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

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• The Taft Museum exhibits “Old Masters to Impressionists" ~ Three Centuries of French Painting from the Wadsworth Atheneum
• The Portland Museum of Art shows "The Draw of the Normandy Coast ~ 1860-1960"
• The Art Gallery of Western Australia opens "Picasso to Warhol ~ Fourteen Modern Masters"
• MoMA displays "New to the Print Collection ~ Matisse to Bourgeois"
• The Honolulu Museum of Art to highlight art work by Hiroshi Honda
• The National Gallery of Art Exhibits Renaissance Works by Antico
• Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht Shows Modern Masterpieces from the Liege Collections
• Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe Exhibits "Animal Still Lifes from the Renaissance to Modernism"
• Tamara de Lempicka's Art Deco Paintings on View for the First Time in Mexico City
• The Baltimore Museum of Art Exhibits Prints from Dürer to Lichtenstein
• Hirshhorn Museum to show Walead Beshty "Directions" ~ Photograms & Glass Sculptures
• Tate Modern Presents Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray & Francis Picabia Exhibition
• Lehmbruck Museum's Extensive Exhibition Celebrates its 100th anniversary
• Alfred Kubin ~ Drawings, 1897-1909 displayed at the Museum Neue Galerie New York
• "Paint Made Flesh" Survey opens at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC
• Our Editor Views The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design In Oslo
• Sotheby's NYC to sell Masterpieces by Puerto Rican Painters
• Stadel Museum shows Expressiveness of Prints from Its Collection Made by Edvard Munch
• This Week in Review in Art Knowledge News

The Taft Museum exhibits “Old Masters to Impressionists" ~ Three Centuries of French Painting from the Wadsworth Atheneum Posted: 15 Jun 2012 10:06 PM PDT Cincinnati, Ohio.- The Taft Museum's latest special exhibition "Old Masters to Impressionists: Three Centuries of French Painting from the Wadsworth Atheneum" on view through September 16th, covers an enormous amount of ground in terms of historical period, styles, and subject matter. An exhibition of 50 outstanding masterpieces from the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum. The works provide a history of French painting, ranging from the 17th through the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th century. All the major types of painting are represented, including religious and mythological subjects, portraiture, landscape, still life, and genre. "Old Masters to Monet" begins with the great 17th-century masters who went to Rome and absorbed Italian ideas of beauty, classical sculpture, and ideal landscape. Claude Lorrain's "Landscape with St. George and the Dragon," commissioned by Cardinal Fausto Poli in 1641, is one of the artist's most important paintings in this country. The 18th-century works present a rich tapestry of life in France during the Rococo age. There are several scenes and portraits of aristocrats, including the "Portrait of the Duchesse de Polignac" by the most important woman painter, Madame Vigée-Lebrun. Genre scenes of this era had a decidedly risqué bent and on view will be humorous aspects of life by Greuze, Boucher, and Boilly. A more serious approach is evidenced in the "Still Life" by Chardin and the charming family pictures by Lépicié and Hallé. The change in style brought about by the French Revolution is evident in the impressive composition designed by Jacques Louis David, and the creation of a new aristocracy is presented by the two brilliant paintings by Ingres. A series of diverse trends unfolds during the 19th century. There is the vigorous Romanticism of Géricault and Delacroix; pastoral and realistic landscapes by Corot, Dupré, Courbet, and Rousseau; the academicism of Bouguereau, Vibert, and Motte. In addition there is the realism of Bonvin and Ribot. Portraiture is represented by the surprisingly early portrait of a young woman by Millet. Perhaps the most exciting group of works in the exhibition is the selection of the Impressionists, and no picture better captures the essence of this popular school than Pierre-Auguste Renoir's famous painting of his friend Monet at work in the garden of their rented home at Argenteuil in 1873. Also included are fine examples by their colleagues Manet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Degas, Cézanne and Monet himself. The final group of paintings by the younger Post-Impressionist generation includes Louis Anquetin's "Avenue de Clichy," a view of a Parisian boulevard on a rainy evening that had a profound effect on Vincent van Gogh, whose own powerful "Self-Portrait" of about 1887 is included. Finally there are works by Ranson, Vuillard, and Bonnard who focus on intimate interiors. Hartford art patron Daniel Wadsworth (1771-1848) founded the Wadsworth Atheneum to share the wonders of art with the public. A National Historic Landmark built in about 1820, the Taft is home to nearly European and American master paintings; Chinese porcelains; and European decorative arts. The mission of the Taft Museum of Art is to preserve, exhibit and interpret its unique collections and historic house in a way that exemplifies artistic, intellectual and professional standards of the highest quality; fosters the pleasure and understanding of art; embraces diverse audiences; maximizes its human, financial and physical resources; and enhances the cultural, educational and economic climates of our city and region. The museum reopened in 2004 after extensive renovations. The expansion doubled the size with a new special exhibitions gallery, redesigned gardens, parking, and museum shop. America's oldest public art museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art has a rich and diverse collection of European art, featuring approximately 900 paintings, 500 sculptures, 800 drawings, and 3,000 British and Continental prints. Paintings on display represent periods ranging from late medieval through the mid-twentieth century. Especially impressive are Baroque and European old master paintings, including masterworks by Caravaggio, Frans Hals, Anthony van Dyck, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Adriaen van Ostade, Thomas Gainsborough and Claude Lorrain. Nineteenth century artists, particularly those working in France, are amply featured and include significant works by Edgar Degas, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Theodore Rousseau, Gustave Courbet, Eugène Boudin, and Alfred Sisley. 19th-century American paintings are well represented, including the well known murals by Robert Duncanson. The galleries in the historic house also include Chinese porcelains, European decorative arts, Limoges enamels, watches, sculptures, and furniture. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.taftmuseum.org

