Displaying items by tag: landscape

It was the Roaring Twenties. Women bobbed their hair and hiked their skirts, and an estimated 100,000 speakeasies flourished in New York City in the face of Prohibition. Yet there was an oasis of calm: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park. Overlooking the leafy landscape on the Upper East Side, the private homes of the privileged rose with the stock market and multiplied into elegant neighborhoods. In 1926, a small residence hotel with a Beaux-Arts façade opened at 20 East 76th Street and seamlessly blended into the neighborhood. The Surrey was luxurious and discreet; qualities movie actresses Claudette Colbert and Bette Davis and other celebrities appreciated. Later, John F. Kennedy made the popular residence his home in the city.

But by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Surrey had lost its luster, until new owners launched a $60 million, 14-month-long renovation. Debuted in 2009, the aura of the 17-story, 190-room hotel‘s historic past remains intact, but interior designer Lauren Rottet has added a contemporary flair, helped along by the installation of thirty-one original works by international artists...

Continue reading this article about the Surrey Hotel, which was reinvigorated by the leading interior designer Lauren Rottet, on InCollect.com.

Since the colonial period, the Atlantic Ocean has operated both as a barrier between America and Europe and as a conduit for international exchanges of peoples, goods, and ideas. It spurred commerce and enterprise that was the basis for both national economic activity and personal fortune. The activities in America’s great harbors and port cities also supported the nation’s cultural development, prompting the rise of schools of maritime and landscape painting, as well as portraiture.

The exhibition "The Coast & the Sea: Marine and Maritime Art" in America explores these themes and the breadth of experiences through which artists and their audiences engaged our coastlines, while simultaneously highlighting substantial developments in American artistic currents. With fifty-two paintings and ten maritime artifacts dating from the eighteenth- through the early-twentieth centuries, the exhibition illustrates the sublime drama of the oceanic environment; the importance of America’s early naval battles; breathtaking vistas where water, land, and light meet; and depictions of the men and women who animated Northeastern port cities.

Visit InCollect.com to read the full marine paintings article.

Cheekwood is taking important first steps towards the historic restoration of its Mansion, which is slated to debut in 2017. Further building on its reputation as “one of the finest examples of an American Country Place Era estates in the nation,” Cheekwood will refurnish the lower levels of the Mansion to reflect the lifestyle and setting of the 1930s era; originally used by its first residents, Mabel and Leslie Cheek, and designed by legendary landscape and structural architect Bryant Fleming. Several rooms in the 1929 Cheek family home will be restored to furnishings and décor representative of the original period, including rooms that have never before been on view to the general public.

To spearhead this initiative, Cheekwood has hired Leslie B. Jones as its new Curator of Decorative Arts & Historic Interpretation, following her time as the Curator and Director of Historical Resources and Programming for the White House Historical Association in Washington, DC.

A landscape by Vincent van Gogh is to be exhibited for the first time in more than 100 years following the discovery of crucial evidence that firmly traces back its history directly to the artist.

The significance of two handwritten numbers scribbled almost imperceptibly on the back had been overlooked until now. They have been found to correspond precisely with those on two separate lists of Van Gogh’s works drawn up by Johanna, wife of the artist’s brother, Theo.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park offers a fresh perspective to the work of Henry Moore (1898–1986) in a major exhibition of more than 120 works considering the artist’s profound relationship with land, something which was fundamental to his practice and fuelled his visual vocabulary. Born into a mining family in Castleford, West Yorkshire, Moore is one of the most important artists of the 20th century and was a founding patron of YSP. "Henry Moore: Back to a Land" is produced in partnership with The Henry Moore Foundation.

"Henry Moore: Back to a Land" explores the artist’s radical notion of placing sculpture in the landscape, something which forever changed British sculpture. Moore was committed to showing his work in the open air and in the rolling hills of YSP’s former Deer Park in particular. Here, it can be experienced with the resident flock of sheep, an animal described by the artist as an ideal foil for the appreciation of his work, being exactly the right size and scale.

The final installment of the “American Encounters” exhibition series co-organized by the musée du Louvre, the High Museum of Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Terra Foundation for American Art, the exhibition “The Simple Pleasures of Still Life” explores the rise of still-life painting in 19th-century America. In the wake of the exhibitions on landscape, genre painting, and portraiture, this exhibition provides a new opportunity to foster dialogue on American painting.

Featuring 10 artworks from the collections of the four partner institutions, this final exhibition follows on from the previous ones to illustrate how American painters like Raphaelle Peale, Martin Johnson Heade, and William Michael Harnett adapted European models to their time and country, and thus contributed to the creation of a national voice.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has announced the acquisition of five major French paintings as a bequest from a longtime supporter.

The works are a late Cezanne painting of Mont Sainte-Victorie, a Manet still life of fruit, a landscape and cityscape by Pissarro and a Morisot portrait. All were a bequest from Helen Tyson Madeira, who died last year.

The museum also announced that it had received two early portraits by Marcel Duchamp.

Claude Monet's acclaimed work "L’Embarcadère," 1871, is to be offered at Sotheby’s forthcoming London Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on 3 February 2015. The Dutch landscape by Claude Monet is appearing on the market for the first time in a quarter of a century. The painting has been internationally exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and provides the perfect embodiment of the evolution of Impressionism. "L’Embarcadère" was painted by Monet in Zaandam in Holland, where the artist lived with his family for four months over the summer of 1871.

The artist produced a series of 25 works that explored several areas surrounding Zaandam, focussing his attention upon the architectural motifs of the Dutch landscape, canals, mills, and boats. Within a strong compositional framework and in a boldly inventive style, Monet’s use of color and the areas of lively brushwork represent his attempts to evoke the atmosphere of the scene, and Monet includes subtle, but evocative, signifiers of the weather in the full sails of the river-boats, glistening yellow painted houses - and the cool relief of the shaded river-bank.

The Hyde Collection opens its 2015 exhibition schedule with an exhibition drawn from the permanent collection of the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, New York. From January 18, 2015, through April 12, 2015, "Wild Nature: Masterworks from the Adirondack Museum" will be on view in The Hyde’s Wood Gallery.

Over the course of two centuries, the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York have attracted tourists, sportsmen, and artists alike from across the nation. "Wild Nature" features sixty-two stunning masterpieces dating from 1821 to 2001, including paintings and rarely-exhibited photographs and prints. Together these works reveal how images of the Adirondack landscape shaped American perceptions of the wilderness landscape, and how these expectations, in turn, created wilderness as a national icon.

In a letter he wrote in 1825, the American painter John Vanderlyn said that paintings by the itinerant portraitist Ammi Phillips were “... cheap and slight, for the mass of folks can’t judge of the merits of a well-finished picture.” Vanderlyn had gone to France for academic training. His masterpiece, “Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos” (1809-14), a suavely erotic, neo-Classical vision of a nude woman dozing in a pastoral landscape, is one of the gems of the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. But a discerning viewer today might well prefer Phillips. His “Girl in Red Dress With Cat and Dog” (1830-35) is one of the loveliest paintings by any American artist.

A wonderful painting attributed to Phillips is included in “A Shared Legacy: Folk Art in America,” an inspiring exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum.