Category Archives: Art

Exhibitions: ‘New Terrains- Native American Art’ (2024)

Phillips (January 16, 2024) – Curators Tony Abeyta and James Trotta-Bono explore highlights from New Terrains: Contemporary Native American Art, which they curated alongside Bruce Hartman.

The exhibition provides context for the evolution of contemporary Native art, including the influence of modernism, post-war, and pop art.

New Terrains: Contemporary Native American Art New York Exhibition 5–23 January

Join the pair as they reveal works by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Fritz Scholder (Luiseño), Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation), and more.

Art Museum Exhibitions: ‘Nicolas de Staël’ In Paris

ART VISION TV / C&B Films (January 13, 2024) – The Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris is devoting a major retrospective to Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955), a French painter of Russian origin known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting. He was a key figure on the post-war French art scene.

Twenty years after the one organised by the Centre Pompidou in 2003, this exhibition offers a fresh look at the artist’s work, drawing on more recent thematic exhibitions that have highlighted certain little-known aspects of his career (Antibes in 2014, Le Havre in 2014, Aix-en-Provence in 2018).

Art: Photographer Wayne Parsons’ “Imagined Images”

FRAMES (January 13, 2024) – Wayne is a New York City-based photographer. His education includes a BA in physics from the University of Mississippi and a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.

He was a late-comer to photography, buying his first camera when he turned forty and studying black-and-white technique at the International Center of Photography. His interests expanded to color imagery when he adopted digital photography in 2001.

He also reviews photography exhibitions for the New York Photo Review. He is a long-time member and past president of Soho Photo Gallery.

Explore more of Wayne’s work on his website at https://www.rwayneparsons.com/.

Elton John’s ‘Exuberant Art’ Collection In Atlanta

Christie’s (January 11, 2024) – The Rocket Man singer and his husband, David Furnish, discuss the Peachtree Road residence where the pop legend became a ‘serious collector’ of exuberant art and objects.

In 1991 when Sir Elton John bought a duplex-apartment at Park Place on Peachtree Road in Atlanta’s coveted Buckhead neighbourhood, he couldn’t have imagined the extent to which the city would transform him personally and professionally.

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Fine Art: The Burlington Magazine – January 2024

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The Burlington Magazine – January 3, 2024: The new issue features ‘The Golden Age of Avignon’ – Avignon as ‘New Rome’; Rubens and women; Tiepolo in New York; Gertrude Stein and Picasso, and more….

China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta

A vivid photograph of a lotus pond ushers visitors into this ambitious exhibition on the arts and culture of Jiangnan. Lying to the south of the Yangtze – its name literally means ‘south of the river’ – this part of China includes such major cities as Shanghai, Hangzhou and Suzhou. Curated by Clarissa von Spee, Chair of Asian Art and the James and Donna Reid Curator of Chinese Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), this is the first exhibition outside China to present an encyclopaedic view of the cultural history of this historically affluent region. 

The Walpole Society

Ever since the Walpole Society was founded in London in 1911 ‘with the object of promoting the study of the history of British art’, The Burlington Magazine has taken a close interest in an organisation with aims and principles so close to our own: this is the sixth Editorial we have devoted to the subject. The first, written by the art historian August F. Jaccaci, who edited the Magazine’s ‘Art in America’ section, appeared in 1913 on the occasion of the publication of the first of the annual volumes that are the society’s raison d’être.

International Art: Apollo Magazine – January 2024

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Apollo Magazine (December 23, 2023): The new January 2024 issue features ‘The Last Days of Vincent Van Gogh’; What’s in store for the art market?; Paris pays tribute to Agnès Varda, and more…

Breath of fresh air – Gerhard Richter in the Alps

Three exhibitions in the Engadin Valley explore how the Swiss mountains have inspired some of the painter’s most playful work

Remembering the festive geese of Christmas past

The festive bird has often been served up by artists and writers including J.M.W. Turner and Charles Dickens

Exhibits: ‘Medieval Money, Merchants, And Morality’ At The Morgan Library NYC

The Morgan Library & Museum (December 18, 2023) – Diane Wolfthal, David and Caroline Minter Chair Emerita in the Humanities and Professor Emerita of Art History, Rice University, and Dei Jackson, Assistant Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts here at the Morgan, discuss their current exhibition “Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality,” which charts the economic revolution that took place at the end of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance.

“Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality” is open to the public November 10, 2023 through March 10, 2024.

Trade was conducted on an unprecedented scale, banks were established, and coinage proliferated like never before. The widespread use of money in everyday life transformed every aspect of European society, including its values and culture. Bringing together some of the most acclaimed manuscripts in the Morgan’s collection and other exceptional objects including a renaissance purse, a brass alms box, and a hoard of coins, this exhibition will explore the fate of the avaricious, attitudes towards the poor, contentious lending practices, and money management.

The famous Hours of Catherine of Cleves, the Hours of Henry VIII, and the Prayer Book of Queen Claude de France will be presented from a decidedly new angle, combining economic and art history to consider the early history of capitalism and the crisis in values that it sparked. These will feature alongside lesser known treasures, including an Italian account book in its original binding and a stunning leaf from a register of creditors made in Bologna, Italy, in 1394–95. As people today reflect on fluctuating markets, disparities in wealth, personal values, and morality, the themes addressed in this exhibition are as relevant as ever.

