Displaying items by tag: touring exhibition

Major touring art exhibitions are rarely the same from one venue to the next, for a variety of reasons. Lenders drop out, certain canvases can’t travel, or the available rooms in one museum are smaller than those in another.

Even in this context, there’s a dollop of overstatement in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s announcement that it will be the only Canadian stop for “a critically acclaimed solo exhibition from Tate Britain” of late paintings by J.M.W. Turner. The Tate show included more than 150 works; the AGO will show around 50.

A measure of respect is due any artist who has the nerve to take on a revered masterpiece in the history of art, aspiring to remake it according to a conception of new conditions in the present. That's what Jim Hodges did in 2008 with a sculpture born of Albrecht Dürer's famous watercolor that shows a chunk of wet mud sprouting a clump of bristling weeds.

Arguably, Dürer's "The Great Piece of Turf" (1503) is the greatest drawing in all of Western art. Hodges' take on it, a delicate glass sculpture sealed inside a nearly 3-foot-tall bell jar, is one of 56 works in the 25-year retrospective of his career concluding its national tour at the UCLA Hammer Museum. "Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take," jointly organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and Minneapolis' Walker Art Center, continues through Jan. 18.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. announced that they have acquired 100 photographs from The Irving Penn Foundation. Irving Penn, one of the most celebrated artists of the 20^th century, revolutionized fashion photography and was also well known for his still lifes and portraits that frequently appeared in Vogue.

The recently acquired photographs include rare, mostly unpublished works from the late 1930s and 1940s, images of post-war Europe and iconic portraits of celebrated figures such as Agnes de Mille, Langston Hughes and Truman Capote. The collection also includes commercial photography, self-portraits and some of Penn’s most recognizable fashion images. Penn had donated 61 photographs, spanning from 1944 to 1986, to the Smithsonian during his lifetime. He also gifted 60 works to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in 1990.

To celebrate the acquisition and the expansion of the Smithsonian’s Penn holdings, the museum will organize a touring exhibition of approximately 160 works that will open at the Smithsonian in the fall of 2015.

The touring exhibition The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece: Masterworks from the British Museum is currently on view at the Dallas Museum of Art through October 6, 2013. Presenting 120 objects from the British Museum’s renowned collection of Greek and Roman art, each work explores the human form and humanity as sources of artistic inspiration. The show spans three millennia of Greek civilization and includes marble and bronze sculptures, painted pottery, terracotta, and jewelry.

The Body Beautiful is divided into 10 thematic sections that illustrate the various ways the Greeks interpreted the human body including Cycladic figures and realistic Roman genre sculptures. Highlights from the exhibition include the Diskobolos (discus thrower) sculpture from the second century A.D., which is on view for the first time in the United States, and a model of Ancient Olympia as it would have appeared around 100 B.C. A video installation will be shown alongside the model providing glimpses of the original Olympic sites and artworks depicting the ancient athletic event.

Maxwell L. Anderson, The Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, said, “We will present a visually engaging and thought-provoking exploration of the human condition as seen by the ancient Greeks, and, equally, of the origins of our construct of beauty today.”