Old Masters, New Interest

'Portrait of Baron de Robeck Riding a Bay Hunter' (1791), by George Stubbs; estimate: £2 million-£3 million.

Old Masters, New Interest

(Source Wallstreet Journal) Old master dealers and auctioneers have joined forces to launch Master Paintings Week (July 4-10), a new event on London's art-collecting calendar.

Some 23 of the city's top international galleries will stage special painting exhibitions. Auction houses will hold a series of sales featuring works of European art from the 14th to the mid-19th century.
Running parallel will be Master Drawings London, now in its ninth year, where international dealers will offer hundreds of years of art-on-paper up to the present day.

Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting specialist Johnny Van Haeften says that old-master paintings have an image problem in that many people think of them as "dark and dreary, but in fact I think they would be surprised at just how vibrant and fascinating they can be." Among his offerings will be Jan Brueghel the Elder's "Still Life of Flowers in a Blue and White Vase," full of dancing blooms and priced in the region of $5 million.

Old Bond Street's Colnaghi Gallery will focus on the German Renaissance master Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), an artist who has had tremendous influence into the present day. His milk-white, virtuous-yet-dangerous nudes have inspired everything from German expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's colorful sirens to contemporary American artist John Currin's strangely twisted female portraits. Not least, Cranach's Garden-of-Eden painting "Temptation" became known to global TV viewers as the frontispiece for credit lines in the series "Desperate Housewives."

Among the highlights at Sotheby's evening sale on July 8 will be two major equestrian paintings: Goya's 1794 portrait of Spain's Duke of Alcudia seated on a prancing horse with a threatening sky in the background (estimate: £2.5 million-£3.5 million); and star British equestrian artist George Stubbs's delightful 1791 painting of Baron de Robeck on his proud hunter (estimate: £2 million-£3 million).
Another highlight at Sotheby's will be a portrait from 1628 by Dutch master Anthony Van Dyck of his friend Endymion Porter dressed in a rich, satin doublet and a flowing red cap. The work illustrates the artist's incredible ability to capture the essence of his sitter, and has never been offered at auction before (estimate: £1 million-£1.5 million).

A major Van Dyck at Christie's on July 7 will be a portrait of a richly dressed, pregnant "Mrs. Oliver St. John later Lady Poulett" (1636), which was last seen in public at a Detroit Institute of Fine Arts exhibition in 1929 (estimate: £800,000-£1.2 million).

Exhibition: 1609

1609

Friday, July 3, 2009 - Sunday, March 7, 2010
New York State Museum

Two worlds collided in 1609 when Henry Hudson and the Dutch sailed up the “great river” and met the Native People of New York. This exhibition
introduces visitors to information about Henry
Hudson, Native People of New York, and the Dutch period in New York state by dispelling some commonly held myths and showing the legacy these groups left to the residents of the state and the nation. The New York State Museum collaborated with the State Archives, State Library, and Office of Educational Television and Public Broadcasting on 1609, and these institutions provided additional expertise, documents, and artifacts for the exhibition. Archaeologist James Bradley, an expert on Native Americans, Russell Shorto, an authority on colonial Dutch history, and Steven Comer, a Mohican Indian living within the original territory of the Mohican people, consulted on the project. The exhibition also features paintings by Capital District historical artist L. F. Tantillo.

Zondag 20 september vindt op de Albert Cuypmarkt de KunstCuyp plaats

Op zondag 20 september vindt voor de vijfde achtereenvolgende keer op de Albert Cuypmarkt de KunstCuyp plaats. Deze ‘laagdrempelige kunstmarkt van hoog niveau’, maakt onderdeel uit van het jaarlijkse Nazomerfestival, met onder meer een participatiemarkt, een proeverij, buurtbrunch, kinderactiviteiten, straattheater, dans en veel live muziek. De algemene coördinatie is in handen van het wijkcentrum Ceintuur in De Pijp.

Wat heeft de Kunst&CultuurCuyp te bieden? Tientallen stands in de vorm van marktkramen op de plek waar dagelijks de Albert Cuyp markt wordt gehouden. Op een stand kunt u uw kunstwerken te koop aanbieden, interesse opwekken voor een project waar u aan werkt, een speciaal voor de gelegenheid ontworpen project uitvoeren, etcetera. Op de diverse terrassen kunnen bezoekers even uitpuffen en genieten van muziek- en theateroptredens.

Prix d’Albert. De best verzorgde en/of meest origineel ingerichte kraam ontvangt de jaarlijkse Prix d’Albert, bestaande uit een solotentoonstelling in wijkcentrum Ceintuur met begeleidende publicatie in De Pijp Krant. De stands worden beoordeeld door een deskundige jury.

Voor wie is de Kunst&CultuurCuyp bedoeld? Professionele beeldend kunstenaars uit alle disciplines worden uitgenodigd zich in te schrijven. De KunstCuyp werkt dit jaar voor de tweede keer samen met ‘Open Ateliers De Pijp’ dat op 3 en 4 oktober plaats vindt. Deelnemers aan die route roepen wij specifiek op zich voor de KunstCuyp in te schrijven, zodat tevens een representatief voorproefje van de route kan ontstaan. Een stand van de organisatie van de route zal extra aandacht aan dit evenement schenken.

Speerpunt: Het Nazomerfestival werkt dit jaar aan het thema duurzaamheid. U als mogelijke deelnemer aan het festival roepen we op om na te denken over dit thema en het op enigerlei wijze weer te geven in uw stand.

Publiciteit. Het programma van de KunstCuyp wordt gepubliceerd in De Pijpkrant, die voorafgaand aan de KunstCuyp in een oplage van 15.000 huis aan huis in De Pijp bezorgd wordt. De website www.nazomerfestival-depijp.nl bevat het programma en onder meer gegevens van de deelnemende kunstenaars (afbeelding, kort statement en een link naar een website naar keuze). De organisatie verspreidt persberichten, aankondigingen in de vorm van posters en flyers en realiseert free publicity.


Grotere kaart weergeven

PLOT is a new public art quadrennial, produced and presented by Creative Time.

Judi Werthein

To create La Tierra de los Libres, Judi Werthein chose to collaborate with itinerant agricultural workers from Colombia's Pacific Coast who were driven to inland cities by conflict surrounding the drug trade. To make a living in their new, urban environment, this group drew on a cultural tradition of singing while they worked and began performing in local restaurants and bars. Werthein gave the musicians a literal Spanish translation of The Star-Spangled Banner and asked them to play the song in their own style.

PLOT is a new public art quadrennial, produced and presented by Creative Time. This World & Nearer Ones is the first edition of PLOT, and will be held this summer on Governors Island. 19 artworks by international contemporary artists will be presented. The exhibition is free and open to the public Friday-Sunday.

Featuring work by Edgar Arceneaux, AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Adam Chodzko, Tue Greenfort, Jill Magid, Teresa Margolles, Anthony McCall, Nils Norman, Susan Philipsz, Patti Smith and Jesse Smith, Tercerunquinto, Tris Vonna-Michell, Mark Wallinger, Klaus Weber, Lawrence Weiner, Judi Werthein, Guido van der Werve, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. Curated by Mark Beasley.

Curatorial Statement (Excerpt)
It could be stated that many of the works of This World & Nearer Ones seem enveloped in a pall of darkness, to be read either as a persistence of the irrational and the obscure or a reflection of the spirit of the age. It was the Impressionists that chose to employ dark mirrors, in order to refresh their eyes and see color anew; to stare into dark glass before turning back again to the world. This, then, is the exhibition as dark mirror. It seeks, through materially slight and ephemeral means, to present works that eschew the spectacular and absolute and, employing more than a little dark humour, invite open speculation. Avoiding easy succour—there is no vividly coloured, lime green, depression-era glass by which to forget oneself—the artists present a world in which certainty and the future are in question. For certainty without critical thought has been the crowning tragedy of the age. What we are being asked to consider is the sureness of our beliefs, from the invocation of spirits both scientific and ritually summoned; fictional architecture and neo-liberal urban planning; the ghosts of counterculture and culturally-sanctioned agit-prop to the spoken testimony of army veterans and science fiction narratives. It, as with the island, is in a state of becoming, caught between worlds and open to all, a moment to consider without fixity the times in which we live.
Mark Beasley, May, 2009
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2009/plot09/artworks.php

