Simon Hemmer @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

Simon Hemmer

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

October 20 – November 19, 2023

Form, space and movement are central to the work of the German artist SIMON HEMMER, whose exhibition at Galerie Forsblom marks his debut in Finland. Simon Hemmer’s absurd topographies, mosaics and tapestries unfold as tangles of geometric and organic patterns that morph into waves, staircases, vortexes and grids. Abstracted in the extreme, his picture planes are compressed to the fullest, forming vibrant, jagged-edged patterns of intricate detail, with every fragment finding its place in rhythmic synergy. Simon Hemmer pushes the boundaries of painting with his signature technique of painting with colored pencils instead of brushes and paint.

Simon Hemmer’s style pays tribute to avant-garde movements, notably Cubism, with Futurist elements thrown into the mix. Many of Simon Hemmer’s paintings echo Cubism’s typical treatment of form and perspective: abandoning the illusion of depth, the flattened picture plane ripples and pulsates purely on the surface of the canvas. Simon Hemmer’s paintings also capture a sense of speed and dynamic movement that is reminiscent of the work of the Futurists.

Simon Hemmer (b. 1978) studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Professor Albert Oehlen. He received the Royal Award for Modern Painting Prize in the Netherlands in 2007. Simon Hemmer has widely exhibited across Europe. The artist lives and works in Hamburg.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22 - 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

Pablo Picasso Cubist Masterpiece Buffalo Bill will Highlight Christie's 20th Century

Pablo Picasso Cubist Masterpiece Buffalo Bill will Highlight Christie's 20th Century Evening Sale in New York

17 November 2022

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)

Buffalo Bill

Oil and sand on canvas 18¼ x 13⅛ in. (46.3 x 33.3 cm.)

Painted in Paris in spring 1911

Photo courtesy of Christie's

$10,000,000-15,000,000

Christie’s announces Pablo Picasso’s Buffalo Bill as a leading highlight of the 20th Century Evening Sale taking place at Rockefeller Center Thursday, 17 November 2022. Estimated to achieve $10 million – 15 million, Buffalo Bill carries an esteemed provenance. The painting’s first owner was the legendary art dealer of the Cubist movement, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. It comes to Christie’s from a distinguished private collection where it has remained for more than thirty years.

David Kleiweg de Zwaan, Christie’s Senior Specialist, Impressionist and Modern Art remarks: “Buffalo Bill’s daring exploration of new territory as a scout resonated with Picasso, who himself was reconnoitering new frontiers in his pioneering Cubist art. With the recent opening of the Cubism show at The Met, we are thrilled to bring this rare Cubist portrait depicting an icon of the American West to the market in our 20th Century Evening Sale in New York this November.”

Painted in 1911 during the highpoint of Analytical Cubism, Buffalo Bill is singular within Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre, standing as one of the few named male portraits that he painted in the years of pre-war Cubism. It is exemplary of the artist’s practice during this period of radical artistic experimentation, as Picasso interpreted the well-known image of Buffalo Bill, an icon of the American frontier, through his newly conceived language of deconstructed lines and forms. In it, Picasso pushed the boundaries of representation to their extreme, reducing the well-known image of the Wild West star to its essentials, whilst retaining glimpses of his signifying characteristics—such as his flamboyant goatee and famed Stetson hat.

Pablo Picasso was a great fan of the rugged frontiersman and identified with this heroic adventurer and showman. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show first toured to Paris in 1889, and returned in 1905, filling a 17,000 seat arena to capacity for months. In letters to his Cubist accomplice, Georges Braque, Picasso signed himself “ton pard,” short for the cowboy “pardner,” playfully indulging in their shared love of, as they called it, “Le Far West.”

Buffalo Bill has been in a number of important exhibitions. Picasso selected it for his landmark 1932 retrospective at the Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, followed by the Kunsthaus Zurich, and it was included in the 1989-1990 exhibition Picasso and Braque, Pioneering Cubism at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The sale of Buffalo Bill coincides with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current show, Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition, open through January 2023. The exhibition is one of 40 exhibitions participating in the International Celebration Picasso 1973-2023, a worldwide initiative marking the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death and celebrating his lasting legacy.

CHRITIE'S NEW YORK

20 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020

www.christies.com

Pablo Picasso @ Acquavella Galleries, NYC - PICASSO: Seven Decades of Drawing

PICASSO: Seven Decades of Drawing

Acquavella Galleries, New York

Through December 3, 2021

Arguably the most influential artist of the 20th century, over the course of his career Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) pioneered successive artistic innovations that shaped the development of modern art. He was prolific in a wide range of mediums, including painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, and printmaking. Born in 1881 in Spain, the son of an art teacher, Pablo Picasso exhibited his first paintings in Barcelona at the age of 12. After an earlier trip to Paris, he left Barcelona in 1904 and moved permanently to France, where he would live until his death in 1973. 

Acquavella Galleries presents PICASSO: Seven Decades of Drawing, a survey of significant drawings by painter, draftsman, sculptor, printmaker, and ceramicist, Pablo Picasso. Curated by Olivier Berggruen, the show features over 80 drawings spanning seven decades of the artist's career, including works in an array of mediums such as charcoal, crayon, colored pencil, collage, graphite, gouache, ink, pastel, and watercolor. 

Drawing was the foundation of Pablo Picasso’s practice throughout the many stages of his stylistic development. The son of an art teacher, Picasso began to sketch at an early age; it is said that his first word was “piz,” short for “lápiz,” the Spanish word for pencil. He began his formal training at the age of seven, quickly mastering the techniques of classical draftsmanship. 

Pablo Picasso’s drawings reflect the artist’s lifelong quest to innovate and experiment; they also demonstrate his virtuosic ability to switch between styles, techniques, and mediums. Guided by his intuition and innate understanding of line, in his drawings Picasso imaginatively experimented and pioneered the development of radical ideas, innovating new approaches to form and expression in the process.

Several works on view provide insight into the evolution of his most influential, large-scale paintings, such as Les demoiselles d’Avignon, while others stand alone as virtuoso, independent works showcasing Picasso’s mastery of line, form, and medium. Developed in concert with his monumental paintings Les demoiselles d'Avignon [1907, The Museum of Modern Art, New York] and Les trois femmes [1908, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia], three drawings in the exhibition—Les demoiselles d'Avignon: Nu jaune (Étude) [1907, Collection of John and Gretchen Berggruen, San Francisco], Nu à genoux [1907-1908, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York] and Nu debout (Étude pour 'Les trois femmes') [1907-1908, Private Collection]—illustrate Pablo Picasso’s development of the striking, geometric female figures whose fragmented forms paved the way to Cubism. The watercolors, studies of the female form in motion, mark a radical break from traditional composition and perspective in painting. These bold and confrontational depictions of form became a seminal point in the development of Cubism and modern art. 

One of the most recurring subjects in Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre is the tête de femme or buste de femme (the female head or bust of a woman). The subject serves not only as a motif to explore the artist’s stylistic development, but also to chronicle his personal life and relationships. The notorious lothario’s rapid and often dramatic changes of style are frequently attributed to the presence of a new love interest, the waning of an old one, or both. Numerous examples of the motif of the buste de femme abound in the exhibition, including early portraits evincing his study of archaic sculpture; fragmented, Cubist representations; more naturalistic, classicizing portraits; biomorphic Surrealist abstractions; and later, more erotic portraits. In his early drawing, Buste de femme nue (1906), a representation of his mistress and muse Fernande Olivier, Picasso fused Fernande’s striking face with his study of ancient Iberian masks and Romanesque sculpture, while Buste de femme (1907) betrays Picasso’s increasing interest in African masks, a formative influence in his development of Cubism. The evocative Tête de femme (1921), reflects the artist’s study of Classical sculpture and art history after World War I, when he was married to Olga Khoklova, while the sensual Portrait de femme endormie, III (1946), reflects Picasso’s later impassioned affair with Françoise Gilot and his spurring rivalry with Henri Matisse.

