LARGEST EVER HOCKNEY RETROSPECTIVE

Tate Britain 
 February 2017 - 29 May 2017.

Tate Britain’s upcoming retrospective of David Hockney will bring together six decades of the artist’s work for the first time. Major loans from private collections – including works never displayed in public before – will be united with iconic paintings from museums around the world. It will be the most extensive survey ever staged of one of the most successful and recognisable artists of our time. This once-in-a-generation show will offer an unprecedented overview of Hockney’s work in paint, drawing, photography and video.

Highlights will include a double portrait of renowned novelist Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy, painted in 1968, shown in the UK for the first time in over two decades. Isherwood and Bachardy were one of Hollywood’s first openly gay couples and regularly opened up their home to entertain artists, actors and writers. This work was the first of Hockney’s celebrated double portraits, which he painted in the late 1960s and 1970s. Tate Britain will reunite many of this series, including  

American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) 1968;  

Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott 1968-9;  

Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy 1970-1;

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 1971;

 and My Parents 1977.

The retrospective will include vibrant new paintings of the artist’s home and garden in Los Angeles, which will be united for the first time with earlier works depicting the same subject across 35 years. Hockney first moved to this home in 1979 and soon afterwards created  

Hollywood Hills House 1980, a colourful work showing both the interior and the garden.

20 years later he painted Red Pots in the Garden 2000, which features the same banana-leaf palm and gently curving pool from another perspective. New paintings of the garden, created following Hockney’s recent return to California after a decade at his Yorkshire home, will also be shown for the very first time.

The exhibition will cover the full scope of Hockney’s artistic practice, from small scale, intimate works to vast, immersive canvases. Highlights will include rarely seen works exploring tender and personal themes, from his early series of Love paintings and  

We Two Boys Together Clinging 1961 to delicate drawings of the artist’s friends and family, including designer Celia Birtwell, poet W H Auden, artists Andy Warhol and R B Kitaj, and Hockney’s own parents. More recent works, such as his acclaimed landscape paintings of the Yorkshire countryside and his pioneering experiments with digital drawing and filmmaking, will also be showcased.

David Hockney opens at Tate Britain on 9 February 2017 and runs until 29 May 2017. The exhibition is curated by Chris Stephens, Head of Displays & Lead Curator, Modern British Art, and Andrew Wilson, Curator Modern and Contemporary Art and Archives, with Assistant Curator Helen Little. It is sponsored by the Blavatnik Family Foundation with additional support from the David Hockney Exhibition Supporters Circle. This exhibition is organised by Tate Britain in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Paris and The Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Adriaen van de Velde: Master of the Dutch Golden Age

Dulwich Picture Gallery

12 October 2016 - 15 January 2017 
 

Adriaen van de Velde, Panoramic summer landscape with a horseman and a post wagon, 1661, Oil on panel, Private Collection

In collaboration with the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Dulwich Picture Gallery will host the first-ever exhibition devoted to the painter and draughtsman Adriaen van de Velde (1636 - 1672), one of the finest landscape artists of the Dutch Golden Age.

Over a career of less than two decades Van de Velde produced a varied body of paintings and drawings that earned him tremendous posthumous fame in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when he was one of the most sought-after names among collectors in Germany, France and England.

Van de Velde was born in Amsterdam, the son and brother respectively of the marine painters Willem van de Velde the Elder and Willem van de Velde the Younger. Adriaen van de Velde, however, pursued an independent career as a landscape painter to focus on tranquil landscapes that depict both typically Dutch and Italianising views populated by figures in peaceful harmony with animals and the surrounding landscape.

Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape (12 October 2016 – 15 January 2017) will bring together 60 of his most accomplished works, including landscapes and beachscapes as well as an extraordinary selection of exquisite preparatory studies, many of them in red chalk. Displayed alongside the artist’s paintings, these studies offer a rare glimpse of a seventeenth-century landscape painter at work, from conception to completion. The show will also include pen-and-ink drawings and watercolours that stand alone as works of art in their own right, revealing the extent of the young artist’s talent.