Art Books: “David Hockney – Normandy Portraits”

David Hockney: Normandy Portraits

David Hockney Normandy Portraits ARTBOOK | D.A.P. 2023 Catalog Books  Exhibition Catalogues 9781855145870

A compact album presentation of Hockney’s newest explorations in portraiture

Artbook D.A.P.:

This concise volume illustrates around 40 acrylic on canvas works painted by David Hockney (born 1937) at his Normandy studio—depicting his friends and visitors, as well as the artist himself. David Hockney: Normandy Portraits showcases a series of some previously unseen portraits, across 48 pages, uninterrupted by text, to allow readers to engage directly with the artworks.

These new works highlight the ongoing importance of portraiture within the artist’s practice and demonstrate his sentiment that “drawings and paintings … are a lot better than photographs to give you a sense of the person.”

Hockney returned to painting after an intensive period spent depicting the Normandy landscape using an iPad. The portraits were painted quickly and directly onto the canvas without underdrawing. As Hockney has said, “to do a portrait slowly is a bit of a contradiction.”

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New York Times Reviews: Best Art Books In 2023

Photographs of the covers of six of the books discussed, featuring drawings, photographs and colorful paintings.

The New York Times Books (December 14, 2023): Best Art Books of 2023 – The art critics of The Times select their favorites, from Botticelli to Vermeer, Lucy Lippard’s memoir, and Wade Guyton’s intelligent rereading of Manet.

‘Botticelli Drawings’ By Furio Rinaldi (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/Yale).

Botticelli’s portrait of Simonetta Vespucci, in profile, shows how the artist’s effortless squiggles cohere into the subject’s curly hair.

His strawberry-blond Venus on a wind-propelled scallop shell still pulls Florence’s tourists from the gelateria to the Uffizi — but a rarer Botticelli feast is currently on offer in San Francisco, where the Legion of Honor is presenting the first exhibition ever of this Renaissance master’s fragile drawings (through Feb. 11). In this authoritative catalog, Rinaldi makes several new attributions, including two exquisite head studies of a man gazing upward and a woman with modestly lowered eyes. For a Florentine in the later 15th century, the core of painting was disegno (“design,” but also “drawing”), and Botticelli put drawing first. Delicate highlights of white and yellow show the light on tensed muscles or bowed heads. Effortless squiggles cohere into Simonetta Vespucci’s curled hair or John the Baptist’s camel cloak. His line feels spring-loaded; his saints and angels seem ready for the dance floor; his paintings’ grace and vigor started with a pen.

‘Abraham Ángel: Between Wonder and Seduction’ Edited by Mark A. Castro (Dallas Museum of Art; distributed by Yale University Press).

A portrait, in profile, of the artist Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, in dominant brown colors.

Like Vermeer, the Mexican portraitist Abraham Ángel, who died at age 19 in 1924, left little behind. His 20 extant works (on view in Dallas through next January) reproduce beautifully in a slim but convincing catalog that doesn’t overstate the case. Ángel’s preferred substrate was cardboard, and the bumpy nap of it really shows in these pages. So do the Fauve-like colors he used to outline his sitters. (Instead of black he preferred blues and browns, as Alice Neel would.) Playfully primitive, these knowing likenesses (among them Ángel’s tutor and lover, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano) combined Mexico’s burgeoning populist aesthetic with a private romanticism that seems nonetheless to have sought clarity on the promise of his country’s Revolution.

‘Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction’ Edited by Lynne Cooke (University of Chicago Press).

A wall hanging from “Woven Histories.”

This major looker of an exhibition catalog loosens up the warp and weft of conventional views of modern art — all those tight-knotted hierarchical categories (high versus low, art versus craft) on which our institutions and markets still rest — and demonstrates the universe of formal and conceptual brilliance that has always traveled on a parallel track. The sheer variety of work produced by more than 50 artists chosen by the book’s editor, Lynne Cooke, will knock your socks off. (Just wait till you see what’s happening in the field of basketry alone.) So will the visual imaginations of individual geniuses we already know like Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Gego, Lenore Tawney and Sheila Hicks, and the others we’re introduced to here.

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Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (December 8, 2023): This week: the final big art market event of the year, Art Basel in Miami Beach. The Art Newspaper’s associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, talks to our acting art market editor, Tim Schneider, in Miami about the fair, as tensions rise ahead of the pivotal 2024 US election.

In Athens, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, or EMST, is next week opening a months-long programme which will end up with the entire museum filled with women artists. We talk to EMST’s director, Katerina Gregos, about the programme, called What if Women Ruled the World? And this episode’s Work of the Week is two objects: the 15th-century Florentine artist Francesco Pesellino’s panels telling the story of David and Goliath, made for a luxurious cassone or chest for the Medici family.

The panels belong to the National Gallery in London and have just been restored for a new exhibition there, Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed. We talk to Jill Dunkerton, who did the restoration, about these extraordinary paintings.

Art Basel in Miami Beach, Miami Beach Convention Center, until Sunday, 10 December.

What if Women Ruled the World? begins at EMST, Athens, on 14 December.Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed, National Gallery, London, until 10 March 2024.