International Art News

Self-portrait – Van Dyck – Oil on panel, 43 x 32.5 cm – ca. 1615 – Vienna, Gëmaldegalerie der Akademie der Bildenen Künste

20 november 2012 – 3 march 2013 – Museo Nacional del Prado
The Prado had no problem setting up with the help of the Boijmans van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam and a great number of international lenders, a very wealthy exhibit with some one hundred works of art that show the fullness of the youth’s genius.

Drunken Silenus, Van Dyck, oil on canvas, 107 x 90 cm, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen

Between approximately 1613 and 1618, the year when he registered as a master in the painters’ guild, Van Dyck worked in a variety of styles. In what are probably his earliest pictures he appears tentative in his rendering of anatomy. But even then he shows a strong personality and an experimental bent, which can be seen in his taste for rugged types and textured surfaces, both of which are different from what was common in Antwerp at the time.

Paintings such as the Drunken Silenus and The Lamentation are more accomplished than pictures displayed earlier in this exhibition. They show Van Dyck experimenting with modes of expression associated with Venetian and early Netherlandish painting… read more on the museum site

Museo Nacional del Prado

Edward Hopper (Nyack, 1882 - New York, 1967). Hotel Room. 1931 - Oil on canvas - 152.4 x 165.7 cm. Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.

Until the 16th of September 2012 – Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
The exhibition Hopper is the result of a collaborative project between the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux de France. These are two particularly important institutions with regard to Edward Hopper, given that Paris and early 20th-century works of art were key reference points for the artist, while the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid houses the most important collection of his work outside the USA.

Edward Hopper, Morning Sun, 1952, huile sur toile, 71,4 x 101,9 cm, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Howald Fund Purchase (exposition au musée Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid)

Despite their enormous popularity and apparent accessibility, Hopper’s paintings are among the most complex phenomena within 20th-century art in the opinion of the exhibition’s two curators, Tomàs Llorens (Honorary Director of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza) and Didier Ottinger (Associate Director of the MNAM/Centre Pompidou). In order to demonstrate this point the exhibition will be organised into two parts: a first half that covers the artist’s formative years from approximately 1900 to 1924, represented through a comprehensive selection of sketches, paintings, drawings, illustrations, prints and watercolours that will be complemented by works of artists as Winslow Homer, Robert Henri, John Sloan, Edgar Degas or Walter Sickert; a second half will cover the years 1925 onwards, that focuses on Hopper’s mature output and aims to illustrate his career in the most complete and wide-ranging manner possible. In order to do so, this section combines thematic groupings (recurring motifs and subjects in Hopper’s works) with an overall chronological ordering.

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

E.O. Hoppé - Gina Palerme caracterizada para Bric-a-Brac en el Palace Theatre, 1915. Silver gelatine, print original, Artist Estate collection

Until May 21 2012 – Foundation Mapfre
Emil Otto Hoppé (14 April 1878 – 9 December 1972) was a German-born British portrait, travel, and topographic photographer active between 1907 and 1945. Born into a wealthy family in Munich, he moved to London in 1900 originally to train as a financier, but took up photography and rapidly achieved great success.

He was “the only son of a prominent banker, and was educated in the finest schools of Munich, Paris and Vienna. On leaving school he served apprenticeships in German banks for ten years, before accepting a position with the Shanghai Banking Corporation. He never arrived in China. The first leg of his journey took him to England where he met an old school friend. Hoppé married his [old school friend's] sister, Marion Bliersbach and stayed in London. While working for the Deutsche Bank, he was becoming increasingly enamoured with photography, and, in 1907, jettisoned his commercial career and opened a portrait studio. Within a few years E.O. Hoppé was the undisputed leader of pictorial portraiture in Europe. To say that someone has a “household name” has become a cliché, yet in Hoppé’s case the phrase is apt. Rarely in the history of the medium has a photographer been so famous in his own lifetime among the general public. He was as famous as his sitters. It is difficult to think of a prominent name in the fields of politics, art, literature, and the theatre who did not pose for his camera.”[1]

Although Hoppé was one of the most important photographic artists of his era and highly celebrated in his time, in 1954, at the age of 76, he sold his body of photographic work to a commercial London picture archive, the Mansell Collection. In the collection it was filed by subject in with millions of other stock pictures and no longer accessible by author. Most all of Hoppé’s photographic work—that which gained him the reputation as Britain’s most influential international photographer between 1907 and 1939—was accidentally obscured from photo-historians and from photo-history itself. It remained there for over thirty years after Hoppé’s death, and was not fully accessible to the public until the collection closed down and was acquired by new owners in America.

E.O. Hoppé - Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, duquesa de York, futura reina Isabel, Reina Madre 1923. Silver gelatine, print original, Artist Estate collection

In 1994 photographic art curator Graham Howe retrieved Hoppé’s photographic work from the picture library and rejoined it with the Hoppé family archive of photographs and biographical documents, reconstituting for the first time since 1954 the complete E.O. Hoppé Collection. After many years of cataloguing, conservation, and research, the rediscovery of E.O. Hoppé’s extraordinary output can now be seen for the first time in over sixty years.

