Few artists have captured the public’s imagination with the force of Frida Kahlo (1907–1954). In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of this Mexican artist and to recognize her powerful influence on artists working today, the Walker Art Center (in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) organized a major traveling exhibition that went beyond the myth, providing an intimate look at 46 of Kahlo’s hauntingly beautiful paintings and 90 photographs from her personal albums, many of which had never been seen by the public. Premiering at the Walker October 27, 2007 to January 20,2008 and co-curated by world-renowned Kahlo biographer and art historian Hayden Herrera and Walker associate curator Elizabeth Carpenter, the exhibition was on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, February 20–May 18, 2008 and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, June 14–September 28, 2008.

While concentrating on Kahlo's hauntingly seductive and often brutal self-portraits, the exhibition also will include those particular portraits and still-life paintings that amplify her sense of identity. The peculiar tension between the intimacy of Kahlo's subject matter and the reserve of her public persona gives her self-portraits the impact of icons. As her practice progressed, her images grew in confidence and complexity, reflecting her private obsessions and political concerns. Kahlo struggled to gain visibility and recognition both as a woman and an artist, and she was a central player in the political and artistic revolutions occurring throughout the world.

The exhibition also featured photographs that once belonged to Kahlo and Diego Rivera from the Vicente Wolf Photography Collection, many of which had never before been published or exhibited. Emblematic images of Kahlo and Rivera by preeminent photographers of the period (Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Gisele Freund, Tina Modotti, Nickolas Muray) were on view alongside never-before-seen personal snapshots of the artist with family and friends, including such cultural and political luminaries as André Breton and Leon Trotsky. These photographs—several of which Kahlo hand-inscribed with dedications; effaced with self-deprecating marks; and kissed, leaving a trace of lipstick—pose fascinating questions about an artist who was both the consummate manufacturer of her own image and a beguiling and willing photographic subject.

During her lifetime, Kahlo was best known as the flamboyant wife of renowned muralist Rivera. Today she has become one of the most celebrated and revered artists in the world. Between 1926, when she began to paint while recuperating from a near-fatal bus accident, and 1954, when she died at age 47, Kahlo painted some 66 self-portraits and about 80 paintings of other subjects, mostly still lifes and portraits of friends. "I paint my own reality," she said. "The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to." Her reality and her need to explore and confirm it by depicting her own image have given us some of the most powerful and original images of the 20th century. Paradoxically, her work allowed her to both express and continually fabricate her own subjectivity.

Kahlo was born in 1907 in Coyoacán, then a southern suburb of Mexico City. Three years after the 1925 bus accident, she showed her paintings to Rivera. He admired the paintings, and the painter, and a year later they married. Theirs was a tumultuous relationship: Rivera once declared himself to be "unfit for fidelity," and Kahlo largely withstood his promiscuity. As if to assuage her pain, Kahlo recorded the vicissitudes of her marriage in paint. She also recorded the misery of her deteriorating health—the orthopedic corsets she was forced to wear, the numerous spinal surgeries, plus a number of miscarriages and therapeutic abortions. Her painful subject matter is distanced by an intentional primitivism, as well as by the canvases' small scale. Kahlo's sometimes grueling imagery is also mitigated by her sardonic humor and extraordinary imagination. Her sense of fantasy, fed by Mexican popular art and pre-Columbian culture, was noted by surrealist poet and essayist Breton when he came to Mexico in 1938 and claimed Kahlo for Surrealism. She rejected the designation but clearly understood that doors would open under the surrealist label—and they did: Breton helped secure exhibitions for her in New York in 1938 and Paris in 1939.

Soon after Kahlo returned from attending her Paris show, Rivera asked her for a divorce. They remarried a year later. In the second half of the 1940s Kahlo's health worsened; she was hospitalized for a year between 1950 and 1951, and in 1953 her right leg was amputated at the knee due to gangrene. Her insistence on being strong and joyful in the face of pain sustained her, however; she drew a picture of her severed limb in her journal and wrote, "Feet, what do I need them for if I have wings to fly?"

Kahlo had her first exhibition in Mexico in 1953. Defying doctor's orders, she attended the opening and received guests while reclining on her own four-poster bed. Because she could not sit up for long and she suffered severe effects from prescribed painkillers, her paintings in the period from 1952 to 1954 lost the jewel-like refinement of her earlier works. Her late still lifes and self-portraits—many of which proclaim Kahlo's allegiance to Communist doctrine—testify to her passion for life and her indomitable will, however.

Frida Kahlo brought together works such as



Henry Ford Hospital (1932),

depicting the artist's miscarriage in Detroit (a first in terms of the iconography of Western art history), and



The Broken Column (1944), painted after she underwent spinal surgery.

It also included self-portraits such as



Me and My Doll (1937)



and Self-Portrait with Monkeys (1943),

both of which explore the theme of childlessness.

The artist's suffering over Rivera's betrayals is reflected in paintings like her masterful double-portrait



The Two Fridas (1939);

created during her separation and divorce from Rivera, the work presents a powerful depiction of pain inflicted by love and Kahlo's divided sense of self.

Collectively, these images suggest the extent to which, for Kahlo, painting served as catharsis, as well as an opportunity to redefine and critique modern bourgeois society.

Collectors of Kahlo's work can be found around the world—the paintings in the exhibition come from some 30 private and institutional collections in France, Japan, Mexico, and the United States. Several paintings have never before been on public view in the United States. Two of the most important and extensive collections of Kahlo's work—the Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño Collection in Mexico City and the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of Modern and Contemporary Mexican Art, currently housed in the Centro Cultural Muros in Cuernavaca—have loaned some of their most treasured Kahlo paintings to the exhibition.

The exhibition was accompanied by a richly illustrated 304-page catalogue featuring more than 100 color plates, as well as critical essays by Herrera, exhibition co-curator Elizabeth Carpenter, and Latin American art curator and critic Victor Zamudio-Taylor. A separate plate section is devoted to works from the Vicente Wolf Photography Collection. The catalogue also includes an extensive illustrated timeline of relevant socio-political world events, artistic and cultural developments, and significant personal experiences that took place during Kahlo's lifetime, along with a selected bibliography, exhibition history, and index.

Frida Kahlo was organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition was co-curated by Hayden Herrera and Walker Art Center Associate Curator Elizabeth Carpenter.

More images from the exhibition:



Frida Kahlo, The Frame, circa 1938
oil on aluminum and glass_11-1/4 x 8-1/8 inches unframed_12-11/16 x 9-5/8 inches framed
Collection Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris © 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av. Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.



Photographer unknown, Diego Rivera, Cuernavaca, 1930
Vicente Wolf Photography Collection



Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (Autorretrato con collar de espinas y colibrí), 1940
oil on canvas_24-5/8 x 18-7/8 inches_Nikolas Muray Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin



Frida Kahlo, Still Life with Parrot and Fruit (Naturaleza muerta con loro y frutas), 1951
oil on canvas_9-7/8 x 11-1/16 inches_Nikolas Muray Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin
© 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av., Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.



Lola Alvarez Bravo, Frida Kahlo with 1930 Self-Portrait drawing by Diego Rivera, Coyoacan, circa 1945
Vicente Wolf Photography Collection
© 1995 Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation



Frida Kahlo, Portrait of Doña Rosita Morillo (Retrato de Doña Rosita Morillo), 1944
oil on Masonite_30-1/16 x 24 inches unframed_39-3/8 x 33 x 2-3/8 inches framed_Collection Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico City
© 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av., Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.



Frida Kahlo, Me and My Parrots (Yo y mis pericos), 1941
oil on canvas_32 x 24-1/2 inches
Private Collection © 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av., Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.



Frida Kahlo, The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Me and Señor Xólotl [El abrazo de amor del universo, la tierra (México), Diego, yo y el señor Xólotl], 1949
oil on Masonite_27-9/16 x 23-13/16 inches_The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of Modern and Contemporary Mexican Art: Courtesy The Vergel Foundation; Muros; Costco / Comercial Mexicana
© 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av., Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México,



Frida Kahlo, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree) [Mis abuelos, mis padres, y yo (árbol genealógico)], 1936
oil and tempera on metal_12-1/8 x 13-5/8 inches_The Museum of Modern Art, New York_Gift of Allan Roos, M.D., and B. Mathieu Roos, 1976_digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY
© 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av., Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.



Photographer unknown, Frida on a boat, Xochimilco, Mexico City, n.d.
Vicente Wolf Photography Collection



Frida Kahlo, The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (El suicidio de Dorothy Hale), 1939
oil on Masonite with painted frame_23-1/2 x 19-1/2 inches framed_Collection of Phoenix Art Museum_Gift of an anonymous donor
© 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av., Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.



Julien Levy, Frida Kahlo, New York, 1938
Vicente Wolf Photography Collection
© 2001 Philadelphia Museum of Art



Frida Kahlo, Without Hope (Sin esperanza), 1945
oil on canvas mounted on Masonite_11-1/16 x 14-3/16 inches_Collection Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico City
© 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av., Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.



Peter A. Juley, Diego Rivera at work on Liberation of the Peon, New York, 1931
Vicente Wolf Photography Collection
© Peter A. July Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum



Frida Kahlo, Still Life: Pitahayas (Naturaleza muerta: Pitahayas), 1938
oil on aluminum_10 x 14 inches_Collection of Madison Museum of Contemporary Art_Bequest of Rudolph and Louise Langer
© 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av., Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.



Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Necklace (Autorretrato con collar), 1933
oil on metal_13-3/4 x 11-7/16 in. (35 x 29 cm)_The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of Modern and Contemporary Mexican_Art: Courtesy The Vergel Foundation; Muros; Costco / Comercial Mexicana
© 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av., Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.



Photographer unknown, Frida Kahlo in her studio at Casa Azul, Coyoacán, n.d.
Vicente Wolf Photography Collection



Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Frida Kahlo, Coyoacan, circa 1938
Vicente Wolf Photography Collection
Courtesy of Manuel Alvarez Bravo Estate and ROSEGALLERY



Frida Kahlo, Frieda and Diego Rivera, 1931
oil on canvas_39-3/8 x 31 inches
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Albert M. Bender Collection, Gift of Albert M. Bender © 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av., Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.



Frida Kahlo, My Nurse and I (Mi nana y yo), 1937
oil on metal_12 x 13-3/4 inches_Collection Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico City
© 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av., Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.



Guillermo Kahlo, Kahlo family portrait, Coyoacán, Mexico City, 1926
Vicente Wolf Photography Collection
© Courtesy of Guillermo Kahlo Estate



Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait, 1930
oil on canvas_26 x 22 inches
Private Collection © 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av., Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.



Frida Kahlo, Moses (Moisés), 1945
oil on Masonite_20 x 37 inches_Private collection, Texas
© 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av., Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.



Sylvia Salmi, Frida Kahlo, 1944
Vicente Wolf Photography Collection



Frida Kahlo, Itzcuintli Dog with Me (Escuincle y yo), circa 1938
oil on canvas_28 x 20-1/2 inches_Private Collection
© 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av., Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.

The work of Jasper Johns (b. 1930) represents an important breakthrough in art at midcentury, a period of radical change in American art. Themes developed in the first decade of his career was examined as a group for the first time in a comprehensive exhibition of 84 works, on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, January 28 through April 29, 2007.

Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965 presents some of Johns' most iconic paintings, drawings, and prints selected from public and private collections, including the artist's own. Departing from the format of the survey or retrospective, the show will trace the unfolding relationship of four specific motifs in Johns' works—the target, the "device," the stenciled naming of colors, and the imprint of the body—revealing the works' significance to the following generation of artists. The exhibition includes the largest group of target paintings ever assembled. After Washington, the exhibition will travel to the Kunstmuseum Basel, June 2 through September 9, 2007, the only other venue.

The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965 was arranged chronologically in sequences of closely related works:

Target:

Of the four earliest icons (targets, flags, numbers, and maps) that occupy his work, the target is Johns' most abstract image. Representing something anonymous and universal, the familiar target appears in Johns' work until 1961. His first two paintings of the target image,



Target with Plaster Casts (1955)



and Target with Four Faces (1955),

incorporate a row on top of small cubicle-like boxes with hinged drop doors, each containing a plaster cast of a body part.

Mechanical device:

The target as a subject is replaced by the mechanical "device"—a wooden, compass-like instrument attached to the canvas by a pivot on one end and manipulated to scrape through the paint surface in circles and arcs. The first of these works,



Device Circle (1959),

is affixed with the kind of compass arm that Johns used to create his target images. From Device Circle, Johns produced two simultaneous sequences of work: those that show the artist changing his manner of applying paint (in long strokes of the brush) and introduce the stenciled color names, and those that use or depict the device.

Stenciled naming of colors:

Johns began naming colors with stenciled lettering in the paintings



False Start (1959)



and Jubilee (1960).

In these works, he labeled and mislabeled colors using red, yellow, blue, and orange paint in the former, and black, white, and gray paint in the latter.

Imprint of the Body:

Combining themes of sensuality and mortality, Johns began using his own body as an instrument and an image. In works such as



Periscope (Hart Crane) (1963),

he incorporated the stenciled words RED YELLOW BLUE and a device image that is attached to an imprint of his palm. In this way, the artist compared the device to his own outstretched arm. In the



Skin drawings (1962),

Johns covered his head and hands with baby oil and left an impression of these body parts on mechanical drafting paper. The images were revealed when he rubbed them with strokes of charcoal.

In



Arrive/Depart (1963–1964),

the composition of red, yellow, blue, and orange paint incorporates several handprints and the imprint of a skull.

Throughout the second half of the exhibition, various works represented a complex combination of the motifs. New themes also emerge: Periscope (Hart Crane) (above) is presumed to reference Crane's suicide by drowning through the image of the extended arm. Together with this painting, works such as



Passage(1962)



and Land's End (1963),

which also draw their titles from Crane's poems, form a sequence of works dedicated to Crane.

Others, such as the uncommonly large paintings



Diver (1962)



and According to What (1964),

are compilations of motifs and techniques.

By contrast, one large drawing, also titled



Diver (1962–1963), is an expansive but diagrammatic representation of the body as device.

The monochromatic painting Voice (1964–1967) is also startlingly spare. Here the device moves through a field of gray paint, leaving behind a single curving band that brings us back to the image of the target, where we began.

Jasper Johns

Over the past 50 years, Jasper Johns has created a rich body of work that has had profound influence on art in the U.S. and Europe. Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930 and raised in South Carolina. After attending the University of South Carolina for three semesters, he moved to New York City at the age of nineteen and briefly attended a commercial art school. After service in the army, including a period in Japan, he returned to New York in 1953, where he flourished as an artist.

Along with his contemporary Robert Rauschenberg, Johns was widely acknowledged as one of the most important American painters of the postwar era and one of the greatest living American painters. He is also regarded as one of the greatest graphic artists of the 20th century, creating important bodies of drawings as well as prints in a variety of media. In 1950s New York, Johns met John Cage and Merce Cunningham, with whom he collaborated, producing sets and props for performances. Johns' work on canvas and paper from that period, often limited to a single motif against a monochromatic field, has since attained enormous historical stature. Subsequently, his work has grown increasingly complex, even quasi-autobiographical. Developments such as abstract painting and drawing in a crosshatch manner further distinguish Johns' contribution to the history of art since midcentury.

The exhibition curator and catalogue author was Jeffrey Weiss, head of the department of modern and contemporary art, National Gallery of Art, Washington. Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965 was published by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, and includes essays by John Elderfield, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, associate director for conservation and research, Whitney Museum of American Art; Robert Morris, American artist, critic, and Johns contemporary; and Kathryn A. Tuma, assistant professor of modern art, Johns Hopkins University.

The exhibition Picasso: Peace and Freedom, at the Albertina 22 September 2010–16 January 2011, showed the twentieth century’s most important painter from a hitherto almost unknown perspective: in cooperation with Tate Liverpool, the Albertina presents Pablo Picasso as a politically and socially committed artist, thereby questioning the common image of this genius of a century. Assembling some two hundred exhibits from more than sixty international collections, the exhibition illustrates within a historical review and in chronological order how Picasso responded to the war and its atrocities in his art. The exhibition’s scope ranged from Picasso as a history painter and his key motif of the Dove of Peace – one of the most important symbols of hope and the most famous emblem of the Peace Movement – to his still lifes, which contain subtle and hidden commentaries on global events, as well as hints of Picasso’s political attitude.

In 1944, Picasso joined the French Communist Party, whose loyal member he remained until his death in 1973. That same year, Picasso set to work on the painting The Charnel House, (below) which marked the beginning of the Albertina’s exhibition. Based on a documentary about the murder of a Spanish Republican family, it is one of artist’s most important paintings protesting against Franco’s regime in Spain apart from



Guernica.

The major global crises of those days – the Spanish Civil War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Korean War, and the Algerian War of Independence – run through the artist’s oeuvre like a red thread.

With his liberal paraphrases on this serious crisis of the Roman Empire, Picasso addressed the impending catastrophe of a Third World War and nuclear Armageddon.

To the Algerian War of Independence he responded with his









Women of Algiers, I, 1955



Picasso. Women of Algiers. Variation ''N''



Picasso. Women of Alger, Version ''O''.1955

Women of Algiers series of 15 paintings,

on which he began to work within the first month of this major violent conflict by referring to



Women of Algiers by Eugène Delacroix.

Whereas Delacroix’s Women of Algiers of 1834 marked the beginning of French colonization in Algeria, Picasso’s variations symbolize the end of the country’s foreign rule.

The Dove of Peace, created in 1949, likewise held prominent position in the exhibition. It became an international emblem used by the Peace Movement and a symbol of hope during the Cold War. Many works by Picasso from that period explicitly served propaganda purposes and were meant to support the Communist cause and the Peace Movement.

“I came to the party as one goes to the fountain.” (Picasso)

For Picasso, who had left his native country of Spain under Franco’s regime and had experienced the Nazi occupation of Paris in his French exile, it was only natural to feel drawn to the Communist Party. He saw Communism and its peace ideal as a means to ban Fascism and in 1944 joined the French Communist Party, whose member he remained until the end of his life. Out of extreme generosity and driven by his conviction, Picasso donated a lot of his time and money to the Communist Party and in addition provided works of art for its purposes. Picasso’s propaganda motifs were extremely valuable for the party: by then an internationally renowned artist, he designed numerous posters and pamphlets and conceived drawings for party-affiliated newspapers if requested.



