The Whitney's Collection: Selections from 1900 to 1965

May 13, 2019, 11:46 am

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Whitney Museum of American Art

Jun 28, 2019–

 This summer the Whitney debuts a complete re-installation of the Museum’s extraordinary holdings of early and mid-twentieth century American art. The Whitney’s Collection: Selections from 1900 to 1965 traces major art historical movements and genres, presenting 120 works by more than seventy artists, including Elizabeth Catlett, Elsie Driggs, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Marisol, Joan Mitchell, Archibald Motley, Alice Neel, Georgia O’Keeffe, Kay Sage, and Andy Warhol. The exhibition reflects upon the enduring influence of the Museum’s history on the institution’s current mission, particularly the claim made by curator Hermon More at the opening of the Museum in 1931: “We look to the artist to lead the way.”

This exhibition of more than 120 works, drawn entirely from the Whitney’s collection, is inspired by the founding history of the Museum. The Whitney was established in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a sculptor and patron, to champion the work of living American artists. Mrs. Whitney recognized both the importance of contemporary American art and the need to support the artists who made it. The collection she assembled foregrounded how artists uniquely reveal the complexity and beauty of American life.

The exhibition begins with a gallery devoted to selections from the Museum’s founding collection, followed by galleries that weave their way through major art historical movements and genres. Key achievements by individual figures, including Georgia O’Keeffe and Jacob Lawrence, are interspersed throughout the show. 

Icons of the collection such as Calder’s Circus and the work of Edward Hopper are featured as well as more recent acquisitions—in particular, Norman Lewis’s American Totem (1960), a painting made at the height of the civil rights movement by an under-appreciated protagonist in the story of Abstract Expressionism. Such additions demonstrate that the Whitney’s collection is a dynamic cultural resource that allows us to continually reframe the history of American life and artistic production.

This exhibition is organized by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection, with Margaret Kross, senior curatorial assistant, and Roxanne Smith, curatorial assistant.

Images

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), Summer Days, 1936 

Norman Lewis (1909-1979), American Totem, 1960 

Charles Demuth, My Egypt, 1927

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning, 1930 

Edward Hopper, Railroad Sunset, 1929 

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Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960

May 13, 2019, 11:49 am

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Apr 28, 2017–Jun 2, 2019

Focusing on works made from 1900 to 1960, Where We Are traces how artists have approached the relationships, institutions, and activities that shape our lives. Drawn entirely from the Whitney’s holdings, the exhibition is organized around five themes: family and community, work, home, the spiritual, and the nation. During the six decades covered here, the United States experienced war and peace, economic collapse and recovery, and social discord and progress. American artists responded in complex and diverse ways, and a central aim of the exhibition is to honor each artist’s efforts to create her or his own vision of American life. The artists and their works suggest that our sense of self is composed of our responsibilities, places, and beliefs.

Georgia O’Keeffe: “Music, Pink and Blue No. 2” (1918. Oil on canvas, 35 × 29 15/16in.). Photo by Sheldan C. Collins, image courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

Where We Are, as well as each of its sections, is titled after a phrase in W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939.” Auden, who was raised in England, wrote the poem in New York shortly after his immigration to the United States and at the very outset of World War II. The title of the poem marks the date Germany invaded Poland. While its subject is the beginning of the war, Auden’s true theme is how the shadow of a global emergency reaches into the far corners of everyday life. Although mournful, the poem concludes by pointing to the individual’s capacity to “show an affirming flame.” Where We Are shares Auden’s guarded optimism, gathering a constellation of artists whose light might lead us forward.

Early Sunday Morning 1930
painting, Oil on canvas, 894x1530mm
ARTIST: Edward Hopper

Painting, Number 5 1914
painting, Oil on linen, 997x813mm
ARTIST: Marsden Hartley

Where We Are is organized by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection, with Jennie Goldstein, assistant curator, and Margaret Kross, curatorial assistant.

Christie’s American Art May 22

May 13, 2019, 11:55 am

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Christie’s has announced that The Michael Scharf Family Collection will lead the American Art sale on May 22. Considered one of the finest collections of American Modernism, this impressive group of twenty-eight paintings offers a strong representation from the Stieglitz Circle with works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove, as well as exceptional early explorations into abstraction by artists including Max Weber and Charles Green Shaw.

 

Michael Scharf began his collection of American Modernism in 1972 when he purchased Arthur Dove’s Parabola and began to study the artist and his contemporaries. His collecting habits, however, were founded during his childhood with serial collections of stamps, porcelain pugs, early editions of Elizabethan plays and British literature, and early sixteenth-century Hebrew books printed in Constantinople.

Michael Scharf comments, “The more I studied, the more I came to believe Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin were important artists who were responsible for instigating a transformation in the development of Modern American art. Also, the purchase of Parabola caused a bee to land in my bonnet. The bee stung me into activity, and a burning interest developed. Thus the Collection was born.”

Eric Widing, Deputy Chairman, American Art, Christie’s remarks, “Over many decades, Michael Scharf assembled an authoritative collection which represents, in depth, the emergence of modernism in America. Among its highlights are masterworks by many of the best-known American artists of the early twentieth century: Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Max Weber and dozens of others. Some works are among the earliest American abstractions, others explore nature and still others touch upon diverse subjects such as the city, music, and mystical and symbolic imagery. It is a justly celebrated collection.” 

Leading the collection is Georgia O’Keeffe’s Inside Red Canna, 1919, which is arguably the artist’s earliest depiction of a magnified flower in oil (estimate: $4,000,000-6,000,000). A triumph of American Modernism, the work is the culmination of a series of a small watercolors and oil paintings of cannas O’Keeffe created between 1918 and 1919. Of this group, Inside Red Canna is the largest in scale and is one of the most compositionally complex paintings within O’Keeffe’s early oeuvre. The painting was included in O’Keeffe’s watershed 1923 retrospective exhibition at Anderson Galleries, organized by her dealer and future husband Alfred Stieglitz, which launched the artist to her iconic status.

Arthur G. Dove’s River Bottom, Silver, Ochre, Carmine, Green, circa1923 (estimate: $3,000,000-5,000,000), is among the most important works by the artist to come to the market and reflects Dove’s deep connection to the American landscape and his fascination with water. In this view looking down onto a riverbed, Dove creates an amorphous exploration of color, line and form, pushing representation of nature to the edge of abstraction.

Marsden Hartley’s Abstraction(estimate: $4,000,000-6,000,000) was created in 1912-13 during a pivotal period of his career in Europe and embodies one of the artist’s most experimental and boldest abstract statements of his oeuvre. Building upon his musical ‘intuitive’ works of late 1912, and anticipating the politically and personally entrenched wartime German Officer paintings, Abstraction veritably vibrates with the intellectual and spiritual energy of one of the greatest visionaries of early twentieth-century art.

The collection also features seminal artists of early abstraction including one of the first shaped canvases ever painted in America by Charles Green Shaw, Plastic Polygon, 1937 (estimate: $250,000-350,000). Other collection highlights include works by Oscar Bluemner, Max Weber and Konrad Cramer, among others.

The American Art sale on May 22 is comprised of 88 lots and distinguished by rare and fresh to the market paintings, many with important provenance. The American Art online auction opens for bidding May 15-22 and features works from some of the most noteworthy American artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, from Milton Avery, Edward Hopper, and Andrew Wyeth to Asher B. Durand and George Inness, with estimates starting under $5,000. All lots will be on view in Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries from Saturday, May 18-21.

The top lot of the American Art sale is Norman Rockwell’s famed Saturday Evening Post cover The Homecoming, which was printed for the May 26, 1945 issue, just eighteen days after the end of World War II (estimate: $4,500,000–6,500,000). The timely and emotional image tells the story of a young soldier arriving home, where family, neighbors and even a love interest rush to greet him with ecstatic joy. The work was described by Post editor Ben Hibbs as “the finest cover Norman has done; in fact, I have always felt that it is the greatest magazine cover ever published.” 

Another fine example from the group of American Illustration in the sale is N.C. Wyeth’s painting for the novel Deerslayer, titled "She foundChingachgook studying the shores of the lake, the mountains, and the heavens..." (estimate: $700,000-1,000,000).

Among the strong selection of American Modernist works is Shipyard Society by George Bellows (estimate: $4,000,000-6,000,000), which is offered by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to support future acquisitions.  Painted in Camden, Maine, in 1916, Shipyard Society shows two of the most famed themes of Bellows’ career; the struggle of man versus the sea along the coast of Maine, and a focus on a realistic depiction of all levels of society.

 

Additional American Modernist highlights include Edward Hopper’sWindy Day which is sold to benefit The Prospect Hill Foundation and depicts the White River in Vermont with the adept handling of watercolor and keen understanding of light for which the artist’s works on paper are best known (estimate: $1,000,000-1,500,000).

The auction includes iconic Impressionist works, including a Cos Cob interior by Childe Hassam recognized by scholars as the best of its type, a pastel example of William Merritt Chase’s famed Shinnecock, Long Island, landscapes, and a John Singer Sargentsketch after the artist’s masterwork El Jaleo in the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum. 

Stellar examples by the Hudson River School include works by Sanford Gifford, John Frederick Kensettand Albert Bierstadt. A strong group of Western works includes examples by Alfred Jacob Miller, Henry Farny and Taos Society artists such as Walter Ufer. The sculpture selection is led by an Augustus Saint-Gaudens once owned by Stanford White, as well as exceptional models by Gaston Lachaise, Elizabeth Catlett andHerbert Haseltine.

Initiatives in Arts and Culture's (IAC) 24th Annual American Art Conference

May 14, 2019, 4:37 am

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In New York, American art is the focus from Friday, May 17 to Saturday, May 18, 2019, with an arts industry conference at Bonhams, 580 Madison Avenue. Tickets here.

 

 

Initiatives in Arts and Culture's (IAC) 24th Annual American Art Conference will explore the myth, mystique and artistry that cement a work's status as a "masterpiece" of American art. Key elements include taste of the times and its documentation, as well as history's evolving judgment often recorded in the words of the artists' themselves. This consideration explores the birth and role of nostalgia as a force on American art and the celebration of which constitutes that American myth. Participants will also consider the lampooning and glorification of American art in which the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the extraordinary is elevated into the Pantheon.

Receptions, viewings, and book signings complement formal talks and panels. View the schedule here.

Among confirmed participants are:

• Amanda C. Burdan, Curator, Brandywine River Museum of Art;
• Heather Campbell Coyle, Chief Curator, Delaware Art Museum;
• R. Ruthie Dibble, Curator, Chipstone Foundation;
• Vincent Di Girolamo, Assistant Professor, History at Baruch College, City University of New York;
• Jennifer R. Henneman, Associate Curator, Petrie Institute of Western American Art (PIWAA), Denver Art Museum;
• Ethan W. Lasser, Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. Curator of American Art, Head, Division of European and American Art, Harvard Art Museums;
• Angela Miller, Professor, Art History and Archaeology Department, Washington University in St. Louis;
• Ariel Plotek, Curator of Fine Art, Georgia O'Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico;
• Andrew Schoelkopf, co-founder and partner, Menconi + Schoelkopf;
• Rebecca Shaykin, Associate Curator, The Jewish Museum, where she is curating a forthcoming exhibition on art dealer Edith Halpert;
• Paul Staiti, Alumnae Foundation Professor of Fine Arts at Mount Holyoke;
• Marin R. Sullivan, director, Harry Bertoia Catalogue Raisonne and co-curator, Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life, a forthcoming retrospective scheduled to open at the Nasher Sculpture Center (2020);
• Jan and Marica Vilcek, Cofounders and Chairman Vice Chairman, The Vilcek Foundation;
• Farris Wahbeh, Benjamin and Irma Weiss Director of Research Resources, Whitney Museum of American Art.

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Picasso’s Women: Fernande to Jacqueline A tribute to John Richardson

May 14, 2019, 8:25 am

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Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York

May 3–June 22, 2019

I am perhaps a painter without style. 
—Pablo Picasso
Gagosian, in partnership with members of the Picasso family, is pleased to present Picasso’s Women: Fernande to Jacqueline, an exhibition of paintings and sculptures that attests to the central role and influence of the many women in Picasso’s life. It has been organized in honor of the gallery’s late friend and colleague, Sir John Richardson.



