Category Archives: Exhibitions

Exhibitions: “Leonardo – Experience A Masterpiece” At The National Gallery, London (Nov 9 – Jan 12)

The secrets of Leonardo’s masterpiece are revealed in four distinct spaces. Each space invites you to look at ‘The Virgin of the Rocks’ in a new way.

Leonardo Experience a Masterpiece National GalleryThe mind of Leonardo

Start your journey in a landscape populated by the thoughts and ideas of Leonardo as he sets about painting ‘The Virgin of the Rocks’.

The studio

Discover the secrets only science and conservation can reveal in this projection-filled space which unlocks the mysteries of how ‘The Virgin of the Rocks’ was painted and reveals the lost composition hidden beneath the painted surface.

The light and shadow experiment

Take part in the room-sized experiment to discover the dramatic effects of light and shadow on Leonardo’s composition for ‘The Virgin of the Rocks’.

The imagined chapel

At the end of your journey, you will come face to face with the original masterpiece where it hangs on the walls of an imagined chapel for you to contemplate how ‘The Virgin of the Rocks’ might have appeared in its original setting as part of an elaborate altarpiece.

To read and view more: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/leonardo-experience-a-masterpiece#HighlightPaintings93395

Top Exhibitions: The Hudson River Museum Features Watercolorist James McElhinney

From a Hudson River Museum release:

The Hudson Museum James McElhinney ExhibitJames McElhinney: Discover the Hudson Anew presents the painter’s sketch books and prints related to the River in a comprehensive showing for the first time. A video program, animating turning pages, will allow visitors to see additional sketchbook paintings. McElhinney says he wants his art to demonstrate “that constructive dialogue between humanity and nature is alive and well, while underscoring how art provides durable and dynamic modes of engagement.”

Big ideas often come in small packages. James McElhinney has journeyed around the world with a pocket-size sketchbook and watercolor tin, communing with nature, and stopping to observe and record the glorious views around him. Fourteen years ago, during a period of convalescence, he used a sketchbook and watercolor to paint views from his hospital windows. That pragmatic decision was pivotal for the artist. He fell in love with the mobility and intimacy of this small-format media, which can be packed into the lining of a hiking vest, following in the footsteps of historical expeditionary artists. Since then, he has engaged in pictorial conversation with the Hudson River, always with materials on hand.

To read more: https://www.hrm.org/exhibitions/discover-the-hudson-anew/

Top New Exhibitions: “An Impressionist Autumn” At The Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston Thru January 12

From a Arts and Culture Texas online article:

Paul Cézanne, The Turning Road (La route tournante), c. 1877, oil on canvas, private collection.While all of the works on exhibit hold special interest, Aurisch identifies several gems. For example, Van Gogh fans will enjoy his spectacular perspectival rooftop view from the window of his room in The Hague in 1882. Maurice de Vlaminc’s 1906 Dancer at the “Rat Mort” (La danseuse du “Rat Mort”) is a delight with his Fauve treatment of the figure; through color and gestural line, it’s as though we are witnessing a shift into the 20th century. And Henri Matisse’s 1943 still life titled Lemons against a Fleur-de-lis Background (Citrons sur fond rose fleurdelisé) vibrates with lively pink patterned wallpaper and a stacked brick platform, charged with Japonisme energy.

This fall season, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents Monet to Picasso: A Very Private Collection and Berthe Morisot: Impressionist Original, billed together under the theme of “An Impressionist Autumn,” on view Oct. 20, 2019 through Jan. 12, 2020. The two exhibitions offer museum visitors the chance to peek into the private lives of artist, muse, and society at large.

To read more: http://artsandculturetx.com/fall-for-impressionism-morisot-and-monet-to-picasso-at-mfah/

New Museum Exhibitions: “Andy Warhol – From A To B And Back Again” At The Art Institute Of Chicago

From the Art Institute of Chicago website:

Self-Portrait, 1964 The Art Institute of Chicago; gift of Edlis Neeson CollectionWarhol, with obvious self-deprecation, described his philosophy as spanning from A to B. As this exhibition decidedly proves, his thinking and artistic production ranged well beyond that, but his true genius lies in his ability to identify cultural patterns and to use repetition, distortion, and recycled images in a way that challenges our faith in images and questions the meaning of our cultural icons.

