Antoni Tàpies @ Pace Gallery, NYC - A Survey of Works on Paper

Antoni Tàpies: On paper

Pace Gallery, New York

November 7 - December 20, 2025

Pace presents a survey of works on paper by the Spanish artist Antoni Tàpies at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Bringing together some 40 artworks created between the 1940s and the 2010s—including never-before-exhibited compositions—this presentation showcases Tàpies’s meditations on the human condition through his works on paper and, more broadly, his indelible impact on the history of art in Europe and across North America and Asia.

Born in Barcelona in 1923, Antoni Tàpies was a self-taught artist who developed a unique visual language centering on exchanges among symbols, gestures, and materials. The artist—who was also a celebrated theorist and philosopher—incorporated signs and symbols from Catalonia and other cultures into his paintings, collages, and sculptures, imbuing his work with historical allusions and odes to phenomena of the natural world. Replete with personal resonances and references to political and social struggles in his native Catalonia and Spain, his art made radical aesthetic propositions during the postwar era.

Over the course of his seven-decade career, Antoni Tàpies investigated abstract and surrealist forms using unconventional, raw materials. His combinations of media as diverse as wood, dirt, spray paint, cardboard, blankets, clothes, carpet, furniture, and marble dust reflect the intensely experimental ethos of his process. Tàpies forged complex layers of materials like these, bringing striking amalgams of color and texture to the fore of his compositions. In this way, enactments of transformation and transfiguration animated the spirit of all his work as an artist.

Pace’s exhibition of Tàpies’s works on paper, the gallery’s twelfth exhibition dedicated to the artist since it began representing him in 1992, sheds new light on the ways that drawing functioned in his practice—as a medium through which he could narrate his own experiences and express the poetic and fragile dimensions of the human condition. Featuring a large selection of works produced between the start of his career in the 1940s and the final years of his life, this presentation will trace the development of his visual lexicon, which reflects his deep interest in signs and symbols from Eastern religions and philosophies, particularly Buddhism. They also speak to the connections between Antoni Tàpies and his American contemporaries at the forefront of Abstract Expressionism—importantly, the artist began showing with Martha Jackson Gallery in New York the year it opened in 1953, during the early years of his career, and he presented solo exhibitions with the storied American gallery until 1978.

Tàpies’s reimagination and redefinition of painting as a highly physical undertaking would inspire future generations of artists. Notably, in 1993—the same year he mounted his first solo show with Pace—he was chosen to represent Spain at the 45th edition of the Venice Biennale, when he won the Golden Lion for his large-scale installation titled Rinzen. In 1984, the artist established the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona—which opened a museum and library in 1990—to support the exhibition of his work and that of other modern and contemporary artists. Along with the Fundació Joan Miró and Museu Picasso, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies remains a key cultural institution in the fabric of the Spanish city.

Today, his work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao; Tate, London; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Kunstmuseum Basel; the Städel Museum, Frankfurt; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and many other international institutions.

Concurrently with Pace’s exhibition in New York, Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World is on view at the Museu Tàpies in Barcelona through January 25, 2026.

Antoni Tàpies (b, 1923, Barcelona; d. 2012, Barcelona) is recognized as one of the leading artistic voices to emerge from postwar Europe. Working in parallel with global art movements including Abstract Expressionism, Gutai, Art Informel, Tachisme, and Arte Povera, Tàpies believed that his era required a new kind of existential expression. Influenced by Surrealist methods while a member of the avant-garde Dau al Set group in postwar Barcelona, he came to develop a unique form of automatism and to reject representation and the illusionistic picture plane. He incorporated unconventional media such as textiles, straw, detritus, and found objects into his work, accentuating their tactile and material nature. Their earthy, distressed surfaces relate to themes of entropy and decay, challenging the viewer to find beauty in what is typically overlooked. Tàpies’s oeuvre resides between figuration and abstraction, matter and mysticism, as manifested through his painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, and printmaking.

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Jean Dubuffet @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "The Hourloupe Cycle" Major Exhibition

Jean Dubuffet

The Hourloupe Cycle

Pace Gallery, New York

March 13 – April 26, 2025

Pace Gallery presents a major exhibition of works from Jean Dubuffet’s celebrated Hourloupe cycle. On view at the gallery’s 540 West 25th Street location in New York, the exhibition has been conceived to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Fondation Dubuffet last year.

It brings together a selection of important paintings, sculptures, and architectural models from public and private collections, including the monumental canvas Nunc Stans—among the largest paintings that Jean Dubuffet ever created—on loan from the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

One of the great innovators of post-war European painting, Jean Dubuffet looked to the margins of society—to the art of outsiders, mediums, the incarcerated, and the institutionalized—to liberate his own creativity. He coined the term “Art Brut” to describe the raw aesthetic of such outsiders, challenging the conventions of the period. Ahead of his time as both an artist and a philosopher, Dubuffet’s works posed fundamental questions about the nature of reality, leaving an indelible mark on the history of Modernism.

