In this week’s episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon delves into the significance of a deceptively simple teapot designed by Johann Friedrich Böttger and given to the Frick by the great German-born collector Henry H. Arnhold (1921–2018). Enjoy a Saxon cocktail while exploring the complicated history behind Böttger’s quest to discover the formula for porcelain in a clifftop fortress outside Dresden in the early 18th century.
Step into our galleries to experience ‘Gauguin and the Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Ordrupgaard Collection’. Explore the carefully curated collection of Wilhelm and Henny Hansen, who utilised their exceptional eye for quality to assemble works by Renoir, Monet, Degas, Morisot, Manet and Pissarro among many others.
FEATURES | Tom Stammers on women collectors in 19th-century France; Nalini Malani interviewed by Debika Ray; Alexander Marr puzzles over Isaac Oliver’s most mysterious portrait; Sophie Barling visits the Villa Carmignac; Thomas Marks on fast food and fine art
REVIEWS | Peter Parker on Barnett Freedman at Pallant House;Caroline Bugler on Cranach at Compton Verney; Tom Fleming on Bill Brandt and Henry Moore at Hepworth Wakefield; Michael Hall on Edwardian houses; Clare Bucknell on visual traces of the English Civil War; Cora Gilroy-Ware on neoclassical style
MARKET | Jo Lawson-Tancred on museums and online shopping; and the latest art market columns from Emma Crichton-Miller, Susan Moore and Samuel Reilly
Join us – if you dare – as we follow the acclaimed Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno into his installations of intricate spider webs inhabited by solitary, social and semi-social spiders, bridging the architectures of each other’s webs.
In the video, Saraceno talks about how spiders mirror human beings and help us understand ourselves and the way we live. “Every day, I try to enter territories, or thoughts, or ways of working, which might challenge ourselves and might challenge how we see the world.”
Observing a spider in its web for more than twenty minutes, Saraceno argues, can completely change your life and way of noticing things, revealing an unseen world. In connection to this, he feels that art and science – as well as other forms of knowledge – combined, can help us “form new alliances between disciplines and lose our comfort zone of operating and seeing and perceiving and being in the world. To try to find new ways to work and to be.”
Tomás Saraceno (b. 1973) is an Argentinian artist. Saraceno is particularly known for his large-scale, interactive installations and floating sculptures, as well as his interdisciplinary approach to art. With his practice, he explores new sustainable ways of inhabiting the environment.
His work has been exhibited at prominent venues all over the world, including the 58th La Biennale di Venezia in Venice, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires. Saraceno’s work is also part of international collection such as Bauhaus Museum in Weimar, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and SFMoMA in San Francisco.
In 2015, he launched the Aerocene Foundation – an open-source community project for artistic and scientific exploration of environmental issues. Relating to arachnology research, Saraceno is the first person to have scanned, reconstructed and re-imagined spiders’ woven spatial habitats.
For more see: https://studiotomassaraceno.org/about/ Tomás Saraceno was interviewed by Helle Fagralid at his studio in Berlin in November 2019. Camera: Rasmus Quistgaard Edited by Klaus Elmer Produced by Helle Fagralid Cover photo: Tomás Saraceno. ‘Social… Quasi Social… Solitary… Spiders… On Hybrid Cosmic Webs’, 2013. Installation view. Detail. Courtesy of the artist and Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2020
In this week’s episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” celebrate the 444th anniversary of Titian’s death by delving into the tumultuous life of Pietro Aretino, one of the most celebrated—and reviled—literary figures of the Italian Renaissance. Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon examines Titian’s portrait of Aretino at the Frick and the friendship between the Venetian painter and the acid-tongued writer, known to his contemporaries as the “scourge of princes.” This week’s complementary cocktail is the Bellini, a mixture of Prosecco and white-peach puree created by the Cipriani family in Venice and named for Titian’s teacher, Giovanni Bellini.
Tiziano Vecelli or Vecellio, known in English as Titian, was an Italian painter during the Renaissance, considered the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno. During his lifetime he was often called da Cadore, ‘from Cadore’, taken from his native region.
Michelangelo is among the most influential and impressive artists of the Italian High Renaissance. His lifelike sculptures and powerful paintings are some of the most recognizable works in Western art history. He also drew prolifically, making sketch after sketch of figures in slightly varying poses, focusing on form and gesture.
However, remarkably few of these drawings remain today, many of them burned by the artist himself, others lost or damaged over the centuries.
A recent exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Michelangelo: Mind of the Master, brought together more than two dozen of Michelangelo’s surviving drawings—including designs for the Sistine Chapel ceiling and The Last Judgment—to shed light on the artist’s creativity and working method. In this episode, co-curators of this exhibition, Julian Brooks and Edina Adam, discuss the master and what we can learn from his works on paper.
THE MODERN HOUSE (AUG 2020): “I like to make things with unusual textures and I use a lot of heavy glazes, which either bubble or foam up, and I’m interested in the ways the glaze chemistry can make different textures. I’ve been making pieces with a sort of volcanic surface a lot recently, which is achieved by an element in the glaze recipe making tiny explosions in kiln, and then cooling it down very quickly so they set.”
In the first of a new series, Studio Visits, in which we’ll be meeting artists, designers and makers in their place of work, LA-based ceramist Raina Lee invites us into her treehouse studio and gallery space for a talk about her creative process.
Raina, how did you get into ceramics?
“I was a journalist in the tech and video game industry, and I still do some writing now. I happened to be living near a ceramics studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and I decided to take a class. I was enthralled.
“It was so exciting to do something physical and work the clay with my hands – I just fell in love with it. Writing is very abstract and a lot of the time you work on something or pitch an idea and it doesn’t work out, by there’s always a physical end result when making ceramics.”
“I am an Italian ( since 1969) architect and graphic designer (since 1994) that lives and works in Barcelona (since 2007) but mostly I’m a curious person (since ever).“
Every day I try to rediscover a way to observe the world as through the eyes of a child. Children are able to have a vision of things totally uninhibited and without the conditioning of the experience. The children’s drawings are always amazing and beautiful in their spontaneous simplicity and clarity.
I like trying to explain the world I see through different techniques of expression. I like the richness of the language and the diversity of its forms. I do not want to confine me in a prison of a style or shape.
Drawing and illustration are for me one of the ways to recount and photograph the thoughts, feelings and emotions. Every picture has a story and every picture is a witness of a story.
In this week’s episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” examine one of the Frick’s recent acquisitions, the Sèvres “Vase Japon,” with Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon. A unique interpretation of a Chinese (not Japanese) bronze vase from the Han Dynasty, the object represents the 18th-century influence of China on European porcelain design. This week’s program is paired with a Long Island Iced Tea.
On this episode of Art Institute Essentials Tour, take a closer look at Paris Street; Rainy Day, painted by Gustave Caillebotte in 1877. This complex intersection represents in microcosm the changing urban milieu of late nineteenth-century Paris. Considered the artist’s masterpiece, Caillebotte strikingly captured a vast, stark modernity, complete with life-size figures strolling in the foreground and wearing the latest fashions.
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