In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met

July 20, 2018, 3:29 pm

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Exhibition Dates:	October 16, 2018–October 1, 2020
Exhibition Location:	The Met Fifth Avenue, Lower Level, Robert Lehman Wing,  Galleries 964–965

Dutch paintings of the 17th century—the Golden Age of Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer—have been a highlight of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection since the Museum's founding purchase in 1871. Opening October 16, the exhibition In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met will bring together some of the Museum's greatest paintings to present this remarkable chapter of art history in a new light. Through roughly 65 works organized thematically, the exhibition will orient visitors to key issues in 17th-century Dutch culture—from debates about religion and conspicuous consumption to painters' fascination with the domestic lives of women.   The exhibition will provide a fresh perspective on the canon and parameters of the Dutch Golden Age by uniting paintings from The Met's Benjamin Altman, Robert Lehman, and Jack and Belle Linsky bequests. Works typically displayed separately in the Museum's galleries—such as Rembrandt's Gerard de Lairesse and Lairesse's own Apollo and Aurora—will be presented side by side, producing a visually compelling narrative about the tensions between realism and idealism during this period. The presentation will offer an opportunity to display recently conserved and rarely exhibited works, including Margareta Haverman's A Vase of Flowers—one of only two known paintings by the artist and the only painting by an early modern Dutch woman in the Museum's collection. The exceptional quality of Rembrandt's late self-portrait will be even more evident following the removal of a synthetic varnish dating to the mid-20th century. The title of the exhibition comes from one of the period's major works of art theory, Philips Angel's The Praise of Painting (1642), a pioneering defense of realism in art. Exhibition visitors will also be able to peruse a comprehensive two-volume catalogue by the late Walter Liedtke about The Met's Dutch paintings collection. In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met is organized by Adam Eaker, Assistant Curator in The Met's Department of European Paintings. The exhibition will be featured on The Met's website, as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter using the hashtag #MetDutchMasterpieces.

Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, Delft 1632–1675 Delft). Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, ca. 1662. Oil on canvas, 18 x 16 in. (45.7 x 40.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Marquand Collection, Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1889

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Charles Demuth: Definitively Modern

July 20, 2018, 3:49 pm

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Demuth Museum, Lancaster, PA
June 2 through September 2, 2018

Charles Demuth, Marine, n.d., watercolor on paper, collection of the Demuth Museum, Lancaster, PA

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The exhibition Charles Demuth: Definitively Modern and accompanying catalog focus on the Demuth Museum’s collection of original art by Charles Demuth.  The collection is now the largest in the world with 52 works of art as well as it is the largest repository of original archival material on the artist.

Charles Demuth, Landscape, watercolor, Demuth Museum Collection

The exhibit will feature highlights from the collection.


Demuth played a vital role in the American modernist art scene both abroad and at home while surrounded by the who’s who of the expatriate art scene and close friends including, Leo and Gertrude Stein, Marsden Hartley, Eugene O’Neill, and Marcel Duchamp. Demuth soaked up the experience and dynamism that was life as an artist in the early 20th century and brought it home to his studio on East King Street in Lancaster, where his primary subject matter was the city of Lancaster and his mother’s flower garden.

Demuth's evolving style and pioneering artistic achievements, celebrated in his famous architectural works, are inseparable from his lifelong exploration and contributions in watercolor. Demuth suffered from diabetes, a debilitating disease that rendered him incapable of anything other than bed rest for periods of his life, and assisted his developments in watercolor, which was more suited to his lifestyle and was currying favor with the early modernists of the time.

During the years 1914-1919, which are considered to be Demuth's most prolific, he utilized the free-flowing effects of the watercolor medium to capture his travels to New York and Provincetown. During these frequent excursions, he spent time with a group of companions, many of whom formed the cultural elite, and was exposed to the work of expatriate artists, often via exhibitions of European and American modern art in the galleries of Alfred Stieglitz. Despite his attachment to New York, Demuth consistently returned to Lancaster and painted most in his home studio. He preferred to interpret what he saw literally in his own backyard, including the vegetables and flowers that were so important in his agricultural city.


Accompanying this exhibition is a major catalogue, Charles Demuth: The Demuth Museum Collection by Anne M. Lampe published by the Demuth Museum, 176 pages. $29.95

Corot: Women

July 21, 2018, 5:38 am

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Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
February 8–July 22, 2018

National Gallery of Art 
September 9 through December 31, 2018
 

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
The Muse: History, c. 1865
oil on canvas
overall: 46 × 35.2 cm (18 1/8 × 13 7/8 in.) framed: 73.7 × 61 × 11.5 cm (29 × 24 × 4 1/2 in.)
Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, H.O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929

Dressed in rustic Italian costume or nude on a grassy plain, rendered with a sophisticated use of color and a deft, delicate touch, Corot's women convey a mysterious sense of their inner lives. Corot: Women features 44 paintings created between the 1840s and the early 1870s: nudes, individual figures in costumes, and an allegorical series of the model in the studio. The National Gallery of Art is the only venue for Corot: Women, on view from September 9 through December 31, 2018.

"Recognized as a great master of landscape painting, Corot is among the best represented artists in the Gallery's collection of 19th-century French art. This unique exhibition presents an opportunity to examine a smaller and less well-known aspect of his career," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "We are grateful to The Edwin L. Cox Exhibition Fund, as well as Leonard and Elaine Silverstein, who helped to make this exhibition possible."

One of the greatest landscape painters of the 19th century, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) bridged the French neoclassical tradition and the impressionist movement of the 1870s. His figure paintings constitute a much smaller and less well-known portion of his oeuvre, but are of equal importance to the history of art, in particular for the founders of modernist painting, such as Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque. Corot: Women both distills and expands upon the Musée Marmottan Monet's exhibition Corot: The Painter and His Models (Paris, February 8–July 22, 2018).

About the Exhibition

Corot: Women focuses on Corot's images of women painted throughout his career but rarely exhibited in his lifetime. Corot's figural oeuvre is comprised largely of three major motifs: nudes, single figures in costume posed three-quarter and full-length, and a late series of allegories focused on his studio. The model served a series of established poetic types: modern, Italian, or Greek women reading, seated or walking; women at wells; girls weaving crowns of flowers; women playing mandolins or tambourines, seated or standing, in an interior or against a landscape.

The costumed, single-figure works make up the largest component of Corot's figural paintings. They range from vaguely neoclassical images of models in muted tones, antique garb, and simplified compositions, such as

 

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

The Blonde Gascon, c. 1850

oil on canvas

overall: 40.01 x 30.16 cm (15 3/4 x 11 7/8 in.)

Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Purchased with the Drayton Hillyer Fund

Photo by Stephen Petegorsky

The Blonde Gascon (c. 1850),

to more romantic evocations of sitters in richly colored exotic dress, as depicted in

 

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Young Woman in a Pink Skirt, c. 1845–1850

oil on canvas

overall: 47.8 x 39.3 cm (18 13/16 x 15 1/2 in.)

framed: 71.12 x 62.87 x 7.62 cm (28 x 24 3/4 x 3 in.)

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown

Image © Sterling and Francine Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA (photo by Michael Agee)

Young Woman in a Pink Skirt (c. 1845–1850). Incorporating Corot's sophisticated color sensibility in the costume details, each work conveys a distinct feminine subjectivity.

In the mid-1850s the nude became a way for Corot to give a new direction to his career and to establish himself as more than a landscape painter. Corot's engagement with the traditional genre of the nude was complicated by the shifting social position of artists' models and the incursion of photography into artistic practice in France's Second Empire.

Corot's studio, recognized by his contemporaries as essential to understanding his method and the meaning of his art, embodied his artistic aspirations and achievements. Beginning around 1865 Corot transcribed and reinvented his studio in a group of paintings that reference the studio's broader artistic and cultural significance. More than just a working space, Corot's studio was integral to his identity and was a recurring theme in his art, especially in the final decade of his life.

Three highlights in this exhibition are from the Gallery's collection:

 

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Agostina, 1866

oil on canvas

overall: 132.4 x 97.6 cm (52 1/8 x 38 7/16 in.)

framed: 173.7 x 138.4 cm (68 3/8 x 54 1/2 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Chester Dale Collection

Agostina (1866), Corot's largest figure painting;  

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

The Repose, 1860, reworked c. 1865/1870

oil on canvas

overall: 57.8 x 101.6 cm (22 3/4 x 40 in.)

framed: 83.8 x 127.3 x 12.1 cm (33 x 50 1/8 x 4 3/4 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (William A. Clark Collection)

The Repose (1860, reworked c. 1865/1870), the only female nude he exhibited publicly;

 

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Corot's Studio: Woman Seated before an Easel, a Mandolin in Her Hand, c. 1868

oil on wood

overall: 61.8 x 40 cm (24 5/16 x 15 3/4 in.)

framed: 78.4 x 56.5 cm (30 7/8 x 22 1/4 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Widener Collectio

and Corot's Studio: Woman Seated before an Easel, a Mandolin in Her Hand (c. 1868), which is the most resolved from his series of studio paintings.

Corot's female figures hover between the sitter's likeness, art historical precedents, and formal innovations, resulting in mysterious images that go beyond the generic categories of portraiture, allegory, and erotica.

Exhibition Curator

The exhibition is curated by Mary Morton, curator and head of the department of French paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Gypsy Girl with Mandolin, c. 1870

oil on canvas

overall: 63.5 x 50.8 cm (25 x 20 in.)

framed: 87 x 75.6 x 9.5 cm (34 1/4 x 29 3/4 x 3 3/4 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Count Cecil Pecci-Blunt

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Italian Girl, c. 1872

oil on canvas

overall: 65 x 54.5 cm (25 9/16 x 21 7/16 in.)

framed: 94.9 x 84.5 x 11.4 cm (37 3/8 x 33 1/4 x 4 1/2 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Avalon Foundation

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Interrupted Reading, c. 1870

oil on canvas mounted on board

overall: 92.23 x 65.09 cm (36 5/16 x 25 5/8 in.)

framed: 131 x 104 x 14 cm (51 9/16 x 40 15/16 x 5 1/2 in.)

The Art Institute of Chicago, Potter Balmer Collection

The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Juive d'Alger, c. 1870

oil on canvas

overall: 81.9 x 64.8 cm (32 1/4 x 25 1/2 in.)

Private Collector

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Melancholy, c. 1860

oil on canvas

overall: 48 x 36 cm (18 7/8 x 14 3/16 in.)

framed: 75.2 x 63.2 x 11 cm (29 5/8 x 24 7/8 x 4 5/16 in.)

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Wounded Eurydice, c. 1868–1870

oil on canvas

overall: 60.64 x 45.4 cm (23 7/8 x 17 7/8 in.)

Minneapolis Institute of Art, Bequest of Mrs. Egil Boeckmann

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Woman with a Large Toque and a Mandolin, c. 1850–1855

oil on canvas

overall: 112 x 88 cm (44 1/8 x 34 5/8 in.)

Private Collection

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Young Woman at The Fountain, c. 1860

oil on canvas

overall: 65 x 42 cm (25 9/16 x 16 9/16 in.)

Musée d'Art d'Historie de Genève

© Musées d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève, Dépôt de la Fondation Jean-Louis Prévost & de laFondation Gandur pour l’art, Genève, 1875, n° inv. BA 2010-0001, photo by Bettina Jacot-Descombes

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Bohemian Woman at a Fountain, c. 1865–1870

oil on canvas

overall: 58.1 x 42.86 cm (22 7/8 x 16 7/8 in.)

Philadelphia Museum of Art, The George W. Elkins Collection, 1924

The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

The Crown of Flowers, c. 1865–1870

oil on canvas

overall: 64.8 x 43.2 cm (25 1/2 x 17 in.)

framed: 91.44 x 49.53 x 10.16 cm (36 x 19 1/2 x 4 in.)

The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Helen and Abram Eisenberg Collection

Photo by Mitro Hood

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Springtime of Life, 1871

oil on canvas

overall: 105.09 x 74.61 cm (41 3/8 x 29 3/8 in.)

