“Rockwell/Wyeth: Icons of Americana,”

 

The Polk Museum of Art has announced its newest exhibition, “Rockwell/Wyeth: Icons of Americana,” opening on January 27, 2024. Featuring 40 paintings by Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth – along with the complete set of 321 covers of “The Saturday Evening Post” illustrated by Rockwell – this loan-based exhibition showcases the work of two of the most celebrated figures in American art, whose vivid illustrations captured the imaginations of Americans throughout the 20th century and are still admired for their nostalgic qualities to this day.  This exhibition, exclusive to Polk Museum of Art audiences and developed in partnership with the National Museum of American Illustration, offers a rare juxtaposition of Rockwell and Wyeth examined side by side as a principal scholarly focus.

Norman Rockwell_NR-Visits-a-Country-School

Rockwell_Young-Girl-Holding-Coke

Wyeth (1882-1945) and Rockwell (1894-1978), each with a distinctive style, rose to prominence and national acclaim in different eras, but both became household names through the everyday familiarity and accessibility of their work to Americans everywhere. While the nature of the artists’ commercial work was wide-ranging, from advertisements to magazine covers, as the exhibition explores in depth, Wyeth is best known as a prolific book illustrator, who invigorated the pages of Scribner Classics like “Treasure Island” and “Robin Hood.” Likewise, Rockwell is synonymous with “The Saturday Evening Post” and the cover illustrations he produced for it, art that sought simultaneously to sell magazines and to reflect shifting American interests and values across several decades.

“Rockwell and Wyeth remain among the biggest names in the history of American art, and, after years of planning, we are excited to unveil this original, scholarly exhibition to our visitors,” said H. Alexander Rich, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Museum. “So many of our shared visions of a seemingly simpler, not-too-distant American past — however idealized they might be — have been shaped through the prism of Rockwell and Wyeth’s illustrations.”

“Rockwell/Wyeth: Icons of Americana” will be on view in the Museum’s Dorothy Jenkins Gallery, Harper Family Gallery, and Perkins Gallery from January 27 to May 26, 2024.

Images:

Book - “Illuminating the Vitae patrum: The Lives of the Desert Ascetics in Fourteenth-Century Italy,”

This is the first book to extensively examine the richly illustrated manuscript of the Vitae patrum housed at the Morgan Library and Museum.

Drawing upon scholarship on the history of psychology, eastern monasticism, gender and hagiography, a new book from Denva Gallant, assistant professor of art history at Rice University, explores a deeper understanding of the intersection of visual culture and spirituality in medieval Italy.

“Illuminating the Vitae patrum: The Lives of the Desert Ascetics in Fourteenth-Century Italy,” is the first book to extensively examine the richly illustrated manuscript of the Vitae patrum (MS. M. 626) housed at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, providing a comprehensive analysis of its historical and cultural significance.

“The manuscript’s extraordinary illustrations serve as a singular witness to the era’s evolving religious practices, making the desert saints’ teachings compelling and accessible to fourteenth-century city dwellers,” Gallant said, explaining how it deepens our understanding of the centrality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers to late medieval piety.

By focusing on the most extensively illuminated manuscript of the Vitae patrum during the Trecento, the book sheds new light on the ways in which images communicated and reinforced modes of piety.

Denva Gallant, assistant professor of art history at Rice University, explores a deeper understanding of the intersection of visual culture and spirituality in medieval Italy in her new book.

Published by Penn State University Press in 2024, “Illuminating the Vitae patrum” is a result of prestigious grants, including the College Art Association Millard Meiss Publication Fund Grant and a 2022 ICMA-Kress Research and Publication Grant, underscoring its significance in the field of medieval studies.

The book is yet another avenue for Gallant to deliver scholarship on the Desert Fathers to a wider audience. Collaborating with the Mivos Quartet and composer Christopher Stark, she has also performed text from “The Lives of the Desert Fathers,” connecting with the public through a unique blend of scholarly and artistic expression.

Gallant brings a wealth of expertise in European medieval art and architecture to this groundbreaking work. Her scholarly contributions extend to narrative, the eremitic ideal, environmental imaginaries, race and ethnicity in late medieval Italy and patronage in the Middle Ages.

