WALLRAF-RICHARTZ-MUSEUM CELEBRATES SESQUICENTENNIAL WITH EXHIBITION OF HIDDEN TREASURES

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150 years ago the collection of Ferdinand Franz Wallraf found a home in its first museum building. Since then it has been divided up, diminished, added to, and moved around a number of times. Like many other museums around the world, the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud has a problem: it can only put a relatively small proportion of its treasures on display at any one time. Even today, about three-quarters of the paintings ‘enjoy’ a Sleeping Beauty existence in the depository, a place only accessible to a privileged few.

To mark the museum's sesquicentennial, it would like to show a little more of what they have. And so they had the idea of exhibiting the ‘hidden’ items under the title ‘Panopticon’. This word is derived from the Greek ‘pan’ (all) and ‘optikós’ (seeing), and has mostly been used in English to describe a circular prison where one warder could ‘see all’ the prisoners. But they have nothing so forbidding. They just want you to ‘see all’ the art. It is true, though, that the pictures may feel somewhat imprisoned: the 500 or so items have to be packed pretty closely together...

The many functions of the depository are explained in the panel texts.

Behind Closed Doors
Like most museums, the Wallraf has a depository – a storehouse for paintings and sculptures not on display. There is a separate depository for the graphics collection, housing another 75,000 or so works on paper, in particular prints, drawings and book illustrations. This separation is necessitated by the different climatic conditions required.

The paintings depository is kept under lock and key and protected by a variety of security devices. For behind its closed doors, on pull-out racks and shelves, three quarters of the museum’s stock of paintings are waiting to be exhibited, restored, or loaned. The fittings are purely practical. The racks, which are almost six metres high, are arranged in echelon one behind the other, and can be pulled out as required.

As an important part of the museum, the depository guarantees first and foremost the appropriate storage of works not on display. It provides above all a pool of substitute works which can be used to fill gaps in the gallery when paintings are on loan, being examined or being restored. All the treasures in the depository are in principle ‘equal’. On closer inspection, though, it becomes clear that alongside paintings that hang in the gallery when required are others which never see the light of day. These have found their way into the depository for various reasons. Some are no longer in tune with the taste of the age, others are in poor condition, while some have even turned out to be fakes.

Deceptive
Alongside paintings that can be indubitably attributed to a particular artist, the depository also contains fakes. Some of these arrived at the Wallraf as part of larger collections, and were only unmasked after they got here. Some fakes are easier to spot than others. One first step is the stylistic examination of a painting. This involves comparing the suspect work with similar paintings by the artist in question, and paying attention to brushwork, coloration and other specific features. To back up this ‘style critique’, technical investigations are performed. Do the materials, such as canvas and paints, correspond to those customarily used by the artist? Is there an underdrawing? If so, would we expect one from this artist? Only when questions like these are settled can the genuineness of a picture be accepted or rejected.

One example from our depository is the Wheatsheaf painting once attributed to Vincent van Gogh. In 1949 it was purchased as an allegedly genuine van Gogh. An expert report was commissioned to prove the authenticity. The result of the examination was beyond doubt: the picture is a fake. Now you will quite justifiably ask why the picture is still with the museum. Well, after a long dispute, the dealer refused to accept the expert opinion. And so the painting remained in the depository as an unmasked fake, was given a simple frame, and can at least be used to train the eye to spot differences in quality.

Damaged
The Wallraf has its own art-technology and conservation department. As its responsibilities are very extensive, some paintings have to wait a long time before being restored. In this exhibition you will see restored and non-restored paintings side by side.

Many of the works in the museum’s collection have attained a ripe old age, and the centuries have not left them totally unscathed. Climatic changes, careless handling in the past and natural aging are some of the reasons why paintings suffer damage. When and whether a work is restored depends on its importance for the collection. In ‘prominent’ cases grants may be available. This is why pictures by lesser-known artists may be in the depository: they have to wait longer before being restored.

One example of a painting in a poor state of preservation is ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ by Maerten van Heemskerck, a panel nearly 500 years old. An earlier overpainting was removed after 1941, with the result that the considerable damage to the paint layer, formerly hidden, was revealed very clearly, and very irritating it is too. This damage can be seen in particular along the joins between the three boards comprising the panel on which the picture is painted.

Unframed
Why are some paintings not exhibited? Lack of space is not always the reason. Sometimes it’s because they don’t have a frame. Possibly the frame is no longer intact, having been damaged while in the possession of its previous owner, or during rehanging, or in transit, or else it simply fell apart with old age.

But that means the frame too has to be restored, and this is a time-consuming and expensive business. And since paintings have priority in the conservation workshop, pictures are still confined to the depository simply because they have no appropriate frame.

The Right Frame
It goes without saying that a painting belongs in a frame. In the Middle Ages, the frame was often indeed part of the painted panel. It protects a picture from damage, surrounding and stabilizing it. If we look on the reverse, we will also see that the hook by which the picture is hung on the wall is also attached to the frame.

Frames are chosen to match the pictures. There are rectangular, square and oval frames, with or without a mat or mount. Frames can be plain, gilt, ornamented, large or small, broad or narrow. Often frames are inconspicuous, ‘retiring’ behind the artwork.

But what frame is right for what picture? The Wallraf attaches great importance to the original purpose for which the picture was exhibited. Thus some paintings in the museum, in an endeavour for authenticity, were re-framed using well-preserved frames contemporaneous with the picture. Such frames have since been replaced as inappropriate, but are kept in the depository for purposes of documentation.
 
Website :Wallraf-Richartz-Museum
 
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NEW MUSEUM PRESENTS FIRST NEW YORK SURVEY OF WORKS BY BELGIAN ARTIST CASTEN HÖLLER

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"Museum visit" takes on a whole new meaning at the New Museum in New York where visitors can ride a three-story slide that winds through the building or jump into a salty pool — in the buff — for an out-of-body experience.

The "Experience" exhibit features the creations of German artist Carsten Holler runs through Jan. 15, allowing visitors to explore different sensations through Holler's odd interactive works of art.

The exhibit may be a first for museumgoers and for a museum. Visitors are asked to sign a waiver and are given helmets and elbow pads for the slide.

Slides are Holler's signature installations, and the 102-foot-chute at the New Museum is the only one he has created that cuts through a building's interior.

The slide is "a non-surprising environment, completely predictable," Holler says. "Yet when you put yourself in it, you have to let go, losing control. You have no means of mastering the situation.

"I'm proposing to look at the world, at what other experiences you can have, how you can experience your whole outside environment outside your body," Holler says.

At the preview, squeals and laughter came from visitors shooting out of the slide.

"Viewing the third and second floors while descending past in a slide was perhaps the most innovative way I have ever experienced an art exhibit," said Leslie Grandy, a human resources professional from Diamond Bar, Calif.

Other playful pieces in the exhibit include a giant foam dolphin and hippopotamus; monumental, brightly painted mushroom sculptures; and a slowly turning Mirror Carousel with flashing lights.

Six people can fit in the 2-foot-deep "Psycho Tank." The pool sits off the ground in a tent-like structure, affording privacy. Visitors are handed spa-like bathrobes, slippers and towels before disrobing or donning their own bathing suits.

Roni Weiss, 28, a social media consultant from Harlem, got into the pool with three other people.

"For me, it was more the naked thing than floating," Weiss said. "It was interesting to have conversations with other naked people."

The entire exhibit can be experienced through upside-down goggles. But be forewarned: It can be dizzying.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.

Website : New Museum

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THOMAS RENTMEISTER 'OBJECTS. FOOD. ROOMS' AT KUNSTMUSEUM BONN

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Muda, 2011. Verschiedene Materialien, u. a. Kühlschränke, Penatencreme, Styropor, Wäsche, Zucker, Mehl, Papiertaschentücher, Kerzen. Installationsansicht Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2011 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2011. Foto: Bernd Borchardt, 2011.







Thomas Rentmeister, born in 1964 in Reken (Westphalia), studied under Günther Uecker and Alfonso Hüppi at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. During the 1990s he became prominent with his elegant polyester works which combine sculptural presence with a hint of the organically soft or even flowing. Thus, the reflective sculptures, which appear differently depending on the visitor’s point of view, lose their context-independent autonomy and “melt“ into their environment. His objects and installations, for which from the late 1990s on he has been using materials untypical for sculpture like handkerchiefs, potatoe chips, Penaten or Nutella creme, are yet another reference to everyday life.

These materials do not only complement the plastic quality of his sculptures with their material-dependant dominant smell, they also ironize the neutral objectness that is so important to minimalism by establishing a humorous link between art and life. For Rentmeister, art is much more than just a formal exercise – sculpture (and its materials) is an everyday phenomenon, we just aren’t always aware of the esthetic quality of sugar cubes and handkerchiefs.

