The career of William H. Johnson (1901–1970) was one of the most brilliant yet tragic of any early 20th-century American artist. Best known for his lively paintings of the African American experience in the rural South and urban North, Johnson was also an accomplished printmaker and watercolorist whose style shifted from dramatic expressionism to what he termed a more “primitive” approach using bright and contrasting colors and flattened, two-dimensional forms. William H. Johnson’s World on Paper examined, for the first time, his achievements as a graphic artist. Delicate watercolor drawings, bold block prints, and colorful screenprints reveal him as an inventive modernist.

The exhibition, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from May 19 through August 12, 2007, was drawn largely from the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the largest and most extensive holding of Johnson’s work in all mediums.

Born in 1901 in Florence, S.C., to a poor family, Johnson moved to New York at age 17, just in time for the first flowering of the Harlem Renaissance. Working a variety of jobs, he saved enough money to pay for an art education at the prestigious National Academy of Design. Johnson worked with painter Charles Hawthorne, who raised funds to send Johnson abroad to study. He spent the late 1920s in France, absorbing the lessons of modernism. During this period, he married Danish artist Holcha Krake. The couple spent most of the 1930s in Scandinavia, where Johnson’s interest in folk art had a profound impact on his work. Returning with Holcha to the United States in 1938, Johnson immersed himself in African American culture and traditions. Although Johnson attained some success as an artist in this country and abroad, financial security remained elusive. Following his wife’s death in 1944, Johnson’s physical and mental health deteriorated; he spent the final 23 years of his life in obscurity, confined to a state hospital in Long Island, N.Y.

Seventy-nine works were featured in the show, including block prints, screenprints, oil and tempera paintings, along with selected drawings and watercolors, providing an overview of Johnson’s career, both in Europe in the 1930s and in New York in the 1940s. Among the varied subjects of his work are early landscapes of Denmark, Norway and North Africa; portraits of his neighbors in Denmark; scenes of daily life in Harlem and the rural South; and scenes of black enlisted men and female volunteers of World War II. The exhibition reveals Johnson’s stylistic development from his academic beginnings to a more expressionistic mode and finally to his distinctive form of figurative abstraction based on folk art and African colors and patterns.

While in Europe, Johnson came in contact with the art of Edvard Munch, whose rough-gouged experimental block prints seem to have inspired Johnson to try new printmaking techniques. The unevenly inked black areas in some of the artist’s block prints, such as Jon Fisherman (2), suggest that Johnson did not use a printing press but instead applied pressure to the back of the paper with the bowl of a spoon or the heel of his hand to transfer the wet ink from the block to the paper.

Back in the United States in the late 1930s Johnson continued to make block prints while at the same time he was attracted to the screenprint technique. A stencil method developed in the 1920s for printing signboards and posters, in the 1930s the screenprint was adopted by artists to make limited edition prints. It was as a screenprint artist that Johnson would leave his most lasting mark as a printmaker. The bright-hued, opaque inks and the hand cut stencils used for making screenprints proved to be ideal for translating the sharp edges and flat expanses of his new painting style, which appears to have been inspired in equal parts by the colorful cartoons of his childhood, the folk art of Scandinavia and North Africa, and the African American folk traditions of his own country.

William H. Johnson’s World on Paper was organized and circulated by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Itinerary

An exhibition of more than 40 prints was on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (July 1, 2006 through Jan. 7, 2007). An expanded version of the exhibition that included selected drawings and watercolors toured to the Amon Carter Museum in Forth Worth, Texas (Feb. 3 – April 8, 2007), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (May 19 – August 12, 2007) and the Montgomery Museum of Art, in Montgomery, Ala. (Sept. 15 –Nov. 18, 2007). In Philadelphia the exhibition was further enriched by the inclusion of several of Johnson’s oil paintings and prints from private collections.



William H. Johnson, Sowing, about 1940-1942, serigraph on paper, 10 x 16

From theartblog.org: (link added)

Harlem Cityscape with Church, c. 1939-40, William H. Johnson (1901-1970). Tempera on paperboard. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation.



Jitterbugs (V), c. 1941-1942, William H. Johnson (1901-1970). Color silkscreen print. Smithsonian American Art Museum; Gift of Mrs. Douglas E. Younger.



Jon Fisherman II, c. 1930-1938, William H. Johnson (1901-1970). Hand-colored block print. Smithsonian American Art Museum; Gift of the Harmon Foundation.

While Johnson’s earlier work is influenced by German Expressionism and Impressionism, after his return from Europe to New York in 1938, his work becomes something else entirely. He moves to the graphic flatness of silkscreen as well as watercolor, pen and ink and pencil, moving easily back and forth among those mediums; the resulting work has a feel of collage, quilting and applique. The African-American quilting influence also seems to be reflected in the willful anti-rectilinearity.

What’s stunning is the few short years, from 1939 to 1945, in which he was able to produce work in this mature style–colorful, geometric, using the rhythm of repeating shapes. It’s deceptively childlike. And wow, is it beautiful! The work from that period is mostly narrative. It’s lively even when the subject matter is dark, as when he depicts a young soldier leaving his family farm for World War II, or when he depicts injured soldiers.



William H. Johnson, Going to Church, c. 1941, silkscreen

Johnson was creating a narrative of quotidian African-American lives at the mid-century. Like Pippin and Jacob Lawrence, he created a John Brown image–it’s included in the exhibit. And there’s a sense of his boyhood Southern farm roots and his own move north, which paralells the African-American migration north of the previous generation. Lawrence’s Great Migration series was created in the same period as Johnson’s lively works on paper. But Johnson’s work is without the heroic political overlay. There’s the war and how it affected people. There’s the jitterbug dance craze. There’s a strong sense of family and the urban scene. It’s all put in personal terms.

The 1944 death of Johnson’s wife Holcha Krake (a Danish fiber-artist he met in France in 1929), had a severe effect on him, and by 1947, syphilis had destroyed his sanity altogether.

I left the exhibit of more than 80 works, wanting still more. Fortunately, I took home a catalog, Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson, by Richard J. Powell with an introduction by Martin Puryear. The book, which has a bunch of pictures of him as well as many images not in the exhibit, made me fall in love with the guy. He was handsome, sexy and intense, and if he were alive today he would probably be one of those celebrity artists who are as much public personae as they are artists (which is not to denigrate his art, which I personally love all the more for its folk art influences).



Joe Lewis and an Unidentified Boxer, c 1939-42, tempera, pen and ink on paper

More images from the exhibition:



William H. Johnson (1901-1970), Blind Singer, ca. 1939-1940, Serigraph on paper. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation 1971.127)



William H. Johnson (1901-1970), Jitterbugs II, ca. 1941, Modified screen print, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas 2000.11)



William H. Johnson (1901-1970), Three Friends, ca. 1944-1945, Serigraph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation 1967.59.1020)



William H. Johnson Lom Kirke, Norway hand-colored woodcut on paper, ca. 1935-1938



William H. Johnson Sitting Model hand-colored relief print, ca. 1939



William H. Johnson Willie and Holcha hand-colored woodcut on paper, ca. 1935



William H. Johnson Harlem Street with Church hand-colored relief print, ca. 1939-1940



William H. Johnson Farm Couple at Well hand-colored relief print, ca. 1940-1941

From October 25, 2003, through February 8, 2004, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presented the groundbreaking exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations. Co-organized by guest curator Elisabeth Sussman and Sandra Phillips, SFMOMA senior curator of photography, the exhibition consisted of approximately 200 of the artist's most significant photographs—making it the most complete presentation of her work ever assembled. The prints were drawn from major public and private collections throughout the world and included many images that have never been exhibited publicly. The artist's working method and intellectual influences were revealed through the display of contact sheets, cameras, letters, notebooks and other writings, as well as books from Arbus's personal library. Benefiting from new research into her career, Diane Arbus Revelations explored the roots of her prodigious influence on contemporary artistic practice, enrich the understanding of the breadth and consistency of her unique vision, and illuminate its enduring impact on the way we see the world and the people in it.

After opening at SFMOMA the exhibition traveled nationally and internationally to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (February 29–May 30, 2004); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (June 27–August 29, 2004); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (February–May 2005); Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (June–September 2005); the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (October 2005–January 2006); and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (July 9–October 8, 2006).

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) found most of her subjects in New York City, a place that she explored as both a known geography and as a foreign land. She was primarily a photographer of people she discovered in the metropolis and its environs during the 1950s and 1960s. Her "contemporary anthropology"—portraits of couples, children, carnival performers, nudists, middle class families, transvestites, people on the street, zealots, eccentrics and celebrities—stands as an allegory of postwar America, an exploration of the relationship between appearance and identity, illusion and belief, theater and reality. Some of her best known images—



identical twins in New Jersey;



a "Jewish giant" slouching to fit in a living room scaled to his diminutive parents;



and a young couple on Hudson Street whose demeanors evoke both early adolescence and late middle age—have become photographic icons.

At the same time, Arbus was committed to photography as a medium that is obliged to tangle with facts. She had no interest in improving upon the reality she confronted or in creating images that mirror a preconceived view. Many of her subjects face the camera in implicit awareness of their collaboration in the portrait-making process. Her photographs render the encounter between photographer and subject as a self-conscious meeting, one that becomes a central drama in the picture. The result is a body of work that penetrates the psyche with all the force of a personal encounter and, in doing so, broadens our understanding of ourselves and those around us.

Diane Arbus (born Diane Nemerov in New York City in 1923) first began taking pictures in the early 1940s. While working in partnership with her husband Allan Arbus as a stylist collaborating in their fashion photography business, she continued to take pictures on her own. She studied photography with Berenice Abbott in the 1940s and with Alexey Brodovitch in the mid-1950s. It was Lisette Model's photographic workshop, however, that inspired her, around 1956, to begin seriously pursuing the work for which she has come to be known.

Her first published photographs appeared in Esquire in 1960. During the next decade, working for Esquire, Harper's Bazaar and other magazines, she published more than 100 pictures, including portraits and photographic essays, some of which originated as personal projects, occasionally accompanied by her own writing.

In 1962—apparently searching for greater clarity in her images and for a more direct relationship with the people she was photographing—she began to turn away from the 35mm camera favored by most of the documentary photographers of her era. She started working with a square format (2 1/4-inch twin-lens reflex) camera and began making portraits marked by a formal classical style that has since been recognized as a distinctive feature of her work.



Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962,



Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning, N.J. 1963,

and the virtually unknown work,



Girl on a stoop with baby, N.Y.C 1962

—all on view in the exhibition—are each triumphant examples of Arbus's technique.

She was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1963 and 1966 for her project on "American Rites, Manners, and Customs." She augmented her images of New York and New Jersey with visits to Pennsylvania, Florida and California, photographing contests and festivals, public and private rituals. "I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present because we tend while living here and now to perceive only what is random and barren and formless about it," she wrote. "While we regret that the present is not like the past and despair of its ever becoming the future, its innumerable, inscrutable habits lie in wait for their meaning…. These are our symptoms and our monuments. I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary."

Although her work appeared in only a few group shows during her lifetime, her photographs generated a good deal of critical and popular attention. The boldness of her subject matter and photographic approach were recognized as revolutionary. In the late 1960s, Arbus taught photography at Parsons School of Design, the Rhode Island School of Design and Cooper Union and continued to make pictures in accordance with her evolving vision. Notable among her late works are the images of her



Untitled series, made at residences for people with mental disabilities between 1969 and 1971. These images echo in many respects a number of works produced earlier in her career:

Fire eater at a carnival, Palisades Park, N.J. 1956;



A child in her nightgown, Wellfleet, Mass, 1956;

Bishop by the sea, Santa Barbara, Cal 1964;



Two ladies at the automat, N.Y.C. 1966.

In 1970 Arbus made a portfolio of original prints entitled A box of 10 photographs which was to be the first of a series of limited editions of her work. She committed suicide in July 1971.

At the time of her death, Arbus was already a significant influence—even something of a legend—among serious photographers, although only a relatively small number of her most important pictures were widely known at the time. Even today, the work on which her reputation rests represents only a small fraction of her achievement. Although superficial elements of her style and subject matter have been widely imitated, the fundamental preoccupations of her art remain elusive. Her imagery has permeated the culture, but the riveting impact of her pictures remains as powerful and controversial today as when the pictures were first seen.

Diane Arbus Revelations provided the viewer a unique and long-awaited opportunity to explore the breadth and depth of Arbus's accomplishments. Contemplating many of the lesser known, but often equally significant works in the context of the iconic images will serve to illuminate them both and reveal, within a complex vocabulary of expression, a remarkably original and consistent vision.

Arbus's gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar continues to challenge our assumptions about the nature of everyday life and compels us to look at the world in a new way. By the same token, her ability to uncover the familiar within the exotic enlarges our understanding of ourselves. Her devotion to the principles of the art she practiced—without deference to any extraneous social, political or even personal agenda—has produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its bold commitment to the celebration of things as they are. Her refusal to patronize the people she photographs is in fact a tribute to the singularity of each and every one of us and constitutes a deep and abiding humanism.

In conjunction with Diane Arbus Revelations, Random House will be publishing a 320-page, fully illustrated book featuring an essay by Sandra S. Phillips and an extensive chronology by Elisabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus based on documents in the Arbus archives, including many excerpts from the artist's writings. See sample pages here.

“Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape,” the first major retrospective in 35 years devoted to this celebrated leader of the Hudson River School, was on view from Sept. 14 through Jan. 6, 2008 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The exhibition presented 57 works, including some of the most beautiful and well-known American landscape paintings of the 19th century. Works from every aspect of Durand’s long career as a major engraver, portrait painter and landscape painter are on display. These include the iconic



“Kindred Spirits” (1849)



and “Progress (The Advance of Civilization)” (1853),

as well as a generous selection of his plein-air painted sketches, often referred to as his “Studies from Nature.”

New research and new approaches to the study of art history prompted this fresh look at Durand’s contribution to American art. “Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape” was organized for the Brooklyn Museum by Linda Ferber, vice president and director of the museum division of the New-York Historical Society and former Andrew W. Mellon Curator and chair of American art at the Brooklyn Museum.

Asher B. Durand (1796–1886), the acknowledged dean of the American landscape school from his election as president of the National Academy of Design in 1845 until his death at age 90, was a figure of central importance in American art. During these 40 years, Durand set the tone for American landscape painting, which celebrated man’s relationship to nature and the wilderness. He helped to define an American sensibility about the land, setting it apart from European traditions, and he perfected innovative compositional elements, such as the vertical format for scenes. Durand’s influence hastened the decline of history painting in the mid-19th century and the rise in popularity of landscape paintings, which were increasingly considered great works of art.

Durand was an early and influential proponent of sketching outdoors. In the late 1840s, the distinction between plein-air sketches for an artist’s personal use and the larger-scale finished landscape paintings for public display collapsed. Durand, who was influenced by the British critic John Ruskin, advocated a naturalistic approach to landscape. This progressive attitude, which aligns Durand with other supporters of realism, lends a modern sensibility to his work.

The exhibition was organized in a chronological and thematic manner that reflects the stages of Durand’s career, with emphasis given to the landscape paintings for which he is best known today. His multifaceted six-decade career spanned the period from the earliest efforts of artists and writers to create a national cultural identity through the mid-century triumph and subsequent eclipse of the Hudson River School.

Durand’s most famous painting, “Kindred Spirits,” was the centerpiece of the exhibition. It was commissioned by New York businessman and arts patron Jonathan Sturges as a gift for William Cullen Bryant, who had delivered a moving eulogy for Thomas Cole at the National Academy of Design in 1848. The painting depicts Bryant and Cole in the wilderness of the Catskill Mountains in New York and was intended as an homage to Cole and as a demonstration of Durand’s position as leader of the landscape school. The botanical precision of the mountain forest and foreground trees marks a new direction toward realism in Durand’s work.

Another highlight of the exhibition was the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s



“Dover Plains, Dutchess County, New York” (1848),

one of Durand’s best-known pastoral images.

An engraving based on the painting was distributed in 1850 to the members of the American Art-Union, a popular method for promoting fine arts. In this scene, Durand depicts the coexistence of man and nature in panoramic scene that was considered a radical compositional departure at the time. Although the peaceful scene appears to be effortlessly executed, Durand spent a year painstakingly sketching the hills in upstate New York so every detail, including the native trees and plants, was correct.

Other works on view included



“Thomas Cole” (ca. 1837),

a sensitive portrayal of Cole painted at the peak of Durand’s powers as a portraitist;



“In the Woods” (1855),

a landmark painting composed from oil studies made in the Shokan region of the Catskills that was intended to evoke the primeval North American forest and represents one of Durand’s most important contributions to the American landscape vocabulary;



“White Mountain Scenery, Franconia Notch, New Hampshire” (1857),

a classic panoramic view of the White Mountains that was commissioned by the prominent New York collector Robert L. Stuart;

and a selection of his “Studies from Nature,” featuring vignettes of Durand’s favorite sketching sites.



"Study from Nature, Stratton Notch, Vermont," by Asher B. Durand, oil on canvas, 18 by 23 3/4 inches, New York Historical Society, Gift of Mrs. Lucy Maria Durand Woodman, daughter of the artist, 1907

About the Artist

Durand was born Aug. 21, 1796, in Maplewood (formerly Jefferson Village), N.J. From 1812 to 1820, he was an apprentice, then partner, to an engraver copying English book illustrations. His reputation as a printmaker was established in 1823, when he received wide acclaim for an engraving after John Trumbull’s famous painting “The Declaration of Independence.” This firmly established his reputation as the finest engraver in the United States. In the 1830s, Durand ended his engraving business and entered into a short, successful period as a portrait painter of U.S. presidents and other Americans of political and social prominence.

In 1837, a sketching expedition to the Adirondacks with the artist Thomas Cole, a close friend and mentor, led to Durand’s decision to concentrate on landscape painting. Durand’s subsequent annual summer trips to the Catskill, Adirondack and White Mountains yielded hundreds of drawings and oil sketches that he later incorporated into finished paintings. From 1840 to 1841, he traveled extensively in Europe, studying the old masters and sketching from nature. Durand, who was one of the founders of the National Academy of Design in New York City, served as its second president from 1845 until 1861. In 1855, his influential “Letters on Landscape Painting” were published in the Crayon, an important art periodical founded by the artist’s son, John. Durand, who retired in 1869, stopped painting in 1878 and died Sept. 17, 1886, in his home town of Maplewood, N.J.

From the NY Times:

One of the less dramatic painters of the Hudson River School, Durand (1796-1886) favored the realistic approach to landscape advocated by the English critic John Ruskin, rather than the metaphorical view held by Cole and other Hudson Riverites that its representation ought to express God’s sublimity. Obeying Ruskin’s call for truth to nature, Durand explored forest interiors with close attention to the ways of trees, foliage, rocks and ground cover in smaller paintings, while his larger and more elaborate exhibition pictures, influenced by European masters like Claude Lorrain and John Constable, are Arcadian visions suffused with light, color and atmospheric perspective.

A vibrant example of both approaches is



“The Beeches” (1845),

a landscape in a vertical format that was new in his work and probably derived from Constable. A beech and a linden tree, leaning but sturdy and in vigorous leaf, dominate the left foreground. Beside them a rustic path meanders down to a shining pond, which a shepherd and his fleecy flock are nearing. In the distance a range of pale blue hills juts into a bluer but cloud-streaked sky. If it is compositionally similar to Constable’s 1826 canvas “The Cornfield,” never mind. The harmoniously lighted scene, projecting an atmosphere of peace, plenty and all’s right with the world, was warmly received by critics, admired as much for its ambitious scale as for its “every-day character,” as one viewer wrote at the time of its exhibition...

Durand became close friends with Cole, who encouraged his painting ambitions. By 1835, urged on by a patron, the merchant Luman Reed, Durand was painting life portraits of presidents and other prominent figures, and by 1838 had begun to try his hand at landscape. One of these early ventures, whose humor is almost unique in his work, is



“Dance on the Battery in the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant” (1838),

a kind of fête galante on the order of Watteau, in which Stuyvesant, the peg-legged governor of New York, sits out a merry if rather stiffly painted country dance under sheltering trees.

An 1837 sketching trip with Cole to Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks seemed to fix Durand’s concentration on landscape. His work became stronger after a year in Europe in 1840 to study the old masters with a view to improving his composition and color handling. He became known for his elegant scenic depictions, mostly in the Catskill, Adirondack and White Mountain regions, like



“Mountain Stream” (circa 1848),

which shows a boulder-filled rivulet running between woodsy mountainsides toward the deep gorge known as the Kaaterskill Clove, with the Catskill range thrusting up in the background. A stag stands poised on a rock in the picture’s center.

Publication



A full-color catalog, co-published by the Brooklyn Museum and D Giles Limited, includes essays by Ferber; Barbara Dayer Gallati, curator emerita of American art at the Brooklyn Museum; and Kenneth T. Jackson, Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences at Columbia University.

Credit

“Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape” was organized by the Brooklyn Museum.

From 26 May to 8 September 2013 there will be on exhibition of over 160 of the works the “artist of the century” Max Ernst (1891–1976) at the Fondation Beyeler in cooperation with the Albertina,Vienna.

Although the exhibitions at the Albertina and the Fondation Beyeler both direct a contemporary gaze
at Max Ernst’s oeuvre and bring together a similarly wide range of works, the two presentations differ in respect of their vantage point and their hanging and also because 21 works are being shown only at the Fondation Beyeler. Many of them, for example



The Fireside Angel (The Triumph of Surrealism),



The Robing of the Bride,


The Blessed Virgin Chastising the Infant Jesus before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard and the painter



and Oedipus Rex,

are among Ernst’s most famous masterpieces.

Ernst Beyeler thought highly of Max Ernst and, as early as 1953, the artist created the series of etchings entitled Das Schnabelpaar for the art dealer from Basel. The Beyeler Collection includes seven works by Max Ernst, of which four are paintings and three are sculptures. The oldest work, Snow Flowers, was executed in the 1920s while the most recent, Birth of a Galaxy, dates from 1969.

Max Ernst is one of Modernism’s most versatile artists. After his beginnings as a rebellious Dadaist in Cologne, he moved to Paris in 1922, where he soon became one of the pioneers of Surrealism. He was interned twice as an enemy alien during the Second World but was released thanks to the intervention of the poet Paul Éluard, who was his friend. In 1941 Max Ernst fled to the USA, where he found new stimuli for his work as well as providing new impulses for the generation of young American artists. A decade later he returned to a Europe that had been devastated by the war and where the once highly esteemed Max Ernst seemed to have been forgotten, only to be rediscovered as one of the 20th century’s most multifaceted artists. In 1958, having renounced his German nationality in 1948 in order to take US citizenship, Max Ernst eventually became a French citizen.

Ernst was indeed one of the “artists of the century” – not only because of the high quality and wide range of his oeuvre but also because of the length of his creative career, which lasted around 60 years from 1915 to 1975. Active at a time of tremendous artistic, social, political and technical upheaval, he knew how to integrate these changes into his oeuvre, which therefore reflects key characteristics of the 20th century.

