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• The Met to Show Fu Baoshi's "Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution"
• The Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow Presented Performance Artist Ane Lan
• Denis De Gloire's tribute to Jackson Pollock's 100th Anniversary at Galerie Ida
• Solo Exhibition of Tian Xiaolei in the United States opens at Meulensteen
• Japanese artist Nobu Fukui's "We Didn't Start the Fire" at Stephen Haller Gallery
• Sotheby's in London Announces Impressionist & Modern Art Sale Highlights
• The Dayton Art Institute’s 90th Anniversary Celebration shows Hello World!
• "The Legacy of the Harlem Renaissance" at Oklahoma City Museum of Art
• Major Pablo Picasso Exhibit Opens at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow
• New Museum Presents Major Survey of Works by George Condo
• The Walters Art Museum To Show "Setting Sail: Drawings of the Sea"
• Studio Museum Harlem hosts Kehinde Wiley's The World Stage: Africa Lagos~Dakar
• Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute Explores Role of Modern Fashion Models as Muses
• Kunsthaus Zürich presents Rivoluzione! Italian Divisionism Movement
• Super Rich Collectors Ready to Spend Again at Auctions of Rare Art
• Sale at Villa Grisebach shows Mies van der Rohe and Photography
• The Michele & Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts Shows Courier & Ives Images of the American West
• This Week in Review in Art Knowledge News

The Met to Show Fu Baoshi's "Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution" Posted: 15 Jan 2012 09:05 PM PST New York City.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art is pleased to present "Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965)", on view at the museum from January 21st through April 15th 2012 in the Galleries for Chinese Painting and Calligraphy. Drawn primarily from the preeminent holdings of the Nanjing Museum in Nanjing, China, "Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965)" will showcase the artist's 40-year career with some 70 paintings and 20 seals that have never been shown outside China. These works will chronicle Fu's stylistic evolution from his student days in China and Japan to his life in the wartime capital in Sichuan, and through his career as one of the favorite artists of Chairman Mao. The exhibition, augmented by superb works from a private New York collection, offers the most comprehensive treatment of the artist's oeuvre ever presented in the West. A notable highlight will be the inclusion of a draft of Fu's most famous commission—the vast landscape panorama he created in 1959 for the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China. Perhaps the most original figure painter and landscapist of China's modern period, Fu Baoshi created indelible images celebrating his homeland's cultural heritage while living through one of the most devastating periods in Chinese history. He was eight years old in 1912 when China's last imperial dynasty was overthrown and the Chinese Republic was established. He subsequently witnessed the divisive warlord era and Communist rebellion of the 1920s, the Japanese invasion and occupation of eastern China from 1937 to 1945, and the Communist Revolution and establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Over the last 15 years of his life, his art reflected China's political transformation under Mao Zedong. Throughout his career, however, Fu remained one of China's great individualist masters. Trained in both China and Japan at a time when arts education stressed the need for the modernization of indigenous traditions through the study of Western methods, Fu developed a new style incorporating foreign styles and techniques, and began creating boldly individualistic and strongly nationalistic work. Noting that Chinese painting had evolved toward too great a dependency on monochromatic, calligraphic brushwork, Fu sought to revive earlier traditions of realistic description that made greater use of color and ink wash. He also stressed the need for an artist to be emotionally and physically present in his art. To achieve this end, Fu often painted while inebriated. He also sought spontaneity through a spattered-ink method of painting—a kind of "action art" that parallels the working methods of some of the Abstract Expressionists. After an introductory section featuring a rare group of Fu's earliest extant works in the manner of traditional Chinese masters, the exhibition will present an in-depth examination of some of his finest works from the early 1940s. On view in this section will be Qu Yuan (1942), depicting the poet Qu Yuan (343-278 B.C.), who committed suicide to prove his loyalty; and Drunken Monk (1944), a portrait of Huaisu (725-c.799), a Buddhist monk known for his "wild cursive" calligraphy who, like Fu, is said to have done his best work while inebriated. Both works reflect Fu's use of art to mirror his own state of mind and feelings. During the war years from 1942 to 1945, Fu revived the millennium-long monumental landscape tradition to evoke the grandeur of China's towering mountains and surging rivers. Whispering Rain at Dusk (1945) exemplifies Fu's unrivaled ability to achieve rich and often brooding atmospheric effects through layered applications of ink wash suffused with pale color. The remainder of the exhibition will be devoted to works of art created after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. This part will offer an insight into how Fu sustained his creative vision while adapting his art to the socialist agenda of Mao Zedong's New China. While he never adopted Soviet-style Social Realism, a group of works that Fu painted in 1957 during a study trip to Eastern Europe shows him applying his spontaneous ink-wash style to the depiction of aerial trams, airplanes, and a flotilla of naval vessels. The Far Snows of Minshan Make Us Happy (1953), a bold image of soldiers enduring the hardships of the legendary Long March as they traversed the Min Mountains of Sichuan in 1935, is an example of the kind of image Fu was required to paint celebrating the history of the Party after the Communist Revolution of 1949. During the final decade of his life, Fu drew inspiration from two sources that were beyond reproach—the poetry of Mao Zedong and China's natural scenery. His success in interpreting both led to the most important commission of his career: a vast landscape panorama for the Great Hall of the People that had to be completed by October 1, 1959, in time for the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. Such is the Beauty of our Rivers and Mountains (1959?), a preliminary draft for the monumental painting, is a highlight of the exhibition. From this time forward, Fu often enhanced the political content of his images through the simple device of adding a red flag or a glowing red sky. The exhibition will include Heaven and Earth Glowing Red (1964), depicting the burning-red sun floating over the ocean, romanticizing the Communist Revolution of China. Also on view will be Jinggang Mountain (1964), presenting a powerful image of a mountain known also as the "birthplace of the Red Army and the cradle of the Communist Revolution." But even when the subject matter of his paintings reflects the utilitarian and propagandistic roles that art was required to play, his dramatic ink-wash style and bold compositions remain highly personal interpretations. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (colloquially The Met) is an art museum on the eastern edge of Central Park, along "Museum Mile" in New York City, United States. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works of art, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, often called "the Met", is one of the world's largest art galleries; there is also a much smaller second location, at "The Cloisters", in Upper Manhattan, which features medieval art. Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is also home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique weapons and armor from around the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens. The founders included businessmen and financiers, as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day, who wanted to open a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. It opened on February 20, 1872, and was originally located at 681 Fifth Avenue. Today, the Met measures almost 1/4-mile (400 m) long and occupies more than 2,000,000 square feet (190,000 m2). The Met's permanent collection is cared for and exhibited by seventeen separate curatorial departments, each with a specialized staff of curators and scholars, as well as four dedicated conservation departments and a department of scientific research. Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine and Islamic art. After negotiations with the City of New York in 1871, the Met was granted the land between the East Park Drive, Fifth Avenue, and the 79th and 85th Street Transverse Roads in Central Park. A red-brick and stone "mausoleum" was designed by American architect Calvert Vaux and his collaborator Jacob Wrey Mould. Vaux's ambitious building was not well-received; the building's High Victorian Gothic style being already dated prior to completion, and the president of the Met termed the project "a mistake." Within 20 years, a new architectural plan engulfing the Vaux building was already being executed. Since that time, many additions have been made including the distinctive Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue facade, Great Hall, and Grand Stairway. These were designed by architect and Met trustee Richard Morris Hunt, but completed by his son, Richard Howland Hunt in 1902 after his father's death. The wings that completed the Fifth Avenue facade in the 1910s were designed by the firm of McKim, Mead, and White. The modernistic sides and rear of the museum were the work of Roche, Dinkeloo, and Associates in the 1970s and 1980s. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.metmuseum.org/