This major retrospective—the first to be organized by a US institution in 30 years—builds on the wealth of new research, scholarship, and perspectives that has emerged since Andy Warhol’s early death at age 58 in 1987. More than 400 works offer a new view of the beloved and iconic American Pop artist, not only illuminating the breadth, depth, and interconnectedness of Warhol’s production across the entirety of his career but also highlighting the ways that he anticipated the issues, effects, and pace of our current digital age.

To read more: https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/2937/andy-warhol-from-a-to-b-and-back-again?utm_medium=email&utm_source=warhol&utm_campaign=nonmember&utm_content=warhol-opening-non-mem-10-20-19

New Museums: San Francisco Historical Society Museum Opens Oct 7 In The Old Mint

From a San Francisco Chronicle online article:

As trivia game experts know, San Francisco has had three U.S. mints. The first mint, on Commercial Street, was replaced in 1874 by a grand structure at Fifth and Mission streets. That building, now called the Old Mint, was itself replaced in 1937 by a new mint on Duboce Avenue, which is still coining money,

San Francisco Historical Society Museum Opening 2019

The newest museum in San Francisco will open in the city’s oldest mint this week.

The Commercial Street building is built on the site of the first U.S. mint in the West, which opened in 1854 during the California Gold Rush to turn nuggets and gold dust into coins and bullion. Later it was used as a subtreasury, where the government stored millions of dollars in gold and silver bars.

To read more: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/nativeson/article/SF-s-newest-museum-is-opening-in-the-city-s-14494442.php

London Exhibitions: The “Egyptian Fantasies Of John Frederick Lewis

From an Apollo magazine online article:

In the Bezestein, El Khan Khalil, Cairo (detail; 1860), John Frederick Lewis. Blackburn Museum and Art GalleryThings take an even stranger turn when he gets to Egypt, and his own features still appear again and again; not, as before, as a barely significant detail in an otherwise busy composition, but as a principal element. In a series of fine single-figure paintings brought together at the Watts Gallery, Lewis represents himself as a Syrian sheikh scanning the horizon of the Sinai desert; as the suave ‘bey’ of a Cairene household, lowering his eyelids as his servant offers him a water pipe; as an impassive carpet-seller in the Bezestein bazaar. In none of these, however, does he quite meet our eye.

In his mid thirties, an age at which most ambitious artists were making themselves as visible as possible, John Frederick Lewis (1804–76), a successful painter of sporting subjects and Mediterranean scenes, vanished from London for more than a decade. It was an audacious move. He spent two years in Italy, then followed in Lord Byron’s footsteps, travelling through Albania, Corfu, Athens and Smyrna, and after a year in Constantinople he sailed for Egypt. Once there Lewis fell in love with Cairo, and rather than returning to England with his sketchbooks he set up home, staying until 1851. Those years might have been something of a biographical blank had it not been for a visit in 1844 from his old friend William Makepeace Thackeray, who included a somewhat excitable account in his travel book Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846). 

To read more: https://www.apollo-magazine.com/john-frederick-lewis-watts-gallery-review/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=APWH%20%2020191004%20%20AL&utm_content=APWH%20%2020191004%20%20AL+CID_8f41f662a8c7742f6db2d929c7188b59&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Apollo&utm_term=Read%20the%20full%20article

Museum Exhibitions: “Beyond Midnight – Paul Revere” At The New York Historical Society

From an New York Times online review:

Grant Wood (1892−1942), Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931. Oil on Masonite. Metropolitan Museum of ArtRevere’s place in history was cemented by the Longfellow poem, published in 1861, more than 40 years after Revere’s death. Longfellow “was flexible about the historical details,” said Debra Schmidt Bach, who coordinated the exhibition for the New-York Historical Society. “I mean, it was a fictionalized poem,” she said. “It was not intended as a detailed examination of the ride.”

NY Historical Society.JPGThe exhibition was organized by the American Antiquarian Society, of which Ms. Hewes is the curator of graphic arts. Nan Wolverton, the show’s other curator, is the director of fellowships at the antiquarian society, and of its Center for Historic American Visual Culture. The display includes more than 140 objects from the antiquarian society’s extensive Revere holdings; the New-York Historical Society’s own collection; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Massachusetts Historical Society, among others.

To read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/arts/design/paul-revere-beyond-midnight.html

Outdoor Exhibitions: British Artist Bruce Munro’s “Field Of Light At Sensorio”, Paso Robles, CA

From a New York Times online article:

Jennifer Young and Ron Genauer at the installation.CreditJim McAuley for The New York TimesBut there is nothing quite like the mind-bending spectacle now on display at dusk in the hills of Paso Robles here, a popular wine destination. That is the witching hour when thousands of solar-powered glass orbs on stems, created by the artist Bruce Munro, enfold visitors in an earthbound aurora borealis of shifting hues.

Since it opened in May, “Field of Light at Sensorio” — the 60-year-old British artist’s largest such installation to date — has drawn thousands of tourists and become an Instagram phenomenon. The subtly changing patterns of this light safari, activated by a nebula of fiber-optic cables attached to hidden projectors, seem to inspire a cathedral-like awe among ticket-holders, who pay $19 to $30 for an evening stroll along 15 acres of illuminated walkways.

https://www.sensoriopaso.com/

To read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/15/arts/design/field-of-light-sensorio.html

Top Upcoming Exhibitions: “Paul Klee – 1939” At The David Zwirner Gallery NYC Sept. 10 – Oct. 26

From the DavidZwirner.com online listing:

Paul_Klee___Armer_Engel___1939The works on view illustrate how Klee responded to his personal difficulties and the broader social realities of the time through imagery that is at turns political, solemn, playful, humorous, and poetic. Ranging in subject matter, the works all testify to Klee’s restless drive to experiment with his forms and materials, which include adhesive, grease, oil, chalk, and watercolor, among others, resulting in surfaces that are not only visually striking, but also highly tactile and original. The novelty and ingenuity of Klee’s late works informed the art of the generation of artists that emerged after World War II, and they continue to hold relevance and allure for artists and viewers alike today.

David Zwirner is pleased to present Paul Klee: 1939, the gallery’s inaugural exhibition of Paul Klee’s (1879–1940) work since announcing its exclusive collaboration with the Klee Family. On view at 537 West 20th Street, New York, the exhibition focuses on Klee’s art from 1939, the year before he passed away, which marked one of the artist’s most prolific periods.

To read more: https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/1939#/installation-views

Top Exhibitions: “Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet”, Metropolitan Museum NYC October 29

From the MetMuseum.org website:

Nuit tombante sur la Loire - Félix Vallotton, 1923Witness to the radical aesthetics that gripped Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Vallotton developed his own singular voice. Today we recognize him as a distinctive artist of his generation. His lampooning wit, subversive satire, and wry humor is apparent everywhere in his artistic production. Vallotton’s trenchant woodcuts of the 1890s solidified his reputation as a printmaker of the first rank while boldly messaging his left-wing politics.

Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet will present pivotal moments in the artist’s career as a painter and printmaker. Painted portraits, luminous landscapes, and interior narratives that pulse with psychological tension join the exhibition from more than two Metropolitan Museum of Artdozen lenders. Swiss-born and Paris-educated, Vallotton (1865–1925) created lasting imagery of fin-de-siècle Paris.

For the first time ever, this exhibition will display Picasso’s legendary portrait of Gertrude Stein, from The Met collection, alongside Vallotton’s rendering of this formidable collector, which was painted a year later. Vallotton finished his portrait in a matter of weeks and gave it to Gertrude Stein.

To read more: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2019/felix-vallotton-painter-disquiet