Artlover in Antibes

David Hockney's Bigger Trees Near Warter Presented at Tate Britain

2009-11-26T15:07:00.001+01:00

David Hockney's Bigger Trees Near Warter Presented at Tate Britain

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David Hockney walks in front of his painting "Bigger Trees Near Warter" at Tate Britain in London. Photo: EFE/Felipe Trueba

British artist David Hockney poses for photographers near his painting "Bigger Trees Near Warter" at Tate Britain in London. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett.

LONDON.- David Hockney gifted Bigger Trees near Warter 2007 to Tate in 2008. The oil painting, his largest ever, was made on fifty canvas panels and was executed outside, en plein air. Measuring 4.6 x 12.2 metres (15 x 40 feet), its subject is a typical Yorkshire landscape, west of Bridlington. The work was first exhibited in 2007 at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. David Hockney also presented Tate with two digital photographic renderings of the painting on paper sheets in the same dimensions as the oil.

Focusing on the arrival of spring before trees have come into leaf, Bigger Trees near Warter features two copses, a mighty sycamore tree, buildings and a road curving to the left flanked by early flowering daffodils.

Hockney’s ambition to paint such a large-scale canvas posed a problem as it was impossible for him to step back and view the whole work. He began by making drawings and used these to locate where each canvas would fit in the composition. From these a computer-mosaic of the picture was generated enabling him to step back, albeit in a virtual space. Hockney was then able to take the individual canvas panels to the site and thus create his enormous work over a six-week period.

David Hockney said: ‘My picture is adaptable. You can split it in two and show one or both halves, or even a quarter of it. Or show the painting with two full-scale reproductions that would almost make a cloister.’

Commenting on the gift, Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate said: ‘Standing before David Hockney’s Bigger Trees near Warter, the viewer is overwhelmed by the beauty of the winter trees and the energy of the Yorkshire landscape. In this work he has deftly joined together the tradition of painting en plein air with digital technology on a monumental scale.’

East Yorkshire first engaged Hockney’s imagination as a teenager. As an adult, he has intermittently returned to this part of England when visiting his mother and sister at their home in the coastal town of Bridlington. However, he only became fully absorbed by the landscape over the past four years, making it the primary source of inspiration for his art. Five paintings from David Hockney’s East Yorkshire landscape series were exhibited for the first time in the UK at Tate Britain in a display entitled David Hockney: The East Yorkshire Landscape.

There are seven paintings by Hockney in Tate Collection including The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles I) 1962, acquired as early as 1963, the celebrated A Bigger Splash 1967 and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy 1970 -71. The Collection also includes many works of paper.

David Hockney was born on 9 July 1937 in Saltaire, Bradford. He graduated from the Bradford School of Art in 1957 and studied at the Royal College of Art from 1959-1962. While there he met RB Kitaj and became instrumental in the founding of the British Pop Art movement. Hockney settled in Los Angeles in 1978. He has been the subject of countless solo exhibitions worldwide including a major touring retrospective held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Tate Gallery, London in 1988.

Tormented Italian Master Caravaggio and Francis Bacon Connect in Rome Show

2009-11-13T11:22:00.001+01:00

Tormented Italian Master Caravaggio and Francis Bacon Connect in Rome Show

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Visitors walk in front of Francis Bacon paintings during an exhibition at the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Photo: Reuters/Max Rossi.

A man looks at a Caravaggio painting during an exhibition at the Galleria Borghese in Rome November 11, 2009. Portraits by Italian master Caravaggio and Irish-born 20th-century painter Francis Bacon stand side-by-side in a new exhibition, connecting their tormented views of humanity despite contrasting approaches to realism. The show at Rome's Galleria Borghese marks 400 years since Caravaggio's death and 100 years since Bacon's birth and at its heart lies their shared fascination with the human form and their predilection for the expressive portrait. Reuters/Max Rossi.

By: Ella Ide

ROME (REUTERS).- Portraits by Italian master Caravaggio and Irish-born 20th-century painter Francis Bacon stand side-by-side in new exhibition connecting their tormented views of humanity despite contrasting approaches to realism.

The show at Rome's Galleria Borghese marks 400 years since Caravaggio's death and 100 years since Bacon's birth and at its heart lies their shared fascination with the human form and their predilection for the expressive portrait.

Both were radical for their times: against the distorted idealism of high mannerism, Caravaggio was driven by obsessive attention to the real, while Bacon was derided for his refusal to relinquish the human figure in favor of abstraction.

"Bacon can be compared to Caravaggio above all in terms of intensity," said art historian Michael Peppiatt, co-curator of the exhibition and Bacon's close friend and biographer.

Both painters have been seen as icons of gay, tormented genius and their tragic natures and lives marked by violence -- Bacon's lover committed suicide and Caravaggio was condemned to death after killing a man -- are echoed in their works.

"They were both conscious of the shortness of life and of the fragility of humanity, and each powerfully conveys this consciousness through his art," said Peppiatt in a statement.

Seventeen works by Bacon are featured alongside 14 paintings by Caravaggio, six of which, including the "Madonna with the Serpent" and the "Sick Bacchus," belong to the Borghese's permanent collection.

Many of the works by Bacon, including "Head VI," the result of his studies of Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X, are on loan from London's Tate Gallery.

The lavish entrance to the Galleria Borghese is devoted to Bacon's triptychs, painted after the suicide of his lover George Dyer, with chilling scenes of distorted, semi-naked male figures whose life oozes from them to form flesh-colored puddles.

The show runs until January 24, 2010 and has already attracted well over 67,000 visitors, with the record numbers forcing the Borghese to extend its open hours and increase the number of tickets available for the daily tours by 30 percent.

Andy Warhol's Iconic 200 One Dollar Bills from 1962 Sells for $43,762,500 at Sotheby's

2009-11-12T11:05:00.001+01:00

Andy Warhol's Iconic 200 One Dollar Bills from 1962 Sells for $43,762,500 at Sotheby's

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Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987), 200 One Dollar Bills, 1962. silkscreen ink and pencil on canvas, 80 1/4 x 92 1/4 in. Est: 8,000,000—12,000,000 USD. Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 43,762,500 USD. Photo: Sotheby's

This photo shows a 1965 self-portrait by Andy Warhol. The painting belongs to Cathy Naso, who was 17-years-old when she got a part-time job as a receptionist at Warhol's Factory. The painting sold at Sotheby's for $6,130,500, soaring past the $1.5 million high estimate. AP Photo/Sotheby's.

NEW YORK, NY.- Tonight at Sotheby’s in New York, Andy Warhol’s monumental masterpiece, 200 One Dollar Bills, brought a remarkable $43,762,500, soaring past the pre-sale estimate of $8/12 million. Competition was fierce. Auctioneer Tobias Meyer opened the bidding at $6 million and was immediately met with an almost unheard of response - a bid of $12 million, twice his opening bid. Five more bidders raised their paddles before the winning bid was cast by an anonymous purchaser bidding on the telephone. The Warhol was the top-selling lot in a sale of Contemporary Art that brought an outstanding total of $134,438,000, far-above pre-sale expectations (est. $67.9/97.7 million) and with all but two lots finding buyers. The sale was 98.6% sold by value and 96.3% sold by lot – the highest sold-by -lot total by lot in about twenty years, with only one exception. New auction records were established for Alice Neel, Jean Dubuffet, Juan Muñoz and Germaine Richier; as well as for a sculpture by Willem de Kooning, a neon by Bruce Nauman and a work on paper by Jackson Pollock.

“The desire for great art is very strong,” said Tobias Meyer, Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art. “In a market that has been characterized by pent-up demand, we were able to offer fresh material with conservative estimates, and our sellers were rewarded with the remarkable results we saw this evening.”

Anthony Grant, International Senior Specialist of Contemporary Art, noted, “The stars aligned tonight. With an offering of true icons of post war art, we saw bidding from all corners of the world, from both dyed-in-wool collectors and new clients alike. The Myers Collection in particular offered a great international sampling of artists – Richier, Gottlieb, Appel and Neel - and attracted a great depth of bidding, both private and institutional.”

“Andy Warhol’s 200 One Dollar Bills is a hugely important work for American art history,” said Alex Rotter, Head of the Contemporary Art Department in New York. “Not only was it one of the starting points of Pop Art, but this picture had the perfect ownership history – directly from Warhol’s dealer to the legendary collector Robert C. Scull, and then from his estate sale at Sotheby’s to the current owner who acquired it in 1986 for $385,000. We are immensely gratified by the extraordinary price of more than $43 million achieved for the work this evening.”

In addition to 200 One Dollar Bills several other works by Andy Warhol achieved strong prices tonight. A Self- Portrait from 1965 that the artist gave to Cathy Naso, a young receptionist at The Factory, sold for $6,130,500, more than tripling the pre-sale estimate of $1/1.5 million. More than seven bidders fought for the painting, which had been kept in a closest for 42 years, giving the colors a stunning quality and freshness.

“I think I am dreaming,” said Ms. Naso, who attended the auction this evening but chose to keep a low profile. “I’m simply overwhelmed, both by the amazing price and also by all the attention this painting received. After all these years in the closet, the painting has now come out and has travelled to London, to Hong Kong and has been seen all over the world. Andy has made me famous for fifteen minutes and I’ve come to realize that fifteen minutes of fame is more than enough.”

An Untitled 1962 drawing of a roll of dollar bills, also by Warhol, that came from the collection of Leonard Newman, eventually sold for $4,226,500 against a pre sale estimate of $2.5/3.5 million with seven bidders competing.

Other works that achieved strong prices include Jasper Johns’ Gray Numbers (lot 29), which saw seven bidders drive the price to $8,706,500 (est. $5/7 million). Orange, Red, Orange (lot 47) by Mark Rothko from the Estate of Lucia Moreira Salles had not appeared on the market for nearly 30 years and fetched $3,386,500 (est. $2/3 million) after a contest involving six bidders. Trinité-Champs Elysées (lot 48) by Jean Dubuffet made $6,130,500 (est. $4/6 million) and set a new record for the artist at auction. Violins Violence Silence (lot 27) by Bruce Nauman established a new record for a neon work by the artist when it sold for $4,002,500, comfortably in excess of the $2.5/3.5 million estimate.

The sale began with a group of 20 works from the Collection of Mary Schiller Myers and Louis S. Myers, noted collectors and arts benefactors from Akron, Ohio. Two world auction records were set by works from the Myers Collection: a record was set for American artist Alice Neel when six bidders competed for Jackie Curtis and Rita Red (Lot 2), which brought $1,650,500, well exceeding its estimate of $400/600,000, while Germaine Richier’s La Feuille (lot 4) was sought-after by six bidders, driving the price past the previous auction record and its estimate to bring $842,500. A new record for a Willem de Kooning sculpture was achieved by Large Torso, which sold for $5,682,500, well over the previous record of $3.9 million. Untitled XV, an abstract landscape from perhaps the most exuberant period in de Kooning’s rich and complex career, brought $6,130,500 against an estimate of $5/7 million. Donald Judd’s copper Untitled also exceeded expectations, bringing $1,650,500 against an estimate of $800,000/1.2 million.

2009-09-22T14:24:00.002+02:00

The Stadel Museum will Show the First Monographic Exhibition on Sandro Botticelli

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Sandro Botticelli (1444/45-1510), Idealized Portrait of a Lady, ca. 1480. Mixed technique on poplar, 82 x 54 cm. Frankfurt, Städel Museum. Photo: Städel Museum

Sandro Botticelli (1444/45-1510), Minerva and the Centaur, 1480 - 1482, canvas, 207 x 148 cm. Florenz, Uffizien. Photo: Uffizien, Florenz.

