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• The Bank Austria Kunstforum Explores the Fernando Botero Phenomenon
• Sotheby's Contemporary Art & 20th Century Italian Art Auction Achieves Multiple Records
• Bonhams Announces October Sale of Fine Prints in San Francisco
• The Milwaukee Art Museum Presents "Impressionist Masterworks on Paper"
• The Morris Museum of Art Shows the Art of Edward Rice
• The Whitechapel Gallery Shows Major UK Exhibition of Polish Artist Wilhelm Sasnal
• ArtPalmBeach Fair Celebrates its 15th Anniversary in January
• St. Patrick’s Cathedral Cornerstone Has Long Eluded Searchers . . and Is Still Missing !
• Major Surrealism Exhibition To Open At Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art
• Ethel Carrick & E Phillips Fox's Artistic Marriage Reviewed at the Queensland Art Gallery
• Vatican Museums Honor Galileo 400th Anniversary of the Astronomer's First Celestial Observations
• Guggenheim Museum Bilbao celebrates A Retrospective of Work by Takashi Murakami
• Sidney Nolan: A New Retrospective at Queensland Art Gallery
• Tim Burton Major Retrospective at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art
• Van Gogh's Cypresses & The Starry Night: Visions of Saint-Remy at Yale University Art Gallery
• The National Portrait Gallery to exhibit " Inventing Marcel Duchamp "
• Kunsthaus Zürich Exhibits the ‘Gruppe Junge Kunst’ (Young Art Group)
• A Floating World ~ Photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue at CaixaForum Madrid
• The London Barbican Art Gallery Presents 150 Years of Animation
• This Week in Review in Art Knowledge News

