Displaying items by tag: georges seurat

The Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria is hosting an exhibition of 19^th-century graphic works, on loan from Paris’ Musée d’Orsay.

The exhibition includes pastels by Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, and Odilon Redon; gouaches by Honoré Daumier and Gustave Moreau; watercolors by Paul Cézanne, along with works by other artists of the period. The exhibition encompasses a broad range of artistic movements and styles.

Works from the life estate of Paul Mellon, longtime VMFA donor and trustee, are in the newly reinstalled Mellon Galleries, opening on Friday, January 16. The galleries have been closed for six months to protect the art during a roof replacement. Eleven works have been reframed as a part of the ongoing Mellon reframing project.

The life estate remained with Mellon’s widow, Rachel Lambert Mellon, until her death on March 17, 2014. Mrs. Mellon held a life estate in 26 works of art originally bequeathed to VMFA in 1999 by Mr. Mellon. Among the highlights are six masterworks by Degas, Gauguin, Pissarro, Seurat, Dufy, and van Dongen.

Good fortune or just plain chance sometimes dictates the collecting directions of art museums. That is certainly the case with the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which received a bequest of 96 Neo-Impressionist works in 1979 from W.J. Holliday, a local publisher and art collector. Combined with a significant landscape it owned previously by Georges Seurat and seven targeted acquisitions since, the 131-year-old institution lays claim to being the most important repository in the U.S. of works in the eye-grabbing pointillist style.

Capitalizing on that signature strength, the museum has organized "Face to Face," which it bills as the first-ever look at Neo-Impressionist portraiture, a subject that has received less attention than the landscapes, seascapes and urban scenes more typically associated with the style. The two-venue exhibition was seen earlier this year at the ING Cultural Centre in Brussels.

‘Seurat: Master of pointillism’ opens this week at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands. We spoke to the curator, Toos van Kooten, to find out more about the exhibition and how it came about.

Can you tell us a bit about the exhibition?

Georges Seurat is known for his meticulously stippled paintings and his eerily illuminated black-and-white drawings. His oeuvre comprises some 50 paintings and about 200 drawings, which became highly sought-after following his untimely death. The Kröller-Müller Museum is the only museum in the world that has five paintings to its name, including the famous painting Le Chahut. This valuable collection, assembled by Mr and Mrs Kröller-Müller in the early 20th century, is the basis for an exhibition devoted entirely to this great painter, with the underlying question: what makes his work so special and so well loved?

The final group of paintings, drawings and sculptures bequeathed to museums by Paul Mellon before his death in 1999 have at last begun to arrive. Hidden away for decades, many are rarities that had never been seen by curators.

The group includes more than 200 works — examples by such artists as van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin, Monet and Seurat — that were only recently removed from the walls of the Mellons’ many homes, where they were enjoyed by his widow, Rachel Lambert Mellon, who died in March at 103.

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has purchased an early drawing by the Impressionist master Georges Seurat for £2,434,500 ($3,971,643). Regarded as one of the finest drawings ever produced by Seurat, ‘Mendiant hindou’ was expected to fetch between $129,000 and $194,000 at auction. The work comes from the private collection of Jan Krugier, one of the preeminent art dealers and collectors of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Created around 1878-1879 when Seurat was only twenty years old, ‘Mendiant hindou’ illustrates how the artist used light, shadow and gradation to create forms and convey the mood of his subjects. According to Timothy Potts, the director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the drawing “signifies the beginning of Seurat’s obsession with the effects of light and dark that characterize his mature paintings and drawings.”

In addition to ‘Mendiant hindou,’ the J. Paul Getty Museum holds three masterpieces by Seurat in its collection -- ‘Madame Seurat, the Artist’s Mother,’ ‘Poplars,’ and ‘Woman Strolling.’

A book published by Rizzoli New York will accompany the exhibition ‘Impressionists on the Water,’ which is currently on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. The show presents over 90 paintings, prints, models and photographs by artists such as Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat and Alfred Sisley and explores how France’s waterways and oceans influenced these masters of Impressionism.

The book ‘Impressionists on the Water’ includes scholarly essays that examine the historical and cultural aspects of the nautical themes embraced by the Impressionists. The volume also charts the changing depictions of water from Pre-Impressionism through Impressionism to neo- and post-Impressionism. Contributors include Phillip Dennis Cate, a specialist in nineteenth-century French art; Daniel Charles, a noted historian with a particular expertise in maritime heritage; and Christopher Lloyd, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, who is responsible for the care and maintenance of the UK’s royal collection of pictures.

‘Impressionists on the Water’ is available through Rizzoli’s website. The exhibition will be on view at the Peabody Essex Museum through February 17, 2014.

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA is currently hosting the exhibition Impressionists on the Water. The show, which features over 90 paintings, prints, models and photographs, explores how France’s waterways and oceans influenced artists such as Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Georges Seurat. These key Impressionists spent a considerable amount of time at sea, on riverboats and on floating studios attempting to capture the atmospheric quality of water and the unique way that light played on its surface.

Daniel Finamore, the Peabody Essex Museum's Russell W. Knight Curator of Maritime Art and History, said, "While the Impressionists have been popularly celebrated for generations, this exhibition introduces aspects of their work not often explored. Rather than viewing Impressionism as a moment of schism and revolution, we see how artists handled maritime subject matter from the birth of the movement, through its creative evolution and the lasting impact of the Impressionists' vision of the sea in art."

Impressionists on the Water will be on view through February 17, 2014.

Sotheby’s will offer the Collection of Alex and Elisabeth Lewyt in a series of auctions in New York and Paris beginning on May 7, 2013. The works, which include paintings and drawings by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), and Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), will lead Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Sale in New York. Proceeds from the sale will benefit a charitable foundation to be created in the couple’s name. The 200 works, which also include illustrated letters by artists such as Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), are expected to garner anywhere from $67 million to $98 million.

The first sale of the series will present a selection of 20 works from the Lewyt’s collection. Highlights include a seminal Cézanne still-life titled Les Pommes, which the Lewyts bought from the Wildenstein Galleries in 1953; Modigliani’s sensual portrait of the socialite Marguerite de Hasse de Villers titled L’Amazone; and various works by Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque (1882-1963), and Marc Chagall (1887-1985).

Alex Lewyt, a New York-based vacuum cleaner inventor who died in 1988, and his wife, Elisabeth, an animal-welfare activist who died this past December, began amassing their remarkable collection in the 1950s.