MAJOR EXHIBITION OF LARGE-SCALE SCULPTURES BY HENRY MOORE AT GAGOSIAN GALLERY IN LONDON

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Gagosian Gallery, in collaboration with The Henry Moore Foundation, present a major exhibition of large-scale sculptures by Henry Moore, some of which are being presented indoors for the first time.

Moore’s oeuvre, emblematic of modern British sculpture, is informed by elements of the abstract, the surreal, the primitive, and the classical. His rolling corporeal forms are as accessible and familiar as they are distinctly avant-garde. Moore’s first solo sculpture exhibition was held in London in 1928; by the late 1940s he had become one of Britain’s most celebrated artists with a diverse oeuvre that encompassed drawings, graphics, textiles, and sculpture. In the following decades he continued to receive increasingly significant sculpture commissions, following a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946 and winning the international prize at the Venice Biennale in 1948. His heightened success and fame provided him with the means to work increasingly in bronze rather than direct carving, thus achieving the monumental scale that he had always desired for his work. His large-scale sculptures have been placed in indoor and outdoor environments all over the world including Kenwood House, London; Dallas City Hall Plaza; Tiergarten, Berlin; the University of Chicago; Exchange Square, Hong Kong; UNESCO headquarters, Paris; Lincoln Center, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; the United Nations Headquarters, New York; the Houses of Parliament, London; St Paul’s Cathedral, London; and the City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima.

Moore’s large-scale sculptures celebrated the beauty and power of organic forms at a time when traditional representation was largely eschewed by the vanguard art establishment. Their prodigious size and forceful presence have an overwhelming physicality that promotes a charged relation between sculpture, site, and viewer. In Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 2 (1960) the rough texture of the patinated dark surface infuses the large corpus with a certain brutalism, the stunted head and blocky limbs akin to arched geological formations, weathered from time immemorial. Reclining Figure: Hand (1979) is immediately identifiable as a human form despite its modulated stylization; the softly rounded, cloud-like body attests to Moore’s more exploratory impulses when compared to Large Four Piece Reclining Figure (1972–73) and Reclining Connected Forms (1969), where he alludes to body parts using the vocabulary of mechanical components. Large Two Forms (1966) and Large Spindle Piece (1974) evidence an interest in both natural and man-made objects.

It was Moore’s intention that these large-scale forms be interacted with, viewed close-up, and even touched. In order that their heft and mass be perceived in myriad of settings, they were most commonly placed outdoors, subject to the effects of changing light, seasons, and terrain. Within the controlled white environment of the gallery space, the sheer volume and mammoth proportions of the sculptures are more keenly felt. Brimming with latent energy, their richly textured surfaces and sensual, rippling arcs and concavities can be seen to new effect.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, featuring essays by Anita Feldman and Anne Wagner.

Henry Moore was born in West Yorkshire, England in 1898 and died in East Hertfordshire, England in 1986. His public commissions occupy university campuses, pastoral expanses and major urban centers in 38 countries around the world. His sculpture and drawings have been the subject of many museum exhibitions and retrospectives, including the Tate Gallery, London (1951); Whitechapel Gallery, London (1957); Tate Gallery, London (1968); Forte di Belvedere, Florence (1972); Tate Gallery and the Serpentine Gallery, London for the occasion of Moore’s eightieth birthday (1978); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1983); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (1987); Royal Academy of Arts (1988); Shanghai Art Museum (2001); Henry Moore, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2001); CaixaForum, Barcelona, (2008); Kunsthal, Rotterdam (2006, travelled to Didrichsen Museum, Helsinki in 2008); Kew Botanical Gardens, London (2007–08); Tate Britain (2010); Kremlin Museum, Moscow (2012).

The Henry Moore Foundation was founded by Moore in 1977 to increase public enjoyment of the arts, especially sculpture. Today it opens his restored Hertfordshire home, studios and sculpture grounds to the public, tours the world's largest collection of his work, and runs sculpture exhibitions and research at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. It also supports sculpture through an active grants programme. For 2012, The Foundation has launched Henry Moore Friends, an opportunity to help promote the artist's legacy.

Everything I do, I intend to make on a large scale... Size itself has its own impact, and physically we can relate ourselves more strongly to a big sculpture than to a small one.
Henry Moore

Website : Gagosian Gallery


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WIM DELVOYE IS SECOND ARTIST TO CREATE A NEW MONUMENTAL SCULPTURE FOR THE LOUVRE

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Belgian artist Wim Delvoye poses next to "Suppo" in the Louvre museum, on May 30, 2012 in Paris, as part of his exhibition of contemporary art, "Wim Delvoye at the Louvre", running from May 31 to September 17, 2012. AFP PHOTO / FRED DUFOUR.



The Louvre invites Wim Delvoye to intervene at various locations within the museum and nearby: under the Pyramid, in the Napoleon III apartments, in the Gothic galleries of the Department of Decorative Arts, and in the Tuileries gardens. Wim Delvoye is the second artist, after Tony Cragg in 2011, to create a new, monumental sculpture to be installed at the central column supporting the Pyramid’s entry platform or belvedere: a huge Gothic corkscrew-shaped tower made of stainless steel, titled Suppo. Another imposing Corten steel sculpture will take up residence in the Tuileries in July and remain at this venue through the autumn, when it will be joined by other works featured in FIAC’s outdoor sculpture exhibition.

Within the museum’s walls, some fifteen recent works in stained glass, porcelain, and bronze, revealing the artist’s current fascination with nineteenth-century sculpture and his experimentation with computerized reproduction techniques, are juxtaposed with objects from the collections of the Department of Decorative Arts. Delvoye’s sculptures rest on furniture, are installed in display cases, and some even line the ceremonial staircase leading to the former private apartments of the Minister of State. A large stained-glass window presented in the Lefuel staircase enters into dialogue with those installed in 2009 by François Morellet, while a Gothic chapel resonates with the tapestries and liturgical objects exhibited in the Anne de Bretagne room.

From the down-to-earth redeployment of Gothic motifs to contorted and twisted crucifixes, Delvoye’s popular and decorative art, which has its roots in subversive and ironic reinterpretations of past styles, finds a particularly trenchant echo in the Louvre’s collections.

Born in 1965, the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye works in varied mediums and is perhaps best known for his “Cloaca” series which, with a seriousness reminiscent of scientists’ laboratory experiments, sheds light on the digestive process. In 2009, Delvoye was invited to create a monumental work for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection during the 53rd Venice Biennale and solo shows were held in 2010 at the Musée Rodin in Paris and in 2011 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. With each of these exhibitions, he has erected an ever taller tower, a series that reaches its pinnacle to date with the spectacular Suppo at the Louvre, a full 11 meters high.

Exhibition curator: Marie-Laure Bernadac, Curator in Charge, Special Advisor on Contemporary Art, Musée du Louvre, assisted by Aurélie Tiffreau.

Website : Musée du  Louvre

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FRIEDER BURDA'S COLLECTION ON VIEW FOR THE FIRST TIME IN FRANCE AT MUSEE GRANET

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The exceptional collection of Frieder Burda that had never left Germany is now being presented for the first time in France, this summer at the Musée Granet.

With more than 1000 works, the collection was built up by Frieder Burda, an heir to the Burda publishing and magazine empire in Germany, and since 2004 it has been kept and presented in the museum bearing his name in Baden-Baden. Contemporary art, with roots in the modern tradition, is a characteristic of his collection, which includes a large proportion of “painting-based” paintings and large formats; another characteristic is its architectural setting, the building designed by New York architect, Richard Meier.

Frieder Burda was a businessman when, in 1960, he started his collection through the acquisition of a torn canvas by Lucio Fontana which is showcased in the exhibition. This acquisition was followed by many others, always guided by a passion for colour, that the Musée Granet exhibition shows among a selection of masterpieces of the Frieder Burda Museum.

Patiently Collected Works
For the first time in its history, the Musée Granet shows, in an exhibition space of nearly 800 2m, German Expressionist artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, August Macke, post-war artists Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz - who was a friend of Frieder Burda -and the American painters Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning and Alex Katz. Pablo Picasso returns to the Musée Granet with seven major works from the last years of the incomparable period of 1960 to 1972. He had already featured, in 2009, in the Picasso Cézanne exhibition, and then in 2011, with the presentation of fifteen masterpieces that date from the period 1917 to 1970 and are now in the Jean Planque collection.

Continuing its interest in collections and collectors, the Musée Granet wishes to give an account, through the patiently collected and lovingly selected works, of the thousand and one paths taken by these tireless art enthusiasts. After the Swiss Jean Planque, whose collection was presented in the summer of 2011 and is now confided for fifteen years to the Musée Granet, it is now the German Frieder Burda who has accepted to present the finest works in his collection available to visitors in Aix-En-Provence.

Portrait(s) of Frieder Burda and the First Work Bought for his Collection
In the tradition of patrons and collectors since the Renaissance, portraits of Frieder Burda and his family have been done by many artists, such as Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke and Jean Hucleux. Two of these portraits open the present exhibition with the first work bought by Frieder Burda in 1969.