Minneapolis Institute of Art, Bequest of Mrs. Erasmus C. Lindley in memory of her father, James J. Hill

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Diana and Actaeon (Diana Surprised in Her Bath), 1836

oil on canvas

overall: 156.53 x 112.71 cm (61 5/8 x 44 3/8 in.)

Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975

 

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Marietta (Roman Odalisque), 1843

oil on paper mounted on canvas

overall: 29.3 x 44.2 cm (11 9/16 x 17 3/8 in.)

framed: 49 x 63 x 8 cm (19 5/16 x 24 13/16 x 3 1/8 in.)

Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris

 

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Bacchante with a Panther, 1860, reworked c. 1865–1870

oil on canvas

overall: 55 x 95 cm (21 5/8 x 37 3/8 in.)

framed: 81 x 121 x 9 cm (31 7/8 x 47 5/8 x 3 9/16 in.)

Collection of Shelburne Museum, Anonymous gift in memory of Harry Payne Bingham

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Bacchante by the Sea, 1865

oil on wood

overall: 38.74 x 59.37 cm (15 1/4 x 23 3/8 in.)

framed: 54 x 75 x 7 cm (21 1/4 x 29 1/2 x 2 3/4 in.)

Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, H.O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O.Havemeyer, 1929

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Saint Sébastien, c. 1850–1860

oil on canvas

overall: 90 x 60.5 cm (35 7/16 x 23 13/16 in.)

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

© Lyon MBA - Photo RMN / Ojeda-Le Mage

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Woman with a Pearl, c. 1868–1870

oil on canvas

overall: 70 x 55 cm (27 9/16 x 21 5/8 in.)

framed: 93 x 74.5 x 9 cm (36 5/8 x 29 5/16 x 3 9/16 in.)

Musée du Louvre, Paris, Départment des Peintures

© RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY, photo by Stephane Marechalle

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Young Greek Woman, c. 1870–1871

oil on canvas

overall: 84.14 x 70.49 cm (33 1/8 x 27 3/4 in.)

framed: 102.3 x 73.7 x 10.8 cm (40 1/4 x 29 x 4 1/4 in.)

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Mademoiselle de Foudras, 1872

oil on canvas

overall: 88.9 x 59.3 cm (35 x 23 3/8 in.)

Lent by Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums) on behalf of Glasgow City Council. Presented by Trustees of DWT Cargill, 1950

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Woman with a Pink Shawl, c. 1865–1870

oil on canvas

overall: 66.7 x 55.2 cm (26 1/4 x 21 3/4 in.)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Henry C. and Martha B. Angell Collection

Photograph © 2018 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Sibylle, c. 1870

oil on canvas

overall: 81.92 x 64.77 cm (32 1/4 x 25 1/2 in.)

framed: 95.7 x 83 x 7.5 cm (37 11/16 x 32 11/16 x 2 15/16 in.)

Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, H.O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Italian Woman (Woman with the Yellow Sleeve), c. 1870

oil on canvas

overall: 73 x 59 cm (28 3/4 x 23 1/4 in.)

framed: 87 x 57.4 x 13.5 cm (34 1/4 x 22 5/8 x 5 5/16 in.)

The National Gallery, London, Accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by HM Government from the estate of Lucian Freud and allocated to the National Gallery, 2012

© The National Gallery, London

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Woman with a Mandolin, c. 1860–1865

oil on canvas

overall: 51.4 x 40.3 cm (20 1/4 x 15 7/8 in.)

framed: 69.2 x 59.4 x 7 cm (27 1/4 x 23 3/8 x 2 3/4 in.)

Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum Purchase

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Woman Reading in the Country, c. 1868–1870

oil on canvas

overall: 54.3 x 37.5 cm (21 3/8 x 14 3/4 in.)

framed: 76 x 61 x 9 cm (29 15/16 x 24 x 3 9/16 in.)

Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Louise Senff Cameron, in memory of her uncle,Charles H. Senff, 1928

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Woman Reading in The Studio, c. 1868

oil on paperboard on wood

overall: 32.5 x 41.3 cm (12 13/16 x 16 1/4 in.)

framed: 50.5 x 59.1 x 6.4 cm (19 7/8 x 23 1/4 x 2 1/2 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

The Lady in Blue, 1874

oil on canvas

overall: 80 x 50.5 cm (31 1/2 x 19 7/8 in.)

framed: 125.5 x 95.5 x 16.5 cm (49 7/16 x 37 5/8 x 6 1/2 in.)

Musée du Louvre, Paris, Départment des Peintures

© RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY, photo by Stephane Marechalle

Brand-New & Terrific: Alex Katz in the 1950s

July 23, 2018, 1:52 pm

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Colby College Museum of Art

July 11, 2015 - October 18, 2015 

Cleveland Museum of Art

04/30/2017 - 08/06/2017

Neuberger Museum of Art
July 01, 2018 - October 14, 2018

Brand-New & Terrific: Alex Katz in the 1950s is the largest museum exhibition to showcase Alex Katz’s (b. 1927) innovative portraits, landscapes and still lifes from this pioneering period. Organized by the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, in close collaboration with Katz, this presentation explores the first decade of the artist’s career, a period characterized by fierce experimentation from which his signature brightly colored figurative paintings emerged. 

The exhibition’s title derives from Katz’s early manifesto announcing his intentions to invigorate traditional artistic subject matter. Creating work at a time when abstract painting dominated the art scene, Katz forged an ingenious way to wed abstraction with recognizable imagery by paring down his compositions to their most fundamental elements. In retrospect, these works prefigured the subsequent development of Pop Art. The exhibition includes more than 60 key loans from public and private collections, including many rarely seen works from the artist’s own holdings as well as a sampling of Katz’s works from the Colby College Museum of Art collection.

 

Brand - New & Terrific: Alex Katz in the 1950s explore s the first decade of the artist’s career, a period characterized by fierce experimentation and innovation from which Katz’s signature style emerged. The exhibition is the first museum survey to focus on the artist ’s output from this formative decade. Curated by Diana Tuite, Katz Curator at the Colby Museum, Brand - New & Terrific draws from the Colby Museum’s deep collection of artworks by Alex Katz and will include many rarely seen loan s from the artist and other public and private collections. 

Born and raised in New York, Katz studied at the Cooper Union in the late 1940s and then attended Maine’s Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1949 and 1950. There, the artist first began to paint from life and found the subjects that he would depict for years to come — the Maine landscape, his circle of friends, and domestic interiors. Within the same period Katz also turned to found photographs as a source for paintings, such as Group Portrait 2 ( c. 195 0). With faceless sitter s and backgrounds reduced to bands of color, he found the essence of composition by paring it down to its most fundamental elements. 

By 1954, inspired in part by the cut paper constructions of Henri Matisse, Katz began to make collages from pieces of watercolored paper. Intimate in scale and delicate in construction, these works were often created at the kitchen table of the Lincolnville, Maine, farmhouse where he still spends his summers. 



Collages such as Wildflowers in Vase ( c. 1954 - 55), a small bouquet of bright flowers, explore the economy of line and form and the proportionality of color. These early works helped to lay the foundation for Katz’s mature style — the vibrant palette, use of repetition, and the graphic placement of a figure against a solid ground — that emerged toward the end of the decade. 

In spite of their small size, paintings like



 Blueberry Field (1955)

 

 and Goldenrod (1955) rehearse the immersive experience of nature for which Katz has become so well - known. 

Katz’s portraits, often full - length depictions of friends and, after 1957, his wife Ada, primarily appear before chromatic backgrounds. 

 

In Ada (1959), Katz’s wife is rendered in blue against a brilliant green backdrop. Another example of work from this period is

 

 Irving and Lucy (1958), a portrait of art historian Irving Sandler and his wife set into a vigorously painted but neutral colored ground. 

In 1959 Katz began to experiment with repetitions of the same figure within a single composition. These so - called “reduplicative portraits” include 

 

Ada Ada (1959), a painting with two images of his wife in a blue housecoat with arms crossed, and the equally conceptually sophisticated 

 

Double Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (1959), in which the artist appears twice, almost mirror ed across the center of the canvas. Multiplied but not identical, these figures inspire close examination, raising questions about copies and originals, reproduction, and representation. 

Also created in 1959, Katz’s first cutouts are freestanding or wall - mounted figures liberated from any ground whatsoever. 

 

 Bather (detail), 1959. Alex Katz (American, b. 1927). Oil on linen; 121.9 x 182.9 cm. Colby College Museum of Art, Museum purchase made possible by Peter and Paula Lunder through the Lunder Foundation, Michael Gordon ’66, Barbara and Theodore Alfond through the Acorn Foundation, and the Jere Abbott Acquisitions Fund, 2016.189. Art © Alex Katz / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.


Catalogue:

Brand-New and Terrific: Alex Katz in the 1950s

by Diana Tuite(Author), Sharon Corwin(Foreword), Katy Siegel(Contributor), Richard Shiff(Contributor), & 1 more

 

Celebrating an experimental decade in the career of Alex Katz, this book introduces audiences to a relatively unknown body of his work. Coming of age as an artist in the 1950s, Alex Katz set out to reinvent representational painting in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. At first, Katz struggled to find an audience, destroying hundreds of canvases. 

This book surveys the artwork that survived from this momentous decade, one in which he first painted outdoors, innovated with collages, and met Ada del Moro, his wife and muse. The essays in this book contextualize Katz’s painting, consider how he and his peers looked at one another, mined 19th-century portraiture, and borrowed from television, advertising, and cinema. 

The result is a fascinating study of a young artist laying the groundwork for an astonishingly successful career. Fans of Katz will be inspired by the radicality of his early work, and those being introduced to the artist will be struck by its freshness and relevance.

Picasso – Donner à voir exhibition

July 24, 2018, 8:29 am

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From 15 June to 23 September 2018, the Musée Fabre de Montpellier Méditerranée  Métropole will be presenting the  Picasso – Donner à voir exhibition, in association with  ‘Picasso-Méditerranée’, an international cultural event launched by the Musée National  Picasso-Paris. Montpellier – a Mediterranean metropolis located halfway between Catalonia and Provence  – is involved in this programme. 

The Musée Fabre is presenting a major exhibition encompassing the artist’s entire career  and offering an overview of the creation of a prodigious oeuvre with a particular focus in  the selection and presentation of the works. The exhibition is structured around his pivotal years, experimentation and departures from  previous work, reflecting the continuous movement of his metamorphoses. The works will  be presented in an open-plan exhibition format that lends itself well to formal comparisons  between periods. 

Fourteen key dates 

 While the idea of change governs all of Picasso’s artistic creation, we can nevertheless identify  certain paroxysmal moments. 

The exhibition’s perspective is rooted in fourteen key dates that  highlight formal and technical departures from Picasso’s oeuvre; yet it is also deliberately distanced  from the artist’s biography. It covers 900 m 2 and is designed with no physical separation between  the different sections, meaning the works can be compared, contrasted and viewed from different  perspectives. 

Each section brings together a variety of different works completed over a short  time period: one or several seasons, a single year. The selected works thus reflect the artist’s ability  to explore several formal hypotheses at the same time, sometimes even within the same work. 

 A ‘self-destructive’ artist  
The open-plan format challenges the idea of ‘evolution’ in Picasso’s work and deconstructs any  overly linear interpretation of his oeuvre. None of his departures are ever definitive. The physical changes in Picasso’s work reflect a series of round trips within his own career path.   

While several recent exhibitions have helped highlight the external points of reference used or  ‘cannibalised’ by the artist (Picasso and the Masters, Picasso and Folk Art and Traditions),  Picasso  – Donner à voir  demonstrates how Picasso drew inspiration from his own work.    

The exhibition explores the period from 1895 to 1972: 77 years of artistic creation! 

In addition to  masterpieces of painting, sculpture, etching and drawing, records, sketchbooks and preparatory  drawings have been included that reveal these moments of intense experimentation and bring  us closer to the creative process. 

