2017-01-31

2233 - 20170604 - U.S.A. - NEW HAVEN - CONNECTICUT - Century: Reflections on Modern America - 23.12.2016-04.06.2017

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Childe Hassam, Avenue of the Allies, 1918. Oil on canvas. Private collection.
 
It Was a New Century: Reflections on Modern America presents a fresh view of the dawn of the modern age through nearly 60 late 19th- and early 20th-century American paintings, prints, drawings, and watercolors on loan to the Yale University Art Gallery from a private collection. The new century saw the acceleration of America’s already dizzying transformation into an industrial power, which had defining effects on the nation’s art and culture. Technological innovations improved the quality of life for many—even as American cities grew larger, denser, and tougher—and artists embraced both the glamour and grittiness of urban life as a quintessentially modern subject. Opening with the bustling street and colorful flags of Childe Hassam’s Avenue of the Allies (1918), the exhibition is organized thematically, addressing the leading artistic ideas of the day as well as the underlying preoccupations that drove them.
Social realism emerged as the primary approach to capturing the city during the early 20th century, led by the artists of the so-called Ashcan School, named for its focus on the life and urban experience of New York’s working class. In images such as Jerome Myers’s Peddlers, Lower East Side (1905), which depicts a busy sidewalk market scene, and Everett Shinn’s pastels swirling with falling snow and huddled figures rushing through Washington Square Park, the urban landscape and its inhabitants often merge into a unified expression of bustling city life.

Combining spectacle, energy, and violence, George Bellows’s depictions of boxing matches are widely considered among the signature achievements of the period. A group of six lithographs in the exhibition explores the boxing theme in depth and provides a sense of the unfolding drama in the ring as well as the crowd. Bellows’s 1917 lithograph A Stag at Sharkey’s—based on a 1909 painting of the same title—contributed to the public debate about the propriety of boxing and is one of the most venerated artworks he ever produced. Sharkey’s Athletic Club, a bar across from Bellows’s New York studio, hosted illegal “stag” prizefights for all-male audiences. Bellows portrays a fleeting moment of dynamic equilibrium between the two boxers before the match is won or lost.

Individual humanity was expressed through portraiture, another key genre of the period. Though the eponymous subject of Walt Kuhn’s Clown in a Beaver Hat (1944) is painted in full makeup, the sitter’s own character is powerfully evident in his intense expression. Works by Kuhn and others poignantly convey depth, as these artists looked past the artificiality of the costume to capture the self-awareness of the actors.

Leisure was also a prominent theme of the time, both in and out of the city. Parks, beaches, and the countryside offered reprieves from the demands of urban life, and artists including William Merritt Chase, William Glackens, and Maurice Prendergast made recreation a primary subject, bathing their scenes in bright sunlight and shimmering colors that call to mind vacations long past. Influenced by the virtuosic paint handling and attention to light of the French Impressionists and Postimpressionists, these artists adapted that vocabulary to the American landscape.

A group of nostalgic, rural scenes by an earlier generation of artists, such as Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson, as well as by 20th-century figures including Hassam and Willard Metcalf, portrays the other, more retrospective view of the modern experience—the loss of tradition and the wistful recollection of simpler times. Industrialization coincided with rapid urban growth during the mid-19th century, and by the early 20th century rural life was itself an exotic subject for the artists of New York and their equally urban patrons. Pastoral scenes offered them a visual escape.

The exhibition concludes with a group of watercolor views of Venice by Prendergast, a fitting counterpoint to the vision of New York presented in Hassam’s brilliant Avenue of the Allies at the start of the installation. Mark D. Mitchell, the Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, and exhibition curator, observes, “Equal parts energy, leisure, nostalgia, modernity, and urban kaleidoscope, Prendergast’s Venetian watercolors are shimmering summations of the American artistic experience at the turn of the 20th century.”

“The Gallery is grateful for the opportunity to share this private collection of exceptional American art with the public,” states Pamela Franks, Acting Director and the Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “The assembled works present a compelling panorama of a new, modern America—a nation and its artists seeking to embrace the future, to honor the past, and, above all, to interpret the present.”
 
 
 
Yale University Art Gallery - Century: Reflections on Modern America -
23.12.2016-04.06.2017
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2017-01-25

2232 - 20170514 - U.S.A. - PITTSBURGH -PENNSYLVANIA -The Frick Pittsburgh's world class collection highlighted in new exhibition and book - 29.10.2016-14.05.2017

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Claude Monet (1840–1926) Banks of the Seine at Lavacourt (Bords de la Seine a Lavacourt), 1879. Oil on canvas. Frick Art & Historical Center.
 
The Frick Art & Historical Center is currently presenting the first exhibition in eight years to focus exclusively on its permanent collection. On view through May 14, 2017 at The Frick Art Museum, The Frick Collects: From Rubens to Monet celebrates the works of fine and decorative art at the heart of the Frick experience. Admission is free.
Designed to bring renewed attention to the depth and breadth of the Frick’s collection—from bachelor purchases by Henry Clay Frick, through his daughter Helen’s work to ensure the creation of The Frick Art Museum and the preservation of Clayton, and to more recent museum acquisitions, The Frick Collects: From Rubens to Monet features many of the museum’s most significant objects and tells the story of the Frick today and how it has evolved from its founding collections.

