GUSTAV KLIMT: THE DRAWINGS AT ALBERTINA PAYS TRIBUTE TO THE PHENOMENAL DRAFTSMAN

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Gustav Klimt, Reclining Girl and Two Studies of Hands (Study for "Shakespeare's Theater", Burgtheater, Vienna), 1886/87. Black chalk, stumped, white heightening. Albertina, Vienna.



It is the 150th anniversary of Gustav Klimt’s birthday that offers the Albertina the occasion to pay tribute to the phenomenal draftsman. The Albertina is in possession of 170 of the artist’s most important drawings, among them sheets from all phases of his production. The presentation highlights Klimt’s unique talent as a draftsman, whose manner of thinking and method of work are immediately evident in his numerous figure studies, monumental work drawings, and elaborately executed allegories. It is the first time that these unparalleled works are presented in the Albertina – the center of research for Klimt’s drawings – in a solo exhibition after fifty years.

Gustav Klimt the Draftsman
Gustav Klimt was such a brilliant draftsman that he occupies a unique position worldwide. The central subject of his more than 4,000 sheets is the human – particularly the female – figure. From 1900 on, he revolutionized the depiction of the nude: his sophisticated erotic studies blazed the trail for the Austrian Expressionists’ uninhibited depiction of the human being, particularly for Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. But Klimt also pointed the way for younger colleagues with his figure studies allegorizing “The Sufferings of Weak Humanity.”

The practice of daily drawing after nude or clothed models remained crucial for Klimt throughout his life. The artist produced innumerable studies of women and men of all ages, as well as of children, in the context of his painted allegories of life. Untiringly exploring his figures’ poses and gestures, he fathomed the essence of specific emotional values and existential situations. As if in a trance, his figures, anchored in the picture plane, submit to an invisible order, whether in states of dream, meditation, or erotic ecstasy. It is the idea of a fateful bond between man and the cycle of life determined by Eros, love, birth, and death that provided the background for this kind of representation. The numerous studies for his portraits of women convey an air of majestic enrapture.

Klimt’s figures strike us as equally sensuous and transcendent. The artist’s endeavors are characterized by a subtle balancing act between the uninhibited stroke and formal discipline. His brilliant art of the line becomes manifest in every phase of his development – whether in the photographically realistic precision of the 1880s, in the flowing linearity of the period around 1900, in the metallic linear sharpness of the Golden Style, or in the nervous expressiveness of his late years. Though being related to his paintings, Klimt’s drawings constitute a world of its own and, because of the immediacy of their expression, offer deep insights into the artist’s working methods and intellectual universe.

The Klimt Collection of the Albertina
In the possession of 170 works by the artist, the Albertina holds one of the most comprehensive collections of Gustav Klimt’s high-carat drawings. The sheets exemplify all phases, techniques, and genres of representation in the artist’s production. Klimt frequently relied on black, red or white chalk, later on pencil, occasionally on pen and ink, or on watercolors. The range of his works’ functions spans from figure studies and illustrations for books to monumental preparatory sheets and meticulously detailed allegories. Besides studies of female and – less frequent – male heads, the exclusive genre of completely executed portrait drawings is excellently represented. Of particular interest are the series of studies connected to various paintings; they will be shown in the exhibition in their entirety for the first time.

The Albertina as a Center of Research for Gustav Klimt’s Drawings
The Albertina’s position as a center of research for Gustav Klimt’s drawings was established by the exhibition activities and studies of Alice Strobl, who was curator at the Albertina, before she became its Vice-Director. From the 1960s on, she documented and investigated all of Gustav Klimt’s drawings scattered across the world. Between 1980 and 1989, the Albertina published the fourvolume catalogue raisonné of Gustav Klimt’s drawings that she wrote and which encompasses descriptions of nearly four thousand items. This work is still a milestone of Klimt scholarship. Beginning in 1975, the later Albertina curator Marian Bisanz-Prakken was of crucial assistance in dating the artist’s sheets. Since 1991, Marian Bisanz-Prakken has had sole responsibility for this cataloguing work; she will publish all new additions in a supplementary volume. Thanks to this continuity in the area of Klimt scholarship, the Albertina has for decades been the international authority on the assessment of Gustav Klimt’s drawings.

This is why the museum naturally felt the responsibility to devote a comprehensive exhibition to Klimt’s drawings on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birthday. The last show in the Albertina presenting exclusively drawings by Klimt was to be seen on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birthday in 1962. For the 50th anniversary of Gustav Klimt’s and Egon Schiele’s demise, the drawings of both artists were paid tribute to in an exhibition in 1968.

The Exhibition
Next to 30 outstanding loans from collections in Austria and abroad, 130 of Klimt’s 170 drawings in the possession of the Albertina will be shown in the exhibition – among them works presented in Vienna for the first time such as the life-size transfer sketch for The Three Ages of Woman, the iconlike drawing of a standing couple, for which the artist used gold and which was made in the context of The Kiss and “Fulfillment,” or the brush and ink drawing Fish Blood that has only recently turned up in a private collection.

The exhibition unfolds in four chapters that explore the main phases of the artist’s development. Though the comparison with the relevant paintings plays an important role, it is always the autonomy of the drawing that the presentation emphasizes. Each sheet constitutes a world of its own and often goes far beyond the representation of the theme in the respective painting.

Historicism and Early Symbolism (1882-1892)
This chapter surveys the years from the last phase of Klimt’s studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule to the crisis year of 1892 in which he lost his younger brother Ernst, with whom he had closely collaborated, and his father. Highlights of this group are the head and figure studies for the Burgtheater paintings and the spectacular Allegory of Sculpture, which already heralds the artist’s transition to Symbolism.

The Turn to Modernism and the Secession (1895-1903)
With his contribution to Allegorien, Neue Folge, Klimt professed his faith in Symbolism publically for the first time. In 1897, he was appointed president of the newly founded Secession. The works presented in this section include Klimt’s illustrations for Ver Sacrum, portraits of anonymous sitters, as well as numerous studies for his faculty paintings Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence and the Beethoven Frieze. His studies for portraits of women of Viennese society, a genre newly developed by the artist, constitute a group of its own.

The Golden Style (1903-1908)
Parallel to his work on his paintings in the Golden Style, Klimt’s creativity as a draftsman reached a culmination in these years. Around 1904, the artist switched from black chalk on wrapping paper to graphite pencil on Japan paper. In the context of his studies for Water Snakes I and II he thematized the taboo topics lesbian love and autoeroticism for the first time. This chapter of the presentation highlights the studies for pregnant women in Hope I and II, The Three Ages of Woman, The Kiss, “Fulfillment” and “Expectation” in the Stoclet Frieze, Judith II (Salome), and the first version of Death and Life. A series of studies for various portrait paintings are shown next to various autonomous, painterly portrait drawings.

The Late Years (1910–1918)
From 1910 on, Klimt increasingly focused on erotic themes in his work as a draftsman. He not only made entire series of studies for his major works The Virgin and The Bride, but also numerous autonomous drawings. The studies for portraits of women, for which he received many commissions in those years, occupy an important place. Concentrating on specific types, Klimt also dedicated himself to half-length and head-and-shoulder portraits of anonymous female sitters.

Website : Albertina

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FIRST MAJOR PRESENTATION OF CLAUDE'S INFLUENCE ON TURNER AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY

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The National Gallery’s spring exhibition, Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude, is the first major presentation of Claude’s influence on Turner. Turner’s daring free painting technique and radical approach created a revolution in painting at the beginning of the 19th century. The inspiration for these dramatic developments was the 17th-century artist Claude’s mastery of light on canvas. This exhibition tells the story behind Turner’s inspiration and the revolutionary works that went on to inspire future generations of artists.

The show reveals how Turner’s life-long desire to absorb all he could from the Old Master lay at the heart of his work. From the Roman Campagna-inspired views of the Thames Valley to paintings of the emerging industrial landscape, 'Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Night' (1835, National Gallery of Art, Washington), the exhibition demonstrates Turner’s skill at recreating gleaming light and atmosphere.

Turner’s first experience of the work of Claude had an immediate and lasting impact on the artist. A contemporary remarked that, ‘Turner was awkward, agitated and burst into tears’ on seeing Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (1648, The National Gallery). The combination of natural detail and ethereal effect in masterpieces such as 'Landscape with the Arrival of Aeneas before the City of Pallenteum' (1675, National Trust’s Anglesey Abbey) proved irresistible. He was captivated with Claude’s ability to depict light in landscape and praised his work as ‘pure as Italian air’.

The exhibition focuses on the major Claude-inspired themes that run through Turner’s career and that on occasion shocked and dazzled audiences of his day: the evocation of light and air in landscape, the effect of light upon water and his often radical reworking of contemporary scenes. The exhibition brings together a rich variety of media such as large majestic oils on canvas, mezzotints, etchings, watercolours and works in gouache, and displays of leaves from Turner’s pocket sketchbooks that show intimate drawings in pen, pencil and ink on paper, rarely on public display.

The importance of the sea to Britain’s identity is another crucial theme of Turner’s work and Claude’s harbour scenes exerted a powerful hold on his imagination, as shown in works including 'Le Havre: Sunset in the Port', (about 1832, Tate) and East Cowes, the Seat of J. Nash, Esq. (about 1827–30, Victoria and Albert Museum). The exhibition includes a selection of Turner’s most spectacular watercolours from the 1840s which depict the unique character of Venetian light.

