted as blocking light, deepening shadows, heightening a sense of enclosure and confinement, and amplifying feelings of diminution and anonymity.

The artists featured in this exhibition chose their subjects, arranged their compositions, and scrutinized details to convey particular aspects of urban life. They used line to capture the specifics of a face or the idiosyncrasies of a building and manipulated tone to mimic the play of light. Employing precise detail and descriptive clarity to characterize experience, suggest meaning, and convey a narrative, certain elements were emphasized while others were minimized, resulting in images distilled to their narrative or atmospheric essence.

Exhibition Curator

The exhibition is organized by Charles Ritchie, associate curator, department of modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art.

Martin Lewis

Quarter of Nine - Saturday's Children, 1929

drypoint on laid paper

plate: 25.1 x 32.7 cm (9 7/8 x 12 7/8 in.)

sheet: 34 x 45.7 cm (13 3/8 x 18 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Addie Burr Clark

Mabel Dwight

The Clinch, 1928

lithograph

image: 230 x 297 mm

sheet: 291 x 407 mm

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Paul Cadmus

Shore Leave, 1935

etching in black on laid paper

image: 25.4 x 28.26 cm (10 x 11 1/8 in.)

plate: 26.35 x 29.53 cm (10 3/8 x 11 5/8 in.)

sheet: 33.97 x 38.1 cm (13 3/8 x 15 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Florian Carr Fund and Gift of the Print Research Foundation

Reynold Weidenaar

Locomotive Shops, 1947

etching and aquatint

unframed: 12 7/8 x 16 7/8 in. (32.7 x 42.86 cm)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Bequest of Frank B. Bristow)

Leo Meissner

War Bulletins, c. 1942

wood-engraving

Image: 155 x 230 mm

Sheet: 257 x 290 mm

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Benton Murdoch Spruance

The People Work - Evening, 1937

lithograph in black

image: 34.61 x 48.26 cm (13 5/8 x 19 in.)

sheet: 40.64 x 58.1 cm (16 x 22 7/8 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection

Reginald Marsh

Tattoo-Shave-Haircut, 1932

etching and engraving

unframed: 10 x 9 1/2 in. (25.4 x 24.13 cm)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Olga Hirshhorn)

File Name: 4842-010.jpg

John Wilson

Adolescence, 1943

lithograph

Image: 471 x 245 mm

Sheet: 592 x 370 mm

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Clare Leighton

Breadline, New York, 1931

wood engraving

Image: 298 x 200 mm

Sheet: 444 x 293 mm

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Victoria Hutson Huntley

Lower New York, 1934

lithograph in black on wove paper

image: 25.72 x 34.61 cm (10 1/8 x 13 5/8 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Bob Stana and Tom Judy

Martin Lewis

Building a Babylon, Tudor City, N.Y.C., 1929

etching, drypoint

overall: 32.7 x 20 cm (12 7/8 x 7 7/8 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Bob Stana and Tom Judy

Millard Owen Sheets

Family Flats, 1935

lithograph

image: 390 x 567 mm

sheet: 457 x 617 mm

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Lawrence Edward Kupferman

Victorian Mansion, 1938

drypoint in black on laid paper

plate: 35.72 x 32.54 cm (14 1/16 x 12 13/16 in.)

sheet: 38.89 x 35.4 cm (15 5/16 x 13 15/16 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Martin Lewis

Yorkville Night, 1948

drypoint

sheet: 10 7/8 x 14 3/4 in. (27.62 x 37.47 cm)

image: 8 1/2 x 11 1/2 in. (21.59 x 29.21 cm)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Bequest of Frank B. Bristow)

Stow Wengenroth

Quiet Hour, 1947

lithograph

image: 8 3/4 x 15 in. (22.23 x 38.1 cm)

sheet: 11 1/16 x 17 11/16 in. (28.1 x 44.93 cm)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Bequest of Frank B. Bristow)

John Taylor Arms

West Forty-Second Street, Night, 1922

aquatint and etching in blue black and yellow on yellow laid paper

plate: 26.99 x 17.46 cm (10 5/8 x 6 7/8 in.)

sheet: 46.04 x 29.21 cm (18 1/8 x 11 1/2 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Donald and Nancy deLaski Fund

Armin Landeck

View of New York, 1932

lithograph in black on wove paper

image: 68.9 x 59.7 cm (27 1/8 x 23 1/2 in.)

sheet: 80 x 64.1 cm (31 1/2 x 25 1/4 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Louis Lozowick

Allen Street, 1929

lithograph in black on wove paper

image: 19.1 x 28.5 cm (7 1/2 x 11 1/4 in.)

sheet: 28.2 x 40 cm (11 1/8 x 15 3/4 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Jacob Kainen

Gerald Kenneth Geerlings

Grand Canal, America, 1933

drypoint

Image: 304 x 227 mm

Sheet: 386 x 283 mm

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Samuel Chamberlain

Manhattan, Old and New, 1929

drypoint

image: 219 x 173 mm

sheet: 332 x 258 mm

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Asa Cheffetz

Monday (The American Scene), 1932

wood engraving on paper

overall: 17.78 x 25.4 cm (7 x 10 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Promised Gift of Bob Stana and Tom Judy

Howard Norton Cook

Looking up Broadway, 1937

lithograph

Image: 330 x 241 mm

Sheet: 450 x 315 mm

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Isac Friedlander

3 A.M., 1934

etching on wove paper

plate: 24.13 x 39.69 cm (9 1/2 x 15 5/8 in.)

sheet: 32.07 x 46.67 cm (12 5/8 x 18 3/8 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection

Gerald Geerlings

Olympus (New York), 1929

drypoint in brown on blue laid paper

plate: 22.9 x 15.2 cm (9 x 6 in.)

sheet: 40.6 x 26.7 cm (16 x 10 1/2 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Samuel L. Margolies

Men of Steel, c. 1939

drypoint

image: 378 x 300 mm

sheet: 476 x 381 mm

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Robert Riggs

Germantown & Chelten, c. 1950

lithograph in black on wove paper

image: 35.56 x 51.12 cm (14 x 20 1/8 in.)

sheet: 40.64 x 58.1 cm (16 x 22 7/8 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Florian Carr Fund and Gift of the Print Research Foundation

Thomas Willoughby Nason

Louisburg Square, 1930

wood engraving

Image: 176 x 201 mm

Sheet: 244 x 252 mm

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Salvatore Pinto

Mills, c. 1937

wood engraving

image: 178 x 252 mm

sheet: 280 x 408 mm

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Fermin Rocker

Subway Entrance, 1940

lithograph

Image: 265 x 404 mm

Sheet: 320 x 452 mm

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

Edward Arthur Wilson

Untitled (Laying Pipe in New York City), 1941

lithograph in black on wove paper

image: 27.94 x 33.02 cm (11 x 13 in.)

sheet: 34.29 x 48.9 cm (13 1/2 x 19 1/4 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams

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Impressionism: The Art of Landscape

February 8, 2017, 9:31 am

≫ Next: Modern Art Classics: Liebermann, Munch, Nolde, Kandinsky

≪ Previous: American Prints of Urban Life

Museum Barberini, Potsdam
January 23–May 28, 2017

Impressionist landscapes were not spontaneous mood paintings but were used by artists as a place to carry out their experiments. These artists liberated landscapes from their historic and symbolic significance. Designed to appeal to all the senses, the exhibition Impressionism: The Art of Landscape is divided into eight themes with 92 works which represent landscape painting as the guiding genre of Impressionism. With works by artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Gustave Caillebotte the exhibition brings major representatives of Impressionism to Potsdam.

In the 19th century, Impressionist painters developed an awareness of the present that revolutionized art and continues to permeate events in painting in our time. Although their audience was in Paris and the city itself contained many motifs, landscapes provided the most important subject matter for Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, and Gustave Caillebotte. Against this backdrop they were able to test new artistic techniques.

The exhibition Impressionism: The Art of Landscape examines for the first time the experimental domains found in Impressionist landscapes. Artists depicted the sea, forest paths, meadows, gardens, snowy landscapes, and reflections on the surface of water, addressing all the viewer's senses. The show presents masterpieces in the context of 92 paintings which come from 32 international museums and private collections. They are displayed in thematic sections, showing series of the most important motifs. The exhibition sheds new light on Impressionist artists and their obsession with their own individual perception of light and nature.

For the exhibition Impressionism: The Art of Landscape a catalog has been published in German and English by Prestel Verlag, Munich. It contains a preface by the museum's founder and patron Hasso Plattner. Essays by Stephen F. Eisenman, Christoph Heinrich, Nancy Ireson, Stefan Koldehoff, Richard Schiff and Ortrud Westheider are based on the first conference held by the Museum Barberini, which took place on June 28, 2016 in Potsdam. 252 pages.

Gustave Caillebotte: The Argenteuil Bridge and the Seine, c. 1883, private collection

Claude Monet: Water Lilies, 1914–1917, private collection,\

Claude Monet: Water Lilies or The Water Lily Pond, 1904, Denver Art Museum

Claude Monet: Low Tide at Les Petites-Dalles, 1884, private collection

Alfred Sisley: The Meadow at Veneux-Nadon, 1881, private collection, Scan: RECOM ART

Claude Monet: Under the Poplars, 1887, private collection, Scan: RECOM ART

Claude Monet: Poplars at Giverny, 1887, private collection, Scan: RECOM ART

Alfred Sisley: My House at Moret, 1892, private collection, Scan: RECOM ART

Claude Monet: Grainstack, Sunlight, Snow Effect, 1891, private collection

Claude Monet: Frost at Giverny, 1885, private collection

↧

Modern Art Classics: Liebermann, Munch, Nolde, Kandinsky

February 8, 2017, 9:47 am

≫ Next: Alfred Sisley (1839-1899): Impressionist Master

≪ Previous: Impressionism: The Art of Landscape

Museum Barberini, Potsdam
January 23–May 28, 2017

The term modern art embodies change, while classic stands for timelessness. The exhibition Modern Art Classics: Liebermann, Munch, Nolde, Kandinsky draws a line from German Impressionism to Fauvism and Abstract Art after 1945 and addresses this dynamic era.

The exhibition Modern Art Classics: Liebermann, Munch, Nolde, Kandinsky focuses on upheavals in painting from modernism to the present day. With 60 paintings and sculptures from a period of 100 years, the show examines issues related to artistic and social emancipation in six sections. Today these works are considered classics of modern art. The exhibition begins in the 1890s and spans the period from German Impressionism through the Fauves to abstract painting after 1945 und highlights the development of painting in the 20th century.

Billionaire SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner and Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel in front of Edvard Munch's "Girls on the Bridge" at Museum Barberini. The painting sold for $54.5 million at Sotheby's in Nov. 2016.

Max Liebermann: The Flower Terrace at Wannsee to the South, 1921, private collection

Wassily Kandinsky: White Sound, 1908, private collection

Edvard Munch: Woman Looking in the Mirror, 1892, private collection

Edvard Munch: Summer Night by the Beach, 1902/03, private collection

Edvard Munch: The Girls on the Bridge, 1902, private collection

Rufino Tamayo: Children Playing with Fire, 1947, private collection

Andy Warhol: Mona Lisa Four Times, 1978, Museum Barberini

Joan Mitchell: Faded Air I, 1985, private collection

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Alfred Sisley (1839-1899): Impressionist Master

February 9, 2017, 9:32 am

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Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut
January 21–May 21, 2017

Hôtel de Caumont Centre d’Art, Aix-en- Provence
June through October 2017

The Bruce Museum and the Hôtel de Caumont Centre d’Art in Aix-en- Provence, France, are mounting a major monographic exhibition of the art of the French Impressionist Alfred Sisley (1839-1899). The first retrospective in more than 20 years of this purest of all the major Impressionists, Alfred Sisley (1839-1899): Impressionist Master spotlights about 50 of Sisley’s paintings, which come from private collections and major museums in Europe and North America. The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, will premiere the exhibition and is the only venue in the United States. The show will then travel to France, where it will be on exhibit from

Born in Paris in 1839 to well-to-do British parents, Alfred Sisley at first intended to pursue a career in commerce and spent two years in London from 1857 - 1859. During this time, he visited museums, studying both the Old Masters and the great British landscape painters John Constable and J.M.W. Turner.

On his return to Paris, he was determined to become a landscape painter and enrolled in Charles Gleyre’s studio, where he met the future Impressionists Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille.

Initially Sisley worked in the naturalistic landscape tradition of the Barbizon School but increasingly adopted a proto-Impressionistic style, recording specific locations in a sequence of visual records of different times of the day, weather conditions and seasons. In so doing he charted comprehensively and from multiple points of view the landscapes of his residences in the villages along the Seine west of Paris and beyond the Forest of Fontainebleau at Veneux- Nadon and Moret-sur-Loing.

Sisley was first and foremost a painter of light. He knew how to imbue all of his paintings with it.One could say that light floods his landscapes, deliciously bathing even the most modest ofdetails. - Anonymous, “Echo de Paris,” Le Gaulois 1899

While his landscapes are generally modest in scale and tonally relatively restrained, the magic with which he was able to capture the effects of the light dancing on water, the brilliance of winter sun on snow and hoar frost, the movement of the wind in trees, the exploration of the depth of a rural scene, and the vastness of the skies create compelling works akin to poetry. They demand close, quiet contemplation and their re-evaluation is well overdue.

His very delicate, lively sensibility was at ease before all the glories of nature... Sisley understood lovely light, the transparency of the envelope of air, the mobility and changeability of reflections, the speed of movement. – Octave Mirbeau, 1892

The exhibition Alfred Sisley (1839-1899): Impressionist Master is organized by the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut and Culturespaces. The show is curated by MaryAnne Stevens, independent art historian and curator of the 1992/3 and 2002/3 retrospective exhibitions on the artist.

It is accompanied by a fullyillustrated catalogue published by Editions Hazan. Contributors to this volume, Richard Shone, who wrote a book on the painter, and Kathleen Adler, a 19th-century French specialist, bring new insights that ensure the publication will be an indispensable reference on the artist and his oeuvre.

Alfred Sisley
Spring, Peasant under Trees in Blossom,1865-66
Oil on canvas, 46.5 x 56 cm
Galerie Bailly, Geneva
Image courtesy of Galerie Bailly, Geneva

Alfred Sisley (French, 1839-1899)
The Seine at Bougival, 1872
Oil on canvas, 50.8 x 65.5 cm
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Gift of Henry Johnson Fisher, B.A. 1896 (1962.54) Photo credit: Yale University Art Gallery

Alfred Sisley
Fishermen Spreading their Nets (Drying Nets),1872
Oil on canvas, 42 x 65 cm Kimbell Art Museum,
Fort Worth, Texas (APx1977.01)
Photograph: Robert LaPrelle. © 2009 Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Alfred Sisley
Bougival, 1876
Oil on canvas, 60 x 73 cm
Cincinnati Art Museum, John J. Emery Fund (1922.38)
Image courtesy of Cincinnati Art Museum

Alfred Sisley
The Rue de la Princesse, Louveciennes, c. 1873 Oil on canvas, 38 x 54 cm
The Phillips Family Collection
Photography by Hyla Skopitz copyright 2016

Alfred Sisley
The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, 1872
Oil on canvas, 49.5 x 65.4 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ittleson, Jr., 1964 (64.287)
Image courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alfred Sisley
The Route to Verriéres, 1872
Oil on canvas, 47.5 x 63 cm
Private Collection, Thomas Gibson, England

Alfred Sisley
Spring at Bougival,c. 1873
Oil on canvas, 40.6 x 57.1 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bequest of Charlotte Dorrance Wright, 1978 (1978-1-31) Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museumof Art

Alfred Sisley
The Marly Aqueduct, 1874
Oil on canvas, 54.3 x 81.3 cm
Toledo Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey (1951.371)

Image courtesy of Toledo Museum of Art

Alfred Sisley
Under Hampton Court Bridge, 1874
Oil on canvas, 50 x 76 cm
Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Donated by Dr. Herbert and Charlotte Wolfer-de-Armas, 1973

Alfred Sisley
Fête Day at Marly-le-Roi, 1875
Oil on canvas, 54 x 73 cm
The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum, Bedford
Image courtesy of The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum

Alfred Sisley
The Bridge at Saint-Mammès, 1881
Oil on canvas, 54.6 x 73.2 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917 (Cat. 1082)

Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Alfred Sisley Flood at Port-Marly, 1872
Oil on canvas, 46.4 x 61 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon (1985.64.38)

Image courtesy of National Gallery of Art

Alfred Sisley
A Farmyard at Chaville-December, 1879 Oil on canvas, 46 x 55.5 cm
Private Collection

Alfred Sisley

Church at Moret-sur-Loing: Morning, Rainy Weather, 1893
Oil on canvas, 65.9 x 81.3 cm
Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow (GLAHA 43815)

Alfred Sisley
The Flood at Port Marly, 1876
Oil on canvas, 50 x 61 cm
Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection on loan at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid (CTB.1974.25)

Alfred Sisley
The Hilly Path, Ville d'Avray, 1879
Oil on canvas, 50 x 65 cm
Collection of The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, Museum purchase, by exchange, and Gift of the Charter Collectors, 2010.18

Image courtesy of The Speed Art Museum

Alfred Sisley
Church at Moret, 1893
Oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm
Musée Calvet d’Avignon – Gift of Joseph Rignault, 1997, Fondation Calvet (22.279) Image courtesy of Musée Calvet d’Avignon

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Toulouse - Lautrec Illustrates the Belle Époque

February 9, 2017, 12:43 pm

≫ Next: Christie’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, 2.28: Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Auguste Rodin

≪ Previous: Alfred Sisley (1839-1899): Impressionist Master

The Phillips Collection
February 4 through April 30, 2017

In a special exhibition opening o n February 4 , The Phillips Collection presents an extraordinary selection of Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec’s iconic and rare printed work s from nearly the entire period of his lithographic career ( 1891 – 1899 ) . An inaugural collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), Toulouse - Lautrec Illustrates the Belle Époque assembles, for the first time in the United States, close to 100 defining images of late 19th - century Montmartre , drawn from one of the leading collections of prints and posters by Toulouse - Lautrec .

