2012-12-25

U.S.A. - SAN DIEGO-CALIFORNIA - Charles Reiffel: An American Post-Impressionist

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Charles Reiffel, In the San Felipe Valley. Oil on canvas, 1927. Museum purchase, 1927.41


While Charles Reiffel (1862–1942) is usually considered today as a leader of the California plein-air school of painting, this exhibition celebrates his legacy as a preeminent practitioner of Post-Impressionism in America. During his lifetime, Reiffel’s work was exhibited throughout the country and won the accolades of critics, who referred to him as the “American Van Gogh”. Others judged Reiffel’s work “too modern,” favoring his more conservative contemporaries.

Charles Reiffel: An American Post-Impressionist will propose a fresh assessment of the artist, firmly establish his place in the national canon, and shed light on this splendid page in the history of American Post-Impressionism. The exhibition will include over 80 works, primarily paintings, but also works on paper, including the crayon sketches in which Reiffel pioneered his own personal technique. This show will span the entirety of Reiffel’s career, from his early travel studies to his latest San Diego subjects, and will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth. Charles Reiffel: An American Post-Impressionist, is organized by The San Diego Museum of Art and the San Diego History Center and will be presented concurrently at both venues.


The San Diego Museum of Art  now through 10.02.2013


Website : The San Diego Museum of Art

Website : San Diego

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2012-12-21

  
This is your life.
Do what you love, and do it often.
If you don't like something, change it.
If you don't have enough time, stop watching TV.
Start doing things you love.
All emotions are beautiful.
Open your mind, arms and heart to new things
and people, we are united in our differences.
Ask the next person you see what their passion is
and share your inspiring dream with them.
Travel often.
Getting lost will help you find yourself.
Some opportunities only come once, seize them.
Life is about the people you meet
and the things you create with them.
Life is short.
Live your dream.

Vrolijk Kerstfeest en een Gelukkig Nieuwjaar
Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
Fröhliche Weihnachten und ein Glückliches Neues Jahr

Hamelinck Lucien
FIC123.BE

2012-12-18

U.S.A. - DURHAM-NORTH CAROLINA - Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters - The Cone Sisters of Baltimore

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Henri Matisse, Striped Robe, Fruit, and Anemones, 1940. Oil on canvas, 21 5/8 x 25 5/8 inches (54.9 x 65.1 cm). The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland, BMA 1950.263. © 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.



Henri Matisse fondly called Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta Cone “my two Baltimore ladies.” The two Cone sisters began buying art directly out of the Parisian studios of avant-garde artists in 1905. At a time when critics disparaged Matisse, and Pablo Picasso was virtually unknown, the Cones followed their passions and amassed one of the world’s greatest art collections. The exhibition tells this story and features more than 50 of these masterpieces–including paintings, sculptures and works on paper by Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin, Renoir, van Gogh, Pissarro, Courbet and more–on loan from The Baltimore Museum of Art.

In addition to modern masterpieces, the exhibition includes textiles and decorative arts from Europe, Asia and Africa that the Cones collected, as well as photographs and archival materials to highlight the remarkable lives of these sisters. Also featured in the exhibition will be an interactive virtual tour of their adjoining Baltimore apartments, showing their remarkable collection as it was displayed in their home.

All works are from the collection of The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland.


Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University   04.12.2012 - 10.02.2013


Website : Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

Website : Durham

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2012-12-11

U.S.A. - MADISON-WISCONSIN - Seen/Unseen

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Eric Staller, Untitled, date unknown. Photograph and light drawing, 15-7/8 x 19-7/8 inches. Collection of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Museum Purchase Fund.



Artists throughout history have pictured reality as understood by their societies. Embedded in works of art are assumptions, varying from culture to culture, about the nature of all things. What is reality? Is it objective and understandable, or subjective and elusive? Finite and predictable, or infinite and in constant flux? Philosophers, theologians, and scientists, as well as poets and artists, have traditionally reflected on these questions. Their answers, as evidenced in Seen/Unseen, a new exhibition in MMoCA’s Henry Street Gallery from May 11, 2012, through June 16, 2013, embody particular notions of the world and the role human beings play.

