THE BROAD OPEN IN LOS ANGELES WITH PANORAMIC EXHIBITION OF MASTERWORKS

The Broad is a new contemporary art museum founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. The museum, which is designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, opened September 20, 2015 with free general admission. The museum will be home to the 2,000 works of art in the Broad collection, which is among the most prominent holdings of postwar and contemporary art worldwide. With its innovative “veil-and-vault” concept, the 120,000-square-foot, $140-million building will feature two floors of gallery space to showcase The Broad’s comprehensive collection and will be the headquarters of The Broad Art Foundation’s worldwide lending library. For more information on The Broad and to sign up for updates, please visit www.thebroad.org
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Exhibition Highlights 

The monographic galleries reflect the collection’s historic deep holdings in classic Pop art of the 1960s, notably 

Andy Warhol,  featuring his 1962 Small Torn Campbell’s Soup Can (Pepper Pot),

and Roy Lichtenstein’s 1965-66 I...I’m Sorry! and 

his 1968-69 five-canvas panel Rouen Cathedral, Set 3. 

The third-floor galleries will also feature works dating from the 1970s by Richard Artschwager and Chuck Close. Concentrated installations of art from New York’s East Village and Soho scenes of the 1980s reflect the Broads’ passionate immersion in that era as collectors. Highlights from the collection’s incomparable paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiatare prominently featured, as are strong representations by Cindy Sherman, drawn from The Broad’s largest collection in the world of her works; Sherrie Levine, including Fountain (Buddha), 1996, her appropriated version in cast bronze of the porcelain urinal that Marcel Duchamp famously and notoriously exhibited in 1917 as Fountain; Barbara Kruger’s iconic Untitled (Your body is a battleground) from 1989; as well as works by Jack Goldstei nand others. 

Artists whose work came to the fore in the 1990s include Glenn Ligon, Andreas Gurskyand Julie Mehretu,all of whom have significant representations in the inaugural exhibition. A recent work by Mehretu, Cairo, 2013, a vast, swirling, ink-and-acrylic representation of the architecture, atmosphere and social dynamism of the Egyptian capital during the political turbulence of the Arab Spring, isfeatured in the large entry gallery on the third floor. Works from the 1980s and 1990s highlight the Broads’ intensive and sustained engagement with artworks containing tough social and political content, found in the work of artists like David Wojnarowicz, Cady Noland, Kara Walker, Anselm Kiefer and Mike Kelley. The collection’s abiding interest in sometimes biting, confrontational imagery critical of some of the most traumatic passages and challenging issues in American and European modern history plays a major role in the installation.

Anselm Kiefer’s masterwork Deutschlands Geisteshelden, addressing the recovery of Germany from the ravages of World War II, is shown in relationship with German artist Joseph Beuys’ multiples, selected from the Broad’s 570-work Beuys multiples collection, the most comprehensive set of these key works in the Western U.S. 

Galleries on the 15,000-square-foot first floor focus almost exclusively on the collection’s most recent artworks, dating from 2000 to the present—many of which will have their debut showing in Los Angeles. Those works include Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room, 2013, a mirror-lined chamber housing a dazzling and seemingly endless LED light display;

Robert Longo’s 2014 charcoal drawing Untitled (Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014), of police protests in Ferguson, Mo.;

and The Visitors, 2012, by Ragnar Kjartansson, a 360-degree, nine-screen video projection that surrounds the viewer with images of the artist and his musician friends performing within different rooms of a derelict historic mansion, a highly poignant contemplation on collaboration and the creative process.

About the Broad Collection 

The Broad collection includes The Broad Art Foundation and The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, which together hold 2,000 works of postwar and contemporary art. With a strong desire to advance public appreciation for contemporary art, the Broads established The Broad Art Foundation in 1984 as a way to keep these works in the public domain through an enterprising loan program that makes the art available for exhibition at accredited institutions throughout the world. The Broads continue to actively add to the collection through strategic acquisitions focused on expanding the representations of an artist’s work and broadening the scope of the collection. The result is a lending library of contemporary art and an expansive collection that is regularly cited as among the top in the world.

Sotheby’s November 5 2015 Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art:Kazimir Malevich. Vincent van Gogh. Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, James Ensor

Sotheby’s November 5 2015 Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art will feature one of the finest works by Kazimir Malevich remaining in private hands: 

Mystic Suprematism (Black Cross on Red Oval). 

