FRANCIS BACON 'ONTMOET' OUDE MEESTER

Oude schilderkunst naast moderne schilderijen. Met de expositie 'Conversation Piece II: Cornelis van Haarlem en Francis Bacon' wil het Frans Halsmuseum in Haarlem de verbinding laten zien tussen beide kunstenaars. De Italiaanse grootmeester Michelangelo (1475-1564) was voor hen beiden een grote inspiratiebron.
De tentoonstelling is te zien van 3 juli tot en met 10 oktober.
De serie 'conversation piece' van het museum is bedoeld om bezoekers met een frisse blik te laten kijken naar oude meesters uit de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw. Francis Bacon (1909-1992) voelde zich midden in de traditie staan van de schilderkunst. Volgens hem kan kunst zich niet losmaken van de traditie, maar die alleen vernieuwen. Bacon bewonderde in de werken van Michelangelo 'de vleselijke figuren, die zich om hun as draaiden alsof ze op het punt staan een discus te werpen'. Hij schilderde zelf ook dergelijke figuren.
De invloed van Michelangelo is eveneens te zien in het werk van Cornelis van Haarlem (1562-1638). Ook hij schilderde veel naakte figuren in allerlei gedraaide poses, zoals op het schilderij 'De kindermoord te Bethlehem' uit 1591.

Website : Frans Hals Museum

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Bron/Source : De Pers

LE MUSEE DU LUXEMBOURG A PARIS ROUVRIRA EN FEVRIER 2011

Le Musée du Luxembourg à Paris rouvrira ses portes au public le 5 février 2011 avec une exposition Cranach
Le Sénat a choisi la Réunion des musées nationaux pour reprendre la gestion du musée. L'opérateur public s'est engagé à un important programme d'investissement.
La RMN est prête à mettre 2 millions d'euros pour la rénovation du bâtiment, avec l'intervention des architectes Jean de Gastines et Shigeru Ban.
Un restaurant et une boutique vont aussi être aménagés dans le bâtiment, situé près du Sénat, en lisière du jardin du Luxembourg. La RMN a proposé l'itinérance en province de certaines expositions du musée. En terme de tarifs, elle prévoit une part de gratuité pour certains publics et un tarif moyen de 7,50 euros. Enfin, la RMN s'est engagée à reprendre l'ensemble du personnel de la société SVO qui gérait précédemment le musée.La convention de délégation de service public qui liera la RMN au Sénat sera signée début juillet pour huit ans.Sur le plan financier, le questeur René Garrec (UMP) a précisé que "l'objectif du Sénat n'est pas de gagner de l'argent mais de faire que (le musée) fonctionne bien". "Le système fera (en sorte) que cela couvre le minimum de frais et que nous ne subventionnions pas de façon déguisée les musées nationaux", a-t-il ajouté.Un comité de programmation composé de trois représentants du Sénat, de six personnalités qualifiées choisies par le Sénat et d'un représentant du délégataire sera nommé lors du prochain bureau du Sénat, le 13 juillet. Le Sénat s'est réservé la possibilité de s'opposer à un projet d'exposition. La première, à partir du 5 février 2011, sera consacrée au maître de la Renaissance allemande Cranach.L'opérateur public, qui avait perdu en 2000 la gestion du musée, était en concurrence avec deux concurrents privés, Culturespaces, qui gère le Musée Jacquemart-André, et la Compagnie des Alpes, qui gère des domaines skiables et le Musée Grévin.Le Musée du Luxembourg est fermé depuis janvier, à la suite de la rupture du contrat de la société SVO. Le Sénat y avait mis fin de façon anticipé en raison d'un litige. SVO réclame une indemnisation en contentieux, ce qui devrait se régler devant la justice.Pour son dernier appel d'offres, le bureau du Sénat a opté pour le régime de la délégation de service public. Ce régime permet au Sénat d'imposer au nouvel exploitant du musée des contraintes de service public, notamment en matière tarifaire. SVO était lié au Sénat par une "autorisation d'occupation temporaire du domaine public" qui laissait à l'exploitant une grande liberté de gestion.

Website : Musée du Luxembourg

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Bron/Source : France 2

LES INEDITS D'EDGAR DEGAS, D'UNE BELLE FRAICHEUR DE LIGNE

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Vérité ! Vie ! Que ce soit une étude de jockey en pierre noire sur calque pour la composition intitulée Avant la course (vers 1872-1873) ou une Femme cousant, un graphite sur papier bleu, et encore des études pour Alexandre et Bucéphale (1859-1861), Edgar Degas campe ses figures dans l'air, vives lymphes des toiles à venir. Au Musée Malraux qui détient une des premières collections françaises d'impressionnistes, se plaçant ainsi en second rang après Paris, l'exposition Degas inédit ne présente pas moins de 60 œuvres de la plus belle eau en provenance de la collection muséale ainsi que du Musée d'Orsay.

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) avait un souhait : « Etre illustre et inconnu ». Il fit beaucoup pour le satisfaire, notamment passé la soixantaine, paraissant s'isoler de la vie artistique et du monde parisien dont il reste, en réalité, une personnalité fort active, moins admirée que Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh ou Gauguin. La tendance s'inverse depuis l'exposition rétrospective organisée en 1989 en France, au Canada et aux États-Unis. Les études se multiplient. Ce mouvement de la recherche s'accompagne d'une popularité accrue auprès du grand public qui résume l'artiste au peintre des danseuses et des courses de chevaux.
Héritier revendiqué de la tradition classique ingresque et de la modernité du réalisme, Degas fut aussi un des grands acteurs de l'impressionnisme, dès ses débuts. C'est bien dans ce cadre précis, -le festival Normandie Impressionniste –, que les dessins de la collection Olivier Senn prennent place. Né au Havre en 1864, Senn était un négociant de coton, fin amateur de l'art de son temps. Il a constitué sa collection de la fin du XIXe siècle aux années 30, achetant son premier Degas en 1908. Elle comprend des Courbet, Delacroix, Corot mais surtout des impressionnistes (Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas…), des postimpressionnistes, des Nabis, des Fauves.
Le Musée Malraux a reçu cette extraordinaire donation (250 œuvres !) en 2004. L'ensemble des Degas est jusqu'à présent totalement inédit. Ce sont des œuvres de jeunesse, des copies de maîtres anciens qui rappellent la formation poursuivie à Rome, des dessins préparatoires pour de grandes compositions, soit 47 œuvres acquises par Olivier Senn lors des quatre ventes de l'atelier de l'artiste dispersé en 1918-1919. L'ensemble apporte des informations, souvent inédites, sur la genèse d'œuvres historiques ambitieuses, retravaillées à maintes reprises, parfois laissées inachevées ou demeurées inconnues.
Senn n'a rien acheté au hasard. Ses choix sont cohérents, passionnants. L'amour de la ligne et du trait y domine. On y trouve aussi deux beaux pastels de femme au bain, des portraits comme l'étonnant Moujik, ainsi qu'un rare paysage de montagne, une aquarelle quasi cézanienne datée de 1890-1893.

Degas inédit Musée Malraux, 2 boulevard Clémenceau, Le Havre, jusqu'au 19 septembre

