BRITISH ARTISTS GILBERT & GEORGE TAKE THEIR 'JACK FREAK PICTURES' EXHIBITION TO HAMBURG

With its major spring show, Deichtorhallen Hamburg is once again bringing stars of the international art world to Hamburg. British artists Gilbert & George (born 1943 and 1942) have long since been acknowledged icons of British art, with their joyfully staged breaches of taboos and their stylish appearance as conservative dandies.
The show will present the latest, wide-ranging group of pictures the duo has created. Called the “Jack Freak Pictures”. They will be on display in the cathedral-like setting of the large Deichtorhalle from February 25 to May 22, 2011 for the first time more or less in its entirety – some 120 pictures will be on view.
The duo’s large-format pictures may in a sense resemble Medieval church windows, but present decidedly profane themes. In this case, Gilbert & George have created a group around the British national symbol, the Union Jack, with all its different connotations, from symbol of national pride through to the cult symbol of the British Pop world and countercultures. Surrounded by medals and amulets, the streets of London and the red, blue and white design of the British flag, as in their previous art here Gilbert & George are not only the creators of their own world of images, but also act as protagonists in it.
The “Jack Freak Pictures” are among the most symbolic, philosophically most elaborate and visually striking art Gilbert & George have ever created. Within Gilbert & George’s oeuvre as a whole they constitute the powerful concentration of the themes and emotions that the artists have now been exploring in their art for more than 40 years. In these pictures, the artists play the roles of both victim and monster, puppets of a cosmic revue, sleepless guardians of empty big-city streets and crazy-looking talking heads, as Michael Bracewell outlines in his essay in the exhibition catalog. The large sized images, digital processed, do not address the individual constitution of the two artists but instead point up states of human existence and can be read as a description of the modern world from the artists’ point of view.
The exhibition is being organized by Deichtorhallen Hamburg and the British Council and will move on from Hamburg, albeit it on a smaller scale, to Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria. Hatje Cantz Verlag has brought out a catalog with an essay by Michael Bracewell and color illustrations of all 153 works in the series.
Since 1967, Gilbert (born Sept. 17, 1943 in St. Martin / Italy) and George (born Jan. 8, 1942 in Devon, England) have formed the artist duo Gilbert & George. With the idea of using themselves as living sculptures, as the material of their art, in the 1960s they extended the notion of sculpture. Since then Gilbert & George have constantly created new variations in their art that shed light on the context of life in society today.
Gilbert & George have participated in many important group and solo exhibitions including the largest retrospective of any artist to be staged at Tate Modern (2007). The exhibition went on to tour Haus der Kunst, Munich (2007); Castello di Rivioli, Turin (2007); Milwaukee Art Museum (2008) and Brooklyn Museum (2008 –09). They have had many other extensive solo exhibitions, including, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1971-1972), National Gallery, Beijing (1993), Shanghai Art Museum (1993), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1995-1996), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998), Serpentine Gallery, London (2002), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2002) and Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2004-2005). They won the Turner Prize in 1984 and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

Website : Deichtorhallen Hamburg

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.
Bron/Source : Artdaily

EDMOND DEMAN : L'HOMME QUI DONNA CORPS AU RÊVE SYMBOLISTE

Edmond Deman

On proclame de tous côtés que le livre dans sa chair de papier imprimé, son « décor » noble ou ordinaire, va disparaître, passer la main à son homologue digital. Le plus fidèle compagnon de nos vies, dérisoirement jeune en regard des premiers dessins de Lascaux, n’aura fait que traverser l’histoire du monde.
Le glas pourtant n’a pas encore sonné. Les spécialistes peu pressés de conclure, se contentent d’observer une paradoxale fuite en avant de l’activité éditoriale et de s’interroger sur la disparition annoncée de tout ce poids de papier, cette appétence de l’encre, de la reliure, de l’illustration qui donnèrent au livre une part de sa noblesse. Il n’est pas anodin de constater qu’avant que les bibliothèques ne se transforment en champs archéologiques et que les librairies ne disparaissent, de multiples expositions consacrent d’une manière ou d’une autre la valeur du livre « objet ».
Le musée de Mariemont par exemple s’attaque à son histoire complexe tandis que le musée Félicien Rops, à Namur, par un biais spécifique, rouvre un chapitre important de l’histoire des lettres et des arts en Belgique.
Aux plus riches heures du symbolisme, la peinture de Rops, Khnopff, Spilliaert, Van Rysselberghe, Lemonnier, Lemmen, Redon… se mêlait au texte en toute autonomie. Des arabesques, des culs-de-lampe, des frontispices et autres embellissements couraient à même la page, scellant les noces de la poésie plastique et littéraire.
Un des principaux alchimistes de cette aventure fut le Bruxellois, Edmond Deman, éditeur et marchand d’art, fils d’un Français du Nord, ami des poètes et des peintres, de Rops et aussi bien de Mallarmé.
Né en 1857, il apparaît dans la fragilité sépia des photos d’époque comme la pierre angulaire d’une entreprise éditoriale et d’une conception de la lecture d’autant plus « charnelle » que l’« e-book » menace ! Les pages s’y feuillettent d’un effleurement du doigt, ne dispensant (pour le moment !) aucune des valeurs sensuelles qui apprivoisent le lecteur « à l’ancienne » et prêtent main-forte au texte.
Editeur singulier et téméraire, « passeur » d’idées à une époque où Bruxelles participait de l’avant-garde mais où le public ignorait les noms que nous nous flattons de connaître, Edmond Deman donna corps aux rêves d’une poignée d’écrivains qui, pour des raisons diverses confiaient leurs textes tantôt aux éditions parisiennes, tantôt aux bruxelloises. Il voulait que les meilleurs recueils trouvent une résonance dans les meilleurs dessins.
Le souvenir de l’homme, qui édita une bonne cinquantaine d’ouvrages haut de gamme, à tirage souvent limité, s’est perdu dans les archives du symbolisme, oublié de tous, à l’exception de quelques fans de cette fin de siècle, ropsiens, mallarméens, verhaeriens avertis et d’Adrienne Fontainas, récemment disparue, aux travaux de qui on doit cette redécouverte.
Le musée Rops s’est attelé à redessiner les contours des activités de l’éditeur qui traita comme personne le livre dans son rapport à l’œuvre d’art. Quelques photos de sa fameuse maison, rue Montagne de la Cour à Bruxelles, accueillent le visiteur.
Elle a beau paraître sombre, un peu lugubre, elle fut le trait d’union entre les poètes et les peintres, le lieu où la galerie marchande d’œuvres d’art et la librairie prolongeaient naturellement l’activité éditoriale trop raffinée pour être rentable.
L’épopée n’est pas banale et le fait que Rops entretenait avec Deman, qui vénérait et négociait son art, les meilleures relations justifie l’exposition. En lecteur bien rodé et en épistolier de plus de trois mille lettres, le dessinateur et ses compères entretenaient avec la littérature des rapports exemplaires de cette symbiose entre les arts propre au symbolisme. Le catalogue fort éclairant sur cette période de l’édition publie ces lettres de Rops à Deman où les comptes d’apothicaire se mêlent aux réflexions existentielles.
Grâce à nombre de livres rares, de dessins, gravures et peintures, on voit comment Deman concevait son travail, annonçant le livre d’artiste et l’album de planches au sens moderne. Et comment il s’associait à la création la plus contemporaine, collaborant avec des peintres qui s’écartaient parfois radicalement de l’illustration traditionnelle pour se confronter au texte. Ainsi Spilliaert, au tout début du siècle, bien avant l’époque des chromos, créa de magnifiques lavis dans les pages mêmes du théâtre de Maeterlinck et de Crommelynck, n’hésitant pas à envahir le texte de lumineuses figures crépusculaires.
Rops avec La grande lyre destinée au livre de Mallarmé, Rassenfosse avec Le Rideau cramoisi, Khnopff à qui on doit la marque de l’éditeur, et Jean Delville, Maximilien Luce, Maurice Denis, Georges Minne (Les villages illusoires de Verhaeren), Lemonnier, Evenepoel, Odilon Redon, Pissarro… tous faisaient partie de son musée personnel. Deman, apparemment, était aussi ouvert aux déliquescences symbolistes et visionnaires qu’aux douceurs feutrées des Nabis et aux tentations du réalisme social. L’important était de se démarquer de la banalisation de l’édition.

Website : Musée Félicien Rops - Namur - 29.01-20.05.2011

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.

Bron/Source : Le Soir

SEE THE BEAUTY AND CHARM OF AMERICAN IMPRESSIONISTS IN THE GARDEN AT THE TAFT MUSEUM

Robert Vonnoh, Poppies in France, 1888, oil on canvas, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Daniel J. Terra Foundation.

