Dorothea Lange’s America

Sept. 14 through Dec. 30, 2018
Reynolda House Museum of American Art

January - April, 2019
Suzanne H. Arnold Art Gallery, PA
​
September– December, 2019
Gilcrease Museum, OK

September - December, 2020
Pulaski Tech, AR

The exhibition, “Dorothea Lange’s America,” presents Lange’s haunting photographs of 1930s and 1940s America and features some of the most iconic images of the 20^th century.

“Lange’s documentary photographs appeared in local newspapers, reaching both the masses across middle America and the lawmakers in our nation’s capital, becoming poignant catalysts for social change and, ultimately, highly valued works of art,” says Allison Perkins, Reynolda House executive director. “We identified this exhibition as an opportunity not only to appreciate the artistry of her photographs, but also to draw connections between their subjects and our communities today.”





One of the highlights of the exhibition is the most recognizable photograph of Lange’s career, “Migrant Mother,” made in 1936. Recently named the most downloaded photograph in the Library of Congress' archive, it is also one of the most arresting images ever created; its ensuing influence on photojournalism is incapable of measurement. The portrait of Florence Owens Thompson with three of her young children became a visual shorthand for the Great Depression and humanized its consequences for the public at large. Upon its original publication in a San Francisco newspaper, the image ignited a massive benevolent response: 20,000 pounds of food was delivered within days to the migrant camp where the photograph was made.

You force yourself to watch and wait. You accept all the discomfort and the disharmony. Being out of your depth is a very uncomfortable thing. You force yourself onto strange streets, among strangers. It may be very hot. It may be painfully cold. It may be sandy and windy and you say, ‘What am I doing here? What drives me to do this hard thing?’-- Dorothea Lange

Highlighting this show are oversized exhibition prints of her seminal portraits from the Great Depression, including 

White Angel Breadline, 

and, most famously,Migrant Mother – an emblematic picture that came to personify pride and resilience in the face of abject poverty in 1930s America.

 

Dorothea Lange
Hands, Maynard and Don Dixon, California, 1930

Dorothea Lange
Filipinos cutting lettuce, Salinas, California, 1935

Dorothea Lange
Woman in trailer camp, California, 1940

Lange herself had known adversity early in life. At age 7 she was stricken with polio, which left her with a lifetime limp. And at age 12 her father disappeared from the scene, leaving an impoverished household behind. Every day she would ride the ferry with her mother from Hoboken to lower Manhattan, to a roiling working-class neighborhood teeming with immigrants. During that period Lange talked her way into photo courses with a range of teachers as diverse as Arnold Genthe and Clarence White. In 1918 she moved to San Francisco where she befriended the photographers Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, and, through them, the celebrated Western painter Maynard Dixon, who became her first husband. She soon opened a thriving portrait studio that catered to San Francisco’s professional class and monied elite. But with the crash of 1929 she found her true calling, as a peripatetic chronicler of the many faces of America, old and young, urban and rural, native-born and immigrant, as they dealt with unprecedented hardship, sometimes with resilience, often with despondence. Her immortal portraits seared these faces of the Depression era into America’s consciousness.

All works in the exhibition are from the collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. The exhibition was organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions. 

Great collection of Lange images

Picasso. Blue and Rose

Musée d'Orsay

18 September 2018 - 6 January 2019

Fondation Beyeler, Basel 

3 February to 26 May, 2019

The Musée d'Orsay, associated with the Musée Picasso-Paris, presents the first exhibition on the blue and pink period of Pablo Picasso in France. This exhibition offers an unprecedented gathering of masterpieces, some never presented in France, and a new analysis of the years 1900-1906, an essential phase in the artist's career.

The album shows the evolution of Picasso's painting year by year and comments on the central works of the exhibition, giving the reader an overview of the blue and pink period. 

Pablo Picasso Self-portrait© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau © Succession Picasso 2018

 
 

In 1900, at age eighteen, Pablo Ruiz, who would soon begin signing his work Picasso, already had all the makings of a young prodigy.

His work was divided between academic paintings to please his father, a teacher who dreamed of an official career for his son, and more personal works inspired by his contact with avant-garde circles in Barcelona. 

It is his salon painting which took him to Paris, having been selected to represent his country in the Spanish painting section of the Universal Exhibition. He presented the large canvas Last Moments, which he painted over in 1903 with his masterpiece Life:

Courtesy of www.PabloPicasso.org

This marked the start of a period of intense creative activity punctuated by travel between Spain and the French capital, Paris. Between 1900 and 1906, Picasso’s work gradually shifted from a rich palette of Pre-Fauvist colours – which owes a great debt both to the post-Impressionism of Van Gogh and to Toulouse-Lautrec – to the almost monochrome blues of the Blue Period, followed by the rose shades of the Saltimbanques Period, and the ochre hues of Gósol.

For the first time in France, this exhibition will span the Blue and Rose Periods, organised as a continuum rather than as a series of compartmentalised episodes. It also aims to reveal Picasso’s early artistic identity and some of the enduring obsessions in his work.