Accompanying The Frick Collects: Rubens to Monet is a new 120-page guide to the collection, produced in collaboration with Scala, specialists in museum publications. The Frick Pittsburgh, A Guide to the Collection is the first publication since 1993 to focus on The Frick Pittsburgh’s permanent collection. Featuring an introduction by Frick Director Robin Nicholson and contextual essays by Director of Curatorial Affairs Sarah Hall and Associate Curator of Decorative Arts Dawn Reid Brean, it is available for purchase at The Frick Museum Store for $16.95 retail ($15.26 for members). The accompanying publication is generously underwritten by The Richard C. von Hess Foundation.

Frick Director Robin Nicholson comments, “Regular visitors to the Frick are familiar with the spectacular Rubens portrait that is regularly on view at The Frick Art Museum and likely know the dazzling Monet that typically hangs in the sitting room at Clayton. The Frick Collects features these iconic works and other extraordinary paintings and decorative arts from the collection, as well as more recent acquisitions, such as Meissonier’s 1806, Jena. By bringing these works together in our exhibition galleries, we are putting the spotlight on our own world-class collection, and taking the opportunity to tell more of our own stories—both about individual objects and about the Frick as a whole.”

The Frick Collects: From Rubens to Monet is composed of 42 paintings, 26 decorative arts pieces, nine pieces of furniture, six works on paper, and three examples of sculpture, and is organized by acquisition date, allowing visitors to perceive the development of the collection, from Henry Clay Frick’s earliest purchases to recent museum acquisitions. Thematic sections include: From Apartment to Starter Home: The Collecting Begins, covering the years 1881 to 1892; The Confident Collector, encompassing purchases made through the 1890s to around 1906; Collecting with Ambition, which includes important purchases made from other collections and covers the years when Frick was purchasing with the intention of creating a public gallery; Her Father’s Daughter, which elucidates Helen Clay Frick’s collecting interests; and, Expanding the Legacy, which includes the establishment of The Frick Art Museum and acquisitions made since the museum’s founding.
 
 
 
 
Frick Art & Historical Center - The Frick Collects: From Rubens to Monet
29.10.2016-14.05.2017
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2017-01-18

2231 - 20170416 - U.S.A. - NEW BRITAIN - CONNECTICUT - New Britain Museum of American Art displays portfolio of photographs by Ansel Adams - 08.12.2016-16.04.2017

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Ansel Adams (1902–84), Winter Storm, 1940, Silver gelatin print, 7 3/8 x 9 in., Courtesy of the New Britain Museum of American Art, Reproduced with permission of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.
 
 The New Britain Museum of American Art presents the exhibition Ansel Adams: Yosemite Valley, on view from December 8, 2016 to April 16, 2017 in the Helen T. and Philip B. Stanley Gallery. Celebrating the National Park Service’s centennial year, this exhibition comprises 16 silver gelatin prints by Ansel Adams (1902¬–1984) dating from 1927 to 1960 and depicting the majestic beauty of Yosemite National Park in California.
Born in San Francisco, Adams became known for his striking black-and-white landscape photographs of the American West. In 1916, he visited Yosemite National Park with his family, and was given his first camera by his father. Photography and Yosemite would remain subjects of fascination for the remainder of Adams’s life.

In 1960, Yosemite Valley was published by the Sierra Club, a renowned conservation organization of which Adams was a dedicated member for over 30 years. The artist served a vital role at the Club, assisting in effectively persuading the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service to declare numerous wilderness lands as National Parks, acting as the Club’s official trip photographer, and receiving numerous environmental awareness awards.

The prints presented in this exhibition highlight Adams’s interest in the aesthetic and scientific aspects of nature in their most grand and minute detail. These images had profound success in awakening many Americans to the purity of the nation’s natural regions and the importance of preserving them.



New Britain Museum of American Art - Ansel Adams: Yosemite Valley
08.12.2016-16.04.2017



 
 
 
 

2017-01-11

2230 - 20170402 - U.S.A. - SAN FRANCISCO - CALIFORNIA - SFMOMA presents "A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions" - 10.12.2016-02.04.2017

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Doris Salcedo, Plega ria Mud a , 2008–10; wood, mineral compound, metal, and grass; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase, by exchange, through a fractional gift of Shirley Ross Davis; © Doris Salcedo.
 
A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions reflects on the ways that artists have responded to the evolving conditions of the 21st century. Composed of work by 40 artists, the exhibition broadly considers the fluidity of ideas and how artworks embody time. The installation, which highlights recent acquisitions and works on view to the public for the first time, calls attention to the varied forms and approaches taken by different artists and the connections between the personal, the intimate and the individual; constructions of identity, history and culture; the instability of materials; and strategies to rediscover or recover the past. 
The title phrase is taken from art historian George Kubler’s seminal book The Shape of Time (1962), in which the author proposes a history of “things”—including artworks—that traces connected ideas developed in sequence, sometimes over centuries and with intervening deviations and lapses. Through ideas, artworks are affected by their historical context and, in turn, affect it.