The pleasure Max Ernst took in experimenting with different techniques made him a pioneer of multimedia expression. With no apparent effort, he combined in his work the themes, styles and techniques that were important to successive generations. His ceaseless quest for new forms of expression, questions and subjects is emblematic of modern man. Max Ernst appears to us as the artist who never wanted to find himself, as he once said: “A painter is lost when he finds himself”.

With his early Dadaist experience, his key position among the Surrealists and his prelude to action painting, Max Ernst travelled between worlds and cultures, moving to Paris from Cologne and from New York back to France. At a time of political unrest, he maintained his critical, creative gaze, seeking refuge in a country, the USA, which he scarcely knew but to which he nonetheless responded with curiosity and which provided him with important impulses for his late work. With exhibitions in New York, projects in Arizona and Touraine, participation in the Venice Biennale and Documenta, Max Ernst was an early 20th century example of the kind of “cultural and artistic nomad” who only later became a customary figure.

In his private life, too, Max Ernst was able to master contrasts, for he effortlessly exchanged the life of a wartime refugee for an extremely glamorous life at the side of Peggy Guggenheim, who was his patroness and – for a brief period – his wife. Later he exchanged that life with virtually no transition for the remoteness of the Arizona Desert with artist Dorothea Tanning. With Luise Straus, who was his first wife and the mother of his son Jimmy, and who died in Auschwitz, with Gala Éluard, Leonora Carrington, Peggy Guggenheim and Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst surrounded himself with strong women, many of them artists and all of them his equals.

As an intellectual, who was comfortable with both the visual arts and literature, Max Ernst was also extremely curious about technology and science, particularly the natural sciences and psychoanalysis, a discipline that was of particular significance for Surrealism. The large number of artistic techniques that Max Ernst developed and promoted was both impressive and surprising, as the following summary shows:

Collage

As early as 1919, Max Ernst started working with the technique of collage, which he used to design or simulate new pictorial realities. He created his collages from illustrations taken from various novels, textbook catalogues, natural science journals and 19th century sales catalogues. He excised the fragments from wood engravings, using a scalpel in order to achieve cut edges that were perfectly exact and smooth.

In around 1929/30 Max Ernst created his most famous collage novels La femme 100 têtes (Hundred- Headed Woman/Headless Woman) and Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel (A little Girl dreams of taking the Veil), which are among Surrealism’s most fascinating, enigmatic works.

Frottage

In around 1925, Max Ernst began his Natural History series, in which he used the technique of frottage for the first time (the French word frotter means “to rub”) as a semi-automatic procedure. He placed objets trouvés he found outdoors, such as leaves and wood, under a sheet of paper and rubbed over them with a pencil. Then he took the structures that emerged and transformed them into fantastic pictures. In his frottages, Ernst breathes new life into lifeless objects, giving them another, to some extent uncustomary, significance.

Max Ernst developed frottage while he was staying in Brittany. In his essay Beyond Painting he describes a kind of visionary revelation that caused him to use the wooden floor and other objects in his guest-house room as objects for his frottages.

Grattage

Grattage is an artistic technique used by Max Ernst in painting that he developed in around 1927 as an extension of frottage. In a first phase, he applied several superimposed layers of paint to a canvas. Underneath the painting ground that he prepared in that way, he placed objects such as metal grids, wooden boards and string, the relief of which could be seen through the canvas. In order to transfer those structures to the picture, he scratched away the top layers of paint (gratter is the French word for “to scratch”.) In a subsequent phase, he reworked the patterns that had become visible, transforming them into forests, shellflowers, birds and petrified cities.

Decalcomania

Decalcomania is a transfer technique in which the damp pigment on a piece of glass or a sheet of paper is pressed against a canvas, leaving behind fine streaks, bubbles or marbled traces of paint when they are removed. In a subsequent phase, the artist reworks the complex surface structure. This artistic technique had already been developed in the 18th century and was used by other Surrealist artists too. Max Ernst adopted the technique in the late 1930s, using it to represent mysterious landscapes peopled by eery faces, figures and animals hiding in the thickets of nature.

Oscillation

In around 1942, while an exile in the USA, Max Ernst started developing the technique of oscillation. He let paint drip out of a tin perforated with a number of holes, which he attached to a long string and swung to and fro over the canvas. This largely uncontrollable and, once again, semi-automatic procedure created reticulated compositions of circles, lines and points on the surface that were reminiscent of planets’ orbits. Oscillation was an innovative technique that not only extended the range of Surrealism’s artistic repertoire but also heralded Jackson Pollock’s Drip Painting.

The exhibition is a chronological presentation of all the major creative phases and groups of themes in Max Ernst’s work, opening with Capricorn, his most important sculpture.

Max Ernst, who was born on 2 April 1891 in Brühl (Germany), first learnt about painting from his father. He had a conservative, middle-class upbringing, against which he soon rebelled. Starting in 1910, he studied art history as well as psychology, Romance languages and philosophy. Initially influenced by Expressionism and Futurism, he soon came in contact with other artists and art movements.

His early work



City with Animals

demonstrates this unique combination of different styles, displaying both Cubist and Futurist features. His encounter with Hans Arp (also represented in the Beyeler Collection along with the Surrealists Dalí, Giacometti and Miró) came at a time full of turmoil. Dada is born; the years after the First World War are a time of radical change, protest and experimentation. Dada brings Max Ernst into contact with Surrealist artists. He ceases to be just a German artist and becomes a leading figure in the Surrealist art movement in Paris. There his works begin to acquire enigmatic qualities, for the unconscious and dreams are important elements of Surrealism, which it took over from psychoanalysis. Max Ernst remains an innovator, experimenting with frottage from the mid-1920s onwards. Hybrid creatures are created from different natural species; his interest in the natural sciences finds expression in his works.



At the First Limpid Word

is one such puzzle. A monumental work, it formed part of the decoration of the house that Max Ernst shared with Paul Éluard and his wife Gala (who later became Dalí’s muse). It was only in the 1960s that the wall painting, which had been painted over, was rediscovered.

The Blessed Virgin Chastising the Infant Jesus (above) is an equally spectacular work, a scandal-provoking painting with blasphemous elements that deconstructs the traditional sacred image of the Madonna, representing a radical liberation from Ernst’s middle class roots.

One room of the exhibition contains a number of key works with the jungle paintings from the second half of the 1930s including



Nature at Dawn

with its dark, sinister character. Different traditions are echoed here, ranging from borrowings from Henri Rousseau to the Romanticism of a painter like Caspar David Friedrich.

With The Robing of the Bride (above) there is not only an obvious reference to Renaissance art but also a more differentiated context. The transformation of a woman into an animal and vice versa is an erotic motif that the painting conveys through a number of details. The Fireside Angel, (above) on the other hand, thematises the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, with which many artists and intellectuals concerned themselves. With the brightly coloured, mask-like, terrifying dimension of its figure, which seems to fly towards the viewer as an unstoppable whirlwind between aggression and mockery, Max Ernst prefigures the political catastrophe that was to befall Europe.

Ernst’s late work displays thematic caesura – on the one hand, a poetical and sensuous contemplation using over-painting in the refined, technically innovative work The Garden of France and, on the other, Birth of a Galaxy, a splendid late work in which air, water, earth and light all rise into a starry firmament.

As a free spirit – ironical, elegant and rebellious – and a man of many different facets, Max Ernst today remains an artist whose work is both accessible and complex. His works speak to us, evoking uncharted depths and hidden mysteries, as well as prompting reflection. Like mercury – which continuously changes shape in a fascinating way, hence being impossible to grasp – Max Ernst is still an exceptional artist almost forty years after his death, exemplary in his artistic independence and possessing an urge for freedom and a bold readiness for innovation in his work and life that preserve his oeuvre from stylistic opportunism and conventionality.



A Fondation Beyeler catalogue in cooperation with the Albertina, Vienna, in German and English, accompanies the exhibition. The edition for the book trade is published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern. The catalogue edited by Werner Spies and Julia Drost includes a foreword by Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Sam Keller, essays by Werner Spies, Julia Drost, Adrian Sudhalter, Raphaël Bouvier, Jürgen Pech, Ralph Ubl, Gabriele Wix and others. The publication comprises 352 pages with approx. 343 illustrations. ISBN 9783906053080, English)

More images from the exhibition:


Max Ernst, The Entire City La ville entière, 1935–36. Oil on canvas, 60 × 81 cm. Kunsthaus Zurich© 2013, ProLitteris, Zurich. Photo: Kunsthaus Zurich.

Max Ernst, Painting for Young People, 1943. Oil on canvas, 60.5 × 76.5 cm. The Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection, Berlin© 2013, ProLitteris, Zurich. Photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin
\
Max Ernst, Napoleon in the Wilderness, 1941. Oil on canvas, 46.3 × 38 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York© 2013, ProLitteris, Zurich. Photo: © 2013, Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence.


Approaching Puberty… (The Pleiades)
la puberté proche... (les pléiades), 1921
Collage, gouache, and oil on paper,
mounted on cardboard, 24.5 × 16.5 cm
Private collection
© 2013, ProLitteris, Zurich



Ubu Imperator, 1923
Oil on canvas, 100 × 81 cm
Musée national d’art moderne,
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
© 2013, ProLitteris, Zurich
Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI,
Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Philippe Migeat



Woman, Old Man, and Flower
Weib, Greis und Blume, 1924
Oil on canvas, 97 × 130 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, © 2013, ProLitteris, Zurich
Photo: © 2013, Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York /
Scala, Florence


Max Ernst – Biography

Germany 1891 – 1922
1891 Max Ernst is born on 2 April in Brühl, near Cologne. He is the third of nine children born to
Philipp Ernst, a teacher for the mute and hearing impaired and an amateur painter, and his wife Luise.
1910 – 1914 Studies classical philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and art history at the University of
Bonn.
1913 Participates in the exhibition Rheinischer Expressionismus and briefly visits Paris for the first
time, where he meets Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay at the home of August Macke.
1914 Beginning of his friendship with Hans Arp, whom he meets in the Galerie Feldmann in Cologne.
Called up to serve in the artillery in the First World War.
1918 Marries the art historian Luise Straus.
1919 Founds the Cologne Dada group together with Hans Arp and Johannes Theodor Baargeld.
Dada exhibition in Cologne. Max Ernst creates his first collages. Visits Paul Klee in Munich.
1920 Birth of his son Hans-Ulrich Ernst, known as Jimmy.
1921 First exhibition of collages in Paris. Holiday with Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber, Tristan Tzara and
André Breton in Tarrenz (Tyrol).
France 1922 – 1941
1922 Max Ernst moves to Paris, leaving his wife and son behind.
1923 Max Ernst moves to Eaubonne outside Paris with Paul and Gala Éluard, where he takes on the
task of painting the rooms. He exhibits at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris
1924 André Breton publishes his first Surrealist manifesto.
1925 The Parisian art dealer Jacques Viot signs a contract with Max Ernst. The first frottages are
created.
1926 Divorces Luise Straus.
1927 Marries Marie-Berthe Aurenche. Begins his Horden, Wälder, Muschelblumen und
Vogeldenkmäler (Hordes, Forests, Shell-Flowers and Monuments to the Birds) series.
1929 Publication of the first collage novel La femme 100 têtes.
1930 Short role in Luis Buñuel’s film L’âge d’or. Foundation of the magazine Le surréalisme au service
de la révolution. Meets Alberto Giacometti.
1932 First one-man exhibitions in the USA at the Julien Levy Gallery, New York.
1934 Spends part of the summer in Zurich, where he paints a mural in the Corso Bar. Meets the
novelist James Joyce.
1936 Leaves Marie-Berthe Aurenche. 48 of his paintings are shown in the exhibition Fantastic Art,
Dada, Surrealism in New York.
1937 Publication of the essay Au-delà de la peinture in the magazine Cahiers d’art. The special issue
is dedicated to Max Ernst. He paints L’ange du foyer (Fireside Angel). A large number of his works are
confiscated in Germany and one painting is shown in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich.
1938 Max Ernst leaves the Surrealist group and goes to Saint-Martin d’Ardèche in the south of France
with his lover, the artist Leonora Carrington.
1939/40 Max Ernst is interned twice as an enemy alien. He is released after the intervention of Paul
Éluard. He creates many works using the technique of decalcomany.
America 1941 – 1953
1941 Escapes to the USA with the help of Peggy Guggenheim. They travel to California, Arizona, New
Mexico and New Orleans before getting married in December.
1941 Takes part in the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition staged by André Breton and Marcel
Duchamp; publication of the magazine VVV. Meets the artist Dorothea Tanning. Develops the
technique of oscillation.
1943 Is divorced from Peggy Guggenheim. Spends the summer with Dorothea Tanning in Arizona.
1944 Max Ernst works in Great River, Long Island, creating a new series of sculptures.
1945 Writes the script for and acts in an episode in Hans Richter’s film Dreams That Money Can Buy.
1946 Moves with Dorothea Tanning to Sedona, Arizona, where they build a house. Double wedding
ceremony in Beverly Hills: Max Ernst marries Dorothea Tanning, Man Ray marries Juliet Browner.
1947 The last major Surrealist exhibition is held at the Galerie Maeght in Paris.
1948 Starts working on the sculpture Capricorn. Robert Motherwell publishes Max Ernst. Beyond
Painting, and Other Writings by Max Ernst and his Friends. Max Ernst becomes a US citizen.
1950 Travels to Europe with Dorothea Tanning. Rents a studio in Paris.
1951 The first German retrospective of his work is shown in his birthplace Brühl on the occasion of his
60th birthday.
1952 Yves Tanguy visits Sedona. Max Ernst delivers a series of lectures in Honolulu.
Europe 1953 – 1976
1953 Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst return to France permanently. He works in the impasse Ronsin
next to Constantin Brancusi’s studio. His poem Das Schnabelpaar, illustrated with eight lithographs, is
published by Ernst Beyeler.
1954 Max Ernst is awarded the grand prize for painting at the 27th Venice Biennale. André Breton
thereupon excludes him from the Surrealist group.
1955 Moves to Huismes near Chinon (Touraine) with Dorothea Tanning. First solo show at the Galerie
Beyeler.
1956 Max Ernst becomes a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts. The Kunsthalle in Berne devotes
him a retrospective.
1957 Max Ernst receives the grand prize for painting of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Renewed
collaboration with film director Hans Richter for his film 8 x 8.
1958 Max Ernst becomes a French citizen. In September, 40 of his works are included in the
exhibition DADA. Dokumente einer Bewegung in the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle and the Stedelijk Museum
in Amsterdam.
1959 – 1962 Major retrospectives in Paris, New York, Chicago, London, Cologne and Zurich.
1963 Peter Schamoni makes a film about Max Ernst entitled Entdeckungfahrten ins Unbewusste
(Journeys into the subconscious). Two years later he makes a film about Ernst’s life entitled Mein
Vagabundieren – meine Unruhe (My vagabond years – my restlessness).
1964 Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning settle in the south of France (Seillans). He participates in
documenta III.
1966 Becomes an officer of the Legion of Honour. Participates in exhibitions in Venice, Zurich and
Berne. Meets Werner Spies.
1967 Creates colour etchings for a German edition of Samuel Beckett’s From an Abandoned Work.
Produces jewellery for the Galerie Le Point Cardinal, exhibiting designs by Ernst, Arp, Derain, Hugo,
Picasso, Tanning etc.
1968 Designs the set for Olivier Messiaen’s La Turangalîla at the Paris Opera.
1969/70 Major exhibitions in Stockholm, Amsterdam and Stuttgart. The rediscovered murals from
Eaubonne are shown by François Petit in Paris.
1972 Awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Bonn. Participates in documenta 5.
1974 Second one-man show at the Galerie Beyeler.
1975 Travels to New York for the major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which
later travels to the Grand Palais in Paris. Publication of the first two volumes of the catalogue raisonné
of his work. Max Ernst falls ill.
1976 Max Ernst dies in Paris on 1 April, during the night preceding his 85th birthday. He is buried in
the Père Lachaise cemetery. The Kaiserring, the international German art prize of the town of Goslar,
is awarded to him posthumously.

“Variations on America: Masterworks from American Art Forum Collections” celebrated the vision and passion of private collectors who are formally affiliated with the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibition presented 72 major artworks, several of which are rarely on public display, from 26 distinguished private collections by some of America’s most talented and cherished artists, including John Singer Sargent, Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe.

The exhibition was on view from April 13 through July 2 2007. “Variations on America” featured a wide range of paintings, watercolors, pastels, decorative arts and sculptures from the mid-19th century through the 20th century, selected by Chief Curator Eleanor Harvey and Deputy Chief Curator George Gurney.

The exhibition was presented in loose chronological groupings, beginning with two early portraits of children, each touched with sadness.



Henry Inman’s “Mistippee” (about 1833)

shows a young Creek boy, whose tribe was part of the “Trail of Tears” forced migration to the west.



Sarah Miriam Peale’s “Mary Leopold Griffith (1838–1841)” (1841)

is a posthumous portrait of a child felled by illness.



James McNeill Whistler’s “Harmony in Grey: Chelsea in Ice” (1864),

painted soon after his mother came to live with him in London, is one of the artist’s first great experiments with abstraction, prefiguring developments in his art almost a decade later. Broad swaths of grey and tan and white evoke ice floes on the Thames River, with the distant city nearly obscured in smoke and haze.

The exhibition included more than 10 seascapes and landscapes from the 1870s and 1880s, among them major artworks by Sanford Robinson Gifford, Martin Johnson Heade, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and Francis A. Silva, which suggest the variety of expression American artists found in nature.



Frederic Edwin Church’s “View from Olana in the Snow” (1871–1872)

is a magesterial view across the open landscape and river near the artist’s new home near Hudson, N.Y.



Arthur Wesley Dow’s “A Field, Kerlaouen” (1885),

often considered his finest work, creates an unusually intense mood through the handling of trees, an open field and an overcast sky.

Narrative paintings were included, such as



Eastman Johnson’s “Cardplaying at Fryeburg, Maine” (about 1865),

one of his best works celebrating the annual ritual of making maple sugar—a return to rural pleasures at a time of Civil War.



William McGregor Paxton, in “The Breakfast” (1911),

shows how a new marriage can be fraught with tension, even before the morning coffee cups have been cleared.

Some featured objects had not been on public view in many decades. The exhibition is a rare opportunity to see Louis Comfort Tiffany’s acclaimed three-panel stained glass “Dining Room Screen with Autumnal Fruits” (about 1900). When Tiffany exhibited the screen at the 1900 Paris Exposition Internationale, he was awarded the grand prize, beating his rivals René Lalique and Émile Gallé.

A delightful contrast was Reginald Marsh’s hilarious three-panel “Golf Course Scene” (1922), lampooning the foibles and fashions of golfers.

Three bronze sculptures capture the ambivalent and elegiac concern for Native American cultures early in the 20th century, after wars and broken treaties had forever transformed traditional tribal cultures. Adolph Weinman’s “Chief Blackbird—Ogalalla Sioux” (modeled 1903), Cyrus Dallin’s “Appeal to the Great Spirit” (modeled 1912) and James Earle Fraser’s “End of the Trail” (1918) summarize these complex emotions. These were joined by significant works depicting southwestern subjects by artists associated with the Taos School, including Ernest L. Blumenschein, Bert Geer Phillips and E. Martin Hennings.

Nearby, four major oil paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe revealed the range of her accomplishment, from the delicate blushed tones and vitalistic forms in



“Red Lines” (1923)

that recalled her earliest abstractions to the richly contrasting



“Birch and Pine Trees—Pink” (1925)

painted near Lake George to the monumental



“Black Cross with Red Sky” (1929)

that reveals the profound impact of her first trip to New Mexico

to the explosive



“Black Place No. IV” (1944)

with its surging land forms and burning colors.

One of the largest groupings was work by the Ashcan School artists who turned from academic studio painting to city streets and public parks and beaches for subjects. Two masterful and brisk pastels by Everett Shinn—



“Madison Square, Dewey Arch” (1899)



and “Washington Arch, After the Rain” (1902)—

contrast the daily routines of the average city dweller with the grand public monuments then appearing around New York City.



George Bellows’ “Noon” (1908)

presents industry and construction in the city as an heroic enterprise;

while



William Glackens’ “The Purple Dress” (1908–1910)



and Guy Pène du Bois’ “Intellect and Intuition” (1918)

focus on the “new woman” emerging in the age of suffrage marches and liberated lifestyles.

Three extraordinary oils celebrate the spectacle of leisure activities carried out in the public sphere, for all to watch:

Robert Henri’s



“At Joinville” (1896)



and “Far Rockaway” (1902),



and William Glackens’ “In the Buen Retiro” (1906)


A choice selection of eight watercolors was a rare chance to see works that are seldom exhibited because of their light-sensitivity.

Winslow Homer’s



“Watching Ships, Gloucester” (1875),

with three small boys in straw hats gazing out to sea, is among his most affecting works on the subject of American innocence.

Thomas Moran’s impressive



“Hot Springs of Gardiner’s River” (1872)

records the surreal hues of Yellowstone’s sulfur springs.

Maurice Prendergast’s



“Summer Visitors” (1896)

is a tour-de-force of technique, with 21 figures navigating stepping stones among the pools of water along Nantasket Beach near Boston, all on a 19 by 15-inch sheet of paper. Superb watercolors by Thomas Anshutz, John Marin, Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth complete this group.

Wyeth’s two watercolors were displayed with a major tempera painting by the artist called



“The Quaker” (1975)

that commemorates his father, N.C. Wyeth, and his father’s teacher, Howard Pyle.

Two paintings by Willem de Kooning— “Torso” (late 1950s)



and “Stowaway” (1986)

—are separated by almost 30 years, but displayed remarkable similarities in color and brushwork.

Two paintings by David Hockney—



“Savings and Loan Building” (1967)



and “Savings and Loan Building” (1987)

—show the artist’s canny reprocessing of minimalism and cubism into a witty personal vision.

Among the other modern and contemporary artworks are a large David Smith bronze sculpture and impressive canvases by Tom Wesselmann, Richard Estes, Alice Neel, Wayne Thiebaud and David Bates.

The exhibition concluded with a 10-foot-tall sculpture by Niki de Saint Phalle titled “La Lune” (1987), in which a goddess’ head appears within a mirrored crescent moon, atop a lobster and turtles encrusted with glass mosaic.

Publication



The catalog, co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and D Giles Ltd London, features color reproductions of each artwork with extended entries by the museum’s curators and a foreword by Broun.

Another image from the exhibition:




Reading“Le Figaro”
by Mary Cassatt, ca. 1877-1878, oil, 39 3/4 x 32. Private collection.

(click on links for more info and images)

When the first printed images appeared in Europe in the fifteenth century they were limited to the small size and shape of a sheet of paper that could fit in a standard printing press. By the sixteenth century, the ambition to rival paintings and to adorn wall surfaces prompted artists and printmakers to challenge these restrictions. Printed images were expanded in various ways to accommodate new formats. Large-scale woodcuts and engravings began to be printed on several sheets of paper that could be joined together to form a single picture. Some were arranged in frieze-like sequences similar to carved wall reliefs, while others were pieced together to emulate the scale of monumental murals and tapestries.

Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and Titian, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from January 31 – April 26, 2009, traced the rich history of an under-recognized aspect of Renaissance printmaking. This major loan exhibition featured a diverse group of nearly 50 rarely displayed prints dating from the late 15th to the early 17th century that are all uncommonly large in scale. They are printed from two or more woodblocks or engraving plates on multiple sheets that had to be joined together to form a single large picture. Drawn entirely from collections in the United States, Grand Scale was the first exhibition since the 1970s to explore this facet of printmaking with examples by some of the most important artists and printmakers of their day, including Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and Titian (c.1488-1576). Six of the works on view belonged to the Museum’s distinguished collection of old master prints.

Printmaking flourished as an art form in the sixteenth century with the introduction of etching and other technological advances. Painters and artists working in other mediums became increasingly involved in print projects and undoubtedly contributed to innovative approaches to scale. The subjects of oversize prints range widely from the imperial processions of the ancient Romans to the ceremonial grandeur that surrounded the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I (1459-1519); from the intrigues of Greek gods to the rowdy behavior of peasants in Reformation Germany; and from familiar biblical narratives to the nascent sciences of astronomy, warfare, and geography.

The exhibition included one of the most spectacular examples of early printed maps,





Jacopo de Barbari’s six-block woodcut, Map of Venice, 1500.

This woodcut is remarkable in all its aspects: its high viewpoint, its perspectival rendering of the city in minute – if not completely accurate — detail, as well as its enormous size (approximately four by nine feet). The delicately carved woodcut lines can be fully appreciated in the extraordinarily fine impression loaned to the exhibition by the Cleveland Museum of Art. This was among the prints that paved the way for some of the most impressive mural-sized woodcuts produced by the workshop of the Venetian painter Titian over a decade later.



The Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, c.1514,

printed from twelve blocks and measuring four by seven feet, was one of several works based on Titian’s designs featured in the exhibition.

Images of parades or processions, inspired by ancient Roman sources, became popular during the Renaissance and their sequential nature was especially well-suited to the multiple-sheet print format. Mimicking an architectural frieze, these printed sets bear direct comparison to sculpted or painted examples, and surely found similar use in interior decorative programs. Grand Scale presents several of these extended scenes, such as

Andrea Andreani’s The Triumph of Caesar, 1598–99,










and Jan Saenredam’s The Punishment of Niobe, 1594.



Pieter Coecke van Aelst I’s woodcut suite, Customs and Fashions of the Turks, 1553,

is based on drawings for tapestries made by the artist when he traveled to Istanbul in 1533. The tapestries were never executed, but the designs survive in this woodcut frieze of seven scenes that constitutes an important early document of Turkish culture based on direct observation.

Extraordinarily large prints were commissioned as decorative schemes for important festivals and commemorative events. A magnificent example was



The Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I, 1515,

an elaborate architectural design inspired by the triumphal arches of ancient Rome, on view in the exhibition. The Triumphal Arch is comprised of nearly 200 separate woodcut images and measures over 11 feet high – a complex visual tableau achieved as a collaborative project by artists in the service of Maximilian I, who reigned over much of Europe as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire from 1508-19. Albrecht Dürer oversaw the production of the woodcut blocks, which were executed by various artists in his circle. Overwhelming in its architectural scale and highly detailed in its individual scenes, the Triumphal Arch fulfilled its intended purpose, which was to celebrate the illustrious ancestry and achievements of the Hapsburg emperor.

The survival of these monumental prints is remarkable in itself. Most were far too large to be preserved in collector’s albums, while others that were attached to walls as decorations, or rolled up and stored in cupboards, simply disappeared over time. Because of the challenges in displaying such large works, the rare impressions that have remained intact often languish unassembled in storage. Grand Scale offers a unique opportunity for visitors to experience firsthand an important, yet little-known facet of Renaissance art.

Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and Titian was conceived and guest-curated by Larry Silver, Farquhar Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, in collaboration with Elizabeth Wyckoff, Assistant Director and Curator of Prints and Drawings, Davis Museum and Cultural Center. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Shelley Langdale, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings coordinated the exhibition.



A fully illustrated catalogue, with essays by leading scholars in the field, and featuring 62 b/w and 45 color illustrations, accompanied the exhibition.

From October 2, 2011 – January 29, 2012 the Fondation Beyeler displayed a comprehensive exhibition Surrealism in Paris. On view were major works by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, and many more who either belonged to the movement or were associated with it. The show focused on the innovative forms of expression developed and employed by the Surrealists – especially object art, collage, photography and film.

Surrealism was one of the most crucial artistic and literary movements of the twentieth century. After emerging in Paris in 1924, it unfolded a worldwide effect that continues to this day. Major modern artists belonged to the movement, were associated with it, or inspired by it. Its aim was radical change and expansion of the expressive means of art and poetry and their impact on society. Aspects of the psyche and creativity that had previously lay fallow were to be made fertile for artistic activity and human life as a whole.

Profoundly shaken by the experience of the First World War and under the leadership of its chief theoretician, André Breton, the Surrealists developed innovative approaches and lent form to an art that tapped poetic imagination, the world of dreams, and the unconscious mind. Their idols included Sigmund Freud and many writers, such as the scandalous Marquis de Sade, the poets Charles Baudelaire, Comte de Lautréamont, and Arthur Rimbaud, Edgar Allan Poe, and the German Romantics.

"Dalí, Magritte, Miró – Surrealism in Paris" comprised about 290 masterworks and manu-scripts by about 40 artists and authors. These included approximately 110 paintings, 30 objects and sculptures, 50 works on paper, 50 photographs, 30 manuscripts and original editions, 15 pieces of jewelry and four films. The exhibits were arranged in the exhibition spaces partly by artist, partly by theme. The introduction was provided by Giorgio de Chirico, a pioneering predecessor of Surrealism whose cityscapes and interiors of the 1910s can be considered decisive forerunners of the movement. On view as well were valuable manuscripts and editions of Surrealist texts, including manuscript versions of Breton's manifestos.

A further emphasis was placed on two major artists of the movement, Joan Miró and Max Ernst. Miró, who opened out entirely new spaces for modern art with his hovering dreamlike colored configurations, was represented by works such as



Painting (The Circus Horse), 1927, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

and Ernst by superb works such as the renowned

Wavering Woman (The Slanting Woman), 1923, from the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

One room was devoted to Yves Tanguy, whose imaginary spaces populated by mysterious objects – as in the monumental

The Last Days, 1944, from a private collection

– represent one of the most poetic evocations in all Surrealism.

The next space was devoted to a key Surrealist medium – the object. The works on view included Meret Oppenheim's famous



Ma gouvernante - My Nurse - Mein Kindermädchen, 1936/1967, from the Moderna Museet Stockholm,

and Hans Bellmer's major object The Doll, 1935-36, from the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Also brought together here were major drawings and paintings by Victor Brauner.

A special feature of the exhibition was the inclusion of two superb private collections of Surrealism. The presentation of that of André Breton and his first wife, Simone Collinet, represents a premiere. The couple amassed the collection in the 1920s, and after they separated Collinet expanded her share. Among the works in the collection are

Francis Picabia's large-scale painting Judith, 1929,



and de Chirico's The Evil Genius of a King, 1914-15, now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

On view in a second room were outstanding works from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, including



Max Ernst's The Antipope, 1941-42,

which the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice seldom permits to travel.

These works constituted an ensemble within the exhibition in which the period of the Surrealists' New York exile during World War II is virtually distilled.

The artists prominently represented in further rooms included Hans Arp, and not least Pablo Picasso, who for a time was closely associated with Surrealism. On view was his highly Surrealist painting



The Artist's Studio (The Open Window), 1929.

This was followed by an outstanding group of works by the visual magician René Magritte. In an inimitable way, Magritte's art captures visual reality only to subvert it again. Fine examples are the early



The Interpretation of Dreams, 1930,

and later major works such as

The Dominion of Light, 1962,

both from private collections.

A concise selection of outstanding Surrealist photographs, including works by Man Ray, Raoul Ubac, Dora Maar, and Eli Lotar rounded off the picture. A screening room presents key works of Surrealist cinematic art, including ones by Luis Buñuel and Man Ray.

The exhibition concluded with the artist who is likely the most famous Surrealist of all, Salvador Dalí. A spectacular group of his masterpieces on view here included



The Enigma of Desire, 1929, from the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich,



the outstanding Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937, from the Tate London,



and Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate, one Second before Awakening, 1944, from the Museo Thyssen Bornemisza in Madrid.

The exhibition linked up with previous Galerie Beyeler and Fondation Beyeler projects. Ernst Beyeler early on devoted various exhibitions to Surrealism in his Basel gallery, including the 1947 "Surréalisme et peinture" and the 1995-96 "Surrealismus: Traum des Jahrhunderts," as well as to individual representatives of the movement, bringing his unique eye for this art into play. Accordingly, the Beyeler Collection now boasts key works by such artists as Arp, Ernst, Miró and Picasso. The Fondation Beyeler can likewise look back on shows of Surrealist art, including "Calder, Miró", 2004, "Picasso surreal," 2005, "René Magritte: The Key to Dreams", 2005, and, with some Surrealist works, "Giacometti", 2009. These were supplemented by thematic exhibitions in which Surrealist art prominently figured. This Surrealism exhibition provided a panoramic view of the movement as a whole.

The exhibition was curated by Philippe Büttner, Fondation Beyeler Curator.

In addition to private lenders, the most important institutional lenders are: The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Fondation, New York); the Centre Georges Pompidou; Musée national d’art moderne, Paris; das Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Tate, London; Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich – Pinakothek der Moderne; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; das Museu Coleccao Berardo, Lisbon; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Menil Collection, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Kunstmuseum Basel and Kupferstichkabinett and the Kunsthaus Zürich and Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung.



The catalogue, published by Beyeler Museum AG and edited by Philippe Büttner, provides an introduction to the movement, presented the works on exhibit, and gives special attention to the question of the presentation of Surrealist art – both by the Surrealists themselves and in private collections. It contains essays by Quentin Bajac, Philippe Büttner, Julia Drost, Annabelle Görgen, Ioana Jimborean, Robert Kopp, Ulf Küster, Guido Magnaguagno, Philip Rylands, Marlen Schneider, Jonas Storsve und Oliver Wick, and a chronology of Surrealism by Valentina Locatelli. The lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue was published in a German and English edition by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, 289 pages and 304 full-color illustrations.

A second exhibition venue was at the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels (March to July 2012).

From October 21, 2009 to January 10, 2010 the Philadelphia Museum of Art presented a major traveling retrospective celebrating the extraordinary life and work of Arshile Gorky (American, born Armenia, c.1902-1948), a seminal figure in the movement towards gestural abstraction that would transform American art in the years after World War II. The first comprehensive survey of the work of this artist in nearly three decades, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective premiered at the Museum and presented 180 paintings, sculptures and works on paper reflecting the full scope of Gorky’s prolific career. Drawn from public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe, this retrospective evealed the evolution of Gorky’s unique visual vocabulary and mature style. It was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The exhibition traveled to Tate Modern, London (February 10 - May 3, 2010) and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (June 6 - September 20, 2010) following its debut in Philadelphia.

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective was the first major exhibition of its type since 1981 and the first to benefit from the publication of three biographies of the artist: Nouritza Matossian’s Black Angel: The Life of Arshile Gorky (1998), Matthew Spender’s From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky (1999), and Hayden Herrera’s Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work (2003), all of which shed new light on the artist’s Armenian background and his central role in the American avant-garde.

This was the first major museum exhibition to highlight the artist’s Armenian heritage and examine the impact of Gorky’s experience of the Armenian Genocide on his life and work.

(Click on links for more information)

The retrospective and its accompanying catalogue also benefited from in-depth interviews with the artist’s widow, Agnes “Mougouch” Gorky Fielding, who has generously supported the project from the start, through key loans and first-hand accounts of Gorky’s artistic practice as well as his cultural milieu. Among the works included were such renowned paintings as the two versions of



"The Artist and his Mother," 1926-36 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York)



and "The Artist and his Mother," about 1929-42 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.);



"The Liver is the Cock’s Comb," 1944 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery),

the artist’s largest easel painting;



"Water of the Flowery Mill," 1944 (Metropolitan Museum of Art),

which demonstrates his deep absorption in nature-based abstraction;



"The Plow and the Song series," 1944-47,

which reflects Gorky’s continuing engagement with memories of his rural Armenian childhood;



"Agony," 1947 (Museum of Modern Art, New York),

Gorky’s haunting late painting, a product of his increasingly tormented imagination in the late 1940s;



and "The Black Monk" (“Last Painting”) (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid),

which was left unfinished on Gorky’s easel at the time of his death in 1948.

Some of the works included in the exhibition had not been on public view before, among them the wood sculptures, "Haikakan Gutan I, II, and III" (Armenian Plow I, II and III), of 1944, 1945, and 1947 (collection of the Diocese of the Armenian Church of America (Eastern), on deposit at the Calouste Gulbenkiam Foundation, Lisbon), as well as the Museum’s recently acquired



"Woman with a Palette" (1927).

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective was presented in a generally chronological sequence. Thematic groupings will represent each phase of Gorky’s career, which underwent an astonishing metamorphosis as he assimilated the lessons of earlier masters and movements and utilized them in the service of his own artistic development. Beginning in the mid-1920s with Gorky’s earliest experiments with Impressionism and the structural rigor of the paintings of Paul Cézanne, and continuing through his prolonged engagement with Cubism in the 1930s, the exhibition ends with the Surrealist-inspired burst of creativity that dominated the final decade of Gorky’s life and left us with so many breathtakingly beautiful paintings and drawings. In the 1940s, Gorky’s contact with Surrealism informed his breakthrough landscapes in Virginia and the visionary works made in his spacious, light-filled studio on Union Square, which he called his “Creation Chamber.” Several galleries in the exhibition served as “creation chambers” in their own right, highlighting the artist’s working process by presenting Gorky’s most significant paintings alongside the numerous painstaking studies that informed their making.

Catalogue


The exhibition was accompanied by a 400-page catalogue, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press. The catalogue includes essays by a group of noted art historians and curators: Harry Cooper, Jody Patterson, Robert Storr, Michael Taylor, and Kim Theriault, who present new theoretical approaches to the artist’s work. The essays build upon new biographical details about the artist’s Armenian background that have emerged in recent years, while also exploring Gorky’s creative thinking, his unique experimentation and extraordinary command of materials, and his imaginative exploration of various themes. The catalogue is fully illustrated in color and includes a section devoted to Gorky’s exhibition history, a bibliography, and a chronology of his life and work.

About Arshile Gorky

Born Vosdanig Adoian around 1902 near Lake Van in an Armenian province of Ottoman Turkey, Gorky witnessed as a young boy the ethnic cleansing of his people, the minority Armenians. Turkish troops in 1915 drove Gorky’s family and thousands of others out of Van on a death march to the frontier of Caucasian Armenia. Suffering from starvation in 1919, during a time of severe deprivation for the Armenian refugees, Gorky’s mother died in his arms. With his sister, Vartoosh, he eventually arrived in the United States where, claiming to be a cousin of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, he changed his name to Arshile Gorky.

Gorky stayed briefly with relatives in Watertown and Boston, Massachusetts, before settling permanently in New York in 1924, where he studied at the Grand Central School of Art, later becoming an art instructor there. Gorky met and became fast friends with many of the city’s emerging avant-garde artists, including Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, John Graham, Isamu Noguchi, and David Smith. Among his students was Mark Rothko.

The noted art critic Harold Rosenberg observed that Gorky, “a lifelong student, was an intellectual to the roots, he lived in an aura of words and concepts, almost as much at home in the library as in the museum or gallery.” He was largely self-taught, visiting museums and galleries and reading voraciously. Gorky became familiar with modern European art and embarked on a systematic study of its masters and their methods, from Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, whose landscapes and still-lifes he emulated masterfully, to Pablo Picasso’s Cubist and neoclassical works, and the biomorphic abstractions of Joan Miró. Works by Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger informed, respectively, Gorky’s vast Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia series of the early 1930s and the sequence of murals on the theme of aviation that Gorky created in 1936 for the Administration Building of Newark Airport, under the aegis of the Public Works of Art Project (later the Works Progress Administration), through which Gorky and many other American modernists found employment during the Great Depression.

One of the key themes of Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective was the artist’s profound engagement with the Surrealist movement throughout the 1940s. Gorky’s relationships with members of the Surrealist group in exile in the United States, including its leader, André Breton, as well as painters Yves Tanguy, Wifredo Lam, and Max Ernst, and his close friendship with the Chilean-born artist Roberto Matta all contributed to the development of his singular visual vocabulary, a highly original form of Surrealist automatism characterized by biomorphic forms rendered with thinned-out washes of paint. After his marriage in 1941 to Agnes Magruder, whose parents had a farm in Virginia, Gorky’s experience of the American landscape would enrich his artistic vision, and, beginning in 1943, emerges as a central theme in the lush, evocative paintings for which Gorky is best known. The rich farmland and bucolic atmosphere of rural Virginia (and later Sherman, Connecticut) reminded Gorky of his father’s farm near Lake Van, and inspired him to create freely improvised abstract works that combined memories of his Armenian childhood with direct observations from nature. The resulting paintings, such as



"Scent of Apricots on the Fields" (1944) and "The Plow and the Song" series (1944-1947)(above), are remarkable for their evocative strength, lyrical beauty, and fecundity of organic forms.

Gorky’s last years were tragic. In January 1946, a fire in his Connecticut studio destroyed 27 recent paintings. Shortly thereafter, he underwent a painful operation for rectal cancer, and while recovering created some of the most powerful, though agonized, works of his final years, including the haunting "Charred Beloved" series (1946), which alludes to his lost paintings. In June 1948, Gorky was involved in a serious car accident that left him with a broken neck and temporarily paralyzed his painting arm. His young wife left him shortly afterward to pursue a brief affair with Matta, Gorky’s friend and mentor. Gorky took his own life on July 21, 1948, leaving behind an impressive body of work that secured his reputation as the last of the great Surrealist painters and an important precursor to Abstract Expressionism.

Gorky and Philadelphia

The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s extraordinary collection of modern art provided a unique context for understanding Gorky’s work, since it includes many paintings from the A.E. Gallatin Collection, such as



Fernand Léger’s "The City" (1919),



Pablo Picasso’s "Self-Portrait" (1906),



Giorgio de Chirico’s "The Fatal Temple" (1914),



and Joan Miró’s "Dog Barking at the Moon" (1926),

all of which inspired the artist during his formative years. Gorky often visited the Gallery of Living Art at New York University where the Gallatin Collection was on view in the 1920s and 1930s, and he made several paintings that were directly inspired by works by modern artists that he encountered there.

De Chirico’s painting "The Fatal Temple" (1914)

provided the point of departure for the





"Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia" series,

which consists of more than 80 drawings and paintings made between 1930 and 1934.

Gorky also had his first one-man show at the Mellon Galleries in Philadelphia in February 1934, and one of his first patrons was the noted Philadelphia collector Bernard Davis. Bernard and Irmgard Davis were keen collectors of modern art and assembled a large collection under the name of La France Art Institute, including numerous works by Gorky, many of which were later donated to prominent American museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gorky and his first wife Marny George even spent their honeymoon with the Davis family in Frankford, a neighborhood in northeast Philadelphia, during which time Gorky visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art (then known as the Pennsylvania Museum of Art) as well as the Barnes Foundation in nearby Merion. The Museum also owns three major works by Gorky that were included in the exhibition:



"Abstraction with a Palette" (1930),



"Dark Green Painting" (1948),

and the recently acquired "Woman with a Palette" (1927) (above).

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Tate Modern, London, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin presented Turner to Monet: Masterpieces from The Walters Art Museum from October 2, 2010 – January 2, 2011. This selection of forty nineteenth-century paintings included works from Impressionist artists Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas, as well as British and American masters J.M.W. Turner, Gilbert Stuart and Asher B. Durand, among others.

Selected by former Walters curator Eik Kahng for their art historical significance and fine quality, these paintings provided examples of the various artistic schools and movements of nineteenth century painting in Western Europe and the United States.

Highlights included:



J.A.D. Ingres’ neoclassical rendering of Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864)



and Eugène Delacroix’s Christ on the Sea of Galilee (1854),



as well as Monet’s Springtime (1872)



and Manet’s fascinating Café-Concert (1879).

The dialogue between the academic and avant-garde was further explored in



Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier’s 1814 (1862),

a jewel-like portrait of Napoleon on horseback,



and Mariano Fortuny’s astonishing satirical portrait of a clergyman – likely an inspiration for Francis Bacon’s pope paintings. While each work is deeply satisfying on its own, together they make an exhibition that captures well the historical breadth and depth of The Walters collection and of nineteenth-century painting.

Also included in the exhibition:



Rosa Bonheur
Ploughing Scene, 1854
Oil on canvas
31 ®ˆ x 43 ®˙ x 5 5/8 in. (80.01 x 111.13 x 14.29 cm)



Mariano José Maria Bernardo Fortuny y Carbó
Arab Fantasia, 1866-67
Oil on panel
33 ®˘ x 39 ®˙ x 5 ®˘ in. (84.5 x 101 x 13.3 cm)



Jules Adolphe Aimé Louis Breton
Returning from the Fields, 1871
Oil on canvas
42 ®˘ x 56 x 6 ®˙ in., 100 lb. (107.32 x 142.24 x 17.15 cm, 45.4 kg)



Thomas Couture
Lawyer Going to Court, 1860
Oil on canvas
26 ®˙ x 30 x 4 ®˙ in. (67.9 x 76.2 x 12.1 cm)



Charles-François Daubigny
The Coming Storm, Early Spring, 1874
Oil on panel
31 1/8 x 40 5/8 x 4 ®˙ in. (79.06 x 103.19 x 12.07 cm)



Edgar Degas
Before the Race, 1882-84
Oil on wood
22 ®˙ x 26 1/8 x 4 ®˘ in. (57.79 x 66.36 x 10.8 cm)





Asher Brown Durand
The Catskills, 1859
Oil on canvas
62 ®ˆ x 50 ®ˆ in. (158.8 x 128.3 cm)



Edouard Manet
At the Café, ca. 1879
Oil on canvas
26 x 23 x 3 in. (66 x 58.4 x 7.6 cm)



John Everett Millais
News from Home, 1856-57
Oil on panel
27 x 23 4 5/16 in. (68.6 x 58.4 x 11 cm)



Jean-François Millet
The Potato Harvest, 1855
Oil on canvas
37 x 41 ®˙ x 5 ®ˆ in. (94 x 106 x 14 cm)



Jean-François Millet
The Goose Girl, 1863
Oil on canvas
22 1/8 x 26 ®˘ x 4 ®ˆ in., 25 lb. (56.2 x 66.68 x 11.43 cm, 11.3 kg)



Claude Monet
Windmills Near Zaandam, 1871
Oil on canvas
29 x 42 ®ˆ x 4 in. (73.7 x 108 x 10.2 cm)



Rembrandt Peale
Portrait of Dr. Meer, 1795
Oil on canvas
29 x 24 ®ˆ in. (73.66 x 62.23 cm



Camille Pissarro
Route to Versailles, Louveciennes, 1869
Oil on canvas
24 x 28 x 4 ®ˆ in. (61 x 71.1 x 11.4 cm)



Camille Pissarro
The Church at Eragny, 1884
Oil on canvas
34 ®ˆ x 30 x 3 ®ˆ in. (87.6 x 76.2 x 8.9 cm)



Théodore Rousseau
A Swamp in the Landes, 1884
Oil on panel
30 1/8 x 36 x 6 1/8 in. (76.52 x 91.44 x 15.56 cm)



Alfred Sisley
The Terrace at Saint-Germain, Spain, 1875
Oil on canvas
42 ®˘ x 53 ®˙ x 6 ®˙ in., 80 lb. (107.32 x 136.53 x 17.15 cm, 36.3 kg)



Alfred Sisley
View of St. Mammès, ca. 1880
Oil on canvas
31 ®ˆ x 39 x 4 ®ˆ in. (80 x 99.1 x 11.4 cm)



Joseph Mallord William Turner
Raby Castle, the Seat of the Earl of Darlington, 1817
Oil on canvas
61 ®˙ x 85 ®ˆ x 7 in. (156.85 x 217.17 x 17.78 cm)

Nearly eighty masterpieces of Italian Renaissance drawing from Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, including a number of rarely seen works, were on view only at The Morgan Library & Museum from January 25 through April 20, 2008.