With the Hourloupe, Jean Dubuffet used his practice as a means to reinvent the everyday in an alternate world. He posited the parallel universe of the Hourloupe, which the viewer was invited to imaginatively inhabit, to critique the consensus of reality—as if one might step through a portal in the humdrum existence of waking life into an alternative space of fantasy and possibility. Pace gallery’s exhibition in New York showcases the dictionary of biomorphic forms that Jean Dubuffet invented as part of the Hourloupe’s visual language of experience and sensation. Charting the artist’s use of a recurring alphabet of forms across painting, sculpture, and architecture, the show reflects his lifelong effort to disrupt and refashion our modes of perception.

The Hourloupe cycle was the longest lasting series of Dubuffet’s career, comprising works created between 1962 and 1974. Pace, which has represented the artist since 1967, was the first American gallery to exhibit sculptures from L’Hourloupe in its inaugural exhibition of the artist’s work in 1968. A foundational figure in the gallery’s history, Jean Dubuffet has been the subject of more than 20 solo exhibitions at Pace over the course of seven decades.

The Hourloupe style emerged in the early 1960s from Dubuffet’s Paris Circus period, the result of casual experiments with felt-tip markers. Creating absent-minded doodles in red, black, and blue pen while chatting on the telephone, Jean Dubuffet arrived at a visual language resembling a web of meandering lines. These lines create interlocking shapes of negative space, which lock together like puzzle pieces. Over the course of more than ten years, he produced some of his best-known drawings, paintings, sculptures, and large-scale public environments in this style, comprising the cycle known as L’Hourloupe.

Anchoring Pace’s presentation is Nunc Stans (1965), a 26-foot-long painting on loan from the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York for the first time. This masterpiece of L’Hourloupe contains an inventory of characters and forms that recur throughout the cycle and the exhibition. The work’s title refers to the philosophical concept of eternity—the notion that there is no such thing as past and present, but only an eternal ‘now.’

“If Dubuffet teaches anything, it is that there are no conclusions, and no true beginnings,” the late critic Peter Schjeldahl once observed. “There is only the middle, the presentness of life.”

The exhibition also includes the 1966 painting Fusil Canardier, in which Jean Dubuffet reimagines a punt gun as an animated creature, suggesting the metamorphic powers of L’Hourloupe to render alive what was previously inanimate. This uncanniness is reflected in the more figurative sculptures from the cycle, three of which are on view at Pace exhibition. In these large-scale works, including L'Incivil (1973–2014) and Le Facetieux (1973–2014), faces and limbs are abstracted and contorted but, like Fusil Canardier, retain a sense of anatomical familiarity.

Sculpture and architecture were central to Dubuffet’s process in the Hourloupe cycle. He realized his sculptural works first in polystyrene, which he produced by cutting through the material with a hot wire, creating maquettes for forms that would then be realized at a larger scale. The exhibition at Pace features Banc-Salon (1974–2024), a hybrid between a sculpture and an architectural bench, on which visitors are welcomed to sit beneath a sculptural cloud suspended from above. The show also includes the original nine-by-12-foot model of Dubuffet’s monumental, habitable environment, the Jardin d'email (1968), which the artist realized for grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands in 1974 and remains on view today. These works are presented with two wall-mounted ceramic compositions from 1965, as well as Comptoir amoncelant (1968), a still life of a food-laden counter. Together, these works express the artist’s aim to transpose domestic and quotidian scenes from our reality into the parallel universe of L'Hourloupe.

Pace’s exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Fondation Dubuffet. Founded by the artist himself, the Fondation Dubuffet’s mission is to protect and promote the work of Jean Dubuffet.

JEAN DUBUFFET

Jean Dubuffet (b. 1901, Le Havre, France; d. 1985, Paris) believed that art must be part of ordinary life and sought artistic authenticity outside of established conventions and an annihilation of hierarchical values. Jean Dubuffet looked to the margins of the everyday—the art of incarcerated and institutionalized people, mediums, and isolated provincials—to liberate his own creativity, coining the term “art brut.” His interest in the tactile possibilities of abstract art, its texture and materiality, evolved early on with the use of media such as sand, glass, and tar—an employment of matter that characterized his work as well as the Art Informel movement of the 1940s and 50s. In keeping with his exploration of the quotidian, his use of line and color was redefined in his mature work of the 60s, dominated by his renowned Hourloupe series, the longest cycle of artwork in the artist’s oeuvre, which spanned twelve years from 1962 to 1974. Jean Dubuffet maintained an active career in his later years, prolifically creating paintings, works on paper, and monumental sculpture.

