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Book: Pieter Bruegel. The Complete Works

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Pieter Bruegel. The Complete Works 
TASCHEN

ISBN 978-3-8365-5689-7
Edition: English  

The life and times of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1526/30–1569) were marked by stark cultural conflict. He witnessed religious wars, the Duke of Alba’s brutal rule as governor of the Netherlands, and the palpable effects of the Inquisition. To this day, the Flemish artist remains shrouded in mystery. We know neither where nor exactly when he was born. But while early scholarship emphasized the vernacular character of his painting and graphic work, modern research has attached greater importance to its humanistic content.

Starting out as a print designer for publisher Hieronymus Cock, Bruegel produced numerous print series that were distributed throughout Europe. These depicted vices and virtues alongside jolly peasant festivals and sweeping landscape panoramas. He would eventually increasingly turn to painting, working for the cultural elite of Antwerp and Brussels.

This monograph is a testament to Bruegel’s evolution as an artist, one who bravely confronted the issues of his day all the while proposing new inventions and solutions. Rather than idealizing reality, he addressed the horrors of religious warfare and took a critical stand against the Catholic Church. To this end, he developedhis own pictorial language of dissidence, lacing innocuous everyday scenes with subliminal statements in order to escape repercussions.

To produce this XXL-sized collection, TASCHEN undertook a comprehensive photographic campaign, capturing all the breadth and splendid detail of Bruegel’s oeuvre like never before. The result gathers all 39 paintings, 65 drawings, and 89 etchings in pristine reproductions —each piece a unique witness to both the religious mores and the close-knit folk culture of Bruegel’s time.

Marking the 450th anniversary of his death and his first ever monographic exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, this volume is the most immersive journey into Bruegel’s unique visual universe.

Nature Unleashed: The Image of Catastrophe since 1600

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Hamburger Kunsthalle

In a large-scale exhibition spanning several epochs, the Hamburger Kunsthalle traces based on important works how artists working in different media picture natural catastrophes while also shedding light on humanity’s failure to come to terms with nature due, among other things, of our faith in technology. Nature Unleashed: The Image of Catastrophe since 1600 features approximately 200 exhibits, including paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, photographs, films and videos.

As viewers make their way past blazing fires, earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions and sinking ships, they will take note of pictorial constants in the expression of such disasters but will also become aware of the differences in depiction from one era to the next. The show’s special appeal lies in the close juxtaposition of artworks created centuries apart. The trajectory of exhibited works spans an arc from the years around 1600 to the present day. Contemporary works serve to anchor the theme in the here and now and underline its topicality.

Catastrophes are omnipresent. The media constantly reports on natural disasters, acts of war, political upheavals and other crisis scenarios, characterising them all with the common term »catastrophe«. Catastrophes don’t just happen, they are made. It is only in our perception, in our active engagement with such drastic events that they take on distinctive contours and reveal their typical face. Every age makes its own catastrophes and  redefines the criteria by which certain events are labelled as such. These fundamental observations form the basis for the exhibition project.

Featured artists include Wenzel Hollar (1607–1677), Jan Asselijn (1610–1652), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), John Martin (1789–1854), Martin  Kippenberger (1953–1997), Christian Jankowski (b. 1968) and Julius von Bismarck (b. 1983). Alongside pieces from the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s own collections, important works were loaned  by prestigious museums and collections including the Musée du Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as well as the Kunsthaus Zurich and the Kunstmuseum Basel.

A richly illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition in which all works on view are presented with individual commentaries. Catalogue essays contributed by experts on this complex topic set it against the backdrop of current catastrophe research. The catalogue can be purchased in the Museum Shop for 29 Euros or can be ordered online at www.freunde-der-kunsthalle.de.

A multimedia guide in German and English is available as well as a children guide for visitors aged 6 to 12 years. For the dates of guided tours and all further information on the exhibition, visit www.hamburgerkunsthalle.de.

The exhibition is a cooperative project between the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Chair of Art History and Visual Culture Studies at the University of Passau.




Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature

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Denver Art Museum (DAM) 
Oct. 20, 2019 through Feb. 2, 2020.

Museum Barberini
Spring of 2020

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) will be home to the most comprehensive U.S. exhibition of Monet paintings in more than two decades when it presents Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature, in the fall of 2019. The exhibition will feature more than 100 paintings spanning Monet's entire career and will focus on the celebrated French impressionist artist's enduring relationship with nature and his response to the varied and distinct places in which he worked.


Claude Monet, Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge, 1899
 
Claude Monet, Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge, 1899. Oil paint on canvas; 35-5/8 x 35-5/16 in. Princeton University Art Museum: From the Collection of William Church Osborn, Class of 1883, trustee of Princeton University (1914-1951), president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1941-1947); given by his family, 1972-15. Image courtesy Princeton University Art Museum.
Co-organized by the DAM and the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, Denver will be the sole U.S. venue for this presentation from Oct. 20, 2019 through Feb. 2, 2020. The exhibition will travel to the Museum Barberini in the spring of 2020.


Monet traveled more extensively than any other impressionist artist in search of new motifs. His journeys to varied places including the rugged Normandy coast, the sunny Mediterranean, London, the Netherlands and Norway inspired artworks that will be featured in the presentation.
The exhibition will uncover Monet's continuous dialogue with nature and its places through a thematic and chronological arrangement, from the first examples of artworks still indebted to the landscape tradition to the revolutionary compositions and series of his late years.

"We're thrilled to organize and present this monumental exhibition, which will provide a new perspective on such a beloved artist," said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the DAM. "Visitors will gain a better understanding of Monet's creative process and how he distanced himself from conventions associated with the traditional landscape genre of painting."

Drawn from major institutions and collections from across the globe, Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature will include works as early as  

File:Monet, Claude - View At Rouelles, Le Havre (1858).jpg
Claude Monet, View from Rouelles, 1858-61. Oil paint on canvas; 18-1/2 x 25-5/8 in. Marunuma Art Park.
View from Rouelles (Marunuma Art Park, Japan), the first painting Monet exhibited in 1858 when he was 18 years old,

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and as late as The House Seen through the Roses (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), a 1926 work completed in Giverny only a few months before Monet’s death.


 
Claude Monet, 1873-74, Boulevard des Capucines, oil on canvas, 80.3 x 60.3 cm, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.jpg 
 
Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873-1874. Oil paint on canvas; 31-5/8 x 23-3/4 in. (80.3 x 60.3 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: the Kenneth A. and Helen F. Spencer Foundation Acquisition Fund, F72-35. Photo courtesy Nelson-Atkins Media Services / Jamison Miller.

Other highlights include the Boulevard des Capucines (1873-74) from The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,  


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Claude Monet, Under the Poplars (Sous les Peupliers), 1887. Oil paint on canvas; 28-3/4 x 36-1/4 in. Private collection.

Under the Poplars (1887) from a private collection and  

Waterlilies and Japanese bridge



















Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge (1899) from the Princeton University Art Museum.


 

The exhibition also will include six Monet paintings from the DAM collection;

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Claude Monet
French, 1840-1926
Waterloo Bridge
1903
Oil paint on canvas
Funds from Helen Dill bequest, 1935.15



Claude Monet
French, 1840-1926
Le Bassin des Nympheas
1904
Oil paint on canvas
Funds from Helen Dill bequest, 1935.14

four of them were part of the Frederic C. Hamilton Collection bequest in 2014:




Claude Monet, Path in the Wheatfields at Pourville, 1882. Lent by Frederic C. Hamilton.

Artworks by acknowledged mentors such as Eugène Boudin and Johan Barthold Jongkind, from whom Monet learned to capture the impression of fleeting moments en plein air, will also be featured.The presentation of Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature will explore Monet’s continuous interest in capturing the quickly changing atmospheres, the reflective qualities of water and the effects of light, aspects that increasingly led him to work on multiple canvases at once. Additionally, the exhibition will examine the critical shift in Monet’s painting when he began to focus on series of the same subject, including artworks from his series of Haystacks, Poplars, Waterloo Bridge and Water Lilies.


"Throughout his career, Monet was indefatigable in his exploration of the different moods of nature, seeking to capture the spirit of a certain place and translating its truth onto the canvas," said Angelica Daneo, curator of European painting and sculpture at the DAM. "Monet's constant quest for new motifs shows the artist's appreciation for nature's ever-changing and mutable character, not only from place to place, but from moment to moment, a concept that increasingly became the focus of his art."

Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature will also delve into the artist's increasing abandonment of any human presence in the landscapes he created, a testimony to his commitment to isolate himself in nature. This creative process simultaneously established an intimacy with his subject, which culminated later in Giverny, where he created his own motif through meticulous planning, planting and nurturing of his flowers and plants, which he then translated onto the canvas


This landmark exhibition, which will fill three galleries totaling about 20,000 square feet, is organized and curated by the DAM’s Angelica Daneo, Christoph Heinrich and Alexander Penn and Museum Barberini’s Director Ortrud Westheider. Major lenders include the Musée d'Orsay, Paris; Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

A catalog accompanying the exhibition, and published by Prestel Publishing, will include essays by renowned scholars, including Marianne Mathieu, James Rubin, George T.M. Shackelford and Richard Thomson, among others. The publication will be available in The Shop at the Denver Art Museum and through the online shop. A related academic symposium will be held in Potsdam, Germany, in January 2019.

