Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Murillo: From Heaven to Earth



September 18, 2022—January 29, 2023
Kimbell Art Museum |


The Kimbell Art Museum presents Murillo: From Heaven to Earth, a comprehensive exhibition of works by Spanish Golden Age painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682). The leading religious painter of Seville during his time, Murillo is primarily known for his depictions of the life of Christ, Christian saints, and other Biblical scenes, including monumental paintings of the Virgin in celestial glory. While Murillo: From Heaven to Earth includes a number of these religious paintings, its focus is instead on his earthly pictures of secular subjects and representations of everyday life in the 17th century, which constitute some of the artist’s most iconic pictures. Guillaume Kientz, director of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York and former curator of European art at the Kimbell, serves as curator for the exhibition, which will be seen only at the Kimbell. On view from September 18 through January 29, 2023, the show will feature 50 paintings organized around concepts of youth and age, comedy, romance and seduction, compassion, narrative, and modern realism.  



 Images: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Two Women at a Window (detail), c. 1655– 60, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1942.9.46; Saint Thomas of Villanueva Dividing His Clothes Among Beggar Boys, c. 1667, oil on canvas. Cincinnati Art Museum, Bequest of Mary M. Emery, 1927.412; The Marriage Feast at Cana, 1672, o
il on canvas. The Henry Barber Trust, the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom; 
The Flower Girl, 1665–70, oil on canvas. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, DPH199; Four Figures on a Step, c. 1655–60, oil on canvas. Kimbell Art Museum, AP 1984.18; Kimbell Members. Photography by Robert LaPrelle, Kimbell Art Museum

Murillo: From Heaven to Earth is the largest gathering of paintings in the United States by the artist since the Kimbell’s 2002 exhibition, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, 1617–1682: Paintings from American Collections, and expands the scope of the focused exhibitions on the artist’s portraits (Frick Collection, 2017) and the New Testament narrative of the Prodigal Son (Meadows Museum, 2022). The show is inspired by the Murillo masterpiece Four Figures on a Step, which was acquired by the Kimbell in 1984 and is one of the museum’s most compelling and enigmatic paintings. A rare work in Murillo’s oeuvre, the image depicts street life in Seville with an unsettling cast of characters. In contrast to his iconographic works, Murillo’s intimate depictions of the poor and narratives of charity embody a culture—both visual and literary, stretching from Northern Europe to Spain—that would, for the first time in modern history, make the lower classes the main subjects of its pictorial narratives and written tales. 

“Murillo’s depictions of everyday scenes are especially remarkable because they have no real precedent in Spain,” said Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “The show hopes to shed new light on these paintings’ complex meanings, revealing their importance in their own time and suggesting their relevance in our own.”  

This exhibition brings together some of Murillo’s most exceptional and unusual genre scenes from collections worldwide, including San Diego de Alcala and the Poor from the Real Academia in Madrid, the National Gallery of Art’s Two Women at a Window, and the Young Beggar, on loan from the Musée du Louvre, Paris. A number of religious scenes in which emphatic realism advances the Biblical narrative are included, among them the Marriage Feast at Cana from the Barber Institute, Birmingham, England. The exhibition will also feature another aspect of Murillo’s engagement with contemporary reality—the magnificent, and very worldly, portraits of Spanish clergymen, merchants, and aristocrats who went to the painter for a commemoration of their earthly success and power.   

“While his predecessors achieved a revolution in grounding their art into reality via faithful observation and rendering, Murillo blurs the lines and challenges the boundaries between sacred and secular, earthly and heavenly,” says Guillaume Kientz. 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue with essays and commentaries by leading scholars of Spanish art and culture: Guillaume Kientz, director of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library; Ronni Baer, Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University; Madeleine Haddon, teaching fellow at Edinburgh University; Fernando Loffredo, assistant professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University; and Xavier F. Salomon, deputy director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at the Frick Collection, New York. The Kimbell is pleased to offer free admission to Murillo: From Heaven to Earth during its 50th anniversary week, from October 4 through October 9. 

Edward Hopper’s New York

 

Edward Hopper’s New York, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from October 19, 2022, through March 5, 2023, offers an unprecedented examination of Hopper’s life and work in the city that he called home for nearly six decades (1908–67). The exhibition charts the artist’s enduring fascination with the city through more than 200 paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings from the Whitney’s preeminent collection of Hopper’s work, loans from public and private collections, and archival materials including printed ephemera, correspondence, photographs, and notebooks. From early sketches to paintings from his late in his career, Edward Hopper’s New York reveals a vision of the metropolis that is as much a manifestation of Hopper himself as it is a record of a changing city, whose perpetual and sometimes tense reinvention feels particularly relevant today.

