Monet – Cézanne – Matisse. The Scharf Collection @ Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf

Monet – Cézanne – Matisse

The Scharf Collection

Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf

March 12 – August 9, 2026

Paul Cézanne

River Landscape with Houses, circa 1904

Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 81 cm 

© The Scharf Collection, Photo: Ruland Photodesign

Pierre-Auguste Renoir 

Young woman with flowered hat, 1877-1879

Pastels on paper, 48 × 43 cm

© The Scharf Collection, Photo: Ruland Photodesign

The Scharf Collection – a German private collection of French art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and international contemporary art – is being presented for the first time.

It continues the fourth generation of a branch of the renowned Otto Gerstenberg Collection in Berlin, which encompasses everything from the beginnings of modernism, represented by Francisco de Goya, to the French avant-garde of the second half of the nineteenth century, represented by Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas and the entire graphic oeuvre of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Despite many wartime losses, Gerstenberg’s daughter Margarethe Scharf was able to save the majority of the collection and bequeath it to her two sons Walther and Dieter Scharf.

Following the division of the collection between the grandchildren, Walther Scharf, his wife Eve and son René developed the French focus further and added works by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, among others. 

Claude Monet 

Waterloo Bridge, 1903

Oil on canvas, 65 x 100 cm 

© The Scharf Collection, Photo: Ruland Photodesign

Pierre Bonnard 

Vase with flowers, 1933 

Oil on canvas, 99.5 x 48.5 cm 

© The Scharf Collection, Photo: Ruland Photodesign

Today, René Scharf and his wife Christiane Scharf specialise in international contemporary artists, including works by Sam Francis, Daniel Richter and Katharina Grosse. With a particular interest in the boundaries of the medium of painting and the relationship between figurative and abstract pictorial worlds, they have brought the family tradition of collecting into the present day.

An exhibition by the Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, in cooperation with the Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

KUNSTPALAST, DUSSELDORF

Ehrenhof 4-5, 40479 Düsseldorf

www.kunstpalast.de

Millet: Life on the Land @ National Gallery, London

Millet: Life on the Land

National Gallery, London

7 August – 19 October 2025

The first UK exhibition in nearly 50 years dedicated to Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) will open at the National Gallery in autumn 2025. 

The show will coincide with the 150th anniversary of Millet’s death – by which time his works were well known in the UK and beginning to be eagerly collected by an enthusiastic group of British collectors, resulting in a significant body of his work in UK public collections.

Millet: Life on the Land will present around 13 paintings and drawings from British public collections. It will include the National Gallery’s The Winnower (about 1847‒8), and the exceptional loan of 'L’Angelus' (1857‒9) from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The exhibition will range from Millet’s last years in Paris through to his images of workers on the land during the 1850s following his move to the village of Barbizon in the Fontainebleau Forest in 1849, when he became one of the most significant painters associated with the 19th-century Barbizon school. Two drawings of shepherdesses from the Cooper Gallery (Barnsley) and the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge) will be shown together for the first time.

'The Winnower', which was acquired by the National Gallery in 1978, is one of Millet’s first paintings to treat the theme of rural labour. It was exhibited at the Salon of 1848 and was well received. However, later works exhibited at the Paris Salon produced extreme reaction. While Millet’s own political convictions are unclear, many critics appropriated his work for their own progressive agenda while others labelled him as subversive. Yet there is no doubt that he had sympathy with the workers around him and wrote in 1851 of the ‘human side’ that touched him most. 

In 'L’Angelus', a man and a woman are reciting the Angelus, a prayer which commemorates the annunciation made to Mary by the angel Gabriel. It is traditionally cited at morning, noon and evening, when it marks the end of the working day.  Never collected by its original commissioner, it followed an extraordinary journey through several collections and sales. The two quiet figures silhouetted against land and sky, the profound sense of meditation underscored by a beauty of light have turned it into a world-famous icon in the 20th century. 

Sarah Herring, Associate Curator of Post 1800 Paintings, says ‘Millet endowed rural labourers with dignity and nobility, depicting them in drawings and paintings with empathy and compassion.’ 

