February 2006

Ingres 1780–1867

Louvre: from 02-24-2006 to 05-15-2006

Jean-Auguste-Dominique INGRES - Montauban, 1780 - Paris, 1867 Le bain turc 1862 © Musée du Louvre/A. Dequier - M. Bard

A retrospective of Ingres’ works, comprising eighty paintings and eighty drawings, offers a unique opportunity to discover this celebrated exponent of neoclassicism. Delacroix’s great rival, he was a passionate, sensual artist with quasi-revolutionary ideas. ...

http://www.louvre.fr

Mary Cassatt: Prints

THE NATIONAL GALLERY: 22 February - 21 May 2006

Mary Cassatt, 'The Fitting' 1890-91. © National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. Bequest of Guy M. Drummond, Montréal, 1987-12-31.

Mary Cassatt was the only American painter to exhibit with the French Impressionists. Born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, in 1884, she first travelled to Europe to study painting at the age of 21. In 1877 Edgar Degas, who considered that she had 'infinite talent', invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists. Two years later, Cassatt joined Degas and her fellow Impressionist Camille Pissarro in contributing to a journal of original prints. This marked the beginning of Cassatt's desire to make prints alongside her paintings. In 1890 a large display of Japanese art profoundly affected her, and she produced ten colour prints, described by Pissarro as 'rare and exquisite works'.Mary Cassatt was the only American painter to exhibit with the French Impressionists. Born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, in 1884, she first travelled to Europe to study painting at the age of 21. In 1877 Edgar Degas, who considered that she had 'infinite talent', invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists. ...

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Americans in Paris 1860-1900

THE NATIONAL GALLERY: 22 February - 21 May 2006

Detail from John Singer Sargent, 'Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau)', 1883-4. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1916, photo 1997.

Paris was the centre of the art world in the 19th century, and a magnet for American art students and artists, eager to experience the cosmopolitan delights of the city and to steep themselves in its artistic atmosphere. For the first time in Britain, this exhibition looks at why American artists were drawn to Paris, what they produced there, and how their art changed. The exhibition includes well-known artists - James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt - and others who will largely be unknown to audiences here, including Cecilia Beaux, Elizabeth Nourse and Theodore Robinson. ...

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Frida Kahlo

CENTRO CULTURAL DE BELÉM (Portugal): 17th February to 14th May 2006

51 years after her death, Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) continues to exert a great fascination attraction for her controversial art, difficult loves and physical suffering. After London’s Tate Modern and the Fundación Caixa Galicia in Santiago de Compostela, it is Lisbon’s turn to present the largest and most complete exhibition of Frida Kahlo within the latest decades, with works from the Dolores Olmedo Museum in Mexico, the most important collection in the world of this genial Mexican artist. Between 1926, when she painted her first self-portrait, and her death in 1954, Kahlo produced around 200 images. Her relationship with the muralist Diego Rivera, whom she married, constituted the initial launching of her career, which however is consolidated by her strength and quality. ...

http://www.ccb.pt

Dada

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: February 19 - May 14, 2006

Dada, one of the crucially significant movements of the historical avant-garde, was born in the heart of Europe in the midst of World War I. In the wake of that brutal conflict, Dadaists raucously challenged tradition, and art-making was changed forever. The most comprehensive museum exhibition of Dada art ever mounted in the United States, Dada features painting, sculpture, photography, film, collage, and readymades emerging in six cities: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, and Paris. The exhibition presents many of the most influential figures in the history of modernism, as well as others less known, including Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber, Hans Richter, Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. ...

http://www.nga.gov

The Tablet and the Pen: Drawings from the Islamic World

HARVARD UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM: February 18 through July 23, 2006

Aqa Riza Jahangiri, Master and Pupil (perhaps Prince Salim, later Emperor Jahangir, with his tutor), India; Mughal, late 16th century. Black ink and opaque watercolor on beige paper, 26.2 x 16.5 cm.

The Tablet and the Pen explores the development of drawing as an independent artistic medium in Islamic art. Focusing on examples from Turkey, Iran, and India, this exhibition emphasizes aspects of technique while illuminating the historical circumstances that affected the development of this medium. It examines the role played by drawing in the design of paintings, textiles, and metalwork; the increased demand for and production of single-sheet drawings in the 16th and 17th centuries; and the numerous ways in which drawings served as catalysts for artistic experiment. ...

http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu

James Hyde: Luminous Platforms and Relaxed Seating

SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART: February 18 through April 30, 2006

James Hyde, Colored Glow Tables, Sheet Metal, and Lounges, installation view, BaseKamp, Philadelphia, 2002.

New York-based artist, James Hyde, is producing a compelling intervention in the San Diego Museum of Art's current exhibition of its contemporary collection as part of its critically acclaimed Contemporary Links series. Hyde's three-part installation is designed to reshape museum visitors' experience of the space created for the exhibition Tracking and Tracing: Contemporary Acquisitions 2000-2005. Hyde's intervention marks the fourth installment of the Contemporary Links series, which commissions artists to create new work based on works in SDMA's collection.

http://www.sdmart.org

Girodet: Romantic Rebel

The Art Institute of Chicago: February 11-April 30, 2006

Girodet: Romantic Rebel, the first retrospective in the United States devoted to gifted French painter Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767–1824), assembles more than 100 seminal works (about 60 paintings and 40 drawings), demonstrating the artist’s impressive range--from mythological subjects to portraits and representations of Napoleon’s military triumphs. Profoundly shaped by the dramatic social and political upheaval brought about by the French Revolution, Girodet early on veered away from the rigid Neoclassical style then prevalent in France, interpreting his subjects in an evocative and dreamlike manner, often adding a strange, erotic charge. Increasingly he explored themes of a more Romantic nature, taking up subjects that involved irrational emotions and the exotic, as in his pictures representing the biblical deluge, the legends of Ossian (a fanciful Nordic mythology contrived by a contemporary writer), and the tragic story of the American Indian woman Atala, based on the eponymous novel by the artist’s friend, the writer Chateaubriand. ...