The Portland Museum of Art shows "The Draw of the Normandy Coast ~ 1860-1960" Posted: 15 Jun 2012 08:53 PM PDT Portland, Maine.- This summer, the Portland Museum of Art is presenting the exhibition "The Draw of the Normandy Coast (1860-1960)", on view through September 3rd. This exhibition focuses on the impressive Normandy coast which proved to be an artistic crucible for European and American artists during the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Geographically convenient to Paris, accessible by train, with dramatic cliffs and rock formations, and picturesque and active ports, Normandy was an attractive haven. Realists, Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists, Fauves, Cubists, and Surrealists all gravitated to the area, including Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Pablo Picasso. "The Draw of the Normandy Coast (1860-1960)" will chart the coast's significance and showcase the ways in which the landscape was rendered by a spectrum of artists. The exhibition was inspired by the masterful painting by Claude Monet, La Manneporte Vue en Aval (The Manneporte Seen from Below) (ca. 1884). This powerful landscape is part of the Scott M. Black Collection and is currently on long-term loan to the Portland Museum of Art. The Manneporte, the dramatic arch at Étretat, was the focus of one of Monet's most significant painting campaigns in Normandy. Monet's painting is one of several magnificent works from the Scott M. Black Collection that will be showcased in the exhibition. The exhibition will also include a carefully selected group of masterworks from the Museum's permanent holdings by European and American artists, including Samuel Colman's Cliffs at Étretat (ca. 1873), a work on paper acquired by the Museum in 2009 with the support of the Friends of the Collection. The exhibition is greatly enhanced by generous loans not only from collegial institutions across Maine, including Bowdoin College Museum of Art, but also by special loans from the National Gallery of Art Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art New York; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Tennessee, among other collaborating private collectors and museums. Chefs d'oeuvres including Félix Vallotton's Vuillard Drawing at Honfleur (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts), George Inness' Étretat (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford), and Gustave Courbet's M. Nodler, the Elder at Trouville (Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton) will grace the galleries of the Museum this summer. The Draw of the Normandy Coast (1860-1960) follows in the tradition of the summer 2009 Museum's exhibition Call of the Coast. Just as Call of the Coast studied the attraction of the Maine coast for countless American artists as well as explored the art colonies of New England, The Draw of the Normandy Coast (1860-1960) will examine the importance of the towns and villages of Honfleur and Le Havre, and such unique destinations as Étretat. The exhibition is curated by Margaret Burgess, the Susan Donnell and Harry W. Konkel Associate Curator of European Art at the Portland Museum of Art. The Portland Museum of Art, founded in 1882, is Maine's oldest and largest public art institution. The Museum's architecturally significant buildings unite three centuries that showcase the history of American art and culture. The Museum's collection of more than 17,000 objects includes decorative and fine arts dating from the 18th century to the present. The heart of the Museum's collection is the State of Maine Collection, which features works by artists such as Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, John Marin, Louise Nevelson, and Andrew Wyeth. The Museum has the largest European art collection in Maine. The major European movements from Impressionism through Surrealism are represented by the Joan Whitney Payson, Albert Otten, and Scott M. Black Collections, which include works by Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, René Magritte, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, and Auguste Rodin. The Elizabeth B. Noyce Collection, a bequest of 66 paintings and sculptures, has transformed the scope and quality of the Museum's American collection, bringing to the Museum its first paintings by George Bellows, Alfred Thompson Bricher, and Jamie Wyeth, and adding masterpieces to the collection by Childe Hassam, Fitz Henry Lane, and N. C. Wyeth. In addition to exhibitions, the Museum has constantly changing educational programs, family festivals, lectures, art classes, musical concerts, bookgroups, art camps, gallery talks, and much more. Originally founded as the Portland Society of Art, the Museum used a variety of exhibition spaces until 1908. That year Mrs. Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat bequeathed her three-story mansion, now known as the McLellan House, and sufficient funds to create a gallery in memory of her late husband, Lorenzo de Medici Sweat. Noted New England architect John Calvin Stevens designed the L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Galleries, which opened to the public in 1911. Over the next 65 years, as the size and scope of the exhibitions expanded, the limitations of the Museum's galleries, storage, and support areas became apparent. In 1976, Maine native Charles Shipman Payson promised the Museum his collection of 17 works by Winslow Homer. Recognizing the Museum's physical limitations, he also gave $8 million toward the building of an addition to be designed by Henry Nichols Cobb of I. M. Pei & Partners. Construction began on the Charles Shipman Payson Building in 1981, and within two years the $8.2 million facility was opened to the public. In January 2000, the Museum launched a $13.5 million capital campaign to raise funds for the preservation, educational interpretation, and reopening of its two historic structures: the McLellan House (1801) and L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Galleries (1911). Completed in October 2002, the preservation project reunited these two buildings with the Payson building and returned the McLellan House to its original Neoclassical elegance and the L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Galleries to their original Beaux-Arts splendor. The L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Galleries showcase the Museum's outstanding collection of 19th-century American art. The Museum purchased the Winslow Homer Studio in Prouts Neck, Maine, in January 2006. The Studio is where the great American artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910) lived and painted many of his masterpieces from 1883 until his death. The Museum is currently engaged in a major capital campaign to raise $8.3 million for the acquisition, preservation, and endowment of the Studio. A National Historic Landmark, the restored Winslow Homer Studio will be used to celebrate the artist's life, to encourage scholarship, and to educate audiences about the artistic heritage of Winslow Homer and Maine. The Studio and the surrounding grounds are closed to the public while construction and restoration projects take place. The Museum plans to complete this project in 2012. Recently, the Museum purchased two adjacent properties on Spring Street. In 2007, the Museum purchased 87 Spring Street to provide space for long-range expansion. In February 2008, the Charles Quincy Clapp House (1832), at 97 Spring Street, reverted back to the Museum from the Maine College of Art. Located next to the McLellan House, the Charles Q. Clapp House was built in 1832 by Portland businessman Charles Q. Clapp as a private residence. Cited as one of the America's finest examples of Greek Revival architecture, the building is on the National Register of Historic Places. The Museum plans to restore this building to its original elegance and complete the Museum's campus. Currently the Museum is visited by 160,000 visitors a year, approximately 10,000 of whom are school children. Museum membership is at an all-time high of 8,000 members and continues to grow. Now and into the future, the Museum is committed to serving as a dynamic center for the visual arts and strives to be an essential resource for the people of Maine and New England. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.portlandmuseum.org

The Art Gallery of Western Australia opens "Picasso to Warhol ~ Fourteen Modern Masters" Posted: 15 Jun 2012 08:34 PM PDT Perth, Australia.- "Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters" is the exciting launch exhibition of the Australian exclusive partnership between the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) and the Museum of Modern Art New York (MoMA). Featuring over 100 works by fourteen of modern art's most iconic artists, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, this exhibition presents a world-class introduction to the figures who redefined the very idea of art. "Picasso to Warhol" opens on June 16th and will remain on view through December 3rd. Savour some well-known favourites such as Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans and discover some new friends, such as Fernand Léger's Big Julie. Encompassing a wide range of art movements including Cubism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, Picasso to Warhol will leave you inspired and invigorated with a renewed sense of wonder at what modern art can be. The MoMA series is an exciting collaboration between the Art Gallery of WA (AGWA) and the renowned Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. The partnership is an Australian exclusive for AGWA and was developed through AGWA's Director, Stefano Carboni's strong New York connections. In an evolution of the Gallery's Great Collections of the World series, AGWA and MoMA will present six world-class exhibitions over three years from June 2012 through to mid 2015. The Art Gallery of WA will be the only Australian venue for each of the six exhibitions. The series launches in June 2012 with "Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters", a stunning display of works from fourteen of the most iconic modern artists including Picasso, Matisse, Pollock and Warhol. The five following exhibitions are drawn from MoMA's extensive collection and showcase a significant selection of works from each of MoMA's curatorial departments including design and photography. Each exhibition in the series differs both thematically and by medium, providing a highly varied series that will engage audiences time and again. This exhibition is organised by The Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth The Art Gallery of Western Australia, founded in 1895, occupies a precinct of three heritage buildings on the south-eastern corner of the Perth Cultural Centre. The Gallery houses the State Art Collection, which includes one of the world's finest collections of Indigenous art, the pre-eminent collection of Western Australian art and design, as well as Australian and International art and design. Through the Collection, its associated programs, and stimulating exhibitions they offer Gallery visitors unique and exciting experiences of historic and contemporary Australian artists, and bring the art of the world to Western Australia. They place particular emphasis on the arts of Australia, and due to its geographic position, the Indian Ocean Rim. Their proximity and access to many of the most exciting cultures of the world adds immeasurably to programs, exhibitions, collections and events at the State Art Gallery. The Gallery aims to develop the pre-eminent art collection in Western Australia by acquiring, preserving, displaying and interpreting the visual arts from the past and present. Our emphasis is on Western Australian and Indigenous art, and the influences of both Australian and international arts which have informed local developments. The State Art Collection contains more than 17,000 works of art. The holdings of Indigenous art are a highlight of the Collection, providing a comprehensive overview of traditional and contemporary works from Arnhemland, the Central Desert and Western Australia. Twentieth century Australian and British paintings and sculpture are a particular strength of the Collection, which also has extensive holdings of prints, photographs, drawings, decorative arts, craft and design from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The Gallery places a high priority on the purchase of the art of today to create a legacy for future generations. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.artgallery.wa.gov.au

