International Art News

From may 25 to September 8, 2013 – The Fondation Beyeler
Max Ernst (1891–1976) is one of modernism’s most versatile artists. Having started out as a Dadaist in Cologne, he soon became a pioneer of Surrealism in Paris. A tireless creator of new figures, forms and techniques, Max Ernst kept on evolving in new directions even up to his late years. His remarkable oeuvre, which defies any clear stylistic definition, was also shaped by his eventful life and the many different places in which he lived in Europe and America.

The major retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler will present an exemplary selection of over 170 paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and books by Max Ernst that encompass all aspects of his work. For the first time in Switzerland, visitors will be able to experience the full richness of Max Ernst’s multifaceted oeuvre.

Fondation Beyeler

From June 13 to June 16 2013 – Halls 1 and 2 of Messe Basel at Messeplatz.
Art Basel has been described as the ‘Olympics of the Art World’. Over 300 leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa show the work of more than 4,000 artists, ranging from the great masters of Modern art to the latest generation of emerging stars.

The show’s individual sectors represent every artistic medium: paintings, sculpture, installations, videos, multiples, prints, photography, and performance. Each day offers a full program of events, including symposiums, films, and artist talks. Further afield, exhibitions and events are offered by cultural institutions in Basel and the surrounding area, creating an exciting, region-wide art week.

Art Basel

Until the 14th of October 2012 – Museum Tinguely
This year the Museum Tinguely in Basel is dedicating its large summer exhibition to one of the most important figures of the Russian avant-garde: Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953). It is now almost twenty years since the last comprehen-sive retrospective to be devoted to this radically innovative artist. The presented works will include early paintings, counter-reliefs that reach out into the surrounding space, reconstructions of his revolutionary tower, and the flying machine Letatlin. The exhibition is rounded off with examples of his work for the theatre. The œuvre of this outstanding artist from the watershed period at the beginning of the twentieth century will be represented in over one hundred masterpieces, mostly on loan from major collections in Moscow and St Petersburg.

Vladimir Tatlin began his career as a seaman. Until 1913 his artistic activities were limited exclusively to painting and drawing. Interested in the traditional fields of icon-painting and folk art, he later transferred his attention to the most modern avant-garde trends in Russia and Western Europe, more precisely Paris. His entire later work is founded on painting. The exhibition will show a comprehensive selection of his early paintings with their bold expanses of colour, rhythmic curves, and striking use of dark and light outlines. In these eye-catching works Tatlin achieved a highly original synthesis of the Russian tradition and the French avant-garde.

Museum Tinguely

From June 14 to June 17, 2012 – Messe Basel, Messeplatz
The world’s premier international art show for Modern and contemporary works, Art Basel features nearly 300 leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. More than 2,500 artists, ranging from the great masters of Modern art to the latest generation of emerging stars, are represented in the show’s multiple sections. The exhibition includes the highest-quality paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations, photographs, video and editioned works.

65,000 people attended Art 42 Basel, the last edition of this favorite rendezvous for the global artworld, including art collectors, art dealers, artists, curators and other art enthusiasts.

With its world-class museums, outdoor sculptures, theaters, concert halls, idyllic medieval old town and new buildings by leading architects, Basel ranks as a culture capital, and that cultural richness helps put the Art Basel week on the agenda for art lovers from all over the globe. During Art Basel, a fascinating atmosphere fills this traditional city, as the international art show is reinforced with exhibitions and events all over the region.

Located on the banks of the Rhine, at the border between Switzerland, France and Germany, Basel is easily navigated by foot and trams.

Art Basel Website

From April 1 2012 to August 12, 2012  – Kunstmuseum Basel
The spectacular exhibition Renoir. Between Bohemia and Bourgeoisie: The Early Years at the Kunstmuseum Basel will focus on the underappreciated early work of the great painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919).
Fifty paintings—portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, among them masterworks from the collections of major museums such as the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, the National Gallery, London, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as virtually unknown works from private collections, form a magnificent panorama of the formative years of Renoir’s art.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was among the French painters who founded Impressionism. With a light palette, loose brushwork, and motifs from modern urban life and leisurely amusements in natural settings, he and his fellow innovators wrote art history. The painter’s Impressionist period and his late work have subsequently tended to eclipse other parts of his oeuvre. He has been celebrated as the “painter of happiness,” but that has also been a cliché to which he was reduced..

The Kunstmuseum Basel now presents a grand survey exhibition, the first show ever to emphasize the artist’s outstanding and surprisingly complex early work, up to and including the eminent Impressionist paintings of the 1870s.
Renoir’s most important model during these first years of his career was his lover, Lise Tréhot. Their relationship lasted from 1865 to 1872. Lise sat for a series of important early works in which he staged her in a wide variety of roles and pictorial genres. This group of paintings constitutes a highlight of the exhibition. The two illegitimate children who issued from the relationship with Lise were given up for adoption—a fact that the artist kept secret throughout his life and that puts a new complexion on the ostensibly perfect idylls in his pictures of pairs of lovers and mothers with children.
Portraits of his friends and fellow artists Claude Monet, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley form another distinct group. Renoir’s own contribution to Impressionism is most clearly apparent in his landscapes, especially those of the countryside around Paris, and in his scenes of la vie moderne. The period from the mid-1860s to the late 1870s is defined by extraordinary social, political, and artistic developments. The tensions between bohemia and the bourgeoisie, two milieus in which Renoir moved, are readily apparent in his oeuvre. He experienced the political sea changes from the conservative climate of the Second Empire to the revolution of the Paris Commune and hence to the Third Republic, even as he avoided involvement in these conflicts whenever possible. A young artist’s chances of achieving visibility depended on his work being shown in the Salon. Renoir and his fellow Impressionists rebelled against that institution by organizing exhibitions of their own. In the late 1870s, however, as his work slowly found official recognition, his attitude toward the Salon grew friendlier as well. Renoir’s early work lets us trace his evolution as an artist in fascinating paintings. Paintings from this period reflect the growing range of his pictorial imagination as he spent many days studying the paintings at the Louvre, but also took in the revolutionary innovations of his time: the realism of Gustave Courbet, the Barbizon school’s en plein air painting, and the inspirations he received from Édouard Manet and Claude Monet, his closest artistic associates at the time.

Museum Hours

29 January – 13 May 2012 – Foundation Beyeler
With the exhibition “Pierre Bonnard”, the Fondation Beyeler celebrates the great French colorist and one of the most fascinating of modern artists. More than 60 paintings from renowned museums and private collections provide insight into all phases of his career.
Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was a co-founder of an artist‘s group known as the Nabis, who admired the style of Paul Gauguin and Japanese woodblock prints. In Paris, Bonnard depicted the bustling life on the streets and in the cafés, before retiring first to Normandy, very close to Monet‘s water-lily garden, then to the sunny Côte d‘Azur, where he was inspired by the light and colors of the Mediterranean environment. Continually experimenting, he produced variants in ever-new color combinations and from surprising points of view on subjects from everyday life, in which time only apparently seems to stand still. The artist‘s favorite model was the mysterious Marthe, his muse and wife. Bonnard created harmonious still lifes, enigmatic interiors, intimate female nudes, moving self-portraits, and decorative landscapes whose magnificent palette is unique in modern art.

One of the principal lenders is the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Further outstanding loans come from the Tate London; the Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Kunstmuseum Basel; the Kunsthaus Zürich; and from distinguished private collections, not least from the Hahnloser successors.

Foundation hours and read more