Michelangelo, Vasari, and Their Contemporaries: Drawings from the Uffizi surveyed the work of renowned masters who defined Florentine draftsmanship. The exhibition focused on works by important artists who participated in a major campaign of redecorating the famed Palazzo Vecchio, one of the most impressive buildings in Renaissance Florence and the focal point of artistic activity throughout the sixteenth century.

Under the auspices of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, (1519–74), this former city hall was transformed by the leading artists of the time into a palatial residence and an icon of Medici Florence. The artist-historian Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) acted as the mastermind and creative director of the complex and varied decorations for the palazzo, choosing as his collaborators the most talented painters in Florence. The exhibition demonstrates how drawing functioned not only as a means of planning the elaborate paintings, frescoes, and tapestries needed for the refurbishment of the palazzo, but also as a tool that facilitated the creative process for Vasari and his contemporaries.



Pontormo, Two Studies of Male Figures ; (1521). Black chalk and red chalk, red wash, heightened with white chalk. Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi.


PALAZZO VECCHIO

Palazzo Vecchio was built as the government headquarters of Florence during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. After Duke Cosimo I came to power in 1537 through a series of tense political machinations, the young ruler soon established his authority and significantly expanded Florentine territories and influence. A strong personality with a clear vision for his dukedom, Cosimo I moved his family from the traditional Medici residence to Palazzo Vecchio as a calculated gesture to confirm his identification with the state.

Cosimo I employed the arts as a means of demonstrating his absolute power. His decision to completely renovate and expand the palazzo was designed to exalt his status as sovereign against an extraordinarily prestigious backdrop. Historically, only the most respected artists and intellectuals had been involved with the palazzo’s alterations, and Cosimo’s campaign was no exception. Florence’s leading painters, sculptors, and architects were called upon to demonstrate their talents in the redecoration of the city’s historical and symbolic center, simultaneously glorifying their ruler as well as their own artistic endeavors.

THE ARTISTS

The exhibition was divided into three sections highlighting the artists who shaped the nature of Italian Renaissance drawing and contributed to the palazzo’s decorations under Duke Cosimo I.

The first section, “The Great Masters,” showcased the artists who directly preceded Vasari’s intervention in the palazzo and served as great artistic examples for subsequent generations. Michelangelo (1475–1564), who had already sculpted his masterpiece, the statue of David, for the palazzo and competed with Leonardo in the decoration of the palazzo’s main hall, was one of the preeminent models for Vasari and his collaborators. His black-chalk masterpiece, the



Bust of a Woman,

one of the so-called Divine Heads, exerted a tremendous influence on Florentine draftsmanship, and his sheet with studies of legs exemplifies his perfect anatomical constructions.

Andrea del Sarto (1486-1531), a guiding force in the history of Italian Renaissance art, also figured prominently in the exhibition with a red chalk Study of a Male Model, preparatory for his painting of the Madonna of the Stairs from the 1520s, and with a rare compositional study of high drama and emotional intensity, the



Lamentation of Christ.

Additionally, mannerist masters Pontormo (1494–1557), Rosso Fiorentino (1494–1540), Francesco Salviati (1510–1563), and Bronzino (1503–1572) were represented by exquisite examples of their graphic work. Michelangelo, Vasari, and Their Contemporaries: Drawings from the Uffizi



Pontormo’s vibrant study of Seated Male Figures

records his method of studying a live model’s movements to exceptional effect, and Rosso’s masterful yet highly personal approach to drawing is evident in his



Virgin and Child with Four Saints,

presumably a study for this oil painting:



Also on view were Bronzino’s meticulously rendered preparatory study for one of the nearly life-size figures that adorn the private chapel of Cosimo I’s wife Eleonora of Toledo (1522–1562) in the Palazzo Vecchio, and



Salviati’s great graphic masterpiece, a tapestry design of The Age of Gold.

The second section of the exhibition, “Vasari and His Collaborators,” focused on Vasari’s own drawings as well as those of his collaborators in the various rooms of the palazzo, in particular the magnificent Salone dei Cinquecento (Hall of the Five Hundred). Under Vasari’s direction, artists such as Alessandro Allori (1535–1607), Bernardo Buontalenti (1513–1608), Giovanni Stradanus (1523–1605), Santi di Tito (1536–1603), and Giovan Battista Naldini (1537–1591) collaborated on expansive painted scenes commemorating the duke’s military exploits as well as the Medici’s illustrious ancestors. Among Vasari’s drawings on view was an exceptional compositional study of The Siege of Milan for the Room of Leo X and a design for the Salone dei Cinquecento.

The final portion of the exhibition, “The Painters of the Studiolo,” showcased drawings by painters of the celebrated Studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici, Cosimo’s heir. Included were studies by late mannerist artists such as Girolamo Macchietti (1535–1592), Maso da San Friano (1531–1571) and Poppi (1544–1597).

From Intelligent Life:

I am amazed by the complicated flickering composition of Rosso Fiorentino's "Virgin and Child with SS. John the Baptist, Margaret, and Sebastian and an Elderly Male Saint (Joseph?)" from 1522-5, in black chalk and gray wash.

Ditto for the solid, sculptural muscularity (beefcake, again) of the



"Male Nude Seen From Behind" by Bronzino in 1540-6,

every arched muscle illuminated--the shadows creating an impossible stone texture.

I can hold a pen, but I know my pen stroke could never create the flutter of the



"Punishment of Titius", done by Poppi (a Michelangelo copy) in which the agitated bird flies down in feathered strokes on the softly moulded writhing figure, which may very well be as delicate and beautiful as the Michelangelo original.

It goes without saying that the drawings on view are not simply life drawings, or copies of other works. In this show drawing from life meets that special, master Mannerist edge. As Holland Cotter said in the New York Times, "everyone wanted to make art this good and this strange".

Michelangelo's bizarrely polished masculine figures and limbs sit across from a quick sketch by Pontormo, "Two Studies of Male Figures" from 1521, in which the males in question look like crash-test dummies, twisting and turning in heavy charcoal strokes, emerging from the chaos of the page.

From ArtTattler:

An important figure in the transition between mannerism and the baroque period at the end of the sixteenth century, Santi di Tito emphasized in his works a narrative clarity and simplicity of expression. This preparatory drawing is for a fresco in a chapel dedicated to St. Luke, the patron saint of the arts, in the church of Santissima Annunziata in Florence. Intended as an allegorical representation of architecture, its subject employs the story of Solomon directing the building of the temple, presented in a straightforward composition that directs the viewer’s eye to the main figures elegantly highlighted in brilliant white.



Known as the first chronicler of the lives of Renaissance artists, Vasari had a prominent career as artist to both the Medici court in Florence and the papal court in Rome. This drawing comes from one of the most important commissions of Vasari’s career: Pope Julius III hired him to oversee the design and construction of his family’s funerary chapel in Rome, a project supervised by Michelangelo. Probably a study for the figure of John the Evangelist, this drawing displays Vasari’s exceptional ability to conjure a figure in his mind and transfer it flawlessly to paper.



Trained by Bronzino and deeply familiar with Michelangelo’s sculpture, Allori was often commissioned to supply designs for the ducal tapestry workshop. This detailed representation of a crowd paying homage to Bacchus is the only preparatory drawing that survives from a series intended as models for tapestries with scenes from Bacchus’s life. Finely executed in a wide variety of techniques, this is a typical example of the increasing interest in exuberant decoration that characterized Florentine draftsmanship of the later sixteenth century.

More images and comments here and here.

The exhibition was organized by special arrangement with the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale fiorentino and the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi and was conceived by Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, former director of the Uffizi. It will only be shown in New York and is curated by Rhoda Eitel-Porter, Charles W. Engelhard Curator and department head of Drawings and Prints, The Morgan Library & Museum.


CATALOGUE



Michelangelo, Vasari, and Their Contemporaries: Drawings from the Uffizi was accompanied by a catalogue written by Annamaria Petrioli Tofani with contributions by Rhoda Eitel-Porter.



EXHIBITION CHECKLIST

The Great Masters



Michelangelo Buonarroti CAPRESE, FLORENCE, 1475–1564 ROME
Studies of a Male Leg (recto and verso)
Metalpoint (lead?)
342 x 280 mm (13 7/16 x 11 in.)
Inv. 18719


Michelangelo Buonarroti CAPRESE, FLORENCE, 1475–1564 ROME
Bust of a Woman, Head of an Old Man, and Bust of a Child
Verso: Male Heads and Other Studies
Black chalk
357 x 252 mm (14 1/10 x 9 15/16 in.)
Inv. 598


Andrea del Sarto (Andrea d’Agnolo) FLORENCE 1486–1530 FLORENCE
Studies of a Male Model Seated on the Ground
Verso: Study of Drapery
Red chalk and red wash
265 x 200 mm (10 7/10 x 7 7/8 in.)
Inv. 318


Andrea del Sarto (Andrea d’Agnolo) FLORENCE 1486–1530 FLORENCE
Lamentation of Christ
Black chalk and gray wash
Inscribed at lower center, in pen and brown ink di mano dandrea del Sarto
276 x 226 mm (10 7/8 x 8 7/8 in.)
Inv. 642


Pontormo (Jacopo Carucci) PONTORMO, EMPOLI, 1494–1556 FLORENCE
Two Studies of Male Figures
Verso: Seated Nude Boy
Black and red chalk, red wash, heightened with white chalk; verso: red chalk
285 x 408 mm (11 1/4 x 16 1/16 in.)
Inv. 6740


Pontormo (Jacopo Carucci) PONTORMO, EMPOLI, 1494–1556 FLORENCE
Male Nude Seen from Behind and Study of a Head
Verso: Study of a Male Nude
Black chalk on paper tinted pink; verso: black chalk
225 x 165 mm (8 7/8 x 6 1/2 in.)
Inv. 6593 F



Pontormo (Jacopo Carucci) PONTORMO, EMPOLI, 1494–1556 FLORENCE
Eve’s Expulsion from Earthly Paradise
Black chalk
291 x 210 mm (11 7/16 x 8 1/4 in.)
Inv. 6715


Rosso Fiorentino (Giovan Battista di Jacopo) FLORENCE 1494–1540 PARIS
Virgin and Child with SS. John the Baptist, Margaret, and Sebastian and an Elderly Male Saint (Joseph?)
Black chalk and gray wash
331 x 253 mm (13 x 19 15/16 in.)
Inv. 479


Rosso Fiorentino (Giovan Battista di Jacopo) FLORENCE 1494–1540 PARIS
Nude Woman Standing with One Arm Above Her Head
Red chalk, with traces of black chalk
365 x 176 mm (14 3/8 x 6 15/16 in.)
Inv. 6478


Andrea di Cosimo Feltrini FLORENCE 1477–1548 FLORENCE
Study for a Grotesque
Black chalk
171 x 283 mm (6 3/4 x 11 1/8 in.)
Inv. 143


Baccio Bandinelli FLORENCE 1493–1560 FLORENCE
Hercules Standing
Red chalk
405 x 197 mm (15 15/16 x 7 3/4 in.)
Inv. 520


Baccio Bandinelli FLORENCE 1493–1560 FLORENCE
Hercules and Cacus
Verso: Studies of Heads and Arms
Pen and brown ink (recto and verso)
399 x 282 mm (15 11/16 x 11 1/8 in.)
Inv. 714


Baccio Bandinelli FLORENCE 1493–1560 FLORENCE
Portrait of Duke Cosimo dei Medici
Black chalk, stumped
268 x 204 mm (10 9/16 x 8 in.)
Inv. 15010


Baccio Bandinelli FLORENCE 1493–1560 FLORENCE
Christ Shown to the People (Ecce Homo)
Pen and brown ink, with traces of black chalk
424 x 566 mm (16 11/16 x 22 1/4 in.)
Inv. 705


Bacchiacca (Francesco Ubertini) BORGO SAN LORENZO 1494–1557 FLORENCE
A Goat Being Milked
Verso: A Barking Dog
Black chalk, stumped, pricked for transfer; verso: black chalk, stumped
228 x 116 mm (9 x 4 9/16 in.)
Inv. 1927



Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo) FLORENCE 1503–1572 FLORENCE
Male Nude Seen from Behind
Black chalk, with gray wash, on paper tinted yellow ochre
422 x 165 mm (16 5/8 x 6 1/2 in.)
Inv. 6704


Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo) FLORENCE 1503–1572 FLORENCE
Study of Two Nude Half Figures and a Right Arm
Verso: Studies of Figures and Drapery
Black chalk, with touches of gray wash; verso: black chalk
322 x 247 mm (12 11/16 x 9 3/4 in.)
Inv. 10320


Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo) FLORENCE 1503–1572 FLORENCE
Flying Putti
Black chalk, stumped
263 x 184 mm (10 3/8 x 7 1/4 in.)
Inv. 570


Attributed to Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo) FLORENCE 1503–1572 FLORENCE
Half-Length Portrait of a Gentlewoman
Red chalk, red wash, with traces of white chalk
391 x 267 mm (15 3/8 x 10 1/2 in.)
Inv. 414


Francesco Salviati (Francesco de’ Rossi) FLORENCE 1510–1563 ROME
The Allegory of Fortune
Black chalk
457 x 296 mm (18 x 11 5/8 in.)
Inv. 609


Francesco Salviati (Francesco de’ Rossi) FLORENCE 1510–1563 ROME
The Age of Gold
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white gouache, over traces of black chalk
414 x 533 mm (16 5/16 x 21 in.)
Inv. 1194


Francesco Salviati (Francesco de’ Rossi) FLORENCE 1510–1563 ROME
A Seminude Youth with a Bow in His Right Hand
Red chalk, with traces of red wash
415 x 238 mm (16 5/16 x 9 3/8 in.)
Inv. 538 S

Bernardo Buontalenti FLORENCE 1513–1608 FLORENCE
Lunette with the Coat of Arms of Cosimo I dei Medici and Eleonora of Toledo
Verso: Lunette with the Medici Coat of Arms
Red chalk, pricked for transfer, on paper darkened by pouncing; verso: pen and brown ink, over black chalk
291 x 537 mm (11 7/16 x 21 1/8 in.)
Inv. 427


Vasari and His Collaborators
Giorgio Vasari AREZZO 1511–1574 FLORENCE
The Damned Soul (After Michelangelo)
Black chalk
232 x 198 mm (9 1/8 x 7 13/16 in.)
Inv. 18738

Giorgio Vasari AREZZO 1511–1574 FLORENCE
A Prophet
Pen and brown ink
284 x 167 mm (11 3/16 x 6 9/16 in.; original sheet, trimmed and laid down on secondary support)
Inv. 1207 S
Giorgio Vasari AREZZO 1511–1574 FLORENCE
Allegory of Charity
Pen and brown ink, with gray wash, heightened with white gouache, over traces of black chalk, on paper tinted yellow-ochre
413 x 250 mm (16 1/4 x 9 13/16 in.)
Inv. 1071 S

Giorgio Vasari AREZZO 1511–1574 FLORENCE
Study for the Decoration of a Loggia
Pen and brown ink, with brown wash, over traces of black chalk
294 x 479 mm (11 9/16 x 18 7/8 in.)
Inv. 1618


Giorgio Vasari AREZZO 1511–1574 FLORENCE
Study for the Decoration of a Ceiling with Virtue Overcoming Fortune and Envy
Pen and brown ink, with brown wash, over traces of black chalk
448 x 368 mm (17 5/8 x 14 1/2 in.)
Inv. 1617


Giorgio Vasari AREZZO 1511–1574 FLORENCE
Pietà
Pen and brown ink, over traces of black chalk
417 x 305 mm (16 7/16 x 12 in.)
Inv. 625


Giorgio Vasari AREZZO 1511–1574 FLORENCE
Study for a Frontispiece
Pen and brown ink
265 x 196 mm (10 7/16 x 7 3/4 in.)
Inv. 394


Giorgio Vasari AREZZO 1511–1574 FLORENCE
St. John the Evangelist
Black chalk
353 x 253 mm (13 7/8 x 9 15/16 in.)
Inv. 14274


Giorgio Vasari AREZZO 1511–1574 FLORENCE
Studies of Male Figures
Black chalk
212 x 364 mm (8 3/8 x 14 5/6 in.)
Inv. 13844


Giorgio Vasari AREZZO 1511–1574 FLORENCE
The Florentine Victory over Milan
Pen and brown ink, light brown wash, over black chalk, squared in black chalk
427 x 368 mm (16 13/16 x 14 1/2 in.)
Inv. 626


Giorgio Vasari AREZZO 1511–1574 FLORENCE
Male Figure Seated on a Stool
Black chalk, heightened with white gouache, on grayish green paper
364 x 212 mm (14 5/16 x 8 3/8 in.)
4 of 9



Inv. 8502


Giorgio Vasari AREZZO 1511–1574 FLORENCE
The Triumph of Cosimo I at Montemurlo
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, over traces of black chalk, heightened with white gouache, lightly squared in black chalk, on faded blue paper
392 x 271 mm (15 7/16 x 10 11/16 in.)
Inv. 1186


Giorgio Vasari AREZZO 1511–1574 FLORENCE
Study for a Ceiling Dedicated to Saturn
Pen and brown ink, light brown wash, over black chalk
376 x 402 mm (14 13/16 x 15 13/16 in.)
Inv. 7


Vincenzo Borghini FLORENCE 1515–1580 FLORENCE
Study for the Wainscot of the West Wall in the Salone dei Cinquecento
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, over black chalk
234 x 348 mm (9 3/16 x 13 11/16 in.)
Inv. 119


Vincenzo Borghini FLORENCE 1515–1580 FLORENCE
Study of a Fountain
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, over traces of black chalk
240 x 263 mm (9 7/16 x 10 3/8 in.)
Inv. 1611


Cristoforo Gherardi BORGO SAN SANSEPOLCRO 1508–1556 FLORENCE
Vulcan’s Forge
Pen and brown ink, brown wash
229 x 414 mm (9 x 16 5/6 in.)
Inv. 760


Giovanni Stradanus (Jan van der Straet) BRUGES 1523–1605 FLORENCE
The Triumph of the Florentine Army After Taking Siena
Pen and brown ink, brown and gray wash, over traces of black chalk
345 x 345 mm (13 9/16 x 13 9/16 in.)
Inv. 657


Giovanni Stradanus (Jan van der Straet) BRUGES 1523–1605 FLORENCE
The Capture of Vicopisano
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white gouache, on faded blue paper
377 x 185 mm (14 13/16 x 7 1/4 in.)
Inv. 1184


Giovanni Stradanus (Jan van der Straet) BRUGES 1523–1605 FLORENCE
The Fox and Hare Hunt
Pen and brown ink, with traces of white heightening
Inscribed at lower left, Della Strada/ inventor 1567
242 x 382 mm (9 1/2 x 15 in.)
Inv. 2347


Giovanni Stradanus (Jan van der Straet) BRUGES 1523–1605 FLORENCE
The Ship of Religion Guided by the Holy Spirit
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white gouache, over traces of black chalk, on paper tinted (?) with ochre
243 x 355 mm (9 5/8 x 14 in.)
Inv. 1082 S
5 of 9



Marco Marchetti da Faenza FAENZA ca. 1526/27–1588 FAENZA
Wall Decoration with the Medici Coat of Arms
Pen and brown ink, brown wash
217 x 308 mm (8 9/16 x 12 1/8 in.)
Inv. 95


Girolamo Macchietti FLORENCE 1535–1592 FLORENCE
The Adoration of the Magi
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, over black chalk, heightened with white gouache, on faded blue paper
263 x 216 mm (10 3/8 x 8 1/2 in.)
Inv. 1087


Girolamo Macchietti FLORENCE 1535–1592 FLORENCE
Head of a Young Man
Red chalk, red wash
284 x 206 mm (11 3/16 x 8 1/8 in.)
Inv. 7288


Giovan Battista Naldini FLORENCE 1537–1591 FLORENCE
A Satyr Holding a Bunch of Grapes
Black chalk, stumped, heightened with white gouache
412 x 245 mm (16 1/4 x 9 5/8 in.)
Inv. 17175


Giovan Battista Naldini FLORENCE 1537–1591 FLORENCE
Naval Battle
Black chalk, stumped, with traces of heightening in white gouache, on greenish blue paper
258 x 415 mm (10 3/16 x 16 5/16 in.)
Inv. 16501


Jacopo Zucchi FLORENCE ca.1540–1596 ROME
Allegory of the City of Pistoia
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white gouache, on paper tinted blue
212 x 212 mm (8 3/8 x 8 3/8 in.)
Inv. 1491


Friedrich Sustris PADUA ca. 1540–1599 MUNICH
The Triumph of Giuliano dei Medici
Pen and brown ink, light brown and gray wash, over black chalk; squared in black chalk
318 x 385 mm (12 1/2 x 15 3/16 in.)
Inv. 592


The Artists of the Studiolo
Carlo Portelli LORO CIUFFENNA before 1510–1574 FLORENCE
The Family of Darius Before Alexander
Pen and brown ink, with light brown wash, over black chalk
328 x 218 mm (12 15/16 x 8 9/16 in.)
Inv. 1482


Carlo Portelli LORO CIUFFENNA before 1510–1574 FLORENCE
Two Standing Figures, One Holding a Pitcher
Brush and light brown wash, over black chalk
330 x 217 mm (3 x 8 9/16 in.)
Inv. 12137


Jacopo Coppi (Jacopo del Meglio) 1523–1591
Women in a Landscape with the Allegory of a River
6 of 9