Jean Dubuffet’s work has been featured in over 400 solo exhibitions throughout the world, including over thirty traveling exhibitions. He has been the subject of numerous retrospectives at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas (1966); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1973, 1981); Kunst Foreningen Copenhagen (1988); National Museum of History, Taipei, Taiwan (1998); and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Deoksugung, South Korea (2006). Notable recent exhibitions include Metamorphoses of Landscape, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland (2016); Drawings, 1935–1962, The Morgan Library and Museum, New York (2016); The Photographic Tool, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland (2018); Le Voyageur sans boussole, Centre Pompidou, Málaga, Spain (2018); L’arte in gioco. Matière e spirito 1943–1985, Fonazione Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2018); Jean Dubuffet and Venice, Palazzo Franchetti-Cavalli, Venice (2019); Jean Dubuffet, Barbican Art Centre, London (2020–2021); Jean Dubuffet: Ardent Celebration, Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain (2022); and Jean Dubuffet. Rebonds: From One Work to Another, Fondation Dubuffet, Paris (2023–2024).

Jean Dubuffet’s work is held in over sixty public collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate, London, among many others

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City 

www.pacegallery.com

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

Toulouse-Lautrec: The Human Comedy, SMK - National Gallery of Denmark

Toulouse-Lautrec: The Human Comedy 

SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhague 
17 Septembre 2011 - 19 February 2012

A cripple descended from aristocratic stock who became the controversial chronicler of modern-day Paris. The story of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec can very easily simply become the oft-told tale of this quirky artist who, for better or worse, became as one with his own art and circle of motifs. A major exhibition at the Royal Collection of Graphic Art at the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) moves out of the shadow of the mythology surrounding the artist. Featuring more than 130 works, the exhibition presents a sharply focused image of an artist whose depictions of the Parisian entertainment scene dissected and commented on modern existence by means of striking and groundbreaking effects. 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) 

Toulouse-Lautrec as Pierrot, Photograph, 1894

Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi, France

Toulouse-Lautrec: The Urban Scene - Paris

More than any other artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) stands as the enfant terrible of French late 19th century art. Over a brief but intense period of slightly more than 15 years the artist infiltrated the city’s entertainment scenes, interpreting virtue and vice across boundaries of class and social distinction without compromise. The city, which was described in Lautrec’s own day as a stage, became the starting point of his art. And the entertainment industry was the microcosm he used to record how the players on the urban scene staged themselves and their desires, regardless of gender and class.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s circle of motifs focuses on theatres, circuses, brothels, cafés, and dance halls, particularly in Montmartre. Here he created a repertoire of figures that comprised dancers, singers, actors, prostitutes, and their audiences and clients. Exercising his keen eye for tragic comedy this gallery of characters became an obvious source of subject matter in his work on decoding urban existence. The exhibition offers a veritable parade of such portrayals, demonstrating how Lautrec used caricature as a way of making shrewd observations of the social games being played; games which were set against the backdrop of a growing consumer culture and often centred on sexuality and desires. 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)

La Clownesse, seated, Mademoiselle Cha-U-Kao (From the album Elles)

1896

Lithograph, 525 x 403 mm

Image courtesy of the SMK

Toulouse-Lautrec: A pioneer

Toulouse-Lautrec’s artistic identity and anti-bourgeois attitude prompted him to transgress the boundaries between popular and highbrow culture, prefiguring aspects of 20th century avant-garde art. Parallel to his purely artistic work he also created illustrations and advertisements marketing a range of products and experiences. 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)  

La Chaîne Simpson - The Simpson Chain / Advertisement 

Designmuseum Danmark, The Prints and Drawings Collection 

Photo: Pernille Klemp 

1896

Poster, lithograph, 876 x 1247 mm

The exhibition focuses attention on Lautrec’s graphic works and on selected drawings. It shows how he, with his keenly honed sense for the commercial market and mass communication, found his own radical and innovative idiom, particularly within the graphic medium – which includes his groundbreaking posters. In his graphic experiments he employed simplification, stylisation, and exaggeration to achieve a hitherto unseen form and effect that had a strong impact on the public conscience – an idiom which means that his artistic takes on the human condition remain as fresh and mischievous today as when they were created.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 - 1901)

Cover for the album Yvette Guilbert

1894

Lithograph, 407 x 388 mm
Image courtesy of the SMK

At the exhibition: Themes, guide, app and film Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre

The exhibition differs from conventional retrospectives by opting out of the typical mode of chronological presentation. Rather, the many works are arranged by themes, focusing on the various scenes and players featured in Lautrec’s universe. The exhibition is accompanied by an informative guide, and visitors can also – before, during, and after their visit – access other materials such as apps for their smartphones and iPods. The latter can be borrowed from the ticket desk. Also, the film Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre is shown every day in the exhibition and in the Gallery’s cinema. 