The exhibition opens with Van de Velde’s most accomplished paintings, made when the artist was still in his early twenties. Blissful scenes such as the masterly

Beach at Scheveningen, 1658 (Oil on canvas, 52.6 x 73.8 cm, 

© Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister.

introduce Van de Velde’s highly individual style, in which everything stands out in the pure light of a summer’s day. 

Especially in his later work Van de Velde succeeded in incorporating the sun-drenched atmosphere of Italianate painters such as Karel Dujardin in his works, but brought a refinement to his subjects that was rarely matched by his contemporaries. Van de Velde probably never travelled outside Holland; the mountainous scenery and Italianate character of some of his landscapes and drawn studies sprung from the imagination and were inspired by the work of fellow artists. Examples include the Pastoral scene from the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, and the preparatory composition drawing for this painting from the Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

There are few artists whose working procedures can be illustrated as well as in the case of Van de Velde, making it possible to follow precisely the various phases of his creative process. For the first time Van de Velde’s famous painting of 

Adriaen van de Velde,

The Hut, 1671,

Oil on canvas, 76 x 65 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The Hut (Rijksmuseum)  will be displayed alongside the drawn studies that the artist made in preparation for the painting, providing insight into the work’s genesis.

Such studies include Seated woman with basket and 

Resting cow with three sheep (both Amsterdam Museum), as well as a drawing from a private collection depicting the hut that lends the picture its name. These and other studies in the exhibition reveal Van de Velde’s almost obsessive attention to detail and how he proceeded from a rough composition sketch in pen and ink to separate studies of animals and figures from life, often executed in the medium of red chalk.

Few seventeenth-century Dutch landscapists devoted so much time and energy to sketching from models in the studio and the exhibition will showcase some of the artist’s remarkable figure studies, including a sheet with Two Studies of a Reclining Shepherd (Rijksmuseum), which in its elegance and exquisite use of red chalk prefigures the work of eighteenth-century French artists such as Antoine Watteau and François Boucher.

Van de Velde excelled in the depiction of the human figure and their integration into a landscape and was frequently asked to paint the staffage in the landscapes of his contemporaries; his figures can be found in works by artists such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema, and, for example, in

 Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Two Churches and a Town Wall (1660s) by Jan van der Heyden, which will feature in the exhibition.

The exhibition includes a selection of the artist’s cabinet-sized works and concludes with his larger paintings. Together they illustrate the enormous variety of subject-matter in Van de Velde’s oeuvre, from panoramic views to hunting scenes, pastoral subjects or depictions of winter. 

The larger works include the monumental 

Portrait of a Family in a Landscape (Rijksmuseum) a

Adriaen van de Velde,

Landscape with cattle and figures

1664, Oil on canvas, 125.7 x 167 cm,

© Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

nd the idyllic Landscape with cattle and figures (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). 

Together these works show a Dutch Arcadia as it was imagined by this exceptionally refined artist.

Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape is curated by Bart Cornelis, former Deputy Editor of The Burlington Magazine, London, in collaboration with Marijn Schapelhouman, Senior Curator of Drawings at the Rijksmuseum.

The exhibition includes works from over 20 lending institutions and private collections, including the Royal Collection, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, Musée du Louvre, Paris, and The National Gallery, London.

Biography:

Adriaen van de Velde was baptised in Amsterdam on 30 November 1636. He was the son of the famous marine painter Willem van de Velde the Elder (1611-1693) and brother of the equally renowned marine painter Willem van de Velde the Younger (1663-1707). Adriaen van de Velde was most probably first taught by his father. On 5 April 1657 he married Maria Ouderkerk in Amsterdam, where he most probably remained for the rest of his life. His wife was Catholic and their children were all baptised in clandestine Catholic churches in Amsterdam. He died at the age of 35 and was buried on 21 January 1672 in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam.

