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

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• The Weinstein Gallery Opens ~ "Surrealism: New Worlds", A Major Exhibition
• The Cleveland Museum of Art Presents Prints From the John Bonedrake Donation
• The Arizona State University Art Museum Presents Animal Prints From its Collection
• The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin Castle Shows John Thompson's 19th Cenutry Photographs of China
• The Silvana Gallery Opens Tigran Hovumyan ~ Master Painter of Surrealism
• The London Art Fairs for Modern British & Contemporary Art Opens in January
• Compton Verney Presents Sir Stanley Spencer and the English Garden
• National Gallery of Victoria opens "Stick it! Collage in Australian Art"
• ' El Greco to Velazquez ' at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA)
• The Jewish Museum opens "Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention"
• Lawsuit Seeks the Removal of a Digital Book Collection
• Peabody Essex Museum Opens Masterworks of Maya Art
• Delaware Art Museum presents " The Invented Worlds of Alida Fish "
• National Gallery of Victoria to exhibit Bugatti Family Treasures
• Aaron Johnson and Barnaby Whitfield Solo at Irvine Contemporary
• Acclaimed Private Collection of 17th-Century Dutch & Flemish Paintings at Peabody Essex Museum
• London's Largest Street Exhibition by The Royal Academy Schools Students
• Goya's 3 Rediscovered Drawings Presumed Lost for Over 130 Years Realize $7.9 Million at Christie's
• 'Dürer and Cranach' at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza & Fundación Caja Madrid
• Art Knowledge News Presents "This Week In Review"

The Weinstein Gallery Opens ~ "Surrealism: New Worlds", A Major Exhibition Posted: 10 Dec 2011 12:59 AM PST San Francisco, California.- The Weinstein Gallery is pleased to announce "Surrealism: New Worlds", on view from December 10th through January 27th 2012 at 301 Geary Street in San Francisco. The exhibition will be the largest survey of Surrealism to be mounted by a private gallery on the West Coast and includes over 80 original paintings & sculptures by 22 leading Surrealists, This comprehensive exhibition represents five decades of this long-lasting, influential, and ever-present art movement and features many works that have until now been held for decades in private collections. The exhibition includes work by the original members —Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Marcel Duchamp. It also features artists who came into the movement in the 1930s, drawn to the magnetism of its leader, André Breton, and his promise for a surrealist revolution, including Kurt Seligmann, Oscar Dominguez, Victor Brauner, André Masson, Marcel Jean, Alexander Calder, Wolfgang Paalen, Roberto Matta, and Gordon Onslow Ford. And, the exhibition looks at New World artists, who had studied surrealism from afar and then had it land in their backyard when the European surrealist artists were forced to flee to America during World War II. Among these are Enrico Donati, Jimmy Ernst, William Baziotes, David Hare, and Gerome Kamrowski. This show also features work by some of the underrepresented women artists, who were integral to the movement but who have received less attention for their critical role: Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, and Stella Snead. The accompanying 152-page catalogue features a new essay by Surrealism scholar, Mary Ann Caws. In it she writes that as the movement transitioned to America, "Surrealism reencountered a revolutionary aspect of which this remarkable exhibition is a manifestation, another sort of new world manifesto in visual terms." The word surrealist was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, which was first performed in 1917. World War I scattered the writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and in the interim many became involved with Dada, believing that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had brought the conflict of the war upon the world. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings and art works. After the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued. During the war, André Breton, who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic methods with soldiers suffering from shell-shock. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vaché, Breton felt that Vaché was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysics founder Alfred Jarry. He admired the young writer's anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote, "In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most." Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. They began experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault delved deeper into automatism and wrote The Magnetic Fields (1920). Continuing to write, they attracted more artists and writers; they came to believe that automatism was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada attack on prevailing values. The group grew to include Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise, Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac, Gala Éluard, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy. In 1924 they declared their philosophy in the first "Surrealist Manifesto". That same year they established the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and began publishing the journal La Révolution surréaliste. Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage and decalcomania. Soon more visual artists became involved, including Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Francis Picabia, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Alberto Giacometti, Valentine Hugo, Méret Oppenheim, Toyen, and later after the second war: Enrico Donati. The group included the musician, poet, and artist E. L. T. Mesens, painter and writer René Magritte, Paul Nougé, Marcel Lecomte, and André Souris. Giorgio de Chirico, and his previous development of metaphysical art, was one of the important joining figures between the philosophical and visual aspects of Surrealism. In 1924, Miró and Masson applied Surrealism to painting, explicitly leading to the La Peinture Surrealiste exhibition of 1925, held at Gallerie Pierre in Paris, and displaying works by Masson, Man Ray, Paul Klee, Miró, and others. The show confirmed that Surrealism had a component in the visual arts. Breton published Surrealism and Painting in 1928 which summarized the movement to that point, though he continued to update the work until the 1960s. Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in Britain and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions. Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dalí joined the group in 1929, and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935. From 1936 through 1938 Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Roberto Matta joined the group. Paalen contributed Fumage and Onslow Ford Coulage as new pictorial automatic techniques. Long after personal, political and professional tensions fragmented the Surrealist group, Magritte and Dalí continued to define a visual program in the arts. This program reached beyond painting, to encompass photography as well, as can be seen from a Man Ray self portrait, whose use of assemblage influenced Robert Rauschenberg's collage boxes. World War II prompted an artistic exodus from europe, and many of the surrealists including Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst became influential in the USA.  Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Roberto Matta and later, Mark Rothko all became involved with the surrealist movement, while in England Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Paul Nash used or experimented with Surrealist techniques. The Weinstein Gallery in San Fransico is situated on 3 floors in Union Square. The Gallery specializes in contemporary and modern masters, including Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Enrico Donati, Raoul Dufy, Jimmy Ernst, Leonor Fini, Roberto Matta, Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell, Gordon Onslow Ford and Pablo Picasso. The gallery made the news in 2011 when a Picasso was stolen from its walls in broad daylight, although it was quickly recovered and is now no longer for sale, its fame generating so many more gallery visitors! Fortunately, the gallery have not allowed the theft to deflect them from their aim of making art as accessible as possible, and they are well-known for their friendly and knowledgable staff who are helpful to every visitor, whether they can afford the art on the walls or not. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.weinstein.com

