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

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• The Schirn Kunsthalle Shows a Solo Exhibition of Italian Painter Francesco Clemente
• The Hyatt Regency in London Hosts an Exhibition of Sir Peter Blake's Prints
• LewAllen Galleries Presents Works By Jeanette Pasin Sloan & Steve Smulka
• Peabody Essex Museum Displays Forty-Five Magnificent Landscape Paintings
• "The Spectacular of Vernacular" at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston
• Goodwood House Pays Tribute to "The Horse" for the Annual Summer Exhibition
• Singapore's Pop and Contemporary Fine Art Hosts the Artwork of Yayoi Kusama
• Aaron Payne Fine Art Presents an Exhibition of Taos Moderns
• The Smithsonian American Art Museum Shows “The Great American Hall of Wonders”
• The British Museum In London Welcomes Our Editor ~ Unrivaled And Surprising Collections Of Artworks From Around The World
• Damien Hirst Large Vitrine Work Unicorn to Go on Display at Tate St Ives
• LiKailin Contemporary Fine Art presents “Moving” ~ 18 Contemporary Artists
• New Acropolis Museum Designed By Bernard Tschumi Architects Opens in Athens
• Manga ~ Professor Munakata’s British Museum Adventure
• The Tate Britain Re-stages William Blake's 1809 One-Man Exhibition
• Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World"
• Art Amsterdam Celebrates 25th Anniversary and Opens with 120 Solo Exhibitions
• The Boston Athenæum to Show Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey
• Museum of Arts and Design to Present Winners of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize
• Art Knowledge News Presents "This Week In Review"

