EXHIBITION OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF CHINA: THE TANG DYNASTY ON VIEW AT THE REOPENED DRENTS MUSEUM

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The exhibition shows spectacular archaeological objects from the Tang Dynasty.




Since August 2010, the Drents Museum has been closed due to large-scale reconstructions in the existing building, and the addition of a spectacular new exhibition wing, designed by renowned architect Erick van Egeraat. On Thursday November 17, 2011, the Drents Museum reopened to the public with completely renewed presentations of the permanent collections, a new Children’s museum, a larger Museum café and a new wing for temporary exhibitions. In this new wing, the Drents Museum presented the major opening exposition ‘The Golden Age of China’, about the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907 AD), the glorious dynasty with the most open cultural character in all of China’s history.

In the Netherlands, the term ‘Golden Age’ has strong associations with the 17th century, the age of prosperity and unparalleled activity in the fields of architecture, visual arts, literature and science. Historians consider the Tang Dynasty one of the highlights in Chinese civilization; The Golden Age of China, the efflorescence of Chinese culture from the 7th till the 9th century AD. The trade connected with the Silk Road led to an open society with great wealth and tolerance. To the Chinese, this is the most important dynasty in their history; the Golden Age of Chinese culture.

Chang’an (present-day Xi’an) was the heart of the empire, the first city in the Orient from which the Silk Road flowed into the country like a lifeline of culture, religion and merchandise. Changa’an was the largest and most flourishing Asian capital, which at some point had more than a million inhabitants. Merchants and traders from all over arrived in China with luxury articles. New cultures and religions arrived in their wake. Clothing, jewellery, utensils, ethereal oils, food and wine from abroad were popular both in palaces and among a large part of the city’s population. Art and literature flourished.

The exhibition shows spectacular archaeological objects from the Tang Dynasty. Some one hundred and fifty wonderful objects of glass, silver, gold, earthenware and stone show the craftsmanship of China’s Golden Age. The exhibition also shows unique murals depicting Chinese court life, and remarkable terracotta statues of people and animals, glazed in exquisite colours.

Magnificent camels with their loads, pretty women with curves, musicians on horseback showing the hustle and bustle of a metropolis. The exhibition will be designed by Atelier Hähnel-Bökens from Düsseldorf and will be the first international exposition in the new Drents Museum.

Website : Drents Museum

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STADEL MUSEUM FRANKFURT INAUGURATES AN ENTIRELY NEW PRESENTATION OF THE MODERN ART COLLECTION

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Franz Marc (1880-1916), Dog Lying in the Snow, um 1911. Oil on canvas, 62,5 x 105 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. Photo: Städel Museum - ARTOTHEK. Property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein.





The reopening of the garden wing with its presentation “Modern Art (1800–1945)” on November 17, 2011 is the first of three major collection openings at the Städel Museum. At the first opening, visitors will not only find the museum rooms of the garden wing refurbished and redesigned as well as a museum shop with a bookshop and a café extending the former range of services, but also “an entirely new presentation of the modern art collection which, besides familiar and popular works, includes a number of important new additions and surprising positions,” as Max Hollein, Director of the Städel Museum, notes. The “Modern Art” presentation at the Städel Museum offers a concentrated survey of the development of European art and sculpture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The emphasis is on German and French painting. With works such as Claude Monet’s “The Luncheon” (1868), Pablo Picasso’s “Fernande Olivier” (1909), or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Standing Nude with Hat” (1910), the Städel possesses key works of the more recent history of art. The new presentation will not only make the contentual connections and interactions between the European art movements and the various artists better understandable, but will also comprise photographs for the first time and include more works by women artists than before. One room each will be devoted to the work of Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

Following the reopening of the “Modern Art” presentation, the “Old Masters (1300–1800)” collection in the Main wing of the old building will be accessible from December 15, 2011. The final highlight will be the opening of the extension building with its presentation of contemporary art on February 25, 2012.

Structural and infrastructural measures
The old Städel Museum building with its Main River and garden wings underwent general refurbishment in the course of the construction of the extension building for the contemporary art presentation. Under the direction of the architects schneider+schumacher, who are also responsible for the extension building, the entire old structure was modernized. The roof of the garden wing was renovated and fitted with new skylights, for example. The existing building was turned into a barrierfree area by means of an additional elevator and furnished with the latest fire protection measures. Exactly in the axis of the main entrance, a central staircase connects the old structure to the new building. Additional measures after plans by the architectural office Kuehn Malvezzi ensure the conditions necessary for present-day forms of presentation in the old building. Its special qualities have been brought out as far as possible by restoring historical spatial axes. The design of the route through the exhibition, of lighting, coloring, displays, and new furniture grants the optimum effect of all works in a contemporary setting.

A series of elegant grey tones alternates with a strong blue in the section reserved for Modernism; the color concept is supported by a new system of dimmable artificial lighting at the level of the skylights and spots for addition accents. A newly furnished museum shop designed by SPIESS Interior Design with a bookshop and a café in the entrance area improve the Städel’s customer service. The Peter Schmidt Group was commissioned with the further development of the entire Städel’s graphic presentation; the results are to be found in all wall texts and printed matter, as well as in a new logo. Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Schweickart, chair of the Städel Museum’s administration, emphasizes that “we are extraordinarily happy that the reopening of the ‘Modern Art’ collection after a construction period of only fourteen months can now ring in the new Städel and allows us to present our collection to the public in a new form.”

New presentation of the collection
The refurbishment measures were accompanied by a fundamental reorganization of the modern art department. “The new presentation offered an opportunity of going through the Städel’s own holdings, which comprise about 1,200 works in the field of modern art, with a fresh eye,” says Dr. Felix Krämer, head of the department. Many of the two-hundred works on display have long since been part of the gallery’s fixtures. Frequently, these exhibits are now to be found side by side with new discoveries or rediscoveries. Two of the most spectacular finds in the museum’s depot are certainly Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Saint Jerome” from 1874, which was not included in the Städel’s inventories in the turmoil of World War II, and a nude which could be attributed to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner with absolute certainty in 2010. Other artists such as Ernst Deger, Anton Zwengauer, Ottilie W. Roederstein, Angilbert Göbel, or Helmut Kolle are largely forgotten, yet are definitely worth rediscovering.

While the artists’ national context was more strongly emphasized in the old presentation, the new presentation clearly focuses on contentual connections and the cultural exchange between the European artists and the various movements. Works by the German Brücke artists are mounted next to paintings by Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch – their great examples. The tour through the exhibition starts in the hallway with monumental works by Philipp Veit, Friedrich Overbeck, and Carl Friedrich Lessing, which reflect the Städel’s foundation years of the early nineteenth century (this introductory section will be accessible after the reopening of the Main wing as of December 15). While the first room offers art from the first half of the nineteenth century with Johann Wilhelm Heinrich Tischbein’s famous portrait of Goethe in its center, art from after 1850 (Gustave Courbet, Victor Müller, Arnold Böcklin) is shown in the two large halls that follow. The presentation continues on both sides – with Symbolist tendencies (Odilon Redon, Franz von Stuck, Max Klinger, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes) respectively Impressionism and Modernism (Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, Max Liebermann, artists of the Brücke group, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso), respectively. The accents of the selection result from the priorities developed over the years so that one room each is reserved for Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

The presentation of the collection also reflects the dark sides of German history. In a special cabinet, works by artists who were persecuted in the Third Reich are deliberately confronted with paintings that represent the official production of those years. This approach is not aimed at scandalization; the context promises to bring to light the “degenerate” artists’ creativity and urge for innovation even more clearly. The inclusion of photographs in the “Modern Art” presentation is a complete novelty. Thanks to the acquisition of the Wiegand Collection by the Städelscher Museums-Verein made possible through the support from the Kulturstiftung der Länder and the Hessische Kulturstiftung, photography could be established as a new area of the Städel’s collection. The common presentation of painting, sculpture, and photography allows highlighting the interaction between the various media, which has brought about brilliant results particularly in the field of modern art.

New acquisitions and permanent loans
“It is for the first time now that the new ‘Modern Art’ presentation reveals the commitment with which we have deliberately extended the collection also in this respect in recent years,” says Max Hollein. Next to the two hundred and fifty photographs from the Wiegand collection, the most important acquisitions include works by painters from the New Objectivity milieu like Karl Hubbuch and Anton Räderscheidt. Félix Vallotton’s “Nude Blonde” from 1921 represents another major purchase by the Städelscher Museums-Verein. Further new acquisitions include works by Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach and Hanns Ludwig Katz. An important addition to the Städel’s collection is a group of permanent loans transferred to the museum by the Commerzbank from the erstwhile Kunstsammlung Dresdner Bank. These comprise, among others, works by László Moholy-Nagy, Ljubov Popova, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, and Max Beckmann. Further important permanent loans by Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner have been entrusted to the Städel by private collectors.


Website : Städel Museum

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OVERVIEW OF THE OEUVRE OF DUTCH EXPRESSIONIST PAINTER JAN ALTINK AT THE GRONINGER MUSEUM

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Jan Altink, De rode koetjes, 1927. Was/olieverf op doek, 50,5 x 60 cm. Bruikleen Stichting De Ploeg. Foto Marten de Leeuw.





From 19 November 2011 to 9 April 2012, the Groninger Museum displays an overview of the oeuvre of Jan Altink under the title Iconen van het Groningerland (Icons of the Groningen Countryside). This retrospective exhibition in the Ploeg Pavilion presents around seventy paintings and forty works on paper. The work from the collection of the Groninger Museum and of De Ploeg foundation has been supplemented by loans from private collections and public institutions. The emphasis lies on Altink’s paintings and prints from the 1920s and ‘30s.

Icons of the Groningen Countryside
Jan Altink, born and raised in Groningen, completed his education at Minerva Academy of Art in Groningen. In 1918 he was one of the founders of the De Ploeg artists’ association. He was even the name-giver of the artists’ group: in his view, art life in Groningen should be drastically overturned (‘ploeg’ in Dutch means both ‘plough’ and ‘team’), so that it could germinate again. Although Altink also produced portraits and still lifes, he is primarily known as a landscape artist. In fact, his characteristic landscapes with high horizons and roads or waterways disappearing into the distance are almost prescriptive of the expressionistic way in which the artists of De Ploeg elevated the Groningen countryside to an idealized theme; they are icons of the Groningen landscape.

The expressive use of complementary colours such as purple and green contributes greatly to the originality of his visual language. This visual language was strongly influenced in the twenties by the expressionism that Jan Wiegers brought to Groningen after his meeting with E.L. Kirchner in Davos, Switzerland. In around 1927, a change occurred in Altink’s artistic approach; he developed a painting style that gave a more lyrical-impressionistic representation of the Groningen countryside. In addition to his autonomous work, Altink also produced advertising designs, for Vroom & Dreesman among others.

Website : Groninger Museum

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IMPRESSIONIST MASTERS FROM THE CLARK COLLECTION ON VIEW AT CAIXAFORUM IN BARCELONA

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In April 1874 the first exhibition was held in the studio of the photogra-pher Nadar, in the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, of a group of painters who had been rejected in the Official Salon: the Impressionists. European art entered into a new stage, marked by a series of very rapid changes that, in just a few years, dispensed with appearance, natural colours, the subject and perspective: the elements that, since the Renaissance, had characterised pictorial representation.

When Sterling Clark moved to Paris in 1910, some of the leading artists of this pictorial revolution were still alive. In 1916 Clark bought the painting Girl crocheting by Auguste Renoir, attracted by the colour and sensuality of the feminine image. It was the culminant point of a passion that led him to bring together an extraordinary collection of works of French painting that crossed over from the 19th to the 20th century. Clark did not share the iconoclastic spirit so common in many of the manifestations of contemporary art. Quite the contrary, he sought continuity between the creations of the past and the present. The works he acquired, mainly from the early stage of Impressionism, existed alongside the old masters as well as the immediately previous painting styles, free of ruptures.

This exhibition presents the masterpieces of the French painting collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. To begin with, it reconstructs the path that led to Impressionism, when a group of painters –Camille Corot, Jean-François Millet, Constant Troyon and Théodore Rousseau— decided to move to the wood of Barbizon, close to Fontainebleau, in order to be able to paint in the open air. Traditionally, the landscape had been the backcloth of mythological or religious scenes. The artists from the Barbizon school moved it into the foreground and established an intimate relationship, as if they wanted to merge it with nature.

The Impressionists quickly followed their steps. The early compositions by Claude Monet, Gustave Caillebotte or Alfred Sisley aspire to retain the impression of a moment during the day, magnificently and sumptuously, through the effects of light and colour. Around 1880 Impressionism experienced a moment of plenitude with the work of Monet that lasted until the final consequences of the search for beauty. The painting is the result of the superimposition of individual brushstrokes that create the effect of an explosion of light, the point of flight disappears and the landscape becomes the object of a transcendental meditation.

The impressionists also renewed interior and still life painting: they chose simple subject matters linked to daily life in the country or city and portrayed them as no-one else had done until then: often with natural light, with a vibrant brushstroke that recreates the effect of the light on the surface of things.

Renoir was Sterling Clark’s great passion, and bought thirty-nine paintings by this artist –nudes, scenes of modern life, portraits, self-portraits, landscapes and still lives– with special emphasis on the early stage of his production, between 1874 and 1880, the period most linked to Impressionism.

All this research coexisted alongside the art of academic painters who placed the conventional subjects on the canvas: historic, religious and mythological works and portraits of important figures. For Sterling Clark any art could be good in its category. Thus, in his collection, the masterpieces by Impressionist painters share space with works by the best painters trained in the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris.

In the final part of the “Impressionists. French masters from the Clark Collection” exhibition, stress is made of the contribution of the Post-impressionists: from Honoré Daumier to Henry Toulouse-Lautrec, from Edouard Degas to Pierre Bonnard and Paul Gauguin. Bright and luminous colours, which do not always coincide with real colours and a conception of two-dimensional space, regardless of the laws of perspective.

Sterling Clark turned his personal passion into a collective heritage. In 1955 Clark created his own museum in Williamstown, in the state of Massachusetts and is today a reference centre for lovers of painting, with exhibition rooms and a research and higher education centre.

Website : CaixaForum Barcelona

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OF BEAUTY AND DEATH: ANIMAL STILL LIFES FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO MODERNISM IN KARLSRUHE

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The Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe unveiled a new major exhibition that will, for the first time ever, cast the spotlight on the rich history of the genre of the animal still life, spanning from the 16th to the 20th century. Over 120 paintings, watercolours and reliefs by such famous artists as Dürer, Rubens, Weenix, Chardin, Goya, Manet, Ensor, Kokoschka and Beckmann form a testimony of the subject’s importance. Besides works from our own collection, around 90 exquisite loans from renowned museums in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Munich, Paris, Stockholm, Vienna and Zurich provide insights into this fascinating pictorial world.

In its conception, the exhibition is based on the Kunsthalle’s own collection—a collection rich in animal paintings that dates back to the margraves and grand dukes of Baden, and which features works by Jan Fyt, Willem van Aelst, Jan Weenix, Nicolas de Largillierre, Jean Siméon Chardin and others. These works can now be viewed in a wider context thanks to the many loaned works also on display. The catalogue contains scholarly commentaries to all exhibits and sheds light on their art historical and cultural contexts.

The exhibition not only illustrates how the function and visual symbolism of the animal still life changed over the course of centuries, but also shows how the artists’ perception of the recurring motifs changed too. Alongside the enormous range in styles in their compositions, the images themselves are expressions of widely differing things: at once a symbol of aristocratic hunting pleasure, metaphors for human suffering and an expression of sensual experience.

The Renaissance saw the creation of works commissioned by rulers who had a passion for hunting. These works amount to the first independent depictions of slain beasts, their beauty captured even in death. One such ruler, Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, commissioned his court painter, Lucas Cranach the Elder, to create decorations featuring game birds for his hunting residences. The painted trophies were supposed to attest his hunting successes. At the same time, depictions of animals crept into Cranach’s history paintings, where they were imbued with a complex metaphorical significance. With scientific scrutiny, Dürer, by contrast, took up the depiction of animals in his early study of a slaughtered duck, faithfully rendering the creature’s plumage to the very last detail.

Following on from such pioneers as Cranach, in the late 16th century the animal still life evolved as a genre in its own right, first flourishing in Flanders, before being adopted by the Dutch in their ‘Golden Age’ in the 17th century and undergoing some striking changes in the process. Works by artists from the southern and northern Netherlands form two important focal points in the show. The exhibition also highlights works by French painters of the 18th century, the shift towards modernism around 1800, as well as the animal still lifes of the Impressionists and Expressionists in the 19th and 20th century.

The themed exhibition, conceived to give visitors a comprehensive overview of the genre, makes it clear how much the artists’ handling of the traditional motifs has changed over time. That said, however, the show also reveals the clear affinities between the works that cross centuries. Courbet, for instance, showed that he was influenced by the naturalistic technique and art of composition of a Jan Weenix. And in his depiction of a dead eagle owl, we see Manet’s response not just to Chardin but to the trompe-l’oeil in general, to which artists have repeatedly turned their hand in creating visual illusions since antiquity. Soutine’s pictures, meanwhile, reveal a close affinity with Goya’s works. In the hands of both artists, slaughtered animals become metaphors for human life.