 

Adriaen van de Velde,

The Angel appearing to the Shepherds

, Brush and brown ink over

black chalk, 17.2 x 20.2 cm, © The Trustees of The British Museum

Adriaen van deVelde,

Herdsman and herdswoman with livestock by a stream

, Pen in

brown and black grey wash, 17.7 x 17.7 cm, Teylers Museum, Haarlem, The

Netherlands

Adriaen van de Velde

, Figures in a deer park

c. 1665, Oil on panel, 21.1 x 28.6 cm, 

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Edward and Sally Speelman Collection, TR:1644-2005.

 

Adriaen van de Velde,

Figures on the beach at Scheveningen

1660, Oil on canvas, 38.2 x 50cm,

Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015

Adriaen van de Velde,

Seated woman with basket

, Red chalk, 28.3 x 20 cm, Private Collection

Adriaen van de Velde,

Panoramic summer landscape with a horseman and a post wagon

1661, Oil on panel, 37.8 x 49 cm, Private Collection.

Carriage on the Beach at Scheveningen, Adriaen van de Velde 1660. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Adriaen van de Velde,

Two studies of a reclining shepherd, 1666-1671, 

red chalk over asketch in black chalk, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 

Purchased with the support of theVereniging Rembrandt

Helen Levitt: In the Street

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

September 13, 2016, to January 2, 2017

Milwaukee Art Museum  

2017

Helen Levitt: In the Street is an exhibition featuring more than 40 works by the renowned photographer Helen Levitt. Recording the theater of New York City streets, the exhibition features black-and-white and color photographs spanning the artist’s career from the late 1930s to the mid-1980s as well as a short film by Levitt from the 1940s.

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York, ca. 1940
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the Telfair Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Robert O. Levitt
© Estate of Helen Levitt

A lifelong New Yorker, Levitt frequented the Lower East Side, Spanish Harlem, and other working-class neighborhoods of the city where life played out on the stoops and sidewalks. Using a handheld Leica camera outfitted with a right-angle viewfinder that allowed her to look in one direction but snap photographs in another, Levitt often passed unnoticed by her subjects, capturing unguarded instants of joyful play and meditative melancholy that constitute the mystery and poetry of everyday lives.

Showcasing the honest, humorous and inventive works of prolific documentary photographer Helen Levitt, this exhibition will feature 30 works by Levitt from the collections of the High and the Telfair Museums (Savannah, Ga.). One of the best-known street photographers of the 20th century, Levitt (American, 1913-2009) documented the everyday dramas of New York City. Working from the 1930s through the 1990s, Levitt roamed the Lower East Side, Spanish Harlem and other urban neighborhoods, capturing the story of city life.

Her photographs portray mothers hovering as their children play, pedestrians making their way along busy sidewalks, and neighbors visiting on stoops, among other scenes. Rarely do any of the figures in Levitt's work, child or adult, engage directly with the photographer or strike a premeditated pose; much more frequently they seem to be occupied completely in their own worlds.

Her photographs, first in black and white and later in color, observe people of every age, race and class without attempting to impose social commentary. Sojourns in New Hampshire and Mexico added variety to Levitt's portfolio, but New York City remained at the heart of her work. 

The exhibition is supplemented with nine images from the Museum’s collection, including three captivating photographs that record the fears and fantasies of children as expressed in their exuberant chalk drawings on the city’s pavement and walls. Also on view is Levitt’s 1948 short film In the Street, her directorial debut. The 16-minute black-and-white film, shot in Spanish Harlem, is a cinematic version of her earlier photographs of children.

“Throughout her long career, Levitt wielded the camera not as a tool of social reform or photojournalism tethered to a historical moment or political movement, but rather as a crystal ball through which to peer into the enduring nature of the human spirit,” commented Malcolm Daniel, Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at the MFAH. “The same unassuming modesty that allowed Levitt to portray her subjects so authentically also kept her from receiving the widespread recognition that she deserves. For many Museum visitors, this may be a first introduction to one of photography’s great artists.”