The Schirn Kunsthalle Shows a Solo Exhibition of Italian Painter Francesco Clemente Posted: 01 Aug 2011 10:06 PM PDT Frankfurt.- The Schirn Kunsthalle is pleased to present a comprehensive solo exhibition, with monumental works by the Italian painter Francesco Clemente. "Francisco Clemente: Palimpsest" is on view now and remains on exhibit through September 4th. Francesco Clemente, born in 1952 in Naples, has pioneered an extraordinary pictorial language that draws on a variety of timeless symbols, myths, cultures, and philosophies. Frequently charged with eroticism, his oeuvre also has a profound religious quality. The variety of mediums which he employs and the subject matter of his work are deeply informed by Clemente's nomadic artistic life. Since the 1970s he has continually travelled between Italy and India, adding New York City to his preferred places of residency since 1980. This exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle is the first comprehensive showing of his paintings and drawings in Germany in more than a quarter century. The exhibition brings together some forty works made between 1978 and 2011. Taking as its starting point Clemente's early works on paper, the show also includes both large format paintings and more recent, spectacular monumental watercolours. Conceptualized in close cooperation with the artist, the exhibition brings to light for the first time the close resemblance of Clemente's aesthetic to the manner in which references are actualized in a palimpsest: effacement, partial erasure, and superimposition of writing surfaces. In so doing it reveals a concern at the centre of his oeuvre: Clemente's conviction in his role as an artist as a kind of universal witness of consciousness. Realized in a variety of media such as pastel, fresco, oil, gouache and watercolor, Clemente's work interweaves traditional likenesses and narratives with more personal motifs and stories. In his paintings forms and lines seem to emerge and recede forming multilayered records of experience. This aesthetic is quite similar to the technique of the palimpsest, employed in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Applied on used scrolls of parchment, it involved scraping, erasing and washing the older manuscripts to yield a clean sheet for reuse, although in fact traces of the original texts often remained visible. The similarity of his method of working to a palimpsest is far from coincidental. Instead such a technique points back to the origins of his artistic inclinations. As Clemente recently put it: "The original impulse in my life as an artist was to write and to break from writing into image." His concern with language was already evident at the young age of twelve, when a collection of his poems, Castelli di Sabbia was published. Thereafter he studied Greek and Latin in high school, before moving to Rome in 1970, where he increasingly came to believe that art was the "last oral tradition alive in the West." It was then that he first saw it as his task to make work that had a political consciousness was the call of the day. Since then he has single-mindedly pursued giving form to images that might help bring about an increased awareness of the need to break with established  notion of Self in order to expand awareness. It was this goal and his deep interest in philosophy and spirituality that led Clemente to India for the first time in 1973. He would spend more than half of the 1970s, at irregular intervals, particularly in the southern city of Madras on the east coast, present-day Chennai. He lived a simple life with actress Alba Primiceri, whom he met in 1974 and married soon after. It wasn't long before he had set up a studio, begun to collaborate with local artists and exchange ideas with members of the Theosophical Society there. In the late 1970s art critics increasingly linked his work the so-called "Italian Transavantgarde." Although the "group," which also included painters Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi and Mimmo Paladino, attracted a great deal of international attention, Clemente soon disassociated his work from theirs. Clemente visited New York for the first time in 1980. Soon after arriving he not only began to collaborate with such writers as Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, but the contemporary composer Morton Feldman. In 1981 – at the same time the so-called death of painting was being fervently proclaimed – Clemente decided to explore even more intensively the possibilities of this medium. Part of this activity resulted in his collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. His non-conventional techniques of painting as well as his openness to collaborating with other artists contributed to Clemente rapidly becoming a rising star of the international art scene. His works were exhibited both at documenta 7 in Kassel (1982) and the Venice Biennial (1988, 1993 and 1995). Solo shows were held at such renowned institutions as the Nationalgalerie Berlin (1984), Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover (1984/85), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1994), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1999), and MADRE Museum, Naples (2009). The exhibition "Francesco Clemente. Palimpsest" at Schirn Kunsthalle is divided into three distinct gallery spaces. The first section is dedicated to three monumental watercolors, collectively entitled "A History of the Heart in Three Rainbows" (2009), each measuring over 18 meters long and 185 centimeters high. With their scroll-like format and fluid, metamorphosing forms, the works, appear to be almost natural, powerful palimpsests of the human spirit – landscapes, as it were, of spiritual evolution. These large format watercolors, composed of constantly changing layers of color, evoke various states of consciousness, which ebb away only to then take on new dimensions. For the second gallery space the artist has created a series of large, semi-abstract photographic images transformed into a kind of "wallpaper." Applied directly to the walls of the Schirn rotunda and extending more than fourteen meters in length, it features fragments of letters, objects, works and snapshots from his Broadway studio in New York City. This "wallpaper" evokes the poetic and culturally eclectic context from which Clemente's art continues to emerge. In the third and last gallery space visitors encounter some thirty of Clemente's key works from 1978 to 2011. More or less installed chronologically, they unfold as a kind of painted palimpsest. At once epigrammatic and expansive, these works attest to the artists' continual processing of visual information in which some forms survive, while others die out. Following the September 11, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers in New York City, a site just a few blocks from Clemente's studio, he increasingly felt the urgency to continue making art that might help building bridges between people and worlds. Such works as "For an History of Women" (2009) and "Camouflage Paradise" (2010) push even further to the limit the possibilities of using "contemplative languages still alive in spite of the onslaught perpetrated by industrial society." Their expanding and contracting sequential like forms, articulate to his growing conviction in his role as an artist as a kind of universal witness of consciousness. Far more than a mere collagist, over the past 40 years Clemente has been steadily pioneering a new kind of history painting with a quiet, yet insistent mediative power. The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is one of Germany's most renowned exhibition institutions. Since its founding in 1986, the Schirn has mounted approximately 180 exhibitions, including major survey shows devoted to the Vienna Jugendstil, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism, to women Impressionists, to subjects such as "shopping — a century of art and consumer culture," the visual art of the Stalin era, new Romanticism in contemporary art, and the influence of Charles Darwin's theories on the art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Large solo exhibitions have featured artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, Julian Schnabel, James Ensor, James Lee Byars, Yves Klein, Peter Doig, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, and Georges Seurat. And artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Ayse Erkmen, Carsten Nicolai, Jan De Cock, Jonathan Meese, John Bock, Michael Sailstorfer, Terence Koh, Aleksandra Mir, Eberhard Havekost, and Mike Bouchet have developed new exhibitions for the Schirn. The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt showcases highly charged themes and topical aspects of artists' oeuvres with an incisive voice and from a contemporary standpoint. As a site of discoveries, the Schirn offers its visitors an original, sensory exhibition experience as well as active participation in cultural discourse. Visit the kunsthalle's website at ... http://www.schirn.de

The Hyatt Regency in London Hosts an Exhibition of Sir Peter Blake's Prints Posted: 01 Aug 2011 09:31 PM PDT London.- The Hyatt Regency London (The Churchill) at 30 Portman Square will host an exhibition of prints by the Godfather of British Pop Art, Sir Peter Blake. Organised by Candlestar, the exhibition will run until September. "Peter Blake – In Print" is the sixth exhibition Candlestar has produced in partnership with the luxury five-star hotel Hyatt Regency London, the main hotel partner to Frieze Art Fair, and is the first time Candlestar has focussed on the work of a single artist during its Hyatt series. Sir Peter Blake is best known for his limited edition prints and the design of the sleeve for The Beatles album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. This show is a series of snapshots of the prodigious body of print works that Sir Peter has made over a career that has spanned nearly six decades.

