This Week in Review in Art Knowledge News

Written by Editor, Art Knowledge News Thursday, 19 January 2012 20:04

This is a new feature for the subscribers and visitors to Art Knowledge News (AKN), that will enable you to see "thumbnail descriptions" of the last ninety (90) articles and art images that we published. This will allow you to visit any article that you may have missed ; or re-visit any article or image of particular interest. Every day the article "thumbnail images" will change. For you to see the entire last ninety images just click : here .

When opened that also will allow you to change the language from English to anyone of 54 other languages, by clicking your language choice on the upper left corner of our Home Page.  You can share any article we publish with the eleven (11) social websites we offer like Twitter, Flicker, Linkedin, Facebook, etc. by one click on the image shown at the end of each opened article.  Last, but not least, you can email or print any entire article by using an icon visible to the right side of an article's headline.

MALBA Shows Latin American Art From 1910 to 2010

Written by Manuel Torrijos Friday, 20 January 2012 03:16

Buenos Aires, Argentina.- The Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) is pleased to present "Latin American Art From 1910 to 2010" on view at the museum until February 6th. The exhibition features more than 170 works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, objects, installations and videos. During the first decades of the 20th century, at the height of historical avant-garde movements like Expressionism, Cubism and Futurism in Europe, it was common for Latin American artists to travel to and study in cities like Paris, Milan, Florence, Barcelona, Madrid, Zurich, London and Berlin. In many cases, the work they made while in Europe formed part of avant-garde exhibitions and debates, as these artists participated in the modernist aesthetic and the attendant crisis in painting and sculpture as modes of representing reality.

During the 1920s, many of these artists returned to their countries and became major players in different regional art scenes, leading the battles between the traditional and “the new.” Xul Solar´s Neocriollo (Argentina), Tarsila do Amaral´s Anthropophagia (Brazil), as well as Rafael Barradas' Vibrationism and Joaquín Torres-García’s  Constructive Universalism (Uruguay) are examples of modernist Latin American avant-garde formulations that were not a derivative affirmation of the European movements, but rather an alternative space for the creation of other narratives. These formulations form an integral part of international art history from 1910 to 1930.

In the 1930s, while Torres-García was formulating his Constructive Universalism which combined the design of non-figurative structures with universal symbols placed in a grid, the influence of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros’s revolutionary Mexican Muralism was felt throughout the continent. The “art and politics” binary became a crux of cultural life in Latin America; Antonio Berni’s New Realism in Argentina and Candido Portinari’s work in Brazil constituted different way of formulating the relationship between artistic expression and its social contexts. Photography, film and the press reports on political instability were documentary sources used to produce often monumental works that featured images of rural and urban workers, as well as people protesting to demand social rights or participating in popular celebrations. Later, photography would become a rich medium for the documentation of modern life and the growth of cities, as well as an integral part of the renovation taking place on local art scenes.


At the same time, in the 1920s many Latin American artists delved into the world of magic and the fantastic, creating images related to autobiographical experiences and religious beliefs, on the one hand, and, in some cases, the now internationally important Surrealist movement, on the other. Such work would combine fragments of dreams with veiled political criticism, the esoteric, exotic visions, and real and imaginary landscapes. In both literature and the visual art, the Surrealist movement explored psychic energy and avoided conscious intervention through practices like free association and psychic automatism, as well as the use of chance and randomness.

Abstract and non-figurative art have formed part of art history around the world since the early 20th century. In an attempt to do away with an illusionist conception of painting and with the idea of the painting as a “window to the world,” different tendencies attempted to liberate the visual arts from the representation of reality. In the mid-1940s, Buenos Aires became one of the most active centers of Concrete Art and related strains. Madí, Asociación Arte Concreto Invención and Perceptismo were the three groups that used components of visual language (form, color, lines and plane) to make their works, replacing the traditional frame in painting with irregular and shaped frames. They devised jointed and transformable “sculptures,” “painting-objects,” volumes, mobiles and serial designs, and made use of industrial materials like enamel, glass and bakelite. In Paris in the 1950s, Kinetic Art emerged amidst a group of mostly Latin American artists. These artists formulated works that could actually move; in them, the viewer would participate in a temporal and transformative aesthetic experience by pressing buttons, pulling levers or turning knobs to put mobiles, machines and boxes with startling effects in motion.


