RETROSPECTIVE OF THE WORK BY FILMMAKER AND ARTIST HARUN FAROCKI IN KUNSTHAUS BREGENZ - AUSTRIA

Harun Farocki Immersion, 2009 Double channel video installation Color, sound, 20 min. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg/ Paris© Harun Farocki Filmproduktion

With Harun Farocki, the Kunsthaus Bregenz presents a filmmaker and artist whose work has had a strong influence on the history of the political film since the late 1960s. His great importance to the visual arts is reflected not only in the retrospectives of his films at institutions like Tate Modern in London but also in solo exhibitions at the MUMOK Wien, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. At the very least, Farocki’s participation in the “documenta” in 1997 and 2007 is a strong indication of the impact of his films and installations in the art context.
Organized by the Kunsthaus Bregenz, this exhibition, which is the most comprehensive retrospective of his work in Austria to date, spans the period from 1968 to the present and for the first time in Europe shows three video installations that, with the support of the KUB, were created especially for this occasion and form part of the series Serious Games. For these new video installations, which each last eight minutes, Farocki shot footage in military facilities in the USA and combined these sequences with material from computer simulations. Reminiscent of computer games, these programs are used by soldiers to practice for real emergency situations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and potential crisis zones. A variation of this can be found in another film in the Serious Games series, Immersion, which deals with the reenactment of soldiers’ traumatic wartime experiences using the same kind of simulation technology, which in this case serves therapeutic purposes.
The relation between technology and war already played a decisive role in the artist’s earlier work. In the series Eye/Machine, 2001–2003, which consists of three separate installations and is being shown along with Serious Games on the first upper floor of the KUB, Farocki draws comparisons between surveillance mechanisms in belligerent conflicts and the use of cameras in civilian situations, e.g. to register motion in public places or to monitor operation sequences in high-tech industrial facilities.
Comparison Via a Third, 2007, calls for a careful examination, a visual and cognitive scanning, of the aesthetically striking images of three geographically distinct production sites. This 2-channel 16-mm film installation as well as the split-screen video installation Counter-Music, 2004, and a comprehensive film library of 25 works are on display on the second floor. Comparison Via a Third shows a double video projection of brickyards and fired blocks being used to construct buildings in Africa, India, and Europe. Shot in the objective manner of a film documentary, this work gets by without spoken commentary, its impact deriving solely from the suggestive atmosphere of what is being presented. However, by merely showing the seemingly archaic production conditions prevalent in Indian high-rises, the film makes the viewer aware of parallels between different stages of industrialization within a society and in this way underscores the dubiousness of the traditional notion of progress.
In Counter-Music Harun Farocki resorts almost exclusively to already existing material. This includes footage from sleep laboratories as well as surveillance and monitoring cameras that keep an eye on automobile, rail, and subway traffic as well as pedestrians. He compares images of the canal system and abstract display boards for the functioning of a place with living, organically pulsing bodies, and designs a portrait of the city in the tradition of films from the 1920s like The Man with the Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov or Berlin – Symphony of a Great City by Walter Ruttmann. Excerpts from both films can be seen in Farocki’s installation.
Harun Farocki’s characteristic form of double projection is what enables him to produce both a regular succession of individual images and a simultaneity in their interrelationships. Despite the sometimes hard and unpredictable cuts, the jumping back and forth of images creates the soft montages that give the exhibition in Bregenz its title. One of Farocki’s best-known and most-loved works is certainly the piece that caused such a stir at the last “documenta,” Deep Play, which is being presented on the third upper floor of KUB. Twelve projection surfaces confront the viewer with different views of the final of the World Cup in 2006. Among the footage is not only material that was available to the normal viewer but also computer-generated abstractions of the game, vector measurements of the players’ bodies, and close-ups of individual players. The final, which was followed worldwide by 1.5 billion viewers in the summer of 2006 and whose infamous headbutt by Zidane preoccupied soccer fans and laymen alike, is transformed into a metaphor of the complex relationship between entertainment, monitoring, battle, and the media.
Harun Farocki was born in 1944 in Nový Jičín in, a part of Czechoslovakia annexed by Germany at the time. He lives in Berlin. From 1966 to 1968 he studied at the German Film and Television Academy, Berlin (West). 1974–1984 author and editor of the journal Filmkritik, Munich. 1998–1999 Speaking about Godard, New York / Berlin (co-written by Kaja Silverman). 1993–1999 visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1966 more than 100 productions for television or cinema: children’s television, documentaries, essay films, story films. Since 1996 numerous group and solo exhibitions in museums and galleries. 2007 presentation of Deep Play at the documenta 12. Since 2004 visiting professor, since 2006 full professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

23.10.2010 - 09.01.2011

Website : Kunsthaus Bregenz

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

DAVID HOCKNEY, DE MONET A AVATAR

Le peintre anglais se risque au numérique à la Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent. Rencontre avec un géant du pinceau, passionné d'effets spéciaux.

David Hockney fait la révolution à Paris avec «Fleurs fraîches», ses créations sur iPhone et iPad exposées jusqu'au 30 janvier à la Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent. Rencontre avec un pur «British», grand peintre qui a su tirer la leçon du cinéma américain. Sang vif et humour à revendre.
Votre premier geste de peintre en arrivant à Paris?
Monet ! Je suis allé à Giverny et au Grand Palais. J'ai eu la chance inouïe de voir seul l'exposition avant l'ouverture au public. Deux heures fabuleuses pendant lesquelles j'ai pu regarder chaque tableau de ce coloriste subtil. La rétrospective est éblouissante. Voir d'un même coup d'œil les séries de Meules, de Cathédrales, c'est une leçon magnifique. On ne reverra pas autant de Monet avant 25 ans. Donc, je ne le reverrai pas. Les tableaux de Normandie m'ont rappelé mes falaises du Yorkshire. En sortant du Grand Palais, j'étais high comme dans un trip. Toute cette beauté, la bienveillance irradiante de son œuvre, vous rendent heureux de vivre.En sortant, je me suis précipité à l'Orangerie voir les Nymphéas car, au Grand Palais, la dernière salle vous laisse sur votre faim. Le lendemain, j'étais à Giverny. Dans ce jardin extraordinaire, on voit naître les Nymphéas, on les comprend intimement. J'étais si transporté que je m'y suis acheté un étui à cigarettes Monet (rires). Monet fumait tout le temps, jusqu'à 86 ans. J'ai quitté l'Amérique à cause de cette furie antitabac. Je suis peintre, j'ai 73 ans et j'ai fumé une cigarette comme Monet. Je ne me suis jamais senti en meilleure santé ! J'adore Paris, ville des peintres et des fumeurs. D'être ici me donne plus d'espoir pour l'Europe…
Vous avez quitté la Californie pour l'Angleterre. Le Retour au pays natal comme chez Thomas Hardy?
La Californie reste ma base mais j'aime l'Angleterre de ma mère. Je vis dans un endroit très isolé, en pleine nature, qui m'inspire beaucoup. Il n'y a aucun vis-à-vis ! Un de mes assistants est parisien. C'est le premier de son espèce qui ait jamais foulé ce sol oublié ! (rires).
Vous avez tiré une mosaïque de peintures de votre contemplation du Grand Canyon. Répétez-vous l'expérience en Angleterre?
Nous avons installé neuf caméras vidéo haute définition sur une jeep et arpenté tout doucement une belle route déserte du East Yorskhire, près de chez moi. On voit chaque fleur, la feuille de chaque arbre, l'écorce de chaque tronc, l'étirement de chaque nuage. On projettera ces images en simultané sur neuf écrans géants et on aura une vision incroyable du paysage. Un tableau en mouvement en même temps qu'un relevé d'une minutie totale. On a fait un essai avec 18 écrans. Du jamais-vu ! Je montrerai ce travail à la Royal Academy de Londres dans 18 mois avec mes peintures, dessins, photographies et vidéos.
Pourquoi vous plongez-vous dans l'univers numérique de l'iPhone et de l'iPad?
La technologie nouvelle m'a toujours intéressé. La photographie, les films, les caméras, l'imprimerie, les faxs, les pièces jointes d'e-mails, tout cela parle de la même chose: la fabrication d'une image. En tant que peintre, je suis forcément au cœur du sujet. L'exposition à la Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent peut partir dans un courrier électronique ! Quand nous en avons eu l'idée, les moyens techniques, surtout l'iPad, n'existaient pas. Il a fallu trouver le château d'un fou pour réaliser ce projet assez dingue.
Pierre Bergé est ce fou?
Il l'est, assurément. Il a tout de suite adhéré à notre idée. Il nous a envoyé le meilleur technicien de Paris pour qu'elle prenne corps. On ne le voit peut-être pas du premier coup, mais les projections d'images sont d'une qualité sidérante.
Qu'est-ce qu'un peintre chercheet trouve dans l'outil numérique?
Un nouveau médium, tout simplement.
Nouvel obstacle ou liberté nouvelle?
Les deux, comme dans tout médium. Le gain est évident: c'est un support universel. C'est aussi un support lumineux. Je m'en suis servi aussitôt pour «peindre» sur mon iPad la tour Eiffel qui étincelle dans la nuit et que je vois scintiller depuis mon balcon du Lutetia. Je ne peins pas des fleurs, mais la lumière sur les fleurs, le soleil qui cogne contre une vitre… L'iPad est le nouveau carnet d'esquisses du peintre. D'ailleurs, il rentre pile dans la poche intérieure de ma veste destinée à abriter mes carnets. C'est comme avoir un piano dans sa poche !
Vos œuvres numériques sont des esquisses, des tableaux ou des rencontres du 3e type?
Je dessine certaines très vite, avec spontanéité, en une demi-heure. D'autres m'occupent deux ou trois jours. Je les laisse reposer. J'y reviens. Je change. Jusqu'à ce que je voie quelque chose. L'arc-en-ciel des couleurs est le même que dans la peinture à l'huile. Les nuances sont à portée de ma main, autant qu'avec un pinceau.
Est-ce une contagion de Los Angeles, citadelle du cinéma?
Los Angeles, c'est Hollywood. Je vis à Hollywood. Contrairement à l'attitude dédaigneuse qui veut que la Californie soit un désert culturel, les chefs-d'œuvre américains sont nés à Hollywood, forgeant un âge d'or. Je ne crois pas que nous vivions là-bas un déclin. Je suis passionné d'effets spéciaux et je vais tout voir. J'ai vu Avatar, bien sûr. Le plus réussi est le vol des héros. Le volume du son m'assourdit. Les effets de caméra sont trop rapides. La caméra vous dit où regarder. J'aurais voulu traîner un peu dans ce monde virtuel, voir un arbre de plus près, découvrir une feuille en entier… Mais c'est une autre histoire !