Group tickets and event reservations will go on sale December 17, 2018. Single ticket sales will be announced at a later date.



Claude Monet, The Artist's House at Argenteuil, 1873. Oil paint on canvas; 23-11/16 x 28-7/8 in. (60.2 x 73.3 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago: Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1933.1153. Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY.
 
Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature is organized by the Denver Art Museum and the Museum Barberini, Potsdam.

Americans Abroad, 1860-1915

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On August 17, 2018, the Portland Museum of Art (PMA) in Maine opened Americans Abroad, 1860-1915, an exhibition of watercolors, prints, and paintings by American artists who travelled to Europe for training and inspiration in the late 19th century. The exhibition of 24 works by artists such as Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, draws from the PMA collection and special loans, and includes rarely seen watercolors by John Singer Sargent, Maurice Prendergast, and more.
File:Winslow Homer - Looking out to Sea, Cullercoats (1882).jpg
Winslow Homer, Looking out to Sea, Cullercoats, 1882.
Bequest of Charles Shipman Payson. Portland Museum of Art

In the decades around 1900, American artists went to Europe in droves, seeking training, inspiration, and patronage in the continent’s grand cities and rural enclaves. From Winslow Homer and James Abbott McNeill Whistler to Florence Robinson and Frederick MacMonnies, these artists reveled in famed art havens such as Paris, London, and Venice. They also explored the varied landscapes and villages from the Southern Alps to England’s Northern Coast. Traversing the continent, they honed their formal techniques across media and benefited from the new opportunities for travel and communication that modernity offered.

 
John Singer Sargent, (United States (b. Italy), 1856 - 1925) The Deck, Venice, circa 1907 Watercolor on paper, 13 1/4 inches Private collection, 11.1995.3

These American artists experienced Europe in distinct ways. Many settled in Paris or London, where Whistler and Mary Cassatt worked among the international avant garde while MacMonnies established himself at the more traditional Salon. Homer made extended trips to France and England, and John Singer Sargent passed the majority of his life travelling broadly across the continent. Like many artists based in Europe, including Edwin Lord Weeks and Henry Ossawa Tanner, Sargent extended his travel to sites in North Africa and the Middle East, many of which were under European colonial control in these years.

Mary Cassatt - Sketch Of Anne And Her Nurse

Mary Cassatt, Anne and Her Nurse
Regardless of the diverse itineraries and experiences, American artists working abroad continually examined the importance of place, focusing on architecture, customs, and the unique qualities of light and landscape. Whether exhibited in Europe or at home, their paintings, sculptures, prints, and watercolors made a lasting impact on the transatlantic story of American art.

Book: Jan Baptist Weenix & Jan Weenix: the paintings

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Dutch paintings from the 17th Century
 
 
Jan Baptist Weenix & Jan Weenix: the paintings, by Anke A. Van Wagenberg-Ter Hoeven, is the result of art historical research on the work of the 17th-century Dutch artist Jan Baptist Weenix (1621-1659) and his son Jan Weenix (1641-1719). Works by both these artists can be seen in all major museums with holdings of Dutch and Flemish paintings.

 File:Jan Baptist Weenix - The Ford in the River - WGA25522.jpg

Jan Baptist Weenix - The Ford in the River



This book fills a gap in art history and throws new light on the appreciation of Dutch art. Since 2004, hundreds of paintings have been documented as either Weenix I or Weenix II. For centuries, attributions had been confused because of the two artists’ similar subject choices and (at least for a time) similar style. Following the death of his father (and teacher), Jan gradually changed his style to conform to the more courtly taste of the late 17th and early 18th century.

File:Jan Baptist Weenix - Italian Landscape with Horsemen by a Spring - Google Art Project.jpg

Jan Baptist Weenix - Italian Landscape with Horsemen by a Spring


This first ever published monograph on Jan Baptist Weenix and his son Jan Weenix includes over 500 paintings.


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Jan Weenix (Dutch, Amsterdam ca. 1641?–1719 Amsterdam) Gamepiece with a Dead Heron ("Falconer's Bag") 1695

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Anke A. Van Wagenberg-Ter Hoeven is Chief Curator at Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD, U.S.A.

800 pages
Two volumes in slipcase
21 x 27 cm
500 illustrations (mostly in colour)
English
ISBN 9789462621596

THE CHARTERHOUSE OF BRUGES:JAN VAN EYCK,PETRUS CHRISTUS,AND JAN VOS

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The Frick Collection
September 18, 2018, through January 13, 2019 

For the first time in twenty-four years and only the second timein their history, two masterpieces of early Netherlandish painting commissioned by the Carthusian monk Jan Vos will be reunited in a special exhibition at The Frick Collection. These works—the



Jan van Eyck and Workshop
The Virgin and Child with St. Barbara, St. Elizabeth, and Jan Vos
, ca. 1441–43
Oil on panel
18 5/8 × 24 1/8 inches
The Frick Collection, New York
Photo: Michael Bodycomb

Frick’s Virgin and Child with St. Barbara, St. Elizabeth, and Jan Vos, commissioned from Jan van Eyck and completed by his workshop, and 

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Petrus Christus
The Virgin and Child with St. Barbara and Jan Vos (known as the Exeter Virgin),
ca. 1450
Oil on panel
7 5/8 × 5 ½ inches
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
The Virgin and Child with St. Barbara and Jan Vos (known as the Exeter Virgin, after its first recorded owner), painted by Petrus Christus and now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin—will be shown with a selection of objects that place them in the rich monastic contextfor which they were created. 

The exhibition pays tribute to Vos as a patron and offers insightinto the role such images played in shaping monastic life in fifteenth-century.

Bruges.The Charterhouse of Bruges: Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus, and Jan Vos will be on view in the museum’s Cabinet Gallery and is organized by Emma Capron, the Frick’s 2016–18 Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow.

 CARTHUSIAN PATRONAGE IN RENAISSANCEBRUGES 

The Carthusians belonged to one of the most austere monastic orders of the late Middle Ages, removed entirely from the secular worl dand committed to a life of solitude and silence spent mostly within the confines of their cells. These ascetic ideals belied a complex attitude toward ornament and images. While specific images were cited as distracting luxuries in the order’s regulations, others were valued as important tools for meditation, and the Carthusians’monasteries, known as charterhouses, became rich repositories of painted panels, illuminated manuscripts, funerary monuments, altarpieces, and other fine works of art. 

In April 1441, the Carthusian monk Jan Vos was elected prior of the Charterhouse of Genadedal, an important monastery near Bruges that was patronized by the dukes of Burgundy and the city’s foremost patrician families. Soon after his arrival in Bruges, Vos commissioned TheVirgin and Child with St. Barbara, St. Elizabeth,and Jan Vos from Jan van Eyck, who laid out the painting’s composition. Following the artist’s death in June 1441, the panel was completed by an unknown member of his workshop. Several years later, Vos commissioned the closely related Virgin and Child with St. Barbara and Jan Vos from Petrus Christus. 

It was not uncommon for preeminent Netherlandish masters to paint important works for Carthusian monasteries, most famously Rogier van der Weyden, who, around 1455–64, gifted his monumental Crucifixion (now in the collection of El Escorial, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo, Madrid) to the charterhouse of Scheut near Brussels, and another panel (possibly depicting the Virgin, now lost) to the charterhouse of Herne, where his son was a monk. Genadedal boasted impressive works of artas well. In addition to the Van Eyck Virgin and the Petrus Christus panel, a small choir book from Genadedal is included in the exhibition. 

Single leaf from a 14th-century gradual

Unknown artist, Low Countries
Gradual (song book formerly at Genadedal), 14th century Manuscript
6 5/16 × 4 3/
4 inches
Bibliothèque municipale, Douai


One of the only surviving illustrated manuscripts from the charterhouse, its decoration is worn from generations of monks touching and kissing the holy figures depicted within it. Another outstanding work in the exhibition is associated with Genadedal: 

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Petrus Christus
Portrait of a Carthusian Lay Brother,
1446
Oil on wood
11 1/2 × 8 1/
2 inches
The Jules Bache Collection, 1949, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Petrus Christus’s Portrait of a Carthusian Lay Brother. Painted in 1446, it probably depicts one of the charterhouse’s membersand is thought to be the earliest surviving portrait of a cleric not depicted in the act of praying. Additional links of patronage tied the charterhouse to Van Eyck and Petrus Christus: for instance, the wealthy merchant Pieter II Adornes,who joined Genadedal in 1454 following the death of his wife, had previously been portrayed by Petrus Christus and had probably commissioned two panels of

The Stigmatization of St. Francis from Van Eyck (identified today as works in the 


Galleria Sabauda in Turin 



and the Philadelphia Museum of Art).  

ABOUT THE PAINTINGS: DEVOTION & COMMEMORATION

Though different in scale, the Frick and Exeter Virgins bear remarkably similar imagery, composition, and fine execution. Both scenes depict Vos being introduced to the Virgin and Child by Saint Barbara, and are set within elaborate porticos opening on a panoramic cityscape; the panels achieve remarkable monumentality while conveying myriad minute details. Kneeling on holy ground removed from the city below, Vos exemplifies the Carthusian ideal of isolation from the world. 