Pablo Picasso Self-portrait with top hat© www.bridgemanimages.com © Succession Picasso 2018

“The strongest walls open at my passing”
When he arrived at the Gare d’Orsay in October 1900, Picasso plunged into a very vibrant contemporary art scene: he discovered the paintings of David and Delacroix, but also works by Ingres, Daumier, Courbet, Manet and the Impressionists.

Like other artists of his generation, the young painter was a great admirer of Van Gogh, as demonstrated by his transition several months after this first trip to Paris to painting with strokes of pure colour.

Some self-portraits reveal how the artist embraced and absorbed the successive influences of the “modern masters”. In the summer of 1901, his Self-Portrait in a Top Hat was a parting tribute to Toulouse-Lautrec, nightlife and the cabaret scene; and in Yo Picasso, he depicts himself as the new messiah of art - elegant, arrogant and provocative - in homage to Van Gogh.

Seven months later, in his blue Self-Portratit, Picasso makes another reference to the Dutch painter, not in terms of style, but in the pose of a misunderstood genius sporting a red beard. A comparison with the self-portrait he painted on his return from Gósol in 1906 reveals just how much the artist developed in the space of a few years. Here, Picasso is experimenting with a new idiom, restricting his palette to complementary shades of grey and pink and reducing his facial features to an oval mask shape.

 

Pablo PicassoWoman in Blue© www.bridgemanimages.com © Succession Picasso 2018

 

 

 

 

 

From Barcelona to Paris: Spanish influences
The eye-opening experience of Paris in 1900 was not the young Picasso’s sole source of inspiration. His trips to Málaga, Madrid, Barcelona and Toledo between two visits to Paris speak volumes about his attachment to Spain, and the work he produced at the start of the century draws both on the Catalan modernists and the Spanish Golden Age.

Picasso was active within the lively artistic scene which was developing around 1900 in certain avant-garde Spanish venues and publications. In Barcelona, the young artist was an avid enthusiast of the paintings of his elders, Santiago Rusiñol and Ramon Casas. 

He spent a great deal of time at the Els Quatre Gats cabaret, haunt of the Barcelona bohemian crowd. It was at once a tavern, exhibition venue and literary circle, modelled on the famousChat Noir in Paris.

On 1 February 1900, Picasso held his first proper exhibition there, filling the space with approximately five hundred portrait drawings executed in a matter of weeks, and one oil on canvas -Last Moments- which he presented at the Universal Exhibition in Paris shortly afterwards.

When Picasso settled in Madrid for a few months in the winter of 1901, his work fluctuated between modernists illustrations for the magazine Arte Joven and more ambitious painting imbued with references to Velasquez (Woman in Blue).

Pablo PicassoThe Wait (Margot)© Gasull Fotografia © Succession Picasso 2018

The Vollard gallery exhibition
Picasso arrived at the Gare d’Orsay station for the second time in the spring of 1901, armed with a few pastels and paintings produced in Madrid and Barcelona. The Catalan dealer Pedro Mañach persuaded Ambroise Vollard, the renowned gallery owner of the Parisian avant-garde, to organise an exhibition of Picasso’s work in the early summer – a fine opportunity for an unknown foreigner who barely spoke a word of French.

He painted round the clock in his studio on the boulevard de Clichy, producing as many as three pictures a day. This frenzied activity generated the majority of the 64 paintings and the handful of drawings displayed in the exhibition, which was opened on 25 June on rue Laffitte.
Picasso’s work was diametrically opposed to that of the painter with whom he shared the gallery space. He contrasted the quintessentially Spanish scenes of the Basque painter Francesco Iturrino with subjects about typical life in Paris by day and by night.

The exhibition at the Vollard gallery closed on 14 July. It was a critical success and sales were respectable. It introduced Parisians to a Picasso who embraced and reworked the styles and motifs of the great modern artists Van Gogh, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. It made an impression on the young poet Max Jacob, who was keen to be introduced to the artist.

Pablo Picasso Seated Harlequin© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image of the MMA © Succession Picasso 2018

Towards blue
After the success of the Vollard exhibition, the autumn of 1901 was a period of introspection for the young painter, when his art took a new direction. In tandem with the cycle of paintings directly associated with the death of Casagemas, he produced a group of poignant works characterised notably by the appearance of the figure of Harlequin.

Picasso’s Seated Harlequin, lost in thought at a bistro table, forms part of a group of paintings of a similar format focusing on related themes. Their iconography draws both on the café scenes of Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet, and on the world of the saltimbanques (circus performers) which would soon dominate his pictorial world.

But it is from the recently deceased Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec from whom Picasso borrows the daringly fluid lines of his compositions. The black outlining and flat areas of colour in his paintings create “the impression of stained glass”, writes the art critic Félicien Fagus in 1902.

 http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/events/exhibitions/in-the-museums/exhibitions-in-the-musee-dorsay-more/page/1/article/picasso-47542.html?tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=649&cHash=47131641af

 

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)Acrobat with a ball 1905 Oil on canvas H. 147; W. 95 cmMoscow, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts© Image The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow © Succession Picasso 2018

Pablo PicassoThe Death of Casagemas© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau © Succession Picasso 2018

The death of Picasso’s friend Casagemas
Carles Casagemas, the son of the American consul in Barcelona, forged a close friendship with Picasso in the summer of 1899. He shared a studio with him in Barcelona and then accompanied him to Paris in the autumn of 1900.
His failed love affair with a young model prompted him to commit suicide on 17 February 1901 in a Montmartre restaurant, after he fired a shot at his lover and missed. Picasso heard the news while he was in Madrid.