Musée Fabre will display over 120 pieces within the exhibition, including a remarkable set of  works loaned by the Musée National Picasso-Paris, representing ‘all the breakthroughs, all the  key pieces that Picasso kept to himself in order that he could continue living with them and  seeking out what it was that his painting or sculpture had achieved at a given point – something  that he would perhaps only understand much later, in the light of other works or in a different  era’. (Pierre Daix). 

These are joined by works on loan from other prestigious museums in France  and elsewhere, including Picasso Museum Barcelona; Musée Picasso, Antibes; Kunsthaus Zurich;  Museum Berggruen, Berlin; Metropolitan Museum, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington;  Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Musée de  l’Orangerie, Paris; Bibliothèque Nationale de France; Médiathèque Emile Zola de 

Pablo Picasso,  Vollard Suite: Faun  Unveiling a Sleeping Girl (Jupiter  and Antiope, after Rembrandt), 12  June 1936, sugar-lift aquatint with  varnish, scraper and burin on copper.  Sixth state, Montpellier, Musée Fabre,  photo © Musée Fabre de Montpellier  Méditerranée Métropole / Frédéric  Jaulmes, press office / Musée Fabre,  © Succession Picasso 2018  

In its collection of graphic works, the Musée Fabre possesses a  remarkable copy of the  Vollard Suite (1930-1937) by Picasso, thanks  to the generosity of Frédéric Sabatier d’Espeyran. The diplomat and bibliophile donated his entire library to the city  of Montpellier in 1965, all in all over 600 publications and albums  illustrated by the greatest artists of the 20 th century. (Two years later,  his wife, née Renée de Cabrières, donated the private mansion which  today houses the Musée Fabre’s decorative arts department.) Thanks to this remarkable legacy, now shared between the Médiathèque  Emile Zola and the Musée Fabre, the museum is one of the rare  establishments in the world to hold a complete, signed copy of the  Vollard Suite . 

The Sabatier d’Espeyran collection contains other engravings and  lithographs by Picasso, including another series also published by  Ambroise Vollard,  Les Saltimbanques , as well as more recent illustrated  books, such as  Toros and Les Bleus de Barcelone , published for the opening of the Picasso  Museum in Barcelona.   

The exhibition  Picasso, Donner à voir will be a rare opportunity for the Musée Fabre to showcase  the  Vollard Suite in its entirety, as part of its permanent collection. A selection of other engravings,  publications (mostly from the Sabatier d’Espeyran collection housed in the Médiathèque Zola)  and copper plates will also be on display to evoke the artist’s studio, opposite a presentation  about the donor. 

The exhibition is structured around fourteen key dates, pivotal moments in Picasso’s career.

SECTION I – 1895-1896: ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Picasso, Self-portrait, 1896 Oil on canvas, 32 x 23.5 cm. Barcelona, Musée Picasso © Succession Picasso 2018

The exhibition opens with the itinerant nature of Pablo Ruiz Picasso’s life, which took him from LaCorogne to Barcelona, via Madrid and Malaga. This travel with his family was motivated by his father’s appointment as a teacher at the school of fine arts in Barcelona.

The moving around is presented as a metaphor for the numerous shifts and transformations between styles and techniques practised by the artist throughout his life.A series of academic works allude to Picasso’s traditional training at the LaCorogne school followed by the prestigious LaLlotja school in Barcelona. 

In parallel, two more personal paintings reflect Picasso’s early artistic maturity and his mastery of the conventions of the Spanish realist tradition:  


Portrait of a Young Girl, Barefoot (early 1895, LaCorogne) and Self-portrait (1896) 



SECTION II – 1901: PARISIAN MODERNITY AND THE BLUE PERIOD

Picasso, The Death of Casagemas, summer 1901, Oil on wood, 27 x 35, Musée national Picasso-Paris © Succession Picasso 2018

Picasso visited Paris for the first time in 1900 for the Exposition Universelle, the world’s fair where he had the opportunity to see the most recent artworks produced by the Parisian avant-garde, completing the survey opened up to him by Catalan modernism. He moved to Madrid in spring 1901 where he was appointed artistic director of the Arte Joven review that reflected the artist’s ambition, namely to import Catalan and Parisian modernism to the city. 

Picasso then returned to Paris, where art dealer Ambroise Vollard dedicated a solo exhibition to the artist. This proved to be an occasion for Picasso to demonstrate his ability to assimilate the vocabulary of modernism. In the run-up to this exhibition, he was invited to exhibit in a collective exhibition in France for the first time, organised by the Société des Beaux-Arts de Béziers.Picasso’s enthusiastic response to the City of Lights and the distractions it offered was somewhat overshadowed, however, by the suicide, just months later, of his close friend Carlos Casagemas. 

The colourful exuberance of his earlier paintings was replaced by an ethereal monochrome tone that faithfully represented feelings of misery. Pierre Daix described the shift as ex abruptoor ‘violent’.


SECTION III – 1906: ARCADIA AND ARCHAISMP. 

Picasso, Woman with Comb, 1906, gouache on paper, 139 x 57, Paris, Musée de L’Orangerie© Succession Picasso 2018 

Picasso’s search for exoticism was sparked by his discovery, on the one hand, of 



The Turkish Bath, a painting by Ingres, in autumn 1905 and, on the other hand, of Gustave Fayet’s collection, which included several works by Gauguin, in 1906.

With these indirect allusions and through the mediation of works by other artists, frequent exchanges with André Derain and Henri Matisse prompted Picasso to familiarise himself with ‘Negro art’, a term which encompassed all art produced outside of Europe. Picasso’s trip to Gósol, a village in the Catalan Pyrenees, in the summer of 1906, resulted in the artist’s combining of exoticism and archaism. He drew inspiration from traditional mountain costumes and attitudes as well as Romanesque sculpture. He modified his vocabulary in light of a stricter repertoire seemingly drawn from an imaginary Arcadia. 

William Rubin identified this moment with ‘the shift from gentle lyricism to a hardening of shapes and a more sculptural precision of forms.’ This section will include an ensemble of paintings and sculptures in which these different concerns were manifested in the theme of the woman at her dressing table: between eroticism mixed with exoticism and dreams of a primitive society.  

SECTION IV – 1907-1908: SPOTLIGHT ON LES DEMOISELLES D’AVIGNON

Picasso, Three Figures Under a Tree, winter 1907-8, oil on canvas, 99 x 99, Musée National Picasso-Paris © Succession Picasso 2018 

Inspired by his first visit to the Musée du Trocadero in spring 1907 and his rivalry with Derain and Matisse, Picasso undertook an ambitious painting project that would pass into posterity under the name Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Picasso produced a substantial volume of preparatory works which gave the artist the time to plan for every aspect of a complex composition, the final outcome clearly a direct result of the thoroughness of his preceding studies.

This intense period of research in spring is examined by presenting notebooks and sketches, drawings and painted studies rounded out by a multimedia installation which lends a tangibility to the creative process at work.The final piece in this section, Three Figures Under a Tree, painted in winter 1907, provides some understanding of the connection between the ‘geometric monstrosity’ (André Salmon) of 



Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and cubism.

SECTION V – 1911-1912: CUBISMS 

P. Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, spring 1912, Oil and oilcloth on canvas framed with rope, 29 x 37, Musée National Picasso-Paris© Succession Picasso 2018 

 

Man with a Guitar(autumn 1911) and Still Life with Chair Caning (spring 1912) are two masterpieces that provide a window into the ‘mountain rope’ that tied Picasso and Georges Braque, whom the artist met in 1907, together. The two founders of cubism then explored different methods, not for representation but the suggestion of reality. The image, firstly fragmented almost to the point of abstraction, was then recomposed using new processes, like the introduction of printed block letters to the composition and collages with motifs (e.g. chair caning, newspaper and wallpaper) produced in series. 

At the same time as Still Life with Chair Caning opened the way to papier colléand prefigured the question of theready-made, the work also heralded a method that would prove fundamental in the next stages of Picasso’s artistic practice: the association of different forms of representation in a single work. 

SECTION VI – 1914: ‘BAROQUE CUBISM’ AND A NEW INGRISM 

The summer of 1914 was a pivotal moment in Picasso’s career. He initially continued exploring the potential afforded by cubism with the association of several geometric or other naturalistic elements in the same work, or indeed the representation of a single subject in several compositions in visual registers that at first glance seemed conflicting. 

 

Pablo Picasso. Man leans on a table, 1915

Pablo Picasso. Man leans hands CROSS has table, 1916

 
His Man Leaning on a Table series helps us to understand this process.The reappearance of Ingres-style drawing in the artist’s work suggests neither a rupture nor a ‘return to order’ but rather the introduction of an additional element that allowed the artist to play with forms of representation and the evocation of reality. This approach finds its iconographic equivalent in the omnipresent theme of the six-sided dice. The pointillist technique also re-emerged, echoing Picasso’s experimentations during the years 1900 and 1901. Picasso then drew subtly on all the registers he invented or made his own.

From 1914 emerged a double movement in his creative process: he further enriched the range of pictorial options available to him at the same time as he borrowed, self-referenced, subverted and combined others.1914 was also the year in which Picasso, a Spanish artist, was separated from his French friends who were either sent to the front line like Braque and Derain, or enlisted voluntarily like Apollinaire. The gallery owned by his art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was also confiscated.

 SECTION VII – 1918-1923: A BULIMIA OF STYLES

The Pipes of Pan, 1923, oil on canvas, MP79,Musée National Picasso-Paris © RMN-Grand Palais / Jean-Gilles Berizzi © Succession Picasso 2018

In this section, we take the year 1917 as the starting point to describe the method employed by Picasso which seems to have taken shape from this moment: metamorphosis versus evolution (Jean Leymarie). 

The year 1917 was firstly one of new discoveries: Italy – Rome for the classical tradition and Naples and Pompeii for Antiquity – as well as his collaboration with the Ballets Russes company which introduced Picasso to an art from anchored in the present. Indeed, it was the present that governed all of the artist's choices, as he himself declared in an interview with Mexican critic Marius de Zayas in 1923. The notion of the present allowed Picasso to banish any idea of progress from his work. 

In 1917, he demonstrated his freedom from any evolutionist interpretation of his work by reviving themes and processes seen more than a decade earlier during a trip to Barcelona where he depicted bullfights and women in traditional dress sometimes represented in the pointillist style. The figure of Harlequin that re-emerged in 1915 adopted new metaphorical significance: ‘While Harlequin was diversity personified, Picasso considered himself, after Rome, as painting personified.’ (Yve-Alain Bois). 

This opinion confounds the idea that Picasso’s career was punctuated by a series of departures from his previous work. Thus, instead of focusing on a single year for this section, the collection presented is less restricted by time, between 1917 – the year when Picasso discovered Italy for the first time and returned to his Spanish roots – and 1923 when Picasso told Marius de Zayas: ‘The different techniques I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution, or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting. All I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it will always remain in the present.’ 

SECTION VIII – 1924-1930: ‘SURREALISMS’

 Picasso, Head of a Man,1930, iron, brass and bronze, 83.5 x 40 x 36, Musée National Picasso-Paris © Succession Picasso 2018 

The appearance of aggressive figures in Picasso’s works from 1924 interrupted the apparent tranquillity that set the tone during the course of preceding years in which his painting was inhabited by harlequins and giants. This was the year in which André Breton published his surrealist manifesto, stating: ‘Picasso is hunting in the environs.’ 

Picasso’s rapprochement with the surrealist group was confirmed the following year when the artist agreed to have studies he created in the summer of 1924 in Juan-les-Pins reproduced in reviews La Révolution Surréaliste(issue 2) and later La Danse (issue 4). 