Instantly recognizable paintings featured in the exhibition, such as Automat (1927), Early Sunday Morning (1930), Room in New York (1932), New York Movie (1939), and Morning Sun (1952), are joined by lesser-known yet critically important compositions including a series of watercolors of New York rooftops and bridges and the painting City Roofs (1932).

Edward Hopper’s New York offers a remarkable opportunity to celebrate an ever-changing yet timeless city through the work of an American icon,” says Adam D. Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum. “As New York bounces back after two challenging years of global pandemic, this exhibition reconsiders the life and work of Edward Hopper, serves as a barometer of our times, and introduces a new generation of audiences to Hopper’s work by a new generation of scholars. This exhibition offers fresh perspectives and radical new insights.”

Edward Hopper’s New York is organized by Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints, with Melinda Lang, Senior Curatorial Assistant, at the Whitney.

Edward Hopper and New York City
Born in the Hudson River town of Nyack, New York, in 1882, Hopper first visited Manhattan on family day trips. After completing high school, he commuted to the city by ferry to attend the New York School of Illustration and the New York School of Art. In 1908 he moved to the city, and he spent the majority of his life, from 1913 until his death in 1967, living and working in a top-floor apartment at 3 Washington Square North in Greenwich Village. He was joined there by his wife, the artist Josephine (Jo) Verstille Nivison, following their marriage in 1924. Jo played a crucial supportive and collaborative role in Hopper’s practice, serving as his longstanding model and chief record-keeper. A selection of Jo’s watercolors, capturing their Washington Square home, are included in Edward Hopper’s New York.

“Hopper lived most of his life right here, only blocks from where the Whitney stands today,” says Conaty. “He experienced the same streets and witnessed the incessant cycles of demolition and construction that continue today, as New York reinvents itself again and again. Yet, as few others have done so poignantly, Hopper captured a city that was both changing and changeless, a particular place in time and one distinctly shaped by his imagination. Seeing his work through this lens opens new pathways for exploring even Hopper’s most iconic works.”

Over the course of his career, Hopper observed the city assiduously, honing his understanding of its built environment and the particularities of the modern urban experience. During this time, New York underwent tremendous development—skyscrapers reached record-breaking heights, construction sites roared across the five boroughs, and the increasingly diverse population boomed—yet Hopper’s depictions remained human-scale and largely unpopulated. Deliberately avoiding the famous skyline and picturesque landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building, Hopper instead turned his attention to unsung utilitarian structures and out-of-the-way corners, drawn to the collisions of new and old, civic and residential, public and private that captured the paradoxes of the changing city.

Edward Hopper’s New York: The Exhibition
Organized in thematic chapters spanning Hopper’s entire career, the installation comprises eight sections including four expansive gallery spaces showcasing many of Hopper’s most celebrated paintings and four pavilions that focus on key topics through dynamic groupings of paintings, works on paper, and archival materials, many of which have rarely been exhibited to the public.

Edward Hopper’s New York begins with early sketches and paintings from the artist’s first years traveling into and around the city, from 1899 to 1915, as he grew from a commuting art student to a Greenwich Village resident. In Moving Train (c. 1900), Tugboat with Black Smokestack (1908), and El Station (1908) he observed the ways people occupied and moved through space within a dramatically developing urban environment.

Although Hopper aspired to recognition as a painter, his first successes came in print through his illustrations and etchings, an important history featured in a section of the exhibition titled “The City in Print.” His artworks for illustrations and published commissions for magazines and advertisements often featured urban motifs inspired by New York—theaters, restaurants, offices, and city dwellers—that would become foundational to his art. During this early period, he also consolidated many of his impressions of New York through etchings like East Side Interior (1922) and The Open Window (c. 1918–19), which preview the dramatic use of light that has become synonymous with Hopper’s work.

“The Window,” the next section, focuses on this enduring motif for Hopper—one that he explored with great interest in his city scenes. While strolling New York’s streets and riding its elevated trains, Hopper was particularly drawn to the fluid boundaries between public and private space in a city where all aspects of everyday life—from goods in a storefront display to unguarded moments in a café—are equally exposed. In paintings on view such as Automat (1927), Night Windows (1928), and Room in Brooklyn (1932), Hopper imagines the unlimited compositional and narrative possibilities of the city’s windowed facades, the potential for looking and being looked at, and the discomfiting awareness of being alone in a crowd.

