The Color of the Moon

September 12, 2018, 8:07 am

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Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY
February 9-May 12, 2019

James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA
June 1-September 8, 2019

 

Oscar Florianus Bluemner (American, born in Germany, 1867-1938). Moon Radiance, 1927. Watercolor with gum coating on hot pressed off-white wove paper laid down by the artist to thick wood panel. Collection of Karen and Kevin Kennedy.

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 The moon—its face, color, and enduring myth—threads through the tapestry of American landscape painting, holding timeless allure for artists everywhere. This softly glowing orb has inspired countless works of art since the first humans looked up at the skies and saw its cratered face. The experience of contemplating the moon is universal to the human experience. It unites us in philosophical questions about our own place in the world.

Arthur Dove (American, 1880-1946). Moon, 1935. Oil on canvas. Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of Barney A. Ebsworth, 2000.39.1.

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  George Inness (American, 1825-1894). Winter Moonlight (Christmas Eve), 1866. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Montclair Art Museum. Museum purchase; Lang Acquisition Fund, 1948.29.

Next winter, the Hudson River Museum, in Yonkers, New York, presents a stunning exhibition devoted to the allure of the moon for American painters, whose art has reflected the eternal fascination with our closest celestial body. It is the first major museum examination of the moon as it relates to the story of the American nocturne, as it developed from the early 1820s through the late 1960s.

Frederic Edwin Church, Moonrise (The Rising Moon), January – March, 1865. Oil on canvas, 10 x 17 inches. 

The exhibition features more than 50 works of art, highlighting key painters who depicted the moon, from the early 19th-century masterpieces of Thomas Cole, the father of the Hudson River School, who embraced a kind of longing Romanticism that the astronomical body symbolized, to late works by famed illustrator Norman Rockwell, represented by his depictions of a long-held romantic yearning finally fulfilled–America’s triumphant lunar landing in 1969. All of the works in the exhibition underscore how the Romantic idea of the moon held an inexorable pull for artists, and was central to its depiction of landscape, a subject of ongoing engagement at the Museum.

The Color of the Moon will premiere at the Hudson River Museum on February 8, 2019 and run through May 12, followed by a summer 2019 showing at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, which has partnered with the Hudson River Museum to organize the exhibition.  

The Color of the Moon reveals the long and enduring relationship between art and lunar science.The exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, when American astronauts traveled across the skies to step onto the pitted surface of the moon in July 1969. Even before that historic moment, much scientific and aesthetic debate revolved around the question: What color is the moon? Artists continued their own explorations despite public disappointment when astronauts reported the rocks and dust were grayish brown. The Hudson River Museum, which has the only public planetarium in Westchester County and is dedicated to exploring the relationship between the arts and science, is poised as an ideal venue to explore this subject.

Several works from the Museum’s collection will be featured in The Color of the Moon, including  




The Burning Ship by Albert Bierstadt.

Other major artists represented through loans include Jasper Francis Cropsey, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Susie M. Barstow, George Inness, Edward Bannister, Ralph Blakelock, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Arthur Dove, Edward Steichen, Oscar Bluemner, Marguerite Zorach, Joseph Cornell, and Jamie Wyeth.



Major lenders include the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, The New-York Historical Society, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Olana State Historic Site, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Delaware Art Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, along with works from private collections.

Publication:

The Hudson River Museum will co-publish a fully-illustrated, 200-page catalog with Fordham University Pressand the Michener Art Museum. Authors include co-curators Laura Vookles (Chair, Curatorial Department, Hudson River Museum) and Bartholomew F. Bland (Executive Director, Lehman College Art Gallery, The City University of New York), as well as Theodore W. Barrow (Assistant Curator, Hudson River Museum), Stella Paul (author of Chromaphilia: The Story of Color in Art), and Melissa Martens Yaverbaum (Executive Director, Council of American Jewish Museums).

Themes explored in the essays will include our eternal fascination with the appearance of the moon and the myths it inspired; the moonlit landscapes of the Hudson River School; the moody moon of the Gilded Age; the allure of our lunar neighbor for early Modernists; and how the race for the moon transformed its appearance in popular culture.

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Gauguin: A Spiritual Journey

September 12, 2018, 8:22 am

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De Young Museum 
November 17, 2018 through April 7, 2019 

Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903) "Woman with Mango Fruits," ca. 1889 Painted oak, 11 3/4 x 19 1/4 in. (30 x 49 cm) Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, 1781 Photograph by Ole Haupt © Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen (Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)

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The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) has announced Gauguin: A Spiritual Journey, debuting at the de Young museum on November 17. The first exhibition at FAMSF dedicated to the work of Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) will explore two themes central to his career: the relationships that shaped his life and work, and his quest to understand spirituality, both his own and that of other cultures he encountered.

 

Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903) "Reclining Tahitian Women," 1894 Oil on canvas, 23 5/8 x 19 1/4 in. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, 1832 Photograph by Ole Haupt © Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Through an exceptional partnership with the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, more than sixty Gauguin works will be on view—ranging from oil paintings and works on paper to wood carvings and ceramics—alongside art of the Pacific Islands from the FAMSF collection. Combined, these works encompass distinctive phases of Gauguin’s career to show the development of his ideas, the scope of his oeuvre, and the inspiration he found in New Zealand, the Marquesas Islands, and Tahiti.

"The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have the largest repository of works on paper in the western United States, including numerous works by Gauguin—among them, The Woman from Arles, one of his most important drawings,” says Melissa Buron, Director of the Art Division at FAMSF. “Putting these works on view with Gauguin’s stunning oil paintings provides an unprecedented opportunity for our collection to shine and take its place in the larger historical narrative.”

Gauguin: A Spiritual Journey will feature works showing the deep influence that other artists, places, and relationships had on the arc of his career. Embarking on a profession in painting with no formal training, Gauguin was mentored by Impressionists including Camille Pissarro and Edgar Degas. (In fact, as an avid collector himself, Gauguin originally owned two of the Pissarro paintings on view in the exhibition.) Later collaborations with Vincent van Gogh and Émile Bernard show experiments with Symbolism as Gauguin developed his own distinctive style of painting, using flat fields of bold color and dark outlines that in turn influenced artists including Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

The exhibition will take visitors on a journey through the progression and scope of Gauguin’s work, from an early drawing of his wife, Mette Gad (ca. 1873), to better-known paintings inspired by his travels to Tahiti, such as 

 

Tahitian Woman with a Flower (Vahine no te tiare), from 1891. Although Gauguin is best known as a painter and printmaker, the exhibition will also feature fifteen experimental ceramics and intricate wood carvings interspersed with period photography and excerpts from his own letters and writings.
Gauguin was greatly influenced by Pacific art and culture, from his time spent in the region en route to Tahiti in 1895.

 

Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903) Flowers and Cats, 1899 Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 27 15/16 in. (92 x 71 cm) Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, 1835 Photograph by Ole Haupt, © Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Corresponding to this period of Gauguin’s travel and work in the Pacific, carvings and images from New Zealand, the Marquesas Islands, and Tahiti will be on view from FAMSF’s own extensive holdings in Oceanic arts.

Works such as the striking Māori gable figure of Tüwhakairiora, purchased by founder M. H. de Young from the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition in Golden Gate Park, will add to visitors’ understanding of the Pacific histories, beliefs, and art that inspired Gauguin and captured his imagination. (Tüwhakairiora was an ancestor who avenged the death of his grandfather and became a leader of all the peoples of New Zealand’s northeast coast of North Island in the seventeenth century.)

“It is exciting to bring so many Gauguin works to San Francisco,” says exhibition curator Christina Hellmich, curator in charge of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “I am pleased that we can highlight some lesser-known aspects of his life, including his wife’s critical role in his career, and offer contemporary perspectives through a new video installation. The striking works of Māori, Marquesan, and Tahitian art from our own collection will allow visitors to learn about Gauguin’s fervent interest in the art and spirituality of Oceania.”

Among many of Gauguin’s paintings are subjects believed to depict Indigenous Māhu, or Tahitian “third gender” individuals. In Sāmoa, the equivalent is known as a Fa’afafine, an indigenous queer minority considered to be gifted in the spirit of more than one gender. Sāmoa-based interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara has been commissioned to create a new video work that will debut with this exhibition. Filmed in Upolu Island Sāmoa, her piece, entitled First Impressions: Paul Gauguin, shows a group of Fa’afafine friends discussing works that Gauguin created during his time in the Pacific.
"The Glyptotek contains one of the world’s finest collections of Gauguin’s works,” adds Christine Buhl Andersen, Director of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. “For us it is of crucial significance that the collection is put into new contexts and thus remains vital and relevant. This is the case here where two museums have combined their potential and worked together curatorially, thus creating an original exhibition. We at the Glyptotek have enjoyed an excellent collaboration with the de Young museum and we look forward to experiencing the public’s reception of the exhibition when it opens in San Francisco.”

Gauguin: A Spiritual Journey is organized by Christina Hellmich, curator in charge of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and co-organized by Line Clausen Pedersen, curator at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.

The exhibition will be on view at the de Young museum from November 17, 2018, through April 7, 2019, and then travel to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.

Catalogue 

Gauguin: A Spiritual Journey Hardcover – November 27, 2018

by Christina Hellmich(Author), Line Clausen Pedersen(Author), Max Hollein(Contributor)

This dazzling book showcases dozens of Paul Gauguin's most celebrated works and presents a new consideration of the artist's relationships.

This vibrant examination of Paul Gauguin's life and work features more than fifty pieces from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek collection in Copenhagen, including paintings, wood carvings, and ceramics along with Oceanic art and Gauguin's works on paper from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's permanent collections. Each piece is reproduced in exquisite detail, offering a superb opportunity to enjoy Gauguin's groundbreaking use of color, line, and form. Essays examine Gauguin's relationships and reveal the struggles, indulgences, awakenings, and betrayals of his personal and professional life. Other essays provide new insights into Gauguin's travels to the far reaches of the French colonial empire in the Pacific and explore his cultural identity, sexuality, and spirituality. Beautifully designed to complement Gauguin's extraordinary oeuvre, this book offers a refreshing take on an artist whose life and work continue to fascinate to the present day.

Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment

September 12, 2018, 7:58 am

≫ Next: Christie’s: An American Place: The Barney A. Ebsworth Collection

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Princeton University Art Museum 

Oct. 13, 2018-Jan. 6, 2019

Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts 

Feb. 2-May 5, 2019

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas

May 25–Sept. 9, 2019

Albert Bierstadt, American, 1830–1902, Mount Adams, Washington, 1875. Oil on canvas. Gift of Mrs. Jacob N. Beam.(Princeton University Art Museum)

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This fall, the story of our changing relationship with the natural world will be comprehensively told through a groundbreaking exhibition encompassing three centuries of American art. Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment presents more than 120 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, videos and works of decorative art, from the colonial period to the present, exploring for the first time how American artists of different traditions and backgrounds have both reflected and shaped environmental understanding while contributing to the development of a modern ecological consciousness. 
 

       This sweeping exhibition engages a wide range of genres and historical contexts – from colonial furniture to the art of Jeffersonian natural science, from Hudson River landscape painting to Native American basketry, from Dust Bowl regionalism to modernist abstraction and postwar environmental activism – highlighting the evolving ecological implications of subjects and contexts of creation as well as artistic materials and techniques. The result is a major reinterpretation of American art that examines both iconic masterpieces and rarely seen objects through a lens uniting art historical interpretation with environmental history, scientific analysis and the dynamic field of ecocriticism.

“Nature’s Nation advances a new approach to understanding and interpreting American art of the past three centuries, opening up rich avenues of engagement with both celebrated and less familiar works of art,” said James Steward, Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, director. “At a time when the question of our relationship with the natural world is so much on our minds, Nature’s Nation positions the museum as a crucial site for close looking, conversation and exchange on questions that matter both to our identities as Americans and to our future.”

       The exhibition is the culmination of years of innovative research by co-curators Karl Kusserow, the John Wilmerding Curator of American Art at the Princeton University Art Museum, and Alan C. Braddock, the Ralph H. Wark Associate Professor of Art History and American Studies at William & Mary. To help rethink American art history in environmental terms, they have selected works by more than 100 artists, including John James Audubon, George Bellows, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, Thomas Eakins, Theaster Gates, Winslow Homer, Louisa Keyser, Dorothea Lange, Ana Mendieta, Thomas Moran, Isamu Noguchi, Georgia O’Keeffe, Maya Lin, Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles Willson Peale, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Alexis Rockman, Robert Smithson, Carleton Watkins and Andrew Wyeth. 

       Nature’s Nation begins with an introductory gallery, where iconic paintings by 

 

Albert Bierstadt (Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite, ca. 1871-73) 

 

and Thomas Moran (Lower Falls, Yellowstone Park, 1893) are displayed alongside works by Valerie Hegarty (Fallen Bierstadt, 2007) and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Browning of America, 2000) that revise and complicate earlier perceptions of the pristine American environment. The fifteen diverse works in the introduction set the stage for the following sections, which together reveal our evolving sense of what nature means and how we as humans relate to it.

       The first, Colonization and Empire, focuses on images of the young Republic’s ideas about natural order, as seen in 



Charles Willson Peale’s renowned The Artist in His Museum (1822), before exploring picturesque and sublime representations of the land in paintings such as 

 

Thomas Cole’s Home in the Woods (1847), and Americans’ plans for nature’s transformation, as in Frederick Law Olmsted’s enormous Central Park “Greensward Plan” (1858).

      

 A second section, Industrialization and Conservation, explores work that addresses the tensions between progress and preservation, including complex representations of consumption and its effects by 



Winslow Homer (Prisoners from the Front, 1866), 

 
Thomas Anshutz (The Ironworker’s Noontime, 1880) and a Standing Rock Sioux artist (a stretched buffalo robe of 1882). 

