Long before today’s fast-paced news cycle, the visual memory of contemporary events in eighteenth-century Europe was shaped and sometimes even manipulated by great “view painters.” In captivating, acutely-observed scenes these painters, predominately from Italy, recorded such occasions as royal celebrations, religious ceremonies, sporting contests, and natural disasters.
On view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from May 9 through July 30, 2017, Eyewitness Views: Making History in Eighteenth-Century Europe is the first exhibition to focus on view paintings as depictions of contemporary events. The paintings, by artists such as Antonio Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto, Giovanni Paolo Panini, and Francesco Guardi, are spectacular and famous works from the golden age of European view painting. The exhibition is co-organized by the Getty Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art and will travel to those museums in 2017 and 2018, respectively.
“Eyewitness Views brings together an incredible array of international loans to tell the fascinating story of how artists captured, and in many ways created, history in eighteenth- century Europe,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Both in their subject matter of spectacular public occasions, such as papal visits, and in the brilliance of their execution, these colorful panoramic views provide a window into history as well as a testament to the achievements of some of the era’s greatest painters.”
Potts adds, “Ambitious exhibitions of this kind increasingly require the commitment of partner institutions, and we are particularly grateful to our colleagues in Minneapolis and Cleveland for their support in helping us realize this exhibition.”
The paintings, often commissioned by kings and queens, depict many of the great cities of Europe, including Venice, Rome, Siena, Naples, Paris, Dresden, Warsaw, and Madrid; indeed many of the iconic monuments depicted are still recognizable to a well-traveled person today. Vividly detailed and gorgeously painted, these often large-scale canvases transport viewers to the grandeur of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome or onto a gondola floating along the Grand Canal in Venice during a regatta. Featuring more than 40 works created by three generations of eighteenth-century artists, the exhibition lets visitors experience what it was like to be present on the scene as history is made, rubbing shoulders with monarchs, dignitaries, and popes.
In King Charles III Visiting Pope Benedict XIV at the Coffee House of the Palazzo del Quirinale, Giovanni Paolo Panini captured the young king’s conflicting emotions: tall and elegantly dressed in red, Charles betrays a hint of timidity as he arrives for his first audience with the pope on November 3, 1744.
After Dresden suffered heavy bombardment in the Seven Years’ War, the ruins of one of the city’s largest churches, the Kreuzkirche, had to be demolished.
The painter Bernardo Bellotto was among those who witnessed this poignant scene in July 1765, commemorating it that same year in The Demolition of the Ruins of the Kreuzkirche.
Francesco Guardi recorded the first hot air balloon flight in Venice on April 15, 1784 in his painting The Balloon Flight of Count Zambeccari. Mistrusting this new invention, the Venetians cautiously constructed a floating launch platform on the open water of the lagoon in case the balloon were to crash—but it soared into the sky, watched by a crowd of astonished spectators.
After its presentation at the Getty Museum, Eyewitness Views will travel to the Minneapolis Institute of Art from September 10 through December 31, 2017, and to the Cleveland Museum of Art from February 25 through May 20, 2018.
At the Getty, the exhibition is curated by Peter Björn Kerber, assistant curator in the department of paintings at the Getty Museum.
The Rialto Bridge with the Festive Entry of the Patriarch Antonio Correr (detail), 1735, Michele Marieschi. Oil on canvas. Osterley Park, The Palmer-Morewood Collection, National Trust (accepted in lieu of tax and transferred to the National Trust by Her Majesty's Government in 1984). Photo: National Trust Photo Library / Art Resource, NY
The Centre Pompidou in Paris is now (through August 14) presenting the first major museum retrospective of his work in France.
Through his attention to the details of everyday life and urban banality, Evans largely helped to define the visibility of 20th-century American culture. Some of his photographs have become icons in this respect. His pictures of an America in crisis during the 1930s, his projects published in Fortune magazine during the 1940s and 1950s, and his definition of the "documentary style" have all influenced generations of photographers and artists.
Conceived as a retrospective of Evans’ work in all its completeness, the exhibition highlights the photographer’s fascination with vernacular culture. In the US, "vernacular” defines popular or common forms of expression employed by ordinary people for useful ends. This means everything that is created outside art and the main production circuits. It eventually formed a specifically American culture.
The first part of the exhibition brings together the main subjects of the vernacular constantly sought out by Evans: the typography of a sign, the layout of a display, the window of a small store, etc. The second section shows how he himself adopted the operating mode or visual forms of vernacular photography by occasionally becoming a photographer of architecture, postcards or street portraits for the space of a project. And he always worked explicitly from an artistic viewpoint.
The retrospective looks back at the artist’s entire career, from his first photographs of the late Twenties to the Polaroids of the Seventies, through more than 300 vintage prints from leading international collections, and a hundred-odd documents and objects. It also devotes a considerable place to the postcards, enamel plaques, cut-out images and graphic ephemera Evans collected throughout his life.
The retrospective looks back at the artist’s entire career, from his first photographs of the late Twenties to the Polaroids of the Seventies, through more than 300 vintage prints from leading international collections, and a hundred-odd documents and objects. It also devotes a considerable place to the postcards, enamel plaques, cut-out images and graphic ephemera Evans collected throughout his life.
Walker Evans Exhibition Catalog cover
Walker Evans: Depth of Field High Museum of Art, Atlanta
June 11 - September 11, 2016 Vancouver Art Gallery October 29, 2016 -
Vancouver Art Gallery is presenting an exhibition of work by Walker Evans, a preeminent American photographer who shaped the history of twentieth-century photography. Opening on October 29, 2016, Walker Evans: Depth of Field features over 200 photographs from the 1920s to the 1970s, including the iconic images Evans made in the American South during the Great Depression—work that played a major role in solidifying the term we now refer to as documentary photography. This exhibition addresses the full arc of his career and is the most comprehensive look at Evans’ work ever presented in Canada. “The significance of Walker Evans in the establishment of photography as art can hardly be overemphasized. His work serves as the nexus for many strands of twentieth-century photography, and holds a special significance in Vancouver, a city that has become widely associated with conceptually rigorous photography over the past three decades. Evans’ emphasis on the everyday and his historically inflected vision have been a model for generations of photographers and an important point of reference for Vancouver-based artists to this day. As an institution that is specialized in exhibiting and collecting photography, we are honoured to be a partner on this project, and we look forward to presenting this comprehensive exhibition to our audiences,” said Kathleen S. Bartels, Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Evans initially aspired to become a writer. He studied literature for a year at Williams College in Massachusetts and spent time in Paris during the mid-1920s, where he encountered the work of a range of modern European photographers. He began his career in 1928, working in the vein of European Modernism, or the so-called “New Vision,” which emphasized striking, unconventional perspectives. As his work progressed, he began to develop his own visual idiom, influenced greatly by his encounters with European artistic and literary trends during his time in Paris in 1926. Evans was deeply moved by two major European photographers of the first decades of the 20th century—Eugène Atget and August Sander—whose pictorial ideas were straightforward and quiet in spirit. Modern European literature was equally important to Evans, particularly the writing of French poet Charles Baudelaire, whose work celebrated ordinary life in the streets, and Gustave Flaubert, who emphasized objectivity and the non-appearance of the author in artistic expression. “Depth of Field” examines how Evans’ early exposure to these European creative ideals enabled him to recognize the aesthetic possibilities of capturing everyday life and landscapes in the United States. After returning to the United States, Evans began to realize that the artistic material he was looking for was right in front of him, in the symbols and faceless architecture of the commercial world, the traces of everyday life found in cheap cafés and small-town streets and the widespread deprivations of the Great Depression. By the 1930s Evans had developed a singular approach to image making that drew upon a concise narrative structure associated with literature and placed him on the path of becoming one of the world’s most important photographers. His precise and lyrical images of modern America in the making would frame the development of documentary photography in Europe and North America and serve as a significant point of orientation for numerous artists who came after him, including Diane Arbus, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank and Helen Levitt, among many others. Organized chronologically, the retrospective begins with early work from the late 1920s, including some of Evans’ lesser-known projects, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, The Crime of Cuba and Antebellum Architecture, which will be presented together for the first time as discrete photographic essays. The exhibition then moves forward in time to the indelible images Evans made for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression in the American South, the covert views he created in the subway system of New York in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the little-studied work he produced over his two decades as a staff photographer at Fortune magazine, to the often- overlooked Polaroid images Evans’ made toward the end of his career. The exhibition is curated by John T. Hill, a photographer, designer and writer with assistance from Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art. Hill was the first director of graduate studies in photography at Yale University, where he became a friend and colleague of Walker Evans, and eventually became the executor of Evans’ estate. He has published five books including Walker Evans: First and Last; Walker Evans at Work; Walker Evans: Havana 1933; Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye, awarded the Prix Nadar (Paris) and a Kraszna-Krausz Book Award (London); and Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary. Co-organized by the High Museum of Art and the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, Bottrop, in collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery, the exhibition is among the most thorough examinations ever presented of the photographer’s work and the most comprehensive Evans retrospective to be mounted in Europe, Canada and the southeastern United States.
In addition to the High’s collection, the exhibition draws photographs from such prominent institutions as The Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Art Gallery. More than 50 photographs are on loan from Atlanta residents Marian and Benjamin A. Hill, longtime supporters of the High and among the most significant private collectors of Evans’ work.
About Walker Evans
“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.” – Walker Evans
Walker Evans III was born Nov. 3, 1903, in St. Louis. Like other important American artists of his time, he spent his early years in the Midwest before moving to the more cosmopolitan East Coast to find a place in the culture of his era. Following a year in Paris in 1926, he returned to live in New York City in 1927. At the time, Evans thought of himself as a writer, though he had already begun to photograph using a small tourist camera. In New York City, his photographic vision developed very quickly and came to reveal a sure mastery of visual form—a complexity in both describing and understanding the rapidly changing postwar world.
In 1930 two of his pictures of New York City skyscrapers were published in a German book on architecture.
In the same year, three of his Brooklyn Bridge photographs were published with Hart Crane’s epic poem, “The Bridge.”
Others photographs soon appeared in New York arts and literary magazines, and in 1933 a selection of his works was exhibited in New York’s new Museum of Modern Art.
In 1935 Evans secured a position as information specialist with the newly organized Resettlement Administration (later called the Farm Security Administration). Toward the end of this engagement, he and his friend, the writer James Agee, took on a Fortune magazine assignment, an essay on cotton tenant farmers in rural Alabama. This Fortune/FSA collaboration would lead to the groundbreaking book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”
Evans left the FSA in 1938. That same year, to accompany a retrospective of Evans’ work, The Museum of Modern Art published a collection of his pictures in “American Photographs,” which would come to be considered one of the most influential books of 20th century photography. In 1945, Evans joined Fortune magazine as its first staff photographer, where he remained until 1965.
Evans’ prominence grew with a large exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947, and his photographs frequently appeared in group exhibitions at other museums throughout the mid-20th century. Following the republication of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” and “American Photographs” in the early 1960s, Evans began to be known and respected by a new generation of photographers. This interest continued to build, culminating in a second retrospective of his work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1971, which subsequently toured the United States. Evans continued to create, sell and exhibit his photographs until his death in 1975.
“Walker Evans: Depth of Field” Publication
Accompanying the exhibition is a comprehensive and extensively illustrated publication that investigates the trans-Atlantic roots of Evans’ practice and his development of a compellingly lyrical documentary style. The book examines in detail the complex development of Evans’ oeuvre from his early street photography, to his iconic photographs of the Great Depression to his later embrace of colour photography. Over 400 pages, the hardcover publication features essays by John T. Hill, Heinz Liesbrock, Jerry L. Thompson, Alan Trachtenberg and Thomas Weski and features extensive illustrations ranging from the artist’s earliest images taken with a vest pocket camera to his final Polaroid photographs of the 1970s.
Walker Evans, Cinema, Havana, 1933.Copyright Walker Evans Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Walker Evans
Truck and Sign, 1930 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, Everett V. Meeks, B.A. 1901, Fund, 2009.163.1
Walker Evans Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York , 1931 silver gelatin print Private collection
Walker Evans Torn Movie Poster , 1931 silver gelatin print Private collection
Walker Evans Tin snips, by J. Wiss & Sons Co. , $1.85 , 1955 ink jet print Private collection
Walker Evans NEHI, Sign from Advance, Alabama collected by William Christenberry and exhibited by Walker Evans at the Yale University Art Gallery in 1971 porcelain on metal Collection of William and Sandra Christenberry
Christie’s announces the sale of 19th Century European Art on May 23, which offers a strong selection of fresh to the market paintings, drawings, and sculpture by leading artists who reflect the extraordinary diversity of this pivotal period of art history. Painters of the Barbizon, French Realist and Orientalist schools are represented, as well as a strong selection of Belle Époque painters and important female artists. The tightly curated sale of 88 lots is primarily sourced from private collections with lots ranging in price from $7,000 to $1,200,000.
Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (Spanish, 1863-1923), Algarrobo (The Carob Tree), oil on canvas. Estimate: $700,000 - 1,000,000
A highlight of the sale is Joaquín Sorolla’s (Spanish, 1863-1923), Algarrobo (The Carob Tree) painted when the artist was visiting the Spanish village of of Jávea, in eastern Spain (estimate: $700,000-1,000,000). The artist was entranced by the beauty of the area, and this work is a striking example of Sorolla’s ability to capture the effects of heat and light using an almost abstract pattern of light and texture. It is considered among the first true landscape paintings by the artist.
The sale also includes a very strong section of works of art by French artists lead by Le Roi de la forêt by Rosa Bonheur (estimate: $800,000 – $1,200,000). This masterpiece by the renowned animalier depicts a life-sized stag in the artist’s exactingly naturalistic style and was considered by the artist herself to be one of her masterpieces.