On his death – and linking himself to Claude for posterity – Turner left the National Gallery Dido building Carthage (1815) and Sun rising through Vapour: Fishermen cleaning and selling Fish (before 1807) on condition that they were hung between two pictures by Claude, which he named as ‘The Seaport’ (Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, 1648) and ‘The Mill’ (Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, 1648). The exhibition sheds light on this relationship through photographs, letters and works that tell the story behind the Turner Bequest and its importance in the history of the National Gallery.

'Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude' unites works from Tate, The Holkham Estate and art galleries and museums around the United Kingdom including Glasgow Museums, Walker Art Gallery Liverpool and Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust, as well as works from the United States. The exhibition has been organised in collaboration with Tate Britain. It has been conceived, and works have been selected, by Ian Warrell, Curator of 18th- and 19th-Century British Art at Tate Britain and known internationally as a leading expert on the subject. The National Gallery curator is Susan Foister.

Website : The National Gallery

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VALENCIAN INSTITUTE FOR MODERN ART SHOWS A RETROSPECTIVE OF SPANISH PAINTER MENCHU GAL

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Menchu Gal, Nocturno en el Cantabrico, 1950.



The exhibition, organized in collaboration with Menchu Gal Foundation and sponsored by Social Kutxa, shows oils, drawings and watercolors, representing different stages of the creative artist and genres that grew from his first works influenced by êcole de Paris in the 30's, to his latest creations of the 90's.

If we look at the work and artistic career of Menchu Gal (Irun, 1919 – 2008), a woman who managed to find happiness in painting during the dark years after the war, who succeeded in being herself despite all the obstacles imposed by the society of the Franco regime, we make a great discovery. A discovery because, although she occupied a place of honour in the Spanish art of her time, although she was one of the few women artists who shone in a world dominated by men, and although she was the first woman to be awarded the National Painting Prize, in 1959, her name fell into oblivion, like those of María Blanchard and, to a lesser extent, Maruja Mallo or Remedios Varo, all unjustly distanced from the general public but who achieved ever greater closeness to those curious nonconformist followers who wanted to discover the alternative, hidden, parallel paths of art.

Menchu Gal is there, and her sensibility places her in contact with many other restless spirits who are capable of connecting with the warmth of her indoor scenes, with the salty tang of her seascapes, with the fragments of the world outside that she captured, in all of which we feel the pulse of life. Her work invites the viewer to walk with her, following her steps and marking out a map of shared affinities in which every individual will draw up their own personal itinerary with a starting point determined by their longings, tastes and wishes. One particular thing that this Basque artist's work produces, apart from her themes and her use of styles such as Cubism or Fauvism to express herself, is the feeling of closeness. Her pictures make one want to live in those interiors where there is someone peacefully reading or where the human figures are absent but have left behind the warmth of their words, their smiles, the everyday expressions behind which the true happiness that so often goes unnoticed lies concealed.

Menchu Gal painted still lifes, interiors, landscapes and portraits, but whichever path she took she always attempted to reflect herself, to take up her brushes and express herself with them, as if she felt that the colours and textures were an alphabet of her heart. If there is one thing that is characteristic of her oil paintings it is undoubtedly their lack of coldness, the sensation that behind every brushstroke the artist has left a small part of herself, a kind of positive energy that lives on in a latent state. There will be those who look at her Bahía nocturna (Bay at Night) and imagine themselves inside the story that it depicts, dreamers seeking the calm that is always conveyed by boats drawn up on the beach, white sand, the sacred murmur of the sea with hardly any other sounds to be heard. There will be those who gaze at her Acantilado (Cliff) and become aware of the nightmare of the abyss, the giddy sensation of its sheer drop. And also those who feel the desire to cross El puente (The Bridge) and get to the bottom of the mystery that lies concealed behind the balanced serenity of the scene.

Menchu Gal presents the repeated miracle of the harvest, soars high above rooftop terraces, experiences the ecstasy of falling dusk and makes her way – taking us with her – into the "great forest" of storytelling, a world where everything is possible, and she is capable of making us count the clouds and delight in the different colours of the earth in her marvellous Abstracción paisajística (Landscape Abstraction). Her most internalised geographical settings, the ones that are drawn from the solid trunk of the tree of her childhood, are scenes of the north, panoramas of Irun, Fuenterrabía, Baztán, Elizondo, Bidasoa, San Juan, Cantabria and the simple moist green mountains that mark out the map of her personal experiences, but the branches of her emotions also reach out towards the landscape of Castile, filling the sprawling plains with bands of light-hearted colours that invite the spirit to expand. There are traditional compositions, such as Plaza del Ensanche (Irún), Fuenterrabía and Paisaje castellano VI (Castilian Landscape VI), but also bursts of subtlety and freedom that represent her personal imprint, such as Bodegón con sandía y otros objetos (Still Life with Watermelon and Other Objects), 1960, or Pueblo II (Town II), 1959, where she draws us into scenes from children's tales, as in the "great forest". Along the way we also find compositions that are almost "naive", such as Bodegón con pajarito (Still Life with Small Bird) or Bodegón con figuras y tulipanes (Still Life with Figures and Tulips), from the final period of her life, which can be read as a return to childhood, an acclamation of innocence. The road is not monotonous, it varies and is renewed, it changes and forks in various directions, like Menchu Gal's paintings.

Website : IVAM

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YVONNE RAINER- SPACE, BODY, LANGUAGE ON VIEW AT KUNSTHAUS BREGENZ

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Yvonne Rainer, who is being presented by the Kunsthaus Bregenz in cooperation with the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, is one of the most vibrant art personalities of the 20th–21st centuries. Even today Rainer’s artistic production is not easy to classify adequately, for the established categories such as choreographer, dancer, theoretician, activist, poet, and filmmaker only approximately embrace her influential and many-sided activities. They say nothing as yet about their mutual interrelations, a feature that is so typical of Rainer’s creative work.

Born in San Francisco in 1934, Yvonne Rainer had already moved to New York by 1957 to study dance with the legendary Martha Graham and the early Merce Cunningham. She would later distance herself from their influence, however, as her interest in Martha Graham’s expressive dance and in Cunningham’s emphasis on improvised and combined chance operations progressively waned. Her experiences with the dancer Anna Halprin and with Robert Dunn, a musician who studied under John Cage, and the friendships that she formed there with Trisha Brown, Elaine Summers, Steve Paxton, and David Gordon eventually led to the founding of the Judson Dance Theater in New York. Interested laypeople – often from the visual arts or the music, film, or poetry scenes – worked together with contemporary dance professionals in this hub of the New York avant-garde scene. Both personally and professionally, Yvonne Rainer already had close contact here with visual artists, some of whom such as Carl Andre, Robert Morris, or Robert Rauschenberg were involved in her dance pieces, as dancers or in some other capacity.

This was the era of the hybrid art forms of Fluxus and Happening. Yvonne Rainer created surprising choreographies in which she impressively developed an entirely independent language of expression marked, among other things, by the extension of dance to include everyday gestures and activities. Her legendary comparison of minimal sculpture and dance, which she herself also questioned at the time, showed vividly just how close the practice of avant-garde visual art and dance were in the 1960s. The scaling of the work to the human body, deliberate repetition, and the avoidance of strategies of overwhelmment are some of the major points of comparison that she stressed in this connection, premises that are already conspicuous in one of her early works now considered a milestone of postmodern dance: Trio A (1966). Later incorporated in her evening-length dance program The Mind Is a Muscle, this short work lasting only five minutes appeals on account of the reduction of its movements and the simultaneous technical prowess and understatement of their execution. Additional features are – and this holds for other early works by Rainer –repetition, variation, and the underlining of her actors’ real bodily presence. Her eschewal of a specific narrative line with intro, climax, and finale and her avoidance of eye contact with the audience are also typical of her works. Moreover, in The Mind Is a Muscle Yvonne Rainer’s interest in combining dance with other forms of expression such as film and installation also emerged – during the performance she ran the film Volleyball which she had made a year earlier and a slide show, and used a cassette recorder, foam plastic sheets, and mattresses as stage design and as props. In line with her critique of the adulatory enshrinement of choreographer and individual dancers, and the concomitant star cult, she dissolved her own company in 1970 and founded a democratically operating dance group Grand Union with likeminded friends.

In the early 1970s, Yvonne Rainer turned her back on the stage to make movies with her specific type of directorial work uniting fiction and reality, the personal and the political. Yet this did not entail turning her back on the subjects and strategies she had dealt with and implemented there. Her rejection of linear narrative and identification with actors, no less than her intellectual abstracting of emotion are also found in her films. Quite apart from the historical documentary value of the seven movies Rainer made from 1972 to 1996, their treatment of political themes (such as racism), autobiographical aspects, and feminist issues makes them outstanding works of 20th century movie history.

Since 2000, Yvonne Rainer has been choreographing again, drawing on elements of pop culture, sport, general dance history, and her own works.

While Yvonne Rainer has twice taken part in documenta (1977, 2007), had film retrospectives at the New York Museum of Modern Art and at the Tate Gallery in London, and her influence on the visual artists – above all on a younger generation can hardly be rated highly enough, there has been no big survey exhibition in Europe to date that attempted to establish the significance of her complex oeuvre for art history and to do it justice in terms of its current relevance.

The exhibition curated by Yilmaz Dziewior and Barbara Engelbach in Bregenz and Cologne will change this. Not only the complexity of Rainer’s oeuvre is a challenge, but also the fact that her dance pieces were conceived as live performances and hence raise questions in a museum context as to their adequate presentation. The museum’s response here will take the form, on the one hand, of live performances of Trio A in the museum itself, but above all in a collaboration with the Vorarlberger Landestheater, where Yvonne Rainer and her company performed two of their current works on February.

