Clouet to Seurat: French Drawings from The British Museum

Four centuries of French draftsmanship were on view in Clouet to Seurat: French Drawings from The British Museum, opening November 8, 2005, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition featured nearly 100 masterpieces, ranging from rare Renaissance portraits by Jean and François Clouet to selections from The British Museum's incomparable holdings of Claude Lorrain and Antoine Watteau, through stellar works of the 19th century, from Ingres and Delacroix to Degas, Cézanne, and Seurat. A majority of these works had never before been exhibited in the United States. Clouet to Seurat remained on view at the Metropolitan through January 29, 2006.

The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The British Museum.

Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan, commented: "This exhibition presents Metropolitan Museum visitors with a truly remarkable opportunity to see rarely exhibited drawings by master draftsmen, and to witness the development of French art unfold before them. Surveying such a broad period allows one to appreciate the cyclical nature of stylistic development. For instance, the battles waged in the 17th century between the Rubénistes, who favored color and naturalism, and the Poussinistes, proponents of line and the study of antiquity, are echoed in the contrast between the classicism of Ingres and the Romanticism of Delacroix in the early 19th century."

Exhibition Organization and Contents

Organized chronologically, Clouet to Seurat created a visually compelling picture of the evolution of French draftsmanship from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century. Whether the drawings were made as part of a working process or as works of art in their own right, they reveal the mastery and exquisite beauty of the French artistic tradition in the artists' most direct and immediate means of expression. Among the works on view were two of a group of royal portraits from the 16th century by Jean Clouet (1485/90–1541) and his son François Clouet (ca. 1516–1572) that are rare examples of the early use of different colored chalks to produce naturalistic effects. Under Queen Catherine de Médici such royal portraits in colored chalks were collected and valued as independent works of art.

A more unified national style developed in the 17th century, in part due to the establishment in 1648 of the French Royal Academy (Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture), where the influence of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) gave rise to a cool and classicizing Baroque idiom. Another formulation of the Baroque style reached its apogee in the work of landscape painter Claude Lorrain (1604/5–1682) who spent his working career in Rome. Indisputably the French Baroque artist most beloved by British collectors, Claude is represented in the exhibition by five works — selected from among 500 in The British Museum's collection — which demonstrate the range of his production, from free plein air studies to the breathtakingly fresh drawings from his Liber Veritatis, in which he made record drawings of his completed paintings.




Head of Hebe, Study for the "Apotheosis of Hercules", ca. 1733–36
François Lemoyne
© The Trustees of the British Museum (2005). All rights reserved

The French Enlightenment was represented, on the one hand, by the sparkling trois crayons drawings by Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), the most original and influential Rococo draftsman, and on the other hand by the more cerebral drawings of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825). Tendencies inspired by Watteau's informal and accessible style were stifled by the French Revolution of 1789, and with David at the helm, French art returned to a conservative classicism.

During the 19th century, great innovation often co-existed with a deep respect for the art of the past. Artists such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), David's leading pupil, and Jean-Louis Gérôme (1824–1904) continued the academic tradition. Romantics like Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) and Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) and Realists like Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), all represented in the exhibition, laid the foundations for ground-breaking movements such as Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Drawings continued to play an integral role in this evolution, even as artistic traditions were challenged and re-invented. Two studies for La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat (1859–1891) were on view, as were drawings by Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), among others.

The British Museum Collection

The Department of Prints and Drawings at The British Museum oversees one of the oldest and finest collections of works on paper in the world. Founded in 1753 with the bequest of Sir Hans Sloan (1660–1753), which contained more than 200 French drawings, and built up over subsequent centuries through bequests and judicious acquisitions, the collection now contains over 3,500 drawings by French artists. In 1965, an important bequest of 16 works from César Mange de Hauke (1900–1965) enriched the collection significantly, including 13 masterpieces of the 19th century. Nonetheless, The British Museum's splendid holdings of French drawings are comparatively little known having long been overshadowed by its works from the Italian and Northern schools.

Exhibition Credits and Catalogue

The exhibition is organized by Perrin Stein, Curator, in the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Drawings and Prints, and Martin Royalton-Kisch, Senior Curator, Department of Prints and Drawings at The British Museum. Following its showing at the Metropolitan, Clouet to Seurat was exhibited at The British Museum.