At the same time, a movement that came to be called Informalism took hold internationally. Informalism was a strain of abstraction characterized by the use of random drippings, brushstrokes, and splashes on the pictorial surface, as well as the application of glass, pieces of canvas and paper, sand and pigment to create reliefs on the support. From 1949 to 1959, Lucio Fontana developed a personal poetic to make a series of canvases with holes and slashes, thus creating spatialism. The painting, now pierced by the artist’s gesture, gave the work of art new meaning. It marked the end of the painting constructed according to the modernist narrative and the beginning of contemporary art.

In the early 1960s, the visual arts experienced the end of Modernism and the beginning of contemporary period. Critics and artists spoke of “the death of painting” and “the end of art.” With the new era, painting and sculpture’s reign over “the fine arts” came to an end. New disciplines, media and supports emerged: objects, constructions, performances, assemblages, happenings, installations, videos, environments, interventions, and interactive explorations.  Works ceased to look like “works of art,” and artists began working with elements taken from everyday life and industrial and waste materials, as well as texts and words. They engaged in actions in urban or natural settings; created photographic and film registers, and proposed corporeal and sensorial experiences, as well as ideas and concepts that combine in Neo-figurative, Pop, Minimalist and other poetics. Between the 1960s and 1970s New Figuration proposed a return to the figure, which was placed in the midst of an abstract pictorial interweave of textures, drippings and gestures. Pop art, Conceptualism and Minimalism dominated the art scene and made use of a number of different formats, and assumed different positions within the production system. The 1970s also witnessed the emergence of Systems Art, Hyperrealism, Arte Povera and graffiti art. The debate revolved around issues like the dematerialization of the work of art and new relationships between art and politics. Starting in the early 1980s, the international return to painting had an impact on the regional art scene. The Transavantgarde in Italy, Bad Painting in the United States, among other movements, produced and put into circulation large canvases covered with faces and pictorial images that combined the codes of film, theater, literature, music, dance, urban graffiti and gender studies. In Latin America, art had its own agenda whose relationship to the international neo-avant-gardes was always tense. At the same time, Latin American art was committed to its distinct cultural, as well as historical and social, contexts


With an impressive unique permanent collection and a continuous stream of new and exciting temporary exhibitions, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) should be at the top of the list for art lovers visiting Argentina’s capital. The museum was created by the Eduardo F. Constantini Foundation as a not-for-profit museum to display (and build on) the collection donated by Eduardo F. Constantini. Since its founding in 2001, The Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires has dedicated itself to the preservation, dissemination, and integration of modern and contemporary Latin American art worldwide. Fundación Costantini, in its dedication to 20th century Latin American art, owns a unique collection that includes the principal tendencies and movements that characterize the region’s art in all its mediums, bringing together paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings, collages, photographs, installations and artists’ objects from Mexico and the Caribbean to Argentina. Located on the tranquil and historic Avenida Figueroa Alcorta in Palermo, Buenos Aires, and close to the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the MALBA building was constructed to blend in with its surroundings and encourage a natural interaction between its visitors and the art it showcases. Designed by renowned local architects AFT (Atelman, Fourcade & Tapia), the stunning building provides an airy and luminescent environment, with sectional yet fluid gallery spaces. Visitors seamlessly transition from one period or style of art to the next, the lighting changing throughout the building to best suit the art on display. The mission of the MALBA is to stimulate interest in and knowledge of Latin American art. To achieve this, the museum maintains a dynamic cultural center which serves to constantly highlight and expose the collection, a program of high-quality temporary exhibitions and a library of Latin American films (shown in the museum's theatre Tuesday through Saturday). MALBA also hosts meetings, classes, lectures and seminars with authors and artists. The museum's terrace restaurant and cafe is very highly regarded. Celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2011, the MALBA is already visited by almost 1.5 million people every year. Visit the museum's website at ... www.malba.org.ar