The exhibition, which has been realized by the Kunstmuseum, will after its presentation in Bonn be shown at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in Australia and includes works from all creative periods as well as recent works specially made for the show.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog available from DuMont publishers including essays by Christoph Schreier, Stephan Berg, Amy Barrett-Lennard, Leigh Robb and Hannes Böhringer.

Website :Kunstmuseum Bonn
 
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FIRST MAJOR DIANE ARBUS RETROSPECTIVE IN FRANCE AT JEU DE PAUME A PARIS

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Diane Arbus, Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962. © The Estate of Diane Arbus.



Diane Arbus (New York, 1923–1971) revolutionized the art she practiced. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Her gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar, and for uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges our understanding of ourselves.

Arbus found most of her subjects in New York City, a place that she explored as both a known geography and as a foreign land, photographing people she discovered during the 1950s and 1960s. She was committed to photography as a medium that tangles with the facts. Her contemporary anthropology—portraits of couples, children, carnival performers, nudists, middle-class families, transvestites, zealots, eccentrics, and celebrities—stands as an allegory of the human experience, an exploration of the relationship between appearance and identity, illusion and belief, theater and reality.

In this first major retrospective in France, Jeu de Paume presents a selection of two hundred photographs that affords an opportunity to explore the origins, scope, and aspirations of a wholly original force in photography. It includes all of the artist’s iconic photographs as well as many that have never been publicly exhibited. Even the earliest examples of her work demonstrate Arbus’s distinctive sensibility through the expression on a face, someone’s posture, the character of the light, and the personal implications of objects in a room or landscape. These elements, animated by the singular relationship between the photographer and her subject, conspire to implicate the viewer with the force of a personal encounter.

Diane Arbus was born in New York City on March 14, 1923, and attended the Ethical Culture and Fieldston Schools. At the age of eighteen she married Allan Arbus. Although she first started taking pictures in the early 1940s and studied photography with Alexey Brodovitch in 1954, it was not until 1955-57, while enrolled in courses taught by Lisette Model, that she began to seriously pursue the work for which she has come to be known.

Her first published photographs appeared in Esquire in 1960 under the title The Vertical Journey. From that point on she continued to work intermittently as a free-lance photographer for Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Show, The London Sunday Times, and a number of other magazines, doing portraits on assignment as well as photographic essays, for several of which she wrote accompanying articles.

During the 1950s, like most of her contemporaries, she had been using a 35mm camera, but in 1962 she began working with a 6x6 Rolleiflex. She once said, in accounting for the shift, that she had grown impatient with the grain and wanted to be able to decipher in her pictures the actual texture of things. The 6x6 format contributed to the refinement of a deceptively simple, formal, classical style that has since been recognized as one of the distinctive features of her work.

She received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1963 and 1966 for projects on “American Rites, Manners and Customs” and spent several summers during that period traveling across the United States, photographing contests, festivals, public and private gatherings, people in the costumes of their professions or avocations, the hotel lobbies, dressing rooms and living rooms she had described as part of “the considerable ceremonies of our present.” “These are our symptoms and our monuments,” she wrote in her original application. “I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary.”

The photographs she produced in those years attracted a great deal of attention when a selected group of them were exhibited, along with the work of two other photographers, in the 1967 “New Documents” show at the Museum of Modern Art. Nonetheless, although several institutions subsequently purchased examples of her work for their permanent collections, her photographs appeared in only two other major exhibitions during her lifetime, both of them group shows.

In the late 1960s she taught photography courses at Parsons School of Design, the Rhode Island School of Design and Cooper Union and in 1971 gave a master class at Westbeth, the artists cooperative in New York City where she then lived. During the same period she initiated the concept and did the basic research for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1973 exhibition on news photography, “From the Picture Press.”

She made a portfolio of ten photographs in 1970, printed, signed and annotated by her, which was to be the first of a series of limited editions of her work. She committed suicide on July 26, 1971 at the age of forty-eight. The following year the ten photographs in her portfolio became the first work of an American photographer to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale.

In the course of a career that may be said to have lasted little more than fifteen years, she produced a body of work whose style and content have secured her a place as one of the most significant and influential photographers of our time. The major retrospective mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in 1972 was attended by more than a quarter of a million people in New York before it began its tour of the United States and Canada. The Aperture monograph Diane Arbus, published in conjunction with the show has sold over 300,000 copies. Beginning in 2003, Diane Arbus Revelations, an international retrospective organized by The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art travelled to museums throughout the United States and Europe between 2003 and 2006. Major exhibitions devoted exclusively to her work have toured much of the world including, Australia, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

Website : Jeu de Paume

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MIRO'S, MONETS, MODIGLIANIS FROM THE NAHMAD COLLECTION AT KUNSTHAUS ZÜRICH

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Over the past half-century the Nahmad family's primary relationship with art was how much money they could make by dealing in the works of Picasso, Monet and Dali.

Now a new exhibition, "Miro, Monet, Matisse - The Nahmad Collection" reveals for the first time the world-class works they stashed away, almost forgotten in a warehouse.

Their story began in the early 1960s, when brothers Ezra and David began buying art in Paris and transporting it back to Milan to sell.

On one occasion they drove through the night with a Picasso strapped to the roof of their Morris Minor car, because it wouldn't fit in the trunk, Ezra's son Helly said in an interview for the exhibition's catalog.

"When they arrived in Milan, they discovered to their shock that the painting was no longer there -- it had blown off on the motorway. They drove straight back and luckily found the picture -- lying damaged in grass on the roadside," Helly said.

For the older generation of the Nahmad family this autumn's exhibition is the first chance to show their children what they've achieved, the show's curator Christoph Becker told a media briefing.

Since most of their purchases head straight from the auction house to the depot, the family members have never seen some of the paintings and only have a piecemeal overview of what they owned, he said.

Concentrating on the period from 1870 to 1970, the exhibition spans impressionist watercolors by Monet through to 14 brightly colored psychedelic canvases by Spanish artist Joan Miro, including many rarely seen works.

Among the highlights is Pablo Picasso's painting of his son in a harlequin costume: "Le Petit Pierrot aux fleurs" (1923/1924). The soft, pastel colors contrast with the abstract, bulbous figures of his later work, also on display.

Elsewhere, Amedeo Modigliani's elongated figures rub shoulders with explosions of colors and shapes in Wassily Kandinsky's abstract works.

Some artists are equally notable for their absence, Becker said. Although the family made a lot of money dealing paintings by Salvador Dali, none of his oeuvre is included in the exhibition.

Becker declined to speculate on whether the Nahmads will make the collection accessible to the public on a more permanent basis, but added that the exhibition had kindled an awareness of how significant the works are as an entity.

"Miro, Monet, Matisse - The Nahmad Collection" runs at the Kunsthaus Zurich until January 15.
Reporting by Caroline Copley, editing by Paul Casciato

Website : Kunsthaus Zürich

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THE MYSTERY OF THE BODY: BERLINDE DE BRUYCKERE IN DIALOGUE WITH LUCAS CRANACH AND PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

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The Kunstmuseum Bern presents the largest monographic exhibition of works by Berlinde De Bruyckere (b. 1964) hitherto shown in Europe. The Flemish artist creates deceptively real sculptures and touching drawings of human bodies suffering. The presentation brings them into a dialogue with the works of the German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach and the Italian film maker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

The human body is one of the most commonly portrayed subjects, and each generation of artists interprets it anew. The exhibition lucidly illustrates Berlinde De Bruyckere's in-depth examination of Lucas Cranach's and Pier Paolo Pasolini's work over the past three years.

New existentialism in contemporary art
We not only find De Bruyckere’s representations of suffering human beings shocking because of their directness but likewise deeply moving. In her existential representations of suffering she unites elements of pain as well as of lust, shame, and grief. The artist evokes a confusion of feelings in us that oscillates between disgust and dismay. In doing so, De Bruyckere underscores the essentially human – namely that we all possess a body. The artist takes a stand in opposition to the event industry and the beauty market. Contrary to the ideal images used in advertising, her sculptures of bodies do not hide their scars and sutures. Instead they highlight the body’s vulnerability. Her works make us conscious of the fact that our bodies are vulnerable and immortal. Awareness for this is rapidly diminishing in a world in which practically every nook and cranny has been infiltrated by the new media. De Bruyckere successfully moves her viewers into feeling real sympathy for her sculptures without pandering to voyeurism.

Putting society under political and critical scrutiny
Lucas Cranach still embedded the theme of suffering in a religious context. His masterly Schmerzensmann (Man of Sorrows) presents the scourged figure of Christ wearing a crown of thorns to arouse our pity and bring us to reflect on religion. Cranach depicts Christ as a man who suffers, not as God, and thereby circumvents ecclesiastical ideology. De Bruyckere adopts the motif of suffering and adapts it to the present. With it she critically questions modern society and thereby takes a political stance in her work. In this way she resembles Pier Paolo Pasolini. For the Italian film maker the human body was not only an arena for staging individuality, sensuousness, as well as insatiable and uncontrollable drives, but also for sexual and violent excessiveness. Pasolini views the body as a focal point in the fight against petty bourgeois social order, in which he not only saw the birth of Fascism but also the foundations of consumer society.

