Category Archives: Exhibitions

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

Top Events: Open House Chicago 2019 Features Over 350 Sites Oct. 13-14

From the OpenHouseChicago.org website:

Open House Chicago 2019 sitesThe Chicago Architecture Center’s Open House Chicago (OHC) is the city’s annual architecture festival. For one weekend in October you can explore Chicago’s most iconic and unique architectural treasures. From mansions to sacred spaces, theaters to private clubs, hotels to secret rooms—OHC gives visitors a behind-the-scenes look at many of the city’s great spaces that are rarely, if ever, open to the public.

OHC is a citywide event that includes more than 350 sites located in more than 38 neighborhoods. Sites reflect the cultural diversity and history of Chicago, as well as the unique character of each community. Locations include private clubs, residential spaces, offices, hotels, theaters, design/architecture studios, schools and places of worship as well as manufacturing, cultural and government facilities. This diverse selection of sites allows visitors to plan an itinerary according to their own specific interests. Browse the sites that have participated in OHC since 2015.

To read more: https://openhousechicago.org/

Exhibitions: Bertoldo di Giovanni – Renaissance of Sculpture in Medici Florence, Opens Sept. 18 At The Frick Collection NYC

Bertoldo di Giovanni (ca. 1440–1491)This fall, The Frick Collection will present the first-ever exhibition on the Florentine sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni (ca. 1440–1491), a renowned student of Donatello, a teacher of Michelangelo, and a great favorite of Lorenzo “il Magnifico” de’ Medici, his principal patron. More than twenty statues, reliefs, medals, and statuettes — constituting nearly his entire extant oeuvre — will be on view exclusively at the Frick, which houses the only sculptural figure by Bertoldo outside of Europe. The exhibition will800px-Bertoldo_di_giovanni,_medaglia_della_congiura_dei_pazzi_(lorenzo),_1478 highlight the ingenuity of the artist’s designs across media, including bronze, wood, and terracotta, and provide the first chance to fully explore longstanding questions of attribution, function, groupings, and intended display. Bertoldo di Giovanni: The Renaissance of Sculpture in Medici Florence will bring into focus the sculptor’s unique position at the heart of the artistic and political landscape in fifteenth-century Italy.

To read more: https://www.frick.org/exhibitions/bertoldo?utm_source=Frick+eNews&utm_campaign=8cb95d1fae-Acquisition_Bertoldo_2019&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_518a4c86ac-8cb95d1fae-364490665

Top Art Exhibitions: “The Impressionist Pastel” At Art Institute Of Chicago

From Art Institute of Chicago online release:

Two Dancers, c. 1893–98 Hilaire Germain Edgar DegasThis focused installation features pastels by four artists whose work was shown in the Impressionist exhibitions: Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Eva Gonzalès, and Berthe Morisot. Their subjects range from scenes of modern life, such as ballet performers and a woman working in a hat shop, to depictions of intimate moments of bathing and women with children.

Although Impressionism is most closely associated with oil painting, during the late 19th century, Impressionist artists increasingly began to exhibit and market their prints and drawings as finished works of art. In fact, prints and drawings made up nearly half of the works in the eight Impressionist exhibitions held in Paris between 1874 and 1886. Pastels in particular became increasingly sought-after by collectors.

Art Institute Chicago logoPastel, a medium used to draw on paper or, less often, on canvas, is made by combining dry pigment with a sticky binder. Once artists have applied the pastel to the surface, they can either blend it, leave their markings visible, or layer different colors to create texture and tone. Pastel portraits had previously gained popularity in France and England in the 18th century, but fell out of fashion with critics when pastel was deemed too feminine; not only was it used by women artists, but it had a powdery consistency similar to women’s makeup. The Impressionists rejected this bias and instead embraced the medium’s ability to impart immediacy, boldness, and radiance.

Website: https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9400/the-impressionist-pastel

Top European Events: 30th Anniversary of the Peaceful Revolution In Berlin On Nov. 4-10, 2019

From a SmithsonianMag.com online article:

“History is best told at the original locations,” Moritz van Dülmen, CEO of event organizer Kulturprojekte Berlin, says in a press release. “To better understand the Peaceful Revolution and to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Wall, we will recount the events of 1989/90 precisely where they took place.”

his November, Germany’s capital is set to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall with a festival featuring large-scale video projections, concerts, open-air exhibitions, an augmented reality app that temporarily resurrects the fractious barrier between east and west, and a floating art installation made up of 30,000 handwritten messages.

https://mauerfall30.berlin/en/#

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/berlin-will-mark-30th-anniversary-walls-fall-week-long-arts-festival-180973018/#dFgCcckczBeP5Zxo.99

Top Events In Europe: “Open House London 2019”, Free Entry To City’s Top Buildings On Sept. 21-22

From a TheModernHouse.com article:

Open House London 2019 collectionsRunning the course of a weekend, from Saturday 21st to Sunday 22nd September, Open House London gives the public free access to over 800 buildings in all of the capital’s 32 boroughs, ranging from the iconic (10 Downing StreetBarbican Centre) to the prosaic (a tour of Southwark Integrated Waste Management Facility, anyone?). To help you plan your weekend, here’s our edit of what to see at Open House London 2019.

https://openhouselondon.org.uk/

Goldfinger’s London
In the 53 years Hungarian-born Ernő Goldfinger spent in London, from his arrival in 1934 to his death in 1987, the man who unwittingly gave his name to one of Ian Fleming’s villains (so notorious was his temperament) made a profound and lasting contribution to the city’s built environment. Any exploration of his legacy should begin with a trip to the home he built for his family in Hampstead, 2 Willow Road, an efficient, well-proportioned modernist vision crammed with artworks by Duchamp, Moore and Ernst.