Universum Max Beckmann

 Kunstmuseum The Hague)

January 27 to May 20, 2024

Sharp angles, alienating perspectives, oppressive frames. The painter Max Beckmann uses all kinds of techniques to manipulate the space in his paintings. The painted picture surface is his domain; through painting, Beckmann gets a grip on reality, which for him consists of physical but also spiritual dimensions. With his unique imagination of space, he is one of the most idiosyncratic and unique artists of the twentieth century. In the exhibition Universum Max Beckmann, Kunstmuseum The Hague examines – for the first time – the painter's oeuvre based on his imagination of space.

Universe Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann (1884-1950) fills his paintings with images and meanings that cannot be immediately unraveled; a special visual language, which he develops based on countless sources (literature, religion, mythology) and his own observations. His paintings are charged, intellectual, spiritual. But the German-born Beckmann is just as much a sophisticated 'man of the world' who incorporates the influences of modern times into his work. He immerses himself in contemporary forms of entertainment: the magical world of theater, circus and cinema are important impulses. Technological developments in the film literally offer new perspectives; developments that he follows closely, and are recognizable in the way in which Beckmann himself comes to view the world. Fragments from some influential productions from this time can be seen in Universum Max Beckmann .

In his paintings, Max Beckmann follows the traditional genres of painting: portraits, still lifes, landscapes (including sea and city views) and mythological and historical scenes. The innovative and modern aspect of his work therefore lies not so much in his choice of subject, but rather in his elaboration of it. By taking elements from that reality and rearranging them in his performances, he gains a grip on the world around him.

Especially the way in which he represents, or actually manipulates, space is unique. From the early monumental, traditional compositions to sharp frames, angular and alienating perspectives, stacks, cut-offs and striking formats. Feverish performances sometimes, with countless objects and figures in often defined, oppressive spaces. Perspectives that are not separate from the artist's life and resonate with the turbulent Europe during and between two world wars. Are Beckmann's paintings a reaction to the changing society? Are they processing his own experiences, during the war or later, when he fled Germany?

After formative periods in Weimar
, Berlin and Florence, and after the traumatic experiences of the First World War, Max Beckmann's reputation grew rapidly. In the interwar period he was based in Frankfurt. His work is published and exhibited, he teaches at the prestigious Städelschule, and he regularly travels to Paris or Berlin. A room with his work in Berlin's National Gallery – an honor that no other living artist deserves – is the crowning achievement of the work.

However, when the National Socialists seized power in 1933, Max Beckmann's success began to crumble. There is no room for his progressive, modern painting in the Germany they envision. Beckmann loses his appointment at the Städelschule, 'his' hall of honor in Berlin is vacated, exhibitions of his work no longer take place. With the painful exception of the exhibition of 'degenerate' art – a comprehensive overview of what art, according to the National Socialists, should not be. He flees Germany with his wife Quappi, never to return.

They travel to the Netherlands, where he is fairly well known and has painted several seascapes: Scheveningen, Zandvoort, places of which he cherishes fond memories. From there he wants to move on to Paris, or better yet: New York. He sees a future there for him and his wife. Interest in his work is also growing there. But they are overtaken by reality: due to the outbreak of the Second World War, further travel is no longer possible. The artist was forced to settle in Amsterdam, where he was able to move into a house with a studio on the Rokin.

This forced 'isolation' leads to the most productive phase of Beckmann's life. Here, in the Netherlands, during this period, he perfected his now recognizable formal language. Alienating compositions, in which the picture plane is completely filled; ambitious compositions, imposing sizes, figures and objects crammed together. The painter paints his paintings in bright colors that contrast strongly with the typical, heavy contours.

While the world is in chaos, Beckmann continues to paint. The right contacts ensure that he can still sell his canvases in wartime, especially to collectors in Germany and the United States. The acclaimed painter had less success in the Netherlands - it was only at the end of the war that the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam acquired the important double portrait of Beckmann and his wife.