The prior’s choice of patron saints has been connected to his earlier career as a Teutonic Knight, a military religious order that looked after the relics of Elizabeth of Hungary, a noblewoman who renounced worldly goods to devote herself to the poor and who is depicted as a nun in the Frick panel. 

Saint Barbara is shown in both the Frick and Exeter panels with her attribute, the tower where her father imprisoned her to prevent (unsuccessfully) her conversion to Christianity. Barbara was the patron saint of artillerymen and, as such, was especially revered by the Teutonic Knights. The story of her confinement in the tower must have also resonated with the reclusive Carthusians: during the late Middle Ages, charterhouses often were compared to prisons. 

The Virgin features as central object of veneration in both the Frick and Exeter panels, as she does in a diptych and clay tablet (both lost) that Vos is known to have owned. This reflects not only the ubiquity of the Virgin’s cult during the late Middle Ages, but also her importance as patron of the Carthusian order. 

Because of its diminutive size (7 5/8 x 5 1/2 in.), it is probable that the Exeter Virgin served a devotional purpose. As the fourteenth-century Carthusian writer Guillaume d’Ivrée recounted, such images were frequently found in monks’ cells, where they were meant to “excite devotion and imagination, and augment devotional ideas.” 

This is consistent with meditative practices of the period, which relied on physical images to help conjure mental ones. Images provided the crucial first step for this spiritual progress: they helped focus the monks’ minds and allowed them to visualize themselves in the presence of holy beings. 

Looking at his own likeness in the company of the Virgin, Christ, and Saint Barbara would have helped Vos visualize this divine encounter in his mind’s eye. 

This reliance on mental images and visualization is not so different from exercises promoted by mindfulness meditation today. Images were all the more important for an order whose members spent the majority of their time in their cells, in solitary prayer: images, especially ones as rich in detail as the Frick and Exeter Virgins, would have offered endless possibilities for examination, helping to relieve the mental strain of complete isolation. 

The function of the Frick Virgin is more difficult to ascertain. Previous studies have identified it as either a devotional work or an altarpiece. A recent examination of the archives of the Utrecht charterhouse—where Vos took the panel after leaving Bruges in 1450—provides compelling evidence that it had served as his memorial, a type of funerary monument popular in northern Europe during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Broadly defined, memorials (also called votive tablets or epitaphs) were large painted or sculpted tablets, which depicted a deceased donor being introduced by saints to holy figures—in most cases the Virgin and Child—whose intercession they sought. 

Generally, memorials would be placed above the tomb of the deceased, thus functioning as grave markers. Their frames usually bore an inscription that identified the deceased and petitioned passers-by to pray for the repose of the deceased’s soul. Indeed, during the fifteenth century, prayers from the living were believed to hasten the release of the deceased’s soul from purgatory into heaven, and memorials were created specifically in order to secure suffrages for the dead. 

This was not the first time that Van Eyck was commissioned to paint a memorial: his monumental 

 The Virgin Mary and the child Jesus seated on an elevated throne decorated with biblical figures. To the left is St. Donatian (standing). The panel's donor Joris van der Paele kneels in prayer as St. Donatian stands over him



Virgin and Child with the Canon Joris van der Paele (ca. 1434–36) originally hung in Bruges’ Church of Saint-Donatian, above Van der Paele’s grave. (It is now in the Groeningemuseum in Bruges.) 



(copy after Jan van Eyck's Madonna and Child with a Donor. 172cm x 99cm. before 1757–60.)

Another memorial by the artist, The Virgin and Child with Nicolas van Maelbeke,was completed probably around the time Vos arrived in Bruges. 

 
Copy after Jan van Eyck's Madonna and Child with a Donor. Silverpoint on paper, 13.4 x 10.2 cm. Unknown artist, 15th century, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.

Although lost, the panel is known through two silver point drawings from about 1445 (now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg and the Albertina, Vienna). The latter, attributed to Petrus Christus, is featured in the exhibition. This composition inspired the Exeter Virgin and shows the impact of Van Eyck’s legacy on the younger painter. 

When Vos began his tenure as prior of Genadedal, he was probably in his fifties, at an age when one usually started planning for death. By then Van Eyck had completed his memorials for Van der Paele and Van Maelbeke, which may have been known by Vos, perhaps prompting him to commission the artist to produce a similar(thoughmore modest) in size memorial for himself. 

In 1443, about two years after the completion of the Frick Virgin, Vos petitioned his acquaintance, Bishop Martin de Blija, to attach to the memorial an indulgence—that is, a grant that promised passers-by a remission of time served in purgatory in exchange for their prayers. 

Specifically, the indulgence guaranteed forty days of pardon to whoever would greet the Virgin in the Frick panel with the Ave Maria, the first line of which, significantly, appears embroidered on the canopy behind the Virgin, suggesting that Vos planned from the onset of the commission to seek an indulgence for the panel. The painting’s imagery thus invited viewers to recite the indulgenced prayer. The indulgence could also be gained by saluting the panel’s images of Saint Barbara or Saint Elizabeth by reciting both the Ave Maria and the Pater Noster. 

Forty-day indulgences were by no means uncommon duringthe late Middle Ages, and they were frequently granted to encourage prayers in front of newly made images. As a spiritual privilege granted to the Carthusians, the indulgence was only valid as long as the image remained within the order. Thus, on the walls of The Frick Collection, the Virgin has lost its supposed power of spiritual remission. 

What prompted Vos to seek an indulgence for his memorial? Effectively, the indulgence made the painting’s beholder a mutually beneficial offer: in addition to benefitting Vos’s soul, the recitation of special prayers in front of 5 the panel would also improve the viewer’s prospects for salvation through the remission offered by the indulgence. Vos thus used the indulgence to call attention to his memorial and incentivize suffrages for his soul among his fellow monks. In procuring the indulgence, Vos transformed the panel into a currency in the economy of salvation that pervaded the era.The Frick and Exeter Virgins survived the destruction of the Bruges and Utrecht charterhouses during the religious wars, in 1578 and 1580 respectively. 

While Vos’s body lies anonymously somewhere beneath the residential buildings that now stand on the site of the Utrecht charterhouse where he died in 1462, his memorial hangs on the walls of The Frick Collection. Venerated today for its artistic qualities rather than as an object that helped one secure salvation,Vos’s memorial has fulfilled its function, though perhaps not in the way that he had anticipated: it has kept alive the memory of this Carthusian monk, whose patronage of Van Eyck and Petrus Christus gave us two masterworks of early Netherlandish painting.  

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Workshop of Jan van Eyck
The Virgin and Child by a Fountain,
ca. 1440
Oil on panel
8 3/8 × 6 3/4 inches
Private collection


PUBLICATION


The exhibition is accompanied by a beautifully illustrated catalogue written by curator Emma Capron with essays by Maryan Ainsworth, Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Till-Holger Borchert, Director of the Bruges Museums. It is published in association with D Giles Limited. Drawing on recent technical examination information and new archival research on the works commissioned by Jan Vos, the volume explores the panels’ creation, patronage, and function in their rich Carthusian context. The book is hardcover, 160 pages, with 85 color illustrations.








Exhibit dedicated to life and works of American artist and designer, Louis Comfort Tiffany

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The Lyman Allyn Art Museum will open a new permanent exhibit this October, dedicated to life and works of American artist and designer, Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848 – 1933), who was best known for his innovative work with stained glass. The installation will feature three newly conserved stained glass windows which were commissioned in the early 1900s to memorialize loved ones in New London.

The collection, which will showcase never before exhibited objects (many of which came from the artist’s descendants), will illustrate Tiffany’s early career as a painter, then show his work as an interior designer, and tell the story of his innovations and success as a glassmaker. With items both from the museum’s collection and on loan, the exhibit will include nearly 100 pieces of decorative arts and fine arts objects including a range of windows, lamps, paintings, period photographs, furniture, metalworks, glass samples and finished Favrile glass vessels, as well as jewelry and adornments. The works will be displayed in the museum’s Chappell Gallery, a 1,070 square foot space devoted to the artist.

“Louis Comfort Tiffany is known as one of the most creative and versatile artists of his era. This new exhibit, which provides a comprehensive and insightful look at his many works, allows us to tell a rich story about his life and career,” stated Museum Director, Sam Quigley. “We are thrilled to join the ranks of noteworthy institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art,  The Corning Museum of Glass and the Morse Museum in Florida, that offer a focused collection from this very important artist,” he added.

Much of Tiffany’s success was driven by technical innovations in blown and stained glass. As such, the exhibit will present the creativity, history, and artistry that Tiffany and his craftspeople used to create vivid new effects in glass. They made multi-colored iridescent surfaces and deep colors, textures, and other effects to make the glass itself mimic the versatility of a painted canvas. This type of iridescent glass with distinctive coloring in which the color is ingrained in the glass itself became known as Favrile glass. Tiffany patented the process in 1894 and first produced the glass for manufacture in Queens, New York in 1896.

The museum will also provide several short and informative videos which explore Tiffany family history, the patronage of Tiffany windows and the conservation and preservation of the windows installed in the gallery. The videos will be created by Todd Gipstein, an award winning writer, photographer, and producer whose work has been featured in National Geographic.

Following the gala opening of the exhibit on October 20, the museum will launch a lecture series in November, 2018. The series will be kicked off with a presentation focused around Agnes Northrop, a noted independent female designer for Tiffany Studios. The first lecture will be delivered on November 17 by renowned Tiffany expert and author Alice Cooney Freylinghuysen, the Andrew W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“A wide range of cultural influences informed the art and design of the Gilded Age, bringing objects, designs, and ideas from around the world to America and to this region,” noted Tanya Pohrt, Special Project Curator. “Tiffany’s fascination with the art and culture of the middle east and the far east illustrates the global and cosmopolitan nature of American art and design in this era,” she added.



Some notable pieces to be displayed in the upcoming exhibit include





the Dragonfly Lamp, ca 1906. Tiffany Studios, designed by Clara Driscoll,


 

as well as two stained glass windows from the Frank Loomis Palmer (1851-1917) Mausoleum, Cedar Grove Cemetery, New London. River of Life window, probably J & R Lamb Studios, ca. 1904-1910,






and Saint Cecilia window, Tiffany Studios, ca. 1913.




Today, the Tiffany family name is most commonly associated with Tiffany & Co., a prestigious American luxury jewelry and specialty retailer, founded in New York in 1837 by Louis Comfort’s father, Charles L. Tiffany. By the 1870s and 1880s, Tiffany & Co. was the world's premier source for luxury goods, serving royalty and the wealthy industrialists who led America's Gilded Age. Tiffany’s son, Louis Comfort Tiffany established his own firms specializing in arts and decorative glass. His firm designed interiors and furnishing for many notable clients including President Chester Arthur’s White House and Mark Twain’s mansion. Later following the death of Charles Lewis Tiffany in 1902, the younger Tiffany stepped in, becoming primary shareholder and design director at Tiffany & Co., a title he held until 1919.

About Lyman Allyn Art Museum

The Lyman Allyn Art Museum welcomes visitors from New London, southeastern Connecticut and all over the world. Established in 1926 by a gift from Harriet Allyn in memory of her seafaring father, the Museum opened the doors of its beautiful neo-classical building surrounded by 12 acres of green space in 1932. Today it presents a number of changing exhibitions each year and houses a fascinating collection of over 17,000 objects from ancient times to the present; artworks from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, with particularly strong collections of American paintings, decorative arts and Victorian toys and doll houses. Tiffany in New London is part of the museum’s revitalization initiative, which includes the recently completed reinstallation which highlights the Museum’s permanent collection, the replacement of the building’s HVAC system, and future improvements to its 12 acres of green space.

The museum is located at 625 Williams Street, New London, Connecticut, exit 83 off I-95. The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm, Sundays 1:00 – 5:00 pm; closed Mondays and major holidays. For more information call 860.443.2545, ext. 2129 or visit us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or the web at: www.lymanallyn.org.

Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing

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Frist Museum
March 15–May 27, 2019

Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) is recognized as one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century, and her insightful and compassionate work has exerted a profound influence on the development of modern documentary photography. With hardship and human suffering as a consistent theme throughout her career, Lange created arresting portraits with the aim of sparking reform.


This is the first exhibition to examine her work through the lens of social and political activism, presenting iconic photographs from the Great Depression, the grim conditions of incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II, and inequity in our judicial system in the 1950s. The exhibition encompasses 300 objects, including 130 vintage and modern photographs, proof sheets, letters, a video, and other personal memorabilia.

Organized by the Oakland Museum of California





Dorothea Lange, Crossroads General Store, circa 1938. © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor.





Dorothea Lange,
Crossroads General Store, circa 1938. © The Dorothea Lange
Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul
S. Taylor.



 http://museumca.org/sites/default/files/Kern%20Co.%2C%20California%E2%80%94Lettuce%20Strike%2C%201938.jpg

Kern Co. California—Lettuce Strike1938
Dorothea Lange,
Last West, Gas Station, Kern County, California
, 1938. © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the
Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of
Paul S. Taylor.


http://museumca.org/sites/default/files/Migrant%20Mother%2C%20Nipomo%2C%20California%2C%201936_lo-res.jpg
 
Migrant Mother
Dorothea Lange,
Migrant Mother, Nipomo, 1936
. The Dorothea Lange Collection, the
Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor.

http://museumca.org/sites/default/files/One%20Nation%20Indivisible.jpg

One Nation Indivisible
Dorothea Lange,
Pledge of Allegiance
, 1942. © The Dorothea
Lange Collection, the
Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor.

http://museumca.org/sites/default/files/The%20Road%20West%2C%20US%2054%20in%20New%20Mexico%2C%201938.jpg

The Road West
Dorothea Lange,
The Road West, New Mexico, 1938. © The Dorothea Lange Collection,
the Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S.Taylor.

http://museumca.org/sites/default/files/Shipyard%20Worker%2C%20Richmond%20California%2C%20circa%201943.jpg

Shipyard Worker
Dorothea Lange,
Shipyard Worker, Richmond California,
circa 1943. © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S.
Taylor.

http://museumca.org/sites/default/files/White%20Angel%20Bread%20Line%2C%20San%20Francisco%2C%201933.jpg

White Angel Bread Line
Dorothea Lange,
White Angel  Bread Line, San Francisco, 1933.
© The Dorothea Lange
Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor.

http://museumca.org/sites/default/files/Young%20Man%20at%20Manzanar%20Relocation%20Center%2C%20July%203%2C%201942.jpg

Young Man at Manzanar
Dorothea Lange,
Young Man at Manzanar Relocation Center, 1942. Collection of the
Oakland Museum of California, Gift of Paul S. Taylor.


Also see:

http://arthistorynewsreport.blogspot.com/2017/07/dignity-vs-despair-dorothea-lange-and.html

Adolph Gottlieb in Provincetown

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From Aug. 31 to Oct. 21, 2018, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in Provincetown, Mass., will present Adolph Gottlieb in Provincetown, curated by Sanford Hirsch, Executive Director of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation.

Adolph Gottlieb, Sea and Tide, 1952, oil on canvas, 60 x 72”, ©Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Adolph Gottlieb, Sea and Tide, 1952, oil on canvas, 60 x 72”, ©Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

One of the original Abstract Expressionist artists, Adolph Gottlieb was part of many artists’ groups and associations, some formal and some not. He worked year-round, yet had a longstanding habit of spending summers away from his home in New York City. Early in his career he would travel to Cape Ann to be near his friends Milton and Sally Avery and Mark Rothko and the larger colony of artists in East Gloucester and Rockport.

Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974)

Imaginary Landscape

Date Created:
1955
Style:
Painting
Medium:
Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
8" x 10"
Gift from the Richmond Bequest


From 1946 to 1956 Gottlieb spent his summers in Provincetown where he could divide his days between his two great passions – art and sailing. Gottlieb’s practice was to spend mornings in the studio and afternoons on the water. Evenings were spent with friends and colleagues, including Robert Motherwell, Hans Hoffman, Karl Knaths, Weldon Kees and many more.

During his time in Provincetown Gottlieb worked almost exclusively on paper and a few small oils. His studio was too small for large paintings, and the focus on smaller work was part of his summer routine.  The works he created in Provincetown extend from his Pictographs of the 1940s through to the beginnings of what would become his Burst paintings in 1956. Some of the major transitions in his art took place in the studio on Commercial Street, including his plans for the stained glass façade of the Steinberg Center in New York City and an incredibly creative period in 1956 that was part of a major transition year for him.

Gottlieb was fully part of the Provincetown art community during the decade he worked there. He was one of the organizers of Forum 49 and related events, and exhibited many of his works at the fledgling Provincetown Art Association.  At the same time, Gottlieb was also a well-known and respected racer of small sailboats in the waters off the Cape.

Hot Sun, Late Sun: Van Gogh and Picasso

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Since its inauguration in 2014, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles has presented works by the great masters of painting—foremost among them being Vincent van Gogh, whose work underpins the direction of our program. However, while Vincent will be present once again, this upcoming exhibition is driven by the work of another great painter in modern art, Pablo Picasso. 

Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh: an extraordinary dialogue delving into the major influence of the Dutch painter on Picasso, who considered him the “greatest of all”; just this would have sufficed. But Hot Sun, Late Sun is a thematic exhibition, weaving an intricate conversation highlighting the intersections between practices— between Pablo Picasso and Sigmar Polke for one, but also between Alexander Calder, Adolphe Monticelli, Giorgio de Chirico and Vincent van Gogh. Hot Sun, Late Sun will feature a number of rare loans, which we are proud to present to the public  until 28 October 2018.

Vincent van Gogh, Crâne, Paris, mai 1887.jpg 

Vincent van Gogh, Crâne, Paris, mai 1887
Vincent van Gogh, Champ aux meules de blés, 1890.jpg

Vincent van Gogh, Champ aux meules de blés, 1890.
Vincent van Gogh-Moissonenprovence-1888.jpg


Vincent van Gogh-Moissonenprovence-1888

 

Picasso-Têted'hommeauchapeaudepaille,1971© Succession Picasso 2018.jpg

Picasso-Tête d'homme au chapeau de paille, 1971-© Succession Picasso 2018
Picasso-Paysage,1972-© Succession Picasso 2018-HD.jpg
Picasso-Paysage, 1972-© Succession Picasso 2018

History, Labor, Life: The Prints of Jacob Lawrence

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Jacob Lawrence Forward Together
Jacob Lawrence; “Forward Together,” 1997; silkscreen on paper; 25.5 x 40.125 inches. Copyright 2018 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Experience a comprehensive overview of printmaking works by the influential American artist Jacob Lawrence (b.1917, d. 2000) in the exhibition “History, Labor, Life: The Prints of Jacob Lawrence” on view at the Moss Arts Center this fall.