Knights and Hunters: Ken Garduno, Jason Hernandez, Michael Hsiung and Sam Saghatelian

Knights and Hunters: Ken Garduno, Jason Hernandez, Michael Hsiung and Sam Saghatelian

13 June – 11 July, 2009

Los Angeles – Black Maria Gallery announced “Knights and Hunters,” a new group exhibition that will open on Saturday, June 13, at 7 PM. The show will feature new drawings and paintings by Los Angeles artists Ken Garduno, Jason Hernandez, Michael C. Hsiung and Sam Saghatelian.

The exhibited works share a common theme in that they explore the complex interconnectedness of chivalry and machismo, according to Zara Zeitountsian, the director of Black Maria Gallery.

“Against the backdrop of gender politics, the ever-evolving roles of men and women, and particularly the cultural underpinnings that inform tradition and change, the ‘Knights and Hunters’ exhibition examines our understanding of what could be described as the gentleman’s ethos on the one hand, and the Don Juan complex on the other,” Zeitountsian explained.

“As the works included in the exhibition shed light on the many ironies of what it might mean to be a man in the contemporary world, they reveal the comical, the shocking and not-so-shocking, and sometimes the downright grotesque,” Saghatelian continued. “So it is that many of the works are tongue-in-cheek and unabashedly over the top. But perhaps the most important thread running through these works is that of a certain loving curiosity, and ultimately an insistence on pointing at a common humanity beyond the politics and stereotypes.”

Foundry to Finish: The Making of a Bronze Sculpture

In a process still relatively unchanged from Adriaen de Vries' time, "Juggling Man" is replicated in the direct lost-wax method. A foundry worker scoops slag from molten bronze.

Foundry to Finish: The Making of a Bronze Sculpture June 23 - July 11 2010 at The Getty Center

http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/foundry_finish/index.html?cid=egetty093

Dutch artist Adriaen De Vries became renowned in his lifetime for the innovative compositions and technical virtuosity of his bronze sculpture. He made Juggling Man around 1610, at a time when technical innovations in casting would have offered a safer approach than the method he chose.

De Vries practiced the more traditional direct lost-wax approach, in which the original model sculpted of clay and wax becomes encased in a mold. If the artist ran into a problem during the next stage of casting with molten bronze, he would have had to start the creative process all over again. The model would have been destroyed.

This exhibition and accompanying photographs and videos demonstrate the process of bronze casting as de Vries practiced it for Juggling Man. It is explained in three stages: modeling, casting, and finishing. Read all, modelling, casting, finishing and more...http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/foundry_finish/index.html?cid=egetty093

MOMA presents James Ensor

James Ensor (Belgian, 1860–1949), The Intrigue. 1890. Oil on canvas, 35 7/16 x 59 1/16" (90 x 150 cm) Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels.

MOMA presents James Ensor
June 28, 2009–September 21, 2009

James Ensor (1860–1949) was a major figure in the Belgian avant-garde of the late nineteenth century and an important precursor to the development of Expressionism in the early twentieth. In both respects he has influenced generations of later artists. This exhibition presents approximately 120 works, examining Ensor's contribution to modernity, his innovative and allegorical use of light, his prominent use of satire, his deep interest in carnival and performance, and his own self-fashioning and use of masking, travesty, and role-playing. Examples of Ensor's paintings, prints, and drawings are installed in an overlapping network of themes and images to produce a complete picture of this daring, experiential body of work. Ultimately, this exhibition presents James Ensor as a socially engaged and self-critical artist involved with the issues of his times and with contemporary debates on the very nature of modernism. The exhibition, which is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, will travel to the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, October 2009–February 2010.