Pablo Picasso, Buste de femme (Dora Maar), 1940. Oil on canvas, 29 1/8 x 23 5/8 in, 74 x 60 cm © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Pho

 
In the early 1960s, Richardson was planning to write a study of Picasso’s portraits and spent hours with the artist, poring over reproductions of his works. As Picasso spoke about the complexities of his pictorial thinking—pointing out, for example, that a portrait of Dora Maar might also contain elements referring to her romantic predecessor Marie-Thérèse Walter, and her successor Françoise Gilot—Richardson began to believe that a detailed biographical treatment of Picasso’s portraiture would close a notable gap in Picasso scholarship. Decades later he would sit down to write what would become the monumental multivolume biography, A Life of Picasso.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait de femme profil gauche sur fond vert et brun, 1939 Oil on canvas 28 3/4 x 23 5/8 in 73 x 60 cm © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Maurice Aeschimann. Courtesy Gagosian.

Maar once told Richardson that when a new woman entered Picasso’s life, everything changed: the art, the house, the poetry, even the dog. And yet, Maar’s observation is a bit misleading, for within the era of each successive muse, Picasso never settled on a singular style. Rather, in penetrating Picasso’s imagination, each woman served as a catalyst for experiments in color and form that would continue to change as the contours of the relationship shifted. It is through this process that Picasso’s work was constantly reinvented and renewed.
Picasso was as eclectic in his choice of muse as he was in style: the bohemian Fernande Olivier; disciplined Olga Khokhlova; blonde Venus Marie-Thérèse; passionate artists Dora and Françoise; Sylvette David, the young woman with a high ponytail; and Jacqueline Roque, the devoted, romantic beauty. Picasso’s portraits of these women express psychological insights, as well as the drama that only profound intimacy can reveal. He depicts each, as Leo Steinberg has argued, not how she presents herself to the world, but how she feels inside. These women invoke poetry, beauty, war, and poverty, ingeniously reflecting the spirit and reality of the changing times. Not merely mute muses, Fernande and Françoise published memoirs; Olga and Marie-Thérèse kept extensive archives of photographs and letters over decades; Dora gave interviews to researchers and documented Picasso’s work and private life in photographs. Picasso’s women are as essential to our understanding of the artist and his oeuvre as they were instrumental in his creative life.

Sotheby's July 3 Old Master Evening Sale

May 15, 2019, 4:37 am

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J.M.W. Turner, Landscape with Walton Bridges. Estimate: £4-6 million. Courtesy Sotheby's
A rare, late work by Britain’s favourite artist, J.M.W. Turner, will be unveiled in Moscow ahead of its sale at Sotheby’s Old Master Evening Sale on 3 July. One of an important group of works painted by the artist in the last ten years of his life, Landscape with Walton Bridges, comes to the market for the first time in over 35 years with an estimate of £3-4 million. One of the preeminent figures that mark the pages of history – like da Vinci, Darwin, Picasso or Einstein – who changed the way we see and think about the world, Turner is an artist rooted in the aesthetic philosophy and culture of his time. Perpetually engaged with the art of both his predecessors and contemporaries, he was at the same time possibly the first ‘modern’ painter; who directly inspired the Impressionism of the nineteenth century, and presaged the Abstract Expressionism of the twentieth. Seemingly inspired by a sense of sheer delight in the working of paint, Turner’s visionary, experimental late works produced from the 1830s until his death in 1851 are considered to be the artist’s supreme achievement, and the pictures upon which his artistic significance ultimately rest. Essentially explorations of the effects of light, Turner created the works for himself, rather than for exhibition or for sale, retaining them for the development of his art. With their bold application of colour, their treatment of light and their deconstruction of form, these late works revolutionised the way the painted image was perceived. Applying the techniques he perfected in watercolour to the use of oil, with successive layering of translucent colour thinly applied to the surface, which imbue his canvases with a rich, hazy light, Turner gave his works a potency and power that had never been achieved before, and has seldom since. This series of late works was inspired by compositions found in the Liber Studiorum, the series of engraved views Turner had published earlier in his career, around 1810-11. The central motif - Walton Bridges - is also one that the artist had treated twice before in oils, in 1806 and 1807. Clearly a subject with significant meaning to him, in this work he sets the bridge in an idealised, Italianate landscape of his own imagining. Julian Gascoigne, Sotheby’s Old Master Paintings specialist commented: “This spectacular series of late oil paintings, in which Turner fondly revisits and reworks motifs long cherished in his mind, show a great artist late in his career, with his reputation established and his financial needs met, freed from the demands of public exhibition and the constraints of his critics. Vigorously and freely painted, with an emphasis on colour and light, rather than structure and form, he is exploring the possibilities of his medium and painting for himself, not for public consumption. Nearly two centuries later, however, seen through the lens of the Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism that would follow in the 19th and 20th centuries, we recognise them as the first seeds of an idea, from which would be born modern art.” One of a very small handful of late works to ever have left Turner’s studio, and therefore not included in the Turner Bequest at Tate Britain, Landscape with Walton Bridges was given to his landlady and partner in later life, Sophia Booth, with whom the artist had lived in Margate and London during the last years of his life. The work is now the only one of this group of ten or so proto impressionist late pictures inspired by the Liber Studiorum left in private hands. In 1887 the painting was acquired by the great American financier and collector Junius Spencer Morgan and spent the next hundred years as one of the jewels in the crown of the celebrated Morgan Collection in New York. Landscape with Walton Bridges was unveiled  in Moscow alongside   Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap (estimate: £1.5 – 2 million) and Gerrit Dou’s The Penitent Magdalene (estimate £800,000 – 1.2 million) from Sotheby’s Old Master Evening Sale on 3 July, and works from the forthcoming Russian Paintings sale in London on 5 June and the Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale in New York on 15 May. Landscape with Walton Bridges will also be exhibited at Sotheby’s New York (18 – 21 May) and Sotheby’s Hong Kong (28 – 30 May).

Sotheby’s American Art auction in New York 21 May 2019

May 15, 2019, 7:09 am

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Sotheby’s American Art auction in New York on 21 May 2019 is led by Edward Hopper’s Central Park scene, Shakespeare at Dusk (estimate $7/10 million), as well as significant examples by American icons such as Norman Rockwell, Grant Wood, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Mary Cassatt. Highlights from the auction are now on view in Sotheby’s newly expanded and re-imagined New York galleries, with the full exhibition of all works opening on the 17th. 
 
EDWARD HOPPER’S SHAKESPEARE AT DUSK 

Edward Hopper, Shakespeare at Dusk. Estimate: $7/10 Million. Courtesy Sotheby's.

Following the sale of Edward Hopper’s seminal Two Comedians last November, Sotheby’s is  offering yet another outstanding work by the artist: Shakespeare at Dusk (estimate $7/10 million). Set in Central Park, this scene belongs to Hopper’s celebrated series of New York cityscapes—a subject matter he explored early in his career while studying under Robert Henri and continued until his death in 1967. Painted in 1935, the work was previously held in the collection of John J. Astor VI, prominent socialite and son of Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, who tragically died in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. 

A lifelong lover of poetry and prose, Hopper overtly references the profound influence of literature on his emotional response to specific times of day, particularly the evening in Shakespeare at Dusk. The poems that he quoted, often as explanations for his own art, frequently focus on the mood of dusk—its sense of mystery, anxiety, and eros born out of the varying effects of light and shadow.
Shakespeare at Dusk depicts two statues cloaked in shadow near a deserted southern end of the Central Park Mall, which is illuminated by the vibrant afterglow of sunset on the horizon. In the foreground, Hopper presents John Quincy Adams Ward’s full-standing sculptural portrait of the celebrated playwright William Shakespeare, with his head bowed in contemplative thought. The inclusion of identifiable modern skyscrapers beyond the park is exceedingly rare in Hopper’s oeuvre and the present work is one of only a few New York scenes where the exact physical location is clearly apparent. 

MILTON AVERY’S TWO FIGURES ON BEACH 



Painted in 1950, Two Figures on Beach belongs to a remarkably innovative and productive period of Milton Avery’s celebrated career, and exemplifies the distinctive blend of realism and abstraction that defines his most admired aesthetic (estimate $1.2/1.8 million). Here, Avery reinvents the traditional art historical motif of the reclining female form through his distinctive and thoroughly modern vision, in a scene that emanates leisure and tranquility. 

JACOB LAWRENCE’S THE CARPENTERS 



Recently discovered by Jacob Lawrence scholars, The Carpenters will appear at auction for the first time after being held in the family of its original owners, who purchased it from The Downtown Gallery soon after it was completed in 1946 (estimate $500/700,000). Executed following Lawrence’s military service during the Second World War, the work demonstrates the artist’s profound interest in the depiction of African American workers and labor, particularly in the post-war years. Lawrence would return to the subject of carpenters again in the late 1960s, placing it among the most persistent themes in his body of work. 


MARY CASSATT’S DEPICTION OF MOTHERHOOD 

 
 
Painted in 1914, Young Mother in a Floppy Hat and Green Dress with Her Child Outdoors epitomizes Mary Cassatt’s unmatched ability to capture the timeless bond between a mother and her child, a subject that accounts for one-third of her oeuvre (estimate $1.5/2.5 million). While Cassatt’s work from the 1870s reflected her interest in the experience of modern women in Parisian society, by the 1880s, her emphasis began to shift from the public to the private domains of women’s lives. In Young Mother in a Floppy Hat and Green Dress with Her Child Outdoors, Cassatt embraces a new visual language in order to convey the quiet, intimate moments spent within the domestic realm – including simple, daily interactions between mothers and their children. 

ALL THAT IS GLORIOUS AROUND US: PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT AMERICAN COLLECTOR 



A stunning selection of ten 19th century landscapes emerging from a private American collection are led by Sanford Robinson Gifford’s A Lake Twilight (estimate $1.2/1.8 million). Painted in 1861, the work is a dramatic depiction of the nation’s landscape at the brink of the Civil War. 

Additional highlights from the group include  
 

Frederic Edwin Church’s Ruins at Baalbek (estimate $1/1.5 million),  

 

and Thomas Cole’s Sunset on the Arno (estimate $600/800,000). 


NORMAN ROCKWELL’S CHRISTMAS HOMECOMING 

 
A selection of three works by Norman Rockwell on offer include his preliminary study for the painting Christmas Homecoming, which appeared on the cover of the 25 December 1948 edition of The Saturday Evening Post (estimate $400/600,000). The work is the only image in the artist’s oeuvre in which all members of his immediate family appear and are portrayed as themselves. Rockwell's wife, Mary, embraces their eldest son, Jarvis, as he arrives home for the holidays with Christmas presents in hand, while the artist, his middle son Tom, and youngest son Peter appear in the background. Rockwell’s friends and fellow artists, Grandma Moses and Mead Schaeffer, are also rendered as family members. One of Rockwell's favorite models, Sharon O'Neil, appears twice as a set of twins in the immediate foreground.

Freeman’s American Art and the Pennsylvania Impressionists June 19

May 15, 2019, 7:16 am

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Freeman’s has again artfully curated another strong sale for June, consisting of nearly 160 lots and replete with many sought after artists. Many of the usual suspects will make an appearance in both the American Art and the Pennsylvania Impressionists categories, including William Glackens (1870-1938), Martin Lewis (1881-1962), Joseph Stella (1877-1946) and Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), as well as Fern Coppedge (1883-1951), Edward Redfield (1869-1965), Walter Schofield (1867-1944), and Mary Elizabeth Price (1877-1965). In addition, the sale will feature various, renowned artists including Walter Palmer (1854-1932) and Hugh Breckenridge (1870-1937).