MoMA displays "New to the Print Collection ~ Matisse to Bourgeois" Posted: 15 Jun 2012 07:23 PM PDT New York City.- The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is currently exhibiting "New to the Print Collection: Matisse to Bourgeois", on view through January 7th 2013. This exhibition showcases some 80 prints and artists' books the Museum has acquired over the past two years, and reveals how an art collection is always a work in progress. On view for the first time at MoMA, these seminal works in the history of printmaking span more than a century, from 1888 to 2011, with some contextualized by related works already in the collection. Pablo Picasso's 1937 print The Weeping Woman, acquired in 2011, which filled one of the last major gaps in MoMA's holdings of works by the artist, is shown alongside the third state of the same image that joined the collection in 1999. Likewise, the 1958 linoleum cut Solid as a Rock (My God Is Rock), by Charles White, acquired in 2010, is complemented by a lithograph by White that was donated to the Museum more than 40 years ago, and illuminates White's widespread impact on a younger generation of artists. Other highlights include Jasper Johns' celebrated screenprint Flags I (1973), two vertical flags printed with 31 screens, which adds a key example of Johns' early screen printing to the collection. The exhibition also addresses more experimental processes that have often led to rare or one-of-a-kind works, from James Ensor's hand-colored Deadly Sins (1888–1904) and a group of Henri Matisse's monotypes (1914–15), to a recent monumental cyanotype by Christian Marclay. The Museum of Modern Art's collection of prints was inaugurated with the founding of the Museum itself, in November 1929: a group of German Expressionist prints were among the first objects MoMA acquired. Today, the Museum's holdings in this area are remarkable in their scope; comprising more than fifty thousand works, they cover the period from the late nineteenth century to the present. The holdings are regularly reevaluated and reshaped by the Museum's curators; works are routinely added, not only to fill gaps but also to give stronger emphasis to lesser-known or previously overlooked artists or practices, reflecting the ways in which new generations of scholars and artists are redefining the discipline of printmaking. New to Print is organized by Christophe Cherix, The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books, with Judy Hecker, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books. The Museum of Modern Art (stylized MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been singularly important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world. The museum's collection offers an unparalleled overview in modern and contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, drawings, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books and artist's books, film, and electronic media. MoMA's library and archives hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, as well as individual files on more than 70,000 artists. When The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929, its founding Director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., intended the Museum to be dedicated to helping people understand and enjoy the visual arts of our time, and that it might provide New York with "the greatest museum of modern art in the world." The public's response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic, and over the course of the next ten years, the Museum moved three times into progressively larger temporary quarters, and in 1939 finally opened the doors of the building it still occupies in midtown Manhattan. 1951 the Grace Rainey Rogers Annex, designed by Philip Johnson (winner of the inaugural Pritzker Prize for architecture) opened beside the original building and MoMA later expanded into neighbouring buildings that it acquired. In 1984, a major renovation designed by famous Argentinian archiect Cesar Pelli doubled the Museum's gallery space, enhanced visitor facilities and added a residential tower above the museum. On May 21, 2002 the museum closed for extensive rebuilding works, the largest and most ambitious building project in its history. This project nearly doubled the space for MoMA's exhibitions and programs. Designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, the new MoMA features 640,000 square feet of new and redesigned space and opened to the public on November 20, 2004. The Peggy and David Rockefeller Building on the western portion of the site houses the main exhibition galleries, and The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Building, containing classrooms, auditoriums, teacher training workshops, and the Museum's expanded Library and Archives subsequently in November 2006. These two buildings frame the enlarged Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. The rich and varied collection of The Museum of Modern Art constitutes one of the most comprehensive and panoramic views into modern art in the world. From an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing, The Museum of Modern Art's collection has grown to include over 150,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and drawings, and design objects. MoMA also owns approximately 22,000 films and four million film stills, and MoMA's Library and Archives, the premier research facilities of their kind in the world, hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, and extensive individual files on more than 70,000 artists. The collection houses a number of important and familiar works including; "The Dance I", "The Plum Blossoms" and "View of Notre-Dame" by Henri Matisse, "The City Rises" by Umberto Boccioni, "The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali, "Broadway Boogie Woogie" by Piet Mondrian, "Paintin" by Francis Bacon, "Starry Night" and "The Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background" by Vincent van Gogh, "The Sleeping Gypsy" and "The Dram" by Henri Rousseau, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" by Pablo Picasso, "Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol, "Te aa no areois" (The Seed of the Areoi) by Paul Gauguin, the "Water Lilies" triptych by Claude Monet, "The Bather" by Paul Cézanne, "Vir Heroicus Sublimis" and "Broken Obelisk" by Barnett Newman "Flag" by Jasper Johns, "Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale" by Max Ernst and "Suprematist Composition: White on White" by Kazimir Malevich. It also holds works by a wide range of influential European and American artists including Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Helen Frankenthaler, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Edward Hopper, Paul Klee, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Dorothea Lange, Fernand Léger, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, René Magritte, Aristide Maillol, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Kenneth Noland, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Auguste Rodin, Mark Rothko, Stanley Spencer, David Smith, Frank Stella, and hundreds of others. MoMA developed a world-renowned art photography collection, first under Edward Steichen and then John Szarkowski, which included photos by Todd Webb, as well as an important film collection under The Museum of Modern Art Department of Film and Video. The film collection owns prints of many familiar feature-length movies, including Citizen Kane and Vertigo, but the department's holdings also contain many less-traditional pieces, including Andy Warhol's "eight-hour Empire" and Chris Cunningham's music video for Björk's "All Is Full of Love". MoMA also has an important design collection, which includes works from such legendary designers as Paul László, the Eameses, Isamu Noguchi, and George Nelson. The design collection also contains many industrial and manufactured pieces, ranging from a self-aligning ball bearing to an entire Bell 47D1 helicopter. Visit the museum's website at ... www.moma.org/

The Honolulu Museum of Art to highlight art work by Hiroshi Honda Posted: 15 Jun 2012 06:58 PM PDT Honolulu, Hawaii.- For the first time in nearly two decades, the Honolulu Museum of Art presents a focused selection of its extensive holdings in the work of Japanese-American artist Hiroshi Honda . "Hiroshi Honda: Detained" will be on view at the museum from June 21st through September 9th.  Honda was born in Hilo in 1910 to Japanese parents who had immigrated to Hawai'i at the turn of the 20th century. At the age of 6, he was sent to Japan to receive his education, and there he spent his childhood and young adulthood working in the family business, studying sumi-e ink drawing, and serving in the Japanese air force. In 1939, he returned to Hawai'i to teach in Japanese schools in Hilo and Honolulu. The bombing of Pearl Harbor changed Honda's life profoundly. Despite his American citizenship, his Japanese education and military service made him immediately suspect as a spy. He was seized and detained on Honolulu's Sand Island along with some 1,500 other Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals, and from there he was transported to a succession of internment camps in Arkansas, Wisconsin, and Northern California, all of them operated by the United States Justice Department for the imprisonment—without due process—of virtually anyone of Japanese descent for the duration of World War II.