James Ensor (Belgian, 1860–1949), The Intrigue. 1890. Oil on canvas, 35 7/16 x 59 1/16" (90 x 150 cm) Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels.

Employing Art Along With Ambassadors

Sol Lewitt's Wall Drawing #1256: Five Pointed Stars was installed in Berlin in 2008.

Photo: Werner Huthmacher

Arts / Art & Design
Employing Art Along With Ambassadors
By PATRICIA COHEN Published: June 27, 2009 (New York Times Pernmalink)
Hundreds of prominent and accomplished artists have either donated or been commissioned to create art for the scores of new American embassies, consulates and residences worldwide.

Richard Long at Tate Britain

‘A Line in Scotland’, a sculpture by Richard Long

Richard Long at Tate Britain

(Source Financial Times,Visual Arts) Landscape as a site for artistic pleasure began in the late Middle Ages, reached its apogee with the romantics – Constable, Turner, Caspar David Friedrich – and petered out with the end of modernism. It was alien to classical civilisation and is anathema to most contemporary art. So the great revelation of Richard Long’s retrospective at Tate Britain is that here is an artist who, since the 1960s, has been quietly, radically reclaiming landscape as a source of delight, both sensual and intellectual.
This is a sweeping, joyful, dramatically alive show. Long’s seminal idea – that walking became art when he said it was – is demonstrated in different ways: slate circles arranged on specific sites or imported into the gallery; sticks or stones marking intervals on a walk; photographs; text pieces noting times, places and thoughts on his journeys. The idea gains seriousness, credence, occasionally humour, from the repetition and variety of its manifestations. And even if you leave, as I did, unconvinced by every element, the show coheres room by room into a persuasive exploration of man’s relationship with and place in the abstract entity we call nature.

“Heaven” and “Earth”, the mud-and-water frescoes opening the show and providing its title, evoke both the visceral, spontaneous primitivism of cave-painting and a highly ordered vocabulary of abstraction. Derived from ancient Chinese symbols, Long’s marks include signs for mountains, river, wind, tranquillity. “Heaven” is based on six solid lines; “Earth” on six broken ones, denoting the basic sky/earth, cerebral/physical duality at the heart of his work. It is a delicately rendered metaphysical piece, answered by the concluding work, a wall painting in Cornish china clay which, Long says, “represents the force of my hand speed, and the forces of water, chance and gravity”. The clay courses down like summer rain, shaping patterns that suggest cosmic variety, life-giving energy, lyrical affirmation.

Both pieces are rooted in the personal and gestural, with the mud in “Heaven” and “Earth” coming from the Avon in Long’s native Bristol. Throughout the show, the city’s contours of oozing river, mud banks, spring tides, caves, limestone cliffs, together with the flat expanse of nearby Dartmoor, leave an imprint on Long’s work that is as pronounced as Suffolk’s Stour is on Constable. A photograph of a Somerset beach, a text work denoting “A Straight Northward Walk Across Dartmoor”, an Exmoor Ordnance Survey map marked with the route of “A Ten Mile Walk”, as well as photographs recording treks across treeless plateaus in the Alaskan tundra, the Mongolian steppes, the Argentine pampas – all echo or reference these landscapes of Long’s childhood.

Standing out radiantly from them all is “A Line Made By Walking”. In 1967, aged 22, Long took a train from London’s Waterloo, got off at the first station in open countryside, found a field, walked back and forth until he had made a flattened line, waited for sunlight, took a photograph and went home. The rough, grainy image of that sunbeamed line is direct, luminous, mysterious, but also earthy, heavy with the weight of feet trampling grass. Read Article...
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e10c617c-61de-11de-9e03-00144feabdc0.html

‘Richard Long, Heaven and Earth’, Tate Britain, London, to September 6. www.tate.org

Futurism in Tate Modern

Luigi Russolo
The Revolt 1911
Collection: Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague © The Estate of Luigi Russolo

Futurism in Tate Modern
Exhibition 12 June - 20 September 2009

Tate Modern celebrates the centenary of this dramatic art movement with a ground-breaking exhibition. Futurism was launched by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909 with the publication of the Manifesto of Futurism on the front page of Paris newspaper Le Figaro. Drawing upon elements of Divisionism and Cubism, the Futurists created a new style that broke with old traditions and expressed the dynamism, energy and movement of their modern life.