To read more click on the following link: https://www.themodernhouse.com/journal/what-to-see-at-open-house-london-2019/?utm_source=The+Modern+House+Newsletter&utm_campaign=510c9ffe5f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_08_18_07_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1141c98ca6-510c9ffe5f-95015105&mc_cid=510c9ffe5f&mc_eid=7dc3496ab5

Top Upcoming Exhibitions: “James Tissot – Fashion & Faith”, Legion Of Honor Museum In San Francisco Oct 12, 2019 To Feb 9, 2020

James Tissot, Self Portrait, ca. 1865. Oil on panel Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Mildred Anna Williams CollectionTissot consistently defied convention in both his professional and personal life. His contributions to the academy and the avant-garde are documented by participation at diverse venues such as the Paris Salon as well as London’s Royal Academy and the Grosvenor and Dudley Galleries. This exhibition explores his multifaceted career with a fresh perspective and original scholarship and will also question where and how Tissot should be situated in narratives of the nineteenth-century canon.

Tissot was arguably a painter of modern life although he did not formally belong to the Impressionist circle and never exhibited in their group shows, despite an invitation from Edgar Degas. 

Legion of Honor Museum

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris are co-organizing James Tissot: Fashion & Faith, the first major reassessment of the artist’s career in over 20 years. In San Francisco, this international retrospective will examine approximately 60 paintings, additional works on paper, and cloisonné enamels by Tissot. Exhibition highlights are drawn from the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, including Tissot’s Self Portrait (ca. 1865) as well as prints and photographs from the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts. New scholarship on the artist presented in this collaboration demonstrates that even Tissot’s most ebullient society paintings reveal rich and complex commentary on topics such as nineteenth-century society, religion, fashion, and politics, rendering him an artist worthy of reexamination in the twenty-first century.

https://legionofhonor.famsf.org/exhibitions/james-tissot-fashion-faith

Top Museum Exhibits: “STRANGE LIGHT: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF CLARENCE JOHN LAUGHLIN” At High Museum Of Art, Atlanta

From the High.org website:

The Bat 1940 by CLARENCE JOHN LAUGHLINDubbed “The Father of American Surrealism,” Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) was the most important Southern photographer of his time and a singular figure within the burgeoning American school of photography. Known primarily for his atmospheric depictions of decaying antebellum architecture that proliferated his hometown of New Orleans, Laughlin approached photography with a romantic, experimental eye that diverged heavily from his peers who championed realism and social documentary.

High Museum Of Art Atlanta

On view through November 10, 2019

Water Witch 1939 Clarence John LaughlinThe exhibition surveys Laughlin’s signature bodies of work made between 1935 and 1965, emphasizing his inventiveness, artistic influences, and deep connection to the written word. The High began collecting Laughlin’s work in 1974 and Strange Light: The Photography of Clarence John Laughlin is the first major presentation of Laughlin’s photographs by the High Museum following a landmark acquisition of his work in 2015.

The more than one hundred works in this exhibition attest to Laughlin’s innovative approach and prescience for the future of the photographic medium. From allegorical social commentary, to expertly constructed narratives, to bizarre material experimentation, Laughlin’s effort to access a higher artistic potential for photography is evident throughout his career. His desire to push the limits of photographic possibility paved the way for generations of artists and the growth of the medium into a tool of magical potential.

https://high.org/exhibition/strange-light-the-photography-of-clarence-john-laughlin/

Top Museum Exhibits: “Paul Gauguin – The Art Of Invention” At The St. Louis Art Museum (Until Sept. 15)

From an Antiques and the Arts Weekly:

Paul Gauguin The Art of Invention St. Louis Art Museum 2019Comprising 55 Gauguin masterworks on loan from Copenhagen’s Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, as well as some 35 objects from the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum, “Paul Gauguin: The Art of Invention,” now on view in St Louis, offers a superb overview and deep insight into the life, thought and art of this quasi-mythological being whose shadow looms large not only over artistic Modernism but over the very romantic notion of the artist who sacrifices everything for art.

Along with many other artists in every discipline, Gauguin has been reappraised in recent years. His freedom and devotion to art above all came at a steep cost to others: the wife and children he left behind in Europe, the Native child brides he took in the South Seas and the children they bore him and hosts of friends – Van Gogh and Pissarro among them – who felt the sting of his wrathful restlessness.

French art historian Jean Leymarie, in his short, perfect essay on Paul Gauguin, published in the gorgeous dusty columns of the 1962 Encyclopedia of Art, sums up the birth of Modernism: “Painters no longer attempted to represent the external world by creating the illusion of an image, but rather to suggest their interior dreams through allusive symbols and the multiplication of decorative forms; line and color were invested with the role of expressive vehicles and became the abstract equivalents of sensation. This change, amounting to the overthrow of the empirical and optical vision that had come down from the Renaissance, was perhaps the most violent about-face in modern art. The way, from that time, was open, and we know how boldly Gauguin proceeded.”

 

https://www.antiquesandthearts.com/the-right-to-dare-everything-paul-gauguin-the-art-of-invention/