Delaware Art Museum 

Getty Museum, Getty Center
The J. Paul Getty Museum has announceda rare exhibition of three celebrated works by the great Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), on loan from the Galleria Borghese in Rome, home to the largest collection of Caravaggio’s paintings in the world. Caravaggio: Masterpieces from the Galleria Borghese will be on view at the Getty Center from November 21, 2017 through February 18, 2018. 
 

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) has announced that Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo and Susan and Matthew Weatherbie have made a commitment to give their exceptional collections of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art to the Museum—a donation that will constitute the largest gift of European paintings in MFA history. The Boston-area collectors plan to give the MFA not only their art collections, but also a major research library and funding to establish a Center for Netherlandish Art at the MFA, the first of its kind in the U.S.

The donation of 113 works by 76 artists—including one of the finest Rembrandt portraits in private hands—will elevate the Museum’s holdings into one of the country’s foremost collections of Dutch art from the Golden Age and significantly strengthen its representation of Flemish paintings from the time. The Center for Netherlandish Art will encourage sharing works of art with wide audiences through collaborative study, generous loans and a commitment to mentoring the next generation of scholars, furthering the Museum’s mission to bring art and people together.

Jan van der Heyden, View of the Westerkerk, Amsterdam, about 1667–70. Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection.

“We are extremely grateful to the Van Otterloos and Weatherbies for their deep commitment and for their support of the mission of the Museum in such a generous way,” said Matthew Teitelbaum, Ann and Graham Gund Director. “Rose-Marie, Eijk, Susan and Matt are path-breaking collectors and philanthropists. Together, their paintings, combined with those of the MFA, complement each other and enrich our understanding of Dutch and Flemish art. Truly, the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts. We are honored to display, preserve and care for these masterworks, share them with the world, and nurture generations of scholars in the years ahead.”

By integrating these two exceptional private collections—formed by the Van Otterloos and Weatherbies through decades of committed connoisseurship—with the MFA’s, the Museum will nearly double its holdings of Dutch and Flemish paintings. Beautifully conserved and of the highest quality, works from the promised gifts include all categories of Dutch painting for which the republic of the Netherlands was (and is) best known—portraits, genre scenes, landscapes, seascapes, still lifes, flower pictures, cityscapes and architectural paintings. Together, they afford insight into the 17th-century Dutch way of life, whether it’s through a humorous genre scene by Jan Steen, a luxurious still life by Willem Kalf,

 


a poetic landscape by Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael,

 


an atmospheric marine by Willem van de Velde the Younger

or a vibrant flower picture by Rachel Ruysch. Among the Flemish paintings

Peter Paul Rubens, Coronation of the Virgin, about 1623

Oil on panel. Susan and Matthew Weatherbie Collection.

are important oil sketches by Peter Paul Rubens,


portraits by the influential Anthony van Dyck,

 Still Life with Various Vessel on a Table Osias-Beert

works by pioneering still life painter Osias Beert,

and landscapes by Jan Brueghel the Elder.

“Eijk and I couldn’t be happier that our collection will find a home at the MFA, where it can be displayed, loaned and shared with the widest possible audiences,” said Rose-Marie van Otterloo. “We believe in the MFA and its vision for the Center as a way to stimulate new ideas and connoisseurship, and keep Dutch and Flemish art alive for generations to come.”




A major highlight of the gifts is Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn’s moving Portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh (1632). In nearly perfect condition, the portrait displays delicate tones of black-on-black and virtuosic control of the brush. Aeltje Uylenburgh was the cousin both of Rembrandt’s wife-to-be, Saskia, and the prominent art dealer Hendrick Uylenburgh, with whom Rembrandt lived when he first arrived in Amsterdam. In addition to subtly describing the inner life of the subject, the painting provides a crucial bridge between Rembrandt’s early years in his native Leiden, exemplified by the MFA’s  



Artist in his Studio (1628), and his establishment as a successful portraitist in Amsterdam, illustrated in works such as the Museum’s  



Reverend Johannes Elison (1634)



and Maria Bockenolle (Wife of Johannes Elison) (1634).

The gift of Aeltje will bring the number of Rembrandt paintings in the MFA’s collection to an astounding six and is one of many instances where the promised gifts will complement the MFA’s holdings.

The Vero Beach Museum of Art announced its recent acquisition of




Peter Blume’s Study for 'South of Scranton' (1930) for the Museum’s permanent collection. Blume was one of the most famous and important American painters in the 1930s. His style was similar to the Precisionists like Charles Sheeler, but Blume was in fact one of the first American artists to understand and practice Surrealism.

One of Blume’s most significant works, Study for 'South of Scranton' was inspired by a road trip the artist took with his wife. They traveled south from their home in Connecticut through the coal fields and steel mills of Pennsylvania until finally stopping in Charleston, South Carolina, where Blume saw sailors performing calisthenics aboard a docked German naval ship. When he returned to work, he used the Surrealist method of free association to merge the images he had seen while traveling.

In a later interview, he remembered the genesis of the composition: “As I tried to weld my impressions into the picture, they lost all their logical connections. I moved Scranton into Charleston, and Bethlehem into Scranton, as people do in a dream.”

On the left side of Study for ‘South of Scranton’, gray quarries and heavy machinery form a bleak industrial landscape. The rest of the painting contains picturesque Charleston streets, acrobatic figures leaping through the air, and a ship deck over the ocean.






The second and final version of this subject is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was awarded First Prize at the Carnegie International in 1934. Both this work and Study for 'South of Scranton' were included in a 2014 retrospective of Blume’s paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.


During his career, Blume won major awards from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum, and his works were collected by the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

In the autumn and winter of 2017/18, the Hamburger Kunsthalle will present the first extensive museum show of the work of the Hamburg-based painter Anita Rée (1885–1933). Featuring some 200 paintings, works on paper and art objects, the retrospective sheds light on an important and multifaceted oeuvre, ranging from Impressionist plein air painting to Mediterranean landscapes to portraits in the spirit of the New Objectivity. The Hamburger Kunsthalle’s rich holdings of works by Rée, comprising 13 paintings and 25 works on paper, will be supplemented by significant pieces from private and public collections in Germany, England, Switzerland and the USA.

Anita Rée took painting lessons from Arthur Siebelist in Hittfeld, did further training in Paris in the winter of 1912/13, and worked from 1922 to 1925 in Positano in southern Italy. After her return to Hamburg, Rée’s many portraits and public commissions brought her nationwide recognition, and she was able to make valuable contacts in the art world. She spent her last years living a reclusive life on the island of Sylt, where she took her own life in 1933.

The retrospective at the Hamburger Kunsthalle invites visitors to discover a great artist. Anita Rée grapples in her art with questions of identity, exploring the relationship of the individual to society and the feeling of belonging in a fast-changing world. As a painter straddling tradition and modernism, an independent woman on the art scene, as a regional artist with international aspirations and someone with South American and Jewish roots brought up in Protestant Hamburg, Rée lived in many senses between different worlds.

The exhibition stems from an interdisciplinary research project involving in-depth art-historical and art-technological studies. Archives in Hamburg, Germany and elsewhere in Europe were systematically searched for traces of Rée’s life and work. With the support of the ZEIT-Stiftung, her artistic methods and the materials she used in her paintings and works on paper were investigated scienti-ically. Thanks to the new insights thus gained, we are now able to appreciate Anita Rée as an active and self-assured artist and not view her merely as a victim of her times, gender or religion.



A richly illustrated catalogue featuring scholarly essays in German and English accompanies the exhibition (Prestel Verlag, Munich), available in the Museum Shop for 29 euros or online at www.freunde-der-kunsthalle.de.


At the end of the exhibition, the Hamburger Kunsthalle will publish a new catalogue raisonné of Anita Rée’s work, compiled in collaboration with the art historian Maike Bruhns and funded by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung.

Phillips’ Sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art in New York will take place on 15-16 November, with 250 works of art spanning nearly a century. The Evening sale on Thursday, 16 November, will offer 44 lots, featuring works by some of the most sought-after artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to Peter Doig and Richard Prince. The auction will also include two lots by Latin masters Carmen Herrera and Hélio Oiticica. Preceding the Evening Sale, the Day Sale on Wednesday, 15 November, will offer over 200 lots. For the first time, Phillips is hosting the Day Sale in a new format of two sessions. The Morning Session will focus on Modern and Post-War Art, including works by Roy Lichtenstein, Josef Albers, Henry Moore, Yayoi Kusama and Robert Motherwell, while the Afternoon Session will feature works of Contemporary art, offering works by Damien Hirst, Agnes Martin, Peter Doig, and Oscar Murillo.

Jean-Paul Engelen, Worldwide Co-Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, said, “On the heels of Phillips May Evening Sale, in which Peter Doig’s Rosedale set a world auction record for a work by a living British artist, we are delighted to offer the artist’s Red House as a star lot this season. Executed in 1995-1996, Red House is a true masterwork, created at a pivotal point in the artist’s career, directly after his Turner Prize nomination. The painting is a testament to Peter Doig’s important place within the canon of Contemporary art.” Robert Manley, Worldwide Co-Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, added, “Our November auctions in New York were thoughtfully composed, with the goal of breaking down the barriers of traditional collecting categories. The auction includes a fantastic selection of lots by modern masters alongside their contemporary counterparts, as well as important works of Latin American art and photography. We are delighted to have the opportunity to offer such a strong selection of works of art across several artistic genres that will appeal to discerning collectors of all interests and backgrounds.”

The Evening Sale | 16 November 2017, 5pm



Leading the Evening Sale is Peter Doig’s Red House. The work was created in the immediate aftermath of his Turner Prize nomination in 1994, which propelled him to international recognition in the art world. Painted between 1995 and 1996, Red House captures the breakthrough moment in Peter Doig’s artistic development when the thick impasto of his early 1990s paintings thawed to reveal delicate mists of translucent color. Continuing the central tenets of his practice, namely that of the slippage between reality, imagination, and memory, Doig in many ways presents his own re-interpretation of



Edvard Munch’s Red Virginia Creeper, 1898-1900. Red House was featured in the artist’s seminal 1998 solo exhibition Peter Doig: Blizzard Seventy-Seven, which traveled from the Kunsthalle Kiel, to the Kunsthalle Nuremberg, and finally to the Whitechapel Gallery.



Franz Kline’s Sawyer is also among the Evening Sale’s top lots, hailing from an important private American collection. Painted in 1959, at the peak of Kline’s career the painting exemplifies the artist’s iconic black and white palette. Dominated by black and white, the work is enlivened by impastoed passages of cream, ochre, peach, chalky whites and greys that infuse the composition with a soft, atmospheric tone. In 1960, the same year Kline represented the United States at the 30th Venice Biennale, Sawyer was debuted in Kline’s solo exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, alongside some of the artist’s now most esteemed masterpieces. The works exhibited here stand as remarkable examples of the bravura of Kline's late oeuvre, which tragically ended with his premature death just two years later in 1962. It is testament to Sawyer’s significance within Kline’s oeuvre that it was celebrated in the artist’s first posthumous institutional retrospective exhibition in the United States at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 1968-1969.

Executed in the final decade of Cy Twombly’s life, Untitled, 2004, pays homage to the Mediterranean sea of his adopted home in Italy. It is one of ten paintings that comprise the artist’s acclaimed Untitled (Winter Pictures) series, which the artist painted in the winter of 2003-2004 from his home in Gaeta. Building on Twombly’s epic series Quattro Stagioni (A Painting in Four Parts), 1993-1994, in the collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York, the series Untitled (Winter Pictures) points to Twombly’s preoccupation with the classical leitmotif of nature’s seasons. A remarkable example of Twombly’s inimitable painterly practice, Untitled is built up with coats of acrylic paint that the artist applied to the wooden panel with a combination of brush, cloth and hand. While works from this series typically feature similar cascading vertical lines, Untitled is one of only two painting distinguished by repeated circular blotches that run in splattering rivulets like dripping clouds beyond the edges of the pictorial support.

In addition to a strong selection of contemporary works, Phillips’ Evening Sale will include a breadth of modern masterworks from distinguished private collections. Four works on paper by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso from the collection of Anne Marie and Julian J. Aberbach are among the sale’s highlights and the collection of Betty and Stanley Sheinbaum will offer works by Robert Motherwell, Richard Diebenkorn, and Henry Moore.




Robert Motherwell’s A Sculptor’s Picture, With Blue leads the collection and will be offered in the New York Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art on 16 November. The work is a tour-de-force from one of the most pivotal years in the Abstract Expressionist’s personal life and career. The monumental painting was created in New York in the spring of 1958 around the time of Motherwell’s nuptials to Helen Frankenthaler. Imbued with the sense of figuration so characteristic for Motherwell’s abstract compositions, this powerful work visualizes the couple’s union with the two black amorphous forms merging through the force of splattering brushstrokes. A Sculptor’s Picture, With Blue represents the culmination of a discrete group of three paintings completed during the joyous period in spring of 1958. As the only work to remain in private hands, its companions now reside in prestigious permanent collections. Unseen to the public in more than three decades, the work was acquired by Betty Sheinbaum directly from the artist’s 1959 solo exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. Remaining in her collection since, Betty loaned the work to major exhibitions at the Pasadena Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution.

Also included in the November Evening Sale in New York is Richard Diebenkorn’s Driveway. Painted in 1956 during Richard Diebenkorn’s famed Berkeley years, Driveway epitomizes the early stages of the artist’s shift from abstraction to representation, which would cement him as one of the most significant American painters of the past century. Despite presenting itself with the immediacy of what appear spontaneous brushstrokes, Driveway is in fact the culmination of a laborious creative process that saw Diebenkorn, like fellow Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, successively and continuously rework the composition with impasto paint– discovering and developing his ideas within the very process of painting. Betty and Stanley Sheinbaum acquired the work directly from Diebenkorn’s solo exhibition at the Poindexter Gallery in New York in 1958.

Henri Matisse’s bronze sculpture Le Tiaré will also be offered in the November Evening Sale. A remarkable example of Henri Matisse’s mature sculptural oeuvre, Le Tiaré is celebrated as the apex in his pursuit of organic simplicity. Conceived in Nice in 1930 and cast in the months before his passing in November 1954, the present bronze was purchased by Betty Sheinbaum from famed art dealer Erick Estorick in 1960. Inspired by the tiari flower worn by Tahitian women in their hair, this work is a testament to the radical turning point in Matisse’s mature career, prompted by his trip to Tahiti in 1930. The trip revitalized Matisse, who continuously sketched and drew the island’s lush tropical vegetation – ushering in a wholly new formulation of his art.

Works by Henry Moore, Henri Matisse, Hans Arp, and Edouard Vuillard, among others, will also be sold in the New York sales of 20th Century & Contemporary Art.

After setting the world auction record for Carmen Herrera in the November 2016 Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Phillips is pleased to include two works of Latin American art in the upcoming auction – Carmen Herrera’s Untitled (Orange and Black) and Hélio Oiticica’s P31 Parangolé, capa 24, Escrerbuto. The movements and oeuvres of these artists are inextricably linked with those of their transnational peers and a discussion of 20th century and contemporary art would be incomplete without noting the tremendous contributions of Latin American artists.

Painted in 1956, Untitled (Orange/Black) is among the first mature paintings Carmen Herrera created upon returning to New York from Paris two years prior. A remarkable example of the asymmetrical and intuitive arrangement of forms characteristic of her New York period, the dichromatic painting is testament to the modular, almost mathematical process of combining and rotating triangular forms that Herrera initiated in 1956 with works such as the present one. Sidelined as a female Cuban immigrant in the context of the Abstract Expressionist, male-dominated New York art world, it is only recently, due in part to her 2016 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, that Herrera has been accorded her due place within the annals of post-war abstraction.