The Charnel House

Picasso also did highly political paintings, including his monumental work The Charnel House of 1945. Besides horrible images from concentration camps, he had been inspired by a documentary film about a Spanish Republican family whose members had been brutally killed in their own kitchen. The Charnel House was Picasso’s most political work since Guernica. Since he had lost many friends and associates during the war, it was also a way for him to mourn his ‘family’, the Spanish people. The same holds true for his painting Homage to the Spaniards.

Still Lifes

The artist’s numerous impressive still lifes are also expressive of the war and the loss and deprivation it entailed. His contemplations about mortality and the futility of human action reflect Picasso’s own threatened existence, but also his resistance against any form of suppression. Using plain objects of everyday life, Picasso alluded to the hardships and deficits of that period of time. Such traditional vanitas symbols as human and animal skulls are forms of memento mori and thus reminders of the constant presence of death. For Picasso, the owl was a bird of death that calls to mind the transience of human existence. Picasso was prompted to use this motif by an injured young owl that was successfully raised by him.

Las Meninas



Velázquez's Las Meninas



'Las Meninas' (after Velázquez), 1957 (Museu Picasso, Barcelona)









Between August and December 1957, Picasso worked on his variations of Las Meninas (1656), Velázquez’s most important painting. Picasso transformed this masterpiece into an overt accusation of Franco’s regime and royalist policy. His paraphrases have turned out bitter satires aimed at Franco’s monarchist speculations. The royal figures have metamorphosed into caricatures of the present. The numerous variants of the Infanta Margarita Maria refer to the official ‘coming out’ of the Infanta Maria Pilar, Juan Carlos’s sister, an event that was celebrated with a spectacular ball in Estoril in Portugal in 1954. Picasso has changed Velázquez’s self-portrait into that of an inquisitor: even twenty years after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, many Republicans were still imprisoned then. Picasso actively supported the Amnesty for Spain campaign and demanded that those held captive be released. In his La Meninas series, he also protested against their inhumane treatment: Picasso’s critical revision depicts the clergymen appearing in Velázquez’s painting murdered and lying in coffins. Picasso has turned the ceiling bosses visible in the original painting into terrifying hooks for the suspension of torture victims.

The Rape of the Sabine Women

Only a few days after the outbreak of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when President Kennedy announced the naval blockade, Picasso set to work on his series The Rape of the Sabine Women , drawing his inspirations from



Nicolas Poussin’s Rape of the Sabines from 1637/38



and Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women from 1799.






The series The Rape of the Sabine Women, done in autumn 1962, captures the struggle for power between the East and West during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Picasso was well aware of the powerful impact of the ancient myth and saw it as a possibility to respond to and understand the present. Picasso used this series to denounce violence, as he had done in his earlier works, Guernica and The Charnel House. His idea of warfare and its consequences clearly concentrated on the suffering of the victims, in particular women and children: deformed bodies trampled down by soldiers express helplessness and despair.

The Dove – Picasso’s Symbol for Peace and Freedom

Through his dove, which was first to be seen on



the poster for the First International World Peace Congress in Paris in 1949,

Picasso’s art became accessible to millions of people. From then on, the motif was used countless times and http://www.blogger.com/homeappeared on the posters for the peace conferences in Wroclaw, Paris, Stockholm, Sheffield, and Rome. It became the ubiquitous emblem of the Peace Movement and is still one of the most important symbols of hope. The dove adorned scarves, cups, posters, and T-shirts, as well as postage stamps in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Picasso supported the Communist Party in France and other countries and radical organizations in the West with numerous variants of the motif. The artist even named his daughter Paloma, after the Spanish word for ‘dove’. By the 1950s, this key motif of his art had become so popular that it was even used as a caricature for anti-Communist propaganda. The New York Times mockingly referred to “Picasso’s fat little pigeons.”

War and Peace






In 1951/52, Picasso, who had been entrusted with the commission by the Communist-governed village of Vallauris in Southern France, worked on his War and Peace murals. They were intended for a deconsecrated palace chapel that was to be transformed into a Temple of Peace. Picasso titled the two monumental compositions after Leo Tolstoy’s Napoleonic epic. They were the artist’s most significant political statements since the end of the Second World War. War and Peace powerfully and impressively demonstrates men’s inherent potentials: they can be beasts and monsters, but also humanists. There are more than two hundred preliminary studies for the chapel at Vallauris. Picasso finally painted the two murals on panels that were attached to two opposite walls of the small church. In 1958, he added another painting to the end wall: four figures in black, white, yellow, and red, symbolizing the harmonious coexistence of the four world races. The chapel at Vallauris was opened in 1958, but closed soon afterwards because of the tensions between Picasso and the rightwing Gaullist government.

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe


‘Variations’ after



Manet’s 'Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe',







painted between 1960 and 1961 (Musée National Picasso, Paris).

Between 1959 and 1962, Picasso paraphrased Édouard Manet’s famous painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) in numerous paintings, drawings, and prints. Picasso was fascinated both by Manet’s sketchy manner of painting and his unconventional daringness of linking an anti-bourgeois subject with the high ambition of creating a classical composition. In addressing a taboo – the prostitution at the Bois de Boulogne – Manet’s liberal depiction caused a scandal when it was exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in 1863. Picasso’s preoccupation with Manet’s provocative theme is not least an expression of the artist’s sympathetic relationship with the emerging sexual revolution, the hippie movement, and its demand for free love. In France, it was once again the Bois de Boulogne in Paris that was the hotspot of this social revolution. Picasso admired Manet not only as an artist, but also as a committed republican and political activist: Manet had been deeply disappointed about the failure of the Paris Commune in 1871, which had sought to govern Paris according to Socialist ideas and whose suppression had entailed the proclamation of the Third Republic. For Picasso, history repeated itself when in 1958 General de Gaulle put an end to the Fourth Republic, which had been rendered politically weak and unstable through frequent changes of government, and proclaimed the Fifth Republic.

Mothers and Musketeers

The paintings of the last decade of Picasso’s life are dominated by two subjects: women and musketeers. The woman – as an allegory of love and in her roles as mother – is regarded as the epitome of harmony and security, an embodiment of the yearning for peace. In her strong erotic appeal, the woman symbolizes fertility and conception and thus illustrates that life begins with sexual desire. Musketeers, on the other hand, personify militant warriors, eagerly on the lookout for adventure and loot. Picasso depicts them as arrogant soldiers, foppish and ridiculous in their complacent virility. For Picasso, a committed pacifist, the figure of the musketeer was emblematic of war and barbarity, although it was generally associated with a highly positive soldier’s image during the 1950s and 1960s, thanks to Dumas’s novel.

Views of Picasso

In the USA, Picasso’s affiliation with Communism was regarded with great scepticism. It even earned the artist, who was considered a “subversive alien”, a charge from the FBI, which remained pending until his death. In the paranoid America of the McCarthy era, persons associated with Picasso – such as Charlie Chaplin – were eyed with suspicion, and by the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, Picasso’s reputation had suffered to such an extent that the authorities refused to issue a visa for him when he wanted to travel to the United States for the first time in 1950 in order to attend a peace conference. In the West, Picasso’s works from after 1944, particularly the murals War and Peace, turned out to be the artist’s least successful pictures, whereas they also met with criticism in the East, since they were not in line with the Soviet Communist Party’s call for Social Realism. Between these polarities, Picasso developed his own artistic and political attitude, which he described as follows: “I did not paint the war because I am not one of those artists who go looking for a subject like a photographer, but there is no doubt that the war is there in the pictures which I painted then.”

In many of his works, Picasso overtly promoted the Communist cause and the Peace Movement and protested against war and suppression. Through his oeuvre, he explicitly commented upon the global political crises of his time. His still lifes, his numerous interpretations of themes from classical mythology (such as The Rape of the Sabine Women), and his variations of art historical masterpieces (Velázquez’d Las Meninas and Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe) contain subtle and hidden statements about international events and Picasso’s political beliefs.

Picasso’s membership in the Communist Party from 1944 onwards and the reflection of his political commitment in his work are probably the last quasi-unexplored terrain when it comes to the research into this artist. The exhibition, which was the result of a seven-year scientific project conducted by Dr. Lynda Morris, attempted to make a profound scholarly analysis of the period in question by incorporating views of Picasso from North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Russian Federation. Picasso: Peace and Freedom is a comprehensive show which includes masterpieces addressing the subject of the Cold War that were created from the 1940s on. They are complemented by political ephemera and contemporary biographical texts, such as letters, archival documents, publications, and newspapers. While the exhibition deals with Picasso’s global role and art from the perspective of his support of the Communist Party and the Peace Movement in general, the focus of the presentation in Liverpool was on the artist’s visit in Great Britain on the occasion of his participation in the Peace Congress in Sheffield in 1950. Vienna as a town located at the crossroads between the East and West after the Second World War, likewise offers itself as an ideal venue: in 1952 it hosted the World Peace Congress, whose poster showed Picasso’s drawing of a dove surrounded by a circle of interlocking hands. This exhibition, co-organized by Tate Liverpool and the Vienna Albertina, will modify, expand, and probably revolutionize our hitherto common view of Picasso. Within this framework, the artist, who has mostly been perceived as an extrovert and womanizer, appears in a social and cultural context that has previously largely been ignored in the treatment of this painter, whose political side has systematically been shut out.

“No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy.” (Picasso)

BIOGRAPHY

1881 25 October: Pablo Ruiz Picasso is born in Málaga.

1918 Picasso marries Olga Koklova. Until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Picasso is largely apolitical, and his work develops independently of contemporary political events. The artist, due to his invention of Cubism and his return to Classicism in the 1920s, becomes the leading pioneer of Modernism.

1936 In recognition of Picasso’s opposition to Franco’s takeover, the Republicans appoint the artist director of the Prado.

1937 26 April: Bombardment of the Basque town of Guernica. In response, Picasso creates his painting of the same name, which becomes a worldwide anti-war symbol. Mid-June: Guernica is presented at the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World Fair.

1940 14 June: Picasso turns down invitations from the US and other countries to flee from occupied France. He assists the resistance movement whilst in voluntary exile. 25 August: Threatened by the presence of German troops in Royan, Picasso returns to Paris for the duration of the war. Autumn: A German officer, seeing a photograph of Guernica in Picasso’s studio, asks the artist: “Did you do this?” – “No,” Picasso replies, “You did.”

1944 August: After the liberation of Paris, Picasso, as the leading practitioner of an art condemned by the Fascists, becomes a celebrated hero. For weeks afterwards, he receives visits in his studio from young writers, photographers, artists, intellectuals, and GIs. 5 October: The Communist daily newspaper L’Humanité announces Picasso has joined the French Communist Party (PCF). He believes that Communism offers a path away from the Fascist atrocities of the Second World War and the Spanish Civil War. 7 October: Anger at Picasso’s political beliefs leads to protests by right-wing groups at this year’s opening of the Salon d’Automne in Paris, also known as the Salon de la Libération. Many are outraged that the Salon is exhibiting a Spaniard’s work only a few weeks after the liberation of France. 16 October: A procession takes place to the Père Lachaise cemetery in order to honour the victims of the Résistance. Picasso and Paul Éluard attend, marching under the flag of the Front national universitaire.

1945 February–May: Picasso completes The Charnel House. It is based on a Spanish documentary film in which a Republican family is annihilated in its kitchen. 23 May: Picasso draws Maurice Thorez (1900–1964), Secretary General of the PCF. June: The PCF pays tribute to Picasso at its Tenth Congress, but reaffirms its call for realism in art. End of year: Begins Homage to the Spaniards, a patriotic composition.

1946 July: Picasso moves into the upper floor of the Antibes Museum on the Côte d’Azur. He cares for a wounded owl, an animal that is soon to appear in a series of still lifes as a symbol of death.

1947 August: Picasso begins making ceramics in Vallauris (near Nice), at the Madoura pottery.

1948 Picasso assists the protests of the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the US division of international brigades in the Spanish Civil War. 23–28 August: Picasso takes part in the Peace Congress in Wroclaw, Poland. He issues a public declaration supporting the persecuted Chilean Pablo Neruda and visits the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he receives a medal from the Polish president. October: Picasso donates a million (old) francs to the miners’ strike in Northern France.

1949 February: Louis Aragon visits Picasso’s studio and selects the lithograph of a dove (created on 9 January) whose image is used on the poster for the World Peace Congress in Paris. The image becomes known worldwide as the Dove of Peace. 19 April: Birth of Françoise Gilot and Picasso’s daughter Paloma (Spanish for ‘dove’). 20–23 April: Picasso attends the World Peace Congress in Paris. 28–31 October: Picasso attends the World Peace Congress in Rome.

1950 29 January: The Communist town council of Vallauris bestows honorary citizenship on Picasso. March: Picasso is one of twelve Partisans of Peace selected to present the fifty million signatures of the Stockholm Peace Appeal against Atomic Weapons to the US Congress in Washington. He is refused a visa to enter the US. November: Picasso is awarded the Prize of the World Peace Congress, which he shares with Paul Robeson (1898–1976) and Pablo Neruda (1904–1973).

1951 18 January: Picasso starts work on Massacre in Korea, an overt political statement about the US military intervention in Korea. 1952 Outraged by the Korean War, Picasso decides to decorate a deconsecrated chapel in Vallauris with two wall paintings to be arranged opposite each other; one depicts War, the other, Peace.

1954 November: Shortly after the outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence, Picasso begins working on the series The Women of Algiers.

1955 Summer: Picasso purchases the Villa La Californie above Cannes. 1956 25 October: Picasso’s 75th birthday is celebrated at the Madoura pottery. Soviet state-owned works by Picasso are shown in exhibitions organized by Ilya Ehrenburg in Moscow and Leningrad (today’s St. Petersburg). November: Picasso is one of ten Communist artists and intellectuals who in an open letter to Le Monde express profound anxiety about the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. They denounce the PCF’s silence and demand clarification from the party’s Central Committee.

1957 May: A major retrospective is held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which subsequently tours to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Because of Picasso’s association with Communism it is impossible to invite the artist to the US. August: Picasso begins working on the Las Meninas series (based on Velázquez). It reveals the artist’s dialogue with one of the most important works in the history of Spanish painting and at the same time is a critical comment on current political events under Franco’s regime in Spain. Autumn: Commissioned by the UNESCO, Picasso designs a mural for the organization’s Paris headquarters.

1959 Picasso becomes involved with the launch of an international amnesty campaign against the continuing imprisonment of Republicans in Franco’s Spain. August: Picasso begins his variations on Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (until 1962).

1961 2 March: Picasso marries Jacqueline Roque in Vallauris. 25 October: Picasso’s 80th birthday, celebrations at Vallauris three days later.

1962 The Soviet government awards Picasso the International Lenin Prize for Peace. Autumn: Only ten days after the outbreak of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Picasso starts working on the series The Rape of the Sabine Women and his belligerent lobster and cat scenes.

1965 Picasso becomes ill and travels to Paris for an ulcer operation. It is his last trip there.

1966 A Picasso exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow is organized with the aid of Ilya Ehrenburg.

1967 Picasso refuses to join the French Legion of Honour.

1968 23 March: Picasso sends a written statement of solidarity to the Day of the Intellectuals for Peace in Vietnam. Mid-November 1968: Picasso provides his drawing Physiognomy of War as a motif to be used on the poster for the March to Washington, organized by American anti-Vietnam activists.

1971 An exhibition is staged at the Louvre to honour Picasso on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

1973 8 April: Picasso dies in Mougins.

The Courtauld Gallery, London 16 June – 18 September 2011




Jane Avril in the Entrance to the Moulin Rouge, c.1892 © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

Nicknamed La Mélinite after a powerful form of explosive, the dancer Jane Avril (1868-1943) was one of the stars of the Moulin Rouge in the 1890s. Known for her alluring style and exotic persona, her fame was assured by a series of dazzlingly inventive posters designed by the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901). Jane Avril became an emblematic figure in Lautrec’s world of dancers, cabaret singers, musicians and prostitutes.

She was also a close friend of the artist and he painted a series of striking portraits of her which contrast starkly with his exuberant posters. Organised around The Courtauld Gallery’s painting Jane Avril in the Entrance to the Moulin Rouge, the exhibition explored these different public and private images of Jane Avril.

Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge brought together a rich group of paintings, posters and prints from international collections to celebrate a remarkable creative partnership which captured the excitement and spectacle of bohemian Paris.



Jane Avril © Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

In contrast to Toulouse-Lautrec, who was a member of one of France’s oldest noble families, Jane Avril was the daughter of a courtesan. Born Jeanne Beaudon, she suffered an abusive childhood and, aged thirteen, ran away from home. The following year she entered the formidable Salpêtrière hospital in Paris to be treated for a nervous disorder popularly known as St Vitus’ Dance.



It was at one of the bal des folles, the fancy dress balls which the hospital organised for its patients, that she took her first dance steps and found both her cure and her vocation. New research undertaken for this exhibition examined the connections between her eccentric movements, described by one observer as an ‘orchid in a frenzy’, and contemporary medical theories of female hysteria. Her experiences helped shape her public persona and, as a performer, she was also known as L’Etrange (the Strange One) and Jane La Folle (Crazy Jane).

At the age of twenty she was taken on by the Moulin Rouge as a professional dancer. Adopting the stage name Jane Avril (suggested to her by an English lover), she was determined to make her mark as a star in the flourishing world of the Montmartre dance-halls and cabarets, which featured such larger-than-life personalities as La Goulue (the Glutton), Grille d’Egout (Sewer-grate) and Nini les-Pattes-en-l’air (Nini legs-aloft).

The ability to generate publicity through a carefully crafted image was the key to success and celebrity in the entertainment industry of Montmartre.



La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge, 1891-92 © Museum of Modern Art, New York

A racy portrait of the brazen La Goulue, lent to the exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, underscored the contrasting sophistication of Avril’s public image.

