PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION PRESENTS EXHIBITION OF GALLERIST ILEANA SONNABEND: AN ITALIAN

Considered by many to be among the greatest gallerists of late 20th century contemporary art, Ileana Sonnabend (1914-2007) also brought together a major art collection of her own. The exhibition Ileana Sonnabend. An Italian Portrait, on view at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, from May 29 to October 2, 2011, presents works from the Sonnabend Collection, New York, on the theme of Italy: works by Italian artists, and works by international artists which reference Italian culture, tradition, and topography.

Ileana Schapira was born in Bucharest, Romania. Her father was a successful businessman and financial advisor to King Carol II of Romania. She met Leo Krausz (later Castelli) in 1932 and married him a year later. In 1935 they moved to Paris and opened an art gallery there, with René Drouin, before emigrating to New York in 1941. Leo Castelli joined the US army, and Ileana studied at Columbia University, where she met Michael Sonnabend, whom she was to marry in 1959. In the 1940s and 50s the Castellis initiated a collection of art that included works by Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock. In 1957 they opened their first art gallery in New York. Together they discovered and exhibited the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and began lifetimes of showing new art, beginning with Neo-dada and Pop Art (Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and James Rosenquist). Late in 1962 Michael and Ileana Sonnabend opened the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris, where they exhibited the work of American artists but also the work of several young Italians, beginning with Mario Schifano (1963) and Michelangelo Pistoletto (1964), followed by Gilberto Zorio, Mario Merz and Giovanni Anselmo (1969), Piero Paolo Calzolari (1971), Jannis Kounellis (1972) and others.

In 1970 Ileana Sonnabend opened a gallery in New York, moving in 1971 to the SoHo district, together with the Castelli Gallery, thus spurring a migration of the contemporary art scene in New York. She opened her SoHo gallery with a now-celebrated performance by Gilbert & George. As she continued, through her gallery and collecting, to register new art as it emerged on both the European and the New York scene—Minimalism, Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, performance, Transavanguardia, Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Geo and new photography—she acquired a reputation for her connoisseurship, her appetite for ‘the new’ and for the international character of her gallery.

Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) and Ileana Sonnabend had in common that their careers were as both gallerists and collectors. In New York in the 1940s the Castellis frequented Guggenheim’s Art of This Century museum-gallery (1942-47)—about which Castelli remarked “Peggy’s gallery was a sensation…No one realized that Peggy was doing something of epoch-making importance.” The Castellis bought works of art from Guggenheim. However, whereas Guggenheim’s patronage focused on the generation of the American Abstract Expressionists, Ileana Sonnabend promoted subsequent avant-gardes over a fifty-year period, as if in a line of succession from Guggenheim.

Michael and Ileana Sonnabend had strong personal ties to Italy, and to Venice in particular, where for many years they rented an apartment for the summer. Beginning with a sojourn in Rome in 1960, where they were in contact with the ‘Scuola di Piazza del Popolo’ and the dealer Plinio de Martiis, and in 1962 in Venice, where they were befriended by artists, critics and dealers such as Giuseppe Santomaso, Giuseppe Marchiori, Attilio Codognato, Giovanni Camuffo and Carlo Cardazzo, they formed many close Italian friendships, including Gian Enzo Sperone, Germano Celant, Achille Bonito Oliva, Giuseppe and Giovanna Panza, and the many artists whose works Ileana would exhibit, in Paris and New York. Ileana, with Leo Castelli and Alan Solomon, played an important role in bringing Robert Rauschenberg to the 1964 Venice Biennale, where he won the Grand Prix for Painting—a crucial event in the career of Rauschenberg, in the history of the Venice Biennale and of European and American contemporary art as a whole.

Ileana Sonnabend. An Italian Portrait brings together more than 60 works by almost 50 artists, selected by Antonio Homem (director of the Sonnabend Gallery, New York, and adopted son of Ileana Sonnabend). It will include Andy Warhol’s portrait of Ileana Sonnabend, works on Italian themes by Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, works by Italians such as Tano Festa, Lucio Fontana, Mimmo Rotella, Schifano and Piero Manzoni, works by American artists inspired by Italian culture (Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, John Baldessari for example), by artists of the Arte Povera movement (Zorio, Anselmo, Calzolari, Jannis Kounnelis, and Merz), by several international photographers (including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Max Becher and Andrea Robbins), and by many others—whether Italian (Giulio Paolini, Luigi Ontani) or not (Bruce Nauman, Anselm Kiefer, Philip Haas, Rona Pondick for example). The exhibition moves beyond its Italian leitmotif to a more general survey of the diversity, originality and indeed brilliance of Ileana Sonnabend’s career as a promoter and collector of emerging art.

Website : Peggy Guggenheim Collection

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EXHIBITION OF DANISH AND NORDIC ART 1750-1900 ON VIEW AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF DENMARK

From the birth of Danish painting through the famous Golden Age of Danish art to the dawn of Modernism. All the major trends and movements within 150 years of Danish and Nordic art unfold themselves in a new, comprehensive display of the collections housed at the National Gallery of Denmark. "Danish and Nordic Art 1750-1900" shows more than 400 works in 24 freshly renovated exhibition rooms. This tour de force of art involves many different aspects; it includes a historical overview, special themes of immediate relevance to contemporary life, and individual focus on artists of particular importance. It also sheds light on some of the overlooked chapters of Danish art history.

An important collection
The National Gallery of Denmark’s collection of pre-20th century Danish art is the most important collection of its kind to be found in any museum. The collection performs a crucial function as the pre-eminent source of knowledge of Denmark’s artistic heritage. This is also why it enjoys special attention from the museum’s audience, and indeed it is the most popularly used section of the Gallery for guided tours, lectures, tuition, and other educational activities.

Choices made at every turn
The scope and quality of the Gallery’s collection has allowed the new display unique opportunities for relating grand narratives and rather more obscure stories about Danish art and Danish artists. Taking its point of departure in the most recent research, "Danish and Nordic Art 1750-1900" aims to provide an accurate account of what the Gallery regards as the most significant artists and movements within Danish art in the period leading up to the 20th century. The final hanging has been preceded by a rigorous vetting process where experts have had their pick among the more than 3,500 works housed in the collection. Of course, the new display offers plenty of opportunities to revisit unmissable masterworks by the greatest Danish artists of the era. However, a number of obvious candidates have had to give way in favour of artists who have hitherto lead rather obscure lives within Danish art history.

Main narratives, undercurrents, and German interludes
The overall structure of the new display will present audiences with a chronological presentation that takes its beginning in the mid-18th century and traces the main outline of the story of older Danish art interspersed with monographs that offer in-depth treatments of some of the greatest artists of the era, among these Abildgaard, Eckersberg, Købke, Ring, and Hammershøi. At the same time the new display lays down another track that focuses on those who were not perfectly adapted to accepted art history, on offbeat art, on “wrongly gendered” art, etc. These auxiliary narratives can be summed up as a Romantic/idealistic undercurrent within Danish 19th century art; an undercurrent that runs parallel to the generally accepted main narrative inspired by France. For example, the Gallery has persuaded lenders to provide four paintings by Caspar David Friedrich for the new presentation. One of the key exhibition rooms is dedicated to the interplay between the great German artist and his Danish contemporaries, who regarded his visionary empathy with the moods of nature as an inspirational Romantic alternative to Eckersberg’s rather more sober and rational depictions of nature.