The Cleveland Museum of Art Presents Prints From the John Bonedrake Donation Posted: 09 Dec 2011 11:12 PM PST Cleveland, Ohio.- The Cleveland Museum of Art is pleased to present "A Passion for Prints: The John Bonebrake Donation" on view at the museum through January 29th 2012. "A Passion for Prints: The John Bonebrake Donation" features a selection of nearly 60 prints from the collection of John Corwin Bonebrake (1918-2011). John became a devoted print collector after joining the Print Club of Cleveland in 1961. An architect, John began by choosing images of cathedrals, castles, and other structures, but soon broadened his outlook to include a wide range of material. His outstanding collection of about 1,000 19th- and 20th-century graphics includes figural subjects as well as landscapes and works of historical interest executed in a range of printmaking techniques. Knowing his collection would eventually be donated to the museum, John sometimes made acquisitions to enhance strengths and fill gaps in the CMA's print collection.

The Arizona State University Art Museum Presents Animal Prints From its Collection Posted: 09 Dec 2011 10:15 PM PST Tempe, Arizona.- The Arizona State University Art Museum is pleased to present "Just Animals: Selections from the ASU Art Museum Print Collection" on view at the museum through January 21st 2012. The word animal evokes many impressions: everything from friendly pets, like dogs and cats, to wild creatures like bears and elephants. The word brings to mind images (fur, eyes, tails), sounds (purr, bark) and events (family zoo trip, pet adoption center visit). We all have memories that make recognizing animals in art easy. But sometimes artists will add something extra. Maybe it is a little humor, as in Walton Ford's reflection on Audubon's nature studies in his print "Nila", or a more serious commentary on our ecological destruction, as in Oscar's monoprint "Pooch". Or it can be the remarkable ability to capture a personality on paper, as Beth Van Hoesen does in "Puff".

The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin Castle Shows John Thompson's 19th Cenutry Photographs of China Posted: 09 Dec 2011 09:48 PM PST Dublin.- The Chester Beatty Library, Dublin Castle is proud to present "China Through the Lens of John Thompson 1868-1872" on view at the library through February 26th 2012. On loan from the Wellcome Library London, the exhibition features 51 images taken by legendary Scottish photographer and explorer John Thomson.  The photographs form a unique archive documenting the people, customs and landscape of 19th century China providing a valuable historical record of a nation undergoing major change. The exhibition was timed to coincide with Chinese New Year celebrations. Traditional clothing and material from the Library's own collection, are included in the exhibition.  Admission is free.