The gouache on paper entitled Porträt Frieder Burda (1996) was given, sheet by sheet, to the collector by his friend Sigmar Polke (1941-2010), so that, each time, he was waiting to see the whole work. Just over ten years ago, Jean Olivier Hucleux (born in 1923) also did the portrait of Frieder Burda in front of one of the emblematic works of his collection, the painting Party (1962) by his friend Gerhard Richter.

Birth of the Idea of Collecting
This painting was among the first that Frieder Burda acquired after meeting Richter and discovering his work. This was also the time that he had the idea of starting a collection and that he became aware of what art could bring him. Lucio Fontana died in 1968, the very year that his Concetto Spaziale - Attese had such an effect on Frieder Burda; his was the first work to be bought by the collector. The painting really fascinated him, with its youthful radicalism, he who rather wanted to provoke his father, the publisher and collector of German Expressionism.

German Expressionism
As long as he can remember, Frieder Burda was surrounded by the German expressionist paintings of his father’s collection (e.g. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, and Max Beckmann) which forged his love of colour and that he subsequently inherited. The term «Expressionist» describes an artistic tendency that appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, mainly in Germany; the Expressionist group included various artists including many who participated in the exhibition of «Degenerate Art» mounted by the Nazis; they championed the use of instinct and introspection, claiming to follow Vincent Van Gogh who wanted to «express with red and green the terrible human passions.»

The Malaise of a Materialist Society
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was one of the most emblematic figures of the Die Brücke (The Bridge) group (1905-1913). One of his canvases features, Zwei Akte mit Badetub und Ofen of 1911 on one side and Pfortensteg Chemnitz of 1910 on the other: more than the visible reality of the scenes, it is the subjectivity of the artist which becomes the subject of the painting. With the painting Strasse mit Passaten bei Nachtbeleuchtung (19261927), Kirchner again took up his favourite themes at Berlin, representing the nightlife of a great city.

August Macke’s meeting with Franz Marc led, in 1910, him into the adventure of the Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider) between 1911 and 1914; both used the theme of animals in their search for a pantheistic communion with nature, visible in Zoologischer Garten in Braun und Gelb, painted in 1912. Three urban views and Akademie II (1944) represent Max Beckmann, who belonged to the Neue Sachlichkeit (the new objectivity), a figurative movement that appeared in the 1920s. In a style that was often cold, the artists took inspiration from the masters of the past as well as from photography to tackle contemporary themes and, disillusioned and objective, to indicate the malaise of a materialistic society. Beckmann’s work never lost the tragic resonance of the 30s and the Second World War, and a certain muted anguish persists even in his Mediterranean landscape.

The Final Picasso
Between 1996 and 2004, Frieder Burda bought eight Picassos of the artist’s final period, dated between 1960 and 1972. At this time, the collector was living in the charming little town inland from Cannes where he intended to build his museum.

Picasso settled in Mougins in 1961, with Jacqueline «the lady of Vauvenargues,» in the large house, or mas, of Notre Dame-de-Vie that was large enough to house several workshops and which still had a wide view over the Bay of Cannes. He was then eighty years old and his whole life had been devoted to art, but as well as his usual appetite for work and his energy, there was, at his advanced age, an added feeling of urgency.

Dazzling Freedom of the Final Paintings
Enfant, a bronze dating from 1960, confirms the interest that Picasso always had for sculpture. In its simplification and formal density, it concentrates the vital energy and innocence of childhood. It is indeed in this way that one should experience the sculpture and the paintings of the Burda collection, on a quest to free painting and to bring it to life. Before 1965 and his illness, he would paint up to three paintings in the same day: the theme of the painter and his model, as seen in the painting of 1 November 1964, is recurrent in all of Picasso’s work and was particularly strong at this time. In 1968, he also found the time to paint, notably the Nu assis of 3 April and the Nu couché of 7 October, symptomatic of his artistic research into what was essential in figuration. The monumental Homme debout (September 1969) is an example of his figures that were uncluttered by anecdote, while Buste d’homme, painted between the 22 September and the 2 November 1969, is somewhat reminiscent of the “musketeer” series. In the Homme au chapeau assis of «Wednesday 16.2.72,» bought by Frieder Burda in 2001, there is still the creative vitality and dazzling freedom which pervades his final paintings.

To Frieder Burda, Picasso’s final period, as seen through his works, seems to encapsulate the whole of Expressionism. With the undisputed success of abstract art in the United States and Europe, Picasso went into resistance until figuration returned in force in the 1980s.

The American Artists
In the 1970s, Frieder Burda spent several periods in the United States. There, he discovered the work of a new generation of artists who shattered the world art scene of the post-war period. It was after this, at the end of the ’80s, that he started collecting the works of these artists and built up a remarkable and representative collection of the various trends of American painting of the second half of the 20th century.

World-wide Triumph of American Art
Frieder Burda was naturally enthusiastic about Abstract Expressionism: in the works of Rothko, Pollock and Kooning he discovered the formal freedom and expressivity of the Expressionist paintings of his father’s collection. This movement was an original fusion of the practice of abstraction and the principles of expressionism, and it ensured the world-wide triumph of American art. Jackson Pollock, a figurehead of the New York School, just had to be included in Burda’s collection. Composition no.16 (1948) shows the painter being born: the fluid paint was projected onto the canvas by dripping until it randomly covered the surface. Large Torso (1974) by Willem de Kooning puts into three dimensions the artist’s struggle with the pictorial material. Frieder Burda was interested in other trends of American painting. From the mid- 1950s some artists returned to figuration, but in new forms. Pop Art, New Realism and Hyperrealism questioned American society at different levels. Alex Katz used smooth and impersonal painting in his over-sized portraits (Scott and John, 1966). Big Piles of Bones (Scenarios), a late work of Robert Rauschenberg (2005), used the juxtaposition and assembly of images. Photography, with its optical anomalies was the direct source of virtuoso paintings by Richard Estes and Malcolm Morley.

Richter, Polke, Baselitz
Gerhardt Richter, Sigmar Polke and Georg Baselitz are all artists with whom Frieder Burda maintained a close and fruitful dialogue over many years, his collection permits an appreciation of the entire production of each of them. These three painters now have unanimous international recognition as major artists of the last fifty years.

Each, in their own way, is the product and the witness of the historical and political tribulations of Germany in the 20th century. The traumatism of the Second World War fed into the work of Baselitz, while the «capitalist realism» invented by Polke and Richter in 1962 denounced both the ideological indoctrination in the RDA and the consumer society of the West. However, artistic and pictorial aspects remained central to their interrogations and their practice.

Figuration and Abstraction Bring the very Nature of Painting into Question
The hijacking of images is central to Polke’s work. His work on the canvas often involves a superimposition of various materials, some transparent, that interact with each other; images, stories and messages are mixed up in layers of matter and meaning.

Richter is widely admired for his refined and virtuoso work on pictorial material. An eclectic artist who asserts his absence of style as his main quality, his work can be smooth and velvety, giving a photographic effect, or he can work the material much more in the spirit of action painting. His constant oscillation between figuration and abstraction brings the very nature of painting into question.

Described as a new Fauve and a neo-expressionist, Baselitz’s work inevitably interested Frieder Burda. Since 1969, he has painted often apparently insignificant motifs upside down: landscapes, portraits, nudes and animals done with energetic brush-strokes and in expressive colours have become his trademark. But under the brio of the form, Baselitz questions the capacity of Germans to really face up to their history.

New German Painting
For several years now, Frieder Burda has taken an interest in the painters of the following generation, that of artists born in the 1960s who are now the avant-garde of German painting. Remaining faithful to his personal taste and eye while also reflecting a certain German specificity in the international art world, he supports painting in the debates which, periodically since the 1970s, have predicted its demise as a mode of expression.

A Free, Eclectic and Internationally Monumental Painting
The most remarkable German artistic phenomena of the last 15 years has been the emergence on the international scene of the New Leipzig School that is well represented in the Burda collection. Rather than a school, it is an informal collective, based in the old East German town, that brings together generally figurative painters who have very diverse, even disparate, references: the classic artistic tradition as much as comic strips; graffiti and mass-media imagery, photography, socialist realism, Surrealism and hyper-realism. Artistic skill can be denigrated or emphasised and promoted. The result is a free and eclectic painting style that is intentionally monumental in its formats.

Neo Rauch is the most visible of the New Leipzig School artists and today has a wide international audience. His fantastical, timeless world is expressed in Interview (2006) in a dreamlike vision coloured with Surrealism. Flut I (1992-1993), inhabited by figurative debris, evokes some pictorial cataclysm. Much more serene is Tim Eitel’s painting, which reformulates German romantic sentiment in the language of modernity; the experience of photography is at the heart of Abend (2003). A hyperrealistic tendency is also present in the work of Eberhardt Havekost, (Alpennähe 2, 1999), whereas Heribert C. Ottersbach proposes, in Jasons Flucht (Moderne Kunstler) (2004) an Impressionist dissolution of the image.

Website : Musée Granet

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THE ROYAL ACADEMY CELEBRATES THE QUEEN'S DIAMOND JUBILEE WITH SEVERAL DISPLAYS

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Peter Greenham, R.A., Study for a Portrait of Her Majesty the Queen, 1964. Oil on canvas, 244.50 x 122.40 x 5.0 cm. Photo: ©Royal Academy of Arts, London; Photographer: Prudence Cuming Associates Limited.




