Curators: Marilyn McCully, Michael Raeburn and Emilie Bouvard
Many of the paintings that Picasso did over a period of some four years (summer 1926-spring 1930) form a cohesive group, which Christian Zervos would later (1938) as “Tableaux magiques”. With these works principally figure paintings – Picasso opened a new chapter in his oeuvre, probing a deep emotional dimension, which anticipates the power of Guernica a decade later.
This was accompanied by formal developments that are as radical as anything he had done before, including experimentation with materials and the realization of monumental sculptural ideas in paint.
The works in the show will set not only in terms of the artist’s own development but, importantly, in the context of contemporary Surrealism and psychology (Jung vs Freud) and especially the interest among writers such as Leiris and Zervos on the magical powers ofs art.
In the summer of 1926, in Juan-les-Pins, Pablo Picasso began work on a series of paintings that was continued into the first quarter of 1930. This group of some one hundred and fifty paintings, which use similar means of expression and a common range of subjects, was first recognised by the editor and critic Christian Zervos in a 1938 article in his journal Cahiers d’art entitled “Picasso’s Magic Paintings”. These paintings, mainly heads and figures, often set in the theatre of the artist’s studio, are based on extreme formalisation and the use of a system of signs. In time, constructions of flat planes and lines gave way to monumental sculptural forms, creating an impression of constant metamorphosis. The artist’s remarkable creative imagination led Zervos to see him as a magician, who could invent new forms that would affect the thinking of the spectator. These radical works provoked strong opinions and interpretations both at the time they were done and ever since.
"Picasso.Magic Paintings" is the first exhibition devoted specifically to this period of Picasso’s activity, including a broad selection of works.
SECRET SPELLS Pablo Picasso's magic paintings have an expressive power that goes beyond formal representation. The sinuous lines that create double profiles or the substitutions of anatomical features seem to have the character of repeated spells or magic formulae. These works appear in series, and the spells seem to have been elaborated in sequences of drawings in his sketchbooks. In several of the seated figures and heads, the displacement of facial features, especially in the sleeping figures, contributes to their disturbing quality.
Picasso's methods seem to parallel the characteristics of magic rites and ceremonies used to invoke invisible spiritual powers.
MAGIC OBJECTS By the mid-1920s, Pablo Picasso owned a significant collection of non-Western works, which he had started collecting early in the 20th century. The creation of the magic paintings parallels a rise in the taste for works of this kind in artistic circles. Between 1926 and 1930, Picasso was in contact with a second generation of dealers in non-Western art in Paris, including Louis Carré, André Level, Pierre Loeb and Charles Ratton, and he added to his collection with their help.
There are eleven objects owned by Picasso or known to him by 1930 in the Musée National Picasso-Paris. These works appeared in exhibitions and in art journals, particularly in Cahiers d'art, where a mask from the Torres Straits was reproduced (Christian Zervos, "L’Art nègre", Cahiers d'Art, No. 7- 8, 1927), and they were an inspiration for Picasso's work.
METAMORPHOSIS The process of metamorphosis – or re-creation – is seen most clearly in Picasso’s dislocation of facial and physical features. The large compositions in this room, which were done in Cannes in the summer of 1927, show how the artist transformed his drawings of bathers on the beach into what appear to be plans for sculptural figures with exaggerated body parts and gestures. In Nude on a White Background (1927, Musée national Picasso-Paris, MP102), a bather is gesturing upwards with a long thin arm.
Picasso's preoccupation with sculpture was connected to his desire to find a suitable form for a monument to the memory of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, his close friend who had died in 1918. The little plaster maquette Métamorphose II (1928, Musée national Picasso-Paris, MP202) was a model for a much larger sculpture, but it was rejected by the Apollinaire Committee as far too shocking for a funeral monument, and this was never realised.
TRANSMUTATIONS Christian Zervos used the term "transmutation" to describe the relationship of Pablo Picasso's magic paintings to objective reality. In a series of paintings done in Cannes, Picasso developed his formulation of a woman's head by reducing facial features to signs: straight lines for hair, the nose (and nostrils) at the top, with the eyes appearing on opposite cheeks; the vertical, tooth-lined mouth is placed between, while the outline of the head itself becomes an irregular geometric form. In one of these paintings, the incorporation of powdered chalk into the paint surface at once suggests the misty atmosphere and also the sand of the beach.
Among Picasso’s still lifes of the same period is a series of schematic representations of guitars. In the painting Guitar (April 27, 1927, Musée national Picasso-Paris, MP1990-13) there is a floating sign that combines the letters M and T, a reference to Picasso's young lover Marie-Thérèse Walter.
MAGIC WRITINGS The period that Christian Zervos identified in 1938 as that of Pablo Picasso's "Magic Paintings" received immediate attention in intellectual circles. Several of the writers who wrote about the artist's new paintings were also his friends. Zervos, art critic and founder of Cahiers d'art, had been a supporter of the Spaniard’s work since 1926, and published it as it emerged. Influenced by the philosophy of Hegel, Zervos committed himself to the defence of Picasso’s creative freedom, and in 1938, one year after the creation of Guernica and in the face of rising international threats, this vision of a free Picasso took on a political dimension. The writer, critic and ethnologist Michel Leiris became Picasso's friend in the 1920s. Carl Einstein, a leading author on African and modern art with radical political views, was one of his correspondents. Leiris and Einstein were active participants in the activities of the journal Documents (19291930) together with Georges Bataille. In contrast to André Breton’s Surrealist movement, which considered Picasso to be one of its spiritual ancestors, the Documents group defended a "realist" Picasso, attached to reality in all its compelling monstrosity.
THE POWER OF INVENTION Drawing played an essential role in Pablo Picasso's artistic practice. His development of imagery in series reveals his constant probing of visual ideas and changes of scale from drawings to paintings. The group of drawings of the artist's studio refers to the large Painter and Model in New York (MoMA). In this series Picasso achieves different effects of texture and substance with Indian ink, and in all of them emphasis is given to the figure of the painter at the right with his palette, based on Picasso’s first welded iron sculpture made in October 1928, Head (Musée National Picasso-Paris, MP263).
When Christian Zervos published his article on "Picasso's Magic Paintings" (Cahiers d'art, no. 3-10, 1938), he included among the reproductions of oil paintings a sequence of drawings of bathers from a sketchbook that Picasso had with him in Cannes in 1927. While the distortion of their bodies and the use of signs for facial features and hair are similar to those in the paintings, the bathers in the drawings are rendered volumetrically, like monumental sculptures, with shadows and highlights revealing not only the massiveness of their forms but also their movement.
THE STUDIO The artist's studio can be compared to an alchemist’s laboratory, where the Great Work – the transmutation of matter – is carried on in a collaboration between the artist and his model. Several of Pablo Picasso’s experiments in depicting heads and figures culminated in atelier compositions. The vibrant colours of two versions of the model in the studio (done in Cannes in 1927) provide a startling contrast to the subdued palette of earlier works. In the more complex compositions that followed, references to the now familiar formulae used for magic paintings can be seen in the paintings of the studio. While the artist is usually shown in the act of painting, his shadow-profile sometimes intrudes into the studio scene, signifying a spiritual presence.
Throughout these years, Picasso was involved in the preparation of an illustrated edition of Honoré de Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece, a novella that explores the interconnected relationships of artist, model, painting and spectator. Among the illustrations in the book are many drawings related to magic heads.
EXHIBITING THE MAGIC PAINTINGS In the aftermath of the first world war, Pablo Picasso showed at Paul Rosenberg's gallery at 21, rue La Boétie in Paris. Rosenberg, who also represented Georges Braque and Marie Laurencin, was one of the most progressive art dealers of the 1920s. As a commercial strategy, he sometimes gave Picasso solo exhibitions, sometimes included him with other modern artists, as when he first exhibited some magic paintings in 1929 and 1930. Thanks to his contacts with American collectors and dealers, Rosenberg ensured that Picasso's work became widely known in the United States. These works (not yet referred to as magic paintings) appeared in many individual and group exhibitions, facilitating their entry into private and then public collections across the Atlantic. Rosenberg also provided documentation of Picasso's art, photographing his work and collecting it in a portfolio that could be shown to admirers and collectors. These works were therefore already familiar in certain circles when Christian Zervos wrote about them in 1938.