Two works by Jean-François Millet,
Le Passage des oies sauvages (estimate: $600,000-800,000)
and Portrait of a Woman, probably the Artist's Sister (estimate: $250,000-350,000)
are highlights which are emblematic of the two different periods of Millet’s career – his early portraiture, and his later depictions of peasant life in the area around Barbizon. Le Passage des oies sauvages is an important work by the artist in pastel, a medium in which he was considered exceptionally skilled.
There is also a strong group of paintings by Sir Alfred Munnings, Dutch paintings lead by a very high quality Wouterus Verschuur, and several important works by Jean-Léon Gérôme which illustrate the wide variety of subject matter within the artist’s oeuvre.
Sotheby’s annual spring auction of European Art will be held in New York on 24 May 2017. The sale offers more than 80 paintings and sculptures that exemplify the diversity of the 19th to early 20th centuries, led by exquisite works by Jean Béraud, Jean-Léon Gérôme and William Bouguereau. Many of the pieces on offer have emerged after decades spent in private collections, including newly-rediscovered paintings by John William Godward, Jean-Francois Millet and Sir Alfred James Munnings.
SIR ALFRED JAMES MUNNINGS: PORTRAITS OF AMERICAN SOCIETY
The May sale includes a varied selection of paintings by Sir Alfred James Munnings. In 1924, Munnings left England for his only trip to the United States – a whirlwind six-month itinerary of painting and parties. The artist first visited New York, Washington and Pittsburgh, and later joined Frederick Prince and his family on their estate in Massachusetts, where he expanded his portrait commissions to their fellow members of South Hamilton’s Myopia Hunt Club – the first being Mr. & Mrs. Bayard Tuckerman. Munnings was initially hired to paint a
Portrait of Mrs. Bayard Tuckerman (estimate $300/500,000) and the result so impressed her husband that he requested his portrait to be painted.
The Portraits of Mr. Bayard Tuckerman (estimate $300/500,000) and Mrs. Tuckerman have been hanging on the family’s walls ever since they were painted in 1924, and will make their public debut in our New York Galleries this May.
After painting his “New England friends,” Munnings visited Long Island, New York, painting members of the Phipps, Whitney and Brady families, the latter of which commissioned a vibrant and elegant
Portrait of Miss Ruth Brady on Bugle Call (estimate $1.4/1.8 million). Inspired in part by a long tradition of British portraiture of noblemen and gentry on their horses, Munnings’ stylish and vibrant portraits brought him incredible success both in the United States and Britain.
FIVE EXCEPTIONAL WORKS BY JEAN BÉRAUD'
Jean Béraud was the most celebrated observer of Parisian life during the Belle Époque, and this season Sotheby’s is privileged to offer five outstanding paintings by the artist from a private collection. Each painting is an entertaining spectacle as much as it is a historical document. Captured in riveting detail,
La Marseillaise (estimate $400/600,000) is a light-filled painting depicting an exuberant group of workman, artists, students and shopkeepers parading westward down rue St Antoine from the Place de la Bastille singing the Marseillaise on Bastille Day in 1880.
Le Monologue (estimate $400/600,000) is an interior scene depicting an attentive audience sitting on the edge of their seats, shoulder-to-shoulder listening to the celebrated French actor, Coquelin cadet. The women are rendered in vivid detail, clad in brightly-colored gowns and flanked by the tailored display of men in black-and-white evening costume.
AN IMPORTANT REDISCOVERED WORK BY JOHN WILLIAM GODWARD
Previously unrecorded, John William Godward’s masterpiece Julia (estimate $750/950,000) adds an important rediscovery to the artist's oeuvre. This tour-de-force of color, form and structural harmonies is a hallmark of the artist’s ability to balance hard and soft, opaque and translucent. The work has descended through the family of Julia Sophia Winkelmeyer Straub, the daughter of the St. Louis brewer Julius Winkelmeyer, over generations. As far as is known, this is the first time that the painting has been seen in public since it joined her collection over a century ago.
RARE MASTERPIECE BY WILLIAM BOUGUEREAU
Furthermore, the auction includes a superb full-length painting by William Bouguereau. Dating from 1891, Petite Bergère (estimate $900,000/1.2 million) appearing on the market for the first time in more than 30 years and offers collectors a rare chance to add a masterpiece by the artist to their collection.
Switzerland sees its first major exhibition devoted to the Berlin years of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938). The Kunsthaus Zürich has gathered together some 160 paintings, pastels, drawings, prints, sketchbooks and a selection of textiles, sculptures and photographs for a survey of Kirchner’s work in Germany’s bustling capital city and on the idyllic Baltic Sea island of Fehmarn. Between 1912 and 1914, these two contrasting places of inspiration marked the high point of Kirchner’s Expressionist oeuvre. The co-founder of theartists’ association ‘Brücke’, who is best known in Switzerland for his images of the ‘unspoilt’ mountain scenery around Davos, appears here in what, for Swiss audiences, is a less familiar, edgier guise.
LOANS FROM BERLIN, SYDNEY, NEW YORK, MADRID .
The Kunsthaus Zürich has teamed up with the renowned Brücke-Museum in Berlin to bring together works on loan from many continents in a dialectical exploration of Kirchner. Important exhibits come from the Städel (Frankfurt), the Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich), the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid),the Guggenheim Museum and Museum ofModern Art (both New York), the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles),the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney) and the popular Kirchner Museum Davos. Private lenders are supplying works that, in some cases, have never before been shown in public. There is also a full-size reconstruction of the mansard niche of Kirchner’s second Berlin live-in studio – again, for the first time in Switzerland. The artist decorated it with textiles he designed himself, featuring Fehmarn motifs.
BERLIN AND FEHMARN: PLACES OF INSPIRATION
The exhibition is arranged chronologically, alternating between Berlin and Fehmarn – the two places of inspiration. They are often viewed as diametric opposites: on the one hand the frenetic lifestyle of a city that never rests, on the other the relaxing peace of a rural retreat; the hardship and alienation of the city dweller versus a harmonious existence in union with nature. Our exhibition, together with the accompanying catalogue, presents these two poles –metropolis and idyllic nature – as two conjoined aspects of Kirchner’s life and work. Both exemplify his longing for an existence removed from bourgeois norms and for a new and contemporary form of expression. In addition to exhibits from Kirchner’s time in Berlin, the presentation also includes a representative selection of his early paintings from Dresden and some of the first pieces produced in Switzerland. They provide the context without which it is impossible to comprehend the profound changes in Kirchner’s art between 1911 and 1917. The focused presentation investigates this pivotal phase in Kirchner’s work, and with it the socio-political changes of the early 20th century.
EARLY 20TH-CENTURY ATTITUDES TO LIFE
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s move from Dresden to Berlin in autumn 1911 marks a turning point in his art. In the years from 1912 to 1915, in thrall to Europe’s most modern metropolis, the young artist created works that, in their exaggerated and condensed way, can be regarded as metaphors for an early 20th-century attitude to life. In this era of radical transformation, the imperial capital held out the prospect of progress and limitless potential, but also isolation and a struggle to survive. It was the centre of unbridled industrial growth, the rise of the automobile and, with two million inhabitants, the largest ‘tenement city’in Europe. Yet Berlin was also the metropolis of art, hedonism and prostitution. In this melting pot of opportunities and risks, Kirchner created works of breathless, existential directness that took aim squarely at Wilhelmine conventions. His motifs were also shaped by these observations: fashionably dressed passers-by; motorised traffic and industrial plants ‘eating’ their way through the city; café and brothel scenes. Movement, dynamism and multiple perspectives typify Kirchner’s work during the Berlin years, in what, looking back, he described as a ‘painting of motion’. The prime example – ‘Street, Berlin’ (1913) from the Museum of Modern Art, New York – will be on show at the Kunsthaus, as will the double-sided canvas ‘Two Women on the Street (recto)/‘Two Bathers in Surf’ (verso) from the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
GETTING AWAY FROM IT AL
LIn the summer months of 1912 to 1914, Kirchner left Berlin for the Baltic Sea island of Fehmarn, which he already knew from an earlier visit. Here, together with his new companion Erna Schilling and his fellow painters, he led an uninhibited life close to nature. Far from the big city and freed from all conventions, they enjoyed an Arcadian existence. It was in this idyll that, in 1912, he painted the long-lost and recently rediscovered square painting ‘Mexico Bay, Fehmarn’, which is in private ownership. The celebrated ‘Three Bathers’ (1913, from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) also bears witness to their bond withnature. Contrasts of warm and cold, colours that range from muted to strong, and dynamic forms express this exalted sense of harmony with nature.
ARMY AND DRUGS: THE CRISIS
The outbreak of the First World War took Kirchner by surprise during his 1914 summer retreat on Fehmarn, forcing him to break off his stay abruptly and return to Berlin. His army training as a field artilleryman in Halle and his general experiences of war plunged him into a deep psychological and physical crisis in 1915, with large-scale alcohol and drug abuse threatening his artistic identity. The works that arose despite – or perhaps because of – this crisis, such as the celebrated ‘Schlemihl’ woodcut cycle or the drawing ‘Self-Portrait under the Influence of Morphine’ (1917), made using a reed pen and ink on gesso paper, form a further key focus of the exhibition. Following a number of stays in sanatoria in Königstein, Berlinand Kreuzlingen, Kirchner moved to Switzerland in 1918, embarking on his long road to recovery in the mountains of Davos, where he remained until he took his own life in 1938. The exhibition closes with this new turning point in Kirchner’s career.
KIRCHNER AND THE KUNSTHAUS
The Kunsthaus Zürich first exhibited works by Kirchner in a group exhibition in 1918, from which two woodcuts were acquired. Projects for major solo shows in 1926 and 1936 did not come to fruition. After Kirchner’s death there were monograph exhibitions in 1952 and 1954 followed, in 1980, by the biggest retrospective to date. Now, a hundred years on from Kirchner’s move to Switzerland, the Kunsthaus Zürich is devoting an exhibition to the master of Expressionism, with a particular focus on the Berlin years (1911–1917).
Kunsthaus curator Dr. Sandra Gianfreda has designed the presentation together with Prof. Magdalena M. Moeller, director of the Brücke-Museum, Berlin.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) was one of the most prolific and creative members of the German expressionist movement. His move from Dresden to Berlin in 1911 marked a turning point in his career and ignited the most important and innovative period of his work. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Berlin Yearslooks in-depth at this significant time during which he produced his most celebrated masterpieces.
As Sandra Gianfreda reveals, under the influence of the most modern metropolis in Europe, Kirchner created works whose exaggerated and condensed style could be regarded as a true metaphor for the attitude to life during the early years of the twentieth century. During this time of rapid change, Berlin was not only the center of industry, but it was a metropolis of the arts and encouraged a new kind of hedonism. Berlin vibrated with energy and intellectual questions that Kirchner channeled in his work, creating pictures of breathless, existential directness that challenged conventions of the age. An essential book for fans of Kirchner’s work, it presents his greatest paintings and demonstrates the profound changes in his style that were inspired by his time in Berlin.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Self-portrait in the live-in studio in Berlin-Friedenau, 1913/1915 Glass negative, 13 x 18 cm Kirchner Museum Davos, Gift of the Estate of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 2001
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Two Nudes by a Tree, Fehmarn, 1912/13 Oil on canvas, 100 x 75 cm Private collection
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Erna with Japanese Umbrella (Japanese Girl), 1913 Oil on canvas, 80 x 70.5 cm Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau / Bequest of Dr Othmar und Valerie Häuptli Photo: Jörg Müller
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Curving Bay (Laburnum Tree), c. 1914 Oil on canvas, 146 x 123 cm Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Nervous Persons at Table (Kohnstamm Sanatorium), 1916 Woodcut on cardboard, 42 x 28 cm Kassel, Museumslandschaft Hessen, Graphische Sammlung, Städtischer Kunstbesitz
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Three Bathers, 1913 Oil on canvas, 197.5 x 147.5 cm Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Foundation Purchase 1984 Foto: AGNSW
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Erich Heckel and Otto Mueller Playing Chess, 1913 Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 40.5 cm Brücke-Museum, Berlin
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Friedrichstrasse Berlin, 1914 Oil on canvas, 125 x 91 cm Staatsgalerie Stuttgart Photo: bpk/Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Self-Portrait in Morphine Rush, 1917 Reed pen and ink on gessoed paper, 50 x 38 cm Brücke-Museum, Berlin
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Mexico Bay, Fehmarn, 1912 Oil on canvas, 50.5 x 50.5 cm Private collection, Germany
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Circus, 1913 Oil on canvas, 120 x 100 cm Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne, Photo: bpk/Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen/ Sybille Forster
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Mansard niche in Kirchner’s live-in studio, Berlin-Friedenau, 1914/15 Glass negative, 24 x 18 cm Kirchner Museum Davos, Gift of the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Estate, 2001
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Schlemihl’s Encounter with the Shadow (Sheet 6 from the Schlemihl-Cycle), 1915 Colour woodcut on blotting paper, 30.5 x 29.3 cm Brücke-Museum, Berlin, Karl and Emy Schmidt-Rottluff Foundation
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Street at Schöneberg City Park, 1912/13 Oil on canvas, 121 x 151 cm Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Mrs Harry Lynde Bradley Foto: Larry Sanders
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Streetcar and Train, 1914 Oil on canvas, 71 x 81 cm Die Lübecker Museen, Museum Behnhaus Drägerhaus
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Artillerists’ Bath – Bathing Soldiers, 1915 Lithograph on yellow paper, 50.5 x 59.0/4 cm E.W.K. Collection, Bern/Davos Collection E.W.K., Bern / Davos
Baltazar de Echave Ibía, San Pablo y San Antonio ermitaños, siglo XVII. Museo Nacional de Arte, Inba Adjudicación, 2000.
The Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL, National Art Museum of Mexico) presents ‘Melancholy’, an exhibition that delves into the manner that melancholy, commonly characterized by reflecting the darkest human sides of passion and affection, is represented in Mexican art through a selection of 137 works of art including paintings, etchings, sculptures and writings. The exhibits can be visited through April 9th of July, 2017, in the rooms on the first floor of the site.
Under the curatorship of Abraham Villavicencio Garcia, and comprised of the work of nearly 80 Mexican artists, this exposition reflects the way that human feelings are explained, interpreted and represented - revealing melancholy as a possible source for inspiration and artistic creativity.
In Villavicencio’s words, “This exhibition seeks to exalt the emotional charges evoked in the works of important novohispano, modern, and contemporary artists through themes such as sin, blame, mourning, lost love, death, spirituality, creation and magic.”
“’Melancholy’ manifests that in addition to sorrow, madness, and fear the sentiment is capable of producing creativity, heroism, intellectualism, and of the quests deep within the human psyche. To ponder upon it, through the Mexican artists’ hands that participate in this exhibition, is an opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with our age-old cultural roots that permit us to discover, under a new light, our potential for transcendence, salvation, and self-knowledge”, points out Sara Baz Sánchez, Director of the National Art Museum of Mexico.
The exhibition is comprised by four thematic nucleuses. The first theme is given the name ‘The Loss of Paradise’ where the various manners that Christianity represents bitterness and hopelessness after the fall of Adam and Eve is reflected upon, brought on by the belief of original sin and a life deprived of divine contemplation. Melancholy is seen wandering endlessly through suffering because of reproach and self-punishment. Some of the pieces that make up this section are “King of Ridicule”, 17th – 18th Century, by Cristobal de Villalpando,
and “After the Storm”, 1910, by Diego Rivera.
On its behalf, ‘The Night of the Soul’ - the second nucleus of the exhibition - brings together artistic representations that refer to the lost of love such as through the death of children for mothers, widowhood, being an orphan, and love that was lost, which upon occasion lead to suicide and lifelessness. “The Empty Crib”, 1871, by Manuel Ocaranza; “Repented Margarita”, 1881, by Felipe Ocádiz; “Portrait of Sofía” ,1991, by Julio Galán; “The Lady of the Violets”, 1908, by Germán Gedovius and “Weddings from Heaven and Hell”, 1996 by Arturo Rivera are some of the works that make up this selection.
Saturn, the historic God who personifies time and identified as the most somber of the planets, was considered responsible for melancholy. Its powers gain strength in ‘The Shadow of Death’, the third nucleus of the exhibition, though which pieces like “Mary Magdalene”, c.a. 1690-1700, by Juan Tinoco; “This is the Mirror that Deceives You”, also known as “Allegory to Death”, 1856, by Tomás Mondragón; “That’s Life”, 1942, by Robert Montenegro, and “Death and Resurrection”, c.a. 20th century, by José Clemente Orozco address the reality of the world by those that bear witness to melancholy. Death becomes its greatest obsession - like a faithful dialectics and necessary for life.
Finally, ‘The Children of Saturn’ - the last of the parts of the exhibition - alludes to the idea of a renaissance by claiming that those who are born under the zodiacal sign of Sagittarius and Aquarius, regented by Saturn, are impregnated with a cosmic wisdom and artistic genius for which these individuals stand out among humanity as ascetics, prophets, saints, mystics, poets, artists, philosophers, and alchemists. They were the proof that melancholy was the pathway to ascend to the clarity of the human soul and mindfulness of the universe. Among the works that conform this section “Pierrot Doctor”, 1898, by Julio Ruelas; “Woman at the Window”, 1948, by Alfonso Michel; “The Illuminated”, 1982, by Rufino Tamayo and “Magus”, 2010, a bronze sculpture by Leonora Carrington, stand out.
Opening on February 10, 2017, on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim features more than 170 modern objects from the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
Assembling many of the foundation’s most iconic works along with treasures by artists less familiar, this celebratory exhibition explores avant-garde innovations of the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, as well as the groundbreaking activities of six pioneering arts patrons who brought to light some of the most significant artists of their day and established the Guggenheim Foundation’s identity as a forward- looking institution. Visionaries includes important works by artists such as Alexander Calder, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Vincent van Gogh.
More than a dozen works on paper by Picasso and Van Gogh, rarely on view to the public, will be installed in the Thannhauser Gallery, where the earliest works represented in the Guggenheim collection are typically on display. Additionally, sculptures by Edgar Degas and paintings by Pierre- Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, and Édouard Manet will be placed on the ramps for the occasion of the exhibition. In May, a fresh selection of works on paper by artists including Klee, Picasso, and Van Gogh will replace the first grouping.
Pablo Picasso(1881-1973)
Woman Ironing, Paris, 1904 La repasseuse, Paris, 1904
Oil on canvas 45 3/4 x 28 3/4 inches (116.2 x 73 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Thannhauser Collection, Gift, Justin K. Thannhauser, 1978 78.2514.41
Oil on canvas 51 1/4 x 35 1/4 inches (130.2 x 89.5 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 37.537
Pablo Picasso(1881-1973)
Carafe, Jug and Fruit Bowl, Horta de San Juan, summer 1909 Carafon, pot et compotier, Horta de San Juan, summer 1909
Oil on canvas 28 1/4 x 25 3/8 inches (71.8 x 64.6 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 37.536
Pablo Picasso(1881-1973)
Bottles and Glasses, Paris, winter 1911–12 Bouteilles et verres, Paris, winter 1911–12
Oil on paper, mounted on canvas 25 3/8 x 19 1/2 inches (64.4 x 49.5 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 38.539
Robert Delaunay(1885-1941)
Eiffel Tower, 1911 (dated 1910 by the artist) Tour Eiffel, 1911 (dated 1910 by the artist)
Oil on canvas 79 1/2 x 54 1/2 inches (202 x 138.4 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 37.463
Fernand Léger(1881-1955)
Nude Model in the Studio, 1912–13 Le modèle nu dans l’atelier, 1912–13
Oil on burlap 50 5/8 x 37 3/4 inches (128.6 x 95.9 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection 49.1193
Fernand Léger(1881-1955)
The Smokers, December 1911–January 1912 Les fumeurs, December 1911–January 1912
Oil on canvas 50 7/8 x 38 inches (129.2 x 96.5 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 38.521
Franz Marc(1880-1916)
Yellow Cow, 1911 Gelbe Kuh, 1911
Oil on canvas 55 3/8 x 74 1/2 inches (140.7 x 189.2 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection 49.1210
Franz Marc(1880-1916)
Stables, 1913 Stallungen, 1913
Oil on canvas 29 x 62 inches (73.6 x 157.5 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection 46.1037
Remarks: Acquired through Karl Nierendorf
Robert Delaunay(1885-1941)
Window on the City No. 3, 1911–12 La fenêtre sur la ville no. 3, 1911–12
Oil on canvas 44 3/4 x 51 1/2 inches (113.7 x 130.8 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection 47.878.R
Robert Delaunay(1885-1941)
Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part), 1912 Les fenêtres simultanées [2e motif, 1re partie], 1912
Oil on canvas 21 5/8 x 18 1/4 inches (55.2 x 46.3 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 41.464
Pierre Bonnard(1867-1947)
Dining Room on the Garden, 1934–35 Grande salle à manger sur le jardin, 1934–35
Oil on canvas 50 x 53 1/4 inches (126.8 x 135.3 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 38.432
Vasily Kandinsky(1866-1944)
Composition 8, July 1923 Komposition 8, July 1923
Oil on canvas 55 1/8 x 79 1/8 inches (140 x 201 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 37.262
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner(1880-1938)
Dancers, 1906 Tänzerinnen, 1906
Ink on paper 17 5/8 x 13 3/4 inches (44.8 x 34.9 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Estate of Karl Nierendorf, By purchase 48.1172.438
Remarks: FULL RUN
Oskar Kokoschka(1886-1980)
Knight Errant, 1915 Der irrende Ritter, 1915
Oil on canvas 35 1/4 x 70 7/8 inches (89.5 x 180 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Estate of Karl Nierendorf, By purchase
Édouard Manet(1832-1883)
Portrait of Countess Albazzi, 1880 Portrait de la comtesse Albazzi, 1880
Pastel on primed canvas 22 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches (56.5 x 46.5 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Thannhauser Collection, Bequest, Hilde Thannhauser, 1991 91.3909
Georges Seurat(1859-1891)
Peasant with Hoe, 1882 Paysan à la houe, 1882
Oil on canvas 18 1/4 x 22 1/8 inches (46.3 x 56.1 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 41.716
Claude Monet(1840-1926)
The Palazzo Ducale, Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore, 1908 Le Palais Ducal vu de Saint-Georges Majeur, 1908
Oil on canvas 25 9/16 x 39 9/16 inches (65 x 100.5 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Thannhauser Collection, Bequest, Hilde Thannhauser, 1991 91.3910
Vincent van Gogh(1853-1890)
The Road to Tarascon, late July–early August 1888 La route de Tarascon, late July–early August 1888 Reed pen and ink over graphite on paper 9 9/16 x 12 9/16 inches (24.3 x 31.9 cm)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Thannhauser Collection, Gift, Justin K. Thannhauser, 1978 78.2514.22
Vincent van Gogh(1853-1890)
Boats at Saintes-Maries, late July–early August 1888 Bateaux à Saintes Maries, late July–early August 1888 Reed pen and ink over graphite on paper 9 9/16 x 12 9/16 inches (24.3 x 31.9 cm)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Thannhauser Collection, Gift, Justin K. Thannhauser, 1978 78.2514.21
Pablo Picasso(1881-1973)
Le Moulin de la Galette, Paris, autumn 1900 Oil on canvas 34 3/4 x 45 1/2 inches (88.2 x 115.5 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Thannhauser Collection, Gift, Justin K. Thannhauser, 1978
Max Beckmann, Bird’s Hell, Oil on canvas, 47 1/4 x 63 1/4 in. (1938, estimate on request)
Max Beckmann’s Bird’s Hell (1938, estimate on request) will lead 20th Century at Christie’s, a series of sales that take place from 17 to 30 June 2017, in the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on 27 June 2017, when it will be offered at auction for the first time. One of the most powerful paintings that Beckmann created while in exile in Amsterdam it presents a searing and unforgettable vision of hell and is poised to set a world record price for the artist at auction. Begun in Amsterdam and completed in Paris at the end of 1938, this work ranks amongst the clearest and most important anti-Nazi statements that the artist ever made, mirroring the escalating violence, oppression and terror of the National Socialist regime. The painting will be on view in New York until 17 of May, Hong Kong from 25 to 29 May and London from 17 to 27 June 2017.
Painted with vigorous, almost gestural brushstrokes and bold, garish colours, Bird’s Hell envelops the viewer in a sinister underworld in which monstrous bird-like creatures are engaged in an evil ritual of torture. Presiding over the scene is a multi-breasted bird who emerges from a pink egg in the centre of the composition. To her right, a crouching black and yellow bird looms over golden coins spread before him, while behind the central figure, a group of naked women stand huddled together. Heightening the sense of hysteria is the group of figures standing within a glowing, blood red doorway to the left of the composition. Guarded by another knife-wielding bird, they return the bird-woman’s gesture, their right arms raised in unison in the same furious salute. At the front of the scene, a naked man – the symbol of innocence within this reign of terror – is shackled to a table, held down by another bird that is slashing his back in careful, horizontal lines.
Continuing the Germanic tradition of the depiction of hell, this painting echoes the gruesome allegorical scenes of
Hieronymus Bosch’s famed The Garden of Earthly Delights, while at the same time, takes aspects of Classicism and mythology to turn reality into a timeless evocation of human suffering. In this way, Bird’s Hell, like
Pablo Picasso’s Guernica
or Max Ernst’s Fireside Angel
of the same period, transcends the time and the political situation in which it was made to become a universal and singular symbol of humanity.
Adrien Meyer, International Director of Impressionist & Modern Art, Christie’s New York: "Bird’s Hell was painted in 1938 in Amsterdam as a direct attack on the cruelty of the Nazi regime. A year earlier, Hitler's government had confiscated over 500 of his works from German museums, and included some of these in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition. This emblematic picture has since been unanimously recognized as the Guernica of Expressionism. The grasping composition echoes the fantastical world of 16th century master Hieronymus Bosch. The current owner first attempted to buy this masterpiece in 1956 and succeeded thirty years later, lending it since to the most prestigious exhibitions around the world. Its upcoming sale represents a unique opportunity to acquire not only a Beckmann monument but also a true piece of history."
Jay Vincze, Head of Impressionist & Modern Art, Christie’s, London: “We are honoured to present such a seminal work by Max Beckmann at auction for the first time. Bird’s Hell stands alongside Picasso’s Guernica as one of the most politically charged paintings of its time and it is a rare opportunity to offer a work of such historical significance by Beckmann. For the artist there were two worlds, one of spiritual life and the other of political life. In this painting he is asking the viewer to decide which is more important. It is a terrifying, yet timeless history painting and a masterpiece of the artist’s oeuvre.”
Egon Schiele Einzelne Häuser (Häuser mit Bergen) (1915, estimate: £20,000,000-30,000,000) was painted in the middle of the First World War and exemplifies the artist’s visionary understanding of landscape, which he used as an allegory of human emotion.
Van Gogh’s Le Moissonneur (d’après Millet) (1889, estimate: £12,500,000-16,500,000), was painted in 1889, the same year that he left Arles and admitted himself into an asylum. The auction will take place on 27 June 2017 as part of 20th Century at Christie’s, a series of sales that take place from 17 to 30 June 2017. The works will tour to Hong Kong from 25 to 29 May 2017 and will be on view in London from 17 to 27 June 2017.