The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with entries by Perrin Stein and an essay on French drawing and the history of the collection at The British Museum by Martin Royalton-Kisch. Published by The British Museum Press and distributed by Yale University Press.


From a review: (images added)

Nearly a hundred of the British Museum’s vast collection of French drawings, many of which are rarely displayed because of their sensitivity to light, are on view in this fine accompaniment to the van Gogh shows. Also running chronologically, "Clouet to Seurat" begins in the sixteenth century, including splendid works by the relatively unknown



Francesco Primaticcio ("A Seated River God with a Nymph, Two Dogs, and the Banished Callisto"),



Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues ("Oak and Dragonfly"),



and Pierre Dumonstier II ("Right Hand of Artemisia Gentileschi Holding a Brush").

Nicolas Poussin’s "The Holy Family with St. Elizabeth, the Infant St. John and Putti" is one of the highlights of the seventeenth-century gallery,



as well as Claude Lorrain’s "Coast View with Perseus and the Origin of Coral."

Several pieces by Antoine Watteau represent the Rococco style of the early eighteenth century, in addition to pieces by François Le Moyne and François Boucher.

A particular favorite is Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s "Return from the Wet Nurse."

The early nineteenth century brought neoclassicism and works by Jacques-Louis David, Camille Corot, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Théodore Géricault,

and Pierre-Paul Prud’hon (the marvelous chalk drawing "Standing Female Nude").

Realism took hold after the 1848 revolution, exemplified by



Victor Hugo’s "Landscape with a Castle on a Cliff,"



Honoré Daumier’s "Clown Playing a Drum,"



and Gustave Courbet’s "Self-Portrait" of the artist revealing a knowing glance.

Impressionism followed, with Edgar Degas’s very green "Dancers at the Barre,"

Georges Seurat’s studies for "La Grande Jatte:

(Georges Seurat, The Couple: Study for "La Grande Jatte", 1884, © British Museum)



(Georges Seurat, Landscape with dog: study for 'La Grande Jatte', 1884 Conté crayon, © British Museum)

Odilon Redon’s mysterious "Christ Crowned with Thorns,"



and Paul Cézanne’s "The Apotheosis of Delacroix," which features Degas, Pissarro, Monet, and Cézanne himself.

Beyond The Visible: The Art Of Odilon Redon

Museum of Modern Art
October 30, 2005–January 23, 2006

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2005/odilon_redon.html


Caught between description and dream, the felt and the imagined, French artist Odilon Redon, whose career bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, transformed the natural world into nightmarish visions and bizarre fantasies. Closely allied with the Symbolist movement, Redon offered his own interpretations of literary, biblical and mythological subjects; created a universe of strange hybrid creatures; and presented landscape in a singular way: we see grinning disembodied teeth, smiling spiders, melancholic floating faces, winged chariots, unfamiliar plant life, and velvety black or colored swirls of atmosphere. With a recent gift from the Ian Woodner family, The Museum of Modern Art is now the site of the most significant body of the artist's work outside France, and this book will showcase the full range of Redon's varied oeuvre--charcoal "noirs," luminous pastels, richly textured canvases, literary collaborations and experiments in printmaking--and will illuminate the hold his particular kind of Modernism has had on both twentieth-century and contemporary artists.

Catalogue



Beyond The Visible: The Art Of Odilon Redon

From a review: (images  added)

Odilon Redon, "The Teeth"

French artist Odilon Redon’s (1840-1916) dark world of the fantastic, featuring figures that Gauguin referred to as "imaginary beings" and not "monsters," will be inhabiting MoMA for another month, offering holiday cheer to those seeking respite from shopping crowds everywhere. The bulk of this exciting retrospective of the Decadent Symbolist is his bizarre drawings, "noirs" that feature lonely figures amid bleak landscapes. A large severed head is carried on a platter in

"Descent into Hell."

In "Eye-Balloon,"

an enormous eyeball in the shape of a hot-air balloon floats through gray skies, its only passenger a head on a plate.



A child’s face looms in the shaft of a dark well in "The Well."



Look closely at the figure’s fingers and feet in "The Convict."