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow Presented Performance Artist Ane Lan Posted: 15 Jan 2012 09:04 PM PST Krakow, Poland.- The Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow (MOCAK) proudly presented "All the World's Women Are in Me!", and exhibition of video and photographs by Norwegian performance artist Ane Lan on view at the museum. The exhibition is a male edition of a feminist exhibition. It shows woman's presence in the world, her versatility and her ability to adapt to all circumstances. The exhibition highlights commonly prevailing stereotypes in the treatment of women and their helplessness in standing up to them. This is a statement about the changing role of gender at a time of  'in-depth democracy', which requires empathy with the other party and the situation itself, as well as an ability to become – at least for a moment – someone else. Ane Lan sets up situations which oblige him to become a woman, which entails looking at the world from a female perspective. But – as there is no such thing as an archetypal woman, but there are as many women as there are there individual stories, circumstances or occupations – the artist becomes very different characters.

Denis De Gloire's tribute to Jackson Pollock's 100th Anniversary at Galerie Ida Posted: 15 Jan 2012 07:58 PM PST WAREGEM, BELGIUM - For over ten years, Denis de Gloire, wandering about in his atelier in Waregem, Belgium, has been working on a impressive homage to Jackson Pollock who was born on the 28 th of January 1912 in Cody (Wyoming) and who passed away in New York 1956. After such a long period and passion for his subject, it seems as De Gloire has become the incarnation of Pollock, holding and moving his paint pallet, sharing and feeling the same shades of colour the man he most inspires did before him. Pollock's spirit but also Franz Kline, Yves Klein, Engelbert van Anderlecht, Robert Motherwell, Louis Morris and Robert Indiana roam his chambers of creativity, in the form of canvases, merging as a crowd, referring to those outbursts that marked many in the past. Remarkable for his most fascinating demarche, is his statement: "I am not an artist. I make paintings."

Solo Exhibition of Tian Xiaolei in the United States opens at Meulensteen Posted: 15 Jan 2012 07:26 PM PST NEW YORK, NY.- Meulensteen announces the first solo exhibition of Tian Xiaolei in the United States. Based in Beijing, he creates surreal animated videos and images that engage with the history of Chinese art and the rapidly evolving social, economic, and political realities of contemporary China. The exhibition features Song of Joy, an ambitious computer-animated film through which Tian explores the relationship between pretended joy and real pain, and addresses hidden truths regarding the era of consumption and desire. This boisterous and ironic celebration of the new China features hundreds of identically outfitted businessmen frolicing in a chaotic amusement park and participating in choreographed dances and marches to the tune of Mozart's Requiem. Also on view is Tian's print series Chinese Contemporary Paintings. Employing digital techniques to reinterpret the conventions of Chinese traditional landscape painting, Tian creates naturecentered images of dramatic topographies that become dwarfed by fantastic animal figures. Exhibition on view through February 18th.

Japanese artist Nobu Fukui's "We Didn't Start the Fire" at Stephen Haller Gallery Posted: 15 Jan 2012 07:06 PM PST NEW YORK, NY.- Stephen Haller Gallery presents an exhibition of dynamic new work by Nobu Fukui, collage paintings vibrant with invention Fukui's work reads as non-objective painting at a distance, yet on closer observation intrigues with surprising imagery that suggests narrative. The eye plays across the surface of his work as if watching a video game in giddy visual delight. Paint, collage, three-dimensional beads: these are some of the ingredients of this exciting work. Benjamin Genocchio in the New York Times wrote: "In fact, some works are so densely layered that they are a bit like bubbling cauldrons of imagery. It is part Pop Art, part potpourri…" On exhibition through 18 February.

