Rembrandt and the Dutch golden age masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum

October 5, 2017, 8:31 am

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Art Gallery of New South Wales

11 Nov 2017 – 18 Feb 2018

 

 

Rembrandt Self-portrait as the Apostle Paul 1661, Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, De Bruijn-van der Leeuw Bequest, Muri, Switzerland



Johannes Vermeer Woman reading a letter 1663, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, on loan from the City of Amsterdam (A van der Hoop Bequest



Karel Dujardin Self-portrait 1622 (detail)

Drawn from the Rijksmuseum, the renowned national collection of the Netherlands, this exhibition includes a rare painting by Johannes Vermeer and a room dedicated to one of the greatest minds in the history of art, Rembrandt van Rijn.

Rembrandt and the Dutch golden age presents a richly unfolding panorama of Dutch society during an era of unparalleled wealth, power and cultural confidence. In the Dutch golden age, the art of painting flourished like never before. Artists sensitively observed the beauty of the visible world, transforming it, with great skill, into vivid and compelling paintings. Their subjects ranged from intense portraits and dramatic seascapes to tranquil scenes of domestic life and careful studies of fruit and flowers.

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The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920

October 5, 2017, 8:51 am

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Cleveland Museum of Art
September 30, 2017 through January 14, 2018

The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s is the first major museum exhibition to focus on American taste in art and design during the 1920s and early 1930s. Through a rich array of over 300 extraordinary works in jewelry, fashion, automobiles, paintings and decorative arts, featuring the events and people that punctuated the era, the exhibition explores the impact of European influences, American lifestyle, artistic movements and innovation during this exciting period. The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s is co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and is on view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Hall from September 30, 2017 through January 14, 2018.   

• Blues, 1929. Archibald J. Motley Jr. (American, 1891–1981). Oil on canvas; 91.4 x 106.7 cm. Collection of Mara Motley, MD, and Valerie Gerrard Browne. © Valerie Gerrard Browne / Chicago History Museum / Bridgeman Images

“The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s is a blockbuster show—gorgeous, bountiful, exhilarating,” said William Griswold, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “The exhibition explores the creative impulses that shaped American taste in that dynamic era, as well as new ideas that challenged the status quo and a desire for change in art and design. We are excited to give our visitors an inside look at this glorious age of innovation and artistic expression.”

“Nowhere else can be seen under one roof such an extraordinary group of design masterworks, which formed the essence of American style in the first half of the 20th century, than in this exhibition,” said Stephen Harrison, curator of decorative art and design. “Some of these rare pieces represent recent discoveries. Others are owned privately and have not been seen publicly since they were made in the 1920s. These works pushed the boundaries of art and design in an age when people were hungry for change.” 

After the First World War, with the postwar map of Europe redrawn and social mores redefined, design influences merged—especially in Paris, Vienna and across the United States. New fortunes, primarily American, fueled self-indulgence and consumption, prompting design featuring vibrant colors, sumptuous materials and a unique sense of freedom. The United States became the leading marketplace for innovative architecture, interior design, decorative art, fashion and music, with industrial design moving into the domestic sphere. 

Craftsmanship and experimentation flowed back and forth across the Atlantic, with an influx of European émigré designers coming to America and American creative talent traveling and studying abroad. Organized in six sections, The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s explores objects affected by the purchasing power of new fortunes and new tastes, and reveals a decade marked by sharp contrasts as new ideas began to challenge traditional revival styles.

The exhibition opens with A New Look for Familiar Forms, providing updated, modern interpretations of older styles of decoration. Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Edgar Brandt, Armand-Albert Rateau, Jean Dunand and Raoul Dufy were among those who produced extraordinary objects using lavish craftsmanship, exotic materials and high technical skill, often invoking earlier French styles but with pared-down form. This trend influenced American manufacturers, especially in furniture, while silver and jewelry design forged an important connection between traditional techniques and new influences.

Next, A Smaller World explores transatlantic connections that helped blend influences and cultures. Trained designers arriving from Vienna, Berlin and Eastern Europe brought new aesthetics to the United States, especially an interest in industrial design and the American skyscraper.

The Persistence of Traditional “Good Taste” features works that show how Americans equated “good taste” and social success with older European styles of design, a trend showcased through some of the finest colonial revival decorative arts produced in America. Antiquing became a national pastime and, along with the purchase of historic reproductions, formed the cornerstone of traditional American decor. 

Bending the Rules showcases a new ideal for the young modern woman, dictating more revealing fashions and calling for colorful jewelry in exotic forms as well as accessories for cosmetics and cigarette smoking that lent additional glamour and adventure to liberated lifestyles. Fashionable people “stepped out” to nightclubs on both sides of the Atlantic to hear jazz music, which transformed traditional concert venues into dance halls and gave the era a new pulse.

Abstraction and Reinvention explores the simple shapes and minimalistic decoration that defined modernism in the first half of the 1920s, as well as the use of bold geometric shapes that took hold in the latter half of the decade. These abstracted and often fragmented shapes were influenced by fine art movements such as Cubism, but they also emanated from architectural sources as diverse as the stepped shapes of ancient Mayan temples, the setback profiles of skyscrapers and the open-plan arrangements of interior spaces, especially those of Frank Lloyd Wright. 

The final gallery, Toward a Machine Age, highlights the technological and stylistic innovations of the 1920s that became widespread in America by the early 1930s. Modern design of pure form and minimal decoration fit the era’s innovations in new technology and industrial materials, such as tubular steel, rubber, plastics and chrome. Revolutionary advancements in transportation were accompanied by new aerodynamic designs that emphasized speed. The popularity of this aesthetic informed the look of both luxury goods and everyday objects, heralding a new age of machines.
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Exhibition Catalogue 


 
Lavishly illustrated with hundreds of full-color illustrations and featuring essays by Stephen Harrison, curator of decorative art and design at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Sarah D. Coffin, curator and head of product design and decorative arts at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s reveals how designers established a new visual representation of modernity within the context of a changing world.

The Birth of the Art Market: Rembrandt, Ruisdael, van Goyen and the Artists of the Dutch Golden Age

October 5, 2017, 9:03 am

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Bucerius Kunst Forum

23. September 2017 - 7. January 2018 

The Bucerius Kunst Forum presents the first large-scale exhibition devoted to the birth of the art market in the Golden Age of the Netherlands. Tracing the careers of artists such as Rembrandt, Ruisdael, van Goyen and many others, the exhibition explores how the transformation of Dutch society during the seventeenth century brought forth a new art market, with artworks tailored to its demands. Artists, art dealers and their workshops had to keep pace with the evolving market situation, leading to art prices ranging from just a few Dutch guilders to astronomical sums.  

The Birth of the Art Market: Rembrandt, Ruisdael, van Goyen and the Artists of the Dutch Golden Age is the first exhibition curated  by Prof. Dr. Franz Wilhelm Kaiser in his new role as artistic director of the Bucerius Kunst Forum.

• Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (workshop), Willem Burchgraeff (detail), 1633
  Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

In the seventeenth century, the importance of the aristocracy had already dwindled, and the Calvinist reformed church in the Netherlands called for plain, unadorned church buildings. While the traditional art patrons thus largely fell away, an expanding middle class was for the first time able to afford oil paintings. An extraordinarily diverse group of educated and affluent members of society offered fertile ground for an art market whose commercialization would have a greater impact on painting techniques, genres and themes than the original noble and clerical clients had ever had. Artists began to reposition themselves and to paint pictures for an anonymous market rather than on commission, without knowing in advance the wishes of the prospective buyers.

• Jan Miense Molenaer (ca. 1610-1668), Young Musicians and a Dancing Dwarf, ca. 1630–1635
  SØR Rusche Sammlung, Oelde/Berlin

• Simon Jacobsz de Vliege The Flagship Aemilia Fires a Salute. 1640

The Descent from the Cross (Rembrandt, 1634)

 

The exhibition features master works on loan from internationally renowned museums and collections, including the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen; National Portrait Gallery, London; Dresden State Art Collections, Old Masters Picture Gallery; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Bavarian State Painting Collections, Alte Pinakothek; State Museum of Schwerin/ Ludwigslust/ Güstrow; Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister; The Kremer Collection, Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts; SØR Rusche Collection, Oelde/ Berlin; National Museum in Warsaw; Liechtenstein, The Princely Collections, Vaduz/ Vienna; and other museums and private collections.

More images

Giovanni Bellini: Landscapes of Faith in Renaissance Venice

October 6, 2017, 9:49 am

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Getty Museum, Getty CenterOctober 10, 2017 – January 14, 2018

One of the most beloved and influential religious painters of the Italian Renaissance, Giovanni Bellini (Venice, about 1435-1516) was also a master in depicting landscape. His paintings of religious scenes often featured evocative natural settings that were as important and affecting as their human subjects.

On view October 10, 2017, through January 14, 2018, Giovanni Bellini: Landscapes of Faith in Renaissance Venice presents 12 paintings and one drawing that explore the poetic role played by the natural world in the artist’s religious compositions. The exhibition includes several masterpieces that rarely travel, making this an exceptional opportunity to experience the artistic beauty and iconographic complexity of Bellini’s art.

“Giovanni Bellini skillfully employed natural and built features in his imagery to complement religious subjects and enhance the contemplative, meditative potential of his paintings,” said Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Thanks to the loan of a number of masterpieces from generous institutions in Europe and the United States, our visitors will be able to experience directly the poetic beauty that made Bellini one of the greatest masters of the Renaissance, and has kept him on the list of the most admired and coveted artists ever since. The exquisite beauty and delicate charm of these paintings have an aesthetic and spiritual power way beyond their modest scale. As a focused experience of sublime beauty in the service of devotion, this exhibition is as good as it gets. Not to be missed is a gross understatement.”

Giovanni Bellini was one of the most illustrious artists of the Italian Renaissance, admired for his accomplishments in all genres of painting practiced in 15th-century Venice, including religious subjects, mythological scenes, and portraits. He began his career painting small pictures intended for private devotion, later creating emotionally intense portraits as well as innovative altarpieces. Toward the end of his long life he added mythological and secular allegory to his repertoire. He was also one of the artists who championed the shift from painting in egg tempera, traditional in Italy, to painting in oil, a technique pioneered in the Netherlands. He operated a busy studio in Venice and trained many younger artists, including Giorgione and Titian. A standout among great artists both in his family and in his community, Bellini was one of the key figures who elevated the Venetian school to international repute.

