Joan Miro - Self-Portrait, 1937-1938-February 23, 1960, oil and pencil on canvas, Collection of Emilio Fernández, on loan to the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

Until August 12, 2012 – National Gallery of Art
When you hear the name Joan Miró (1893-1983), what springs to mind? Playful shapes in red, blue, and black, floating free of gravity? Stick figures, naked and distorted? Cursive letters moving across barely brushed canvases? Suns, stars, and flowers? Fields of color?

But there is another Miró – not Miró the childlike inventor, the daring Surrealist, the poet of few words, or the lyrical abstractionist (although they are all here), but rather Miró the artist of his times. In his 90 years, he lived through two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and the rise and fall of Francisco Franco, the dictator who ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975. Through it all, he remained deeply tied to his homeland of Catalonia in northeastern Spain, a region with a distinct culture and proud spirit.

Joan Miro - Dog Barking at the Moon, 1926, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, A.E. Gallatin Collection, 1952

This exhibition traces the arc of Miró’s career while drawing out his political and cultural commitments. The first two rooms explore his early work, rooted in Catalonia and then transformed in the 1920s under the influence of Paris and the surrealists. A large middle section is devoted to the terrible years of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and its repressive aftermath, when Miró developed his mature vocabulary. The last two rooms cover the final decade of Franco’s rule, when Miró turned to making monumental paintings, both calm and explosive.

The story that unfolds is a complex one. Was Miró an activist, a fantasist, or both? Did his art emerge despite or because of difficult times? Miró always kept a figurative “ladder of escape” – one of his favorite images – with him, and he would scale it to flee from harsh conditions into the freedom of his imagination. Yet his ladder was firmly planted on the ground, and he often climbed down to decry oppression. These two impulses, however different, were resolved in Miró’s powerfully simple definition of an artist as “one who, amidst the silence of others, uses his voice to say something.”

This exhibition was organized by Tate Modern, London, in collaboration with Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, and in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Modigliani - Grand Nu allongé

From May 17 to July 15, 2012 – Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand
“Modigliani: A Life in Pictures” brings to Brazil the first time 37 original works, including paintings, drawings and sculptures, 22 works of friends, including a picture of Picasso and about 200 pieces of manuscripts, diaries, letters and photographs that trace a panorama of the artist’s life and their counterparts in Paris of the early twentieth century. A work of the MASP collection also includes the show in Sao Paulo. The exhibition is part of the Italy-Brazil Moment and it’s arrived in the country through a partnership of the Modigliani Institut Archives Légales Paris-Rome with the MCA (Museum to open sky).
Another highlight is the 22 works produced by women and friends of Modigliani, which help to contextualize the fruitful period lived by the artist. Three oils of Jeanne Hébuterne his wife, a picture of Picasso, another of Foujita, paintings for four hands with Moise Kisling, and pieces by Marevna, Jacob and others…

Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand

Edgar Degas Place de la Concorde Oil on canavas 78.4x117.5 cm

From May 19th, 2012 – State Hermitage Museum
Edgar Degas’ work entitled Place de la Concorde (1876) is on display as part of the Revived Masterpieces series. The characters in the paining are the artist’s friend Ludovic Lepic and his two daughters, crossing the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Completed by the artist in 1876, this canvas is a very important milestone on the work of Edgar Degas and 19th century French painting as a whole. It is simultaneously a realistic portrait, a street scene and an urban landscape in the impressionist key.
For a year and a half, the painting underwent a process of restoration at the Hermitage, the primary goal of which was uncovering the part of the original painting that was caught under the frame. An area with a width of up to 4 cm was not covered with a layer of the lacquer applied later, which also made it possible to verify that the painting was initially made in a silver colour, and then covered with yellow lacquer. Thanks to the painstaking work of the restorers, it was possible to restore the famous canvas to its original condition and restore the true character of the master’s painting.

Hermitage Museum

Image © The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust

From June 7, 2012 to September 2, 2012 – Norton Museum of Art
Edward Gorey (1925-2000) is among the rare breed of artist whose work is as much beloved by children as it is by adults. His stories and illustrations carry an Edwardian sophistication while still able to impart the whimsy of an invented world that was all his own. The exhibition features more than 170 works by the master artist and author drawn from The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust. The exhibition includes selections from The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Unstrung Harp, The Doubtful Guest, The Gilded Bat and other well-known publications. Featured are original pen-and-ink illustrations, preparatory sketches, unpublished drawings, and ephemera.

Norton Museum

Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of the Artist, c. 1665, oil on canvas, Kenwood House, English Heritage, Iveagh Bequest.