PICASSO: Seven Decades of Drawing

Exhibition Catalogue, November 2021

A fully illustrated hardcover catalogue will be produced for the exhibition featuring critical essays by historian and curator Olivier Berggruen and historian Christine Poggi.

Seven Decades of Drawing is supported by loans from The Art Institute of Chicago, The Cleveland Museum of Art; Fondation Beyeler, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Morgan Library & Museum; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Para el Arte (FABA), Madrid. 

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES

18 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.acquavellagalleries.com

Alexander Archipenko @ Eykyn Maclean Gallery, NYC - Space Encircled

Alexander Archipenko: Space Encircled

Eykyn Maclean, New York

November 9 - December 14, 2018

Eykyn Maclean presents an exhibition devoted to the work of Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964), the artist’s first solo-exhibition in New York City since 2005. The presentation focuses on Alexander Archipenko’s pioneering use of negative space within the human figure. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Matthew Stephenson and with the support of the Archipenko Foundation, which lends a number of works to the show. Matthew Stephenson is an independent fine art consultant and worldwide representative of The Archipenko Foundation and Estate.

“We are thrilled to reintroduce one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century to a New York audience and to explore his groundbreaking use of negative space, a term he entitled ‘space encircled’,” said Nicholas Maclean, co-founder of Eykyn Maclean.

The Ukrainian born artist is one of a small number of early 20th century masters to have immigrated to the United States, alongside such visionaries as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Max Beckmann. A pioneer amongst contemporary avant-garde artists in Paris, Alexander Archipenko was one of the first to apply Cubism to sculpture. Upending traditional sculptural methods, the artist developed a new way to evoke the human form by inserting free space within the sculpture, an aesthetic play of interwoven solids, curves and voids that presents multiple contrasting views at once. This play of negative space would go on to directly influence such artists as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

In addition to this novel and sensual approach to space and shape, Alexander Archipenko experimented with materials both traditional and unexpected, using methods of construction that departed from conventional modes of carving and molding. His work across disciplines produced a new term, “sculpto-painting,” as demonstrated with Oval Figure, a piece that draws upon the fundamental elements of both art forms to achieve its particular vitality.

Eykyn Maclean’s exhibition includes works from all periods of the artist’s life and in a variety of media, including terracotta sculptures, works on paper, sculpto-paintings and bronzes. 

A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue features essays on the title theme by Dr. Alexandra Keiser, Archipenko Foundation Research Curator and Professor Christina Lodder, Honorary Professorial Fellow in Art History at University of Kent, Canterbury. The catalogue also includes a new interview with the artist’s widow, Frances Archipenko Gray.

EYKYN MACLEAN

23 East 67th Street, New York, NY 10065

www.eykynmaclean.com

Cubism and War: The Crystal in the Flame, Picasso Museum, Barcelona

Cubism and War: The Crystal in the Flame

Picasso Museum, Barcelona

20 October, 2016 - 29 January, 2017

Some 80 works are presented, all created in the period spanning from 1913 to 1919. The clear interconnections with the Paris avant-garde from before the war take on new relevance here, along with the consolidation of discoveries made during the war in work completed afterwards.

The feature artists in the exhibition are three foreigners based in France during the period, who due to their citizenship status were not obliged to participate militarily: Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris and Diego Rivera. Furthermore, the vital role of other artists like María Blanchard, Gino Severini and Jacques Lipchitz are explored, along with certain French artists who did not end up fighting, like Henri Laurens and Henri Matisse. These latter ended up doing some of their most experimental work during the period. The exhibition also explores the artistic response of two great cubists who survived their time in the trenches: Georges Braque and Fernand Léger.

During the war itself, from 1914 to 1918, a group of artists in the rearguard responded to the situation by channelling cubism’s burst of energy, linking the previous period of the avant-garde with the conflict itself. This was a highly positive, creative response to the urge to reaffirm a constructive path in the context of the war’s mechanization, responding to a need whose reparative urgency was deep and intense. The evolution of cubism during the Great War (thinking specifically of the movement in Paris itself under the imminent threat of chaos) towards greater control, coherency and integrity as the predominant values in cubist art, is still relevant today, a full century later.

