U.Va. Art Museum Exhibit. . . 'Cuban Art Today'

Thursday, 27 October 2005 17:29

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA.-Often working with limited resources, contemporary Cuban artists are pushing the boundaries of expression and technique. Their subject matter plays on both literal and metaphoric levels, exploring concepts of personal and national identity. The University of Virginia Art Museum special exhibition “Mi Cuerpo, Mi País: Cuban Art Today” showcases a range of work by contemporary Cuban artists drawn from the collection and on loan to the museum.

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Jose Gurvich: Constructive Imagination / Jewish Culture

Thursday, 27 October 2005 17:30

NEW YORK.-Americas Society presents the first New York retrospective of José Gurvich (b. Luthuania, 1927; d New York, 1974), a prominent member of the Taller Torres-García in Montevideo, Uruguay. José Gurvich: Constructive Imagination is the centerpiece of the series Tradition and Transformation: Jewish Culture in Latin America. “This retrospective is an example of America Society’s commitment to producing solo shows of Latin American artists whose works are underrepresented in the United States. Critical shows by other members of Taller Torres-García date back to 1972 with Julio Alpuy and to 1988 with Augusto Torres’ Form, Structure, Síntesis: A Retrospective,” said Tess O’Dwyer, Vice President for Cultural Affairs. Besides the Taller Torres García, other in depth monographic shows presented at the Americas Society include those of Wilfredo Lam, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Geraldo de Barros, seminal artists whose work was not represented at the time.

Read more: [[Jose Gurvich: Constructive Imagination / Jewish Culture]]

Viaggio leggero. Niente da perdere

Friday, 28 October 2005 11:13

MODENA, ITALY.-Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena presents Viaggio leggero. Niente da perdere -Travelling light. Nothing to lose . This is the title of the first exhibition in a series of three focusing on cooperation with foreign art institutions to promote the give-and-take of knowledge, and the integration of different artistic and social realities. The exhibition will concentrate on themes dealing with the most peculiar aspects of other social systems stimulating at the same time thoughts about the Italian society and its relationship with others. The first of these initiatives takes on the correlation between creativity on the one hand and wealth or poverty on the other, between the complexities of themes the artists are facing and the ease with which they cope with them.

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Picasso. The Love of Drawing at Musée Picasso

Friday, 28 October 2005 11:45

PARIS, FRANCE.-Musée Picasso presents Picasso. The Love of Drawing. Exhibition organized by the Musée Picasso and the Réunion des musées nationaux, in Paris. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the museum’s opening, the Musée Picasso is presenting a set of works taken from its own collections, with the addition of major pieces from the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, a total of over three hundred and fifty drawings, water colors, gouaches, pastels and collages by the twentieth century’s greatest graphic artist. The exhibition gives visitors an opportunity to see masterpieces they may have seen in earlier exhibitions as well as sheets never shown before and so appreciate once more Picasso’s astounding virtuosity in drawing. Picasso’s mother claims that her son’s first words were “piz, piz”, as he called for a pencil, lápiz in Spanish. His childhood passion for drawing continued throughout his long life because he drew constantly, jotting down his feelings and inventions as if he were keeping a diary: “Obviously you never know what you are going to draw… but when you start, a story or an idea appears and there it is. Then the story grows, as on stage or in life… and the drawing turns into other drawings and becomes a real novel. It is highly entertaining, believe me. At least I have great fun inventing things and I spend hours while I am drawing, imagining and thinking about what my characters are doing. In the end, it is a way of telling stories.”

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Art Nourishing People With HIV / AIDS

Friday, 28 October 2005 12:05

PHILADELPHIA, PA.-Paul Davis Jones is exhibiting a series of paintings titled “Land Sea Sky” at The Art Institute of Philadelphia Gallery in Philadelphia. Jones will be contributing 40% of all sales to MANNA a nonprofit organization that delivers meals to people with HIV/AIDS. Says Jones, “I am delighted that The Art Institute of Philadelphia supports my goal of contributing what would normally be a gallery commission to MANNA.” In this exhibition Jones has exercised the artist’s editing prerogative. He says, “ Whenever I visit a place where land, sea and sky meet I find myself imagining the location without human additions like marinas, condos and beach clubs. As an artist I can remove anything that bothers my eye or prevents full communication with nature. I have done this editing in my paintings of places like the moors of Provincetown Massachusetts and beaches in the Caribbean.” “Land Sea Sky” at The Art Institute of Philadelphia gallery 1622 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia,

Architecture Dialogues - Reclaiming Urban Wastes

Friday, 28 October 2005 12:18

NEW YORK.-The Whitney Museum of American Art presents Architecture Dialogues - Reclaiming Urban Wastes: Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Since her 1969 manifesto, "Maintenance Art--Proposal for an Exhibition," Mierle Laderman Ukeles has explored art projects that collapse the distinction between fine art and the often hidden infrastructure of everyday life. As the artist-in residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation for over 25 years, she has combined performance work, public sculpture, and civic advocacy. Ukeles will discuss her evolving art practice, particularly her current work with Field Operations, the design team planning New York's new Park Land at Fresh Kills. New York's landfill since 1948, Fresh Kills' ecological transformation will create a public space 2.5 times the size of Central Park. Architecture Dialogues examines current trends and innovative practices in contemporary architecture. This season's series of four talks weighs interventions in the American landscape. Architecture Dialogues is made possible by the generous support of the Architecture Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Alice Neel's Women Exhibit at MWA in DC