The National Gallery of Art Exhibits Renaissance Works by Antico Posted: 15 Jun 2012 06:57 PM PDT Washington, D.C.- The National Gallery of Art is proud to present "Antico: The Golden Age of Renaissance Bronzes" on view through April 8th 2012. Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi, known as Antico (c. 1455–1528), transformed the art of bronze sculpture. His contributions are celebrated in this show, the first monographic exhibition in the United States devoted to the Italian sculptor and goldsmith. The exhibition includes some 40 rare works—medals, reliefs, busts, and Antico's renowned statuettes—more than three-quarters of the sculptor's known works. "Antico: The Golden Age of Renaissance Bronzes" was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with The Frick Collection, New York, where it will be on view from May 1st through July 29th 2012. The exhibition presents 37 masterpieces by Antico, grouped thematically and installed with related works by fellow Gonzaga court artist Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431–1506), Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430/1435–1516), and others. Antico's earliest known work in the exhibition is an elegant portrait medal representing his patron, Gianfrancesco Gonzaga (c. 1479–1482), wearing contemporary clothing. In a later medal, he is portrayed as an ancient figure, wearing antique-style Roman drapery. The exhibition includes Antico's finest statuettes, such as the "Seated Nymph" (1503, Robert H. and Clarice Smith), a beautiful example of the rich interplay of gilded, silvered, and patinated surfaces. Highlighting the refinement Antico achieved in the modeling of the hair and drapery, this work is identified through surviving letters as a statuette made for the private study of the famous Marchesa of Mantua, Isabella d'Este. The Seated Nymph is reunited, for the first time, with four other bronze statuettes from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna that were also most likely made for Isabella's study: Hercules and Antaeus (1519), Pan (probably after 1519), Atropos (probably after 1519), and Hercules (probably after 1519). Two sculptures from antiquity that served as models for Antico are on view, offering insights into how he interpreted the classical precedents that are at the core of his artistic output. An example of this relationship in the exhibition is the loan from the Hispanic Society of America, New York, of a marble Roman portrait bust of a young man (c. AD 140–150), which is the source for Antico's "Young Man" (c. 1520, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles). Antico's bronze inventions in turn promoted ancient Roman statuary, such as the Apollo Belvedere, excavated in Rome in 1489, that became widely appreciated through Antico's multiples of small bronzes. Probably born in Mantua, Antico is first documented in 1487. He is known to have been married with children by 1496. Antico spent his entire career in the service of the Gonzaga family. His first patron was Gianfrancesco Gonzaga di Ròdigo, lord of Bozzolo (1446–1496), followed by bishop-elect Ludovico Gonzaga (1460–1511), Gianfrancesco's younger brother. By 1501, Antico was working and living at the court of Gazzuolo, the residence of Gianfrancesco's widow, Antonia del Balzo (c. 1460–1538), and bishop-elect Ludovico. After Ludovico's death, the Marchesa Isabella d'Este (1474-1539) in Mantua became Antico's principal patron. The artist is recorded as restoring antique marble statues in Rome, but his greatest works were commissioned by the Gonzaga family over three generations. Now visited by more than 4.5 million people annually, the National Gallery of Art is now one of the world's leading art museums. The National Gallery of Art was created in 1937 for the people of the United States of America by a joint resolution of Congress, accepting the gift of financier and art collector Andrew W. Mellon. Since its inception, the mission of the National Gallery of Art has been to serve the United States of America in a national role by preserving, collecting, exhibiting, and fostering the understanding of works of art, at the highest possible museum and scholarly standards. The original West Building, designed by John Russell Pope (architect of the Jefferson Memorial and the National Archives), is a neoclassical marble masterpiece with a domed rotunda over a colonnaded fountain and high-ceilinged corridors leading to delightful garden courts. At its completion in 1941, the building was the largest marble structure in the world. The modern East Building, designed by Pritzker Prize winning architect I. M. Pei and opened in 1978, is composed of two adjoining triangles with glass walls and lofty tetrahedron skylights. The pink Tennessee marble from which both buildings were constructed was taken from the same quarry and forms an architectural link between the two structures. The East Building provided an additional 56,100 m2 of floor space and accommodated the Gallery's growing collections and expanded exhibition schedule as well as housing an advanced research center, administrative offices, a great library, and a burgeoning collection of drawings and prints. The two buildings are linked by an underground concourse featuring sculptor Leo Villareal's computer-programmed digital light project "Multiverse". On May 23, 1999 the Gallery opened an outdoor sculpture garden located in the 6.1-acre block adjacent to the West Building at 7th Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W. The garden provides an informal, yet elegant setting for works of modern and contemporary sculpture. The National Gallery of Art has one of the finest art collections in the world. It was created for the people of the United States of America by a joint resolution of Congress accepting the gift of financier, public servant, and art collector Andrew W. Mellon in 1937. European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts are displayed in the collection galleries and Sculpture Garden. The permanent collection of paintings spans from the Middle Ages to the present day. The strongest collection is the Italian Renaissance collection, which includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the great tondo of the "Adoration of the Magi" by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Bellini's "The Feast of the Gods", the only Leonardo da Vinci painting in the Americas, Ginevra de' Benci; and significant groups of works by Titian and Raphael. However, the other European collections include examples of the work of many of the great masters of western painting, including Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Van der Weyden, Dürer, Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Goya, Ingres, and Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts is admittedly not quite as rich as this, but includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a superb collection of work by Rodin and Degas. The National Gallery of Art contains three museum shops, three cafes and a bar as well as the Library, a major national art research center serving the Gallery's staff, members of the Center for Advanced Study, visiting scholars, and serious adult researchers. Visit the museum's thorough website at .. http://www.nga.gov

Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht Shows Modern Masterpieces from the Liege Collections Posted: 15 Jun 2012 06:56 PM PDT Maastricht, NL - Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht presents Wintertuin / Wintergarden a selection of modern masterpieces from the Liège collections on view through 19 June 2011. In Wintertuin, the Bonnefantenmuseum is presenting forty classic masterpieces from the collections of the city of Liège and the French Community of Belgium, including seven works of exceptionally high quality known as 'Belgian national treasures' (Chagall, Ensor, Gauguin, Kokoschka, Liebermann, Marc and Picasso).

Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe Exhibits "Animal Still Lifes from the Renaissance to Modernism" Posted: 15 Jun 2012 06:54 PM PDT Karlsruhe, Germany.- The Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe will unveil a new major exhibition that will, for the first time ever, cast the spotlight on the rich history of the genre of the animal still life, spanning from the 16th to the 20th century. "Of Beauty and Death: Animal Still Lifes from the Renaissance to Modernism" remains on view through February 19th. Over 120 paintings, watercolours and reliefs by such famous artists as Albrecht Dürer, Peter-Paul Rubens, Jan Weenix, Jean Siméon Chardin, Francisco Goya, Édouard Manet, James Ensor, Oskar Kokoschka and Max Beckmann form a testimony of the subject's importance. Besides works from the museum's own collection, around 90 exquisite loans from renowned museums in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Munich, Paris, Stockholm, Vienna and Zurich provide insights into this fascinating pictorial world. Works from the museum's own collection can now be viewed in a wider context thanks to the many loaned works also on display.

Tamara de Lempicka's Art Deco Paintings on View for the First Time in Mexico City Posted: 15 Jun 2012 06:53 PM PDT MEXICO CITY.- President Felipe Calderón inaugurated the Tamara de Lempicka Exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts, adding that during his government, an enormous effort has been made to enable Mexicans to discover and enjoy great national and international exhibitions, some of which have been unparalleled. He said that Tamara de Lempicka belongs to the great 20th Century women painters who were attracted to Mexico and found refuge and a source of inspiration here, such as Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington and Alice Rahon. Of Tamara de Lempicka, the President said that her fascinating, avant-garde plastic discourse made her one of the main exponents of Art Déco. The exhibition gathers 48 paintings, 15 works on paper and 21 photographs, that come from private collections in France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, United States and Mexico. It is important to mention that Jack Nicholson's collection has been included in the show. "Although Tamara was a citizen of the world, at the end of her life, she found a refuge for her last years in Mexico. As historian Fabienne Bradu noted, She fled her entire life, from exile to exile, eventually choosing Mexico as the last stage of her journey and life," she said. International museums who loaned works of art include: Centre National d´Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou en París, Musée d´Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne, Métropole Musée d´Art et d´Historie de Saint-Denis, Musée d´Art et d´Industrie André Diligent in Roubaix, Musée Departémental de l´Oise in Beauvais, Musée des Années 30 in Boulogne-Billancourt, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, Musée Malraux in Le Havre, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie in Warsaw. For her first major show, in Milan, Italy in 1925, under the sponsorship of Count Emmanuele Castelbarco, de Lempicka painted 28 new works in six months. She was soon the most fashionable portrait painter of her generation among the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy, painting duchesses and grand dukes and socialites. Through her network of friends, she was able to display her paintings in the most elite salons of the era. De Lempicka was criticized and admired for her 'perverse Ingrism', referring to her modern restatement of the master Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, as displayed in her work Group of Four Nudes, 1925. A portrait might take three weeks of work, allowing for the nuisance of dealing with a cranky sitter; by 1927-8 de Lempicka could charge 50,000 French francs per portrait (a sum equal to about US $2,000 then—perhaps ten times as much today). Through Castelbarco she was introduced to Italy's great man of letters and notorious lover, Gabriele d'Annunzio. She visited the poet twice at his Lake Garda villa, seeking to paint his portrait; he in turn was set on seduction. After these attempts to secure the commission, she left angered while both she and d'Annunzio remained unsatisfied. In 1929, she painted her iconic work Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame. As summed up by the magazine Auto-Journal in 1974, "the self-portrait of Tamara de Lempicka is a real image of the independent woman who asserts herself. Her hands are gloved, she is helmeted, and inaccessible; a cold and disturbing beauty [through which] pierces a formidable being—this woman is free!" De Lempicka won her first major award in 1927, first prize at the Exposition Internationale de Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, France for her portrait of Kizette on the Balcony. During the Roaring 20s Paris, Tamara de Lempicka was part of the bohemian life: she knew Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide. Famous for her libido, she was bisexual, and her affairs with both men and women were carried out in ways that were scandalous at the time. She often used formal and narrative elements in her portraits and nude studies to produce overpowering effects of desire and seduction. In the 1920s she became closely associated with lesbian and bisexual women in writing and artistic circles, such as Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West, and Colette. She also became involved with Suzy Solidor, a night club singer at Boîte de Nuit, whom she later painted. Her husband eventually tired of their arrangement; he abandoned her in 1927, and they were divorced in 1928. Obsessed with her work and her social life, de Lempicka neglected more than her husband; she rarely saw her daughter. When Kizette was not away at boarding school (France or England), the girl was often with her grandmother Malvina. When de Lempicka informed her mother and daughter that she would not be returning from America for Christmas in 1929, Malvina was so angry that she burned de Lempicka's enormous collection of designer hats; Kizette watched them burn, one by one. In 1928, her long time patron the Baron Raoul Kuffner visited her studio and commissioned her to paint his mistress. De Lempicka finished the portrait, then took the mistress' place in the Baron's life. She travelled to the United States for the first time in 1929, to paint a commissioned portrait for Rufus Bush and to arrange a show of her work at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. The show went well but the money she earned was lost when the bank she used collapsed following the Stock Market Crash of 1929. De Lempicka continued both her heavy workload and her frenetic social life through the next decade. The Great Depression had little effect on her; in the early 1930s she was painting King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of Greece. Museums began to collect her works. In 1933 she traveled to Chicago where she worked with Georgia O'Keeffe, Santiago Martínez Delgado and Willem de Kooning. Her social position was cemented when she married her lover, Baron Kuffner, in 1933 (his wife had died the year before). The Baron took her out of her quasi-bohemian life and finally secured her place in high society again, with a title to boot. She repaid him by convincing him to sell many of his estates in Eastern Europe and move his money to Switzerland. She saw the coming of World War II from a long way off, much sooner than most of her contemporaries. She did make a few concessions to the changing times as the decade passed; her art featured a few refugees and common people, and even a Christian saint or two, as well as the usual aristocrats and cold nudes. In the winter of 1939, Tamara and the Baron started an "extended vacation" in the United States. She immediately arranged for a show of her work in New York, though the Baron and Baroness chose to settle in Beverly Hills, California, living in the former residence of Hollywood director King Vidor. She became 'the baroness with a brush' and a favorite artist of Hollywood stars. She cultivated a Garboesque manner. The Baroness would visit the Hollywood stars on their studio sets, such as Tyrone Power, Walter Pidgeon, and George Sanders and they would come to her studio to see her at work. She did war relief work, like many others at the time; and she managed to get Kizette out of Nazi-occupied Paris, via Lisbon, in 1941. Some of her paintings of this time had a Salvador Dalí quality, as displayed in Key and Hand, 1941. In 1943, the couple relocated to New York City. Even though she continued to live in style, socializing continuously, her popularity as a society painter had diminished greatly. After Baron Kuffner's death from a heart attack in 1962, she sold most of her possessions and made three around-the-world trips by ship. Finally De Lempicka moved to Houston, Texas to be with Kizette and her family. (Kizette had married a man named Harold Foxhall, who was then chief geologist for the Dow Chemical Company; they had two daughters.) There she began her difficult and disagreeable later years. Kizette served as Tamara's business manager, social secretary, and factotum, and suffered under her mother's controlling domination and petulant behavior. Tamara complained that not only were the paints and other artists' materials now inferior to the "old days" but that people in the 1970s lacked the special qualities and "breeding" that inspired her art. The artistry and craftsmanship of her glory days were unrecoverable. In 1978 Tamara moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, to live among an aging international set and some of the younger aristocrats. After Kizette's husband died of cancer, she attended her mother for three months until Tamara died in her sleep on March 19, 1980. Her ashes were scattered over the volcano Popocatepetl by Count Giovanni Agusta. De Lempicka lived long enough, however, for the wheel of fashion to turn a full circle: before she died a new generation discovered her art and greeted it with enthusiasm. A 1973 retrospective drew positive responses. At the time of her death, her early Art Deco paintings were being shown and purchased once again. A stage play inspired in part by her life ("Tamara") ran first in Toronto, then for two years in Los Angeles (1984-1986) and subsequently at the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City (see Dec. 3, 1987 NY Times for a review).