When he returned to Paris several months later, the artist addressed this tragic event in a painting produced in the very studio where Casagemas spent his final hours.
In the summer, The Death of Casagemas, with its Fauvist expressionism and thick layers of impasto, recalls of some of Picasso’s works exhibited in the Vollard exhibition.

The palettes of the other portraits of the deceased man are tinged with the blue that Picasso gradually introduces into his paintings that autumn. Blue is also the dominant colour in his large painting Evocation, the last composition in the cycle, which parodies the binary structure of El Greco’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz in an irony-tinged final farewell.

“Of Sadness and Pain”

 
In the autumn of 1901, Pablo Picasso went to Saint-Lazare women’s prison in Paris. The inmates were mainly prostitutes, some of whom were incarcerated with their children. Women infected with venereal diseases were singled out with bonnets.

These visits initiated a series of paintings on the theme of motherhood, produced in the final months of the year.

When the artist returned to Barcelona in late January 1902, he continued to paint female figures embodying loneliness and misfortune. This marked the beginning of the Blue Period, characterised by the dominance of this colour, sentimental themes and a quest for expressive forms. 

 

 

Pablo Picasso Woman and child on the shore© www.bridgemanimages.com © Succession Picasso 2018

 

Stiff, solemn female bodies are bowed under the weight of curves. Mother and child groups are idealised and stylised. The bonnets worn by the women inmates of Saint-Lazare prison are transformed into hoods and their clothes become long tunics modelled on the paintings of El Greco. 

Pablo PicassoWailing woman© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Béatrice Hatala © Succession Picasso 2018

“The blues of the abyss”
Although the term Blue Period instantly conjures up painting, Picasso’s art extends well beyond this medium.
Paintings, sculptures, drawings and engravings all stem from the same aesthetic experiments, the same quest to express suffering.

These ink and pencil sheets, which belong to the significant body of graphical work produced between 1902 and 1903 depict the suffering, emaciated bodies of men and women and demonstrate mastery of a wide array of techniques. They reveal the virtuosity of Picasso the draughtsman.
The paintings offer numerous variations of the colour blue. For Picasso, “the need to paint in this way was driven from within”, but he was probably also influenced by his habit of painting at night by the light of a paraffin lamp.

In tandem with these tragic depictions of the destitute, whose deformed limbs are reminiscent of paintings by El Greco, Picasso produced portraits of his Barcelonan friends through lenses of both benevolence and sarcasm.

Pablo PicassoLa Célestine© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau © Succession Picasso 2018

Picasso and eroticism
In Paris and Barcelona, between 1901 and 1903, Picasso produced numerous lively erotic drawings which verge on caricature and which offer a counterpoint to the somber, melancholic paintings of destitute figures in his Blue Period.
They are an extension of his exploration of the shady world of brothels, made manifest in his paintings by the prostitutes of the Saint-Lazare prison, and by the portrait La Célestine inspired by the Barcelonan brothel keeper Carlota Valdivia.

These works, long kept hidden, were in many cases quickly sketched on the back of business cards for his friend Sebastià Juñer-Vidal’s factory, but they represent a recurring theme in Picasso’s work: the permanent and inextricable association between love and death.

Pablo PicassoLife© Photo Scala, Florence © Succession Picasso 2018

Life
Life was painted in the spring of 1903, and represents the culmination of the aesthetic experiments carried out by Picasso since the start of the Blue Period. It is painted on top of Last Moments, which Picasso presented at the Universal Exhibition in 1900.
A number of sketches and an x-ray analysis of the painting reveal the development of the composition and figures. Although the man on the left was initially a self-portrait, he eventually adopts the features of Carles Casagemas, Picasso’s friend who committed suicide in February 1901 after a failed love affair. The artist also planned to position an easel and winged figure in the centre of the picture.

The final painting has given rise to many different interpretations. It is often seen as an allegory for the cycle of life from childhood – embodied by the pregnant woman – to death, symbolised by the crouching figure in the background, and therefore reflects the metaphysical ideas of certain artists such as Paul Gauguin.

 "Au rendez-vous des poètes"
 

It was probably shortly after moving into the Bateau-Lavoir, in May 1904, that Picasso wrote this phrase in blue pencil above the door of his Montmartre studio: "Au rendez-vous des poètes" (Poets’ meeting place). 

At the time, Picasso was living in an artists’ colony on the Butte with several of his fellow countrymen, such as Paco Durrio, and had a whole host of poet friends including Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon.

They were some of his earliest admirers and they instilled in him an appreciation for the new style of poetry which pervades Picasso’s works of the Rose Period.

Pablo PicassoWoman with a crow© Toledo Museum of Art © Succession Picasso 2018

Towards rose
In the early months of 1905, building on the works produced in the last weeks of 1904, Picasso broadened his colour range.
This subtle transition took place without any major change in the style of his figures, whose mannerism and Expressionist distortions are similar to those of the Blue Period.