Sotheby's in London Announces Impressionist & Modern Art Sale Highlights Posted: 15 Jan 2012 06:51 PM PST LONDON.- Sotheby's London Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, on Wednesday 22nd June, will offer a selection of works of exceptional quality and rarity, many of which have remained in private collections for decades and have never before appeared at auction. In addition to two exquisite works on one of René Magritte's most sought-after themes, L'Empire des lumières, a monumental Joan Miró and a rare painting by Paul Klee, the sale is led by one of the most important oils by Egon Schiele ever to come to the market, Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II), being sold by the Leopold Museum, Vienna, and estimated at £22-30 million / $36-50 million. Further important works include a lifetime cast of Alberto Giacometti's bronze Trois hommes qui marchent II (est. £10-15 million) - an instantly recognisable icon of Modern art which forms the genesis of L'Homme qui marche I (which fetched £65 million in February 2010 at Sotheby's and established a world record at the time for any work of art at auction) and Pablo Picasso's bold late painting Couple, le baiser, an uninhibited interpretation of the theme of lovers in a passionate embrace (est. £6–8 million). The Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale is estimated to fetch a total in excess of £77 million. Egon Schiele's Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II) Painted in 1914, at the height of celebrated Austrian artist Egon Schiele's short career (he died in 1918 at the age of just 28), Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II) is one of the most impressive of the artist's few monumental cityscapes. The work comes to the auction market for the first time from the collection of the Leopold Museum in Vienna with an estimate of £22-30 million. The painting is loosely based on motifs drawn from Krumau, the town known to have inspired some of his greatest works. It was this town in Southern Bohemia in which Schiele's mother was born, and to which Schiele and his lover Valerie (Wally) Neuzil moved in 1911 in order to escape what they perceived as the claustrophobic atmosphere of Vienna. Having been acquired - in the year it was painted - by Schiele's friend and great patron Heinrich Böhler, Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II) was subsequently sold by Böhler's widow in 1952 to Rudolf Leopold, founder of the Leopold Museum in Vienna, which is home to a pre-eminent collection of Austrian 20th-century art. Pablo Picasso's Couple, le baiser Representing a culmination of Pablo Picasso's exploration of lovers that preoccupied him between October and December 1969, Couple, le baiser (£6–8 million) moves beyond the latent eroticism and sense of tenderness embodied by his earlier works to a more uninhibited interpretation of the passionate encounter. With such an erotically charged work - understood to represent Picasso's wife Jacqueline Roque and the artist himself - Picasso channelled the concerns regarding his fading virility that preoccupied him at the advanced age of 88. The physical closeness of the lovers in the throes of an embrace, and the bright, lively palette that Picasso used to render the figures and the foliage that surrounds them in Couple, le baiser, belies the emotional profundity that these compositions held for him. Picasso takes the painter and model theme a step further in Couple, le baiser than in preceding works - there is no longer an easel separating the two figures; the erotic tension of earlier works is finally consummated as the painter and his muse become entangled in a forceful embrace. Furthermore, the couple has moved from the artist's studio into nature, emphasising their freedom and the almost primitive intensity of their act. The artist's granddaughter, Diana Widmaier Picasso, wrote of these late works, 'These are not embraces but wrestling matches the sexes have abandoned themselves to. The unleashing of sexual passions is total, a lack of inhibition stamped with bestiality, animality ...'. SCULPTURE Following the world record for any work of art at auction established at Sotheby's London, when Alberto Giacometti's L'Homme qui marche I fetched £65 million in February 2010, Sotheby's now offers Giacometti's extraordinary bronze Trois hommes qui marchent II (est. £10-15 million). The sculpture, which epitomises the artist's mature style and is one of his most iconic works, forms the genesis of L'Homme qui marche I. The image of Trois hommes qui marchent II first appeared in the margin of a letter that Giacometti wrote to his dealer, Pierre Matisse, depicting three men on a raised platform walking in different directions, and the present work is the second of two versions of the subject, with the figures grouped more closely together. Trois hommes qui marchent II – a lifetime cast – was created at the definitive point of Alberto Giacometti's career, at the end of the 1940s when he was producing career-defining bronzes featuring his signature attenuated figures. The present work depicts three men captured in mid-stride, each seemingly alone in a crowd, as they narrowly pass each other in disconnected paths. Occassionally, as in Trois hommes qui marchent II, Giacometti enhanced the patina of the sculpture to give the work a beautiful modulation of gold and amber highlights against the rich brown base-tone. A further work by Giacometti, the unique bronze Figure debout of circa 1950 (est. £300,000-400,000) comes to the market from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and will be sold, alongside Jean Arp's bronze Evocation d'une forme humaine lunaire spectrale, executed in 1950 and cast in 1957 (est. £800,000 – 1.2 million), to benefit the museum's Acquisitions Fund. IMPRESSIONIST AND POST-IMPRESSIONIST WORKS Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's masterly painting La Liseuse will be offered for sale for the first time in over 70 years (est. £5–8 million). Painted in 1889, the work is a major example of the insightful character of Toulouse-Lautrec's portraiture, as well as of his remarkably modern style. The artist himself held La Liseuse in great esteem, as demonstrated in his selection of the work, together with four other paintings, for the exhibition of Les XX held in Brussels in 1890. Writing to his grandmother, he said: 'At the end of January I'm going to carry the good work, or rather the good paintings, to Belgium…'. The subject of this intimate portrait is the artist's 18-year-old neighbour, Hélène Vary, whom he had known since childhood and proclaimed to be 'very beautiful', 'her Grecian profile is incomparable'. In 1888 and 1889, Toulouse-Lautrec executed three portraits of Hélène, and the present work is the most penetrating and personal in its projection of her inner life, tenderly capturing the model in the act of reading and exemplifying Lautrec's exploration of the expressive qualities of line and colour. The work was acquired by the distinguished Brussels collector Roger Janssen in 1939 and it has remained in the same family until now. Not seen at auction for nearly 70 years, Paul Signac's magnificent Pointillist harbour scene of 1913, Les Tours vertes, La Rochelle (est. £1.2-1.8 million) is one of the artist's earliest oil paintings of this French Atlantic port, with its characteristic medieval towers surrounding the busy harbour, a subject the artist returned to many times between 1911 and 1928. By the time Signac painted the work, he had developed his pointillist technique so that his dabs of paint had become larger, looser and more expressive than the more tightly spaced dots of his earlier compositions, and the individualised colour patches hold an expressiveness and freedom that characterised many of the artist's most accomplished works. MODERN HIGHLIGHTS Sensual, bold and ultra-stylised, Tamara de Lempicka's La Dormeuse (est. £2.2-£3.2 million) is a highly charged and suggestive depiction of a femme fatale in repose. Tamara de Lempicka's striking depictions of women have come to personify the age of Art Deco and in this tantalising work, painted in 1930, her model epitomises the ideal of early Hollywood glamour. Every curve of the figure's flesh is rendered with imperceptible brushstrokes. Her skin appears to be incandescent, as if she is bathed in silver moonlight and her hair glows with a metallic sheen. The subject of the sleeping woman was filled with erotic potential, and in this painting, Lempicka precedes Picasso's celebrated 1932 portraits of the sleeping Marie-Thérèse Walter by two years, creating perhaps one of the most intimate and unashamedly sensual renderings of the theme. Appearing for the first time at auction, Paul Klee's important oil and tempera on gesso on board, Stadtburg Kr. (est. £ 2-3 million) is a magnificent example of the artist's ability to blend architectural elements and geometric forms into a fantastic, dream-like composition. The present work was executed in 1932, shortly after Klee left the Bauhaus, where from 1920 he had worked as a Form master. Inspired by Bauhaus teaching, Klee's work became increasingly abstract and geometricised and on leaving the school he introduced a pointillist technique in his watercolours and oils. In this rare example, he replaced dots with small rectangular forms, combining them in a wonderfully poetic fashion. Klee commented in his diary as early as 1902: 'Everywhere I see only architecture, linear rhythms, planar rhythms,' and this sense of rhythm and movement is beautifully rendered in the present work. According to Klee's own analysis, he tried 'to achieve the greatest possible movement with the least possible means'. Having belonged to the important Basel collector Richard Doetsch-Benziger, who owned the painting for several decades, the work now comes to auction from a private Swiss collection where it has remained for the last 40 years. Painted in circa 1905/1906 at the height of Kees van Dongen's Fauve period, Le Clown (est. £1.8-£2.5 million) portrays the brightly lit pageantry of the Cirque Médrano on the Boulevard Rochechouart. Depicting a clown performing in a circus ring with a horse and rider in the distance, Van Dongen invests his composition with all the frenetic energy that the event demanded. This vibrant painting exemplifies the spirited colour palette and painterly freedom of Van Dongen's most successful compositions. For several decades Le Clown remained in Van Dongen's personal possession, until it was acquired by Lucile Martinais-Manguin, daughter of the painter Henri Manguin. Together with her husband André, Martinais-Manguin amassed an impressive collection of modern art and founded the Galerie de Paris, and the present work remained in her collection for more than 50 years. SURREALISM Sotheby's February 2011 series of sales demonstrated the high demand for supreme Surrealist works, with Salvador Dalí's Portrait de Paul Eluard selling fo £13 million, establishing a new record price for any Surrealist work of art sold at auction, and René Magritte's gouache Le Maître d'École selling for £2.5 million, achieving a new auction record for a work on paper. The forthcoming June 2011 sale presents a selection of great works by artists including Joan Miró, René Magritte and Max Ernst. Coinciding with the Tate Modern retrospective of Joan Miró, the artist's bold and powerful work Femme à la voix de rossignol dans la nuit of 1971 appears at auction for the first time (est. £4.5-6 million). The intensely colourful and pictorially commanding oil on canvas displays a broad swathe of red pigment draped down the centre of the composition like a matador's cape. Painted at a time when Miró was one of Spain's most renowned cultural figures, the work belongs to a series of monumental compositions that occupied Miró during this time (the present work measures 130 by 195cm). The compositions that Miró completed during this period demonstrate a level of expressive freedom, exuberance and confidence in his craft.

