2014-10-29

2119 - U.S.A. - ELMHURST-ILLINOIS - Richard Koppe - 06.09.2014-11.01.2015

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This fall, in cooperation with the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Elmhurst Art Museum presents the first museum exhibition of Richard Koppe's inventive work in more than forty years. Including 70 rarely seen paintings, prints and drawings, the exhibition highlights Koppe's signature canvases from the mid-20th century - from his earlier compositions of stylized fish and birds to his distinctive versions of abstract expressionism and hard-edge abstraction.
 
Combining aspects of cubism and surrealism, Koppe explored line, color, composition and space, producing works that are both playful and intricate. A special section including photographs, studies, textiles, tableware and related objects is dedicated to the artist's celebrated murals and designs for Chicago's famous Well of the Sea restaurant in 1948. Koppe's rigorous experimentation with form, mastery of diverse media and interest in design reflect his experience as a student of transplanted European modernists like László Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Archipenko at Chicago's New Bauhaus in the late 1930s. Koppe went on to promote the modernist program as Head of Visual Design and Fine Arts at the Institute of Design (ID) at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and later as Professor of Art at UIC.  
 
This exhibition is largely drawn from UIC's Campus Collection, to which Koppe's estate donated nearly one thousand of his works shortly after his death. Koppe's modernist practice and legacy are of particular interest to EAM as we continue to explore art, architecture and design of the mid-20th century. Inspired by the museum's McCormick House, designed in 1952 by Mies van der Rohe, our goal is to present and study artists of this era such as Koppe, ripe for rediscovery and new scholarship. Koppe's New Bauhaus training and tenure at IIT overlapped with Mies' tenure as Director of the School of Architecture; this connection provides a greater understanding of Mies' concurrent architectural practice and contextualizes the work of other mid-century designers often shown in the McCormick House.
 
 
 
 
Elmhurst Art Museum    06.09.2014 - 11.01.2015
 
 
 
 
 

2014-10-22

2114 - U.S.A. - COLUMBIA-SOUTH CAROLINA - Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera - 17.10.2014-18.01.2015

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The CMA presents a landmark exhibition of the most famous and beloved of American illustrators, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera . This is the first exhibition to explore in-depth Rockwell's richly detailed study photographs, created by the artist as references for his iconic paintings. Rockwell is known for his depictions of everyday life created with humor, skill, and emotion. However, it is little known that he staged photographs to make his popular covers of The Saturday Evening Post. Norman Rockwell: Behind the Cameraay  includes 50 photographs that show the careful procedure Rockwell used to make his art, as well as 16 original paintings and drawings, and takes viewers behind the scenes in the creative process of one of America's great masters.

Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera brings together prints of Rockwell's study photographs and original paintings and drawings from the permanent collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum linked to the photographs on display. The result is a fascinating frame-by-frame view of the development of some of Rockwell's most indelible images. At the same time, the photographs themselves—painstakingly staged by Rockwell and involving an array of models, costumes, props, and settings—are fully realized works of art in their own right.

The CMA is the last venue in the national tour of the exhibition. It is a last chance to see the selection of photographs and paintings, and the creative process of an American master.


 
Columbia Museum of Art     17.10.2014 - 18.01.2015



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2014-10-15

2113 - U.S.A. - COLUMBUS-OHIO - Paul-Henri Bourguignon: A 50th-Anniversary Retrospective - 17.10.2014-18.01.2015

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In 1964, the Columbus Museum of Art held an exhibition of the work of Belgian artist Paul-Henri Bourguignon (1906 – 1988).  Fifty years later the museum celebrates the work of this talented visual artist, who was a prolific writer and journalist, a skillful photographer, and an avid observer of the human condition. One critic noted, “When Bourguignon concentrates on faces, the pathos of the human condition stands out.”

Bourguignon began his arts studies in Brussels’ Académie des Beaux Arts and then studied art history at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. His first solo exhibition was at the Galérie d’Egmont in Brussels at age 22.  He met his wife, Erika, in Haiti and they settled in Columbus, Ohio in 1950 after she joined the faculty of The Ohio State University.  Today, his widely collected works are found in American museums, and in public and private collections throughout the U.S. and Europe, including the Columbus Museum of Art.