“The devotional components of Giovanni Bellini’s pictures, such as a sole crucifix in a landscape or an image of Saint Jerome reading in the wilderness, are always infused with a refined sensitivity to the natural world,” said Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of paintings at the Getty Museum and curator of the exhibition. “Bellini’s paintings feature expressively charged interpretations of sacred characters and symbols immersed in a realm of lived experiences in a way that was entirely unprecedented in Italian painting. Through this poetic use of landscape, Bellini elevated the devotional work of art to an object of worthy aesthetic admiration, thus ushering in a new chapter in the history of European painting.”

• Christ Blessing, about 1500, Giovanni Bellini, tempera and oil on wood panel. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.

In some works, it is the figure that dominates the picture, with the landscape as a secondary but important element. For example, Christ Blessing, about 1500, depicts Christ after having risen from the tomb, strikingly close-up and gazing straight at the viewer. In the background, the sun is rising in the hills, the sky is tinged with tones of orange, yellow and blue, and the three Marys hurry toward the tomb that they will find empty. The icon is fused with a narrative which evokes the landscape of the Venetian mainland, familiar to the contemporary viewer.

• Sacred Allegory, about 1500-1504, Giovanni Bellini, tempera (?) and oil on wood panel. Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo credit: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY.
   

Sacred Allegory, about 1500-04, shows a mysterious cast of characters in an unusual landscape. The composition is divided by a marble terrace in the foreground and a resplendent landscape in the background. A clothed boy that may be the Christ child sits on a cushion shaking a tree that may be the Tree of Life. The Virgin Mary sits enthroned with her hands in prayer. Other figures in the picture include unidentified male and female saints. The picture was likely made for a sophisticated art lover who was able to understand the complex meaning of the scene and at the same time to appreciate the supreme skill of the artist, possibly the Marchioness of Mantua Isabella d’Este, one of the most celebrated collectors of the Italian Renaissance.



The exhibition also includes one of Bellini’s earliest surviving works, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, about 1455, which depicts the saint as a penitent hermit blessing a lion. He reads in a cave that dominates the picture’s foreground, while a broad, deep landscape opens out into the background. Rather than evoking the Syrian desert of the fable, the scenery recalls the gentle slope of the Venetian mainland, a feature of many of Bellini’s paintings.

Crucifixion (detail)

about 1495-1500

Giovanni Bellini

tempera (?) and oil on wood panel.

Collezione Banca Popolare di Vicenza

Saint Jerome Reading in the Wilderness (detail)

about 1485

Giovanni Bellini

tempera and oil on wood panel.

National Gallery, London. Bought, 1855.

© National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY

Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist (detail)

about 1458-59

Giovanni Bellini

oil and tempera on wood panel.

Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Museo Correr, Venice.

Photo credit: Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, NY

Crucifixion

1465 - 1470

Giovanni Bellini (Italian, about 1431/1436 - 1516)

Tempera on wood panel

Paris, Musee du Louvre, Departement des Peintures

© RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo: Michel Urtado

The Nativity, about 1480

Giovanni Bellini (Italian, about 1431/1436 - 1516)

Pen and brush and brown ink

The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

The Courtauld Gallery, London

Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist and a Female Saint in a

Landscape (detail)

about 1501

Giovanni Bellini

tempera and oil on wood panel.

Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo credit: Scala/Ministero per i Beni

e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY

Saint Jerome Reading in the Wilderness (detail)

about 1485

Giovanni Bellini

tempera and oil on wood panel.

National Gallery, London. Bought, 1855.

© National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY

Bruegel: Drawing the World

October 6, 2017, 11:12 am

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Albertina, Vienna

8 September–3 December 2017 The Albertina is devoting a comprehensive exhibition to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the 16th century’s most important Netherlandish draughtsman. With its 80 works, this exhibition presents the entire spectrum of Bruegel’s drawn and printed oeuvre and seeks to shed light on his artistic origins by juxtaposing his output with high-quality works by important predecessors such as Bosch and Dürer. Included are around 20 of the Dutch artist’s most beautiful drawings from the museum’s own extensive holdings as well as from international collections, a selection that also brings together two of his final drawings—Spring and Summer—for the first time in many years.  Furthermore, numerous printed treasures—sought out and painstakingly restored at the Albertina over the course of long-running research efforts—are being shown for the first time. Humanity’s Tragedy and Greatness Pieter Bruegel’s drawings, done on the eve of the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule and amidst an era of political, social, and religious transformations, conjure up a complex pictorial world. Bruegel reflects on social conditions in away that is humorous, down-to-earth, perceptive, and deeply critical. And as a moralist, he makes a theme of human beings’ tragedy and greatness, ridiculousness and weakness. Bruegel’s works stand out for his immense interest in the real world inhabited by his contemporaries: they feature peasants working in the fields, picturesque landscapes, alpine peaks, and intimate river valleys, but also numerous satirical and moralising takes on contemporary society as well as absurd and comical grotesques.  The portrayal of the individual recedes in favour of illustrations of specific archetypes. At turns keenly observant of nature or engaging in parodic exaggeration, the artist the constant conflict between ideal and reality from various angles. His penchant for therough-hewn and folksy, along with unsanitised impressions of social conditions, is something that he has in common with the roughly contemporary authors Rabelais, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, who, in their literature, turned the world into stage and formulated universal insights, while his deeply moral approach is akin to that of Michel de Montaigne or Francis Bacon. In Bruegel’s most famous drawing—The Painter and the Connoisseur, one of the masterpieces held by the Albertina—the artist makes a theme of art production itself: he confronts viewers with the serious, intellectual work of the painter, in response to which a purported art connoisseur can do nothing but gape perplexedly and reach into his purse. In this work, art meets with the incomprehension of the buyer and of society at large. Numerous Precious Works Rediscovered Pieter Bruegel the Elder is one of the 16th century’s foremost draughtsmen. Even during his lifetime, his drawings enjoyed the greatest popularity and were coveted collector’s items—with many also being reproduced as copperplate prints and widely disseminated. His audience consisted not of the peasants who so often populated his pictures, but rather of the educated elite. Alongside The Painter and the Connoisseur, the Albertina owns five other drawings from Breughel’s own hand—meaning that alongside those of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin and the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, this is one of the world’s largest collections of his rare drawings, of which only around 60 are extant. The Albertina is also one of a very few collections worldwide that own the artist’s entire printed oeuvre—with many of them even present in multiple examples, including numerous rarities and even a few unique state proofs.  Most of the Albertina’s rich holdings of early Netherlandish, Dutch and Flemish art were acquired by Albertina founder Duke Albert and by the former Imperial Court Library. Bruegel’s work in the Albertina has been analysed over several years of research. In the process, numerous precious works have been rediscovered, works such as a large-format view of Antwerp by a Bruegel contemporary of which only one further copy is known. Many of these have never before been exhibited and were therefore given conservational attention for the very first time.  In light of the countless publications and exhibitions on Bruegel, it may come as a surprise that new finds of works by such a famous master can still occur—which is why it is all the more cheering to have discovered over 100 additional copies of prints by Bruegel, works previously unknown to researchers, that have now been restored for this exhibition with the utmost care. "Experiencing the Alps On his travels, he drew many views from life, so that it is said that, when he was in the Alps, he swallowed all the mountains and rocks and then spat these out again onto panels".Karel van Mander, 1604 In 1552, Pieter Bruegel traveled to Italy in the company of his friend, the cartographer Abraham Ortelius. After his return, he captured the impressions gathered during the journey over the Alps in his   Large Alpine Landscape  Soldiers at Rest (Milites Requiescentes) from The Large Landscapes The Penitent Magdalene (Magdalena Poenitens) from the series The Large Landscapes  and in the series of the Large Landscapes: wide panoramas of the alpine mountains featuring steep cliffs, meandering rivers, and tiny trees and houses. In view of this unprecedented closeness to reality, Bruegel’s biographer Karel van Mander admiringly wrote in 1604 about the artist’s ability to directly translate what he had seen into a picture. The Antwerp publisher Hieronymus Cock disseminated Bruegel’s drawings in the form of engravings. This meant a steady income for the young artist, for the revenue from reproducible prints was more lucrative than the sale of individual drawings. Bruegel’s alpine views enjoyed widespread renown and established his role model function as a draftsman of landscapes far beyond his death.  Engraved Ethics "Many of his bizarre and highly evocative compositions have been engraved into copper. On his deathbed, however, he instructed his wife to burn a large number of these fine and neatly drawn and inscribed satires, which are in some cases all too biting and imbued with sarcasm, either because he regretted having done them, or because he feared that they could have unpleasant consequences for his wife. "Karel van Mander, 1604 Whereas Bruegel’s earliest surviving drawings deal exclusively with landscape subjects, from the second half of the 1550s onward his artistic interest increasingly focused on man and his relationship to society: produced in close cooperation with the Antwerp publisher Hieronymus Cock, engraved illustrations of proverbs, genre scenes, and moralizing allegories became one of the artist’s trademarks. The criticism of foolery, excessive greed, and boundless egoism in particular were important themes in and around the proto-capitalist mercantile city of Antwerp. What all of the moralizing prints have in common is the fundamental significance of the accompanying captions, which provide an additional verbal level of interpretation. The interplay between image and text invites the viewer to evaluate and actively interpret both the thematic overlaps and omissions. Van Mander’s statement that the artist had these works burned before his death because of their socio-critical content must presumably be understood as an embellishing anecdote, yet it nevertheless testifies to the explosive nature ascribed to Bruegel’s pictures.  A New Bosch "Who is this new Hieronymus Bosch for the world, versed in imitating the master’s ingenious dreams with such great skill of paintbrush and pen –so that sometimes he surpasses even him." Dominicus Lampsonius, 1572 Beginning in the 1550s, Bruegel closely followed the pictorial inventions of the Netherlandish artist Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1450 –1516). The latter’s depictions of fantastic hybrid creatures and devils were well known far beyond the country’s borders and coveted collectables. In terms of the salability of his prints, it was thus a clever move by the young Bruegel to adopt his predecessor’s pictorial idiom. In collaboration with the publisher Hieronymus Cock, he led a revival of Bosch’s art and became its most important exponent. For example, the engraving  Big Fish Eat Little Fish, based on Bruegel’s drawing, contains an ambiguous reference to Bosch as the inventor of the motif, whereas Bruegel’s name was not yet mentioned at this early stage in his career.  Bosch, who already had had many followers during his lifetime, was widely imitated. Such themes as the Temptation of Saint Anthony, Christ’s Decent into Hell, and The Last Judgment offered ample opportunities to depict the monstrous creatures that were so popular on the art market. Unlike other followers, Bruegel ingeniously knew how to elaborate on Bosch’s language of form and motif, so that the humanist writer Dominicus Lampsonius praised him as the “new Hieronymus Bosch.” Diablerie and Drollery: The Seven Deadly Sins “He worked very much in the manner of Hieronymus Bosch, and was thus called by many “Pieter the Droll.” There are few pictures by his hand which even the serious viewer can contemplate without laughing—indeed, however reserved and morose he might be, he cannot help but at least smile”.Karel van Mander, 1604 The series of the Seven Deadly Sins, drawn in 1556 and 1557 and engraved in 1558, depicts Pride (Superbia),    Envy (Invidia), Wrath (Ira),    Avarice (Avaritia),    Sloth (Desidia),   Gluttony (Gula) and Lust (Luxuria)  as female personifications accompanied by their symbolic animals –peacock, turkey, bear, toad, donkey, pig, and rooster. The female protagonists, placed in the center of the composition, are shown against a high horizon and surrounded by figures, animals, and hybrid creatures exemplarily visualizing the respective vices in a number of narrative scenes. The personifications themselves similarly succumb to the sins they embody: for example, Invidia enviously devours her own heart; Ira wages a war; Desidia sleeps; and Gula guzzles. Whereas Bosch had created a sinister world full of sinfulness and often cruel punishment in his pictures, the works of Pieter Bruegel were always also marked by a comical component. For instance, the depiction of Gluttony shows a gourmand pushing his paunch in front of him in a wheelbarrow, while in the allegory of Sloth a sluggard emptying his bowels is supported by several small figures poking him with their lances. The crude humor of this scene would have been unthinkable before. Throughout his life, Bruegel remained eager to discuss in his pictures the fundamental moral problems of his politically and socially turbulent environment.  Drinking, Dancing, Reveling: The Peasants’ Kermises “Nature was wonderfully felicitous in her choice when, among the peasants of an obscure village in Brabant, she selected the quick-witted and humorous Pieter Bruegel to become a painter so that he could depict the peasants”.Karel van Mander, 1604 Images of peasants comprise only a small part of his oeuvre, and it was not Bruegel who invented the peasant genre. The first peasant pictures can already be found in the calendars of devotional literature and in prints by Albrecht Dürer. From the 1550s onwards, depictions of the rural population’s cheerful celebrations enjoyed great popularity on the Antwerp art market.  Pieter Bruegel stages thelively hustle and bustle of peasants in the center of a Flemish village, withanimals roaming freely and mingling with the revelers.  The target audience of the engravings was, of course, not the peasants depicted in them, but rather the urban population. Documenting local customs, these images simultaneously visualize them for the urban consumer in an aesthetically pleasing manner as both information and entertainment.  The art historiographer Karel van Mander reports that Bruegel frequently went to kermises dressed in a traditional peasant’s costume or mingled among the guests of a wedding party in order to capture rural life in pictures. Although this anecdote was more likely born from Van Mander’s fantasy, it has strongly influenced our idea of Bruegel as a masterly painter of crude but merry country life to this day.  In the Course of the Seasons In his famous season pictures, Bruegel directly picks up on the depictions of the months in medieval books of hours. His magnificent drawings Springand Summer served as designs for a planned series of engravings.  In Spring, flower beds are planted and sheep sheared, with courting couples in the right background suggesting a tender springtime atmosphere. Summer shows simple peasants working in the fields near a village: grain is cut, bundled, and carted off. Compared with the highly detailed kermis pictures, the depictions of the seasons reveal a new three-dimensionality and monumentality of the figures.  In Summer, a farmhand refreshes himself with a drink from an enormous jug. His bare foot and the blade of his scythe extend beyond the frame of the landscape scene to the zone of the legend, which lends the composition a high degree of immediacy. The vibrant, delicate pen drawings are distinctly different from the more rigid and schematic lines in the engravings for which they served as models. Bruegel was not able to realize the planned scenes for Autumn and Winter before his death. Therefore, in 1570, his Antwerp publisher Hieronymus Cock asked the landscapist Hans Bol to deliver the two missing sheets, so as to be able to publish the complete cycle of the four seasons.  In the Latin captions a connection is made between the seasons and the ages of man: from childhood in Spring and youth in Summer to maturity and old age in  Autumn  and Winter. On Art and Artists One might call drawing the father of painting, and indeed also the proper access or gateway to many other art forms, such as that of the goldsmith or the architect. The seven liberal arts could also not exist without it, for the art of drawing encompasses all things Karel van Mander, 1604 In August 1566, a storm of iconoclasm raged in the Netherlands, which brought with it a hitherto unknown wave of destruction of art. As the result of a ban on images demanded by the reformers (“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”), works of art with Christian themes were obliterated throughout Europe. Hence Bruegel was a witness to a turbulent era, and in his most famous drawing reflected upon the production of art and the artist’s role: in  The Painter and the Buyer he discusses creative work as an intellectual achievement that goes far beyond mere craftsmanship. Completely immersed in the creative act, the melancholically brooding artist despises the purely profit-oriented world of the purported art connoisseur, who over hastily reaches for his purse. Because of the insurmountable mental distance between them, the painter and the buyer are an unequal couple. That the painting the artist is in the process of completing is positioned outside the pictorial space invites the spectator to imagine the invisible masterpiece and thus imitate the mental process of creating a picture.  This satirical depiction is Bruegel’s most personal and at the same time most radical work. In the age of iconoclasm, addressing the significance and freedom of art exposed an explosive topicality. The fact that Bruegel dealt with the very theme in a graphic medium was probably due to the spontaneity drawing permitted. However, it also fits in with the idea that drawing was the basis of all other arts.  Biography Pieter Bruegel is born between1526 and 1530. His place of birth was a topic of dispute.  According to his biographer Karel van Mander, Bruegel was born in the village of Bruegel in the Duchy of Brabant. Around 1545he begins his artistic training, according to his early biographer Karel van Mander, in the Antwerp studio of Pieter Coecke van Aelst. In 1550/51, he collaborates on an altarpiece in the workshop of Claude Dorizi in Mechelen and becomes a member of the Antwerp painters’ guild as a “free master.”  From 1552 to 1554, Bruegel undertakes a journey to Italy (a common practice among artists of his time), traveling to the Apennine Peninsula via Lyon and as far as the Strait of Messina. In 1553, he spends time in Rome. His crossing of the Alps is documented by numerous drawings. In 1554,after his return to Antwerp, Bruegel begins an intensive collaboration with the publisher Hieronymus Cock. He increasingly focuses in his works on the theme of man and his relationship to society. Beginning in 1556, numerous pictures are also created in the grotesque style of Hieronymus Bosch. Beginning in 1559, Bruegel signs his paintings in capital Roman letters “BRUEGEL” to emphasize the humanistic aspiration of his art. In 1563, the artist moves from Antwerp to Brussels and marries Mayken Coecke van Aelst, the daughter of his presumptive teacher. One year later, his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger is born, followed in 1568 by his second son Jan. The move to the royal seat brings the artist into the direct proximity of potential customers.  In the last years of his career, the cast of figures in his works is increasingly reduced, and the individual becomes the main protagonist. In 1569, Bruegel dies in Brussels and is given a tomb in the church of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle. His sons, who both become painters, take over their father’s workshop and, through copies of his works, ensure the widespread renown of his oeuvre and a level of popularity that continues to this day.  Catalogue   Pieter Bruegel the Elder Summer, 1568 Pen and ink © Hamburger Kunsthalle / bpk, Photo: Christoph Irrgang Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Painter and the Buyer, ca. 1565 Pen and ink © The Albertina Museum, Vienna Pieter Bruegel the Elder Spring, 1565 Pen and ink © The Albertina Museum, Vienna Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Engravers: Jan and Lucas van Duetecum) The Kermis of Saint George, ca. 1559 Engraving © The Albertina Museum, Vienna Pieter Bruegel (Engraver: Pieter van der Heyden) Elck, ca. 1558 Engraving The Albertina Museum, Vienna Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Alchemist, 1558 Pen and ink bpk / Kupferstichkabinett, SMB / Jörg P. Anders Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Ass at School, 1556 Pen and brown ink Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Descent of Christ into Limbo, 1561 Pen and ink © The Albertina Museum, Vienna Pieter Bruegel the Elder Sloth, 1557 Pen and ink © The Albertina Museum, Vienna Pieter Bruegel the Elder Big Fish eat little Fish, 1556 Pen and ink © The Albertina Museum, Vienna Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Engravers: Jan and Lucas van Duetecum) Large Alpine Landscape, 1555-1556 Engraving © The Albertina Museum, Vienna Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Rabbit Hunt, 1560 Etching Hieronymus Bosch The Tree Man, ca. 1500 Pen and ink © The Albertina Museum, Vienna

Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy

October 7, 2017, 7:15 am

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Musée National-Picasso, Paris

10 October 2017 to 11 February 2018

Tate Modern
8 March – 9 September 2018

In March 2018 Tate Modern will stage its first ever solo exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work, one of the most significant shows the gallery has ever staged. The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy will take visitors on a month-by-month journey through 1932, a time so pivotal in Picasso’s life and work that it has been called his ‘year of wonders’. More than 100 outstanding paintings, sculptures and works on paper will demonstrate his prolific and restlessly inventive character. They will strip away common myths to reveal the man and the artist in his full complexity and richness.

1932 was an extraordinary year for Picasso, even by his own standards. His paintings reached a new level of sensuality and he cemented his celebrity status as the most influential artist of the early 20th century. Over the course of this year he created some of his best loved works, including

Pablo Picasso
Nude Woman in a Red Armchair (Femme nue dans un fauteuil rouge)
1932
Oil paint on canvas
1299 x 972 mm
Tate. Purchased 1953
© Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2017

Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, an anchor point of Tate’s collection, confident colour-saturated portraits and Surrealist experiments, including thirteen seminal ink drawings of the Crucifixion. His virtuoso paintings also riffed on the voluptuous sculptures he had produced some months before at his new country estate.

In his personal life, throughout 1932, Picasso kept a delicate balance between tending to his wife Olga Khokhlova and their 11-year-old son Paulo, and his passionate love affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, 28 years his junior. The exhibition will bring these complex artistic and personal dynamics to life with an unprecedented range of loans from collections around the world, including many record-breaking works held in private hands.

Highlights will include  

Pablo Picasso
Girl before a Mirror (Jeune fille devant un miroir)
1932
Oil paint on canvas
1623 x 1302 mm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim 1937
© Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2017

Girl before a Mirror, a signature painting that rarely leaves The Museum of Modern Art,

Pablo Picasso The Dream (Le Rêve) 1932. Private collection © Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2017

and the legendary The Dream, a virtuoso masterpiece depicting the artist’s muse in dreamy abandon, which has never been exhibited in the UK before.

1932 was a time of invention and reflection. Having recently turned 50, in collaboration with Christian Zervos, Picasso embarked on the first volume of what remains the most ambitious catalogue of an artist’s work ever made, listing more than 16,000 paintings and drawings. Meanwhile, a group of Paris dealers beat international competition to stage the first ever retrospective of his work, a major show that featured new paintings alongside earlier works in a range of different styles.

Realist portraits of Olga and Paulo revealed Picasso’s feelings of pride and tenderness for his family, while his sexually charged new paintings unveiled for the first time the presence of the secret woman in his life. This included the iconic trio of Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, Nude in a Black Armchair and The Mirror, widely regarded as a pinacle of Picasso’s artistic achievement of the inter-war period. This dazzling series will be reunited at Tate Modern for the first time in 85 years.

Picasso’s journeys between his homes in Boisgeloup and Paris capture the contradictions of his existence at this pivotal moment: a life divided between countryside retreat and urban bustle, established wife and recent lover, painting and sculpture, sensuality and darkness. The year ended traumatically when Marie-Thérèse fell seriously ill after swimming in the river Marne, losing most of her iconic blonde hair. In his final works of the year, Picasso transformed the event into scenes of rescue and rape, a dramatic finale to a year of love, fame and tragedy that pushed Picasso to the height of his creative powers.

Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions, Tate Modern and co-curator of the exhibition said: ‘Picasso famously described painting as “just another form of keeping a diary”. This exhibition will invite you to get close to the artist, to his ways of thinking and working, and to the tribulations of his personal life at a pivotal moment in his career. By showing stellar loans from public and private collections in the order in which they were made, this exhibition will allow a new generation to discover Picasso’s explosive energy, while surprising those who think they already know the artist.’

The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy will be open from 8 March to 9 September 2018 at Tate Modern in the Eyal Ofer Galleries. It will be curated by Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions, Tate Modern and Nancy Ireson, Curator, International Art, with Juliette Rizzi and Laura Bruni, Assistant Curators. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Musée National-Picasso, Paris, where it will be curated by Laurence Madeline from 10 October 2017 to 11 February 2018.

Pablo Picasso
Portrait of Olga in an Armchair (Portrait d’Olga dans un fauteuil)
1918
Oil paint on canvas
1300 x 888 mm
Musée National Picasso
© Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2017

 

Pablo Picasso
Reclining Nude (Femme nue couchée)
1932
Oil paint on canvas
1300 x 1610 mm
Private Collection
© Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2017

Pablo Picasso
The Crucifixion (La crucifixion)
1932
Ink on paper
345 x 505 mm
Musée National Picasso
© Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2017

 

Pablo Picasso
Bust of a Woman (Buste de femme)
1931
Cement
780 x 445 x 500 mm
Musée National Picasso
© Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2017

Pablo Picasso
The Rescue (Le sauvetage)
1932
Oil paint on canvas
1445 x 1122 x 77 mm
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler
© Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2017

Pablo Picasso
Nude in a Black Armchair (Nu au fauteuil noir)
1932
Oil paint on canvas
1613 x 1295 mm
Private Collection, USA
© Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2017

Pablo Picasso
The Mirror (Le miroir)
1932
Oil paint on canvas
1300 x 970 mm
Private Collection
© Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2017

Pablo Picasso
Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (Femme nue, feuilles et buste)
1932
Oil paint on canvas
1620 x 1300 mm
Private Collection
© Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2017

Pablo Picasso
Woman on the Beach (Nu sur la plage)
1932
Oil paint on canvas
330 x 400 mm
The Penrose Collection© Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2017

Frozen Lives: Karl and Anna Kuerner, Andrew Wyeth's Iconic Couple

October 7, 2017, 8:19 am

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Frozen Lives: Karl and Anna Kuerner, Andrew Wyeth's Iconic Couple

Author: LuLynne Streeter
Publisher Schiffer Publishing, Ltd 

Size:5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″ | 27 color and b/w images | 144pp
ISBN13: 978-0-7643-5415-1 

 Binding:hard cover |$19.99

To their children, Karl and Anna were “ordinary” people.To the rest of the world, they were the extraordinary faces immortalized by Andrew Wyeth. Their story shows they were also far more complicated. Reflecting unprecedented access granted to the author by the Kuerner family, this compellingly readable book sheds light on the complex impacts the Kuerners had on Andrew Wyeth. 

Even as a young boy growing up in Pennsylvania's rural Brandywine Valley, he was fascinated by his intriguing neighbors, and they would be a major source of Wyeth's inspiration for more than seventy years. Karl Kuerner, hardened by poverty and his service in the German Army during World War I, faced demons of anger and frustration. Anna had her own battles, sometimes wandering the farm muttering to herself in German, between periods in the insane asylum. 

More on now iconic paintings focused on his neighbors, the Kuerners: examples are  

Evening at Kuerners (1970);  

The Kuerners (1971);

and Spring (1979).



 

• Andrew Wyeth (1917 — 2009, USA) The Kuerner farm. watercolor. sketch

Included are family photos as well as color images of some of the major Wyeth paintings that the Kuerners and their farmscape inspired.




About the Author

 
LuLynne Streeter is an award-winning author, poet, journalist, and photographer. Raised in the Southwest, she has traveled extensively throughout the United States and Mexico. The compelling story of the Kuerners and their extraordinary experiences with artist Andrew Wyeth captured Streeter's imagination and passion several years ago, leading to the detailed research that resulted in Frozen Lives. She currently lives and writes in Galveston, Texas. 

Also see: http://ashorthistoryblog.com/the-neighbors-whisper-about-the-germans-in-the-icy-white-house-up-on-the-hill/

Basic Instincts: Joseph Highmore

October 8, 2017, 9:20 am

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A highly successful artist and Governor of the Foundling Hospital, Joseph Highmore (1692-1780) is best known as a portrait painter of the Georgian middle class. However, during the 1740s Highmore’s art radically shifted as he turned his focus to societal attitudes towards women and sexuality. Curated by Highmore expert, Dr Jacqueline Riding, Basic Instincts explores this ten-year period and his disruptive commentary, reflecting his engagement with the work of the new Foundling Hospital and its mission to support desperate and abused women. On public display in the UK for the first time is a remarkable painting that still retains the power to shock. Joseph Highmore, Pamela in the Bedroom with Mrs Jewkes and Mr B, 1743-44 In 1744 Highmore created a series of 12 paintings on his own initiative inspired by Samuel Richardson’s international bestseller, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. First published in 1740, the novel’s sixth edition of 1742 included illustrations by Hubert Gravelot and Francis Hayman. However, unlike the commissioned illustrations, Highmore’s paintings explicitly make reference to the abuse and sexual violence at the heart of Richardson’s story of a virtuous young maidservant fighting off the unwanted advances of her predatory master. Highmore and Richardson became friends, and Highmore subsequently illustrated Richardson’s masterpiece, Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady, whose tragic heroine avoids a forced marriage, but dies having been abandoned by her family, duped by an admirer, drugged and raped. Unlike William Hogarth, Highmore’s representation of Georgian society favoured realism over broad humour and theatricality, so his nuanced articulation of social attitudes towards women and sexuality means that modern audiences can miss his challenging commentary. However, at the heart of Basic Instincts is a remarkable painting that has never before been publicly displayed in the UK and which does not fail to shock.   The Angel of Mercy (c.1746) depicts a desperate mother in the act of killing her baby, with the distant Foundling Hospital presented as an alternative solution. This painting is unique in western art for showing maternal infanticide as a contemporary reality. The fashionably dressed mother is free from direct biblical or mythological allusion, unlike  Joseph Highmore, Hagar and Ishmael, 1746 Hagar and Ishmael (1746) the large canvas Highmore donated to the newly established Hospital, which represents an Old Testament story of maternal abandonment. Instead The Angel of Mercy confronts the ‘elephant in the room’ in terms of the Hospital’s campaign; that without Christian compassion and practical support, even respectable women will be driven to murder. Basic Instincts curator Jacqueline Riding said: ‘This is the first major Highmore exhibition for 50 years and nowhere can his life and work have greater resonance than at the Foundling Museum: an organisation at the forefront of the public display, interpretation and appreciation of early-Georgian art. Setting The Angel of Mercy, the Pamela paintings and Hagar and Ishmael among Highmore’s most tender portraits of mothers and children, family and friends, uniquely demonstrates the artist’s depth and variety, while indicating the true breadth of British Art in a period still labelled “The Age of Hogarth”’. Foundling Museum director Caro Howell said: ‘Basic Instincts demonstrates that in the eighteenth century, the Foundling Hospital’s impact on contemporary artists went far beyond a simple donation of art. For Joseph Highmore it sparked a radical engagement with the issue of women’s vulnerability to sexual assault and society’s unwillingness to support them, culminating in a work of quite exceptional power.’ Catalogue Basic Instincts explores the limits and narratives around female respectability in Georgian society, and reveals the complexity of Highmore’s engagement with issues surrounding women’s vulnerability to male exploitation. The first major publication dedicated to Joseph Highmore and written by Dr Jacqueline Riding will be published by Paul Holberton publishing to coincide with the exhibition. The exhibition is supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. The Artist’s Family (c. 1730), Joseph Highmore. © Private collection / Bridgeman Images Mr Oldham and his Guests (c. 1735–45), Joseph Highmore. © Tate, London 2015 Joseph Highmore, The Vigor Family, 1744 © Victoria and Albert Museum.

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FRANCOIS I AND DUTCH ART

October 8, 2017, 9:28 am

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October 18, 2017 – January 15, 2018
Louvre -Hall Napoléon
 

François I’s taste for Italian art is well known; his patronage is essentially identified with the creation of an Italian school at Fontainebleau, but his reign was equally marked by a vigorous tradition of Dutch artists settling in France.

The best-known Northern artists active in France during is reign—Jean Clouet and Corneille de la Haye known as Corneille de Lyon—were portrait specialists. The exhibition offers an exceptional presentation of the painted oeuvre of Jean Clouet (only around twenty panels are confirmed to be by the artist), as well as a few rare preparatory drawings, sketched from life.

As well as Paris, the Norman, Picard, Champagne, and Burgundian centers were swept by a wave of Northern influences—from Antwerp, Brussels, Leiden, Haarlem—in the art of manuscript illumination and religious painting. Recent research has gradually revealed painters unjustly consigned to oblivion: Godefroy le Batave, Noel Bellemare, Grégoire Guérard, and Bartholomeus Pons are only some of the artists who excelled in media as diverse as illumination, painting, stained glass, tapestry, and sculpture. The king made extensive purchases of tapestries, gold and silver objets d’art, and Flemish paintings. A whole segment of the French Renaissance is now resurfacing; and this exhibition sets out ro reveal its many and varied facets, its extravagance, and its monumental character.