The show also presents photographs and film documentations of stage works, notebooks, dance scores, scripts, and movie and exhibition posters. Kuehn Malvezzi conceived the exhibition design. In addition to the rare chance to see works by Yvonne Rainer performed live, all of the artist’s films are screened at the Kunsthaus Bregenz. All in all this many-sided project offer detailed and far-ranging insight into the legendary work of Yvonne Rainer.

The exhibition will be showing at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, from 28 April to 29 July, 2012.

Website : Kunsthaus Bregenz

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STÄDEL MUSEUM INAUGURATES UNDERGROUND BUILDING TO HOUSE CONTEMPORARY ART COLLECTION

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With the opening of the extension for the presentation of contemporary art, the Städel Museum has carried the largest expansion of its nearly two-hundred-year history– with regard to its architecture and its collection alike – to completion. In the autumn of 2009, in conjunction with important additions to the museum’s holdings, work commenced on the construction of an annex designed by the architectural firm schneider+schumacher of Frankfurt. Situated beneath the Städel garden, the new light-flooded halls provide some 3,000 square metres of additional exhibition space, thus doubling the area available for the presentation of the Städel’s holdings. Thanks to the completion of the annex, from now on visitors will be able to experience 700 years of Occidental art under one roof in presentations of equally high quality: the Old Masters, Modern Art and Contemporary Art. The grand opening will be celebrated with an Open House and major public festivities on 25 and 26 February from 10 am to 8 pm each day.

“Together we have achieved so much”, observes Max Hollein, Städel Museum director. “Thanks to the unparalleled dedication of many, with its new building and the substantial expansion of its contemporary art collection, the Städel has made yet another quantum leap in its history of nearly two hundred years. We interpret this splendid support as a mandate for the institution’s future.”

The financing of the overall project – which encompasses the refurbishment of the old building as well as the construction of the new – has already been concluded. Amounting to approximately 52 million euros in total (34 million euros for the annex and 18 million for the renovation measures), fifty per cent of the project costs have been funded with support from businesses, foundations and innumerable private citizens, and fifty per cent with public subsidies.

As Prof Nikolaus Schweickart, Chairman of the Städel Foundation, emphasized, “the joint efforts of the public sector and a wide range of business, foundations and private individuals light an important beacon for the Städel Museum’s continued existence and represent a remarkable demonstration of cultural commitment in the twenty-first century. Museum work in this form would be unthinkable without the active involvement of numerous citizens, partners, patrons, sponsors and visitors.”

“For centuries, Frankfurt has been able to rely on its citizens’ unique sense of loyalty to their city”, Mayor Petra Roth proudly points out. “All the more does the city of Frankfurt feel an obligation to support the refurbishment of the Städel Museum’s old building and the construction of its new annex with the substantial sum of altogether 16.4 million euros.”

Prof Dr Felix Semmelroth, Deputy Mayor in Charge of Culture of the City of Frankfurt, sees in the Städel extension a case of “magnificent collaboration between the Städel Museum and the public sector. Together they have succeeded in enriching the Frankfurt Museum Bank with a veritable architectural jewel – the spectacular new building by the architects schneider+schumacher of Frankfurt”, Semmelroth adds.

Since its founding some two hundred years ago, the Städel Museum has been a unique art museum, and one which from the beginning acquired the art of each respective era of its history as an integral part of its collection – whether that of the Nazarenes in the early nineteenth century, or later that of the Impressionists and Expressionists. In the new annex, the contemporary art collection will find adequate accommodation in the Städel Museum for the first time. Building on a substantial basis, this collection has undergone significant structural expansion over the past few years. Through the transfer of 600 works from the Deutsche Bank collection and 220 photographs from that of the DZ Bank in 2008, as well as through numerous major donations and a stringent purchasing policy supported substantially by the Städelkomitee 21. Jahrhundert, altogether some 1,200 additional works of contemporary art have recently made their way into the Städel’s holdings.

As Dr Martin Engler, Head of the Contemporary Art Collection at the Städel, explains, “the presentation of contemporary art in the Städel brings out lines of connection that define the art of the post-war period as an art-historical entity in its own right, as well as one inextricably interlinked with early modern art.” With a selection of more than 330 works, this first presentation of the collection will devote itself to central themes of abstraction and figuration in painting and other media such as drawing, printmaking, photography and sculpture, as well as to the reciprocities between them. Individual areas of the collection have been completely reorganized. Now geometric-constructive abstraction has as much of a place of its own in the Städel as does painting which has expanded within and beyond the boundaries set by the canvas stretcher – into new media and above all into the third dimension. Art Informel, traditionally already well represented in the holdings, has been further enhanced there in recent years by the addition of works by artists of various nationalities, while also being conceptualized historically into the past and future. Above all, however, deliberate emphasis has been placed on showing how the various areas of the collection interrelate. In that context, a special effort has been made to present artistic stances to which relatively little attention has been paid to date, for example geometric abstraction in European post-war art.

The new building designed by the architects schneider+schumacher of Frankfurt and situated beneath the Städel garden provides an optimal setting for the presentation of contemporary art at the Städel Museum. Reaching as much as eight metres in height, the new halls are supplied with light through 195 perfectly round skylights measuring 1.5 to 2.5 metres in diameter and forming a distinctive pattern on the garden lawn. “For us it was important to create a building which can assert itself as independent and prominent work of architecture while at the same time offering optimal space for the presentation of art”, Prof Michael Schumacher of schneider+schumacher explains. “Since the ceiling is supported by a mere twelve columns, the interior offers a high degree of flexibility, making an entirely new spatial structure possible for every new presentation of the collection on the 3,000-square-metre exhibition area”, Till Schneider of schneider+schumacher points out. The design of the first presentation was developed with the Kuehn Malvezzi architectural firm of Berlin; with a system of interlocking galleries it offers a flexible path through the contemporary art holdings. As Prof Wilfried Kuehn sums up the concept of the exhibition design, “the dynamic and intuitive visitor route in the Garden Halls forms a specific contrast to the axial structure of the presentations in the Main Wing”.

Founded in 1815 as a private foundation, the Städel Museum has meanwhile assembled a collection of some 3,000 paintings, 600 sculptures, 500 photographs and more than 100,000 drawings and prints. The Städel thus presents a survey of seven hundred years of European art history from the early fourteenth century, the Renaissance and the Baroque to the nineteenth century, early modern art and the present. Among the highlights of the internationally renowned holdings are works by Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Dürer, Sandro Botticelli, Rembrandt and Jan Vermeer, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann and Alberto Giacommetti, Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter, Wolfgang Tillmans and Isa Genzken.

The Presentation of the Contemporary Art Collection
The “present” begins at the Städel Museum with such figures as Josef Albers, Jean Fautrier, Hermann Glöckner, Ernst Wilhelm Nay or Fritz Winter, since these artists – all born in the century before last – have served as important pioneers, players and teachers for art since 1945. They are thus paradigmatic of a historical continuity connecting the art of the European post-war period directly with that of the early modernist era while at the same time launching themes still relevant today. In keeping with this expansion of the art-historical framework, the art of the present day must likewise be viewed from a broader perspective in order to comprehend themes and developments which – apart from their dissociative tendencies – also shed light on the connective, affinity endowing aspects.

Owing to its stylistic diversity as well as its longevity, the oeuvre of Ernst Wilhelm Nay – one of the most prominent artists of post-war Germany – is a particularly potent example of this outlook on European art history. Encompassing the figural painting of his early years and various stages of abstraction – first gestural, later organic-geometric –, this lifework tells a history of art that ranges from the waning of early modernism to the hard-edge painting of the sixties. Yet the oeuvres of such widely differing artists as Fritz Winter and Josef Albers likewise reflect the great extent to which pre-war and post-war, the first and second modernist eras, avant-garde and neo-avant-garde are intertwined – formally and with regard to their protagonists. Geometric-constructivist abstraction – one of the chief focusses of the presentation of the contemporary art collection at the Städel – thus stands out as a formative narration. Launched by artists such as the Russian Suprematists and Piet Mondrian in the early twentieth century, a line of development wends its way to Lyonel Feininger, László Moholy-Nagy, Hermann Glöckner, Otto Freundlich, Josef Albers and Adolf Fleischmann, then carrying on with Ad Reinhardt, Kenneth Noland, Donald Judd, Blinky Palermo, Imi Knoebel, John M Armleder or Joseph Kosuth, interconnecting the entire century with regard to form and content alike.

A similar path was taken by European Art Informel, which already commenced prior to the war before coming into its own with all force later on, buttressed by the experiences of World War II. Beginning in the 1920s in the work of Jean Fautrier and continuing in the 1930s in that of Fritz Winter, it aids us in discerning post-war art’s deep roots in the early modern period. At the same time, Informel becomes legible as a term of both historical and formal significance, possessing relevance far beyond the 1950s for the art of the present day, as exemplified by the works of such artists as Imi Knoebels, Per Kirkeby or Wolfgang Tilmans.

One of the most suspenseful aspects of modern art is its multifaceted endeavour to broaden the concept of painting. In the wake of Minimal Art, painting gave up the two-dimensionality which had been its essential distinguishing feature for centuries, left the wall and self-confidently entered the third dimension. From the 1960s onward, this “extended painting” repeatedly found itself infiltrated by reality – an infiltration which again and again inspired it with new life. This phenomenon is witnessed, for example, in the sewn canvases of Piero Manzone and Yves Klein’s sponge reliefs, in Günther Uecker’s nail paintings and the use of everyday or industrial materials in the works of John M Armleder, Gerhard Hoehme, Isa Genzken, Imi Knoebel, Michael Beutler or Leni Hoffmann.

