Le Corbusier : Barcelona & Madrid exhibition

Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes 

CaixaForum Barcelona, Through 11 May 2014 

CaixaForum Madrid, June-October 2014

Architect, city planner, painter, interior designer, writer, editor, photographer and amateur film-maker. Le Corbusier was a multidisciplinary artist who amazed the world with his creative power and unconventional ideas. Through 215 objects illustrating the full dimensions of his creative processes, the exhibition Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes explores the many facets of an artist regarded today as a key figure in 20th-century architecture. The result is a truly extraordinary experience, the most complete exhibition devoted to the architect in Spain in the last twenty-five years. This comprehensive retrospective traces Le Corbusier’s life and work over a sixty-year career in which he constantly observed, imagined and created landscapes: architectural landscapes, domestic landscapes and found object landscapes. Organised by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of New York and featuring many pieces loaned by the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, the exhibition includes not only models, paintings, plans and photographs, but also four recreations of rooms, complete with their original furniture. The show also focuses on Le Corbusier’s links to the city of Barcelona, as well as featuring several panoramic photographs taken by Richard Pare of some of the architect’s most outstanding projects. 

The most comprehensive retrospective that MoMA has ever devoted to the architect, this show was visited by more than 400,000 people from June to September last year. Following this enormous public success, the exhibition is now on view in Spain where it opened, firstly, at CaixaForum Barcelona and subsequently, from June to October 2014, at the centre’s Madrid counterpart. 

LE CORBUSIER

Courtesy CaixaForum Barcelona

A key figure in 20th-century architecture, Le Corbusier was a pioneer in efforts to improve the homes of the lower classes, proposing new forms of efficient architecture in densely-populated cities. He was also a multidisciplinary artist, for he also practised painting and photography and successfully fused art with architecture.

Le Corbusier (real name Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) was born in the small industrial town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the Jura Mountains in Switzerland.In 1917, he established his studio in Paris, from where he worked practically all over the world and, over a professional career spanning six decades, directly or indirectly changed the face of many cities, from South America to India. He became renowned for his poetic and often provocative interpretations of technologies and values in the new machine age, working on some 400 architectural projects and designing 75 buildings in a dozen countries. He also published nearly 40 books and wrote hundreds of articles, including some of the most influential texts in modern culture.

Le Corbusier’s concept of architecture was deeply rooted in nature and the landscape, from the carefully framed view from an open floor plan and the dialogue between growing cities and their geographic territory to the natural panorama in its broadest sense. As the artist he was, he drew and painted almost daily, capturing in his work the spatial connections between nature and buildings in the Swiss mountains, on the Mediterranean coast, in Italy, in the south of France and on the great plains of northern India. For Le Corbusier, the emerging metropolis was also a landscape, one in which a recently reorganised domestic interior could establish relations with a broader orbit of natural and human forces. 

LE CORBUSIER

Courtesy CaixaForum Barcelona

Far from embodying a universal or international architecture, distanced from place, Le Corbusier’s work was rooted in its surroundings, even though the architect sought transformation in order to accommodate new lifestyles in a world characterised by technological change. 

Visitors to this major exhibition will see works ranging from his early years as an artist in the Jura Mountains (Switzerland) to his final days on the Côte d’Azure, passing through Istanbul, Athens, Rome, Paris, Geneva, Moscow, Barcelona, New York and India. All these projects reveal the way in which the architect observed and imagined landscapes throughout his career, using all the artistic media and techniques available to him. The exhibition focuses on four types of landscape: the landscape of found objects; the domestic landscape; the architectural landscape of the modern city; and the landscapes he dreamed for large territories that he was commissioned to plan.

Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes is divided into five sections and features several models, as well as paintings, plans, photographs and documents. Moreover, four interiors created by Le Corbusier have been reconstructed and are displayed with their original furniture. These are: the Maison Blanche; a pavilion for the Villa Church in Ville-d’Avray; the unité d’habitation housing unit in Marseilles; and the cabin in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin where Le Corbusier spent the final days of his life. 