Picasso also participated in the first surrealist exhibition at the Pierre gallery in Paris. Later, in 1928, he became close with sculptor Julio Gonzalez who introduced him to the soldering technique that allowed Picasso to pursue his destruction/recomposition of the human figure by creating anthropomorphic sculptures with everyday objects, a technique not dissimilar to surrealist processes



 

Picasso, Painter Picking up his Brush, 1927, etching, 46 x 50, illustration for H. de Balzac, Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, Paris, Vollard, 1931© Succession Picasso 2018 

Picasso’s renewed interest in sculpture prompted by his meeting Gonzalez flourished in June 1930 when he purchased the Château de Boisgeloup which he converted into a spacious studio. Concurrently, Picasso signed up to several ambitious editorial projects which gave him the opportunity to step up his engraving work. 

In autumn 1930, Albert Skira commissioned Picasso to produce a suite to illustrate Ovid’s Metamorphoses.The book was published in October 1931 with 32 etchings. The diversity of the styles employed, at times in the same plate, was a direct echo of the theme of Metamorphoses. The same year, Ambroise Vollard published Le Chef d’œuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece) by Balzac, which featured engravings on wood based on drawings by Picasso.

SECTION X – 1937: SPOTLIGHT ON GUERNICA 

 

P. Picasso, Dream and Lie of Franco, 1937, etching and sugar-lift aquatint on copper, 31.7 x 42.2 cm Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France© Succession Picasso 2018 

The beginning of 1937 was marked by the eruption of politics at the heart of Picasso’s work. In January, he received a commission from the Spanish government for the country’s pavilion at the Exposition Internationale in Paris. The bombing of the city of Guernica on 28 April prompted Picasso to completely change the theme of his project which he had begun with a series of studies on the theme ‘The Studio: the painter and model’. 

However, the coexistence of the intimate register of studio scenes and the representation of the miseries of war becomes striking from January. To show this, the Portrait of Marie-Thérèse– produced on 6 January – is presented beside the two prints forming the Dream and Lie of Franco, engraved on 8 January and whose theme was inspired by the events of the bombardment of Madrid. The contrast between the curves and pastel colours of the portrait and the parodic and monstrous register of the engravings echoes something Picasso said to Marius de Zayas in 1937: ‘If the subjects I want to express happen to lend themselves to different forms of expression, I never hesitate to adopt them.’

This combination of new elements and the re-use of other, older elements is characteristic of the way in which Picasso worked. Furthermore, the very theme of the publication reflected Picasso’s approach: the relentless attitude of the artist Frenhofer who modified over a decade the same composition, in permanent metamorphosis. The conclusion of the book, in which the ideal model seems to defeat the painter, echoes the Picassian iconography of the painter and his model. Sometimes the model is the object of the painter's gaze and desire, other times it takes its revenge and turns into a menacing figure. 

Such as the case in Woman Throwing a Stone, which appears to aim at the painter/sculptor his tools or even a fragment of his own unstructured body.

The copies of Metamorphoses and Chef d’œuvre in connu presented in the exhibition come from the collection owned by Frédéric Sabatier, a collector and bibliophile from Montpellier, who will feature in a display structured around the copy of the Vollard Suite which he bequeathed to the city of Montpellier, currently held at the Musée Fabre. 

SECTION XI – 1946-1947: THE MEDITERRANEAN REDISCOVERED

Picasso, Bull, faience, 37 x 40 x 30, Antibes, Musée Picasso© Succession Picasso 2018 

In the autumn of 1946, the curator of Château Grimaldi in Antibes invited Picasso to set up there to work with Françoise Gilot. Picasso, who was first introduced to this area on the Côte d’Azur in 1920, had spoken of the imaginary bond he felt united the port of Antibes and the evocation of Antiquity. During his stay he produced a considerable number of works that ‘reflected the classic Mediterranean tradition in a new vision, at once childlike and complex.’ (Roland Penrose). This revival was an opportunity to ‘bequeath a sort of anthology of the latest problems he had encountered, through a hymn to Françoise who changed his life.’ (Pierre Daix)

While Picasso revived certain visual statements and a Mediterranean iconography and geography, he also reappropriated two techniques he had not used for several years. In 1945, he met printer Fernand Mourlot and took up lithography again. During the summer of 1946, he met Georges and Suzanne Ramié who worked at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris, which signalled the start of a long collaboration from the following summer. 

SECTION XII – 1953-1954: FROM INTIMATE CHRONICLES TO PAINTING PAINTINGS

Verve, cover by P. Picasso, 1953, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France© Succession Picasso 2018 

Late 1953 was described by Marie-Laure Bernadac as the pivotal episode that set the artist’s late period in motion. The moment was characterised by an urgency to paint and a period of hyper-production during which Picasso increased his experimentation. This section focuses on three groups in which the notion of metamorphosis is central. In drawings from the series inspired by the painter and his model published in the magazine Verve. Picasso once again reinvented the theme of the artist’s studio through representations in various styles. 

Next, the series on Women of Algiers opened a succession of citations and variations inspired by paintings by the masters. Picasso then worked in series mode, seeming to explore each composition through multiple interpretations: ‘What interests him is what happens from one version to another, the changes, the metamorphoses, the toing and froing, the constants. “You understand”, he said to Kahnweiler, “it’s not about time regained, but time for discovery”.’ (Marie-Laure Bernadac). 

The progression of a subject through time and space depicted across multiple representations is envisaged alternatively in three dimensions with his first sculptures made from folded sheet metal. The staccato succession of planes infers a new relationship with the space, about which Werner Spies remarked that there is ‘something dramatic in this impossibility to grasp and comprehend, yet at the same time we can see this art’s underlying rule, its variability and refusal to set the expression in stone and see the formal solutions as optimal and definitive.’


SECTION XIII – 1963-1964: ‘PAINTING IS STRONGER THAN ME’ 

P. Picasso, Large Nude, 1964, oil on canvas, 140 x 195, Zürich Kunsthaus© Succession Picasso 2018‘

By painting paintings, and paintings of paintings (Delacroix, Velázquez and Manet) and by going through his ritual (of painter and model), Picasso ended up inventing an “alternative” way of painting, creating a new pictorial language.’ (Marie Laure Bernadac). From 1963 onwards, his painting only seemed to refer to itself, Picasso abandoning all direct citations of the compositions of the masters, iconography being supplanted by the pictorial. His frantic creativity can thus be gauged from the hundreds of paintings produced during his last ten years, which appears in an increasingly elliptical style. 

Marie-Laure Bernadac spoke of his ‘stenographic style’ or even ‘painting/composition made of signs and ideograms’. Picasso learned in 1963 of the death of two friends from his early days, André Derain and Jean Cocteau, and his painting was fuelled by an urgency, the kind that threatens those who find themselves alone.

 SECTION XIV – 1972: ‘MEMORIES OF THE PRANKS OF YOUTH’

Similar to the story about the painter Frenhofer about whom Picasso illustrated the short story Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu, the artist’s career shows a trajectory forever unfinished, always recommencing. While Frenhofer destroyed his composition by producing a ‘wall of paint’ thereby drowning his subject, Picasso rather took the opposite approach: the figures he painted in the year before his death gradually dissolved into the white canvas. 

Pierre Daix said as much talking about a painting from 1971: ‘Picasso broke his own painting and all painting to find a painting beyond painting. He recommenced what he had already done well between 1906 and 1908 or after 1924-1926, but now kicking every ounce of life out of his art, like a young painter dead set on expelling life from his painting.’

 Picasso, The Young Painter, 1972, oil on canvas, 91 x 72.5, Musée National Picasso-Paris© Succession Picasso 2018

The exhibition concludes with the figure of the Young Painter showing the surprising portrait executed in 1972. This self-portrait, as guessed by René Char, indicates the youthfulness still driving Picasso in his final metamorphosis. 

 

This is also the case of many skeletal self-portraits produced that same year, one of which Picasso spoke about to Pierre Daix: ‘I did a drawing yesterday. I think I have touched on something there... It’s not like anything ever done.’

Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master

July 26, 2018, 11:47 am

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Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh
7 July – 14 October 2018


Britain’s love affair with one of history’s greatest artists will be explored in the major Festival exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery this summer. Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master is the first exhibition to tell the exceptionally rich story of how Rembrandt’s work in Britain has enraptured and inspired collectors, artists and writers over the past 400 years. This major new exhibition, which will only be shown in Edinburgh, will bring together key works by Rembrandt which remain in British collections, as well as treasures that have left the country. Some of the exhibits have never been on public display before, while others return to Britain for the first time in decades, some after even a century or more.

Speaking of the exhibition, Christopher Baker, Director, European and Scottish Art and Portraiture at National Galleries of Scotland, said: “This exhibition provides an extraordinary opportunity to study the staggering range of Rembrandt’s achievement and its profound impact on British taste and art. Featuring both major international loans and many less well-known rarities, it tells a riveting story. From the collectors of the artist’s own life time in the seventeenth century to today’s painters, Rembrandt has cast a spell on the British imagination. It’s a tale of scholarship and money, of privilege and popularity – and it’s all laid out exclusively in Edinburgh this summer!

For the first time, we’ll be offering a range of new ticket options, including off-peak prices, which we hope will allow as many people as possible to experience Rembrandt’s inspiring work.”

The genius of Rembrandt (1606-69) is so universally admired, and his imagery so ubiquitous, that he has become a global brand like few other artists in history; yet no nation has demonstrated such a passionate, and sometimes eccentric, enthusiasm for Rembrandt’s (or indeed any artist’s) works. As a result, there is a wealth of paintings, drawings and prints by Rembrandt in British collections, and the number of his works that have been here at some point in their history is staggering, surpassing any other country apart from the Netherlands, where they originated.



The arrival of an early Self-portrait (c.1629), which was presented to Charles I before 1633, makes an impressive starting point for the exhibition (it was the first painting by Rembrandt to leave Holland), but did little to anticipate the level of adulation his work would inspire in the following century and which had become a kind of mania among British collectors around 1750.  

Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery Of The Master will bring together 15 major works in oil (and two further oils attributed to Rembrandt, and two more from his workshop), as well as an extensive selection of 15 outstanding drawings and more than 20 prints, including some of his most celebrated etchings, such as  



Christ Presented to the People (1655),  

 

The Three Trees (1643)

 

and Portrait of Jan Six (1647).

Great paintings such as





Belshazzar’s Feast (c.1636-38) from the National Gallery London,



and Girl at a Window (1645) from Dulwich Picture Gallery,

will be shown alongside star works that are now overseas, such as  



The Mill (1645/8) from the National Gallery in Washington, which left Britain when it was sold to a US collector for the staggering sum of £100,000 in 1911.

The exhibition will also reveal the profound impact of Rembrandt’s art on the British imagination, by exploring the wide range of native artists whose work has been inspired by the Dutch master right up to the present day.

The son of a miller, Rembrandt was born and trained in Leiden, where he spent his early career. From 1631 he also worked in Amsterdam, mainly as a portrait painter, and he settled there permanently in 1634. Rembrandt married the same year and enjoyed a success as painter and printmaker, covering a wide range of subjects and receiving important private and public commissions. He oversaw a busy workshop with many pupils.

Rembrandt nevertheless ran into financial difficulties – most likely due to an enormous mortgage on his house and substantial expenditure on his art collection – and was declared insolvent in 1656. After his large house and possessions had been sold, he continued to work in Amsterdam until his death. Contrary to what is widely believed, Rembrandt did not die in poverty, although he never again prospered as he had done at the height of his career.

Among the early arrivals in Britain were Rembrandt’s only portraits of ‘British’ sitters,



Reverend Johannes Elison

 

and his wife Maria Bockenolle (both 1634), which will be on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Although they were painted in Amsterdam, the Boston portraits depict a Dutch couple who lived in Norwich, and the paintings were in Britain by 1680. Such expensive and ostentatious portraits are uncommon for clerics, and rare in Rembrandt’s work; they presumably reflect the status of the couple’s son, a successful merchant, who probably commissioned them. They are one of only three pairs of full-length portraits painted by Rembrandt, and have not been seen in the UK since 1929.