The son of a wealthy noble family from Albi, France, Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec (1864 – 1901) is best known for capturing the heart of Parisian nightlife in dynamic cabaret and dance hall scenes inspired by the city’s burgeoning entertainment district . After training with academic painters in Paris, he established a studio in bohemian Montmartre and was regularly seen at livelyhot spots like the Chat Noir, the Mirliton, and the Moulin Rouge. His impressions of these local amusements fashioned a portrait of modern life. Toulouse - Lautrec’s arrival in Paris also coincided with both revival and innovation in the technology of color lithography .

Thesheer scale of theposte s plastered around the city transformed Paris nto an open air exhibition, whilelimited - edition lithographs and print albums designed for the home catered to collectors.

This exhibition highlights Toulouse - Lautrec’s embrace of printmaking and his experiments with the medium that revolutionized the field.

“I am delighted for the Phillips to exhibit such a rich collection of printed works by Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec, who forever changed and shaped the art of lithography,” said Director Dorothy Kosinski. “This is a rare opportunity to see such a large colle tion that captures a defining moment in the artist’sprintmaking career on view in the United States.”

Included in the special exhibition at the Phillips is Toulouse - Lautrec ’s first lithograph, the poster Moulin Rouge , La Goulue (1891) , which made him an overnight success. Produced in some 3,000 impressions, the poster’s massive scale, fragmented forms, compressed pictorial space, and range of colors broke new ground . By presenting this significant work alongside a unique trial proof in black and white , the exhibition provid es a glimpse into the artist’s highly involved pr intmaking process . Other special features on view include never - before - published trial proofs , unique images , and rare prints displayed with richly colored final impressions.

Many of the poster s were commissioned by famous performers like Jane Avril, May Belfort , Aristide Bruant, and May Milton . The se personalities, among others, arebrought to life through Toulouse - Lautrec’s perceptive skills of observation and caricature. By maximizing the impact of just a few details, their celebrity was immortalized in these masterful works that caught the public’s
attention.

“This show is special because it not only features an impressive number of familiar images, but by displaying trial proofs, it also offers visitors a behind - the - scenes look at the genius of Toulouse - Lautrec’s prints.” said Renée Maurer, Associate Curator at the Phillips .

“Having attracted 145, 000 visitors to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibition Toulouse - Lautrec Illustrates the Belle Époque was a great success, one that I hope our partners from The Phillips Collection will also enjoy in this first collaboration, thanks to an exceptional collection ,” said Nathalie Bondil, Director General and Chief Curator at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts . “ The Paris of the belle époque is paraded before our eyes. What a privilege to be able to exhibit these rarely shown unique posters by Toulouse - Lautrec .”

The exhibition alsoincludes additional works by Toulouse - Lautrec’s contemporaries, such as

Théophile Alexandre Steinlen’s famous posterTournée du Chat Noir ( 1896 ) and

Louis Anquetin’s never-before-exhibited painting Inside Bruant’s Mirliton ( 1886 – 1887 ) Oil on canvas , 57 1⁄16 × 61 13⁄16 in . Private collection.

Once considered lost, with only preliminary drawings as evidence of its existence, Anquetin’s large painting invites viewers inside Aristide Bruant’s lively cabaret the Mirliton, where Toulouse - Lautrec, Bruant, and Émile Bernard watch entertainer La Goulue perform.

THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION AND TOULOUSE - LAUTREC

During his lifetime, museum founder Duncan Phillips acquired four works on paper by Toulouse - Lautrec. His first purchase made in 1927 was the lithograph Miss May Belfort ( large plate ) (1895) . In 1939, Phillips presented the museum’s only previous exhibition of Toulouse - Lautrec’s art, containing 55 works (drawings, prints, and paintings) sourced from the Art Institute of Chicago and private collections. Toulouse - Lautrec Illustrates the Belle Époque marks the first solo showing of the artist’s work at the Phillips in nearly 80 years. As a complement to the exhibition, an installation of work by Toulouse - Lautrec’s contemporaries and inspiration will be on view in nearby permanent collection galleries.

Images in the Exhibition:

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec, Moulin Rouge, La Goulue , 1891. Brush and spatter lithograph, printed in four colors. Key stone printed in black, color stones in yellow, red, and blue on three sheets of wove paper, 75 3⁄16 × 46 1⁄6 in. Private collection

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec, The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge , 1892. Brush and spatter lithograph, printed in six or seven colors. Key stone printed in olive green, color stones in aubergine, blue, red, yellow , and black on wove paper. State II/II, 21 × 14 3⁄4 in. Private collection

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec, Ambassadeurs, Aristide Bruant , 1892. Brush and spatter lithograph, printed in five colors. Key stone printed in olive green, color stones in orange, red, blue and black on two sheets of wove paper , 52 15⁄16 × 36 5⁄8 in. Private collection

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec , Divan Japonais , 1892 – 93. Crayon, brush, spatter, and transferred screen lithograph, printed in four colors. Key stone printed in olive green, color stones in black, yellow, and red on wove paper, 31 3/4 × 23 15⁄16 in. Private collection

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec , Cover for L’Estampe originale, 1893. Brush and spatter lithograph, printed in six c olors. Key stone printed in olive green, color stones in beige, salmon red, red, yellow, and black on wove paper. Only state, 22 1/4 × 25 11⁄16 in. Private collection

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec, Jane Avril , 1893 . Brush and spatter lithograph, key stone printed in olive green on wove paper . Trial proof, 47 9⁄16 × 33 7⁄8 in. Private collection

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec, Jane Avril , 1893. Brush and spatter lithograph, printed in five colors. Key stone printed in olive green, color stones in yellow, orange, red , and black on wove paper, 48 13⁄16 × 36 in. Private collection

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec, At the Ambassadeurs, Singer at the Café - Concert , 1894 . Crayon, brush and spatter lithograph, printed in six colors. Key stone printed in olive green, color st ones in yellow, beige - gray, salmon pink, black , and blue on wove paper . Only state , 12 × 9 3/4 in .

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec , The Box with the Gilded Mask , about 1894. Crayon, brush , and spatter lithograph with scraper, printed i n five colors. Key stone printed in olive green, color stones in red or brown - red, yellow, gray - beige, and black - olive green or black on imitation Japan paper. Only state, 14 5⁄8 × 12 7⁄8 in. Private collection

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec , Mademoiselle Marcelle Lender, Half - length , 1895. Crayon, brush , and spatter lithograph, printed in eight colors. Key stone printed in olive green, color stones in yellow, red, dark pink, turquoise - green, blue, gray , and yellow - green on wove paper. State IV/IV, 12 15⁄16 × 9 5⁄8 in. Private collection

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec , May Belfort , 1895. Crayon, brush, and spatter lithograph , printed in five colors. K ey stone printed in olive green, color stones in red , black, gray , and yellow on wove paper, 31 5⁄16 × 24 in. Private collection

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec , May Milton , 1895. Crayon, brush, spatter, and transferred screen lithograph, printed in five colors. Key stone printed in olive green, color stones in blue, red, yellow, and black on wove paper, 31 5⁄16 × 24 in. Private collection

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec , Mademoiselle Églantine’s Troupe , 1895 – 96. Brush, spatter, and crayon l ithograph, printed in three colors. Key stone printed in turquoise, color stones in red and yellow on wove paper, 24 5⁄16 × 31 5⁄8 in. Private collection

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec , The Photographer Sescau , 1896. Brush, crayon, and spatter lithograph , printed in five colors. Key stone printed in blue, color stones in red, yellow , and green on wove paper, remarque in black, 23 7⁄8 × 31 ½ in. Private Collection

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec , The Simpson Chain , 1896 . Brush, c rayon, and spatter lithograph , printed in three colors. Key stone printed in blue, color stones in red and yellow on wove paper , 32 5⁄8 × 47 1/4 in. Private Collection Toulouse - Lautrec Illustrates the Belle Époque February 4 – April 30, 2017

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec , The Jockey , 1899 . Crayon , brush, and spatter lithograph, printed in six colors. Key stone printed in black, color stones in turquoise - green, red, brown, gray - beige and blue on China paper . State II /II , 20 3 / 8 × 14 1/4 in . Private c ollection

Henri de Toulouse - Lautrec , Jane Avril , 1899 . Brush lithograph, printed in four colors from three stones . Key stone printed in black, one color stone in red, one in yellow and blue on wove paper , 22 1⁄16 × 14 15⁄16 in. Private collection

↧

Christie’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, 2.28: Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Auguste Rodin

February 11, 2017, 8:16 am

≫ Next: The Art of the Surreal Christie’s 28 February

≪ Previous: Toulouse - Lautrec Illustrates the Belle Époque

The Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on 28 February will present 51 lots from the birth of Impressionism through to some of the most important and ground-breaking movements of the 20th century, and will feature two esteemed European collections, The Personal Collection of Barbara Lambrecht and Le Corbusier: Important Works from the Heidi Weber Museum Collection, forming a focal point for the sale.

IMPRESSIONIST & MODERN ART EVENING SALE HIGHLIGHTS

GAUGUIN

A major highlight is Paul Gauguin’s Te Fare (La maison) (estimate: £12,000,000-18,000,000), one of the most richly coloured of his Tahitian landscapes, painted on his first visit to the island.

An homage to the spectacular Tahitian landscape, Te Fare (La maison) was created in 1892, the year that Paul Gauguin painted some of his greatest masterpieces. A large hibiscus tree dominates the composition, its rich emerald green leaves and just visible orange blossoms obscuring the purple-roofed house situated behind it. This wooden hut could, it has been suggested, be the artist’s own rented home in Mataiea. A quiet, enigmatic narrative seems to veil the scene, imbuing the composition with a deeper, psychological dimension, a reflection of Gauguin’s Symbolist involvement. In Te Fare (La maison) Gauguin has increasingly simplified and monumentalised the landscape, transcending reality by turning the natural world into a mystic vision of colour, line and form.

PICASSO

A monumental portrait of two figures by Pablo Picasso titled Joueur de flûte et femme nue (1970, estimate: £6,500,000-8,500,000),

Joueur de flûte et femme nue depicts a voluptuous female nude, being softly serenaded by a bearded, flute-player seated next to her. The couple’s interlocking limbs, and the sensual, spontaneous style of the painting all serve to infuse the composition with a heady sense of eroticism, a feature that characterises much of Picasso’s late work. The unmistakable, hieratic profile of the seated nude in Joueur de flûte et femme nue is that of Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s great love, wife and final muse, who first appeared in his work in 1954.

RENOIR

Canotage á Bougival (circa 1881, estimate: £3,700,000-4,700,000), a landscape by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, formerly in the collection of Albert C. Barnes, painted at a transitional moment in his career.

Renoir is likely to have painted Canotage á Bougival in the spring of 1881, soon after returning from a two-month trip to Algeria, his first ever voyage outside of France. During his travels, the artist had devoted himself fully to landscape painting, revelling in the dense and luxuriant foliage of palm and banana trees. Seeking to maintain the creative energy that the Algerian vistas had inspired in him, he continued to paint landscapes that bear witness to one of the central tenets of Impressionism: the plein-air master standing outdoors. Canotage á Bougival was acquired in 1920 by one of the most important collectors of the 20th Century: Dr Albert C. Barnes. Barnes's collection of modern art remains among the greatest of its kind, and features many works by Renoir, whom Barnes admired above all other painters.

MATISSE

Henri Matisse’s Jeune fille aux anémones sur fond violet (1944, estimate: £5,000,000-7,000,000), is part of a series of interior scenes that the artist created whilst living in Vence in the South of France

Depicting a young artist, Annelies Nelck, Jeune fille aux anémones sur fond violet is the first of three portraits by Matisse that features this model. Of these three works, the present oil is the only one to remain in private hands; the other two reside in the Musée Matisse, Nice, and the Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii. Wearing a red and orange Romanian blouse – one of Matisse’s adored collection of lavish dresses and ornate costumes that he often depicted his sitters in – Nelck is surrounded by blossoming flowers against a soft, mauve background, bringing Matisse's lifelong preoccupations with colour and line to a triumphant conclusion.

RODIN

Auguste Rodin’s timeless expression of passionate love Le baiser (conceived circa 1882, estimate: £4,000,000-6,000,000).

First conceived circa 1882, Le baiser is one of the most iconic sculptures of Rodin’s entire oeuvre, renowned for its poetic depiction of two young lovers caught in a passionate embrace. Rodin’s work dramatically portrays the intense desire that has swept through these two figures, causing their bodies to intertwine in an almost spiral formation, as they succumb to their lustful impulses. Slightly larger than life size, the original marble version was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1898.

Also see

THE PERSONAL COLLECTION OF BARBARA LAMBRECHT

and

LE CORBUSIER: IMPORTANT WORKS FROM THE HEIDI WEBER MUSEUM COLLECTION

↧

The Art of the Surreal Christie’s 28 February

February 12, 2017, 9:37 am

≫ Next: Max Ernst at Auction

≪ Previous: Christie’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, 2.28: Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Auguste Rodin

The sixteenth edition of The Art of the Surreal sale will take place at Christie’s on 28 February, following the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale and will include 35 lots that chart the history of Dada and Surrealism.

René Magritte’s La corde sensible (1960, estimate: £14,000,000-18,000,000), one of the largest oils he created

René Magritte’s La corde sensible, a composition unique in his oeuvre, exemplifies the artist’s lifelong quest to reveal and revel in the mystery that he perceived to exist within the real world. Magritte originally presented it as a gift to his wife, Georgette. Later owned by Ronald Winston, the son of the world-renowned jeweller, Harry Winston, the painting has remained in the same private collection since 1990. Situated under a blue sky, amidst a verdant green landscape with a mountain range in the distance, an enormous crystal glass stands incongruously in the middle of the valley. Hovering just above it is a cloud, the weightless form meeting the solid glass creating a compelling contrast between lightness and weight, transparency and opacity, atmosphere and earth.

Le domaine d’Arnheim (1938, estimate: £6,500,000-8,500,000)

Le domaine d’Arnheim is René Magritte’s first realisation in oil of one of his most enduring pictorial motifs, the magisterial eagle-shaped mountain. The epic scale and romantic grandeur of this painting’s mountain imagery is echoed on a window ledge in the foreground of the painting where a small, almost minimal, still-life rests in the form of a pair of bird eggs. The present work formed part of the collection assembled by the great English patron and collector of surrealist art, Edward James.

The group of seven works by Max Ernst, offered from a number of prestigious collections, includes Les deux oiseaux, (estimate: £100,000-150,000)one of a major series of object-paintings on the theme of imprisoned birds that Ernst made in 1925. The delicacy of the birds’ forms is presented in sharp contrast to the heavy texture of the sandpaper ground, imprisoning bars and the strong cork boundary of the artist’s picture-frame.

Savage Moon (1926, estimate: £250,000-350,000) is one of a series of moonlit landscape paintings that Ernst made the following year, in 1926. Depicting a mystic moon casting its ethereal light over the surface of the sea, it is one of the very first paintings that he ever made using the new technique of grattage, a method of scraping random patterns in oil paint.

Max Ernst Portrait érotique voilé (1933 and circa 1950, estimate: £1,500,000-2,500-000): Centred upon the depiction of an imperious bird-headed female figure sporting a revolutionary bonnet de la Liberté and seated on a crimson throne, this final version was unseen in public until the major retrospective of Ernst’s work held at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf in 1991.

Out of the apparent geometric simplicity of the forms a matrix of abstract pattern and colour has been created. Portrait érotique voilé is offered by the artist’s family, it was first created in 1933 and later reworked by the artist into a new, more regal and grandiose version around 1950.

One of the first works he created upon arriving in the USA, Yves Tanguy’s La lumière,la solitude (1940, estimate: £500,000-700,000, illustrated, left) is a comparatively large, highly worked, jewel-like painting, distinctive for the rich rainbow colours of its background. With its constellation of automatic, intuitively-arrived-at, forms in the foreground, it hovers on the borderline between realist landscape and abstract fantasy. One of the best compositions the market has seen for years this painting was hidden in a private European collection for decades until now.