The artist painted a number of pictures inspired by Madeleine, with whom he was romantically involved.
These portraits trace the gradual move away from monochrome blue towards a nuanced palette ranging from the vivid red clothing of Woman with a Crow to the milky-white complexion of his Woman in a Chemise.

In the summer of 1905, Picasso’s trip to the Netherlands awakened an interest in traditional costumes and picturesque landscapes. The shapely bodies of the women of Schoorl fostered Picasso’s growing interest in the use of sculptural effects in painting.

Pablo PicassoThe acrobat family© Gothenburg Museum of Art / Photo Hossein Sehatlou © Succession Picasso 2018

Saltimbanques
The Saltimbanque cycle – which Picasso developed simultaneously in painting, drawing, engraving and sculpture – spans the period from late 1904 to the end of 1905.
There are two main themes: the family and fatherhood of Harlequin, and the circus which combines the Commedia dell’arte character and the lithe figures of acrobats, jesters and hurdy-gurdy musicians.

These two threads come together in the large gouache Family of Saltimbanques with a Monkey, which featured in the exhibition at the Serrurier gallery in 1905.
These compositions, inspired by the troupe of the Médrano circus located at the corner of the rue des Martyrs and boulevard Rochechouart, are characterised by their seriousness.

Picasso is less interested in the show, usually excluded from the frame, than in the other aspects of their lives, capturing a medial space between public and private worlds where in the most banal triviality and the most sublime grace converge.
Where we might expect movement, lightness and cheerfulness, Picasso offers static, compact and melancholic painting, culminating in Family of Saltimbanque which he worked on during the spring. This masterpiece from 1905 forms part of the Chester Dale collection, but is not available for loan under the terms of the bequests policy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From rose to ochre

 

 

Pablo Picasso Boy Leading a 

Horse© Succession Picasso 2018 / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In early 1906, the paintings of Ingres, which featured in a retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in 1905, inspired Picasso to paint the large composition The Watering Place , which he later abandoned and for which he lifted Boy Leading a Horse .
 

 

The artist’s work was imbued with a new classicism, and the Rose Period was transitioning towards ochre.

These trends became more distinct during his trip to Gósol from May to August 1906. There is a strange synergy between his work and the spectacular landscape of this isolated village in the Catalan Pyrenees. 

Picasso’s encounter with Romanesque sculpture and Iberian art the previous winter at the Louvre museum prompted a return to his roots which reinforced his interest in the work of Gauguin.

Over a period of several weeks, both his sculpture and paintings become characterised by an extreme simplification of form and space, forecasting and initiating the aesthetic revolutions which follow. Leo and Gertrude Stein facilitated and supported this ongoing development by providing intellectual affirmation and financial assistance.

Pablo PicassoNude on a Red Background© Succession Picasso 2018 © RMN-Grand Palais (musée de l'Orangerie) / Hervé Lewandowski

 

 

 

 

 

The major turning point 

 
In Gósol, Picasso embarked on a new path, influenced by the Classical Antiquity of the Mediterranean just as by the paintings of Ingres.
There, in the solitude of a summer spent with his partner Fernande, he undertook his first critique of the sensual escapism of The Turkish Bath, 1862, Paris, Musée du Louvre), beginning in a series of works on the theme of hairdressing.

When the artist returned to Paris, he refocused his attention almost exclusively on the female body, to which he devoted a number of works, rejecting illusionist techniques in favour of a new expressive language: composing images by interlacing basic shapes with a colour palette restricted to shades of ochre.

The gradual emergence of this radically new vocabulary represents the first application of Cézanne’s theory of the geometrisation of volumes.
Picasso’s experimental approach, in which the relationship between painting, sculpture and engraving plays a key role, produced

 

 

 

 

 

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (New York, Museum of Modern Art) in 1907, which blazes the trail for the great adventure of Cubism.

Exhibition Album

 
Claire Bernardi, Stéphanie Molins, Emilia Philippot
Musée d'Orsay / Hazan - 2018
Paperback, 21,6× 28,8 cm - 48 p. - 40 ill.
ISBN : 978-2-75411-480-6
Bilingual french, English

Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice

The Morgan Library & Museum
October 12, 2018 through January 6, 2019

National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

Early 2019.

The dramatic canvases of Jacopo Tintoretto (1518/1519 – 1594) , with their muscular, expressive bodies, are some of the most distinctive of the Italian Renaissance. His drawings , however, have received less atte ntion as a distinctive category in his oeuvre . Opening October 12, Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice will be the first exhibition since 1956 to focus on the drawing practice of this major artist . It will offer a new perspective on Tintoretto’s evolut on as a draftsman, his individuality as an artist, and his influence on a generation of painters in northern Italy. 

Organized to mark the five - hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth, this exhibition brings together more than seventy drawings and a small group of related paintings . It places Tintoretto’s distinctive figure drawings alongside works by contemporaries such as Titian, Veronese, and Bassano , as well as by artists — Domenico Tintoretto, Palma Giovane, and others — working in Venice during the late sixteenth century, whose drawing style was influenced by Tintoretto’s. 