EGON SCHIELE:
Schiele created landscapes filled with melancholy, charging the natural world with a deeper spiritual meaning. The autumnal setting of Einzelne Häuser (Häuser mit Bergen) can be seen as a metaphor for mortality; the crumbling facades of the townscape and surrounding trees used as an alternate physical expression of the elemental forces of growth, death and decay. As with almost all of Schiele’s townscapes, the buildings in Einzelne Häuser (Häuser mit Bergen) appear to represent his mother’s hometown, Krumau, a medieval Bohemian town on the Moldau River, known today as Český Krumlov on the Vltava in the Czech Republic. Schiele painted Einzelne Häuser (Häuser mit Bergen) on the reverse of a fragment of an older picture known as Monk I that dates from 1913. It is believed to have formed part of one of his largest attempted projects, Bekehrung (‘Conversion’), and is linked to the two monumental allegories that he produced the same year, of which only fragments, sketches and photographic evidence are now known.
VINCENT VAN GOGH: Painted in September of 1889 Le Moissonneur (d’après Millet) is one of ten paintings that Van Gogh made after a series of drawings by Jean-François Millet entitled Les Travaux des Champs (1852), seven of which now reside in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, with the other two in private hands. The work of Millet became a major focus for Van Gogh during this period, following the gift of a set of engravings of Millet’s Les Travaux des Champs by Jacques-Adrien Lavielle that was sent to Van Gogh from his brother Theo van Gogh the same year. Le Moissonneur (d’après Millet), employs the composition of Millet but is filled with Van Gogh’s own dramatic and intense use of colour. With his back to the viewer, bent over as he works the fields, the male figure is illuminated against the deep blue sky and golden yellow fields.
In collaboration with London’s Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris will present the most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to the work of David Hockney, from June 21 to Oct. 23. The retrospective closes at the Tate later this month on May 29 and will be at the Met from November 2017 to February 2018.
The exhibition celebrates the artist’s 80th birthday, retracing his entire career through more than 160 works (paintings, photographs, engravings, video installations, drawings and printed works), including his most iconic paintings (swimming pools, double portraits and monumental landscapes) and some of his most recent creations. It focuses in particular on Hockney’s interest in modern technologies for the production and reproduction of visual images.
Moved by a constant concern to ensure a wide circulation for his work, he has successively taken up the camera, the fax machine, the computer, the printer, and most recently the iPad. For him, artistic creation is an act of sharing. Edited by Didier Ottinger, curator of the exhibition, a 320-page catalogue with 300 illustrations will be published by the Centre Pompidou. This will include essays by Didier Ottinger, Chris Stephens, Marco Livingstone, Andrew Wilson, Ian Alteveer and Jean Frémon, and also an extensive chronology.
The exhibition opens with paintings of Hockney’s youth, produced while at art college in his native Bradford, UK. Images of an industrial England, they testify to the influence of the gritty social realism of his teachers, members of the so-called Kitchen Sink School. At the Bradford School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, Hockney discovered and assimilated the English take on Abstract Expressionism represented by Alan Davie. In Jean Dubuffet he found a style (informed by graffiti, naïve art...) that corresponded to his quest for an expressive and accessible art, and in Francis Bacon the boldness to explicitly thematise the subject of homosexuality.
His discovery of Picasso, finally, convinced him that an artist should not limit himself to a single style: he called one of his early exhibitions “Demonstrations of Versatility”. In 1964, he discovered the West Coast of the United States, where he became the painter of a sunny and hedonistic California, his Bigger Splash (1967) acquiring an iconic status. It was there, too, that he embarked on the large double portraits that celebrate the realism and perspectival vision of the photography he also assiduously engaged in.
In the United States, where he now lived, Hockney was confronted by the critical ascendancy of abstract formalism (Minimal Art, Colour Field Painting…). To the Minimalist grid, he responded by painting building facades and geometrically mowed lawns, and to “stain colour field painting” (which used dilute paint to stain the canvas itself) with a series of works on paper depicting the water of a swimming pool under different lights.
In his costumes and stage designs for opera Hockney took his distance from a photographic realism whose possibilities he now felt he had exhausted. Abandoning the classical perspective associated with the camera (“the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops”, he once said), he experimented with different ways of constructing space. Looking again at Cubism, which sought to synthetically represent the vision of a viewer who moved in relation to the subject, Hockney used a Polaroid camera to produce what he called “joiners”, representations of the subject through multiple images joined together. Systematising this “polyfocal” vision, he created Pearblossom Highway from more than a hundred photos taken from different points of view.
Searching for new principles for the pictorial representation of space, Hockney found inspiration in the Chinese scroll paintings that render the visual perceptions of a viewer in movement. Combined with the multiple viewpoints of Cubist space, this allowed him to produce Nichols Canyon, a representation of his car journey from the city of Los Angeles to his studio in the hills.
In 1997, Hockney returned to Northern England and the countryside of his childhood. His landscapes reflect his complex reconsideration of the question of space in painting. Using high-definition cameras, he also brought movement to the Cubist space of his Polaroid “joiners”, juxtaposing video screens to compose a cycle of four seasons – a subject that since the Renaissance has evoked the inexorable passage of time.
In the 1980s, Hockney began to explore the new, digital graphics tools available for the computer, producing new kinds of images. The computer was followed by the smartphone, and then the iPad, which he has used to create ever more sophisticated drawings, circulated among his friends by means of the Web.
Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia June 3 through September 10, 2017
Dramatic landscapes, exotic subjects and vibrant colors all characterize the work of the once forgotten artist Martin Johnson Heade. Now recognized as one of the most important American painters of the 19th century, Heade devoted equal time to landscape, marine and still-life subjects, but is best known for his studies of tropical birds and flowers. The Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia will present the exhibition “The Genius of Martin Johnson Heade” from June 3 through September 10, 2017. Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the exhibition shows Heade’s creative range of work, from an early folk portrait to a late magnolia still life. The Georgia Museum of Art does not have any works by Heade in its permanent collection. Born in 1819 in Lumberville, Pennsylvania, Heade first studied art with the folk artist Edward Hicks. From his rural beginnings, in a town where his family ran the general store, he traveled to Rome, Chicago, New York City, Brazil, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Colombia and Panama. His close friend, the artist Frederick Edwin Church, inspired his trips to South and Central America, but
Martin Johnson Heade, Orchids and Hummingbird, 1875-83. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865.
Martin Johnson Heade (American, 1819–1904) Passion Flowers and Hummingbirds about 1870–83 Oil on canvas 39.37 x 54.93 cm (15 1/2 x 21 5/8 in.) Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865 Inscriptions: Lower left: M J Heade
Heade’s close-up views of tropical flora and fauna differed from Church’s dramatic landscapes painted there.
Martin Johnson Heade (American, 1819–1904) Approaching Storm: Beach near Newport about 1861–62 Oil on canvas Inscriptions: Lower left: M. J. Heade 186[?]
71.12 x 148.27 cm (28 x 58 3/8 in.) Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865
When Heade painted landscapes, he often focused on New England’s salt marshes and seascapes. Late in his life, he wrote, of his travels south, “A few years after my first appearance in this breathtaking world [1863], I was attacked by the all-absorbing hummingbird craze, and it has never left me since.” His goal was to document the birds in an illustrated publication, much like John James Audubon’s “Birds of America,” but he never managed to do so, although he painted more than 40 images for the project. “This exhibition offers the museum the opportunity to closely examine Heade’s lush use of color and his meticulous attention to detail,” said Sarah Kate Gillespie, the museum’s curator of American art, “from his New England beaches to his South American hummingbirds and orchids.” She added, “this exhibition also contextualizes Heade’s work amongst that of his contemporaries, allowing us to exhibit important artists we don’t have represented in our permanent collection, such as Asher B. Durand and Fitz Henry Lane. The conversations among these works and artists highlight Heade’s skill and accomplishment.” Unlike many of these contemporaries, Heade was marginalized by the New York art world. For example, he was never offered membership in the National Academy of Design.
Washington Allston (American, 1779–1843) Rising of a Thunderstorm at Sea 1804 Oil on canvas 97.15 x 129.54 cm (38 1/4 x 51 in.) Everett Fund
Martin Johnson Heade (American, 1819–1904) Dawn 1862 Oil on canvas 31.11 x 61.59 cm (12 1/4 x 24 1/4 in.) Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865 Inscriptions: Lower right: M. J. Heade-62
Martin Johnson Heade (American, 1819–1904) Salt Marshes, about 1866–76 Oil on canvas 39.37 x 76.83 cm (15 1/2 x 30 1/4 in.) Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865 Inscriptions: Lower left: M.J. Heade
Martin Johnson Heade (American, 1819–1904) South American River 1868 Oil on canvas 66.04 x 57.47 cm (26 x 22 5/8 in.) Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865 Inscriptions: Lower left: M J Heade 68.
Martin Johnson Heade (American, 1819–1904) Sunset on Long Beach about 1867 Oil on canvas 25.72 x 55.88 cm (10 1/8 x 22 in.) Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865 Inscriptions: Lower right: M J Heade
Martin Johnson Heade (American, 1819–1904) Magnolia Grandiflora about 1885–95 Oil on canvas 38.42 x 61.28 cm (15 1/8 x 24 1/8 in.) Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865 Inscriptions: Lower left center: M.J. Heade
Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900) Cayambe 1858 Oil on canvas 30.48 x 45.72 cm (12 x 18 in.) Gift of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865 Inscriptions: Center left: F. Church/58
Albert Bierstadt (American (born in Germany), 1830–1902) Lake Tahoe, California 1867 Oil on canvas 55.56 x 76.2 cm (21 7/8 x 30 in.) Gift of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865 Inscriptions: Lower left: ABierstadt/67 [AB in monogram]
Fitz Henry Lane (American, 1804–1865) Fresh Water Cove from Dolliver's Neck, Gloucester early 1850s Gloucester, Massachusetts, America Oil on canvas 61.28 x 91.76 cm (24 1/8 x 36 1/8 in.) Bequest of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815-1865
Martin Johnson Heade (American, 1819–1904) The Stranded Boat 1863 Oil on canvas 58.1 x 93.66 cm (22 7/8 x 36 7/8 in.) Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865 Inscriptions: Lower right: M J. Heade/1863 14. 64.430
Martin Johnson Heade (American, 1819–1904) Lake George 1862 Oil on canvas 66.04 x 125.41 cm (26 x 49 3/8 in.) Bequest of Maxim Karolik Inscriptions: Lower right: M J Heade/62.
Oscar Bluemner, Violet Tones, signed Florianus (lower right); also signed, titled, dated and inscribed 28 1/2 x 38 1/2 Tempera - Varnish Painting/on Paper/1934 Record #370/"Violet Tones"/Oscar F. Bluemner/102 Plain St. S. Braintree/Mass on the reverse, casein on Fabriano paper mounted on board by the artist, 28 ½ by 38 ½ inches (72.4 by 97.8 cm). Estimate $2/3 million. Photo: Sotheby's.
QUINTESSENTIAL NORMAN ROCKWELL
Two Plumbers from 1951 is Norman Rockwell at his best. Created at the height of his career, the painting brilliantly demonstrates the artist’s talent for depicting everyday life with a dose of humor. To produce the current work, Rockwell employed two of his studio assistants – Don Winslow and Gene Pelham – as models, posing them in front of a dresser owned by his wife, Mary. By combining real-life models, who were often friends and neighbors of the artist, and photography, Rockwell was able to meticulously account for each and every detail, which is in part what brings his paintings to life. In his own words: “Now my pictures grew out of the world around me, the everyday life of my neighbors. I don’t fake it anymore”. Sold at Sotheby’s New York in 1996, and having remained in the same private collection since, Two Plumbers returns to the market this season with a pre-sale estimate of $5/7 million.
JOHN SINGER SARGENT’S PORTRAIT OF HIS GODSON
John Alfred Parsons Millet is an exceptional example of John Singer Sargent’s celebrated portraiture, which earned him international renown by the 1880s (estimate $2.5/3.5 million). Depicting his godson, a member of the Millet family, who were patrons of the artist, the painting was a gift from the artist to the sitter’s mother, and is inscribed to my friend Mrs. Millet. Included widely in major exhibitions, including in London, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Tokyo, the work has been off the market since 1980.
REGIONALISM
Acquired by the present owner in 1971, Church by the Barrens, Indian Harbor, Maine is a bold example from Marsden Hartley’s mature period, during which the landscape and people of the artist’s home state of Maine became the primary focus of his work (estimate $800,000/1.2 million). Here he captures the splendid effects of the Maine sunset, imparting an undeniably romantic view of his home and revealing the deep inspiration he gleaned from it. This important period of Hartley’s career is also the focus of the exhibition Marsden Hartley’s Maine, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Thomas Hart Benton based Across the Curve of the Road on a sketch he executed during a trip he took through the South in 1938 to immerse himself in the culture of rural America. Belonging to a distinguished Southern collection – along with nine other works in the sale including strong examples by Andrew Wyeth and Charles Ephraim Burchfield – Across the Curve of the Road, expresses the clear dynamism with which Benton captured the unique yet familiar quality of the southern landscape (estimate $1/1.5 million).
Oscar Bluemner, Violet Tones, signed Florianus (lower right); also signed, titled, dated and inscribed 28 1/2 x 38 1/2 Tempera - Varnish Painting/on Paper/1934 Record #370/"Violet Tones"/Oscar F. Bluemner/102 Plain St. S. Braintree/Mass on the reverse, casein on Fabriano paper mounted on board by the artist, 28 ½ by 38 ½ inches (72.4 by 97.8 cm). Estimate $2/3 million. Photo: Sotheby's.
Violet Tones is a rare work by Oscar Bluemner from the 1934 (estimate $2/3 million). A dynamic interpretation of a darkened street in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Violet Tones highlights Bluemner’s command of color and form. His meticulous arrangement of hues, rooted in color theory, and subtle repetition of forms bring forth tremendous visual impact. Violet Tones was included in an important exhibition of Bluemner’s work organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art from 2005 to 2006.