After the war, Beckmann managed to emigrate to the United States. He received an appointment at Washington University in Saint-Louis, later also in New York. Here he receives the recognition that he might have received earlier under other circumstances: as one of the leaders of modern, Western European painting. He died in New York in 1950.

Max Beckmann and Kunstmuseum The Hague
Max Beckmann has a unique position in Western European art history. His expressive paintings and focus on the inner suggest a debt to German Expressionism. His vision of painting, which in his view cannot be anything other than figurative, also characterizes an alliance with new realistic trends after the First World War, the returns a l'ordre . Movements that traditionally form important core collections of Kunstmuseum The Hague.

Between 1921 and 1926, the museum acquired five lithographs by Max Beckmann from the period 1921-1923; the first purchases of his work in the Netherlands. Only after his death, in 1956, was a major retrospective of his work shown in The Hague. That year, the museum acquired the first painting by Beckmann for the collection: Small café, revolving door (1944). In 2021 it was able to add a second painting: Bathers with a green changing cabin and skippers with red trousers, painted in 1934 after a visit to the Dutch coast.

Universe Max Beckmann shows a cross-section of the oeuvre of a unique painter. The exhibition shows the world through the eyes of Max Beckmann, who gives meaning to the chaos of the modern world around him with a special, personal visual language and idiosyncratic representation of space.

Catalog
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog with contributions from, among others, Daniel Koep (Head of Exhibitions, Kunstmuseum The Hague), Thijs de Raedt (Curator, Kunstmuseum The Hague), Oliver Kase (Head of Modern Art, Pinakothek Munich) and Vera de Lange (Film historian). The catalog is published by Waanders.

Images

Max Beckmann, Bathers with green changing cabin and skippers with red trousers, 1934. Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm. Art Museum The Hague, purchased with financial support from the Rembrandt Association, the Mondriaan Fund, VriendenLoterij, Kunstmuseum Fund and the Mondriaan Business Club.

Max Beckmann, Reclining Nude with Dog, 1927. Oil on canvas, 67 x 47 cm. Museum Wiesbaden

Max Beckmann, The Soldier's Dream, 1942. Oil on canvas, 90 x 145 cm. Hilti Art Foundation, Vaduz

Actors, 1941-1942, oil on canvas (triptych), right part 199.4 x 83.7 cm, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA, Gift of Lois Orswell.

Actors, 1941-1942, oil on canvas (triptych), detail from right part 199.4 x 83.7 cm, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA, Gift of Lois Orswell.

Actors, 1941-42, Oil on canvas, left: 199.4 × 83.7 cm / center: 199.4 × 150 cm / right: 199.4 × 83.7 cm, Harvard Art Museums, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge , MA. Gift of Lois Orswell, Photo: President and Fellows of Harvard College

Max Beckmann, Double portrait, 1941. Oil on canvas, 193.5 x 89 cm. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Frans Hals

The Frans Hals exhibition will open in the Rijksmuseum on February 16, 2024 , with approximately fifty of the best works by the Haarlem master from international top collections.

Due to his loose, impressionistic way of painting, Frans Hals is seen as one of the most innovative painters of the 17th century. Whether they were stately regents, cheerful musicians or laughing children, with his unparalleled talent and courage he depicted them so vividly that it almost seems as if they were really breathing.

The Frans Hals exhibition is organized in collaboration with the National Gallery London and the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and with special cooperation from the  Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. 

Only in Amsterdam are the never-before-lent 

Detail

Feast of the Officers of the St. George's Civic Guard from 1616, and the 

Regentesses of the Oude Mannenhuis from ca. 1664 (both Frans Hals Museum), 

Laughing Fisherman's Boy , ca. 1630 from a private collection 

and 

Laughing Boy , ca. 1625 from the Mauritshuis.

Thanks to a historic decision by the Wallace Collection in London to lend works, one of Hals' best-known paintings, 

The Laughing Cavalier from 1624, is returning to the Netherlands for the first time since 1870.

