2014-01-30

U.S.A. - NEW YORK - Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris - 29.01.2014-04.05.2014

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Widely acknowledged as one of the most talented photographers of the nineteenth century, Charles Marville (French, 1813–1879) was commissioned by the city of Paris to document both the picturesque, medieval streets of old Paris and the broad boulevards and grand public structures that Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann built in their place for Emperor Napoleon III. This exhibition presents a selection of around one hundred of his photographs.

Marville achieved moderate success as an illustrator of books and magazines early in his career. It was not until 1850 that he shifted course and took up photography—a medium that had been introduced just eleven years earlier. His poetic urban views, detailed architectural studies, and picturesque landscapes quickly garnered praise. Although he made photographs throughout France, Germany, and Italy, it was his native city—especially its monuments, churches, bridges, and gardens—that provided the artist with his greatest and most enduring source of inspiration.


By the end of the 1850s, Marville had established a reputation as an accomplished and versatile photographer. From 1862, as official photographer for the city of Paris, he documented aspects of the radical modernization program that had been launched by Emperor Napoleon III and his chief urban planner, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. In this capacity, Marville photographed the city's oldest quarters, and especially the narrow, winding streets slated for demolition. Even as he recorded the disappearance of Old Paris, Marville turned his camera on the new city that had begun to emerge. Many of his photographs celebrate its glamour and comforts, while other views of the city's desolate outskirts attest to the unsettling social and physical changes wrought by rapid modernization.

Haussmann not only redrew the map of Paris, he transformed the urban experience by commissioning and installing tens of thousands of pieces of street furniture, kiosks, and Morris columns for posting advertisements, pissoirs, garden gates, and, above all, some twenty thousand gas lamps. By the time he stepped down as prefect in 1870, Paris was no longer a place where residents dared to go out at night only if accompanied by armed men carrying lanterns. Taken as a whole, Marville's photographs of Paris stand as one of the earliest and most powerful explorations of urban transformation on a grand scale.

By the time of his death, Marville had fallen into relative obscurity, with much of his work stored in municipal or state archives. This exhibition, which marks the bicentennial of Marville's birth, explores the full trajectory of the artist's photographic career and brings to light the extraordinary beauty and historical significance of his art.



The Metropolitan Museum of Art   29.01.2014 - 04.05.2014



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2014-01-23

U.S.A. - KANSAS CITY-MISSOURI - In the Looking Glass - 25.01.2014-20.07.2014

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Unknown maker, British. Portrait of three girls, ca. 1850s. Daguerreotype, half plate, image size: 5 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches. Gift of the Hall Family Foundation, 2010.63.10. © Nelson Gallery Foundation





This exhibition highlights a commitment to the earliest form of photography: the daguerreotype. The museum's world-renown daguerreotype holdings now include more than 800 pieces. Continuing to build on this strength, this exhibition displays the newest additions to this remarkable collection and expands this vision to include European daguerreotypes and beyond.

Americans loved the daguerreotype and by 1843, it had become widely popular, remaining the dominant form of photography for the next 20 years. The process made portraiture affordable to a broader public and covered a wide stylistic spectrum. In Europe, French daguerreotypes reveal a more consistent emphasis on creativity and artistry while many British daguerreotypes are distinguished by elaborate hand-painting. In Japan, photography–relatively unknown until 1868—was a means of adopting Western culture.

The daguerreotype is like no other photographic process. Each plate is a one-of-a-kind image. For viewers of the 1840s and 1850s, daguerreotypes seemed to be magical bits of reality. More than a century later, they still hold that kind of wonder and appeal.




Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art    25.01.2014 - 20.07.2014




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2014-01-16

U.S.A. - HUNTINGTON-WEST VIRGINIA - Visions of the Prophet: The Visual Art of Kahlil Gibran - 02.11.2013-09.02.2014

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The Huntington Museum of Art, in an exclusive partnership with the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia, brings you the exhibit Visions of the Prophet: The Visual Art of Kahlil Gibran. This collection of works by the Lebanese-born, visionary artist and writer Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) includes 96 drawings, watercolors, and paintings. Beloved worldwide for his writings, his visual art is less known, ironic since it was visual art that he pursued first. Gibran is best known for his book titled The Prophet, a collection of 26 philosophical essays that became one of the top-selling books of the twentieth century. Since it was first published in 1923, The Prophet has never been out of print, and has been translated into 40 languages. The book was especially popular during the 1960s with followers of the American counterculture and New Age movements.