Magnéto anglaise (1921-22, estimate: £400,000-600,000) is one of a much celebrated series of ironic, ‘abstract’ works that Francis Picabia made for his solo show at the Galerie Dalmau in Barcelona, in November 1922. It was first bought from the artist by the celebrated collector and Parisian fashion designer Jaques Doucet and later formed part of the English collection of E.J. Power for 20 years. Picabia’s ‘mechanomorphic’ abstractions appeared to challenge and lampoon the whole idea of modernist aesthetics, the contemporary art market and the mechanical workings of human sexual attraction and interaction.

Rich in imagery and enigmatic in its meaning, Statices (1929, estimate: £1,300,000-1,800,000) is a captivating example of Picabia’s celebrated Transparency paintings, a series of works named for their depiction of multiple images, layered atop one another in an effect similar to multiple-exposure photography.

Completing this group is Phimparey (circa 1941-42, estimate: £200,000-300,000), a painting that demonstrates a move towards pop art in its reproduction of a popular magazine image.

Two works are being offered by The Art Institute of Chicago. Paul Delvaux’s Le village des sirènes, created in 1942, one of the best years in Delvaux’s oeuvre, at the very height of the German occupation of Belgium, portrays an otherworldly scene, in which a group of elegantly dressed women sit along a gently curving street with mermaids swimming beyond. The silence conveyed offers a startling contrast to the chaos of the war that was raging in Europe at this time while the disconcerting and anachronistic architectural juxtapositions and disquieting atmosphere reveal a strong affinity with the art of Giorgio de Chirico.

Part of the collection since 1954, Giorgio de Chirico’s Guerrieri e filosofi (circa 1928, estimate: £300,000-500,000) is one of a series of gladiatorial paintings that appeared regularly in de Chirico’s oeuvre during the late 1920s and early 1930s. De Chirico stated that many of his Gladiatori from this period were intended as a satire on the art world who had turned against him.

Olivier Camu, Deputy Chairman, Impressionist & Modern Art, Christie’s: “The sale presents 16 of the leading Dada and Surreal artists in a carefully curated group of paintings and Surrealist objects from some of the most celebrated collections in the world. René Magritte’s magnificent oil La corde sensible, painted in 1960, is an exquisite composition that eludes meaning or logical explanation and is poised to achieve a significant record for the artist. It is arguably the most striking and important Magritte work we have offered at auction since 2002. It is also a privilege to be offering on behalf of the Art Institute of Chicago two great paintings by Paul Delvaux and Giorgio de Chirico. Together with the Max Ernsts from the collections of the artist’s family and the great German philanthropist and collector Barbara Lambrecht, the provenance of the works of art in this edition of The Art of the Surreal is unrivalled.”

Further artists representing the range of the movement include Jean (Hans) Arp, Alexander Calder, whose sculpture The bat (1966, estimate: £400,000-600,000) shows how Surrealism continued to influence artists throughout the second part of the 20th century, Salvador Dalí, who collaborated with Edward James on the striking bright red Mae West Lips Sofa (1938, estimate: £400,000-600,000), sold by the Edward James Foundation, Óscar Domínguez, André Masson, Joan Miró, Man Ray and Antoni Tàpies.

↧

Max Ernst at Auction

February 12, 2017, 1:43 pm

≫ Next: Renoir at Auction II

≪ Previous: The Art of the Surreal Christie’s 28 February

Christie's 2017

A museum quality work and the cover lot of the sale, The Stolen Mirror by Max Ernst (1891-1976) is a surrealist technical tour-de-force, highly autobiographical and one of the artist's finest works (estimate: £7-10 million). This dream-like landscape was painted in 1941 at the pinnacle of Ernst’s oeuvre, when he was using the decalcomania technique of manipulating paint which he picked up from Oscar Dominguez. Many Surrealists tried the technique though Ernst was the only one to adapt decalcomania in a sustained manner to painting in oils on canvas. Rarely employing it as an end in itself, but rather as a means to create the unexpected, he became a master of the technique and achieved a remarkable degree of control over a fundamentally unpredictable process. The current record for a work by the artist, realising £10,283,175/ $16,322,500 at Christie’s in 2011, this painting once belonged to Edward James, one of the foremost early collectors of Surrealist art; it was later re-acquired by Ernst’s son Jimmy Ernst and descended through the family to the estate of Edith Dallas Ernst, from which it was last sold. Previous sale: http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/max-ernst-the-stolen-mirror-5493627-details.aspx

Christie's 2015

Max Ernst (1891-1976)

Le Couple (L'Accolade)

Price realised USD 9,125,000

EstimateUSD 6,000,000 - USD 8,000,00 Sotheby's 2014

Max Ernst

OHNE TITEL (PORTRÄT EINES KÜNSTLERS ALS CHERUBIM) (UNTITLED (PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST AS A CHERMUBIM))

Estimate

150,000— 250,000

↧

Renoir at Auction II

February 12, 2017, 3:50 pm

≫ Next: Marsden Hartley's Maine

≪ Previous: Max Ernst at Auction

Christie's 2017

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

La maison de Renoir àCagnes-sur-Mer

Pr.£122,500($186,078)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Nu couché, vu de dos, sur fond ocre

Pr.£506,500($769,374)

Christie's 2014

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Madeleine au corsage blanc et bouquet

Pr.£962,500($1,638,175)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Jeune femme brodant à la fenêtre

Pr.£662,500($1,127,575)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Paysage du Midi

Pr.£542,500($920,080)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Roses

Pr.£146,500($248,464)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Jeune fille dans un pré

Pr.£386,500($655,504)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Femme au corsage rouge et au chapeau

Pr.€433,000($554,310)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Fleurs rouges et blanches dans un

Pr.£146,500($248,464)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

La Clairière

Pr.£302,500($513,040)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Vénus Victrix

Pr.$533,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Anémones dans un vase vert

Pr.£602,500($982,075)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Paysage de Cagnes

Pr.£626,500($1,021,195)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Esquisse pour 'Au jardin'

Pr.£68,500($111,655)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Marine à Berneval

Pr.$689,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

La Baigneuse

Pr.$1,325,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Les deux soeurs

Pr.$8,005,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Femme à l'ombrelle

Pr.$2,517,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Jeunes filles jouant au volant

Pr.$11,365,000

Christie's 2012

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919)

Bouquet de roses

Pr.€259,000($315,980)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Femme dans un paysage à Cagnes

Pr.€457,000($585,034)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Gabrielle et Jean Renoir

Pr.€481,000($615,758)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Coucher de soleil à Douarnenez

Pr.£469,250($746,108)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Mademoiselle Grimprel au ruban rouge

Pr.£3,065,250($4,873,748)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Nu au chapeau de paille assis en bordure de

Pr.£1,138,850($1,810,772)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Portrait de Jean Renoir

Pr.$362,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Portrait de Coco

Pr.$722,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Paysage de Cagnes

Pr.$362,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Abricots et figues

Pr.$458,500

· Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Tête de Madeleine

Pr.$578,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

La vallée de la Cagne

Pr.$170,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Paysage à la cabane (Petit paysage)

Pr.£277,250($440,828)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Buste de femme en costume oriental

Pr.£397,250($631,628)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Femmes dans un paysage

Pr.£433,250($688,868)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Auvers-sur-Oise

Pr.$530,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Calvaire et église de Nizon (Près de

Pr.$302,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Paysage près de Cagnes

Pr.$866,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Paysage de Bretagne

Pr.$506,500

Christie's 2011

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Esquisse de personnages dans un paysage

Pr.£27,500($44,193)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Esquisse de fleurs

Pr.$410,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

La source (Nu allongé)

Pr.£5,081,250($8,241,788)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Portrait de Jeanne Samary

Pr.$1,106,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Portrait de bébé (Lucien Daudet)

Pr.£577,250($936,300)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Jeune femme au chapeau noir

Pr.£3,401,250($5,516,828)

Christie's 2010

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Tête de jeune fille

Pr.£1,161,250($1,723,295)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Groupe de femmes

Pr.£49,250($73,678)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Nu couché (Odalisque couchée)

Pr.£791,650($1,174,809)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Corbeille de fleurs

Pr.£2,729,250($4,050,207)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Marie-Louise Durand-Ruel

Pr.$542,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Lavandières

Pr.$25,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Adrienne

Pr.$1,986,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Portrait de femme au chapeau fleuri

Pr.$1,022,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Le Poirier

Pr.$866,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Anemones

Pr.$266,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Assiette de Provence

Pr.$146,500

Christie's 2009

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Les hauteurs de Trouville

Pr.$1,426,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Nu couché, vu de dos, sur fond ocre

Pr.$602,500

Christie's 2008

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Jeune homme à la cravate rouge,

Pr.£445,600($882,734)

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919)

Jeune fille au sein découvert

Pr.€115,000($146,094)

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919)

Femme à l'ombrelle assise dans le

Pr.€1,162,600($1,476,947)

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919)

Portrait de Pierre Renoir

Pr.€265,000($336,651)

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919)

Les petites laveuses à Cagnes

Pr.€301,000($382,385)

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919)

Femme nue au canapé

Pr.€817,000($1,037,903)

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841-1919)

Jeune fille de profil

Pr.€697,000($885,457)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Paysage, arbre jaune

Pr.$481,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Paysage

Pr.$104,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Pêches et amandes

Pr.$398,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Deux pommes et un citron

Pr.$314,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Etude de nu

Pr.$242,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Paysage ensoleillé

Pr.£412,000($816,172)

Christie's 2007

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Nature morte aux fraises

Pr.$325,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Portrait de femme

Pr.$541,000

· Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Etude de femme au chapeau jaune

Pr.$457,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

L'église de Varengeville et les

Pr.$337,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Femme en bleu

Pr.$757,800

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Nature morte au melon et au vase de

Pr.$2,505,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Jeune fille au chapeau noir à fleurs

Pr.$2,169,000

· Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Deux femmes lisant

Pr.$713,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Au Théâtre, la loge

Pr.$6,089,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Femme dansant en costume d'italienne

Pr.$881,000

Christie's 2006

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Jeune fille au chapeau fleuri

Pr.$3,600,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Beaulieu, femmes et garçonnet

Pr.$4,608,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Baigneuse, nue assise

Pr.$1,696,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) and Richard Guino (1890-1973)

Grande laveuse

Pr.$520,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Femme à la guitare

Pr.$2,144,000

Christie's 2005

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Jeune fille au chapeau

Pr.£848,000($1,587,456)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Nature morte aux citrons et oranges

Pr.£209,600($392,371)

Christie's 2004

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Filette à la poupée

Pr.$489,100

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Tête de jeune femme

Pr.$197,900

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Les fillettes

Pr.$93,210

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Paysage (Route à Essouyes)

Pr.$101,575

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Portrait d'Andrée penchée

Pr.$623,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

La maison de la poste à Cagnes

Pr.$365,900

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Les arbres, Automne

Pr.$253,900

· Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Esquisse de 'Jugement de Paris'

Pr.$343,500

Christie's 2000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Femme au profil

Pr.$215,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Alpes maritimes

Pr.$94,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Paysage à Cagnes

Pr.$102,800

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Jeune garon au ruisseau

Pr.$886,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Buste de femme à la blouse rose

Pr.$534,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Etude: Sucrier et citron

Pr.$64,625

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Paysage sous bois

Pr.$292,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Cantonnier au bord de la route

Pr.$149,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Jeune femme au chapeau rouge

Pr.$281,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

La belle Sicilienne

Pr.$556,000

Christie's 1999

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Portrait de femme

Pr.$244,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Fleurs dans un vase

Pr.$277,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Cabanon prs des Collettes

Pr.$107,000

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Bouquet de fleurs

Pr.$200,500

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Tte de Gabrielle en rouge

Pr.$112,500

The National Gallery, London

A Bather

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

probably 1885-90

A Nymph by a Stream

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

1869-70

At the Theatre (La Première Sortie)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