FRANKFURT.- The Städel Museum will show the first monographic exhibition on Sandro Botticelli (1444/45–1510) in the German-speaking world from 13 November 2009 to 28 February 2010. Taking the artist’s monumental Idealized Portrait of a Lady, one of the Städel Museum collection’s highlights, as its starting point, the exhibition presents numerous works from all productive periods of this great master of the Renaissance in Italy about 500 years after his day of death (17 May 1510). The exhibition opens with portraits and allegorical paintings that illustrate the degree of sophistication with which Botticelli drew on this highly developed genre and enriched it with new impulses. While the second chapter centers on his famous mythological representations of goddesses and heroines of virtue, the third part is dedicated to his abundant religious oeuvre. With a total of more than forty works by Botticelli and his workshop, the show presents a comprehensive selection of his work surviving worldwide. Forty further exhibits, among them works by such contemporaries as Andrea del Verrocchio, Filippino Lippi, and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, will allow to understand Botticelli’s precious creations in the historical context of their genesis. The presentation is supported by outstanding loans from the most important collections of paintings in Europe and the United States. These include the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery London, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, and the Old Masters Picture Gallery in Dresden, as well as the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Sandro Botticelli’s painting has become a landmark of Italian Renaissance. The delicate beauty, elegant grace, and unique charm of his frequently melancholic figures make his work the epitome of Florentine painting in the Golden Age of Medici rule under Lorenzo the Magnificent. Initially trained as a goldsmith and then apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli soon ranked among the most successful painters in Florence in the second half of the quattrocento next to Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, and the Pollaiuolo brothers. From 1470 on, he received prestigious public commissions and established himself as a painter of large altarpieces. Throughout his life, Botticelli was in the ruling Medici family’s and their supporters’ good graces. Fulfilling their wishes for innovative decorative paintings, the master could not only rely on his personal knowledge of Florentine traditions and of ancient art, but also on definite suggestions and concepts from the circle of humanists gathered around Lorenzo de’ Medici. Held in equally high esteem as both a panel and a fresco painter, Botticelli enjoyed a high standing beyond his native Florence and was thus one of the artists summoned to decorate the walls of the Sistine Chapel in Rome by Pope Sixtus IV in 1481. It was particularly his much-discussed late work that brought out the characteristic features of his original style in an extreme manner. Guided by the art of drawing – the exhibition includes an outstanding selection of preparatory sketches – Botticelli followed his penchant for presenting his figures with sharp contours, strong movements, and abundant gestures, grounding his compositions on textures of lines and surfaces rather than on spaces and volumes. In this respect, his painting had already stood out against his competitors’ works and current theoretical demands in his early years. This is one of the reasons why art-historical research, which has devoted a vast number of major monographs and work studies to Botticelli since the beginnings of the twentieth century, still assigns a special position to the artist without fail.

The starting point and center of the cross-genre exhibition is provided by a main work from the collection of the Städel Museum not only very well known in Frankfurt: the master’s idealized portrait of a young lady, who is probably to be identified with Simonetta Vespucci, the beloved jousting tournament lady of Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano de’ Medici. This portrait is less aimed at a true-to-life likeness of the subject than at the ideal of a woman characterized by perfect beauty and equally perfect virtuousness, an ideal also reflected in the poetry of that time. Such an ideal defines itself not least through its rapport with antiquity: thus, the beautiful female wears a piece of jewelry round her neck which is obviously based on an ancient cameo showing Apollo and Marsyas, which will also be on display in the exhibition. In the Städel Museum, Botticelli’s famous portrait of Giuliano from the National Gallery of Art in Washington will offer itself for comparison with his beloved Simonetta’s likeness. Both paintings make up the center of the first part of the presentation, which is devoted to Botticelli’s art of portraiture and, drawing on prominent examples, illustrates the interplay between social norm and artistic form as well as the different genre conventions of the male and the female portrait.

The second chapter of the exhibition deals with Botticelli’s mythological pictures, which number among the artist’s most original creations. The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, which safeguards the most comprehensive and significant collection of works by the artist in the world, supports the exhibition in Frankfurt with one of its most popular works among others loans: the famous Pallas and the Centaur, one of Botticelli’s monumental mythological paintings, to be seen in the context of Medicean self-presentation. Together with Botticelli’s Primavera, it once adorned the walls of a bedchamber in a Florentine palace owned by the family of bankers. We see Pallas taming the wild centaur indulging in his passions through her wisdom and virtue. The control and cultivation of emotions was a central issue in ancient philosophy and – combined with Christian thought – of the Renaissance, too; among the painters of the time, Botticelli offered himself as a congenial interpreter for such subjects. The political dimension and the reference to the patron family are symbolically present in the form of two intertwined diamond rings on Pallas’s gown, which were an emblem of the Medici family. Another great female figure featuring in the Florentine artist’s oeuvre is the goddess Venus. His life-size Venus from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin is a repetition of the central figure of (the unloanable) Birth of Venus in the Uffizi Gallery, which he isolated from the context of the scene and set off against a black background. This work is one of the first monumental nudes of postancient painting.

The third and last section of the exhibition is devoted to Botticelli’s religious pictures. Next to his portraits and mythological works, Botticelli has owed his continuing fame to his Madonnas. According to theological thinking, Mary stands out as the ideal woman among the saints: she is the most virtuous and the most beautiful female, the bride of the Song of Songs. Besides many other works spanning from Botticelli’s earliest works still revealing the influence of his teacher Fra Filippo Lippi to examples of his late style, the exhibition in Frankfurt shows one of the artist’s most beautiful Madonnas: The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child. The Madonna’s physiognomy of this painting from the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, whose brilliant colorfulness has only been uncovered through restorative measures some years ago, is rendered in the vein of the same female model which the painter developed for his idealized portraits and pictures of ancient goddesses. This chapter also includes a number of narrative pictures, such as a removed Annunciation fresco once to be found in the vestibule of the hospital of San Martino alla Scala in Florence and preserved in the Uffizi Gallery today. Not only the enormous size of the fresco (243 x 550 cm), but also its qualities as a painting testify to Botticelli’s extraordinary importance in this medium. Four panels depicting scenes from the life of St. Zenobius, an early bishop and patron of Florence, offer a further highlight, with which the exhibition ends. Usually scattered to museums in London, Dresden, and New York, they have been brought together for the first time in Frankfurt again. Ranking not only among his most significant late works, but also among his very last, the panels are to be considered as Botticelli’s legacy as an artist

2009-09-15T10:09:00.001+02:00

Tiffany Exhibition Coming to VMFA in May Opens at Musée du Luxembourg in Paris

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Image showing three lamps made by Louis Comfort Tiffany at the exhibition “Tiffany: Color and Light” which opened at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, France

VMFA Director Alex Nyerges (left) chats at the Musée du Luxembourg with Robin Nicholson, VMFA's deputy director for exhibitions, and Anna Eschatasse, executive assistant for special exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The three attended today's preview in Paris of the show of Louis Comfort Tiffany works that will be on view at VMFA in May. Photo: Jay Paul)

PARIS.- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Director Alex Nyerges, in Paris today for a preview of one of the most significant exhibitions ever mounted of works by the master of American glass, Louis Comfort Tiffany, called the show “dazzling.”

“Here in Paris, the City of Light, the color and light of these Tiffany masterworks are spectacularly appropriate,” Nyerges said.

The exhibition opens to the public at the Musée du Luxembourg Wednesday, Sept. 16, and continues through Jan. 10. It will then travel to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts for a showing from Feb. 11 to May 2.

The American première of “Tiffany: Color and Light” will be at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond May 29. VMFA will be the only American museum to show the exhibition, which will continue in Richmond through Aug. 15.

“Tiffany: Color and Light” will be the first major exhibition to be shown at VMFA after the grand opening May 1 of the James W. and Frances G. McGlothlin Wing, now under construction.

“The Tiffany exhibition will be the first of many international exhibitions in the expanded Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,” Nyerges said at the Paris preview.

When the museum reopens, “gallery space will be 50 percent larger and special-exhibition space will double,” he said. “We will be able to accommodate much larger and more extensive special exhibitions than ever before in our history,” he said.

The expansion will add some 165,000 square feet to VMFA's previously existing 380,000 square feet.

“The Tiffany exhibition will occupy 8,500 square feet of the 12,000 square feet of special-exhibition space in the new wing,” he said.

Conceived by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and organized in collaboration with VMFA and the Musée du Luxembourg, “Tiffany: Color and Light” celebrates the work of the renowned designer who achieved original and spectacular effects in hand-blown glass vessels, leaded glass windows and lamps, and other decorative objects.

“Our own large treasure of works by Tiffany makes Richmond an ideal venue, and we are delighted to have been able to lend 14 important works to the show,” Nyerges said.

The exhibition’s approximately 170 objects will include blown-glass vessels; lamps; leaded-glass windows; and decorative objects such as mosaics, bronzes and jewelry; along with paintings, watercolors, architectural elements and silver. Four of the windows, created for the Erskine and American United Church in Montreal, have never before been shown in the United States.

Tiffany (1848-1933) took advantage of the new technology of electric lighting to reveal the jewel-like hues and sparkle of his leaded-glass lampshades. The wide popularity of his lamps made Tiffany’s a household name.

“Visitors to the exhibition will see first-hand evidence of Tiffany’s love of exoticism, rich ornament, fine craftsmanship, and the abstract qualities of color that placed him squarely in many of the artistic movements of his time, from Arts and Crafts and the American Aesthetic Movement to Art Nouveau and Symbolism,” says Barry Shifman, VMFA’s Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Decorative Arts from 1890 to the Present.

The exhibition’s curators are Rosalind Pepall, senior curator of decorative arts at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, who is the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and Martin Eidelberg, professor emeritus of art history at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

2009-09-14T11:30:00.001+02:00

Nassau County Museum of Art to Present Norman Rockwell: American Imagist

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Norman Rockwell, Breakfast Table Political Argument (oil study) 1948, oil on acetate on board, 10 1/4" x 11", signed lower right and inscribed, "To Herb Herrick, Sincerely, Norman Rockwell" Saturday Evening Post cover oil study, October 30, 1948, study for America, illus 134, study for LNM #C445 © 2009 National Museum of American Illustration™

ROSLYN HARBOR, NY.- “I paint life as I would like it to be,” said the great illustrator Norman Rockwell. Seeing himself as a storyteller, Rockwell created the images that defined America and Americans, in this country and abroad. His enormous impact was achieved through the 321 covers he created for Saturday Evening Post from 1916 to 1963, including his famous Four Freedoms series of patriotic wartime paintings.

Norman Rockwell: American Imagist, opening at Nassau County Museum of Art (NCMA) on Sunday, September 20, 2009 and remaining on view through Sunday, January 3, 2010, is organized by American Illustrators Gallery, New York City and The National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, Rhode Island. The exhibition is curated for NCMA by Constance Schwartz and Franklin Hill Perrell and includes approximately 300 Saturday Evening Post covers and about 48 Rockwell paintings. The exhibition is sponsored by Sterling Glen Senior Living and David Lerner Associates with support from Wachovia Bank and Wells Fargo and Company, the New York State Council on the Arts and Arizona Beverages.

A poet of the American heartland, Norman Rockwell was born 115 years ago in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He demonstrated drawing talent from his earliest years, sketching as literary works were read to him aloud. While in high school, he studied at the Chase School of Fine and Applied Art. Leaving school before graduation, he went on to attend the National Academy of Design, later transferring to the Art Students League. His earliest commission, at the age of 16, was for Christmas cards. He was then retained to illustrate a series of children’s books. Rockwell became the art director for Boy’s Life, the official publication of the Boy Scouts of America. His association with the Boy Scouts was to continue for a half century. Rockwell began freelancing his services to magazines, among them Life, Literary Digest and Country Digest. At 22, he began his legendary association with The Saturday Evening Post, the most prestigious magazine of that era. Rockwell’s first work for the Post was Mother’s Day Off which ran on the May 20, 1916 cover. From then, until 1963, he went on to produce 321 Post covers. It was these illustrations that came to be his greatest legacy.

2009-07-09T10:18:00.000+02:00

Chronological Survey of Le Corbusier's 60-year Oeuvre Opens at Martin Gropius Bau

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A woman observes a work of art made by Le Corbusier (1887-1965), at the retrospective exhibition that is on view through October 5 in Berlin. Photo: EFE/Rainer

Chapel Notre-Dame-du-Haut, Ronchamp, 1950-55 © FLC / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009.

BERLIN.- Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau is presenting the first comprehensive exhibition since 1987 of the wide-ranging work of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965). The architect’s links to Germany and Berlin will also be stressed. There will be a total of about 380 exhibits to be seen in the Martin-Gropius-Bau.

“Le Corbusier – Art and Architecture” provides a chronological survey of his 60 year oeuvre. At the same time, by virtue of being divided into three relatively autonomous areas – “Contexts”, “Privacy and Publicity” and “Built Art” – it highlights leading themes that are important to an understanding of Le Corbusier’s work. These include his interest in the Mediterranean and the Near East, his pursuit of organic forms in the 1930s, and his fascination with new technologies and media. The juxtaposition of these aspects illustrates Le Corbusier’s central concept of a “synthesis of the arts”, which manifests itself in the interplay of architecture, urban planning, painting, design, film, and other disciplines.

