FIC123 CultuurBericht

MUSEUM FÜR GEGENWARTSKUNST SHOWS A NEW SELECTION OF WORKS BY TIM ROLLINS + K.O.S.

2012-01-24T08:45:00.000+01:00

Tim Rollins K.O.S., Temptation of St Anthony.

More than twenty years after the Museum für Gegenwartskunst first presented the art of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), the collective now shows a new selection of works. Based on Tim Rollins’s studies of art as a form of collaboration in which individual creativity becomes operative as an agent of social change, the works pay poetic homage to the community, but also represent a political reference to the potential inherent in each individual.

When Rollins started teaching in a school in New York’s South Bronx in 1982, he developed a pedagogical method of social activism that aimed to foreground individual abilities. In his workshop “Art and Knowledge,” launched in one of America’s most acutely deprived areas, Rollins and his study group began to use classical and modern literature, philosophy, and political theory as raw materials. The writings of Martin Luther King, Lewis Carroll, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, Homer, and William Shakespeare, to name but a few, become points of departure for a rich visual language. Modified pages from books are pasted directly onto the canvas, forming the substratum on which the artists elaborate their interpretive approaches.

The concept behind this form of transformation is a leitmotif that has defined the entire oeuvre of this collective, which has been active for over two decades, though its membership has changed. It is not only an indispensable element of the creative process as such, but also a motif that, though it may not be immediately apparent, ties together the texts selected for the group’s work. The connecting element that emerges between works such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Collodi’s Pinocchio, Rollins argues, is the theme of self-sacrifice that gives rise to new life, new ideas, new hope: Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as well as Gregor Samsa must die, and Pinocchio, too, barely skirts death. Thanks to inclusion of their narratives in the canon of classical literature and because Tim Rollins + K.O.S. turn their attention to them, these characters and their stories are ultimately brought back to life, so transfiguration ought to be seen not as a mere alteration of the sort that takes place, for instance, when a literary or musical original is translated into a work of visual art; it is also a miraculous resurrection in a metaphorical sense. Moreover, there is a temporal component to transfiguration, so that these works should be read not as interpretations of the literary or musical model, but rather as a conversation with it across time.

The oeuvre of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. blends classical education and ‘street culture,’ erudition and spontaneity, combining elements from various artistic movements such as the function of language as a medium of artistic expression in Conceptual art and the reference to the political meaning of everyday objects in Italian Arte Povera.

Tim Rollins & K.O.S. were the recipients of the Joseph Beuys-Prize in 1989 from the Joseph BeuysFoundation, Basel

Website : Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel

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Next item 01.02.2012

EXHIBITION EXPLORES THE INTERACTION BETWEEN EUROPE AND THE REST OF THE WORLD OVER THE COURSE OF 2.500 YEARS

2012-01-23T08:25:00.001+01:00

The National Museum in Copenhagen opened its doors to a new temporary exhibition with the title “Europe meets the World”. This exhibition depicts the interaction – good and bad – between Europe and the rest of the world.

In the name of the Lord
"In nomine domini” (in the name of the Lord) is the inscription on the blade of a sword that is one of the items exhibited. The sword was probably made to be used in the Crusades and is a very good illustration of how, for many centuries, Europeans met the surrounding world – not only during the Crusades, but also in the times that followed.

The major voyages of discovery from Portugal and Spain in particular put the world at Europe’s feet. When they encountered new, foreign cultures in South America, for example, the Europeans’ unshakeable religious faith, mixed with their deep cynicism and lack of respect for the native Indians and their culture, enabled them to conquer and subject the rich kingdoms.

New knowledge and bustling trade
“Europe meets the World” is not just about history and war, conflict and suppression. The meeting with foreign cultures brought with it new knowledge and bustling trade. The exhibition begins with ancient Greece, which became Europe’s gateway to the civilisations of the Middle East. At the outset, the interaction was mainly from east to west: for example, the Greeks’ adoption of the Phoenician alphabet.

From ancient Greece, the exhibition moves on to the Roman Empire, which was the dominant power in Europe in the centuries after Christ’s birth. Although the various peoples and cultures of the Roman provinces had to swear allegiance to the Emperor, local customs and traditions were not suppressed, which helped to stimulate the entire continent’s cultural development. The first centuries after Christ's birth saw a major expansion of trade and a burgeoning globalisation process. People traded with each other throughout the Roman Empire. Moreover, ceramics and other Roman goods were carried to far more distant lands. From the Orient, caravans brought costly treasures such as spices and silks back to Europe. The exhibition leads the visitor towards contemporary Europe, the result of the continent's history and its encounters with the rest of the world.

The National Museum’s own exhibits – including Heinrich Himmler’s eye patch
Despite its international approach, the exhibition is based solely on the National Museum’s own artefacts. These include the aforementioned sword, which was found at Søborg Castle, the seat of Danish archbishops. The Crusader sword is a symbol of how Denmark is part of a continent that is changing constantly, ceaselessly influenced by the world around us.

The eye patch used by Heinrich Himmler to conceal his true identity after Germany’s defeat in the Second World War is one of the items exhibited. “Europe meets the World” reveals why this particular item is part of the National Museum’s collection.

Website : National Museet

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FRANCE IN MINIATURE, SIXTEEN SCALE MODELS OF FORTIFIED TOWNS UNDER THE GREAT GLASS ROOF OF THE GRAND PALAIS

2012-01-20T06:01:00.001+01:00

Arranged around a 650 square-metre map of France, sixteen scale models of fortified towns, produced in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, are to go on show in this prestigious Champs-Élysées setting. Interactive multimedia displays and innovative exhibition design will allow visitors to examine every detail of these extraordinary models.

This exhibition is an unmissable opportunity for the general public to view spectacular pieces from the Musée des Plans-reliefs in Paris. These historic models of fortified towns (plans-reliefs) are part of a unique collection begun in 1668 under Louis XIV and expanded until 1873. Initially created for military purposes, the 1/600th-scale models represented fortifications and their surroundings to help the central government prepare defensive operations. But they were also used for reasons of prestige: exhibited until 1777 in the Galerie du Bord de l’Eau of the Louvre, they expressed the power of France. Teams of engineers and topographers were sent all over the country to produce these models. Constructed in wood, paper, silk and metal, they reproduce the smallest details with remarkable precision.

The Musée des Plans-reliefs possesses over a hundred of these scale models. Sixteen of the most impressive pieces – the model of Cherbourg covers some 160 square metres – will be exhibited in the great hall of the Grand Palais. They illustrate how national borders change over the centuries: some of the towns on display, such as Bergen-op-Zoom (in Holland) or Exilles (in Italy), were once French. Others, such as Saint-Omer or Besançon, were once foreign but later became French. Each model will also be presented from a particular angle, focusing on the town’s construction and planning, defence techniques and the art of war, the history of the town and its province, or its changing environment. The model of Brest, which was finished in 1811 and depicts the old town that was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War, will be compared with contemporary views. These various approaches will be developed through a range of interactive features, including audiovisual documents, multimedia terminals and touch screens.

The exhibition design will make the most of the vast space in the great hall of the Grand Palais and allow visitors to examine the models very closely. To situate each town geographically, the scale models will be displayed around a huge floor map of France covering 650 square metres.

This exhibition is the first to be produced by the Maison de l’histoire de France (MHF), with the support of the RMN-Grand Palais and the scientific partnership of the Musée des Plans-reliefs. It reflects the MHF’s principal aim, which is to bring France’s rich history alive for the widest possible audience.

Scale models exhibited
Fort-Barraux (Isère), Montmélian (Savoie), Exilles (Italy), Fenestrelle (Italy), Embrun (Hautes-Alpes), Grenoble (Isère), Briançon (Hautes-Alpes), Mont-Dauphin (Hautes-Alpes), Besançon (Doubs), Neuf-Brisach (Haut-Rhin), Strasbourg (Bas-Rhin), Luxembourg, Bergen-op-Zoom (Holland), Saint-Omer (Pas-de-Calais), Cherbourg (Manche), Brest (Finistère).

Website : Grand Palais

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C'EST LA VIE : PHOTOGRAPHY SINCE 1940 AT THE SWISS NATIONAL MUSEUM IN ZURICH

2012-01-19T07:39:00.000+01:00

For the first time, the Swiss National Museum in Zurich presents its extensive archive of press photographs. The exhibition looks at recent Swiss history from

the perspective of the press photographer and reveals how, in the second half of the 20th century, press photography developed into the photojournalism we know today.

Housed in three original pavilions by the designer and engineer Jean Prouvé from the 1940s, «C’est la vie» includes meticulously composed photographs depicting political events, episodes from everyday life, unforgettable moments, candid pictures of well-known personalities and portraits of everyday heroes. It also shows how the extensive photo reportages of the early years were superseded by individual snapshots – initially still in black and white, then in colour. New methods of image transfer and printing technologies enabled ever-increasing numbers of up-to-the-minute photos to appear in the daily press. From the 1960s onwards, the illustrated weekly press went into decline. The exhibition illustrates this process by juxtaposing an analogue picture agency from the 1940s with its present-day digital counterpart.

In 2006 the Swiss National Museum acquired the archives of the press photo agencies Presse Diffusion Lausanne and Actualité Suisse Lausanne, which together comprise millions of negatives, paper prints and transparencies from 1940 (foundation of PDL) to 2000 (closure of ASL).

The archives are an ideal complement to the photographs taken by private individuals that previously formed the core of the Swiss National Museum’s photography collection. An examination of the archives soon revealed a wealth of treasures. The diversity, breadth and aesthetic quality of the photographic material are remarkable and exceptional. The new holdings will also be an invaluable source of visual material for the Swiss National Museum’s research activities.

Website : Swiss National Museum - Landesmuseum Zürich

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LACMA PRESENTS CHRIS BURDEN'S KINETIC SCULPTURE MODELED AFTER A FAST-PACES MODERN CITY

2012-01-18T08:15:00.003+01:00

Operator Alison Walker watches miniature cars move along the roads in Chris Burden's latest kinetic sculpture, "Metropolis II," at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in Los Angeles, Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2012. The sculpture does more than just imitate life. The colorful display of roads, cars, trains and buildings is art imitating what the artist foresees life being like in five or 10 years. AP Photo/Jae C. Hong.

Created by artist Chris Burden, Metropolis II (2010) is a complex, large-scale kinetic sculpture modeled after a fast-paced modern city. The armature of the piece is constructed of steel beams, forming an eclectic grid interwoven with an elaborate system of eighteen roadways, including a six-lane freeway, train tracks, and hundreds of buildings. 1,100 miniature toy cars speed through the city at 240 scale miles per hour on the specially designed plastic roadways. Every hour, the equivalent of approximately 100,000 cars circulates through the sculpture.

Situated in the center of the grid are three electrically powered conveyor belts, each studded with magnets at regular intervals. The magnets on the conveyor belt and those on the toy cars attract, enabling the cars to travel to the top of the sculpture without physical contact between the belt and cars. At the top, the cars are released one at a time and race down the roadways, weaving in and out of the structure, simulating rapid traffic and congestion.

Metropolis II is on long-term loan to LACMA, thanks to the generosity of LACMA Trustee Nicolas Berggruen. Beginning January 14, 2012, the work will be on view on the first floor of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) and run on weekends during the scheduled times below.

Chris Burden is a leading international artist who works and lives in Los Angeles. Over the past forty years, Burden has produced a multitude of assemblages, installations, scientific models, and kinetic and static sculptures, including Urban Light at LACMA.

He has performed and exhibited his work internationally, at institutions including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; de Appel, Amsterdam; The Tate Museum, London; The Baltic Centre, Newcastle, England; The 48th Venice Biennale, Venice; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Conceptual Art, San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Institute of 3 Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, New York.

Burden produced his first mature works during the early 1970s. His work was characterized by the idea that the truly important, viable art of the future would not be with objects; the things that you could simply sell and hang on your wall. Instead art would be ephemeral and address political, social, environmental, and technological change. Earth, performance, body, video, computer, narrative, and conceptual art became the new mediums. Burden, with his shockingly simple, unforgettable, “here and now” performances shook the conventional art world during this period and took this new art form to its extreme.

The images of Burden that continue to resonate in public mind is of a young man who had himself shot (Shoot, 1971), electrocuted (Doorway to Heaven, 1973), cut (Through the Night Softly, 1973), drowned (Velvet Water, 1974), and locked up (Five Day Locker Piece, 1971).

Chris Burden was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1946. He moved to California in 1965 and obtained a BFA at Pomona College, Claremont, California in 1969, and later a MFA at the University of California, Irvine in 1971. He is also the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He taught at UCLA for twenty-six years and is currently a professor emeritus at UCLA.

Website : LACMA

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LARGE SURVEY EXHIBITION OF MULTIFACETED ARTIST NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE AT THE MAX-ERNST-MUSEUM

2012-01-17T07:30:00.000+01:00

Niki de Saint Phalle, Nathalie, 1965, Privatsammlung, © 2012 NIKI CHARITABLE ART FOUNDATION, All rights reserved.

Foto: © André Morain.

The Max-Ernst-Museum is showing the wide-ranging œuvre of the multifaceted artist Niki de Saint Phalle, undoubtedly one of the most important artists of the 20th century, in a large survey exhibition. Through her paintings, assemblages, shooting paintings (tirs), sculptures and installations, this artist created a unique cosmos which established her international reputation.

Niki de Saint Phalle, born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1930 and died in San Diego, California, in 2002, had a defining influence on the art of her day, feminine features of which she celebrated and shaped. Like no one before her, she found a valid form for the elemental force of femininity, particularly in her Nanas.

The exhibition at the Max-Ernst-Museum provides an extensive overview of her œuvre, from the early paintings to the late sculptures. Play with me, the title both of the exhibition and of one of her first paintings, is also directed at the viewer. It is an appeal to the individual’s creativity, an invitation to make an attempt and participate in the artist’s unbridled joie de vivre. That joy was evident in all the phases of her creative life. Her œuvre unites her interest in the originality of life and her own experiences. Niki de Saint Phalle cannot really be categorised, nor was she shy of contradictoriness. Whether she engrossed herself in sources like the tarot or Indian culture, or drew on subjective experiences, such as her childhood memories, everything flowed directly into her art and involved a broad creative spectrum. Painting, drawing and printing, the colossal but also miniature sculptures, reliefs, gardens, and also books, letters and written records, up to and including films form a unique cosmos – and the essence of her creative work.

The exhibition of more than 150 works, curated by Guido Magnaguagno, former director of the Tinguely Museum in Basel, embraces the sculptures on loan from the Niki Charitable Art Foundation in California and Paris, the Sprengel Museum in Hanover and the Musée d’art moderne in Nice, to all of which Niki de Saint Phalle made generous donations of her works. The show also features works from numerous private and public lenders. It has been complemented moreover by quintessential works by Jean Tinguely, her partner of many years, and paintings by her first teacher, the still largely unknown Hugh Weiss. The presentation also involves the artist’s films, which illustrate her dream worlds and her engagement with the patriarchy, and which are frequently dealt with quite separately from her other work.

Website : Max-Ernst-Museum

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IKKAN ART GALLERY PRESENTS REQUIEM FOR THE XX CENTURY: SELF-POTRAITS IN MOTION BY MORIMURA YASUMASA

2012-01-16T11:03:00.002+01:00

Ikkan Art Gallery announces the first solo show in Singapore for the internationally acclaimed Japanese artist Morimura Yasumasa. This exhibition showcases moving image and photographic works from his Requiem series which recently toured museums in Japan.

Morimura (b.1951, Osaka), the “Daughter of Art History”, appropriates universally well-known images derived from art history, mass media and pop culture to create unconventional and bold self-portrait renderings in photography, performance and video.

Through the extensive use of props, costumes, make-up and digital manipulation, Morimura masterfully transforms himself into recognizable subjects that punctuate the western cultural canon. His unsettling deconstruction of iconic images challenges the assumptions already placed on such works/images while commenting on Japan's complex and conflicting absorption of Western culture. His ability to satirize and simultaneously create homage of his source material is what makes Morimura's work particularly forceful and effective.

Where art draws its inspiration from the human condition, Ikkan Art Gallery’s philanthropic vision is to help alleviate the hardships faced by the less-‐privileged by contributing to a worthy cause. All of artworks from the exhibition will be available for sale, where a portion of the proceeds will be donated to Singapore Children’s Society – Ikkan Art Gallery’s adopted charity for the event. The mission of Children’s Society – Bringing relief and happiness to children in need – resonates strongly with the Gallery. These funds will go to the running of the Society’s 59 programmes and services that reach out to over 57,000 children, youths and families in need.

About the Exhibition
Based on the theme of ‘the men of the twentieth century’ the Requiem series considers the history and significance of the construction, war and destruction that symbolized this period and attempts to answer the question, ‘what was the twentieth century?’.

Morimura took old news photographs of various events characterizing these times, or the famous people of the age, such as Lenin, Hitler and Einstein, then used self-portrait techniques to bring these back to life. Impersonations of famous male artists from the period form a recent chapter to this series. Both Dali and Warhol feature here and through dialog with these pioneers of revolutionary art, Morimura focuses on the attraction of their humanity and creativity from a new angle.

The culmination of this exhibition, the most recent work in the series, is a 23 minute video referencing the historical events of 1945. Gift of Sea: Raising a Flag on the Summit of the Battlefield reimagines the famous news photograph ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’ into a dream-like story which weaves together Morimura dressed up as Marilyn Monroe and as a Japanese soldier/artist. Various strange happenings occur, many of which reference art history.

The Morimura/Soldier confronts and makes friends with a group of American soldiers on a beach-the film’s climax sees them jointly raise a white flag on the summit of a mountain backlit by a symbolic sunset.

When asked ‘what kind of flag would you raise over the battlefield’, Morimura’s answer is ‘a white one’. For him, the symbolical plain white flag is the flag of art. Morimura portrays history by making himself ‘become’ its proponents, confronting historical memory through theatrical staging.

A requiem is a religious service for the repose of the souls of the dead. The object of these works is to look at the era of men that has now passed, to offer respect to its ideologies, and to verify the meaning of forgotten memories in order to pass them on to the twenty-first century. Using inherited items as a foundation, it is Morimura’s desire to hoist the pure white flag of art at the summit of various battlefields, such as history, society and daily life, during the twenty-first century.