Toulouse-Lautrec. The Human Comedy: Exhibition Catalogue 

On the occasion of this exhibition The National Gallery of Denmark also publishes with Prestel the catalogue Toulouse-Lautrec. The Human Comedy. Main article by Birgitte Anderberg and Vibeke Vibolt Knudsen, preface by Karsten Ohrt. 176 p, 24x30, richly illustrated. Available in Danish, and German.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 

Die menschliche Komödie 

Prestel, 2011 

SMK - Statens Museum for Kunst 
Solvgade 48-50
DK-1307 Kopenhagen

Website: www.smk.dk

The exhibitions at the Royal Collection of Graphic Art are sponsored by Oak Foundation Denmark

19th Century Paintings Sales Results - Sotheby's Amsterdam, June 2011

19th Century European Paintings Auction

Sotheby's Amsterdam, 7 June 2011 

Totals EUR 1,5 / USD 2,3 million   

Next 19th Century European Paintings sale on 12 December 2011

7 June 2011's sale of 19th Century European Painting at Sotheby’s Amsterdam brought EUR 1,586,925 (USD 2,312,848), within pre-sale expectations (est. EUR 1.5 - 2 million). The auction achieved sellthrough rates of 46.9% by lot and 69.2% by value, and set three new artist records.

The highest price achieved was for Winter in the Streets of a Dutch Town painted by WILLEM KOEKKOEK (1839-1895), one of the most distinguished painters of townscapes, which realised €228,750 ($333,389) against a pre-sale estimate of €100,000 – 150,000. Willem Koekkoek’s works were greatly admired all over Europe for their nostalgic mood and uniquely refined and detailed style of painting. This painting is an impressive example, not only because of its size, but also because of its ability to capture Holland's Age of Romanticism. 

Speaking after the sale, Mrs. Eveline van Oirschot, Chairman of Sotheby’s Amsterdam, said: ‘This very successful total result shows us again the strong demand nowadays for paintings of good quality coming from private collections.’

In church considered as one of the finest paintings by the American artist GARI MELCHERS fetched €88,350 ($128,765), above the pre-sale high estimate (est. €50,000 - 70,000), and is bought by the American Telfair Museum of Art. The painting was once part of the collection of Walther Rathenau, the Berlin industrialist and founder of the German Democratic Party, who was murdered in 1922 by officers of the extreme right wing party because of his Jewish background and political ideas. 

Holly McCullough of the Telfair Museum of Art comments :’Gari Melchers served as the Telfair’s fine arts advisor between 1906-1916 and was responsible for acquiring some of the very finest works in our collection. We are absolutely delighted to attain this very fine example of Melchers’ early work as a tribute to his ongoing legacy at the Telfair.’ 

A beautiful city view, Figures at the fishmarket in Delft, by CORNELIS SPRINGER realised €162,750 ($237,198), against a pre-sale estimate of €150,000 - 200,000. 

Another high price is realised for A girl in kimono a magnificent watercolour by FLORIS ARNTZENIUS, which sold for €78,750 ($114,773), well above pre-sale expectations (est. €20,000 - 30,000).  

NEW ARTIST RECORDS 

Another high price and new artist record for JAN HENDRIK VERHEYEN with A Lively Townscene, Utrecht, which sold for €96,750/ $141,007, against a pre-sale estimate of €12,000 - 18,000.

New artist record also for MARIE BELOUX-HODIEUX with A flower still life with peonies, hydrangea in a copper kettle, which sold for for €6,250/ $9,109 (est. €4,000 - 6,000).

Another new artist record for SALOMON LEONARDUS VERVEER, The ferry on the maas near Dordrecht, which sold for €102,750/ $149,752 against a pre-sale estimate of €50,000 - 80,000.

Pre-sale estimates do not include buyer’s premium.

Sale prices include buyer's premium. Sale session totals are net aggregate figures plus premiums. Sotheby's buyer's premium is 25% of the hammer price on the first €15.000, 20% of the hammer price up to and including €800.000, and 12% thereafter on each lot. 

Sotheby’s Amsterdam holds 19th Century Paintings auctions twice a year. The next sale will take place on 12 December 2011. 

SOTHEBY'S AMSTERDAM - NETHERLANDS 

www.sothebys.com 

French drawings US traveling exhibition - Storied Past: Four Centuries of French Drawings from the Blanton Museum of Art at The Frick, Pittsburg, The Blanton, Austin and Stanford University Center for Visual Arts

Storied Past: Four Centuries of French Drawings from the Blanton Museum of Art 

This traveling  Exhibition featuring 56 drawings chronicling a 400-year period in France, between 1500 and 1900, makes its debut at the Frick in Pittsburgh, where it is on view through April 17, 2011. Following its showing at the Frick, the exhibition will be on view at the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas from September 18 - December 31, 2011, and the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University from May 28 - August 24, 2012.