Website : Normandie Impressionniste

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Bron /Source : Le Soir

FIRST EXHIBITION TO EXPLORE PICASSO'S RESPONCE TO DEGAS

Throughout his life Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was fascinated with the life and work of Edgar Degas (1834–1917). Picasso collected the Impressionist’s pictures, continually re-interpreted his images, and at the end of his life, created scenes that included depictions of Degas himself. Picasso Looks at Degas, a ground-breaking exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute during the summer of 2010 brings together over one hundred works from international museums and private collections. The exhibition is the first to explore Picasso’s direct response to Degas’s work and includes never-before-exhibited archival material that sheds new light on his relationship with the ballet. The Clark is the exclusive North American venue for the exhibition which is curated by well-known Picasso expert Elizabeth Cowling and recognized Impressionist scholar Richard Kendall. Picasso Looks at Degas is on view at the Clark June 13 through September 12, 2010; it will be presented at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona in the fall of 2010.
The depth of Picasso’s fixation is revealed through dramatic pairings and groupings of art that have never been brought together in this ambitious way. Degas’s In a Café (L’Absinthe) (1875–76, Musée d’Orsay) is placed alongside Picasso’s Portrait of Sebastià Junyer i Vidal (1903, Los Angeles County Museum of Art); Picasso’s oil on canvas The Blue Room (The Tub) (1901, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.) is paired with The Tub (c. 1889, Collection Jacques Doucet, Paris), a monotype by Degas that may have served as a prototype; and Picasso’s 1905 Portrait of Benedetta Canals (Museu Picasso, Barcelona) is hung beside Degas’s Woman with an Umbrella (c. 1876, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).
“This exhibition is the culmination of five years of research,” said Michael Conforti, director of the Clark. “Curators Elizabeth Cowling and Richard Kendall began discussing the exhibition ten years ago and have met with members of the Picasso family, studied hundreds of works by Picasso and Degas, and visited archives, museums, and private collections in the United States and Europe. Their insightful work will change our view of Picasso as an artist. This fresh look at two of the greatest artists of the modern period will fascinate visitors as well as scholars and art historians.”
Picasso and Degas shared many acquaintances and lived in close proximity in Paris until the older artist’s death in 1917, through they probably never met. Picasso Looks at Degas examines Degas through Picasso’s eyes and the ways the Spanish artist’s response varied over time from emulation to confrontation and parody to homage. The artists shared a lifelong obsession with women, visible in their portraits of friends and images of singers, laundresses, ballet dancers, bathers, and prostitutes. It is widely acknowledged that these are Degas’s signature themes, but all of them are echoed in Picasso’s work.
While usually identified as painters, both Degas and Picasso were innovative sculptors, printmakers, and extraordinary draftsmen, and the exhibition brings together works in these different media to examine Picasso’s reaction to the challenge of Degas. The exhibition opens with Picasso’s early years when he received an academic training similar to that of Degas, whose art he had yet to discover. It then leads into the bohemian world of early twentieth-century Paris where Picasso first directly encountered Degas’s work and began to respond to the Impressionist’s imagery of modern life. During this period Picasso experimented with a subject particularly associated with Degas—the laundress—and made it his own in Woman Ironing (1904, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). In pictures such as End of the Performance (1900–01, Museu Picasso, Barcelona), Picasso pays tribute to Degas’s café-concert scenes by depicting singers in mid-performance on stage.
The ballet, a central theme in Degas’s work and paintings such as Dancers in the Classroom (c. 1880, the Clark), established him as the Impressionist artist of dance. Picasso Looks at Degas examines Picasso’s depiction of the ballet at various points in his career. In a striking example of how the artists’ unspoken dialogue unfolded, the Clark’s iconic sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1880–81), considered shocking and radical in its time, is juxtaposed with Picasso’s Standing Nude (1907, Civiche Raccolte d’Arte, Milan), which heralded Cubism. Shortly after Degas’s death, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a dancer from the Ballets Russes, and embarked on a passionate exploration of the dance that culminated in a number of sculptures emulating Degas’s celebrated series of dancers executing arabesques.
Picasso also inherited and transformed another of Degas’s favorite themes—women bathing or doing their hair—returning to it repeatedly over a period of more than fifty years. The exhibition will reveal how both artists explored this intimate female world in all media and in formats ranging from the diminutive to the monumental. In one exceptional pairing Picasso’s dramatic blue-gray Nude Wringing Her Hair (1952, Private Collection) is juxtaposed with Degas’s late red-pink Combing the Hair (c. 1892–1896, The National Gallery, London). The exhibition also brings together sculptures by both artists which explore the unusual subject of a heavily pregnant nude woman.
In the late 1870s Degas created a series of monotypes depicting prostitutes and their customers in brothels. Relishing the subject, Picasso particularly admired these prints and eventually acquired nine of them for his own collection. At the end of his life he directly engaged with them in a series of humorous and poignant etchings in which Degas himself appears in the guise of a wary and inhibited but fascinated client. The exhibition closes with this series and with the portrait of Degas Picasso painted in 1968 as a tribute to the great Impressionist.

Website : The Clark

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

KODAK DONATES COLORAMA COLLECTION TO PHOTO MUSEUM

Eastman Kodak Co. is turning over its archive of panoramic Colorama images to a hometown photography museum in upstate New York where its founder lived. George Eastman House said Friday the collection includes original negatives and prints of all 565 gigantic Coloramas displayed in New York's Grand Central Terminal from 1950 to 1990.
Those backlit transparencies, promoted by Kodak as the "world's largest photographs," measured 60 feet long by 18 feet high. New elongated images were installed every three weeks, depicting landscapes, sporting events and family celebrations and vacations.
The images "reflected and reinforced American values and aspirations while encouraging picture-taking as an essential aspect of leisure, travel and family," said Alison Nordstrom, curator of photographs at Eastman House.
"The Coloramas taught us not only what to photograph, but how to see the world as though it were a photograph," she said. "They served to manifest and visualize values that even then were misunderstood as nostalgic and in jeopardy, salvageable only through the time-defying alchemy of Kodak cameras and film."
Eastman House is a landmark Colonial Revival mansion in Rochester that was home to film and photo pioneer George Eastman, Kodak's founder.
Turned into a film and photography museum in 1947, it will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Kodak Colorama with a four-month exhibition that opens June 19. The exhibition featuring three dozen Coloramas will then embark on an international tour. The lineup of venues has not yet been decided.
Steve Kelly, a professional photographer for Kodak who created several Coloramas, called them "Kodak Moments of the highest order."
"We at Kodak are proud to have them reside at the home of our founder so that the public can once again experience the magnificence of these images," Kelly said.
Aside from its collection of more than 400,000 highly valued photographs, Eastman House is one of the nation's four major motion picture archives with more than 30,000 titles. Its treasures include the archives of filmmakers Cecil B. DeMille, Kathryn Bigelow, Spike Lee, Ken Burns and Martin Scorsese.
Technicolor, the color-movie pioneer synonymous with Hollywood glamour, announced in March it was donating its filmmaking artifacts to Eastman House to round out the museum's trove of original reels of movie classics such as "Gone with the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz."
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.

Website : George Eastman House

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

UN SIECLE DE PAYSAGE A LYON

Le Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon s'est intéressé à la naissance de la peinture de paysage au 19e siècle

L'exposition du Musée des Beaux-Arts qui commence samedi montre comment, avec la généralisation de la pratique du plein air les peintres ont modifié leur approche de la nature entre la fin du 18e et la fin du 19e siècle.Le musée expose une sélection des peintures de paysage réunies par un amateur lyonnais (jusqu'au 4 octobre).
A la suite de Nicolas Poussin et Claude Lorrain, jusqu'au 19e siècle les artistes sont fidèles à une tradition classique selon laquelle la nature ne peut être reproduite avec une fidélité objective mais doit être recomposée et idéalisée. Elle reste le cadre de scènes tirées de la mythologie ou de l'histoire antique, porteuses d'un sens moral.

Mais les peintres se constituent un répertoire de motifs en étudiant des morceaux de nature (arbres, rochers, bâtiments, ciels) en plein air. Cette pratique, attestée par des témoignages dès le 17e siècle, se généralise à partir des années 1780. Elle est impulsée en France par les écrits de Pierre Henri de Valenciennes, qui forme toute une génération. Ces études d'après nature restent des documents de travail conservés dans l'atelier.Au tournant des 18e et 19e siècles un autre courant s'inspire des maîtres nordiques du 17e, composant des scènes animées par des personnages rustiques dans une nature champêtres. Il s'agit toujours d'oeuvres travaillées à partir d'études sur le motif. Dans ce courant se détache l'oeuvre de Georges Michel, représenté dans l'exposition par un ensemble important de son travail en Ile-de-France. Son vocabulaire est inspiré des artistes hollandais, il multiplie ciels d'orage, nuages de pluie, coups de lumière...Le goût des acheteurs pour la spontanéité des études en plein air favorise leur évolution, à partir des années 1820, vers un statut d'oeuvre à part entière. Des artistes commencent à les présenter dans le cadre d'expositions. Ces études sont souvent réalisées lors de voyages, notamment en Italie. Le pays est une destination incontournable dans la formation des peintres, où ils représentent sites pittoresques et aussi de simples fragments de nature.
Au 19e siècle, les peintres français explorent aussi les campagnes françaises. La forêt de Fontainebleau attire une véritable colonie artistique. Autour de Lyon, Adolphe Appian et Auguste Ravier travaillent sur le motif avec Camille Corot à Crémieu, Morestel et Optevoz. Les Alpes, aussi, attirent les peintres. Des écoles régionales naissent à Lyon ou en Provence. La Normandie, la Bretagne ou les Pyrénées attirent également les peintres.Si la finalité des peintures de paysages reste souvent classique, comme chez Corot, on y perçoit une sensibilité grandissante à l'atmosphère et l'attention portée à la palette conduira certains peintres (Paul Guigou, Eugène Boudin) aux prémices de l'impressionnisme.L'exposition du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon montre l'évolution de la peinture du paysage, où le prétexte historique disparaît progressivement pour laisser la place à un genre à part entière.

Website : Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

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Bron/Source : France 2

ALBERTINA OPENS WALTON FORD'S FIRST EXHIBITION IN AUSTRIA

The work of the American artist Walton Ford (born in 1960)is presented by the Albertina for the first time in Austria in an exhibition.
The presentation comprises 22 large-format works by the artist from the last ten years.
All of Ford’s works radiate something disconcerting and eerie: a wild turkey crushing a little parrot between its claws, a horde of monkeys devastating a laid table, a buffalo surrounded by a pack of bloodstained wolves amidst a well-kept French garden. Ford’s technique of painting relies on the proven method of the scientific draftsman. As irritating in their style as bewildering in their contents, his works breathe an oppressing familiarity. With titles such as “An Encounter with Du Chaillu,” “Borodino,” “The Sensorium,” or “Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London,” his drawings blur the dividing line between man and animal and push open the door to a realm of fantasies, dreams, and nightmares.
Always as large as life and rendering every detail, Walton Ford’s animal watercolors strike us as contrary to the zeitgeist at first sight, thus immediately questioning established expectations concerning the contemporary aesthetics’ complex of rules. In their old masterly style, Walton Ford’s gloriously colorful pictures recall and quote famous nineteenth-century artists’ portrayals of nature and animals. They seem to echo past colonial times and combine things supposed to be overcome with topical scenes. In his narrative works, Ford proves to be an artist who varies a world handed down in order to unfold a visual universe of infinitely complex and irritating allusions. His animal pictures testify to the comprehensive art-historical and scientific knowledge he can avail himself of in his quest for analogies between yesterday and today. They constitute a contemporary “bestiary” of impressive imaginative power.
Walton Ford was born in 1960 in Larchmont in the state of New York and now lives in the mountains of The Berkshires in Massachusetts. Even from an early age, the various exhibits in the Museum of Natural History in New York held a fascination over him. In particular, Ford embarked on an intimate study of the works of the US American ornithologist and drawer of animals, John James Audubon (1785-1851). Walton Ford's search for finding analogies between the past and the present day has led to a series of pictures, created from the 1990s onwards, in which he superimposes intricate natural history depictions with current perceptions and critical commentaries, as well as adding quotes from literary sources from past centuries, rendered in the style of the old masters. In his works, which can be seen as satires on political oppression and the exploitation of the environment, he casts doubt on the adage of the ‘ever new' and the ‘ever better' that has held sway ever since the Renaissance. At the same time he raises questions on a diverse range of set expectations and established rules in contemporary aesthetics. In glorious colour, his pictures open up a view of a reality that we have long since suppressed or forgotten. The artist conscientiously presents himself as an outsider in the contemporary art world through his body of work, which stands out today as truly singular and has already garnered great attention in the USA.

Website : Albertina

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

TATI NOSTALGIE

Avec L'Illusionniste, Sylvain Chomet ressuscite à merveille l'esprit du créateur de M. Hulot.

Après Les Triplettes de Belleville, Sylvain Chomet s'attaque bille en tête, avec toute sa passion et sa créativité, aux pérégrinations d'un ­artiste de music-hall vieillissant, contraint de s'exiler en Angleterre pour survivre. L'intrigue de son nouveau film d'animation, L'Illusionniste, se situe à la fin des années 1950. Les acrobates, jongleurs, ventriloques et autres trapézistes se retrouvent soudainement démodés par l'arrivée du rock'n'roll et de ses cohortes de groupes hystériques, nouvelles idoles des jeunes.
Avec ses colombes, son haut-de-forme, ses mouchoirs multicolores et son lapin grassouillet (méchant comme une teigne), l'illusionniste s'éloigne des salles parisiennes et écume les petites salles de seconde zone, voire le pub d'un village de la côte ouest écossaise où il fait la connaissance d'Alice, petite Galloise qui croit dur comme fer à ses tours de magie.
Élégance quasi poétique
On l'aura compris, l'illusionniste, c'est Jacques Tati lui-même, ressuscité par la grâce de l'animation de Sylvain Chomet. «Au début, la présence de Tati dans le film m'a un peu fait peur, confesse le réalisateur. En même temps, le script inédit que m'avait confié sa fille ne mettait pas en scène directement M. Hulot, mais plutôt Jacques Tati dans une histoire intime entre une jeune fille et un vieux prestidigitateur sur le déclin.»
Tout commence en 2003, lorsque Sylvain Chomet souhaite rendre hommage à Jacques Tati dans Les Triplettes de Belleville. Sa fille, Sophie Tatischeff, apprécie tellement son travail qu'elle donne d'emblée son feu vert. Elle mentionne aussi l'existence d'un scénario, «Film Tati no 4», jamais tourné par son père car jugé «trop sérieux». Tombé amoureux du ­sujet, Sylvain Chomet n'effectue qu'un changement en transposant l'histoire de Prague à Édimbourg.
Baignant dans une mélancolie certaine, ce film d'animation nostalgique créé à l'ancienne a surtout le mérite de faire renaître la silhouette de Jacques Tati. Il traverse le film avec une élégance quasi poétique et cette légère raideur comique qui l'a rendue inoubliable. Un tour de passe-passe dont Sylvain Chomet peut être fier.

Website : Pathé Distribution

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Bron/Source : Le Figaro

SUMMER EXHIBITIONS CELEBRATE FORMER FRYE DIRECTOR AND ALASKA CONNECTION

The Frye Art Museum’s summer exhibitions celebrate the tenure of former Frye Director Ida Kay Greathouse, the role that Alaska played in the history of the Museum, and the artwork of Fred Machetanz, who captured the rugged mountains and brilliant light of Alaska.
Ida Kay Greathouse: A Tribute (June 19–September 19, 2010)
Honoring Frye Art Museum Past Director Ida Kay Greathouse, the Frye presents Ida Kay Greathouse: A Tribute, an exhibition of major works of art selected by Mrs. Greathouse during her 25-year tenure as Director.
Mrs. Greathouse became the Frye director in 1966, after the death of her husband, Walser Greathouse, the Frye's first director and executor of Charles Frye's will. Having witnessed her husband's astute collecting during his directorship, Mrs. Greathouse focused on American art, complementing her first acquisitions—William Harnett’s A Wooden Basket of Catawba Grapes and Walt Kuhn’s Acrobats in Dressing Room—with works by William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, George Luks, John Singer Sargent, Everett Shinn, and N. C., Andrew, and Jamie Wyeth. During her tenure she also enhanced the Founding Collection’s French paintings with impressionist works by Berthe Morisot, Pierre-August Renoir, and Alfred Sisley, among others.
Under Mrs. Greathouse’s leadership, the Frye also moved in new collecting directions, acquiring significant works by early-20th century Russian-trained émigrés Nicolai Fechin, Leon Gaspard, and Sergei Bongart, as well as 20th century Alaskan landscapes by Ted Lambert, Sydney Laurence, Fred Machetanz, and Eustace Ziegler. As early as 1970, Mrs. Greathouse voiced interest in adding a new gallery to display the Museum’s collection of Alaskan art. Her dream became a reality in 1984 when the Frye unveiled its Alaska Wing, a popular feature of the Museum during Mrs. Greathouse’s directorship and later renamed the Greathouse Gallery in her honor.
Providing the first overview of her collecting accomplishments, Ida Kay Greathouse: A Tribute features important acquisitions made over the nearly three decades Mrs. Greathouse led the Frye until she retired in 1993. While including a number of French paintings, the exhibition focuses primarily on American objects, demonstrating the key role played by Mrs. Greathouse in moving the Museum from its initial mandate to showcase European art to becoming an active exhibitor of 20th century American art.
Ida Kay Greathouse: A Tribute is curated by Director Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker. Collection Research: Jayme Yahr. Collection Management: Donna Kovalenko. Project Coordination: Laura Landau.
Northern Latitudes: The Frye and Alaska (June 19–September 19, 2010)
Honoring the special role that Alaska has played in the history of the Frye Art Museum, Northern Latitudes: The Frye and Alaska features a selection of the Museum’s Alaskan acquisitions, the majority of which were made by Ida Kay Greathouse, the Frye’s longest-serving director. Mrs. Greathouse’s dedication to Alaskan art led to the Museum’s construction of an Alaska Wing, which opened in 1984. Including works by Eustace Paul Ziegler (1881–1969); Sydney Laurence (1865–1940); Theodore Roosevelt (Ted) Lambert (1905–1960); and Fred Machetanz (1908–2002), Northern Latitude captures the rugged wilderness and solitude experienced by artists when they sojourned to Alaska and encountered its expansive skies, isolated outposts, and panoramic views of snow-capped Mt. McKinley. Although Ziegler was a close friend of Frye Art Museum founders Charles and Emma Frye, the couple did not collect Alaskan paintings. They did, however, have business ties to Alaska. In 1891, Charles Frye opened the Frye-Bruhn Meat Packing Company with his younger brother Frank and a childhood friend, Charles Bruhn. Headquartered in Seattle, Frye-Bruhn expanded into Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, launching stations in several towns such as Juneau, Valdez, Skagway, Haines Mission, and Ketchikan. (The Frye-Bruhn building in Skagway is currently being considered for placement on the National Register of Historic Places.) The Fryes’ businesses and other investments enabled the establishment of the Frye Art Museum, which opened to the public in 1952.
Northern Latitudes: The Frye and Alaska is curated by Jayme Yahr. Collections Management: Donna Kovalenko. Project Coordination: Laura Landau.
On Arctic Ice: Fred Machetanz (June 12–September 6) Working in the isolated wilderness, Fred Machetanz (1908-2002) produced a body of artwork that encompasses the rugged mountains and brilliant light of Alaska. On Arctic Ice: Fred Machetanz showcases a selection of stone lithographs produced by Machetanz between 1946 and 1980 that depict the flora, fauna, and people of America’s northernmost state.