An undoubted highlight of the auction is an important and dramatically composed painting by Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945) entitled “The Huge Monster Soon Came in Sight, Part of His Body Appearing Above the Waves and Part Concealed” (Angelica and the Sea-Serpent) (lot 85). Originally created as an illustration for Thomas Bulfinch’s The Legends of Charlemagne, which was published in 1863 and was an iconic collection of European fables and legends from the Middle Ages. The lot boasts compelling provenance, having been gifted by the artist to his friend Ralph Graves, whom he met in Washington, D.C. while working on a series of murals for National Geographic, and has remained in the same family ever since. According to the present owner, it is “by far the best and most dramatic painting” of the series NC Wyeth created for the publication.



Another exciting highlight of the sale is a beautiful portrait by Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) of one of the artist’s childhood friends, entitled “Ethel Page as Undine” (lot 19). 

Another exciting highlight of the sale is a beautiful portrait by Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) of one of the artist’s childhood friends, entitled “Ethel Page as Undine” (lot 19). This painting is Beaux’s second of three depictions of Ethel Page; the other portraits are in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Page, who came from an affluent Philadelphia family and is a direct descendent of Roger Williams (the founder and first governor of Rhode Island) is shown here, dressed for a formal gala event and depicted as Undine, the mythological water nymph. The work is one of the artist's most successful paintings, for which Beaux won a Mary Smith prize from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and garnered Beaux considerable fame. The work is deeply inspired by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and the Aesthetic Movement.

Well represented in the sale, as always, are the Pennsylvania Impressionists.



Most notable is a serene winter scene (lot 121) by Edward Willis Redfield; “The Frozen Creek” was completed in Point Pleasant and originally in the collection of the artist’s granddaughter.



Additional highlights count Daniel Garber’s (1880-1958) “Cobb’s Creek” (lot 154),

 a Walter Elmer Schofield painting entitled “Road to the Moors”, which was painted in England and was previously in the collection of Mrs. Whitney, wife of the head of J.P. Morgan (lot 134).

Moreover, the sale will offer a number of works by renowned female Pennsylvanian artists, counting five paintings by Fern Coppedge (lots 114, 126, 127, 144, 159), including a charming spring scene and an impressive representation of the Grist Mill in Bucks County. In addition, a beautiful, screen-like floral still life by Mary Elizabeth Price, painted with gold and silver leaf, along with two other works by the artist, will round out the category (lot 146).

The sale will offer several excellent watercolors, including

 

 an Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) called “Frozen Wash” (lot 89), as well as an enticing group of more modern works, including several gouaches by Burchfield (lots 70-74) and a “mystical” watercolor by Stella (lot 76). Additionally, there are several noteworthy still life lots, including works by Herman Dudley Murphy (1867-1945) (lots 20 & 21) and John F. Peto (1854-1907) (lot 18).

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A Passion for American Art: Selections from the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Collection

May 15, 2019, 7:27 am

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Peabody Essex Museum 

May 11 through December 1, 2019

The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) presents the debut exhibition of an outstanding collection of American painting, furniture, and decorative arts that was assembled by philanthropists, Carolyn and Peter Lynch, over the course of fifty years. A Passion for American Art: Selections from the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Collection takes visitors on the personal collecting journey of a couple that shared an extraordinary life together.

Through travel, exploration, and intellectual curiosity, the Lynches amassed a broad-ranging collection that includes spectacular, classic furniture from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia; paintings by Childe Hassam, Martin Johnson Heade, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent; works by modern furniture master Sam Maloof; and pottery by Otto and Gertrud Natzler.

Also featured are three significant works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Childe Hassam, and J.O.J. Frost that were recently donated to PEM by Peter Lynch in memory of his late wife, Carolyn Lynch. By embracing an organic approach to collecting and by freely integrating multiple subjects, time frames and media, the Lynches created lively conversations about artistic creativity, regional styles, and evolving traditions in America. A Passion for American Art is on view at PEM from May 11 through December 1, 2019.

This jewel-box exhibition celebrates the couple’s abiding love of nature and of American history through 120 works of decorative art, 36 pieces of furniture, 35 paintings and sculptures, and 10 Native American artworks. The majority of the works are pristine examples of American creativity from the 18th and 19th centuries – an era when many artists echoed the latest styles and forms from Europe while also striving to express new American ideals, beliefs, and regional tastes.

Publication: 




Published by the Peabody Essex Museum, the major 224-page publication, A Passion for American Art: Selections from the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Collection, celebrates the outstanding examples of American painting, furniture, decorative arts, and Native American art from the Carolyn and Peter Lynch collection. This luxuriously illustrated book traces the couple’s growth as collectors, their cultural and aesthetic affinities and their relationships with artists and fellow collectors. Writer Jeanne Schinto offers a profile of the Lynches and a view into how the collection expresses the couple’s distinctly American sensibility. PEM’s Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Art, Dean Lahikainen, shares an introduction to the collection and a series of short essays by PEM curators explore how the Lynches combined diverse works in the living spaces of their homes. The exhibition catalog will be available this spring at pemshop.com.









"This exhibition allows us to marvel not only at the range of American traditions and creativity but also appreciate how collecting can amplify a sense of place and express aesthetic and intellectual values,” says Lahikainen.

PHILANTHROPISTS AND ART LOVERS

Best known for heading Fidelity’s Magellan Fund, the best performing mutual fund in the world, Peter Lynch is also a major philanthropist. Together, the couple established the Lynch Foundation in 1988 to support nonprofit organizations in the greater Boston community. For many years, Carolyn served as a PEM Trustee and Overseer and helped found the museum’s American Decorative Arts Committee. In 2014, the Lynch Foundation generously created an endowment for the PEM’s robust changing exhibition program.

A Passion for American Art features three works given to PEM’s American art collection by Peter Lynch in memory of his late wife. These include Marblehead folk artist J.O.J. Frost, American Impressionist painter Childe Hassam, and American master Georgia O’Keeffe. PEM has presented solo exhibitions in recent years of both Hassam’s and O’Keeffe’s works.

Frost’s 1925 panoramic masterwork, an oil on fireboard painting, called The March into Boston from Marblehead, April 16, 1861: There Shall Be No More War, is of exceptional quality and scale. The local and national histories referenced in the painting, coupled with the highly-detailed, large-scale panoramic narrative scene, has broad appeal. The painting is poignantly autobiographical, capturing Frost’s childhood memory of watching his father alongside other Marblehead men depart on foot to Faneuil Hall in Boston to enlist in the Civil War.



A key loan in PEM’s 2016 exhibition, American Impressionist: Childe Hassam and the Isles of Shoals, Hassam’s 1911 painting East Headland, Appledore, Isles of Shoals is a masterpiece within Hassam’s Appledore oeuvre. East Headland is the first major American impressionist picture, and the first Hassam, to enter PEM’s collection. The work also holds special significance to the Lynch family as Peter took Carolyn to Appledore as a birthday surprise to see the island and the site depicted in this painting.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Cedar and Red Maple, Lake George, 1921. Oil on canvas. Peabody Essex Museum, Gift of Peter S. Lynch in memory of Carolyn A. Lynch. © Peabody Essex Museum. Photography by Bob Packert.

 In Cedar and Red Maple, Lake George, 1921, O’Keeffe’s treatment of natural forms and unconventional contours resulted in a modernist painting that abstracts, combines, and layers the landscape in ways that – at the time – were unprecedented in American art. The small but vivid canvas is characteristic of her aesthetic responses to the Lake George landscape. This gift dramatically bolsters PEM’s expanding and diversifying collection of works by women and by modern artists.

 

Martin Johnson Heade, Orchid and Hummingbirds near a Mountain Lake, about 1875-90. Oil on canvas. Collection of Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch. Photography by Bob Packert/Peabody Essex Museum.

The essential Duchamp

May 15, 2019, 7:32 am

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Art Gallery of New South Wales
 On view until 11 Aug 2019

'The essential Duchamp' celebrates the legendary work of artist and provocateur Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp Bicycle wheel 1964 (replica of 1913 original) Philadelphia Museum of Art; Fountain 1950 (replica of 1917 original) Philadelphia Museum of Art; Hat rack 1964 (replica of 1917 original) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Bottlerack 1961 (replica of 1914 original) Philadelphia Museum of Art, © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP. Copyright Agency, 2018

More than a century after Marcel Duchamp’s (1887–1968) readymade Fountain was rejected from display in New York and over five decades since the last significant exhibition of his work came to Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales presents The essential Duchamp. This must-see exhibition from the Philadelphia Museum of Art also marks the 50 year anniversary of the artist’s death.

The essential Duchamp is the most comprehensive survey of the art and life of Duchamp ever to be seen in the Asia Pacific region, bringing together over 125 works from the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s world-renowned collection. The travelling exhibition began in 2018 and concludes its tour at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney, following on from the Tokyo National Museum, Japan and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea.

Dr Michael Brand, director of the Art Gallery of NSW, said The essential Duchamp features work spanning the artist’s six-decade career, exploring Duchamp’s formative years alongside iconic works and key documentary materials.

“Tracking the achievements of Marcel Duchamp is to map some of the most seismic shifts in 20th century art history. The essential Duchamp reveals the life and work of an artist whose provocative and unorthodox approach dramatically expanded the possibilities for making art.

“Duchamp began building his reputation as a major disruptor of the art world when he exhibited Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2) 1912 at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. Yet, even as this magnificent and innovative take on Cubism established his name, Duchamp’s relentless efforts to challenge conventions saw him abandon painting and embark into uncharted artistic territory including the legendary readymades and the development of Rrose Sélavy, his female alter ego,” Brand said.

“The Philadelphia Museum of Art holds the world’s largest and most significant collection of Duchamp’s work together with an incomparable library and archival holdings relating to the artist, making The essential Duchamp a rare opportunity to experience his work in depth,” Brand added.
Timothy Rub, George D. Widener director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art said the Museum is proud to partner with the Art Gallery of NSW for a second time to bring another ambitious and innovative exhibition to Sydney, following the success of America: painting a nation in 2013.

“The gift of the Louise and Walter Arensberg collection in 1950, with its great concentration of works by Duchamp, was a landmark event in the history of the Philadelphia Museum of Art establishing it as a world renowned destination for modern art. We are delighted to share it with new audiences in the Asia-Pacific region.

“Duchamp’s reputation has never stood higher than it does at present among artists working around the world. Fifty years after his death the passage of time has seemed only to clarify and to strengthen the argument that his work represents an inflection point in the history of art, the significance of which has not been fully appreciated,” Rub said.

Dr Matthew Affron, exhibition curator and Muriel and Philip Berman curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said The essential Duchamp tells the story of Duchamp’s making and unmaking as a painter, revealing an influence that continues to resonate.

“Duchamp’s legend has proliferated internationally. His impact is seen today in artists’ engagement with multiples and facsimiles, in critical reflection on the display of art in galleries and museums, and in work that deals with commodity culture or explores the connections between gender, sexuality, and art.

“Duchamp wanted to exclude his personal taste and the technical skill of his hand from his work in order to make ideas paramount and bring forward the intellectual value in art. The essential Duchamp explores his insistent pursuit of independence and freedom in both art and life,” Affron said.
Nicholas Chambers, exhibition coordinating curator and senior curator of modern and contemporary international art at the Art Gallery of NSW, said the exhibition is unprecedented in Australia due to the depth and breadth of the representation of Duchamp’s career.

“From his early paintings as a teenager to his portable museums of miniatures late in life, and including important works that have not before been seen in the Asia Pacific region such as Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel 1910, Sonata 1911, and Chocolate Grinder (No. 2) 1914, this exhibition offers rare insights into the development of both Duchamp’s art and his enigmatic persona,” said Chambers.

The essential Duchamp is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication which tells the artist’s story through four key periods. Written by exhibition curator Matthew Affron with additional contributors: Cécile Debray, director at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris; Alexander Kauffman, Andrew W. Mellon–Anne d’Harnoncourt Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Michael R. Taylor, chief curator and deputy director for art and education, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond and John Vick, collections project manager, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Marcel Duchamp 'Portrait of the artist's father' 1910 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950-134-49 © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP. Copyright Agency, 2019.