A few years after the visit from the Norwich minister and his wife, Rembrandt was again busy exploring English subjects. A group of four drawings depicting English views has been much debated and is exhibited here together for the first time. The drawings, in which the locations – St Albans Cathedral, Windsor Castle and London with Old St Paul’s – are clearly identifiable, are of similar size and executed in pen, brown ink and wash. On stylistic grounds all four drawings must have been created in Rembrandt’s studio in about 1640, but controversies have centred around the questions of whether they are (all) by the hand of Rembrandt, and if they were drawn from prints or ‘from life’, which would infer, tantalisingly, that Rembrandt might have visited England.

From about 1720, the steady flow of major paintings by Rembrandt, such as the beautiful and tender  

 

Landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1647) (which will be on loan to this exhibition from the National Gallery in Dublin), grew into an enormous surge. By the 1770s Rembrandt mania was in full swing, pushing demand and prices to extraordinary levels. Even so, British collectors still succeeded in bringing prized pictures into the country, including  

 

An Old Woman Reading (1655), on loan here from the Buccleuch collection,

 

and A Woman in Bed (Sarah) (1647), which is now in the National Galleries of Scotland.

The publication in 1752 of a catalogue of Rembrandt’s etchings gave collectors a tool to identify different states or versions of the artist’s prints, as well as copies and forgeries. At the same time, it fuelled the craze for rarities such as corrected proof prints and impressions on exotic papers. To meet this desire for the uncommon, those who were fortunate enough to have access to Rembrandt’s original etching plates pulled new editions, sometimes creating collectors’ items that Rembrandt himself never produced; for example, impressions on satin or in red ink, such as  

 

Portrait of the Preacher Jan Cornelis Sylvius (1633) in the NGS collection. Reprints and copies catered to the huge demand for Rembrandt’s etchings in a competitive market.

Captain William Baillie infamously acquired the worn plate of The Hundred Guilder Print, one of Rembrandt’s most famous etchings. He reworked it and in 1775 printed a limited edition, thereafter cutting the plate into four pieces and continuing to print from these mutilated fragments.

The impact of the massively enhanced exposure to Rembrandt’s imagery on artists in Britain was profound. The Dutch artist’s portraits and self-portraits in particular inspired British painters from William Hogarth, Thomas Hudson, Joseph Wright of Derby and Allan Ramsay to Sir Henry Raeburn and Sir Thomas Lawrence.

Above all, it was Sir Joshua Reynolds who appreciated Rembrandt as an artist, writer and collector. His Rembrandt collection was one of the most distinguished in Britain, including prized paintings such as  



 

A Man in Armour (‘Achilles’) (1655), on loan here from Glasgow Museums. The strongest impact on Reynolds as a portraitist lasted from about 1745 to about 1770.



His Portrait of Giuseppe Marchi (1753) (Royal Academy of Arts, London),
 


and his Self-portrait from around the same time (Tate), both show strong chiaroscuro combined with warm colouring and – in the former – fancy oriental costume, all reminiscent of Rembrandt’s paintings.

In the early nineteenth century, British landscape painters also began to fall under Rembrandt’s spell. A major catalyst for this was the acquisition by a group of British collectors of The Mill (1645/48), which will be lent by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and had been in the celebrated collection of the Duc d’Orléans. The Mill epitomises the Dutch artist’s influence on British landscape painting throughout the nineteenth century, starting with Turner, John Crome and John Constable.

The Victorian era also brought major shifts in the reception of Rembrandt’s art, thanks to the founding of public galleries, and the creation of exhibitions. The introduction of cheap reproduction techniques permitted an unprecedented popularisation. Rembrandt’s reputation also transformed, as a romantic image of him gained currency and he became, in the public imagination, a universally celebrated genius. Ultimately, Rembrandt himself became the subject in art and popular culture: with artists such as John Gilbert producing sumptuous paintings depicting imaginary scenes from his life.


Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, Rembrandt continued to represent the gold standard for etching revival artists, including the Scots James McBey, Sir David Young Cameron, Sir Muirhead Bone and William Strang. Their moody landscapes were much in fashion among specialist print collectors and fetched huge prices in Europe and America (some sold for higher prices than many original Rembrandts). This allowed printmakers like Cameron to become collectors of Rembrandt prints themselves (Cameron’s bequest of 55 outstanding etchings to the NGS transformed its holdings), but the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the global financial collapse which ensued brought about a parallel collapse in the print market.

Rembrandt was also profoundly relevant for the artists of the ‘School of London’ group, which emerged in the 1950s. Among them Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, who have been close friends for more than 60 years, have copied Rembrandt voraciously. Works by both artists based on

 

Rembrandt’s celebrated A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654) in the National Gallery collections, will feature here, as will Rembrandt’s painting itself.

Many others have borrowed from Rembrandt in recent years. John Bellany, for example, did so in direct homages such as Danae: Homage to Rembrandt II (1991). Other, younger artists have viewed Rembrandt in a way that may seem cynical or disrespectful but which turns out to be the opposite. Glenn Brown has made painted, drawn and etched variants after Rembrandt since 1996, in works such as Unknown Pleasures (2016) and Half-Life (after Rembrandt) (2017), which offer a vibrant but deeply felt homage.

Clara Govier, Managing Director of People’s Postcode Lottery, said:“We are thrilled that, together with the Friends of the National Galleries of Scotland, players of People’s Postcode Lottery are supporting this beautiful exhibition. Like Rembrandt, PPL is a popular export from the Netherlands; our British players have now helped us to raise £310m for charities across the UK. We hope this once-in-a-lifetime show will be enjoyed by visitors from across the world, and we’re proud that the support of our Players has helped the National Galleries of Scotland to bring this ambitious project together.”

Publications

Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master and Rembrandt & Britain are published by National Galleries of Scotland Publishing on the occasion of this exhibition.



Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master
Christian Tico Seifert with Peter Black, Stephanie S. Dickey, Patrick Elliott, Donato Esposito, M.J. Ripps and Jonathan Yarker
176pp; 140 illustrations; Paperback; £22; ISBN 978 1 911054 19 1


Rembrandt & Britain
Christian Tico Seifert
36pp; 26 illustrations; Paperback; £7.95; ISBN 978 1 911054 26 9

Masterful Likeness: Dutch Drawings of the Golden Age

July 26, 2018, 1:39 pm

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J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center

July 24–October 28, 2018

During the seventeenth century, Dutch political and religious freedom as well as maritime trade and military strength ushered in an era of economic prosperity. In this golden age, artists inspired by the everyday made vast numbers of highly finished drawings. Masterful Likeness: Dutch Drawings of the Golden Age, on view July 24–October 28, 2018, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, brings together landscapes, topographical views, portraits, and scenes of daily life, underscoring Dutch artists’ masterful description of the world around them. 

            The seventeenth-century Dutch Republic’s art market flourished as members of a rising merchant class sought luxury goods to decorate their homes and assert their status. To meet the demands of these new patrons, Dutch artists not only produced paintings but created and sold drawings. Stimulated by the bounty brought to the Netherlands on mercantile ships and an emerging national pride, artists chronicled their observations and ideas. This exhibition presents their proud commemorations of Dutch places, people, and pastimes, revealing how drawings reflect and shape national identity. 

In the Dutch Golden Age, a period defined by economic prosperity and political and religious freedom, the art market flourished. Praised for their artful portrayal of the world around them, Dutch artists in the seventeenth-century met the demand for luxury goods by creating vast numbers of highly finished drawings. This selection of landscapes, topographical views, portraits, and scenes of daily life showcase how drawings helped shaped the emerging national identity of the Dutch Republic.

“Dutch artists documented and invented their world masterfully. The same attention to detail seen in capturing the specific – portraits of burghers, panoramic views of cities – is also used to create more generic subjects of artful fantasy,” says Stephanie Schrader, Curator of Drawings and organizer of the exhibition.

            Dutch masters, including Rembrandt van Rijn, Albert Cuyp, and Hendrick Avercamp, will be featured alongside recent acquisitions of drawings by Gerard ter Borch, Willem Buytewech, and Esaias van de Velde.

Masterful Likeness: Dutch Drawings of the Golden Age will be on view July 24-October 28, 2018, at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition is curated by Stephanie Schrader, curator in the Department of Drawings, and co-curated by Casey Lee, curatorial assistant in the Department of Drawings. 

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (Dutch, 1606 - 1669)

Title/Date:

Nude Woman with a Snake, about 1637

Culture:

Dutch

Medium:

Red chalk with white gouache heightening

Dimensions:

24.7 × 13.7 cm (9 3/4 × 5 3/8 in.)

Accession No.

81.GB.27

Object Credit:

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (Dutch, 1606 - 1669)

Title/Date:

Landscape with the House with the Little Tower, about 1651

Culture:

Dutch

Medium:

Pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash

Dimensions:

9.7 × 21.5 cm (3 13/16 × 8 7/16 in.)

Accession No.

83.GA.363

Object Credit:

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Joachim Anthonisz. Wtewael (Dutch, 1566 - 1638)

Title/Date:

Young Woman Assisted by a Gentleman, about 1609 - 1611

Culture:

Dutch

Medium:

Pen and black ink, gray wash, and white gouache heightening

Dimensions:

19.4 × 24.9 cm (7 5/8 × 9 13/16 in.)

Accession No.

85.GA.230

Object Credit:

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Aelbert Cuyp (Dutch, 1620 - 1691)

Title/Date:

A Milkmaid, about 1642 - 1646

Culture:

Dutch

Medium:

Black chalk, graphite, gray wash

Dimensions:

12.1 × 14.8 cm (4 3/4 × 5 13/16 in.)

Accession No.

86.GG.672

Object Credit:

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

David Bailly (Dutch, 1584 - 1657)

Title/Date:

Portrait of a Woman, 1629

Culture:

Dutch

Medium:

Pen and light and dark brown ink; framing line in dark brown ink; pupils

incised by the artist

Dimensions:

Diam.: 12.9 cm (Diam.: 5 1/16 in.)

Accession No.

87.GA.40

Object Credit:

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Herman Saftleven the Younger (Dutch, 1609 - 1685)

Title/Date:

A Young Herdsman Leaning on his "Houlette", about 1650

Culture:

Dutch

Medium:

Black chalk and brown wash

Dimensions:

27.5 × 18.6 cm (10 13/16 × 7 5/16 in.)

Accession No.

2001.40

Object Credit:

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Cornelis Visscher (Dutch, about 1629 - 1658)

Title/Date:

Portrait of a Woman, 1658

Culture:

Dutch

Medium:

Black chalk

Dimensions:

20.3 × 17.8 cm (8 × 7 in.)

Accession No.

2004.57

Object Credit:

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Hendrick Avercamp (Dutch, 1585 - 1634)

Title/Date:

A Winter Scene with Two Gentlemen Playing Colf, about 1615 - 1620

Culture:

Dutch

Medium:

Opaque watercolor with pen and brown ink

Dimensions:

9.4 × 15.6 cm (3 11/16 × 6 1/8 in.)

Accession No.

2008.13

Object Credit:

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Abraham Rutgers (Dutch, 1632 - 1699)

Title/Date:

A Street in Jisp on a Winter's Day, before 1664

Culture:

Dutch

Medium:

Pen and brown and black ink and brown and gray wash

Dimensions:

19.3 × 30.6 cm (7 5/8 × 12 1/16 in.)

Accession No.

2008.18

Object Credit:

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Adriaen van Ostade (Dutch, 1610 - 1685)

Title/Date:

Peasants Drinking in a Tavern, early 1640s

Culture:

Dutch

Medium:

Pen and brown ink and wash over black chalk

Dimensions:

11 × 14.8 cm (4 5/16 × 5 13/16 in.)

Accession No.

2011.32

Object Credit:

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Herman Saftleven the Younger (Dutch, 1609 - 1685)

Title/Date:

The Corner of the Bulwark at Utrecht, 1650s

Culture:

Dutch

Medium:

Black chalk and brown wash

Dimensions:

10.8 × 15.4 cm (4 1/4 × 6 1/16 in.)

Accession No.

