Displaying items by tag: private collections

Maine Sublime: Frederic Edwin Church’s Landscapes of Mount Desert and Mount Katahdin will open on June 9, 2013 at Olana in Hudson, NY. Olana State Historic Site was the home of Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), a major figure in the Hudson River School, and includes the artist’s studio. The villa is a mixture of Victorian, Persian, and Moorish styles and overlooks the Hudson River valley, the Catskill Mountains, and the Taconic Ridge.

The upcoming exhibition focuses on the 50-year period during which Church traveled and painted landscapes of Maine. Maine Sublime presents 10 oil and 13 pencil sketches from Olana’s collection and many of works will be on public view for the first time. The show will include loans from the Portland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and two private collections.

Church first visited Maine in 1850 and spent six weeks on Mount Desert. In 1852, Church explored the Mount Katahdin region and in the coming decades he would continue to visit and be captivated by Maine’s natural beauty. The plein-air sketch Wood Interior Near Mount Katahdin (circa 1877) is one of the works that has never been on public view but will be part of the upcoming exhibition.

Maine Sublime will be on view at Olana through October 31, 2013. The exhibition will then be on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art through the summer of 2014.

The Panoramic View: The Hudson and the Thames, which is currently on view at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, NY, focuses on the panoramic vista, a form that became popular among artists in the late 18^th century. The term panorama was originally coined by the Irish painter Robert Barker (1739-1806) to describe his wide-angle paintings of Edinburgh and London. The form was ideal for members of the Hudson River School and other artists entranced by the natural world as it allowed them to capture the sweeping grandeur of the landscapes that inspired them.

The Panoramic View includes works by Robert Havell, Jr. (1793-1878), an English artist who emigrated from London to New York and painted both the Hudson and the Thames; founder of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole (1801-1848); and Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900), a first-generation member of the Hudson River School. The exhibition features loans from galleries, private collections, and museums including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The New-York Historical Society.

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies The Panoramic River, which is on view through May 19, 2013.

The Louvre’s new outpost in Abu Dhabi, which is slated to open in 2015, has assembled the 130 paintings, miniatures, sculptures, and other artworks that will form its permanent collection. Museum officials allowed reporters a sneak peek of the works including paintings by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Édouard Manet (1832-1883), and Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). The entire collection will be on view from April 22 to July 20, 2013 as part of the exhibition The Birth of a Museum at a gallery on the island of Saadiyat, close to where construction for the new museum is currently underway.

Louvre Abu Dhabi’s collection is comprised of numerous works from private collections, many of which have never been on public view before. Highlights from the museum’s holdings include Picasso’s gouache, ink, and collage work on paper Portrait of a Lady (1928); Gauguin’s Children Wrestling (1888); and Paul Klee’s (1879-1940) Oriental Bliss (1938).

The Louvre’s new venue, which was designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel, is the museum’s first branch outside of France. The venture is expected to bring the Louvre and its French partner museums approximately $1.31 million over 30 years. The Louvre also has an offshoot location in the northern city of Lens.

Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century is now on view at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT and explores the art created in Britain during the reign of King Edward II. The period, which is known as the Edwardian era, lasted from 1901 to 1910.

 Sandwiched between the rigid Victorian era and the devastation of World War I, the Edwardian era was a time of rapid technological growth, significant artistic development, shifting political and social structures, and increased consumption among the elite. Edwardian Opulence explores how all of these changes influenced the creation, consumption, and display of British art through a range of objects.

 Highlights from the exhibition include portraits by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931), diamond-studded tiaras, vivid Autochrome color photographs, bejeweled bell pushes by Carl Fabergé (1846-1920), and an extravagantly embellished gown that belonged to the American-born Vicereine of India.

The show is comprised of 170 works from public art museums and private collections. Lenders include Queen Elizabeth II, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Britain, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Musée d’Orsay. Edwardian Opulence will be on view through June 2, 2013.

The Cloisters museum and gardens, a branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art located in northern Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park, will celebrate its 75^th anniversary this year. Assembled from architectural elements, both domestic and religious, that date from the 12^th through the 15^th century, the Cloisters houses approximately 3,000 works of art from medieval Europe.

To commemorate its 75^th year, the Cloisters has a number of celebratory exhibitions planned. Search for the Unicorn: An Exhibition in Honor of the Cloisters’ 75^th Anniversary will present the Unicorn Tapestries (1495-1505), a series of seven tapestries, which were a gifted to the museum by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. when the Cloisters opened in 1938. The Tapestries are the museum’s best-known masterpieces, but their history and meaning remain mysterious. The Unicorn Tapestries will be exhibited alongside approximately 40 works from the Metropolitan, sister institutions, and private collections. Search for the Unicorn will be on view from May 15-August 18, 2013.

In September, the Cloisters will mount an installation by Janet Cardiff (b. 1957). The Forty Part Motet (2001) is comprised of 40 speakers, each playing the sound of one singer in a 40-voice choral performing “Spem in alium numquam habui” (circa 1573) by the Tudor composer Thomas Tallis (circa 1505-1585). The installation will play on a loop in the Cloister’s Fuentidueña Chapel through December 8, 2013. The Forty Part Motet is the first piece of contemporary art to be featured at the Cloisters.

The Cloisters will wrap up its anniversary celebrations with the exhibition of six near life-size stained glass windows on loan from England’s historic Canterbury Cathedral. It will be the first time the panels have left the cathedral since their creation in 1178-80. Current repairs to the cathedral’s stonework required the removal of the windows, which have recently been conserved. The stained-glass windows that will be on view at the Cloisters feature six figures from an original cycle of 86 ancestors of Christ, the most comprehensive stained-glass cycle known in art history. The Romanesque masterpieces will be on view from March through May 2014.