Website : Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent

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Bron/Source : Le Figaro

FIFTY PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS BY ANTONI TAPIES ON VIEW AT THE PALAU FABRE FOUNDATION

Fifty Antoni Tàpies’ paintings and drawings are being exhibited at the Palau Fabre Foundation

(Fundación Palau Fabre) from today on in the “Gaze at the Hand” (“Mira la mano...”) exhibition, which shows the vitality of the last ten years of this artist, who has already reached 87 and with which the Foundation opens a new stage.
Arriving simultaneously with the vernissage of the new permanent exhibition, the Foundation has done a redistribution of the spaces assigned to temporary exhibitions, which starts with an exhibition of the recent work of Tàpies, chosen by the also artist Perejaume, the director of the center, Josep Sampera, has informed today in a press conference.
The exhibition starts with a dozen of the most recent work of Tàpies, created in the last three years, all of them on paper and lots of ink, such as “Stretched Body” (2008, “Cuerpo estirado”), “Arrow Body” (2008, “Cuerpo flecha”), “Blue Ink” (2007, “Tinta azul”), “Black on Red” (2008, “Negro sobre rojo”), or “White Eyes” (2007 “Ojos blancos”).
In this space, the greater size works are “Black Strip” (2008, “Banda negra”), a piece in black and white that contrasts with “Two Forms of Varnish” (2008, “Dos formas de barniz”), in which two varnish ocher geometric blots standout next to a small cross.
On the first floor of the Foundation, a complete “Gaze at the Hand” suite can be seen where up to now only in a Madrilenian gallery could have been seen and which Tàpies has yielded for the occasion.
Throughout the course of the thirty works, Tàpies shows as in a typographic alphabet, some of the elements of the iconography of his creation, the caligraphic “a” or the crosses.
Near those elements, some parts of the human body can be distinguished with clarity, such as the head, the naked torso or the hands to which the title of these series refer to.
The journey of the exhibition ends with the projection of the documentary “T as in Tàpies” (“T de Tàpies”), directed by Carolina Tubau, in which the artist gives some clues in order to understand his creative process.
In spite of having followed different personal paths and artistic roads, Tàpies and Palau Fabre agreed and cooperated since their mutual commitment for the culture and with Catalonia. Precisely, Sampera has explained, in the makover fo the areas fot this museum, some Tàpies’ pieces that were already at the Foundation, have been relocated, among them a work of 1978, when Palau Fabre was president of the Catalonian Pen Club, along with a new incorporation, “Raimon”, a CCOO deposit, an original work that the artist donated to the then clandestine syndicate in 1974, for a solidary campaign in favor of the Vietnamese people.
Among the new incorporations to the Foundation, two drawings of the sculptor Juli González and one created by Picasso when he was 20 standout, the latter being a work which Samper has said that “had been erroneously considered to be a fake, and that has been rediscovered by the painter’s daughter, Maya Picasso, in one of her consultations to the Josep Palau Fabre’s Picassian Fund.
Samper has commented that when Palau showed the signed drawing to Picasso, in order to include it in his book “Picasso in Catalonia”, the artist wrote an “X” and the word “faux” (false) on the signature, seeing that it was apocriphal and done afterwards, but Maya Picasso has undone the misunderstanding, since “the false was referred to the signature and not to the drawing”.

24.10.2010 - 16.01.2011

Website : Palau Fabre Foundation Barcelona

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

CETTE PREMIERE CRANACH A BOZAR EST UNE PREMIERE AU BENELUX

Lucas Cranach the Elder, A Female Personification of Justice, 1537, Private collection

Les spécialistes se sont souvent demandé qui, de Dürer ou de Cranach l'Ancien occupait la première place sur la scène de la grande peinture allemande. Un débat un peu vain qui tient sans doute à la trop bonne fortune des nudités de Cranach. Graciles et longilignes, sensuelles et cérébrales, comme prises entre vice et vertu avec une pointe d'étrangeté, ses Vénus, Judith, Salomé et Lucrèce ont toujours énormément plu aux modernes, à commencer par Picasso qui a réalisé en 1949 un Vénus et l‘Amour d'après le maître.

L'œuvre prolixe de Cranach à laquelle le Palais des Beaux-Arts consacre une exposition de premier ordre, agréable à visiter en raison de son efficace et belle scénographie, compte encore un millier de pièces. Cinquante tableaux majeurs du vieux maître, autant de très beaux dessins et de gravures se déclinent à Bruxelles au voisinage d'une cinquantaine d'autres maîtres européens contemporains comme Dürer, Titien, Metsys et leurs suiveurs. Au total, 50 collections publiques et privées ont été sollicitées pour mener à bien ce projet qui a pris trois années pour aboutir.

Même au cœur de ses œuvres les plus religieuses et les plus diplomatiques célébrant l'Eglise et l'Electorat de Saxe où il était peintre de Cour, Cranach impose une loi très personnelle. Rompant avec l'idéal classique en vogue à la Renaissance, il cisèle figures et visages avec une linéarité si expressive et une acuité si troublante qu'on n'en épuise jamais la beauté ni le mystère.
Déjà les œuvres d'avant la célébration de la Réforme, « catholiques » dénotent une sobriété presque incisive, déviante, que la suavité charnelle et le merveilleux à la flamande du paysage mettent en tension. Cranach a modelé son style en fonction des peintres flamands et italiens et, naturellement, de la tradition germanique, transgresse ces composantes au bénéfice d‘un style hautement identifiable, encore gothique et déjà maniériste. Ce style fera la fortune de l'atelier, très performant et promu pendant quasi toute la carrière du peintre à un franc succès.
Côte à côte, un tableau du Flamand Quentin Metsys et un de Cranach donnent toute la mesure de cette transgression des habitudes. Ici, de l'Allemand, une double étude de tête, un extraordinaire portrait de « couple » où le Christ et la Vierge sortent de l'ombre en toute simplicité, comme des figures profanes, totalement humaines. Ils s'adressent au spectateur avec une modernité saisissante ! Là, au contraire, sous le pinceau du Flamand, les mêmes figures en prière et en majesté sont prises dans une ostentation religieuse bien plus conventionnelle.

Maniérisme, espace de liberté ?