A dialogue transcending media and time
The exhibition presents a transmedia dialogue between sculptures, drawings, paintings, and films. However, the dialogue not only brings together various media but also spans many epochs. The show visually demonstrates how the body has always been a “mystery” in the sense that it can never be comprehended fully. Every one of us is challenged to confront this fact. The exhibition is a collaborative project together with Cornelia Wieg and the Stiftung Moritzburg — Kunstmuseum des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt.

Website : Kunstmuseum Bern

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MARC CHAGALL AND THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE AT THE ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO

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The Art Gallery of Ontario brings the magic and wonder of modern painter Marc Chagall to Toronto next month with a major exhibition organized by the world-renowned contemporary art museum, Centre Pompidou. Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde: Masterpieces from the Collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris is on view from Oct. 18, 2011 to Jan. 15, 2012, and includes 32 vivid and imaginative works by Marc Chagall and eight pieces by Wassily Kandinsky, alongside pieces from other visionaries of Russian modernism such as Kasimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, Sonia Delaunay, and Vladimir Tatlin. A total of 118 works belonging to the collection of the Centre Pompidou comprises a broad array of media including painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography and film.

Programming highlights for Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde include:

CHAGALL’S MUSICAL WORLD
Under the direction of acclaimed violinist Jacques Israelievitch, the Koffler Chamber Orchestra presents a concert inspired by Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde. Featuring works by Chagall’s favourite composers as well as those who share the painter’s Russian-Jewish background, the program includes a Mozart Divertimento, Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C major, Op. 48, Marc Kopytman’s Music for Strings and Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and Strings, featuring guest pianist Andrew Burashko.

PAST PRESENT: CHAGALL THROUGH TORONTO’S ARTISTS
Koffler Art Salon presents a not-to-be-missed evening of music, dance, performance, spoken word and more with Toronto’s avant-garde artists who reach back to the world of Chagall for inspiration. The evening includes performances by the eight-piece jazz fusion ensemble The Thing Is, the cutting-edge dance artists of Kaeja d’Dance, Russian-born accordionist Sasha Luminsky, and Yiddish jazz chanteuse Theresa Tova with pianist Matt Herskowitz, who offer an excerpt from their new production of Bella: The Colour of Love (based on the life of Bella Chagall, wife and muse to Marc Chagall).

MARC CHAGALL AND HIS TIMES Wednesday
Yale University’s Benjamin Harshav, a pre-eminent Jewish culture critic and a respected scholar on Chagall, presents a lecture on the artist and his times. Professor Harsha’s recent publications include Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World: The Nature of Chagall's Art and Iconography (Rizzoli, 2006); Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative (Stanford University Press, 2004). Presented in collaboration with the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto.

The presentation of Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde at the AGO is generously supported by Nance Gelber and Daniel Bjarnason, Leslie and Anna Dan, Joe and Budgie Frieberg, Al and Malka Green, and Dorothy Shoichet.

Website : The Art Gallery of Ontario
 
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ALBERTO GIACOMETTI, A RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION AT THE MUSEO PICASSO IN MALAGA

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Installation view of the exhibition at the Museo Picasso Malaga.





The Museo Picasso Málaga presents Alberto Giacometti. A Retrospective, an exhibition that precisely reflects the different stages in the career of one of the outstanding artists of the last century. Giacometti’s work is crucial to understanding the development of the avant-gardes and the subsequent evolution of contemporary art, while as an artist he nevertheless defies classification. This project challenges the conventional reductionist view of Giacometti’s oeuvre.

This is the first Alberto Giacometti retrospective to be held in Spain in more than 20 years, and it will bring together 198 artworks in the Palacio de Buenavista. The 20 photographs and 166 of the other works are from the collections of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, in Paris, created by the artist's widow. The show is completed by three works by Gioacommetti that are on loan from private collections and from the Zurich Kunsthaus, along with a work by José Ruiz Blasco and a selection of eight works by Pablo Picasso from private collections, the MPM’s own permanent collection and the Fundación Picasso Casa Natal.

The activities that have been scheduled to take place alongside this exhibition include workshops, jointly organized with ONCE, that involve six resin copies of sculptures by Alberto Giacometti; a seminar that will examine the subject of Architects, Film-makers and Artists in their Studios; a series of talks to be held in Malaga and Paris on The Artist’s Studio; guided tours of the exhibition for adults and schoolchildren, and workshops for school group during term-time and for children in general during the Christmas holidays.

With his exhibition of Alberto Giacometti (Borgonovo, Switzerland, 1901 - Chur, Switzerland, 1966), the Museo Picasso Málaga presents the work of a key figure in twentieth-century art and a contemporary of Pablo Picasso, with whom he coincided in Paris, although, though the Swiss artist was a generation younger. Despite the evident aesthetic and existential differences that characterize their work and their attitudes, there are significant points in common in the two artists’ careers, such as being sons of artists, their academic training, their move to Paris during their youth from peripheral countries to the artistic centre of the time, and their shared interest in the Old Masters.

The exhibition also addresses other key facets of Giacometti’s life and work, such as his obsession with inventing new modes of representation by stripping traditional genres such as the portrait, the still-life, the human figure and landscape down to the barest minimum. The show also explores his belief in the existence of a reality beyond the realm of appearances, as evidenced by his brief foray into Surrealism – a reality he perceived as being in constant flux and transformation.

The 169 works by Giacometti brought together for this exhibition, which include oil paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, furniture and textiles, and the 20 photographs by other artists documenting the artist at work, are grouped in different sections and arranged chronologically to show the successive stages of his aesthetic evolution: the earliest works, his arrival in Paris and first exposure to non-academic influences, his interest in late Cubism, his artistic relationship with creative talents such as Picasso and Cézanne, the notion of the cage as delimited space and the human as an artistic genre, among other topics. Alongside them are displayed a small selection of works by Pablo Picasso that illustrate the common features of both artists, as described above.

It should be pointed out that twenty of the works that have been brought to Malaga - amongst them two oil paintings - have never before been on loan from the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti for exhibition purposes. This is therefore the first time they have been on show. Also on display is an interactive digital version of a 1932 sketchbook of Giacometti’s drawings that reveals the Swiss artist’s explicit interest in a group of works by Pablo Picasso that are specific in terms of period and form.

A journey through his work
A painter, sculptor, draftsman, printmaker, creator of decorative objects and writer, Giacometti never ceased to explore new artistic paths. The exhibition as a whole bears witness to his disturbing and wonderful world and the coherence of his aesthetic position.

Alberto Giacometti. A Retrospective begins with works from the family setting of his early years, and the first portraits and anatomical studies. One of the key sections of the exhibition traces the artist’s development from his arrival in Paris in 1922 and his attempts to engage as a sculptor with late Cubism in the second half of the twenties and the early thirties and with the tenets of Surrealism, from his first contacts with Jean Cocteau and André Masson in 1929 through to his admission into André Breton’s circle in 1931.

During the thirties Giacometti devoted a part of his energies to applied arts, designing and making furniture and decorative objects, a number of examples of which are included in the show. This line of work gave added impetus to his experimentation and his sculptural exploration of a new idea of ​​place, with an aesthetic far removed now from Cubism and Surrealism. He now set himself to question the value of abstract art as a credible vision of reality, and in engaging with and reworking the traditional genres made a unique contribution to the history of twentieth century art.

During the second half of the thirties, after he was expelled from the surrealist group, he began to focus on the relation between figure and pedestal, on the expression of architectural and spatial qualities, highlighting the work of art as the nucleus that facilitates the experience of place. One of the most innovative departures here is the affirmation of the value of real movement in sculpture.

From 1946 on, are the stretched and elongated threadlike figures sculpted in bronze that inhabit a space shared with the viewer. These are complemented by a series of oil paintings in which the representation of the protagonists strips them of subjectivity in order to endow them with objective intensity and luminosity. For Giacometti, sculpture was of interest to the extent that it embodied his vision of the outside world. The exhibition concludes with the impressive figure of the Walking Man I from the sixties, the culmination of a life and a career of absolute dedication to his work.

The exhibition also includes a remarkable selection of Giacometti’s prints and drawings, which focus on the modes of representation of the artist’s studio and models, and a series of works that bear witness to his appreciation of the art of other cultures, notably those of Africa and Oceania.

The exhibition is curated by art historian Véronique Wiesinger, director of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti in Paris and one of the world’s foremost experts on the artist’s work, in collaboration with José Lebrero Stals, artistic director of the Museo Picasso Málaga.

