Category Archives: Art

Top Upcoming Art Books: “Leonor Fini – Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings”

Leonor Fini - Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings 2020Leonor Fini (1907–96) is one of the most important artists and personalities of the twentieth century. Her work came to prominence as part of the 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where her paintings were widely celebrated for their uniquely female approach to surrealism—although Fini never joined the surrealist movement.

0826a7ee73c580dba81b75756d38f812Self-made and self-taught, she preferred to work on her own and was known for her fierce independence and provocative panache. A prolific painter, Fini also wrote, worked extensively in book illustration and printmaking, and designed for plays, ballets, operas, and film.

Presenting the definitive catalogue raisonné of Leonor Fini’s more than 1,100 oil paintings, this book brings together more than one thousand color illustrations and essays on her work by Fini experts Richard Overstreet and Neil Zukerman and a concise, up-to-date biography by British art historian Peter Webb.

Richard Overstreet is an American artist and photographer. In 1998, he founded the Leonor Fini Archives in Paris.

Neil Zukerman is the owner of the CFM Gallery in New York. He is an expert of Leonor Fini’s work and author of several books about her.

Peter Webb is an art historian and has published extensively on art and artists of the 20th century. He formerly taught at the Coventry College of Art, the Hornsey College of Art and the Middlesex University in London.

Leonor Fini (1907- 1996) was an Argentinian surrealist painter, designer, illustrator, and author, known for her depictions of powerful women.

Read more 

Cocktails With A Curator: Boucher’s ‘A Lady On Her Daybed’ (Frick Collection)

In this episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, examines the life and work of French painter François Boucher, with a focus on “A Lady on Her Daybed.” Discover why Boucher was said to epitomize the taste of the eighteenth century.

This week’s complementary cocktail has a kick: the potent French 75, named after the powerful French 75mm field gun.

Read more

Art History: “The Lives of Caravaggio” (The Getty)

Art + Ideas - Getty PodcastsMichelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is one of the most admired painters of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Known for his powerful, dramatically lit compositions, Caravaggio depicted violence and the human form with a degree of realism unprecedented at the time. He was among the most famous painters in Rome—but not only because of his skill as an artist.

Michelangelo Merisi da CaravaggiCaravaggio was also notorious for his wild life and shocking temper. After being sentenced to death for murder, he fled Rome and died in exile at age 38 . Three biographies written in the decades after his death constitute nearly all that is known about the enigmatic artist.

In this episode, Getty curator and expert on Italian painting Davide Gasparatto discusses Caravaggio and the role these early biographies, by Giulio Mancini, Giovanni Baglione, and Giovanni Pietro Bellori, played in defining Caravaggio’s legacy.

Top New Art Books: “Alice Trumbull Mason – Pioneer of American Abstraction”

Alice Trumbull Mason Pioneer of American Abstraction - Rizzoli May 2020The first comprehensive publication exploring the life and art of pioneering American abstract artist Alice Trumbull Mason is perfect for audiences eager to discover unsung yet brilliantly talented women artists.

A groundbreaking artist, Alice Trumbull Mason (1904-1971) was one of the earliest painters of the twentieth century to embrace abstract painting in America. Mason’s early paintings have been compared to those of Gorky, Kandinsky, and Miró, and in 1936 she became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) and one of its leaders in the promotion of abstract work by artists such as Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt, Piet Mondrian, and many others. Mason was a true artist’s artist whose efforts helped lead to the great movements of later twentieth-century art, such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Post-Modernism, and Conceptual Art.

Rizzoli BooksAlice Trumbull Mason features essays that illuminate and contextualize the artist’s multifaceted work and personal life through her paintings, prints, poetry, and letters. The book reveals the full life story of a seminal abstractionist, making a sound argument for adding her to the annals of great twentieth-century artists.

About The Author

Elisa Wouk Almino is senior editor of HyperallergicMarilyn Brown is professor emerita of art history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Tulane University. Meghan Forbes is a postdoctoral fellow in the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Will Heinrich writes about art for The New Yorker and the New York TimesThomas Micchelli is an artist, writer, and coeditor of Hyperallergic WeekendChristina Weyl is an art historian and curator with a focus on midcentury American printmaking and women artists.