The Bank Austria Kunstforum Explores the Fernando Botero Phenomenon Posted: 13 Oct 2011 11:09 PM PDT Vienna.- The Bank Austria Kunstforum is proud to host the first ever comprehensive presentation in Austria of the painted oeuvre by the Columbian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero (b. 1932 in Medellín). "Botero", on view at the gallery until January 15th 2012, includes 70 paintings ranging from the late 1950s until today telescope a view for us into Botero's artistic universe. The artist interprets his portraits, nudes and still life with allusions to his South American origins. They are pictures of seeming cheer and innocuousness, but at the same time are ambivalent and infused with dark, unfathomable cunning. Botero has been astonishing the world now for more than fifty years with his opulent, "blown up" figures, whose aesthetics as it were contradict the precise rendition of form and colour. Botero does nothing other than force art history to question its own canon. The exhibition includes the sensational Abu Ghraib Cycle of 2004/2005 and explores the "phenomenon of Botero", which is today more topical than ever. The exhibition is sectioned into various chapters: Everyday Life in South America, Catholicism, Bull Fight, or paraphrases of the most famous works in the history of art – images in which the sensuousness of life keeps colliding with its transience. "I am the most Columbian among Columbian artists," says Fernando Botero. He makes us understand with incredible consistency what a picture has to achieve according to his ideas: an unambiguous message, a dialogue between artist and observer that is unequivocally understood. Botero's subjects seem to come from another age and are full of melancholy and nostalgia. In this way Botero – exactly like contemporary South American literature and music – is placed entirely in the tradition of his home continent. His figures have the effect of being captured in an anachronism: they exist unconcernedly, they eat, drink, play cards, go for walks, sew, weep, go on picnics; they always seem isolated, plunged into some world deep inside themselves. Botero moreover inserts metaphors of impending threat into his pictures – such as erupting volcanoes or collapsing buildings – which turn the seeming idyll upside down into the negative. The reproach, also repeatedly made by art critics, that Botero deals only with cosy and "appetising" motifs, is not true by any stretch of the imagination, as is proven above all in his Abu Ghraib Cycle. Here the artist wants to bear emotional witness to the shame that rises when watching the terrible scenes of torture perpetrated by US American soldiers. With this cycle Botero brought political events of everyday into his art. Fernando Botero was born the second of three children in Medellín, in the mountains of Colombia. His parents were David Botero and Flora Angulo. David Botero, a salesman who traveled by horseback, died when the boy was age four, and his mother worked as a seamstress. An uncle took a major role in his life. Although isolated from art as presented in museums and other cultural institutes, Botero was influenced by the Baroque style of the colonial churches and then the rich life of the city. In 1944, after Botero attended a Jesuit school, Botero's uncle sent him to a school for matadors for two years. In 1948, at the age of 16, Botero published his first illustrations in the Sunday supplement of the El Colombiano daily paper. He used the money he was paid to attend high school at the Liceo de Marinilla de Antioquia. His first solo show was held at the Galería Leo Matiz in Bogotá, a few months after his arrival. In 1952, Botero travelled with a group of artists to Barcelona, where he stayed briefly before moving on to Madrid. In Madrid, Botero studied at the Academia de San Fernando. In 1952, he traveled to Bogotá, where he had a solo exhibit at the Leo Matiz gallery. Later that year, he won the ninth edition of the Salón de Artistas Colombianos. In 1953, Botero moved to Paris, where he spent most of his time in the Louvre, studying the works there. He lived in Florence, Italy from 1953 to 1954, studying the works of Renaissance masters. In recent decades, he has lived most of the time in Paris, but spends one month a year in his native city of Medellín. He has had more than 50 exhibits in major cities worldwide, and his work commands selling prices in the millions of dollars. While his work includes still-lifes and landscapes, Botero has concentrated on situational portraiture. His paintings and sculptures are united by their proportionally exaggerated, or "fat" figures, as he once referred to them. Botero is an abstract artist in the most fundamental sense, choosing colors, shapes, and proportions based on intuitive aesthetic thinking. Though he spends only one month a year in Colombia, he considers himself the "most Colombian artist living" due to his insulation from the international trends of the art world. In 1980, with the support and backing of the popular Viennese actor Heinz Conrad, the first exhibitions were organised in the former banking hall of the Österreichische Creditanstalt für Handel und Gewerbe (Austrian Bank of Trade and Commerce), premises built in 1914, which was then standing empty. The curtain-raiser was a comprehensive show on Austria's cultural and intellectual history from 1880 to 1980: "Aufbruch in die Moderne" (Starting out into the Modern Age), curated by Rupert Feuchtmüller and organised by Ivo Stanek, which attracted 28,000 visitors. Subsequent exhibitions, such as "Fotografis" – a presentation of the superlative photograph collection of the Länderbank, as it was then called – also proved to be great attractions for the public. The success of these exhibitions was as surprising as it was overwhelming, so that the director of the Länderbank and later Federal Chancellor Franz Vranitzky initiated a resolution to set up a permanent exhibition venue oriented on international standards – the Länderbank Kunstforum was born, and the present director of the Albertina, Klaus Albrecht Schröder, was its first director. In 1988, the Austrian star architect Gustav Peichl was commissioned to design the first reconstruction of the Kunstforum, making it the most modern exhibition building in Austria at the time. The re-opening was in March 1989 with "Egon Schiele und seine Zeit" (Egon Schiele and his Time). This exhibition attracted 186,000 visitors and was successful not only in Vienna; it created a sensation on tour in London, Munich and Wuppertal. The Schiele exhibition in the Kunstforum was the first major debut of the then little known Leopold Collection; it thus functioned as a booster for the Austrian Republic to purchase the collection and set up the present-day Leopoldmuseum. Since then, the objective of the Kunstforum has been very clearly defined: the presentation of international top exhibitions on classical modern art and its forerunners: Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, J. M. W. Turner, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Kazimir Malevich, Kurt Schwitters, Wassily Kandinsky, Tamara de Lempicka and many more. Visit the gallery's website at  ... http://www.bankaustria-kunstforum.at

Sotheby's Contemporary Art & 20th Century Italian Art Auction Achieves Multiple Records Posted: 13 Oct 2011 10:12 PM PDT LONDON.- Last night's, Sotheby's Evening Sales of Contemporary Art and 20th Century Italian Art, including 'Italian Identity' – an important private collection – brought the combined total of £39,456,950/ $62,081,566 USD/ €45,048,011 against the pre-sale estimate of £34,982,000-48,338,000 – in excess of the total achieved for the equivalent sales last year (£34 million). A total of six artist records were established across both sales – for Alberto Burri, Leon Kossoff, Wim Delvoye, Francesco Lo Savio, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Giuseppe Penone.