LewAllen Galleries Presents Works By Jeanette Pasin Sloan & Steve Smulka Posted: 01 Aug 2011 08:54 PM PDT Santa Fe, NM.- LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, "Bending Light: Jeanette Pasin Sloan & Steve Smulka". On view at LewAllen Galleries Downtown from August 5th through September 5th, the exhibition presents works by two leading artists who actively blur traditional genre distinctions to expand the range of contemporary representational painting.

Peabody Essex Museum Displays Forty-Five Magnificent Landscape Paintings Posted: 01 Aug 2011 08:12 PM PDT SALEM, MA.- This summer, visitors to the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) will come inside to get closer to nature. Forty-five magnificent landscape paintings featuring rugged mountains, verdant forests and luminous sunsets are on display in Painting the American Vision, an exhibition of works by Hudson River School painters from the collection of the New-York Historical Society. In the first half of the 19th century, a loosely affiliated group of painters, poets and writers sought to create a distinctly American aesthetic, liberated from European history and artistic conventions. What they had in common was a belief in the transformative power of nature, its ability to change and be changed, and its potency as a source for individual spiritual renewal. On view July 30th through November 6th.

"The Spectacular of Vernacular" at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston Posted: 01 Aug 2011 08:11 PM PDT HOUSTON, TX.- In an era of virtual neighborhoods and fast-paced Internet communication, The Spectacular of Vernacular addresses the role of vernacular forms in the work of 27 artists who utilize craft, incorporate folklore, and revel in roadside kitsch to explore the role of culturally specific iconography in the increasingly global world of art. Originally employed as a linguistics term, vernacular is now broadly applied to categories of culture, standing in for "regional," "folkloric," or "homemade"—concepts that contemporary artists have investigated since the late 1950s as part of a deeper consideration of the relationship between art and everyday life. For the artists included in the exhibition, aspects of the vernacular—and often specifically American vernacular—provide a platform for narratives of home life, social ritual, and sense of place.

Goodwood House Pays Tribute to "The Horse" for the Annual Summer Exhibition Posted: 01 Aug 2011 07:52 PM PDT CHICHESTER, UK - Goodwood has always been inexorably linked with horses from its rich history and early associations with hunting to international dressage, horse trials and carriage driving championships, to the public horse races established in 1802 and the celebrated Glorious Raceweek. From 1 August to 26 September, Goodwood House opens its doors to the public to showcase its beautiful art collection including The Horse, an exhibition of horse-related art from the Goodwood collection and work by British photographer, Tim Flach and leading British Sculptor, Nic Fiddian-Green.

Singapore's Pop and Contemporary Fine Art Hosts the Artwork of Yayoi Kusama Posted: 01 Aug 2011 07:11 PM PDT SINGAPORE.- Pop and Contemporary Fine Art brings to our little red dot "The Dots Within", an exhibition celebrating the artwork of Japan's most premier and notable avant-garde artist, Yayoi Kusama, the princess of polka dots. Within Yayoi Kusama's artwork is the concept that we are all just one polka dot that is within this planet, which is but a dot within the solar system, which is a dot within the galaxy, which is a dot within the universe which is but a dot on a pumpkin… and thus the cycle continues into infinity.