The show forms part of the firmly consolidated exhibition programme that ”la Caixa” Foundation devotes to architecture. This programme goes beyond the focus on particular styles and historic periods to provide visitors with an overview that enhances their understanding of the role that architecture plays in the world around us. Particularly outstanding amongst the shows organised so far are those devoted to such great masters as Mies van der Rohe, Andrea Palladio and Richard Rogers, and recent projects like Building the Revolution: Art and Architecture in Russia 1915-1935 and Towers and Skyscrapers: fromBabel to Dubai.

Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes. Organised by: The Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA), in cooperation with the Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris. Produced by: ”la Caixa” Foundation. Curated by: Jean-Louis Cohen, Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture, Institute of Fine Arts, University of New York, and Barry Bergdoll, Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Place: CaixaForum Barcelona (Av. de Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, 6-8). Dates: from 29 January to 11 May 2014. CaixaForum Madrid. Dates: June to October 2014.

CaixaForum Madrid Exhibitions 2011-2012 Programme

CaixaForum Madrid: Art exhibitions programme 2011-2012 

CaixaForum Madrid boosts its cultural attractions with an outstanding programme of exhibitions to suit all tastes.

Major exhibitions of the work of Delacroix, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Piranesi, the finest contemporary art and the archaeological treasures of Saudi Arabia are the highlights of the new season 2011-2012 at CaixaForum Madrid.

 Photo: CaixaForum Madrid, Spain

CaixaForum Madrid will hosting two outstanding exhibitions of two great artists, Eugène Delacroix and Piranesi, whose works and styles had a notable influence on later currents.  Like the ones planned in the spheres of archaeology and contemporary art these two exhibitions will show the fruits of the strategic alliances established in recent years between ”la Caixa” Welfare Projects and leading Spanish, European and American museums. Specifically in this case, with the Musée du Louvre and MACBA  for the joint organisation of exhibitions. 

The season will begin on 18 October with Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), the most important retrospective of the work of the great French painter in half a century. The exhibition, the fruit of the cooperation agreement between ”la Caixa” Welfare Projects and the Louvre, brings together over one hundred works, many of which will be seen for the first time in Spain. It includes loans from leading museums such as the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the Art Institute of Chicago. 

This is the most complete exhibition of his work ever held in Spain and the most important internationally since the great exhibition organised in Paris to coincide with the centenary of his death in 1963.

Lovers of contemporary art will have an opportunity to enjoy a wide selection of two of the largest and most internationally renowned collections with the exhibition The Persistence of Geometry. From 15 December, the collections of ”la Caixa” Foundation and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) will come together in a show that focuses on the use of geometry  in the spheres of sculpture and installation since the sixties.

Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 1909-1929. When art dances with music will bring to CaixaForum Madrid the pioneering spirit of Sergei Diaghilev and his world famous ballet company. From 16 February, through 200 objects including posters, costumes, elements for the choreography and the sets visitors will be drawn into the notion of total art propounded by Diaghilev. Avantgarde artists such as Matisse and Picasso, musicians like Ravel and Stravinsky and writers of  the stature of Jean Cocteau, all present at the exhibition, were part of that  thirst for innovation whose aim was to renew visual language through the choreography, the sets and the musical language.

In the spring of 2012 the rooms of CaixaForum Madrid will be home to the first comprehensive exhibition in Spain of the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, one of the most important illustrators of the 18th century. Like no-one else he cultivated the three dimensions and detail in the engraving. The exhibition consists of  an unrepeatable set of over 300 works by this Italian genius of drawing through a montage that provides visitors with a new way of observing art in which the engravings are combined with audiovisuals and reproductions of pieces and sets. The spectators will discover the technique, intensity and evocative power of his work, which had a great influence on Romantics, Surrealists and Cubists. His engravings of Venetian gaols still inspire film sets today.

