Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Exhibits: ‘Antoni Gaudí’ At The Musée d’Orsay In Paris

The Musée d’Orsay is hosting the first major exhibition devoted to Antoni Gaudí organized in France in Paris in fifty years. In an immersive museographic experience, it will show the spectacular creations of this unique artist, in particular, presenting sets of furniture never before exhibited in France. It will offer a new vision of the artist as a unique and singular figure, a non-isolated genius who practiced in a Catalonia in the midst of social, political and urbanistic upheaval.

Until July 17th, 2022

Projet pour l’église de la Colònia Güell, Antoni Gaudí
Antoni Gaudí, Projet pour l’église de la Colònia Güell
©Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona / Marc Vidal i Aparicio

The exhibition will focus on showing the architect’s creative process at a time of an exceptional local artistic profusion linked to “Modernism” or the Art Nouveau movement in Spain, supported by distinguished patrons, anxious to distinguish Catalonia, a land of Mediterranean identity. Gaudí’s workshop, his many collaborators, and his sophisticated working techniques will be the guiding line of the exhibition to make the public understand the extraordinary inventive capacity of the architect who defied all the creation of the moment.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

Friday May 27, 2022: Are stolen Cambodian statues hidden in the world’s great public collections?

We discuss Cambodia’s looted heritage with Celia Hatton, Asia Pacific editor and presenter at the BBC World Service, whose documentary for BBC TV and radio Cambodia: Returning the Gods exposes the connections between looters, smugglers and, allegedly, some of the world’s most famous encyclopaedic museums. Plus, the dark truth behind the art and antiques assembled by the Marcos family in the Philippines as they return to power.

We talk to the Filipino artist Pio Abad—who’s made art about Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and their collections for more than a decade—about Bongbong Marcos’s presidential election victory in the Philippines and what that means for the country and the art and antiquities seized by its government after the Marcoses were deposed in the 1980s. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, we discuss a sculpture by Ruth Asawa—Untitled (S.266, Hanging Seven-Lobed, Multi-Layered Interlocking Continuous Form within a Form) (1961)—a highlight of a new exhibition at Modern Art Oxford in the UK, with Emma Ridgway, the show’s co-curator. Remarkably, the solo exhibition is the first in a European institution dedicated to the Japanese-American artist.

You can read Celia’s report on Cambodian antiquities online at bbc.co.uk. Cambodia: Returning the Gods (radio version) is on the BBC website and the BBC Sounds app—under The Documentary Podcast stream for the World Service and the Crossing Continents podcast stream in the UK—and on other podcast platforms.

Cambodia: Returning the Gods (television version) is on iPlayer in the UK and will be shown again on the BBC World news channel, broadcast date tbc—check listings.Pio Abad: Fear of Freedom Makes Us See Ghosts, Ateneo Art Gallery, Ateneo de Manila University, until 30 July, pioabad.com.

Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the Universe, Modern Art Oxford, UK, 28 May-21 August; Stavanger Art Museum, Norway, 1 October-22 January 2023.

The Getty: Photographer Imogen Cunningham

May 11, 2022 – In this episode of Getty Art + Ideas, Getty photographs curator Paul Martineau discusses Imogen Cunningham’s trajectory, focusing on key artworks made throughout her life.

“When Cunningham passed away, I think in part her reputation was based on her personality, the fact that she had lived so long, the fact that she was full of witty quips, and she wouldn’t let anyone boss her around. But I think in some ways that eclipsed the work.”

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1883, photographer Imogen Cunningham joined a correspondence course for photography as a high schooler after seeing a magazine ad. Over the course of her 70-year career, Cunningham stirred controversy with a nude portrait of her husband, photographed flowers while minding her young children in her garden, captured striking portraits of famous actors and writers for Vanity Fair, and provided insight into the life of nonagenarians when she herself was in her 90s. Although photography was a male-dominated field, Cunningham made a name for herself while also supporting the work of other women artists. Her long, varied career is the subject of the new exhibition Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective at the Getty Center.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

This week, Philip Guston Now is unveiled at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston after its controversial postponement in 2020; Ben Luke talks to Kate Nesin and Megan Bernard, two of the four curators on the team assembled by the museum to revise the exhibition, which was postponed by four museums in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. 