Created in 1972 during Hélio Oiticica’s seminal New York years, P31 Parangolé, capa 24, Escrerbuto brilliantly exemplifies the pioneering Brazilian artist’s immersive and experiential art practice. The present work is a salient example of Oiticica’s infamous Parangolés, which Oiticica created between 1964 and 1979 with the goal of engendering what he called “lived experiences” through the spectator’s wearing of the cape-like wrap. It is testament to the art historical significance of this work that it was celebrated in Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium, the artist’s first U.S. retrospective in twenty years that travelled from the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, to the Art Institute of Chicago and, most recently, to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, between 2016 and 2017. While Oiticica has long been highly regarded in Latin America and in Europe, it has in large part been due to this retrospective that Oiticica’s far-reaching influence on performative and socially-engaged art practices has finally been given its due reverence in the United States.

An engaging image of lyrical calm and beauty, Henri Matisse’s Jeune fille dormant à la blouse roumaine dates from 20 December 1939. This picture shows a sleeping Lydia Delektorskaya, Matisse’s studio assistant, secretary and Muse, who wears a Romanian blouse with embroidered sleeves, which appeared in a number of Matisse’s works. Jeune fille dormant à la blouse roumaine relates to Matisse’s 1940 masterpiece Le rêve, a work which he revered so much that, when he was about to undergo an operation, he considered bequeathing it to Paris; it remained for a long time in his own collection. That painting was completed towards the end of 1940, the culmination of a long artistic journey in which the present drawing was one of the first steps. It was formerly in the collection of Fernand Graindorge, a prominent collector and philanthropist, and was exhibited at the Kunsthalle in Basel in 1954, shortly before Matisse’s death.

Henri Matisse’s Jeune fille accoudée, executed in 1938, shows one of the motifs that preoccupied the artist repeatedly during his career and in particular in the late 1930s: that of the seated woman. The present work likely depicts Russian émigré Princess Hélène Galitzine. It relates to a group of drawings that Matisse made as he explored the subject matter that he would use in the upper portion of Le chant, the fireplace decoration he created for Nelson A. Rockefeller’s apartment in New York. Le chant was commissioned by Rockefeller to decorate his triplex apartment in New York. Matisse had a full-scale model of the fireplace made up, around which he could work in the new apartment at the former Hôtel Régina, in Cimiez. He turned his rooms in the Régina into a make-believe realm. Plants, carpets, art and furniture combined to create a space that echoed salons, harems and artists’ studios all at once. It was within its generous spaces that Matisse conjured the bucolic, elegant world glimpsed in Jeune fille accoudée. This drawing was also formerly owned by Fernand Graindorge.

Portrait de femme endormie. III is an intimate portrait by Pablo Picasso of his partner Françoise Gilot sleeping. This picture has been dated twice by the artist – with one inscription pointing to the last day of October and the other to the first of November 1946. The work was created while Picasso and Gilot were staying in Antibes, a particularly fruitful period when he was able to create in the large spaces at Château Grimaldi. Filled with a passion for the Mediterranean, for Françoise and for these exciting new pastures, he filled the château with pictures, plunging into a lyrical world of mythological creatures. Looking at Picasso’s work during this time, his enthusiasm is quite apparent. This was a period of immense relief and celebration in the wake of WWII. At the same time, Picasso was living publicly with Françoise. There is a close parallel between Portrait de femme endormie. III and Picasso’s images from a decade and a half earlier, showing his then lover Marie-Thérèse Walter sleeping. However, in Portrait de femme endormie. III the intimacy is that of a stolen moment, with Picasso watching on admiringly while his tired partner sleeps.

Executed nearly 30 years prior, in 1920, Picasso’s Deux nus depicts two nude figures standing together, statuesque and poised. This picture dates from the height of Picasso’s involvement with the ballet, and the women stand with the assurance of the dancers who so intrigued him. This drawing also reveals the increasing interest in classical culture that had been whetted by Picasso’s trip to Italy three years earlier. It is a tribute to the quality and importance of Deux nus that it was formerly in the collection of Dr. Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, one of the greatest patrons of Cubism, who owned a dazzling array of Picasso’s works – he would lend almost twenty paintings to the artist’s first museum exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1932. Before Reber acquired Deux nus, it passed through the hands of the legendary art dealer Paul Rosenberg. It was only a couple of years before the picture was created that Picasso and Rosenberg had come to a formal agreement, with the dealer given first choice of the artist’s works, a mark of distinction for Deux nus.

About the Collectors Julian J. Aberbach, born in 1909, and his brother Joachim, or Jean, were the sons of a successful Jewish jeweller in Vienna. By the 1930s, the brothers had relocated to Paris and entered the music business, forming their own company. After selling their company, the brothers made their way to the United States. Julian served as an officer in the US military during the Second World War, helping command the Free French forces. During his time in the army, he had spent time in the South; developing an ear for country music, he intended to enter that world from a business perspective. He went on to Los Angeles and founded his legendary company, Hill and Range. He and his brother worked with stars ranging from Johnny Cash to Elvis Presley to Edith Piaf and helped create or publish hits as varied as Frosty the Snowman, I Walk the Line, and Love me Tender.

While in Paris, chance brought Julian and his wife Anne Marie together, when he asked her for help choosing lottery numbers, eventually attempting to ask her out for a meal. This was the beginning of a swift romance and a successful half-century-long marriage. Both remained very attached to France, and Julian was even awarded the National Order of the Legion of Honour.

As early as the 1950s, Julian had begun to collect pictures by various artists, not least on his regular trips to Europe. In this, he was often assisted by Anne Marie, their collection an equal reflection of both their tastes. Julian and Anne Marie, along with Jean, went on to acquire significant and acclaimed works. Many works by artists ranging from Francis Bacon to Fernando Botero, from Ellsworth Kelly to Willem de Kooning, and from Henri Rousseau to Georges Rouault were donated by the families to a wide-ranging number of institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Hood Museum, and the Rose Art Museum.
 

The Day Sale: Morning Session | 15 November 2017, 11am
The Morning Session of the Day Sale will take place at 11am on 15 November, with John McCord as Head of Sale. Two works by Roy Lichtenstein will be offered as highlights – Brushstroke and Ceramic Sculpture #16. Executed in 1965, Brushstroke is from the series of the same name, which sought to directly reinterpret the Abstract Expressionism of artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The works in this series all featured one or two brushstrokes, rendered with his characteristic Ben-Day dots. The present work is the first early enamel brushstroke work to come to the market in almost a decade, and has remained in the same distinguished private collection for three decades. Ceramic Sculpture #16 was executed in the same year as Brushstroke, when the artist started regularly working with sculptural media like ceramic and enamel and recalls the familiarity of consumerist objects that harken back to American diner culture of the 1960s. With his characteristic Ben-Day dots and blocks of color, the artist breaks down the three dimensional form of a leaning tower of cups and saucers into its graphic surface elements. While confronted with a recognizable symbol of low culture, viewers are simultaneously faced with the sculpture’s lack of functionality and in turn, characterization of a high art object.

The Morning Session will also include seventeen works from the Sheinbaum collection, including works by Henry Moore, Mark Tobey, and Robert Motherwell, among others. Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 50 was executed in 1958 and acquired one year later by the Sheinbaums. It is completely fresh-to-the-market, having remained in their family’s collection for nearly sixty years. The Sheinbaums were also avid collectors of Henry Moore and six of his bronzes will be offered on 15 November. Betty Sheinbaum started her remarkable collection with maquettes by modern master Henry Moore, whose trailblazing work she had discovered on a trip to England as a young woman. By the time she acquired the present works in 1959-1960, Moore’s reputation was growing, but he was still very much a radical contemporary artist. These sculptures demonstrate important themes in the artist’s oeuvre and a number influences on his signature exploration of figural forms.

Collectors will also be given the opportunity to acquire a rare early work by Lee Bontecou, an artist renowned for her success in a period of male-dominated minimalism. The present lot belongs to the year that the artist returned to New York in 1959, following her Fulbright Scholarship trip to Italy, and received recognition in the post-war minimalist sphere, when there was a pivotal shift in her sculptural practice. Having discovered the use of a blowtorch, Bontecou began creating lightweight, welded metal frameworks, which she subsequently filled with wire mesh, canvas and muslin. Untitled is one of the most recognizable and renowned examples from the very beginning of this important transition for Bontecou.