The unnaturalness the viewer feels from looking at his work arises from the difficulty of imitating subjects-the sense that he cannot quite ‘become’ them remains. It is through this response that he is able to take events that have become totally ‘comprehensible’ and unpick them to make them ‘incomprehensible’ – answering ‘what is art?’.

Website : Ikkan Art Gallery

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GAGOSIAN GALLERY HOLDS WORLDWIDE EXHIBITION OF 25 YEARS OF SPOT PAINTINGS BY DAMIEN HIRST

2012-01-13T06:44:00.000+01:00

Myristyl Acetate, 2005

Household gloss on canvas
180 x 180 inches (457.2 x 457.2 cm)
© Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2011

Gagosian Gallery presents “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011” by Damien Hirst. The exhibition will take place at once across all of Gagosian Gallery’s eleven locations in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong, opening worldwide on January 12, 2012. Most of the paintings are being lent by private individuals and public institutions, more than 150 different lenders from twenty countries. Conceived as a single exhibition in multiple locations, “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011” makes use of this demographic fact to determine the content of each exhibition according to locality.

Included in the exhibition are more than 300 paintings, from the first spot on board that Hirst created in 1986; to the smallest spot painting comprising half a spot and measuring 1 x 1/2 inch (1996); to a monumental work comprising only four spots, each 60 inches in diameter; and up to the most recent spot painting completed in 2011 containing 25,781 spots that are each 1 millimeter in diameter, with no single color ever repeated.

In conjunction with the exhibition will be the publication of The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011, a fully illustrated, comprehensive and definitive catalogue of all spot paintings made by Hirst from 1986 to the present. Published by Gagosian Gallery and Other Criteria, The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011 includes essays by Museum of Modern Art curator Ann Temkin, cultural critic Michael Bracewell, and art historian Robert Pincus-Witten as well as a conversation between Damien Hirst, Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari.

The third issue of the Gagosian App for iPad will also launch January, providing an interactive, in-depth look at the series that features more than ninety spot paintings.

“Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011” precedes the first major museum retrospective of Hirst’s work opening at Tate Modern in London in April, 2012.

Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol, England. Solo exhibitions include "The Agony and the Ecstasy," Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples (2004); "A Selection of Works by Damien Hirst from Various Collections," Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2005); Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo (2005); "For the Love of God," Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2008); "No Love Lost," The Wallace Collection, London (2009); "Requiem," Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev (2009); and “Cornucopia,” the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco (2010). He received the Turner Prize in 1995. His work is included in many important public and private collections throughout the world.

I was always a colorist, I’ve always had a phenomenal love of color… I mean, I just move color around on its own. So that’s where the spot paintings came from—to create that structure to do those colors, and do nothing. I suddenly got what I wanted. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of color. — Damien Hirst

Website : Gagosian Gallery

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SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART PRESENTS RICHARD ALDRICH'S FIRST SOLO MUSEUM SHOW

2012-01-12T06:40:00.001+01:00

Richard Aldrich, Untitled, 2010; oil and wax on panel; 15 x 11 in.; collection of Amy and Harris Schwalb; © Richard Aldrich. Images courtesy Bortolami Gallery, New York, New York.

Through March 25, 2012, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presents New Work: Richard Aldrich, the first museum exhibition to feature work exclusively by Richard Aldrich. The presentation brings together an array of new paintings by the New York–based artist anchored by a selection of earlier pieces that show the diversity of his work and the expansive possibilities of painting itself. Organized by Gary Garrels, SFMOMA Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, the exhibition continues the museum's New Work series dedicated to featuring the most innovative expressions of contemporary art.

Aldrich pursues an open-ended exploration of painting and uses its fundamental elements—canvas, stretcher bars, paint—to interrogate and celebrate the intellectual and sensual conundrums of the art form. Deeply aware of the historical precedents of abstract painting, he sometimes evokes images and memories, while at other times uses the elements of painting to their own ends. Inherent throughout his work are issues of perception and understanding, explorations of the immediacy of the present moment grounded in language and past experience.

The presentation at SFMOMA includes some 14 works of both small, intimate panels and larger canvases that range from resolutely abstract to hints of representation, minimalist to richly colorful and painterly. Aldrich's works incorporate paint, collage, and found objects, claiming everything within the boundaries of the canvas as the territory of painting. His range in painting reveals an ongoing effort to understand his relationship to the history of painting as well as to the act of painting, resulting in a body of work that extends tradition but remains distinctly personal.

"Aldrich reinvents and extends our understanding of painting—a medium and form of art that has often been fundamentally challenged over the past hundred years—as a vital medium for contemporary art," says Garrels.

Aldrich was born in 1975 in Hampton, Virginia, and received his BFA from Ohio State University in 1998. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work was featured at The Saint Louis Art Museum (2011) and the 2010 Whitney Biennial and has shown in Europe and the United States at institutions including White Columns, New York; Midway Contemporary Art Center, Minneapolis; Palais De Tokyo, Paris; and P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art, Long Island City, New York, among many others.

A free illustrated brochure has been produced in conjunction with this exhibition, featuring images of Aldrich's work and an extended interview with the artist.

THE NEW WORK SERIES
From its inception in 1987, SFMOMA's New Work series was conceived as a means to feature the most innovative expressions of contemporary art. Artists such as Matthew Barney, Marilyn Minter, and Christopher Wool were given their first solo museum exhibitions through the program, establishing the series as an important vehicle for the advancement of new art forms. Over the ensuing decade, New Work featured artists such as Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Tatsuo Miyajima, Doris Salcedo, Luc Tuymans, Kara Walker, and Andrea Zittel, among many others. After a four-year hiatus, SFMOMA reintroduced the New Work series in 2004 and has since showcased work by Phil Collins, Rachel Harrison, Wengechi Mutu, Felix Schramm, Paul Sietsema, Lucy McKenzie, Mai-Thu Perret, Ranjani Shettar, Vincent Fecteau, Mika Rottenberg, R. H. Quaytman, and Anna Parkina.

The New Work series is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and is generously supported by Collectors Forum, the founding patron of the series. Major funding is also provided by The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation and Robin Wright and Ian Reeves.

Website : SFMOMA

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PAINTING ON PAPER : JOZEF ALBERS IN AMERICA EXHIBITION ON VIEW AT KUNSTMUSEUM BASEL

2012-01-11T07:20:00.000+01:00

Josef Albers, Studie zu einem Adobe, um 1947.

The exhibition presents more than seventy works on paper Josef Albers (b. Bottrop, Germany, 1888; d. 1976) created after emigrating to the United States in 1933: studies for the Kinetics and Adobes of the late 1930s and 1940s as well as an extensive group of works beginning in 1950 that served Albers’s preparation for his Homage to the Square paintings.

All loans for the exhibition have been provided by the Museum Quadrat, Bottrop, and the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut. It is the first time that such a large selection of these works is on view in Europe. The focus of the show is on issues of colour.

Josef Albers had received initial training in the arts at the Royal Art School, Berlin, the School of Applied Arts, Essen, and the academies of Berlin and Munich. In 1920, he took up his studies at the Weimar Bauhaus, and only a few years later, in 1923, he was appointed head of its stained-glass workshop. Albers created glass paintings and designed furniture and glass and metal implements; his art gradually became nonrepresentational. After the Bauhaus, which had moved to Dessau in 1925 and then to Berlin in 1932, was dissolved, Albers and his wife Anni emigrated to the US in 1933; he became an American citizen in 1939. Albers accepted an appointment to direct the Art Department at the newly founded Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, where he taught from 1933 until 1949. Between 1950 and 1959, he headed the Art Department at Yale University in New Haven. The impressions he received from the sublime landscapes of North America and the art and culture of Latin America and Mexico, where he traveled extensively starting in 1935, came to profoundly shape his subsequent creative work, particularly his painting. His teaching and art had a far reaching influence which is still visible today in European and American art, especially in his students John Cage, Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, and Richard Serra were among his students.

The Kinetics and Adobes of the late 1930s and 1940s show the influence of the architectural structures of monumental brick buildings in pre-Columbian settlements and then of the pyramids of the Maya culture, whose abstract and “Cubist character” Albers took particular care to bring out in his black-and-white photographs. Accordingly, linear structures predominate in the Kinetics. Dynamic visual effects result that permit of forever new readings the beholder can unlock by engaging the relationships between surface and space implicit in the color fields delineated by the geometric shapes. Designations such as Kinetic, Biconjugate, or Tautonym reflect this optical dynamism of Albers’s works, which includes the coexistence of multiple perspectives on intimated spaces, now seen from a high angle, now from a low angle, and their mirror-inverted correspondence. The compositions of the Adobes owe more to the Mexican mud brick houses built in the eponymous style with their characteristic color; the motifs recall windows, doorways, or floor plans such as can be found in these architectures. In these works, too, Albers experimented with unmixed paints, closely observing the changes that took place at the interfaces between them, calling their identity in question.

The Homages to the Square occupied Albers from 1950 to his death in 1976. In these works on paper, Albers explored color in all its variations and the subtlest gradations, without subscribing to systems or a theory of color. He worked on sheets of highly absorbent blotting paper; their limited size encouraged his penchant for experimentation and accommodated his serial method, which had been a defining feature of Albers’s art from the very outset. Some of the later sheets seem mere sketches or unfinished, a quality that is the privilege of the medium of drawing, creating opportunities for spontaneous decisions and allowing the beholder to gain insight into the creative process. Notes he wrote in the margins or in the color fields are particularly indicative of the experimental nature of some exhibits from this group. In order to avoid any suggestion of representation as well as involuntary composition within a picture and to foreground his true subject, color, Albers now chose the square, as simple as it is radical, as the motif for his paintings. Within the square he placed further squares, superimposing them so that they emerge only along their edges; solely the square at the center of each sheet appears in its entirety. Such superimposition of squares heightens the interaction between the colors the painter has applied.

The motif of the square is not neutral; it is surrounded by cultural associations as well as others rooted in psychology, as the art of native America, for instance, demonstrates. It suggests cosmological notions of heaven and earth or the four points of the compass, but also the idea that a man, his arms outstretched, may be inscribed upon a square (thus in a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci after Vitruvius). In comparison with the Adobes, the square is more meditative in character; like a mandala, where the circle and the square are the dominant shapes, it invites mental concentration and calm contemplation. As the beholder perceives the picture in its entirety, the effect the colors have on him grows only stronger. To counteract the danger that the picture would seem static, Albers displaced the interior squares – there are now three of them, now four – downward from the center. A grid system of ten units each on the horizontal and vertical axes on which all pictures are based gave rise to a wealth of possible ways of placing the squares at different distances in each picture and redistributing the relative weights between the colors. By dislocating the center downward, Albers also forestalled the impression of looking at a perspectival depiction of squares or architectural segments growing smaller with increasing distance from the beholder, with their corners aligned, as though in a construction drawing, on the same diagonals. Instead, the squares seem to leap out toward the beholder or recede from him depending on their color, to grow smaller or larger, and sometimes even to take the form of upright rectangles. This effect brings the spatial depth opened up by the colors themselves back into the surface, allowing Albers to heighten the interplay between the colors delimited by their assignment to the individual fields and to demonstrate their inexhaustible variability. His focus was on the “Interaction of Color” – thus the title of his book, which came out in 1963 – the harmonic coexistence of colors in a picture.

The “Homages to the Square” from this group of works range from color tests to finished works that are no less accomplished than a painting. Though it may seem paradoxical, the works on paper presented here convey a particularly palpable sense of Albers’s talents as a painter, much more so than his paintings executed on fiberboard. The painter’s individual hand apparent in the paintings, where he applies unmixed tube paint using a knife or spatula, recedes into the background in the works on paper. Yet the surfaces conversely gain a relief that is almost gestural in its expression, and by contributing to the sense of animation that pervades the pictures and heightening the material quality of the paint, it allows the colors to come into their own being. The thick blotting paper extracts the oil from the paints and lends them a luminous presence with a silky shine.

Integrated into the exhibition are the two works by Josef Albers held by the Kunstmuseum Basel. The glass painting Fuge (Fugue, 1925; inv. G. 1958.64; permanent loan from the Friends of the Kunstmuseum Basel) exemplifies the artist’s work from his time at the Bauhaus. The painting Blue Call (1956; inv. G. 1968.24) is an early example of the Homage to the Square series.

Website : Kunstmuseum Basel

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ON GUSTAV KLIMT'S 150TH BIRTHDAY, VIENNA'S BELVEDERE MARKS 2012 AS THE KLIMT YEAR

2012-01-10T07:11:00.001+01:00

Owning the largest collection of paintings by Gustav Klimt worldwide, the Belvedere is preparing a very special presentation for this anniversary year. The show Masterpieces in Focus: 150 Years of Gustav Klimt on the Upper Belvedere’s piano nobile will display all of the artist’s paintings preserved in the museum in an extraordinary fashion. Unlike most exhibitions of recent years, it will not deal with stylistic relationships or art historical contexts, but will concentrate on the individual works as such – on the message each of these masterpieces conveys to the spectator.

This anniversary practically invites us to look at each single year, even beyond Klimt’s lifetime. A further focus of the exhibition will thus be on the hitherto neglected history of the reception of Klimt’s work and personality. Over these 150 years, Klimt has become a phenomenon not only in art theory, but also in contemporary history. The interdisciplinary approach and the selection of the objects, as well as the show’s graphic and multimedia format, will certainly contribute to transmitting to the spectator Klimt’s art and its consequences on an entirely new level of understanding.

With Gustav Klimt / Josef Hoffmann, the Belvedere pays tribute to two pioneers of Modernism in a comprehensive exhibition that simultaneously introduces the Klimt Year 2012. The painter Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) and the architect and product and interior designer Josef Hoffmann shared a common vision of an art that was meant to touch all spheres of life. Over two decades, they were joined in their artistic and social activities, even if the intensity of their collaboration varied. They frequented the same circles, worked for the same clientele, and were both leading personalities in Vienna’s newly emerging art scene.

Such outstanding projects as the Beethoven exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 1902 and the Stoclet Palace in Brussels, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, were landmarks for generations to come. Klimt and Hoffmann strove to establish a harmony between the visual and the applied arts and set new benchmarks in Europe when it comes to the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk. By means of numerous paintings, original plans, elaborate reconstructions, models, and historical documents, the show at the Belvedere illustrates the genesis and spatial impact of their joint projects and elucidates the intensive exchange with the Belgian art scene that lastingly influenced the evolution of Viennese Modernism.

Website : Belvedere Wien

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EXHIBITION OF JAPANESE PRINTS BY TSUKIOKA KOGYO TO OPEN AT BONNEFANTENMUSEUM

2012-01-09T08:13:00.001+01:00

The presentation links up with a series of 'art on paper' exhibitions in the Bonnefantenmuseum.

The presentation The beauty of Silence – Japanese prints by Tsukioka Kōgyo will be opening in the Bonnefantenmuseum on 15 January 2012. The presentation links up with a series of 'art on paper' exhibitions in the Bonnefantenmuseum, and revolves around the work of one of the great Japanese print artists of the turn of the last century, Tsukioka Kōgyo. Kōgyo became well-known for his popular depictions of the typically Japanese Noh theatre, which underwent a real revival at the end of the 19th century. He also depicted animals and landscapes. His technique in creating coloured woodcuts is so refined that it is indistinguishable from painting.

The year of Tsugioka Kōgyo's birth, 1869, coincided with great political and economic upheaval in Japan. From 1603 to 1868, the 'Shoguns' had held sway over a feudal power system, controlling all the distinguished families in Japan. Though the emperor was still the official ruler, he was in effect a hostage as well.

The emperor's power was restored in 1868, at the start of the Meiji period, named after the first 'modern' emperor of Japan. Emperor Meiji differed from the Shoguns in his interest in the West, including Western art. He also ushered in the industrial revolution in Japan, which had already spread from England and Belgium to Europe and the United States years before. Furthermore, he promoted a central government, with Tokyo as its economic and political centre, and gradually opened the borders of the closed-off and introspective country. However, this modernisation of Japan also went hand in hand with the rise of a strong nostalgia for the country's own past and for oriental values.

One of these oriental values, the classical and subdued Noh theatre, had thrived for centuries under Shogun rule and initially looked like becoming a victim of the modernisations. It recovered, however, by successfully convincing a new audience of its silent beauty. Through the efforts of several Noh actors, Japanese government officials and foreign visitors to Japan, a revival of this old form of theatre was set in motion. Add to this the interest of artists like Kōgyo's master Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-92) and the fact that 'ordinary people' finally had the opportunity to become acquainted with this theatre form, and its revival was firmly established – not only on stage, but also on printed paper.

The prints give a lot of information about the plays (often showing an important scene from the story), as well as the situations backstage. There are also prints of the singers and musicians, props and masks, and the construction of the stage itself. They are a gold mine not just for lovers of this old theatre form, but also for print collectors, as all the prints in this series are particularly well printed on the highest quality paper. Kōgyo also created series of prints of other subjects, including some wonderful prints of nature and birds.

Website : Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht

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VANITY : FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY FROM THE F.C. GUNDLACH COLLECTION AT KUNSTHALLE WIEN

2012-01-06T08:10:00.001+01:00

Fashion is a manifestation of ideals of beauty and social change, an expressive play between belonging and distinction, communication and trend. Its only constant factor is permanent change. In the sphere of beautiful appearances fashion/photography works in a both anticipatory and historicizing way: it reflects the change it creates.

As part of the Kunsthalle Wien’s special photography program, the exhibition Vanity, which presents about two hundred selected works from the F.C. Gundlach Collection (Hamburg), explores the subject of fashion and photography. F.C. Gundlach, who was born in Heinebach, Hesse in 1926, was a legendary fashion photographer himself who produced 180 covers and 5,500 pages for the editorial section of the magazine Brigitte alone. The gallery owner, collector, curator, and founder regards fashion photography as the most unequivocal indicator of social contexts: “Fashion photographs are always interpretations, results from a mise en scène. They reflect and visualize the day’s zeitgeist and anticipate that of tomorrow.”

