International Art News

Jacopo Robusti detto Tintoretto: Autoritratto, 1587, Parigi, Musée du Louvre – Département des Peintures

From February 25 to June 10, 2012 – Scuderie del Quirinale
JACOPO ROBUSTI (or CANAL), better known as TINTORETTO (1519-1594), is the only key Italian 16th century painter not to have had a major monographic exhibition devoted to his work to date. If we ignore the thematic exhibition of his portraits held in Venice in 1994, the last exhibition of the great Venetian master’s work was held in 1937, due among other reasons to the sheer physical impossibility of shifting the large canvases that he painted in Venice

The exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale is part of a broader programme designed to explore the work of those artists who have helped to make the story of art in our country so unique and so grandiose, ranging from Botticelli to Antonello da Messina, from Bellini to Caravaggio and, more recently, to Lorenzo Lotto and Filippino Lippi.
This exhibition, focusing on the three main themes that distinguish Tintoretto’s work: religion, mythology and portraiture, is strictly monographic and will be divided into sections comprising a handful of carefully selected and unquestioned masterpieces, beginning and ending with his two celebrated self-portraits of himself as a young man, from the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and as an old man, from the Louvre. Even though he was in competition with Titian, his contemporaries yet recognized his “utterly exquisite eye in portraiture”, and some of his most famous portraits from leading international collections will be on display here in Rome.
Also on display will be the spectacular Miracle of the Slave painted in 1548 for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, a work that allowed him to grab the limelight as one of leading lights of the Venetian art scene, while the exhibition closes with The Deposition (1594) from the Monastry of San Giorgio Maggiore, possibly the last work in which it is possible to identify the hand of the master. Other famous works on show will include what is considered to be one of his first acknowledged paintings, Jesus Among the Doctors (1542) lent by the Milan Cathedral’s Diocesan Museum, and such celebrated masterpieces as the Madonna of the Treasurers and the Stealing of the Dead Body of St. Mark, both from the Gallerie dell’Accademia, and the St Mary of Egypt and the St Mary Magdalen from the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Visitors will also have the privilege of being able to witness the unprecedented and spectacular juxtaposition of the Last Supper from the Venetian church of San Trovaso with another version of the same subject, from the church of San Polo, painted five years later to celebrate one of the Scuole del Sacramento’s favorite themes.

Jacopo Robusti detto Tintoretto: Trafugamento del corpo di san Marco, 1562-1566, Venezia, Gallerie dell’Accademia

Alongside the large canvases with their dramatic impact and their tense, rapid brushwork, visitors will also be able to inspect the artist’s intense historical and mythological works, charged with emotion, including, for example, the octagonal panels depicting Apollo and Daphne and Deucalion and Pyrrha, two of the fourteen made in 1541 for the ceiling of Casa Pisani and now in the Galleria Estense in Modena, or the splendid Susanna and the Elders from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Il Tintoretto 1518 – 1594 - Susanna and the Elders - oil on canvas (147 × 194 cm) — 1560-62 - Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

A major innovation at this exhibition is the commentary in the shape of texts in each room penned by Melania Mazzucco, a writer who has devoted numerous novels to, and written unforgettable pages on, Tintoretto and his circle. Her narrative will accompany visitors step by step, room by room, from the beginning to the end of the show.
This deliberately small exhibition comprises some 40 paintings (accompanied by a section devoted to the artistic environment contemporary with the Venetian master), all of the highest quality and on loan from leading international museums and collections, offering visitors a tight but extremely significant overview of the artistic career of Jacopo Tintoretto: that ‘tireless manual labourer’ as his fellow Venetian and art critic Boschin called him once and for all, ‘but without intending in any way to demean him’, as the great art critic Roberto Longhi pointed out, describing him in his turn as ‘a natural genius, a great inventor of dramatic tales that unfold in a choreography of vibrant light and shade… an endlessly entertaining performance.’

Museum Hours

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). Woman with a Hat, 1905. Oil on canvas; 31 3/4 x 23 1/2 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bequest of Elise S. Haas. © 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

February 28–June 3, 2012 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael’s wife Sarah were important patrons of modern art in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century. This exhibition unites some two hundred works of art to demonstrate the significant impact the Steins’ patronage had on the artists of their day and the way in which the family disseminated a new standard of taste for modern art. The Steins’ Saturday evening salons introduced a generation of visitors to recent developments in art, particularly the work of their close friends Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, long before it was on view in museums.

Beginning with the art that Leo Stein collected when he arrived in Paris in 1903—including paintings and prints by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Manet, and Auguste Renoir—the exhibition traces the evolution of the Steins’ taste and examines the close relationships formed between individual members of the family and their artist friends. While focusing on works by Matisse and Picasso, the exhibition also includes paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Manguin, André Masson, Elie Nadelman, Francis Picabia, and others.