Read more or purchase

Top Photographers: 65-Year Old William Neill “Light On The Landscape”

Drawing from the tradition of behind-the-scenes books like Ansel Adams’ Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs and Galen Rowell’s Mountain Light: In Search of the Dynamic Landscape, Light on the Landscape covers in detail the core photographic fundamentals such as light, composition, camera angle, and exposure choices, but it also deftly considers those subjects that are less frequently examined: portfolio development, marketing, printmaking, nature stewardship, inspiration, preparation, self-improvement, and more. The result is a profound and wide-ranging exploration of that magical convergence of light, land, and camera.

Light On The Landscape - William Neill 2020

For more than two decades, William Neill has been offering his thoughts and insights about photography and the beauty of nature in essays that cover the techniques, business, and spirit of his photographic life. Curated and collected here for the first time, and accompanying 128 beautiful reproductions of Neill’s photographs, these essays are both pragmatic and profound, offering readers an intimate look behind the scenes at Neill’s creative process behind individual photographs as well as a discussion of the larger and more foundational topics that are key to his philosophy and approach to work.

Light On The Landscape - William Neill 2020

Website

Filled with beautiful and inspiring photographs, Light on the Landscape is also full of the kind of wisdom that only comes from a deeply thoughtful photographer who has spent a lifetime communicating with a camera. Incorporating the lessons within the book, you too can learn to achieve not only technically excellent and beautiful images, but photographs that truly rise above your best and reveal your deeply personal and creative perspective―your vision, your voice.

Read more or purchase

Art History: “Auguste Rodin – The Father Of Modern Sculpture”

From Christie’s online magazine (May 2020):

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) Meditation, small model, type I version
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) Meditation, small model, type I version

Rodin travelled to Italy in 1875, a trip described by the late art historian Kirk Varnedoe as, ‘one of the seminal events in modern art’.

Here, in his mid-thirties, he fell under the spell of the Renaissance master, Michelangelo. His monumental, exaggerated nude figures would have a deep and lasting influence on the artist. ‘My liberation from academicism was via Michelangelo,’ Rodin later recalled. ‘He is the bridge by which I passed from one circle to another.’

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is renowned for breathing life into clay, creating naturalistic, often vigorously modelled sculptures which convey intense human emotions: love, ecstasy, agony or grief. Breaking the rules of academic convention and classical idealism, Rodin ushered in a new form of highly expressive sculpture that went on to influence generations of artists that followed.

Christie's logo

Read full article at Christie’s

 

Art History: “Cocktails With A Curator – Turner’s ‘Harbor Of Dieppe'” (Frick)

In this episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, discusses the French port city depicted in J. M. W. Turner’s painting “Harbor of Dieppe: Changement de Domicile,” and how the artist’s extensive travel throughout Europe helped to develop his affinity for harbors. The complementary cocktail is the Widow’s Kiss, a French drink traditionally given to women who had lost their husbands at sea.

To see this painting in detail, please visit our website: https://collections.frick.org/objects…

 

Top Digital Magazines: “The Brooklyn Rail – May 2020” – Arts & Culture

AUDREY FLACK with Charles Duncan

“When you’re alone in the studio, and your life is turned upside down by something, it’s you and the work.”

Art In Conversation

HENRI LOYRETTE with Joachim Pissaro

Read The Brooklyn Rail May 2020 Issue

Art History Video: “Travels With a Curator – Lazienki Palace” In Warsaw (Frick)

In this episode of “Travels with a Curator,” we travel to Warsaw, Poland, with Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. Xavier enchants us with the romantic Łazienki Park and Palace, also known as the Palace on the Isle. The idyllic gardens and ornately decorated interior spaces are similar in many ways to our own Frick mansion. One of the Frick’s Rembrandt paintings, “The Polish Rider,” once hung in the royal apartments on the second floor.

Art Podcasts: Six Top U.S. Museum Directors Discuss Closures, Reopening & Role In Society (The Getty)

Art + Ideas - Getty PodcastsIn this two-part series, six US museum directors discuss the pandemic and its repercussions for their institutions. These candid, insightful conversations address wide-ranging topics, from the logistical challenges of when to close and how to reopen to philosophical exchanges about the role of museums in society.

This first episode features Max Hollein of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Kaywin Feldman of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and James Rondeau of the Art Institute of Chicago.

This second episode features Matthew Teitelbaum of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Ann Philbin of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and Timothy Potts of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Website