The Day Sale: Afternoon Session | 15 November 2017, 2pm
Works by Damien Hirst, Agnes Martin, Julian Schnabel and Michelangelo Pistoletto are among the highlights of the Afternoon Session of the Day Sale, with Rebekah Bowling serving as the new Head of Sale. Hirst’s Adenylosuccinate Lyase, a stellar example of his iconic spot paintings, will lead the auction. The present lot is an exceptional piece from one of Hirst’s most celebrated series, one which questions three of the most essential qualities of painting – color, form and composition – and relates them to the building blocks of science. Titled after a chemical compound, this work confronts the viewer in a mass of glossy vibrancy, each component of which stands in stark contrast to the white, rectangular canvas on which it rests. Hirst’s repetitive forms in the present lot negate the spontaneity of expressionist painting in favor of the sensibility of Pop Artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol through careful, methodical gesture. But unlike these artists, who used the dot as a means to produce an image, Hirst mass produces the dot itself, paring down his composition to painting’s most basic form. This work has remained in the same distinguished private collection since a year following its creation in 1993.

Damien Hirst’s Tearful, executed in 2010, will also be offered in the Afternoon Session. His renowned Cabinets series, begun in 1988 have become synonymous with contemporary conceptual art. A few years following the success of the earlier works in the series, such as the pharmaceutical cabinets, Hirst embarked on a new set of Cabinets. The present lot belongs to the latter series, featuring a delicate display of precious stones inside a gold-plated stainless steel cabinet. Aptly titled after human emotion, Tearful is a paradigm of the artist’s seminal practice in its arresting beauty.

Two untitled works by Agnes Martin, circa 1995, will also be offered. Emptied of image, narrative and “meaning” in any conventional sense, these works, both executed in the twilight of Agnes Martin’s career, wonderfully embody the expressiveness within minimal means that is a hallmark of Martin's corpus. Painted after her move to Taos in New Mexico, the softly colored, almost translucent bands are reminiscent of the ethereal desert light in which she was working. The vast expanse of the empty landscape, where the horizon and sky merge almost imperceptibly, became the inspiration for her work, with her use of color exploring the physical properties of the light spectrum, rather than the objects of color themselves.

Aurel Scheibler

13 Oct 2017 – 13 Jan 2018

Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery
November 3, 2017 – September 3, 2018 
 
The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery opens this week “The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers,” which brings together nearly 100 representations of laborers to explore the role of working people in the formation, self-definition and development of the United States. Featuring paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, prints and time-based media, the multifaceted exhibition offers a powerful visual history of American labor. Historic images of mill girls in factories, newsboys on city streets and proud artisans and craftsmen appear alongside contemporary images of working-class men and women.



Spanning the course of American history, “The Sweat of Their Face” encourages viewers to reflect on the conditions and repercussions of labor, particularly with regard to evolving relationships between those who work and those who benefit from work. At the same time, the exhibition offers insight into how American artists have refashioned the European portrait tradition to depict workers in compelling new ways. Winslow Homer, Dorothea Lange, Jacob Lawrence and several other renowned American artists are represented, along with individuals whose names have long been forgotten but who reemerge as a result of their work.

• Author: David C. Ward & Dorothy Moss
• Genre: Art, Political Science
• Book format: hardcover
• Language: english
• Number of Pages: 223
• Street Date: October 31, 2017
• TCIN: 53077792
• UPC: 9781588346056

Smithsonian American Art Museum
Nov. 3, 2017 through March 18, 2018


Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991), one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century, was drawn to New York City at a time when unparalleled transatlantic and hemispheric cross-cultural exchange was taking place. “Tamayo: The New York Years” is the first exhibition to explore the influences between this major Mexican modernist and the American art world. It reveals how a Mexican artist forged a new path in the modern art of the Americas and contributed to New York’s dynamic cultural scene as the city was becoming a center of postwar art.

Rufino Tamayo, Lion and Horse [León y caballo], 1942, oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 46 1/2 in. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, University purchase, Kende Sale Fund, 1946 © Tamayo Heirs/Mexico/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

“Tamayo: The New York Years” brings together 41 of Tamayo’s finest artworks, including a number of key loans from public and private collections in Mexico, that place Tamayo at the center of a major shift in the history of 20th-century art. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to trace Tamayo’s artistic development—from his urban-themed paintings depicting the modern sights of the city to the dream-like canvases that show an artist eager to propel Mexican art in new directions. E. Carmen Ramos, the museum’s deputy chief curator and curator of Latino art, organized the exhibition, which is on view at the museum’s main building from Nov. 3 through March 18, 2018. “Tamayo: The New York Years” is the latest in a series of projects at the museum that situates the art of the United States in a global context.

“‘Tamayo: The New York Years’ offers a new understanding of American modernism,” said Stephanie Stebich, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Carmen brilliantly traces Tamayo’s myriad influences and impacts on the burgeoning New York art scene with subtlety and nuance.”

Tamayo lived in New York intermittently from the late 1920s to 1949. During this period, he befriended and exhibited with Reginald Marsh, Stuart Davis, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Berenice Abbott and other New York-based artists who wanted to capture modern urban life. Tamayo, who had been interested in popular entertainment in Mexico, found in Coney Island a unique locus of modernity and the American experience. He depicted Coney Island several times, including in “Carnival” (1936), which was recently acquired by the museum.

Tamayo’s exposure to international modernism in New York, coupled with his firsthand study of pre-Columbian and Mexican folk art, led him to his own synthesis of modernist styles and Mexican culture. Tamayo also crossed paths with younger American artists including Jackson Pollock and Adolph Gottlieb who, like him, would break ground with new modes of representation befitting the seismic social transformations of the midcentury period.

Rufino Tamayo, The Pretty Girl [Niña bonita], 1937, oil on canvas, 48 1/8 x 36 1/8 in. Private collection. ©Tamayo Heirs/Mexico/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Image courtesy Colección Hemerográfica–Archivo Tamayo, Museo Tamayo

This exhibition considers how New York—its sights, artists, critics, collectors and art venues—nurtured Tamayo’s vision of modern Mexican art. In this context, he created an art that resisted clear narratives, emphasized the creative rather than political underpinnings of art making and mined the ancient myths and forms of indigenous art to express the existential crisis of World War II. In 1939, Tamayo saw Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937) at the Valentine Gallery and the influential artist’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Inspired by Picasso’s imagery and reliance on African art, Tamayo reconsidered the forms and myths of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic and folk art as the basis for a series of wartime paintings featuring aggressive and deprived animals. By the 1940s, his richly colored and abstracted compositions modeled an alternative “American” modernism that challenged social realism and dovetailed with a rising generation of abstract expressionists who were also seeking a visual language that fit their uncertain times.

Rufino Tamayo, New York Seen from the Terrace [Nueva York desde la terraza], 1937, oil on canvas, 20 3/8 x 34 3/8 in. FEMSA Collection. © Tamayo Heirs/Mexico/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo by Roberto Ortiz 

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“Tamayo’s New York story is a complex one that reveals how his immersion in the U.S. art world shaped his art and how in turn his presence had ripple effects in the broader art world,” said Ramos. “The rising abstract expressionists may not have emulated Tamayo’s style, but as they were beginning to assert a new direction in contemporary art, they drew resolve from his prominent example as an American artist driven by aesthetic and not overt sociopolitical concerns. Influence, in other words, comes in many forms. Tamayo, who absorbed the New York artistic scene and was transformed by it, also helped redefine notions of the national across the Americas at a crucial time in history.”

More images (scroll down):  https://artssummary.com/blog/

The Frick Collection
November 1, 2017 through February 4, 2018 

This year marks the 400 th anniversary of the birth of one of the most celebrated painters of the Spanish Golden Age, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617– 1682). A number of international exhibitions are planned to pay tribute to the artist’s achievements, the first of which will be presented this fall and winter at The Frick Collection. Murillo: The Self -Portraits is also the onl y such commemoration occurring in the United States. 