The painting is the last of a renowned group of five canvases restituted to the artist’s heirs in 2008 to be offered for sale, and as such represents the final opportunity to acquire a seminal masterpiece by Malevich from this celebrated collection. Mystic Suprematism epitomizes the 20th century European avant-garde at its most revolutionary, and comes to auction this November with an estimate of $35/45 million. 

Simon Shaw, Co-Head of Sotheby’s Worldwide Impressionist &

Modern Art Department, said: “Mystic Suprematism captures a moment when Malevich was at his most radical, iconoclastic and powerful. As the last canvas to come to auction bearing the exceptional provenance of the artist and his family, its sale will mark a major market moment this fall. Sotheby’s first offered a work from this illustrious group in 2008, when Suprematism, 18th Construction achieved a record $60 million. With so few outstanding Suprematist paintings remaining in private hands, we are honored to have been entrusted by the artist’s family once again and look forward to presenting Mystic Suprematism to collectors worldwide this fall.” 

 

Mystic Suprematism offers a searing presentation of Malevich's art at its most iconoclastic and theoretically complex. Painted in 1920–22 in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the image embodies the 'new world order' promoted by the Suprematist movement – Malevich's radical artistic philosophy that had transformed Russian avant-garde art in the early-20th century. 

Five years following the publication of his Suprematist Manifesto in 1915, Malevich had fine-tuned his philosophies and perfected the artistic expression of his ideas, eliminating many of the colors, shapes and more painterly elements that dominated his earlier Suprematist compositions. His paintings at this stage were absolute in their dismissal of cultural, political or religious precedent. Mystic Suprematism epitomizes this shift in its most extreme form, with its irreverent black cruciform and oval of red paint set against an abyss of white. 

In 1927, Malevich accompanied the present painting along with more than 70 other works to the seminal exhibition Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung in Berlin. This was the first time the artist’s work was exhibited outside of Russia, and the show was pivotal in establishing his reputation as one of the most influential international artists of the 20th century. 

Following the exhibition, Malevich was obliged to return to the Soviet Union and arranged for the painting to be stored in Berlin, but he was unable to return to Germany as he was prevented from leaving the Soviet Union, where he died in 1935. Mystic Suprematism was later entrusted to the German architect Hugo Häring, who purportedly sold it to the Stedelijk Museum, where it was featured for over 50 years. Following a 17-year struggle, it was finally returned to the artist's heirs in 2008 after a historic settlement was reached with the City of Amsterdam.

Of the four other works that were restituted to Malevich’s family, two were sold by Sotheby's, one was sold privately to the Art Institute of Chicago, and one was sold to an anonymous collector. In the last 25 years, only four major works by Malevich have been sold at auction. 

Sotheby’s New York Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art on 5 November 2015 will also feature an exquisite group of late- 19th and early-20th century masterworks assembled in the 1940s and ‘50s by Belgian collectors Louis and Evelyn Franck. 

The works are led by Vincent van Gogh’s Paysage sous un ciel mouvementé, a sweeping landscape view from Arles that is estimated to sell for $50/70 million. The collection also offers Pablo Picasso’s Nu au jambes croisées,  a large-scale, fully- worked pastel from his famed Blue Period  (estimate $8/12 million); superb examples by Paul Cézanne, Kees van Dongen and Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec; and the finest work by Belgian painter James Ensor ever to appear at auction. 

Born in 1907 in Belgium, Louis Franck was a passionate sailor, international banker and discriminating art collector, whose father was an important patron to Belgian artists including James Ensor. After marrying Evelyn Aeby, the couple moved to London in 1935, and it was during this time that they began to build their remarkable art collection. Louis and Evelyn went on to found the Old Broad Street Charity Trust and became major benefactors of the World Wildlife Fund, of which Louis served as Vice-President and Treasurer from 1976 to 1985. The Francks’ superb collection has been on public view at the Fondation Gianadda in Martigny, Switzerland since 1997. 

Painted in April of 1889 at the height of the artist’s famed Arles period, Vincent van Gogh’s Paysage sous un ciel mouvementé is a testament to the most successful period of his career (estimate $50/70 million). Painted just one year before Van Gogh’s death, the dramatic landscape depicts the fields outside Arles in the south of France, where he lived from early 1888 through mid-1889. Its palette evokes the colors found in this new Southern climate, yet the turbulent skies foretell Van Gogh’s mental decline in the months following the work’s execution. 

Since 2014, only three works from Van Gogh’s mature period (1888–1890) have appeared at auction – all at Sotheby’s.  

