FEATURES | Michael Prodger visits the newly resplendent Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden; Yinka Shonibare talks to Samuel Reilly; Seamus Perry considers the visual qualities of Wordsworth’s poems; Tim Smith-Laing on the modern monsters of Léopold Chauveau; Emilie Bickerton looks at how museums tackle the subject of cinema; Christopher Turner talks to Grażyna Kulczyk, founder of the Muzeum Susch
REVIEWS | Matthew Sperling on Picasso’s works on paper at the Royal Academy; Nicholas Hatfull on Edward Hopper at the Fondation Beyeler; Scott Nethersole on Renaissance art in the regions of Italy; Alan Powers on the life of Humphrey Stone; Max Norman on a new study of Poussin; Peter Parker on John Minton’s illustrations for Elizabeth David’s cookery books
MARKET | Tim Maxwell and Tamara Bell on cybersecurity; and the latest art market columns from Susan Moore and Emma Crichton-Miller
Monocle 24 speaks with Gill Saunders and Margaret Timmers about their upcoming book ‘The Poster’ from Thames & Hudson in partnership with the V&A.
Featuring posters from the world-class collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, this book is the perfect resource for all those who appreciate one of the most popular art forms.
Even in the digital age, the printed poster has continued to be one of the most influential and well-loved ways of informing and entertaining audiences. A powerful means of mass communication, posters are an invaluable resource for understanding the time periods in which they were produced and distributed and have often played key roles in shaping society.
Organized into seven thematic chapters, The Poster brings together more than 300 examples that offer a comprehensive history of the poster as a medium that has been used to share, sell, or incite political and social change. The text traces the poster through innovations in design, illustration, typography, and printing, as well as movements in art, including Art Nouveau, modernism, Art Deco, psychedelia, and punk.
Featuring works by A. M. Cassandre, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Alphonse Mucha, Milton Glaser, Paula Scher, and Peter Gee, and many more, this book is an essential resource for graphic designers, illustrators, and anyone interested in social and political history.
Explore the exhibition “El Greco: Ambition and Defiance” with curator Rebecca Long and research associate Jena Carvana. Follow along as they lead you through the galleries and share some of the reasons El Greco and his work continue to fascinate us.
I have seen Naples from his vantage of a ship anchored offshore — one of the most sublime locations in the world, that sweep of coast stacked with apricot, carmine, azure and rose villas; the blue, blue U of the harbor; the emphatic Vesuvius anchoring the view.
Frances Mayes
In October of 1820, typhus raged in Naples. With his artist friend, Joseph Severn, the British poet John Keats rocked in the city’s harbor for 10 days, not nearly the quaranta giorni — 40 days — that give us our word quarantine.
Before this journey, Keats always felt intense melancholy. In “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time,” he wrote “… mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.” (And in the smooth pentameter of “Ode to a Nightingale”: “I have been half in love with easeful death.”) Not a holiday, this voyage out of England was a desperate trip to the sunny climate of Italy. His cough had grown steadily worse. Since the morning he’d seen a splotch of blood on his pillow, he knew he had little chance of surviving the consumption that had invaded his lungs. His last-ditch: Go to Rome. Meanwhile, exile at sea.
TEFAF (The European Fine Art Fair) brings together the world’s leading experts across a multitude of disciplines to implement and adhere to TEFAF’s vetting procedures and regulations. This allows TEFAF to create a standard that applies across all of its fairs.
Established in 1988, TEFAF is widely regarded as the world’s pre-eminent organization for fine art, antiques, and design. TEFAF runs three Fairs internationally – TEFAF Maastricht, which covers 7,000 years of art history; TEFAF New York Spring, focused on modern and contemporary art & design; and TEFAF New York Fall, covering fine and decorative art from antiquity to 1920. TEFAF gives international dealers the platform to present museum-quality works of all eras and genres to a broad base of collectors and connoisseurs.
“I draw literally and figuratively from the natural world. My drawing and mark making refer to and derive from botanical and biological anatomies, including marine life, as well as, the structures of both macro and micro cosmologies and writing systems, such as logograms.”
Sigrid Burton is an American painter, long based in New York City, whose semi-abstract work is known for its use of expressive, atmospheric color fields and enigmatic allusions to natural and cultural realms. Burton has had solo exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Osaka, including at Artists Space and the Michael C. Rockefeller Arts Center, and been included in shows at A.I.R. Gallery, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, and the Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rockefeller Foundation, and Palm Springs Desert Museum, and has been reviewed in Arts Magazine, Arts & Antiques, Jung Journal, Chicago Tribune and LA Weekly.
Writers most frequently observe that Burton’s atmospheric works recall artists such as J.M.W. Turner, Odilon Redon, Pierre Bonnard and Mark Rothko, as well as the light of her native California.Art & Antiques described her approach as “chromatic expressionism” in which color is “her undisputed protagonist”. Peter Frank observed, “The dialectic between color and form has always inflected, even impelled” Burton’s painting, with color the more omnipresent element, and form the more persistent. Art historian William C. Agee wrote, “The domains she explores […] meet, intersect, fuse, and then disappear, like apparitions, in liquid pools of mist and color. Her pictorial odyssey refers simultaneously to both a higher order, a timeless cosmic vastness, as well as to a private, interior world, abounding in personal histories and memories.” Burton has lived and worked in Pasadena, California since 2013.
“The grasses up north are as blue as jade, Our mulberries here curve green-threaded branches; And at last, you think of returning home” Li Bai
“Inside” – Thomas W. Shaller (March, 2020)
“A feat, this heart’s control Moment to moment To scale all love down To a cupped hand’s size”
Edith Tiempo, Bonsai
“Bonzai” – Thomas W. Shaller (March 2020)
Thomas W. Schaller is an award-winning artist, architect, and author based in Los Angeles. As a renowned architectural artist, he received a Graham Foundation Grant and was a two-time recipient of the Hugh Ferris Memorial Prize. He has authored three books; the best-selling, and AIA award winner, Architecture in Watercolor (VNR – McGraw Hill) The Art of Architectural Drawing (J.Wiley and Sons), and Thomas W. Schaller, Architect of Light : Watercolor Paintings by a Master – a retrospective of his recent artwork released by North Light Books / F+W Media and now Penguin / Random House, NYC in 2018.
“My work is a study in contrasts: light and dark, vertical and horizontal, warm and cool tones, the real and the imagined, as well as the past, present, and future. These elements and others are designed to collide and sometimes find resolution on the surface of the paper. And by so doing, I invite you to take part in my artistic process – not to determine the stories I am telling – but hopefully, to inspire you to tell stories of your own.”
“Kenny Rogers took portraits and western landscape photos like no other. He was passionate and fell in love with the warmth and beauty that captured all that he saw through a lens,” says Patty Wente IPHF CEO and President.
“One Tree” – Kenny Rogers
The International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum mourns the passing of its first Lifetime Achievement Award Winner and 2017 inductee Kenny Rogers. Rogers was a dedicated and talented photographer for nearly four decades. His best-known images are portraits of well-known singers, actors, and dignitaries from around the globe.
“The Thumb” – Kenny Rogers
In addition, he had an ongoing passion for photographing the American landscape. Rogers was skilled with his large format view camera, and loved to make prints in his darkroom. Regarding his photography, he said, “I am an impulsive obsessive. I impulsively get involved with something, and then I get obsessed with it. So that’s what happened with photography.”