Aaron Payne Fine Art Presents an Exhibition of Taos Moderns Posted: 01 Aug 2011 07:10 PM PDT Santa Fe, NM.- Aaron Payne Fine Art is pleased to present an exhibition of Taos Moderns. The Taos Moderns were a diverse group of artists working between the mid 1940's and the 1970's in and around Taos, New Mexico. They were part of a stylistic lineage, primarily non-figurative or pure abstraction, that reflected and interpreted the power of light, color and the landscape in their art and changed the way Taos and its artists were viewed. The Taos Moderns came to New Mexico from all across America. Many of them were attracted to New Mexico by the space, the brilliant light, and the diverse cultures of indigenous Pueblo and Hispanic peoples. They were attracted by the freedom to work outside of the financial, cultural, and academic constraints of their previous homes. Many had been students at leading schools of fine art, or studied with established masters such as Josef Albers and Hans Hoffman.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum Shows “The Great American Hall of Wonders” Posted: 01 Aug 2011 07:09 PM PDT Washington, DC.- The exhibition "The Great American Hall of Wonders" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum examines the 19th-century American belief that the people of the United States shared a special genius for innovation. It explores this belief through works of art, mechanical inventions and scientific discoveries, and captures the excitement of citizens who defined their nation as a "Great Experiment" sustained by the inventive energies of Americans in every walk of life. "The Great American Hall of Wonders" will be on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through January 8th 2012. "The Great American Hall of Wonders" investigates questions that are still critical today. The exhibition reveals both the successful experiments of the past, as well as the ones that went awry, and invites today's citizens to explore a valuable legacy left by the founding fathers: a belief in the transformative power of American inventiveness. The exhibition features 162 objects, including paintings and drawings by pre-eminent artists, including John James Audubon, Albert Bierstadt, George Catlin, Frederic Edwin Church, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Thomas Moran, Samuel F.B. Morse and Charles Willson Peale, as well as sculptures, prints, survey photographs, zoological and botanical illustrations, patent models and engineering diagrams. The exhibition explores six subjects that helped shape America during the period—the buffalo, giant sequoia and Niagara Falls represent American beliefs about abundant natural resources for fueling the nation's progress, while inventions such as the clock, the gun and the railroad linked improvements in technology with the purposeful use of time. Peale's iconic self-portrait "The Artist in His Museum" (1822), which will greet visitors at the entrance to the exhibition, embodies the ideas set forth in the exhibition. Peale—museum founder, artist, scientist and inventor—depicts himself at the threshold of his museum, a democratic reinterpretation of an Old World "wunderkammer" or cabinet of curiosities. Its galleries were filled with portraits of the founding fathers, natural history specimens, mechanical inventions and a massive mastodon skeleton. At a time when many Americans feared that the country would not survive the passing of the founders' generation, Peale insisted that it was not the revolutionary generation, but rather invention itself that lay at the heart of the national project. The next generation began to define what their democratic nation would be in their scientific and artistic descriptions of America's bounteous nature and in mechanical inventions aimed at improving their lives. On July 4, 1836, President Andrew Jackson authorized the construction of a patent office where the museum's National Historic Landmark building is located. Construction began later that year. The building was designed to celebrate American invention, technical ingenuity and the scientific advancements that the patent process represents. The museum's building was always intended for public display of patent models that were submitted by inventors. By the 1850s, more than 100,000 people each year visited the building, which became known as the "temple of invention," to see the designs that filled display cabinets in the exhibition galleries. In addition to patent models, the government's historical, scientific and art collections were housed on the third floor. The Patent Office occupied parts of the building from 1840 to 1932. The Smithsonian American Art Museum, the nation's first collection of American art, is an unparalleled record of the American experience. The collection captures the aspirations, character and imagination of the American people throughout three centuries. The American Art Museum is the home to one of the largest and most inclusive collections of American art in the world. Its artworks reveal key aspects of America's rich artistic and cultural history from the colonial period to today. More than 7,000 artists are represented in the collection, including major masters, such as John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence, Helen Frankenthaler, Christo, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Lee Friedlander, Nam June Paik, Martin Puryear, and Robert Rauschenberg. The Museum has been a leader in identifying significant aspects of American visual culture and actively collecting and exhibiting works of art before many other major public collections. American Art has the largest collection of New Deal art and the finest collections of contemporary craft, American impressionist paintings, and masterpieces from the Gilded Age. Other pioneering collections include historic and contemporary folk art, work by African American and Latino artists, photography from its origins in the nineteenth century to contemporary works, images of western expansion, and realist art from the first half of the twentieth century. In recent years, the Museum has focused on strengthening its contemporary art collection through acquisitions and by commissioning new artworks. A recent renovation (2000–2006) of the Museum's historic main building expanded the permanent collection galleries and created innovative new public spaces. The Luce Foundation Center for American Art, the first visible art storage and study center in Washington, allows visitors to browse more than 3,300 works from the collection. It adjoins the Lunder Conservation Center, which is shared with the National Portrait Gallery, the first art conservation facility to allow the public permanent behind-the-scenes views of the preservation work of museums. In addition to a robust exhibition program in Washington, D.C., the Museum maintains a highly regarded traveling exhibition program. It has circulated hundreds of exhibitions since the program was established in 1951. From 2000 to 2005, museum staff have organized 14 exhibitions of more than 1,000 major artworks from American Art's permanent collection that traveled to 105 venues across the United States. More than 2.5 million visitors saw these exhibitions. The Museum has several major exhibitions touring the United States. The American Art Museum is a leader in providing electronic resources to schools and the public through its national education program. We offer an array of interactive activities online featuring rich media assets that can easily be used by anyone, as well as Artful Connections, real-time video conference tours to classrooms. Museum staff maintain seven online research databases with more than 500,000 records, including the Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture that document more than 400,000 artworks in public and private collections worldwide. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers contact the Museum directly for assistance, and nearly 6 million virtual visitors from across the globe use the database resources available online. Save Outdoor Sculpture, a joint project between the Museum and Heritage Preservation, is dedicated to the documentation and preservation of outdoor sculpture. Ask Joan of Art, the Museum's online reference service, began in 1993 and is the longest running arts-based service of its kind in the United States. American Art staff produce a series of three podcasts, also available through iTunes, which feature voices of artists, curators, museum staff, visiting lecturers and students, as well as the occasional soundtrack. In 2005, the Museum debuted Eye Level, the first blog at the Smithsonian, which has more than 7,000 readers each month. In 2008, American Art was the first museum in the world to host an alternate reality game, Ghosts of a Chance, which offered a new way of engaging with the collection in its Luce Foundation Center. Visit the museum's website at ... http://americanart.si.edu

