Edvard Munch: Breathe, Feel, Suffer and Love

September 16, 2017, 7:43 am

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Modernism, San Francisco

August 31  - October 7, 2017 

Modernism is presenting a major exhibition of prints and drawings by the legendary Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863 - 1944). Encompassing thirty works  produced between 1894 to 19 30 , the exhibition complements aconcurrent retrospective of Munch's paintings at  the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  

Also see(Edvard Munch: Color in Context National Gallery of ArtSeptember 3, 2017, through January 28, 2018.)

The Modernism exhibition features some of  Munch's most famous images, including  The Sick Child,  Madonna, and The Kiss;


– painted  versions of which are simultaneously on view at SFMOMA  – affording viewers a rare  opportunity to see how he treated key themes including death and  love in diverse media.

Printmaking was central to Munch's practice, and works on paper wereas significant to him artistically as oils on canvas. Over the course of five decades, beginning in 1894, he printed  some eighteen thousand impressions, representing hundreds of motifs, realized as etchings,  lithographs, woodcuts, and mixtures of these techniques. 

The bulk of this oeuvre is now in  Oslo's Munch Museum,, which inherited his personal collection upon his death. Decades of scholarship by that museum, as well as institutions such as the National Gallery of Art in  Washington DC  – have revealed the extraordinary richness of his graphic art, and its intimate  relationship to his paintings and drawings. As Munch wrote in an 1889 diary entry, his artistic aim was to show "living people who breathe, feel, suffer and love". 

By creating multiple  variat ions on a print over a period of decades  – and using prints as inspiration for subsequent  drawings and paintings and prints  – he was able to explore his innermost feelings through  countless expressionistic permutations on the living people who stirred his  own love and suffering. 

This strategy can be seen from the very beginning of his printmaking career. For example, one  of the earliest images in the Modernism exhibition, a drypoint etching titled  



Death and the Woman (1894), derived from an ill - fated affair that he recorded in sketches in the late 1880s  and 
 

developed into a painting in 1893. Like the painting, his etching adapts the traditional theme of the Dance of Death, depicting a nude young woman passionately embracing a  skeleton. 

In the same year, Munch extracted the emotional essence of his composition, setting  aside the symbolism, in a painting called  The Kiss. 

 

This painting in turn became the basis for  an 1895 etching, also on view at Modernism, showing the fervid embrace of a nude couple.  

 

Over the  years that followed, Munch continued to develop the motif using a broad range of  techniques. One of the most important was the woodcut, which facilitated greater abstraction. 



A 1902 version, in which the couple has been clothed in black, can be seen at the Modernism  exhibition

 
 (and compared to a similar painting from 1897 on view at SFMOMA). 

While the identity of the lovers in  The Kiss is hidden  – and the connection to Munch's own life  is essentially poetic  – other works by Munch are explicitly autobiographical, perhaps none  more so than  

 

Edvard Munch, The Sick Child, 1885–86. The original version. Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo.

This image originated with the death from tuberculosis of  Munch's older sister Johanne Sophie in 1877. He was greatly traumatized by the experience,  and began painting his memory of Johanne Sophie on her deathbed as early as 1885. 



Edvard Munch, The Sick Child, 1896. The second painting was completed while the artist was living in Paris, Konstmuseet, Gothenburg.

A  decade later he focused in on her haunted face  – emphasizing her gaze into the darkness  ahead  – in a color lithograph that he considered to be his "greatest print". 

The four - color version on view at Modernism, printed in 1896, can be compared to 

a painted version from the same year at SFMOMA, which shows the graphic influence of Munch's printmaking  experience on his contemporaneous canvasses. 


 
Edvard Munch. The Sick Child. 1897

  

'The Sick Child', Edvard Munch, 1907 | Tate

To realize his complex compositions, Munch often depended on models, who could act out his memories and fantasies as he captured their emotional undercurrents. 

 

One of those models, Ingeborg Kaurin, can be seen in a charcoal drawing at Modernism. The drawing takes the title of the nickname Munch gave her,  Mossepiken, and may have been a study for paintings such as  

The Forerunner, a 1913 self - portrait in which hefondles an uncomfortable peasant girl. 



Munch was also an adept portraitist. The Modernism exhibition includes a pastel of the Norwegian singer Marta Sandal, captured in 1902, the year she was discovered by Edvard  Grieg, launching her illustrious career.) 

Munch's remarkable creativity over six productive decades resulted in myriad innovations in  both form and content, which greatly influenced painters and graphic artists of his ownera, including Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner . More recently his work has inspired  contemporary  artists ranging from Georg Baselitz to Marlene Dumas to Jasper Johns. Yet the  person he inspired most, and who was most inspired by him, was Edvard Munch himself. 

The  exhibition at Modernism vividly illustrates that virtuous circle of self - influence.  


 Madonnas

 (see below).
Paintings:

Version from Munch Museum, Oslo. 1894. 90 cm × 68 cm (35 in × 27 in). It was stolen in 2004 and recovered two years later.

Version from National Gallery of Norway, Oslo. 1894–95. 91 cm × 70.5 cm (36 in × 27.8 in).

Version from Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg. 1895. 90 × 71 cm (35.4 × 28 in)

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Modigliani Unmasked

September 18, 2017, 11:51 am

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Jewish Museum

September 15, 2017–February 4, 2018

The Jewish Museum presents Modigliani Unmasked, the first exhibition in the United States to focus on Amedeo Modigliani’s early work made in the years after he arrived in Paris in 1906. The exhibition puts a spotlight on Modigliani’s drawings, with a large selection acquired directly from the artist by Dr. Paul Alexandre, his close friend and first patron. The drawings from the Alexandre collection, many being shown for the first time in the United States, as well as other drawings from collections around the world and a selection of Modigliani’s paintings and sculptures, illuminate how the artist’s heritage as an Italian Sephardic Jew is pivotal to understanding his artistic output. The exhibition is on view at the Jewish Museum from September 15, 2017 through February 4, 2018.

Modigliani Unmasked considers the celebrated artist, Amedeo Modigliani (Italian, 1884-1920), shortly after he arrived in Paris in 1906, when the city was still roiling with anti-Semitism after the long-running tumult of the Dreyfus Affair and the influx of foreign emigres. An Italian Sephardic Jew with a French mother and a classical education, Modigliani was the embodiment of cultural heterogeneity. When he moved to Paris, he came up against the idea of racial purity in French culture — in Italy, he did not feel ostracized for being Jewish. His Latin looks and fluency in French could have easily helped him to assimilate. Instead, his outsider status often compelled him to introduce himself with the words, “My name is Modigliani. I am Jewish.” As a form of protest, he refused to assimilate, declaring himself as “other.” The exhibition shows that Modigliani’s art cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the ways the artist responded to the social realities that he confronted in the unprecedented artistic melting pot of Paris.

In these years prior to World War I, Modigliani largely stopped painting in order to develop his conceptual and pictorial ideas through drawing and sculpture. The works in the exhibition reveal the emerging artist himself, enmeshed in his own particular identity quandary, struggling to discover what portraiture might mean in a modern world of racial complexity.

Modigliani Unmasked is arranged thematically, and includes approximately 130 drawings, 12 paintings, and seven sculptures by the artist. Modigliani’s art is complemented by work representative of the various multicultural influences — African, Asian, Greek, Egyptian, and Khmer — that inspired the young artist during this lesser-known, early period.

When he arrived in Paris, Modigliani — still virtually unknown — met Dr. Alexandre, a young physician. Alexandre amassed some 450 drawings directly from the artist and commissioned a number of portraits. The exhibition includes a selection of drawings depicting Dr. Alexandre, as well as a mysterious, unfinished portrait never seen before in the United States. Probably painted around 1913, it is a stylistic anomaly within Modigliani’s oeuvre, more sketchy and gestural than his typical portraits.

Modigliani would visit museums in Paris, including the Louvre and the Musée du Trocadéro, and was mesmerized by the nonwestern art. Unlike most of his contemporaries in the French vanguard, who appropriated such works expressionistically as an abstracted distortion of the human form, Modigliani’s manner of using such stylized effects was far more respectful. The influence of masks in particular is clearly visible in the many drawings and sculptures in the exhibition.

Prominent in the Alexandre collection are the stylized drawings related to sculptures. Produced between 1909 and 1914, this body of work constitutes a distinct category within the artist’s oeuvre and reveals his ongoing preoccupation with identity. Particularly noticeable is his obsessive examination of physiognomy. When seen together, his repeated images of heads and faces reveal minute, calculated variations in the eyes, noses, and mouths. As seen in the exhibition, this group of drawings offer a nuanced commentary on the underlying issue of aesthetics as it relates to race.

In 1911, Modigliani began to explore a motif borrowed from ancient art, the caryatid, and a selection of these drawings is included in the exhibition. While in classical art the caryatid is usually a woman, his are male, female, or of ambiguous gender. He also incorporated elements derived from Egyptian art, as well as ancient South and Southeastern Asian sources such as facial features, postures, and tattoos.

The exhibition also includes a selection of life studies and female nudes. Among these are of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, whom the artist met in 1910. Her exotic presence inspired Modigliani to introduce her to Egyptian art. The influences he drew from Egyptian art, such as the attenuation of the figure and the angularity of form, can be seen in the drawings he did of her.

Modigliani’s fondness for performance, including theater, street entertainment, and the circus, is reflected in numerous early drawings, often sketched from a blend of life and imagination. The exhibition includes his drawings of the Commedia dell’Arte character, Columbine, as well as circus performers. Many of these works — like others in the exhibition — reveal the acuity of his psychological awareness, which had the effect of transforming simple sketches into portraits.

Modigliani Unmasked is organized by Mason Klein, Senior Curator, The Jewish Museum. The exhibition was designed by Galia Solomonoff and Talene Montgomery of SAS/Solomonoff Architecture Studio.

Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by the Jewish Museum and Yale University Press. The book includes an essay by Mason Klein that offers close analysis of Modigliani’s portraits and figure studies in pencil, ink, gouache, and crayon, ultimately arguing that the artist demonstrated a modernist embrace of difference, as well as an understanding of identity as heterogeneous, beyond national or cultural boundaries. The 172-page book also includes an afterword by Richard Nathanson. Featuring 165 color illustrations, the hardcover will be available worldwide.

Amedeo Modigliani

Unfinished Portrait of Paul Alexandre, 1913

Oil on canvas, 31½ x 25¾ in. (80 x 65.6 cm)

Private collection on long-term loan to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen

Amedeo Modigliani

The Jewess, 1908

Oil on canvas

21⅝ x 18⅛ in. (54.9 × 46 cm)

Laure Denier Collection, Paul Alexandre Family, courtesy of Richard Nathanson, London

Amedeo Modigliani

Nude with a Hat, 1908

Oil on canvas, 31⅞ x 21¼ in. (81 × 54 cm)

Reuben and Edith Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, Israel

Photo courtesy of the Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, Israel

Amedeo Modigliani

Jeanne Hébuterne with Yellow Sweater, 1918-19

Oil on canvas

39⅜ x 25½ in. (100 x 64.7 cm)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, By gift 37.533

Image provided by Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, New York

Toward the end of World War I, Modigliani left Paris for the south of France. In this more serene environment the artist’s work became more contemplative, his figures abbreviated and calm, and his palette brighter. Hébuterne, an art student whom he met at the Académie Colarossi in Paris in the winter of 1916 –17, was his lover, later his wife. Here he depicts her with affection and no sense of the erotic. The face is outlined as a long oval, the eyes are blank, and the nose is long and geometric. The artist underscores the simple elegance of Hébuterne’s features, rendered as a series of flat shapes —the tilt of her head, the echoing refrain of the turtleneck sweater and her crossed hands, while conveying her youthful, moody personality. 