The Frick Art & Historical Center, Pittsburg

February 5 - April 17, 2011 

The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

September 18 - December 31, 2011 

Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University

May 28 - August 24, 2012 

Storied Past: Four Centuries of French Drawings from the Blanton Museum of Art chronicles the full range of artistic uses of the medium, from quick sketches to finished compositional studies, to drawing as an end in itself. The Blanton Museum at the University of Texas at Austin has organized the exhibition from their permanent collection, which was supplemented a bit more than a decade ago by a large gift of drawings. The French drawings from this gift had not received systematic academic study, nor had most of them been published. 

Especially rich in 17th and 18th century drawings, the exhibition illustrates the rise to dominance of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture as one of the most dominant cultural and political institutions in Europe.  

The exhibition includes works by François Boucher (1703-1770), Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805), and Nicolas Lancret (1690-1743), among others, with the nineteenth century represented by choice sheets from François-Marius Granet (1777-1849), Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867), Jean Forain (1852-1931), Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen (1859-1923), and others who reflect shifts in the approach to drawing in the modern era. 

At the Frick, the exhibition find a perfect counterpart in the museum’s permanent collection, which visitors enter as they exit the traveling drawings show. Paintings by Jean-Marc Nattier (1685-1766), Lancret (1690-1743), Jean-Baptiste Pater (1695-1736), Boucher, Hubert Robert (1733-1808), and Nicolas-Bernard Lepicié (1735-1784), are displayed with examples of decorative arts from the period. Interpretation links the Frick’s collection to the Blanton exhibition through specific Collection Connection labels, and with a printed gallery guide. 

Frick Director Bill Bodine comments, “The Frick’s presentation of Storied Past: Four Centuries of French Drawings from the Blanton Museum of Art reflects an institutional interest in French art established by Helen Clay Frick, founder and benefactor of the museum. We are delighted to be the first museum to host this exhibition of the Blanton’s magnificent drawings, many of which are unpublished and unfamiliar to the art world at large. This exhibition also provides us with the opportunity to highlight select French drawings and paintings in our collection that were purchased by Miss Frick and relate to the body of work on loan from the Blanton Museum of Art.”

STORIED PAST: 

FOUR CENTURIES OF FRENCH DRAWINGS 

FROM THE BLANTON MUSEUM OF ART 

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION 

The exhibition begins in a period of transition from the mannerism of the late Renaissance to the Baroque period. Two sheets showing designs for a powder flask made by an artist associated with the School of Fontainebleau show the sophisticated sense of decoration that prevailed among artists working around the court of Francis I. Two drawings attributed to seminal printmaker Jacques Callot (1592-1635) and his circle date to the period he spent in Florence, and show his interest in melding his observations of life around him into his expressive and inventive finished compositions. The fluid chalk Study of a Man with a Turban, c. 1617, attributed to Callot, is characteristic of his elegant figures and displays a masterful ability at controlling light and shade and swiftly capturing the spirit of a figure, as well as its contours.  

The Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture was founded in 1648. Modeled on Italian examples, the Académie provided training for and official recognition of artists, and allowed for artists to categorize themselves more highly than craftsman or tradespeople. Instruction at the Académie was based on a combination of lectures and studio classes. By the 1680s the Académie royale was an extremely influential organization, with well-established rules, a code of practice, lectures, regular competitions and prizes, exhibitions, and life-drawing-classes.  

The Académie, like those in Italy, considered drawing a fundamental part of the training of an artist and a necessary skill for a successful painter. Engrained in the academic system was a hierarchy of importance with history painting (narrative painting of religious, classical or mythological subject matter) being the most important, followed by portraiture, genre, landscape, and still-life painting. As the exhibition progresses through the Baroque period, examples of typical classical, mythological and religious subjects are prevalent, featuring an annunciation by Michel Dorigny (1616-1665) and a fascinating Elevation of the Cross attributed to Raymond LaFage (1656-1684). Religious and mythological subjects, along with the occasional classical landscape, dominate for about 50 years, until the emergence of the Rococo. 

The style of Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) is represented in this exhibition by Landscape in a Venetian Manner, c. 1715-1716 (Circle of Watteau). Watteau is best known for his fêtes galantes, a term invented by the Académie in 1717 to describe the artist's variation on the traditional theme of outdoor feasts. This drawing depicts the type of classicized, pastoral setting that might have been populated by fashionable couples in one of Watteau’s finished paintings. The artist kept bound albums of his landscape drawings —some made from nature and others copied from earlier artists— which he later incorporated into his painted compositions. This drawing exhibits the distinctive featherlike touch and delicacy of Watteau that suggests life's fragility and transience. 