Pen and brown ink, with brown wash, over black chalk
246 x 382 mm (9 11/16 x 15 1/16)
Inv. 15556


Giovanni Stradanus (Jan van der Straet) BRUGES 1523–1605 FLORENCE
The Banquet of King Cyrus the Great
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white gouache, on paper tinted brown
292 x 644 mm (11 1/2 x 25 3/8 in.)
Inv. 2341


Giovanni Stradanus (Jan van der Straet) BRUGES 1523–1605 FLORENCE
Allegory of the Immortality of Poetry
Black chalk, pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white gouache, on paper tinted ochre; the figure of Time inserted on a separate piece of paper
Inscribed at lower right, Gio. Stradanu . . . faciebat 1585
469 x 344 mm (18 1/2 x 13 1/2 in.)
Inv. 544 S (and 825 E)
Maso da San Friano (Tommaso Manzuoli) FLORENCE 1531–1571 FLORENCE
An Angel in Flight and Separate Studies of Arms and a Head
Black chalk, gray wash, heightened with white gouache, on darkened blue paper
206 x 313 mm (8 1/8 x 12 5/16 in.)
Inv. 6466


Maso da San Friano (Tommaso Manzuoli) FLORENCE 1531–1571 FLORENCE
The Three Marys at the Tomb
Pen and brown ink and wash, over black chalk
184 x 311 mm (7 1/4 x 12 1/4 in.)
Inscribed at lower left, in pen and brown ink, Tommaso.
Inv. 7277


Maso da San Friano (Tommaso Manzuoli) FLORENCE 1531–1571 FLORENCE
The Risen Christ
Black chalk, with gray wash, on paper tinted gray
237 x 181 (9 5/16 x 7 1/8 in.)
Inscribed at lower left, in pen and brown ink, Tomso Manzuoli.
Inv. 7283


Maso da San Friano (Tommaso Manzuoli) FLORENCE 1531–1571 FLORENCE
Two Nude Children and a Dog
Black chalk, with gray wash, traces of white heightening, on blue-gray paper
254 x 295 mm (10 x 11 5/8 in.)
Inv. 1822 S
Girolamo Macchietti FLORENCE 1535–1592 FLORENCE
Male Nude Seen from Behind
Red chalk, with red wash, heightened with white, on paper tinted red
295 x 208 mm (11 5/8 x 8 3/16 in.)
Inv. 17585


Alessandro Allori FLORENCE 1535–1607 FLORENCE
Studies for a Man with a Naked Torso Holding a Sword
Black chalk, with touches of wash
430 x 278 mm (16 15/16 x 10 15/16 in.)
Inv. 10253


Alessandro Allori FLORENCE 1535–1607 FLORENCE
Study of a Pitcher
Black chalk, with brown wash
7 of 9



440 x 249 mm (17 5/16 x 9 13/16 in.)
Inv. 716


Alessandro Allori FLORENCE 1535–1607 FLORENCE
Seated Male Nude with Raised Right Arm
Black chalk, with touches of wash, heightened with white chalk, on paper tinted light brown
436 x 312 mm (17 3/16 x 12 1/4 in.)
Inv. 10206


Alessandro Allori FLORENCE 1535–1607 FLORENCE
Half-Length Male Portrait
Black chalk, stumped
363 x 258 mm (14 5/16 x 10 3/16 in.)
Inv. 18486


Bibliography: Petrioli Tofani 2002, p. 34.
Alessandro Allori FLORENCE 1535–1607 FLORENCE
The Triumph of Bacchus
Black chalk, pen and brown ink, with brown-gray wash, heightened with white gouache, on paper tinted light brown; squared in red chalk
281 x 471 mm (11 1/6 x 18 9/16 in.)
Inv. 740


Santi di Tito SANSEPOLCRO 1536–1603 FLORENCE
The Crossing of the Red Sea and a Study of Drapery
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, over traces of black chalk, over a drapery study in red chalk, on faded blue paper
269 x 204 mm (10 9/16 x 8 in.)
Inv. 2003 S
Santi di Tito SANSEPOLCRO 1536–1603 FLORENCE
Studies of the Head, the Face, and the Bust of a Child
Red chalk, stumped
163 x 213 mm (6 7/16 x 8 3/8 in.)
Inv. 16320


Santi di Tito SANSEPOLCRO 1536–1603 FLORENCE
Solomon Building the Temple of Jerusalem
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, over black chalk, heightened with white gouache, on faded blue paper; squared in black chalk
272 x 227 mm (10 11/16 x 8 15/16 in.)
Inv. 752


Santi di Tito SANSEPOLCRO 1536–1603 FLORENCE
Male Nude
Black chalk, stumped, with traces of white chalk, on blue paper
397 x 248 mm (15 5/8 x 9 3/4 in.)
Inv. 16326


Santi di Tito SANSEPOLCRO 1536–1603 FLORENCE
Battle Scene, Possibly the Victory of Joshua over the Amorites
Verso: Faint Sketch of a Nude Figure
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white gouache, on blue paper; squared in black chalk; verso: black chalk
286 x 217 mm (11 1/4 x 8 9/16 in.)
Inv. 7706


Giovan Battista Naldini FIESOLE 1537–1591 FLORENCE
Furius Camillus Punishes the Treacherous Schoolmaster of Falerii
Red chalk, stumped, heightened with white gouache
397 x 267 mm (15 5/8 x 10 1/2 in.)
Inv. 14609


Giovan Battista Naldini FIESOLE 1537–1591 FLORENCE
Head of a Youth Turned to the Left
Black and red chalk, heightened with white gouache
277 x 193 mm (10 15/16 x 7 5/8 in.)
Inv. 1965 S

Giovan Battista Naldini FIESOLE 1537–1591 FLORENCE
Seated Male Nude
Verso: Study of Legs
Black chalk, stumped, heightened with white gouache, on blue paper
267 x 180 mm (10 1/2 x 7 1/16 in.)
Inv. 6540


Jacopo Zucchi FLORENCE ca.1540–1596 ROME
Studies of Decorative Elements (recto and verso)
Pen and brown ink, with brown wash; verso: black chalk, pen and brown ink, with light brown wash
340 x 252 mm (13 3/8 x 9 15/16 in.)

Giovanni Maria Butteri FLORENCE ca.1540–1606 FLORENCE
Allegory of the River Mugnone
Verso: Allegory of the River Arno
Black chalk, stumped, squared in black chalk; verso: black chalk
149 x 230 mm (5 7/8 x 9 1/16 in.)
Inv. 7260


Poppi (Francesco Morandini) POPPI 1544–1597 FLORENCE
Two Nude Figures Fighting
Black chalk, stumped, heightened with white chalk, on blue paper
277 x 192 mm (10 15/16 x 7 9/16 in.)
Inv. 1797


Poppi (Francesco Morandini) POPPI 1544–1597 FLORENCE
The Punishment of Titius
Black chalk
221 x 339 mm (8 11/16 x 13 3/8 in.)
Inv. 248


Poppi (Francesco Morandini) POPPI 1544–1597 FLORENCE
Composition with Copies of Sculptural Models
Black chalk, with gray wash
148 x 105 mm (5 13/16 x 4 1/8 in.)
Inv. 4274


Poppi (Francesco Morandini) POPPI 1544–1597 FLORENCE
Four Heads
Black chalk, with gray wash
142 x 96 mm (5 9/16 x 3 3/4 in.)
Inv. 4257 F

HARP-PLAYER. From an Egyptian painting.


EGYPT.

Egyptian painting is principally found on the walls of temples and tombs, upon columns and cornices, and on small articles found in burial places. There is no doubt that it was used as a decoration; but it was also intended to be useful, and was so employed as to tell the history of the country;--its wars, with their conquests and triumphs, and the lives of the kings, and many other stories, are just as distinctly told by pictures as by the hieroglyphics or Egyptian writings. We can scarcely say that Egyptian painting is beautiful; but it certainly is very interesting.



KING RAMESSES II. AND HIS SONS STORMING A FORTRESS

The Egyptians had three kinds of painting: one on flat surfaces, a second on bas-reliefs, or designs a little raised and then colored, and a third on designs in _intaglio_, or hollowed out from the flat surface and the colors applied to the figures thus cut out. They had no knowledge of what we call perspective, that is, the art of representing a variety of objects on one flat surface, and making them appear to be at different distances from us--and you will see from the illustrations given here that their drawing and their manner of expressing the meaning of what they painted were very crude. As far as the pictorial effect is concerned, there is very little difference between the three modes of Egyptian painting; their general appearance is very nearly the same.

The Egyptian artist sacrificed everything to the one consideration of telling his story clearly; the way in which he did this was sometimes very amusing, such as the making one man twice as tall as another in order to signify that he was of high position, such as a king or an officer of high rank. When figures are represented as following each other, those that are behind are frequently taller than those in front, and sometimes those that are farthest back are ranged in rows, with the feet of one row entirely above the heads of the others. This illustration of the storming of a fort by a king and his sons will show you this. The sons are intended to be represented as following the father, and are in a row, one above the other (Fig. 2).

For the representation of water, a strip of blue filled in with perpendicular zigzag black lines was used. From these few facts you can understand how unformed and awkward Egyptian pictures seem if we compare them with the existing idea of what is beautiful. There appear to have been certain fixed rules for the use of colors, and certain objects were always painted in the colors prescribed for them. The background of a picture was always of a single, solid color; Egyptian men were painted in a reddish brown, and horses were of the same shade; women were generally yellow, sometimes a lighter brown than the men; negroes were black, the Asiatic races yellow, and but one instance is known of a white skin, blue eyes, and yellow hair. The draperies about the figures were painted in pleasing colors, and were sometimes transparent, so that the figures could be seen through them.



PORTRAIT OF QUEEN TAIA

The execution of Egyptian paintings was very mechanical. One set of workmen prepared the plaster on the wall for the reception of the colors; another set drew all the outlines in red; then, if chiselling was to be done, another class performed this labor; and, finally, still others put on the colors. Of course nothing could be more matter-of-fact than such painting as this, and under such rules an artist of the most lofty genius and imagination would find it impossible to express his conceptions in his work. We know all this because some of these pictures exist in an unfinished condition, and are left in the various stages of execution; then, too, there are other pictures of the painters at their work, and all these different processes are shown in them. The outline drawing is the best part of Egyptian painting, and this is frequently very cleverly done.




HUNTING IN THE MARSHES. TOMB OF TI, SACCARAH



OFFERINGS TO THE DEAD, WALL PAINTING, EIGHTEENTH DYNASTY



VIGNETTE ON PAPYRUS, LOUVRE



ANCIENT GREECE AND ITALY.

The painting of Greece and that of ancient Italy are so much the same that it is almost impossible to speak of them separately; the art of painting was carried from Greece to Italy by the Etruscans, and the art of ancient Rome was simply that of Greece transplanted. If Greek artists were employed by Romans, certainly their works were Greek; and if Romans painted they aimed to imitate the Greeks exactly, so that Italian painting before the time of the Christian era must be considered together with that of Greece.

In architecture and sculpture the ancient Greeks accepted what had been done by the Egyptians and Assyrians as a foundation, and went on to perfect the work of the older nations through the aid of poetic and artistic imaginations. But in painting the Greeks followed nothing that had preceded them. They were the first to make pictures which were a life-like reproduction of what they saw about them: they were the first to separate painting from sculpture, and to give it such importance as would permit it to have its own place, quite free from the influence of any other art, and in its own way as grand and as beautiful as its sister arts.

Apollodorus, an Athenian who lived at about the close of the fifth century B. was the first one who knew how to make his pictures appear to be real, and to follow the rules of perspective so as to have a background from which his figures stood out, and to shade his colors and soften his outlines. He was very famous, and was called _skiagraphos_, which means shadow painter.

The works of the ancient painters which still remain in various countries are wall-paintings, paintings on vases, mosaics, paintings on stone, and certain so-called miniatures; and besides these principal works there are many small articles, such as mirrors, toilet-cases, and other useful objects, which are decorated in colors.

Murals, or wall-paintings, are the most important and interesting remains of ancient painting.

The Etruscan tombs which have been opened contain many beautiful objects of various kinds, and were frequently decorated with mural pictures. They often consist of several rooms, and have the appearance of being prepared as a home for the living rather than for the dead.



[FIG. 5.--ETRUSCAN WALL-PAINTING.]

Fig. 5 is in a tomb known as the Grotta della Querciola. The upper part represents a feast, and the lower portion a boar-hunt in a wood, which is indicated by the few trees and the little twigs which are intended to represent the underbrush of the forest. If we compare these pictures with the works of the best Italian masters, they seem very crude and almost childish in their simplicity; but, if we contrast them with the paintings of the Egyptians, we see that a great advance has been made since the earliest paintings of which we know were done. The pose and action of the figures and their grace of movement, as well as the folding of the draperies, are far better than anything earlier than the Greek painting of which there is any knowledge; for, as we have said, these Etruscan works are essentially Greek.



[FIG. 6.--HUMAN SACRIFICE OFFERED BY ACHILLES TO THE SHADE OF PATROKLOS. _From an Etruscan wall-painting._]

Fig. 6 belongs to a later period than the other, and is taken from a tomb at Vulci which was opened in 1857 by François. This tomb has seven different chambers, several of which are decorated with wall-paintings of mythological subjects. A square chamber at the end of the tomb has the most important pictures. On one side the human sacrifices which were customary at Etruscan funerals are represented: the pictures are very painful, and the terror and agony of the poor victims who are being put to death make them really repulsive to see. On an opposite wall is the painting from which our cut is taken. This represents the sacrifices made before Troy by Achilles, on account of the death of his dear friend Patroklos. The figure with the hammer is Charon, who stands ready to receive the sacrifice which is intended to win his favor. Your mythology will tell you the story, which is too long to be given here. The realism of this picture is shocking in its effect, and yet there is something about the manner of the drawing and the arrangement of the whole design that fixes our attention even while it makes us shudder.

The ancient wall-paintings which have been found in Rome are far more varied than are those of Etruria; for, while some of the Roman pictures are found in tombs, others are taken from baths, palaces, and villas. They generally belong to one period, and that is about the close of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire. Modern excavations have revealed many of these ancient paintings; but so many of them crumble and fade away so soon after they are exposed to the air, that few remain in a condition to afford any satisfaction in seeing them. But fortunately drawings have been made of nearly all these pictures before they fell into decay.



FIG. 7.--THE ALDOBRANDINI MARRIAGE. From a wall-painting in the Vatican.

Some of the ancient paintings have been carefully removed from the walls where they were found, and placed in museums and other collections. One of the finest of these is in the Vatican, and is called the Aldobrandini Marriage. It received this name from the fact that Cardinal Aldobrandini was its first possessor after its discovery, near the Arch of Gallienus, in 1606.

As you will see from Fig. 7, from it, there are three distinct groups represented. In the centre the bride veiled, with her head modestly bowed down, is seated on a couch with a woman beside her who seems to be arranging some part of her toilet, while another stands near holding ointment and a bowl. At the head of the couch the bridegroom is seated on a threshold. The upper part of his figure is bare, and he has a garland upon his head. On the right of the picture an ante-room is represented in which are three women with musical instruments, singing sacrificial songs. To the left, in another apartment, three other women are preparing a bath. This is charming on account of the sweet, serious way in which the whole story is placed before us; but as a painting it is an inferior work of art--not in the least above the style which we should call house decoration.

Although ancient writers had spoken of landscape paintings, it was not until 1848-1850, when a series of them was discovered on the Esquiline in Rome, that any very satisfactory specimens could be shown. These pictures number eight: six are complete, of the seventh but half remains, and the eighth is in a very imperfect state. They may be called historical landscapes, because each one has a complete landscape as well as figures which tell a story. They illustrate certain passages from the Odyssey of Homer. The one from which our cut is taken shows the visit of Ulysses to the lower world. When on the wall the pictures were divided by pilasters, and finished at the top by a border or frieze. The pilasters are bright red, and the chief colors in the picture are a yellowish brown and a greenish blue. In this scene the way in which the light streams through the entrance to the lower world is very striking, and shows the many figures there with the best possible effect. Even those in the far distance on the right are distinctly seen. This collection of Esquiline wall-paintings is now in the Vatican Library.



[Illustration: FIG. 8.--LANDSCAPE ILLUSTRATION TO THE ODYSSEY. _From a wall-painting discovered on the Esquiline at Rome._]

Besides the ancient mural paintings which have been placed in the museums of Rome, there are others which still remain where they were painted, in palaces, villas, and tombs. Perhaps those in the house of Livia are the most interesting; they represent mythological stories, and one frieze has different scenes of street life in an ancient town. Though these decorations are done in a mechanical sort of painting, such as is practised by the ordinary fresco painters of our own time, yet there was sufficient artistic feeling in their authors to prevent their repeating any one design.

The variety of subjects at Pompeii is large: there are landscapes, hunting scenes, mythological subjects, numerous kinds of single figures, such as dancing girls, the hours, or seasons, graces, satyrs, and many others; devotional pictures, such as representations of the ancient divinities, lares, penates, and genii; pictures of tavern scenes, of mechanics at their work; rope-dancers and representations of various games, gladiatorial contests, _genre_ scenes from the lives of children, youths, and women, festival ceremonies, actors, poets, and stage scenes, and last, but not least, many caricatures, of which here is an example (Fig. 9).



[Illustration: FIG. 9.--THE FLIGHT OF ÆNEAS. _From a wall-painting._]

The largest dog is Æneas, who leads the little Ascanius by the hand and carries his father, Anchises, on his shoulder. Frequently in the ancient caricatures monkeys are made to take the part of historical and imaginary heroes.



[Illustration: FIG. 10.--DEMETER ENTHRONED. _From a Pompeian wall-painting._]

Fig. 10, of Demeter, or Ceres, enthroned is an example of such devotional paintings as were placed above the altars and shrines for private worship in the houses of Pompeii, or at the street corners, just as we now see pictures and sacred figures in street shrines in Roman Catholic countries. In ancient days, as now, these pictures were often done in a coarse and careless manner, as if religious use, and not art, was the object in the mind of the artist.



[Illustration: FIG. 11.--POMPEIAN WALL-PAINTING.]

Fig. 11 shows you how these painted walls were sometimes divided; the principal subjects were surrounded by ornamental borders, and the spaces between filled in with all sorts of little compartments. The small spaces in this picture are quite regular in form; but frequently they are of varied shapes, and give a very decorative effect to the whole work. The colors used upon these different panels, as they may be called, were usually red, yellow, black, and white--more rarely blue and green. Sometimes the entire decoration consisted of these small, variously colored spaces, divided by some graceful little border, with a very small figure, plant, or other object in the centre of each space.

[Illustration: FIG. 12.--NEST OF CUPIDS. _From a Pompeian wall-painting._]




Fig. 12, of a Nest of Cupids is a very interesting example of Pompeian painting, and more nearly resembles pictures of later times than does any other ancient painting .

MOSAICS.

The pictures known as mosaics are made by fitting together bits of marble, stone, or glass of different colors and so arranging them as to represent figures and objects of various kinds, so that at a distance they have much the same effect as that of pictures painted with brush and colors. The art of making mosaics is very ancient, and was probably invented in the East, where it was used for borders and other decorations in regular set patterns. It was not until after the time of Alexander the Great that the Greeks used this process for making pictures. At first, too, mosaics were used for floors or pavements only, and the designs in them were somewhat like those of the tile pavements of our own time.

This picture of doves will give you a good idea of a mosaic; this subject is a very interesting one, because it is said to have been first made by Sosos in Pergamos. It was often repeated in later days, and that from which our cut is taken was found in the ruins of Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, near Rome; it is known as the Capitoline Doves, from the fact that it is now in the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Few works of ancient art are more admired and as frequently copied as this mosaic: it is not unusual to see ladies wear brooches with this design in fine mosaic work.




Fig. 13.—Doves Seated on a Bowl.

From a mosaic picture in the Capitol, Rome.
A few examples of ancient mosaics which were used for wall decorations have been found; they may almost be said not to exceed a dozen; but pavement mosaics are very numerous, and are still seen in the places for which they were designed and where they have been during many centuries, as well as in museums to which they have been removed. They are so hard in outline and so mechanical in every way that they are not very attractive if we think of them as pictures, and their chief interest is in the skill and patience with which mosaic workers combine the numberless particles of one substance and another which go to make up the whole.

Mosaic pictures, as a rule, are not large; but one found at Palestrina, which is called the Nile mosaic, is six by five metres inside. Its subject is the inundation of a village on the river Nile. There are an immense number of figures and a variety of scenes in it; there are Egyptians hunting the Nile horse, a party of revellers in a bower draped with vines, bands of warriors and other groups of men occupied in different pursuits, and all represented at the season when the Nile overflows its banks. This is a very remarkable work, and it has been proved that a portion of the original is in the Berlin Museum, and has been replaced by a copy at Palestrina.

PAINTINGS ON STONE.

It is well known that much of the decoration of Greek edifices was in colors. Of course these paintings were put upon the marble and stone of which the structures were made. The Greeks also made small pictures and painted them on stone, just as canvas and panels of wood are now used. Such painted slabs have been found in Herculaneum, in Corneto, and in different Etruscan tombs; but the most important and satisfactory one was found at Pompeii in 1872. Since then the colors have almost vanished; but Fig. 14, from it, will show you how it appeared when found. It represents the mythological story of the punishment of Niobe, and is very beautiful in its design.

VASE-PAINTING.

Vase-painting was another art very much practised by the ancients. So much can be said of it that it would require more space than we can give for its history even in outline. So I shall only say that it fills an important place in historic art, because from the thousands of ancient vases that have been found in one country and another, much has been learned concerning the history of these lands and the manners and customs of their people; occasionally inscriptions are found upon decorated vases which are of great value to scholars who study the history of the past.



Fig. 14.—Niobe. From a picture on a slab of granite at Pompeii.



Fig. 15.—The Dodwell Vase. At Munich.

The Dodwell vase shows you the more simple style of decoration which was used in the earlier times. Gradually the designs came to be more and more elaborate, until whole stories were as distinctly told by the pictures on vases as if they had been written out in books. The next cut, which is made from a vase-painting, will show what I mean.

The subject of Fig. 16 is connected with the service of the dead, and shows a scene in the under world, such as accorded with ancient religious notions. In the upper portion the friends of the deceased are grouped around a little temple. Scholars trace the manufacture of these vases back to very ancient days, and down to its decline, about two centuries before Christ. I do not mean that vase-painting ceased then, for its latest traces come down to 65 b.c.; but like all other ancient arts, it was then in a state of decadence. Though vase-painting was one of the lesser arts, its importance can scarcely be overestimated, and it fully merits the devoted study and admiration which it receives from those who are learned in its history.



Fig. 16.—Scene in the Lower World.
From a vase of the style of Lower Italy.

The largest and most comprehensive retrospective ever presented in the United States of the career of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), one of the greatest landscape painters in the history of art, premiered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

The exhibition of approximately 140 works, divided almost evenly between oils and works on paper, will include masterworks representing his extensive range of subjects-seascapes, topographical views, historical events, mythology, modern life, and scenes from his own fertile imagination-many of which have never been shown in the United States.

