The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec

March 1, 2017, 11:59 am

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The Chrysler Museum of Art

March 10–June 18, 2017

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, (French, 1864–1901), La Troupe de Mademoiselle Eglantine (Mademoiselle Eglantine's Troupe), 1896. Lithograph, sheet: 24 1/4 x 31 1/4 in., The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1940. © The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by Thomas Griesel. Click image to enlarge.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's radical, bold, and often outrageous posters and illustrations are in the spotlight for the Chrysler's spring keynote exhibition.

One of Paris' key post-Impressionist artists, Toulouse-Lautrec frequented the city's many entertainment establishments, including the popular Moulin Rouge.

He was commissioned to produce posters promoting new Cafe-Concerts, groundbreaking performers like Jane Avril, audacious impresarios like Aristide Bruant, and everyday denizens. Like many Parisian artists Toulouse-Lautrec drew inspiration from the Japanese prints being exported to Europe, which offered new ways of looking at the world.

Explore belle epoque Paris through the eyes of this keen observer and his extraordinary works on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Meet the legends of 19th-century Parisian nightlife in The Chrysler Museum of Art's spring keynote exhibition, The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec: Prints and Posters from The Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition is on view from March 10 to June 18, 2017.
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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is synonymous with the Belle Epoque, or Beautiful Era, in Paris. He created iconic works of the hedonistic nightlife that still define the ideal of bohemian urban life today. His brief 10-year career, from 1891 until his death in 1901, was a manic celebration of the freedom Paris offered and his work gave enduring renown to many of its star performers. The electric color, bold shapes and restless energy of his designs beckoned workers, aristocrats and foreign tourists into the new cafe-concerts, cabarets and other haunts of Montmartre.

The exhibition follows different themes of Toulouse-Lautrec's life in Paris: the new café-concert culture, entertainment on stage and the daily life of the women performers onstage and off. He was commissioned to produce promotional posters of groundbreaking performers like dancers

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
(French, 1864–1901)
Jane Avril, 1899
Lithograph, sheet: 22 1/16 x 15 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1946
© The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Photograph by Peter Butler

Jane Avril

and La Goulue (stage name of Louise Weber),

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, (French, 1864–1901), Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret (Aristide Bruant in His Cabaret), 1893. Lithograph, sheet: 53 9/16 x 37 15/16 in., The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Emilio Sanchez, 1961. © The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by Thomas Griesel.

along with audacious impresarios like Aristide Bruant.

In addition, he depicted everyday denizens of the city, including the private lives of prostitutes captured in his lithographic portfolio, Elles (1896).

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901)
Frontispiece from Elles, 1896
Lithograph printed in olive green, blue, and orange on cream wove paper
20 11/16 x 15 13/16 in. (52.5 x 40.2 cm) Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1962.107
A monument in modern printmaking, Toulouse-Lautrec’s Elles portfolio has been interpreted as a chronicle of the daily lives of lesbians involved in the worlds of prostitution and entertainment. The evocative image of a woman in nightdress letting down her hair, seen from behind, in combination with the presence of a man’s top hat introduces one of the themes.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901)
Woman Reclining — Waking Up, from Elles, 1896
Lithograph printed in gray on cream wove paper
15 13/16 x 20 5/8 in. (40.2 x 52.4 cm)
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1962.110

Here the rectangle of the sheet serves as the shape of a bed. From underneath a heap of disheveled bedclothes suggested by a nearly abstract pattern of undulating lines, the shaded, profiled head of a woman and a lax arm emerge. Through a half-opened eye, she regards the viewer/artist and presumed client with an air of familiarity.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901)
The Seated Clowness (Miss Cha-U-Kao), from Elles, 1896
Lithograph printed in green-black, black-brown, yellow, red, and blue on cream wove paper
20 11/16 x 15 13/16 in. (52.5 x 40.2 cm)
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1962.108
This sheet features the contortionist dancer Miss Cha-U-Kao (a phonetic play on chahut-chaos or chaotic can-can). She is shown at rest, her outlandish costume, provocative pose, and brazen stare conveying her strong personality. Sharp outlines are set off against soft atmospheric effects achieved through a technique of blowing fine dots of ink on a lithographic stone.

The portfolio of 12 prints shows the women not at work, but in scenes of daily life — sipping coffee in the morning or washing before a mirror.

Toulouse-Lautrec mastered the relatively new art of lithography, an intricate printmaking process based on the principle that grease and water are repellent. Like many Parisian artists, his printmaking style was heavily influenced by Japanese woodcut prints being exported to Europe for the first time.

The Japanese influence on Toulouse-Lautrec will be explored in Inspiring Impressionism, a complementary exhibition of Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcut prints from the Chrysler Museum collection. Named Ukiyo-e or "floating world pictures" after the pleasure district of Tokyo, they first showed celebrity actors and courtesans, and later branched into landscapes and historical subjects.

The prints became wildly popular in Paris after Commodore Matthew Perry's 1853 voyage to open Japan to foreign trade—a mission that began in Hampton Roads, forever changing the worlds of commerce and art. Japanese artist Hibata Ossuke documented this visit, and the Chrysler owns a rare copy of his images of Perry and his squadron, showing probably the first foreigners seen in Edo in more than 200 years. The Museum will also exhibit famed prints from Utagawa Hiroshige's remarkable series, 53 Stations of the Tokaido.

Toulouse-Lautrec was just 36 when he succumbed to a stroke in 1901, leaving behind 368 prints and posters pushing the boundaries of design. Explore his genius in The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec at the Chrysler Museum from March 10–June 18, 2017.

The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec: Prints and Posters from The Museum of Modern Art was organized by Sarah Suzuki, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
(French, 1864–1901)
Divan Japonais,1893
Lithograph, sheet: 31 15/16 x 24 1/2 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund, 1949
© The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Photograph by Thomas Griesel

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Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World

March 2, 2017, 11:30 am

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Yale Center for British Art

Thursday, February 2, 2017 - Sunday, April 30, 2017

Kensington Palace
June 22 to November 12, 2017

This exhibition will explore the story of three remarkable German princesses: Caroline of Ansbach, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, and Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Strelitz, all of whom married into the British royal family in the eighteenth century. Caroline and Charlotte became queens consort to George II and George III respectively; Princess Augusta never achieved this distinction but held the titles of Princess of Wales and Princess Dowager, and was mother to King George III.

Through their wide-ranging intellectual, social, and political interests, Caroline, Augusta, and Charlotte helped to shape court culture and the age in which they lived, and would leave a lasting legacy. They encouraged the greatest philosophers, scientists, artists, and architects of the day; and they brought art, music, dance, enlightened conversation, and experimentation into the palaces and royal gardens, and supported industry, trade, and imperial ambition. The exhibition will include many important works of art and manufacture, which belonged to these women and their families, or were commissioned by them. Works by Hans Holbein, William Kent, Allan Ramsay, Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Stubbs, Thomas Gainsborough, Johan Zoffany, and many more will be on display.

Johan Joseph Zoffany, Queen Charlotte (detail), 1771, oil on canvas, Royal Collection Trust, UK, © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016

Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World is a collaboration between Historic Royal Palaces and the Yale Center for British Art. It will be on view at the Center in spring 2017 and then at Kensington Palace from June 22 to November 12, 2017. The lead curator is Joanna Marschner, Senior Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, assisted by Samantha Howard, Curatorial Assistant. The organizing curator at the Center is Amy Meyers, Director, who is assisted by Lisa Ford, Assistant Director of Research; Glenn Adamson, Senior Research Associate; and Tyler Griffith, Postdoctoral Research Associate.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication of the same title, a beautifully illustrated catalogue of works edited by Joanna Marschner, with the assistance of David Bindman and Lisa Ford. Co-published with Historic Royal Palaces in association with Yale University Press, the book will feature contributions by an international team of scholars.

This February, the Yale Center for British Art premiered the first exhibition to explore the instrumental roles of the Hanoverian princesses Caroline of Ansbach (1683–1737), Augusta of Saxe-Gotha (1719–1772), and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1744–1818)—all of whom married into the British royal family—and how they shaped the nation’s society and culture during a time of significant political and social transformation. Organized by the Center in partnership with the UK’s Historic Royal Palaces, Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World brings together nearly three hundred objects from public and private collections across Britain, Europe, and the United States.

The exhibition features works by the artists Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543), Mary Delany (1700–1788), Allan Ramsay (1713–1784), Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), George Stubbs (1724–1806), and Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788); craftsmen and designers Anna Maria Garthwaite (1690–1763), Matthew Boulton (1728–1809), and Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795); and architects William Kent (1685–1748) and William Chambers (1723–1796), among many others.

Elaborate court costumes and jewels, musical manuscripts, botanical and anatomical illustrations, architectural drawings and garden designs, royal children’s artwork, and the princesses’ own scientific instruments are being showcased. These important works serve to show how the princesses promoted the arts, sciences, trade, and industry, and underline their development of new models of philanthropy, especially to benefit the health of women and the welfare of children. These efforts spurred unprecedented intellectual exchange and social transformation which continues to have significance for us today.

Enlightened Princesses debuted at the Center in New Haven from February 2 to April 30, 2017, and subsequently will travel to Kensington Palace in London, once home to Caroline and Charlotte, where it will be on view from June 22 to November 12, 2017.

“Caroline, Augusta, and Charlotte had sweeping intellectual, social, cultural, and political interests, which helped to shape the courts in which they lived, and encouraged the era’s greatest philosophers, scientists, artists, and architects to develop important ideas that would guide ensuing generations,” said Amy Meyers, Director of the Yale Center for British Art and organizing curator at the Center. “The palaces and royal gardens they inhabited served as incubators for enlightened conversation and experimentation, and functioned as platforms to project the latest cultural developments to an international audience. Their innovative contributions across disciplines held great significance centuries ago and continue to inform our lives.”

The lives of Caroline, Augusta, and Charlotte straddled the eighteenth century. Caroline, the wife of the future George II, arrived in London in 1714 when the first Hanoverian king, George I, was crowned. She became queen consort after her husband succeeded his father in 1727. Augusta was married to Caroline’s eldest son, Frederick Prince of Wales, but never became queen as her husband died young. However, as mother of the next king, George III, Augusta became crucial to shaping his reign. In 1761, George III married Charlotte, who died in 1818, two years before her husband.

“Until this point, the contributions of these three princesses have been little understood, and it is the aim of this exhibition to demonstrate how they influenced the interests of their era in the most vibrant of ways. In their engagement and support of many important projects and initiatives, they provided a blueprint for the royal women who followed them—right up to the present. For this, it is our intention to bring to the princesses the attention they deserve,” said Joanna Marschner, Senior Curator at Historic Royal Palaces and lead curator of the exhibition.

In addition to masterpieces from the Yale Center for British Art and Historic Royal Palaces, Enlightened Princesses presents works from the Royal Collection Trust, who have loaned over eighty objects for this exhibition. In total, nearly fifty esteemed collections are represented, including works from Royal Society; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond; British Museum; National Portrait Gallery, London; British Library; Victoria and Albert Museum; Science Museum, London; Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library; Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library; and Yale University.