The Silvana Gallery Opens Tigran Hovumyan ~ Master Painter of Surrealism Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:58 PM PST Glendale, CA.- The Silvana Gallery is pleased to present the "Second Annual Holiday Small Works Group Show" with an exclusive solo exhibit of  Tigran Hovumyan . Mr. Hovumyan will travel from his studio in Yerevan, Armenia to be at the gallery for the opening. Tigran's multitude of surrealist paintings are the rage in Europe and he has created a number of brand new works specifically for this exhibition. As well as Tigran Huvumyan, the exhibition features acrylic, mixed media and sculptures by local American artists as well as handmade jewelry and fine crafts. An opening reception will be held on December 10th, the exhibition will remain on view through February 1st 2012.

The London Art Fairs for Modern British & Contemporary Art Opens in January Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:57 PM PST London.- The London Art Fair is pleased to announce that 120 galleries will be attending the 2012 even, being held at the Business Design Centre in Islington from January 18th through January 22nd. London Art Fair, the UK's original and largest art fair for Modern British and contemporary art, announces a stellar line-up of over 100 galleries from the UK and beyond.  They will be complemented by the acclaimed Art Projects section, focusing on new work from younger galleries and Photo50, a showcase for contemporary photography.  Major artists represented include Bridget Riley, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron, Damien Hirst, Keith Coventry and Marcus Harvey, as well as the most exciting new talent. UK-based contemporary galleries include Charlie Smith London, Danielle Arnaud, Other Criteria, Pertwee Anderson and Gold, Purdy Hicks, Scream, Union Gallery and Vigo, while Modern British specialists such as Agnew's, Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, Offer Waterman, Osborne Samuel, Piano Nobile, Robin Katz Fine Art and The Fine Art Society and will once again prominently feature. International galleries include Artêria (Canada), Foley Gallery (New York), Galerie Olivier Waltman (Paris), JECZA Gallery (Romania), Whatiftheworld gallery (South Africa). Work on sale ranges from £50 to over £1 million, highlighting London Art Fair's reputation for both quality and accessibility. Alongside the main fair, Art Projects features emerging international contemporary artists and galleries presenting solo shows, curated group displays, editions and large-scale installations, this year including: Alma Enterprises, Bearspace, Edel Assanti, Hannah Barry Gallery, Hoxton Art Gallery, Limoncello Editions and The Residence Gallery. Launched in 2005, Art Projects has established itself as one of the most exciting sections of London Art Fair attracting widespread critical acclaim and a distinct audience. In 2011 they expanded Art Projects to encompass selected projects by galleries from London, New York, Germany and Ireland, alongside public galleries and foundations such as The Whitechapel, ICA and Saatchi Editions. Art Projects features curated solo and group shows of contemporary work – painting, photography, sculpture, editions – as well as large scale installations, video and film. Photo50 is an exhibition of contemporary photography and features fifty works – most for sale – curated by Sue Steward (writer, broadcaster, photography curator). This year, Photo50 opens up a spectrum of contemporary photography from the analogue to the digital. This selection of work by twelve photographers focuses on different ways of representing an image and it reveals the broad range of processes involved in image-making. I label them 'alchemists' because the term resonates with the ancient practitioners of photography, the experimenters with chemicals and paper, the pioneers of 'writing with light' which is what photo-graphy literally means. Many images in this exhibition were produced through analogue processes and reveal surprising similarities with their digital counterparts; many mingle the two. There is also the changing assumption that the photographic print is the finished object, the ultimate goal of production. But it is no longer necessarily the end-point; the printed paper is enduring the transformation, partially destroyed or decorated, re-built to take on a new dimension – and becoming an original art work in its own right. The works in Photo50 highlight the richness and diversity of photography today. It's almost impossible now to define 'photography' because of its porous nature and its convergence with painting film and craft, demonstrated in this exhibition.  It is a vast art form - and London is a hub for these significant, beautiful, seismic changes. The Photography Focus Day on Wednesday 18 January will examine contemporary photographic practice with debates, discussions and tours; all free to attend with your ticket to London Art Fair.. An extensive programme of talks and critical debates in association with key partners, plus daily tours of the Main Fair and Art Projects. Visit the fair's website at ... www.londonartfair.co.uk