Bonhams Announces October Sale of Fine Prints in San Francisco Posted: 13 Oct 2011 09:15 PM PDT San Francisco, California.- Bonhams is excited to announce its sale of Fine Prints on October 25th in San Francisco, and simulcast to Los Angeles, will feature a wide range of lithographs, woodcuts, etchings and screenprints spanning myriad centuries. The sale is led by a brightly-colored lithograph of "Ambassadeurs, Aristide Bruant," 1892, by French Post Impressionist artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (est. $30,000-40,000). The piece depicts Parisian singer and restaurateur Aristide Bruant, and demonstrates the unique style that Toulouse-Lautrec introduced to the art world at the time. Also of the same period is a poster of Fernand Toussaint's "Cafe Jacqmotte," 1894 (est. $20,000-40,000). Not far prior to the creation of these works, James Abbott McNeill Whistler created "Little Venice, from Twelve Etchings," in 1880. At the opposite end of the color spectrum, this print was done in dark brown ink on antique cream laid paper (est. $12,000-18,000).

The Milwaukee Art Museum Presents "Impressionist Masterworks on Paper" Posted: 13 Oct 2011 08:57 PM PDT Milwaukee, Wisconsin.- The Milwaukee Art Museum is proud to present "Impressionism: Masterworks on Paper" on view at the museum from October 14th through January 8th 2012. Organized in conjunction with the Albertina in Vienna, "Impressionism: Masterworks on Paper" is the first exhibition devoted exclusively to the significance of drawing to the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist avant-garde movements — and to the development of modern art. The exhibition makes its premiere in Milwaukee, presenting more than one hundred drawings, watercolors, and pastels by many of the greatest artists in the history of Western European art — Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas,  Pierre Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. These artists created drawings independently of painting, as they sought to create an art that more accurately represented their times. In the process, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists effectively elevated drawing in nineteenth-century France to a status equal with that of painting.

The Morris Museum of Art Shows the Art of Edward Rice Posted: 13 Oct 2011 08:20 PM PDT Augusta, GA.- The Morris Museum of Art is proud to present "Preservation of Place: The Art of Edward Rice", on display through November 20th. This exhibition, one of the most inclusive overviews of Rice's career to-date, features thirty paintings produced since 1982 by the noted realist, drawn from private and public collections from across the south. "His painterly skills, combined with the instincts of a serious architectural historian, have combined to create a body of work that is noteworthy for its elegance, precision, and devotion to the telling detail. His depiction of the obvious and the forgotten, the historic and generic—the often overlooked—is more than a simple architectural record" said Kevin Grogan, director of the Morris Museum of Art. "These images haunt the imagination and mirror the lost architecture of the Old South. They preserve a sense of self as much as they do a sense of Southern history."

The Whitechapel Gallery Shows Major UK Exhibition of Polish Artist Wilhelm Sasnal Posted: 13 Oct 2011 08:19 PM PDT London.- The Whitechapel Gallery is proud to present the first major UK exhibition of Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal, a leading figure in contemporary painting. Wilhelm Sasnal paints images from everyday life and the mass media. His paintings range from portraits of his family and friends to icons of popular culture such as Roy Orbison, from a news image of a young girl rescued from the wreckage of the recent Tsunami in Japan to troubling chapters in the history of Poland including World War II and the Holocaust. "Wilhelm Sasnal" will be on view at the gallery from October 14th through January 1st 2012.