The display also features a new work created by the artist Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA) (b. 1962) specifically for this exhibition, which has been inspired by a meeting, in 1753, between Princess Augusta and Mrs. Eliza Lucas Pinckney, the owner of a slave plantation in South Carolina, which was then a British colony. A letter written by Mrs. Pinckney to a friend, detailing the encounter, is included in the exhibition as a special loan from the collection of The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America in the State of South Carolina. The dress worn by Mrs. Pinckney on the occasion, made of silk produced on her plantation, is also on display, courtesy of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

EXHIBITION THEMES
Enlightened Princesses is organized according to five themes and features a rich variety of objects that offer a glimpse into the princesses’ private lives, courts, and legacies.

Oil portraits of

Caroline (ca. 1735), by Joseph Highmore (1692–1780);

Augusta (1769), by Allan Ramsay (1713–1784);

and Charlotte (1771), by Johan Joseph Zoffany (1733–1810)

will set the stage for the exhibition.

The Court as a Stage

For Caroline, Augusta, and Charlotte, the royal court operated as a stage, not only for the performance of music, dance, and theater but also as a political and cultural arena. In their furnishing of these spaces, the princesses constructed a visual statement of the authority of the Hanoverian dynasty, under which the patronage of music and the arts would flourish. At the same time, they had to navigate the inherently political nature of public and private life at court during a period that witnessed an information revolution, initiated by the mass circulation of newspapers, journals, and magazines replete with commentary, debate, and critique.

This section includes Hans Holbein the Younger’s Lady Lister (ca. 1532–43), one of the artist’s many portrait drawings of courtiers at the Tudor court, which were particularly prized by Caroline and hung at Kensington Palace in celebration of the distinguished pedigree of the Royal House. These drawings were displayed alongside images of the present generation of the royal family.

The painting “The Music Party”: Frederick, Prince of Wales with his Three Eldest Sisters (1733), by Philippe Mercier (1689–1760), is one such example. It depicts Caroline’s eldest son playing the cello. He is accompanied by his three sisters—Princess Anne (1709–1759) at the harpsichord; Princess Amelia (1711–1786) reading a volume of John Milton’s poems; and Princess Caroline (1713–1757) playing the mandora.

Cultures of Learning: Powerful Conversations

At the heart of their social circles, Caroline, Augusta, and Charlotte built relationships with the leading cultural and intellectual figures of their age, including politicians, clergymen, philosophers, gardeners, architects, authors, playwrights, and composers. The princesses’ interests often overlapped or had a common focus, such as in science, medicine, philanthropy, and especially maternity, as well as the commercial interests of the state in Britain and abroad. Their pursuits in this area are represented by such objects as

an oil portrait by John Vanderbank (1694–1739) of Sir Isaac Newton (1726);

Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of his friend, the musician Carl Friedrich Abel, later acquired by Queen Charlotte for whom he provided music (1777);

and Allan Ramsey’s remarkably nuanced portrait of Charlotte’s medical adviser, Dr. William Hunter (1760).

Royal Women: Education, Charity, and Health

Attitudes regarding royal child-rearing changed rapidly over the lifetimes of Caroline, Augusta, and Charlotte. There were shifts in methodology and focus in response to the evolving contemporary philosophies about childhood, sentimentality, and individual freedoms. The princesses were active contributors to the educational programs devised for their children, and sought to draw them into conversations beyond the palace walls. In their public roles as encouragers and protectors, the princesses were involved in ambitious and wide-reaching public philanthropic projects, organizations, and societies, especially those connected with health and social welfare.

A precious silk satin baby robe (1762) belonging to George, Prince of Wales (later George IV), the eldest child of George III and Queen Charlotte, compares poignantly with tokens left by unmarried and impoverished mothers as they consigned their children to the Foundling Hospital. The hospital was a charity supported by all three of the princesses, which reflected their progressive interests, and it became an outlet to promote social change, through assistance it provided to disenfranchised and voiceless children in the greater society.

Political Gardening

Caroline, Augusta, and Charlotte created and recast each other’s gardens, which were political and social spaces, as well as private retreats. They drew in the products of empire—plants and animals were collected from many continents, not only for their beauty and rarity but also their economic value. Similarly, collections of animals and birds brought back from the exploration of these “new” worlds were an important feature in the royal gardens. In the design of their gardens, the princesses explored contemporary garden philosophies and exercised their architectural ambitions. Many of their landscapes were made to be shared, not just with the community of gardeners, philosophers, and scientists the princesses drew into their circle but with a wider community, fostering an unprecedented relationship between monarchy and subject.

Mark Catesby’s (1683–1749) dynamic watercolor The Painted Finch and the Loblolly Bay (ca. 1722–26)

and an intricate cut-paper collage by Mary Delany, Cactus Grandiflorus, melon thistle (1778), serve as evidence of the princesses’ entanglement in Britain’s imperial ambition.

To Promote and Protect: The Princesses and the Wider World

To promote the arts and sciences, Caroline, Augusta, and Charlotte supported and championed national products, and allowed their interest to be used by enterprising industrialists. The development of advanced industrial technologies—including cloth weaving, porcelain production, and metal casting—enabled unprecedented mass-produced consumer goods. This ensured, for the first time, that the image of the British monarchy was widely disseminated in a way recognized as a “brand” to domestic and international audiences. Additionally, Britain’s increased colonial expansion following the American War of Independence resulted in heightened interest in the fruits of empire, which the princesses celebrated by furnishing their homes and developing their gardens with imports from the Caribbean, India, Africa, China, and Australasia. Masterpieces that have been gathered to reflect the princesses’ engagement with the wider world include a painting by

William Verelst (1704–1752), Audience Given by the Trustees of Georgia to a Delegation of Creek Indians(1734–35),

as well as one of the Center’s treasured works, a painting by George Stubbs of a zebra belonging to Queen Charlotte (1763).

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Prints & Drawings at Swann - Records for Hopper, Cassatt & Whistler

March 7, 2017, 11:22 am

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On Thursday, March 2, Swann Galleries’ sale of 19th & 20th Century Prints & Drawings exceeded $3M and broke ten auction records. The house, which is celebrating it diamond anniversary this year, has enjoyed several record-breaking sales already in their spring 2017 season.

Marc Chagall, Four Tales from the Arabian Nights, (Pre-sale estimate: $250,000 to $350,000)

The rare deluxe edition of Marc Chagall’s 1948 portfolio Four Tales from the Arabian Nights, of which only 11 were printed, topped the sale. The set belonged to the publisher of Pantheon Books, Kurt Wolff. The vibrant color lithographs include the 13th plate denoting the deluxe edition; still in the original case, the set sold to a collector for $269,000*.

Edward Hopper, Evening Wind, etching, 1921. Sold March 2, 2017 for $149,000, a record for the print. (Pre-sale estimate: $50,000 to $80,000)

Early twentieth-century American prints saw competitive bidding and high prices. Edward Hopper’s rare 1921 etching Evening Wind sold for $149,000, nearly doubling its high estimate of $80,000.

The American master was also represented in the sale by the 1921 etching Night Shadows, which went for $33,800.

A premiere selection of prints by Hopper’s mentor Martin Lewis was led by the extremely rare aquatint Which Way?, 1932, which was purchased for $42,500, a record for the work.

Further highlights by Lewis included the 1929 drypoint Bay Windows

and 1916’s etching The Orator, Madison Square, each of which went for $27,500.

Another highlight of the sale was Männlicher Akt (Selbstbildnis I), 1912, Egon Schiele’s first attempt at a printed self-portrait; the work brought $30,000.

Orologi Molli, a watercolor by Salvador Dalí featuring one of his famous melting clocks, surpassed its high estimate to sell for $112,500. Another original, a pen and ink drawing by Paul Klee of prancing bulls, titled Drama in der Kuhwelt, 1915, reached $25,000.

All four offered works by Mary Cassatt found buyers, including the rare circa-1902 drypoint Crocheting Lessons, which sold for $27,500.

Another Cassatt, the color drypoint and soft-ground etching The Coiffure, circa 1891, broke its previous auction record to sell for $81,250.

Etchings made by James A.M. Whistler during a 1879-80 trip to Venice performed well, including the luminous Upright Venice, at $70,000.

Two further prints from the same period each broke their previous auction records:

The Garden reached $70,000,

while San Biagio sold for $62,500.

The complete set of 14 lithographs in Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s Mélodies de Désiré Dihau, 1895, was sold for $30,000, a record for the work.

The next sale of Prints & Drawings at Swann Galleries will be Old Master Through Modern Prints on May 2, 2017. For more information, contact Todd Weyman at tweyman@swanngalleries.com.

More Sales Prices with buyer’s premium

370 Pablo Picasso, Femme au fauteuil, No. 1, lithograph, 1948. $55,000 D

502 Joan Miró, La Permissionaire, color aquatint and etching, 1974. $45,000 D

411* Henri Matisse, Études pour la Vierge, Visage, lithograph, 1950-51. $32,500 D

575 Chagall, Roses et Mimosa, color lithograph, 1975. $25,000 D

MARC CHAGALL Quai de la Tournelle.

Estimate $25,000 - $35,000
Price Realized (with Buyer's Premium) $25,000

THOMAS HART BENTON The Race.

Estimate $20,000 - $30,000
Price Realized (with Buyer's Premium) $23,750

GEORGE BELLOWS The Pool-Player.

Estimate $20,000 - $30,000
Price Realized (with Buyer's Premium) $18,750

MARTIN LEWIS Rain on Murray Hill.

Estimate $15,000 - $20,000
Price Realized (with Buyer's Premium) $18,750

THOMAS HART BENTON The Station.

Estimate $4,000 - $6,000
Price Realized (with Buyer's Premium) $15,000

KEY: * = Auction Record for the Work; C = Collector; D = Dealer

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Alicia Koplowitz Collection - Grupo Omega Capital

March 3, 2017, 1:47 pm

≫ Next: MAGRITTE. THE TREACHERY OF IMAGES

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Musée Jacquemart-André

From 3 March to 10 July 2017

Alicia Koplowitz has amassed through Grupo Omega Capital, a collection that reflects her own personal tastes, bringing together numerous masterpieces from some of the world’s greatest artists. The Old and Modern Masters feature heavily in her collection, fostering a dialogue of sorts across the centuries: antique sculptures and paintings by Zurbarán, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Guardi and Goya can be seen alongside paintings and drawings by Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso, Van Dongen, Modigliani, Schiele, de Staël, Freud, Rothko and Barceló, as well as sculptures by Giacometti, Bourgeois and Richier.

