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.
BERRY CAMPBELL GALLERY (April 30, 2023): An exhibition of Abstract Expressionist Ethel Schwabacher (1903-1984). Schwabacher joins the gallery’s stable of women artists whose ambitious, independent, and insightful art is essential to a complete historical understanding of the ‘downtown’ art scene in the 1950s.
Many of the thirteen works have not been on view since they were shown at one of her five solo exhibitions at Betty Parsons Gallery, including the large-scale center piece to the show entitled, Prometheus (1959). Ethel Schwabacher: Woman in Nature(Paintings from the 1950s) focuses on Schwabacher’s unique brand of abstraction, which is characterized by both automatic drawing and sweeping brushstrokes that swirl across the surface of the canvas and which explores themes of motherhood, landscape, and creativity.
As part of the resurgence of women artists, Ethel Schwabacher was one of the twelve women artists included in the landmark traveling exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum in 2016. Concurrently with the Berry Campbell exhibition, Action! Gesture! Paint! is on view at the Whitechapel Gallery in London featuring 91 international women artists, including a major Ethel Schwabacher painting from the 1950s.
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.
The Art Newspaper April 27, 2023: This week: AI and art. We explore some of the key aspects relating to artificial intelligence and its use in the art world: the works being made using AI technologies and exploring their impact; anxieties about machines replacing humans; the idea of AIs being able to think and create independently; and whether we can truly grasp the significance and possible effects of the technologies and those who control it, and more.
Host Ben Luke talks to Noam Segal—an associate curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, whose focus is on technology-based art—about AI, its history in art, its social and environmental effects, and how artists are using it today. The Art Newspaper’s live editor, Aimee Dawson, talks to the artist and writer Gretchen Andrew about making art with AI and together they explore its wider application across the art world.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, an image made using AI by the photographer Boris Eldagsen. The piece caused controversy earlier this month when it was awarded a prize at the Sony World Photography Awards, which Eldagsen refused to accept. The researcher and photographer Lewis Bush discusses the work, the controversy and wider questions around AI and photography.
The Art Newspaper April 20, 2023: This week features a tour of Tate Modern’s exhibition that brings together the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint and the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian.
We hear about the two artists’ distinctive contributions to abstraction, their shared interest in esoteric belief systems and their deep engagement with the natural world, from one of the show’s curators, Bryony Fer. Our editor, Americas, Ben Sutton visited the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to talk to the Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, as her retrospective opens at the museum.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is a reconstruction of a Roman gateway that has just opened at Richborough Roman Fort in Kent, southern England. Andrew J. Roberts, a properties historian with English Heritage, the charity that looks after the historic site, explains what the gateway tells us about the Romans’ arrival in Britain in 43 CE.Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life, Tate Modern, London, until 3 September.
Additionally: Kunstmuseum den Haag, The Hague, 7 October-25 February 2024Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, until 13 August; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 15 October -7 January 2024; Seattle Art Museum, 15 February–12 May next year. The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 24 September-15 January 2024; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut, 18 April 2024-15 September 2024.The Roman gateway and rampart, Richborough Roman Fort and Amphitheatre, Kent, now open.
Villa Medicis, Rome (April 18, 2023) – The piano nobile of Villa Medici consists of the former rooms of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici with three rooms in a row – the Room of the Elements, the Room of the Muses and the Room of the Lovers of Jupiter – with 16th century frescoes by the Mannerist painter Jacopo Zucchi. These rooms, which are open to the public on guided tours throughout the year, are located next to two private rooms from the same period which complete the complex.
As part of the project Reenchanting Villa Medici, the interior refurbishment of these emblematic spaces of Villa Medici has been entrusted to India Mahdavi, an internationally renowned French architect, designer and scenographer, who will be responsible for the artistic direction of the project in association with craftsmen (more information to come). This transformation is being carried out with respect for the period décor and previous architectural interventions, in order to revisit the premises by adding a touch of colour and modernity. The rooms will be equipped by Maison Tréca, a French manufacturer of high quality bedding.
Grace Wright’s atmospheric paintings are all-consuming, inviting the viewer into a baroque world of tangled gestures. Markings on the canvas twist and convulse about themselves to build an anarchic structure before unravelling to moments of repose. While Wright’s gestures may be abstract, she views her paintings as representational narratives, evoking the tempestuous rhythm of the natural world, while alluding to 17th-century religious paintings.
Grace Wright, World Receivers, 2023
Deep Symmetry explores a recent evolution of Wright’s practice as a result of her time in Europe in the latter half of 2022. Its title was inspired by the architectural geometries of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, France, and a quote by writer Karl Ove Knausgaard: “Life is irregularity, death is geometry”.
Wright has been long fascinated with the deeper, universal connections that exist beyond our normal comprehension. Marrying alluring, harmonious colour with visceral imagery to monumental standing, Wright’s paintings are a reflection of this deep connectedness; her coiling energetic brush marks echoing the universal ‘rhythmic, cyclical nature’ forms in our world, to emotion and the force of life itself.
April 13, 2023: This week: Expo Chicago and the art scene in the Windy City. Ben Sutton, The Art Newspaper’s editor, Americas, and Carlie Porterfield, associate editor, art market, Americas, discuss the fair, and the wider market and gallery scene in Chicago.
As the US president Joe Biden visits Northern Ireland to honour the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday or Belfast agreement, we talk to Hannah Crowdy, head of curatorial at National Museums Northern Ireland, a group of four museums. She tells us about how the museums are addressing the anniversary, representing Northern Ireland’s recent history and looking to the future.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Georges Clairin’s 1876 portrait of the celebrated French actor Sarah Bernhardt, who died 100 years ago. The work is part of a huge new exhibition about Bernhardt opening this week at the Petit Palais in Paris. The museum’s director, Annick Lemoine, tells us about the painting and the extraordinary fame of the woman it depicts.
Principled and Revolutionary: Northern Ireland’s Peace Women by Hannah Starkey, Ulster Museum, Belfast, until 10 September; Array Collective: The Druthaib’s Ball, Ulster Museum, until 3 September.Sarah Bernhardt: and the woman created the star, Petit Palais, Paris, until 27 August.
Sotheby’s (April 11, 2023) – This collection was put together by a couple of passionate collectors who favored avant-garde works from the 1930s and 1940s, thus creating an extremely harmonious whole that perfectly reflects the taste of an era and the artistic revolutions that went through it.
The works have remained preserved in a Parisian apartment for almost sixty years, and their appearance on the market constitutes an unprecedented opportunity for collectors today”. Says Aurélie Vandevoorde, Director of the Impressionist and Modern Art Department.
Unveiling an unprecedented group of 12 works by some of the greatest masters of the 20th century, which include artists such as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Nicolas de Staël & Georges Braque, “Le Souffle Moderne” Collections presents an exceptional ensemble embodying the artistic avant-gardes of the 1930s and 1940s.
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