ArtPalmBeach Fair Celebrates its 15th Anniversary in January Posted: 13 Oct 2011 08:07 PM PDT PALM BEACH, FL.- ArtPalmBeach celebrates its 15th Anniversary at the Palm Beach County Convention Center from January 20th-23rd, 2012 with a Preview evening January 19th. ArtPalmBeach is considered one of the most influential contemporary art fairs on Florida's Gold Coast by both critics and art enthusiasts since its opening in 1997. In honor of the Anniversary celebration, the fair will debut the most extensive program in its history by encompassing premiere events, special exhibitions, topical lectures, special museum tours, site specific art installations, art performances and exclusive VIP programs.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral Cornerstone Has Long Eluded Searchers . . and Is Still Missing ! Posted: 13 Oct 2011 08:05 PM PDT New York, NY - Much is known about the cornerstone of St. Patrick's Cathedral. As the Archdiocese of New York embarks on a five-year, $175 million renovation of what has been described as the nation's largest Roman Catholic Gothic sanctuary, architects and historians have meticulously reviewed every detail of James Renwick Jr.'s original blueprints. The corner of Fifth Avenue and 50th Street (home of the famous Easter Parade in NYC), where the cornerstone of St. Patrick's Cathedral is thought to have been laid.They have learned that the cornerstone was hand-cut by Cormack McCall, a 22-year-old Irish immigrant. It was laid on Sunday, Aug. 15, 1858, the Feast of the Assumption, by John Hughes, New York's first archbishop. Two hundred priests and 100 choirboys marched in the formal procession. The throng of onlookers was so thick — 100,000 strong, by one estimate — that all the city's streetcars were diverted north to accommodate the crowd. Downtown Manhattan was described as "depleted." The stone was left open for offerings from the public. It was sealed exactly two years later, on Aug. 15, 1860. Much has been learned about the cornerstone, except for two salient details: Where it is and when it went missing. "It's the great mystery of the cathedral," said Msgr. Robert T. Ritchie, St. Patrick's rector. The cathedral was conceived by Archbishop Hughes, who presciently anticipated the development of Midtown Manhattan, as more than merely a replacement for the old St. Patrick's downtown on Mott Street. In "The History of the Archdiocese of New York," Msgr. Thomas J. Shelley wrote that the new cathedral was "meant to be a statement in stone of the Catholic presence in a city that was then the capital of Protestant America." Many cornerstones are prominently marked with the date construction began. Some identify the builder or architect. Most are in plain sight, appropriately enough, at a corner of the building. Not so at St. Patrick's. "I have no idea where it is," Msgr. Ritchie said. Actually, there is a vague idea. "We know it was at 50th Street and Fifth Avenue, but exactly where nobody knows," said Thomas G. Young, the author of several books about the cathedral. "It was in none of the plans we found," he said. "I once found a photograph when the building was 8 or 12 feet high and there was a block missing. I often wondered if that was an opening that led to the cornerstone below it, but it was probably too high." Scaffolding has already been erected around the cathedral, though whether the cornerstone will be rediscovered during the renovations is uncertain. "We're still in the early stages of planning the restoration, and it's very early to determine exactly how the time frame and other particulars will look," said Kate Monaghan, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese. The cornerstone-laying ceremony on a glorious August day in 1858 was an affirmation of the city's evolving demography. "No religious pageant of equal pomp could have been experienced on this continent before," Mr. Young wrote, "and the effect on the people was stunning." A wooden canopy covered the spot where the cornerstone was to be laid. Archbishop Hughes spoke from a flag-bedecked platform nearby. Those among the largely Irish-immigrant crowd who were close enough to hear his lengthy remarks were delighted to learn that the new cathedral would be named for St. Patrick, the apostle of Ireland. After ritually blessing the cornerstone, Archbishop Hughes placed it in the foundation. It contained a parchment litany in Latin of ecclesiastical and government officialdom and a celebratory news report on the recent laying of the first Atlantic cable, heralding instantaneous communication with the continent from which so many of New York's immigrant Catholics hailed. The cavity in the cornerstone was left unsealed temporarily to accommodate offerings from ordinary citizens, but it is unclear whether they constituted financial contributions or sentimental relics. The cathedral's foundation was built with Maine granite. The marble walls were quarried in Westchester County. While the original plans called for steps at Fifth Avenue (there are seven now at the East 50th Street corner), it is also unclear whether any alteration of the street elevation after 1858 might have obscured the cornerstone. The cathedral was finally consecrated in 1879. According to one account, the cornerstone was not marked and the walls were built above it, perhaps suggesting it is below grade. Other versions of that theory abound. One theory is that the cornerstone might have been dislodged or moved later during construction of the Lady Chapel at the cathedral's eastern exposure. A detailed historical guide published in 1931 suggests the craggy foundation cornerstone was "not the kind of granite that yields easily, if at all, to the sculptor's chisel." There must have been some temporary reason for omitting the inscription, since it is claimed the surface could be smoothed. "Either at that time, or afterward," the guidebook's author continued, "an almost invisible square was clipped off the lower east end of the stone above and that one is sometimes taken for the foundation stone. Wonders me: who made this cut, and why?" The day after the 1858 ceremony, The New York Times reported that "the archbishop sprinkled the stone with holy water, and with a knife marked on each side of it the sign of the cross." In 1860, Archbishop Hughes announced that construction would be delayed because donations had been depleted, and the delays continued because of the Civil War. He wrote that the names of 73 donors in addition to 103 original donors would be deposited in the cornerstone "and the wall built over it to the average height of the other portions of the structure," which was then about 10 feet. Then he added mysteriously: "Of course, on the list of subscribers that is to remain outside of the cornerstone, the names only of those who shall have paid can be inscribed." "The noble impulse that actuated the primary patrons of the new cathedral," he wrote, "are entitled to the respect of being incorporated and recorded in the cornerstone, which, in all probability, will never be disturbed by human agency." As for the other donors' names, Archbishop Hughes said, "though unseen by men, they will ever be under the eyes and inspection of God, and may turn up for honor and mercy on the Day of Judgment." For whatever motivation, he envisioned that unlike traditional time capsules, this one would never be discovered. For the past 151 years, the Archbishop has been correct. By Sam Roberts for the NY Times