Friday, 28 October 2005 12:22

WASHINGTON, DC.-“Alice Neel’s remarkable portraits reveal her ability to capture the essence of her subjects as well as her growth as an artist,” said NMWA Director Judy L. Larson. “The women’s museum is honored to host this glimpse into Neel’s life and her long, successful career.” A self-proclaimed “collector of souls,” Neel is known for her bold, truthful portraits. Despite the art world’s infatuation with abstraction in the 1940s and 50s, Neel refused to adjust her painting style, persisting instead in painting raw images of real people. Neel sustained an interest in women throughout her career, selecting her subjects based on outward attributes that revealed inner selves. Based upon Neel’s interpretation not flattery, these images remain unfailingly, and often disconcertingly, honest. Alice Neel’s Women examines these portraits as a central facet of Neel’s body of work that chronicles the evolution of American social mores as well as Neel’s personal and artistic growth. These paintings and drawings do not simply record the wide circle of intriguing women that Neel befriended such as Florence Lasser, a public relations specialist for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and ground-breaking feminist art historians Ann Sutherland Harris and Mary D. Garrard, but represent the varied types of roles that women, including Neel herself, embodied and performed.

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Frans Post (1612-1680) Brazil at the court of Louis XIV

Friday, 28 October 2005 12:33

PARIS, FRANCE.-The Louvre presents Frans Post (1612–1680) Brazil at the court of Louis XIV. A unique moment in the history of art: the Louvre presents the works presently known of Frans Post, the first European artist to paint the New World, offered to Louis XIV in 1679. This exhibition follows the fabulous adventure of a series of landscapes by Dutch artist Frans Post, the first European to paint the New World, done in Brazil between 1637 and 1640, completed in the Netherlands and offered to Louis XIV some forty years later.

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Murray Hantman: From Image to Abstraction

Wednesday, 26 October 2005 11:53

PORTLAND, ME. - Abstract, colorful works, many inspired by Maine’s coast, will be on view in the exhibition Murray Hantman: From Image to Abstraction, at the Portland Museum of Art. With a career that spanned much of the 20th century, Murray Hantman participated fully in the energy and innovation that characterized the American, and specifically, New York, art world during his lifetime. The exhibition will feature approximately 45 paintings and works on paper, drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection. Like many of his contemporaries, Hantman’s work was shaped by the times in which he lived—by the exhilarating sense of the potential of art in the modern era coupled with the harsher realities of American life during the Great Depression and World War II. Those forces combined in Murray Hantman to create an artist profoundly committed to art as an agent of social good and spiritual renewal. As a painter for more than 60 years, and a teacher for 30 of those, he devoted himself to the nurture of creativity and the practice of art.

Read more: [[Murray Hantman: From Image to Abstraction]]

Retrospective of Van Gogh's Drawings at the Met

Friday, 28 October 2005 14:51

NEW YORK.-The first major exhibition in the United States ever to focus on Vincent van Gogh's extraordinary drawings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art . Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings — comprising 113 works selected from public and private collections worldwide, including an exceptional number of loans from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam — will reveal the range and brilliance of the artist's draftsmanship as it evolved over the course of his decade-long career. Generally over-shadowed by the fame and familiarity of his paintings, Van Gogh's more than 1,100 drawings remain comparatively unknown although they are among his most ingenious and striking creations. Van Gogh engaged drawing and painting in a rich dialogue, which enabled him to fully realize the creative potential of both means of expression. A group of paintings will be exhibited alongside the related drawings.

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Sarah Lucas Survey Exhibition at Tate

Saturday, 29 October 2005 11:14

LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND.-Tate Liverpool presents the first survey exhibition of the artist Sarah Lucas. One of the leading figures in an outstanding generation of young British artists who emerged during the 1990s, Sarah Lucas has gained an international reputation for provocative works that frequently employ coarse visual puns and a defiant, bawdy humor. The exhibition presents art in a range of media – photography, sculpture, collages, installations and drawings – and includes key works from her career and a new work made for the exhibition, Year of the Rooster 2005. ‘With only minor adjustments, a provocative image can become confrontational, converted from an offer of sexual service into a castration image.’ Sarah Lucas.