This exhibition both showcases the work of key Futurists such as Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini and explores art movements reacting to Futurism. Highlights include Boccioni's dynamic bronze Unique Forms of Continuity in Space 1913 and Picasso's Head of a Woman (Fernande) 1909 as well as major works by artists such as Braque, Malevich and Duchamp.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/futurism/default.shtm

Luigi Russolo
The Revolt 1911
Collection: Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague © The Estate of Luigi Russolo

Vivons-nous une belle époque ?

Réception des maires à l’Elysée en 1900… le siècle commençait bien. Peut-on dire la même chose bientôt dix ans après ?

25 juin 2009
26 juin 1909 : Vivons-nous une belle époque ?

(Source: Le Monde Blog) « Je suis persuadé que le XXème siècle verra luire un peu plus de fraternité et moins de misère » s’exclamait l’ancien Président de la république Loubet au moment d’inaugurer l’Exposition universelle et de commencer le siècle.
L’activité économique est effectivement repartie, réduisant les écarts de richesse, donnant plus de travail à tous.
Les foules se passionnent pour les progrès en matière de transport : les automobiles plus rapides, les aéroplanes qui volent plus loin et plus haut.
La République, même fatiguée, paraît indestructible. Aucun roi, aucun Bonaparte ne la menace. Elle dispense ses bienfaits sur les colonies qui ne cessent de s’agrandir.
Les Français savent lire, écrire, compter, comme en témoignent les informations transmises par le ministère de la guerre sur les appelés du service militaire.
Nos pourrions donc croire que nous vivons une époque heureuse, une belle époque.

D’où vient donc ce climat social qui s’alourdit ? Les postiers, les cheminots, les enseignants, les mineurs, les vignerons, les carriers, protestent tour à tour et souvent violemment. Il faut souvent la troupe pour ramener le calme.
D’où vient cette volonté de contestation des artistes ? Le cubisme, la recherche de formes nouvelles et incompréhensibles par le grand public, le rejet des académies et des salons officiels sont le signe d’un bouillonnement des idées neuves, d’un refus de la société telle qu’elle est.
A nos frontières, nous entendons parfois le cliquetis des armes que l’on prépare et affute. Les armées allemande, française, anglaise, russe, austro-hongroise, n’ont jamais eu autant de canons, de navires de guerre et de fusils à tir rapide.

Nous vivons une belle époque mais… pour combien de temps ?
http://ilyaunsiecle.blog.lemonde.fr/2009/06/25/26-juin-1909-vivons-nous-une-belle-epoque/

A creative life that blossomed in the asylum

Visual escape: "Cleopatra's Bed Flowers" by Aloise Corbaz, one of the inspirations for the Art Brut movement. STECK COLLECTION, SWITZERLAND; WATARIUM MUSEUM OF ART

A creative life that blossomed in the asylum After going from Switzerland to the periphery of the German court, Aloise Corbaz's artist talent was discovered in a sanitarium
By JEFF MICHAEL HAMMOND
Special to The Japan Times

(Source Japan Times) To view the pictures of Aloise Corbaz is to enter a fantastic, colorful world of a beautiful young woman with her handsome suitor, filled with carriages and crowns, roses and nights at the opera. The belle is Aloise herself, or, perhaps more precisely, Aloise's ideal self, center stage in a theatrical production far from her routine existence in a Swiss home for the mentally ill.
A new exhibition of more than 80 pictures by this remarkable artist is on show at the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art (aka Watarium), in a new exhibition simply titled "Aloise," which is being held in Japan only. One of many striking features of her work is its vibrant coloring. Leaving the black and brown pencils virtually untouched in their box, Aloise structured her pictures around flaming reds and soft pinks, supported by hues of yellow, orange, green and blue.