Compton Verney Presents Sir Stanley Spencer and the English Garden Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:52 PM PST Kineton, Warwickshire, UK.- Compton Verney's unique blend of art expertise, Georgian architecture and breathtaking historic landscape makes it the ideal setting for an important new exhibition on one of Britain's best-loved artists: the eccentric, quintessentially English genius Sir Stanley Spencer (1891-1959). "Stanley Spencer and the English Garden", will focus on Spencer's gorgeous garden views and landscapes of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. The exhibition will be on view from June 25th through October 2nd. Spencer's luscious garden pictures, which have often been overlooked by critics in favour of his more visionary subjects, are not just beautiful oils. Spencer's virtuoso treatment of this highly accessible and enormously attractive subject demonstrates the artist's immense feeling for, and understanding of, the way the English landscape and the traditional English garden were changing during the twentieth century, and how contemporary building development was redefining or even eradicating familiar environments. They also chart his personal vision of the garden as 'private heaven'. Spencer was born and spent much of his life in Cookham in Berkshire. His father, William Spencer, was a music teacher. His younger brother, Gilbert Spencer (1892–1979), was a talented painter of landscapes. From 1908 to 1912, Spencer studied at the Slade School of Art at University College, London under Henry Tonks and others. His contemporaries at the Slade included Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Isaac Rosenberg and David Bomberg. So profound was his attachment to the village of his birth that most days he would take the train back home in time for tea. It even became his nickname: his fellow student C.R.W. Nevinson dubbed him Cookham, a name which Spencer himself took to using for a time. After a long period of agonising whether or not to join up, in 1915 Spencer volunteered with the Royal Army Medical Corps and worked as an orderly at the Beaufort War Hospital. In 1916, the 24-year-old Spencer volunteered for service with the RAMC in Macedonia, and served with the 68th Field Ambulance unit. He subsequently volunteered to be transferred to the Berkshire Regiment. His survival of the devastation and torment that killed so many of his fellows indelibly marked Spencer's attitude to life and death. Such preoccupations come through time and again in his religious works. Towards the end of the war he was commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to paint what became "Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916" (now in the Imperial War Museum). It was visibly the consequence of Spencer's experience in the medical corps. A further major commission was to paint murals for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere dedicated to the war dead. The altarpiece depicts the Resurrection of the Soldiers. Spencer's work as a war artist in the Second World War included his epic depiction of shipbuilding workers and their families at Port Glasgow on the Clyde. When the war ended he again took up, as did certain other British neo-romantic artists of the time, his visionary preoccupations — in Spencer's case with a sometimes apocalyptic tinge. Until the early twentieth century Compton Verney was home to the Verney or Willoughby de Broke family for almost 500 years. It has now been transformed from a derelict eighteenth-century mansion into a gallery of international standing, offering a combination of high quality attractions and facilities. The project took ten years to complete and over twenty gallery spaces have been created. Compton Verney is unique in that it is a place where art, architecture, landscape and learning fuse, to offer the visitor an experience that is completely integrated and accessible. The Georgian mansion and adjacent service buildings have been conserved and extended in a contemporary idiom, a transformation executed by two architectural practices: Stanton Williams and Leamington-based Rodney Melville & Partners. The sensitive combination of restored Grade I-listed buildings and new spaces has been realised in construction and craftsmanship of outstanding quality. Attention to detail in the use of appropriate materials, natural lighting and works of art on open display complement the collections and the site itself. The qualities of the materials chosen - handmade bricks, hand-tooled stone, glass and steel - reflect the spirit of the original buildings, while bringing a new dynamic to the architectural composition. The buildings are linked from a single point of entry and the family of service buildings have been developed to incorporate a Learning Centre and offices. The historic importance of the site meant extensive consultations with English Heritage, Stratford District Council and the local Parish Council were required, resulting in a careful restoration of the core fabric of the building, with the contemporary extension providing an added dimension and focus. Inside the mansion, restored eighteenth-century rooms on the ground floor lead to progressively more abstract and flexible spaces on the upper floors, where new galleries have been created within the existing shell of the historic building. The galleries at Compton Verney are of an international standard enabling the hosting of loaned works of art from all over the world. Compton Verney houses six permanent collections, focusing on areas currently under-represented in British museums and galleries, including paintings and objects from Naples during the 'Golden Age' of Baroque Art (1600-1800), exquisitely carved sculptures by artists such as Tilman Riemenschneider seen alongside panel paintings by Lucas Cranach and Martin Schongauer in the collection of Northern European art from 1450-1650, the British Portraits collection which features portraits of well-known Tudor Royals and important figures from the Georgian period. It also includes a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and two views of London by Venetian artist Canaletto who worked in Britain in the mid 1700s, bronzes and pottery in the Chinese collection, dating from between the Neolithic period (about 4500-2000 BC) and Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), the UK's largest collection of British Folk Art objects and paintings, made as everyday objects by everyday people and objects of inspiration and original textile designs by Enid Marx in the Marx-Lambert collection. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.comptonverney.org.uk

National Gallery of Victoria opens "Stick it! Collage in Australian Art" Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:51 PM PST MELBOURNE,AU - The National Gallery of Victoria presents "Stick it! Collage in Australian Art", the Gallery's first exhibition to focus on this fascinating art form. Featuring over forty works primarily drawn from the NGV Collection together with a small number of loans, Stick it! explores graphic and eye-catching works created by pasting and applying paper, ephemera and other materials to a base. Stick it! Collage in Australian Art will be on display at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Federation Square from 20 March to 29 August 2010. Open 10am–5pm, closed Mondays. Entry is free.