http://www.artic.edu

Having New Eyes

ASPEN ART MUSEUM: February 7 - April 16, 2006

Featuring emerging and established artists from around the globe, Having New Eyes presents works in a variety of media that take the eye as their primary aesthetic focus. As one of the most vulnerable organs in the body and the locus of visual experience, the eye has occupied a place both central to and unsettling in modern visual culture. ...

http://www.aspenartmuseum.org

French Donjons: Castle of Coucy, Medieval Life in Miniature

JOSLYN ART MUSEUM: February 4 - May 14

Photo courtesy of International Castle Research Society

In the Middle Ages, centuries of conflict between France and England furthered the development of the art of building castles. The donjon or keep, the residential tower, became the prominent part of castle architecture and was always placed at a strategic point, where it stood as a symbol of power. This exhibition is an historically accurate representation, researched and built by the Society for Medieval Castle Science (SMCS) of Aachen, Germany, of the donjon that graced the castle of Coucy, situated some 120 km northeast of Paris. The residence of many powerful nobles of the Middle Ages, Coucy was famous for having the largest donjon ever built in Europe: 180 feet tall and 100 feet in diameter, with walls up to 24 feet thick. Constructed in 1226-28, it stood nearly 700 years, until it was destroyed in 1917 during World War I. ...

http://www.joslyn.org

HANNE DARBOVEN: HOMMAGE À PICASSO

Deutsche Bank & Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation: 04 / 02 - 23 /04/ 2006

Portrait of the Artist, 2004 © Deutsche Guggenheim

German artist Hanne Darboven (b. 1941) began her art studies in 1952 at age eleven, and in 1962, she enrolled at the Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg. By 1966 Darboven had left both the Hochschule and Germany behind to move to New York. Employing the neutral language of numbers and using pen, pencil, the typewriter, and graph paper as materials, she began to make simple linear constructions of numbers that she called Konstruktionen. In these early pieces, the graph paper’s grid structure seems almost to shape the work, as can be seen in the artist’s frequent use of square forms and 4 x 4 groupings of numbers, both handwritten and typed. It was these Konstruktionen that garnered the attention of the American artist Sol LeWitt, who befriended Darboven and became an early champion of her work, which had certain affinities with his conceptual art. ...

http://www.deutsche-bank-kunst.com

Frank Stella 1958

HARVARD UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUMS (Arthur M. Sackler Museum): February 4 through May 7, 2006

Frank Stella, Untitled, 1958. Acrylic paint on off-white wove paper, 66 x 50.5 cm. Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Margaret Fisher Fund, 2004.22. Photo: Katya Kallsen, HUAM. © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

This tightly focused exhibition investigates a single moment in the career of one of the nation's most important postwar artists. Nineteen fifty-eight was Frank Stella's first year of independent work. After graduating from Princeton, he moved to New York City where he shared a studio with the young sculptor Carl Andre and threw himself into a series of monumental abstract canvases. Until now, these 30 works have been either neglected or treated as a prelude to the proto-minimalist black paintings that Stella began at the end of the year. But the works from 1958 stand solidly on their own, as the exhibition demonstrates by bringing most of them together for the first time. ...

http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu

DAVID SMITH: A Centennial

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: February 3-May 14, 2006

David Smith with Australia, Bolton Landing, New York, ca. 1951. Photo by David Smith, ©2006 The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York.

If you ask why I make sculpture, I must answer that it is my way of life, my balance, and my justification for being. —David Smith

Widely considered the greatest sculptor of his generation, David Smith (1906–1965) created some of the most iconic works of the 20th century. Marked by the use of industrial materials, especially welded metals, and the integration of open space, Smith’s three-dimensional version of Abstract Expressionism revolutionized the art of sculpture in the U.S. and around the world. Organized on the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birth, David Smith: A Centennial presents over 120 of his greatest sculptures, as well as a selection of his drawings and sketchbooks, from his entire 33-year career as a sculptor. Considering his art as a totality, the exhibition provides audiences with a singular opportunity to understand the complexity of Smith’s aesthetic concerns as well as his impact on the course of modern and contemporary sculpture.In addition to bringing together the masterpieces of Smith’s mature period in the 1950s and 60s, the exhibition gives special emphasis to his connection with his European forebears. ...

http://www.guggenheim.org

Focus: Cecilia Edfalk “Double White Venus”

Art Institute of Chicago: February 2–April 23

Cecilia Edefalk (b. Sweden, 1954) is a painter of deeply concentrated, expressively oblique images. The artist exhibits comparatively few paintings; they always center on a single motif and are executed and presented in series. Past subjects form an eccentric group, including the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, self-portraits, a copulating couple, and a classical marble head. Although she is a brilliant colorist, her palette is tightly restricted. In one way or another, all of her work emerges from a relationship to other modes of representation, most often photography. Her paintings have been almost exclusively figurative, although some of her latest, more experimental paintings verge on total abstraction. Most recently, the artist has reconsidered her own painted works as exquisite photographic details. In every respect, her project is a conceptual one; Edefalk is engaged in a quiet, forceful investigation into the mechanics of making and looking at the painted image. ...

http://www.artic.edu