Il n'est pas toujours aisé de distinguer, en dépit de la signature, ce qui relève de la main de Cranach ou de son atelier à Wittenberg. Aucune œuvre secondaire ou mineure pourtant ne figure à l'exposition. Au contraire. On y voit des tableaux fameux comme L'Allégorie de la justice, Le Jugement de Pâris, Les Amants mal assortis, Lucrèce, Marie de Saxe, Vénus et Cupidon voleur de miel et cette poétique Chasse aux cerfs ou cet étourdissant petit tableau dédié aux travaux d'Hercule, où les corps entremêlés ont une puissante résonance dramaturgique et symbolique.
Si l'art de Cranach, comme celui de n'importe quel maître, reflète son temps fait de crise politique et religieuse, de violence et d'ostentation festive, il apporte aussi, de manière particulièrement explicite, « sa » réponse. La peinture sert évidemment les potentats mais se regarde aussi et de plus en plus elle-même. Un discours de biais, en coulisses, auquel on a parfois donné le nom de maniérisme et qui fait figure d'espace de liberté où un public actuel peut se retrouver.

20.10.2010-23.01.2011

Website : BOZAR Bruxelles

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Bron/Source : Le Soir

DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART CELEBRATES THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WENDY AND EMERY REVES COLLECTION

To house the remarkable collection, the DMA opened a 16,500-square-foot wing in 1985 designed by the Museum’s architect, Edward Larrabee Barnes, to recreate five rooms from Villa La Pausa, the home of Wendy and Emery Reves in the south of France.

This November marks the 25th anniversary of the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection at the Dallas Museum of Art. In 1985, the Museum received more than 1,400 works from the private art collection of Emery Reves – including impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, and decorative arts objects – donated by the Wendy & Emery Reves Foundation, Inc. on behalf of Wendy’s late husband Emery. With this gift the Museum’s collections of late 19th- and early 20th-century European art and European decorative art were transformed.
To house the remarkable collection, the DMA opened a 16,500-square-foot wing in 1985 designed by the Museum’s architect, Edward Larrabee Barnes, to recreate five rooms from Villa La Pausa, the home of Wendy and Emery Reves in the south of France. The wing presents the entire Reves Collection, featuring important works by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Gustave Courbet, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincent van Gogh, among others, which has been installed as it was in the original villa. Since its opening at the DMA, the Reves Collection has been one of the most visited galleries of the Museum. This year, the Museum launched an all-new smARTphone tour of the collection highlighting more than twenty works of art and offering “behind-the-scenes” fe at ures.
In celebration of the 25th anniversary, the Museum will host on October 28, 2010, at 7:30 p.m. a special Brettell Lecture focusing on the sculptor Auguste Rodin and his monumental decorative portal The Gates of Hell. Guest lecturer Antoinette le Normand-Romain, former curator of the Musée Rodin in Paris, will discuss this masterwork as well as three important sculptures by Rodin in the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection that were the products of the creative process for The Gates of Hell.
“The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection stands as one of the great bequests in the Dallas Museum of Art’s history,” said Bonnie Pitman, The DMA’s Eugene McDermott Director. “The extraordinary gift of this remarkable collection 25 years ago significantly developed the Museum’s holdings of European art, and the contribution of European decorative arts, the area of Wendy’s particular personal interest, established the institution’s collection in that area. These works of art in this unique setting are enjoyed enormously by our visitors.”
Wendy and Emery Reves’ Mediterranean villa was originally built in 1927 by Coco Chanel, who directed the design of it with the architect Robert Streitz, and many of the furnishings in the rooms were part of Chanel’s original décor of the villa. The rooms recreated in the Museum include the library, dining room, salon, bedroom, and hall, as well as a patio built around a central courtyard. The patio and the hall were specifically designed at Chanel’s request to remind her of the Romanesque convent outside Paris where she boarded as a child. “The presentation of the Reves Collection at the Dallas Museum of Art replicates a collector’s beloved home in Europe within an American museum setting; as Wendy Reves commented in 1985 at the Dallas opening, ‘I do feel the spirit of La Pausa here,’” said Olivier Meslay, Senior Curator of European and American Art and The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art. Among the masterpieces of the Reves Collection is Vincent van Gogh’s Sheaves of Wheat, which was the centerpiece of the Museum’s 2006 exhibition Van Gogh’s Sheaves of Wheat examining the artist's fascination with the motif and the artist’s work on paper Café Terrace at Night. This drawing was featured in two New York museum exhibitions over the past five years – Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night at the Museum of Modern Art and Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005. Also part of the collection is The Duck Pond by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, which went to the National Gallery in London in 2007 for the exhibition Renoir Landscapes, 1865-1883. Camille Pissarro’s The Road to Versailles, Louveciennes: Morning Frost was requested by The Fabre Museum in Montpellier, France, in 2007 for its exhibition L’Impressionisme vu d’Amerique, which was then presented at Musée de Grenoble. The extensive decorative arts holdings include over 300 superb pieces of Chinese export porcelain; European furniture; a rare French cabinet-on-stand attributed to Pierre Gole; a collection of rare 17th- and 18th-century frames from France, Italy , Spain, England, and Germany; European fans; important carpets from Europe and Central Asia; and over 150 silver objects.
The Reves Collection also includes a gallery of paintings and memorabilia from Sir Winston Churchill and a library of rare books, testimony of Emery Reves’ enduring friendship with Churchill and his career as a publisher and journalist.
Visitors to the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection can access a DMA smARTphone tour of highlights from the collection at DallasMuseumofArt.mobi. The 21 stops include paintings, such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Lise Sewing and Édouard Manet’s Vase of White Lilacs and Roses, and works on paper, such as Edgar Degas’ The B at hers and Camille Pissarro’s Self-Portrait. Visitors can also learn more about the collection of decorative arts. Biographies and images of artists are part of the special smARTphone fe at ure, as well as images of additional works by these artists found throughout the Museum’s galleries. Wendy Reves shares memories of life at Villa La Pausa and of collecting art. Archival photographs of the villa, visitors including Churchill and Salvador Dalí, and Chanel are also included.

Website : Dallas Museum of Art

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

EXHIBITION AT THE COURTAULD GALLERY FOCUSES ON CEZANNE'S PAINTINGS OF CARD PLAYERS AND PIPE

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), The Card Players, c.1890-92. Oil on canvas, 65.4 x 81.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960

Paul Cézanne’s famous paintings of peasant card players and pipe smokers have long been considered to be among his most iconic and powerful works. This landmark exhibition, organised by The Courtauld Gallery in London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is the first to focus on this group of masterpieces. Described by Cézanne’s early biographer, Gustav Coquiot, as being “equal to the most beautiful works of art in the world”, this is a unique opportunity to enjoy these remarkable paintings in unprecedented depth. The exhibition brings together the most comprehensive group of these works ever staged, including three of the Card Players paintings, five of the most outstanding peasant portraits and the majority of the exquisite preparatory drawings, watercolours and oil studies. Cézanne’s Card Players stand alongside his Bathers series as the most ambitious and complex figurative works of his career.
The first mention of the Card Players series comes in 1891 when the writer Paul Alexis visited Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence and found the artist painting a local peasant from the farm on his estate, the Jas de Bouffan. A number of different farm workers came to sit for him over the years, often smoking their clay pipes. They included an old gardener known as le père Alexandre and Paulin Paulet, who posed as the figure seated on the left in The Card Players, a task for which he was paid five francs. Cézanne’s depictions of card players would prove to be one of his most ambitious projects and occupied him for several years. It resulted in five closely related canvases of different sizes showing men seated at a rustic table playing cards, including versions from The Courtauld Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée d’Orsay. Alongside these he produced a larger number of paintings of the individual farm workers who appear in the Card Players compositions, major examples of which will be reunited from the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, together with The Courtauld’s Man with a Pipe.
Cézanne devoted himself to his peasant card players, often repeating his compositions, striving to express the essence of these sun-beaten farm workers whom he found so compelling. Rather than posing his models as a group playing cards, Cézanne made studies of them individually and only brought them together as opponents on the canvas itself. For him, the local peasants of Aix were the human equivalent of his beloved Montaigne Sainte-Victoire that presided over the town – steadfast, unchanging and monumental. As he later put it, “I love above all else the appearance of people who have grown old without breaking with old customs”. Cézanne’s card players are not shown as rowdy drinkers and gamblers in the way that, for centuries, peasants had been depicted in rural genre paintings. Rather, they are stoical and completely absorbed in the time-honoured ritual of their game. As the famous English critic Roger Fry wrote in 1927: “It is hard to think of any design since those of the great Italian Primitives… which gives us so extraordinary a sense of monumental gravity and resistance – of something that has found its centre and can never be moved.”
The monumentality of the works epitomises Cézanne’s stated aim to produce “something solid and durable, like the art of the museums”. Appropriately, one of the first works by Cézanne to enter a museum collection was The Card Players, which was accepted by the Louvre in 1911, five years after the artist’s death.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Cézanne’s card player and peasant works is that their evocation of unchanging traditions was achieved by pushing the boundaries of painting in radical new directions. Cézanne painted freely and inventively, rendering his peasants through a vibrant patchwork of brushstrokes which animates the surface of the paintings. For most nineteenth-century viewers his technique would have appeared as coarse as his peasant subject matter but the Card Players would prove an inspiration to later generations of avant-garde artists. For Pablo Picasso, Cézanne’s peasants were a touchstone for his Cubist portraits and their example resonates throughout the twentieth century with particular homages paid to them by artists as diverse as Fernand Léger and Jeff Wall.
The Courtauld Gallery’s world-renowned Cézanne collection includes two of the masterpieces from this series, The Card Players and Man with a Pipe. These will be joined by major loans from international collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which will be the second venue for the exhibition from 9 February to 8 May 2011.
Cézanne’s creation of a relatively large number of preparatory works for the Card Players paintings was highly unusual and indicates his commitment to this ambitious series. In preparation for the exhibition, The Courtauld and the Metropolitan collaborated on the first technical research project to look systematically at this group of works. This has shed fresh light on Cézanne’s working practice. Most importantly, by examining the extent of underdrawing on each canvas it has challenged established views about the sequence in which he produced the paintings. Whereas it has traditionally been assumed that he worked from the largest paintings to the smallest, gradually simplifying the scenes, it now seems clear that he started the series with the smaller canvases, using them to establish his iconic compositions.
Cézanne’s Card Players is the latest in a successful series of focused exhibitions organised by The Courtauld Gallery, in which masterpieces from its own collection are re-examined in the context of important closely related loans from international museums and galleries. The show is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, including contributions from leading Cézanne scholars, John House (The Courtauld Institute of Art) and Richard Shiff (University of Texas at Austin).