Website : Museo Picasso Malaga

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FIRST EXHIBITION ON PIETRO PERUGINO, RAPHAEL'S MASTER AT ALTE PINAKOTHEK MUNICH

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Perugino, Bildnis des Francesco delle Opere, 1494, Florenz, Uffizien





As a highlight and to conclude the Alte Pinakothek’s 175th jubilee celebrations, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen are staging the first exhibition on Pietro Perugino – one of the most successful artists of the Italian Renaissance – to be held outside Italy. It unites more than 30 works from all phases of the master’s creative output, focussing in particular on the heyday of the artist’s career in the late 15th century. ‘The Vision of Saint Bernard’, an altarpiece completed around 1490 which King Ludwig I of Bavaria, the founder of the Alte Pinakothek, managed to acquire in 1829, was the initial impetus behind this exhibition and forms its focal point.

Although generally underestimated today, contemporaries heralded Pietro Perugino (c. 1450–1523) as the best painter of his generation. Prominent patrons courted his attention even some distance from Florence and Perugia, the centres in which he worked. Popes, cardinals, dukes and wealthy merchants were among his clients. He managed his workshop with astute business acumen, dealing with a surprising number of major commissions for the Church and municipalities in Umbria and Tuscany.

The classical harmony and contemplative mood of his works not only satisfied the aesthetic and religious craving of the times, but also paved the way for the painting of the High Renaissance. Perugino’s works were increasing admired once again in the 19th century and, more recently, art history has attempted to rid the artist of the overwhelming shadow cast by his famous pupil, Raphael. Irrespective of this, the humanist and sophisticated technical qualities of his innovative and sensitive works are worthy of rediscovery in their own right. In addition to the exquisite paintings and drawings by Perugino and his workshop the exhibition also includes related works by the artist’s contemporaries and testimonies to how positively his art was received. Many major collections of paintings and prints in Europe and the USA are supporting this exhibition through the loan of important works. These include the Uffizi Gallery and the Galleria Palatina in Florence, the Galleria Nazionale in Perugia, the Vatican Museums, the Louvre, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery, London and the National Gallery, Washington, DC, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The exhibition is being sponsored by the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung.

Pietro Vannucci, known as Perugino, was born around 1450 in Perugia or Città della Pieve in Umbria and probably spent his first few years as an apprentice in Perugia. The experience he gained in the painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio’s circle in the art centre Florence had a profound impact on him. The exhibition opens with outstanding examples of early works from his own hand, including one of the most popular works in the Galleria Nazionale in Perugia – a panel from the San Bernardino cycle – completed in 1473.

In 1480, Perugino was called upon to paint the Sistine Chapel with three colleagues of his from Florence. This prestigious commission from Pope Sixtus IV secured the Umbrian master’s place as one of the leading artists of his time and, a few years later, Perugino chose to establish a workshop in Florence. It was there, as well as in Perugia where he also maintained a foothold, that he completed numerous large-format altarpieces, fresco decorations, private devotional paintings and portraits over the following twenty years.

The altarpiece in Munich depicting the vision of St. Bernard, originally intended for a family chapel in the Cistercian church Santa Maria Maddalena di Cestello in Florence, marks the beginning of his mature work. It forms the focal point of the first part of the exhibition and is outstanding thanks to a harmony in the composition of figures, architecture and landscape that was virtually unsurpassed in Italian painting up until that time. In exemplary fashion, it shows the sensitivity and innovativeness with which the painter furthered the tradition of Florentine and Central Italian painting in the 15th century. His compositions are governed by a contemplative mood and a calm balance in structure and colouring. Perugino was able to accentuate the aesthetic and spiritual potential of his art, accompanied by Humanist ideals and a new religious orientation, without making a difference between large altarpieces and small devotional pictures.

The exhibition brings together a broad selection of religious pictures made for private use and includes loans from Stockholm, St. Petersburg, London, Florence and Frankfurt, among others, with subjects such as St. Sebastian, the Man of Sorrows and, of course, the Virgin and Child predominating. An exquisite cabinet painting from the Louvre of Apollo and the shepherd Daphnis in an Arcadian landscape – one of the extremely rare testimonies to Perugino as a painter of mythological subjects – has also made its way to Munich. It was probably painted around 1490 for Lorenzo the Magnificent, head of the de’ Medici banking family that ruled Florence.

Several panels from the S. Pietro polyptych, which are otherwise in scattered locations around the globe and which are part one of the largest altarpieces that Perugino completed in his native town in 1495, form a transition to the second part of the exhibition. Here, images of the Madonna and Child form a further highlight and are shown, for example, vis-à-vis an early drawing of the Virgin by Raphael. Perugino’s exceptional talent as a portraitist can also be seen, represented by his most important works, including the famous portrait of Francesco delle Opere of 1494 from the Uffizi Gallery. This work is a particular impressive example of how the master succeeded in incorporating qualities found in Early Netherlandish painting in his art, so admired by his contemporaries.

Perugino’s late work and paintings by his successors – represented by a further altarpiece – document the master’s efficiently organised working method in particular – one of the principle business-orientated qualities that prompted the leading 16th-century historian and artist biographer, Giorgio Vasari, to ruin Perugino’s posthumous fame.

It was not until the 19th century that the painter was once again accorded the recognition that he deserved, although he was principally seen as Raphael’s teacher. The acquisition of works by Perugino for Ludwig I was also largely motivated by the profound admiration shown for Raphael at that time. The exhibition is rounded off by an in-depth examination of the Umbrian master’s life and art in the 19th century. Examples of German Romantic painting can be seen as well as a drawing by Edgar Degas, among other works.

Website : Alte Pinakothek

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TATE ST IVES PRESENTS THE INDISCIPLINE OF PAINTING: INTERNATIONAL ABSTRACTION FROM THE 1960S TO NOW

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Bernard Frize, Suite Segond 100 No 3, 1980. Alkyd Urethane lacquer on canvas, 162 x 130 cm. Collection of the artist, courtesy Simon Lee Gallery, London.






The Indiscipline of Painting is an international group exhibition including works by forty-nine artists from the 1960s to now. Selected by British painter Daniel Sturgis, it considers how the languages of abstraction have remained urgent, relevant and critical as they have been revisited and reinvented by subsequent generations of artists over the last 50 years. It goes on to demonstrate the way in which the history and legacy of abstract painting continues to inspire artists working today.

The contemporary position of abstract painting is problematic. It can be seen to be synonymous with a modernist moment that has long since passed, and an ideology which led the medium to stagnate in self-reflexivity and ideas of historical progression. The exhibition challenges such assumptions. It reveals how painting's modernist histories, languages and positions have continued to provoke ongoing dialogues with contemporary practitioners, even as painting's decline and death has been routinely and erroneously declared.

The show brings together works by British, American and European artists made over the last five decades and features major new commissions and loans. It includes important works by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Gerhard Richter and Bridget Riley alongside artists such as Tomma Abts, Martin Barré and Mary Heilmann.

A catalogue accompanying the exhibition features essays by Terry R Myers and Daniel Sturgis and texts by Alison Green, Stephen Moonie and Bob Nickas.

The Indiscipline of Painting is a collaborative project between Tate St Ives and Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, where the exhibition will travel to for the 14 January 2012, running until 10 March 2012.

As part of The Indiscipline of Painting, Newlyn Art Gallery has commissioned an exhibition of new work by John M. Armleder. John M. Armleder is at Newlyn Art Gallery 8 October 2011–3 January 2012.

The exhibition will be showing works from the following artists (in alphabetical order): Tomma Abts; John M. Armleder; Tauba Auerbach; Martin Barré; Francis Baudevin; Daniel Buren; André Cadere; Ingrid Calame; Keith Coventry; Michael Craig Martin; Karin Davie; Peter Davies; Gene Davis; David Diao; Moira Dryer; Bernard Frize; Michelle Grabner; Tim Head; Alex Hubbard; Katharina Grosse; Peter Halley; Jane Harris; Mary Heilmann; Jacob; Richard Kirwan; Imi Knoebel; Bob Law; Sherrie Levine; Jeremy Moon; Olivier Mosset; Carl Ostendarp; Blinky Palermo; Steven Parrino; David Reed; Gerhard Richter; Bridget Riley; Ruth Root; Robert Ryman; Sean Scully; Frank Stella; Myron Stout; Daniel Sturgis; Cheyney Thompson; Niele Toroni; Richard Tuttle; Dan Walsh; Andy Warhol; Peter Young; Heimo Zobernig.

Website : Tate St Ives

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THE SPANISH LINE: DRAWINGS FROM RIBERA TO PICASSO AT THE COURTAULD GALLERY

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Jusepe de Ribera (lo Spagnoletto) (1591-1652) Man tied to a tree, and a figure resting Red chalk 241 x 150 mm © The Courtauld Gallery, London





This exhibition explores the rich, intriguing and varied territory of Spanish drawings, a field that remains relatively little known. The Courtauld Gallery holds one of the most important collections of Spanish drawings outside Spain, totalling approximately 100 works ranging from the 16th to the 20th centuries. A selection of some 40 of the finest and most representative drawings has been chosen for the exhibition. They include examples by many of Spain’s greatest artists, such as Ribera, Murillo, Goya and Picasso. The exhibition also invites visitors to explore lesser-known treasures from the Golden Age of Spanish art created by Francisco Pacheco, Antonio Garcia Reinoso, Vicente Carducho, Antonio del Castillo and others. Many of these works have never previously been exhibited and they are presented here in the light of important new research.