Dating from the late 1920s to the present, the photographs shown in the exhibition Vanity confront us with staged images of clothing fashion. Great gestures and glamorous ideals are the concern of artists from George Hoyningen Huene and Irving Penn to Richard Avedon and William Klein. Next to famous photographs for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar by Horst P. Horst, Erwin Blumenfeld, and others, the show centers on pictures of costumes by Cecil Beaton and F.C. Gundlach’s presentations of Pop and Op Art fashion. Taking these approaches as a starting point, the exhibition proceeds to highlight formal aspects of composition tending toward graphic abstraction (Imre von Santho), painting (Sara Moon and Lillian Bassman), or sculpture (George Hurrell and Regina Relang). Again and again, the visualization of glamour, elegance, and femininity in the form of fashion photographs reveals the influence of contemporary art movements and classicist vocabulary. While dresses are the center of attention in fashion photographs until the 1960s, young photographers such as Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton answer with conceptual strategies of mystification and detached irony from the 1970s on. The most recent works in the exhibition playfully relate to the object character of their subjects, which may have become unwearable like the dress made from stuffed animals Armin Morbach confronts us with, or turn the extravagant rendering of ephemeral clothes into a mannerist postmodern quotation (Kristian Schuller). Five artistic positions underpin the credo of the intertextual nature of photography behind the F.C. Gundlach collection and subtly undermine the fashion industry’s self understanding: among them Wols’s with dramatic renderings of mannequins at the Paris World Fair of 1937, Leon Levinstein’s with street photography works shot in New York and San Francisco between 1955 and 1975, and Edgar Leciejewski’s with a series of pictures of people taken from Google Street View, which take a stand on the issue of individuality and the public sphere in the era of the Internet and social networks. Ultimately, fashion photography, as a medium of the self representation of society, reveals the shift of cultural interest from products to brands, images, and events. Considering the popularity of fashion blogs and live streams, the importance of magazines, the epitome of the twentieth century communication medium for fashion, seems to be on the wane. The musealized form of fashion photography becomes evident as medium of memory, which creates fashion as myth.

With works by Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman, Cecil Beaton, Sibylle Bergemann, Erwin Blumenfeld, Guy Bourdin, Louise Dahl Wolfe, Hubs Flöter, Ralph Gibson, F.C. Gundlach, George Hoyningen Huene, Horst P. Horst, George Hurrell, William Klein, Nick Knight, David Lachapelle, Edgar Leciejewski, Zoe Leonard, Leon Levinstein, Peter Lindbergh, Gjon Mili, Sara Moon, Armin Morbach, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, Regina Relang, Kristian Schuller, Melvin Sokolsky, Deborah Turbeville, Yva, Imre von Santho, Wols.

Website :Kunsthalle Wien

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YAYOI KUSAMA'S FLOWER SCULPTURES BRIGHTEN THE JARDIN DES TUILERIES FOR THIS WINTER

2012-01-05T07:53:00.000+01:00

Visitors to the Tuileries will find the brightly colored triffid-like flowers on the Grand Allee of the Jardins des Tuileries, installed on a grassed sculpture sitebordered by the symmetrically trimmed chestnut trees that are a main feature of Le Notre's original design. Flowers that Bloom at Midnight will remain on view until the spring.

The Jardins des Tuileries in Paris has been enlivened by Yayoi Kusama's vibrantly colored Flowers That Bloom at Midnight, a series of unique largescale sculptures. This is the first time that these sculptures are seen in France. The presentation by the Musée du Louvre-which coincides with Kusama's major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou-is consistent with the museum's ongoing initiative to integrate contemporary art into its broader historical and cultural programme. This special project has been realized with the support of Gagosian Gallery.

The first known photograph of Kusama as a small child is an arresting image: her beautiful face with its grave expression appears above a cluster of gigantic dahlias, each bloom larger than her small head. In a watercolor of 1950 entitled Self Portrait, the sunflower is an anthropomorphic stand-in for the artist herself. Flowers have continued to populate Kusama's imaginary since the beginning of her career, and it is evident that the gay yet monstrous flower sculptures of today have their origins in the surrealistic specimens that pervade the landscapes of her early paintings.

With her unrivalled eye for color, pattern and sinuous baroque form, Yayoi Kusama developed Flowers That Bloom at Midnight-an exuberant series of fifteen unique sculptures cast in fiberglas-reinforced plastic and painted by hand-following major permanent sculptural commissions for public institutions that include The Visionary Flowers (2002), Matsumoto City Museum of Art, Nagano, Japan; Tulipes de Shangri-La (2003), Eurolille, Lille, France; and The Hymn of Life: Tulips (2007), Beverly Hills City Council, Los Angeles.

Visitors to the Tuileries will find the brightly colored triffid-like flowers on the Grand Allee of the Jardins des Tuileries, installed on a grassed sculpture sitebordered by the symmetrically trimmed chestnut trees that are a main feature of Le Notre's original design. Flowers that Bloom at Midnight will remain on view until the spring.

Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan in 1929. She lives and works in Tokyo. Her work is collected by leading museums throughout the world including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Major exhibitions of her work include Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Fukuoka, Japan (1987); Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York (1989); "Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama,1958-1969," LACMA, 1998 (traveling to Museum of Modern Art, New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo), 1998-99; Le Consortium, Dijon, 2000 (traveling to selected venues in Europe, Korea and Japan), 2001-2003; "KUSAMATRIX," Mori Museum of Art, Tokyo, 2004 (traveling to Art Park Museum of Contemporary Art, Sapporo Art Park, Hokkaido); "Eternity-Modernity", National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (touring Japan), 2004-2005; "The Mirrored Years," Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2008, (traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand through 2009); "I Want to Live Forever," PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2009).

"Look Now, See Forever"opened at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia earlier this month. A major traveling retrospective, initiated by Tate Modern, is currently on view at Centre Pompidou, Paris. It will travel to Tate Modern, London and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 2012. moment au Centre Pompidou à Paris. Elle va voyager à la Tate Modern à Londres et au Whitney Museum of American Art à New York en 2012.

Website : Yoyoi Kusama

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KUNSTMUSEUM BONN IS FIRST GERMAN MUSEUM TO SHOW EXHIBITION OF LAURA OWENS' WORK

2012-01-04T07:41:00.004+01:00

Laura Owens, installation view.

Kunstmuseum Bonn is the first German museum to show a solo exhibition of Laura Owens who was born in Euclid, Ohio (USA) in 1970 and lives in Los Angeles today. With Laura Owens, who already had several exhibitions at renowned museums like the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2003), Kunsthalle Zürich (2006) and Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht (2007), Kunstmuseum Bonn presents, after Franz Ackermann, yet another important young position in contemporary painting.

Laura Owens undoubtedly takes a special position in the field of young contemporary painting, as her seemingly romantic and naïve pictorial language goes beyond the separation between abstract and figurative art. Only upon a closer look the analytical potential of her paintings dealing with the tradition of modernism becomes visible. Her paintings can be placed somewhere between vital colorism and symbolically charged figuration which at times reveals the absymal, at other times the dreamlike of existence. The almost childlike handwriting of the ornamentally charged paintings provokes the question about the limits of painting as art or as an element of everyday life.

In addition to numerous unique books made in 2011, the exhibition includes two comprehensive new series: One series, including several large-sized works, deals with the representational aspect of painting while the other series with smaller works questions the topic of time.

A catalog published by Kerber Verlag with essays by Stefan Gronert, Stephan Berg and Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer accompanies the exhibition.

Website : Kunstmuseum Bonn

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GARE DU NORD : DUTCH PHOTOGRAPHERS IN PARIS 1900-1968 ON VIEW AT THE HAGUE MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY

2012-01-03T08:06:00.001+01:00

Emmy Andriesse (1914-1953), Montmartre, Paris, 1948

Paris was where it was at. It was the place to be. For decades the sparkling nightlife and intellectual ferment of the French capital attracted writers and artists from around the world. Among them were Dutch photographers, who flocked to Paris to capture romantic images of life in the city’s streets. In this exhibition, pictures snapped by photographers like Henri Berssenbrugge, Emmy Andriesse, Ed van der Elsken and Johan van der Keuken bring to life the twentieth-century metropolis that plays the starring role in the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag’s concurrent exhibition Paris, City of modern art.

Paris shares a long history with photography; it is the birthplace of the medium. It would become the city of modern art, but it was the capital of photography right from the moment when Louis Daguerre first presented his discovery to the world in 1839. Dutch photographers were already going there in the 1920s and ’30s to study the discipline at specialist schools or in the hope of learning the profession by working as assistants to renowned practitioners like Man Ray or Berenice Abbott.

In the 1950s, Paris quickly recovered its pre-war attractiveness; the city had lost nothing of its glamour in the intervening years and it held a strong appeal for the generation of twenty-year-olds who were now discovering the world. The photo-books about Paris published between 1954 and 1963 by Nico Jesse, Ed van der Elsken and Johan van der Keuken were immediately hugely popular. They show a dream world far from the petty and restrictive Dutch society of the period; the most photographed city in the world held out the prospect of a more intense and adventurous life. These books did much to create the alluring image of Paris that still exists in the collective consciousness of the Dutch population.

Nico Jesse’s 1954 photo-book Vrouwen van Parijs (‘Women of Paris’) gives a light-hearted and romantic view of the city. Jesse – a family doctor as well as a passionate photographer – photographed no fewer than 2000 women in the space of ten days. His portraits of actresses, students, mannequins and female vagrants offered a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of Paris and introduced the Dutch public to the ‘Parisienne’ in all her different facets.

In his 1956 photo novel Een liefdesgeschiedenis in Saint Germain de Prés (also published as Love on the Left Bank), Ed van der Elsken offered a rather different view of the city. He had been living in Paris for a number of years and therefore had more opportunity to photograph real street life. He hung around with a group of existentialist young people whom he photographed regularly. They became the main characters in his (fictive) love story, which portrayed a rougher and tougher side of Parisian life (in particular that of the bohemian artists in and around the Quartier Latin).

Gare du Nord showcases work by around fifty Dutch photographers. Exhibits will include images not only of anonymous street life, but also of celebrities like Orson Welles, Juliette Gréco, Christian Dior and the still extremely young Brigitte Bardot and Yves Saint Laurent. In addition, there will be a chance to see two short experimental films: Joris Ivens’ 1927 film Études des mouvements à Paris (Studies of Movements in Paris) and De Hallen van Parijs (also known as Les Halles de Paris) made by Paul Schuitema in 1939. The latter was digitized last year by Eye Film Institute Netherlands and is now for the first time available to the general public.

Website : Fotomuseum Den Haag

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LOAN FROM CENTRE POMPIDOU IN PARIS BRINGS FORTY OF THE MUSEUM'S TOP PAINTINGS TO THE HAGUE

2012-01-02T08:01:00.000+01:00

Robert Delaunay, La Tour Eiffel, 1926, 169 x 86 cm, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou

The prestigious Centre Pompidou in Paris has loaned forty of its top works for a special exhibition in Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. The exhibition includes famous masterpieces by such artists as Kandinsky, Brancusi, Picasso, Matisse, Miró, Giacometti, Léger, Braque and Delaunay. Visitors to the museum this will have a unique opportunity to experience Paris as the dazzling city of modern art in The Hague. In the first half of the 20th century, Paris was an irresistible magnet which attracted up-and-coming artists from all over the world. It was here that modern art history was written. The most progressive artists of the Netherlands were also drawn to this exciting site of renewal and artistic freedom. This autumn the flow has been reversed as the top collection of the Centre Pompidou comes to The Hague, forming the backbone of a major exhibition featuring Paris as the centre of modern art. This exhibition is being complemented by the historical photography exhibition Gard du Nord in The Hague Museum of Photography.

Never before has there been an exhibition focused on the relationship between the Netherlands and Paris as the cradle of modern art. A look at exhibitions in Europe in the past shows many examples of the connection between Paris and Berlin or Moscow, but up to now the Netherlands was missing from this list. Yet various Dutch artists experienced crucial developments in their career while they were in Paris. One such example is Piet Mondrian, who after visiting Paris embarked on a completely new direction, both in his work and his private life. And it was not only Mondrian: Kees van Dongen, Karel Appel and Constant were all inspired and influenced by the exciting and flourishing artistic life in Paris. This presence of Dutch artists in Paris is given a special focus in the exhibition.

During the first half of the 20th century, art underwent a period of rapid renewal. Stirred up by the apocalyptical character of World War I and driven by the idea of a better future, or in a reaction against the style of their predecessors, the artists in Paris developed new styles in an enormous range of exuberant colours and forms. Paris was an artistic refuge where artists could meet in bars and cafés, form groups, discuss, influence each other and argue their principles. Nowadays we can use internet to exchange experiences and ideas with people all over the world, but in the early years of the 20th century, the only way to meet was ‘in the flesh’, and Paris was the community of modern art.

The Parisian air also spread to The Hague Museum of Photography. Here the exhibition Gare du Nord is featuring work by Dutch artists who worked in Paris in the period 1900 to 1968.

Website : Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

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KUNSTVEREIN HAMBURG CURATES EXHIBITION WITH WORKS BY AMERICAN GRAPHIC DESIGNER CHARLEY HARPER

2011-12-30T05:45:00.001+01:00

Charley Harper, The Name is Puffin, 1971. © Charley Harper Art Studio.

Kunstverein Hamburg goes Berlin: On invitation by the Volksbühne the Kunstverein Hamburg curates an exhibition with works of the American graphic designer Charley Harper at the pavilion at RosaLuxemburg-Platz, Berlin. The exhibition presents a collection of app. 35 works that had been shown at the Kunstverein Hamburg in Summer 2011.

Birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, fish, the artwork of wildlife artist Charley Harper (1922 –2007) is a visual ecosystem in which elements of colour, shapes, lines and subjects are interrelated, interdependent and perfectly balanced. Harper had an unique ability to capture the essence of any living organism. His works still challenges our previous perceptions of nature, and offers a new and unexpected way to enjoy it, both visually and verbally. In a style he called “minimal realism”, Charley Harper captured the essence of his subjects with the fewest possible visual elements. As an artist, he was less interested in creating the illusion of dimension than he was in capturing the infinite patterns and designs of nature. Unlike traditional super realistic wildlife art, his is flat, simple, playful and funny. When asked once to describe his unique visual style, he responded: “When I look at a wildlife or nature subject, I don’t see the feathers in the wings, I just count the wings. I see exciting shapes, colour combinations, patterns, textures, fascinating behaviour and endless possibilities for making interesting pictures.”

He contrasted his nature-oriented artwork with the realism of John James Audubon, drawing influence from Cubism and Minimalism. His style distilled and simplified complex organisms and natural subjects without losing identity, yet they are often arranged in a complex fashion. Using his mechanical drawing tools: ruling, pen and compass, T—square, triangles and French curves, Harper drew orthographically, using direct front, rear, side, top and bottom views to reveal the uniqueness of the creature he depicted.

For the exhibition in the pavilion of the Volksbühne at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin the Kunstverein produces a special display that reflects the open room structure and includes the works in form and content.

Website : Kunstverein Hamburg

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KUNSTHAL ROTTERDAM PRESENTS A MAJOR EXHIBITION OF EGYPTIAN MUMMIES IN THE NETHERLANDS

2011-12-29T07:55:00.003+01:00

The Kunsthal Rotterdam presents a major exhibition of Egyptian mummies in the Netherlands. In a stunningly designed exhibition, over 225 objects provide insight into the fascinating burial rituals of ancient Egypt. Highlights are the mummy of Anchhor from Thebes and his authentic coffins, which are still completely intact. The exhibition includes countless rare objects such as the magic scarabs, amulets, jewels and statues that were placed inside the coffins. Some of the secrets of the mummies have been revealed thanks to the use of new technological developments. There is also a comprehensive educational programme for children and students in the MummieLAB.

The remarkable rituals of ancient Egypt
Nowhere does death such an important role as in the lives of the ancient Egyptians. The exhibition tells the story of the ritual of mummification, which began in approximately 2600 BC as a way of preserving the body for as long as possible for its journey to the kingdom of the god Osiris. Beautiful objects illustrate how this process of mummification took place, and remarkable burial traditions such as the mummification of animals are also explained.

MummieLAB
The ancient Egyptian civilisation and its elaborate burial rituals have always made a strong impression on new generations and continue to do so to this day. Together with Rotterdam’s Erasmus Medical Centre, and using x-rays, MRI scans and facial reconstruction techniques, the exhibition provides a comprehensive overview of the technical examination of mummies. In the MummieLAB, young visitors can mummify soft toys and have their photographs taken on a sarcophagus. A special smartboard programme is being developed for use by schools.

Website : Kunsthal Rotterdam

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FIRST MAJOR CANADIAN EXHIBITION OF WORKS BY VAN GOGH FOR MORE THAN 25 YEARS TO OPEN AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA IN OTTAWA

2011-12-28T07:55:00.000+01:00

Vincent van Gogh, Almond Blossom, 1890. Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 92 cm. Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).

The National Gallery of Canada’s 2012 exceptional summer show, Van Gogh: Up Close, will be the first major Canadian exhibition of works by the famous Dutch artist for more than 25 years. In what promises to be a truly unique exhibition, visitors to the National Gallery will have the opportunity to discover Vincent van Gogh’s genius from an entirely new perspective by exploring the artist’s approach to nature through his innovative use of the close-up view. Opening on May 25, 2012, the exhibition is organized in partnership with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and supported by Sun Life Financial, the exhibition will be honoured by the patronage of Her Majesty The Queen of the Netherlands and His Excellency the Right Honourable David Johnston, Governor General of Canada.

Van Gogh: Up Close will feature some 45 paintings from private and public collections around the world, offering the opportunity to see some of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings alongside others that are rarely, if ever, shown. The exhibition will also explore parallel uses of the close-up view in Japanese prints, drawings from the 16th through the 19th century and 19th-century photographs to provide a context for Van Gogh’s extraordinary compositions.

"Vincent van Gogh’s profound love of nature has often been taken for granted, but has rarely been studied. This project will give us fresh insight into Van Gogh’s thinking and places him in a new and unexpected light," said NGC director Marc Mayer. "We are profoundly indebted to our lenders, both institutional and private. Without their generosity and commitment to this undertaking Van Gogh: Up Close would have been impossible."

“As a long-standing supporter of the arts in Canada, we are proud to partner with the National Gallery as Presenting Sponsor of this outstanding exhibition,” said Dean Connor, President of Sun Life Financial. “We are delighted that thousands of Canadians will now have the opportunity to view some of this brilliant artist’s most original and radical work.”

Nature in focus
Beginning with his work from Paris (1886/7) and continuing to the end of his career (1890), the exhibition will reveal how Van Gogh experimented with depth of field and focus by zooming in on a tuft of grass or a single budding iris in some paintings, while providing shifting views of a field or garden in others. For example, the show will display Iris (1889), from the National Gallery of Canada’s collection, as well as paintings that depict another corner of the garden where Van Gogh painted Iris, but from a wider angle. Van Gogh: Up Close will demonstrate how these paintings became the most radical and innovative in the artist’s body of work.

Where it started
In early 1886 Van Gogh arrived in Paris from the Netherlands and came face to face with a revolutionary new way of painting. For the first time he was exposed to the art of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, which compelled him to revise his painting in both content and style. He quickly abandoned the sombre hues of his earlier Dutch works in favour of a brighter palette and modernized brushstroke, beginning with a series of flower still lifes painted in a typical 19th-century Western style. But Van Gogh swiftly departed from this tradition and focused increasingly on the subject itself, eliminating the surrounding space.

At the same time, Van Gogh developed a keen interest in Japanese woodblock prints, which he admired for their aesthetic qualities. Like the Impressionist painters who had discovered these prints earlier, Van Gogh became fascinated with Japanese art. This led him to experiment with unusual visual angles, decorative use of colour, cropping and flattening of his compositions.

In 1888, in Arles, Vincent van Gogh wrote: If we study Japanese art, then we see a man, undoubtedly wise, who spends his time – on what? – studying the distance from the earth to the moon? […] – no, he studies a single blade of grass. This blade of grass leads him to draw all the plants – then the seasons, the broad features of landscapes, finally animals, and then the human figure. He spends his life like that, and life is too short to do everything.

Van Gogh, the man
While often remembered for his battles with mental illness, Van Gogh was an ambitious, well-read and sophisticated thinker whose work was informed and deliberate. He was fluent in English, French and Dutch, and he had a great love for the written word. Through out his life he read a vast amount of literature that stretched from the bible to French Naturalist writings. Van Gogh also had a strong understanding of art history that extended from Old Master paintings right up to the emergence of photography.

Website : National Gallery of Canada

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SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART PRESENTS DEFINITIVE LOOK AT 110 YEARS OF SCULPTURE

2011-12-27T07:54:00.001+01:00

A major new exhibition, which uses the extraordinary collection at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to explore the development of sculpture over the last 110 years, opened in Edinburgh this week. The Sculpture Show highlights the enormous diversity of sculptural practice in this period, bringing together some 150 works, by artists such as Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas, Barbara Hepworth and Damien Hirst. This fascinating overview of Modern and Contemporary sculpture also includes key loans from private and public collections, and brings the story right up to date, with works by this year’s Turner Prize winner Martin Boyce and nominee Karla Black.

Simon Groom, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art said: 'The Sculpture Show gives us a fantastic opportunity to showcase the huge strengths of the collection in innovative ways. It also allows us to celebrate the specific strengths of contemporary art in Scotland, with the inclusion of works by this year’s Turner Prize nominee Karla Black and winner Martin Boyce, as well as past winners including Simon Starling, Martin Creed and Douglas Gordon. With major international loans and new commissions, this history of sculpture is the history of how art became contemporary.'

The Sculpture Show takes over both floors of the Gallery’s main building, and also extend into the grounds, where a recent work by Roger Hiorns has been installed on Charles Jencks’s Landform. Comprising two decommissioned aircraft engines from the United States Air Force, this spectacular work is on loan from the Arts Council Collection and is being shown for the first time in the UK. It joins an array of sculpture on permanent display in the grounds of the Gallery’s two buildings, Modern One and Two.

The exhibition demonstrates the depth, richness and range of sculpture in the Gallery’s collection. It begins with collages, reliefs and assemblages made by Cubist, Surrealist and Constructivist artists in the early 20th Century (including masterpieces by Picasso and Man Ray), and demonstrates the continuing influence of these techniques throughout the century, up to contemporary artists such as Toby Paterson. Other highlights from the first half of the century include Impressionist sculptures by Degas, Rodin and Medardo Rosso, as well as displays devoted to Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein (including Epstein’s rarely seen monumental alabaster carving Consummatum Est (1936-7)).

After a worldwide tour, Ron Mueck’s monumental work A Girl (2006) has returned to Edinburgh to form the centrepiece of The Sculpture Show. The 5-metre mixed-media sculpture of a newborn baby, rendered in breathtaking detail on an enormous scale, was acquired following the phenomenally successful Mueck exhibition, which drew over 130,000 visitors at the Scottish National Gallery in 2006. A Girl features in a display devoted to Super-realist sculpture, which also includes Duane Hanson’s celebrated Tourists. Further rooms illustrate the impact of surrealism on sculpture of, or about the human body including works by Marcel Duchamp, Sarah Lucas, Giacometti and Hans Bellmer.

The upper galleries chart developments in sculpture from the 1960s onwards, exploring the ways in which the definition of the artform has expanded in the last 50 years. Crucial to this is the work of artists such as Joseph Beuys, Donald Judd, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Bruce McLean and six new works by the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, one of the key members of the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s, and one of the elder statesmen of contemporary art. The Way Things Go by Peter Fischli and David Weiss brings film and video into The Sculpture Show, the enchanting 29 minute film features a large kinetic sculpture which comes to life as a 100 foot long chain reaction.

A striking late work by American Minimalist artist Sol LeWitt has been specially installed for the exhibition. Wall Drawing #1136 (2004) covers three walls of a single room, and reaches almost 22 metres in length. The work, which took a team of eight people a month to complete, immerses the viewer in a vibrant world of colour. It comprises 149 vertical bands, hand-painted in an irregular sequence of primary and secondary colours, intersected by the sweeping curved form which snakes around the room. This work, which is part of the ARTIST ROOMS collection, has never before been on display in Scotland.

Throughout the exhibition, a series of changing displays of recent sculpture will be shown. The first of these is devoted to leading Glasgow-based sculptor Nick Evans, who is currently exploring the collection as part of a SNGMA / Creative Scotland Fellowship.

A series of exquisite photographs by Turner Prize winner Martin Boyce, which give the viewer an insight into the artists’ research and inspirations, are also on display. These images are being shown in conjunction with Untitled (After Rietveld), a haunting fluorescent light work by Boyce which was recently gifted to the galleries.

Website : Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

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DE HALLEN HAARLEM PRESENTS THREE SOLO EXHIBITIONS BY DUTCH ARTISTS WHO SHARE A STRONG ONTRINSIC RELATION

2011-12-26T07:09:00.002+01:00

Marijn van Kreij. Untitled (Private & Confidential), 2010. Gouache on paper, 152 x 120 cm. Courtesy Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam.

This winter De Hallen Haarlem is presenting solo exhibitions by three Dutch artists who share a strong intrinsic relation: Daan van Golden, Marijn van Kreij and Annesas Appel. A predilection for graphic patterns and the use of repetition as a stylistic device are corresponding features in their work. These are the first large solo museum exhibitions for Van Kreij and Appel in the Netherlands. On the occasion of Daan van Golden’s solo exhibition the project En/Of will release an LP with music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and a record-sleeve with photography by Van Golden. A selection from the En/Of editions can both be seen and heard.

Through these exhibitions De Hallen Haarlem wants to emphasise the importance of Daan van Golden (Rotterdam, 1936) and show in which way he inspires a younger generation of artists. Van Golden is a typical artist’s artist, whose artistic views have particularly met with response among his colleagues. In recent years the international recognition for his work has soared: the large retrospective Red or blue for example was shown in London, Geneva and Lisbon. The exhibition in De Hallen Haarlem comprises a selection of his paintings and photographs spanning a period of 50 years.

Daan van Golden
His relatively small but diverse body of work is characterized by an acute attention to detail. References to important works from art history, as well as to less exalted images from commerce, pop-music and daily life are important components of his work. Van Golden has never been too concerned about prevailing artistic trends and has always carved a path of his own. His art does not consist of large brushstrokes, but of a much more modest gesture: his paintings are the result of a labour-intensive process, whereby a visual motive is explored in a very careful and precise manner.

Marijn van Kreij
As is true for Daan van Golden, repetition and the reuse of existing motives are important visual elements for Marijn van Kreij (Middelrode, 1978) as well. For example both a picture of the band Nirvana and graphic patterns on the interiors of envelopes are recurring visual motives in his work. He likes to play with references to diverse sources of inspiration from the visual arts and pop culture, thereby dissolving the distinction between high and low culture. With great precision he can copy a page from an Ad Reinhardt catalogue as easily as he can draw a copy of a live-picture of a Nirvana concert, over and over again.

Van Kreij’s exhibition How to Look Out will show recent and older work including drawings, prints, sculptures and video. The exhibition consists of a site-specific installation that will incorporate works by other artists.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a lavishly illustrated publication with texts by Nickel van Duijvenboden and Xander Karskens.

Annesas Appel
In Annesas Appel’s (Amsterdam, 1978) first solo museum exhibition, De Hallen Haarlem will offer an overview of her projects from the past five years. Annesas Appel systematically maps existing objects from her everyday surroundings and classifies their formal characteristics according to specific criteria.

In Colours_ a mathematical tale (2011) she gives a new visual interpretation of the book covers in her own bookcase. Appel has linked the colours of the covers to the CYMK-system that typifies colours by a specific percentage of cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Subsequently she visualised these figures on a screen with four vertical planes, thereby creating a whole new image. Appel’s work moves on the edges of autonomous art and graphic design. As is the case for Van Kreij and Van Golden repetition plays an important role in her work. With Van Golden she also shares the acute attention to detail, that makes her output relatively low.

Special edition En/Of by Daan van Golden
En/Of is an initiative of curator and music publisher Robert Meijer (1977). Since 2001 he has been working on this project that brings together art and music. The idea behind En/Of is simple: Meijer asks both a musician and an artist to make a contribution that fits within the format of a double LP. Every edition consists of an LP and a work of art, limited to 100 copies. Up to now 45 different artworks and records have been produced, of which a selection can be seen and heard at De Hallen Haarlem. On the occasion of Daan van Golden’s solo exhibition, En/Of will release a special edition with photography by Van Golden and music by experimental musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.

Website : De Hallen Haarlem

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BEST-KNOWN GRAPHIC WORK OF SPANISH ARTIST FRANCISCO GOYA AT MALMÖ KONSTHALL

2011-12-23T08:05:00.001+01:00

The best-known graphic work of Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746–1828) is Los Desastres de la Guerra, known in English as The Disasters of War. Its message remains just as relevant today. Goya’s etchings depict for the first time war from the viewpoint of the civilian population’s suffering, without any attempt to soften the impact. We are ruthlessly presented with the brutality of war and the inhumanity of mankind. The etchings are an intense visual report of a barbaric behaviour that has since been repeated and is still continuing around the world today.

Goya began working for the Spanish royal court painting cartoons for tapestries, before gradually becoming the official court painter. Concurrently with his career as a portrait painter, he did a number of commissions for the Catholic Church in Spain. After suffering a severe illness that confined him to his bed and left him deaf, Goya changed his work method in about 1793. He continued to do commissions but also began working on his own choice of subject matter. In these latter works he expressed his own thoughts and ideas, and his style became freer and more expressive. In 1824 he moved to France for political reasons and died four years later at the age of 82.

These more personal works by Goya include the graphic series The Disasters of War, which consists of 80 [82] etchings. Produced between 1810 and 1820, the series contains gruesome illustrations of the Spanish struggle for independence. The French army had invaded Spain in 1808 and Napoleon had placed his brother on the Spanish throne. This led to an uprising in Madrid and sparked off Spain’s war of liberation (part of the Peninsular War), during which guerrilla-like methods were used up until 1814.

The Disasters of War was first published in 1863, 35 years after Goya’s death. This delay was probably because Goya himself did not dare to publish such images – which would have been political dynamite at that time – for fear of the consequences. The pictures can be divided into three main topics: events from the war (nos. 1–47), the famine in Madrid during Napoleon’s siege of the city (nos. 48–64), and critical comments on the political situation in Spain (nos. 65–80).

The wartime events are depicted with a powerful realism and a mercilessness that are hard to protect oneself against. The impact is reinforced by the short comments engraved beside the pictures, such as “It’s impossible to look at this” or “This is too much!” It is thought that these comments are based directly on Goya’s own notes. He presumably witnessed many of the horrendous scenes that he depicts or heard about them from friends and acquaintances.

The famine in Madrid from 1811 to 1812, which in Spanish is usually called “Año del Hambre”, the year of hunger, took more than 20,000 human lives. Madrid’s civilian population suffered terribly during Napoleon’s long siege of the city. Goya’s strongly drawn moments in time give hunger a face. Their focal point is always on the individual rather than on the historical course of events. We encounter emaciated people, both alive and dead.

The last etchings in the series focus on the situation in Spain immediately after the war, and are a devastating criticism of the subsequent power struggle between the country’s new rulers and the Church. In his satire, Goya uses various allegorical scenes and addresses topics such as the Inquisition and the use of torture.

The black-and-white graphic style suited Goya and he was a master at building up an image by using sharp contour lines combined with the chiaroscuro technique used in painting. He is said to have stated: “in art no colour is needed, I just see light and shadow.” Goya always based his copper plates on drawings, and a number of the original drawings for The Disasters of War are extant. Often, as in The Disasters of War, he combined various graphic techniques such as line etching, aquatint and engraving.

Over the years many artists have been influenced and inspired by The Disasters of War. One of them is Gerhard Nordström, whose works can be experienced at the same time at Malmö Konsthall in a major retrospective.

Website : Malmö Konsthall

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EXHIBITION AT DE NIEUWE KERK IN AMSTERDAM SHEDS LIGHT ON THE MAIN ELEMENTS OF JUDAISM

2011-12-22T07:56:00.002+01:00

This winter, De Nieuwe Kerk and the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam present an exhibition about Judaism. With more than five hundred objects on display, this exhibition tells the fascinating story of three thousand years of Jewish religion, culture, art and history, the chronicle of a world religion that takes diverse international forms but has always held onto its identity. The exhibits come from internationally renowned museums and private collections, and most of them are on display in the Netherlands for the first time. The absolute highlights include a first-century Dead Sea Scroll from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (with reservation), the oldest complete Torah scroll, originally from Erfurt and now at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, valuable manuscripts, a painting by Chagall from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Alefbet Tapestry by the contemporary Russian-American artist Grisha Bruskin.

Judaism is the most ancient monotheistic religion. Over the ages, it has spread around the globe. Whenever Jews arrived in a new place, they would integrate into society without giving up their identity. Judaism therefore takes many different outward forms, but the core of the religion is the same all over the world.

Since the earliest days of Judaism, there have been Jewish stories. Through the centuries, tales, parables, legends, and songs helped to keep the tradition alive and in touch with the times. Like any other religion, Judaism tries to answer questions about life's origins, significance, and purpose. There is more than we imagine in heaven and earth, but what, exactly? What secrets lie hidden within Creation? What is the meaning of life?

The exhibition sheds light on the main elements of Judaism. At the heart of the religion is the Book: the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament. Text study is central to Jewish religious life and forms the foundation of many stories, holidays, and precepts. Other themes include sacred sites, the abstract God, days of celebration and commemoration, the life cycle, daily life and history. The aim is to provide new insight into the many facets of Judaism.

Each exhibit, whether a manuscript, a ceremonial object, a painting, or a model, is presented as a rare and precious jewel. The message of the exhibition is underlined by a documentary and a series of filmed interviews with Jews around the world – liberal and orthodox, famous and unknown – giving visitors a vivid impression of the enormous diversity within Jewish religious experience.

Judaism: A World of Stories is part of a series of exhibitions at De Nieuwe Kerk on the cultural history of world religions. While the Jewish Historical Museum focuses primarily on Jewish culture, religion, and history in the Netherlands, De Nieuwe Kerk will use this special exhibition to showcase Judaism's global diversity, with the building as a spiritual site.

Website : Nieuwe Kerk

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BEFORE THE LAW: POST-WAR SCULPTURES AND SPACES OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT MUSEUM LUDWIG COLOGNE

2011-12-21T07:37:00.000+01:00

Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Sitzender Jüngling, 1916/17. Bronze, Höhe 104 cm. Stiftung Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg. Foto: Jürgen Diemer.

The question of the fundamental conditions of human existence is of timeless importance as well as contemporary urgency. Human rights violations and assaults on human dignity can be observed every day – the media seeming to allow us to examine these with increasing thoroughness. The exhibition Before the Law is dedicated in both a focused and comprehensive manner to the central theme of the human condition and its fragility. The sculptures of the postwar era and spaces of contemporary art visualize with great immediacy how the various artists come to terms with the conditio humana.

This show, organized in collaboration with Siemens Stiftung, is the last programmatic exhibition curated by Kasper König at Museum Ludwig.

The parable and metaphor providing the topic for the exhibition is the eponymous short story by Kafka. It tells of a man from the countryside seeking to gain entry to the law. The doorkeeper denies him admission, while repeatedly assuring him of the possibility of entering at a later date. The country man remains waiting at the gates his entire life, excluded from the law. And the same doorkeeper mans his post year after year, representing the eternal, statue-like counter-figure to the aging individual embodied by the country man.

Noteworthy in comparison to other definitions is Kafka’s concept of the law as a space that is tangible and finite, to which there is an entrance and from which one can be excluded. The exhibition takes up this mental image and creates an interior that encompasses the entire third floor, where 24 artistic positions resolutely define their own setting.

Before the Law combines figurative sculptures from the post-war era with contemporary positions, spanning an arc across the last sixty years. The catastrophe of World War II constitutes a fundamental break with human rights and human dignity that has been determinative of our contemporary understanding of these values, as reflected for example in the first article of the German constitution. Against this backdrop, the works of the post-war years – which portray with great directness the oppressed, wounded and threatened human being - form the argumentative core of the exhibition. Statues by Germaine Richier, Gerhard Marcks, and Alberto Giacometti give the traumatized human a face and a body, finding artistic forms with which to express the speechlessness of that time. They form the starting point for the viewer’s contemplation of contemporary installations by artists such as Phyllida Barlow, Paul Chan, and Zoe Leonard. In contrast to their historical “role models” these works have largely abandoned figurative portrayal, approaching the ever more complex and splintered conditions of present-day human existence by way of spatial dimensions and diverse materials.