The Baltimore Museum of Art Exhibits Prints from Dürer to Lichtenstein Posted: 15 Jun 2012 06:51 PM PDT Baltimore, MD.- "Print by Print: Series from Dürer to Lichtenstein" at the Baltimore Museum of Art from October 30th through March 25th 2012, offers a rare opportunity to view more than 350 prints by artists working in series from the late 15th through the 21st centuries, including Canaletto, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Odilon Redon, and Ed Ruscha. This sweeping exhibition presents 29 series of multiple images in complete sets — revealing the true vision of the artist, print by print. Also represented are two voices for a new generation of printmakers, Daniel Heyman and Andrew Raftery, who will speak at the BMA on Saturday, December 3rd. The Baltimore Museum of Art is home to an internationally renowned collection of 19th-century, modern, and contemporary art. Founded in 1914 with a single painting, the BMA today has 90,000 works of art — including the largest holding of works by Henri Matisse in the world.

Hirshhorn Museum to show Walead Beshty "Directions" ~ Photograms & Glass Sculptures Posted: 15 Jun 2012 06:49 PM PDT WASHINGTON, DC - This spring, the Hirshhorn Museum presents its next installation of "Directions," featuring two recent bodies of work by Los Angeles-based artist Walead Beshty. "Directions: Walead Beshty, Legibility on Color Backgrounds" opens April 30 and is on view through Sept. 13, 2009. Beshty makes use of historical formats and contemporary technologies to create works that encourage us to reconsider some of the fundamental premises of modern art. The photograms and glass sculptures featured in this exhibition, moreover, pose questions about the attributes of their respective media, the nature of abstraction, as well as the production, valuation and consumption of art.

Tate Modern Presents Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray & Francis Picabia Exhibition Posted: 15 Jun 2012 06:47 PM PDT   LONDON - Tate Modern presents Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, on view through May 26, 2008. This exhibition aims to chart the artistic and personal relationships of three of the great figures in early twentieth-century art, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia.  Together they created the Dada movement in New York during the First World War, and, unusually within the history of modern art, they remained friends, with periods of varying intensity, throughout their lives. At the heart of the friendships lay a shared outlook on life, manifested in their works through jokes and a sense of irony, iconoclastic gestures, and a pronounced, if often coded, interest in sexual relations and eroticism. Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia aims to explore the various affinities and parallels between the work of these three, showing how they responded to each others' ideas and innovations. Picabia was a painter, Man Ray worked in all media but became celebrated as a photographer and Duchamp abandoned the life of a professional artist, yet became a revered figure for later generations of artists. The exhibition begins in the 1910s, with works showing the artists' attempts to respond to and go beyond the implications of Cubism and abstraction. It will feature seminal early works including Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2) 1912 which created a furor when it was exhibited in America in 1913, Picabia's I See Again in My Memory My Dear Udnie 1913-14 and Man Rays The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows 1916. Covering the period to the end of their careers and spanning nearly 40 years, the show will also feature Duchamp's ready mades and optical experiments. It will include Man Ray's rayographs (camera-less photographs), many of the iconic photographs of the interwar years, as well as examples of his many objects. Also on display will be important later paintings by Man Ray and Picabia, including a selection of the latter's monster and late dot paintings. For the first time in Europe, Tate will show a newly-made projected version of Duchamp's major late work, Given1946-66. Unveiled only after Duchamp's death, the original work is permanently installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.   Unfolding in a loose chronology, themes explored in the exhibition include: the representation of movement; objects and their relationship to photography; light and transparency; the role of verbal allusions and puns in art; and performance and play-acting. Films by all three artists will also be shown, including Entr'acte 1924,which was scripted by Picabia and in which all three artists have cameo performances. There will be a rich section dedicated to the artists' friendships, with photographs, letters, books and magazines. Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia is curated by Jennifer Mundy, Head of Collection Research at Tate, with assistance from Nicholas Cullinan, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. It will be accompanied by a scholarly catalogue with contributions from a range of distinguished authors.The exhibition will travel to the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona from 19 June - 21 September 2008.   Visit The Tate Modern at : www.tate.org.uk/modern/

Lehmbruck Museum's Extensive Exhibition Celebrates its 100th anniversary Posted: 15 Jun 2012 06:46 PM PDT DUISBURG, GERMANY - Grace kneels in Duisburg, was forged in 1911 in a Parisian studio. For its creator Wilhelm Lehmbruck, the Kneeling Woman became a completely personal mark of creation. Affecting the art of the modern era like an impulse, with its graceful yet peculiar pose and a gesture that until that time was unique the piece has exercised an immense influence on sculpture and painting in the past hundred years. In 2011 the Kneeling Woman celebrates its anniversary, and the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg thus dedicates one of the most complex and extensive exhibitions in their history to the piece, curated by an international team managed by Marion Bornscheuer, curator of the Lehmbruck Collection and painting and graphics. Exhibition on view from 24th September to 22 January 2012.