We discuss how the show and its interpretation have changed in the last two years. As Queer Britain, the UK’s first national LGBTQ+ museum opens its doors, Gareth Harris, chief contributing editor at The Art Newspaper, speaks to Matthew Storey, the curator of the museum’s inaugural exhibition, Welcome to Queer Britain. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, our acting digital editor, Aimee Dawson, talks to Candida Lodovica de Angelis Corvi, global director at the Colnaghi gallery, about a rediscovered work by the 17th-century artist Caterina Angela Pierozzi, on display at Colnaghi in London.

Philip Guston Now, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, until 11 September; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 23 October-15 January 2023; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 26 February-27 August 2023; and Tate Modern, London, 3 October 2023-25 February 2024. To hear an in-depth discussion about Philip Guston with the curator Robert Storr, author of the book Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting, listen to the episode of this podcast from 18 September 2020.

Museum Exhibits: Tour Of The Whitney Biennial 2022

The Whitney Biennial has surveyed the landscape of American art, reflecting and shaping the cultural conversation, since 1932. The eightieth edition of the landmark exhibition is co-curated by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs. Titled Quiet as It’s Kept, the 2022 Biennial features an intergenerational and interdisciplinary group of sixty-three artists and collectives whose dynamic works reflect the challenges, complexities, and possibilities of the American experience today.

To learn more about the exhibition visit https://whitney.org/exhibitions/2022-…

Previews: Art In America Magazine – May 2022 Issue

‘Art In America’ May 2022 – Each May, Art in America brings our readers a sampling of “new talent,” with a special focus on artists whose practice makes them stand out in a sea of competitors vying for attention. “Practice” is very much the operative word here: at a time when many artists are becoming known more for their social-media presence than for their creative endeavors, and when careers are bolstered more by the market than by critical attention, the editors, critics, and curators who contributed to our selection this year remained centered on what matters. As you’ll discover in these pages, the artists showcased are all contributing in some resonant way to the ongoing dialogue around art, aesthetics, and the culture at large, from Alexander Si, who turns an anthropological lens on the culture of whiteness; to Suneil Sanzgiri, whose films engage with anticolonialism; to Laurie Kang, who treats photography as a form of installation art (and who has contributed a compelling print to this issue); to the other notable talents featured. With this issue, we continue a tradition developed over more than a century of this magazine: writing art history as it is being made.

Exhibitions: ‘Surrealism And Magic’ At The Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Through September 26, “Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity”, curated by Gražina Subelytė, Associate Curator, Peggy Guggenheim Collection. A joint project between the museum and the Museum Barberini, where it will be on view from Oct. 22, 2022 to Jan. 2023.

Cover Preview: Artforum International – May 2022

PLEASURES OF THE TEXT

Erika Balsom on Ruth Beckermann’s MUTZENBACHER

GROUP THINK

Alex Kitnick on “Lifes”

MAKE HISTORY

Tim Griffin on the art of Virginia Overton

PRODUCTIVE TENSIONS

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie on the art of Ruth Asawa

Reviews: The Week In Art

This week, now that the pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron has defeated the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election, we speak to Anaël Pigeat, editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper France, about the Macron government’s cultural record so far and what we can expect from his second term. 

Tate Britain has opened an exhibition of work by the late 19th- and early 20th-century British painter Walter Sickert; we take a tour of the show with one of its curators, Thomas Kennedy. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, The Art Newspaper’s associate editor, Tom Seymour, talks to Dan Leers of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, US, about A workman lifts a drum from a boiling lye solution, March 1944, a photograph in the museum’s new exhibition, Gordon Parks in Pittsburgh, 1944/1946.

Walter Sickert, Tate Britain, London, until 18 September; Petit Palais, Paris, 14 October-29 January 2023.

Gordon Parks in Pittsburgh, 1944/1946, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 30 April-7 August.

International Art: Apollo Magazine – May 2022 Issue

• The method in Jackson Pollock’s madness

• The problem with Russian money in the art world

• What war photography looks like today

• Philip Guston’s uneasy quest for freedom

Plus: The women artists gazing at men, the portraits of Glyn Philpot, and Elizabeth David’s taste in Old Masters; and reviews of Donatello in Florence, Boilly in Paris, Kafka’s drawings and Stephen Shore’s memoir.

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