1876-7

Dancing Girl with Castanets from Pair of Dancing Girls with Musical Instruments

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

1909

Dancing Girl with Tambourine from Pair of Dancing Girls with Musical Instruments

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

1909

Gladioli in a Vase

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

about 1874-5

Head of a Girl

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

1898

Lakeside Landscape

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

about 1889

Misia Sert

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

1904

Moulin Huet Bay, Guernsey

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

about 1883

Pair of Dancing Girls with Musical Instruments

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

1909

The Skiff (La Yole)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

1875

The Umbrellas

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

about 1881-6

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Mademoiselle Sicot
1865
oil on canvas
overall: 116 x 89.5 cm (45 11/16 x 35 1/4 in.)
framed: 141 x 113.7 cm (55 1/2 x 44 3/4 in.)
Chester Dale Collection
1963.10.209
On View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Flowers in a Vase
c. 1866
oil on canvas
overall: 81.3 x 65.1 cm (32 x 25 5/8 in.)
framed: 98.4 x 83.2 x 8.3 cm (38 3/4 x 32 3/4 x 3 1/4 in.)
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon
1983.1.32
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Woman by a Fence
1866
oil on canvas
overall: 25 x 16.1 cm (9 13/16 x 6 5/16 in.)
framed: 40.6 x 32.1 x 5.1 cm (16 x 12 5/8 x 2 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.66
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Woman in a Park
1866
oil on canvas
overall: 26.1 x 16.1 cm (10 1/4 x 6 5/16 in.)
framed: 47.3 x 37.4 x 6.6 cm (18 5/8 x 14 3/4 x 2 5/8 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.68
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Woman Standing by a Tree
1866
oil on canvas
overall: 25.2 x 15.9 cm (9 15/16 x 6 1/4 in.)
framed: 41.3 x 32.1 x 7 cm (16 1/4 x 12 5/8 x 2 3/4 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.67
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Diana
1867
oil on canvas
overall: 199.5 x 129.5 cm (78 9/16 x 51 in.)
framed: 222.6 x 159.1 cm (87 5/8 x 62 5/8 in.)
Chester Dale Collection
1963.10.205
On View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Head of a Dog
1870
oil on canvas
overall: 21.9 x 20 cm (8 5/8 x 7 7/8 in.)
framed: 36.2 x 35.8 x 5 cm (14 1/4 x 14 1/8 x 1 15/16 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.57
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Odalisque
1870
oil on canvas
overall: 69.2 x 122.6 cm (27 1/4 x 48 1/4 in.)
framed: 99 x 153.7 cm (39 x 60 1/2 in.)
Chester Dale Collection
1963.10.207
On View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Claude Monet
1872
oil on canvas
overall: 65 x 50 cm (25 9/16 x 19 11/16 in.)
framed: 85.1 x 70.5 x 9.2 cm (33 1/2 x 27 3/4 x 3 5/8 in.)
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon
1985.64.35
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Pont Neuf, Paris
1872
oil on canvas
overall: 75.3 x 93.7 cm (29 5/8 x 36 7/8 in.)
framed: 99.4 x 118.7 x 14 cm (39 1/8 x 46 3/4 x 5 1/2 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.58
On View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
The Dancer
1874
oil on canvas
overall: 142.5 x 94.5 cm (56 1/8 x 37 3/16 in.)
framed: 164.1 x 116.2 cm (64 5/8 x 45 3/4 in.)
Widener Collection
1942.9.72
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Landscape between Storms
1874/1875
oil on canvas
overall: 24.4 x 32.6 cm (9 5/8 x 12 13/16 in.)
framed: 45.1 x 52.7 x 6.7 cm (17 3/4 x 20 3/4 x 2 5/8 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.65
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Madame Monet and Her Son
1874
oil on canvas
overall: 50.4 x 68 cm (19 13/16 x 26 3/4 in.)
framed: 77.4 x 95.5 x 11.4 cm (30 1/2 x 37 5/8 x 4 1/2 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.60
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Regatta at Argenteuil
1874
oil on canvas
overall: 32.4 x 45.7 cm (12 3/4 x 18 in.)
framed: 55.6 x 71.4 x 6.7 cm (21 7/8 x 28 1/8 x 2 5/8 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.59
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Picking Flowers
1875
oil on canvas
overall: 54.3 x 65.2 cm (21 3/8 x 25 11/16 in.)
framed: 78.1 x 88.9 x 7.6 cm (30 3/4 x 35 x 3 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.61
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Woman with a Cat
c. 1875
oil on canvas
overall: 56 x 46.4 cm (22 1/16 x 18 1/4 in.)
framed: 85.1 x 75.9 x 7.6 cm (33 1/2 x 29 7/8 x 3 in.)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin E. Levy
1950.12.1
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
A Girl with a Watering Can
1876
oil on canvas
overall: 100 x 73 cm (39 3/8 x 28 3/4 in.)
framed: 125.7 x 97.5 x 6.9 cm (49 1/2 x 38 3/8 x 2 11/16 in.)
Chester Dale Collection
1963.10.206
On View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Madame Henriot
c. 1876
oil on canvas
painted surface: 65.8 x 49.5 cm (25 7/8 x 19 1/2 in.) stretcher size: 68.8 x 53.6 cm (27 1/16 x 21 1/8 in.)
framed: 102.9 x 87 cm (40 1/2 x 34 1/4 in.)
Gift of the Adele R. Levy Fund, Inc.
1961.3.1
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Young Woman Braiding Her Hair
1876
oil on canvas
overall: 55.5 x 46 cm (21 7/8 x 18 1/8 in.)
framed: 76.8 x 68 x 7 cm (30 1/4 x 26 3/4 x 2 3/4 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.63
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Georges Rivière
1877
oil on cement
overall: 36.8 x 29.3 cm (14 1/2 x 11 9/16 in.)
framed: 61 x 52.4 x 7 cm (24 x 20 5/8 x 2 3/4 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.64
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Marie Murer
1877
oil on canvas
overall (oval): 67.6 x 57.1 cm (26 5/8 x 22 1/2 in.)
framed: 89.8 x 80 cm (35 3/8 x 31 1/2 in.)
Chester Dale Collection
1963.10.59
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Jeanne Samary
1878
oil on canvas
overall (including taped edges): 19 x 17.8 cm (7 1/2 x 7 in.)
framed: 32.4 x 29.9 x 3.8 cm (12 3/4 x 11 3/4 x 1 1/2 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.78
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
The Mussel Harvest
1879
oil on canvas
overall: 54.2 x 65.4 cm (21 5/16 x 25 3/4 in.)
framed: 75.3 x 86.4 x 8.9 cm (29 5/8 x 34 x 3 1/2 in.)
Gift of Margaret Seligman Lewisohn in memory of her husband, Sam A. Lewisohn
1954.8.1
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Oarsmen at Chatou
1879
oil on canvas
overall: 81.2 x 100.2 cm (31 15/16 x 39 7/16 in.)
framed: 104.1 x 123.5 x 9.5 cm (41 x 48 5/8 x 3 3/4 in.)
Gift of Sam A. Lewisohn
1951.5.2
On View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
The Young Soldier
c. 1880
oil on canvas
overall: 54.93 × 33.02 cm (21 5/8 × 13 in.)
framed: 68.58 × 46.04 × 4.45 cm (27 × 18 1/8 × 1 3/4 in.)
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon
2014.18.46
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Nude with Figure in Background
c. 1882
oil on canvas
overall: 12.8 x 8.3 cm (5 1/16 x 3 1/4 in.)
framed: 22.9 x 18.4 x 2.5 cm (9 x 7 1/4 x 1 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.74
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Small Study for a Nude
1882
oil on canvas
overall: 13.3 x 10.3 cm (5 1/4 x 4 1/16 in.)
framed: 25 x 22.2 x 4.7 cm (9 13/16 x 8 3/4 x 1 7/8 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.73
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Mlle Charlotte Berthier
1883
oil on canvas
overall: 92.1 x 73 cm (36 1/4 x 28 3/4 in.)
framed: 97.5 x 117.5 x 10.2 cm (38 3/8 x 46 1/4 x 4 in.)
Gift of Angelika Wertheim Frink
1969.10.1
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Girl with a Hoop
1885
oil on canvas
overall: 125.7 x 76.6 cm (49 1/2 x 30 3/16 in.)
framed: 148 x 100.6 cm (58 1/4 x 39 5/8 in.)
Chester Dale Collection
1963.10.58
On View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Suzanne Valadon
c. 1885
oil on canvas
overall: 41.3 x 31.8 cm (16 1/4 x 12 1/2 in.)
framed: 64.1 x 53.3 x 6 cm (25 1/4 x 21 x 2 3/8 in.)
Chester Dale Collection
1963.10.60
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Child with Brown Hair
1887/1888
oil on canvas
overall: 11.7 x 10.1 cm (4 5/8 x 4 in.)
framed: 21.3 x 19.4 x 4.4 cm (8 3/8 x 7 5/8 x 1 3/4 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.70
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Young Girl Reading
c. 1888
oil on canvas
painted surface: 14.8 x 10.7 cm (5 13/16 x 4 3/16 in.) overall size: 15.5 x 11 cm (6 1/8 x 4 5/16 in.)
framed: 30.8 x 29.5 x 5.1 cm (12 1/8 x 11 5/8 x 2 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.71
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Girl with a Basket of Fish
c. 1889
oil on canvas
overall: 130.7 x 41.8 cm (51 7/16 x 16 7/16 in.)
framed: 151.1 x 61.9 x 5.1 cm (59 1/2 x 24 3/8 x 2 in.)
Gift of William Robertson Coe
1956.4.1
On View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Girl with a Basket of Oranges
c. 1889
oil on canvas
overall: 128.8 x 41.8 cm (50 11/16 x 16 7/16 in.)
framed: 151.1 x 61.9 x 5.1 cm (59 1/2 x 24 3/8 x 2 in.)
Gift of William Robertson Coe
1956.4.2
On View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
The Blue River
c. 1890/1900
oil on canvas
overall (including taped edges): 7.7 x 9.6 cm (3 1/16 x 3 3/4 in.)
framed: 18.7 x 21 x 4.4 cm (7 3/8 x 8 1/4 x 1 3/4 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.75
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Head of a Young Girl
c. 1890
oil on canvas
overall: 42.6 x 33.3 cm (16 3/4 x 13 1/8 in.)
framed: 67.6 x 58.7 x 6.9 cm (26 5/8 x 23 1/8 x 2 11/16 in.)
Gift of Vladimir Horowitz
1948.18.1
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Landscape at Vétheuil
c. 1890
oil on canvas
overall: 11.5 x 16.5 cm (4 1/2 x 6 1/2 in.)
framed: 27.9 x 31.8 x 4.1 cm (11 x 12 1/2 x 1 5/8 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.72
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Bather Arranging Her Hair
1893
oil on canvas
overall: 92.4 × 74 cm (36 3/8 × 29 1/8 in.)
framed: 110.2 x 94 cm (43 3/8 x 37 in.)
Chester Dale Collection
1963.10.204
On View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Child with Blond Hair
1895/1900
oil on canvas
overall (including taped edges): 9.5 x 8.4 cm (3 3/4 x 3 5/16 in.)
framed: 19.4 x 17.8 x 2.9 cm (7 5/8 x 7 x 1 1/8 in.)
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection
1970.17.69
• Not on View
Work of Art
Renoir, Auguste
, French, 1841 - 1919
Child with Toys - Gabrielle and the Artist's Son, Jean
1895-1896
oil on canvas
overall: 54.3 x 65.4 cm (21 3/8 x 25 3/4 in.)
framed: 65.7 x 76.7 x 3.5 cm (25 7/8 x 30 3/16 x 1 3/8 in.)
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon
1985.64.36
On View

↧

Marsden Hartley's Maine

February 16, 2017, 12:16 pm

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The Met Breuer
March 15 through June 18, 2017

Colby College Museum. Waterville, Maine
July 8 through November 12, 2017

The exhibition Marsden Hartley's Maine, on view at The Met Breuer from March 15 through June 18, 2017, will showcase the American artist's lifelong artistic engagement with his home state of Maine. Approximately 90 paintings and drawings will illuminate his extraordinarily expressive range—from Post-Impressionist interpretations of seasonal change in inland Maine in the early 1900s to folk-inspired depictions, beginning in the late 1930s, of the state's hearty inhabitants, majestic coastline, and great geological icon, Mount Katahdin.

The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Colby College Museum of Art.

Born in Lewiston, Maine, in 1877, Hartley became known for his peripatetic nature, especially his time spent in Paris and Berlin, where he participated in the European avant-garde. Over the course of his career, however, he returned to his home state repeatedly, painted Maine subjects while living abroad, and proclaimed himself the "painter from Maine" in the final chapter of his life. With the artist's place of origin as its focus, the exhibition will trace the powerful threads of continuity that run through Hartley's work and underlie many of his greatest contributions to American modernism. To Hartley, Maine was a springboard to imagination and creative inspiration, a locus of memory and longing, a refuge, and a place for communion with earlier artists who painted there, especially Winslow Homer, the most famous American artist associated with the state. Hartley died in Ellsworth, Maine, in 1943.

Hartley began his career by painting and exhibiting views of the state's western hills in a vibrant painterly style, seen in works such as The Silence of High Noon-Midsummer (1907–1908), which he debuted in 1909 at his first solo exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz's art gallery, 291. Hartley worshipped Paul Cézanne above all other modern painters; in emulation of Cézanne's legendary serial views of Mont Sainte-Victoire in his home of Aix-en-Provence, Hartley adopted Maine's Mount Katahdin as one of his key subjects beginning in 1939.

One entire gallery of the exhibition will be devoted to Hartley's bold, audacious figure paintings, such as Madawaska-Acadian Light-Heavy (1940) and Canuck Yankee Lumberjack at Old Orchard Beach, Maine (1940–41). The unrefined sensuality of the figures evokes Walt Whitman's poetry, which the painter also admired. His depictions of working-class men are typically static, even saint-like in appearance. The Met's presentation of the exhibition will include select works from the Museum's collection by other artists who shaped Hartley's vision, including Cézanne, Japanese printmakers Hiroshige and Hokusai, and American painters Winslow Homer and Albert Pinkham Ryder.

Marsden Hartley's Maine is co-curated by Randall Griffey, Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Elizabeth Finch, Lunder Curator of American Art at the Colby College Museum of Art; and Donna M. Cassidy, Professor of American and New England Studies and Art History at the University of Southern Maine.

To accompany the exhibition, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will publish a fully illustrated catalogue featuring lead essays by the exhibition's co-curators with additional contributions by poet and theorist Richard Deming, Senior Lecturer in English and Director of Creative Writing, Yale University, who addresses Hartley's writings about Maine, and conservators Isabelle Duvernois and Rachel Mustalish, both of The Met, who provide new technical analyses of his art.

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Canuck Yankee Lumberjack at Old Orchard Beach, Maine
1940–41
Oil on Masonite-type hardboard
40 1/8 x 30 in. (101.9 x 76.2 cm)
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Church at Head Tide, Maine
1938
Oil on commercially prepared paperboard (academy board)
281/8 x 221/8 (71.4 x 56.2 cm)
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Bequest of Adelaide Moise

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
City Point, Vinalhaven
1937–38
Oil on commercially prepared paperboard (academy board)
181/4 x 243/8 in. (46.4 x 61.9 cm)
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Gift of the Alex Katz Foundation

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Desertion
1910
Oil on commercially prepared paperboard (academy board)
14 1⁄4 x 22 1/8 in. (36.2 x 56.2 cm)
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Gift of the Alex Katz Foundation

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Knotting Rope
1939–40
Oil on board
28 x 22 in. (71.1 x 55.9 cm)
Private collection, New York

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Lobster Fishermen
1940–41
Oil on hardboard (masonite)
29 3/4 x 40 7/8 in. (75.6 x 103.8 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Lobster on Black Background
1940–41
Oil on hardboard (masonite)
22 x 28 in. (55.9 x 71.1 cm)
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Madawaska—Acadian Light-Heavy
1940
Oil on hardboard (masonite)
40 x 30 in. (101.6 x 76.2 cm)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Bequest of A. James Speyer

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Mt. Katahdin (Maine), Autumn #2
1939–40
Oil on canvas
30 1⁄4 x 40 1⁄4 in. (76.8 x 102.2 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection, Bequest of Edith Abrahamson Lowenthal, 1991

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Smelt Brook Falls
1937
Oil on commercially prepared paperboard (academy board)
28 x 22 7/8 in. (71.1 x 58.1 cm)
Saint Louis Art Museum, Eliza McMillan Trust

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Storm Down Pine Point Way, Old Orchard, Maine
1941–43
Oil on hardboard (masonite)
22 x 28 in. (55.9 x 71.1 cm)
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Summer, Sea, Window, Red Curtain
1942
Oil on masonite
40 1/8 x 30 1/2 in. (101.9 x 77.5 cm)
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy,
Andover, Massachusetts, Museum Purchase

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
The Ice Hole, Maine
1908-9
Oil on canvas
34 x 34 in. (86.4 x 86.4 cm)
New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum Purchase through the Ella West Freeman Foundation Matching Fund

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
The Lighthouse
1940–41
Oil on masonite-type hardboard
30 x 40 1/8 in. (76.2 x 101.9 cm)
Collection of Pitt and Barbara Hyde

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
The Silence of High Noon—Midsummer
1907–08
Oil on canvas
30 1/2 x 30 1/2 in. (77.5 x 77.5 cm)
Collection of Jan T. and Marica Vilcek, Promised Gift to The Vilcek Foundation

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
The Wave
1940
Oil on masonite-type hardboard
30 1⁄4 x 40 7/8 in. (76.8 x 103.8 cm)
Worcester Art Museum

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Three Flowers in a Vase
1917
Oil and metal leaf on glass
13 1/8 x 7 5/8 in. (33.3 x 19.4 cm)
Private collection

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Untitled (Maine Landscape)
1910
Oil on board
12 1/8 x 12 in. (30.8 x 30.5 cm)
Collection of Jan T. and Marica Vilcek, Promised Gift to The Vilcek Foundation

↧

The Medici’s Painter: Carlo Dolci and 17th-Century Florence

February 13, 2017, 9:08 am

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The Davis Museum at Wellesley College
February 9 through July 9, 2017

Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
August 2017

The Medici’s Painter: Carlo Dolci and 17th-Century Florence is the first-ever exhibition in America devoted to the luminous and meticulously rendered paintings and drawings of 17th-century Italian artist Carlo Dolci (1616–1687). It is the Davis Museum’s most ambitious Old Master project to date.

Dolci was arguably the most important artist in Florence during the 17th-century and the exhibition brings together for the first time in the U.S. the artist's sophisticated devotional work, pictures and drawings of the highest pictorial, technical, andspiritual qualities.

The exhibition includes more than5 0paintings and drawings, on loan from the most important public and private collectionsi n the U.S. and abroad,and from otherwise inaccessible private collections.Works will travel from the Uffizi Gallery and Pitta Palacein Florence, the Louvre Museum inParis, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, J. Paul Getty Museum inLos Angeles, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.

The Medici’s Painter is organized by Dr. Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, Head of European Art Department & Elizabeth and Allan Shelden Curator of European Paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts, with Dr. Francesca Baldassari. Straussman-Pflanzerwas previously the Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs and Senior Curator of Collections at the Davis Museum.

“The exhibition will consider Dolci’s art in depth as well asconsider art as a critical diplomatic, political, and cultural tool from the early modern period to the present,” said Straussman-Pflanzer. “It provides the first opportunity in the United States to study the life and oeuvre of the most important artist in 17th-centuryFlorence.”

Dolci, Carlo, The Penitent Magdalene(ca. 1630). Oil on canvas.

Best known for his half-length and single-figure devotional pictures, Dolci was also a gifted painter of altarpieces and portraits as well as a highly accomplished draughtsman. He created his first works of artin the mid-1620s, after entering the studio of the Florentine painter Jacopo Vignali (1592–1664) in 1625. Among his first patrons were members of the Medici family and foreign nobility, who immediately recognized his reverence for detail, brilliant palette, and seemingly enameled surfaces.

New Scholarship

This exhibition moves beyond the notion of Dolci as a sentimental painter or an exclusively devotional one, andreturns to an appreciation of the aesthetic merits, naturalistic underpinnings, and cultural context of the artist’s work. Exhibiting Dolci’s oeuvre chronologically with attention to autograph works by the artist, the exhibition will exceed long standing prejudices by presenting the artist’s exquisite surfaces and breathtaking palette alongside preparatory drawings. Such juxtaposition will revealthe sheer technical virtuosity of the artist as well as the naturalistic vein that forms the foundation of his entire legacy.

PUBLICATION

Anexhibition catalogue, published by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College and distributed by Yale University Press, will accompany the exhibition. The catalogue will be edited by Julia P. Henshawwith contributions by early modern scholars Francesca Baldassari, Edward Goldberg, Scott Nethersole, Lisa Goldenberg Stoppato, and Eve Straussman-Pflanzer.

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Carlo Dolci, Poetry (Poesia), late 1640s. Oil on panel, 21 1/3 x 16 3/6 inches (54 cm x 42 cm). Florence, Galleria Corsini.

http://www.walksinsideflorence.it/slir/w1024/img_slir//walks/9/7/971436002822.jpg

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A Life of Seduction: Venice in the 1700s

February 23, 2017, 8:08 am

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Gabriel Bella, Fat Thursday Festivity in Piazzetta, 18th century, Venice, Querini Stampalia Foundation

Presented exclusively by the New Orleans Museum of Art, A Life of Seduction: Venice in the 1700s
showcases a remarkable range of objects – costume, glass, handbags, masks, a puppet theater, and exquisite paintings by Canaletto, Guardi, Longhi and others. Renowned for its beauty and singularity, Venice played a central role in the history of Western art. In the 18th century, the city experienced a revival in the arts and was the premier destination for intellectuals and travelers. Venetians cultivated a distinctive and in influential tradition of street life, festivals, and fashion.