Taking account of the latest research and critical scholarship, the exhibition takes an explicitly contemporary look at Le Corbusier, while also serving as an introduction to the work of the architect.

The core of the exhibition is made up of a large number of exhibits from the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, including original paintings, sculptures, numerous original pieces of furniture, original drawings and plans, first editions of Le Corbusier’s books plus numerous small objects from the architect’s private collection, which he used for purposes of inspiration, orientation and demonstration. Le Corbusier’s most important structures are illustrated using both original and new, specially constructed architectural models, while a number of installations based on historical interiors bring his spatial concepts to life.

Among the most impressive exhibits are the giant mural from Le Corbusier’s Paris office in the Rue de Sèvres (1948) and a walk-in model of the Philips Pavilion (1958), which shows how close this project was to today’s computer-generated architecture. The film material shot by Le Corbusier himself in Arcachon and Rio de Janeiro and the reconstruction of the historical model of the “Plan Voisin” (1925), his radically utopian master plan for Paris, are among the major features of the show.

Le Corbusier’s practice of always working closely with his contemporary artists is shown by such exhibits as original pieces of furniture by Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé and paintings by Fernand Léger and André Bauchant.

Le Corbusier and Berlin
For its Berlin presentation “Le Corbusier – Art and Architecture” will be supplemented to include such exhibits as original plans, sketches, books and films concerning Le Corbusier’s relationship with Germany, especially Berlin.

This connection is shown in three stages: First there is Le Corbusier’s long stay in Germany in 1910/11. In 1910 Le Corbusier received a grant to study the German arts and crafts movement known as the Werkbund. From April 1910 to April 1911 he stayed almost uninterruptedly in Germany, working for six months with Peter Behrens and meeting many leading representatives of the Werkbund. The second phase covers Le Corbusier’s dealings with the Bauhaus and Werkbund movements in the 1920s and his participation in the great Bauhaus exhibition of 1923 in Weimar. In 1927 Le Corbusier built his first two buildings in Germany for the Werkbund exhibition at the Weissenhof estate in Stuttgart. Finally the exhibition shows Le Corbusier’s work in Berlin after the war, such as his Unité d’Habitation (dwelling unit) built near Berlin’s Olympia Stadium in connection with the 1957 International Construction Exhibition in Berlin and his contribution to the Capital Competition for International Ideas in 1957/58.

2009-06-25T10:30:00.001+02:00

Homme a l'epee Sells for 7 Million and Leads Sotheby's Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art

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Pablo Picasso’s Homme à l’épée selling at Sotheby’s this evening

Claude Monet, Route de Giverny en hiver, 1885. Estimate: £3-4 million, sold for: £3,849,250. Photo: Sotheby's.

LONDON.- Sotheby’s Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art tonight brought a total of £33,531,150/ US$55,323,044/ €39,479,519* – a figure comfortably within the pre-sale expectations of £26,750,000-37,270,000 – and saw 23 of the 27 lots offered find buyers. The sale achieved the best sellthrough rates since last June for an Evening Sale in this category at Sotheby’s - a sold-by-lot rate of 85.2% and a sold-by-value rate of 90.8%. Furthermore, eight works sold for prices in excess of £1 million, with an average lot value of £1,457,876. The auction saw active bidding within the room and on telephones from international collectors. Pablo Picasso’s Homme à l’épée (lot 8) was the top-selling lot of the evening when it realised £6,985,250/US$11,524,964/ €8,224,421, comfortably within its estimate of £6-8 million, and this represents the highest price of the Impressionist & Modern Art sales series in London this summer.

Commenting on tonight’s results, Melanie Clore, Co-Chairman of Impressionist & Modern Art, Sotheby’s Worldwide, said: “Tonight’s auction saw strong prices achieved across the board and this is a very positive message for the market. We were particularly delighted with the £7 million realised for Picasso’s Homme à l’épée - the highest price of the season. The sell-through rate of 85.2% was the highest that we have seen in an Evening Sale in this field at Sotheby’s since last summer. This impressive performance is testament to our discriminating selection process when assembling the sale to respond to current market conditions. This evening, we’ve seen once again that there is still a very healthy ongoing market for great Impressionist and Modern works of art.”

The top prices of the evening were:
Pablo Picasso’s Homme à l’épée from July 1969 (lot 8), which sold to a private collector for £6,985,250/US$11,524,964/ €8,224,421 against an estimate of £6-8 million. The richly coloured and monumental depiction of a musketeer from the artist’s late oeuvre is one of his most important and iconic subjects of this period. Throughout his career Picasso projected the different sides of his own identity in a number of ways and the musketeer was one of the most celebrated subjects and guises of his latter years. The painting starred in the seminal exhibition of Picasso’s work at the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 1970 and was selected for the poster advertising the exhibition.

Discussing the price achieved for Picasso’s Homme à l’épée tonight, Helena Newman, Director of the Evening Sale and Vice-Chairman of the Impressionist & Modern Art department, Sotheby’s Worldwide, said: “This striking painting from 1969, which had never been at auction before this evening, came to the market at a time when the interest in and assessment of Picasso’s late oeuvre has never been stronger. It was extremely satisfying to see the painting so admired during its pre-sale exhibition. The price it achieved tonight is indicative of its rarity, quality and iconic nature, having been selected for the poster advertising the seminal exhibition of the artist’s work at the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 1970.”

A second work by Picasso - a larger-than-life nude entitled Nu debout from 1968 (lot 17) - also performed strongly tonight, selling for £4,297,250/ US$7,090,033/€5,059,575, in excess of the estimate of £3-4 million; it was the second highest lot of the sale. The painting, which belongs to a series of major works that Picasso undertook on the theme of the female nude in the late-1960s, had been in the same private collection for more than 35 years. Executed when Picasso was a man in his late-80s, it is a striking example of the breathtaking flood of invention and fantastic vitality that characterised Picasso's late years.

Claude Monet was represented in the sale by a quintessential winter landscape entitled Route de Giverny en hiver (lot 11), which sold to an Asian private collector for £3,849,250/ US$6,350,878/ €4,532,100, near its high estimate of £4 million. The classic Impressionist scene from 1885 depicts the snow-covered road leading to the town of Giverny, where the artist lived at the time and where he painted some of his most celebrated works.

The sale was also distinguished by strong prices for sculpture. In particular, three works by Alberto Giacometti from a private European collection (lots 5, 6 and 7) were highly sought-after and sold for a total of £7,403,750/ US$12,215,447/ €8,717,162, above the combined estimate of £4.2-6.3 million. Diego (Tête au col roulé) was the subject of the lengthiest bidding-battle and soared above its estimate of £1-1.5 million to sell for £2,729,250/ US$4,502,990/ €3,213,414. Dating from the early-1950s, the plaster sculpture merges Giacometti’s talents as both a painter and a sculptor. Prominent British artist Barbara Hepworth’s unique largescale stone carving Three Standing Forms - inspired by her triplets - ranked among the most important works by the artist ever to appear at auction and it sold for £780,450/ US$1,287,664/ €918,900, against an estimate of £700,000-1,000,000.

The eye-catching vista of Istanbul by Paul Signac entitled La Corne d’or. La Suleimanie (lot 15) attracted interest from a number of prospective buyers and sold to a private collector for £1,385,250/ US$2,285,524/ €1,630,991, against an estimate of £1.2-1.8 million.

2009-06-22T10:42:00.000+02:00

Colombian Museum Hosts Largest Exhibition Ever in Latin America of Andy Warhol's Works

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Several people observe "Mao" made by Andy Warhol in 1972 at the exhibition "Mister América" which opened in Colombia. Photo: EFE/Leonardo Muñoz

BOGOTA.- The exhibition, organized by Museo de Arte del Banco de la República in conjunction with the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, offers a complete panorama of the work of this fertile artist and it is the largest exhibition ever organized in a Latin American museum. The list of works of art comprises 26 paintings, 57 silk screens, 39 photographs and 2 installations (‘Silver Clouds’ and ‘Cow wallpaper’). Fourteen of his films will also be screened at the Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño.

Andy Warhol, Mr. America explores all aspects and periods from this multi-facetic production from this artist, with a particular emphasis in the period between 1961 and 1968.

It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of iconic American products such as Campbell's Soup Cans from the Campbell Soup Company and Coca-Cola bottles, as well as paintings of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Troy Donahue, and Elizabeth Taylor. He founded "The Factory," his studio during these years, and gathered around himself a wide range of artists, writers, musicians, and underground celebrities. He began producing prints using the silkscreen method. His work became popular and controversial.

Among the imagery tackled by Warhol were dollar bills, celebrities and brand name products. He also used as imagery for his paintings newspaper headlines of photographs of mushroom clouds, electric chairs, and police dogs attacking civil rights protesters. Warhol also used Coca Cola bottles as subject matter for paintings.

New York's Museum of Modern Art hosted a Symposium on pop art in December 1962 during which artists like Warhol were attacked for "capitulating" to consumerism. Critics were scandalized by Warhol's open embrace of market culture. This symposium set the tone for Warhol's reception. Throughout the decade it became more and more clear that there had been a profound change in the culture of the art world, and that Warhol was at the center of that shift.

A pivotal event was the 1964 exhibit The American Supermarket, a show held in Paul Bianchini's Upper East Side gallery. The show was presented as a typical U.S. small supermarket environment, except that everything in it from the produce, canned goods, meat, posters on the wall, etc. were created by six prominent pop artists of the time including the controversial (and like-minded) Billy Apple, Mary Inman, and Robert Watts. Warhol's painting of a can of Campbell's soup cost $1,500 while each autographed can sold for $6. The exhibit was one of the first mass events that directly confronted the general public with both pop art and the perennial question of what is art.

As an advertisement illustrator in the 1950s, Warhol used assistants to increase his productivity. Collaboration would remain a defining (and controversial) aspect of his working methods throughout his career; in the 1960s, however, this was particularly true. One of the most important collaborators during this period was Gerard Malanga. Malanga assisted the artist with producing silkscreens, films, sculpture, and other works at "The Factory", Warhol's aluminum foil-and-silver-paint-lined studio on 47th Street (later moved to Broadway). Other members of Warhol's Factory crowd included Freddie Herko, Ondine, Ronald Tavel, Mary Woronov, Billy Name, and Brigid Berlin (from whom he apparently got the idea to tape record his phone conversations).

During the 60s, Warhol also groomed a retinue of bohemian eccentrics upon whom he bestowed the designation "Superstars", including Edie Sedgwick, Viva, and Ultra Violet. These people all participated in the Factory films, and some, like Berlin, remained friends with Warhol until his death. Important figures in the New York underground art/cinema world, such as writer John Giorno and film-maker Jack Smith, also appear in Warhol films of the 1960s, revealing Warhol's connections to a diverse range of artistic scenes during this period.

Tamara de Lempicka's Art Deco Paintings on View for the First Time in Mexico City

2009-06-11T11:09:00.000+02:00

Tamara de Lempicka's Art Deco Paintings on View for the First Time in Mexico City

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A man stands beside the painting "M. Tadeusz Lempicki" during the exhibition of works of art made by Tamara de Lempicka which opened at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. Photo: EFE/Mario Guzmán.

MEXICO CITY.- President Felipe Calderón inaugurated the Tamara de Lempicka Exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts, adding that during his government, an enormous effort has been made to enable Mexicans to discover and enjoy great national and international exhibitions, some of which have been unparalleled.

He said that Tamara de Lempicka belongs to the great 20th Century women painters who were attracted to Mexico and found refuge and a source of inspiration here, such as Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington and Alice Rahon.

Of Tamara de Lempicka, the President said that her fascinating, avant-garde plastic discourse made her one of the main exponents of Art Déco.

“Although Tamara was a citizen of the world, at the end of her life, she found a refuge for her last years in Mexico. As historian Fabienne Bradu noted, She fled her entire life, from exile to exile, eventually choosing Mexico as the last stage of her journey and life," she said.

The exhibition gathers 48 paintings, 15 works on paper and 21 photographs, that come from private collections in France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, United States and Mexico. It is important to mention that Jack Nicholson’s collection has been included in the show.

International museums who loaned works of art include: Centre National d´Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou en París, Musée d´Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne, Métropole Musée d´Art et d´Historie de Saint-Denis, Musée d´Art et d´Industrie André Diligent in Roubaix, Musée Departémental de l´Oise in Beauvais, Musée des Années 30 in Boulogne-Billancourt, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, Musée Malraux in Le Havre, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie in Warsaw.