Spring begins a bit early in 2011, when The American Impressionists in the Garden opened at the Taft Museum of Art. Bringing together brilliantly colored paintings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the exhibition features 40 pictures of European and American gardens created by American Impressionists and four bronze sculptures for gardens by American sculptors.
“From Giverny to Boston and Charleston, American painters captured the sensuous pleasures to be found in gardens, ornamenting their canvases with lush blossoms in fuchsia, persimmon, and daffodil yellow,” says Lynne Ambrosini, the Taft’s chief curator.
The interactions between the two artistic fields of gardening and painting make up the subject of this exhibition. The Cincinnati audience will be familiar the artists in the exhibition, including celebrated American artists John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, Gari Melchers, Ernest Lawson, and Frederick Frieseke.
“I had never realized before how much the concepts of garden design influenced concepts of painting—and vice versa—in America around 1900,” say Deborah Scott, Taft director and CEO. “Gardening fed painting, which fed gardening, and so on, in one big fascinating repeat loop.”
American impressionist painters turned their attention to the garden, finding it an ideal subject for the study of light and color in landscape, and they were not alone. This exhibition explores the importance of gardens in American art and society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Appreciated for their variations of form, color, style, and silhouette, gardens constituted a key cultural interest of the period. The vogue for gardening expressed itself in the birth of garden clubs, horticultural and hobbyist publications, the establishment of civic and private gardens, new modes of garden design. The relationships between the gardening movement and the fine arts of painting and sculpture is the focus of this exhibition, which is organized by the Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art in Nashville, Tennessee.
Though the Tafts did not collect work from the Impressionists – it was not their taste – their love of landscapes, and their love for their own garden, make this show a great fit for us. I’m looking forward to having the sculpture pieces in the garden here, which will give a whole other dimension to how people experience the Taft’s space.
The Taft will also be showing American Impressionism in Cincinnati Collections, opening January 28, 2011, thanks to the generosity of private lenders. This exhibition includes examples of “American Impressionism,” a term that refers to subjects of contemporary life and landscape rendered in a freely-brushed style. By the 1880s and '90s, Impressionism had spread from its beginnings in Paris to become an international style. Many American Impressionists studied in Cincinnati with Frank Duveneck or in New York with William Merritt Chase; both of these influential American teachers had extensive experience working in Europe and transmitted the principles of open-air painting, loose brushwork, and brighter color to their students.

Website : Taft Museum of Art

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.

Bron/Source : Artdaily

THE COURTAULD GALLERY PRESENTS LIFE, LEGEND, LANDSCAPE: VICTORIAN DRAWINGS AND WATERCOLOURS

William Henry Hunt (1790-1864), Chaffinch Nest and May Blossom, c.1845. Watercolour on paper, 241 x 375 mm © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London.

Lost from view for many years and recently presented to The Courtauld Gallery, The Old Farm Garden by Frederick Walker (1840-1875), sets the scene for a wide-ranging exploration of Victorian drawings and watercolours. The exhibition is the first devoted to this area of The Courtauld Gallery’s collection and reflects the growing appreciation for Victorian draughtsmanship. The show, on view from 17 February to 15 May 2011, includes numerous previously unseen works and ranges from informal preparatory drawings for paintings, sculptures and stained glass to highly finished exhibition watercolours. It includes life studies, landscapes, genre scenes and subjects from literature and legend. The exhibition features works by most of the major artists of the age, from the redoubtable Royal Academicians of the early years of Victoria’s reign, such as J.M.W. Turner, William Etty and Edwin Landseer, to Pre-Raphaelites such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and works of the 1890s by Whistler and Aubrey Beardsley.
Frederick Walker began his career as an illustrator but his growing success as an ambitious painter in oils and watercolours was cut short by his early death, aged 35. Although he is now little-known outside a small circle of specialists, his work enjoyed a significant posthumous reputation, with artists as diverse as Vincent van Gogh and John Ruskin amongst his fervent admirers. The Old Farm Garden of 1871 shows a woman, modelled by the artist’s sister Mary, knitting out of doors, with a cat about to spring on her ball of wool. Tulips, flowering shrubs and beehives adorn the garden. The influential critic John Ruskin described the flowers in this work as ‘worth all the Dutch flower pieces in the world’. The exhibition also includes an earlier watercolour by Walker depicting boys playing piggyback in a village street, and it offers a rare opportunity to reconsider this outstanding artist.
William Etty’s large watercolour of a female nude contrasted with a cast of the Venus de’ Medici opens the exhibition’s first section on the figure. As well as serving as an artistic exercise, Etty’s image explores the real and the ideal in female beauty. This theme is raised in a different context by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s imposing Pre-Raphaelite portrait study for his celebrated painting Venus Verticordia. Rossetti is said to have used a cook whom he had encountered on the street as the model for this sensuous idealised image of ‘Venus who turns hearts’. A more intimate aspect of female portraiture is developed in the exhibition by Rossetti’s small pencil sketch of Elizabeth Siddal, his wife and muse, seated at her easel; Whistler’s portrait of the young Elinor Leyland, daughter of one of his major patrons; and George Frederic Watt’s sensitive depiction of Emily Tennyson, wife of the great poet.
The exhibition features a splendid selection of landscapes, produced both abroad and at home. They include John Frederick Lewis’s watercolour of a Cairo silk bazaar, J.M.W. Turner’s late Swiss view of Brunnen on Lake Lucerne and The Quarries of Syracuse (Sicily) - Edward Lear’s final design for one of the few oil paintings he exhibited at the Royal Academy. Lewis’s portrait of a man in North African dress, possibly the artist himself, underscores Victorian taste for travel and the exotic. Also in this vein is David Wilkie’s Madame Giuseppina, a depiction of a celebrated Greek beauty who was the landlady of an inn in Istanbul where Wilkie stayed in 1840 on his last trip abroad. By contrast, Samuel Palmer’s naturalistic watercolour of the Surrey countryside near Dorking responds to the beauty of the English landscape. Views by Philip Wilson Steer and Whistler show the development of a more informal and Impressionistic approach to landscape painting around 1890.
The exhibition includes a diverse group of drawings of animals and natural history. An outstanding example is William Henry Hunt’s minutely rendered Chaffinch Nest and May Blossom which exemplifies the critic John Ruskin’s ideal of ‘truth to nature’. Despite its air of uncontrived simplicity, this superbly detailed arrangement with branches of flowering hawthorn was the result of painstaking work in the studio. Edwin Landseer’s coloured sketch of a lion’s head has a very different character and was produced in preparation for the monumental sculpted lions at the base of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square. This drawing may have originated on one of Landseer’s regular sketching trips to study the lions in London’s Zoological Gardens.
Richard Doyle’s strange Moonlit Landscape with an Apparition typifies the fantasy subjects so enjoyed by the Victorians. The world of medieval legend and literature exerted an even stronger pull on the Victorian imagination. Daniel Maclise’s superb pen and ink drawing depicts a scene from Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, a cycle of poems set in the time of King Arthur. It depicts Enid kissing her husband Geraint as they prepare to ride away from the scene of the Welsh knight’s victory over a wicked adversary.
Fuelled by the public demand for illustrated books and new popular magazines, many of the major Victorian artists, particularly the Pre-Raphaelite painters, tried their hand at illustration. John Everett Millais’s jewel-like The Parting of Ulysses depicts a scene from Homer’s Odyssey and shows the sorceress Circe waving farewell to the Greek hero Ulysses. This is a copy by Millais of his own wood-engraved illustration from 1862 and appears to have been made in order to meet the art market’s demand for fine small-scale watercolours. Servant Carrying Slippers is one of two small works in the exhibition drawn by the young Aubrey Beardsley in the early 1890s as illustrations for Bons Mots, a series of pocket-size books of the sayings of English wits. Beardsley wrote of these delightful and irreverent inventions: ‘The subjects were quite mad and a little indecent…a new world of my own creation.’ The exhibition concludes with Charles Conder’s Les Incroyables (The Incredibles). Painted on silk, this fine example of the Aesthetic style of the 1890s shows a ballroom with figures dressed in the decadent costume of Paris’s gilded youth in the years after the French Revolution. Conder had been part of the painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s circle in Paris and this highly accomplished and previously unexhibited work typifies an exhibition which is full of surprises and unexpected pleasures.

Website : Courtauld Gallery

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.

Bron/Source : Artdaily

LES TRESORS DE LA FUTURE MAISON DE L'HISTOIRE DE FRANCE

L' impératrice Eugénie entourée de ses Dames d'honneur. F.X.Winterhalter.(Musées du Palais impérial de Compiègne. M.Poirier)

Neuf musées nationaux vont apporter leur concours à l'institution qui doit voir le jour en 2014.