From June 3, 2012 to Sept 3, 2012 – The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London showcases 48 masterpieces from the collection known as the Iveagh Bequest. These magnificent paintings reside at Kenwood House, a neoclassical villa in London, and they make their U.S. debut at the MFAH.

Thomas Gainsborough, Mary, Countess Howe, c. 1764, oil on canvas, Kenwood House, English Heritage, Iveagh Bequest

Donated by Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh (1847–1927) and heir to the world’s most successful brewery, the collection was shaped by the tastes of the Belle Epoque—Europe’s equivalent to America’s Gilded Age—when the earl shared the cultural stage and art market with other industry titans such as the Rothschilds, J. Pierpont Morgan, and Henry Clay Frick. Acquired mainly from 1887 to 1891, the earl’s purchases reveal a taste for the portraiture, landscape, and 17th-century Dutch and Flemish works typically found in English aristocratic collections. In addition to the masterworks from the Iveagh Bequest, the exhibition includes several works acquired specifically for Kenwood.

Anthony van Dyck, Princess Henrietta of Lorraine Attended by a Page, 1634, oil on canvas, Kenwood House, English Heritage, Iveagh Bequest. Courtesy American Federation of Arts

The MFAH presentation is the first stop on a limited, four-venue U.S. tour that provides a rare opportunity for visitors to view superb paintings that have never before traveled outside the United Kingdom. The highly acclaimed works on view represent the greatest artists of their periods, from Rembrandt van Rijn, Thomas Gainsborough, and Anthony van Dyck to Frans Hals, Joshua Reynolds, and J. M. W. Turner.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, A Coast Scene with Fisherman Hauling a Boat Ashore ("The Iveagh Sea-Piece"), c. 1803–04, oil on canvas, Kenwood House, English Heritage, Iveagh Bequest.

The Museum of Fine Arts

From May 19 to September 16, 2012 – Tampa Museum of Art
A Hundred Years – A Hundred Chairs. Masterworks from the Vitra Design Museum provides an opportunity to contemplate the fascinating history of chair design. Assembled from the expansive holdings of one of the world’s foremost design museums, this exhibition allows us to consider the aesthetic, technological and manufacturing concerns expressed through the design of the most ubiquitous of objects, the chair.

The exhibition begins in the last decades of the 19th century with curved wooden furniture that lent itself to mass-production. It was the introduction of the mass- produced object that changed the course of subsequent design. At the outset of the 20th century, design played a significant role in cultural development. Gerrit Rietveld designed furniture with simple lines, while Marcel Breuer created the first tubular steel chairs. This lightness in shape was subsequently a source of inspiration for Alvar Aalto, who was the first to use plywood, and for Jean Prouvé, who started to use techniques and materials that had previously only been used by the aeronautical industry.

Following the Second World War, design became a key element of daily life. American designers began to collaborate closely with industry. Designers like Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen and Harry Bertoia came up with designs that would be used for the mass production of furniture for American homes while in Europe, furniture design was developing mainly in Italy and Scandinavia. At the same time, the many designers wanted to make designer goods more accessible to the general public. Hans Wegner and Arne Jacobsen were forerunners in Scandinavian countries in creating wooden furniture, while the Italians turned their attention to more novel materials like plastic.

The considerable malleability of these materials, together with the development of new types of foam, gave rise to a wealth of creative fantasy in the sixties. At that time, Pop Art provided a source of inspiration and designers played on form and colour. The main representatives of this trend were Verner Panton and Joe Colombo. Later, in the seventies, designs became even more radical, leading to the emergence of opposition to the rules of Modernism. Groups of designers such as Memphis or Archizoom emphasized the amusing and playful nature of forms rather than functionality.

More recently, the eighties were marked by a search for individualism and pluralism, and the result was the emergence of a variety of remarkably novel approaches. Philippe Starck, Ron Arad and Gaetano Pesce are leading representatives of this trend. A search for simple but innovative shapes and materials found in the work of Frank Gehry and Jasper Morrison characterized the nineties. And finally, fantasy remains an indispensable criterion in the conception of forms as witnessed in the work of Ron Arad and Marc Newson.

Reproductions of drawings, sketches and documents belonging to the Vitra Design Museum accompany the chairs on display, and seven films reveal the manufacturing process of some of the chairs, giving the spectator general insight into different production techniques.