J.M.W. Turner was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, (October 1, 2007 - January 6, 2008), the Dallas Museum of Art (February 10 - May 18, 2008), and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (June 24 - September 21, 2008), in association with Tate Britain, London, which lent 86 works from its vast and impressive Turner bequest.

The exhibition was arranged chronologically. Among the paintings in the show were



Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812),

one of Turner's greatest achievements,



The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 (1822-1824),



Detail from "The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805," oil on canvas, 102-144 inches National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Hospital Collection

the largest painting by Turner and his only royal commission, from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England;



and Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus-Homer's Odyssey (exh. 1829),

a major mythological painting from the National Gallery, London;

as well as the masterpieces



Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight (1835)



and Mortlake Terrace (1827)

from the National Gallery of Art's own collection of 114 works by Turner.

The exhibition also surveyed Turner's mastery of watercolor from highly innovative and experimental sketches and studies to large-scale finished works. Among these were



Tintern Abbey (1794),



The Battle of Fort Rock, Val d'Aouste, Piedmont 1796 (1815),



and Norham Castle, on the River Tweed (c. 1822-1823) from Tate Britain.

The exhibition was selected by a team of American curators- Franklin Kelly, senior curator of American and British painting, National Gallery of Art; Dorothy Kosinski, senior curator of painting and sculpture and The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art, Dallas Museum of Art; and Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator in Charge of the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; in collaboration with Ian Warrell, curator of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century art, Tate Britain.



The 320-page exhibition catalogue, which is fully illustrated with 210 color and 50 black and white images, includes an overview of the artist's life and career by Warrell and an essay by Kelly entitled "Turner and American Art." It was published by Tate Enterprises, Ltd and Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

The Artist

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born the son of a barber, in Covent Garden, London. He worked as an assistant to an architect and studied at the Royal Academy Schools. His early work consisted of drawings and watercolors; he exhibited his first oil painting, Fishermen at Sea, in 1796 at the Royal Academy. Success came at the age of 27 and Turner eventually came to see his works as rivaling those of the old masters of European art.

During his career he prolifically documented his travels throughout England, Scotland, Wales, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Bohemia, Switzerland, and Italy. In his late period, when Turner was concerned with the painting of light, subject matter became almost secondary. He sent paintings to the Royal Academy, which were described by one contemporary as being "without form and void, like chaos before the creation." Renowned British art historian and critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) perceived Turner's paintings to be unique in the degree to which they wedded detailed observations of nature to grand general effects.

Excellent article, more images

Jan Gossaert (active 1503; died 1532) was one of the most startling and versatile artists of the Northern Renaissance. A pivotal Old Master, Gossaert changed the course of Flemish art, going beyond the tradition of Jan van Eyck and charting new territory that eventually led to the great age of Rubens – yet this is the first major exhibition dedicated to him in more than 45 years.

'Jan Gossaert’s Renaissance' at the National Gallery, London, 23 February – 30 May 2011 included more than 80 works, and placed Gossaert in the context of the art and artists that influenced his development. It brought together many of the artist’s most important paintings



('Virgin and Child', about 1527, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid;



'Hercules and Deianeira', 1517, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham;



and 'Saint Luke Painting the Virgin', 1520–22, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

with drawings, prints and contemporaneous sculptures.

Gossaert made his name working for wealthy and extravagant members of the Burgundian court in the Low Countries. In 1508–9, as part of a Vatican embassy, he was the first Northern artist to travel to Rome to make copies after antique sculpture. He became the first artist to introduce the Italian Renaissance style of depicting historical and mythological subjects with sensuous nude figures into the art of the Low Countries.

The National Gallery has one of the largest and finest collections of Gossaert's paintings in the world – a highlight being



'The Adoration of the Kings' (1510–15).

This landmark exhibition allowed them to be set in the context of the full range of the artist’s work, from the fruits of his early visit to Rome to the unusually erotic presentation of the nude in his Adam and Eve series.

'Jan Gossaert’s Renaissance' was displayed across six rooms and traced the key themes of the artist’s work. Renaissance sculpture, prints and drawings by contemporaries such as Albrecht Dürer, Jacopo de’Barbari and Lucas van Leyden are included to demonstrate the artistic milieu of which he was a part.

The story of Adam and Eve fascinated Gossaert, and he would return to this theme numerous times over the span of his 30-year career. Room 2 of the exhibition demonstrated how he explored the erotic nature of the relationship between the first couple in some exceptional – almost unprecedented – paintings and drawings. The earliest example in Gossaert’s oeuvre,



'Adam and Eve' (about 1510, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid)

and the peerless



'Adam and Eve' (about 1520, Royal Collection)

were displayed alongside some of his preparatory drawings as well as



Dürer’s famous 1504 engraving of 'Adam and Eve' (British Museum, London).

Although Gossaert’s early 'Adam and Eve' was initially based on this famous, imaginative work, his erotic and psychological interpretations diverged greatly from Dürer’s interest in the perfect human form, as he explored the bold sensuality of the two figures.

This room also examined Gossaert’s interest in the Gothic tradition, the new Renaissance and architectural motifs. The 'Adoration of the Kings' was shown alongside prints that provided source material for the parts of the composition, enabling visitors to further explore this sumptuous altarpiece.

Another highlight of the exhibition was the reuniting of a triptych for the first time since it was painted in the early 16th century – with centre panel



'Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane' (1509–10, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin),

and its exterior wings



'Saint Jerome Penitent' (both panels framed together, National Gallery of Art, Washington).

Gossaert’s masterpiece



'Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane'

is one of the most carefully observed and naturalistic night scenes painted at that time. With its backlit angel, beneath a sliver of silvery moon and an unusual youthful Christ kneeling in prayer, this impressive painting combines an extraordinarily realistic effect of the moon and unusual lighting effects with a powerfully atmospheric depiction of the biblical scene.

Some of Jan Gossaert’s most compelling paintings depict sensuous, mythological nudes that can be understood as a celebration of corporeal pleasures. Reviving classical eroticism, their idealised forms are voluptuous and seductive yet also sculptural, painted to evoke the sheen of marble. Long time patron Philip of Burgundy – who was a churchman as well as Admiral of the Netherlands – commissioned mythological paintings such as



'Salmacis and Hermaphrodite' (about 1517, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam)



and 'Venus' (about 1521, Pinacoteca dell’Accademia dei Concordi, Rovigo)

not only for his own collection but also to give as gifts. Paintings, prints and drawings that demonstrate Gossaert’s portrayal of the nude and his adaption of the eroticism of the past were displayed in Room 3.

In a series of paintings of the Virgin and Child, Gossaert explored the natural, lifelike relationship of mother and child – a motif that was introduced to painting of the Low Countries in the early 1520s. Taking inspiration from Italian Renaissance examples, Gossaert created new compositions and poses of figures, but also focused on the motif of the child at play. Featured works included '



Virgin and Child' (about 1527, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid),

in which Gossart emphasised the sensuous nature of the intimate embrace of the figures,

and the exquisite and fine



'Virgin and Child' (about 1525, The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois).

Here, the sculptural forms of the Virgin and Child surrounded by the brilliance of the sun’s rays virtually burst out of the frame.

The final – and largest – room of 'Jan Gossaert’s Renaissance' was devoted to portraits and will showcase his remarkable ability to represent the lifelike appearance of individuals. His close study of physiognomy and extraordinary handling and execution of paint set him apart from his contemporaries in this genre. A highlight was one of the masterpieces of early Netherlandish portraiture:



'An Elderly Couple' (about 1520, The National Gallery, London).

This room also featured many stunning illusionistic portraits in which Gossaert plays intriguing spatial games, creating figures that seem to emerge from the confines of their frames: from the meticulous



'Portrait of a Merchant' (about 1530, National Gallery of Art, Washington),

a tour-de-force of detail in its accessories and documents, to



'Portrait of Anna van Bergen' (about 1526–30, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Massachusetts),

one of the rare surviving independent portraits of female sitters by Gossaert.

His



'Portrait of Henry III of Nassau' (about 1520–25, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas)

highlights even further the trompe l'œil effect as the figure seems to step out from the frame to meet the viewer, an illusionistic device of which Gossaert was fond.

Jan Gossaert’s Renaissance celebrated Gossaert’s decisive role as an artistic pioneer, bridging the gap between the Northern and Southern Renaissances and paving the way for Low Country artists of the future.

'Jan Gossaert’s Renaissance' was organised by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (on display there from 6 October 2010 to 17 January 2011) and the National Gallery, London. The exhibition at the National Gallery was curated by Dr Susan Foister, Deputy Director and Director of Collections at the National Gallery.

Publication



'Van Eyck to Gossaert: Towards a Northern Renaissance'
By Susan Frances Jones

Published alongside the exhibition Jan Gossaert’s Renaissance, this book draws on the National Gallery’s collection, and provides an essay and commentaries on 50 selected works – all magnificently illustrated in colour. The author explores one of the most glorious and innovative periods for Netherlandish painting, beginning in the early 15th century with Jan van Eyck, and ending in the late 16th century with Pieter Bruegel.

Susan Frances Jones was Assistant Curator at the National Gallery, London, from 1994 to 1996 and Old Master Society Fellow in the Department of European Painting at The Art Institute of Chicago from 1998 to 2001.

ISBN: 978 1 85709 505 03

More images here, and here and here.

Reviews here and here.

With the exhibition “Pierre Bonnard”, 29 January – 13 May 2012, the Fondation Beyeler celebrated one of the most fascinating of modern artists. With more than 60 paintings by the renowned French colorist on loan from international museums and private collections, the show provides a fresh review of Bonnard's oeuvre and development. It covers his entire career from his beginnings with the Nabis through Symbolism and Impressionism to his ever more colorful and abstract late works. The paintings depict familiar scenes with bathers, views of the artist's garden, everyday life, and the bustle of the Paris streets.

Born in Fontenay aux Roses near Paris, Bonnard (1867–1947) worked principally in his private residences and studio apartments in Paris. The main locations were his house "Ma Roulette" in Vernnonet, Normandy (1912-39), and the villa "Le Bosquet" in Le Cannet on the Côte d'Azur (1927-47) and their respective gardens. In these personal surroundings Bonnard found the scenes and inspirations for his compositions in color as well as his preferred subjects, to which he remained faithful throughout his life while varying them in different ways. Marthe, his lover and, from 1925, his wife, was his favorite model. The wedding ended the ménage à trois among Marthe, Bonnard and Renée Monchaty - the painter's model, muse and lover from 1918 onwards - who reacted by taking her own life.

At the onset of the twentieth century, Bonnard practiced his own personal style, a "different modernism" beyond all "isms" beholding to French classicism, and never questioned the centrality of objectivity. Yet he broke through the traditional barriers between genres and developed them further. He created unconventional still lifes that included human figures and animals. Landscapes depicting "wild nature" stood in contrast to vibrant Parisian cityscapes. In his representations of interiors he oscillated between intimate depictions of his wife at her toilette and views of their bourgeois dining room.

The vitality of his often luminous palette soon set Bonnard off from the Impressionists. Turning away from their attempts to capture the fleeting moment, he represented the permanence and memorableness of things. With the aid of color composition, he lent his paintings an unusual sense of space as perceived by the human eye rather than the camera lens. In the end, he was concer-ned to convey the whole range of sensory impressions through color.

If shortly after his death in the middle of the past century Bonnard was viewed as a representative of a superficial harmony and an "innocent" chronicler of haute bourgeois life, ever since the 1984 travelling exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (which was also on view at the Zurich Kunst-haus), he has figured as an artist who captured the profound disquiet of a society destined to vanish. By means of subtle aesthetic nuances, Bonnard delved beneath the ostensible harmony of the day. This is seen in his color dissonances, interpenetrating spaces, ambiguous locations and alogical figure placements.

In the exhibition, conceived as a "maison immaginaire de Bonnard," his paintings were grouped in association with certain spaces that provided his favorite motifs: "La Rue," "La Salle à manger," "La Salle de bains," "Le Miroir," "Intérieur – Extérieur," and "Le Jardin."

The exhibition opened with the room "La Rue." Bonnard painted Parisian street scenes especially in his early phase. He repeatedly chose a busy traffic intersection in northwestern Paris not far from his studio, as evidenced by two outstanding paintings of the same title -



Place Clichy 1906-07 from a private collection



and Place Clichy 1912 from the Musée national d'Art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris.

The next room featured depictions of Bonnard's "Salle à manger" with its very special atmosphere. This dining room offered him many opportunities to cast an often humorous eye on the bourgeois interior, as in the major painting



Le Café (Coffee), 1915, from the Tate, London,



and La Nappe blanche (The White Tablecloth), 1925, from the Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal.

The dining room still lifes marked a contrast with the intimate interiors of the bedrooms and bathrooms on view in the room "La Salle de bains."

The nude was one of Bonnard's favorite motifs. The major examples on view here included



L'Homme et la Femme (Man and Woman), 1900, from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Depicting the artist and his lover, Marthe, this early work marked a first transition point in Bonnard's oeuvre, possessing a very modern-looking naturalness with which he left the stark simplifications of the Nabi phase behind. Besides the other rooms in his house, Bonnard was particularly inspired by the bathroom, from 1908 focusing increasingly on the subject of a woman at her toilette. An outstanding example, on account of its condensed spatial structure, is



Le Cabinet de toilette (The Bath-room), 1932, from the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Bonnard's bathtub motifs are renowned. A full five works in this genre were on view:

La Source (Nu dans la baignoire), (The Source (Nude in the Bathtub)), 1917, from a private collection;



Baignoire (Le Bain), (The Bath), 1925, from the Tate;



Nu à la baignoire (Sortie du bain), (Nude by the Bathtub (Getting out of the Bath)), 1931, from the Musée national d'Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris;



Nu dans le bain (Nu dans la baignoire), (Nude in the Bath), 1936-38, from the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris,



and La Grande Baignoire (Nu), (The Large Bathtub (Nude)),1937-39, from a private collection.

A further section comprised solely pictures with the mirror motif, which expands the pictorial space and simultaneously questions it. Here, in addition to



Le Cabinet de toilette au canapé rose (Nu à contre-jour), (The Dressing Room with Pink Sofa (Nude in Contre-Jour)), 1908, from the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels,

one could find two self-portraits made in front of the mirror in the artist's bedroom:



Autoportrait (Le Boxeur), (Selfportrait (The Boxer)), 1931, from the Musée d'Orsay,



and Portrait de l'artiste dans la glace du cabinet de toilette (Autoportrait), (Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror (Self-Portrait)), 1939-45, from the Musée national d'Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Next came a room devoted to the important relationship between interior and exterior space in Bonnard's art. Windows intrigued him throughout his career. His views through windows are always recognizable as such, the outside world being clearly perceived from an interior point of view. This leads to an integration of the environment in the interior realm, as wasseen to good effect in



Fenêtre ouverte sur la Seine (Vernon), (Open Window towards the Seine (Vernon)), 1911-12, from the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice,



and Grande salle à manger sur le jardin, (Dining Room on the Garden), 1934-36, from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

The exhibition also included a rather large number of garden depictions from all phases of the artist's career. After the turn of the century, nature advanced to become a key motif in Bonnard's visual repertoire. In his eyes the garden represented an order in which the human relationship to nature in general was reflected. In the early



La Partie de croquet, (The Croquet Game), 1892, from the Musée d'Orsay,

the landscape still serves as a foil for an ornamental harmony.

In his later nature depictions Bonnard interlocked the landscape and garden with his house, as seen in the famous painting



Le Jardin sauvage (La Grande Terrasse), (The Wild Garden (The Large Terrace)), 1918, from the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.,



and Décor à Vernon (La Terrasse à Vernon), (The Terrace at Vernon), 1920/39, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The "Pierre Bonnard" exhibition continued the Fondation Beyeler tradition of devoting exhibitions to artists represented in its collection. Ernst Beyeler dealt in Bonnard works and in 1966 mounted a Bonnard show in his gallery. With



Le Dessert, (The Dessert), 1940,

the Beyeler Collection possesses one of the artist's major late still lifes.

One of the principal lenders is the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, with four significant works: apart from La Partie de croquet, Autoportrait (Le Boxeur) and L'Homme et la Femme, already mentioned, the museum was represented by



La Symphonie pastorale (Campagne), (Pastoral Symphony (Land-scape)),1916-20.

Further outstanding loans came from the Tate, London; the Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Kunstmuseum Basel; the Kunsthaus Zürich; and from distinguished private collections, not least from the Hahnloser successors.

The exhibition was curated by Ulf Küster, Fondation Beyeler Curator.

The catalogue was published in German and English by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, It contains essays by Evelyn Benesch, Andreas Beyer, Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, Michiko Kono, Ulf Küster and Beate Söntgen, and a biography by Fiona Hesse. 176 pages, 121 illustrations, ISBN 978-3-905632-95-8 (English).

MASTERWORKS FROM THE MORGAN: Drawings (April 29–through July 2, 2006) comprised approximately one hundred works from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries, highlighting the breadth and depth of the Morgan’s holdings. The exhibition chronicled the history of the Morgan’s collection, as it contains works from the initial group of drawings purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1909 to notable acquisitions and gifts since the institution’s founding in 1924 to works acquired in the last several years.

Most of the works in the exhibition were presented by school, with large sections dedicated to Italian, French, and Netherlandish and Flemish drawings and a smaller contingent of works by British, Spanish, and German artists. The concluding section will consist of modern drawings by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century artists. Works on view include drawings by sixteenth-century Italian artists, such as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo; seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish masters Rembrandt and Rubens; eighteenth-century French and Italian artists, such as Watteau and Tiepolo; and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists, such as Cézanne, Delacroix, Degas, Picasso, and Pollock.

Important examples include one of only four Jacopo da Pontormo drawings in America,



Standing Male Nude Seen from the Back and Two Seated Nudes (1517–21);



Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve (1504),

one of the most important drawings by this seminal German artist;



Hendrick Goltzius’s Young Man Holding a Skull and a Tulip (1614),

an iconic drawing by the draftsman and engraver and one of the most requested by visitors;



and Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn’s The Bulwark de Rose and the Windmill de Smeerpot (ca. 1649–52),

by far the most important landscape by Rembrandt in the collection and one of the finest of his existing Amsterdam views.

Other works include



Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Two Studies of the Head and Shoulders of a Little Girl (ca. 1717),

a masterpiece in the trios-crayon technique by the most influential of eighteenth-century French draftsmen, whose name is synonymous with the rococo;



Thomas Gainsborough’s Study of a Lady (ca. 1785),

a complex and technically virtuosic study by one of the most significant English portrait painters of the eighteenth century;



Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter (1936),

an emotionally insightful and technically brilliant pen and ink study of the artist’s lover;

and two recent acquisitions never before seen at the Morgan—



Erich Heckel’s Seated Man (Self-Portrait) (1912),

and Juan Gris’s Man with Opera Hat (1912).

More from the exhibition:



William Blake (1757–1827) British “When the Morning Stars Sang Together” (Job 38:4–7), ca. 1804–7 Pen and black ink, watercolor, over traces of graphite.

The series of twenty-one watercolor illustrations for the Book of Job are one of Blake’s supreme achievements.




William Blake's Here, God reenacts the creation of the world, while Job and his wife kneel below. The scene follows the moment in which Job challenged God to appear and explain why he deserved the succession of evils that devastated him. “Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind . . . Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? . . . When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” 2001.76. Gift of J. P. Morgan, Jr., 1924.



Paul Bril (1554–1626) Netherlandish Wooded Ravine with Distant Harbor View, ca. 1590–95 Pen and brown ink, some point of brush and brown, gray, and blue wash, heightened with white gouache over traces of black chalk One of the most influential Northern artists working in Rome in the late sixteenth century, Bril is credited with founding the Italianate landscape tradition perfected in the next century by Claude Lorrain. This drawing is one of only about one hundred sheets, mostly finished landscapes, by the artist that have survived. The composition may have served as the model for a painting, now lost but recorded in a photograph.



John Constable (1776–1837) British View of Cathanger near Petworth, 1834 Graphite, on two sheets of paper pasted together Inscribed and dated by the artist at upper left corner in graphite, Petworth Sepr. 12 / 1834 Cat Hanger. Constable visited Petworth estate in Sussex for two weeks in the fall of 1834, filling a large sketchbook with about twenty drawings in pencil and watercolor of the surrounding countryside. This sheet is the earliest known dated drawing from his visit and one of the most highly finished. Cathanger was a farm on the River Rother, a tributary of the Arun. Constable’s sensitive handling of the pencil describes the gently rolling terrain, while the white of the paper suggests patches of sunlight on the water in the center foreground.



William Hogarth (1697–1764) British Gin Street, ca. 1750 Red chalk, some graphite; incised with a stylus Inscribed variously as part of design, in graphite, along edge of distiller’s roof at left, kilman distiller, above doorway at right, s gripe pawn broker; on scroll in lower left corner, The / Down / fall of Mdm Gin, and above arch in lower right corner, Drunk for a penny / Dead Drunk for two pence / Clean straw for nothing; inscribed in red chalk along lower margin at lower center, gin street. In this model for a print, published in London in 1751, Hogarth presented a veritable catalogue of the evils of drink. The drawing is set in a slum where the only successful businesses are the pawnbroker, distiller, and undertaker. In the same year that Hogarth published this drawing, the Gin Act was passed, reducing the number of gin shops and more than doubling the tax on the spirit.



Inigo Jones (1573–1652) British Design for the Scene of Whitehall with the Banqueting House for Time Vindicated to Himself and to His Honours, ca. 1622 Pen and brown ink, over traces of graphite and stylus; squared for transfer in graphite and brown ink Inscribed by the artist at upper left, in pen and brown ink, Whitehall Gate.; at upper center, Bancquet House. Jones was Britain’s first classically inspired architect and also a talented designer of masques for the courts of James I and Charles I. This drawing exemplifies both talents. It is Jones’s modello for a scene in Ben Jonson’s masque. The performance took place in early 1623 in the Banqueting House itself, which had been constructed according to Jones’s designs between 1619 and 1622.



Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) British The Pass of St. Gotthard, near Faido, 1843 Watercolor, point of brush, scratching out On commission from John Ruskin, his most ardent patron, Turner began this drawing with quick pencil sketches worked up into a “sample study.” In executing the finished watercolor, he widened the view and vertically compressed the design, eliminating the sky and lowering the viewpoint so that one feels about to be swept into the foreground torrent. Traveling to Faido in 1845, Ruskin was surprised to discover that “the mountains, compared with Turner’s colossal conception, look pigmy & poor.”




Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) German Kneeling Donor, 1506 Brush and black ink, gray wash, heightened with white gouache, with accents in pen and dark black ink, on blue paper Signed with monogram and dated, at lower left, in brown ink, 1506. During his stay in Venice in 1505–7, Dürer received the important commission for an altarpiece in the church of the German community, San Bartolomeo. The theme of the large panel celebrates the brotherhood of Christians in their devotion to the rosary. This drawing is a pose study for one of the principal donors of the painting, seen holding a rosary and kneeling in the right foreground. The pictorial effects of the delicately applied pen, wash, and gouache on middle-toned blue paper, known in Italian as carta azzurra, reveal Dürer’s orientation to the native Venetian tradition.



Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) German Portrait of a Man in a Black Cap Oil on paper, possibly over black chalk; some retouching in cap and bust While working at the court of Frederick the Wise of Saxony in Wittenberg, Cranach specialized in portraiture. For this likeness, the artist used a technique uncommon in northern European drawing of the early 1500s: brush and oil paint on paper. The white highlights of the oil paint in the face contrast with the brown ground, making the sitter seem to emerge from the shadows and enhancing the illusion of his presence. His sharp, penetrating gaze enhances the effect.



Georges Seurat (1859–1891) French Nurse with a Child’s Carriage, 1882/84 verso: Woman Standing, Arms Extended Conté crayon on Ingres paper The velvety surface, lustrous black, and rich palette of grays in this drawing are typical of Seurat’s art. He achieved such effects with a Conté crayon—a medium greasier than pencil or charcoal and allowing for greater variations of value— applied on heavy-textured paper. Also characteristic of Seurat is the reduction of the scene to simple geometric patterns, a process of distillation for which his work is often considered a precursor to twentieth-century abstract art.



Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French Still Life with a Chocolatière, 1900 Brush and black ink Signed at lower right, in black ink, Henri-Matisse In this study for a painting, Matisse played with the stark contrast of black and white, varying the thickness of the black lines and modulating the size of the white areas to suggest a strong effect of light. The tightly interlocked arrangement of the dishes on the table reveals his interest in Cézanne’s still lifes.




Luca Signorelli (1441/50–1523) Italian Four Demons Inspecting a Book, 1500–1503 Black chalk Signorelli’s fresco cycle in the Cappella Nova of Orvieto Cathedral (1499–1503) dedicated to the Last Judgment established his reputation as one of the greatest Renaissance painters. This drawing most likely belongs to his studies for that cycle, although none of the figures corresponds exactly with those in the frescoes. Signorelli’s array of muscular devils in the Cappella Nova was much admired by Michelangelo and inspired new possibilities for depicting the nude figure.



Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi; 1444/45–1510) Italian Horses and Spectators (Fragment of an Adoration of the Kings), 1500–1505 Brush and brown ink or tempera, heightened with white, over traces of black chalk, on three pieces of prepared linen stitched together Together with two additional sections now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, these figures once formed part of a composition of the Adoration of the Magi. The monochrome technique and expressive figures reveal the influence of Leonardo’s unfinished Florentine Adoration. The extensive modeling and high degree of finish suggest that Botticelli’s original canvas was either intended as a monochromatic painting or, more likely, a late compositional study used as a guide for establishing light values.



Bartolomeo Montagna (ca. 1450–1523) Italian Nude Man Standing Beside a High Pedestal Point of brush and black ink, brown wash, heightened with off-white gouache, over traces of black chalk, on blue paper faded to brown Although Montagna was the leading painter in Renaissance Vicenza, only about thirty of his drawings are known. The Morgan possesses two fine examples. This study, a rare depiction of a secular nude, was probably inspired by classical statuary or literature, a subject that would have appealed to humanist circles. The detailed and careful execution reveals a northern Italian sense of realism and also suggests that the sheet was produced as an independent work of art.



Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Two Designs for Machines: Maritime Assault Mechanism and a Device for Bending Beams,1487–90 Pen and brown ink, over black chalk Inscribed by the artist in pen and brown ink, in mirror writing (right to left script), on recto above upper design, pie[na] di fieno bagniato; to left, Strume[n]to diurno / e da mare per i[s]calare / una to[r]re di sopra e se le / fu[s]sino due torri va per / tale linia che l’una fa– / cci scudo all’altra ma / fa che‘l mare sia con tu– / tti i segni di tranquilita.

During the Renaissance many artists produced designs for weaponry and defenses, a subject evidently of particular interest to Leonardo, by whom nearly four hundred drawings survive. As is revealed in his characteristic reverse writing, the upper sketch describes a device to scale a tower during a naval siege, and the lower details a mechanism to bend wooden beams.

The designs were likely executed during Leonardo’s sojourn at the Sforza court in Milan, around 1487–90.




Filippino Lippi (1457/58–1504) Italian Kneeling St. Mary Magdalene and Standing Christ, ca. 1480s verso: Standing Man Holding a Sword and Kneeling Youth Holding a Staff Leadpoint, heightened with white gouache, on light gray prepared paper; verso: leadpoint, heightened with white gouache, on light gray prepared paper; standing man heavily reworked in silverpoint, now golden brown Lippi executed four independent figure studies after young male models: the two on the recto approximate a Noli me tangere scene in which Christ appears to the Magdalen after his resurrection, forbidding her to touch him; the two on the verso appear to be spectators, perhaps in an Adoration of the Magi. This drawing, and a number of similar sheets of figure studies not directly connected to extant paintings, was likely part of a sketchbook produced by Lippi around 1482–83.



Albrecht Altdorfer (ca. 1480–1538) German Two Lovers by a Fountain in a Landscape Pen and black and white ink, on brown prepared paper; framing lines in black ink Signed with monogram on lining, in red chalk, AB 98, and inscribed in graphite, G. f.B.

In this independent finished drawing, Altdorfer placed a knight and lady and their tethered horse beneath a pollarded willow tree beside a little spring or fountain. That he was influenced by the expressive potential of the woodcut is apparent in the almost deliberate coarseness of the curved lines defining the willow tree and other elements of the highly stylized landscape, such as the jagged outlines of the mountainous background, modeled by upward pen strokes to suggest sheer vertical, if not naturalistic, effect.




Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) French Portrait of Guillaume Guillon Lethière (1760–1832), 1815 Pencil on wove paper Inscribed by the artist at lower right, in pencil, M. de Ingres/a Madlle Lescot, and signed and dated (and erased but still legible) beneath dedication, Ingres rome 1815.

Ingres portrayed his mentor Guillaume Guillon Lethière first in 1811 and again in 1815 in this superb frontal portrait made for Lethière’s friend Hortense Lescot. Alexandre Dumas wrote of the subject: “Monsieur Lethière était à la fois un beau talent, un bon Coeur et un charmant esprit.” In this dashing portrait, every nuance of detail is crisply delineated in a range of tonal effects resulting from Ingres’s skillful alternation of soft and hard pencils.




Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) French Two Lawyers Conversing Black chalk and gouache in white and gray, with some pale pink, yellow, and brown watercolor Signed at lower right, in pen and black ink, h. Daumier.

Pairs or groups of lawyers are the subject of many of Daumier’s drawings. Frequently the figures are contrasting visual types, as in the present example. Here, a thickset man leans over to compare anecdotes or discuss strategy with a thin colleague. The artist was at the peak of his artistic power in the 1860s, the period to which this drawing undoubtedly dates.




Andrea del Sarto (Andrea d’Agnolo; 1486–1530) Italian Young Man Taking a Step, with a Basket, and Balancing a Sack, 1511–24 Black chalk Andrea del Sarto excelled in representations of the human figure, preparing each pose from the live model with a sensitive understanding of anatomy. The present boldly delineated study is preparatory for the figure of a manservant ascending a flight of stairs in the monochrome fresco of the Visitation in the cloister of the convent of the Compagnia dello Scalzo, Florence. Andrea intermittently worked on the cycle of twelve murals, his first major commission, from about 1507 to 1526.



Correggio (Antonio Allegri; ca. 1489–1534) Italian Head of a Woman Crying Out, ca. 1511–14 Charcoal and black chalk, in some passages blended with white chalk, on two pieces of light brown paper joined vertically at left Remarkable for its intensity of emotion and rich sfumato-like modeling in heavy charcoal, this drawing is a cartoon for the head of the grief-stricken Mary Magdalene in the Entombment of Christ, a frescoed roundel from the portico of the basilica of Sant’Andrea in Mantua, now in the Museo Diocesano. It reveals Correggio’s early understanding of the importance of carefully planning a composition executed in the unforgiving fresco technique.




Jacopo Tintoretto (1518–1594) Italian Two Studies of Samson Slaying the Philistines Black chalk, heightened with wetted white chalk, on blue paper (faded) The present sheet is among the more than thirty studies Tintoretto and his workshop produced after a wax or clay replica of Michelangelo’s 1528 sculptural model for Samson Slaying the Philistines. The spiraling and radically foreshortened figure of Samson wielding the jawbone of an ass atop one of his victims must have held a particular fascination for the artist, who rose to the challenge of producing a two-dimensional image of the sculpture with admirable skill.



Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) Italian Virgin and Child Seated on a Globe, 1740s Pen and brown ink, with brown, ochre, and violet wash, over black chalk This design was probably intended for metalwork, such as a finial or the ornament surmounting a processional mace. It depicts the Virgin of Mount Carmel and Child as experienced in the vision of Saint Simon Stock, a twelfth-century Carmelite friar: the Virgin presented him with a scapular—an article of devotion composed of two small woolen squares— held aloft by the angel at right. The drawing may have been made for the Scuola Grande dei Carmini, Venice, in the 1740s.



Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal; 1697–1768) Italian Architectural Capriccio Pen and brown ink, with gray wash, over graphite and traces of black chalk Canaletto, who primarily worked for an affluent English clientele visiting Venice while on the Grand Tour, brought topographical painting to perfection. He also produced such fanciful views, or “capricci,” as this one, which combine reality with imaginary elements. It is a fairly accurate rendering of the eastern end of San Lorenzo and the adjacent houses in the Castello neighborhood, though most other elements are purely fictional for this location. Picturesque details of everyday life evoke a uniquely Venetian atmosphere.



Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) Flemish Seated Male Youth (Study for Daniel), ca. 1613 Black chalk, heightened with white chalk, on light gray paper This sheet is preparatory for the figure of Daniel in Rubens’s painting Daniel in the Lions’ Den. After establishing the position of the figures in compositional drawings and oil sketches, Rubens would make studies after the model for major figures to guide studio assistants in the execution of a painting. Here he outlined the figure in black chalk and blocked out shadows to indicate volume and light. The painting’s fidelity to this study indicates that it belongs to the final stages of preparation.



Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) Flemish Descent from the Cross, ca. 1617–18 verso: St. Andrew, ca. 1618–19 Pen and brown ink, brown wash, occasional point of brush, on light brown paper; verso: pen and brown ink, brown wash, occasional point of brush, slight indication of a head in black chalk This rapidly drawn sheet demonstrates the inventiveness and importance of preparatory drawings in Rubens’s creative process. It represents his initial ideas for a composition which was realized in two painted versions of the subject commissioned by the Order of the Capuchins in 1617 and circa 1618–19, although neither painting replicates the composition exactly. The study of St. Andrew on the verso is preparatory for an altarpiece of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes for the Fishmonger’s Guild in Mechelen at Notre-Dame-au-delà-de-la-Dyle.



Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) Flemish Diana and Endymion Pen and point of brush and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white gouache, on blue paper, faded to green gray Like his mentor, Peter Paul Rubens, van Dyck was a prolific and energetic draftsman who executed pen-and-ink sketches to explore ideas for compositions. The restless experimentation and disregard for detail and proportion evident in this sheet reflect van Dyck’s preoccupation with the dramatic action of the scene.



Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) Flemish View of Rye from the Northeast, 27 August 1633 Pen and brown ink Signed, dated, and inscribed by the artist, at lower right, in brown ink, Rie del naturale li 27 d' Augto 1633–Aovand[yck]; inscribed above in Jan van Rymsdyk’s hand, in brown ink, Rymsdyk’s Museum.

Although one of the most celebrated portraitists in Northern art, van Dyck is less well known for his plein-air studies, which are some of the earliest known topographical views of architecture in Britain. In this view of Rye, a town on the Sussex coast, several important historic buildings can be identified, including the Romanesque church of St. Mary at the town’s highest point and Ypres Tower, the remains of Rye castle, at the far left.



Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669) Dutch Woman with a Child Descending a Staircase, ca. 1635–36 Pen and brown ink, brown wash; traces of framing line in brown ink Inscribed at lower right corner, in an old hand, in brown ink, W or R.

In this remarkably intimate study, Rembrandt masterfully employed his brush to evoke the darkness of the staircase and create a sense of movement in the dramatic shadows that envelop the woman. With a thick reed pen and brown ink, he described her cap, using careful strokes to define the faces of woman and child, and bold strokes to describe the child’s body and woman’s skirt.





Adriaen van Ostade (1610–1685) Dutch A Violinist at a Farmhouse Door, 1673 Watercolor, pen and brown ink, with touches of gouache, over traces of graphite; framing line in brown ink Signed and dated at lower left, in brown ink, Av.(in ligature) Ostade · 1673. This colorful genre scene represents the apogee of Ostade’s watercolor manner and depicts one of his many variations on the theme of rustic pleasures. Ostade’s watercolors were created predominantly as independent works of art to be marketed to collectors, although the present sheet also served as the basis for a painting. This robust, highly finished sheet was a favorite of Charles Fairfax Murray, whose collection forms the core of the Morgan’s holdings.




Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) French The Death of Hippolytus Pen and brown ink, brown wash, over black chalk; verso: pen and brown ink over black chalk An independent exploration of a theme that Poussin did not treat in a painting, the subject of this highly baroque sheet derives from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Cast out of Athens by his father after rejecting the advances of his stepmother, Hippolytus’s chariot is menaced by a bull sent by Poseidon. After his chariot crashes and Hippolytus is dragged to his death, his friends attempt to regain control of the horses and disentangle the hero’s body from the wreckage.



Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) French Seated Young Woman, ca. 1715–1717 Black, red, and white chalk on buff paper Watteau is best known for his rapidly executed figure studies in trois crayons, using red, black, and white chalks. This sheet is an exceptional example of his mastery of the technique and embodies such immediacy and energy that one does not notice at first that the artist did not include the lower half of the woman’s right leg and foot and failed to indicate the base on which she is seated. Trimmed from a larger sheet, the original may have included multiple studies.




Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French Standing Man in a Bowler Hat, Slight Sketch of a Woman at Left Essence (thinned oil paint) on oiled brown paper Stamped in red ink at lower left corner, Degas. This boldly painted sketch dates to the late 1860s or early 1870s. Degas first used strokes of black to delineate the figure and then modified the pose with a thin gray oil paint, notably redefining the contours to depict the man at a slightly less frontal angle. While he sometimes made these oil studies in preparation for a painting, and an inscription on the back of the frame associates it with his 1868–70 painting Interior (The Rape), this work has not been definitively linked to a specific canvas.



Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French Mlle Bécat at the Café des Ambassadeurs, 1885 Pastel over lithograph Signed and dated at lower right, in pastel, Degas / 85. This dramatically composed scene captures the spectacle and excitement of the café-concert in fin-de-siècle Paris. Degas, who was a frequent visitor to this popular form of entertainment, used it as an inspiration for many compositions, including the 1877/78 lithograph that was reworked in pastel for the present composition. The three silhouetted female spectators in the immediate foreground contrast with the spotlighted singer, who is performing her frenzied, comic dance, with arms raised and fingers splayed, in her trademark style épileptique.



Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French Still Life with Pears and Apples, Covered Blue Jar, and a Bottle of Wine. Watercolor over black chalk Cézanne began this monumental study with a light and free sketch in black chalk and then used transparent strokes of watercolor in rich hues to define the contours. The broken lines and shimmering planes of color lend the sheet a surface dynamism that is enriched by the bold use of the reserve of paper. Reflecting the artist’s mastery of the watercolor, this still life was executed sometime during the last few years of his life.



Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Te arii vahine (The Queen of Beauty or The Noble Queen), 1896–97 Watercolor, with gouache, over black crayon Initialed by the artist at lower left, in black crayon, pg; inscribed at lower center, in black crayon, te arii vahine. This watercolor was executed by Gauguin after his 1896 canvas Te arii vahine, one of his first works after returning permanently to Tahiti. He characterized the painting as “much better than anything I’ve done previously.” The colors used in this replica are different from those in the painting; they establish the watercolor as an independent drawing in which the artist continued to explore color harmonies.




Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch Two Cottages at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, 1888 Reed pen and brown ink, over graphite In early summer 1888 van Gogh visited the Mediterranean fishing village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, where, as he wrote to his brother, he hoped to “ . . . get [his] drawings more spontaneous, more exaggerated.” The spontaneity he hoped to achieve is expressed in a vigorous, freely drawn graphite sketch that the artist then articulated with alternating thick and fine strokes of a broad-nibbed reed pen. The drawing’s brisk, energetic execution indicates that it might have been made on site.

The Fondation Beyeler’s exhibition 30 September 2012 to 27 January 2013 of work by Edgar Degas (1834–1917)was the first ever show devoted to this important late 19th century French painter to focus exclusively on his rich and complex late work, the culmination of an artistic career spanning more than sixty years. In Degas’ late work, created between around 1886 and 1912, the creativity of a daring pioneer of Modernism reached its masterly apotheosis.

Although Edgar Degas’s art enjoys great popularity, exhibitions of his work generally focus on his Impressionist phase from the early 1870s to the mid-1880s or on specific aspects of his oeuvre. By contrast, the exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler brought together over 150 representative works encompassing all the themes and series important to an understanding of Degas’s late work: dancers and female nudes, jockeys and race horses as well as landscapes and portraits.

Two Degas pastels in the permanent collection of the Fondation Beyeler provided the point of
departure for the exhibition’s conception:



Breakfast after the Bath (the Bath), around 1895 to 1898, and



Three Dancers (Blue Tutus, Red Bodices), around 1903,

are masterpieces that clearly demonstrate the radicalism and modernity of Degas’ late work.

The exhibition started at a point in time when Degas’s work was beginning to show signs of fundamental changes in respect of its style and content. In the second half of the 1880s, Degas abandoned the highly detailed, delicate painting that had been his trademark during the Impressionist period, while simultaneously renouncing the »picturesque«, genre-like themes of big city life in Paris. This period saw Degas disengaging from his Impressionist companions as well. With advancing age, he also began to model wax sculptures – three-dimensional, partly fragmentary studies of moving or static human figures and horses discovered in his studio only after his death, 74 of which were later cast in bronze.

The eighth and last Impressionist exhibition took place in 1886. In the three decades that followed, Degas increasingly distanced himself from the art world, shunning contact with the art-loving public. He was one of the few artists who could afford to behave in this way: Parisian dealers repeatedly bought works from his studio for European and American private collectors. Only a small number of solo exhibitions authorised by the artist were held in the years until his death in 1917. That gradual withdrawal from public life has contributed to the impression, still widespread today, that Degas was a difficult loner. From the 1890s onwards, the idiosyncratic bachelor lived in a kind of »inner emigration« in which he surrendered himself solely to his art. The late work he created in the process is one of the most exciting and obsessive to be found anywhere in European art history.

The stylistic characteristics of Degas’s late work include discontinuous spaces, asymmetric compositions that disintegrate, unusual vantage points and unconventional poses by the figures he represents, which are shown in the foreground. The intimate physical proximity of the (male) viewer to the female figures is counteracted by the irritating imprecision of the representation, with its blurred contours. The seductive luminosity of the colours, which fill the pictorial space with an iridescent light, gives what we see in the pictures an indefinite quality, both spatially and temporally. Degas transported what he described as his »orgies of colour« to a remote, dreamlike state in which present and past, things seen and things remembered are indissolubly interwoven.

Through his constant variation and combination of a small number of motifs, Degas created extensive series founded on a pioneering concept of the work of art. Individual paintings cease to be stand-alone works and instead always point to the conceptual premises underlying the »serial« work in progress.

The exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler therefore encompassed not only all the themes Degas explored but also all the techniques he used: oil painting, pastels, drawing, monotype, lithography, photography and sculpture. No other artist of the period experimented with as many forms of artistic expression as he did. He spread, cross-hatched and dabbed the pastels, often with his bare finger. He reworked them with steam and brushes or scraps of fabric, combining them with gouache, tempera and printing techniques like monotype. Pastel technique, which inherently and uniquely combines the qualities of both painting and drawing, as well as being highly tactile, provided the ideal basis for an oeuvre in which individual artistic achievements conditioned and inspired one another.

The Fondation Beyeler presented Degas’s late work in a series of rooms in which different genres and themes are emphasised in turn. Dancers and portraits are followed by women at their toilet, after which come landscapes and interiors and then, at the end of the exhibition, horses and riders.
The show opens with ballet dancers. Interestingly, Degas’s late pictures of ballerinas hardly ever show them dancing on stage, and the glamour of the dance performances of the 1870s has vanished. The waiting dancers, either standing or seated, who feature in these works are young women who are resting, adjusting their costume or practising their dance steps. Degas ceaselessly studied the poses, movements and costumes of the dancers. He repeated, varied and combined figure constellations that provided an occasion for bold experiments with composition and colour.

Of his many oil paintings, pastels and drawings on this theme, three examples deserve particular mention:



Danseuse sur la scène from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyons,

which dates from around 1889,



Danseuses au foyer from 1895/96,

which has been loaned by the Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal,



and Danseuses from the Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne,

which was painted in around 1898.

From The peculiar doings of Meerkat and Jellyfish:

Here are my absolute favourite pieces of him in the exhibition:



Danseuses, 1897-1901, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. A. Alfred Taubman

I think the main reason why this piece is my absolute favourite is the face expression of the tired woman in the middle. I absolutely adore the lines on her face. You can really feel her mood. But that's not everything. I really like the body positions and lines in general in this picture. The four women create a red and then blue line with their dresses and hair colour across the whole painting. :D

Danseuses au foyer, 1895-96, Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal (above)

Light blue against dark red. Perfect juxtaposition. And once again, beautiful black lines, especially on the bale dancer in front.

Danseuses, c. 1898, Fondation de l'Hermitage, Lausanne, Bequest of Lucie Schmidheiny (above)

Yellow against blue with such chaotic strokes. Then we have warmer colours of red and light orange. So much power and "boom" with harmony and quiet, relaxing mood. The sense of "moment"



Le Petit Dejeuner a la sortie du bain, 1895-98, Private Collection

Beautiful pattern and strokes. Beautiful body figure. Love the bathtub! :D

One room was devoted to Degas’s portraits. All his models were friends and acquaintances of his, some of them long-standing; his close relations with, for example, Henri Rouart, Ludovic Halévy and Paul Valpinçon dated back to his schooldays. This room contained poignant portraits such as that of



Henri Rouart et son fils Alexis from 1895–98 loaned by the Neue Pinakothek in Munich

and the 1904 work



Esquisse pour un portrait (M. et Mme Louis Rouart),

which belongs to Richard and Mary L. Gray and the Gray Collection Trust.

Degas liked to spend holidays on his friends’ country estates. The grand home of the Valpinçon family in Normandy provided the setting both for the 1892 work



Salle de billard,

loaned by the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and for the roughly contemporaneous



Intérieur,

which belonged to a private collection. In the mid-1890s Degas discovered the potential that photography offered for his artistic purposes. In just a brief span of time, he created a series of cleverly staged portraits of famous friends such as that of



Pierre Auguste Renoir and Stéphane Mallarmé,

loaned by the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris, in which the two men, immersed in twilight, seem to have moved to another sphere.