Yet however vehemently abstraction established itself in the twentieth century and reality entered painting in a wide variety of forms, the figure and object have by no means disappeared from the art of our own present. The juxtaposition of such widely different painterly concepts as those of Asger Jorn, Georg Baselitz, Leon Golub or Eugène Leroy exemplifies the degree to which figural painting survived on the brink of non-form, the dissolution of its integrity. In the works of other artists, for instance the sculptures of Otto Freundlich or the paintings of Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Neo Rauch or Corinne Wasmuht, the proportions of abstraction and figuration are balanced at the very most.

The interplay of painting and photography – an aspect of central importance for the new presentation at the Städel – was another characteristic manifestation of the process of expanding and redefining the concept of painting. A decisive factor in the discourse on painting was the ever-more-evident tendency to undermine photography’s claim to the immediate illustration of reality – initially the medium’s chief distinguishing feature. Photography now adamantly insisted on its own reality and its autonomy as a medium. In the age of digital imaging techniques – employed, for example, by Jörg Sasse and Andreas Gursky – as well as of photographs created in the darkroom entirely without a camera – as in various works by Wolfgang Tillmans – it becomes apparent how closely the two formerly so competitive media converge. In the case of an artist like Katharina Sieverding, photography is above all a neutral pictorial medium for which reality merely provides an occasion for independent pictorial intentions, or which reduces the real world to autonomous painterly pictorial structures. The concept of painting undergoes a surprising expansion even here – not into the third dimension or the world of real objects, but as an entirely different – and essentially competitive – method of pictorial production.

The presentation of the contemporary art collection at the Städel shows that the boundaries between the genres are permeable, and a general tendency towards hybrid pictorial techniques becomes apparent. Whereas formerly the finest distinctions had to be made in order to develop adequate definitions, now the concept of a history of art comprehensively interlinked before and after 1945 proves valid. Above all, however, it is important to fine-tune the definition of contemporary – or that of the contemporary art museum – used over the past decades to distinguish it paradigmatically from traditional art history. Contemporary art – long considered to have emerged from history following the paradigm shift in art around 1960 – could thus be newly incorporated into that history. This art and its history have not yet come to an end – nor has the demise of painting, so often pronounced in the past, ever actually occurred. What has changed, on the contrary, is the conception of what constitutes painterliness – and with it the definition of the painting museum.

Website : Städel Museum Frankfurt

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FIRST RETROSPECTIVE OF DUTCH ARTIST DAAN VAN GOLDEN AT WIELS, CONTEMPORAY ART CENTRE

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Installation view of Daan van Golden's Apperception at WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels.




WIELS presents the first retrospective of Dutch artist Daan van Golden (b. 1936, works and lives in Schiedam) in Belgium. The exhibition Apperception presents the various facets of his work, through a selection of major works and others which have never yet been exhibited, and illustrate the singularity of this visionary artist. Although he has worked since the early 60s, Daan van Golden has produced a limited body of work, resulting from his ‘meditative’ painting process which favors slowness and concentration. Van Golden’s work has gone through several phases since the 1960s, phases that might seem to bear resemblances to the concerns of contemporaneous artistic movements such as pop art, conceptual art, postmodernism, or appropriation art. However, van Golden’s art should not be interpreted as having espoused each of these various art-historical trends in succession. His works contain elements of each of these movements, reflecting a practice that essentially questions painting, everyday imagery, perception, and the beauty that is inherent to the world around us.

An ‘apperception’ is perception that is assimilated to a reflection and awareness, as distinct from perception that is strictly the sensory ability itself. Throughout his career, van Golden has appropriated fragments of reality, perceptions he reproduces meticulously. The artist’s gaze thus captures the often minute details of the visible world that surrounds him to reveal hidden forms – apperceptions. The visual experiences the artist invites us to share with him thus form the basis of a conception of art that is intimately connected to life, revealing to us the extraordinary concealed in the ordinary.

Van Golden works slowly. Throughout his career, he has had few exhibitions: his work was shown at the ICA in London in 1967 and at Documenta 4 in 1968; he represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 1999; more recently, he held exhibitions at the Camden Arts Centre in London as well as at Culturgest in Lisbon and Mamco in Geneva, in 2008 and 2009, respectively. His work rhythm could be labelled anti-productive in an art world in which ubiquity tends to have become the norm. His works, however, are the result of a meticulous meditation-inducing method, close to Zen Buddhism and the philosophy of the Far East that has been an important source of inspiration for the artist. Faithful to the principle according to which art and life are one, van Golden does not consider art as an end in itself, but rather as a means to sublimate a transient reality that is difficult to perceive, yet within reach of one and all.

The exhibition opens with Buddha, a work dating from 1971–73. Highly evocative of the 1970s through its choice of subject but also its use of dried flowers, this work can be interpreted as a self-portrait. The pun on the artist’s name (‘Golden’) and the gold colour that is to be seen not only in the painted face but also on the framework emphasizes the autobiographical element of the work. The sky-blue background against which the Buddha’s head seems to be floating is another colour that is characteristic of van Golden, an indication of his admiration for the French artist Yves Klein. Like him, van Golden uses this colour to denote immateriality.

Geometric Abstraction
Van Golden’s stay in Japan between 1963 and 1965 led to a radical transformation in his work. He relinquished the gestural aspect of lyrical abstraction in favour of a quite particular geometric abstraction. The artist reproduced, with remarkable precision, the chequered motifs of cloth handkerchiefs and napkins, following a detailed and time-consuming technique. Van Golden thus substituted the very physical act of painting for a more ‘intellectual’ attitude that consists in defining a subject.

While their vernacular origin and their perfectly flat colors bring them close to pop art, these geometric Compositions are very similar to the work of the forerunners of minimalism who, at this time, advocated the modular grid as the fundamental compositional structure. The choice of the three chromatic versions shown here – the primary colours blue, yellow and red – refers to the strict colour scale of the Dutch De Stijl movement.

From this pivotal period onwards, van Golden would raise the question of painting as object, which would go on to become the very subject of his White Painting dating from 1966. This work depicts a blank canvas floating in a meditation-inspiring blue background.

Organic motifs
The works gathered in this room are all characterized by organic motifs. These floral ornamentations come from tapestries, curtains or wrapping papers. Following the same principle as that of the paintings with geometric motifs, van Golden once again took his inspiration from domestic ornaments, which he faithfully reproduced. In some cases, the work of art and decorative ornament coincide completely: the wallpaper thus intrudes on the frames hung on the wall it serves to cover, or, conversely, the image overflows the mat frame that is meant to demarcate or highlight. Contrary to modernist dogma, the work of art here loses its autonomy and becomes amalgamated with its immediate surroundings and the decorations. This close tie between art and life, a legacy of the historical avant-gardes, recurs throughout van Golden’s work.

Agua Azul
In 1987, invited to take part in Century 87 in Amsterdam, van Golden decided to cover the pathways of the city’s botanical garden with sky-blue gravel, one of his favourite colours. A direct intervention in the public space, this action evoked Japanese gardens and confirmed the artist’s aspirations to create a work of art in which art and everyday life would come together.

Decoration vs Abstraction
From the early 1990s onwards, van Golden started work on his longest series of paintings, entitled Heerenlux, a direct reference to the brand of varnish he used to create them. Reproducing a floral motif taken from a piece of cloth found in Morocco, the artist altered the focal point either by painting general views of the motif or by concentrating on details. This method thus highlights the photographic approach to painting taken by van Golden, who will zoom in on and reframe his subject until he has exhausted it. This series also clearly illustrates the artist’s ongoing to-ing and froing between figuration and abstraction. Starting out from a floral motif, the artist arrives at a non-figurative motif. As their names indicate, the two Study Pollock paintings consist of details of drip paintings by Jackson Pollock, another iconic figure of abstract art. In this series, the artist sets out from a non-figurative subject in which he has identified certain figures, such as birds.

Another key symbol of abstract art, the monochrome work of Yves Klein is staged in Insel Hombroich, a series of photographs from 1988 in which the artist captured his daughter doing a cartwheel in front of the French artist’s painting. The monochrome here becomes the setting for a family scene in which the artist has brought together his greatest passions: his daughter Diana and the history of painting.

Silhouettes
Van Golden has always been interested in random silhouettes gleaned from a wide range of sources: photographs, press clippings, reproductions of art works, etc. In the early 1980s, he thus extracted the silhouette of a bird from a reproduction of the famous painting by Matisse, La Perruche et la Sirène. Van Golden isolated and enlarged the outline of the bird before positioning it against a plain background in several works, such as the two Study H.M. paintings from 2003 and 2004 shown here. The scalloped edges of the bird are not to be found in the original painting, but are the result of the enlargement, by means of a projector, of the reproduction found by Van Golden.

Dating from 2007, Study Giacometti finds its source in the reproduction of a work by the eponymous sculptor drawn from an auction catalogue. In his work on silhouettes, however, no importance is given to the original subject. On the contrary, van Golden explores the tension between subject and background, thereby highlighting the importance of the void in defining the shapes of the silhouettes and thus challenging the viewer’s visual certainties.

Celuy qui fut pris
Three identical versions of Celuy qui fut pris are assembled here, offering clear illustrations of the reproductive activity, itself based on reproductions, that is dear to van Golden. For this series, the artist was inspired by the picture of a nineteenth-century sculpture of which he only retained the silhouette. Stripped of all detail, the matrix sculpture has become a red smudge, functioning like a Rorschach test.

For several years now, van Golden has systematically painted four copies of each work, a choice motivated by his belief in the symbolical value of the number four. In the age of ‘technological reproducibility’ – to quote the famous essay by Walter Benjamin – this repeated act of hand-copying might seem antiquated. And yet it is precisely thanks to this extremely slow, precise and meditative work method that van Golden has returned to art some of its lost aura.