New themes and new approaches to education
One of the underlying ambitions behind all of the new presentations currently being developed by the Gallery is to ensure that historical matters and material re-main relevant to contemporary audiences. In addition to the major – and minor – tracks laid down in the chronological presentation, "Danish and Nordic Art 1750-1900" also provides contemporary perspectives on the art from the era. Several of the exhibition rooms are devoted to themes that reverberate with relevance to our own time. Particular works and particular communication activities are used to place especial emphasis on issues such as body and gender in art, and in-depth attention is also paid to art’s interest in journeys as motif and metaphor. In keeping with this approach, the new display involves a range of all-new digital and analogue education and communication initiatives. An entire room is dedicated to a particularly important work from the collection; this work is replaced by another every six months. The first of this series of highlights is Eckersberg’s canonical View through Three Arches of the Third Storey of the Colosseum, which is given an in-depth treatment through a wide range of educational and communication approaches.

Website : National Gallery of  Denmark

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MUSEU NACIONAL D'ART DE CATALUNYA OPENS EXHIBITION DEDICATED TO THE WORK OF JOAQUIN TORRES-GARCIA

Joaquín Torres-García: Untitled. 1933. © Colección Alejandra, Aurelio y Claudio Torres


Torres-García. Crossroads brings together more than 80 works, mainly drawings, many of them unpublished, from the collection of Alejandra, Aurelio and Claudio Torres, as well as paintings and wooden constructions. The show explores the Uruguayan-Catalan artist’s creative process, from his beginnings in Modernisme and his Noucentista period to his recognition as one of the pioneers of avant-garde art.

The exhibition looks at the essential features of Joaquin Torres-García's career as an artist, which takes in the first half of the 20th century. Torres-García (Montevideo, 1874-1949), who trained in Barcelona during the Modernista period, was a key figure in the Noucentista movement. After leaving Catalonia in 1920, he set out along a path that was to lead him to become one of the pioneers of geometric abstraction, along with artists like Mondrian, Van Doesburg and Hélion.

The aim of this exhibition, which is arranged as a series of crossroads marked by choices historiography often considers as opposites, is to give the visitor a close-up view of the inner workings of the artist's creative process and analyse the way Torres-García, faced with these 'crossroads', decided to take new paths without ever entirely abandoning the ones he had already travelled. This wish to add together dualities or opposites became an essential feature throughout his work, a production in which reason and nature, abstraction and primitivism, the eternal and the temporal, classicism and modernity all overlap and become integrated. Following the artist's footsteps on a creative path that covers the first half of the 20th century, the exhibition explores the contrast and the synthesis, or underlying equivalence, between 'classical beauty' and 'modern beauty'.

The first part of Torres-García. Crossroads analyses what we might call the artist's apprenticeship. The crossroads or poles during this period correspond to certain specific moments in his life, such as the years spent in Barcelona and New York. The exhibition shows how Torres-García evolved towards classicism without abandoning his original commitment to Modernisme. It also explains how he integrates his view of urban life and explores the duality between the contemporary and the classical. The second part is devoted to his mature years and analyses the myths and the ideas that form the basis of his poetics: Nature, Reason and the myth of Atlantis.

Torres-García, a modern master

Born in Montevideo of a Catalan father, Joaquin Torres-García arrived in Catalonia in 1891, when he was 16. He trained as a painter in Barcelona during the Modernista period and his first exhibited works, such as Woman Dancing (1900), clearly identify him with this style and with its poetics. In 1912, Prat de la Riba commissioned him to decorate the Saló de Sant Jordi of the Palau de la Generalitat (the Catalan government building), a job that kept him busy for for more than five years. Thanks to this, Torres-García became the figurehead of Noucentisme, a movement that aspired to transform and modernise Catalonia during the early part of the 20th century and which began life, as Eugeni d'Ors noted, as a reaction against Modernisme. When he returned to easel painting in 1916, his work adopted the new avant-garde tendencies that were stirring things up in the art scene in Barcelona at that time. After 1920, when he left Catalonia at the age of 50, his life was marked by constant moves between America and Europe. From 1920 to 1922, Torres-García lived in New York. During that period he produced a portfolio of drawings with the title New York City, in which the artist captures the feverish pace of life in the great city. In New York, Torres-García hoped to find the means to set up a company that would manufacture the original toys he designed. This was in line with another project of his that sprang from the same keenly felt educational vocation, the Mont d'Or school he founded in Terrassa.

After his stay in New York and two years spent in Florence, Torres-García arrived in Paris at the end of 1926 determined to get his toy business off the ground. During the six years he spent in the French capital, crucial years for his artistic development, he became one of the main driving forces behind abstract art between the wars, which centred around two associations, Abstraction-Création and Cercle et Carré. In this context, Torres-García frequented artists like Van Doesburg, Hélion and Seuphor, who defended a form of geometric abstraction that diverged from the more expressionist abstract art that had been in vogue in the years before the First World War. These artists proposed a new concept, which they called 'plastic expressionism', whose signs of identity were serialisation and mechanisation and which questioned the traditional status of painting and sculpture. Torres-García shared these artists' rationalist approach, but whereas the classical philosophical tradition that nurtured their thinking opposed the rational to the natural, he merged the two poles to integrate nature into reason. As a result of his constant reflections on art, Torres-García's work never stopped evolving, exploring the paths of abstraction to make up a language of his own which he called 'constructive art'.

Finally, after a period spent living in Madrid (1932-1934), Joaquin Torres-García returned to his home town of Montevideo, where he helped to spread the ideas of modernity throughout the South-American continent.

Website : MNAC

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JAN FABRE ET LA MORT A VENISE

En marge de la Biennale d'art 2011, Jan Fabre expose son tout nouveau travail à Venise. Il y livre un hommage et une relecture de la célèbre Pietà de Michel-Ange. Une semaine avant l'ouverture, il nous présente sa création en avant-première.

Le contraste est saisissant. A l'extérieur, une petite brise vient rafraîchir la ville écrasée par le soleil. Des gamins jouent sur la place, deux jeunes femmes passent en riant, des hommes déchargent le contenu d'une barque. A l'intérieur, pas un bruit, pas un mouvement. Entre les hautes colonnes de la Nuova Scuola Grande di Santa Maria della Misericordia, un long podium doré occupe tout l'espace. Une étendue brillante et intimidante sur laquelle se dressent cinq sculptures immaculées.

Tandis que la vie éclate au dehors, Jan Fabre explore une nouvelle fois cette étrange contrée, à la lisière de la mort, qui le fascine depuis toujours. Cette fois, il s'y aventure en revisitant à sa façon la célèbre Pietà de Michel-Ange. Le premier coup d'œil est impressionnant. Contraste des murs vieillis et de cette surface dorée sur laquelle trônent les sculptures d'une blancheur parfaite. Force de la succession des œuvres menant à l'image de la Pietà, instantanément reconnaissable. Majesté d'un lieu à la hauteur démesurée, baigné de la seule lumière venue de l'extérieur…

L'ensemble force le respect, intimide le visiteur. Pour approcher les sculptures, il faut ensuite enfiler de larges chaussons de feutre. Quatre cerveaux géants tout d'abord. Chacun est surmonté d'un élément symbolique : arbre de vie, croix, bonsaï, tortues… Ceux-ci ne sont pas seulement associés à la reproduction du cerveau. Ils en sont les prolongations diverses, directement sculptés dans la masse. Vient ensuite l'interprétation très libre de la Pietà vers laquelle tout converge. Ici, le Christ prend les traits de l'artiste. Quant à la mère éplorée, elle a le visage de la mort. L'image est saisissante. Emouvante aussi. Car étrangement, il se dégage de cette vision une douceur inattendue.