Nature morte, Vase aux marguerites et coquelicots from 1890 sold in November 2014 for $61.8 million (estimate $30/50 million) to an Asian private collector. 

In February of 2014, an impressive 11 bidders spanning North America, South America, Europe and Asia competed for L'homme est en mer from 1889 at Sotheby’s London, driving the final price to $27.5 million (estimate $9.8/13 million).  

L'Allée des Alyscamps from 1888 sold in May 2014 to an Asian private collector for $66.3 million, marking the highest auction price for Van Gogh since 1998 and an auction record for any landscape by the artist. 

Pablo Picasso’s pastel Nu au jambes croisées was created in 1903, at the apotheosis of the artist’s Blue period (estimate $8/12 million). The work represents this fragile aspect in the young artist’s life, when sex, melancholy and vulnerability took root and would ultimately shape every successive period of his art for nearly a century. Large-scale, fully-worked pastels from Picasso’s Blue period rarely appear at auction, and the Franck work embodies this critical moment in the artist’s oeuvre.

 

A unique feature of this collection is the group of three superb works by the great Belgian symbolist painter James Ensor. Louis Franck’s father, François, was a patron of Ensor’s and an important collector of the artist’s works. Louis inherited several of these great paintings, notably

Ensor’s masterwork Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,

which Louis subsequently sold to the Getty Museum in 1981. Works by Ensor are tremendously rare at auction, and the three paintings on offer in the Evening Sale are truly exceptional examples from the artist’s finest period.

Les Toits d’Ostende (estimate $1.5/2 million),

 Le Jardin d’Amour (estimate $2/3 million),

 and particularly  Les Poissardes mélancoliques (estimate $3/5 million)

each demonstrate the artist’s irreverent disregard for convention and his unique vision

.
The collection offers two important paintings by Paul Cézanne. Fleurs dans un pot d'olives (estimate $5/7 million), painted in 1880-82, displays the artist’s ability to imbue a still-life with all of the subtlety and emotional potency of portraiture. Still-lifes from the artist’s mature period, such as the present work, are considered the harbingers of 20th-century Modernism, providing inspiration for the Cubists. 

Portrait de Victor Chocquet (estimate $2.5/3.5 million) belongs to a rare group of works depicting the artist’s most important patron: Victor Chocquet. Painted circa 1880-85, the present portrait is presumed to have been modeled after a photograph found in Cézanne's archives by his son, in which the sitter is wearing the same jacket and tie illustrated in the work.

Georg Baselitz Black Out Paintings

September 2 –November 28, 2015 

McCabe Fine Art 
Artillerigatan 40 114 45 
Stockholm Sweden 

McCabe Fine Art ipresents an exhibition of work by German artist Georg Baselitz. Having gained notoriety and critical attention in the 1960s, Baselitz (b. 1938) is among the most successful artists to come out of Germany. Influenced by folk art as well as German Expressionism, Baselitz incorporates elements of both styles into a unique blend of figuration and abstraction. His Neo-Expressionist paintings, which often depict discombobulated or upside down figures, reflect complex and disorienting themes surrounding German identity in the post-World War II era. In particular, Baselitz himself is concerned with what it means to be a contemporary German artist. 


The paintings on view at McCabe Fine Art are from Baselitz’s “Collusion” series (“Verdunkelung,” in German),which the artist began in 2008. The title of this series refers to the wartime practice of blacking out windows as a means of protection against enemy airstrikes. In each painting a sketchy white figure appears frail and ghostlike against a dark murky background. Drips and splatters of runny white paint erupt from these male nudes, recalling one of Baselitz’s earliest and most well-known paintings: 

Georg Baselitz, Die große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain), 1962/63; courtesy of Museum Ludwig, Köln

The Big Night Down the Drain(1962/63.) 

When exhibited as part of the artist’s first solo show, this seminal work depicting a topless man holding his disproportionately large penis in his hand was deemed obscene. The painting was confiscated by the authorities, and Baselitz and his two dealers were fined. Typical of Baselitz’s oeuvre, which includes paintings, sculptures and prints, the “Collusion” paintings conflate history (most often, as in this case, the darkness, despair, and vileness of World War II) with a reference to his own personal history. 

Given Baselitz’s strong connections to Nordic art and artists, it is important that a solo exhibition of his work is being held in Stockholm. Baselitz’s subject matter, which features soldiers, forests, woodsman and animals, relates directly to traditional Nordic painting. Specifically, several late 19thcentury/early 20thcentury Nordic painters have had a great influence on the German artist. 