 
Jacob Lawrence, “New York in Transit I,” 1998, silkscreen, edition of 50 with 5 AP, © 2015 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.


Featuring more than 90 works produced between 1963 and 2000, the exhibition focuses on his graphic work and explores three major themes of his printmaking oeuvre. Lawrence’s recording and recollection of African-American and larger African diasporic histories are featured, as well as his vivid observations of dynamic city life in Harlem, New York City. Works in the exhibition include significant complete print portfolios, such as the “Toussaint L’Ouverture” series, as well as “The Legend of John Brown” series, amongst others.

A prominent 20th-century artist, Lawrence is renowned for his depiction of African-American life as well as epic narratives of African-American history.

Presented in the Ruth C. Horton Gallery, Sherwood Payne Quillen ’71 Reception Gallery, and Miles C. Horton Jr. Gallery, “History, Labor, Life: The Prints of Jacob Lawrence” features more than 90 works produced by Lawrence from 1963 to 2000.

Lawrence started exploring printmaking as an already well-established artist. Printmaking suited his bold formal and narrative style exceptionally well. The connections between his painting and printmaking were intertwined, with the artist revisiting and remaking earlier paintings as prints. The inherent multiplicity of this medium provided an opportunity for him to reach broader audiences.
Lawrence was primarily concerned with portraying African-American experiences and histories. His acute observations of community life, work, struggle and emancipation during his lifetime were rendered alongside vividly imagined chronicles of the past. The past and present in his practice are intrinsically linked, providing insight into the social, economic, and political realities that continue to impact and shape contemporary society today.

Lawrence spent his formative years in New York City, where his work as an artist was shaped by the intellectual strength and vitality of the Harlem Renaissance, not only in terms of his engagement with such artists as Charles Alston and Augusta Savage, but by the ongoing discourse at the time about writing and giving identity to African-American history.

Lawrence spent months in the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, which is now the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, studying historical documents, books, photographs, and journals before creating a series of narrative works that would bring him national recognition. He was only 25 when he became the first African-American artist represented in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York with his “Migration Series” (1941), now considered to be a landmark in the history of American modern art.

During his career, Lawrence received the National Medal of Arts, which is the highest award given to artists and arts patrons by the United States government, as well as 18 honorary doctorates from institutions, including Harvard University, Yale University, New York University, and Howard University. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and served as a commissioner for the National Council on the Arts.

Today, Lawrence’s work is represented in almost 200 museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“History, Labor, Life: The Prints of Jacob Lawrence” is organized by the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art in collaboration with the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation and is curated by Storm Janse van Rensburg, SCAD head curator of exhibitions. The exhibition is on view through Oct. 13.
 
Jacob Lawrence, People in Other Rooms (Harlem Street Scene), 1975. Silk screen on wove paper through hand-cut film stencils, On loan from the SCAD Museum of Art and the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation
Jacob Lawrence, General Toussaint L'Ouverture, 1986, Silk screen on Bainbridge two-ply rag paper, through hand-cut film and brushed-lacquer stencils, On loan from the SCAD Museum of Art and the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation
Jacob Lawrence, And God brought forth the firmament and the waters, from the Eight Studies for the Book of Genesis series, 1989–1990, Silk screen prints Whatman Print Matte paper, through hand-color-separated photo stencils, On loan from the SCAD Museum of Art and the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation  
Jacob Lawrence, Play, 1999, Silk screen, On loan from the SCAD Museum of Art and the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation
Jacob Lawrence, The Builders (Family), silkscreen on paper, 34” x 25.75”, 1974. © 2018 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Beauty’s Legacy: Gilded Age Portraits in America and Gilded Chicago: Portraits of an Era

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Richard H. Driehaus Museum
September 8, 2018 – January 6, 2018 

George Peter Alexander Healy (American, 1813 –1894).  Jeannette Ovington, 1887.  Oil on canvas.  New- York Historical Society, Gift of the Estate of Ina Love Thursby, through Walter M.  Brown, 1944.18
George Peter Alexander Healy (American, 1813 –1894). Jeannette Ovington, 1887. Oil on canvas. New- York Historical Society, Gift of the Estate of Ina Love Thursby, through Walter M. Brown, 1944.18
Beauty’s Legacy: Gilded Age Portraits inAmerica, organized by the New-York Historical Society, looks at the popular revival of formalportraiture in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

During this time the established elite and the newly wealthy of the Gilded Age sought to commemorate their social status and personal affluence by commissioning the most sought-after and well-known artists of their time to paint elaborate portraits of themselves and their families.

Displayed in the Museum’s second floor galleries, the exhibition will feature nearly sixty artworks,
including oil paintings, miniatures, and bronzes. Beauty’s Legacy contains works by artists such as
Gilbert Stuart, Rembrandt Peale, John Singer Sargent, Eastman Johnson, and William Adolphe
Bouguereau. It features portraits of members of socially prominent families such as Washington,
Bonaparte, Livingston, Vanderbilt, and Astor, names that left a lasting impression on the cultural and
financial legacies of our nation.

Théobald Chartran (French, 1849 –1907).  James Hazen Hyde, 1901.  Oil on canvas.  New-York Historical Society, Gift of James Hazen Hyde, 1949.1

Théobald Chartran (French, 1849 –1907). James Hazen Hyde, 1901. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society, Gift of James Hazen Hyde, 1949.1

Gilded Chicago: Portraits of an Era explores how the resurgence of portraiture manifested itself in
Chicago. The exhibition includes ten paintings of Gilded Age Chicagoans—with familiar last names
such as McCormick, Field, Pullman, and Nickerson. “I find of particular interest the contrast of the
portraits of the plainly dressed men hanging next to the fashionable and brightly attired women,”
said exhibition guest curator, Jeannine Falino, “It allows us to consider the role these women played
as leaders of Gilded Age Chicago’s social society in a whole new light.”

William Chase Canvas Print - Myra Reynolds by William Merritt

One of the most striking portraits, by famed American artist William Merritt Chase, features a name
that may not be as familiar to visitors. Myra Reynolds became one of the University of Chicago’s first
English fellows in 1892, she earned her PhD and eventually became a full professor, making her
career at the Hyde Park institution for over 30 years. Chase’s commission came from members of
the university women’s residence, Nancy Foster Hall, which Reynolds led for decades. ]

The portraits will hang in the Gallery on the Museum’s first floor, the same room where the Nickerson family originally displayed their art collection which was donated to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1900.

In addition to the two Gilded Age portrait exhibitions, Treasures from the White City: The Chicago
World’s Fair of 1893 will be on display in the Museum’s third floor galleries. Objects are drawn from
the Museum’s permanent collection, as well as the collection of Richard H. Driehaus, featuring
original works and memorabilia designed for and exhibited at the fair. The exhibition will include
objects by Louis Comfort Tiffany created for his magnificent World’s Fair chapel, a selection of
substantial silver pieces designed by both Gorham Manufacturing Company and Tiffany & Company,
and relics from the exposition such as tickets, maps and programs. Treasures from the White City:
The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 is presented in celebration of the fair’s 125th anniversary.
Gilded Chicago: Portraits of an Era and Treasures from the White City: The Chicago World’s Fair of
1893 are organized by the Richard H. Driehaus Museum and are part of Art Design Chicago, an
initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art exploring Chicago’s art and design legacy, with
presenting partner The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.

Beckmann. Exile Figures

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Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
From 23 October 2018 to 27 January 2019

CaixaForum, Barcelona
From 20 February to 28 May 2019


Max Beckmann (Leipzig, 1884 – New York, 1950) was one of Germany’s leading 20th-century artists. Initially close to Expressionism and New Objectivity, Beckmann developed a unique and independent pictorial style of a realistic type but one filled with symbolic resonances, offering a powerful account of society of his day.

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MAX BECKMANN
Autorretrato con vaso de champagne




1919, óleo sobre lienzo, Nueva York, Metropolitan Museum of Art - Imágen cortesía del Metropolitan Museum of Art (www.metmuseum.org) - © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn


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Curated by Tomàs Llorens, the exhibition brings together more than 50 works, including paintings, lithographs and sculptures, organised thematically into two principal sections. The first, smaller section covers Beckmann’s years in Germany from the period prior to World War I, when he first achieved public recognition, to the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s when he was expelled from the Frankfurt art school where he taught and was banned from exhibiting in public. The second, larger part, focuses on the artist’s years in Amsterdam and the United States where he lived after he was obliged to leave Germany.

Max Beckmann. Quappi con suéter rosa. 1932 - 1934. ©VEGAP, Madrid

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Max Beckmann. Quappi With Pink Sweater. 1932-1934. ©VEGAP, Madrid


This part is based on four metaphors relating to exile, understood both literally and as the existential condition of modern man: Masks, which looks at the loss of identity associated with the condition of exile; Electric Babylon, which focuses on the modern city as the capital of exile; The long goodbye, which constructs a parallel between exile and death; and The Sea, a metaphor of the infinite, its powers of seduction and alienation.