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, MARSDEN HARTLEY & THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST
Georgia O’Keeffe was inspired by imagery of the American Southwest for much of her career. Painted in 1941, Turkey Feathers and Indian Pot demonstrates the appeal that the indigenous culture of the region held for the artist, in addition to its stark and expansive landscape (estimate $1/1.5 million). O’Keeffe’s disregard for traditional scale and spatial depth here results in a modern interpretation of still-life, and displays the synthesis of realism and abstraction that has become her signature aesthetic.
New Mexico also served as a point of inspiration for Marsden Hartley, who once wrote that New Mexico is “the perfect place to regain one’s body and soul”. Landscape, New Mexico is one of his most dramatic depictions of the region (estimate $800,000/1.2 million). This 1923 work belongs to Hartley’s deeply significant New Mexico Recollections series, a group of approximately two dozen works painted in Berlin that embodies the artist’s respect for and embrace of the American landscape as subject matter.
ROCKWELL KENT’S LEADING IMAGE
Six months after establishing an auction record for the artist with Gray Day, Sotheby’s presents its highly important pendant, Blue Day, Greenland (estimate $400/600,000). Painted during the artist’s third and final trip to Greenland, Blue Day, Greenland was illustrated on the cover of Kent’s autobiography – a statement of its importance within the artist’s oeuvre. Exhibited widely across the United States, and in Russia, the painting has been held in a private collection since its purchase at Sotheby’s in 2003.
Sotheby’s announced their Evening Sales of Latin America: Modern Art and Latin America: Contemporary Art on 25 May in New York. Leading the Modern Art auction are Rufino Tamayo’s iconic The Bird Charmer (Encantador de pájaros) (estimate $3/5 million) and Diego Rivera’s arresting masterpiece, Retrato de la Actriz Matilde Palou (estimate $2/3 million). Both works appear in the market during a time of renewed interest in Mexican Modernism, with recent exhibitions at both the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Dallas Museum of Art in the US, the Grand Palais in Paris, and at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.
Further highlights include an outstanding Surrealist sequence, topped by Remedios Varo’s The Troubadour (El Trovador) (estimate $1/1.5 million), Wifredo Lam’s Portrait de Madame Nena Azpiazu (estimate $400/600,000) and Leonora Carrington’s Untitled (The White Goddess) (estimate $700/900,000). Exceptional modern sculptures on offer this May include Agustín Cárdenas’s Dogon (estimate $125/175,000) and several works by Fernando Botero, including the monumental Donna Seduta (estimate $700/900,000).
Masterworks of 20th century abstraction lead the Evening Sale of Latin American Contemporary Art, with Gego’s 1969 masterpiece Columna Reticulárea (estimate $1/1.5 million), Joaquín Torres-García’s elegant and recently re-discovered Sin Título (estimate $200/250,000), and Jesús Rafael Soto’s Construcción en Blanco (estimate $500/700,000) rounding out the sale’s compelling narrative of kinetic works. Additionally, in a sign of the growing prominence of Latin American artists on the global stage, Sotheby’s marquee Contemporary Art Evening Sale includes works by Brazilian artists Sergio Camargo and Mira Schendel.
A champion of modernism, Rufino Tamayo’s fervent apolitical approach to his work is among the artist’s defining attributes. Unlike his contemporaries, Tamayo shirked political activism and moved to New York at the peak of the Mexican Muralist Movement, knowing that his unpopular opinion would stifle his artistic progression in his homeland.
New York afforded Tamayo the artistic freedom to create some of his most iconic works, including The Bird Charmer (1945). The painting was exhibited during the artist’s fourth individual show at the famed Valentine Gallery in 1946, where it was acquired by distinguished collectors, John and Dominique de Menil. The title suggests Tamayo’s optimism following the War years, which is magnified by the subject joyfully playing an instrument, as birds fly in undefined infinity above.
In stark contrast to Tamayo’s apolitical work, Diego Rivera’s Retrato de la Actriz Matilde Palou is an emblematic representation of the artist’s steadfast “Mexicanidad”. Regarded as a one of Rivera’s finest portraits to have appeared at auction, the monumental work depicts the Mexican Golden Age film star in a relaxed pose, dressed in an elaborate costume flush with unmistakable Mexican symbolism. The portrait last appeared at auction in 1988 at Sotheby’s, and was exhibited for the first time in nearly 30 years this March at Sotheby’s Los Angeles.
Rivera’s striking portrait captures the young starlet at the height of her fame, painted in the same year as the release of her most celebrated film, Luis Buñuel’s Susana. Her relaxed pose and undulating form exemplify Rivera’s use of a manneristic style in his late portraits to lend a languid, glamorous air to the sitter. The artist imagines Palou in an elaborate Mexican costume; the tiers of her dress are emblazoned with the nation’s flag and coat of arms, while Aztec-inspired jewelry adorns her ears, wrists and left hand—all aesthetic affirmations of proud ‘mexicanidad’. Standing at 80 x 48 1/8 inches, the work is an arresting and confrontational example of Rivera’s masterful skill, and a beguiling celebration of Mexican identity.
The sale’s Surrealist sequence is led by The Troubadour (El Trovador), a canonical example of Remedios Varo’s complex visual lexicon. Executed in 1959, the work is a poetic display of Varo’s remarkable creativity and the matrix of influences that serve as the foundation and iconography for her paintings, such as medieval history, Greek mythology, scientific reason, music and nature. In the present work, Varo situates a troubadour within a siren-esque boat surrounded by a striking dense forest and swarming birds—echoing the epic length of the Orinoco River, one of the largest river systems in the world, and its rich wildlife.
The work, filled with the awe and mysteries of the natural world, comes to Sotheby’s from The Estate of Henry Willard Lende, Jr. As an engineer, philanthropist and land steward, Mr. Lende found endless fascination in the natural world — a life-long passion made manifest in his enduring legacy: the 644-acre natural habitat laboratory known as the Cibolo Preserve.
Located just east of Boerne in Kendall County, Texas, the Cibolo Preserve is a unique cross-section of history and nature dedicated to research and education. Celebrated for its extraordinary natural beauty, among various other traits, the Preserve is an active area of study for scientists from the University of Texas at San Antonio, along with other respected institutions. The sale of The Troubadour serves to ensure the continuity of the Cibolo Preserve and maintain Mr. Lende’s promise to this remarkable landscape.
Painted in 1941, Wifredo Lam’s Portrait de Madame Nena Azpiazu emerged as the artist returned to his native Cuba, after 18 years abroad. His homecoming would mark one of the most prodigious turning points in his career as he rediscovered and reclaimed his Afro-Cuban identity and roots. The sale comes just months after the critically acclaimed exhibition of Lam’s work at Tate Modern.
Maria Luisa (Nena) Azpiazu, who frequented social circles of cultural giants such as Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, and Ernest Hemingway, commissioned the work from Lam in 1941, after which it remained in her collection for 50 years.
Leonora Carrington’s Untitled (The White Goddess) is an exemplary work showcasing the complexity of the artist’s unique visual vocabulary informed by her Celtic heritage. Executed circa 1958 in Mexico, the painting is situated within a pivotal period of productivity for Carrington and depicts a white spiritual figure wading in a spring, surrounded by a troupe of animals within a forest setting. Carrington’s polytheistic worldview is fully conceived in this magical realm, exploring the morphing of reality with centuries-old fairytales and folklore. In true Surrealist fashion, Carrington denies the viewer vital clues on the work’s meaning, instead leaving subtle suggestions and hints.
Seraphim (White, Yellow, and Green), Claudio Bravo’s exquisite oil on canvas, unveils the artist's life-long devotion to mundane materials capable of transforming their shapes through human manipulation. Painted in 1999, the present work exemplifies Bravo’s technical mastery of trompe-l'oeil effects and exudes a marvelous virtuosity unmatched in twentieth-century Latin American paintings.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Italian, Caprese 1475-1564 Rome. Unfinished cartoon for a Madonna and Child, 1525-30. Black and red chalk, white gouache, brush and brown wash. Casa Buonarroti, Florence.
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), a towering genius in the history of Western art, will be the subject of a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art this fall.
During his long life, Michelangelo was celebrated for the excellence of his disegno, the power of drawing and invention that provided the foundation for all the arts. For his mastery of drawing, design, sculpture, painting, and architecture, he was called Il Divino ("the divine one") by his contemporaries. His powerful imagery and dazzling technical virtuosity transported viewers and imbued all of his works with a staggering force that continues to enthrall us today.
On view at The Met from November 13, 2017, through February 12, 2018, Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer will present a stunning range and number of works by the artist: approximately 150 of his drawings, three of his marble sculptures, his earliest painting, his wood architectural model for a chapel vault, as well as a substantial body of complementary works by other artists for comparison and context. Among the extraordinary international loans are the complete series of masterpiece drawings he created for his friend Tommaso de'Cavalieri and a monumental cartoon for his last fresco in the Vatican Palace. Selected from 54 public and private collections in the United States and Europe, the exhibition will examine Michelangelo's rich legacy as a supreme draftsman and designer.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Italian, Caprese 1475-1564 Rome. Portrait of Andrea Quaratesi, 1532. Drawing, black chalk. The British Museum, London.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue written by Carmen C. Bambach that will include essays by a team of leading Michelangelo scholars. It will be published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.
Carmen C. Bambach delivers a thorough and engaging narrative of the artist’s long career, beginning with his training under Ghirlandaio and Bertoldo and ending with his 17-year appointment as chief architect of St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican.
In each thematic chapter, related drawings and other works are illustrated and discussed together, many for the first time, to provide new insights into Michelangelo’s creative process. In addition to St. Peter’s, other featured projects include the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Tomb of Pope Julius II, and the architecture of the Campidoglio in Rome. Michelangelo’s theories of art are also explored, and new consideration is given to his personal life and affections and their effect on his creative output. Magnificent in every way, this book will be the foremost publication about this remarkable artist for many years.
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao May 12–September 17, 2017 The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is pleased to present Paris, Fin de Siècle: Signac, Redon, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Their Contemporaries, an exhibition that analyzes the Parisian art scene, underscoring the most important French avant-gardes of the late 19th century, particularly the Neo- Impressionists, Symbolists, and Nabis. The leading exponents of these movements are represented in the show by approximately 125 paintings, pastels, drawings, and prints.
Fin-de-siècle Paris was a time and place of political upheaval and cultural transformation, during which sustained economic crisis and social problems spurred the rise of radical left-wing groups and an attendant backlash of conservatism that plagued France throughout the late 1890s. In 1894, President Sadi Carnot fell victim to an anarchist assassination, while the nationally divisive Dreyfus Affair began with the unlawful conviction for treason of Alfred Dreyfus, an officer of Alsatian and Jewish descent. Such events exposed France’s social and political polarization: bourgeois and bohemian, conservative and radical, Catholic and anticlerical, anti-republican and anarchist.
Mirroring the facets of an anxious, unsettled era, this period witnessed a spectrum of artistic movements. By the late 1880s, a generation of artists had emerged that included Neo- Impressionists, Symbolists, and Nabis. Their subject matter remained largely the same as that of their still-active Impressionist forebears: landscapes, the modern city, and leisure-time activities. However, the treatment of these familiar subjects shifted and these scenes were joined by introspective, fantastical visions and stark portrayals of social life.
The exhibition takes a closer look at these avant-garde movements, concentrating especially on some of the most prominent artists of that time: Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Maximilien Luce, Odilon Redon, Paul Signac, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Félix Vallotton. The ambition to spontaneously capture a fleeting moment of contemporary life gave way to the pursuit of carefully crafted works that were anti-naturalistic in form and execution and sought to elicit emotions, sensations, or psychic changes in the viewer. Despite their sometimes contradictory stances, these artists shared the goal of creating art with a universal resonance, and there was even overlap among members of the different groups.
Surveyed together, the idioms of this tumultuous decade map a complex terrain of divergent aesthetic and philosophical theories, while charting the destabilizing events at the brink of a new century. OVERVIEW OF THE EXHIBITION Gallery 305: Neo-Impressionism The Neo-Impressionists debuted as an entity in a gallery of the Eighth (and last) Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1886, led by Georges Seurat. That same year, Félix Fénéon, an art critic and champion of these artists, coined the term “Neo-Impressionism” in a review. When Seurat died at an early age, Paul Signac took his place as the leader and theorist of the movement.
The principal Neo-Impressionists—Henri-Edmond Cross, Maximilien Luce, Seurat, and Signac—were joined by the former Impressionist Camille Pissarro as well as other like-minded artists, such as Belgian painter Théo van Rysselberghe, from nearby countries. These vanguard painters looked to scientific theories of color and perception to create visual effects in Pointillist canvases, inspired by the optical and chromatic methods developed by scientists.
The theories of French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul set out in the Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors, and Their Application to the Arts (in French, De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l’assortiment des objets colorés, 1839) and American physicist Ogden Rood in Modern Chromatics (1879) were particularly influential. This modern, revolutionary painting technique was characterized by the juxtaposition of individual strokes of pigment to evince the appearance of an intense single hue. By thus orchestrating complementary colors and employing mellifluous forms, the Neo-Impressionists rendered unified compositions. The representation of light as it impacted color when refracted by water, filtered through atmospheric conditions, or rippled across a field was a dominant concern in their works.