Jean Clouet, François I, Department of Paintings, Musée du Louvre © RMN - Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) /Michel Urtado

• Jean Clouet, Portrait équestre de François 1er 

The Tryptich of the Adoration of the Magi Jan de Beer 1515

Power Plays at the Louvre

October 8, 2017, 2:09 pm

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The Petite Galerie exhibition for 2017–2018 focuses on the connection between art and political power. Governing entails self presentation as a way of affirming authority, legitimacy and prestige. Thus art in the hands of patrons becomes a propaganda tool; but it can also be a vehicle for protest and subverting the established order. 

Spanning the period from antiquity up to our own time, forty works from the Musée du Louvre, the Musée National du Château de Pau, the Château de Versailles and the Musée des Beaux-arts de la Ville de Paris illustrate the evolution of the codes behind the representation of political power.

The exhibition is divided into four sections:

• “Princely Roles”: The first room presents the king’s functions— priest, builder, warrior/protector—as portrayed through different artistic media. Notable examples are Philippe de Champaigne’s Louis XIII, Léonard Limosin’s enamel Crucifixion Altarpiece, and the Triad of Osorkon II from ancient Egypt.
• “Legitimacy through Persuasion”: The focus in the second room is on the emblematic figure of Henri IV, initially a king in search of legitimacy, then a model for the Bourbon heirs from Louis XVI to the Restoration. Features include sculptures by Barthélémy Prieur and François-Joseph Bosio, and paintings by Frans Pourbus the Younger, Ingres, and others.
• “The Antique Model”: The theme of the third room is the equestrian statue. The Louvre is home to several remarkable examples, among them the Barberini Ivory leaf, a bronze of Charles the Bald, and François Girardon’s Louis XIV.
• “The Insignia of Power”: In the fourth room majestic portraits of monarchs, including Antoine-François Callet’s Louis XVI,François Gérard’s Napoleon I and Franz-Xaver Winterhalter’s Louis Philippe, are accompanied by the regalia used during the coronation of the kings of France. This final section also highlights the dramatic historical and representational changes that came with the French Revolution.

“By providing keys to the observation and explanation of different artworks, the Petite Galerie sets out to make the visit to the museum an enjoyable and enlightening experience”, says Jean-Luc Martinez, president-director of the Musée du Louvre. Informative labels and digital touchscreen displays encourage attention to detail and help to establish context. 

In addition, five themed tours of the Louvre’s permanent collection are proposed:
       1) Royal Roles and Representational Codes in the Ancient East,
       2) The Pharaoh,
       3) The Powers of the Roman emperor,
       4) The Islamic Sovereign,
       5) The King as Artist and Patron.

Exhibition curators: Paul Mironneau, Director of the Musée National et Domaine du Château de Pau; Jean-Luc Martinez, President-Director of the Musée du Louvre

• Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Henri IV recevant l’ambassadeur d’Espagne, 1817, huile sur toile. Paris, Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris © RMN-Grand Palais, Agence Bulloz.

Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael about 1500

October 8, 2017, 2:15 pm

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National Gallery 
1 September 2017 – January 2018


This autumn there is unique opportunity to explore the complex relationship between three giants of Renaissance art in a special display at the National Gallery.

Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael around 1500 brings together eight works by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Raffaello Santi, or Raphael; three artists who were keenly aware of each other’s work and at times intensely rivalrous. Together they are credited as fathers of a new, dynamic, monumental, and psychologically incisive approach to art – the High Renaissance.
National Gallery Director, Dr Gabriele Finaldi, says:

“This display of great masterpieces by Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael – the triumvirate of the High Renaissance – could only happen at the National Gallery. The combination of our own astoundingly rich holdings and the exceptional loan from the Royal Academy of Michelangelo’s marbletondo makes this a completely unique event.”

• Michelangelo, 'The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist ('The Taddei Tondo')', about 1504–05 © Royal Academy of Arts, London

The centrepiece of this free display is 'The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John', also known as the 'Taddei Tondo' (1504–05). The work, the only marble sculpture by Michelangelo in the UK, was an exceptional loan from the Royal Academy to the critically acclaimed Credit Suisse Exhibition: Michelangelo & Sebastiano (15 March – 25 June 2017). The sculpture currently remains on loan to the National Gallery, providing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore the connections between these three Renaissance masters.

In 'Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael around 1500' the 'Taddei Tondo' is presented alongside seven choice works from the National Gallery Collection to tell the story of how these three artists inspired each other in their revolutionary approaches to art around the turn of the 16th century: how they learnt from each other, stole from each other, and worked in opposition to each other – respectful friends and acrimonious rivals.

Matthias Wivel, the National Gallery’s Curator of 16th-century Italian Paintings says:

“For a museum that doesn’t normally have sculpture at its disposal, it is fantastic to have on hand one of the greatest in Britain, not least because it complements the National Gallery’s rich holdings by these three giants of Western European art so well. Sculpture is so crucial to the development of visual art at this time and the ‘Taddei Tondo’ provides a key to understanding Michelangelo’s evolution as an artist, following but also rejecting Leonardo’s example, as well as for the young Raphael’s development of a more expressive, dynamic style in synthesis with what he was simultaneously learning from Leonardo.”

The other Michelangelo works featured in 'Around 1500' are

The Virgin and Child with Saint John and Angels ('The Manchester Madonna')

and The Entombment.

Leonardo  is represented by

The Virgin with the Infant Saint John the Baptist adoring the Christ Child accompanied by an Angel ('The Virgin of the Rocks')

 

and The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist ('The Burlington House Cartoon’).

There are three works by Raphael in the display –

 

The Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Nicholas of Bari ('The Ansidei Madonna'),



Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and

 

The Madonna of the Pinks ('La Madonna dei Garofani').

Of Tuscan origin, Leonardo returned to Florence in 1499 after more than fifteen years in Milan, where among other things he had painted two versions of 'The Virgin of the Rocks', the second of which is displayed here. In 1501 he exhibited to the public a now lost full-size drawing – or ‘cartoon’ – of 'The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne'. It would have been closely related to The Burlington House Cartoon, exhibited here.

Leonardo’s animated, mobile figures impressed his younger compatriot Michelangelo who adapted them for his marble 'Taddei Tondo'. Its sense of psychological purpose and disquiet is Michelangelo’s own, however, and runs counter to Leonardo’s dispassionate, otherworldly approach. A deep animosity developed between them.

Hailing from Urbino and trained in Umbria, the young Raphael made his name with such works as 'The Ansidei Madonna'. In Florence from around 1504–5, Raphael quickly assimilated Leonardo’s style, as seen here in The Madonna of the Pinks and the Saint Catherine. Similarly, Raphael made drawings after Michelangelo’s works, including the 'Taddei Tondo', integrating Michelangelo’s emotive dynamism into his own harmonious, idealised artistic style. Friendly at this stage of their lives, Michelangelo and Raphael would shortly become fierce rivals in Rome, competing for commissions from successive Popes and their courts.

Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer

October 9, 2017, 9:18 am

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Exhibition Dates:	November 13, 2017–February 12, 2018
Exhibition Location:	The Met Fifth Avenue

•  Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564). Studies for the Three Labors of Hercules, ca. 1530. Red chalk, 10 11/16 x 16 5/8 in. (27.2 x 42.2 cm). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017, www.royalcollection.org.uk

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), a towering genius in the history of Western art, will be the subject of a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art this fall. During his long life, Michelangelo was celebrated for the excellence of his disegno, the power of drawing and invention that provided the foundation for all the arts. For his mastery of drawing, design, sculpture, painting, and architecture, he was called Il Divino (“the divine one”) by his contemporaries. His powerful imagery and dazzling technical virtuosity transported viewers and imbued all of his works with a staggering force that continues to enthrall us today.  

Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer will present a stunning range and number of works by the artist: approximately 150 of his drawings, three of his marble sculptures, his earliest painting,



 (“The Torment of Saint Anthony”),

his wood architectural model for a chapel vault, as well as a substantial body of complementary works by other artists for comparison and context.

 Currently, the Met has three works by Michelangelo: Two drawings (“Studies for the Libyan Sibyl,” “Design for the Tomb of Pope Julius II della Rovere”) and a sculpture, “Young Archer,” which is on loan from the French government. A spokeswoman for the museum said the two drawings were typically not exhibited because of their sensitivity to the light, but they will be part of the show.

Among the extraordinary international loans are the complete series of masterpiece drawings he created for his friend Tommaso de’Cavalieri and a monumental cartoon for his last fresco in the Vatican Palace. Selected from 54 public and private collections in the United States and Europe, the exhibition will examine Michelangelo’s rich legacy as a supreme draftsman and designer.

• Michelangelo Buonarroti, Italian, Caprese 1475-1564 Rome. Portrait of Andrea Quaratesi, 1532. Drawing, black chalk. The British Museum, London.

Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer is organized by Carmen C. Bambach, Curator in The Met’s Department of Drawings and Prints.

• Michelangelo Buonarroti, Italian, Caprese 1475-1564 Rome. Unfinished cartoon for a Madonna and Child, 1525-30. Black and red chalk, white gouache, brush and brown wash. Casa Buonarroti, Florence.
  

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue written by Carmen C. Bambach that will include essays by a team of leading Michelangelo scholars. It will be published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.

European Old Masters: 16th – 19th Century

October 10, 2017, 10:00 am

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Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre,   
782 Kingsway, Gymea NSW Australia

28 September  – 3 December 2017 

European old masters including  magnificent works by some of the leading  Italian, French and Britishartists of the High Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo and Romantic periods are on loan from the Art Gallery of New South Wales to Hazelhurst Regional Gallery for the exhibition European  Old Masters: 16th  – 19th Century . 

• Jacopo Amigoni Bacchus and Ariadne c1740-42. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gift of James Fairfax AC 1993. Photo: AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.

Despite its early ambitions to collect works bythe  European masters, The ArtGallery of New South Wales did not in fact start collecting old masters until the 1950. Between 1951 and 1976, the Gallery acquired an outstanding group of English 18th - century portraits,  including works by three of the leading painters of the age: William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough and  Joshua Reynolds. During the se years the Gallery also purchased landscapes and subject pictures  representative of British Neo - Classicism and Romanticism by artists such as Richard Wilson, John Glover,  Richard Westall, William Hamilton and Francis Danby.  

The extraordinary donation by James Fairfax AC during the 1990s significantly enriched the Gallery’s holdings of European old masters, particularly in the area of 18th - century French and Italian art such as the works by Nicolas de Largillierre and  Canaletto.  The collection has continued to develop with the  acquisition of major Italian Renaissance and Baroque works  such as the work of Giulio Cesare Procaccini,  also exhibited in  European Old masters: 16th - 19th Century . 


Sir Charles Lock Eastlake
 An antique rural scene
 1823-1824
oil on canvas
 67.3 x 90.3 cm canvas; 100.4 x 124.0 x 14.0 cm frame Bequest of Amy Alfreda Vickery 1942

 


William Hogarth 
Dr Benjamin Hoadly M D
early 1740 
oil on canvas 
75.9 x 63.5 cm stretcher; 98.5 x 86.2 x 5.0 cm frame Purchased 1951

 

Joseph Wright of Derby 
Margaret Oxenden
 circa 1757-circa 1759 
oil on canvas
126.3 x 102.0 cm stretcher; 151.7 x 127.0 x 7.5 cm frame Purchased 1952

 


Sir Joshua Reynolds
 Stephen Croft
 1760 
oil on canvas
76.2 x 63.6 cm stretcher; 95.5 x 82.0 x 7.0 cm frame Purchased 1965


Bernardo Strozzi
 The release of St Peter
circa 1635
oil on canvas
125.5 x 114.0 cm stretcher; 149.5 x 138.8 x 7.0 cm frame Purchased 1965

 

Thomas Gainsborough 
Samuel Kilderbee
 circa 1758 
circa 1783 {partially repainted}
oil on canvas
76.3 x 63.7 cm stretcher; 94.5 x 82.5 x 9.5 cm frame Purchased 1966

 

Francis Danby
 The three sisters of Phaethon weeping over the tomb of their brother 1841-1845
 oil on canvas
63.5 x 91.6 cm stretcher; 76.0 x 104.0 x 7.5 cm frame
 Purchased 1970

  

Sir Henry Raeburn
 John Spottiswoode of Spottiswoode 
circa 1820
oil on canvas
128.6 x 102.7 cm canvas; 151.5 x 126.0 x 10.2 cm frame Purchased with the William and Mary Farnsworth gift fund 1971


Sir Joshua Reynolds
 James Maitland, 7th Earl of Lauderdale
 1759-1760
oil on canvas
239 x 148.5 cm stretcher; 263.5 x 172.0 x 9.0 cm frame
Purchased with an anonymous gift fund for an 18th century portrait 1976

 

Jean-Marc Nattier 
Madame de La Porte
 1754
 oil on canvas
 80.8 x 64.1 approx original canvas; 81.7 x 65.4 cm stretcher; 111.0 x 94.5 x 10.0 cm frame
 Gift of William Bowmore OBE 1992


Nicolas de Largillierre
 Portrait of an officer
 circa 1714-circa 1715
oil on canvas
65.5 x 54.1 cm original canvas; 65.9 x 55.1 cm stretcher; 90.0 x 78.8 x 10.0 cm frame
Gift of James Fairfax AC 1995

 


Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo
 The apotheosis of a pope and martyr 
circa 1780-1785
 oil on canvas
83.5 x 45.0 x 1.5 cm stretcher; 99.5 x 61.3 x 5.5 cm frame Gift of James Fairfax AC 1995

 


Canaletto
 The Piazza San Marco, Venice 1742-1746 oil on canvas
6 7.5 x 119.0 cm stretcher; 85.0 x 136.0 x 9.0 cm frame Gift of James Fairfax AC 1996

Reflections: Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites

October 10, 2017, 11:12 am

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National Gallery

2 October 2017 – 2 April 2018

“The finest picture in the world” – Edward Burne-Jones in 1897 about 'The Arnolfini Portrait'

This autumn, one of the most celebrated paintings in the National Gallery,

• Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Giovanni (?) Arnolfini and his Wife and ‘The Arnolfini Portrait’, 1434 (detail). Oil on oak, 82.2 x 60 cm. National Gallery, London © The National Gallery, London.

Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait, will be exhibited for the first time alongside works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its successors. Focusing on the profound influence this 15th-century masterpiece had on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Reflections will shed light on the different ways these young British artists of the 19th century responded to the painting and one of its most distinctive features, the convex mirror.

Featuring key loans from Tate’s Pre-Raphaelite collection, including





 Sir John Everett Millais’s 'Mariana' (1851),



Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 'The Girlhood of Mary Virgin' (1848–9),

William Holman Hunt’s 'The Awakening Conscience' (1853), (below) and William Morris’s 'La Belle Iseult' (1858), (below) the only completed easel painting he produced, this landmark exhibition provides a unique opportunity to view these paintings next to the work that inspired them.

Co-curated by Susan Foister, Deputy Director and Curator of Early Netherlandish, German, and British Paintings at the National Gallery and Alison Smith, Lead Curator of British Art to 1900 at Tate, the exhibition will show a wide range of exhibits from public and private collections, including one of the convex mirrors owned by Rossetti (Kelmscott Manor, Gloucestershire, UK), another used by William Orpen (Private Collection), as well as early photographs (Wilson Centre for Photography), drawings, archival exhibits surrounding the acquisition of 'The Arnolfini Portrait', works on paper, and a Victorian reproduction of

van Eyck’s masterwork 'The Ghent Altarpiece' by the Arundel Society (1868–71, The Maas Gallery, London).

Acquired in 1842, when the National Gallery was just 18 years old, 'The Arnolfini Portrait' captivated the Victorian audience, as is demonstrated in an article dedicated to the painting in 'The Illustrated London News'. At that time the work was a rare example of Early Netherlandish painting that could be seen in this country – to this day, the National Gallery remains the only UK public collection that holds works by Jan van Eyck.

In 1848, disenchanted with the contemporary academic approach to painting they had been taught as students at the Royal Academy School of Art – which was at that time situated in the east wing of the National Gallery building in Trafalgar Square – a group of young artists founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The name reflected their preference for Late Medieval and Early Renaissance art that came ‘before Raphael’.



William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti all became fascinated with 'The Arnolfini Portrait' which hung just a few rooms away from where they studied. The refined oil painting technique and its use of a mirror inspired these artists to the extent that critics of the day dubbed the Pre-Raphaelites the ‘pre-Van Eycks’ acknowledging the transformative effect the picture had on their art and vision.

The convex mirror, which in 'The Arnolfini Portrait' famously shows a reflection of van Eyck himself, left a lasting impression on the Pre-Raphaelites. They adapted the device as a means of exploring ideas of distortion, doubling, and reflection, but also as a way to convey a complex psychological drama. The exhibition bringstogether paintings featuring this artistic device, including

 


Hunt’s 'Awakening Conscience' (1853, Tate), which depicts a woman and her lover – here the mirror is used to reflect a view out of the window, an allusion to the woman’s possible redemption from a life of shame. Many of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s paintings feature female figures in interior scenes that incorporate the mirror device, such as



Rossetti’s 'Lucrezia Borgia' (1860–1, Tate)



and Holman Hunt’s 'Il Dolce far Niente' (1866, Private Collection).

The Arthurian legend of 'The Lady of Shalott' captured the imagination of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which became especially popular thanks to the poem of the same title by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Depictions of the story in which the heroine is cursed to only look upon the outside world through a mirror, were frequent among Pre-Raphaelite painters, and 'Reflections' will feature interpretations by Hunt (about 1886–1905, Manchester City Art Galleries) (below),



John William Waterhouse (1894, Leeds Art Gallery),

 

and Elizabeth Siddall (1853, The Maas Gallery, London).

Other motifs from 'The Arnolfini Portrait' appropriated by the Pre-Raphaelites include a pair of pointed slippers in

 

William Holman Hunt

The Lady of Shalott, about 1886-1905

Oil on wood

44.4 x 34.1 cm

Manchester Art Gallery

© Manchester City Galleries/Bridgeman Images

Hunt’s 'The Lady of Shalott' (1886–1905, Manchester City Art Galleries)



and the hanging bed drapery and oranges in William Morris’s 'La Belle Iseult' (1858, Tate).

Morris was passionate about Early Netherlandish painting and in particular, van Eyck. He referenced the punning inscription on the frame of

van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?), a possible self-portrait which entered the National Gallery Collection in 1851 and is displayed in the exhibition, which reads ‘Als Ich Can’ (As I can). Morris adapted this as: If I can and featured it in one of his earliest embroideries and even had it inscribed on the stained-glass window of his home, Red House, in Bexleyheath.


In the 17th century 'The Arnolfini Portrait' belonged to the Spanish Royal Collection and is likely to have been seen by Velázquez providing inspiration for his monumental





'Las Meninas' (1656, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid).



John Phillip’s Partial copy of ‘Las Meninas’, (1862, Royal Academy of Arts, London)

 


depicts a cropped view of the Infanta Margarita and her maid of honour, and hanging above them is a rectangular mirror reflecting a double portrait of the King and Queen of Spain.

By the 1860s the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had disbanded as the artists began to diversify their individual interests, some adopting a more painterly style similar to Old Masters such as Velázquez. However, van Eyck’s convex mirror remained an important source of inspiration for the next generation of artists, including Mark Gertler, William Orpen, and Charles Haslewood Shannon.


These artists continued to incorporate the mirror into their self-portraits and in domestic interiors well into the early 1900s, as seen in

 

Orpen’s 'The Mirror' (1900, Tate)

 

and Gertler’s 'Still Life with Self-Portrait' (1918, Leeds Art Gallery).

Co-curator of the exhibition Susan Foister says:

“This fascinating story has never before been presented in an exhibition and needed extensive collaboration between two institutions, the National Gallery and Tate, to make it happen. It has been a real pleasure to work with co-curator Alison Smith, Lead Curator of British Art to 1900 at Tate, who first proposed the idea for this exhibition.”

Director of the National Gallery, Gabriele Finaldi says:

“Van Eyck’s 'The Arnolfini Portrait' had a mesmerising effect on the young Pre-Raphaelites who saw it at the National Gallery. Fascinated by its truth to nature and its elegant symbolism, they brought about a revolution in British painting.”

• Simeon Solomon,'A Youth Relating Tales to Ladies',  1870

Exhibition organised by the National Gallery in collaboration with Tate Britain.

Publication

Title: Reflections: Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites
Author: Alison Smith, with Caroline Bugler, Susan Foister, and Anna Koopstra
104 pages, 48 colour and 16 black and white illustrations, 270 x 210 mm (portrait)
Paperback
Published by National Gallery Company. Distributed by Yale University Press

Fascinating review

Sotheby’s Paris 19--22 October MAGRITTE – MONET – PICABIA – MAN RAY - DAL I- ERNST

October 10, 2017, 11:42 am

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A first in Paris.   Sotheby’s is presenting a new saleon 19 October dedicated toworks by artists who left a powerful mark on modern times, from the emergence of the avant - garde to the present day.  

The many works on sale include a magisterial piece by René Magritte – one of the artist's very first Surrealist paintings; a magnificent picture by Claude Monet , whose radical modernity already foreshadows 20 th centuryabstraction ; a view of  Fernand Léger 's studio, and various iconic works by  Man Ray from a private  Italian collection. Abstraction and the French post - war school are also represented, with a major painting by Nicolas de Staël from the celebrated Mellon collection.




RENE MAGRITTE Dating from 1926,  Le Toit du monde ( estimate:  € 1,5 00,0 00 - 2 ,0 00,0 00) belongs to  Magritte 's first cycle of  S urrealist paintings .  F or the first time at auction, this enigmatic painting with  little trace of  any  human figure was the first  of his painting to employ  the  image  of the  human circulatory  system, a stylistic figure found  in some of his most iconic  pieces of the  next few years. With a  remarkable provenance ( including  Eugene Flagey, Carlo Ponti  and Sophia Loren,  and  Franco Russoli),  this painting draws the viewer  right into  the poetic enigma of  Magritte 's work ,  for whom "art  should evoke the mystery without which the world would not exist." 
  

FRANCIS PICABIA Painted in 1929,  Artémis ( estimate: € 500, 000 - 700,000 ) is a remarkable example of the iconic series of Transparences  Picabia  began  i n 1927. These were an immediate success with both collectors and the  Surrealist circle.  Here, superimposing several motifs and images, the artist draws viewers into a work where different  levels of interpretation are discernible . This complex, magisterial work,  making its first - ever  appearance  on the market, immerses us in the veryheart of Picabia 's artistic explorations .  

 
ROBERTO MATTA Les Séparés vivants ( estimate:  € 30 ,000 - 500,000 ),  painted at the end of the war,  reflect s the artist's aim  to create a new representation of humanity, a "new  image of mankind" , whose sources  lay  in primitive art  and the psyche. Deeply marked by the events of the  war, Matta 's art at this time  took on a mor e incisive  line, echoing the suffering and fear experienced by  humanity .  A t the same time,  his  work  evinced a  new  kind of freedom in gestural and chromatic terms, and  expressed his aspirations after this sombre time . This  painting is one of the most accomp lished pieces in this  highly sought - after period of his work .  



NICOLAS DE STAËL In May1952 Nicolas de Staël rediscovered the Southof France and its dazzling light. The Mediterranean left an indelible mark on him, and his palette changed, taking on brighter, more intense colours. Méditerranée ( estimate:  € 700,000 - 1,000,000 ) shows  how brilliantly the painter evokes the atmosphere of  the South and alternates our perception of colours  and volumes.  Powerful, simplified forms now  structure the painting's c omposition , just as the coloured contrasts structured Monet's Marine , inspired by  the sea in  Normand y . 


MAN RAY The sale ends witha remarkable group of fifteen works by Man Ray, which come from the Sergio Tomasinelli collection   These were all bought from Luciano Anselmino, who was not onlyMan Ray 's dealer at the end of his life  but also a close friend. They provide a magnificent overview of Man Ray's art  in all its diversity. 



Among them is thetouching Tearful Woman  (estimate:  € 300,000 - 400, 00  , a black and white photographic print  hand - coloured  by Man Ray. The  only other extant  copy of this sensual and captivating image was sold a few months ago for over $2 million. 

 

Other notable works include Orchestra(estimate:  € 180,000 - 250 ,000 ) 



and Decanter  ( estimate:  € 180,000 - 250,000 ) , which form part of Man Ray 's revolutionary Revolving Doors series, together with a whole range of the Surrealistobjects that made the artist famous and popular .  

.

 

IMPRESSIONIST AND MODERN ART AUCTION ON 22 OCTOBER 2017 

 On  22 October, the sale of Impressionist and modern art of Paris, from  the dawn of Impressionism  to the  early 1950s,  provides a select overview of art within and outside France, with great modern artists like Fernand Léger, Raoul Dufy and Marc Chagall. The latter will be represented by a fine group of works  including   



Le Bouquet Blanc  (estimate:  € 800,0 00 - 1, 200,0 00 ),a magnificent synthesis of the most  fundamental motifs in his work. 



A drawing by Egon Schiele (Femme debout, estimate:  € 200,000 - 250,000 ) will be on offer. 

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Thomas Cole's Journey: Atlantic Crossings

October 13, 2017, 4:40 pm

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Metropolitan Museum of Art on January 30, 2018

 
National Gallery London in June 2018.

A 2018 exhibition will establish Thomas Cole as a major artist of the 19th century within a global context. The artist's most iconic works, including The Oxbow (1836) and his five-part series The Course of Empire (1834–36) will be presented for the first time as a direct outcome of his transatlantic career.

Consummate works by J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, among others, will reveal Cole's engagement with European art, while masterworks by Asher B. Durand and Frederic E. Church will demonstrate Cole's extraordinary legacy in establishing a school of 19th-century landscape art in America.

Thomas Cole's Journey: Atlantic Crossings opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on January 30, 2018, and travels to the National Gallery London in June 2018.

With his work seldom seen outside the USA, this exhibition establishes British-born Cole (1801–1848) as a major global figure in 19th-century landscape art.

It also marks the first time that Cole’s monumental cycle of paintings The Course of Empire (1833–36, New York Historical Society) has been shown in the UK, and provides a vivid new context for




Cole’s The Oxbow (1836, The Metropolitan Museum of Art); a founding masterpiece of American landscape painting

Thomas Cole's Journey is curated by Elizabeth Kornhauser, Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor in the History of Art, Yale University, and Christopher Riopelle, Curator of Post 1800 Paintings, National Gallery, London.

 

The Course of Empire – The Savage State;  

 

The Course of Empire – The Arcadian or Pastoral State;  

 

The Course of Empire – The Consummation of Empire; 

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire Destruction, 1836

(The New-York Historical Society )

 

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire Desolation, 1836

(The New-York Historical Society )

Catalogue

 

Thomas Cole (1801–1848), arguably the greatest American landscape artist of his generation, is presented here in a new light: as an international figure, born in England, and in dialogue with the major landscape painters of the age, including J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. Cole traveled in Europe from 1829 to 1832. Thomas Cole’s Journey reexamines his seminal works of 1832–36—notably The Oxbow and Course of Empire—as a culminating response to his experiences of British art and society and of Italian landscape painting. These, combined with Cole’s passion for the American wilderness and his horror of the industrial revolution in Britain, led him to create works that offer a distinctive, even dissident, response to the economic and political rise of the United States and the ecological changes then underway. This groundbreaking book also discusses Cole’s influence on later artists, from Frederic Edwin Church to Ed Ruscha. 

Drawn from Nature & on Stone: The Lithographs of Fitz Henry Lane

October 13, 2017, 4:54 pm

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Cape Ann Museum

Oct. 7, 2017 — March 4, 2018

Drawn from Nature & on Stone will be the first ever comprehensive exhibition focusing on 19th century American artist Fitz Henry Lane (1804–1865) as a printmaker. Georgia Barnhill, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts Emerita at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA, is serving as guest curator and worked closely with the Cape Ann Museum in organizing this special show. The exhibition, exhibition catalog and related programming are being organized in connection with Fitz Henry Lane Online, a catalogue raisonné and resource tool created by the Cape Ann Museum.




Fitz Henry Lane has long been recognized as one of America’s most important marine painters of the mid-19th century; in addition to those paintings preserved in the collection of the Cape Ann Museum — the single largest collection of Lane’s works in the world — examples of his oils are featured in major art museums across the country. Lane’s success as a printmaker, however, and his life-long fascination with the medium is something that is not widely recognized.

With this exhibition, the Museum will investigate this important part of Lane’s career, exploring the intersection of his work in oil and in print and his success at creating illustrations for sheet music, business cards and stationery, advertising materials and book illustrations. The exhibition will also spotlight a series of views Lane created of towns and cities throughout the region including Gloucester; Boston; Norwich, Connecticut; Castine, Maine; and Baltimore. In total, Lane is thought to have had a hand in the production of approximately 65 lithographs and perhaps more.

Drawn from Nature & on Stone will feature lithographs from the Cape Ann Museum’s own holdings and from collections throughout the region including the American Antiquarian Society, the Boston Athenaeum, The New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. The exhibition will offer scholars and lay people alike the opportunity to explore the intersection of Lane’s work as a printmaker and a painter, to learn more about the art of lithography and to consider the enduring effects printing has on American culture from the early 19th century through today.

More images

In the Limelight: Toulouse-Lautrec Portraits from the Herakleidon Museum

October 14, 2017, 6:00 am

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Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut

September 23, 2017 - January 7, 2018

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec enjoyed the spectacle, the night life, and the tawdry side of Belle Époque Paris. Best known for his art portraying the café-concert and the entertainers who performed there, this exhibition explores how Toulouse-Lautrec used portraiture to comment on the absurdity and excess of Bohemian life in Paris at the turn of the century. The show examines the relationship between portraiture, caricature, and rise of the cult of celebrity in the late 19th century, while focusing on the artist’s portraits of entertainers who became icons of the Parisian nightlife.

Featuring 100 drawings, prints, and posters, the exhibition showcases the artist’s satirical portraits of stage personalities like Sarah Bernhardt, Jane Avril, and Arstide Bruant alongside those of his friends and family.

In the Limelight: Toulouse-Lautrec Portraits from the Herakleidon Museum, a single source exhibition provided by PAN Art Connections Inc. www.pan-art-connections.com, is organized by the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut. The works are on loan from the collection of Herakleidon Museum, Athens, Greece (www.herakleidon-art.gr).


