Displaying items by tag: pierre bonnard

The Art Institute of Chicago announced that Gloria Groom has been named the chair of the museum’s European Painting and Sculpture department. She will now oversee the museum’s collection of Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, early 19th-century, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist art.

Groom, who is also currently the Art Institute’s David and Mary Winton Green Curator, is known best for her work related to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and has written about the work of Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.

The art collection of the late John Whitehead, former chairman of Goldman Sachs, is being offered as the cornerstone in Christie's Impressionist and Modern Art sale this May in New York.

The 90 piece estate, with rare works by Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pierre Bonnard, is expected to achieve over $40 million in sales.

Whitehead served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, where he commanded a landing craft at Omaha Beach, in the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

Pablo Picasso “detested” Pierre Bonnard, says Guy Cogeval, president of Paris’s Musée d’Orsay. It’s easy to see why. In the early 20th century, Picasso and members of experimental groups such as the cubists and the futurists were finding shocking new ways to render the world. They tended to view a decorative-minded painter like Bonnard as a lightweight.

Meanwhile, conservative critics and collectors lionized his work as an alternative to the demands of modernism.

Pejorative labels like “decorative” began to stick, and by midcentury, Bonnard was in need of rehabilitation. Over the last few decades, a number of exhibitions have brought new attention to Bonnard (1867–1947) by emphasizing his vivid colors and subtle compositions. His rediscovery will culminate this spring with a Paris exhibition that organizers say is the first to look at the whole of his career.

For almost a century, Milanese jeweler Buccellatihas kept the art of the Italian Renaissance at the core of their design philosophy, but with the opening of their Madison Avenue flagship on March 12, the house’s designers have found themselves dipping into a new creative pool: Impressionism.

Entitled "Timeless Blue," a capsule of one-of-a-kind jewels has been created in response to masterpieces by French, American and Russian masters Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Winslow Homer, Mikhail Larionov and Odilon Redon.

An Italian pensioner who unknowingly bought a stolen Gauguin for a pittance has been allowed to keep it after it was valued at $50 million.

The man, who has requested anonymity out of fear the painting could attract thieves, acquired the work along with another piece at an art sale in Turin in 1975.

The auctioneers told him they were worthless "rubbish," but they were in fact an 1889 Gauguin entitled "Fruits on a Table" or "Still Life with a Small Dog," and a work by Pierre Bonnard entitled "Woman with Two Armchairs," now thought to be worth $850,000.

When Aimé Maeght, a French art dealer, lost his young son to leukemia in the 1950s, a trio of formidable modern painters—Georges Braque, Joan Miró and Fernand Léger—persuaded him to turn the family’s summer retreat above the hills of Nice into an artists’ haven. The Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation is 50 years old this month, and still bears abundant traces of the artists who made it happen: a magical Miró labyrinth, mosaics and stained glass by Braque. Its collection of 12,000 works includes 35 sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, as well as masterpieces by Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, Miró, Léger and Alexander Calder, among others. On average, 200,000 visitors tour its colourful galleries and garden every year.

Behind the idyllic exterior, though, the institution is vulnerable. The foundation is finding it hard to raise its €3m ($4m) annual budget.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky ( on view through September 14, 2014), an exhibition that sheds new light on the extraordinary response of artists in Germany and France to key developments in modern art in the early 20th century. For the first time in a major museum exhibition, Expressionism is presented not as a distinctly German style but as an international movement in which artists in Germany and France responded with various aesthetic approaches to modern masters such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Paul Gauguin, among others. Over 40 artists—including Wassily Kandinsky, Emil Nolde, Gabrielle Münter, Franz Marc, Robert Delaunay, and Pierre Bonnard—are represented in over 90 paintings and 45 works on paper, in addition to approximately 30 ephemera objects.

“Expressionism in Germany and France offers a unique opportunity to observe the ways that a generation of artists was influenced by some of the greatest names in modern art history,” says exhibition curator Timothy O. Benson. “Our visitors will gain insight into the culturally rich cosmopolitan milieu established by the many exhibitions, collectors, gallerists, critics, and not least the artists of the time (many of whom traveled between Paris and Germany) and how this cultural atmosphere transcended national borders.”

The Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, announced that it has received a significant gift from the estate of May Gruber, a legendary New Hampshire businesswoman and civic leader. Included in the donation are works by Rembrandt, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Pierre Bonnard, James McNeill Whistler, David Hockney, and Jim Hodges. many of the works are currently on view in the museum’s European, Modern, and Contemporary art galleries.

Gruber, the former head of Pandora Industries, a Manchester institution that created iconic sweaters and knitwear in the city from 1940 until 1983, helped found Child Health Services and the Manchester Community Music School. Gruber and her first husband, Saul Sidore, began collecting art in the 1960s based on advice from Charles Buckley, then director of the Currier.

Susan Strickler, the director and CEO of the Currier, said, “May Gruber felt strongly about giving back to the community that helped her company to grow. Her tastes were eclectic and wide-ranging, as is evidenced by the works she gave to the Currier. Because of her bequest, the region has an even more exceptional collection of art to cherish.”

Founded in 1929, the Currier Museum of Art’s collection includes European and American paintings, decorative arts, photographs, and sculpture.

On Wednesday, April 2, Italy’s Culture Ministry unveiled two paintings that were recovered by police specializing in locating stolen art. The works, which are by the French artists Paul Gauguin and Pierre Bonnard, had been hanging in an Italian factory worker’s kitchen for nearly 40 years. He was unaware of the spectacular value of the works in his possession.

The two paintings were stolen from a London home in 1970 and then abandoned on a train traveling from Paris to Turin. The works were stored in an Italian Railways lost and found facility until they were offered at a lost-property auction in 1975. A Fiat factory worker with a passion for art purchased the paintings for roughly $30. A friend of the factory worker alerted Italian heritage police last summer when he grew suspicious of the paintings’ value.

Gauguin’s “Fruits sur une Table ou Nature au Petit Chien” is estimated to be worth between 10 million and 30 million euros. The Bonnard painting, titled “Le Femme aux Deux Fauteuils,” is said to be worth around 650,000 euros. The investigation into how the paintings ended up in the Fiat worker’s kitchen are still ongoing. It is unclear who the works will be returned to since the original owners have passed away.