SIGNS-SYMBOLS As the representation of faces and bodies became more formalised in the series of Pablo Picasso’s paintings of 1927 and 1928, features and body parts were increasingly reduced to signs. The positioning of the almondshaped eyes, tooth-lined mouth or even the nostrils may seem arbitrary, but the emotional power of these heads is undiminished. In certain paintings Picasso replaced the predominantly curved, often biomorphic, forms that had characterised his earlier work, with figures composed of sharp angles. While two of these appear to cry out in anguish, others hark back to the mysterious symbolic conventions of non-western art, particularly from Africa or Oceania, as Picasso understood them.
RHYTHM AND MONUMENTALITY Pablo Picasso's engagement with sculpture, beginning in the autumn of 1928, had repercussions in his paintings and drawings, many of which reflected a move towards monumentality. Following the rejection of his submissions to the Apollinaire Committee for a memorial to the poet, the forms of the heads in his paintings become increasingly solid. A series of heads and figures, sometimes featuring a red armchair, done between January and May 1929, suggest possible new solutions for a monument, but they remained unrealised in three-dimensional form.
However, Picasso did work on a number of sculptures at this time in collaboration with Julio González, who initiated him in metal sculpture. Head of a Man (1930, Musée National Picasso-Paris, MP269) combines iron, brass, and bronze elements, and here the sharp contrasts of flat planes with protruding elements, as well as the curved back of the head, achieve a forceful expressiveness akin to the heads in Picasso’s magic paintings.
MYTHIC REALISM The German critic Carl Einstein wrote with great insight about Pablo Picasso at this time, notably in the journal Documents, of which he was an editor. He coined the label "mythic realism" to distinguish Picasso's work of the late 1920s from that of the Surrealists. It was, he considered, far more “grounded” and related to the fundamental realities of mythical sources. While the unsettling quality of Picasso’s magic paintings has often provoked comparison with Surrealism, Picasso’s artistic undertaking was not concerned with revealing his own fantasies but rather with producing a body of work with a more universal significance.
Painted in Picasso’s Paris studio between December 1929 and March 1930, the final magic paintings were a group of works on wooden panels, apparently from a dismantled wardrobe. The formulation of the heads in these compositions varies between triangular-shaped faces to monumental “creatures” whose bone structure defines their mass. These figures would be introduced into the panel painted with a scene of the Crucifixion (7 February 1930, Musée National Picasso-Paris, MP122), in which the elements of expressive transformation that had characterised the magic paintings of the previous four years find their fullest expression.
Claude Monet’s Charing Cross Bridge from 1903 (estimate $20/30 million) was announced at Sotheby’s. The collection—which also features works by Pierre Bonnard, Lyonel Feininger, Jacques Lipchitz, Emil Nolde and Edgar Degas —was assembled primarily in the 1970s and ‘80s by Andrea Klepetar-Fallek and her then-husband, Fred Fallek. According to Sotheby’s, “her extraordinary life story is one of incomparable resilience, independence and optimism – including her flight from Nazi-occupied Vienna, escape from an Italian concentration camp, and departure from Peronist Argentina.” Charing Cross Bridge was acquired in 1977 through Galerie Beyeler and has remained in the Klepetar-Fallek collection for more than 40 years. Monet’s paintings of Charing Cross Bridge rarely appear at auction: the most recent example was offered in June 1992, and sold for $4.1 million.
Willem de Kooning, Untitled XXII. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s New York. Sotheby’s has revealed two of the major lots of the fall auction season in New York: an “extremely rare” Willem de Kooning painting offered by art dealer Robert Mnuchin, father of US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, on behalf of an undisclosed seller; and Claude Monet’s Charing Cross Bridge, which will lead the house’s Impressionist and Modern art evening sale. The abstract de Kooning work, titled Untitled XXII, is estimated to sell for between $25 million and $35 million. Although that range lags behind the current de Kooning record, $66.3 million set three years ago for a painting from 1977, it would place the work among the artist’s top-five auction records, according to the artnet Price Database. There is a guarantee on the work, as well as an irrevocable bid from a third party, ensuring that the painting will sell. In recent years, de Kooning collectors such as Ken Griffin—who paid $300 million for Interchange in 2016—and Steve Cohen have opted to conduct their major transactions privately, suppressing the artist’s auction track record. The de Kooning painting up for sale next month was purchased by the current owner in 2004 from New York’s Mitchell-Innes and Nash gallery. It was one of roughly 100 de Kooning paintings that the gallery priced between $500,000 and $3 million, while representing the artist’s estate for a few years after his death, in 1997.
Claude Monet, Charing Cross Bridge (1899–1901), from the collection of Andrea Klepetar-Fallek, is expected to fetch $20 million to $30 million at auction. Courtesy of Sotheby’s New York.
Untitled XXII “was one of the best from that period,” gallery co-owner David Nash told Bloomberg. “Now, 15 years later, they are extremely rare. They’ve been dispersed to private collections and museums.” The Monet estimate is also well below the artist’s auction record, which has shot up in recent years. After holding steady at $80.3 million from 2008 to 2016, a new top price for the Impressionist has been achieved three times in the past three years. A haystack canvas, Meule,sold for $81.4 million at Christie’s New York in November 2016 and Nymphéas en fleur went for $84.7 million at the Peggy and David Rockefeller auction at Christie’s New York in May 2018 before a different haystack painting, Meules, sold for $110.7 million at Sotheby’s New York this May.
Andrea Klepetar-Fallek. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
But the Charing Cross Bridge remains one of Monet’s most revisited subjects, with 37 paintings in the series completed between 1899 and 1905. Examples belong to institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The painting was purchased by Andrea Klepetar-Fallek and her fourth husband, Fred Fallek, in 1977 through Basel’s Galerie Beyeler. Charing Cross Bridge was among the gems of their collection, hanging over the living room couch. Fallek died in 1983; Klepetar-Fallek died this past May.
Pierre Bonnard, Femme se déshabillant, from the collection of Andrea Klepetar-Fallek, is expected to fetch between $1.5 million and $2.5 million at auction. Courtesy of Sotheby’s New York.
Born Andrea Samek in 1920, Klepetar-Fallek was a survivor of the Holocaust who fled her native Vienna and escaped an Italian concentration camp. She moved to Israel in 1948 before settling in Argentina. After the death of her third husband, Juan Klepetar, and the rise of the Peronist government, Klepetar-Fallek moved to New York in 1972. There, she met Fallek, a fellow Holocaust survivor who had lost his art collection to his ex-wife in their divorce. The two then established a tradition of giving each other works of art for each birthday and anniversary. The upcoming sale also includes other works from Klepetar-Fallek’s collection, such as Pierre Bonnard’s Femme se déshabillant, estimated at $1.5 million to $2.5 million; Lyonel Feininger’s Hästende Leute (Hurried People), estimated at $100,000 to $150,000; and Emile Nolde’s Rote Dahlien (Red Dahlias), estimated at $60,000 to $80,000.
September 29–December 15, 2019 Félix Buhot was one of the most original printmakers in France during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This exhibition, selected entirely from a private collection, examines the full range of Buhot’s graphic effort, from his highly imaginative intaglios to the more somber lithographs, a medium to which he turned near the end of his career. Also included are several drawings and paintings related to the prints. Organized by the Palmer Museum of Art.
Félix Buhot, Convoi funèbre au Boulevard de Clichy (Funeral Procession on the Boulevard de Clichy), 1887, etching, drypoint, aquatint, roulette, soft ground, lift ground, and stop-out over heliogravure, printed from two plates, second state of three, plate: 11 13/16 x 15 3/4 inches. B/G 159. Private collection.
Félix Buhot, L’Hiver à Paris (Winter in Paris), 1879, etching, aquatint, spitbite, soft ground, drypoint, and scraping, 9 5/16 x 13 9/16 inches. Purchased with funds provided by the Friends of the Palmer Museum of Art, 2002.62.
A painter, draughtsman, architect, archaeologist, and poet who captured in his art the human and the divine, love, friendship, learning, and power, who gave us quintessential images of community and civilisation: Raphael’s life was short, his work prolific, and his legacy immortal.
In the year that marks the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, the National Gallery will present one of the first-ever exhibitions to explore the complete career of this giant of the Italian Renaissance. In his brief career, spanning just two decades, Raffaello Santi (1483–1520) shaped the course of Western culture like few artists before or since.
This exhibition will examine not just his celebrated paintings and drawings - but also his not so widely known work in architecture, archaeology, poetry, and design for sculpture, tapestry, prints, and the applied arts. The aim is to do something no previous Raphael exhibition has ever done - explore every aspect of his multimedia activity.
The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Raphael will demonstrate why Raphael plays such a pivotal role in the history of Western art, and seek to understand why his work remains relevant to us today. There will be more than ninety exhibits, with focus on autograph works and those in media he did not practice himself but for which he provided designs.