Major Surrealism Exhibition To Open At Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art Posted: 13 Oct 2011 08:00 PM PDT Brisbane, Australia (ABC Limelight).- Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art have announced a major new exhibition of Dali, Magritte, Miró, Picasso, Man Ray and other surrealists. "Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams" opens in June and showcases Europe's most important and extensive collection of surrealist works from the Musée National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Gallery of Modern Art, which opened in December 2006, complements the Queensland Art Gallery building. Situated at Kurilpa Point only 150 metres from the Queensland Art Gallery building, the Gallery of Modern Art focuses on the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Musée National d'Art Moderne, housed in Paris's iconic Centre Pompidou, is one of the world's best museum collections of modern and contemporary art. Its Surrealism collections are the finest in Europe — and the core of this collection is coming to the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. This exhibition presents more than 180 works by 56 artists, including paintings, sculptures, 'surrealist objects', films, photographs, drawings and collages. 'Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams' is an opportunity to see important art works that rarely leave Paris, in an exhibition that will provide a fascinating and comprehensive overview of this important artistic movement. The exhibition presents a historical overview of Surrealism, charting its evolution from Dada experiments in painting, photography and film, through the metaphysical questioning and exploration of the subconscious in the paintings of Giorgio De Chirico and Max Ernst; to the readymade objects of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray's photographs. Gaining traction in the early 1920s, the movement's development is explored through the writings of Surrealism's founder André Breton and key early works by André Masson. Also included is a remarkable selection of paintings and sculptures by surrealists Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Victor Brauner, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger and Paul Delvaux. Film and photography are also represented throughout the exhibition, including films by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, René Clair and Man Ray. Important photographic works by Hans Bellmer, Brassaï, Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Eli Lotar and Jacques-André Boiffard also feature. The exhibition is rounded out with late works that show the breadth of Surrealism's influence, and includes major works by Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Joseph Cornell. 'Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams' will be accompanied by an innovative Children's Art Centre program, an exciting range of public programs, including talks, discussions and performances, and a full-colour exhibition catalogue. The popular Up Late program will return on Friday nights from July, as well as an amazing film program at the Gallery's Australian Cinémathèque. The Queensland Gallery of Modern Art was briefly closed after the Brisbane floods of January 2011, but reopened in March. In July 2002, Sydney-based company Architectus was commissioned by the Queensland Government following an Architect Selection Competition, to design the Gallery. A main theme of Architectus's design is a pavilion in the landscape, one which assumes its position as both hub and anchor for this important civic precinct. Critical to this is the building's response to the site, its natural topography, existing patterns of urban generation, and the river. The Gallery's flagship project is the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art series of exhibitions, now a major event on the national and international arts calendar. The expertise developed from staging the Triennial for over a decade has led to the establishment of the Australian Centre of Asia-Pacific Art (ACAPA), to foster alliances, scholarship and publishing, and the formation of an internationally significant collection of art from the Asia-Pacific region. Similarly, the Gallery is committed to profiling Indigenous Australian art and strengthening relationships with Queensland's Indigenous communities. The Gallery is also recognised as an international leader in presenting innovative museum-based learning programs for children. These programs are coordinated through the Children's Art Centre. Visit the museum's website at ... http://qag.qld.gov.au/

Ethel Carrick & E Phillips Fox's Artistic Marriage Reviewed at the Queensland Art Gallery Posted: 13 Oct 2011 07:59 PM PDT BRISBANE, AU - The story of one of Australian art's most significant marriages is told for the first time in a new exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery. The personal artistic union of Ethel Carrick & E Phillips Fox, two of Australia's most significant late impressionist painters, are celebrated in a major exhibition from April 16 to August 7, 2011. Queensland Art Gallery Director Tony Ellwood said 'Art, Love and Life: Ethel Carrick and E Phillips Fox' would includes more than 100 paintings, and give a fresh view of both artists' careers, telling their stories jointly for the first time in a major institution.