For her first major show, in Milan, Italy in 1925, under the sponsorship of Count Emmanuele Castelbarco, de Lempicka painted 28 new works in six months. She was soon the most fashionable portrait painter of her generation among the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy, painting duchesses and grand dukes and socialites. Through her network of friends, she was able to display her paintings in the most elite salons of the era. De Lempicka was criticized and admired for her 'perverse Ingrism', referring to her modern restatement of the master Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, as displayed in her work Group of Four Nudes, 1925. A portrait might take three weeks of work, allowing for the nuisance of dealing with a cranky sitter; by 1927-8 de Lempicka could charge 50,000 French francs per portrait (a sum equal to about US $2,000 then—perhaps ten times as much today). Through Castelbarco she was introduced to Italy's great man of letters and notorious lover, Gabriele d'Annunzio. She visited the poet twice at his Lake Garda villa, seeking to paint his portrait; he in turn was set on seduction. After these attempts to secure the commission, she left angered while both she and d'Annunzio remained unsatisfied.

In 1929, she painted her iconic work Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame. As summed up by the magazine Auto-Journal in 1974, "the self-portrait of Tamara de Lempicka is a real image of the independent woman who asserts herself. Her hands are gloved, she is helmeted, and inaccessible; a cold and disturbing beauty [through which] pierces a formidable being—this woman is free!" De Lempicka won her first major award in 1927, first prize at the Exposition Internationale de Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, France for her portrait of Kizette on the Balcony.

During the Roaring 20s Paris, Tamara de Lempicka was part of the bohemian life: she knew Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide. Famous for her libido, she was bisexual, and her affairs with both men and women were carried out in ways that were scandalous at the time. She often used formal and narrative elements in her portraits and nude studies to produce overpowering effects of desire and seduction. In the 1920s she became closely associated with lesbian and bisexual women in writing and artistic circles, such as Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West, and Colette. She also became involved with Suzy Solidor, a night club singer at Boîte de Nuit, whom she later painted. Her husband eventually tired of their arrangement; he abandoned her in 1927, and they were divorced in 1928.

Obsessed with her work and her social life, de Lempicka neglected more than her husband; she rarely saw her daughter. When Kizette was not away at boarding school (France or England), the girl was often with her grandmother Malvina. When de Lempicka informed her mother and daughter that she would not be returning from America for Christmas in 1929, Malvina was so angry that she burned de Lempicka's enormous collection of designer hats; Kizette watched them burn, one by one.

Kizette was neglected, but also immortalized. De Lempicka painted her only child repeatedly, leaving a striking portrait series: Kizette in Pink, 1926; Kizette on the Balcony, 1927; Kizette Sleeping, 1934; Portrait of Baroness Kizette, 1954-5, etc. In other paintings, the women depicted tend to resemble Kizette.

In 1928, her long time patron the Baron Raoul Kuffner visited her studio and commissioned her to paint his mistress. De Lempicka finished the portrait, then took the mistress' place in the Baron's life. She travelled to the United States for the first time in 1929, to paint a commissioned portrait for Rufus Bush and to arrange a show of her work at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. The show went well but the money she earned was lost when the bank she used collapsed following the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

De Lempicka continued both her heavy workload and her frenetic social life through the next decade. The Great Depression had little effect on her; in the early 1930s she was painting King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of Greece. Museums began to collect her works. In 1933 she traveled to Chicago where she worked with Georgia O'Keeffe, Santiago Martínez Delgado and Willem de Kooning. Her social position was cemented when she married her lover, Baron Kuffner, in 1933 (his wife had died the year before). The Baron took her out of her quasi-bohemian life and finally secured her place in high society again, with a title to boot. She repaid him by convincing him to sell many of his estates in Eastern Europe and move his money to Switzerland. She saw the coming of World War II from a long way off, much sooner than most of her contemporaries. She did make a few concessions to the changing times as the decade passed; her art featured a few refugees and common people, and even a Christian saint or two, as well as the usual aristocrats and cold nudes.

In the winter of 1939, Tamara and the Baron started an "extended vacation" in the United States. She immediately arranged for a show of her work in New York, though the Baron and Baroness chose to settle in Beverly Hills, California, living in the former residence of Hollywood director King Vidor. She became 'the baroness with a brush' and a favorite artist of Hollywood stars. She cultivated a Garboesque manner. The Baroness would visit the Hollywood stars on their studio sets, such as Tyrone Power, Walter Pidgeon, and George Sanders and they would come to her studio to see her at work. She did war relief work, like many others at the time; and she managed to get Kizette out of Nazi-occupied Paris, via Lisbon, in 1941. Some of her paintings of this time had a Salvador Dalí quality, as displayed in Key and Hand, 1941. In 1943, the couple relocated to New York City. Even though she continued to live in style, socializing continuously, her popularity as a society painter had diminished greatly. They traveled to Europe frequently to visit fashionable spas and so that the Baron could attend to Hungarian refugee work. For a while, she continued to paint in her trademark style, although her range of subject matter expanded to include still lifes, and even some abstracts. Yet eventually she adopted a new style, using palette knife instead of brushes. Her new work was not well-received when she exhibited in 1962 at the Iolas Gallery. De Lempicka determined never to show her work again, and retired from active life as a professional artist.

Insofar as she still painted at all, De Lempicka sometimes reworked earlier pieces in her new style. The crisp and direct Amethyste (1946), for example, became the pink and fuzzy Girl with Guitar (1963).

After Baron Kuffner's death from a heart attack in 1962, she sold most of her possessions and made three around-the-world trips by ship. Finally De Lempicka moved to Houston, Texas to be with Kizette and her family. (Kizette had married a man named Harold Foxhall, who was then chief geologist for the Dow Chemical Company; they had two daughters.) There she began her difficult and disagreeable later years. Kizette served as Tamara's business manager, social secretary, and factotum, and suffered under her mother's controlling domination and petulant behavior. Tamara complained that not only were the paints and other artists' materials now inferior to the "old days" but that people in the 1970s lacked the special qualities and "breeding" that inspired her art. The artistry and craftsmanship of her glory days were unrecoverable. In 1978 Tamara moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, to live among an aging international set and some of the younger aristocrats. After Kizette's husband died of cancer, she attended her mother for three months until Tamara died in her sleep on March 19, 1980. Her ashes were scattered over the volcano Popocatepetl by Count Giovanni Agusta.

De Lempicka lived long enough, however, for the wheel of fashion to turn a full circle: before she died a new generation discovered her art and greeted it with enthusiasm. A 1973 retrospective drew positive responses. At the time of her death, her early Art Deco paintings were being shown and purchased once again. A stage play inspired in part by her life ("Tamara") ran first in Toronto, then for two years in Los Angeles (1984-1986) and subsequently at the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City

2009-06-04T14:41:00.001+02:00

Metropolitan Museum of Art Announces it will Show Vermeer's Masterpiece The Milkmaid

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Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632-1675), The Milkmaid, ca. 1658. Oil on canvas, 45.5 x 41 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam SK-A-2344

NEW YORK, NY.- On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s historic voyage from Amsterdam to New York, the Rijksmuseum is sending The Milkmaid, perhaps the most admired painting by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer (1632—1675), to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. To celebrate this extraordinary loan, the Metropolitan Museum will present Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid, a special exhibition beginning on September 9, which will bring together all five paintings by Vermeer from its collection, along with a select group of works by other Delft artists, placing Vermeer’s superb picture in its historical context.

Along with Rembrandt and Frans Hals, Vermeer is now counted as one of the greatest Dutch artists of the Golden Age. Until a century ago, however, his rare paintings – only 36 survive today – were little known and often misattributed. During his brief career, Vermeer sold his exquisite works to a small circle of discerning collectors in his native Delft, and in the neighboring court city of The Hague. The Milkmaid, dating from about 1657-58, was one of the first paintings by Vermeer to be purchased by the Delft collector Pieter van Ruijven, who by 1670 owned 21 of the artist’s works. Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid will mark the first time that the painting has traveled to the United States since it was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair 70 years ago.

In addition to the Metropolitan Museum’s five Vermeer paintings – among them Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (ca. 1662), A Maid Asleep (1656–57), and Study of a Young Woman (probably ca. 1665–67) – this focused presentation will include important works by Pieter de Hooch, Gabriël Metsu, Nicolaes Maes, Emanuel de Witte, Hendrick van Vliet, and Hendrick Sorgh, all masters who, like Vermeer, were active during the remarkable period of exploration, trade, and artistic flowering that occurred during the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century. Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid will also feature several works on paper that illuminate the artist’s theme, including engravings by Lucas van Leyden (The Milkmaid, 1510) and Jacques de Gheyn II (The Archer and the Milkmaid, ca. 1610), both from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection, and Jacob Backer’s beautiful drawing A Woman with a Jug (ca. 1645), on loan from the Maida and George Abrams Collection.

Francis Bacon's Provocative Works Featured in Exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art

2009-05-20T11:07:00.001+02:00

Francis Bacon's Provocative Works Featured in Exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Triptych Inspired by T. S. Eliot’s Poem “Sweeney Agonistes” Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm. 1967. New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation 1972.

NEW YORK, NY.- The first major New York exhibition in 20 years devoted to Francis Bacon (British, 1909–1992)—one of the most important painters of the 20th century—will be presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 20 through August 16, 2009. Marking the 100th anniversary of the artist's birth, Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective will bring together the most significant works from each period of the artist's remarkable career. Drawn from public and private collections around the world, this landmark exhibition will consist of some 65 paintings, complemented by never-before-seen works and archival material from the Francis Bacon Estate, which will shed new light on the artist's career and working practices. The Metropolitan Museum is the sole U.S. venue of the exhibition tour.

"Bacon is more compelling than ever: despite the passage of time, his paintings remain fresh, urgent, and mysterious. Never before has this work been more relevant to young artists," noted Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Chairman of the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art. "For these reasons, we are very pleased to be able to present a retrospective spanning his entire career to our viewing public."

Entirely self-taught, Francis Bacon emerged in 1945 as a major force in British painting. He rose to prominence over the subsequent 45 years, securing his reputation as one of the seminal artists of his generation. With a predilection for shocking imagery, Bacon's oeuvre was dominated by emotionally charged depictions of the human body that are among the most powerful images in the history of art.

The exhibition's loosely chronological structure will trace critical themes in Bacon's work and explore his philosophy about mankind and the modern condition with visually arresting examples. The earliest group of works, from the 1940s and '50s, focuses on the animalistic qualities of man, including: paintings of heads with snarling mouths (Head I, 1947–1948, The Metropolitan Museum of Art); images of men as pathetic and alone (Study for a Portrait, 1953, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany); and the human figure portrayed as base and bestial (Figures in a Landscape, 1956, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, England). The exhibition also features numerous versions of Bacon's iconic studies (1949–1953) after Diego Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X (1650). Mortality is addressed directly in his last works (Triptych, 1991, The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

In the 1960s, working in his classic style of much looser, colorful, and expressive painting, Bacon showed the human body exposed and violated as in, for example, Lying Figure, 1969 (Foundation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland). In the following decade he increasingly used narrative, autobiography, and myth to mediate ideas about violence and emotion, as in the 1971 painting In Memory of George Dyer (Foundation Beyeler) and Triptych Inspired by the Orestia of Aeschylus, 1981 (Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo, Norway).

A number of important works by Bacon will only be presented at the Metropolitan Museum, including Study for Portrait I, 1953 (Denise and Andrew Saul); Painting, 1946 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York); and Self Portrait, 1973 (private collection, courtesy Richard Nagy, London).

Central to an understanding of the artist's working methods are the large caches of archival materials that have only become available since Bacon's death, especially the contents of the artist's famously cluttered London studio. A rich selection of 65 items from the studio, his estate, and other archives will be included in the exhibition. The objects include pages the artist tore from books and magazines, photographs, and sketches—all of which are source materials for the finished paintings on view in the exhibition.

