Wednesday, May 8, 2024

Banksy

SoHo is now the home to the world's largest collection of Banksy’s life-sized murals and artwork. Located at 227 Canal Street (at Broadway), NYC The Banksy Museum is now open, in preview, to the public.. Tickets are now available online at MuseumBanksy.com and on site at the museum. Advance reservations are strongly encouraged.


Displaying over 160 works by the world's most famous-yet-anonymous street artist, The Banksy Museum recreates the revolutionary and often ephemeral art that Banksy has painted on surfaces in London, Bristol, Paris, Venice, Bethlehem, New York, Los Angeles, and beyond. Visitors to the museum will immerse themselves in an environmental experience, giving viewers access to Banksy creations, much of which has long since been whitewashed or dismantled. Beyond the iconic street art, the exhibition also features some of the artist's studio work, as well as animated visual and video elements.


The New York Banksy Museum experience, an American premiere, follows successful exhibitions in ParisBarcelonaKraków and Brussels. The new exhibition, a New York premiere, is expanded to over 160 recreations, making it the largest display of Banksy work ever seen in a single setting. 








































Saturday, May 4, 2024

Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider

 

Tate Modern

Franz Marc Tiger 1912. Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Bernhard and Elly Koehler

In the early 20th century, an international circle of friends came together to transform modern art. Their story is told in a major new exhibition at Tate Modern – Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider – celebrating their radical experimentation with form, colour, sound and performance. The show draws on the world’s richest collection of expressionist masterpieces at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, alongside rare loans from public and private collections, including works never previously seen in the UK. From celebrated artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc and Paul Klee, to previously overlooked figures like Wladimir Burliuk and Maria Franck-Marc, the exhibition reveals the multicultural and transnational nature of this key moment in early modernist art.


Franz Marc, Cows, Red, Green, Yellow, 1911. Lenbachhaus Munich.

The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) was a loosely affiliated and diverse network of artists, connected by their desire to express personal experiences and spiritual ideas. They published their groundbreaking Almanac in 1912, edited by Kandinsky and Marc, and staged two public exhibitions in 1911 and 1912. The collective brought together highly individual creatives from across western and eastern Europe and the USA to form ‘a union of various countries to serve one purpose’. They proclaimed that ‘the whole work, called art, knows no borders or nations, only humanity.’

Tate Modern’s exhibition begins with the collective’s core couple of Kandinsky and Münter and their creative network in pre-First World War Munich. Munich at that time was an artistic hub of experimentation where different cultures and experiences converged. A room of stunning portraits and self-portraits introduce this diasporic creative community, including Marianne Werefkin’s Self-Portrait c. 1910 and Münter’s Listening (Portrait of Jawlensky) 1909. A selection of photographs from the Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art exhibition staged in Munich in 1910 and Erma Bossi's bold and expressive Circus 1909 demonstrate diverse urban experiences, while themes of sexuality and performance are explored through Werefkin’s collaboration with free-style performer Alexander Sacharoff, including her provocative 1909 portrait reflecting the dancer’s androgynous persona.

The urban centre of Munich is contrasted with rural Murnau, a small sub-Alpine Bavarian town which became home for Münter and Kandinsky from 1909. This space for creative exchange and artistic experimentation inspired a new search for spirituality and an interest in folk art. Encounters with the local landscape and vernacular culture influenced a move to expressive painterly compositions focused on the power of line and colour, leading Kandinsky and Münter to radically new approaches in both abstract and figurative painting such as Improvisation Deluge 1913 and Portrait of Marianne Werefkin 1909. Meanwhile, their friends and collaborators Marc and Franck-Marc explored the animal world and the creativity of children through works such as Tiger 1912 and Girl with Toddler c. 1913.

Some rooms offer visitors experiential environments focused on single works which capture modernism’s fascination with sound, colour and light. These include Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert) 1911, revealing his interest in the neurodiverse condition known as synaesthesia in which one of the senses is experienced through another, and Franz Marc’s 1911 Deer in the Snow II, whose mysteries are unlocked through an exploration of colour theory and optics.

The exhibition concludes by showing how the Blue Rider artists ensured their lasting legacy in ways we recognise today – publishing manifestos and editorials, curating exhibitions, touring shows, and fostering relationships with museums and galleries. Münter staged a solo show at Berlin’s Der Sturm, Klee’s Legend of the Swamp 1919 nearly perished in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937, while Kandinsky’s text On the Spiritual in Art was translated and is still published internationally across the globe. With the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 the collective was dispersed, but their ideas and aspirations for a transnational creative community still resonate powerfully today.



Gabriele MünterPortrait of Marianne von Werefkin, 1909Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Gabriele Münter, 1957 ©DACS 2024



Gabriele MünterListening (Portrait of Jawlensky),1909Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Gabriele Münter, 1957 ©DACS 2024


Gabriele MünterKandinsky and Erma Bossi at the Table,1912.Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation Gabriele Münter © DACS 2024



Robert DelaunayCircular Shapes, Moon no. 1,1913LenbachhausMunich and Gabriele Münter and Johannes EichnerFoundation, Munich



Wassily Kandinsky and Franz MarcDer Blaue Reiter, R. Piper & Co., Munich, 1912Book cover© Victoria and Albert Museum, London



Wassily KandinskyRiding Couple, 1906-1907LenbachhausMunich, Donation of Gabriele Münter, 1957



Wassily KandinskyImprovisation Deluge, 1913Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Gabriele Münter, 1957



.Marianne von Werefkin,Self-portrait I,c.1910Lenbachhaus Mu






Wassily KandinskyMurnau–Johannisstrasse from a Window of the Griesbräu, 1908.Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Gabriele Münter, 1957


Auguste MackePromenade,1913.Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Bernhard and Elly Koehler1965


Marianne von WerefkinThe Dancer, Alexander Sacharoff, 1909Fondazione Marianne Werefkin, Museo Comunale d'ArteModerna, Ascona


Erma BossiCircus,1909Lenbachhaus Munich, on permanent loan from the GabrieleMünter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich



Franz MarcCows, Red, Green, Yellow,1911.Lenbachhaus MunichMaria 


Franck-MarcGirl with Toddler, circa 1913Lenbachhaus Munich© Legal succession of the artist


Gabriele MünterMurnau Farmer’s Wife with Children, 1909–1910.Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Gabriele Münter, 1957 ©DACS 2024