The Spanish Line is the first substantial exhibition on the tradition of Spanish draughtsmanship to take place in London and reflects the growing scholarly interest in the subject. The exhibition marks the completion of a four-year research project and the publication of a complete scholarly catalogue of The Courtauld Gallery’s collection of Spanish drawings. In many public collections ‘Spanish school’ was often used as a convenient label for anonymous drawings, frequently from other countries and of lesser quality. Significant discoveries are still regularly made and The Courtauld’s exhibition aims to stimulate further discussion and research in this exciting field of study.

The Courtauld Gallery’s collection has its origins with the MP and celebrated Hispanist Sir William Stirling Maxwell (1818-78), whose pioneering Annals of the artists of Spain (1848) helped lay the foundations for the later scholarly study of Spanish art. Sir Robert Witt (1872-1952) acquired a substantial part of the Stirling Maxwell collection when it came on the market. Witt was able to expand the group with further acquisitions, often made for small sums and against prevailing taste. In 1952 they formed part of his magnificent bequest of approximately 3,000 drawings to The Courtauld Gallery.

The exhibition is arranged in broadly chronological order, emphasising various aspects of Spanish draughtsmanship. The first highlight is a rare double-sided sheet of studies for Saint Stephen taken to his martyrdom, by the Renaissance artist Juan de Juanes. It was produced in preparation for an altarpiece which is celebrated as one of the early masterpieces of Spanish art (now in the Museo del Prado in Madrid). The back of the drawing gives rare insight into Spanish workshop practice in the 16th century, as it includes recipes for the painter’s materials and contractual information about the altarpiece, here fully deciphered for the first time.

Other early drawings testify to the important role of the Italian High Renaissance as a model in Spain: Pablo de Céspedes, for example, captured a figure from Michelangelo’s Last Judgment soon after its completion, in a meticulously modelled pen and ink drawing. Jusepe de Ribera was one of several 17th century artists to participate in the exchange between Italy and Spain. Known as ‘Lo Spagnoletto’ (the little Spaniard), he settled in Italy as a successful follower of Caravaggio. His Man tied to a tree is one of the most arresting and mysterious images in the exhibition.

Spanish painters also drew inspiration from Dutch and Flemish artists, whose work was most readily available through prints. A beautiful study sheet in red chalk by the Andalusian artist Antonio Garcia Reinoso (1623-1677) shows how Northern prototypes were imaginatively reworked in a local idiom. Prominently signed and dated 1647, this is one of the most important drawings by Reinoso, of whom the early artists’ biographer Antonio Palomino (1653-1726) wrote: “He had great facility in invention, and left a great many drawings, which he executed exquisitely, in wash, pen, charcoal or chalk; not content with one drawing of a subject, he liked to make many, and all very different [from each other].”

Reinoso’s contemporary, Antonio del Castillo y Saavedra (1616-1668), also used Northern print sources, but to a very different effect. This can be admired in his carefully arranged and beautifully controlled pen drawing of four male heads, proudly signed with his initials in the very centre.

Another facet of Spanish draughtsmanship can be studied in Alonso Cano’s drawings, which are particularly well represented in The Courtauld’s collection. In some of his sketches, his dark pen seems to scratch tiny agile figures swiftly on the paper. A brilliant example is his Saint Bernardino and Saint Juan of Capistrano, a study for a painting today in Granada’s Museo de Bellas Artes which originally formed part of an altarpiece for the Franciscan monastery of San Antonio and San Diego in Granada. Cano was particularly well known and later collectors erroneously inscribed his name on many drawings. The exhibition proposes new attributions for several of these sheets.

Cano’s teacher, Francisco Pacheco (1564-1644) is also represented in the exhibition. Pacheco was an influential earlier writer on art, and both master and father-in-law of Diego Velasquez. His highly finished Saint Mark is dated to the specific day of its creation: 23 October 1632. The drawing shows Saint Mark in fervent devotion and reflects the importance of the cult of saints in Spain. Strong devotional feeling is a common characteristic of religious subjects in Spanish drawings, although these are richly varied in technique, style and interpretation. The particularly strong Spanish devotion to the Virgin Mary led to many depictions of her. Other expressions of Spanish Catholicism include the image of the soul being guided by guardian angels, here represented in a rapidly sketched brush drawing by the Sevillian Francisco de Herrera the Younger.

Such small but vigorously executed works lead the way to the most powerful and original of all Spanish draughtsman: Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828), whose Cantar y Bailar (Singing and Dancing) stands out for its energy and freedom of execution. This work comes from the Witches and Old Women Album, one of Goya’s celebrated private drawing books. An old woman, who appears to be levitating, grasps a guitar and sings open-mouthed. Seated on the ground another figure gazes beneath her skirt whilst holding her nose. Goya’s impact on the following generation is clearly evident in the highly expressive Woman walking by Eugenio Lucas y Padilla (1824-1870) who demonstrates in a tiny format an astonishing technique which pushed the conventional boundaries of drawing. Ink is rubbed and brushed onto the paper leaving different textures and marks which characterise this drawing as one of Lucas's manchas (literally, "stains").

The exhibition concludes with two works by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). These include a delightful early drawing of pigs, executed in 1906 and once owned by the American writer Gertrude Stein, a close friend of the artist. The other is a pen and ink drawing of 1923 titled Femme Assise.

The four-year research project which underpins the exhibition has been funded by the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica and is the first such comprehensive assessment of Spanish drawings in a public collection in Britain. It will result in the first catalogue of a national school of drawings held by The Courtauld Gallery. Written by Zahira Véliz, author of the only monograph on Alonso Cano’s drawings, the catalogue includes detailed analysis of the individual works as well as an introductory essay on Spanish drawings. This scholarly publication represents an important contribution to this rapidly developing field of study.


Website : Courtauld Gallery

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'BECKMANN & AMERICA' AT THE STÄDEL MUSEUM HIGHLIGHTS MAX BECKMANN'S LATE WORKS

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Max Beckmann’s (1884–1950) late oeuvre from the United States will be highlighted for the first time in a monographic special exhibition shown at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt under the title “Beckmann & America” from October 7, 2011 until January 8, 2012. With a total of 110 exhibits, including forty-one paintings as well as numerous drawings, watercolors, printed graphic works, and sculptures, the show offers a comprehensive survey of this important artist’s fascinating last period of life and creative production. After living and teaching in St. Louis from 1947 on, Beckmann finally moved to New York where he died in 1950. Decisive from an evolutionary point-of-view, these years in America granted the artist the right environment for a new beginning and further development.

Securing Departure from the MoMA, The Beginning from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as The Argonauts from the National Gallery of Art in Washington as loans, the Städel will be able to present three of Max Beckmann’s nine finished triptychs in its exhibition. These works are regarded as the highlights of the artist’s work. For Frankfurt am Main, where Max Beckmann lived from 1915 to 1933 and worked and taught at the Städel School, the exhibition project is of special importance: the Städel Museum boasts a rich collection of paintings, drawings, printed graphic works, and sculptures by the artist and has presented a series of exhibitions on specific aspects and periods of his oeuvre.

The exhibition is substantially supported by the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain and realized on its initiative as part of the project “The Phenomenon of Expressionism.” BNY Mellon, a global financial services company, is supporting the exhibition as Corporate Sponsor to help make these rarely-seen examples of Beckmann‘s work accessible to a broader public.

Max Beckmann ranks among the most important artists of the twentieth century. Born in Leipzig in 1884, the painter, drawing on contemporary history, mythology, and his own biography, created an oeuvre constituting one of the most outstanding productive iconographic achievements in modern art. His life and his work are closely linked with the history of Germany. In World War I he served as a voluntary medical orderly in Flanders until his emotional and physical breakdown. Impressions of the war fundamentally changed his painting. Beckmann came to focus on the brutality of everyday human relations, and the subjects of his pictures turned expressive and angular. The artist lived in Frankfurt from 1915 on where he became a professor at the Städel School ten years later. He enjoyed increasingly bigger successes in these years, which culminated in retrospectives in Mannheim, Zurich, Basel, and Paris. Beckmann, whose seemingly metaphorically encoded paintings simply fulfill the cliché of German painting, already became known in the USA through numerous solo and group exhibitions from the mid-1920s on, when his career in Germany had reached its climax. With the seizure of power by the National Socialists in 1933, his career was precipitously interrupted. He was deprived of his professorship at the Städel School in Frankfurt and emigrated to Amsterdam in 1937.