2009-05-15T16:27:00.002+02:00

Guggenheim Museum and Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Celebrate Visionary Architect

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Frank Lloyd Wright, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1943–59, Exterior view. © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

NEW YORK, NY.- Fifty years after the realization of Frank Lloyd Wright’s renowned design, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum celebrates the golden anniversary of its landmark building with the exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. On view from May 15 through August 23, 2009, the 50th anniversary exhibition brings together 64 projects designed by one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, including privately commissioned residences, civic and government buildings, religious and performance spaces, as well as unrealized urban mega-structures. Presented on the spiral ramps of Wright’s museum through a range of media—including more than 200 original Frank Lloyd Wright drawings, many of which are on view to the public for the first time, as well as newly commissioned models and digital animations—Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward illuminates Wright’s pioneering concepts of space and reveals the architect’s continuing relevance to contemporary design.

The exhibition takes its title from Frank Lloyd Wright’s musings on the importance of interior space in shaping and informing a structure’s exterior. “The building is no longer a block of building material dealt with, artistically, from the outside,” Wright said. “The room within is the great fact about building—the room to be expressed in the exterior as space enclosed.” Few designs in Wright’s oeuvre so well illustrate the concept of designing “from within outward” as the Guggenheim Museum, in which the interior form gives shape to the exterior shell of the building.

Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum, stated, “Fifty years ago, the trajectories of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Frank Lloyd Wright became intertwined. When it opened in October 1959, the museum drew both criticism and admiration, but what was indisputable was that Wright had reinvented the art museum.” Armstrong continued, “How fitting that we open our fiftieth-anniversary celebrations with Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, an exhibition that documents and challenges how architecture influences the way we live and how we experience art.”

“Rather than a retrospective, this exhibition focuses on the diversity of Wright’s vision and the ways he sought to realize it, conveying fresh perspectives on how the buildings themselves celebrate that vision through spaces that enrich our lives with their transformational power,” said Phil Allsopp, President and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, the only organization established by Frank Lloyd Wright to be the repository of his life’s work and the first to bear his name. “The concept of the exhibition also reflects a growing recognition of the enormous relevance today of Frank Lloyd Wright’s design philosophies, which embrace culture, technology and environment. The exhibition articulates the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s public mission and active engagement in education, scholarship, design, research, historic preservation, and public policy.” The Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, which the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation owns and operates at its headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona, is the primary source of loans for the exhibition.

During his 72-year career, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), who died just six months before the opening of the Guggenheim, worked independently from any single style and developed a new sense of architecture in which form and function are inseparable. Known for his inventiveness and the diversity of his work, Wright is celebrated for the awe-inspiring beauty and tranquility of his designs. Whether creating a private home, workplace, religious edifice, or cultural attraction, Wright sought to unite people, buildings, and nature in physical and spiritual harmony. To realize such a union in material form, Wright created environments of simplicity and repose through carefully composed plans and elevations based on consistent, geometric grammars.

His innovative designs complement the surrounding environment of the site and intensify the physical, emotional, and social experience of flowing, continuous space within them. In his earliest designs, such as the Larkin Company Administration Building (Buffalo, New York, 1902–06) and Unity Temple (Oak Park, Illinois, 1905), Wright carefully deconstructs the box-like environment of his European contemporaries by opening up corners and using walls merely as screens to enclose tranquil interior spaces. Wright’s architecture is a translation of his conception of society into a spatial language that can be understood intuitively and enhances the everyday experience. While the aesthetic strength of Wright’s work has invited people to revisit his idiom, it is the ambition of Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward to celebrate the basic idea behind his architecture—the sense of freedom in interior space—and inspire visitors to see the potential that architecture can carry for the here and now and for the future.

Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward is organized in a loosely chronological order and is installed to be viewed from the rotunda floor upwards. Off the first ramp in the High Gallery is an original curtain depicting Wright’s native Wisconsin landscape from the 1952 Hillside Theater at Taliesin, Wright’s home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin (1911–59). On loan from Taliesin, this curtain creates the backdrop for a sound installation of recorded oral histories from the collection of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which feature the voices of clients, friends, apprentices, and architects reflecting on the revelatory experience of living and working in Wright-designed spaces.

Highlights of Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward include newly created three-dimensional scale models that examine the internal mechanics of functional space in relation to exterior form in a variety of Wright’s projects. Among these are an exploded version of the Herbert Jacobs House (Madison, Wisconsin, 1937); a mirrored model for Unity Temple; and a sectional model of Beth Sholom Synagogue (Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1953). Large-scale models of unrealized urban schemes for projects, including his Plan for Greater Baghdad (1957), the Crystal City for Washington, D.C. (1940), and the Pittsburgh Point Civic Center (1947), provide insight into Wright’s visions for the landscapes of the city. The models were developed by Michael Kennedy of New York–based Kennedy Fabrications Inc., which specializes in architectural models and prototyping, and Situ Studio, a Brooklyn-based firm focused on research, design, and fabrication.

Special animations offer viewers the opportunity to experience an interpretation of nine of Wright’s un-built or demolished projects as well as his own Taliesin and Taliesin West. The animations were designed by teams of students from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design Interactive Spaces course taught by Allen Sayegh and from Madison Area Technical College, with the assistance of Archi Zarzycki of arc.studio.3d and ZD Studios (both also of Madison).

The curatorial team for Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward includes Thomas Krens, curator and Senior Advisor of International Affairs for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; David van der Leer, Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design; and Maria Nicanor, Curatorial Assistant, all for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in collaboration with Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives; Margo Stipe, Curator and Registrar of Collections of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives; and Oskar Muñoz, Assistant Director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives. Mina Marefat, an architect and Wright scholar, has served as Curatorial Consultant for the Baghdad module of the exhibition. The exhibition installation for Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward has been designed by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in collaboration with the design firm Wendy Evans Joseph Architecture.

Media partner Thirteen/WNET.

The Legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright In 1990, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was declared a landmark by the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission and in 2005 was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On October 7, 2008, the Interior Secretary of the United States named the Guggenheim a National Historic Landmark in recognition of the museum’s significance within American history and culture. UNESCO World Heritage Center also is considering Wright’s legacy: ten of the architect’s most relevant buildings, including the Guggenheim Museum, Taliesin, and Taliesin West, his home and studio in Scottsdale and the headquarters of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, have recently been included on the United States’ World Heritage Tentative List, which identifies the most significant cultural and natural treasures worldwide.

In anticipation of its 50th anniversary in 2009, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum recently undertook a four-year restoration, the results of which were unveiled in September 2008. At the outset of the restoration project, a team of architects, structural engineers, and conservators undertook a comprehensive condition assessment and found that, while the building remained in good structural condition, the removal of 11 coats of paint, the infilling of exterior cracks, the treatment of corroded steel structures, and the repair and reinforcement of the concrete were essential to insure the ongoing health of the structure.

With its legacy grounded in the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the Guggenheim is dedicated to exploring the connections between design, architecture, and other forms of art, especially in the context of the city. Design exhibitions organized by the Guggenheim have included the 2001 retrospective of the work of architect Frank Gehry, which became the most attended show in the history of the New York museum, and a retrospective of the work of architect Zaha Hadid in 2006. With such projects at the forefront, the Guggenheim has initiated the development of a broad program in which architecture and design become a means of expression to document, divert, and direct our increasingly urban societies.

Exhibition Tour Following the presentation of Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the exhibition will travel to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain, where it will be on view from October 6, 2009 through February 2010.

Publications Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward is accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue published by Skira/Rizzoli. With forewords by Phil Allsopp, Richard Armstrong, and Thomas Krens, the catalogue will include essays by Wright scholars Richard Cleary, Neil Levine, Mina Marefat, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Joseph M. Siry, and Margo Stipe.

In addition to the exhibition catalogue, The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum will be published on the occasion of museum’s fiftieth anniversary and in association with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. This first-ever book to explore the 16-year construction process behind one of the greatest modern buildings in America will examine the history, design, and construction of Wright’s masterwork. Fully illustrated with preliminary drawings, models, and photographs, the book includes three major essays by Hillary Ballon, Neil Levine and Joseph Siry.

Education and Public Programs In conjunction with the exhibition, the Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents a full roster of educational programs, including Learning by Doing, an exhibition featuring a selection of shelters designed, built, and lived in by students at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Arizona and Wisconsin over the past seven decades. Curated by David van der Leer, Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, in collaboration with the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, the exhibition provides an opportunity for visitors of all ages to create their own designs, which will be incorporated into Learning by Doing over the course of the summer.

In addition, the Sackler Center will present the two-day symposium Frank Lloyd Wright: Now What Architecture?! on May 14 and 15 in the Peter B. Lewis Theater at the museum. Based upon the architect's captivating 1931 question, this symposium––which will include debates on contemporary architecture and urban design among scholars, architects, designers, and cultural critics from around the world––will introduce Wright’s ideas about space into the 21st century’s dialogue.

Among the additional public programming offered, The Architecture of Writing: Wright, Women and Narrative will be presented on Wednesday, June 10 at 6:30 pm. Moderated by Sarah Williams Goldhagen, The New Republic, participants will include Carol Gilligan, New York University, Gwendolyn Wright, Columbia University, and Beverly Willis, FAIA. Honoring Taliesin Fellow Lois Gottlieb, this special evening features the premiere of A Girl Is A Fellow Here: 100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, a new 15-minute film produced by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, followed by a panel discussion that seeks to expand definitions of architectural genius in which collaboration, in general, and women, in particular, assume greater stature in the remarkable history of Frank Lloyd Wright and in the rich history of American architecture. This event is co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. For more information, visit www.guggenheim.org/education or contact the Box Office at 212 423-3587.

On April 13, one month before the opening of Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University will host the panel discussion Frank Lloyd Wright in the 21st Century: Being Versus Seeming? Moderated by Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia, with Michael Maltzan, Michael Maltzan Architecture, Los Angeles; Shohei Shigematsu, OMA*AMO PC, New York; and Marion Weiss, WEISS/MANFREDI–Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism, New York, the panel will include an introduction of the Guggenheim Museum’s spring Frank Lloyd Wright programs by David van der Leer. For information contact Benjamin Prosky, Director of Special Events, GSAPP, Columbia University, (212) 854-9248, or visit www.arch.columbia.edu.

2 well-known French painters conquer China

2009-04-28T12:20:00.017+02:00

2 well-known French painters conquer China

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FU Ji Tsang & Denis RIBAS are two well-known French contemporary artists who are staging an exhibition of their latest works in China. The following are some current details:-

SYNCRETIZE CHINESE WESTERN VISION

25^th April – 20^th June 2009

www.samlinam.org

Please also refer below to some earlier information about David FU Ji Tsang at Autour de l'Art, an art gallery in Antibes.

http://artlover06.blogspot.com/2006/12/fu-ji-tsang-french-artist-for-all.html

Deux bien connus peintres français vainquent la Chine

FU Ji Tsang et Denis RIBAS sont deux bien connus artistes français contemporains qui mettent en scène une exposition de leurs œuvres derniers en Chine. Trouvez suivante des renseignements au courant:-

SYNCRETIZE CHINESE WESTERN VISION

25^th April – 20^th June 2009

www.samlinam.org

Référez-vous aussi ci-dessous à l'information précédente sur David FU Ji Tsang à Autour de l'Art, une galerie d'art à Antibes.

2009-04-27T11:55:00.001+02:00

More than 70 Large-format Paintings by David Hockney on View at Kunsthalle Würth

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British artist David Hockney poses in front of his painting “Three Trees in the Proximity to Thixendale Summer”, at Kunsthalle Wurth in Germany. More than 70 works of art made by this artist have been gathered in the exhibition titled “Just Nature”. The exhibition will be open from April 27 through September 27, 2009. Photo: 'EFE/Norbert Foersterling

David Hockney, Three trees in the proximity to Thixendale winters 2007, Oil on five canvases, ever 91.5 x 122 cm, 183 x 487.5 cm, © David Hockney Photo: Richard Schmidt.

KUNZELSAU.- British artist David Hockney (b. 1937), celebrated for decades as the “painter laureate of Southern California,” is doubtless one of the most interesting and important painters in contemporary art. Yet anyone who believes they are entirely familiar with Hockney’s art will be forced to reconsider in light of his recent work. Contrary to his earlier assertions, he has returned to his native Yorkshire and rediscovered the beauty of his home county’s landscapes, which held little inspiration for him as a young artist. Since then, he has been creating precisely observed, magically glowing natural scenes in which his new enthusiasm combines with his many experiences gained over a lifetime of experimental painting. Hockney’s broad interests and his knowledge of artistic techniques lend these works a special character – seemingly naturalistic, they nonetheless continually question the potential of painting. It is perhaps this masterful mixture of apparent simplicity and great conceptuality that makes Hockney’s art so popular, and at the same time manifests the aesthetic demands he places upon himself.