The Essential Duchamp, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will present a rich and engaging account of the life and work of one of the most original and influential artists of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968).
Marcel Duchamp profoundly changed the way in which we think about the creation and interpretation of art. He earned his celebrity a century ago when his painting Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912) was exhibited at the groundbreaking Armory Show in New York, where it sparked reactions ranging from admiration to outrage. Twenty-five years later, Duchamp observed to an interviewer that the painting and its scandal had in some ways overtaken his story, leaving him "only a shadowy figure behind the reality of that painting." Our understanding of his complaint must be tempered, however, by the knowledge that Duchamp preferred to glide in relative silence through the world of the avant-garde. An aura of mystery was fundamental to his persona.
Organized by Matthew Affron, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition will consist of approximately one hundred and forty works of art and important archival and documentary items, nearly all drawn from the Museum's collection. It will be arranged as a survey of Duchamp's more than sixty years of activity as an artist. Threaded throughout the exhibition and central to its narrative structure will be the story of Duchamp's life in France and the United States. The exhibition will be divided into four sections.

 

The Essential Duchamp was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

 

　

  1. A Painter’s Life

Duchamp took up painting as an adolescent in the summer of 1902, and for the next eight years he drifted among various idioms of innovative art: Impressionism, Symbolism, and Fauvism. This modernist apprenticeship led to a brief but extremely original engagement with Cubism and the production of numerous important works including Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912), the composition that had a scandal at the Armory Show in New York and made its author an art celebrity in the United States. But in the autumn of 1912, the twenty-five-year-old Duchamp to a momentous decision: he resolved to abandon the painter's craft and seek new ways of working.
The first chapter in the life and the work of Marcel Duchamp is the story of his making and unmaking as a painter.

Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)
Marcel Duchamp
1912
Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950
 

  2. "Can Works be Made Which are Not ‘Of art’?"

Starting in 1912 Duchamp worked toward the execution of his magnum opus, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), a picture on glass that overturned the ground rules of painting as conventionally understood. In 1913, the first of his so-called readymades came into being. Readymades, functional objects deprived of their utilitarian identity, blurred the line between fine art and mass production and challenged commonsense notions about the priority of the artist's hand and the difference between original and copies in art.
In 1915, Duchamp emigrated to New York City. It was there, in 1917, that a notorious object entitled Fountain triggered the first public discussion of the idea of the readymade.

＊Readymades
The Philadelphia Museum of Art holds 6 readymades out of 12 crated by Duchamp. From the collection, this exhibition will present Bicycle Wheel, Bottle rack, and Fountain.

＊The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even("The Large Glass")
*The exhibition will show the 1980 replica (Komaba Museum, The Universty of Tokyo) of the 1915–1923 original
This famous work was left unfinished after Duchamp worked on it from 1915 to 1923. The glass was accidentally shattered after the work’s first public display at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926. Duchamp repaired The Large Glass and accepted the cracks as part of the work.

  3. Rrose Sélavy

Duchamp spent the better part of the interwar period based in Paris. Having already abandoned the activity of painting, he now shifted his professional energies to playing chess. But he also invented an artistic female persona named Rrose Sélavy, and used this assumed identity to pursue new activities in the art world. Duchamp pursued experiments in word-play (puns and verbal games) and also made unconventional art works based upon his long study of the principles of perspective and optics. These concerns dovetailed in "Anemic Cinema", the short avantgarde film he produced in 1926 with the assistance of his frequent accomplice, the photographer Man Ray. Meanwhile, by the mid-1930s, Duchamp had become more and more interested in an outgrowth of the readymade idea, namely the notion of producing and marketing replicas in limited editions of his earlier and more recent works. This idea led to the painstaking fabrication of a portable museum of miniature replicas, (From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy Box in a Valise) (1935–41). Throughout the interwar period, and then once again as a wartime emigre in New York, Duchamp also worked as a fellow traveler of the international Surrealist group (Duchamp became an American citizen in 1955).

  4. Our Lady of Desire

In the final two decades of his life, Duchamp achieved legendary status, first among artists and art-world insiders and then in the broader culture. During this same period, he went almost totally underground as an artist. Working in near-total secret within his New York studio, he created his final masterpiece, Étant donnés (1946–66). This room-sized, three-dimensional construction built around a life-case mannequin of a female nude offered a final reflection on themes that had preoccupied Duchamp across his career: the nature of the erotic, the artistic implications of modern engineering, science, and mathematics, the aesthetics of realism and the psychology of vision. In 1969, after the artist's death, Étant donnés was placed in proximity to its epic predecessor The Large Glass, which some years before had joined the principal collection of Duchamp's art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was only once Étant donnés was revealed to the world that the unifying logic of the rest of his late production, which was related to it, became apparent.

Duchamp Sitting by a Replica ofFountain
Photographer unknown
Gelatin silver print; 1965
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library and Archives: Gift of Jacqueline,Paul and Peter Matisse in memory of their mother Alexina Duchamp

 

Teeny Duchamp beside the Doors forEtant donnésin or near La Bisbal d' Empordà
Photographer unknown
Gelatin silver plate; Early 1960s
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of Jacqueline, Paul and Peter Matisse in memory of their mother Alexina Duchamp

Surrealism in Mexico

May 21, 2019, 9:35 am

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Di Donna, 744 Madison Avenue, NYC
April 26 – June 28, 2019

Di Donna Galleries announces Surrealism in Mexico, an exhibition that explores the robust creative moment that emerged between 1940 and 1955 as an international community of artists fled World War II in Europe and settled in Mexico. There, many principles that had defined the Surrealist movement were broadened and transformed in response to a new topography, new cultures, and the experience of exile, toward the creation of radically innovative new styles. This vibrant art-historical episode was made possible through liberal ideas about collaboration, immigration, and gender roles. It is particularly relevant in the context of today’s cultural and political climate, where such issues remain under intense scrutiny and debate.

Surrealism in Mexico is unprecedented in the United States for its subject and its scope. The exhibition will feature paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and collages by artists including Lola Álvarez Bravo, Leonora Carrington, Esteban Francés, Gunther Gerzso, Kati Horna, Frida Kahlo, Agustín Lazo, Matta, Gordon Onslow Ford, Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, Bridget Bate Tichenor, and Remedios Varo, with loans from distinguished private collections, corporate collections, and non-profit foundations in Mexico, the United States, and Europe.

A fully illustrated catalogue with scholarly essays by Mexico City-based curator Tere Arcq and Dr. Salomon Grimberg will be published to accompany the exhibition.

In 1938, André Breton and his wife, the artist Jacqueline Lamba, traveled to Mexico, where they were hosted by Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Breton championed Kahlo’s work, while Kahlo’s home and studio became a nexus for intellectual and creative dialogue. Moreover, Kahlo’s unapologetic expressions of her own physical and psychological conditions validated women’s experiences as a subject for artists such as Carrington and Varo.




Frida Kahlo. Me and My Parrots. 1941. Oil on canvas. Private Collection. © 2019 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 

Di Donna Galleries is pleased to present four paintings by Kahlo in this exhibition, including her famous painting  


 
La Venadita (The Little Deer) (1946) and her commanding self-portrait Me and My Parrots (1941).

Carrington, Tichenor, and Varo typically worked in illustrative styles, fusing autobiography, cosmic and ancient myths, and poetic aspects of the natural landscape in developing their own unique forms of magic realism. While the thematic sources of Carrington’s work, which included alchemy, Gnosticism, shamanism, and other esoteric subjects predated her arrival in Mexico, it was there where Carrington, away from a stifling upbringing and the horrors of war, discovered the freedom to cultivate a deeply personal and codified visual language.

Works such as the exquisitely rendered

Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) reveal Carrington’s remarkable ability to evoke mysterious and intimate rituals. Varo similarly found creative liberation in Mexico. Her paintings often contain figures on expedition or conducting ritualistic acts among the cosmos, as in  



Papilla estelar (Celestial Pablum) (1958).

Paalen, Matta, Francés, and Onslow Ford developed new types of abstraction in response to local history and geology.

Paalen developed an alternative theory to Breton’s brand of Surrealism, followed by a series based on totemic figures seen in grand canvases such as Tropical Night (1948), that indicate the influence of both quantum physics and pre-Columbian objects accessible to him at the time.

In 1941, Matta began a new series of works inspired by the country’s landscape and the psychological anxiety of wartime, sensitively alluded to in Centro del agua (Center of Water) (1941), which Matta painted while visiting Paalen.

Onslow Ford’s ambitious painting The Luminous Land (1943), which will be shown in New York for the first time, is an abstracted interpretation of the lake and mountain setting of his home in the remote town of Erongarícuaro, centered around an erupting volcano. In Mexico, Onslow Ford admitted that his growing attachment to nature and its impact on his psyche led him away from Surrealism.

For artists in this exhibition who had been part of the Surrealist circle in Europe, the practice of living and making art in Mexico quickly demythified notions of the country that had been constructed across the Atlantic. The fertile art-historical moment addressed by Surrealism in Mexico comprises pictorial innovations involving both figuration and abstraction, united by investigations into the physical and unseen worlds, as artists adapted conventional Surrealist strategies to the new experience of being in Mexico. This remarkable period of expansion, in both aesthetic and conceptual terms, resulted in work that would come to define major episodes in these artists’ careers, and transform notions of Surrealism beyond Europe’s borders.

More images 

Renoir: The Body, The Senses

May 21, 2019, 9:37 am

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Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts 

June 8–September 22, 2019 

Kimbell Art Museum,  Fort Worth, Texas 

October 27, 2019–January 26, 2020

Over the course of his long career, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919) continually turned to the human figure for artistic inspiration. The body—particularly the nude—was the defining subject of Renoir’s artistic practice, from his early days as a student copying the old masters in the Louvre to the early twentieth century, when his revolutionary style of painting inspired the masters of modernism.

In recognition of the centenary of Renoir’s death, the Clark Art Institute and the Kimbell Art Museum present Renoir: The Body, The Senses. This daring exhibition is the first major exploration of Renoir’s unceasing interest in the human form, and it reconsiders Renoir as a constantly evolving artist whose style moved from Realism into luminous Impressionism, culminating in the modern classicism of his last decades.

Co-organized by Esther Bell, Martha and Robert Lipp Chief Curator at the Clark, and George T.M. Shackelford, Deputy Director at the Kimbell, the exhibition will be on view at the Clark in Williamstown, Massachusetts June 8–September 22, 2019 and at the Kimbell in Fort Worth, Texas October 27, 2019–January 26, 2020.

Renoir: The Body, The Senses includes some seventy paintings, drawings, pastels, and sculptures by the artist as well as works by his predecessors, contemporaries, and followers. An international roster of exceptional loans including 

Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
The Boy with the Cat
1868
Oil on canvas
H. 123; W. 66 cm
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay) / René-Gabriel Ojéda

Boy with a Cat (1868, Musée d’Orsay);  



Study: Torso, Effect of Sun (c. 1876, Musée d’Orsay);




Seated Bather (c. 1883–1884, Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums);

 Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
The Bathers
Circa 1918-1919
Oil on canvas
H. 110; W. 160 cm
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

and The Bathers (1918–19, Musée d’Orsay),

as well as major contributions from the Clark’s renowned collection of the artist’s work:

 

 

survey the breadth of Renoir’s career.

Renoir’s respect for tradition will be demonstrated by comparison with such paintings as

 

The Three Graces (Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1636, Dulwich Picture Gallery), 



Andromeda (Eugène Delacroix, 1852, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston),

 

and TheRepose (Camille Corot, 1860, reworked c. 1865/70, National Gallery of Art).

His distinct approach to the subject of bathers will be underscored in a comparison of works such as

 

his Bathers Playing with a Crab (c. 1897, Cleveland Art Museum)



and The Bathers (Edgar Degas, c. 1895, Art Institute of Chicago).



Renoir’s profound influence on future generations will be seen in Pablo Picasso’s Nude Combing Her Hair (1906, Kimbell Art Museum), among others.

“Our exhibition will survey Renoir’s long career through the lens of the single subject that defines his legacy,” said Bell. “It’s the subject that most compellingly demonstrates how truly radical—and so often brilliant—he was.”