Based on a photograph taken by the artist that is presented further in the exhibition, the recent Mozart series also resorts to the practice of two-coloured silhouettes dear to van Golden. One of the two portraits included here nonetheless gives pride of place to emptiness, thus becoming the very subject of the work that seems to have been interrupted prior to its completion.

Study Dürer, on the other hand, presents a reproduction of a well-known work by Albrecht Dürer, turned on its side. The bird motif recurs throughout van Golden’s work, and it is also to be found in the readymade Birds. This banal plywood board, which the artist has merely framed, reveals bird shapes in the wood veins. In his quest for images, van Golden is open to all possibilities, thereby demonstrating that ‘beauty’ is indeed to be found at the heart of life.

BB
The iconic figure of the French actress Brigitte Bardot, the subject of much media attention from tabloids in the 1960s, has more than once been a favourite subject of van Golden. In the late 1970s, the artist acquired a notebook containing many reproductions of the actress that had been collected by an anonymous admirer. The artist took photographs of the notebook before mounting these pictures in gold-coloured frames. By reproducing each page as such, without even concealing the notebook’s spirals, van Golden not only shows the reproducibility of mass images (by tabloids), but also their anonymous and original recuperation (by a secret admirer).

Photography
After taking part in the prestigious documenta 4 in Kassel in 1968, van Golden retired from the art scene. For the ten years that followed, the artist travelled the world and developed a new photographic practice. The selection of photographs shown in this room includes images that have never been exhibited before and reflects the variety of van Golden’s interests.

Music
Musical imagery has been a constant presence in van Golden’s work. From classical music to jazz and punk rock, the artist’s passion for music crosses genres and is proof of his eclectic tastes. Although van Golden learned to paint in a Jesuit college and is painstaking in his work method, his life has been filled with sensory experiences, journeys to distant lands, and a fondness for hippie culture… Among the works on display, the painted portrait of Fats Domino clearly shows the printed source of the picture. Indeed, the singer’s portrait comes from an enlarged press clipping of which van Golden has faithfully reproduced the grid of dots that compose it.

Youth is an Art
On the side walls, the series entitled Youth is an Art completes the exhibition. Named after a sentence by Oscar Wilde, this series brings together photographs of the artist’s daughter, from her birth until the age of 18. The selection shown here consists of the framed pages taken from the exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of the first display of this work, at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam in 1997, the year Diana van Golden turned 18.

Although it resembles a simple family photo album, this series cannot in fact be reduced to a strict autobiographical documentary undertaking. The choice and sophistication of themes, compositions and colours echo the artist’s pictorial practice. Like his paintings, van Golden’s photographs also find their source in the beauty that is to be found in the real world. Van Golden favours an approach based on ‘seeing’, and not on ‘doing’. In painting as in photography, the artist follows the same process, one that consists in seeking out and imitating the art that is to be found in what the world around us has to offer, no matter how ordinary.


Website : Wiels - Brussels

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FIRST MAJOR EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS AND VIDEOS BY AI WAIWAI AT JEU DE PAUME

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Laisser tomber une urne

de la dynastie des Han 1995
Ai Weiwei
Triptyque, tirages n&b.
© Ai Weiwei


"Ai Weiwei – Interlacing" is the first major exhibition of photographs and videos by Ai Weiwei. It foregrounds Ai Weiwei the communicator – the documenting, analyzing, interweaving artist who communicates via many channels. Ai Weiwei already used photography in his New York years, but especially since his return to Beijing, he has incessantly documented the everyday urban and social realities in China, discussing it over blogs and Twitter. Photographs of radical urban transformation, of the search for earthquake victims, and the destruction of his Shanghai studio are presented together with his art photography projects, the Documenta project Fairytale, the countless blog and cell phone photographs. A comprehensive book accompanies this exhibition.

Ai Weiwei is a generalist, a conceptual, socially critical artist dedicated to creating friction with, and forming reality. As an architect, conceptual artist, sculptor, photographer, blogger, Twitterer, interview artist, and cultural critic, he is a sensitive observer of current topics and social problems: a great communicator and networker who brings life into art and art into life.

Ai Weiwei was born in 1957, the son of the poet Ai Qing. Following his studies at the Beijing Film
Academy, he cofounded in 1978 the artists’ collective The Stars, which rejected Social Realism and advocated artistic individualism and experimentation in art. In 1981 Ai Weiwei went to the USA and 1983 to New York, where he studied at Parsons School for Design in the class of the painter Sean Scully. In New York he discovered artists like Allen Ginsberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and, above all, Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp is important for him because he understood art as part of life. At this time, Ai Weiwei produced his first readymades and thousands of photographs documenting his life and friends in the Chinese art community in New York. After his father fell ill, he returned to Beijing in 1993. In 1997 he cofounded the China Art Archives & Warehouse (CAAW) and began from then on to deal with architecture as well. Ai Weiwei opened his own studio in 1999 in Caochangdi and set up the architecture studio FAKE Design in 2003. In the same year, he played a major role, together with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, in the construction of the Olympic stadium, the so-called Bird’s Nest. Following its completion, it became a new symbol of Beijing. In 2007, 1001 Chinese visitors traveled, at his instigation, to Documenta 12 in Kassel (Fairytale). In 2010 the world marveled at his large, yet formally minimal carpet of millions of hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern.

Ai Weiwei deliberately confronts social conditions in China and in the world: Through photographically documenting the architectonic clear-cutting of Beijing in the name of progress, with provocative measurements of the world, his personal positionings in the Study of Perspective, with radical cuts in the past (made to found pieces of furniture) in order to create possibilities for the present and the future, and with his tens of thousands of blog entries, blog photographs, and cell phone photographs (along with many other artistic declarations). This first, large exhibition and book project of his photography and videos focuses on Ai Weiwei’s diversity, complexity, and connectedness, his “interlacing” and “networking” with hundreds of photographs, blogs, and explanatory essays.

Imprisoned on April 3rd 2011 by the Chinese authorities because of his political activities, released on bail June 22nd 2011, Ai Weiwei is still, today, banned from leaving the country.

Website : Jeu de Paume Paris

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FIRST INSTITUTIONAL SOLO EXHIBITION IN EUROPE BY THE AMERICAN PAINTER HERNAN BAS AT KUNSTVEREIN HANNOVER

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Hernan Bas, »A boy in a bog«, 2010

Acryl, Airbrush und verschiedene Drucktechniken auf Leinwand, 147,32 x 132,08 cm
Courtesy der Künstler und Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Foto: Nicola Kuperus





The Kunstverein Hannover presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Europe by the American painter Hernan Bas (born 1978 in Miami, lives in Detroit). The son of Cuban parents, he grew up in Miami and developed in part large-format paintings depicting fantastic, dreamlike landscapes whose protagonists convey a melancholic romanticism.

Hernan Bas, whose work is already represented in numerous public and private collections in the United States and Europe, has evolved a wide-ranging oeuvre within the course of only a few years. His pictures are marked by an exciting combination of fictional landscapes, abstract elements and religious or mythological set pieces. Diverse techniques such as woodcut, silkscreen, airbrush, acrylic and oil painting are superimposed over each other, opening up in the process a wondrous world of art historical and literary references.

The exhibition in the Kunstverein Hannover focuses on the artist’s most recent works, exemplified by a selection of about 40 paintings of various sizes from the past five years. The common denominator in Bas’s works is the isolated protagonist who is only given an individual character in several small-format portraits, slipping into diverse roles there. Within the scope of the large-format canvases, the figures function conversely as the focal point of a tremendously multifaceted painting and are faced in the picture with melancholically languorous, peculiarly fairytale-like landscapes. A gathering of Hernan Bas’s technically very heterogeneous works makes the impression of a walk through a wonderland of art and literary history.

Abstraction and narrative representation regularly overlap and merge. It involves classical and modern myths that arise in the pictures like episodes from a fantasy novel and then disappear again before they can finally be deciphered. Bas thus generates a peculiar atmosphere in many of his works that oscillates between hopeless, cool resignation and mystical, metaphysical yearning. The escapism that runs through his oeuvre, a withdrawal from the real world, nevertheless does not seem pessimistic in Bas’s paintings. Self-ironic picture titles refract the melancholy and transform the withdrawal into an inquisitive atmosphere of awakening and adventure.

Website : Kunstverein Hannover

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VALENCIAN INSTITUTE FOR MODERN ART SHOWS A RETROSPECTIVE OF SPANISH PAINTER MENCHU GAL

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Menchu Gal, Nocturno en el Cantabrico, 1950.





The exhibition, organized in collaboration with Menchu Gal Foundation and sponsored by Social Kutxa, shows oils, drawings and watercolors, representing different stages of the creative artist and genres that grew from his first works influenced by êcole de Paris in the 30's, to his latest creations of the 90's.

If we look at the work and artistic career of Menchu Gal (Irun, 1919 – 2008), a woman who managed to find happiness in painting during the dark years after the war, who succeeded in being herself despite all the obstacles imposed by the society of the Franco regime, we make a great discovery. A discovery because, although she occupied a place of honour in the Spanish art of her time, although she was one of the few women artists who shone in a world dominated by men, and although she was the first woman to be awarded the National Painting Prize, in 1959, her name fell into oblivion, like those of María Blanchard and, to a lesser extent, Maruja Mallo or Remedios Varo, all unjustly distanced from the general public but who achieved ever greater closeness to those curious nonconformist followers who wanted to discover the alternative, hidden, parallel paths of art.