2011.33

Object Credit:

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Jan de Bisschop (Dutch, 1628 - 1671)

Title/Date:

The Valkenburg Ferry Boat, 1655 - 1660

Culture:

Dutch

Medium:

Pen and brown ink and brown and grey wash over traces of black chalk

Dimensions:

9.5 × 15.9 cm (3 3/4 × 6 1/4 in.)

Accession No.

2011.28.3

Object Credit:

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

  

          

Devotion to Drawing: The Karen B. Cohen Collection of Eugène Delacroix

July 30, 2018, 3:04 pm

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The Met Fifth Avenue
July 17–November 12, 2018

Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798–1863).
Göetz von Berlichingen Being Dressed in Armor by His Page George, 1826–27.
Watercolor and bodycolor with gum arabic. 8 3/8 x 5 5/8 in. (21.3 x 14.3 cm).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift from the Karen B. Cohen Collection of Eugène Delacroix, in honor of Thomas P. Campbell, 2014

Renowned as a giant of French Romantic painting, Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was equally a dedicated and an innovative draftsman. Opening July 17, Devotion to Drawing: The Karen B. Cohen Collection of Eugène Delacroixwill explore the central role of drawing in the artist’s practice through more than one hundred works—from finished watercolors to sketchbooks, from copies after old master prints to preparatory drawings for important projects. As the first North American exhibition devoted to Delacroix's drawings in more than 50 years, it will introduce a new generation to the artist's draftsmanship.

The exhibition will celebrate a major gift to The Met from Karen B. Cohen, an Honorary Trustee and a longstanding supporter of the Museum, of her extraordinary collection of drawings by Delacroix. Assembled with an eye to the artist's process, Mrs. Cohen’s collection illuminates the ways in which drawing shaped Delacroix's artistic development; his use of the medium in the preparation of prints, paintings, and public decorative programs; and his investment in the expressive potential of his materials.The exhibition is made possible by The Schiff Foundation.

Exhibition Overview
Devotion to Drawing: The Karen B. Cohen Collection of Eugène Delacroix will begin with an examination of drawing as a method of training and study for Delacroix throughout his career. This section will present academic and anatomical drawings; studies from life and nature; and copies after a broad range of sources, from old master prints after Raphael and Rubens to contemporary caricatures by artists such as George Cruikshank. Among the highlights will be two of the artist’s sketchbooks: one from an 1829 trip to Normandy and the other of costumes sketched during an 1855 performance of Othello in Paris.

The second section of the exhibition will look at how Delacroix used drawing to invent, research, and refine his ideas for paintings on canvas, decorative and religious murals, prints, and illustrations.  It will feature drawings for a number of his major paintings, including The Massacre at Chios (1824), Liberty Leading the People (1830), and The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage (1845).

A group of drawings related to his first important commission for the French State—the decorations for the Palais Bourbon—will reveal the dynamism of Delacroix’s premières pensées (first thoughts) executed in fluid pen and ink. More precise preparatory works in graphite will demonstrate the care with which Delacroix planned his prints, from his early satirical subjects to his landmark illustrations for Hamlet, published in 1843. The drawings will be paired with their resulting prints, enabling first-hand comparisons of the studies with the finished lithographs.

The third and final section of the exhibition will reveal how Delacroix reveled in the aesthetic possibilities offered by graphic media including ink, wash, and watercolor. The works in this section will also emphasize how drawing was a means of invention for Delacroix. The intense study and preparation demonstrated in the earlier sections of the exhibition will come to fruition here in drawings that show the artist’s imagination at work on paper.

 

Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798–1863). The Giaour on Horseback, 1824–26. Pen and iron gall ink with wash over graphite. 7 15/16 x 12 in. (20.1 x 30.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift from the Karen B. Cohen Collection of Eugène Delacroix, in honor of Jane Roberts, 2015 (2015.713.2)

Credits and Catalogue

Devotion to Drawing: The Karen B. Cohen Collection of Eugène Delacroix is organized by Ashley E. Dunn, Assistant Curator in The Met’s Department of Drawings and Prints.



The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press
.
Related Exhibition

This exhibition will overlap with a major retrospective of Eugène Delacroix’s work—the first comprehensive retrospective in North America devoted to the artist—on view at The Met from September 17, 2018 through January 6, 2019. Titled Delacroix, it will illuminate the artist’s restless imagination through approximately 145 works, the majority of them paintings.

The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée du Louvre. The catalogue is made possible by the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund and the Janice H. Levin Fund.

• 
  
  
  Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798–1863).
  Crouching Tiger, 1839.
  Pen and brush and iron gall ink.
  5 3/16 x 7 3/8 in. (13.1 x 18.7 cm).
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift from the Karen B. Cohen Collection of Eugène Delacroix, in honor of Sanford I. Weill, 2013
 

 

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Obsession: Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso from the Scofield Thayer Collection

July 30, 2018, 3:29 pm

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	The Met Breuer,  July 3–October 7, 2018

At The Met Breuer this summer, the exhibition Obsession: Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso from the Scofield Thayer Collection will present a selection from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Scofield Thayer Collection of some 50 erotic and evocative watercolors, drawings, and prints by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Pablo Picasso, whose subjects, except for a handful, are nudes. The exhibition will provide a focused look at this important collection and mark the first time this brilliant group of works are being shown together; it also marks the centenary of the death of Klimt and Schiele.

Egon Schiele, Girl (1918), donated to the Met by Scofield Thayer.

An aesthete and scion of a wealthy family, Scofield Thayer (1889–1982) was co-publisher and editor of the literary magazine the Dial from 1919 to 1926. In this avant-garde journal he introduced Americans to the writings of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, and Marcel Proust, among others. He frequently accompanied these writers’ contributions with reproductions of modern art. Thayer assembled his large collection of some 600 works—mostly works on paper—with staggering speed in London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna between 1921 and 1923.



Gustav Klimt, Reclining Nude With Drapery (c. 1913), donated to the to the Met by Scofield Thayer.

While he was a patient of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, he acquired a large group of watercolors and drawings by Schiele and Klimt, artists who at that time were unknown in America. When a selection from his collection was shown at the Montross Gallery in New York in 1924—five years before the Museum of Modern Art opened—it won acclaim. It found no favor, however, in Thayer’s native city, Worcester, Massachusetts, that same year when it was shown at the Worcester Art Museum. Incensed, Thayer draw up his will in 1925 leaving his collection to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He withdrew from public life in the late 1920s and lived as a recluse on Martha’s Vineyard and in Florida until his death in 1982.

Pablo Picasso, Three Bathers Reclining by the Shore (1920), donated to the Met by Scofield Thayer

Obsession: Nudes by Klimt, Schiele and Picasso from the Scofield Thayer Collection is organized by Sabine Rewald, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Curator for Modern Art in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.



The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by The Met. An essay by James Dempsey, instructor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and an authority on Scofield Thayer, discusses the collector’s professional and private life. In her essay, Sabine Rewald discusses in depth the works of the three artists and also examines Thayer’s purchases between 1921 and 1923, as documented in invoices.

Evocative and often highly erotic works on paper by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Pablo Picasso are presented along with new details about Scofield Thayer (1889–1982), the unusual and complicated man who collected them. Thayer was a wealthy publisher, poet, and aesthete who led an intense public life that included the editorship of the prominent literary journal The Dial and friendships with literary luminaries such as e. e. cummings. In the 1920s, Thayer went on an art-buying spree in London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, acquiring approximately 600 works of art. Among these are particularly provocative drawings and watercolors by Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso, at a time when these works were little known or appreciated. This book showcases 52 of the rarely seen works—which have now taken their place as modernist erotic masterpieces—and presents them within the context of the collector’s remarkable life and tempestuous times.

 Great review, LOTS of images

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – The Unknown Collection

August 2, 2018, 2:50 pm

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Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
June 29-0ctober 21, 2018

Among the great treasures of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart's Department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs is a group of 82 drawings and 84 prints as well as a few illustrated books by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880 – 1938), the co-founder of the artists’ group Brücke. This remarkable body of work encompasses all periods of the artist’s work and many of the subjects that were important to him: metropolitan life, dance as well as landscapes on the island of Fehmarn and in the Alps. Kirchner’s prints are almost as rare as his drawings. Many were not produced in editions, but exist only in a few hand-pulled impressions.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Rote Kokotte, 1914, Farbkreide, Tempera, Weißhöhung, Papier (elfenbeinfarben), 30,2 x 41 cm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Graphische Sammlung.

In 2018, to mark the 80th anniversary of the death of the artist, the Kirchner holdings, last shown in their entirety in 1980, are the subject of our major exhibition that is accompanied by a catalogue of the collection.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Farbentanz, 1933/34, Farbholzschnitt, Papier (rohweiß), 40,8 x 56,5 cm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Graphische Sammlung. 

In 1937, all the Kirchner prints held by Staatsgalerie Stuttgart – many of them acquired in the 1920s – were seized as part of the infamous Nazi campaign against »degenerate« art.

The foundations for the current Kirchner collection were laid after the Second World War and rest primarily on a group of 143 drawings and prints that entered our holdings in 1957 with the provenance »Collection Dr. Gervais, Zürich/Lyon«. The identity of the collector was long unknown.

Research has since revealed that all the works came from the estate of the artist or that of his wife, Erna Kirchner (1884 – 1945), and that the »Gervais Collection« was an invention of the Kirchner pupil Christian Laely (1913 – 1992) that made it possible to circumvent the asset freeze and to continue selling works to collectors in Germany.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self-Portrait, 1932, colour woodcut, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs

Kirchner and the Artists’ Group Brücke

August 2, 2018, 7:14 pm

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Graphik Kabinett 
June 8 - September 16, 2018

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,Brücke signet (In: Exhibition of the artists' group 'Brücke' (Bridge) at Galerie Commeter Hamburg, 1912), 1912, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Department of Print, Drawings and Photographs

Exhibition

Complementing the exhibition »Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – The Unknown Collection«, the Graphik Kabinett is showing a display of drawings and prints by the other members of the »Brücke« group, which Kirchner had co-founded in 1905. The cabinet exhibition draws on the rich holdings of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and presents drawings, woodcuts, etchings and lithographs by Erich Heckel (1883-1970), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884- 1976), Emil Nolde (1867-1956), Max Pechstein (1881-1955) and Otto Mueller (1898-1979).

Most of the works on paper are devoted to the human figure. Divorced from strict naturalism, their depiction is spontaneous, simplified and resolutely two-dimensional. The renunciation of ‘correct’ proportions and perspective ran counter to classic academic traditions and allowed the artists to create emotional, ‘expressive’ works that focused on the human figure in an urban setting (street and theatre scenes) as well as in nature (nudes, bathers).



Erich Heckel

Under the influence of artists such as Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch, the Brücke artists experimented with printmaking, using bold colours and crudely cut woodblocks printed in strong black and white to give expression to their feelings and passions with great immediacy. By 1911 this style – in the visual arts, but also in literature – had come to be known as Expressionism.

Max Pechstein, Kabarett

Max Pechstein,

Erich Heckel
Paar - Liebespaar, 1909–1910

Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele: 1918 Centenary

August 3, 2018, 9:12 am

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Neue Galerie New York
June 28–September 3, 2018 

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and Egon Schiele (1890-1918) are two of the greatest artists Austria produced in the early twentieth century. Although born nearly thirty years apart, both tragically died in 1918—the same year that the Austro-Hungarian Empire ceased to exist following its defeat in World War I. Over the intervening century, the works of Klimt and Schiele have come to define the fertile creativity that marked the so-called “joyous apocalypse,” an apt term used to connote the waning days of Habsburg rule.

This show pays tribute to the groundbreaking achievements of Klimt and Schiele, two masterful artists who are key figures in the collection of the Neue Galerie New York.






Egon Schiele (1890-1918)
Town among Greenery (The Old City III), 1917
Oil on panel
Neue Galerie New York
In memory of Otto and Marguerite Manley, given as a bequest from the Estate of Marguerite Manley

Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), The Dancer (detail), 1916–17 (unfinished). Oil on canvas. Private Collection.