Vatican Museums Honor Galileo 400th Anniversary of the Astronomer's First Celestial Observations Posted: 13 Oct 2011 07:58 PM PDT VATICAN CITY (AP).- Rudimentary telescopes, celestial globes and original manuscripts by Galileo are going on view at the Vatican Museums as part of an exhibit marking the 400th anniversary of the astronomer's first celestial observations. "Astrum 2009: Astronomy and Instruments" traces the history of astronomy through its tools, from a 3rd century A.D. globe of the zodiac to the increasingly complicated telescopes used in more recent times to gaze at the stars. At a briefing to launch the exhibit , Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican's top culture official, declined to revisit the Church's 17th century condemnation of Galileo for his discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun.

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao celebrates A Retrospective of Work by Takashi Murakami Posted: 13 Oct 2011 07:57 PM PDT BILBAO, SPAIN - From February 17 through May 31 2009, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will present the most important retrospective to date of the work of the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami (b. Tokyo, 1962), one of the most celebrated contemporary artists to have emerged from Asia in the last century.  Organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), this exhibition, which takes up the entire third floor of the museum, offers us a fresh new vision of this Japanese artist's groundbreaking project.

Sidney Nolan: A New Retrospective at Queensland Art Gallery Posted: 13 Oct 2011 07:56 PM PDT Brisbane, Australia - Sidney Nolan's first major retrospective since his death presents an opportunity to unravel something of the artist's enigma and understand his achievement throughout an entire career. He is best known for his various series, inspired by landscapes, myths or historical events. His output was prolific, ranging across various techniques and media. This retrospective features critical phases from the St Kilda and Wimmera themes through to the first 'Ned Kelly' series.  On view at the Queensland Art Gallery through 28 September, 2008.

Tim Burton Major Retrospective at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art Posted: 13 Oct 2011 07:55 PM PDT LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Tim Burton, a major retrospective exploring the full range of Tim Burton's creative work, both as a director of live-action and animated films, and as an artist, illustrator, photographer, and writer. Taking inspiration from popular culture, fairy tales, and traditions of the gothic, Burton has reinvented Hollywood genre filmmaking as an expression of a personal vision. The exhibition is on view at LACMA from May 29 through October 31.

Van Gogh's Cypresses & The Starry Night: Visions of Saint-Remy at Yale University Art Gallery Posted: 13 Oct 2011 07:54 PM PDT NEW HAVEN, CT.- The Yale University Art Gallery exhibits side by side two of Vincent van Gogh's most renowned paintings, Cypresses (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and The Starry Night (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Completed in June 1889, during his yearlong confinement at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, in southern France, these two paintings exemplify the work of this modern master at the height of his creativity.

The National Portrait Gallery to exhibit " Inventing Marcel Duchamp " Posted: 13 Oct 2011 07:53 PM PDT   Washington, DC - This groundbreaking exhibition casts new light upon Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), one of the most influential artists of the recent past. This show demonstrates that Duchamp harnessed the power of portraiture and self-portraiture both to secure his reputation as an iconoclast and to establish himself as a major figure in the artworld. In the process, he played a key role in the reinvention of portraiture, exerting a transformative influence from the early 20th century to the present. On view March 27, 2009 through August 2, 2009.

Kunsthaus Zürich Exhibits the ‘Gruppe Junge Kunst’ (Young Art Group) Posted: 13 Oct 2011 07:52 PM PDT ZURICH- The exhibition of work by artist Haris Epaminonda, planned to begin on 16 September 2011, has been postponed. Instead, the Kunsthaus will show contemporary art until 27 November acquired from the 'Gruppe Junge Kunst' (Young Art Group) and presented to the Kunsthaus on long-term loan. The 'Gruppe Junge Kunst' is a member of the Vereinigung Zürcher Kunstfreunde (VZK), the museum's patron association. When the Kunsthaus Zürich and Haris Epaminonda conceived of the exhibition a year ago, the plan was to create art especially for a Zurich premiere. Since the artist is now expecting a child, however, she cannot complete these works, and the exhibition has been postponed until December of 2012.

A Floating World ~ Photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue at CaixaForum Madrid Posted: 13 Oct 2011 07:51 PM PDT MADRID.- Lluís Reverter, secretary general of "la Caixa" Foundation, opened A Floating World. Photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986), accompanied by the exhibition curators, Florian Rodari, Martine d'Astier de la Vigerie. The exhibition was organised and produced by "la Caixa" Social Outreach Programmes in cooperation with the Donation Jacques Henri Lartigue, the body established to conserve and disseminate the donation that the photographer made to the French government in 1979, and which loaned all the pieces in the exhibition at CaixaForum Madrid.