21.10.2010 - 16.01.2011

Website : The Courtauld Gallery

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

De Delacroix a Kandinsky : Orientalisme en Europe au Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique - Musée Art moderne à Bruxelles

L’exposition présente un tour d’horizon de l’art orientaliste qui se développa en Europe au cours du XIXe siècle (1798-1914). Des paysages désertiques sous une chaleur accablante, des silhouettes féminines tantôt voilées de mystère et de discrétion tantôt représentées dans toute leur sensualité, des artisans entourés d’objets aux multiples couleurs et textures… Cet éventail de thèmes invitera le visiteur à entamer un voyage à travers des mondes exotiques où se mêlent fantaisie et réalité. Les peintures, les dessins et les sculptures témoignent d’une vision occidentale de l’Orient. Plusieurs facteurs, tels que le développement des moyens de locomotion, les conceptions scientifiques de l’époque, les intérêts politiques et le romantisme ont façonné cette représentation de l’Orient.

Nous vous invitons à découvrir cet univers fascinant sur le site web de l'exposition.

15.10.2010 - 09.01.2011

Website de l'exposition

Bron/Source : KMSKB - MRBAB

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GROUND-BREAKING EXHIBITION THAT EXPLORES PICASSO'S REPONSE TO DEGAS

The Museu Picasso in Barcelona presents, from 15 October to 16 January 2011 the major exhibition «Picasso Looks at Degas». The exhibition is curated by Elizabeth Cowling, Professor Emeritus of History of Art at Edinburgh University, and Richard Kendall, the Clark’s Curator at Large and is organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown and the Museu Picasso, Barcelona, with the special cooperation of Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte.
Throughout his life Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was fascinated by the personality and art of Edgar Degas (1834–1917). He collected the Impressionist’s work, often re-interpreted his signature imagery, and at the end of his life created scenes that included depictions of Degas himself. «Picasso Looks at Degas» is the first exhibition to explore the extent and significance of this phenomenon and brings together over one hundred works from international museums and private collections, including many that have never before been shown in Spain. The Museu Picasso is the exclusive European venue for the show, which is curated by Picasso expert Elizabeth Cowling and Impressionist scholar Richard Kendall.
Thanks to his friendship with older artists in Barcelona’s Quatre Gats group, Picasso knew something of Impressionism before his first visit to Paris in 1900. However, what became a sustained dialogue with Degas’s work began to develop only after he started visiting the French capital and seeing examples in the original. When he settled in the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre in 1904 Picasso was within a few minutes’ walk of Degas’s studio. They had many acquaintances in common in the Parisian art world, including the legendary dealer Ambroise Vollard, but they seem never actually to have met. Using compelling pairings and groupings of works on related themes, the exhibition examines Degas through Picasso’s eyes and the ways in which the Spanish artist’s response varied over time from emulation to confrontation and from parody to homage. Both shared a lifelong obsession with women, visible in their portraits of friends and innumerable representations of the female nude. But Picasso also echoed Degas’s acknowledged signature subjects of café concert performers, ballet dancers, women at their toilette, and prostitutes. While usually identified as painters, both Degas and Picasso were supreme draftsmen and highly innovative sculptors and printmakers, and the exhibition brings together works in all these media in order to examine Picasso’s reaction to the challenge posed by Degas’s oeuvre and the fascinating affinity between their creative thinking and working methods.
The exhibition opens with Picasso’s early years when he received an academic training very similar to that of Degas, whose art he had not discovered at that point. It then turns to the bohemian world of early twentieth-century Paris where Picasso first began to respond directly to Degas’s imagery of modern life. In pictures such as End of the Performance (1900–01, Museu Picasso, Barcelona), he paid tribute to Degas’s café-concert scenes by depicting a singer in mid-performance on stage. One of the most dramatic confrontations in this section is between Degas’s controversial masterpiece In a Café (L’Absinthe) (1875-76, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and Picasso’s riveting Blue period Portrait of Sebastìa Junyer i Vidal (1903, Los Angeles County Museum of Art). The ballet is a central theme in Degas’s work, and paintings such as Dancers in the Classroom (c.1880, Clark Art Institute, Willamstown) 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 this artistic dialogue unfolded, the Clark’s iconic sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1879–1881), considered shocking and radical in its time, is juxtaposed with Picasso’s Yellow Nude (1907, Gretchen and John Berggruen Collection, San Francisco), 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. Never-before-exhibited archival material complements these works and sheds new light on Picasso’s relationship with Olga and the ballet.
Picasso inherited and transformed another of Degas’s favourite 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. Picasso’s statuesque Woman Plaiting Her Hair (1906, Museum of Modern Art, New York) will be shown with both Degas’s glowing red-pink Combing the Hair (c. 1896, The National Gallery, London) and his immense, apparently unfinished Nude Woman Drying Herself (1884-86, Brooklyn Museum, New York).
In the late 1870s Degas created a series of monotypes depicting prostitutes and their customers in brothels. 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 (Private collection) as a tribute to the great Impressionist.