Edward Hopper’s New York presents, for the first time together, the artist's panoramic cityscapes, installed as a group in a section of the exhibition titled “The Horizontal City.” Early Sunday Morning (1930), Manhattan Bridge Loop (1928), Blackwell’s Island (1928), Apartment Houses, East River (c. 1930), and Macomb’s Dam Bridge (1935), five paintings made between 1928 and 1935, all share nearly identical dimensions and format. Seen together, they offer invaluable insight into Hopper’s contrarian vision of the growing city at a time when New York was increasingly defined by its relentless skyward development.

“Washington Square” highlights the importance of Hopper’s neighborhood as his home and muse for nearly 55 years. Paintings like City Roofs (1932) and November, Washington Square (1932/1959) show Hopper’s fascination with the city views visible from his windows and his rooftop, and a rare series of watercolors—a practice he generally reserved for his travels to New England and elsewhere—reveals how attuned he was to the spatial dynamics and subtleties of the city’s built environment. As documented in the exhibited correspondence and notebooks, the Hoppers were fierce advocates of Washington Square, and they argued tirelessly for the preservation of their neighborhood as a haven for artists and as one of the city’s cultural landmarks.

“Theater,” a particularly revealing gallery in the exhibition, explores Hopper’s passion for the stage and the critical role it played as an active mode of spectatorship and source of visual inspiration. This section includes archival items like the Hoppers’ preserved ticket stubs and theatergoing notebooks and highlights the ways that theater spaces and set design influenced Hopper’s compositions through works like Two on the Aisle (1927) and The Sheridan Theatre (1937). Additionally, the presentation of New York Movie (1939) and a group of its preparatory studies along with figural sketches for other paintings reveal the Hoppers’ collaborative scene staging, in which Jo played an active part as model.

Throughout his career, Hopper explored the city with sketchbook in hand, recording his observations through drawing, a practice highlighted in this section of the exhibition. A large selection of his sketches and preparatory studies on view in “Sketching New York” chart Hopper’s favored locations across the city, many of which the artist returned to again and again in order to capture different impressions that he could later explore on canvas.

Finally, in “Reality and Fantasy,” a group of ambitious late paintings, characterized by radically simplified geometry and uncanny, dreamlike settings, reveal how New York increasingly served as a stage set or backdrop for Hopper’s evocative distillations of urban experience. In works such as Morning in a City (1944), Sunlight on Brownstones (1956), and Sunlight in a Cafeteria (1958), Hopper created compositions that depart from specific sites while still tapping into urban sensations, reflecting his desire, as noted in his personal journal “Notes on Painting”, to create a “realistic art from which fantasy can grow.”

For more information about the artworks included in this exhibition, please see Conaty’s catalogue essay Approaching a City: Hopper and New York.

Edward Hopper and the Whitney Museum of American Art
Edward Hopper’s career and work have been a touchstone for the Whitney since before the Museum was founded. In 1920, at the age of thirty-seven, Hopper had his first solo exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club. He was included in a number of exhibitions there before it closed in 1928 to make way for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which opened in 1931. Hopper’s work appeared in the inaugural Whitney Biennial in 1932 and in twenty-nine subsequent Biennials and Annuals through 1965, as well as several group exhibitions. The Whitney was among the first museums to acquire a Hopper painting for its collection. In 1968, Hopper’s widow, the artist Josephine Nivison Hopper bequeathed the entirety of his artistic holdings–2,500 paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings–and many of her own works from their Washington Square studio residence. Today the Whitney’s collection holds over 3,100 works by Hopper, more than any other museum in the world.

“Given Hopper’s status in the Whitney's history and within the ranks of American art history, this periodic reconsideration and regular reckoning is imperative and a critical obligation,” says Weinberg.



Catalogue




An accompanying exhibition catalogue, Edward Hopper’s New York, published by the Whitney and distributed by Yale University Press, features essays by curator Kim Conaty, writer and critic Kirsty Bell, scholar Darby English, and artist David Hartt. Alongside these essays are four focused texts that draw upon the resources made newly available through the Museum’s Sanborn Hopper Archive. These contributions are authored by Whitney staff members who have been working closely with the archive, including Farris Wahbeh, Benjamin and Irma Weiss Director of Research Resources; Jennie Goldstein, Assistant Curator; Melinda Lang, Senior Curatorial Assistant; and David Crane, former Curatorial Fellow. The publication features more than three hundred illustrations and fresh insights from authoritative and emerging scholars. Copies are available for purchase online and in the Whitney Shop ($65.00).