       Finally, Ecology and Environmentalism considers art of the 20th and 21st centuries that reimagines ecology on a global scale through expansive techniques and media. Among the works featured are 



Georgia O’Keeffe’s iconic The Lawrence Tree (1929) and Robert Rauschenberg’s lithographic collage announcing the first Earth Day (1970).

  

     “The Museum is grateful to the many institutions and funders who enthusiastically supported this innovative new vision of North American history and culture,” Steward said. Lenders include 70 eminent national collections, both private and public, as well as works drawn from Princeton’s extensive holdings.

Reframing more than 300 years of diverse artistic practice in North America, from the colonial period to the present, Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment examines for the first time how American artists have both reflected and shaped environmental understanding while contributing to the emergence of a modern ecological consciousness.

Sanford Robinson Gifford, Hunter Mountain, Twilight, 1866. Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.57

The exhibition traces evolving ideas about the environment – and our place within it – from colonial beliefs about natural theology and biblical dominion through the 19th-century notion of manifest destiny to the emergence of modern ecological ethics. This pioneering exhibition will gather approximately 125 works of art by a broad range of artists – including iconic masterpieces as well as rare and seldom exhibited works – and interpret them through an interdisciplinary lens that unites art and environmental history with scientific analysis, using ecocriticism as a tool to see the history of American art in a new light.

Organized by the Princeton University Art Museum, the exhibition is cocurated by Karl Kusserow, John Wilmerding curator of American art at the Princeton University Art Museum; and Alan C. Braddock, Ralph H. Wark associate professor of art history and American studies at the College of William and Mary.

Nature’s Nation will consist of paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, videos and works of decorative art gathered from more than 70 eminent collections across the United States as well as from Princeton’s own extensive holdings. The exhibition will be arranged in three chronological eras marked by shifting human conceptions of the natural world and increasing artistic awareness of environmental change.

Among the more than 100 artists featured in the exhibition will be John James Audubon, George Bellows, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, Thomas Eakins, Theaster Gates, Winslow Homer, Louisa Keyser, Dorothea Lange, Ana Mendieta, Thomas Moran, Isamu Noguchi, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles Willson Peale, Sarah Miriam Peale, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Alexis Rockman, Robert Smithson and Carleton Watkins.



A major 448-page catalogue, published by the Princeton University Art Museum and distributed by Yale University Press, accompanies the exhibition. In addition to a series of expansive narrative essays by the curators, the publication features contributions by 13 distinguished scholars and artists in a variety of fields, including art historians Rachael DeLue and Robin Kelsey, artists Mark Dion and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and environmental theorists Timothy Morton and Rob Nixon.

Christie’s: An American Place: The Barney A. Ebsworth Collection

September 17, 2018, 4:57 pm

≫ Next: Christie’s 12 works by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, October

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Christie’s has announced An American Place: The Barney A. Ebsworth Collection, will be offered in a dedicated evening and day sale in November as a highlight of its flagship 20th Century Week in New York. The collection of Barney A. Ebsworth represents an extraordinary achievement in the history of collecting — a singular assemblage of over 85 artworks that illuminates the rise of American art across the 20th century. Highlights of the collection include Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey, 1929, the most important work by the artist still in private hands (estimate in the region of $70 million), Jackson Pollock’s Composition with Red Strokes (estimate in the region of $50 million) and Willem de Kooning’s Woman as Landscape (estimate in the region of $60 million).

A global tour of highlights will commence in Paris 6-9 September, coinciding with La Biennale Paris, followed by highlight exhibitions in New York, Hong Kong, London, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and culminating with the auction preview at Christie’s Rockefeller Galleries in New York. The tour in Paris will include works by Hopper, Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Nadelman, Davis, Sheeler, O’Keeffe and Glackens. The collection is expected to realize in excess of $300 million.

Marc Porter, Chairman, Christie’s Americas, commented: 

“Last season, Christie’s made the bold move of launching the $835 million Collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller in Asia, underscoring our investment and deep commitment to collectors in this growing region. This season, Christie’s Paris will host the debut of this stunning collection for the global collecting community, positioning it in the heart of Europe and paying homage to Barney A. Ebsworth’s lifelong love affair with the city that first introduced him to great art. His unique journey as a collector resonates with the influence and art historical connections of Gertrude Stein’s Paris, and ultimately set a new high standard for the creation of a nuanced collection of 20thCentury Art that is without parallel in its exceptional depth and quality.”

“AN AMERICAN PLACE” – COLLECTION HIGHLIGHTS

As a tribute to the former Stieglitz gallery, Ebsworth bestowed the name “An American Place” on his home in Seattle, which was built in collaboration with architect Jim Olson and designed as a dialogue between art and architecture. Ebsworth’s credo in collecting was “quality, quality, quality,” and with that mindset he amassed the most comprehensive collection of American Modernism in private hands, with many works having been loaned to leading institutions throughout his years of ownership.


A seminal composition within the landscape of American Modernism, Edward Hopper’s Chop Sueywas one of  Mr. Ebsworth’s most prized possessions (estimate in the region of $70 million). Possibly derived from a Cantonese phrase, tsap sui, meaning ‘odds and ends,’ chop suey referred not only to a low-cost stir-fry dish but, moreover, to a public destination where the societal fusion of different cultural elements of the modern city came together.



As in his masterwork Nighthawks (1942, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois), Hopper’s 1929 painting Chop Suey distills the atmosphere of this everyday eatery into a cinematic scene that at once depicts an implicit narrative while creating clear allusions to broader themes of social isolation, gender roles and art historical tradition. While having its roots in the French Impressionist and Ashcan traditions of painting city life, Chop Suey incorporates a thoroughly modern play of light and color to capture a specific restaurant that the Hoppers frequented on the Upper West Side of New York.  The most important painting by Hopper left in private hands, Chop Suey epitomizes the psychologically complex meditations for which the artist is best known, while uniquely capturing the zeitgeist of New York during one of its most interesting eras of transition. Chop Suey was included in the groundbreaking retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris 2012-13, which broke attendance records for the location.




Willem de Kooning’s Woman as Landscape is a tour-de-force of 20th century painting (estimate in the region of $60 million). Executed at the height of the artist’s career in 1955, this large-scale canvas belongs to a small group of works that are well positioned among the most powerful paintings in American art. Measuring over five and a half feet tall, Woman as Landscape is a heroic painting that encompasses the painterly bravado and radical use of color that singled out de Kooning as a leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement, and one of the pre-eminent painters of his generation. The shocking female forms sensationalized the art world, energizing and scandalizing in equal measure, but his vivid brushwork came to represent the dramatic shift in art that occurred in the postwar years, a change that would alter the course of art history. Now firmly established as part of the 20th century art historical canon, many of de Kooning’s Woman paintings form the cornerstones of major international museum collections and as such, Woman as Landscape is one of the only paintings from this important period of the artist’s career to remain in private hands.




Jackson Pollock’s Composition with Red Strokes was executed in 1950 during the peak of his extraordinary creative output and is a central work to the artist’s oeuvre, demonstrating his new technique (estimate in the region of $50 million). It was these startling, original and accomplished paintings that, in Willem de Kooning's phrase, finally 'broke the ice' for American painting, completely revolutionizing it and in the process reshaping the entire history of 20th century art. The diverse, virtuosic and carefully controlled markmaking in Composition with Red Strokes represents the variety, subtlety and mystery that Pollock had achieved in his new language of paint. Displaying a fascinatingly dense, intricate and animated abstract surface, Composition with Red Strokes is one of the richest, most engaging and successfully resolved of all these famous works. Other works made by Pollock in this key period are held at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art.



Among the other Post-War highlights in the Collection are Joan Mitchell’s 12 Hawks at 3 O’clock, created at a pivotal time when the artist’s abstraction reached new levels (estimate: $14-16 million),  



Gray Rectangles by Jasper Johns, the first work by the artist to be acquired by the legendary collectors Victor and Sally Ganz (estimate: $20-30 million), and

 

Franz Kline’s Painting (estimate: $5-7 million).


Ebsworth had a lasting friendship with Georgia O’Keeffe – she acted as a witness to his second marriage which took place at her Abiquiú home in New Mexico – who is represented in the Collection with  



Horn and Feather, 1937 (estimate: $700,000-1,000,000)

Beauford Delaney, 1901–1979 by Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) Pastel on paper, 1943, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation

and Beauford Delaney, 1943 (estimate: $200,000-300,000).


Additional works in the Collection by members of the Stieglitz Circle are  



Stuart Davis’s Still Life in the Street (estimate: $500,000-700,000)

and Marsden Hartley’s Calm After Storm off Hurricane Island (estimate: $1,500,000-2,500,000).


 


Among the finest examples ever to appear on the market from Precisionist artist Charles Sheeler is Catwalk, 1947, which once belonged to Nelson Rockefeller (estimate: $1,200,000-1,800,000).

Representing the Ashcan School is  

 

William Glackens’ Café Lafayette (Portrait of Kay Laurel), which was Ebsworth’s first acquisition of American Art in 1972 (estimate: $250,000-350,000). Among several examples by the American artists in Gertrude Stein’s circle offered in the sale are Elie Nadelman’sDancing Figure (estimate: $600,000-800,000).

The Collection also includes extremely rare examples from important artists who infrequently appear on the market and are primarily held in museums, such as Patrick Henry Bruce’s Peinture/Nature Morte (estimate: $2,000,000-3,000,000 million), which was displayed alongside Hopper’s Chop Suey in the library. In total, the Collection includes a full range of price levels, with estimates starting at $100,000.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1934, Barney A. Ebsworth was an entrepreneur and his success was self-made. He founded Clipper Cruise Line, among other cruise lines, the Intrav luxury travel business and was an angel investor in the stuffed-animal phenomenon Build-A-Bear Workshop. Ebsworth’s passion for art originated during his station with the US Army in France in 1956, when he made weekly trips to the Louvre.

Mr. Ebsworth was a renowned collector who gave generously over the years to the Seattle Art Museum as well as to many other museums and charitable institutions, including gifts of major early American works. He also devoted substantial time and financial resources in support of these institutions, including serving on the Board of the Seattle Art Museum. Ebsworth was named as one of the ‘World’s 200 Greatest Collectors’ and ‘America’s Top 100 Collectors’, and served as a board member or trustee for the Seattle Art Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Frank Lloyd Wright House in Ebsworth Park, St. Louis, and the Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis.

Christie’s 12 works by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, October

September 17, 2018, 9:59 pm

≫ Next: Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 15 November 2018 at Christie’s

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This October during London’s Frieze Week, Christie’s will present the largest and most diverse selection of 12 works by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, two British masters of the 20th century. 

The group is led by Francis Bacon’s Figure in Movement(1972, estimate on request), held for 41 years in the prestigious collection of Magnus Konow. The work is a poignant meditation on human existence, expressed through the memory of Bacon’s muse and lover George Dyer, whose tragic suicide took place less than thirty-six hours before the opening of Bacon’s career-defining retrospective at the Grand Palais, and had a devastating impact upon the artist. Within Bacon’s oeuvre, Figure in Movement sits at the centre of the black triptychs. 

In addition, a collection of some of the earliest works on record by Bacon, comprises six pieces including his earliest surviving large-scale work, Painted Screen (circa 1930), a precursor to his famed triptychs. On loan to Tate, London, since 2009, the collection bears an outstanding provenance that includes Bacon’s first patron Eric Allden and his early artistic mentor Roy de Maistre. In the 1940s, five of the works entered the family collection of Francis Elek, who met Allden around this time; he acquired the sixth following de Maistre’s death in 1968.

Similarly, Lucian Freud’s early Man in a Striped Shirt (1942, estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000), created when the artist was 19, also from the collection of Magnus Konow, is presented alongside a still-life celebrating the artist’s love for his wife Caroline Blackwood, and a 1980 portrait of his friend and lover Susanna Chancellor. Two of the first studies of Francis Bacon Freud created in 1951 are also included. Selected works from this group will be on view at Christie’s Hong Kong (4-7 September), Los Angeles (5-8 September), New York (15-18 September) and King Street from 28 September, ahead of the auction on 4 October 2018. 

FRANCIS BACON: EARLY WORKS

In 1939, Francis Elek came to England from Czechoslovakia as part of a swimming team, and became separated from his family at the outbreak of conflict in Europe. It was whilst searching for them through the Red Cross after the war that he met Allden, and subsequently acquired the majority of the present collection in the late 1940s. The collection represents some of the very first works in Bacon’s catalogue raisonné, capturing the birth of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artistic voices. Collectively, they chronicle Bacon’s formative influences, blending his early interests in furniture design with the contemporary innovations of the European avant-garde. 

 

Few works remain from this seminal period: in addition to Painted Screen (circa 1930, estimate: £700,000-1,000,000) the present group includes the earliest surviving oil on canvas, 

 

 Painting, (1929-30, estimate: £450,000-650,000), 

 

while an early work on paper, Gouache (1929, estimate: £180,000-220,000), is testament to Bacon’s early fascination with interior architecture and design. 

Francis Bacon’s rugs shine a vital light on the relationship between art and design in his early practice, the present three belong to a group of just 12 surviving examples (All: Rug, circa 1929, estimate £70,000-100,000). Frequently hung on the wall like paintings, inspired perhaps by the tapestries of Jean Lurçat, their bold geometric designs owe much to Bacon’s interests in Synthetic Cubism and the Bauhaus movement, encountered during his time in Berlin and Paris between 1927 and 1928. 

Unseen in public until 2011, Francis Bacon by Lucian Freud (both 1951, estimates: £500,000-700,000) belong to an outstanding group of three studies that represent Freud’s first depictions of Bacon, the third was in the collection of R. B. Kitaj and sold by Christie’s in the estate sale of 2008 for £468,500, against an estimate of £100,000-150,000. The studies are among the most intimate records of one of the 20th century’s greatest artistic relationships. They depict Bacon in a spontaneous moment of characteristic irreverence: shirt and trousers unbuttoned, eyes downcast, hips flexed and chest bared. Freud found great inspiration in Bacon’s impulsive painterly language while Bacon appreciated his companion’s witty vitality. 