The London Barbican Art Gallery Presents 150 Years of Animation Posted: 13 Oct 2011 07:50 PM PDT London.- The Barbican Centre is proud to present "Watch Me Move: The Animation Show", on view until September 11th. "Watch Me Move" is the most extensive exhibition ever mounted to present the full range of animated imagery produced in the last 150 years. It brings together industry pioneers, independent film-makers and contemporary artists including Étienne-Jules Marey, Harry Smith, Jan Švankmajer, William Kentridge and Nathalie Djurberg alongside the creative output of commercial studios such as Walt Disney, Aardman, Studio Ghibli and Pixar. Presenting animation as a highly influential force in the development of global visual culture, "Watch Me Move" explores the relationship between animation and film and offers a timely insight into the genre as a cultural phenomenon. Cutting across generations and cultures, the show features over 170 works, from iconic clips to lesser-known masterpieces. Taking the viewer behind the dream-world of the finished film, it includes puppets, stage sets, storyboard drawings, wire-frame visualisations, cel and background images. Transforming the gallery into an immersive environment, the exhibition is divided into seven interconnected themes: Apparitions, Characters, Superhumans, Fables, Fragments, Structures, and Visions. The first section Apparitions focuses on the emergence of the animated image, from early scientific experiments with photography to computer generated imagery. A pioneer of time-lapse photography, Percy Smith, captures the unseen wonders of the natural world. In The Birth of a Flower,1921, snowdrops and roses blossom in seconds. Speeding up time with his split-second frames photographer Eadweard Muybridge created now iconic images of animals and humans in motion are also on show. Breathing life into static objects, John Lasseter's first film for Pixar Animation Studios, Luxo Jr, 1986, follows the antics of a small desk lamp, as its elder lamp affectionately looks on. Contemporary artist Christian Boltanski's Shadow Cinema, 2011, features cut out silhouettes flickering gently on two large lightboxes, reminiscent of the modest graphic origins of animation. In the 1930s there was a distinct shift from the early experimental animation to a series of cartoons and feature films designed to attract the masses. Characters presents a host of some of the biggest stars of our animated screens – on cinema and TV – many borne of that time and still popular now. They include Mickey Mouse, Koko the Clown, Tom & Jerry, The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, The Simpsons, Nick Park's Creature Comforts and the celebrated cast of Toy Story. Whether drawn in pencil, cut with scissors, modelled from clay or generated by the click of a mouse, Characters demonstrates animation's ability to construct strong, funny, emotive and complex personalities. This section also includes less well-known characters, showing the power of animation to convey social and political issues. For example Tim Webb's award-winning film, A is for Autism, 1992, which combines word, drawing, music and animation by people with autism. Individuals with extraordinary powers are a staple of post-war animation. Marvel and DC comics elaborated an initial line-up, while a parallel, more diverse roll-call was created by the Japanese manga and anime industries. Superhumans tend to be ordinary humans, who have been possessed or traumatized beyond the realm of normal experience. In "Betty Boop, Ha! Ha! Ha!", 1934, our protagonist accidentally inhales laughing gas causing her whole world to become hysterically alive; in Ralph Bakshi's ambitious feature "Hey Good Lookin'",1982, the character Crazy hallucinates himself into an orgy of violence and sex during a rooftop shooting spree; whilst the Hulk is an ordinary young man whose body is chemically altered, giving him remarkable strengths coupled with a profound sense of alienation. Other highlights include, "Astro Boy", 1963-66, set in a futuristic city in 2030, featuring the amazing adventures of a child robot with superpowers. Originally created as a manga character in 1952, by the legendary Osamu Tezuka, it captured the imagination of a nation in need of hopes and dreams. People have always told and retold stories, whether real or imagined. The technical and artistic qualities of animation, in all its forms, have made it the ideal medium to interpret myths, fables, fairy tales and other forms of collective story-telling. Fables includes one of the oldest surviving animated feature films,The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926, by Lotte Reiniger. Captivating, intricate and beautiful, it features a silhouette technique invented by Reiniger that involved manipulating cardboard cut-outs and thin sheets of lead placed under a camera, then animated frame by frame. In 1937 Walt Disney made history with the release of "Snow White", his first full-length animated feature in glorious Technicolor. Fragments demonstrates the potential of animation to construct individual stories. The charming simplicity of Belgian artist Francis Alÿs' "The Last Clown",1995-2000, uses illustrated line and colour wash to create the humorous tale of a lone, thoughtful man