The Dayton Art Institute’s 90th Anniversary Celebration shows Hello World! Posted: 15 Jan 2012 06:50 PM PST DAYTON, OH.- As part of The Dayton Art Institute's 90th Anniversary celebration, Chief Curator Will South has organized Hello World! Rarely Seen Art from Our Collection, a show that brings together the museum's "hidden treasures": seldom seen, as well as some never before seen, works of art from out of the museum's vaults. The themes explored in Hello World! include faces and figures, how cultures decorate the world, landscapes (both real and imagined), and flight (of birds, of man, and of the imagination).  The exhibition runs through January 3, 2010, at The Dayton Art Institute.

"The Legacy of the Harlem Renaissance" at Oklahoma City Museum of Art Posted: 15 Jan 2012 06:49 PM PST   OKLAHOMA CITY, OK - The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance with a one-of-a-kind exhibition held only at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, February 5 through April 19, 2009. Organized by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Harlem Renaissance will include more than 100 paintings, sculptures, and photographs by artists such as Richmond Barthé, Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, William H. Johnson, Malvin Gray Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald J. Motley Jr., James VanDerZee, and others. From the "vogue" of Harlem in the twenties to the Great Depression in the thirties, artists created innovative works that expressed the uniqueness of their experiences as African American artists, while participating in larger developments in American art.