This summer, as Britain celebrates the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the Royal Academy of Arts marks the occasion with a series of displays and events. Peter Greenham’s Study for a Portrait of Her Majesty the Queen (1964) has gone on show in the RA’s entrance hall, while displays in the John Madejski Fine Rooms celebrate the long-standing connection between the monarchy and the Royal Academy from its foundation in 1768 to the present day.


THE QUEEN’S ARTISTS
THE JOHN MADEJSKI FINE ROOMS
25 May – 12 August 2012

The Queen’s Artists features a selection of paintings, drawn from the Royal Academy’s Collection, by Royal Academicians elected during the early part of the Queen’s reign. The display in the Reynolds Room and Council Room includes works by Jean Cooke, Frederick Gore and Ruskin Spear. Subjects range from Richard Eurich’s fanciful reminiscence of a summer spent in Whitby in 1911 to Carel Weight’s depiction of people observing the two minute silence on Remembrance Sunday.

The Saloon house a fascinating selection of sculptures, paintings and drawings prepared by Royal Academicians for the nation’s coinage and royal seals, on loan from the Royal Mint Museum. Portraits of the Queen by Edward Bawden and Sir Charles Wheeler, never before shown in public, are exhibited alongside designs by current Royal Academicians James Butler, Tom Phillips and Christopher Le Brun PRA. Sir Anthony Caro’s new coin design for the London 2012 Games is also on show. This display is supported by the Royal Mint Museum.


THE KING’S ARTISTS: GEORGE III’S ACADEMY
TENNANT GALLERY
THE JOHN MADEJSKI FINE ROOMS
25 May – 21 October 2012

The King’s Artists: George III’s Academy in the Tennant Gallery brings to light George III’s instrumental role in the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768 and his influence upon the choice of artists invited to form its original membership. Dominating the exhibition are the imposing portraits of George and Queen Charlotte, painted by the Royal Academy’s first President, Sir Joshua Reynolds. These served as reminders of the RA’s great patrons, presiding over the institution in its resplendent, purpose-built, new apartments in Somerset House.

A newly discovered pencil study by Reynolds for his grand portrait of the monarch is being shown for the first time alongside the finished oil painting. On loan from a private collection, this sketch was hurriedly taken in one of the brief sittings that the king allowed and is a poignant reminder of how George and Joshua were obliged to put aside mutual antipathy for the sake of their Academy.
 
Website : Royal Academy of Arts
 
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DRESDEN CELEBRATES 500TH ANNIVERSARY OF RAPHAEL'S SISTINE MADONNA WITH EXHIBITION

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Raffael (Raffaello Santi), Die Sixtinische Madonna, 1512/13, 269,5 x 201 cm © Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.



In 1512, Raphael (1483-1520) was commissioned to paint the Sistine Madonna. In 2012, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden celebrate with a major exhibition the 500th anniversary year of the commission and the creation of the painting.

Divided in four sections, the exhibition will shed light on the art and cultural historic context as well as on the reception history of this masterpiece:

I. Raphael in Rome
This section of the exhibition presents the “Sistine Madonna” in the context of other Roman works by Raphael and those by other artists of the Renaissance. Important works by Raphael lent from international museum will be on view. Among them are the “Garvagh Madonna” (c. 1509/10) from the National Gallery in London or a fragment of an angel (c. 1512) from the Pinacoteca Vaticana. Other masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance are, for instance, the drawing “Mary in the Mandorla with Apostles and the kneeling Pope Sixtus IV” from the Albertina in Vienna as well as a Madonna by Filippino Lippi (c. 1475) from the Szépmüvészeti Museum in Budapest. Moreover, the commissioner, Pope Julius II, who had the Dresden altar piece painted for the monastery San Sisto in Piacenza, will be introduced in this section.

II. „Make room for the great Raphael!“ The spectacular acquisition of the “Sistine Madonna” by August III
For almost 250 years the “Sistine Madonna” nearly remained unknown in her original installation site in Piacenza. Only through the spectacular acquisition for the picture gallery in Dresden in 1752/54 did the painting appear in the public. Adolph Menzel recorded August’s legendary saying when the painting had arrived in his pastel “Make room for the great Raphael!” (1855/1859). The eventful purchase story will be presented by means of documents from the Saxon Principal State Archive Dresden, the Biblioteca Passerini-Landi and the Archivio Gulieri in Piacenza. Many of them have never been exhibited before.

III. On its way to becoming a myth – The “Sistine Madonna” in literature, art, music and design
Due to the public presentation of the “Sistine Madonna” in the picture gallery in Dresden, the reception of the artwork in literature, arts and crafts, photography and music started around 1800. As a parallel development, the Madonna was copied in paintings and graphic arts. Friedrich Bury’s painting “Electress Auguste copies the Sistine Madonna” (c. 1808/09) from the Museum Schloss Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel is just one example. Moreover, the painting was a favourite motive in magazines, embroidered pictures, advertisement, caricatures and scrapbooks of the middle class in the periods of the Biedermeier and the German Empire. The myth surrounding the painting continued in the 20th century when following World War II the painting was brought to Russia in 1945. According to the propagated legend, it was herewith rescued by the Soviet army. The rescue legend survived the painting’s return to Dresden in 1955 and, for instance, found its expression in the painting “The rescue of the Madonna” (1984/85) by Mikhail Kornetsky that is today in the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga.

IV. An international career: The little angels in kitsch and art
For the first time around 1800, the little angels were copied out of the entire content of the painting – that was the start for their solo career. The exhibition shows examples and caricatures from the early 19th century to the present.

Website : Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

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MAJOR INSTALLATION BY THE GERMAN ARTIST THOMAS KLIPPER AT KUNSTHAL CHARLOTTENBORG

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Thomas Kilpper, Pavilion for Revolutionary Free Speech, 2011-12. Anders Sune Berg. Installation shot, Kunsthal Charlottenborg.





This summer Kunsthal Charlottenborg presents a major installation by the German artist Thomas Kilpper, entitled Pavilion for Revolutionary Free Speech. The work was originally created for the Danish Pavilion in the 2011 Venice Biennale, where it took the form of a raised wooden platform attached to the pavilion. Into the wooden floor of this structure the artist carved 33 portraits including images of leading figures – in politics, business, church and media – from Italy, Denmark and other countries. All of them are people who Kilpper believes have been directly or indirectly responsible for promoting censorship, social exclusion or intolerance.

The portraits include personalities from our own day including internationally famous figures such as Silvio Berlusconi and Pope Benedict XVI. The Danish personalities portrayed were: Pia Kjærsgaard, the leader of the Danish People’s Party (DPP); Anders Fogh Rasmussen, formerly leader of the Liberal Party, who while Prime Minister relied on the DPP for support; and Flemming Rose, the journalist and former culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which commissioned and published the controversial Mohammad Cartoons in 2006.

The work was created for the group show Speech Matters curated by Katerina Gregos, which included eighteen artists from ten countries and was exhibited in the Danish Pavilion in Venice between June and November 2011. The exhibition explored the subject of free speech and Kilpper’s work constituted an ’alternative’ space next to the main pavilion. Kilpper’s Pavilion for Revolutionary Free Speech included a ‘Speakers’ Corner’ which featured talks by speakers invited by the artist, and from which members of the public could address the Biennale through an outsized megaphone.

When Speech Matters opened it was criticised in the Danish press by a number of politicians and commentators, who objected that the exhibition did not include enough Danish artists, or that public money was being used to commission foreign artists to represent Denmark, or that the public was being invited to trample on the faces of Kjærsgaard, Rasmussen and Rose. Other commentators defended the exhibition, while Kilpper pointed out that visitors did not have to step on the portraits, and that even if they did then it was not his intention that this should be an act of disrespect. Charlottenborg is now offering people who were not able to be in Venice the opportunity to see Kilpper’s work for themselves.

The floor panels of Kilpper’s pavilion were designed to also function as woodcut printing blocks, and the artist has subsequently been using them to make a variety of prints: in both fabric and paper; and including single portraits (each over a metre wide) as well as larger banners. At Charlottenborg the exhibition will include the entire floor, an installation of prints and an 18 metre wide banner on the building’s facade. Related works are being shown this year at dispari&dispari project, Reggio Emilia (February – April), Kunsthalle Bergen (March – April) and Ludwig Forum, Aachen (June – September). However, Charlottenborg is the only venue where the complete floor will be exhibited.

Thomas Kilpper was born in 1956 in Stuttgart and lives and works in Berlin. He was trained at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. His work has consistently investigated the relationship between history, politics and collective memory, often taking the form of large-scale site-specific installations and floor carvings. Kilpper has exhibited across Europe and America, with recent installations that include: State of Control, created in the former GDR State Security (‘Stasi’) HQ, Berlin (2009); and Anemonevej Surprises, created in a group of empty apartments in Nakskov, Denmark, for the Tumult festival (2010). Since 2006 Kilpper has also run the Berlin-based project space after the butcher.