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The Water Remembers: Paintings by May Stevens

Saturday, 29 October 2005 11:21

WASHINGTON, DC.-The National Museum of Women in the Arts presents The Water Remembers: Paintings and Works on Paper by May Stevens, 1990-2005. In The Water Remembers: Paintings and Works on Paper by May Stevens, 1990-2005, a collection of 27 paintings and related works on paper, the artist May Stevens reveals her own spiritual connection to water. These aquatic landscapes include abstracted texts ranging from Virginia Woolf to Irish poetry of the 5th century B.C.E. Written in silver or gold, the words form waves, waterfalls, and mere trickles, but remain mostly indecipherable. For Stevens, these poetic and highly personal works of art evoke a sense of connection between people as well as the fluidity of time, place, and life. These images are also laden with personal memories, emotions, and associations of loss and absence. In the end, however, her shimmering, life-affirming waterscapes are powerful metaphors for life’s journey. The Water Remembers: Paintings and Works on Paper by May Stevens, 1990-2005 is organized by the Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, Missouri, in association with the Mary Ryan Gallery, New York. .

Dubuffet & l'art brut at Lille Métropole

Saturday, 29 October 2005 11:23

VILLENEUVE D'ASCQ, FRANCE.-Musée d'art moderne Lille Métropole presents Dubuffet & l'art brut. For the very first time in France on such a large scale, the Dubuffet and Art Brut exhibition will bring together works by Jean Dubuffet and Art Brut. Dubuffet enjoyed being provocative, did not like "cultural art" and spent his life looking for works in areas outside the mainstream art world. His insatiable curiosity led him to taking an interest in highly inventive works by people with no formal training who were often neglected by society. In 1945, he gathered works by the mentally ill, self-trained artists and mediums under the title "Art Brut", amassing a significant collection, which he donated to the town of Lausanne in 1971. By comparing works by Dubuffet – from the Metro (1943) to Mires (1983) series, with special emphasis on the Hourloupe cycle (1962-1974) – with those of about forty artists from amongst the most important in Art Brut, such as Aloïse Corbaz, Adolf Wölfli, Augustin Lesage, Madge Gill, Emile Ratier, Auguste Forestier, Emile Josome Hodinos, Willem Van Genk, and many more, the exhibition will call into question Dubuffet’s possible influences, the role of Art Brut in his intellectual and artistic approach, and the circumstances under which he created the works displayed.

New book: Matisse. Masterpieces

Saturday, 29 October 2005 11:26

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK.-Eight of the world's leading Matisse scholars shed new light on eight of the Statens Museum for Kunst's masterpieces by Matisse in a new, comprehensive scholarly publication. Statens Museum for Kunst owns one of the most important Matisse collections in the world, including a number of paintings which can only be regarded as absolute masterpieces from his younger years. These artistic milestones date from Matisse's outrageous success with Fauvism in 1905 to his decisive shift towards a more naturalistic idiom in the years 1917-18. A period characterised by uncompromising experimentation which proved epochal for Matisse's subsequent work and for recent art history in general. Eight paintings - eight approaches - Eight of the museum's masterpieces form the point of departure for the new book Matisse. Masterpieces at Statens Museum for Kunst. The eight works are certainly the most important among the museum's Matisse pieces and were also highly regarded by the artist himself. Each of the works enters into complex and evocative contexts with contemporary key works from Matisse's many-faceted body of work; something which in itself is enough to prompt a reassessment. Consequently, Statens Museum for Kunst invited eight contributors to take a closer look at one of these major pieces.

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Court Theatre. Shows at Fontainebleau

Saturday, 29 October 2005 11:28

FONTAINEBLEAU, FRANCE.- In the eighteenth century, the Château de Fontainebleau was a particularly creative environment producing many new shows that enjoyed lasting success. Le Devin de village by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1752, as well as Zémire et Azor and La caravane du Caire by André Modeste Grétry in 1771 and 1783 were performed for the first time before the court at Fontainebleau. This exhibition explores several aspects of dramatic and operatic creation during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI (sets, repertoire, actors) and looks at the history of the theatre (where the exhibition is held) fitted out in the wing of the Great Fireplace in 1725 and destroyed by fire in 1856. When the court moved to Fontainebleau for four to six weeks in the autumn, the chateau hummed with theatrical activity. French and Italian actors joined musicians from the Royal Academy of Music to give brilliant performances from the 1750s until 1786, the court’s last stay in Fontainebleau. The chateau’s theatre had been decorated in 1725 to drawings by Robert de Cotte, with carved decors by the Slodtz brothers, artists for the Menus-Plaisirs du Roi. The repertoire was made up of operas, ballets and plays.

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Pastels by Degas, Pissarro, Cassatt and Others

Saturday, 29 October 2005 11:30

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA.-In the spirit of the 50th anniversary of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, a special installation of pastels will be on view . The pastels are drawn from the Clark’s extensive collection of works on paper, which includes prints, drawings, and photographs, and now numbers 5,000 objects. French and American artists Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, Jean-François Millet, Frederick Childe Hassam, Edouard Vuillard, and Edouard Manet will be featured. These 19th-and early 20th-century artists revived the traditional use of pastels for portraiture, and often depicted new subjects, particularly modern life and the city. The fleeting quality of the pastel also made it the perfect medium for representations of light, and these artists experimented with the physical qualities of the medium. The Clark’s pastels, favorites with many visitors, are exhibited in the galleries for limited periods of time because, as works on paper, they require limited exposure to light. When not on public view, pastels and other works on paper in the collection, including prints, drawings, watercolors, and photographs, may be seen in print study room by appointment.