The exhibition Before the Law not only demonstrates the persistent topicality and expressiveness of post-war figurative sculpture, but through its historical context also puts into focus the humanistic potential of contemporary art. In times of increasing insecurity and fast-paced living, it seems necessary to address a type of art that insists on earnestly coming to terms with the human condition.

An extensive catalogue will be published by Buchhandlung Walther König to accompany the exhibition, with contributions by Penelope Curtis, Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Kasper König, Thomas Macho, and Thomas D. Trummer.

Website : Museum Ludwig

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CABINET EXHIBITION OF COLOURFUL LANDSCAPES BY SWISS PAINTER ALBERT WELTI AT KUNSTHAUS ZÜRICH

2011-12-20T07:30:00.000+01:00

Albert Welti, Autumn Wood, around 1900
Schaffhausen, Museum zu Allerheiligen

The Kunsthaus Zürich is staging a cabinet exhibition of colourful landscapes by the Swiss painter, graphic artist and draughtsman Albert Welti (1862-1912). A pupil of Arnold Böcklin and a native of Zurich, Welti received numerous national commissions and is known both in Switzerland and abroad for his painting of the citizens’ assembly in the chamber of the Swiss Council of States. His works express the turn-of-thecentury mood: a time of transitions, as with the motif of the bridge, the cycle of ageing and the depiction of dream-like twilight scenes in nature.

Albert Welti loathed the impressionistic in all its forms. He was reluctant to exhibit his pastel works, and most remained hidden away in his studio throughout his life. Reportedly, he never showed his colour improvisations even to his closest friends, regarding them as nothing more than ‘pastel nature sketches’ – study material at best, that served its purpose in terms of picture composition. Posterity has come to view them differently. The Kunsthaus Zürich was quick to recognize his genius, staging a major, comprehensive exhibition of his work as early as 1912. The most recent significant presentation, curated by Bice Curiger in 1984, featured drawings and graphic works from the Kunsthaus collection on the theme of ‘Walpurgis Night.’ Marking the 150th anniversary of Welti’s birth, the new exhibition is centred around 45 pastel landscapes whose intense, hyper-natural chromatic effect speaks directly to the viewer. They helped Welti to break free from the influence of his mentor and model Arnold Böcklin and develop his own artistic style. In fact, these ‘improvisations’ are masterpieces in their own right. Using a selection of 13 studies for paintings and engravings – including one pastel that served as a draft for the celebrated mural of the citizens’ assembly in the chamber of the Council of States at the Swiss Federal Parliament building – curator Bernhard von Waldkirch demonstrates the various functions of pastel drawing. The majority of the works are from the artist’s estate in the Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen, the Kunsthaus Zürich and private collections.

FLUID TRANSITIONS
Welti’s art is imbued with the specific atmosphere of the turn of the century. Its Janus-faced quality is most productive where his pictures depict a transition, as with the motif of the bridge, the cycle of ageing and the depiction of dream-like twilight scenes. Welti is at his most carefree in his Post-Impressionist pastel landscapes; drawing on a still-fresh apprehension of the scenery and without recourse to Symbolist personification, he hints at the presence of the unconscious. He exhibits a particular penchant for twilight scenes – those moments in nature at which chiaroscuro is utterly transformed into colour. In his boldest efforts, Welti ventures into the field of chromatic improvisation; but unlike with Kandinsky, he remains firmly anchored in the visible world.

TALES, MYTHS AND LEGENDS
Throughout his life, Welti drew on the rich treasury of folk tales, myths and legends. Guided by the painting technique of the Old Masters, he became skilled in the iconography of classical history and landscape painting. Yet in many ways, his conception of the image is resolutely modern. His uncompromising advocacy of imagination opens up lines of communication with our earliest childhood memories and creates a bridge to the formal language of the preconscious. As brain research has taught us, dreams are not limited to sleep. Even when we are awake, many brain activities link us to the regions associated with dreaming: here too, the transitions are fluid.

ARTISTS, TEACHERS, COMMISSIONS
Albert Welti was born in 1862 in Zurich-Aussersihl, an area that was still rural at the time. His father ran the successful Welti-Furrer transport company. In 1880, Albert embarked on an apprenticeship in photography with his uncle Oswald Welti in Lausanne, though he abandoned it after a year. His father allowed him to move to Munich where, from 1882 to 1886, he trained as a painter at the Academy. He received his first painting lessons from Ludwig von Löfftz, an outstanding pastel artist with whom Karl Stauffer-Bern and Lovis Corinth also studied. The Weltis’ circle of close friends in Munich included Ernst Kreidolf and Wilhelm Balmer. Welti spent two years in the Zurich studio of Arnold Böcklin, to whom he retained a debt of gratitude throughout his life. In 1894 he married and settled in the Zurich district of Höngg. 1892 saw a fateful meeting with the East Prussian landowner Franz von Doehlau, who supported him until his death. Welti travelled to Berlin, Breslau, Dresden, Vienna, Paris and Venice. In 1901 he was commissioned to paint the glass windows in the stairway of the Federal Parliament building on the subject of ‘the textile industry in eastern Switzerland.’ In 1906 the family spent time in Innertkirchen and Vättis, where Welti painted numerous pastels from nature. Hermann Hesse was among those who admired his art. In 1907 he worked on the designs for the image of Wilhelm Tell’s son to appear on the 25-centime stamp. The following year he moved to Berne to begin work on the commission for the painting of the citizens’ assembly in the Council of States chamber of the Federal Parliament. The numerous sketches, drawings and cartoons that Wilhelm Balmer executed as a mural continued to occupy him until his sudden death in 1912. Hermann Hesse, who visited Welti on a number of occasions, published a monograph on him in 1917 for which he wrote the foreword.

THE ART OF THE PASTEL: A UNION OF DRAWING AND PAINTING
Pastel painting has been a recognized technique in its own right since the 18th century. It was revived in the last quarter of the 19th century by artists such as Manet, Degas, Redon and Picasso, and experienced an upsurge in popularity in the context of Symbolism and Art Nouveau. In Switzerland Augusto Giacometti, with his decoratively abstract pastel paintings, is regarded by art historians as its chief pioneer. Manipulating the pastel crayon, a dusty, porous material that can be used on paper to create painterly nuances or spontaneous improvisations, requires supreme skill; and yet the technique’s consummation is its union of drawing and painting.

WORKS FROM THE KUNSTHAUS PRINTS AND DRAWINGS COLLECTION
The Collection of Prints and Drawings of the Kunsthaus Zürich is represented in the exhibition by four pastels and the engraving ‘The Journey into the 20th Century,’ a critique of the era. It was Kunsthaus director Wilhelm Wartmann who in 1912 – the last year of the artist’s life – published the first catalogue raisonné of his graphic prints and organized an exhibition. He considered Welti to be the leading Swiss Symbolist, alongside Hodler. The Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft subsequently acquired the entirety of Welti’s graphic prints. Today, the Kunsthaus possesses the most comprehensive collection of paintings, drawings and graphic works by the master and some of his contemporaries. The opening of the Kunsthaus extension will provide sufficient space for these treasures to be shown to the public at more frequent intervals than has hitherto been possible.

A 144-page book (Scheidegger & Spiess) accompanies the exhibition, featuring 70 colour illustrations and a text by Bernhard von Waldkirch.

Website : Kusthaus Zürich

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KUNSTHAUS ZÜRICH TO PRESENT 'WINTER TALES. WINTER IN ART FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO IMPRESSIONISM

2011-12-19T08:28:00.003+01:00

Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Return from the Inn, after 1616. Oil and tempera on wood, 40,8 x 64,5 cm. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Schenkung der Familie Maxwell 1955.

From 10 February to 29 April 2012 the Kunsthaus Zürich is staging a thematic exhibition focusing on depictions of winter from the Renaissance to Impressionism. Entitled ‘Winter Tales,’ it includes some 120 works by artists such Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Jacob van Ruisdael, Francisco de Goya, Kazimir Malevich, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch and many other European painters. For the first time in a Swiss art museum, it brings together the hand-carved, opulently gilded sleighs of Austria’s ruling family and sumptuous Flemish tapestries.

The creation myths of most great civilizations generally agree that winter came into the world as a punishment and a plague. Until the Middle Ages, its arrival imperilled food supplies and health in a predominantly agrarian society that was at the mercy of nature. Since then, social and technological progress have combined to progressively mitigate winter's impact. The Kunsthaus Zürich exhibition also highlights the pleasurable aspects of the season, and its timing has been deliberately chosen to herald the arrival of spring.

FROM SUFFERING TO PLEASURE
Having fallen out of fashion after the Renaissance, the winter landscape was rediscovered by artists in the late 18th century. Initially, the harsh season is romanticized; later, artists turn their attention to the subtle palette of winter colours. The display in the large exhibition gallery of the Kunsthaus Zürich ranges from large-format depictions of Napoleon’s army stranded amid the ice and snow – the very picture of misery and suffering – to frozen ponds and rivers, magnificent still lives and the pleasures of ice skating.

DUTCH PAINTING, ROMANTICISM, IMPRESSIONISM
Kunsthaus Director Christoph Becker and guest curator Ronald de Leeuw present a wide-ranging, eclectic and international selection of more than 120 works of art from various genres created in Western Europe between 1450 and the 1920s. They include Dutch painting, a wealth of landscapes and Impressionist works together with Dutch allegories of the months, scenes of winter festivities and folk customs as well as still lives. Portraits and interiors offer an insight into the changing winter fashions and furnishings with which people sought to shield themselves from the cold and damp.

ARTISTIC TAPESTRIES, HORSES AND SLEIGHS
The selection of paintings, arranged by genres and schools, is complemented by a number of superb objects: large-format tapestries and a magnificent sleigh pulled by life-size horses, cups and goblets, delicate porcelain figures and vessels cut from semi-precious stones offer a captivating illustration of the exquisite craftsmanship deployed by supreme practitioners to satisfy their clients.

PRESTIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS LOAN WORKS FROM BRUEGHEL AND GOYA TO
MUNCH
The many loans successfully negotiated over a three-year period in cooperation with the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna are drawn from some of the world’s leading museums, including the Musée d’Orsay and Musée du Louvre (Paris), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the National Gallery (London), Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) as well as private collections and the museums’ own holdings.

Paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Younger hang side by side with works by Jacob van Ruisdael, Hendrick Avercamp, Jan van Goyen, Aert van der Neer, Francisco de Goya, Kazimir Malevich, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro and Edvard Munch.

FROM DEATH TO CARNIVAL
In addition to these celebrated artists, the exhibition also presents painters whose work is rarely shown outside their country of birth; for some they will be a revelation, for others a chance to renew old acquaintances. Often they feature surprising motifs that are unique in the context of the exhibition. They include the monumental, part-frozen Niagara Falls (‘Chutes du niagara en hiver,’ 1857) by Hippolyte-Victor-Valentin Sebron and the autumn painting in the Japanese style by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen Kallela entitled ‘L’automne’ (1902). Edouard Alexandre Odier’s painting depicts an episode in Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, while Pierre-Maximilien Delafontaine portrays an ice skater in triumphant pose. From the serenity of German Romantic Carl Friedrich Lessing’s ‘Monastery Courtyard in the Snow,’ around 1829, visitors are thrust into the turbulent world of Roman carnival in around 1650, as depicted by Johannes Lingelbach.

‘Winter Tales’ begins in the Renaissance and guides visitors through 400 years of social and cultural history, through bad times and good, before finally emerging into the spring awakening of Impressionism.

Website : Kunsthaus Zürich

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PALAZZO STROZZI TO SHOW AMERICANS IN FLORINCE: SARGENT AND THE AMERICAN IMPRESSIONISTS

2011-12-16T08:08:00.000+01:00

William Merritt Chase, The Olive Grove, c. 1910, oil on canvas mounted on panel; 59.6 x 85 cm; Chicago (IL), Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.25

Americans in Florence. Sargent and the American Impressionists on view at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence , from 3 March to 15 July 2012, sets out to illustrate the extremely fertile and multifaceted relationship that the painters of the New World established with Florence and other cities in Tuscany between the mid 19th century and the World War 1. After the end of the American Civil War, there was a substantial increase in the number of American artists travelling to Europe , although, of course, the 18th century Grand Tour tradition had never really died. The painters’ main destinations were Florence , Venice and Rome , cities which the artists idolised in their eagerness to explore their ancient monuments and to take their own measure against the art of the past. They were also attracted by the charm and variety of the landscape, so different from the countryside back home, by the light, by the evocative and atmospheric panoramic views, and by the picturesque charm of the local people.

The exhibition is divided into five sections with works by over thirty Americans artists who worked in Florence . Some, like John Singer Sargent, are famous, while the work of other less well-known artists is being shown in Italy for the first time. On returning home, they all became celebrated painters and authoritative masters who played a crucial role in forming the new generation of American painters and in forging the birth of a national school of painting. Their paintings dialogue in the sections of the exhibition with those by Florentine and Tuscan painters including Telemaco Signorini, Vittorio Corcos and Michele Gordigiani, whose work came closest to the sophisticated manner, so rich in literary allusions, that was favoured and nurtured by the most exclusive circles in that cosmopolitan colony.

Section 1. Room with a View
This section focuses on the places where the Americans’ daily life was played out in Florence . Sargent’s The Hotel Room is typical of their first encounter with the city, involving an inevitable sojourn in a hotel in the centre to give them the time to explore and look for somewhere more appropriate to stay, far from the din, the poverty and the filth of the metropolis. Henry James, an illustrious American writer of the same generation, describes Florence as lethargically overlooking its sluggish green river, as in Lorenzo Gelati’s painting View of Florence with Washing hanging out to dry, “basking” in its decadent beauty, brimming with that atmosphere of the past which James and other Americans were aware was so lacking in their own country. Similarly, the market place, as shown in Telemaco Signorini’s painting, was a discovery for the Americans, with its hubbub, colours, smells and dirt, not to mention the threat represented by beggars and pickpockets. The aim of these painters and their intellectual friends was to take up residence just outside Florence , in a villa in the hills, such as the village of Batelli in View of Piagentina painted by Silvestro Lega, then in a country setting that has been totally swallowed up by the expanding city today.

Section 2. Americans in Florence
The second section consists of a gallery of self-portraits and portraits of the exhibition’s leading players, the American artists who spent time in Florence , whose work forms the heart of the exhibitions’ subsequent themes. These include Sargent, Frank Duveneck, William Merritt Chase, Cecilia Beaux, Edmund Charles Tarbell, Robert Vonnoh, Thomas Eakins and Frederick Childe Hassam, all of whom were ensnared in the engrossing experience of the Old World, and their search for a personal ‘room with a view’ capable of unveiling the aesthetic and literary mystery of a city to which some of them would later donate their self-portraits (now in the Uffizi). Alongside these painters, the portraits of Vernon Lee and Henry James evoke the presence of the large Anglo-American colony of scholars, collectors, writers and art critics, who in a singular melding of personalities and proclivities, projected onto Florence and its surroundings the utopian ideal of a perennial Renaissance.

Section 3. The Circle of Egisto Fabbri: Scholars and Painters
This section not only reconstructs the environment in which the influential Italian-American collector Egisto Fabbri’s artistic education took place, beginning at the school of Julian Alden Weir in America and continuing in Paris in the shadow of Cézanne, Degas and Pissarro, it also reconstructs the American acquaintances of the young Fabbri who, when he finally returned to Florence, was to devote his energy to the cult of Cézanne and to a spirituality of Symbolist inspiration. Alongside the work of William Morris Hunt and John La Farge, masters of the younger generation setting out for Europe, the section will also include paintings by Mabel Hooper La Farge (John’s daughter-in-law) and Mary Cassatt, both of whom were Fabbri’s friends; by James Abbot McNeill Whistler and by Sargent himself, who portrayed the leading players in the American society that Egisto frequented, its eccentric and cosmopolitan aspirations acted out against the splendid backdrop of the Florentine hills.

Section 4. The Image of Florence and Tuscany
Here the visitor encounters views of the city and its surroundings painted in accordance with the literary standards introduced by the novels of Edward Morgan Foster and the literary transfigurations of Edith Wharton, Maurice Hewlett and Elisabeth Pennel, who were to ‘invent’ the Tuscan countryside we can still recognise today in certain unchanged vistas, and with which the American painters George Inness, Elihu Vedder, the Duvenecks, Hassam and Merritt Chase proved to be perfectly at ease, translating its variety into sun-drenched naturalistic snapshots or into views prompted by sudden moods or by dreams of a bygone era. Selected watercolours that Sargent devoted to the serene elegance of villa life, alongside others inspired by the gardens of Florence and Lucca , by the Tuscan countryside and by the Carrara marble quarries, provide us with a significant anthology of the highest quality, illustrating this peculiarly American way of interpreting the Italian landscape.

Section 5. America through the Lens of Painting and Literature
The last section takes the visitor across the Atlantic , in the wake of the American artists who returned home brimming with enthusiasm and experience. These paintings were almost all produced by artists who had painted Florence and Tuscany and whose careers benefited enormously from the experience in the Old World . This was a very different decision from that made by Whistler, Cassatt and Sargent, who elected to stay in Europe , although they were inevitably somewhat nostalgic exiles. Tarbell, Hassam, Weir, Benson, Chase, Cassatt and Beaux painted the American landscape and domestic interiors, and portrayed women or leading personalities in American politics and society. Many, on returning from Europe, became the younger generations’ teachers and it was this new graft, nurtured also by the collections of European old masters and modern art being put together by America’s wealthiest families with advice from the artists themselves (Cassatt, Chase), that forged America’s first national school of painting.

Website : Palazzo Strozzi

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FIRST EVER EXHIBITION IN AUSTRALIA DEDICATED TO RENAISSANCE PAINTINGS IN CANBERRA

2011-12-15T07:39:00.000+01:00

Attributed to Marco del Buono and Apollonio di Giovanni, Love procession c.1440s. Tempera on wood panel, 39.2 x 56.0 cm. Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, bequest of Antonietta Noli, widow of Carlo Marenzi 1901.