The exhibition curator is Christopher Green, Professor of the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, a leading art history institution affiliated with the University of London.

PICASSO MUSEUM, BARCELONA

MUSEU PICASSO, BARCELONA

Montcada, 15-23 - 08003 Barcelona

www.museupicassobcn.cat

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism – Exhibition at Aquavella Galleries, NYC

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism
Acquavella Galleries, New York
Through November 30, 2011

GEORGES BRAQUE: PIONEER OF MODERNISM, a retrospective of seminal paintings curated by Dieter Buchhart, is on view at Acquavella Galleries in New York. The exhibition include over forty major paintings and papiers collés by the artist, all on loan from prestigious international public and private collections. The exhibition marks the first major Braque retrospective in the United States since the Guggenheim Museum’s celebrated exhibition in 1988.

Best known as the co-founder of Cubism with Pablo Picasso* and as the inventor of the papier collé technique, Georges Braque’s legacy is better understood in the context of his lasting influence on artists for the past century. “The purpose of this retrospective is to present the artist not only as the cocreator of Fauvism and Cubism but also as a profoundly passionate, progressive and influential painter all the years of his life, well beyond his early triumphs,” explained William Acquavella.

As a young man, Georges Braque was a leading member of the Fauves, together with Henri Matisse, André Dérain, and Maurice de Vlaminck, before being inspired by the structured compositions of Paul Cézanne. This adherence to structure would guide Braque for the remainder of his career, especially during his close six-year collaboration with Picasso.

Together, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso invented a new aesthetic by portraying their subjects from multiple vantage points. They created a new pictorial world in which an object was deconstructed and then reconstructed on the basis of geometric criteria. They used forms that resembled geometric cubes, leading art critic Louis Vauxcelles to assign the name “Cubism” to the new movement. Still lifes became Braque’s preferred vehicle for innovation, and he was celebrated for instilling the most everyday objects with a profound spirituality usually reserved for devotional painting. Georges Braque described his fascination with the genre, “A lemon and an orange side by side cease to be a lemon and an orange and become fruit. The mathematicians follow this law; so do we.” In addition to fruit, other familiar objects such as tobacco pouches and musical instruments became frequent sources of inspiration.

At seventy-nine, Georges Braque became the first living artist to be accorded a solo exhibition at The Louvre museum and was awarded state honors at his funeral in 1963. His work is held in the permanent collections of the world’s foremost museums including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Collection, London; The Albertina, Vienna; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Kunsthaus Zurich; The Phillips Collection, Washington DC; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; many of whom have loaned work for the exhibition.

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism, Exhibition catalogue, 2011
Photo © and Courtesy Acquavella Galleries, New York

Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism is accompanied by a 160 page hardcover catalogue which will include essays by Dieter Buchhart, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine and Richard Shiff.

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, NEW YORK, NY
www.acquavellagalleries.com

Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912 is on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through January 8, 2012

Picasso and Braque: The cubist experiment, 1919-1912. Kimbell Art Museum, Texas, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
Through August 21, 2011 

Santa Barbara Museum of Art 
September 17, 2011 - January 8, 2012

PICASSO AND BRAQUE: THE CUBIST EXPERIMENT, 1910-1912  is the first exhibition to unite many of the paintings and nearly all of the prints created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque during these two exhilarating years of their artistic dialogue, is now on view at the Kimbell Art Museum . “This small-scale exhibition examines a brief moment with huge implications for the history of art,” commented Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “This show is the first to focus exclusively on this landmark period of intense productivity and adventure for Picasso and Braque.” This international loan exhibition is organized by the SANTA BARBARA MUSEUM OF ART and the KIMBELL ART MUSEUM and has its debut in Fort Worth. 

During the years 1910 through 1912, these two great masters invented a new style that took the basics of traditional European art—modeling in light and shade to suggest roundedness, perspective lines to suggest space, indeed the very idea of making a recognizable description of the real world—and toyed with them irreverently. 