The epicentre of this world was the famous Moulin Rouge. Opened in 1889, it offered customers a nightly programme of performances by its roster of stars.



At the Moulin Rouge, an exceptional loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s most celebrated paintings and wasa highlight of the exhibition. It serves as the artist’s homage to this venue as well as a monumental group portrait of his circle. Shown from the rear, Jane Avril is instantly recognizable by her red hair. The scandalous La Goulue is seen with raised arms in the background, where the diminutive figure of Lautrec can also be made out. The ghostly face of May Milton, one of several English performers, looms into the canvas from the right.

Although she also sang, Jane Avril’s true vocation was as a solo dancer and she devised her own choreographic routines and dress. Combining sensuality and ethereal detachment, her remarkable performances captured the imagination of artists and writers alike. Lautrec’s friend, Paul Leclercq, described the scene:

‘In the midst of the crowd, there was a stir, and a line of people started to form: Jane Avril was dancing, twirling, gracefully, lightly, a little madly; pale, skinny, thoroughbred, she twirled and reversed, weightless, fed on flowers; Lautrec was shouting out his admiration.’



Jane Avril au Jardin de Paris, 1893 © Museum of Modern Art, New York

Jane Avril became the subject of some of Lautrec’s greatest posters, landmarks in the history of both art and advertising. One of the first was made to promote Avril’s appearance at the Jardin de Paris, to which a special bus ran every night after the Moulin Rouge closed at eleven. This large and dramatic poster shows Jane Avril in the provocative high kick of the cancan, framed by the hand of a musician grasping the neck of a double-bass. The radical composition reflects Lautrec’s admiration for Japanese prints. The poster was an instant hit and Avril credited it with launching her career.



Jane Avril Divan Japonais

No less striking is the image of Jane Avril seen in profile as a member of the audience at the venue known as the Divan Japonais. As in all his publicity posters, Lautrec focuses on enhancing the uniquely recognisable aspects of his subject’s appearance.



One of Lautrec’s last posters of Avril shows her full length; a snake coils up her dress, animating her wild dance.



Jane Avril London Mademoiselle Eglantine

In 1896 Jane Avril travelled to London to perform at the Palace Theatre as part of the troupe of Mademoiselle Eglantine. At her personal request Toulouse-Lautrec designed a poster for the performance which shows Avril at the end of the line of four cancan dancers, captured in a brilliant froth of petticoats and black stockings. The exhibition reunited a group of material relating to this commission, including a preparatory drawing, Avril’s letter to Lautrec from London and the programme for the Palace Theatre. Avril’s repertoire included songs such as Mon Anglais (My Englishman). She admired England and critics speculated that aspects of her dance style and attire had English origins. She noted pointedly in her memoirs that ‘over there, one lives freely, without bothering others or making fun of them, as happens so often at home’.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s relationship with Jane Avril was closer than with any of his other Montmartre subjects and she remained the artist’s loyal friend until his death. Their friendship is reflected in a series of remarkable portraits in which the star is shown as a private individual, in contrast with her exotic poster image and her performances at the Moulin Rouge.




Jane Avril, c.1891-92 © Sterling and Francince Clark Art Institute, Williamstown


An arresting bust-length portrait of Avril, loaned by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, focuses on her startlingly white and angular face. The Courtauld Gallery’s Jane Avril in the Entrance to the Moulin Rouge captures Avril on the cusp of public and private worlds. A carriage is glimpsed in the background while the hat and coat on the wall may allude to her male admirers. However, she seems withdrawn and far older than her twenty-two years. In Jane Avril leaving the Moulin Rouge, Avril is shown as a passer-by, an elegant but anonymous and solitary figure. The exhibition reunites these portraits for the first time and also includes a rich documentary section exploring the intersection of Avril’s medical history and her public persona.


Toulouse-Lautrec’s death in 1901 marked the end of the golden age of Montmartre. Jane Avril went on to perform briefly as a stage actress before marrying and settling into bourgeois obscurity. Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril examines a friendship which has come to define the world of the Moulin Rouge. However, it also looks beyond Avril’s identity as a star of Lautrec’s posters to consider the complex personal histories and the cultural changes which lay behind this remarkable creative partnership.

Photos and links to reviews:



Jane Avril



Jane Avril at the Moulin Rouge



Toulouse-Lautrec, dressed in Jane Avril’s clothes to attend the ‘Women’s ball’ (bal des femmes) held by the Courrier français at the Elysée-Montmartre, BJ March BIJC, 1892

An unprecedented display of paintings and photographs by the acclaimed American artist Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art June 18-September 15, 2002. The final stop in a three-city tour of a landmark traveling exhibition, Thomas Eakins at the Metropolitan was the first major showing of the artist's work in New York City since 1970.

More than 150 works drawn from institutions nationwide represented every major theme explored by Eakins, including his iconic depictions of rowers, surgeons, musicians, artists, collectors, and teachers. Some 60 photographs by the artist and his circle—along with newly discovered information about the role of photography in his work— enhanced public understanding of Eakins's remarkable achievements.

Traveling only to the Metropolitan was his powerful 1884-85 painting of male nudes,


Swimming,

on loan from the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth.

The exhibition was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art with funding from The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc.

Today considered a leading repository of works by Eakins, the Metropolitan Museum established a relationship with the artist during his lifetime. Indeed, the Metropolitan's first acquisition of a painting by Eakins was presented by the artist himself in 1881. Through subsequent purchases and gifts, the collection has grown to include some of Eakins's most significant paintings, works on paper, and photographs.

The son of a Philadelphia writing master and teacher of calligraphy, Thomas Eakins displayed artistic talent—most notably in mechanical drawing—even as a youth. Encouraged by his father to pursue a career as an artist, Eakins enrolled in classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and attended anatomy lectures and demonstrations at Philadelphia's Jefferson Medical College.

In 1866, he became one of the first American artists to seek serious professional training in France—a practice that would later become commonplace—to continue his studies in the atelier of the noted historical and genre painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Eakins also received instruction in sculpture and portraiture. Having completed his studies, and in ill health, he escaped the damp climate of Paris in the winter of 1869-70 to spend several months in Madrid and Seville, where he immersed himself in Spanish art before returning home.

Unlike many of his compatriots, who would seek their artistic inspiration in foreign lands, Eakins chose to document and memorialize the familiar. Settling in his parents' house in Philadelphia in 1870, he painted outdoor sporting scenes that included his male friends and meditative indoor scenes that featured his female relatives. Even when an image appears to be merely a genre scene, it is rooted in Eakins's commitment to the specificity of portraiture, which would become his principal concern after 1886.

Today Eakins is closely identified with his depictions of rowers on Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, such as the great oil painting of 1871,



The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull),

and the meticulous watercolor of 1873-74,



John Biglin in a Single Scull

(both from the Metropolitan Museum).

But he also painted men hunting for waterfowl and fishing—such as



Starting Out After Rail (1874, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)



and Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River (1881, Philadelphia Museum of Art)

And another by the same title, not in the exhibition:



Eakins also painted sports including



baseball,





boxing,



and wrestling.

The women Eakins painted were members of his family, friends, or pupils, and they were often shown in domestic settings. Two of his students served as models for



The Pathetic Song (1881, Corcoran Gallery of Art),

which portrays a parlor concert and captures the moment at the end of a song.

And family friend Weda Cook posed for one of his most ambitious and moving musical paintings,



The Concert Singer (1891, Philadelphia Museum of Art).

The artist's investigative approach required that Cook begin each of the more than 80 sittings by singing the same melody so that he could study the action of her vocal chords.

Eakins excelled at portraiture, but his insistence on repeated sittings—he orchestrated and scrupulously recorded every detail of pose, costume, and setting—was a process his subjects found tedious, despite the fact that the results were masterful and captured the sitter's essence. Potential patrons feared that Eakins's probing approach would ruthlessly reveal, rather than flatter; and even friends who agreed to pose as a favor to Eakins often declined to accept their portraits as gifts.

Eakins is also identified with medical portraits such as



The Gross Clinic (1875, Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

which shows the pioneering surgeon Dr. Samuel David Gross performing and commenting on surgery on a living patient. The public acclaim that Eakins hoped for when he completed his masterpiece did not materialize, although the work is now considered by many art historians to be the greatest American painting ever created.

From 1876 to 1886, Eakins was an instructor and then director of the school at the Pennsylvania Academy. His salary and a small income provided by his father allowed him to carry on his career with but few portrait commissions.



“The Agnew Clinic,” oil on canvas, 84 3/8 by 118 1/8 inches, 1889, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Beginning in the summer of 1880, Eakins turned his attention to photography. He saw photography as a modern medium that—in addition to anatomy and mechanical drawing—should be put to the service of painting. Likewise, he was deeply interested in its inherent artistic possibilities and poetics. He quickly mastered the new medium and—urging his students to learn it also—introduced the camera to the American art studio.

The subject matter in Eakins's photographs—primarily the human figure (both clothed and nude) and portraits of his family and friends, his students, and himself—echoes that of his paintings, making him the first American artist to integrate these two disparate media. In some instances, Eakins used photographic images diagnostically: by studying them, he hoped better to understand the human figure, details of human physiognomy, and gestures. But groundbreaking scholarship in the field of painting conservation has revealed how Eakins (using lantern slide projectors) employed photographic images to mark his canvases and create such complex multi-figure paintings as



Mending the Net (1881, Philadelphia Museum of Art).

The challenges posed by the new technology and Eakins's solutions to them suggest that he also viewed photographs as discrete works of art. He was the only American painter in his day to make his own photographic enlargements on platinum papers—a notable achievement for an amateur. Influenced by the noted photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), Eakins also designed and constructed a special camera that made multiple exposures on a single plate, capturing the nuances of human musculature in motion.

Due in large part to Eakins's influence on the school's curriculum—and his insistence that both male and female students study anatomy and conduct dissections—the Pennsylvania Academy became the most liberal and advanced art school in the United States in the early 1880s. His belief that artists needed to investigate the nude human figure challenged Philadelphia decorum and exacerbated his difficulties with the school's administration, however, and forced his resignation in 1886. Thereafter, Eakins held teaching posts—lecturing on anatomy—in various schools in Philadelphia and New York.



A platinum print of Eakins's classroom at the Art Students' League (ca.1889, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) shows Eakins's unique talent for integrating photography and art instruction. In this rare glimpse of a life drawing class in session, the nude model—a female, whom we see from behind—reclines on a blanket. A male art student, sketchbook in hand, can be discerned in the shadows, drawing the same lithe figure Eakins records with his camera.

Eakins's late portraits, such as



The Thinker: Portrait of Louis N. Kenton (1900, The Metropolitan Museum of Art),

capture the introspection of his subjects at the same time they reflect his own melancholy. Simple and vigorous, The Thinker is a probing, intensely realized image of an individual as well as an archetypal portrayal of modern man in the first year of the new century, a fact that is prominently proclaimed at the corner of the canvas.

Excellent Review, more images

A catalogue published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press accompanied the exhibition.

Two hundred nineteen works by leading 19th-century American, British, and French artists from the legendary collection formed by Grenville L. Winthop (1864-1943) went on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 23, 2003. The exhibition, which marked the first time the collection has traveled since its bequest to Harvard in 1943, featured paintings, drawings, and sculptures by more than 50 artists, including William Blake, Edward Burne-Jones, Jacques-Louis David, Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault, Winslow Homer, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Gustave Moreau, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Singer Sargent, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. A Private Passion: 19th-Century Paintings and Drawings from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection, Harvard University remained on view at the Metropolitan through January 25, 2004.

The exhibition was organized by the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in collaboration with Ville de Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts and Réunion des musées nationaux, the National Gallery, London, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

In 1943 Grenville Lindall Winthrop bequeathed his entire collection of more than 4,000 works of art to his alma mater, Harvard College. During his life, he almost never lent objects from his collection to museums, and in keeping with his wishes, the works have always been at Harvard, available to students and scholars, rather than on loan to other institutions.

Over the course of four and a half decades, Winthrop assembled objects from almost every culture and historical period. In particular, no other collector could claim the depth of Winthrop's reach in both French and British art together. Rather than purchase already-formed collections of drawings, Winthrop was a pioneer in establishing a collection of works on paper, piece by piece.

Winthrop acquired more works by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres than any other private collector of his day. The exhibition at the Metropolitan included 34 of Winthrop's Ingres, including



Raphael and the Fornarina (1814)



and Odalisque with the Slave (ca. 1837-40), as well as a number of drawn and painted portraits.

Other important French works included

Jacques-Louis David's 1817 portrait of his friend and fellow revolutionary



Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès,

and sketchbooks containing more than 100 studies for David's monumental



Coronation of Napoleon I (Le Sacre).

Works by the French Romantic painters included

Théodore Géricault's



Cattle Market (1817)



and Postillion at the Door of an Inn (1822-23)



and Eugène Delacroix's A Turk Surrenders to a Greek Horseman (1856).

In addition to paintings by many of the leading French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, the exhibition featured eleven sculptures by Auguste Rodin,



Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel (1871-78)



and a selection of Edward Burne-Jones's watercolors, Days of Creation (1875-76),

were among the important group of paintings and drawings by the British Pre-Raphaelites.

Winthrop assembled one of the finest collections of works by William Blake, represented here by one of artist's rare oil paintings,



Christ Blessing (ca. 1810),



Thy Sons and Thy Daughters Were Eating and Drinking Wine, (1821)





as well as by pages from his celebrated Book of Job (1821).

A great admirer of the progressive artists of 19th-century America, Winthrop owned a group of watercolors by Winslow Homer that included



Mink Pond (1891)



and Adirondack Lake (1892).

The expatriate American artists John Singer Sargent and James Abbott McNeill Whistler were represented in his collection as well; the former by five pictures, the latter by eight, including a shimmering



Nocturne in Blue and Silver (ca. 1871-72).

A Private Passion debuted at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, in the spring of 2003. It then traveled to the National Gallery, London, before its appearance at the Metropolitan Museum.

The exhibition was organized by an international committee of curators coordinated by Stephan Wolohojian, Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums. The exhibition will be installed at the Metropolitan by Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator of 19th-Century European Painting, with the assistance of Rebecca A. Rabinow, Assistant Research Curator.



Stephan Wolohojian edited the fully illustrated catalogue, which contains contributions by more than 60 specialists. The catalogue was published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.


Excellent Review with more images:

including:



"Café-Concert (À la Gaîté Rochechouart)," by George Pierre Seurat, conté crayon and white gouache on buff laid paper, 12 1/8 by 9 ¼ inches, 1887-8

German Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1350–1600



"German Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1350–1600" is a spectacular exhibition catalogue by Maryan W. Ainsworth and Joshua P. Waterman. It features 315 illustrations in full color.

The book includes paintings made in the German-speaking lands (including Austria and Switzerland) from 1350 to 1600, including the towering figures of the German Renaissance—Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Hans Holbein the Younger—and many by lesser masters.

It is available here.

Excerpts:



" Hans Holbein the Younger (Augsburg 1497/98–1543 London). Benedikt von Hertenstein, 1517.

Viewed straight on, Hertenstein appears noticeably broader than he perhaps should, with an oversized left arm and hand. But, as we pass from left to right before the painting, he assumes more natural proportions and seems to project in a realistic manner out of his space into ours. As he engages us with his glance and we reach an angle of forty-five degrees opposite his image, we gradually experience the full force of Hertenstein's corporeal presence. The inscription becomes more prominent, and the authorship of the painting is featured. Holbein's striking effect of verisimilitude, in which the ideal image of the man is recognized only "in passing," calls attention to the transience of life—both Hertenstein's and our own.



Lucas Cranach the Younger (Wittenberg 1515–1586 Wittenberg). Nymph of the Spring, ca. 1545–50.

This small, astonishingly well-preserved painting shows a nude woman reclining on the grassy bank of a river, near a spring that issues from a rock formation. Looking toward the viewer, she identifies herself and offers a word of caution through the first-person Latin inscription at the upper right: "I, nymph of the sacred spring, am resting; do not disturb my sleep." The scene's open eroticism is heightened by the nymph's sultry, half-closed eyes; the red tinge of her cheeks, buttocks, elbows, knees, and feet; the transparent veil that meanders from head to foot, as if to guide the viewer's gaze along her body; and the bundled red dress, which evokes the thought of her disrobing. A bow and quiver hang in a nearby tree, signaling that the nymph belongs to the entourage of the huntress goddess Diana. A green parrot perched on the bow and two rock partridges in the grass probably serve as symbols of the Luxuria (lust) that is embodied by the nymph and called forth in the male viewer.

Norman Rockwell 332 Magazine Covers



Norman Rockwell 332 Magazine Covers By Christopher Finch Size: 11 x 13", 400 pages 332 full-color illustrations.

This beautiful album of Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers, painted between 1916 and 1963. All of his Post covers are reproduced in splendid full color in this oversized volume, with commentaries by Christopher Finch, the noted writer on art and popular culture. It captures everyday events and historic moments in American history. 332 of these cover paintings, from beloved classics like "Marbles Champion" to lesser-known gems like "Feeding Time," are reproduced in stunning full color in this large-format volume, which is sure to be treasured by art lovers everywhere.

It is available here.

Selected images:



The Art Student Post Cover • April 16, 1955 plate 310



The Toss Post Cover • October 21, 1950 plate 290



Walking to Church Post Cover • April 4, 1953 plate 301



Fishing Post Cover • August 3, 1929 plate 144

Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism, on view at the Akron Art Museum October 29, 2011 – February 5, 2012, offered a broad survey of landscape painting as practiced by leading French artists from Gustave Courbet to Claude Monet and their most significant American followers including Childe Hassam and John Singer Sargent. This exquisite exhibition of more than fifty paintings included many of the finest examples of French and American impressionist landscapes from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum as well as American impressionist paintings from the Akron Art Museum.

Among the earliest works in the exhibition were



Charles-François Daubigny's The River Seine at Mantes (1856)



and Gustave Courbet's Isolated Rock (1862).

Both reveal the waning influence of the academic Beaux-Arts tradition, in which generalized landscapes served merely as background for historical or mythological scenes.