Ce n'est pas un musée mais bien une Maison de l'histoire de France que le président de la Répu­blique souhaite ouvrir en 2014. La différence entre les deux termes n'est pas anodine: elle renvoie au fait que cette maison n'aura pas de collections en propre et fonctionnera en réseau avec une poignée de musées publics. En principe située dans le bâtiment parisien des Archives nationales, la maison présentera un centre de recherche et une galerie chronologique et organisera des expositions temporaires grâce à neuf musées nationaux - Les Eyzies, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Pau, Cluny, Écouen, la Malmaison, Compiègne, Fontainebleau et le Musée des plans et reliefs. Cette idée a notamment été adoptée pour une question de bon sens: une collection publique représentative de milliers d'années d'histoire serait non seulement coûteuse, mais très difficile à rassembler. Le tout alors que la France aurait 1000 musées, publics, associatifs, privés ou locaux, ayant trait à l'histoire.
Décrits par Frédéric Mitterrand comme «un premier cercle» sur lequel le projet pourra s'appuyer, ils représentent, en termes de périodes historiques, un large éventail. Ce ne sont pas des musées de beaux-arts, même si Jean-François Hébert, chargé de mission pour la maison, estime que «un jour ou l'autre, des établissements comme le Mémorial de Caen ou la BNF rejoindront le groupe, d'une manière ou d'une autre». Le réseau est appelé à grandir au fil du temps, même si l'équilibre ne semble pas évident à trouver. Si les petits établissements qui manquent de public ­applaudissent cette soudaine mise en lumière, certains conservateurs ou directeurs des neuf établissements tordent déjà le nez à l'idée d'avoir été «choisis». Et éprouvent des craintes de se voir réduits au rang de filiales fournisseuses d'objets précieux.
«Nous avons notre identité, sommes déjà dans des réseaux européens, témoigne un des directeurs. Le principe de travailler ensemble en réseau est parfait, mais il faut que cela soit libre, ouvert et souple.»
Installé le 13 janvier, le comité d'orientation scientifique cornaqué par l'historien Jean-Pierre Rioux s'est déjà réuni deux fois pour donner une base solide à ce principe de réseaux, réfléchir au contenu d'une exposition de préfiguration - ayant pour thème «La France, depuis quand?» - au portail et à la galerie permanente. «Nous ne sommes pas là pour penser la structure administrative du futur ensemble», explique Jean-Pierre Rioux, qui plaide tout de même pour une cavalerie légère.

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.

Bron/Source : Le Figaro

THE BELVEDERE IN VIENNA DEDICATES COMPREHENSIVE SHOW TO AUSTRIAN ARTIST EGON SCHIELE

The Belvedere dedicates a comprehensive show to Egon Schiele (1890-1918), one of the most outstanding Austrian artists of the twentieth century; it is the first to concentrate on his selfportraits and portraits.

Beginning with works in the academic style, Schiele succeeded, in a series of revolutionary portraits, in overcoming the traditional conception of portraiture and redefining the genre. In keeping with early Austrian Expressionism, in his portraits the artist attempted to give visual form to the mental states of his models. Toward the end of his life he became Vienna’s most important portraitist, alongside Gustav Klimt.
An important moment in his recognition as an artist was the purchase of a portrait of Edith Schiele by the Austrian Staatsgalerie (today Belvedere) in 1918. This first public acquisition of a painting by the artist, brought about by the director of the time, Franz Martin Haberditzl, laid the foundation for the museum’s now extensive Schiele collection, which contains several major works by the artist.
Roughly one-third of the artist’s mature oeuvre in oil consists of portraits. (The other two-thirds comprise, again in approximately equal parts, landscapes and allegories.) Portraits and self-portraits are even more prominent among the drawings and watercolors. While some of these works on paper serve as direct studies for oils, others manifest a distinctly different, independent approach to the artistic task at hand. Viewed in their totality, Scheele’s portraits and self-portraits are an incongruous mix of the revolutionary and the conservative: at one moment, the artist pioneered radical new ways of looking at the self, and then again, he circled back to the convention. In presenting some 100 works, roughly one quarter of which are on view in Austria for the first time, the exhibition traces Scheele’s evolution as an artist and his extraordinary achievements as a portraitist. Arranged in chronological order, the show documents the complex interactions between Scheele’s portraits and self-portraits, and his continuous exploration of both genres. Attracted to human subject matter already in early adolescence, Schiele was inclined to view others through the mirror of himself. In his breakthrough Expressionist self-portraits of 1910 and 1911, he tried on multiple personalities, probed his own emotions, and then projected his reactions onto his portrait subjects of the time. Only gradually did the artist develop a more objective approach to the people. At the same time, Scheele’s sense of self coalesced. With new maturity, Schiele acquired an acute sensitivity to the human personality, and his late portraits benefit from the same profound insights that animate his earlier self-portraits.
Relating these representations to the written correspondence between the artist and his collectors and patrons also casts new light upon the close ties between artist and patron, characteristic of the Viennese art scene at the time.
EARLY WORK (1906–1909)
Schiele’s interest in portraiture was already evident in his childhood, and family members were among his earliest subjects. In 1906, the precocious artist was admitted to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, where, at sixteen, he was the youngest student in his class.
At first, Schiele dutifully executed his academic assignments, which began with copies from antique casts and progressed to portraits of live models. But soon he came under the influence of Vienna’s more avant-garde artistic trends. By 1909, he had all but stopped attending classes at the Academy. Impressed by Gustav Klimt’s exhibition at the 1908 “Kunstschau,” Schiele instead spent his time assimilating the lessons implicit in the elder master’s work. From Klimt’s example, Schiele developed a fluid, elegant line and an awareness of negative space that would remain with him for the rest of his life.
At Klimt’s invitation, Schiele exhibited three large portraits at the 1909 “Kunstschau.” This Viennese debut—a flagrant violation of the Academy’s rules—was followed by an exhibition offer from a local gallery, the „Kunstsalon Pisko“. Fed up with the Academy’s repressive policies and regressive artistic philosophy, Schiele and a group of likeminded classmates, dubbing themselves the “Neukunstgruppe”, resigned en masse in June 1909. Schiele’s life as an independent artist had begun.
THE EXPRESSIONIST BREAKTHROUGH (1910–1911)
In early 1910, Egon Schiele emerged with an Expressionistic style unlike anything that had ever before been seen in Vienna. Dispensing with the tightly packed decorative surrounds characteristic of Klimt’s and his own prior portraits, he positioned his figures against blank backgrounds that emphasized the subjects’ existential isolation. Schiele’s artistic development during this period progressed at a tremendous speed, and his style changed rapidly. Works from early 1910 are distinguished by a jarring palette of acid greens, reds and yellows, while works from the latter part of the year are more somber in tone, suggesting the influence of contemporaries like Max Oppenheimer and Oskar Kokoschka.
At the same time, Schiele made considerable professional strides. By the end of 1910, he had gathered a group of important patrons: Carl Reininghaus, heir to an industrial fortune; Oskar Reichel, a successful doctor; Arthur Roessler, art critic, author, and sometime dealer; and Heinrich Benesch, a civil servant whose devotion often exceeded his financial means. Patronage brought with it an upsurge in portrait commissions. A series of large canvases depicting such sitters as Roessler, the publisher Eduard Kosmack, and the boy Herbert Rainer make 1910 one of Schiele’s most productive years as a portraitist.
SELF-PORTRAITS (1910–1918)
Self-portraiture was central to Schiele’s creative vision. Beyond the practical convenience and cost-savings of using himself as a model, self-examination was for him a key to the human soul. Though Schiele’s self-portraits are often inflected with his own emotions, these emotions serve as a bridge to broader existential themes.
Twenty at the time of his Expressionist breakthrough in 1910, Schiele used self-portraits to explore post-adolescent issues of identity and sexuality. In these works, he tried on different personalities: sometimes elegant and assured, at others belligerent or anguished. Schiele’s sense of artistic mission served as a powerful subtext for many of the self-portraits, particularly in the years 1911-14. He was a “seer” both literally and metaphorically. He viewed himself as a quasireligious figure, as a saint, or in the aftermath of his imprisonment, a martyr.
In 1914, on the cusp of full adulthood, Schiele bid farewell both to his adolescent self and to his lover Wally Neuzil in the monumental Death and Maiden. Hereafter, self-portraits would figure less prominently in his work. In later paintings such as The Family, the distinctive features of the artist fade to give way to universal meanings. While Schiele now represents the male gender, the female is represented by an anonymous model.
COMING OF AGE (1912–1915)
Just as Schiele’s career in Vienna was starting to take off, he decided to leave the city. Unfortunately, the conservative denizens of smaller towns such as Krumau (today’s Český Krumlov, where Schiele spent a few months in mid-1911) and Neulengbach (where he moved subsequently) did not take kindly to the artist’s bohemian ways. In April 1912, Schiele was arrested on charges of “public immorality” for allegedly exposing minors to pornographic art. The so-called prison incident proved a turning point in Schiele’s personal and artistic growth. His relationship with his model and lover, Wally Neuzil, deepened, resulting in some of the artist’s most moving portraits to date. Looking more objectively at his portrait sitters, Schiele grew more responsive to their personalities. His portrait of fifteen-year-old Erich Lederer and his double portrait of Heinrich Benesch and his son, Otto, both depict sensitive youths on the brink of maturity.
Schiele did not consider Wally a suitable long-term mate, and in 1915 he married a more respectable bourgeois girl, Edith Harms. While the marriage was not without its problems, Schiele proved extremely attuned to his wife’s moods and whims, in his art if not in their shared life. Schiele’s portraits of Edith mark the beginning of the final phase in his development. LATE PORTRAITS (1916–1918)
Three days after his marriage to Edith Harms in June 1915, Schiele, who had been drafted into the army, reported for basic training. Military duties left little time for art, but his portraits of prisoners-of-war demonstrate the sensitivity that is the hallmark of his late style.
In early 1917, Schiele managed to get himself transferred to Vienna and to resume his artistic activities. His growing professional success was reflected in numerous portrait commissions. Schiele painted notable figures such as Franz Martin Haberditzl, the Director of the Austrian Staatsgalerie (today Belvedere), and the industrialist Hugo Koller, as well as friends like the artist Albert Paris Gütersloh. Edith, too, continued to be a favorite portrait subject. In tandem with Schiele’s greater responsiveness to his sitters’ personalities came a change in style. His work was now more conventionally realistic. His lines, which formerly had jumped seismographically in response to the artist’s emotions, now hewed tightly to the subject’s inner life. Toward the end of his life he became, alongside Klimt, the most important portrait painter in Vienna.
In October 1918, he and his pregnant wife both succumbed to the deadly Spanish flu. The artist was twenty-eight years old.