Suspendus aux colonnes qui entourent le podium, on retrouve des cocons recouverts de carapaces vertes de scarabées. La signature Fabre en quelque sorte. Mais au-delà de celle-ci, l'artiste parvient une nouvelle fois à surprendre, rendant hommage à Michel-Ange tout en livrant sa propre vision du lien unissant la mort à la vie, le monde réel et le spirituel. Loin de jouer la provocation, il livre une œuvre d'une grande beauté formelle confrontant chacun à sa fin inéluctable.

Dans quelques jours, la foule se pressera dans ces lieux, bousculant la belle sérénité actuelle. De grandes affiches annoncent l'événement dès l'aéroport. C'est qu'en quelques années, Venise est devenu un rendez-vous incontournable pour Jan Fabre qui y présente tous les deux ans de nouvelles créations en marge de la Biennale officielle. Dans le même temps, son travail se déploie à Otterlo (Pays-Bas) et à Vienne. D'un côté, le musée Kröller-Müller présente une rétrospective de son travail avec plusieurs créations nouvelles. A Vienne, le Kunsthistorisches Museum revient sur sa période bleue. Ses grands dessins à la pointe bic se mêlent aux Rembrandt, Rubens et autres Caravage. Une redécouverte permettant de constater le chemin accompli par l'artiste et son incroyable créativité depuis plus de trente ans. Et lui-même nous l'assure ; il ne fait que commencer…

Du 1er juin au 16 octobre,

Website : Nuova Scuola Grande di Santa Maria della Misericordia
Sestiere Cannaregio 3599, Fondamenta della Misericordia, Venise.

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INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY CELEBRATES ELLIOT ERWITT'S CAREER WITH EXHIBITION

Elliott Erwitt, Marilyn Monroe, New York City, 1956 © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photo.



An eyewitness to history and a dreamer with a camera, Elliott Erwitt has made some of the most memorable photographs of the twentieth century. A substantial retrospective exhibition of his work, Elliott Erwitt: Personal Best, is on view at the International Center of Photography from May 20 to August 28, 2011. The exhibition includes more than 100 of Erwitt’s favorite images, a selection of his documentary films produced over the past sixty years, as well as some previously unseen and unpublished prints from his early work.

Born Elio Romano Erwitz to Russian Jewish émigrés in Paris in 1928, Erwitt spent his childhood in Italy, returned to France in 1938, and emigrated to the United States with his family in 1939. After moving to Los Angeles in 1941, Erwitt attended Hollywood High School and began working in a commercial darkroom processing photographs of movie stars. He studied filmmaking at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1949 to 1950, and worked as a documentary photographer on the Standard Oil Company project directed by Roy Stryker.

After military service, Erwitt returned to New York, where he met Edward Steichen and Robert Capa, who became strong influences in his life. In 1953, he was invited by Capa to join Magnum Photos, and in 1955 he was included in Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition. From early on, Erwitt set his own criteria for photographing. During the 1940s and 1950s, when many noted fine-art photographers followed established guidelines for exposure, focus, and composition, Erwitt developed his own ideas. With an incisive, humanistic sense of observation and a finely honed wit, he illuminated the small moments of life, even when covering major news events.

“To me, photography is an art of observation,” said Erwitt. “It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place . . . I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”

Throughout six decades of making pictures, Erwitt has been recognized for his versatility. While famous for personal photographs of people and dogs and widely reproduced commercial imagery, Erwitt is also respected for his work as a photojournalist. Among the iconic moments he has captured with his camera are the Khrushchev-Nixon “Kitchen Debate” in 1959, and Jacqueline Kennedy, veiled and in distress at the funeral of her husband in 1963; his photograph of segregated water is a poignant reminder of the injustices of the Jim Crow South. Erwitt is also celebrated for portraits, including such distinguished subjects as Grace Kelly, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, and Che Guevara.

“Erwitt is noted for his offbeat sense of humor, combining gentle whimsy with ironic observation of everyday life. Often these works involve visual puns that make the viewer look twice, but they are always organized with great elegance and precision,” said ICP Chief Curator Brian Wallis, who organized the exhibition.

Internationally renowned for his photographs, Erwitt is also a recognized filmmaker. His documentaries include Beauty Knows No Pain, Red, White and Blue Grass, and The Glassmakers of Herat. He has also produced seventeen comedies and satires for HBO. To date, he has authored more than twenty photography books, including Eastern Europe (1965), Photographs and Anti-Photographs (1972), Son of Bitch (1974), Personal Exposures (1988), Between the Sexes ( 1994), Elliott Erwitt’s Handbook (2002), and Elliott Erwitt: Personal Best (2009).

Website : International Center of Photography

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EXHIBITION OF PRINTS BY PIERRE ALECHINSKY AT THE TEL AVIV MUSEUM OF ART

Le Test du Titre (The Test of the Title), 1966. An album of six etchings, 35x50; 38.3x48.2. Copy 12/54. Publisher: Éditions Georges Visat, Paris. Gift of Fonds de Solidarité avec Israel , Paris (June 1967).



Tel Aviv Museum of Art presents Pierre Alechinsky's 'The test of the Title'. Pierre Alechinsky (b. 1927, Brussels), an interdisciplinary artist who has worked in painting, drawing, print, writing, and filmmaking, studied book illustration and typography at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et des Arts Décoratifs in Brussels (1944-46). In 1949 he joined the CoBrA ( COpenhagen , BRussels , Amsterdam ) group (1948-1951) which formed a year earlier in Paris as an alternative to the declining Surrealistic tendency in contemporary painting. The group members believed that the pursuit of pure psychic automatism in the spirit of Surrealism swept its followers to over-concentration on matter, against which the CoBrA artists introduced a commitment to spontaneity and experimentation. This reformist inclination was conveyed by the title of the movement's manifesto: "La cause était entendue" (The Case was Settled), an ironic reference to the title of the manifesto published by the adherents of Surrealism in 1947, "La cause est entendue" (The Case is Settled). The allusion game in the title indicates the CoBrA artists' affinity to the written word.

The movement's guiding line—encouraging spontaneity through interaction with the controlled and planned—remained uncontested by Alechinsky throughout his life, spawning diverse modes of creation. His interest in Japanese calligraphy (having specialized in the field in Japan in 1955), as well as his long experimental work in print (dating back to the 1950s, when he studied etching with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17, Paris), seem to have stemmed from the challenge of building spontaneity into cohesive, orderly structures. Concurrently, since 1965, writing became anchored as a parallel, complementary creative channel in Alechinsky's oeuvre, as he himself attested: "My right, writing hand, returns what the pleasure of painting with my good, left hand does not say."

Textuality is conspicuously present in Alechinsky's visual work which is always attentive to aspects of language, script, and even storytelling. The six etchings in the series, exhibited in the order set by the artist himself, unfold a sequence which tempts one to define it as a narrative (albeit obscure); a tale in which his familiar images and creatures operate and are being operated. Departing from their frames, they violate an existing order, charging-carried somewhere by an unknown force, settling as objects on display only to disappear again, dispersed in all directions, dissolving. The space is significant in its capacity as the realm of action and the activity sphere of an artist who frequently addresses the means of mediation between the work and the world outside it: the painterly means and materials, such as the delimiting frames, as well as the extra-painterly means, literary ones included, such as the title which he regarded as "an addition, a knot in a psychological handkerchief to make one remember to think of [something]."

In his engagement with the work's frames-boundaries, Alechinsky presents a borderland.