A new generation of artists, known as the Barbizon school, painted preparatory sketches directly from nature–en plein air–in the environs of Paris, setting the stage for impressionism’s dramatic assault on officially-sanctioned painting styles.

Impressionists Claude Monet, Camille Pissaro and Gustave Caillebotte painted highly elaborated "impressions"—the seemingly spontaneous, rapidly executed landscapes and cityscapes that prompted the name of their movement. Monet was represented in Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism with



Rising Tide at Pourville (1882),



Vernon in the Sun (1894)



and The Islets at Port-Villez (1897).

In the late 19th century, Americans who aspired to a career in painting typically trained at fine arts academies in Europe, especially Paris. While there, many American artists like Frederick Frieseke and Willard Metcalf were inspired by the light-filled canvases of leading impressionists to take their easels outdoors, sometimes setting up right next to a French mentor who could provide informal instruction.

Theodore Robinson, represented in the exhibition by



The Watering Pots (1890)



and La Roche Guyon (1891),

established a warm friendship with Monet over the course of several summers spent in Giverny.

Back in America, simultaneous trends in depicting the beauty of rural areas untouched by industrialization and populated urban locales demonstrate the competing impulses of nostalgia for a simpler time and delight in the new modern era. In works such as



William Glackens's Bathing at Bellport, Long Island (1912),



Julian Alden Weir's Willimantic Thread Factory (1893)



and Robert Spencer's The White Tenement (1913)

populated beaches, factories and tenements are given the same treatment as French Impressionist landscapes, painted with brilliant colors and lively, broken brushwork.

Impressionist works drawn from the Akron Art Museum’s collection included



Childe Hassam’s Bedford Hills (1908),



Frederick Frieseke’s Through the Vines (1908),



John Twachtman’s The Winding Brook (1887-1900),



Willard Metcalf’s Maytime (1909-1914)



and Julian Alden Weir’s White Oaks (1913).

Julian Alden Weir was a prominent American impressionist who was well represented in the exhibition with the early



A French Homestead (1878),

Willimantic Thread Factory (1893)(above) and the mature work White Oaks (1913), (above) which demonstrates how much the artist’s style evolved towards impressionism after he initially rejected it. When Weir first encountered impressionist paintings in France in 1877, he wrote, “I never in my life saw more horrible things.”

The American Willard Metcalf, a close friend and colleague of Weir, was often commended by contemporaries for his patriotic delight in depicting the New England landscape where he lived and worked. Maytime exemplifies Metcalf’s ability to render the character of the individual seasons through careful observation in nature of the transitory effects of light and color. Maytime, wrote Metcalf, “has always been a favorite of mine, in as much as I felt that I had succeeded in getting some of the elusiveness of that beautiful spring morning.”

The breadth of works included in Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism told the story of the development of French impressionism and its impact on American painting during a period when industrialization and technological advances were radically altering the face of the landscape, a phenomenon that artists responded to in highly personal ways. Artists forged strong relationships on both sides of the Atlantic through individual friendships, artist colonies and new artist groups, which afforded the artists a sense of community and belonging in a rapidly changing world.

This exhibition was organized by the Brooklyn Museum.

“Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities,” on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum Sept. 26 through Jan. 4, 2009, examined the friendship of two iconic artists who were attracted to the distinct landscapes of the American southwest and far west and committed to depicting its essence with modernist sensibilities. This exhibition, the first to pair these artists, celebrated their mutual appreciation of the natural world and reveals the visual connections between O’Keeffe’s paintings and Adams’ photographs.

“Natural Affinities” included 42 paintings by O’Keeffe from public and private collections and 54 photographs by Adams from the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Ariz., which holds the largest single collection of Adams’ work.

The exhibition was organized by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M. Independent scholar Anne Hammond selected the artworks for the exhibition with Barbara Buhler Lynes, curator at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Emily Fisher Landau Director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center. Eleanor Jones Harvey, chief curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Toby Jurovics, curator of photography, are the coordinating curators in Washington.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and Ansel Adams (1902-1984) met in Taos, N.M., in 1929 at the home of a mutual friend, Mabel Dodge Luhan. The two immediately became friends. The following year, they met again in New Mexico. Adams was there making photographs for his first book, “Taos Pueblo” published in 1930, and O’Keeffe was spending the first of many summers painting in New Mexico, which she made her permanent home in 1949.



In 1933, Adams traveled from California to New York for the first time and met O’Keeffe’s husband, Alfred Stieglitz, the influential photographer whose modern art galleries in New York City launched the careers of numerous American artists. Stieglitz presented an exhibition of Adams’ photographs in 1936 at his gallery, An American Place, which established the younger photographer as one of America’s leading modernists.

In 1937, O’Keeffe and Adams toured the southwest by car with a group of friends, visiting well-known archaeological sites including Canyon de Chelly. The following year, O’Keeffe visited Adams in Yosemite. Although their friendship lapsed in the 1940s as they pursued separate interests, the artists resumed regular correspondence in the 1950s. The artists last visited in person in 1981 when O’Keeffe, then 94, went to see Adams in Carmel, Calif., and Adams, then 79, visited O’Keeffe at her home in Abiquiu, N.M.

The paintings and photographs included in “Natural Affinities” explored the formal connections between O’Keeffe’s and Adams’ works. The artists often emphasized their subjects’ essential qualities, creating abstract images. For example, in



O’Keeffe’s “Abstraction White Rose” (1927)



and in Adams’ “Foam, Merced River, Yosemite Valley, California” (1951),

they depict their subjects extremely close-up so that any sense of the subject is lost to abstraction.

This also is evident in



O’Keeffe’s “The Black Iris” (1926)



and Adams’ “Leaves, Frost, Stump, October Morning, Yosemite National Park” (c. 1931).

O’Keeffe and Adams also frequently called attention to the abstract components of the southwestern landscape as can be seen in



O’Keeffe’s “Black Hills with Cedar” (1942)



and Adams’ “Ghost Ranch Hills, Chama Valley, Northern New Mexico” (1937).

Occasionally, comparisons between works by O’Keeffe and Adams highlighted their different approaches to the same subject, such as an adobe church near Taos.



In O’Keeffe’s “Ranchos Church No. 1” (1929),

the building becomes organic and seems to rise almost weightlessly from an expansive foreground.

In contrast, Adams underscores its monolithic solidity in his photograph



“Saint Francis Church, Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico” (c. 1929).

More images:



Ansel Adams, Winter Sunrise, the Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, California, 1944, Gelatin silver print, 15-5/8 x 19-1/4", Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, ©The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.



Ansel Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico,1941, Gelatin silver print, 15-9/16 x 19-11/16", Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, ©The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.



Publication



A fully illustrated catalog, published by Little, Brown and Company, features essays by Lynes, critic Richard B. Woodward and Sandra Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Tour

After its presentation in Washington, the exhibition traveled to the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Jan. 24–May 3, 2009) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (June 6–Sept. 7, 2009).

From October 8, 2010, to January 9, 2011, the Albertina presented the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to Michelangelo in more than twenty years. The presentation of more than a hundred of the artist’s most precious drawings provided fascinating insights into the creative work of this great genius. It retraced the development of his depiction of the human body, from the delicate figures drawn in beautiful lines of the early Renaissance to a new, monumental body ideal that has kept its validity down to the present day.

The drawings presented in this exhibition were from the Albertina’s own holdings as well as from thirty of the most renowned international museums and art collections, including the Uffizi and the Casa Buonarroti in Florence, the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle, and the British Museum in London.

(Click on links for more information)

Michelangelo Buonarroti was a sculptor, architect, painter, and graphic artist. The exhibition in the Albertina focused on his drawing oeuvre. As a medium for developing new ideas and conveying artistic thoughts, the drawing was the basis of all his creative work. In addition, it achieved a new status as an autonomous artwork under the great Florentine artist. In the seventy-five years of his artistic career, Michelangelo (1475-1564) created an extremely complex oeuvre, influencing not only his entire era but also subsequent generations of artists.

On the basis of Michelangelo’s most important commissions and groups of drawings, the exhibition in the Albertina presented his work in its proper chronological sequence, not least in order to illustrate the development of the master’s drawing oeuvre. The selection on display spanned the entire period from his earliest extant drawing (a copy after Giotto) and the drafts for The Battle of Cascina to the preliminary drawings for the famous frescoes in the Sistine Chapel and the subtle presentation sheets for Michelangelo’s friend Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, to the late Crucifixion depictions by the almost eighty-year-old artist. Furthermore, it featured projects the master realized while in the service of several popes and princes: the Tomb of Pope Julius II, the Medici Chapel, The Last Judgment, as well as the design for the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica. Complementing the selection are works by pupils and fellow artists to whom art-historical scholarship has often attributed drawings by Michelangelo in the past, although their style clearly differs from that of the great master. Finally, the exhibition included a number of paintings based on drafts by Michelangelo.

The declared objective of the exhibition was to reposition Michelangelo as a graphic artist. Following losses through the vagaries of history as well as by the artist’s own destruction of several of his works, only some 600 drawings remain today. The ongoing discussion concerning their authenticity and chronology served Dr. Achim Gnann, the curator of the exhibition, as a point of departure in conceiving this presentation over a period of about three years.

Michelangelo and His Era

Michelangelo lived in an era of armed conflict and profound change. The invention of printing from movable type, the understanding of central perspective, the discovery of America, the first circumnavigation of the world, and the adoption of a heliocentric worldview expanded the spatial and intellectual horizons of the early modern age. The autonomy of the individual and his capacity for critical thought and creative power were formulated as central convictions of the Renaissance. This new self-image permitted artists like Michelangelo to adopt a self-confident posture in their dealings with mighty princes. It was in this intellectual climate that Michelangelo became a sculptor, painter, draftsman, and architect. Michelangelo experienced—and influenced—the development from the early Italian Renaissance and Mannerism to the beginning of the Baroque period. He witnessed the power struggle between the Medici and the Vatican, served under nine popes, and also perceived the influence of the checkered history in his own work. On the basis of Michelangelo’s central projects, the exhibition in the Albertina retraces the development of his creative career in the context of the cultural and political events of the Renaissance.

The Human Body in the Drawings of Michelangelo

The thematic link that connects the artworks on display is the human body. In his exemplary oeuvre Michelangelo created a vocabulary of movements and postures that would serve as a reference to many subsequent generations of artists. Michelangelo replaced the delicate figural lines of artists such as Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Domenico Ghirlandaio with a new monumental ideal of the human body. He created figures of great dramatic expression, lending them monumentality and heroic power. At the same time, his works are characterized by deep inner feeling and emotional tension. The human body as aesthetic leitmotiv, which is the focus of interest in Michelangelo’s work, characterized the Renaissance period. The new conviction that the description of the body reflects the innermost emotions of the soul emerged in this era, and Michelangelo rendered the concept in a particularly impressive manner.

The Drawing—A Medium for Developing New Ideas and an Autonomous Artwork

While studying Michelangelo’s richly varied and extremely detailed drawings, we also follow the artist’s train of thought. The genre of drawing, which forms such an essential part of his oeuvre, is undoubtedly the most pure and unbroken expression of an artistic idea. In Michelangelo’s works, it is no longer merely a preliminary study; it achieves a new status as an autonomous artwork. Contemporaries of Michelangelo collected his drawings, which the artist considered primarily as material he needed for his work, and guarded them like precious gems.

Early Drawings

Michelangelo showed a keen interest in drawing even as a boy. When his father sent the thirteen year old for an apprenticeship under the important Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, the latter was immediately astounded by his pupil’s exceptional talent. The artist’s early pen-and-ink drawings are unmistakably in keeping with Ghirlandaio’s technique, yet his lines are straighter, more regular, and more controlled. The position and function of each detail is clearly defined and sculpturally translatable. In the beginning, the artist liked to combine two different colors of ink, thus loosening the line-work and lending the composition a more colorful impression. It was a common practice in the workshop training of apprentices for pupils to copy the works of great artists. Michelangelo is said to have copied various sheets by older masters in a faithful manner, before coloring, smearing, and smoking them to make them appear old. Among the earliest drawings of his youth are the three famous copies based on frescoes by Giotto



and Masaccio,



whom Michelangelo admired for their simplicity and coherent figural language. Following their example, he developed a new ideal of depicting the human figure, characterized by dignified greatness, heroic grandeur, and monumentality.

The Battle of Cascina

After the fall of the Medici and the establishment of the Republic of Florence, the government commissioned a decorative program for its seat in the Palazzo della Signoria (Palazzo Vecchio). In a kind of artistic contest, the young Michelangelo in 1504 faced the experienced artist Leonardo da Vinci, who in 1503 had started to paint



The Battle of Anghiari (1440) against the Duchy of Milan,

while Michelangelo depicted the dramatic events of July 28, 1364, in



The Battle of Cascina. Michelangelo chose the moment between the surprise attack and the reaction of the soldiers, who rushed to arms. While Leonardo staged the dynamic clash of riders and soldiers in all its brutality and violence, Michelangelo structured his composition on three spatial levels and conceived the event as an “allegory of vigilance.” His contemporaries were immediately fascinated by his draft because of the expressive, richly varied postures and complex rotational movements of the bodies. The three-dimensional definition of the figures and the effort to make them space-encompassing was yet another achievement that had a lasting effect on subsequent generations of artists.

The Sistine Chapel

With the ascendance to the papacy of Julius II (1503), Michelangelo had secured his most important patron. In 1505 he summoned Michelangelo to Rome to build his papal tomb. When the construction of the new Saint Peter’s became an increasingly important priority for the pope, however, he commissioned the artist to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Disappointed at having to break off the tomb project on which he was already working, Michelangelo, who saw himself primarily as a sculptor, was initially reluctant to accept the new commission.



Study

He independently developed his complex program of scenes from the story of the Creation and the lives of the patriarchs Moses and Noah accompanied by the biblical prophets and the ancestors of Christ combined with figures from heathen mythology.

The Tomb of Julius II



Monumental tomb study

In 1505 Julius II gave Michelangelo his first commission: to create a monumental personal tomb in the old Saint Peter’s. It was to surpass every existing tomb in size, magnificence, and the richness of its sculptural decoration, with more than 40 figures to glorify the pontiff’s political and cultural achievements. Initially conceived as a grand project, it was to be recorded in Michelangelo’s artistic biography as the “tragedy of his life.” The execution of the original plan was prevented by other papal commissions.



Wall tomb study

Following the death of Julius II in February 1513, his heirs altered the design, rejecting the free-standing, walk-in mausoleum in favor of a still-impressive but significantly smaller wall tomb. While the first draft provided for a program of classical sculpture, Christian motifs were predominant in the later designs. No use was made of the famous sculptures of the Slaves in Paris and Florence in later project phases.

The Medici Chapel

In 1519 Michelangelo received his largest commission to date: to design the Medici Chapel in San Lorenzo in Florence along with its sculptural program. Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici and Pope Leo X commissioned this project for constructing tombs for the most important members of the Medici family. Michelangelo based his architectural structure on Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy to which the Medici Chapel was added as a counterpart. He set new standards, however, with his completely new formal language. The three-dimensional architectural elements combine with the sculpture in harmonious unity. The artist studied individual parts of the figures in several careful drawings in order to arrive finally at the uniquely sensual gestures and introverted spiritual expressiveness. Michelangelo’s final move to Rome in 1534 as well as the death of the Medici pope at the time, Clemens VII, prevented him from ever completing this huge Gesamtkunstwerk.

Leda and the Swan



During Michelangelo’s stay in Ferrara in 1529, Duke Alfonso I d’Este presented his famous art collection to him and expressed his wish to receive a painting by the master. Upon this request, Michelangelo created a tempera painting of Leda and the Swan within a year. According to the Greek myth, Zeus admired Leda, the wife of King Tyndareus of Sparta, and seduced her in the guise of a swan. The duke sent an envoy to Florence who made disparaging remarks about the painting, whereupon Michelangelo presented it as a gift to his pupil Antonio Mini. Later the painting of Leda made its way to Fontainebleau and was burned there a hundred years later because of its lascivious subject matter. The painted copies in London’s National Gallery and by Peter Paul Rubens are not based on the painting but on Michelangelo’s cartoon, which Mini took with him to France along with the painting in order to sell them both.

Presentation Drawings for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri

At the age of 57, Michelangelo met the 17-year-old Roman nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. He was immediately smitten by the youth’s beauty, distinguished appearance, and intellect, and their meeting marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Michelangelo sent Tommaso sonnets, letters, and drawings in which he expressed his love for him. He promoted the young man’s artistic interest and taught him how to draw. The drawings that Michelangelo presented to Tommaso as gifts—



The Punishment of Tityus,



The Rape of Ganymede,



The Fall of Phaeton,



and A Children’s Bacchanal


—are executed in an extremely subtle, detailed, and accomplished manner, depicting classical, mythological subjects. In addition the master created drawings of “divine heads” (teste divine) for him, including that of Cleopatra, presented here.

The Last Judgment



With Pope Clement VII another member of the Medici dynasty entered the Vatican. His papacy was marked by the sack of Rome (1527) when the Medici were exiled from Florence, military defeat, and the advance of the Protestants. Nevertheless he was a generous patron of the arts, and Michelangelo’s fresco The Last Judgment for the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel is the most important work commissioned during his papacy.

As he had done earlier with his ceiling frescoes, Michelangelo designed a dramatic depiction of human fate, interpreting the Last Judgment as a monumental apocalyptic vision of the thought of redemption and the terror of damnation. Here again, Michelangelo combines the biblical narrative with scenes from ancient mythology. The connection with the Inferno from Dante’s Divine Comedy can be seen at the bottom of the fresco in the figure of Charon, the ferryman carrying the dead to the underworld. In the dynamic postures and foreshortening of the figures reaching in all directions as well as in their sculptural quality and moving, powerful expressiveness we experience the master’s visionary imagination in all its creative diversity. During this period of crisis in the church and the resulting efforts to reform it, Michelangelo made the acquaintance of the Roman poetess Vittoria Colonna, under whose influence he entered a phase of deep spirituality and religiosity in his artistry. In this spirit and as a reflection on his own mortality, Michelangelo created his late Crucifixion and Pietà scenes.

