Vincent Van Gogh was a master of creating sumptuous still lifes. In this latest Expert Voices, Sotheby’s specialist Simon Stock describes how his painting “Nature Morte: Vase Aux Glaïeuls”, offered in Sotheby’s upcoming Modern Art Evening Sale (9 October | Hong Kong), perfectly captured the essence of the artist’s first summer in Paris in 1886. Discover how the artist infused his inspiration of Japanese wood block prints into his paintings, and how he painstakingly captured the joy of living in his still lifes, but also the transience of life.
Tag Archives: Arts & Literature
Previews: Times Literary Supplement – September 24
Art Exhibit: ‘Chaïm Soutine / Willem de Kooning’ At The Musée de l’Orangerie
The Musée de l’Orangerie presents an exhibition bringing together the works of Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943), painter of the Paris School of Russian origin (now Belarus) and Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), abstract expressionist American of Dutch origin.
This exhibition will focus more specifically on exploring the impact of Soutine’s painting on the pictorial vision of the great American painter.
Soutine indeed marked the generation of post-war painters by the expressive force of his painting and his figure of “accursed artist”, grappling with the vicissitudes and excesses of Parisian bohemia. His work was particularly visible in the United States between the 1930s and 1950s, when the figurative artist of European tradition was re-read in the light of new artistic theories. The gestural painting and the pronounced impasto of Soutine’s canvases lead critics and curators to proclaim him a “prophet”, herald of American abstract expressionism.
It was precisely at the turn of the 1950s that Willem de Kooning began the pictorial work of Women, canvases in which a singular expressionism was built, between figuration and abstraction. The development of this new language corresponds to the moment when the painter summons the artistic universe of Chaïm Soutine and confronts it. De Kooning discovered his predecessor’s paintings in the 1930s, then at the retrospective which devoted the painter to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1950. He was then particularly marked by the presentation of Soutine’s paintings in the Foundation’s collections. Barnes of Philadelphia, where he visited with his wife Elaine in June 1952.
Previews: Times Literary Supplement (TLS) – Sep 10
Tours: Rodin Sculptures, Cantor Museum, Stanford
At the time of his death, Auguste Rodin (France, 1840-1917) was counted among the most renowned artists in the world. A century later, after numerous reassessments by generations of art historians, Rodin continues to be recognized for making figurative sculpture modern by redefining the expressive capacity of the human form. This installation spans three galleries and features nearly 100 Rodin sculptures essential to telling his story and representing his groundbreaking engagement with the body. Drawn from the extensive holdings of the Cantor Arts Center, the largest collection of sculptures by Rodin in an American museum, it also presents comparative works by his rivals, mentors, admirers, and imitators.
Check out the Cantor for publications about August Rodin and his works, available for purchase in the Cantor’s Atrium.
Front Cover Views: The New Yorker – September 13
Poetry Readings: “I Am!” – By John Clare (1793 – 1864)
Read by John Davies
John Clare was an English poet who lived most of his life in abject poverty. His life was marred by bouts of mania and depression, and for the final 23 years of his life, Clare was locked in an insane asylum. It was here he began to write poetry; ‘I Am’ was Clare’s final elegy before his passing.
I Am!
BY JOHN CLARE
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
Cover Previews: Apollo Magazine – September 2021
FEATURES | Jonathan Griffin on mysticism and modern art; Yasmine Seale watches Sheila Hicks at work; Andrew Lloyd Webber gives Sophie Barling a tour of Drury Lane; Eve M. Kahn at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.; Valeria Costa-Kostritsky on the Museum of Homelessness
| REVIEWS | Susan Owens on Gustave Moreau’s fables at Waddesdon; Aimee Ng on the Medici at the Met; Emilie Bickerton on Georges Méliès at the Cinémathèque Française; Peter Parker on Richard Chopping in Salisbury; Tom Stammers on history in the age of Romanticism; Kitty Hauser on the life of Francis Bacon; David Ekserdjian on Italian paintings at the Norton Simon; Sameer Rahim on the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus; Rebecca Ann Hughes on the tricks of the white-truffle trade |
| MARKET | Jo Lawson-Tancred selects her highlights of TEFAF Online; and the latest art market columns from Susan Moore; Emma Crichton-Miller and Samuel Reilly |
| PLUS | Susan Moore and Niru Ratnam ask if the art world has a sense of humour; Diane Smyth on the rise of falling in photography; Martin Herbert at the restored Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin; William Dunbar on a cave monastery in Georgia; Gillian Darley on the visions of Joseph Gandy; Robert O’Byrne on the forgotten art of Ignazio Hugford |
Views: ‘Richard Chopping: The Original Bond Artist’
In April 1956, at the suggestion of his friend Francis Bacon, Richard Chopping took the society hostess Ann Fleming to see some of his trompe l’oeil paintings, which were then on show at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery in Mayfair. Impressed by these pictures, Fleming invited the artist to meet her husband, Ian, who was looking for someone to provide dust-jacket illustrations for his James Bond novels.
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Chopping was immediately offered the job, and his striking designs remain the work for which he is best known and are, for many collectors, the reason the novels are particularly prized.
As this small but imaginatively curated exhibition demonstrates, there was a great deal more to Chopping than James Bond. Nevertheless, the highly detailed, finely executed and often macabre paintings he produced for Fleming are characteristic of his work as a whole. Born in Essex in 1917, Chopping moved to London at the age of 18 with little idea of what he wanted to do, but soon got a job on the magazine Decorations of the Modern Home.
Museum Tour: The Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Musée Marmottan Monet features over three hundred Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, including his 1872 Impression, Sunrise. Marmottan Museum’s fame is the result of a donation in 1966 by Michel Monet, Claude’s second son and only heir.
Boomers Daily 