Also see:
max beckmann in exile

Balthus

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Fondation Beyeler in Riehen / Basel
2 September 2018 to 1 January 2019

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza

From 19 February to 26 May 2019



In 2019 the museum will be presenting an exhibition on the legendary artist Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (1908-2001), known as Balthus. The exhibition is jointly organised with the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen / Basel, where it will be seen from September 2018 to January 2019.

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Considered one of the great masters of 20th-century art, Balthus is undoubtedly one of the most unique painters of his time. His diverse, ambiguous work, which has been equally admired and reviled, pursued a direction that ran completely counter to the rise of the avant-gardes. Balthus himself named some of his influences derived from the tradition of art history, ranging from Piero della Francesca to Caravaggio, Poussin, Géricault and Courbet. A more detailed study of his work also reveals references to more recent movements such as Neue Sachlichkeit and his employment of devices derived from 19th-century children’s book illustrations.

In his divergence from modernity, which could now be described as “post-modern”, Balthus evolved a personal and unique type of avant-garde art and a figurative style that defies classification. His particular pictorial language, with its use of solid forms and strongly defined outlines, combines the procedures of the Old Masters with certain aspects of Surrealism. The resulting images involve numerous contradictions, juxtaposing tranquillity with extreme tension; reverie and mystery with reality; and eroticism with innocence.

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The starting point for the exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler is Balthusʼs monumental painting Passage du Commerce-Saint-André, from 1952–1954, which has been on permanent loan to the museum for some time. This enigmatic work epitomizes the artist's intensive engagement with the dimensions of space and time in the image, and with their relationship to the figure and the object. With this focus, the exhibition will bring together some fifty important pictures from every phase of Balthus's oeuvre, looking also at the strategies employed in the staging of his often provocative images, and illuminating the elements of irony and mystery in his work. His pictures combine tranquility with extreme tension, and embody a wealth of contradictions, mingling dream and reality, eroticism and innocence, the factual and the unfathomable, the familiar and the uncanny, in a wholly unique way. 



Balthus, Thérèse, 1938 Oil on cardboard on wood, 100.3 x 81.3 cm
 The exhibition, curated by Raphaël Bouvier with the support of MIchiko Kono and Juan Ángel López-Manzanares, brings together paintings from every period of Balthus’s career from the 1920s onwards. It will cast light on aspects such as the different types of intellectual interaction between the dimensions of space and time that exist in his paintings; the relationship between figure and object; and the essence of his enigmatic oeuvre.

"Object Lessons: American Still-Life Painting in the Nineteenth Century."

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The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State

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Martin Johnson Heade, "The White Rose," c. 1874–80, oil on artist’s board, 11 7/8 x 9 7/8 inches. Promised gift of Barbara Palmer. Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State

    "Object Lessons: American Still-Life Painting in the Nineteenth Century" opens Sept. 4 in the first-floor special exhibitions gallery. The show highlights the rich tradition of still-life painting in the United States with an emphasis on Pennsylvania’s influential role in that history. The 22 works featured in "Object Lessons" explore a variety of themes – from the brevity of life, to the bounty of the continent, to the poetic power and meaning of the commonplace. Rarely seen loans from private collectors complement the holdings of the Palmer to explore how flowers, fruit and simple household items have transfixed and beguiled viewers from the nineteenth century to the present day.



    • Richard La Barre Goodwin, "Still Life with Strawberries," c. 1885.
      Richard La Barre Goodwin, "Still Life with Strawberries," c. 1885, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.

      Image: Richard La Barre Goodwin / Collection of the Palmer Museum of Art, 2011.104, Gift of Alvin and Jean Snowiss
    • Richard La Barre Goodwin, "Still Life with Strawberries," c. 1885.

      Richard La Barre Goodwin, "Still Life with Strawberries," c. 1885, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.
      Collection of the Palmer Museum of Art, 2011.104, Gift of Alvin and Jean Snowiss


    “The Palmer is committed to presenting exhibitions that explore different periods and styles in American art,” said Erin Coe, director of the Palmer Museum of Art. “This exhibition places masterworks from the collection in dialogue with loans from private hands to better understand the development and cultural significance of still-life painting in the 19th century, when the genre was at its height of popularity.”

    Pennsylvania artists were at the forefront of the still-life genre, and the exhibition features works by a number of painters local to or identified with the Commonwealth, notably William Michael Harnett, Albert F. King, Rubens Peale, John Frederick Peto and Severin Roesen. "Object Lessons" also includes a varied roster of important artists who gravitated toward depicting inanimate objects amid the rising commodity culture and cosmopolitan networks of the Gilded Age, among them William Mason Brown, William Merritt Chase, Charles Caryl Coleman, Martin Johnson Heade and Elihu Vedder.

    “The exhibition not only brings together a distinguished group of artists who excelled at still-life painting, but it is also an opportunity to consider premier, though seldom exhibited, examples by them,” said Adam Thomas, curator of American art at the Palmer.

    Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today

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    The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University
    October 24, 2018 – February 10, 2019

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    Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies, 1870. Oil on canvas, 23-5/8 × 29-9/16 in. (60 × 75 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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    Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies, 1870



    The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in New York City will present the exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, a sweeping re-examination of the history of modern art.

    On view October 24, 2018 – February 10, 2019 at the Wallach, located in Columbia’s Lenfest Center for the Arts on 125th Street west of Broadway, the exhibition presents more than 100 works of art from the mid-19th century to today, on loan from more than 40 public and private collections.

    Created by artists from Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Henri Matisse to Romare Bearden, and Mickalene Thomas, the works show how the representation of the black female figure has been central to the development of art for the past 150 years.

    Posing Modernity is co-organized by the Wallach and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Columbia’s presentation is curated by Denise Murrell, the Wallach’s Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar.

    Henri Matisse, Dame à la robe blanche (Woman in White), 1946, Oil on canvas; 96.5 x 60.3 cm.  Des Moines Art Center, Acc.  No.  1959.40.  Courtesy The Matisse Foundation.  © 2017 Succession H.  Matisse / Artists Rights Society




















    Henri Matisse, Dame à la robe blanche (Woman in White), 1946, Oil on canvas; 96.5 x 60.3 cm. Des Moines Art Center, Acc. No. 1959.40. Courtesy The Matisse Foundation. © 2017 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society

    After being shown at the Wallach, Posing Modernity will be expanded to include other works and will be presented as Le Modèle noir de Géricault à Matisseat the Musée d'Orsay, from March 26 to July 14, 2019.

    File:Edouard Manet - Olympia - Google Art Project 3.jpg

    In New York, the presentation focuses specifically on the black female figure, beginning with Edouard Manet’s 1860s portrayals of Laure, the model who posed as the maid in Olympia, and here:

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    Jacques-Eugène Feyen, Le baiser enfantin (“The Childlike Kiss”), 1865. Oil on canvas, 110 by 152 cm.  Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille, France


    In Paris, a broader and expanded treatment of the black figure begins with portaits by Marie-Guillemine Benoist and Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault at the start of the 19th century.

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    Édouard Manet, Baudelaire's Mistress (Jeanne Duval), 1862. Oil on canvas; 89.5 x 113 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest


    In both New York and Paris, the exhibition explores the work of Manet’s Impressionist-era cohort, including Frédéric Bazille, Edgar Degas and the photographer Nadar; sculptors including Charles Henri Joseph Cordier and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux; paintings, drawings and prints of Henri Matisse (before and after his 1930s Harlem visits); the portraiture of diverse artists of the Harlem Renaissance, including Charles Alston and William H. Johnson; and the legacy of these depictions for successive generations of postwar modern and contemporary artists, from Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold through to the current moment.

    By taking a multidisciplinary approach that focuses on the connection between the history of art and the history of ideas, the exhibition will study aesthetic, political, social and racial issues as well as the realm of the imagination—all of which is revealed in the representation of black figures in visual arts from the French and American abolition eras to the present day.

    Publication


    Cover of the forthcoming exhibition catalog by Denise Murrell, for "Posing Modernity The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today" (Yale University Press).



    November 27, 2018
    224 pages, 9 x 10 1/4
    177 color illus.
    ISBN: 9780300229066
    Hardcover

    The forthcoming exhibition catalog  "Posing Modernity The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today" is by Denise Murrell (Yale University Press).

    An ambitious and revelatory investigation of the black female figure in modern art, tracing the legacy of Manet through to contemporary art

    This revelatory study investigates how changing modes of representing the black female figure were foundational to the development of modern art. Posing Modernity examines the legacy of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), arguing that this radical painting marked a fitfully evolving shift toward modernist portrayals of the black figure as an active participant in everyday life rather than as an exotic “other.” 
     
    Denise Murrell explores the little-known interfaces between the avant-gardists of nineteenth-century Paris and the post-abolition community of free black Parisians. She traces the impact of Manet’s reconsideration of the black model into the twentieth century and across the Atlantic, where Henri Matisse visited Harlem jazz clubs and later produced transformative portraits of black dancers as icons of modern beauty. 
     
