Displaying items by tag: Modernism

London’s Royal Academy of Arts announced that it will present the first survey of California modernist Richard Diebenkorn’s figurative and abstract works to a UK audience in nearly twenty-five years. Diebenkorn, who rose to fame as the west coast ambassador of Abstract Expressionism, and later, helped establish the Bay Area Figurative movement, oscillated between abstract and representational painting during his sixty-plus-year career. Today, he is widely recognized as one of the most influential American artists of the post-war era. 

“Richard Diebenkorn” explores the three distinct phases of Diebenkorn’s career, beginning in the early 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism was gaining traction in New York.

On Sunday, December 21, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) in Berkeley, California, will say goodbye to its Brutalist home of forty-four years. Founded in 1963 following a major donation from the Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, the BAM/PFA announced an architectural competition to design the new museum building in 1964. The jury named the San Francisco-based architect Mario Ciampi and his associates Richard L. Jorasch and Ronald E. Wagner the winners of the competition, saying, “The richness of this building will arise from the sculptural beauty of its rugged major forms and will not require costly materials or elaborate details. We believe this design...can become one of the outstanding contributions to museum design in our time.”

One of the largest university art museums in the United States, the BAM/PFA opened the doors of its distinctive Modernist building on the UC Berkeley campus in 1970. Executed in the Brutalist style, an architectural movement that flourished from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, the BAM/PFA’s building is a behemoth cast concrete structure.

From 1915 onward, six million black Southerners quit that region for points north in an epic tide of souls fleeing oppression and seeking opportunity. This spring, the Museum of Modern Art will honor the Great Migration’s centennial by reuniting Jacob Lawrence’s famous paintings of this mass movement, a suite of 60 panels to be shown at MoMA for the first time since 1994.

The exhibition is part of an ambitious project to bring fresh perspectives on the legacy of the migration through new works commissioned from poets, authors and filmmakers inspired by Lawrence, one of the most renowned artists of mid-20th-century Modernism.

Sotheby’s New York will host two highly-anticipated design auctions this week. “The Jon Stryker Collection: Masterworks of European Modernism,” will take place on Tuesday, December 16, followed by the “Important 20th Century Design” sale on Wednesday, December 17.

“Masterworks of European Modernism” will feature works from the collection of Jon Stryker -- an American architect, philanthropist, and activist. In 2002, Stryker teamed up with Peter Shelton and Lee Mindel of the New York-based architecture and interior design firm Shelton, Mindel & Associates to renovate his former apartment at the “Prasada,” a Beaux-Arts luxury apartment building overlooking Central Park in Manhattan. With help from Shelton and Mindel, Stryker created a stylish and modern space within the historic building to showcase his collection of European and Scandinavian twentieth-century design and photography.

For thirty-seven years, Josef Albers’ mural “Manhattan” graced the lobby of the MetLife (previously PanAm) Building on Park Avenue in New York City. Installed in 1963, the giant red, white, and black work was designed as an homage to New York, the city to which Albers emigrated in 1933. The mural was removed in 2000 during a lobby redesign and all but one of the panels ended up in a landfill site in Ohio after a failed attempt to remove asbestos from the backs of the tiles. Much to the delight of art lovers, “The Art Newspaper” has reported that the modernist masterpiece could make a triumphant return to New York City.

The forthcoming World Trade Center Transit Hub could be a possible home for the work, but no definitive plans have been announced. 

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.

"Forbidden Games” is an exhibition of 167 of the 178 photographs David Raymond donated and sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2007. The show, which runs through Jan. 11, 2015, includes works taken from 1920 through the 1940s by such major surrealist and modernist photographers as Man Ray, Bill Brandt, Brassaï and Hans Bellmer, as well as many less well known, such as Dora Maar, Marcel G. Lefrancq and George Hugnet. There are also works by photographers not ordinarily identified with either tendency who nonetheless occasionally took pictures that could be so considered. The images Mr. Raymond assembled make a grand introduction to important aspects of art photography between the end of the First World War and mid-century.

Gustave Courbet, who was born on June 10, 1819, in Ornans in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France and died December 31, 1877, in La Tour-de-Peilz on Lake Geneva, counts among the most important forerunners of classic modernism. His self-confident demeanor, the emphasis he placed upon his individuality as an artist, his inclination towards provocation and breaking taboos, not to mention his revolutionary painting technique, were to set standards that have influenced generations of artists. The exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler is the first dedicated to Gustave Courbet in Switzerland for over fifteen years.

The show presents pioneering works from all phases of the artist’s career, including a number of paintings that have rarely been seen in public or which indeed for many decades were not publicly accessible at all.

A Houston couple has donated 120 modern and contemporary Latin American artworks valued at nearly $10 million to the University of Texas.

The Houston Chronicle reports that Charles and Judy Tate, UT alumni, selected the university's Blanton Museum of Art for the donation. They also gave more than $1 million to a university endowment that supports a Latin American curatorship.

The art includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and mixed-media works. Many are by artists who took part in the creation of modernism, such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Tarsila do Amaral, Lygia Clark, Carlos Merida, Wifredo Lam, Armando Reveron, Alejandro Xul Solar and Joaquin Torres-Garcia.

Sue Roe's chronicle of artistic high jinks in modernist Paris comes wrapped in a cover of blushing red, inky black and bilious green. These are the colours in which Picasso painted the Moulin de la Galette, a hilltop windmill in Montmartre that no longer ground flour but instead served as a raffish dance hall. Female mouths are like bleeding wounds, male top hats have a silky black sheen, and an unnatural green glare alluding to that most toxic of local tipples, absinthe.

Inside, Roe's writing is almost equally vivid. Reading her account of the way modern painters saw the world anew in raw, garish tones, you might feel the need to reach for your sunglasses. Picasso, the protagonist of this group biography, follows a relatively monochrome course from the frostbitten poverty of his "blue period" to a "rose period" when his images are warmed by a new sensuality.