Left: Lucian Freud, Man in a Striped Shirt (1942, estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000)
Right: Lucian Freud, Still Life with Zimmerlinde (circa 1950, estimate: £400,000-600,000)

Painted when Lucian Freud was just 19 years old, Man in a Striped Shirt (1939, estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000) is a rare early work that bears witness to the young artist’s talent. Richard Chopping was a fellow student of the East Anglian School of Art in Dedham, and also a friend of Francis Bacon, appearing in the 1978 diptych Two Studies for Portrait of Richard Chopping. Freud’s painting is charged with his uncompromising eye for the specific, studying Chopping’s distinctive features with the intense focus typical of Freud’s earliest paintings. 

Executed in the early 1950s, Still Life with Zimmerlinde (circa 1950, estimate: £400,000-600,000) is an intimate study of a zimmerlinde, more commonly known in English as a house lime, dedicated to his second wife, Caroline Blackwood. One heart-shaped leaf dominates the composition, its serrated outline faithfully traced and its bright, backlit green surface exposing every vein. To the lower left, the image is cut short by a swathe of still-raw canvas in which Freud has written, in his distinctive rounded hand, ‘For Caroline / with all my love / Lucian’. 

Gifted by Lucian Freud to the current owner, Head of a Woman (circa 1980, estimate: £350,000-450,000) stands among the artist’s earliest depictions of Susanna Chancellor. Freud first met her when she was just seventeen years old and the two quickly fell into a passionate relationship that would continue in various guises until the artist’s death in 2011. However, it was not until nearly 20 years into their friendship that Freud would begin to depict Susanna, coinciding with a renewed focus on his familial circle. 

FRANCIS BACON: FIGURE IN MOVEMENT

Executed in 1972, Figure in Movement takes its place among an extraordinary group of works painted in the aftermath of George Dyer’s tragic death the previous year. In the hustle between figuration and abstraction, Bacon creates a vivid sense of the transition from life to death, transforming Dyer’s distinctive features into commentary on the fleeting nature of life. Figure in Movement sheds critical light on Bacon’s understanding of the human condition during this period. Laced with allusions to photography, literature, reportage and film, it is an attempt to visualise the ways in which figural traces continue to live in the mind: Dyer is simultaneously reincarnated and estranged, his likeness skewed to the point of ambiguity and mirrored imperfectly in billowing black. Included in Bacon’s 1983 touring retrospective in Japan, as well as his 2016 exhibition at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, Figure in Movement demonstrates the new artistic directions he pursued during the 1970s, with the period following Dyer’s death seeing a move away from the characterful portraits of Bacon’s 1960s Soho circle towards dark, existential meditations on mortality.

Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 15 November 2018 at Christie’s

September 21, 2018, 9:49 am

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Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction will present work by some of the great artists of the 20^th Century alongside those currently at the forefront of their artistic practice. The season will be led by Francis Bacon’s Figure in Movement (1972, estimate: £15,000,000-20,000,000), a seminal work which creates a vivid sense of the transition from life to death, and Gerhard Richter’s Schädel (Skull) (1983, estimate on request), unveiled for the first time in 30 years.

Alongside these are masterpieces by American Contemporary artists Jeff Koons and Mark Grotjahn, as well as the finest examples of European Post-War Abstraction with works by Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, Jean Dubuffet and Pierre Soulages, and German artists such as Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Sigmar Polke.

Three works from the personal collection of Paul Maenz and 12 works by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud (see separate post here) will be offered, the largest and most diverse selection of works ever offered at auction by the artists. The Post-War and Contemporary Art EveningAuction will be held on 4 October 2018 and is followed by the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Auction on 5 October 2018. All works will be exhibited at King Street from 28 September 2018.

American Contemporary Art

 

Jeff Koons, Cracked Egg (Blue) (1994-2006, estimate: £10,000,000-15,000,000). © Christie’s Images Limited 2018.

With its monumental scale, vibrant colour, elegant contours and dual mirrored surface, Cracked Egg (Blue) (19942006, estimate: £10,000,000-15,000,000), is an icon of Jeff Koons’s sculptural practice. A feat of technical virtuosity, engineered to precision over a twelve-year period, it is one of the central works in Koons’s landmark Celebration series, taking its place alongside masterpieces such as Balloon Dog and Tulips.



The current auction record for any living artist was set by Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog (Orange), 1994-2000, which sold for $58,405,000 at  at Christie’s New York on November 12, 2013.


Mark Grotjahn’s Face Paintings combine expressive abstraction and kaleidoscopic hues, with strong connections to the mask-like faces rendered by Picasso and Matisse. Within Untitled (Yellow and Green Low Fall Face 41.80) (2011, estimate: £6,000,000-8,000,000) a palette of whites, greens, yellows, blues and blacks conjures an animated surface of movement and colour. Bright light appears to explode from the centre of intertwined lines that subtly intimate the features of a face.

Works from the Collection of Paul Maenz 

Christie’s will offer three works from the personal collection of Paul Maenz: Albert Oehlen’s Stier mit Loch (Bull with Hole) (1986, estimate: £800,000-1,200,000), Anselm Kiefer’s Midgard (1983-85, estimate: £1,200,000-1,800,000)

Keith Haring, Untitled (1984, estimate: £3,000,000-5,000,000). © Christie’s Images Limited 2018.

and Keith Haring’s Untitled (1984, estimate: £3,000,000-5,000,000).

One of the most influential gallerists of his generation, Maenz had a pivotal impact on the international art world during the 1970s and 1980s, introducing new waves of Avant-garde artists to both European and American audiences. Working closely with artists, curators and critics, Maenz gave voice to some of the most pioneering movements of the time: most notably Conceptualism, Arte Povera, Italian Transavanguardia and Neo-Expressionism. The works presented from his collection offer a snapshot of this world during the mid-1980s, capturing the spirit of political subversion, painterly radicalism and restless creative optimism that captivated Maenz during this period.

European Abstraction

‘Beyond the Monochrome’ brings into focus the seminal achievements of Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein. United by their far-reaching innovations in relation to the picture plane, the artistic process, materiality, spirituality and transcendence, Fontana, Manzoni and Klein together forged a new era. Concetto spaziale, Attese (1959, estimate: £1,200,000-1,800,000) is an early example of Fontana’s tagli or ‘slashes’, which ruptured the canvas as part of his Spatialist mission to introduce an infinite fourth dimension into the work of art. Made in the same year, Untitled Blue Monochrome (IKB 276) (1959, estimate: £4,000,000-6,000,000) exemplifies Klein’s ‘International Klein Blue’ monochromes, through which art became a portal to the unknown. Manzoni’s Achrome (1957-58, estimate: £3,000,000-5,000,000) takes the monochrome to absolution, creating a colourless surface of pure, limitless potential.

Held in the same collection since the 1980s, and featured in the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden’s major Jean Dubuffet retrospective in 1993, Madame au Jardin (Lady in the Garden) (1956, estimate: £2,500,000-3,500,000) is a romantic large-scale work from the artist’s important series of Assemblages. Never before seen in public, Peinture 162 x 114 cm, 29 août 1958 (1958, estimate: £1,800,000-2,200,000) is a dramatic large-scale oil painting by Pierre Soulages. It has been held in the same private collection for the last 60 years, and dates from a defining decade in the artist’s career.

German Art

The diversity of German contemporary art is represented by a group of 13 works by Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Sigmar Polke. Georg Baselitz’s inverted portrait Fingermalerei - Haubentaucher (Finger Painting - Great Crested Grebe) (1972, estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000) is one of the earliest works within his series of Fingermalerei (‘Finger-Paintings’) which encompass birds, trees and self-portraits, some of his most significant motifs.

This is presented alongside Baselitz’s 11 P.D. Füße (11 P.D. Feet) (1960-63, estimate: £6,000,000-10,000,000), a seminal suite of early works depicting wounded feet.

A third work by the artist, Locke (Tress) (1990, estimate: £500,000-700,000), is a totemic example of his sculptural portraits. Anselm Kiefer’s Die Ungeborenen (The Unborn) (1978, estimate: £700,000-1,000,000) is one of the earliest examples where he explores the theme of a netherworld of unborn people, ideas and creative possibility. In contrast, the sophisticated psychedelia of Sigmar Polke’s Mexiko (1977-79, estimate: £1,200,000-1,800,000), depicts saguaro cacti in saturated hues of green and purple against a white ground; at the foot of the foremost cactus is a Jeep, revealed only by its purple shadows while two people stand to the centre.

Dreiteiliges Genähtes (Three-Piece Sewn) (1988, estimate: £2,500,000-3,500,000) is a monumental abstraction by Polke, which towers three metres in height, comprised of four pieces of translucent fabric sewn together.

Martin Kippenberger’s Ohne Titel aus der Serie Krieg Böse (Untitled from the Series War Wicked) (1991-92, estimate: £800,000-1,200,000) is from a seminal series that formed an ongoing conceptual riposte to the high seriousness of Neo-Expressionists.

Painted on a dramatic scale, Albert Oehlen’s Untitled (1989, estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000) is a frenzy of techniques that marks the birth of his abstract period while, Bigote (Moustache) (2003, estimate: £500,000700,000) is a vast, shimmering and playful work from his series of Grey Paintings.

Additional Highlights

Stretching over three metres in height, Untitled (2010, estimate: £1,500,0002,000,000) is a monumental example of Rudolf Stingel’s Baroque-inspired works. Executed in 2010, its shimmering painterly surface confronts the viewer like a piece of ornamental architecture or a fragment of decorative carpet.

Country Club (2003, estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000) is an early painting from Hurvin Anderson’s celebrated ‘Country Club’ series. Poised between figurative and abstract worlds, it depicts a deserted tennis court bathed in tropical heat, inspired by photographs taken on an artist’s residency in Trinidad, following in the footsteps of his former teacher Peter Doig. Ball Watching IV (2003, estimate: £350,000-550,000) is a deeply personal work that combines Anderson’s central thematic concerns: the vicissitudes of memory, the presence of the past, the barriers erected between cultures and the mutability.     

Gerhard Richter
Unveiled for the first time in 30 years, Gerhard Richter’s Schädel (Skull) (1983, estimate on request) is one of the highlight works of Christie’s Frieze Week auction series. Last exhibited in January 1988 at the Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich, Schädel (Skull) is the first of the iconic series of only eight skull paintings created that year.

Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud

(see separate post here) 

Held for 41 years in the prestigious collection of Magnus Konow, Figure in Movement can be placed among an extraordinary group of works painted in the aftermath of George Dyer’s tragic death the previous year. In addition to this are some of the very first works in Bacon’s catalogue raisonné, chronicling Bacon’s formative influences of furniture design and the contemporary innovations of the European avant-garde. The present group includes Painted Screen (circa 1930, estimate: £700,000-1,000,000), the earliest surviving largescale work and a precursor to his famed triptychs.
These are presented alongside early paintings by Lucian Freud including Man in a Striped Shirt (1942, estimate: £1,000,0001,500,000), a portrait of Richard Chopping painted when Freud was just 19 years old, and Head of a Woman (circa 1980, estimate: £350,000-450,000), one of the artist’s earliest depictions of his friend Susanna Chancellor. .

Property from a Distinguished Private Collector. David Hockney (b. 1937), Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972. Acrylic on canvas. 84 x 120 in (213.5 x 305 cm). Estimate on request. Offered in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 15 November 2018 at Christie’s in New York © David Hockney 

In its November Evening Sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Christie’s will offer one of the most quintessential canvases of the 20^th Century, David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972 (estimate in the region of $80 million). Representing a culminating apex of the artist’s two most celebrated motifs— the glistening water of a swimming pool and a double portrait – Portrait of an Artist is an immediately recognizable and iconic image in Hockney’s diverse oeuvre. Having graced the covers of numerous artist monographs, starred in various exhibitions – including his traveling retrospective organized by the Tate Britain, the Centre Pompidou, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017-2018 – as well as the 1974 cult Hockney film, A Bigger Splash, the present canvas firmly stands its ground among Hockney’s most celebrated works. 

Alex Rotter, Co-Chairman Post-War and Contemporary Art, Christie’s, remarked:  

“Christie’s is honored to offer Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which stands as one of the great masterpieces of the modern era. David Hockney’s brilliance as an artist is on full display with this monumental canvas, which encapsulates the essence of the idealized poolside landscape, and the tremendous complexity that exists within human relationships. With this painting, Hockney cemented his placement within the realm of history’s most venerated artists, and come November, it is poised to become the most valuable work of art by a living artist ever sold at auction.”

An often-told story of two compositions—the first destroyed over months of working and reworking, Hockney originally conceived the composition for Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) from the accidental, almost surreal juxtaposition of two photographs on his studio floor—one of a swimmer underwater, taken in Hollywood in 1966, and the other of a boy staring at something on the ground. Intrigued by how together, the disparate clipped images made it appear as if the boy was staring at the swimmer, this double-portrait arranged by chance impelled for Hockney a substantial dramatic charge.

Chief among his courtier of muses is the standing figure in Portrait of an Artist, Peter Schlesinger. Hockney met the eighteen-year-old Schlesinger in 1966 while he was a student in one of Hockney’s advanced art classes at UCLA. For the next five years, Schlesinger would prove to be the great love of Hockney’s life as well as a favorite model. The two lived together in California and London, mixing with Hockney’s expansive social circle as a prominent couple in the worlds of art, film and literature. Throughout the late ‘60s as their relationship deepened, Hockney’s desire to capture the intensity of his feelings for Peter, as well as his physical beauty, contributed greatly to the artist’s sudden shift towards a more naturalistic approach to his work. However, the much younger Schlesinger was far less gregarious than Hockney, and tensions between the pair grew gradually before a heated fight in Cadaqués in 1971 led to the end of their relationship—leaving Hockney distraught.