walking up a hill who encounters a dog, stumbles, gets his foot caught in the animal's tail, and falls. Frank Mouris's Academy award-winning "Frank Film", 1973, cleverly combines thousands of images cut from glossy magazines to create an animated stream of consciousness. The ingeniousness of this film is the dual soundtrack of Mouris' voice: one an uninterrupted recitation of words, mostly beginning with 'f'; the other a personal synopsis of his life. Also on show is Tim Burton's "Vincent", 1982, a six minute stop-motion film about a young boy, Vincent Malloy, who longs to be like the actor Vincent Price (narrator of the film) and is obsessed with the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Since the earliest days of film, artists have experimented with its most basic properties – form, sound, movement and duration – often for the sheer pleasure of witnessing the results. Structures includes the film "Tango", 1980, by Zbigniew Rybczýnski. A collage of overlapping time and space, it shows individuals entering a claustrophobic room, repeatedly, until it fills with a crowd of people, each seemingly oblivious to their neighbours. "A Colour Box", 1935, is a riot of light and motion whereby Len Lye painted geometric patterns directly onto celluloid, to a soundtrack of Cuban music. Conveying the excitement of possibilities the moving image presents, Lye later adapted the film for the GPO Film Unit to advertise the postal system. Norman McLaren's remarkable film Neighbours, 1952, uses stop-motion filming with live characters and props, weaving a dizzying visual tapestry in which two neighbours live peacefully in adjacent cardboard house. When a flower grows between their houses, they fight each other to the death over the ownership of the single small bloom. Visions looks at how animation has taken us into a whole new virtual sphere. Thanks to the breath-taking realism of CGI technologies, and the emotional persuasiveness of new media techniques, this world is now almost inseparable from our own, as the real and the imaginary continue to collude. Disney's pioneering film Tron,1982, was inspired by the emerging gaming industries, which developed out of the first commercially viable video game, Computer Space, in 1971. Nearly thirty years on, Avatar, 2009, used technologies that were effectively developed games engines, now so sophisticated that virtual characters (derived from motion-capture renderings of real actors) could be made to move as if through real space. RMB City is the online world of Second Life conceived by Beijing artist Cao Fei (aka China Tracy) as a place for participants – currently around 20 million users – to create a parallel reality in which to live out their dreams. A comprehensive programme of events, films and talks also accompanies the exhibition. The Barbican Centre is the largest performing arts centre in Europe. Located in the north of the City of London, England, in the heart of the Barbican Estate, the Centre hosts classical and contemporary music concerts, theatre performances, film screenings and art exhibitions. It also houses a library, three restaurants, and a conservatory. The London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra are based in the Barbican Centre's concert hall. The Barbican Centre is owned, funded, and managed by the City of London Corporation, the third-largest arts funder in the United Kingdom. It was built as the city's gift to the nation at a cost of £161 million (equivalent to £400 million in 2007), and opened by Queen Elizabeth II on March 3, 1982. The Centre's design – a concrete ziggurat – has always been controversial and divides opinion. It was voted "London's ugliest building" in a Grey London poll in September 2003. In September 2001, arts minister Tessa Blackstone announced in that the Barbican complex was to be a Grade II listed building. It has been designated a site of special architectural interest for its scale, its cohesion and the ambition of the project. In the mid-1990s a cosmetic improvement scheme by Theo Crosby, of the Pentagram design studio, added statues and decorative features reminiscent of the Arts and Crafts movement. In 2005-6, the Centre underwent a more significant refurbishment, designed by architects Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, which improved circulation and introduced bold signage in a style in keeping with the Centre's original 1970s Brutalist architecture. That improvement scheme added an internal bridge linking the Silk Street foyer area with the lakeside foyer area. The Centre's Silk Street entrance, previously dominated by an access for vehicles, was modified to give better pedestrian access. The scheme included removing most of the mid-1990s embellishments. Outside, the main focal point of the Centre is the lake and its neighbouring terrace. The theatre's fly tower has been surrounded by glass and made into a spectacular high-level conservatory. The Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the City of London's Barbican Library, neither part of the centre, are also on the site. The Museum of London, is nearby at Aldersgate, and is also within the Barbican Estate. Visit the centre's website at ... http://www.barbican.org.uk

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