Website : Musée Picasso Barcelona

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

EXHIBITION REVEALS HOW GUSTAVE COURBET REALIZED THE VISION OF A POETIC ART OF MODERNITY

The French painter Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) ranks among the most fascinating nineteenth-century artists. He is regarded as the crucial pioneer of political realistic painting and as a revolutionary of the Paris Commune. But Courbet also had an entirely different side: he was one of the great dreamers in history. In his portraits, but also in his landscapes, drawings, and still-lifes, he depicts a world of absorption and introversion – in stark contrast to the frenzied industrialization of his age. One hundred works from eleven countries – among them loans from Stockholm, Paris, Montpellier, Los Angeles, New York, and Oslo – will present this “other” Courbet for the first time in the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt from October 15, 2010 to January 30, 2011. Curated by Professor Klaus Herding, the exhibition reveals how Courbet, from a starting point in German Romanticism, realized the vision of a poetic art of Modernity, later to be further developed by Cézanne and Picasso, as well as in the schools of Symbolism, Surrealism, and Magic Realism. Why so many contemporary artists refer to Courbet may also result from the sonambulistic sensualism, which many of Courbet’s works radiate, and their immersion into remote areas concealed from the outside world.
Gustave Courbet, born into a middle-class family in Ornans near Besançon in the Franche-Comté region in 1819, has always been regarded as an advocate of socially committed art. His painting “The Stonebreakers” from 1849 (probably destroyed in 1945), which shows two day laborers without covering up their wretched everyday hardship, has often been cited as an example in this context. Courbet’s work has also been associated with his engagement in the Paris Commune. It was in 1873 when the artist alone was blamed for the dismantling of the Vendôme Column erected in celebration of the Napoleonic Wars by the Paris Commune in May 1871. Before he was sentenced to pay the expenses for its re-erection, he took refuge in Switzerland, where he died in La Tour-de-Peilz on Lake Geneva in 1877.
Courbet’s contemporaries, such as the writer Jules Champfleury and the philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, considerably contributed to Courbet’s image as an advocate of Realism, which still dominates our understanding of his art. Unflinching veracity, the treatment of socio-political subjects, and the depiction of people in their daily routines are considered essential features of the Realist movement, which harked back to seventeenth-century Spanish and Dutch painting. In Germany, where during the 1850s Courbet was particularly revered in Frankfurt and Munich, he was held in even greater esteem than in France as a pioneering painter of the Realist movement. However, the definition of realism also implies a component that goes beyond the pure portrayal of an object. For, as a rule, the artist who looks at things from a realist perspective and thus renders them in a truthful fashion intends to overcome this “bad” reality by doing so: unlike naturalism, realism contains an idealistic impulse.
In the Schirn’s exhibition, this phenomenon of realism is deliberately eclipsed, whilst the focus is on a “different,” dreamy Courbet. With good cause: because even in those instances where Courbet directly referred to reality, it turns out to be a device of introversion and defamiliarization: Courbet’s portraits frequently reveal a pensive tendency toward self-contemplation; his landscapes show remote rocky and wooded scenery; his seascapes breathe loneliness; his hunting scenes suggest identification with the victim; and his still lifes lead us into an enchanted realm in which the standards of the outer world no longer apply. A substantial number of his figures are lost in dreams as they are depicted sleeping or drowsing, often expressive of some yearning that alludes to hidden desires. Courbet’s figures are rarely shown in action; now and then, the narrative rendered in a picture is interrupted; sometimes one can perceive the explosive release of intense emotion; mostly, however, soft nuances prevail.
The artist’s technique complies with this penchant for nuances. He rarely used glaring, unmixed colors. Courbet avoided unambiguousness. Frequently, a color no longer defines a specific object, but extends beyond it or even “circumvents” it while it spreads across the picture and leaves room to chance. Through his method of applying and removing paint with a palette knife, Courbet literally rendered “proper” – i.e., academic – painting impossible. One also comes across surprising conversions. A solid object (such as a rock) is depicted as something translucent, whereas a non-solid substance (like water) seems to be impermeable. Often, the painter erratically alternated between these two forms of paint application. Such methods severely unsettled nineteenth-century visual habits and have affected art production ever since, so that Courbet’s significance for us lies in this innovative approach rather than in revolutionary gestures.
Last, not least, Courbet’s paintings and drawings reveal an unusually broad emotional spectrum that includes the exposure of fright and self-doubt and encompasses his contemporaries’ traits of morbidity and suspicion as well as their feelings of superiority and self-confidence. In depicting these emotions, Courbet never once yielded to the then-prevalent dictate of idealist representation. Besides the political content of his art, the exploration of people’s inner lives pursued in his portraits and the dissolution of matter achieved in his landscapes constitute major artistic innovations. However, it is not always possible to isolate Courbet’s three fundamental accomplishments – social criticism, abstraction, and introspection – from one another, since they frequently interlock. Courbet’s saying “I even make stones think” shows how persistently he penetrated the inner nature of things in order to transform reality through poetic reflection.
How fertile the upheaval of traditions provoked by Courbet was for Manet and Cézanne, but also for Picasso or de Chirico, for Beckmann and Duchamp is evidenced by the fact that each of these artists and even numerous present-day painters such as Gerhard Richter or Neo Rauch have laid claim to completely different features of Courbet’ work as important for their production. The exhibition is also of special importance because of the artist’s personal relationship with Frankfurt. The city had never been as close to the Paris art scene as it was with Courbet, who exhibited in Frankfurt as early as 1852. His painting “A Burial at Ornans”, which he presented in the Lederhalle, caused fierce debates. People regarded it as scandalous to depict an everyday scene such as a burial in the form of a historical painting. After a number of further exhibitions, Courbet visited the area personally for the first time in 1858/59, staying for several months and painting such important works as “The Lady on a Terrace” and “View of Frankfurt”. He started working on one of his largest hunting pictures, “Stag Taking to the Water” (1858–1861), during his sojourn. He also made a lot of contacts and played a crucial role in the formation of a Frankfurt school of painting. He would exercise a decisive influence on such important artists as Wilhelm Leibl, Hans Thoma, and Carl Schuch, as well as on the Kronberg school of painting. Besides Courbet’s landscapes, his sea pieces from between 1865 and 1873 are a highlight of the exhibition both because of their original subject matter and their anti-civilizational thrust. In these years and particularly after the failure of the Paris Commune, Courbet came to paint self-reflective still lifes in which he pondered on life and death, and on his own end.

15.10.2010 - 30.01.2011

Website : Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

OEUVRES AU NOIR DESSEIN

« Manières noires », exposition passionnante, illustre l'étrange fascination qu'exerce, sur les créateurs et sur les autres, cette « absence de couleur » qu'est le noir.
Noir sur blanc. Noir, refuge d'Yves Saint Laurent. Présence de l'ombre rebelle pour Yamamoto. Femme devenue reine de Sonia Rykiel. Boule de cristal d'Henri Michaux. Une luminosité folle et implacable se dégage des cimaises du BAM, le musée des Beaux-arts de Mons en sa cage de verre, pourtant envahi d'œuvres au noir ! Palpitation, irisation, le noir est une couleur pour Matisse, Monet ou Goya. C'est la couleur de la lumière. Présent dans l'histoire des hommes depuis l'âge des cavernes, le noir a connu des fortunes diverses dans l'histoire de l'art. Le XXe siècle est le siècle d'or, celui qui a propulsé le noir au rang de valeur iconique depuis le Carré noir sur fond blanc de Malevitch, en 1915.
Loin d'effrayer, le noir se fait velours et séduction dans cette mise en scène accordée comme les touches d'un piano par Winston Spriet-Prévert. On passe du black-out cinématographique à la condition de toute représentation dans la chambre noire du photographe ou à l'appréhension de l'espace chez Richard Serra. La source d'Idées noires et de pages d'humour horrifique pour Franquin flirte avec une robe de chez Chanel ou des bijoux de deuil, gravitant jusqu'au noir qui éteint les lumières dans les compositions de Michaux.

« Manières noires, titre de l'exposition, est emprunté à la technique de gravure, précise Françoise Foulon, maître d'œuvre de cette impressionnante aventure. Nous employons le pluriel parce que nous embrassons plusieurs disciplines, peinture, bande dessinée, design, mode etc. Ce n'est pas courant de voir une exposition dans un musée des Beaux-arts qui rassemble des casseroles, des robes, des chaises et de la dentelle de Chantilly ! »
L'art en noir et blanc
Pour monter en neige ce noir de noir, plusieurs commissaires ont la patte ! Raphaël Pirenne, docteur en histoire de l'art et chargé de recherches au CNRS a fait danser la cote des prêts. Il amène des œuvres fondamentales comme la double citation de Guernica d'Art & Language, renvoyant en 1980 à la palette chromatique de Picasso et au dripping de Jackson Pollock. Pour faire vibrer le noir, Parmiggiani et son époustouflant Etoiles de la nuit génère une spatialisation du lieu d'exposition, comme si la surface du mur acquérait subitement une profondeur et un mouvement inattendus. On rencontre aussi Jean Dubuffet, Tony Smith, Richard Serra, Joëlle Tuerlinck poursuivant chacun à leur manière une interrogation de la perception. Les monochromes noirs de Marthe Wéry, d'Amédée Cortier ou de Bernar Venet, jusqu'à cette tonne de charbon étalée au sol, mélangent réflexion spirituelle, langage de l'abstraction géométrique et manifeste d'une présence brutale dans le champ de perception.
Xavier Canonne, directeur du Musée de Charleroi, a fouillé ses coups de cœur pour mettre en lumière la lutte contre l'obscurité de Lisa Kereszi. Dancer on stage (2003) met en scène une danseuse surgissant du fond noir de la scène. « Cette photo est un coup de foudre et le reste. Je l'ai achetée il y a trois ans, à Paris Photo, se souvient Canonne. C'est du ciné à la David Lynch, l'ombre et son négatif, une image terriblement intrigante. » Il installe les photographies Nacht de Thomas Ruff en regard de Concessions de Boltanski qui évoque les crimes de guerre dans un système de dévoilement, désir de voir et d'occulter.
Morgan Di Salvia cornaque une bande dessinée où le noir est devenu un choix stylistique, avec Franquin, Jacques Tardi, Olivier Deprez ou Blutch. Paul Willemsen, directeur d'Argos, introduit le ballet des films expérimentaux au fil de choix radicaux, comme le dramatique Nocturne (Lampedusa), de Pieter Geenen, qui filme des réfugiés à la caméra infrarouge. Patrick Everaert, artiste et collectionneur de design, joue sur le noir d'une lampe, écrin de lumière. Ce noir longtemps repoussé par le plastique psychédélique, revient en force dans les créations les plus radicales en matière de design : la série Smoke de Maarten Baas, avec ce vernis protecteur couvrant le mobilier carbonisé, est un exemple de densité accentuée de l'objet.
L'histoire de la mode du noir au XXe siècle accompagne les silhouettes fluides. La collection du Musée de la mode d'Anvers revient avec brio sur ces robes de l'entre-deux-guerres. Pour avoir les idées claires, plongez dans le noir !