Created during a highly productive period following the devastating end of the artist’s relationship with Schlesinger, Portrait of an Artist is a powerful testament to the therapeutic power of painting. And out of his great sadness, came a time of extraordinary creative output.

Hockney had begun the painting in October 1971—as documented by Jack Hazan, who recorded its progress in his movie titled A Bigger Splash, about the end of Hockney and Peter Schlesinger’s five-year relationship. Hockney first resolved to paint Portrait of an Artist in 1971, but after months of struggling through the composition abandoned the first incarnation of the canvas around the same time as the dissolution of his romance with Schlesinger.

In early April, Hockney began the canvas anew in preparation for his exhibition the following month with André Emmerich Gallery in New York. Hockney travelled to Le Nid du Duc—director Tony Richardon’s house in the South of France—to take further preparatory photographs for the painting, taking his studio assistant Mo McDermott as a stand-in for Schlesinger and a young photographer named John St. Clair as the swimmer. Hockney took hundreds of photos, which came to cover the wall of his studio. Using those images, Hockney worked on the painting with great passion for eighteen hours a day for two weeks, completing it the night before it was to leave for the New York exhibition.

Another chief source of inspiration for Hockney is the image of the pool. Hockney’s discovery of his most famous subject matter corresponded to his arrival in Los Angeles nearly a decade earlier. Already celebrated as an enfant terrible of Contemporary art by the time he left the Royal College of Art in London in 1962, Hockney had first traveled to California in January 1964. The place held a magnetic draw for the artist, who had immersed himself in the potent idealism of its sun-drenched landscape, and the California that he had found in magazines, movies and the gay novels of John Rechy. Here, he felt free to invent the city, giving it a promptly recognizable, iconic form. "[Los Angeles was] the first time I had ever painted a place," Hockney later explained. "In London I think I was put off by the ghost of Sickert, and I couldn’t see it properly. In Los Angeles, there were no ghosts... I remember seeing, within the first week, the ramp of a freeway going into the air and I suddenly thought: My God, this place needs its Piranesi; Los Angeles could have a Piranesi, so here I am" (D. Hockney, quoted in S. Howgate, David Hockney Portraits, exh. cat., National Portrait Gallery, London, 2006, p. 39).

Deeply attuned to the history of art, Portrait of an Artist recalls the images of the classical renditions of the bather placed in an idyllic background found in Western painting since the Renaissance. The convention is a metaphor not only for the harmonious relationship between the human figure and nature, but also represents a world that is uncorrupted and pure. Employing a combination of a graphic designer's eye for composition, an illustrator's technique, the precision of a photograph and a painter's sensitivity to color, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) not only conveys the essence of the Californian good-life that had inspired him a decade before, but also stands as a vivid testament to a once in a life-time love.



The auction current record for David Hockney was set by Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica, 1990, which sold for $28,453,000 at Sotheby’s New York on May 16, 2018.

Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in New York on 12 November at Sotheby's

September 22, 2018, 5:09 am

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The Beautiful and Damned: Radical Art of the Great War

This November, as the world pauses to remember the events of the First World War on the centenary of the Armistice of 11 November 1918 that drew it to its close, Sotheby’s will bring together a group of works that illustrates the tremendous and varied impact of the War on the artistic production of those whose lives it transformed.

Incorporated into the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in New York on 12 November, the offering will assemble works that capture the period from immediately prior to the outbreak of the war through to its aftermath, together telling the artistic history of that momentous period. Highlighting this group are important works by Marsden Hartley, Ludwig Meidner and Franz Marc.

The works will be presented under the moniker ‘The Beautiful and Damned,’ in reference to the 1922 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald – the title of which alone captures the vicissitudes of the time.

A true masterpiece of Modern art and the finest example of the artist’s renowned Berlin Pictures remaining in private hands, Marsden Hartley’s triumphant Pre-War Pageant represents one of the first examples of an American artist working in a purely abstract idiom. Radically melding diverse influences including Cubism, German Expressionism, Native American Art and Mysticism, the groundbreaking work captures the tenor of Berlin and Hartley’s emotional response to the city that he loved.

Ludwig Meidner’s dual-sided painting Apokalyptische Landschaft (Apocalyptic Landscape), estimated to sell for $12–18 million, was executed in 1912 near the brink of the Great War. The arresting and cataclysmic urban scene reflects the social, political, emotional and artistic upheaval in Germany at the time. In stark contrast, the verso depicts a delightful and assured portrait, Junger Mann mit Strohhut, featuring an unidentified young man reading in a smart blue blazer and jaunty straw hat, enveloped in the joy of life afforded during the pre-war Edwardian era.

With its spectacularly rhythmic composition, comprised of dazzling, overlapping angular areas of color, Kühe explores the central subject of Franz Marc’s oeuvre – the animal world. Executed in 1912, at a crucial moment in his career, immediately following the formation of Der Blaue Reiter– the artistic movement that Marc co-founded with Wassily Kandinsky in 1911 – the semi-abstracted treatment of the figures, coupled with the richly contrasting colors of bold blue and vermillion that reject the naturalistic use of color, epitomizes the profound contributions of Marc’s oeuvre to the emerging modernist aesthetic at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Beautiful and Damned works will be incorporated into the Impressionist & Modern Art sale on 12 November.

Dalí’s Aliyah: A Moment in Jewish History

September 22, 2018, 6:06 am

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The Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas 

September 9, 2018 –January 13, 2019

In 1966, the publisher Samuel Shore of New York commissioned Salvador Dalíto produce a series of works by 1968, when their completion would celebrate the 20th anniversaryof the founding of the State of Israel. Inspired by the historic challenges and post-World War II renewal of the Jewish people, Dalí created a series of 25 mixed-media paintings on paper that loosely trace major moments in Jewish history—both the tragic and the joyous—culminating in the creation of Israel in 1948.



From the paintings, Shorewood Publishers produced a limited edition of 250 sets of 25 lithographs, with each set accompanied by a letter of introduction from David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), the founding Prime Minister of Israel. The title, Aliyah, comes from the Hebrew word “to rise or ascend,” and is commonly used to describe migration to Israel, a process that many Jews see as stepping up to their homeland.The paintings were shown in 1968 at the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art in New York, timed with Israel’s anniversary celebrations, while the lithographic sets were offered for sale to those who wished to commemorate the anniversary through art.

Salvador Dalí

Aliyah, Convenant: Eternal Circumcision

1968

Although the current locations of the original paintings are not known, in 2017 the Meadows Museum acquired a rare, complete set of the 25 lithographs thanks to a gift from Linda P. and William A. Custard and The Meadows Foundation, in tribute to the Honorable Janet Pollman Kafka, Honorary Consul of Spain, for her twenty years of service to the country. Both Linda P. Custard and Janet Kafka serve on the Museum’s Advisory Council, the former in the role of chair. Aliyah will be presented during Israel’s 70th anniversary year.



In 1962, Dallas businessman and philanthropist Algur H. Meadows donated his private collection of Spanish paintings, as well as funds to start a museum, to Southern Methodist University. The museum opened to the public in 1965, marking the first step in fulfilling Meadows’s vision to create “a small Prado for Texas.” Today, the Meadows is home to one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Spanish art outside of Spain. The collection spans from the 10th to the 21st centuries and includes medieval objects, Renaissance and Baroque sculptures, and major paintings by Golden Age and modern masters.

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A Passion for Collecting: Modern Works from the Pérez Simón Collection

September 22, 2018, 6:13 am

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Di Donna Galleries
September 13 – October 12, 2018
Monday – Friday, 10AM to 6PM
Saturday, 12PM to 6PM September 15 and 29

Edvard Munch, Sommernacht im Studentenhain (Summer Night in Studenterlunden), 1899. Pérez Simón Collection. © 2018 The Munch Museum / The Munch-Ellingsen Group / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Di Donna Galleries announces a rare glimpse into the renowned private art collection of Juan Antonio Pérez Simón with the exhibition A Passion for Collecting: Modern Works from the Pérez Simón Collection, to be held from September 13 to October 12, 2018. This exhibition presents highlights from the collection representing major episodes in the history of modernism, with paintings by Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Fernand Léger, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, and Mark Rothko.

A Passion for Collecting: Modern Works from the Pérez Simón Collection will feature a curated selection of approximately eighteen works that travels to Di Donna Galleries from Mexico, where Mr. Pérez Simón is one of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs. There, over the span of more than four decades, Pérez Simón has assembled one of the largest and most comprehensive private art collections in the world, encompassing Old Master paintings, Dutch vanitas, Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Latin American art, and European modernism, to mention only a few areas within his vast scope of interest. Portions of the collection have previously been shown in various cities in Europe, Asia and America, including Madrid, Paris, Rome, London, Beijing, Shanghai, Quebec, Dallas and San Diego.

A Passion for Collecting: Modern Works from the Pérez Simón Collection at Di Donna Galleries will offer the first opportunity to experience the collection in New York. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay on the significance of these works within the context of an art-historical narrative, with full cataloguing and illustrations for each work.

Pérez-Simon’s collection is unified through a prevailing interest in timeless human experiences encompassing love, death, physicality, spiritual ecstasy, and an appreciation of the sublime potential of nature. His early passion for art was stimulated by reproductions of Barbizon School paintings, with woodland scenes that reminded him of his youth in the Asturia region of northwest Spain. His admiration for the Impressionist and Modern artists who followed lies in the innovative ways they individually approached light, landscape, and color, in effect drawing out the sensuous aspects of nature and daily life in abstracted form. Later works in the exhibition from the categories of Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Color Field painting are similarly characterized by lush execution that amplifies poignant subjects concerning the human condition.



As the earliest work in the exhibition and a reference to mythic bathing scenes from classical antiquity, Cézanne’s Scène légendaire (c. 1878), establishes a foundation for considering artistic interpretations of timeless themes.

The Edenlike setting seen in that composition assumes a very different tone in Munch’s painting Sommernacht im studentenhain (1902), in which embracing couples are arranged around a dramatically landscaped park. Though the subject literally depicts human intimacy, the anonymity of the figures and the large void confronting the viewer at the center of the composition communicate a sense of alienation.
 


By contrast, Picasso’s portrait of his girlfriend Françoise Gilot sitting in an armchair (Françoise dans un fauteuil, 1949) is arranged on an emphatically frontal plane, in primary colors and with a centralized geometric structure—a bold representation that nevertheless captures the sitter’s likeness with remarkable sensitivity.

A group of paintings by Magritte in the exhibition reveals the artist’s skill as a colorist throughout a range of scenes that challenge experiential knowledge, drawing into question the certainties of life in the physical world.

In an untitled red and white painting on paper by Rothko (1959), color and ambiguous, floating forms transport the viewer further from concrete associations, to convey transcendence of earthly concerns.

Together, these works reveal a uniquely humanistic approach to modernism that illuminates art-historical dialogues across centuries and styles. Di Donna Galleries invites visitors to reexamine the development of modernism in the context of this extraordinary glimpse into one of the world’s most significant private collections.

 Salvador Dalí, La ascensión de Cristo (Piedad), 1958. Oil on canvas. Pérez Simón Collection Photo: Studio Sébert Photographes. © 2018 Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.   Frida Kahlo, “Girl from Tehuacán, Lucha María or Sun and Moon” (1942)    

Rembrandt: Painter as Printmaker

September 24, 2018, 3:55 pm

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Denver Art Museum is the sole venue for Rembrandt: Painter as Printmaker, opening Sept. 16. Coinciding with the 350th anniversary of the Dutch artist’s death (1606–1669), the exhibition will offer fresh insight into the life and career of the masterful printmaker.

About 100 prints from Rembrandt van Rijn’s career spanning from 1625 to 1665 will be showcased, including biblical, portrait, allegory, still life, landscape and genre artworks that demonstrate the mastery that cemented Rembrandt as one of the greatest artists in history. The exhibition will show how Rembrandt used his view of the world around him to fuel his artistic journey, and will give a deeper understanding of his working habits as an artist and, more specifically, as a printmaker.

Rembrandt: Painter as Printmaker will take a close look at Rembrandt’s innovative approach to printmaking that combined the three principle methods of intaglio: etching, drypoint and engraving. While the exhibition focuses on Rembrandt's exploration of printmaking, 17 drawings and several paintings also will be on view to provide additional context about his creative process in all media.

"Head of an Old Man with a Cap" (c. 1630) by Rembrandt van Rijn © Courtesy of Agnes Etherington Art Centre

"Christ Preaching - The Hundred Guilder Print" (c. 1648) by Rembrandt van Rijn © Bibliothèque nationale de France, Department of Prints and Photography

 

"The Tree Trees" (1643) by Rembrandt van Rijn © Bibliothèque nationale de France, Department of Prints and Photography

 

"Self-Portrait in a Cap, Wide-Eyed and Open-Mouthed" (c. 1630) by Rembrandt van Rijn © Bibliothèque nationale de France, Department of Prints and Photography

 


 

"Adam and Eve" (1638) by Rembrandt van Rijn © Bibliothèque nationale de France, Department of Prints and Photography

 

Exhibition catalog 

 

 

As a pioneering printmaker, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) stood apart from his contemporaries thanks to his innovative approach to composition and his skillful rendering of space and light. He worked with the medium as a vehicle for artistic expression and experimentation, causing many to proclaim him the greatest etcher of all time. Moreover, the dissemination of the artist’s prints outside of the Dutch Republic during his lifetime contributed greatly to establishing Rembrandt’s reputation throughout Europe.