A selection of some of the most beautiful pieces from this exceptional collection is to be presented to the public for the first time at the Musée Jacquemart-André, the former residence of another remarkable collector: Nélie Jacquemart, who together with her husband developed a splendid ensemble as eclectic as Alicia Koplowitz’s - Grupo Omega Capital collection can be.The exhibition pays tribute to one of the most prolific collectors of our time.

The fifty-three works shown here retrace her tastes and the choices she has made over a period of thirty years, and invite us to share in the emotion of the collection. Beyond the diversity of technique, epochs and styles, the works in the Alicia Koplowitz Collection - Grupo Omega Capital all share the same artistic sensibility. They bear witness to a subtle but confident, audacious taste, with a certain penchant for female portraits. Whether she is the model or artist, the creator shaping the material or the inspiring muse, woman is at the heart of the majority of these artworks, all of which have been selected by Alicia Koplowitz - Grupo Omega Capital.

Francisco de Zurbarán (1598 – 1664) -

The Virgin with the Child Jesus and the Child Saint John the Baptist -

Circa 1659 -

Oil on canvas -119 x 100 cm

Juan Pantoja de la Cruz (1553-1608) -

Portrait of Doña Ana de Velasco y Girón, Duchess of Braganza, formal court portrait -

1603 - Oil on canvas -103 x 82 cm

Francesco Guardi (1712-1793) -

Beneath the arches of the Doge’s Palace, Venice with a view of the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore

- Oil on canvas - 49,5 x 36,2 cm

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) -

Portrait of the Countess of Haro

- Circa 1802/1803 - Oil on canvas - 54,3 x 35,5 cm

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) -

Young Girl Reading

- 1889 - Oil-based paint on board - 68 x 61 cm

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) -

Women on the Banks of the River

- 1892 - Oil on canvas - 31,8 x 40 cm

Kees Van Dongen (1877-1968) -

Woman in a Large Hat

- 1906 - Oil on canvas - 100 x 80,5 cm

Egon Schiele (1890-1918) -

Woman in a Blue Dress

- 1911 - Watercolour and wash on paper - 47,9 x 28,8 cm

Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) -

Red-headed Woman wearing a Pendant

- 1918 - Oil on canvas - 92 x 60 cm

Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955) -

Composition

- 1948 - Oil on canvas - 81 x 60 cm

Lucian Freud (1922 - 2011) -

Girl in a Fur Coat

- 1967 - Oil on canvas - 61 x 51 cm

Fukuoka Sogo Bank Ltd. /© Lucian Freud Archive/Bridgeman Images

(left)

Mark Rothko (1903 - 1970) -

N°6 (Yellow, White, Blue over Yellow on Gray)

- 1954 - Oil on canvas - 240 x 151,8 cm

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) -

Untitled IV

- 1977 - Oil on canvas - 223 x 195,7 cm

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MAGRITTE. THE TREACHERY OF IMAGES

March 10, 2017, 8:28 am

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The painter René Magritte (1898–1967) was a conjurer of enigmatic paintings. In a concentrated solo exhibition devoted to the great Belgian Surrealist, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt explores his relationship to the philosophical currents of his time.

Magritte did not see himself as an artist, but rather as a thinking human being who conveyed his thoughts through his painting. Throughout his life he sought to imbue painting with meaning equal to that of language. Driven by his curiosity and his affinities with some of the leading philosophers of his age, such as Michael Foucault, he created a remarkable body of work and developed an altered view of the world that is reflected in a unique combination of masterfully precise painting and conceptual processes.

The exhibition sheds light on Magritte’s philosophical investigations in five chapters. His word pictures reflect his fundamental views on the relationship between language and visual imagery. Other essential pictorial formulas are concerned with legends and myths associated with the invention and definition of painting. The quasi-scientific method Magritte applied in his painting bears witness to his distrust of simple answers and simplistic realism.

René Magritte, La Lampe philosophique, 1936, Oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm, Private collection © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

The Schirn is presenting Magritte’s masterpieces of enigmatic painting from the 1920s to the 1960s, among them his emblematic self-portrait entitled "La Lampe philosophique" (1936),

René Magritte, La Condition Humaine, 1935, Oil on canvas, 54 x 73 cm, Norfolk Museums Service (accepted by HM Government in lieu of tax and allocated to Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery) © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

"La Condition Humaine" (1948),

René Magritte, Les Mémoires d’un saint, 1960, Oil on canvas, 80 x 99,7 cm, The Menil Collection, Houston © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

"Les Mémoires d’un Saint" (1960),

René Magritte, Le beau monde, 1962, Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm, Private collection, Courtesy Sotheby’s © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

"Le Beau Monde" (1962),

René Magritte, L'Heureux donateur, 1966, Oil on canvas, 55,5 x 45,5 cm, Musée d'Ixelles-Brussels, Photo: Mixed Media © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

and "L’Heureux Donateur" (1966).

René Magritte, Les Amants, 1928, Oil on canvas, 54 x 73.4 cm, New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Gift of Richard S. Zeisler, Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

René Magritte, La colère des dieux, 1960, Oil on canvas, 80 x 70 cm, Private collection © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

René Magritte, La réponse imprévue, 1933, Oil on canvas, 82 x 54,4 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, Photo: J. Geleyns - Ro scan / Charly Herscovici, with his kind authorization – c/o SABAM-ADAGP, 2016 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

René Magritte, La main heureuse, 1953, Oil on canvas 50,5 x 65 cm, Collection Diane SA, Photo: Nicolas Giudice – Objectif- Fontaine –l’Evêque (Belgium) © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

René Magritte, La lecture défendue, 1936, Oil on canvas, 54,4 x 73,4 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, Photo: J. Geleyns - Ro scan / Charly Herscovici, with his kind authorization – c/o SABAM-ADAGP, 2016 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

René Magritte, Variante de la tristesse, 1957, Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm, Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth, Photo: Acorn Photo, Perth © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

René Magritte, This is not a pipe, 1935, Oil on canvas, 27 × 41 cm, Private collection © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

René Magritte, L’Art de la conversation, 1950, Oil on canvas, 51.4 × 59.1 cm, New Orleans Museum of Art, Gift of William H. Alexander, 56.61 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

René Magritte, Le palais de rideaux III, 1928/29, Oil on canvas, 81.2 x 116.4 cm, The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

The exhibition features some 70 artworks, including numerous masterpieces from major international museums as well as public and private collections, among them the Musée Magritte in Brussels, the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C..

CURATORS

Didier Ottinger, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris; Dr. Martina Weinhart, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

CATALOG

MAGRITTE. THE TREACHERY OF IMAGES

Edited by Didier Ottinger. Foreword by Philipp Demandt. Essays by Jan Blanc, Barbara Cassin, Michel Draguet, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Didier Ottinger, Klaus Speidel, and Victor I. Stoichita. 208 pp., 28.0 x 23.5 cm (vertical format), 157 color illustrations, Prestel Verlag, Munich, London, New York, 2017, ISBN 978-3-7913-6723-1,

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RICHARD GERSTL RETROSPECTIVE

March 10, 2017, 9:25 am

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Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
February 24 to May 14, 2017

He is the “first Austrian Expressionist,” and for many still an insiders’ tip: the painter Richard Gerstl (1883–1908). He only lived to be 25 years old and yet he is mentioned in the same breath as the great masters of Viennese Modernism: Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka. During his brief life Gerstl created an exciting and unusual, though relatively limited oeuvre with impressive highlights and pioneering innovations.

From February 24 to May 14, 2017, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt will be presenting the first retrospective of Richard Gerstl’s work in Germany. His painting reflects his concern with the contradictions of modern art. He was a rebel whose paintings opposed the Vienna Secession in terms of both style and content; he rejected their concept of beauty and committed himself to an aesthetic of ugliness. Gerstl loved to provoke and painted against the traditional rules in the conviction that he was treading “completely new paths” in art. He created merciless, confident paintings that do not adhere to earlier models and remain unique to this day. His oeuvre is that of a seeker who anticipated much of what was later articulated by other artists, for example in the paintings of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s.

The portrait, especially the self-portrait, nudes, and landscapes are Gerstl’s preferred genres. The exhibition at the Schirn presents, for example, two of his self-portraits: the earliest one,

Richard Gerstl, Semi-Nude Self-Portrait, 1902/04, Oil on canvas, 159 x 109 cm, © Leopold Museum, Vienna

"Semi-Nude Self-Portrait (Selbstbildnis als Halbakt)" from 1902/04,

Richard Gerstl, Nude Self-Portrait, September 12, 1908, Oil on Canvas, 139,3 x 100 cm, © Leopold Museum, Vienna

and his last, "Nude Self-Portrait (Selbstbildnis als Akt)" from 1908.

Besides portraits such as

Richard Gerstl, The Sisters Karoline and Pauline Fey, March / April 1905, Oil on canvas, 175 x 150 cm, Belvedere, Vienna

"The Sisters Karoline and Pauline Fey (Die Schwestern Karoline und Pauline Fey)" (March/April 1905)

Richard Gerstl, Portrait of Henryka Cohn, June 1908, Oil on canvas, 147,9 x 111,9 cm, © Leopold Museum, Vienna

and "Portrait of Henryka Cohn II (Bildnis Henryka Cohn II)" (summer 1908),

The exhibition also features the numerous likenesses of Mathilde Schönberg, such as

"Mother and Daughter (Mutter und Tochter)" (late 1906)

Richard Gerstl, Seated Female Nude, Fall 1908, Tempera on canvas, 166 x 116 cm © Leopold Museum, Vienna

and "Seated Female Nude (Sitzender weiblicher Akt)" (fall 1908),

as well as portraits of friends and students of the composer Arnold Schönberg,

Richard Gerstl, The Schönberg Family, late July 1908, Oil on canvas, 88,8 x 109,7 cm, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien

Gerstl’s painting "The Schönberg Family (Die Familie Schönberg)"

Richard Gerstl, Group Portrait with Schönberg, late July 1908, Oil on canvas, 169 x 110 cm, Kunsthaus Zug, Stiftung Sammlung Kamm, Photo: Kunsthaus Zug / Alfred Frommenwiler

and especially the "Group Portrait with Schönberg (Gruppenbildnis mit Schönberg)" (both late July 1908) constitute a highlight of the exhibition.

More images:

Richard Gerstl, Portrait of Alexander von Zemlinsky, July 1908, Oil on canvas, 170,5 x 74,3 cm, Kunsthaus Zug, Stiftung Sammlung Kamm, Photo: Kunsthaus Zug / Alfred Frommenwiler

Richard Gerstl, Laughing Self-Portrait, Summer/Fall 1907, Oil on canvas, 40 x 30,5 cm, Belvedere, Vienna

Richard Gerstl, Couple in a Field, July 1908, Oil on canvas, 111,2 x 90,7 cm © Leopold Museum, Vienna

Richard Gerstl, Mathilde Schönberg in the Garden, July 1908, Oil on canvas, 171 x 61 cm © Leopold Museum, Vienna

Richard Gerstl, Portrait of Mathilde Schönberg in the Studio, Spring 1908, Oil and mixed media on canvas, 171 x 60 cm, Kunsthaus Zug, Stiftung Sammlung Kamm, Photo: Kunsthaus Zug / Alfred Frommenwiler

Richard Gerstl, Grinzing, Spring 1906, Oil on canvas, 29,7 x 40,2 cm, Private collection, Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York

The Schirn has assembled no fewer than 53 of the 60 surviving works by Richard Gerstl, including loans from leading Austrian museums such as the Leopold Museum, the Galerie Belvedere, MUMOK, the Wien Museum, the Albertina, the Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum Linz, and the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg.