Menchu Gal is there, and her sensibility places her in contact with many other restless spirits who are capable of connecting with the warmth of her indoor scenes, with the salty tang of her seascapes, with the fragments of the world outside that she captured, in all of which we feel the pulse of life. Her work invites the viewer to walk with her, following her steps and marking out a map of shared affinities in which every individual will draw up their own personal itinerary with a starting point determined by their longings, tastes and wishes. One particular thing that this Basque artist's work produces, apart from her themes and her use of styles such as Cubism or Fauvism to express herself, is the feeling of closeness. Her pictures make one want to live in those interiors where there is someone peacefully reading or where the human figures are absent but have left behind the warmth of their words, their smiles, the everyday expressions behind which the true happiness that so often goes unnoticed lies concealed.

Menchu Gal painted still lifes, interiors, landscapes and portraits, but whichever path she took she always attempted to reflect herself, to take up her brushes and express herself with them, as if she felt that the colours and textures were an alphabet of her heart. If there is one thing that is characteristic of her oil paintings it is undoubtedly their lack of coldness, the sensation that behind every brushstroke the artist has left a small part of herself, a kind of positive energy that lives on in a latent state. There will be those who look at her Bahía nocturna (Bay at Night) and imagine themselves inside the story that it depicts, dreamers seeking the calm that is always conveyed by boats drawn up on the beach, white sand, the sacred murmur of the sea with hardly any other sounds to be heard. There will be those who gaze at her Acantilado (Cliff) and become aware of the nightmare of the abyss, the giddy sensation of its sheer drop. And also those who feel the desire to cross El puente (The Bridge) and get to the bottom of the mystery that lies concealed behind the balanced serenity of the scene.

Menchu Gal presents the repeated miracle of the harvest, soars high above rooftop terraces, experiences the ecstasy of falling dusk and makes her way – taking us with her – into the "great forest" of storytelling, a world where everything is possible, and she is capable of making us count the clouds and delight in the different colours of the earth in her marvellous Abstracción paisajística (Landscape Abstraction). Her most internalised geographical settings, the ones that are drawn from the solid trunk of the tree of her childhood, are scenes of the north, panoramas of Irun, Fuenterrabía, Baztán, Elizondo, Bidasoa, San Juan, Cantabria and the simple moist green mountains that mark out the map of her personal experiences, but the branches of her emotions also reach out towards the landscape of Castile, filling the sprawling plains with bands of light-hearted colours that invite the spirit to expand. There are traditional compositions, such as Plaza del Ensanche (Irún), Fuenterrabía and Paisaje castellano VI (Castilian Landscape VI), but also bursts of subtlety and freedom that represent her personal imprint, such as Bodegón con sandía y otros objetos (Still Life with Watermelon and Other Objects), 1960, or Pueblo II (Town II), 1959, where she draws us into scenes from children's tales, as in the "great forest". Along the way we also find compositions that are almost "naive", such as Bodegón con pajarito (Still Life with Small Bird) or Bodegón con figuras y tulipanes (Still Life with Figures and Tulips), from the final period of her life, which can be read as a return to childhood, an acclamation of innocence. The road is not monotonous, it varies and is renewed, it changes and forks in various directions, like Menchu Gal's paintings.
 
Website : IVAM
 
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FIRST MARC CHAGALL RETROSPECTIVE EVER HELD IN SPAIN AT THE MUSEO THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA AND FUNDACION CAJA MADRID

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The first retrospective on the Russian artist Marc Chagall to be organised in Spain opens on 14 February at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid. More than 150 works from public and private collections and institutions around the world will be on display in the two venues, offering a complete overview of the career of one of the leading artists of the 20th century: a unique creative figure with a highly distinctive style who played a key role in the history of modern art. The MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the Kunsthaus Zurich, the Kunstmuseum Berne, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and Tate Modern in London are among the twenty international museums that have lent key works from their collections, to be seen alongside others from private collections. Particularly important is the loan from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which is sending 20 works, and that from the artist’s family, which has been particularly generous in this respect. The result is a large and comprehensive group of masterpieces selected by the exhibition’s curator, Jean-Lous Prat, President of the Comité Chagall. Together they will make this exhibition a major and unrepeatable artistic event and one that will offer visitors a unique opportunity to appreciate the wide-ranging and incomparable oeuvre of this essential figure.

Marc Chagall developed a highly expressive and colourist pictorial style that was closely linked to his own life and to the religious and popular traditions of the Russian Jewish community. Chagall combined elements from Cubism, Fauvism and Robert Delaunay’s Orphism to create a personal style that is difficult to categorise. Born in the small Russian town of Vitebsk, Chagall’s long life (he lived to be almost 100) was marked by the major historic events of the first half of the 20th century. A tireless creator and one always open to new experiences and to learning, Chagall’s output is rich and varied. Using his particular and unique style, he was permanently open to exploring new techniques (oil, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, stained glass, etc) and to undertaking new projects. One important section of this exhibition, for example, is devoted to his significant activitie s as a book illustrator. Throughout his life Chagall was surrounded by poets and writers who were his friends and with whom he maintained close and mutually creative relations. Breton, Malraux, Cendrars and Apollinaire were among those who considered him a “literary painter” and it is evident that Chagall loved literature, particularly the message of freedom contained within words, which he was able to enrich with his fantastical and colourful compositions.

Chagall was essentially a master of colour; his tones vibrate in different intensities and function to highlight the subjects of his paintings. His blues, greens, reds and yellows fill with life his real or imaginary characters, who inhabit a special universe of their own. Everything is possible in this constantly surprising world based on real or imagined stories: a violinist, a rabbi, two lovers, an acrobat, a landscape and a wide range of fantastical animals fill his compositions. In this world, colours and surprising figures and animals come together in previously unknown ways, resulting in a unique combination that made Chagall a forerunner of Surrealism, as that movement’s theoretician, André Breton, noted: “With Chagall, metaphor made its triumphant entry into modern painting.”

Russia (Vitebsk, 1887) – France (Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1985)
In the summer of 1911, the young Chagall arrived in Paris from the remote provincial city of Vitebsk in Russia with the aim of making his way in the international capital of the art world at that date. He made friends with the painters Léger, Modigliani and Soutine and with the poets André Salmon, Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire among others. Over the next few years he exhibited at the Salon d’automne and at the Salon des Indépendants. Through Apollinaire, Chagall met the Berlin art dealer Herwarth Walden who chose three of his works for the first Herbstsalon in Berlin in 1913. Chagall held his first solo exhibition in Walden’s gallery in 1914. Accustomed to Expressionism, the German public received his works with enthusiasm and Chagall progressed from being a young and talented painter to one who enjoyed international recognition.

From Berlin the artist went back to his native city where he was surprised by the outbreak of World War I. In 1915 he married his fiancé Bella Rosenfeld and following the Russian Revolution was employed as Director of the Vitebsk Art School for two years. Due to differences of opinion with Kazimir Malevich he was obliged to leave the academy and in 1920 began to work for the State Jewish Theatre in Moscow for which he created sets and costume designs.

In 1922 Chagall left Russia for ever and after a short period in Berlin settled in France in 1923. He lived there for the rest of his life with the exception of a brief period between 1941 and 1948 when he lived in the USA in order to avoid deportation by the Nazis. It was during this period, in 1946, that the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a retrospective exhibition of his work that fully established his international reputation. Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza acquired his first painting by Chagall, The Madonna of the Village, in 1965, followed by three further exceptional works that are now part of the Museum’s Permanent Collection, namely The Cockerel, The Grey House and Nude. In one of the biographies of the family, the Baron recalled: “I once asked Chagall why he always painted cows playing the violin in the skies in his paintings. Very simply, he replied that he had grown up in the countryside and had therefore always been surrounded by cows, ‘which is why I always paint cows in the sky’”.

The present exhibition at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid follows a chronological order. The first part, “The Path of Poetry”, runs from Chagall’s earliest years in Russia and his early period in Paris to his enforced exile in the USA and includes his experiences in revolutionary Russia and his return to France in 1920. The second part, “The Great Play of Colour”, to be shown at the exhibition space of Caja Madrid, analyses Chagall’s artistic evolution from 1950 onwards, focusing on the principal themes within his work in his final decades including the Bible and the Circus, his relationships with contemporary poets and his sculptures and ceramics.

The Path of Poetry
Chagall lived in Paris for the first time between 1911 and 1914. He arrived there in the company of Leon Bakst, his teacher in Saint Petersburg, and according to his own account felt immediately attracted to French art:

“Bakst gave my life a new direction. I will never forget him. In 1911 he invited me to accompany him to Paris as his assistant but we parted ways there and I graduated towards the circles of the European contemporary artists. In the Louvre, in front of Manet’s Olympia, Courbet and Delacroix, I understood the nature of Russian and Western art. I was captivated by the proportion and the aesthetic of French painting.”

Despite his ongoing fascination with the French art scene and the Parisian way of life, Chagall remained faithful to the world of his native Russia, which he missed and constantly recalled in his paintings. In addition, his desire for artistic freedom meant that he did not ally himself with any of the avant-garde movements (Cubism, Fauvism, etc) although his work reveals their influence at this period. As a result, he produced a type of art that puzzled his contemporaries but which they admired. Chagall’s initial intention to devote himself to painting was made with the aim of liberating himself from the Hasidic Jewish tradition in which the depiction of images of man is considered sacrilegious, and it may be for this reason that Chagall always adhered to figuration and never moved towards abstraction, in contrast to most of his fellow Russians. The yellow Room, The Violinist, Dedicated to my Fiancé and The Wedding are outstanding examples of his Paris output that open the present exhibition. They are large-format works with complex compositions and already feature Chagall’s unique and completely new universe: a poetic, fantastical and imagined world in which everything is possible and in which recollections of his youth and his innate sense of colour combine with the geometry and destructuring of forms characteristic of Cubism or with the vibrant colours of Fauve painting.