Sumptuously illustrated with comparative paintings and drawings as well as prints, this important volume draws on exciting new scholarship on Rembrandt's etchings. Authors Jaco Rutgers and Timothy J. Standring examine the artist’s prints from many angles. They reveal how Rembrandt intentionally varied the states of his etchings, printed them on exotic papers, and retouched prints by hand to create rarities for a clientele that valued unique impressions.

More on November 11 Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s

September 25, 2018, 7:23 am

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In its November 11 Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art, Christie’s will offer Property from the Sam Rose and Julie Walters Collection, comprising a suite of four works by Pablo Picasso representing the artist’s muses, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot and Jacqueline Roque. Together, the collection is expected to exceed $28 million.

Conor Jordan, Deputy Chairman, Impressionist and Modern Art, Christie’s, remarked: “As a noted Picasso connoisseur, Sam Rose spent many years assembling these compelling portraits with his wife, Julie Walters. It is Christie’s privilege to present these four wonderful works on their behalf. Picasso’s promethean creative force was inspired by one element above all others – the woman in his life. From the lyrical eroticism of the years of Marie-Thérèse eclipsed in turn by the tumultuous era of Dora, and then the vernal rebirth of Françoise’s presence, through to Jacqueline’s classical, watchful aura, this suite of works shines a glorious light on Picasso’s art and traces its progress over twenty-five years of innovation.”

Across more than half a century, Rose has ascended to one of America’s most prominent real estate developers, celebrated not only for his business acumen, but his belief in giving back to the community. Rose and his wife, Julie Walters, have committed themselves to empowering others—a generosity of spirit embodied in the couple’s collection of fine art. In their many years of collecting, Rose and Walters have come to amass a dazzling selection of examples of fine art by some of the greatest names of Modern, Post-War, Contemporary, and American art. This dedication to the arts included Rose’s tenure as a trustee of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where the couple’s collection was shown in the 2015–2016 exhibition Crosscurrents: Modern Art from the Sam Rose and Julie Walters Collection.

Leading the collection is Femme au béret orange et au col de fourrure (Marie‐Thérèse), 4 December 1937 ($15,000,000 – 20,000,000). The young blonde woman featured is distinctly Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s clandestine mistress and the mother of his second child, Maya.

“Marie-Thérèse incarnated a wild beauty, a sporty and healthy beautiful plant,” Brigitte Léal has written. Always attentive to his muse’s particular taste in attire, and how it characterized her, Picasso has flattered Marie-Thérèse in a stylishly cosmopolitan scooped-neck dress trimmed with fur, while happily exploiting a more casual but crowning accessory in the shape of a jaunty red plaid beret, which he used to accentuate her lavender-pink complexion and signature golden shoulder-length tresses.

Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s later mistress from 1943 and mother to two of his children, as well as the subject of a rhapsodic portrait in the present collection, had occasional contact with Marie-Thérèse during the post-war period.

From these observations and conversations with Picasso, Françoise in her memoir Life with Picasso revealed the first valuable insights into the strong appeal that Marie-Thérèse once held for Picasso:

“She became the luminous dream of youth, always in the background but always within reach, that nourished his work. The flight of a bird symbolized for him the freedom of their relationship. And over a period of eight years her image found its way into a great body of his work in painting, drawing, sculpture and engraving… Marie-Thérèse brought a great deal to Pablo in the sense that her physical form demanded recognition. She was a magnificent model.”

Pablo Picasso, Buste de femme (Dora Maar) 28 March 1939, oil on panel. Estimate: $5,000,000 – 8,000,000. © Christie’s Images Limited 2018.

Following Marie-Thérèse, was Dora Maar, who is depicted in Buste de femme (Dora Maar) painted on 28 March 1939 ($5,000,000 – 8,000,000). Picasso continued to alter and reshape Dora’s visage in new, astonishing and challenging ways, which Dora neither protested nor resisted, assuming a role that she accepted almost masochistically.

Dora had already done service two years earlier as the Weeping Woman soon after Picasso painted Guernica.

In the present painting she widens her eyes—in the shapes of glowing red cherries—as if mesmerized, staring in the face a challenge far greater than any she has ever known, a clear and present danger, and more of the same in the distant shape of things to come. Picasso had already made Dora his modern Sybil, employing her as a silent oracular presence whose facial expression of inner distress bespeaks her prophecy. Dora would remain the central, defining presence in Picasso’s wartime paintings.

Picasso painted his second wife Jacqueline about as often as he portrayed Dora. Jacqueline represented for the artist a sort of atavistic, Mediterranean ideal, dark and intense. The new style with which he presented her was marked by irrepressible energy and liberated handling of paint. She was his final muse who oversaw the late, great Indian summer of his career.

‘It is Jacqueline’s image that dominates Picasso’s work from 1954 until his death, longer than any of the women who preceded her,’ observed Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson. ‘It is her body that we are able to explore more exhaustively and more intimately than any other body in the history of art.’

Winslow Homer: Photography and the Art of Painting

September 26, 2018, 1:45 pm

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Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Eight Bells, 1886, oil on canvas, 25 3/16 x 30 3/16 in. Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover. Gift of an anonymous donor. Credit: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA / Art Resource, NY

This fall the Brandywine River Museum of Art, in Chadds Ford, Penn., will present Winslow Homer: Photography and the Art of Painting, exploring the surprising role photography played in the evolving practice of one of America’s most iconic artists. On view November 17, 2018 through February 17, 2019, the exhibition will feature approximately 50 paintings, prints, watercolors and drawings from all major periods of the artist’s career, as well as a comparable number of photographs collected by Homer.

 

Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Cliff at Prout’s Neck, c. 1883-87, albumen silver print, 3 5/8 x 4 ½ in. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick. Gift of the Homer Family

Winslow Homer: Photography and the Art of Painting examines the role the relatively new medium of photography played in the evolving practice of one of America’s most iconic artists. The exhibition presents a full picture of the artist’s working methods and includes noteworthy archival objects, such as two wooden dolls used as models, his palette and two of the three cameras he owned.
As a young artist for Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War, Homer utilized photographs as source material for some of his drawings, including Alexander Gardner’s famous photograph of Lincoln’s first inauguration—which provided Homer with the pictorial information he needed to construct his own detailed view of the event.

Winslow Homer ..White Mountain Wagon, c. 1869. 

This exhibition documents Homer’s post-Civil War travels to newly popular tourist destinations such as the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Catskills and Adirondacks of New York, and Cape Ann in Massachusetts. In his travels he was introduced to a new type of photography—commercially produced views to promote tourism. These photographs captured a moment in time and effects like glare, blur and shadow that the eye might not perceive. Homer quickly understood that photography could provide fresh, immediate perspectives that he could incorporate into his paintings.

Winslow Homer (1836–1910), The Fisher Girl, 1894, oil on canvas, 28 ¼ x 28 ¼ in. Mead Art Gallery, Amherst College. Gift of George D. Platt, Class of 1893

During the last three decades of his life, Homer often created compositions of the same subject in different mediums including painting, printmaking and photography. His use of various media came from his interest in probing the way things look and the challenge of portraying them realistically. Homer often borrowed certain elements—the cropping, the blur of the background and the flatness of the composition—from photographic convention, yet his painting, based on unique optical experiences, was an artistic creation reflective of myriad decisions. To Homer, paintings had the potential to make a subject more clearly understood; photography added to that conversation about how to portray the world around him.

"Perils of the Sea," 1881, watercolor, by Winslow Homer. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massaschusetts. Image © Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA

Organized by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA), Winslow Homer: Photography and the Art of Painting is curated by Frank H. Goodyear, BCMA co-director, and Dana E. Byrd, Bowdoin College Assistant Professor of Art History. The exhibition features a rich selection of work drawn from the BCMA’s incomparable holdings of Homer’s art and archival materials, and from more than 20 major institutions, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.

“Homer gave visual form to the American experience in the second half of the 19th century and has been highly influential to generations of artists, including many of those in the Brandywine’s collection,” said Thomas Padon, director of the Brandywine River Museum of Art. “Because of this, Winslow Homer: Photography and the Art of Painting will have particular resonance here, and we are thrilled to be the second and only other destination for this remarkable exhibition.”



An illustrated catalogue authored by Goodyear and Byrd and published by Yale University Press accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue serves as a significant contribution to the study of Winslow Homer and the cross-disciplinary study of painters and photography in American art.

Frank Goodyear and Dana Byrd demonstrate that photography offered Homer new ways of seeing and representing the world, from his early commercial engravings sourced from contemporary photographs to the complex relationship between his late-career paintings of life in the Bahamas, Florida, and Cuba and the emergent trend of tourist photography. The authors argue that Homer’s understanding of the camera’s ability to create an image that is simultaneously accurate and capable of deception was vitally important to his artistic practice in all media. Richly illustrated and full of exciting new discoveries, Winslow Homer and the Camera is a long-overdue examination of the ways in which photography shaped the vision of one of America’s most original painters.

Dalí: Poetics of the Small, 1929–1936

September 27, 2018, 3:20 pm

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The Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas 

September 9, 2018 –January 13, 2019

This fall, the Meadows Museum, SMU, will present a major exhibition of works by Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), exploring an overlooked or lesser-known aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. With Dalí: Poetics of the Small, 1929–1936, the Meadows is organizing the first in-depth exploration of the artist’s small-scale paintings—some measuring just over a foot, and others as small as 3 by 2 inches. A major part of the artist’s output during the early part of his Surrealist period (1929–1936), these small works reflect Dalí’s precise style of painting.

Organized by the Meadows as part of its mission to present Spanish art in America, Dalí: Poetics of the Smallwill be on view at the Meadows Museum—the only venue for this exhibition—from September 9 through December 9, 2018.Also at the Meadows this fall, Dalí’s Aliyah: A Moment in Jewish Historywill feature a rare, complete set of the lithographs created by the artist to celebrate 1968 as the 20th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. These works reveal a different aspect of Dalí’s artistic practice, with images that are large in scale and painted in a loose, expressionistic style that is the opposite of the precise technique displayed in the small-scale Surrealist works. Dalí’s Aliyah: A Moment in Jewish Historywill be on view at the Meadows Museum from September 9, 2018, through January 13, 2019.“Despite Salvador Dalí’s global reputation, there is much still to learn about his artistic development and output,” said Mark Roglán, the Linda P. and WilliamA. Custard Director of the Meadows Museum. “In producing so many small-scale paintings, it is clear that the artist saw their size as important, recognizing that within a constrained frame the viewer’s eyes are drawn to details differently. By contrast, the large-format lithographs Dalí created for his Aliyahcommission demonstrate an understanding of a different set of traditional artist’s skills, using art to capture and present history and the people involved in shaping it. We are excited to provide visitors with a chance to reconsider one of the 20th century’s most important and engaging artists.”Dalí: Poetics of the Small, 1929–1936(September 9–December 9, 2018)Salvador Dalí’s deep admiration for the refined and precise works of the Dutch master painters of the 17th century and, in particular, for the paintings of Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), has long been acknowledged. Dalí was similarly known for his notoriousattention to detail, a precision that is evident in the small-scale, jewel-like paintings presented in Dalí: Poetics of the Small, 1929–1936. Painted at the height of his career—when nearly half of the works he produced were cabinet-size paintings—these works have never been systematically studied or exhibited as a cohesive group.This exhibition will include nearly two-dozen of Dalí’s small-scale paintings, including at least one from each year during his highly productive period between 1929 and 1936. Among them are important works such as



The Accommodations of Desire (1929, The Metropolitan Museum of Art),

 


Phantom Cart (1933, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres), 

 

 

and The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition (1934, The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida). 

 

Diminutive in scale, these paintings reflect Dalí’s distinctive Surrealist style, with familiar but distorted figures often set against a dramatic or barren landscape.










Plans for the exhibition began after the Meadows acquired Dalí’s small-scale painting The Fish Man (L’homme poisson, 1930) in 2014, and asked the conservation department at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, to conduct technical analysis of the work. Despite much art historical study of Dalí’s life and body of work, very few such technical analyses had been made of his small-scale paintings. The results of that research—which revealed extensive underdrawing and changes to the composition before it was completed—encouraged the Meadows to begin exploring the subject of Dalí’s cabinet paintings in more depth.Under the leadership of Claire Barry, the Kimbell’s director of conservation, X-radiography and infrared reflectography, as well as pigment analysis and other tests, were conducted on nine of the paintings to be presented in this exhibition. The resulting data provides a better understanding of Dalí’s artistic technique and working process during the 1930s, but also highlights an interesting set of contradictions for the artist.



In 1948, Dalí’published his own book on painting and artistry, 50 Secrets ofMagic Craftsmanship, in which he shares his perspective on what makes for a great work of art. Curiously, it turns out that Dalí largely did not take his own advice. For example, where Dalí’s book discourages graphite outlines on a canvas or panel as a precursor to painting, the technical examination of these works shows that he consistently did exactly that. Similarly, the artist’s advice on choosing paint types, the mixing of pigments, or how best to paint elements such as the sky, were all clearly recommendations that he himself diverged from and sometimes evencontradicted in his own practice.

Dalí: Poetics of the Small, 1929–1936 is co-curated by Roglán and Shelley DeMaria, Meadows Museum Curatorial Assistant.



The exhibition catalogue includes full-color reproductions of the works and is illustrated with over 140 additional comparative, historical, and technical images. The accompanying texts present new art historical and technical research, including: an essay addressing the influence of Vermeer’s paintingson Dalí’s own style by Mark Roglán, Meadows Museum Director; an essay by Shelley DeMaria exploring Dalí’s contemporaneous influences such as photography and collage; an essay presenting the results of the technical study of several works by Claire Barry, Kimbell Art Museum Director of Conservation, and Peter Van de Moortel, Assistant Paintings Conservator at the Kimbell Art Museum; and, also by DeMaria, object entries for each work tracing the artist’s iconography throughout the eight-year period under examination.

