Thursday, September 12, 2019

Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection

Frida Kahlo, The Bride Who Becomes Frightened When She Sees Life Opened, 1943, oil on canvas, 24 7/8 x 32 in., The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th-Century Mexican Art, The Vergel Foundation, Conaculta/INBA, © 2018 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Diego Rivera, Landscape with Cacti, 1931, oil on canvas, 49 3/8 x 59 in., The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th-Century Mexican Art, The Vergel Foundation, Conaculta/INBA, © 2018 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The North Carolina Museum of Art this fall opens Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection (October 26, 2019–January 19, 2020). Few artists have captured the public’s imagination with the force of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907–54) and her husband, the Mexican painter and muralist Diego Rivera (1886–1957). The myths that surrounded these two icons of the 20th century in their lifetime arose not only from their significant bodies of work, but also from their friendships (and conflicts) with leading political figures and their passionate, tempestuous personal relationships.

“Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection will emphasize a remarkable chapter in art history that is at once Mexican and global,” says Museum Director Valerie Hillings. “Diego Rivera’s personality, politics, and monumental, social realist murals made him a celebrity during his lifetime. While he once overshadowed his equally talented wife, Frida Kahlo’s fame has far outstripped her husband’s in the years since her death. The NCMA is honored to present this exhibition and Luces y Sombras: Images of Mexico | Photographs from the Bank of America Collection, which will celebrate these artists’ culture of origin as well as the diverse sources of influence they drew upon in creating their distinctive oeuvres.”

Kahlo and Rivera’s works are varied in scope and inspiration. She is best known for her self-portraits, while he worked as a large-scale muralist in Mexico and the United States. Kahlo’s work is deeply personal, often depicting her own dreams, painful personal experiences, and affinity with Mexican culture, while Rivera’s pursues larger looks at history and cultural revolution. Both artists forged the way for Mexican art as a significant element of the 20th century and beyond.

Similarly important is the legacy of two of Kahlo and Rivera’s patrons, Jacques and Natasha Gelman. The Gelmans became Mexican citizens in 1942 and began amassing Mexican art, sustaining a growing collection of Mexican modernists, like Kahlo and Rivera (with whom they became close friends), as well as their compatriots Rufino Tamayo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and others. Their unparalleled collection shows the richness of Mexican art through painting, drawing, photography, and film.

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Beyond Midnight: Paul Revere

New-York Historical Society

September 6, 2019 – January 12, 2020

The patriot, silversmith, and entrepreneur Paul Revere was forever immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1861 poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” but his genuine accomplishments are often eclipsed by the legend of the midnight journey. This groundbreaking exhibition featuring more than 150 objects re-examines Revere’s life, transforming visitors’ understanding of the innovative businessman through an in-depth exploration of his accomplishments as a silversmith, printmaker, and pioneering copper manufacturer. Organized by the American Antiquarian Society, it draws from their unparalleled collection of Revere engravings, and also includes glimmering silver tea services; commonplace objects such as shoe buckles, thimbles, and medical tools; and important public commissions such as a bronze courthouse bell, all of which reveal facets of this versatile artisan’s career.

Paul Revere Jr. (1735−1818), engraver; attributed to Christian Remick (1726−73). The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated on King-Street, Boston on March 5^th 1770 by a Party of ye 29^thReg[imen]t, ca. 1770−74 Hand-colored engraving. Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC01868

An in-depth book accompanies the exhibition and is available for purchase in the NYHistory Store. (Coordinated at New-York Historical by Debra Schmidt Bach, curator of decorative arts.)

Grant Wood (1892−1942), Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931. Oil on Masonite. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1950, 50.117

Paul Revere’s Ride

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - 1807-1882

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light,—
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.”
Then he said “Good night!” and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war:
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon, like a prison-bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.
Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street
Wanders and watches with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers
Marching down to their boats on the shore.
Then he climbed to the tower of the church,
Up the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry-chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,—
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town,
And the moonlight flowing over all.
Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night-encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel’s tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, “All is well!”
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,—
A line of black, that bends and floats
On the rising tide, like a bridge of boats.
Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride,
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse’s side,
Now gazed on the landscape far and near,
Then impetuous stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle-girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry-tower of the old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry’s height,
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns!
A hurry of hoofs in a village-street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed that flies fearless and fleet:
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders, that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.
It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer’s dog,
And felt the damp of the river-fog,
That rises when the sun goes down.
It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.
It was two by the village clock,
When be came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadows brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.
You know the rest. In the books you have read,
How the British Regulars fired and fled,—
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard-wall,
Chasing the red-coats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.
So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