A large number also come from the Neue Galerie in New York, and further works from important private collections in Europe and the United States. A scholarly publication will accompany the exhibition that will include—for the first time since 1993—an updated catalogue raisonné.

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Revolution: Russian Art 1917 – 1932

March 11, 2017, 5:14 am

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Royal Academy of Arts
11 February – 17 April 2017

In February 2017, to commemorate the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the Royal Academy of Arts will present Revolution: Russian Art 1917 – 1932 . This landmark exhibition will focus on a momentous period in Russian history between 1917, the year of the October Revolution, and 1932 when Stalin began his violent suppression of the Avant-Garde.

The exhibition will feature Avant - Garde artists such as Chagall, Kandinsky, Malevich and Tatlin alongside the Socialist Realism of Brodsky, Deineka, Mukhina and Samokhvalov, amongst others.

Photography, sculpture, film, posters and porcelain will be featured alongside paintings. It will present this unique period in the history of Russian art, when for fifteen years, barriers were opened and the possibilities for building a new proletarian art for the new Soviet State were extensive.

With over 200 works, the exhibition will include loans from the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow as well as some of the most significant international private collections. M any of the works have never been seen in the UK before. A century after the 1917 October Revolution, this turning point in Russian history remains a major event in modern consciousness.

Although there have been a number of exhibitions of 20 th century Russian art, these have focused on either the Avant - Garde or Socialist Realism as separate entities. Revolution: Russian Art 1917 – 1932 takes as its starting point the major exhibition of 1932, which was presented in 33 rooms at the State Russian Museum in Leningrad and orchestrated by prominent art critic and curator Nikolai Punin . The 1932 exhibition presented a wide spectrum of Russian art from those first fifteen years after the revolution.

The Royal Academy's exhibition follows that example with a wide sweep of works that , for the first time in the UK , combine and contrast the diverse array of art that flourished during this complex post - Revolutionary period. The exhibition is arranged around broad thematic sections , each of which will explore the complex interaction between art and politics in the turbulent yet dynamic period of modern Russian history.

Salute the Leader will examine Lenin’s rise to power; his cult status after his death followed by the advent of Stalin.

Man and Machine will focus on proletarian worker heroes – both women and men whose physical effort promoted the success of industry and technology, powerfully recorded in painting, photography and film.

Brave New World sets the scene for the new cultural world and

Fate of the Peasants will look at the impact of collective farming on traditional rural life. Eternal Russia will show how images of old Russia persisted as signs of national identity even in revolutionary times.

New City, New Society will concentrate on the new city life - styles, the diversity of social typ es, some wealthy and some poor, under Lenin’s New Economic Policy in the 1920s and Stalin’s Utopia will feature Stalin’s grandiose public projects and the dark reality of his utopian vision of progress.

Highlights will include a gallery dedicated to over 30 paintings and architectons by Malevich. These works will be seen together for the first time since 1932 in an exact reconstruction of the original hang designed by the artist for the Leningrad exhibition . A room will also be dedicated to the work of Kuzma Petrov - Vodkin . Woven throughout the galleries will be original films, photographs and documents, many of which have never been exhibited before.

Revolution: Russian Art 1917 – 1932 has been organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
The exhibition is curated by Ann Dumas, Curator, Royal Academy of Arts together with John Milner, Professor of the History of Russian Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art a nd Dr Natalia Murray, Curator and Lecturer in Russian Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art , London.

Catalogue

Revolution: Russian Art 1917 – 1932 will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. Authors include co-curators of theexhibition John Milner and NataliaMurray together with Faina Balakhovskaya, John Bowlt, Masha Chlenova, Ian Christie, Christina Lodder , Nicoletta Misler , Nick Murray, Evgenia Petrova and Zelfira Tregulova .

Boris Mikailovich Kustodiev,

Bolshevik

1920. Oil on canvas 101 x 140.5 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery. Photo

Marc Chagall,

Promenade

1917-18. Oil on canvas 175.2 x 168.4 cm. State Russian Museum

Kazimir Malevich,

Peasants c. 1930. Oil on canvas 53 x 70 cm. State Russian Museum St. Petersburg.

Russian Museum St. Petersburg;

Wassily Kandinsky,

Blue Crest

1917. Oil on canvas 133 x 104 cm. State Russian

Alexander Deineka,

Textile Workers

Petersburg. © DACS 2016;

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin,

Fantasy

1925. Oil on canvas 50 x 64.5 cm. State Russian Museum

Isaak Brodsky,

V.I.Lenin and Manifestation

1919 .

Oil on canvas 90 x 135 cm The State Historical Museum. Photo © Provided with assistance from the State Museum

and Exhibition Center ROSIZO

Kazimir Malevich, "Head of a Peasant," 1928–29. Oil on plywood, 28 1/5'' x 21 1/5''. State Russian Museum. Photo © 2016, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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Looking North and South: European Prints and Drawings, 1500– 1650,

March 11, 2017, 6:17 am

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Clark Art Institute
March 5–May 29, 2017

Looking North and South: European Prints and Drawings, 1500– 1650, on view at the Clark Art Institute March 5–May 29, 2017, explores the character of artistic exchange among artists working in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as seen in prints, drawings, and rare books from the Clark’s permanent collection. Northern artists, predominantly those in the Netherlands and Germany, traveled increasingly to southern Europe— particularly Italy—during this time, responding to Italian art and antique statuary. The circulation of artistic ideas, practices, and traditions resulted in a dialogue of inspiration and innovation across the continent.

Looking North and South examines how artists responded to the work of their contemporaries in different regions of early modern Europe, revealing varying modes of artistic production and the important role of works on paper in shaping the exchange of ideas. Thirty-four works from the Clark’s permanent collection and from the Clark’s Julius S. Held Rare Book Collection are presented in the exhibition, including works by Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528); Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–69); Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640); Guercino (Italian, 1591–1666); and Giorgio Vasari (Italian, 1511–1574).

“The Clark’s collection of Old Master prints and drawings is extraordinary in its breadth, depth, and quality,” said Olivier Meslay, Felda and Dena Hardymon Director of the Clark. “It is remarkable to be able to present an exhibition of this size and quality with works entirely from our permanent collection.”

Looking North and South considers approaches to drawing practices and education, depictions of the body and narrative subjects, and the dynamics of printmaking and artistic collaboration. Prints moved easily across large geographical distances, passing between artists and collectors and making ideas and artistic forms available to wide audiences. Drawings—from the highly finished to the loosely executed—offer insight into artists’ working processes and creativity.

“In highlighting the complexity of artistic exchange across Europe in this period, the exhibition encourages viewers to think broadly about artists and their work in more connected ways,” said exhibition curator Lara Yeager-Crasselt. “By raising questions about process and material, the exhibition encourages close looking in a particular way. Seeing some of these works side-by-side allows the viewer to think about what northern and southern artists were interested in depicting, how they were making these works, and how they were responding to each other—or in some cases not responding at all.”

Drawing the body is a fundamental aspect of artistic learning and has served as one the first steps in an artist’s education since the Renaissance. Artists in the Netherlands and Italy approached the

depiction of the body in different ways because of their respective traditions or training, yet their artistic challenges in representing the body—whether from life or from antique sculpture—and handling light and shadow were similar.

In Andrea del Sarto’s (Italian, 1486–1530) chalk drawing Study of Drapery (1510–13), the artist created an exquisite preparatory work, likely rendered from a studio model, that addresses the interplay of light and shadow as it falls over the folds of cloth.

In contrast, Head of a Woman (c. 1495–1497) by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (Italian, c. 1467–1516) is a precise and delicate example of a finished, possibly independent drawing that follows the tradition of Leonardo da Vinci in using sfumato (gradual shading) in the depiction of the human form.

Albrecht Dürer’s representations of the human body were admired throughout Northern Europe.

In his engraving Adam and Eve (1504), Dürer applied a system of proportions to achieve what he considered an idealized human form. Based on his study of the ancient Roman theorist Vitruvius, as well as antique statuary he encountered in Italy, Dürer developed a set of ideal measurements that would later appear in

Four Books on Human Proportion (1528).

Conversely, Jacopo Palma il Giovane’s (Italian, c. 1548–1648) Ten Head Studies (1636) utilizes the drawing method of deconstructing the human form, which he helped popularize in Venice. The figures, seen from various perspectives and representative of different ages and types, are interspersed with depictions of eyes, noses, and ears. Although the origins of this print are unknown, it relates to images found in drawing books, which formalized a method of progressive learning around the human form. This approach quickly spread to Northern Europe, where drawing books were used by art students and amateurs alike.

Similarly, Abraham Bloemaert (Dutch, 1566–1651) intended the Tekenboek (c. 1650)—one of the few Dutch drawing books produced in the seventeenth century—to serve as a teaching tool for young art students and amateur artists. The drawing manual, published by the artist’s son Frederick Bloemaert (Dutch, 1616–1690) shortly after his father’s death, included prints of figures, anatomical studies, animals, and various narrative compositions. Images of bodily fragments such as heads and hands served as models for students to copy. Through these teaching manuals, students could learn how to study the body in isolated segments, independent of a teacher.

Looking North and South also examines the varied approaches to and functions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century narrative drawings and prints by northern and southern European artists. Highly detailed Italian drawings such as

Vasari’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (c. 1556–57) are preparatory works conceived for

paintings.

Several seventeenth-century Dutch drawings, like

Rembrandt’s Nathan Admonishing David (c. 1652–53), show the power of storytelling through a seemingly rapid manner of execution.

The exhibition also considers the role of printmaking in the widespread dissemination of these images across Europe. Prints contributed significantly to the spread of artistic ideas as well as to linking artists, printmakers, publishers, and collectors in new ways. Issues related to artists’ ownership of the images, both adversarial and collaborative, are explored through considering works by Dürer and Rubens and replicas of their originals made by printmakers Marcantonio Raimondi (Italian, 1470–before1534), Boetius Adams Bolswert (Flemish, 1590–1633), and Schelte Bolswert (Flemish, 1581–1659).

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Picasso: Encounters

March 11, 2017, 6:46 am

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The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.
June 4–August 27, 2017

Picasso: Encounters explores Pablo Picasso’s (1881–1973) interest in and experimentation with large-scale printmaking throughout his career, challenging the notion of Picasso as an artist alone with his craft. The exhibition includes important paintings on loan from the Musée national Picasso–Paris. The exhibition addresses his expansive formal vocabulary, the narrative preoccupations that drove his creative process, the often-neglected issue of the collaboration inherent in print production, and the muses that inspired him, including Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque.

The exhibition begins with Picasso’s seminal Self-Portrait (1901) from his Blue Period as a representation of the artist’s mythic isolation. The painting, on loan from the Musée national Picasso–Paris, is followed by thirty-five of the artist’s most important graphic achievements, ranging from the Clark’s rare impression of

The Frugal Repast (1904)—Picasso’s first major statement in printmaking—

to Ecce Homo, after Rembrandt (1970), executed three years before his death.

Picasso continuously mined his personal life for subject matter. The exhibition includes the captivating 1923 drypoint portrait of his first wife Olga, the playful image of his daughter Paloma (1952), and the heartrending aquatint of his embittered second wife Françoise Gilot (1952).

The exhibition also explores the intertwined narrative threads of the

Minotauromachia (1934),

The Large Bullfight (1935),

and Weeping Woman I (1937).

Four Weeping Woman prints are accompanied by

Portrait of Dora Maar (1937), the revered oil painting on loan from the Musée national Picasso–Paris. Maar was Picasso’s muse and served as his model for the paintings, drawings, and prints of weeping women produced in the 1930s.

Picasso’s final years, during which he transformed the compositions of Old Masters from Rembrandt to Cranach to Manet, are represented by linocuts such as

Portrait of a Young Girl, after Cranach the Younger, II (1958)

and Luncheon on the Grass, after Manet (1968).

Picasso: Encounters is organized by the Clark Art Institute, with the exceptional support of the Musée national Picasso–Paris. Additional support for the exhibition is provided by Margaret and Richard Kronenberg and Marilyn and Ron Walter.

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The Wyeths: Three Generations, Works from the Bank of America Collection

March 12, 2017, 9:07 am

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March 11-August 13, 2017

Mint Museum,Charlotte, N.C.

For more than a century, the members of the Wyeth family have created works of art that have stirred the imagination and fascinated art lovers worldwide. The Mint Museum is now preparing to host an exhibition of Bank of America’s largest collection of unique works by one family, providing a window into the Wyeth family’s artists through more than 60 remarkable paintings, drawings, and photographs.

The Wyeths: Three Generations, Works from the Bank of America Collection will open March 11 and remain on view through August 13 at Mint Museum Randolph, 2730 Randolph Road in Charlotte.

“Through our Art in our Communities program, Bank of America has made our corporate art collection available for museums and nonprofit galleries around the world,” said Bank of America’s North Carolina and Charlotte Market President Charles Bowman, who also sits on the Mint’s board of trustees. “This is the first time this unique Wyeth exhibition will be on display in the South and the first time it’s been seen in the U.S. in seven years. We’re very excited to bring these generational works to the Mint Museum for the Charlotte community to enjoy.” In addition to lending the works to the Mint, the exhibition is sponsored by Bank of America.

“This is the most comprehensive exhibition of work by the members of the Wyeth family that the museum has ever hosted,” said Dr. Jonathan Stuhlman, the Mint’s Senior Curator of American, Modern, and Contemporary Art. “We extend our gratitude to Bank of America for sharing these treasures of American art with our visitors, who will delight in the opportunity to see so many of these beautifully-executed images of stories, people, and scenery created over the course of the entire 20th century.”

Gnomes Bowling

N. C. Wyeth (American, 1882–1945)
Created: 1921

Oil on canvas. Bank of America Collection

Untitled (Marines landing on beach)

N. C. Wyeth (American, 1882–1945)

Created: 1944

Oil on hardboard. Bank of America Collection

N. C. Wyeth, A Young Maine Fisherman, 1933, oil on canvas.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch Collection

Patriarch N.C. Wyeth was one of the country’s foremost illustrators at the turn of the 20th century. Included in the exhibition are his illustrations for books by Robert Louis Stevenson and Washington Irving.

The Rebel

Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917– 2009)

Created: 1977

Drybrush on paper. Bank of America Collection

Eight Bells, (Clyde Stanley and Andrew Wyeth aboard Eight Bells), 1937

N.C.’s son, Andrew, is known for his haunting, highly detailed realist paintings and is represented by works from the 1940s through the 1990s.

Although not as well-known as her brother, Andrew, Henriette Wyeth was an accomplished artist who painted striking portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. She is represented in the exhibition, as is her husband, Peter Hurd, who chronicled the landscape of the American west.

Number 86

Jamie Wyeth (American, b. 1946)

Created: 1980

Watercolor and mixed media on paper. Bank of America Collection.

The Tempest, A Triptych

Jamie Wyeth (American, b. 1946)

Created: 1999

Watercolor, gouache, and varnish highlights on gray archival cardboard. Bank of America Collection.

Andrew Wyeth’s son, Jamie, represents the third generation of the family in the show. Jamie continues the family’s tradition of realism using oil paint rather than his father’s preferred mediums of tempera and watercolor. His paintings often feature the people, animals, and landscapes of Maine and Pennsylvania, and are imbued with a unique sense of magic and mystery.

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Madonnas and Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy

March 12, 2017, 9:14 am

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The Fitzwilliam Museum

7 March – 4 June 2017

The Fitzwilliam Museum opens a major new exhibition that reveals the central place of religion in the Italian Renaissance home from March 7 - 4 June 2017. ‘Madonnas and Miracles’ will show how religious beliefs and practices were embedded in every aspect of domestic life. Challenging the idea of the Renaissance as a time of increasing worldliness and secularization, the exhibition will show ho w the period’s intense engagement with material things went hand in hand with its devotional life.

A glittering array of sculptures and paintings, jewellery, ceramics, printed images and illustrated books will bear witness to the role of domestic objects in sustaining and inspiring faith.

The culmination of a four -year European- funded project, ‘Madonnas and Miracles’ will present the fruits of a ground -breaking interdisciplinary investigation carried out at the University of Cambridge by members of the Department of Italian, and the Faculties of History, Architecture and History of Art. Extensive research in neglected archives and collections across the peninsula has transformed our understanding of the daily lives of Renaissance Italians, and has uncovered hundreds of sources that allow us to tell a new story about the role of the divine in everyday life.

Coinciding with the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, the exhibition will confound the assumption that Catholicism was a religion dominat ed by priests and ecclesiastical institutions, whilst Protestant families in northern Europe were urged to serve God in their homes. When we peer through the keyhole into the Italian Renaissance home, we find a world in which religion was domesticated in innumerable ways, inflecting every hour of the day and every stage of the life cycle. The intimacy between human and divine was everywhere visible and palpable: in streets and houses, on walls and furnishings, and on a wealth of objects that could be held in the hand. The humblest artisans and the most exalted artists were engaged in producing artefacts that promoted domestic piety.

The exhibition will present a domestic sphere that was supercharged with spiritual significance. Many different kinds of artefact —paintings and crucifixes, crockery and cutlery, jewellery, rosaries, statuettes, prayer books and cheap prints —will be brought together so that we can see how they worked collectively to shape the domestic religious sphere.

Some of the most powerful items on display will be familiar items of daily life turned to divine purposes. An ivory comb from the mid-fifteenth century features a tiny Annunciation scene. A two -handled cup is decorated with the instruments of Christ’s Passion. Conversely, some religious objects served worldly purposes. A rock crystal rosary, created for a wealthy patron, reveals delicate scenes in gilded glass within each of its thirteen beads; it would have functioned simultaneously as a potent religious tool and a breathtaking piec e of jewellery.

The inclusion of some rare surviving items from Jewish homes – for example, a Hanukkah lamp or a spice -box used in a ritual to mark the end of the Sabbath – will remind visitors that Renaissance Italy was a multi -cultural society. At the same time, the juxtaposition of sacred objects and books from Jewish and Christian households will hint at some of the qualities of domestic devotion that are shared across different faiths.

Displaying almost fifty objects from the Museum’s own collection, as well as over one hundred important loan works from Europe, the United States and Israel, ‘Madonnas and Miracles’ will explore a series of interlinked themes: family life, the physical experience of prayer, the role of the saints, miracles, pilgrimage and religious reform.

The exhibition will demonstrate that domestic religion at the time was well attuned to the needs of ordinary lay-folk, as they experienced the crises and anxieties of everyday life. The point will be driven home by one of the highlights of the show: a selection of ex-voto images drawn from shrines across Italy and never before displayed in the UK. Thousands of these roughly painted boards, originally created to give thanks for miracles were produced in the period. Treasured for their spiritual significance rather than for their artistic value, sizeable collections still exist at many Italian shrines, and the practice of making ex -votos continues to this day. These images of worshippers at moments of extreme physical peril will provide moving testimony to the Renaissance fascination with the miraculous, in its intersection with everyday domestic life.

During the Renaissance, strong ties bound members of a family to their household Madonna, which might be embodied in painting, print, scul pture or figurine. The image of Mary, often displayed on the wall of a bedroom or above a threshold, provided comfort and security to residents of the home as well as offering them a focus for their devotions.

The exhibition will show how the Madonna also functioned as a role -model for motherhood and parenting. This theme is intimately depicted in a favourite painting from the Fitzwilliam’s collection,

Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist (c. 1490–95), Pinturicchio (Bernardino di Betto). © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist (c. 1490–95), Pinturicchio (Bernardino di Betto). © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Pinturicchio’s Virgin and Child with St John, which portrays Mary teaching Jesus to read.

A polychrome wooden doll of the Christ Child from Camerino will leave Italy for the first time to be displayed in the exhibition. Many women in Renaissance Italy possessed similar dolls, which were dressed, undressed, handled and kissed, mimicking the Virgin’s maternal bond with Christ. The Camerino doll continues to be an object of veneration, looked after and dressed by local nuns, and annually revered by crowds of people who queue up to kiss it on the feast of the Epiphany.

Alongside masterpieces by renowned artists such as Filippo Lippi and Annibale Carracci, ‘Madonnas and Miracles’ will feature domestic objects from the Museum’s reserve collection rarely seen by the public. A number of little-known ceramic pieces from the Museum’s stores have been renovated for the exhibition by conservation expert Penny Bendall. They include a maiolica inkstand, sculpted with a scene of the Nativity, and another piece depicting the Adoration of the Magi. The latter has to be rotated to allow the complete story to be seen; thanks to the conservation of its original bright colours, visitors will be able to imagine how it would have captured the attention of children as they received religious instruction. Chips and missing paint have been left, in order to retain the evidence of well-loved domestic wear and tear.

The multi -sensory nature of devotion will be highlighted by the use of different media. While they admire rosaries made of rosewood and bone, visitors will be able to listen to the voice of an elderly Italian woman repeating her Ave Marias and Paternosters. A set of knives that bear the musical notation for a four- part grace will be brought to life by a newly -commissioned recording by members of the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue, edited by curators Maya Corry, Deborah Howard and Mary Laven.

Comb with The Annunciation (c. 1450–1500), possibly Italy, France or Flanders. © Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin.

Comb with The Annunciation (c. 1450–1500), possibly Italy, France or Flanders. © Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin.

Jewelled cross pendant (possibly 16th century), Italy. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Jewelled cross pendant (possibly 16th century), Italy. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist (c. 1490–95), Pinturicchio (Bernardino di Betto). © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Maiolica panel, painted with a half-length figure of the Virgin with the infant Christ (c. 1600–1700). © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Virgin and Child (c. 1480–90), Studio of Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi). © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

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Pissarro. A Meeting on St. Thomas

March 21, 2017, 11:55 am

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Ordrupgaard Museum, Denmark
10 March – 2 July 2017

Is there a connection between Danish Golden Age painting and French Impressionism? Now, Ordrupgaard is marking the centenary of the sale of the Danish West Indies with an exhibition that highlights the meeting between the Danish Golden Age painter, Fritz Melbye, and the ‘father’ of French Impressionism, Camille Pissarro at Saint Thomas. The exhibition adds a completely new angle to the origins of Impressionism.

Most people are familiar with the great impressionist painter, Camille Pissarro, but few are aware that he was a Danish citizen. Pissarro was born in 1830 in the town of Charlotte Amalie at Saint Thomas. In 1850 the Danish painter, Fritz Melbye travelled from Copenhagen to the Danish colony, and the two young artists spend a couple of years in each other’s company.

Into Impressionism

Pissarro. A meeting on St. Thomas presents an extensive number of early works by Pissarro and Melbye, painted during their years together in the Danish West Indies and Venezuela. With paintings, sketches and drawings loaned from museums and collections around the world, the exhibition shows how Pissarro built upon his early years of learning with Melbye as his mentor, and how he applied these lessons in Impressionism.

The exhibition Pissarro. A Meeting on St. Thomas tells the story about the meeting of Pissarro and Melbye, and the creative exchange between the two artists, which Pissarro brought with him into Impressionism. The exhibition presents both artists with pieces borrowed from museums and collections all over the world.

Pissarro. A Meeting on St. Thomas is an invitation to join an artistic exploration from the Danish West Indies, through the jungle of Caracas and Venezuela, all the way to France where Impressionism was born. The exhibition shows Melbye’s influence on the slightly younger Pissarro as his first mentor and teacher, and thus presents a unique new angle on the origins of French Impressionism.

Camille Pissarro. Inlet with Sailboat, 1856. Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

Camille Pissarro. Landscape from the Antilles, Rider and Donkey on a Road, 1856. Ordrupgaard

Fritz Melbye. Palm Trees and Grasses, n.d.
Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, New York /
Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation

Camille Pissarro, People discussing in the Roadside, 1856. Stern Pissarro Gallery, London

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Landscape, St. Thomas, 1856, Oil on canvas, 46,3 x 38 cm, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Camille Pissarro, The Ennery road. Val d'Oise., 1874. Paris, musée d'Orsay. Photo ©, Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt .

Fritz Melbye, Parti fra Skt. Thomas havn i Charlotte Amalie, 1851-52, Museet for Søfart.

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ALICE NEEL: PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE

March 21, 2017, 12:18 pm

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Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands
November 5, 2016 through February 12, 2017

Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles
4 March through 17 September 2017

Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany
October 13, 2017, through January 14, 2018

This retrospective of paintings by Alice Neel (1900–1984) – one of North America’s most important female artists, although largely unappreciated during her own lifetime – is the fruit of a collaboration between several European institutions. The exhibition at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles places the US painter and her realist brush firmly in the spotlight. Imbued with a powerful psychological dimension, Neel’s portraits bear witness to almost a century of evolution in attitudes towards gender and ethnicity, and to radical changes in fashion at the heart of American society.

Working in an epoch that declared abstraction the new modernism, Neel would always remain a “painter of modern life” as imagined by Charles Baudelaire, with whom she shared the same vision of modernity and the artist’s role in relation to it. Hallmarked at once by expressionism and realism, Alice Neel’s œuvre translates the paradoxical personality of its maker, who wanted to paint individuals from all social classes and create a visual history of her time – a Comédie Humaine .

Conceived by Jeremy Lewison, the leading expert on Alice Neel, the exhibition presents more than seventy paintings, including a portrait of Andy Warhol “laid bare” under the artist’s keen gaze.

After the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki and the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in The Hague, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles welcomes this major exhibition from 4 March to 17 September 2017, after which it will travel on to Germany and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg.

Exhibition curator: Jeremy Lewison

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Alice Neel is born on 28 January 1900 in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, USA. She studies art at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, an institution that distances itself from the formalist approach to art taught during this epoch. In the 1930s Alice Neel lives in Greenwich Village, a district of New York with a Bohemian reputation and popular with artists. She is entered on the payroll of the Works Progress Administration, for which she paints urban scenes. During this period she also meets and paints the portraits of fellow Communist Party sympathizers.

In 1938 she moves to Spanish Harlem (today East Harlem), where she embarks on a new series of portraits featuring Puerto Ricans, among others. In the 1960s she settles in Upper West Side, where she reconnects with the art world and executes her famous portraits of artists, gallerists and curators. At the end of the decade she finds inspiration for her art not only among family members, but also by observing women and children, whom she thus paints at the dawn of the feminist movement. From this period onwards, too, her painting is finally recognized by the American art scene and celebrated in the form of numerous solo and collective shows.

Alice Neel dies on 13 October 1984 in New York.

Catalogue

This groundbreaking book re-evaluates the work of Alice Neel, one of the most renowned American portrait painters of the 20th century

This insightful catalogue examines anew the full range of Alice Neel’s (1900-1984) celebrated paintings of people, still life, and cityscapes. Featuring around seventy paintings spanning the entire length of her career, this handsome book accompanies a major retrospective of her work, and reveals her underlying interest in the history of photography, German painting of the 1920s, and other artists, such as Van Gogh and Cézanne, all of which provided an important precedent for the veracity and raw emotional intensity of her figurative works. Neel is renowned for her visual acuity and psychological depth, and her portraits and nude paintings of friends, family, strangers, and prominent cultural figures alike convey an incredibly consistent intimacy regardless of the relationship to her subject.

The accompanying essays trace the trajectory of Neel’s artistic language as it evolved alongside contemporaneous trends in the New York City art world and examine the manner in which her own work figured into the social and cultural contexts of her time. Created over a sixty-year period, Neel’s oeuvre offers a remarkably expressive document of the specific milieus she navigated through and ultimately transcends the marker of time altogether.

Main exhibitions (a selection)

• Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction , National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 18 April 2014 – 11 January 2015

• Alice Neel: Painted Truths , Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 21 March – 13 June 2010, and subsequently touring to the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and the Moderna Museet, Malmö

• Alice Neel , Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 29 June – 17 September 2000, and subsequently touring to Andover, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Denver

• Féminin-Masculin, Le Sexe de l’art , Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 24 October 1995 – 12 February 1996

Alice Neel: The Spanish Family© Estate of Alice Neel
  Alice Neel: Frank O'Hara© Estate of Alice Neel
  Alice Neel: Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd© Estate of Alice Neel
  Alice Neel: Joey Skaggs© Estate of Alice Neel
  Alice Neel: Self-Portrait© Estate of Alice Neel

José , 1936 Oil on canvas, 58.4 x 46 cm Estate of Alice Neel Photo credit: Malcolm Varon, New York

Pregnant Julie and Algis , 1967 Oil on canvas, 107.6 x 161.9 cm Estate of Alice Neel Photo credit: Malcolm Varon, New York

Ginny and Elizabeth , 1975 Oil on canvas, 106.7 x 76.2 cm Estate of Alice Neel Photo credit: Ethan Palme

Great review, more images

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Helen Frankenthaler Paintings and Woodcuts

March 21, 2017, 12:22 pm

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As in Nature: Helen Frankenthaler Paintings
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
July 1–October 9, 2017

This exhibition comprises a selection of large paintings by Helen Frankenthaler from the 1950s through the 1990s, focusing on nature as a longstanding inspiration. Like many abstract artists, Frankenthaler continually tested the constraints of the genre, at times inserting into her compositions elements of recognizable subject matter that throw the abstract elements into relief. The paintings in this exhibition represent the full range of styles and techniques that she explored over five decades of work; while all are primarily abstract, they also contain allusions to landscape, demonstrating how Frankenthaler’s delicate balance between abstraction and a nuanced responsiveness to nature and place developed and shifted over time. As Frankenthaler once commented, “Anything that has beauty and provides order (rather than chaos or shock alone), anything resolved in a picture (as in nature) gives pleasure—a sense of rightness, as in being one with nature.”

No Rules: Helen Frankenthaler Woodcuts
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
July 1–September 24, 2017

In 1994, when being interviewed by printer/publisher Ken Tyler, Helen Frankenthaler stated, “There are no rules, that is one thing I say about every medium, every picture . . . that is how art is born, that is how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules, that is what invention is about.”

No Rules explores Helen Frankenthaler’s inventive and groundbreaking approach to the woodcut. The artist began creating woodcuts after experimenting with lithography, etching, and screen printing. She produced her first woodcuts,

East and Beyond (1973)

and her ethereal Savage Breeze (1974), by carving pieces of wood with a jigsaw, inking each block of wood separately and arranging the pieces of wood to print them on paper.

In Essence Mulberry (1977)

and Cameo (1980),

she invented a new technique termed “guzzying,” working the wood’s surface to achieve specific results when printed. Throughout her career, the artist worked with a variety of print publishers to push the medium in new directions. In 1983 she traveled to Japan and worked in traditional methods of color woodblock printing with an expert carver and printers to produce

Cedar Hill (1983), resulting in an entirely different, layered approach to color.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Frankenthaler continued to experiment with enthusiasm and daring. For Freefall and Radius (both 1992–93), the artist worked with dyed paper pulp to create the maquettes for the final woodcuts. In Tales of Genji (1998)

and Madame Butterfly (2000), she worked with a dazzling array of blocks and papers, collaborating with an expert Japanese carver, printers, and paper-makers to create serial images acknowledged to be landmarks in the evolution of the medium. Her final three woodcuts,

Snow Pines (2004),

Japanese Maple (2005),

and Weeping Crabapple (2009), pay homage to three different types of trees in strikingly divergent ways.

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Slow Food: Still Lifes of the Golden Age

March 22, 2017, 11:08 am

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From 9 March through 25 June 2017 the Mauritshuis presents Slow Food: Still Lifes of the Golden Age, the first exhibition to be devoted to the development of meal still lifes in Holland and Flanders from 1600 onwards. The cornerstone of the exhibition is a masterpiece acquired by the museum in 2012, Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels by Clara Peeters.

The exhibition features 22 masterpieces from Washington’s National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum among others including all the works by Peeters from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid.

