Displaying items by tag: Modernism

Frank Gehry’s 1987 Winton Guest House will go up for sale at auction on May 19, according to the seller, the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. The building currently stands on a 180-acre site in Owatonna, Minnesota, that the university sold to a health clinic last summer; the seller has until August 2016 to move the house from the new owner’s land. Chicago auction house Wright is organizing the sale, and is noted for previous sales of historic architecture — in particular for the successful 2006 auction of Pierre Koenig’s 1959 Case Study House #21 in Los Angeles.

Mike and Penny Winton commissioned Gehry to design a guest house on their lakeside property near the Twin Cities in 1982, in close proximity to a 1952 Philip Johnson brick-and-glass house that stood nearby on the same plot of land. Completed in 1987, Gehry’s structure is noted for geometric rooms arranged like individual homes; they project from a central 35-foot-tall pyramidal living room, and the entire house covers 2,300 square feet.

The woman, carved from limestone, sits with her arms resting on her pulled-up legs and looks enigmatically ahead. She is regarded as one of Romania’s finest modernist artworks, yet the Bucharest government’s refusal to say whether it wants to buy her has left the €20m (£15m) sculpture in a murky legal limbo, and its owners unable to sell.

The statue, "The Wisdom of the Earth" by Constantin Brâncuși, has a history that reflects the tumult in its creator’s native land. First sold in 1911, it was confiscated by the communists in 1957 and became the subject of a lengthy legal battle after the fall of the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, ending in 2008 with it returned to the family of its original owner.

The United States has honored Frank Lloyd Wright -- widely considered the father of modern architecture -- by nominating ten of his buildings for inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List. This is the first time that the U.S. has included works of modern architecture on its ballot and the first time that it has nominated a new site since 2013.

According to UNESCO, to be included on the World Heritage List, a site must be of outstanding universal value and meet at least one out of the ten selection criteria, which includes “representing a masterpiece of human creative genius” and “serving as an outstanding example of a type of architectural building, which illustrates a significant stage in human history.” If added to the World Heritage List, the buildings would join the ranks of such iconic modern structures as the innovative Sydney Opera House by Danish architect Jørn Utzon and Spanish Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi’s sculptural works in Barcelona, including Parque Güel and Crypt of La Sagrada Familia.

Moderna Museet highlights Louise Bourgeois, one of the most important 20th and 21st-century sculptors. Her art serves as a bridge from Modernism and continues to exert its influence on contemporary artistic practices today. "Louise Bourgeois – I Have Been to Hell and Back" is the most comprehensive Swedish exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’s art to date. It demonstrates the width of her oeuvre and presents her captivating and varied body of work over seven decades. One-third of the pieces in the exhibition have never before been shown publicly. Before entering the exhibition, visitors will encounter her monumental work Maman, a gigantic spider sculpture, which is standing outside the museum on Skeppsholmen.

The art of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) is complex, radical and full of subversive humour, danger and fear. She succeeds in formulating that which is hard to find words for, and her creative urge was intimately linked with her need to understand, imbuing her oeuvre with a compelling psychological dimension.

On February 12, 2015, Modernism Week -- a multifaceted event aimed at celebrating and fostering appreciation of midcentury modern architecture, art, and design -- will begin in Palm Springs, California. Launched in 2006 by a group of local design and architecture aficionados, Modernism Week has grown to include over 100 events. Among the exhibitions, home tours, film screenings, and lectures, is Modernism Week’s catalyst -- the Palm Springs Modernism Show and Sale.

Now in its fifteenth year, the Palm Springs Modernism Show and Sale will be held from February 13-16, 2015, at the Palm Springs Convention Center. The show will feature 85 national and international dealers offering everything from furniture and jewelry to fine and decorative arts. Exhibitors will offer works representing all art and design movements of the twentieth century, but a special emphasis will be placed on midcentury modern. A preview reception on February 13, 2015, will give collectors and enthusiasts the chance to browse and shop the show before it opens to the public on February 14, 2015. Two dealers to look for at the show are Archive of Laguna Hills, California, and Bridges Over Time of Newburgh, New York.

One of the missions of the Vilcek Foundation is to highlight the many contributions to American society and cultural made by immigrants to this country.

The exhibit “From New York to New Mexico: Masterworks of American Modernism from the Vilcek Foundation,” which opened Sunday at the Philbrook Museum of Art, explores the development of a uniquely American form of avant-garde art.

You have likely heard the saying, "go big or go home." Defined in the Urban Dictionary as to "do whatever you are doing to its fullest," the term has been somewhat overused in modern language.

Since the 1940s, many artists have expressed the idea of going big through the size of their paintings. For those curious about the effect of standing before a large-scale painting, don't miss "XL: Large-Scale Paintings from the Permanent Collection" at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. Mary-Kay Lombino, curator, provided this statement about the exhibit: "By going big, artists radically extended the tenets of modernism. Their paintings, thanks to their monumental scale, had an emotional effect on their spectators."

Tate Britain has announced that it will host London’s first major Barbara Hepworth exhibition in nearly fifty years. “Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for the Modern World” will open on June 24, 2015, and run through October 25, 2015. After the exhibition closes, it will travel to the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands (November 2015 – April 2016), and the Arp Museum in Rolandseck, Germany (May – August 2016).  

Born in Wakefield, England, in 1903, Hepworth studied sculpture at the Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art, where she befriended fellow sculptor Henry Moore.

Works by Kandinsky, Chagall and Malevich are due to travel from Russia to Spain for the opening of Malaga’s State Russian Museum this March. The first European branch of the St. Petersburg institution is due to be housed in a former tobacco factory in the southern Spanish city.

The inaugural display, “Russian Art of the XV-XX centuries”, traces a path of the country’s art history through 100 works, beginning with Russian icons from the end of the Middle Ages to Modernism and concluding with Soviet Realism. The director of the Russian State Museum, Vladimir Gusev, told "El Diario Sur" in an interview: “we want to break the stereotypes of Russian art.”

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts kicks off its centennial year this morning with an announcement of a major long-term loan of modernist painting.

The 400 paintings, drawings and prints collected by the late Myron Kunin, founder of the Regis Corporation, is believed to be one of the foremost collections of modernist painting in private hands.

"It's a rather important way to kick off the anniversary year," said MIA curator of painting Patrick Noon.