Loans from across his entire career – many of them unprecedented – will be travelling to London from around the world, to join 10 works from the National Gallery’s outstanding collection of Raphaels. Lenders will include the Louvre, Musei Vaticani, Galleria degli Uffizi, National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), and the Museo Nacional del Prado.
Work and activities that cannot be represented by original exhibits – such as the monumental frescoed rooms in the Vatican Palace, known as the Stanze of Raphael – will be presented in other innovative ways.
For centuries Raphael has been recognised as the supreme High Renaissance painter, capturing visually our idea and ideals of the Renaissance.
Though he died at 37, Raphael's example as a paragon of Classicism dominated the academic tradition of European painting until the mid-19th century.
Raphael (Raffaello Santi) was born in Urbino where his father, Giovanni Santi, was court painter. He almost certainly began his training there and must have known works by Mantegna, Uccello, and Piero della Francesca from an early age. His earliest paintings were also greatly influenced by Perugino. From 1500 - when he was an independent master - to 1508 he worked throughout central Italy, particularly Florence, where he became a noted portraitist and painter of madonnas. In 1508, at the age of 25, he was called to the court of Pope Julius II to help with the redecoration of the papal apartments. In Rome he evolved as a portraitist, and became one of the greatest of all history painters. He remained in Rome for the rest of his life and in 1514, on the death of Bramante, he was appointed architect in charge of St Peter's.
Detail, Plautilla Nelli (1524-1588) The Last SupperAdvancing Women ArtistsConservator Rossella Lari with Nelli's painting during restoration.Advancing Women Artists
Revealed this week after a multiyear restoration, an artist-nun's masterwork is now on public view at the Santa Maria Novella Museum in Florence some 450 years after it was created. The only known Last Supper by a female artist in the modern age, Plautilla Nelli’s 21-foot canvas is one of the largest works by an early woman artist in the world—and one of the most challenging compositionally. Though Nelli lived in an age when women were banned from the study of anatomy, she defied social convention by authoring 13 life-size male figures and confronting a theme usually reserved for male artists at the height of their career—as a testimony to their mastery.
Plautilla Nelli (1524-1588) The Last SupperAdvancing Women Artists
Nelli chose to paint the moment in which Christ announces his betrayal and emulates Leonardo da Vinci’s idea of portraying the Apostles with dynamic emotion, a then-new concept for Last Supper paintings in Florence. At a time when women could not practice art professionally, self-taught convent painter Plautilla Nelli (1524-1588) established an all-woman workshop within the walls of her convent, Santa Caterina di Cafaggio (now demolished) and, through the sale of private devotional works to Florentine nobility, the nuns became economically self-sufficient. Nelli produced large-scale works featuring biblical subjects and inherited the drawings of Fra Bartolomeo, thereby continuing the traditions of the School of San Marco, an early sixteenth-century art movement that developed in Florence at the time of bonfire-of-the-vanities friar Savonarola, who supported the production of art by religious women ‘as a way to avoid sloth’. Giorgio Vasari, reputedly Italy’s first art historian, wrote about her in the second edition of his Lives (1568), saying “she would have done wonderful things if she had only studied as men do.”
“One will never get closer to an artist than in the restoration studio,” says conservator in charge Rossella Lari. “We restored the canvas and, while doing so, rediscovered Nelli’s story and her personality. She had powerful brushstrokes and loaded her brushes with paint. Reflectography revealed very little under-drawing… Plautilla knew what she wanted and had control enough of her craft to achieve it.” The restoration was supported by diagnostic analysis, executed by the Institute for the Conservation and Valorization of Artistic Heritage of Italy’s National Research Council. This 360-degree process, led by an all-woman team of curators, restoration artists and scientists, was one of revelation—the chemical composition of Nelli’s pigments was uncovered, as was evidence conclusively suggesting Nelli’s Last Supper to be a ‘choral piece’, created in true ‘workshop style’, as different painterly hands and varying levels of expertise are evident across the canvas.
The restoration of Nelli’s Last Supper was promoted and funded by Advancing Women Artists, whose mission is to research, restore and exhibit art by women in Tuscany’s museums, churches and storehouses. During the painting’s stint in the restoration studio, its ‘rescue mission’ was embraced by donors from all over the world. “As always, this restoration’s objective has been to promote art as part of our shared heritage, bringing beauty to everyone’s everyday life,” says Florence’s Vice Mayor Cristina Giachi. “Private support makes costly restorations like this one possible and represent that sense of universal belonging that art promotes. Moreover, an important synergy has been created in this case between private citizens who wish to invest and take care of a work and a team of high-level sector professionals capable of giving the work new life and beauty." Phase two of the worldwide public appeal, ‘The Adopt an Apostle Program’, matched 12 donors with their respective ‘Saint’. The first to be adopted, Saint John, the last, Saint Simon. Retired US lawyer Donna Malin became ‘parent’ to Nelli’s Christ figure. To solve the ‘problem’ of Judas’ adoption, Canadians Margaret MacKinnon and Wayne McArdle—adopters of two of the painting’s figures—developed the ‘Art Defense Fund’ for Judas, where ten donors were invited to ‘chip in’ to save the painting’s most unpopular figure, which engendered debate on the impartiality of art restoration and each figure’s right to be restored. “Nelli claims authorship of her masterwork by signing the canvas, which was not common in the Renaissance,” explains MacKinnon. “She accompanied her signature with the inscription ‘Orate pro Pictora’. All those involved in the project have taken this appeal literally. We ‘pray for the paintress’ through conservation, to ensure her legacy is restored to the public.”
In 1817, following the Napoleonic suppression of religious orders throughout Europe, Nelli’s painting was transferred from her convent of Santa Catherina to the Monastery of Santa Maria Novella which has been its adoptive home for two centuries. During the flood of 1966, Nelli’s Last Supper was one of 14,000 artworks damaged from the side effects of 600,000 tons of water, rubble and mud that invaded the city when the Arno’s flooding ravaged Florence, though not immersed. After several decades in the friars’ modern-day private quarters, the painting has been installed in the Museum’s Old Refectory, across from a Last Supper by Nelli’s contemporary Alessandro Allori, restored to its original dignity and the public eye.
The restoration catalog, Visible: Plautilla Nelli and her Last Supper restored, is a dual-language publication (English and Italian), published by The Florentine Press. Released for the painting’s debut, it includes conservation and diagnostic highlights, the history of the painting in its multiple venues, Plautilla as part of the Dominican context and studies spotlighting details of Nelli’s piece—from how she set her Last Supper table to how her story inspired modern-day art patrons. In Spring 2020, art aficionados can expect the world premiere of a full-feature documentary by the same name in Florence, produced for American public television by Bunker Film and WFYI productions.
The painting's restoration has been a collective effort whose main players include the American non-profit Advancing Women Artists (AWA), the Municipality of Florence, Florentine Civic Museums, the Superintendent’s Office for Archeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Florence, Pistoia and Prato and the Dominican friars of the Monastery of Santa Maria Novella. AWA, founded in 2009 by US author and philanthropist Jane Fortune (1942-2018), has restored 65 works in Florence by historic female artists spanning five centuries. Plautilla Nelli’s story triggered Fortune’s quest to discover and salvage the works of other ‘invisible women’ that art history has neglected. AWA’s recovery of Nelli’s forgotten oeuvre laid the groundwork for the Uffizi’s first-ever monographic show on the artist in 2017, which displayed 15 of the 20 paintings and drawings attributed to the artist that Fortune and her organization restored over the course of a decade. Nelli is the first of a plethora of women painters awaiting recognition—whether on display or in storage, and according to Fortune’s estimation, the works by historic women artists in Tuscany exceed 1,500. Up next for AWA—the restoration of Saint John of God healing plague victims by eighteenth-century Florentine painter Violante Ferroni.
Imposing or intimate, violent or tender, extravagant or humble, a selection of 40 masterpieces from the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, one the most important fine arts collections in Europe, will constitute an exceptional journey through the major achievements of Italian Renaissance. It will feature masterpieces by Titian, Raphael, Parmigiano, El Greco, Annibale Carracci, Artemisia Gentileschi, Guido Reni, Ribera and Luca Giordano.
Flesh and Blood: Italian Masterpieces from the Capodimonte Museum offers a rare opportunity to experience the fierce beauty of art from the 16th and 17th centuries. Renowned Renaissance artists such as Titian and Raphael join Baroque masters including Artemisia Gentileschi, Jusepe de Ribera, Guido Reni, and Bernardo Cavallino to reveal the aspirations and limitations of the human body and the many ways it can express love and devotion, physical labor, and tragic suffering.