The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, featuring a scholarly essay by the curator Mia Laufer, PhD candidate (Washington University in Saint Louis) and former Zvi Grunberg Resident Fellow at the Bruce Museum (2015-2016), acknowledgments by Peter C. Sutton, The Susan E. Lynch Executive Director of the Bruce Museum, and a foreword by Paul Firos, founder of the Herakleidon Museum.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901)
Jane Avril, 1893
Color lithograph (before letters) 1240 x 915 mm
© Copyright Herakleidon Museum, Athens, Greece

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901)
Eldorado, Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret, 1892
Color lithograph, 1380 x 960 mm
© Copyright Herakleidon Museum, Athens, Greece

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901)
Divan Japonais, 1893 Color lithograph, 808 x 608 mm
© Copyright Herakleidon Museum, Athens, Greece

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901)
Study of Y. Guilbert (I) Linger, Longer, Loo, 1894
Ink drawing, 107 x 163 mm
© Copyright Herakleidon Museum, Athens, Greece

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901)
La Troupe de Mademoiselle Églantine, 1896
Color lithograph, 617 x 804 mm
© Copyright Herakleidon Museum, Athens, Greece

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901)
Chocolat Dansant, Le Rire, 1896
Color lithograph, 240 x 214 mm
© Copyright Herakleidon Museum, Athens, Greece

 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901)
Au Concert, 1896
 Color lithograph
© Copyright Herakleidon Museum, Athens, Greece 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)
La Revue Blanche, 1895. ,
color lithograph.
© Herakleidon Museum, Athens, Greece, courtesy PAN Art Connections, Inc.

Lines of Inquiry: Learning from Rembrandt’s Etchings

October 14, 2017, 8:29 am

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Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

September 23, 2017 - December 17, 2017

 
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College
February 6–May 13, 2018


Rembrandt’s etchings, long treasured for their innovation and perceptive portrayal of the human psyche, continue to inspire a wide range of audiences and admirers, including scientists and engineers. Encouraging close looking at these masterworks in the context of collection building and new scientific approaches, this multifaceted exhibition will highlight Rembrandt’s scope and subtlety as an etcher.

Rembrandt Self-Portrait Leaning on a Stone Sill Transmitted light photograph enlarged detail showing Basilisk.



Rembrandt Self-Portrait Leaning on a Stone Sill 1639 



Rembrandt St. Francis Beneath a Tree Praying (1657). R.T. Miller Jr. Fund, 1952.31



More than sixty impressions from across Rembrandt’s oeuvre will show the artist’s process, including how he made changes to his plates, and detail his use of a variety of printing supports. Works from the collections of Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Syracuse, and Yale Universities, Oberlin and Vassar Colleges, the University of Kansas, the Morgan Library & Museum, and private collections will feature subject matter ranging from portraits and self-portraits to genre scenes, religious narratives, landscapes, study plates, and academic nude studies.



Rembrandt Hundred Guilder Print ca. 1648 

The accompanying catalogue incorporates new research and initiatives that examine the status of the printmaker, including an overview of Rembrandt print collecting by American academic collections, an account of Oberlin’s secret guardianship of the Morgan’s Rembrandt prints during World War II, and an introduction to Cornell’s Watermark Identification in Rembrandt’s Etchings (WIRE) project, a collaboration among museums, faculty, and students dedicated to digitally facilitating access to Rembrandt watermark scholarship.



Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), Woman Sitting Half-Dressed Beside a Stove, 1658
Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca

Lines of Inquiry has been organized in collaboration with  the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, where it will be on view February 6–May 13, 2018.



Rembrandt Jan Six 1647 Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center Vassar College

An exhibition catalogue is forthcoming.

Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art

October 15, 2017, 1:14 pm

≫ Next: Van Gogh, Monet, Degas: The Mellon Collection of French Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

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The Amon Carter Museum of American Art will host the first major exhibition in the United States to explore the multifaceted meanings of hunting and fishing in both painting and sculpture from the early 19th century to the mid-20th century. Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art is on view October 7, 2017, through January 7, 2018, and features more than 60 paintings and sculptures that together demonstrate the aesthetic richness and cultural importance of hunting and fishing in America. Admission is free.

“Hunting and fishing is a subject that captivated artists throughout the 19th and 20th centuries,” says Amon Carter executive director Andrew J. Walker. “Not mere pictures of wild game and fish, these paintings and sculpture show that the relationship between man and nature defined the American experience for artists as broad reaching as Winslow Homer and Charles M. Russell.”

Wild Spaces, Open Seasons includes a wide variety of genre scenes, landscapes, portraits and still lifes, including iconic and rarely seen works by Thomas Cole, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Andrew Wyeth, as well as key pictures by specialists such as Charles Deas, Alfred Jacob Miller, William T. Ranney and Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait. In addition, the show sheds new light on modernist interpretations of these subjects by George Bellows, Stuart Davis and Marsden Hartley. The works illuminate evolving ideas about community, the environment, national identity, place and wildlife, offering compelling insights into socioeconomic issues and cultural concerns. Capturing a communion with nature that was becoming increasingly scarce over the decades, many artists alluded to the country’s burgeoning industrialization and urbanization at the turn of the century.

The exhibition is organized into six thematic sections: Leisurely Pursuits, Livelihoods, Perils, Communing in Nature, Myth and Metaphor, and Trophies.

Leisurely Pursuits examines representations of hunting and fishing as recreational pastimes, often the province of society’s upper echelons, and the role of art making in navigating the social codes of leisure. Despite its European aristocratic origins, the hunt as an upper-class social ritual with strict codes of etiquette infiltrated but morphed in American democratic society. The portraits in this section display how the European tradition of representing sitters as gentleman-hunters was transformed in the American context, where hunting was central to the rugged exploits of folk heroes like Daniel Boone and later became legitimatized as a popular, hyper-masculine sport in the era of Theodore Roosevelt.

Livelihoods features images of commercial enterprise, necessity and sustenance involving different social strata. Many people—guides, frontiersmen, trappers—depended on the bounty of the forest and waterways for their well-being. While America’s expanding agricultural prosperity made hunting for sustenance less of an imperative, the fur trade and commercial fishing still generated income. The paintings in this section explore the ways in which hunting and fishing became a means of financial reward.

Suspense-filled and often sublime depictions of close calls, tights spots and struggles to the death fill the Perils section. Such artworks enjoyed great popularity in America during the second half of the 19th century. Whether for commerce, sport or sustenance, hunting is fraught with a host of potential perils, including harsh weather, human error, rugged terrain, territorial disputes and wild animals. These works served as both spectacles intended to excite viewers, as well as visual metaphors for man’s attempts to tame the wilderness. As the country moved toward modernity, many Americans romanticized a past that celebrated the danger brave hunters faced in the unforgiving and volatile wilderness.

Depictions of fellowship and camaraderie in the fourth section, Communing in Nature, reveal how outdoor endeavors forged familial bonds and strengthened communities against the backdrop of shifting attitudes toward the natural world. Artists depicted families, pairs and parties engaged in hunting and fishing activities to express their beliefs in these groups as novel communities that would reinvigorate American society. Capturing vital moments of camaraderie and fellowship amongst hunters and fisherman, many artists suggested that these brother- and sisterhoods were communal antidotes to the fracturing of rural societies caused by industrialization and urbanization.

Myth and Metaphor investigates the persistence of mythological associations prevalent to hunting and fishing, the ritual and spiritual aspects of the practice, and the way in which the figure of the hunter in particular became a malleable metaphor in the modern era. The works in this section forge the connections of hunting and fishing imagery in America to traditional myth—from personal mythic narratives of catching the fish of a lifetime, to the subject’s Classical roots, to political and religious allegory. This section reveals that from the earliest cave paintings and modern renderings of the chaste huntress Diana to the coming-of-age ritual aspects of the American Indian hunt and the parallels drawn between their participants and Classical models, the idea of myth and spirit, and even religious symbolism, is central to images of hunting and fishing.

In the final section, Trophies, depictions of spoils of the hunt act as symbols of masculinity, mortality and nostalgia. Artists’ desire to create trophy paintings gave new meaning to trompe l’oeil, or “fool the eye” still lifes. Prized for their cleverness and ability to test the limits of perception, trompe l’oeil still lifes memorialized the hunt for a growing class of sportsmen. Works in this section open onto issues of display and taxidermy, trompe l’oeil gambits and formal innovation.

In conjunction with Wild Spaces, Open Seasons, the Amon Carter presents Caught on Paper, a selection of works on paper from the museum’s collection that echoes the themes of the paintings and sculptures in Wild Spaces. The museum will also feature a concurrent video installation by living artist Hugh Hayden called Hugh the Hunter, which shows that the gentlemanly associations of the hunt persist to the present day and that myth, metaphor, perils and trophies continue to be important representations of hunting and fishing in art.

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Risky Business: The Perils and Rewards of Hunting in American Art

By Kory W. Rogers

Suspense-filled depictions of close calls, tight spots, and struggles to the death enjoyed great popularity in American art during the second half of the nineteenth century. As the country moved full steam ahead toward modernity, many Americans romanticized a past that held preindustrial activities in high esteem, including rugged and risky excursions in the wild. The visual culture that emerged around hunting reflected the social and economic anxieties and successes of rapidly changing times by illustrating the harsh environments and dramatic confrontations endured in pursuit of quarry, whether for commerce, diversion, or sustenance.

The English-born artist Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (1819–1905) found inspiration in the hard-scrabble life and craggy terrain of New York’s Adirondack Mountains. His paintings perpetuated the archetype of the brave hunter who, through courageous acts, conquered and tamed America’s wilderness. The symbolic implications of such works reflected social anxieties of the time while reinforcing the power of individuals and, in turn, the nation. His painting The Hunter’s Dilemma (Fig. 1), reflects a common storyline in American paintings of the second half of the nineteenth century—the mortal predicament. This theme reflected cultural stresses caused by rapid industrialization—as well as the promises and perils of westward expansion—where the potential rewards were worth the risk of hardship, harm, and possible failure. Potentially sacrificing life and limb to retrieve his kill, the hunter in Tait’s painting has climbed down onto a ledge set halfway up the face of a sheer cliff. Dressed in buckskin, a traditional garb that appears throughout popular culture as the costume associated with such heroic figures as Daniel Boone, the young man confronts—and pursues the challenge of—the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of hoisting his dead quarry to higher ground.

 

Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (1819–1905), The Hunter’s Dilemma, 1851. Oil on canvas, 33¾ x 44¼ inches. Collection of Shelburne Museum; Gift of William H. Scoble (1961-2). Photography by Andy Duback.

 

Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (1819–1905), A Tight Fix–Bear Hunting, Earl Winter (The Life of a Hunter: A Tight Fix), 1856. Oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Ark. Photography by Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

 

Winslow Homer (1836–1910), A Huntsman and Dogs, 1891. Oil on canvas, 28⅛ x 48 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pa. The William L. Elkins Collection (1924, E1924-3-8).

 

  N. C. Wyeth (1882–1945), Deep Cove Lobster Man, ca. 1938. Oil on gessoed board (Renaissance Panel), 16¼ x 22¾ inches. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pa. Joseph E. Temple Fund (1939.16).

Excellent article

The exhibition catalogue