The minute hand in the ominous "The Masque of the Red Death" is a feather brushing away time.

Get up close to "The Teeth" (above) to see how Redon scraped the canvas to create the halo of light around the chattering dentoids.

It wasn’t until the turn of the century that Redon began brightening his works, using pastels, watercolors, and colored wove paper. He continued his techniques of wiping, stumping, incising, erasing, and smudging to create such abstract drawings as



"Roger and Angelica"



as well as the quasi-religious "The Window,"



and the garishly purple "Woman with Flower Corsage."

The earliest painting on view is

1872’s "Landscape at Daybreak,"

a postapocalyptic image of desolation.



In "The Black Sun,"

two faceless people walk through the desert, a sun with a gloomy face looking down from above.

"Green Death" spins out of a coiled snake.

The canvas itself becomes a character in "Underwater Vision."

The exhibition also features fabulous prints, many of which Redon did for illustrated books. Among our favorites are

"The Misshapen Polyp Floated on the Shores, a Sort of Smiling and Hideous Cyclops" from THE ORIGINS,

the six lithographs that comprise HOMAGE TO GOYA:

"Everywhere Eyeballs Are Ablaze" from the first of several series on THE TEMPTATION OF SAINT ANTHONY,

and the sideshow-esque "And He Had in His Right Hand Seven Stars: and Out of His Mouth Went a Sharp Two-edged Sword" from THE APOCALYPSE OF SAINT JOHN

as well as such cool one-offs as

"The Egg,"

"The Spider,"

"The Haunting,"

and "The Reader";

in the latter, the light seeping through the window forms a kind of spiderweb.

Dark but not disturbing, this welcome Redon tribute will bring out the Goth in you.

Nice article

Georgia O’Keeffe: Abiquiu Views

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has announced a series of presentations featuring works inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s two residences in Northern New Mexico. The first of these exhibits, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abiquiu Views,” opened in Santa Fe on February 7, 2014. It features more than a dozen images of the cottonwoods that grow along the Chama River, a subject she painted repeatedly from the late 1940s through the 1950s, with other views from her home and studio at Abiquiu. Over the course of the year, the Museum will explore O’Keeffe’s use of her residence as a source for her artwork. The exhibits include her original studio worktable, arranged with her art materials and personal effects. Subsequent presentations in April, May, and September will focus on her garden, the iconic patio with the black door, and the landscape surrounding her home at Ghost Ranch.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Cottonwood Tree in Spring, 1943, Oil on canvas, 30 x 36 (76.2 x 91.4). Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Gift of The Burnett Foundation. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Georgia O’Keeffe owned two adobe Pueblo Revival homes in the high-desert plateau of Northern New Mexico. She split her time between the two residences, spending summer and fall at the Ghost Ranch, purchased in 1940, and winter and spring and at her four-acre residence in the village of Abiquiu, purchased in 1945. O’Keeffe painted the views from the homes, but the structures themselves were also an outlet for her aesthetic expression; over the course of the more than four decades that she lived in these residences, her modern sensibility informed the way she shaped and inhabited the spaces of her homes.

c. 1952 oil: Cottonwoods

By bringing together paintings inspired by her residences, some seen for the first time in many decades, this series of exhibitions examines the significance of the homes as part of her artistic practice. “In addition to her artwork, the Museum holds O’Keeffe’s New Mexico homes and contents as part of its extended collection,” said Carolyn Kastner, curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. “Her homes and the way she lived in them comprise two of her greatest creative efforts, conceived and perfected to suit her artistic practice.” The exhibitions complement the recent Museum publication, Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Houses: Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu.

Related article

Matisse: Life in Color, Masterworks from the Baltimore Museum

Venues

The Indianapolis Museum of Art October 13, 2013-January 12, 2014
Minneapolis Art Institute February 23, 2014 – May18, 2014
San Antonio Museum of Art June 14, 2014 – September 7, 2014

Matisse: Life in Color, Masterworks from the Baltimore Museum of Art features almost fifty paintings and sculptures and thirty works on paper spanning six decades of Henri Matisse’s prolific career.

