Through some 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera, it will explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in New York City’s Harlem and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South.
The first art museum survey of the subject in New York City since 1987, the exhibition will establish the Harlem Renaissance and its radically new development of the modern Black subject as central to the development of international modern art.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (October 18, 2023) – Over an intense nine weeks in the summer of 1905 in the modest fishing village of Collioure on the French Mediterranean, Henri Matisse and Andre Derain embarked on a partnership that led to a wholly new, radical artistic language later known as Fauvism.
Their daring, energetic experiments with color, form, structure, and perspective changed the course of French painting; it marked an introduction to early modernism and introduced Matisse’s first important body of work in his long career.
This exhibition, which is co-organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, emphasizes as never before the legacy of that summer and examines the paintings, drawings, and watercolors of Matisse and Derain through sixty-five works on loan from national and international museums, including Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou; National Galleries of Scotland; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; as well as private collections.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (October 6, 2023) – Stephan Wolohojian, John Pope-Hennessy Curator in Charge, and Ashley Dunn, Associate Curator, explore Manet/Degas. This exhibition examines one of the most significant artistic dialogues in modern art history: the close and sometimes tumultuous relationship between Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas.
Born only two years apart, Manet (1832–1883) and Degas (1834–1917) were friends, rivals, and, at times, antagonists who worked to define modern painting in France. By examining their careers in parallel and presenting their work side by side, this exhibition investigates how their artistic objectives and approaches both overlapped and diverged. Through more than 160 paintings and works on paper, Manet/Degas takes a fresh look at the interactions of these two artists in the context of the family relationships, friendships, and intellectual circles that influenced their artistic and professional choices, deepening our understanding of a key moment in nineteenth-century French painting. On view: September 24, 2023–January 7, 2024
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (September 4, 2023) – This exhibition examines one of the most significant artistic dialogues in modern art history: the close and sometimes tumultuous relationship between Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Born only two years apart, Manet (1832–1883) and Degas (1834–1917) were friends, rivals, and, at times, antagonists who worked to define modern painting in France.
Through more than 150 paintings and works on paper, Manet/Degas takes a fresh look at the interactions of these two artists in the context of the family relationships, friendships, and intellectual circles that influenced their artistic and professional choices, deepening our understanding of a key moment in nineteenth-century French painting.
Manet/Degas is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, Paris.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (August 3, 2023) – A virtual tour of Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE–400 CE. Featuring more than 140 objects dating from 200 BCE to 400 CE, the exhibition presents a series of evocative and interlocking themes to reveal both the pre-Buddhist origins of figurative sculpture in India and the early narrative traditions that were central to this formative moment in early Indian art.
With major loans from a dozen lenders across India, as well as from the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States, it transports visitors into the world of early Buddhist imagery that gave expression to this new religion as it grew from a core set of ethical teachings into one of the world’s great religions. Objects associated with Indo-Roman exchange reveal India’s place in early global trade.
The exhibition showcases objects in various media, including limestone sculptures, gold, silver, bronze, rock crystal, and ivory. Highlights include spectacular sculptures from southern India—newly discovered and never before publicly exhibited masterpieces—that add to the world canon of early Buddhist art. On view: July 21st–November 13th, 2023
The Metropolitan Museum of Art –Join Susan Alyson Stein, Engelhard Curator of Nineteenth-Century European Painting, to virtually explore Van Gogh’s Cypresses, the first exhibition to focus on the trees—among the most famous in the history of art—immortalized in signature images by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890).
Such iconic pictures as Wheat Field with Cypresses and The Starry Night take their place as the centerpiece in a presentation that affords an unprecedented perspective on a motif virtually synonymous with the Dutch artist’s fiercely original power of expression. Some 40 works illuminate the extent of his fascination with the region’s distinctive flamelike evergreens as they successively sparked, fueled, and stoked his imagination over the course of two years in the South of France: from his initial sightings of the “tall and dark” trees in Arles to realizing their full, evocative potential (“as I see them”) at the asylum in Saint-Rémy.
Juxtaposing landmark paintings with precious drawings and illustrated letters—many rarely, if ever, lent or exhibited together—this tightly conceived thematic exhibition offers an extraordinary opportunity to appreciate anew some of Van Gogh’s most celebrated works in a context that reveals the backstory of their invention for the first time.
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.
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.
Largely known today as the subject of The Met’s iconic portrait by Diego Velázquez, Pareja—who was born in Antequera, Spain—was enslaved in Velázquez’s studio for over two decades before becoming an artist in his own right. This presentation is the first to tell his story and examine the ways in which enslaved artisanal labor and a multiracial society are inextricably linked with the art and material culture of Spain’s “Golden Age.”
Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja (ca. 1608–1670) has long been a landmark of European art, but this provocative study focuses on its subject: an enslaved man who went on to build his own successful career as an artist. This catalogue—the first scholarly monograph on Pareja— discusses the painter’s ties to the Madrid School of the 1660s and revises our understanding of artistic production during Spain’s Golden Age, with a focus on enslaved artists and artisans.
The authors illuminate the highly skilled labor within Seville’s multiracial society; the role of Black saints and confraternities in the promotion of Catholicism among enslaved populations; and early twentieth-century scholar Arturo Schomburg’s project to recover Pareja’s legacy.
The book also includes the first illustrated and annotated list of known works attributed to Pareja. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (October 18, 2023) – Over an intense nine weeks in the summer of 1905 in the modest fishing village of Collioure on the French Mediterranean, Henri Matisse and Andre Derain embarked on a partnership that led to a wholly new, radical artistic language later known as Fauvism. 
Boomers Daily 