Amedeo Modigliani

Lola de Valence, 1915

Oil on paper, mounted on wood, 20½ x 13¼ in. (52.1 x 33.7 cm)

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 67.187.84

Image provided by The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, New York 

Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876 – 1967), 1967 

This portrait depicts the famous nineteenth -century Spanish dancer Lola de Valence, also memorialized by the poet Charles Baudelaire and the painter Édouard Manet. Modigliani’s radical approach to portraiture is on display here: the dancer’s face is essentially an African mask. 

Amedeo Modigliani

Lunia Czechowska, 1919

Oil on canvas, 31½ x 20½ in. (80 x 52 cm)

Museu de Arte de São Paulo

Assis Chateaubriand, Gift, Raul Crespi, 1952

Photograph by João Musa

Modigliani saw himself primarily as a sculptor. Even when declining health forced him to abandon the medium, he continued to think, draw, and paint as one. Lunia Czechowska, a good friend of Leopold and Hanka Zborowski, became acquainted with the artist an d emerged as one of his favorite models. Here, Modigliani suppresses descriptive identity in the service of a universalized presence: he graphically captures Czechowska’s aristocratic bearing, depicting her like an icon. Her smooth, ethereal features and exaggeratedly long neck emphasize the image’s sculptural quality. 

 

Amedeo Modigliani

Caryatid, c. 1911

Oil on canvas

28½ x 19¾ in. (72.5 x 50 cm)

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf

Image provided by bpk Bildagentur / Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen / Art Resource, NY

Amedeo Modigliani Portrait of Docteur Devaraigne, 1917
Oil on canvas 
Collection of Bruce and Robbi Toll  

Modigliani painted two portraits of Dr. Devaraigne, who was probably a friend. The sitter’s identity is partly established by his military uniform, which suggests that he had been mobilized during World War I. When a subject’s personality or features were particularly striking, as with Dr. Devaraigne, Modigliani would sometimes exaggerate them, increasing the sense of their individuality. Often, especially with people he knew, he painted more than one version of a portrait. 

Amedeo Modigliani
Portrait of Manuel Humbert, 1916
Oil on canvas 
Collection of Bruce and Robbi Toll  

Modigliani immortalized the Spanish landscape painter Manuel Humbert Estève, a struggling artist whom he met in the ethnically diverse environment of Montparnasse. In such paintings, he continued to question portraiture’s claim to truth, presenting the genre as eve rambiguous. Here, he renders the sitter’s head as masklike, with a narrow, triangular face and stylized arched brows connected to a thin, straight nose. But he distinguishes personal features as well —pursed mouth, parted hair —constantly altering the counterpoise of individuality and formal abstraction. 

Amedeo ModiglianiHanka Zborowska, 1916
Oil on canvas 
Private collection 

Based on stylistic similarities with other paintings of 1916, this work is quite likely the first of a series of twelve portraits of the common-law wife of the poet Leopold Zborowski, who was Modigliani’s art dealer during the last years of his life. Here, the artist balances the generic artifice of the mask with the particular self absorption of the sitter, a tension that resonates in his metaphoric use of an inner and outer eye.   

Amedeo Modigliani
Portrait of Roger Dutilleul. 1919
Oil on canvas 
Collection of Bruce and Robbi Toll  


This classic example of Modigliani’s consummate painterly style pays homage to one of his most devoted patrons, Roger Dutilleul. Unable to afford to collect the work of more established figures, Dutilleul turned to young contemporary artists. Between 1918 and 1925 he acquired thirty -four paintings and twenty -one drawings, virtually ten percent of Modigliani’s late work.
 

Jacques Lipchitz 
Death Mask of Amedeo Modigliani, 1920,
Cast plaster 
The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 
Bequest of Joseph Halle Schaffner in memory of his beloved mother, Sara H. Schaffner 

Modigliani succumbed to tubercular meningitis on Saturday evening, January 24, 1920, at the Hôpital de la Charité on Paris’s left bank. Two of his fellow artists, Moïse Kisling and Conrad Moricand, attem pted to make a death mask before his burial in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Neither painter possessed the necessary technical skills; they removed the plaster mold too early, and broke it. The sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, another Jewish artist resident in Paris and a close friend of Modigliani, salvaged the mask; he produced a number of plaster casts and, eventually, an edition in bronze.   

Renaissance Venice. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese. From Italian and Russian collections

September 19, 2017, 9:28 am

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The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art, Moscow

09.06.2017 – 20.08.2017

Main Building

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts proudly presents a large-scale project of exceptional significance – “Renaissance Venice. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese. From Italian and Russian collections”, exhibiting 25 outstanding works by three of the greatest painters. These works will be brought to Moscow for the first time, and some of them have never been displayed outside of Italy.

During the Renaissance, Venice experienced the golden age of art and, first and foremost, painting. In the 16th century, a triad of great masters of the brush – Titian Vecellio (c. 1490–1576), Jacopo Tintoretto (1518–1594) and Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) – created their famous paintings in this city. These artists played a defining role in the formation of the European artistic culture and rendered an important influence on the development of art over the next centuries.

This exhibition provides a unique opportunity to see works of these great contemporaries side by side, whose creations revolutionized the concepts of painting in many ways and laid the foundation for painting throughout Europe. Many great masters of the 17th century, including Velazquez, Rubens, Rembrandt and Poussin, learned from Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese.

The relationship among the great Venetian Renaissance masters is one of the most important topics reflected in the concept of the exhibition. Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese were born in different towns, belonged to different generations, had different social statuses and received different educations. Each of them had his own inimitable artistic language and style. At the same time, they complemented one another to some extent. Their creative lives had much in common: all of them fulfilled orders for Venetian churches and surrounding areas and worked for major politicians and influential people.

The three artists also headed popular studios, which, according to Venetian tradition, were family-owned. Their coexistence in the artistic space of Venice is often regarded as competition. The reality was much more complicated, however: every master had his own niche and worked for specific categories of customers and segments of society. They carefully observed each other’s works, studied them and eventually came to a mutual relationship without any open confrontation: while remaining loyal to their common cultural background, each one recognized the uniqueness of his own style.
The exposition presents a unique opportunity to see priceless masterpieces of the three artists from collections of the most famous Italian and Russian museums. Portraits and religious works – from compositions for private customers to large altarpieces (a type of painting revolutionized by Venetian artists in the 16th century) – will be displayed in the same space.

Curators also paid attention to the rendering of mythological scenes, where Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese discovered their own approaches to the topic of beauty filled with sensuality and thrill. Venetian painting of the 16th century, the golden age of Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, gained fame for centuries thanks to the freedom and originality of interpretation of erotic scenes, common to mythological themes.



It is not easy to highlight specific examples in the diverse panorama of the exhibition, but Titian’s “Salome” is deserving. It belongs to the collection of the Doria Pamphilj Gallery housed in Rome, and it is rarely seen outside Italy. Made by the young artist in the mid-1520s, when the Renaissance in Venice reached maturity, this painting attracts viewers with its poetry and brightness of color. Striving to achieve the expressiveness of the color scheme is a distinguishing feature of the Venetian painting style, but Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese made an especially outstanding contribution to this tradition.

Jacopo Tintoretto was a dramatic artist who used color as a powerful expressive medium. This can be clearly seen in his altar paintings, such as

“Last Supper” from the church of San Marcuola,

“Baptism of Christ” from the San Silvestro church

 


and “Pietà”, which is currently housed in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice.

The wealth of colors in the works by Paolo Veronese (who, according to his name, was born in Verona) expresses the uplifting nature of his art and his worship of the world’s beauty. This is obvious in his paintings depicting ancient myths. The exhibition includes his magnificent



 


"Venus, Mars and Love with a Horse”, which is housed in the Sabauda Gallery in Turin.

Most of the paintings will be brought from the most famous Italian collections of museums and churches. A few artworks presented belong to Russian collections. These include two paintings from the Hermitage

 (“St. George” by Jacopo Tintoretto



and “Portrait of a Man” by his son and assistant Domenico Tintoretto),



one painting from the collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (“Resurrection of Christ” by Paolo Veronese, which will be exhibited for the first time after the restoration is completed by Nadezhda Koshkina, head of the Museum’s restoration workshop),



and Titian’s “Venus and Adonis”, owned by the Classica charity fund and considered to be one of the sensations of the exhibition. The chief researcher of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Victoria Markova, identified this work as one by the great master, and it has only recently entered art history, having never been displayed in Russia before.

More images:

Lamentation over the Dead Christ | Jacopo Tintoretto

 

paolo veronese the ascension of the lord 

 The Last Supper by Jacopo Tintoretto. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

Curator – Victoria Markova, Doctor of Arts, chief researcher of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the custodian of Italian paintings
Curator from Italy – Thomas Dalla Costa (University of Verona)
Academic supervisor – Professor Bernard Aikema (University of Verona)
The exhibition is held with the assistance of the Embassy of Italy in Moscow and Ambassador Cesare Maria Ragaglini.


The artworks courtesy of the following museums: Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts; the National Art Gallery (Bologna); the Gallerie dell’Accademia (Venice); the Church of San Giovanni Elemosinario (Venice); the Church of San Marcuola (Venice); the Church of San Silvestro (Venice); Castelvecchio Museum (Verona); Palazzo Chiericati (Vicenza); Musei di Strada Nuova – Palazzo Bianco (Genoa); Galleria Estense (Modena); Museo di Capodimonte (Naples); Doria Pamphilj Gallery (Rome); National Gallery of Ancient Art, Palazzo Barberini (Rome); Capitoline Museums (Rome); Sabauda Gallery (Turin); Uffizi Gallery (Florence).

Word/Play: Prints, Photographs, and Paintings by Ed Ruscha

September 19, 2017, 11:18 am

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Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha
February 3 – May 6, 2018

Ed Ruscha, Clarence Jones, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 124 inches, Phillip G. Schrager Collection

The first major exhibition featuring Ed Ruscha in his home state of Nebraska, Word/Play brings together prints, photographs, and artist books dating from the 1960s through 2014, complemented by a selection of major paintings. An important early figure in Conceptual Art, Ruscha deftly combines imagery and text. At turns poignant, provocative, and confounding, Ruscha’s use of the written word is a signature element of his work.

Born in Omaha in 1937, Ruscha lived in the city for several years before his family moved to Oklahoma City. In 1956, Ruscha relocated to Los Angeles to study commercial art at the Chouinard Art Institute and quickly became a fixture in the energized West Coast art scene. Rarely seen photographs featured in Word/Play reveal the urban landscapes that inspired many of Ruscha’s most famous prints and paintings, including images of nondescript apartment buildings, everyday consumer goods, and the Los Angeles streets.

Examining the breadth of Ruscha’s rigorous engagement with printmaking, the exhibition encompasses screen prints, etchings, and lithographs, revealing his aptitude for pairing traditional techniques with unexpected subjects and unconventional materials, such as coffee or gunpowder. Ruscha’s monumental mountain paintings combine the names and occupations of traditional laborers with sublime topographies, highlighting his capacity to ennoble the mundane and cleverly transform it into the extraordinary. Several of these images contain palindromes, inscribed over mirror-image landscapes, such as

Lion in Oil (2002).


More images:

Ed Ruscha.  Sweets, Meats, Sheets; Closed; Air, Water, Fire; and Open from Tropical Fish Series, 1975

4 Color screenprints

25 3/4 × 32 3/4 in

65.4 × 83.2 cm

© Ed Ruscha. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

 

 

Ed Ruscha

Periods, 2013

Lithograph

28 3/4 × 28 in

73 × 71.1 cm

© Ed Ruscha. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Gilded Age Drawings at The Met

September 19, 2017, 11:22 am

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	The Metropolitan Museum of Art August 21–December 10, 2017

More than three dozen rarely seen treasures from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of late 19th-century American works on paper are featured in the exhibition Gilded Age Drawings at The Met. Created primarily during the 1870s to ’90s—America’s so-called Gilded Age—shortly after the founding of the Museum, many of these innovative drawings in watercolor, pastel, and charcoal were acquired during the artists’ lifetimes and represent the beginnings of The Met’s collecting of American examples of this art form. On view will be iconic works by some of the leading American artists of the period, including Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, John La Farge, and John Singer Sargent, along with striking examples by artists who are less well-known today. A highlight of the exhibition will be three works by Cecilia Beaux, La Farge, and Sargent that are recent promised gifts to The Met.