Tampa Museum of Art

Hubert Le gall - Fauteuil « Placide le lapin câlin » - 2012 - Fausse fourrure, drap de laine et bois verni 155 x 80 x 90 cm - Édition à 99 exemplaires

Until June 2, 2012 – Mazel Galerie
Silence is golden, from design to painting – Duo Show

Vincent Guzman « Sanguine » - Acrylique et pigments sur toile - 2012 100 x 100 cm

Mazel Galerie

Alex Katz Eleuthera 1984 Oil on linen 305 x 670.5 cm Private Collection, Courtesy Galería Javier López, Madrid © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

9 May to 23 September 2012 – Tate St Ives
Born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York, Alex Katz is one of the most important and respected living American artists. In July 2012 Katz celebrates his 85th birthday, and a career that spans a remarkable six decades. Tate St Ives Summer Exhibition 2012 brings together over 30 canvases and collages from the 1950s to now.

Given the gallery’s location on the beach, and the nature of the summer season here, the exhibition places a special emphasis on Katz’s seascapes and beach scenes, as well as images of family holidays and friends, painted in his own seaside retreat of Lincolnville, Maine, where he continues to spend his summers.

To accompany the show Katz has made a personal selection of works from the Tate Collection. Drawn from British, European and American artists, he brings together an illuminating cross-generational selection of artists for this special one-room display.

Alex Katz Round Hill 1977 Oil on Linen 180.3 x 243.8 cm Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Partial and Promised Gift of Barry and Julie Smooke Art © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Digital Image © 2012 Museum Associates / LACMA

Katz’s paintings are defined by their flatness of colour and form, their economy of line, and their cool but seductive emotional detachment. He works in the tradition of European and American artists like Manet, Matisse, and Hopper. Many of Katz’s works picture an everyday America of easy living, leisure and recreation. Working with the themes of portraiture, landscape, figure studies, marine scenes and flowers, Katz is influenced as much by style, fashion and music as he is art history.

In the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was still the dominant force in American art when Katz began exhibiting. Whilst his interests were firmly based in the previous generation of artists including Pollock, Rothko, Guston and De Kooning (De Kooning and Guston in particular offered early support and encouragement), his own painting developed in reaction to their work, and he is acknowledged as a hugely influential precursor to the Pop Art movement with which he became associated throughout the 1960s.

Tate St Yves

Louise Bourgeois, Arch of Hysteria, 1993. Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Allan Finkelman - ©Louise Bourgeois Trust- Louise Bourgeois Trust/VAGA, New York, by SIAE 2012

From May 8 to November 4, 2012 – Galleria dell’Accademia – Firenze
The exhibition Art Returns to art, curated by Bruno Corà, Franca Falletti and Daria Filardo, will see the installation in the rooms of the Galleria dell’Accademia of works by: Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Burri, Antonio Catelani, Martin Creed, Gino de Dominicis, Rineke Dijkstra, Marcel Duchamp, Luciano Fabro, Hans Peter Feldmann, Luigi Ghirri, Antony Gormley, Yves Klein, Jannis Kounellis, Ketty La Rocca, Leoncillo, Sol LeWitt, Eliseo Mattiacci, Olaf Nicolai, Luigi Ontani, Giulio Paolini, Claudio Parmiggiani, Giuseppe Penone, Pablo Picasso, Alfredo Pirri, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Renato Ranaldi, Alberto Savinio, Thomas Struth, Fiona Tan, Bill Viola, Andy Warhol.

Louise Bourgeois’s Arch of Hysteria, hung with all its charge of “life’s emotional frenzy” in front of Pontormo’s Venus and not far from Michelangelo’s David,will offer definitive proof of how the naked form of the human body can be used to express concepts and stir sensations that are vastly different. And the effort to bring form out of brute matter, something which obsessed Michelangelo all his life, seems to still weigh heavily today on the shoulders of Giuseppe Penone in his arduous hollowing out of massive tree trunks, just as it is echoed in the forms carved out of concrete by Antony Gormley.

Giulio Paolini’s L’altra Figura will be located almost opposite Bill Viola’s video Surrender: two contemporary ways of reappraising and interpreting the theme of mirroring and reproducibility that lead, in the left arm of the Tribuna, to the 19th-century Salone dei Gessi, filled with plaster casts that were created so lely to be reproduced.

The theme of reflection is also explored in Alfredo Pirri’s floor of fractured mirrors, in Olaf Nicolai’s work Portrait of the Artist as a Weeping Narcissus, whose tears ripple the surface and alter the reflected image, and in Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirror picture Sacra conversazione, which includes us in a conversation of the present day.