BAM, 8 rue Neuve, Mons - Belgique, jusqu'au 13 février 2011

Website : BAM

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Bron/Source : Le Soir

PICASSO TO JULIE MEHRETU : MODERN DRAWINGS FROM THE BRITISH MUSEUM COLLECTION

This survey of modern drawings from the British Museum’s extensive collection explores the significant interchange of ideas between artists mainly working in Europe and America during the past hundred years. It showcases some of the greatest artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, starting with Picasso’s study for his masterpiece Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, the painting that changed the world in 1907, and concluding with Julie Mehretu, the Ethiopian-born artist and one of the stars of the contemporary international art scene. The exhibition features 70 works all of which have been added to the British Museum’s collection over the past 35 years and most of which have never been on public display at the Museum before. The British Museum has an unparalleled collection of graphic art from across the world, and actively collects modern and contemporary works today.
Unfettered from academic codes of practice that traditionally valued displays of skill over imagination and individuality, artists of the twentieth century and beyond have availed themselves of an increasing variety of materials and modes of expression. Impromptu sketches and compositional studies such as Picasso’s working out of his ideas for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, are shown alongside works that are complete in themselves. Some drawings are intended to provide a template for the final product, others to capture retrospectively something executed in another medium. As well as Pablo Picasso, the exhibition features works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Georgio de Chirico, Henri Matisse, René Magritte, David Smith and Louise Bourgeois and major contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Francesco Clemente, Judy Chicago and William Kentridge.
A particular highlight is Picasso’s double page composition Leaping Bulls dating from 1950, the first entry in the Visitors’ Book for the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Roland Penrose, a founding member of the ICA in 1947 and friend of Picasso, donated the Visitors’ Book to the British Museum in the mid 1970s, by which time it had become an invaluable document of the international art scene in London in the immediate post-war era.

07.10.2010 - 25.04.2011

Website : British Museum

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

OVERVIEW OF ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER'S CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT AT HAMBURGER KUNSTHALLE

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), founding member of the Die Brücke (The Bridge) artists group in Dresden, Germany 1905, is among the most influential artist personalities in German classical Modernism. A trailblazer for Expressionist art, he succeeded in creating some of the most innovative formal solutions of his day - particularly as a printmaker. The exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle features a representative overview of the most significant phases in Kirchner’s creative development: the early work showing studio and street scenes of Dresden and Berlin, work created during summer stays on the Baltic Sea island Fehrmarn and the later work in Davos. The exhibition itself centers primarily on paintings from the Kunsthalle’s own collection along with selected loans, all works indisputably regarded as the high point of Kirchner’s oeuvre as a painter. For the first time, these paintings will be shown in a context that includes their preliminary sketches - most of them on loan from private collections - print graphics showing similar motifs and the artist’s photographs as an integrative whole. The multi format presentation offers visitors a fascinating opportunity: Looking at the originals, one can follow Kirchner’s creative process from the first fleeting idea in sketches to the final painting. Another special feature and high point are the large-format drawings - all of them measuring 90 x 69 cm, the paper size Kirchner used for nude drawings from 1906 to1910 and 1913 in his Dresden and Berlin studios. For the first time, 14 of the total 33 surviving drawings will be shown side-by-side - clearly documenting Kirchner’s pivotal development as an Expressionist artist before the onset of the First World War. A separate section shows views of Hamburg and St. Pauli nightlife, prints Kirchner produced in the course of his October 1910 visit to the city.
The comprehensive exhibition catalogue Kirchner und Hamburg features essays on Director Gustav Pauli (Hamburger Kunsthalle) and Max Sauerlandt (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg), along with art scholar Gustav Schiefler, some of the most important proponents of Kirchner’s art in 1920s/30s Germany. Numerous research findings highlight, among other things, the challenging museum acquisition politics surrounding Modernist art in the Hansestadt during theWeimar period. All of Kirchner’s pieces in the Hamburger Kunsthalle collection will be published for the first time as a notated, fully-illustrated directory, including reconstructions of the Kunsthalle’s one-time collection, seized in 1937 as “degenerate art.”

Website : Hamburger Kunsthalle

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DEICHTORHALLEN HAMBURG PROVIDES A COMPREHENSIVE INSIGHT INTO THE ART OF POUL GERNES

Porträt Poul Gernes, Foto: Jørn Petersen, Herlev, Courtesy Estate of Poul Gernes

Deichtorhallen Hamburg is staging a retrospective showcasing over 400 exhibits that provide a comprehensive insight into the art of the Danish painter, sculptor, filmmaker and performing artist Poul Gernes (*1925, † 1996), who numbers among the most influential of Scandinavian artists. In the 50 years that he was active he had numerous exhibitions; in 1988, his work featured in the Danish pavilion at the Venice Biennial, and he shaped the face of more than 150 buildings in Denmark. He left behind an impressive oeuvre, which is fascinating on account of its extraordinary complexity and his aesthetic is as topical today as it as when he developed it in the 1960s and 1970s.
Curator of the exhibition Dirk Luckow (General Director of Deichtorhallen Hamburg) describes Poul Gernes’ oeuvre as hilarious, anarchic, opulent, joyful, folkloristic, funky, psychedelic – while at the same time also emphasizing the fact that Gernes took his cue in part from Constructivist architectural traditions in art, such as the Bauhaus. Paul Gernes constantly sought to link art to life by means of color and design. Art to his mind had to become an integral part of life. Today, it is quite striking how there are parallels between the works of many younger artists and those of Poul Gernes. Furthermore, wherever one looks in urban space today and in ready-to-use design one encounters highly colorful patterns such as stripes and folkloristic flowers that are astonishingly reminiscent of Gernes’ aesthetic.
In 1961, Poul Gernes joined forces with art historian Troels Andersen to establish the radical Experimental Art School in Copenhagen, which was known as Eks-skolen for short, and quickly became an indispensable part of the Danish art scene. Characteristic of his work are the picture series from the 1960s and 1970s, that can be located somewhere between Minimalism and a Pop Art feel. In them, simple circles, letters, plain patterns or targets are varied. Gernes preferred to present them in complex room installations. In addition to producing paintings and sculptures, from 1977 onwards Gernes concentrated on the painting and interior decoration of public buildings, including the 25-storey hospital in Herlev on the outskirts of Copenhagen, (he had started this project already in 1968).
THE EXHIBITION AT DEICHTORHALLEN HAMBURG
For the first time this exhibition provides Gernes’ extensive and intensively colored painterly abstractions in a setting commensurate with their spatial dimensions. In the Deichtorhallen it is possible to present his unusually large-format work series in a spacious museum architecture with 3000 square meters. In this way, the monumental scale of Gernes’ pieces that oscillates between abstraction and ornamental design becomes appropriately tangible as an objective of his art. After Hamburg, the retrospective will move on to the two municipal galleries of Malmö and Lund.
This exhibition sheds clear light on the important stages in Gernes’ development – from virtually unknown studies from the 1940s to the large-format stylized floral and linear forms that featured in his late flower paintings of the 1990s. Previously little exploited sources including numerous works from Gernes’ estate, not to mention museums and private collections enable visitors to gain a new understanding of Gernes’ art – in particular as regards to how he linked art and the face of everyday life.

08.10.2010 - 16.01.2011

Website : Deichtorhallen Hamburg

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

LARGEST-EVER EXHIBITION IN SCANDINAVIA OF THE WORK OF ALICE NEEL AT MODERNA MUSEET MALMÖ

This autumn, Moderna Museet Malmö presents Alice Neel: Painted Truths – the largest exhibition of this American artist ever to be shown in Scandinavia. With 59 works spanning more than 70 years, the exhibition fills the entire Turbine Hall and the new gallery at Moderna Museet Malmö.