Foremost is Edvard Munch (1863–1944), Baselitz’s great appreciation for whom is evidenced in his expressionistic style and haunting treatment of psychological themes. Baselitz’s deep fascination with Munch has even manifested itself in the form of several portraits. In addition, Swedish artists from the same generation such as Carl Fredrik Hill (1849–1911), Ernst Josephson (1851–1906), and August Strindberg (1849–1912) are important references for Baselitz. Since the beginning of his career Baselitz has returned again and again to paintings by Scandinavian artists for inspiration. 

Georg Baselitz 

Baselitz lives and work in Germany. Major retrospectives of his work have been held worldwide, including at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1983; traveled to Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Kunsthalle Basel); Centre Pompidou, Paris (1993); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1995; traveled to Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1996); and Royal Academy of Arts, London (2007). Baselitz has represented Germany at the Venice Biennale (1980) and participated in Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany (1982). Eight new large-scale works by Baselitz, which comprise his series titled Fällt von der Wand nicht(Doesn't Fall From the Wall), are exhibited at the Arsenale at the 56thVenice Biennale (2015). He is also a professor at the Hochschule der Kunste art academy in Berlin. 

Also see http://artobserved.com/2009/09/go-see-salzburg-georg-baselitz-at-thaddaeus-ropac-through-september-19-2009/

Women of Abstract Expressionism: Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) will present the first full-scale museum presentation celebrating the female artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Organized by the DAM and curated by Gwen Chanzit, Women of Abstract Expressionism brings together 51 paintings to examine the distinct contributions of 12 artists who played an integral role in what has been recognized as the first fully-American modern art movement. On view June 12, 2016 through Sept. 25, 2016, the exhibition presents a nuanced profile of women working on the East and West Coasts during the 1940s and ’50s, providing scholars and audiences with a new perspective on this important chapter in art history.

Following its debut at the DAM, Women of Abstract Expressionism will travel to the Mint Museum in October 2016 and to the Palm Springs Art Museum in February 2017.


The DAM’s exhibition focuses on the expressive freedom of direct gesture and process at the core of abstract expressionism, while revealing inward reverie and painterly expression in these works by individuals responding to particular places, memories and life experiences. Women of Abstract Expressionism also sheds light on the unique experiences of artists based in the Bay Area on the West Coast where they were on a more equal footing with their male counterparts than those working in New York. The featured artists include Mary Abbott, Jay DeFeo, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Gechtoff, Judith Godwin, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Deborah Remington and Ethel Schwabacher.


“For millennia women have been creators and innovators of artistic expression,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the DAM. “Few women have found their way into the accounts of art history, and not until the 20th century have they received some of the credit that is long overdue. We are delighted to be the first U.S. museum to tell these stories of the most prolific female Abstract Expressionists.”

Lee Krasner, who often lived in husband Jackson Pollock’s shadow, is one notable Abstract Expressionist painter featured in the exhibition. Seven of Krasner’s works will be on view, showing the breadth of her artistic development and her responses to the natural world around her. This is visible in prominent works such as  

Lee Krasner, The Seasons, 1957. Oil and house paint on canvas, 92-3/4 × 203-7/8 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Frances and Sydney Lewis by exchange, the Mrs. Percy Uris Purchase Fund and the Painting and Sculpture Committee 87.7. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins. © 2015 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The Seasons (1957)  and Charred Landscape (1960).


From the New York Times:

Over the next quarter-century, Krasner drove dynamically through a number of style shifts - not all of them equally compelling, it's true - achieving at her peak a powerful, dramatic, and at times disturbing imagery that makes deep connections with the forces of nature. Her high- key floral abstractions of the late 1950's, such as ''Listen,'' with its brilliant bursts of color arrestingly played off against ''open'' areas of bare canvas, have a contagious exuberance. They are succeeded by a series of angry, large-scale canvases - somberly umber in tone - like ''Charred Landscape'' of 1960, a turbulent massing of peaky and ovoid forms that suggests cosmic catastrophe.

Elaine de Kooning, Bullfight, 1959. Oil on canvas; 77-5/8 x 131-1/4 x 1-1/8 in. Denver Art Museum: Vance H. Kirkland Acquisition Fund. Courtesy Mark Borghi Fine Art, New York, NY. © Elaine de Kooning Trust

Elaine de Kooning is another artist whose work will be placed in a context independent from her husband, and well-known contemporary, Willem de Kooning. Elaine de Kooning was a skilled draughtswoman and abstract painter as shown in her monumental canvas Bullfight (1959). The artwork depicts the impact of energy and excitement brought on by her experience of witnessing bullfights in Mexico.


