Van Gogh Museum Films (May 12, 2023) – Vincent van Gogh lived in Auvers-sur-Oise from 20 May 1890 until his death on 29 July of the same year. He was tremendously productive in these months and made several of his most renowned masterpieces, including Wheatfield with Crows and Tree Roots.
In the anniversary year of 2023, the Van Gogh Museum and Musée d’Orsay are organising a major exhibition about the final months of Vincent van Gogh’s life, which he spent in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise. The exhibition Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months opens on 12 May 2023.
Richard Estes. M Train on Route to Manhattan Approaches the Williamsburg Bridge. 1995.
Museum of the City of New York (May 10, 2023) – In honor of the centennial of the founding of the Museum of the City of New York as the city’s storyteller, This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture explores the many ways that the city has inspired storytelling.
It features both famous and lesser-known images of New York in film and television, song and poetry, literature, visual and performing arts, and fashion, painting a collective, moving and even funny version of a city that has captured the imagination of the world.
The exhibition is organized around the types of places where the human-scale stories of New York are told. It showcases the city’s bustling streets and subways, its iconic parks and waterfronts, its restaurants and nightspots, and its dense and vibrant neighborhoods. Covering the century since the Museum was founded, it illustrates both the massive changes and the enduring themes that have shaped the many stories we tell about New York.
Museo Picasso Málaga (May 9, 2023) – is the first major exhibition in Spain devoted to this facet of Picasso’s work. The selection of pieces is intended to underline the central role played by the representation of the human body, taken as both a whole and as a fragment, in the Málaga-born artist’s œuvre.
Picasso’s sculptures were seemingly overshadowed by his paintings and played a secondary role in his prolific artistic career. The first exhibition devoted chiefly to them did not take place until 1967, at the Tate Gallery in London, and until then his three-dimensional work had barely received any critical attention. However, sculpture was not a secondary concern for Picasso but a form of expression on a par with painting. According to Pierre Daix, ‘he was at least as great a sculptor as he was a painter, and for him these two aspects of his work were always complementary, for he had discovered very early on that the switching from one to the other enabled him to determine precisely what painting is and what sculpture is’.
Vienna Channel (May 5, 2023) – Art expert Markus Hübl takes you to the Upper Belvedere, the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Leopold Museum. He analyzes some of the world’s most famous artworks as well as AI pictures with cats that clearly were inspired by those masterpieces.
Video timeline:00:16 Upper Belvedere: The Kiss (Lovers) by Gustav Klimt, 1907–1908 01:33 Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna: Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel, 1563 02:33 Leopold Museum: Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant by Egon Schiele, 1912
The Art Newspaper May 4, 2023: Featuring the coronation in the UK. As Charles III is crowned at Westminster Abbey this weekend, Anna Somers Cocks, founder of The Art Newspaper and a former assistant keeper of metalwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, tells us about the objects involved in the coronation and the monarchical history they convey.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this week opens Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, the latest in the hugely successful Costume Institute exhibitions. The German designer, who died in 2019, was also the inspiration for this year’s Met Gala, the museum’s star-studded fundraiser.
We talk to Stephanie Sporn, a fashion historian and arts and culture writer, about the exhibition, the gala and the controversy around Lagerfeld’s offensive comments about a range of issues. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Good Housekeeping III (1985/2023) by the British artist Marlene Smith. She was part of the Blk Art Group, a collective of young Black British artists active in the late 1970s and 1980s, which is the subject of The more things change…, an exhibition at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery in the UK.
Smith has re-created the work, first made in 1985, for the show, and tells us more about its making, its context, and the history of the Blk Art Group. Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until 16 July.The more things change…, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, UK, until 9 July.
Musée du Louvre (May 4, 2023) – As part of its contemporary programs, the Louvre has invited twenty young creative figures to present their take on the museum in the form of a 3:30 min film.