Metaphorically, mirroring becomes a merging with the gaze of the visitor, who is conceptually made part o f the creative process in Rineke Dijkstra’s video installation that tells of a slow observation and reproduction of one of Picasso’s pictures, in Thomas Struth’s photo in front of Dürer’s self-portrait and in Martin Creed’s performance with athletes running swiftly through the spaces of the gallery.

Marcel Duchamp, L'invers de la peinture, 1955 circa, 73,5 x 48 cm ,private collection, by courtesy of collector

The reproduction, repetition and circulation of images in the history of art is tackled from a critical perspective in the works of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Luigi Ghirri, Hans Peter Feldmann and Ketty La Rocca, which refer directly to icons familiar to everyone. In his Untitled, Jannis Kounellis will recall the iconography and sense of tragedy of the Crucifixion, a theme tackled in a different way in Alberto Burri’s work and in Renato Ranaldi’s Triumphans, while the gold or ultramarine monochromes of Yves Klein can be related to the gold grounds of the 14th-century altarpieces.

Yves Klein, L’esclave de Michel-Ange, 1962, pure pigment and synthetic resin on synthetic resin, 60 x 22 x 15 cm, © Yves Klein, ADAGP, Paris

The casts of the David’s eyes in Claudio Parmiggiani’s work po se the problem of the fragment, while Leoncillo and Luigi Ontani’s images of Saint Sebastian present different visions of that sacred iconography. The gaze at the past will appear emblematic and mysterious in Alberto Savinio’s Nettuno Pescatore as well as in Gino de Dominicis’s Urvasi e Gilgamesh. Interesting reflections on the work of the past will also be provided by Francis Bacon’s Figure sitting (the Cardinal), Pablo Picasso’s Arlequín con espejo and Sol LeWitt’s drawings of Piero della Francesca’s frescoes, as well as by the ovoid volumes of Luciano Fabro’s Il giudizio di Paride or Eliseo Mattiacci’s large iron sculpture Carro solare del Montefeltro. Memory as recognition of origins will be the focus of Fiona Tan’s film Provenance, and the classical elements of museum architecture are the form out of which Antonio Catelani develops his Klettersteig. (©Art of the Day)

Firenze Musei

Kamagurka - The End of Cubism - 2012

From the first of May to the first of August 2012 – Arentshuis and other locations
Artist, painter, theatre and television producer Kamagurka (Luc Zeebroek) will act as curator for a special art project in Bruges: Kamarama. On several locations he will display his own works as well as works of other artists who inspire and fascinate him. It will be an exhibition full of remarkable art, surprising perspectives and a certain amount of humour.

Kati Heck - check - 2012 - courtesy Jan Mostmans

The Arentshuis will act as a live atelier in which Kamagurka will display his own art works. From time to time he will create a new work here, by himself or together with other artists such as David Bade (May 1), Stephen Tunney (May 3 & 4), Werner Mannaers (May 17 & 18), Jeroen Henneman (June 28 & 29) and Muzo (July 10 & 11).

Roland Topor

In the Garemijn Hall, Kamagurka displays works from artists who inspired and influenced him. He likes to combine historic and contemporary art. He’s also fascinated by international links and the use of mixed media in art.

Kamagurka - Retrospective VII (kubistische smurfin) - 2012

Displayed artists: Capitaine Lonchamps (B), David Bade (NL), Don Van Vliet a.k.a. Captain Beefheart (US), Emile Salkin (F), Francis Picabia (F), Fred Bervoets (B), George Condo (US), George Grosz (D), Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes (F), Herr Seele (B), J.J. Grandville (F), James Ensor (B) , Jan Fabre (B), Jeff Olsson (S), Jeroen Henneman (NL), Kati Heck (D), Luc Tuyman s (B), Lucebert (NL), Marcel Duchamp (F), Markus Lüpertz (D), Max Ernst (D), Muzo (F), Otto Dix (D), Pablo Picasso (E), Paul Joostens (B), René Daniëls (NL), René Magritte (B), Rinus Van de Velde (B), Roland Topor (FR), Stephen Tunney a.k.a. Dogbowl (US), Werner Mannaers (B), Wim Delvoye (B), Wim T. Schippers (NL) and Yves Obyn (B).

Herr Seele - Cowboy Henk, 2011 - courtesy of the artist

You will also see art works in the streets of Bruges such as his ‘accidental’ portraits of fictive people. There will be 12 portraits spread around the Arentshof garden and alongside the Dijver. If you think you recognize a family member, friend or acquaintance in one of the portraits, you can report this on this website. At the end of the project, Kamagurka will choose the one who is the best lookalike of one of his portraits.

Kamarama