The exhibition opens in New York on November 1, 2017, and continues through February 4, 2018, after which it moves to London’s National Gallery from February 28 through May 21, 2018. Murillo’s career w as a successful one, and he painted canvases for the most important patrons and churches in Seville. While the majority of his artistic production was for religious institutions, he also created allegorical and genre scenes. Murillo’s paintings of urchins in the streets of Seville are particularly well known and, together with his Immaculates and other religious images, they remain the artist’s signature works. Less familiar are a number of portraits, both full - and half -length, that Murillo painted of his patrons and friends. Biographers and scholars have paid little attention to this aspect of the artist’s career, and this is the first exhibition dedicated exclusively to the subject. 


 Murillo’s first biographer, Antonio Palomino, described the artist in 1724 as “an eminent portrait painter,” although only about fifteen portraits by or attributed to him (including the two self -portraits) have survived. Five of these are included in
the exhibition. Significantly, the painter’s only known self -portraits will be shown together for the first time since they were documented in the 1709 inventory of his son Gaspar’s art collection. These two self-portraits —one recently given to The Frick Collection and the other from the National Gallery in London—will be shown with a group of other works by Murillo that will provide a larger context for these rare canvases. At the Frick, seventeen works, paintings as well as works on paper, will be presented in the intimate lower -level galleries.  

Murillo: The Self - Portraits is jointly organized by Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, The Frick Collection, and Letizia Treves, Curator of Later Italian, Spanish, and French 17th- Century Paintings, National Gallery, London. 

1. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Self-Portrait, ca. 1650−55

Oil on canvas

42 1/8 x 30 1/2 inches

Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Henry Clay Frick II, 2014

© The Frick Collection

The earlier of the two self -portraits featured in the exhibition, was acquired in 1904 by Henry Clay Frick and remained in the Frick family until 2014, when Trustee Mrs. Henry Clay Frick II generously gave it to the museum. (The self -portrait was the first Spanish painting acquired by Mr. Frick, who subsequently purchased several well -known masterpieces by El Greco, Velázquez and Goya.) The portrait was sensitively restored by Dorothy Mahon at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and a seventeenth -century Spanish frame was provided by Colnaghi. 

The painting is among Murillo’s earliest known works and dates from the first half of the 1650s, when the artist was in his mid -thirties. It was probably intended for his own collection, as is suggested by its later documentation in his son’s collection. Murillo presents himself in a black jacket typical of the Spanish upper class. His sleeves are slashed and reveal his white shirt underneath, and he wears a rigid white collar, known in Spanish as a golilla. The painter’s hair is long, over his shoulders, and he sports a fashionable moustache and slender goatee. No attributes or objects identify him as an artist; however, a long inscription in red letters declares him a famous p ainter. Because the inscription incorrectly gives his birth date as 1618 (instead of 1617) and states his death date, we know that it was added posthumously. Murillo’s face is surrounded by a trompe l’oeil stone frame, a hollowed- out block, chipped and eroded by time. The block, in turn, is propped on top of a stone ledge. This fictive frame is unique in concept and is not found in any other work by the painter or by his followers. 

2. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Self-Portrait, ca. 1670

Oil on canvas

48 1/16 × 42 1/8 inches

The National Gallery, London; Bought, 1953

© The National Gallery, London

Within a few years of his wife’s death, in 1663, Murillo executed a second self - portrait, which he dedicated to his four teenage children. The elegantly rendered Latin inscription below the portrait trans lates “Bartolomé Murillo painted himself to fulfill the wishes and prayers of his children.” In format, this self -portrait is similar to the earlier one. Murillo appears again in three- quarters pose, gazing out toward the viewer. He looks older, his expression forlorn and weary. By this date, Murillo was in his fifties and had lost not only his wife, but also five of his nine children. The outfit he wears is similar to the one in the Frick self -portrait: a black jacket over a white shirt. The golilla, however, has been updated with a more fashionable style: a wider, unstarched collar decorated with lace, known in Spain as a valona (Walloon collar). 

The trompe l’oeil stone frame around Murillo’s image is more elaborate than the one in the earlier self -portrait. Decorated with scrolls and idealized foliage, it is resting on a stone ledge, set into the niche of a wall. Flanking the frame are the signature attributes of an artist: to the left, a wooden ruler, a sheet of paper with a red- chalk drawing of human leg s, a compass, and a chalk holder; to the right are the painter’s brushes and palette. 

While the sitter in the earlier self -portrait could be mistaken for a nobleman (were it not for the posthumous inscription), the later self -portrait clearly depicts an artist, who names himself in the inscription carved into a cartouche below the frame. Soon after Murillo’s death, in 1682, his second self -portrait was engraved in Flanders, probably to commemorate his life and career. 

This was the first of many portraits of Murillo to be produced in print form, and it disseminated the painter’s image across Europe. The engraving is signed by its author, Richard Collin, who had worked in Rome and Antwerp before moving to Brussels, in 1678, to work as a royal engraver for Charles II of Spain, who then ruled Flanders. Below the portrait, a plaque is inscribed identifying Murillo and replicating the dedication to his children found on the original canvas. The inscription further explains that the engraving was commissioned by Nicolás Omazur, an Antwerp merchant based in Seville, who had been a patron of Murillo’s. 

As is typical of engravings after an original, the print reproduces the self -portrait in reverse. Collin did not copy the painting exactly, however. Most conspicuous is the fact that, in the engraving, Murillo’s hand no longer gras ps the frame. In addition, the oval frame in the engraving is narrower and higher than the one in the painting, the painter’s attributes have been omitted from the ledge, and the inscription is now presented on a tablet rather than a cartouche. With these modifications, the print evokes the tombs and monuments found in European churches, in which carved busts were placed in niches over inscriptions commemorating the life of the deceased. 

3. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Juan Arias de Saavedra, 1650

Oil on canvas

53 1/8 × 38 9/16 inches

Collection Duchess of Cardona

The composition of many of Murillo’s portraits were related to print culture in Spain and responds to the format used in that art form. His earliest known portrait, dated 1650, now in the collection of the Duchess of Cardona, was restored for the exhibition and is on view to the public for the first time. It represents Juan Arias de Saavedra, a Sevillian aristocrat, and was painted when the sitter was twenty -nine years old (only four years younger than Murillo). The portrait’s inscription provides most of the information we have about Saavedra and his friendship with Murillo. 

The sitter is shown half -length and in three quarters, again within an oval trompe l’oeil stone frame. He is somberly dressed in black, with a white goililla. The red cross embroidered on Saavedra’s proper left shoulder and the scallop shell on his chest identify him as a Knight of the Order of Santiago. The frame is surrounded by an elaborate cartouche and two palm branches; two putti at the top hold the Saavedra family’s coat of arms with two 4 tablets, inscribed in Latin with the age of the sitter and the year the portrait was painted. An inscription provides detailed biographical information: Saavedra was a senior minister of the Holy Inquisition in Seville and was commended for his skills in punishing heretics. Additionally, he is celebrated for being a “profound connoisseur of the liberal arts, and of painting in particular.” 

Murillo’s two self -portraits and many of his portraits present the sitters as if “set in stone.” The stone block of the Frick self -portrait, chipped and scarred by time, and the frames of the London self -portrait and of Saavedra’s portrait are striking elements in these compositions. Stones and ruins occupy the background of many of the artist’s works. 

Murillo’s interest in remnants of antiquity is not surprising. Seville was known in the seventeenth century as the “New Rome.” Built on the ruins of the Roman city of Hispalis, it was the only major center in Spain to boast ancient foundations. A few miles northwest of Seville are the ruins of Italica, one of the largest and most important cities of the Roman empire and the birthplace of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian. Throughout Seville, relics of its ancient past would have been visible and known to Murillo. Many aristocrats in Seville collected antiquities and ancient coins (including Murillo), and these also may have inspired him. 