The drawings of the Rococo period have exceptional crossover in artists and subject matter with the permanent collection at the Frick, both collections include Watteau’s contemporary Lancret, as well as Jean-Marc Nattier and François Boucher, and demonstrate the period’s interest in portraiture, allegory, mythology, and idealized landscapes. The favorite painter of Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, Boucher is represented by two drawings in this exhibition. Mucius Scaevola Putting His Hand in the Fire, c. 1726-1728, an early drawing, shows the influence of his teacher, François Le Moyne (1688-1737), whose work is also included in the exhibition. A later sheet by Boucher, Juno Commanding Aeolus to Unleash the Winds,1769, is executed in a markedly different style than the earlier drawing and was made in preparation for a painting now in the collection of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. 

The neoclassical period is exemplified by François-Marius Granet, who studied in the studio of Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) along with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). Granet traveled to Italy early in the 19th century and there developed a market for his works focusing on church interiors, ruins, and monuments. His drawing Monks Entering a Cloister, c. 1802-1819, shows his fascination with the atmosphere of classical architecture, and his typical skill at employing dramatic light effects.

By the mid-19th century, the hold of academic training on the art world began to weaken, and the lure of Italy as the land of both ideal landscape and ideal architecture collapsed as younger artists, like Théodore Rousseau, began to find deeper meaning in creating images of their own landscape. Rousseau’s small charcoal drawing on pink paper A Marshy River Landscape, c. 1845, illustrates his interest in responding directly to nature. The decidedly unpicturesque view of scrubby growth and wintry trees growing alongside a chill and grey looking river bordered by swampy land, has his characteristic manner of close observation combined with sketchy, more poetic passages. The pink paper and the use of white chalk on the horizon create an effect of either sunrise or sunset, and an atmosphere of sublimity and transcendence. As the exhibition concludes at the cusp of the 20th century we see artists exploring a variety of more moderns subjects—from the late realism of Workers Loading Ballast by Frédéric Jacque (1859-1931), to the more academic and conservative orientalism of Alexandre-Louis Leloir (1843-1884) and his Moroccan Girl Playing a Stringed Instrument, 1875, to the graphic sensibility employed by Théophile Alexandre Steinlen in preparatory drawings for his famous lithographs.

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

A catalogue published by Hudson Hills Press accompanies the exhibition. Storied Past: Four Centuries of French Drawings from the Blanton Museum of Art includes essays by Cheryl K. Snay, the Blanton’s former Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings; Jonathan Bober, Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings and European Paintings; and Kenneth M. Grant, Paper Conservator, Harry Ransom Center. The catalogue includes entries on all works, which are accompanied by full-color images. 

STORIED PAST

Four Centuries of French Drawings from The Blanton Museum of Art

By Jonathan Bober, Kenneth M. Grant, and Cheryl K. Snay

Hudson Hills Press, March 2011 

Hardcover - 304 pages - 10 x 11 in. - 25 x 27 cm 

100 color plates - 30 black & white

Storied Past: Four Centuries of French Drawings from the Blanton Museum of Art is organized by the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. Support for the exhibition is provided by Continental Airlines and the Still Water Foundation.  

Upcoming exhibitions at the Frick

A Closer Look: France and the Automobile, 1890-1925

March 8 - April 17, 2011

PAN–Fin de Siècle Prints: Art Nouveau on Paper 

May 21 - September 11, 2011 

Fabergé: The Hodges Family Collection

October 22, 2011 - January 15, 2012 

FRICK ART & HISTORICAL CENTER  

Pittsburgh, PA 15208 

www.thefrickpittsburgh.org

La Boheme at Museum Ludwig Cologne - The Staging of Artists in photography of the 19th and 20th century

“La Bohème”. The Staging of Artists in photography of the 19th and 20th century
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
25 September 2010 - 9 January 2011

In his 1851 novel Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, the French author Henri Murger created the image of the artist as an outsider who, in the midst of the middle class era, lived in romantic poverty. Bohemian life, viewed through rose-tinted glasses and elevated to undying popularity by Puccini’s opera, constituted in Murger’s view a transitional stage: “Bohemia is the first stage in artistic life; it is the preface to the Academy, the hospital, or the Morgue.” The term became synonymous with the 19th century artist who was dependent on an anonymous market and, while free of constraints, had to sell the fruits of his labours without the patronage of the courts. In the middle of this period in which the legend of the Bohemian swelled to bolster the artists’ feelings of self-confidence, came the invention of photography. Just how far this colourful approach to life was mirrored in photographic stagings of artists are examined in this exhibition at Museum Ludwig. It traces out the idea of the Bohemian milieu in photographic portraits, scenes and stagings.

The span of the work covered here extends from the earliest Daguerreotypes to the striking portraits by Nadar and the opulent artists’ banquets of the 1920s. Thus for instance Louis Alphonse de Brébisson staged around 1842 a group of friends painting and playing instruments as the quintessence of a romantic artists’ association in Bohemia. Felix Tournachon, known as Nadar, was not only a leading member of the Parisian Bohemians, he also created legendary portraits of his friends and contemporaries. No less ingenious was the collaboration between David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, whose group photographs such as Edinburgh Ale aimed at positioning themselves close to the artistic Bohemia. Historical pageants and so-called tableaux vivants tell of the lengths people went to dress up, not least for the artists’ and academy balls in the 19th century. Also on show are numerous poetic stagings done after historical models by David Wilkie Wynfield, a Pre-Raphaelite photographer, and Julia Margaret Cameron.