Also among the works by Klimt in the exhibition are




Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907),



Park at Kammer Castle (1909),



Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1914),



Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden) (1914),



and The Dancer (1916-17).


Masterworks by Schiele include



Portrait of the Painter Karl Zakovšek (1910),



Self-Portrait with Arm Twisted above Head (1910),

 

Portrait of the Painter Max Oppenheimer (1910),


and Friendship (1913).

Highlights Of German Art - Neue Galerie New York

August 3, 2018, 10:36 am

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Neue Galerie New York 

June 28–September 3, 2018

The German collection spans the period from 1890 to 1940, and emphasizes the key movements of that era, including Expressionism, with canvases by members of the Brücke (Bridge), including Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and also artists affiliated with the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider), such as Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, August Macke, and Gabriele Münter. The Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement is also addressed, with important selections by Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Christian Schad. In the decorative arts, the Bauhaus is a special area of emphasis, with major examples of design by Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Wilhelm Wagenfeld.

Collectively, these works reflect this tumultuous epoch in German history, as the nation shifted from an empire to a fragile democracy under the Weimar Republic following World War I. Likewise, the utopian ideal of uniting art and life in the pre-war era was replaced by a more practical embrace of a machine aesthetic, as artists reconciled themselves to the emergence of modern technology.




Erich Heckel (1883–1970)
Bathers in a Pond, 1908-09
Oil on canvas
Neue Galerie New York and Private Collection
© 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

OLGA PICASSO

August 3, 2018, 3:18 pm

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MUSEO PICASSO MÁLAGA

26th February.- 2nd June 2019

 

 

This exhibition examines the relationship between Picasso and his first wife, Olga Khokhlova. It puts into perspective the creation of some of Picasso’s major works and reconstructs his body of work within the context of a personal story that developed alongside a different political and social one. Throughout the artist’s classical period, Olga was the Picasso model par excellence. 

 

 

During the upheaval of Europe between the wars, his depictions of her were to undergo a metamorphosis, as their relationship gradually deteriorated. 

 

Pablo Picasso, spring 1918, Portrait d'Olga dans un fauteuil (Olga in an Armchair), oil on canvas, 130 x 88.8 cm, Musée Picasso, Paris, France

 

 

The exhibition is organized by Musée national Picasso-Paris and Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte, Madrid, in collaboration with the A.S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; Museo Picasso Málaga and CaixaForum Madrid.

 

 

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Olga in Pensive Mood, [winter 1923]
Pastel and pencil on paper
105 x 74 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris)/Mathieu Rabeau
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2018

Frans Hals Portraits: A Family Reunion

August 4, 2018, 5:56 am

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Toledo Museum of Art 
Oct. 13, 2018-Jan. 6, 2019

Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium  
Feb. 2-April 28, 2019

Collection Frits Lugt in Paris 
(dates are to be determined)

 In 2011 the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) added a remarkable Old Master painting to its magnificent collection –  

Frans Hals (Dutch, 1582/83–1666), The Van Campen Family in a Landscape (fragment), ca. 1623–25, oil on canvas. 151 x 163.6 cm. Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, inv. 2011.80

Van Campen Family Portrait in a Landscape (circa 1623-25) by Frans Hals. 

 Frans Hals (Dutch, 1582/83–1666), Children of the Van Campen Family with a Goat-Cart (fragment), ca. 1623–25, oil on canvas. 152 x 107.5 cm. Frans Hals (Dutch, 1582/83–1666), Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium,

Brussels, inv. 4732. ©Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

This acquisition, and the subsequent conservation of Hals’s Children of the Van Campen Family with a Goat-Cart by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (RMFAB) in Brussels, has led the two museums to collaborate on an historic exhibition. Bolstered by evidence from the conservation treatment on the latter painting, scholars verified that the canvases now in Toledo and Brussels, as well as a third in a private collection, once formed a single composition painted by Hals in the early 1620s. The original canvas was cut into sections more than two centuries ago. These spirited representations of the Van Campen family will now be reunited as a result of this significant international partnership. In addition, the four other family portraits painted by Hals, including his only double portrait of a married couple, will be brought together for the first time. 
 

Frans Hals Portraits: A Family Reunion premieres at TMA, the exclusive U.S. venue, where it will be on view Oct. 13, 2018-Jan. 6, 2019, before traveling to the RMFAB in Brussels, Feb. 2-April 28, 2019, and the Collection Frits Lugt in Paris (dates are to be determined). 

            “Featuring Frans Hals’s dynamic and authentic imagery of real families, this exhibition operates on a number of exciting levels, including the jigsaw puzzle of innovative scholarship, along with the incorporation of contemporary Toledo-area faces and voices as they consider the character of family relationships in our community today,” said Brian Kennedy, TMA’s Edward Drummond and Florence Scott Libbey director. 

            This extraordinary exhibition will spotlight major loans from several European and North American museums and private collections, including the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, National Gallery in London, Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Cincinnati Art Museum and Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati and the Toledo Museum of Art. 

            The exhibition was co-curated by Lawrence W. Nichols, TMA’s William Hutton senior curator, European and American painting and sculpture before 1900, and the RMFAB’s Liesbeth De Belie, curator of 17th-century Dutch paintings. 

            One of the greatest portraitists in the history of Western European painting, Frans Hals (1582/83-1666) is renowned for his revolutionary candid style of capturing sitters in seemingly spontaneous poses and lively gestures. A contemporary of Hals’s wrote that his “paintings are imbued with such force and vitality that…they seem to breathe and live.”

            Accompanying the reunion of the Toledo and Brussels portraits in the installation will be Head of a Boy (circa 1623-25) from a private collection, which completes the original painting of the Van Campen family;  

Frans Hals (Dutch, 1582/83–1666), Family Group in a Landscape, ca. 1645–48, oil on canvas. 202 x 285 cm. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, inv. 1934.8. ©Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Family Group in a Landscape (circa 1645-48) from the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; 

Family Group in a Landscape (circa 1647-50) from the National Gallery in London;  

Frans Hals (Dutch, 1582/83–1666),

Marriage Portrait of Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen, ca. 1622, oil on canvas.140 x 166.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. SK-A-133.©Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Marriage Portrait of Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen (circa 1622) from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; 

Frans Hals (Dutch, 1582/83–1666), Portrait of a Dutch Family, mid-1630s, oil on canvas. 111.8 x 89.9 cm. Cincinnati ArtMuseum, Cincinnati (Ohio), inv. 1927.399

and Portrait of a Dutch Family (mid-1630s) from the Cincinnati Art Museum. 

            Setting the scene and providing context for the exhibition will be a gallery of other works of Netherlandish art from TMA’s collection that represent families. Leading into the exhibition of portraits by Hals will be an entry space devoted to encouraging visitors to reflect on multiple definitions of family by engaging with a selection of TMA objects across cultures and eras, as well as a monumental collage and video of Toledo community members, which resonate with the theme of family. 

            Upon exiting the focused Hals section, visitors will be invited to respond to the portraits on view by sharing their own perspectives of family in the 21st century through a series of interactive tools and approaches. In addition, a library and reading area and performance space will be provided to further enhance the gallery experience.

            “As one of the leading luminaries of the Dutch Golden Age, Hals is also one of the most ingenious and accessible artists of any period or place,” said Nichols. “His charismatic and sympathetic portraiture not only reflects 17th-century everyday life, it also provides us with a rich platform from which to explore and approach the meaning of family in our own time.”

            Family portraiture first emerged in the Netherlands as a genre in the early 16th century, when prosperous middle-class Dutch families began to commission artists for their likenesses. These family portraits would have been displayed in private homes, not public exhibition spaces, though in spaces in the house where guests would see them. Most of these group portraits featured families in a domestic interior or a parkland setting. The major challenge for artists working in the genre was how to represent individuality as well as the collective dynamic.

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Impressionist Treasures: The Ordrupgaard Collection

August 11, 2018, 11:50 am

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National Gallery of Canada

May 16, 2018 - September 9, 2018

A landmark show has opened at the National Gallery of Canada: the first and only presentation in North America of paintings from the world-renowned Ordrupgaard collection.

Impressionist Treasures: The Ordrupgaard Collection, on view until September 9, 2018, offers a survey of leading artistic movements in French painting from the beginning of the nineteenth century through to Impressionism and Post-impressionism, as well as works from the Danish Golden Age.
In one compelling presentation, the luminous landscapes of  Camille Corot, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, are displayed alongside the realist landscapes and hunting scenes of Gustave Courbet, the still-lifes of Édouard Manet and Henri Matisse, the intimate portraits of Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Paul Gauguin’s sensual paintings, as well as the unparalleled works from the Danish Golden Age, including those by C. W. Eckersberg and Christen Købke.

“This collection offers a spectacular panorama of the development of Impressionism, from the great Romantic colourist Eugène Delacroix, to the monumentality of Cézanne and the first glimmers of where Modern art would turn in the 20^th century,” said National Gallery of Canada Director and CEO, Marc Mayer. “In addition to bringing this exceptional collection to Canada, it is worth noting that many of the artists represented in the show can also be found in our collection. This includes works by Vilhelm Hammershøi, one of the most important Scandinavian painters active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”

The exhibition brings together 76 key paintings from Denmark’s renowned collection assembled by Wilhelm and Henny Hansen in the early 20th century, who created what is regarded as one of Europe’s most notable and beautiful survey of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.

Built between 1892 and 1931, the collection was kept in the family’s residence named Ordrupgaard, located in a suburb of Copenhagen. In 1918, motivated by a desire to promote French modern art, the influential Danish businessman and visionary opened the doors of his country house to the public one day a week. After his death, Hansen’s widow Henny bequeathed their home and the collection to the Danish state, which was then transformed into a museum in 1953.

The Canadian exhibition of the Ordrupgaard Collection is presented by the National Gallery of Canada in collaboration with Ordrupgaard and organized by Associate Curator, Erika Dolphin. 

Among the highlights of the exhibition are











The Chailly Road through the Forest Fontainebleau, a landscape by Claude Monet;  



Basket of Pears, a still-life by Édouard Manet;  



Portrait of a Young Woman. Vaïte (Jeanne) Goupil, by Paul Gauguin;  



Women Bathing, by Paul Cézanne;



and View from Frederiksborg Castle, by landscape painter Peter Christian Thamsen Skovgaard.


The exhibition also features portraits by two of the best women Impressionist artists:  



Women with a Fan. Portrait of Madame Marie Hubbard, by Berthe Morisot;



and The Convalescent. Portrait of a Woman in White, by Eva Gonzalès.

The 60 French paintings on view are organized chronologically, from the beginning of the 19^th century to the very beginnings of the 20^th century and grouped by artist. In some cases, as with Corot, Pissarro, Sisley and Gauguin, visitors will have the privilege of seeing six or more works from the same artist painted over the span of their careers.

This exhibition also brings to Canada a fine and rare selection of 16 paintings by leading Danish masters. This reflects how the collection was historically exhibited by the Hansens with French works in the purpose-built gallery attached to their home and the Danish works on the walls of their private quarters. The National Gallery’s own Hammershøi, Sunshine in the Drawing Room, will hang alongside these rarely seen works from Ordrupgaard.

The exhibition includes educational spaces designed to enrich the visitor experience. They present French and Danish art within an historical context and offer interactive activities focused around the colours used by the Impressionists.

Publication



The exhibition is accompanied by a 120-page hardcover bilingual catalogue written by National Gallery of Canada former Chief Curator Paul Lang. Complete with in-depth descriptions and full page illustrations, Impressionist Treasures surveys the great masters of Impressionism and Post-impressionism and the major trends of French painting that preceded them, such as the Barbizon School and Realism, through a collection regarded as one of the most beautiful in Europe.

Also included: a portrait of George Sand by Eugène Delacroix:

Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera

August 11, 2018, 12:01 pm

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Opening November 28, 2018
Exhibition Location:	The Met Breuer, Floor 2
Press Preview:	Monday, November 26, 10 am–noon

Opening November 28 at The Met Breuer, Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera begins in the 1940s and extends into the 21st century to explore large-scale abstract painting, sculpture, and assemblage through more than 40 works from The Met collection, a selection of loans, and never-before-seen promised gifts and new acquisitions. 