Inspired by painters from the Renaissance, the Pre-Raphaelites, the French Symbolists, and others, such as visionary William Blake, Gibran sought to express symbolic ideas about life, humanity, and the interconnectedness of all things in his own unique way. These works span his career and include early works from his first exhibition at photographer Fred Holland Day’s studio in Boston in 1904, to works created during the last years of his life, including six works used as illustrations in his last book The Garden of the Prophet.  All the pieces on view come from the personal collection of Gibran’s patron Mary Haskell who donated her collection to the Telfair Museums in 1950. They provide a survey of Gibran’s career as a visual artist, document his relationship with Mary Haskell, and substantiate his literary career with examples of several drawings and watercolors used as illustrations for six of his English-written books. The exhibit also includes self-portraits by Gibran, an early oil portrait of Gibran by Lilla Cabot Perry and photographs of Gibran and his New York studio.

Tania Sammons, Curator at the Telfair Museums, and organizer of this exhibit has written extensively about Mary Haskell and Kahlil Gibran. She writes the following about the work of Gibran, “Through oil, watercolor, pencil, pen, pastel, gouache, or some variation thereof, Gibran sought to evoke the essence of life. He wanted to elevate humanity through his work and share his ideas about the connectedness of all things. He wanted to inspire and stretch the imaginations of his audiences, if they so choose to be open to his message of oneness. In his visual work and his writing, Gibran provided a first step into a spiritual understanding of life.”

The exhibit will be accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Tania Sammons and Dr. Suheil Bushrui, the University of Maryland’s George and Lisa Zakhem Kahlil Gibran Chair for Values and Peace.