Website : Belvedere

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.

Bron/Source : Artdaily

MADRID'S MUSEO THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA PRESENTS AN EXHIBITION DEVOTED TO JEAN-LEON GEROME

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid presents Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), on view from 15 February through 22 May 2011. An ambitious exhibition jointly organised with the Musée d’Orsay, the Réunion des musées nationaux and J. Paul Getty Museum. It is the first major monographic exhibition to be devoted to this French painter and sculptor since the celebrated one held in the United States thirty years ago, and the first to be devoted to the artist in Spain. The carefully selected group of oil paintings and sculptures to be seen in Madrid constitute a reduced version of the exhibition shown in Los Angeles and Paris during the course of 2010. Nearly 60 works are shown at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, including some of Gérôme’s most famous and important creations, covering all facets of his lengthy and prolific career.

The exhibition is based on the art historical research and cataloguing of Gérôme’s work undertaken in recent years. It aims to present and analyse the artist’s work from a new viewpoint; not just as that of one of the most famous of the French Academic painters, but also as the output of one of the great creators of images in the 19th century, thus reassessing the position that Gérôme occupies within French painting of the period. This new focus is used to explore the artist’s theatrical approach to history painting, his complex relationship with the Orient, use of polychromy in his sculptures, deployment of archaeological references, combative position against anti-academic art in the late 19th century, and the interesting fact that much of his work found a home in the United States. The catalogue also analyses Gérôme’s particular visual syntax that at times led him to an obsessive illusionism, as well as his relationship with the visual arts, printmaking, photography and even filmmaking, which was soon to appear as a new art form.
Gérôme was one of the most famous painters of his day, although he was also the subject of criticism and controversy throughout his career. His popularity was largely the result of his careful promotion of his works, which became known beyond the frontiers of France and even reached the United States where he was one of the most admired and collected artists from the 1870s onwards. Gérôme soon became familiar with the new art of photography and, like most artists of his day, made use of photographs when devising some of his compositions. Above all, he made use of the new medium to sell his work. On the request of his dealer and publisher Adolphe Goupil (later his father-in-law), from 1859 onwards Gérôme began to use photographic reproductions and prints to disseminate his works.
He also adapted his output to suit Goupil’s publishing aims, judiciously combining anecdotal subjects that guaranteed popular success with a type of composition suited to reproduction in the small format of prints or as photographs. While called to task by some critics of the day, Gérôme succeeded in creating striking images that remained in the viewer’s memory.
Perfectly painted, with an absolute precision of line and a masterly use of colour, Gérôme’s works, despite the academic nature of his subjects and compositions, established a more complex relationship with modern art than might seem to be the case at first sight. This issue has been the subject of recent attention on the part of art historians when reassessing Gérôme’s work and artistic personality. He combined the Romantic interest in reproducing subjects from the classical world, the Far East and even French history with a rationalist desire to offer a truthful account, with the latter intention even prevailing over the need to make the composition intelligible and leading him to infringe academic norms on occasions.
Gérôme is thus important for the way in which he used photographs to devise his figures, scenes and landscapes, his desire to offer an authentic, precise representation that was rigorously based on scientific and archaeological research of the day, and his innovative concept of the setting or “set”, which anticipated and inspired scenes from the great historical films, particularly those set in classical Rome and made by directors such as Cecil B. DeMille and Mervyn LeRoy, among others. The fact that Gérôme’s work was so well known in the United States undoubtedly contributed to its role as a source of inspiration for some major Hollywood films. It is this dual nature of his output, at once both scholarly and popular, that makes it so important and appreciated today, both on the part of art historians and the general public.
Gérôme, heir to Ingres and Delaroche. The “Neo-Greeks”
Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) entered the studio of Paul Delaroche at the age of sixteen. This was an extremely popular studio and one frequented by numerous young artists, including the photographer Gustave Le Gray, who would become a close friend of Gérôme’s. In addition, the young Gérôme soon came under the direct influence of Jean-Dominique Ingres who, along with Delaroche, was one of the great champions of the academic tradition to which Gérôme’s art conformed during this initial phase of his career in which he worked in the genres of history painting and portraiture. Gérôme presented Cock Fight at the 1847 Salon. It enjoyed great success, revealing him as a new talent, and the artist soon began to receive his first official commissions. He became known as the leading name in a new school, the “NeoGreeks”. A renewed interest in Antiquity, now inspired by the desire to present archaeological information in realistic detail, became the pretext for sentimental and pleasing genre scenes that present a humanised, domestic, indeed, almost trivial vision of antiquity, depicted through the use of a deliberately archaic style on occasions.
Orientalism
Gérôme soon abandoned the “Neo-Greek” style but his concern to offer realistic depictions continued to be present throughout his oeuvre. Anecdotal realism and an interest in detail were two of the principal characteristics of his art, both in his paintings of Oriental themes and in his great historical compositions. In both cases the artist revealed the same interest in achieving a theatrical and dramatic effect. Whether genre scenes, landscapes or figures, this part of Gérôme’s output reveals a profound concern to achieve a realistic reconstruction places and settings, as well as an interest in the depiction of the picturesque in the form of buildings and exotic dress. His subjects no longer focused on the imaginary East depicted by the previous generation. Rather, Gérôme’s completely accurate and documented scenes were based on sketches produced during his numerous trips to the Near East, particularly Egypt and Asia Minor, and on photographs taken in situ by his travelling companions.
Gérôme and history
The core of the exhibition comprises an outstanding group of Gérôme’s history paintings, including examples of the principal themes within his oeuvre; Ancient Rome, Napoleonic scenes and episodes from the reign of Louis XIV. In all of them Gérôme’s originality lies in his rejection of the “grand sujet” and of the didactic and morally edifying role traditionally associated with works of this type. Rather than the culminating moment of a historical event, in his historical paintings Gérôme preferred to depict the associated anecdote, recording the episode that takes place immediately before or after the principal one. As a result, his paintings acquire a markedly narrative character, emphasised by the theatrical presentation of the composition and an almost cinematographic conception of the setting. His scholarly depictions of Roman civilisation and his obsession with precise archaeological detail made him a point of reference for films of this type. Paintings such as The Death of Caesar (1867) and Pollice Verso (1872) depict scenes that reveal evident parallels with celebrated films such as Quo Vadis by Mervyn LeRoy (1951) and Ben Hur by William Wyler (1959).
Fantasies and The artist in his studio. Polychrome sculpture
Gérôme’s career as a sculptor began in 1878 within the context of the Universal Exhibition. Despite being considered a model of academicism at that date, Gérôme never hesitated to defend an opposing position with regard to the use of polychromy in modern sculpture – a viewpoint overtly expressed in his painting Sculpturae vitam insufflate pictura - and he thus occupied the central position in contemporary debates. Following the example of classical antiquity, Gérôme added colour to his marble sculptures using a mixture of wax and pigments. His concern for detail and for archaeological accuracy resulted in a degree of illusionism and a use of trompe l’oeil in his paintings and sculptures of this period that borders on the obsessive. One of his most famous coloured sculptures, Tanagra (1890) also reveals the artist’s taste for the selfreferential, in this case offering a game of mirrors between sculpture and painting. Depictions of the sculptor working in his studio became the subject of numerous works from his last years, many of them self-portraits.