Website : Kunsthal Charlottenborg
 
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MUSEUMS IN HANNOVER PRESENT AN OVERVIEW OF THE CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL ART SCENCE IN GERMANY

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The Sprengel Museum Hannover, the kestnergesellschaft and the Kunstverein Hannover are presenting a large overview of the contemporary international art scene in Germany entitled MADE IN GERMANY ZWEI, which opened on May 16, 2012. The exhibition shows groundbreaking positions of a younger generation of international artists living and working in Germany. Thematic emphases illustrate and relate today’s artistic concerns. Current tendencies, artistic approaches and forms of expression are examined and discussed in reference to Germany’s international art world. Following nationwide studio visits, the 45 participating artists were introduced at the press conference on May 15, 2012. The artists come from fourteen different countries, thirty-three of them are based in Berlin and twenty female artists are participating.

MADE IN GERMANY ZWEI focuses on six main themes conceived to highlight current artistic concerns. The curators of the exhibition place the artistic involvement with (social, virtual, institutional) “Spaces,” “Narrativity,” “Networkings,” with “The past in the present,” with the “Super-sensory,” and with the limitations and stretching of the medium (“Medium as material”) at the center of their inquiry into the current state of artistic creativity in Germany as possible approaches to the exhibition. Many of the works in the show were created specifically for MADE IN GERMANY ZWEI.

The exhibition is the successor of the popular 2007 show “Made in Germany,” the three art centers’ first collaborative exhibition. The successful show conveyed an impression of the active, prolific and varied art scene in the country. It included several artists who were discovered internationally as a result of the exhibition, which had over 60,000 visitors and around 400 reviews.

THEMATIC FIELDS OF THE EXHIBITION

Medium as Material describes an intense engagement with the possibilities of the mediums of painting, photography, film or sculpture. On the one hand, a specific occupation with different materials is observable: Their structure and exterior surface are combined and, like colors in painting, brought into an aesthetic force field and set in relation to one another. On the other hand, artists are trying to do away with the boundaries separating the single mediums, to mediate between painting and photography, photography and sculpture, but also between analogue and digital techniques, and connect them. Thus the medium becomes the actual artistic material, its message. This is also reflected in the impact of the computer and of representational and communicational virtuality on our dealings with the tangible world.

(> Rosa Barba, Alexandra Bircken, Marieta Chirulescu, Simon Denny, Jan Paul Evers, Max Frisinger, Gregor Gleiwitz, Olaf Holzapfel, Keller/Kosmas (Aids-3D), Nina Rhode, Ricarda Roggan, Julia Schmidt, Susanne M. Winterling, Alexander Wolff)

A general art-historical interest in the contemporary art of the last ten years has led us to embed The Past in the Present. However what is crucial here is not the direct influence of the respective teachers who interact with artists and who they build on, rather points of contact can be found in artists’ wider historical recourse to the fields of Romanticism, pre-modernism and modernism, in Surrealism and, above all, in Constructivism. These are the eras that mark clear ‘sea changes’ in cultural history and that artistically transmit a utopian vision that today seems to have lost its way. “The Past in the Present” is shown in the form of direct references to certain artists or artworks or, as may be, in a reloading of past art styles and aesthetics. Beyond any formal allusions, the occupation with concrete historical events or figures can be observed. Straightforward forms of research that exploit the past as a matrix for a perspective on the present make it clear that this is not about any kind of historicizing repetition, but that the searching out, re-sorting, reworking and translating defines part of the makeup of contemporary art.

(> Natalie Czech, Simon Fujiwara, Cyprien Gaillard, Dirk Dietrich Hennig, Benedikt Hipp, Sven Johne, Alon Levin, Reynold Reynolds, Bernd Ribbeck, Kathrin Sonntag, Helen Verhoeven, Susanne M. Winterling)

Elements of a storyline and its reflection, of the occupation with Narrativity, are noted time and again in contemporary art. Not only, as expected, the field of films, but also installations and drawings lead the viewer to different forms of narration. In MADE IN GERMANY ZWEI, historical research and fiction are often superimposed. Researched facts and elements of fiction are seamlessly combined. Or the research behind, and the presentation of, the revisited documents form the basis of a fictive story that is then narrated. The depicted research is evidence for the credibility of the fiction as well as the medium of the narrative. The viewer reconstructs the connection between the single elements, fills the blanks in the fragmentary story and him/herself (re)constructs a fiction offered by the artist.

(> Keren Cytter, Omer Fast, Simon Fujiwara, Dirk Dietrich Hennig, Sven Johne, Reynold Reynolds, Julia Schmidt, Jorinde Voigt)

Networkings enter the picture in different ways in MADE IN GERMANY ZWEI. In their works, several contemporary artists develop a web of allusions and references. Their references can go back to historical artworks, artists or theoretical texts that exist outside of the art world. Other artists, in turn, develop a web-like reference system in which one work alludes to another or evolves out of it. Networked thinking and (re)acting is here reflected, as promoted, not least of all, by the Internet as well as by the enormous increase in mobility of all kinds. The artworks show themselves to be relative to, and always related to, other works, representative of a mobility that present-day life has taken up.

(> Saâdane Afif, Shannon Bool, Mike Bouchet, Matti Braun, Natalie Czech, Olaf Holzapfel, Marcellvs L., Michael Pfrommer, Michael Riedel, Jorinde Voigt, Suse Weber)

The theme of Spaces is qualified by various artistic engagements with surrounding space. This is, for one, understood as the concrete experience with physical space and its thematization in installations and sculptures. And two, at issue is an occupation with the production of space via actions, representations and experiences, of strategies to cope with everyday, social and virtual spaces, their boundaries and possibilities.

(> Ulf Aminde, Shannon Bool, Mike Bouchet, Keren Cytter, Keller/Kosmas (Aids-3D), Kitty Kraus, Klara Lidén, Agata Madejska, Mandla Reuter, Alexander Wolff)

Just as artists redefine medial, historical or categorical boundaries, some of them try to extend the sensually knowable to include a metaphysical dimension. Thus in different ways, some of their works point beyond the object or the picture to aspects of the enigmatic or the metaphysical, aspects that cling to what is sensually unverifiable. This interest in the non-sensual or even the Super-Sensory is above all the expression of mistrust in the supposedly one-dimensional meaning of a picture.

(> Rosa Barba, Ulla von Brandenburg, Nina Canell, Benedikt Hipp, Alicja Kwade, Michael Pfrommer, Bernd Ribbeck, Kathrin Sonntag)

The curators of MADE IN GERMANY ZWEI are Susanne Figner, Martin Germann, Antonia Lotz, Kathrin Meyer, Carina Plath, Gabriele Sand, Kristin Schrader, Ute Stuffer and René Zechlin. The exhibition’s organisers are the directors Ulrich Krempel (Sprengel Museum Hannover), Veit Görner (kestnergesellschaft) and René Zechlin (Kunstverein Hannover).

The exhibition is under the patronage of Federal President Joachim Gauck.

Website : Sprengel Museum Hannover
Website : Kunstverein Hannover
Website : kestnergesellschaft

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RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION INTRODUCES THE PUBLIC TO THE LIFE AND WORK OF EVA BESNYÖ

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Eva Besnyö, Sans titre, 1931, (Le lido de Wannsee, Berlin). Épreuve gélatino-argentique, 40 x 50 cm. Collection privée, Berlin.© Eva Besnyö / Maria Austria Instituut Amsterdam.



In 1930, when Eva Besnyö arrived in Berlin at the age of only twenty, a certificate of successful apprenticeship from a recognised Budapest photographic studio in her bag, she had made two momentous decisions already: to turn photography into her profession and to put fascist Hungary behind her for ever.
Like her Hungarian colleagues Moholy-Nagy, Kepes and Munkacsi and – a little later – Capa, Besnyö experienced Berlin as a metropolis of deeply satisfying artistic experimentation and democratic ways of life. She had found work with the press photographer Dr. Peter Weller and roamed the city with her camera during the day, searching for motifs on construction sites, by Lake Wannsee, at the zoo or in the sports stadiums, and her photographs were published – albeit, as was customary at the time, under the name of the studio. Besnyö’s best-known photo originates from those years: the gypsy boy with a cello on his back – an image of the homeless tramp that has become familiar all over the world.

Eva Besnyö had a keen political sense, evidenced by the fact that she fled in good time from anti-Semitic, National Socialist persecution, leaving Berlin for Amsterdam in autumn 1932. Supported by the circle surrounding woman painter Charley Toorop, filmmaker Joris Ivens and designer Gerrit Rietveld, Besnyö — meanwhile married to cameraman John Fernhout — soon enjoyed public recognition as a photographer. An individual exhibition in the internationally respected Van Lier art gallery in 1933 made her reputation in the Netherlands practically overnight. Besnyö experienced a further breakthrough with her architectural photography only a few years later: translating the idea of functionalist “New Building” into a “New Seeing”.

In the second half of the 30s, Besnyö demonstrated an intense commitment to cultural politics, e.g. at the anti-Olympiad exhibition “D-O-O-D” (De Olympiade onder Diktatuur) in 1936; in the following year, 1937, she was curator of the international exhibition “foto ’37” in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

The invasion of German troops in May 1940 meant that as a Jew, Eva Besnyö was compelled to go into hiding underground. She was attracted to a world view shaped by humanism in the post-war years, and her photographs became stylistically decisive for neo-Realism and immensely suitable for the moralising exhibition, the “Family of Man” (1955).