The “Louvre Looks” initiative brings together creatives under forty – whether they come from the visual arts, poetry, film, experimental music, or fashion. They created new films in the palace itself and thus reconnect with the past of the Louvre – which hosted artist studios even before it became a museum. These films go live every Thursday on YouTube. Over the course of twenty weeks, you will be given the opportunity to discover many fresh insights into the Louvre.
The fourteenth film was conceived by stylist Marine Serre. Addressing the upcycling of clothes, she has reinterpreted Quentin Metsys’ Mary Magdalen wearing a new dress, thereby creating a bridge between time periods.
Painter: Jean François Grébert
Marine Serre for Regards du Louvre
Creative Direction: Marine Serre
A Film Directed by: Beau Rivage Film
Music: Vivaldi, The four Seasons 3rd Movement by Wilfred Symphony Orchestra
PBS NewsHour (May 3, 2023) -How many women artists can you name? That was a question Katy Hessel, then a 21-year-old art history major, asked herself. The results were disappointing. And so she set about learning and teaching herself and then others.
Art historian, author and presenter Katy Hessel
That resulted in her new book, “The Story of Art Without Men.” Jeffrey Brown discussed the book with Hessel for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
Art Trip (April 30, 2023) – A tour of the new exhibition – ‘Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map’, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The first New York retrospective brings together nearly five decades of Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures in the largest and most comprehensive showing of her career to date.
This exhibition is the first New York retrospective of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), an overdue but timely look at the work of a groundbreaking artist. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map brings together nearly five decades of Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures in the largest and most comprehensive showing of her career to date.
Smith’s work engages with contemporary modes of making, from her idiosyncratic adoption of abstraction to her reflections on American Pop art and neo-expressionism. These artistic traditions are incorporated and reimagined with concepts rooted in Smith’s own cultural practice, reflecting her belief that her “life’s work involves examining contemporary life in America and interpreting it through Native ideology.” Employing satire and humor, Smith’s art tells stories that flip commonly held conceptions of historical narratives and illuminate absurdities in the formation of dominant culture. Smith’s approach importantly blurs categories and questions why certain visual languages attain recognition, historical privilege, and value.
CBS Sunday Morning (April 30, 2023) – Bill Blackbeard was something of a superhero. During his lifetime, he collected and preserved 2.5 million ephemeral artifacts of comic strip art, including newspapers and Sunday color sections dating as far back as 1893.
Treasures from his collection are now featured in a new exhibit, “Man Saves Comics,” at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University. Correspondent Luke Burbank reports.
Sotheby’s (April 28, 2023) –Looking for some inspiration for your next museum visit? This month, we’re taking a tour of six of the world’s most exciting and innovative museum exhibitions with Tim Marlow, Director of the Design Museum, London.
Doris Salcedo – Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, 21 May–17 September 2023 – Salcedo is a Colombian-born artist, whose central subject is human trauma and tragedy. Though much of her work emanates from the violent conflict over the last three decades in her native land, its resonance is universal. Doris Salcedo presents eight major series of works from across her career – from untitled pieces of wooden furniture filled with concrete to the remarkable Palimpsest in which the names of over 300 refugees and migrants who died at sea quite literally weep before our eyes.
Vincent van Gogh 2023 marks the 170th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh. Three exhibitions opening this month look set to enhance our understanding of the great Dutch painter:
Van Gogh and the Avant Garde The Art Institute of Chicago 14 May–4 September 2023 – Van Gogh and the Avant Garde takes the modern landscape as its central subject and looks at how the artist – along with Seurat, Signac and others – turned his attention from urban Parisian life to wrestling with the surrounding countryside with a formal inventiveness that set the tone for the development of Modernism.
Van Gogh’s Cypresses The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 22 May–27 August 2023 – From the religious connotation of trees in graveyards to their role as the backdrop of his incarceration at the asylum in Saint-Remy, the artist’s flame-like evergreens will be presented with all their evocative resonance in Van Gogh’s Cypresses,
Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 12 May–3 September 2023 – The unsurpassable Van Gogh Museum will celebrate its own 50th anniversary with Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months – an exhibition delving into the tremendously productive final period of his life, in which he made several of his most renowned masterpieces.
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