Guest-curated by the former director of the Civic Museums of Venice, Giandomenico Romanelli, the exhibition is organized around four themes: A City that Lives on Water, the Celebration of Power, Aristocratic Life in Town and Country, and the City as Theater.

Venice in the 1700s

Venetian Manufacture Finial from Gondola XVIII century Iron Venice, Museo Correr

Venetian Manufacture Hat (Corno) of Doge Francesco Morosini late 17th century Brocade factory Venice, Museo Correr

Venetian Manufacture, Sugar bowl, 18th-century, glass and chalcedony, Venice, Museo del Vetro

Venice’s relationship to water is clearly expressed in its nickname: “The Bride of the Sea.” From the early medieval period, the Venetian Republic held maritime dominance of the Mediterranean and was Europe’s earliest portal to the East. A bird’s-eye view by Joseph Heintz the Younger (1600-1678), shows the all-encompassing role of the sea for Venetians (see gallery above). Following earlier traditions, Heintz presents the city with cartographic accuracy, emphasizing both its layout and architecture.

The city’s canals are its most important thoroughfares, providing efficient, elegant passage, and relief from the tiny, bustling streets of its 117 islands. Opulent palaces line the city’s Grand Canal and function as the regal backdrop for the frequent, civic pageantry staged on and in view of water.
In the 18th century, the canals of Venice become an artistic subject in their own right. Appreciation for the city’s singular beauty inspired the development of a tradition of view painting, the vedute. Travelers on the Grand Tour were eager for mementos, and many pictures of all types were created for export to satisfy the demand.

The gondola is the signature conveyance of Venice. Its unique, eminently stylish shape is designed for elegance and speed. The exhibition features two gondola models exquisitely crafted in miniature. An elaborate gondola ornament, also included in the exhibition, replicates the motifs of Egyptian Islamic metalwork, demonstrating the distinctly Venetian integration of western and eastern motifs so notable in the city’s architecture and decorative arts.

Venice was led by a tightknit group of patrician families, who each year elected a Doge as their leader. The second section of the exhibition explores the ceremony that developed around the Doge’s election process and the office itself. A painting by a follower of Joseph Heintz the Younger, Fantastic Vision of the Triumph of Venice (see gallery above), envisions a fanciful celebration of the Doge. Adapted from the traditional subject of the “triumphal entry,” the Doge is dressed in armor, riding an impossibly huge, unwieldy chariot. Flag-waving attendants celebrate him and angels sound trumpets of fame overhead. Two elephants haul the entourage, symbolizing Venice’s contacts with the exotic East.

Venice embraced luxury and masking

Venice was a center for luxury goods, including glass, furniture and textiles, all of which are featured in the exhibition’s sumptuous display of private life. A commanding, fanciful rococo desk lent by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, with its curving lines, gilt wood and delicate painted motifs is a true highlight (see gallery above). The exhibition gives special attention to fine apparel. Public and civic dress were highly regulated in the city, where strict sumptuary laws fixed appearance according to social class and gender. Black was the norm for public appearance in Venice, but in private both men and women dressed in sumptuous silks, examples of which are on display.

The city boasted 17 theaters featuring opera and commedia dell’arte plays. Antonio Vivaldi worked and composed music in the city for forty years. Carlo Goldoni, at his Goldoni Theater, introduced audiences to innovative, witty productions of sophisticated complexity. His plays remain beloved by Italians. Theaters in Venice were open to all classes and the expansion of theatergoing in this period represents an important turning point in public entertainment.

By the 13th century, the wearing of masks was unique to the culture of Venice, which came to be called the “city of masks.” Masks were worn during Carnival, but Venetians often wore masks when appearing in public at other times. Seemingly a way to preserve modesty, the mask was in fact liberating. It allowed a certain anonymity and facilitated open contact and mixing between social classes and genders. The mask served to subvert a rigid social hierarchy. In 1709 city magistrates held a meeting devoted to concerns about the practice, reflecting the impact ‘masking’ had on Venetian culture. Little changed, however. As one 18th-century French tourist said, “The entire town is disguised.”

The staging of elaborate ceremonial festivities marking liturgical and political events became increasingly popular in the course of the 18th century. For example, regattas on the Grand Canal were staged to honor visiting rulers and diplomats, and great emphasis was placed on merrymaking of all sorts.

Gabriel Bella’s painting, Giovedì Grasso, depicts the celebration of the last Thursday before Lent (see gallery above). It remains a major festival in Venice, and was initiated as early as 1162. The festival centerpiece is a large, wooden tower, placed in front of the Doges’ Palace, from which reworks were launched. The painting also includes acrobats balancing on poles and o of each other, as part of the “feats of strength” competition. A wide array of other competitions were staged in squares across the city; many of them are represented in uproarious detail in paintings in the exhibition.
Vanessa Schmid, Senior Research Curator for European Art

A Life of Seduction: Venice in the 1700s will be on view in the Ella West Freeman Galleries from February 16 – May 21, 2017.

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Masterpieces from the Leiden Collection. The Age of Rembrandt

February 23, 2017, 8:20 am

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Musée du Louvre

22 February - 22 May 2017

As part of its season devoted to the Dutch Golden Age, the Musée du Louvre is presenting a selection of masterpieces by 17th-century Dutch painters from the collection of Thomas Kaplan and his wife, Daphne Recanati Kaplan. This selection, brought together at a major international museum for the first time, showcases the largest private collection of works by Rembrandt. Visitors will discover some thirty paintings and drawings by the greatest painters of the Golden Age from the region of Leiden in the Netherlands, primarily ten works by Rembrandt and a painting recently attributed to the artist.

Among the Leiden Collection’s Rembrandt paintings is the Minerva, a particularly spectacular large-format work, part of a series of strong women and mythological goddesses.

As its name indicates, this collection highlights the “fine painters” of Leiden, among them Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris. It also includes a number of Rembrandts—currently the largest private holding of his work—and numerous “Rembrandtesques.” Thus the collection is made up of excellent pictures by the greatest artists—Jan Steen, Rembrandt, and Jan Lievensz, and their master Lastman, Frans van Mieris, Gerrit Dou, and others—and covers the various specialties of Dutch art.

The thematic presentation shows how a single painter can practice different genres. It also reminds us that Dutch painting, often seen as simultaneously ribald, colorful, charming, and bourgeois, draws on a mixed repertoire and makes use of all the modes from the satirical to the solemn.

On the occasion of this exhibition, the large-format painting Eliezer and Rebecca at the Well is to be officially gifted to the Musée du Louvre by Thomas Kaplan and Daphne Recanati Kaplan. The work was painted by Ferdinand Bol (1616–1680), one of Rembrandt’s most talented pupils. Acquired by the Kaplans in 2009, the work has been on loan to the Louvre’s Dutch galleries since 2010.

Jan Lievens_Boy in a cape and turban (Portrait of the Prince Rupert of the Palatinate)(c) New York_The Leiden

Rembrandt Self-Portrait with Shadded eyes (c) New York The Leiden Gallery

Jan Steen Prayer before the Meal (c)New York The Leiden Gallery
Gerrit Dou
Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an Artist’s Atelier
c) New York\The Leiden Galler
Rembrandt
Unconscious patient (Allegory of Smell)
(c) New York The Leiden Gallery

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Bruegel: Defining a Dynasty

February 23, 2017, 8:54 am

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Holburne Museum

February 11, 2017 – June 4, 2017

The Holburne Museum is proud to announce the UK’s first exhibition devoted to the Bruegel dynasty, including recent attributions for two paintings from the Museum’s own collection. Bruegel: Defining a Dynasty will unravel the complex Bruegel family tree, revealing the originality and diversity of Antwerp’s famous artistic dynasty across four generations through 29 works, including masterpieces from the National Gallery, Royal Collection Trust, the National Trust, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Ashmolean Museum and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Wedding Dance in the Open Air, 1607–1614, oil on panel, 36.6 × 49 cm, A45, © The Holburne Museum

A key work in the exhibition will be Wedding Dance in the Open Air, an oil painting from the Holburne’s own collection which, following conservation work and technical examination, can be attributed firmly to the hand of Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Previously thought to be the work of a copyist or follower of Brueghel, it now takes its place as the only version of this popular scene in a UK public museum.

Together with Robbing the Bird’s Nest

Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Visit to a Farmhouse, c. 1620–30, oil on panel, 36.5 × 49.4 cm, A46, ©The Holburne Museum. Photography by Dan Brown

and the Visit to a Farmhouse, also featured in the exhibition, this new discovery makes the Holburne Museum the primary collection of Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s work in the UK.

A book to accompany the exhibition Bruegel: Defining a Dynasty is written by Amy Orrock and published by Philip Wilson.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 'Spring', oil on panel, 60.5 x 75.8cm, 1632, Society of Antiquaries of London (Kelmscott Manor)

Jan Brueghel the Elder, A Stoneware Vase of Flowers, c. 1607–1608, oil on panel, 56 × 89.5 cm, PD.20–1975, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Two Peasants Binding Faggots, c. 1620–50, oil on panel, 36.2 × 27.3 cm, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham

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CHAGALL: COLOUR AND MUSIC

February 25, 2017, 11:21 am

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Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
January 28 to June 11, 2017

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) presents CHAGALL: COLOUR AND MUSIC, the largest exhibition ever devoted to Marc Chagall (1887-1985) in Canada. The exhibition explores, for the first time, the omnipresence of music in the artist’s life and work, through close to 340 works and a major documentary corpus. This unusual approach demonstrates the degree to which Chagall’s aesthetic and artistic world is imbued with music, from his paintings, works on paper, costumes, sculptures, ceramics, stained glass and tapestries, to his creations for the stage and his grand decorative and architectural projects.

This major exhibition reveals some fabulous costumes rarely seen by the public and some decors produced by the artist for the ballets Aleko (1942), The Firebird (1945) and Daphnis and Chloé (1958-59), and the opera The Magic Flute (1967), thanks to some exceptional loans granted by the Opéra de Paris, the New York City Ballet and the New York Metropolitan Opera. They are staged in such a way as to recreate the particular atmosphere of each show by means of subtle special effects.

With its fully spatialized musical accompaniment, the exhibition is accompanied by various multimedia devices: music, films, photo slides and especially an extraordinary projection of the famous ceiling of the Opéra de Paris, in the Palais Garnier. In partnership with the Opéra national de Paris, Google lab and Google Art Project in Paris digitized in ultra-high definition this 220 m2 painting completed in 1964 by Chagall. A huge technological challenge, some stunning zoom effects were used on these images to reveal the splendour of the material and the meticulous detail, which up to now have been invisible to the naked eye, of this monumental decor, Chagall’s tribute to 14 composers.

The exhibition also explains how the ceiling of the Opéra de Paris, and the decorative and architectural programme of the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York (1966) embody the concept of total art dear to the artist and testify to his research into the universality of music and how it is revealed in architecture.

Following the joint presentation of the exhibition at the Cité de la musique – Philharmonie de Paris, and La Piscine – Musée d’art et d’industrie André Diligent de Roubaix in 2015-2016, the Montreal edition has been enhanced by over 100 works, including some rarely loaned masterpieces: Golgotha (1912), Self-portrait with Seven Fingers (1912-1913), the Birth (1911- 1912) and the Green Violinist (1923-1924), brought together by some major institutions, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée national d’art moderne (Paris), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme (Paris), the Musée national Marc Chagall (Nice), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Fondation Beyeler (Riehen/Bâle) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Nathalie Bondil, Director and Chief Curator of the MMFA explains: “An artist without borders, Marc Chagall orchestrated a work consisting of many forms of expression: easel painting, mural decor, book illustrations, lithographic collections, stage costumes, sculptures, ceramics, stained glass windows, mosaics... In this score, music provides all the harmony: songs from his childhood, religious prayers, fairs, readings, ballet and opera performances, and of course a broad repertoire from classical (Bach and Mozart) and contemporary (Schoenberg and Messiaen) composers. Here, astonishingly, for the first time, the soundtrack of his life forms the subject of an exhaustive exhibition.”

“This exhibition is an original exploration of all the sounds and all the colours of which the œuvre of Marc Chagall is made. Multidisciplinary and interactive, with the exceptional works, and the inclusion of music, photographs, and films along the way, it is an invitation to a sensory immersion in the work of one of the most important and remarkable artists of the 20th century,” added Ambre Gauthier, Guest Curator.

“As Chagall constantly repeated, the three most essential elements in life for him were the Bible, love and Mozart. His entire work is imbued with music. I had the great honour of knowing Marc Chagall during the last years of his life, when I realized how deep his knowledge of music was, ranging from klezmer to Stockhausen, and also of his interest in complete art, which is evident in his theatrical and monumental productions. It is a special pleasure to have had the privilege of lending my support to this event, which reveals the new light cast by this genius,” added Mikhaïl Rudy, Musical Director of the Exhibition.

“With this explosion of luminous colours and shapes, through which the visitor is invited to succumb to the enchantment, and to discover and explore the pictorial and sculptural world of Marc Chagall, among roots, rhythms and harmonies in balance, the artist consumed by his thirst for constant renewal reveals himself to be a very involved, attuned and visionary witness to the times of light and darkness that still concern us today,” stated Meret Meyer, Vice-president of the Comité Marc Chagall, and Bella Meyer, granddaughters of the artist.

The MMFA’s interest in the links uniting music and the visual arts in Chagall is consistent with the themes of its earlier exhibitions Warhol Live: Music and Dance in Andy Warhol’s Work (2008) and Splendore a Venezia: Art and Music from the Renaissance to Baroque in Venice (2014).

This foray into the enchanting world of this painter of music also marks the opening of the Pavilion for Peace, which is dedicated to international art and education. This fifth pavilion of the MMFA, inaugurated just in time for the 375th anniversary of Montreal, bears the name of the Jewish Holocaust-survivor couple and great donors, collectors and music-lovers, Michal and Renata Hornstein. This exhibition is dedicated to them.

CREDITS AND CURATORIAL TEAM

This exhibition was organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with the LosAngeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and initiated by the Cité de la musique – Philharmonie de Paris, and La Piscine – Musée d’art et d’industrie André Diligent, Roubaix, with the support of the Chagall Estate.

The Guest Curator of the exhibition is Ambre Gauthier, who holds a PhD in art history. The curatorial committee is composed of Bruno Gaudichon, Chief Curator, La Piscine – Musée d’art et d’industrie André Diligent, Roubaix; Stephanie Barron, Senior Curator of Modern Art, LACMA; and Meret Meyer of the Comité Marc Chagall. In Montreal, the curators are Nathalie Bondil, MMFA Director and Chief Curator, and Anne Grace, Curator – Exhibitions and Education, MMFA.

The musical director is the internationally renowned pianist Mikhail Rudy.

The exhibition design is by Menkes Shooner Dagenais Letourneux Architectes, under the direction of Sandra Gagné, Head of Exhibitions Production at the MMFA.

THE DESIGN: A SYMPHONY OF COLOURS

The layout of this major exhibition is both chronological and thematic, covering all periods of the artist’s long and productive career – his years in Russia, his Parisian period, his exile in New York, his time in Mexico and his life in the South of France – and examines all his forms of expression.

Cultural and Religious Roots Music was at the heart of Chagall’s art from the very beginning. Selected drawings and paintings give us a sense of the cultural and religious context of his childhood in Vitebsk in White Russia (today Belarus), the role of song in the synagogue and the influence of his family members, several of whom were musicians. Large paintings of the archetypal violinist demonstrate the importance of this figure in his work and the ubiquity of the violin itself, the instrument of the exodus, carried by the Jewish people as they fled or migrated. Music will also be heard in the first galleries in order to give visitors a deeper, transversal experience of Chagall’s work.

The exhibition will feature a klezmer violin decorated with the Star of David, which would have belonged to a typical Belarusian family like Chagall’s. It is on loan from Amnon Weinstein, the celebrated luthier who has spent the last twenty years locating and restoring violins that were played by Jews in the concentration camps and ghettos during the Nazi era. Weinstein, many of whose relatives perished during the Holocaust, named these instruments “Violins of Hope.”

TOUR HIGHLIGHTS

MARC CHAGALL (1987-1985)

Music is omnipresent in the artistic trajectory of Marc Chagall, from his native city of Vitebsk, Belarus, to his arrival in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. Fostered by his family environment and Hasidic Jewish roots, Chagall’s sensitivity to music found full expression in the emblematic figures that are recognized as archetypes of his art and as part of a visual voyage by way of spoken and written language. The opera, ballets and monumental art to which the artist brought all his creativity — from The Theatre of Jewish Art (Moscow, 1919-1920), to Aleko (Mexico City, 1942), The Firebird (New York, 1945), Daphnis and Chloe (Brussels and Paris, 1958-1959) and The Magic Flute (New York, 1967) — demonstrate the connections he wove between music and the design of sets and costumes.

Ambitious projects like the Paris Opera ceiling (1964) and the decoration in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera in New York (1966) attest to a concept of total art achieved through an exploration of the universality of music and its representation in space. Chagall pursued this concept in ceramics, sculpture, collage, large paintings and even light, as he worked with stained glass to fill space with the magical colour of sound.