It was only after ten years in exile, which were determined by isolation, fear, and want because of the war, that he succeeded to leave Europe for America – which was what he had ardently longed for; his New York art dealer Curt Valentin had found a teaching assignment for him. When Beckmann finally arrived in America in the late summer of 1947, he was already regarded as one of the “most powerful German Expressionists,” as he was characterized in the catalogue of the exhibition “Art in Our Time,” with which the MoMA had celebrated its ten-year anniversary in 1939. Life in the New World offered the artist undreamt-of opportunities for development. This was mainly due to encounters with certain people and progressive institutions. So it was far from Europe where Beckmann was to spend his last and extremely productive period of his life. The Beckmann catalogue raisonné lists eight-five paintings dating from these three years alone. The themes chosen comprise a remarkably small number of landscapes, comparably numerous still lifes, but also portraits as well as religious and mythological subjects.

From the viewpoint of Frankfurt, but especially with the objective of establishing a historical perspective, both the exhibition and the catalogue start with the first Beckmann acquisition for the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, The Descent from the Cross from 1917. The oil painting, which the former director of the Städel Georg Swarzenski purchased directly from the artist’s studio in 1919, was confiscated by the National Socialists in 1937 and presented in the exhibition “Degenerate Art.” Today, the outstanding work is part of the collections of the MoMA in New York, from where it will return to the city on the Main for the exhibition.

This painting will be followed by works such as the first landmark triptych Departure (MoMA) or Begin the Beguine (University of Michigan Museum of Art), which – though still painted on European soil – already anticipate Beckmann’s feeling of freedom and his desire to leave his Amsterdam exile behind. When he arrived in America, Beckmann was welcomed with open arms. St. Louis, Missouri became his first place of residence in America; he stayed for two years and held a guest professorship at the city’s Washington University. With personalities such as Perry T. Rathbone, director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, his wife Euretta, and life on the campus of Washington University, it was rather an informal atmosphere that surrounded Beckmann. The encounters with people who not only helped the German artist in America, but also made friends with him, will be reflected in the presentation of a selection of very different portraits. The persons portrayed include Georg Swarzenski as well as the painter’s art dealer and friend Curt Valentin and his student and friend Walter Barker.

When Beckmann moved to New York, where he started teaching at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, in the fall of 1949, he found himself immersed in a pulsating cosmopolitan milieu. He lived in the center of art which not only offered him historical treasures like those to be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and places such as The Cloisters, but also the opportunity to follow the day’s developments in art. Frequent shorter and longer journeys took him to the Midwest, to Chicago, to New Orleans, to Boulder, Colorado, or to California and the West Coast. The expanses of the foreign continent, which were an entirely new experience for the artist, its coasts, and the atmosphere of its “wild” landscapes, as well as the cosmos of its metropolises, became a perceptible source of inspiration for his art. His discovery of the American landscape becomes manifest in such works as San Francisco (Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt), Morning on the Mississippi (private collection), or Mill in the Eucalyptus Grove (private collection).

The exhibition in Frankfurt will present Beckmann’s late work primarily as the result of his decisive artistic attitude and unremitting work in the awareness of his own development. Beckmann remained a European painter even in America. Remarkably, he did not cease to dedicate himself to figurative solutions and his metaphoric subjects, standing his ground as a European artist of international status in his new environs despite the steadily increasing importance of US-American Abstract Expressionism and its artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, or Mark Rothko. Beckmann devoted himself to exploring figuration and space, line and color, reality and metaphysics in a by and large unbroken approach. Considering Beckmann’s triptychs, his Beginning (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) – a narratively structured recollection of his own childhood days – presents itself as the subjective counterpart to the ideationally conceived The Argonauts (National Gallery of Art, Washington). In the final analysis, Beckmann’s “American” work, which never strikes us as repetitious, reveals itself as a consistent extension of previous achievements.

Though Max Beckmann, the draftsman, also used the medium for preparatory sketches, his drawings are to be seen as independent works when considering their complexity and formal achievement. It is only to be attributed to exterior circumstances that the artist produced a conspicuously large number of drawings during his longer stay in Boulder, Colorado, for example, where he had no studio. The medium of drawing, which is relatively open compared with that of painting, offered Beckmann the opportunity to receive new impressions, but also allowed him to pursue his memories and his fantasies and to develop his imagination. Many of these drawings will be on display in the exhibition.

In the midst of his “new” life, Max Beckmann suffered a heart attack and died on a street corner near New York City’s Central Park in December 1950. His last painted pictures – Falling Man and the Argonauts (both of which are to be found in the National Gallery of Art in Washington) or Backstage (Städel Museum) – strike us as wise existential statements, as a farewell from his theater of the world.

With three thematically independent exhibitions – “Beckmann & America” in the Städel Museum (October 7, 2011 – January 8, 2012), “Max Beckmann. Face to Face” in the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig (September 17, 2011 – January 22, 2012), and “Max Beckmann. The Landscapes” in the Kunstmuseum Basel (September 4, 2011 – January 22, 2012) – this autumn art season offers the unique opportunity to explore Max Beckmann’s manifold oeuvre in a profound manner.

Website : Städel Museum

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ANSELM KIEFER: SELECTED WORKS FROM THE GROTHE COLLECTION AT THE MUSEUM FRIEDER BURDA

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Anselm Kiefer is known to be one of the most important contemporary artists nationwide as well as worldwide. Through January 15, 2012, selected works by Kiefer from the Grothe collection can be seen at the Museum Frieder Burda. The curator Walter Smerling has selected 33 large format pictures from 30 years, focussing on the decade 2000. For the first time, the work ”Essence“ from the current series of alpine landscapes are being publicly exhibited. From the collection Frieder Burda, the work „Böhmen liegt am Meer“ from 1995 is shown.

The focus of the exhibition is on the monumental picture „Der fruchtbare Halbmond“ The fertile half moon (460 x 760 cm), a work from the year 2009. It refers to the consolidation of the occident and orient and is being exhibited in Germany for the first time. Kiefer’s theme is the tower of Babel and the cradle of our culture, situated in the fertile Mesopotamia. The tower divided religions and languages, but Kiefer believes in the originally uniting aspects: the foundations are no longer simply destroyed, but also under construction. The former power of the fertile land can be regenerated, the solidarity of the different cultures becomes possible.

When selling his substantial collection, Hans Grothe did not sell his works by Anselm Kiefer. He acquired his first pictures by Kiefer out of mere fascination and because he was emotionally touched; since at first, the rational contents did not really become accessible to him. The collection includes works from three decades that fascinate due to their unique materials, the compelling density of their messages and the intensity of their aura, becoming especially visible when contrasting the different works.

In the works selected for the exhibition, the German past is not so much at the center of attention as it is characteristic for several other works. The curator Walter Smerling explains: “It is rather the christian-jewish or mythological themes that dominate. And the often described emotionalism of Kiefer’s works seems to be strangely altered, reduced or even neutralized. The works are impressive, without being overwhelming, and they invite you to analyze and reflect on them“.

Right from the beginning, Kiefer‘s paintings were located between abstraction and figuration. Symbolic combinations are created from lead, concrete, dried plants, glass, barbed wire and other heterogeneous materials. Due to numerous pastose, not too colorful layers, the surface of the picture receives a relief structure, leading to a plasticity of the pictures nearly resembling a sculpture.

Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen/Baden-Württemberg in 1945. He attended school in Rastatt, where today you can see a monumental installation by him, made from carved wood. He studied arts at the art academies in Freiburg, Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf. From 1993 to 2006, he lived and worked in Barjac, in the Département Gard in Southern France. Since 2007, Anselm Kiefer has lived in Paris, where in 2010 he was called to the Collège de France as a professor. In 1999 in Tokio, he was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale Prize. In 2008, he was awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels.

The exhibition was developed in close cooperation between the Museum Frieder Burda and the Foundation for Art and Culture in Bonn. A catalog is available from the editorial Wienand Verlag.

Website : Museum Frieder Burda

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FRANS HALS MUSEUM CONFRONTS CONTEMPORARY ARTS WITH MASTER PAINTINGS OF THE GOLDEN AGE

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Cornelis van Haarlem, Huwelijk van Peleus en Thetis (detail), 1592/93, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem.




From 7 October 2011 to 8 January 2012, the Frans Hals Museum is presenting paintings by John Currin (1962) in an encounter with the work of Cornelis van Haarlem (1562 – 1638). The American artist John Currin is well known for his realistic paintings in which commonplace scenes alternate with explicitly erotic images. Solo exhibitions of Currin’s work have been staged in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In the ‘Conversation Piece’ series, the Frans Hals Museum would like to present the collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth century paintings in a new light.

Currin is very interested in the realistic painting technique and the Mannerist ideal of beauty of the Northern Renaissance. In his work, which is executed with immense technical skill, he addresses both social and provocatively sexual themes, often distorting or exaggerating the shapes of his figures.