' El Greco to Velazquez ' at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:50 PM PST BOSTON, MA - The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), celebrates the richness of Spain's magnificent artistry with El Greco to Velazquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III, highlighting works by the great Spanish masters; and Antonio Lopez Garcia, a retrospective of this contemporary realist. The exhibitions were opened on Saturday by Her Royal Highness Dona Cristina de Borbon, Infanta of Spain, and His Excellency Don Inaki Urdangarin, Duke of Palma.

The Jewish Museum opens "Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention" Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:49 PM PST NEW YORK, NY.- A trailblazing figure in 20th-century art, Man Ray (1890-1976) revealed multiple artistic identities over the course of his career – Dadaist, Parisian Surrealist, international portrait and fashion photographer – and produced many important and enduring works as a photographer, painter, filmmaker, writer, sculptor, and object maker. Relatively few people know that he was born Emmanuel Radnitzky to Russian Jewish immigrants. In fact, he spent a lifetime suppressing his background to the point of denying he was ever called anything but Man Ray. The Jewish Museum will present "Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention" from November 15, 2009 through March 14, 2010.

Lawsuit Seeks the Removal of a Digital Book Collection Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:48 PM PST New York, NY - Three major authors' groups and eight individual authors filed suit against a partnership of research libraries and five universities on Monday, arguing that their initiative to digitize millions of books constituted copyright infringement. The lawsuit, filed in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, contends that "by digitizing, archiving, copying and now publishing the copyrighted works without the authorization of those works' rights holders, the universities are engaging in one of the largest copyright infringements in history." In addition to copyright infringement, the suit also cites concerns about the security of the files in the HathiTrust repository, which is organized and maintained by the University of Michigan. Scott Turow, the president of the Authors Guild, said the books on file were at "needless, intolerable digital risk." The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are the Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors and the Québec Union of Writers. Individual authors include Pat Cummings, Roxana Robinson and T. J. Stiles. "We've been greatly concerned about the seven million copyright-protected books that HathiTrust has on its servers for a while," said Paul Aiken, executive director of Authors Guild, an industry group that says it represents more than 8,500 authors. "Those scans are unauthorized by the authors." HathiTrust is the name of the partnership of libraries. The announcement leaves the Authors Guild fighting a two-front war against what it contends is copyright infringement. It filed a lawsuit in 2005 against Google, contending that the company's project of scanning and archiving digital books violated copyrights. In March, a federal judge in New York rejected a settlement that Google had worked out with authors' and publishers' groups. A new hearing on that case will be held on Thursday. The plaintiffs are not seeking damages in the lawsuit; instead, they are asking that the books be taken off the HathiTrust servers and held by a trustee. HathiTrust, founded in 2008, is a collaboration of research libraries that share the goal of building a digital archive. The partnership has so far digitized more than 9.5 million total volumes, including books and journals. About 27 percent of those works are believed to be in the public domain, the group said. John P. Wilkin, the executive director of HathiTrust, said in an interview Monday that nearly all the digitized works were provided by Google and that the project was "a lawful activity and important work for scholarship." "This is a preservation operation, first and foremost," Mr. Wilkin said. "Books are decaying on the shelves. It's our intention to make them available to people at institutions for scholarly purposes. We are ensuring that the cultural record is preserved." The lawsuit also objects to HathiTrust's method of determining which books are so-called orphan works, whose rights holders are unknown or cannot be found. About 150 books in the HathiTrust digital library have so far been identified as possible orphan works, Mr. Wilkin said, and many more are expected to be identified. A list of the possible orphan works has been posted online, and after 90 days, if they have not been claimed, HathiTrust will consider them orphans, Mr. Wilkin said. The first group of orphan works are expected to be made available to users of HathiTrust's repository on Oct. 13. James Grimmelmann, an associate professor of law at New York Law School who has closely followed the Google lawsuit, said that a settlement in that case would have provided a framework to decide which use of the libraries' books was permitted. "They chose now to go after the libraries in part because of the posting of books online," he said. "And in part because the Google books settlement has fallen apart."