In the summer of 1914 Chagall returned to Vitebsk to see his fiancé Bella. He intended to return to Paris after a brief stay but the outbreak of World War I followed by the Bolshevik Revolution obliged him to remain in Russia until 1922. The marked contrast between the liveliness of the flourishing Parisian avant-garde art scene and the tranquillity of life in provincial Vitebsk, “sad and happy” as Chagall described it in his autobiography, resulted in a new direction in his painting. During the six years that he lived in this small Jewish city before moving to Moscow, Chagall executed a series of painting that he termed “documents” on its people and landscapes, including Bella on the Bridge, Landscape of l’Isle Adam and The Livestock Dealer. They include a series of views of Vitebsk that fuse opposing sentiments. Idyllic, nostalgic or apocalyptic, they convey Chagall’s happiness following his recent marriage as well as the emotional tensions resulting from the Revolution in which the artist actively participated in its early years. Chagall depicts the churches and modest homes of his fellow Russians and transforms Vitebsk into an idyllic city over which he and his beloved Bella or other characters fly in works such as Flying over Vitebsk or Man-Cockerel flying over Vitebsk. In contrast, he also shows it as a sad and apocalyptic town as in The grey House in the Museo Thyssen’s collection.

In 1927 Chagall signed a contract with the art dealer Georges Bernheim that marked the start of his years of success. Five years earlier the artist had decided to return to the West, movingly firstly to Berlin for a brief period until his friend the poet Blaise Cendrars persuaded him to return to Paris in September 1923 and to accept Ambroise Vollard’s commission to illustrate a series of prints for his editions of Gogol’s Dead Souls and La Fontaine’s Fables. For the Gogol text Chagall produced 107 prints between 1924 and 1927 in which he reveals his complete mastery of drypoint and etching. Using his profound knowledge of the Russian people and his boundless imagination, Chagall invented characters that he depicted with absolute freedom and with an almost caricatural and acerbic irony. In 1927 he turned to La Fontaine’s Fables, producing a series of illustrations that are perfectly adapted to that writer’s imagination and irony, expressed in poems filled with heroes of classical and popular mythology and with a cast of animals that behave in the manner of humans. During this period Chagall also produced a series of gouaches and independent works that are clearly based on these themes. The present exhibition brings together a comprehensive group of more than 40 of them (Cat transformed into a Woman, The Fox and the Grapes, The two Doves, The Cockerel, and others), shown alongside copies of the two books and a framed selection of the illustrations.

Years later Chagall received a new commission from Vollard to illustrate the Bible, a project that took him back to his childhood and to the Hasidic tradition of his native town. Chagall brilliantly handled the different techniques of printmaking that he used, playing with black and white and with thick and thin lines to produce a uniquely powerful series of images. Universally esteemed, these books constitute an important phase in his work and thinking in the first part of the 20th century. The artist himself spoke about this facet of his work:

“Apart from colour, I think that I would have been missing something if I had not worked in intaglio and lithography at various moments in my life [...] When I picked up a lithographic stone or copper plate it was like touching a talisman. It seemed to me that I could express all my sadness and joy through them [...] Everything that had happened to me over the course of my life: birth, deaths, marriages, flowers, animals, birds, poor workers; parents, lovers in the night, the biblical Prophets, on the street, at home, in the Church and in the Sky. And, with advancing age, the tragedy of life, within us and around us.”

The Great Play of Colour
Bella died suddenly in 1944 and Chagall ceased painting for some months. A year later his assistant Virginia McNeill became his new companion. He returned with her to France to settle there permanently in the spring of 1950 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in Provence. A new light, that of the South of France, began to fascinate Chagall and the region offered him a new homeland of celestial colours that flooded his works of his final decades. These were compositions that focused on his traditional themes of religion, the family, dreams, fable and the circus. The blue Circus, The Dance, Red Roofs, Red and black World, War and Lovers at the Post are among the paintings on display in the central gallery of Fundación Caja Madrid.

During these years Chagall embarked on the new artistic adventure of ceramics. The invention of forms and the application of colours to the clay or the glaze allowed him to investigate a popular art form that soon gripped his imagination. This experience would shortly lead on to sculpture and he began to work in marble, stone and bronze, imperishable materials that could be used to express the forms and associations of a primitive art form and which thus led him back once again to his origins, to religion and to fantasy:

“What could I bring to ceramics and sculpture? Perhaps the memory of my father, my mother, my childhood, my family. One has to be humble with this material and submit oneself to it! It is natural and everything that is natural is religious.”

The exhibition brings together a group of sculptures, ceramics and reliefs, some never previously exhibited, which represent the focus of Chagall’s activities from 1950 onwards. During these years the artist also returned to various projects that he had abandoned due to the war including book illustration, while also starting new ones. A retrospective in Jerusalem in 1951 took him to Israel, which he would regularly visit from then on. In 1952 he separated from Virginia and shortly afterwards married Valentina Brodsky (Vava). Their honeymoon in Greece inspired a new illustration project for Daphnis and Chloe, while he also designed the sets and costumes for its production at the Paris Opera. In 1958 Chagall started to design stained glass, which he produced for Metz cathedral, the synagogue of the University Clinic of Hadassah in Jerusalem, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among other places. In 1963, André Malraux, the French Minister of Culture, commissioned him to paint the frescoes for the ceiling of the Opera in Paris. Chagall used these 200 square metres to create an homage to the great composers – Mozart, Ravael, Stravinsky and Debussy – and the present exhibition includes a preliminary study for this project.

The exhibition ends with a space devoted to one of Chagall’s great themes, namely the Circus. This magical world particularly interested him throughout his life and connected him with his childhood in Vitebsk, which was frequently visited by troops of strolling acrobats whose liberty and sense of joy fascinated the local children who impatiently awaited their arrival. As early as the 1920s Vollard, who had a box at the Winter Circus in Paris to which he often invited Chagall, commissioned him to illustrate a book on the subject, however it was in the 1960s that the artist most focused on this theme, producing a series of gouaches and a book published in 1967.

The most important retrospective of Chagall’s work was presented at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1969. In 1973 the Russian Minister of Culture invited Chagall to visit his native land, to which he had not returned since 1922. That same year, the Marc Chagall National Museum of the Biblical Message opened in Nice, while in 1984 the Maeght Foundation organised a major retrospective on the artist, now aged 97. Chagall died soon afterwards in his house at Saint-Paul-deVence, leaving numerous unfinished projects.

Website : Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Website : Fundacion Caja Madrid

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FIRST MAJOR DUTCH CALDER EXHIBITION TO BE HELD SINCE 1969 AT THE HAGUE MUNICIPAL MUSEUM

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Last year the Hague Municipal Museum received the prestigious Turing Art Grant for its exhibition concept for Alexander Calder - The Great Discovery. The award has made it possible to go ahead with this huge project and this spring the Hague Municipal Museum will present the first major Dutch Calder retrospective to be held since 1969. This relative neglect of Calder is surprising since he used to be regarded in the Netherlands as the most important American artist of the post-war period. Early on, Calder redefined sculpture by drawing three-dimensional figures and portraits with wire in space. Then, in 1930, he visited Mondrian’s studio in Paris, which was to be a turning point in his career. Calder admired Mondrian’s use of space and converted it into his own artistic expression grounded in gesture and immateriality. That realization and the way it radically changed his work is the key focus of this exhibition.

Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976) grew up in a family full of creative energy: his father was a sculptor and his mother painted. As a child, he made small sculptures, model animals and jewellery from whatever materials came to hand. Even so, he trained initially as an engineer and did not attend art school until 1923. His technical education would enable him to translate his passion for movement into art; everything he made was kinetic. This was a major innovation: never again would sculpture be seen as necessarily a matter of chisels and blocks of wood or stone.

Between 1926 and 1933 Calder lived in Paris, then the heart of the modern art movement. At this stage, Calder redefined sculpture by drawing three-dimensional figures and portraits with wire in space and he was famous for the regular performances he gave with the complete and complex miniature circus Cirque Calder (1926-1931) he had concocted from everyday materials like wire, wood, leather, cork and scraps of cloth. All the circus figures could be made to move: acrobats swayed across the tightrope, dogs jumped through hoops and the elephant stood up on its back legs.

The central feature of the exhibition is a complete reconstruction of Mondrian’s studio in the Rue du Départ. This exhibit marks Calder’s transition from figurative to abstract art: it was his visit to this studio in 1930 that triggered a radical change in his artistic practice. Abandoning his figurative sculptures, he became an abstract artist. He began to add red, black or white discs to his wire and to produce mobiles of increasing size, in which he constantly sought to combine equilibrium and movement.

The exhibition includes a film that was shown in the Netherlands in the early 1930s. Made by Hans Cürlis in 1929, it shows Alexander Calder creating two wire circus figures with no more than a pair of pliers and his own bare hands. Even then, Calder was regarded as the most innovative sculptor because of his novel choice of methods and materials.

Website : Hague Municipal Museum

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

IMPRESSIONISM: PASTELS, WATERCOLORS AND DRAWINGS ON VIEW AT ALBERTINA IN VIENNA

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Jean-Louis Forain, The Client, 1878. Watercolour and gouache. Collection of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee; Museum purchase with funds provided by Brenda and Lester Crain, Hyde Family Foundations, Irene and Joe Orgill and the Rose Family Foundation, 1993.© Collection of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis.