Major Pablo Picasso Exhibit Opens at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow Posted: 15 Jan 2012 06:48 PM PST MOSCOW, (REUTERS).- Russia's influence on Pablo Picasso was celebrated at a new Moscow exhibit on the Spanish painter, sculptor and co-founder of the Cubism movement. Picasso paintings of bulging-eyed women and sculptures bearing his trademark triangular noses feature in a 240-piece collection of works by one of most prolific and dominant artists of the 20th century. The largest Picasso exhibit on Russian soil in over 50 years opened on Friday and it was the Russian influence on Picasso -- by way of his Russian wife and access to her world -- that excited those in the marble halls of Moscow's Pushkin Museum near the Kremlin, which is housing the exhibit. "At that time, Russia was the capital of revolution and this energy impacted Picasso greatly, it affected how he created," Mikhail Shvydkoy, the Kremlin's cultural envoy, told Reuters. Anne Baldassari, director of France's National Picasso Museum in Paris, which is lending the bulk of the works, said art movements and masters in Russia such as avant-garde painters Kazimir Malevich and Vasily Kandinsky played an "undeniably large" role in Picasso's life and inspiration. A year after the Russian revolution of 1917, Picasso, who was born in 1881 in Malaga, married ballerina Olga Khokhlova, whose pensive glances and oval eyes came to characterize many of his painted women. Though they separated bitterly after eight years when the painter started an affair with his 17-year-old muse, Khokhlova is believed to be the inspiration for Picasso's mother and child themes. Walking past painting "Olga in an armchair", depicting Khokhlova with her head downturned in a drapey black and floral dress, Shvydkoy added: "He was surrounded by Russian culture and this made him a man of the world." The Painter and His Model (1914) posed a new question about figuration inspired by popular imagery, postcards and studio photography.Portrait of Olga in an Armchair (1917) illustrates how the plastic acquisitions of pasted papers are annexed through the painting to create a great portrait.His works from the years 1919-1923, which featured a return to the techniques of sanguine, pastel and charcoal, depict themes inspired by the frescos of Pompeii or Primaticcio's decorative motifs at Fontainebleau in the form of monumental drawings on cloth (Three Woman at the Fountain and The Spring, 1921). This culminated in the great painting masterpiece The Pipes of Pan (1923), which marked the end of Picasso's second "classical" period. The portraits of his son Paulo, born in 1921, perverted the styles of Velázquez and Manet. Picasso lived much of his adult life in France, but as French Minister of Culture Frederic Mitterrand put it while attending the exhibit's opening: "Russia taught him, encouraged him, moved him." Works from the five major tenants of Picasso's creations -- his blue, rose, African, Cubism and surrealism periods -- are on display for three months in Moscow as the Picasso museum in Paris undergoes reconstruction. Instantly recognizable and much-loved paintings such as 1967's "The Kiss", depicting a black and white lip-locked couple with vertical eyes, the Cubist "Seated Woman" from 1937, and "Jacqueline with Crossed Hands", his 1954 painting of his second and last wife, crown the exhibit. Russian First Lady and self-proclaimed art devotee Svetlana Medvedeva, adorned with pearls and her neck rimmed in black mink, swanned through the elaborate collection but, true to form, did not utter a word. She paused to look at the 30 paintings and 20 photographs connected directly to Russia, from when Picasso designed for Russian ballet director Sergei Diagilyev. Minister Mitterrand added that Picasso's relationship with Russia echoed a pre-Soviet age when the Russian elite spoke French with each other and the two countries exchanged ideas and literature. The State Pushkin Museum contributed several of its own Picasso paintings, such as the 1903 "Old Jew with a Boy" from his more morose, reflective "blue" period. Picasso's Postwar Works, 1947 - 1972,  are infused with the theme of joie de vivre.The series of paintings from the 1950s blend diversity and uniformity in colour to lend the artist's everyday life a uniquely Picassian interpretation of pop culture. In 1950-1951, this also incorporated the polysemic bestiary invented from waste materials and household objects. Picasso's work as a ceramicist is also present in a selection of the collection's 108 unique pieces (1929-1962).The Studio of La Californie (1956), painted in memory of Matisse and as a tribute to Delacroix's Women of Algiers, or the series of Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe After Manet testify to the important project of reinterpreting the history of painting that Picasso embarked on at the time. Finally, through the figures of the musketeers, bullfighters and musicians and the large nudes and embraces that populated his final works,Picasso addressed the themes of Sergei Diagilyev, Rembrant, Titian, and Velázquez in an attempt to push the pictorial dynamic to the limits of its capacity. The solemn ceremony of stone laying of the Museum took place on August 17, 1898 in the presence of the Emperor Nikolas II and members of the royal family. The Museum was opened on May 31, 1912 as a Museum of Fine Arts named after Emperor Alexander III under the University of Moscow. On May 31, 1923 ceased its subordination to the University. In 1932 was re-named The State Museum of Fine Arts, in 1937 was named in honour of Alexander Pushkin the great Russian poet. (Reporting by Amie Ferris-Rotman, editing by Paul Casciato)

New Museum Presents Major Survey of Works by George Condo Posted: 15 Jan 2012 06:47 PM PST NEW YORK, NY.- Since first bursting onto the scene in the early 1980s with his unique adaptation of the language of Old Master painting, George Condo has created one of the most adventurous, imaginative, and provocative bodies of work in contemporary art. Condo's work has been deeply influential to two generations of American and European painters, who have felt the impact of the artist's astonishing technical ability, stylistic versatility, and inventive subject matter. This January, the New Museum presents "George Condo: Mental States," the first major US survey of over eighty paintings and sculptures from the past twenty-eight years of the artist's career. Condo is famously prolific, and this tightly edited selection of works from 1982 to the present responds to his prodigious output with a unique conceptual approach. The exhibition is organized thematically and stylistically in "chapters" developed in close collaboration with the artist. Highlighting the breadth of Condo's artistic exploration, the exhibition focus is on the specific ideas to which he has returned throughout his career, particularly his ongoing investigation of human physiognomy and its capacity to convey varied "mental states."

The Walters Art Museum To Show "Setting Sail: Drawings of the Sea" Posted: 15 Jan 2012 06:46 PM PST Baltimore, MD.- The Walters Art Museum is pleased to present "Setting Sail: Drawings of the Sea from the Walters' Collection", on view from June 18th through September 11th. "Setting Sail" features drawings, paintings, and prints of ships, sailors and the sea from the permanent collection of the Walters. The sea, and the men and women who make their living from it, have provided subjects for art from ancient times until the present day.

Studio Museum Harlem hosts Kehinde Wiley's The World Stage: Africa Lagos~Dakar Posted: 15 Jan 2012 06:45 PM PST NEW YORK CITY -  The Studio Museum in Harlem is proud to present The World Stage: Africa, Lagos ~ Dakar, our first-ever solo exhibition of the work of Kehinde Wiley, a former artist in residence (2001–02). The exhibition features ten new paintings from Wiley's multinational "World Stage" series, a global extension of his signature examinations of power and portraiture. On exhibition through 26 October , 2008.

Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute Explores Role of Modern Fashion Models as Muses Posted: 15 Jan 2012 06:44 PM PST NEW YORK, NY.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art's renowned Costume Institute Benefit – the annual black-tie dinner to benefit the Museum's Costume Institute – took place on May 4, 2009, celebrating the exhibition The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion, which will be on view from May 6 through August 9. The stars were out in full force showing the latest in fashion. Brooke Shields, Gisele Bundchen, Madonna, Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen, Katy Perry. Bono, Kanye West, Heidi Klum, Lauren Hutton, Justin Timberlake all were at the red carpet posing for photographers. Dinner guests arrived at the Metropolitan Museum at 7:00 p.m. for an inaugural viewing of the exhibition and cocktails in the Museum's Carroll and Milton Petrie European Sculpture Court. Dinner followed at around 8:30 p.m. at The Temple of Dendur in The Sackler Wing. "The exhibition examines a timeline of fashion from 1947 to 1997 through the idealized aesthetic of the fashion model," said Harold Koda, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute. "We look at the power of clothing, fashion photography, and the model to project the look of an era. With a mere gesture, a truly stellar model can sum up the attitude of her time – becoming not only a muse to designers or photographers, but a muse to a generation." The exhibition features approximately 80 masterworks of haute couture and ready-to-wear. Fashion editorial, advertising, and runway photography plus large- scale projections from feature films are used throughout the galleries to contextualize the fashion zeitgeist. The exhibition, in the Museum's second-floor Tisch Galleries, explores how models transmit cultural change via photographs that document turning points in society and design. With the post-WWII resurgence of the American fashion and advertising industries, the launch of Dior's New Look and a proliferation of model agencies, an environment in which high-fashion models with celebrated personalities and distinctive identities emerged. Lisa Fonssagrives, Dovima, Suzy Parker, Sunny Harnett, and Dorian Leigh personified this Golden Age of Haute Couture. Photographers such as Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and Cecil Beaton portrayed the new ideal of feminine artifice. Daywear from Christian Dior and eveningwear from Charles James evoke the mood of the time, and in some cases, recreate scenes from important photographs. A large gallery inspired by William Klein's 1966 film Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? evokes the Sixties "Youthquake" with Bernard and François Baschet's metallic dresses from the movie and ensembles from Paco Rabanne, Pierre Cardin, André Courrèges, and Rudi Gernreich, designers who heralded the transformation from a sophisticated to a youthful ideal with Jean Shrimpton, Peggy Moffitt, Veruschka, and Twiggy. The next gallery focuses on the 1970s, when athletic, All-American models such as Lisa Taylor and Jerry Hall enlivened the simple, unstructured goddess dresses of Halston, and an emerging group of ethnic beauties like Mounia and Kirat presented the haute bohemian looks of Yves Saint Laurent. In the 1980s, supermodels expressed an idealized glamour, dissolving boundaries between runway, editorial, and advertising work. Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington emerged as the "Trinity" appearing in global campaigns for designer brands seeking to bolster their identities. These models could morph into a different persona at each photo shoot, and still manage to convey their priceless, individual distinction. By the 1990s, grunge and street style led to a radical shift from glamorous beauty to the rebel chic of Kate Moss, much as Twiggy supplanted Jean Shrimpton in the '60s. The exhibition's presentation of the minimalism of Donna Karan, Helmut Lang, and Prada that immediately followed shows how models of this era became an anonymous cadre of replicated perfection, allowing the clothing to supersede all. A coda to the exhibition features the Richard Prince and Marc Jacobs collaboration of masked, anonymous nurses (Stephanie Seymour and Natalia Vodianova) in Louis Vuitton, versus selections from John Galliano's 2007 supermodel-fueled runway show in Versailles for the 60th anniversary of Christian Dior. Designers in the exhibition include Giorgio Armani, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Pierre Cardin, Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, André Courrèges, Christian Dior, John Galliano for Christian Dior, Rudi Gernreich, Halston, Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis and Louis Vuitton, Charles James, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Helmut Lang, Ralph Lauren, Prada, Paco Rabanne, Yves Saint Laurent, Giorgio di Sant'Angelo, and Gianni Versace. Iconic models featured include Nadja Auermann, Naomi Campbell, Janice Dickinson, Dovima, Linda Evangelista, Lisa Fonssagrives, Jerry Hall, Shalom Harlow, Sunny Harnett, Lauren Hutton, Iman, Dorian Leigh, Donyale Luna, Peggy Moffitt, Kate Moss, Suzy Parker, Jean Shrimpton, Christy Turlington, Twiggy, Amber Valletta, and Veruschka, among others. Photographers whose images capture the mood of fashion via their subjects, and whose work is in the exhibition, include Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Cecil Beaton, Gilles Bensimon, William Claxton, Patrick Demarchelier, Arthur Elgort, Hiro, William Klein, Annie Leibovitz, Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel, Helmut Newton, Norman Parkinson, Irving Penn, Gösta Peterson, Franco Rubartelli, Francesco Scavullo, Melvin Sokolsky, Bert Stern, Juergen Teller, Deborah Turbeville, Ellen von Unwerth, and Chris Von Wangenheim. Visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art at : http://www.metmuseum.org/

Kunsthaus Zürich presents Rivoluzione! Italian Divisionism Movement Posted: 15 Jan 2012 06:43 PM PST   ZURICH, SWITZERLAND - Kunsthaus Zürich opens Switzerland's first ever comprehensive overview of Divisionism, the most significant movement in Italian painting in the late 19th century. These masterpieces of colour and light testify to a world in upheaval – from idyllic landscapes and the blessings of modern technology, to the hard lot of the farmer and a burgeoning proletariat. On exhibition through 1 November, 2008.