The British Museum In London Welcomes Our Editor ~ Unrivaled And Surprising Collections Of Artworks From Around The World Posted: 01 Aug 2011 06:50 PM PDT First founded in 1753, the British Museum now houses more than an incredible 7 million objects from all human history, of which approximately 50,000 items are displayed in 75,000 m² of exhibition space, making it one of the largest and most important human history museums in the world. There are nearly one hundred galleries open to the public, representing 2 miles (3.2 km) of exhibition space. From 5,000 visitors in its first year, the museum is now visited by nearly 6 million people annually. Originally founded following the government's purchase of Sir Hans Sloane's huge private collection of curios, the museum has continued to expand throughout its history. The first exhibition galleries and reading rooms opened in Montagu House, Bloomsbury, London, in 1759. Later donations from Captain Cook and Greek and Roman artifacts from Sir William Hamilton saw the museum rapidly expand during the 18th century. During the 19th century, the British Museum became one of the most powerful in the world. Bolstered by objects such as the Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles and Babylonian artifacts, the museum soon outgrew its surroundings, and thus a new, neo-classical building was designed by Sir Robert Smirke, which was completed in 1831. The building was constructed using up-to-the-minute 1820s technology. Built on a concrete floor, the frame of the building was made from cast iron and filled in with London stock brick. The external architecture of the Museum was designed to reflect the purpose of the building. The monumental South entrance, with its stairs, colonnade and pediment, was intended to reflect the wondrous objects housed inside. As the museum continued to grow, it actively pursued and acquired new exhibits, sending archaeologists abroad to find treasures of the ancient world. Excavations in Lykia, Assyria and Mesopotamia threw up incredible finds, not least Charles Newton's discovery of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World. Later on John Turtle Wood discovered the Temple of Artemis. More expansion followed to cope with influx of artifacts, including Sydney Smirke's Round Reading Room. A White Wing was added in 1914, and in 1939, a new gallery for the Parthenon sculptures was created by the American architect, John Russell Pope (but was damaged by bombing during World War II shortly afterwards). Following the war, the damaged museum was restored and in 2000 it gained its newest extension, the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, designed by Pritzker and Stirling Prize winning architect, Lord Norman Foster. The Museum is now looking forward to its next major building project, the £100 million World Conservation and Exhibition Centre which will concentrate all the Museum's conservation facilities (one of the oldest and largest conservation facilities in the world) into one center and provide new space for temporary exhibitions. This project, designed by Rogers, Stirk, Harbour and Partners (including the Pritzker Laureate, Sir Richard Rogers) is expected to be completed by 2013. Originally, the British Museum also housed the natural history artifacts, until these gained their own, dedicated museum in Kensington in 1881. Until 1973, when it too became a separate institution, the British Museum was also home to the British Library, which can number Karl Marx, Lenin, Bram Stoker and Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle among the famous 19th century figures who took advantage of its impressive (and free) facilities. The famous former "reading room" is now the museum's centerpiece and hosts major exhibitions. Visit the museum's thorough website at: http://www.britishmuseum.org/ The Etruscans were the original inhabitants of much of Italy – before the Romans. They had a culture which was much more friendly to women (Rome was notoriously misogynistic), which produced brilliant art, which welcomed immigrants from Greece and Phoenicia, and which was highly literate (though we have only a few words of their language).The Romans destroyed the Etruscans. They stole bits of Etruscan culture but they destroyed Etruscan society. Etruscan artworks have their own room – Room 71. And here you can see some really lovely work from their civilisation – which lasted five hundred years and which, many Etruscans seem to have believed, would have a finite lifecycle just like a man, a tree, or a horse. Etruscans were fine metalworkers in both bronze and precious metals. Even the bronze helmet, which must have been primarily functional, has an incredibly crisp design and execution. More startling is the gold jewellery, which uses techniques like filigree and granulation to create shimmering surfaces – incredibly detailed work considering these metalworkers had no magnifying glasses to make their work easier.There are amazing bronze mirrors, too, with scenes from mythology incised on the back. Quite often, the Etruscans take Greek mythology as their subject – they had no qualms about borrowing stories from other pantheons and other peoples. Looking at the sheer number and beauty of these mirrors you just know that the Etruscans were a people who took their appearance very seriously.Incredibly, you can even see a piece of Etruscan painting, 2,500 years old. There are so many other things to see in the British Museum. Romans, Greeks, Ancient Egypt; Lindow Man and medieval clocks, Japanese prints and Assyrian gates. But don't miss the Etruscans. They're worth knowing – as is Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa, a beautiful and interesting ancient woman from a little known ancient culture. The original 1753 collection has now grown to over thirteen million objects. The Department of Prints and Drawings holds the national collection of Western Prints and Drawings. It ranks as one of the largest and best print room collections in existence alongside the Albertina in Vienna, the Paris collections and the Hermitage. The holdings are easily accessible to the general public in the Study Room, and the department also has its own exhibition gallery, where the displays and exhibitions change several times a year. There are approximately 50,000 drawings and over two million prints covering the period from the 14th century to the present, including many works of the highest quality by the leading artists of the European schools. There are magnificent groups of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, (including his only surviving full-scale cartoon), Dürer (the collection of 138 drawings is one of the finest in existence), Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Claude Gellée and Jean-Antoine Watteau, and largely complete collections of the works of all the great printmakers including Dürer, Rembrandt and Goya. More