CaixaForum Madrid will close the exhibition season by inviting visitors to discover the archaeological treasures of Saudi Arabia. From 3 July 2012, Routes of Arabia. Archaeological treasures of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia will present a selection of over  300 works, most of which had never left their country of origin before their presentation at the Musée du Louvre in Paris and CaixaForum Barcelona in November last year. The aim of the exhibition is to reveal this little known archaeological treasure and offer an unprecedented  panorama of the different cultures that followed one another on the Arabian Peninsula from prehistory to the dawn of modern times.

CAIXA FORUM MADRID 

Paseo del Prado, 36

www.lacaixa.es

Jacques Henri Lartigue, A Floating World - Exhibition in Barcelona

Photography Exhibition > Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986)
Photography Exhibition > Spain > Barcelona > CaixaForum

A Floating World
Photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986)
CaixaForum Barcelona

Curators of the exhibition: Florian Rodari and Martine d'Astier de la Vigerie, director of the Donation Jacques Henri Lartigue, assisted by Maryam Ansari.

Through October 3, 2010

Mise à jour lien Photographies de Lartigue avec texte en français

Jacques Henri Lartigue, Bibi, Arlette and Irène. Storm in Cannes. Cannes, May 1929. Photo by JH Lartigue © Ministère de la Culture - France / AAJHL (Association des Amis de Jacques Henri Lartigue) – Courtesy Fundacion "La Caixa"

Fundacion "La Caixa" Social Outreach Programmes presents the first major anthological exhibition devoted in Spain to Jacques Henri Lartigue (Courbevoie, 1894 - Nice, 1986), without doubt one of the greatest photographers of the last century. A Floating World. Photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986), illustrates the interests of a man devoted to exploring, with the greatest sensitivity and under an appearance of happiness and nonchalance, the emerging concerns of a period marked by radical change.

Jacques Henri Lartigue’s photographs date to a period that was shaken by events and great social changes (World War One, the Russian Revolution, the Nazi occupation of France, and so on), yet he does not focus on such conflicts. On the contrary; he seeks to portray innocence, spontaneity and the joy of being alive.

Jacques Henri Lartigue, My cousin Bichonnade. 40, Rue Cortambert, París, 1905. Photo by JH Lartigue © Ministère de la Culture - France / AAJHL – Courtesy Fundacion "La Caixa"

Reflecting the artist’s fragile, moving gaze, the exhibition  A Floating World. Photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) also depicts the new lifestyles that emerged during the early-20th century, when women began to play an active role in society and technological progress generated new forms of leisure. 

Jacques Henri Lartigue, Delage car. ACF Grand Prix, June 26, 1912. Photograph by JH Lartigue © Ministère de la Culture - France / AAJHL – Courtesy Fundacion "La Caixa"

The fact that Lartigue took photographs for his own pleasure has made it impossible for either curators or critics to really classify his work. As a result, his photographs are usually presented in chronological order, or grouped by theme. On this occasion, however, the organisers have decided to go one step further and to demonstrate, from a approach never before taken with this artist, the extent to which these images, admired for their grace and beauty, form a unique document that illustrate a period and a way of life that have since disappeared; that of the French bourgeoisie in the last century.

Jacques Henri Lartigue, Coco, Hendaya, 1934. Photo by JH Lartigue © Ministère de la Culture - France / AAJHL – Courtesy Fundacion "La Caixa"

A Floating World. Photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) features more than 230 exhibits. Of these, 182 are modern prints of Lartigue’s photographs, whilst the show also includes 18 modern recreations of his stereoscopic pictures with their original three-dimensional effect. Lartigue took these pictures with a stereoscopic camera, a device very much in fashion at the time, in the attempt to capture reality in all its dimensions.

The show is completed by a section entitled The Supports of Memory, whose aim is to give visitors an insight into the different techniques that Lartigue used to create and organise his works. The section includes 23 vintage prints, produced between 1905 and 1926, as well as 3 cameras that belonged to Lartigue, some stereoscopic glasses, 8 autochrome prints (coloured photographs), four albums of original photographs and 6 volumes of the diaries and agendas that he kept throughout his life.

Jacques Henri Lartigue – Biography

Jacques Henri Lartigue occupies a very special place in the history of photography: that of a talented amateur who always  spoke of painting as his principal passion and regarded photography as a secondary occupation. However, from 1902, when he was eight years old, until his death in 1986, taking photographs was like breathing for him. 

Lartigue was born in Courbevoie, near Paris, in 1894, into a family of industrialists. His father bought him his first padre camera when he was eight years old, and at a very young age Jacques Henri began to keep a diary formed by photographs and short texts. This habit stayed with him all his life, and the diaries now form an extraordinary document portraying the lifestyle of a generation that discovered, amongst other things, fashion, sport, and motor racing. 

Photo: Jacques Henri Lartigue, Bibi, shadow and reflection. Hendaye August 1927. Photograph by JH Lartigue © Ministère de la Culture - France / AAJHL.

Photo: Jacques Henri Lartigue, Gérard Willemetz and Dany. Royan, July 1926. Photograph by JH Lartigue  © Ministère de la Culture - France / AAJHL. Courtesy Fundacion "La Caixa"

Lartigue was a sickly child who soon learned how quickly his happiness could disappear. For this reason he decided to narrate his life and, through the story he told, to construct his own persona, just as, by constantly portraying it, he built his own happiness. For Lartigue, happiness is indissociable from its preservation; this joy must be retained through writing, photography, and albums – the final stage in creating his autobiography. 

Throughout his life, Lartigue conserved the fresh outlook of childhood and the insatiable curiosity of youth. His photographs celebrate the present moment whilst concealing the anguish that the passing of time caused him.

Discovered by chance, late in life, in 1963, when he was nearly 70 years old, by John Szarkowski, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Lartigue became known and recognised in his native France and throughout the world thanks to the glory he achieved in the United States. In 1974, the French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, invited Lartigue to take his official photograph. It was the firm friendship that grew up between the two that persuaded Lartigue to donate his entire work to the Republic in 1979.

The exhibition was organised and produced by ”la Caixa” Social Outreach Programmes in cooperation with the Donation Jacques Henri Lartigue, the body established to conserve and disseminate the donation that the photographer made to the French government in 1979, and which loaned all the pieces in the exhibition at CaixaForum Barcelona.

CaixaForum Barcelona
Av. de Ferrer i Guàrdia, 6-8
08038 Barcelona 
www.lacaixa.es/obrasocial
5 May - 3 October 2010
Times: Monday to Saturday, from 10 am to 8 pm - Saturdays, from 10 am to 10 pm - Admission free to exhibitions

Lucian Freud Retrospective Exhibition in Barcelona and Los Angeles

LUCIAN FREUD
CaixaForum, Barcelona
24 October, 2002 - 12 January, 2003
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
February 9 - May 25, 2003

“What do I demand of a painting? That it surprise, disturb, seduce, convince,” At 80, Lucian Freud is one of the greatest living realist painters. Known mainly for his unsettling portraits and nudes, he is the creator of a disturbing universe, populated mostly by models from his own circle: his mother, children, friends, artists, lovers, etc. “My work is completely autobiographical. It is about me and what surrounds me,” the artist has repeatedly declared. The "La Caixa" Foundation now presents Lucian Freud at CaixaForum, the largest retrospective exhibition ever held on the artist. With 126 paintings, drawings and etchings, some of recent creation, the show covers more than 60 years of Freud’s artistic career. Visitors are offered a chance to view works from the fruitful creative period of the past twenty years together with others of the first decades. Among the foremost works in the exhibition is the extraordinary series of portraits of the artist’s mother, portraits of his painter friends such as Francis Bacon, John Minton, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews, and a number of self-portraits, in addition to other emblematic paintings such as The Painter’s Room, Leigh Bowery (seated) and Girl with Roses. The Lucian Freud retrospective exhibition, organised by the Tate Britain Museum, (where it has run from 20 June to 22 September, 2002), has been produced by "La Caixa" Foundation in Barcelona. Following its exhibition at CaixaForum it will be shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles from 9 February to 25 May, 2003.