Peabody Essex Museum Opens Masterworks of Maya Art Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:47 PM PST SALEM, MA.- Integrated by masterworks of Maya Art, the exhibition Fiery Pool: the Maya and the Mythic Sea was inaugurated at Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts, United States. The showcase based on new interpretations regarding the relevance of the ocean for the Prehispanic civilization, will be open from March 27th to July 18th 2010. Among artwork exhibited stands out a ceramic incense burner decorated with an aquatic deity from the heap of Palenque Archaeological Site Museum.

Delaware Art Museum presents " The Invented Worlds of Alida Fish " Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:46 PM PST   WILMINGTON, DE.- The Delaware Art Museum presents The Invented Worlds of Alida Fish, featuring 31 photographs by the Delaware Division of the Arts' 2008 Masters Fellow in Visual Arts, on view November 1, 2008 – February 8, 2009. While many photographers take their subjects from the world around them, Alida Fish imagines her own worlds, and uses traditional, historical, and digital processes to bring to life her amazing visions. The photographs in this exhibition date from 1983 through 2008, providing an overview of the past 25 years of Fish's career and her sustained involvement with manipulating objects, negatives, and prints to create evocative and unsettling images.

National Gallery of Victoria to exhibit Bugatti Family Treasures Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:45 PM PST MELBOURNE, AU - The National Gallery of Victoria will present Bugatti: Carlo Rembrandt Ettore Jean, the first Australian exhibition to focus on the extraordinary Bugatti family. Bugatti: Carlo Rembrandt Ettore Jean will comprise over 30 works across a range of media exploring the remarkable, creative output that emerged from this one family in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Welcome to the world of Bugatti. On exhibition 6 February through 26 April, 2009.

Aaron Johnson and Barnaby Whitfield Solo at Irvine Contemporary Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:44 PM PST WASHINGTON, DC.- Irvine Contemporary is the result of an artistic friendship and a personal dialog about being artists intensely engaged in new directions for painting. Their paintings and mediums are to presents an exhibition of new paintings by Aaron Johnson and Barnaby Whitfield, Don't Be Afraid, You're Supposed to Be, on view through June 5. This extraordinary exhibition is very different and highly individuated--Johnson working with acrylics in a multi-layered reverse painting process, and Whitfield in pastels on paper--but they share important strategies and interests: setting up Romantic beauty and the grotesque as codependents, using eroticism and unrestrained, ambiguous sexuality as a way to connect the personal and the public, turning pop culture and art history inside out, and directly engaging the viewer's gaze in seduction and recognition. Johnson and Whitfield are both fearless about diving into the psychological deep end to see what happens in the exposure and loss of the self in the work. They both dig down into the primal Freudian "dream work" in providing images of the psyche's struggle with the body, sex, desire, death, and mortality. We could call them post-irony Romantics: their works are unrestrained, direct, exuberant. Playing along the margins of the surreal, the baroque, the Romantic, and the grotesque, they continually create surprising and unpredictable images that haunt us with recognitions and wonder. Aaron Johnson Aaron Johnson's work combines multiple processes and genres in a Dionysian riot of figuration and abstraction, drawing energy from equal parts Western painting traditions from the Renaissance to Ab-Ex and Pop, Buddhist Tantra imagery, cues from Pop high culture subversion, imagery channeled through psychedelia, and the iconography of mass media. The pours of paint and multiple layers in his reverse painting technique mirror the process of creating images by accrual of sources and ideas. Comparisons with other artists—from Van Gogh, Chris Ofili, and Fred Tomaselli to R. Crumb and Robert Williams—expose how Johnson has moved beyond genre categories. Instead of an easy younger artist homage to Fred Tomaselli and his psychedelic compositions made from mind-altering drug materials themselves, Johnson's works look like he has ingested a Tomaselli painting whole and produced new kaleidoscopic works under the influence. Aaron Johnson has been in many exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles , London , Denmark , and major art fairs, and recently exhibited with Irvine Contemporary at the Scope-Miami (2009). Roberta Smith, who reviewed Aaron Johnson's shows twice in The New York Times, has called his works "visceral, beautiful and flamboyantly timely, which is saying a lot." Aaron Johnson has an MFA from Hunter College, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY . Barnaby Whitfield Barnaby Whitfield's compositions in pastels on paper are lushly pigmented images that seduce viewers by their directness, ambiguity, and masterful figuration. With an admiration for Old Masters and classical drawing, Whitfield creates images that recall the audacity of Gauguin's Romantic myth-making but channeled through a con-temporary sense of dark beauty, the grotesque, and the complexities of sexual identity. Some of Whitfield's tableaux of sensually provocative figures, insider art jokes, and kitschy Americana settings could be storyboards for a yet unproduced John Waters art history documentary. Whitfield's intensely personal scenes draw from the encyclopedia of painting, modern celebrity and camp culture, found Internet images, and the details of personal life. Having been compared to John Currin, Ashley Bickerton, and German Expressionists, Whitfield has defined a new approach that fuses elements of Romanticism, Classicism, and Decadence in a highly personal style. His compositions often have the effect of operatic narrative tableaux: faces, skin, and bodies seem illuminated by some kind of fleshly glow, but juxtaposed with a dark humor directed at our celebrity and youth-besotted popular culture. Viewers meet the gaze of the figures with a disarmingly direct and bare sexuality, denuded of pretense. Multiple sexual personas abound in Whitfield's portraits: his own face and body can appear rendered in the figures of both sexes, often draped with symbolic birds and animals. Whitfield's use of the grotesque and Gothic for critiquing the follies of contemporary culture has affinities with German expressionists like Otto Dix, whose caustic images of Weimar culture were populated with images of distorted nudes, animals, and death. But Whitfield is more at home with comedy through drag and camp than German angst. The works often convey a delicious Oscar Wildean sense of humor, the Wilde of "moderation is a fatal thing; nothing succeeds like excess." Barnaby Whitfield has been in many exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and art fairs, and has been reviewed in Art in America, Beautiful Decay, and Anthem. With Irvine Contemporary, he participated in New Realisms (September, 2009) and at the Scope-Miami (2009). He lives and works in New York City . Visit Irvine Contemporary at : http://irvinecontemporary.com/index.php