Website : Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.
Bron/Source : Artdaily

MATHAF REUNIT LES MAITRES ARABES DU XXE A DOHA

Le premier musée consacré à l'art moderne arabe, inauguré le 30 décembre 2010, réunit les maîtres arabes du XXe siècle

Mathaf (musée, en arabe) rassemble les oeuvres - 6.500 pièces - jusqu'ici éparpillées entre les collections des particuliers et quelques musées nationaux.
Sa première exposition dévoile des oeuvres de l'Egyptien Mahmoud Saïd, du Syrien Fateh al-Moudarrès, des Libanais Paul Guiragossian et Chafiq Abboud, et des Irakiens Diaa Azzaoui et Jawad Salim.
Dans le cadre de la politique culturelle du Qatar, Mathaf s'enorgueillit d'abriter la plus grande collection de peintures et de sculptures arabes. La plupart des oeuvres étaient la propriété d'un membre de la famille régnante, cheikh Hassan Al Thani, qui a fait don de sa collection à la Fondation du Qatar et à l'Autorité des musées du Qatar, qui ont bâti Mathaf, a précisé la directrice du musée, Wassan Khoudayri.
Le musée a par ailleurs acquis de nombreux maîtres arabes contemporains lors d'enchères organisées par les maisons Christie's ou Bonham à Dubaï. Parmi ces tableaux figure une toile du maître égyptien Mahmoud Saïd (1897-1964), "Les chadoufs", représentant des paysans égyptiens tirant l'eau du Nil. Le tableau s'était vendu en avril 2010 à Dubaï à 2,43 millions de dollars, l'un des prix les plus élevés jamais atteints par une peinture d'un artiste arabe.
"Il est impossible d'exposer en même temps toutes les oeuvres que nous possédons", a expliqué la directrice de Mathaf qui organisera régulièrement des expositions thématiques. "Nous voulons que l'art moderne arabe soit reconnu au niveau international", a-t-elle ajouté.
Mathaf est installé dans une école de la banlieue de Doha rénovée par l'architecte français Jean-François Bodin, qui l'a dotée d'une façade cubique en métal et en verre et en a aménagé l'intérieur.
Un pôle culturel dans la région
"Il n'y avait aucun musée consacré à l'art moderne arabe dans cette partie du monde", a souligné Nada Chaboutt, conseillère artistique du musée, qui déplore le fait que les Arabes "soient toujours en marge de la modernité, même dans le domaine artistique". Mathaf tente dans une première étape "de découvrir et d'archiver" les artistes modernes et contemporains arabes, avant d'élargir son activité", ajoute Mme Chaboutt pour qui la création du musée s'inscrit "dans le cadre du processus de changement culturel en cours au Qatar".
Ce petit pays de moins de deux millions d'habitants tente de s'imposer comme pôle culturel dans la région du Golfe. Il a déjà ouvert en novembre 2008 un Musée d'art islamique, riche d'une collection décrite comme l'une des plus prestigieuses au monde. Construit sur une île artificielle au large de la Corniche de Doha, il rassemble 800 objets d'art et d'histoire collectés sur trois continents, d'Espagne jusqu'en Inde, et illustrant la civilisation musulmane, du VIIe au XIXe siècle après JC.
Le bâtiment a été conçu par l'Américain d'origine chinoise, Ieoh Ming Pei, architecte de la Pyramide du Louvre. Pour sa part, l'architecte français Jean Nouvel a été chargé du projet du Musée national du Qatar. L'établissement pourrait être terminé en 2013 et évoquera une rose des sables.

Website : Mathaf

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.

Bron/Source : France 2

VENETIAN AND FLEMISH MASTERS FROM THE ROYAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS ANTWERP ON VIEW IN BRUSSELS

Francesco Guardi, Piazza San Marco, olio su tela, 62x96 cm, inv. 567, 1760-1770, datazione critica. Bergamo, Accademia Carrara.

Following their initial collaboration in 2009, which focused on the collection of the House of Savoy, the museums of Flanders and of northern Italy are once again putting their respective schools of painting into perspective with a stunning selection of pictures. From the 15th to the 18th century, the exhibition presents four centuries of contrast between 15 masterpieces from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp and some fifty paintings from the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, one of the finest collections of Venetian paintings in existence.
Venetian and Flemish Mastersis organised chronologically in four sections, one for each century; within each section, four major themes are highlighted - the portrait, saints in a natural setting, the sacred and the profane, and panoramic views. In thequattrocento Bellini's portraits influenced Van Eyck, while the northern painter exportedhis naturalism. In thecinquecento the Venetians moved beyond the techniques of the Flemish Primitives.
Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese created an explosion of colour and brought new light into the landscapes of Patenier. In theseicento, Rubens, in Italy, had an influence on Tiepolo. Thesettecento, finally,saw a proliferation of styles in a Venice in decline, from Canaletto's snapshots to the sarcastic genre paintings of Guardi, which influenced the love of excess in the work of Jordaens. In short: the Venetian and Flemish schools could not have existed without each other.
From 11th February to 8th May 2011, the exhibition is on view at Brussels, Centre for Fine Arts

Website : BOZAR

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.

Bron/Source : Artdaily

CHRISTIAN LACROIX SELECTS TRADITIONAL COSTUMES FROM THE NEAR EAST FOR EXHIBITION

Palestinian festive dresses are presented at the exhibition "L'Orient des Femmes" (Women in Orient) at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. A collection 150 traditional costumes and accessories from the Near East, selected by French designer Christian Lacroix, are shown from February 8 to May 15, 2011. REUTERS/Charles Platiau.

The exhibition reveals another aspect of femininity, from the North of Syria to the Sinaï peninsula, introducing an exceptional collection of 150 traditional costumes and accessories from the Near East, selected by designer Christian Lacroix, in close co-operation with Hana Chidiac, Head of the North African and Near East collections at the Musée du quai Branly.
From this common work has emerged a poetic journey punctuated by sumptuous garments, the majority of which are exhibited in France for the first time: festive dresses, coats, veils and head-dresses which comprised the bride's trousseau illustrate, in a unique way, the continuity of the traditions and knowledge developed and transmitted from mother to daughter.
Homage to the millennary art of embroidery, the exhibition shows the work of these women who have sought, over the centuries, to create ways to enhance their beauty and to exist within societies which have so long marginalised them, displaying at the same time their own personalities, aesthetic sensibilities and emotions.
The creations presented reveal to the visitor a glimpse of the history of these women whose hands, gestures, tastes and talent have endowed the fabric and the silk or cotton threads with part of themselves, composing each garment like a work of art.
Beyond its historical and ethnological scope WOMEN IN ORIENT also aspires to be an invitation to explore the aesthetics of women’s clothing as art.
Guided by coloured threads on black cotton, by silver lamé and striped silk linings, by the cut of winged dresses and the tie-dye fabrics, Christian Lacroix has been inspired to select a remarkable group of garments.
As the political, economic and cultural crossroads between Asia, Europe and Africa, the Near East has been the cradle of rich civilisations that have left their marks on many different artistic fields, including art of clothes, still largely unknown to a wider public.
The history of textile and embroidery extends over thousands of years, and can be seen not only asa way of dressing, but also as a language, and as social, geographical and religious markers. Since the 1970s, the image and appearance of Near Eastern women have changed. Today, what we call "Islamic dress" imposes itself across the region. This dark costume completely covers the body of woman, leaving no part visible, and is in fact leading to the progressive abandonment of traditional eastern costumes, causing the disappearance of the final remnants of a secular art of clothes.
By exhibiting for the first time a selection of traditional dresses originating from a vast area at the heart of the "Fertile Crescent", from the north of Syria to the Sinaï Peninsula, the musée du quai Branly offers to its visitors the opportunity to discover the diverse ways of life and costumes of Near Eastern women.
It reveals a different face of the Eastern woman, taking a new, lively and aesthetic look at their traditional creations.
With the exception of a moving child's dress from the 13th century, discovered in a Lebanese cave and lent by the Beirut National Museum, the exhibited items mainly date from the late 19th century to the present day. They come from the musée du quai Branly collections and the Widad Kamel Kawar collection (Jordan), the most exceptional private collection of Near East costumes and accessories.
The exhibition aims to present the costumes of female villagers and Bedouins, whose richness and splendour evoked admiration of 20th century travellers, and disconcerted more than one of them, as noted by the geographer Jacques Weulersse: "They expected to see the clothes of poor peasant women, but they discovered the costumes of opera ballerinas". (Paysans de Syrie et du Proche Orient, Paris, Gallimard, 1946)
For this event, the musée du quai Branly has acquired about thirty accessories: dresses, coats, head-dresses and veils, which complement the outfits selected and enhance the permanent collections alongside belts, aprons, jackets and jewellery.
Christian Lacroix has conceived the route through the exhibition as a poetical perambulation. The garments form a motionless, hovering procession. They inhabit a colourful world where, bathed in warm and comforting light, the designer's imagination is projected into a dreamlike East. From black to vivid colour, from night to day, the dresses seem suspended in a frozen instant of time, of which the visitor is the secret spectator.
The exhibition starts with the display of a 13th century girl's dress discovered during archaeological excavations in Lebanon. It ends with five white dresses embroidered with colours, forming the crowning piece; a nod to the traditional fashion show which usually ends with the presentation of a wedding dress.
Between these two temporal extremes, the journey follows a geographical route starting in Northern Syria to culminate in the Sinaï desert, revealing, step by step, the costumes of Syrian, Jordanian, Palestinian and Bedouin women.
It is punctuated by stylised dummies in traditional costumes and by wedding chests containing the accessories of the traditional bride's trousseau. These chests, which the visitor comes across like hidden treasures, were designed by Christian Lacroix for the event.
A space decorated with gouache miniatures in Persian style, and dolls dressed with traditional costumes, allows the visitor to rest on benches also designed by Christian Lacroix. Here the visitor can read texts relating the history of silk in the Near East, or the story of indigo.
In the same space, a set of small embroidered dresses, specially created for the exhibition, offer to visual disabled visitors the opportunity to "finger read" the fabrics and discover the lines and embroideries of the items on display.

