Art Knowledge News - Keeping You in Touch with the World of Art...

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• The Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) ~ Is A World Famous Dynamic Cultural Complex
• Kunstmuseum Basel opens " The Magic of Things: Still Life Painting 1500-1800 "
• Nottingham Contemporary opens Major David Hockney Exhibition
• Getty Museum Brings Together Masterpieces of Classical Baroque
• Van Gogh Museum Acquires Exciting Paintings by Louis Anquetin
• Gagosian Gallery features Mike Kelley's First NY Show Devoted to Painting
• Metropolitan Museum Announces The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Acquisitions
• Neuberger Museum of Art opens "British Subjects: Identity and Self-Fashioning 1967-2009"
• "Guest of Cindy Sherman" A New Film Chronicles Life with the Reclusive Artist
• Dorotheum Vienna's first auction week features Old Masters & 19th Century Painting
• First Retrospective of Artist & Critic Lil Picard Debuts at Grey Art Gallery
• The Boros Collection is on View at a Converted WW ll Bunker in Berlin
• Stephen Cohen Gallery Presents Lori Nix
• Aspen Art Museum shows ~ Unknown Pleasures - Nine Artist Group Exhibition
• Art Knowledge News Presents "This Week In Review"

The Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) ~ Is A World Famous Dynamic Cultural Complex Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:27 PM PST Located in the heart of Houston's Museum District, the Museum of Fine Arts (MFAH) is a dynamic cultural complex comprising two gallery buildings, a sculpture garden, visitor's center, library, theater, gift shop, café, two art schools, and two house museums. The MFAH's permanent collection totals 62,172 pieces in 300,000 square feet (28,000 m2) of exhibition space, placing it among the largest art museums in the United States. The original 'Caroline Wiess Law' building was designed in phases by architect William Ward Watkin and constructed in 1924 with the east and west wings added in 1926. The 'Robert Lee Blaffer Memorial Wing' was designed by Kenneth Franzheim and opened to the public in 1953. Two subsequent additions, the Cullinan Hall and the Brown Pavilion, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were built in 1958 and 1974 respectively. This section of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston campus is the only Mies-designed museum in the United States. The 'Caroline Wiess Law' building provides an ideal space in which to exhibit the museum's collection of twentieth and twenty-first-century artworks, as well as installations of Oceanic art, Asian art, Indonesian gold artifacts, and Pre-Columbian and sub-Saharan African artworks. The 'Audrey Jones Beck Building' which opened to the public in 2000 was designed by Rafael Moneo, a Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate and a respected Spanish architect of tremendous range. The museum Trustees elected to name the building after Audrey Jones Beck in honor of the large collection she had donated to the museum several decades prior. The building also doubles as the museum's main campus exhibition space with an additional 158,150 sq ft (14,693 m2). The 'Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden', designed by US-born artist and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi and opened in 1986. The Sculpture Garden houses more than twenty-five masterworks by some of the most acclaimed artists from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries from the MFAH and other major collections. The garden itself is a sculpture that unites the pathways between the Caroline Wiess Law Building and the Glassell School of Art. Visit the museum's website at : http://mfah.org/ The permanent collection of the museum spans more than 6,000 years of history with more than 62,000 works from six continents. The European Painting and Sculpture collection contains examples from the earliest Christian art to the present day. The museum´s collection is particularly strong in Renaissance and Baroque art. Among the Renaissance highlights are Italian examples by Fra Angelico, Giovanni di Paolo, Sebastiano del Piombo, Antico, and Scarsellino, as well as Flemish masterpieces by Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling. Baroque artworks include notable works by Orazio Gentileschi, Guido Reni, Philippe de Champaigne, Luca Giordano, Frans Hals, and Jan van Huysum. The 18th- and 19th-century galleries feature important artworks by Jean-Siméon Chardin, Anton Raphael Mengs, and Canaletto, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Francisco de Goya, William Adolphe Bouguereau, Camille Corot, and Théodore Rousseau. From the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism period, MFAH features key works by Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Gustave Courbet, and Édouard Vuillard. Modern Art highlights include Cubist works by Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger, as well as works by Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, and Piet Mondrian. Art at mid-century is one of the MFAH´s outstanding strengths. The Abstract Expressionist collection deserves particular recognition, as it contains key works by Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Franz Kline. The next generation is also well represented, with paintings by Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland. Post-World War II sculpture includes examples by Picasso and Alexander Calder, and Assemblage can be studied through works by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely. Other styles and approaches represented in the collection include Hard-Edge Abstraction (with examples by Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin), Pop Art (Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and James Rosenquist), Minimalism (Donald Judd and Jo Baer), and current movements. Recently the collection has been enhanced by the addition of major works by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, and other modern masters. The Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden displays important sculpture by Auguste Rodin, Aristide Maillol, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Louise Bourgeois, and other key figures. A particular strength of American art at the MFAH is 19th-century landscape painting, with fine examples by Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and others reflecting the allure of the American wilderness. The post-Civil War period is well represented at the museum, with works by John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, and Childe Hassam. The holdings in early-20th-century American art include wonderful Ashcan School paintings and important early abstract works. Paintings by Georgia O´Keeffe and other Taos artists are another highlight. The American galleries in the Beck Building surround a sculpture court that features works by Frederick William MacMonnies and Paul