Alfred Kubin ~ Drawings, 1897-1909 displayed at the Museum Neue Galerie New York Posted: 15 Jun 2012 06:44 PM PDT NEW YORK CITY - The Neue Galerie New York opens the exhibition "Alfred Kubin: Drawings, 1897-1909," featuring more than 100 works on paper by the Austrian artist. This is the first major museum exhibition of his work ever held in the United States, and it focuses on his macabre early drawings, watercolors, and lithographs. It will be on view at the Museum Neue Galerie through January 26, 2009. The exhibition is organized by Annegret Hoberg, curator of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

"Paint Made Flesh" Survey opens at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC Posted: 15 Jun 2012 06:42 PM PDT WASHINGTON, DC.- For generations, artists have used a wide range of painterly effects to suggest the physical properties and metaphorical significance of human flesh. The Phillips Collection presents Paint Made Flesh, a survey of figurative painting since the 1950s. Bringing together 43 provocative works from private collections and museums around the world, the exhibition features 34 internationally renowned contemporary artists rarely seen together, including Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Willem de Kooning, Alice Neel, Lucian Freud, Eric Fischl, and Julian Schnabel. Paint Made Flesh was organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tenn. Paint Made Flesh is on view at the Phillips from June 20 through Sept. 13, 2009. While in recent years figure painting has been pushed to the periphery of contemporary art, Paint Made Flesh uses some of the most celebrated examples to show how ideally suited the subject and the medium are to expressing what lies beneath the surface—the emotional, sensual, and tragic aspects of human experience. Featuring works created between 1952 and 2005 in Europe and the United States, the exhibition traces figurative painting's powerful personal and social commentary—beginning with images that convey a feeling of existential despair following World War II and culminating with recent paintings that reflect how individual identity has been altered by the forces of globalism, science, and technology. "Paint Made Flesh generates a fresh and fascinating conversation about the powerful legacy of figure painting," says Dorothy Kosinski, director of The Phillips Collection. "The exhibition, with its thoughtful juxtaposition of paintings, not only reveals the singular capacity of paint to capture the complexities of the human condition, but also broadens the scope of our collection's conversation with contemporary artists." AMERICAN ART: 1952–1975 At the same time that well-known abstract painters such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Helen Frankenthaler were abandoning the representation of tangible objects, many American artists remained preoccupied with the human figure. Artists such as Alice Neel, whose unflinching paintings are among the most powerful portraits of the 20th century, distorted the anatomy of their subjects and used an unusual color palette to express themes of poverty, despair, and turmoil. Other painters, such as Willem de Kooning, who once said "flesh is the reason oil painting was invented," used vigorous brushstrokes and deliberate vulgarity to describe feelings of anguish and anxiety. BRITISH PAINTING Drawing on the English tradition of portraiture, artists such as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon took full advantage of paint's capacity to be thick or thin, opaque or transparent, to translate the surface of flesh into expressions of psychological strength and vulnerability. Bacon dramatically smeared and scraped oily color to extract every nuance of feeling and tension, while Freud focused on the skin's various bumps, scabs, scars, and wrinkles to create powerful and riveting images of humanity. NEO-EXPRESSIONISM IN GERMANY AND THE UNITED STATES The widespread revival of figure painting in Germany and the United States during the 1970s and 1980s was often labeled neoexpressionism because it evoked the strong colors, primitive forms, and energetic brushstrokes of early-20th-century German expressionists such as Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, and Edvard Munch. German artists Georg Baselitz and A.R. Penck, who were children during the Nazi occupation, and American artists Susan Rothenberg and Julian Schnabel, combined bold colors and crudely painted figures with imagery culled from dreams, folk art, and personal obsessions to render psychological depth. FIGURE PAINTING TODAY The exhibition culminates with recent work by contemporary artists such as Tony Bevan, Wangeschi Mutu, Albert Oehlen, and Daniel Richter who show the body responding to a wave of social concerns, including new technology, disease, and threats of terrorism. They mix and adapt expressive styles to challenge perceptions of identity beyond nationality, ethnicity, religion, or politics—turning the human form into the embodiment of complex social values. This section also includes portraits from the late 1990s to 2006 by Michael Borremans, Francesco Clemente, John Currin, Eric Fischl, Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, and Lisa Yuskavage. In these works, skin is blemished, wrinkled, or otherwise made imperfect as if it is a topographical map that signifies the subject's inner psychology. Fischl's Frailty is a Moment of Self-Reflection (1996), created by the painter while mourning his father's death, is a poignant consideration of human vulnerability. By depicting skin as if it is made of parchment, Fischl has stripped away any sense of decorum or artifice to reveal a painful truth about the eroding impact of time. In contrast, portraits by Borremans, Yuskavage, and Currin combine the likeness of their subjects with cultural stereotypes derived from art history, old movie posters, and girlie pinups. In each, skin seems to be made of plastic or covered with heavy makeup, reinforcing the artificiality of the social persona while reflecting the era of plastic surgery and digital beautification. EXHIBITION ORGANIZATION AND TOUR ITINERARY Paint Made Flesh was organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tenn. The curator is Mark W. Scala, chief curator of the Frist. After its presentation at the Phillips, the exhibition will be on view at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, N.Y., from Oct. 25, 2009 to Jan. 3, 2010. EXHIBITION CATALOGUE A 126-page catalogue with 74 color illustrations accompanies the exhibition. Paint Made Flesh, published by Vanderbilt University Press, features essays by Mark Scala; Susan H. Edwards, executive director of the Frist; Emily Braun, Ph.D, distinguished professor of late-19th- and 20th-century European and American Art at Hunter College, City University of New York; and Richard Shiff, Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in art history at the University of Texas-Austin. The book is available in the Phillips Museum Shop for $29.95. Visit : http://www.phillipscollection.org/

Our Editor Views The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design In Oslo Posted: 15 Jun 2012 06:36 PM PDT The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design (Norwegian: Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design) in Oslo is the national museum of art of Norway. It was established on 1 July 2003 through a merger of the Norwegian Museum of Architecture, the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery, and the National Touring Exhibitions. In 2003 the museum was established as a foundation, merging the former Norwegian Museum of Architecture, Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, Museum of Contemporary Art and National Gallery. A new director, Sune Nordgren, was appointed, and the work of restructuring the National Museum from four separate museums began. This entailed the creation of one, split-function organization with four different exhibition venues. In April 2005, most of the staff of the National Museum moved to a new administration building in Kristian Augusts, close to Tullinløkka. On the 1 July 2005 the National Touring Exhibitions, Norway became part of the National Museum. The aims of the new museum are to 'raise the level of knowledge about and commitment to the visual arts, architecture, the decorative arts and design, develop critical faculties, stimulate new perceptions, increased historical consciousness and tolerance of diversity'. The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design lends a number of works from the Collections to exhibitions in Norway and abroad. Artworks from the National Museum are also on loan to State buildings in Norway and abroad. The National Museum is a forward-looking and innovative arena for the experience of the visual arts. At the same time it should be a safeguard for many of the nation's art treasures. With this project the nation will have a unifying and worthy National Museum, which is well- exposed, extrovert and easily accessible. The overall concept holds rationality and possesses openness that gives great opportunity for the flexibility of the different functions. At the same time the building contains of dramatic and challenging room sequences in a unique and very modern building. The experience of the project should be characterized by the interaction and synergy between the sites' distinctiveness, the different parts of the project and the overall architectural expression. The museum emerges as Norway's national icon.

Sotheby's NYC to sell Masterpieces by Puerto Rican Painters Posted: 15 Jun 2012 06:35 PM PDT   NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby's fall sales will feature two rare masterpieces by Puerto Rico's most acclaimed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists, José Campeche y Jordan (1751-1809) and Francisco Oller y Cestero (1833-1917). On the afternoon of November 12, Sotheby's London will offer Oller's epic painting La Batalla de Treviño (Est.$340 / 380,000) as part of The Spanish Sale, and on the evening of November 18, Sotheby's New York, as part of the Latin American Art Sale, will offer a fine example of one of Campeche's most beloved religious subjects, La Virgen de la Merced (Est. $150 / 200,000).