Website : The Frye Art Museum

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

WORK OF DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION BY BERLINDE DE BRUYCKERE AT HAUSER & WIRTH ZURICH

Horse, deer and man metamorphose in Berlinde De Bruyckere’s exhibition for Hauser & Wirth Zürich. De Bruyckere’s work deals with death and transfiguration and looks to stories and art of the past to address anxieties that remain current. Her sculptures accomplish an almost alchemical transformation of wax into flesh, and out of this fantastical realism she creates intolerably mutated bodies: figures lack heads, borrow and reconfigure anatomies, become amorphous, vegetal and abstract. Their distortions emphasise our own fragile existence. ‘I want to show how helpless a body can be,’ De Bruyckere has said. ‘Which is nothing you have to be afraid of — it can be something beautiful.’
Antlers, a new motif for the Flemish artist, summon the fate of Actæon who was turned into a stag by the Goddess Diana before swiftly being torn to death by his own hounds. Preternaturally delicate and raw, pairs of antlers are suspended by string from the gallery walls. Blood red, mottled white and sinuous, they are utterly unlike the clichéd hunting trophies mounted in baronial halls. Flowing downwards and growing together as though protecting one another, these pairs seem sensitive and still alive; one wears bandages — an intimation of human feeling lying within these abstract animal forms.
Two other pieces in the exhibition use the same technique: a horse, sliced in two lengthways and hung vertically in a vitrine; and an elongated human figure whose resting body twists into a fleshy landscape that admits no head. The latter is dignified despite its deformity and has been granted a pillow to cushion its legs. Its emaciated form calls to mind Renaissance depictions of Christ taken from the cross, as well as more contemporary horrors such as concentration camp victims or the distorted bodies of famine sufferers. The horse imagines death on a large scale. Headless and hoofless, pale and translucent, its vertical carcasses are anthropomorphic, resembling swollen human figures whilst also calling to mind Rembrandt’s ‘Flayed Ox’ and Soutine’s ox torsos.
Another horse’s torn body, cast in iron, rises dramatically from a table. Iron is a new material for De Bruyckere and was chosen to convey ‘the heaviness of death’. The horse’s unyielding weight and emptied body contrast brutally with the malleable vulnerability of the waxen forms. Bringing unlike things together, De Bruyckere tests sculpture’s potential to recuperate and heal, using materials and motifs to create an increasingly complex language of empathy and suffering.

Website : Hauser & Wirth

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

KUNSTHAUS ZURICH SHOWS THOMAS STRUTH - PHOTOGRAPHS 1978-2010

From 11 June to 12 September 2010 the Kunsthaus Zürich presents the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of work by Thomas Struth to date. The photographs on show, some 100 mostly large-format, were produced between 1978 and the present day. The exhibition also includes a premiere presentation of a group of new pieces.
At the latest since the success of his Museum Photographs in the early 1990s, Thomas Struth (born in 1954) has emerged as one of the world’s leading and most influential artistic photographers. His work develops slowly, in thematic series, between documentation and interpretation, social study and latent psychological meaning. Struth’s careful and meticulous method allies his oeuvre not only with the history of classical photography but also – by way of his constant questioning of his own representational techniques – with contemporary art as well. Streets empty of people, visitors standing before famous artworks in renowned museums, portraits of individuals and families as well as landscapes, jungles and flowers: Struth’s photographic work over the last thirty years can be roughly classified into these four groups.
Street and Museum
Photographs It began with his street pictures in the late 1970s. Initially structured with strict central symmetry, later more freely composed black-and-white images of European streets empty of human beings. There followed street scenes from Asian cities, now incorporating the bustle of passers-by as a central pictorial element. Struth became renowned for his museum photographs, which take the presence and comportment of visitors confronted with world-famous art in museums as their motif. Ultimately, however, Struth was just as interested in the question of the meaning centuries-old pictures are still able to convey. ‘The museums were almost always full to bursting, and that made me wonder what people are actually looking for when they stand in front of these historic paintings. For me a museum is a place for sharpening my instruments, my perception. What is the use of pictures from the past? How can they serve to inspire me to interesting or productive future ideas?’
Family Portraits
Another pivotal group is composed of family photograph from around the world. Struth’s work in what at first seems an antiquated genre was triggered by the artist’s desire to understand himself: ‘I was trying to analyse and to comprehend myself, my own family, the position of the family in western culture; I was thinking of why we are the way we are.’
Pictures from Paradise and New Works
Finally, the Zurich show, curated by Tobia Bezzola, in addition to Struth’s fourth central category of works, his photographs of landscapes, jungles and flowers, also features a series of new pieces, some of them very large-format, which herald a new thematic classification within Struth’s oeuvre. The artist here focuses on the complex visual structures produced by complex technical facilities. These most recent pieces may be seen as the continuation of Struth's interest in a ‘history of human ambition’, which makes itself manifest in the collective accomplishments of a given culture, whether in the form of a mediaeval cathedral, an urban structure, or the design of a space ship.
Thomas Struth
1954: born in Geldern (Lower Rhine), lives in Düsseldorf and Berlin. 1973–1980: studies at the Art Academy of Düsseldorf. 1978: awarded the Art Academy of Düsseldorf’s New York fellowship. 1980–1982: civilian service. 1990: awarded Werner Mantz Prize by the Werner Mantz Foundation. 1993–1996: professorship at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. 1997: Spectrum – International Prize for Photography, Foundation of Lower Saxony. 2007: marriage to Tara Bray Smith.

Website : Kunsthaus Zurich

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

DES INEDITS D'EDGAR DEGAS, D'UNE BELLE FRAICHEUR DE LIGNE

Les dessins de la collection Olivier Senn au centre d'une exposition inscrite dans le festival Normandie Impressionniste.
Vérité ! Vie ! Que ce soit une étude de jockey en pierre noire sur calque pour la composition intitulée Avant la course (vers 1872-1873) ou une Femme cousant, un graphite sur papier bleu, et encore des études pour Alexandre et Bucéphale (1859-1861), Edgar Degas campe ses figures dans l'air, vives lymphes des toiles à venir. Au Musée Malraux qui détient une des premières collections françaises d'impressionnistes, se plaçant ainsi en second rang après Paris, l'exposition Degas inédit ne présente pas moins de 60 œuvres de la plus belle eau en provenance de la collection muséale ainsi que du Musée d'Orsay.