Arranged thematically in groupings of figure studies, landscapes, and still lifes, the presentation will reveal how some American artists of the period used drawing in preparation for painting in oil, while others created fully realized works of art for exhibition. The former practice is represented by five major works by the acclaimed American realist Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), whose masterful watercolors were collected more enthusiastically in New York than in his native Philadelphia, as well as a grisaille drawing by Eakins’s one-time student Henry Ossawa Tanner. Other highlights include the evocative and meticulously observed watercolor Winter Scene in Moonlight by the American Pre-Raphaelite Henry Farrer (1844–1903) and lyrical floral still lifes by Ellen Robbins (1828–1905) and Laura Coombs Hills (1859-1952) underappreciated Boston artists who specialized in the popular genre.

A display of late 19th-century artists’ materials—watercolor boxes, among other items—will also be featured.

Due to their sensitivity to light, drawings cannot be regularly displayed, and many of these American examples have not been shown for more than 30 years. The exhibition underlines the American Wing’s renewed commitment to presenting works on paper on a rotating basis in our collection galleries as well as exhibitions. 

Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916). The Dancing Lesson, 1878 

Watercolor on off-white wove paper. 18 1/8 x 22 5/8 in. (45.9 x 57.3 cm). 

• Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933)
  Louise Tiffany, Reading, 1888
  Pastel on buff colored wove paper
  20–1/2 x 30–1/4 in. (52.1 x 76.8 cm)
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the family of Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, 2003 (2003.606)
  
  
  
  
• Henry Farrer (1844–1903)
  Winter Scene in Moonlight, 1869
  Watercolor and gouache on white wove paper
  11–7/8 x 15–3/16 in. (30.2 x 38.6 cm)
  
  
  
  
•  John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
  In the Generalife, 1912
  Watercolor, wax crayon, and graphite on white wove paper
  14–3/4 x 17–7/8 in. (37.5 x 45.4 cm)
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1915 (15.142.8)

Monet: Framing Life

September 22, 2017, 9:01 am

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“Detroit Institute of Arts

Oct. 22, 2017“ to March 4, 2018

Monet: Framing Life” is an intimate exhibition focusing on an important painting in the DIA collection—: Claude Monet'’s “Rounded Flower Bed (Corbeille de fleurs)” from 1876, formerly known as “Gladioli” and recently retitled based on new research. Monet created this work while living in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil between late 1871 and early 1878, an especially productive time. It was there that he met and worked beside fellow avant-garde painters that formed the group now known as the Impressionists.

This exhibition brings the DIA’s painting together with 10 other Argenteuil paintings by Monet and fellow impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir—including seven major loans from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. In doing so, the exhibition presents a more comprehensive story about the creation of “Rounded Flower Bed (Corbeille de fleurs)” and how it fits into Monet’s body of work,as well as the history of Impressionism more broadly.

A catalog accompanies the exhibition.

This exhibition has been organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts.

• “Rounded Flower Bed (Corbeille de fleurs),” 1876, Claude Monet, oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts  

 
 

• “Snow in Argenteuil,” 1875, Claude Monet, oil on canvas. The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. Matsukata Collection  

 

• “Argenteuil,” about 1872, Claude Monet, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection, 1970.17.42 

 

• “Bridge at Argenteuil on a Gray Day,” about 1876, Claude Monet, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection, 1970.17.44 

 
 
 

• “Claude Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil,” 1873, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, oil on canvas. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. Bequest of Anne Parrish Titzell, 1957.614 

 

• “Claude Monet,” 1872, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1985.64.35  

 

• “Regatta at Argenteuil,” 1874, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection, 1970.17.59

 

• “The Artist’s Garden in Argenteuil (A Corner of the Garden with Dahlias),” 1873, Claude Monet, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Gift of Janice H. Levin, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1991.27.1  

• “The Artist’s House at Argenteuil,” 1873, Claude Monet, oil on canvas. The Art Institute of Chicago. Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1933.1153  

 

• “The Bridge at Argenteuil,” 1874, Claude Monet, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1983.1.24  

 

• “Woman with a Parasol–Madame Monet and Her Son,” 1875, Claude Monet, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1983.1.29

Frank Stella: Experiment and Change

September 25, 2017, 7:50 am

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NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale will present Frank Stella:Experimentand Change, an exhibition that spans the artist’s 60-year career from the late 1950’s to the present.  The exhibition, composed of approximately 300 paintings, relief sculpture and drawings will offer insight into his trajectory from minimalism (e.g. the geometry of the black paintings) to maximalism (eg. the spatially complex constructionist and large sculptures of the Moby Dick series.) Curated by Bonnie Clearwater, Director and Chief Curator, ExperimentandChange leads the museum’s 60th anniversary celebration presented by AutoNation, and will be on view from November 12, 2017 to July 8, 2018.

 

• Frank Stella, Paradoxe sur le comediene, 1974, Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, Private Collection, NY © 2017 Frank Stella,/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Photo Credit: Jason Wyche

The exhibition juxtaposes works from various periods of Stella’s career, revealing his aesthetic development and focusing on his “Working Archive,” which contains material never exhibited before, such as notes, sketches and maquettes that shed light on his growth as an artist. Stella’s diverse interests include art history, architecture, new materials (fluorescent pigment, carbon fiber, titanium, et al.) and computer-aided modeling for rapid prototyping.  His preparatory studies show the ideas in his work that led to a notion about the enlargement of pictorial space.
Included will be penciled color sequences for the larger concentric square paintings (1973), flat foam-core cut-outs leading to the emergence of a more generous “working space” and 3D printed models from the 1990’s through the present outlining the use of digital technology.
Frank Stella (b. 1936) emerged as part of a generation of American artists excited by, driven and challenged by Abstract Expressionism.   FrankStella: ExperimentandChange emphasizes the variety of expression found throughout his entire body of work.  The twists and turns of Stella’s career are illuminated by insights that were discovered during the curatorial process.  This exhibition elaborates on the research Clearwater began for a previous exhibition, FrankStellaat2000: ChangingtheRules, an in-depth exploration of the artist’s bold paintings, sculpture and architectural models from the 90’s.
Clearwater notes, “An initial spark of his artistic aspirations was the experience of seeing Rogier van der Weyden’s early Netherlandish Crucifixion Diptych (c. 1460) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art while an undergraduate at Princeton University.  Stella said that the sheer visual impact of van der Weyden’s diptych appeared as a ready-made definition of art.  Rogier’s painting became a goal for him to hope to live up to.  Given the characterization of this moment I realized the necessity to remap his career to show how this painting, rather than the rules of formalist modernism, propelled his progress.
Clearwater further states “We can see the influence of van der Weyden in the large number of diptych-like paintings divided into two equal parts.  A typical double concentric painting, Paradoxesurlecomediene, (1974), and a mitered maze work such as FortindelasFlores support this view.
These paintings might also encourage us to speculate how Stella’s attraction to the use of shallow pictorial space and bright fluorescent pigments helped him to approach his goal, the absolute beauty of the Netherlandish masterpiece."
One of the exhibition’s highlights is Deauville (1970) a 45-foot long canvas shaped like a thoroughbred racetrack.  As an aficionado of racing of all kinds, he often imagines himself running across the canvas. “While his contemporaries Donald Judd and Dan Flavin created work that was machine-made, I see Stella as a modern day John Henry, racing against the machine, brushing paint from one end of the canvas to the other and back again, setting an admirable and competitive pace.”
For Stella, Deauville was the starting point for the exhibition design at NSU Art Museum.  The shape of the elongated oblong painting complements the 83,000-square foot museum’s curved galleries designed by leading modernist architect Edward Larrabee Barnes.  Architecture has played into Stella’s work throughout his career. The Irregular Polygons (1965-66) broke with the conventional rectangular format of easel painting, as did the early 1960's notched aluminum paintings.  This departure was suggested by a view of European mural painting, which noted the irregularity of the perimeter.  The interruption of the imagery by windows, doorways and other architectural features generated irregular edging which in turn generated irregular and complicated surfaces.  This notion coupled with illustrations from intersecting Kazmir Malevich’s planar geometry helped to establish the shaped canvas as a format in its own right, one which Stella continues to exploit.
In the exhibition, Deauville is shown adjacent to several Irregular Polygons and a large double concentric square Parodoxe sur le comediene (1974), and works from the Polish Village series (1971-74), which represent Stella’s first constructed relief paintings, his attempt to build a painting and then paint it.  Among these works we find a full-scale sketch, a 12-foot cartoon for Suchowola, and a Polish Village relief, drawing attention to Stella’s leap from a flat, two-dimensional plane to the literal three-dimensional depth of these constructions.
Another project inspired by architectural space enlists Hooloomooloo paintings (early 1990’s) made for the Kawamura Museum in Japan.  The entire series of these paintings will be exhibited at NSU Art Museum, creating an almost continuous frieze on the second floor, starting on a long curved wall and ending high above the atrium.  The irregular shapes of these paintings were determined by the architectural space of the Japanese museum.  Removed from their intended location, their arched forms and cutout shapes appear arbitrary until the viewer imagines the resulting negative space as doors, windows and arches.
“Stella believes that art offers at least the illusion of ultimate freedom.  In the context of the art world, he appears fearless and indifferent to risk.  Even works that initially looked like misfits to him (and others) now appear revelatory in light of his most recent pursuits,” explains Clearwater.
Frank Stella’s ExperimentandChange is part of NSU Art Museum’s Regeneration Series, exhibitions designed to explore the wide-ranging impact of World War II on artists in Europe and the United States.  It was launched in 2016 with AnselmKiefer fromtheHallCollection.  Stella’s work is grounded in the post-war philosophical shift in which the individual was to master his/her own existence as popularized through the zeitgeist of existential philosophy, phenomenology and gestalt psychology. When Stella stated in a 1964 radio interview, “What you see is what you see,” not only was he suggesting that his compositions were nothing more than their appearance, but he was also pointing out that his work dealt with the psychology of perception and could be rephrased as, “What you see is how you comprehend what you see.”
Born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, and based in New York, Frank Stella is one of the most important artists working today. He first studied art in high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA and continued painting at Princeton University where he graduated with a degree in history. Following his graduation in 1958, he moved to New York and achieved fame before the age of 25. His Black Stripe Paintings (1959), comprised of a regulated sequence of stripes painted in enamel with the broad strokes of a house painters brush, debuted in the Sixteen Americans exhibition at Museum of Modern Art in the same year. In 1962, Stella’s first solo exhibition was presented by the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. His first retrospective was presented by the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 and he was honored with a second retrospective by the institution in 1987. His work has subsequently been the subject of retrospective exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan, including the touring exhibition Frank Stella: A Retrospective, which originated at Whitney Museum of American Art in 2015. Among his numerous honors, he received the National Medal of the Arts in 2009 and the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture in 2011.

A Global Table - Magnificent food still lifes of the Durch Golden Age

September 29, 2017, 7:04 am

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Frans Hals Museum and De Hallen Haarlem

23 September 2017 to7 January2018

This unique exhibition featuring old and new art showcases the magnificent food still lifes of the Golden Age. It offers an alternative reading of these works as documents from an eventful history. What does the foodwe see tell us about the Netherlands’colonial and trade relations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?