Images



 Edward Hopper, Night Shadows, 1921. Etching, 12 × 15 15/16 in. (30.5 × 40.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.1047. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society




Edward Hopper, Manhattan Bridge Loop, 1928. Oil on canvas, 35 × 60 in. (88.9 × 152.4 cm). Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy Art Resource, NY





Edward Hopper, Sunlight on Brownstones, 1956. Oil on canvas, 30 3/8 × 40 1/4 in. (71.1 × 101.6 cm). Wichita Art Museum, KS, Roland P. Murdock Collection. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

Modernist Diaspora: Immigrant Jewish Artists in Paris, 1900-1945,

 


In the early 20th century, there was perhaps no greater source of creative vitality than the artistic communities at work in the city of Paris, France.

Among the most profound and prolific were a cohort of young Jewish immigrants, who arrived with varying levels of training and contact with their artistic traditions, yet who created among the most innovative and stunning examples of contemporary art.



Their experiences are the subject of Modernist Diaspora: Immigrant Jewish Artists in Paris, 1900-1945, a new book by historian Richard Sonn.

Rich with examples from period art, Sonn reveals the critical role of intellectual and cultural exchange among the city’s Jewish immigrant artists in creating the vibrancy of Parisian modernism. By tracing the experiences of Jewish artists who made their way to Paris in the years between the beginning of the 20th century and the end of the World War II, the author gives readers a close look at a unique cultural and social environment that was key to the work of a generation of artists who “produced the greatest efflorescence of art in the long history of the Jewish people.”

At the heart of the book is the left-bank neighborhood of Montparnasse, where Jewish painters and sculptors gathered amidst the rising tide of antisemitism and nationalism in Europe. The works of great artists such as Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and Sonia Delaunay-Terk were created here, made possible by the diverse, cosmopolitan society of Paris and the swirling artistic trends of the 20th century.

“The matrix of modernism granted immigrant artists the right to innovate freely and independently, while the artists’ colony allowed its denizens to live differently, in ways that challenged prevailing attitudes toward racism, antisemitism and militarism,” Sonn said.

The last chapter explains how these artists responded personally and artistically to the Holocaust, with the lucky ones finding exile in the U.S. and Switzerland, and others going into hiding in the south of France. More than a hundred were deported, of whom only a handful returned to Paris.

Published by Bloomsbury, Modernist Diaspora: Immigrant Jewish Artists in Paris, 1900-1945 includes 60 illustrations, most in color.

Richard Sonn is professor of history at the University of Arkansas, where he specializes in modern European and modern French history and is active in the university's Jewish Studies program. His previous work has emphasized cultural and intellectual history in France, with a keen interest in the emerging modernist milieu of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His previous books include Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin-de-Siècle France, published by University of Nebraska Press; Anarchism by Twayne Publishers; and Sex, Violence, and the Avant Garde: Anarchism in Interwar France, by Penn State University Press.

Wednesday, August 17, 2022

A Time of Toil and Triumph: Selections from the Shogren-Meyer Collection of American Art




Grohmann Museum, Milwaukee

Sept. 9, 2022—Feb. 26, 2023 

As a part of its 15th anniversary celebration, the Grohmann Museum is organizing a blockbuster exhibition from one of the premier collections of American industrial art—The Shogren-Meyer Collection. A collection focused primarily on the art of the 1930s and 40s, it also includes many fine examples from the surrounding decades, with many created during the depression era—a time of both toil and triumph.


A grand opening event will be held for A Time of Toil and Triumph on Friday, Sept. 9 from 5 to 8 p.m. The free event will include a Gallery Talk with the collectors, Dan Shogren and Susan Meyer at 6:30 p.m.


Now making their home in the Twin Cities, Shogren and Meyer met while in college at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where both majored in history. It was at that time they took a keen interest in the era on which the collection is based, the “interwar period,” a time of American reinvention—economically, socially, and artistically.


They have since built one of the finest collections of American Art concentrated on this time. Selected from the hundreds of works in their collection, A Time of Toil and Triumph will include dozens of paintings and photographs by Aaron Bohrod, Margaret Bourke-White, John Steuart Curry, Walker Evans, Lewis Hine, Edmund Lewandowski, Dorothea Lange, Thornton Oakley, and Isaac Soyer, among many others.




John Stockton De Martelly (1903-1979), Whiskey Going into Barrels to Age (Marking the Casks), 1946, Oil on canvas, 36 x 33 in.



Robert Gilbert (1907–1988) Industrial Composition, 1932, Oil on canvas, 47 x 34 in.



Joe Jones (1909–1963), Levee, 1933, Oil on canvas, 30 x 41 in.



Edmund Lewandowski (1914-1998), The Waterfront (Buoy Tenders), 1935, Oil on canvas, 32 x 47 in.



Thornton Oakley (1881-1953), The Wonderland of Oil, ca.1942, Pastel and gouache on paper, 30 x 40 in.