Museum Hours

Marc Chagall (Vitebsk, 1887 - Saint-Paul de Vence, 1985). The Blue Circus (Le cirque bleu).- 1950-52- Oil on linen canvas - 232.5 x 175.8 cm - Centre Pompidou, Paris. Dación 1988. En depósito, Musée national du Message Biblique Marc Chagall, Niza. © RMN / Gérard Blot.

Until May 20th 2012, – Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
For more than eighty years Marc Chagall cultivated an art practice inspired by love, memories, Russian and Jewish traditions, and the historical or artistic events he witnessed and in which he often played a part. This retrospective traces his artistic development chronologically and examines the main themes that pervade the work of this artist, who is essential in envisioning the twentieth century.

Marc Chagall - Portrait of Vava. 1953-1956. Oil on canvas. 95 x 73 - Private Collection

Organised by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and Caja Madrid Foundation and curated by Jean-Louis Prat, President of the Comité Chagall, this exhibition will be the first major retrospective in Spain devoted to this Russian artist. Its principal aim is to highlight the prominent role played by Chagall within the history of art. The galleries of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum will display work from the artist’s early years and from his period in Paris, at that time capital of the avant-garde. In addition, there will be sections on Chagall’s experience in Revolutionary Russia and in France up to the time of his enforced exile to the United States in 1941. The exhibition space of Caja Madrid Foundation will focus on the artist’s American years and on his subsequent artistic evolution. Attention will be paid to his use of biblical subjects and his relationship with contemporary poets. Also on display will be works in other media such as sculptures, ceramics and stained-glass windows.

Museum Hours

Berthe Morisot, At the ball, 1875, oil on canvas, 62 x 52 cm. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.

Until February 12, 2012 – Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
As the result of an important agreement reached with the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, this autumn the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza will be presenting the first monographic exhibition in Spain on the work of the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot. Married to Eugène Manet, brother of her teacher Édouard Manet.
Berthe Morisot (Bourges, 1841-París, 1895), was the first woman to join the Impressionist movement. Born into an upper middle-class French family and educated in the arts and music, she managed successfully to combine her facet as an artist with the role of modern woman and active advocate of culture. The model and friend of Manet, whose brother Eugène she married, she was an ally of the Impressionist painters -including Degas, Renoir, Monet and Pisarro- and exhibited work of her own at virtually all of their exhibitions. Admired by intellectuals of the calibre of Mallarmé and Valéry, Morisot played a key role in the development of French Impressionism, taking part in the legendary First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874 and in other subsequent ones of the group.

Berthe Morisot, La Psyché, 1876, huile sur toile, 65 x 54 cm, Museo Thyssen‐Bornemisza, Madrid.

More than thirty works from the Musée Marmottan Monet will be shown alongside others from the Thyssen collections, allowing visitors to discover the elegant, luminous work of this painter, expressed in the form of landscapes, scenes of daily life and female subjects. Morisot’s life and work also allow for an analysis of the role of women in late 19th-century France given that she was not just a great creative figure but also an urban, middle-class woman who was interested in fashion. In Paul Valery’s words: “Berthe Morisot’s uniqueness lies in the fact that she lived her painting and painted her life.”

Museum Hours

José de Ribera, Boy with a windmill and an old man pulling a cart with a dead body, 1640 – 1650. Watercolour, pen, dark ink and pencil on paper, 235 x 170 mm. D8551

Until the 31st of July 2011 – Museo Nacional del Prado
Acquisitions for the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Museo del Prado, 1997-2010
This exhibition presents a selection of works on paper – drawings, prints and photographs – acquired by the Museo del Prado between 1997 and 2010. It offers visitors the first opportunity to admire the most important works acquired over this period and which are normally stored in the Department of Prints and Drawings due to their fragile nature. In addition, the exhibition sets out the Museum’s principal strategies with regard to the acquisition of works on paper.

The Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, located in the new Jerónimos Building designed by Rafael Moneo, houses the collection of drawings, prints and old photographs that has been built up since the time of the Museum’s founding. Together with the original works from the royal collection, a number of additional groups were added such as those from the Museo de la Trinidad and the Museo de Arte Moderno. Together they constituted the core of this area of the Prado’s collection, which has been expanded over the years, particularly with the addition of the Pedro Fernández Durán Bequest in 1931. It has continued to grow over the years through significant acquisitions, particularly in the period from 1997 to 2010.
In contrast to other artistic media, the material characteristics of works on paper mean that special conservation conditions are required for storing them, preventing their long-term public display. They are therefore normally kept in the Department of Prints and Drawings, where they can be studied and are made available to outside researchers. These works are only temporarily placed on display for exhibitions such as the present one.

Entitled Goya and More, the exhibition aims to emphasise the fact that while Goya’s work has always been the focus of one of the Museum’s principal acquisition strategies and perhaps the one that attracts the most media attention due to the undoubted value of his creations, a very large number of works of equal artistic importance by other artists have also entered the collection. Using this theme as its guiding thread, the exhibition is organised into various sections corresponding to the principal acquisition policies established by the Museum. It also present the main lines of research and the exhibitions to be organised by the Department of Prints and Drawings over the next few years.

Museum Hours