Website : Musée du quai Branly

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.

MID-CAREER OVERVIEW OF VICKY'S WORK AT THE VALENCIAN INSTITUTE OF MODERN ART

Installation view at the Valencian Institute of Modern Art.

This exhibition is not so much a mid-career coverage of Vicky Civera's work over the last twenty years but it is rather a celebratory focusing on major aspects and key incidentals of her work. It picks up the precisions that seem unconsciously and undogmatically to characterize its essence: a deceptive lightness, a sly sexuality, an obsessive referencing of a self-absorbed family network, a constant circling around the presence of the fetish, a fecund painterly competence, a fluid surging lyricism, a deliberately cultivated hermeticism, and a bizarre and fragile psychology along with a deeply rooted inner strength. At a certain level the show is the sum of her life. It is deft, humorous, light in touch, and self-protectively twisted. Vicky talks a lot to herself: creative chatter!
Civera moves the world back into her shell, absorbs what attracts her and sends everything back, reread, modified, digested, mulled, and changed. I've known her for so many years that I guess I can say these things, perhaps sometimes being right and perhaps sometimes being wrong. As far as I am concerned the brute diamond at the centre of her world is the feminine: vulnerable, reserved, intimate, hidden and given.
Feminine not feminist but like the latter I suspect that she also slips between Freud and Marx. She knows that feminist politics redressed the image, set Freud as a reading and not as a truth, and she also knows that in a global world the spheres of the social and the economic are problematically reasserting themselves. Advanced capitalism lives in a spectacular world, Civera knows this and her change of scale may even owe something to it. Yet, always, she hurries back into her self, as the only anchor she has deeply emotional and never theoretically illustrative. It is a bruised rather than a comfortable process but it has been one of constant growth. The world does not let us alone and neither does Vicky – whatever the degree of mimesis her work proposes – ask it to.
The question thus becomes where do the new circumstances of contemporary global living leave her or, perhaps more succinctly, how does she situate herself in the midst of what will not be a short-termed crisis but rather a geopolitical upheaval that will result in radical readjustments. My answer to this question – and here I keep Marx and Freud in play – would be within the critical parameters of what we might call commodity fetishism. Vicky uses, enjoys, and abuses contemporary products, catch your eye objects picked up in the streets, cloth cuttings from a haberdashery store, industrial materials etc. Marxist fetishism is a matter of inscription, questioning how the sign of value comes to be placed on a commodity; whereas Freudian fetishism flourishes as a phantasmatic inscription, ascribing excessive value to objects considered to be valueless: high heels, belts, fashion items, small objects, jottings, closed containers.
Her world is oniric with occasional touches of the surreal; it is private, closed in on the rituals and surprises of the studio and it comes at us with a cautious smile. Her pieces live up against each other in an endless muted conversation and they ask us to be attentive, to be sensitive to detail, to the minor registers of the imagination – minor not because they are less significant but because they opt for the subtlety of understatement. Fetishisms create social and sexual constructions of things at intractable points that trouble the social or sexual psyche. Civera exploits these sensations.
The show brings together objects, installations, drawings and paintings. It shows both the range of her work and its coherence. To some extent it can be seen as a walk through a hedonistic fantasy garden inhabited by fragile, discrete, or sexually overt objects, accompanied by a series of muted secrets, leading us to an upper level where her sets of drawings serve as the corner-stones of her poetic, disturbingly personal and endlessly nuanced, lexicon. These works engage the eye but they also leave a curious after-taste: a gnawing twang.

Website : Valencian Institute of Modern Art

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.
Bron/Source : Artdaily

EXHIBITION OF SUPERLATIVE BRITISH WATERCOLORS AT THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS - SAINT PETERSBURG

John Constable (British, 1776-1837), Hampstead (1833). Watercolor over graphite. Collection of BNY Mellon.

Romantics to Moderns: British Watercolors and Drawings from the Collection of BNY Mellon features approximately 70 works on paper by 49 of Britain’s most gifted artists from the mid-1700s through 1935. The exhibition will be on view at the MFA through May 1, 2011.
Represented artists include John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, Samuel Palmer, John Ruskin, Walter Sickert, and J. M. W. Turner. The exhibition provides a nigh comprehensive history of 200 years of British watercolors and drawings—a first for the Tampa Bay area. Because of their fragility, these works are rarely exhibited.
British watercolors are among the most striking ever produced. The medium began to flourish in eighteenth-century England and was pursued by talented artists and amateurs. Watercolor was considered part of a genteel education. Due to portable materials, artists could also work outdoors, vividly capturing beautiful landscapes and architectural and historic sites. These specific geographical areas and buildings often resonated with a public eager to celebrate their country.
The landscapes in the Collection of BNY Mellon are especially impressive and range from pre-Romantic works by Gainsborough to those by modernists like Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell (author Virginia Woolf’s sister) of the influential Bloomsbury Group. J. M. W. Turner’s ethereal Barnard Castle (late 1830s) is a rare find outside of museum collections, and Constable’s Hampstead (1833) reveals the artist’s almost scientific study of clouds. Turner and Constable are two of the most accomplished landscape painters in the history of art. Moreover, Francis Danby’s majestic View near Killarney (about 1818) epitomizes Romanticism, and John Sell Cotman’s luminous River Landscape (1806) anticipates the French Impressionists.
Romantics to Moderns encompasses a number of large-scale watercolors. David Cox’s mysterious Evening (about 1811) and Peter DeWint’s evocative Distant View of Lowther Castle, Cumberland (about 1836) are two of the most dramatic works in the exhibition.
The British landscape tradition and interest in pastoral subjects continued well into the mid-nineteenth century. Samuel Palmer’s A Farm near Prince’s Risborough, Buckinghamshire (about 1844) and Alfred William Hunt’s Ullswater at Midday (1863) are striking examples. John Ruskin, an influential critic, as well as artist, and Turner’s champion, is represented by two watercolors, including an exuberant view of Venice.
John Nash’s stylized and brilliantly colored compositions carry the British landscape into the modernist era. His works demonstrate the impact of French Modernism on British artists at the turn of the twentieth century. Romantics to Moderns is the Museum’s first exhibition devoted to British art of the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.
The Mellons
The Mellons are part of the fabric of American history and philanthropy. Banker and statesman Andrew Mellon (1855-1937) not only made a fortune, but also served as Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to London. He became one of America’s greatest art collectors and founded the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He never saw his vision take form, however, dying only months before the museum had been approved by Congress.
His son Paul (1907-1999) took up his father’s mantle and nurtured the Gallery’s development for more than six decades. He and his second wife Bunny gave more than 1,000 works to the collection.
Paul Mellon was drawn to British art and culture throughout his life, having studied at Clare College, Cambridge University, while his father was ambassador. He founded the Yale Center for British Art at his alma mater and its affiliate institution in London, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Inspired by the legacy of the Mellon family and Paul’s encouragement, BNY Mellon began building its collection of British art in 1980. The works on paper especially reflect Paul Mellon’s influence and interests and are highly respected in the art world.

Website : Museum of Fine Arts - St. Petersburg-Florida

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.
Bron/Source : Artdaily

EVOLUTION OF THE CONCEPTION OF BEAUTY IN CONTEMPORARY GLASS AT MUDAC IN LAUSANNE

Zoltan Bohus, Formula II, 1981. Collection du mudac, Lausanne.