Museum Hours

Pavel Hayek, Jabloň, 2008, 130x130 cm, akryl na plátně. Foto Libor Teplý

From February 29 to April 1, 2012 – Brno The House of Arts
This joint exhibition by the artists Otto Zitko (b. 1959, resident in Vienna) and Pavel Hayek (b.1959, resident in Brno), set up by the Brno gallery owner Karel Tutsche will present two artistic positions which differ but are at the same time complementary. The link between them is not a demonstrative expression of the monarchist relationship of Brno to Vienna; Pavel Hayek invited Zitko as a creative kindred spirit. The compositions in Hayek’s pictures are only compositions to the same extent that Zitko’s gesture is a true gesture. In this context Barbara Steiner talks of Zitko’s compound gesture and Jiří Valoch about Hayek’s composition-free pictures – structures sui generis. This structural aspect is the great connection between the two artistic approaches. Zitko’s endless line overgrowing the pictures and interior walls of the House of Arts, and Hayek’s floorplan-specific structures which are “themselves” placed into the position of a design.

Hours

Lauri Laine, Visitor, 2011oil on canvas, 255 x 165 cm. Photo: Jussi Tiainen

From March 10 to April 22, 2012 – Kunsthalle Helsinki
Lauri Laine is one of the most prestigious and internationally famous Finnish artists of his generation. The retrospective exhibition showcases Laine’s paintings from the mid-1980s to the present. Working in Helsinki and Rome, the artist’s large-scale, opulent abstractions are inspired by the way Italian and Spanish masters of Renaissance and Baroque painting handled light and space in their work.

Museum Hours

Robert Jessup - Neighborhood Geometry - oil on canvas 80 X 74 inches

March 21, 2012 – April 21, 2012 – Besharat Gallery
Robert Jessup was born in Moscow, Idaho, in 1952. He graduated from the University of Washington with a BA in Art History and a BFA in Painting, before gaining his MFA in Painting from the University of Iowa City.

Robert Jessup’s paintings describe a place neither here nor there; part memory, part imagination. They are both awkward and beautiful, and they show us what we might otherwise only see with our eyes closed. That is unless you come from a place where people balance fish or teacups on their heads, or push boulders uphill while nude. With the imagination of a child and skill of a seasoned painter, Robert Jessup creates paintings that have the unique ability to both unsettle and delight us at the same time.

Mr. Jessup’s paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; as well as many public, private, and corporate collections.

Gallery Hours

Jean Cocteau avec un revolver 1926 Berenice Abbott Épreuve gélatino argentique, 35,5 x 28 cm. Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc

From 21 February 2012 until 29 April 2012 – Musee du Jeu de Paume
With Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), urban experience is at the heart of the exhibition: in an America shaken by the Wall Street Crash, her images of 1930s New York convey her fascination with an urban landscape in the throes of dramatic change. Also known for championing the work of Eugène Atget, Abbott, who originally wanted to be sculptor, proved to be a great photographer of matter, space and light.
This is the first exhibition in France to cover every stage of Berenice Abbott’s career, featuring over 120 vintage prints by this American photographer as well as a series of documents never previously shown. The selection of portraits, architectural photographs and scientific plates shows the many facets of a body of work all too often reduced to a handful of familiar images.

Berenice Abbott came to the French capital in the 1920s and was trained by Man Ray before opening her own studio, where she began a successful career as a portrait photographer. Mixing in the artistic and intellectual circles of the day, she photographed a cosmopolitan cast including Eugène Atget, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Sylvia Beach, André Gide, Foujita, Max Ernst, and Marie Laurencin.

Park Avenue et 39e rue, New York 8 octobre 1936 Berenice Abbott Épreuve gélatino argentique, 19 x 24,5 cm. Museum of the City of New York. Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

The exhibition also features a substantial selection of images form her Changing New York project (1935-1939), for which she is best known. This undertaking was Abbott’s own initiative but was financed by the Works Progress Administration, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal efforts to combat the Great Depression. Conceived as both a record of the city and a work of art in its own right, this ambitious government commission focuses on the contrast between the old and the new in the rapidly changing city.
The photographs she took in 1954 when travelling along the US East Coast on Route 1 (the exhibition is presenting a never previously exhibited selection of these) reflect her ambition to represent the whole of what she called the “American scene.”
In the 1950s, Abbott produced a set of photographs illustrating the principles of mechanics and optics for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Combining aesthetic and educational concerns, these abstract, experimental images echo her photograms of the 1920s.
An active participant in the avant-garde circles in the 1920s, a determined opponent of Pictorialism and the school of Alfred Stieglitz, famous for bringing Eugène Atget to international attention, Berenice Abbott spent her whole career exploring the notions of documentary photography and photographic realism. This retrospective at Jeu de Paume brings out the richness of her approach, and both the diversity and unity of her work.

Museum Hours