Capitain Petzel in Berlin Presents New Works by Artist Sarah Morris

Written by Werner Wintermeyer Saturday, 04 February 2012 23:07

BERLIN.- Capitain Petzel Berlin presents “John Hancock”, an exhibition of new works by Sarah Morris and her film ’Points on a Line’ (2010). The exhibition is on view from April 29 through July 30, 2011. Sarah Morris is one of the most intriguingly contradictory artists of her generation, known for her complex abstractions, which play with architecture, design and the psychology of urban environments.

Read more: [[Capitain Petzel in Berlin Presents New Works by Artist Sarah Morris]]

David Hockney featured at Alan Cristea Gallery Lithographs Exhibition

Written by Carla Whitmore Thursday, 19 January 2012 20:20

LONDON.- The Alan Cristea Gallery, Cork Street W1, will today unveil an exhibition of David Hockney’s largest and most colourful lithographs in an exhibition entitled ‘Moving Focus. A focal point of this free exhibition will be two views of the ‘Hotel Acatlán’ which the artist discovered when car trouble forced him to stop in the midst of a journey to Mexico City. Taking place from the 19th January until 18th February in the gallery’s space at No. 34 Cork Street, the exhibition is timed to coincide with the Royal Academy’s major new show of landscape works by Hockney, and is one of a number of art exhibitions and auctions celebrating the work of one of Britain’s best loved artists to take place this month.

In the mid-1970s, shortly after moving to California, David Hockney began his working relationship with master printer Kenneth Tyler. It was with Tyler, that Hockney created the Moving Focus series, which remains his largest and most ambitious series of colour lithographs. The series combines the Renaissance tradition of fixed-viewpoint painting with the Eastern aesthetic of multiple, narrative viewpoints within the same picture. The acknowledgement of the flatness of picture plane along with the exaggeration of perspective and foreshortening present in Tyler Dining Room, Amaryllis in Vase, Pembroke Studio Interior and, most didactically, The Perspective Lesson underscore Hockney’s questioning of the traditional western values in composition.

Hockney made the two Hotel prints featured in this exhibition after discovering the hotel Acatlán’ when car trouble forced him to stop en route to Mexico City. Hotel : Acatlán Second Day is based on sketches made of the hotel courtyard shortly after his arrival. Further sketches made when he revisited the hotel on the return leg of his journey resulted in Hotel Acatlán : Two Weeks Later. The figure in the lower right corner of this print refers to his 1954 portrait of his mother, Woman with a Sewing Machine.


The Hotel Acatlán also provided the subject matter for the three View of Hotel Well lithographs hanging in the exhibition, each one providing a different viewpoint of the central feature of the courtyard. The sense of distorted perspective is here enhanced by the skewed, hand-painted frames designed by Hockney himself. 

David Hockney was born in 1937 in Bradford, where he studied at the Bradford School of Art before going on to graduate from the Royal College of Art in 1962. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1991 and made a Companion of Honour in 1997. He was awarded an Order of Merit in this year’s New Year Honours list. Hockney is generally acknowledged to be one of the most important and influential artists working today and his paintings, prints and drawings have been the subject of numerous retrospectives at almost every major international museum. Examples of his work are held in most international public collections, and works from the Moving Focus series can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Collection, the National Gallery of Australia, the Government Art Collection, the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis and the Smithsonian Museum, Washington DC amongst others.