Hockney’s somewhat unreal-looking version of “realism” arises from the combination of emotion and perspective in his painting. In order to capture a motif as a whole, he not only relies on continual shifts from close-up to distant viewpoints but on a gradual development of the picture, which often consists of several equal-sized canvases. In this way, he creates extended formats that enable the viewer to virtually roam through the picture. The eye is drawn so close to the visual scenes that we have the feeling of actually standing inside the unframed views. In addition, there are entire series of works in which the artist observes selected landscape motifs at different times of day or different seasons and depicts his impressions with great precision. The colours, that change with the intensity of the sunlight, are translated into colourful, energetic images that reflect the immediacy of natural light. Yet here, too, it is not a faithful recording of actual appearances that is foremost but the subjectivity of human vision, an artistic transformation that always contains something unspoken and wonderful.

Over 70 large-format paintings, drawings and inkjet printed computer drawings of landscapes, selected by David Hockney especially for the Kunsthalle Würth, are on view here for the first time in such a comprehensive exhibition.

2009-04-22T16:36:00.000+02:00

City of Linz to Return Gustav Klimt Painting to Descendants of Jewish Family

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Portrait of a Woman (Ria Munk) made by Gustav Klimt.

LINZ.- The Mayor of Linz, Franz Dobusch, announced yesterday that the town will return the painting titled, Portrait of a Woman (Ria Munk) made by Gustav Klimt to the descendants of a Jewish family who were robbed of it by the Nazis.

An independent expert has confirmed the painting was seized from Mrs Munk by the Nazis after she was deported to a concentration camp where she died in 1941.

Family lawyer Alfred Noll applied in 2007 for the return of the painting, which made its way into Linz's collection from an art dealer after the Second World War.

Gustav Klimt (July 14, 1862 – February 6, 1918) was an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Art Nouveau (Vienna Secession) movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects, many of which are on display in the Vienna Secession gallery. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism--nowhere is this more apparent than in his numerous drawings in pencil.

Klimt became one of the founding members and president of the Wiener Sezession (Vienna Secession) in 1897 and of the group's periodical Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring). He remained with the Secession until 1908. The group's goals were to provide exhibitions for unconventional young artists, to bring the best foreign artists' works to Vienna, and to publish its own magazine to showcase members' work. The group declared no manifesto and did not set out to encourage any particular style -- Naturalists, Realists, and Symbolists all coexisted. The government supported their efforts and gave them a lease on public land to erect an exhibition hall. The group's symbol was Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of just causes, wisdom, and the arts -- and Klimt painted his radical version in 1898.

In 1894, Klimt was commissioned to create three paintings to decorate the ceiling of the Great Hall in the University of Vienna. Not completed until the turn of the century, his three paintings, Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence were criticized for their radical themes and material, which was called "pornographic". Klimt had transformed traditional allegory and symbolism into a new language which was more overtly sexual, and hence more disturbing. The public outcry came from all quarters — political, aesthetic, and religious. As a result, they were not displayed on the ceiling of the Great Hall. This would be the last public commission accepted by the artist. All three paintings were destroyed by retreating SS forces in May 1945. His Nuda Verita (1899) defined his bid to further shake up the establishment. The starkly naked red-headed woman holds the mirror of truth, while above it is a quote by Schiller in stylized lettering, "If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad."

In 1902, Klimt finished the Beethoven Frieze for the 14th Vienna Secessionist exhibition, which was intended to be a celebration of the composer and featured a monumental, polychromed sculpture by Max Klinger. Meant for the exhibition only, the frieze was painted directly on the walls with light materials. After the exhibition the painting was preserved, although it did not go on display until 1986.

During this period Klimt did not confine himself to public commissions. Beginning in the late 1890s he took annual summer holidays with the Flöge family on the shores of Attersee and painted many of his landscapes there. These works constitute the only genre aside from the figure that seriously interested Klimt, and are of a number and quality so as to merit a separate appreciation. Formally, the landscapes are characterized by the same refinement of design and emphatic patterning as the figural pieces. Deep space in the Attersee works is so efficiently flattened to a single plane, it is believed that Klimt painted them while looking through a telescope.

Klimt's 'Golden Phase' was marked by positive critical reaction and success. Many of his paintings from this period utilized gold leaf; the prominent use of gold can first be traced back to Pallas Athene (1898) and Judith I (1901), although the works most popularly associated with this period are the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) and The Kiss (1907 - 1908). Klimt traveled little but trips to Venice and Ravenna, both famous for their beautiful mosaics, most likely inspired his gold technique and his Byzantine imagery. In 1904, he collaborated with other artists on the lavish Palais Stoclet, the home of a wealthy Belgian industrialist, which was one of the grandest monuments of the Art Nouveau age. Klimt's contributions to the dining room, including both Fulfillment and Expectation, were some of his finest decorative work, and as he publicly stated, "probably the ultimate stage of my development of ornament." Between 1907 and 1909, Klimt painted five canvases of society women wrapped in fur. His apparent love of costume is expressed in the many photographs of Flöge modeling clothing she designed.

As he worked and relaxed in his home, Klimt normally wore sandals and a long robe with no undergarments. His simple life was somewhat cloistered, devoted to his art and family and little else except the Secessionist Movement, and he avoided café society and other artists socially. Klimt's fame usually brought patrons to his door, and he could afford to be highly selective. His painting method was very deliberate and painstaking at times and he required lengthy sittings by his subjects. Though very active sexually, he kept his affairs discreet and he avoided personal scandal. Like Rodin, Klimt also utilized mythology and allegory to thinly disguise his highly erotic nature, and his drawings often reveal purely sexual interest in women as objects. His models were routinely available to him to pose in any erotic manner that pleased him. Many of the models were prostitutes as well.

Klimt wrote little about his vision or his methods. He wrote mostly postcards to Flöge and kept no diary. In a rare writing called "Commentary on a non-existent self-portrait", he states "I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women...There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night...Who ever wants to know something about me... ought to look carefully at my pictures."

In 1911 his painting Death and Life received first prize in the world exhibitions in Rome. In 1915 his mother Anna died. Klimt died three years later in Vienna on February 6, 1918, having suffered a stroke and pneumonia. He was interred at the Hietzing Cemetery in Vienna. Numerous paintings were left unfinished.

Klimt's paintings have brought some of the highest prices recorded for individual works of art. In November 2003, Klimt's Landhaus am Attersee sold for $29,128,000, but that was soon eclipsed by prices paid for other Klimts.

In 2006, the 1907 portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, was purchased for the Neue Galerie in New York by Ronald Lauder for a reported US $135 million, surpassing Picasso's 1905 Boy With a Pipe (sold May 5, 2004 for $104 million), as the highest reported price ever paid for a painting. Adele Bloch-Bauer I is one of the five paintings referred to below in the Legacy section and an NPR report. On August 7, 2006, Christie's auction house announced it was handling the sale of the remaining four works by Klimt that were recovered by Maria Altmann and her co-heirs after their long legal battle against Austria (see Republic of Austria v. Altmann). Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II was sold at auction in November 2006 for $88 million, the third-highest priced piece of art at auction at the time. 'The Apple Tree I' (ca. 1912) sold for $33 million, 'Birch Forest' (1903) sold for $40.3 million, and 'Houses in Unterach on Lake Atter' (1916) sold for $31 million. Collectively, the five restituted paintings netted over $327 million.

Amedeo Modigliani Exhibition Opens Today at The Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn

2009-04-17T12:08:00.001+02:00

Amedeo Modigliani Exhibition Opens Today at The Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn

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Amedeo Modigliani, Reclining Nude (Céline Howard), 1918, Private collection, Geneva.

BONN.- Amedeo Modigliani was one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His iconic works are deeply engrained in the collective pictorial memory. The Art and Exhibition Hall wants to celebrate this outstanding artist, who died tragically young at the age of only 35, with a comprehensive retrospective exhibition.

Born in Italy in 1884, Modigliani was painter, draughtsman and sculptor. With the exception of a handful of landscapes, his creative energy was entirely devoted to portraits and nudes. Modigliani's paintings are deeply rooted in Italian art history, drawing particularly on the formal languages of the Renaissance and Mannerism. These he combined with elements from Expressionism, Cubism and Symbolism as well as African sculpture, whose perceived primitivism and iconic presence fascinated him and many avant-garde artists of the time. His work cannot be easily classified as belonging to any of the contemporary styles like Cubism or Fauvism. Yet it bears eloquent testimony to the restlessness and exuberance of an artist who was only too aware of his own vulnerability and mortality and who needed the euphoria of intoxication in order to live and work. Modigliani’s idiosyncratic, at times melancholy portraits captivate the viewer to this day.
The exhibition follows the biography of the artist and reflects the decisive turning points of his life. The Art and Exhibition Hall hopes to be able to present a representative selection of some paintings, drawings and a few sculptures from 1900 to 1919 that allows viewers to form an impression of the oeuvre of this exceptional artist.

Important Works by Tamara de Lempicka From the Collection of Wolfgang Joop to be Sold at Sotheby's

2009-04-07T16:14:00.001+02:00

Important Works by Tamara de Lempicka From the Collection of Wolfgang Joop to be Sold at Sotheby's

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Tamara Lempika, Portrait de Marjorie Ferry, 1932. Est. $4/6 million. Photo: Courtesy of Sotheby´s.

Tamara Lempika, Portrait de La Duchesse de La Salle, 1925. Est. $4/6 million. Photo: Courtesy of Sotheby´s.

NEW YORK, NY.- On May 5 and 6, 2009 ten paintings by Tamara de Lempicka from the collection of noted fashion designer Wolfgang Joop will be offered at Sotheby’s New York. It is the finest group of paintings by the artist ever to appear at auction. Four paintings will be included in the evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art on May 5th and six will be offered the following day. Highlights will be on view in London from April 22-25 prior to the exhibition and sale in New York.

Emmanuel Di-Donna, Vice Chairman, Impressionist and Modern Art Worldwide and Head of Sotheby’s Evening Sales, New York, commented, “This group of paintings, all from Lempicka’s prime period, embodies the spirit of the Art Deco era and its sense of style and modernity. These iconic images range from intimate and sensual to bold and monumental. As an artist, Lempicka drew on the avant-garde art and design around her, Cubism in particular, to derive a distinct aesthetic all her own.”

Recent decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in Tamara de Lepmicka, a figure who occupied an important position in ‘Roaring Twenties’ Paris. Her glamour has inspired celebrity collectors in the movie, music and fashion worlds. A voracious collector, Wolfgang Joop has spent several decades amassing an extraordinary collection of modern and contemporary art and 20th century design. Benjamin Doller, a Vice Chairman of Sotheby’s commented, “As a key player in the fashion industry with his collection Wunderkind, it’s understandable that Mr. Joop would appreciate the Hollywood glamour and decadence celebrated in Lempicka’s work. A pioneer in many areas of collecting, he was among a handful of early enthusiasts to rediscover her in the 1970s. ”

“Tamara’s appeal to me is comparable to that of a blue diamond,” said Wolfgang Joop. “From the first moment I saw her paintings, I was captivated by the unique way in which she presented women, and I have been fortunate to enjoy a long and intimate history with her. In turn, she inspired my work with a distinctive style that embodies the image of a modern woman.”

Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale – May 5, 2009
Among the works that will be offered in the evening sale on May 5th is a painting that has become synonymous with Lempicka's style – Portrait de la Duchesse de la Salle (est. $4/6 million). Sexy, bold and monumental in its presentation, this spectacular picture from 1925 celebrates the strength and power of the modern woman.

Also included in the evening sale is a sultry portrait from 1932 - Portrait de Marjorie Ferry – which exemplifies the sleek and sexy aesthetic that defined Lempicka's art (est. $4/6 million). The model is the English-born Marjorie Ferry, a cabaret singer living in Paris, who is transformed by Lempicka into a modernday goddess, cloaked in marble-crisp drapery in front of a Doric column.

Lempicka's Portrait of Mademoiselle Poum Rachou from 1933 is one of her most recognizably Cubist-inspired compositions, calling to mind the 1920s Le Petit dejeuner series of Fernand Léger (est. $1.8/2.5 million). A dynamic still life from 1931, Arlette Boucard aux Arums, features a portrait of Arlette Boucard, a young woman whom Lempicka painted as an adolescent in 1928 (est. $800,000/1.2 million). For this new composition, Lempicka pairs a photograph of the girl with a bouquet of arums or calla lilies, a dual symbol of purity and seduction and an allusion to Arlette’s passage from youth to womanhood.

Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale – May 6, 2009
Le Telephone II will be the cover lot of the Impressionist and Modern Art Day sale on May 6th. Painted in 1930, the year after Lempicka moved into a large Art Deco apartment with a studio on the Left Bank in Paris, the present work exemplifies the modernity of the age and of the artist herself (est. $800,000/1.2 million). Pulp magazines had gained enormous popularity in the 1920s and the femme fatale became the central figure in these works, soon to be immortalized in the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and in the film noir classics of the thirties.

Wolfgang Joop
Wolfgang Joop was born in Potsdam, Germany in 1944 and studied Drawing, Sculpture and the Theory of Art before working as a freelance artist. He was invited to be an honorary professor of Life Drawing and Design at the University of Art in Berlin, and his drawings and paintings are included in the permanent collections of several contemporary art museums, including the Hamburg Museum of Art and Industry which houses over 100 of his works. Wolfgang Joop, founder and creator of the world renowned fashion company WUNDERKIND has become one of the most influential designers for luxury fashion in the world. With the creation of the label WUNDERKIND he has built the only German fashion house of its kind, offering their worldwide clientele a sophisticated range of luxury ready-to wear collection and accessories. The company's products are sold in more than 100 of the best boutiques and stores worldwide. End of 2008 the brand opened its first international boutique in London’s Mayfair district, on 16 Mount Street. Wolfgang Joop’s collection ranges from paintings and furniture dating from the seventeenth-century to the present day, and includes works by Jeff Koons, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Alexandre Noll, Charlotte Perriand, Jean Royère and Jean Prouvé, among others.

Pompidou Offers Comprehensive Overview of the Work of Russian Artist Wassily Kandinsky

2009-04-07T16:08:00.001+02:00

Pompidou Offers Comprehensive Overview of the Work of Russian Artist Wassily Kandinsky

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A woman observes the painting "Red Spot II" made by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky which is on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Photo: EFE/Ian

Improvisation 19, 1911. Oil on canvas – 120 x 141,5 cm. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Gabriele Münter-Stiftung © ADAGP, Paris 2009.

PARIS.- This exhibition offers, for the first time in 25 years, a comprehensive overview of the work of Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, documenting the key periods of his artistic career (Munich, Paris / Munich/ Moscow / Weimar, Dessau, Berlin / Paris) through a selection of major paintings dating from 1907 to 1942. Thanks to the unprecedented collaboration between the Centre Pompidou, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, this international retrospective, showing in Munich, Paris and New York, has been able to draw on the three largest public collections of Kandinsky’s work, as well as loans from other institutions and private collections.

Through some hundred exceptional paintings, this unique exhibition examines Kandinsky’s contribution to modern art, its chronological organisation revealing the logical unfolding of his ideas and his relationship to his time.

At the Centre Pompidou, the retrospective is complemented by a selection of recent additions to the Centre’s own holding of Kandinsky’s work: watercolours and manuscripts of the so-called “Russian” period from 1914 to 1917, and the Bauhaus portfolio celebrating his 60th birthday in 1926. The last major Kandinsky exhibition in Paris was held at the Centre Pompidou in 1984, to mark the accession of the Nina Kandinsky Bequest.

Kandinsky is curated by Tracey Bashkoff, Associate Curator for Collections and Exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Christian Derouet, Curator at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Annegret Hoberg, Curator at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Karole Vail, Assistant Curator, assisted with the organization of the New York presentation.

The exhibition will offer a comprehensive chronological survey of Kandinsky’s work through a selection of his most important canvases, including examples from his series of Improvisations, Impressions and Compositions, while investigating his formal and conceptual contributions to the course of abstraction in the twentieth-century. The unprecedented collaborative efforts of the Guggenheim, Pompidou, and Lenbachhaus will assemble works that have rarely traveled together, such as Munich’s early masterpiece, A Colorful Life (1907), or the Guggenheim's Light Picture (1913)—a seminal work among the first of Kandinsky's truly abstract canvases which has not even been exhibited in the museum’s own galleries since the 1970s—offering new contexts and comparisons for those works that have been held apart.

The survey will trace Kandinsky’s vision through thematic motifs, such as the horse and rider, mountainous landscapes and tumultuous seascapes, apocalyptic imagery and other religious subjects, and follow the artist’s painted realizations of his well-developed aesthetic theories, allowing a re-examination of the geographical- and time-based periods traditionally applied to his oeuvre.

Wassily Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow – d. 1944, Paris ) was one of the pioneers of abstraction and great theorists of Modernism. His seminal pre-World War I treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in Munich in 1911 lays out his program for the development of art independent of observations of the objective world. Interested in synesthesia, and more particularly in the relationship between painting and music, Kandinsky strove to give painting the freedom from nature he felt in music. Kandinsky’s discovery of a new subject matter based only on the artist’s “inner need” would occupy him throughout his life.

Hockney's Beverly Hills Housewife Highlights Christie's Post-War & Contemporary Art Sale

2009-03-24T14:59:00.002+01:00

Hockney's Beverly Hills Housewife Highlights Christie's Post-War & Contemporary Art Sale

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An employee from Christie’s contemplates the work of art titled 'Beverly Hills Housewife', made by artist David Hockney, during the presentation at Christie’s in London, today March 23. Photo: EFE/Andy Rain.

Andy Warhol’s Portrait of Man Ray, 1976. Estimate: $2-4 million. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd 2009.

NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s will offer a selection of works from the Collection of Betty Freeman in the May 13 Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Leading the selection is one of the most important works to come to the auction market by David Hockney, Beverly Hills Housewife, (estimate: $7-10 million), 1966-1967. The Evening Sale selection of works from the collection comprises 19 lots and is estimated at $26-40 million.

Laura Paulson, Deputy Chairman and International Director of Post-War and Contemporary Art stated: “Betty Freeman’s deep commitment to the arts was demonstrated by a lifetime of indefatigable dedication and passionate support. David Hockney’s epic Beverly Hills Housewife is one of the artist’s most fascinating and iconic works and remains a perfect, timeless tribute to Freeman, a modern-day Medici, who will be remembered as an influential patron of our contemporary culture.”

Marc Porter, President of Christie’s Americas said: "This was a highly competitive consignment won by Christie's through creative marketing commitments, the expertise of its specialists and our long-term relationships with the consignor rather than through any revenue sharing arrangements."

A diptych measuring twelve feet long and six feet high, David Hockney’s Beverly Hills Housewife depicts a 1960’s California housewife standing on the patio of her well-appointed home. The painting’s modernist setting is testament to the refined and minimalist sensibilities of the subject, who is none other than Freeman herself. Having recently arrived in Los Angeles, the British artist asked Freeman if he could come to her house and paint the swimming pool in her backyard for a series that would become famously representative of his oeuvre, the ‘California Dreaming’ series. Upon arriving, Hockney decided to focus the work on Freeman, immediately finding that she, like many Los Angeles residents he had met, was very much a function of the space that she existed in, and the space that she existed in was very much a function of her.

Infused with pervasive and powerful silence, Beverly Hills Housewife not only captures the artist’s detached fascination with the California landscape, it also demonstrates his predilection for scenes bathed in crisp light and hyper-real colors, a distinct departure from the work being created by Hockney’s Post-War British counterparts at the time. Painted between 1966-1967, the work depicts a tanned, sculptural Freeman in bright pink dress standing on her covered patio. Hockney added the antelope trophy head on the wall to create a deliberately humorous face-off between the Freeman and fictional character.

Beverly Hills Housewife would become the centerpiece of Betty Freeman’s collection. She was to remain in the same house, memorialized on canvas, for the remainder of her life. The painting not only conveys the essence of the California good life, it also stands as a testament to the remarkable life-long friendship between the subject and the artist.

A much-admired, generous supporter of avant-garde contemporary music, Betty Freeman was also drawn to the work of the contemporary artists of her day who challenged the boundaries of painting and sculpture. She began collecting art in the 1950’s and gathered works by Abstract Expressionist artists. As with the composers she supported, Freeman forged friendships with artists David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Dan Flavin, Clyfford Still, and Sam Francis, and followed the development of their careers throughout her lifetime. Freeman was also an accomplished photographer, who published and exhibited portraits of musicians and composers.

In addition to Beverly Hills Housewife, the New York Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale will also feature works from the Collection of Betty Freeman by Roy Lichtenstein, Dan Flavin, Alexander Calder, Sam Francis, Andy Warhol, and Claes Oldenburg.

Roy Lichtenstein’s Frolic, 1977, (estimate: $4-7 million), was inspired by his own 1962 painting, Girl with Ball, by ads and comic books, and by one of the greatest painters in art history – Pablo Picasso. In Frolic, Picasso is seen through the filter of Pop, as his celebrated 1932 painting Baigneuse au ballon de plage in the collection of New York’s MoMA is interpreted with an unusual and irreverent twist.

Andy Warhol’s Portrait of Man Ray, 1976 (estimate: $2-4 million), will also be featured as part of the collection. One of Warhol’s most definitive portraits, his execution of Man Ray is a testament of his adoration of the celebrated artist. Man Ray’s work had a very significant impact on Warhol’s career, but with this portrait it becomes evident that Man Ray’s being had just as much of an influence. This portrait reinforces the larger theme within Warhol’s oeuvre regarding the concept of the artist as celebrity, putting Man Ray among the ranks of the glittering cultural icons by which Warhol defined his life and work, including Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Mick Jagger and Mohammed Ali.

Typewriter Eraser (estimate: $1.4-1.8 million), epitomizes Claes Oldenburg's revolutionary approach to sculpture as an objectification of mundane objects. Produced in 1976, this work marks a period of technical expansion for the sculptor, in which he experimented with new materials and an everincreasing scale.

A rare, early painting by Sam Francis from 1954 entitled Grey (estimate: $2.5-3.5 million) will also be offered. First exhibited in Dorothy Miller’s seminal Twelve Americans show at the MoMa, the work was acquired directly from Francis’ private collection by Betty Freeman, who enjoyed a long and close relationship with the artist.

Vermeer Masterpiece Back in Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum Presents Top Vermeer Work

2009-03-12T15:05:00.001+01:00

Vermeer Masterpiece Back in Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum Presents Top Vermeer Work

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Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance (ca. 1664).

AMSTERDAM.- A major work by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) is temporarily back in Amsterdam. From 11 March to 1 June 2009, the Rijksmuseum presents his Woman Holding a Balance (c.1664) from the United States. The Rijksmuseum proudly presents this important work alongside four other masterpieces by Vermeer from the museum s own collection. Vermeer did not produce many paintings, so this is a unique moment for the Rijksmuseum as the only museum in Europe to be able to show five works by the renowned artist together. The painting is on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, from which it rarely leaves.

Woman Holding a Balance
Among the items sold in 1696 in the sale of the estate of Jacob Dissius, a bookseller in Delft, were 21 paintings by Johannes Vermeer, a fellow townsman and already in his day a much admired artist. Isaac Rooleeuw, an Amsterdam merchant, managed to snap up two of the artist’s most important and expensive works in the space of five minutes: The Milkmaid and The Woman Holding a Balance. For five years they hung side-by-side at his home in Amsterdam, until Rooleeuw went bankrupt and the paintings were sold. The Woman Holding a Balance remained in private hands in Amsterdam for another century until shortly after 1800 she left the Netherlands and eventually in 1942 found herself via a circuitous route through Europe in Washington’s National Gallery of Art.

Vermeers reunited
For the first time in more than 200 years, The Milkmaid and The Woman Holding a Balance are once again together in Amsterdam, in the Rijksmuseum. Together with The Woman Reading a Letter, they represent the essential Vermeer. In all three works, he presents a domestic scene with a young woman standing in a typical Vermeer room, as she busies herself with some everyday activity, absorbed in thought. While Vermeer manages with his exceptional sense of detail to make us believe that we are watching a slice of real life, each of these scenes is minutely choreographed. He was careful to give each object its place, making clever use of perspective and the soft daylight entering the room from the left.