The details of the Kimbell Conservation Department’s analysis are published in the exhibition catalogue in an essay that discusses Dalí’s compositional design; the underdrawing, painted cutouts, and pictorial delineation revealed by the study; and the artist’s employment of pigments, grounds, and texture. 

Hodler//Parallelism

September 27, 2018, 3:26 pm

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Kunstmuseum Bern 

Ferdinand Hodler, Thunersee mit Niesen, 1910, Öl auf Leinwand, 105,5 x 83 cm. Privatsammlung Schweiz © Peter Schälchli, Zürich

To commemorate the centenary of the death of Ferdinand Hodler, the Kunstmuseum Bern is – jointly with the Musées d’art et d’histoire de Genève – mounting a large special exhibition. The show presents the work of this famous Swiss artist from a new perspective: from that of his theory of parallelism.

In 1897, Hodler stated in his lecture on the goal of artists that «it is the quest of the artist to express the eternal element of nature and beauty, and reveal its essential beauty». In the lecture he explains his perception of the world and makes this understanding the fundamental idea behind his oeuvre. With «beauty» he actually meant an order intrinsic to nature, one of the repetition of forms and colours. In his eyes this phenomenon excited the pleasing effect of unity in the attentive beholder. Hodler believed that it presented a universal law, which he called parallelism, and dedicated himself to making it visible in his art.



Ferdinand Hodler, was already in his lifetime internationally famous. For his theory of parallelism he drew on a concept that was widespread in various sciences in the nineteenth century. Based on his own observations – for example of trees lining a road, a rockslide, clouds, or mountains mirrored in a lake – he made parallelism the determining principle of his work, implementing it in the compositional structures of repetition, symmetry, or mirror images:

«The success or failure of my work depends wholly on whether my parallelism is true or not. Parallelism is, as I discovered it, described it, and employ it, either a universal law and is universally valid – and then my work has universal meaning – or I was wrong, and then my art is nothing but delusion and misconception. »

The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bern makes it possible to view Ferdinand Hodler’s work and his distinctive visual imagery in a new light by revealing the synthesis of his artistic work and his writings outlining his artistic ambitions. The show addresses Hodler’s theory and how he visually put it into practice in ten sections, each focusing on different bodies of works and motifs.

The Kunstmuseum Bern and the Musées d’art et d’histoire de Genève are indebted to numerous Swiss institutions as well as private sponsors for their generous support. A richly illustrated catalogue will be published for the exhibition and contains scholarly contributions from leading experts in the field.

Curators

Nina Zimmer, Kunstmuseum Bern – Zentrum Paul Klee
Laurence Madeline, Paris

Muchmore infoandmany images: http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/events/exhibitions/archives/exhibitions-archives/browse/6/page/0/article/ferdinand-hodler-7814.html?cHash=9d8469fc8b

Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice

September 27, 2018, 3:35 pm

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The Morgan Library & Museum
October 12, 2018 through January 6, 2019

National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

Early 2019.

The dramatic canvases of Jacopo Tintoretto (1518/1519 – 1594) , with their muscular, expressive bodies, are some of the most distinctive of the Italian Renaissance. His drawings , however, have received less atte ntion as a distinctive category in his oeuvre . Opening October 12, Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice will be the first exhibition since 1956 to focus on the drawing practice of this major artist . It will offer a new perspective on Tintoretto’s evolut on as a draftsman, his individuality as an artist, and his influence on a generation of painters in northern Italy. 

Organized to mark the five - hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth, this exhibition brings together more than seventy drawings and a small group of related paintings . It places Tintoretto’s distinctive figure drawings alongside works by contemporaries such as Titian, Veronese, and Bassano , as well as by artists — Domenico Tintoretto, Palma Giovane, and others — working in Venice during the late sixteenth century, whose drawing style was influenced by Tintoretto’s. 



Tintoretto (1518/19 - 1594), Seated Male Nude , ca. 1549. Black and white chalk, squared, on blue paper. Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 5385. © RMN - Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY 

The exhibition also features a particularly engaging group of drawings that have recently been proposed as the work of the young El Greco during his time in Italy. When the exhibition travels to the NGA in March 2019, it will be shown with Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice , a major retrospective focusing on his paintings. 

The Exhibition Seven sections explore the career and legacy of Tintoretto. Born the son of a fabric dyer ( tintore in Italian ) from whose profession the young artist derived his nickname, the ar tist rose to prominence in the 1540s. By the time of his death in May 1594, he was the pre - eminent artist in Venice, responsible for vast pictorial cy cles in the Palazzo Ducale and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, as well as paintings found throughout the churches and palaces of Venice. Even during his lifetime, he was thought of as an impetuous genius, an artist who worked hastily, without careful design or consideration. Yet although Tintoretto was never an academic draftsman akin to his Florentine contemporaries, over the course of his career he forged his own distinctive style of drawing and his own way of using them . As Tintoretto’s fame grew, his expanding workload required more assistants, and his drawing practice evolved. In training those assistants  he influenced a generation of artists in northern Italy. 

The Venetian School of Drawing and Tintoretto’s Early Works 

Since the sixteenth century, writers have often noted a distinction between the supposedly more formalized and intellectual process of drawing in central Italy and the more personal, experimental Venetian approach. Venetian artists indeed adopted a broad range of techniques, media, and methods of drawing, including pen and ink, black and white chalk on blue paper, colored chalks, and b rush drawings. Tintoretto’s experimental manner evolved in the context of these rich, diverse means of design. 

Titian (1488 - 1576), Embracing Couple , ca. 1568 – 70, charcoal and black and white chalk on faded blue paper. The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Titian, the leading artist of his time, remained a powerful influence through works such as Embracing Couple , which might be considered the quintessential Venetian drawing: it is loose and impressionistic yet also a powerful study of light and shadow falling across bodies twisting through space. 

Tintoretto was equally fascinated by the works of artists like Pordenone and Schiavone, who presented alternate artistic paths. By 1537 or 1538, Tintoretto was an indepen dent master. While many of Tintoretto’s drawings have been lost, from those that remain we can trace his evolution from an early experimental mode of drawing akin to Schiavone’s, to an increasing attention on life study, and on to quicker, functional figure drawings intended to satisfy the practical needs of a busy painter. A drawing like his Venus and Vulcan highlights the various elements of Tintoretto’s early drawing style, with its energetic approach to design and bodies that are simultaneously muscular and lithe. 

Highlights in Tintoretto’s Career , and the Evolution of His Drawing Practice 

The watershed moment in Tintoretto’s career was the unveiling in 1548 of his  

 

Miracle of the Slave , a work of a monumentality, drama, and richness unseen in his painting to that point. The confraternity of San Rocco then commissioned Tintoretto to take up the decoration of their church. 

During the late 1550s, Tintoretto also painted two vast paintings for the church of the Madonna dell’Orto, 



 



the Last Judgment 



 and Making of the Golden Calf. 

These highlighted Tintoretto’s abilities and soon led to commissions at the Palazzo Ducale and the Scuola Grande di San Marco. 

A few years later, Tintoretto began painting the Scuola di San Rocco, a project that would occupy him on and off for the rest of his career. Although there are no extant drawings directly related to the Miracle of the Slave  the exhibition includes studies connected with each of these other projects.

 

Tintoretto (1518/19 - 1594) , Study of a Man with Raised Arms , ca. 1562 – 66 , charcoal, heightened with white, on blue paper, squared for transfer , The British Museum, London . ©The Trustees of the British Museum 



Tintoretto (1518/19 – 1594), Venus and Vulcan , ca. 1545, black chalk, pen and brown ink with brown and gray wash, bpk Bildagentur / Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Art Resource, NY . Photography by Jorg P. Anders 

The most familiar of Tintoretto’s drawings are the many studies after Michelangelo’s Samson and the Philistines and his sculptures in the Medici Chapel . A group of these studies is included in the exhibition, along with a cast of the Samson on which they are based. Although traditionally believed to be Tintoretto’s own youthful studies, the exhibition argues that these sculpture drawings are exercises that he used in his workshop to teach his assistants how to convey drama , meaning , and sculptural presence of the human form. 

In later years, Tintoretto’s workload increased to such a degree that his paintings were designed by him but executed by the workshop. His later figure drawings tend to be more simplified and abstracted than his earlier studies of live models, and they frequently adopt exaggerated musculature that was perhaps i ntended to emphasize form for the workshop assis tants executing the paintings. 

Tintoretto’s Influence on the Next Generation 

Tintoretto’s son Domenico (1560 – 1635) was trained in the family workshop in the 1570s and eventually became his father’s primary assistant and artistic heir. In his early years, he demonstrated a talent for naturalistic observati on in both drawing and painting and was a notable portraitist. 



Domenico Tintoretto (?) and Workshop (1518/19 - 1594), Study of Michelangelo’s Samson and the Philistines (recto and verso), ca. 1560 – 70, charcoal and black chalk with white opaque watercolor on blue paper, The Morgan Library & Museum, Thaw Collection, 2005.234. Photography by Janny Chiu. 



Tintoretto (1518/19 - 1594), Study for a Man Climbing into a Boat (recto), 1578 – 79, charcoal, squared in charcoal. The Morgan Library & Museum. Gift of J.P. Morgan, Jr. The Morgan Library & Museum, IV, 76. Photography by Graham S. Haber, 2012. 

Domenico Tintoretto (1560 - 1635), Reclining Female Nude , ca. 1590, black and white chalk on blue paper. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. 

was arguably at his best when making studies of a model, such as his remarkable series of drawings after a female nude. However, later in his career and particularly after the death of his father, Domenico abandoned his interest in anatomical structure and three - dimensional space that always characterized his father ’s work , although he essentially continued Jacopo’s working methods . 

Some of the most intriguing drawings in the show are the early works of Domenikos Theotokopoulos, El Greco, (ca. 1541 – 1614) done during his years in Italy. They have the same heightened emotion seen in El Greco’s paintings, with dramatic lightin g depict ing crowds of figures with their heads clustered together. Long considered the work of an unknown artist in Tintoretto’s circle, these drawings are comparable to the few later drawings believed to be by El Greco , and several also include his characteristic handwriting. 

Attributed to El Greco (ca. 1541 - 1614), Last Supper , ca. 1575, brown wash with white opaque watercolor, over black chalk, on light brown paper. The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of János Scholz, 1981.96. Photography by Janny Chiu, 2018.

While the work of a distinctive artist, a drawing such as the Last Supper (ca. 1575 ) reveals a compositional debt to Tintoretto and evokes an emotional intensity similar to Tintoretto’s Christ Mocked (also in the exhibition). 

In many ways, Jacopo Palma (ca. 1548 – 1628) became Tintoretto’s truest artistic heir. The son of the minor painter Antonio Palma, he received early training in his father’s workshop in Venice and traveled to Pesaro and Rome for various projects before retur ning to Venice. During the campaign to redecorate the Palazzo Ducale after the fire of 1577, Palma was closely associated with Tintoretto and his workshop, and after Tintoretto’s death, it was Palma rather than Domenico Tintoretto who became the leading pa inter in Venice. 

Palma’s drawings take us back not only to the chalk drawings of Titian and Tintoretto but also to the pen drawings of Veronese and the compositional studies of Schiavone and the Tintoretto family.

Palma Giovane (1544 - 1628), Christ Carried to the Tomb , ca. 1610, brush and brown and white oil paint over black chalk on oatmeal paper. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Wolfgang Ratjen Collection, Purchased as the Gift of Helen Porter and James T. Dyke, 2007. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Palma’s Christ Carried to the Tomb (ca. 1610), for example, captures the spiritual intensity of Titian’s late devotional painting as well as the urgent energy of Tintoretto’s, and is drawn in a painterly technique parallel akin to that of Schiavone or Domenico Tintoretto. In Palma’s works, we can see a summary of the distinct ive local traditions of drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice. 

Publication  

Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice

 

Publication 

Drawing in Tintoretto’s Veniceoffers a complete overview of Tintoretto as a draftsman, in which all of the drawings in the exhibition are discussed and illustrated . A checklist of the exhibition is also included in the volume. Author: John Marciari. Publisher: Paul Holberton Publishing, London. 240 pages, 175 colour illustrations. 

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Picasso. Blue and Rose

September 28, 2018, 3:25 pm

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Musée d'Orsay

18 September 2018 - 6 January 2019

Fondation Beyeler, Basel 

3 February to 26 May, 2019

The Musée d'Orsay, associated with the Musée Picasso-Paris, presents the first exhibition on the blue and pink period of Pablo Picasso in France. This exhibition offers an unprecedented gathering of masterpieces, some never presented in France, and a new analysis of the years 1900-1906, an essential phase in the artist's career.

The album shows the evolution of Picasso's painting year by year and comments on the central works of the exhibition, giving the reader an overview of the blue and pink period. 

Pablo PicassoSelf-portrait© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau © Succession Picasso 2018

 
 

In 1900, at age eighteen, Pablo Ruiz, who would soon begin signing his work Picasso, already had all the makings of a young prodigy.

His work was divided between academic paintings to please his father, a teacher who dreamed of an official career for his son, and more personal works inspired by his contact with avant-garde circles in Barcelona. 

It is his salon painting which took him to Paris, having been selected to represent his country in the Spanish painting section of the Universal Exhibition. He presented the large canvas Last Moments, which he painted over in 1903 with his masterpiece Life:

Courtesy of www.PabloPicasso.org

This marked the start of a period of intense creative activity punctuated by travel between Spain and the French capital, Paris. Between 1900 and 1906, Picasso’s work gradually shifted from a rich palette of Pre-Fauvist colours – which owes a great debt both to the post-Impressionism of Van Gogh and to Toulouse-Lautrec – to the almost monochrome blues of the Blue Period, followed by the rose shades of the Saltimbanques Period, and the ochre hues of Gósol.