Panoramas: The Big Picture

New-York Historical Society
August 16 – December 8, 2019

Panoramas: The Big Picture explores the history and continued impact of panoramas from the 17th to the 21st century, as they were used to create spatial illusions, map places, and tell stories. Highlights include John Trumbull’s sweeping double vistas of Niagara Falls (1808), sections of Richard Haas’ nearly 200-foot long trompe l’oeil panorama of Manhattan (1982), and Eadweard Muybridge’s 17-foot photographic panorama of San Francisco before the city’s devastating 1906 earthquake (1878). The exhibition examines and reveals the impact that these and other panoramas had on everything from mass entertainment to nationalism to imperial expansion. (Curated by Wendy Ikemoto, associate curator of American Art).

John Trumbull (1756–1843), Niagara Falls, from Two Miles Below Chippawa, 1808 [detail]
Oil on canvas
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Alexander Eddy Hosack, 1868.6.

John Frederick Kensett (1816–1872), View from Cozzens’ Hotel, near West Point, N.Y., 1863 [detail]
Oil on canvas
Robert L. Stuart Collection, the gift of his widow Mrs. Mary Stuart, S-189.

Leigh Behnke (b. 1946), Chrysler Building, 1996
Watercolor on two pieces of heavy watercolor paper with deckled edges
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Lawrence L. Di Carlo, 2006.29.

Monday, September 9, 2019

The Alana Collection Masterpieces of Italian Painting

Musée Jacquemart-André

13 September 2019 to 20 January 2020

In autumn 2019, the Musée Jacquemart-André will be focusing on the Alana Collection, one of the most precious and little-known private collections of Renaissance art in the world, which is currently located in the United States. Echoing its exceptional collection of Italian art, the Musée Jacquemart-André will hold an exhibition of more than seventy-five masterpieces by the greatest Italian masters, such as Lorenzo Monaco, Fra Angelico, Uccello, Lippi, Bellini, Carpaccio, Tintoretto, Veronese, Bronzino, and Gentileschi. This exhibition will give visitors a unique chance to admire for the first time pictures, sculptures, and objets d’art that have never been exhibited to the general public.
In the tradition of all the greatest American collections, the Alana Collection is the fruit of a passion for art and an intensive selection process, adopted over several decades by Alvaro Saieh and Ana Guzmán; the combination of the couple’s forenames make up the name of the Alana Collection. Over the years, their passion has been transformed into a veritable fascination with Gothic art and the Italian Renaissance and has gradually led them to focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings.
These masterpieces have been exceptionally loaned to the Musée Jacquemart-André due to the two collectors’ passion for this period of art. The exhibited works attest to the enduring taste for the Italian Renaissance, considered as a founding stone of Western civilisation. They provide a comprehensive overview of one of the greatest collections of private art, from thirteenth-century painting to Caravaggesque works.
Curatorship
> Carlo Falciani, an art historian, exhibition curator, and professor of the History of Modern Art at the Accademia di Belle Arte in Florence.
> Pierre Curie, curator at the Musée Jacquemart-André and a specialist in seventeenth-century Italian and Spanish painting.

Eight Scenes from the Life of Christ (13th century), Roman painter. Alana Collection, Newark

Annunciation (n.d.), Lorenzo Monaco. Alana Collection, Newark

Saint John the Evangelist (c. 1432–34), Fra Filippo Lippi. Alana Collection, Newark

The Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia (c. 1614), Guido Reni. Alana Collection, Newark

From the Douanier Rousseau to Séraphine - The Great Naïve Masters

Musée Maillol, Paris

11 Sep 2019 - 19 Jan 2020

The Musée Maillol is holding an exhibition of more than a hundred works from the fascinating, dreamy, unique, and rich world of the ‘Naïve’ artists. Called ‘modern primitives’ by one of their ardent supporters, the collector and art critic Wilhelm Uhde (1874–1947), these artists renewed painting in their own way, independently from the avantgarde artists and without academicism. Brought together for the first time in Paris, their brightly coloured works shed light on an inter-war period in the history of art that is often overlooked.

Based on Henri Rousseau and Séraphine Louis, the exhibition aims to highlight a constellation of overlooked artists such as André Bauchant, Camille Bombois, Ferdinand Desnos, Jean Ève, René Rimbert, Dominique Peyronnet, and Louis Vivin. Self-taught artists, like the Douanier Rousseau who preceded them, they took up art privately or later in life, driven by a thwarted vocation, a divine calling, or historical events. Out of necessity, they combined their artistic activities with an occupation that was often modest: they were road menders, domestic workers, fairground wrestlers, printers, or Post Office workers. It is thanks to several figures, including the founder of the Musée Maillol, Dina Vierny, that their works were discovered.