The National Gallery of Australia opened the first ever exhibition in Australia dedicated to Renaissance paintings. The exhibition is titled Renaissance – 15th & 16th Century Italian Paintings from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, it is the Gallery’s major summer exhibition.

The exhibition features more than 70 paintings including works by Italian masters such as Raphael, Botticelli, Bellini and Mantegna – artists whose paintings have never been seen in Australia before.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of Italian art are the foundation of the grand tradition of European painting. The genius of artists such as Raphael, Botticelli and Titian is known to most Australians, but visitors to this exhibition will also discover the talents of less wellknown painters such as Tura, Crivelli, Lotto, Vivarini, Carpaccio, Perugino and Moroni.

None of the works in the exhibition has ever left Europe before. The paintings are only able to be loaned by the National Gallery of Australia because the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo is renovating its display spaces and is closed. The National Gallery of Australia has organised the exhibition in partnership with the City of Bergamo and its Pinacoteca Accademia Carrara, Bergamo. The city of Bergamo is situated in the province of Lombardy in Northern Italy, near Milan.

‘Renaissance is an unparalleled opportunity for Australians to see works of extraordinary quality created by masters of the Early and High Renaissance period without having to travel overseas. There has never been an exhibition in Australia that has included fifteenthcentury Italian art, and this period is barely represented in Australian collections,’ said Dr Ron Radford AM, Director of the National Gallery of Australia.

‘Some of the most famous names in the history of art are represented in the exhibition. No paintings by Raphael, Botticelli, Bellini or Perugino have ever been shown in Australia before,’ he said.

The paintings emanate from cities and courts of Renaissance high culture. In Venice, Florence, Bergamo, Padua, Ferrara and Siena, the Church and private patrons commissioned religious scenes as well as magnificent portraits. Some of the paintings in this exhibition were originally sizeable church altarpieces, the like of which have rarely been seen in Australia, but the majority of the paintings are intimate devotional panels commissioned for private use.

Christine Dixon, Senior Curator of International Painting and Sculpture, National Gallery of Australia and Co-ordinating Curator of the exhibition said, ‘The Renaissance exhibition will provide visitors with an intriguing view of the beliefs and lifestyles of both the elite and the ordinary Italian citizen of the time. The Gallery is proud to present such a unique show which will allow visitors to appreciate the beauty of these 500 year old works which still speak to us today.’

Website : National Gallery of Australia

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STÄDEL MUSEUM TO OPEN ENCHANTED LANDSCAPES EXHIBITION IN FEBRUARY 2012

2011-12-14T07:54:00.001+01:00

Claude Lorrain (about 1600–1682), Landscape with a Tower, about 1635-40. Pen and grey/brown wash on off-white paper, ruled in red chalk. Städel Musuem, Frankfurt am Main.

“In Claude Lorrain, nature declares itself eternal,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe noted enthusiastically on the French Baroque artist’s landscape paintings in 1818. According to Germany’s prince among poets and most famous “Grand Tourist,” Lorrain’s idealized, timeless landscapes possess “the highest truth, but no trace of reality.” As of February 2012, the Städel Museum will show one hundred and thirty works created at different points in Claude Lorrain’s (c. 1600 or 1604/05–1682) career, among them thirteen paintings and numerous drawings and prints. Prepared in partnership with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, “Claude Lorrain. The Enchanted Landscape” will present the work of the most important landscape painter of the seventeenth century in a monographic exhibition for the first time in Germany after almost thirty years.

Besides five drawings and about forty etchings, the Städel possesses a significant late painting by the master: “Christ Appears before Mary Magdalene (Noli me tangere.” In recent years, the Städel could acquire a rare etching from the spectacular “Fireworks” series and – supported by the Kulturstiftung der Länder and the Hessische Kulturstiftung – the outstanding drawing “Dancer with Tambourine and Bagpiper.” The Städel considered this a wonderful occasion to highlight this artist’s achievements in a comprehensive research and exhibition project. Spanning several years, the preparation of the show, carried out in collaboration with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, yielded new scholarly insights for an art-historical classification and assessment of Claude Lorrain. The results will now become generally available for the first time in a special presentation. “We can contribute new findings particularly concerning the function of the drawings and the very original way Claude Lorrain used them, but also regarding the only little researched engravings, their dating, and the circumstances of their genesis,” says Dr. Martin Sonnabend, curator of the exhibition and head of the Städel’s Collection of Prints before 1750.

Claude Gellée, known as Le Lorrain (“The Lotharingian”), Claude Lorrain, or traditionally just Claude in English, was born in Chamagne, a village near Nancy, in Lorraine in 1600. Still in his youth, he went to Rome where he settled permanently excepting a short return to his homeland in 1625. From his beginnings, Claude primarily devoted himself to landscape painting: his pictures were such a success that he soon received commissions from the pope, powerful cardinals, and European princes. From the mid-1630s till the end of his days, Claude, who had no big workshop and virtually no pupils, had to work hard to satisfy the demand for his paintings.

During his life-time, Claude was particularly held in high regard in Italy and France, while his art excited the utmost admiration in England and Germany in the eighteenth century. Travelers from England who, in keeping with their station, visited Italy on their Grand Tour acquired many of the artist’s paintings, and the greater part of his surviving 1,100 drawings and several of his etchings are also to be found in English collections – which has particularly left its mark on English ornamental gardening. Claude’s influence on German art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries does not only become manifest in Goethe’s assessment, but also in Classicist German landscape painting. The Städel Museum possesses several paintings that evidence this impact, e.g. Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein’s portrait “Goethe in the Roman Campagna” (1787) or Josef Anton Koch’s “Landscape with Noah Offering a Sacrifice of Gratitude” (1803). These works are now on exhibit once more after the refurbishment measures in the garden wing have been concluded and the “Modern Art” collection of the Städel has become accessible again.

“Claude Lorrain” is the first special exhibition at the Städel sponsored by J.P. Morgan as Corporate Sponsor. This partnership engagement enables the Städel to present the master’s impressive oeuvre in a comprehensive special show in Frankfurt. J.P. Morgan has shown its commitment to the Städel Museum in numerous joint educational projects since 1998. Last, the art club “J.P. Morgan Kids” was founded and successfully launched with the support from J.P. Morgan in 2007.

Website :Städel Museum

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GUGGENHEIM NEW YORK ANNOUNCES RETROSPECTIVE DEVOTED TO THE SIXTY-YEAR CAREER OF JOHN CHAMBERLAIN

2011-12-13T08:23:00.001+01:00

Dolores James, 1962. Painted and chromium-plated steel, 72 1/2 × 101 1/2 × 46 1/4 inches (184.2 × 257.8 × 117.5 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York © 2011 John Chamberlain / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: David Heald/Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

From February 24 to May 13, 2012, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents John Chamberlain: Choices, a major retrospective comprising approximately ninety-five works by the important American artist and the first U.S. museum presentation of his work since 1986. The exhibition examines Chamberlain’s development over his sixty-year career, exploring the shifts in scale, materials, and techniques informed by the assemblage, or collage, process that has been central to his working method. Taking as a point of departure his 1971 Guggenheim exhibition, the retrospective presents works from the artist’s earliest monochromatic iron sculptures and experiments in foam, Plexiglas, and paper to his latest large-scale foil pieces, which have never been shown in the United States, and addresses the “chosen”—Chamberlain prefers this term to “found”—element in his lifelong engagement with recycled materials.

John Chamberlain: Choices is organized by Susan Davidson, Senior Curator, Collections and Exhibitions, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Following its New York presentation, John Chamberlain: Choices will travel to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, where it will be on view from March through September 2013.

“One day something—some one thing—pops out at you, and you pick it up, and you take it over, and you put it somewhere else, and it fits. It’s just the right thing at the right moment. You can do the same thing with words or with metal,” Chamberlain has stated. Fit and choice have rightly become the guiding principles for Chamberlain’s work. His respect for the material’s inherent properties informs the multiplicity of his forms, the simplicity of his process, and the work’s complex underpinnings. The title of the Guggenheim’s exhibition pays tribute to the artist’s process of active selection, or choosing, that is fundamental to his practice.

Born in 1927 in Rochester, Indiana, Chamberlain briefly studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago (1951–52), and at the avant-garde Black Mountain College (1955–56), near Asheville, North Carolina, where he credits his time with teachers including poets Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson among the greatest influences on his work. He rose to prominence in the late 1950s with energetic, vibrant sculptures hewn from disused car parts, achieving a three-dimensional form of Abstract Expressionism that astounded critics and captured the imagination of fellow artists. An inveterate rebel, Chamberlain also violated the formalist prohibition deriding the use of color in sculpture. He chose to adapt uncommon, recycled materials in his work such as the slick, industrial palette of defunct auto bodies.

Chamberlain moved to New York in 1956, where he developed his particular method of assemblage, first using small found metal parts that quickly became larger welded versions of bent and twisted steel. Although he was originally influenced by the compilation methods of David Smith (who also relied on welding found metal parts), Chamberlain’s work soon showed a preference for voluminous and spatial masses. His astonishing, balanced sculptures stressed the deep volumes and eccentric folds that he managed to achieve by squeezing or compressing the metal and then welding the disparate elements into highly developed, collage-like compositions.

Equally conversant in a variety of materials, Chamberlain has not solely restricted his medium to automobile parts. For a seven-year period beginning in 1965, he returned to painting, using an enamel automobile finish to produce highly glossed, small-format square pictures; he ventured into writing and directing 16 mm films; and, fueled by his interest in science, he began an investigation into unusual materials such as urethane foam, aluminum foil, paper bags, and mineral-coated Plexiglas. Later, printmaking and photography (using a wide-angle camera attached at hip level) entered his artistic repertoire.

In addition to Abstract Expressionism, throughout his career, Chamberlain has been associated with both Minimalism and Pop. His works composed of “crushed automobile parts” in bright colors resonated with America’s fascination with consumer car culture, accordingly aligning him with the contemporary work of many Pop artists whose focus was on the object. On the other hand, for Donald Judd and his compatriots, Chamberlain’s sculptures embodied the neutral, redundant, and expressively structured tenants of Minimalism that sought to remove objectivity, inexpressiveness, and the referential. The attempts to place Chamberlain in such various, conflicting categories acknowledge the artist’s elusiveness and singularity. His tireless pursuit of discovery, his curiosity, and his intuitive process distinguish him as one of the most important American sculptors of our time.

Since returning in the mid-1970s to metal as his primary material, Chamberlain has limited himself to specific parts of the automobile (fenders, bumpers, or the chassis, for example). He has been adding color to––or in some techniques, subtracting color from––the found car parts by dripping, spraying, and patterning on top of existing hues to often-wild effect. This liberation and deep exploration of color reference Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse, two artists whose color sense he greatly admires. Beginning in the late 1980s, Chamberlain began using the discarded tops of custom vans, cutting them into long ribbons that he left unfurled, crumpled into undulating bands, or rolled into dense rosettes. The scale of his work increased dramatically at this time, aided in part by a significantly larger studio space in Sarasota, Florida, in 1980, and ultimately on Shelter Island, at the far end of Long Island, where his studio is today.

Over the last three decades, Chamberlain has worked in varying ways within his basic artistic equation, but as his work matured, he has moved toward more aggressive manipulations of form and color and away from crashed-car renown. Perhaps not intentionally, the deep folds of Chamberlain’s sculptures resemble Renaissance drapery studies that imply the underlying presence of a figure, or conversely, a void. His works throughout the 1990s and first years of the twenty-first century became increasingly volumetric, if not baroque, in their massing of form and vibrant color choice. However, in recent years, the artist has embarked on the production of a new body of work that demonstrates a decided return to earlier concerns. Among the largest works he has ever made, these confidently monumental bonfires of metal, with their stacks of mostly horizontal and vertical crushed and rolled metal are drawn from a supply of 1940s and 1950s automobiles. The works’ elegant refinements and exponentially complex renderings exemplify his long-held artistic philosophy, “it’s all in the fit.”

Exhibition Installation
The exhibition encompasses John Chamberlain’s full range of sculptural production and is organized chronologically, spiraling up the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda. Relief sculptures and assemblages installed on the walls and on the ramps create opportunities to experience the work two-dimensionally as well as in the round. Doomsday Flotilla (1982), a seven-part work of painted and chromium-plated steel, is on view in the High Gallery, and SPHINXGRIN TWO (1986/2010), an aluminum arc reaching up to 16 feet, is installed on the rotunda floor and marks the first time a work from this series has been shown in the United States. A foam sculpture carved to resemble and serve as a couch for visitors, which occupied the rotunda floor during the 1971 retrospective, will be re-installed on Rotunda Level 6.

Website : Guggenheim Museum N.Y.

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DICKENS AND LONDON, A NEW EXHIBITION EXPLORING ONE OF THE WORLD'S MOST INFLUENTIAL AUTHORS

2011-12-12T07:16:00.001+01:00

There has not been a major exhibition on Charles Dickens in the UK since 1970. Dickens and London will be the largest exhibition marking the 200th anniversary of his birth in 2012. It will reveal that Dickens was the first great novelist of the modern city and the age of mass culture. Original and rarely seen manuscripts of his most famous novels, including Bleak House and David Copperfield, will be on show.

The display examines the central relationship between Dickens and London – the city that he described as his ‘magic lantern’. Often walking the streets at night, Dickens would build in his mind the settings, plots and characters of his novels. Evoking the atmosphere of the streets of Victorian London and the river Thames, visitors will follow in Dickens’ footsteps and be taken on a memorable and haunting journey, discovering the places and subjects which sparked his imagination.

The great social questions of the 19th century will be investigated including childhood mortality, prostitution, and wealth and poverty. They will be set against the new features of the modern industrial age such as steam boats, railways, the electric telegraph and the penny post. The display will end with a specially-commissioned film, The Houseless Shadow, by William Raban, one of the UK’s leading documentary filmmakers. It will explore the continuities between London after dark as it is now, compared with how it was described by Charles Dickens over 150 years ago.

Key objects on display will include:

• Dickens’ writing desk and chair;
• the only surviving costume of the famous clown, Grimaldi;
• Dickens’ bank ledger;
• Luke Fildes’ painting Applicants for admission to a casual ward;
• excavated items from Jacob’s Island;
• manuscript pages describing the East End opium den featured in Dickens’ last, unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood and William Powell Frith’s celebrated portrait of Dickens, both lent by the V&A.

Alex Werner, Head of History Collections at the Museum of London and lead curator of Dickens and London, said: “Dickens is the first author to describe the modern city of the 19th century and its profound impact on society and, in particular, on ordinary people. London was Dickens inspiration. He knew its alleys and streets better than anyone. His writings remain relevant today especially for the rapidly developing mega-cities around the world today, which face many of the problems and challenges that impacted on Victorian London 150 years ago.”

The official book of the exhibition, ‘Dickens’ Victorian London’ by Alex Werner will be published by Ebury Press, £25 on 5 January 2011. Advance copies of the book will be on sale at the Museum of London when the exhibition opens.

As part of the Dickens and London exhibition, the Museum of London will also feature three costumes from BBC One’s new three-part drama, Great Expectations. Starring Gillian Anderson, Ray Winstone, David Suchet and Douglas Booth, Great Expectations forms the centrepiece of the BBC's celebration of Dickens as we go into the bicentenary of his birth, in 2012. Great Expectations is due to broadcast on BBC One this Christmas.

To coincide with the opening of the Dickens and London exhibition, the Museum of London is launching a new iPhone and iPad graphic novel app which will take users on a journey through the darker side of Charles Dickens’ London. Drawn from a selection of his short stories, Dickens: Dark London will be published monthly throughout the run of the exhibition to echo how Dickens himself released his writings. The first edition of Dickens: Dark London will be available free of charge from 9 December 2011. Each following edition will be available to download monthly for £1.49 on iTunes.

From 7 December 2011 to 10 February 2012, the acclaimed creative director and set designer, Simon Costin, will be designing a playful and contemporary window installation inspired by the Dickens and London exhibition. The display will create a fantastical vision of a wintery London in the mid 19th century - a magical and sprawling blackened cardboard city. The model will explore winding alleys, shop fronts and at night, hundreds of tiny LED lights will illuminate to make the murky windows of the city and street lamps glimmer.

The installation will also feature stylised versions of Victorian ‘window tappers’. These were once small mechanical toys, which were wound up and would tap against the glass of a shop window to attract the attention of passers by.

Simon Costin work is widely celebrated. He collaborated extensively with the late Alexander McQueen, becoming his Creative Director, and has also worked with clients including Hermes, Lanvin and Stella McCartney.

The Museum of London has commissioned artist Suki Chan to produce a work that responds to the nocturnal world of Charles Dickens’ London and draws parallels with our modern city. The commission will be displayed in the museum’s entrance and will open on 7 December 2011, two days prior to Dickens and London and is entitled Sleep Walk, Sleep Talk.

Dickens and London opens at the Museum of London on 9 December 2011 and runs until 10 June 2012.

Website : Museum of London

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NEW ROOMS WITH WORKS SPANNING THE YEARS 1962 TO 1982 ON VIEW AT THE REINA SOFIA MUSEUM

2011-12-09T07:02:00.001+01:00

Opening to the public at the Museo Reina Sofía on Wednesday 30 November are the rooms devoted to the third section of the Museum’s Collection, which covers the period from 1962 to 1982. The Museum’s Collection is articulated around four areas corresponding to the key moments in the history of art, both Spanish and international, in the 20th and 21st centuries. Two of them have already been opened to the public. The first, exhibited on the second floor of the Sabatini Building, takes in the twenties and thirties, when the avant-gardes moved in the direction of greater commitment and antagonism. The second, presented a year ago under the title Is the War Over? Art in a Divided World (1945-1968), surveys the forties, fifties and sixties, and can be visited on the fourth floor.

Occupying some 2,200 square meters of the two exhibition areas in the Nouvel Building, the third section of the Collection is now presented under the title From Revolt to Postmodernity (1962-1982). In it are about 300 works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, videos, photographs and documentary material. A substantial part of the work is seen here for the first time, since it includes recent acquisitions, donations and long-term loans that have not been shown before. In this respect, the Museum has made a great effort to fill important gaps in this part of the Collection, adding names essential to an articulation of the period.

