Displaying items by tag: robert motherwell

The artist, Robert Motherwell, was one of the important figures on the New York art scene in the 1940s and 1950s. A recent volume, “Robert Motherwell: Early Collages” (Guggenheim) by Susan Davidson and Megan Fontanella explores a little known aspect of his work.

The pieces, most made during his first decade of exploratory art making, are a combination of figurative and purely abstract works, unlike the purely abstract works and paintings that came later in his career.

Christopher Bedford, Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, has announced that Baltimore businessman, author, and collector Stephen M. Salny has made a promised gift to the museum of 48 works on paper created by some of today’s leading contemporary artists, including 11 lithographs by Ellsworth Kelly. Among the other artists represented in the gift are Josef Albers, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, Sol Lewitt, Brice Marden, Robert Motherwell, and Sean Scully.

Salny’s gift will augment strengths of the Rose Art Museum collection, which includes paintings and other works by some of the artists included, notably Kelly, Johns, Motherwell, and Frankenthaler, while also extending its holdings in new directions, including the first work by Hirst to by acquired by the museum.

A century after his birth, on Jan. 24, 1915, Robert Motherwell occupies a middle rung on the reputation ladder of Abstract Expressionists. The names Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and possibly others would now come sooner to many people’s minds on the topic.

But through the long arc and productive prime of his career, Motherwell was as important as anyone in shaping the transformative artistic mode of the mid-20th century.

Robert Motherwell, a major figure of the New York School best known for his eloquent abstract works, is being honored with a centennial celebration in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Hosted by the Fine Arts Work Center and the Provincetown Art Association Museum, in conjunction...

To continue reading about the Robert Motherwell centennial celebration, visit InCollect.com.

"New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940 – 1970" was the Met’s most exciting exhibition to date under the auspices of director Thomas Hoving, who turned Henry Geldzahler loose to prick the art world to alertness. Paul Kasmin Gallery announces "The New York School, 1969: Henry Geldzahler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art," on view at 293 Tenth Avenue from January 13 – March 14, 2015. Curated by Stewart Waltzer, this comprehensive group show reprises Geldzahler’s seminal exhibition and includes exemplary works by Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, Joseph Cornell, Mark di Suvero, Dan Flavin, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenberg, Jules Olitski, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, featuring works from the original exhibition.

The New York School artist Robert Motherwell could be ponderous in oil on canvas. But on paper, he was lighter and looser, to judge from the Kasmin Gallery’s career-spanning mini-survey of Mr. Motherwell’s drawings and collages (organized with the artist’s Dedalus Foundation). Working with ink, charcoal, acrylic and assorted labels and wrapping papers, Mr. Motherwell offset strong colors and muscular gestures with the suggestion of chance and accident.

The show includes notable works from every phase of Mr. Motherwell’s long career, from the loopy 1951 ink drawing “Fowl” to the vibrant mixed-media piece “The Red and Black No. 24” of 1987-88.

A new exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey charts the developments in abstract painting that took place between 1950 and 1990. The show examines how postwar artists such as Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Jean Dubuffet, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, and Frank Stella ushered in advancements in abstraction thanks to their individual approaches to line, color, and form.

“Rothko to Richter: Mark-Making in Abstract Painting” presents nearly thirty paintings on loan from the collection of Preston H. Haskell III, a Princeton University alumnus and a longstanding Museum benefactor. The exhibition touches on a number of monumental movements, including Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Minimalism, Op art, and Postmodernism.

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, has purchased two paintings by pioneering 20th-century American artists -- “Lattice and Awning” by Arthur Dove and “Summer Fantasy” by George Bellows. Dove, an early American modernist who spent most of his life in New York, was not previously represented in a public collection in Los Angeles County. The late-career landscape by Bellows, who is best known for his gritty depictions of day-to-day life, will enhance The Huntington’s collection of works by the realist painter.

Kevin Salatino, Hannah and Russell Kully Director of the Art Collections at The Huntington, said, “We have strengthened our collection of great American paintings dramatically with these acquisitions. ‘Lattice and Awning’ is a superb example of the artist’s work at a peak moment in his career, while ‘Summer Fantasy’ is a fascinating, multifaceted painting that eloquently fills a gap in our collection. Each will add invaluable depth to our display of American art.”

The works will go on view on July 19, when The Huntington opens five new rooms in its Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art, which house one of the largest collections of American art in California. The Huntington’s holdings span from the colonial period through the mid-20th century and include works by John Singleton Copley, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, John Sloan, and Robert Motherwell as well as a selection of American decorative arts.

Las Vegas billionaire Frank Fertitta III is suing a respected Swiss curator accused of standing behind the authenticity of a Mark Rothko painting that turned out to be a fake. Feritta acquired “Untitled (Orange, Red and Blue)” from New York’s disgraced Knoedler gallery in 2008. He paid $7.2 million for the canvas.

Oliver Wick, a Swiss Rotko expert and specialist in American paintings, received $300,000 for the sale. According to court documents, Wick “was aware of substantial evidence that the painting was a forgery” and “conducted no independent research into the authenticity of this fake Rotko.” The painting had been exhibited at the Fondation Beyeler museum in Basel, Switzerland, where Wick was a curator.

Knoedler, which closed in 2011, has been accused by multiple clients of selling forged paintings. The forgeries, which were presented as authentic works by Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning, had been painted by a Queens-based Chinese artist and sold to Knoedler by Glafira Rosales, a Long Island art dealer. Rosales pleaded guilty to nine charges, including wire fraud, tax fraud, and money laundering, last September. During her 15-year scheme, Rosales swindled unsuspecting customers out of over $80 million.

Since September 2013, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. has acquired a number of important works from the 15th through 20th centuries including tempera-and-gold drawings on vellum from the Middle Ages and works on paper by Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin. Earl A. Powell III, the director of the National Gallery of Art, said, “These acquisitions are masterworks from the Middle Ages to the current moment that represent the highest levels of creativity in media ranging from printmaking and manuscript illumination to easel painting and photography. We are delighted that they can be shared with the public as part of our permanent collection.”

Among the museum’s recent acquisitions are a woodcut-illustrated book of Giovanni Boccaccio’s ‘Seminal History of Famous Women’, the Gallery’s earliest German woodcut book; ‘Still Life with Peacock Pie,’ a banquet piece measuring more than four feet across by the Dutch Golden Age painter Pieter Claesz; one of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s finest versions of ‘Avenue of Cypresses at Villa d’Este’; a watercolor by Cézanne titled ‘A Stand of Trees Along a River Bank’; an early drawing by Gauguin titled ‘Seated Nude Seen from Above’; a pastel of Waterloo Bridge by Monet; and Pop artist Jim Dine’s ‘Name Painting.’ The National Gallery of Art also received works by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Marc Chagall, Jasper Johns and Robert Motherwell from the celebrated Herbert and Dorothy Vogel Collection. 

The National Gallery of Art was established in 1937 for the people of the United States by a joint resolution of the U.S. Congress. Financier and art collector, Andrew W. Mellon, donated a portion of his sizeable art collection to the museum, forming its core holdings. The National Gallery of Art’s collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures and decorative arts spans from the Middle Ages to the present and includes the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas as well as the largest mobile ever created by Alexander Calder.