As quinoa and the avocado have changed European cooking over the last few decades, so, from the fifteenth century onwards,‘new’ foodstuffs like coffee, sugar and tomatoes transformed our ancestors’ eating habits. 

From the end of that century European imperialism changed the map of the world and created a global trading network.The start of an emotionally charged exchange between peoples and cultures, it sawt he import of new agricultural produce and foodstuffs from Africa, America, East and Southeast Asia and India.Before this,Europeans had no knowledge of tea, sugar, coffee, tomatoes, potatoes or maize.These new and,at the time, exotic types of food changedthe European diet forever. 

As the prime movers of international trade,the Dutch saw their economy boom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.The huge abundance of wealth gave rise to a self-assured bourgeoisie that delighted in displaying its affluence. People had their portraits painted and they also wanted landscapes and seductive still lifes on their walls. It is no surprise that many of the new products feature in the Golden Age still lifes. 

The Still Life as a HistoricalDocument

A Global Table features seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish stilllifes by artists such as Floris van Dijck, Balthasar van der Ast, Clara Peeters, Jan de Heemand Willem Kalf.

The Old Master paintings are not the subject of traditional art-historical analysis but rather ‘read’ as historical documents. The exhibition invites viewers to ask three simple questions about the foods in the still lifes: What are they? Where did they come from and how much did it cost–in terms of money and human suffering –to get them here? In finding answers to these questions,the paintings can be seen as documents charting the growthof economic powerand colonial expansion of the Republic and the Dutch contribution to the creation of the world economy. 



 

Balthasar van der Ast

Still Life with Shells and Tulips,1620

Oil on Panel

Mauritshuis, The Hague

Jan Davidsz de Heem

Still Life with Moor and Parrot, 1641

Oil on Panel

Hotel de Ville (Broodhuis), Brussel

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The Art of Laughter: Humour in the Golden Age

September 29, 2017, 7:06 am

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Frans Hals Museum

From 11 November

Seldom have more humorous paintings been made than in the Dutch Golden Age. Prosperity and a new buying public encouraged painters to think up an enormous variety of visual jokes. Naughty children, stupid peasants, foolish dandies and drunkards, quack doctors, pimps and procuresses, lazy serving maids and lusty ladies–they appear in large numbers in Golden Age masterpieces. The humour implicit in the works would have been evident to contemporary viewers. 

Frans Hals is often called ‘the master of the laugh’. More than any other painter in the Golden Age, he was able to bring a vitality to his portraits that made it appear as if his models could just step out of the past into the present. Hals was one of the few painters in the seventeenth century who dared portray his figures – often common folk – with a hearty laugh and bared teeth. Merriment and jokes are prominent features in his genre paintings; artists in the Golden Age frequently used it in their work. Now – centuries later – the visual jokes are harder to fathom. A great deal of new research into the field has been carried out, particularly in the last twenty years, and we are beginning to get an idea of the full extent of seventeenth-century humour.

The exhibition showcases some sixty masterpieces from the Low Countries and beyond by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Judith Leyster, Adriaen Brouwer, Gerard van Honthorst, Jan Miense Molenaer and Nicolaes Maes. Works by these and other artists will be shown in the context of an introduction and seven specific themes, including mischief, farce and love and lust, and one room is devoted to each of them.

The exhibition ends with the comical self-portrait, in which painters feature in their own jokes. Thus humour eventually arrives at the artists themselves, creating an intriguing finale.

There will also be a small selection of joke books, incredibly popular in the seventeenth century, which confirm the reputation of the Dutch as an unusually cheerful and humorous people. According to an Italian contemporary, the writer Lodovico Guicciardini, who was living in the Low Countries at that time, the Dutch were ‘very convivial, and above all jocular, amusing and comical with words, but sometimes too much.’

Catalogue

A catalogue is being published to coincide with The Art of Laughter: Humour in the Golden Age with contributions by the curators of the exhibition, Anna Tummers, Curator of Old Masters at the Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem, Jasper Hillegers, Assistant Curator of Old Masters, Elmer Kolfin, lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and Mariët Westermann, Golden Age specialist and Vice-President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The catalogue is being published by Uitgeverij Waanders. 

Frans Hals,

Pekelharing, 

1628-30,

oil on canvas, 75 x 61,5 cm,

Museumlandschaft Hessen Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel

Gerard van Honthorst,

Smiling Girl, a Courtisane, Holding an Obscene Image, 

1625,

oil on canvas, 46,9 x 60 cm, Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis

Pieter van Roestraeten,

The Licentious Kitchen Maid, 

1665/70,

oil on canvas,73,5 x 63 cm, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem

Jan Steen,

Children Teaching a Cat to Dance,

c. 1662/63,

olieverf op paneel, 68,5 x 59 cm,

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Veronese in Murano: Two Venetian Renaissance Masterpieces Restored

September 29, 2017, 2:08 pm

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The Frick Collection

October 24, 2017, through March 11, 2018 

This fall, The Frick Collection will present a focused exhibition on two important Renaissance paintings by the celebrated artist Paolo Veronese (1528– 1588), St. Jerome in the Wilderness and St. Agatha Visited in Prison by St. Peter. While the paintings are known to scholars, their remote location in a church in Murano, an island in the lagoon of Venice known today for its glassmaking studios and shops, has made them difficult to study. 

St. Jerome in the Wilderness has been exhibited outside the church only once—in 1939, in the Paolo Veronese exhibition at Ca’ Giustinian, in Venice— while St. Agatha Visited in Prison by St. Peter has not left the church since being installed in the early nineteenth century. 

These two rarely seen canvases now leave Italy for the first time since their creation, over 450 years ago. And thanks to Venetian Heritage and the sponsorship of BVLGARI, they have been fully restored and returned to their original glory. Veronese in Murano: Two Venetian Renaissance Masterpieces Restored, on view October 24, 2017, through March 11, 2018, will provide a unique opportunity for an international audience to discover these two masterpieces in the Frick’s unique setting. The exhibition is organized by the Frick’s Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon, an eminent Veronese scholar (who wrote 

 

the accompanying catalogue), and Venetian Heritage.

Paolo Veronese (1528–1588)

St. Jerome in the Wilderness,

1566–67

Oil on canvas

91 × 57 1⁄4 inches

San Pietro Martire, Murano

Photo: Ufficio Beni Culturali del Patriarcato di Venezia

Paolo Veronese (1528–1588)

St. Jerome in the Wilderness (detail)

1566–67

Oil on canvas

91 × 57

1⁄4 inches

San Pietro Martire, Murano

Photo: Ufficio Beni Culturali del Patriarcato di Venezia

Paolo Veronese (1528–1588)

St. Jerome in the Wilderness (detail)

1566–67

Oil on canvas

91 × 57 1⁄4 inches

San Pietro Martire, Murano

Photo: Ufficio Beni Culturali del Patriarcato di Venezia

Paolo Veronese (1528–1588)

St. Jerome in the Wilderness (detail)

1566–67

Oil on canvas

91 × 57 1⁄4 inches

San Pietro Martire, Murano

Photo: Ufficio Beni Culturali del Patriarcato di Venezia

 

The first of these two works depicts St. Jerome , who lived between the fourth and fifth century in Dalmatia and is known primarily for having translated the Hebrew and Greek versions of the Bible into Latin. Jerome spent substantial time in the desert, probably in Syria, where he led an ascetic life. In a letter to his friend Eustochium, Jerome describes his trials:

“living in the wilderness, in the vast solitude that provides a horrid, sun- scorched abode to monks . . . Tears all day, groans all day —and if, resist it as I might, sleep overwhelmed me, my fleshless bones, hardly holding together, scraped against the bare ground. I say nothing about food or drink... All the company I had was scorpions and wild beasts . . . So it was that I wept continually an d starved the rebellious flesh for weeks at a time. Often I joined day to night and did not stop beating my breast until the Lord restored my peace of mind . . . Angry and stern with myself I plunged alone, deeper and deeper, into the wasteland; and, as th e Lord is my witness, from time to time and after many tears I seemed to be in the midst of throngs of angels.” 

While living as a monk in Bethlehem, Jerome was visited by what was to become one of his most frequent iconographic symbols. As he and the other monks were reading the Scriptures, a lion limped into the monastery . The men fled in terror, but Jerome realized that the animal was injured. He asked his fellow monks to help him remove the thorn that tormented the animal’s paw, then dress ed the wound. Once healed, the lion “lost all his wildness, and lived among [them] like a house pet.”

Veronese portrays Jerome in the desert, with trees framing the composition. On the right, wooden beams held together by ropes and covered by a roof of leaves indicate a rudimentary hut, a shelter from the elements. Underneath this structure is a still life of objects traditionally associated with Jerome: a crucifix, an hourgla ss, a skull, and two open books. The hourglass and skull refer to the transience of life, while the volumes allude to Jerome’s translation of the Bible. The saint is an isolated figure in this landscape , alone in his gruel ling devotion. His muscular body is tense, covered only by a red cloth secured by a cord. Toothless and haggard, his face is transfixed as he focuses his tear -filled eyes on the crucifix, while beating his chest with a rock. The bruised ribs are visible, and drops of blood testify to his self -punishment. A divine wind rustles the saint’s graying beard, an extraordinary passage of bravura painting. The faithful lion on the left is the only witness to his frenzied state. 

While St. Jerome in the Wilderness was a common subject for Italian Renaissance paintings and was a theme often treated by Venetian artists , the second Murano canvas depicts a less typical narrative:

Paolo Veronese (1528–1588)

St. Agatha Visited in Prison by St. Peter, 1566–67

Oil on canvas,

65 1⁄2 × 81 1⁄2 inches

San Pietro Martire, Murano

Photo: Ufficio Beni Culturali del Patriarcato di Venezia

Paolo Veronese (1528–1588)

St. Agatha Visited in Prison by St. Peter (detail), 1566–67

Oil on canvas,

65 1⁄2 × 81 1⁄2 inches

San Pietro Martire, Murano

Photo: Ufficio Beni Culturali del Patriarcato di Venezia


Agatha was a third-century martyr from Sicily who lived in Catania at the time of the Christian persecution under the Roman emperor Decius. Of noble origin, she had pledged her chastity to God and therefore would not yield to the advances of Quintianus, a Roman consul, who was enticed by her beauty . Quntianus first tried to bend Agatha to his will by forcing her to live for a month in the brothel of a woman named Aphrodisia. Firm in her resolve, Agatha left the house untouched. 

Quintianus then commanded Agatha to worship pagan idols; when she refused, he sent her to jail where she was tortured and Quintianus ordered her breasts to be cut off. Left in prison without food or water and with no medical aid, she suffered greatly. One night she was visited by an old man who revealed himself to be St. Peter, telling her he had been sent by God to comfort and heal her. When the jailers were alerted by Peter’s supernatural light, the saint vanished, and Agatha knelt in prayer, finding that her wounds were gone. 

Quintianus, however, did not desist. He had her placed naked over burning coals, but she was saved by a heaven sent earthquake. Finally, having been sent back to jail, she prayed to God to end her torture, and she peacefully died in prison. 

Veronese sets the scene in Agatha’s dark prison cell , which he describes in detail. A high, barred window and a door to the right are the only portals to the outside world. Below the window is a bed, a simple wooden frame covered by a thin mattress; underneath it is a chamber pot. 

A candle at left illuminates a wood shelf on which Veronese has created a modest yet exquisite, still life: a glass pitcher with red wine, a bowl, and a loaf of bread. 

Agatha has been interrupted during her prayers in the semi darkness. She is clothed in a green dress and clutches a pink drapery around her. A heavy chain below the bench makes clear that Agatha is a prisoner in this room. With her left hand, she draws a white blood- stained cloth to her wounded breasts. 

She steadies herself against the bench, surprised by the two visitors that have burst into her cell. 