“These are beautiful, enigmatic, playful works of art. They’re like conversations in the artist’s studio or favorite café, not to be hurried,” remarked Malcolm Warner, deputy director at the Kimbell Art Museum. “We hope our visitors will take the time to savor them.” Following up on hints they found in the work of Paul Cézanne, and brimming with youthful bravado, Picasso and Braque created pictorial puzzles, comprehensible to a point but full of false leads and contradictions. Viewers pick up a few clues—a figure, a pipe, a moustache, a bottle, a glass, a musical instrument, a newspaper, a playing card—and these start to suggest a reality in three dimensions. The impression is that of a fast, modern world, with glimpses of models, friends, and the paraphernalia of drinking and smoking. But things never fully add up, either in detail or as a whole—and deliberately so. Teasingly elusive, the image is a construction of forms and signs that the artist has put together in a spirit of parody and play. The pleasure for the viewer is to let go of all normal expectations and enter into the game, which is an endlessly intriguing one. 

More than any avant-garde artists before them, Picasso and Braque called into question conventional ideas about art as the imitation of reality. They collaborated so closely and like-mindedly (“roped together like mountain climbers,” in Braque’s own phrase) that their works of this period are sometimes difficult to tell apart. Their radical experiment in picture-making, which came to be known as Analytic Cubism, has been as far-reaching in its implications for art as the theories of Einstein for science.

This choice, intimately scaled exhibition, featuring 16 paintings and 20 etchings and drypoints, was conceived and organized by Eik Kahng, chief curator at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, in partnership with the Kimbell and Mr. Warner. The Kimbell is a natural collaborator on the project since the Museum’s collection includes an outstanding example of the work of each artist from the Analytic Cubist period, Picasso’s Man with a Pipe and Braque’s Girl with a Cross, both painted in 1911. 

In the exhibition these appear among paintings from a number of other distinguished collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Menil Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Tate in London, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, and the Robert B. and Mercedes H. Eichholz Collection. The etchings and drypoints are selected from several sources, most notably the extraordinary holdings of Cubist prints in the Melamed Family Collection.

Not surprisingly in light of its importance in the history of art, Cubism has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions. Some of them have been dauntingly large, especially given the amount of time each of these highly complicated works demands of the viewer. The guiding principle of the present exhibition is that less can be more. It offers the kind of small, carefully calibrated selection that invites the viewer to spend time exploring each work in detail. 

The inclusion of a good number of etchings and drypoints ensures that printmaking emerges with a proper sense of its importance to Picasso and Braque at this moment in their careers. Other themes suggested by the exhibition and discussed in the accompanying catalogue include the role of format, especially the use of oval-shaped canvases. What part does this play in the Cubists’ pictorial game? How do the visual push and pull of the oval format differ from those of the rectangle or square? How did the artists intend their oval compositions to be framed? 

This last question is especially relevant to the Kimbell’s Picasso, an oval canvas that has been lined and framed as a rectangle. In an essay in the catalogue, Kimbell conservators Claire Barry and Bart Devolder present the discovery that this painting appears in an early photograph of the artist’s studio—as a work in progress, much different from its final form, but clearly on an oval stretcher. This, along with results of their research into the materials and techniques of the Cubists, will also be presented in a special section of the exhibition. 

For the past year, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art has been working with California-based MegaVision to capture spectral images of select works in the exhibition. The quality of spectral imaging surpasses that of normal professional photography. Thanks to recent advances in the technology of LEDs (light-emitting diodes), RGB (red, green, and blue) filters have been removed from behind the lens and replaced with LED-produced RGB light, which is aimed directly onto the object that is being photographed. Beyond the visible spectrum, spectral imaging allows options for ultraviolet and infrared, which can reveal features invisible to the human eye. The elimination of the filters in the optical path allows for a higher-quality image, greater accuracy of color, and, especially important in the art world, a huge reduction of harmful light.