Objects with a Human Skin
Like Van Haarlem, Currin favours a cool approach to the figures, which are depicted not so much as human beings, but rather as objects that have been covered in human skin. Although four centuries separate them, they both show a remarkable preference for strange distortions and anatomical exaggerations to animate their staging. It is also striking that they both often include a static still life in an otherwise lively picture. The way a dish of carefully arranged fruit appears in a Bible scene by Cornelis van Haarlem or ornate white Wedgwood china turns up in one of John Currin’s erotic pieces can border on the absurd.

Currin usually works from photographs or with the aid of dolls, but he uses live models for specific details like translucent veins or light reflected in long blonde hair.

Artists Confronted
In the ‘Conversation Piece’ series, the Frans Hals Museum would like to present the collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth century paintings in a new light. The confrontations between contemporary and historic works show that certain painterly principles are universal and are constantly revisited by artists. This very continuity in painting can reveal unexpected, meaningful connections.

Website : Frans Hals Museum

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A SOLO EXHIBITION AT THE SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE HIGHLIGHTS ICELANDIC ARTIST ERRO'S WORK

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Icelandic artist Erro stands in front of his art piece 'Fishscape' of 1974 with the catalogue of the exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle (exhibition space) in Frankfurt Main, Germany, 05 October 2011. The Schirn features the solo exhibition 'Erro. Portrait and Landscape' between 06 October 2011 and 08 January 2012. EPA/ARNE DEDERT.



On the occasion of Iceland’s presentation as a guest of honor at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, the Schirn Kunsthalle will dedicate a solo exhibition to this country’s artist Erró from October 6, 2011 to January 8, 2012. Erró ranks among the great solitary figures of twentieth-century art. At once pop and baroque, eye-catching and narrative, critical of society and humorous, moral and inscrutable, he has produced an opulent, unmistakable oeuvre refusing all categorization in the course of the past fifty years. Combining pictorial elements from a wide variety of popular sources reproduced in painting, his critical narrative collages unfold eloquent tableaus: reflecting essential social issues such as politics, war, science, art, and sexuality, Erró’s dense visual arrangements seem to be aimed at assembling a comprehensive atlas of images of the modern world. The exhibition at the Schirn will present the artist’s series of landscapes “Scapes” and – for the first time – his entire series of portraits “The Monsters” from 1967/68. Linking the two work groups, selected films by Erró from the 1960s will be screened.

The exhibition “Erró. Portrait and Landscape” is sponsored by Nomura Bank (Deutschland) GmbH. Additional support comes from the project “Fabulous Iceland – Guest of Honor, Frankfurt Book Fair 2011.”

Born Guðmundur Guðmundsson in Ólafsvík in 1932, Erró, who is regarded as one of Iceland’s foremost artists today, grew up on a remote farm in the country’s southwest. Before he turned to contemporary art, he had studied at traditional art academies in Reykjavík and Oslo and learnt the technique of fresco painting and mosaic art in Italy. In 1958, he joined the ranks of the international avant-garde when he settled in Paris. Initially decisively influenced by Surrealism which had come to life again in the postwar French capital, Erró, working in the context of the various forms of New Realism and Pop Art emerging in Europe and in the USA, developed a highly individual kind of critical, ironic collage painting in the mid-sixties by using pictorial elements as spread by the mass media which he reproduced in painting.

Erró has produced thousands of paintings since then, which, mostly in the form of series dedicated to a certain subject, unscrupulously combine fragments from the most different spheres (comics, caricatures, picture postcards, photographs, films, art reproductions, illustrated encyclopedias, catalogues, and magazines of all kinds) to dense, often disturbing visual assemblages. There seems to be no limit to the range of subjects, styles, and genres adopted by the artist. The gamut of his works, which frequently draw on contemporary historical events, spans from the ironic interpretation of Baroque apotheoses (“Baroquisme,” 1965–1968) to representations of Mao Zedong’s journeys through the Western world executed in the manner of Socialist Realism (“Chinese Paintings,” 1974) and political satires on the basis of comics and caricatures arranged to monumental triptychs. Relying on the endlessly repetitive and obsessive realm of images established by the consumer society, Erró has succeeded in creating a special pictorial history of the modern world. Yet, despite all provocations and breaches of taboos in terms of the contents presented, he has remained surprisingly true to certain conventions of traditional painting in his oeuvre. Thus, he has not only established a particular contemporary form of historical painting, but also resuscitated genres such as portrait and landscape painting in an original way. These genres will be presented in the exhibition at the Schirn in the form of a selection of Erró’s sprawling “Scapes” series, an unusual extension of classical landscape painting, and his series of grotesque double portraits titled “The Monsters,” which have not been on display for more than forty years after a gallery show in 1969.

The “scape” type of picture Erró developed in the mid-sixties provided the artist with an approach he would repeatedly return to and evolve into the common denominator of a series which may be regarded as the sum total of his production as a painter. These overwhelming large-format “landscapes” resulting from the artist’s examination of an explosively spreading consumerist and media culture confront us with a culmination of the features characteristic of Erró’s art such as the obsessive manner of dealing with reproduced pictures and the principle of accumulation. “Foodscape,” painted immediately after Erró’s first visit to New York, is a definitely programmatic work: the artist unfolds an endless “landscape” of food on a jam-packed surface of 2 x 3 meters. Chunks of cheese, cakes, pieces of meat, vegetables, fruit, sauces, and pastes merge to a dizzying panorama of Western affluent society. “Inscape” (1968), a work dedicated to human anatomy, “Planescape” (1970) in its apparently apocalyptic tenor, and the colorful “Birdscape” (1979) continue the principle of accumulating innumerable variations of one and the same motif. In his both critical and humorous landscapes oscillating between realistic pictorial fragments and abstract overall compositions, Erró has kept on reflecting upon subjects like sexuality (“Lovescape,” 1969), war (“Fishscape,” 1974), art (“Odelscape,” 1982), politics (“Reaganscape,” 1986), and science (“Science Fiction Scape,” 1992).

Having realized quite early on that the history of the twentieth century is mainly written by images, Erró has questioned the mechanisms of modern mass media in the classical medium of painting. It is above all in his “Scapes” where his personal vision of a critical encyclopedia of the totality of pictures spread by the mass media becomes manifest. The flood of pictures evoked by Erró’s paintings – it often took the artist several years to assemble the necessary pool of images – has become a reality in the meantime. The works’ visionary power has only become completely comprehensible against the background of today’s endless global transfer of images through the Internet. After their first presentation in Paris and Venice in the mid-1980s, the “Scapes” are now presented in context again for the first time at the Schirn.

“The Monsters,” a thirty-part series of paintings dating from 1967/68, is a group of works to be read as an ironic comment on the classical portrait genre. Erró’s grotesque gallery of prominent persons confronts each official likeness with a second, monstrously distorted face. Mostly taken from horror movie magazines, Erró’s atrocious grimaces present themselves as the celebrities’ otherwise hidden faces. They reveal some dark secret behind the dubious façade, caricature a supposed image, and thus change one’s view of the person concerned. Yet, since the selection of people from history and today’s world comprising such different heads as Ludwig van Beethoven, Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill, Dante, Paul Klee, Sophia Loren, Marshall McLuhan, Mao, Socrates, Josef Stalin, and Albert Schweitzer follows no graspable concept, the pictures can hardly be understood as a form of direct critique. The artist’s tongue-in-cheek warning not to trust the official image of people too much rather seems to be a reaction to their representation in the media. The artist overturns alleged certainties such as the distinction between good and evil, true and false and challenges the viewer to form his or her own impression of the contradictory visual information he supplies. This also endows his “Monsters” with an unbroken relevance to the reality of today’s media society.

A number of still little-known film works by the artist from the 1960s will be screened to forge a bridge between the two workgroups, the landscapes and the portraits. “Grimaces” (1962–67) focuses on the unfathomable other side of the human countenance. Erró’s film portraits of 167 colleagues pulling faces constitute a grotesque anthology of the sixties’ international art scene unfolding to the accompaniment of a sound poem written by the Lettrist artist François Dufrêne; the artists featured include Marcel Duchamp, Claes Oldenburg, Carolee Schneemann, and Andy Warhol. The film “Stars” (1966/67) is exclusively based on reproduced picture material: the viewer is faced with a monotonous, seemingly endless sequence of female Hollywood stars’ portraits filing past – stars whose iconic glamour the exhausting repetition reduces to the absurd. Erró’s method of wearying accumulation so characteristic of him culminates in his film “Faces (Two Frames Story)” (1964–67). Thousands of ready pictures of faces from various sources – sportsmen, Native Americans, politicians, film stars, monsters, models, babies – are presented one after another in such a fast way that the single image become almost unrecognizable and dissolves in the seemingly unending stream of images.
 
Website : Schirn Kunsthalle
 
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SOME 200 PAINTINGS AND OTHER WORKS FROM THE STEINS' COLLECTION AT PARIS' GRAND PALAIS

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The lady with the crazy hat is back, 106 years after she scandalized Parisians. Nearby is another woman of scandal, reclining naked, her body strangely contorted and tinted blue. These Matisse masterpieces are part of the art collection of writer Gertrude Stein and her brothers, Americans from San Francisco who set up in Paris and became legendary patrons of avant-garde art.