The mother of two children, she had experienced the classic female conflict between bringing up children and a profession career as a crucial and very personal test. Consequentially, Besnyö became an activist in the Dutch women’s movement “Dolle Mina” during the 70s, making a public commitment to equal rights and documenting demonstrations and street protests on camera.

This first retrospective exhibition at Jeu de Paume, showing ca.120 vintage prints, aims to introduce the public to the life and work of this emigrant and “Berliner by choice”, a convinced cosmopolitan and the “Grande Dame” of Dutch photography. “Like many other talents, that of Eva Besnyö was lost to Germany and its creative art as a direct consequence of the National Socialists’ racial mania.” (Karl Steinorth, DGPh, 1999)

Curators: Marion Beckers and Elisabeth Moortgat

Website : Jeu de Paume - Paris

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FIRST MAJOR EXHIBITION IN GERMANY FOCUSING ON EL GRECO'S PAINTINGS IN DÜSSELDORF

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El Greco, Die unbefleckte Empfängnis, 1607-1613, Öl auf Leinwand, 108 x 82 cm, © Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid



El Greco and Modernism is the first major exhibition in Germany focusing on El Greco’s paintings and pictorial world. Taking place one hundred years after a ground-breaking El Greco exhibition that toured Europe, El Greco and Modernism illustrates how the Old Master inspired and fascinated many artists of the early Modernist period.


Born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Crete, 1541, El Greco moved to Italy, and later Madrid and finally Toledo in Spain, where he remained until his death in 1614. His paintings had a profound impact on the work of many modern artists including Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso and Delaunay.

This exhibition will be shown exclusively at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf. It unites over 100 works – paintings, sculptures, drawings – by around 38 artists from the early Modernist period and over 40 important works by El Greco, above all portraits, landscapes and works on religious themes.

A major highlight includes The Immaculate Conception, loaned by the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. There will be also shown works from the artist’s workshop. The exhibition also includes key masterpieces such as El Greco’s only surviving panel picture, Laocoön, loaned by the National Gallery of Art, Washington. In this striking and influential work El Greco explores Greek mythology. Also on show will be The Opening of the Fifth Seal loaned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Visitors will have the rare opportunity to view Laocoön together with Ludwig Meidner’s Three Wailing Figures in the Apocalyptic Landscape as part of hisApocalyptic Landscapes as well theThe Descent from the Cross by Max Beckmann, from MoMA, New York, and El Greco’s El Espolio from the Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

El Greco and Modernism brings together works from the world’s leading museums such as MoMA, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Museo del Greco, Toledo, The National Gallery, London, The National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, Alte Pinakothek, Munich and the Musée du Louvre, Paris.

El Greco’s oeuvre was discovered by the German public circa 1910 following the publication of Julius Meier-Graefe’s diary, The Spanish Journey. The art historian had encountered El Greco’s painting in Spain in 1908. His diary describes the strong impression El Greco’s art made on him.

Even though the notion of ‘El Greco and Modernism’ has been a recurring topic for over 100 years, an exhibition on the subject has remained a desideratum. The Düsseldorf exhibition provides a fascinating insight into the oeuvre of El Greco as well as the evolution of Modernism.

It is particularly timely that El Greco and Modernism goes on show inDüsseldorf in 2012. Exactly one hundred years ago, a selection of ten paintings by El Greco went on show in the city, having been shown in Munich in 1911. The paintings were shown within an exhibition of the Hungarian private collection Marcell Nemes, hosted by the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. In the same year, a small number of El Greco’s pictures were presented in the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, jointly with works by Picasso and van Gogh. Thus, for many artists of the Rhineland, the summer of 1912 provided the very first direct encounter with El Greco works.

Beat Wismer, General Director, Museum Kunstpalast, says:‘In the 1912 “Almanach Der Blaue Reiter”, Franz Marc captured the insights of many artists in a nutshell: “Cézanne and Greco are kindred spirits across the centuries which separate them.”’

The touring exhibition of 1912 had a profound impact on a new generation of artists. Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Oppenheimer, Ludwig Meidner were all influenced by the paintings. Key representatives of the Blaue Reiter movement, such as August Macke, Franz Marc, Albert Bloch, recognised the Old Master as one of the father figures of Modernism and mentioned his name in the same vein as Cézanne. The complex psychological possibilities offered in El Greco’s paintings made him became a key figure for avant-garde artists. In particular, the artist’s late works, with their exaggerated figures, distorted pictorial spaces, dream-like landscapes Mannerist aesthetic and striking use of colour, attracted a great deal of attention.

Beat Wismer, General Director, Museum Kunstpalast, explains: ‘The exhibition will trace two important aspects of reception history: On the one hand, El Greco, who in Germany from 1910 onwards was regarded as one of the fathers of Modernism in the same vein as Cézanne, is brought together with those representatives of the Modernist period – Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, Delaunay – on whom he had a formative influence in the view of art historians, museums, but also artists of the time. On the other hand, with direct reference to selected works, the exhibition aims to examine the elective affinity between German and Austrian Expressionists, such as Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, August Macke, Franz Marc, Ludwig Meidner, Max Oppenheimer and El Greco, and El Greco’s influence on these artists.’

The 2012 exhibition at Museum Kunstpalast paves the way towards a major exhibition in Madrid and Toledo scheduled to take place in 2014, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of El Greco’s death.

Website : Museum Kunstpalast

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MARC QUINN EXHIBITION AT THE OCEANOGRAPHIC MUSEUM OF MONACO

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A major exhibition of works by Marc Quinn has gone on show at the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco from 12 May to 15 October 2012. "The Littoral Zone" exhibition includes Sculptures, paintings and installations by the artist which arel being shown throughout the museum, alongside its collection of marine specimens and underwater fauna, setting up a fascinating dialogue between art and science.

Over 60 works by Marc Quinn are being shown both inside and outside the museum including new works such as the The Origin of the World (Cassis madagascariensis) Indian Ocean, 310, a huge 3 metre bronze shell, new underwater paintings from the series The Zone and the unveiling of the latest version of Marc Quinn's Self sculptures, Self 2011. Other pieces in the show include Planet, a 10m bronze baby and a series of burning sculptures which thanks to new technology, can burn with real fire inside the museum without a flue. The relationship between art and science is explored both in the museum collection and the artists work.

Built on the side of the mythical Rock of Monaco, the Oceanographic Museum was designed as a palace dedicated to the sea, displaying the results of the oceanographic expeditions carried out by its founder, Prince Albert I of Monaco - great grandfather of the Sovereign Prince Albert II of Monaco. It aims to educate visitors about the life of the sea and to raise awareness about its fragility. The museum has a large collection of marine specimens and houses an outstanding aquarium, bringing together more than 4,000 species of fish and invertebrates. Its Shark Lagoon, a giant 400,000 litre tank, displays the extraordinary diversity of the coral reef.

Marc Quinn was born in London in 1964. He studied history and the history of art at the University of Cambridge (1982-85) and began working as a sculptor in 1984. Marc Quinn is represented by the White Cube Gallery in London and by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg and Paris. His works of art can be found in many major museums and private collections worldwide.

His solo exhibitions include: Tate Gallery, London (1995), Kunstverein Hannover (1999), Fondazione Prada, Milan (2000), Tate Liverpool (2002), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2004), Groninger Museum, Groningen (2006) and MACRO, Rome (2006), DHC/ART Fondation pour l’art contemporain, Montréal (2007),the Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2009) and Kistefos-Museet in Norway. (2011) He lives and works in London.

Website : Oceanographic Museum of Monaco

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'THE QUEEN: ART AND IMAGE' ON DISPLAY AT THE NATIONAL POTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON

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The National Portrait Gallery’s touring exhibition of some of the most remarkable and resonant images of The Queen across 60 years of her reign – opens in London today ahead of her Diamond Jubilee weekend celebrations.

From Beaton and Leibovitz to Annigoni and Warhol, The Queen: Art and Image is the most wide-ranging exhibition of images in different media devoted to a single royal sitter. Formal painted portraits, official photographs, media pictures, and powerful responses by contemporary artists are shown in an exhibition that has both traditional representations with unconventional works that extend the visual language of royal portraiture.

Documenting the changing nature of representations of the Monarch, the exhibition shows how images serve as a lens through which the shifting perceptions of royalty can be viewed. This perspective reflects radical artistic changes. It also demonstrates fundamental shifts in the social scene and historical context, and the exhibition highlights important developments and events: from The Queen’s ambiguous relationship with the press, to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the advent of new technology. This multi-textured view of the period is emphasised by the inclusion, alongside fine art, of material drawn from newspapers, film footage, postage stamps and satirical images.

Among the highlights of the works from life are both Annigoni’s celebrated commissions, his iconic 1954-5 portrait and also his very different but no less magisterial 1969 commission for the National Portrait Gallery, Lucian Freud’s 2000-1 portrait from the Royal Collection and Thomas Struth’s compelling recent large-scale photograph depicting The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh. Among other exhibited photographers for whom The Queen sat are Annie Leibovitz, Dorothy Wilding, Cecil Beaton (whose iconic Westminster Abbey Coronation image will be on display) and Chris Levine, whose highly unusual photograph from 2004 of The Queen with her eyes closed will be included.

