Displaying items by tag: cubist

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.

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.

Life with Picasso was never easy, it seems, and neither was the €52 million renovation of Paris's Picasso Museum. After five years of delays and difficulties, culminating in a public quarrel and the firing of its president in May, the museum's reopening is finally set for the artist's birthday, Oct. 25. The public will get a preview of the new interiors, before the artworks are installed, on Sept 20-21. The renovation has doubled the public space, modernized outdated facilities and added a new entrance, a multimedia auditorium and a Cubist garden with geometric topiary trees.

The museum's 17th-century hôtel particulier was built in 1659 by Pierre Aubert, a financier and adviser to Louis XIV. He was also the salt tax collector, and his extravagant mansion was quickly nicknamed Hôtel Salé (salty). The majestic staircase, based on a plan by Michelangelo, is the centerpiece, with delicate ironwork banisters and a sumptuous array of sculpted garlands, cherubs and divinities.

The problematic Musée Picasso in Paris, which has been going through political upheaval has received some good news. Pablo Picasso’s eldest daughter, Maya Widmaier-Picasso, has donated two works by her father to the institution. Last June, Anne Baldassari, president since 2005 was fired, replaced by Centre Pompidou-Metz director Laurent Le Bon. This has created a split in the Picasso family. The changes have occured because of the delayed five-year renovation project, which has caused a massive spending deficit.

A 1908 drawing of a woman’s face in the Cubist style, containing a portrait of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire on the reverse of the page has been gifted by the artist's daughter.

A court here on Wednesday issued a ruling that permits the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to display art as it sees fit in the Venetian palazzo given to it by the wealthy collector Peggy Guggenheim.

In a 16-page decision, the Paris tribunal rejected legal claims made by a group of her descendants that the foundation was bound to display Guggenheim’s vast collection of modern art the way she had originally presented it in her home.

Her family — seven grandsons and great-grandsons based in France — vowed to appeal after the tribunal dismissed their demands to revoke Guggenheim’s donation to the foundation unless the displays of Cubist, Surrealist and abstract postwar art were returned to their original state without additions of contemporary works.

Pablo Picasso’s colorful 1932 oil painting “The Rescue” sold for $31.5 million at a New York auction Wednesday, far exceeding its $14 million to $18 million estimate.

“The Rescue” led the bidding at a Sotheby’s sale of impressionist and modern art. The auction house sold 50 pieces, raising about $219 million.

It was the second straight night a painting by the Cubist master changed hands for a big price. Picasso’s 1942 painting of his mistress in a purple dress titled “Portrait of Dora Maar” sold Tuesday for $22.5 million at Christie’s.

Pablo Picasso’s grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso, will raffle off Man in the Opera Hat (1914) to raise funds for the International Association to Save Tyre. The Lebanese city of Tyre is a UNESCO World Heritage site whose history goes back to ancient Phoenicia.

Picasso will sell 50,000 raffle tickets for $135 a piece and a winner will be drawn during an event at Sotheby’s in Paris on December 18. The market value of the small Cubist gouache is said to be around $1 million. The raffle money will go towards creating an arts center and educational institute in Tyre, which has been severely damaged by decades of military conflict.

Picasso will travel to New York in December with the work to promote the raffle. To date, 40,000 raffle tickets have been sold. 

The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. is currently hosting the exhibition Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945, the first in-depth look at the Cubist master’s works preceding World War II. During this period, Braque used the theme of still life to hone his pioneering Cubist style. The exhibition presents 44 works from this period as well as related objects that help trace the artist’s evolution from a painter of still lifes to interiors in the late 1920s, to large-scales spaces in the 1930s, to personal interpretations of everyday life in the 1940s.

The exhibition brings together Braque’s Rosenberg Quartet (1928-1929) for the first time in 80 years. The four canvases were used as models for marble panels in the Paris apartment of Braque’s art dealer, Paul Rosenberg. All in varying degrees of completion, the works come together to reveal the different stages of Braque’s artistic process.

Duncan Phillips, founder of the Phillips Collection, was a well-known champion of Braque’s work and helped introduce his paintings to a wider American audience through acquisitions and exhibitions. Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945 will be on view at the Phillips Collection through September 1, 2013.

Thomas M. Messer, the longtime director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, passed away on Wednesday, May 15, 2013 at his home in Manhattan. Messer served as the institution’s director from 1961 to 1988 when he retired. Messer also served as the director of the Guggenheim Foundation, which is dedicated to promoting the understanding and appreciation of art, from 1980 to 1988.

During his time at the Guggenheim, Messer helped to establish the museum as of one of the finest art institutions in the world. In doing so, he grew its collection, increased its exhibitions program, improved its publications, and helped it to become a global entity.

Messer vastly expanded the Guggenheim’s holdings by acquiring two major private collections. In 1963, Justin K. Thanhauser, the son of a German art dealer, gave the museum a trove of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early modern works including over 30 Picassos. The second bequest came from Peggy Guggenheim who left her entire collection including an array of Cubist, Surrealist, and Abstract Expressionist works to the Guggenheim Foundation. The collection operates as a museum known as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.  

Born in Eastern Europe in 1920, Messer arrived in the United States in 1939. He graduated from Boston University in 1942, joined the army, and served as an interrogator for military intelligence in Europe. After the war, he stayed in Europe and studied art at the Sorbonne. Upon his return back to the United States, Messer was named director of a small museum in New Mexico. He eventually earned a master’s degree in art history from Harvard and was soon appointed director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

While he has no surviving family, Messer leaves behind a legacy of diplomatic leadership as well as one of the finest art institutions in the world.

The Museum of Modern Art’s William S. Paley collection is currently on view at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. A Taste for Modernism presents 62 works that cover all of the pivotal movements that defined the art world during the late 19^th and 20^th centuries. The exhibition features works by 24 major artists including Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Joan Miró (1893-1983), Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), and Francis Bacon (1909-1922). The William S. Paley collection has been on a North American tour since 2012 and the Portland Museum of Art is the only venue in New England that the exhibition will visit.

Highlights from the exhibition include two works by Cézanne, which Paley acquired from the artist’s son; eight works by Picasso that trace his artistic evolution over the first three decades of the 20^th century including Boy Leading a Horse (1905-06) from his Rose Period, the Cubist painting An Architect’s Table (1912), and the collage-inspired composition Still Life with Guitar (1920); Gaugin’s The Seed of the Areoi (1892), which was inspired by the artist’s trips to Tahiti; and Edward Hopper’s (1882-1967) realist landscapes.

William S. Paley (1901-1999), the media mogul responsible for building the CBS broadcasting empire, was an important art collector and philanthropist during the 20th century. Paley began collecting in the 1930s and took a particular liking to French modernist movements including Fauvism, Cubism, and Post-Impressionism. Paley played a major role in cementing the Museum of Modern Art as one of the most significant institutions in the world. MoMA was founded in 1929 and Paley fulfilled various roles at the museum including patron, trustee, president, and board chairman from 1937 until his death.

A Taste for Modernism will be on view at the Portland Museum of Art through September 8, 2013. It will them travel to the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (October 10, 2013-January 5, 2013) and The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas (February-April, 2014).