Category Archives: Art

New Exhibitions: “Cézanne – The Rock and Quarry Paintings” (Princeton)

Cézanne The Rock and Quarry Paintings book edited by John Elderfield April 2020Cézanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings is the first major exhibition to examine an essential but understudied aspect of the revolutionary French painter’s work: his profound interest in rock and geological formations.

Throughout his career, Cézanne made canvases that take rock formations as their principal subjects. Although they are among the artist’s most extraordinary landscapes, such paintings of geological forms have never before been the focus of significant scholarship.

Cézanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings will feature approximately 15 of the most important of these paintings, as well as selected watercolors and related documentary material. Together, they reveal the artist’s fascination with geology, which helped shape the radical innovations of his artistic practice

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Art Lectures: “Science In The 17th Century Dutch Golden Age” (MFA Boston)

Peer through the lens of flourishing 17th-century Dutch technological innovation to witness wondrous advancements in science, including astronomy and medicine.

Harold J. Cook, John F. Nickoll Professor of History, Brown University

Artists: Spanish Painter Joan Miró’s “Endlessly Creative” Printmaking

Excerpts from a Christie’s online article (Feb 28, 2020):

Joan Miró Christie's
Joan Miró

Like Pablo Picasso, his compatriot and peer, Miró had an unwavering commitment to printmaking. Also like Picasso, he created more than 2,000 works in the medium. It’s often said that Miró’s fondness for calligraphic lines — such a distinctive feature of his paintings — lent itself naturally to graphic work.

‘In terms of both the quality and quantity of his output, Joan Miró was one of the most important printmakers of the 20th century,’ says Murray Macaulay, Head of Prints at Christie’s in London.

Joan Miró Prints Christie'sThe son of a watchmaker, Joan Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893. He moved to Paris in the early 1920s and soon joined the Surrealist movement. He also befriended a host of avant-garde writers, such as Max Jacob, Tristan Tzara, Antonin Artaud, André Breton and Paul Eluard.

The first prints Miró ever made were illustrations for Tzara’s 1930 book of poems, L’arbre des Voyageurs. Literary sources would prove to be a constant inspiration for him, with notable examples including Alfred Jarry’s play, Ubu Roi; Stephen Spender’s poem, Fraternity; and the mystic, medieval text, Canticle of the Sun, by St Francis of Assisi.

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Exhibitions: Press Preview Of “Michelangelo – Mind Of The Master” (The Getty)

A film by Eric Minh Swenson.

Michelangelo was one of the most creative and influential artists in the history of Western art. This exhibition explores the full range of his work as a painter, sculptor, and architect through more than two dozen of his extraordinary drawings, including designs for celebrated projects such as the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Medici Chapel tombs, and The Last Judgment. These studies and sketches enable us to witness Michelangelo at work, and to experience firsthand his boundless creativity and his pioneering representation of the human form.

This exhibition has been organized by the Teylers Museum, Haarlem in collaboration with the J. Paul Getty Museum and The Cleveland Museum of Art. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

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Surrealism: “Midnight In Paris, 1929″(Dalí Museum)

Excerpts from a Wall Street Journal online review (Feb 25, 2020):

Midnight in Paris Surrealism at the Crossroads 1929 Special Exhibit Dali MuseumMasson, a founding Surrealist, saw the movement as an immersion “into what the German romantics call the night side of things.” However, “towards 1930,” Masson wrote, “a formidable disaster appeared in its midst: the demagogy of the irrational.” “Midnight in Paris” touches on Surrealism’s highs and lows, its darkness, poetry, beauty and banalities, reminding viewers—at the heart of the Dalí Museum, no less—that the movement is much, much more than melting watches.

In 1920s Paris, Surrealist revolution and transgression were in the air, but not everyone agreed on how to make Surrealist works or what they should look like. “Midnight in Paris: Surrealism at the Crossroads, 1929,” an exhibition of 80 paintings, prints, sculptures, drawings, collages, photographs, films and documents at St. Petersburg’s Dalí Museum, proposes to examine Surrealism’s rich visual fabric, conflicts and rivalries during the movement’s heyday in the City of Light. Organized by Didier Ottinger, deputy director of the Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Pompidou, and William Jeffett, chief curator of special exhibitions at the Dalí, it focuses on the moment just before Surrealism burst onto and began to dominate the world stage.

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Exhibitions: Inside Look At “Picasso And Paper”, Royal Academy Of Arts (Video)

Join Curator Ann Dumas for a view inside the ‘Picasso and Paper’ exhibition, which features works spanning the artist’s entire career. Can you guess which work the artist made when he was just nine years old?