Alongside these commissions, The Queen: Art and Image shows a rich selection of unofficial portraits of the British monarch from major twentieth-century artists including those of Gilbert and George, Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter, as well as arresting, spontaneous portraits by such photographers as Eve Arnold, Patrick Lichfield and Lord Snowdon.

Collectively, the exhibition celebrates and explores the startling range of artistic creativity and media-derived imagery that The Queen has inspired. It also probes the relation of this imagery to a world of changing values during a reign that has engaged the attention of millions.

The Queen: Art and Image, organised by the National Portrait Gallery, comes to London following a highly successful tour to Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff.

Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, says: ‘The Queen is the most portrayed person in British history, reflecting her long reign and also the respect and affection that is felt towards her. The National Portrait Gallery is very pleased to have shared this exhibition with our other national partners in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff and delighted that it now comes to London ahead of The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee weekend celebrations.’

John Griffith-Jones, Senior Partner and Chairman of KPMG in the UK, says: ‘KPMG is pleased to support what will be a fascinating visual chronology of The Queen’s reign. With such a wide range of imagery and artistic styles, I am sure the exhibition will be of huge interest to many people, and will form a significant part of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations.’

The exhibition is curated by Paul Moorhouse, the National Portrait Gallery’s Curator of Twentieth-Century Portraits. At the National Portrait Gallery he has curated the major retrospectives: Gerhard Richter Portraits and Pop Art Portraits. As part of the Gallery’s on-going Interventions series of displays focusing on unconventional approaches to portraiture he has curated Bridget Riley: From Life, Tony Bevan: Self Portraits, John Gibbons: Portraits, Frank Auerbach: Four Portraits of Catherine Lampert, Andy Warhol: 10 Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century and Anthony Caro: Portraits.

Website : National Portrait Gallery


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FIRST EXHIBITION IN SPAIN DEDICATED TO DAVID HOCKNEY'S LANDSCAPES IN BILBAO

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Winter  Timber 2009



Organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is the first major exhibition held in Spain to celebrate the crucial role landscape plays in the career of this artist, considered the most important living British painter.

Bright landscapes inspired by his native county of Yorkshire form the core of this exhibition which, with Iberdrola’s sponsorship, brings together on the Museum’s second floor around 150 works—oil paintings, charcoals, iPad drawings, sketchbooks and digital videos—most of which have been created in the past eight years. This exhibition offers a unique vision into Hockney's creative world and demonstrates his enormous capacity to represent nature using different techniques, as well as revealing his attachment to the landscape of his youth.

The exhibition also illustrates the extent to which the depiction of the natural environment has been present throughout the artist's career, even when other subjects were the focus of his output. A selection of works from 1956—during his student days in Bradford—until 1998 contextualizes Hockney’s later landscapes and reveals his early preoccupation with the representation of space and his use of color and manipulation of perspective to reflect the natural world.

One of the large, petal-shaped galleries designed by Frank Gehry houses Hockney's early works, which come from different public and private international collections and date from the late 1950s, while he was still a student, and the 1960s, such as Flight into Italy – Swiss Landscape (1962), a stylized representation of Alpine peaks. Exhibited alongside them are two of his famous photographic collages from the 1980s, Grand Canyon Looking North, Sept. 1982 and Pearblossom Highway, 11–18 April 1986 # 1, a work in which a road draws the viewer into the painting, showcasing Hockney’s experimentation with perspective and the representation of pictorial space in Cubism.

This same space with curved walls features his two paintings of the Grand Canyon, made in 1998, including the spectacular landscape A Closer Grand Canyon (1998), which is more than seven meters long. From the same year is Garrowby Hill (1998), a work created from memory in the studio after his return to Yorkshire in 1997 to spend time with his friend Jonathan Silver, who was terminally ill and had always supported his career. The drive between his mother’s house and his friend’s deathbed in the town of Wetherby familiarized Hockney further with the landscapes of his youth and inspired a deep interest in and affection for its features.

Recent Landscapes
The Museum’s classical galleries, the starting point of the exhibition tour, display six series of works created between 2005 and 2009 that reveal Hockey’s deep curiosity and energy in embracing the myriad possibilities of landscape art, both when painting from observation and when using his memories and imagination in the studio. As the artist said, “We see psychologically” through the filter of our personal memories.

The first gallery houses a large group of small-scale oil paintings and watercolors made by the artist in 2004 and 2005 directly from observation. They were painted following the publication in 2001 of Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Masters, in which he argues the enormous influence the camera lens had on painting from the fifteenth century onwards.

When he returned to painting after this period of investigation, Hockney deliberately rejected the camera’s influence and started to paint directly from observation. It was an extraordinarily prolific period in which the artist depicted numerous landscapes in Yorkshire, such as Path Through Wheat Field July (2005), Woldgate, 27 July 2005 (2005) and Fridaythorpe Valley, August 2005 (2005), which can be seen in this first gallery.

Also on display along with his watercolors and oil paintings is the representation of a small farm track that the artist refers to as “The Tunnel” in East Yorkshire. The road or track is a strong motif in his recent landscapes and is also reminiscent of some of his early paintings.

The artist's emotional involvement with the landscape of his childhood and youth is also clear in the series of works The Woldgate Woods and Thixendale Trees created between 2006 and 2008 and on display in the Museum’s second classical gallery. In these two groups of work Hockney employs the discipline of working in a series, and by doing so focuses attention on the landscapes changing conditions and the subtle modulations of light.

The last gallery shows a representation of the cycle of nature in full through a series of works created by Hockney from both observation and memory and imagination in the studio: from the group called Hawthorn Blossom, which anticipates the arrival of spring through the flowering of the hawthorn, to the Trees and Totems series, in which works such as Winter Timber (2009)—more than 6 meters wide—show lifeless felled trees.

The same space also houses a small selection of charcoal drawings of trees and “totems” (stumps) which the artist painted directly from observation and to which he turned in order to recreate the same subject in the studio.

The Arrival of Spring
Dominating one of the Museum’s massive, irregular galleries is the monumental The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (Twenty-Eleven), which allows observers to feel how the excitement of this season emerging around them. This glorious tribute to nature is an installation consisting of one large 32 canvas paintings, surrounded by 51 iPad drawings printed out on paper, all of which record the transition from winter through to late spring on a small road in East Yorkshire and reveal Hockney’s experience in designing opera sets.

The three paintings of Woldgate that are also on display in this gallery were painted in the studio from the artist's memory and focus on what Hockney himself considered, without judgment, a “small subject”, but one in which a certain dramatic sense of nature can be perceived.

The Sermon on the Mount
From curving walls to another of the Museum’s most impressive spaces, the stunning oil painting entitled A Bigger Message (2010), which is more than seven meters long, envelops the viewer. In December 2009, during a visit to The Frick Collection in New York, Hockney was attracted by the work The Sermon on the Mount, painted in 1656 by French artist Claude Lorrain. The fascination he felt for this work lay not in the biblical scene that it portrays, but in the spatial effect Claude achieved.

Subsequently, the artist made a life-size transcription of the painting and then a number of studies, some faithful to the original and others more stylized. The project culminated in the 30-canvas oil painting entitled A Bigger Message. Although much larger than The Sermon on the Mount, this work maintains the structure of Claude’s, but in applying his own technique, Hockney transforms the subject into a monumental work, one “message” of which is the artful depiction of space.

The same interest in capturing the sublime landscape Hockney found in Claude Lorrain’s work also prompted the artist to take the Yosemite National Park in America as a subject. Hockney was already familiar with this outstandingly beautiful natural area, but only following his prolonged focus on the Yorkshire landscape did he consider it a possible subject for his large works. His mastery of the iPad enabled him to capture the dramatic light and weather conditions swiftly and adapt his technique to allow for the increased size of the printed images, which represent the most recent and largest works in the exhibition, on view in this space.

Sketchbooks and films
The sketchbooks provide a wonderful insight into both the inspiration behind many of the paintings in the exhibition and their composition.

The exhibition also shows the artist's interest in new technologies throughout his career: from his early use of the Polaroid camera, his innovative incorporation of the color copier and use of the iPhone and iPad; in addition, this interest is especially evident in a number of new films produced with up to 18 cameras, which are presented on multiple screens, showing the use of the techniques developed in his paintings in video format and transporting the visitor on a bewitching journey through David Hockney’s eyes.

Website : Guggenhiem Museum Bilbao

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150 RECENT WORKS BY CHINESE ARTIST XU JIANG IN EXHIBITION AT THE KUNSTHALLE IM LIPSIUSBAU DRESDEN

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A woman walks in front of the sculpture 'Living together' (2012) in the exhibition 'Re-Generation' of Chinese artist Xu Jiang in the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, a museum of the Dresden State Art Collection (SKD), in Dresden, eastern Germany, on Tuesday, May 15, 2012. About 150 of his recent works like oil paintings and sculptures are on display. Sunflowers, those plants which adjust themselves towards the sun, form the central subject of the exhibition. It is the first exhibition of Xu Jiang in Germany, an exhibition developed jointly by the Dresden State Art Collection, the National Art Museum of China und der China Academy of Art Hangzhou. The exhibition starts on May 17, 2011 and lasts until Aug. 18, 2012. AP Photo/Jens Meyer.