Enhanced in the setting of Marcel Breuer's 1966 modernist architectural masterpiece, icons of Abstract Expressionism, such as Jackson Pollock's classic "drip" painting No. 28, 1950 (1950), and Louise Nevelson's monumental Mrs. N's Palace (1964–77), will be shown in conversation with works by international artists, such as the Hungarian artist Ilona Keserü.

In the wake of unprecedented destruction and loss of life during World War II, many painters and sculptors working in the 1940s grew to believe that traditional easel painting and figurative sculpture no longer adequately conveyed the human condition. In this context, numerous artists, including Barnett Newman, Pollock, and others associated with the so-called New York School, were convinced that abstract styles—often on a large scale—most meaningfully evoked contemporary states of being. 

Many of the artists represented in Epic Abstraction worked in large formats not only to explore aesthetic elements of line, color, shape, and texture but also to activate scale's metaphoric potential to evoke expansive—"epic"—ideas and subjects, including time, history, nature, and existential concerns of the self.

Highlights of the exhibition will include a group of paintings by Pollock and a selection of his experimental sketchbook drawings from the late 1930s and early 1940s that demonstrate the artist's exploration of automatic techniques and his interest in Jungian psychoanalysis. 

Major works by Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Clyfford Still will expand the representation of mid-century American painting, while an entire room devoted to Mark Rothko's meditative compositions will offer a powerful immersion in color, feeling, and sensation. 

These heralded Abstract Expressionists will be joined by Hedda Sterne and Philippines native Alfonso Ossorio, who were also associated with the movement. A significant ink painting from 1966 by Japanese artist Inoue Yuichi will illuminate the international practice of large-scale calligraphic abstraction. Monumental painterly canvases by Joan Mitchell—a lyrical retort to Pollock's freighted whipping drips—and Mark Bradford—whose Duck Walk (2016) marks a recent addition to the collection—will evoke Abstract Expressionism's long and profound legacy.

The exhibition will also feature a gallery of works by the next generation of artists, including Edna Andrade, Carmen Herrera, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, and Anne Truitt, who tamed the highly pitched emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism by working in the hard edge and minimalist styles that came to define modern art in the 1960s and 1970s. An adjacent gallery with key works by Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis will explore the reductive technique of staining canvas in painting.

The exhibition's largest gallery will present a range of works composed of found objects and repurposed materials, including the centerpiece of the installation, Nevelson's Mrs. N's Palace, and Thornton Dial's elegiac Shadows of the Field (2008), which evokes the history of American slavery. The spacious installation design will establish artistic and conceptual connections between the artists on view while encouraging visitors to contemplate individual works of art in isolation or in dialogue with others in their midst.

Egon Schiele - Fondation Louis Vuitton

August 12, 2018, 1:12 pm

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Fondation Louis Vuitton
October 3, 2018–January 14, 2019

A solo exhibition of work by 19th century Austrian painter Egon Schiele will be on view on the first floor of the Fondation Louis Vuitton. The first exhibition in Paris dedicated to the artist in 25 years, Egon Schiele will feature approximately 120 works—drawings, gouaches, and paintings—including masterpieces such as



Self-Portrait with a Chinese Lantern Plant (1912, Leopold Museum, Vienna),



Pregnant Woman and Death (1911, Národní Galerie, Prague),




Portrait of the Artist’s Wife Seated, Holding Her Right Leg (1917, Morgan Library & Museum, New York),


Standing Nude with Blue Sheet (1914, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg),  




Seated Male Nude (1910, Neue Galerie, New York),


and Self-Portrait (1912, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).


The exhibition brings together some 120 works - drawings, gouaches, and paintings - over more than 600m2, in the pool-level galleries (Gallery 1). It is organised chronologically across four rooms, following the concept of line and its development in the artist’s work. Dieter Buchhart explains his choice in this way: “Very few artists have approached line and drawing with the same virtuosity and intensity as Schiele. [...] By evolving from the ornamental line towards the expressionist line, combined, in three dimensions, fragmented and amputated, he enabled a borderline dissonant and divergent experience of the line as a sign of human existence.”
The exhibition’s four chapters are entitled:

The Ornamental Line (1908-1909) ; The Existential Line of Expressionism (1910-1911), The Physical Balance of the Combined Line at the Dawn of the First World War (1912-1914), and The Amputated, Fragmented Line during the War Years (1915-1918).

• The Ornamental Line brings together works inspired by the jugendstil, full of fluidity,which makes reference to the discovery of the work of Gustav Klimt, who played a major role in his development.
• The Existential Line of Expressionism is indissociable from the artist’s most expressionist works and his angular and contorted portraits and self-portraits, which are sensual and vibrant, enlivened by touches of pure colour.
• The Physical Balance of the Combined Line at the Dawn of the First World War, from the years before the first global conflict, convey the premonitory fear of war. This group of work is contemporary to, or immediately followed, the artist’s brief period of imprisonment in 1912 in Neulenbach, following accusations of indecency. It is characterised by a less sinuous line and a flatness of drawing which partially frees itself from the former dissonance.
• The Amputated, Fragmented Line during the War Years denotes a significant change: the introduction of formation in the representations of the body. The bodily postures are also more familiar, less aggressive.

Egon Schiele is organized by the Fondation Louis Vuitton and is curated by Artistic Director Suzanne Pagé and independent curator Dieter Buchhart.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring essays by Buchhart and Pagé, as well as distinguished scholars and curators including Jean Clair, Alessandra Comini and Jane Kallir.

Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory

August 13, 2018, 6:19 pm

≫ Next: Paris 1900: City of Entertainment

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Tate Modern

23 January 2019 - 6 May 2019

In January 2019 Tate Modern will stage the UK’s first major Pierre Bonnard exhibition in 20 years, showing the work of this innovative and much-loved French painter in a new light. The exhibition will bring together around 100 of his greatest works from museums and private collections around the world. It will reveal how Bonnard’s intense colours and modern compositions transformed painting in the first half of the 20th century, and will celebrate his unparalleled ability to capture fleeting moments, memories and emotions on canvas.

Spanning four decades from the emergence of Bonnard’s unique style in 1912 to his death in 1947, Tate Modern’s exhibition will show how the artist constructed his vibrant landscapes and intimate domestic scenes from memory. At once sensuous and melancholy, these paintings express moments lost in time – the view from a window, a stolen look at a lover, or an empty room at the end of a meal.

These motifs can be seen in breakthrough works like 



Dining Room in the Country 1913 (Minneapolis Institute of Art) in which he brought interior and exterior spaces together to create a vibrant atmosphere, while the bright colours of works like  



The Lane at Vernonnet 1912-14 (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh) exemplify how his joyful palette could still evoke the poignancy of a moment gone forever.


The exhibition will emphasise Bonnard as a 20th century artist who – like his friend and contemporary Henri Matisse – had a profound impact on modern painting and would become an influential figure for later artists like Mark Rothko and Patrick Heron. Bonnard will be repositioned as a man who engaged with the world around him, revealing overlooked areas of his activities – from his frequent travels around France and his practice of working on different subjects side by side, to his response to the crises of both the First and Second World War.


Alert to his surroundings, he developed unconventional compositions in his paintings of everyday life: his landscapes collapsed into layers of dense foliage, such as



Summer 1917 (Fondation Maeght)



and street scenes, as in Piazza del Popolo, Rome 1922 (private collection), were simplified into friezes.

Perhaps most famously, his interior scenes like  

 

Coffee 1915 (Tate)

Pierre Bonnard

Nude in an Interior

c. 1935 oil on canvas overall: 134 x 69.2 cm (52 3/4 x 27 1/4 in.) framed: 139.7 x 76.2 x 3.8 cm (55 x 30 x 1 1/2 in.) Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon

and Nude in an interior c.1935 (National Gallery of Art, Washington) caught domestic life at uncanny moments and reframed them from snatched points of view.

A variety of these domestic scenes mark out Bonnard’s career, often showing figures in quiet contemplation, apparently oblivious to the viewer’s gaze. The artist’s wife Marthe de Méligny was a continual subject in these images. She suffered from various illnesses throughout her life and treated these with what was then called hydrotherapy through repeated bathing.

 

Bonnard’s paintings of her bathing, drying and dressing, are among his most iconic works. They form key markers in his development as an artist, as his partner’s withdrawal from the outside world becomes a shared psychological story captured in paint.

Bonnard’s process of reimagining through memory also allowed his paintings to become more abstract. This is already evident in the bands of contrasting colour in works like



The Violet Fence 1922 (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh)

but reaches a high-point in the vivid Studio with Mimosa 1939-46 (Musée National d'Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou, Paris).

Pierre Bonnard, "View of Le Cannet Roofs", 1941-1942.

The exhibition will conclude with a group of stunning works created towards the end of Bonnard’s life, while spending the Second World War in Le Cannet living with scarce resources and the anxiety of invasion. These panoramic views and vibrant garden scenes show the artist looking back on a lifetime of memories and working on the brink of abstraction.

Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory is curated at Tate Modern by Matthew Gale, Head of Displays, with Helen O’Malley and Juliette Rizzi, Assistant Curators. The exhibition is organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen and Kunstforum Wien.

https://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/pierre-bonnard-colour-memory


https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hmpo3tulgt8vmke/AACWkG-SCU57YVCNERek8gUra?dl=0

Paris 1900: City of Entertainment

August 15, 2018, 2:08 pm

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The Frist Art Museum presents Paris 1900: City of Entertainment, an exhibition that revives the splendor of the French capital at the turn of the twentieth century, when millions visited the site of the International Exposition. Organized by the Petit Palais Museum of Fine Arts in Paris with additional loans from other Parisian museums, the exhibition will be on view in the Frist’s Ingram Gallery from October 12, 2018, through January 6, 2019. The Frist is the first of three venues in the United States to present this iteration of an exhibition that was originally on view at the Petit Palais in 2014.

With the International Exhibition of 1900 as its starting point, the exhibition offers a focused look at the different ways in which Paris became the entertainment capital of the world. Belle Époque Paris, a period of relative peace and prosperity stretching from 1874 to 1914, was the site of intense artistic and architectural innovation, which gave rise to entertainment forms that continue to remain relevant.

Bringing together over 250 objects—paintings, prints, sculptures, decorative art, costumes and fashion accessories, posters, photographs, and more—kept mainly by the City of Paris museums, Paris 1900 immerses visitors in the era’s sparkling atmosphere of elegance, pleasure, and festivity. Major artists represented in the exhibition include Pierre Bonnard, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Édouard Vuillard, as well as many others working across multiple mediums. The objects will be presented in six groupings: “Paris, Showcase of the World”; “Art Nouveau”; “Paris, Capital of the Arts”; “The Parisian Woman”; “Traversing Paris”; and “Paris by Night.”

The exhibition also tells the story of a vibrant and swiftly changing city. Although Paris was quite different from its idealized representation in posters and advertisements, the turn of the century was indeed an exceptional time. The city was growing rapidly and had a population of nearly three million by 1914. Additionally, Paris attracted travelers for both business purposes and leisure activities. “It is fitting that Nashville is the first stop of this exhibition’s tour,” says Frist Art Museum curator Katie Delmez. 

http://www.petitpalais.paris.fr/en/collections/paris-1900

The Church at Moret (Evening)

Alfred Sisley

The four seasons : Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter

Paul Cézanne 

Portrait of Madame de Bonnières

Pierre-Auguste Renoir 

Figures in an Interior

Edouard Vuillard

Female bathers at Perros-Guirec

Maurice Denis 

 

Conversation in Arcachon

Pierre Bonnard 

Ambroise Vollard in a Red Scarf

Pierre-Auguste Renoir


 

Nice, on the Promenade des Anglais

Henri-Marie-Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa dit Toulouse-Lautrec