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Media: “Smithsonian Open Access” – 2.8 Million Images Into Public Domain

People everywhere can now download, remix and share Smithsonian Open Access content for any purpose, for free, from portraits of historic Americans to 3D scans of dinosaur fossils. What will you create, imagine and discover?

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Top New Art Books: “Ten In One – The Impressionists” (Taschen, March 2020)

Ten In One Impressionism The Birth of Light in Painting Taschen March 2020The lives and oeuvres of Impressionist pillars Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Rousseau, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, and van Gogh are each explored in-depth in TASCHEN’s Basic Art series. Now, this volume combines all 10 monographs into one for the price of three.

“These seductive books have slick production values, excellent illustrations, and smart texts. Each one is a fast-food, high-energy fix on the topic at hand.” – The New York Times Book Review

This book gathers ten Basic Art monographs into one volume featuring:

  • Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Rousseau, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, and van Gogh
  • a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of each artist, covering their cultural and historical importance
  • approximately 1,000 illustrations with explanatory captions

Ten In One Impressionism The Birth of Light in Painting Taschen March 2020

With blockbuster exhibitions, record-breaking auction prices, and packed museums, Impressionism remains close contender for the world’s favorite period of painting. Its favorite subjects— from dappled harbor scenes and summer days to vibrant Parisian salons and gardens—brim with optimism and joie de vivre. The works once dismissed as unfinished or imprecise are now beloved for their atmospheric evocation of time and place, as well as the stylistic flair of rapid brushstrokes upon canvas.

What we take for granted today—the relativity of perception depending on the viewer, lighting mood, or location to the object—was then the inspiration for some of the finest paintings in art history. Consider Monet’s 30+ variations of the Rouen Cathedral, Cézanne’s dazzling experimentation with color, Gauguin’s primitivist innovations, or Manet’s scandalous nudes: rarely has a single genre produced so many brilliant artists in such a short time.

Since 1985, TASCHEN’s Basic Art series has published some 200 individual volumes, making it the world’s most successful art-book series. Each title contains an extensive text on the artist’s life and work, a detailed biography, and some 100 high-quality color illustrations with explanatory captions. With Ten in One, TASCHEN now presents ten Basic Art monographs in one volume. A must for every art lover!

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Art Lecture Videos: The History Of Hollywood “Horror Movie Posters” (Columbia Museum Of Art)

Recorded February 14, 2020 at the Columbia Museum of Art.

Daniel Finamore, curator of It’s Alive! Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Art from the Kirk Hammett Collection talks about the exhibition and where these posters fit into the canon It's Alive Columbia Museum of ART History of Horror Movie Posters video Feb 20 2020of art history. Finamore is the curator of Maritime Art and History at the Peabody Essex Museum. Best known as lead guitarist of the famed rock band Metallica, Kirk Hammett is also an obsessive collector of visually arresting horror and sci-fi film art and has dedicated the last three decades to creating one of the world’s most important collections.

It’s Alive! features more than 100 pieces of graphic art, many hailing back to the days of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, that have seeped into the public imagination and reflected society’s deepest fears and anxieties for nearly a century. Not only do these objects explore the power of graphic art in its own right, they have inspired Hammett’s work throughout his own artistic career.

Organized by the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.

Top Exhibitions: 54-Year Old British Photographer David Yarrow – “Living On Earth” (Maddox Gallery)

Photographer David Yarrow
Photographer David Yarrow

For more than two decades, legendary British photographer David Yarrow has been putting himself in harm’s way to capture immersive photography of the world’s most revered and endangered species.

Featuring a selection of Yarrow’s most iconic photographs, ‘Living On Earth’ highlights the beauty of the endangered planet and the art of narrative as conveyed by one of the most relevant fine art photographers in the world.

Maddox Gallery ‘WHITE HORSES’ Living On Earth Exhibition David Yarrow Feb 13 - March 10 2020
‘WHITE HORSES’

David Yarrow’s commitment to ‘capturing the splendour of what remains wild and free in our world’ allowed him to transcend wildlife photography and become one of the world’s leading fine art photographers. He has travelled pole to pole, to the world’s most remote habitats to allow us a glimpse of the truly untamed. The resulting images are unerringly iconic and connect with us on a primal level; of curiosity, desire, and fear.

Maddox Gallery Living On Earth by David Yarrow Catalog Cover
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