Displaying items by tag: Modern Art

Frieze Week always brings with it a flurry of art events, but few are as highly anticipated as the inaugural Art Miami New York (AMNY) fair. Produced by the esteemed ownership team of Art Miami, AMNY will bring the brand’s distinct style and ambiance to New York City. According to Nick Korniloff, the Founder/Partner of AMNY, “It only...

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You may recognize Frida Kahlo from her self-portraits paintings, or from the many black and white photographs taken of her—often dressed in elaborate and traditional Mexican clothing. But few know that over 300 of her belongings were hidden in the bathroom of her Mexico City home for nearly 50 years.

After the artist’s death in 1954, her husband Diego Rivera ordered that her wardrobe and other personal objects be locked up until 15 years after his death.

A prized Picasso portrait, which has been in the Goldwyn family collection since it was acquired by Hollywood legend Samuel Goldwyn Sr. in 1956, has been sold to another film and entertainment mogul from halfway around the world.

Wang Zhongjun, chairman and co-founder of entertainment giant Huayi Brothers Media Group, purchased Pablo Picasso’s “Femme au chignon dans un fauteuil” at Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on May 5 for US$29.93 million (HK$233 million).

"Horace Pippin: The Way I See It," a major exhibition of over 65 paintings of his work assembled from museums and private collections across the United States, opened in Chadds Ford, PA. One of the leading figures of 20th-century art, Horace Pippin (1888-1946) is known for his bold, colorful and expressive paintings of family life, history, religion and war. The Brandywine River Museum of Art is the only venue for this landmark exhibition.

Taking its title from Horace Pippin's response to his own question about what made him a great painter: "I paint it exactly the way it is and exactly the way I see it," the exhibition will look closely at Pippin as an artist who remained independent—creating and upholding a unique aesthetic sensibility, vividly depicting a range of subject matter, from intimate family moments and bold floral still lifes, to powerful scenes of war, history and religion that comment on issues such as racism and social justice.

Asian collectors snapped up paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet at a Sotheby’s auction in New York that totaled $368.3 million.

The tally on Tuesday was the second highest for an Impressionist and modern art auction at Sotheby’s and a 67 percent increase from a similar sale last May. The auctioneer also surpassed its high presale target of $351 million despite failing to sell 14 of the 64 lots.

For most of the 60 years that Los Angeles artists have been making aesthetically powerful, conceptually acute work, book publishers have generally looked the other way.

Not surprisingly, it wasn't especially difficult during that time to find monographs on second- and even third-tier New York School artists or histories of parochial developments in Manhattan, center of both the art market and the publishing industry.

No museum exhibition is perfect, but some are less perfect than others. Surprisingly, even these shows sometimes turn out to be exceptionally valuable. They clarify notions of quality and the pleasures and rigors of looking, for curators and visitors alike.

“Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions” at the Morgan Library & Museum is one of these flawed gems. Of its nearly 100 drawings, about half are either weak or just acceptable, which is not good enough for an institution of the Morgan’s stature.

On Saturday the Bruce Museum opens up to “Walls of Color – The Murals of  Hans Hofmann,” marking the first exhibition to focus on the artist’s varied and under-appreciated public mural projects.

Hans Hofmann is famed for his dynamic approach to color,” says the show’s curator Dr. Kenneth Silver, New York University Professor of Modern Art as well as an Adjunct Curator of Art at the Bruce Museum. “He was a towering figure among New York School painters. He was also the most important teacher and theoretician of the Abstract Expressionist movement.”

In 1924, at age eighty-three, Claude Monet was asked to recount the difficult early years when he and his fellow Impressionists were ridiculed for their loose brushwork, lack of finish, and modern subject matter. “We would have died of hunger without Durand-Ruel, all we Impressionists,” he said. “We owe him everything.” 1 He was referring to the Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel (1831–1922), who for fifty years tirelessly promoted the canvases of Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, and other leading artists of the French modern school. Ironically, the art dealer (Fig. 1) whose adept marketing brought acclaim to the Impressionists is less known today than the artists he championed, a circumstance that an exhibition in Philadelphia seeks to redress.

Durand-Ruel’s deep conviction in the work of the Impressionists led him to buy more than 5,000 of their canvases and kept him on the verge of bankruptcy for decades...

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Do you ever think about what makes a good story—for a painting? American artist Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) did. A century ago, Benton wanted to become the major American artist of his day. Although trained in Chicago and Paris and a member of the vanguard modern art community in New York around 1915, Benton had yet to make the kind of defining contribution to the art world that his ancestors Senator Thomas Hart Benton and John Charles Fremont had made to American political history. Casting about for opportunities, the ambitious painter looked to Fort Lee, New Jersey—the “first Hollywood.” He started working there on silent-era motion-picture productions in various artistic capacities, such as painting sets for director Rex Ingram. The appeal of the emerging motion picture industry and its influential new form of storytelling were clear to Benton. Epic themes such as cultural identity, westward expansion, tolerance, and the American Dream were worthy of movie screens—why not canvas (Fig. 1)?

Benton developed a cinematic painting style to communicate stories about American history and society as memorably as the movies. He learned to capture qualities intrinsic to motion pictures: the illusion of three-dimensional space; rhythmic motion; the glow of projected light...

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