Category Archives: Art

Tours: The Musée d’Orsay In Paris, France (4K Video)

The Musée d’Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d’Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. 

Cover Previews: Apollo Magazine – September 2021

FEATURES | Jonathan Griffin on mysticism and modern art; Yasmine Seale watches Sheila Hicks at work; Andrew Lloyd Webber gives Sophie Barling a tour of Drury Lane; Eve M. Kahn at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.; Valeria Costa-Kostritsky on the Museum of Homelessness

REVIEWS | Susan Owens on Gustave Moreau’s fables at Waddesdon; Aimee Ng on the Medici at the Met; Emilie Bickerton on Georges Méliès at the Cinémathèque Française; Peter Parker on Richard Chopping in SalisburyTom Stammers on history in the age of Romanticism; Kitty Hauser on the life of Francis Bacon; David Ekserdjian on Italian paintings at the Norton Simon; Sameer Rahim on the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus; Rebecca Ann Hughes on the tricks of the white-truffle trade
 
MARKET | Jo Lawson-Tancred selects her highlights of TEFAF Online; and the latest art market columns from Susan MooreEmma Crichton-Miller and Samuel Reilly
 
PLUS | Susan Moore and Niru Ratnam ask if the art world has a sense of humourDiane Smyth on the rise of falling in photography; Martin Herbert at the restored Neue Nationalgalerie in BerlinWilliam Dunbar on a cave monastery in Georgia; Gillian Darley on the visions of Joseph Gandy; Robert O’Byrne on the forgotten art of Ignazio Hugford

Views: ‘Richard Chopping: The Original Bond Artist’

In April 1956, at the suggestion of his friend Francis Bacon, Richard Chopping took the society hostess Ann Fleming to see some of his trompe l’oeil paintings, which were then on show at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery in Mayfair. Impressed by these pictures, Fleming invited the artist to meet her husband, Ian, who was looking for someone to provide dust-jacket illustrations for his James Bond novels.

Peter Parker
 31 AUGUST 2021

Chopping was immediately offered the job, and his striking designs remain the work for which he is best known and are, for many collectors, the reason the novels are particularly prized.

As this small but imaginatively curated exhibition demonstrates, there was a great deal more to Chopping than James Bond. Nevertheless, the highly detailed, finely executed and often macabre paintings he produced for Fleming are characteristic of his work as a whole. Born in Essex in 1917, Chopping moved to London at the age of 18 with little idea of what he wanted to do, but soon got a job on the magazine Decorations of the Modern Home.

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Museum Tour: The Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

Musée Marmottan Monet features over three hundred Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, including his 1872 Impression, Sunrise. Marmottan Museum’s fame is the result of a donation in 1966 by Michel Monet, Claude’s second son and only heir. 

Art Exhibitions: ‘Jasper Johns – Mind/Mirror’ In Philadelphia & New York

September 29, 2021–February 13, 2022 – Few artists have shaped the contemporary artistic landscape like Jasper Johns. With a body of work spanning seventy years, and a roster of iconic images that have imprinted themselves on the public’s consciousness, Johns at ninety-one is still creating extraordinary artworks.

This vast, unprecedented retrospective—simultaneously staged at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York—features a stunning array of the artist’s most celebrated paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints as well as many lesser-known and recent works. Each a self-contained exhibition, the two related halves mirror one another and provide rare insight into the working process of one of the greatest artists of our time.

Jasper Johns is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker whose work is associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art. He is well known for his depictions of the American flag and other US-related topics. 

Art Books: ‘Caravaggio – The Complete Works’

Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da  Caravaggio  (1571–1610), was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of Italian painting, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial: violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. Today, he is considered one of the greatest influences in all art history.

This edition offers a neat and comprehensive Caravaggio catalogue raisonné. Each of his paintings is reproduced from recent top-quality photography, allowing for a vivid encounter with the artist’s ingenious repertoire of looks and gestures, as well as numerous detail shots of his boundary-breaking naturalism. Five accompanying chapters trace the complete arc of Caravaggio’s career from his first public commissions in Rome through to his growing celebrity status and trace his tempestuous personal life, in which drama loomed as prominently as in his canvases.

The author

Sebastian Schütze was a longtime research fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History) in Rome. He is a member of the academic board of the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples, and a member of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. From 2003 to 2009 he held the Bader Chair in Southern Baroque Art at Queen’s University in Kingston. In 2009 he was appointed professor of early modern art history at Vienna University.

New Art Books: ‘Vermeer – The Complete Works’

In his lifetime, however, the fame of Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) barely extended beyond his native Delft and a small circle of patrons. After his death, his name was largely forgotten, except by a few Dutch art collectors and dealers. 

TASCHEN

Despite numbering at just 35, his works have prompted a New York Times best seller; a film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth; record visitor numbers at art institutions from Amsterdam to Washington, DC; and special crowd-control measures at the Mauritshuis, The Hague, where thousands flock to catch a glimpse of the enigmatic and enchanting Girl with a Pearl Earring, also known as the “Dutch Mona Lisa”.

Outside of Holland, his works were even misattributed to other artists. It was not until the mid-19th century that Vermeer came to the attention of the international art world, which suddenly looked upon his narrative minutiae, meticulous textural detail, and majestic planes of light, spotted a genius, and never looked back.

This 40th anniversary edition showcases the complete catalog of Vermeer’s work, presenting the calm yet compelling scenes so treasured in galleries across Europe and the United States into one monograph of utmost reproduction quality. Crisp details and essays tracing Vermeer’s career illuminate his remarkable ability not only to bear witness to the trends and trimmings of the Dutch Golden Age but also to encapsulate an entire story in just one transient gesture, expression, or look.

The author

After completing his studies of art history and archaeology at the University of Vienna, Karl Schütz joined the staff of the Gemäldegalerie of the city’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, serving from 1972 as a curator and from 1990 to 2011 as its director. His particular scholarly interests include Netherlandish and Flemish painting, early-16th-century German painting, courtly portraiture, and the history of the Gemäldegalerie collection.

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Met Museum Exhibit Tour: The Medici – Portraits And Politics, 1512-1570 (Video)

Join exhibition curator Keith Christiansen and Renaissance art historians Linda Wolk-Simon and Davide Gasparatto in conversation about the exhibition “The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570,” and the development of the Florentine identity through portraits under Cosimo I de’ Medici’s rule. Film made possible by the generous support of The Brownstein Family Foundation, a Patron Member of The Friends of the Bargello. Learn more about the exhibition “The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570” on The Met’s website: https://www.metmuseum.org/MediciPortr…

Art: Vasudeo S. Gaitonde’s “Painting 4” – The Abstract Artist ‘Haven From Chaos’

Cara Manes, Associate Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, discovers a haven from the chaos of the everyday amid the “silence” and imperfection of Vasudeo S. Gaitonde’s “Painting, 4.”

Vasudeo S. Gaitonde was regarded as one of India’s foremost abstract painters. He received the Padma Shri Award in 1971.