Nadar (French, Paris 1820-1910 Paris)

Jean-Francois Millet, 1856-58

Salted paper print from paper negative; Mount: 

15 7/8 in. — 11 5/8 in. (40.4 — 29.5 cm) 

Image: 10 9/16 — 8 3/8 in. (26.8 — 21.3 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 

Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012 (2013.159.46)

www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/306329 

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875)

Jean-François Millet was born at Grouchy (Manche) and was a pupil of Paul Delaroche in Paris by 1837. For some years he painted chiefly idylls in imitation of 18th-century French painters. Becoming, like Honoré Daumier, increasingly moved by the spectacle of social injustice, Millet turned to peasant subjects and won his first popular success at the Salon of 1848 with The Winnower. From the following year he was chiefly active at Barbizon and associated with the Barbizon school of landscape painters.

His work was influenced by Dutch paintings of the 17th century and by the work of Jean-Siméon Chardin and was influential in Holland on Jozef Israëls and on the early style of Vincent Van Gogh.

Barbizon school

The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement toward Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name from the village of Barbizon, France, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where many of the artists gathered. Most of their works were landscape painting, but several of them also painted landscapes with farm workers, and genre scenes of village life. Some of the most prominent features of this school are its tonal qualities, colour, loose brushwork, and softness of form.

The leaders of the Barbizon school were: Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Jules Dupré, Constant Troyon, Charles Jacque, and Narcisse Virgilio Díaz. Jean-François Millet lived in Barbizon from 1849, but his interest in figures with a landscape backdrop sets him rather apart from the others.

NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism @ Cleveland Museum of Art

Degas and the Laundress: 

Women, Work, and Impressionism 

Cleveland Museum of Art

October 8, 2023 –January 14, 2024

Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)

Woman Ironing, begun c. 1876, completed c. 1887. 

Oil on canvas; 99 x 82.5 cm. 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 

Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1972.74.1

The Cleveland Museum of Art presents Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism, on view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Gallery. The first exhibition to explore Impressionist artist Edgar Degas’s representations of Parisian laundresses, the groundbreaking show includes the largest selection of these works seen together to date, only in Cleveland. The artworks from this series—revolutionary in their emphasis on women’s work, the strenuousness of such labor, and social class—were featured in Edgar Degas’s most significant exhibitions, where they were praised by critics as epitomizing modernity. The nearly 100 works exhibited from over 30 European and American collections reveal that depictions of laundresses by the artist and his contemporaries featured some of the most striking formal innovations of the time.  

“Degas carried out some of the most striking experimentation of his long career throughout his laundress series,” said Britany Salsbury, curator of prints and drawings. “The subject fascinated him beginning as a young man in the 1850s and continuing until his final decade of work as an artist. The images that he created of these women are fascinating for their emphasis on labor itself rather than the stereotypes that persisted about them throughout popular culture. The women who undertook work ironing and washing often did so because they lacked other options, and they endured tremendously difficult working conditions.”

A visible presence in the city, ironing in shops open to the street or carrying heavy baskets of clothing, laundresses undertook some of the most difficult and poorly paid labor at the time, leading some in the industry to supplement their income through sex work. The depictions of these women featured in Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism provide a surprising contrast to more familiar Impressionist representations of upper-middle-class leisure.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)

The Laundre [La Blanchisseuse]ss, 1877–79. 

Oil on canvas; 80.8 x 56.6 cm. 

Art Institute of Chicago, 

Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1947.102

Edouard Vuillard (French, 1868–1940)

Woman Ironing, 1892

Oil on board; 21.4 x 25.4 cm. 

The Cleveland Museum of Art, 

Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift, 2020.119

Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867–1947)

The Little Laundress, from Album des peintres-graveurs, 1896. 

Color lithograph on China paper; image: 29 x 19.7 cm; sheet: 45.4 x 33.7 cm. 