Stadel Museum shows Expressiveness of Prints from Its Collection Made by Edvard Munch Posted: 15 Jun 2012 06:34 PM PDT FRANKFURT.- The Städel Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings holds more than 80 prints by the Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863–1944), among them donations by the artist and many acquisitions already made during his life-time. Presenting these impressive treasures, the exhibition "Edvard Munch. Prints in the Städel Museum" pays tribute to the outstanding expressiveness of Edvard Munch's prints and illustrates their landmark importance for twentieth-century art. Like in his paintings, Munch mainly gave expression to psychological states and interior processes in his prints, too. With his scenic descriptions and symbolic mental landscapes, he created sheets thematizing moods and life experiences such as love, jealousy, anxiety, angst, disease, loneliness, or grief. On view through 18 October, 2009. Portraits, however, also play an important role within Munch's work as a printmaker. He captured friends from the bohemian world such as Henrik Ibsen, Stéphane Mallarmé, or August Strindberg in psychologically profound pictures. The show contextualizes this oeuvre by confronting it with selected positions of artists such as Beckmann, Gauguin, Heckel, Klinger, Redon, or Toulouse-Lautrec as they become manifest in works from the Städel's collection.  The Städel Museum will set up a special microsite under http://munch.staedelmuseum.de , which offers detailed information on the various printing techniques, the life and work of the Norwegian artist, and the works by Edvard Munch in its collection. Edvard Munch began to dedicate himself to printing at the age of 31 when he lived in Berlin. The year was 1894. The extensive oeuvre of prints he produced in Germany, Paris, and Norway throughout the following decades into his old age mirrors both his life and his fascination with the specific qualities of the chosen means of expression. Fond of experiments, he succeeded in combining the peculiar possibilities of the etching, the lithograph, and the woodcut with complex contents in a masterly and innovative way. Most of the motifs he chose resemble those of his paintings executed before. In 1894, Munch was as well known as he was controversial. It was especially the scandal around the exhibition of his paintings at the Association of Berlin Artists in 1892 – which was closed down because of the public's and the critics' outrage – that provoked a discussion on the free treatment of his objects' colors and forms. Like the French Impressionists, the Scandinavian was vehemently rejected by the conservative voices in the Berlin of that day. Doing without color, Munch at first translated decisive motifs of his paintings like "The Girl by the Window," "The Day After," or "The Sick Child" into etchings in Berlin. These early dry-point works made in the knowledge of contemporary masterpieces such as the etchings by Max Klinger (1857–1920), but obviously without having received any lengthy instructions show an astounding quality and evince Munch's promising talent. Together with five other engravings, these works are part of a portfolio with intaglio prints by Edvard Munch published by Julius Meier-Graefe in Berlin in 1895 and unsuccessfully offered for sale at the time. The Städel has been in the possession of the complete portfolio of a special edition printed on rice paper in only ten copies. Munch's first lithographs date from as early as 1894 when he did his first etchings. The more than 30 examples in this technique presented in the exhibition include impressive pictures depicting changing moods of love ("Sea of Love," "Separation," and "Vampire"). Two lithographed versions of "Jealousy" (1896) suggest a comparison with the later painting of the same name in the gallery of the Städel. Munch's "Cordon" offers a visionary commentary on the "female as an object of desire" that has a forebear in Henri Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographic oeuvre. In an unrivaled way, Munch captures difficult-to-grasp psychological states and emotions between the sexes. It is hardly perceptible how his motifs transcend the everyday world and find their equivalent in today's emotional life. As simple as his symbolically condensed feelings seem to be, as profound is the meaning pervading them. Both Eros and Thanatos are among the fundamental experiences of life which occupied the artist throughout his career. The pictures of his 15-year old sister Sophie's demise in 1877, which he witnessed and depicted again and again in varied forms in paintings and prints, number among his most powerful documents concerning the subject of death. In Paris, where he took up residence in 1896/97, he had "Death in the Sickroom" (in black on blue-grey deckle-edged paper) and "The Sick Child," an incunabulum of color lithography, printed by Auguste Clot. It was under Clot's hand, who, commissioned by Ambroise Vollard, began working on series of prints by Les Nabis (Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis) at that time, that color lithography blossomed as a new late-nineteenth-century achievement in printing technology. Many of Munch's lithographs are empathic portraits of contemporaries. He rendered his patron and friend "Harry Graf Kessler" as a subtle aesthete in 1895, working with the model in front of him and drawing directly on the stone. The portfolio "From the Linde Villa," a special kind of family portrait, was executed on behalf of the Lübeck ophthalmologist and significant sponsor Max Linde in 1902. Since the work was intended exclusively for the family's personal use, only a few copies were printed, which is why it is only rarely to be found in public collections. The exhibition also includes a number of portraits of his bohemian comrades such as the Polish poet Stanisław Przybyszewski, the writer Henrik Ibsen, and the Swedish playwright August Strindberg – the latter Munch's partner "in regard to the feminine, in drinking, and in neurosis," as Meier-Graefe put it in 1915. After having done etchings and lithographs, Munch began to try his hand at woodcuts, too, in 1896. Comparing the dry-point work "Two People" from 1894 with a color woodcut exploring the same subject from 1899 reveals the technically caused differences. But such juxtapositions also disclose how the atmosphere of silence and isolation translates into the idiom of the respective printing medium – a creative process always accompanied by the condensation of the pictorial idea and its expression in increasingly concrete terms. There were only a few artists such as Paul Gauguin and Félix Vallotton who, like Munch, in those days made use of the Japanese woodcut as the oldest known printing technique against the background of the interest developed for it in Paris. As Gauguin, thanks to his experimental attitude, began to break new ground for the woodcut around 1895, Munch also developed innovative methods of production in this field. While he printed his color woodcut "Seascape" (1897) from two blocks in the traditional way, "Two People" (1899) and "To the Forest II" (1915) are the result of a procedure hitherto unknown in this technique. Munch cut up the block with a fretsaw to apply different colors to the various parts and achieve a wide range of variants after assembling them like a puzzle. The influence Munch would exercise on subsequent artists was also based on this method, which would be taken up by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Today, the Städel Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings holds 81 prints by Edvard Munch. Edvard Munch was still alive, when, under Georg Swarzenski's directorship, the outstanding color lithograph "The Sick Girl" and two etchings were purchased for the Städtische Galerie. Further acquisitions could be made in 1912, 1914, 1916, and 1918. After the artist himself had donated 11 lithographs and woodcuts to the collection in the early 1930s, the holdings had increased to 40 works. While two of three paintings by the artist purchased in the 1920s were confiscated as "degenerate" in 1937, his prints were spared. The losses to be lamented by the Städel in the field of Expressionist prints were generously made up for by Dr. Carl Hagemann's legacy after World War II in 1948. The transferred prints of his collection also included works by Edvard Munch. Since those days, well-considered purchases were made at auctions to complement and extend the extant holdings in a reasonable manner.

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