MUSIC AND FAMILY LIFE

Some of the manifestations of music in the art of Chagall include his drawings and paintings of musicians and musical instruments. From the start of his career in Vitebsk, Chagall would paint many portraits of women and men, often holding mandolins, who appear to be singing ballads. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century in Russia, when everyone knew the songs of Tchaikovsky and Glinka, this was the most common means of making music at home.

Yet the musical figure perhaps most closely associated with Chagall is the violinist.

This symbolic, recurring character throughout the artist’s career expresses the whole gamut of emotions prompted by music. From the Green Violinist to wedding scenes featuring klezmer bands in which the violin plays the leading part, this king of instruments is omnipresent in Chagall’s oeuvre. These depictions, which feature scenes of local customs, tell us much about shtetl life in the early twentieth century, but it is the tenderness and compassion with which the painter regards his subjects that move us the most.

Birth, 1911-1912, Oil on canvas, 113.4 x 159.3 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Maurice E. Culberg. © SODRAC & ADAGP 2017, Chagall ®. Photo The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY

Green Violinist, 1923-1924

Oil on canvas, 198 x 108.6 cm. New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift. © SODRAC & ADAGP 2017, Chagall ®. Photo The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY

This iconic painting is based on earlier versions of the same subject. In the culture Chagall grew up in, the fiddler would also have been known as a klezmer. The Yiddish word klezmer is derived from the Hebrew words klay (instrument) and zemer (music). Thus the literal meaning of klezmer is “instrument of song.” Klezmers were mainly travelling musicians, living under precarious conditions and sharing in the many peregrinations of the European Jews. They were poor, moving from village to village, and hence used no heavy or expensive instruments. The readily transportable violin, which lends itself to modulations and glissandos, is unquestionably the one most played by these artists. In Chagall’s work, these nomadic musicians – more than the music itself – play a leading role. In addition to their “floating” nature, on a roof or over Vitebsk, they are quintessential in the nostalgia that prevails in the world of this Jewish painter. Indeed, klezmers are an integral part of Jewish folklore, in which traditions seem fixed for all time.

Self-portrait with Seven Fingers, 1912-1913

Oil on canvas, 132 x 93 cm. Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, on loan from the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands. © SODRAC & ADAGP 2017, Chagall ®. Photo Banque d'images, ADAGP / Art Resource, NY

The rich iconographic and stylistic references in this painting demonstrate Chagall’s multiple allegiances during his first Parisian period. The artist has quickly absorbed the lessons of Cubism, evident in the fragmented representation of himself holding a palette, and naturalistically depicts the Eiffel Tower, visible through the window on the left, clearly placing himself in the capital of the avant-garde art world. The seven fingers on the artist’s hand relate to a Yiddish saying whereby to do something with seven fingers means to do it very well and with all one’s heart.

However, Chagall eschews symbolism for a formal explanation of the self-portrait: “The painting was made in La Ruche. I was in top shape then. I believe I painted it in one week. It’s my painting ‘To Russia, donkeys and others’ on an easel. I was influenced by the constructions of the Cubists, but did not renounce by previous inspiration. Why seven fingers? To introduce another construction, a fantastic element alongside realist elements. Dissonance adds to psychic effect. The text in Hebrew characters, Russia-Paris, is but a visual element.”

RHYTHM AND COLOUR

Chagall moved to Paris in 1911 and in 1912 rented a studio in La Ruche – the now celebrated rotunda building that housed 140 artists’ studios – where he encountered the art of Léger and Picasso and the Orphist and Futurist movements, and made friends with the writers Apollinaire and Cendrars. These influences fostered a new way of constructing pictorial space, but Chagall also sought his own form of modernism. Like other contemporary Jewish artists, he drew from past forms to find and impose his own voice, recalling the imprint of the calligraphic lettering on the parchments and sacred scrolls of his childhood: “My family belonged to the Hasidic community. Music and religion played a major part in the world of my childhood and left a deep impression on my work, as did everything that belonged to that world.”

The musicality of colour, through compositions of coloured scales and scores, is omnipresent in Chagall’s oeuvre, contained in his early works and fully liberated during his first period in Paris. By the early 1920s, the theories of Arnold Schoenberg and the twelve-tone movement were developing the notion of the Klangfarbenmelodie (melody of tone colours), which explores timbre based on the paradigm of tone colour. While Alexander Scriabin and later Olivier Messiaen experimented by associating colours with specific notes, Chagall’s chromatic and plastic investigations arose more from his interest in composing his own personal world of sound. As both a symbolic and compositional element, colour contained and transmitted the essence of the universal and humanist message he wished to convey through its visual, emotional and metaphysical power.

Half-past Three (The Poet), 1911

Oil on canvas, 195.9 x 144.8 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. © SODRAC & ADAGP 2017, Chagall ®

Executed shortly after Chagall’s arrival in Paris, this painting is a testimony to the stimulating art world in which he found himself. It portrays the Russian poet Mazin, likely a regular visitor to the artist’s studio in the early hours of the morning. Stylistically demonstrating Chagall’s assimilation of different avant-garde movements, the picture’s representation of the poet’s head, turned upside down, relates to a Yiddish idiom: translated literally, the popular phrase “fardreiter kop” means a “turned head,” expressing a state of confusion or giddiness that borders on madness. Chagall adopted the pictorial devices of Cubism and Futurism in the fragmentation of the body and background into faceted planes and diagonal shafts of colour.

The isolated, easily legible parts of the image (such as the cat, book and flowers) combined with abstract form, as well as emphasis on colour, reveal Chagall’s strong affinity with the painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Their paintings, termed “Orphism” by the poet Apollinaire, were structured with vibrant and luminous colour, and perhaps reminded Chagall of the folk art of his native Russia. An additional reference to the artist’s homeland can be seen in the fragments in Cyrillic script of a love poem by the contemporary Russian poet Aleksandr Blok on the figure’s lap.

The Blue Circus, 1950-1952

Oil on canvas, 232.5 × 175.8 cm. Nice, Musée national Marc Chagall, on deposit from the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris. © SODRAC & ADAGP 2016, Chagall ®. © CNAC / MNAM / Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo Gérard Blot

Commissioned along with The Dance (1950-1952) to decorate the new auditorium of the Watergate Theatre in London, The Blue Circus is an emblematic work in Chagall’s oeuvre. The theme of the circus, metaphor of the world, is associated with the Mediterranean, in terms of atmosphere and colour, as well as its mermaid iconography, in this composition in which a trapeze artist balances above a green horse with human eyes, the artist’s double in animal form. A fish, similar to the one found on the designs for the scenery for Daphnis and Chloe and on the ceramics that date from the same time, offers a bouquet to the trapeze artist. The colour blue, in navy and indigo tones, imposes its nocturnal presence on the whole surface of the painting lit up by a violinist-moon.

BALLETS AND OPERA:

ALEKO – THE BALLET (MEXICO, 1942)

In 1942, Chagall was commissioned by the Ballet Theater to design the sets and costumes for the ballet Aleko. The ballet was planned for New York, but the cost of mounting it there proved too onerous, and the production was moved to Mexico, where qualified labour could be had for far less. Chagall, his wife Bella, Massine and the Ballet Theatre troupe all travelled to Mexico City to complete work on the production and begin rehearsing in the great theatre of the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Chagall quickly fell under the charm of the city’s colourful atmosphere and the kindness and gaiety of its inhabitants. He also encountered for the first time the mystical vibration with which the Mexican light instills colour. The mythologies of Mexico and Russia seemed to fuse at this time for

Backdrop design for Aleko: “A Wheatfield on a Summer’s Afternoon,” 1942, gouache, watercolour and pencil on paper, 38.5 x 57.2 cm. New York, Museum of Modern Art, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. © SODRAC & ADAGP 2017, Chagall ®. Photo © The Museum of Modern Art / Licenced by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

the painter, and he drew upon his most precious memories, imbuing them with new life. Chagall executed the four backdrops for Aleko in Mexico – monumental compositions that set the poetic and chromatic tone for each episode of the story as portrayed in the ballet’s four scenes.
The story of Aleko has the simplicity of a melodrama or an ancient tragedy. Aleko, a young Russian aristocrat, weary of his frivolous life, has joined a band of gypsies. He then falls in love with Zemphira, the daughter of the tribe’s chief, but surprises her in the arms of another man. Mad with jealousy, he kills the gypsy girl and her lover. Devastated by the death of his daughter, the gypsy chief banishes Aleko from the community forever. The narrative, based on one of Pushkin’s most famous poems, touched Chagall deeply, for it evoked exile, the nomadic life and the lost aroma of Russia.

Costume for Aleko: Gypsy with playing cards, 1942. Private collection. © SODRAC & ADAGP 2017, Chagall ®. © Archives Marc et Ida Chagall, Paris

THE FIREBIRD – THE BALLET (NEW YORK, 1945)

When The Firebird premiered on October 24, 1945, at the Ballet Theater in New York, this ballet was already legendary. Diaghilev had staged a first version in 1910 for the second season of the Ballets Russes. The premiere, which took place later that year at the Opéra de Paris, was a triumph. Sol Hurok, impresario of the Ballet Theatre in New York, had the idea of restaging the famous ballet. Scheduling it for the company’s 1945–46 season, he invited Adolph Bolm to create a new choreography and Chagall to design the sets and costumes. As Hurok wanted the new version to be slightly shorter, Stravinsky, who had been living in the United States since 1939, was asked to rework his score.

In 1944, Chagall suffered the terrible blow of his beloved Bella’s death. Working on the preparatory sketches for the sets and costumes for The Firebird, he rediscovered in painting something of the paradise he had lost. Inspired by a Russian tale, The Firebird tells the story of a young prince, Ivan Tsarevitch, who frees a captive princess from a spell by means of a magnificent bird with feathers of fire. The old Russian tale the ballet is based on corresponded perfectly to his fantastic imaginary world. The painting he did for the project triggered a renaissance, for it allowed him to manifest via form and colour the hope he believed in so deeply and the message at the heart of The Firebird – the life-affirming power of love.

Backdrop design for The Firebird: “The Enchanted Palace” (Act II), 1945, gouache, graphite and gold paper collage on paper, 37.5 x 62 cm. Private collection. © SODRAC & ADAGP 2017, Chagall ®. © Archives Marc et Ida Chagall, Paris

Costume for The Firebird: the sorcerer Koschei, 1949, jacket, bodice, pants, spats, gloves, mask, headdress. New York City Ballet. © SODRAC & ADAGP 2017, Chagall ®. Photo © Museum Associates / LACMA

DAPHNIS AND CHLOE – THE BALLET (BRUSSELS AND PARIS, 1958-1959)

The French publisher Tériade was eager to produce an illustrated edition of the ancient Greek romance Daphnis and Chloe, written by Longus, and asked Chagall to produce illustrations for the book, inciting the artist to make his first trip to Greece in 1952. The visit was a revelation that had a profound impact. Chagall rediscovered the light of Greece and was struck by its penetrating clarity. He felt he was encountering the very spirit of the Greek writer’s narrative and sensed the shades of ancient gods emerging from the blue undulations of the Mediterranean.

Over the course of the next few years, Chagall would interpret the story of Daphnis and Chloe in lithographs, on ceramics, as well as in costumes and sets for the ballet, for which the musical score was written by the French composer Maurice Ravel. Commissioned by the Opéra de Paris ballet, Chagall’s version of Daphnis and Chloe was first staged with a new choreography by Serge Lifar, on July 8, 1958, at the Brussels World’s Fair. A year later, George Skibine created a new version of the ballet, which was performed in Paris.

As always, Chagall worked closely with the choreographer – first Lifar, then Skibine – and with the dancers. His understanding of bodily movement and gesture was acute, and his belief in the importance of the dynamism of line was such that for some costumes he painted directly on the dancers’ leotards. He achieved the kind of fusion of painting and movement first envisaged in 1911.

Backdrop design for Daphnis and Chloe, 1958, gouache, graphite, coloured pencil and tempera on paper, 56 x 79.5 cm. Private collection. © SODRAC & ADAGP 2017, Chagall ®. © Archives Marc et Ida Chagall, Paris

Costumes for Daphnis and Chloe:
A Shepherdess, 1959. Paris, Opéra national. © SODRAC & ADAGP 2017, Chagall ®. Photo © Museum Associates / LACMA

THE MAGIC FLUTE – THE OPERA (NEW YORK, 1967)

Chagall’s ultimate stage experience would focus on Mozart’s Magic Flute. The idea for the production came from Rudolph Bing, director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, who was planning a revival of The Magic Flute as part of the inaugural season of the new “Met.” Chagall, who felt the same ardent admiration for Mozart as he did for Rembrandt, embraced the project enthusiastically. The Magic Flute was for him not only a musical masterpiece but also a philosophical source comparable to the Bible. He saw the work as a form of religious ritual, illustrating the opposing forces that are part of creation and that battle for power over the human soul.

It took Chagall three years to design the sets and costumes, and the huge number of sketches, drawings and models he executed, on display here, testify to the creative excitement it inspired in the artist. Working on the complex staging, it was vital to take full account of the singers – their precise position on the stage and their poses as dictated by the narrative, vocal technique and stage directions. It required a scenographic approach that was less balletic and closer to the strategies employed for theatre and the mass spectacles of Russia’s revolutionary period.

Chagall paid attention to the smallest detail of scenery and costumes: every rock, flat, column and statue, every accessory was infused with meaning. But the greatest care was devoted to the fantastic beings that seemed to spring from a realm imagined jointly by Mozart and Chagall. The luminous world of Chagall’s Magic Flute, combining enchantment, farce and drama, is at once a fairy tale and an initiation story. The Magic Flute had its premiere on February 19, 1967, during the new Metropolitan Opera’s inaugural season. Greeting the audience as they entered the lobby were two monumental compositions by Chagall, The Sources of Music and The Triumph of Music. The opening night was a triumph.

Variation on the theme of The Magic Flute, 1966-1967, gouache, coloured pencil and collage on Japan paper, 50.5 x 62 cm. Private collection. © SODRAC & ADAGP 2017, Chagall ®. Photo © Museum Associates / LACMA

Costume for The Magic Flute: Green Face Costume (Queen of the Night), 1967 (mask reconstruction: 2016), costume, mask, shoes, tights, gloves. New York, Metropolitan Opera. © SODRAC & ADAGP 2017, Chagall ®. Photo © Museum Associates / LACMA.

LARGE DECORS:

THE SOURCES OF MUSIC AND THE TRIUMPH OF MUSIC (NEW YORK, 1966)

Marc Chagall (1887-1985), Final model for the wall painting at the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York: The Triumph of Music (detail), 1966, tempera, gouache and collage on paper mounted on Korean paper, 109 × 91.5 cm. Private collection.

© SODRAC & ADAGP 2017, Chagall ®. © Archives Marc et Ida Chagall, Paris
Marc Chagall working on the panels for New York’s Metropolitan Opera: The Triumph of Music, 1966. Paris, Atelier des Gobelins. © SODRAC & ADAGP 2017, Chagall ®. Photo © Izis-Manuel Bidermanas

The Sources of Music and The Triumph of Music – two panels created by Chagall for Lincoln Center, home of the Metropolitan Opera – form a diptych on the theme of musical creation. The vertical panels, each measuring approximately 11 by 9 metres, become part of the architecture of the building designed by Wallace Harrison and welcome the audience into the auditorium.

The Sources of Music, the predominantly yellow right panel, depicts a theatrical King David in double
profile, playing the harp in the centre of a serene composition populated with musicians, animals
and angels that recalls the sets Chagall created about that time for the opera The Magic Flute.

Orpheus occupies the lower part of the composition, counterbalancing David’s movement and initiating a leftward thrust that symbolizes transition and metamorphosis.

The explosively forceful Triumph of Music, the predominantly red left panel, shows a victorious hybrid angel blowing a trumpet in the middle of a whirlwind that sweeps along musicians, dancers and fantastic animals. The centrifugal motion is accentuated by the circles drawn in the centre of the composition and the rays emanating from a solar prism to the right of the angel. Both panels include fragments of the skyline of New York, the city where the artist lived in 1941 during his exile. The skyscrapers – formal elements reinforcing the verticality of the composition – are also an homage to the metropolis for which this decoration was intended.

THE OPÉRA DE PARIS CEILING (PARIS, 1964)

Marc Chagall, Final model for the ceiling of the Opéra de Paris, 1963, gouache on cloth-backed paper, 140 x 140 cm. Private collection.© SODRAC & ADAGP 2017, Chagall ®. © Archives Marc et Ida Chagall, Paris

Perhaps the most outstanding example of Chagall’s love of music, this magnificent circular painting is a symphony of colours and shapes. As viewers gazing upon it, we are caught up in a continuous movement: dancers, angels, swans, couples and roosters swirl as though dancing a waltz or a farandole. Nothing is static; all is rhythmically organized by the arrangement of the panels of colour. The compelling movement is the essence of the painting. Chagall chose to depict key works by his fourteen favourite composers, and conceived of the circular decoration as a flower with five petals, each of a different colour. Each petal is associated with two composers: white for Rameau and Debussy, red for Ravel and Stravinsky, yellow for Tchaikovsky and Adam, blue for Mussorgsky and Mozart, and green for Wagner and Berlioz.

