Displaying items by tag: Goya

The long-awaited art exhibition Spanish Masters from the Hermitage. The World of El Greco, Ribera, Zurbarán, Velázquez, Murillo & Goya opened at the Hermitage Amsterdam on Saturday 28 November 2015. The exhibition includes more than sixty superior paintings and a rich collection of graphic works and applied arts masterpieces. Never before has the Netherlands hosted such a comprehensive survey of Spanish art, with work that is hardly represented in Dutch museum collections.

Portraits make up a third of Goya’s output – and more than 150 still survive today – but there has never been an exhibition focusing solely on Goya’s work as a portraitist, until this autumn when almost half this number will come together at the National Gallery, London.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) is one of Spain’s most celebrated artists. He was an incisive social commentator, considered (even during his own lifetime) as a supremely gifted painter who took the genre of portraiture to new heights. Goya saw beyond the appearances of those who sat before him, subtly revealing their character and psychology within his portraits.

All known drawings from Francisco Goya’s private “Witches and Old Women” album are being presented in their original sequence, thanks to extensive technical research undertaken by conservators, curators and art historians. An exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London (until May 25) marks the first time that all 22 ink drawings, which include depictions of elderly women fighting, witches carrying babies on their backs and pensioners dancing, have been shown together since their sale and dispersal in Paris in 1877.  

In what the noted Goya scholar Juliet Wilson-Bareau calls a “feat in forensics”, conservators and curators spent months examining the sheets to determine the pictures’ correct order. Although Goya (1746-1828) meticulously numbered each sketch, eight lost their numbers over the years.

Imelda Marcos, former first lady of the Philippines and the owner of a famously massive shoe collection, turns out to have also briefly been in possession of an early 19th-century Goya canvas. The artwork somehow vanished from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), apparently never to be seen again, until much of the shoe queen's property was seized by the Philippine government in 2014.

When the museum initially acquired "The Marquesa of Santa Cruz as a Muse" from the Duke of Wellington dynasty in 1965, it was buzzy enough to earn a feature in "Time" magazine.

It's hard to believe that this gorgeous bit of painting by Francisco de Goya, held at the Carnegie Museum of Art since 1965, has only been on view now and then. But that's because it hasn't always been acknowledged as the Spaniard's work. This is about to change, as new research just about proves that the Pittsburgh painting is by him.

The prestigious "Burlington Magazine" is getting ready to publish an article, by the late art historian John Williams, that shows that Goya used the Carnegie piece to help him paint his great fresco around the base of the dome at the chapel of San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid, where he finished working in 1798.

An old woman, back bent and teeth buckled, kneels on the floor; beside her lie two vessels and a shallow bowl and spoon. Her gaze is misted and sad, but her eyes meet the viewer’s; in her arms, about to be devoured, is a newborn baby. In a picture nearby an elderly couple fly up into the air together, her arms clutch his legs, his outstretched hands clack castanets, associated with music, sensuality and sex. Their faces are angled towards each other, crimped with glee. The walls of the Courtauld Gallery in London are currently crowded with similar images: unsettling and superstitious, erotic and grotesque.

“Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album”, an ambitious new exhibition, opened this week. It marks the first time an institution or individual has tried to reconstitute one of Francisco Goya’s sketchbooks, which were broken up in 1826 after his death.

The Prado Museum has devoted an exhibition to showcase the results of the time the painter Francisco de Goya dedicated to working on tapestries.

The Royal Tapestry Factory’s commission to Francisco de Goya to paint tapestry cartoons in 1775 brought the artist to Madrid where he eventually spent two decades of his life. “Goya in Madrid” analyzes the Spaniard’s works and the sources that inspired him.

A total of 142 pieces, which were the models to create the tapestries to decorate El Escorial and El Pardo palaces, were made by the artist during the period he spent at the Spanish royal court. The cartoons have belonged to the Prado Museum since 1870, when they arrived from the Royal Palace.

The Frick Collection has always been rich in Spanish paintings, particularly works by Velázquez, El Greco and Goya. The museum’s founder, Henry Clay Frick, bought three canvases by El Greco on his travels to Spain, and they currently hang together as part of “El Greco in New York,” an exhibition organized in collaboration with the Frick, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hispanic Society to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the artist’s death.

But in 1904, before Frick acquired any of these well-known paintings, he bought a self-portrait by the 17th-century Baroque artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.

The Norton Museum of Art presents "Master Prints: Dürer to Matisse," featuring astonishing works on paper including woodcuts, etchings, engravings, aquatints, and lithographs that range from the 15th to 20th centuries. This not-to-be-missed exhibition brings together several of the earliest as well as later examples of the golden age of printmaking. Works by old masters Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, and Canaletto, will be displayed alongside those of modern masters Degas, Matisse, Picasso, and Cezanne. The exhibition is on view through Sunday, Feb. 15, 2015, and is accompanied by a video demonstrating printmaking processes, and texts describing the role prints held in society before the advent of photography.

“Each and every work in this exhibition is rare, and of a breathtaking quality that is no longer available on the market,” says Jerry Dobrick, the Norton’s Curatorial Associate for European Art.

Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado may be missing a boat load of art, but it’s also found quite the pile of cash. According to a report in Germany’s FAZ, the institution has discovered a previously unknown Swiss bank account containing over €1 million, which is part of a fortune bequeathed to it in 1991.

The account belonged to Manuel Villaescusa Ferrero, a lawyer and real estate mogul who bequeathed the entirety of his €42 million ($56 million) fortune to the Prado to be used for new acquisitions. The substantial gift has already been used to purchase works by El Greco, Georges de La Tour, Sánchez Cotán, Juan van der Hamen y Léon and Goya.