than 30,000 British drawings and watercolours include important examples of work by William Hogarth, Paul Sandby, J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Girtin, John Constable, John Sell Cotman, David Cox, James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank. There are about a million British prints including more than 20,000 satires and outstanding collections of works by William Blake and Thomas Bewick. The Department of Asia contains over 75,000 objects covering the whole Asian continent and from the Neolithic up to the present day and includes the most comprehensive collection of sculpture from the Indian subcontinent in the world, including the celebrated Buddhist limestone reliefs from Amaravati, an outstanding collection of Chinese antiquities, paintings, and porcelain, lacquer, bronze, jade, and other applied arts, Buddhist paintings from Dunhuang and the Admonitions Scroll by Chinese artist Gu Kaizhi (344–406 AD) and the most comprehensive collection of Japanese pre-20th century art in the Western world, including a copy of The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai, stunning works by Hiroshige, Harunobu and others. The British Museum houses one of the world's greatest and most comprehensive collections of Ethnographic material from Africa, Oceania and the Americas, representing the cultures of indigenous peoples throughout the world. The Sainsbury African Galleries display 600 objects from the greatest permanent collection of African arts and culture in the world. The three permanent galleries provide a substantial exhibition space for the Museum's African collection comprising over 200,000 objects, including both unique masterpieces of artistry and objects of everyday life. Highlights of the African collection include the Benin Bronzes, a magnificent brass head of a Yoruba ruler from Ife, Nigeria, Asante goldwork from Ghana and the Torday collection of Central African sculpture, textiles and weaponry. The Americas collection mainly consists of 19th and 20th century items although the Inca, Aztec, Maya and other early cultures are well represented. The Department of the Middle East has collections representing the civilizations of the ancient Near East and its adjacent areas. These include Mesopotamia, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula, Anatolia, the Caucasus, parts of Central Asia, Syria, Palestine and Phoenician settlements in the western Mediterranean from the prehistoric period until the beginning of Islam in the 7th century. The collection includes six iconic winged human-headed statues from Nimrud and Khorsabad. Stone bas-reliefs, including the famous Royal Lion Hunt relief's that were found in the palaces of the Assyrian kings at Nimrud and Nineveh. The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh and Sumerian treasures found in Royal Cemetery's at Ur of the Chaldees. The museum's collection of Islamic art and archaeological material, numbers about 40,000 objects, one of the largest in the world. As such, it contains a broad range of Islamic pottery, paintings, tiles, metalwork, glass, seals, and inscriptions. The Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities of the British Museum has one of the world's largest and most comprehensive collections of antiquities from the Classical world, with over 100,000 objects. These mostly range in date from the beginning of the Greek Bronze Age (about 3200BC) to the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine I in the 4th century AD. The Cycladic, Minoan and Mycenaean cultures are represented, and the Greek collection includes important sculpture from the Parthenon in Athens, as well as elements of two of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos. The Department also houses one of the widest-ranging collections of Italic and Etruscan antiquities and extensive groups of material from Cyprus. With such a vast collection and limited display space, many of the British Museum's temporary exhibitions focus on specific items or groups of items from their own collection, with possible additions on loan from other institutions. "The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead" (until 6 March 2011), focuses on the illustrated spells designed to guide the deceased through the dangers of the underworld, ultimately ensuring eternal life. Many of the examples of the Book of the Dead in the exhibition have never been seen before, and many are from the British Museum's unparalleled collection. In addition to the unique works on papyrus and linen, superbly crafted funerary figurines (shabtis), amulets, jewellery, statues and coffins illustrate the many stages of the journey from death to the afterlife. "Picasso to Julie Mehretu - Modern drawings from the British Museum collection" (until 25 April) showcases many of the great artists of the 20th century, starting with Picasso's study for his masterpiece "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", the painting that shook the art world in 1907. It also features works by E L Kirchner, Otto Dix, Matisse, Magritte, David Smith and Louise Bourgeois and major contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter and William Kentridge. The exhibition concludes with Julie Mehretu, the Ethiopian-born artist who is one of the stars of the international contemporary art scene with acclaimed solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim in New York and across the world. "Images and sacred texts-Buddhism across Asia" (until 3 April 2011) includes sacred texts, painted scrolls and sculptures from Sri Lanka to Japan. "Adornment and identity-Jewelry and costume from Oman" and "Traditional jewelry and dress from the Balkans" (both until 11 September 2011) are unique displays jewelry, male and female dress and more. "Lasting impressions-Seals from the Islamic World" (until 23 February 2011) is a travelling photographic exhibition from the British Library and the British Museum. This small display explores how Islamic seals were made and used, what was written on them and how they were decorated. On display will be images of clay, metal and gemstone seals from the British Museum dating from the 9th to the 19th centuries, and seal impressions stamped on royal letters, documents and manuscript books held in the British Library. Later this year (from 26 May 2011 until 11 September 2011), the British Museum will feature "Out of Australia Prints and drawings from Sidney Nolan to Rover Thomas". The exhibition is the first exhibition of Australian works on paper of this scale and ambition to be held outside Australia. It features 125 works on paper by 60 artists, from the 1940s modernists to contemporary artists and Indigenous Australian printmakers, all drawn from the British Museum's impressive collection. Artists featured include, Albert Tucker and Arthur Boyd, James Gleeson, Robert Klippel, Brett Whiteley and Colin Lanceley.

