Tag Archives: The Art Institute of Chicago

Art: ‘Ethel Schwabacher – Woman In Nature’ (NYC)

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.

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Art: ‘Must-See Museum Exhibitions’ – May 2023

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.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

This week: is heritage in Ukraine being attacked and looted, and what can be done to protect it?

Ben Luke talks to The Art Newspaper’s museums and heritage editor, Tom Seymour, who has been to the Ukrainian-Polish border with the International Council of Museums (ICOM), to witness museum materials being sent into Ukraine to help institutions there. Then, Tom talks to Sophie Delepierre, the head of heritage protection at ICOM, about the organisation’s efforts in Ukraine and elsewhere.

As a major exhibition of the work of Paul Cezanne opens at The Art Institute of Chicago, ahead of its journey to Tate Modern later in the year, Ben talks to Gloria Groom and Caitlin Haskell, the curators of the Chicago exhibition. And for this episode’s Work of the Week, our acting digital editor, Aimee Dawson, asks Oliver Lanzenberg, the grandson of the artist Nicola L., about his grandmother’s work Gold Femme Commode (1969/1993). The piece is part of a show at Alison Jacques, one of a number of exhibitions opening to coincide with the second edition of London Gallery Weekend.

Tom’s full report into ICOM’s work for Ukraine is in the next print edition of The Art Newspaper and online soon.

The organisation Sophie mentions is NEMO, the Network of European Museum Organisations, ne-mo.org.

Cezanne, The Art Institute of Chicago, 15 May-5 September; Tate Modern, London, 5 October-12 March 2023.

Nicola L., Alison Jacques, London, until 23 July.

London Gallery Weekend, 13-15 May.