Throughout his career, Hockney has been a gifted and prolific printmaker and some of his most iconic images have been realized in various print media. Alan Cristea Gallery always holds a wide and ever-changing selection of his prints in stock.


A Mixed Exhibition, including etchings and lithographs by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, will be staged in the gallery space at No. 31 Cork Street to coincide with David Hockney: Moving Focus. Lithography, a method for printing using a stone or metal plate, was a medium which fascinated Picasso; During the 20th century, a group of celebrated artists including Chagall, Matisse, Miro and Picasso rediscovered the largely unexplored art form of lithography, thanks to the Mourlot Studios, a Parisian print-shop founded in 1852 by the Mourlot Family, which was transformed when the founder’s grandson, Fernand, invited a number of leading artists of the day to explore the complexities of fine art printing During the war Picasso had been starved of the associations so necessary to him with fellow artists, poets and craftsmen and one can speculate that the opportunity of renewing a daily relationship with a master printer was of great personal and professional appeal to him. Picasso made numerous single images during these years but, in most cases, he would develop and transform a theme through many stages of a stone or plate. One such example is Les deux Femmes nues, 1945, of which 6 different states are showcased in this exhibition.

Printmaking came in sporadic bursts throughout Matisse’s career, at different times in his life he became completely absorbed by one method or another. He had made a handful of aquatints in the 1930s but significantly these images consisted on a white line on a black background. In 1946 he became more seriously involved with the medium. With the help of the Crommelynck brothers, he reversed the process, painting freely with a brush dipped in China ink on prepared metal plates. Matisse eschews the female body in favour of just the face, the subtle tones provided by chine collé are discarded in favour of rich black against pure white, as can be seen in Jeune étudiant de trois-quarts, an aquatint from1952. Their origins can be traced back to Eskimo sculpture or African masks, but, more importantly, they constitute the culmination of a lifetime of striving to create the most direct, simple and compelling mark. This exhibition will also feature a number of exciting works by Richard Hamilton, Julian Opie, Joe Tilson and Andy Warhol among others.

Art Knowledge News Presents "This Week In Review"

Written by Editor, Art Knowledge News Wednesday, 18 January 2012 20:29

This is a new feature for the subscribers and visitors to Art Knowledge News (AKN), that will enable you to see "thumbnail descriptions" of the last ninety (90) articles and art images that we published. This will allow you to visit any article that you may have missed ; or re-visit any article or image of particular interest. Every day the article "thumbnail images" will change. For you to see the entire last ninety images just click : here .

When opened that also will allow you to change the language from English to anyone of 54 other languages, by clicking your language choice on the upper left corner of our Home Page.  You can share any article we publish with the eleven (11) social websites we offer like Twitter, Flicker, Linkedin, Facebook, etc. by one click on the image shown at the end of each opened article.  Last, but not least, you can email or print any entire article by using an icon visible to the right side of an article's headline.

The Deichtorhallen in Hamburg to Feature a Saul Leiter Retrospective

Written by Kim Livingston Wednesday, 18 January 2012 21:08

Hamburg, Germany.- The Deichtorhallen is proud to present "Saul Leiter: Retrospective", on view from February 3rd through April 15th. This exhibition, the first restrospective of the artist's work to be held includes more than 400 works and includes early black and white and color photography, fashion photography, over-painted nudes, and Leiter's paintings in his never before shown sketchbooks. The last section of the exhibition is devoted to new photographic works by Saul Leiter that he continues to create on the streets of his neighborhood in New York's East Village.

Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was a well known Talmud scholar and Saul studied to become a Rabbi. His mother gave him a Detrola camera at age 12. At age 23, he left theology school and moved to New York City to become an artist. He had developed an early interest in painting and was fortunate to meet the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart. Pousette-Dart and W. Eugene Smith encouraged Saul to pursue photography and he was soon taking black and white pictures with a 35 mm Leica, which he acquired by exchanging a few Eugene Smith prints for it. In 1948, he started taking color photographs. He began associating with other contemporary photographers such as Robert Frank and Diane Arbus and helped form what Jane Livingston has termed The New York School of photographers during the 1940s and 1950s.