Paris remained however the metropolis of art and artists, and so the self-stagings from around 1900 by the artists of Montmartre and Montparnasse, such as Modigliani and Picasso, testify to their will to style. Likewise the figure of the dandy rose up amid this milieu in 19th century France. Stunning examples of this include the self-representations of the Pictorialists, such as Alfred Stieglitz and Frank Eugene Smith. The outlandish costumes in which the author Pierre Loti dressed up and the studio scenarios created for instance by Alphonse Mucha were also directly imbued with typical French flair. A special highlight will be the photographs of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, in which self-staging was wed with deep psychological introspection. Opulent and fanciful were the artists’ parties of the 1920s; on show will be examples from the Malkasten Düsseldorf, from Cologne, Hamburg, and from the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, photographed by leading photographers such as August Sander and T. Lux Feininger.

The Museum Ludwig, Cologne

The Museum Ludwig is one of Germany’s most important museums for 20th century art and contemporary art. It was founded in 1976 when Peter and Irene Ludwig presented the City of Cologne with 350 works of modern art. These works predominantly consist of American Pop Art paintings, objects, and sculptures (e.g. by Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Warhol, and Wesselmann). In this genre the Museum Ludwig boasts the most significant collection outside the USA. A collection of Russian Avant-garde art spanning the years between 1905 and 1935 (Gontcharova, Larionow, Exter, Popova, Malevich, Rodchenko) also came to the museum. In 1986 the Museum Ludwig, together with the Wallraf Richartz Museum, obtained a building of its own situated between Cologne Cathedral, the Rhine river and the central train station. Cologne architects Peter Bussmann and Godfrid Haberer designed the building, which also houses the Philharmonic Hall.

The collection of Cologne lawyer Dr. Josef Haubrich (1889-1961) became part of the Museum Ludwig as well. Immediately after World War II Haubrich had presented the City of Cologne with his collection of Expressionist paintings (Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Otto Mueller) and other exponents of Classical Modernism (Marc Chagall, Otto Dix).

In 1994 Peter and Irene Ludwig donated a significant part of their Picasso collection (90 works) to the City of Cologne which made it necessary for the Wallraff Richartz Museum to move to a building of its own. On 31 October 2001, on the occasion of its re-opening, Irene Ludwig donated a further 774 works by Picasso to the Museum Ludwig. Consequently the Museum Ludwig now owns the third largest Picasso collection worldwide, after Barcelona and Paris. It comprises a representative cross-section of all of the artist’s creative periods, covering all genres, materials, and techniques.

1977 saw the start of the photographic collection, very early on for a contemporary art museum. The museum managed to purchase around 1000 photographs from L.Fritz Gruber, the initiator of the photokina fairs. As a result, several icons of 20th century photography became part of the museum’s collection. In addition, important loans and donations were received, among them industrial photography by A. Renger-Patzsch and photographic works by Russian avant-garde artists. With the Agfa Collection the Museum Ludwig owns an internationally renowned collection on the history of 19th century photography.

Also in the 1970s, the Museum Ludwig began to collect video and film works. As early as 1974 the first 16mm films, among others by Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Joan Jonas, and ten further artists were purchased. Since then the museum has continuously expanded its collection. Since 2000 the Museum Ludwig has made a special point of collecting and presenting works representing the technical media in the context of contemporary art. The substantial acquisitions, e.g. of works by Aernout Mik, Renee Green, and Mike Kelley can be seen in this context.

www.museum-ludwig.de

Ordination by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) for sale at Christie's London

On 7 December 2010 in London, Christie’s will offer a masterpiece from one of the most celebrated groups of paintings in European history. Ordination by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) will highlight the Old Masters and 19th Century Art Evening Sale where it will be presented for sale for the first time in over 225 years by the Trustees of the Belvoir Estate. It is expected to realise £15 million to £20 million.

Richard Knight, International Co-Head of Old Masters and 19th Century Art at Christie's, said: “We are honoured to have been entrusted with the sale of Nicolas Poussin's 'Ordination'. One of the Sacraments, 'Ordination' formed part of the set of seven, a commission to Poussin by one of Rome's most celebrated collectors. The pictures, for which there was no iconographical precedent, became a prize coveted by Popes and Kings. Poussin is without question one of the greatest of all French painters whose influence on the development of European Art from the 17th Century onwards cannot be overstated. Like Titian before him and his contemporaries Caravaggio and Velazquez, he developed a personal, innovative and highly rigorous style of outstanding originality.  His work has been deeply influential on generations of artists up to the present day.

