Tag Archives: History

Art, Arts & Literature, History, Reviews

Art History: “Auguste Rodin – The Father Of Modern Sculpture”

May 9, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

From Christie’s online magazine (May 2020):

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) Meditation, small model, type I version

Rodin travelled to Italy in 1875, a trip described by the late art historian Kirk Varnedoe as, ‘one of the seminal events in modern art’.

Here, in his mid-thirties, he fell under the spell of the Renaissance master, Michelangelo. His monumental, exaggerated nude figures would have a deep and lasting influence on the artist. ‘My liberation from academicism was via Michelangelo,’ Rodin later recalled. ‘He is the bridge by which I passed from one circle to another.’

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is renowned for breathing life into clay, creating naturalistic, often vigorously modelled sculptures which convey intense human emotions: love, ecstasy, agony or grief. Breaking the rules of academic convention and classical idealism, Rodin ushered in a new form of highly expressive sculpture that went on to influence generations of artists that followed.

Read full article at Christie’s

Art, Arts & Literature, History, Videos

Art History: “Cocktails With A Curator – Turner’s ‘Harbor Of Dieppe'” (Frick)

Video May 8, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

In this episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, discusses the French port city depicted in J. M. W. Turner’s painting “Harbor of Dieppe: Changement de Domicile,” and how the artist’s extensive travel throughout Europe helped to develop his affinity for harbors. The complementary cocktail is the Widow’s Kiss, a French drink traditionally given to women who had lost their husbands at sea.

To see this painting in detail, please visit our website: https://collections.frick.org/objects…

History, Travel, Videos

Art History Video: “Travels With a Curator – Lazienki Palace” In Warsaw (Frick)

Video May 6, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

In this episode of “Travels with a Curator,” we travel to Warsaw, Poland, with Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. Xavier enchants us with the romantic Łazienki Park and Palace, also known as the Palace on the Isle. The idyllic gardens and ornately decorated interior spaces are similar in many ways to our own Frick mansion. One of the Frick’s Rembrandt paintings, “The Polish Rider,” once hung in the royal apartments on the second floor.

Travel, Videos

New Books: “The Louvre – The Many Lives Of The World’s Most Famous Museum” (James Gardner)

May 4, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

The fascinating and little-known story of the Louvre, from its inception as a humble fortress to its transformation into the palatial residence of the kings of France and then into the world’s greatest art museum.

Some ten million people from all over the world flock to the Louvre each year to enjoy its incomparable art collection. Yet few of them are aware of the remarkable history of that place and of the buildings themselves―a fascinating story that historian James Gardner elegantly chronicles in the first full-length history of the Louvre in English.

More than 7,000 years ago, men and women camped on a spot called le Louvre for reasons unknown; a clay quarry and a vineyard supported a society there in the first centuries AD. A thousand years later, King Philippe Auguste of France constructed a fortress there in 1191, just outside the walls of a city far smaller than the Paris we know today. Intended to protect the capital against English soldiers stationed in Normandy, the fortress became a royal residence under Charles V two centuries later, and then the monarchy’s principal residence under the great Renaissance king François I in 1546.

It remained so until 1682, when Louis XIV moved his entire court to Versailles. Thereafter the fortunes of the Louvre languished until the tumultuous days of the French Revolution when, during the Reign of Terror in 1793, it first opened its doors to display the nation’s treasures. Ever since―through the Napoleonic era, the Commune, two World Wars, to the present―the Louvre has been a witness to French history, and expanded to become home to a legendary collection, including such masterpieces as the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo, whose often-complicated and mysterious origins form a spectacular narrative that rivals the building’s grand stature.

James Gardner

James Gardner is an American art critic and literary critic based in New York and Buenos Aires. He is the author of six books, including Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, and the British Spectator. He was the art critic at the New York Post and wrote architecture criticism for the New York Observer, before serving as the architecture critic at the New York Sun. He is now a contributing editor at The Magazine Antiques.