Dina Vierny, who came from a Bessarabian Jewish family that emigrated to France in the 1920s, who was a model for Maillol and Matisse, and who worked for the French Resistance from the outset of the war, discovered André Bauchant’s paintings at Jeanne Bucher’s gallery during the Occupation. Encouraged by the galley owner, the muse opened her own gallery in 1947, and then founded the Fondation Dina Vierny – Musée Maillol much later, in 1995. She exhibited works by her favourite artists, including Wassily Kandinsky, Serge Poliakoff, and Bauchant.

After the war, a new encounter played a major role in her career: she met Anne-Marie Uhde, who gave her the collection that belonged to her dead brother Wilhelm. By organising two legendary exhibitions, ‘Les Peintres du Coeur-Sacré’ in 1928 and ‘Les Primitifs modernes’ in 1932, Wilhelm Uhde brought together for the first time works by artists who did not know one another. After the war, Dina Vierny was one of the few collectors, together with Anatole Jakovsky, who continued the work of this lifelong art lover, as attested by the exhibition ‘Le Monde merveilleux des naïfs’, presented in the gallery in 1974. Almost fifty years later, the Musée Maillol is paying tribute to these artists and those who supported them.

Rousseau, Bauchant, Bombois, Desnos, Eve, Louis, Rimbert, Peyronnet, and Vivin all produced works that were captivating and full of a unique lyricism. Although they could be described as realistic, the works depict disjointed spaces, unsettling scenes, and imaginary images in which the obsessive attention to detail is often excessive and even surrealistic. Although they followed a certain pictorial tradition, in both the iconography and the surprising use of the rules of perspective, they renewed, sometimes in a humorous way, the portrait, still life, and landscape genres.

The exhibition will highlight—via a thematic itinerary—the pictorial qualities of these artists, beyond biographical accounts, which have for a long time been the only source of information about them. A selection of amazing revolutionary works, from major public collections (Musée d’Orsay, Musée de l’Orangerie, Musée Picasso, Centre Pompidou, LAM, Kunsthaus Zurich, Kunsthalle Hamburg) and private collections, will highlight each artist’s great formal inventiveness, without overlooking the links they maintained with pictorial tradition and contemporary art.

By combining a historical, analytical, and perceptive approach to the works and their presentation in the exhibition, the Musée Maillol will unveil the subversive dimension of Naïve art and will present these Naïve, primitive, modern, or anti-modern artists as great artists who ran counter to the avant-garde artists.

Curatorship: Jeanne-Bathilde Lacourt, Curator of Modern Art at the Musée d’Art Moderne, d’Art Contemporain et d’Art Brut, Lille Métropole (LaM). Àlex Susanna, a writer, art critic, and exhibition curator.

Two Lions on the Look-out in the Jungle (1909–10), Henri Rousseau

This broad survey of ‘naive’ artists includes celebrated painters such as Henri ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau and Séraphine Louis, whom the critic Wilhelm Uhde dubbed ‘modern primitives’ for their untutored and idiosyncratic paintings, as well as work by less well-known artists such as Camille Bombois and Dominique Peyronnet. Find out more from the Musée Maillol’s website.
Preview the exhibition below | View Apollo’s Art Diary here

Mimosas (n.d.), Séraphine Louis. Coll. Musée d’Art naïf et d’Arts singuliers, Laval Cliché, Ville de Laval

The Styx (1939), André Bauchant. © Adagp, Paris, 2019

Portrait of Paul Léautaud and his cats (1953), Ferdinand Desnos. © Adagp, Paris, 2019

Sunday, September 8, 2019

Leyendecker and the Golden Age of American Illustration

Reynolda House Museum of American Art , Winston-Salem, N.C.
Aug. 31 through Dec. 31, 2019

Reynolda House Museum of American Art is presenting the work of Joseph Christian (J.C.) Leyendecker, one of the most prolific and sought-after artists of the Golden Age of American Illustration, from Aug. 31 through Dec. 31, 2019. Leyendecker (1894–1951) captivated the public with his striking images and fashionable depictions of handsome men and glamorous women. This will be the museum’s first exhibition focused on illustration and its first to explore the work of an openly gay artist. Reynolda is the opening venue for a national planned tour of “Leyendecker and the Golden Age of American Illustration.”

J.C. Leyendecker, Couple in Boat —Arrow Collar Advertisement, oil on canvas, 1922, © 2019 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI. Photo courtesy American Illustrators Gallery, New York, NY.