A long period of creativity, inspiration, and striving for knowledge, the Renaissance peaked in Italy as artists turned their attention to the classical world and made the human body the center of artistic representation. Renaissance art is interested in the naturalistic depiction of the human form and its emotional life; it seeks a balance between the spiritual and material.
Flesh and Blood draws from the illustrious Farnese collection begun by Pope Paul III, who oversaw Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, to present notions of beauty and power in the 16th century. A commissioned portrait of the future pope as a cardinal by the young master Raphael opens the exhibition with ambition and poise.
Titian’s stunning Danae, which illustrates the Greek myth of a goddess impregnated by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold, illustrates how artists were compelled to explore erotic subjects through the veil of mythology. Antiquity also influenced El Greco, whose Boy Blowing on an Ember evokes a classical painting famous for its mastery of light. El Greco’s painting anticipates the chiaroscuro (light and dark) style that dominates the 17th-century works on view in the second part of the exhibition.
Founded by Greek settlers about 600 BCE, Naples successively became part of the Roman and Byzantine Empires. In the medieval period it was incorporated into the Kingdom of Sicily before entering the Spanish Empire, which ruled the city until the 19th century. In the 17th century Naples was the second-largest city in Europe after Paris. Despite being a large and densely populated city in which many cultures and political regimes took root, Naples did not foster steady artistic patronage until the second half of the 16th century under a decree for the redevelopment of the hundreds of neglected churches in the city. Baroque art in Naples sprang out of this mandate and led to the grandeur and glory of the period.
Drunken Silenus, 1626, Jusepe de Ribera, Spanish, 1591–1652, oil on canvas, 72 13/16 × 90 3/16 in. Image courtesy of Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte.
Jusepe de Ribera’s provocative Drunken Silenus parodies the idealized beauty of the female form cast as reclining Venuses in many Renaissance paintings,
Danae, 1544–45, Titian, Italian, 1488/90–1576, oil on canvas, 34 15/16 x 44 3/4 in. Image courtesy of Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte.
including Titian’s Danae. Here the rotund body of this Greek companion to Dionysus, which denotes his unbridled appetites, is rendered with loaded and vital brushstrokes as it emerges from its dark, earthy surroundings.
Judith and Holofernes, ca. 1612–17, Artemisia Gentileschi, Italian, 1593–ca. 1653, oil on canvas, 62 5/8 x 49 5/8 in. Image courtesy of Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte.
A more dramatic use of chiaroscuro is made in Artemisia Gentileschi’s visceral Judith and Holofernes. Here the Jewish heroine beheads the Assyrian general who was threatening to destroy her village. The choice to portray the violent climax of the story perhaps relates to the artist’s own traumatic experience in 1611, when she was raped by the painter Agostino Tassi. This image shows how flesh and blood are wrapped up with our humanity at a time when Western painting began to be infused with personal experiences of agony and ecstasy, delight and despair.
The exhibition is organized by the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples, the Seattle Art Museum, the Kimbell Art Museum, and MondoMostre.
Portrait of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, Future Pope Paul III, ca. 1509–11, Raphael, Italian, 1483–1520, oil on wood panel, 51 15/16 × 33 7/8 in. Image courtesy of Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte.
Boy Blowing on an Ember, 1571–72, El Greco, Greek, ca. 1541–1614, oil on canvas, 23 13/16 × 19 7/8 in. Image courtesy of Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte.
In addition to Swann Galleries’s biannual sale of Old Master Through Modern Prints, the house will offer a curated sale of Old Master Drawings on November 5. The auction traces the development of draftsmanship over several centuries from late-Gothic, early-Renaissance works of the fifteenth century, to Baroque and Rococo drawings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The Italian Renaissance is represented by early-sixteenth-century studies of eagles ($4,000-6,000); Christ’s Charge to Peterfrom the circle of Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, based on one of Raphael’s cartoons painted as designs for tapesties ($5,000-8,000);
Lot 15: Ludovico Carracci, St. Luke, red chalk, circa 1585-88. Estimate $8,000 to $12,000.
and Ludovico Carracci’s St. Luke, red chalk, circa 1585-88 ($8,000-12,000).
Baroque works of note include The Holy Spirit Appearing to St. Gregory, red chalk, late 1640s, by Il Guercino, offered at $8,000 to $12,000; and Scenes from the Battle of Vienna: A Pair, pen and wash, circa 1685, by Francesco Monti, Il Brescianino—expected to bring $10,000 to $15,000. Pietro Antonio Novelli’s A Young Woman Washing Linen, pen and ink, is estimated at $15,000 to $20,000.
A collection of nineteenth-century French works on paper from the estate of the esteemed New York art dealer Eric Carlson, who specialized in French academic and realist drawings, complements the offerings of earlier works. Highlights from the selection are
Lot 127: Théodore Géricault, Le Giaour, pen, ink & pencil, 1820. Property from the Eric Carlson Irrevocable Trust. Estimate $7,000 to $10,000.
Théodore Géricault’s prepartory drawing for the same-titled lithograph La Giaour, pen, ink and pencil, 1820 ($7,000-10,000); Notre Dame and the Île de la Cité, Paris, watercolor, 1864, byLouis-Adolphe Hervier ($2,000-3,000); and an 1859 color pastel work A Landscape at Dusk with Rolling Hillsby Joseph Alfred Belelt du Poisat ($1,000-1,500).
Of particular note is an 1833 ink, wash and pencil study by Eugène Delacroix ($3,000-5,000). The prepatory work was created for the allegorical decorations of the Salon du Roi in the Palais Bourbon in Paris—his first large-scale government commission.
Additional French works include two circa-1820 pencil drawings by Delacroix, apparently loosely based on figures in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes, offered at $7,000 to $10,000. Laurent de la Hyre’s black chalk and pencil preparatory drawing St. Peter Healing the Sick, for his 1635 painting May de Notre Dame,is available at $15,000 to $20,000.
Lot 222: Henri-Edmond Cross, The Sower, watercolor & pencil, circa 1890. Estimate $15,000 to $20,000.
Henri-Edmond Cross’s pointalist watercolor The Sower, circa 1890, is expected to bring $15,000 to $20,000. Dutch, Flemish, German and English draughtsmen round out the stellar offering.
Exhibition opening in New York City October 25. The complete catalogue and bidding information is available at swanngalleries.com and on the Swann Galleries App.
Rembrandt Etchings from the John Villarino Collection Feature in Old Master Through Modern Prints at Swann
Old Master Through Modern Prints at Swann Galleries on Tuesday, October 29 will offer an important selection of prints by Rembrandt van Rijn. Also on offer are works from European and American virtuosos. Rembrandt etchings from the John Villarino Collection form the cornerstone of the Old Master offering. In 1995 Villarino turned his collecting tastes toward Rembrandt as he recognized the profound influence the Dutch artist had on the works of later artists. Villarino was captivated by a small etching saying, “I saw his eyes, and the look was, ‘I’m going to conquer the world.’”
Lot 89: Rembrandt van Rijn, A Beggar Seated on a Bank, 1630. From the John Villarino Collection. Estimate $20,000 to $30,000.
Highlights from the collection include A Beggar Seated on a Bank, 1630, likely an early self-portrait in the guise of a beggar ($20,000-30,000); Sheet of Studies, with a Woman Lying Ill in Bed, etc., circa 1641-42 ($25,000-35,000);
and The Rat Catcher, 1632 ($12,000-18,000).
Lot 167:Rembrandt van Rijn, Landscape with a Cottage and Haybarn: Oblong, etching and drypoint, 1641. Estimate $60,000 to $90,000.
Additional etchings by the Dutch master include some of the earliest dated landscapes by the artist: Landscape with a Cottage and Haybarn: Oblong, 1641 ($60,000-90,000)—one of his most sought-after landscape etchings—and Landscape with a Cottage and a Large Tree, 1641 ($40,000-60,000).
Further Old Master printmakers include Albrecht Dürer, who leads the sale with a 1504 engraving Adam and Eve at $80,000 to $120,000, and Lucas Cranach with The Judgement of Paris, woodcut, 1508, at $15,000 to $20,000.
Lot 367: Paul Klee, Der Held mit dem Flügel—Inv. 2, etching, 1905. Estimate $70,000.
European prints include Paul Klee’s etchings Der Held mit dem Flügel—Inv. 2, 1905, an early etching (of which only three impressions have been found at auction in the past 30 years) ($70,000-100,000), and Höhe!, 1928 ($60,000-90,000).