Within this context, the sacred has been the most universally explored reality, and the goal of making the sacred visible has led artists to conceptualize it in both abstracted and concrete terms. Thus, Byzantine artists, in rendering their religious icons, simplified and exaggerated the natural features of holy figures. Conversely, nineteenth-century American landscape artists, proceeding from observation, saw and recorded the spiritual in the physical details of nature. In scientific and mathematical thought, also reflected in the arts, nature carries on without the intervention of the divine. As Galileo famously declared: “The book of nature is writ in number.” Magnificent as it is, it just is.

The nature of reality, in its secular as well as sacred dimensions, has been fertile ground for modern and contemporary artists. The paintings, sculpture, prints, and photographs assembled for this exhibition present a rich variety of interpretations. In Sam Francis’s Untitled Mandala (1974), concentric squares splashed with bright colors suggest a balance between underlying principles of chaos and order. Reality may be wholly subjective, a projection of mind, as evoked by Marsden Hartley’s Trees and Mountains (1932), where the artist’s brooding purples and aggressive brushwork charge nature with a dark energy that is felt more than seen. Ronald Bostrom photographs a deracinated weed in Mullen (1977). Pulled from the nurturing soil to be documented by the camera’s eye, the mullen plant nonetheless has seeds that remain viable for centuries, symbolizing for Bostrom the tenacity of all living things. From another perspective, all we know may finally be elusive, as suggested by Kenneth Josephson’s photograph New York State (1970), which questions, in plays upon representation, the ability of photography to chronicle objective reality.

Also included in the exhibition are works by Richard Anuszkiewicz, Adoph Gottlieb, Barbara Hepworth, Sol LeWitt, Richard Misrach, and Alyson Shotz, among others.

Seen/Unseen brings to a close a series of three exhibitions in MMoCA’s Henry Street Gallery that has explored the nature of self, society, and reality. This trilogy of exhibitions, drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, encompasses the fundamental character of modern and contemporary art.

Exhibitions in MMoCA’s Henry Street Gallery are generously funded through an endowment established by the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation


MMoCA    11.05.2012 - 16.06.2013


Website : Madison Museum of Contemporary Art

Website : Madison

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2012-12-04

U.S.A. - GREENWICH-CONNECTICUT - Face & Figure: The Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise

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Gaston Lachaise (1882 – 1935)

Man Walking (Portrait of Lincoln Kirstein),
1933
Bronze, 23 1/2 in. high.
Bruce Museum Collection 2010.01




Gaston Lachaise (American, b. France, 1882–1935) was more than a gifted sculptor of the human body, he was one of the finest portraitists of his age. Key examples of the artist’s work, many on loan from leading museums, private collections and the Lachaise Foundation, will reveal the full range of Lachaise’s vision, with special attention to the fascinating interchange between figural work and portraiture.

Gaston Lachaise was the extraordinary exception that proves the rule. In contrast to nearly every other modern artist in the early years of the twentieth century, for whom Paris was the modernist Mecca, Lachaise abandoned France for the United States. Perhaps not surprisingly, the young Parisian’s voyage to our shores was motivated by something other than pure esthetic drive: he was in passionate pursuit of a married American woman, Isabel Dutaud Nagle (1872–1957), who would become his obsession, his muse, and eventually his wife.

It is no exaggeration to say that Lachaise’s oeuvre is a sustained elaboration of his intense feeling for Nagle’s beauty. The series of great nudes that secured his reputation—standing on tip-toe, dancing, reclining, floating, and even levitating—are meditations on flesh and space in the immediate wake of Auguste Rodin’s myriad brilliant formulations. Lachaise was probably lucky to have crossed the Atlantic in what seemed to be the wrong direction in 1906 (living first in Boston and then New York), as he thereby became the leading representative of French art implanted in the New World.

"Lachaise was that singular being of today and yesterday," American painter Marsden Hartley wrote in 1939, "the worshipper of beauty . . . beauty was his meat and bread, it was his breath and music, it was the image that traversed his dreams, and troubled his sleep, it was his vital, immortal energy."


Bruce Museum   22.09.2012 - 06.01.2013


Website : Bruce Museum

Website : Greenwich

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