The retrospective exhibition Lucian Freud at the CaixaForum premises, will map out a chronological journey through the British painter’s artistic career, covering more than 60 years. The show begins with a series of works from the decade of the 1940’s - Box of Apples in Wales (1939), The Painter’s Room (1943-1944) and Girl With Roses (1947-1948), among other oil paintings, and concludes with a group of recent works, such as Eli (2002), finished last August. The 126 works that make up the exhibition, distributed over nine rooms, invite the visitor to discover certain chapters in the life of Freud: his relationships with his mother, wives and children, his friendship with Francis Bacon, solitude, etc. After all, Freud has often stated, “Everything is autobiographical, and everything is a portrait.”

Lucian Freud Biography

Lucian Freud was born in Berlin on December 8th, 1922. His father, architect by profession, was the son of Sigmund Freud, the creator of psychoanalysis. The family came to England in 1933, a few months after the Nazi party came to power. Six years later, in 1939, Freud became a naturalised British subject. In that same year, he enrolled in Cedric Morris’s East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, an informal painting institute. In 1941, after completing his brief academic career, he enlisted as merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy. “I liked the idea of adventure – the figure of the old salt – but I was soon disappointed.” In 1944, the Lefevre Gallery put on Freud’s first solo exhibition, which included The Painter’s Room (1943-1944), a widely celebrated work that will be on display at CaixaForum. In 1948 he married Kitty Garman, daughter of Jacob Epstein, later marrying Caroline Blackwood in 1952. In the 1950’s he became famous in London, along with his cohort Francis Bacon. After spending periods in Paris and Greece, he settled in London, where he still lives and works.

“To me, the person is the painting”, says Lucian Freud, who is mainly known for his unsettling portraits and nudes, several of which can now be seen at CaixaForum within the retrospective exhibition. Among the foremost works in the exhibition is the extraordinary series of portraits of Freud’s mother, such as The Painter’s Mother Reading (1975). The series begins in 1972, the year in which the artist’s father died, and his mother sank into deep depression. It concludes in the year of her death, in 1989. “If my father hadn’t died, I never would have painted her,” says Freud who went to pick her up four or five times every week for her to pose.

The exhibition also contains several self-portraits of Lucian Freud, such as Reflection with Two Children (1965) – the two children are his, Rose and Ali – Interior With Mirror in Hand (1967) and Painter Working, Reflection (1993), a painting which, when Freud set to touching it up, “turned out to be of my father”. In that regard, Lucian Freud states, “My idea of the portrait emerges from my unhappiness with the portraits that look like their models. I want my portraits to be ‘of’ people, not like them. More than looking like the models, that they ‘be’ themselves.”

The show also offers some unsettling nudes, such as those of Leigh Bowery, a performer weighing over 200 pounds who became Lucian Freud’s first professional model, posing for him several days a week over two years. “I must have a fondness for unusual or oddly-proportioned people, and I don’t want to indulge it too much,” Lucian Freud has said. The daughters of the painter also posed for several nudes, such as Portrait of Rose (1978-1979). “There’s something in a nude person, when I see them before me, that appeals to my sense of respect. It could even be called my gentlemanliness. In the case of my daughters, it is the respect of a father in addition to that of a painter. They take my painting them well. They don’t make me feel uncomfortable.”

The Lucian Freud exhibition is organised by William Feaver.

Lucian Freud
24 October, 2002 - 12 January, 2003

CaixaForum
Av. Marquès de Comillas, 6-8
08038 Barcelona