Frans Hals takes the main stage for the first time in the Rijksmuseum, just a 15-minute train ride from Haarlem, the city where he worked, lived and died. With a walk through Haarlem, a visit to the Frans Hals Museum and the family graves in the St. Bavo Church, the visitor can get even closer to Frans Hals.

Frans Hals can be seen in the Philips Wing of the Rijksmuseum. A start time is required. Reservations via www.rijksmuseum.nl .

MASTER OF LIVELINESS AND LAUGHTER

Frans Hals (Antwerp 1582/1584 – Haarlem 1666) set himself the goal of portraying a living person as convincingly as possible. He deliberately and courageously searched for his own style that was completely original within 17th-century Dutch painting. Hals opted for a rapid brushwork that gave his subjects unprecedented mobility. As one of the few artists in Western art history, Hals succeeded in painting people smiling and laughing, a challenge that most painters avoided because it was so difficult. In the exhibition, the Rijksmuseum focuses on the identity of the people depicted and their environment, making them come even more to life. For example, 

Malle Babbe must have been a well-known figure on the streets of Haarlem, and his 

Pekelharing was probably an English actor who toured the Netherlands with a theater company.

BACK ON STAGE

In his own time, Frans Hals was seen as a groundbreaking innovator for his original style and technique, rivaled only by painters such as Rembrandt in the Netherlands and Velázquez in Spain. He was a much sought-after portraitist, who counted not only wealthy Haarlem citizens among his clients, but also those from other Dutch cities. Hals' work slowly fell into oblivion over the course of the 18th century. It took until the second half of the 19th century to be rediscovered, like Vermeer, by the French art critic and journalist Théophile Thoré-Bürger (1807-1869). Until the 1960s, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Frans Hals were referred to as 'the big three' of 17th-century Dutch painting. After that, the attention paid to him visibly diminished. The last major retrospective was in 1989 and 1990 at The Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and The National Gallery of Art in Washington. Time for the Rijksmuseum to put Hals back on stage after more than thirty years and show a new generation how groundbreaking he was.

FORERUNNER OF IMPRESSIONISM

The very loose brushstroke has always been seen as the most distinguishing feature of Hals' art. He can rightly be called the forerunner of impressionism. With his virtuoso touch he influenced painters such as Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, James McNeil Whistler, Claude Monet, Max Liebermann, Vincent van Gogh and John Singer Sargent. Almost all of them came to Haarlem to admire his portraits and militia pieces.

LOANS

The Frans Hals exhibition shows important works from his oeuvre, which now consists of approximately 200 works, such as the Laughing Cavalier (1624, Wallace Collection, London), 

Catharina Hooft with her nurse , ca. 1619/20) and Malle Babbe , c. 1640 (both Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), 

Family in a Landscape , c. 1646 (Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), Young Woman with a Display of Fruit and Vegetables , 1630, (Private Collection) and 

The Lute Player , c. 1623 (Musée du Louvre). 

The Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem lends no fewer than four militia and regent pieces. Hals's earliest militia piece, Feast of the Officers of the St. George's Civic Guard (1616, Frans Hals Museum) has never left Haarlem.

THEMATIC APPROACH

Compared to the National Gallery London and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, where the Frans Hals exhibition can be seen before and after Amsterdam respectively, the Rijksmuseum opts for a thematic approach instead of a chronological one. The 10 rooms of the Philips Wing are dedicated to portraits and pendants, laughter, family, small works, and militia pieces.

COMPOSITION AND DESIGN

Frans Hals was compiled by the Rijksmuseum curators of 17th-century Dutch Painting Friso Lammertse and Tamar van Riessen in collaboration with Bart Cornelis of The National Gallery London. The French architect and designer Jean-Michel Wilmotte created the exhibition design. The graphic design and associated publications are provided by the Dutch designer Irma Boom.