 Huntington Museum of Art     02.11.2013 - 09.02.2014




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2014-01-09

U.S.A. - Fort Lauderdale-Florida - Spirit of Cobra - 08.11.2013-18.05.2014

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Cobra, an interdisciplinary avant-garde European movement with far reaching international impact, was itself a product of international dialogue and creative exchange. The acronym Cobra was based on the home cities of its founders – Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. Born against a background of crisis in post-World War II Europe, this international group of artists united to create spontaneous art rooted in experimentation and experience. One of the greatest strengths of the Cobra movement was its exuberant optimism in the face of devastation.
Anchored in the belief that every human being is creative, Cobra philosophy was inspired by psychology, mythology, popular culture, utopian vision, and innovative approaches to art history, expressed not only in painting and sculpture, but also through music, film, and written word. The Cobra artists thought deeply about the role of the artist in society. Their aim was art made for and by everyone, irrespective of class, race, intellect, and educational level - core values of the Cobra movement that are still very relevant today.
The Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale is home to the largest and most comprehensive collection of Cobra artists in the United States. Last year we partnered with the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amstelveen (a suburb of Amsterdam, the Netherlands) to create a series of Cobra related exhibitions, publications, and symposia to take place through 2016. The first of these, Spirit of Cobra (opening in Fort Lauderdale on November 8, 2013, and guest curated by Dutch art historians Katja Weitering and Brenda Zwart), unites works from both collections and serves as a general introduction to this pivotal and profoundly influential avant-garde movement. In addition to works from the Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale and the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition features significant loans from American public and private collections that have not been examined for many years, and in some cases never before exhibited in the U.S. The exhibition will also engage visitors of all ages through inclusion of an interactive playful space inspired by the joyful, direct expression Cobra artists sought out in children’s art.
Spirit of Cobra showcases the origins of the movement, which united poets, painters, sculptors, photographers, and anthropologists from Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, and other locations after World War II, and encompasses the contradictory and experimental tendencies within the Cobra movement, which lasted formally from 1948 to 1951. The Cobra artists took inspiration from creativity outside the mainstream art world and actively worked together in a group experiment that was extremely productive in fostering their individual creative trajectories even as it insisted on the artist’s role in a larger social network.
The heart of the Cobra movement is collective activity that attempts to bridge—without collapsing—a rich diversity of personal perspectives and creative media. Although the Cobra movement is known primarily through the later careers of several of its most important members (mostly painters) including Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Constant, Corneille, Christian Dotremont, and Asger Jorn, their working methods were profoundly shaped by Cobra’s commitment to collective investigation and experimental practices.
Spirit of Cobra focuses on the unique meeting of a group of young artists from several European countries from 1948 to 1951, brought together by a desire to start over after the war and an interest in the legacy of the prewar avant-gardes, especially Surrealism. They came together after parallel attempts to develop a modern, expressive art and poetry related to politics, myth, and popular culture, as explored in the Linien and Helhesten groups in Denmark, the Reflex group in the Netherlands, and the Surrealists in Belgium. They considered geometric abstraction too inhuman and apolitical, Surrealism too academic and metaphysical, Socialist Realism too dogmatic. They demanded a “living art” based on a seemingly paradoxical combination of spontaneity, material immediacy, popular art forms, and socialist politics.
The organized movement lasted less than three years, but deeply ingrained the artists’ later focus on experience and experiment over the production of finished art objects. Their avant-garde-inspired experimentalism was tempered by an interest in using visual imagery (sometimes in animal form) to open a dialogue with a broader audience. Their legacy extends in several directions, from Alechinsky and Dotremont’s exploration of the relationship between word and image to Jorn and Constant’s overtly political interventions in architecture and urbanism in the Situationist International (1957–61).
As part of the Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale’s ongoing commitment to Cobra scholarship, in 2014 we will present Helhesten: The Hel Horse - Danish Cultural Resistance during World War II (guest curated by Kerry Greaves), an examination of this important artistic precursor to Cobra. Animal Culture, guest curated by Katja Weitering (Creative Director, Cobra Museum of Modern Art) and Karen Kurczynski (Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst), is a comprehensive exhibition that places Cobra within a world context. After opening in Fort Lauderdale in late 2015, Animal Culture will travel to the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in the Netherlands, as well as 2-3 additional US venues.



 
Nova Southeastern University's Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale  -  18.11.2013 -18.05.2014




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2014-01-02

U.S.A. - FORT WORTH-TEXAS - FOCUS: Fred Tomaselli - 12.01.2014-02.03.2014

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Fred Tomaselli, Hang Over


Fred Tomaselli is known for his visually packed paintings that are hybrid in materials, subjects, and cultural references. A single piece may be comprised of brightly colored passages of paint, photo-collage, found images from field guides and magazines, and drugs such as aspirin, marijuana leaves, and ecstasy pills. These materials are layered onto wood panels and suspended in slick epoxy resin. Tomaselli’s stylized works range from psychedelic-patterned abstractions to idealized representations of allegorical figures, animals, nature, and the cosmos. The more time spent with the artist’s paintings, the more details emerge, and the works become increasingly complex and dynamic.

Tomaselli’s mesmerizing scenes bend reality through visual stimulation and seduction, illustrating the utopian and transcendental abilities of art. His works also comment on the artifice of suburban America in the 1960s and 1970s and the subcultural quest for escapism—whether it be reached through hallucinatory experiences or trips to amusement parks such as Disneyland—realities that are particularly tied to the artist’s upbringing in California during those years. On his work, Tomaselli states, “It is my ultimate aim to seduce and transport the viewer into the space of these pictures while simultaneously revealing the mechanics of that seduction.”

Fred Tomaselli was born in Santa Monica, California, and received his BA from the California State University in Fullerton. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Tomaselli has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum; Aspen Art Museum; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Indianapolis Museum of Art; SITE Santa Fe; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Tomaselli was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 1998 and New York’s Public Design Commission Annual Award for Excellence in Design in 1992. His work is in the collections of many museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Art Institute of Chicago; and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.



 
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth      12.01.2014 - 02.03.2014




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