Watch a video preview of the exhibition, “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” on view at The Met from October 11, 2021–January 30, 2022. Nearly from its inception, Surrealism has had an international scope, but knowledge of the movement has been formed primarily through a Western European focus. This exhibition reconsiders the true “movement” of Surrealism across boundaries of geography and chronology—and within networks that span Eastern Europe to the Caribbean, Asia to North Africa, and Australia to Latin America. Including almost eight decades of work produced by artists from over 45 countries, “Surrealism Beyond Borders” offers a fresh appraisal of these collective concerns and exchanges—as well as historical, national, and local distinctions—that recasts appreciation of this most revolutionary and globe-spanning movement. Learn more about the exhibition: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions…
Category Archives: Arts & Literature
Inside Views: Academy Museum Of Motion Pictures In Los Angeles
Actor and academy trustee Tom Hanks opens the long-awaited Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to members of the media for a preview. (Sept. 22)
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is a museum in Los Angeles, California being constructed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which will be devoted to the history, science, and cultural impact of the film industry. It will be the first large-scale museum of its kind in the United States.
Views: Influences Of Pop Music On Literature
An important moment in the relationship between pop music and writing occurred in 2017 when the Nobel prize in literature was awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro. The previous year, it had gone to Bob Dylan.
In Long Players, a collection of short pieces by poets, novelists and journalists about the albums that have most affected them, a recurrent suggestion is that you can learn more about writing from songs than you can from books, especially when you’re young. “In my view, David Bowie was a great writer”, says Deborah Levy about The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972).
Previews: ‘M+’ Museum Of Contemporary Visual Culture In Hong Kong
The first global museum of contemporary visual culture in Asia is set to open to public in November 2021 in Hong Kong. As per the latest reports, the construction work of the iconic building, located in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, has completed. The museum will be dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design, and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Designed by a global team of the world-renowned architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron in partnership with TFP Farrells and Arup, the M+ building is set to become a new addition to the global arts and cultural landscape and a new international architectural icon.
Art Exhibit: ‘Chaïm Soutine / Willem de Kooning’ At The Musée de l’Orangerie
The Musée de l’Orangerie presents an exhibition bringing together the works of Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943), painter of the Paris School of Russian origin (now Belarus) and Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), abstract expressionist American of Dutch origin.
This exhibition will focus more specifically on exploring the impact of Soutine’s painting on the pictorial vision of the great American painter.
Soutine indeed marked the generation of post-war painters by the expressive force of his painting and his figure of “accursed artist”, grappling with the vicissitudes and excesses of Parisian bohemia. His work was particularly visible in the United States between the 1930s and 1950s, when the figurative artist of European tradition was re-read in the light of new artistic theories. The gestural painting and the pronounced impasto of Soutine’s canvases lead critics and curators to proclaim him a “prophet”, herald of American abstract expressionism.
It was precisely at the turn of the 1950s that Willem de Kooning began the pictorial work of Women, canvases in which a singular expressionism was built, between figuration and abstraction. The development of this new language corresponds to the moment when the painter summons the artistic universe of Chaïm Soutine and confronts it. De Kooning discovered his predecessor’s paintings in the 1930s, then at the retrospective which devoted the painter to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1950. He was then particularly marked by the presentation of Soutine’s paintings in the Foundation’s collections. Barnes of Philadelphia, where he visited with his wife Elaine in June 1952.
Previews: Times Literary Supplement (TLS) – Sep 10
Tours: Rodin Sculptures, Cantor Museum, Stanford
At the time of his death, Auguste Rodin (France, 1840-1917) was counted among the most renowned artists in the world. A century later, after numerous reassessments by generations of art historians, Rodin continues to be recognized for making figurative sculpture modern by redefining the expressive capacity of the human form. This installation spans three galleries and features nearly 100 Rodin sculptures essential to telling his story and representing his groundbreaking engagement with the body. Drawn from the extensive holdings of the Cantor Arts Center, the largest collection of sculptures by Rodin in an American museum, it also presents comparative works by his rivals, mentors, admirers, and imitators.
Check out the Cantor for publications about August Rodin and his works, available for purchase in the Cantor’s Atrium.
Front Cover Views: The New Yorker – September 13
Poetry Readings: “I Am!” – By John Clare (1793 – 1864)
Read by John Davies
John Clare was an English poet who lived most of his life in abject poverty. His life was marred by bouts of mania and depression, and for the final 23 years of his life, Clare was locked in an insane asylum. It was here he began to write poetry; ‘I Am’ was Clare’s final elegy before his passing.
I Am!
BY JOHN CLARE
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
Profiles: British Painter William Lee-Hankey – ’19th Century Rural France’
William Lee Hankey RWS, RI, ROI, RE, NS was a British painter and book illustrator. He specialised in landscapes, character studies and portraits of pastoral life, particularly in studies of mothers with young children such as “We’ve Been in the Meadows All Day”.
Boomers Daily 