Since 1965 his pieces combine painting and work on paper in a structured layout: a central image (to which the work's title usually alludes), surrounded by what he calls "footnotes." When the key image is painted with acrylic, the "footnotes" are rendered in Indian ink; when the key image is a drawing, the "notes" are painted with acrylic. These "notes" ostensibly protect the work, providing it with a frame, since "such a solitary image, abandoned and therefore vulnerable, demands protection from time to time, or a frame of access […] A picture remains solitary in the struggle against indifference. One must introduce a suitable system of references to attract attention." This principle seems to be present also in the featured series, where the sphere of action is inserted in a soft, printed frame floating within the larger, uniformly contoured frame, the one imprinted on the paper by the printing plate. The borderland is created in-between these two frames. In their juxtaposition with the frames imprinted by the medium, the hovering frames outlined by the artist seem to separate the occurrences from their hold on the paper, inundating them, while the detachment and the invisible context raise quandaries, call for interpretations.

The title of the series presented here, Le Test du Titre (The Test of the Title), likewise introduces questions; for how is the title of a painted image gauged? The appearance of the word "title" in the title of the work is not unusual in Alechinsky's oeuvre. Such was the case in his first book, Titres et pains perdus (Lost Titles and Loaves) from 1965, in the book Le Test du Titre (The Test of the Title) for which the featured series was created, as well as in the 1983 book Le Bureau du titre (The Title Bureau) in which he gathered titles detached from their images "so they might be appreciated in their own right." Alechinsky regards titling as a practice in which painters are even more versed than writers, since every unidentified painting, like a "ventriloquist's dummy" "yields to its title," while imploring the painter: "focus you thought." Hence, where do we locate the yet-obscure title of the six etchings presented here?

On the eve of the series' festive exposition at the Parisian Galerie La Hune, Alechinsky approached 61 artists, literary figures and cinematographers, known as "crack-shot titlers" or "sharpshooters," as he put it, asking them: "Please give first names, quotations, descriptive phrases, retentions, ironies, tirades, tributes, poems and slaps to dumb images." He was surprised to find considerable similarities between some of the proposals although they were conceived by each respondent individually. Unsurprisingly, however, Alechinsky did not append the list of proposals to the series album, thereby leaving the question of title pending, perhaps in order for The Test of the Title to stimulate the viewer to contemplate—for instance, the fact that "images await their captions. Backs to the wall."

Website : Tel Aviv Museum of Art


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MKG IN HAMBURG REAPPRAISES ART NOUVEAU WITH EXHIBITION OF MORE THEN 180 POSTERS

On the occasion of the reappraisal of one of the most comprehensive collections of commercial art in the world, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg will show a selection of 180 works of the decades when picture production exploded – around 1900. The exhibition will be on view on May 20th and will run until August 28th 2011.

From the late 19th Century the MKG accumulated a unique collection comprising more than 15000 sheets, among them posters, book covers, calendars sheets, postcards and letterheads. Among the 200 designers from Europe and the US represented, are leading artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Alfred Mucha, Henry van de Velde, and Peter Behrens. The artists used print especially to deal with contemporary topics, like sports, fashion, politics, engineering and the everyday and laid the foundations for corporate design, graphic design and an aesthetics of advertising – all of which are commonplace today.

The exhibition will present the results of a research project financed by die ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius, highlighting the key-developments of Historicism, Art Nouveau, the Vienna Secession, Expressionism and Art Déco in Europe, as well as New Advertising in the USA. Over the course of three years more than 10000 graphic works, ca. 2000 posters, and examples of book illustrations from the collection “Commercial Art in Art Nouveau” have been compiled in an inventory. The opulent book accompanying the project and the exhibition embellished with numerous plates offers an overview over the international development, introductions to the most important aspects of commercial art, its styles as well as biographies of nearly 200 important graphic artists.

Nowadays graphic design is playing such an important role in everyday life that it has become unthinkable without images. Adverts, magazines, internet, a lot of television, even street signs and other necessities – all of them have gone through the hands of graphic designers. This has not always been the case. Only 150 years ago the printed image was rare in everyday life. When around 1890 colour-print began to conquer all aspects of everyday life there were also critical voices to be heard. In the US for example people warned against a “Chromo Civilization”, which threatened to lead to general superficiality.

The exhibition and the opulent catalogue to go with it deal with the picture explosion around 1890 and the great advancement in quality to be discerned in the layout of books and magazines, commercial art and job printing post 1895. By 1910 this development had largely been completed. Advertising in its various guises, from the small brochure to the great poster, multiple forms of business graphics, which eventually lead to corporate identity, or the illustrated book with its contemporary layout had found their new forward-looking form. For the first time this large exhibition will take a comprehensive look at the whole of the developments that lay the foundations for today’s diversity in graphic design.

Important artists contributed to these developments. William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement represent the beginning. Out of rejection of industrialisation and the estrangement of the worker from the working process, Morris sought a return to working methods of medieval workshops, where design and execution lay in the same hands. In his workshop Morris produced wallpaper and fabric and from 1890 onwards especially precious books, published by his Kelmscott Press. He instituted the so-called „private press movement“: private publishers and printers offered a valuable and exemplary alternative to the industrially produced book.

When commercial art came into fashion, it offered impulses of similar importance. The Parisian Jules Chéret had started it off and after 1890 commercial art had become an interesting art genre in its own right. Young artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or Pierre Bonnard wanted to be part of the “Poster Boom”, or “Affichomanie”, as it was termed in France, and thus sought to distinguish themselves through spectacular poster designs.

In the mid 1890s Aubrey Beardsley and Alphonse Mucha formed an idea of Art Nouveau that is still valid today: youths of ideal beauty in harmonious surroundings, stylised to an ornamental degree, promising a carefree future. The exquisite stylisation of the everyday brought with it a certain degree of removal from reality, which formed a great contrast to the oftentimes tangible functionality of the designs: many of them were realised for book covers, posters or invitation cards. The desires to which glossy adverts appeal today clearly were no different then and were equally exploited.

Around 1900 the architects and designers Henry van de Velde and Peter Behrens introduced to commercial art a professional design, reaching beyond the individual image. It was van de Velde, who in 1898 designed the first corporate identity for the food maker Tropon. A few years later, Peter Behrens followed in his steps, when he designed a much more encompassing corporate identity for AEG. Around 1905 professional designers took the lead, when it came to the layout of books, posters and other areas of graphic design. Ludwig Hohlwein, Lucian Bernhard, Walter Tiemann and Emil Rudolf Weiß would be representatives of Germany, which had become a leading capacity in this category. Edward Johnston worked in England, and Leonetto Cappiello in France.

These names no longer have any meaning to the interested layman. As professional graphic designers, typographers and commercial artists, they fell through the cracks of art history. While the arts had formed a unity in the 1890s, and around 1900 the notion of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ was considered an ideal of modern art, from 1905 onwards applied arts and free graphics gradually followed their own paths. At a first glance the crude wood cuts for posters and brochures by artists of Die Brücke stood apart from the elegant and colourful professionally designed advertising prints. Since 1905 first advertising agencies opened in the US and in Germany; they offered their services independently of printing or publishing houses and employed young graphic designers as well. By 1910 already, photo design, as it is still widely practised today was developed. The individual and recognisable touch of the graphic designer would soon be the exception.

The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg holds a unique collection of commercial art comprising over 15,000 works, including posters, illustrated books and periodicals, calendar pages, post cards, and letterheads from the decades around 1900. Justus Brinckmann, the museum’s founder acquired most of them. More than 12,000 small-size graphic works in the collection are by renowned designers.