PUBLICATION FRANS HALS

Authors: Bart Cornelis, Friso Lammertse, Justine Rinnooy Kan, Jaap van der Veen
Dutch and English edition, 224 pages
NL ISBN 978 94 9266 043 5 (softcover), ENG ISBN 978 94 9266 044 2 (softcover)
Price: 35 euros
Published in collaboration with The National Gallery, London and Hannibal Books, Veurne

Peggy Bacon: Biting, never Bitter

 

PORTLAND MUSEUM OF ART

June 14, 2024, through February 2, 2025

Peggy Bacon (United States, 1895-1987), Auction Notice, 1931, ink on wove paper, 7 1/2 x 8 3/4 inches. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Museum purchase with support from May-Leigh Call Smart, 1981.1089

 

 

Peggy Bacon: Biting, never Bitter explores the humor and sharp wit of one of the most insightful visual and literary artists of the 20th century.  

On view at the Portland Museum of Art June 14, 2024, through February 2, 2025, Biting, never Bitter represents a timely and noteworthy solo presentation of Peggy Bacon’s wry observations of her social, professional, and artistic networks during the 1920s and 1930s. Featuring more than 60 prints, drawings, paintings, and pastels, Peggy Bacon: Biting, never Bitter is a testament to her enduring influence on the artistic landscapes in Maine, New York, and beyond. 

Born in Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1895, Peggy Bacon (1895–1987) began her formal art education in 1913 at the School of Applied Arts for Women in New York, and later at the Art Students League of New York until 1920, receiving instruction from Kenneth Hayes Miller and prominent Ashcan School artists John Sloan and George Bellows. Bacon built upon the Ashcan School’s portrayals of the grit and reality of everyday life, bringing her own sharp humor and distinctively modern style to subjects in print, paint, and word.  

Biting, never Bitter is particularly focused on Bacon’s time as a student at the Art Students League of New York, with the intention of highlighting this formative period in her career when the artist first discovered drypoint printmaking—a favorite technique throughout her lifetime and the medium for which she is best known today. Indeed, most of Bacon’s early work provides important insights into the social culture of the League at that time, drawn from her own experiences. Many of these documentary prints, often bearing a hint of humor, foreshadow what would become a widely recognized aspect of her artistic career: caricature and cartoon. The artist’s first caricatures appeared in the student-produced magazine Bad News, published by Bacon and her peers at the Art Students League in 1918; an original copy of this lively, satirical volume will be featured in the exhibition, along with a variety of replicas for visitors to peruse. 

 

 

Peggy Bacon (United States, 1895-1987), Aesthetic Pleasure, 1936, drypoint on laid paper, 7 3/16 x 10 7/8 inches. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Gift of Harold Shaw, 1984.387. Image courtesy Petegorsky/GipePhoto

The keen and distinctive tone of Bacon’s work garnered critical acclaim throughout the 1920s and 1930s. As New York World-Telegram writer Howard Cushman observed in 1931: “Her caricature is biting but never bitter,” the phrase that inspires the exhibition title. Taking a cue from the 19th-century French caricaturist Honoré Daumier, Bacon's inflammatory sketches of New York’s art world—described by one critic as “portraits in acid”—routinely ignited the pages of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and others. 

Congenial Scene.

In 1934, with support from the Guggenheim Fellowship for Graphic Arts, Bacon turned her satirical gaze toward 39 notable figures from the period, including Franklin Roosevelt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Diego Rivera, Alfred Stieglitz—even Bacon herself. The collection, titled Off with Their Heads!, is one of more than 60 books the artist illustrated in her lifetime, including around 20 that she personally authored. Biting, never Bitter showcases several of Bacon’s first edition publications—including The True Philosopher and Other Cat Tales (1919) and Off with Their Heads!—highlighting the breadth and dynamism of her creative work as both artist and author.   

Biting, never Bitter also marks the first solo exhibition of Bacon’s work at the Portland Museum of Art and includes artworks from the PMA’s collection. Bacon had deep and meaningful connections to Maine, having spent her first summer in Ogunquit in 1938, and ultimately settling in Cape Porpoise—a small fishing community near Kennebunkport—in 1961.  

Peggy Bacon: Biting, never Bitter offers a compelling and satirical window into the social structures of the United States that still hold relevance today, particularly in areas of gender, education, and class. This compelling and witty exhibition presents an opportune moment for visitors to engage with the ideas and issues of Bacon’s time and ours, through an especially sardonic artist’s perspective.