Leiter’s earliest black and white photographs show an extraordinary affinity for the medium, and by 1948 he began to experiment in color. Edward Steichen included Leiter’s black and white photographs in the exhibition Always the Young Stranger at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. In the late 1950s the art director Henry Wolf published Leiter’s color fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper’s Bazaar. Leiter continued to work as a fashion photographer for the next 20 years and was published in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova. Leiter has made an enormous and unique contribution to photography. His abstracted forms and radically innovative compositions have a painterly quality that stands out among the work of his New York School contemporaries. Perhaps this is because Leiter has continued through the years to work as both a photographer and painter. His painterly sensibility reaches its fruition in his painted photographs of nudes on which he has actually applied layers of gouache and watercolor.

Martin Harrison, editor and author of "Saul Leiter Early Color", writes, "Leiter’s sensibility…placed him outside the visceral confrontations with urban anxiety associated with photographers such as Robert Frank or William Klein. Instead, for him the camera provided an alternate way of seeing, of framing events and interpreting reality. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances." Saul Leiter’s work is featured prominently in Jane Livingston’s "The New York School" and in Martin Harrison’s "Appearances: Fashion Photography Since 1945". His work is in the collections many prestigious public and private collections. In 2008, The Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris mounted Leiter’s first museum exhibition in Europe with an accompanying catalog. Saul Leiter is represented in New York by the Howard Greenberg Gallery.

The Deichtorhallen are one of the largest exhibition venues for contemporary art and photography in Europe. The two historic buildings, built in 1911/13 impress with their open steel and glass architecture, and today offer spectacular space for large international exhibitions. Since 2011, the two buildings at the interface of Hamburg's Kunstmeile and Hafencity have been supplemented by a satellite in Hamburg's Harburg district, the Sammlung Falckenberg. The Deichtorhallen were originally constructed between 1911 and 1914 on the grounds of the former Berlin train station, built as the Hamburg counterpart to the "Hamburger Bahnhof" in Berlin, and served as market halls. They are among the few remaining examples of industrial architecture from the period of transition from Art Nouveau to the expressive forms of the 20th Century.

The two halls are open steel structures with a combined floor space of 5,600 square meters. Körber-Stiftung gifted the restored Deichtorhallen to the City of Hamburg, which has owned them ever since. In 1989, they were assigned to a limited liability company: Deichtorhallen-Ausstellungs GmbH. On Nov. 9, 1989 Deichtorhallen's international art exhibition program opened with the show "Einleuchten", curated by Harald Szeemann. Down through the years, Deichtorhallen Hamburg has emerged as an exhibition center for photography and contemporary art with three pillars of activities, three institutions under the single Deichtorhallen brand. Since 2009, Dr. Dirk Luckow has been Artistic Director of Deichtorhallen Hamburg. A design shop, the photography bookshop and the award-winning restaurant "Fillet of Soul," complete the picture of the Deichtorhallen. Located at the junction between art district and port city, they offer an ideal starting point for cultural activities. Visit the Deichtorhallen website at ... http://www.deichtorhallen.de

The Marmottan Monet Museum Shows Henri Edmond Cross and Neo-Impressionism

Written by Edouard Petussier Thursday, 19 January 2012 03:08

Paris.- The Marmottan Monet Museum is pleased to present "Henri Edmond Cross and Neo-Impressionism: Seurat to Matisse", on view until February 19th. The exhibition traces the evolution of the work of Henri Edmond Cross (1856-1910) in the context of work by other members of the Neo-Impressionist movement, highlighting Cross’s network of friends, influences and followers from his Paris years with Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and the other ‘Neos’, to the last 20 years of his life (1892-1910), when he settled in Saint-Clair, near his friend Signac in Saint-Tropez – the rallying point for a new generation of artists, where Henri Matisse and the future Fauves discovered and experimented with the principles of ‘divisionism’.