One of the extraordinary features of the London self -portrait is the painter’s right hand protruding out of the frame, into the viewers’ space, clutching the frame itself. The origin of this trompe l’oeil effect is probably derived from contemporary Northern prints, which were readily available in Spain during Murillo’s time. The protruding hand dissolves the boundaries between art and reality, bringing the sitter closer to the viewer. It is as if Murillo tries to break down notions of time and space, making his presence felt beyond his death. 

 

5. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Two Women at a Window, ca. 1655–60

Oil on canvas

49 1/4 × 41 1/8 inches

National Gallery of Art, Washington; Widener Collection (1942.9.46)

Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

Perhaps the most beautiful of Murillo’s paintings to use trompe l’oeil to explore the relationship of art and reality is Two Women at a Window  . Painted in the late 1650s, it remains one of the best known and most mysterious of Murillo’s works. Although technically a genre scene rather than a portrait, the painting shares common features with the other works in the exhibition. 

The composition is devised within the space of a window —a dark void framed on three sides by a shutter, a ledge, and a window jamb. From behind the shutter emerges an attractive young woman, who peers out into the space beyond, partially shielding her face with a veil. A second young woman casually leans against the window sill, resting her hand on her chin as she watches the scene below. The effect of these two figures emerging from the window is exceptionally realistic. The women have been identified alternately as servants or prostitutes. A Spanish proverb from the period warns that “a woman at the window, a grape of the street.” 

The nature of the painting’s commission and its message remains unknown, but the canvas is designed, like Murillo’s London self -portrait, to confound the viewer with an illusion of reality beyond the painted space. Both of Murillo’s self -portraits are potent statements about his art, fitting tributes with which to commemorate his life and work on the four hundredth anniversary of his birth.

 PUBLICATION  



Accompanying the exhibition is a richly illustratedpublication that investigates the two self -portraits side by side, highlighting similarities and differences, and placing them in the context of the broader group of works in the show. In addition, the book discusses recent technical analysis, offering a better understanding of how the self -portraits were painted and providing a rare opportunity to compare how one of the most celebrated and influential European painters chose to represent himself at different stages of his life and career. The book’s lead authors are exhibition curators Xavier F. Salomon and Letizia Treves, while the technical studies are written by María Álvarez -Garcillán, Silvia A. Centeno, Jaime García- Máiquez, Larry Keith, Dorothy Mahan, and Nicole Ryder. 

London Painters brings together works by a small group of artists who have commonly been identified as the main proponents of the so-called “School of London”: Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj and Leon Kossoff. Through a selection of self-portraits, depictions of their loyal, sometimes shared sitters and London scenes, the show explores the artists’ dedication to the figure and cityscape, at a time when abstraction prevailed. This is the first exhibition dedicated to this group in New York.

“The story of the supposed School of London is a story of friendships, an intimate tale. With that in mind, London Painters unites pictures that highlight these relationships and the circles of shared acquaintance, as well as London itself, the city that provided such a thrilling backdrop to so much of their development,” says Pilar Ordovas, founder of the gallery. “It feels fitting to bring London to New York for my third exhibition in the city, to celebrate the work of artists that have defined much of what I do.” 

Francis Bacon, Fury, circa 1944. Oil and pastel on board, 37 x 29 in.

Powerfully evoking the early days of the British post-war period is Francis Bacon’s ‘Fury’, circa 1944, which relates to



Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion from the same year – the first Bacon painting in the Tate’s collection and the first to garner critical attention for the artist – the fervent orange background and screeching creature speak of the horrors that remained after the Second World War.



Painted just a few years later, in 1950, ‘Study after Velázquez’ is a variation on

 

Velázquez’s magnificent portrait of Pope Innocent X and one of the first Popes that Bacon ever made. Bacon’s subject appears to be metamorphosing into a secular figure, having lost most of the purple from his cape and depicted without a papal cap.

Bacon was a regular at Wheeler’s and the Colony Club in Soho, as were Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, who met as students in the late 1940s. As well as sharing a long friendship and a sculptural way of applying oil paint, in the early 1950s, Auerbach moved into his current Camden studio, formerly Kossoff’s. It was here that Juliet Yardley Mills, the subject of  



Head of J.Y.M., came to sit for Auerbach each Sunday and Wednesday for forty years.

Frank Auerbach, Head of J.Y.M. II, 1984-85

In a sense, Auerbach and Kossoff are the most literal members of the ‘School’, using the cityscape as their devout subject.



Auerbach’s The Pillar Box III



and Kossoff’s Stormy Summer Day, Dalston Lane,

are intimate portraits of their familiar city.

Over the years, this small group came to share a number of friends and acquaintances. Jane, Lady Willoughby de Eresby, was a great friend to Michael Andrews and to Lucian Freud.



Andrews’ Portrait of Jane, 1989-91, is one of very few portraits that the artist (who is buried on her estate in Scotland) painted.



Freud’s depiction of Jane, Woman with Fair Hair – Portrait II, shows her as more youthful, set against a dark background.



Man in a Blue Shirt, 1965, is one of two portraits Freud made of Bacon’s partner, George Dyer. This painting was in fact painted on Lady Willoughby’s estate – a striking testament to the intermingled lives of this group of artists and their loyal sitters.

It was R.B. Kitaj who promoted the notion of a “School of London” when he organized

 

The Human Clay, at The Hayward Gallery, London in 1976. This show was filled with works by the artists exhibited here, and a few years later, when Kitaj married Sandra Fisher, Auerbach, Freud and Kossoff were part of his minyan – the ten Jewish men that accompany the groom. Kitaj was friends them all and they often ate together at his home, surrounded by their paintings.



The Neo-Cubist, 1976-1987, is a portrait of Kitaj’s oldest and closest friend, whom he met in his first year at the Royal College of Art – David Hockney. This painting started with a photograph of the blond-haired, bespectacled student, standing fully nude except for two mismatched socks.
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Represented here by an iconic Los Angeles pool painting, Hockney, although based in the United States during much of the period, was a close friend to the young Londoners.

The artists included in London Painters used paint not for the explosions of Abstract Expressionism, but rather to create a connection between artist and subject, to examine the emotions and internal struggles on both sides of the canvas. Nowhere is this more evident than in their self-portraits, including



Freud’s Self-Portrait, executed in 2002, which has only once been exhibited, in the inaugural Met Breuer show, Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
November 10, 2017–February 25, 2018

• 
  
• Curated by Edith Devaney
• Exhibition organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

After his monumental landscape exhibition in 2012, the artist returns to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao with an intense, immersive installation of portraits.

Each work is the same size, was painted in the same time frame of three days, and shows the sitter in the same chair, illuminated by the bright light of southern California, against the same vivid blue background.

Thanks to Hockney’s virtuoso paint handling, the uniformity of the elements in each painting underscores the differences between the sitters, allowing their personalities to leap off the canvas with warmth and immediacy.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is pleased to present David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life, an exhibition featuring a remarkable new body of work in which the British artist returns to portraiture with a renewed creative vigor, offering an intimate snapshot of the LA art world and the people who have crossed his path in recent years.

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

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



A catalog accompanies the exhibition.

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

This intimate exhibition focuses on the DIA’s only painting by Claude Monet — Rounded Flower Bed (Corbeille de fleurs), formerly known as Gladioli and recently retitled based on new research. Monet painted this work while living in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil between late 1871 and early 1878. His time in Argenteuil was especially productive, for it was there that he and fellow avant-garde painters formed the Impressionists.

Experience the DIA’s painting together with 10 other Argenteuil paintings by Monet and fellow impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and discover the story behind the creation of Rounded Flower Bed (Corbeille de fleurs) and how it fits into the history of Monet’s work and the Impressionist movement.



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


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

 
 

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

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


 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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



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

Pace London
3 November – 22 December 2017 

Pace is delighted to present IMPULSE, an exhibition of radical abstract painting from the United States in the 1960s and '70s. Focusing on lyrical, post-painterly abstraction, the exhibition features work by Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Sam Gillam, Ed Clark and Frank Bowling. Responding to the dominance of Abstract Expressionism in the '50s, these artists boldly experimented with process, form and colour. Each found new ways to apply paint to canvas, championed improvisational techniques, and used colour expressively.