Tintoretto (1518/19 - 1594), Seated Male Nude , ca. 1549. Black and white chalk, squared, on blue paper. Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 5385. © RMN - Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY 

The exhibition also features a particularly engaging group of drawings that have recently been proposed as the work of the young El Greco during his time in Italy. When the exhibition travels to the NGA in March 2019, it will be shown with Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice , a major retrospective focusing on his paintings. 

The Exhibition Seven sections explore the career and legacy of Tintoretto. Born the son of a fabric dyer ( tintore in Italian ) from whose profession the young artist derived his nickname, the ar tist rose to prominence in the 1540s. By the time of his death in May 1594, he was the pre - eminent artist in Venice, responsible for vast pictorial cy cles in the Palazzo Ducale and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, as well as paintings found throughout the churches and palaces of Venice. Even during his lifetime, he was thought of as an impetuous genius, an artist who worked hastily, without careful design or consideration. Yet although Tintoretto was never an academic draftsman akin to his Florentine contemporaries, over the course of his career he forged his own distinctive style of drawing and his own way of using them . As Tintoretto’s fame grew, his expanding workload required more assistants, and his drawing practice evolved. In training those assistants  he influenced a generation of artists in northern Italy. 

The Venetian School of Drawing and Tintoretto’s Early Works 

Since the sixteenth century, writers have often noted a distinction between the supposedly more formalized and intellectual process of drawing in central Italy and the more personal, experimental Venetian approach. Venetian artists indeed adopted a broad range of techniques, media, and methods of drawing, including pen and ink, black and white chalk on blue paper, colored chalks, and b rush drawings. Tintoretto’s experimental manner evolved in the context of these rich, diverse means of design. 

Titian (1488 - 1576), Embracing Couple , ca. 1568 – 70, charcoal and black and white chalk on faded blue paper. The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Titian, the leading artist of his time, remained a powerful influence through works such as Embracing Couple , which might be considered the quintessential Venetian drawing: it is loose and impressionistic yet also a powerful study of light and shadow falling across bodies twisting through space. 

Tintoretto was equally fascinated by the works of artists like Pordenone and Schiavone, who presented alternate artistic paths. By 1537 or 1538, Tintoretto was an indepen dent master. While many of Tintoretto’s drawings have been lost, from those that remain we can trace his evolution from an early experimental mode of drawing akin to Schiavone’s, to an increasing attention on life study, and on to quicker, functional figure drawings intended to satisfy the practical needs of a busy painter. A drawing like his Venus and Vulcan highlights the various elements of Tintoretto’s early drawing style, with its energetic approach to design and bodies that are simultaneously muscular and lithe. 

Highlights in Tintoretto’s Career , and the Evolution of His Drawing Practice 

The watershed moment in Tintoretto’s career was the unveiling in 1548 of his  

 

Miracle of the Slave , a work of a monumentality, drama, and richness unseen in his painting to that point. The confraternity of San Rocco then commissioned Tintoretto to take up the decoration of their church. 

During the late 1550s, Tintoretto also painted two vast paintings for the church of the Madonna dell’Orto, 



 



the Last Judgment 



 and Making of the Golden Calf. 

These highlighted Tintoretto’s abilities and soon led to commissions at the Palazzo Ducale and the Scuola Grande di San Marco. 

A few years later, Tintoretto began painting the Scuola di San Rocco, a project that would occupy him on and off for the rest of his career. Although there are no extant drawings directly related to the Miracle of the Slave  the exhibition includes studies connected with each of these other projects.

 

Tintoretto (1518/19 - 1594) , Study of a Man with Raised Arms , ca. 1562 – 66 , charcoal, heightened with white, on blue paper, squared for transfer , The British Museum, London . ©The Trustees of the British Museum 



Tintoretto (1518/19 – 1594), Venus and Vulcan , ca. 1545, black chalk, pen and brown ink with brown and gray wash, bpk Bildagentur / Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Art Resource, NY . Photography by Jorg P. Anders 

The most familiar of Tintoretto’s drawings are the many studies after Michelangelo’s Samson and the Philistines and his sculptures in the Medici Chapel . A group of these studies is included in the exhibition, along with a cast of the Samson on which they are based. Although traditionally believed to be Tintoretto’s own youthful studies, the exhibition argues that these sculpture drawings are exercises that he used in his workshop to teach his assistants how to convey drama , meaning , and sculptural presence of the human form. 

In later years, Tintoretto’s workload increased to such a degree that his paintings were designed by him but executed by the workshop. His later figure drawings tend to be more simplified and abstracted than his earlier studies of live models, and they frequently adopt exaggerated musculature that was perhaps i ntended to emphasize form for the workshop assis tants executing the paintings. 

Tintoretto’s Influence on the Next Generation 

Tintoretto’s son Domenico (1560 – 1635) was trained in the family workshop in the 1570s and eventually became his father’s primary assistant and artistic heir. In his early years, he demonstrated a talent for naturalistic observati on in both drawing and painting and was a notable portraitist. 