Today, Alice Neel (1900-1984) is an iconic figure in American painting. For most of her life, however, she worked without recognition from either critics or the public. Persistently and unremittingly, Neel continued to paint portraits – or pictures of people, as she preferred to call them – in an era that was dominated by abstract expressionism, pop art and the readily available photograph.
Alice Neel’s oeuvre is characterised by a genuine fascination with people and a striving to make sense of the human drama of everyday life. Neighbours, friends, artist colleagues and family members were portrayed in her psychologically incisive portraits. Neel painted all kinds of people, of all ages, and without masking their vanity, vulnerability or eccentricities, she captured their inner and outer features and qualities. Her works give an idea of the social and economic diversity of American life in the mid-20th century.
In 2008, Moderna Museet Stockholm featured a smaller exhibition of Neel’s work, but this is the first time Neel’s oeuvre is shown more extensively in Scandinavia. Alice Neel: Painted Truths highlights nine different themes, such as Nudes, Old Age and The Psychological Portrait. In addition to her famous portraits, the exhibition includes her less well-known street paintings. Altogether, 59 works are presented, spanning more than 70 years of Neel’s career – from the 1920s to the 1980s.
Two films will also be shown as part of the exhibition, by the French artist Michel Auder, and by Alice Neel’s son, Hartley Neel. Both films show Alice Neel in action, painting.

9.10.2010 - 02.01.2011

Website : Moderna Museet Malmö

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

MARCHE AVEC LES TURKANAS

Voyage 5, septembre 2009, Lapongo Les pasteurs sont obligés d’abattre leurs chèvres avant qu’elles ne meurent de faim © Roger Job

Le Musée de la Photographie de Charleroi met à l'honneur le travail au long cours de Roger Job. Le photographe belge s'est rendu à huit reprises au Turkana entre 2008 et 2010. Il fait découvrir en images et en mots la vie des pasteurs nomades de la région.

Dans la poussière d'une piste desséchée, sur les pierres de basalte brûlantes, au bord d'une rivière boueuse, dans le sable qu'il faut creuser pour atteindre un peu d'eau, parmi la végétation épineuse, les Turkanas marchent, inlassablement. À leurs côtés, un homme blanc. Grand, barbu, baraqué, il ne figure jamais sur la photo. C'est lui qui photographie.

Longtemps, les Turkanas, pasteurs nomades du Kenya, l'ont appelé « le blanc qui marche ». Puis un jour, ils lui ont trouvé un nouveau nom : Adokolé Jobo. « Adokolé, explique Roger Job, c'est le mot utilisé pour « phasme », cette espèce d'insecte mimétique géant tout dégingandé qui évolue doucement. (…) Jobo, juste une adaptation de Job à leur système de prononciation tonale. Recevoir un aussi beau nom est comme recevoir la légion d'honneur. »
Ce nom lui convient parfaitement. Sous son air de colosse des Ardennes, Roger Job est un homme qui aime prendre son temps. Aux images vite faites, il préfère le travail sur le long terme. Plutôt que les sujets mille fois couverts, il se passionne pour des univers où l'homme et la nature parviennent encore à dialoguer.
Xavier Canonne, directeur du Musée de la photographie, se souvient encore du jour où il est venu lui présenter un projet de livre sur les chevaux de traits ardennais. « Je lui ai dit de ne pas faire cela, que personne ne l'achèterait, qu'il allait se ruiner. Il m'a répondu : « Ouais, bon, je le ferai quand même. » Il l'a fait et il en a vendu des milliers. Il en est à la 5e réédition. »
Huit voyages
Roger Job, lui, se souvient de ce jour de 2008 où il est venu présenter son travail sur les Turkanas au même Xavier Canonne. « Il a regardé les photos que je lui présentais sans un mot. Puis il m'a dit : “2010, grande salle, 60 tirages, au travail !” Là, j'ai su qu'on allait y arriver. »
Depuis des années, il marchait aux côtés des Turkanas. À la fin des années 90, il avait découvert chez eux un peuple fier, heureux, libre. Retournant dans la région en 2008, il découvre les ravages de la sécheresse. Il retrouve ses amis et constate que leurs troupeaux sont décimés. Pour ces pasteurs nomades, la mort du troupeau signifie leur propre mort à moyenne échéance. L'association Vétérinaires sans Frontières, associé à l'exposition, est très active dans la région pour cette raison.
Roger Job commence alors un travail au long cours. Huit fois, il se rend dans la région, marchant avec les Turkanas, partageant leur quotidien. Sa présence les amuse, son endurance les étonne. Mais ce qui compte pour lui, c'est de photographier pour témoigner. Raconter leur vie en images et en mots (Roger Job est journaliste avant d'être photographe) pour nous faire partager cette existence rude et fascinante, l'angoisse de la sécheresse qui fait disparaître petit à petit un mode de vie ancestral, la joie de la pluie revenue, les cérémonies de mariage, les paysages…
Sur les murs de la grande chapelle du Musée et dans le livre qui accompagne l'exposition, il nous fait magistralement partager l'existence de ces « premiers derniers hommes ». Et nous invite à marcher quelque temps à leurs côtés.
Musée de la Photographie à Charleroi jusqu'au 16 janvier.

Infos : http://www.museephoto.be/

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Bron/Source : Le Soir

LES INEDITS DE CAPA EXPOSES A NEW YORK

Robert Capa, Exilés républicains espagnols transférés d'un centre d'internement, Le Barcarès, mars 1939© Estate of Cornell Capa / ICP / Magnum, International Center of Photography

L'International Center of Photography de New York expose les photos de Capa, Seymour et Taro retrouvées en 2007
Ces images, dont de nombreux inédits, avaient été prises par les trois photographes pendant la Guerre d'Espagne. Elles avaient été confiées à un général mexicain en 1940.
Après des années d'oubli, 4500 négatifs contenus dans trois boîtes ont été donnés au Centre international de photographie de New York, fondé par le frère de Capa, Cornell Capa.
L'exposition de ces images inédites des trois photographes, engagés aux côtés des républicains espagnols, est un événement. Le Centre en présente une grande partie sous forme de planches-contact modernes. Il expose aussi une sélection de tirages, dont des portraits inédits d'Ernest Hemingway, de Federico Garcia Lorca et de Dolores Ibarruri (La Pasionaria).
Des photos qui sont devenues des icones peuvent ainsi replacées dans leur contexte chronologique. C'est aussi l'occasion de découvrir des photos qui n'avaient jamais été publiées, voire jamais tirées.
Environ un tiers des photos sont du photographe franco-hongrois Robert Capa, mort à 40 ans, en 1954, au Vietnam. Des images du front, dans l'Aragon ou à Teruel. Et aussi des photos des camps d'internement du sud de la France pour les réfugiés espagnols en 1939.
Un tiers sont de David Seymour, dit Chim, cofondateur avec Henri Cartier-Bresson et Capa de l'agence Magnum et photographe de guerre aussi, tué en 1956 à Suez. Il s'agit souvent de photos de l'arrière, des portraits de soldats républicains, ou des inédits de Barcelone, lors du 19e anniversaire de la révolution russe.
Enfin, un tiers des photos sont de la compagne de Capa, l'Allemande Gerda Taro, qui mourut, renversée par un char républicain à Brunete, en juillet 1937. Elle n'avait que 26 ans. La jeune photographe, considérée comme la première femme photographe de guerre, était longtemps restée dans l'ombre de Capa. C'est l'occasion de découvrir son travail, sur le front, dans la vie de tous les jours à Valence en guerre, à la morgue après un raid aérien.
Les photos de la "valise mexicaine", en réalité trois boites contenant 4500 négatifs, auraient été confiées en 1940 au général mexicain Francisco Javier Aguilar Gonzalez, consul à Marseille, par un assistant de Capa. Ensuite, on avait perdu leur trace. Leurs auteurs les pensaient perdues à jamais. Les héritiers du général les ont trouvées à sa mort, dans les années 1990.
Après des années de négociation, elles ont été données par les héritiers à l'International Center of Photography. Leur redécouverte a permis de réattribuer certaines photos dont on ne connaissait que les tirages. Et de donner un éclairage nouveau au travail de ces témoins de la Guerre d'Espagne.
The Mexicain Suitcase, International Center of Photography jusqu'au 9 janvier 2011

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Bron/Source : France 2

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, THE MUSEO DEL PRADO EXHIBITS TREASURES FROM ITS LIBRARY

Bibiena, Giuseppe Galli (1696-1756). Architetture e prospettive... , 1740 (Cerv/708)