Acclaimed Private Collection of 17th-Century Dutch & Flemish Paintings at Peabody Essex Museum Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:43 PM PST SALEM, MA.- One of the world's best private collections of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, including masterworks by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Gerrit Dou, Jan Steen and others, were unveiled this winter at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts. Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection presents paintings, furniture and decorative arts exceptional for their quality, superb condition and impeccable provenance. As exemplars of the Dutch Golden Age, the works are distinguished not only for the glowing quality of light achieved by the most talented artists of the time, but also for their place in an unsurpassed period of artistic, cultural, scientific, and commercial accomplishment in the Netherlands.

London's Largest Street Exhibition by The Royal Academy Schools Students Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:42 PM PST   LONDON - The Royal Academy Schools and the international real estate company Hines, launch an online competition inviting members of the public to vote for their favourite work of art from a raft of talented Royal Academy Schools' students. The competition can be found on a dedicated website www.onespiritshowcase.com. This street exhibition is the first One Spirit Showcase project - a series of collaborations between Hines' and cultural organizations

Goya's 3 Rediscovered Drawings Presumed Lost for Over 130 Years Realize $7.9 Million at Christie's Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:41 PM PST LONDON - Three rediscovered drawings by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) were sold 8 July at Christie's in London for a combined total of £4,010,150 / $7,908,016 / €5,032,739. Last recorded at a landmark auction of works by the artist in Paris in 1877, the drawings have been missing and presumed lost ever since, and represent the most important grouping of sketches by the artist to be sold at auction in over 30 years. The top lot was Bajar riñendo (Down they come) which sold for £2,281,250 / $4,498,625 / €2,862,969, a world record price at auction for a work on paper by the artist. The three drawings, which were sold individually, had been expected to realise only a total in excess of £2 million.