The exhibition investigates a number of themes central to today’s consideration of Renoir’s art, chief among them his engagement with the long tradition of the female nude as depicted in antique sculpture, in painting since the Renaissance, and as espoused, in his time, by the École des Beaux-Arts. Further themes include the concept of the female body and the male gaze in the nineteenth century; Impressionist figure painting and the effects of light on flesh; Renoir’s talent as a draftsman; the relationship between Renoir’s treatment of the body and that of such contemporaries as Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, and Paul Cézanne; and his late—still much debated—paintings and sculpture, works that inspired the next generation of modern artists.

“One hundred years after his death, Renoir still courts controversy,” said Shackelford. “We expect today’s audiences will be both inspired and challenged by the magnificent images of the nude that we’re bringing together in Renoir: The Body, The Senses—and we’re looking forward to a lively discussion.”

The artist’s critical reception—then and now—is explored in the exhibition and in the accompanying catalogue. During his lifetime, Renoir was idolized by artists including Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, and Henri Matisse, as well as renowned collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein, Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune, Albert Barnes, and Sterling and Francine Clark. But he also experienced brutal criticism. In 1876, critic Albert Wolff wrote in Le Figaro,“Would someone kindly explain to M. Renoir that a woman’s torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh with the green and purplish blotches that indicate a state of complete putrefaction in a corpse...”—referring to Study: Torso, Effect of Sun, now regarded as one of the high points of Impressionism. Today, Renoir remains a polarizing figure worthy of scholarly investigation, unabashed contemplation, and reconsideration by contemporary audiences.

In an interview conducted for the exhibition catalogue, contemporary artist Lisa Yuskavage, whose work prominently features the female nude, discusses why Renoir endures as an artist worthy of continued examination. “…Renoir doesn’t impress everyone. And yet he persists. I really do think that the serious conundrum is why. I think that is a worthwhile thing to try to understand. What is it that makes his work persist? It’s not just because a lot of people like it. I think the answer really lies in understanding who has loved it.”

Catalogue



The companion catalogue (Yale University Press) also features essays from leading scholars of nineteenth-century painting, such as Colin B. Bailey, Director of the Morgan Library & Museum; Esther Bell; George T.M. Shackelford; Nicole Myers, the Lillian and James H. Clark Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Dallas Museum of Art; Martha Lucy, Deputy Director of Research, Interpretation and Education at the Barnes Foundation; and Sylvie Patry, Deputy Director of the Musée d’Orsay. Yuskavage’s reflections on Renoir are included in a lively discussion with Alison de Lima Greene, the Isabel Brown Wilson Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, exploring the depiction of the body in relation to twenty-first-century feminist dialogue.

Monsters & Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s

May 28, 2019, 7:34 am

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Frist Art Museum 
June 21 through September 29, 2019

The Frist Art Museum presents Monsters & Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s, an exhibition that explores the powerful and unsettling images created in response to the threat of war and fascist rule. Featuring works by Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Dorothea Tanning, and others, the exhibition will be on display in the Frist’s Upper-Level Galleries from June 21 through September 29, 2019.

Through 78 objects, including paintings, drawings, film, and sculptures drawn primarily from the collections of The Baltimore Museum of Art and The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Monsters & Myths highlights the brilliance and fertility of this period, which arose in response to Hitler’s rise to power, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II—events that profoundly challenged the revolutionary hopes that had guided most Surrealist artists in the 1920s.

“In this exhibition, Surrealists’ portrayals of monsters, fragmented bodies, and other depictions of the grotesque are explored as metaphors for the threat of violence and fears and fantasies of unbridled power,” says Frist Art Museum chief curator Mark Scala.

Since 1924, artists and writers associated with the Surrealist movement had aimed to deconstruct the social order, particularly through targeting oppressive traditions by embracing the irrational and the marvelous in pursuit of psychic liberation.

“Seeking access to hidden truths, the artists in this show used their darkest imaginings to confront trauma,” says Scala. “They employed the language of dreams, free association, and Freudian psychoanalytic theory to help transform both themselves and a society that seemed inescapably bound for fascism and war.”

Through each artist, the psychological power of monstrosities appears in different guises in the exhibition. The first section, titled “The Emergence of Monsters,” focuses on the symbolism of deformation, fragmentation, and hybridity to reflect the inhumanity of war as well as individual psychological torment. In this section, Picasso reintroduces the myth of the Minotaur, a symbol of the repressed forces of the unconscious. Hans Bellmer and

André Masson. There Is No Finished World. 1942. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Bequest of Saidie A. May, BMA 1951.333. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

André Masson merge violence and malevolent sexuality in images of dismemberment and mutilation. Headless bodies in works by Alberto Giacometti and Magritte symbolize the loss of reason.

The exhibition continues with the section titled “The Spanish Civil War,” which includes paintings and prints by



Dalí, Miró, and Picasso, among others, capturing their despair at the brutality of the fascists in their war with the republican government.

Immediately following “The Spanish Civil War,” the section “World War II” features works that portend the coming disasters and capture the emotional upheavals experienced by artists during the early years of the war. While these responses are marked by anxiety and distress, a surprising beauty can be seen in even the most horrific works, such as Wolfgang Paalen’s painting of colorful bird-like demons in The Battle of Saturnian Princes III (1939).


The section “Dislocation and Survival” features extraordinary paintings by Surrealists, including Dalí, Ernst, Masson, and Roberto Matta who fled the war, mostly for the United States.

Photo Credit: Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Ernst’s painting Europe After the Rain II (1940–42) spans the mutating structures and human wraiths of a post-apocalyptic Europe with the crystalline outcroppings of a desert landscape, inspired by Ernst’s experience as an exile visiting Arizona. Like the other works in this section, Europe After the Rain II underscores transitions between past and present, reality and dream, and reason and irrationality that were acutely felt by these expatriate artists.

The exhibition concludes with “Surrealism in the Americas,” showing the influence of exiled European artists like Masson and Ernst on Americans such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Tanning. Highlights include Tanning’s phantasmagorical painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony.

Also included in the exhibition is the film Un Chien Andalou (1929) by Buñuel and Dalí, which contains a network of narratives relating to anticlericalism, unfulfilled desire, memory, and death.

Exhibition Catalogue



The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Rizzoli Electra with essays by exhibition curators Oliver Shell, Baltimore Museum of Art associate curator of European Art, and Oliver Tostmann, Susan Morse Hilles Curator of European Art at The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Other contributors are Robin Adèle Greeley, associate professor of modern & contemporary Latin American art history at the University of Connecticut and the author of Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War, and Samantha Kavky, associate professor of art history at Pennsylvania State University–Berks and co-editor of the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas.

Chapters of Artist James McNeill Whistler’s Life in Two Exhibitions

May 28, 2019, 7:39 am

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Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art.

Whistler in Watercolor
May 18–Oct. 6

For renowned artist Whistler (1834–1903), watercolor was the medium through which he reinvented himself in the 1880s and painted his way into posterity. Now, four co-curators at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery have brought together the worlds of art history, conservation and scientific research to give the public special insight into this part of Whistler’s life and rare access to the artworks in the exhibition “Whistler in Watercolor.”

Because of his great affinity for Whistler’s art, Freer amassed the world’s largest collection of watercolors by the artist and included them in his bequest to the Smithsonian in 1906. Freer’s collection comprises more than 50 examples—figures, landscapes, nocturnes and interiors—of Whistler’s watercolors, yet they have never left the Freer Gallery of Art. “Whistler in Watercolor” introduces people to the artist’s vast creative output and provides wide access to a rarely seen segment of his work.

“This is a groundbreaking exhibition for a number of reasons,” said curator Lee Glazer. “The watercolors—‘dainty,’ ‘beautiful’ and ‘portable’ as the artist described them—are critical to understanding how Whistler’s art historical ambition and his canny understanding of the commercial art market coalesced.”

“Whistler in Watercolor” does much more than assemble the full range of Whistler’s work in watercolor. It is the culmination of research by museum curators, scientists and conservators that shines new light on Whistler’s materials, techniques and artistic genius.

The Freer|Sackler’s Department of Conservation and Scientific Research is the foremost center in the United States for the care and scientific study of the arts of Asia. “Whistler in Watercolor” gave staff the rare opportunity to investigate some of the museum’s American collection.

McCarthy, together with paper conservator Emily Jacobson, employed scientific tools including reflected infrared imaging, which revealed alterations in composition and microscopic examination, to examine the watercolors and learn more about Whistler’s techniques, which uncovered information about the artist’s use of watercolor paper. The team’s methods and discoveries are fully described in the accompanying publication Whistler in Watercolor.

This exhibition is the culmination of more than four years of art historical and scientific research of these rarely seen pieces of art, and a perfect example of how Freer|Sackler experts—sometimes in unexpected ways—care for, research and share the museums’ unique collections.

The Ocean Wave James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903)1883–84 Watercolor on paper. Gift of Charles Lang Freer,Freer Gallery of Art,

Blue and Silver–Choppy Channel James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903)ca. 1893–97 Watercolor on paper mounted to board. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, Freer Gallery of Art,

The Peacock Room in Blue and White
May 18—ongoing
What ultimately led Whistler to delve seriously into watercolors was one of the more infamous chapters in his career—his creation of the now-iconic Peacock Room for his patron Frederick Leyland, a shipping magnate in London. With the blue-and-white ceramics reinstalled, curators at the Freer|Sackler have returned the room to how it appeared in Whistler’s time.
In 1876, Leyland had the shelves of his dining room filled with blue-and-white Chinese porcelains of the Kangxi era. Their patterns and colors inspired Whistler to redecorate the room in a profusion of blue, green and gold patterns similar to peacock plumage. The intricate patterns provided a tonal counterpoint to the bolder patterns and colors of the porcelains. Leyland, however, found the artist’s modifications—and his fee—excessive. The two men quarreled, and Leyland terminated his relationship with Whistler. The loss of this key patron, combined with the legal fees incurred during Whistler’s libel suit against art critic John Ruskin, sent the artist into bankruptcy. He turned to watercolors in the 1880s as way to broaden the audience for his work and take his career in a fresh direction.
The challenge for the museum’s curators to present the space as Whistler intended was having enough porcelains to fill the room. Kangxi-era pots in the Freer collection could only fill less than half of the 218 shelves, so the curators decided to commission more than 100 new vessels.
“Blue-and-white porcelain from the Freer collection adorn the shelves of the east and north walls, and newly commissioned pieces in the Kangxi style line the west and south walls,” said Kerry Roeder, the Luce curatorial fellow at the Freer|Sackler. “These porcelains are not reproductions of historical blue-and-white ware. Instead, they reflect the continuity of a 1,500-year-old porcelain-making tradition in Jingdezhen, China, and several are representations of objects in our collection.”
Porcelain production during the Kangxi period greatly expanded China’s export trade with Europe, sparking the East-West exchange that endures to this day.
“One of the most thrilling aspects of this new installation is that it allows visitors to experience the room in much the same way Whistler originally envisioned it,” Roeder said.

L’Affichomania: The Passion for French Posters

May 28, 2019, 8:23 am

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Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA June 8-Sept. 15, 2019;

Vero Beach Museum of Art, Vero Beach, Florida, Oct. 19, 2019-Jan. 12, 2020; 

Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin, March 7-May 31, 2020; 

Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, Washington, June 26-Aug. 23, 2020; 

June Collins Smith Museum of Art, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, Sept. 19, 2020-Jan. 3, 2021; 

Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah, Sept. 3, 2021-Feb. 19, 2022;

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee, March 19-June 12, 2022.

The dynamism and style of turn-of-the-century Paris are brought to life in this spirited exhibition featuring approximately 50 iconic French posters dating from 1875 to 1910. L’Affichomania: The Passion for French Posters showcases the remarkable images of five master printmakers who worked in France: 

Jules Chéret, Théâtrophone, 1890, color lithograph, photograph by John Faier, © 2015, courtesy of the Richard H. Driehaus Museum

 Jules Chéret, 

 

Eugène Grasset, 

 Courtesy the Driehaus MuseumAlphonse Mucha, "Princess Hyacinth", 1911

Alphonse Mucha, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. 

These pioneering artists reigned in Paris during an astonishing stretch of artistic creativity and developed the vivid new visual style on view in this exhibition.

