Displaying items by tag: francisco goya

The representation of human emotion through facial expression has interested Western artists since antiquity. Drawn from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of drawings, prints, and photographs, the diverse works in About Face: Human Expression on Paper—portraits, caricatures, representations of theater and war—reveal how expression underpinned narrative and provided a window onto the character and motivations of the subjects, the artists, and even their audiences. The exhibition is on view from July 27 through December 13, 2015.

Using Charles Le Brun’s illustrations for Expressions of the Passions and Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne de Boulogne and Adrien Tournachon’s photographic series as touchstones, the approximately 60 works dating from the 16th through the 19th century show how artists such as Hans Hoffmann, Francisco Goya, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Thomas Rowlandson explored the animated human face.

From Francisco Goya’s Duchess of Alba in White to a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts’ 2016 lineup of exhibitions offers a remarkable variety of artistic media and periods. The year begins with European Old Masters, including Fra Angelico, Goya, Murillo and Rubens, from an illustrious Spanish private collection in Treasures from the House of Alba: 500 Years of Art and Collecting. In late spring, the beautifully designed high-performance Italian coachbuilt cars, concept cars, and motorcycles of Bellissima! The Italian Automotive Renaissance, 1945–1975 will roll into the galleries and remain through the summer. Samurai: The Way of the Warrior, a dynamic exhibition of medieval and early modern Japanese armory and customs, closes out the year.

All known drawings from Francisco Goya’s private “Witches and Old Women” album are being presented in their original sequence, thanks to extensive technical research undertaken by conservators, curators and art historians. An exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London (until May 25) marks the first time that all 22 ink drawings, which include depictions of elderly women fighting, witches carrying babies on their backs and pensioners dancing, have been shown together since their sale and dispersal in Paris in 1877.  

In what the noted Goya scholar Juliet Wilson-Bareau calls a “feat in forensics”, conservators and curators spent months examining the sheets to determine the pictures’ correct order. Although Goya (1746-1828) meticulously numbered each sketch, eight lost their numbers over the years.

Six former high ranking Spanish government officials are being investigated over alleged corruption surrounding the sale of government-owned artworks, including two paintings by the Spanish master Francisco Goya with a total worth of around €14 million, Spanish daily newspaper ABC reported on Friday.

Former education secretary Eva Almunia, and her husband Carlos Eso, who served in the cabinet in Spain’s Aragones region, oversaw the purchase of five paintings purchased with public funds between 2006 and 2010, while they were both in office.

Seventy paintings that span the 15th to the 20th centuries from the collection of the Spanish investor Juan Abelló and his wife Ana Gamazo, including works by El Greco, Francisco Goya, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, are due to go on show in the US for the first time. “The Abelló Collection: A Modern Taste for European Masters” will open at the Meadows Museum at the Southern Methodist University in Texas next year, 18 April-2 August.

A key work in the show is Francis Bacon’s "Triptych," 1983, one of the artist’s final works in the format, which Abelló acquired in 2008 through a private sale.

This fall, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, presents "Goya: Order and Disorder," a landmark exhibition dedicated to Spanish master Francisco Goya (1746–1828). The largest retrospective of the artist to take place in America in 25 years features 170 paintings, prints and drawings—offering the rare opportunity to examine Goya’s powers of observation and invention across the full range of his work. The MFA welcomes many loans from Europe and the US, including 21 works from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, along with loans from the Musée du Louvre, the Galleria degli Uffizi, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington) and private collections. "Goya: Order and Disorder" includes some 60 works from the MFA’s collection of Goya’s works on paper, one of the most important in the world. Many of these prints and drawings have not been on view in Boston in 25 years. Employed as a court painter by four successive rulers of Spain, Goya managed to explore an extraordinarily wide range of subjects, genres and formats. From the striking portrait "Duchess of Alba" (1797) from the Hispanic Society of America, to the tour de force of Goya’s "Seated Giant" (by 1818) in the MFA’s collection, to his drawings of lunacy, the works on view demonstrate the artist’s fluency across media.

It’s the end of a case that lasted more than a decade. France’s supreme court, the Council of State, has ruled that the foreign affair ministry was right to have turned down a restitution claim for three artworks seized by the American army in Austria at the end of World War Two.

They hadn’t been there long. In 1940, a German-American dealer had sold the three drawings by Adriaen Van Ostade, Francisco Goya, and Honoré Daumier to an Austrian dealer in charge of building a permanent collection for a regional museum in Salzburg. The pieces then entered the possession of an Austrian private collector. Suspected of being Nazi loot, they were retrieved by the Allied Forces and repatriated to France.

A young woman hangs sheer white linens on a clothesline. A refulgent angel descends from the heavens while shepherds tend their flocks by night. And an early motion-picture camera captures the fairyland allure of a world’s fair, slowly panning its illuminated buildings.

These vastly different images — from a 19th-century painting, a 17th-century print and a 20th-century film — are among the treasures in the current exhibition at Vassar’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. What brings them together is “Mastering Light: From the Natural to the Artificial,” a quirky, thought-provoking show that divides its subject into three sometimes overlapping areas: interiors and exteriors illuminated by daylight; nighttime events made visible by moonlight or firelight; and scenes either lighted by or on the subject of artificial light.

The art critic Robert Hughes described Goya's Disasters of War etchings as the greatest anti-war manifesto in the history of art. It is fitting, then, that as the world prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of the D-day landings and 100 years since the start of the 1914-18 war, 15 of these Goya prints will form the centrepiece of a powerful exhibition opening on Wednesday at the Louvre's outpost in Lens, a depressed former mining town flattened in the bombings of the first world war.

The exhibition's curator, the art historian Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, claims, however, that The Disasters of War: 1800 to 2014 is not pacifist.

No one saw the depraved underbelly of post-war Weimar-era Germany as surely as Otto Dix.

His famous triptych Metropolis set dismembered veterans alongside bourgeois revellers and femme fatales.

A year later, in 1928, came the dehumanised, androgynous Portrait Of The Journalist Sylvia von Harden, a masterpiece currently held in Paris.

But it is a series of 50 prints titled Der Krieg (The War), made ten years after the beginning of the First World War, whose unerring focus is pertinent as the world commemorates the centenary of the start of machine-led, industrial-scale killing.