Late Crucifixion Drawings








The three poignant depictions of the Crucifixion of Christ belong to a series of stylistically related drawings on the subject. They are frequently attributed to the artist’s last creative period, although the exact date of their creation cannot be established with certainty. In these drawings Michelangelo focuses on the essential, omits decorative details, and reduces the figures to simple, block-like forms. Standing beneath the Cross are Saint John and the Mother of God. They are left entirely to their own devices in an empty space that dramatically reveals the hopelessness of their situation. They are either plainly venting their grief and desperation or recoiling in reaction to the icy-cold sensation that Christ’s death on the Cross has evoked within them. These drawings bear testimony to the deeply religious beliefs of Michelangelo, whose thoughts revolved around Christ’s death and salvation toward the end of his life.

More images here:


Artist´s biography

Michelangelo is born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese near Arezzo, where his father is mayor. His mother dies when he is six. He spends his childhood with a foster mother in Settignano. As a boy he accompanies her husband, a mason, to the nearby quarries.Michelangelo attends a Latin school in Florence. His father apprentices him at the age of twelve to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio.At this time the great city-state of Florence is a cultural stronghold of Humanism but at the same time a city embattled on all sides.From 1488 to 1492 Michelangelo lives in Florence at the court of Lorenzo il Magnifico, where he studies the Medici collection of antiquities. In the mortuary of the Ospedale di Santo Spirito he studies the anatomy of the human body. In order to demonstrate his talent, he successfully presents artificially aged drawings as originals. Michelangelo’s outstanding talent for copying the frescoes in Santa Maria del Carmine attracts the envy of his colleagues. Pietro Torrigiani breaks his nose, thus permanently disfiguring him. The Dominican monk Savonarola causes political unrest with his fanatical preaching against ostentation and immorality. Botticelli is among the converts, burning his pagan works and ceasing his activity as an artist. The Medici are driven from Florence, which becomes a republic in 1494. Michelangelo flees to Venice and Bologna.

In 1495 Michelangelo returns to Florence and sells one of his sculptures as a work of antiquity, having artificially aged the surface. He thus demonstrates that his art is equal to the sculpture of antiquity.Michelangelo’s father, having lost his position and faced with the lack of success of his other sons, must rely to the end of his life on Michelangelo’s support.

In Rome three years later, Michelangelo executes his celebrated Pietà for the tomb of the French Cardinal Lagraulas in Santa Petronilla (today in St. Peter’s, Rome). The emphasis on suffering found in Gothic lamentation scenes is replaced by lyric idealism. In 1501 the Florentine cathedral workshop asks the now-famous sculptor to complete work on a block of marble that had suffered under the hands of previous sculptors for several decades. For a sum three times higher than that originally offered, Michelangelo creates the David. More than four meters high, the sculpture is put on display outside the Palazzo Vecchio in 1504. In an exemplary manner, it unites the principles of the High Renaissance: knowledge of antique sculpture, the study of nature, and a balance between realism and idealism. In the same year Michelangelo accepts the challenge to compete with Leonardo da Vinci in painting the most famous battle scenes in art history on opposite walls of the Palazzo Vecchio. Michelangelo’s contemporaries enthusiastically receive his cartoon and preparatory drawings for a fresco that is never to be executed. His drafts feature figures exploring the space around them in every direction, depicted in a wide variety of postures with complicated foreshortening. Michelangelo’s new ideal of the human body is to influence generations of artists from Rubens to Delacroix.

Under Pope Julius II (1503-1513) Rome replaces Florence as the center of Renaissance art. The artloving pontiff becomes Michelangelo’s most important patron. Their fruitful collaboration, however, is complicated by the difficult relationship between the two quick-tempered men. Many of the artist’s works remain unfinished and go down in art history as “perfect torsos.” The first commission that Michelangelo receives from Julius II is for a monumental tomb in St. Peter’s. It turns into a tragedy for the artist and takes more than 40 years to complete. Disagreements with the pope lead Michelangelo to return secretly to Florence. In 1506 Michelangelo witnesses the most spectacular archeological find of his day: the Laocoön group of sculpture. Its dramatic energy influences the characteristic terribilità of his figures. Julius II hires the most important artists of the day to work at his court: Bramante designs the new St. Peter’s, Raphael paints frescoes in the private apartments of the pope (Stanze di Raffaello), and Michelangelo completes his ceiling frescoes in the Sistine Chapel over four years (1508-1512), a legacy that is his greatest work of painting. After the violent end of the Florentine Republic (1512), the Medici return to power following an absence of more than 20 years. One year later a member of the Medici family is elevated to the papacy as Leo X (1513-1521).

In 1519 Michelangelo undertakes the sculptural and architectural design of the family tomb in the Medici Chapel and the adjoining Biblioteca Laurenziana at San Lorenzo in Florence. This large Gesamtkunstwerk also remains unfinished when Michelangelo moves to Rome in 1533. With the election in 1523 of the Medici pope Clemens VII (1523-1534) Rome hopes for the kind of cultural heyday it experienced under Julius II. Not least because of the pope’s hesitant policies and lack of willingness to reform, Rome is sacked in 1527 by German mercenaries in the hire of Emperor Charles V. The pope is driven from Rome. Florence is once again proclaimed to be a republic. Michelangelo changes sides again and accepts responsibility for the fortifications of the Florentine Republic. In Rome, Michelangelo meets the 17-year-old, Humanistically schooled Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. The older artist creates intimate sonnets and sensitive mythological drawings dedicated to the young nobleman. Their content suggests a deep platonic friendship between the two men. In 1533 Pope Clemens VII commissions Michelangelo to paint The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel; eight years later the artist completes the fresco under Pope Paul III (1534-1549).

Michelangelo’s free interpretation and the nudity of the figures are considered scandalous. Some twenty years later Michelangelo’s pupil Daniele da Volterra is given the unpleasant task of painting loincloths on several of the figures. This results in the nickname “Il braghettone” (“the breeches maker”). In this period Michelangelo establishes first contacts with the Roman poetess Vittoria Colonna. Under her influence he becomes acquainted with the spiritual ambitions of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation. The heartfelt Pietà and Crucifixion scenes of his later years attest to his newly internalized religious feelings.

In 1534/35 the new Farnese pope, Paul III, releases Michelangelo from the time-consuming contract for the Tomb of Julius II in order to force the artist to work for him. He puts Michelangelo in charge of all artistic matters at the Vatican. Over the next few years Michelangelo works primarily as an architect. As project manager for construction of the new St. Peter’s, he designs a spectacularly monumental central-plan building, but it is never executed. Giorgio Vasari publishes the first edition of his biographies of artists (1553), which includes that of Michelangelo, the first that he has written about a living artist. Vasari founds the first academy of drawing in Florence in 1563. Thus he establishes drawing not only as an indispensable discipline for every budding artist: as the purest version of the idea, it is considered the mother of all artistic genres. Michelangelo’s marble group for a Pietà (Cathedral Museum, Florence), which the 75-year-old artist creates for his own tomb, remains, like an alternative version, the Rondanini Pietà, unfinished. Michelangelo dies on February 18, 1564, only a few days before his eighty-ninth birthday. His nephew Leonardo Buonarroti secretly brings the body to Florence, where Michelangelo is celebrated in a solemn funeral procession as the greatest genius of his time.

The American painter Philip Guston (American, b. Canada, 1913-1980) was the subject of a major retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 27, 2003, through January 4, 2004. The exhibition included more than 75 paintings and drawings dating from 1930, when he was 17, to 1980, the year of his death.

Beginning with his childhood fascination with popular American comic strips, through mural painting laden with political imagery, to easel painting and a burgeoning interest in, advancement of, and ultimate disenchantment with abstraction and Abstract Expressionism, through his invention of a highly controversial figurative mode of painting and drawing that influenced younger artists, Guston courageously changed styles according to his beliefs and in response to social and political issues of the day.

The exhibition was organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas.

Philip Guston explored the stages of this precocious and highly energetic artist's career, featuring key works drawn from around the United States, the United Kingdom, and rarely seen paintings from Australia.

Highlights included



the Drawing for Conspirators (1930)

—the artist's first reaction to the cruelties of the Ku Klux Klan,



the tondo Bombardment (1937-38)



and The Tormentors (1947-48),

which, together with



White Painting (1951),

documented Guston's transition from Symbolic Realism into abstraction.

Works that richly demonstrate Guston's personal interpretation of the Abstract Expressionist movement included



Painting (1954),



Zone (1953-54),



To Fellini (1958)

and other nuanced abstractions.

Following a group of transitional drawings and paintings of the 1960s,



Edge of Town (1969),

The Law (1969),



The Studio (1969),



and Courtroom (1970)

all incorporate Klan imagery used both to comment on political issues of the day and to represent the artist surrounded by everyday artifacts. These were first seen in Guston's controversial 1970 Marlborough Gallery exhibition in New York.

Wharf ((1976),



Painting, Smoking, Eating (1973),



the powerful battle scene The Street (1977),



and Talking (1979),

further displayed Guston's autobiographical symbolism.

Drawings and paintings included in the exhibition—most notably a painting,

San Clemente (1975), depicting Richard Nixon—will demonstrated the artist's frustration with American politics during the late 1960s and early 1970s.



Painter's Table (1975) on left and San Clemente on right (1975)

Philip Guston brought a unique combination of moral intensity and probing self-reflection to his art. He was the youngest of seven children born to Jewish immigrants from Odessa in 1913 in Montreal, Canada. Guston—whose original surname was Goldstein—moved as a child with his family to Los Angeles. After witnessing his father's depression and finding him following his suicide, the young Guston retreated to a place of literal isolation—a closet illuminated by a single light bulb—and began a lifelong career in art through an intense engagement with cartoons of his own invention. The light bulb later became a prevailing image in Guston's mature work. At Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles Guston met and became a friend of Jackson Pollock.

In his early schooling, art school, and throughout his career, Guston devotedly studied the history of art. His influences were broad, ranging from the Italian Renaissance masters of the 15th century to modern European artists such as Cézanne, Léger, and Mondrian. His mural paintings of the 1930s were inspired by the great Mexican artists David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974), Diego Rivera (1886-1957), and José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949). He was also influenced by the haunting cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico (Italian, 1888-1978).

After moving to New York City in 1935, where he renewed his friendship with Pollock, Guston met and saw the work of many of his contemporaries—Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, among many others. Together they would form the center of the major American art movement that became known as Abstract Expressionism. Gradually Guston shifted from painting public murals to working privately in the studio, at an easel. At the same time, he began to accept university teaching positions that brought him to cities in the midwest. As Abstract Expressionism took root in New York City in the mid-1940s, Guston arrived slightly later at his personal version of the style. Guston's imagery of the 1950s and early 1960s is considered to be as complex and as moving as other works produced by the movement. Guston's emphasis on the brushstroke—what he saw as the most fundamental act of marking, the cornerstone of painting, the essence of an artist's uniqueness—remains one of his most enduring legacies. The brushstroke and a continuing inquiry into structure, recalling the "plus and minus" compositions of the mid-teens by Mondrian, became the chief pictorial components for Guston's Abstract Expressionism and are among his most significant contributions to the movement.

In addition to his devotion to drawing and painting, Philip Guston was also an avid reader of philosophy, fiction, and poetry and he was a writer and a charismatic educator, continuing to teach through much of his career. In 1965 he helped found the New York Studio School for Drawing and Painting. However in the 1970s, as his health began to deteriorate, Guston became increasingly withdrawn. He retreated from the New York art scene and spent most of his time at his home and studio in Woodstock, New York, where he continued the autobiographical figuration he had begun in the late 1960s. After Musa, his wife of 40 years, suffered a stroke in 1977, and after his own nearly fatal heart attack in 1979, he painted figurative works and intimate portraits. From this period,



Couple in Bed (1977),



Sleeping (1977), and a group of small acrylics from 1980 was on view in the exhibition.

While dining at the Woodstock home of Sylvia and Fred Elias (his doctor), Philip Guston suffered another heart attack and died at the age of 67.

Michael Auping, Chief Curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and curator of the exhibition, wrote in his essay in the exhibition catalogue Philip Guston Retrospective: "Significant artists are often those figures who make bold and difficult transitions throughout their career, and in that process synthesize vast territories of art history. These are artists whose works reflect not only the aspirations and anxieties of their own generation, but of those that came before and after." Auping continued: "Having helped to define the one great movement associated with American art, Abstract Expressionism, he also had the boldness and skill to carve his way out of it."

Prior to its presentation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philip Guston was on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Following its showing at the Metropolitan, the exhibition was seen at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, England, from January 24 through April 12, 2004.



A fully illustrated catalogue, Philip Guston Retrospective, published by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in association with Thames & Hudson, accompanied the exhibition. It contains essays by Michael Auping, Dore Ashton, Bill Berkson, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Michael E. Shapiro, and Joseph Rishel, as well as Guston's 1965 essay "Faith, Hope, and Impossibility."

The first major retrospective in more than 20 years devoted to the great 16th-century painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614) – known to posterity as El Greco – opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 7, 2003. One of the most original artists of his age, El Greco was celebrated for his highly expressive and visionary religious paintings. The international loan exhibition's approximately 80 works included an unsurpassed selection of his psychologically compelling portraits, as well as his rare incursions into landscape, genre, mythology, and sculpture. Particular emphasis was placed on his late works, in which mystical content, expressive distortions, and monumental scale are taken to ever greater extremes, culminating in the Adoration of Shepherds, the spectacular nine-foot-tall painting created to decorate his own tomb.

All aspects of the artist's activity were explored, from his beginnings as an icon painter in his native Crete, to his move to Venice and Rome and his study of Italian art, to his definitive move to Toledo, Spain, and his creation of a uniquely personal and deeply spiritual style. His work has sometimes been associated with the great mystics of Counter-Reformation Spain, but his paintings have had a profound influence on the protagonists of 20th-century modernism, including Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock. El Greco remained on view at the Metropolitan through January 11, 2004.

The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The National Gallery, London.

"In his own time," stated Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum, "El Greco's highly personal style – with its dematerialization of the figure and its expressive effects of light and color – was without precedent and often astonished his contemporaries. Yet it is only in the last 150 years that he has come to be appreciated as one of the great creative geniuses of Western art. This landmark gathering of his works, which has been organized by an international team of scholars, builds on the last major El Greco exhibition of 1982 with a greater focus on the artist's late and most mystical phase, and the philosophical and religious thought that informed it."

A unique synthesis of late medieval Byzantine traditions and the art of the Italian Renaissance, El Greco's art sought to create a new and spiritually more intense relationship between viewer and image. Although he established a large and productive workshop in Toledo, he founded no school, and for almost two centuries following his death his works were decried for their extravagance—except for his astonishing portraits, which Velazquez took as his model. A sympathetic interest in his art was the product of the 19th-century Romantic movement's new emphasis on individual expression and extremes of emotion. Since then El Greco's creative stature has never been challenged. Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin saw themselves as his artistic heirs. More recently, his works have inspired the expressive abstractions of generations of 20th-century painters. The 1982 exhibition of his works was seen in Madrid, Washington, Toledo, Ohio, and Dallas.



The Dormition of the Virgin (Syros, Church of the Dormition)



and St. Luke Painting the Virgin (Athens, Benaki Museum)

were among the rare, early works documenting El Greco's first training as a painter of religious icons in his birthplace of Crete. The archaizing abstractions of these images – based on late medieval prototypes – reflect his country's continuing reverence for the Byzantine traditions of its Greek heritage.

The style and sacred function of Byzantine icons, which rejected mimesis in favor of an attempt to mystically embody the living presence of the divine, greatly shaped El Greco's approach to religious art. Throughout his career, he always signed his works with his Greek name, Domenikos Theotokopoulos.

A number of key works illustrated the transforming effects of El Greco's stay in Italy, beginning with his arrival in Venice, in 1567, and his subsequent stay in Rome, from 1570 until 1577.



Christ Driving the Money-Changers from the Temple (ca. 1570, Minneapolis Institute of Arts),

with its deep, stage-like space, bold brushwork, and dramatic lighting, shows the powerful influence of Titian as well as the Venetian mannerist Tintoretto. During the Counter Reformation the theme, reprised several times by El Greco, was interpreted as the purification of the Church.

Works from the artist's sojourn in Rome display El Greco's study of the art of Michelangelo and his awareness of Italian art theory. He became a member of a small circle of antiquarians.



The Boy Lighting a Candle (Museo Nazionale di Capodimente, Naples)

is a rare and charming example of El Greco's excursion into genre painting as well as an emulation of a celebrated lost work of ancient art.

In 1577 El Greco traveled to Spain, where he hoped to find royal patronage – unsuccessfully, as it turned out. Instead, he settled permanently in Toledo, still an intellectual and religious center of the country. Once again, he found his place among a circle of scholars and church reformers who appreciated his signature style, with its elongated, undulating forms and sometimes dissonant colors.





The Adoration of the Name of Jesus

was among the first works painted by El Greco in Spain – perhaps an attempt to attract the attention of Philip II, who is shown kneeling in the foreground. The artist painted two versions of this religious allegory, which were shown together for the first time. Although the larger of the two versions found a place in Philip II's grandiose palace, the Escorial, El Greco did not become one of the king's artists.

The increasingly ethereal and otherworldly quality of his religious works can be traced in a series of important canvases from the 1580s and 1590s, including



Christ on the Cross Adored by Donors (ca. 1585-90, Musée du Louvre, Paris);



The Agony in the Garden (The Toledo Museum of Art);



Madonna and Child with Saint Martina and Saint Agnes and Saint Martin and the Beggar (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.);



and The Resurrection (Museo del Prado, Madrid).

In the Resurrection (ca. 1597-1604, Museo del Prado), one of El Greco's most celebrated works, expressive distortion and mystical drama are taken to unprecedented extremes. Emerging from the tomb with an almost explosive force, Christ acts as a magnet, pulling the figures below, drawn out to impossible lengths, heavenward.