Significance:  The works in L’Affichomania: The Passion for French Posters represent some of the most compelling and well-known examples of French poster art such as 



Steinlen’s Le Chat Noir 

 
and Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge: La Goulue. 

 The exhibition explores the richness of the artists’ achievements in this emerging medium and the visually powerful role of the poster in French society.

Bright, bold and promoting everything from products and inventions to the famed Bohemian events and performers of Montmartre, the large-scale color lithographs were heralded as a new art form – a brilliant fusion of craft and commerce. The popularity of posters fueled a passion for collecting them, called affichomanie (craze for posters). Thanks to relaxed posting guidelines, along with advances in color printing, tens of thousands of posters were plastered along the streets of Paris every year. Pedestrians encountered these large prints throughout the city, making graphic art and design a part of modern daily life.

Tour:  The exhibition premieres at the Taft Museum of Art, the first stop on a nationwide tour of the following venues:

Organizer:  L’Affichomania: The Passion for French Posterswasorganized by the Richard H. Driehaus Museum in Chicago and drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection of fine and decorative arts.

Curator:  Jeannine Falino is an independent curator, museum consultant and professor specializing in decorative arts, craft and design.

Book:  A publication of the same title accompanies the exhibition and includes texts by the curator and by collector Richard H. Driehaus.

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The Renaissance of Etching

May 28, 2019, 8:49 am

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

October 23, 2019–January 20, 2020

The Albertina Museum in Vienna 

February 12–May 10, 2020

Exhibition Dates:	October 23, 2019–January 20, 2020
Exhibition Location:	The Met Fifth Avenue, Galleries 691–693 The Charles Z. Offin Gallery, Karen B. Cohen Gallery, Harriette and Noel Levine Gallery

The emergence of etching on paper in Europe in the late 15th and early 16th centuries—when the technique moved out of the workshops of armor decorators and into those of printmakers and painters—was a pivotal moment that completely changed the course of printmaking. Opening October 23, The Renaissance of Etchingwill trace the first 70 years of the etched print, from ca. 1490 to ca. 1560, through some 125 etchings created by both renowned and lesser-known artists. The prints will be displayed alongside a selection of drawings, printing plates, illustrated books, and armor. The works are drawn from the collections of The Met, The Albertina Museum, and a number of European and American lenders.

It is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Albertina Museum.

Etching is an intaglio printmaking technique in which lines or areas on a metal plate are incised with acid in order to hold ink; the image on the plate is then printed onto paper. Artists today etch prints much the way they did in the early 16th century. In essence, the technique is equivalent to drawing on the surface of a printing plate. As a result, etching has an ease that opened the door for all kinds of artists to make prints. Among the pioneers of the medium are some of the greatest painters of the Renaissance, including Albrecht Dürer, Francesco Parmigianino, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

The Met’s exhibition will begin with the origins of etching in the workshop of the German printmaker and armor decorator Daniel Hopfer and then move on to explore the ways in which a range of artists from Germany, Flanders, Italy, and France began to experiment with the new medium. In the transition from armor to print, a technique used to create unique and costly armor for elite patrons transformed into one used to produce relatively inexpensive prints for a broad audience. Furthermore, what was once the artwork (the etched metal armor) was now the tool used to create the artwork (the metal plate printed on paper).

The exhibition will conclude with the period around 1560, when the technique became professionalized and the Netherlandish print publisher Hieronymus Cock employed etchers to create prints after designs produced by other artists. This period marked a transition from the use of etching as a means of experimentation to its standardization and expansion by printmakers and print publishers.

Following its presentation at The Met, the exhibition will be on view at The Albertina Museum in Vienna (February 12–May 10, 2020).


A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition:

The Renaissance of Etching

Nadine Orenstein, Freyda Spira, Catherine Jenkins, and Christof Metzger

Nadine Orenstein is Drue Heinz Curator in Charge, and Freyda Spira is associate curator, both in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Catherine Jenkins is an independent scholar. Christof Metzger is curator in charge of Department of Drawings and Prints at the Albertina Museum, Vienna.

  

View InsidePrice: $65.00

November 12, 2019
304 pages, 9 x 10 1/2
237 color illus.
ISBN: 9781588396495
Hardcover
Published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press

 

The first comprehensive look at the origins and diffusion across Europe of the etched print during the late 15th and early 16th centuries

The etching of images on metal, originally used as a method for decorating armor, was first employed as a printmaking technique at the end of the 15th century. This in-depth study explores the origins of the etched print, its evolution from decorative technique to fine art, and its spread across Europe in the early Renaissance, leading to the professionalization of the field in the Netherlands in the 1550s. Beautifully illustrated, this book features the work of familiar Renaissance artists, including Albrecht Dürer, Jan Gossart, Pieter Breughel the Elder, and Parmigianino, as well as lesser known practitioners, such as Daniel Hopfer and Lucas van Leyden, whose pioneering work paved the way for later printmakers like Rembrandt and Goya. The book also includes a clear and fascinating description of the etching process, as well as an investigation of how the medium allowed artists to create highly detailed prints that were more durable than engravings and more delicate than woodblocks.

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Renewing the American Spirit: The Art of the Great Depression

May 30, 2019, 7:33 am

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Oklahoma City Museum of Art

 Nov. 2, 2019 and close April 26, 2020

 

 

 

This fall, “Renewing the American Spirit: The Art of the Great Depression” explores the physical and social landscape of the United States during the Great Depression through paintings, prints, photographs and other media. This original exhibition includes a selection of works from the Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s excellent collection of WPA art, a recently acquired monumental mural by Gardner Hale, which has not been exhibited publicly since the First President's bicentennial exhibition in 1932, and several loans from regional institutions.

“Renewing the American Spirit” examines the diverse responses of artists to the social upheaval and economic distress that characterized American life in the 1930s. Together, the aesthetically and politically varied works produced in the 1930s paint a revealing portrait of the nation’s evolving psyche as it sought to move ahead through one of the country’s most challenging periods.

“The art of this time period provided artists with relief, documented the social injustices of the time and even functioned as forms of propaganda,” said Michael Anderson, director of curatorial affairs. “‘Renewing the American Spirit’ examines the formation of a new national identity, one that would prove short-lived aesthetically with the rise of the American avant-garde after the end of World War II, but far reaching politically through the creation of the New Deal coalition.”

‘“The Triumph of Washington,’ Gardner Hale’s monumental mural, adds to the Museum’s impressive holdings in Great Depression-era art,” added Anderson. “The painting presents a dynamic and triumphant fictionalized view of the general and head of state, on horseback, amidst flag-bearing soldiers, and in front of a looming twentieth century skyline. We are deeply grateful to D. Wigmore Fine Art for the gift of this major work and excited to include it as a focal point for this new exhibition.”

Gardner Hale was well known for his murals and frescoes in the early 1900s. He had a studio in NYC and was a member of the Architectural League of New York, National Society of Mural Painters, American Federation of Arts, Salons of America and Society of Independent Artists. His work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Society of Independent Artists and Salons of America.

In addition to the Museum's renowned collection of WPA art and “The Triumph of Washington” by Gardner Hale, the exhibition features key examples of Depression-era Native American art, highlighted by the work of Acee Blue Eagle, and paintings and works on paper by Hans Hofmann, John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and Milton Avery.

Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet

May 30, 2019, 3:43 pm

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Royal Academy of Arts, London 

June 30–September 29, 2019

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

October 29, 2019–January 26, 2020 

The Visit (La Visite),1899. Gouache on cardboard. 55.5 x 87.0 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, 1909 © Kunsthaus Zürich.

Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) created indelible imagery of fin-de-siècle Paris in painted portraits and interior narratives that pulse with psychological tension. Witness to the radical aesthetics that gripped Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Swiss-born and Paris-educated Vallotton is today recognized as a distinctive artist of his generation.

 

Félix Vallotton,Self-portrait at the Age of Twenty (Autoportrait à l’âge de vingt ans),1885.

Oil on canvas. 70 x 55.2 cm. Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne. Acquisition, 1896. Inv. 620. Photo © Nora Rupp, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne.

Opening October 29 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet will present pivotal moments in the artist’s career as painter and printmaker through some 70 works of art from more than two dozen lenders.

 

Félix Vallotton,The Ball (Le Ballon),1899.

Oil on cardboard. 48 x 61 cm. Musée d'Orsay. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski.

The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in collaboration with Fondation Félix Vallotton, Lausanne.

Félix Vallotton,Intimacies V: Money (Intimités V: L'Argent),1897-8.

Xylograph. 25 x 32.3 cm. Ville de Genève, Musées d’art et d’histoire, Don Lucien Archinard © Musées d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève, Cabinet d'arts graphiques.

Highlights of the exhibition will include Vallotton’s trenchant woodcuts of the 1890s, prints that solidified his reputation as a graphic artist of the first rank while boldly messaging his left-wing politics. Additionally, for the first time, Vallotton’s portrait of the legendary American collector Gertrude Stein will be displayed alongside Picasso’s painting of this formidable woman in The Met collection.

 

Félix Vallotton,Sunset, Villerville (Coucher de soleil, Villerville),1917.

Oil on canvas. 55.5 x 97cm. Kunsthaus Zürich. Association of Zürich Art Friends. Acquired 1977 © Kunsthaus Zürich.

Arriving in Paris at the age of 16, Vallotton attended the Académie Julian, where he trained under the painters Jules Lefèbvre and Gustave Boulanger. Immersing himself in Parisian life as participant and keen observer, Vallotton’s early works are replete with witty and often unsettling observations of domestic and political life. He attained early recognition of his talents as a printmaker, and his illustrations proliferated in literary magazines and left-wing journals through the 1890s. While he spared no barbs satirizing the French bourgeoisie, Vallotton married into their ranks in 1899. (His wife was a member of the famed Bernheim-Jeune family of art dealers.)

Félix Vallotton,Red Peppers (Poivrons rouges),1915.

Oil on canvas. 46 x 55cm. Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Dübi-Müller Foundation, Photo © SIK-ISEA, Zurich. 

Vallotton circulated briefly within the Nabi artists—Bonnard, Vuillard and Denis, to name a few. Bonnard and Vuillard remained his friends for years after the Nabi disbanded. Vallotton’s marriage brought financial security and an end to printmaking as an essential source of revenue. Thereafter, the artist devoted himself exclusively to painting, dividing his time between bourgeois Paris and Normandy, where he spent his summers.



A catalogue published by the Royal Academy will accompany the exhibition.

The exhibition is organized at The Met by Dita Amory, Curator in Charge of the Robert Lehman Collection.

Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection

May 30, 2019, 3:52 pm

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Frist Museum
May 24–September 2, 2019 

The Frist Art Museum presents Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection—an exhibition that captures the vitality and expressiveness of twentieth-century Mexican art with iconic works by Frida Kahlo, her husband Diego Rivera, and their contemporaries, including Manuel Álvarez Bravo, María Izquierdo, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Organized by the Vergel Foundation and MondoMostre in collaboration with the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (INBAL), the exhibition will be on display in the Frist’s Ingram Gallery from May 24 through September 2, 2019.

Among the more than 150 works on view will be seven painted self-portraits by Kahlo, Rivera’s Calla Lily Vendor, and numerous portraits of the Gelmans, plus more than fifty photographs that provide insight into Kahlo and Rivera’s passionate love affair and how the couple lived, worked, and dressed.

Husband-and-wife collectors Jacques and Natasha Gelman were glamorous and wealthy Eastern European refugees who married in Mexico in 1941, took part in Mexico City’s vibrant art scene, and acquired art mostly from their artist friends. In 1943, Jacques commissioned a full-length portrait of Natasha from Rivera, Mexico’s most celebrated painter. “The Gelmans formed close friendships with many artists in this exhibition, often acting as patrons and promoters of their careers and assembling one of the finest collections of modern Mexican art in the world along the way,” says Frist Art Museum curator Trinita Kennedy.