The rooms devoted to this period will house work by artists like Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Hélio Oiticica, Luis Gordillo, Gerhard Richter, Pistoletto, Carl Andre, Hans Haacke, Eugènia Balcells, Eulalia Grau, Mario Merz, Marcel Broodthaers, Donald Judd, Moraza, Molero, Yvonne Rainer, Buren, Jo Spence, Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Carlos Alcolea, Carlos Leon, Esther Ferrer, Concha Jerez, George Brecht, Alberto Corazón, Colita, Nacho Criado and others.

In the twenty years covered by the newly presented work, world-changing events took place whose decisive factors were the growth of new technologies, the advance of consumerism, the processes of decolonization (materializing in nonconformist attitudes among young people and women) and the beginnings of globalization. Events like May ’68, the economic crisis starting in 1973, the death of Franco, the transition to democracy and the start of globalization on an international scale are just some of the landmarks of this period, one of the most turbulent in the history of the 20th century, in Spain and elsewhere.

While this part of the Collection begins in the year of the war in Algeria and the Cuban missile crisis, and so belongs to the buildup to May ’68, 1982 marks the end of the political transition in Spain and opens a decade dominated by figures like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and defined by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. These years are essential for an understanding of the world we live in, and many of the transformations of today’s society have their origins in them.

The period also brought the definitive paradigm shift with regard to what had been considered art since the Renaissance. This was not only because the traditional division of the medium into painting and sculpture was finally overcome, but also because of the “absence” of the author. It is the turning point between modernity and postmodernity. In modernity the author lay at the centre, whereas it was now his “death” that was proclaimed. Artists also showed dissatisfaction with the isolation of the studio, reacting to a need to go out into the streets and interpellate their public.

The new paradigm also implies a radical response to an art understood as a western male practice, with the appearance of voices like those of feminism or tropicalism, or of others raised in protest and denunciation of a repressive social and political context, as in the case of the Latin American and Spanish dictatorships. Minimalism, conceptual art, arte povera, and practices in an expanded field (sculpture opening up to landscape, films shown in museums, etc.) are all characteristic of those years.

A fundamental role is played in the presentation of this part of the Collection by the long-term loans secured by the Museum through various agreements in order to lend coherence to the expository discourse. Special mention should be made of that of Javier Luz, which includes the material by Trama; that of Onnasch, with four works by George Brecht, one by Dieter Roth and another by Daniel Buren; and that of Vijande, which has made it possible to include several pieces by Luis Gordillo.

Above all, however, we must highlight the importance of the long-term loan of the Sonnabend Collection. Decisive artists of the second half of the 20th century, such as John Baldessari, Donald Judd and Bernd and Hilla Becher, can now be seen as part of the Collection thanks to the agreement subscribed recently between the Museo Reina Sofía and the estate of the celebrated gallerist and collector Ileana Sonnabend (Bucharest, 1914 - New York, 2007). The agreement also makes provision for other works by important artists to visit the rooms of the Museo Reina Sofía in the future.

The framework for such actions is the Museum’s policy of long-term loans, which allows it to fill the existing gaps in its Collection without costly investments in pieces that can in some cases reach exceedingly high values on the market, so putting them effectively beyond the institution’s reach.

In the meantime, a number of the Museum’s new acquisitions are presented here for the first time. Among them are works by Hans Haacke, André Cadere, Luciano Fabro, Helio Oiticica, Juan Carlos Romero, Roberto Jacoby, Paz Muro, Concha Jerez, Eugenia Balcells, Raimundo Patiño, Herminio Molero, Nazario, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Angels Ribé, CADA, Colita, Miguel Trillo and Antón Patiño.

Website : Museo Reine Sofia

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EXHIBITION ON THE THEME OF THE COUNTER-CULTURE IN SWITZERLAND AT THE MUSEE DE L'ELYSEE

2011-12-08T07:13:00.001+01:00

Karlheinz Weinberger, Zürich, 1962 © P. Schedler, Warth ( CH ), courtesy Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

The Musée de l’Elysée offers an original exhibition on the theme of the counter-culture in Switzerland, expressed through photography and the visual arts from 1950 to the present day. The exhibition is a contextualization of the work of twenty-five photographers, artists, film and video makers. It shows the various aspects of the counter-culture in the 1960s and 1970s, and the photography critique that succeeded it.

The counter-culture of the 1960s challenged the traditional values in private and public life; it redesigned cultural and political boundaries, from projects of empowerment to sexual liberation, from realism to utopia, from the possible to the impossible. After this long period dedicated to the conquest of freedom, notably artistic freedom, counter-culture disappeared during the 1980s, to be recycled by fashion, consumerism and the market economy. Society switched from patriarchal domination to an ideology of desire and consumerism. The global village of the 1980s has now become the environment for globalization. When everything is measured with the same scale of value, everything can become the subject of appropriation. Contemporary culture blends tradition and modernity, and is now integrated very directly into the market economy. In a politically correct environment, critical visual and contemporary approaches usually use unconventional perspectives.

From subversion to critical expression
In the historical section, the exhibition examines the life of Swiss ‘ Hell’s Angels ’ photographed by Karlheinz Weinberger. It also discusses Luc Chessex’s political utopia in the 1960s, who left Switzerland and moved to Cuba, and addresses the controversy caused by Harald Szeemann at the Venice Biennale in 2001, when he decided to present the work of Arnold Odermatt, a police photographer from the Nidwalden canton.

In the contemporary section, the exhibition presents recent work by Swiss photographers who constantly question the issue of Swiss identity, through landscape, the environment, security and even the Swiss chalet, the ultimate symbol of the sense of Swiss identity born in the late 19th century. Each viewpoint is confronted with another and it is their accumulation that makes the exhibition. Ruptures, fragilities, unconventional approaches or second level perspectives undermine the certainties and draw, between the lines, another vision of society, its customs, its politics or its artistic expression. Although true counter-culture does not exist anymore, contemporary artistic expression uses with intelligence and originality critical tools such as humour, irony, editing, collage or unconventional perspectives.

The exhibition aims at examining counter-culture in Switzerland in three thematic sections.

Culture and behaviour
The first part of the exhibition offers a vision of themes such as behaviour, politics and religion. It includes the photographs, films and videos of Karlheinz Weinberger, Yann Gross, Luc Chessex, Gianni Motti, Arnold Odermatt, Francis Reusser, Nicolas Savary & Tilo Steireif, Emmanuelle Antille and Christian Lutz. The Musée de l’Elysée also recreates the exhibition of the thirty-two photographs by Arnold Odermatt that Harald Szeemann exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2001 on the theme of car accidents.

Humour, irony and unconventional perspectives
The second part of the exhibition shows unconventional work, using humour and irony. It shows series of photographs, collages and projections by Claude Baechtold, Andri Pol, Plonk & Replonk and Nicolas Crispini.

Questioning signs of identity
The third section includes a selection of photographs that present a critical point of view on typically Swiss identity values, such as the landscape, the railway, the Swiss chalet, the army or the post. Series of photographs by Léo Fabrizio, Christian Schwager, Jean-Luc Cramatte, Matthieu Gafsou, Jules Spinatsch and Martin Stollenwerk are exhibited, in parallel with the 19th century photographs of Fred Boissonnas, Adolphe Braun and Francis Frith, all taken from the collection of the Musée de l’Elysée.

Website : Musée de l'Elysée

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EXHIBITION AT MODERNA MUSEET FOCUSES ON NON-COMMERCIAL GALLERY YNGLINGAGATAN 1

2011-12-07T06:57:00.001+01:00

M/M Paris, Theatre posters. Installation view from Galleri Ynglingagatan 1, 1999 © M/M Paris.

Following this spring’s events and magazine projects on the 1980s, Moderna Museet moves on in Swedish art history to the 1990s, with the exhibition Moment – Ynglingagatan 1. The non-commercial gallery Ynglingagatan 1 was a vital forum for Swedish contemporary art in the 1990s, featuring international artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Takashi Murakami and M/M (Paris), decades before their works were recognised by critics and major institutions all over the world.

With modest means and fuelled by a feeling of exasperation with the existing art scene, Ynglingagatan 1 took matters in their own hands in autumn 1993. Their first exhibition was Bjarne Melgaard. The focus on relational aesthetics, cross-disciplinary art, design and fashion, and a distinctly international profile helped to set Ynglagatan 1 apart from other galleries and art institutions in Stockholm. Ynglingagatan 1 was also a launching pad for the careers of a group of Swedish artists, including Karl Holmqvist, Ann-Sofie Back, Peter Geschwind and Johanna Billing.

- The impelling force behind it was frustration with the stagnation of the established art scene. Young artists had nowhere to exhibit their work. And nobody showed foreign artist here either. The vision was to create an alternative art scene, like the one they had seen in New York, but which still did not exist in Sweden, says Thomas Ekström, co-founder of Ynglingagatan 1 and curator of this exhibition.

- Perhaps this retrospective can serve as an inspiration to artists today. If you’re not happy with the art scene as it is, you have to invent your own. It works, says Daniel Birnbaum, director of Moderna Museet.

The exhibition Ynglingagatan 1 is a retrospective presentation of works from the gallery’s programme, in chronological order. It attempts, as far as possible, to feature the works that were exhibited at the gallery, comparable works from the time, or documentations of exhibitions and projects. With its ambition to specifically highlight the 1990s, the exhibition serves as a prism. Events, debates and lectures will also be organised to reflect the thoughts and ideas that were circulating at the time when the gallery was operating.

Website :Moderna Museet

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CLOUD STUDIES: THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE SKY AT THE FOTOMUSEUM IN WINTERTHUR

2011-12-06T05:43:00.001+01:00

The English pharmacist and meteorologist Luke Howard wrote in 1802 in the preface to his manuscript On the Modification of Clouds: “Clouds are subject to certain distinct modifications, produced by the general causes which affect all the variations of the atmosphere; they are commonly as good visible indicators of the operation of these causes, as is the countenance of the state of a person’s mind or body.” Eighty years later, meteorologists had still not reached a consensus on how to classify, label, and read the forms of clouds. It was during this time that scientists first began using photography to record and measure clouds. With its help, they attempted to gain precise and accurate images that would provide insight on the interplay between clouds and the atmosphere and which could be used to create and convey a classification of cloud forms.

The exhibition CLOUD STUDIES – The Scientific View of the Sky presents six stages of meteorological cloud photography, from its infancy in the 1880s – in Switzerland with the first images by Albert Riggenbach photographed from Mount Säntis – up to the newspaper images in the United States that were captured by the first weather satellites in the 1960s. At the beginning of the 20th century, cloud formations and cloud systems were investigated foremost by the military and led to fundamental insights into interrelated weather situations.

CLOUD STUDIES – The Scientific View of the Sky at the Fotomuseum is a rich collection of photographs, notes, records and atlases from diverse research sources and depicts the origins of contemporary weather forecasting. Each of the six parts of the exhibition represents a different scientific and photographic view of clouds while reflecting on the “history of the gaze” as well as the history of the medium with its various photographic mechanisms and reproductive technologies.

An additional theme running throughout the exhibition is the development of science and its varying ideas about clouds. The protagonists and working methods change over time—from the ambitious, wealthy amateur Ralph Abercromby to the anonymous teams of weather satellite technicians. Whereas Riggenbach still wished to capture images of ideal cloud types, the view of the cloud constellations and their chaotic systems expands with the introduction of film, at the latest, and with the constant recording and measuring capacities of digital cameras, which transmit images to earth, where they are evaluated and publicized.

Conceived by curator Helmut Völter (Leipzig), the exhibition CLOUD STUDIES – The Scientific View of the Sky explores the question as to how all these changes influenced the intentions, concepts, and technical developments associated with images of the clouds. It shows how similar or dissimilar photographs of clouds can be, when photographed according to individual specifications. Ultimately it is left to the viewer to decide if and how scientific cloud photography differs from related and frequently published motifs from the history of art and photography.

Website : Fotomuseum Winterthur

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MICHEL MAJERUS' COMPLEX AND COMPREHENSIVE OEUVRE ON VIEW AT KUNSTMUSEUM STUTTGART

2011-12-05T07:49:00.001+01:00

Michel Majerus only lived to the age of thirty-five and nevertheless the artist left behind a complex and comprehensive oeuvre. In a creative period of just ten years he produced a unique statement about painting that remains relevant today. Majerus worked with diverse techniques and varied subjects and motifs taken from the realm of computers, comics, and advertising. At the same time he made use of art history, drawing on works by artists such as Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, and other representatives of Pop Art and Minimal Art. With his »sampling method« of combining various elements in a free and nonhierarchical manner, he created his own world of imagery and thereby gave painting an important impulse. Because of his works’ large size and their installation character, very few museums have been able to show them in all their complexity. From November 26, 2011 to April 9, 2012 the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart fills this gap with a comprehensive exhibition of more than one hundred of the artist’s paintings and installations, including works on loan from Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and Stuttgart.

The Stuttgart exhibition returns the work of Michel Majerus to its starting point: from 1986 to 1992 the artist studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart with, among others, K. R. H. Sonderborg and Joseph Kosuth. Afterward he went to Berlin and lived for a year in Los Angeles. Prior to his death in 2002 he participated in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad and today is represented in museums and private collections around the world. Since the generous size of the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart’s ground floor and basement galleries—with their high and long walls—accommodate Michel Majerus’s expan-sive works particularly well this special exhibition will be the first that is not presented in the Cube. The resulting spatial opportunities enable the exhibition to show the range of Majerus’s multifaceted oeuvre, from the early works of his Stuttgart period to those he produced while living in Los Angeles. Furthermore, on more than 2,500 square meters the alternation of concentrated and open areas offers surprising views and perspectives that impressively convey Majerus’s handling of space—a central subject in his artistic creation.

Typical for the artist (b. 1967) are works like the installation comprised of wooden boxes »A 1-7, T 1-7, H 1-7, M 1-7« (1996) or the »sinnmaschine« (1997) that occupy space in an unusual way or even create their own space. The over one-hundred-meter-long wall piece with text written without spaces »one by which you go in, one by which you go out« can be deciphered and actually experienced only once we make our way through the entire basement of the museum. Particularly complex is the spatial arrangement of the last installation, which the artist completed in 2002 before he died in a plane crash. The visitor enters the work »controlling the moonlight maze« through a small entrance and immediately finds himself in the midst of a work comprised of four large-format paintings. Thus instead of standing before a picture surface that projects an imaginary space—as does traditional painting—this cube built of steel beams defines a concrete space.

In order to realize his ideas, Majerus drew on a wide repertoire of methods and techniques: besides acrylic painting on canvas he made use of silkscreen printing, collage, and neon and video works or computer-generated prints and created works on aluminum, PVC, and wood in addition to large-format murals. His mix of completely different painting techniques and his penchant to freely combine art-historical references with the most diverse picture motifs from the consumer world of logos, slogans, icons, and quotations from comics demonstrate Michel Majerus’s nonhierarchical approach to imagery. In the process he very consciously used the technological and cultural developments of the early twenty-first century: »I enjoy making art in the 1990s because it’s now possible to pursue work that isn’t preoccupied with lingering too long at one particular point.« He justified the use of the latest technological means and opportunities such as computers, Photoshop, and beamers as being »as eco-nomically effective as possible« and enabling him to produce in a timesaving manner. These procedural methods also reflect Majerus’s interest in contemporary iconography, popular art, and youth culture. With his multilayered »side-by-side and overlapping« of styles and motifs he responded to the flood of pictures from mass-media society and in the Internet. Raimar Stange once aptly characterized Majerus as a »picture processing machine«; and according to Nicolas Bourriaud Majerus’s works are comprised of the »mnemonic traces of visual impressions.«

In the video piece »michel majerus« from 2000 the artist’s name flickers in continually new constellations on the monitor screen. Majerus took individual stills from the film and reworked them in the medium of painting. What was previously developed successively is now rendered on canvases placed next to one another. The artist’s name gradually breaks up and an increasingly abstract picture emerges. This series of works, which he produced shortly before his death, exemplifies his working method of presenting motifs in continually new variations. Majerus himself compared this method with the sampling technique of techno music: »What interests me about techno is its expanded production opportunities in the sense that all possible influences can be adapted and thereby fused together.« The sources from which the artist created his works are also correspondingly versatile. As such Michel Majerus integrated numerous art-historical quotations in his oeuvre. Along with highlighting his references to Pop Art, Minimal Art, and Color Field Painting the Stuttgart exhibition exemplifies this with Majerus’s reception of Frank Stella’s paintings. The selection of works demonstrates the multifaceted way in which Majerus assimilated the older artist’s work. Some pieces transform a fragment from one of Stella’s paintings into an autonomous picture subject; others give equal status to comic characters, Stella motifs, and figures derived from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s pictorial language.

In addition to this thematic room dedicated to art-historical references, the exhibition also focuses on the artist’s early and late work. The two »Stuttgart Rooms« present for the first time works Majerus produced while a student at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste. Chiefly small format paintings and prints will be on view here. These present a stark contrast to the huge pictures of his late work produced during his sojourn in Los Angeles in 2000-01. In the »Los Angeles« room the image of a large-format videocassette in »xxx« (2001) recalls Pop Art with its interest in surfaces and motifs derived from the everyday world. In its scope the Stuttgart exhibition reveals an artist whose work responded not only precisely and uncomplicatedly but also poetically and in a playfully ironic manner to art history and the digital age, and in the process expanded the range and potential of painting.

It is with the generous support of the Sparda-Bank Baden-Württemberg that the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart’s special feature exhibit »Michel Majerus« was made possible. In securing Sparda-Bank as the primary sponsor, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart brings on board an extremely engaged partner who values continuity in promoting culture. With this motivation, the credit union approaches this sponsorship of the special feature exhibit »Michel Majerus« as the beginning of a long-term partnership with the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. SpardaBank, with total assets of 11.7 billion Euros, is the largest credit union in Baden-Württemberg and the second largest in all of Germany. Exclusively focused on private customers and its strong regional representation, Sparda-Bank employs 744 associates in 42 branches. Beyond economical concerns, the bank, which formerly catered mainly to railroad employees, sees itself as an integral and active part of society and supports culture in BadenWürttemberg. Sparda-Bank, motivated by the spirit of shared cultural experience, sponsors, among others, the jazzopen stuttgart, the dance foundation Birgit Keil, and the music academies of Stuttgart and Karlsruhe. Through its own foundation, it oversees the graphics from the estate of Otto Herbert Hajek and organizes over 150 of its own events and exhibits annually.