Since her death in 1964, Aloise has become one of the most celebrated artists in the field of Art Brut, a term coined by French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-85), who found in the untutored and unrefined artistic output of the mentally ill an immediacy and power he thought lacking in academic art. Dubuffet collected Aloise's works, visiting her from time to time and encouraging her creativity.

Aloise was born in 1886 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Her mother died when she was 11 years old, leaving Aloise in the care of her eldest sister, whose tyrannical control left an indelible mark on Aloise's psyche and on the family. This sister, discovering Aloise's love for a priest who lived nearby, put an early and cruel end to the affair by sending her off to work as a governess in Germany in 1911, when Aloise was about 25. At first, Aloise worked for a family in Leipzig and then for a chaplain in the service of Emperor Wilhelm II in Potsdam. How involved Aloise was in court life is unclear, but coaches, thrones and jewels were recurring motifs in her vibrant pictures.

In 1913 Aloise returned to Switzerland, but her mental health soon deteriorated. She spent the rest of her life in institutions, at first with no opportunities for her creative inclinations, but from 1920 she started secretly drawing on scraps of paper with toothpaste and juice squeezed from leaves. When her activities were discovered, they were encouraged and, given colored pencils, she would draw on larger pieces of paper or in notebooks, often ripping out the pages and sewing them together into large sheets or scrolls. With similar resourcefulness, Aloise frequently used both sides of the paper she worked on and when no clean sheets of paper were available, used newspaper or pages ripped from magazines or books, including one on display in the exhibition drawn over a page from an art book on Japonisme.
Read Article... http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fa20090626a2.html
Visual escape: "Cleopatra's Bed Flowers" by Aloise Corbaz, one of the inspirations for the Art Brut movement. STECK COLLECTION, SWITZERLAND; WATARIUM MUSEUM OF ART

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Heirs race to find Nazi-looted art before time runs out

Thomas Selldorff looks at the painting dyptich Altar wings “the Donors” by Marten Jakobszoon Van Heemskerk van Veen (Dutch 1498-1574) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna June 2003. The painting, that was confiscated by the Nazis from his grandfather's collection, will hopefully be restituted to him soon.

Heirs race to find Nazi-looted art before time runs out
VIENNA (Reuters) - Eighty-one-year old Thomas Selldorff, who fled Austria with his family before it was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, hopes an upcoming international conference will bolster efforts to return Nazi-looted art.

The Nazi's seized over 200 artworks owned by his grandfather, an avid art collector, as part of a policy of seizing Jewish property. So far, Selldorff has been able to retrieve only two of the lost paintings.

"I want to be able to pass these things on to my family ... I want them to have the link and an appreciation for some of the things my grandfather was involved with," said Selldorff, who lives in the United States and wants to exhibit the altar pieces by Austrian baroque artist Kremser Schmidt in a museum.

Some 65 years after World War Two, experts say thousands of artworks confiscated by the Nazis, including masterpieces by art nouveau master Gustav Klimt and expressionist Egon Schiele, still need to be restituted to their rightful owners.

Government officials from around 49 countries, dozens of non-governmental groups and Jewish representatives will meet in Prague this week to review current practices. They are likely to sign a new agreement to step up restitution efforts.

Some participants hope the conference will lead to the creation of a central body responsible for publishing updates on countries' progress, which could prompt them to do more.

The task of restituting Nazi-looted works is an epic one. The Nazis formed a bureaucracy devoted to looting and they plundered a total of 650,000 art and religious objects from Jews and other victims, the Jewish Claims Conference estimates.

Artworks were auctioned off, handed over to national museums or top Nazi officials, or stashed away for a Fuehrer museum Adolf Hitler was planning to build in the Austrian town of Linz, where he spent a part of his youth. Read on... http://www.reuters.com/article/artsNews/idUSTRE55M03A20090623