Super Rich Collectors Ready to Spend Again at Auctions of Rare Art Posted: 15 Jan 2012 06:42 PM PST NEW YORK, (REUTERS).- Fueled by international collectors and Wall Street investors reaping soaring profits, the beaten-down art market appears poised for a remarkable comeback after an 18-month stumble. Rare buying opportunities to buy works by such modern masters as Jasper Johns and Mark Rothko will spur stiff competition and hefty spending by deep-pocketed collectors at the critical spring sales hosted by auction powerhouses Sotheby's and Christie's, art experts predict. "You're going to see records set," said Baird Ryan, managing director of the private financial and consulting services firm Art Capital Group.

Sale at Villa Grisebach shows Mies van der Rohe and Photography Posted: 15 Jan 2012 06:41 PM PST BERLIN - Icons of the history of architecture on view at Villa Grisebach. A convolute of more than two dozen photographs illustrating the work of the architect Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) will be put on sale during the upcoming photography auction in early June. In advance of the upcoming sales, these photographs will be presented in the exhibition "Mies van der Rohe and Photography" through April 11, 2009.

The Michele & Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts Shows Courier & Ives Images of the American West Posted: 15 Jan 2012 06:40 PM PST Springfield, MA.- Currier & Ives images of the American West will be on view at the Michele & Donald D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts from June 28th through January 29th, 2012 in the special exhibition "Imagining the Frontier:  Landscape and Hunting Scenes of the American West". Fascination with the Western frontier had a major influence on American art in the 19th century. Currier & Ives mass produced images that witnessed the great drama of Westward expansion, including the California gold rush, trappers and pioneers traveling to unknown territories, conflicts with Indians, buffalo hunting, fires on the prairie, and the building of the transcontinental railroad. Over 60 million buffalo once roamed the American plains. One 19th-century traveler noted that "the plains were black and appeared as in motion." The majority of the artists who worked for Currier & Ives never visited the Great Plains and had to rely on written accounts of the appearance of buffalo to create their designs. The result was that in some Currier & Ives prints, such as The Rocky Mountains, the buffalo look a bit like furry lions. By 1893, only 300 buffalo remained, and they were brought back from the edge of extinction only by continued conservation efforts over the last one hundred years. Images such as The Great West, with a steam train crossing a vast landscape, showed the expanse of the American frontier, a popular and saleable subject for Currier & Ives lithographs. The title helped to romanticize the idea of Westward expansion.  In 1870, they used the word "great" in as many as nine different titles. Through the use of this imagery Currier & Ives promoted the natural beauty of the American landscape and expressed pride in the country's expansion across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. In many cases, the prints represented the winning of the West as a triumph not of the white man over the wilderness but over the Native American. Today historians often criticize Currier & Ives for the blend of fantasy and reality in their images of the West. The Springfield Museums, located in the heart of downtown Springfield, Massachusetts, is comprised of five world-class museums; the Michele & Donald D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts., the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, the Springfield Science Museum, the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum and the Museum of Springfield History. The Museums Association is proud to be home to the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden, a series of full–scale bronze sculptures of Dr. Seuss's whimsical creations, honoring the birthplace of Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss. \ The Michele & Donald D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts is one of the two Springfield Museums dedicated to fine and decorative arts. The Art Deco-style museum was erected in response to a bequest from Mr. & Mrs. James Philip Gray, who left their entire estate for the "selection, purchase, preservation, and exhibition of the most valuable, meritorious, artistic, and high class oil paintings obtainable," and for the construction of a museum to house them. The museum opened in 1934. The first floor of the museum is dedicated to American art ranging from "Portrait of Nymphas Marston" by John Singleton Copley to "Promenade on the Beach" by Winslow Homer to Contemporary glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly. The American collection also includes the country's only permanent museum gallery dedicated to the lithographs of Currier & Ives. The second floor is a chronological tour of the museum's fine European art collection. Beginning in the Middle Ages with an intricate 15th-century, Hispano-Flemish Fuentes Retable (altarpiece), the galleries lead visitors through the Renaissance and subsequent centuries with fine paintings from Italy and France. The Dutch and Flemish collection is particularly strong. Familiar names in the Impressionism Gallery include Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and Paul Gauguin. Traveling exhibitions can be found in the Wheeler Gallery. Performances, lectures and presentations are offered in the Davis Auditorium. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.springfieldmuseums.org/

This Week in Review in Art Knowledge News Posted: 15 Jan 2012 06:39 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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