Most of the Neo-Impressionists shared left-wing political views, evident, for example, in Pissarro’s and Luce’s depictions of the working classes. The idealized visions of anarcho-socialism or anarcho- communism were also manifest in the utopian scenes that the Neo-Impressionists frequently represented in their works, which often married ideological content and technical theory. But even when not guided by political objectives, the Neo-Impressionists’ shimmering interpretations of city, suburb, seaside, or countryside reflected a formal quest for harmony. Gallery 306: Symbolism Symbolism began as a literary movement in the 1880s and its principles were codified in 1886 when poet Jean Moréas published the “Symbolist Manifesto” in the French newspaper Le Figaro. But the idealist philosophies and highly stylized formal qualities of the idiom quickly infiltrated the visual arts. The term "Symbolism" is applied to a variety of artists who shared anti-naturalistic goals. Sometimes Neo-Impressionist or Nabis works were identified with Symbolism because of their peculiar forms and allusive subject matter, such as those by Maurice Denis, who looked to religion and allegory and used sinuous lines and flattened zones of color or all-over patterning. Indeed, artists associated with Symbolism did not always define themselves as such. One of the most important was Odilon Redon, although his eerie noirs of floating, disembodied heads, creeping spiders, and scenes unmoored from reality, their meaning enigmatic and locked in hermeticism, are closely associated with the Symbolist style. Most of the artists connected to Symbolism were averse to materialism and had lost faith in science, which had failed to alleviate the ills of modern society. They chose instead to probe spiritualism and altered states of mind, believing in the power of evocative, dreamlike images. Decorative idioms, nourished by Art Nouveau’s organic motifs and arabesque forms, permeated their work. Symbolist art embraced mythic narratives, religious themes, and the macabre world of nightmares, abandoning the factual for the fantastic, the exterior world for the drama of psychological landscapes, the material for the spiritual, and the concrete for the ethereal. Although deeply rooted in narrative, Symbolism sought to elicit abstracted sensations and, through subjective imagery, to convey universal experience. These impulses responded to a yearning engendered by the dark side of modernity—the search for the transcendent. Gallery 307: The Nabis and the Print Culture in the 1890s Following the 1890 exhibition of Japanese prints at the École des Beaux-Arts, printmaking experienced a renaissance in France, both in lithography and woodcut. This revival was launched primarily by the Nabis, along with artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The Nabis (from the Hebrew word meaning “prophets”) were a loosely connected brotherhood whose art was influenced by the flat planes of color and pattern of Paul Gauguin’s Synthetism and by the abrupt cropping and two- dimensional compositions of Japanese prints. Renouncing easel painting, the Nabis’ work crossed media to prints, posters, and illustrations for journals such as La Revue blanche, co-owned by their patron Thadée Natanson. As a “low” art exempt from the academic rules that governed painting, printmaking offered an artistic freedom that many found attractive. During the 1890s artists experimented with the possibilities of the stark contrasts of the woodcut, as Félix Vallotton did with his inventive use of black-and-white in scathing commentaries on Parisian society. Other Nabis, like Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, were enthralled with color lithography and tested the limits of the medium inmyriad ways, even introducing manipulations during the printing process, by working closely with master printer Auguste Clot. They produced posters and print portfolios commissioned by dealers, perhaps most importantly gallerist Ambroise Vollard. Toulouse-Lautrec turned his energies to the art of the poster, creating highly reductive yet incisive scenes of city life. These large-scale, eye-catching, brilliant creations were short-lived advertisements pasted along the streets of Paris. Passers-by (potential consumers) were inevitably seduced by exciting caricature-like portrayals of the bohemian venues they advertised: the café- concerts of Montmartre or the famed performers who headlined there, including La Goulue (the glutton) and Jane Avril. The lively, often unconventional existence celebrated in these prints and posters came to define fin-de-siècle Paris.
Henri-Edmond Cross The Promenade or The Cypresses (La Promenade or Les cyprès) 1897 Color lithograph image: 28.3 x 41 cm (11 1/8 x 16 1/8 inches) sheet: 43 x 56.8 cm (16 15/16 x 22 3/8 inches) Private collection
Camille Pissarro The Delafolie Brickyard at Éragny (La Briqueterie Delafolie à Éragny), 1886-88 Oil on canvas 58 x 72 cm (22 13/16 x 28 3/8 inches) Private collection
Paul Signac Saint-Tropez, Fontaine des Lices, 1895 Oil on canvas 65 x 81 cm (25 9/16 x 31 7/8 inches) Private collection
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen The Very Illustrious Company of the Chat Noir (La très illustre Compagnie du Chat Noir), 1896 Lithograph 62 x 39.5 cm (24 7/16 x 15 9/16 inches) Private collection
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Jane Avril, 1899 Color lithograph 55.5 x 37.9 cm (21 7/8 x 14 15/16 inches) Private collection
Paul Ranson The Young Girl and Death (La jeune fille et la mort), 1894 Graphite and charcoal on paper 55.2 x 33 cm (21 3⁄4 x 13 inches) Private collection
Odilon Redon Pegasus (Pégase), Ca. 1895-1900 Pastel on paper 67.4 x 48.7 cm (2 9/16 x 19 3/16 inches) Private collection
Théo Van Rysselberghe Kalf Mill in Knokke or Windmill in Flanders (Le Moulin du Kalf à Knokke or Moulin en Flandre]), 1894 Oil on canvas 80 x 70 cm (31 1/2 x 27 9/16 inches) Private collection
Félix Valloton The Stranger (L ́étranger), 1894 Woodcut on paper 22.4 x 17.9 cm (8 13/16 x 7 1/16 inches) Private collection
Georges Seurat Caretaker (Concierge), 1884 conté crayon on paper 32.3 x 24.5 cm, Private collection
From 21 September 2017, the Atomium (Brussels) invites both the young and the not-so-young to discover René Magritte through a fun experience full of surprises. Certain key works by the major Belgian Surrealist artist will be displayed in an innovative scenography. Visitors will be immersed in the Surrealist universe of René Magritte, whose paintings will be transformed into exhibition sets, split into sections for close examination. Enter the magical world of Belgium’s greatest artist. Weave your way around his bowler-hatted figures, his clouds and birds. Discover the secret messages hidden in his paintings, explore the extraordinary and captivating settings depicted in his masterpieces.
The aim behind the exhibition is to acquaint visitors with the world of René Magritte and, in this way, to introduce them to Surrealism. With this in view, the experience will unfold as follows. Firstly, visitors will quite literally penetrate Magritte’s world, as they are plunged into the renowned artist’s Surrealist realm. Some works will be presented in 3D in actual size, as elements forming part of the exhibition scenography, and visitors will walk through the set like characters in a play, soaking up the atmosphere.
This will bring them face to face with the key elements in Magritte’s paintings: they will be able to linger awhile among the clouds, the famous birds will be suspended above their heads, and they will have green apples to use as seats. Music to suit the setting and theatrical lighting will provide the finishing touches to the overall ambience, reflecting the intention of making these artistic works of genius accessible to everyone. A fun yet educational experience, the exhibition brings to light certain details that have rarely been discussed, but which will be revealed through this particular way of perceiving Magritte’s work. Our aim is to show visitors the conceptual world between image, pictorial art, speech and reality. The carefully selected key works present Magritte’s world and the iconic elements that embody it in all its forms:
THE LOVERS (1928) There is a strong link between the enshrouded face and Magritte’s own life story, but this is also an example of the double meaning so favoured by the renowned artist, as the faces are veiled by cloth.
THE SON OF MAN (1964) Here we see the easily identifiable motifs so closely associated with Magritte: the bowler hat, the apple, the hidden face and the clouds.
THE DOUBLE SECRET (1927) The image is nothing more than a layer, a ‘film’ that may be cut out and repositioned, thereby covering a totally different, obscure image.
Alongside these paintings, displayed in sections, the exhibition will feature memorable quotes by Magritte – in relation to his art and to Surrealism – as well as screenings of a range of his paintings, illustrating other elements of his artistic realm. This original exhibition was proposed by the Atomium and will also be held there. It will take account of the striking architecture of this building, a symbol of Brussels and part of its heritage.
Sanford R. Gifford in the Catskills at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, NY, features paintings by the 19th-century landscape painter Sanford Gifford, whose work was inspired by Thomas Cole. This exhibition focuses on his paintings of the Catskills – with works loaned by Harvard, Yale, Portland Museum of Art, and other leading institutions.
The exhibition opened to the public on May 2, in the gallery of Cole’s 1846 “New Studio” and runs through Sunday, October 29.
Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880) was an American landscape painter and one of the leading members of the Hudson River School, the first major art movement in America, which was founded by Thomas Cole (1801-1848). Gifford credited Cole’s works with stimulating his interest in landscape painting.
The exhibition is curated by Kevin J. Avery, Senior Research Scholar at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and is the first of this magnitude to be held so close to Gifford’s childhood home in Hudson, NY, directly across the Hudson River from Catskill. The exhibition consists of about 20 paintings, which are being loaned by such renowned institutions as the Yale University Art Gallery, Harvard University Art Museums, Portland Museum of Art, and Albany Institute of History and Art, as well as private collections, including those of the artist’s descendants.
In 2003, Dr. Avery co-organized the major retrospective Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford for The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art. In the current exhibition, he sharpens his focus on Gifford’s paintings of the Catskills, the mountains and valleys near Catskill that so inspired Cole. Gifford’s enchanting, seductive – sometimes even stark – interpretations of Kaaterskill Clove and Falls, High Peak and Round Top, as well as Hunter Mountain and the Hudson Valley prospect are richly represented.
Sanford Gifford, Ledge on South Mountain in the Catskills, circa 1861-62. Oil on canvas, 12 7/8 x 10 3/4 in. Framed: 17 1/4 x 15 x 2 1/4 in.
“This exhibition brings to Catskill a remarkable set of paintings that were created by one of the leaders of the Hudson River School and that depict nearby views that can be visited today on the Hudson River School Art Trail,” said Elizabeth B. Jacks, Executive Director of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. “The reconstruction of Cole’s ‘New Studio’ unveiled last year, with its climate-controlled environment, made it possible for distinguished curator Dr. Kevin Avery to assemble these works and for the Site to secure their loan for this exquisite exhibition.”
Sanford Robinson Gifford, Mount Merino, 1861, Oil on canvas, 11 × 22 in. Signed and dated, lower left: S R Gifford 1860, Private collection.
Six of the views depicted in the Gifford paintings in the exhibition can be visited on the innovative walking-and-driving experience called the Hudson River School Art Trail, which reveals nearby settings in the Hudson Valley where visitors can experience the same views that appear in 19th-century paintings by Hudson River School artists. Those six views are located in Greene and Ulster counties and are represented in 10 of the Gifford paintings in the exhibition.
National Gallery, Prague October 4, 2016 through January 5, 2017
Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City February 7 through April 30, 2017
Dallas Museum of Art
May 28 through September 3, , 2017
“Prints are designed to circulate and reach wide audiences; they are to painting and sculpture what the Internet is to the book or printed newspaper. They are capable of being a fundamentally disruptive medium,” wrote the Washington Post. Opening May 28 at the Dallas Museum of Art and remaining on view through September 3, Visions of America: Three Centuries of American Prints from the National Gallery of Art presents an exploration of more than 150 outstanding prints, featuring more than 100 notable artists from Paul Revere to John James Audubon, and from Andy Warhol to the Guerrilla Girls.
The exhibition, organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, is the first major museum survey of American prints in more than 30 years. The DMA is the final venue of a four-city international tour for this remarkable exhibition that critics have described as “historically riveting . . . full of the drama of American life and history.” Organized chronologically and thematically, Visions of America features works by artists such as James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, George Bellows, John Marin, Jackson Pollock, Louise Nevelson, Romare Bearden, Robert Rauschenberg, Chuck Close, Jenny Holzer, and Kara Walker.
“Visions of America tells the story of America from both internal and external views,” said Agustín Arteaga, The Eugene McDermott Director at the DMA. “From colonial times to the modern age, the exhibition takes a fresh look at the major movements in American art with a truthful approach.” Not only is Visions of America an examination of the societies and topography of the new world, it is also an unapologetic survey of the events that shaped the modern United States. From coast to coast, the exhibition invites visitors to imagine North America through the eyes of curious European outsiders, zealous young settlers, clandestine feminists, and boundary breakers. While some prints evoke a world perceived as new and strange, others present an image of utopic equality, or radicalism. Prints have often been a forum for social commentary and criticism as they are well suited to swiftly convey images of current events to a broad audience. Visions of America follows in this style by including works from across the centuries that aim to raise awareness and inspire change. On view, for instance, is an engraving of the Boston Massacre by Paul Revere as well as a broadside from more than two hundred years later by the undercover feminist collective known as the Guerrilla Girls.
“The dichotomy between prints intended to provoke change and ones more weighted to visual concerns is no mistake,” said Sue Canterbury, the DMA’s Pauline Gill Sullivan Associate Curator of American Art. “It is an undercurrent of both the exhibition and the history of American prints.” Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated 360-page hardcover scholarly catalogue published by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, with insightful essays, biographies of the artists, and a glossary of printmaking terms. The book will be for sale in the DMA Store and online ($45, hardcover).
Visions of America: Three Centuries of American Prints from the National Gallery of Art is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The exhibition was curated by Amy Johnston and Judith Brodie, both of the National Gallery of Art, and locally presented by Sue Canterbury, The Pauline Gill Sullivan Associate Curator of American Art, DMA.
John Hill, after William Guy Wall, View from Fishkill Looking to West Point, 1821–25, hand-colored aquatint and engraving, National Gallery of Art, Donald and Nancy deLaski Fund;
Mary Cassatt, Woman Bathing, 1890–91, drypoint and aquatint, National Gallery of Art, Gift of Mrs. Lessing J. Rosenwald;
George Bellows, A Stag at Sharkey's, 1917, lithograph, National Gallery of Art, Andrew W. Mellon Fund;
David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin and Peter Blake were all part of the same stellar generation of British artists as well as lifelong friends – with Blake and Hodgkin even visiting Hockney in Los Angeles in 1979.