Born in 1907 in Coyoacán, a suburb south of Mexico City, Kahlo had a difficult childhood, facing a bout with polio at age six and a bus accident at the age of 18 that left her disabled and often bedridden. “It was during her recovery from the accident that Kahlo began to paint, in part because she was bored in bed. She spent hours alone with an easel and a mirror painting her own face,” says Kennedy. “She never attended art school, but as she considered a career as an artist, she sought out several of Mexico’s leading painters, including Rivera, whom she had met several years earlier.” Their friendship became a courtship, with the two marrying in 1929. Unfaithful to each other, the pair divorced in 1939, only to remarry in 1940.

In the early twentieth century, Mexico’s artistic avant-garde was closely tied to political and social revolution. Following Mexico’s civil war from 1910 to 1920, the government enlisted male painters to produce monumental murals in public buildings. Rivera was a revered figure in this muralism movement and an avowed Communist. “Using art, which could be understood by the masses, Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros and others helped Mexico fashion a new identity rooted in its own unique history,” says Kennedy.

Rivera’s artistic works, as well as his vocal opinions on the role of art, would shape the development of Mexican culture throughout the first half of the twentieth century. “His depictions of Mexican traditions and everyday life soon came to epitomize Mexican culture at home and abroad, including the United States where he created murals in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York,” says Kennedy.

Rivera also created easel paintings representing poignant scenes of everyday life and labor in Mexico, such as  

 

Calla Lily Vendor, a luminous painting that celebrates the beauty and strength of Mexico and its people.

Like Rivera, Kahlo infused her work with mexicanidad, an identification with Mexico’s distinct national history, traditions, culture, and natural environment, but in a much more personal way. About a third of her paintings are self-portraits, the works for which she is now most celebrated. They accentuate her distinctive appearance, characterized by a v-shaped unibrow, deep brown eyes, mustache, carefully coiffed hair with braids, and indigenous Mexican clothing.

 

In Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as Tehuana), for example, she crowns herself with a festive indigenous Mexican headdress known as a resplandor.

Known primarily in artistic circles during her lifetime, Kahlo’s paintings began to attract widespread international attention in the decades following her death. Her work and life story continued to resonate in pop culture with the success of Frida, a 1983 biography by Hayden Herrera, and the 2002 biopic Frida, starring Salma Hayek.

The exhibition includes more than fifty photographs of Kahlo, most of which were taken by noted photographers, such as Lola Álvarez Bravo, Nickolas Muray, and Edward Weston. There is also a special gallery focused on Kahlo’s unique personal style, which offers insight into her wardrobe, hairstyles, and jewelry. An interactive touchscreen allows visitors to explore elements of her clothing and to learn why she wore them. The exhibition concludes with haunting black-and-white photographs of Kahlo’s crutches, corset, and bed, taken recently at the Casa Azul, her former home in Coyoacán, by contemporary artists, including Patti Smith. “Directly associated with her pain, these objects are venerated as relics,” says Kennedy. “As the photos attest, Kahlo’s ability to create magical paintings despite the suffering caused by her broken body captivates and inspires many of us today.”
The works collected by the Gelmans offer an unrivaled opportunity to encounter the chaotic and creative Mexican art world of the first half of the twentieth century in all its complexity. Modern Mexican art exerted a key influence on modern art in the United States, and its impact continues to be felt throughout the world today.

Organized by The Vergel Foundation and MondoMostre

Publication 

Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection

Foreword by John R. Lane and Lou Anne Colodny; essay by James Oles
88 pages, 36 illustrations, 8 ¾ x 11 ¾ inches, softcover
Published in 1996

The Gelman Collection represents one of the most remarkable holdings of Mexican modernism in private hands. It is graced by the outstanding works of renowned artists Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, among many others. This bilingual catalogue features lavish illustrations of thirty key works from this collection, as well as a lively and insightful essay placing these works in both a critical and a historical context. From stunning self-portraits and paintings inspired by European modernist artists to still lifes and abstract landscapes, this volume offers an extraordinary overview of the evolution of twentieth-century Mexican art. In English and Spanish.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (April 18–September 8, 1996), and the exhibition Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (October 5–December 2, 1996)
ISBN 9780918471376 (softcover)

Art History News - April-May

June 3, 2019, 6:45 am

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Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 3 days ago

*Frist Museum* *May 24–September 2, 2019 * The Frist Art Museum presents *Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection*—an exhibition that captures the vitality and expressiveness of twentieth-century Mexican art with iconic works by Frida Kahlo, her husband Diego Rivera, and their contemporaries, including Manuel Álvarez Bravo, María Izquierdo, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Organized by the Vergel Foundation and MondoMostre in collaboration with the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (INBAL), the e... more »

Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 3 days ago

Royal Academy of Arts, London June 30–September 29, 2019The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkOctober 29, 2019–January 26, 2020 [image: Felix Vallotton] The Visit (La Visite), 1899. Gouache on cardboard. 55.5 x 87.0 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, 1909 © Kunsthaus Zürich. Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) created indelible imagery of *fin-de-siècle* Paris in painted portraits and interior narratives that pulse with psychological tension. Witness to the radical aesthetics that gripped Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Swiss-born and Paris-educated Vallotton is today recognized... more »

Renewing the American Spirit: The Art of the Great Depression

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 3 days ago

*Oklahoma City Museum of Art* * Nov. 2, 2019 and close April 26, 2020* John Marin (American, 1870 – 1953). Rough Sea, Cape Split, Maine , 1932. Oil on canvas. Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Museum purchase from the Beaux Arts Society Fund for Acquisitions, 1987.011. Photo: Josep h Mills Walt Kuhn (American, 1877 – 1949). Tiger Trainer , 1932. Oil on canvas. Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Friends of the Okla homa Art Center, 1981.035. Photo: Joseph Mills Stephen Mopope (American, 1898 – 1974). Love - Call , 1931. Tempera on paper. Oklahoma Ci... more »

The Renaissance of Etching

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 5 days ago

The Metropolitan Museum of Art October 23, 2019–January 20, 2020The Albertina Museum in Vienna February 12–May 10, 2020 [image: Renaissance of Etching] *Exhibition Dates:* October 23, 2019–January 20, 2020 *Exhibition Location:* The Met Fifth Avenue, Galleries 691–693 The Charles Z. Offin Gallery, Karen B. Cohen Gallery, Harriette and Noel Levine Gallery The emergence of etching on paper in Europe in the late 15th and early 16th centuries—when the technique moved out of the workshops of armor decorators and into those of printmakers and painters—was a pivotal moment that complete... more »

L’Affichomania: The Passion for French Posters

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 5 days ago

*Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA June 8-Sept. 15, 2019;* * Vero Beach Museum of Art, Vero Beach, Florida, Oct. 19, 2019-Jan. 12, 2020; * *Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin, March 7-May 31, 2020; * *Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, Washington, June 26-Aug. 23, 2020; * *June Collins Smith Museum of Art, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, Sept. 19, 2020-Jan. 3, 2021; * *Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah, Sept. 3, 2021-Feb. 19, 2022;* *Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee, March 19-June 12, 2022. * The dynamism and style of tu... more »

Chapters of Artist James McNeill Whistler’s Life in Two Exhibitions

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 5 days ago

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art. *Whistler in Watercolor**May 18–Oct. 6* For renowned artist Whistler (1834–1903), watercolor was the medium through which he reinvented himself in the 1880s and painted his way into posterity. Now, four co-curators at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery have brought together the worlds of art history, conservation and scientific research to give the public special insight into this part of Whistler’s life and rare access to the artworks in the exhibition “Whistler in Watercolor.” Because of his gr... more »

Monsters & Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 5 days ago

*Frist Art Museum * *June 21 through September 29, 2019* The Frist Art Museum presents *Monsters & Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s*, an exhibition that explores the powerful and unsettling images created in response to the threat of war and fascist rule. Featuring works by Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Dorothea Tanning, and others, the exhibition will be on display in the Frist’s Upper-Level Galleries from June 21 through September 29, 2019. Through 78 objects, including paintings, drawings, film, and sculptures dr... more »

Renoir: The Body, The Senses

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 1 week ago

*Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts * *June 8–September 22, 2019 * *Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas * *October 27, 2019–January 26, 2020* Over the course of his long career, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919) continually turned to the human figure for artistic inspiration. The body—particularly the nude—was the defining subject of Renoir’s artistic practice, from his early days as a student copying the old masters in the Louvre to the early twentieth century, when his revolutionary style of painting inspired the masters of modernism. In recognition of the ... more »

Surrealism in Mexico

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 1 week ago

*Di Donna, 744 Madison Avenue, NYCApril 26 – June 28, 2019* Di Donna Galleries announces *Surrealism in Mexico*, an exhibition that explores the robust creative moment that emerged between 1940 and 1955 as an international community of artists fled World War II in Europe and settled in Mexico. There, many principles that had defined the Surrealist movement were broadened and transformed in response to a new topography, new cultures, and the experience of exile, toward the creation of radically innovative new styles. This vibrant art-historical episode was made possible through lib... more »

The essential Duchamp

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 2 weeks ago

*Art Gallery of New South Wales* * On view** until 11 Aug 2019* 'The essential Duchamp' celebrates the legendary work of artist and provocateur Marcel Duchamp Marcel Duchamp *Bicycle wheel* 1964 (replica of 1913 original) Philadelphia Museum of Art; *Fountain* 1950 (replica of 1917 original) Philadelphia Museum of Art; *Hat rack* 1964 (replica of 1917 original) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; *Bottlerack* 1961 (replica of 1914 original) Philadelphia Museum of Art, © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP. Copyright Agency, 2018 More than a century after Marcel Duchamp’s (1887–1... more »

A Passion for American Art: Selections from the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Collection

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 2 weeks ago

Peabody Essex Museum May 11 through December 1, 2019The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) presents the debut exhibition of an outstanding collection of American painting, furniture, and decorative arts that was assembled by philanthropists, Carolyn and Peter Lynch, over the course of fifty years. *A Passion for American Art: Selections from the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Collection* takes visitors on the personal collecting journey of a couple that shared an extraordinary life together. Through travel, exploration, and intellectual curiosity, the Lynches amassed a broad-ranging collection th... more »

Freeman’s American Art and the Pennsylvania Impressionists June 19

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 2 weeks ago

Freeman’s has again artfully curated another strong sale for June, consisting of nearly 160 lots and replete with many sought after artists. Many of the usual suspects will make an appearance in both the American Art and the Pennsylvania Impressionists categories, including William Glackens (1870-1938), Martin Lewis (1881-1962), Joseph Stella (1877-1946) and Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), as well as Fern Coppedge (1883-1951), Edward Redfield (1869-1965), Walter Schofield (1867-1944), and Mary Elizabeth Price (1877-1965). In addition, the sale will feature various, renowned artists... more »

Sotheby’s American Art auction in New York 21 May 2019

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 2 weeks ago

Sotheby’s American Art auction in New York on 21 May 2019 is led by Edward Hopper’s Central Park scene, *Shakespeare at Dusk *(estimate $7/10 million), as well as significant examples by American icons such as Norman Rockwell, Grant Wood, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Mary Cassatt. Highlights from the auction are now on view in Sotheby’s newly expanded and re-imagined New York galleries, with the full exhibition of all works opening on the 17th. EDWARD HOPPER’S *SHAKESPEARE AT DUSK * Edward Hopper,* Shakespeare at Dusk*. Estimate: $7/10 Million. Courtesy Sotheby's. Following the ... more »

Sotheby's July 3 Old Master Evening Sale

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 2 weeks ago

J.M.W. Turner, *Landscape with Walton Bridges*. Estimate: £4-6 million. Courtesy Sotheby's A rare, late work by Britain’s favourite artist, J.M.W. Turner, will be unveiled in Moscow ahead of its sale at Sotheby’s Old Master Evening Sale on 3 July. One of an important group of works painted by the artist in the last ten years of his life, Landscape with Walton Bridges, comes to the market for the first time in over 35 years with an estimate of £3-4 million. One of the preeminent figures that mark the pages of history – like da Vinci, Darwin, Picasso or Einstein – who changed t... more »