    These and other works by the artist are set in dialogue with the urbane “New Negro” portraiture style with which Harlem Renaissance artists including Charles Alston and Laura Wheeler Waring defied racial stereotypes. The book concludes with a look at how Manet’s and Matisse’s depictions influenced Romare Bearden and continue to reverberate in the work of such global contemporary artists as Faith Ringgold, Aimé Mpane, Maud Sulter, and Mickalene Thomas, who draw on art history to explore its multiple voices.

    Featuring over 175 illustrations and profiles of several models, Posing Modernity illuminates long-obscured figures and proposes that a history of modernism cannot be complete until it examines the vital role of the black female muse within it.
     
    Denise Murrell is curator, Posing Modernity exhibition, and Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University.

    All that Glitters: Life at the Renaissance Court

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    At the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center

    August 28–December 2, 2018


    Courtiers feasting at elaborately set tables, knights in gleaming armor, a richly clad monarch presiding over elegant festivities—these are the images often associated with the medieval and Renaissance courts of Europe. For rulers and members of the nobility at the center of these privileged spaces, the visual arts—illuminated manuscripts, paintings, drawings, enamels, and textiles—were central aspects of their political and cultural identities. All that Glitters: Life at the Renaissance Court, on view from August 28 to December 2, 2018 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, focuses on court culture during the transition between “late medieval” and “Renaissance” (or “early modern”) Europe.




     Unknown, A Tournament Contest, about 1560 - 1570. Tempera colors and gold and silver paint on paper bound between original pasteboard covered with original brown calf Dimensions: Leaf: 43 × 28.9 cm (16 15/16 × 11 3/8 in.) Accession No. 83.MR.184.27v Object Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. Ludwig XV 14, fol. 27v.

                “During this critical period, the court was often a place of leisure, entertainment, and display, where members of the aristocracy engaged in tournaments, hunting, feasting, and games such as chess,” explains Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “The settings for these pursuits were designed to impress—sumptuous and spectacular displays of art and pageantry that reaffirmed their status and prestige. The manuscripts that recorded such courtly pastimes were themselves valued as luxury goods and much sought after by the nobility.”

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    Eitelfriedrich I Hohenzollern from Chronicle of the Hohenzollern Family, about 1572, German,  




    Jörg Ziegler (German, early 16th century - 1574/1577), Eitelfriedrich I Hohenzollern, about 1572. Pen and ink, colored washes, tempera, and gold paint on parchment Dimensions: Leaf: 35.2 × 27.8 cm. Accession No. 83.MP.154.18 Object Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. Ludwig XIII 11, fol 1.

                The objects featured in All that Glitters include a selection of luxury textiles and clothing, a drawing, a hand-colored print, and glass that complement the wide variety of lavishly illuminated manuscripts that found an enthusiastic audience in the palaces and châteaux of late medieval and Renaissance Europe.
                In aristocratic households all over continental Europe, even expressions of religious faith took a luxurious material form. Court artists produced small illuminated prayer books that could be worn as fashionable accessories, decorated with elegant fabrics, precious metals, and glittering jewels that adorned the residences of Europe’s elite.


    Eitelfriedrich I Hohenzollern; Jörg Ziegler (German, early 16th century - 1574/1577); Rottenburg, Germany; about 1572; Pen a… | 16th century German art ...

     
                The adherence to chivalric code and the way it governed both belief and behavior at the Renaissance courts was established in the Middle Ages but emerged with renewed vigor during the late medieval period. A number of dazzling and complex objects including manuscripts and stained glass explore the display of heraldry at court, where rank and systems of social hierarchy were incredibly important. Objects produced for kings, queens, and courtiers enshrined ideals of chivalry, especially in the form of jousting that continued to guide official conduct into the sixteenth century.

    Derrer Family Tree from Friedrich Derrer, about 1626 – 1711 – image The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. Ludwig XIII 12, fol. 7v
         
         “The incredible material luxury of the objects in the exhibition shows how ostentatious life at court could be, but when you dig a little deeper, the same objects can also be evidence of how courtiers were expected to behave and how they built their social hierarchies and identities,” says Larisa Grollemond, assistant curator of manuscripts and curator of the exhibition.

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    Armorial Millefleurs Tapestry, 1530–1550, Belgian, artist unknown, wool; tapestry weave. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Kirkeby. Image: www.lacma.org

              
























































     The exhibition concludes with a display of illuminated manuscript leaves from the court of King Louis XIV at Versailles, where the splendor of European court life reached its apex in the seventeenth-century. The display of heraldry, personal emblems, fine textiles, and luxury books continued to affirm social standing and good taste. Ultimately, the very trappings of magnificence that once cemented the king’s authority would also be what helped spark a revolution.

    Robert Delaunay and The City of Lights

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    Kunsthaus Zürich 

    From 31 August to 18 November 2018 

     






     

    Robert Delaunay, The Runners, 1924–1925. Oil on canvas, 153 x 203 cm. Private collection.
    This most comprehensive exhibition in Switzerland to date on Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) pays homage to the artist’s devotion to his native city, Paris. As a passionate advocate and practitioner of abstract art, Delaunay became a central figure within the Parisian avant-garde in the first decades of the 20th century.

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    Air, Iron, and Water. Study for a mural,” 1936–1937, Robert Delaunay, Gouache on paper and wood, 47 x 74.5 cm.Albertina, Wien. Batliner Collection

     Some 80 paintings, works on paper, films and photographs that explore his favourite themes – aviation, sport and the use of colour in art – will introduce you to Delaunay’s art and his artistic milieu. 

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    Robert Delaunay, Self-Portrait, 1909

    Oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm

    Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art

    moderne - Centre de création industrielle,

    Paris. Donation Sonia Delaunay et Charles

    Delaunay, 1964

    Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI,

    Dist. RMN-Grand Palais

    / Philippe Migeat


     
    Robert Delaunay was fascinated by technological inventions, the Eiffel Tower and photography. In his depiction of the Eiffel Tower, Robert Delaunay combined the dynamism of the vibrant metropolis with the intensity of his colour studies. 

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    Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower and

    Gardens, Champ de Mars, 1922

    Oil on canvas, 178.1 x 170.4 cm

    Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,

    Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.,

    The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981

    Photo: Lee Stalsworth

    André Kertész, Eiffel Tower, 1929

    Gelatine silver print, 27.5 x 34.4 cm

    Musée Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris

    Photo: Musée Carnavalet / Parisienne

    de Photographie

    © RMN-Grand Palais – Gestion droit

    d’auteur

    Modern technology, speed and movement dominate Robert Delaunay’s approach to life. In 1892 Paris receives electric street lighting, illuminating the night as if it were day, while in 1909 Blériot makes the first powered flight across the Channel. This was the backdrop for Delaunay’s investigations into how certain colour contrasts affect the eye and the creation of his ‘electric prisms’ and ‘circular forms’ – the earliest abstract images. 

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    Robert Delaunay, Study for «La Ville»,

    1909–1910

    Oil on canvas, 88.3 x 124.5 cm

    Tate: Presented by the Friends of the

    Tate Gallery 1958
    Photo: © Tate, London, 2018

    Robert Delaunay, The City, 1911. Oil on canvas, 57 1/16 x 44 1/8 inches (145 x 112 cm)

    Robert Delaunay b. 1885, Paris; d. 1941, Montpellier, France
    The City 1911 Oil on canvas 57 1/16 x 44 1/8 inches (145 x 112 cm)
    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift



    The meeting of Sonia Delaunay and the poet Blaise Cendrars led to a fruitful collaboration and one of the most beautiful artists’ books, ‘La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France’ (‘Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Joan of France’), in which text, the rhythm of language, colours and forms blend into a unique ‘simultaneous’ whole.


    For the exhibition  Robert Delaunay and The City of Lights , major museums and private collections in Europe and America have assisted Simonetta Fraquelli, a freelance curator specializing in early 20th-century Parisian art, by lending some of their Delaunay masterpieces which, for conservation reasons, are rarely permitted to travel. They include the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.   



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    Robert Delaunay, Political Drama, 1914

    Oil and collage on cardboard,

    88.7 x 67.3 cm

    National Gallery of Art, Washington,

    Donation Joseph H. Hazen Foundation



    https://uploads5.wikiart.org/images/robert-delaunay/not_detected_234092.jpg





    Robert Delaunay, Portrait of Madame

    Heim,1926

    Oil on canvas, 120 x 75 cm

    Calouste Gulbenkian Museum / Modern

    Collection

    Photo: José Manuel Costa Alves











    Robert Delaunay, Saint-Séverin, 1909

    Watercolour and pencil on paper,

    47.8 x 34 cm

    Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,

    Bequest of Betty Bartlett McAndrew






    Robert Delaunay, The Eiffel Tower

    and the Airplane, 1925

    Oil on canvas, 155 x 95 cm

    Courtesy Galerie Le Minotaure,

    Paris

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    Robert Delaunay, Disc (The First Disc),

    1913

    Oil on canvas, diameter 124 cm

    Esther Grether Familiensammlung








    Robert Delaunay, Windows Open

    Simultaneously (1st Part, 3rd Motif),

    1912

    Oil on canvas, 45.7 x 37.5 cm

    Tate: purchase 1967

    Photo: © Tate, London, 2018





    Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower, 1926–28. Conté crayon on paper, 24 1/2 x 18 3/4 inches (62.3 x 47.5 cm)



    Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower, 1926–1928

    Conté crayon on paper, 62.3 x 47.5 cm

    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New

    York. The Hilla Rebay Collection



    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/Robert_Delaunay_-_Rythme%2C_Joie_de_vivre.jpg/881px-Robert_Delaunay_-_Rythme%2C_Joie_de_vivre.jpg








    Robert Delaunay, Rythmes: Joie

    de Vivre, 1930

    Oil on canvas, 146 x 130 cm

    Private collection



    CATALOGUE

     

    Robert Delaunay and the City of Lights (English Edition) Kunsthaus Zürich

    A scholarly and lavishly illustrated catalogue in English and German accompanies the exhibition. It includes newly commissioned essays by Céline Chicha-Castex, Nancy Ireson, Anne de Mondenard and Simonetta Fraquelli (exhibition curator), contributing to the critical re-evaluation of this remarkable artist.