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) avait un souhait : « Etre illustre et inconnu ». Il fit beaucoup pour le satisfaire, notamment passé la soixantaine, paraissant s'isoler de la vie artistique et du monde parisien dont il reste, en réalité, une personnalité fort active, moins admirée que Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh ou Gauguin. La tendance s'inverse depuis l'exposition rétrospective organisée en 1989 en France, au Canada et aux États-Unis. Les études se multiplient. Ce mouvement de la recherche s'accompagne d'une popularité accrue auprès du grand public qui résume l'artiste au peintre des danseuses et des courses de chevaux.
Héritier revendiqué de la tradition classique ingresque et de la modernité du réalisme, Degas fut aussi un des grands acteurs de l'impressionnisme, dès ses débuts. C'est bien dans ce cadre précis, -le festival Normandie Impressionniste –, que les dessins de la collection Olivier Senn prennent place. Né au Havre en 1864, Senn était un négociant de coton, fin amateur de l'art de son temps. Il a constitué sa collection de la fin du XIXe siècle aux années 30, achetant son premier Degas en 1908. Elle comprend des Courbet, Delacroix, Corot mais surtout des impressionnistes (Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas…), des postimpressionnistes, des Nabis, des Fauves. Le Musée Malraux a reçu cette extraordinaire donation (250 œuvres !) en 2004. L'ensemble des Degas est jusqu'à présent totalement inédit. Ce sont des œuvres de jeunesse, des copies de maîtres anciens qui rappellent la formation poursuivie à Rome, des dessins préparatoires pour de grandes compositions, soit 47 œuvres acquises par Olivier Senn lors des quatre ventes de l'atelier de l'artiste dispersé en 1918-1919. L'ensemble apporte des informations, souvent inédites, sur la genèse d'œuvres historiques ambitieuses, retravaillées à maintes reprises, parfois laissées inachevées ou demeurées inconnues.
Senn n'a rien acheté au hasard. Ses choix sont cohérents, passionnants. L'amour de la ligne et du trait y domine. On y trouve aussi deux beaux pastels de femme au bain, des portraits comme l'étonnant Moujik, ainsi qu'un rare paysage de montagne, une aquarelle quasi cézanienne datée de 1890-1893.

Website : Musée Malraux

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Bron/Source : Le Soir

MOCA IS THE ONLY WEST COAST VENUE FOR ARSHILE GORKY RETROSPECTIVE

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), presents "Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective" June 6 through September 20, 2010, at MOCA Grand Avenue. This major traveling retrospective celebrates the extraordinary life and work of Arshile Gorky (b. c.1902, Khorkom, Armenia; d. 1948 Sherman, Connecticut), a seminal figure in the movement toward abstraction that transformed American art in the middle of the 20th century. "Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective" positions Gorky as a crucial forerunner of abstract expressionism, and as a passionate and dedicated artist whose tragic life often informed his groundbreaking and deeply personal paintings. The first full-scale survey of Gorky’s oeuvre since 1981, this exhibition includes more than 120 works spanning the artist’s 25-year career. It features the artist’s most significant paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, including two masterworks from MOCA’s permanent collection—Study for The Liver is the Cock’s Comb (1943) and Betrothal I (1947). Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is organized by Michael Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the exhibition was on view October 21, 2009, through January 10, 2010, before traveling to Tate Modern, London, February 10 through May 3, 2010. MOCA’s presentation, the third on the exhibition’s tour, is organized by MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel.
“As the only West Coast venue, MOCA is proud to present the work of this historically important artist who developed a unique and deeply influential visual language,” commented Schimmel. “Gorky courageously re-shaped European modernism into the foundations of abstract expressionism. He inspired a new generation of artists demonstrating that the act of painting alone was enough to be both poetically charged and powerfully tragic. His legacy can be seen in the work of many of the major abstract expressionists represented in the MOCA’s permanent collection, including Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.”
"Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective" is the first major exhibition of its type in three decades and the first to benefit from the publication of three biographies of the artist: Nouritza Matossian’s "Black Angel: The Life of Arshile Gorky" (1998), Matthew Spender’s "From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky" (1999), and Hayden Herrera’s "Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work" (2003), all of which shed new light on the artist’s Armenian background and his central role in the American avant-garde.
This is the first major museum exhibition to highlight the artist’s Armenian heritage and examine the impact of Gorky’s experience of the Armenian Genocide on his life and work. The retrospective and its accompanying catalogue have also benefited from in-depth interviews with the artist’s widow, Agnes “Mougouch” Gorky Fielding, who has generously supported the project from the start, through key loans and first-hand accounts of Gorky’s artistic practice as well as his cultural milieu.
Among the works to be included are such renowned paintings as the two versions of The Artist and his Mother (1926–36, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and about 1929–42, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); Waterfall (1943, Tate Modern, London); the Betrothal series, three large-scale works from 1947 reflecting Gorky’s closer engagement with surrealist ideas and practices—Betrothal 1 (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), The Betrothal (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven), and The Betrothal II (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York)—which are being exhibited together for the second time at MOCA (the works were first exhibited together in MOCA’s exhibition Focus Series: Gorky’s Betrothals in 1994); The Plow and the Song (1947, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio), which demonstrates Gorky’s continuing engagement with memories of his rural Armenian childhood; Agony (1947, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Gorky’s haunting late painting, a product of his increasingly tormented imagination in the late 1940s; and Last Painting (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), which was left unfinished on Gorky’s easel at the time of his death in 1948. Some of the works included in the exhibition have not been on public view before, among them are the wood sculptures, Haikakan Gutan I, II, and III (Armenian Plow I, II and III) (1944, 1945, and 1947, collection of the Diocese of the Armenian Church of America, on deposit at the Calouste Gulbenkiam Foundation, Lisbon).
At MOCA, "Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective" will be presented in a generally chronological sequence. Thematic groupings will represent each phase of Gorky’s career, which underwent an astonishing metamorphosis as he assimilated the lessons of earlier masters and movements and utilized them in the service of his own artistic development. Beginning in the mid-1920s with Gorky’s earliest experiments with the structural rigor of the paintings of Paul Cézanne, and continuing through his prolonged engagement with cubism in the 1930s, the exhibition ends with a series of intimate galleries showcasing the abstract surrealist inspired burst of creativity that dominated the final decade of Gorky’s life and left us with so many breathtakingly beautiful paintings and drawings that form the foundation for abstract expressionism. In the early 1940s, Gorky’s contact with surrealism informed his breakthrough landscapes in Virginia and the visionary works made in his spacious, light-filled studio on Union Square, which he called his “Creation Chamber.” Several galleries in the exhibition highlight the artist’s working process by presenting Gorky’s most significant paintings alongside the numerous painstaking studies that informed their making.

Website : MOCA

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

DESSINER UN MONDE MEILLEUR

Toute l'histoire du design est traversée par la notion de progrès. Utopie ou perspective fantastique ? Des experts font le point, interpellés par les nouveaux défis planétaires.

Est-ce un progrès de concevoir un livre qui parle ? Pourquoi ne pas faire entrer l'ordinateur dans le livre, tout le contraire de l'e-book ? Design et innovation, la course en avant ? Depuis la révolution industrielle, la question du progrès était liée à la nécessité d « être moderne », d'exploiter les matériaux innovants, les dernières techniques de production. Au péril de la planète, quand les entreprises ne voient dans le design qu'un levier de croissance.