The spectral imaging created by MegaVision will be incorporated into interactive software that will allow visitors and online users to manipulate and study works with a level of detail and precision never before possible for museum audiences.  Produced in partnership with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum, this cutting-edge visual technology introduces new ways to look at and understand the processes, relationships, and stylistic developments of this important movement. Hand-held, touch-screen computers will provide mobility and interactive media content to exhibition visitors.  For the first time in a museum setting, every visitor will have the opportunity to sit in front of an actual painting by Picasso or Braque and independently zoom in on the smallest brush strokes and specks of color. This is just an example of the many explorations that this program will make available to visitors.

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

The exhibition catalogue includes essays by some of today’s most talented scholars in the field: Eik Kahng, Charles Palermo, Harry Cooper, Annie Bourneuf, Christine Poggi, Claire Barry, and Bart Devolder. It is distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London, and is available in the Museum Shop in hardcover ($30).

Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910–1912 is on view at the Kimbell Art Museum since May 29 through August 21, 2011, and at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art from September 17, 2011, through January 8, 2012. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. 

Kimbell Art Museum

3333 Camp Bowie Boulevard, Fort Worth, TX 76107

Kimbellmuseum.org

Marc Chagall and His Circle, Paris Through the Window - Philadelphia Museum of Art

Exhibition: Paris Through the Window

Marc Chagall and His Circle

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Through July 10, 2011

As a center of cosmopolitan culture and a symbol of modernity, Paris held a magnetic attraction for artists from Eastern Europe during the early decades of the 20th century. Most painters and sculptors settled around Montparnasse, which was sprinkled with cafes, and art galleries. It was here that Alexander Archipenko, Marc Chagall, Moïse Kisling, Jacques Lipchitz, Louis Marcoussis, Amedeo Modigliani, Chana Orloff, Jules Pascin, Margit Pogany, Chaim Soutine, and Ossip Zadkine established studios and discovered each other’s work. This exhibition includes around 40 paintings and sculptures by these émigrés, whose work was both imbued with the spirit of modernism and informed by their own cultural heritage. The exhibition will focus in particular on the paintings Chagall made between 1910 and 1920, including Half Past Three (The Poet), of 1911, one of the treasures of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The curator of the exhibition, Michael R. Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art at the Museum, said: “This exhibition provides a unique opportunity to reconsider the cross-fertilization of ideas that took place in the French capital during the 1910s and 1920s, which was one of the most experimental and creative periods in Western art.”

Shortly after arriving in Paris in 1911, Marc Chagall rapidly assimilated the pictorial language of the most avant-garde artistic styles of the day, especially Cubism, and married it with the artistic traditions of his native Russia. Chagall developed his own remarkably inventive visual language while living and working at La Ruche (the beehive), so named because of its distinctive cylindrical shape and honeycomb-like maze of artists’ studios. Located on the southwestern fringe of Montparnasse, La Ruche was a three-story-high building with a staircase in the center and studios radiating out from its core. Founded by the French sculptor Alfred Boucher, who converted the original domed central building into a series of small, wedge-shaped studios with large windows that provided excellent lighting, La Ruche opened in 1902 and, since the rent was minimal and artists’ models were supplied free of charge, it quickly became a thriving artists’ community, with its own theater and exhibition schedule. “In La Ruche,” Chagall later said, “you either came out dead or famous.”

By the time Chagall moved there, La Ruche already held a large population of Eastern European artists who had moved to Paris to discover firsthand the most recent trends in modern art. Liberated from the often strict and rigid academic training of their former homelands, they experienced the vibrant artistic interchanges that made Paris such an attractive place to live and work as well as unparalleled exhibition opportunities. Among the other artists to live in or frequent La Ruche in the 1910s were Alexander Archipenko, Moïse Kisling, Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine, and Ossip Zadkine, who is represented in the exhibition by two monumental sculptures in cedar wood that have not been displayed at the Museum since 1963. These émigrés, many of whom were Jewish, were also attracted to the religious tolerance of the French capital, which provided a safe new working environment free from the pogroms and persecution that their families had endured for generations in their former homelands of Russia, Poland, and other Eastern European countries.

The French artist Fernand Léger also worked at La Ruche during this time, as did the Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani, whose libertine behavior made him one of the most colorful personalities of this bohemian enclave. While sculptors and painters like Archipenko, Lipchitz, Marcoussis, and Zadkine experimented with the interlocking planes and sharply angled forms of Cubism, other artists attempted to reconcile modern art’s abstract geometries with the folk traditions of their native lands. Chagall’s brightly colored, folkloric paintings often make reference to the customs and rituals of Jewish life in Vitebsk in his native Russia (now Belorussia), although his monumental 1911 painting Half-Past Three (The Poet), made shortly after his arrival in Paris from art school in Saint Petersburg, reveals—quite literally—the head-spinning impact of Cubism, which encouraged him to incorporate fragmented planes and diagonal shafts of color into his compositions. During his early years in Paris, Chagall studied at the Académie de la Palette with the French Cubist painter Jean Metzinger, whose brightly colored geometric compositions undoubtedly informed Half-Past Three (The Poet) as well as other works from this period.

The exhibition is largely drawn from the Museum’s outstanding collection of modern painting and sculpture, but this is supplemented with a handful of key loans from museums and private collections in the United States and Europe. These include one of Chagall’s most famous works, the early masterpiece Paris Through the Window, of 1913, from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which presents a kaleidoscopic impression of the city of Paris as seen from Chagall’s studio window at La Ruche. The deployment of strong, non-naturalistic color in this painting reveals the influence of Chagall’s friend Robert Delaunay, who developed a more colorful and poetic variant of Cubism known as Orphism. The motif of the Eiffel Tower, which dominates the background of Paris Through the Window, was also a central feature of Delaunay’s work at this time, although the Janus-headed man and the sphinx-like cat in the foreground belong to Chagall’s imagination alone and imbues the work with a dream-like otherworldliness. Another important loan to the exhibition is the 1915 painting The Poet Reclining from the Tate Modern in London, which belongs to the same series of euphoric poet paintings as Half-Past Three (The Poet), which Chagall made four years earlier. In his first years in Paris, the artist counted among his closest friends the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, both of whom wrote eloquently about his work, and these delightfully tumultuous paintings address the themes of poetic reverie, fantasy and inspiration that also characterized his own approach to art-making.

Like many of the La Ruche artists, Chagall returned to his homeland following the outbreak of World War I, which would have a deep impact on his future work, as seen in Wounded Soldier, of 1914, and The Smolensk Newspaper of the same year. In this poignant painting, a young man reacts to the newspaper headline regarding the outbreak of the global conflict with a mixture of terror and disbelief, surely realizing that he would be called up for military duty in the Russian army, while the older bearded man pensively reflects on the wars he has seen during his long life.

During the war years Chagall continued to paint scenes that are evocative of his childhood in Vitebsk, such as Purim, of 1916-18, which remains one of his best-known and most beloved paintings of Jewish village life before the Russian Revolution. In 1923 Chagall returned to Paris at the request of the French art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who commissioned the artist to create a 100-plate cycle illustrating La Fontaine’s Fables, one of the most revered works of French literature. This project dominated his work from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, as seen in The Watering Trough, of c.1925, where the bent-over female figure and smiling pig share the sense of otherworldly fantasy and charm that Chagall similarly expressed in the gouaches and prints that he made for the Fables project. The community of artists, writers, and musicians that sprang up in Montparnasse before World War I thrived for three decades, until the occupation of Paris by German troops on June 14, 1940. Like many Jewish artists, including Kisling and Lipchitz, Chagall spent World War II as a refugee in New York, having fled the catastrophe that now enveloped his beloved Paris.

This exhibition was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and is presented in conjunction with the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts (PIFA), inspired by the Kimmel Center, on the theme of Paris: 1910-1920. The exhibition is funded in part by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Additional support is provided by Bruce and Robbi Toll and by Ovation and Comcast Xfinity.

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART

www.philamuseum.org