About the Artist

Born in Brooklyn, Helen Levitt (1913–2009) learned the fundamentals of camera and darkroom practice at a young age, leaving high school a semester before graduation to work for a commercial portrait studio in the Bronx.

It wasn’t until a meeting with the young French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1935, though, that she was introduced to the 35mm Leica camera and shown a new model of what it might mean to be an artist in photography.

She nurtured her vision over the next few years in New York’s museums and cinemas, and through the friendship of Walker Evans, with whom she shared a darkroom.

By 1940, Levitt’s seemingly artless photographs merited inclusion in the inaugural exhibition of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art, followed by the first of three solo shows there three years later.

Levitt left still photography behind by the late 1940s, working instead as a full-time film editor. Her own film In the Street (shot in 1945–46 and first released in 1948) brought her subjects of a few years earlier to life. Then, beginning 1959 with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a new medium—color photography—Levitt once more rediscovered the enchanting cast of characters that inhabited the sidewalks of the city.

Helen Levitt: In the Street is organized by Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia.

Also see:

BELLOWS AND THE BODY - THE REAL, THE IDEAL AND THE NUDE

The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, UK
21 OCTOBER 2016 – 22 JANUARY 2017

In February 2015 the Barber announced an important new acquisition –

Nude, Miss Bentham (1906), an early masterpiece by one of the most significant American painters of the early 20th century.


This compelling nude study is only the second painting by George Bellows (1882 – 1925) in a British public collection and the first outside London. Bellows was a major figure in the ‘Ashcan School’: a loose grouping of artists who shared an interest in expressing the modernity of their urban environment– specifically New York City – and a social commitment to realism.

George Bellows, Nude Girl - Miss Leslie Hall, 1909, © Terra Foundation for American Art

Focusing on the human figure, this exhibition features key loans from the US and the UK, including the Terra Foundation for American Art’s comparable oil of 1909, Nude Girl: Miss Leslie Hall, last shown alongside Nude, Miss Bentham in 1910. 

The role of the body in the work of other artists associated with the Ashcan School, both within and outside the Life Class, is also explored. Displayed adjacent near the Barber’s outstanding collection of late 19th-century French paintings – important precursors for Bellows – the show offers visitors a unique opportunity to get to know a remarkable artist, who, although canonical in the States, is still unfamiliar across the Atlantic.

At Home in Holland. Vermeer and his Contemporaries from the British Royal Collection

"The Music Lesson" by Johannes Vermeer returns to the Netherlands this autumn for the first time in twenty years. This masterpiece, part of the British Royal Collection, was last on display in the Mauritshuis in 1996, as part of the major Johannes Vermeer exhibition. The painting will be the highlight of this autumn’s exhibition At Home in Holland: Vermeer and his contemporaries from the British Royal Collection. The exhibition opened to the public on the 29th of September. 

"The Music Lesson" by Johannes Vermeer is installed at the exhibition At Home in Holland. Vermeer and his Contemporaries from the British Royal Collection that will open to the public 29 September 2016, Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016. Photographer: Piet Jacobson

"The Music Lesson"

 

"The Music Lesson" by Johannes Vermeer, Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016.

"The Music Lesson" is one of the rare 36 surviving works by Johannes Vermeer. This painting dates from 1660-1662, and shows a woman and a gentleman beside a virginal. Above the instrument hangs a mirror, which reflects the foot of Vermeer's easel. The The painting was acquired by King George III of England in 1762, when it was attributed to Frans van Mieris the Elder. Only later was it recognised as a masterpiece by Vermeer.

Mauritshuis itself has three works by Vermeer

Diana and her Nymphs,  

View of Delft

and Girl with a Pearl Earring,

 but its collection lacks a genre piece by the artist. That’s why the museum is delighted to have the opportunity of showing a fourth Vermeer for a time.