Damien Hirst Large Vitrine Work Unicorn to Go on Display at Tate St Ives Posted: 01 Aug 2011 06:49 PM PDT LONDON. Tate announced yesterday that Damien Hirst's large vitrine work, The Child's Dream 2008, will go on show at Tate St Ives this autumn. The work, which comprises a 'unicorn' in a gold-plated vitrine of formaldehyde, will be one of the highlights of the exhibition The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art. The Child's Dream 2008 has never been displayed in the UK before. It will also be the first time a major Hirst piece has been shown in the South West, home to the artist. The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art Tate St Ives opening 10 October 2009 through 10 January 2010.

LiKailin Contemporary Fine Art presents “Moving” ~ 18 Contemporary Artists Posted: 01 Aug 2011 06:48 PM PDT Cheshire, UK - LiKailin Contemporary Fine Art is delighted to announce the opening of "Moving", an exhibition of 18 Chinese contemporary painters, sculptors and photographers. Over the last year the world has witnessed an emergence of exceptional contemporary art from China and the rest of Asia, which has been stunning audiences with its skill and voice.   "Moving" is a fabulous exhibition of 18 Chinese contemporary artists, comprising painters, sculptors and photographic artists.   The title "Moving", at its most apparent level, refers to the way the artwork moves us emotionally.   However, the exhibition is also intended to provide a visual description of, and commentary on, the inexorable moving forward of China as a nation state - and to provoke a reaction that moves or shifts the viewers' attitudes to China and Chinese culture.