The centre of the flower, painted later, is a sun celebrating Beethoven, Gluck, Bizet and Verdi. Chagall reinterpreted the pieces he knew so well by allowing his own poetry free rein. For Gluck’s opera Orpheus and Eurydice, for example, the absent Orpheus is represented by his lyre, and it is an angel out of a Quattrocento Annunciation that comes to meet Eurydice, its arms full of flowers, to the music of the “Dance of the Blessed Spirits.” The subject of love, found all over the ceiling, culminates in the Tristan and Isolde panel, a variation on the theme of the couple, which, as if by way of Wagnerian modulations, takes us to Romeo and Juliet and the dreamlike depiction of an antique medallion.

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Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer: May 17 Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale

February 27, 2017, 12:43 pm

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Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, oil on canvas, in three parts, 1963.

Christie’s will feature Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1963 as a central highlight in its May 17 Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale in New York (estimate: $50,000,000-70,000,000). Painted in 1963, Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer marks the beginning of Francis Bacon’s relationship with Dyer, his greatest source of inspiration. This triptych is the very first portrait Bacon made of his longtime muse who came to feature in many of the artist’s most arresting and sought after works. Dyer came to appear in at least forty of Bacon’s paintings, many of which were created after his death in Paris in 1971. The convulsive beauty of this work represents the flowering of Bacon’s infatuation with Dyer, and is only one of five triptychs of Dyer that the artist painted in this intimate scale.

The present example once resided in the collection of Bacon’s close friend, Roald Dahl. The celebrated author became an adamant admirer of Bacon’s work upon first encounter at a touring exhibition in 1958. However, collecting his work was not financially viable at the time. In the 1960’s, Dahl’s career saw new heights. He published celebrated books, James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and he wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film, You Only Live Twice. Buoyed by his newfound success, Dahl acquired four judiciously chosen works by Bacon between 1964 and 1967. The present triptych was among them.

Loic Gouzer, Deputy Chairman, Post-War and Contemporary Art, remarked: “Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer is a masterful triptych, which was completed within the first three months of Bacon’s encounter with Dyer. This powerful portrait exemplifies the dynamism and complex psychology that the artist is most revered for. George Dyer is to Bacon what Dora Maar was to Picasso. He is arguably the most important model of the second half of the 20th century, because Dyer’s persona as well and physical traits acted as a catalyst for Bacon’s pictorial breakthroughs. The Francis Bacon that we know today, would not exist without the transformative encounter that he had with George Dyer.”

Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer was completed during the greatest moment of personal and professional contentment in Bacon's career. When the artist met Dyer towards the end of 1963, Bacon was being praised by a public who now saw him as a master of figurative painting. This came on the heels of his first major retrospective in May 1962 at the Tate in London, which was followed by a triumphant exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in October 1963.

Over the past 40 years, Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer has been a central fixture in many of the artist’s most important exhibitions. It was most recently featured in Bacon’s celebrated 2008-2009 retrospective that traveled to the Tate Britain, London, the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It has also been shown in the National Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh and the Moderna Museet in the Stockholm, among other institutions.

Also see Francis Bacon at Auction

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Sotheby’s London, 1 March 2017 Surrealist Art Evening Sale

February 28, 2017, 8:55 am

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Salvador Dalí

Moment de transition

oil on canvas

Painted in 1934.

Estimate:

£6,000,000-8,000,000

A rare masterpiece from the crucial decade in which Dalí was creating his most famous imagery, Moment de transition is one of only a handful of works of this calibre that have appeared at auction in the last decade.

Transforming images were a pivotal subject of Dalí’s art in the 1930s, as he used his inventive

powers to undermine reality. The visual instability provoked by the experience of misreading a

given object or configuration could be both a source of pleasure and disquiet. Moment de

transition is a magnificent example of Dalí’s exploration of illusory perceptions within haunted

landscapes – in this case a Catalan landscape with a horse-drawn cart approaching a small,

distant town. However, at closer observation, the wheels of the cart are no more than two sticks

stuck in the ground, and the rider is revealed to be one of the buildings in the distant town. These

empty, melancholic landscapes dominated Dalí’s art in this period, as the artist returned to the

physical and emotional places that shaped his childhood memories.

René Magritte

Le Repas de noces

gouache on paper

Executed in 1940.

Estimate: £900,000-1,200,000

The finest gouache by Magritte to appear on the market in recent times, Le Repas de noces has remained in the same private collection for almost 50 years. This work originates from a
turbulent period of Magritte’s life, as he fled Brussels for France fearing political persecution

following the German invasion. The artist only remained in the hilltop medieval town of

Carcassonne for a few months but the upheaval inevitably had an effect on his art; he produced

very little work, and what he created shook off the hold of reality in favour of his inner world. Le

Repas de noces combines two elements that Magritte explored around this time: a powerful

image of a reclining lion, the trademark of a Brussels food retailer that was an ubiquitous part of

everyday life, mysteriously coupled with a fragile egg on a table top.

Francis Picabia

Ino

watercolour and pencil on paper, in a wood and

coloured mirror frame by Rose Adler

Executed circa 1930

Estimate: £500,000-700,000

Ino belongs to Picabia’s elegant Transparences series, which derives its name from multiple layers of overlapping imagery. The bold frame for Ino was designed by French fashion, furniture and jewellery designer Rose Adler, who was given the work directly by the artist – bringing together Surrealism and Art Deco.

In this work, two faces of undeterminable gender are combined with foliage to create an image of timeless and contemplative beauty. The deliberately obscure quality renders it a seemingly impenetrable allegory with characteristics of a dream or mystic vision. The mysterious work is

named after the Theban queen Ino, an example of Picabia’s tendency to choose titles based on

Biblical characters and Greco-Roman mythology. The Transparences also drew their inspiration

from Romanesque Frescos, Renaissance painting and Catalan art – rich in a combination of

cultural references that together become compositions of great beauty and harmony.

Paul Delvaux

Filles au bord de l’eau

oil on canvas

Painted in 1966.

Estimate: £1,700,000-2,200,000

Giving a glimpse into Delvaux’s fantastical imagination, Filles au bord de l’eau is an alluring and sophisticated example of his Surrealist creation – bringing together the key elements that defined the artist’s mysterious works.

This dream-like scene depicts at once an interior and exterior setting, as architectural elements such as the blue door, mirrors and window frames suggest the conventional structure of a house even as the walls have dramatically opened onto an impressive seascape. The principal protagonist defines the atmosphere of the painting as one of stillness and expectation, with her expressionless gaze and lingering hand gesture directed outside of the composition.

The nude women that surround her recall the gentle beauty of a Botticelli, adding a

sense of timelessness to the scene. Throughout his lifetime, Delvaux refused to provide any sort

of narrative for his compositions – stating ‘these figures recount no history: they are’ - leaving the

viewer to contemplate the perplexing scene.

Jean Arp

Homme-moustache

oil on cut-out board

Executed in 1925.

Estimate: £1,200,000-1,500,000

Guided by chance and intuition, Arp created organic, irregular shapes evocative of natural forms and parts of human anatomy such as Homme-moustache. Although he developed a highly abstract pictorial vocabulary, in his cut-outs and wood reliefs Arp always established a connection between these biomorphic forms and elements of the natural world in such a way as to unveil the poetic elements hidden in everyday images.

André Masson

Hôtel des automates

oil on canvas

Painted in 1939-41.

Estimate: £1,500,000-2,000,000

Complex in its composition and bewilderingly turbulent in its subject- matter, Hôtel des automates belongs to arguably the most tumultuous period in Masson’s personal and artistic life.
During the course of 1939, the artist grew increasingly exasperated with the political adversity threatening Europe, with several of his friends – including André Breton – head to war.

Masson and his family moved to America for the duration of war, only returning to France at the end of 1945.

This painting is a powerful evocation of a disintegrating civilisation and the loss of innocence, dramatically represented by the distorted shapes and disorienting movements of the human body. The composition is divided into several compartments populated with ‘automatons’ – part human, part machine-like creatures – strongly suggestive of both violence and sex.

AUCTION RECORDS FOR CELEBRATED SURREALIST ARTISTS SET AT SOTHEBY’S OVER THE LAST 5 YEARS

 Joan Miró’s Peinture (Étoile Bleue) sold for £23.6 million in June 2012 – An auction record for Surrealist Art
 Salvador Dalí’s Portrait de Paul Éluard sold for £13.5 million in February 2011
 René Magritte’s Le Beau Monde sold for £7.9 million in February 2014
 Paul Delvaux’s Le miroir sold for £7.3 million in February 2016
 Francis Picabia’s Volucelle II sold for $8.8 million in November 2013
 Kay Sage’s Le Passage sold for £7.3 million in February 2014
 Jean Arp’s Torse tenant par la bride une tête de cheval sold for $3.9 million in November
2013
 Man Ray’s Promenade sold for $5.9 million in November 2013
 Yves Tanguy’s Deux fois du noir sold for £2.5 million in February 2012

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Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale Sotheby’s 1 March 2017: Klimt, Picasso, Gauguin & Modigliani

February 28, 2017, 9:25 am

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Gustav Klimt, Bauerngarten (Blumengarten), oil on canvas, painted in 1907 (Estimate upon request)

Among the finest works by Gustav Klimt ever to come to auction, Bauerngarten was painted during the golden years of Klimt’s career and was a highlight of the critically acclaimed Painting the Modern Garden exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last year. This profoundly beautiful work is to be offered at auction for the first time in over two decades, set to lead Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in London on 1 March 2017.

KLIMT’S GOLDEN YEARS

While Klimt is largely revered for his opulent, symbol-laden portraits of the Viennese bourgeoisie, these works were just one aspect of his artistic expression. It is, arguably, in his landscapes, that he found the freedom to express himself, and to experiment, more freely. His landscapes, therefore, not only represent an important and highly personal facet of his career, but are also critical to our appreciation of the artist.

One of Gustav Klimt’s finest landscapes, Bauerngarten was first exhibited in the landmark 1908 Kunstschau in Vienna; a pivotal moment for Klimt – who had not had a public showing of his work for three years – the exhibition caused a sensation and confirmed the status of Klimt as the leading modern artist of his time. Even then the luminous painting was considered important, acquired just two years after by the National Gallery in Prague.

Landscapes are integral to Klimt’s oeuvre, revealing a more personal and experimental side to his painting that differs from his portraits, which were, for the most part, commissions. At the same time, even in his landscapes, there is often an echo of a figure – here, the shape of a woman is almost tangible under the triangular composition of blazing colours of the flowers. Indeed, Bauerngarten was painted at the same moment as some of Klimt’s most celebrated and innovative figurative works, including his golden portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer and

the gilded Der Küss.

Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, oil and gold on canvas, Neue Galerie, New York

The joyous mood of the painting tells a story too. Each summer, Klimt would retreat to the shore of Attersee for three months to relax and paint, accompanied by family and friends including his lifelong companion, the celebrated designer Emilie Flöge. It was a happy time, and the inspiration for Bauerngarten was found in the rustic garden of a local farmer, with its informal profusion of poppies, daisies and roses transformed into a shimmering array of colour.

KLIMT & HIS CONTEMPORARIES

The influence of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists on Klimt’s landscapes is evident, from Claude Monet’s treatment of his famous waterlily pond to Vincent van Gogh’s ability to make canvases pulsate with energy.

The square canvas chosen by Kilmt for this work heightens its visual impact, and it was in the same decade that Monet started to use this format to depict his waterlily ponds at Giverny. Both Klimt and Monet used this technical innovation to break away from the accepted form of traditional landscape art. Stripping away the sky, both artists created increasingly abstract ideas of the landscapes they were creating, focusing less on faithful renderings but more on the fleeting yet joyous patterns and colours.

In 1906, Klimt attended an exhibition of works by van Gogh in Vienna, and his subsequent appreciation of van Gogh sparked a significant shift in his appreciation of paint. Drawing on this, the dynamic brushwork and vibrancy of Bauerngarten reflect this turning point in Klimt’s style.

GUSTAV KLIMT (1862 – 1918)

A market sensation (ranking among the few artists whose work has achieved over $100 million); Gustav Klimt is widely acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of Modern Art. Celebrated for his highly decorative style – a style that draws on his contemporaries Monet and Van Gogh but is at the same time unique – his unfading popularity is down not only to the universal themes with which he worked (love, beauty and death), but also to the ornate and jewel-like surfaces he created, thanks in no small part to the influence of Japanese art.

Claude Monet, Nymphéas, 1906, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

Vincent van Gogh, Nature morte, vase aux marguerites et coquelicots, 1890, oil on canvas. Sold at Sotheby’s New York in November 2014.

Vienna’s enfant terrible, he studied at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, before creating his own eclectic fusions of the old and the new, which have had a resounding cultural impact. Klimt’s legendary Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I – painted in the same ‘golden’ years as Bauerngarten – was recently the subject of a widely acclaimed film - Woman in Gold, starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds. The painting that is the subject of the film is now the star attraction of the Neue Galerie in New York.

Painted Days Before the Liberation of Paris, Pablo Picasso’s Ripening Symbol of Resilience & Hope Plant de Tomates to Highlight Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale

Pablo Picasso, Plant de tomates, oil on canvas, painted in Paris between 6- 9 August 1944 (est. £10,000,000-15,000,000)

Symbolic of victory in Europe, Picasso’s series of five paintings of a tomato plant in bloom in the Paris apartment he shared with his lover Marie-Thérèse are ripe with personal as well as wider political and cultural significance – a way of reflecting the spirit of hope and resilience that characterised this time. The most complex and visually striking example from the most sought- after series of the war period, Plant de tomates has been in a private collection for four decades since it was sold at Sotheby’s New York in 1976. This exquisite work is expected to fetch £10,000,000 – 15,000,000 as part of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening sale in London on 1 March 2017.

In the summer of 1944, Picasso was staying with Marie-Thérèse at the Boulevard Henri IV in the weeks before the Liberation of Paris from the Nazis by the Allied Forces. Picasso began to take notice of the potted tomato plant that was growing besides the window of the apartment. These were not uncommon in civilian households throughout Europe at a time when food rations limited the amount of available produce for consumption. Seeing the resilient plant as a sign of hope as it continued to bear fruit, Picasso painted five canvases of the plant on a window sill between August 3 and August 12, 1944 – varying in degrees of abstraction. Thus he recorded this consequence of war as a source of admiration and a metaphor of human perseverance in times of strife.

In this work, the branches of the plant are weighed down with the heavy tomatoes – their arched shapes standing in contrast with the strong horizontals and verticals of the window, which fragment the composition into a grid-like form. For his palette, Picasso chose vibrant shades of red and green to emphasise the lush and fertile nature of the plant. The background view outside the window is painted with varying shades of yellow and grey, calling to mind the smoke and gunfire that could be heard throughout the city during these frightening last weeks of the war. Rarely has Picasso invested a still-life with such meaning and sociological importance.

Although not an active member of the Resistance movement, Picasso’s artistic activity during the war was deemed as heroic by many of his contemporaries around the world. His art was blacklisted by the Nazi regime and he was not permitted to exhibit his pictures publicly by government decree. However, by this point in his career, Picasso was financially secure and the paintings that he completed during this period remained in his studio – only to be exhibited after the war. A series of photographs that renowned photographer Cecil Beaton took of Picasso’s studio at rue des Grands-Augustins, several of them showing this work, gives remarkable insight into Picasso's work during this period. In the days leading to the Liberation – and in the midst of his painting of the tomato plant series – Picasso met with several British and American journalists and soldiers who wished to praise him for his accomplishment at his studio.

Pablo Picasso

Femme nue assise

oil on canvas

Painted in Mougins between 3

8 January 1965.

Estimate: £9,500,000-12,500,000

Painted at the home that Picasso shared with Jacqueline in Mougins, Femme nue assise is one of a series of large powerful canvases on the theme of the seated female nude that bear witness to the extraordinary energy and creative urge that characterised the artist’s later years. The painting has a monumental, sculptural presence and is invariably depicted with a powerful sense of the tension

between the invisible artist and his sitter.

Painted in confident brushstrokes, Picasso was able to isolate the symbols of erotic desire and threat embodied in the female nude – subjects that fascinated and preoccupied him. The motif of a nude figure seated in an armchair occurred repeatedly throughout Picasso’s career. While varying in style and depicting different women that marked each period of the artist’s life, these always served as a vehicle of expressing the palpable sexual tension between the painter and his model. The female figure here is inspired by Jacqueline Roque, the last love of Picasso’s life. Jacqueline’s striking features are accentuated in an angular, fragmented manner – the roots of which go back to the artist’s cubist experiments. Whilst borrowing elements from his own artistic past, Picasso created an image with a force and freedom he only achieved in the last decade of his career.

Pablo Picasso

Femme assise dans un fauteuil sur fond blanc

oil on board
Painted on 25th March 1953 Estimate: £6,500,000-9,500,000

“Je vois souvent une lumière et une ombre” – Pablo Picasso

Femme assise dans un fauteuil sur fond blanc is a striking monochromatic portrait of Picasso’s lover Françoise Gilot that encapsulates his unique technical ability and at the same time, it is a personal, intimate work revealing the artist’s emotional state. Picasso’s monochrome works have recently been the subject of a highly acclaimed exhibition Picasso Black and White at the Guggenheim in New York, in which this work was exhibited.

The period when Picasso was living in the south of France with Françoise and their two children is known as his Mediterranean Years, marked by a great personal fulfilment that filtered into his portraits of her – resulting in some of his most elegant and innovative artistic explorations. Using only white paint, Picasso reverses the traditional notion of line and background and thus pushes the boundaries of two-dimensional representation. He allows passages of unpainted brown board to play the role of the line that describes the features of his sitter, and this linear treatment renders the work extremely sculptural.

JUMP TO LOT

Pablo Picasso

Nu couché et tête d'homme

oil on canvas
38 1/8 by 51 1/8 in.
Painted between 20th and 26th March 1967.

Estimate

$8,049,600 - 11,764,80

Nu couché et tête d’homme is a stunning brilliantly coloured example of one of Picasso’s favourite themes, that of the artist and model. This series of works proved to be one of his most passionate and energetic projects, inspired by the final love of his life, Jacqueline Roque.

In this example, the male figure is depicted as a musketeer – rendered with a wealth of vibrant colours, yet his presence is a mere bust dominated by his nude companion. This vainglorious musketeer is a form of self-portraiture for the artist, and the iconography of this is indicative of Picasso’s self-awareness in the last decade of his life. The motif of the reclining nude, reminiscent of Titian, is an example of Picasso’s later works featuring subjects that referred back to great classic examples. Picasso no longer had anything to prove, so his main interlocutors in these works belong to the past.

Jacqueline was Picasso’s devoted second wife, who remained with him until his death in 1973, and his renderings of the unmistakable raven-haired beauty outnumber those of any other woman in his life. In this work, the female figure possesses Jacqueline’s recognisable strong nose and dark hair and her voluptuous curves and unrestrained pose represent the object of the artist’s desire. Positioned directly in front of the viewer, Jacqueline is identified as the universal and ultimate feminine representation. The love that Picasso felt for his wife is reflected in the passionate vitality of the colours and the excitement radiating from this canvas.

ART OF LIGHT

The sale presents a number of different expressions of the sublime magic of light – full of rich contrasts. Two of the greatest works by Alfred Sisley to appear on the market provide an insight into the influence of the artist on the way we view and experience light in art – in beautiful treatments of both summer and winter.

Paul Gauguin

Te Arii Vahine – La Femme aux mangos (II)

oil on canvas
Painted in 1896.
Estimate: £7,000,000 - 10,000,000

Painted in Tahiti, this is an important and extremely rare work from the artist’s best period. Executed during Gauguin’s second and last visit to the South Seas, Te Arii Vahine is inspired by the lush environment that surrounded him, displaying the vivid, sensuous atmosphere and vibrant palette that characterises his most celebrated Tahitian paintings. Attracted by the freedom, wilderness and simplicity of this remote place, Gauguin produced works in which the fluidity and expressiveness of the brushstrokes reflect the sense of artistic liberation.

The work is a smaller version of a large masterpiece of the same title – translated as The Noble Woman or King’s Wife – now in the collection of the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, which is currently on view in Paris at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in the highly acclaimed exhibition of The Shchukin Collection.

Gauguin’s dynamic treatment of paint reflects the richness of nature that excited the artist, dominated by bold contrasts of bright blue and green tones and strong, flame-light reds and yellows – these sumptuous colours inspired by the sunlight that bathed everything around him. Mango trees were abundant in Tahiti, a part of the everyday life of the islanders, and attracting the artist with their exotic appeal and potential for luminous colours. The composition also draws on the Western canon with the subject of a reclining female nude, which harks back to many precedents in European Old Master paintings. Gauguin references Christian imagery, with a nod to the tree of knowledge from the Garden of Eden and the implication that the female is a sinless, Tahitian Eve – contrasting the two worlds and their conceptions of sexuality.

Alfred Sisley

Effet de neige à Louveciennes

oil on canvas
Painted in 1874
Estimate: £6,000,000-8,000,000

Falling snow or the snow-covered countryside offered unparalleled opportunities for exploring the effects of light and weather on a landscape, making winter scenes a key motif for the Impressionists. In this rare snow scene by Sisley the bright blue sky alongside the striking interplay between sunlight and shadow on the snow has a spellbinding effect. One of the finest paintings by Sisley ever to appear on the market, this luminous work was included in the seminal Impressionists in Winter exhibition held at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. and Fine Arts Museums San Francisco in 1998-99.

The painting dates from a pivotal period in Sisley’s oeuvre when he was working with a group of artists including Monet, Renoir and Degas on the plans for what came to be known as the First Impressionist Exhibition. Dating from the same year as this influential occasion, Effet de neige à Louveciennes epitomises the expressive style pioneered by this group of artists.

Alfred Sisley

Le Loing à Moret, en été

oil on canvas
Painted in 1891.
Estimate: £5,000,000-7,000,000

Le Loing à Moret, en été is one of Sisley's richest and most accomplished riverscapes, combining the beauty of nature with the view of the town’s picturesque architecture. Sisley first moved with his family to Veneux-Nadon near Moret-sur-Loing in 1880, and continued to live in that area for the rest of his life, moving several times between the two villages. The mesmerising local scenery offered a constant source of inspiration to the artist, who tried to capture the relationship between land, water and sky as well as the changing effects of light on his surroundings. Juxtaposing brushstrokes of bright yellow, green and purple tones, Sisley captures the shifting effect of the intense blue sky on a bright summer day on the surface of the water.

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Vier Akte unter Bäumen (Four Nudes under Trees)

oil on canvas
Painted in 1913.
Estimate: £3,500,000-5,000,000

Kirchner’s primary concern was the representation of the human form in its most primitive or uninhibited state, and the spontaneous depictions of the body in Vier Akte unter Bäumen strongly reflects this aesthetic goal. With an autobiographical subject matter, daring imagery and vibrant palette, the work is testament to the painter’s avant-garde vision. Painted in the final year of important artistic collective Die Brücke – whose governing philosophy centred on freedom of expression – the work exemplifies the zest and vigour of the movement. A large-scale, museum-quality painting, Vier Akte unter Bäumen is appearing at auction for the first time.

Although drawn to dynamic city life in Berlin, Kirchner felt a need to counteract it with painting trips in the countryside – spending several weeks with fellow artists and their female companions and models, bathing and playing nude and living in tents and huts. This experience of Free Body Culture (Freikörperkultur) was coupled with tribal art and the simple yet expressive forms of African sculpture. This work followed a summer spent in Fehrman with Erna Schilling, who would remain his partner for the rest of his life. In an almost Judgement of Paris style scene, Kirchner himself is depicted with a high-hat and a pipe, surrounded by three female figures.

PASTEL

Edgar Degas

Femme nue, de dos, se coiffant (Femme se peignant)
Pastel on paper laid down on board Executed circa 1886-88

Estimate: £6,000,000-8,000,000

Depicting a ravishing seated nude woman, combing her magnificent red hair, Femme nue, de dos, se coiffant is a remarkable example of Degas’s supreme mastery of the pastel technique that became his principal medium.Degas found in pastel an ideal medium, a perfect fusion of colour and line. The artist’s interest he solitary nude figure is connected with a major shift in his work in the mid-1880s – when he began to search for a more timeless, enduring art as opposed to impressions of modern-life. Degas presents us with a modern nude, an anonymous model posing in his studio, yet his composition derives much of its authority from its roots in the past – harking back to the rich expressions of Titian and Eugène Delacroix and the classicising calm of Jean- Dominique Ingres. Another version of this same subject resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

ART OF PORTRAITURE

Amedeo Modigliani

Portrait of Baranowski

oil on canvas
Painted in 1918.
Estimate: £10,000,000-15,000,000

“To do any work, I must have a living person, I must be able to see him opposite me” – Modigliani

Working in Paris for most of his career, Modigliani is today considered one of the excess of $100 million and last June, Sotheby’s London sold Jeanne Hébuterne (au foulard) – one of the greatest portraits the artist painted of his most loyal muse – for $56.6 million.

Portrait de Baranowski, depicting a young man with fragile goodlooks and a pensive, introspective air, is a wonderfully elegant composition that powerfully synthesises all the elements of Modigliani’s portraits in this period – from geometricsimplification of the stylised human form to the almond, vacant eyes that render the sitter impenetrable.

The painting is a quintessential example of Modigliani’s role as the chronicler of the vie bohème of Montparnasse, depicting the androgynous Polish painter Pierre-Edouard Baranowski. The sitter’s gentle youthful looks inspired Modigliani to create one of his most outstanding yet melancholy portraits, combining the characteristics of the individual with the lyricism of a poetic idea – at a time when the artist’s own health and looks were destroyed by heavy drinking and drug taking. Exhibited at the 1930 Venice Biennale show dedicated to Modigliani, the work is also an example of the artist’s mannerist style that was partly derived from his fascination with the Old Masters of his native Italy.

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Cross Country: The Power of Place in American Art, 1915-1950

March 1, 2017, 11:24 am

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High Museum of Art

Feb. 12 through May 7, 2017

Organized in collaboration with the Brandywine River Museum of Art, the exhibition features more than 200 artworks, including more than 70 from the High’s permanent collection, which encompass a wide range of media and makers—from paintings and photographs to murals and sculpture, by trained and self-taught artists, modernists and regionalists. The High’s American art, photography, and folk and self-taught art departments partnered to select works for “Cross Country” that reflect the range of creative expression and remarkable diversity of American art in the period surrounding the two World Wars.

“Through collaboration across three curatorial departments, we’ve captured the opportunity to highlight important elements from our own permanent collection in the High’s presentation of this exhibition. These include works by Southern artists and superb photography from the era that demonstrate profound contributions to the development of American Modernism,” said Rand Suffolk, the High’s Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr. director.

While the 20th-century city was a significant magnet for modern artists, many sought respite and even refuge in quieter, rural areas. “Cross Country” brings together works by more than 80 artists to explore the impact of the American countryside on their artistic practice and how they adapted the modernist style to express their sense of place.

“The exhibition beautifully illustrates the deep connections between the artists, the places and the moments in history that shaped American art in the early 20th century and beyond,” said Stephanie Heydt, the High’s Margaret and Terry Stent curator of American art.

The exhibition is organized geographically, according to the region depicted in the artworks. Each section incorporates photography and works by self-taught artists to further underscore the diversity of artistic production in the early 20th century.

“Photographers and self-taught artists, particularly those working in rural areas, came to influence the artistic practice of their contemporaries,” said Heydt. “Because we’re highlighting a period in time when photography and self-taught art began to be taken seriously as art forms, we feel it is essential to spotlight this exchange of ideas in order to broaden viewers’ understanding of American art.”

The first section of the exhibition is devoted to the South and features more than 40 works by both trained and self-taught artists, including paintings by Jacob Lawrence and Lamar Dodd, photographs by Walker Evans and Peter Sekaer, and drawings by Bill Traylor. These artworks range from romantic depictions of the South’s agricultural history to scenes of African-American life that address themes including social justice, emotional response to place, and rural decay and degradation. A centerpiece of this section is “Opening Day at Talladega College,” one of the six murals by Hale Woodruff that Talladega College commissioned in 1938 for its Savery Library. Painted during the rise of public mural tradition in the Great Depression, the mural transcends time, linking history to the landmark building for which it was created.

In the other sections of the exhibition, depictions of coastal New England, small-town Pennsylvania, Midwestern farms and other rural regions illustrate the dispersal of standard modernist styles, such as Cubism and Fauvism, and demonstrate the spread and gradual acceptance of these artistic movements in the American provinces. Some of the featured artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe, were firmly entrenched in modernism before leaving the cities behind. Other artists, such as N. C. Wyeth, started out in rural settings and used traditional styles but came to adopt more experimental approaches. Included are masterworks by such renowned artists as Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry and John Marin.

“Cross Country” draws from the collections at the High and the Brandywine River Museum of Art. The exhibition features loans from institutions across the country, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Dallas Museum of Art. Also featured prominently are artworks from Georgia museums including the Booth Western Art Museum, the Georgia Museum of Art and Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries, among others.

Key works on view in each section include:

The South:

Jacob Lawrence, “Firewood #55” (1942): Lawrence created this gouache, ink and watercolor on paper during his first trip to the rural South. In the work, an African-American woman sorts firewood against a sparse landscape, which emphasizes the hardships of farm life in the Depression era.

Bill Traylor, “Untitled (Man with Pipe)” (ca. 1939–1942): Traylor was one of the first living self-taught artists to attract the notice of the art establishment in the 20th century. This pared-down work of poster paint and pencil on cardboard is drawn from the High’s collection and showcases Traylor’s distinct style, which echoes the minimalist qualities of modernism.

Thomas Hart Benton, “Tobacco Sorters” (1942–1944): In this scene of Southern farm life, a tobacco farmer teaches a young girl about tobacco leaves. The tempera and oil on panel is among many examples included in the exhibition that illustrate the rise of Regionalism.

The Mid-Atlantic:

Andrew Wyeth, “Road Cut” (1940): This subdued landscape, an important example of Wyeth’s realist style, depicts a country dirt road leading to an isolated farmhouse. The tempera on panel joins other works in the exhibition by his father, N. C. Wyeth, and his sister Carolyn.

Gordon Parks, “Ella Watson, American Gothic, Washington, D.C.” (1942): Drawn from the High’s collection, this photograph of an African-American woman standing alone before the American flag, with a broom and mop in the foreground, directly references Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” painting and is one of Parks’ most famous works.

Charles Sheeler, “Staircase, Doylestown” (1925): Sheeler is distinguished as one of the founders of American modernism. In this oil on canvas, he depicts the staircase of his 18th-century Pennsylvania farmhouse. Sheeler would return to this subject many times, in both paintings and photographs.

Horace Pippin, “Saying Prayers” (1943): A World War I veteran who began painting in the 1920s without any formal training, Pippin rose to fame after his work was featured in a local art annual in Chester County, Pennsylvania. His scenes of American life, past and present, would go on to be celebrated by major arbiters of modernist art such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The Midwest:

Grant Wood, “Appraisal” (1931): In this oil on composition board, two women appear in the midst of a financial transaction: the sale of a chicken. The disparity between their clothing emphasizes the difference in socioeconomic status and the conflict between rural and urban life in America before World War II.

Harry Callahan, “Eleanor, Indiana” (1948): Although Callahan had little formal training, he credited fellow modernists Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz among his inspirations for pursuing photography professionally. In this photograph from the High’s collection, Callahan’s wife Eleanor stands atop a sand dune on the Lake Michigan shore.

The Northeast:

Georgia O’Keeffe, “Red Canna” (1919): While visiting her husband Alfred Stieglitz’s family home in Lake George, N.Y., O’Keeffe was attracted to the canna lilies that bloomed profusely in late summer. The canna’s billowy petals and intense colors inspired O’Keeffe to create a series of paintings that includes this one, which is part of the High’s collection. Although made early in her career, this painting foreshadows the artist’s mature works with its voluptuous curves and delicately blended colors.

Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, “Bringing in the Maple Sugar” (1939): Men collect sap from maple trees as children frolic in the winter landscape in this oil on canvas by the renowned self-taught artist. Moses had her first gallery show in New York in 1940 at the age of 80 and over the next decade became one of the most popular artists in America.

The West:

Maynard Dixon, “Red Butte with Mountain Men” (1935): In this monumental oil on canvas, the 19th-century scout Kit Carson and his men cross the Utah landscape, dwarfed by the majestic canyons and mesas beyond.

Ansel Adams, “Teton Range and Snake River (Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942)” (1942, printed 1974): Perhaps Adams’ most famous photograph, this image epitomizes his style and captures the untamed American West.

The exhibition is co-curated by Stephanie Heydt, Margaret and Terry Stent curator of American art at the High; Katherine Jentleson, the High’s Merrie and Dan Boone curator of folk and self-taught art; and Brett Abbott, the High’s former Keough Family curator of photography and head of collections. “Cross Country” builds upon an exhibition of 67 artworks organized by the Brandywine River Museum of Art titled “Rural Modern: American Art Beyond the City.” The Brandywine exhibition, featuring works selected by its associate curator Amanda C. Burdan, was on view in Chadds Ford, Pa., from Oct. 29, 2016, through Jan. 22, 2017.

Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a 208-page catalogue published by Skira Rizzoli in association with the Brandywine River Museum of Art, featuring 140 color illustrations with a foreword by Brandywine Director Thomas Padon and essays by Burdan; Christine Podmaniczky, curator of N. C. Wyeth Collections and Historic Properties at the Brandywine; Betsy Fahlman, professor of art history at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts; Jonathan Frederick Walz, director of curatorial affairs and curator of American art at The Columbus Museum; and Catherine Whitney, chief curator and curator of American art at Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa. Support for the catalogue has been provided by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.

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