Three years ago the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius committed to supporting a project to catalogue and research the largest collection of the MKG for the first time: commercial art of the decades around 1900. Since then more than 10,000 graphic works as well as nearly 2,000 posters and examples of book design have been catalogued. Thanks to the generous sponsorship by the ZEIT-Stiftung approximately ten percent will be published in an extensive de luxe edition.

Artists: Aubrey Beardsley, Peter Behrens, Lucian Bernhard, Pierre Bonnard, Will Bradley, Jules Chéret, Otto Eckmann, Lyonel Feininger, Eugène Grasset, Olaf Gulbransson, Thomas Theodor Heine, Ludwig Hohlwein, Oskar Kokoschka, George Lepape, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, William Morris, Kolo Moser, Alphonse Mucha, Emil Orlik, Edward Penfield, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Luwig Sütterlin, Jan Thorn Prikker, Jan Toorop, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Felix Vallotton, Henry van de Velde, Heinrich Vogeler and others.


Website : Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

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EXHIBITION AT MODERNA MUSEET INCLUDES EVERY FACET OF KLARA LIDEN'S OEUVRE

Klara Lidén, Unheimlich Manöver, 2007© Klara Lidén. Photo: Albin Dahlström / Moderna Museet. Installation view from Moderna Museet.


Moderna Museet is the first museum in the world to present a complete exhibition of Klara Lidén. Her major exhibitions to date have been outside Sweden, and have attracted astonishing acclaim from critics and the public, but until now she has been relatively unknown in Sweden. This exhibition is organised jointly with the Serpentine Gallery in London and includes every facet of her oeuvre from 2003 to the present day: videos, stills, installations and a series of painted wall sculptures.

The overall concept is a ghostly labyrinth with an unexpected secret chamber, designed especially by Lidén for Moderna Museet. The entrance to the exhibition has also been moved, to stress the many ways in which a building can be used.

Architecture and urban planning are central to Klara Lidén’s oeuvre. She originally studied architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 2000-2003, but then went to Berlin for a year. There she switched to art and enrolled at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, where she studied between 2004 and 2007. In her work, but also in her activism in urban spaces, Klara Lidén reminds us of the complex interplay between the individual and the collective. She challenges our most fundamental perceptions of private and public spaces, and explains:

“I am partly the poor architect dealing with the problem of existing structures in a city, and partly the amateur dancer or performance artist who wants to convey ideas about rhythm and construction, or about reclaiming our built environment.”

In her video work Paralyzed from 2003, Klara Lidén ignores the etiquette of the public domain and performs an anarchic, wild dance on a commuter train. Paralyzed is also about collectively being alone, since she does not make direct contact with any of her fellow-commuters. In Klara Lidén’s installations, visitors often have to literally negotiate her constructions, which insist on being acknowledged. Now, she is going the full monty and “disturbing” the habitual museum experience with her labyrinthine enactment.

“Every day, all over the world, people travel by underground or bus, wait at crossings, stand in queues or drive on the correct side of the road. It is astounding that this communality actually works. Klara Lidén’s art reminds us, however, of how fragile this community is. Sometimes it is even forced upon us. She wants me to feel uncomfortable about my deceptive longing for perpetual security,” says the curator, John Peter Nilsson.

In the exhibition catalogue, John Kelsey poignantly describes Lidén’s art as “architectonic hooliganism”. One night, for instance, she removed all advertising posters in central Stockholm and replaced them with a transparent sticker bearing the title of this action: U TRY MME, (2002). This can be read as the Swedish word “utrymme”, which means “space”, but also as the English phrase “You try me” – a comment on who has the right to our public sphere.

This major solo exhibition at Moderna Museet features several videos, slide projections and large-scale installations. It also includes the apartment installations Unheimlich Manöver, which was shown at Moderna Museet in 2007.

Website : Moderna Museet

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MORELLET, LE LUMINEUX MINIMALISTE

Beaubourg reformule les installations de l'artiste français qui furent conçues pour d'autres temps et d'autres lieux. Un pur bonheur !

Après Soulages, le Centre Pompidou remet le couvert avec le pétulant François Morellet et ses « réinstallations » au dernier étage. Beaubourg ne consacre pas de cycle aux « anciens » de l'art contemporain mais sait les accueillir au dernier étage, quand l'oeuvre le justifie !

Le bonhomme Morellet a 85 printemps bien sonnés, un discours malicieux, un enthousiasme vierge ! Son itinéraire, au chapitre du poétique, n'a pas flanché en dépit de 455 expos dans l'Hexagone et ailleurs ! Artiste rigoureux et inventif, conceptuel à la base, il a su séduire son public. Il s'agit cette fois de « réinstallations », de reprises d'installations éphémères conçues de 1963 à aujourd'hui dans des lieux précis comme le couvent de la Tourette de Le Corbusier (monts du Beaujolais), l'abbaye de Tournus ou les Alpes bavaroises auxquelles il dédia cette Avalanche de néons, de rais de lumière suspendus, parfaitement saisissants, transposant sans la mimer la dynamique du phénomène naturel. Ephémères mais reproductibles, ces installations furent réalisées dans les circonstances les plus variables, à l'intérieur ou à l'extérieur, toujours à peu de frais. Jouer avec la dynamique pure et simple des carrés, des cercles, des demi-cercles, des ellipses et autres figures géométriques sur la seule base de tubes de néon, abstraire cette dynamique d'un contenu concret et la démultiplier en procédures infinies, fut l'unique loi de Morellet. Cette belle économie de moyens et de vocabulaire à l'épreuve de lieux parfois fameux est confrontée, ici, à l'espace du centre culturel. On pouvait craindre que la magie soit moindre. Le minimalisme, au contraire irradie grâce à ce resserrement.

Sans brosses ni pinceaux, Morellet façonne l'espace depuis longtemps, définissant une sorte de spectacle sobre et pur au carrefour de différents langages, peinture, sculpture, architecture. Il agence des tubes simples de néon qui ont tout à la fois la précision du diamant et le rayonnement flou du soleil sans compter leur valeur graphique sans pareil pour sculpter l'espace. Les mêle parfois à de solides poutres de bois brut.

Peintre au départ, Morellet a longtemps cogité sur les lois élémentaires de la géométrie, des grilles, des systèmes, des séries et sur l'avantage de substituer au romantisme du contenu ou du message, l'intangible de la mathématique. Les arts premiers, la géométrie mauresque de l'Alhambra de Grenade, Mondrian, Max Bill et bien évidemment Dan Flavin sans oublier un certain land art sont ses sources, les territoires où il prend librement son envol. A la sécheresse conceptuelle, il oppose l'humour, une magie funambule qui se joue de la croissance exponentielle des schémas mathématiques. Le résultat tient du ballet visuel et de la gymnopédie plastique. Les titres sont à l'avenant comme en témoigne cette Répartition aléatoire de 40.000 carrés suivant les chiffres pairs et impairs d'un annuaire de téléphone, une des plus belles des vingt-sept installations de l'exposition.

Website : Centre Pompidou

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MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS IN BILBAO CELEBRATES ROBERTO MATTA'S CENTENNIAL WITH EXHIBITION

The year 2011 marks the centenary of the birth of Matta, one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century art because of his importance as a member of the Surrealist group and his enormous influence on the development of American Abstract Expressionism, and above all because he was an absolute artist, a visionary and a precursor of the relationships of art, science and nature and the fundamental role of art in the complete development of the human being.

He was born in Santiago (Chile) on 11 November 1911, to a well-to-do family of Basque origin. He received his primary education from the Jesuits at the Sacred Hearts College in Santiago.

Later, at university, he studied in the School of Architecture. When he finished he travelled to Europe, where he met Le Corbusier and worked in his studio for several years.