Website : Kunstmuseum Stuttgart

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KUNSTSAMMLUNGEN CHEMNITZ EXHIBITION CELEBRATES FRANCOISE GILOT ON HER 90TH BIRTHDAY

2011-12-02T07:42:00.001+01:00

The first exhibition worldwide marking the 90th birthday of Françoise Gilot at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz. On show are drawings dating from 1941 to 2010. After the retrospective exhibition in 2003 “Françoise Gilot – Painting,” this is the second show of works by the artist and author of Life with Picasso at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz.

Françoise Gilot adopted her own particular position at a very early stage in her career as an artist, influenced mainly by her travels to India and Greece, and later to Egypt. Gilot strives to harmonize the organic and the abstract. She has produced more than 1,500 paintings and over 5,000 drawings and prints to date. The retrospective exhibition “FRANÇOISE GILOT on her 90th Birthday. Drawings 1941 – 2010” at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz is exclusively of her drawings, the majority of which are in color. “One of the reasons I like works on paper so much is that through them I prepare for my paintings. Usually a figurative aspect predominates in the drawings, in any case more than in my paintings”, says the artist.

After World War II, intellectual life in France was fueled not only by existentialism, but by debates about the definition of modern art. In the first decade of the 20th century, the great artists of what is called Classical Modernism – Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich,Matisse and Picasso – had already set the ›landmarks‹

of modern art, which continued to represent a highly controversial challenge for the post-1945 generation. The defining and re-defining of modernism was a constant issue in Europe and in North America, which was slowly but surely contesting the old continent’s leadership in ›avant-gardism‹. The international art scene was dominated, in the respective nationally-tinged discourses, by the dispute about Informel art, whether it was termed abstract or lyrical expressionism, tachism or action painting. With the advent of the new generation of Informel artists, the so-called »École de Paris« and then the »Nouveaux Réalistes«, Francewas still polarized by the great living »old Masters « Matisse and Picasso. For several decades those two artists had been the driving forces of the avant-garde, and continued to be highly esteemed, although neither was understood nor accepted by the general public.Nowthey found themselves in the role of chef-d’oeuvres producers.Although themain protagonists of abstraction in France, they never took the final step towards abandoning figuration. The controversies among the following generation concerned ways and modes, theories and methods of non-figurativeness, a threshold into total abstraction which they never crossed.

Being Françoise Gilot
When Francoise Gilot started her career in the 1940s, i.e., during the war, the debates about the abstract and the figurative had not yet begun, and the art scene in Paris was dominated by the »monstres sacrés« (Matisse, Picasso, Miró, and Léger) and their partisans. In 1945, she took part in an exhibition by the Realités Nouvelles group, who was actively involved in the debates about true modernism. From the very start, she worked both in painting and drawing, analysing non-figurativeness and figuration. The object-based genesis of her artistic and poetic synthesis, however, often remained perceptible, facilitated sometimes by a title that was able to suggestively intensify the impact of a nonfigurative composition: in her watercolorMicrocosm (28, 1983), which reveals its title inside the frame, the viewer suspects that the geometrical-zoomorphic forms hovering loosely or connected with each other in the pictorial space are distillates of a symbolic vision of the world using both autonomous monads and subtly corresponding or associated figures. Synthesis and compactness are the specific features of Gilot’s works from the very beginning. The fact that her career and that of Picasso crossed and then ran parallel for a time may have impeded the reception of her work, but in no way did this hinder her creativeness or her individualism. Her early works may be reminiscent of Miró, Léger, and Picasso (who, at that time, could escape the influence of these very seminal creators?), but they are still shaped by her own strongwill, for example, the two earliest drawings in the exhibition: Self-Portrait of 1945 (1) and P.P. Portrait from Memory of 1946 (2). The self-portrait is significantly entitled A Questioning Look: rather than presenting convictions, it expresses a quest for artistic solutions. The artist takes an inquisitive look at herself and the world and condenses the striking beauty of her features into an equally memorable decorative design. By contrast, she transforms the well known face of the mature Picasso into an impressive, seemingly archaic bust, emphasizing concentration and determination in the large eyes and the shape of the forehead. Interestingly, the name of the person portrayed is abbreviated in the title and reference is expressly made to the fact that the portrait was not drawn from direct observation but frommemory.Themonument-like transformation and the avoidance of the subjective impression suggest deliberate distance. Is this an emblematic attempt to control the uncontrollable, or a way to express independence?

Seeing as Shaping
Seeing and showing, the artist interprets experiences, representations and materialities, as well as spaces that reveal their inner structures and unfold ever new imaginative and pictorial features.

Her early still-lifes (3 Rose of the Winds, 1946, 4 Constructivist Tea Pot, 1947, and 6 Emblematic Still Life, 1947) illustrate a struggle to translate volumes and spaces two-dimensionally in a willful synthesis ofMatisse-like planarity and Picasso-like cubist-crystalline faceting. The series of drawings (7 to 15, 1949–1959) in which she creates graphic translations in the portraits of her children, herself or her friends, is one that is quite strongly marked by Picasso’s overwhelming sign language, although her formulations express much greater empathy. Picasso’s line is always a willful expression of control and domination of the sitter,whereas Gilot’s succinct line conveys empathy and the will to do justice to the subject.

Control and Compactness
This search for a strong expressive synthesis is characteristic not only of Gilot’s graphic translation of the biographical resp. direct life-worldly, but also of the artistic interpretation of literary and mythological subject matter (18 Indian Moon, 1963, 19 Lions of Delos, 1967, 21 Oberon, 1970, 22 PuckWeaving a Charm, 1970). Here, drawing – as the most immediate trail of the artist, as a guarantor of the greatest possible proximity to the origins of creativity – is never spontaneously or subjectively expressive, but always the artistically guided and creatively controlled expression of a will to form. Sometimes the manipulative interventions are minimal and elementary, yet they unfold a poetic, at times surreal unfathomability, particularly when the artist works with different techniques and in color. The power of her focused, empathetic translation is particularly conspicuous in her portraits of the protagonists who were close to her (26 Jonas Salk, 1974).

Seeing, Showing, Thinking, Feeling
In Gilot’s works the pictorial space is not a site or a place; it can signify a void, but also an intermediate or free space, even room for maneuver (29 Again, Late for the Party, 1985). Space thrives on its borders and it is existentially crucial to establish these borders. The graphic line invents and sets the limits of space as the site of the possible, an imaginative space in which to find and experience oneself (31 Mythological Couple, 1989, 30 Intertwined Lovers, 1989).Gilot’s drawings addressing worldliness (32 Lost in Thought, 1993, 33 Falcon’s Abode, 1993) seem to illustrate the existential dimensions of being-in-the-world, reflected on most strikingly perhaps by Heidegger in the category he calls »making room« (»Ein-Räumen«).There are not only real spaces, but also new sites of thought and imagination, intertwined in Gilot’s very specific performative act of drawing (34 Carnac, 1994). For her, biography and experience are material and medium, point of departure and goal all in one. Yet her emblematically compact formal idiom conveys not only her ownworldliness, but also her own concept of art. It is a self-declarative manifesto, an artistic statement identified at a very early stage by Mel Yoakum when writing about her 1945 painting The Painter, An Abstraction: » … this distillation of artistic hieroglyphs…symbolically evokes the very act of creating«. (2) The fundus is always passage, journey, path, opening; its transformations in drawings are choreographies of light and shade, proximity and distance. At a time when virtual spaces, in the Internet, for example, are becoming more real and more private, and people’s own or imaginary spaces are coming increasingly under threat, Gilot’s reflections in drawings with concrete articulated shapes remind us of the creative potential of an alert gaze at the world, a gaze nourished by a rich inner life and a deep affinity to the sources of ancient cultures.

Subject and Archetype
The translations and metamorphoses in Gilot’s drawings bring to light surrealist-analytical poetics of life. Based on life, searching for symbols, setting benchmarks, Gilot develops her own idiomand formulates her personal archetypes.Mel Yoakum, perhaps the best expert on Gilot’s works (3), expresses her concept of art as follows: » … what she has come to envision as the core of art is: the ability to make a statement that is both meaningful personally and archetypically without disclosing its content directly.« (4) By distilling from time and life, Gilot develops a highly original balancing act between abstraction and figuration, the formulations of which in turn have almost timeless symbolic power.

Website : Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz

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FLORIAN GERMANN EXHIBITS AT MIGROS MUSEUM FÜR GEGENWARTSKUNST IN ZÜRICH

2011-12-01T08:37:00.001+01:00

Florian Germann's new cycle of works "The Poltergeist Experimental Group (PEG) Applied Spirituality and Physical Spirit Manifestation" examines the phenomena of the Poltergeist and ectoplasm.

In his wide-ranging cycles of works, each of which is devoted to a unifying thematic narrative, the Swiss artist Florian Germann (b. 1978; lives and works in Zurich) creates complex systems of reference, playing with the role of the artist-researcher. As points of departure for these individual experimental arrangements, Germann uses characters from history such as Napoleon or motifs from myth and fantasy such as lycanthropy (from the Greek lukos, "wolf," and anthropos, "man": the werewolf motif), which he subjects to a revisionary rewriting, interweaving factual and fictional aspects. For his first solo exhibition at an institution, Germann creates an extensive new cycle of works; to be on public display for the first time at the migros museum für gegenwartskunst, it is based on his study of apparitions and their physical substance, the so-called ectoplasm.

Florian Germann's new cycle of works "The Poltergeist Experimental Group (PEG) Applied Spirituality and Physical Spirit Manifestation" examines the phenomena of the Poltergeist and ectoplasm. Germann: "Ectoplasm is a synaesthetic material. It responds to physical moods. That struck me as an interesting point of departure for the creation of bodies that would respond physically to their environments. Ectoplasm, of course, appears in the movie Ghostbusters (1984), where it plays a leading role; but in parapsychology more generally, it is an important 'material of study.' It can also be found in cell biology, where it displays the same characteristics: there too it is a material that changes depending on its environment."

EXHIBITION: For his first solo exhibition at an institution, Florian Germann (b. 1978; lives and works in Zurich) has developed a new cycle of works that will be on public display for the first time at the migros museum für gegenwartskunst. It is based on the phenomenon of apparitions and their physical substance, called ectoplasm. Florian Germann's works have been on display at Kunsthaus Glarus (group exhibition, 2010), at the Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (group exhibition, 2010), and at Galerie BolteLang, Zurich (solo exhibition, 2010).

Website : Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst

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

2011-11-30T08:05:00.001+01:00

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

2011-11-29T07:51:00.001+01:00

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

2011-11-28T09:04:00.001+01:00

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

2011-11-25T07:54:00.001+01:00

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

2011-11-24T07:22:00.001+01:00

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

2011-11-23T08:24:00.001+01:00

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

2011-11-22T07:29:00.001+01:00

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

2011-11-21T07:45:00.000+01:00

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

2011-11-18T07:16:00.000+01:00

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

2011-11-17T08:00:00.001+01:00

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

2011-11-16T07:27:00.000+01:00

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

2011-11-15T07:20:00.000+01:00

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

2011-11-14T06:56:00.000+01:00

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

2011-11-11T08:23:00.000+01:00

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

2011-11-10T07:32:00.000+01:00

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

2011-11-09T07:35:00.000+01:00

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

2011-11-08T06:36:00.000+01:00

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

2011-11-07T08:12:00.000+01:00

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

2011-11-04T07:48:00.000+01:00

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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PAINTINGS FROM EL GRECO TO RIPPI-RONAI ON VIEW ET THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS IN BUDAPEST

2011-11-03T08:14:00.000+01:00

Rippl-Rónai József: Nemes Marcell arcképe (1912)

Marcell Jánoshalmi Nemes (1866-1930) was one of the most significant art collectors in early twentieth-century Hungary, as well as one of its most contradictory figures, whose extensive activities as both an art patron and collector became legendary during his own lifetime. In the course of his career he donated numerous valuable works to the Museum of Fine Arts, including El Greco’s The Penitent Mary Magdalene and Ádám Mányoki’s Portrait of Ferenc Rákóczi, the latter being regarded as a national relic in Hungary. He also made donations to several other domestic as well as foreign institutions, such as the Museum of Applied Arts, the Berlin and Munich picture galleries and indeed even to the Prado in Madrid and the Louvre in Paris. With the donation of his collection of eighty works consisting exclusively of Hungarian paintings he contributed to the foundation of the Kecskemét Picture Gallery in 1911. At the same time, he did not limit his patronage to merely donating various kinds of art. He purchased large numbers of works from young Hungarian and foreign talents and a great many Hungarian artists were able to pursue their studies abroad over the course of several decades thanks to the scholarships and foundations he set up.

Although in the upcoming exhibition the Museum of Fine Arts primarily wishes to pay tribute to the extensive patronage of Marcell Nemes, the material selected from Hungarian and foreign museums as well as from private collections also nicely illustrates the diversity and wealth of the former art collection of the famous “marchand amateur”. The 120 exhibits, including antique vases, medieval sculptures, the finest works of old Italian and Netherlandish masters, as well as valuable applied arts objects dating from various periods, conjure up the atmosphere of the collector’s homes thanks to the enterieur-like arrangement.

Alongside the treasured pieces of Nemes’s former El Greco collection, the exhibition will present works by the emblematic figures of Hungarian fine arts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Mihály Munkácsy, Károly Ferenczy, József Rippl-Rónai, Pál Szinyei Merse, Béla Uitz, Károly Kernstok and János Vaszary, among others. After Nemes’s death this once vast collection was broken up and its world famous pictures now enrich the materials of various museums, including the Orangerie in Paris, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and the Tate in London.

Website : Museum of Fine Arts Budapest

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LOCUS SOLUS: IMPRESSIONS OF RAYMOND ROUSSEL AT THE MUSEO REINA SOFIA

2011-11-02T07:59:00.001+01:00

Museo Reina Sofia presents Locus Solus the first exhibition to be held in Spain on the figure and influence of Raymond Roussel (Paris, 1877 - Palermo, 1933), the author of poetic, novelistic and theatrical works without precedent in the history of literature. Roussel is known for both the singularity and exuberance of his narrative and visual universe and also for the complex methodology he developed and then perfected over time. This methodology was based on the exploration of the inventive potential of homonymy and word play, all from the conviction that an artistic/literary work does not need to contain anything real, that it can be exclusively a combination of imaginary objects. In a text published posthumously, How I wrote certain of my books, Roussel explains the process he used. The author, who always kept his distance from the avant-garde and from the literary movements of his times (because, in the words of André Breton, he was "fully determined to follow no inclination other than that of his spirit") reveals in the aforementioned text that he started out by inventing two phrases that were phonetically almost identical but had very different meanings, to later try to write a story that could start with one of them and end with the other.

Using variations of this process he created his two most emblematic works, Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa, which give this exhibition its name. The show analyses the influence that Raymond Roussel has had on modern and contemporary art, by looking at a broad array of works in a variety of formats (paintings, photos, sculptures, ready-mades, installations, videos...) by about thirty different artists. His enormous influence was recognised early on by surrealists and other creators linked to the historical avant-garde – including Marcel Duchamp, who went so far as to describe him as "he who points the way" – and since then it has done nothing but grow, with an authentic myth being generated around this artist who, nonetheless, remains quite unknown.

The exhibition shows how Raymond Roussel's aesthetic-literary undertakings, so complex and ambitious and with their strange blend of conceptual rigor and linguistic delirium, have been a primary source of inspiration to numerous visual artists (Salvador Dalí, Francis Picabia, Allen Ruppersberg, Rodney Graham…) and also to authors from other fields and disciplines, ranging from philosophy (Michel Foucault) to literature (John Ashbery, Michel Butor, Julio Cortázar...), including music and even ethnographic research. The work of Roussel can thus be used as a point of departure for an oblique and transversal reading of 20th century art.

Website : Museo Reina Sofia

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A SELECTION FROM THE MEZZANIN STIFTUNG FÜR KUNST COLLECTION ON VIEW AT KUNSTMUSEUM LIECHTENSTEIN

2011-11-01T07:33:00.000+01:00

Otto Zitko, ohne Titel, 1990.

Domiciled in Liechtenstein, the "Mezzanin Stiftung für Kunst" collection is devoted primarily to international, contemporary art. Bearing the stamp of the extreme care and personal commitment of collector Hanny Frick, it has grown continuously over the past few decades.

Hanny Frick relies on direct contact with artists and their works of art. Her approach has led, over the years, to a collection that places the collector on equal footing with the international art world. The holdings range from paintings, drawings, prints and photography to objects and a remarkable group of sculptures from Europe and Africa. In addition, the collection includes artefacts such as found pieces from nature, tools used by artists and a group of prehistoric rock drawings that have been transferred to paper.

The present selection on view at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein highlights paintings, specific drawings and a group of sculptures of African origin, clearly testifying to the importance Hanny Frick attaches to emotional values as well as transcendental and existential concerns. For her, “art is the mezzanine to heaven.”

Alongside anonymous sculptures from Africa, the exhibition includes works by the following artists: Erwin Bohatsch, Kwang-Young Chun, Martin Disler, Helmut Federle, Thomas Feuerstein, Angelo Filomeno, Eva Frommelt, Martin Frommelt, Ferdinand Gehr, Per Kirkeby, Evi Kliemand, Eugène Leroy, Joseph Marioni, Ferdinand Nigg, Stefan Sprenger, Rütjer Rühle, Michael Toenges, Peter Tollens, Cécile Wick and Otto Zitko.

Website : Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein

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

2011-10-31T07:44:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-28T08:43:00.000+02:00

"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

2011-10-27T07:46:00.000+02:00

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

2011-10-26T07:59:00.000+02:00

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

2011-10-25T08:00:00.000+02:00

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

2011-10-24T08:18:00.000+02:00

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

2011-10-21T07:59:00.000+02:00

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

2011-10-20T08:00:00.000+02:00

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

2011-10-19T06:47:00.000+02:00

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

2011-10-18T08:19:00.000+02:00

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

2011-10-17T08:39:00.001+02:00

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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Bron/Source : Artdaily

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

2011-10-14T08:49:00.000+02:00

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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