'Dürer and Cranach' at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza & Fundación Caja Madrid Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:40 PM PST MADRID, SPAIN - The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid are presenting Dürer and Cranach. Art and Humanism in Renaissance Germany, an exhibition that focuses on the work of two of the greatest artists of the age, who represented different trends within art. It features 234 works including paintings, drawings, prints, goldsmiths' work, and other decorative objects, and is the first exhibition in Spain to offer an overall survey of the German Renaissance. The exhibition will be on view through January 6, 2008. Opening the autumn season in Madrid, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid are presenting an ambitious exhibition that reveals the richness and variety within German Renaissance art. This school had its own identity, distinct from both the Flemish and Italian models, although closely related. The exhibition is organised within the framework of the long-term agreement between the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid, which covers exhibitions as well as educational and other types of activities. The main focus of the agreement is the organisation of exhibitions that are shown divided between the two institutions, allowing for large-scale events of this kind. Dürer and Cranach. Art and Humanism in Renaissance Germany offers a survey of German art from the late 15th to the mid-16th centuries and focuses on two of the greatest artists of the period, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), and to a lesser extent Hans Baldung Grien (1485-1545) and Albrecht Altdorfer (ca.1480-1538). Also included are works by other significant painters who were influenced by these leading artists. The exhibition looks at a period in art history and a group of artists that are rarely the subject of exhibitions in Spain. One of the exhibition's principal aims and attractions is that of offering a global perspective on German Renaissance art, both with regard to the wide variety of different media in which artists worked and the importance that each enjoyed at the time, as well as the role that art played in the political and religious changes that came about during this turbulent period. With this aim in mind, the exhibition includes paintings, drawings, intaglio prints and woodcuts (the latter reflecting the importance of the invention of printing for the dissemination of knowledge), designs, decorative works of art, armour, and military and hunting weapons. Taken together, they offer an idea not just of the art of the time but also of religion, society and politics in a period that witnessed major transformations brought about by the Reformation and the birth of the great international empires. Dürer and Cranach. Art and Humanism in Renaissance Germany covers a period of major changes and social and political conflicts, all of which were reflected in art. The exhibition emphasises the contradictory co-existence of different artistic and cultural options. On the one hand these offered a measured and controlled image of reality whose greatest expression is to be found in some aspects of the work of Dürer (above all in his theoretical writings). This option contrasted with the desire to represent the world in a state of conflict and drama, characteristic of artists such as Altdorfer, Grünewald, and Cranach and even Dürer himself in series such as The Apocalypse. The exhibition also highlights and analyses two very different functions of the work of art. While the first part of the exhibition focuses on its aesthetic role, in the second it shows how the image – without losing its aesthetic value - could acquire more practical and functional characteristics associated with religion, the depiction of political power and war. The exhibition layout - The exhibition's argument is reflected in its layout, which is divided into two main parts. The first is entitled Artists and their World and can be seen at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, while the second part, A World in Conflict, is shown at Fundación Caja Madrid. Artists and their World aims to reveal artists' personal concerns and preoccupations: how they saw themselves and their environment, how they saw their professional status, their idea of religion, their aesthetic intentions and the way they used new technologies such as printing. This part of the exhibition is divided into the following sections: Room 1. Pride and melancholy. An Image of the German Artist reveals the way in which German artists articulated a vision of themselves and their surroundings from the starting-point of their own experiences as creative figures with regard to both workshop practices and intellectual reflection on the act of creation. The subjects that interested them – the artist's own awareness of his status, imitation of nature, his relationship with his surroundings and with God – are represented in this room through several self-portraits, among them Dürer's engraving Melencolia I (1514), a masterpiece of printmaking, which can be read as a spiritual representation of the artist. Room 2. Nuremberg. This section focuses on the creative environment in which Dürer worked during his years of training. His native city was one of the most important economic, commercial and cultural centres in Germany at the time, in which the lack of a guild structure favoured a much more individual relationship between artists and patrons and a greater degree of self-awareness on the part of the artist. Issues such as the influence of Dürer's father – a goldsmith by profession – and his interest in books and the world of publishing are analysed here. Room 3. Italy: "Here I am a gentleman". This phrase of Dürer's refers to the way he was treated in a country of great artists such as Leonardo and Raphael. This room offers an analysis of a number of the issues that most interested Dürer during his trips to Italy. They include landscape, which was a leading theme in 16th-century German art, and the motif of the Virgin and Child, repeated through the artist's career and represented here by some of his finest examples. During his second trip to Italy, Dürer was particularly interested in proportion, i.e., the correct anatomical depiction of human and animal bodies, and the arrangement of figures in a three-dimensional space, in other words perspective, both crucial issues for the future course of his career. Room 4. In the Collector's Cabinet (I): witches, monsters, nudes. This section contrasts Dürer's idealised model with the more sensual, carnal and realist version proposed by artists such as Cranach and Grien. Their work falls within a style that featured numerous references to a dark, wild side of life and an obsession (particularly evident in Grien) with the subject of witchcraft. The painting Two Witches (1523) from the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt is one of the most disturbing and strange paintings executed in 16th-century Europe. A similar taste for the enigmatic is to be found in Lucas Cranach's mythological compositions, which are remote from any classicising aesthetic. Room 5. In the Collector's Cabinet (II): new ideas of beauty. This room looks at the way painters approached themes such as ugliness, the grotesque, old age and sickness. Dürer and in particular Baldung Grien in his remorseless investigation of the subject of old age in the human face, focused on this less agreeable aspect of the human image to a much greater extent than is evident in Italian Renaissance art. Visit The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza at: www.museothyssen.org/ Visit The Fundación Caja Madrid at : www.fundacioncajamadrid.es

Art Knowledge News Presents "This Week In Review" Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:39 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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