The market for the finest Old Masters continues to show great strength. In the past year we have offered masterpieces by such towering figures as Raphael, Rubens and Rembrandt. It is works by such artists as these that have attracted new collectors from around the world, eager to acquire great art of historical importance. We expect wide international interest and excitement from museums, collectors and the art market generally, when Poussin's remarkable 'Ordination' appears in our next sale in London on 7th December.”

A spokesman for the Trustees said: “After careful consideration the Trustees have made the extremely difficult decision to offer at Christie’s one of the 5 remaining works from the Rutland Sacraments. The original group of 7 pictures was acquired by the 4th Duke of Rutland in 1785 but was divided when ‘Penance’ was lost in a fire, and when ‘Baptism’ went to the National Gallery in Washington in 1946. The proceeds released from the sale of the painting will enable us to realise our core aims of securing the restoration and long-term preservation of Belvoir Castle and Estate. The paintings have been on public display at Belvoir for many years and we have been very happy to lend them to the National Gallery for the last 7 years for the public’s greater enjoyment. Following the successful sale of ‘Ordination’, it is our hope that the 4 remaining paintings will go back on public display at the National Gallery in London.”

ORDINATION by NICOLAS POUSSIN (1594-1665) 

This master piece of art is one of five remaining works which once formed the renowned group of Seven Sacraments acquired by the 4th Duke of Rutland in 1785. One of the most celebrated groups of paintings in the entire history of European art it was executed in the 1630s for Cassiano dal Pozzo, a celebrated antiquary and collector in Rome. The group has since been divided; Penance perished in a fire and Baptism went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Cassiano dal Pozzo was one of Poussin’s first and most important patrons. His commission of the Sacraments saw Poussin painting a series of works showing how the earliest Christians lived and worshipped in ancient times, connecting the everyday present of papal Rome with the epoch of the Caesars. Such a thing had never been done before. Although earlier artists had often made a conscious attempt to show Christ and the Apostles in the dress of their time, none had done it with such an exhaustive attention to detail, and commitment to accuracy. The originality of the series was such that its fame quickly spread far and wide.

When Nicolas Poussin was summoned to France by Cardinal Richelieu to serve as First Painter to King Louis XIII, he acquired an important new patron in Paul Fréart de Chantelou, a Parisian diplomat who was determined to secure for himself and for France another version of the pictures that had brought such glory to Cassiano, to Rome and to Poussin. This second set is that which is now in the collection of the Dukes of Sutherland, and on loan to The National Gallery of Scotland.

The family collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo’s descendants quickly became a ‘must-see’ landmark of the Grand Tour, and when Sir Robert Walpole attempted to acquire the first group of Sacraments for his collection at Houghton Hall – where he assembled one of the greatest collections in European history - they became the subject of one of the first formal export blocks in history; the export license was denied by the Pope himself, resulting in the cancellation of the Walpole sale. The dealer and agent James Byres could only manage to arrange the sale of the pictures to Charles Manners, 4th Duke of Rutland (1754-1787), by having copies painted (allegedly in the space of a single day) and substituted for the originals, so that they could be smuggled out of Italy.

The 4th Duke was forming a collection to rival Sir Robert Walpole’s, with the advice of none other than Sir Joshua Reynolds, who undoubtedly supported the Duke’s interest in the first group of Sacraments. Reynolds would have known them well from his travels in Italy. When the original seven Rutland Sacraments arrived in London in 1786, they created a stir. King George III expressed a desire to see the 4th Duke’s triumphant new acquisition, and it was Sir Joshua Reynolds who had the privilege and the pleasure of showing the Rutland Poussins to the King, at the Royal Academy in 1787.

The Seven Sacraments took pride of place in the collection at Belvoir Castle not long after their acquisition by the 4th Duke, and hung there almost without break well into the 21st century. One of them, Penance, perished in a fire; another, Baptism, was acquired by The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1946. The remaining five were lent to the landmark exhibitions, Poussin: Sacraments and Bacchanals at The National Gallery of Scotland in 1981, and Nicolas Poussin, 1594-1665, at the Grand Palais in Paris and the Royal Academy in London, 1994-1995, and have been on loan to The National Gallery, London, since 2003.

Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) is recognised as one of the greatest and most influential artists in European art history. Born in France, he moved to Italy in the 1620s where he spent most of his life championing a renaissance in Classical painting at a time when Baroque was the most common style. Having moved to Rome, Poussin soon found wealthy patrons and established an impressive reputation. In 1640 he was summoned by Louis XIII and returned to France as First Painter in Ordinary to the King. He executed a number of prestigious works but quickly grew tired of the jealousy inferred on him by competing artists, returning to Rome in 1643 where he remained until his death.

Christie's London
Old Masters & 19th Century Art Evening Sale
7th December 2010
London, King Street