Launched in the early 1970s, the mudac collection has reached the respectable age of forty. It has attained a level of maturity that invites in-depth critical examination of its sources. After all, four decades of collecting activity the world over — led by the late Peter Engelhorn and his wife Traudl Engelhorn, and with the zealous collaboration of Rosmarie Lippuner (director of the mudac’s predecessor, the Museum of Decorative Arts) —is no mean feat! The collection is currently on view October 31st 2011 at mudac.
The mudac’s art glass collection is distinguished by several basic traits. Firstly, it centers on a single material, which in turn boasts certain novel artistic properties recognized as such in the early 1950s. Moreover, it is encyclopedic in its scope, proceeding in a keenly curious and open-minded spirit that keeps it in step with the most recent creative developments. Thus its very makeup is protean, even anomalous in the best sense of the word. As such, it bears witness to the emergence of a new form of art —and this in all its aspects and including the many techniques used for its production.
Since the collection deals with contemporary glass art as a recent, indeed ongoing development, the Engelhorn wife-and-husband team was at pains to document it thoroughly, wherever in the world it has been taking place and in the greatly differing styles it entails. It was never a question of confining themselves to a couple of renowned historic sites —Murano and former Bohemia come to mind for their traditional renown —or to a single country currently particularly active in glass creation, such as the United States. To the contrary, their efforts have always been driven by an insatiable quest for novelty. This is what lent impetus to the growth of a collection that, today, mudac is honoured to oversee and develop further.
Our visitors may be overwhelmed by the diversity of techniques represented (blowing, molding, thermo-forming, cutting, engraving, sanding and so on) and the numerous styles illustrated by the hand of over 300 glass artists. All the more so given the mischievous reflections and charms emanating from the material itself, at the same time so pure and yet so mysterious. It thus seemed useful to us to provide a structured reading of the major trends that, from the 1970s until the late 1990s, can be considered more or less central to glass creation.
Indeed, the notions of “beauty” and “good taste” are born of fashion dictates: while often imposing themselves in seemingly absolute manner for a decade or so, these are then radically challenged during the following period of time... To view trends with an amused eye, to see them at a remove and with an open mind, can make us aware of the relativity of our judgmental criteria. It also allows us to measure the passage of time in the light of the displayed selection of works belonging to the museum collection.

Website : MUDAC

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.

Bron/Source : Artdaily

IL S'APELLERA TOUJOURS FRANCE

À l'occasion du 50e anniversaire de la construction du France, le Musée national de la Marine accueille à Paris une exposition inédite de près de 800 objets-souvenirs qui racontent la légende du plus emblématique des paquebots français.

France: ces six lettres blanches au passé de baroudeuses se dresseront fièrement mercredi prochain pour la première fois au Musée national de la Marine. FRANCE: six majestueuses majuscules (2,50 mètres de haut) empruntées à la nation, définitivement ancrées dans une époque où les rêves les plus fous engageaient tout un pays, tout un peuple fier de lui-même. Si le Concorde porta à Mach 2 les couleurs de la France, le dernier des transatlantiques français hissa le pavillon du prestige national des îles Canaries aux mers du Nord, du Havre à New York, où Gérard Oury, entre autres, l'immortalisa dans une scène fameuse du Cerveau, fanfaronnant sous grand pavois, la statue de la Liberté à sa proue. Monument de parade entièrementmade in France, cet aristo des océans était un pur produit de la IVe République, baptisé sous les flonflons de La Marseillaise, le 11 mai 1960, dans le port de Saint-Nazaire.«France vient d'épouser la mer», proclamait le général de Gaulle, fier comme un hauban. La messe était dite. Le mariage tint ses promesses pour le meilleur et pour le pire.
L'histoire du France déroule tous les chapitres d'un roman qui tient du conte de fées autant que de la tragédie. Douze ans de service sous son identité première, une préretraite sous un patronyme norvégien aux accents de Waterloo (Norway), un dernier sobriquet féminin (Blue Lady), puis l'agonie avant un enterrement de dernière classe... Des destins brisés on retient souvent les drames. Le naufrage du plus long paquebot du monde (315,66 mètres) au XXe siècle commença dans les années 70, lorsque le prix du pétrole se mit à flamber nos ambitions, pour s'achever en 2003 sous la morsure de chalumeaux indiens. Son pays lui refusait le droit d'asile: trop vieux, trop cher! L'argument enverra par le fond d'autres réalisations torpillées par la rentabilité moderne. «Construire un paquebot dans les années 60 était un acte poétique, car il était déjà inscrit dans l'inutilité, confirme le designer Philippe Stark dans la préface du livre-catalogue Paquebot France (Editions Musée national de la Marine/Glénat/Chasse-Marée). C'est même insensé de l'avoir réalisé alors que l'avion le concurrençait.» Que pouvaient, au fond, les 160.000 chevaux du France contre les deux réacteurs d'un Boeing 707? Que pesaient 1044 hommes d'équipage, pour la plupart syndiqués, contre une escadrille d'hôtesses de l'air à faire se pâmer Jacques Dutronc? Les rêves sont souvent des jouets cassés dont on peine à se séparer. En 1975, Michel Sardou chantait, la larme à l'œil, «J'étais la France, qu'est-ce qu'il en reste? Un corps mort pour des cormorans.» Un corps dessoudé, éparpillé, certes, mais, plus de trente ans après ce requiem populaire, l'âme du paquebot a survécu.
En février 2009, les collectionneurs se sont rués sur les objets du navire vendus aux enchères pour 1,2 million d'euros. Les associations comme French Lines, les écomusées, les musées entretiennent un patrimoine en pièces détachées que notre mémoire ne cesse de recomposer. Sur internet, des blogs de nostalgiques actifs entretiennent l'héritage de ce fleuron de la marine marchande qui, au-delà des 701.886 passagers accueillis à son bord, continue de fasciner un large public.
Sa grandeur et sa fiabilité impressionnaient
Dans la mémoire collective, le paquebot s'arrime à une nostalgie heureuse, une période de grandeur, de développement économique inégalé. Des documents originaux aux photographies, du mobilier aux cadeaux Bonux, le moindre vestige réactive la manivelle du passé. Avec, c'est selon, l'ambition de tâter de l'écume des Trente Glorieuses, de redécouvrir ou de découvrir, comme le souligne Aymeric Perroy, responsable du patrimoine maritime de la ville du Havre, «un moment de création, de défi industriel, une histoire économique, une tranche de vie, une ambition politique, une humanité... Un rêve, un mythe!».

Coup de projecteur sur une légende en super-8, une superproduction passée du noir et blanc à la couleur avec pour slogan publicitaire en 1974: «Les décors sont du bon Dieu. La mise en scène de la Transat. Les acteurs, c'est vous!» Les deux emblématiques cheminées à ailerons du France se repéraient dans tous les ports du monde. Sa grandeur et sa fiabilité impressionnaient. Son commandant taquinait à plein régime les 35 nœuds sans dégonder le moindre rivet; l'homme d'affaires sirotait à l'arrière-pont un Jack Daniel's sans faire vibrer le baccarat.

En avoir sous le carénage - cinq jours de traversée pour accoster au pier 88 - n'empêchait pas ce sprinter des mers d'afficher les bonnes manières que sont l'art de vivre et le service à la française. Du faste. De l'élégance. À bord, on dorlotait, 24 heures sur 24, les 2 044 passagers qui avaient dépensé (en classe touriste) un peu plus d'un mois et demi de salaire pour se payer un billet Le Havre-New York. L'art du voyage, c'est l'art de bien vivre. Tout le confort d'un palace - air conditionné, 1000 téléphones, une centaine de téléviseurs qui diffusent jusqu'à 150 kilomètres des côtes, des journaux télévisés de bord bilingues... - était proposé dans un décor au style classique, voire composite, mais luxueux.
Une armada de 48 professionnels cornaqués par le peintre Chapelain-Midy, l'architecte Gillet et le critique d'art Mazars avaient œuvré pour respecter les normes de sécurité avec ingéniosité et élégance. La mode était au vinyle, au Formica, à l'aluminium (500 tonnes) utilisé comme habillage dans la piscine ou en placage sur la façade des commodes Lancel. La chaise pliante de Tubauto mesurait son design «camping» au fauteuil bleu Lady de Zanuso, devenus aujourd'hui des pièces vintage des plus tendance! Chaque mur était un musée où s'affichaient des œuvres d'art - Dufy, Braque, Picasso, Segonzac... -, où la tapisserie, symbole d'une longue tradition décorative nationale, trônait en reine grâce aux réalisations de Vasarely, Wogensky, Delaunay, Idoux ou Hilaire. Les premières moquettes synthétiques en Rilsan déroulaient sous les pieds des passagers un tapis rouge (en l'espèce bleu roi) pour déambuler dans ce qu'il était convenu d'appeler «le faubourg Saint-Honoré de l'Atlantique». Sur la coupe transversale du navire offerte à l'embarquement, chacun pouvait découvrir les coins et recoins de cette ville flottante aux 961 cabines de première classe et classe touriste.
Salles à manger, salons, fumoirs, théâtre de 700 places, salles de jeux, piscines, nursery, chenil, hôpital... Tout était prévu pour satisfaire une clientèle exigeante, essentiellement américaine. Les soirées de gala en habit y étaient magiques, les dîners, dignes d'un étoilé. La meilleure cuisine de France se trouvait, disait-on, à bord du France. Sur les nappes blanches sans faux plis, les maîtres d'hôtel servaient les classiques du répertoire Carême-Escoffier préparés par une brigade de 90 cuisiniers. Courgettes à la Maintenon, cailles à la Souvaroff illustraient l'excellence des chefs soumis à des règles de qualité et d'efficacité hallucinantes, comme lorsqu'il convenait de griller 3000 côtes d'agneau en une heure ou de saisir, du bleu au très cuit, 800 steaks au poivre en 45 minutes. «Une crêpe qui flambe se voit de loin. Le plaisir du passager est aussi que ce privilège soit vu des autres!» La remarque venait d'un homme avisé, René Goscinny, dont le plaisir était d'embarquer sur des paquebots (lire à ce sujet son délicieux Tous les visiteurs à terre! Imav éditions). L'auteur d'Astérix fit découvrir le France à Albert Uderzo. Leurs noms s'ajoutent à la longue liste des personnalités qui comptèrent parmi les passagers des 377 transatlantiques et 83 croisières du navire: Johnny Hallyday et Juliette Gréco donnèrent des concerts, Paul McCartney dévasta sa cabine, Marcel Achard, Jean Anouilh, Dalí, Michèle Morgan, Louise de Vilmorin, Audrey Hepburn, Alberto Giacometti, Polnareff signèrent le livre d'or... En 1962, La Joconde y fut même transportée pour être présentée à Washington puis à New York. Le France était considéré comme un lieu sûr, un navire insubmersible... À juste titre. Ce n'est pas la mer qui l'a fait chavirer, mais une dérive des sentiments tragiquement passagère. Regrets éternels.