A further section of the exhibition showed representations of women at their toilet, one of the most frequent pictorial themes in Degas’s late work. The 1883 pastel



Femme au tub from the Tate

and the 1889 pastel



Devant le miroir from the Hamburger Kunsthalle

are two particularly fine examples from the 1880s. Most of the late representations of women who are washing or drying themselves or combing their hair are a significant departure from the idealised representation of naked women traditional in the history of European art. With this theme, Degas’s desire to experiment with colour – as found in, for example, the oil painting



Femme au bain from 1893–98 (Left: Femme au tub, c. 1883; Right: Femme au bain, 1893–98)

loaned by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto – as well as his tendency to represent unusual physical poses come into their own. The latter was exemplarily illustrated by the famous oil painting



Après le bain, femme s’essuyant

from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which dates from around 1896, in which a female nude, her body arched in an unusual position, seems to be clinging to the back of a chair in an empty, monochrome room.

With his last works, created after the turn of the century, Degas approached the boundaries of abstraction. This is shown particularly radically in the pastel



Femme s’essuyant les cheveux from 1900–05,

loaned by the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, in which the colour spectrum is reduced to hues of red, orange and yellow – and the colour values blend into one another with the finest nuances.

A separate room presented landscapes by Degas, which are hardly ever shown in public, as well as works with horses and riders. In the autumn of 1892 Degas surprised the Paris public with an exhibition at the Galeries Durand-Ruel devoted exclusively to landscapes. The choice of works caused uncertainty among the public because it was widely known that Degas had previously always been very disparaging about landscape – the genre for which the Impressionists were best known. The medium and format chosen by Degas caused additional irritation. His landscapes were not imposing oil paintings like those of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, but were small-format monotypes printed on sheets of paper. In addition, his works, which were often heightened with pastels, had little in common with the luminous magic of Impressionist landscape painting. Created in his studio in the early 1890s, they in fact often prefigure the dreamily remote landscapes of the generation of Symbolists who were to follow. Degas’s last landscapes include oil paintings inspired by his visits to the small seaside resort of Saint-Valery-sur-Somme in Picardy, among them Vue de Saint-Valery-sur-Somme from 1896–98, which The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York loaned for the exhibition.

In his late years, Degas used various techniques to represent the motif of horse and rider. In addition to the 1884 oil painting



Chevaux de courses,

which had been loaned by the Detroit Institute of Arts,

the exhibition featured a selection of sculptures, including Cheval en marche modeled in the early 1870s, and two examples each of later works featuring jockeys, in the first case, and horses, in the second. These works, all of them from Swiss private collections, documented Degas’s preoccupation with the representation of complex movements in precarious moments of transition.

The monumental masterpiece



Jockey blessé from 1896–98,

on loan from the Kunstmuseum Basel, provided the exhibition’s grand finale.

The exhibition was conceived by guest curator Martin Schwander, who has worked together with Michiko Kono, Associate Curator at the Fondation Beyeler, on its staging. Martin Schwander was earlier responsible for the exhibition «Venice. From Canaletto and Turner to Monet» in 2008/09.

Edgar Degas reflected the Fondation Beyeler’s tradition of holding exhibitions devoted to artists represented in the permanent collection. With Le Petit Déjeuner après le bain from 1895–98 and the 1903 work Trois danseuses (jupes bleues, corsages rouges), the Fondation Beyeler owns two masterpieces that vividly demonstrate the radicalism and modernism of Degas’s late work. Both paintings can be seen in the exhibition.

Despite the fragility and light-sensitivity of most of Degas’s late works, it was possible to secure a substantial number of outstanding loans from, in particular, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Gallery in London, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design in Oslo, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, the Kunsthaus Zurich and the Tate as well as well-known European, American and Asian private collections.



The Fondation Beyeler published a catalogue for the exhibition in German and English. The catalogue, which contains a foreword by Sam Keller and Martin Schwander, an interview with the artist Jeff Wall, essays by Carol Armstrong, Jonas Beyer, Richard Kendall and Martin Schwander as well as a biography by Mareike Wolf-Scheel, has 268 pages and 232 illustrations. (ISBN 978-3-906053-03-5, English).

The Courtauld Gallery holds the most important collection of works in the United Kingdom by the Post-Impressionist master Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Assembled by the pioneering collector Samuel Courtauld (1876-1947), it includes major paintings and works on paper as well as one of only two marble sculptures ever created by the artist. This special summer display presents the complete collection together with the loan of two important works by Gauguin formerly in Courtauld’s private collection:

Martinique Landscape (Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh) and Bathers at Tahiti (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham). Today, Gauguin is widely celebrated as one of the most important artists of the 19th century. Collecting Gauguin offers an opportunity to consider the contribution of Samuel Courtauld in developing the artist’s reputation in this country.

In 1910 the critic Roger Fry organised his ground-breaking and famously controversial exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries in London. Fry included over forty works by Gauguin (more than by any other artist) and also chose a work by him for the poster, a rare surviving copy of which will be included in the display. Inspired by this exhibition, over the following decade the educationalist Michael Sadler (1861-1943) established the first substantial collection of works by Gauguin in England. Whilst a small number of other individuals acquired single paintings, Courtauld was the only other early collector to assemble a major group of works by Gauguin.

Samuel Courtauld’s acquisitions of works by Gauguin span the short decade in which he assembled his great collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. He bought his first paintings by the artist in 1923, purchasing Bathers at Tahiti, which he later sold, and The Haystacks, an outstanding example of the artist’s work in Brittany (figs. 3 & 4). Gauguin’s exceptionally rare marble portrait of his Danish wife Mette, probably carved with the help of a professional sculptor, was acquired by Courtauld in 1925 for £288 (fig. 6). The earliest painting in the display is Martinique Landscape, 1887, an important large work dating from the four fruitful months that Gauguin spent on this French colonial possession in the Caribbean (fig. 5). In its rich colours and exotic subject matter, this painting foreshadows Gauguin’s journeys to Tahiti in the following decade. Courtauld went on to acquire two of Gauguin’s very finest Tahitian paintings. In 1927 he purchased Nevermore, previously owned by the English composer Frederick Delius (fig. 2). Painted in 1897, during the artist’s second stay in Tahiti, it exemplifies Gauguin’s search for a mythic Polynesian paradise. He wrote of this work: “I wished to describe by means of a simple nude a certain long lost barbarian luxury”.

Courtauld acquired his last painting by Gauguin in 1929 when he paid £13,600 for Te Rerioa (The Dream) (fig. 1). Roger Fry, who saw the work in the gallery of the dealer Paul Rosenberg in Paris shortly after Courtauld’s visit, wrote an enthusiastic letter, urging his friend to buy what he described as “the masterpiece of Gauguin”. An early photograph shows it magnificently installed in Courtauld’s London home in Portman Square (fig. 7). Samuel Courtauld lived with Te Rerioa for just three years before presenting it, along with most of his other Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces, as part of his founding gift to The Courtauld Institute of Art in 1932. It remains one of the highlights of The Courtauld Gallery’s collection.

Collecting Gauguin is the first of a new series of special summer displays which will showcase aspects of The Courtauld’s outstanding permanent collection.


1. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
Te Rerioa (The Dream), 1897
Oil on canvas, 95.1 x 130.2 cm
© The Courtauld Gallery, London



2. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
Nevermore, 1897
Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 116 cm
© The Courtauld Gallery, London



3. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
The Haystacks, 1889
Oil on canvas, 92 x 73.3 cm
© The Courtauld Gallery, London



4. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
Bathers at Tahiti, 1897
Oil on sacking, 73.3 x 91.8 cm
© The Trustees of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham



5. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
Martinique Landscape, 1887
Oil on canvas, 115 x 88.50 cm
© Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

The Courtauld Gallery: 17 October 2013 to 12 January 2014

This exhibition focuses on the remarkable early figure drawings of the great German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). It examines how Dürer reinvented established artistic traditions through an ambitious new approach to the figure rooted in the study of his own body. The exhibition features outstanding early works by Dürer as well as rare drawings and prints by contemporaries, many of which have never been seen in the United Kingdom. They include some of the masterpieces of early German art.

The Young Dürer concentrates on the artist’s formative years, from around 1490 when he completed his artistic training, to about 1496 when he established himself permanently as a master in Nuremberg, southern Germany. This period included the so-called Wanderjahre, or ‘journeyman years’, during which the artist travelled widely and was exposed to a range of new experiences. Dürer’s drawings, in particular, demonstrate the significance of these early influences in shaping his ambitions. A key work from this period is held in The Courtauld’s own collection. The front of this double-sided drawing, dated 1493, shows a highly finished figure from the parable of the



Wise and the Foolish Virgins (fig. 1a).



Preserved on its back are Dürer’s remarkable studies of his own left leg (fig. 1b).

This celebrated sheet combines two crucial aspects of the young Dürer’s artistic approach: close observation from nature and his related ambition to bring new expressive power to depicting the human figure.

Dürer was a precociously talented draughtsman. He abandoned his apprenticeship as a goldsmith with his father to train as an artist in the workshop of the successful Nuremberg painter, woodcut designer and entrepreneur Michael Wolgemut (1434-1519). Nuremberg was one of the most important commercial and intellectual centres in Germany and Wolgemut’s workshop designed the woodcut illustrations for some of the most significant new publications of the time. Here Dürer gained invaluable first-hand experience of the exciting new possibilities offered by the dissemination of images through prints. The young artist was also exposed to the culture of humanism which prioritised the experience of the individual over received doctrine and promoted a new curiosity about the natural world.

The nineteen-year-old Dürer set out on his journeyman years fired by ambition and a belief in his own abilities. He left in 1490 and was away for some four years, establishing professional contacts, undertaking work and absorbing various influences. His exact itinerary remains uncertain. He probably travelled in the region of Frankfurt; he is known to have visited Colmar, and certainly worked in Basel and Strasbourg. The drawings that Dürer created during this period provide rich insights into his development. Among the crucial artistic questions he explored was the modelling of complex draperies and, above all, the anatomically correct rendering of the human body, based on observation. He would later write: “For in truth, art lies hidden within nature; he who can wrest it from her, has it”.

Dürer’s ambition to reform art through a new approach to the natural world is evident in a series of unprecedented drawings in which he studied his own features and body. This intense self-scrutiny is powerfully expressed in the celebrated early



Self-portrait from Erlangen (fig. 4).

For Dürer, it seems, understanding himself became a way of understanding the world. This section of the exhibition also includes the exquisite



Three studies of the artist’s left hand from the Albertina in Vienna (fig. 2),

in which Dürer meticulously observed the anatomy of the hand adopting various gestures. Such drawings show the young Dürer seeking to master the depiction of the human body in order to give his works a greater fidelity to nature and expressive power. They are radically different from the late medieval tradition of copy-book drawings, in which standard templates were repeated in artists’ workshops.

Dürer’s close study of the body allowed him to conceive such ambitious new figure compositions as The Courtauld Gallery’s A Wise Virgin (above). Made when the artist was twenty-two or twenty-three years old, this complex drawing is a statement of ambition. The elegantly twisted figure clothed in intricate drapery depicts the parable recorded in the Gospel of Saint Matthew. Ten virgins were asked to await the arrival of a bridegroom with their lamps filled with oil: five wisely preserved their oil and were admitted to the wedding; the foolish five, whose lamps were empty, were excluded. Dürer has embodied the story in a single figure: the virgin turns to the side with her hand raised in a salutary gesture, implying the presence of the groom without showing him.

Writing in his family chronicle thirty years later, Dürer recalled the circumstances of his return to Nuremberg from his Wanderjahre: “And when I returned home, Hans Frey made an arrangement with my father and gave me his daughter, Miss Agnes by name, and with her he gave me 200 florins, and held the wedding – it was on Monday before Margaret’s Day [7 July] in the year 1494.”



Inscribed Mein Agnes (My Agnes), Dürer’s celebrated sketch of his young wife resting at a table is remarkable for its informality and apparent effortlessness (fig. 3).

Dürer seems to have left Nuremberg again shortly after his wedding, probably to escape an outbreak of the plague. This time he travelled towards Italy and is likely to have reached Venice, although this is still disputed by scholars. Dürer’s interest in Italian art and classical subject matter complemented his own Northern artistic traditions. His early engagement with Italian art gave a further dimension to his depiction of the figure, as can be seen in his copies after Italian prints, examples of which will be included in the exhibition.

As soon as Dürer returned to Nuremberg he established himself as an independent master. Prints were central to his strategy to exploit the journeyman years. Marked with the famous AD monogram,



The Prodigal Son of c. 1496 is the earliest of his engravings for which a preparatory drawing has been preserved (fig. 5).

Praised as “exceedingly beautiful” by the Italian biographer Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), this composition combines a richly detailed setting with a life-like depiction of the Prodigal Son, whose wringing hands, bare legs and body powerfully communicate his moment of spiritual crisis. Images such as this were the culmination of all that Dürer had learned during his Wanderjahre. Nothing like them had been seen before and they ensured that his fame spread rapidly.

Albrecht Dürer redirected the course of German art and it was his drawings and prints – even more so than his paintings – that made him one of the most renowned artists of his time. They are central to his enduring legacy. His contemporary, the philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), lauded him as the “Apelles of black lines” who was able to express “the whole mind of man as it reflects itself in the behaviour of the body”.

Details:

1a. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)
A Wise Virgin (recto), 1493
Pen and brown ink, 291 x 200 mm
Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London, D.1978.PG.251

1b. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)
Study of the artist’s left leg from two view points (verso), 1493
Pen and brown ink, 291 x 200 mm
Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London, D.1978.PG.251

2. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)
Three studies of the artist’s left hand (recto), c. 1493-94
Pen and ink, 271 x 179 mm
Albertina Museum, Vienna, Inv. no. 26327

3. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)
Mein Agnes (My Agnes), c. 1494
Pen and ink, 156 x 98 mm
Albertina Museum, Vienna, Inv. no. 3063

4. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)
Self-portrait (verso), c. 1491-92
Pen and ink, 204 x 208 mm
Graphische Sammlung der Universität, Erlangen, Inv. B155

5. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)
The Prodigal Son, c. 1495-96
Pen and ink, 215 x 220 mm
British Museum, London, Inv. SL, 5218.173

To celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669), from July 15 through October 1, 2006 the Morgan Library & Museum presented highlights from its exceptional collection of Rembrandt etchings. Pierpont Morgan laid the foundation for this collection—the finest in North America— when he acquired his first Rembrandt etchings from Theodore Irwin, Sr., in 1900 and George W. Vanderbilt in 1906. Today the Morgan holds impressions of most of the three hundred or so known etchings by Rembrandt as well as multiple, often exceedingly rare impressions of various states. The exhibition showcased some of the most celebrated etchings from the collection along with a few lesser-known and rarely exhibited examples.

Renowned in the history of printmaking, Rembrandt’s etchings are famous for their dramatic intensity, penetrating psychology, and touching humanity. Celebrating his unsurpassed skill and inventiveness as a master storyteller, the exhibition addresses some of the central and often recurring themes of the master’s work, including portraiture, the Bible, scenes from everyday life, the nude, and landscape.

Celebrating Rembrandt opened with a selection of Rembrandt’s early portraits, created mostly while he was still a student in Leiden. His own face was often the focus of these spirited works, primarily exercises in lighting, technique, and, above all, expression. Sensitive renderings of the artist’s own family—his elderly mother; first wife, Saskia; and son, Titus—are also on display. Biblical depictions, the largest and arguably most important category of Rembrandt’s etched work, were also featured.

Subtle shifts in mood and meaning were illustrated in the different states of



Christ Presented to the People



Christ Presented to the People: eighth (final) state



and Christ Crucified Between Two Thieves (“The Three Crosses”).

Other key highlights, such as



Adam and Eve,



Jacob Caressing Benjamin,



Abraham Entertaining the Angels,



and Abraham’s Sacrifice

demonstrated the unique perspective Rembrandt brought to these biblical accounts.

Also showcased was the Morgan’s pristine impression of one of Rembrandt’s most ambitious compositions,



Christ Preaching, popularly known as “The Hundred Guilder Print.”

Rembrandt was fascinated with the social outcast and those on the fringes of Dutch society. Key examples of this genre on view included



Beggar Man and Woman Behind a Bank



and Beggars Receiving Alms at the Door of a House.

Among the depictions of individuals participating in everyday activities were



The Skater

and an example of a more earthy nature,



The Monk in the Cornfield.

In his later years, Rembrandt continued to produce striking, often introspective portraits, such as the



Self-Portrait, Etching at a Window,

of which the Morgan possesses the rare first and second states.

Etchings of friends and contemporaries include



Jan Six,

the Dutch patrician and collector, who is depicted reclining gracefully against a windowsill reading by sunlight.

A section on landscape etchings illustrated how Rembrandt captured the spirit of the Dutch countryside — often inserting charming hidden details — in works such as



The Three Trees, Cottages and Farm Buildings with a Man Sketching,



and Landscape with Trees, Farm Buildings, and a Tower.

Celebrating Rembrandt: Etchings from the Morgan was organized by Dr. Anne Varick Lauder, Moore Curatorial Fellow, department of Drawings and Prints, The Morgan Library & Museum.

The exhibition was accompanied by a twenty-page illustrated publication, Collecting Rembrandt: Etchings from the Morgan, by Dr. Anne Varick Lauder. The essay traces the history of the Morgan’s Rembrandt collection, relating some of the stories behind Pierpont Morgan’s first purchases during the American Gilded Age while also showcasing the institution’s important holdings of Rembrandt etchings.


More images from the exhibition:



Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, 1606–1669
Self-Portrait in a Soft Hat and Embroidered Cloak, 1631
Bartsch 7. White and Boon 7. Tenth state of eleven.
Etching
RvR 8. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1900; gift of J. P. Morgan, Jr., 1924



Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, 1606–1669
Self-Portrait with Saskia, 1636
Bartsch 19. White and Boon 19. Third state of three.
Etching
(P) 1949.5. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1900; gift of J. P. Morgan, Jr., 1924




Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, 1606–1669
Saskia with Pearls in Her Hair, 1634
Bartsch 347. White and Boon 347. Only state.
Etching
RvR 461. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1906; gift of J. P. Morgan, Jr., 1924\



Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, 1606–1669
The Great Jewish Bride, 1635
Bartsch 340. White and Boon 340. Fifth state of five.
Etching, with some drypoint and burin
RvR 453. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1906; gift of J. P. Morgan, Jr., 1924




Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, 1606–1669
Abraham Entertaining the Angels, 1656
Bartsch 29. White and Boon 29. Only state.
Etching and drypoint on Japanese paper
RvR 37. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1906; gift of J. P. Morgan, Jr., 1924



Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, 1606–1669
Abraham Casting Out Hagar and Ishmael, 1637
Bartsch 30. White and Boon 30. Only state.
Etching with touches of drypoint
RvR 38. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1906; gift of J. P. Morgan, Jr., 1924




Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, 1606–1669
The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, 1634
Bartsch 44. White and Boon 44. Third state of three.
Etching, burin, and drypoint
RvR 65. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1906; gift of J. P. Morgan, Jr., 1924




Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, 1606–1669
The Hog, 1643
Bartsch 157. White and Boon 157. First state of two.
Etching and drypoint
RvR 232. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1900; gift of J. P. Morgan, Jr., 1924



Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, 1606–1669
Six’s Bridge, 1645
Bartsch 208. White and Boon 208. Third state of three.
Etching
RvR 294. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1900; gift of J. P. Morgan, Jr., 1924



Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, 1606–1669
Landscape with a View Toward Haarlem (“The Goldweigher’s Field”), 1651
Bartsch 234. White and Boon 234. Only state.
Etching and drypoint
RvR 330. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1906; gift of J. P. Morgan, Jr., 1924



Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, 1606–1669
Self-Portrait in a Cap, 1630
Bartsch 320. White and Boon 320. Only state.
Etching
RvR 442. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1906; gift of J. P. Morgan, Jr., 1924

Some sixty photographs of New York City from the 1850s to the 1970s—including many landmarks of American photography—were on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 7 through August 25, 2002. Since September 1839, when the painter Samuel F. B. Morse put aside his brushes for a camera, photography has been integral to the life and art of New York City. This celebration of the city as muse included 19th-century photographs by Edward Anthony, Silas Holmes, and anonymous artists, and 20th-century works by Berenice Abbott, Ralston Crawford, Walker Evans, Walter Gropius, Lewis Hine, Helen Levitt, Edward Steichen, and James VanDerZee, among others. With the exception of



Chatham Square (1853),

a rare daguerreotype street scene on loan from the renowned Gilman Paper Company Collection, all of the photographs in the exhibition were drawn from the collection of the Metropolitan's Department of Photographs.

New York, New York: Photographs from the Collection included such rare examples of 19th-century photography as



Edward Anthony's busy street scene Broadway on a Rainy Day (1859),

as well as late 20th-century studies including



Hiroshi Sugimoto's elegant Radio City Music Hall, New York (1978).

Among fascinating images of the city's architectural heritage, its explosive commerce, and its expanding population were dramatic views of airy 19th-century row houses and of the 20th-century skyscrapers that replaced them.



Alfred Stieglitz's From the Back Window, 291 (1915)



and Berenice Abbott's Canyon, Broadway and Exchange Place (1936)

portrayed this transformation.

New York's diversity and cultural traditions were celebrated in



Bill Robinson and Spectators at a New York Black Yankees Baseball Game by James VanDerZee (1934),



The Morning's Bagels by Weegee (ca. 1940),



and Times Square, New York, a photograph of a street preacher by Robert Frank (1954).



Sid Grossman's Coney Island (1947)



and Dan Weiner's Family Shopping for Modern Furniture in a Brooklyn Department Store (1952)

capture the post-war optimism of a generation. These artists explored the city's psychic temperament and evoked its vitality as well its moments of stunning emptiness and, at times, alienation.

The exhibition also featured children at play on the city's streets.





Helen Levitt's photographs of kids imaginatively interacting with urban surroundings (1939-42)

were seen alongside



Ben Shahn's balletic study of boys playing in a vacant lot, New York (1932-35),



and Leon Levinstein's even more athletic Handball Players, Lower East Side, New York (ca. 1958).

The dizzying aspiration, rebirth, and renewal of New York City was articulated in



Lewis Hine's Icarus, Empire State Building (1930).

In this spectacular photograph, a lone steel-worker in a boundless sky, far above the burgeoning city, straddles a construction cable, tightening a clamp as if performing a high-wire act.

Among the most iconic images in New York, New York: Photographs from the Collection was



Edward Steichen's The Flatiron (1904).

This view of what was then the city's tallest building is the quintessential chromatic study of twilight in the city and a prime example of the conscious effort of photographers working at the turn of the century to assert the artistic potential of their medium.

New York, New York: Photographs from the Collection was organized by Jeff L. Rosenheim, Assistant Curator in the Metropolitan's Department of Photographs.