Between 1935 and 1937 he travelled all over Europe, living for a time in Madrid. Through his family he made contact with the world of art and culture there, and he always remembered the enormous impact that Federico García Lorca made on him.

He worked on the design of the Spanish Republican Pavilion in the Exposition Internationale in Paris in 1937, where he met artists such as Picasso (who was painting Guernica), Miró, Magritte and Calder.

Through Dalí, and armed with a recommendation that he had been given by García Lorca, he met André Breton, who invited him to join the Surrealist movement in 1937. He published in the magazine Minotaure and took part in the famous Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in 1938. During this period he met leading contemporary artists, among whom a privileged place was occupied by Marcel Duchamp, who became a decisive influence on his work and with whom he formed a friendship that lasted over the years.

In 1939 he moved to New York, where his works featuring biomorphic forms, his dazzling personality and the innovative ideas and techniques of his style made him the centre of attention for the painters of the New York School, including Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, William Baziotes and Arshile Gorky, among others. His influence on the development of American Abstract Expressionism and his role as a bridge between European ideas about art and the new American art were decisive.

In 1948, after the breakdown of his relations with the Surrealists, he went back to Europe and settled in Rome. From then on, until his death, he travelled a great deal, living in Tarquinia (north-west of Rome), Paris and London.

In 1957 the MoMA in New York organised a retrospective of his work, which was also shown in Minneapolis and Boston. He presented many exhibitions throughout his life, including one held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1985, and his work is represented in the collections of the most prestigious museums in the world.

He always remained faithful to the social commitment of the engagé artist and was involved in the social movements of his time. He made several journeys to Cuba and in 1970 he visited various Arab countries and met artists and intellectuals there. He also painted for the Angola liberation movement. In 1972, at the invitation of President Allende, he returned to Chile, where he worked on collective murals and made many works in which he went beyond the description of social realities and succeeded in revealing “emotional structures”.

Matta continued working intensely until the end of his life, leaving a legacy of paintings, drawings, architecture and poetry that escape customary categories: They seek to involve the viewer completely in a personal world made up of space and time, communication, cosmic revolution and the life of human beings on earth, not forgetting the poetic nature and transformation of the unconscious and desire in his earliest works.

He died at his home in Tarquinia in November 2002.


Website : Bilbao Fine Arts Museum

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MAJOR SOLO EXHIBITION OF SWISS ARTIST MAI-THU PERRET AT AARGAUER KUNSTHAUS

Mai-Thu Perret

The Adding Machine


The Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau presents a major solo exhibition of Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret, on view from 14 May through 31 July 2011. The exhibition, which incorporates sculpture, installation, painting, video and performance as well as text-based work, is the most comprehensive presentation to date of this internationally renowned artist.

In recent years Mai-Thu Perret (b. 1976) has drawn considerable attention in Europe and the U.S. for her ambitious, multidisciplinary artistic work, which comprises sculpture, installation, painting, video, performance, and text-based pieces with a wide underlying frame of cultural and art historical references. The Geneva-based artist is particularly interested in 20th century avant-garde movements and Utopian concepts of life.

The solo exhibition at the Aargauer Kunsthaus titled The Adding Machine highlights the multifaceted approach of Mai-Thu Perret's artistic practice, presenting numerous works that were created specifically for this show, as well as some older works. The artist's wish that the individual works in the exhibition be perceived as connected rather than isolated is already indicated in the exhibition title, The Adding Machine, a reference to the "cut-up" technique of American writer William S. Burroughs.

Burroughs used to cut up the pages of his manuscripts and subsequently rearrange them at will according to the random principle. The result is an associative narrative structure similar to the one underlying Mai-Thu Perret's exhibition: their juxtaposition opens up new cross-references and meanings between the individual works.

Website : Aargauer Kunsthaus

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EBLOUISSANT KAPOOR

L'artiste britannique est l'invité de Monumenta 2011. Il occupe tout l'espace avec une oeuvre unique et époustouflante. On peut la découvrir de l'intérieur et de l'extérieur, comme Jonas explorant les entrailles de la baleine.

Ma tête s'est vidée dans mon corps », lâche une étudiante en sortant du Leviathan d'Anish Kapoor. Sa copine confirme : « J'ai cru que j'allais m'évanouir… » Toutes deux font partie d'un groupe scolaire, l'un des tout premiers à visiter l'installation monumentale de l'artiste au Grand Palais. Mardi soir, plus de 8.000 personnes s'y pressaient pour l'inauguration de la 4e Monumenta. Après Kiefer en 2007, Serra (2008) et Boltanski (2010), c'est l'artiste britannique d'origine indienne qui se mesure à l'architecture démesurée du Grand Palais.

Lors d'une de ses premières visites sur les lieux, il aurait déclaré qu'il voulait que le visiteur découvrant son œuvre s'exclame : Waouaw ! Il a fait mieux que cela. Il laisse le visiteur bouche bée, non pas devant l'œuvre mais au cœur de celle-ci.

Dès mercredi matin, la foule était au rendez-vous. A l'entrée, l'excitation est palpable. Devant nous, une porte tournante ne laisse rien voir de l'intérieur. Dès que l'on pénètre dans le sas, on perçoit une couleur rougeâtre à travers les vitres. Puis, d'un seul coup, on plonge dans le ventre de la bête.

Ici, pas question d'observer l'œuvre à distance : elle vous engloutit mais sans jamais se laisser approcher. La première partie de Leviathan est une plongée dans le rouge. Une nef gigantesque, comme une cathédrale. Mais avec en point de mire trois percées vers d'indéfinissables sphères aussi attirantes qu'effrayantes.

Autour de nous, certains évoquent l'hydre à trois têtes, d'autres parlent de caverne, de cocon, de vaisseau spatial ou encore d'un gigantesque et mystérieux organisme vivant, qu'évoque le rouge sang des parois, un monstre mystérieux, une plongée dans les enfers… Pourtant, tout ici est lisse, souple, protecteur comme un ventre originel où nous serions de retour. Constituée d'immenses bandes de PVC, la structure est gonflée en permanence par un système invisible mais générant une pression inhabituelle.

Du coup, un léger vertige saisit nombre de visiteurs. Soudain, la lumière change, le rouge s'éclaire magnifiquement, les structures extérieures du Grand Palais apparaissant en ombres chinoises. Aucun effet technique ici : la simple apparition du soleil, et son cheminement au fil du jour, modifie constamment l'ambiance du lieu.

Au sortir de cet antre, une deuxième porte nous fait découvrir l'aspect extérieur de la bête. Cette fois, la nef du Grand Palais est bien visible mais un monstrueux appendice semble s'y être développé en toute impunité. Jamais le lieu n'avait été à ce point transformé, dévoré, phagocyté par une œuvre. Une seule et unique œuvre qui fascine et hypnotise par son incroyable présence.


Jusqu'au 23 juin (tous les jours sauf le mardi) dans la Nef du Grand Palais, avenue Winston Churchill, 750008 Paris.

Website : Monumenta

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STAATSGALERIE STUTTGART BRINGS TOGETHER WORKS BY KOLLWITZ, BECKMANN, DIX AND GROSZ

The exhibition “Kollwitz – Beckmann – Dix – Grosz. Wartime” brings together works from within the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart’s collection – immediate artistic reactions to the two devastating world wars and society in the first half of the twentieth century.

Series and portfolios by these artists rarely shown in their entirety are included, as are self-portraits and other impressive individual works. The drawings and prints are complemented by a small number of paintings and sculptures.

For the first time in more than forty years, the Staatsgalerie is presenting its complete internationally noteworthy Käthe Kollwitz holdings, comprising some one hundred drawings and prints. Her oeuvre offers above all investigations – as forceful as they are distressing – of the themes of “war”, “death” and “family”.

The artist’s son and grandson were killed in action in the two world wars, losses that caused her painful uncertainty about her own existence. The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart presents its rich holdings of Käthe Kollwitz drawings and prints, among them her four series “A Weavers’ Rebellion”, “Peasants’ War”, “War” and “Death”.

They are enhanced by works of such Kollwitz contemporaries as Max Beckmann, Ludwig Meidner, Otto Dix and George Grosz to form a powerful image of an epoch.

In the etching series “The War”, published in Berlin in 1924, Otto Dix (1891–1969) visualizes the events and consequences of the battles in France and Belgium with relentless harshness.

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) is represented with works executed during and after World War I, for example the recently purchased drawing “Nurse and Male Figure Tending to Sick Patient” of 1915.

George Grosz (1893–1959) documents in this show primarily the period between the world wars. Characterized by poverty, hunger, hardship and insurgency, it was an era of a still very “warlike” nature, as seen in Grosz’s 1922 series “The Robbers: Nine Lithographs on sentences from Schiller’s Robbers”.

Works by Ernst Barlach (1870–1938) and Ludwig Meidner (1884–1966) are also on view, as are two further series presenting war in all its absurdity and destructive frenzy: “The Damned” by Otto Herrmann (1899–1995) of Stuttgart, executed in the years 1947–50 after Theodor Plievier’s novel “Stalingrad”, and “DRESDEN 1945” by Wilhelm Rudolph (1889–1982).

Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) is represented in the exhibition with his work “Heroic Symbols” of 1969, acquired by the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in 2010. In it he examined the impact of fascism on post-1945 art and his personal stance on that phase of German history.

Art in any shape or form can be beautiful, cheering, soothing – or simply exist without any ulterior motive. Just as important a function of art, however, is to stir people up, call their attention to adverse circumstances, remind them of human nature’s pitfalls – and thus to intervene in society’s processes.

Website : Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

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COMPREHENSIVE EXHIBITION ON PIONEER OF MODERN GERMAN ART, MAX LIEBERMAN, IN BONN

Max Liebermann - Selbstbildnis, 1910
Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle
© bpk ׀ Hamburger Kunsthalle ׀
Elke Walford

In cooperation with the Hamburg Kunsthalle, the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany is showing a comprehensive retrospective on Max Liebermann (1847–1935).

Max Liebermann plays an outstanding role in the history of art and culture in Germany. Not only his artistic oeuvre but also his cultural and political activities make him one of the leading pioneers of modern German painting. Max Liebermann‟s unique position between the end of 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century continues to have an impact on current developments in painting.

A selection of over 100 works which represent the artist‟s various phases of creative development is to add new aspects to the assessment of Liebermann‟s work. Over the past two decades, the focus was primarily on specific topics within his work (outdoor painting, Realism, Impressionism, garden pictures). However, in this exhibition Liebermann is presented as a consistent champion of artistic approaches in the late 19th and early 20th century. This interpretation not only challenges the artist‟s traditional classification as an “Impressionist” but also the concept of Realism itself.

Liebermann‟s unconventional treatment of topics and stylistic development is portrayed in 14 chronologically arranged sections which are made up of paintings and works on paper. The array of exhibits reaches from early outdoor paintings and the tranquil works from the 1870s and 1880s, to scenes depicting modern leisure activities around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, and also to commissioned portraits and self-portraits from the time of the Weimar Republic. The exhibition ends with Max Liebermann‟s brilliant late work which includes the garden pictures he painted in over 200 variations between 1910 and 1933.
 
As a long time president of the Berlin Secession and subsequently of the Prussian Academy of Arts, Liebermann was one of the most influential promoters of Modernism in Berlin during the time of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. Influenced by his appreciation of the Old Dutch Masters and the School of Barbizon and his penchant for the French Impressionists whose works he also collected, Liebermann created a stylistically and thematically varied oeuvre. 

Over 50 public and private lenders from Germany and abroad are participating in this exhibition .

Website : Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany

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MARC CHAGALL - LE MAÎTRE DU RÊVE

Éclats de lumière sous la charpente du Malmundarium. Un jaune solaire. Des flammes coquelicot. Un bleu d'azur... L'exposition Marc Chagall, le Maître du Rêve rassemble une cinquantaine d'estampes originales éditées par Aimé Maeght et le maître imprimeur parisien Fernand Mourlot. "Il s'agit d'une collection privée française jamais montrée au public jusqu'ici. Le parcours présente des lithographies originales, des photographies et des lettres de l'artiste. Il développe les différentes thématiques de Chagall, le coq, l'envol, la tour Eiffel, l'amour, la crucifixion, etc.", précise le commissaire de l'exposition inaugurale du Malmundarium, Jean-Christophe Hubert.

Les panneaux développent tant les particularismes que l'indépendance de Chagall, ce baladin du monde oriental né le 7 juillet 1887 à Liozno dans la banlieue de Vitebsk, en Biélorussie, qui appartenait alors à la Russie tsariste. En 1910, il part étudier à Paris auprès de Léon Bakst grâce à une bourse, et expose ses travaux pour la première fois en 1914. Il est témoin de mouvements picturaux tels que le fauvisme finissant et le cubisme naissant. Tout en adoptant Paris comme sa deuxième ville natale, il n'oublie pas ses origines russes : même lorsqu'il peint les ponts de la Seine ou la tour Eiffel, on peut reconnaître des éléments de décor inspirés de ses souvenirs d'enfance qui ne le quitteront jamais.

"On le rapproche du surréalisme puisque son travail laisse une large part à l'imagination et aux rêves, reprend Jean-Christophe Hubert qui présente en même temps une exposition consacrée au surréalisme au château de Waroux (ci-contre). En fait, son inspiration est purement hassidique. Dans cette tradition juive, tout le monde participe au sacré, même les animaux, les monstres, les êtres hybrides. On retrouve aussi cette notion de fête rêvée permanente, l'importance portée à la musique et aux musiciens dans l'oeuvre de Chagall."

Solidement balisé, le parcours montre que cette oeuvre de l'éternelle et universelle humanité est pleine de références au pays de son enfance, la Biélorussie juive et ce courant mystique venu d'Europe centrale selon lequel l'omniprésence du Dieu caché se révèle dans les merveilles du monde. Le poisson vole. La vache flotte dans l'air, mais le coq rappelle aussi le triple reniement de l'apôtre Pierre...

Bouquet noir et bleu, Symphonie du jardin d'Eden, Les amoureux au-dessus de la ville qui témoigne de son amour pour sa jeune épouse Vava, Tour Eiffel verte, Portrait et enfant rouge, c'est un Marc Chagall au sommet de son art qui est montré ici, dans ce vocable visuel et sentimental bien connu. Les personnages se mettent à marcher, dansent, s'attirent, se repoussent, tournoient au-dessus de la terre, lancés sur une planète nouvelle.

Chagall, plus que tout autre, offre ces déploiements de l'image rendue à la liberté où les songes des années 1950-1960 dominent un parcours élégiaque. Soudain, un couperet tombe au milieu du don d'enfance : une Crucifixion hantée de 1937 vient rappeler les préoccupations humanistes de Chagall, la souffrance irréversible de l'homme au-dessus de toutes les religions : le peintre évoque la tragédie universelle, que ce soit la guerre d'Espagne, la montée du nazisme, ou la lutte du Front Populaire.

"Le Temps est une rivière sans rives", a-t-il écrit...