Domenico Tintoretto (?) and Workshop (1518/19 - 1594), Study of Michelangelo’s Samson and the Philistines (recto and verso), ca. 1560 – 70, charcoal and black chalk with white opaque watercolor on blue paper, The Morgan Library & Museum, Thaw Collection, 2005.234. Photography by Janny Chiu. 



Tintoretto (1518/19 - 1594), Study for a Man Climbing into a Boat (recto), 1578 – 79, charcoal, squared in charcoal. The Morgan Library & Museum. Gift of J.P. Morgan, Jr. The Morgan Library & Museum, IV, 76. Photography by Graham S. Haber, 2012. 

Domenico Tintoretto (1560 - 1635), Reclining Female Nude , ca. 1590, black and white chalk on blue paper. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. 

was arguably at his best when making studies of a model, such as his remarkable series of drawings after a female nude. However, later in his career and particularly after the death of his father, Domenico abandoned his interest in anatomical structure and three - dimensional space that always characterized his father ’s work , although he essentially continued Jacopo’s working methods . 

Some of the most intriguing drawings in the show are the early works of Domenikos Theotokopoulos, El Greco, (ca. 1541 – 1614) done during his years in Italy. They have the same heightened emotion seen in El Greco’s paintings, with dramatic lightin g depict ing crowds of figures with their heads clustered together. Long considered the work of an unknown artist in Tintoretto’s circle, these drawings are comparable to the few later drawings believed to be by El Greco , and several also include his characteristic handwriting. 

Attributed to El Greco (ca. 1541 - 1614), Last Supper , ca. 1575, brown wash with white opaque watercolor, over black chalk, on light brown paper. The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of János Scholz, 1981.96. Photography by Janny Chiu, 2018.

While the work of a distinctive artist, a drawing such as the Last Supper (ca. 1575 ) reveals a compositional debt to Tintoretto and evokes an emotional intensity similar to Tintoretto’s Christ Mocked (also in the exhibition). 

In many ways, Jacopo Palma (ca. 1548 – 1628) became Tintoretto’s truest artistic heir. The son of the minor painter Antonio Palma, he received early training in his father’s workshop in Venice and traveled to Pesaro and Rome for various projects before retur ning to Venice. During the campaign to redecorate the Palazzo Ducale after the fire of 1577, Palma was closely associated with Tintoretto and his workshop, and after Tintoretto’s death, it was Palma rather than Domenico Tintoretto who became the leading pa inter in Venice. 

Palma’s drawings take us back not only to the chalk drawings of Titian and Tintoretto but also to the pen drawings of Veronese and the compositional studies of Schiavone and the Tintoretto family.

Palma Giovane (1544 - 1628), Christ Carried to the Tomb , ca. 1610, brush and brown and white oil paint over black chalk on oatmeal paper. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Wolfgang Ratjen Collection, Purchased as the Gift of Helen Porter and James T. Dyke, 2007. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Palma’s Christ Carried to the Tomb (ca. 1610), for example, captures the spiritual intensity of Titian’s late devotional painting as well as the urgent energy of Tintoretto’s, and is drawn in a painterly technique parallel akin to that of Schiavone or Domenico Tintoretto. In Palma’s works, we can see a summary of the distinct ive local traditions of drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice. 

Publication  

Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice

Publication 

Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice offers a complete overview of Tintoretto as a draftsman, in which all of the drawings in the exhibition are discussed and illustrated . A checklist of the exhibition is also included in the volume. Author: John Marciari. Publisher: Paul Holberton Publishing, London. 240 pages, 175 colour illustrations. 

Hodler//Parallelism

Kunstmuseum Bern 

Ferdinand Hodler, Thunersee mit Niesen, 1910, Öl auf Leinwand, 105,5 x 83 cm. Privatsammlung Schweiz © Peter Schälchli, Zürich

To commemorate the centenary of the death of Ferdinand Hodler, the Kunstmuseum Bern is – jointly with the Musées d’art et d’histoire de Genève – mounting a large special exhibition. The show presents the work of this famous Swiss artist from a new perspective: from that of his theory of parallelism.

In 1897, Hodler stated in his lecture on the goal of artists that «it is the quest of the artist to express the eternal element of nature and beauty, and reveal its essential beauty». In the lecture he explains his perception of the world and makes this understanding the fundamental idea behind his oeuvre. With «beauty» he actually meant an order intrinsic to nature, one of the repetition of forms and colours. In his eyes this phenomenon excited the pleasing effect of unity in the attentive beholder. Hodler believed that it presented a universal law, which he called parallelism, and dedicated himself to making it visible in his art.



Ferdinand Hodler, was already in his lifetime internationally famous. For his theory of parallelism he drew on a concept that was widespread in various sciences in the nineteenth century. Based on his own observations – for example of trees lining a road, a rockslide, clouds, or mountains mirrored in a lake – he made parallelism the determining principle of his work, implementing it in the compositional structures of repetition, symmetry, or mirror images:

«The success or failure of my work depends wholly on whether my parallelism is true or not. Parallelism is, as I discovered it, described it, and employ it, either a universal law and is universally valid – and then my work has universal meaning – or I was wrong, and then my art is nothing but delusion and misconception. »

The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bern makes it possible to view Ferdinand Hodler’s work and his distinctive visual imagery in a new light by revealing the synthesis of his artistic work and his writings outlining his artistic ambitions. The show addresses Hodler’s theory and how he visually put it into practice in ten sections, each focusing on different bodies of works and motifs.