David Hockney, Study for Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), coloured crayon on paper, 1972 (est. £100,000-150,000)
This drawing is a study for one of David Hockney’s most iconic paintings,
Study for Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) – which features on the cover of the catalogue for the current David Hockney retrospective at Tate Britain.
Completed in 1972 following the devastating end of a five year relationship with his first-love Peter Schlesinger, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) shows a fully dressed Schlesinger standing at the edge of the pool gazing at a submerged figure swimming underwater. Originally derived from the accidental juxtaposition of two photographs on his studio floor, the work reveals the parallel intimacy and distance between the couple. This preparatory study is a riveting artefact of the artist’s working process – giving an intimate insight into the creation of an irrefutable masterwork. Each perfectly placed pencil stroke reveals the artists hand, how he was experimenting and what he was concentrating on. There is a delicate balance and haunting juxtaposition between the joy of the swimmer gliding forward – with his arms stretched forwards in anticipation yet entrapped by the weight of the water – and the imposing dominance of the clothed figure standing sentinel. On closer inspection, there is a slight alteration in the position of the vulnerable swimmer from this work to the final version, the sketch portraying a greater ambiguity where the pose can be interpreted as either optimistic or struggling.
Hockney had begun the painting in October 1971, as documented in great detail in Jack Hazan’s semi-fictional documentary A Bigger Splash. It is likely that Hockney made this fresh and vivid drawing on a visit to Le Nid du Duc in early April 1972, sketching only a harsh outline for the standing figure as Schlesinger was not available to pose. Le Nid du Duc was director Tony Richardson’s house in the South of France, a bolthole for London artists who were free to indulge themselves in a utopian lifestyle that almost approached the blissful domesticity that Hockney had fallen for in Los Angeles.
The ripples and flickers of the water demonstrate one of Hockney’s primary concerns in his swimming pool pictures, as he stated that part of his interest lay in the fact that ‘it is a formal problem to represent water, to describe water, because it can be anything. It can be any colour and it has no set visual description.’
Another study:
Howard Hodgkin, After Dinner at Smith Square, oil on board in Artist’s frame, 1980-1 (est. £150,000-250,000) Also currently the subject of a major retrospective exhibition in London, in Hodgkin’s abstract works of art specific personal memories find expression in sumptuous colour-saturated brushwork. After Dinner at Smith Square is the sequel to a painting in the collection of the Tate and currently on view at the Absent Friends exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London. The subjects of both works are the collectors Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, who were close friends of the artist. The couple enjoyed building friendships with artists, often supporting their early careers, and together amassed an eclectic collection that contains over a thousand items spanning 5000 years – now housed at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich. Upon discovering that he was working on this piece, the Sainsburys frequently invited him to dinner to refresh his memory of the scene, on one occasion also posing so that he could make preparatory drawings – an unusual occurrence given that Hodgkin so rarely made studies of the sitters for his portraits. A celebratory painting, Hodgkin captures the Sainsburys in rich, resplendent tones, talking to each other below a small painting by Bonnard.
Sir Peter Blake, Venuses’ Outing to Weymouth, oil on canvas, 1994-2004 (est. £80,000-120,000)
In 1993, Blake was invited to become artist in residence at the National Gallery in London, with the aim of creating a new body of work in response to the Gallery’s collection. Blake was the perfect contemporary artist for this project due to his interest in art history, and holds both Elvis Presley and Hans Holbein in equal esteem. Blake walked through the sixty-six rooms of the gallery in three hours, wandering past each and every painting, when the idea emerged to bringing together all the great Venuses of the collection, from Botticelli and Titian to Velazquez. In this painting he takes the Venuses on a daytrip to John Constable’s Weymouth Bay for a spot of sunbathing in the nude. In the background Folly from Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid is engaged in a game of beach cricket with a cupid.
The setting is not just whimsical, as Weymouth Bay was where Constable spent his honeymoon after a difficult relationship with his future father-in-law – here, he brings together art history’s most wellknown goddesses of love for a triumphal day trip. This witty response to the nation’s treasure trove of art history encapsulates Blake’s charm and was a favourite when exhibited as part of his Tate Liverpool retrospective in 2007.
‘A NEST OF GENTLE ARTISTS’: HAMPSTEAD IN THE 1930s 'A nest of gentle artists' was a phrase coined by the art historian Herbert Read to describe a group of internationally important artists who lived and worked in Hampstead – which had become the epicentre of avant-garde in the 1930s.
Dame Barbara Hepworth, Standing Figure, marble, executed in 1934, the present work is unique (est. £500,000-800,000)
Carved in the pivotal year of 1934, this rare and intimate sculpture encapsulates all that was most important to Hepworth during the early 1930s and was once kept in the collection of her parents. The figure stands poised between abstraction and figuration, with all direct reference to the human form reduced elegantly to a single point on the figure’s head. The subtle contours of the body, beautifully curving around the white marble which in turn demonstrates her virtuosity as a carver as well as her profound understanding of the human figure. The importance of artist’s hand was crucial to her work and she was later known for forbidding the use of any mechanical tools in her studio. Hepworth gave birth to triplets on 3 October of the same year, and once she was able to start carving again that November, the subtle yet sophisticated references to the human figure evident in Standing Figure disappeared altogether as moved into the realm of complete abstraction. Drawing on the powerful dialogue with abstraction developed by Brancusi, along with the minimalist forms of prehistoric Cycladic examples, this work positions Hepworth at the very heart of the European avant-garde.
Ben Nicholson, Two Fishes, oil and pencil on canvas, laid on board, 1932 (est. £250,000-350,000)
This rediscovered poetic still-life gives an intimate insight into Ben Nicholson’s life; his interest and his artistic connections – from his father William Nicholson to Georges Braque, and the Parisian avant-garde.
The first owner of Two Fishes was the artist Edward Wadsworth, who once stated that Nicholson was ‘essentially exquisite and elegant’4 with his pared back compositions. Inspired by regular visits to France throughout the year in which this was painted, Nicholson absorbed elements of Synthetic cubism – when artists started adding textures and patterns to their paintings, experimenting with collage using newspaper print and patterned paper. The roughly textured surface and flattened pictorial also draws inspiration from the Russian avant-garde who had emigrated to Paris in the wake of the Revolution. Nicholson was a devoted follower of tennis, often found bouncing a ball along the streets of St. Ives, and in this work a copy of Le Journal is depicted reporting on Henri Cochot’s loss to his greatest rival during the Davis Cup. Cochot was one of the leading French players of the period, having won Wimbledon twice and ranked world number one from 1928 to 1931. However, 1932 was an inauspicious year for the athlete and this works signals the beginning of the end for his stellar career.
Naum Gabo, Linear Construction in Space No.1, Variation, circa 1950 (est. £150,000-250,000)
Linear Construction in Space No.1 encapsulates Naum Gabo’s constant quest to expand the boundaries of sculpture. Driven in part by his Constructivist enchantment with industry and the modern world, Gabo used man-made substances as opposed to the traditional sculptor’s mediums of stone, wood or bronze. Using the hard but translucent Perspex as a frame, he was able to fill space using reflective nylon filaments stretched across a void to create the impression of a continuous form. Thus he replaced the mass and bulk of conventional sculpture with illusory volume – an emptiness filed with light and movement. The impetus for this work was a public sculpture that was never completed, due to commemorate the skill of the works of a textile factory. Gabo was an idealist when it came to the role that art should play in society, believing that public sculpture should be used to celebrate the achievements of working people in today’s industrialised world. Other versions of this model are housed in museums such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Tate Gallery, London and The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. among others.
MOORE AS DRAUGHTSMAN
Henry Moore, Two Standing Figures, pencil, wax crayon, watercolour, pen and ink and wash on paper, 1940 (est. £200,000 – 300,000) As a consummate and innovative draughtsman, Moore believed that a sculptor’s drawings should – through the suggestion of background and evocation of atmosphere – be more than mere diagrams or studies. Many of these drawings were a means to generate ideas that later became sculptures, but are also important works within their own right. Three impressive examples from a Private American Collection are offered in this sale, celebrating Moore’s brilliance as a draughtsman.
LIFE IN LONDON
William Roberts, The Tea Garden, oil on canvas, 1928 (est. £250,000-350,000) William Roberts felt it rang false to purely invent a subject, and would spend most of his days walking and observing in London – jotting down sketches on individual scraps of paper that went on a pile that built up over the years. Unseen since the 1920s, The Tea Garden is perhaps derived from such an expedition, focusing on the tumultuous energy of modern life with a lovely documentary quality. Following the war, the active breaking of social restrictions meant that there was always a spectacle on view, and Roberts’ taste for these raucous scenes only intensified. This painting also displays his particular interest in the humorous clash of classes one increasingly found in public settings, with an elegantly dressed couple taking notice of the rather brash crowd they are strolling alongside. Roberts had a keen eye of detail and his distinctive style articulates the intricacies of human interaction through gesture and facial expression.
Typical of the artist’s method, several intricate preparatory drawings for The Tea Garden exist, now in the collections of institutions including the Tate, London.
PORTRAITURE
Frank Auerbach, Head of JYM III, oil on board, 1981 (est. £400,000-600,000) Head of JYM III is the ultimate example of the dramatic innovations that Auerbach brought to portraiture, that most traditional of artistic genres. Throughout his career, the artist pursued the same subjects, close friends and admirers of his work, and none more so than Juliet Yardley Mills - who posed for him from 1956 until she was aged eighty in 1997. The task of siting for Auerbach was no easy feat and JYM arrived every Wednesday and Sunday having taken two buses from her home in southeast London and would sustain awkward poses for four hours and more. The immediate force and vigour of execution of this work demonstrates Auerbach’s intimate psychological response to his subjects, as a bold silhouette emerges amid swathes of dramatic brushwork on a sculptural surface that was reworked time and time again.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a major retrospective of the photographs of Irving Penn to mark the centennial of the artist's birth. Over the course of his nearly 70-year career, Irving Penn (1917–2009) mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio photography that is distinguished for its meticulous attention to composition, nuance, detail, and printmaking. Irving Penn: Centennial, opening April 24, 2017, will be the most comprehensive exhibition of the great American photographer's work to date and will include both masterpieces and hitherto unknown prints from all his major series.
Long celebrated for more than six decades of influential work at Vogue magazine, Penn was first and foremost a fashion photographer. His early photographs of couture are masterpieces that established a new standard for photographic renderings of style at mid-century, and he continued to record the cycles of fashions year after year in exquisite images characterized by striking shapes and formal brilliance. His rigorous modern compositions, minimal backgrounds, and diffused lighting were innovative and immensely influential. Yet Penn's photographs of fashion are merely the most salient of his specialties. He was a peerless portraitist, whose perceptions extended beyond the human face and figure to take in more complete codes of demeanor, adornment, and artifact. He was also blessed with an acute graphic intelligence and a sculptor's sensitivity to volumes in light, talents that served his superb nude studies and life-long explorations of still life.
Penn dealt with so many subjects throughout his long career that he is conventionally seen either with a single lens—as the portraitist, fashion photographer, or still life virtuoso—or as the master of all trades, the jeweler of journalists who could fine-tool anything. The exhibition at The Met will chart a different course, mapping the overall geography of the work and the relative importance of the subjects and campaigns the artist explored most creatively. Its organization largely follows the pattern of his development so that the structure of the work, its internal coherence, and the tenor of the times of the artist's experience all become evident.
The exhibition will most thoroughly explore the following series: street signs, including examples of early work in New York, the American South, and Mexico; fashion and style, with many classic photographs of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, the former dancer who became the first supermodel as well as the artist's wife; portraits of indigenous people in Cuzco, Peru; the Small Trades portraits of urban laborers; portraits of beloved cultural figures from Truman Capote, Joe Louis, Picasso, and Colette to Alvin Ailey, Ingmar Bergman, and Joan Didion; the infamous cigarette still lifes; portraits of the fabulously dressed citizens of Dahomey (Benin), New Guinea, and Morocco; the late "Morandi" still lifes; voluptuous nudes; and glorious color studies of flowers.
These subjects chart the artist's path through the demands of the cultural journal, the changes in fashion itself and in editorial approach, the fortunes of the picture press in the age of television, the requirements of an artistic inner voice in a commercial world, the moral condition of the American conscience during the Vietnam War era, the growth of photography as a fine art in the 1970s and 1980s, and personal intimations of mortality. All these strands of meaning are embedded in the images—a web of deep and complex ideas belied by the seeming forthrightness of what is represented.
Penn generally worked in a studio or in a traveling tent that served the same purpose, and favored a simple background of white or light gray tones. His preferred backdrop was made from an old theater curtain found in Paris that had been softly painted with diffused gray clouds. This backdrop followed Penn from studio to studio; a companion of over 60 years, it will be displayed in one of the Museum's galleries among celebrated portraits it helped create. Other highlights of the exhibition include newly unearthed footage of the photographer at work in his tent in Morocco; issues of Vogue magazine illustrating the original use of the photographs and, in some cases, to demonstrate the difference between those brilliantly colored, journalistic presentations and Penn's later reconsidered reuse of the imagery; and several of Penn's drawings shown near similar still life photographs.
Exhibition Credits
Irving Penn: Centennial is co-curated by Maria Morris Hambourg, independent curator and the founding curator of The Met's Department of Photographs, and Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at The Met.
Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a 372-page book with 365 illustrations, including full-page reproductions of all the photographs exhibited, by Maria Morris Hambourg and Jeff L. Rosenheim. A probing introduction to the artist, his concerns, and the evolution of his work is provided by Hambourg, followed by lively in-depth studies of the central themes and episodes of his career, an illustrated chronology, and notes on Penn's printing by Hambourg, Rosenheim, and guest authors Alexandra Dennett, Philippe Garner, Adam Kirsch, Harald E.L. Prins, and Vasilios Zatse.