    Robert Delaunay and The City of Lights will recognize Delaunay’s unwavering commitment to color in painting to convey form, depth, light and movement, while highlighting how the modern metropolis of Paris often provided the inspiration for his imagery and pictorial research. In addition to presenting works from of his most famous series of paintings, such as that of the Eiffel Tower, the book also includes portraits Delaunay made of his artistic milieu during the 1920s. Portraits of the poets Philippe Soupault, Tristan Tzara, and several fashionable socialites, wearing ensembles designed by the artist Sonia Terk-Delaunay, are shown. The newly commissioned texts allow the reader to experience the wide-ranging and prescient nature of Robert Delaunay’s work – exploring the significant themes of movement, technology, sport, and advertising that were to preoccupy him throughout his career.

    Hardcover22 x 27 cm176 pages103 color and 29 b/w ills.EnglishAvailableISBN 978-3-86828-885-8\

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    VAN GOGH at ARKEN

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    ARKEN

    1 September 2018 to 20 January 2019

    VAN GOGH

    Vincent van Gogh, Self-portrait, April-June 1887. Detail. Coll. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

    For the first time in 50 years

    It is more than 50 years since the Danish public has been able to experience a large exhibition devoted exclusively to van Gogh’s paintings and drawings. In a unique collaboration with the Kröller-Müller Museum, The Netherlands, ARKEN now open its doors for a wide-ranging exhibition of van Gogh’s works with a focus on the relations among art, humanity, nature and religion.

    ’The guy with the ear”

    Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) is one of the most famous artists to have walked this earth. Notorious for having cut his ear off. Loved for his moving paintings and letters, which give us intimate insights into his life and thoughts. For Van Gogh life and art were a hard struggle. Yet he was able to create an original artistic idiom that demonstrates his profound belief in the cosmic unity of man and nature. ARKEN’s exhibition shows with 28 paintings and 11 drawings how his depictions of hard-working farm labourers and captivating landscapes in Arles were meant to express the divine in nature and mankind at a time of new departures in society when traditional faith was coming under pressure from modern philosophy and science.

    VAN GOGH

    Vincent van Gogh, Still-life with a Plate of Onions, 1890. Coll. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
    Vincent van Gogh in a letter to Theo van Gogh,  July 1882

    THE INNER LIFE OF NATURE

    Van Gogh’s landscapes are not charming postcards frozen in time. Everything lives and moves. The earth swells, the trees breathe and the heavenly bodies follow their courses.



    Vincent van Gogh, The Ravine, 1889. Courtesy Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.


    From childhood Van Gogh was preoccupied with the close study of nature. All his life he wandered on foot through the landscapes he lived in, and as an artist he preferred to paint under the open sky. Over time Van Gogh developed a quite personal Christian faith. He did not attend church. He found the divine outside the church in everything living, from a dandelion in seed to the intense sea of beams of the sinking sun.

    I PLOUGH MY CANVASES

    In a letter from 1889 Van Gogh wrote: “I plough on my canvases as the peasants do in their fields.” When Van Gogh ploughed the canvas with his brush, he immersed himself in the loam, the olive groves and the quiet corners in the rambling garden of the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy.



    Detail of Vincent van Gogh, The Garden of the Asylum at Saint Rémy, 1889. Courtesy of the Kröller-Müller.


    He asked himself how he could make himself useful – like the diligent peasant – as an artist in the world. The answer for him was to sow the divine message of beauty in the world through his painting. In The Sower Van Gogh gathers his ideas about the artist as someone who shows us the spiritual depths of nature by creating beautiful depictions of it. The sower is the protagonist of the Biblical parable about spreading the word of God. At the same time he is a quite ordinary peasant who works to the rhythm of nature.

     VAN GOGH

    Vincent van Gogh, The Sower, 1888. Coll. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

    The exhibition has been organised in association with the Kröller-Müller Museum, The Netherlands

     

    Detail of Vincent van Gogh, Pine Trees at Sunset, 1889. Courtesy of the Kröller-Müller Museum.

    ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection

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    ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection, an engaging and thought-provoking look at the unexpected subject of tools, will be on view at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT, from September 22 through December 30, 2018. Featuring more than 40 richly imaginative, quirky, and thought-provoking paintings, sculptures, photographs, and sketches, ReTooled celebrates the prevalence of tools in our lives with art that magically transforms utilitarian objects into fanciful works that speak of beauty, insight, and wit.

    The museum’s signature fall exhibition, ReTooled profiles 28 visionary artists from the Hechinger Collection and includes major artists such as Arman, Richard Estes, Howard Finster, Red Grooms, Jacob Lawrence, Fernand Léger and H.C. Westermann; photographers Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans; as well as pop artists Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and James Rosenquist.

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    "Carpenters" lithograph by Jacob Lawrence in the Bruce Museum exhibition"ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection." photo: Joel Breger


    Some of these artists portray tools with reverence to emphasize their purity of design, while others disfigure and transform implements to highlight their obsolescence in today’s world of glass, steel, and technology.

    These works were brought together in the 1980s by John Hechinger, owner of a hardware store chain in the Mid-Atlantic region. Hechinger is often credited as one of the major figures in the transformation of the neighborhood hardware store to the “do-it-yourself” home improvement business. His intent to beautify a new company headquarters led to the acquisition of a tool-inspired collection of diverse 20th-century art.

    “I felt that if I could show my associates how so many artists had celebrated the handsaw or the hammer or the paint brush, they would be aware of the intrinsic beauty of the simple objects that they handled by the tens of thousands,” said Hechinger. “They were not only the focus of their workdays, but our company’s very lifeblood.”

    Hechinger later donated his collection to International Arts & Artists, a non-profit arts service organization based in Washington, DC, dedicated to increasing cross-cultural understanding and exposure to the arts internationally through exhibitions, programs and services to artists, art institutions and the public.
    Curated by Jared Packard-Winkler, ReTooled presents the works in four sections: Objects of Beauty, Material Illusions, Instruments of Satire, and Tools: An Extension of Self.
    In Objects of Beauty, artists celebrate the simplicity and purity of distilled design, emphasizing the beauty of soft curves, harsh cut lines, and the dull shine of hardy iron. Walker Evans’ photograph of a mundane tool in Wrench (1965) encourages viewers to find beauty in the wrench’s slim lines and economy of form, while Jim Dine’s series of nine works, Toolbox (1966), places screen print images of tools in ascetic, yet energetic compositions. These artists work to reveal the rare vulnerable beauty ofeveryday tools taken out of their work environments.

    Material Illusions presents tools through a distorted lens -- artists reimage tools and render them useless in unusual contexts to question their functionality. In Richard Adams’ sculpture Lathe (1979), he subverts the viewer’s initial view of a lathe by constructing the sculpture out of maple wood.

    F.L. Wall’s Summer Tool (1983) presents an oak-fashioned lawn mower cutting each blade of grass at a uniform height, perhaps offering a critical response to our industrial society’s propensity to
    homogenization. This collection highlights the distance growing between modern society and the simple tools that used to be synonymous with American progress, now replaced by the computer and other technological tools.

    In Instruments of Satire, artists play with tools by injecting sharp humor and wit into their works.

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    In James Rosenquist’s Trash Can in the Grass-Calix Krater (1978), he presents a simple trash can adorned with ancient Greek imagery to elevate it to a vessel from antiquity.

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    Claes Oldenburg, Three Way Plug, 1965, offset lithograph with airbrush. 39 x 31½ x 1 inches.
    photo: Joel Breger


    Claes Oldenburg drastically heroizes an everyday object in Three-way Plug (1965) by rendering the plug with a larger-than-life status that verges on the comical. These representations of tools remind viewers that the essence of art is the joy of creation.

    In Tools: An Extension of Self, artists illustrate how tools have shaped the American consciousness by acting as our surrogate limbs and executing the actions that our vulnerable bodies cannot. Thus, the American core value of self-improvement is intertwined with these tools that create our capacity to create change and realize far-fetched visions. Howard Finster’s Saw/Mountains of People Use Tools (1990) pushes forth the idea that tools advanced human civilization by scrawling “tools came first and America was built second” on a Stanley Thrift saw.

    In The Slob (1965), H.C. Westermann imbues a hammer with the personality of its wielder, emphasizing the idea of the tool as an extension of human action.

    ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection was organized by International Arts and Artists, Washington, DC. Gift of John and June Hechinger.

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