Avec la question « Comment habiter le monde ? » l'innovation liée aux usages devient primordiale : tout est « à designer », et c'est une perspective fantastique ! Les designers d'In Progress ont été choisis pour leur prise de position dans la création contemporaine. Ils ont accepté les règles du jeu d'une exposition qui réfléchit sur leur capacité à dessiner les enjeux futurs. « Le sujet n'est pas l'objet, c'est l'homme », disait Charlotte Perriand. Cette parole est plus que jamais d'or. Quel type de monde fabriquons-nous, demandent les commissaires de l'exposition, Jeanne Quéheillard, Laurence Salmon et Nestor Perkal ?
L'utopie du désirable
« Le designer, précise le philosophe français et expert de la société de l'information Jacques-François Marchandise, c'est un concepteur qui convoque de l'imagination, de la culture technique et de la compréhension des technologies. Il est au bon carrefour. » L'utopie du souhaitable et du désirable est donc réaliste. Ainsi, la créatrice française Matali Crasset actualise la notion de progrès sous l'angle d'un environnement acceptable. Phare de la scénographie imaginée par le designer et architecte Nestor Perkal, sa plate-forme de vie réticulaire résume le propos : elle utilise technologies et matériaux de pointe en s'intéressant à la mise en relation du moi et du monde. « Si on prend la notion de progrès dans l'habitat, explique Matali Crasset dans le très innovant livre-catalogue, le progrès s'est caractérisé par une augmentation du confort. » Revers de la médaille : cocooning et inactivité. Que propose-t-elle ? Le strict minimum, le célèbre « less is more » de Mies van der Rohe investit une nouvelle typologie de mobilier intelligent. Ce retour à l'essentiel, c'est le futur proche, une plate-forme de vie minimum, fascinant et bel objet en soi. Cet ovni permet de réaliser les activités quotidiennes -cuisiner,
travailler, communiquer, dormir etc –, tout en devenant interface pour tout ce qui est immatériel, les différents réseaux qui viennent de l'extérieur ou innervent la maison. L'appareil d'éclairage ou de chauffage perd toute matérialité pour se fondre dans la structure alvéolaire.
Au-delà de la recherche de la compétitivité, la dimension environnementale du design devient un enjeu majeur. Face à la matière plastique et à la durée de vie des instruments domestiques, Delo Lindo remet l'artisanat à l'honneur : four en fonte d'acier et mixeur électrique en bois forcent des ponts rompus à tort. Normal Studio utilise les nano technologies pour « augmenter » un mur en pisé en y incluant les fonctions de chaleur et d'électricité…
Les prototypes foisonnent dans cette exposition bavarde où neuf designers croisent leurs conceptions d'un monde meilleur. On retrouve le collectif Big Game mais aussi Etienne Mineur ou encore Satyendra Pakhalé, chacun confronté par écran interposé à la parole de philosophes, sociologues, architectes… Du bousier-aspirateur à la « technologie culturelle », faites le grand écart, car le temps du changement est arrivé !

Design in Progress

Grand-Hornu Images, 82 rue Sainte- Louise, 7301-Hornu

Jusqu'au 12 septembre 2010

Website : Grand Hornu

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Bron/Source : Le Soir

100 YEARS AFTER HENRI ROUSSEAU'S DEATH, THE GUGGENHEIM DEVOTES FIRST IN-DEPTH EXHIBITION

One hundred years after the death of the French artist Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is devoting an exhibition to this pioneer of Modernism—the first occasion that Rousseau has been seen in depth in Spain.
Organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in co-operation with the Fondation Beyeler, Henri Rousseau presents a selection of approximately thirty masterpieces that provide a concise overview of the development and diversity of his oeuvre. From his famous jungle paintings in the later stages of his career, to the views of Paris and its environs, figures, portraits, allegories, and genre paintings, the exhibition gives a unique insight into the essential visual world of Rousseau.
A customs official by vocation, Rousseau initially took up painting in his free time and received no formal art training. Many years passed before his art, not academic and long considered naive, found recognition in the Paris art salons.
His importance within art history lies in his groundbreaking compositional mechanisms and painstaking technique, which greatly influenced younger generations of artists. Along with Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin, Rousseau’s visual inventions paved the way for the twentieth-century’s nascent Modernist movement.
A new visual idiom
For his works, which combined highly diverse themes of urbanity and the natural world adapted to his own visual conception, Rousseau mined resources beyond the academic tradition, relying heavily on postcards, photographs, and popular journals. His imaginary dreamlike jungle landscapes also took their inspiration directly from books on botany and his visits to gardens, woods and zoos.
The works included in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao reveal his unique working method of transferring individual motifs such as leaves and trees, figures, and entire compositional schemes from picture to picture, and combining them to create new visual compositions, painted with a painstaking, naturally refined technique.
Rousseau redefined the picture space by staggering pictorial elements from background to foreground, a method that would later be adopted by the Cubists. This built-up pictorial structure, in the form of painted collage, anticipated the autonomy of the picture plane that would become characteristic of Modernism. Younger artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger, both of whom admired and collected his work, were captivated by his technique.
A tour of the exhibition
Initially, Rousseau painted mostly small-format pictures depicting the French suburbs and the surrounding countryside of his immediate environment. In these landscapes, wilderness is represented by dense wooded areas on the background that the artist used to separate the visual realm by means of either a fence or behind a fortification wall, as in House on the Outskirts of Paris (Maison de la banlieue de Paris, ca. 1905, Carnegie Museum of Art). Gradually, he moved away from this rationally organized civilization toward an unorganized, wild depiction of nature. This passage from the well ordered and familiar to the unknown and alien defined his later work as can be seen in Landscape (Paysage, 1905–10, Philadelphia Museum of Art).
In his famous jungle paintings, Rousseau, who never actually set foot in a jungle, finally succeeded in leaving the sphere of domestication behind for his imaginary wilderness. Now working in a significantly larger format, Rousseau lent these invented landscapes a compelling visual reality. The culmination of the exhibition is formed by a significant assembly of Rousseau’s famous jungle pictures. Of special mention is the monumental painting The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope (Le lion, ayant faim, se jette sur l’antilope , 1895/1905, Fondation Beyeler) included on the occasion of Rousseau’s first appearance at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1905. In March 1906, art dealer and collector Ambroise Vollard acquired the sensational painting—the first Rousseau ever to enter the art trade—in which the artist’s talent for creating an imaginary new world comprised of various figures set against a stage like environment are shown.
In addition, the exhibition illustrates Rousseau’s well-documented interest in photography for source material. A few of his compositions, such as Old Junier’s cart (La carriole du père Junier , 1908, Musée l’Orangerie) were definitively based on photographs. In the course of transferring the photographic image to the canvas, he created an entirely new visual world, arranging its elements into another image layer by layer in front of his imaginary camera lens.
Yet for all his reliance on photographic realism, Rousseau always strove to keep the depicted world at a distance. This is especially seen in The Wedding (La noce, 1904–05, Musée l’Orangerie), a large-format painting whose distortions of scale and proportions with respect to the original model are immediately obvious. Indeed, the simultaneity of character and dream in Rousseau’s paintings, the flatness and lack of perspective, and his peculiar manner of lighting the picture plane, with both brilliant sun and shadowless figures, all combine to give his images a highly tuned Surrealist quality.
After the Impressionist painters and the succeeding generation created a new way to look at the visible, Rousseau introduced into his paintings a new approach to imaginative vision. His perception of reality was based primarily on observation, imitation and transformation of the visible. In this way, he taught modern artists how the unknown could be constructed using the building blocks of the known. He established a new logic and mechanics of compositional structure that profoundly affected subsequent generations of artists, most notably the Surrealists Max Ernst and René Magritte.
Many renowned museums and collections in Europe and America have contributed to the success of the exhibition by their generous provision of loans. These include the Musée national de l’Orangerie, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris; The Mayor Gallery, London; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel; the Nahmad Collection, Switzerland; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York; the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Kunsthaus Zürich; and a number of private collections.

Website : Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

ROUEN ET L'IMPRESSIONNISME, DE MONET A GAUGUIN

Les impressionnistes appréciaient la lumière de Rouen. Le musée des Beaux-Arts leur rend hommage.
Une ville pour l'impressionnisme, rassemble notamment onze des 28 toiles de la série consacrée par Claude Monet à la cathédrale de Rouen.
Elle réunit 130 tableaux signés de ce maître de l'impressionnisme et aussi de Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin ou William Turner.

Des ruelles, un fleuve, des quais, une cathédrale monumentale mais aussi un milieu d'amateurs d'art : les impressionnistes ont trouvé à Rouen la matière et les commodités nécessaires à leurs recherches.
L'exposition du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen montre comment la ville a été un atelier à ciel ouvert pour ces peintres dans leur quête de lumière et de couleurs."
A Rouen, la lumière était réputée unique", dit le directeur des musées de Rouen, Laurent Salomé, pour expliquer la venue dans la ville normande de nombreux artistes, de Monet à Gauguin en passant par Corot et Pissarro.