In 1913, the Art Institute of Chicago became the first American art museum to present the work of the young Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). One hundred years later, the museum is celebrating its important relationship with the artist with the exhibition Picasso and Chicago.

Picasso and Chicago features 250 works by the artist who went on to become one of the defining figures in 20^th century art. Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and ceramics from the museum’s holdings as well as private collections in the city will be on view. This is the first comprehensive Picasso exhibition organized by the Art Institute in nearly 30 years.

The Art Institute of Chicago began collecting works by Picasso after the seminal 1913 Armory Show, which revolutionized American modern art. Works on view from the museum’s collection include The Old Guitarist (1903-04), Mother and Child (1921), Red Armchair (1931), and the sculpture Cubist Head of a Woman (Fernande) (1909). The exhibit also features impressions of The Frugal Meal (1904), one of only three examples in the world of the well-known Blue Period etching actually printed in blue ink.

Picasso and Chicago will be on view through May 12, 2013.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), an obscure graffiti artist who shot to fame in the 1980s thanks to his Neo-expressionist and Primitivist paintings, is the subject of a major exhibition now on view at Gagosian Gallery in New York. Gagosian first featured Basquiat’s work thirty years ago in its Los Angeles gallery.

Since his untimely death at 27, Basquiat has been given a number of posthumous retrospectives including one at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1992-92) and another at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2005). The first major show to focus on the artist in eight years, the Gagosian exhibition will present over fifty works from public and private collections that span Basquiat’s short but powerful career.

Basquiat, who left his family home in Brooklyn at 15, became a major figure in New York City’s underground art scene. After making a name for himself as a prolific graffiti artist, Basquiat transitioned to painting and hit his artistic stride. Basquiat befriended Andy Warhol (1928-1987), was the subject of an iconic New York Times Magazine feature, and had become a major art star before his life was cut short due to a drug overdose.  

Basquiat’s works will be on view at Gagosian Gallery through April 6, 2013.

Man Ray Portraits opens today, February 7, 2013 at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The first major Man Ray (1890-1976) exhibition to focus on his portraits, the show presents over 150 vintage prints and important works from international museums as well as private collections. A number of the photographs on view are on loan from the Man Ray Trust Archive. Taken between 1916 and 1968 in both Paris and the United States, many of the works have not been exhibited in the UK until now.

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, Man Ray spent most of his career in Paris. He made significant contributions to the Dada and Surrealist art movements and worked in a variety of media, but became best known for his avant-garde photography as well as his fashion and portrait work. Man Ray was keen on experimentation, which led to the production of camera-less Rayographs. With the help of fellow photographer, Lee Miller (1907-1977), who was also Man Ray’s muse and lover, he invented solarisation, a technique that involves recording an image on a negative or on a photographic print, reversing the image’s tone so that dark areas appear light and vice versa.

Arranged chronologically, the exhibition features Man Ray’s portraits of artists, friends, celebrities, and lovers including Miller, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Kiki de Montparnasse (1901-1953), and Catherine Deneuve (b. 1943). Man Ray Portraits will be on view through May 27, 2013.  

The renovated Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art opened to the public yesterday. The inaugural exhibition, Gods and Glamour, features 150 loans from both private collections and public institution as well as pieces from the museum’s collection. Objects such as marble sculptures, paintings, Greek pottery, jewelry, and silver come together to illustrate what life in the ancient and medieval Mediterranean world was like. A second inaugural exhibition of late Roman and early Byzantine art loaned by the British Museum is also on view through August 25, 2013.

Designed by the architectural firm, Why, the $10 million renovation was made possible by a gift from the Jaharis Family Foundation with some funds going to acquisitions and educational programs. The new 13,707 square-foot galleries include state-of-the-art display cases by Goppian Museum Workshop in Milan.

The updated Greek, Roman, and Byzantine galleries represent the final phase of the complete reinstallation of the Institute, which began in 2008 after the then new modern wing was constructed.

While sales totaled $3,486,127 million at Sotheby’s American Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture auction on September 28^th in New York, 35% of lots went unsold. Sotheby’s did slightly better than Christie’s in the American Art arena, but both sales are a testament to the lackluster performance of mid-season auctions.

“Sotheby’s did put a few more important paintings in the sale,” said Debra Force of Debra Force Fine Art, Inc. “The question is whether the clientele is there to buy it.” It appears that the clientele interested in purchasing Rockwells were at least in attendance. Is He Coming? (1919), a quintessential Norman Rockwell painting of a young boy and his dog peering up the chimney on what appears to be Christmas Eve, brought in $602,500. The final price was $300,000 more than than the paintings high estimate ($200,000–$300,000).

Sotheby’s sale featured more than 200 paintings, drawings, and sculptures and included property from two noteworthy private collections belonging to Margie and Robert E. Petersen and Susan Kahn Rosenkranz and Richard Rosenkranz. Highlights included works by Rockwell Kent, Marsden Harley, Grandma Moses, and Ben Shahn with Kent and Moses taking two of the top five lots. Moses’ On the Banks of the Hudson reached the third highest price of the sale at $92,500 but still brought in considerably less than its high estimate of $120,000. Rockwell Kent’s Adirondack Farm, Summer sold for $86,5000 (estimate: $25,000–$35,000), the fourth highest sale of the auction.

While the highlights of the auction could have made more money in a more important sale, the quality is there. "Maybe more important collectors need to get used to looking at these mid-season sales," says Force.