Some 200 paintings and other works acquired by the Steins go on display Wednesday at the sumptuous Grand Palais, where Matisse's "Femme Au Chapeau" (Woman with a Hat) scandalized visitors during an art exhibit at the Grand Palais in 1905.

The show, on two floors, brings together masters who defined modern art — Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Manet. Along the way, it tells the story of the important role the Steins played in setting the direction of 20th century art.

Gertrude and her brother Leo, an art critic, lived on the Left Bank's rue de Fleurus. Another brother Michael and his wife Sarah were nearby on rue Madame. They began befriending artists like Matisse and Picasso shortly after arriving in Paris after the turn of the century.

They soon were sought after by Parisian and American artists and intellectuals of all sorts, including writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and set up Saturday salons at the rue de Fleurus to receive their guests — the weekend place to be.

"I think that it was Leo's eye that was the starting point for discovering Matisse, who wasn't having a lot of success at the time, and the young Picasso who wasn't exhibiting anywhere," said Cecile Debray, curator of the exhibit "Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso ... The Stein Family."

"Within a few years, really between 1905 and 1914, they put together the most fabulous collection of modern art that we can imagine," she said.

Leo and Gertrude bought "La Femme au Chapeau." That purchase "will immediately place the collection into the category of the avant-garde," Debray said. This was "the beginning of a long patronage of (Matisse's) art, his work, his radical approach to color."

They also bought his "Nu Bleu: Souvenir de Biskra" (Blue Nude), which shocked the 1907 Salon des Independants. It's a huge painting depicting a reclining woman daubed in blue with oversized breasts and hips. To underscore the radical vision in the painting, it is hung next to more classic nudes, including Bonnard's 1900 "Siesta," a sensual version of a woman seen from the back on her bed.

Even Picasso didn't understand the "Blue Nude." However, it ultimately had a profound influence on him that flowered in his famed painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."

Michael and Sarah ultimately became the main promoters of Matisse, while Gertrude befriended Picasso, collecting works from his rose and blue periods and pre-Cubist paintings like his 1907 "Nu a la Serviette" (Nude With a Towel).

The exhibit includes numerous portraits of the Steins by Picasso, as well as letters, photos of them and audio readings by Gertrude.

Gertrude Stein gained renown beyond the art world for her 1933 book, "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," who joined her on the rue de Fleurus.

The family and its bountiful art collections dispersed as fascism took hold in Europe, with much of the works ending up in the United States. Gertrude remained in France until her death in 1946, and is buried along with Toklas in Paris' famed Pere Lachaise cemetery.

Putting the exhibit together was a five-year task. Together with the Grand Palais it was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Already shown in San Francisco, it goes to the Met from Feb. 1 to June 3. The Paris exhibition continues through Jan. 16.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.

Website : Grand Palais

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STEVE JOBS 1955-2011

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Steve Jobs saw the future and led the world to it. He moved technology from garages to pockets, took entertainment from discs to bytes and turned gadgets into extensions of the people who use them. Jobs, who founded and ran Apple, told us what we needed before we wanted it.

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu.

Website : all about Steve Jobs.com 
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NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM REOPENS IN AMSTERDAM AFTER EXTENSIVE RENOVATION TO BUILDING

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Dating from 1656, the museum building originally served as a formal Amsterdam war fleet storage building and became the home of Het Scheepvaartmuseum in 1973.






The National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam reopened to the public on October 2nd, presenting thirteen new exhibitions in its fully renovated landmark building dating from 1656. Highlights include replicas of the large ship East Indiaman Amsterdam and the steamship Christiaan Brunings, as well as Voyage at Sea, a virtual adventure at sea, among other exhibitions presenting 500 years of maritime history.

On the evening of Saturday, October 1, Het Scheepvaartmuseum (the National Maritime Museum) in Amsterdam hosted its Grand Opening in the presence of Her Majesty Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

Dating from 1656, the museum building originally served as a formal Amsterdam war fleet storage building and became the home of Het Scheepvaartmuseum in 1973. Liesbeth van der Pol of Dok architects’ plan was chosen for the necessary renovations of the museum, and in 2007 the extensive renovation project began. Van der Pol’s plan includes the addition of new spaces for meetings, gatherings and social events and the museum features a new restaurant ‘Stalpaert’ (named after the original Golden Age architect of the building), a museum shop, and patios along the water. The crowning jewel of the museum is its dazzling courtyard ceiling made of hundreds of pieces of glass, designed by Architect Laurent Ney (NEY+Partners) who was inspired by the compass rose seen on old sea charts. The museum renovation project was completed in September 2011.

Like many people, when you think of the Netherlands the first thing you may think of is dikes. But think about the sea behind them, and how much of our prosperity, culture and identity we owe to the people who saw the opportunity of the sea and sailed out to find it. We have the sea to thank for our Golden Age, and for so much more. The sea runs so deep in us, you might say we have salt in our DNA.

This is the story that The National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam wishes to tell. And more than just a story, it will be an experience. We have chosen to redefine the museum as we know it. Our goal is to make everyone part of the story, with innovative and interactive presentations. With eleven exhibitions, Voyage at Sea attraction and two museum ships to experience, the new Scheepvaartmuseum will be an inspiring journey for both young and old.

The Exhibitions
The Voyage of the Sea is a unique and exciting virtual adventure at sea. You will experience, in all its rage and glory, what people on board ship had to endure, from storms to sea battles. The images will surround you. Stand in the cabin of legendary captain Michiel de Ruyter and watch how he prepares for a sea battle. Take part in a hard-fought sailing race. You will even survive the fury of a torpedo hit. Along the way, you will get to know the people and stories behind the museum’s most extraordinary objects. It is a voyage you will never forget!

For our youngest visitors (up to age 6), we present Sal & Lori and Circus at Sea, a fairy-tale underwater world. The tale of the whale tells the story of how through the ages the whale went from feared and monstrous denizen of the deep to endangered species. This exhibit, intended for children aged 6-12, was made possible in part by the World Wildlife Fund. In See you in the Golden Age, the historic glory of the Netherlands comes to life for children aged 10-14. In Port 24/7, take a tour of the Port of Amsterdam and its surroundings. See the spectacular, twenty metre-long model of the whole port zone between Amsterdam and IJmuiden. And if you dare, take the exciting container ride, and learn first-hand what a cargo container getting shipped through the port must feel like! And of course you mustn’t miss the life-sized replicas of the famous East Indiaman Amsterdam and the steamship Christiaan Brunings, which await you on the quay alongside the museum.

In the museum’s regular exhibits, you will see the most interesting pieces from the collection of Het Scheepvaartmuseum at centre stage. But these, too, are anything but ordinary museum exhibits. Het Scheepvaartmuseum lets visitors discover the Netherlands’ nautical heritage for themselves in an intuitive and direct way. Every piece tells its own story and invites the visitor to take a closer look. In The Glass, Silver and Porcelain exhibit, you will hear the clinking of wine goblets and the clatter of silverware. A huge, festively decorated banquet table stands at the centre of the hall. The pleasant, personal atmosphere piques the visitor’s curiosity about the beautiful objects in the buffets along the walls. Other exhibits, like The Photo Albums, are interactive and personal: you decide how much information you want to call up. All these things make a visit to Het Scheepvaartmuseum an exciting and emotional voyage of discovery through five hundred years of maritime history.

The Building ’s Lands Zeemagazijn
A majestic piece of history

Since 1973, Het Scheepvaartmuseum has been housed in ’s Lands Zeemagazijn, one of Amsterdam’s largest Golden Age buildings. It was originally built as a storehouse for the Amsterdam war fleet by city architect Daniël Stalpaert in 1656, when Amsterdam was the largest port in the world and the Dutch dominated world trade. Today, over 350 years later, ’s Lands Zeemagazijn is still an imposing and outspoken building that exudes an air of maritime history.

In 2007, an extensive renovation of the building began, to make it answer to the needs of today’s museumgoer. That renovation, which was completed in 2011, also involved the addition of new spaces for meetings, gatherings and social events. The renovation master plan was penned by Liesbeth van der Pol of Dok architects, whose previous projects included Het Scheepvaartmuseum’s repository building on the adjacent naval site.

But perhaps the high point of the renovation, literally and figuratively, was the glass roofing of the inner courtyard. Architect Laurent Ney (NEY+Partners), inspired by the compass rose seen on old sea charts, created a self-supporting construction in its likeness from hundreds of pieces of glass set in a metal frame. With this dazzling ceiling, the inner courtyard has been given a completely new function as central square and event location. From the courtyard, the visitor can easily find the way not only to the exhibits and attractions but to restaurant Stalpaert, the museum shop, and the patios along the water.

Website : Scheepvaartmuseum - National Maritime Museum

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