Columbus Museum of Art     17.10.2014 - 18.01.2015



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2014-10-08

2112 - U.S.A. - COOPERSTOWN-NY - Dorothea Lange’s America - 18.09.2014-31.12.2014

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Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936.

Lange’s empathetic images of migrant workers, suffering families, and tortured landscapes have seared the imagery of the Depression into America’s consciousness. Her most celebrated photographs of that era—Migrant Mother, White Angel Breadline, and Migratory Cotton Picker—have become icons in American cultural history.

The Great Depression was the catalyst for a tremendous outburst of creative energy in America's photographic community. The devastation wreaked upon the country inspired a host of socially conscious photographers to capture the painful stories of the time. This exhibition features the work of thirteen of these artists.
Pre-eminent among these was Dorothea Lange (1895-1965). Lange herself knew adversity early in life. Raised in Hoboken, New Jersey, at age seven she was stricken with polio, which left her with a lifetime limp. And at age twelve her father abandoned her family, leaving an impoverished household behind. Perhaps in defiance of the odds against her, Lange early and consistently displayed an independent streak. She played truant from school, preferring to wander the ethnic neighborhoods of lower Manhattan.
She rejected her mother's choice of a teaching career for her, declaring—even before she had ever touched a camera!—that she would be a photographer, then heading west to San Francisco to make a living in her chosen field. There she befriended the photographers Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, and, through them, the celebrated Western painter Maynard Dixon, who became her first husband. Within a few months of her move she opened a thriving portrait studio that catered to San Francisco’s professional class and moneyed elite. But with the onset of the Depression she found her true calling as a peripatetic chronicler of the many faces of America, old and young, urban and rural, native-born and immigrant, as they dealt with unprecedented hardship, sometimes with resilience, often with despondence.
Lange's working method was gentle, open, and personal. She engaged her photographic subjects in conversation, winning their confidence and their consent to be photographed. Ironically, her limp, by marking her as someone who had suffered in her own way, helped her to disarm and bond with her subjects. Her pictures typically focus on a single figure, even amidst a crowd shot. And work—its presence or absence—is a constant theme, connected, perhaps, to a frequent emphasis on people's hands.
The importance of Lange’s Depression work was recognized almost immediately, and led to a long and fruitful collaboration with the New Deal's Farm Security Administration (FSA). After the War, she was the first woman photographer awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, helped found Aperture magazine, and was honored by the Museum of Modern Art with a career retrospective. Her most important achievement, however, is that her Depression-era work served in a real way to alleviate the suffering of the very people she chronicled: it raised public awareness of the dire need for federal assistance around the country, and helped convince Congress to provide it.
All works in this exhibit are drawn from the private collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. The exhibit has been organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions

 


Fenimore Art Museum    18.09.2014 - 31.12.2014


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2014-10-01

2111 - U.S.A. - DELAND-FLORIDA - Chen Chi: Watercolors - 12.09.2014-04.01.2015

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Chen Chi, High Noon New York, 1986, Watercolor on paper

Inspired by modern art training in Shanghai, Chen Chi (1912 – 2005) moved to New York City in 1947. His works merge traditional Chinese brushstrokes with Western techniques creating colorful, aesthetic, harmonious works.

Chen Chi was born in Wusih, a small community near Shanghai, China. Due to his father’s financial difficulties in the silk business, in 1926Chen Chi moved to Shanghai where he was employed in an oil pressing factory. The owner of the factory, having children the same age, allowed Chen Chi to attend their classes. In 1931he enrolled in an art school that emphasized western techniques rather than traditional Chinese painting. The establishment of the Chinese Republic, in 1912coupled with the opening of China to the West, which had begun in the nineteenth century, heightened his awareness of Western ideas and art trends. Chen Chi, recalling his early training stated, “We were wanting a more modern painting…. There was already this direction in the modern cultural movement. And with art, we did not want to go back to the Chinese traditional style, although we had such a strong tradition of it…. I belonged to the younger generation, and we wanted … the modern style.”‘


 
Museum of Art       12.09.2014 - 04.01.2014



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