Website : Malmundarium

 

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Bron/Source : Mad.Le Soir

HIRSHHORN MUSEUM PRESENTS 'DIRECTIONS : GRAZIA TODERI' , ITALIAN VIDEO ARTIST'S U.S. MUSEUM

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum presents the recent work of Grazia Toderi (Italian, b. Padua, 1963) for the next installation of the museum’s “Directions” series that highlights artists from around the globe working in a diverse array of media. On view April 21–Sept. 5, “Directions: Grazia Toderi” features two large-scale video projections, “Orbite Rosse” (2009) and “Rossa Babele” (2007) and is organized by associate curator, Kelly Gordon.

Toderi traces her fascination with visualizing the infinite to a formative moment in her childhood—watching the simulcast of the first moonwalk. This historic event of “collective unity” parallels the sensibility the artist seeks to affect with the imagery she chooses for her works, which are most often realized as drawings, videos projections and installations. The artist’s process begins with a series of drawing that map the dynamic possibilities for each principal image. For the video works presented in this “Directions” project, the artist superimposed images from photography and film footage and constructed each scenario digitally, with painterly finesse.

For “Orbite Rosse,” Toderi deploys a shade of red that is familiar to urban dwellers as the peculiar coloration that derives from city lights mingling with vapors in the atmosphere. She has mentioned she was inspired by the glimmering, horizon-altering vantage point and vista provided when one flies into a city at night for this piece as well as others. Suspense is evoked by the imposition of the projection’s dual ovals that focus attention, as if some form of surveillance is underway. Across this twinkling expanse, “events” unfold, accompanied by curious, low-level sounds. Open book-like walls provide the projection surface for “Rosso Babele.” Two glistening pyramids, one upright and one inverted, emerge and float like mystical beacons in an endless sea of light. The title refers to the Tower of Babel story in which mankind, empowered by a common means of communication, attempts to create a structure to link heaven and earth. The effort is upended when divine intervention steps in with an onslaught of various dialects and utter chaos in response to the hubris of this endeavor. In Toderi’s update, the centered structures could also be read as hubs for the beams associated with the common language of today—digital communication. Toderi’s works engage digital technologies, but the artist petitions the viewer to take a break from the perpetual urgency of digitally enabled connectivity and pause, to savor our shared, cosmic connections.

Toderi, who lives and works in Milan and Turin, attended the Fine Arts Academy in Bologna. Since 1994, her work has been featured in gallery and museum exhibitions throughout the world, including biennales in Gwangju, Istanbul and Sydney. Her work has been featured at the Venice Biennale in 1993, 1999 and 2009. In 1999 the artist was awarded the Golden Lion for her contribution to the Italian Pavilion.

Website : Hirshhorn Museum

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Bron/Source : Artdaily

THE ART OF THE AUTOMOBILE : MASTERPIECES OF RALPH LAUREN COLLECTION ON VIEW IN PARIS

Among the major car collections in the world, there is one that stands out more than any other as synonymous with excellence: that of iconic American fashion designer Ralph Lauren.
A selection of the most prestigious sports cars from the 1930s to present day is on view for the first time in Europe at Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Seventeen outstanding cars, chosen by curator Rodolphe Rapetti, and put on display by Jean-Michel Wilmotte, outline the main phases of European automobile history. With this collection, Ralph Lauren shows that the automobile is a major art form created by the industry’s biggest names: Bugatti, Alfa Romeo, Bentley, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, Porsche and of course, Ferrari, the high point of this unique collection.

In 1970, Les Arts Décoratifs presented a selection of competition cars, “Bolides Design.” To compile the exhibition, a special jury was assembled, featuring designers Joe Colombo, Roger Tallon and Pio Manzu, and the artists Jean-Paul Riopelle, Jean Tinguely and Victor Vasarely, as well as Robert Delpire and François Mathey. The jury chose the models with the idea of the car as a design object, a work of art, showing that “art and technique, each at their own level, are the expression of man and his relationship with design.”

The Ralph Lauren collection can be seen from the same perspective. Patiently assembled over several decades by the fashion designer in a quest for speed and performance, it includes some of the most extraordinary jewels in the crown of European automobile history, with beauty as its common denominator.

Within the collection are some of the most elegant and innovative cars in automotive history, from the “Blower” Bentley (1929), the Ferrari 250 GTO (1962), the famous Mercedes 300 SL (1955) and the unforgettable Jaguar “D type,” whose shark fin blazed a triumphant trail at Le Mans in 1955, 1956 and 1957. But the grand tourer, the Bugatti Atlantic (1938) of which only four models were produced, represents the ultimate in luxury while showcasing the evolution of styles and techniques on the road. Each of these exceptional vehicles was designed as a masterpiece blending technological innovation and boldness of style.

For its first presentation in Europe, the Ralph Lauren collection will be put on display by Jean-Michel Wilmotte, who has opted for an intimate visual approach as these vehicles stand out both for their overall design and detail, as well as for bodywork, chassis and engines.

The kinetic and sound of the vehicles will be reproduced by means of several films and recordings. A seminar on automobile design will also be held during the exhibition.

Among the cars on display:

Bentley Blower, 1929

This car was designed by W.O. Bentley, but it was Sir Hilary Birkin, one of the “Bentley Boys” (a group of British gentlemen, all of them drivers and lovers of fast cars) which led Bentley to equip it with a compressor, hence its nickname “Blower.” With massive bodywork embellished with the English flag, the Bentley Blower was created for a single purpose: to win races. This is the car Ian Fleming chose for James Bond 007 in his first novels.

Mercedes-Benz SS K «Comte Trossi», 1930

With its shark profile, the design of this Mercedes-Benz can be attributed to the talent of its owner, Italian aristocrat Count Carlo Felice Trossi, also a racing driver. The SSK is the archetype of the Mercedes of the 1920s, dominated by its colossal bonnet encompassing more than half of its length, with the radiator projecting out front as a windbreaker and exhaust pipes stemming from the sides.

Bugatti 57 SC Atlantic Coupé, 1938

This is one of only four models ever built, and today only two are left. This fantastic car has visible seams and round-headed rivets running the length of its spine and mudguards. Power and speed are suggested by its doors cut out of the roof and ellipsoidal windows taken from the aeronautics register.

Ferrari 375 Plus, 1954

Like all the Ferraris of the time, there were no specific plans for this design. Highly qualified and talented craftsmen created this magnificently rounded shape following the verbal instructions of Ferrari’s official car designer, Pinin Farina. Thus they were able to produce a magnificent spyder which won Le Mans 24 Hours in 1954.

Jaguar XKD, 1955

No car from the ’50s embodies speed better than the XKD Jaguar, with three consecutive victories between 1955 and 1957 at Le Mans 24 Hours, and another at Nürburgring in 1956. It’s this car that enabled the driver Patricia Coundley to become the fastest woman in Europe in 1964. From the aileron at its tip to the elegantly rounded bonnet, its shape harks back to that of a fighter plane.

Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing Coupé, 1955

The Gullwing owes its name to the doors which open upward, like wings. It was the darling of many celebrities including Sophia Loren, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Glen Ford and musician Skitch Henderson. Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa, 1958 This car bears the mark of Sergio Scaglietti, one of Ferrari’s most talented coachbuilders. The Testa Rossa (red head), which takes its name from the red camshaft covers of its V12 engine, bears Scaglietti’s characteristic signature ‒ a long chassis with a torpedo ‒ like body, a headrest emerging from the bodywork and streamlined headlamps.

Website : Musée des Arts Décoratifs

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Bron/Source : Artdaily