Leyendecker and the Golden Age of American Illustration includes 42 original paintings and 101 Post covers from the National Museum of American Illustration in Newport, Rhode Island and the American Illustrators Gallery in New York, as well as other materials related to Leyendecker’s work in advertising throughout his five-decade career.

J.C. Leyendecker, Man in Coat and Scarf, oil on canvas, 1919, © 2019 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI. Photo courtesy American Illustrators Gallery, New York, NY.

Between 1896 and 1950, Leyendecker illustrated more than 400 magazine covers for the nation’s trade and general interest publications, including The Saturday Evening Post, for which he created 322 cover paintings. With his instantly identifiable style—“The Leyendecker Look”—he helped shape the image of a nation, producing dozens of enduring icons and creating some of the earliest national advertising brands.

]

J.C. Leyendecker, *Record Time, Cool Summer Comfort, — House of Kuppenheimer Advertisement (detail)*, oil on canvas, (1920), (c) 2019 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI. Photo courtesy American Illustrators Gallery, New York, NY.

Leyendecker was talented at self-promotion and quickly established an easily recognizable style. His approach to his own career influenced an entire generation of younger artists, most notably Norman Rockwell, who observed, “There wasn’t an illustrator in the country who could draw better.” In his commercial work, Leyendecker created the famed Arrow Collar Man, who came to define the fashionable American male of the Roaring Twenties. Leyendecker based the Arrow Collar Man on his favorite model and lifelong partner, Charles Beach.

Born in 1874 in Montabaur, Germany, Leyendecker immigrated to Chicago in 1882 with his parents and three siblings. Showing an early artistic talent, Leyendecker and his youngest brother, F. X., studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to Paris where they developed their distinctive styles. Upon returning to the United States, the brothers entered a publishing renaissance and soon found themselves at its center, New York City. In 1914, they moved into a 14-room house in New Rochelle, New York, along with Charles Beach, for 48 years.

At the turn of the century, illustrators could disseminate original artworks on a national scale for the first time. As publishing technologies advanced to include images, and later colors, the methods of transportation and communication accelerated, allowing publications to be circulated to millions of Americans on a weekly basis. This change revolutionized the way Americans consumed media, from printed text to vibrant representations of the modern world in mastheads, highly illustrated novels and store windows. It was America’s Golden Age of Illustration.

Collection Rudolf Staechelin

Fondation Beyeler

August 31 - October 29, 2019

The paintings from the celebrated collection of Rudolf Staechelin (1881–1946) are returning to Basel,
after a four-year interval in which the pictures were shown (with works from the Im Obersteg Collection) in widely acclaimed exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Phillips Collection in Washington. Now, from the end of August 2019, nineteen outstanding examples of Impressionism, Post- Impressionism and Classic Modernism are to be seen at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen.

The paintings, by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Ferdinand Hodler, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, and Auguste Renoir, are currently displayed together in a dedicated presentation. Subsequently, individual pictures will be included in the periodically rehung exhibition of the Fondation Beyeler’s permanent collection. Thus the works from the Rudolf Staechelin Collection will be publicly accessible again in Basel, where a new chapter begins in the collection’s eventful history.

Paul Gauguin, Paysage au toit rouge, 1885

Landscape with Red Roof
Oil on canvas
81.5 x 66 cm
Rudolf Staechelin Collection
Photo: Robert Bayer

Ferdinand Hodler, Le Grammont après la pluie, 1917

The Grammont after the Rain
Oil on canvas
60.5 x 80 cm
Rudolf Staechelin Collection
Photo: Robert Bayer

Ferdinand Hodler, La morte, 1915

The Dead Valentine Godé-Darel
Oil on canvas
65 x 81 cm
Rudolf Staechelin Collection
Photo: Robert Bayer

Ferdinand Hodler, Le Mont-Blanc aux nuages roses, 1918

Mont-Blanc with pink Clouds
Oil on canvas
60 x 85 cm
Rudolf Staechelin Collection
Photo: Robert Bayer

Vincent van Gogh, Le Jardin de Daubigny, 1890

Daubigny’s Garden
Oil on canvas
56 x 101.5 cm
Rudolf Staechelin Collection
Photo: Robert Bayer

Édouard Manet, Tête de femme, 1870

Head of a Woman
Oil on canvas
56.5 x 46.5 cm
Rudolf Staechelin Collection
Photo: Robert Bayer

Pablo Picasso, Arlequin au loup, 1918

Harlequin with Black Mask
Oil on canvas
116 x 89 cm
Rudolf Staechelin Collection
© Succession Picasso / 2019, ProLitteris, Zürich
Photo: Robert Bayer

Also in the collection: