Tuesday, May 26, 2020

THE MASTER OF MONDSEE

Upper Belvedere
7 February to 13 September, 2020

The Master of Mondsee, The Flight into Egypt, c. 1475–81, on the St. Wolfgang altarpiece Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna

Master of Mondsee, The Circumcision of Christ, c. 1495–99. From the Mondsee altarpiece (Reproduction, original in the next room). Photo: Johannes Stoll © Belvedere, Vienna.

As part of its IN-SIGHT series, the Belvedere is dedicating a first monographic exhibition to one of the most significant late-medieval painters in Austria: the Master of Mondsee. It centers on the work that gave this anonymous artist his name—the paintings from a Gothic winged altarpiece that were probably once in the abbey church at Mondsee. Stella Rollig, CEO of the Belvedere: “This time our focus is on an outstanding artist in Austria around 1500 and a major work in the Belvedere’s collection of medieval art. For the first time, this show is bringing together all the surviving works from the Mondsee altarpiece and placing this masterpiece in an art- and cultural historical context.” Enchanting depictions of the Virgin Mary, crowded scenes from the childhood of Christ, learned Church Fathers in their studies, and, last but not least, the atmospheric spring landscape from the Flight into Egypt define the varied oeuvre of the Master of Mondsee. This virtuoso painter contributed to a final flowering of the art of the Late Gothic altarpiece at the end of the Middle Ages. By bringing together all the surviving panels from the Mondsee altarpiece, this exhibition provides the first opportunity to appreciate this outstanding work of art as a whole. Veronika Pirker-Aurenhammer, curator of the exhibition: “This show finally reunites the scattered ensemble of paintings from the Mondsee altarpiece after more than two hundred years. It was only in 2015 that the long-lost final painting from the series was acquired by the Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum in Linz. Now, for the first time, we can present the Master of Mondsee’s work in conjunction with the latest research.” 3 The exhibition The IN-SIGHT series of exhibitions was devised in order to analyze and present artists and works from the Belvedere’s collection. The Mondsee altarpiece at the heart of the show is the only established work by this painter, whose name, like so many medieval masters, is unknown. Eight paintings have survived from the lost altarpiece and are distributed across three different collections. The five most well known are in the Belvedere. Two panels were recently acquired from private collections by the Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum in Linz and one work is in the Liechtenstein Princely Collections, Vaduz–Vienna. These two most recent acquisitions have filled a gap in public access to this important ensemble of pictures, which had been separated and scattered following the dissolution of Mondsee Abbey in 1791. The Gothic altarpiece itself—its framework and carvings— probably fell victim to Mondsee abbey church’s earlier conversion into the Baroque style. This makes it all the more fortunate that the paintings from the altarpiece wings escaped destruction and can now be shown together for the first time. The work is introduced from various perspectives and set in a “frame narrative” outlining the historical context, the art of contemporaries, and various sources of inspiration for the subject matter. Part of the exhibition is devoted to the commissioning of the altarpiece by Abbot Benedikt Eck von Vilsbiburg, who appears as the donor in one of the paintings together with the Mondsee coat of arms. Mondsee abbey church was rebuilt in Gothic style during his abbacy. Earlier on Benedikt had commissioned Michael Pacher to create the high altarpiece at St. Wolfgang pilgrimage church, an important influence for the Master of Mondsee. A selection of comparative works demonstrate how the Master of Mondsee engaged with the art of Michael Pacher as well as with prints and other visual sources. There are many indications that the painter had a remarkably wide education and was familiar with Netherlandish art. But 4 he absorbed these influences in a highly individual way giving rise to such an unmistakeable style. One chapter in the exhibition examines the painter’s highly detailed underdrawings revealed by new infrared reflectographs from the Belvedere’s conservation department. These testify to the Master of Mondsee’s skills as a draftsman and offer fascinating glimpses of the creative process behind the images.

ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION

The Master of Mondsee Gabriel Mälesskircher Eberhard Kieser Rudolf von Alt Ferdinand Runk Master E.S. Martin Schongauer Israhel van Meckenem Monogrammist AG Monogrammist BM Michael Pacher The Master of Großgmain The Master of the Habsburgs The Master of the Saints‘ Matyrdoms Painter from the South Tyrol (?) #BelvedereInsight

Into the Night Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art

Lower Belvedere and Orangery

14 February 2020 - 1 June 2020

he exhibition Into the Night explores art and culture from the 1880s to the 1960s through the lens of these alternative scenes.

The Exhibition

Zeichnung einer Sängerin mit großer roter Boa

Erna Schmidt-Caroll, Chansonette, c. 1928, Private collection

In Vienna, the Cabaret Fledermaus, founded and designed in 1907 by key members of the Wiener Werkstätte, marked the transition from Secessionism to Expressionism. In Paris in the 1880s, the Chat Noir and its shadow theater anticipated cinema. In Zurich, Dada was founded at the Cabaret Voltaire while in Rome, the nightclub Bal Tic Tac designed by Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero’s Cabaret del Diavolo were incubators of Futurism. Meanwhile, Theo van Doesburg, co-founder of De Stijl, partly shaped the Minimalist design of the Café L’Aubette in Strasbourg. In Berlin between the wars, the electrifying energy of the nightclubs fired the imaginations of artists working in the styles of Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit, such as Otto Dix, Jeanne Mammen, and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler.

Nightclubs, cafés, bars, and cabarets were vibrant hubs of modernism in the twentieth century, providing artists with a platform for a creative exchange of ideas between painting and graphic art, architecture, design, literature, dance and music. The exhibition looks at many of these locations around the world and explores these fertile artistic environments and their lasting influence on the history of art. It deliberately goes beyond the boundaries of a Eurocentric perspective. Not only does it examine the iconic venues of the avant-garde but it also transports the viewer to the Café de Nadie in Mexico City and the Harlem Renaissance at the New York jazz clubs of the 1920s and 1930s, whose protagonists took up the fight against racism. It concludes with the Mbari Clubs, founded in the early 1960s in Ibadan and Osogbo, Nigeria, and the Rasht 29 Art Club, which was opened in Tehran in 1966.

The exhibition has been organized in collaboration with the Barbican, London, where it is on show from October 4, 2019 to January 19, 2020.

Sunday, May 17, 2020

Christie's auction - Lichtenstein, Picasso

On July 10, ONE: A Global Sale of the 20th Century will be highlighted by Roy Lichtenstein’s monumentally scaled,

Nude with Joyous Painting (estimate in the region of $30 million). Painted in 1994 and belonging to an important private American collection, Nude with Joyous Painting is a tour-de-force of Lichtenstein’s consummate series of nudes that are acclaimed as the summation of his late career. The Nudes mark Lichtenstein’s return to the comic-book heroines that propelled him to fame in the early 1960s and together, they rank among his most significant bodies of work. Culled from his prodigious archive of vintage comics, the Nudes marry Lichtenstein’s Pop Art sensibility with the most storied subject in the history of Western art—the female nude. “The later women paintings and nudes that Roy did are just absolutely gorgeous,” the artist Jeff Koons has affirmed, “in terms of beauty and engaging imagery—interesting, viral imagery—-the women are fantastic.” This sale will mark Nude with Joyous Painting’s auction debut.

Ana Maria Celis, Head of Evening Sale, Post-War and Contemporary Art, remarked: “Nude with Joyous Painting is an iconic example of Lichtenstein’s series of Nudes. This tour-de-force of Pop Art marks his return to the comic book heroines that launched his career in the early 60s. In this work, the beautiful heroine is caught in dramatic moment of suspense in stark contrast to a jubilant interior scene.”

The present work joins the ranks of the most important examples of Lichtenstein’s Nudes that have been offered at auction. Christie’s leads the market for this iconic motif, having sold the artist’s top two most expensive nudes, including Seductive Girl, 1996 for $31.5 million in 2013, and Nude with Red Shirt, 1995, for $28 million in 2012.

Shortly after it was painted, Nude with Joyous Painting was debuted at Leo Castelli’s SoHo gallery in November of 1994. There, it was included in a group of seven breakthrough large-scale nude paintings, several of which are in major American public collections, including Nude at Vanity, 1994 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection) and Nude with Pyramid, 1994 (The Broad, Los Angeles).

As a series, the Nudes were the first body of work that Lichtenstein undertook following his extensive Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum retrospective in New York in 1993. The series

Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger

Picasso’s series of 15 canvases based on Eugène Delacroix’s masterpiece Les femmes d’Alger probably rank as his greatest achievement in the decades that followed the Second World War.

He created them in a burst of activity between December 1954 and February 1955, assigning each work an identifying letter, from ‘A’ to ‘O’. On 10 July, the sixth painting in the series — Version ‘F’ — will appear at auction for the first time, in a trailblazing Christie’s sale called ONE.

He painted it on 17 January 1955, aged 73. Delacroix’s Les femmes d’Alger had fascinated him for decades. According to the memoirs of his ex-lover, Françoise Gilot, he would visit the Louvre every month just to stare at it. When she asked what he thought of Delacroix, ‘his eyes narrowed and he said: “That bastard, he’s really good.”’

It wasn’t until late in Picasso’s career that he set about his series of radical reworkings, though. It was prompted by two events in swift succession. One was the arrival in his life of the woman who replaced Gilot in his affections, Jacqueline Roque — who he thought looked uncannily like one of the three odalisques in Delacroix’s harem scene.

The other — much sadder — event was the death of his dear friend and rival, Henri Matisse, in November 1954. The Frenchman had painted a host of stunning odalisque figures in the 1920s and 1930s, and Picasso now felt inspired to attempt his own. ‘Matisse left his odalisques to me as a legacy,’ he said

Each of Picasso’s 15 canvases is a marvel of invention. What makes Version ‘F’ stand out is the way it marks a bridge between the first phase of the series (of regular-sized canvases) and the second, final phase (featuring much larger works).

Version ‘F’ is the culminating picture of the first phase, both brilliantly coloured and spatially ingenious, a composition so fully resolved that Picasso now felt ready to tackle bigger canvases.

His palette is scorching, comprised principally of saturated red and gold tones. The airy white passages found in his previous versions of Les femmes d’Alger are gone, replaced by a dense, expressive weave of Matissean pattern and colour. More than any other painting in the series, it conveys the hothouse atmosphere of a harem.

The scene is dominated by an odalisque sleeping. She manages both to stretch out across the bottom of the canvas — pushing up against a fellow odalisque, who’s smoking, on the left — and extend her legs vertically towards the top of the canvas on the right.

Where Version ‘F’ marked the end of the first phase of Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger variations, Version ‘O’ marked the triumphant end of the second — and the series as a whole. In May 2015, the latter sold at Christie’s in New York for $179.4 million, then the world-record price for an artwork at auction.

STÄDEL’S LEGACY: MASTER DRAWINGS FROM THE FOUNDER’S COLLECTION

Städel Museum

13 May to 16 August 2020

With the bequest of his private art collection, the businessman and banker Johann Friedrich Städel (1728–1816) founded a public art museum of international stature, accessible to all – the Städel Museum. The collector left behind an art treasure encompassing not only paintings and prints but also more than 4,600 drawings. For a long time, it was not possible to determine which of the drawings in the museum’s present-day holdings were originally in his collection. At the time of the bequest, no complete inventory was compiled. Furthermore, in the course the collection’s reorganization in the 1860s, many drawings were sorted out and sold. For the first time, the Städel Museum has now succeeded in reconstructing the founder’s drawing collection to a large extent, and identifying the roughly 3,000 works still in the collection today. From 13 May to 16 August 2020, the Städel Museum is presenting a selection of 95 master drawings providing a representative impression of the character, organization and artistic significance of the former drawing collection of Johann Friedrich Städel. Following the founder’s tradition, the outstanding works by Raphael, Correggio and Primaticcio, Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard, Dürer, Roos and Reinhart, Goltzius, Rembrandt, De Wit and many others are here arranged according to “European schools”. They are moreover discussed in detail in an accompanying catalogue. A portion of these drawings are already known among scholars; others are here being published for the first time.