The Kunstmuseum Bern and the Musées d’art et d’histoire de Genève are indebted to numerous Swiss institutions as well as private sponsors for their generous support. A richly illustrated catalogue will be published for the exhibition and contains scholarly contributions from leading experts in the field.

Curators

Nina Zimmer, Kunstmuseum Bern – Zentrum Paul Klee
Laurence Madeline, Paris

Muchmore infoandmany images: http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/events/exhibitions/archives/exhibitions-archives/browse/6/page/0/article/ferdinand-hodler-7814.html?cHash=9d8469fc8b

Dalí: Poetics of the Small, 1929–1936

The Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas 

September 9, 2018 –January 13, 2019

This fall, the Meadows Museum, SMU, will present a major exhibition of works by Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), exploring an overlooked or lesser-known aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. With Dalí: Poetics of the Small, 1929–1936, the Meadows is organizing the first in-depth exploration of the artist’s small-scale paintings—some measuring just over a foot, and others as small as 3 by 2 inches. A major part of the artist’s output during the early part of his Surrealist period (1929–1936), these small works reflect Dalí’s precise style of painting.

Organized by the Meadows as part of its mission to present Spanish art in America, Dalí: Poetics of the Smallwill be on view at the Meadows Museum—the only venue for this exhibition—from September 9 through December 9, 2018.Also at the Meadows this fall, Dalí’s Aliyah: A Moment in Jewish Historywill feature a rare, complete set of the lithographs created by the artist to celebrate 1968 as the 20th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. These works reveal a different aspect of Dalí’s artistic practice, with images that are large in scale and painted in a loose, expressionistic style that is the opposite of the precise technique displayed in the small-scale Surrealist works. Dalí’s Aliyah: A Moment in Jewish Historywill be on view at the Meadows Museum from September 9, 2018, through January 13, 2019.“Despite Salvador Dalí’s global reputation, there is much still to learn about his artistic development and output,” said Mark Roglán, the Linda P. and WilliamA. Custard Director of the Meadows Museum. “In producing so many small-scale paintings, it is clear that the artist saw their size as important, recognizing that within a constrained frame the viewer’s eyes are drawn to details differently. By contrast, the large-format lithographs Dalí created for his Aliyahcommission demonstrate an understanding of a different set of traditional artist’s skills, using art to capture and present history and the people involved in shaping it. We are excited to provide visitors with a chance to reconsider one of the 20th century’s most important and engaging artists.”Dalí: Poetics of the Small, 1929–1936(September 9–December 9, 2018)Salvador Dalí’s deep admiration for the refined and precise works of the Dutch master painters of the 17th century and, in particular, for the paintings of Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), has long been acknowledged. Dalí was similarly known for his notoriousattention to detail, a precision that is evident in the small-scale, jewel-like paintings presented in Dalí: Poetics of the Small, 1929–1936. Painted at the height of his career—when nearly half of the works he produced were cabinet-size paintings—these works have never been systematically studied or exhibited as a cohesive group.This exhibition will include nearly two-dozen of Dalí’s small-scale paintings, including at least one from each year during his highly productive period between 1929 and 1936. Among them are important works such as



The Accommodations of Desire (1929, The Metropolitan Museum of Art),

 


Phantom Cart (1933, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres), 

 

 

and The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition (1934, The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida). 

 

Diminutive in scale, these paintings reflect Dalí’s distinctive Surrealist style, with familiar but distorted figures often set against a dramatic or barren landscape.










Plans for the exhibition began after the Meadows acquired Dalí’s small-scale painting The Fish Man (L’homme poisson, 1930) in 2014, and asked the conservation department at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, to conduct technical analysis of the work. Despite much art historical study of Dalí’s life and body of work, very few such technical analyses had been made of his small-scale paintings. The results of that research—which revealed extensive underdrawing and changes to the composition before it was completed—encouraged the Meadows to begin exploring the subject of Dalí’s cabinet paintings in more depth.Under the leadership of Claire Barry, the Kimbell’s director of conservation, X-radiography and infrared reflectography, as well as pigment analysis and other tests, were conducted on nine of the paintings to be presented in this exhibition. The resulting data provides a better understanding of Dalí’s artistic technique and working process during the 1930s, but also highlights an interesting set of contradictions for the artist.



In 1948, Dalí’published his own book on painting and artistry, 50 Secrets ofMagic Craftsmanship, in which he shares his perspective on what makes for a great work of art. Curiously, it turns out that Dalí largely did not take his own advice. For example, where Dalí’s book discourages graphite outlines on a canvas or panel as a precursor to painting, the technical examination of these works shows that he consistently did exactly that. Similarly, the artist’s advice on choosing paint types, the mixing of pigments, or how best to paint elements such as the sky, were all clearly recommendations that he himself diverged from and sometimes evencontradicted in his own practice.