The exhibition at The Mauritshuis contains works by masters such as Gerard ter Borch, Gerrit Dou, Pieter de Hooch, Gabriël Metsu and Jan Steen, which are regarded as some of the most important Dutch genre paintings in the Royal Collection.

Produced during the Dutch ‘Golden Age’, when the Netherlands was at the forefront of commerce, science and art, these works represent a high point in ‘genre painting’ –  ordinary scenes of everyday life rendered in extraordinary detail.  Renowned for their exquisite depiction of space and light, Dutch artists of the period also included humorous or moralising messages in their work for the contemporary viewer to decode.

Johannes Vermeer is perhaps the most highly regarded genre painter of his generation, despite only 34 paintings being attributed to him today.

In Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman, early 1600s, Vermeer uses the horizontal grid of the floor tiles to create the illusion of depth within the painting.  The viewer's eye is drawn into the room, where a woman stands with her back to the observer and a man at her side appears to sing.  Their relationship is ambiguous and has been the subject of much debate. However, clues such as the inscription on the lid of the virginal – music is a companion in pleasure, a remedy in sorrow – suggest that there might be a romantic association between the figures.

The shared pleasures of music and love underlie the subject-matter of

Gabriel Metsu’s The Cello Player, c.1658, in which a female figure is greeted adoringly by a pet dog, while her suitor tunes his cello.

The Neglected Lute, c.1708, by Willem van Mieris presents a similar theme, but this time in the form of a seduction.  A woman in a sumptuously decorated room eats oysters and drinks from a delicate glass, while a lute, an erotic symbol to a contemporary audience, rests on the floor at her side.

Jan Steen, A Woman at her Toilet, 1663, Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016

By contrast, Jan Steen's A Woman at her Toilet, 1663, contains a moralising message.  The viewer takes on the role of voyeur, observing through an archway a young woman on an unmade bed in a state of undress.  A lute with a broken string, a skull, and a candle with its flame extinguished carry the warning that yielding to sensuality could lead to ruin.

Scenes of provincial Dutch life, in taverns and cottages and at village fetes, were popular subject-matter for artists.

Adriaen van Ostade's The Interior of a Peasant's Cottage, 1668, is a sympathetic image of peasant family life, with a mother cradling her baby and an older child eating obediently at a table, while their doting father looks on.  The perspective of the composition leads the viewer's eye into the depths of the room, where other figures appear from the shadows.

A Girl Selling Grapes to an Old Woman, c.1658, by Frans van Mieris the Elder, shows a young girl selling produce door to door from a wheelbarrow.  The rich variety of fruit and vegetables on offer advertises the fertility of the Dutch soil and reflects the development of horticulture during the Golden Age.

In one of Pieter de Hooch’s early works, A Courtyard in Delft, c.1657, a woman sits spinning in shadow while another crosses from sunlight into the shade carrying a jug, a dramatic bright-blue sky overhead.  The artist skilfully records all aspects of the scene, from the patchy whitewash on the brickwork to the two towers in the background. 

The quiet, contemplative character of De Hooch's composition contrasts with the strange artificiality of

Ludolf de Jongh's A Formal Garden: Three Ladies Surprised by a Gentleman, c.1676, in which the four foreground figures appear to be actors in a play.

The importance of trade in the Netherlands during the Golden Age is reflected in

Gerrit Dou's The Grocer's Shop: a Woman Selling Grapes, 1672.  Here two women busily weigh goods in a shop selling exotic imported items such as lemons and sponges.  As if caught in an unguarded moment, another in the background, holding a coffee pot, looks directly at the viewer.  In Willem van Mieris's An Old Man and a Girl at a Vegetable and Fish Stall, 1732, beneath the baskets of dried herrings, walnuts and gingerbreads, a rat nibbles an apple unnoticed by the figures in the shop, providing a humorous touch for the viewer.  

Gerard ter Borch (Zwolle 1617-Deventer 1681) A Gentleman pressing a Lady to drink  c.1658-9,, Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016.