Art Books: “Velázquez – The Complete Works”

April 26, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Manet called him “the greatest painter of all.” Picasso was so inspired by his masterpiece Las Meninas that he painted 44 variations of it. Francis Bacon painted a study of his portrait of Pope Innocent X. Monet and Renoir, Corot and Courbet, Degas and Dalí…for so many champions of art history, the ultimate soundboard was—and remains—Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599-1660).

Velazquez The Complete Works — Las Meninas – Diego Velázquez (1656)

This updated catalog raisonné brings together Velázquez’s complete works, jaw-droppingly reproduced in extra-large format, with a selection of enlarged details and brand new photography of recently restored paintings, achieved through the joint initiative of TASCHEN and Wildenstein. The book’s dazzling images are accompanied by insightful commentary from José López-Rey on Velázquez’s interest in human life and his equal attention to all subjects, from an old woman frying eggs to a pope or king, as well as his commitment to color and light, which would influence the Impressionists over two centuries later.

The authors

José López-Rey (1905–1991) taught Italian Renaissance at the University of Madrid and worked as an art advisor for the Spanish Ministry of Education. Before the end of the Spanish Civil War, he emigrated to the USA, where he resumed his teaching career at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York. In 1973 he was awarded emeritus status. López-Rey was a corresponding member of the Hispanic Society of America and a consultant and contributor to several international art journals, including the Gazette des Beaux Arts and Art News.

Odile Delenda, graduate of the École du Louvre, served as professor there, and then as deputy head of the department of paintings at the Musée du Louvre until 2007. She has collaborated on several exhibitions of old master paintings. A research fellow at the Wildenstein Institute in Paris since 1990, she has continued her study of Spanish art from the Siglo de Oro. She is, among other works, the author of Vélasquez, peintre religieux (1993) and, under the auspices of the Wildenstein Institute, the first critical catalogue raisonné of the painted oeuvre of Francisco de Zurbarán and his studio (2009/10).

Art Insider: “Why Did Vincent Van Gogh Paint So Many Self-Portraits?”

Video April 17, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

In Van Gogh Questions, our researcher Bregje Gerritse answers the most frequently asked questions about Vincent van Gogh.

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Art, Arts & Literature, History, Videos

Art History: “Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist And The Avant-Garde” (MoMA)

Video April 15, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

“It would not be a commonplace portrait at all, but a carefully composed picture, with very carefully arranged colors and lines. A rhythmic and angular pose. A decorative Félix, entering with his hat or a flower in his hand.”

With these words, in 1890, Paul Signac described to Félix Fénéon the extraordinary portrait he was dedicating to him. In it, Signac paid homage to Fénéon’s distinctive appearance, his generous but enigmatic personality, and his innovative approach to modernism.

This painting, a masterpiece in the Museum’s collection, will be the centerpiece of Félix Fénéon, the first exhibition dedicated to Fénéon (1861–1944). An art critic, editor, publisher, dealer, collector, and anarchist, Fénéon had a wide-ranging influence on the development of modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the late 1880s, he played a key role in defining the new movement known as Neo-Impressionism, a term he coined himself, whose artists, including Signac, used tiny dabs of color that would mix in the eye of the viewer. Over the next five decades, he championed the careers of artists from Georges-Pierre Seurat and Signac to Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Amedeo Modigliani.

He amassed a renowned collection of paintings by these artists and many others, and he was also a pioneering collector of art from Africa and Oceania. The exhibition will feature some 130 objects, including major works that Fénéon admired, championed, and collected, as well as contemporary photographs, letters, and publications that trace key chapters in his biography. Together these works reveal the profound and lasting legacy of Fénéon’s keen eye and bold, forward-looking vision.

Art, Arts & Literature, History, Videos

Art History: “Emotional Expression” In Artwork Of Venetian Painter “Titian” (National Gallery Video)

Video April 14, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

The way Titian painted was unlike other artists of his day. With little in the way of preliminary drawings, Titian worked very freely straight onto the canvas. Watch artist Andy Pankhurst show us how Titian would have worked.

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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.