The Cleveland Museum of Art, 

Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift, 2020.151

Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism contextualizes Edgar Degas’s laundress series with paintings, drawings, and prints of the same subject by the artist’s contemporaries—including Gustave Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard—as well as painters that Edgar Degas influenced and was influenced by, from Honoré Daumier to Pablo Picasso. It also presents ephemera, such as posters, photographs, and books, that reveals the widespread interest that Parisians of all social classes had in the topic of laundresses during the late 1800s.

“The extraordinary works assembled for this exhibition reveal a new and exciting aspect of an otherwise well-known art historical movement,” said William Griswold, director and president of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “The Cleveland Museum of Art’s exceptional holdings of 19th-century French art situate us to present such an inventive exhibition, and we look forward to sharing works of impressive quality—from Degas’s private sketchbooks to some of his most celebrated canvases alongside those by his colleagues—that have never before been seen together.”

Degas and the Laundress

Women, Work, and Impressionism

Exhibition Catalogue

Britany Salsbury ed.

Published by The Cleveland Museum of Art

ISBN: 978-0-300-27322-9

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication featuring thematic essays by scholars of art history, French studies, literature, and history. The 256-page catalogue is the first publication to examine and document Edgar Degas’s portrayals of Parisian laundresses. Edited by Britany Salsbury with contributions by Aleksandra Bursac, Michelle Foa, Gretchen Schultz, Charles Sowerwine, Richard Thomson, and Claire White.

CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART

11150 East Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44106

www.clevelandart.org

Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh @ Minneapolis Institute of Art

Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh
Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia)
Through January 10, 2016

Eugène Delacroix (French 1798-1863)

Convulsionists of Tangier, 1837-38

Oil on canvas, 37 5/8 x 50 5/8 inches

Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art

The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) presents the first major exhibition in 50 years to explore the legacy and widespread influence of the revolutionary French painter Eugène Delacroix. “Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh” features 75 seminal paintings—including 30 works by Delacroix—to reveal the artist’s indelible impact on French painting and how his radical example led to the rise of modern art. The exhibition also examines Delacroix’s role as mentor and archetype during his lifetime and how his work shaped the styles and predilections of many modern artists, including Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others. Organized in partnership with the National Gallery, London, “Delacroix’s Influence” is on view at Mia through January 10, 2016, and draws on works from the Mia’s robust 19th-century holdings, as well as loans from 45 prestigious public and private collections worldwide.

“Eugène Delacroix was the very engine of revolution that helped transform French painting in the 19th century,” said Patrick Noon, the Mia’s Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator and Chair of Paintings, and organizing curator of the exhibition. “Kept at arm’s length by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, he was an artist who was truly ahead of his time, whose work and critical writings resonated deeply with his peers and helped shape the trajectory of art history. This exhibition will examine Delacroix as the bridge—in practice and in theory—between Anglo-French Romanticism and Impressionism.”

“Delacroix’s Influence” demonstrates how Delacroix redefined the possibilities of capturing the unique interplay between light and form, as well as his fascination with optical effects, bold use of color, and passion for the exotic. These innovations subsequently inspired the spontaneity of the Impressionists, the dreamlike allusion of the Symbolists, and the saturated color palette made famous almost a century later by such artists as Renoir and Matisse. Organized according to four thematic sections—Emulation; Orientalism: Imagined/Experienced/Re-Imagined; Narrative Painting at a Crossroads: ‘Truth in Art’; and Delacroix’s Legacy: In Paint and Prose—the exhibition features a broad swath of paintings by Delacroix and his admirers, including works by Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Redon, Renoir, and Signac, among others. Notable works in the exhibition include:

• Delacroix’s Convulsionists of Tangier (1837-38), widely considered one of the artist’s foremost masterworks and a cornerstone of Mia’s 19th-century collection. The painting depicts a frenzied scene that Delacroix witnessed during his travels to North Africa in 1832, in which members of the Aïssaouas, a fanatical Muslim sect, crowd the streets. Delacroix’s use of vivid colors and vigorous brushstrokes represent the artist’s signature style and ability to expertly capture the turmoil and urgency of his subject.

• Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1861), one of three Lion Hunt paintings Delacroix produced for dealers and private collectors between 1855 and 1861. This final picture differs markedly in its spatial definition from the flat composition of the earlier pictures—capturing a greater sense of depth and clearly articulated narrative while also maintaining intense and expressive brushwork.

• Édouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862), the artist’s first major work depicting modern urban life. The painting features a band playing for a fashionable crowd that includes several portraits of Manet’s friends—the poet Baudelaire, painter Henri Fantin-Latour, poet and novelist Théophile Gautier, and composer Jacques Offenbach—as well as his brother, Eugène, and the artist himself. To capture these portraits, Manet used photographs as his source of imagery, a technique often employed by Delacroix to underscore a distinct contemporary sensibility in his work.

• Paul Cézanne’s Standing Nude (c. 1898), a representation of a nude in an interior setting that evokes the traditional theme of a woman or goddess at her toilet. Although Cézanne frequently depicted female bathers in an outdoor landscape, the artist admired Delacroix’s The Morning Toilet (or Woman CombingHer Hair) (1850), which he copied shortly after it was exhibited in the 1885 Delacroix retrospective at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

• Paul Gauguin’s Christ in the Garden of Olives (1889), one of several religiously inspired paintings Gauguin created, in which a vulnerable Christ is depicted in isolation prior to his impending martyrdom—a pose derived from Delacroix’s Christ Shown to the People (1850). The work’s dark colors and gloomy tonality severely contrast against Christ’s flaming hair, further emphasizing the sense of alienation in this overt personification of the artist.

• Van Gogh’s Olive Trees (1889), one of 15 canvases of olive trees van Gogh created while housed in the asylum of St-Paul in St-Rémy in southern France. In his correspondence with his brother, van Gogh wrote of the olive tree: “It’s too beautiful for me to dare paint it or be able to form an idea of it…if you want to compare it to something, [it is] like Delacroix.” It was during this period that the artist created many of his most renowned works, and the vibrant yellow and orange hues in this painting suggest it was produced during the autumn.

• Odilon Redon’s Pegasus and the Hydra (1905), one of several depictions of ancient myths showcasing the artist’s increasing fascination with monster slayers. Influenced by Delacroix’s treatment of similar subjects—in this case, his Apollo Slaying Python (1851)—Redon conceived this work as a metaphor for the artist as an ostracized genius eventually vanquishing chaos and adversity.

Delacroix’s posthumous influence persisted undiminished for nearly five decades and over several generations of avant-garde artists, each of whom, however divergent their own aesthetic programs, discovered something of value in the legendary artist’s oeuvre and dynamic personality. Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists, Symbolists, and Fauves borrowed Delacroix’s ideas as deduced from his varied and accessible painted works and profuse writings.

“This exhibition is a cornerstone of our 100th anniversary celebration and highlights one of the things that the MIA does best, creating remarkable, scholarly exhibitions that change how we and our visitors think about an artist, artistic movement, or era,” said Kaywin Feldman, Mia’s Duncan and Nivin MacMillan Director and President. “Mia founder James J. Hill was the foremost collector of Delacroix works in America during the 19th century, and we look forward to paying homage to his legacy and showcasing the best of our collection as we present a new chapter in our visitors’ understanding of the vital role Delacroix played in the genesis of modern art.”

“Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh” is co-organized with the National Gallery, London, where it will be on view from February 10 through May 15, 2016. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, which comprises lead essays by Patrick Noon, Curator and Chair of Paintings at Mia and organizing curator of the exhibition, and Christopher Riopelle, Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London.

About Delacroix:

Orphaned at the age of sixteen, Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) quickly abandoned his classical academic training at the Lycée Impérial in favor of self-study. He gleaned early insight and direction by copying old master works in the Musée du Louvre, as well as from his friendship with Théodore Géricault, a pioneer of the Romantic movement in French painting. Géricault, who advocated for individual over formulaic expression, profoundly influenced the development of Delacroix’s first publicly exhibited painting, Barque of Dante (1822), which was celebrated for its acute sentiment and imaginative composition. The work was immediately acquired for the Luxembourg Palace— establishing him as the next prodigy of French Romanticism—and became the most copied of Delacroix’s paintings during the 19th century.

By the time of his death, Delacroix had established himself as a champion of the avant-garde and was one of the most revered artists in Paris. His paintings continued to be distinguished by their expressive, improvisational brush strokes, which challenged the traditional techniques and attitudes of the period’s preeminent Grand Style and paved the way for younger artists’ stylistic experimentation and creative innovation.

Support: Major loans from national and international institutions include the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Uffizi Gallery, Florence; Musée d’Orsay, and the Petit Palais, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; St. Louis Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum; Art Institute of Chicago, and the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France.

Mineapolis Institute of Art - MIA
2400 Third Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55404
www.artsmia.org

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

Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 1840-1916 - Exhibition in Paris and Montpellier at the Grand Palais and Fabre Museum

Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 1840-1916 

Grand Palais - Galeries nationales, Paris 

23 March - 20 June 2011 

Musée Fabre, Montpellier 

7 July - 16 october 2011 

The exhibition ODILE REDON: PRINCE OF DREAMS, 1840-1916 is on view in France in Paris through June 2011 and will be on view in Montpellier (South of France) at Fabre museum from July to October 2011. An exhibition organised by the Rmn-Grand Palais, the Musée d’Orsay and the musée Fabre de Montpellier Agglomération. With special support from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.  

Although he was a contemporary of the Impressionists (he took part in the group’s last exhibition in 1886), ODILON REDON (Bordeaux 1840 - Paris 1916) remains the champion of mystery and the subconscious in a period which focused on reality and objectivity. One of the leaders in the art world at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he was a key figure in early symbolism, with his charcoals and lithographs (the famous noirs -blacks) before being admired for his pastels and paintings by the young generation of artists in love with colour, the Nabis and the Fauves. He was then regarded as one of the precursors of surrealism. 

The exhibition in the Galeries nationales-Grand Palais is a real rediscovery of this artist. A number of major exhibitions have recently been devoted to him in other parts of the world -Chicago and London, 1994; Frankfurt, 2007-, but this retrospective is the first in Paris since the exhibition in the Orangerie in 1956. It is based on the study of many unpublished documents which shed new light on Redon’s work. In particular it makes systematic use of his “book of reason” (Paris, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet), in which he jotted down the titles and dates of his works. The book is on display and was published in the appendix to the catalogue. 

Some hundred and eighty paintings, pastels, charcoals and drawings, many unpublished, and a major set of engravings and lithographs (about a hundred prints, courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France-French National Library, Paris) are arranged in chronological  order to emphasise the development in Redon’s style and themes, from the anguished period of the Noirs to the explosion of colour in his last works, in a gradual progression from shade to light. For the first time, the great mural that he painted for his patron Robert de Domecy will be displayed in its original size and layout. Redon’s work in the decorative arts will also be on show, thanks to major loans from the Mobilier national. 

ODILON REDON BIOGRAPHY

Despite the overall continuity of Odilon Redon' style throughout his career, three periods can be distinguished.  

Odilon Redon: Early years to 1890 

From Odilon Redon’ youth and his training in etching under the mysterious Rodolphe Bresdin (1822-1885) in Bordeaux, until the beginning of the Noirs [Blacks] (charcoal drawings, lithographs) which, from his first collection of lithographs (Dans le Reve [In the Dream], 1879), made his reputation in the budding symbolism movement, particularly in literary circles. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) paid homage to him in his famous novel A rebours (Against the Grain, 1884), whose archetypal refined, decadent hero fervently collected Redon’s  work. His references are Darwin and the mysteries of the origins of the world but also the sumptuous macabre works of Edgar Allen Poe and Goya. The extraordinary beauty of his lithographs is due to an accomplished technique and velvety blacks, which were said to be inimitable. 

Odilon Redon: From 1892 the end of the century 

This is the period when the dreams of the Noirs were gradually transposed into colour. Yeux clos (Closed Eyes 1890, Paris, Musée d’Orsay), of which there is a painting and a lithograph, is a turning point after which Redon approached colour in a new spirit. He used pastel with startling originality and, alongside Degas, is still one of the great masters of this medium. He became a major figure in symbolism, and mixed with Mallarmé and Gauguin.  

Odilon Redon in the twentieth century 

After 1899, Redon gave up lithography and charcoal drawing. Black and white gave way to vivid colour in increasingly large formats. Collectors competed for his mythological themes and brightly coloured flower paintings, a sign of his new peace of mind. It was during this period that Redon produced some of the great decorations which number among the lesser known masterpieces of the twentieth century, including the one in the Fontfroide abbey, which will be open to the public while the exhibition is showing at the Musée Fabre (Fabre museum) in Montpellier, in summer 2010. He won the admiration of Bonnard, Vuillard, Matisse and the Fauves and in his last years he designed tapestry cartoons for the Manufacture des Gobelins. 

Head curator: Rodolphe Rapetti, general heritage curator, associate researcher at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art [National Institute of Art History, Paris]

Curators: 

Marie-Pierre Salé, chief curator at the Musée d’Orsay [Orsay Museum, Paris]

Valérie Sueur-Hermel, curator of the Print and Photography department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France [French National Library, Paris], head of the 19th century collections 

Exhibition design: Hubert Le Gall  

RMN - GRAND PALAIS, PARIS 

www.rmn.fr 

Information, tickets, download of audioguides on the website 

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

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

Galerie Michel Rein Paris Expositions

Située dans le Marais près de la Place des Vosges, à Paris, la GALERIE MICHEL REIN présente depuis 1992 un programme d’expositions organisé autour de la promotion d’artistes émergents français et internationaux, ainsi que d’artistes plus établis.

Les artistes de la galerie exposent dans les plus importants musées en France et à l’étranger. Leurs œuvres sont achetées par de grandes collections privées et publiques.

La galerie Michel Rein participe à de nombreuses foires d’art contemporain (FIAC, ArtBrussels...) et collabore à des projets d’expositions et de publications à l’international.

Elle représente le travail de Saâdane Aff, Maria Thereza Alves, Maja Bajevic, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Jordi Colomer, Jimmie Durham, Didier Fiuza Faustino, Dora Garcia, Mathew Hale, Jean-Charles Hue, Armand Jalut, Yuri Leiderman, Didier Marcel, Stefan Nikolaev, Orlan, Dan Perjovschi, Elisa Pône, Mark Raidpere, Michael Riedel, Allan Sekula, Christian Ward, Raphaël Zarka, Chen Zhen.

Artistes permanents : Saâdane Afif - Maja Bajevic - Jean-Pierre Bertrand - Jordi Colomer - Jimmie Durham - Dora Garcia - Jean-Charles Hue - Armand Jalut - Yuri Leiderman - Didier Marcel - Stefan Nikolaev - Orlan - Dan Perjovschi - Mark Raidpere - Allan Sekula - Chen Zhen

Expositions 2010 à la galerie Michel Rein

MICHAEL RIEDEL, 16 octobre - 20 novembre 2010
JEAN-PASCAL FLAVIEN, person(ne) A person(ne) B, 4 septembre - 9 octobre 2010
Exposition collective d'artistes de la Galerie Michel Rein, Summertime Love, 12 juin - 24 juillet 2010
LUCA VITONE, Souvenir d’Italie, 29 avril - 5 juin 2010
CHRISTIAN WARD, Balanced Rock, 13 mars - 24 avril 2010
JEAN-CHARLES HUE, Tijuana, Carne Viva, 5 décembre 2009 - 16 janvier 2010

GALERIE MICHEL REIN
42 rue de Turenne
75003 Paris

www.michelrein.com

From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

From Impressionism to Modernism:

The Chester Dale Collection

National Gallery of Art, Washington 

January 31, 2010  – July 31, 2011

Henri Matisse

The Plumed Hat, 1919

Oil on canvas,

© National Gallery of Art

Chester Dale Collection

Courtesy National Gallery of Art

When Chester Dale bequeathed his remarkable collection of paintings to the National Gallery of Art in 1962, it became one of the most important repositories in North America of French art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some 81 of the finest French and American paintings―among the Gallery’s most beloved masterpieces― explore the collector’s passion and talent for acquiring great art as well as his tastes in modern art. This installation will allow visitors to discover the rich array of Dale’s bequest to the Gallery in the format of a special exhibition.

The range of paintings on view includes Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Forest of Fontainebleau (1834), August Renoir’s A Girl with a Watering Can (1876), Mary Cassatt’s Boating Party (1893/1894), Pablo Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques (1905), George Bellows’ Both Members of This Club (1909), and George Braque’s Still Life: Le Jour (1929). Several sculptures, such as Amedeo Modigliani’s Head of a Woman (1910/1911) and Paul Gauguin’s Père Paillard (1902), will also be on view. Among other artists represented are Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh.

Chester Dale was an astute businessman who made his fortune on Wall Street in the bond market. He thrived on forging deals and translated much of this energy and talent into his art collection. He served on the boards of several museums that hoped to be the beneficiary of his collecting, but his greatest devotion was to the National Gallery of Art, where he served on the board of trustees from 1943 and as president from 1955 until his death in 1962. Two portraits of Dale, by Salvador Dali and Diego Rivera, and two portraits of Dale’s wife Maud (who greatly influenced his interest in art) by Fernand Léger and Bellows, are included in the show.

A fully illustrated catalogue will present a study of the collection, with a biographical essay on Chester Dale as a collector, an exploration of the context of collecting in America from the1920s to the 1960s, and a chronology of the Chester Dale Collection.

A 15-minute documentary film will profile Chester Dale.

A selection of books from the Chester Dale Collection and related documentary material from the Gallery Archives will be installed in Gallery G-21 of the West Building.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

Useful Forms: Furniture by Charlotte Perriand - Exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum

Useful Forms: Furniture by Charlotte Perriand 

Princeton University Art Museum

April 2 - July 11, 2004 

French designer Charlotte Perriand is frequently named as one of the most important but overlooked modernist designers of the twentieth century.  The Princeton University Art Museum give the public a rare opportunity to view a selection of Perriand’s mid-century furniture designs in the exhibition Useful Forms: Furniture by Charlotte Perriand.

Although Charlotte Perriand has been the subject of major exhibitions in both France and England (at the Museé des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Design Museum in London), she has received virtually no exposure in American museums, and remains underrepresented in American museum collections.  The Princeton exhibition will be only the second in the United States to focus on her work, and the first to concentrate exclusively on Perriand’s mid-century designs created during the two decades following her employment in the studio of the architect Le Corbusier.

“Charlotte Perriand was an important designer who enjoyed a long and productive career,” notes Jennifer King, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, “but her later work is often overshadowed by her contributions to Le Corbusier’s atelier, where she collaborated on some of the most iconic chairs of the twentieth century.  This exhibition highlights Charlotte Perriand designs from the 1940s and 1950s—an extremely fruitful period during which she experimented with different materials and forms, and became concerned with issues of affordability.  Perriand thought good furniture design should be accessible to the average consumer, not just the wealthy elite.”

Useful Forms features six works, including the colorful shelving unit designed with the Ateliers Jean Prouvé for the dormitory of the Maison du Mexique of the Cité Universitaire, Paris, in 1952; a freeform desk from 1960; and a folding chaise-longue Charlotte Perriand designed during a trip to Japan in 1941. The exhibition also includes a rare library table designed in collaboration with Jean Prouvé and lighting designer André Salomon for the Maison de l’Etudiant in Paris. 

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated brochure with an essay by Jennifer King, the guest curator.

“The exhibition coincides with a recent upsurge in attention to Perriand’s career, stemming from the long overdue publication of the first book-length monograph on Charlotte Perriand in English, Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living,” said Jennifer King. The book, edited by Columbia University Professor Mary McLeod, features scholarly essays by several Charlotte Perriand scholars including Princeton Professor of Art and Archaeology Esther da Costa Meyer.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM

www.artmuseum.princeton.edu