El Greco's artistic explorations of spirituality and mysticism culminate in





Adoration of the Shepherds (1614, Museo del Prado),

designed to hang above the artist's tomb. Here, the body of the infant Christ, tiny on the ten-foot-tall canvas, emits an incandescent glow that illuminates the entire composition. Heavenly as well as earthly worshippers appear to be weightless, slowly spiraling in adoration around his form. The painting is an unrivaled example of El Greco's visual expression of ecstatic union with the divine.

The exhibition also brought together El Greco's finest portraits, notable for their probing explorations of character and psychological intensity. Among the most famous example is the



Portrait of a Cardinal, probably Don Fernando Niño de Guevara (ca. 1600, The Metropolitan Museum of Art),

whose piercing gaze suggest the stern rectitude with which he carried out his duties.

The exhibition also included El Greco's compelling portrayal of the young cleric



Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino (1609, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

A noted poet and professor of rhetoric, he was one of El Greco's admirers in Toledo and dedicated four poems to the artist.

Rare examples of El Greco's activities as a landscape painter included his famous



View of Toledo (1600-10, The Metropolitan Museum of Art),

sometimes considered the first expressionist landscape in Western art.

Also on view was



The Laocoön (ca. 1600-10, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.),

a late work in which El Greco openly vied with the celebrated first-century sculpture in the Vatican signed by Hagesandros, Polydoros and Athenodoros of Rhodes. The subject, taken from Virgil's Aeneid, concerns the gods' punishment of the Trojan priest Laocoön in front of the walls of Troy, which El Greco shows as Toledo. The writhing forms and expressions of despair and physical pain make it one of his most powerful works.

Following its showing at the Metropolitan, El Greco was on view at The National Gallery, London, from February 11 through May 23, 2004.

The guest curator of the exhibition was Professor David Davies, a noted El Greco scholar. He has been assisted by Gabriele Finaldi, formerly of The National Gallery, London, and then associate director of the Museo del Prado, Madrid; Xavier Bray, assistant curator at The National Gallery, London; and Keith Christiansen, Jayne Wrightsman Curator in the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum.



El Greco was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, authored by a team of international scholars, including: Professor Davies; Sir John Elliott, Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Oxford; Gabriele Finaldi; Keith Christiansen; and Xavier Bray. The catalogue was published by The National Gallery, London, and distributed by Yale University Press.


More images:



The Miracle of Christ Healing the Blind
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) (Greek, Iráklion (Candia) 1540/41–1614 Toledo)

Paul Gauguin was the subject of a major monographic show in New York City for the first time in more than 40 years. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from June 18 through October 20, 2002, Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic featured approximately 120 works drawn from museums and private collections in New York City and State, many of which were rarely exhibited publicly. The exhibition also marked the first time that the Metropolitan displayd its own extensive holdings of the artist's work, numbering some 60 objects.

Comprising paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, and prints, the exhibition vividly conveys the exceptional range of Gauguin's career, both in terms of his technical facility in a variety of media and the far-flung places and cultures that inspired his subjects. From Paris, Brittany, and Provence to Martinique, Tahiti, and the Marquesas, works from all phases of this illustrious artist's travels are on view.

Among the most fabled artists of any era, Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903) is as renowned for his brazenly unconventional life as for his vivid images of exotic locales. Much attention has been focused on his connection to Vincent van Gogh, and their brief but episodic period together in Arles. Gauguin spent his childhood in both Paris and Peru, and in his youth he sailed around the world with the merchant marines and the military. Returning to Paris, he began a career as a stockbroker, married a Danish woman and fathered five children, whom he held dear, despite his neglectful, peripatetic lifestyle. After the collapse of the French stock market in 1882, he began his profession as painter in earnest, voyaging to remote ports of call in Brittany, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific, notably Tahiti and the rugged island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, where he died in 1903 and is buried.

The Metropolitan Museum acquired its first work by Gauguin in 1921, and in the intervening years his work reached an ever-widening public audience through the concerted efforts of prominent New Yorkers and local institutions. Thanks to pioneering acquisitions and the generosity of donors, the Metropolitan and other museums in the state — from the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan to the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo — have afforded generations of viewers a fascinating view of Gauguin's genius.

The exhibition revealed that Gauguin was not only an exceptionally gifted artist but that, no matter where he traveled, he absorbed the sights and subjects encountered there into his own unique vision. Throughout his career he was open and responsive to all forms of culture and the visual arts, endeavoring to comprehend the underlying beliefs, customs, and practices they represented. In Brittany he carved and decorated his own wooden shoes, as well as the cupboards in his quarters, with local motifs. Toward the end of his life in the Marquesas he again carved wooden reliefs — and even coconuts — with exotic imagery.

Among the highlights of the exhibition were a group of nine oil paintings from the Metropolitan's collection, including



Ia Orana Maria (1891),

an iconic image of a Tahitian Madonna and Child,

and the serene portrayal of



Two Tahitian Women holding flowers from 1899.

Two exceptionally important works in his oeuvre —



The Yellow Christ (1889)



and The Spirit of the Dead Watches (Manao tupapau) (1892)

— were on loan from the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.

The Museum of Modern Art lent several works, including



Still Life with Three Puppies (1888)



and The Moon and Earth (Hina Tefatou) of 1893,

which Gauguin presented to fellow artist, Edgar Degas.

Paintings from private collections included



The Wave (1888),



Young Man with a Flower (1891),



and Morning (Te Poipoi) (1892),

as well as a fine group of landscapes and still–lifes, and an engaging self-portrait.

Works on paper in the exhibition included the Metropolitan's



Tahitians,

a charcoal study of a beautiful young woman's face that conveys Gauguin's deep appreciation for exotic peoples.

His pastel,



Martinique Women with Mangoes (Private collection; ca. 1887),

is one of his earliest portrayals of native islanders, whom he admired for being unspoiled by civilization.

An extensive selection of Gauguin's prints were also on view, including a complete series of zincographs on canary yellow paper that he showed in Paris during the Exposition Universelle of 1889, and the suite of woodcuts that he carved in a crude and primitive style to illustrate the largely fictional journal of his first trip to Tahiti, Noa Noa:









Throughout his career Gauguin experimented with and explored a wide variety of media and the exhibition features superb examples of sculpted marble, wood, and earthenware. Among the ceramics on view are unpublished works, such as the stoneware Vessel Decorated with Goats and a Girl from Martinique (Private collection; ca. 1887–89). Relief carvings are also be featured, including a walking stick from Gauguin's stay in Brittany, a panel from his tropical open-air dining room, inscribed Te Fare Amu (House for Eating), and an unusual double coconut from the Marquesas.

Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic was co–organized by Colta Ives, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, and Susan Alyson Stein, Associate Curator of European Paintings, both of the Metropolitan Museum.



The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated book, published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press, with essays by the exhibition curators and conservators, Charlotte Hale and Marjorie Shelley.

An exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art explores for the first time Maurice Prendergast's lifelong fascination with the seaside in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The first retrospective of Prendergast's work in over two decades, Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea will be on view from June 29 through October 13, 2013 and will showcase a selection of more than 90 works in a variety of media, all of which were inspired by popular summer enjoyment of the seashore. Tracing the artist's deepening interpretations of his favorite subject, the retrospective exhibition features works from more than thirty public and private collections and foregrounds Prendergast's experimental style and leading role in the development of early American modernism. The installation will span five galleries, each painted differently to support the artist's famous jewel-like colors, allowing visitors to dive into Prendergast's fantastical world.



“Lighthouse at St. Malo,” c. 1907, by Maurice Prendergast

"No artist captured the holiday atmosphere of the New England coast better than Maurice Prendergast," explains the exhibition's co-curator Nancy Mowll Mathews, co-author of the Prendergast catalogue raisonne. "Through the scope and complexity of the works that we are bringing together, Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea will illustrate how Prendergast transformed the visible reality of seaside resorts and coastal villages into an imagined, Arcadian vision all his own," adds co-curator Joachim Homann, Curator of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.




“Autumn,” ca. 1917-18, by Maurice Prendergast

The focus on the theme of seaside leisure allowed Prendergast to create works of modern and experimental character shunning anecdotal subject matter in favor of formal innovation. The exhibition sheds light on the artist's creative process by including a selection of Prendergast's rarely seen sketchbooks and oil studies. The sketchbooks will provide visitors with an uncommon perspective on Prendergast's extensive preparation of his compositions, highlighting his spontaneity and playfulness. In his oil sketches Prendergast heightened the sensual experience of beaches by liberating color.



“The Promenade”

Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924) was one of the hordes of visitors who frequented New England beaches and resort towns between the 1890s and the 1920s. Prendergast was fascinated with modern life when it was most at ease, and his brilliantwatercolors, animated oil sketches, and richly colored paintings provide insight into this age of leisure travel. Through his work, Prendergast articulated the promises of a society in "pursuit of happiness," painting the public beaches of New England as the ideal venue for young and prosperous American society to celebrate its democratic values in communion with nature.

Among the highlights of the exhibition is a 1901 watercolor



The Balloon,

which is in a private collection and has not been included in earlier Prendergast retrospectives. The Balloon depicts a busy crowd watching a hot air balloon take-off and epitomizes Prendergast's fascination with the new leisure activities that dominated the nation's seashores.

Another highlight is



St. Malo,

a vibrant watercolor created by Prendergast during his 1907 trip to France. On loan from the Williams College Museum of Art, St. Malo and its companion pieces were heralded as one of the first American introductions of the bold coloristic styles of the European Post-Impressionist avant-garde. With The Promenade, ca. 1913 (above) a modernist masterpiece from the Whitney Museum of Art, Prendergast responded to the paintings by Czanne, Matisse, and others who reinterpreted the tradition of Arcadian landscapes in daring compositions. His seven contributions to the International Exhibition of Modern Art of 1913, the so-called Armory Show that brought together cutting-edge art from both sides of the Atlantic, appearedvery European and experimental in color and paint surface.

Prendergast was a cosmopolitan artist who trained in Paris and took every opportunity to travel to France, England, and Italy. Consequently, the sources of inspiration for his art were diverse and reached from the early Italian Renaissance to the French avant-garde. His ability to respond with a stream of innovations to art he revered earned Prendergast admirers among his peers. In the exhibition, a group of paintings by John Sloan (1871-1951), William Glackens (1870-1938), and Maurice Prendergast's brother Charles (1863-1948) will represent the artist's American cohort, while oils by Frenchmen Eugene Boudin (1824-1898) and Maurice Denis (1870-1943) will provide the European context for his work. The installation of works by Prendergast's American and European peers throughout the exhibition will further demonstrate Prendergast's commitment to modernism and experimentation.

Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea features a number of works from the BCMA's own collection in addition to loans from over thirty American private and museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Phillips Collection, and the Addison Gallery, among others. The Williams College Museum of Art, home of the Prendergast Archive and Study Center, is the principal lender


From an excellent review in the Boston Globe (Images added):

“Evening on a Pleasure Boat” is an oil showing five girls and young women seated in a row on deck with the proximate harbor behind. Their faces are smudges, and the painting is dominated to an unusual degree (for Prendergast) by whites, creams, and browns.

But for all its sketchiness, the picture is full of specificity. See the way the girls’ bodies squirm as they turn for a better view of the harbor. Note the mauve dress of the middle girl, the bright blue ribbon at the back of the woman on the right, and the way that same woman holds onto her hat in the wind.

Other pictures, including Prendergast’s hauntingly atmospheric monotypes, are loaded with local observations:



“South Boston Pier,”

with its snaking rails and receding line of lamp posts is echt Boston,

as is the summery



“Float at Low Tide, Revere Beach.”




“Rocky Shore, Nantasket,”



“Handkerchief Point*,”



and “The Stony Beach, Ogunquit”

are the kinds of watercolors in which you can imagine people recognizing themselves. The rocks seem burnished by familiar hands and feet.

*Prendergast did two other watercolors with the similar names:



Handkerchief Point (Coastal Scene)



Nantasket Beach (also known as Handkerchief Point)


Another great review, also well worth reading

The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center at Stanford University held an exhibition June 11 through September 7, 2003, that examined the garden as an enduring and evolving cultural resource. The Changing Garden: Four Centuries of European and American Art traced the changing aesthetics and uses of gardens of the 16th to 21st century, from Italian villas of the powerful Medici family and the royal showcase of Louis XIV at Versailles to New York City's Central Park and San Francisco's Crissy Field. Curator Besty G. Fryberger organized the exhibition and its catalogue, which were dedicated to the late San Francisco philanthropist Dr. A. Jess Shenson for his enduring support of the Cantor Arts Center and Stanford University.



Gabriel Perelle (1604 - 1677) and/or Adam Perelle (1638 - 1695) FONTAINEBLEAU: THE ORANGERY OF THE QUEEN. ca. 1670 - 90. Etching.

The Changing Garden presented nearly 200 works—prints, drawings, paintings, and photographs—by more than 100 artists. The exhibition included great names from art history, such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Camille Pissarro, Maurice Prendergast, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, George Bellows, John Sloan, and Eugène Atget. Pieces by the 18th-century painter and designer of gardens Hubert Robert, as well as anonymous and previously unpublished prints and photographs are of special interest. Artworks by Claes Oldenburg, Bruce Davidson, and Michael Kenna brought the exhibition up to date.




William Merritt Chase (American, 1849-1916) An Italian Garden ca. 1909 Oil on canvas


The Changing Garden exhibition also traveled to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan (March 13–May 23, 2004).

The exhibition and catalogue were organized in three parts. The first examined design concepts and individual garden features; the second highlighted historic gardens and public parks; and the third section focused on activities in garden settings.

Artists have depicted gardens in many ways.




Stefano della Bella (1610–1664)




and Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) created prints of gardens and garden features, as well as the festivities that took place in those settings by their proud owners. Not all artists, however, were concerned with presenting views of mansion and garden.



Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827) focused on the behavior of garden visitors in his satire of an animated gathering in London's Vauxhall Gardens.

By the late 19th century, Charles Marville (1816–c. 1878) and Eugène Atget (1857–1927) took pictures of Parisian gardens and parks using the new technology of photography. During this period,




Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) continued to paint the Tuileries Gardens, while








Maurice Prendergast (1858–1924),



John Singer Sargent (1856–1925),




and James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) portrayed scenes of sociability in the Luxembourg Gardens.

At the dawn of the 20th century, women emerged as independent and influential figures in garden design. Sketches and plans by Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932) and Beatrix Farrand (1872–1959) are included in the show. American realists such as George Bellows (1882–1925), William Glackens (1870–1938), and John Sloan (1871–1951) captured the increasing importance of parks as democratic spaces by showing everyday people enjoying themselves in New York. City's public parks. Contemporary photographer Bruce Davidson (b. 1933) brings the exhibition to its logical conclusion by showing a diverse racial and ethnic population, homeless people, children, and seniors in Central Park.



Eugène Samuel Grasset, France, 1896. Calendar "The Beautiful Gardener" (La Belle Jardinière): August. Gillotype.





EXHIBITION CATALOGUE



The catalogue, with more than 200 illustrations, many in color, was co-published by the Cantor Arts Center and the University of California Press. The catalogue includes six essays: Cantor Arts Center Curator of Prints and Drawings Betsy G. Fryberger, organizer of the exhibition, writes about the representation of gardens in European and American art; Claudia Lazzaro describes Italian 17th-century garden views; Elizabeth S. Eustis discusses the role of prints as propaganda under Louis XIV; Diana Ketcham explores late-18th-century French gardens; Carol M. Osborne portrays gardens as social settings for late 19th- and early 20th-century American artists; and Paula Dietz relates how George Hargreaves recently converted urban spaces into public parks in the Bay Area.

Interesting book review

The first major retrospective devoted to the virtuoso Netherlandish mannerist Hendrick Goltzius – one of the most versatile and accomplished figures in the history of art – was on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art June 26 – September 7, 2003. Hendrick Goltzius, Dutch Master (1558-1617): Drawings, Prints, and Paintings, an international loan exhibition of more than 160 works, spans the artist's entire career and demonstrates his legendary mastery of a remarkably wide range of media, subject matter, and styles – from extravagantly complex mythological scenes in prints, to sensitively observed studies from nature, to sumptuously colored oil paintings on canvas and copper. The exhibition remained on view at the Metropolitan through September 7, 2003.

Internationally acclaimed in his day as the leading artistic personality of the Netherlands, Goltzius's reputation was soon eclipsed by the achievements of the 17th-century painters of Holland's Golden Age. It is only in the last half-century that his pivotal importance as the supreme exponent of Netherlandish mannerism has been appreciated fully. It is less widely recognized that he was a pioneer in the rise of Dutch realism and classicism.

Roughly half of the exhibition was devoted to Goltzius's important activities as printmaker, and includes images such as the celebrated The Wedding of Cupid and Psyche, in which the mannerist love of artifice and exaggeration is most fully expressed. The group of 69 drawings in the exhibition features a number of his famous large-scale pen works – including the spectacular, seven-by-five-foot Venus, Ceres, and Bacchus – as well as postage-stamp-size portraits in metalpoint and some of the first realistic renderings of the Dutch landscape. The group of 13 oil paintings – a medium Goltzius took up only late in his career – was the largest ever assembled, and included the magnificent Danaë, notable for its jewel-like colors and unabashed observation of the female nude.

The exhibition was organized by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Toledo Museum of Art.

Born on the border between the Netherlands and Germany, Goltzius received his earliest training from his father, a glass painter. A fall into burning coals when he was still a child left his right hand crippled, making it impossible for him to extend his fingers fully. Nevertheless he showed a precocious aptitude for drawing, and around 1575 he became an engraver's apprentice. His primary task was to translate the painted and drawn designs of others into print, and he became a skilled imitator of various artistic styles. By the age of 19, Goltzius had settled in Haarlem and around 1595 he became deeply influenced by the art of Bartholomeus Spranger, an important practitioner of the newly fashionable mannerist style. Characterized by artifice and refinement, mannerism tended to exaggerate – and, at times, bizarrely distort – the idealizing art of the High Renaissance. About that time he began to develop a new style of engraving with exaggerated swelling lines, with which he could create stunning painterly effects as well as astonishing, almost kneadable, three-dimensionality. The ambitious young printmaker established a print business in Haarlem in 1582 that soon broke the monopoly on publishing prints in Northern Europe that had been controlled by publishers in Antwerp. His printing house was exceptional in that the design, execution, and publication of the prints all centered around making Goltzius's unique designs and techniques known throughout Europe. It became one of the largest and most successful of its day, and played a central role in the spread of the mannerist style.