The exhibition has been jointly developed by the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the National Art Museum of China and the China Academy of Art Hangzhou. With more than 150 paintings and works on paper as well as two monumental sculptures, the exhibit is Xu Jiang’s first large retrospective in Germany and is an integral part of the Chinese Year of Culture 2012.

Sunflowers, those plants which adjust themselves towards the sun, form the central subject of the exhibition. In the eyes of the artist, they have become symbolic of an entire generation, the generation that grew up after the great wars of the 20th century and the Cultural Revolution. During this time, not only the Chinese history but also individual biographies were subject to unrelenting change.

Xu Jiang’s ‘sunflower generation’ has been shaped by the task of coming to terms with the country’s historical upheaval, by a disengagement from the past and by the necessity of finding new orientation. Through his exhibition, the artist fosters a dialogue about how to redefine artistic positions in the wake of historical events. In a dialogue between artists and visitors, he seeks to explore the spiritual core of a shared history which is rooted in similar social and artistic experiences.

Xu Jiang was born in Fujian, China, in 1955. He is principal and professor at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. He deals in great depth with the cultural context in which he creates his works. At the same time, his works are about the exchange between Western and Eastern cultures. His painting is regarded as an opposition to contemporary visual and consumer culture, a new development in the Chinese art discourse in the digital age.

As director of the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, Xu Jiang has profoundly shaped and reformed the conception of art studies in China with his innovative ideas. Through his work he establishes creative free spaces for experimental art and open debates.

Website : Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau

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SLOW ART: TECHNIQUE, MATERIALS AND PAINSTAKING PROCESSES TAKE CENTRE STAGE AT NATIONALMUSEUM STOCKHOLM

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10 May marked the start of Nationalmuseum’s Slow Art, an exhibition where technique, materials and painstaking processes take centre stage. The focus is on doing things well rather than quickly, on quality over quantity. The exhibition presents 30 or so works of applied art – all unique examples of superb craftsmanship.

Few people remain unmoved by things made with great care and attention to detail. In the old days, fine craftsmanship was much sought after. Since the industrialisation of the early 20th century, however, such skills have no longer been so highly valued. Instead, efficiency and time-saving processes have been the desired goal for many in modern Western society.

It can therefore be difficult to fathom why some people still choose to develop their artistic creativity by immersing themselves in one or more craft techniques. It might even feel a little frightening and provocative to some. After all, what is it that these artists achieve through their persistent, slow and often long-winded work, punctuated by repeated tasks that commonly lead to physical pain? What drives Renata Francescon to mould china clay into rose petals hour after hour, day after day? Why does Tore Svensson insist, year after year, on hammering bowls out of cold iron, even though his body can take no more than a couple of hours of such toil per day? What does Lotta Åström get out of coiling steel wire into a tight spiral that she then saws up into tiny, tiny rings, and then painstakingly solders together to make jewellery like chain mail?

There is no simple answer to these questions – just the knowledge that their goal is to do with more than financial gain through efficient production. They are driven by the satisfaction that individuals can achieve by challenging themselves on a profound level, putting their stamina and their technical skills to the test. A satisfaction that money just cannot buy. Perhaps these artists and craftspeople can be compared to the extreme adventurers who push themselves to the limit up mountains and across icy plains?

Slow Art is about a different perspective on time and manufacturing processes. With this concept, Nationalmuseum is celebrating a contemporary movement in the design world. In a society largely driven by short-term financial gain, the phenomena encompassed by the Slow concept indicate a conscious distancing from prevailing values and circumstances. The term has made its way into a number of modern movements, such as Slow Food (the opposite of Fast Food), Slow Travel, Slow Craft, Slow Design, Slow Fashion, Slow Media and Slow Consumption. People’s need to slow down and create space for reflection has been summarised under the banner of the Slow Movement. Its advocates speak up for an existence that is not driven by a constant battle against the clock, by financial profit and short-term buywear-discard consumption.

Like other Slow movements, Slow Art is a relatively marginal phenomenon. But it is interesting for the light that it sheds on our own existence. Slow Art is about doing things well rather than quickly, valuing quality over quantity. It is about treating materials – our shared natural resources – with care and thus also showing consideration for future generations. It is about seeing the value in slowness.

The Slow Art exhibition presents around 30 objects from the past three decades made in glass, ceramic, textiles, metal, wood and paper. Most of the works come from Nationalmuseum’s collection of applied art and design. The artists on show include Helena Hörstedt, Mafune Gonjo, Eva Hild, Helena Edman, Sebastian Schildt, Helena Sandström, Annika Ekdahl, Pasi Välimaa and Karen Bit Vejle.

Website : Nationalmuseum

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CZECH ART NOUVEAU GEM BY ALFONS MUCHA ON VIEW AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY IN PRAGUE

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The "Slav Epic", a cycle of 20 allegories tracing the history of the Slavic people and inspired in part by mythology, by Art Nouveau Czech artist Alfons Mucha, at the National Gallery in Prague."The Slav Epic" by Alfons Mucha, a Czech Art Nouveau gem, went on display in Prague, fulfilling the wish of the artist who spent 18 years on the series of paintings from 1910 to 1928.




Alfons Mucha (1860–1939) was the most famous Czech modern artist. He attained international fame in Paris at the turn of the 20th century for his original Secessionist decorative art. He saw his own purpose in life, however, in a project that he regarded as much more important: The Slav Epic, a collection of twenty monumental paintings that he worked on between 1912 and 1926. The complete collection was presented to the Prague public for the first time in 1928 on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the independence of the Czechoslovak state. That exhibition took place in the just built Veletržní palace (Trade Fair Palace) and it has returned to that location today. The current installation is based on Mucha’s original arrangement of the Slav Epic following the chronology of the themes in the paintings. This arrangement brings out the inherent ties between the paintings, underscores the rhythm of the series, and highlights the main aim of this grand work, into which Mucha invested the best of his abilities for many years. Even before Mucha began working on the Slav Epic he decided to dedicate it to the City of Prague and he delivered the paintings one by one over time to the city’s representatives.

The thematic timespan of the Slav Epic stretches from impressive visions of early Slav history and the veneration of pagan gods, to the depiction of real culturally and intellectually significant historical events, to the closing vision of the intellectual significance of the Slavs for all of humanity. On ten of the canvases Mucha portrayed scenes from Czech history: the ‘Czech epic’is the central theme of the work. Mucha focused on the Hussite movement and the Czech Brethren, which, like František Palacký, Ernest Denis, Jaroslav Bidlo, and Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, he regarded as the most important stages in Czech history. He drew his information and inspiration from expert literature and discussions with historians, archaeologists, and folklorists. It was not, however, his intention to draw history. The selected themes invite readings and interpretations on several levels; they express Mucha’s philosophy of history based on humanistic ideals. The next ten canvases are devoted to the other Slavs and to pan-Slavic scenes. Mucha based the facts and the atmosphere of the depicted locations on his own knowledge. Since he would never have been able to cover the costs of the material, models, and study trips, he was able to obtain support for the project of the Slav Epic from the American millionaire and Slavophile Charles Richard Crane, who was a long-time friend of T. G. Masaryk and President T. W. Wilson.

To accompany the exhibition, City Gallery Prague in collaboration with Arbor Vitae Publishers has published a monograph on the Slav Epic, edited by Lenka Bydžovská and Karel Srp in cooperation with Miroslav Petříček, Markéta Theinhardtová, Dominique Lobstein, and Tomáš Berger. Rich in illustrations, the publication provides a current look at the Slav Epic, analyses and interpretations of the paintings, a detailed chronology, a selection of contemporary criticism and comments, and an anthology of texts by Mucha. Graphic layout by Jan Šerých.

Website : City Gallery Prague

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MOST COMPREHENSIVE ONE MAN EXHIBITION TO DATE OF BELGIAN ARTIST KRIS MARTIN AT AARGAUER KUNSTHAUS

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Kris Martin, T.Y.F.F.S.H., 2009. Hot air balloon, ventilators, Dimensions variable, Edition 1 + 1AP. Collection Mimi and Filiep Libeert, Courtesy Johann König, Berlin, Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles. Exhibition view Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau, Photo: Dominic Büttner, Zurich.





The Aargauer Kunsthaus presents the most comprehensive one man exhibition to date of Belgian artist Kris Martin (b. 1972) in Europe. Titled Every Day of the Weak, the show assembles Kris Martin’s pivotal works of recent years, thus covering for the first time the entire range and diversity of his oeuvre. The exhibition was organized in cooperation with the Kunstmuseum Bonn and the kestnergesellschaft in Hannover.

In 2010, the anniversary exhibition Yesterday Will Be Better at the Aargauer Kunsthaus opened with Kris Martin’s large scale, clattering arrival/departure display. The current retrospective – the artist’s first - shows that the theme of time (and time travel), transience and finitude plays an important role throughout his oeuvre. Ranging from installation, sculpture, photography and drawing to writing and sound, his diverse art tends to convey intense experiences of life and death. This is particularly evident when Kris Martin examines his own mortality in a very direct way, reproducing, in Still Alive, his own skull as a death’s head and thereby anticipating his own death. He conducts an inquiry into the fleetingness and fragility of life with reference to himself, while at the same always addressing the viewer. That life and death, or beauty and terror, can sometimes be so close to one another is visualised by a work that consists of over 700 shiny grenade shells. These found objects from World War I were once engraved with floral designs by soldiers and kept as souvenirs. Originally instruments of destruction, Kris Martin piles them up like a gold treasure.