“By considering the complex and often contradictory continuum of the past 16 years, A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions brings together profound meditations on equality, loss, desire, migration, materiality and the everyday,” said Jenny Gheith, exhibition curator and assistant curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA. “We see artists creating ambitious installations in non-traditional materials such as sand and grass alongside quiet reflections that mark the passage of time.”

Representing a range of approaches and media—including painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography, film, video and performance—A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions features a dynamic cross-section of contemporary art. Beginning with a performance work by Tino Sehgal in Helen and Charles Schwab Hall and continuing to unfold through a series of seventh-floor galleries organized according to shared formal and conceptual affinities, the exhibition is punctuated by monographic installations by Lutz Bacher, Trisha Donnelly, Dora GarcĂ­a and Emily Jacir. Other highlights of the exhibition include works by artists Tauba Auerbach, Tacita Dean, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Colter Jacobsen, Mark Manders, as well as Sam Lewitt, Paulina Olowska, Catherine Opie, Walid Raad and Danh Vo, among others.
 
 
 
 
SFMOMA - A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions - 10.12.2016-02.04.2017  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2017-01-04

2229 - 20170305 - U.S.A. - WASHINGTON, DC - Stuart Davis exhibition at National Gallery of Art Washington - 20.11.2016-05.03.2017

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Stuart Davis, Place des Vosges No. 2, 1928. Oil on canvas, overall: 65.3 x 92.3 cm (25 11/16 x 36 5/16 in.), framed: 80.7 x 107.6 x 9.5 cm (31 3/4 x 42 3/8 x 3 3/4 in.). Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, Dr. and Mrs. Milton Lurie Kramer, Class of 1936, Collection, bequest of Helen Kroll Kramer. Art © Estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
 
One of the most important American modernists, Stuart Davis blurred distinctions between text and image, high and low art, and abstraction and figuration, crafting a distinct style that continues to influence art being made today. On view at the National Gallery of Art, West Building, from November 20, 2016 through March 5, 2017, Stuart Davis: In Full Swing features some 100 of his most important, visually complex, jazz-inspired compositions, offering a new exploration of his working method.
In Full Swing is the first Davis exhibition at the National Gallery of Art and the first major Davis exhibition anywhere to consistently hang later works side by side with the earlier ones that inspired them. From the paintings of tobacco packages and household objects of the early 1920s to the work left on his easel at the time of his death in 1964, In Full Swing highlights Davis's unique ability to assimilate the imagery of popular culture, the aesthetics of advertising, the lessons of cubism, and the sounds and rhythms of jazz into works that hum with intelligence and energy.

"With a long career that stretched from the early 20th century well into the postwar era, Stuart Davis brought a particularly American accent to international modernism. Davis's works are visually complex, mobilizing bold colors and jagged forms in jangling, jazz-inspired compositions," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art, Washington. "We are grateful to the many major U.S. museums that lent works, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, which has contributed two rarely seen paintings, as well as to the sponsors, including Altria Group.

"We have supported visual and performing arts for more than 50 years. We are pleased to sponsor the Stuart Davis: In Full Swing exhibition to celebrate a unique voice of mid-20th-century American optimism, which importantly helped launch the era of pop art. We are proud of our long-standing partnership with the Gallery and once again glad to support an exceptional exhibition," said Bruce Gates, Altria's senior vice president of External Affairs.

Stuart Davis: In Full Swing differs from previous exhibitions on the artist not only in its degree of focus but also in its organization. From 1940 on, Davis rarely painted a work that did not make a careful reference to one or more of his earlier compositions—a distinctive aspect of his method.

Along with Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis is one of the four most important American modernists. All had long careers that stretched from the early years of the 20th century well into the post–World War II era. All but Davis have had major exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art: O'Keeffe in 1988, Calder in 1998, and Hopper in 2008.

Starting from decidedly provincial roots as a left-wing illustrator of urban life around New York, and with only a brief sojourn in Paris (1928–1929), Davis brought the lessons of French modernism into American painting between the wars and then emerged in the 1940s with a bold and original manner. In blurring distinctions between text and image, high and low art, and abstraction and figuration, Davis's works have remained vital and continue to influence art being made today. He is often seen as a precursor of both pop art and contemporary abstraction.

Omitting his first decade, when he worked as an illustrator while he tried out various modernist styles, the exhibition focuses on the brilliant sequence of moves that began in 1921 with his paintings of tobacco packages and household objects and ended only with his death in 1964. Highlights of the exhibition include all four of Davis's breakthrough egg-beater paintings of the 1920s, three major murals from the 1930s, and 25 paintings from the 1950s, his greatest decade. Principal lenders include the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Phillips Collection.
 
 
 
National Gallery of Art - Stuart Davis -  20.11.2016-05.03.2017