Goltzius traveled to Italy in 1590-91 – now internationally famous, he traveled incognito to avoid being recognized. At the age of 32, he was beyond the stage where he needed to travel to Italy to learn about art; he meant instead to deepen his own artistry and see for himself the works that he had so often heard discussed around him and that he only knew from prints and drawings. His mannerist exaggerations had already begun to give way to more "classically" proportioned forms, but his work after this journey shows an even stronger influence of the Renaissance art that he saw in Italy by such masters as Raphael and Michelangelo. After his return to Haarlem, he began to produce a series of strikingly realistic landscapes and studies from nature. Nevertheless, the mannerist love of virtuoso display is still evident in the large-scale pen drawings and late prints that imitate – and were often mistaken for – the work of earlier 16th-century masters. In 1600, Goltzius began a new career as a painter in oils, most likely because of the greater prestige the medium conferred.

The exhibition was organized chronologically and thematically, with works grouped according to the various media, genres, and styles in which Goltzius excelled at successive stages in his career.

In his early prints, executed while the artist was still in his twenties, Goltzius favored moralizing subjects drawn from antiquity and the Bible. Among the finest of these is the series of four engravings depicting The Story of Lucretia:




The Banquet at the House of Tarquinius, or The Banquet of Turquinius Collatinus, engraving, c. 1578. References: Bartsch 104, Hirschmann 171, Strauss 17, only state. First of the series (of 4) The History of Lucretia.



Tarquinius and Lucretia, c. 1578

the Roman woman who chose suicide over dishonor, following her rape by the king's son. The attenuated forms and self-consciously graceful poses – even in moments of extreme violence – reveal the artist's early interest in mannerist modes of expression and his unique interpretations of traditional subjects.

By contrast, Goltzius's many early drawn and engraved portraits – another important source of fame and income for the young artist – are meticulous and wonderfully observed records of each sitter's appearance and personality. His drawing of a solemn-faced young boy, believed to be the artist's stepson,



Jacob Matham (ca. 1584, Teylers Museum, Haarlem),

is one of many portraits executed in the notoriously difficult and precise medium of metalpoint. Goltzius was one of the few artists to use this medium in the 17th century.

The exhibition featured a number of prints from the late 1580s, in which Goltzius's art develops in the direction of ever-increasing extremes of artifice, exaggeration, and complexity. An important catalyst was the work of the Flemish mannerist Bartholomeus Spranger, whose extravagant style Goltzius sought to emulate and then surpassed. One of the highlights of the exhibition was Goltzius's famous engraving, after a design by Spranger, of the



Wedding of Cupid and Psyche (1586-87, The Metropolitan Museum of Art),

a mannerist tour-de-force of some 80 sinuous women and powerfully muscled men cavorting among spiraling cloudbanks. The print was displayed alongside



Spranger's original drawing of the work (1586, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam),

allowing visitors to study the ways in which Goltzius used his burin to heighten the swirling patterns and dramatic effects of light and shadow already present in the design.

Also from the so-called "Spranger years," but based on Goltzius's own designs, is the print series

the Roman Heroes (1586, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam),







a group of ten impossibly brawny warriors, rendered with the astonishingly varied repertoire of intricate, swelling cross hatchings that is now the hallmark of his engraving style. Dedicated to Emperor Rudolf II, who became one of his most enthusiastic patrons, the series refers to the monarch's heroic achievements.

Goltzius's delight in dramatic foreshortening and ever more daring compositions is seen in



The Four Disgracers (1588, The Metropolitan Museum of Art),

a series of engravings which shows the tumbling mythological figures of Tantalus, Icarus, Phaeton, and Ixion caught in mid-air.

Goltzius's engraving lines reach an extreme in this series in which each figure appears to be caught in a net of swelling and tapering lines.

Mannerist exaggeration reaches its most bizarre formulation in Goltzius's print of



The Great Hercules (1589, The Metropolitan Museum of Art),

whose grotesque bundlings of muscles earned the image the Dutch nickname Knollenman, "bulbous man."

Goltzius's 1590-91 trip to Italy, though brief, had a profound and lasting influence on his work. The exhibition features a number of the artist's meticulous studies of the great monuments of classical antiquity and Renaissance sculpture, such as the



Farnese Hercules,

the Dioscuri,



the Belvedere Torso, and

Michelangelo's Moses

which informed his more classicizing, normative approach to the human form and served as sources for some of the massive figures in his later paintings.

Also on view was a group of portraits – including a dashing



Self-Portrait (ca. 1590-92, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) –

made during and just after the artist's trip to Italy. These boldly realistic images, life-sized and carried out in colored chalks, have no equivalent in the history of Dutch art, and may reflect the influence of contemporary Italian artistic practices.

A series of remarkably naturalistic plant and animal studies also postdates his Italian sojourn, and includes



his portrait-like chalk drawing of a monkey (ca. 1595-1600, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam);



a metalpoint study of a spaniel (ca. 1597, Paris, Collection Frits Lugt, Fondation Custodia),

probably the artist's own dog, napping at his master's feet;

and his chalk and watercolor drawing of an oak tree (ca. 1597-99, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). Goltzius and two other Haarlem artists were said to have created an academy to draw from life. "Studying from life" seems to have meant at the time an alternative to drawing from imagination – for example, drawing from sculptures and other works of art and not necessarily from live models. The casual pose and careful delineation of contours in

Goltzius's Seated Female Nude (ca. 1600, Harvard University Art Museums) suggests that it is one of the rare works from this period actually drawn directly from a nude model.

The trip to Italy, which took Goltzius through spectacular Alpine vistas, also seems to have inspired his first forays into the field of landscape drawing. Some of these works adhere to the Dutch tradition of "fantasy landscapes" inspired by the prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. However, he also produced sketches of the Haarlem countryside that are considered to be the first realistic depictions of Dutch scenery. As such, they look forward to the work of Rembrandt and other great Dutch landscapists of the Dutch Golden Age.

In dramatic contrast to these modestly scaled studies from nature are Goltzius's magnificent, oversize Penwercken ("pen works"), often executed on parchment or canvas, in which meshworks of swelling and tapering lines imitate the appearance of his signature "swelling groove" engraving style. Still mannerist in their self-conscious artifice and bravura display of technique for its own sake, these were highly coveted – and costly – collectors' items. The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II owned at least four.

The exhibition included what is undoubtedly Goltzius's most spectacular pen work, a scene of Venus attended by Bacchus and Ceres (1606 [?], State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg) that measures about seven by five feet. While work on the picture was underway, news spread of the seemingly impossible task Goltzius had set for himself. In a letter of 1605, also on display, the artist mentions that people are taking bets that he will fail. "None of these gossips understands what I am doing," he declares, "nor are they worthy to understand it." Known by its Latin title,



Sine Cerere et Baccho Friget Venus,

the work illustrates the maxim that without food (Ceres) and wine (Bacchus), love (Venus) grows cold.

(Compare another work by Goltzius:



Venus between Ceres and Bacchus)

The exhibition also included a pen work drawing of



Goltzius's own crippled right hand (1588, Teylers Museum, Haarlem),

clearly showing the claw-like fingers of his deformity. Signed with a grand flourish, it can be considered in a sense a self-portrait via the artist's widely recognized feature.



Youth with Tulip and Skull, Morgan Library, New York),

one of his last pen works, is also one of his most ambitious, incorporating an extraordinary range of hatching to suggest the varying textures of bone, petals and hair, as well as the plumes on the man's hat. Goltzius inscribed on a background wall a typically Dutch reminder of the brevity of life: QUIS EVADET / NEMO (Who can escape? No one).

The group of late prints on view, dating from 1592 to 1600, demonstrated the same virtuosity and love of showmanship, as well as remarkable powers of imitation and emulation. Goltzius was called by his friend and biographer Karel van Mander a Proteus in art, after the shape-shifting sea god.

In the Life of the Virgin (1593-94, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)



Adoration of the Magi, from the series "The Life of the Virgin,



The Holy Family and Saint John, Life of the Virgin



The Death of the Virgin, from the series "The Life of the Virgin"

a series of six engravings often referred to as his Meisterstiche ("masterpieces"), each scene is executed in the style of a different great master of the past.



The Circumcision

was apparently so convincing that it was taken by connoisseurs for an original by Albrecht Dürer, but Goltzius revealed his deception by including his own portrait in the background and setting the scene in St. Bavo, the local Haarlem church.

In 1600, at the age of 42, Goltzius gave up printmaking, the medium that had earned him great international recognition during the previous two decades, and began a new career as a painter in oils. To date, approximately 50 works in this medium are known, many only "discovered" in recent decades. The group of 13 on view here, the largest number ever assembled for an exhibition, offered the first comprehensive overview of this little-known aspect of his oeuvre.

His early



Danaë (1603, Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

was clearly intended as a demonstration piece to proclaim his skills, especially in the depiction of the female nude. Resting on gorgeously colored satin cushions, the sleeping figure of the princess Danaë extends nearly the entire width of the canvas. Her right hand, resting between her thighs, alludes to her impending ravishment by Jupiter, who appears directly above as a shower of gold.

Such unabashed eroticism becomes a common feature of many of Goltzius's paintings, such as his



Vertumnus and Pomona (1615, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)



and The Fall of Man (1616, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.),

with its intertwining nude bodies of Adam and Eve.

The reasons for Goltzius's decision to concentrate on oil painting are not certain. As painters were ranked above printers in the artistic hierarchy of 16th-century Europe, it must have been born of this ambitious artist's desire to gain even greater respect among contemporaries and assure lasting fame.

The exhibition had already been on view at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Following its showing at the Metropolitan, the exhibition traveled to the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio (October 18, 2003-January 4, 2004).

The exhibition was organized by Jan Piet Filedt Kok, Head of the Department of Paintings, Huigen Leeflang, Print Curator, and Ger Luijten, Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Nadine M. Orenstein, Curator, and Michiel C. Plomp, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Lawrence W. Nichols, Curator of European Painting and Sculpture before 1900, Toledo Museum of Art.



The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue edited by Huigen Leeflang and Ger Luijten, with contributions by Lawrence W. Nichols, Nadine M. Orenstein, Michiel C. Plomp, and Marijn Schapelhouman. The catalogue, available in a hardcover edition, is published by Waanders Publishers.

American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffe, on view at MOMA August 17, 2013–January 26, 2014, takes a fresh look at the Museum’s holdings of American art made between 1915 and 1950, and considers the cultural preoccupations of a rapidly changing American society in the first half of the 20th century.

American Modern includes paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and sculptures by more than 50 artists, bringing together some of the Museum’s most celebrated masterworks, including pieces by Charles Burchfield, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Florine Stettheimer, Alfred Stieglitz, and Andrew Wyeth.

Contextualizing these works across mediums and amid lesser-seen but revelatory compositions, American Modern offers these artists’ views of the United States in a period of radical transformation, expressed in a variety of visual styles, artistic movements, and personal visions. The selection of more than 100 works is organized thematically, depicting such subjects as urban and rural landscapes, scenes of industry, still-life compositions, and portraiture.

Catalogue



From the NY Times: (images, links [with more info] added)

...The show has been organized by Kathy Curry and Esther Adler, assistant curators in the museum’s department of drawings and prints, and to their credit, it is for the most part beautifully installed, with lots of interesting visual cross-references. It is, for example, rewarding to study side by side the fancy-vs.-plain responses to Cubism in



Gerald Murphy’s 1929 “Wasp and Pear”



and Davis’s 1930 “Egg Beater V...”

There are wonderful works by Davis, Edward Hopper and Charles Sheeler, who glides effortlessly among the mediums here with a consistent sense of crystalline form and emerges as the show’s quiet hero. Don’t miss O’Keeffe’s classic



“Farmhouse Window and Door”

outside the exhibition’s entrance and



Davis’s 1931 “Salt Shaker,”

which is also part of the show, although it hangs in a nearby hallway (next to the escalators).

Surprises include a handsome wall of 10 watercolors by the visionary Charles Burchfield and



Joseph Stella’s 1928 “First Light,”

a small painting of a lone poplar behind a plain gray wall that brings to mind Caspar David Friedrich and Odilon Redon...

More Images:



Edward Hopper (American, 1882–1967). House by the Railroad. 1925. Oil on canvas. 24 x 29_ (61 x 73.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Digital Imaging Studio



Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986). Evening Star, No. III. 1917. Watercolor on paper mounted on board. 8 7/8 x 11 7/8_ (22.7 x 30.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mr. and Mrs. Donald B. Straus Fund. © 2012 The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Digital Imaging Studio



George Bellows (American, 1882–1925). Dempsey and Firpo. 1923-24. Lithograph composition: 18 1/8 x 22 3/8_ (46 x 56.9 cm), sheet: 22 3/4 x 26_ (57.8 x 66 cm). Publisher: probably the artist, New York Printer: Bolton Brown, New York. Edition: 103. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Digital Imaging Studio



Charles Burchfield (American, 1893–1967). The First Hepaticas. 1917–18. Watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paper. 21 1/2 x 27 1/2_ (54.6 x 69.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. Reproduced with permission of the Charles E. Burchfield Foundation




Charles Burchfield (American, 1893–1967). Rogues’ Gallery. 1916. Watercolor and pencil on paper. 13 7/8 x 19 7/8_ (35.2 x 50.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. Reproduced with permission of the Charles E. Burchfield Foundation



Charles Demuth (American, 1883–1935). Eggplant and Tomatoes. 1926. Watercolor on paper. 14 1/8 x 20_ (35.8 x 50.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Philip L. Goodwin Collection. Courtesy Demuth Museum, Lancaster, Pa



Arthur Dove (American, 1880–1946). Willows. 1940. Oil on canvas. 25 x 35_ (63.5 x 88.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Duncan Phillips. ©The Estate of Arthur G. Dove, courtesy Terry Dintenfass, Inc.



Walker Evans (American, 1903–1975). Untitled. c. 1928. Gelatin silver print. 1 9/16 x 2 3/8_ (4 x 6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Dr. Iago Galdston. ©2013 Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art



Edward Hopper (American, 1882–1967). Night Shadows. 1921, published 1924. Etching. 9 7/16 x 11 1/4_ (24 x 28.6 cm). Publisher: The New Republic, New York. Printer: Peter Platt. Edition: approximately 500. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller



John Marin (American, 1870–1953). Lower Manhattan (Composing Derived from Top of Woolworth). 1922. Gouache and charcoal with paper cut out attached with thread on paper. 21 5/8 x 26 7/8_ (54.5 x 67.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. © 2013 Estate of John Marin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York



Elie Nadelman (American, born Poland, 1882–1946). Woman at the Piano. 1920–24. Wood, stained and painted. 35 1/8 x 23 1/4 x 9_ (89.2 x 59.1 x 22.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Philip L. Goodwin Collection. ©Estate of Elie Nadelman



Charles Sheeler (American, 1883–1965). American Landscape. 1930. Oil on canvas. 24 x 31_ (61 x 78.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.



Charles Sheeler (American, 1883–1965). Bucks County Barn. 1932. Oil on composition board. 23 7/8 x 29 7/8_ (60.6 x 75.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller



Charles Sheeler (American, 1883–1965). White Barn, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. 1914–17. Gelatin silver print. 7 5/8 x 9 11/16_ (19.4 x 24.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Anonymous gift, 1941. ©The Lane Collection



Florine Stettheimer (American, 1871–1944). Family Portrait, II. 1933. Oil on canvas in artist’s frame. 46 1/4 x 64 5/8_ (117.4 x 164 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Miss Ettie Stettheimer. ©Estate of Florine Stettheimer

The first major exhibition ever to examine the impact of 17th-century Spanish painting on 19th-century French artists, March 4–June 29, 2003 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, featured nearly 240 paintings and works on paper spanning several centuries of European art at the most astounding levels of achievement.

On view were some 130 paintings by Velázquez, Murillo, Ribera, El Greco, Zurbarán, and other masters of Spain's Golden Age as well as masterpieces by the 19th-century French artists they influenced, among them Delacroix, Courbet, Millet, Degas, and, most notably, Manet. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 4 through June 8, 2003, Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting also included works by American artists such as Sargent, Chase, Eakins, Whistler, and Cassatt, who studied in France but learned to paint like Spaniards.

As the title indicates, at the core of the exhibition was the "Spanish" work of Edouard Manet, whose career thoroughly reveals the importance of Spanish painting by the middle of the 19th century. Manet/Velázquez featured more paintings by Manet (more than 30) and Velázquez (14 autograph or attributed) than any American exhibitions since their eponymous retrospectives at the Metropolitan Museum more than a decade ago.

The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Musée d'Orsay.

Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting offered an extraordinarily rich look at one of the most pivotal epochs in Western art, when French artists of the 19th century shifted their focus from the idealism of Italian Renaissance art and embraced the naturalism of Spanish Baroque painting, setting the course for many of the greatest achievements of French Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism.

Prior to the 19th century, Spanish art had been virtually ignored in France and was thus poorly represented in French collections. This changed with Napoleon's Spanish campaigns (1808–14), which marked a turning point in the French perception of Spanish painting, as the Emperor in Paris sought to obtain key works from every corner of Europe. Although these works were ultimately returned to their countries of origin, just a few decades later, in 1838, King Louis Philippe inaugurated the Galerie Espagnole at the Louvre, placing on view his extraordinary collection of hundreds of Spanish paintings. Although this collection was itself sold in 1853, these paintings left an indelible impression in France. In subsequent years, the works of the Spanish masters became increasingly familiar to Parisians as the Louvre acquired more Spanish paintings and artists traveled to Madrid to study the masterpieces at the Prado. By the 1860s, the French taste for Spanish painting was perceptible at each Paris Salon.