Picasso’s Women: Fernande to Jacqueline A tribute to John Richardson

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 2 weeks ago

Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York May 3–June 22, 2019*I am perhaps a painter without style. * —Pablo Picasso Gagosian, in partnership with members of the Picasso family, is pleased to present *Picasso’s Women: Fernande to Jacqueline*, an exhibition of paintings and sculptures that attests to the central role and influence of the many women in Picasso’s life. It has been organized in honor of the gallery’s late friend and colleague, Sir John Richardson. Pablo Picasso, Buste de femme (Dora Maar), 1940. Oil on canvas, 29 1/8 x 23 5/8 in, 74 x 60 cm © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/... more »

Initiatives in Arts and Culture's (IAC) 24th Annual American Art Conference

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 2 weeks ago

In New York, American art is the focus from Friday, May 17 to Saturday, May 18, 2019, with an arts industry conference at Bonhams, 580 Madison Avenue. Tickets here. *View from Brooklyn*, 1927, by George Ault (1891-1948). The Jan T. and Marica Vilcek Collection, Promised gift to The Vilcek Foundation*© The Vilcek Foundation* *Initiatives in Arts and Culture's* (IAC) 24th Annual American Art Conference will explore the myth, mystique and artistry that cement a work's status as a "masterpiece" of American art. Key elements include taste of the times and its documentation, as well... more »

Christie’s American Art May 22

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 2 weeks ago

Christie’s has announced that *The Michael Scharf Family Collection *will lead the American Art sale on May 22. Considered one of the finest collections of American Modernism, this impressive group of twenty-eight paintings offers a strong representation from the Stieglitz Circle with works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove, as well as exceptional early explorations into abstraction by artists including Max Weber and Charles Green Shaw. Michael Scharf began his collection of American Modernism in 1972 when he purchased Arthur Dove’s *Parabola* and began to stu... more »

Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 2 weeks ago

Apr 28, 2017–Jun 2, 2019 *WHERE WE ARE: SELECTIONS FROM THE WHITNEY’S COLLECTION, 1900-1960* *Where We Are*, a new exhibition of works from the Whitney’s collection made between 1900 and 1960, goes on view in the Museum’s seventh-floor Robert W. Wilson Galleries, beginning April 28. At a time when debate continues over what it means to be American, *Where We Are* proposes a framework of everyday relationships, institutions, and activities that form an individual's sense of self. *Where We Are *brings together some of the Whitney’s most iconic works by Louise Bourgeois, John S... more »

The Whitney's Collection: Selections from 1900 to 1965

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 2 weeks ago

*Whitney Museum of American Art* Jun 28, 2019– This summer the Whitney debuts a complete re-installation of the Museum’s extraordinary holdings of early and mid-twentieth century American art. The Whitney’s Collection: Selections from 1900 to 1965 traces major art historical movements and genres, presenting 120 works by more than seventy artists, including Elizabeth Catlett, Elsie Driggs, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Marisol, Joan Mitchell, Archibald Motley, Alice Neel, Georgia O’Keeffe, Kay Sage, and Andy Warhol. The exhibition refle... more »

N. C. Wyeth: New Perspectives

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 2 weeks ago

*Brandywine River Museum of Art * *June 22 – September 15, 2019 * *Portland Museum of Art in Maine * *October 4, 2019 – January 12, 2020* *Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio * *February 8, 2020 – May 3, 2020 * Th is summer the Brandywine River Museum of Art will present N. C. Wyeth: New Perspectives , the first exhibition in almost 50 years to examine in depth the entirety of Wyeth’s multifaceted oeuvre . A formidable yet often overlooked fig ure in the history of American art , N. C. Wyeth was the foremost illustrator of his generation, and the patriarch of an extraordinary... more »

The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 4 weeks ago

- April 14, 2019 – July 21, 2019 - National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) Coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Ruskin (1819–1900), an important art critic of the Victorian era, the National Gallery has brought together over 90 works, including paintings, watercolors, and drawings, by American artists who were influenced by Ruskin’s writing. Specifically, the exhibition will explore Ruskin’s significant impact on artists associated with a movement called “American Pre-Raphaelitism,” which peaked between 1857 and 1867 and included American artists su... more »

Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 5 weeks ago

*Alte Pinakothek, Munich* *17 April to 21 July 2019* What a shock it must have been for Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerard van Honthorst, and Dirck van Baburen, three young painters from Utrecht, when they encountered the breathtaking and unorthodox paintings of Caravaggio for the first time in Rome. Described as 'miraculous things' his works were marked by an innovative realism, striking drama, and mysterious lighting and were to influence the style of many artists from Italy, France, Spain and the Netherlands. The exhibition, developed in collaboration with the Centraal Museum in Utre... more »

The Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale at Christie's May 13

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 5 weeks ago

*The Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale* opens 20th Century Week at Christie’s New York. The highlights of the New York auction on 13 May, include standout out pieces by Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte and other leading names of the 20th Century. The much anticipated sale presents works from the greatest moments of Impressionism to Modern art, with leading artists of the period. Pablo Picasso’s Baigneuses et crabe, 1938 (estimate: $1.2 – 1.8 million), [image: Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Arbres dans le jardin de l’asile, October, 1889. Oil on canvas. 16 ... more »

The Emil Bührle collection

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 5 weeks ago

*20 march - 21 july 2019* *Musée Maillol* In the spring of 2019, the Musée Maillol will exhibit masterpieces from the Emil Bührle Collection, one of the most prestigious private collections in the world. Exhibited for the first time in France, this ensemble, which was assembled between 1936 and 1956 in Zurich, provides a panorama of French art from the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The Musée Maillol will present the exceptional collection of the manufacturer Emil Georg Bührle (1890–1956), who was born in Germany but settled in Switzerland in 1924 and... more »

Van Gogh and the Sunflowers

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 5 weeks ago

*Van Gogh Museum, **Amsterdam, * * 21 June - 1 September, ** 2019 * *Sunflowers* (1889), one of Vincent van Gogh’s best-known paintings, will be the centrepiece of the summer exhibition *Van Gogh and the Sunflowers*. The presentation will highlight the flower’s significance to the painter and what he hoped to achieve with his *Sunflowers*. Van Gogh himself thought that this work was among the best things he had done. A great deal of study has been devoted to the masterpiece from the Van Gogh Museum’s collection in recent years. The exhibition will show what the latest technic... more »

In a New Light: Alice Schille and the American Watercolor Movement

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 5 weeks ago

*Columbus Museum of Art * * June 14-Sept. 29, 2019* More than 50 works, many of which have not been exhibited for decades, comprise *In a New Light: Alice Schille and the American Watercolor Movement, *on view June 14 to Sept. 29, 2019, at the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA)*. *The exhibition honors the Columbus native’s 150th birthday and her contribution to the American watercolor movement, offering new critical insights on this remarkable artist. In addition, the illuminating exhibition explores Schille’s travels, teaching and her steadfast advocacy for women’s suffrage. *In a New ... more »

Toulouse-Lautrec and the Stars of Paris

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 1 month ago

*Museum of Fine Arts, Boston* *April 7 through August 4, 2019* [image: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Aristide Bruant in His Cabaret (detail), 1893. Poster, color lithograph printed in black, red, green, and gray, proof before letters. Otis Norcross Fund. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.] Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,* Aristide Bruant in His Cabaret* (detail), 1893. Poster, color lithograph printed in black, red, green, and gray, proof before letters. Otis Norcross Fund. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Paris was the center of nightlife and spectacle in the late 19th century, a moment immortaliz... more »

Important American Paintings, Volume XIX: Art Changes Everything

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 1 month ago

Questroyal Fine Art,903 Park Avenue (at 79th Street) Third Floor New York, NY 10075* October 2 – August 22, 2019* * The nineteenth volume in Questroyal’s coveted Important American Paintings series explores the ways in which art attracts collectors and investigates what motivates people to acquire this unique asset. Gallery owner Louis M. Salerno proclaims “Art is an enigma! Without any quantifiable utility, its impact is profound. Over my lifetime, as both a dealer and a collector, I have witnessed the joy and satisfaction that art brings to so many clients.”Featuring 37 color p... more »

PAINTING THE CITY: A New York State of Mind

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 1 month ago

Questroyal Fine Art,903 Park Avenue (at 79th Street) Third Floor New York, NY 10075*May 9 – May 24, 2019* The city of the world rests on more than 300 square miles of rock and is flanked by two rivers and the Atlantic Ocean. With an influence that spans the earth and an appeal that inspires people of every age and gender, paintings of this great city are among the most coveted of any subject matter in American art. This exhibition and salepresents paintings of the city in varying seasons and times, in an array of light and life, in frenzy and in solitude, any one of which may comp... more »

Abstract Expressionism: A Social Revolution Selections from the Haskell Collection

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 1 month ago

------------------------------ *Tampa Museum of Art* *April 11 through August 11, 2019* *Woman II*, 1961 Willem de Kooning (American, b. the Netherlands 1904–1997). Oil on paper mounted on canvas. 29 x 22 1/2 inches. The Haskell Collection. © 2018 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York *Abstract Expressionism: A Social Revolution, Selections from the Haskell Collection,* presents twenty-five works from the Haskell Collection indicative of Abstract Expressionism as a unifying direction in Post-World War II art. [image: Abstract Expressionism: A ... more »

Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 1 month ago

*Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), * *February 27 through June 16, 2019 * Throughout her entire career, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) avidly collected traditional Mexican folk art—*arte popular*—as a celebration of Mexican national culture. She drew inspiration from these objects, seizing on their political significance after the Mexican Revolution and incorporating their visual and material qualities into her now-iconic paintings. The first-ever Kahlo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), *Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular* (through June 16, 2019) focuses on the artist’s last... more »

Scenes from the Heartland: Stories Based on Lithographs by Thomas Hart Benton

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 1 month ago

When a contemporary writer turns her imagination loose inside the images of an iconic artist of the past, the result is storytelling magic at its best. Here are nine tales that bring to vivid life the early decades of the 20th century as witnessed by one of America's most well-known painters. Thomas Hart Benton sketched fiddlers and farm wives, preachers and soldiers, folks gathering in dance halls and tent meetings. Though his lithographs depict the past, the real-life people he portrayed face issues that are front and center today: corruption, women's rights, racial inequality. ... more »

Researchers prove Leonardo Da Vinci was ambidextrous

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 1 month ago

Researchers at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence have proved what was suspected for a long time: that Renaissance genius Leonardo Da Vinci was able to write, draw and paint with both hands. The study also uncovered a previously unknown landscape sketch on the back of the original work, titled *Landscape Drawing for Santa Maria Della Nave* and alternatively known as *Landscape 8P*. [image: An infrared view of the backside of Leonardo da Vinci's <em>Landscape Drawing for Santa Maria Della Nave</em>, also known as <em>Il Paesaggio</em> or <em>Landscape 8P</em> (1473) reveals another land... more »

Feininger, Klee and the Bauhaus

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 1 month ago

EXHIBITION DATES *New York, May 1 – Aug 16 2019, Shepherd W&amp;K Galleries 58 East 79th Street New York, NYC 10075 USA www.shepherdgallery.com* *Dortmund, Sept 17 – Oct 26 2019, Galerie Utermann Silberstraße 22 44137 Dortmund www.galerieutermann.de* *Vienna, Nov 14 2019 – Jan 1 2020, Wienerroither &amp; Kohlbacher Strauchgasse 2 1010 Vienna www.w-k.art * [image: Lyonel Feininger, Rosa Wolke II] Lyonel Feininger, *Rosa Wolke II* (Shepherd W&amp;K Galleries, New York; Galerie Utermann, Dortmund; and W&amp;K - Wienerroither and Kohlbacher, Vienna) *1919-2019: 100 years ago the Bauhaus art school ... more »

Alice Neel: Freedom

Jonathan KantrowitzatArt History News - 1 month ago

David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street New York February 26—April 13, 2019 Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom. It’s very hard to get freedom. You know all these things in life keep crawling over you all the time, so it’s very hard to feel free. —Alice Neel1 David Zwirner is presenting an exhibition of paintings and significant works on paper by Alice Neel (1900–1984), on view at 537 West 20th Street in New York. Spanning six decades of the artist’s career, *Alice Neel: Freedom* is organized by Ginny Neel of The Estate of Alice Neel. The exhibitio... more »