New Acropolis Museum Designed By Bernard Tschumi Architects Opens in Athens Posted: 01 Aug 2011 06:47 PM PDT ATHENS, GREECE.- The new Acropolis Museum opened today. It is located 300 meters from the famous ruins, and cost $181 million to build. Today, the new Acropolis Museum has a total area of 25,000 square meters, with exhibition space of over 14,000 square meters, ten times more than that of the old museum on the Hill of the Acropolis. The new Museum offers all the amenities expected in an international museum of the 21st century. Athens may be one of the most congested cities in Europe, but you won't feel it here, staring up at the Parthenon's columns as they turn to gold in the evening sunlight. Suddenly, your high-speed city break will feel like a proper Athens holiday.

Manga ~ Professor Munakata’s British Museum Adventure Posted: 01 Aug 2011 06:46 PM PDT LONDON (REUTERS).- Japanese manga artist Hoshino Yukinobu has brought his popular character Professor Munakata to London's British Museum, featuring some of the collection's most famous treasures in his drawings. In a single-room display near the entrance to the famous museum, a giant picture of folklore expert Munakata donning his trademark bowler hat and black cape includes the Sutton Hoo helmet dating from the 7th-century. The exclusive new manga by Hoshino Yukinobu at the British Museum. Manga is a Japanese comic book art form which has become an international phenomenon in recent years. On exhibition through 3 Januray, 2010.

The Tate Britain Re-stages William Blake's 1809 One-Man Exhibition Posted: 01 Aug 2011 06:45 PM PDT LONDON - The Tate Britain unveiled the first display devoted to William Blake's only one-man exhibition, reuniting nine of the surviving works two hundred years after they went on display in May 1809. The original exhibition was Blake's most significant attempt to create a public reputation for himself as a painter and provided a vital insight into the artist's self-image and ambitions. A new edition of Blake's Descriptive Catalogue (1809) was published by Tate Publishing to coincide with the display.

Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" Posted: 01 Aug 2011 06:44 PM PDT CHADDS FORD, PA - The family of Andrew Wyeth and the Brandywine River Museum invite the public to a celebration of the life and work of Andrew Wyeth, who died on January 16. This special event will be held Saturday, January 31, from 9:30 to 4:30 p.m. Complimentary admission will be offered to all visitors on this day.

Art Amsterdam Celebrates 25th Anniversary and Opens with 120 Solo Exhibitions Posted: 01 Aug 2011 06:43 PM PDT AMSTERDAM,NL - All the galleries at Art Amsterdam will be staging a solo exhibition. This means that 120 artists will have solo exhibitions devoted to their work, which is unique at a contemporary art event. This is how Art Amsterdam will celebrate its 25th anniversary in the period from Wednesday 13 May to Sunday 17 May 2009. 120 galleries will display the latest developments in contemporary art at Art Amsterdam, with paintings, photos, sculptures, installations and videos. The participating galleries include all the top-flight Dutch galleries, plus 31 foreign galleries from ten countries: Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, France, Denmark, Austria, South Africa, United States, Japan and Korea.

The Boston Athenæum to Show Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey Posted: 01 Aug 2011 06:42 PM PDT BOSTON, MA - Carnivorous plants, falling masonry, and uninvited guests fill the imaginary world of artist and author Edward Gorey. His stories and accompanying illustrations maintain a delicate balance between the hilarious and the horrific.  While the images that accompany Gorey's minimalist text appear simple, the pen work is often complex. These eloquent images might complement his text and on other occasions raise puzzling questions. Gorey rarely depicts murder or mayhem, portraying instead the actions that precede an event or suggest the immediate aftermath. His characters' lack of emotion encourages the viewer to supplement the ongoing narrative. The result is often a delicate balance between the hilarious and ominous uncertainty. When asked about the effect of his work on readers Gorey replied, "In a way I hope it is mildly unsettling."

Museum of Arts and Design to Present Winners of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize Posted: 01 Aug 2011 06:41 PM PDT New York City - The Museum of Arts and Design is proud to present the Abraaj Capital Art Prize and the first exhibition of its prize winners. The Abraaj Capital Art Prize is an award that seeks to raise international awareness of artists from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia (MENASA). The work of the three winners will be on view at the Museum's Design and Innovation Gallery, which explores emerging trends in art and design through a series of short-term exhibitions guest-curated by leading voices in the field. On view 5 August through 30 August, 2009.

Art Knowledge News Presents "This Week In Review" Posted: 01 Aug 2011 06:41 PM PDT 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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