Career-spanning works from Pablo Picasso are on offer with Taureau ailé conteplé par Quatre Enfants, a 1934 etching from the Vollard Suite, at $25,000 to $35,000, and a 1962 color linoleum cut Portrait de Jacqueline en Carmen (L’Espagnole), at $35,000 to $50,000.
Edvard Munch’s lithograph based on the 1895 painting of the same name, Der Tod im Krankenzimmer, 1896, is available at $40,000 to $60,000.
Exemplary works from the nineteenth century feature Mary Cassatt’s In the Opera Box (No. 3), etching, 1880, estimated at $20,000 to $30,000
and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s Aux Ambassadeurs—Chanteuse au Café-Concert, color lithograph, 1894, which is expected to bring $15,000 to $20,000.
American printmakers are led by a run of drypoints by Martin Lewis that offer a study in chiaroscuro.
Of note is Shadow Dance, 1930 ($30,000-50,000);
Spring Night, Greenwich Village, 1930 ($15,000-20,000);
and Chance Meeting, 1940-41 ($7,000-10,000).
Color woodcuts by Edna Boies Hopkins and Gustave Baumann also feature.
Exhibition opening in New York City October 24. The complete catalogue and bidding information is available at swanngalleries.com and on the Swann Galleries App.
The Albertina houses one of Europe’s most important compilations of Modernist art in the form of the Batliner Collection. Its permanent display starts off with such artists of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism as Degas, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Gauguin. Further highlights include examples of German Expressionism, with the groups of Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, (including paintings by Kirchner, Kandinsky, and Nolde) and the art of New Objectivity, with works by Wacker, Sedlacek, and Hofer. An in-depth focus on Austrian art comprises works by Kokoschka and paintings by Egger-Lienz. The great diversity of the Russian avant-garde is represented by paintings by Goncharova, Malevich, and Chagall. The presentation is topped off by numerous chefs-d’oeuvre by Picasso, ranging from his early Cubist pictures and works from his mature period of the 1940s to superb prints that have not yet been exhibited and paintings from his experimental late period.
Beginning at the turn of the millennium onward the Batliners began collecting the diverse painted output of the present era: Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Alex Katz, Imi Knoebel, and Arnulf Rainer.
Herbert Batliner, one of the greatest art collectors and patrons of our time, passed away on Saturday, 8 June 2019, after a long and serious illness at the age of 90 in Vaduz.⠀
In the year 2000, he donated the Propter Homines Hall to the ALBERTINA, in which the museum has since been able to show all major exhibitions from Dürer to Raphael or to Vincent van Gogh. In 2007, the Liechtenstein lawyer and trustee gave his valuable art collection to the ALBERTINA. Today it is one of the world's most important collections of Modernist painting and in recent years has become the basis of many successful exhibitions by Picasso, Magritte, Max Ernst and Matisse.
Monet to Picasso. Masterworks from the Albertina. The Batliner Collection It is under the title Monet to Picasso. Masterworks from the Albertina. The Batliner Collection that the Albertina presents its extensive holdings of classical modernist paintings, which come from the Batliner Collection. The overview of the most interesting chapters of 130 years of art history made possible by this permanent collection is unique both in Vienna and in Austria. Ed. by Klaus Albrecht Schröder Limited special edition 2018 224 pages 21 x 17 cm / Softcover German EUR 16,90 English EUR 16,90
xx Hindman’s American and European Art sale was conducted on October 17 at 10am CST at the Chicago sale room (1338 W. Lake St.). Notable highlights include Henry Moret, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Kees Van Dongen, Jean Dufy, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Childe Hassam, Fern Isabel Coppedge and Thomas Hart Benton.
The catalog for the October 17 auction is available here.
Also for sale was a wonderful example of Thomas Hart Benton’s commissioned work, Whiskey Barrels (or Whiskey Barrels Going into the Rackhouse to Age) at an estimated $600,000 - $800,000.
The artist’s work has shown strong results at Hindman in the past, his 1967 Discussion selling for $1,052,500 at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers' evening sale on May 20, 2015.
This painting Whiskey Going into the Rackhouse to Ageor Whiskey Barrels, produced by Thomas Hart Benton in 1945, dates from the period of his greatest fame and prosperity, when his work was energetically promoted by the most innovative art dealer of the time, Reeves Lewenthal. Lewenthal had started his career as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, but then drifted into promotional work, particularly representing artists. In doing so, he became convinced that the art world was operating on an outmoded business model and needed to adjust to the new realities of the modern age. In 1934 he started a print gallery, Associated American Artists, to test his ideas.
Associated American Artists started in July 1934, when twenty-three artists met in Thomas Hart Benton’s New York studio. Despite its name, the gallery was not an artist’s association but a strictly commercial venture, and Lowenthal paid his artists a flat fee and then kept four fifths of the profit. Lewenthal publicly launched the project in October 15, 1934, in fifty large cities, and despite the ongoing depression it was a commercial success from the outset. Initially, the gallery was exclusively devoted to producing lithographs by major American artists. Lewenthal advertised his project in national magazines, and sold his prints in department stores in every region of the country as well as by mail order from his headquarters in New York City. His advertisements stressed the value of art as an indicator of the owner’s refinement and culture, and also stressed the patriotic significance of American subject matter. Whereas previous art dealers had made very small editions aimed for an exclusive high-priced market, Lowenthal produced relatively large editions, which were priced low and aimed at a middle-class audience. In the first offering the prints were priced at just $5 each, with a reduction of a dollar for each one if you purchased five at once. In 1939 AAA’s success led the business to expand from a cramped 42nd street loft, where it handled sales by mail, to a handsomely designed 30,000-square foot walk-in ground-floor gallery at 711 Fifth Avenue, with art deco styling and the most modern forms of recessed electric lighting. It inaugurated the new space with a major exhibition of the work of Thomas Hart Benton, accompanied by a substantial catalogue with text by Thomas Craven. Lewenthal soon established a large stable of American realist artists, including Benton, Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, and Rafael Soyer. By 1941 Lowenthal did $500,000 a year in business, and by 1943-44 this had grown to a million dollars a month and he had 107 artists under contract. Impressively creative, Lewenthal was a leader in marketing approaches which were still not usual in this period, when most art galleries were family affairs. He produced major catalogues; he advertised in national magazines; he published color reproductions of works by the artists he represented, and he maintained close ties with American business leaders. One of Lewenthal’s innovations was to develop lucrative contrasts with major corporations for paintings which could be used for publicity and advertising purposes. His clients included such businesses as Esso, Abbott Laboratories, The American Tobacco Company, and the Scruggs-Vandervoort Barney Department Store in St. Louis. During World War II, he also arranged to do projects supporting the war effort, some commissioned by the army and navy, and others funded by large corporations. Other artists represented by AAA who took part in the commission were Joseph Hirsh, Zoltan Zepeshy, Lawrence Beal Smith Franklin Boggs, Aaron Bohrod, Paul Sample, Ernest Fiene, George Schreiber and Fred Ludekins. Benton, by far the most famous of the group, seems to have been the first to be hired, and several of the paintings Benton produced for these advertising commissions stand out as among his most celebrated works. For example, his painting of Tobacco Sorters, 1944, for the American Tobacco Company, is now in the Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas, and another painting from this series, Night Firing of Tobacco, 1943, recently sold for $2,652,500 at Christie’s (Christie’s sale 14315, November 21, 2017). This painting of Whiskey Barrels was produced about 1945 by Thomas Hart Benton as part of a commission by Hiram Walker-Gooderham & Worts Limited, for use in their Imperial Whiskey advertisements. Similarly to the iconic, Fluid Catalytic Crackers (1945, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), which resembles the work of Charles Sheeler in its precisionist rendering of an oil refinery, this work portrays a whiskey distillery with similar meticulous accuracy. In the foreground, three muscular men roll whiskey barrels down a platform, presumably to a warehouse where the liquor will be aged. Founder of Imperial Whiskey, Hiram Walker, pioneered the now de rigueur process of barrel-aging whiskey, which was made previously by pouring spirits over charcoal. Implicitly, the painting stresses two themes that were central to American mythologies of this period: the superiority of American technology and manufacturing, and the strength and manliness of the American worker. It’s worth noting that the painting was produced in 1945, the year World War II came to an end, when American patriotism was at its height, when abstract painting was not yet in vogue, and when Regionalists such as Benton were still dominant in American art. It was reproduced in a full-page advertisement in Life Magazine on June 3, 1946. After being used as an advertisement, this painting was stored away and forgotten until the 1980s, when it was rediscovered in a warehouse in Canada. On the verso, the painting carries a label filled out by Benton himself, providing the title, the value ($5,000, which would have been a year’s income for many Americans at the time), and the medium (oil-tempera), as well as a note that it should be handled carefully because of its “fragile surface.” The painting also carries a label indicating that it was included in the 26th Annual Art Director’s exhibition, presumably around 1946. The Hiram Walker & Sons Distillery remained in the Walker family until 1926 when it was purchased by Harry C. Hatch, who merged it and his own company, thereby creating Hiram Walker-Gooderham & Worts Limited. The company was acquired by British beverage company, Allied Domecq, in 1987; then was purchased by Pernod Ricard in 2005 and sold to Fortune Brands later that same year; Beam Global Spirits & Wine, Inc. split from Fortune Brands to become an independent publicly traded company called, Beam Inc., in 2011. Three years later, it was purchased by Suntory Holdings and was renamed Beam Suntory. The company is headquartered in Chicago and Imperial Whiskey is brewed in Bardstown, Kentucky about 15 miles from Maker’s Mark distillery, in Loretto, Kentucky. – Henry Adams Ruth Coulter Heede Professor of Art History Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Whiskey Going into the Rackhouse to Age or Whiskey Barrels by Thomas Hart Benton will be featured in the October 17 American and European Art auction. The sale will also include the additional paintings (Lot 106-Lot 117) that were commissioned as part of a 1945-1947 advertising campaign for Hiram Walker Distilleries of Windsor, Canada and Peoria, Illinois. Many of the works in this session, including the Thomas Hart Benton subsequently appeared in issues of Life Magazine. While the details of the commissions are not fully known, one requirement for each artist was to include whiskey barrels in their work.