A lesser-known artist featured in Women of Abstract Expressionism, Sonia Gechtoff, experienced a career that spanned both coasts. Her artistic contributions are pivotal in understanding the situation for women during the Abstract Expressionist movement. Gechtoff had much success in the Bay Area, but was surprised to experience gender bias in New York.

“Women of Abstract Expressionism, for the first time, positions this expanded group of painters within the context of abstract expressionism and its cultural milieu,” said Gwen Chanzit, curator of modern art at the DAM. “The exhibition will contribute to a more complete understanding of this important mid-20th century movement by presenting artists beyond the handful of painters who have previously defined the whole in textbook accounts. It also will present these female artists together for the first time. While visitors discover the significant role of women in the formation of abstract expressionism, they will be treated to a powerful presentation of remarkable paintings.”

Lee Krasner, Polar Stampede, 1960

Lee Krasner, Imperative, 1976 

Exhibition Catalog


A fully illustrated catalog, edited by Joan Marter and published by Yale University Press in association with the DAM, will serve as a permanent record of Women of Abstract Expressionism. Essays by leading scholars of abstract expressionism will be included in the catalog, as well as an extensive compilation of artist biographies of women featured in the exhibition and some additional 30 artists whose work paralleled the movement.

The Botticelli Renaissance

24th September 2015 – 24th January 2016 | Gemäldegalerie - Staatliche  Museen zu Berlin  

5th March 2016 – 3 d July 2016 | Victoria and Albert Museum, London   

The Florentine painter Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510 ) is considered one of  the most important artists of the Renaissance. Countless reproductions  have been made of his works, with some creators add ing a slant or  “modern touch”, resulting in a work that has acquired a momentum and  trajectory in its own right. Many of these re-workings are so removed from  the originals that Botticelli has become a household name and can be used as a touchstone for fashion and lifestyle with out any mention being  made of his paintings. Products are named after him, popular-culture personalities allude to his motifs in fashioning their own image, and some of the characters portrayed in his works – particularly his “Venus” – are now firmly embedded in collective awareness. 

Yet our apparent familiarity with his opus was not inevitable. Sandro Botticelli was largely forgotten after his death, only to be rediscovered around 1800. From the mid-19th century onwards the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England and the  associated admiration of Botticelli were instrumental in the artist’s  resurgence, which caught the imagination of increasing numbers of artists  and a steadily growing public.

Since then, Botticelli’s work has been subject to wildly different interpretations and poses numerous questions.  How did the artist come to be so famous? How did he get to be a pop icon? Why are his paintings considered timeless and “European”, to the  extent that they even feature on Euro coins? One thing is certain: few old  masters can equal Botticelli as a source of inspiration for modern art and  present-day artists.   

The exhibition, which includes more than forty original works, explores a touching story of appropriation and appreciation th at began in the early 19th century and continues to this day. For the first time ever, Sandro  Botticelli’s works are presented in the context of subsequent interpretations and paraphrases. The 130 works on show will include many masterpieces of European art and important wor ks on loan from the  great collections of the world. Among them represented are Dante Gabriele Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, René Magritte, Elsa Schiaparelli, Andy Warhol and Bill Viola. 

The exhibition also features drawings, photographs, videos, fashion and design objects. The visual aspect of the exhibition is largely a reflection of the partnership  between the Gemäldegalerie and the Victoria and Alb ert Museum. Since  the beginning of Botticelli’s comeback in the early years of the 19 th century  Berlin has possessed a significant number of the master’s works. The  largest collection of Botticellis outside of the painter’s own city of Florence  has always been housed in the Gemäldegalerie of the Staatliche – formerly Königliche – Museen zu Berlin, founded in 1830. 

Sandro Botticelli: Venus, 1490
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders

 

Sandro Botticelli: Bardi-Altar, 1484
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie / Jörg P. Anders 

 

  

Sandro Botticelli: Giuliano de' Medici, 1478
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie / Jörg P. Anders

 

Sandro Botticelli: Tondo Raczynski, 1477
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie / Jörg P. Anders

 

 

 

Sandro Botticelli: Smeralda Bandinelli, 1471 Victoria and Albert Museum, London
 

Sandro Botticelli: Mystische Geburt, 1501 bpk Berlin / Foto: Jochen Remmer

 

 

Sandro Botticelli: Porträt eines jungen Mannes, um 1480–1485. Andrew W. Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. © Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington


 

Edward Burne-Jones: The Mill, 1870
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Daydream, 1880 Victoria and Albert Museum, London
 

 

Antonio Donghi: Donna al caffè (Frau im Café), 1931. © 2015 Archivio Fotografico - Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia"
 

Edgar Degas: Venus (nach Botticelli), 1859 Peter Schälchli, Zürich

Tomoko Nagao: Botticelli - The Birth of Venus with Baci, Esselunga, Barilla, PSP and EasyJet, 2012
 

David LaChapelle: Rebirth of Venus, 2009 Courtesy David LaChapelle Studio

William Bouguereau: Geburt der Venus, 1879. Öl auf Leinwand. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Foto: © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

 

Canaletto Celebrating Britain

The Holburne Museum Great Pulteney Street Bath June 27, 2015 – October 4, 2015  Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria, 22 October 2015 — 14 February 2016

When the Venetian painter Antonio Canal arrived in London in 1746, Britain was booming. During his nine-year stay, the artist captured the latest achievements of British architecture and engineering. Including loans from Compton Verney, The National Trust, The British Museum, Royal Collection Trust and Tate this exhibition also features Canaletto’s British contemporaries and a review of John Wood’s reinvention of architecture in Bath.

Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697-1768), known popularly as Canaletto, is today remembered as one of Italy’s greatest view painters. His images of Venice were particularly popular with Grand Tourists from Britain. When war caused the flow of British visitors to Venice to dry up, Canaletto followed his patrons home to Britain, where he stayed for almost nine years from 1746 to 1755.

Through a series of astonishing canvases and drawings, Canaletto celebrated the accomplishment, success and prosperity of the rising British nation and its latest achievements of architecture and engineering. Canaletto’s London is busy but beautiful with its wealth of new landmarks: Wren’s Baroque churches, the majestic St Paul’s Cathedral and the naval palaces of Greenwich; Hawksmoor’s ‘Gothick’ towers for Westminster Abbey, William Kent’s new Palladian Horse Guards building and the Rococo pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh. The construction of two marvels of engineering, the new bridges across the Thames at Westminster and Walton, is documented in detail.

From the Guardian: (Some images aadded)

One highlight of the show is bringing together for the first time

 
The Old Horse Guards, Canaletto Copyright The Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation

Canaletto’s spectacular view of The Old Horse Guards from St James’s Park, being lent by Andrew Lloyd Webber, alongside what it became four years later,

The New Horse Guards from St James’s Park, a rarely seen work being lent from a private collection.

There are many loans from the Queen’s Canaletto collection including two spectacular views of the Thames from Somerset House,

 

Canaletto, London The Thames from Somerset House Terrace towards Westminster © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014

one looking towards Westminster

 

London: The Thames from Somerset House Terrace towards the City, 1750-51. ©-Her-Majesty-Queen-Elizabeth-II-2015. Royal Collection Trust

and the other to St Paul’s Cathedral and the City with a forest of new church spires pointing into the sky from the churches built after the Great Fire of London.

Canaletto, London Westminster Bridge with a procession of civic barges Royal Collection Trust© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014 

Also in the show are views of Westminster Bridge, an engineering triumph respected throughout Europe.

 From the Artfund:

Canaletto, Warwick Castle, 1752

© Birmingham Museums Trust

Canaletto's Italianesque depiction of Warwick Castle shows how the artist used light to add a Mediterranean touch to a traditional English scene. Canaletto was particularly taken with this castle, and painted five different views of it during his time in England. 

Another interesting review

More images from the exhibition:

Canaletto, A self-portait with Saint Pauls in the Background, 1746

Courtesy Anglesey Abbey © NTPL Chris Titmus

Canaletto, The Grand Walk Vauxhall Gardens, c.1751

© CV, photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

Canaletto, The Interior of the Rotunda, Ranelagh, 1754

© CV, photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

Canaletto, A View Of Walton Bridge, 1754

By permission of the trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

 

The first Westminster Bridge as painted by Canaletto in 1746.

London: Whitehall and the Privy Garden from Richmond House - Canaletto
 

London: Greenwich Hospital from the North Bank of the Thames - Canaletto

The Thames and the City of London from Richmond House - Canaletto

Catalogue

Celebrating Britain: Canaletto, Hogarth and Patriotism

Paperback, 260 x 216 mm 128 pages, 55 colour illus.
PRICE: £25.00
ISBN: 978 1 907372 78 0