Art gives us real delight only when the eye derives pleasure from what is really worthy.
(John G. Johnson, from his art and travel memoir, Sight-Seeing in Berlin and Holland among Pictures, 1892.)

This fall, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present Old Masters Now: Celebrating the Johnson Collection, a major exhibition focusing on one of the finest collections of European art ever to have been formed in the United States by a private collector. The exhibition marks the centenary of the remarkable bequest of John Graver Johnson—a distinguished corporate lawyer of his day and one of its most adventurous art collectors—to the city of Philadelphia in 1917. It also coincides with the celebration of the centennial of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

 http://press.philamuseum.org/old-masters-now-celebrating-the-johnson-collection/


The exhibition will include masterpieces by key figures of the Renaissance such as Botticelli, Bosch, and Titian; important seventeenth-century Dutch paintings by Rembrandt, Jan Steen, and others; and works by American and French masters of Johnson’s own time, most notably Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Édouard Manet and Claude Monet. Old Masters Now will also provide a behind-the-scenes look at the collaborative work of the Museum’s curators and conservators who have worked with the collection since it was entrusted to the Museum’s care in the early 1930s. The exhibition will explore a host of fascinating questions ranging from attribution to authenticity and illuminate the detective work and problem-solving skills that are brought to bear when specialists reevaluate the original meaning and intent of works created centuries ago.

 

  

Saint Nicholas of Tolentino Saving a Shipwreck, 1457. Giovanni di Paolo (Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia), Italian (active Siena), first documented. Tempera and gold on panel with vertical grain, 20 1/2 x 16 5/8 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917.

Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and CEO said, “Over time our appreciation of Johnson’s extraordinary gift continues to grow, and yet it remains a source of endless fascination with many discoveries still to be made. We are delighted to open a window onto our work, offering visitors a fresh look at the process of scholarship and conservation that we bring to the care of our collection and an insight into the questions, puzzles, and mysteries that continue to occupy our staff.”
The exhibition will open with a gallery dedicated to Johnson himself, providing a picture of one of Philadelphia’s most prominent leaders during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A timeline will trace key moments in his colorful legal career, highlighting important cases and invitations he was reported to have received from President Garfield and President Cleveland to be nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court, and another from President McKinley to serve as his Attorney General, all of which Johnson declined. It notes that in 1901, he represented his hometown baseball team, the Phillies (then known as the Philadelphia Ball Club), when players sought to break their contract to play for another team. This section will also explore his decades-long formation of an art collection, from his early acquisitions of contemporary art, such as Mary Cassatt’s On the Balcony, to paintings that he acquired the day before he died. Archival material, travel albums, and large-scale photographs of the interiors of Johnson’s houses at 426 and 506 South Broad Street will reveal the strikingly idiosyncratic way in which he displayed and lived with his collection.
Eight paintings in the exhibition will illustrate some of the fascinating breakthroughs in understanding that have emerged from curators’ and conservators’ work researching and caring for the collection over time. Among them is Rogier van der Weyden’s The Crucifixion, with Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist Mourning, from around 1460. This pair of wood panels long puzzled scholars, who were uncertain whether they were created as part of an altarpiece or as an independent work. A conservator’s close technical study eventually led to the realization that they had served as shutters that closed over what was likely one of the largest altarpieces made during the Renaissance in northern Europe, its existence is known only through the Johnson Collection paintings and two others discovered in 2012.
Descent from the Cross, painted by the Netherlandish artist Joos van Cleve around 1520, has undergone a year-long conservation treatment and will be placed on view for the first time in thirty years. Once considered to be simply a copy of a major painting of the same subject created by Rogier van der Weyden eight decades earlier, it remained in storage as a study picture. The painting is now considered to be Joos van Cleve’s homage to this revered masterpiece.
Another work that illustrates how historical and technical study may recover an artist’s original meaning is Dutch master Judith Leyster’s painting The Last Drop (The Gay Cavalier). Dating to about 1629, it depicts a scene of two men approaching the end of a night of drinking. In 1979, an art historian discovered an early copy of the painting that included a skeleton—a warning to the revelers that they should change their ways. The Johnson painting showed no skeleton, but a conservator’s examination and microscopic cleaning tests in 1992 determined that though it once had been painted over, it remained beautifully intact. Removal of the overpainting, documented in a series of photographs, revealed the true message of Leyster’s painting.
Titian’s enigmatic Portrait of Archbishop Filippo Archinto (1558) has been newly cleaned and restored following years of study and conservation treatment. It will be presented alongside a display illustrating how the artist’s original materials have changed with age. Recent analysis by Museum conservators and scientists revealed that Titian painted Archinto with a purple cloak, a color identified with archbishops. The blue pigment that contributed to the purple hue deteriorated over time, making the cloak appear red today. This discovery adds insight into how Titian’s contemporaries would have seen this masterful portrait.
Attribution is examined in the section devoted to the Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch. Johnson was among the earliest Americans to collect Bosch, and today the Museum is among only a handful in the United States that possess a work by this great painter. Although Johnson purchased 10 works that he understood to be by the artist, close comparative looking and technical research—most notably through the use of dendrochronology (dating growth rings in wood)—has led to the conclusion that only one of these 10 works can be considered authentic today.
Mark Tucker, The Neubauer Family Director of Conservation, said: “The work that goes on in conservation is at the very heart of the Museum’s commitment to expanding the understanding of the art in its care. We are looking forward to sharing with visitors not just the results of that work, but also the processes of investigation and the excitement of discovery.”
The exhibition also explores those areas of European painting in which Johnson focused in depth, including Italian, Dutch and Netherlandish, and French art. The number of Dutch paintings he acquired was among the largest of his day, and is especially rich in landscapes by Jacob van Ruisdael and animated genre scenes by Jan Steen. Rembrandt’s Head of Christ will also be on view in this section.
One section devoted to some of the earliest works in Johnson’s collection explores how art historians and conservators evaluate the original context of works that today exist only as fragments of a larger whole. Here an image of the Sienese artist Duccio’s great altarpiece called the Maestá will be placed beside his workshop’s Angel, showing how it was placed and functioned within the larger composition. Other fragmentary works on view include four small superb paintings by Botticelli and Fra Angelico’s St. Francis of Assisi.
Another section is devoted to Johnson’s fascination with the art of his time. It highlights Édouard Manet’s The Battle of the U.S.S. “Kearsarge” and the C.S.S. “Alabama,” James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, and major paintings by John Constable, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Winslow Homer, Camille Pissarro, Eduard Charlemont, and a marble by Auguste Rodin.
During the presentation of the exhibition the Johnson curatorial and conservation team will be frequently available in the galleries to give talks and answer questions about the works on view. Visitors will also be encouraged to explore the European galleries, where other works from the Johnson Collection are also installed. One installation in gallery 273 is devoted to sculptures from the Johnson Collection and another to embroideries and other textiles from his collection.
Jennifer Thompson, The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, said: “Our understanding of the Johnson Collection is constantly changing. This exhibition marks the first significant assessment of how our thinking on it has evolved over the years. While the careful study we have given to objects in the collection is rarely presented to the public, we are quite pleased to give visitors a behind-the-scenes look at the work we do.”
Digital Publication
The Museum is publishing its first digital catalogue to coincide with this centennial exhibition. The publication includes thematic essays, catalogue entries on objects from the Johnson Collection, and digitized archival resources. The essays focus on the history, scholarship on, and stewardship of this collection and are written by the Museum’s curatorial and conservation team. It will be available for free and accessible to researchers and the public alike. For this new digital publication, the Museum has made use of a new technology implementing IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) to present digital images in a more versatile and flexible way.
The development of this catalogue is led by Christopher D. M. Atkins, The Agnes and Jack Mulroney Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, and Manager of Curatorial Digital Programs and Initiatives; and Karina Wratschko, Special Projects Librarian. Atkins said: “We are connecting art information with archival information. This is the most groundbreaking aspect of the project as most institutions have treated these materials separately, until now.”
The John G. Johnson Curatorial and Conservation Team
Jennifer Thompson
The Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection
Christopher D. M. Atkins
The Agnes and Jack Mulroney Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, and Manager of Curatorial Digital Programs and Initiatives
Mark Tucker
The Neubauer Family Director of Conservation
Teresa A. Lignelli
The Aronson Senior Conservator of Paintings
Carl Brandon Strehlke
Curator Emeritus, John G. Johnson Collection
Joseph J. Rishel
Curator Emeritus, European Painting
About John Graver Johnson (1841–1917)
Born in the village of Chestnut Hill, now part of Philadelphia, and educated in the city’s public Central High School and then the University of Pennsylvania, Johnson became recognized as the greatest lawyer in the English-speaking world. He represented influential clients such as J. P. Morgan, US Steel, the Sugar Trust, and Standard Oil. He was also known to accept cases that many would consider ordinary if the details piqued his intellectual interest. Johnson quietly acquired many important works of art, but also highly singular ones that have been the source of much scholarly discussion.