As one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954) fundamentally altered the course of modern art with his stylistic innovations. Across a succession of stylistic periods, Matisse aimed to discover the “essential character of things” through art that expressed balance and serenity. He experimented throughout his career with abandoning conventional perspective and form in favor of dramatically simplified areas of pure color, flat shapes and decorative patterns.

The majority of the artwork in Matisse: Life in Color, Masterworks from the Baltimore Museum of Art come from the renowned Cone Collection, formed by Baltimore sisters Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone. Noted for their enduring dedication to modernism, the sisters assembled one of the largest private collections of the work of Matisse in the world.

From landscapes to nudes, still lifes to interiors, the exhibition’s varied and vivid works explore the shifts in Matisse’s style over time—with a crowd-pleasing emphasis on his popular early paintings.

Highlights include

Purple Robe and Anemones (1937),

Two Girls, Red and Green Background, Interior, Flowers and Parakeets (1924),

and the artist’s book Jazz.

Matisse: Life in Color, Masterworks from the Baltimore Museum of Art also features milestones of Matisse’s career including

The Pewter Jug (1917)

Large Seated Nude (1922-29),



Striped Robe, Fruit, and Anemones, 1940, The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland (1950.263)© 2013 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Large Reclining Nude, 1935

Large Reclining Nude is one of Matisse’s most compelling paintings of the 1930s and an
important work in the transition to his late painting style and to his paper cutouts. He
worked on the painting for several months and documented the stages of its evolution
through photographs. Matisse progressively flattened the image, striving for a balance
between the sinuous arabesques of the figure and the regular grid pattern of the
background.

The Yellow Dress, 1929-1931

In 1929, Matisse was in the midst of a painting block. His production fell off sharply, and
he left a number of paintings unfinished. He began The Yellow Dress in September 1929,
but he struggled for another two years to bring it to a satisfying conclusion as he sought
to achieve a balance between modeled form and outline. Matisse simplified and enlarged
the figure and the dress as the painting progressed, transforming the domestic subject
into something monumental and timeless.

Seated Odalisque, Left Knee Bent, Ornamental Background and Checkerboard, 1928

After seeing an exhibition of Islamic art in Munich in 1910, Matisse became intrigued by
the decorative aesthetics of Near Eastern and North African cultures. Following a trip to
Morocco in 1912–13, images of women in North African costume begin to appear in his
work. The strong patterning of the carpets and textiles dominates this painting.

From a review of the Indianopolis show:

Per the exhibition title, Matisse wasn't an artist overly enamored with earth tones. But, for Matisse, it was never just about the color. Take a look at his painting,



"Ballet Dancer Seated on a Stool,"

which starts with a bored looking woman wearing a tutu with a white skirt. The skirt is dotted with clumps of dried white paint set against a deep blue background. If the white shock of the skirt resembles at all a splash in the water, then the clumped paint is the foam. The bored, abstracted face of the ballet dancer is far from the center of attention. The tutu pops off the canvas, and the wavelets of paint, rising above the canvas, have a sculptural quality...


More images from the exhibition:

Young Woman at the Window, Sunset

1921

The Cowboy (Jazz Plate XIV) -1947-

Henri Matisse Marie-Jose in a yellow dress (III) 1950 colour lift-ground aquatint (black with four colors)

ABOUT HENRI MATISSE

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954) was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century and perhaps the most universally beloved. His stylistic innovations fundamentally altered the course of modern art. In a career spanning six decades, his achievements in painting, sculpture, drawing, graphic arts, book illustration and paper cutouts earned the acclaim of collectors, critics, his contemporaries, and generations of younger artists.

Matisse trained as a lawyer before developing an interest in art. He moved to Paris to study painting in 1891 and eventually
became a fixture of the bohemian Montmartre neighborhood where Picasso, Mondrian, and others worked. He followed the traditional academic path, first at the Académie Julian and then at the École des Beaux Arts, before discovering a dynamic contemporary Parisian art scene. He began to experiment with a variety of styles to create his own pictorial language. In 1905, he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne with André Derain, and their shockingly bold experiments
using color to structure their paintings earned them the derisive nickname “Les Fauves” (Wild Beasts).

He experimented throughout his career with abandoning conventional perspective and form in favor of dramatically simplified areas of pure color, flat shapes and decorative patterns. Across a succession of stylistic periods, Matisse aimed to discover the “essential character of things” through art that expressed balance and serenity.


