Displaying items by tag: Cubism

A rare still life cubist collage by Pablo Picasso that features newspaper cuttings of ads for Quaker oats and Cherry Rocher cherry brandy has been acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Of the 30 collages Picasso made, only a handful remain in private hands. It shows a stylized glass and bottle standing on a table, in a medium seen as revolutionary in the early 20th century. It was made using charcoal, ink and pencil and stencilled lettering, but the bottle was cut from samples of a French newspaper, Le Journal, dated 12 December 1912.

The United States on Thursday returned an oil painting by Pablo Picasso that was reported stolen from a major Paris museum 14 years ago.

"The Hairdresser," which Picasso created in Paris in 1911 during his cubism period, was seized by US customs agents in New Jersey.

Valued at $15 million, it was authenticated in January by experts from the Centre Georges Pompidou museum, its previous home.

“Russian Modernism: Cross-Currents of German and Russian Art, 1907-1917” at the Neue Galerie is a lively, scattershot exhibition, with numerous paintings of great interest, others of not so much and many by Russian artists most of us have barely heard of.

Containing 53 paintings and 21 works on paper, the show spans a decade when modern art movements were breaking out all over Europe — Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada and De Stijl. To the east, Russia was no exception. The show’s ambitious title introduces an immense subject that is beyond the resources of this small jewel-box museum.

Pablo Picasso “detested” Pierre Bonnard, says Guy Cogeval, president of Paris’s Musée d’Orsay. It’s easy to see why. In the early 20th century, Picasso and members of experimental groups such as the cubists and the futurists were finding shocking new ways to render the world. They tended to view a decorative-minded painter like Bonnard as a lightweight.

Meanwhile, conservative critics and collectors lionized his work as an alternative to the demands of modernism.

Pejorative labels like “decorative” began to stick, and by midcentury, Bonnard was in need of rehabilitation. Over the last few decades, a number of exhibitions have brought new attention to Bonnard (1867–1947) by emphasizing his vivid colors and subtle compositions. His rediscovery will culminate this spring with a Paris exhibition that organizers say is the first to look at the whole of his career.

Pablo Picasso’s 1911 painting "La Coiffeuse" (The Hairdresser) which has been missing for over a decade, has surfaced in the United States. The Cubist canvas was discovered by federal Customs and Border Protection officials in a FedEx shipment heading from Belgium to a climate-controlled warehouse in Long Island City, New York, in December 2014. The package’s shipping label described the contents as an “art craft” holiday present worth $37.

The painting, which is owned by the French government, is part of the Musee National d’Art Moderne’s collection. It was last exhibited in Munich in 1998, and returned to Paris, where it was placed in storage at the Centre Georges Pompidou.

Pablo Picasso’s 1907 painting "Femme" will be on temporary display at the J. Paul Getty Museum through March 2015. The painting, which closely relates to Picasso’s famed "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York), will hang in the Getty Museum’s West Pavilion alongside portraits by Edouard Manet and Paul Cézanne, 19th-century masters whom Picasso greatly admired.

“This work represents a pivotal moment in Picasso’s career, marking the first experiments with fractured space that culminated in his revolutionary painting "Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon" of the same year and the creation of cubism,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Paul Cézanne's painting "Vue sur L'Estaque et Le Château d'If" (1883–1885) will go under the hammer at Christie's London in February 2015. The painting has been in the private collection of British magnate Samuel Courtauld since he purchased the work in 1936.

“The sun here is so terrific that objects appear silhouetted not only in white or black, but in blue, red, brown, violet,” Cézanne wrote in a letter to his friend Camille Pissarro in 1876. The artist's planes of colour prefigured Cubism, and the view of pines and the Mediterranean sea beyond red roof tiles of Estaque, a fishing port near Marseille, was a recurrent theme in the Cézanne's work.

When it comes to exploring Picasso, it would seem there is little left for curators to discover, despite his prodigious output. Right now, there are two major gallery exhibitions, at Gagosian and at Pace, as well as a show of Cubist works including Picasso from the Leonard Lauder collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But what few people realize is that Picasso’s sculpture is still relatively uncharted territory. The last show devoted to it in this country took place in 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art. B

The “Nature and Metamorphosis” retrospective includes 56 paintings and 103 drawings from 1924 through 1990, spanning Peter Blume’s entire career. From jarring early works inspired by the machine age and growth of cities through profound ruminations on to power of nature. Blume’s work helped define American modernism.

While best known as a painter, Blume was a virtuoso, dynamic draftsman, and his drawings show a surprising range. The retrospective is curated by Robert Cozzolino, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) senior curator and curator of Modern Art. “Blume was critical to the development and reception of modernism in America. His work played a key role in disseminating avant-garde ideas in the U.S. art world using a method that resembled Flemish art transposed through the lens of Cubism and the unconscious.

Before he became obsessed with Picasso and Braque, there were Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Back in elementary school, Leonard A. Lauder, the 81-year-old philanthropist and cosmetics tycoon, used to go to the movies at the Museum of Modern Art several times a week. Sometimes he would hang out in the galleries, too, soaking up the art. “I didn’t discover Cubism then,” he said. “But just by looking, you learn what’s good.”

Decades later, in 1976, on one of his regular visits to Sotheby’s, Mr. Lauder happened upon a Cubist drawing by Léger that he ended up buying.