Manship. The MFAH collection contains a large number of Frederick Remington paintings, emphasizing his achievements as the creator the American cowboy as an enduring archetype. The museum´s collection of Texas art consists of more than 2,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs. The collection encompasses representations of the Texas landscape, spiritual and symbolic works, and examples of Modernism and Post-Modernism. These works testify to the rich and varied history of the art of Texas. Among the artists included are John Biggers, Rackstraw Downes, Dorothy Hood, and James Surls. MFAH's collection of Native American Art presents an unbroken visual history of the Pueblo peoples of northern Arizona and New Mexico from pre-hispanic times to the mid-20th century. It also includes works from the last 125 years made by the Navajo, the Apache, and other semi-nomadic peoples. Ceramics, kachina dolls, watercolors, textiles, baskets, stone and silver jewelry and various kinds of wooden objects are represented. The greatest strength of the museum´s Pre-Columbian collection lies in works of the Maya and the cultures of West Mexico. Of particular note are Maya ceramic vessels, limestone reliefs, and exquisite works in jadeite and flint. Other highlights from Mesoamerica include a large stone Aztec figure, a rare Ulúa marble vase, and an elaborate lid for a Teotihuacán incense burner. Examples from other regions include volcanic stone carvings from Costa Rica, ceramic vessels from coastal Peru, and beautiful small objects for personal use made of gold, silver, and inlaid bone and wood. The Glassell Collection of Pre-Columbian Gold includes gold objects that were created as personal ornaments to adorn the face and body, as well as ritual objects, like drinking cups for ceremonies and masks for burials. The MFAH is strategically positioned as an international leader in Latin American art. The museum´s collection includes more than 760 modern and contemporary Latin American works and more than 2,500 Pre-Columbian objects. Building on this momentum and commitment, in 2001 the MFAH became the home of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA). The center, the only one of its kind in the world, serves as both a curatorial department and a resource center within the museum. The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art consists of the finest examples of geometric abstraction in paintings, constructions, drawings, posters, and graphic materials by Brazil's foremost artists of the post-World War II era. The works of Asian art range from a Chinese vessel made about 2400 B.C. to contemporary Japanese ceramics made in the 1990s. The arts of India gallery displays 100 artworks representing diverse subject matter and media from India's unique regions and historic eras. In October 2010 the museum opened the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Arts of China Gallery to showcase its growing collection of Chinese works. Objects in the gallery, which was designed to reflect a distinct Chinese aesthetic, range from those created in the ancient Zhou and Shang dynasties to modern installations featuring video. Some of the important works include a 20th-century painting by Wu Changshi titled Flowering Vine and a carved limestone Avalokitesvara dating to between 557 and 618 A.D. The masks, figures, hats, and knives in the museum´s African art collection span some 2,500 years, from Nigeria´s early Nok culture, the first in all of sub-Saharan Africa to produce sculpture, to the mid-1900s. The Oceanic Art collection´s primary strength is in Melanesian works, particularly from the Sepik River region of New Guinea, with a secondary strength in Australian bark paintings. The ancient Egyptian works include a spectacular polychrome coffin of Pedi-Osiris and a rare blue faience sculpture of the god Thoth as a baboon. The MFAH also includes extensive collections of photography and prints and drawings (including 100 early German woodcuts and engravings, including 35 by Albrecht Dürer, and groups of prints by Rembrandt and by Jacques Bellange). Amongst the exhibitions that can currently be seen at the MFAH are "Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time", on view through July 4th 2011. For more than five decades, Carlos Cruz-Diez (born 1923) has experimented intensively with the origins and optics of color. His wide-ranging body of work includes unconventional color structures, light environments, street interventions, architectural integration projects, and experimental works that engage the response of the human eye while insisting on the participatory nature of color. The MFAH and the Cruz-Diez Foundation, Houston, present the first large-scale retrospective of this pioneering Franco-Venezuelan artist. Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time features more than 150 works created from the 1940s to today, including paintings, silk-screen prints, and innovative chromatic structures; room-size chromatic environments, architectural models, and videos; and a virtual re-creation of the artist´s studio. The exhibition introduces international audiences to Cruz-Diez´s extensive production and places his theoretical and artistic contributions to 20th-century Modernism in a broader context than they have traditionally been seen. "Romancing the West: Alfred Jacob Miller in the Bank of America Collection" until May 8th 2011 features works by Alfred Jacob Miller inspired by a six-month journey to the Rocky Mountains in 1837. Originally from Baltimore, Miller had a chance encounter, while living in New Orleans, with Scottish adventurer Sir William Drummond Stewart, who invited the artist to accompany him on a journey from Missouri to the Rocky Mountains of present-day Wyoming. On the expedition, Miller executed more than 100 field sketches, which became the inspiration for his work over the next three decades. The art in this exhibition, mainly studio works at various stages of completion that showcase a sometimes unorthodox fusion of media, provides a window onto how Miller worked and how he envisioned the West. These works depict the early days of westward expansion in lyrical and spirited watercolors that capture the rough terrain, the majestic Rockies, the abundant wildlife, and the mixed cultures that populated the West. The exhibition looks at these brilliant watercolors in the context of 19th-century art in general, Miller's career, and his place in American art as an early, and innovative, painter in watercolor. ANNOUNCEMENT: Our Editor has been invited to visit Museums and cultural sites worldwide, and they are featured on our Home Page (center). Because of the Editor's travel we will be posting many interesting articles from our archives, some of the BEST Articles and Art Images that appeared in your magazine during the past six plus (6+) years . . and we are publishing current art news articles on the left hand side under RECENT NEWS .. Enjoy

Kunstmuseum Basel opens " The Magic of Things: Still Life Painting 1500-1800 " Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:26 PM PST Basel, Switzerland - Dewdrops on dainty petals, light glancing off precious silverware, candied confectionery in blue and white Chinese porcelain bowls, the soft plumage of a dead songbird, the pale hue of a skull – still lifes have not ceased to exercise their spell upon us to this day with their close-up views of inanimate, yet by no means lifeless objects reproduced with painterly finesse. However, still life painting was anything but a merely aesthetic affair, even if today's viewer tends to perceive it as such. It reflects not only a feeling of transitoriness and a longing for redemption, but also the pleasure of visually representing exotic trading goods with which Dutch and other merchants made their fortunes. On exhibition 7 September through 4 January, 2009.

Nottingham Contemporary opens Major David Hockney Exhibition Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:24 PM PST NOTTINGHAM, UK - A major exhibition of over 60 works by David Hockney from national and international museum collections will open Nottingham Contemporary, one of the most interesting new spaces for art in the UK. Designed by leading architects Caruso St John, the public opening is on Saturday 14 November 2009. The exhibition will re-examine Hockney's work 1960-1968, his early years in London and Los Angeles, in the context of art today. It is the first time the early work - finishing with the iconic Californian painting A Bigger Splash - has been brought together since the Whitechapel retrospective of 1970, nearly 40 years ago.

Getty Museum Brings Together Masterpieces of Classical Baroque Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:23 PM PST LOS ANGELES.- Ludovico Carracci (1555-1619) and his two cousins, the brothers Agostino (1557-1602) and Annibale (1560-1609) Carracci, together brought about a revolution in the study and practice of painting that forever changed the history of art. The repercussions on European painting-a measured classicism and the expression of genuine emotion that characterized Baroque art-lasted for the next 250 years. On view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, December 16, 2008 through May 3, 2009.

Van Gogh Museum Acquires Exciting Paintings by Louis Anquetin Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:21 PM PST AMSTERDAM.- The Van Gogh Museum purchased the painting Woman on the Champs-Élysées by night (c. 1891) by Louis Anquetin (1861-1932). The purchase was made possible with support of the BankGiro Lottery, the Rembrandt Association (supported by Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds) and the VSB Foundation. The painting shows a mysteriously smiling lady in extravagant attire strolling alone in the glow of the streetlights along a grand boulevard in Paris. The painting seems to fit into a thematically linked group of works in which Anquetin depicted the piquant world of lesbian relationships. With Woman on the Champs-Élysées by night, the Van Gogh Museum is able to introduce visitors to the distinctive nocturnal and sinful side of Paris culture, thus providing more insight into Van Gogh's social and artistic environment.

Gagosian Gallery features Mike Kelley's First NY Show Devoted to Painting Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:19 PM PST NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian Gallery presents Mike Kelley's "Horizontal Tracking Shots," his first show in New York devoted entirely to painting. Evoking painting as a series of experiences akin to the movie camera gliding through space, capturing action as it goes, Kelley has devised a spatial push-pull effect through the arrangement of large polychrome panel paintings and smaller framed canvases. In the untitled colored reliefs, individual colors pop or recede in relation to each other. The colors of the flat support panels are determined by key colors in the organically shaped panels that are attached to them. On  view through 23 December, 2009.

Metropolitan Museum Announces The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Acquisitions Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:18 PM PST NEW YORK CITY - To celebrate Philippe de Montebello's 31 years as Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the curators of the Museum announced plans today to organize an exhibition of approximately 300 of the more than 84,000 works of art acquired during his tenure. This unique project – The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions, which will be on view in The Tisch Galleries from October 24, 2008, through February 1, 2009 – will be a collaboration of the curators currently working in the Museum's 17 curatorial departments.

Neuberger Museum of Art opens "British Subjects: Identity and Self-Fashioning 1967-2009" Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:16 PM PST Purchase, New York - When artist Tracey Emin, who represented Great Britain at the 2007 Venice Biennale, was asked by an interviewer whether she felt British, she replied, "I am British! My passport's British. I was born in London. My dad's Turkish-Cypriot; my mum's from the East End.... I'm definitively multicultural British!" The interviewer's question was not so strange considering that in the last sixty years, Britain has become a multi-cultural society, transformed by the dissolution of its empire, post-war immigration, and the new social movements embracing minority cultures. This has had a tremendous impact on British culture and notions of identity -- on what it means to be British and conceptions of selfhood. Exhibition on view at Neuberger Museum of Art from 13 September through 13 December, 2009.

"Guest of Cindy Sherman" A New Film Chronicles Life with the Reclusive Artist Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:15 PM PST NEW YORK, NY - In 1979, Cindy Sherman rocked the NYC art world at age 26 with her "Film Stills." The haunting photographic series appears to chronicle actresses in the midst of dramatic and evocative film scenes, but is in fact the artist herself posing as the different subjects. Hailed for her play on media and identity, the shy and reclusive Sherman almost always uses herself as the model in her photographs and always in disguise. Today, at age 54, she is internationally acknowledged as one of the world's most gifted and significant visual talents - in May 1999, ARTnews named Sherman, alongside Matisse and Picasso, as one of "The 20th Century's Most Influential Artists."