The exhibition is organized into three sections. The first, Bibliotheca artis (Library of Art), is the most important, featuring major works from the European literature on art, starting with the great treatises of the Italian Renaissance. On display are first editions of the key texts on painting by Leon Battista Alberti (1547) and Leonardo da Vinci (1651), as well as the first systematic treatise on perspective by Daniele Barbaro, who is the subject of a portrait by Titian in the Museum’s collection. The dissemination of Renaissance ideas in northern Europe is best represented by Dürer’s theoretical writings, of which an example here is the first Latin edition of his treatise On Measurement (1532). Also included in this section is a copy of the founding text of art history, Vasari’s Lives, a work that exercised a notable influence in Italy and the rest of Europe.
Art theory during the Spanish Golden Age represents is another important section within the exhibition, with copies of several groundbreaking texts on display. Among 16th-century treatises, for example, is Felipe de Guevara’s Comentario de la pintura, recently rediscovered among the holdings of the Madrazo library and exhibited to the public for the first time. Velázquez’s teacher and father-in-law Francisco Pacheco is represented here by a short section from the first edition of his Arte de la pintura (1649), accompanied by an extremely rare leaflet (the only example in a Spanish library) with manuscript annotations by the author and a reproduction of Velázquez’s portrait of him. Other outstanding items, also on show for the first time, are the manuscript copy of the Discursos by Jusepe Martínez (ca.1673-1675) and one of the copperplates used for the illustrations of Palomino’s El museo pictórico (1715).
The second section, Bibliotheca architecturae (Library of Architecture) brings together a carefully selected group of architectural treatises. Once again the key theme is the Italian Renaissance, with important editions of works by Vitruvius, Vignola, Serlio and Palladio. In addition to emphasising the significance and beauty of some of these texts, such as the edition of Vitruvius published by Cesare Cesariano in 1521 (the oldest book in the exhibition), this section also focuses on the way in which Renaissance painters such as El Greco used their illustrations to create the architectural backgrounds in their own compositions. This section also includes French, German and Spanish books on architecture and concludes with an area devoted to a small selection of books on public celebrations, which are unique witnesses to the spectacular temporary architectural structures designed for royal entries, canonisations, funerals, etc, by artists of the stature of Rubens and Valdés Leal.
The third section, Bibliotheca imaginis (Library of the Image) focuses on the important role that book illustrations played in European art in the early modern age. It includes drawing manuals, which were an essential element in artists’ training as they offered models for learning to draw the human figure step by step. Among them are the Principios by García Hidalgo (ca.1700), the most important and rarest of the Spanish manuals, produced in the final years of the Golden Age.
Books were of fundamental importance to painters as they constituted essential formal and iconographic sources for the creation of their own works. In this regard the exhibition offers a brief reflection on the genre of the portrait through three types of printed repertoires that were fundamental to the dissemination of formal models. Also on display are a number of books that are crucial to an understanding of the meaning of Renaissance and Baroque art, namely illustrated editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1595), Ripa’s Iconology (1603), and various important emblem books, whose contents inspired the iconography of numerous paintings in the Museo del Prado.
Books lie at the origins of numerous paintings and also function as unique witnesses to their subsequent critical fortunes. The most important cycles of European paintings were reproduced in print form and disseminated through sumptuous albums, while the first collections of paintings (firstly private, aristocratic and royal ones and later public collections) became known throughout Europe through books such as the Prodromus (1735), a copy of which brings the exhibition to a close. Having opened with the first great theoretical text that codified the principles of Renaissance painting – Alberti’s Pittura – the exhibition closes with the birth of the institution that marked the evolution of the visual arts in the modern age: the Museum.

Website : Museo del Prado

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

SIDNEY NOLAN'S ANTARCTIC PAINTINGS ON DISPLAY AT THE POLAR MUSEUM IN CAMBRIDGE

Striking paintings by Sir Sidney Nolan are being shown at a new exhibition in Cambridge. The special exhibition at the Polar Museum at the Scott Polar Research Institute runs from 30 September to 18 December 2010.

Only a few of Nolan’s Antarctic works remain in Britain. They are part of a series painted in 1964 after Nolan visited the Antarctic as a guest of the US Navy during Operation ‘Deep Freeze’. The majority of the series is held in museums and galleries worldwide.
With the support of the Sidney Nolan Trust and the Australian High Commission, the Polar Museum is delighted to present a selection from the small number of Nolan's Antarctic works which remain in Britain.
At the Adelaide festival in 1962, Nolan's friend Alan Moorehead, the Australian journalist and author, suggested a trip to the Antarctic. Moorehead, a freelance journalist for The New Yorker, then arranged for them to tour the US Naval and scientific bases in Antarctica. The visit became the inspiration for a major series of 68 paintings which Nolan completed in his studio in London. These vivid landscapes and portraits of the scientists and staff he encountered on the bases have never been shown in Cambridge before.
Sir Sidney Nolan (1917-1992) is Australia's most significant and internationally acclaimed artist. Born in Melbourne, he left school at 14 and, although he enrolled at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, was largely self taught. In the 1940s, he was a member of the avant-garde group, the Angry Penguins. In 1951 he moved to London, where he set up a studio in Putney.

Website : The Polar Museum

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

LE MYTHE DE L'ELDORADO : L'OR DES INCAS

Les Incas dominent les Andes durant un siècle (1400-1533). Lorsqu'ils s'installent dans la région de Cuzco au XIIIe siècle, dix civilisations s'y sont succédé. Ils y deviennent les héritiers de traditions élaborées pendant plus de 3.000 ans.
L'ombre du mystère et des niches de couleurs chatoyantes : la Pinacothèque de Paris met en scène l'or mythique des Incas. Un voyage dans les mystères du temps ! L'or – recette infaillible pour appâter le public et éponger une partie des frais d'assurance –, côtoie pierres rares, plumes exotiques, coquillages, métaux comme l'argent ou le cuivre, tissus Paracas, ces linceuls aussi précieux que l'or.

L'exposition montre bien plus qu'elle n'annonce. Les Incas certes, mais aussi toute la civilisation andine sont exposés ici. Dominant un espace immense de l'Equateur au Chili, des hauts plateaux des Andes aux plaines désertiques de la côte Pacifique, l'empire inca et les cultures andines placent l'or au pinacle. En sortant des eaux du lac Titicaca, Manco Capac, fondateur de l'empire, ne tenait-il pas à la main une canne en or avec laquelle il s'en fut chercher le lieu divin où ériger la ville sacrée de Cuzco ? Cela, c'est pour l'époque des légendes fondatrices…
Dans l'état actuel des connaissances, le Pérou est le pays où est née la métallurgie de l'or. Des fouilles récentes sur les rives du lac Titicaca viennent de mettre au jour un bijou composé d'or et turquoises : il date de 2.500 av. notre ère ! La région andine a connu sa production la plus importante entre le Xe et le XVe siècle, grâce à une parfaite maîtrise technique, surtout en orfèvrerie.
De là viendrait donc l'expression « C'est le Pérou ! », liée à l'or et à la richesse ? « Au XIVe siècle, le nom de Pérou est un territoire situé dans la cordillère centrale des Andes. Il englobait une vaste proportion de l'Amérique du Sud avant l'arrivée des Européens et il devint synonyme d'immense richesse, précise Fernando Rosas Moscoso, professeur à l'université de Lima. L'Etat inca et le Pérou, vice-royauté espagnole, durent leur pérennité aux métaux précieux – l'or et l'argent étant autant associés au monde andin préhispanique, c'est-à-dire avant l'arrivée des conquistadors, qu'à l'empire espagnol. »
force symbolique de l'or
A Paris, les 253 œuvres majeures en provenance de grands musées péruviens soulignent l'importance de l'or et sa force symbolique dans les civilisations précolombiennes. D'abord, il est étroitement associé au rituel religieux. L'or est le principe viril tandis que l'argent, « larme de la lune », est associé à la fécondité.
Selon Paloma Carcedo de Mufarech, commissaire de l'exposition, « c'est en partie dans les objets en métal que les croyances de l'ancien Pérou se manifestaient. La lumière qui émane d'un matériau le relie aux esprits et aux forces de l'univers : l'or, métal inaliénable dont l'éclat est aveuglant lorsqu'il brille au soleil, a fasciné les hommes au point de donner lieu à une infinité de mythes et à ces œuvres majeures ».
A travers les grands chapitres que sont la présence du divin dans le quotidien, la cérémonie du sacrifice, la cosmogonie précolombienne et conditions de passage dans l'au-delà, la scénographie magnifie les objets cérémoniels : ornement frontal funéraire « chimu » en or laminé repoussé, main votive de la culture sican, et ce couteau sacrificiel, un « Tumi », se disputent les regards de visiteurs, tout aussi captivés par le grand pectoral constitué de 410 plaques d'or carrées, à porter comme une camisole…

Pinacothèque, 28 place de la Madeleine, Paris, jusqu'au 6 février 2011.

Website : Pinacothèque

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Bron/Source : Le Soir