Manet/Velázquez featured major works – many of which had rarely been lent to exhibitions – from the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the Musée d'Orsay and Musée du Louvre in Paris, and public and private collections from across Europe and North America. Among the highlights were



Velázquez's Count-Duke of Olivares (1622-27, Hispanic Society of America, New York)



and The Buffoon Pablo de Valladolid (ca. 1636-37, Museo del Prado),



Zurbarán's Saint Francis in Meditation (ca. 1635-40, National Gallery, London),



Ribera's The Clubfooted Boy (1642, Musée du Louvre),



Murillo's Immaculate Conception of the Venerables (1660-65, Museo del Prado),



and Goya's Bullfight Scene: "Suerte de Varas" (1824, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles).

Works by French artists included

Delacroix's Saint Catherine, after Zurbarén (1824, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Béziers),



Courbet's La Signora Adela Guerrero, Spanish Dancer (1851, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique),



Degas's Thérèse De Gas (ca. 1863, Musée d'Orsay),



and Renoir's Romaine Lacaux (1864, The Cleveland Museum of Art).

Of the more than 30 Manets in the exhibition were many of the artist's acclaimed "Spanish" pictures, including



The Spanish Ballet (1862, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.),



Mlle V… in the Costume of an Espada (1862, The Metropolitan Museum of Art),



The Dead Toreador (1864, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.),



and The Balcony (1868-69, Musée d'Orsay).

American artists who went to Paris to study in the 19th century also succumbed to the allure of Spanish art, and the exhibition at the Metropolitan included

John Singer Sargent's copies after Velázquez



(Buffoon Don Juan de Austria (after Velazquez) John Singer Sargent - 1879)

and El Greco



(John Singer Sargent - The Descent from the Cross, after El Greco)

as well as such iconic images as



Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881, U.C.L.A. Hammer Museum),



The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston),



and the Metropolitan's own Madame X (Madame Gautreau, née Virginie Avegno) of 1882.

Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Thomas Eakins, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler were also represented by multiple works in the exhibition.



Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, including essays by the organizing curators and by several notable scholars of this period. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the catalogue will be distributed by Yale University Press.

The exhibition was conceived by Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator of 19th-Century European Painting at the Metropolitan Museum, and organized by him with Genevieve Lacambre, Honorary Curator in Chief of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, with the assistance of Deborah Roldán, Research Assistant in the Department of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Columbus Museum of Art celebrates one of the city’s best loved native sons with George Bellows and the American Experience, on view August 23, 2013 – January 4, 2014. The exhibition highlights the importance of CMA’s Bellows collection, widely recognized as the best in the world, and showcases the artist’s vibrant, groundbreaking works. Bellows and the American Experience brings together more than 35 of his most stunning works from museums and private collections throughout the United States. The world of his paintings comes to life through period photographs, descriptions by his friends, thoughts from his own record book, as well as caricatures and conservation studies.



“Stag at Sharkey’s”

“For the past year our Bellows paintings have traveled the world as part of a major retrospective that drew crowds to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Royal Academy in London,” said CMA Curator of American Art Melissa Wolfe. “We’re excited to welcome them home and to be able to celebrate the profound impact George Bellows had, and continues to have, on the art world.”



Polo at Lakewood

George Wesley Bellows, one of the country’s most celebrated twentieth-century artists, is especially known for his controversial boxing images and evocative urban scenes. His career, although brief, was dazzling. An avid athlete, Bellows played shortstop for the Buckeyes before leaving Columbus in 1904 to study art in New York City. Within five years the young artist had taken the American art world by storm, winning every major award and rising from art student to acclaimed luminary.



“Stag at Sharkey’s”

He was a college dropout at twenty-two, a member of the prestigious National Academy at twenty-seven, the country’s most important lithographer at thirty-five, and tragically dead from a ruptured appendix at forty-three. In these twenty-one years of professional life, Bellows created an enormous body of work that conveyed his lively sense of humor, his seemingly effortless talent, and his political and social sensibilities. Bellows captured the essence of his subjects and delivered it to his viewers with perception, compassion, and, occasionally outrage.



George Bellows
Blue Snow, The Battery
Columbus Museum of Art, Museum Purchase: Howald Fund
Bellows - New York



George Bellows
New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon

From an excellent (short) article in the Columbus Monthly:

Bellows won fame with tough-fisted sports paintings, yet portraits of wife Emma and daughters Anne and Jean, such as



“Emma and Her Children,”

reflect his affection for his Midwestern, family-oriented beginnings. (Ironically, his parents discouraged his art, though his father was a prominent architect.)

The Museum will host an international scholarly symposium November 8 and 9 that will explore many of the issues and concerns central to the artist’s work.

With the Vienna Secession and Wiener Werkstätte, Vienna around 1900 was one of the cradles of modern art. From September 26, 2010 – January 16, 2011 the Fondation Beyeler mounted Vienna 1900: Klimt, Schiele, and Their Times, the first comprehensive exhibition ever devoted in Switzerland to this theme, curated by Barbara Steffen. On view were about 200 paintings, water-colors and drawings, supplemented by architectural models, furniture, textile designs, glass and silver objects, artists posters, and photographs.

At the center of the exhibition of Viennese modernism were the renowned ornamental portraits and landscapes of Gustav Klimt, the expressive figure depictions of Egon Schiele, and the legendary erotic drawings of both artists. Presented in addition were works by the young Oskar Kokoschka, Richard Gerstl, and Arnold Schoenberg. Running like a thread through the exhibition is the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk, a leitmotif of the artists, artisans, and architects of the Vienna Secession and Wiener Werkstätte, as witnessed by models and drawings of key buildings and furniture designed by the major architects of the day – including Otto Wagner, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann, Adolf Loos – as much as by objects of applied art, especially those by Koloman Moser.

Vienna around 1900

The imperial and royal capital and residence city of Vienna formed the stage for a profound, epochal change at the end of the old and beginning of the new century. In those years, Vienna magnetically attracted people from all over the Austro-Hungarian monarchy to the bastion of visual arts, music, literature, applied art, and architecture. The artistic and intellectual climate in Vienna oscillated between tradition and new beginnings, faith in progress and apocalyptic gloom. Franz Kafka and the Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler projected a pessimistic view of the world. Otto Wagner in architecture, like Klimt in painting and Freud in science, embodied that profound change of paradigms that introduced essential impulses that were to influence the art of the following gene-rations.

The Vienna Secession

The founding of the Vienna Secession (Association of Austrian Visual Artists) by Klimt, Hoffmann, Olbrich and other painters, sculptors and architects in 1897, set off a burgeoning of fine and applied art in the city that would last for two decades, and trigger the programmatic development of the interdisciplinary gesamtkunstwerk known as Viennese modernism. The Vienna Secession artists rejected the traditional, conservative and historicist definition of art that dominated the Künstlerhaus academy, and advocated public recognition of art on an international level. The concept of the gesamtkunstwerk was understood as a collaboration of fine and applied artists, including architects, on a basis of equality, an idea of design that transcended borderlines between fields, premised on the notion of subordinating every detail to the effect of the whole. Everyday life, in particular, was to be suffused with art.

The Exhibition

The exhibition ranged from the founding of the Vienna Secession to the end of the First World War in 1918, the year of death of Klimt, Schiele, Wagner and Moser. The Secession exhibition building, erected in 1898 to plans by Olbrich (1867-1908), a striking structure with a golden, leaf-patterned cupola where the first Secession show took place that same year, became a Vienna landmark. It was also the site of Klimt’s renowned Beethoven Frieze of 1902, a replica of which in the foyer forms the prelude to the Fondation Beyeler exhibition. On view in the first room are historical archi-tectural models, artists posters and documents on the Secession, and a fan of leaves designed by all of its members.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), first president of the Vienna Secession, was a gifted painter and drafts-man and the key figure in the gesamtkunstwerk movement. Three exhibition rooms wee devoted to around fifty of his paintings, drawings and sketches. Klimt’s best-known motifs, apart from allegories, include his ornamental female portraits, of which the masterpieces



Judith II (Salome; 1909),



Water Nymphs (Silverfish; c. 1899),



Goldfish (1901/02),



and The Dancer (1916/18) a

were on view. The last-named painting embodies the quintessence of the artist’s portraits of ladies: its flat com-position, patterns of color, aesthetic-erotic atmosphere, and abstraction coupled with a standing female figure, already anticipate the art of the later twentieth century.

A frequent motif of Klimt’s landscapes was lake Attersee in the Salzkammergut, where he summered between 1900 and 1907. With well-nigh abstract color compositions like



Attersee (1901)



and The Park (1910 or earlier),

he advanced in the direction of nonobjective art. Due to its innovative representation of space and plane,



Approaching Thunderstorm (The Large Poplar II; 1903) is considered Klimt’s most outstanding landscape.

Klimt served as a mentor to younger artists such as Kokoschka and especially Schiele, though both were to develop in a different direction, turning away from the gesamtkunstwerk to adopt nascent Expressionism.

Schiele’s ties with Klimt and his admiration for him are reflected in his famous oil,



The Hermits (1912),

which represents the two as a double figure cloaked in a black coat.

In contrast to Klimt, whose figures were always embedded in an abstract colored pattern, Schiele liberated himself from all aesthetization. He was interested in the “true”, indeed tormented human body and human sexuality.

The exhibition brought together twenty important paintings (portraits and landscapes) and more than fifty of the extremely valuable works on paper by Schiele (1890-1918). Prematurely felled by the Spanish Flu, Schiele was a master of self-staging and psychological visualization. His famous self-depictions, such as



Self-Portrait with Lowered Head



and Self-Portrait with Raised Bare Shoulder (both 1912),

count among the major works of Expressionism. Schiele rejected the predominant classical idealization of the male body and had no scruples about addressing scandalous subject matter, as in the renowned painting



Cardinal and Nun (Tenderness; 1912).

A separate cabinet devoted to erotic art included the great, sensual watercolors and drawings in which Schiele transcended the theme of the nude to represent unprecedented aspects of sexuality. Often the models assume eccentric poses, appearing isolated in an undifferentiated space. A public showing of these works was unthinkable in Vienna around 1900. In 1912, Schiele was taken to court for publicly displaying licentious erotic art.

The majority of Klimt’s drawings of women are done in pencil or charcoal sparingly highlighted with color, in which the female body is sketched with precise contours. Many of the drawings are explicitly erotic in nature. Unlike the comparable works of Schiele, rarely does a woman’s direct gaze at the viewer disturb her sexual self-intimacy.

Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), painter, printmaker and author, represented an Expressionism he understood as a universal movement. His portraits, done between 1907 and 1910 and absolutely unusual at the time, concentrate on head and torso, mostly depicted against an indeterminate background. Out of the purely corporal shell Kokoschka liberates psychological aspects of human existence.

Similarly to Schiele, Kokoschka focused especially on the position and gesture of hands.

In



Annunciation (c. 1911),

an outstanding example of his religious art, the Bible story is combined with extreme gestures and body movements. The exhibition included a famous



Self-Portrait (1917)

and other portraits, such as that of his partner and muse



Alma Mahler

and the composers Anton von Webern and Arnold Schoenberg.

(see more of his portraits here)

The dual talents of many Viennese modern artists and their relationship with music are reflected especially in the work of the composer Schoenberg (1874-1951), whose oeuvre holds a special place in Viennese art of the early twentieth century. It comprises self-portraits, landscapes and painterly visions that are concerned with the human gaze and image. The exhibition included a series of Schoenberg’s major works. A fascination with one’s own gaze, veritably programmatically expressed in Gaze (1910), also served Schiele, Kokoschka, and Gerstl to reveal their inmost selves.

Richard Gerstl (1883-1908) had an affair with the wife of his friend Schoenberg, Mathilde Schoenberg, and portrayed her several times. Among Gerstl’s most important works is



Group Portrait with Schoenberg (1907),

whose impulsive paint handling stands in contrast to the Secessionists’ focus on aesthetics and beauty.

In his famous



Semi-Nude Self-Portrait (1904/05)

Gerstl depicts himself as a messianic figure, quoting formal and substantial elements of depictions of Christ to convey his self-image as an artist. Similarly to Schiele, his self-portraits are characterized by a strong narcissicm and unleashed expressiveness.

The Wiener Werkstätte

The Wiener Werkstätte, a production commune of visual artists and artisans, was founded in 1903 by the entrepreneur Fritz Waerndorfer, its leading light Koloman Moser, and Josef Hoffmann. Modelled along the lines of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, the aim of the shop, which colla-borated with the Secession and Vienna School of Decorative Arts, was to expand the definition of art to include the crafts. The Werkstätte’s love of experiment and the high demands it made on quality had a style-shaping influence, both on architecture and on the implements of daily life. Wardrobes, desks, chests of drawers, lighting fixtures, chairs and tables were produced, along with entire interiors, fashions, jewelry, glass, silver objects, and book designs.

The oeuvre of Koloman Moser (1868-1918), active as a painter, graphic artist, furniture designer, artisan, stage set and exhibition designer, represents a gesamtkunstwerk in itself. His painting extended from landscapes in intense colors to portraits and figure depictions. Mostly portrayed frontally or in profile, the sitters have a rather stiff appearance, as if frozen in the midst of a dynamic movement. Significant Moser works in the exhibition, alongside numerous examples of applied art, are the paintings Venus in the Grotto (c. 1914) and Two Girls (c. 1913/15). An example of extraordinary design and artistic treatment are his Buffet cabinet and picture frame (1900/1901–02) titled The Abundant Catch, which Moser showed in 1910 at the eighth Secession exhibition.

An outstanding example of the idea of the interdisciplinary work of art put into practice is the cabaret Fledermaus (Bat; 1907), conceived by Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) and extensively documented in the exhibition, every facet of which, from interior to furniture, tableware and program brochure, was designed by Hoffmann himself. Chairs, cabinets, silver and glass objects, and an architectural model of the Purkersdorf Sanatorium (1904) attest to the the artist’s wide-ranging creative activity.

Otto Wagner (1841-1918) taught architecture at the Academy of Visual Arts. This “Wagner school” produced famous architects like Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Adolf Loos, whose names alone cover an essential part of building in Vienna around 1900. Wagner’s prime motive in architectural design was functionality, which included the use of modern materials like steel and aluminum. In his pathbreaking Postal Savings Bank (1904-06), apart from reinforced concrete and marble, he employed aluminum both as a design element on the outer cladding and as a structural material. Wagner also conceived the entire interior furnishings of the building, defining hierarchical structures by means of a precise use of materials and a conscious formal language. Among his further well-known buildings is St. Leopold’s Church am Steinhof (1905/06), whose side windows were designed by Moser. Both structures were exhibited in the form of architectural models.

Adolf Loos (1870-1933), a committed opponent of the Vienna Secession, postulated the functional, simple and lucid in architecture and utilitarian objects, something that extended to interiors as well. He became a groundbreaker for modern architecture as a whole. Loos’s famous residence on Michaelerplatz (1909-11) opposite the Imperial Court Building, a model of which is on view in the exhibition, caused a scandal on account of its facade, stripped of all ornamentation.

Subsequent Developments

The vital creativity of the artists active in Vienna around 1900, their supplanting of ornamental Art Nouveau by a clear, functional style, and the rapprochement between fine and applied art – manifested especially in the Wiener Werkstätte and the source of the gesamtkunstwerk idea – had a lasting influence on the development of art. The close cooperation among the artists encompass-sed a new definition of interdisciplinary art which would be ramified at the Bauhaus and in the De Stijl movement. The effects of the gesamtkunstwerk can in fact be traced down to the present day, the strict line between “high” and “low” art having by now well-nigh disappeared. Such contemporary projects as those of the architects Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Gio Ponti, and the artists Tobias Rehberger, Jorge Pardo and Takashi Murakami, reflect continuations of the gesamtkunst-werk idea.

The exhibition was especially enriched by eighty loans from the Leopold Museum, which harbors the largest Egon Schiele collection worldwide. The Albertina in Vienna, with one of the most significant and extensive collection of prints and drawings in the world, lent forty drawings. From the Kunsthaus Zug, Stiftung Sammlung Kamm, the most important collection of Viennese modern works outside Austria, came fifty loans. Further distinguished lenders in Vienna were the Belvedere and the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, the Wien Museum, the Vienna Secession, and the Schoenberg Center, the BA-CA Kunstforum Wien, and the University of Applied Arts. Further generous support was provided by the Neue Galerie, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all New York; the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro, Venice; the Kunstmuseum Basel, Kunsthaus Zurich, and Kunstmuseum Bern.

The exhibition was conceived by guest curator Barbara Steffen. From 1988 to 1992 Ms. Steffen was assistant curator at the Eli Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, from 1992 to 1998 head of European projects at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and from 2006 to 2008 curator of contemporary art at the Albertina, Vienna. Her major exhibitions include the “Gerhard Richter” retrospective at the Albertina (2008), “Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art” at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2003-04), and “Visions of America – The Ileana Sonnabend Collection” at the Essl Museum, outside Vienna. She has been awarded the “Maecenas” art sponsoring prize in 2000, and the “Gustav Klimt Prize” in 1998. Ms. Steffen currently resides in Vienna.



The catalogue, edited for the Fondation Beyeler by Barbara Steffen, was published in German and English by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern. It contains essays by distinguished experts: Christian Meyer (Schoenberg Center, Vienna), Franz Smola (Leopold Museum, Vienna), Barbara Steffen, Beate Susanne Wehr, Alfred Weidinger (Belvedere), and Richard Zettl (University of Applied Arts, Vienna), as well as a chronology by Michiko Kono (Fondation Beyeler assistant curator). 272 pages, 289 illustrations, including 276 full-color illustrations, ISBN 978-3-905632-85-9.

More images:



Egon Schiele, Mutter und Kind (Femme avec enfant/(Mother and Child), 1910. Crayon, aquarelle et gouache, 55.7 x 36.7 cm © Fondation Beyeler 2010, Switzerland



Egon Schiele, Häuser und bunte Wäsche (Maisons avec linge de couleur/Houses and Colorful Laundry ), 1914. Crayon, aquarelle et gouache, 55.7 x 36.7 cm © Fondation Beyeler 2010, Switzerland



Oskar Kokoschka, Der irrende Ritter (Autoportrait/Errant Knight, Self-Portrait), 1915. Huile sur toile, 89.5 x 180 cm © Fondation Beyeler 2010, Switzerland