Website : Musée National de la Marine 09.02.2011-23.10.2011

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.
Bron/Source : Le Figaro

EXHIBITION OF FRENCH DRAWINGS FROM POUSSIN TO SEURAT AT THE NATIONAL GALLERIES IN SCOTLAND

Nicolas Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time. Pen and brown ink and wash, 14.8 x 19.8 cm. National Gallery of Scotland.

An outstanding collection of French master drawings will be the focus of a new display at the National Gallery Complex in Edinburgh next spring. Over the last thirty years the Gallery has carefully and deliberately strengthened its holdings in this area, and is now home to one of the best collections of French drawings in the UK. Among the 60 works on show, ranging in date from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century, will be superb examples by artists such as Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, J A D Ingres, and Georges Seurat. Highlights will include an exceptional preparatory drawing by Poussin for his great painting Dance to the Music of Time, and Seurat’s Seated Nude, a study for the central figure in his celebrated painting Bathers at Asnières.
Of all the major European schools of drawing the French is one of the richest and most fertile. Its variety, as demonstrated in this exhibition, embraces the refinement and elegance of the sixteenth-century School of Fontainebleau; the playful sensualities of the Rococo period and the contrasting rigour of Neoclassicism in the eighteenth century; and the stylistic and formal innovations of nineteenth-century artists from the Romantics to the Post-Impressionists. Reflecting this diversity, French Drawings: Poussin to Seurat will feature a wide-ranging selection of drawings, from studies for ambitious, large-scale paintings, to landscape sketches made in the open air; from designs for tapestries to intimate figure studies. Underpinning the vigorous evolution of French drawing and uniting all of the works on show here is a constant delight in the possibilities offered by the medium.
The display will also feature exceptional images by a number of artists who will be less familiar to most, including a distinctive drawing of a young, pregnant Jewish woman wearing a sarma, an extraordinary cone-shaped metal headdress. The drawing, by Louis Roguin (active1843-71), was made in Algeria, where the artist appears to have spent much of his career. Also of note are a highly finished drawing by Etienne Jeaurat (1699-1789), depicting a well-to-do bourgeois Family in an Interior, and an exceptionally beautiful Study of Drapery by Joseph-Ferdinand Lancrenon (1794-1874), which points to a talent unjustly overlooked by posterity.

05.02.2011 - 01.05.2011

Website : National Gallery of Scotland

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.

Bron/Source : Artdaily

GENERALI FOUNDATION PRESENTS 'unEXHIBIT' AN EXHIBITION BY INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS

With the title “unExhibit,” the Generali Foundation gestures toward the legendary 1957 exhibition an Exhibit as it takes up the question of the “display as exhibition.” The show, which features works by the international artists Maria Eichhorn, Richard Hamilton, Ann Veronica Janssens, Willem Oorebeek, Karthik Pandian and Mathias Poledna, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Heimo Zobernig, not only examines the “display” as a material surface and resonating body for visual and spatial experience, but most importantly also studies artistic methods of not-showing and withdrawing, of “un-exhibiting.” Exhibition on view until July 17, 2011.
An Exhibit (1957) as a historic point of reference
The point of departure for the exhibition at the Generali Foundation leads back to the year 1957, to a loose association of artists, designers, architects, and theorists called the Independent Group; some of its members were Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore, and Lawrence Alloway. The premise of an Exhibit was to show “no objects, no ideas”: a show that consisted of colorful panels loosely suspended in space so that visitors could amble freely between them. This formal decision to do without exhibits and make the display itself the subject of the show can be traced back to a series of attempts in modern art to expand painting into space, as in the case of El Lissitzky or Mondrian, or to elevate the display to the status of a subject in itself, as in the case of Frederick Kiesler or Herbert Bayer. an Exhibit is relevant also as a form of interrogation of the institutional space and the roles played by authorship and the position of the beholder: composed of modular elements, the space enables forever different subjective experiences of spatiality as the visitors become authors who “conceive” the space in forever new ways. The translucent panels, finally, mark a play with the experience of transparency and opacity that is of decisive importance to the subject’s perceptions in a world defined by media.
Perception through transparency and opacity
unExhibit raises the question in a slightly different way than an Exhibit did: the point is now not only to present “no objects, no ideas” but instead the medium or “display”; it is, rather, to employ different forms of withdrawal, encryption, obfuscation, or obscuration to display the conditions on which media surfaces and their production of imagery rest. Only this tension between displaying and concealing makes it possible to experience the difference between the real and what is imaginary or generated by media.
Transforming the Generali Foundation's exhibition space
The concrete exhibition space at the Generali Foundation serves as the frame of reference for a transformation in which the displacement of spatial coordinates brought about by the use of certain materials—mirrors, wallpapers, lighting, fabrics—as well as techniques of reproduction and surface treatments—lithography, xerography, newspaper clipping, grid patterns—not only evacuates the space, but also recodes it. To this end, the architecture of the exhibition room will be reduced to its original state, and no exhibition architecture will be built that would act as a presentation surface in the service of the art on display: Heimo Zobernig reduplicates the minimalist concrete wall—an essential feature of the existing architecture that marks its longitudinal axis. Turned into a wooden scaffold covered with an iridescent fabric resembling construction site safety netting, it is reborn in a glamorous guise, ready for a variety of projections and “mirroring.” The quotation of the concrete wall reduplicated and displaced in the room is not a mere architectonic intervention; it has implications for the entire constitution of the space and the works of the artists that must stand their ground in it. Willem Oorebeek, by contrast, applies wallpaper bearing a dot matrix to the multiply coded concrete wall. Oorebeek uses the matrix dot, whose career culminated in the “Ben-Day dots” of Pop art, in shades of black and gray as the reproductive mark par excellence of the technology of printing.
The loss of authenticity
The loss of authenticity becomes manifest not only as a consequence of ongoing reproduction and repetition, as in Willem Oorebeek's Vertical Club, but paradoxically also by virtue of the heightened visibility of perfect surfaces, as Karthik Pandian and Mathias Poledna's 1991 illustrates. Visibility and withdrawal are interdependent, as is also evident in the light projections, "aquariums," and "laboratory" examinations in the work of Ann Veronica Janssens. The “exhibited” aspect of models or other motifs from the world of “consumer culture” is first removed from the process of its de-auratization by a process of obfuscation: thus in Willem Oorebeek’s Blackouts, where a media image seems to be altogether effaced by a lithographic process of inking so that it can, upon closer inspection, become truly visible in the first place precisely by virtue of this process of invisibilization. The same holds for Willem Oorebeek and Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s work BLACKOUT-Screen (2005) and for Maria Eichhorn’s Wandbeschriftung Nr. 4 (1992) or her Die ungeöffnete Post des Max Foster (1996). Other strategies of non-exhibiting, of refusal and withdrawal draw not only on fashion, but also on the cinema—Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Roehr, Georges Perec, Maya Deren—and on literature—Jean Genet, Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Raymond Roussel—: where things are subject to ongoing reproduction, the double creeps in, and with it the empty, iridescent, over determined surface, in equal measure coldly repellent and replete with projections of loss and desire.

Website : Generali Foundation Wien

FIC123.BE een website met info en cultuur.

Bron/Source : Artdaily