At the age of 34 he married Ida Alicia Powel Morrell (1840–1908), a widow with three children. He traveled to Europe often, visiting France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Germany, and Belgium, and collected pictures as an amateur art historian relying on his own evaluation. In 1892, he published Sight-Seeing in Berlin and Holland among Pictures. Also that year, he published a catalogue of his collection which at the time included 281 paintings.

In 1895, Johnson was appointed to Philadelphia’s Fairmount Art Commission where he oversaw the Wilstach Gallery, which housed a public collection of paintings. Under his leadership, the Commission purchased important works, among them

 

James McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Black,

 

and Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Annunciation, the first work by an African-American artist to enter a public collection in the United States. Johnson was also the attorney for Alexander Cassatt, brother of the artist Mary Stevenson Cassatt.



One of his earliest purchases was Cassatt’s On the Balcony. When Johnson gave this work to the Wilstach Gallery in 1906, it was the first painting by the artist to enter an American public collection. During his 22-year stewardship of the Wilstach Gallery, he made 53 gifts from his personal collection, which are now on view at the Museum.

About the John G. Johnson Collection

Johnson’s collection was formed through his own study and, in later years, with the assistance of illustrious art historians including Roger Fry and Wilhelm Valentiner. Bernard Berenson advised his purchases of works by Antonello da Messina, Sandro Botticelli, and Pietro Lorenzetti, and others. To this day, the John G. Johnson Collection is distinguished by its quality, rarity, and diversity in European art.

At the time of his death on April 14 in 1917, Johnson left his collection to the city of Philadelphia. In his will, he said: “I have lived my life in this City. I want the collection to have its home here.” The City of Philadelphia accepted the conditions of his will, which contained a codicil directing that his house be opened as a gallery for the public to enjoy. In 1933 the Johnson Collection was moved temporarily from Johnson’s house at 510 South Broad Street to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, due to a funding crisis caused by the Great Depression as well as a determination by a court-appointed master that the Johnson house was unsafe for the collection.

In 1958 the Museum, the City, and the Johnson Trust entered a formal agreement concerning storage and display of the Johnson Collection at the Museum. Johnson's art was exhibited as a separate collection within the Museum for more than 50 years. In the late 1980s, legal approval was granted for the Museum to integrate the works into its full collection. The collection numbers 1,279 paintings, 51 sculptures, and over 100 other objects.

More images

 

Julian Gascoigne, Senior Specialist, British Paintings at Sotheby’s said:   “Joseph Wright of Derby is one of a small and select group of British eighteenth-century artists whose work transcends national boundaries and speaks to a wider global sensibility. Drama and passion are at the core of his oeuvre and this is particularly true of this exceptional painting. The artist’s masterful use of light brings to life the sensual antique statue and brilliantly captures the contemporary aesthetic infatuation with the art of the past. With its overt reference to the classical legend of Pygmalion, and the transformative power of art, this is one of the most important works by the artist to come to the market in recent years and we look forward to presenting it to collectors around the world.”   

Joseph Wright of Derby is widely regarded as one of Britain's most interesting and versatile painters and his greatest works, such as



An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (National Gallery, London),



The Orrery (Derby Museums and Art Gallery)



and A Grotto in the Kingdom of Naples with Banditti (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) have become icons of British art the world over.

An Academy by Lamplight is one such masterpiece, and one of the artist’s most famous and celebrated works. This is the first of two versions of the subject painted by Wright and most likely the one he exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1769 – a period when Wright was rapidly establishing himself as one of the most exciting and innovative young artists in Britain. Whilst it has rarely been seen in public in the 250 years since,

 

the other version, painted in 1770, was acquired by Paul Mellon in 1964 and is now in the collection at the Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven.

In An Academy by Lamplight, Wright of Derby tackles a subject with a long and illustrious history dating back to the first academies of art established during the Renaissance in Italy. Wright may have been inspired by the profusion of such organisations in 18th-century Europe and especially in Britain, where the Royal Academy in London was founded just a year before the work was painted, in 1768.



The work depicts six young draughtsmen contemplating the cast of “Nymph with a Shell”, an antique Hellenistic statue much admired in the 18th century when it was housed in the Villa Borghese in Rome. Today it can be found in the Louvre.

Wright was closely associated with the key members of the Enlightenment and, in particular, with the group of scientists and industrialists who made up the intriguing 'Lunar Society'. A peculiarly 18th-century fusion of science, the arts, philosophy and literature, the Society’s members challenged accepted beliefs and pushed the boundaries of scientific and intellectual exploration, counting among its members leading figures like Josiah Wedgewood, Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestly and Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles). Though Wright himself was never officially a member of the Lunar Society he was intimately bound up in that world of intellectual, scientific and commercial enterprise and drew succour from its activities, which forms the spiritual core of his art.

Wright of Derby's 'candlelit' pictures, with their dazzling use of chiaroscuro, are in many ways the artistic manifestation of the intellectual endeavours of these luminaries of the Enlightenment: the introduction of light into darkness acting as a metaphor for the transition from religious faith to scientific understanding and enlightened rationalism.


 

National Gallery of Ireland

Norton Simon Museum 
December 8, 2017 - March 5, 2018


 


In celebration of the installation of Rembrandt’s Self Portrait at the Age of 34, on loan from The National Gallery, London, the Norton Simon Museum presents Rembrandt: Prints ‘of a Particular Spirit,’ a focused exploration of the artist’s graphic output between 1630 and 1640, a period in which his creative evolution and technical refinement reached new heights. Drawing from the Norton Simon’s rich collection of Rembrandt etchings, this exhibition gives viewers the opportunity to examine the artist’s inspired storytelling and sensitive studies of landscape and the human face.


Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669) was the premier portrait painter of Amsterdam in the mid-17th century, and his masterful history paintings drew admiration from his aristocratic patrons. While many artists employed professional printmakers to spread their achievements, only a handful learned printmaking themselves, and fewer still left such a profound effect on the medium as Rembrandt. Taking up etching needle and copper plate early in his career, Rembrandt crafted energetic images that were prized by connoisseurs and imitated by artists. One contemporary English collector, John Evelyn, pronounced him “the incomparable Rembrandt, whose etchings and gravings are of a particular spirit.”

The 21 works on view in this exhibition range from landscapes, such as View of Amsterdam from the Northwest, c. 1640, to religious subjects including Joseph Telling His Dreams, from 1638, and figure studies like Self-Portrait with Saskia, 1636, and Old Man Shading His Eyes with His Hand, c. 1639.

Together these works demonstrate Rembrandt’s technical finesse and ingenuity during the 1630s. As Rembrandt’s career was reaching new heights, some of his boldest compositional treatments were subjects that he rarely addressed in paint, but gave exceptional vitality in print. Characterized by the delicate network of lines, these works imitate the immediacy of drawings while evoking the formalities of careful study and deliberate execution. It is a testament to Rembrandt’s singularity that we are equally captivated by his etchings today as audiences were in the 17th century.

Rembrandt: Prints ‘of a Particular Spirit’ is organized by Casey Lee, academic intern at the Norton Simon Museum (2016–17). It is on view in the small exhibition gallery on the main level from Dec. 8, 2017, through March 5, 2018.