Kris Martin examines and questions cultural conditions surrounding us. In the process he makes reference to literary and art history and, by embedding Christian iconography, also raises questions about present-day possibilities of religion and spirituality. An impressive example of this is his work titled For Whom - a large church bell that even in motion does not produce any sound, for it is missing its clapper. Swinging, yet remaining mute, the sight of this Christian symbol of community is at once irritating and wonderfully liberating. In spite of the symbolism, as well as the melancholy and romanticism, inherent to them, Martin’s works are devoid of pathos, albeit often steeped in sceptical humour. His objects combine formal variety and sensuous materiality with conceptual rigour, playful elegance with cool purist concentration.

Less a creator than a collector and dissector, Kris Martin frequently uses – aside from objects that he has elaborately produced by others – found objects that already have a history inscribed into them. His central artistic strategy consists in lifting those found objects from their original context and, at the same time, removing with great precision and originality essential information from them. He thinks outside the box in working with them, in overlaying them, in shifting their scale, thus generating new readings. We, the viewers, are irritated and motivated to fill in the blanks with our own experiences, to take the fragment and complete it in our minds. Martin’s works take our imagination beyond a rationally interpreted, bounded world and address us in the transience and fragility of our own lives.

Kris Martin today occupies an important and distinct position in contemporary art. He became known for works such as his installation Mandi III, which was included in the 4th Berlin Biennale in 2006. Subsequently, in 2007, a selection of his works was shown at P.S.1 MoMA in New York. The exhibition in Aarau, Bonn and Hanover assembles a large number of major works and, in addition to that, includes a comprehensive catalogue produced in collaboration with the artist.

Website : Aargauer Kunsthaus

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ELSA SCHIAPARELLI AND MIUCCIA PRADA'S IMPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS AT THE METROLITAN

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The spring 2012 exhibition organized by The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations. The exhibition, on view from May 10 through August 19, 2012 (preceded on May 7 by The Costume Institute Gala Benefit), explores the striking affinities between these two Italian designers from different eras. Inspired by Miguel Covarrubias’s satirical “Impossible Interviews” for Vanity Fair in the 1930s, curators Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton orchestrate conversations between these iconic women to suggest new readings of the designers’ most innovative work.

“Given the role Surrealism and other art movements play in the designs of both Schiaparelli and Prada, it seems only fitting that their inventive creations be explored here at the Met,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Schiaparelli’s collaborations with Dalí and Cocteau as well as Prada’s Fondazione Prada push art and fashion ever closer, in a direct, synergistic, and culturally redefining relationship.”

The exhibition is organized by Harold Koda, Curator in Charge, and Andrew Bolton, Curator, both of the Met’s Costume Institute. Film director, screenwriter, and producer Baz Luhrmann is the exhibition’s creative consultant, and has created a series of filmed elements for the exhibition. The production design for the films is by Luhrmann's longtime collaborator, Catherine Martin. The exhibition design is realized by Nathan Crowley, who serves as production designer (he was creative consultant for the Met’s exhibitions Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy and American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity). All mannequin head treatments and masks are designed by Guido Palau.

The Exhibition
In the galleries, iconic ensembles by Schiaparelli and Prada are presented alongside short videos of simulated conversations between the two designers directed by Luhrmann, focusing on how the women explore similar themes in their work through very different approaches.

“Juxtaposing the work of Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada allows us to explore how the past enlightens the present and how the present enlivens the past,” said Koda.

“The connection of the historic to the modern highlights the affinities as well as the variances between two women who constantly subverted contemporary notions of taste, beauty, and glamour,” added Bolton.

The exhibition, in the Metropolitan Museum’s first-floor special exhibition galleries, features approximately 100 designs and 40 accessories by Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973) from the late 1920s to the early 1950s, and by Miuccia Prada from the late 1980s to the present, drawn from The Costume Institute’s collection and the Prada Archive, as well as other institutions and private collections. Eight short videos created by Luhrmann, in which Prada talks with Schiaparelli, who is played by actress Judy Davis, animate the entry gallery and the seven themed sections of the exhibition and provide the thread that connects the objects. In the films, “Schiap” and Prada are seated at a dining table in dialogue that has been created using paraphrased excerpts from Schiaparelli’s autobiography, Shocking Life, and Prada’s filmed remarks. Visitors will have the impression of eavesdropping on a fantastical meeting of two great fashion minds.

The section of the exhibition entitled “Waist Up/Waist Down” looks at Schiaparelli’s use of decorative detailing as a response to restaurant dressing in the heyday of 1930s café society, while showing Prada’s below-the-waist focus as a symbolic expression of modernity and femininity. An accessories subsection of this gallery called “Neck Up/Knees Down” showcases Schiaparelli’s hats and Prada’s footwear. “Ugly Chic” reveals how both women subvert ideals of beauty and glamour by playing with good and bad taste through color, prints, and textiles.

“Hard Chic” explores the influence of uniforms and menswear to promote a minimal aesthetic that is intended to both deny and enhance femininity. “Naïf Chic” focuses on Schiaparelli and Prada’s adoption of a girlish sensibility to subvert expectations of age-appropriate dressing. “Classical Body” explores the designers’ engagement with antiquity through the gaze of the late-18th and early-19th centuries. “Exotic Body” touches on the influence of Eastern cultures through fabrics such as lamé, and silhouettes such as saris and sarongs.

“Surreal Body,” in the final gallery, illustrates how both women affect contemporary images of the female body through Surrealistic practices such as displacement, playing with scale, and blurring the boundaries between reality and illusion, natural and artificial.

Schiaparelli, who worked in Paris from the 1920s until her house closed in 1954, was associated closely with the Surrealist movement and created such iconic pieces as the ‘tear’ dress, the ‘shoe’ hat, and the ‘bug’ necklace. Prada, who holds a degree in political science, took over her family’s Milan-based business in 1978, and focuses on fashion that reflects the eclectic nature of Postmodernism.

Website : The Metropolitan Museum of Arts

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EXHIBITION OF PABLO PICASSO'S MOST CELEBRATED SERIES, THE VOLLARD SUITE, AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM

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Blind minotaur being led by a little girl (resembling Marie-Therese) with a pigeon in a starry night; plate 97 of the Vollard Suite (VS 97). 3-7 December and 31 December 1934. Aquatint with scraper to resemble a mezzotint, drypoint and engraving. Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973). Copyright of Succession Picasso/DACS 2011.






This exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s most celebrated series of etchings, The Vollard Suite, will be the first time a complete set has been shown in a British public institution. The Vollard Suite comprises 100 etchings produced by Picasso between 1930 and 1937, at a critical juncture in Picasso’s career. This exhibition celebrates the recent acquisition of these etchings, thanks to the extraordinary generosity of Hamish Parker. It is the only complete Vollard Suite held by a public museum in the UK.

The prints were made when Picasso was involved in a passionate affair with his muse and model, Marie-Thérèse Walter, whose classical features are a recurrent presence in the series. They offer an ongoing process of change and metamorphosis that eludes any final resolution. Picasso gave no order to the plates nor did he assign any titles to them. Picasso kept the plates open-ended to allow connections to be freely made among them, yet certain thematic groupings can also be identified.

The predominant theme of the Vollard Suite is the Sculptor’s Studio (46 etchings), which deals with Picasso’s engagement with classical sculpture. At this point he was making sculpture at his new home and studio, the Château de Boisgeloup outside Paris. The etchings of his young model, Marie-Thérèse, represent a dialogue alternating between the artist and his creation and between the artist and his model. Various scenarios are played out between the sculptor, the model and the created work. Among them is the classical myth of Pygmalion in which the sculptor becomes so enamoured of his creation that it comes to life at the artist’s touch. Classical linearity and repose within the studio also alternate with darker, violent forces. The latter are represented by scenes of brutal passion and by the Minotaur (15 etchings), the half-man, half-animal of classical myth, which became central to Picasso’s personal mythology. Picasso in a spirit of competitiveness tips his cap to his great predecessors, Rembrandt and Goya. The series concludes with three portraits of Vollard himself, made in 1937.

For the first time the etchings will be displayed alongside examples of the type of classical sculpture and objects that Picasso was inspired by, something which the British Museum is in a unique position to do. As well as this, Rembrandt etchings, Goya prints and Ingres drawings from the Prints and Drawings collection will also be displayed as their influence can be seen in some of Picasso’s works.

The Vollard Suite takes its name from Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), the greatest avant-garde Paris art dealer and print publisher of his day, who gave Picasso his first Paris exhibition in 1901. In exchange for some pictures, Picasso produced for Vollard a group of 100 etchings between 1930 and 1937. The mammoth task of printing some 310 sets, plus three further sets on vellum, was completed by the Paris printer Roger Lacourière in 1939. Vollard’s unexpected death in a car accident that year, followed by the outbreak of the Second World War, delayed the distribution of the Vollard Suite until the 1950s by the dealer Henri Petiet who had purchased most of the prints from the Vollard estate. The set acquired by the British Museum comes directly from the heirs of Henri Petiet and so has an impeccable provenance, having never been shown in public before, and is in pristine condition.

Website : The British Museum

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