Relted exhibition:

Matisse from SFMOMA
November 9, 2013 – September 7, 2014


Henri Matisse, La Conversation (The Conversation), 1938. Oil on canvas. SFMOMA, Bequest of Mr. James D. Zellerbach. 93.149. © 2013 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Henri Matisse, Young Woman in Pink (La Jeune Femme en Rose), 1923. Oil on canvas. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, memorial gift from Dr. T. Edward and Tullah Hanley, Bradford, Pennsylvania. 69.30.134. © 2013 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.


Celebrating the Bay Area’s long standing enthusiasm for Henri Matisse, Matisse from SFMOMA traces four decades of the artist’s career—from his early, Cézanne-inspired still lifes to his richly patterned and brightly colored figural paintings made in the 1920s and 1930s.

This intimate exhibition features 23 paintings, drawings, and bronzes from the internationally acclaimed collection of works by Matisse at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), joined by two paintings and two drawings from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s own important Matisse holdings.

Matisse’s Dancers
November 14, 2012 through February 24, 2013

The Baltimore Museum of Art presented an intimate exhibition of more than 30 dance-themed prints, drawings, and sculptures by the great French artist Henri Matisse. On view from November 14, 2012 through February 24, 2013, Matisse’s Dancers spanned three decades of the artist’s career— from sculptures created in 1909-11 to delicate drawings of dancers sketched in 1949. The centerpiece of the exhibition was a rarely shown series of 11 transfer lithographs of a dancer/acrobat moving through various positions that evolve into an abstraction of reality, movement, and shape. These prints, drawn as lithographs in 1931-32, but published after Matisse’s death, are among the most eloquent examples of the artist’s way of seeing. The BMA has the largest and most significant collection of works by Matisse in the world.

The 1931-32 lithograph series was made around the same time as the famous Dance mural in the Barnes Collection, recently unveiled in Philadelphia. During this period, Matisse made an enormous change in his work, turning to more simplified and structured compositions. The contrast can be seen in an earlier series of prints of dancers from 1926-27. These dancers are not working, but are lounging immobile on couches and chairs like his more familiar odalisques. Two later series of drawings from 1949 show Matisse’s continuing abstraction of movement.

In addition to the prints and drawings, Matisse made sculptures of dancers to explore the challenges of capturing movement in three dimensions. Two early Matisse sculptures of dancers and the BMA’s great Serpentine sculpture by Matisse will be exhibited along with works by a previous generation of artists who were equally fascinated with dancers, Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas.

MATISSE AT THE BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART

The Baltimore Museum of Art has the largest and most significant collection of works by Henri Matisse in the world with approximately 1,500 works, including oil paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, books, textiles, and a ceramic vessel, as well as 220 drawings, prints, and copper plates from the artist’s first illustrated book, Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé.

Upside Down Lady (1930) from French poet Stéphane Mallarmé's book 'Poésies'.

This extraordinary collection began with a gift of 500 Matisse works from Baltimore sisters Claribel and Etta Cone, who had visited the Paris studios of Matisse and Pablo Picasso in the early 20th century and began forming one of the world’s greatest collections of modern art. Over the course of nearly 50 years, they assembled an exceptional collection of approximately 3,000 objects, which were displayed in their Baltimore apartments. Etta Cone met Matisse in 1906, and her initial purchase of several drawings marked the beginning of a life-long passion for his art that continued throughout his career. With masterworks such as

Matisse’s Blue Nude (1907)

competition among museums for The Cone Collection began as early as 1940, but Claribel insisted that it go to The Baltimore Museum of Art if “the spirit of appreciation for modern art in Baltimore became improved.” The collection came to the BMA upon Etta’s death in 1949, and has been on view since 1957. The collection has been the subject of exhibitions at prestigious museums around the world and celebrated in Baltimore with redesigned and expanded galleries that include a dynamic touch-screen virtual tour of the apartments where the Cone sisters lived with their remarkable collection. In recent years, the BMA has conducted ground-breaking research on Matisse’s sculpture and organized major traveling exhibitions with accompanying catalogues on Matisse’s sculpture and prints.