The meal still life – a subset of the genre that shows prepared food laid out on a table without figures in the composition - originated around 1600 with painters in Antwerp such as Clara Peeters and Osias Beert. Haarlem-based painters such as Floris van Dijck and Nicolaes Gillis followed them shortly thereafter. Meal still lifes showing richly set tables piled high with tempting morsels and precious objects became increasingly popular in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Various artists eagerly devoted themselves to depicting the objects on display in great detail. The exhibition in the Mauritshuis features paintings from the early years of this genre, the period 1600-1640.

Astonishing detail

Masters of the meal still life depicted refined delicacies such as fish, oysters, prawns, cheese, bread, olives and nuts, offset by fine glassware, gilded goblets, pottery jugs or oriental porcelain. The way in which the details have been rendered is a feat of extraordinary precision, as is the play of light on the various materials. Peeters succeeds in replicating the somewhat crumbly texture of the biggest cheese and the creaminess of the butter curls on the plate with great accuracy in her

Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels.

The delicate play of light on the blade of the knife is also beautifully rendered. Virtuosity is also on display in the work of Claesz and Heda.

In Heda’s impressive Still Life with Gilt Goblet dated 1635, for example, the suggestion of reflected light on the large glass is magnificent. The glass not only reflects the rays of light coming in through a window, but also the muted sheen of a silver tazza (shallow drinking bowl) and a gilded goblet. The reflection resembles a fine mesh on the glass and is a superb example of the craftsmanship that is so characteristic of these early meal still lifes.

Interpretation

The delicacies and precious objects shown in the meal still lifes evoke a utopian world free of hunger and need. The paintings often incorporate a sense of mortality, of the transience of earthly life. This vanitas symbolism is made explicit in the meal still lifes by Claesz and Heda, each of whom include a timepiece in their compositions. At the same time, a good meal also symbolises prosperity and well-being. It is possible that the cornucopia of food shown in the paintings was also intended as an exhortation to moderation. In a number of paintings by Peeters, for example, a knife with the word ‘TEMP[ERANTIA]’ (moderation) on its blade figures prominently. Her aim may have been to impart a deeper meaning to her compositions.

Osias Beert (Antwerpen? c.1580-1623 Antwerpen), Dishes with Oysters, Fruit, and Wine, c.1610-1620, oil on panel, 53 x 73 cm. Washington, National Gallery of Art, Patrons’ Permanent Fund

Pieter Claesz (Berchem 1597/98-1660 Haarlem), Still Life with Roemer, Tazza, and Watch, 1636, oil on panel, 44 x 61 cm (17 5/16 x 24 in.), Royal Picture Gallery, Mauritshuis, The Hague, on long-term loan from the Friends of the Mauritshuis Foundation (Gift of Willem Baron van Dedem)

Clara Peeters (Active in Antwerpen, c.1607-1621 of later), Table with Cloth, Salt Cellar, Gilt Standing Cup, Pie, Jug, Porcelain Plate with Olives and Cooked Fowl, c.1611, oil on panel, 55 x 73 cm. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

For the duration of the exhibition there will be a greenhouse on the square of the Mauritshuis: Taste Station MH.

Clara Peeters (Active in Antwerpen, c.1607-1621 of later), Still life with fruits and flowers, c.1612-1613. Cooper, 64 x 89 cm, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Bequeathed by Daisy Linda Ward, 1939

30 Van Schooten Frans Hals Museum os 2011-20 (2)

Floris van Schooten (Haarlem? c.1585/88-1656 Haarlem), Still Life with herring and oysters, c.1625-1630, oil on panel, 35 x 49 cm, Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum, purchased with support from "Donation Drs. J-P. de Man "and the Rembrandt Society, 2011

Detail: Floris van Schooten, Still Life with Pewter Flagon and Basket of Cheese, c.1623-1625 Private collection. Now on view in the Mauritshuis

Joachim Beuckelaer "Kitchen Scene with Christ at Emmaus"Now on view in the Mauritshuis

Catalogue

The Mauritshuis and Waanders Publishers will offer a catalogue to accompany the exhibition. Slow Food: Dutch and Flemish Meal Still Lifes 1600-1640 contains more than 150 colour illustrations, published in English (ISBN 978 94 6262 117 6) and Dutch (ISBN 978 94 6262 116 9). The catalogue is written by Quentin Buvelot, Senior Curator at the Mauritshuis, with additional contributions by Yvonne Bleyerveld, Milou Goverde, Zoran Kwak, Anne Lenders, Fred G. Meijer and Charlotte Rulkens. .

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Monet to Matisse: A Century of French Moderns

March 23, 2017, 11:37 am

≫ Next: Calm and Exaltation. Van Gogh in the Bührle Collection

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McNay Art Museum
March 1 to June 4, 2017

The McNay Art Museum is proud to present Monet to Matisse: A Century of French Moderns (March 1 to June 4, 2017) in its newly reconfigured Tobin Exhibition Galleries. Curated by McNay Director Richard Aste and Brooklyn Museum Curator of European Painting and Sculpture Lisa Small, the exhibition includes nearly 60 paintings and sculptures from Brooklyn’s renowned European art collection as well as selections from the McNay’s prized holdings.

“Bringing Brooklyn’s French collection to the McNay is a reunion decades in the making,” says Aste. “Our founder, Marion Koogler McNay, was a visionary collector. Putting her keen collecting eye back on a par with those of her mostly male peers at the Brooklyn Museum, one of the nation’s pioneering art institutions, is powerful, appropriate, and long overdue.”

At the McNay, Monet to Matisse is organized by René Paul Barilleaux, Chief Curator/Curator of Contemporary Art, and Heather Lammers, Director of Collections and Exhibitions.

Indeed, the McNay boasts artworks from the same era—Modernism—and by many of the same artists featured in Monet to Matisse. To reinforce collecting-practice parallels between the McNay and Brooklyn and to highlight the McNay’s growing Modern art collection, the Museum is introducing paintings, sculptures, and prints typically exhibited in the main collection galleries to the Tobin Exhibition Galleries, along with key works on loan from private collectors. Notable examples include:

Paul Gauguin’s Portrait of the Artist with the Idol,

Raoul Dufy, French, 1877-1953
Seated Woman - Rosalie

1929

Oil on canvas

21 7/8 x 18 1/4in (55.6 x 46.4cm)

Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay

© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris

Raoul Dufy’s Seated Woman-Rosalie , and

Vincent van Gogh’s Women Crossing the Fields, all bequests of Marion Koogler McNay.

An iconic suite of ten Mary Cassatt aquatints, graciously donated to the McNay by prominent philanthropist and collector Margaret Batts Tobin in 1977

.

Claude Monet masterpiece Nympheas (Water Lilies)

An arresting Paris-made still life by African American painter Lois Mailou Jones on loan from the Harmon and Harriet Kelley Foundation for the Arts.

Frederick Carl Frieseke’s The Bathers, an exquisite painting on loan from the collection of Marie and Hugh Halff.

Also on view in the McNay’s Charles Butt Paperworks Gallery is the complementary exhibition Sur Papier: Works on Paper by Renoir, Chagall, and Other French Moderns, drawn entirely from the Museum’s renowned prints and drawings collection.

Monet to Matisse: A Century of French Moderns celebrates France as a major artistic center of international Modernism from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. At the time, the genres of portraiture, landscape, the still life, and the nude were redefined in radical ways. The paintings, sculptures, and works on paper in this presentation exemplify the avant-garde movements that defined a hundred years, spanning early attempts to faithfully capture everyday life and concluding with introspective reflections of a disrupted landscape, beginning with the reign of naturalism and ending with the rise of abstraction.

Monet to Matisse: A Century of French Moderns is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, co-authored by Rich Aste and Lisa Small, the exhibition’s organizers from the Brooklyn Museum. The catalogue includes an introductory essay (with a general overview of the exhibition and relevant social and artistic histories), brief thematic essays, and short interpretive entries on individual works of art.

Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926).Rising Tide at Pourville (Marée montante àPourville), 1882. Oil on canvas,26 × 32 in. (66 × 81.3cm).Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Horace O. Havemeyer, 41.1260

This exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum.

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Calm and Exaltation. Van Gogh in the Bührle Collection

March 23, 2017, 11:52 am

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4 March to 17 September 2017

Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles

The exhibition Calm and Exaltation. Van Gogh in the Bührle Collection presents eight paintings by Vincent van Gogh. This selection allows us to see not only the different phases in the Dutch artist’s career, but also the vision of a collector, the Swiss industrialist Emil Bührle (1890–1956), for whom it was crucial that his collection should convey the stylistic development of each artist represented within it. Thus the thread running through his dazzling acquisitions of works by Van Gogh is the lightening and brightening of Vincent’s palette and his synthesis of different influences in his art.

The Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles has been granted the loan of six canvases from the Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection, Zürich, which holds in all seven works by Van Gogh.

These six canvases are presented here alongside two other loans.

The Old Tower (1884)

and Peasant Woman, Head (1885)

are early works painted in the Dutch town of Nuenen,

while

Bridges Across the Seine at Asnières, Paris, 1887 Oil on canvas, 53.5 x 67 cm Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection, Zürich

Bridges Across the Seine at Asnières (1887)

Self-Portrait, Paris, 1887 Oil on canvas, 47 x 35.4 cm Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection, Zürich

and Self-Portrait (1887)

date from the artist’s time in Paris, where he was inspired by Impressionism and Pointillism.

Lastly,

The Weeders, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 1890 Oil on paper, on canvas, 49.3 x 64 cm Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection,

The Weeders

and Blossoming Chestnut Branches (both 1890) testify to the artistic maturity that Vincent attained at the end of his career.

In Blossoming Chestnut Branches , Van Gogh shows us the exaltation of spring. The brushwork is resolutely energetic, the colours vibrant and the composition bold in its horizontality.

Vincent’s extended stay in Provence is represented by two loans respectively issuing from a private collection and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Although the clear light and bright colours of the South found their way into his paintings of this period, in

Entrance to a Quarry , Saint-Rémy- de-Provence, mid-July 1889 Oil on canvas, 60 x 74.5 cm Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Entrance to a Quarry (1889) Van Gogh returns to the more sombre palette he had favoured in the North.

Writing to his brother Theo on 22 August 1889, Vincent says of Entrance to a Quarry :

“And it was precisely a more sober attempt, matt in colour without looking impressive, broken greens, reds and rusty ochre yellows, as I told you that from time to time I felt a desire to begin again with a palette like the one in the north.”

This palette of the North is that of the earth, made up of ochres and dark greens. Vincent van Gogh,

With Olive Orchard (1889), likewise painted in the countryside around Saint-Rémy, one of the artist’s favourite Provençal motifs takes its place in the exhibition.

Exhibition curators: Bice Curiger, Lukas Gloor

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Vincent van Gogh is born on 30 March 1853 in Groot-Zundert in the Netherlands. At the age of 16 he joins Goupil & C ie , a firm of art dealers in The Hague, and subsequently works in the company’s offices in Brussels, London and finally Paris. He gradually loses interest in the commercial art world and, in 1878–79, he becomes a lay preacher in a mining community in the Borinage area of Belgium.