Beyond their possible meanings, the genre of the animal still life presented artists of all epochs with a challenge of skill. The genre demanded painterly virtuosity, irrespective of whether they used the means of naturalistic optical illusion or free expression. Only by uniting the pictures from various epochs under one roof do the painterly affinities between the works become evident here today.

Website : Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe

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EXHIBITION IN STRASBOURG CELEBRATES TOMI UNGERER'S 80TH ANNIVERSARY

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The exhibit entitled “Tomi Ungerer and the Masters. Inspiration and Dialogue” held at the Tomi Ungerer Museum represents a high point in celebration of the artist’s 80th birthday. Approximately 300 works will be shown throughout the museum, a display that has been assembled from both private and public collections and the museum’s permanent collection treating the innovative theme of the illustrator’s work and its ties to the history of art. Indeed, specially selected pieces of his work take on numerous graphic, plastic and cinematographic references. A rich iconographic repertory of artists representing all styles and periods is therefore on view: the German Masters of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance [Baldung-Grien, Dürer, Grünewald, Holbein], Doré and German artists of the 19th century [Caspar David Friedrich, Ludwig Richter, Moritz von Schwind, Carl Spitzweg], Alsatian artists [Hansi, Loux, Sattler, Schnug], Dadaism and Surrealism [Arp, Ernst], satirical sketch artists [Busch, Daumier, Dubout, the caricaturists of Simplicissimus and Anglo-Saxon cartoonists Grandville, and Töpffer]. The exhibition also incorporates Bellmer, Dix, Ensor, Félicien-Rops, Goya, Grosz, Jones, Kubin, Lindner, Posada, Toulouse-Lautrec, von Bayros, Weaver and Wyeth. Dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote that Tomi Ungerer “imitated no one, but borrowed quite readily”. This multitude of influences is an undeniable component in the originality of his art.

A catalog published by the Museums of Strasbourg will be featured alongside the exhibition. A conference “Images modèles, images déplacées” has been organized for December 1st and 2nd in the Auditorium of the Museums of Strasbourg.

 Website : Tomi Ungerer Museum

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VIENNA'S KUNSTHAUS EXHIBITION

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The photographer, artist and film director Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) was a widely travelled, cosmopolitan observer of world events. Even during his lifetime, Henri CartierBresson, more than any other 20th-century photographer, was regarded as the personification of modern photography. He always emphasised that his passion was not for photography per se, but for life, and that he saw himself not as a traveller but as an observer of events, who sojourned in various different cultures.

Henri Cartier-Bresson studied painting with the cubist André Lhote, was influenced by the surrealists around André Breton and took inspiration from the philosophy of Zen Buddhism. He influenced generations of photographers through the aesthetic of his prolific photographic oeuvre and his penetrating thoughts on the theory and practice of photography. His book “Images à la Sauvette” (English title: “The Decisive Moment”), published in 1952, is one of the most-quoted volumes in the history of photography. In 1947 he co-founded Magnum Photos, an agency that became a benchmark for social commitment in photographic journalism as well as for highest photographic quality.

The exhibition takes us on a journey into Cartier-Bresson’s photographic cosmos, presenting photos taken by him over a period of five decades in three highly dissimilar countries – the USA, India and the Soviet Union – during important phases of their history.

America
Of all the countries that Henri Cartier-Bresson visited, the USA was of particular significance for his professional development as a photographer. After a year in Africa, followed by lengthy travels through Europe and Latin America and, finally, a year in Mexico, CartierBresson arrived in New York City in the spring of 1935. On long walks through its streets and boroughs, he photographed his impressions of the city during the years of economic crisis. He had decided to become a photographer in 1932, and only one year later his first solo exhibition had been held at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. Soon afterwards, his photographs also began appearing in the illustrated press.

After years as a prisoner of war in Germany and then as a member of the resistance in France, Cartier-Bresson returned to New York in the spring of 1946. In 1947 the Museum of Modern Art in New York devoted a first major retrospective to his works. Despite the recognition he was receiving from the art world, Cartier-Bresson turned to photographic journalism. He travelled with the author Truman Capote to New Orleans on assignment for Harper’s Bazaar, and took a road trip across the USA with the poet and critic John Malcolm Brinnin. The book containing his sobering images of conditions in the USA shortly after World War II was not published until almost half a century later, however

Although he was not present at the founding of Magnum Photos at the restaurant of the Museum of Modern Art in April of 1947, his influence on the development of this cooperative agency owned by the photographers themselves was to be strongly felt for many years to come. Cartier-Bresson and his co-founders Robert Capa, David Seymour, Richard Rodger and William Vandivert divided the world among them. Cartier-Bresson’s photographic territory was Asia, which determined his travels over the following years and was probably related to the fact that he was at that time married to the dancer Ratna Mohini of Jakarta, Indonesia. Nevertheless, he also spent long periods of time in the USA over the following decades, during which time he documented the development of the country in photographs and also made two documentary films.

India
During the years of massive geopolitical changes following World War II, Cartier-Bresson was often in exactly the right places at key moments in history. He observed the dramatic process of decolonisation in various Asian countries at close hand and captured the events on camera. Cartier-Bresson and his wife arrived in Bombay at the end of 1947, shortly after India had declared its independence.

On 30 January 1948, he had a private meeting with Mahatma Gandhi, during which the spiritual leader of India’s independence movement browsed through the catalogue of Cartier-Bresson’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Shortly after their conversation, Gandhi was assassinated. Cartier-Bresson rushed back to the house and photographed the events in the hours and days following Gandhi’s death. Those photographs went around the world.

Cartier-Bresson remained in India until September 1948 and returned to that country for a stay of several months in 1950 and again in 1966. Between those two trips, he travelled all over Asia, including China, where he documented the collapse of imperial China and the rise of Communism. His photos of India not only capture key moments in political history, but also offer insights into the everyday life of the various groups in Indian society and impressions of the culture and landscape of the subcontinent.

Soviet Union
When Joseph Stalin died in Moscow on 5 March 1953, Henri Cartier-Bresson applied for a visa to visit the Soviet Union. Thanks to a Soviet film director who presented CartierBresson’s book “Images à la Sauvette” at the Kreml, Cartier-Bresson was allowed to enter the USSR in July 1954, thereby becoming the first internationally renowned photographer to travel in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death. Although his movements were constantly monitored, Cartier-Bresson managed to document the everyday life of the people in this enormous country which at that time was essentially inaccessible to Westerners.

In addition to Moscow, he visited Georgia, Uzbekistan and the Caucasus. In 1955, two extensive photo series by Cartier-Bresson appeared in magazines such as LIFE and Paris Match. Here, too, Cartier-Bresson was on the scene during a historically significant phase. Stalin’s death signified the end of an era and brought a temporary thaw in relations between the two power blocs surrounding the superpowers USA and Soviet Union during the Cold War. Cartier-Bresson returned in the early 1970s to update his impressions of the USSR, as was his custom with many other countries.

Website : Kunst Haus Wien

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COLLECTION OF 300 DRAWINGS MADE DURING RODIN'S LAST THIRTY YEARS ON VIEW AT THE MUSEE RODIN

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Auguste Rodin

Femme nue dans ses voiles
© Musée Rodin - Photo : Jean de Calan




We know Rodin the sculptor, but do we know Rodin the creator of drawings? This exhibition spectacularly presents a collection of 300 drawings of his last thirty years. During the last part of his life, drawing was the artist’s predominant form of expression.

At over 60, Rodin embarked upon a true career as a drawer. He had always drawn, but the drawings that date from after 1890 can be considered the last manifestation of his genius. Drawing every day from a live model, his passion resulted in a collection of nearly 7,000 pages, brought together almost in its entirety at the Musée Rodin. Starting in 1903, the museum organized several exhibitions devoted exclusively to the body of his works in drawing. The Musée Rodin’s ambition is to reconnect with the richness and the breadth of these exhibitions, allowing the public to discover this little-known aspect of his talent.

Through the reconstitution of the major identifiable series (little drawings in ink and watercolor from the years 1890-1895; the Psyches; the Women in Peignoir; the Cambodian Dancers; the shaped and shaded drawings of around 1910; the last drawings, splashed with color, to name just a few), certain themes and characteristics of the artist’s drawings are explored, such as the practice of drawing and the importance of the form that is changed, corrected, erased, cut up, folded in two; the mastery of the continuous and synthetic line; the relationship of body to space; and, finally, the femme fatal or the sexual bodies.

The proposed sequence of the exhibition will end with Rodin’s final drawings, which demonstrate the extraordinary tension the artist introduced between the naturalism of a drawing, capturing a gesture, a movement in all its immediacy, and the increasing independence of line and color. Rodin’s freedom in drawing contributed to opening an immense space for the artists of the 20th century. The true mission of the exhibition is to make the viewer sense this liberty.

On the occasion of this exhibition, the museum will also present a selection of works drawn by the artist Paul-Armand Gette, whose set of themes surrounding the feminine body echo Rodin’s drawings, on the first floor of the Hôtel Biron.

Website : Musée Rodin

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VINCENT VAN GOGH AND PAUL GAUGUIN'S JOURNEY ON VIEW AT THE PALAZZO DUCALE IN GENOA

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In April 1897 Paul Gauguin had already been back in Tahiti for two years. His health was poor and he rarely worked outside in the lush natural world or by the ocean. He spent much more time in his studio. That month he received the news from his wife Mette that his daughter Aline, at the age of only twenty, had died in Copenhagen in January from complications due to pneumonia. Gauguin was utterly distraught at this news and in the following months he gradually resolved to take his own life. Illness and distance from home were an unbearable weight. But before leaving the world he wished to paint his masterpiece, one last great work summing up the meaning of his journey in the world and among the lights of painting. So he ordered fresh paints and lots of brushes, some very large, from Paris. On Tahiti he had an enormous canvas made, almost four meters long and one and a half meters high.

Having been admitted to the French Hospital with heart problems on the second day of December 1897, he immediately walked out again and set to work on an epoch-making painting, one of the most celebrated works in the whole of the history of art. By the end of December the painting was finished, and the day before old year's night he climbed up into the mountains with a jar of arsenic, bent on suicide. But he swallowed so much all at once that he immediately vomited the poison. Prey to convulsions and in terrible pain, he lay on the mountain for a whole day until he eventually managed to stagger back down to the village for help. What survives from this whole experience is the celebrated painting Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?, which thanks to an equally epoch-making loan will be on show in Genoa as the finest jewel in an already extraordinarily rich exhibition. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts is lending the work for only the fourth time ever and only the second time in Europe, after Paris around ten years ago.

A visit to the exhibition Van Gogh and Gauguin's Journey will thus be an absolutely unique experience. This work is a world rarity and the idea that it will be on show in Italy is quite unbelievable. No other work, moreover, could better illustrate the sense of the journey that the Genoa exhibition wishes to explore: the journey as geographical exploration, as physical movement and also as an inner voyage. We could almost say that without this painting the exhibition would not have been possible or that this unique painting could be a whole exhibition unto itself.

But this stunning exhibition actually consists of 80 masterpieces of 19th- and 20th-century European and American painting from museums worldwide, inspired by Vincent van Gogh's preeminent role in the art of the two centuries in question. The extraordinary adventure of the "journey" – the ultimate, innermost meaning of the exhibition – gradually developed around his ever-burning flame.

This journey is not only from one place to another and, therefore, through the "spaces" mentioned in the subtitle. It is also a digging deep into self on an equally long and at times more challenging adventure. The twofold meaning thus alludes to journeys with all their physical and geographical connotations, discoveries and explorations, and interior spiritual journeys.

Van Gogh fuses both journeys in his painting. On these grounds, thirty-five of his most significant works (twenty-five paintings and ten drawings), almost all loaned by the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam and the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, form the core of this exceptional Genoa exhibition documenting the transition from the gloominess of Dutch interiors to the almost unbearable brightness of the southern sun. In his self images more than any other subject Van Gogh sought to portray both an interior world and an exterior world. The exhibition thus features the greatly acclaimed Self-Portrait as an Artist, painted in 1888 and exceptionally loaned for the occasion by the Van Gogh Museum. This painting is a perfect, extreme synthesis of the unsolved tension between a journey as leading to somewhere and a journey to isolation.

Not by chance this painting alone emerging from darkness will be displayed in the doge's chapel, the second to last room. It's a seal before reaching the very last picture, portraying a haystack flied over by crows, which are heading towards territories in a journey of no return.

Wheat stack under a cloudy sky, depicted by the artist only three weeks before his death will be displayed to the public for the first time in over forty years. It represents just one of the extraordinary fruits born by this garden, along with, for example, some of the letters written by Van Gogh to his brother Theo and related to the paintings shown at Palazzo Ducale. Fragments of paper similar to holy pictures in a room plunged into darkness that will certainly and deeply touch the viewer.

Van Gogh is thus at the centre of the exhibition with numerous, authentic masterpieces, including the most celebrated version of The Sower, painted at Arles in June 1888, and Shoes. The latter painting of the artist's own worn-down boots could not be a more fittingly symbolic subject in an exhibition on the theme of the journey.

Another two sections in the exhibition – one before and one after Van Gogh – feature American and European painting, respectively. The section on 19th-century American painting is an exploration of unknown territories or the description of a space that was shaping the identity of a new nation. Two painters have been chosen to represent this longing for the unknown, this pathos or primordial force driving them on the journey towards a longed-for place almost to be embraced, had the dimension of the embrace not been out of all proportions: Edwin Church, the painter of the East, of the Hudson Valley, and the Maine coast; and Albert Bierstadt, the painter of the West, of the discovery of Yellowstone and Yosemite.

After a gap of a few years, we come to Winslow Homer's journey on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, to Prout’s Neck on the Maine coast. That journey made at the turn of the century ended in the solitude of stormy waters and the darkness of a whirlpool mirrored by black swirling clouds massed in the sky. Another extraordinary painter, Andrew Wyeth, was to paint the same Maine coast for the whole of the second half of the 20th century, continuing the figurative tradition not only of Homer but also of Edward Hopper, an artist who captured the sense of the journey in provincial America in dumb syllables of stunned silence. He also grasped the feeling of interior journeys in some of his most famous mute and pensive figures.

After Hopper's nights and dark bends, the exhibition continues with the almost monochrome surfaces of Mark Rothko and one of the most remarkable interior journeys that the history of painting has ever witnessed. A journey plumbing the depths of land and water to transform everything into the bruise-like hints of waves. Rothko provides a fascinating comparison with Turner, when his blacks and browns are seen side-by-side on the walls with the almost identical seashores painted by the English artist a century and a half before. After Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn converts sea storms into his electrifying Ocean Parks as he watches the buzzing flow of electricity wires from a high window overlooking the Pacific.

And while the American section ends here, the European painting section begins from the mind's journey when confronted with the infinite of Caspar David Friedrich, a small boat heading its way in the fog. William Turner, on the other hand, blends paint with paint, color with color, ash with ash, water with water, fire with fire, and painting with painting in the swirling of a journey harnessing the power of the elements.

Paul Gauguin’s journey was to the antipodes, first Tahiti and then Martinique. He couldn’t have gone further to discover new color and measure the distance from the education of feeling to feeling in its primordial state. Here the journey is seeing afar and being elsewhere. Monet's journey, on the other hand, is round the sheltered enclosure of the garden at Giverny and in water lilies blooming like wreaths. His journey is inside the light that touches the eye and reveals colours and so sanctions their dissolution.

Lastly, the mental journey of Wassily Kandinsky, in everyday contact with an eventful, at times even morbid vision, shaped out forms generating dreams and enchantments, trepidation and memories. His journey is patently bound to European culture in the first half of the 20th century and by the mid-century that culture – in a kind of epic and also tragic parallel to Rothko – saw Nicolas de Staël set off on a tormented journey from the whitewashed walls of Agrigento to the sheer cliffs of Antibes soaring up into a sky pierced by gulls.

But at the center, monumental and tragic, tormented and splendid, Van Gogh is still an immensely inspiring figure with his cornfields haunted by flapping crows or his gentle gardens in bloom. He is the heart and soul of this extraordinary exhibition, which naturally includes a large group of his paintings.

Genoa is thus the stage for an incredible, superb exhibition of Van Gogh masterpieces. Not to mention the momentous loan of Gauguin's Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? and even more masterpieces by great artists from Hopper to Kandinsky.

Website : Palazzo Ducale

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HAITIAN ARTISTS INVITE WESTERN AND NON-WESTERN ARTISTS TO 2ND GHETTO BIENNALE

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Jean Hérard Celeur.




The 2nd Ghetto Biennale is due to take place from 28th November until 18th December 2011. The 1st ‘Ghetto Biennale’ was held in December 2009 and was hosted by the Atis-Rezistans, the Sculptors of Grand Rue. They invited fine artists, film-makers, academics, photographers, musicians, architects and writers, to come to the Grand Rue area of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, to make or witness work that was shown or happened, in their neighbourhood. In the words of the writer John Keiffer it was a “'third space'...an event or moment created through a collaboration between artists from radically different backgrounds”. Artists from many countries including Australia, Italy, the UK, Jamaica, the USA and Cuba came to Haiti to participate in the Ghetto Biennale.

This is not in reality a Biennale, as traditionally conceived, rather an invitation by a group of Haitian artists to visiting Western and non-Western artists to come to Haiti and "make work" with them to produce a show at the end. There are a number of complex and over-lapping motives for this event.

The lack of formal arts training in Haiti, whilst possibly liberating in many ways, leaves youths and artists sometimes very frustrated in their thirst for new ideas, influences, mediums and aesthetics. The Ghetto Biennale is an arena within which the visiting artists and academics can share philosophies, ideas and aesthetic practices with Haitian arts practitioners.

Presentation is an important aspect of the work of Atis-Rezistans and they have created a unique and local site specific installation in their own neighbourhood. This project has allowed Haitian artists to expose their work, in situ, to the visiting artists, curators, journalists and academics. This has given Haitian artists' the chance to reach a far wider audience, make important contacts and integrate with wider arts networks.

Atis-Rezistans also want to use the Ghetto Biennale to portray a more creative aspect of Haitian reality, to counterbalance the current, dominant negative portrayal of the country. The Ghetto Biennale is an alternative model of tourism which brings visitors who can have positive and creative experiences in Haiti and learn about the rich cultural heritage.

The Ghetto Biennale attracted a large local audience for the final exhibition which significantly broadened the national demographic for arts event attendance.

This project highlights issues of migration and global freedoms of association and gives collaborative and creative possibilities between artists from radically different backgrounds to explore and address these issues. This project is also about institutional critique which will question the advancement of globalisation and Western hegemony. We envision this as the first of many conversations.

The Ghetto Biennale will be holding a congress at the end of the event for the Haitian artists, the visiting artists, Haitian and visiting academics to formally express their experiences and create a dialogue which will hopefully contribute to a debate on the globalisation of art history and the positioning of non-Western art. We hope to use it as a basis to interrogate many terms, cultural positions and arts practices.

The Ghetto Biennale is due to take place between the dates 28th November until 18th December. There will be an event displaying the works created during the process on 16th December and all the artists will be present for a final conference on the 17th December. The Ghetto Biennale is organised and curated by Andre Eugene, Leah Gordon and Celeur Jean Herard.

Website : The 2nd Getto Biennale 2011

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DUTCH LANDSCAPES: PAINTINGS FROM THE ROYAL COLLECTION ON VIEW AT THE BOWES MUSEUM

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Meyndert Hobbema, A Watermill by a Woody Lane. Photo: The Royal Collection © 2011, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.




Dutch Landscapes: Paintings from the Royal Collection, which is on show at The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, brings together 38 remarkable works from the ‘golden age’ of Dutch painting, generously lent by Her Majesty The Queen.

The exhibition, which opened on Saturday 12 November, draws on the Royal Collection’s rich holdings of Dutch 17th century landscapes, presenting outstanding examples by the great masters of landscape, including Jacob van Ruisdael, Aelbert Cuyp, Jan van der Heyden and Meyndert Hobbema.

By the 17th century, landscape painting was well established as a distinct art form and one in which Netherlandish artists excelled. Artists turned to the countryside and to the sea to convey a pride in their homeland – the newly formed Dutch United Provinces – following the Eighty Years War with Spain. As the foundation of trade and empire, the sea was the most important force in Dutch life, and its importance is manifest in the large number of marine artists active at this time.

The fine detail and the meticulous finish of the paintings held particular appeal for British tastes, and a majority of the works in the exhibition were later acquired by King George IV when Prince Regent between 1809-1820.

The ability of Netherlandish artists to depict mood and emotion through their work also inspired and influenced the great British landscape painters John Constable and J M W Turner. Constable admired the ‘acres of sky expressed’ in Ruisdael’s Evening Landscape: A Windmill by a Stream, and on seeing a seascape by Villem van de Velde the Younger, Turner remarked: “Ah! That made me a painter.”

While many Dutch painters found inspiration in their immediate surroundings, others travelled to Italy in pursuit of mountainous vistas and golden light. Since the early 16th century there had been a colony of northern artists in a small quarter of Rome, immediately inside the Porta del Popolo – the setting of Figures before a Locanda, by Johannes Lingelbach.

The Royal Collection contains an outstanding group of works by Aelbert Cuyp, the most poetic of all Dutch landscape artists. His works are imbued with an extraordinary luminosity and spectrum of light that sets them apart from those of other 17th century Dutch landscape artists. The earliest painting in the group, Cows in a Pasture Beside a River, before Ruins, may have been intended as a celebration of the end of the war and the anticipated benefits of peace.

Aelbert Cuyp never ventured to the Mediterranean, but saw Italy through the works of his contemporaries. In his Evening Landscape with Figures and Sheep, the distinctly Dutch terrain is bathed in the warm colours and soft tones of Italy.

Website : Bowes Museum

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REFLEX GALLERY OFFERS RARE OPPORTUNITY TO VIEW A SELECTION OF ROGER BALLEN'S WORK IN AMSTERDAM

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Roger Ballen, "Five Hands". Archival Pigment Print, 90 x 90 cm. Courtesy Galerie Alex Daniels - Reflex Amsterdam and Roger Ballen.




Roger Ballen is regarded as one of the world’s foremost practitioner’s of black and white photography. He has been shooting in monochrome for nearly half a century, from his renowned documentary images of South African villagers to his recent extraordinary explorations of the psyche and its aesthetic.

Ballen’s work has been exhibited across the globe, and is widely collected by the world’s important art institutions, from Moma in New York, to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

The Reflex Gallery, Amsterdam, presents a rare opportunity to view a selection of Ballen’s work from over the past 20 years. The exhibition will showcase iconic images from his acclaimed books, Shadow Chamber, Outland, and Boarding House, as well as important photographs that have never been shown before. In their rich complexity and visual daring, the 25 works on display challenge the viewer’s perception of photography and its relation to art - and to life.

These multi-layered photographs illuminate Ballen’s fascination with the animal kingdom and our complicated relationship to animals and birds. He invites us to reconsider that dynamic:

A bird spreading its wings mirrors the concertina of an accordion. A snake slithers across a drawing of a boy whose eyes peer out of a tiger skin stretched across his face. A siamese crouches on a chaise-longue next to a woman wearing a cat mask. Are these playful scenes, or is there a note of menace? Who is in control – us or them?

“I feel an affinity with animals,” Ballen says. “There is something mysterious and beautiful about them that is hard to put your finger on. They don’t give their secrets away.”

Consistently in these works, Ballen insists on obscuring human identity. All we are given are masked figures, or disembodied hands and feet. It is unsettling, ambiguous. The addition of drawing and collage present yet more layers for us to decipher.

Each image invites careful study, providing multiple readings, multiple meanings. Ballen leaves it to the viewer to make his mind up.

“I want, consciously, or unconsciously, to get to the meaning of life.”

Galerie Alex Daniels cordially invites you to the opening of the exhibition on Saturday, November 12th between 5 and 7 pm in the presence of the artist.

Animal Abstraction, a collection of images from the exhibition as well as other important photographs, is published by Reflex Gallery in conjunction with the show. Roger Ballen will be signing copies of the book at the opening. A portfolio in a limited edition with an original print matching the show will be presented at the opening.

Website : The Reflex Gallery

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EXHIBITION AT VIENNA'S ALBERTINA PRESENTS AN EXTENSIVE TRIBUTE TO RENE MAGRITTE

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René Magritte

Time Transfixed, 1938
Oil on canvas
The Art Institute of Chicago © Charly HERSCOVICI Brussels - 2011 © VBK Wien, 2011




As the year 2011 is drawing to a close, the Albertina is presenting an exhibition highlight with an extensive tribute to René Magritte, one of the most renowned and popular artists of the 20th century. Some 250 exhibits from all over the world, including 150 important paintings and works on paper, cover every creative phase of the Belgian Surrealist’s career. More than 90 lenders have contributed to this great retrospective, thus enabling the Albertina to present every single one of Magritte’s masterpieces. Works such as The Menaced Assassin, The Secret Player, The Gigantic Days, Time Transfixed, The Eternal Evidence, Golconda and The Empire of Light represent Magritte as a main exponent of Surrealism – undoubtedly the most prominent and memorable one next to Dalí. Magritte’s works are not only popular but also have a great intellectual appeal and continue to fascinate present-day viewers due to their enigmatic and mysterious nature.

Magritte was primarily a painter of ideas, an artist of visible thoughts rather than of subject matter. His anti-modernist objectivity, juxtaposed to the avant-garde, may not have enriched art history in terms of form, but did all the more so in terms of motif. In his almost anti-formalist oeuvre he dealt with the material world in a provocative and confusingly open manner. All the objects he painted were clearly recognizable, belonging to the banal, everyday sphere. But when Magritte presented them according to his poetic logic, in an order that cast a completely different light on them and gave them an entirely new power, their meaning began to waver. The recognition of the motifs collided with the mystery of the combination: Magritte brought together things that did not belong together. The artist exposed the viewer’s perception and usual way of seeing as tacit consent and convention, turning the causality of our world view upside down with the depiction of inexplicable metamorphoses, the reversal of the world, the transformation of proportions and surrealistic combinations.

Interior and exterior spaces are connected in a deceptive manner, day and night collide, objects and human bodies merge into one another, and the more distinctly we recognize each object, the more enigmatic the mystery of reality becomes.

Magritte’s paintings draw their generally gloomy atmosphere from the cold and unemotionally staged aesthetics of the depicted subject. Bourgeois orderliness and an ambience of old-fashioned cleanliness turn each space into an eerie crime scene, regardless of whether a murder actually took place or not.

In his extensive oeuvre, comprising paintings, drawings, objects, photographs and short films, Magritte employed a limited number of carefully chosen motifs, reusing them in ever-new combinations to create a complex, surreal world of images.

The green apple, the pipe, the man with the bowler hat, the egg, the rock, the curtain, and the sea are some of the elements Magritte repeatedly took up again. They stand for continuity in his creative work and have become the artist’s trademark.

Reflected in almost all of his works, Magritte’s exceptionally eloquent wit is legendary. He pits the symbol against the symbolic, while the occupation with language and parlance generally occupy a prominent position. In his paintings Magritte was influenced by the philosophical theories of the early 20th century, dealing with issues regarding the concurrence of our perceptions, their verbal description and the actual appearance of reality. He was also striving for analogies of an idea, its image and its actual existence, such as in his famous painting The Treachery of Images where he wrote beneath the depiction of a pipe: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”).

Magritte’s paintings not only influenced the abstract artistic tendencies of the early 20th century but also Conceptual art and Pop art of the 1960s as well as the analytical approach in contemporary art. In addition, advertising and video clips have been based for decades on the formal principles characteristic of Magritte.

With the additional presentation of the artist’s early commercial art, his photographic experiments and his late, bizarrely absurd short films, the exhibition in the Albertina covers all aspects and phases of Magritte’s creative activity, thus drawing the first comprehensive picture of his complex Surrealist method as well as the continuity of recurring motif groups. As yet another highlight the exhibition provides a profound look into Magritte’s life and working method with extensive photo and film footage as well as original documents.

In thirteen chapters, the exhibition retraces the chronological and content-related developments in his art: starting with the classical Surrealist paintings from the 1920s and 1930s, based on the principle of film and collage, and the autobiographically tinted works in which he dealt, among other things, with his mother’s suicide, to the experimental phases of the post-war period, defined by Magritte as “Surrealism in full sunlight” and his période vache (“cow period”), and concluding with his late work, featuring the mysterious day-and-night paintings of the famous Empire of Light series and the “anonymous portraits” of men wearing bowler hats.

The exhibition in the Albertina is not the first presentation of the great Belgian Surrealist’s work in Vienna. The wealth of ideas and omnipresent mystery of his works, however, almost call for a repeated examination of his artistic activity to discover hitherto neglected aspects and thus sharpen our view of his work and our reality. This is made possible thanks to the generous loan of artworks from the most important museums of modern art, including the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (Magritte Museum), Brussels, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, The Menil Collection, Houston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, as well as from prestigious private collections from all over the world. With The Enchanted Spot (1953) the Albertina is in the possession of a major work from the artist’s late period. The René Magritte retrospective is part of a current special focus program on Surrealist art, introduced by the Albertina in 2008 with an exhibition dedicated to Max Ernst’s Surrealistic novel in collage Une semaine de bonté (“A Week of Kindness”), and will be continued with a Max Ernst retrospective scheduled for 2013 as well as with the presentation of Surrealist graphic art from the renowned Gilbert and Lena Kaplan Collection, New York, shown parallel to the René Magritte retrospective.

Website : Albertina

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ARTISTS' FASCINATION WITH FORESTS IS THE FOCUS OF EXHIBITION AT KUNSTHALLE WÜRTH IN GERMANY

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The fascinations of the forest! Hardly another subject in art history can match the forest for expressive potential and a concomitant multiplicity of meanings. As a favourite setting for fairy tales, forests formed an essential projection screen during childhood. The mostly young heroes and heroines went astray there, encountered unusual creatures, were transformed, enchanted, or gobbled up, only to prevail in the end. The phantasmagorical ideas of Romantic painters, writers, and composers still move us in the twenty-first century and have become embedded in our feeling and thinking. Doesn't a stroll in the woods still hold the promise of time to think and recuperate from humdrum life?

In the course of the nineteenth century, Romantic ideas spread so rapidly and widely that something known as the "scientific forest aesthetic" emerged. Woods developed from "untamed wilderness" to sites for an enjoyment of nature and finally into "suburban recreation areas" or even city parks designed to soothe the eye with subtle gradations of green, in foliage, water, and mosses.

In this year's autumn show, the Kunsthalle Würth addresses the multifarious art-historical aspects of the (German) awareness of nature and forests. The range of works on view extends from various myths of creation, such as "the tree of know­ledge" (represented in a painting by Lucas Cranach) through essentially German ideas of the "sacred grove" as the original myth of the Teutons (established, by way of Tacitus, by the victorious Battle of the Teutoburg Forest), from the pantheistic view of nature in Romanticism through the romance of the forest in the Biedermeier period, down to notions of forests as gloomy haunts of outsiders in early industrial society, conveyed by German fairy tales.

The conception of the city park, which owed to what Baudelaire termed modernité, is taken account of in the exhibition, as is the Expressionists' ur-forest that transcended external reality, and the forest metamorphosed into an enigmatic, impenetrable locale in Surrealism. In the late nineteen-twenties the Surrealists located their "antagonist" in the German forest—clairvoyantly anticipating what Martin Heidegger, looking back on the horrifying recent past in 1951, would term the Holzwege, the woodland paths that had led to disorientation and destruction.

As a subject of art, the edifying forest temporarily became a no-go area at that period. Not until the middle of the nineteen-seventies, when dying forests were much-debated, did they re-emerge from the emotionally charged taboo zone into the light of day. The German word "Waldsterben" was even adopted in English. Terms and sayings like carved of good wood, a chip off the old block, a man like an oak, something's in the bush, to be firmly rooted in something are still current. In their German versions, these reflect a great, uninterrupted degree of identification with the country's stands of trees which, as Elias Canetti noted, fill "the German heart with deep and secret joy."

Encompassing about 150 works from the Würth Collection from Cranach to Hockney, the exhibition invites visitors to enjoy a stroll through the incessantly changing attitudes of artists to the myth of the forest.

Website : Kunsthalle Würth

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FIRST LOAN EXHIBITION OF CHINNERY'S WORK IN BRITAIN FOR OVER 50 YEARS ON VIEW ET ASIA HOUSE LONDON

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George Chinnery (1774-1852), Street scene , Macao , with pigs. Oil on canvas, 20.6 x 24.4 cm© V&A Images / Victoria and Albert Museum, London.



George Chinnery is one of the most neglected British artists in his native country. Whilst there have been substantial exhibitions of his work in Lisbon (1995), Tokyo (1996), Hong Kong (2005) and recently in Macau (2010), there has been no public exhibition in Britain since the Arts Council show in 1957, and prior to that a retrospective at the Tate in 1932. Therefore the exhibition on view at Asia House in London from 4 November 2011 to 21 January 2012 is long overdue and promises to surprise and delight the visitor.

Among British artists Chinnery is a most unusual case. He spent the last fifty years of his life in India and on the China coast, where he died and lies buried, and almost all his best work was done in the East. Other 'orientalist' artists from Europe might dip a toe (sometimes more) into Asia, and return to make a living by working up and recycling their sketches, but Chinnery never came back. In Calcutta, Canton and Macau he became something of an exotic creature himself – exuberant, droll, unpredictable, a man who relished his status as the oldest of old hands on the China coast.

George Chinnery was born in London in 1774, trained at the Royal Academy Schools (where Turner was a contemporary), and had early success in Ireland. In 1802 he sailed to India, where he was joined briefly – many years later – by his wife and children. Many other European artists had tried their luck in India, returning sometimes richer, sometimes poorer, but Chinnery’s career followed a different course. He spent twenty-three years in India, where – despite many lucrative commissions – he became hopelessly enmeshed in debt. Unable to return home, he sailed to the China coast to evade his creditors. Against all the odds, he lived on for another twenty-seven years, within the expatriate community at Macau, Canton and, for a short while, Hong Kong. Productive to the end, he was sought out by travellers who wanted to imitate his drawings and to meet the eccentric genius of the China coast.

At his best he was a splendid artist. For a living he painted portraits of swaggering lieutenants, hoary governors and their beribboned wives, American sea-captains, and Chinese and Parsi merchants. George Chinnery immersed himself in these Asian cultures and his drawings and watercolours of local people and their daily activities are regarded by many as his most compelling work: crowded market scenes, fishermen landing on the beach, blacksmiths working at their bellows, gamblers playing in the street, boat-people making makeshift shelters, junks at anchor on a calm evening.

The exhibition comprises some 100 works showing Chinnery’s range, from oils and watercolours to landscapes and portraits – with a special emphasis on his vivid and deceptively simple watercolours, and his fluent drawings of the people going about their everyday lives. Also included are a group of his self-portraits, presenting ‘the ugliest man on the China coast’ as he regarded himself, at varying ages and in contrasting states of mind.

Exhibits will be drawn from major UK institutions such as the British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, National Portrait Gallery, British Library, The Courtauld Gallery, as well as from private collections, and the majority of the loans have not been seen by the British public before.

One of the earliest works in the exhibition is an appealing pencil and watercolour portrait of Marianne, whom he had married in Dublin in 1799, which contradicts his later claims that she was extremely ugly. Both George Chinnery and Marianne appear, thinly disguised, in Clavell’s hugely successful novel Tai-pan as ‘Aristotle Quance, genius of the brush and inveterate philanderer...and his domineering Irish wife, Maureen…’. A portrait of the Kirkpatrick children has a poignant story. The children of mixed-race parentage, their father was Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick, a powerful figure at the Hyderabad court, and their mother Khair un-Nissa was IndoPersian. They were painted by Chinnery shortly before being sent to England, never to see their parents again, and their story is told by William Dalrymple in his book White Mughals. Colonel Kirkpatrick died soon after they left and his widow travelled a thousand miles to see his grave, the portrait travelling with her on the back of an elephant.

One of Chinnery’s best known works is the portrait of the ‘hong merchant’ known to Westerners as Mowqua, a prominent member of the ‘co-hong’, the group of Chinese merchants appointed to deal with the foreign merchants and take responsibility for their behaviour. Mowqua, described as ‘a great character’, was regarded as the second-ranking Hong merchant after Howqua, the companion portrait of whom is also included in the exhibition. Here he is shown lounging in his chair which contrasts the more formal pose of his compatriot.

The exhibition also includes works by Chinnery’s contemporaries such as the pen and watercolour drawing of Tom Raw visits Chinnery in his studio by Sir Charles D’Oyly (1781-1845), illustrating the long satirical poem about the innocent young cadet newly arrived in India. Having your portrait painted by Chinnery was a rite of passage! However, according to D’Oyly, Chinnery liked ‘landscape painting a thousand times better than portrait painting and this is evident in the group of Figures at the water’s edge by a ruined tomb, Bengal and the stunning panoramic view of Macao. The latter is a study for an oil painting, also in the exhibition, and contrasts the more intimate studies of street traders and fishermen.

The exhibition is curated by Dr Patrick Conner who was formerly Keeper of Fine Art at the Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums, Brighton. He is currently Director of the Martyn Gregory Gallery, London, specialists in historical paintings related to the China Trade. Dr Conner’s publications include Oriental Architecture in the West, and George Chinnery, artist of India and the China Coast. His most recent book is entitled The Hongs of Canton – Western Merchants in South China 1700-1900. He has curated a number of loan exhibitions exploring the relationships between 'Eastern' and 'Western' cultures, including The China Trade 1600-1860 (Brighton, 1986), and Impressions of the East. The Art of George Chinnery (Hong Kong Museum of History, 2005).

Website : Asia House

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JEAN COCTEAU SEVERIN WUNDERMAN COLLECTION OPENS IN MENTON, FRANCE

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Jean Cocteau first visited, and fell in love with, Menton while staying with his friend Francine Weissweiller in Saint-Jean Cap-Ferrat, in the summer of 1955. He would return to the town on a regular basis.

In 1956, at the mayor's request, he began painting a huge fresco in the Town Hall's Wedding Room, completing the work in 1958. He was subsequently declared an honorary citizen of Menton.

While out walking one day, Cocteau came upon the Bastion, an abandoned seventeenth-century fort, built into the jetty. He decided he would transform it into a setting for his work, designing its interior himself.

The Bastion Museum opened in 1966, three years after Cocteau's death. It is still home to some of his "Mediterranean" works from the period 1950 to 1963.

Severin Wunderman, collector and donator
Born in Belgium in 1938 and exiled to the United States during the Second World War, Severin Wunderman made his career in luxury watches.

An art lover and great admirer of Jean Cocteau, he acquired the first piece in his collection - an original drawing for Les Enfants Terribles - by chance. It cost the 19-year-old apprentice-watchmaker his entire first wages.

Severin Wunderman built his collection over time, and in 1985 set up a first Jean Cocteau museum in Irvine (California). However, his dearest wish was that a large part of his collection should return to France and a museum there.

Like Cocteau, Severin Wunderman fell under Menton's spell. It was here that he met Jean-Claude Guibal, a member of parliament and mayor of the town who agreed to help him bring his idea to fruition.

On June 27th 2005, with the collection now donated, the town of Menton with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Communication announced its intention to build a public museum. The first stone was laid on December 29th 2008 at a ceremony from which Severin Wunderman was sadly absent, having passed away a few months earlier.

In September 2005, the Ministry of Culture and Communication approved the entry of the Severin Wunderman collection in the inventory of the Jean Cocteau Museum, a Musée de France since 2003.

A donation of 1,800 works
Severin Wunderman's donation comprises 1,800 works of which 990 are by Jean Cocteau.

It is highly representative of Cocteau's work, spanning every period from the first self-portraits of the 1910s to the "Mediterranean" period towards the end of his life, still largely unknown to the public.

The museum will show paintings, drawings, ceramics, tapestries, jewellery, photography, audio documents and film excerpts, in addition to 450 works by the great masters of modern art who were a part of Jean Cocteau's circle, including Picasso, Modigliani, De Chirico, Miró and Foujita, along with an exceptional body of 360 works relating to Sarah Bernhardt, for whom Cocteau coined the term monstre sacré.

Alongside masterpieces showing Cocteau's multi-facetted genius, the collection will give insight into the man behind the artist, through portraits and testimonials by his artist friends.

The Jean Cocteau Severin Wunderman Collection Museum

Retracing the life of Jean Cocteau
Cocteau's work in the visual arts and theatre is presented chronologically and thematically in seven sequences. They chronicle the milestones and encounters in his life and work.

Chamber theatre (1899-1911)
Transformation (1912-1919)
A contentious spirit (1920-1923)
Jean L'Oiseleur (the bird-catcher) (1924-1929)
The blood of a poet (1930-1937)
Mysteries (1937-1948)
Testaments (1949-1963)

Some 150 to 200 new works will be hung each year. They will testify to Cocteau's manifold genius and to the density of his oeuvre.

The architecture
Looking out to the Mediterranean and impinging as lightly as possible on its surroundings, the building which Rudy Ricciotti has designed over 2,700 sq. m. will house all the works in the Severin Wunderman donation.

Inspired by the many facets of Cocteau's genius – Cocteau himself described his work as "an object that's hard to pick up" – the museum's architecture is summed up in its facade: voluntarily multiple, fragmented, sometimes elusive.

In addition to the permanent collections, the museum will include galleries for temporary exhibitions of contemporary drawing, a bookshop and a café. It will be a new hub for life and the arts in Menton.

Architect and engineer, winner of the Grand Prix for Architecture, Rudy Ricciotti is representative of a generation of architects who combine creative force with constructive culture. Based in Bandol, he is in the frontline of today's battle in the minefield of neo-Provencal regionalism. His work includes such landmarks of French architecture as the National Choreography Centre in Aix-en-Provence. He has also won international acclaim with his Bridge of Peace in Seoul, the Potsdam Philharmonic Concert Hall, the Venice Festivals Palace and the future Contemporary Art Museum in Liege.

Menton, "Pearl of France"
Between France and Italy, mountains and the sea, Menton is the stuff of dreams.

Is it the gentle way of life matched by a profoundly Mediterranean spirit that has earned the town its sobriquet, "Pearl of France"?

Avidly disputed, in 2011 Menton celebrates the 150th anniversary of its annexation to France.

Art and history line its streets, from the baroque Saint-Michel-Archange Basilica to the Bastion Museum. Menton is also famed for its extraordinary parks and gardens.

The Jean Cocteau Severin Wunderman Collection Museum is a significant addition to the town's already rich cultural heritage.

Website : Ville de Menton - ouverture du musée

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EXHIBITION OF PAINTINGS BY ROMAIN VAN DER PLAS ON VIEW AT THE MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

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The Twin Towers and the City

World Trade Center #1
Courtesy the estate of Romain de Plas



 
 
 
 
A series of eight expressionist paintings by French-American artist Romain de Plas, 1971-2002, is now on view at the Museum of the City of New York through December 4, 2011. The highly-charged works portray the Towers in a range of modes from calm to agitated, suggesting rather than graphically depicting the chaos of the attacks. Shown in conjunction with photographs by Camilo Jose Vergara, who documented the World Trade Center for forty years, Romain de Plas’s paintings commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11 in this exhibition which has been on view since September 2, 2011.

Romain De Plas was born January 4, 1971, in Paris , France , and moved to New York City when still a child. He attended Brown University and went on to earn a degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts , Boston , in 1998. De Plas worked and for a time lived in a studio on Rivington Street in downtown Manhattan , which provided a view of the World Trade Center . Following the attacks, he worked in the early morning hours, trying to visually express the magnitude of the event and beginning what would become a series of 11 paintings. De Plas died suddenly on September 13, 2002, before he could bring his project to completion. The works on view serve as a meditation on the event and a tribute to the World Trade Center and those who died, some of whom were de Plas’s friends.

Although his work has been shown in Paris , Antwerp , and New York , the World Trade Center series has never before been exhibited.


 Website : Museum of the City of New York

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GROUNDBREAKING PERSPECTIVE ON CAMILLE PISSARRO AT THE LEGION OF HONOR IN SAN FRANCISCO

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Camille Pissarro, Jeanne Pissarro, Called Cocotte, Reading, 1899. Oil on canvas, 22 x 26 3/8 in. (56 x 67 cm). Collection of Ann and Gordon Getty.





Pissarro’s People brings us face to face with one of the most complex and captivating members of the Impressionist group, a man whose life was as quietly revolutionary as his art. The exhibition, on view October 22, 2011, to January 22, 2012, offers a groundbreaking perspective on Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), the painter and printmaker best known for his large body of landscapes and urban views. This is the first exhibition to focus on Pissarro’s personal ties and social ideas through his lifelong engagement with the human figure.

Based on extensive new scholarship by curator Dr. Richard R. Brettell, the exhibition brings together more than one hundred oil paintings and works on paper from public and private collections around the world. Ranging from Pissarro’s earliest years in Paris until his death in 1903, these works explore the three dimensions of his life that are essential to a full understanding of the human element in his art: his family ties, his friendships and his intense intellectual involvement with the social and political theories of his time.

According to Brettell, “Scholars have tended to treat Pissarro’s politics and his art in two separate categories, often refusing to see the most basic connections between them. This is largely because Pissarro was less a political activist than a social and economic philosopher. The title of the exhibition, Pissarro’s People, is not merely an allusion to his politics, but points to a larger attempt to explore all aspects of his humanism. The exhibition embodies his pictorial humanism and creates a series of contexts, linking his web of family and friends to his profound social and economic concerns.”

Exhibition Highlights
Presiding over the powerful themes of this exhibition are three of the artist’s four major self-portraits, starting with his earliest Self-Portrait (1873) from the Musée d’Orsay, painted at the age of forty-three. Pissarro’s People is the first exhibition to bring these works together with portrait likenesses of every member of the artist’s immediate family, reflecting the importance that he attached to his roles as devoted husband and father.

Pissarro was the only Impressionist who made figure paintings in which the domestic worker is the central motif. The exhibition brings together an extraordinary group of paintings representing maidservants and washerwomen, including The Maidservant (1875, Chrysler Museum of Art), Washerwoman, Study (1880, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), The Little Country Maid (1882, Tate Collection) and In the Garden at Pontoise: A Young Woman Washing Dishes (1882, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). The key theme of domestic labor is linked, in turn, to Pissarro’s views on agricultural labor and the market economy in works such as The Harvest (1882, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo), The Gisors Market (1887, Columbus Museum of Art) and his remarkable, biting album of anarchist drawings titled Turpitudes sociales (1889–90, private collection) which is being shown for the first time.

Pissarro held firm to the belief that the miseries of modern capitalist society would inevitably lead to revolution in Europe, and in his late multifigure rural genre paintings, he envisioned a better world as he imagined it would appear in the aftermath of such a momentous uprising. His late scenes of the grain harvest in Haymakers, Evening, Éragny (1893, Joslyn Art Museum), apple picking in Apple Harvest (1888, Dallas Museum of Art) and potato planting are utterly joyous in feeling, bathed in an idealized glow of light and health and abundance.

Camille Pissarro
Pissarro was in many ways a political and ethnic outsider in his adopted country of France. Born into a Sephardic Jewish family on the Danish colony of Saint Thomas in the Caribbean on July 10, 1830, he would never become a French citizen. He died a Danish citizen in Paris on November 13, 1903.

Pissarro’s lifelong interest in the human condition is unique among Impressionist landscape painters. From his early years in the Caribbean and Venezuela until his death, he produced a vast oeuvre of drawings, paintings and prints dedicated to the human figure. He was also a committed reader of radical social, political and economic theory. His profound knowledge of social philosophy, which informs much of his art, far exceeded that of any other significant painter of the period.

Website : Legion of Honor

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'BUILDING THE REVOLUTION: SOVIET ART AND ARCHITECTURE 1915-1935' AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS

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The Royal Academy of Arts present Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915–1935. The exhibition will examine Russian avant-garde architecture made during a brief but intense period of design and construction that took place from c.1922 to 1935. Fired by the Constructivist art that emerged in Russia from c.1915, architects transformed this radical artistic language into three dimensions, creating structures whose innovative style embodied the energy and optimism of the new Soviet Socialist state. The exhibition will juxtapose large-scale photographs of extant buildings with relevant Constructivist drawings and paintings, vintage photographs and periodicals. Many of the works have never been shown in the UK before.

The drive to forge a new Socialist society in Russia encouraged synthesis between radical art and architecture. This creative reciprocity was reflected in the engagement with architectural ideas and projects of such artists as Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Liubov Popova, El Lizzitsky, Ivan Kluin and Gustav Klucis, and in designs by such architects as Konstantin Melnikov, Moisei Ginsburg, Ilia Golosov and the Vesnin brothers, as well as Le Corbusier and Erich Mendelsohn, European architects who were draughted in to help shape the new utopia. Their novel buildings - streamlined, flat-roofed, white-walled and with experimental fenestration - appeared alien among the surrounding traditional low-built wooden structures and densely developed nineteenth century commercial and residential blocks. They left a distinctive mark not only on the two most prominent cities in what was then the USSR, Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also on other urban centres such as Kiev, Ekaterinburg, Baku, Sochi and Nishni Novogorod.

As part of a campaign to preserve these iconic buildings, many of which have either fallen into disrepair, undergone inappropriate transformations or been threatened with demolition, the renowned photographer Richard Pare has documented them in a series of sympathetic and timely images made over the past two decades.

The historical, political, social and cultural context in which these modernist structures were created will be communicated through vintage archival photographs from the Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow (MUAR), showing the buildings under construction or soon after completion. These photographs which have never been exhibited before either, in or outside Russia will be complemented with paintings and works on paper from the George Costakis Collection of Constructivist Art, currently housed at the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. The inclusion of these pieces will demonstrate the vital experimentation of Russian avant-garde artists from c.1915 to 1935, as well as the intense dialogue that developed between them and radical architects, contributing to a new, revolutionary language of architecture.

Although Russian modernist architecture has long been recognised as a distinctive and significant moment in the history of architecture, it has been rarely published in recent years and hence remains little known. Since the 1990s important and pertinent material relating to the movement has surfaced in Russia and it has become easier to access the buildings themselves. Together these factors have encouraged new research into and a greater understanding of this unique period.

The exhibition will be arranged thematically, with sections focusing on residential buildings, factories, health facilities, communications and transport. Each section in turn will explore advancements and nuances within the different building types. The architecture will be brought to life with a mixture of contemporary and vintage photographs.

Website : Royal Academy of Arts

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