Dalí: Poetics of the Small, 1929–1936 is co-curated by Roglán and Shelley DeMaria, Meadows Museum Curatorial Assistant.



The exhibition catalogue includes full-color reproductions of the works and is illustrated with over 140 additional comparative, historical, and technical images. The accompanying texts present new art historical and technical research, including: an essay addressing the influence of Vermeer’s paintingson Dalí’s own style by Mark Roglán, Meadows Museum Director; an essay by Shelley DeMaria exploring Dalí’s contemporaneous influences such as photography and collage; an essay presenting the results of the technical study of several works by Claire Barry, Kimbell Art Museum Director of Conservation, and Peter Van de Moortel, Assistant Paintings Conservator at the Kimbell Art Museum; and, also by DeMaria, object entries for each work tracing the artist’s iconography throughout the eight-year period under examination.

The details of the Kimbell Conservation Department’s analysis are published in the exhibition catalogue in an essay that discusses Dalí’s compositional design; the underdrawing, painted cutouts, and pictorial delineation revealed by the study; and the artist’s employment of pigments, grounds, and texture. 

Winslow Homer: Photography and the Art of Painting

Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Eight Bells, 1886, oil on canvas, 25 3/16 x 30 3/16 in. Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover. Gift of an anonymous donor. Credit: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA / Art Resource, NY

This fall the Brandywine River Museum of Art, in Chadds Ford, Penn., will present Winslow Homer: Photography and the Art of Painting, exploring the surprising role photography played in the evolving practice of one of America’s most iconic artists. On view November 17, 2018 through February 17, 2019, the exhibition will feature approximately 50 paintings, prints, watercolors and drawings from all major periods of the artist’s career, as well as a comparable number of photographs collected by Homer.

 

Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Cliff at Prout’s Neck, c. 1883-87, albumen silver print, 3 5/8 x 4 ½ in. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick. Gift of the Homer Family

Winslow Homer: Photography and the Art of Painting examines the role the relatively new medium of photography played in the evolving practice of one of America’s most iconic artists. The exhibition presents a full picture of the artist’s working methods and includes noteworthy archival objects, such as two wooden dolls used as models, his palette and two of the three cameras he owned.
As a young artist for Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War, Homer utilized photographs as source material for some of his drawings, including Alexander Gardner’s famous photograph of Lincoln’s first inauguration—which provided Homer with the pictorial information he needed to construct his own detailed view of the event.

Winslow Homer ..White Mountain Wagon, c. 1869. 

This exhibition documents Homer’s post-Civil War travels to newly popular tourist destinations such as the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Catskills and Adirondacks of New York, and Cape Ann in Massachusetts. In his travels he was introduced to a new type of photography—commercially produced views to promote tourism. These photographs captured a moment in time and effects like glare, blur and shadow that the eye might not perceive. Homer quickly understood that photography could provide fresh, immediate perspectives that he could incorporate into his paintings.

Winslow Homer (1836–1910), The Fisher Girl, 1894, oil on canvas, 28 ¼ x 28 ¼ in. Mead Art Gallery, Amherst College. Gift of George D. Platt, Class of 1893

During the last three decades of his life, Homer often created compositions of the same subject in different mediums including painting, printmaking and photography. His use of various media came from his interest in probing the way things look and the challenge of portraying them realistically. Homer often borrowed certain elements—the cropping, the blur of the background and the flatness of the composition—from photographic convention, yet his painting, based on unique optical experiences, was an artistic creation reflective of myriad decisions. To Homer, paintings had the potential to make a subject more clearly understood; photography added to that conversation about how to portray the world around him.

"Perils of the Sea," 1881, watercolor, by Winslow Homer. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massaschusetts. Image © Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA

Organized by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA), Winslow Homer: Photography and the Art of Painting is curated by Frank H. Goodyear, BCMA co-director, and Dana E. Byrd, Bowdoin College Assistant Professor of Art History. The exhibition features a rich selection of work drawn from the BCMA’s incomparable holdings of Homer’s art and archival materials, and from more than 20 major institutions, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.

“Homer gave visual form to the American experience in the second half of the 19th century and has been highly influential to generations of artists, including many of those in the Brandywine’s collection,” said Thomas Padon, director of the Brandywine River Museum of Art. “Because of this, Winslow Homer: Photography and the Art of Painting will have particular resonance here, and we are thrilled to be the second and only other destination for this remarkable exhibition.”



An illustrated catalogue authored by Goodyear and Byrd and published by Yale University Press accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue serves as a significant contribution to the study of Winslow Homer and the cross-disciplinary study of painters and photography in American art.

Frank Goodyear and Dana Byrd demonstrate that photography offered Homer new ways of seeing and representing the world, from his early commercial engravings sourced from contemporary photographs to the complex relationship between his late-career paintings of life in the Bahamas, Florida, and Cuba and the emergent trend of tourist photography. The authors argue that Homer’s understanding of the camera’s ability to create an image that is simultaneously accurate and capable of deception was vitally important to his artistic practice in all media. Richly illustrated and full of exciting new discoveries, Winslow Homer and the Camera is a long-overdue examination of the ways in which photography shaped the vision of one of America’s most original painters.