Vermeer in the Rijksmuseum collection
Since 1921, the Rijksmuseum has been able to show four masterpieces by Johannes Vermeer: The Little Street (c. 1658), The Love Letter (c. 1669-70), The Woman Reading a Letter (c. 1664) and one of Vermeer’s best known works, The Kitchen Maid, or as most people know her, The Milkmaid (c. 1658-60). Over the years, these paintings have become firm favourites alongside Rembrandt’s paintings at the Rijksmuseum, attracting more than a million visitors each year from around the world. As far as we know, Vermeer produced far fewer paintings than his famous contemporary. We know of 34 works by Vermeer, found today for the most part in the world s principal museums.

Guest appearance
The Vermeer from the National Gallery of Art in Washington is on loan to the Rijksmuseum from 11 March to 1 June 2009 as part of an annual series of guest appearances by major works at the museum. Each year the Rijksmuseum welcomes an outstanding exhibit from a leading international museum which relates in some way to works in the Rijksmuseum’s own collection. Vermeer’s illustrious predecessors include Catrina Hooghsaet by Rembrandt from Penrhyn Castle in Wales, The Leaping Horse by the 19th-century British artist Constable from the Royal Academy in London, and the Portrait of Jacopo Strada by Titian from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Gerhard Richter - Abstract Paintings Exhibition Opens Today at Haus der Kunst in Munich

2009-02-27T11:49:00.001+01:00

Gerhard Richter - Abstract Paintings Exhibition Opens Today at Haus der Kunst in Munich

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Gerhard Richter, Claudius, 1986, Öl auf Leinwand, 311 x 406 cm, Sammlung Landesbank Baden-Württemberg. © Gerhard Richter.

MUNICH.- Haus der Kunst presents today Gerhard Richter - Abstract Paintings, on view through May 17, 2009. Gerhard Richter has been painting his abstract paintings since the 1970s. Today they comprise two-thirds of all his work. With its concentration on this painting type, this exhibition differs from past Richter retrospectives, which primarily focused – each updated – on the proportional shift from the artist’s photograph-based paintings to his abstract ones.

The series "Cage" from 2006 and "Wald" (Forest) from 2005 – the latter on view for the first time in Europe – serve as the show’s point of departure. The exhibition traces Richter’s artistic development – represented in these series – to its roots, which stretch back to the mid-1980s: from the four-part series "Bach" (1992) and the color-reduced "St. Gallen," (1989) to earlier, more vibrant paintings such as "Blau" (Blue) (1988) and "Claudius" (1986).

Gerhard Richter uses the expanse and height of the exhibition rooms in the Haus der Kunst to flexibly interpret the serial character of the more than 60 large format paintings: to depict the sum of the individual works through their concentration in one room ("Bach"), or to emphasize the individual works by hanging them in different, successive rooms ("Cage").

Abstraction with Richter: Work on the basic questions of painting - In the mid-1980s Gerhard Richter produced an unusual number of large format paintings, frequently in series of three or four works. These paintings – with all their formal analogies – are characterized by a graphic multi-formality and form an open work group.

A main concern of the artist was to overcome the randomness of visual experience and to heighten the individual effect of color and form. Gerhard Richter applies the elements and structures of paint with brushes, squeegees and palette knives, so that the already existing layers are overlapped or completely obliterated by new ones. The traces of these tools and the layers of paint combine to create structures of spatial or landscape impressions without their consolidating into a recognizable object. Arbitrariness, chance, coincidence and destruction allow a specific type of painting to emerge but never a predetermined image. For Richter this multi-layered manner of painting is not based on a found motif or existing image; the artist, rather, works his way free of all motif specifications. "Every consideration that I use to ’construct’ a painting is incorrect and when the execution succeeds then this is only because I destroy this in part, or because it works despite this fact, by not disturbing and appearing planned." (Gerhard Richter)

Since the late 1980s Gerhard Richter has created paintings by dragging a squeegee in vertical or horizontal paths over the entire width or height of the canvas; in this way paint can be both applied as well as removed. Undercoats thus emerge smooth and diffused and are simultaneously superimposed again in a complex manner. Over the course of his artistic development, Gerhard Richter has developed various painting strategies. His abstract works are witness to his unrelenting preoccupation and formal examination of the condition of his own medium.

The beginnings of abstraction were characterized by an attempt at renewal. Abstraction was considered to be the most appropriate means of artistic self-expression and the aspired-to ’pure’ representation of representational techniques developed into subjectivism and high pathos for artists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Postwar artists, however, had experienced the collapse of a civilization; they made use of abstraction’s vocabulary in order to paint themselves free of their despair in their age’s circumstances. This partly violent gesture led Gerhard Richter to realize early on that the works of his predecessors, such as Jackson Pollock, as well as Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, would, in the long run, fall pray to the "stockpile of the spectacle." (Buchloh) Richter, therefore, had to ask himself how a contemporary painted abstraction, which was born out of disillusionment and hopelessness, could now look like. Out of the tension between the utopia of a new beginnings and the mourning over the losses of these, he came to his own conception of painting and was ultimately able to find his own expression of abstraction.

As with his predecessors, the question of his abstract paintings’ relation to the world is also an issue with Richter: Is a sense of unease or the deficit of a particular social situation apparent in Richter’s abstract works? Do they express a general sense of the times beyond their subjective mood? It is typical of the reception of Richter’s abstract paintings that no answers have been formulated that point in a singular direction; rather the critique of the dialectical interplay of coincidence and structure, and of materiality and mentality typical of Richter are positively emphasized. The abstract language he has developed maintains moderation between accessibility and reserve. "The painting of Gerhard Richter is a discreet painting. It is a painting that knows how to distinguish between too much and too little with regard to the expression, reflexivity and self-accusation of painterly means." (Beate Söntgen)

The exhibition is developed in cooperation with the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and is curated by Ulrich Wilmes, who joined the Haus der Kunst in Munich in spring 2008. A catalogue with contributions by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Beate Söntgen, Gregor Stemmrich and Ulrich Wilmes has been published by Hatje Cantz, ISBN 978-3-7757- 2248-3, museum price 49,80 Euros. Supported by the Gesellschaft der Freunde Haus der Kunst.

Welcme to your kingdom - Princess KISHA

2009-02-11T11:05:00.000+01:00

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

2009-01-15T10:13:00.001+01:00

David Cerny Laughs at Europe with Installation at the Council of the European Union

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Detail of the installation "Entropa", which represents several European Community countries, on view at the European Council building in Brussels, Belgium. Photo: EFE/Olivier Hoslet.

BRUSSELS.- The idea was simple but good. So effective that he convinced the presidency of the European Council, which this semester is headed by the Czech Republic, to give its blessing and the 500,000 Euros needed to finance it. Czech artist David Cerný promised the following: a collaboration between 27 artists from the European Community who would put forth their vision from their own countries. France was portrayed as a labor strike, Spain as a slab of concrete and Italy into a soccer field.

The only problem is that behind this work of art, which has caused great controversy reducing Greece to a huge fire, Romania into a Dracula castle, there is only one creative mind, that of David Cerný.

Czech Deputy Prime Minister, Alexandr Vondra, has confessed feeling "surprisingly sorry" after discovering that the only author of Entropa is Cerný and not 27 artists, as had been stipulated in the contract with the artist.

"David Cerný is the only person responsible for not fulfilling his commitment", said Vondra, who added that the Czech presidency is analyzing what to do with the installation, which has already been placed at the Justus Lipsius builiding of the EU Council building and which was supposed to be inaugurated on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Cerný, known for his sculptures such as Freud hanging in the middle of the streets in Prague or for painting a rose on a Soviet tank, has laughed all along and said that he wanted to prove "that Europe could laugh at itself".

Cerny, who also invented 26 false names of European artists that had supposedly collaborated with him, recognizes that he knew the truth would come out and says that economic restrictions and lack of time motivated him to do the whole work by himself.

Belgium appears as a chocolate box, Denmark constructed with Lego and the map of Sweden below a box that looks like the ones Ikea uses.

On his website, the artist posted the fllowing comment:

Europe is unified by its history, culture and, in recent years, also by a jointly created political structure. More or less diverse countries are intertwined by a network of multi-dimensional relationships that, in effect, results in an intricate whole. From within, we tend to focus on the differences between the individual European countries. These differences include thousands of important and unimportant things ranging from geographical situation to gastronomy and everyday habits.

The EU puzzle is both a metaphor and a celebration of this diversity. It comprises the building blocks oft he political, economic and cultural relationships with which we 'toy' but which will be passed on to our children. The task of today is to create building blocks with the best possible characteristics.

Self-reflection, critical thinking and the capacity to perceive oneself as well as the outside world with a sense of imny are the hallmarks of European thinking. This art project that originated on the occasion of Czech Presidency of the Council of the European Union attempts to present Europe as a whole from the perspectives of 27 artists from the individual EU Member States. Their projects share the playful analysis of national stereotypes as well as original characteristics of the individual cultural identities.

That much is stated in an official booklet of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However Entropa is not a real pan-European work by artists-provocateurs, but a mystification. At first glance, it looks like a project to decorate official space, which has degenerated to an unhindered display of national traumas and complexes. Individual states in the European Union puzzle are presented by non-existent artists. They have their names, artificially created identities, and some have their own Web sites. Each of them is the author of a text explaining their motivation to take part in the common project. That all was created by David Cerny, Kristof Kintera and Tomas Pospiszyl, with the help of a large team of colleagues from the Czech Republic and abroad.

The original intention was indeed to ask 27 European artists for participation. But it became apparent that this plan cannot be realised, due to time, production, and financial constraints. The team therefore, without the knowledge of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, decided to create fictitious artists who would represent various European national and artistic stereotypes. We apologise to Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra, Minister Karel Schwarzenberg and their departments that we did not inform them of the true state of affairs and thus misguided them. We did not want them to bear the responsibility for this kind of politically incorrect satire. We knew the truth would come out. But before that we wanted to find out if Europe is able to laugh at itself.

At the beginning stood the question: What do we really know about Europe? We have information about some states, we only know various tourist clichés about others. We know basically nothing about several of them. The art works, by artificially constructed artists from the 27 EU countries, show how difficult and fragmented Europe as a whole can seem from the perspective of the Czech Republic. We do not want to insult anybody, just point at the difficulty of communication without having the ability of being ironic.

Grotesque hyperbole and mystification belongs among the trademarks of Czech culture and creating false identities is one of the strategies of contemporary art. The images of individual parts of Entropa use artistic techniques often characterised by provocation. The piece thus also lampoons the socially activist art that balances on the verge between would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space. We believe that the environment of Brussels is capable of ironic self-reflection, we believe in the sense of humour of European nations and their representatives.

2009-01-08T11:40:00.001+01:00

Seattle Art Museum Presents Iconic Paintings by Edward Hopper in Edward Hopper's Women

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Edward Hopper, New York Restaurant, 1922. Oil on canvas, 24 X 30 in. Collection of the Muskegon Museum of Art. Michigan. Hackley Picture Fund Purchase.

SEATTLE, WA.- The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) presents some of Edward Hopper’s best known paintings in the exhibition Edward Hopper’s Women. The paintings, along with three etchings by the artist, paint a poignant image of the emergence of the modern American woman, through the eyes of an artist with an uncommon ability to convey seemingly unremarkable human situations in ways that elicit powerful associations and emotional responses. Edward Hopper’s Women will be on view through March 1, 2009 at SAM downtown, First Avenue and Union Street.

In 2007 SAM announced the promised bequest of Hopper’s Chop Suey, a seminal painting from 1929. With Edward Hopper’s Women, the museum unveils this evocative painting in the context of a very specific set of social circumstances in New York in the late 1920s -- and the changing role of women within it.

"The tensions that still seem to emanate from this painting are testament to the penetrating power of Hopper’s gaze," noted Patricia Junker, Curator of American Art at SAM. "Hopper revealed himself an uncommonly close observer of people and place, and it was with Chop Suey that he found his most potent, enigmatic subject in the American city—the modern American woman."

Organized by Junker, Edward Hopper’s Women brings together a group of paintings that shows Chop Suey as part of an extended narrative of human vulnerability that evolved as Hopper studied New York women in new kinds of social spaces. Through works such as the early New York Restaurant (1922), and the later Compartment C, Car 293 (1938), visitors can appreciate the universality of Hopper’s themes and the communicative power of his art across time. The paintings, together with related etchings on the theme, suggest that the artist’s near obsession with the idea of human frailty occupied him through his entire career, informing his most potent -- and now iconic -- works. The exhibition is supplemented by a selection of photographs from the Seattle Art Museum’s permanent collection by Edward Hopper’s contemporaries, including Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans and Ben Shahn, among others.