Paolo Veronese (1528–1588)

St. Agatha Visited in Prison by St. Peter (detail), 1566–67

Oil on canvas,

65 1⁄2 × 81 1⁄2 inches

San Pietro Martire, Murano

Photo: Ufficio Beni Culturali del Patriarcato di Venezia

A glorious blond angel dressed in light blue holds a long taper, bringing light into the shadowy room. He precedes St. Peter, who stands by the open door, monumentally dominating the right part of the picture. The saint is dressed in blue and burnt orange. 

Paolo Veronese (1528–1588)

St. Agatha Visited in Prison by St. Peter (detail), 1566–67

Oil on canvas,

65 1⁄2 × 81 1⁄2 inches

San Pietro Martire, Murano

Photo: Ufficio Beni Culturali del Patriarcato di Venezia


In his left hand he holds the keys to heaven (one gold, one silver), his standard attribute. 


With his right hand he gestures upward, referring at once to his celestial mission and to Agatha’s imminent healing, and possibly to her death and heavenly reward . 

H ISTORY OF THE WORKS 

The two paintings were not originally intended for San Pietro Martire, but for a small chapel built near the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli , on another part of the island. In 1566, a priest named Francesco degli Arbori, the chaplain of the Augustinian nuns of Santa Maria degli Angeli, was given a plot of land in the nuns’ cemetery, adjoining the church, to construct a chapel dedicated to S t. Jerome, and it was for this chapel that Veronese’s two canvases were commissioned. Contemporary descriptions indicate that t he chapel was simply decorated , with the two canvases being the main images in its interior : the St. Jerome hung over the altar with the St. Agatha facing it , on the counterfaçade, over the main door. At the time, Veronese was one of the most successful and highest paid painters in Venice, creating magnificent images for the European aristocracy. (About 1565, he had painted 

The Choice between Virtue and Vice 

and Wisdom and Strength for an unknown patron. 

Both canvases now hang in the West Gallery of The Frick Collection .) 

How a priest on a small island got to know such a prominent painter and came to commission such costly paintings remains a mystery. Little is known about Degli Arbori’s life, but the research conducted in preparation for this exhibition has uncovered two important documents relating to him: his deed of gift of the chapel to the nuns of Santa Maria degli Angeli, in 1566, and the priest’s will, written soon before his death, in 1579. 

In 1667, after hanging for a century in the chapel for which they had been created, Veronese’s canvases were removed. On August 1 of that year, the nuns of Santa Maria degli Angeli, having determined that the paintings were “notably suffering damage from the injuries of time, inside the said chapel” had them relocated to the main church of Santa Maria deg li Angeli. The nuns were also worried about possible theft. 

From the second half of the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, the works were frequently described by Veronese’s biographers and guidebook authors, who consistently gave their location as Santa Maria degli Angeli. With the fall of the Venetian Republic and the Napoleonic invasion of Italy in the early nineteenth century, most religious institution s were suppressed, and, in the late spring and summer of 1810, the majority of monasteries and convents in Venice were closed. Such was the fate of the nun’s monastery at Santa Maria degli Angeli, which was officially suppressed in July of that year. 

By 1815, the St. Jerome in the Wilderness and the St. Agatha Visited in Prison by St. Peter had been moved to a neighboring Dominican church, San Pietro Martire, where they have remained. The chapel for which they were originally painted was left empty, abandoned, and eventually demolished, in 1830. The chapel’s stone door, recently identified during research for this exhibition, is the sole architectural element of the structure known to survive. It is visible in the right wall of Santa Maria degli Angeli, presumably embedded there since the mid -nineteenth century. 

Few examples of free- standing chapels created for single patrons are known to have existed in Venice. The chapel built for Francesco degli Arbori must have been an exceptional structure , and its destruction has meant the loss to subsequent generations of a fascinating site for Veronese’s work . 

The island of Murano, however, has retained its enchanting character, and the humble monastic cemetery of Santa Maria degli Angeli still remains in its forsaken northwestern corner of the island . After his death, Francesco degli Arbori was buried in the cemetery, and his body presumably still lies there in the small plot of land adjacent to the church. 

Although the details of Degli Arbori’s prestigious commission remain shrouded in the fog of the past, Veronese’s compositions can be appreciated for their outstanding originality and skillful execution. The recent restoration of both canvases, as well as the technical analysis that accompanied their treatment, will enable future scholars to better understand these paintings and, perhaps, the nature of their commission.

Degas: 'A Passion for Perfection'

September 30, 2017, 6:48 am

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Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 
3 October 2017 – 14 January 2018 

Denver Art Museum 
February 11, 2018 – May 20, 2018

In the centenary year of the artist’s death, the Fitzwilliam Museum will stage a major exhibit ion of its wide -ranging holdings of works by Edgar Degas (1834 -1917), the most extensive and representative in the UK. The Museum’s collections will be complemented by an outstanding group of over fifty loans from private and public collections throughout Europe and the United States, several of which will be on public display for the first time. These include a group of paintings and drawings once belonging to the economist John Maynard Keynes, bought directly in 1918 and 1919 from Degas's posthumous studio sales in Paris, against a backdrop of German bombardment during World War I. 

•  Edgar Degas , Dancers in the wings , c .1900– 1905 © The Fitzwilliam Museum , Cambridge 

• Edgar Degas, Dance Examination , 1880, Denver Art Museum 

The remarkable breadth of works on display will include paintings, sculpture, drawings, pastels, etchings, monotypes, counterproofs and letters – some business -like, some heart - rending – written by Degas to friends and associates. Prominent in the exhibition will be Degas’s work in three dimensions: posthumous bronze casts of dancers, horses and nudes, but also exceptionally rare lifetime sculptures in plaster and wax. 

• Edgar Degas, Arabesque over the Right Leg, Left Arm in Front, First Study , c.1882 –95 © The Fitzwilliam Museum , Cambridge 

The exhibition will show that Degas’s relentless experimentation with technical procedures was a defining characteristic of his art. Abhorring complacency, Degas habitually revisited and reworked compositions and even individual poses, as if to mine the infinite possibilities of a given subject. 

‘It is essential to do the same subject over again, ten times, one hundred times,’ Degas believed,  ‘nothing should be left to chance’. Was he driven by ‘a passion for perfection’, as one acquaintance claimed? Or can his resistance to closure be considered to be a marker of his modernity? Degas repeatedly acknowledged his debt to his artistic predecessors, insisting that ‘No art was ever less spontaneous than mine’. 

• Edgar Degas-WomanScratchingherBack-Denver Art Museum: The Edward & Tullah Hanley Memorial Gift for the People of Denver and the area, 1973.161. 

 

 

• Edgar Degas, Dancers, about 1900. Pastel and charcoal on tracing paper, mounted on wove paper, mounted on board; 37 5/8 x 26 ¾ in.

The exhibition will open with a selection of works that highlight Degas’s reverence for classical antiquity and the Old Masters, as well as for painters and sculptors of his own century. A range of works by some of the artists Degas most admired, from 15th -century Florentine draughtsmen to Eugène Delacroix, Camille Corot and his artistic idol, Jean -Auguste - Dominique Ingres, will feature in the display, along with a number of beautiful and highly sensitive copies made by Degas from antique and  Renaissance paintings and sculpture. 

The exhibition will focus on the most prominent and recurring themes throughout Degas’ 60-year career. These include his interest in learning from the art of the past and from that of his contemporaries, a lifelong fascination with the nude, a passion for horses, and his strong interest in opera and dance. 

Well-known masterpieces will be on view, and the exhibition also will dive deeper into Degas’ obsession with repetition of subjects throughout his entire artistic journey. Visitors will see his transformation from a portraitist and painter of historical subjects to one interested in the contemporary life of late-nineteenth-century Paris. By experimenting constantly throughout his career he developed techniques that allowed him to capture modern subject matter through sharp and precise lighting, such as café concerts, street scenes with new electric lighting, sporting events, and theatrical settings. He considered his work in all media a constant continuum.

The DAM is the sole American venue for the exhibition. Degas: A Passion for Perfection is presented and organized in association with the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, England, whose Degas holdings represent the most extensive in the United Kingdom across the various media in which Degas worked. The exhibition is organized by Jane Munro, Keeper of Paintings, Drawings and Prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and curated locally by Timothy J. Standring, Gates Family Foundation Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the DAM.

As a counterbalance and fitting homage in the centennial year, the exhibition will conclude with a fascinating overview of 20 th- and 21st -century artists such as Walter Sickert, Picasso, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, R.B. Kitaj, Lucian Freud, Howard Hodgkin and Ryan Gander, wh o drew on Degas as he did from past artists, studying and learning from his example while ‘doing something different’. 

Catalogue



 
Essays by leading Degas scholars and conservation scientists explore his practice and recurring themes of the human figure and landscape. The book opens with a study of Degas’s debt to the Old Masters, and it concludes with a consideration of his artistic legacy and his influence on leading artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Ryan Gander, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, R. B. Kitaj, Pablo Picasso, and Walter Sickert.


A small contemporaneous exhibition:

Degas, Caricature and Modernity
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 

•  Honoré-Victorin Daumier (1808-1879), I’m not going down there anymore!, from the series The Bathers, 1839. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Edgar Degas’s (1834-1917) sense of humour is being explored through an exhibition looking at three caricaturists and satirists whose work he collected in large numbers: Honoré Daumier (1808-79), Paul Gavarni (1804-66) and Charles Keene (1823-91). The exhibition Degas, Caricature and Modernity provides a new perspective on Degas as a great artist. It shows how Degas sought inspiration in what was seen as the lowliest art forms, and his ‘rollicking and somewhat bear-like sense of fun’ as described by his friend Walter Sickert (1860-1942). It is part of a season of events at the Fitzwilliam celebrating the art and times of Degas that marks the centenary of the artist’s death, each supporting the major loan exhibition Degas: a passion for perfection. Jane Munro, Keeper of Paintings, Drawings and Prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum commented: “There is a modernity to these caricatures, a real sense of the Paris Degas knew, the Paris of his day. He was a keen observer of people, including the peculiarity of modern city life. Friends and acquaintances relished his banter, anecdotes and piercing mimicry, even if they were sometimes subjected to the lashing of what Degas himself called his ‘wicked tongue’. In this centennial year of the artist’s death we wanted to inject a note of animation and to show a facet of his character that is perhaps less widely appreciated: his humour and keen appreciation of the absurdity of human existence.” Satirical prints were highly popular in Europe at the end of the 19th century and were printed in great numbers. Those selected for the exhibition are by artists whose work Degas was known to enjoy and collect. Their everyday subjects captured a vivid impression of life at the time, referred to by the writer Charles Baudelaire as ‘the epic and heroic quality of modern life’, which tallied with Degas and his contemporaries in their interest in modernity. The three artists featured all drew inspiration from observing and poking fun at the characters and customs of modern life as they knew it: Daumier lampooning the government, the professions and the French bourgeoisie; Gavarni creating comic characters from the people he saw in the city of Paris; and Punch contributor Keene creating social satire of lower and middle class life in England. This exhibition is showing in conjunction with major loan exhibition Degas: a passion for perfection (3 October 2017 - 14 January 2018)

Leonardo to Matisse: Master Drawings from the Robert Lehman Collection,

September 30, 2017, 6:59 am

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art
October 4, 2017----- January 7, 2018

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (French, 1780-1867). Study for "Raphael and the Fornarina" (detail), ca. 1814. Graphite on white wove paper, 10 x 7 3/4 in. (25.4 x 19.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.646)

Leonardo to Matisse: Master Drawings from the Robert Lehman Collection, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning October 4, presents 60 masterpieces of European drawing spanning the Renaissance to the Modern age. It is the first presentation to highlight the full range of Robert Lehman's vast and distinguished drawings collection------ numbering over 700 sheets------ and to explore his significant activity as a 20th-century collector. The exhibition will trace the development of European drawing across five centuries through works by such celebrated masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer, Rembrandt, Tiepolo, Ingres, Seurat, and Matisse. The exhibition is made possible by the Robert Lehman Foundation.