Monet et ses cathédrales

Claude Monet (1840-1929) est venu à Rouen "pour chercher un motif, il ne savait pas à quoi cela allait aboutir, qu'il s'agissait d'un glissement vers une nouvelle peinture", explique Laurent Salomé.
L'initiateur de l'impressionnisme, a peint dans les années 1892 à 1894 une série d'une trentaine de toiles de la cathédrale de Rouen. Une série considérée aujourd'hui comme "une des grandes ruptures de l'histoire de l'art", selon Laurent Salomé. Les "cathédrales", auxquelles le peintre donne des teintes lumineuses et multicolores, correspondant à la lumière de différents moments du jour et de l'année et occupent une salle entière au centre de l'exposition.
Onze d'entre elles, venues des musées du monde entier, ont été rassemblées pour cette exposition. La Cathédrale de Rouen, 1894 qui appartient au Narodni musej de Belgrade, n'avait plus été exposée en France depuis les années 1930.
Avec ses cathédrales aux formes estompées, Monet connaîtra le triomphe en 1895, lors d'une exposition à la galerie Durand-Ruel à Paris, à peine un quart de siècle après la controverse qui avait donné naissance à l'Impressionnisme, sous le feu alors des critiques.
Les ponts de Pissarro
Le succès de Monet fut un choc pour les autres peintres impressionnistes à commencer par Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), le deuxième grand personnage de l'exposition. "Il a éprouvé le besoin au moins de se positionner sinon de rivaliser", assure Laurent Salomé.
De cette émulation naîtra une impressionnante série de ponts de Rouen travaillée à partir d'une chambre d'hôtel sur les quais. "L'anarchiste Pissarro développe une vision humaniste et peint volontiers la rive gauche déjà ouvrière où certains bourgeois de la rive droite n'ont jamais mis les pieds", raconte Laurent Salomé.
Pour Paul Gauguin, Rouen sera un passage vers autre chose, au-delà de l'impressionnisme. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) n'a résidé que quelques mois à Rouen, en 1884. A la différence de ses maîtres, il ne s'intéresse pas aux grands édifices monumentaux leur préfèrant son univers proche, sa rue, des jardins et les petites routes de campagne. Les toiles colorées qu'il a peintes lors de ce passage un peu oublié montrent un peintre qui cherche une voie propre au-delà de l'impressionnisme. "A Rouen il forge son esthétique personnelle qui annonce déjà ses périodes Pont-Aven et Tahiti", assure Laurent Salomé.
L'exposition du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen présente aussi deux aquarelles de William Turner. Ce précurseur de l'impressionnisme a peint, vers 1832, une oeuvre qui annonce la future série de Monet. Peinte soixante ans plus tôt, cette cathédrale fait étonnamment penser à celles du peintre français.
L'exposition Une ville pour l'impressionnisme propose aussi par les oeuvres d'autres peintres moins connus comme Paul Huet (Vue générale de Rouen, 1831), Charles Lapostolet (Le port de Rouen, 1881) ou Charles Angrand (Le pont de pierre, 1881).
Cette exposition constitue le point d'orgue du festival Normandie impressionniste qui organise toute l'été expositions, colloques, concerts et autres manifestations à travers toute la région.
Une ville pour l'impressionnisme, Monet, Pissarro et Gauguin à Rouen
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, esplanade Marcel Duchamp,76000 Rouen.
Tous les jours sauf le mardi de 9h à 19h, mercredi à partir de 11h, jeudi et samedi jusqu'à 22h
du 4 juin au 26 septembre 2010

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Bron/Source : France 2

OBERLIN TO SEND MASTERWORKS BY RUBENS, TER BRUGGHEN, TURNER TO THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION

Illustrating its unconventional approach to displaying art, The Phillips Collection will present loosely themed groupings of some of its own masterworks with 25 masterpieces from Oberlin College’s Allen Memorial Art Museum. Half of the 24 paintings and one sculpture on loan from the Allen are old masters, dating from the 16th to the 18th centuries. They include rare works by painters of the British, Dutch, Flemish, French, German, Italian, and Spanish schools. The other Allen pieces are important modern works of the 19th and 20th centuries. Oberlin extended the opportunity to display some of its treasures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to the Phillips while the Allen is closed for renovations. Side by Side: Oberlin’s Masterworks at the Phillips, opens September 11, 2010, and runs through January 16, 2011.

Side by Side highlights defining features of The Phillips Collection: displays that combine works of different periods, nationalities, and styles, and constant rearrangement of the collection to reveal new affinities between works of art. This approach started with its founder, Duncan Phillips (1866–1966), who viewed the history of art as a continuing series of conversations between artists and works.
“Duncan Phillips was interested in showing modern art’s historical roots,” says Phillips Director Dorothy Kosinski. “That is why he bought an El Greco, a Goya, and a Giorgione. Early on, he hoped to have examples of work by several other old masters, including Rubens, who is represented in this selection from Oberlin. Having these truly wonderful works from Oberlin is a special opportunity to expand the context of our own collection and modern art in general.”
The Allen’s Rubens, The Finding of Erichthonius (1632–33), illustrating a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, will be shown with the Phillips’s radiant and enchanting Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81), Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s great impressionist summary of modern life. Renoir is known to have copied works by Peter Paul Rubens, and in the second half of his career, when Renoir turned away from impressionism, he again looked to Rubens for inspiration.
Other works in this part of the exhibition are by artists in The Phillips Collection who frequented the Louvre and copied works of art in it, including Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, and Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène Delacroix. Other highlights among the old masters in Side by Side include one of the most important examples of northern baroque painting in the United States, Hendrick ter Bruggen’s Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene (1625); The Fountain of Life, a superb 16th-century painting probably painted in Spain after a work by Jan van Eyck; and Joseph Wright of Derby’s night scene Dovedale by Moonlight (c. 1784–85). Oberlin’s modern holdings include works by Alberto Giacometti, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, and Mark Rothko.
Landscape is a strong suit at the Phillips, and many works on loan from the Allen play to this strength. Several, like Wright’s, show the world at night: Giuseppe Cesari’s The Agony in the Garden (Christ on the Mount of Olives) (1597–98) and Pier Francesco Mola’s Mercury Putting Argus to Sleep (1645–55). Christ’s angelic vision illuminates Cesari’s painting, but in the paintings by Mola and Wright, the light source is the moon. These nocturnal scenes find numerous echoes in The Phillips Collection, where silvery moonlight gleams in paintings such as Arthur Dove’s Me and the Moon (1937) and George Inness’s Moonlight, Tarpon Springs (1892).
Joseph Mallord William Turner’s shimmering View of Venice: The Ducal Palace, Dogana and Part of San Giorgio (1841) is one of the outstanding landscape offerings from Oberlin. Like his rival John Constable, represented in The Phillips Collection by On the River Stour (1834–37), Turner had a powerful effect on modern landscape painting. Claude Monet, an artist who was profoundly influenced by him, is represented in the Allen’s works by Garden of the Princess, Louvre (1867). Painted from a window at the Louvre, with a high vantage point, and a distinctive vertical format, the painting is one of the artist’s first views of the city. In a spatially complex composition, looking across an empty expanse of garden, the artist shows a bustling, tree-lined embankment of the Seine, a slice of river, and a cityscape beyond. The painting represents a much earlier stage in Monet’s development than The Road to Vétheuil (1879) and Val-Saint-Nicholas, near Dieppe (Morning) (1897), owned by the Phillips.
Among other modern landscapes on view in Side by Side, Paul Cézanne’s Viaduct at L’Estaque (1882) from the Allen adds another dimension to the rich imagery of the south of France, represented at the Phillips by strong holdings of landscapes by Pierre Bonnard, Cézanne, and Vincent van Gogh, among others.
A display of portraits will include one of the most dramatic works in the exhibition, the Allen’s Self-Portrait as a Soldier (1915), by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Kirchner painted himself in the uniform of his artillery regiment, his eyes vacant and without pupils, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and his right hand horrifyingly amputated. Painted when Kirchner was recuperating from illness and unfit for active duty, this searing portrait expresses the artist’s terror in the face of war. The Phillips’s uncompromising Cézanne self-portrait of 1878–80 will hang nearby as will Oberlin’s Michiel Sweerts’s Self-Portrait (1656).
Historic New York school works from the Allen will hang immediately outside the Rothko Room: Mark Rothko’s The Syrian Bull, Adolph Gottlieb’s The Rape of Persephone, and Barnett Newman’s Onement IV. In 1943, The Syrian Bull and The Rape of Persephone were exhibited at the Third Annual Exhibition of Modern Painters and Sculptors. In response, Edward Alden Jewell from the New York Times used these paintings to criticize the incomprehensibility of recent modern art. Within five days, Gottlieb, Rothko, and Newman wrote a challenge to Jewell that in turn set the aesthetic and cultural themes for the New York school.