Master Drawings from the Collection

The exhibition showcases Städel’s drawing collection with a representative selection of 95 master drawings that have remained in the Städel Museum holdings to this day. The founding collection was distinguished by an uncommonly broad spectrum: it mirrored both regional idiosyncrasies and influential artistic figures, shed light on stylistic differences in historical succession and moreover encompassed an abundance of different drawing mediums, each with its own particular purpose.

The Italian drawings, originally numbering 1,300, ranged from the Florentine masters of the late fifteenth century and exponents of the High Renaissance to those of the founder’s own lifetime. Among the great Italian Renaissance artists in Städel’s collection was Raphael (1483–1520), originally represented by 24 works attributed to him. One of those works is the Caryatid of 1519/20 – the last years of the artist’s life – in which he gently ‘modelled’ a marble sculpture in black chalk. An example of an Italian work by a contemporary of Städel’s is Design for stage set with Indian temple, executed by Giorgio Fuentes (1756–1821) around 1796/1800. In those years, Fuentes exerted a formative and lasting influence on the theatre of the city of Frankfurt with his overwhelmingly large and richly detailed stage sceneries. It is not known what play this design was for, but the fancifully exotic details of the architecture suggest a sacred structure in India. The collection of French drawings comprised some 450 works. The earliest, dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century, were by such influential artists as Claude Lorrain (1600–1682) and Sébastien Bourdon (1616–1671). Examples by chief exponents of the eighteenth century, among them Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743), Antoine Watteau (1683–1721) and François Boucher (1703–1770) provided an overview of the stylistic upheavals of that period. Here playful Rococo creations by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) contrasted with drawings distinguished byclassicist clarity. The scene Travelers Find Two Bodies in an Egyptian Burial Chamber by Augustin Félix Fortin (1763–1832) testifies to the fact that rigorous form does not have to go hand in hand with lack of drama. It was a contemporary of Städel’s who rounded out the French school as well: thanks to the substantial number of drawings by Jean-Jacques de Boissieu (1736–1810), landscape depiction took on especial prominence among the holdings in this medium – possibly owing to a personal preference on the part of the collector. German art in the drawing collection spans the period from 1500 to the Enlightenment. Two eighteenth-century artists were particularly well represented. The holdings comprised 950 drawings by Franz Kobell (1749–1822) and Friedrich Wilhelm Hirt (1721–1772) alone – not only small-scale sketches but also composition designs and drawings so fully developed as to rank as artworks in their own right. The share accounted for by other German artists did not even number 300. Among them, however, were masters such as Hans Baldung Grien (1484–1545) and Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). The unconventional Man with lion, carried out by Dürerin 1517, shows a seated nude man with a lion approaching him from the right. Both protagonists are clearly sizing each other up; the scene’s meaning, however, remains a mystery. The view that Dürer was among the most ‘collection-worthy’ German artists was uncontested by Städel’s contemporaries. Even if Städel himself did not have a painting by Dürer to call his own, by means of print and drawing purchases he succeeded in bringing together various phases of the artist’s oeuvre in his collection. With 1,500 drawings, the Dutch/Flemish school accounted for about one third of the collection; approximately half of that number were verifiably sold in the 1860s. This section covered the period from the sixteenth century to Städel’s own time, while also encompassing all genres, with landscapes making up the largest share. Accomplished studies such as Four Studies of a Right Hand, by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617) are an impressive demonstration of the special qualities of drawing, not least of all because they reveal the processual character of artistic creation. Once again, recognized masters and their workshops are represented, first and foremost Rembrandt (1606–1669) – for example with Seated Old Man (The Drunken Lot) of 1633 – and his successors as well as Jacob de Wit (1695–1754) and the van de Velde family.