The exhibition presents up to 200 drawings, watercolors and pastels by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Active in France during the second half of the nineteenth century and closely associated with avant-garde movements, artists such as Manet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Seurat, Gauguin, Cézanne and Toulouse-Lautrec created works on paper that may be less well-known than their paintings but which are just as significant. This is the first international exhibition devoted exclusively to drawings by these artists and considerablys extend knowledge of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

The starting point for Impressionism on Paper is the fact that a large proportion (40%) of all the items shown in the eight Impressionist exhibitions held in Paris between 1874 and 1886 were works on paper. Many of these can be identified and are included on the selection list. To this core will be added numerous other examples by these artists and others that provide an overview of their drawing skills at this critical stage in the development of a widely appreciated moment in the development of French art.

The aim is to demonstrate the different types of drawing pursued by the Impressionists and PostImpressionists and to demonstrate the various purposes to which their works on paper were put.

Drawing is not an activity with which the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists have so far been closely associated. The exhibition, however, illustrates unequivocally and for the first time that for these artists drawing was a primary function and not a secondary activity.

Although drawings were used as part of the preparatory process towards a painting, more and more they came to be regarded by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists as finished works of art in their own right. Many of the pastels by Degas, the watercolors by Cézanne or the works in mixed media by Toulouse-Lautrec were made on a large scale specifically for exhibition.

The exhibition, therefore, shows that far from ignoring the art of drawing the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists chose to emphasise its primacy thereby ceasing to uphold or even recognise the traditional distinction between drawing and painting. Instead, they elevated the status of drawing to the level of painting itself regarding both practices as part of a single aesthetic. The result was that the traditional hierarchy separating painting from drawing established during the Renaissance ceased with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.

This, in turn, had considerable consequences for the development of modern art in so far as the fusion of line and colour resulting from a series of multiple gestural acts, which characterises the best examples of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist drawings, paved the way for such artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly and Bridget Riley.

Website : Albertina

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

TURNER, MONET, TWOMBLY: LATER PAINTINGS ON VIEW AT THE STAATSGALERIE IN STUTTGART

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William Turner (1775-1851), Claude Monet (1840-1926) and Cy Twombly (1928-2011) are among the most outstanding artists of the past 200 years. The exhibition now in Stuttgart is the first to bring the three artists together. Focusing on their late work, it presents a selection of some seventy paintings, among them twenty by Monet alone. A spacious hang allows the richly coloured canvases and works on paper to interact with each other in unexpected and fascinating ways. Carefully judged juxtapositions bring out a multitude of correspondences between Turner, Monet and Twombly: not only in the way they experiment with colour, pushing the boundaries of painting and breaking with traditions in ways that were not always comprehensible to their contemporaries, but also in their choice of motifs and subject matter. They deal with death and the transience of life, with the changes wrought by the passage of time and with nature as a place of both tranquillity and mortal danger.

Artists in Dialogue
Conceived around the idea of a dialogue between individual works by the three artists, the exhibition does not seek to recount the history of abstraction – to which Turner, Monet and Twombly contributed significant chapters – but to highlight formal and motivic correspondences between paintings and within groups of works. Viewers can enjoy fairly harmonious sections, such as the ‘Atmosphere’ opening sequence, which is characterised by colouristic restraint and an astonishing similarity in the way all three artists handle colour effects. But they are also confronted with provocative contrasts, for example in form of the juxtaposition of Cy Twombly’s five-metre canvas from the “Blooming” series with Monet’s water lilies from the Beyeler Foundation – an abstract red composition on a bright yellow ground set against Monet’s subtly atmospheric colour harmonies.

Abstraction and Colour
Although the three painters belong to entirely different eras, their works share cer-tain formal qualities, among them the use of expressive colour, the dissolution of form, gestural brushwork and a sustained interest in atmosphere. The vivid and ex-pressive brushwork that characterises Cy Twombly’s “Hero and Leandro” (1981-1984) also gives immediacy to the rough, choppy waters of the English Channel in Monet’s “The Sea at Fécamp” (1881) and the crashing waves in Turner’s “Wreckers, Coast of Northumberland” (1834). The pure, vibrant yellow of Turner’s sunsets also appears in Monet’s “San Giorgio Maggiore by Twilight” (1908) or in Cy Twombly’s “Part II: Es-tate” from the Four Seasons cycle “Quattro Stagioni (A Painting in Four Parts)” (1993-1995) and, even more vehemently, in “Untitled (Sunset)”, two works on paper of 1986. The line between recognisability of the subject and near-total dissolution of form into pure light and colour had already fascinated Tuner and prompted paintings such as “Venice with the Salute” (1840-1845), in which the iconic architecture becomes one with the gauzy, all-enveloping luminous haze. What had been experimental in Turner – and quite possibly never intended as finished – became the hallmark of Monet’s work, in which the landscape or the architectural motif are entirely subordinate to the overall atmospheric effect. Cy Twombly, finally, abandoned figuration and the object altogether, relying instead on the evocative power of colour alone.

Motifs and Subjects: The Myth of Venice
The parallels revealed by the juxtaposition of late works by Turner, Monet and Twombly are more than skin-deep. The paintings are loosely grouped under a series of richly allusive headings. ‘Beauty, Power and Space’, ‘Atmosphere’, ‘Naught so Sweet as Melancholy’, ‘The Seasons’, ‘Fire and Water’, ‘The Vital Force’ and ‘A Float-ing World’ are the sections curator Jeremy Lewison has devised for his exhibition. They have an associative openness that invites visitors to let their imagination wan-der, but they also bring out deeper levels of meaning and more complex connections in terms of the formal and thematic issues confronted by the three artists.

A sizable number of works deal with the subject of death and the transience of all earthly things. In Turner’s painting “St. Benedetto, looking towards Fusina” (1843) ominously funereal gondolas cross the still waters of the Venetian Lagoon in the wan light of the setting sun. The painting captures the morbid and melancholy aspect of the watery city and stands in marked contrast to the jubilant celebration of the glorious light that distinguishes “Venice with the Salute” (1840-1845). Monet too was fascinated by Venice and enthralled by the city’s atmospheric light and evoca-tive colour. But if we look at Monet’s Venice paintings in the light of his biography, the paintings take on a somewhat different hue. Monet’s wife fell seriously ill shortly after the couple’s return from a prolonged sojourn in Venice in 1908 and died in May of 1911. Work on the paintings he had started in Venice was a way for Monet to come to terms with the loss of his wife and to remember their shared life. The boat motif, which appears in the work of both Turner and Monet, is also a near-constant presence in much of Twombly’s oeuvre. His sculpture “Winter’s Passage: Luxor“ (1985) is made from found bits of wood and offers an insight into the origin of the motif in the boats of classical antiquity. Twombly’s boats thus allude to man’s final journey into the world of the dead aboard the vessel steered by Charon, the mythological ferryman of Hades. They evoke the transience of life, the passage of time and the transition from one form of existence to another. This aspect is expressed with great poignancy in “Part IV: Inverno“ of the Four Seasons cycle “Quattro Stagioni (A Painting in Four Parts)”, where the barely recognisable, calligraphic boat ciphers are being swallowed up by black paint. Like the boat imagery, the subject of the four seasons is a potent allusion to the fleeting nature of time.

Late Works of the artists: Unbroken creativity and enthusiasm for experimentation
The exhibition focuses on late works by the three artists. Far from resorting to facile repetition, each of them continued to invent new ways of expressing age-old sub-jects. Even though their late works may tend to deal with themes such as melan-choly, loss, mourning and remembrance, they are distinguished by an unbroken crea-tivity and a growing enthusiasm for experimentation.

As he grew older, Turner began to value the effects of light and colour over finish and to leave more and more of his paintings uncompleted and indistinct as to their sub-ject matter, preferring instead to establish an atmosphere and a vague colour com-position. His enigmatic late paintings continue to fascinate the public and are widely seen as a source of inspiration for the Impressionists. Monet, on the other hand, withdrew more and more from the bustle of modern life, retreating to the micro-cosm of his garden at Giverny, where he devoted himself to countless and increas-ingly abstract variations on the theme of his water lily pond that gave expression to his withdrawal from the world. Twombly, finally, discovered the joys of expressive colour. The almost obsessive use of colour that characterises his late work has no precedent in his earlier output and bears witness to his undiminished vitality.

The Exhibition: Idea, Scope, Loans and Presentation
Several years in the making, the exhibition curated by Jeremy Lewison brings to-gether almost seventy works, among them three sculptures by Cy Twombly, ten works on paper and a wide selection of paintings ranging in size from small-format studies by Turner (c. 30 x 48 cm) to enormous works by Twombly (“Untitled” (2007), measures 252 x 552 cm, each of the canvases of the “Four Seasons cycle” c. 300 x 200 cm). An exhibition as ambitious as this one can only be realised with the help of gen-erous loans. Most of the 22 Turner paintings come from the Turner Bequest housed at Tate Britain in London. Further works have been made available by the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and the Sterling and Francis Clark Art Institute in Wil-liamstown. Works by Monet were loaned by the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, the Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, the Beyeler Foundation, Riehen, the Museum Folkwang, Essen, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the National Museum Wales, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Some of the Works by Twombly come from the Centre Pompidou, Paris and Tate Modern, London. Several works have been borrowed from private collections.

The exhibition was shown at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, from 8 October 2011 to 15 January 2012. After its run at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart from 11.02.2012 to 28.05.2012, it will be presented at Tate Liverpool from 22 June 2012 to 28 October 2012.

Website : Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

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Bron/Source : Artdaily