Website : The Phillips Collection

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

WORLD'S LARGEST EXHIBITION OF THE STELLAR NEW YORK ARTIST JAMES RIZZI IN BREMEN

Colorful, with a zest for life, and full of humor—these qualities are typical of James Rizzi, typical of his work, typical of his world. For decades the New Yorker has been delighting numerous collectors around the world and an extensive community of fans with his refreshingly positive creations. Along the way from street painter to celebrated stellar artist, James Rizzi developed his unmistakable, cheerful style while trying out new ideas again and again. Already at the beginning of his unparalleled career, the connection between painting and sculpture led him to develop his famous 3D graphics. Whether it is a matter of the design of a Condor airplane or a postage stamp: James Rizzi remains true to himself, yet is always good for a surprise.
RIZZI'S WORLD for the Artist's Birthday in Bremen
In 2010, the most successful living representative of the first generation of pop artists is celebrating his sixtieth birthday. This is the occasion for a special survey of a dynamic life and versatile oeuvre. The exhibition RIZZI'S WORLD takes place from May 21 to July 4, 2010 at the Messe Bremen in Halle 6 and is the biggest show of the artist's works ever to have been presented. The exhibition agency Popular Art from Düsseldorf has brought 1,400 of Rizzi's works from all around the world to the Weser River.
Highlights
In addition to the famous 3D graphics, paintings and drawings, the exhibition features numerous highlights and surprises, including Rizzi's four-part graduation work from the art academy in Florida, which is insured for one million Euros; a large model of his Condor airplane; and two VW NEW BEETLES which he designed. Moreoever, the exhibition also includes nude drawings by James Rizzi for the first time, as well as stunning, large formats in oil which the Pop painter produced specially for the show in Bremen. Likewise never having been presented before are fifty record covers designed by the artist, as well as a painted guitar. Detailed biographical material, beginning with the childhood of the New Yorker, additionally allows visitors a private view into James Rizzi's life.
Art for Children
With his cheerful, richly colored style partially based on comic books, James Rizzi has delighted generations of young and old, but especially children and youths. One focus of the exhibition is accordingly the theme of art for children. A variegated program for young artists and those who would like to become artists, as well as many exciting participatory actions, offer fun to the entire family. Whoever enjoys color, good mood and creativity is heartily invited to discover RIZZI'S WORLD.
The Bremen Town Musicians
As the site for this extraordinary spectacle, James Rizzi personally selected the city of Bremen. This is not least due to the artist's special fascination with the famous story of the Bremen Town Musicians. The painter from Brooklyn has also given artistic expression to his great enthusiasm for the fairy tale of the Grimm brothers: He portrayed the four animals entirely in his personal style: colorful, with a zest for life, and full of humor. They dance through the image and invite the viewer: "Let's go to Bremen! Let's go to RIZZI'S WORLD!"

Website : James Rizzi

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

PHOTOGRAPHIE ARTISTIQUE ET ARTISTES DANS LA PHOTOGRAPHIE

Il suffit souvent d'une personnalité déterminée pour donner à une institution une orientation inattendue. On peut en juger actuellement au Musée d'Ixelles avec l'exposition Close-up, consacrée à la collection de photographie de cette institution communale. Conservateur du musée de 1957 à 1988, Jean Coquelet était également photographe. Dès les années 70, il fait entrer dans la collection des œuvres d'artistes qu'il côtoie ou qu'il admire. A son départ, la collection est déjà imposante et acquise à relativement peu de frais, la photographie n'ayant pas encore acquis le statut qui est le sien aujourd'hui. Ses successeurs auront la bonne idée de poursuivre dans la voie qu'il avait tracée et, au fil des ans, ils constitueront un ensemble cohérent que le musée expose pour la première fois en tant que tel.
Plusieurs caractéristiques se détachent d'emblée mais la plus importante est sans aucun doute le lien immédiat entre art et photographie. Loin du documentaire, Jean Coquelet et ceux qui lui succéderont s'intéressent à une photographie qui explore, expérimente, travaille sur les formes, le regard, l'architecture, le faux-semblant.

La première salle plonge immédiatement le visiteur dans cet univers avec les clichés de Robert Morian, autodidacte fasciné par le monde végétal. Il lui donne une seconde vie en trouvant dans des fruits et légumes qu'il laisse vieillir, des visages grimaçants, des paysages mystérieux, des formes menaçantes ou poétiques.
Le corps humain prend le relais avec les nus de Lucien Clergue et de Jean Coquelet. Mais d'autres manières de l'aborder sont également de la partie avec Sylvie Collin, Yves Auquier, Chantal Noël ou Marc Trivier. Si certaines œuvres ont été acquises dans les années 70, 80 ou 90, d'autres sont récentes comme la série de Trivier, entrée dans la collection en 2006.
Une collection cohérente
Une troisième salle invite à découvrir les photographes de la profusion, de la superposition des choses. Voici Charley Case avec une étonnante image de vernissage où l'on ne sait plus trop où sont les invités et où est l'œuvre. Quant à Armyde Peignier, on retrouve avec bonheur ses sous-bois touffus où des enfants surgissent comme de petits diables dont on ne sait trop s'ils apprivoisent la nature ou si celle-ci les soumet à sa volonté.
Par contraste, la ville et l'architecture offrent à Gilbert Fastenaekens ou Gilbert De Keyser, l'occasion de réaliser des images parfaitement claires, dépouillées, où les formes se répondent dans un équilibre parfait. A leurs côtés, Marie-Françoise Plissart photographie Bruxelles en plongée avec un vrai sens de la composition tandis que Christian Carez et Philippe De Gobert mêlent le vrai et le faux avec leurs maquettes d'un troublant réalisme.
Si tous ces photographes sont clairement du côté de l'art plus que du reportage, la dernière partie est carrément consacrée à des artistes utilisant la photographie de diverses manières. On y retrouve un Dirk Braeckman toujours fascinant, un chimigramme de Pierre Cordier, un grand diptyque éclatant de couleurs de Marie-Jo Lafontaine mais aussi Didier Mahieu, Stephen Sack et même un Wim Delvoye donnant une étonnante version radiographique du baiser.
Loin de l'habituel mélange des genres de ce type de collection, celle du Musée d'Ixelles s'avère ainsi remarquablement cohérente. C'est sa limite (très peu d'artistes autres que Bruxellois) mais aussi sa force avec un parcours qui assume pleinement la vocation de la photographie à figurer dans un musée au même titre que la sculpture ou la peinture.

Jusqu'au 5 septembre au Musée d'Ixelles, rue Jean van Volsem 71, 1050 Bruxelles.

Website :http://www.museedixelles.be/

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Bron/Source : Le Soir

'KLEE MEETS PICASSO' EXPOSITION CONFRONTS THEMES AND TECHNIQUES AT ZENTRUM PAUL KLEE BERN

Two masters, four themes, eight pictures. Poetry here, drama there. Irony here, sensuality there. Romanticism here, spirituality there. Paul here, Pablo there. The interactive exhibition «Paul und Pablo» by the children’s museum Creaviva invites guests to take part in a journey of creative dialogue beginning on the 6 June 2010.
The exhibition «Klee meets Picasso» at the Zentrum Paul Klee highlights the differences and similarities between two of the most renowned painters of the 20th Century in a unique confrontation of themes and techniques. Simultaneously, the children’s museum Creaviva is using this encounter as a platform for playful interaction with Paul and Pablo in the generous Loft where everyone is invited to participate and assimilate creative dialogue with modern art. Whilst still alive, Klee and Picasso met on only two occasions ‐ the first on 26 October 1933 in Paris and the second on 27 November 1937 in Bern when Picasso visited Klee in his modest attic studio. The unique artistic encounter in which Paul and Pablo meet once again, not personally, but through their outstanding works of art, leaves the creative dialogue to be constructed by the public.
In partnership with the School of Design Bern and Biel, under the direction of Stefan Gelzer, a class of 17 upcoming display artists developed various concepts for interactive installations to build a bridge to modern art for a multigenerational public in a uniquely playful way. Amongst creative stations for big eyes and small hands, the interactive exhibition also offers soul food for curious minds. With the help of an accompanying brochure, interested guests are offered the opportunity to dive deeper into diverse aspects of the artistic confrontation between Paul and Pablo on the quest to learn more about the artists widely regarded as the two great opposites of modern art.
For guests interested in experiencing and exploring the artistic directions of Klee and Picasso in a more practical manner, the «Open Studio» welcomes young and old from June to September, daily at 12pm, 2pm and 4pm. Themes vary on a monthly basis concomitant with current exhibitions.

Website : Zentrum Paul Klee

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Bron/Source :Artdaily