The Art Institute of Chicago (May 18, 2023) – Discover how the changing geography at the fringes of Paris in the 1880s influenced the work of five artists: Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard, and Charles Angrand.
Getty Museum (May 17, 2023) – Imagine a menagerie of over 500 life-sized porcelain animals long gallery in a palace in Dresden. A Fox with a Chicken was a part of this new creation commissioned by Augustus II “The Strong” in the 18th century to share his love for Japanese porcelain with others.
Johann Gottlieb Kirchner produced the model for this life-size porcelain sculpture of a fox-looking a little guiltily around the chicken it is about to devour-as part of an extraordinary commission from Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, who envisioned a life-size porcelain menagerie for his Japanese Palace in Dresden. The Meissen Porcelain Manufactory had been operating for only twenty years when Augustus commissioned this series of porcelain animals to be rendered “in their natural sizes and colors.” The production of porcelain models of this size had never been attempted before in Europe.
PBS NewsHour (May 15, 2023) -At a time when the public teaching of science is again being fought over, the largest museum of natural history in the U.S. just extended its reach. Jeffrey Brown got a look inside the American Museum of Natural History’s stunning new expansion in New York for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
The Art Newspaper May 11, 2023: This week: the Sudan crisis. How are artists responding to another war in the East African country?
The photographer Ala Kheir joins us from Khartoum to tell us about the conflict in Sudan and how it is affecting him and other artists. We talk to Alyce Mahon, the co-curator of Sade: Freedom or Evil, a new exhibition at the Centre Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) in Barcelona about the 18th-century writer and libertine the Marquis de Sade and his artistic and literary influence, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Gwen John’s La Chambre sur la Cour (1907-08), a painting of John herself in a Parisian interior. The picture is one of the highlights of an exhibition dedicated to John at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, UK.Ala Kheir on Instagram @ala.kheir.Sade: Freedom or Evil, Centre Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, until 15 October.
Alyce Mahon, The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde, Princeton University Press, $47/£40.Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 13 May-8 October. Alicia Foster, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, Thames and Hudson, $39.95/£30. Out now in UK, published in the US on 18 July.
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
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