For the first time in France, this exhibition will span the Blue and Rose Periods, organised as a continuum rather than as a series of compartmentalised episodes. It also aims to reveal Picasso’s early artistic identity and some of the enduring obsessions in his work.

Pablo PicassoSelf-portrait with top hat© www.bridgemanimages.com © Succession Picasso 2018

“The strongest walls open at my passing”
When he arrived at the Gare d’Orsay in October 1900, Picasso plunged into a very vibrant contemporary art scene: he discovered the paintings of David and Delacroix, but also works by Ingres, Daumier, Courbet, Manet and the Impressionists.

Like other artists of his generation, the young painter was a great admirer of Van Gogh, as demonstrated by his transition several months after this first trip to Paris to painting with strokes of pure colour.

Some self-portraits reveal how the artist embraced and absorbed the successive influences of the “modern masters”. In the summer of 1901, his Self-Portrait in a Top Hat was a parting tribute to Toulouse-Lautrec, nightlife and the cabaret scene; and in Yo Picasso, he depicts himself as the new messiah of art - elegant, arrogant and provocative - in homage to Van Gogh.

Seven months later, in his blue Self-Portratit, Picasso makes another reference to the Dutch painter, not in terms of style, but in the pose of a misunderstood genius sporting a red beard. A comparison with the self-portrait he painted on his return from Gósol in 1906 reveals just how much the artist developed in the space of a few years. Here, Picasso is experimenting with a new idiom, restricting his palette to complementary shades of grey and pink and reducing his facial features to an oval mask shape.

 

Pablo PicassoWoman in Blue© www.bridgemanimages.com © Succession Picasso 2018

 

 

 

 

 

From Barcelona to Paris: Spanish influences
The eye-opening experience of Paris in 1900 was not the young Picasso’s sole source of inspiration. His trips to Málaga, Madrid, Barcelona and Toledo between two visits to Paris speak volumes about his attachment to Spain, and the work he produced at the start of the century draws both on the Catalan modernists and the Spanish Golden Age.

Picasso was active within the lively artistic scene which was developing around 1900 in certain avant-garde Spanish venues and publications. In Barcelona, the young artist was an avid enthusiast of the paintings of his elders, Santiago Rusiñol and Ramon Casas. 

He spent a great deal of time at the Els Quatre Gats cabaret, haunt of the Barcelona bohemian crowd. It was at once a tavern, exhibition venue and literary circle, modelled on the famousChat Noir in Paris.

On 1 February 1900, Picasso held his first proper exhibition there, filling the space with approximately five hundred portrait drawings executed in a matter of weeks, and one oil on canvas -Last Moments- which he presented at the Universal Exhibition in Paris shortly afterwards.

When Picasso settled in Madrid for a few months in the winter of 1901, his work fluctuated between modernists illustrations for the magazine Arte Joven and more ambitious painting imbued with references to Velasquez (Woman in Blue).

Pablo PicassoThe Wait (Margot)© Gasull Fotografia © Succession Picasso 2018

The Vollard gallery exhibition
Picasso arrived at the Gare d’Orsay station for the second time in the spring of 1901, armed with a few pastels and paintings produced in Madrid and Barcelona. The Catalan dealer Pedro Mañach persuaded Ambroise Vollard, the renowned gallery owner of the Parisian avant-garde, to organise an exhibition of Picasso’s work in the early summer – a fine opportunity for an unknown foreigner who barely spoke a word of French.

He painted round the clock in his studio on the boulevard de Clichy, producing as many as three pictures a day. This frenzied activity generated the majority of the 64 paintings and the handful of drawings displayed in the exhibition, which was opened on 25 June on rue Laffitte.
Picasso’s work was diametrically opposed to that of the painter with whom he shared the gallery space. He contrasted the quintessentially Spanish scenes of the Basque painter Francesco Iturrino with subjects about typical life in Paris by day and by night.

The exhibition at the Vollard gallery closed on 14 July. It was a critical success and sales were respectable. It introduced Parisians to a Picasso who embraced and reworked the styles and motifs of the great modern artists Van Gogh, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. It made an impression on the young poet Max Jacob, who was keen to be introduced to the artist.

Pablo PicassoSeated Harlequin© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image of the MMA © Succession Picasso 2018

Towards blue
After the success of the Vollard exhibition, the autumn of 1901 was a period of introspection for the young painter, when his art took a new direction. In tandem with the cycle of paintings directly associated with the death of Casagemas, he produced a group of poignant works characterised notably by the appearance of the figure of Harlequin.

Picasso’s Seated Harlequin, lost in thought at a bistro table, forms part of a group of paintings of a similar format focusing on related themes. Their iconography draws both on the café scenes of Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet, and on the world of the saltimbanques (circus performers) which would soon dominate his pictorial world.

But it is from the recently deceased Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec from whom Picasso borrows the daringly fluid lines of his compositions. The black outlining and flat areas of colour in his paintings create “the impression of stained glass”, writes the art critic Félicien Fagus in 1902.

 http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/events/exhibitions/in-the-museums/exhibitions-in-the-musee-dorsay-more/page/1/article/picasso-47542.html?tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=649&cHash=47131641af

 

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)Acrobat with a ball 1905 Oil on canvas H. 147; W. 95 cmMoscow, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts© Image The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow © Succession Picasso 2018

Pablo PicassoThe Death of Casagemas© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau © Succession Picasso 2018

The death of Picasso’s friend Casagemas
Carles Casagemas, the son of the American consul in Barcelona, forged a close friendship with Picasso in the summer of 1899. He shared a studio with him in Barcelona and then accompanied him to Paris in the autumn of 1900.
His failed love affair with a young model prompted him to commit suicide on 17 February 1901 in a Montmartre restaurant, after he fired a shot at his lover and missed. Picasso heard the news while he was in Madrid.

When he returned to Paris several months later, the artist addressed this tragic event in a painting produced in the very studio where Casagemas spent his final hours.
In the summer, The Death of Casagemas, with its Fauvist expressionism and thick layers of impasto, recalls of some of Picasso’s works exhibited in the Vollard exhibition.

The palettes of the other portraits of the deceased man are tinged with the blue that Picasso gradually introduces into his paintings that autumn. Blue is also the dominant colour in his large painting Evocation, the last composition in the cycle, which parodies the binary structure of El Greco’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz in an irony-tinged final farewell.

“Of Sadness and Pain”

 
In the autumn of 1901, Pablo Picasso went to Saint-Lazare women’s prison in Paris. The inmates were mainly prostitutes, some of whom were incarcerated with their children. Women infected with venereal diseases were singled out with bonnets.

These visits initiated a series of paintings on the theme of motherhood, produced in the final months of the year.

When the artist returned to Barcelona in late January 1902, he continued to paint female figures embodying loneliness and misfortune. This marked the beginning of the Blue Period, characterised by the dominance of this colour, sentimental themes and a quest for expressive forms. 

 

 

Pablo Picasso Woman and child on the shore© www.bridgemanimages.com © Succession Picasso 2018

 

Stiff, solemn female bodies are bowed under the weight of curves. Mother and child groups are idealised and stylised. The bonnets worn by the women inmates of Saint-Lazare prison are transformed into hoods and their clothes become long tunics modelled on the paintings of El Greco. 

Pablo PicassoWailing woman© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Béatrice Hatala © Succession Picasso 2018

“The blues of the abyss”
Although the term Blue Period instantly conjures up painting, Picasso’s art extends well beyond this medium.
Paintings, sculptures, drawings and engravings all stem from the same aesthetic experiments, the same quest to express suffering.

These ink and pencil sheets, which belong to the significant body of graphical work produced between 1902 and 1903 depict the suffering, emaciated bodies of men and women and demonstrate mastery of a wide array of techniques. They reveal the virtuosity of Picasso the draughtsman.
The paintings offer numerous variations of the colour blue. For Picasso, “the need to paint in this way was driven from within”, but he was probably also influenced by his habit of painting at night by the light of a paraffin lamp.

In tandem with these tragic depictions of the destitute, whose deformed limbs are reminiscent of paintings by El Greco, Picasso produced portraits of his Barcelonan friends through lenses of both benevolence and sarcasm.

Pablo PicassoLa Célestine© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau © Succession Picasso 2018

Picasso and eroticism
In Paris and Barcelona, between 1901 and 1903, Picasso produced numerous lively erotic drawings which verge on caricature and which offer a counterpoint to the somber, melancholic paintings of destitute figures in his Blue Period.
They are an extension of his exploration of the shady world of brothels, made manifest in his paintings by the prostitutes of the Saint-Lazare prison, and by the portrait La Célestine inspired by the Barcelonan brothel keeper Carlota Valdivia.

These works, long kept hidden, were in many cases quickly sketched on the back of business cards for his friend Sebastià Juñer-Vidal’s factory, but they represent a recurring theme in Picasso’s work: the permanent and inextricable association between love and death.

Pablo PicassoLife© Photo Scala, Florence © Succession Picasso 2018

Life
Life was painted in the spring of 1903, and represents the culmination of the aesthetic experiments carried out by Picasso since the start of the Blue Period. It is painted on top of Last Moments, which Picasso presented at the Universal Exhibition in 1900.
A number of sketches and an x-ray analysis of the painting reveal the development of the composition and figures. Although the man on the left was initially a self-portrait, he eventually adopts the features of Carles Casagemas, Picasso’s friend who committed suicide in February 1901 after a failed love affair. The artist also planned to position an easel and winged figure in the centre of the picture.

The final painting has given rise to many different interpretations. It is often seen as an allegory for the cycle of life from childhood – embodied by the pregnant woman – to death, symbolised by the crouching figure in the background, and therefore reflects the metaphysical ideas of certain artists such as Paul Gauguin.

 "Au rendez-vous des poètes"
 

It was probably shortly after moving into the Bateau-Lavoir, in May 1904, that Picasso wrote this phrase in blue pencil above the door of his Montmartre studio: "Au rendez-vous des poètes" (Poets’ meeting place). 

At the time, Picasso was living in an artists’ colony on the Butte with several of his fellow countrymen, such as Paco Durrio, and had a whole host of poet friends including Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon.

They were some of his earliest admirers and they instilled in him an appreciation for the new style of poetry which pervades Picasso’s works of the Rose Period.

Pablo PicassoWoman with a crow© Toledo Museum of Art © Succession Picasso 2018

Towards rose
In the early months of 1905, building on the works produced in the last weeks of 1904, Picasso broadened his colour range.
This subtle transition took place without any major change in the style of his figures, whose mannerism and Expressionist distortions are similar to those of the Blue Period.

The artist painted a number of pictures inspired by Madeleine, with whom he was romantically involved.
These portraits trace the gradual move away from monochrome blue towards a nuanced palette ranging from the vivid red clothing of Woman with a Crow to the milky-white complexion of his Woman in a Chemise.

In the summer of 1905, Picasso’s trip to the Netherlands awakened an interest in traditional costumes and picturesque landscapes. The shapely bodies of the women of Schoorl fostered Picasso’s growing interest in the use of sculptural effects in painting.

Pablo PicassoThe acrobat family© Gothenburg Museum of Art / Photo Hossein Sehatlou © Succession Picasso 2018

Saltimbanques
The Saltimbanque cycle – which Picasso developed simultaneously in painting, drawing, engraving and sculpture – spans the period from late 1904 to the end of 1905.
There are two main themes: the family and fatherhood of Harlequin, and the circus which combines the Commedia dell’arte character and the lithe figures of acrobats, jesters and hurdy-gurdy musicians.

These two threads come together in the large gouache Family of Saltimbanques with a Monkey, which featured in the exhibition at the Serrurier gallery in 1905.
These compositions, inspired by the troupe of the Médrano circus located at the corner of the rue des Martyrs and boulevard Rochechouart, are characterised by their seriousness.

Picasso is less interested in the show, usually excluded from the frame, than in the other aspects of their lives, capturing a medial space between public and private worlds where in the most banal triviality and the most sublime grace converge.
Where we might expect movement, lightness and cheerfulness, Picasso offers static, compact and melancholic painting, culminating in Family of Saltimbanque which he worked on during the spring. This masterpiece from 1905 forms part of the Chester Dale collection, but is not available for loan under the terms of the bequests policy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From rose to ochre

 

 

Pablo Picasso Boy Leading a 

Horse© Succession Picasso 2018 / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In early 1906, the paintings of Ingres, which featured in a retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in 1905, inspired Picasso to paint the large composition The Watering Place , which he later abandoned and for which he lifted Boy Leading a Horse .
 

 

The artist’s work was imbued with a new classicism, and the Rose Period was transitioning towards ochre.

These trends became more distinct during his trip to Gósol from May to August 1906. There is a strange synergy between his work and the spectacular landscape of this isolated village in the Catalan Pyrenees. 

Picasso’s encounter with Romanesque sculpture and Iberian art the previous winter at the Louvre museum prompted a return to his roots which reinforced his interest in the work of Gauguin.

Over a period of several weeks, both his sculpture and paintings become characterised by an extreme simplification of form and space, forecasting and initiating the aesthetic revolutions which follow. Leo and Gertrude Stein facilitated and supported this ongoing development by providing intellectual affirmation and financial assistance.

Pablo PicassoNude on a Red Background© Succession Picasso 2018 © RMN-Grand Palais (musée de l'Orangerie) / Hervé Lewandowski

 

 

 

 

 

The major turning point 

 
In Gósol, Picasso embarked on a new path, influenced by the Classical Antiquity of the Mediterranean just as by the paintings of Ingres.
There, in the solitude of a summer spent with his partner Fernande, he undertook his first critique of the sensual escapism of The Turkish Bath, 1862, Paris, Musée du Louvre), beginning in a series of works on the theme of hairdressing.

When the artist returned to Paris, he refocused his attention almost exclusively on the female body, to which he devoted a number of works, rejecting illusionist techniques in favour of a new expressive language: composing images by interlacing basic shapes with a colour palette restricted to shades of ochre.