• Berthe Morisot: Impressionist Original highlights Berthe Morisot’s approach to portraiture, her focus on the life of women in 19th-century Paris, and her role as one of the founding members of the Impressionist group.
Berthe Morisot, At the Ball (Au bal), 1876, oil on canvas, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, gift of Victorine Donop de Monchy.
Berthe Morisot, Woman with a Fan (Femme à l’éventail), 1876, oil on canvas, private collection
Berthe Morisot, Young Woman (Jeune femme), 1871, oil on canvas, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by the Audrey Jones Beck Accessions
Monet to Picasso: A Very Private Collection features paintings by the pivotal artists who sparked the major art movements of the late-19th through mid-20th century, including Mary Cassatt, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, and Pablo Picasso.
Claude Monet, Valley of the Creuse, Afternoon Sunlight (Vallée de la Creuse, soleil d’après-midi), 1889, oil on canvas, private collection.
Paul Cézanne, The Turning Road (La route tournante), c. 1877, oil on canvas, private collection.
Paul Cézanne, The Promenade (La promenade), 1866, oil on canvas, private collection.
The Hahnloser Collection came together between 1905 and 1936, initially on the basis of close and friendly exchange between the collecting couple of Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler and artist-friends including Pierre Bonnard, Ferdinand Hodler, Henri Matisse, and Félix Vallotton. Later on, the collection also came to include works by their predecessors including Cézanne, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and others.
The ALBERTINA Museum’s ca. 120-work exhibition presents an overview of this internationally unique collection of modern art, with works on loan from the fine art museums Kunstmuseum Bern and Kunst Museum Winterthur additionally serving to illuminate this collection’s exemplary cultural policy aspect.
Henri Manguin | Les Enfants Hans et Lisa Hahnloser, 1910 | Dauerleihgabe an Hahnloser/Jaeggli Stiftung, Villa Flora, Winterthur Foto: Reto Pedrini, Zürich
Félix Vallotton Le chapeau violet, 1907 Dauerleihgabe an Hahnloser/Jaeggli Stiftung, Winterthur Foto: Reto Pedrini, Zürich
Ferdinand Hodler Blumenpflückendes Mädchen, 1887 Hahnloser/Jaeggli Stiftung, Villa Flora, Winterthur Foto: Reto Pedrini, Zürich
Henri Matisse Femme assise devant la fenètre ouverte, 1919 Dauerleihgabe an Hahnloser/Jaeggli Stiftung, Villa Flora, Winterthur Foto: Reto Pedrini, Zürich
Paul Cézanne Groupe de maison, 1876/77 Dauerleihgabe an Hahnloser/Jaeggli Stiftung, Villa Flora, Winterthur Foto: Reto Pedrini, Zürich
Vincent van Gogh Le Café de nuit à Arles, 1888 Hahnloser/Jaeggli Stiftung, Villa Flora, Winterthur Foto: Reto Pedrini, Zürich
The Columbia Museum of Art has debuted the major exhibition Van Gogh and His Inspirations, on view now through Sunday, January 12, 2020.
Organized by the CMA and presented by the Blanchard Family, Van Gogh and His Inspirations is an original exhibition that brings the work of one of the most beloved artists in the world to Columbia, South Carolina, alongside a variety of handpicked paintings and drawings that shaped his vision.
“Van Gogh and His Inspirations represents an exhilarating high-water mark for exhibitions at the Columbia Museum of Art,” says Executive Director Della Watkins. “This show is the commitment of years of work to secure loans from museums and private collections; plan complicated logistical details; establish national, statewide, and local partners in arts, culture, tourism, marketing, hospitality, and education; and honor audience requests for internationally significant shows in the Midlands. Get ready to immerse yourself in fascinating stories, breathtaking art, and get to know the real Van Gogh, one of history’s most mysterious and intense artists.”
Vincent van Gogh, “Flower Beds in Holland,” c. 1883, oil on canvas on wooed, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon
Art historians and South Carolina residents Steven Naifeh and his late partner Greg Smith made a major contribution to the understanding of Van Gogh through the publication of their monumental book (and New York Times bestseller) Van Gogh: The Life in 2011. During the decade spent researching and writing this book, with access to the Van Gogh Museum archives and translations of previously ignored documents, the pair built a coherent collection of works by artists who influenced Van Gogh’s aesthetic thinking. On view to the public for the first time, this private collection speaks directly to Van Gogh’s artistic evolution.
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), “Nursery on Schenkneg,” 1882, black chalk, graphite, pen, brush, and ink, heightened with white body color on laid paper watermarked ED & CIE (in a cartouche), the Metropolitan Museum of Art
In addition to the Smith/Naifeh collection used as its foundation, Van Gogh and His Inspirations includes loans from 12 museums across the U.S. to explore the development of Van Gogh through the lens of the artists who inspired him. The exhibition also brings 12 paintings and drawings by Van Gogh himself, including an outstanding painting of flower fields from the National Gallery of Art, a sensitive painting of a peasant weaving from The Boston Museum of Fine Art, and the world-famous self-portrait from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Side-by-side with their inspirations, these works offer visitors a window into the mind of Van Gogh.
Charles-François Daubigny, French, 1817–1878, “Landscape with Clock Tower on Horizon,” date unknown, oil on canvas. Naifeh/Smith Collection
“No artist emerges out of a vacuum, including Van Gogh,” says Chief Curator Will South. “All of us are shaped by our culture, our time, our experiences. The works by Van Gogh being loaned for this exhibition reveal his connections to the artists and culture he was part of: Flower Beds in Holland from the National Gallery of Art, for example, shows how he looked hard at the work of other landscapists like Charles-Francois Daubigny in addition to that of the Impressionists. His famous Self-Portrait from the Wadsworth Atheneum shows how Van Gogh’s ability to translate psychological intensity stretches back to predecessors such as Rembrandt. This exhibition explores, in short, how Van Gogh became Van Gogh.”
Antonij (Anton) Rudolf Mauve, “On the Dunes,” c.1875, oil on canvas, Naifeh/Smith Collection
In total, Van Gogh and His Inspirations consists of some 60 works, largely paintings but also drawings and etchings, that form a unique, landmark exhibition building on the scholarship of Smith and Naifeh. Notable artists featured range from the incredibly influential and famous, including Rembrandt van Rijn and Jean-Francois Millet, to the lesser-known but highly talented, such as Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, and Anton Gerhard Alexander van Rappard.
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), “Charrette de Bœuf,” 1884, oil on canvas, Portland Art Museum
The Columbia Museum of Art (CMA) presents the major exhibition “Van Gogh and His Inspirations,” on view Friday, October 4, 2019, through Sunday, January 12, 2020. Organized by the CMA and presented by the Blanchard Family, “Van Gogh and His Inspirations” is an original, exclusive exhibition that brings the work of one of the most beloved artists in the world to Columbia, South Carolina, alongside a variety of handpicked paintings and drawings that shaped his vision. Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), “Flower Beds in Holland,” c. 1883, oil on canvas on wood, 48.9 x 66 cm (19 ¼ x 26 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1983.1.21
“Before Vincent, there were surely visual pyrotechnics on canvas. But it was Van Gogh, laying dollop after dollop of brilliant color onto his canvases, consciously seizing the opportunity for copious amounts of complementary hues, who achieved the great intensity that resulted from what appeared to others at the time to be a deranged methodology,” says South. “It was this extraordinary use of color that made Van Gogh compelling, even in his own lifetime. Van Gogh and His Inspirations is a chance to see the work of artists who inspired him, to see what he borrowed from other artists, and to experience how he became the first fully Expressionist painter. It is a rare opportunity in the art world, and it just happens to be in Columbia.”
Eugène Boudin, (French, 1824–1898), “Trouville, Les Jetées, Marée Basse,” 1888, oil on panel, John and Kay Bachmann Collection Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (French, 1845–1902), “La Butte Montmartre en 1878,” 1878, oil on canvas, Naifeh/Smith Collection A full-color catalogue will accompany the exhibition and document, for the first time, the Naifeh/Smith Collection.
On November 13, Christie’s will offer David Hockney’s Sur la Terrasse, 1971 ($25-45 million) as a central highlight of its Evening Sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art. A glowing sun-drenched vision rendered on a spectacular life-sized scale, Sur la Terrasse stands among David Hockney’s most poignant works. Begun in March 1971, and completed that summer, it was painted during the decline of his relationship with Peter Schlesinger: his first love and greatest muse. This turn of events became a milestone in the artist’s personal life, precipitating an intense period that resulted in heart-wrenching expression in his paintings.
The present work has occupied a single private collection for nearly half a century and has never appeared at auction. On October 15, Sur la Terrasse will go on view at Christie’s Los Angeles, marking the first time that it will be seen in public since 1973.
Ana Maria Celis, Head of Evening Sale, Post-War and Contemporary Art, remarked: “Sur la Terrasse is an extraordinarily beautiful work, which provides a window into the conclusion of David Hockney’s relationship with his muse and longtime love, Peter Schlesinger. This work marks a momentous turning point in the artist’s personal and professional lives. The tenderness and nostalgia of this moment is unmistakable in Schlesinger’s position with his back facing the artist, as he looks into the wilds that lie beyond their hotel terrace in Marrakesh. We are very pleased to be bringing Sur la Terrasse to market and into the public eye after residing within a private collection for nearly 40 years, where it went unseen by the public for almost as long.”
Infused with longing and romance, Sur la Terrasse represents Hockney’s last depiction of Schlesinger during their time together. It is based on a series of photographs taken on the balcony of the couple’s room at the Hôtel de la Mamounia in Marrakesh, where they had spent two weeks in February. Viewed through open French windows, Schlesinger stands with his back to the artist, bathed in long shadows. Lush gardens bloom before him, as if enticing him to exotic new pastures. Positioning himself beyond the picture frame, Hockney casts himself as a voyeur, bidding a private farewell to his lover. It is a deeply moving portrait of estrangement, whose themes would be revisited in the iconic 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures).
Sur la Terrasse and its studies, one of which is held in the Arts Council Collection in London, featured in Jack Hazan’s 1974 documentary A Bigger Splash, which he began filming during this period.
Yves Klein, Barbara (ANT 113), 1960
Yves Klein’s monumental Barbara (ANT 113), 1960 (estimate: $12-18 million) will highlight Christie’s Evening Sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art on 13 November. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this work will benefit The Water Academy for Sustainable and Responsible Development Foundation.
This November, Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction will comprise a particularly robust offering of impeccable works by American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Wayne Thiebaud, and Clyfford Still. Anchored by a strong grouping of Abstract Expressionist works, this November’s sale will also encompass significant examples of distinct artistic movements from the latter half of the 20th century through today.
Mark Rothko, Blue Over Red, 1953. Estimate $25,000,000 – 35,000,000. This November, Sotheby's will offer Blue Over Red in the Contemporary Art Evening Auction with an estimate of $25 – 35 million. The painting will be on public view in Sotheby’s York Avenue galleries beginning 1 November.
For Mark Rothko, the first half of the 1950s proved critical. It was during this period that the artist began embracing pure color as a vehicle to an emotional experience, a pioneering approach which ultimately became his signature style of abstraction. Blue Over Red, completed in 1953, marks the apex of this crucial era. Testifying to the importance of this year in Rothko’s career, half of the 16 paintings the artist executed in 1953 reside in permanent museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Legendary dealer and collector Harold Diamond acquired Blue Over Red directly from the artist in 1957. Diamond owned seven Rothko paintings during his life, three of which are now in prestigious museum collections: one in the Addison Gallery of American Art, one in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and one in the Ho-Am Art Museum in Seoul. Subsequently, Blue Over Red spent decades with Baltimore collectors Israel and Selma Rosen, who offered the work at auction in 2005, when it sold for $5.6 million. It has remained in the same private collection since 2007.
Executed in a richly saturated palette of orange, red and yellow, dramatically offset by one luminous blue band, Blue Over Red exemplifies the signature radiance of Rothko’s works. Featuring sumptuous color and blazing light, the work represents the summation of the artist’s deeply philosophical practice. Although the painting comprises overwhelmingly blazing hues, the blue asserts itself intensely, existing ‘over’ the fields of red and orange.
PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE COLLECTION
Willem De Kooning
UNTITLED XXII
Estimate
25,000,000— 35,000,000
Sotheby’s has announced that it will offer Francis Bacon’s Pope on behalf of the Brooklyn Museum this November in New York. Proceeds from the sale will be used to support the museum collection.
Executed during a particularly turbulent and emotional moment of Bacon’s life, Pope offers a rare glimpse into the psychology of the artist and the influences behind the works he created during a passionate yet volatile love affair with Peter Lacy. In the mid-1950s, Lacy moved to Tangier, prompting Bacon to make frequent and extended trips to Morocco to spend time with his lover, among a group of important creative figures such as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.
Perceived as exotic and more tolerant of homosexuality, the Tangier lifestyle offered an escapism that was liberating for both Bacon and Lacy.
Despite this, their romance ultimately devolved into violence, which characterized a period of great psychological angst for the artist. Bacon was particularly prolific during his stints in Morocco. However, he ultimately destroyed the majority of the paintings he created in Tangier – perhaps as a way to separate himself completely from the memory of his calamitous relationship with Lacy.
The present Pope is one of only six Tangier Paintings that survive, five of which Bacon gifted to his friend Nicolas Brusilowski in 1959, hoping that he may be able to reuse the canvases. Brusilowski instead preserved these works, which later made their way into notable private collections worldwide. The sixth work now resides in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.
Brusilowski sold the present Pope to legendary Swiss dealer Jan Krugier, and the work was subsequently acquired from his Galerie Krugier et cie in Geneva by American collector Olga H. Knoepke in 1967. In addition to her significant holdings of art, including works by such masters as Edward Hopper, George Tooker and Lucian Freud, Knoepke was a pioneering businesswoman, who helped found a plastics factory in Brooklyn, New York. She gifted the work during her lifetime to the Brooklyn Museum in 1981, where it has resided until present.
Prior to Sotheby’s November auction, only two of the six surviving Tangier Paintings have ever appeared at auction. The most recent – another Pope – was sold at Sotheby’s Paris in 2008, for $7.3 million (estimate $3.2/4.7 million).
The present work arrives at auction this November following Sotheby’s sale of another outstanding example of Bacon’s Popes, Study for a Head, which achieved $50.4 million in our Contemporary Art Evening Auction in May 2019.
Pope will be exhibited publicly in Sotheby’s New York galleries beginning 1 November. The painting is estimated to sell for $6/8 million in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction on 14 November 2019.
ARKEN is showing a wide and dazzling array of Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) best works in the exhibition Beloved by Picasso – The Powerof the Model. The exhibition has been created in close collaboration with Musée national Picasso-Paris.
Beloved by Picasso presents a total of 51 works in painting, sculpture, drawing and prints – including many masterpieces from the museum’s collection. The exhibition takes a fresh look at the relationships between the Spanish-born artist and his models.
Life and art
Pablo Picasso is one of the most important and acclaimed artists in the history of modern western art. He is famous for his capacity to renew himself and notorious for his uncompromising – some would say promiscuous – lifestyle. His passionate temperament influenced both his artistic practice and his at times turbulent existence.
Picasso’s art is often political and was created as a response to the events of his time. But his work is also private. In June 1932, one of his most productive years, he said himself: “The work one creates is just another way of keeping a diary”. The exhibition gives us unique insights into how Picasso’s friends, family, wives and lovers challenged and inspired his artistic development. With each new model, the visual style of the works changes, and Picasso’s loved ones are a constant source of inspiration for the artist’s wild and sudden changes in style.
The powerful gaze of the model
Art, love, family life and politics all merge in Picasso’s oeuvre. One of the many motifs he cultivated was the artist and his model. Picasso’s work with this motif gives both a humorous and caricatured picture of the innumerable examples in art history of the artist-model relationship.
The exhibition shows how Picasso’s loved ones were genuine partners and sheds light on the powerful gaze of the model. Picasso depicts the complexity of desire and the gaze as strong driving forces when he paints the relationship between artist and model. Picasso stages the desire to see and be seen. The exhibition has been organized in a unique collaboration with Musée national Picasso-Paris.
J. Paul Getty Museum October 29, 2019 through May 10, 2020 .
“Je suis paysan paysan” (I am a peasant’s peasant), the artist Jean-François Millet once declared. Born into a farming family in northern France, he astonished the Parisian art world with the frank portrayal of agricultural labor in oil paintings he exhibited at the semi-annual state-sponsored Salon during the mid-nineteenth century.
Shepherdess and Her Flock by Jean-François Millet (French, 1814 - 1875) about 1864–1865. Black chalk and pastel, 36.4 × 47.5 cm (14 5/16 × 18 11/16 in.)The J. Paul Getty Museum
To his contemporaries, Millet must have seemed a rather unlikely figure to revive the use of pastels--dry sticks of vibrant, velvety color, which had been the medium of choice for aristocratic portraits in the eighteenth century but had fallen out of fashion around the time of the French Revolution. Nevertheless, in the 1850s and 1860s, Millet turned out an important group of pastels, often revisiting in this soft, powdery medium, the same subjects he had treated in uncompromising oil paintings. An intimate, focused exhibition, Peasants in Pastel: Millet and the Pastel Revival will explore the circumstances of this artist’s turn to pastels around 1860 and will present a selection of work by pastellists from the subsequent generation who drew inspiration from his example: Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Giovanni Segantini, and Leon Lhérmitte.
Millet earned a scholarship to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris but failed to find his way as an academic artist. In the mid-1840s, he began to paint scenes of farm workers winnowing grain, tending sheep, and sowing seed, often at a grand scale conventionally reserved for subjects from classical mythology or the bible. His oil technique became increasingly bold, with thick, dark paint applied like “trowel scrapings,” as one critic put it.
The seeming crudeness of both Millet’s subject matter and his style shocked contemporary audiences, who often suspected that he harbored a radical political agenda. But by the 1850s, his work had nevertheless begun to sell, thanks to an arrangement with Alfred Sensier, a dealer, critic, and art historian who provided Millet with materials and a steady income in exchange for his pictures. Sensier especially admired eighteenth-century pastels, and he encouraged Millet to produce small, bright, salable works in this medium. Following Sensier’s advice, the artist saw immediate commercial results. Eager to corner the market, the collector Emile Gavet commissioned no fewer than ninety pastels from Millet.
Millet died in 1875, and Gavet dispersed his vast pastel collection at public auction shortly thereafter. The critical and commercial success of the venture encouraged other artists to try their hand at pastels, which quickly gained widespread acceptance, graduating from a medium used primarily for sketching purposes to one commonly employed for fully realized, independent works. Manufacturers of artists’ supplies now offered a wide range of paper and even canvas supports specially designed for pastels, and in 1880 the Salon designated a room for work in the medium.
Pastels also played an important role in the Impressionist movement, which formally launched in 1874 and helped set the course of European painting for the next quarter century. Nearly all the key Impressionists experimented with pastels, whose brilliant colors and potential for bold, graphic handling suited the daring, independent spirit of the group. Thanks to their portability, pastels proved useful for working en plein air—outdoors, often in the countryside—as the Impressionist landscape painters preferred to do.
Bringing together pastels by Pissarro, Sisley, and some of their less-well-known contemporaries --Léon Augustin Lhermitte and Giovanni Segantini--the exhibition charts Millet’s determining influence on the generation of pastellists that followed him. “Pastels, with their velvety sheen and aristocratic associations, might seem an unlikely choice of medium for the portrayal of rural life and labor,” said Emily Beeny, associate curator of drawings at the Getty Museum and curator of the exhibition. “But by exploring the use of pastels by Millet and his followers, this small, focused exhibition encourages us all to consider how artists’ choice of medium inflects our understanding of their subject matter.”
ALBERTINA Museum 18 September 2020 until 10 January2021
is honoring Amedeo Modigliani with a comprehensive presentation to mark the 100th anniversary of his death. Modigliani (*1884 in Livorno; † 1920 in Paris), who was active as a painter, draftsman, and sculptor, numbers among the early 20th century’s most important artists.
Amedeo Modigliani went to Paris in 1906, a time at which Picasso—having taken an interest in Iberian and African sculpture—was beginning to work on Les Demoisellesd’Avignon. This work was to be quite directly influential: it made Picasso famous, paved the way towards cubism, and made a lasting impression on Modigliani.
The ALBERTINA Museum is now placing Modigliani’s enthusiasm for the art of so-called primitive, prehistoric, and non-European cultures at the center of attention in dialogue with the oeuvres of Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși.
Modigliani Female semi nude 1918
It was not long, after all, before Picasso and the still-unknown Modigliani came to admire each other, a feeling of admiration that revolved around their shared interest in “primitivism.” And it was in the same way that a mutual body of work in the spirit of so-called primitive art arose in creative exchange with Constantin Brâncuşi. The works created during this period of intense dialogue are striking for their shared artistic vision.
On 14 November, Phillips will offer Norman Rockwell’s Before the Shot, marking the first time that a work by the iconic American illustrator will appear in an Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, as well as the first time that one of his paintings will be offered at Phillips. The work has never before been sold publicly, having remained in just two families’ collections since it was painted, the first of which was Rockwell’s own doctor and the model for the painting.
Elizabeth Goldberg, Senior International Specialist of American Art and Deputy Chairwoman, Americas, said, “We are honored to introduce Norman Rockwell’s paintings to Phillips’ auctions by including this masterwork in our November Evening Sale. While Rockwell has traditionally been offered in sales of American Art, we are eager to break down the barriers that separate these collecting categories and reexamine the way that these different voices of the 20th century are classified. Before the Shot is one of the most recognizable paintings by one of America’s most iconic artists. This November, Rockwell’s name will be rightfully positioned alongside other international 20th and 21st century masters, including Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Joan Mitchell, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.”
One of Rockwell’s most well-known paintings, Before the Shot is a nostalgic and humorous reflection of American culture in the 1950s, elevating the commonplace to the remarkable. Nearly identical to the version gracing the cover of the March 15, 1958, issue of The Saturday Evening Post, the picture depicts a child standing on a wooden chair in a doctor’s office, awaiting an impending shot and uneasily inspecting the diplomas on the wall as the physician prepares a syringe.
While Before the Shot betrays a sense of chance encounter, it was actually a picture of much consideration for Rockwell. Typical of his working process for his most important paintings, Rockwell painted Before the Shot from a series of photographs that he directed as scrupulously as one would a film shoot. The source images were taken inside Dr. Donald Campbell’s office in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Rockwell’s home from 1953 until his death in 1978. Dr. Campbell, Rockwell’s own physician, served as the model for the doctor, and eight-year-old Eddie Locke, who Rockwell selected from the lunchroom at Stockbridge Plain Elementary School, posed as the patient. Locke would later model for Rockwell’s popular painting The Runaway. The artist’s practice of selecting his neighbors, instead of professional models, to pose for his paintings lends his work an authentic sense of Americana and pays homage to the everyday middle-class existence in post-war America.
The doctor-patient relationship is one that Rockwell knew intimately; in addition to his wife’s and his own medical treatments, Rockwell had three young boys at the time, who no doubt provided him with much opportunity to study children apprehensively interacting with doctors. Rockwell gave the completed work to Dr. Campbell, who later sold it to another family, in whose collection it has remained ever since. For the past thirteen years, the work was generously on loan to the Norman Rockwell Museum, where it was enjoyed by countless visitors. The painting’s power lies in its amusing relatability; as Rockwell has acknowledged, "I guess everyone has sat in the doctor's office and examined his diplomas, wondering how good a doctor he was...” It is this communal experience that makes Before the Shot a hallmark image of American culture, as relevant today as it was in 1958.
David Hockney, Sur la Terrasse, 1971 (Estimate: $25-45 million). Now on view to the public at Christie’s Los Angeles for the first time since 1973. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019.