Drawn from the Museum's acclaimed Robert Lehman Collection, the exhibition will present a dynamic array of styles, techniques, and  genres—from compositional studies for mythological and biblical narratives to panoramic landscapes and arresting studies of the human form. The selection will also illustrate the different facets of the artists' creative processes—from Leonardo's keen anatomical observation in his Study of a Bear Walking, to Dürer's awakening artistic self-consciousness in his Self-Portrait study, to Rembrandt's re-interpretation of Leonardo's painted masterpiece, The Last Supper.

The selection of drawings on view in Leonardo to Matisse will reflect significant developments in the medium between the 15th and 20th centuries, as styles, techniques, and genres evolved, evoking illuminating comparisons across regions and eras. The portraits, figure studies, landscapes, mythological and biblical narratives included in the exhibition will represent diverse sacred and secular subjects in media ranging from metalpoint, pen and ink, and chalk to graphite, pastel, and charcoal.  The role of drawing as the foundation of all the visual arts will be illustrated by numerous preparatory studies for painting, sculpture, textiles, engraving, and stained glass, including rare 15th century Netherlandish designs for a carved capital and tapestry. Elucidating the varying stages of the design process, the works on view will include rapid preliminary sketches, detailed studies of motifs, expansive compositional designs, and finished drawings intended for patrons.

The Robert Lehman Collection Robert Lehman bought his first drawings in the 1920s, adding works on paper to his father's distinguished painting collection. He began with rare sheets by Italian masters and continued to acquire drawings for the next half century, principally in the field of Italian art, but more expansively through examples from England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States.  By his death in 1969, the drawings collection numbered more than 700 sheets. While a few examples found their way into other public institutions in his lifetime, the remaining sheets form part of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum. Together with the holdings in the Department of Drawings and Prints, it has granted the Museum an outstanding collection of works on paper.

The Robert Lehman Collection is one of the most distinguished privately assembled art collections in the United States. Robert Lehman's bequest to The Met, a collection of extraordinary quality and breadth acquired over the course of 60 years, is a remarkable example of 20th-century American collecting. Spanning 700 years of western European art, from the 14th to the 20th century, the 2,600 works include paintings, drawings, manuscript illumination, sculpture, glass, textiles, antique frames, maiolica, enamels, and precious jeweled objects. Leonardo to Matisse is organized by Dita Amory, Curator in Charge, and Alison Nogueira, Associate Curator, both of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Met. "Conversation: Collecting Drawing," an Education program to accompany the exhibition on October 29, will consider the legacy of Robert Lehman. The exhibition is featured on the Museum's website, as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter via #MetMasterDrawings.

Leonardo da Vinci. Italian, Vinci 1452-1519 Amboise. A Bear Walking, ca. 1482-85. silverpoint on light buff prepared paper; 4 1/16 x 5 1/4 in. (10.3 x 13.3 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.369) Albrecht Dürer. German, Nuremberg 1471-1528 Nuremberg.   Self-portrait, Study of a Hand and a Pillow (recto);    Six Studies of Pillows (verso),   1493. Pen and brown ink; 10 15/16 x 7 15/16 in. (27.8 x 20.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.86)   Vincent van Gogh. Dutch, Zundert 1853-1890 Auvers-sur-Oise. Road in Etten,1881. Chalk, pencil, pastel, watercolor. Underdrawing in pen and brown ink. 15 1/2 x 22 3/4 in. (39.4 x 57.8 cm). The Metropolitan  Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.774)

Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection.

September 30, 2017, 7:15 am

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The Morgan Library & Museum
September 29 through January 7, 2018

• Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Letter to Paul Gauguin, 17 October 1888, with a sketch of Bedroom at Arles, pen and brown ink on graph paper, Thaw Collection, The Morgan Library & Museum, MA 6447. Given in honor of Charles E. Pierce, Jr., 2007. Photography by Graham S. Haber, 2016.

inShare

The Thaw Collection is considered among the foremost private collections of drawings assembled over the last half century. It was first promised to the Morgan in 1975 by Eugene V. Thaw, now a Life Trustee, and the museum received the full collection of 424 works in early 2017. In honor of this extraordinary gift—one of the most important in the history of the museum—the Morgan presents Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection.

On view from September 29 through January 7, 2018, the exhibition includes more than 150 masterworks from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. A partial list of artists represented includes Mantegna, Rubens, Rembrandt, Canaletto, Watteau, Piranesi, Fragonard, Goya, Turner, Ingres, Daumier, Degas, Cézanne, Redon, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and Pollock.

“It is difficult to summarize in a few words what the acquisition of the Thaw Collection means to the Morgan but ‘transformative’ may be the best single way to describe it,” said Director Colin B. Bailey. “The great range of artists, schools, and regions represented is remarkable. Moreover, the quality of the individual drawings reflects Gene Thaw’s exceptional critical eye—and his keen intellectual curiosity. Over the years Gene’s passionate commitment to the Morgan has never wavered and we can think of no better way to honor him and his late wife, Clare, than to present this exhibition of some of the greatest works from their collection.”

The exhibition is organized in a series of sections that illustrate key moments in the history of draftsmanship while also highlighting the work of artists whom the Thaws collected in depth, among them Rembrandt, Goya, Redon, and Degas.

One of the leading art dealers of his day, Eugene Thaw, who was born in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, initially was drawn to contemporary artists before focusing on major masters of the first decades of the twentieth century. He soon expanded his range to include earlier work, with a particular penchant for nineteenth-century French artists. Not long after his marriage to Clare Eddy in 1954, he was encouraged by his wife to keep some of the drawings for which he was particularly enthusiastic, and their private collection began to take shape.

Thaw acquired these great objects from a variety of sources: from art dealers and their galleries, through fellow collectors, at bookshops, and, perhaps most spectacularly, at auction. A major early purchase, in 1980, was the rare sheet by the Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna that set a record price for a drawing by the artist. Later, Thaw had the opportunity to acquire one of the last significant landscape drawings by Rembrandt still in private hands.

The Thaws first became involved with the Morgan in the 1960s. The relationship deepened during the tenures of Morgan directors Charles Ryskamp (1969–86) and Charles E. Pierce, Jr. (1987–2007). In 1975, on the occasion of the collection’s first exhibition at the Morgan, the Thaws announced that they were making a promised gift of their drawings.

Over the years Thaw has contributed other important works to the Morgan including a superb group of landscape oil sketches which the museum shares with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He also gave a collection of early Medieval ornamental objects currently installed in the McKim building’s North Room, and a cache of nineteen illustrated letters by Vincent van Gogh to his protégé, Émile Bernard.

• Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), Leave It All to Providence, 1816-20, black ink and gray wash. Thaw Collection, The Morgan Library & Museum.

• Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Three Studies for a Descent from the Cross, ca. 1654. Pen and brown ink. Thaw Collection, The Morgan Library & Museum.

• Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Four Musicians with Wind Instruments, ca. 1638, pen and brown and black ink and brown wash, and red and yellow chalk, Thaw Collection, The Morgan Library & Museum, 2004.42.

• Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), The Bulwark De Rose and the Windmill De Smeerpot, Amsterdam, ca. 1649-52, pen and brown ink and wash, Thaw Collection, The Morgan Library & Museum, 2006.47.

• Jan Bruegel (1568 - 1625), A View of the Tiber in Rome with the Ponte Sisto and Saint Peter's in the Distance, ca. 1594, pen and brown ink and wash and blue watercolor over black chalk, Thaw Collection, The Morgan Library & Museum, 2017.20.

• Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), The Bathers, ca. 1900, watercolor over graphite, Thaw Collection, The Morgan Library & Museum, 2017.29.

• Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Seated Dancer, 1871-72, oil paint over graphite on pink paper, Thaw Collection, The Morgan Library & Museum, 2017.54.

Roy Lichtenstein in Focus

September 30, 2017, 7:37 pm

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Tate Liverpool
22 September 2017 to 17 June 2018


This autumn Tate Liverpool will be showing works by the renowned American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997). The display includes major paintings such as In the Car 1963 and provides a rare opportunity to see a substantial group of Lichtenstein’s work in the North of England. It includes some 20 paintings, reliefs and works on paper by the artist known for his paintings based on comic strips, advertising imagery, and adaptations of works by other artists.

Lichtenstein was a pioneer of the pop art movement that exploded in the early 1960s. In his often monumentally-sized paintings, he makes use of a printing technique that mimics the Ben-Day dots seen in comic books and commercial newsprint. This became synonymous with the influence of popular mass culture on the look and subject matter of avant-garde art at the time.

Fascinated by the arresting and emotionally charged imagery found in romance and war comics, Lichtenstein sought to recreate in paint the immediacy and impact of these simplified printed images. This display examines how the artist’s work draws on art history while also responding to cultural and political changes from the 1960s onwards.

Lichtenstein experimented with different media throughout his career. Most commonly he used synthetic materials with glossy or mirrored surfaces, the contrasting and reflective effect of this can be seen in works such as  



Wall Explosion II 1965



and Reflections on Girl 1990.

Lichtenstein’s only foray in to film will be displayed for just the second time in Europe. The triple screen film installation Three Landscapes c. 1970–1971 is a mesmerising hybrid of film, painting, billboard, comic strip and kinetic spectacle.

• Roy Lichtenstein, In The Car 1963 © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2017. Photo: Antonia Reeve

Bringing together painting, sculpture and video from throughout Lichtenstein’s career, this exhibition constitutes a key body of work, drawn from ARTISTROOMS - a collection of international modern and contemporary art, established through the d’Offay Donation in 2008, and jointly owned by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland - alongside major loans from both institutions and the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. ARTISTROOMS: Roy Lichtenstein in Focus is curated by Darren Pih, Exhibitions and Displays Curator, with Lauren Barnes, Assistant Curator, Tate Liverpool.

More images:

• Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), Reflections on Crash, 1990, Lithograph, screenprint, relief, and metalized PVC collage with embossing on mold-made Somerset pape, 150.2 x 190.5 cm, Artist Rooms National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. Lent by The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Collection 2015 © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2015

 

• Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), Reflections: Art, 1988 Oil and Magna on canvas, 112.4 x 193.7 cm (44 1/4 x 76 1/4 in.), Artist Rooms National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. Lent by The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Collection 2015 © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2015 

• Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), Modern Art I, 1996, Screenprint on Lanaquarelle watercolor paper, 130.2 x 96.2 cm, Artist Rooms National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. Lent by The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Collection 2015 © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2015. 

• Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), Composition III, 1996, Screenprint on Lanaquarelle watercolor paper, 129.4 x 90.2 cm, Artist Rooms National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. Lent by The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Collection 2015 © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2015 

• Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), Roommates, 1994, 20 colour relief print, 162.9 x 129.9 cm, Artist Rooms, National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. Lent by The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Collection 2015 © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2015

Klimt / Schiele: Drawings from the Albertina Museum

October 3, 2017, 6:30 am

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Royal Academy
4 November 2018 – 3 February 2019

2018 marks the centenary of the deaths of two celebrated figures of twentieth century art: Gustav Klimt (1862 – 1918) and Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918). Klimt / Schiele: Drawings from the Albertina Museum, Vienna , will be the first exhibition in the United Kingdom to focus exclusively upon the fundamental importance of drawing in the relationship between Austria’s two most famous artists. 

The exhibition will comprise around 100 unique works on paper by Klimt and Schiele, including sketches for allegorical paintings, landscapes, portraits, nudes and erotic drawings as well as examples of sketchbooks, graphic designs, lithographs and photographs. These rarely loaned works are all drawn from the exceptional holdings of the Albertina’s world - renowned collection, and, following the exhibition at the RA, due to their sensitivity to light, they will not be loaned again for many years.

Gustav Klimt,Embracing Couple,1901.

(Study for ‘This Kiss to the Entire World; Beethoven Frieze’).

Black chalk. 45 x 30.8 cm. The Albertina Museum, Vienna. 

Egon Schiele,The Cello Player,1910.

Black chalk, watercolour on packing paper. 44.7 x 31.2 cm. The Albertina Museum, Vienna. 

 

Gustav Klimt,Preliminary Drawing for 'Allegory of Sculpture',1889.

Graphite, blue pencil, heightened with gold. 44 x 30 cm. The Albertina Museum, Vienna.

Egon Schiele,Standing Female Nude from the Waist Down with Green Garment,1913.

Pencil, watercolour, gouache on primed Japan paper. 48 x 31.5 cm. The Albertina Museum, Vienna.

 

 

Egon Schiele,Seated Female Nude, Elbows Resting on Right Knee (detail),1914.

Pencil, gouache on Japan paper. 48 x 32 cm. The Albertina Museum, Vienna. 

Egon SCHIELE Seated woman. 1918Black chalk
Albertina Museum, Vienna

 

Gustav KLIMT Initial D, illustration for the magazine Ver Sacrum. 1897/98Pen and brush and ink
Albertina Museum, Vienna     

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Dalí/Duchamp

October 3, 2017, 8:10 am

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Royal Academy

7 October 2017 –7 January 2018

Salvador Dali Museum
February 10, 2018 – May 27, 2018

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) and Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) are usually seen as opposites in almost every respect, yet in fact they shared attitudes to art and life that are manifested in their respective oeuvres on many levels. Taking their friendship as its starting point, this exhibition will demonstrate the aesthetic, philosophical and personal links between them, giving a fresh view of two of the twentieth century’s most famous artists. 

• The First Days of Spring, 1929, by Salvador Dalí

A focused selection of approximately 60 paintings, sculptures, ready-mades, photographs, drawings and films will bring to life the myriad of connections between the works of these two very different, yet equally humorous, creative and intelligent minds. 

The exhibition has been organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and The Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida, in collaboration with the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation and the Association Marcel Duchamp.


Great review

Our Metropolis: Paintings of New York City by American Artists

October 3, 2017, 1:06 pm

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 Hawthorne Fine Art 

 September 21-December 8th

 

Hawthorne Fine Art will present a group of New York City scenes that span over a hundred years of artistic output in an exhibition titled Our Metropolis (by appointment in their Manhattan showroom) from September 21-December 8th. Beginning with the Hudson River School with the work of George Lafayette Clough (1824-1901) and Samuel Colman (1832-1920), this exhibition traverses Tonalism through the work of Gustave Wolff (1863-1935), Impressionism through the work of Paul Cornoyer (1864-1923), Laura Trevitte Horne (1891-1958) and Mary Fairchild Low (1858-1946), the Ashcan School through Ernest Frederick Meyer (1863-1952), Ernest Lawson (1873-1939) and Fritz Bachmeyr (b. 1944), and finally the Modern period of the twentieth century through the work of Marguerite Zorach (1887-1968) and Stuart Davis (1892–1964).

Truman Capote once wrote of New York City: “I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.” It is a sentiment that countless creative types have experienced over the last century, many of whom have left behind portraits of the landmark city as they felt part of it.



A second-generation Hudson River School painter, Samuel Colman frequently painted his native New York City, where he had moved in his youth. In Governors Island, New York Harbor from 1875, the low horizon and Colman’s silvery waters reflect the influence of the Dutch School, whose work he would have seen during his 1871 travels through Holland. In this harbor scene, which subtly suggests industrial activity, of New York City’s most important commercial spaces is portrayed at a rare moment of calm.

 

• GEORGE LAFAYETTE CLOUGH (1824---- 1901) Balcony Bridge, Central Park, New York City Oil on canvas, 11 ⅛ x 16 ⅛ inches, Signed lower left

The same can be said for George Lafayette Clough’s Balcony Arch Bridge, Central Park (c. 1885), which captures the burgeoning public park. Painted after the completion of the Balcony Bridge in 1860, Clough’s work also depicts a leisure spot at a tranquil moment. As illustrated in an 1871 guide The Metropolis Explained, the flattopped, aqueduct style Balcony Bridge was a popular sight. Clough’s vista is reminiscent of early images of Central Park which called upon Victorian modes of ‘promenading’ in a natural environ designed by the era’s leading landscape architect, Frederick Olmsted.

In the works by Gustave Wolff, who relocated to New York City in the 1910s to expand his artistic horizons, the artist depicts scenes unique to his new city: the 79th Street Boat Basin on the west side, known for its distinct views of the Hudson River, the now-lost Wheelock Mansion on 158th Street, and the wintery landscape in Harlem at the time, which was not yet fully developed. These vistas, each softly rendered in the fading light of day, present a turn of the century vision of New York City on the brink of economic expansion in the pale, crystalized vocabulary of Tonalism. Wolff had left his hometown of St. Louis to make a name for himself in the country’s most competitive metropolis and as such his works exhibit both the technical skill he developed earlier in his career and his nascent love of his new city. Crucial here is Wolff’s decision to depict New York City’s historical locations at a moment when it was rapidly evolving – an action that safeguards the city’s past and also gestures toward its future.



At the turn of the twentieth century, artists approached the landscape of New York City from increasingly diverse viewpoints. Early Evening, Empire Park, New York (c. 1910) by Paul Cornoyer, who had relocated to New York City in 1899, captures a small park near Lincoln Center (now known as Richard Tucker Square) at twilight. The atmosphere of dusk combined with the park’s few remaining figures deftly express the experience of the end of the day.

Meanwhile another artist of this period, Laura Trevitte Horne, embraced the bold colors of the flourishing flora in the city’s public spaces in Spring in Central Park. Horne’s ruddy oranges and brilliant greens contrast substantially with the work of another female artist of the same period,

 

Mary Fairchild Low. In Low’s Ships in the Hudson River, January 20th, 1919 (1919), the artist focuses on the icy prowess of the city’s major commercial river during the period of WWI.

During the period of the Ashcan School, realistic scenes drawn from mundane experiences were increasingly prized.

Ernest Lawson’s On the Harlem River certainly shows the influence of the Ashcan style in the presence of the warehouse along the river depicted; while the majority of the work was painted in the sketchy Impressionism of the Barbizon School, the warehouse is painted in the gritty realism of the Ashcan painters like Robert Henri.


Similarly, in New York Street Scene, Ernest Frederick Meyer uses thick, broad brushstrokes to convey the movement of a bustling city street. The lack of detail here builds ambience and universalizes the scene.

In the 1930s, while the rest of the country was recovering from the Great Depression of 1929, New York City was booming. As author Leslie Charteris wrote in 1935 in The Saint in New York, “before them was spread out the ragged panorama of south Manhattan, the wonder island of the West.”  It is during this period that one can see the rise of the image of the skyscraper and all its connotations of commerce and progress.

In Stuart Davis’s drawing Lower Manhattan (ca. 1930), the regularity of the new city-scape is splayed out before us. Conversely, in another painting done in New York at during this period by Marguerite Zorach of her cats on the stairs at her apartment on 10th Street in Greenwich Village, the artist presents an interior view of city life. While artists painted in the comfort of their home studios, the city continued to rise around them.

By the mid to late twentieth century, New York City scenes had become a genre in its own right.

 

In Fritz Bachmeyr’s Snow Scene in Brooklyn, NY, the artist captures the unique experience of commuting in the fully maturated metropolis. Framed by the Manhattan bridge, Bachmeyr’s figures brace themselves against the biting winds of winter (the least ideal season to be living in the city). Informed both by the airy style of French Impressionism and the coarse subjects of the Ashcan School, Snow Scene in Brooklyn, NY demonstrates how painting a New York City landscape more often than not led to stylistic innovations built on historical precedent.


 

• MARGUERITE ZORACH (1887---- 1968) Two Cats on Stairs (Tooky-West 10th Street), c. 1930 Oil on canvas, 34 x 22 inches, Signed lower right

 

• GIFFORD BEAL (1879---- 1956) View from the Studio [27 W. 67th Street], circa 1930 Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches, Estate of the Artist

Drawn in Colour: Degas from the Burrell

October 3, 2017, 2:08 pm

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National Gallery

20 September 2017 – 7 May 2018

“People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself.” Degas
This autumn, visitors to the National Gallery will have the rare opportunity to see a stunning group of artworks by Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas from the Burrell Collection in Glasgow. This will be the first time that most of them will be seen outside Glasgow since they were acquired at the beginning of the 20th century.

• Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas,'The Rehearsal', about 1874 © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection

Marking the centenary of the artist’s death on 27 September 1917, Drawn in Colour: Degas from the Burrell is also a fitting tribute to one of the greatest creative figures of French art.

• Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, Women in a Theatre Box, about 1885-90. The Burrell Collection © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection 

Shipping magnate Sir William Burrell (1861–1958) amassed one of the finest collections of Degas pastels in the world; encompassing works from every period of his career and representative of some of his favourite subjects: the ballet, horse racing, and the private world of women at their toilette. They form part of the collection of 9,000 objects including tapestries, stained glass, sculpture, and paintings that Burrell gifted to the city of Glasgow in 1944.

•  Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, 'The Red Ballet Skirts', about 1900, The Burrell Collection © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection

The 13 pastels, three drawings, and four oil paintings, will be exhibited in London alongside a selection of oil paintings and pastels from the National Gallery’s own Degas collection, as well as loans from other collections which relate thematically or stylistically to the Burrell works.

Christopher Riopelle, Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery said:

"The National Gallery has a long and distinguished history of engagement with the art of Degas. Now we have the opportunity to see how William Burrell, the UK’s greatest private collector of Degas’s works, responded to his art in turn. The incomparable collection of pastels will come as a particular revelation to visitors."

Degas was one of the greatest artistic innovators of his age. He turned from the traditional subjects and technical conventions of his training to find new ways to depict modern, urban life. In Degas’s work, both the highs and lows of Parisian life are depicted: from scenes of elegant spectators and jockeys at the racecourse, to tired young women ironing in subterranean workshops.


 Dancers on a Bench', about 1898, Pastel on tracing paper Glasgow Museums: Art Gallery & Museums, Kelvingrove. All images © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection
Among Degas’s many contributions to the development of art was a relentless technical experimentation with materials, particularly with the supremely flexible medium of pastel that he came to prefer over painting in oil. The range of materials and the cross-fertilization of effects and techniques he used helped him develop a remarkably distinctive and deeply personal vision. Degas’s interest in Japanese prints, photography, and ancient classical friezes probably informed his innovative approach to composition.

• Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas The Green Ballet Skirt about 1896 Pastel on tracing paper

Pastel became increasingly important to Degas in his later years at a time when, coincidentally, brilliant colour began to play an essential role in the contemporary art he admired, and his own eyesight started to fail. The tactile immediacy and luminous colours of pastel, as well as its ephemeral and fragile quality, allowed him to create astonishingly bold and dynamic works of art, distinct from those of his fellow Impressionists.



 Edgar Degas  Woman in a Tub pastel (1896-1901)

'Drawn in Colour: Degas from the Burrell' is divided in three sections: Modern Life, Dancers, and Private Worlds; and explores Degas’s skills and innovations, along with the art historical and personal contexts in which these works were created. The motivations of William Burrell for collecting Degas’s works will also be explored.

• Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas Preparation for the Class about 1877 Pastel on paper 

The exhibition, curated by Julien Domercq, Vivmar Curatorial Fellow of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, is accompanied by a publication that sets the pictures in the context of Degas’s career and includes new technical analysis of his pastel works, offering a penetrating insight into the working practices and preoccupations of a complex and intensely private artist.
National Gallery Director, Dr Gabriele Finaldi, said:

“This is a unique opportunity to see in London the remarkable group of Degas paintings and pastels collected with a singular passion by William Burrell and donated by him to the people of Glasgow. Ablaze with colour these works reflect Degas’s passionate and committed artistic vision.”

Exhibition organised by the National Gallery, in collaboration with the Burrell Collection, Glasgow.

• Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, Three Dancers, about 1900-5 Pastel

Publication
Title: Drawn in Colour: Degas at the Burrell Collection
Authors: Vivien Hamilton with Julien Domercq and Harriet K. Stratis. Contributions by Sarah Herring and Christopher Riopelle.
112 pages, 50 illustrations, 270 x 230 mm

“Max Beckmann: The World as a Stage”

October 4, 2017, 8:11 am

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Kunsthalle Bremen

30 Sep 2017 to 4 Feb 2018 

Museum Barberini, Potsdam
2/24–6/10/2018

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) was fascinated by the world of the theater, the circus and music halls as metaphorical settings for human relationships and world affairs. In his œuvre, one finds numerous paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures which allude directly to these subjects and convey his idea of the world as a stage.

This exhibition focuses extensively on the imagery and history of ideas in Beckmann’s  “world theater” and illustrates how the painter and author of two hitherto neglected dramas viewed himself as a “theater manager, director, and scene-shifter.”

The core of the exhibition is formed by the extensive holdings of the Kunsthalle Bremen, which possesses one of the largest Beckmann collections in Germany including paintings and a nearly complete collection of the artist’s printed works. It is supplemented by loans from major German and international museums and private collections.

• Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait as Clown, 1921. Öl auf Leinwand, 100 x 59 cm Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal, Photo: Antje Zeis-Loi, Medienzentrum Wuppertal © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017. 

• Max Beckmann, Actors, 1941/42. Öl auf Leinwand, 199,4 x 150 cm (Mitte), 199,4 x 83,7 cm (Flügel links), 199,4 x 83,7 cm (Flügel rechts) Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017.

• Max Beckmann: Dance Apache, 1938, Kunsthalle Bremen – Der Kunstverein in Bremen, Photo: Lars Lohrisch, © VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn 2017 

 

• Max Beckmann: Self-Portrait with a Saxophone, 1930, Kunsthalle Bremen – Der Kunstverein in Bremen, Photo: Lars Lohrisch, © VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn 2017

Catalogue

This magnificently illustrated book explores Max Beckmann’s idea of the world as a stage while also providing a striking introduction to one of the 20th century’s most spectacularly creative periods of art and design. Many of the paintings by Max Beckmann show the world of the theater, the circus, and vaudeville. He assumed the position of the spectator and his paintings were the stage. He was driven by pageantry and this is the first publication to show how Beckmann’s artistic theater was palpably visual while also showing his work in the context of the history of ideas. It brings home how the painter and author of dramas that has hitherto received little attention saw himself as an "impresario, director, and scene shifter." This book grants readers highly innovative and captivating access to one of the exceptional artists of the last century and his extraordinary visual and formal language.

Matisse – Bonnard. ‘Long Live Painting!

October 5, 2017, 7:42 am

≫ Next: Rembrandt and the Dutch golden age masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum

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From 13 September 2017 to 14 January 2018, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt will be presenting two outstanding artists– Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) – in an exhibition that is the first in Germany to bring these key modernist masters together.

At the heart of the special exhibition “Matisse – Bonnard. ‘Long Live Painting!’” is the friendship between the two French artists which lasted for over forty years. Both painters shared a preference for the same range of subjects: interiors, still lifes, landscapes and the female nude. With a selection of more than 120 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, the exhibition opens a dialogue between Matisse and Bonnard and offers new perspectives on the development of the European avant-garde from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of the Second World War. The selection of works is enriched by a series of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who visited the two painters in their country houses on the French Riviera in 1944.

For this year’s major autumn show, the Städel has been able to secure a wide range of outstanding loans from internationally renowned collections, among them the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the State Hermitage in Saint Petersburg and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Also on display will be a host of major works from private collections, which are not normally accessible to the public.

An absolute highlight among these are the two paintings which the artists owned from one another:



Pierre Bonnard’s Evening in the Living Room (1907, private collection)

and Henri Matisse’s The Open Window (1911, private collection).

They are being shown together for the first time in Frankfurt.

Another exhibition highlight is Matisse’s Large Reclining Nude of 1935, on loan from the Baltimore Museum of Art, which has not been seen in Germany for more than thirty years. This iconic nude was a milestone on the artist’s journey towards an aesthetic of highly simplified forms and shows his studio assistant and last important model, Lydia Delectorskaya. It is very likely that the painting was inspired by

Bonnard’s Reclining Nude against a White and Blue Plaid (ca. 1909), which it closely resembles in composition, and which has been in the collection of the Städel Museum since 1988. The opportunity to show these two paintings in dialogue was key to the planning of this project.

The title of the exhibition, Long Live Painting!, is based on the programmatic exclamation “Vive la peinture!” with which Matisse saluted his friend Bonnard on 13 August 1925. Those three words on a postcard from Amsterdam were the beginning of a correspondence that went on for more than twenty years and that testifies to the depth of the respect and appreciation the two artists felt for each other. In the first decade of the twentieth century, both artists left Paris, then the capital of the avant-garde, for the Côte d’Azur, where they continued to cement their reputation as protagonists of the European art scene.

Despite the near-contiguity of their lives and careers, art historians tend to correlate the two artists with opposing trends: Bonnard’s breezy, loose brushwork and scintillating soft pastels give rise to the construct of the painter as the last great heir of Impressionism, while Matisse’s preference for strong colours and flat, heavily contoured compositions earn him the accolade of being named a pioneer of twentieth-century abstraction.

In thematic chapters, the exhibition focuses on different interpretations of major genres: interiors, still lifes, landscapes and nudes. The aim of presenting Matisse and Bonnard together is to allow comparative contemplation, to create a space in which commonalities and differences emerge – but not to engender any kind of competition. Such a thing would be quite at odds with the relationship between the two artists. “When I think of you, I think of a mind cleansed of every old aesthetic convention, and it is that alone that permits a direct view of nature, the greatest joy that can befall a painter. I enjoy a little of that, thanks to you” wrote Bonnard to Matisse in January 1940. The value which the latter attached to the judgement of his friend is documented in a letter of November of the same year: “I need to see someone, and you’re the one I want to see.” Matisse did not want to discuss his pictures with anyone else. Seldom have two artists complemented one another so well.

Exhibition tour

The exhibition extends over two floors and is arranged around a series of different artistic themes: interiors, landscapes/nature, still lifes and women/the nude. An introductory section, occupying the first rooms on the ground floor of the exhibition, is devoted to the friendship between the two artists, featuring portraits by the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, self-portraits, and the two works painted by one artist and owned by the other.

The following rooms are devoted to interiors and, in particular, to the motif of the window, where the close exchange of ideas between the two artist-friends is strikingly apparent. Among the outstanding works here are Bonnard’s paintings The Bowl of Milk (ca. 1919) and The Window (1925), both from the Tate Modern in London, and Matisse’s Large Red Interior (1948), one of his last iconic works in oil, which is on loan from the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The last room on the ground floor is devoted to the letters exchanged between the two artists, a selection of which can be heard in dramatised readings, and all of which can be digitally viewed.

Upstairs, the exhibition continues with the theme of landscape and nature, in which the lifelong fascination of both artists with the light and atmosphere of the French Riviera plays an important role.

Here, a highlight of the exhibition is Bonnard’s The Sun-Filled Terrace (1939–1946, private collection). The painting is unusual because of its extremely horizontal format. It shows a terrace, on either side of which a garden landscape stretches away in vibrant, almost pink tones. While many of Bonnard’s late works depict views taken straight from the surroundings of his home at Le Bosquet, this large-scale work has the feeling of a timeless idyll. Matisse was deeply impressed when he saw the as yet unfinished composition in his friend’s studio. In January 1940 he wrote to him: “Your work is still clear in my memory, in all its details. Never before has it seemed to me so complete, and I can still picture quite distinctly the decorative passage with the rose branches. I like it very much.”

Another theme in which the dialogue between the two painters is reflected is still life. Like few other artists of their generation Bonnard and Matisse harboured a lifelong fascination with this centuries-old genre. Taking inspiration from predecessors such as Jean Siméon Chardin and Paul Cézanne, they aimed to release it from a naturalistic depiction of everyday objects and instead used it as a starting point for radical artistic experimentation with colour and form.

The works on show here include Matisse’s still life from the Städel Museum, Flowers and Ceramic Plate (1913) – an early masterpiece and a firm favourite of visitors to the collection – and Bonnard’s luminous Bouquet of Mimosas (ca. 1945, private collection), which makes a perfect pendant to it. As in many paintings in Bonnard’s late, almost abstract style, paint itself seems to be the real subject of the composition, in which the thickly applied hues of yellow and orange blend the vibrantly glowing flowers with the surrounding interior.

In their approaches to the female nude, both artists developed their respective “signature paintings": Bonnard’s were sensuous nudes in baths or boudoirs, while Matisse’s were dreamlike odalisques, women of the harem in exotic settings. Bonnard’s model is typically his wife, Marthe, whom he immortalised in almost 400 paintings over a period of more than 50 years and whom he continued to paint even after her death. Her perpetually youthful body appears again and again in oneiric bathing pictures, permeated with a dreamlike and often disconcerting atmosphere of mystery. Matisse’s odalisques are completely different in tone – works of intimate theatricality, full of shimmering colour, where figure and interior are meshed together in vividly ornamental compositions that give vibrant expression to the artist’s vision of an art of perfect harmony.

The exhibition also allows insight into the creative process behind one of Matisse’s masterpieces, Large Reclining Nude. Using a camera, the artist documented the development of the painting from May to October 1935. In a total of 22 black-and-white photographs, we can see how he gradually reworked essential elements of the composition, continually simplifying it and making it and rendering its elements more planar. This work is also one of the very first oil paintings where Matisse used cut-out stripes of paper as aids to composition – a technique which was to become decisive for his late work and which completely superseded his painting on canvas after 1948. Perhaps the best-known work to have been created using these so-called “cut-outs” is Matisse’s artist’s book Jazz (1947), devoted to the brightly-coloured world of the circus, clowns, and the theatre, which is also on display in the exhibition.

Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Large Reclining Nude, 1935

Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), Reclining Nude against a White and Blue Plaid, around 1909

Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Pianist and Checker Players, 1924

Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), The Work Table (La table de travail),

Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954), Odalisque with a Tambourine, 1925/26

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), Nude at the Mirror, 1931

Pierre Bonnard (1869–1954), Woman Leaving the Bath, ca. 1925

Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Asia, 1946

Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954), Odalisques, 1928

Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954), The Gulf of Saint-Tropez, 1904

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), Terrace in the South of France, 1925

Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), The Sun-Filled Terrace,1939–1946

Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954), Trivaux Pond,1916/17

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), The Family in the Garden (Grand-Lemps)

Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Still Life with „The Dance“, 1909

Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), The Bowl of Fruit, 1914

Henri Matisse, (1869 – 1954), Flowers and Ceramic Plate, 1913

Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), Bouquet of Mimosas, ca. 1945

Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), Evening in the living room, 1907

Henri Matisse (1869–1954), The Open Window, 1911

Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Women with Sofa or The Diwan, 1921

Pierre Bonnard (1867 – 1947), The Bowl of Milk, ca. 1919

Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954), Nice, Black Notebook, 1918

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), The Window, 1925

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) Selfportrait, 1906

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) Selfportrait, 1930

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) Large Reclining Nude, 1935

Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), Reclining Nude against a White and Blue Plaid, around 1909