The gradual emergence of this radically new vocabulary represents the first application of Cézanne’s theory of the geometrisation of volumes.
Picasso’s experimental approach, in which the relationship between painting, sculpture and engraving plays a key role, produced

 

 

 

 

 

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (New York, Museum of Modern Art) in 1907, which blazes the trail for the great adventure of Cubism.

Exhibition Album

 
Claire Bernardi, Stéphanie Molins, Emilia Philippot
Musée d'Orsay / Hazan - 2018
Paperback, 21,6× 28,8 cm - 48 p. - 40 ill.
ISBN : 978-2-75411-480-6
Bilingual french, English

Dorothea Lange’s America

September 30, 2018, 11:41 am

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Sept. 14 through Dec. 30, 2018
Reynolda House Museum of American Art

January - April, 2019
Suzanne H. Arnold Art Gallery, PA
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September– December, 2019
Gilcrease Museum, OK

September - December, 2020
Pulaski Tech, AR

The exhibition, “Dorothea Lange’s America,” presents Lange’s haunting photographs of 1930s and 1940s America and features some of the most iconic images of the 20^th century.

“Lange’s documentary photographs appeared in local newspapers, reaching both the masses across middle America and the lawmakers in our nation’s capital, becoming poignant catalysts for social change and, ultimately, highly valued works of art,” says Allison Perkins, Reynolda House executive director. “We identified this exhibition as an opportunity not only to appreciate the artistry of her photographs, but also to draw connections between their subjects and our communities today.”





One of the highlights of the exhibition is the most recognizable photograph of Lange’s career, “Migrant Mother,” made in 1936. Recently named the most downloaded photograph in the Library of Congress' archive, it is also one of the most arresting images ever created; its ensuing influence on photojournalism is incapable of measurement. The portrait of Florence Owens Thompson with three of her young children became a visual shorthand for the Great Depression and humanized its consequences for the public at large. Upon its original publication in a San Francisco newspaper, the image ignited a massive benevolent response: 20,000 pounds of food was delivered within days to the migrant camp where the photograph was made.

You force yourself to watch and wait. You accept all the discomfort and the disharmony. Being out of your depth is a very uncomfortable thing. You force yourself onto strange streets, among strangers. It may be very hot. It may be painfully cold. It may be sandy and windy and you say, ‘What am I doing here? What drives me to do this hard thing?’-- Dorothea Lange

Highlighting this show are oversized exhibition prints of her seminal portraits from the Great Depression, including 

White Angel Breadline, 

and, most famously,Migrant Mother – an emblematic picture that came to personify pride and resilience in the face of abject poverty in 1930s America.

 

Dorothea Lange
Hands, Maynard and Don Dixon, California, 1930

Dorothea Lange
Filipinos cutting lettuce, Salinas, California, 1935

Dorothea Lange
Woman in trailer camp, California, 1940

Lange herself had known adversity early in life. At age 7 she was stricken with polio, which left her with a lifetime limp. And at age 12 her father disappeared from the scene, leaving an impoverished household behind. Every day she would ride the ferry with her mother from Hoboken to lower Manhattan, to a roiling working-class neighborhood teeming with immigrants. During that period Lange talked her way into photo courses with a range of teachers as diverse as Arnold Genthe and Clarence White. In 1918 she moved to San Francisco where she befriended the photographers Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, and, through them, the celebrated Western painter Maynard Dixon, who became her first husband. She soon opened a thriving portrait studio that catered to San Francisco’s professional class and monied elite. But with the crash of 1929 she found her true calling, as a peripatetic chronicler of the many faces of America, old and young, urban and rural, native-born and immigrant, as they dealt with unprecedented hardship, sometimes with resilience, often with despondence. Her immortal portraits seared these faces of the Depression era into America’s consciousness.

All works in the exhibition are from the collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. The exhibition was organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions. 

Great collection of Lange images

French Twist: Masterworks of photography from Atget to Man Ray

October 1, 2018, 10:44 am

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THE FRICK PITTSBURGH 

 February- May 2019


In the early 20th century , between the two world wars, Paris saw a  fervor of change. From 1910 to 1940, the city became a creative epicenter for artistic exploration,  attracting international avant-garde artists —including photographers experimenting with Surrealism,  Modernism,  and the new reportage.  

French Twist: Masterworks of Photography from Atget to Man Ray, features  100 vintage prints from this golden age of French photography and explores the variety and  inventiveness of native and immigrant photographer s working in France in the early 20th century.  

 This exhibition presents a number of themes that capture the flavor and night life of Paris at this exciting  moment. “Life of the Streets,” “Diversions ,” and “Paris by Night” are just some of the topics that these  masterful photographs explore. 

Visitors will experience Eugène Atget’s lyrical views of Paris streets  and gardens,  Man Ray’s surrealist experiments, and  Henri Cartier-Bresson’s pioneering  photojournalism, as well as works by  Ilse Bing, Brassaï, Jacques -Henri Lartigue, André Kertész, and  Dora Maar. Many of these artists settled in France for life , while others, fleeing the Nazis, brought their  Paris ‐ trained sensibilities and influences to America.  

From the lyrical architectural views of Atget to the Surrealist inventions of Man Ray and Dora Maar, from the boyish wonder of Lartigue to the crepuscular moodiness of Brassaï, from the elegant still lifes of Kertész to the sophisticated street theater of Cartier-Bresson and Ilse Bing, all major facets of French photography are surveyed and celebrated.

 Main sections in the exhibition:

Eugène Atget 

The exhibition opens with one of the most significant figures in the history of photography, Eugène  Atget, whose work influenced a range of artists from Surrealists to documentary photographers. This  selection encompasses pictures of city streets, architectural details, and the gardens at Versailles and  includes one of his most famous photographs,  

 

 Boulevard de Strasbourg, Corsets, 1912
Eugène Atget (1857–1927)
Printing‐out paper, 8 3/4 x 7 inches
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

 Boulevard de Strasbourg, Corsets (1912). 

 

Eugène Atget Nymphaeas, Versailles, ca. 1910

 

La vie de la rue (Life of the Street) 

This section includes images of the streets and buildings of Paris —of the bustling Champ -de -Mars  and the deserted Avenue du Maine —and features a large selection of photographs by Ilse Bing. In  her modernist views of urban architecture, Bing provides a modern take on the old city through  unexpected angles and dramatic cropping. 

Divertissement (Diversions) 

Divertissement focuses on the myriad amusements available in the City of Light s. Lartigue provides  an insider’s view of upper-class life in the Belle Epoque, while Bing and Brassaï chronicle the  attractions of the dance hall, the theater, and the street. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson   

The master of the “decisive moment” and one of the most significant photojournalists of the 20 th century, Henri Cartier -Bresson is featured along with 17 famous photographs from his travels around  the world.  This section includes his stellar images of the Spanish Second Republic and his iconic  view of the coronation of George VI in London. 

Les basses classes (The Lower Classes) 

Between the wars, photographers from Ilse Bing to Andre Kertész to Brassaï chronicled lives of poor  Pari sians, often bringing a Modernist sensibility, rather than a reformer’s eye, to scenes of urban  poverty. 

Paris de nuit (Paris by Night)

In 1933 Brassaï released his photo book  Paris by Night,  which chronicled the city’s streets and  amusements after dark. The book became an immediate success and Brassaï became famous as the  foremost photographer of the city’s bars and brothels, performers , and prostitutes.  

L’art pour l’art (Art for Art’s Sake) 

This section focuses on the technical experimentation and virt uoso technique of photographers  including Pierre Dubreuil, Edward Steichen, and Pal Funk Angelo. It features examples of unusual  techniques like  cliché-verre , solarization, and oil printing.   

 Andre Kertész, Dora Maar, Man Ray 

These three important photographers —all immigrants to Paris between the Wars and all involved in  Surrealist movement —are featured in individual sections that highlight their most famous works.  Kertész is represented by his photographs of the painter Piet Mondrian’s studio. Maar’s Surrealist  street photographs capture her dark humor, and a full complement of Man Ray’s experimental and  psychologically charged images summarize his photographic interests.   

La figure (Portraits and Nudes) 

La Figure showcases experimental approaches to the classic subject of the female nude, including a  cameraless photograph and a solarization by Man Ray and a distortion created with fun-house -type  mirrors by Kertész.   

 

Kiki de Montparnasse, 1923 Man Ray (1890–1976) 11 x 8 3/4 inches Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg © 2012 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris

Hyères, 1932 Henri Cartier‐Bresson (1908–2004) 7 7/8 x 11 5/8 inches Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos	Coronation of King George VI, London, 1938 Henri Cartier‐Bresson (1908–2004) 14 x 9 1/2 inches Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

Champ‐de‐Mars from the Eiffel Tower, 1931 Ilse Bing (1899–1998) 7 1/2 x 11 inches Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg © Estate of Ilse Bing. Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

 

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• Ilse Bing, German 1899 – 1998, Chair, Champs Elysées, 1931, gelatin silver print, 11 1/8 x 8 3/4 inches. Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg © Ilse Bing Estate
  
  
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  Ilse Bing, German 1899 – 1998, Cancan dancers, Moulin Rouge, 1931, gelatin silver print, 10 1/4 x 13 3/8 inches. Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg © Ilse Bing Estate

JMW Turner: Watercolours from Tate

October 4, 2018, 8:58 am

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JMW Turner: Watercolours from Tate will be the first major exhibition of the work of Turner in Latin America, and the first Tate exhibition to be shown in Argentina. It opens today, 26 September 2018, at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires.

J.M.W. Turner is undisputed as the greatest exponent of English watercolour in its golden age. This exhibition, curated by David Blayney Brown of Tate Britain, one of the world’s leading experts on Turner, reveals the role watercolours played in the artist’s life and work.

Turner rarely left home without a rolled up, loose-bound sketchbook, pencils, and a small travelling case of watercolours in his pocket. He exploited the medium’s luminosity and transparency like no one before him, conjuring light effects on English meadows and Venetian lagoons and gauzy mists over mountains and lakes.

The exhibition will comprise more than 80 works from Tate’s collection, including large, finished watercolours alongside spontaneous sketches that reflect the artist’s sometimes impulsive and experimental nature.

Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain, said: ‘We are delighted that JMW Turner: Watercolours from Tate is to be shown at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires and thrilled that this special selection of more than 80 of this great artist’s most resonant watercolours will be the first exhibition from Tate to be shown to audiences in Argentina.’

After Turner’s death in 1851, the contents of his studio were bequeathed to the nation. The Turner Bequest held by Tate comprises around 37,000 works on paper, 300 oil paintings, and 280 sketch books. It is from this bequest that works for this exhibition are drawn – to comprise approximately 80 works on paper including Venice: Looking Across the Lagoon at Sunset,  (above)

J M W TURNER
Great Britain 1775 – 1851
Study for 'Eddystone Lighthouse'c.1817pencil and watercolour on paper
25.4 (h) x 38.3 (w) cm Tate Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856Photo: © Tate 2013

Study for Eddystone Lighthouse,

 

and Caernarvon Castle, North Wales.

As one of the most gifted draughtsmen of his generation, and a superlative master of watercolour, Turner sold most of his finished and exhibited watercolours. What he kept for himself was different, but in no way inferior. It has a special character of its own, often closer to the artist’s true self than the work he made for the public. John Ruskin, one of the first to study the whole Bequest, observed how much of it had been made for Turner’s ‘own pleasure’. Intimate, expressive, experimental, it offers unique insights into the mind, imagination and private practice of a great Romantic painter.

This selection from the Bequest allows us to look over Turner’s shoulder as he progresses from conventional beginnings as a topographical and architectural draughtsman to embrace an extraordinary range of subject matter in a dynamic manner founded on a refined appreciation of light, colour, and atmospheric effects. Joined in this exhibition by a small group of finished watercolours and oil paintings to show their impact on Turner’s public output, these most personal of his works remain as fresh and immediate today as when they first appeared on paper.

JMW Turner: Watercolours from Tate is curated by David Blayney Brown, Senior Curator of British Art 1790—1850, Tate Britain. In spring 2018, the exhibition was presented at Chiostro del Bramante in Rome; in 2019 it will travel to Centro Cultural de la Moneda in Santiago, Chile.

Tudors to Windsors: British Royal Portraits from Holbein to Warhol

October 5, 2018, 7:45 am

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The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
October 7, 2018–January 27, 2019

Tudors to Windsors: British Royal Portraits from Holbein to Warhol sheds new light on changing ideas of monarchy and nationhood in Britain. The exhibition features portraits of British royalty spanning 500 years, by artists from Hans Holbein and Sir Joshua Reynolds to Annie Leibovitz and Andy Warhol.

Cecil Beaton, Queen Elizabeth II, 2 June 1953, semi-matte cibachrome print, National Portrait Gallery, London.     Photo Courtesy of Cecil Beaton / Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Queen Elizabeth I (“The  Ditchley  Portrait”), c.1592, oil on canvas, National Portrait  Gallery, London. National Portrait Gallery, London Courtesy Photo

In a sweeping survey, Tudors to Windsors covers the cavalcade of kings, queens, princes, and princesses who have graced the British crown. The MFAH is the only U.S. venue to host this unprecedented exhibition, part of a major partnership with the National Portrait Gallery in London. Some 150 objects—most never before seen outside of England—tell the story of Britain’s monarchy through masterworks of painting, sculpture, and photography.

Visitors have an extraordinary opportunity to come face-to-face with the fascinating figures of British royalty. Tudors to Windsors explores four royal dynasties: the House of Tudor (1485–1603), the House of Stuart (1603–1714), the House of Hanover (1714–1901), and the present-day House of Windsor. Among the many works of art on view are portraits featuring King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I, King George I, Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Diana, and Prince William.