The exhibition gathers some one hundred oil paintings and watercolours from private collections and museums worldwide (Germany, Belgium, Japan, the USA), including pivotal works in the history of Neo-impressionism, never before seen in public. The first part of the exhibition presents paintings by members of the first Neo-Impressionist group (Cross, Signac, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Camille Pissarro, Maximilien Luce, Theo Van Rysselberghe), pioneers of the movement’s painstaking ‘divisionist’ technique, based on the optical blending of small strokes of pure prismatic colour, contrasting tones, and the use of colour complementaries. The exhibition continues with an exploration of the parallel careers of Cross, Signac and Van Rysselberghe – and the revelation of colour witnessed in their paintings – as the starting point for the ‘second’ Neo-Impressionist movement, featuring thicker touches of colour, and a more strident palette. The final section highlights the links between Cross and a younger generation of painters – including Camoin, Manguin and Henri Matisse – establishing him as a unique, essential link between Seurat’s Divisionism and the Fauvist movement pioneered by Matisse and Derain.


The exhibition also highlights Cross’s watercolour paintings, an important feature of his work throughout his career. Organised in association with the Musée Départemental Matisse in Cateau-Cambrésis, part of the exhibition at the Musée Marmottan Monet will transfer to Matisse’s home town, from 12 March to 10June, 2012. The partner exhibitions each feature the same core body of work, together with their own selections of paintings, many on public show for the first time, shedding new light on Cross’s work and (re)introducing the artist to a wider international audience. By comparing Cross’s paintings with those of his contemporaries – Seurat, Signac, Luce, Van Rysselberghe, Camoin, Matisse and others – both exhibitions will highlight the distinctive, poetic quality of his work, and demonstrate his importance and decisive influence in the context of modern art as a whole.

The Marmottan Monet Museum, a former hunting lodge of Christophe Edmond Kellermann, Duke of Valmy, was acquired in 1882 by Jules Marmottan. His son Paul made it his home and extended the hunting lodge to accommodate his collection of First Empire art objects and paintings. When he died in 1932, he bequeathed to the Academy of Fine Arts all of his collections and his home became the Marmottan Museum in 1934 and the library of Boulogne. In 1957, the Museum received a significant donation from Victorine Donop de Monchy, inherited from his father, Dr. Georges de Bellio, including works by Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Renoir, who was one of the first fans of impressionist painting. Michel Monet, the second son of the painter, in 1966 bequeathed to the Academy of Fine Arts his property in Giverny and its collection of paintings inherited from his father for the Marmottan Museum. He endowed the Museum and the largest collection of works by Claude Monet. The architect and curator of the Museum academician Jacques Carlu then built a room inspired by the great decorations of the Orangerie in the Tuileries to receive the collection.


The works collected by Henri Duhem and his wife Mary Sergeant come beautifully complement this fund in 1987 Thanks to the generosity of their daughter Nelly Duhem. Painter and comrade of Post-Impressionist, Henri Duhem was also a passionate collector collecting the works of his contemporaries. In 1996, Denis and Annie Rouart Foundation was created in the Marmottan Monet Museum in accordance with the wishes of its benefactor . The Museum then enriches its collections of prestigious works of Berthe Morisot, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir and Henri Rouart. Daniel Wildenstein provided an exceptional collection of illuminated manuscripts of his father to the Marmottan Museum in 1980. Since then many other bequests, equally important, were added to the museum collections such as those of Emile Bastien Lepage, Vincennes Bouguereau, Henri Le Riche, John Paul Leon, Andre Billecocq, Gaston Schulmann, the Foundation Florence Gould, Roger Hauser, Cila of Dreyfus, or that of Therese Rouart. . Visit the museum's website at ... www.marmottan.com