In August 1880 Van Gogh decides to become an artist. He wants to be a painter of everyday life, and, above all, of peasant life, following in the footsteps of artists such as Jean-François Millet. Landscapes and still lifes, too, become an important part of his oeuvre.

In 1886 in Paris he discovers Japanese prints and he meets Impressionist artists. Convinced that colour is the key to modernity, Van Gogh leaves for Provence in search of bright light and vibrant colours.

Dreaming of establishing a community of artists, in February 1888 he settles in Arles. Gauguin joins him in October, but their collaboration collapses in late December 1888.

Disappointed and ill, in May 1889 Van Gogh has himself admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy, where he remains for a whole year. He continues with his search for an expressive art based on colour and brush strokes, creating more than 500 paintings and drawings during his 27 months in Provence.

In May 1890 Van Gogh moves to Auvers-sur-Oise, where in just over two months he produces the final 70 paintings of an oeuvre that comprises more than 2,000 works. He dies on 29 July 1890 at the age of 37. Van Gogh’s artistic genius and the poignant story of his life transform him into a veritable international icon.

During his stay at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole psychiatric hospital in Saint- Rémy-de-Provence, Van Gogh turns to the surrounding countryside to enrich his geography as an artist. He tirelessly paints and draws new Provençal motifs: cypress trees, olive groves and hills. The low Alpilles range rising behind the hospital buildings provides Vincent with an opportunity to paint the rugged massif as well as the quarry located nearby. In 1889 he treats this latter in two canvases, of which he executes the first in mid-July – just after suffering a fresh health crisis – and the second in October.

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William Eggleston Los Alamos

March 24, 2017, 11:25 am

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FOAM, Amsterdam
17 March – 7 June 2017

The American photographer William Eggleston (1939, Memphis Tennessee, US) is widely considered one of the leading photographers of the past decades. He has been a pioneer of colour photography from the mid-1960s onwards, and transformed everyday America into a photogenic subject. In William Eggleston – Los Alamos, Foam displays his portfolio of photographs that were taken on various road trips through the southern states of America between 1966 and 1974. The exhibition includes a number of iconic images, amongst which Eggleston’s first colour photograph.

William Eggleston, En Route to New Orleans, 1971–1974, from the series Los Alamos, 1965–1974 © Eggleston Artistic Trust 2004 / Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

Los Alamos starts in Eggleston’s home town of Memphis and the Mississippi Delta and continues to follow his wanderings through New Orleans, Las Vegas and south California, ending at Santa Monica Pier. During a road trip with writer and curator Walter Hopps, Eggleston also passed through Los Alamos, the place in New Mexico where the nuclear bomb was developed in secret and to which the series owes its name.

The over 2200 images made for Los Alamos were originally intended to be published in parts, but were forgotten over the years. The photographs were rediscovered almost 40 years after the project started. They were published and exhibited for the first time in 2003. The vibrant photographs of traffic signs, run-down buildings and diner interiors distinctly betray the hand of the wayward autodidact. His early work evidences his penchant for the seemingly trivial: before the lens of Eggleston’s ‘democratic camera’, everything becomes equally important.

Eggleston began Los Alamos ten years before his contested solo exhibition at MoMA in 1976, which placed colour photography on the map as a serious art form. At the time, colour photography in the fine arts was regarded as frivolous, or even vulgar. It earned Eggleston the scorn of many. However, this did not stop him from experimenting with the no longer used dye-transfer process, a labour-intensive and expensive technique that was mainly used in advertising photography. The process allowed the photographer to control the colour saturation and achieve an unparalleled nuance in tonality; a quality that also characterizes the 75 dye-transfer prints exhibited at Foam.

Images

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American Artists in Europe: Selections from the Permanent Collection

March 24, 2017, 12:28 pm

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The Hyde Collection

February 28 through June 11, 2017

Childe Hassam’s ‘Geraniums,’ painted in 1888/89, is part of The Hyde’s permanent collection and one of the work’s featured in its current show.

When Childe Hassam returned to the United States after living in Paris for three years, he brought with him an American form of Impressionism. His Hyde House favorite Geraniums will be exhibited — along with the works of other American artists who found inspiration overseas — in American Artists in Europe: Selections from the Permanent Collection, which opened Tuesday, February 28,in The Hyde Collection's Whitney-Renz Gallery.

The featured works are drawn from the Museum's permanent collection, highlighting American artists inspired by their travels. "Americans go as students or as established artists, but they both come back with distinctly American versions of movements they encountered in Europe," said Jonathan Canning, Curator of The Hyde.

Forebodings by Winslow Homer, Hyde Collection

When, for example, Winslow Homer tired of painting Americans, he traveled overseas in 1881 in search of strong-willed women exuding natural beauty. The revered painter found his muses on the rough shores of Cullercoats, England. He came back to the States with the subjects that would come to dominate his later years, fisherfolk and the power of the sea.

Before the Civil War, America lacked the cultural equivalents of artists' cafes, salons, and the Bohemian lifestyle that made Europe the center of Western culture. "Artists traveled wanting to see Europe's great cities, art collections, and monuments," Canning said. "It wasn't until after the war that Americans started to develop art academies and cultural institutions of their own."

American Artists in Europe: Selections from the Permanent Collection features works from Hassam; Homer, who traveled to England twice in the mid-1800s;

Duveneck Frank Florentine Flower Girl

Frank Duveneck, who traveled and taught extensively in Italy and Germany;

Elihu Vedder, who found inspiration in Italy and eventually lived there permanently;

and Leonard Freed, who traveled in Europe and Africa before settling in Amsterdam to photograph its Jewish community; among others.

American Artists in Europe runs through June 11 in Whitney-Renz Gallery.

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French Painting at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

March 29, 2017, 10:16 am

≫ Next: México 1900–1950: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco, and the Avant-Garde

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Glyptotek, Copenhagaen

From 19th March, 2017

Manet, Degas, Monet, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin… the Glyptotek’s collection of French painting contains works by some of the greatest figures in art, just as it covers one of the most hectic epochs in art history. With over 200 works the exhibition displays the artistic diversity, which poured forth from France in the years 1809-1950. Through an original presentation of famous masterpieces and rarely seen major works the exhibition presents a visual narrative of 150 years of art which never manages to put down roots, and, for the same reason, is suffused with intensity and invention.

The Art Superpower

From the Romantic Period up to the Second World War France was the meeting point for the most innovative vanguard of artists. The accelerating modernity and cultural broad-mindedness of Paris as well as the attraction of rural settings in the provinces was the perfect climate for the most pioneering European avant-garde. The exhibition’s paintings, drawings and small sculptures bear witness to the fact that art in this period was, at times, a savage quest for originality. These artists were driven by a powerful impulse not merely to keep pace with, but also to be able to anticipate and create the expression and form of the time.

Ideal and Experiment

The exhibition, which is based exclusively on the Glyptotek’s own collection, spans the whole range in the development of art from the academic to the so-called modern. From the idealised painterly expression with its considerable technical wealth of detail, via the freer, experimental paintings, to full-blooded abstraction. In this way the exhibition sums up the many stylistic currents of the period: Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism, and, most of all, Impressionism.

Backwards: 1950-1809

However, the development is far from linear and the art has a tendency to run rings around itself. The artists typically worked outside art historical categories. They moved in and out of the various groups, drew inspiration from their travels and, all in all, worked more dynamically and unpredictably.

The exhibition extends over three floors and juxtaposes artists, genres and techniques with chronology as the governing principle. It is, in fact, the chronology which briefly liberates painting from the constraints of being too closely associated with certain styles and has it assume the foreground as painting first and foremost. To further underline the free approach of the artists the exhibition is arranged according to a reverse chronology. Far from standing as a natural final destination, the modern painting of the 20th century becomes an introduction to a reversed stroll through the art of painting from the 19th century.

Vincent van Gogh, Landscape from Saint-Rémy, 1889, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

Paul Gauguin, Tahiti Woman with a Flower, 1891, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

Claude Monet, Shadows on the Sea. The Cliffs at Pourville, 1882

Paul Gauguin: Pape Moe Mysterious Water, 1894. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

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The Chrysler Museum of Art

March 10–June 18, 2017

Kazimir Malevich, "Head of a Peasant," 1928–29. Oil on plywood, 28 1/5'' x 21 1/5''. State Russian Museum. Photo © 2016, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Gnomes Bowling

N. C. Wyeth (American, 1882–1945)

Untitled (Marines landing on beach)

N. C. Wyeth (American, 1882–1945)

The Rebel

Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917– 2009)

Number 86

Jamie Wyeth (American, b. 1946)

The Tempest, A Triptych

Jamie Wyeth (American, b. 1946)

Conceived by Jeremy Lewison, the leading expert on Alice Neel, the exhibition presents more than seventy paintings, including a portrait of Andy Warhol “laid bare” under the artist’s keen gaze.

After the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki and the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in The Hague, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles welcomes this major exhibition from 4 March to 17 September 2017, after which it will travel on to Germany and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg.

Exhibition curator: Jeremy Lewison

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Alice Neel dies on 13 October 1984 in New York.

Catalogue

Main exhibitions (a selection)

• Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction , National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 18 April 2014 – 11 January 2015

• Alice Neel: Painted Truths , Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 21 March – 13 June 2010, and subsequently touring to the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and the Moderna Museet, Malmö

• Alice Neel , Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 29 June – 17 September 2000, and subsequently touring to Andover, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Denver

• Féminin-Masculin, Le Sexe de l’art , Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 24 October 1995 – 12 February 1996

Alice Neel: The Spanish Family© Estate of Alice Neel Alice Neel: Frank O'Hara© Estate of Alice Neel Alice Neel: Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd© Estate of Alice Neel Alice Neel: Joey Skaggs© Estate of Alice Neel Alice Neel: Self-Portrait© Estate of Alice Neel

Alice Neel: Gus Hall© Estate of Alice Neel

José , 1936 Oil on canvas, 58.4 x 46 cm Estate of Alice Neel Photo credit: Malcolm Varon, New York

Pregnant Julie and Algis , 1967 Oil on canvas, 107.6 x 161.9 cm Estate of Alice Neel Photo credit: Malcolm Varon, New York

Ginny and Elizabeth , 1975 Oil on canvas, 106.7 x 76.2 cm Estate of Alice Neel Photo credit: Ethan Palme

Interpretation

Catalogue

4 March to 17 September 2017

The Hyde Collection

February 28 through June 11, 2017

Alice Neel: The Spanish Family© Estate of Alice Neel
Alice Neel: Frank O'Hara© Estate of Alice Neel
Alice Neel: Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd© Estate of Alice Neel
Alice Neel: Joey Skaggs© Estate of Alice Neel
Alice Neel: Self-Portrait© Estate of Alice Neel