Dorotheum Vienna's first auction week features Old Masters & 19th Century Painting Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:13 PM PST   Vienna, Austria - Devine, delicate, and devoted ladies are trumps at this year's first auction week, certainly in terms of subject matter. Filled with energy, the Dorotheum embarks on its 301st year which brings a number of new developments to the seasoned schedule of its four annual auction weeks. For the first time, Old Masters and 19th Century Painting will be presented as part of the Dorotheum Vienna's first auction week from the 15th to the 18th April 2008. Silver, Furniture, Sculpture, as well as Glass & Porcelain are gathered into a single auction of "Antiques", with Jewellery once again bringing the event to its close.

First Retrospective of Artist & Critic Lil Picard Debuts at Grey Art Gallery Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:12 PM PST NEW YORK, NY.- Debuting at New York University's Grey Art Gallery on April 20, Lil Picard and Counterculture New York comprises over 70 works by a pioneering feminist artist who played varied and vital—but under-acknowledged―roles in the New York art world during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. This first comprehensive American museum exhibition presents paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, and several landmark installations and performances. Also included are photographs, writings, and films. All the works are drawn from the collections of the University of Iowa Museum of Art (UIMA), which organized the show, and from the University of Iowa Libraries, which houses the artist's extensive papers. Lil Picard and Counterculture New York remains on view at the Grey Art Gallery through July 10th.

The Boros Collection is on View at a Converted WW ll Bunker in Berlin Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:11 PM PST BERLIN - Christian Boros and his wife Karen Lohmann are making their collection of contemporary art available to the public in a converted WW ll bunker in Mitte, a central borough of Berlin. The first exhibition exclusively shows works which incorporate the space. As of June 2008 the private collection can be viewed by prior appointment. There will be two-hour guided tours every Saturday.

Stephen Cohen Gallery Presents Lori Nix Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:10 PM PST Los Angeles, CA - Stephen Cohen Gallery is pleased to announce a new show of surreal color photography that explores the tension between truth and illusion through exquisitely detailed post-disaster urban dioramas.  "Lori Nix" will run from June 14 to July 28, 2007.  An opening reception for the artist will be held Thursday, June 14, 2007 from 7 to 9 p.m. A native of rural Kansas, Lori Nix is no stranger to the idyllic or the disastrous.  She spent her childhood playing in open fields under big blue skies—and witnessing the repeated destruction of this same land by the sudden, punishing, astonishingly surreal natural disasters inherent to this region.  This experience left her with a deeply-felt connection to the American landscape, overlaid with an awareness of impending horror that fills her work. Since the advent of photography, artists have played with the possibilities inherent in the medium to manipulate the reality/fantasy continuum.  In the company of photographers like Cindy Sherman, Lori Simmons, James Casebere, Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson, Nix continues in this tradition, probing with the innocent wonder of a child with a new chemistry set, gleefully manipulating her worlds to a point just short of destruction.

Aspen Art Museum shows ~ Unknown Pleasures - Nine Artist Group Exhibition Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:08 PM PST ASPEN, CO - Beginning Saturday, August 9, 2008, the Aspen Art Museum is proud to present the group exhibition Unknown Pleasures, featuring artwork by internationally renowned contemporary artists Sanford Biggers, Anne Collier, Jesper Just, Tim Lee, Euan Macdonald, Susan Philipsz, Ugo Rondinone, Melanie Schiff, and Wilhelm Sasnal. A free public reception will be held from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., on Thursday, August 14, 2008. Unknown Pleasures will remain on view through Sunday, October 19, 2008.

Art Knowledge News Presents "This Week In Review" Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:07 PM PST This is a new feature for the subscribers and visitors to Art Knowledge News (AKN), that will enable you to see "thumbnail descriptions" of the last ninety (90) articles and art images that we published. This will allow you to visit any article that you may have missed ; or re-visit any article or image of particular interest. Every day the article "thumbnail images" will change. For you to see the entire last ninety images just click : here . When opened that also will allow you to change the language from English to anyone of 54 other languages, by clicking your language choice on the upper left corner of our Home Page.  You can share any article we publish with the eleven (11) social websites we offer like Twitter, Flicker, Linkedin, Facebook, etc. by one click on the image shown at the end of each opened article.  Last, but not least, you can email or print any entire article by using an icon visible to the right side of an article's headline.

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