Henry James and American Painting, opening at the Morgan Library & Museum on June 9, is the first exhibition to explore the author’s deep and lasting interest in the visual arts and their profound impact on the literature he produced. Offering a fresh perspective on the master novelist, the show reveals the importance of James’s friendships with American artists such as John La Farge, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler. While the author decided early on that the pictorial arts were not to be the arena in which he would work, the painterly quality of his writing has enthralled readers for over a century.
Co-curated by author Colm Tóibín, whose latest novel House of Names is published this month, and Declan Kiely, head of the museum’s Department of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, the exhibition includes a rich and eclectic selection of more than fifty paintings, drawings, watercolors, sculptures, photographs, manuscripts, letters, and printed books from two dozen museums and private collections in the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland. Together they weave an evocative story of fascinating artistic intersections.
“With its acclaimed collections of art and literature, the Morgan is the perfect place for this exhibition,” said Colin B. Bailey, director of the museum. “The visual arts were part of the bedrock on which Henry James built his house of fiction. He composed the most dramatic moments in his work as though they were framed, as though his characters were placed in light and shade as a painter might pose figures on a canvas.”
THE EXHIBITION
Portraits of Henry James
Henry James was fiercely protective of his privacy and, despite achieving preeminence as a novelist by the end of the nineteenth century, gave only four interviews over the course of his career. He expressed a “dread of the assault of the interviewer.” Nevertheless, he sat for numerous portraits, and was photographed by some of the leading photographers of his day. In less than a decade James used the word “portrait” in three book titles—The Portrait of a Lady (1881), his first literary masterpiece; Portraits of Places (1883), a collection of travel essays; and Partial Portraits (1888), a collection of essays on writers that argued for the inclusion of narrative fiction among the fine arts.
John La Farge (1835–1910), Portrait of Henry James , 1862, oil on canvas. The Century Association, New York City. J.P. Morgan et Amicorum (Guest book logging visitors to the Morgan, including Henry James), 1908-1996. The Morgan Library & Museum.
In 1862, at age nineteen, James sat for John La Farge, a painter eight years his senior, in Newport, Rhode Island. At the time, Henry James was attending Harvard Law School, after which he redirected his focus to essays and fiction. His relationship with La Farge set the tone for his early novel, Roderick Hudson (1875), a coming-of-age story of a young law student from Northampton, Massachusetts, who aspires to be a great sculptor in the classical tradition.
It was La Farge who helped James to gain “the dawning perception that the arts were after all essentially one and that even with canvas and brush whisked out of my grasp I still needn’t feel disinherited. That was the luxury of the friend and senior with a literary side.” The exhibition includes the original typescript of Notes of a Son and Brother, in which James wrote extensively about La Farge’s important early aesthetic influence.
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Henry James, 1913, Oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery, London; Bequeathed by Henry James, 1916. NPG 1767.
The 1913 portrait of James by John Singer Sargent—a treasure on loan from the National Portrait Gallery, London— is perhaps the most famous painted image of the author. Sargent was the natural choice when a group of James’s friends commissioned an oil portrait to mark the writer’s seventieth birthday. James described the finished work, which captured his reserve and sensuous intelligence, as “Sargent at his very best and poor old H. J. not at his worst; in short a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of painting.”
Other portraits of James in the exhibition include Abbott Handerson Thayer’s 1881 crayon on paper drawing from the Collection of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City; Ellen Gertrude Emmet Rand’s 1900 portraits from the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; Alice Boughton’s 1905 and 1906 photographs; William James’s 1910 portrait from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; and E. O. Hoppé’s 1911 photograph from the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Frank Duveneck and Elizabeth Boott Duveneck
The relationship between the American painters Frank Duveneck (1848–1919) and his wife Elizabeth Boott Duveneck (1846–1888), and Elizabeth’s father, the composer Francis Boott (1813–1904), offered James inspiration for three of his most important novels— Washington Square (1880), The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Golden Bowl (1904). There are clear parallels between Elizabeth Boott and James’s characters: Catherine Sloper in Washington Square, Pansy Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady, and Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl.
Francis and his only child Elizabeth were wealthy New Englanders who moved between Boston, where James first met them in 1865, and Europe. James, a regular visitor to their apartment in Villa Castellani at Bellosguardo, overlooking Florence, transformed it into the residence of his characters Gilbert Osmond and his daughter Pansy in The Portrait of a Lady. Frank Duveneck came to the attention of James and the Bootts when he showed his paintings at the Boston Art Club in 1875.
James wrote: “In the rooms of the Boston Art Club hang some five remarkable portraits by Mr. Frank Duveneck of Cincinnati . . . The good people of Boston have recently been flattering themselves that they have discovered an American Velázquez.” James added that “the analogy of Mr. Duveneck’s talent with that of the great Spaniard is a natural, instinctive one.” Elizabeth Boott purchased a painting from the exhibition, and, in March 1888, a portrait of her by Duveneck was accepted by the jury of the Salon in Paris.
The tensions that arose when Elizabeth fell in love with Duveneck, who, as her art teacher, was considered by her father to be an unsuitable match, intrigued James. After Elizabeth finally married Duveneck, James came to vist them at Bellosguardo, writing letters to his family and friends about the family dynamics of their household. Elements of his time with the Bootts made their way into his late masterpiece The Golden Bowl (1904), a novel that explores the drama of father-daughter bonds complicating husband-wife romance. This exhibition contextualizes James’s friendship with the Bootts and Duveneck, and shows the artists’ work together in illuminating conjunction.
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Frank Duveneck (1848–1919), Elizabeth Boott Duveneck , 1888, oil on canvas. Cincinnati Art Museum; Gift of the artist, 1915.
Frank Duveneck (1848–1919), Portrait of Francis Boott , 1881, oil on canvas. Cincinnati Art Museum; The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial
Highlights include Duveneck’s portraits of Elizabeth and Francis Boott,
and the tomb effigy that he designed to mark his wife’s burial place.
John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler
The connections between Henry James and John Singer Sargent make the latter essential to any consideration of James and painting, as they are also fascinating in any consideration of James’s own life in all its rich complexity and ambiguity. James and Sargent were both Americans in Europe who had spent much of their childhood abroad. They were bachelor expatriates, reserved, industrious, careful about their private lives. Both liked society and took an interest in fashionable women. Both, in their work, were interested in surface and psychology. In 1886, one critic noted the connections between them: “He [Sargent] is the Henry James of portraiture, and I can’t help wishing he were not—as I can’t help wishing Henry James were not the Sargent of the novel.” The British painter W. Graham Robertson, who knew both, described them as “real friends, they understood each other perfectly and their points of view were in many ways identical.”
More than a year before James and Sargent were introduced, the writer noted a Venetian genre scene by the artist that was part of an 1882 exhibition at London’s Grosvenor Gallery. Both James and Sargent were enthralled by Venice. “The Aspern Papers” (1888) is set in Venice, and the city also features in The Wings of the Dove (1902), a novel that features a palace that is clearly reminiscent of the Palazzo Barbaro, home of the Curtis family, where both Sargent and James spent considerable time.
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), An Interior In Venice (The Curtis Family) , 1898, oil on canvas. Royal Academy of Arts, London; Diploma Work given by John Singer Sargent, R. A., accepted 1900.
On special loan from the Royal Academy of Arts, London, Sargent’s 1889 painting, An Interior In Venice (The Curtis Family), which was intended as a gift to the family, is displayed. The painting features the couple, Daniel and Ariana Curtis, as well as their son Ralph and his wife Lisa in their opulent Palazzo. Though rejected by the Curtises, (Ariana found her portrayal unflattering), Sargent’s distinguished work is celebrated for its aesthetic depiction of the grand Venetian salon.
In 1884, James declared Sargent to be the “only Franco-American product of importance,” who had, moreover, “high talent, a charming nature, artistic and personal, and is civilized to his fingertips. . . . I like him extremely; and the best of his work seems to me to have in it something exquisite.” Conversely, James sometimes critiqued Sargent’s tendency to paint pretty portraits, rather than to remain true to his subject’s natural likeness. As James opined, “His Mrs. Boit is admirable for life & impudence & talent, but seems to me a supreme example of his great vice—a want of respect for the face.” In the context of fiction writing, James had more creative license to create a less-than-flattering portrait with his pen than did Sargent.
Whistler, like Sargent, became known for creating vivid, iconic, and mysterious images of women—as evidenced in his
Arrangement in Black and Brown: The Fur Jacket (1876)—much as James became known for the subtlety and sympathy with which he treated his female characters. James and Whistler became friends in the 1880s. James sent him an inscribed copy of The Spoils of Poynton (1897) and, upon hearing of Whistler’s appreciation, wrote that he was delighted “to have pleased you, to have touched you … for the arts are one, and with the artist the artist communicates.” James was a regular visitor to Whistler’s home at 110 Rue du Bac in the 1890s, and The Ambassadors (1903) drew upon his impressions to describe the house and garden of the sculptor Gloriani, who is based on Whistler.
Hendrik Christian Andersen and Lilla Cabot Perry
Sculptor Hendrik Andersen appears almost as a character out of James’s fiction. James met him in the spring of 1899 in Rome. James was fifty-six, Andersen almost thirty years his junior. Andersen was born in Norway but raised in Newport, Rhode Island, where the James family had also lived between sojourns in Europe. He studied in Paris and then Naples, and moved to Rome in 1897. Between 1899 and 1915, the year before his death, James wrote seventy-eight letters to the handsome young Norwegian-American. Anderson’s 1899 painted terra-cotta bust of Count Alberto Bevilacqua, on loan from the National Trust--was placed by the mantelpiece in a corner in the small dining room at Lamb House, Rye, where James moved in 1897. In his letters, James advised the young sculptor to produce work on a more domestic scale in order to make it more saleable. The bust bore a resemblance to Andersen, and James wrote, “I shall have him constantly before me as a loved companion and friend. He is so living, so human, so sympathetic and sociable and curious, that I foresee it will be a lifelong attachment.” James later told a friend that the sculpture was “the first object that greets my eyes in the morning, and the last at night.”
Henry James was also close to a number of female artists, in addition to Elizabeth Boott Duveneck. These include Ellen Gertrude Emmet Rand, his cousin who painted portraits of him; Alice Boughton, who took several photographs of James, creating images of character that have shaped the mental pictures of generations of readers and enthusiasts; and Lilla Cabot Perry, who was pivotal in connecting James with the French Impressionists, a movement that he broadly rejected. The daughter of wealthy Bostonians, Lilla Cabot married Thomas Sergeant Perry, literary critic and close friend of Henry James, in 1874. She became the sister-in-law of John La Farge. Perry had no formal artistic training until the age of thirty-six when she studied at the Académie Julian and at the Académie Colarossi. In 1889, the Perrys traveled to Giverny, France, joining the community of artists gathered around Claude Monet. Upon her return to the United States, Perry became an influential proponent of Monet’s work, publishing Reminiscences of Claude Monet from 1889 to 1909, a biographical account of her twenty summers at Giverny.
James visited the second Impressionist exhibition of 1876, held at the Galerie Durand-Ruel, and he dismissed “the young contributors of whom I speak” as “absolute foes to arrangement, embellishment, selection. . . . None of its members show signs of possessing first-rate talent.” He failed to recognize the significance of Impressionism, and he did not know the main French artists of the age, even though he knew most of the French novelists. The work that interested him most was Anglo-American, or pre-Impressionist. What mattered to him was the atmosphere that visual artists created and the world they inhabited more than any new systems or innovations.
Ostensibly rooted in academic convention, The Green Hat, Perry’s 1913 portrait of her daughter, Edith, manifests her adherence to impressionism through the dynamic brushstrokes of its background, the monochromatic palette and the play of light. What interested James most was not the impression, but the expression. Catalog
Published to coincide with the exhibition at the Morgan, in Henry James and American Painting novelist and critic Colm Tóibín, author of the 2004 Man Booker short-listed novel The Master, joins art historian Marc Simpson and Declan Kiely of the Morgan Library & Museum to reveal how essential the language and imagery of the arts—and friendships with artists—were to James’s writing.
Depicting characters like the eponymous young sculptor in Roderick Hudson and spaces like the crowded galleries in The Wings of the Dove, Henry James’s iconic novels reflect the significance of the visual culture of his society. In this book, novelist and critic Colm Tóibín joins art historian Marc Simpson and Declan Kiely of The Morgan Library & Museum to reveal how essential the language and imagery of the arts—and friendships with artists—were to James’s writing.
The authors consider the paintings, photographs, drawings, and sculpture produced by artists in James’s circle, assess how his pictorial aesthetic developed, and discuss why he destroyed so many personal documents and what became of those that survived. In examining works by figures such as John La Farge, Hendrik Andersen, and John Singer Sargent alongside selections from James’s novels, personal letters, and travel writings, Tóibín, Simpson, and Kiely explore the novelist’s artistic and social milieu. They show him to be a writer with a painterly eye for colors and textures, shapes and tastes, and for the blending of physical and psychological impressions. In many cases, the characters populating James’s fiction are ciphers for his artist friends, whose demeanors and experiences inspired James to immortalize them on the page. He also wrote critically about art, most notably about the work of his friend Sargent.
A refreshing new perspective on a master novelist who was greatly nourished by his friendships with artists, this edifying volume reveals a James whose literary imagination, in Tóibín’s words, “seemed most at ease with the image” and the work of creating fully realized portraits of his characters.
Authors: Colm Tóibín, Marc Simpson, Declan Kiely Publishers: Penn State University Press, The Morgan Library & Museum 192 pages, 70 color illustrations.
Selection of Highlights on View
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Venetian Women in the Palazzo Rezzonico, ca. 1880. Private collection, courtesy of David Nisinson
William Morris Hunt (1824–1879), Girl at the Fountain , 1852–54, oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Bequest of Jane Hunt, 1907.
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife , 1885, oil on canvas. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas.
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