The beauty of nature 🌊
— National Gallery of Art (@ngadc) April 22, 2022
Celebrate #EarthDay with a close look at Frederic Edwin Church’s 1857 masterpiece, “Niagara.” ✨ pic.twitter.com/1Lruqtl1Q4
Category Archives: Arts & Literature
Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’
A Venice Biennale special: we give you a flavour of the 59th edition of the Biennale which, as ever, brings a deluge of contemporary art to the historic Italian city.
We talk to four artists in the national pavilions – Francis Alÿs in the Belgian Pavilion, Sonia Boyce in the British pavilion, Shubigi Rao in the Singapore pavilion and Na Chainkua Reindorf in the Ghana pavilion – about their presentations and how, if at all, they relate to the idea of nationhood. Louisa Buck and Jane Morris join host Ben Luke to review the main exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani, and pick their highlights of the Biennale so far. And while most visitors to Venice this week are immersed in contemporary art, for this episode’s Work of the Week, we take a look at a masterpiece that remains exactly where it was intended to hang. The art historian Ben Street joins Ben Luke in San Giovanni Crisostomo, a church near Venice’s Rialto bridge, to look at Saints Christopher, Jerome and Louis of Toulouse, a late painting by the Venetian Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini.
Venice Biennale, 23 April-27 November.
Art Exhibitions: ‘Winslow Homer – Crosscurrents’
Join Stephanie Herdrich, Associate Curator of American Painting and Sculpture, and Sylvia Yount, Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge—both of the American Wing—for a virtual tour of “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents.” This ambitious survey reconsiders Homer’s work through the lens of conflict, a theme that crosses his prolific career.
A persistent fascination with struggle permeates his art—from emblematic images of the Civil War and Reconstruction that examine the effects of the conflict on the landscape, soldiers, and formerly enslaved to dramatic scenes of rescue and hunting as well as monumental seascapes and dazzling tropical works painted throughout the Atlantic world.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is Homer’s iconic “The Gulf Stream” (The Met), a painting that reveals his lifelong engagement with charged subjects of race and the environment. Featuring 88 oils and watercolors, “Crosscurrents” represents the largest critical overview of Homer’s art and life in more than a quarter of a century.
Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’
This week: Tom Seymour talks to the photographer Edward Burtynsky as he is recognised for his Outstanding Contribution to his medium in the Sony World Photography Awards. He discusses the Russian invasion and his Ukrainian heritage.
In this episode’s Work of the Week, we look at Winslow Homer’s most famous work, The Gulf Stream (1899, reworked by 1906), which is at the heart of a new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Sylvia Yount and Stephanie Herdrich, the curators of the exhibition, discuss the making, reception and legacy of the painting. And we talk to Lisa Movius about the decision by the Nord regional government in France to suspend plans for the exhibition Matisse by Matisse—a collaboration between Musée Matisse le Cateau-Cambrésis and the private Beijing museum UCCA—over China’s supposedly neutral position on Russia’s invasion. Will other Western authorities or arts organisations follow suit?
Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition 2022, Somerset House, London, until 2 May. Edward Burtynsky’s multimedia project In the Wake of Progress is at the Luminato Festival, Toronto, 11-12 June.
Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until 31 July. Winslow Homer: Force of Nature, National Gallery, London, 10 September-8 January 2023.
Reviews: The Week In Art
This week: Quiet as It’s Kept, the 80th edition of the Whitney Biennial, is now open to the public at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
The Art Newspaper’s associate editor Tom Seymour, Americas editor Ben Sutton and staff reporter Gabriella Angeletti gather to discuss it. As the latest incarnation of the show Afro-Atlantic Histories is unveiled at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, we speak to its curator, Kanitra Fletcher, about the gallery’s approach to this complex subject. And the National Gallery in London’s long-planned Raphael blockbuster, postponed due to the pandemic, is finally open, so for this episode’s Work of the Week, we speak to Tom Henry, one of the curators of the show, about the Self-Portrait with Giulio Romano (1519-20), one of the Renaissance master’s final paintings.
Contemporary Art Fairs: ‘Art Paris 2022’ (Video)
The Leading Spring Event for Modern and Contemporary Art
Boosted by the success of the September 2021 edition that inaugurated the Grand Palais Éphémère on the Champ-de-Mars with a record-breaking 72,745 visitors, Art Paris is back from 7 to 10 April 2022 with a strong selection of 130 modern and contemporary galleries from some twenty different countries.
Both regional and cosmopolitan, this 24th edition is characterized by its commitment in favour of the environment with two themes – “Natural Histories” and “Art & Environment”- combined with an innovative and sustainable approach to organising an art fair.
Artworks: Collection Loïc Malle (Sotheby’s)
Collection Loïc Malle (6 April 2022 | Paris) – Sotheby’s presents a collection which reads like an anthology of contemporary art, particularly artworks that deal with the act of experience. The experiences expressed through the collection are as diverse as the artists that it encompasses, which includes Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Robert Smithson and Sol LeWitt.
Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’
This week: the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2022 is out—is the market’s recovery as good as it sounds?
We talk to Melanie Gerlis, art market columnist for The Art Newspaper and the Financial Times, about the sixth edition of the market report, what the headline figures tell us and what we can read between the lines.
As the exhibition Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival, opens at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw—focusing on the spaces in Poland and Ukraine used by Holocaust survivors to escape Nazi persecution—we talk to the artist behind it, Natalia Romik. Though long planned, the show has gained a troubling topicality as the Russian invasion and destruction of Ukraine continues.
And in this episode’s Work of the Week, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Piet Mondrian’s birth, we discuss his painting Victory Boogie Woogie (1942-44). Caro Verbeek, the co-curator of Mondrian Moves, an exhibition opening this week at the Kunstmuseum den Haag in the Hague, the Netherlands, tells us about the feverish creation and unfinished nature of the Dutch artist’s final work.
Natalia Romik’s exhibition, Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, until 17 July; TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Szczecin, Poland, 4 August-6 November
Mondrian Moves, Kunstmuseum den Haag, the Hague, Netherlands, 2 April-25 September. Mondrian Evolution, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland, 5 June-9 October; K20, Düsseldorf, Germany, 29 October-10 February 2023
Views: British Illustrator Matt Cook’s ‘Storefronts’
Exhibits: ‘Woody Guthrie – People Are The Song’ At The Morgan Library, NYC
The author of more than three thousand folk songs, Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) is one of the most influential songwriters and recording artists in American history. He is an icon of the Depression era and wrote the world’s most famous protest song, “This Land Is Your Land.”
But he was not only a songwriter, and his subject matter extended well beyond labor politics. The full corpus of his creativity—including lyrics, poetry, artwork, and largely unpublished prose writings—encompassed topics such as the environment, love, sex, spirituality, family, and racial justice. Guthrie created a personal philosophy that has impacted generations of Americans and inspired musician-activists from Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen to Ani DiFranco and Chuck D. As Bob Dylan noted of Guthrie, “You could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live.”
Boomers Daily 