International Art News

Albrecht Dürer - Innsbruck von Norden, um 1496 - Aquarell, Spuren von Deckfarben, mit Deckweiß gehöht - Albertina, Wien

Until the 6 of January 2013 – Albertina
Many of the most important works created for the propaganda and in memory of Maximilian I are preserved in the Albertina. These include works of Albrecht Dürer, but also the extraordinary Triumphal Procession of Albrecht Altdorfer and his workshop, which will form the core of the exhibit. Of the original 109 large-sized parchment sheets with flamboyantly colourful representations of riders, magnificent chariots and landsknechts, sheets 49 to 109 are preseved in the Albertina and, compiled as a frieze, amount to a length of more than 54 metres. In addition to this unique work, other important imperial commissions are presented, such as the monumental woodcut  Arch of Honor and the book projects Theuerdank, Weisskunig and Freydal, which are very closely intertwined with one another in terms of form and ideas. Emperor Maximilian I has been called the “Last Knight” since the 19 th century, although he stood at the beginning of a Europe-wide renaissance of chivalry represented in the form of magnificent tournaments and armaments.

Niklas Reiser - Maria von Burgund, um 1500 - Öl auf Holz - Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien, Gemäldegalerie

In addition to many other themes, the exhibition presents this illustrious aspect of the art from the time of Maximilian with numerous examples from the internal collection, complemented by important loans from international museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) and the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Art History) Vienna.

Albertina

Vincent van Gogh Iris, 1889 Oil on thinned cardboard, mounted on canvas 62.2 × 48.3 cm National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

From May 25 to September 3, 2012 – National Gallery of Canada
Van Gogh: Up Close is the first major exhibition in Canada in over 25 years of works by this famous Dutch artist. It brings together more than 40 of Van Gogh’s paintings from private and public collections around the world, as well as a selection of Japanese woodblock prints, nineteenth-century photographs, and works on paper from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

This exhibition explores Van Gogh’s love for nature and his gift for representing the world around him, from landscapes down to the smallest blade of grass.

Vincent van Gogh View of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer , 1888 Oil on canvas, 64.2 × 53 cm Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands Photo © Stichting Kröller-Müller Museum

For example, the show includes Iris (1889), from the National Gallery of Canada’s collection, as well as paintings that depict another corner of the garden where Van Gogh painted Iris, but from a wider angle. Van Gogh: Up Close will demonstrate how these paintings became the most radical and innovative in the artist’s body of work.

In early 1886 Van Gogh arrived in Paris from the Netherlands and came face to face with a revolutionary new way of painting. For the first time he was exposed to the art of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, which compelled him to revise his painting in both content and style. He quickly abandoned the sombre hues of his earlier Dutch works in favour of a brighter palette and modernized brushstroke, beginning with a series of flower still lifes painted in a typical 19th century Western style. But Van Gogh swiftly departed from this tradition and focused increasingly on the subject itself, eliminating the surrounding space.

Vincent van Gogh Sunflowers, 1887 Kunstmuseum Bern Gift of Prof. Hans R. Hahnloser, Bern

At the same time, Van Gogh developed a keen interest in Japanese woodblock prints, which he admired for their aesthetic qualities. Like the Impressionist painters who had discovered these prints earlier, Van Gogh became fascinated with Japanese art. This led him to experiment with unusual visual angles, decorative use of colour, cropping and flattening of his compositions.

Vincent van Gogh Undergrowth with Two Figures, 1890 Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio Bequest of Mary E. Johnston Image: The Bridgeman Art Library

Often remembered for his battles with mental illness and suicide in July 1890, Van Gogh was first and foremost an ambitious, well-read and sophisticated thinker whose work was informed and deliberate.

Born in 1853, he was fluent in English, French and Dutch, and he had a great love for the written word. Throughout his life he read a vast amount of literature that stretched from the Bible to French Naturalist writings. Vincent Van Gogh also had a strong understanding of art history that extended from Old Master paintings right up to the emergence of photography.

National Gallery of Canada Hours

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) En été, 1868 Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie bpk / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Jörg P. Anders

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..

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) Café concert ou La première sortie, 1876 ©The National Gallery, London. Bought, 1923

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

John Martin (1789–1854) - The Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah, 1852 - Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne

From 21 September 2011 to 15 January 2012 – Tate Britain
John Martin (1789–1854) was a key figure in the nineteenth-century art world, renowned for his dramatic scenes of apocalyptic destruction and biblical disaster. While he was hugely popular, he remained something of an outsider, scorned by the art critics of his time.

Organised in partnership with the Laing, Newcastle, this major exhibition will be the first show dedicated to his paintings for over 30 years, and the largest display of his works seen in public since his death. Bringing together his most famous paintings from collections around the world, as well as previously unseen and newly-restored works, the exhibition will reassess this singular figure in art history, and reflect on the enduring influence of his apocalyptic art on painting, cinema and popular spectacle. The show will also examine how Martin’s populism fits into the story of British art, and how his work connects with the culture of today.

Museum Hours

Carlo Mollino, Untitled Polaroid, circa 1962-73

From the 31st of August to the 25th of September, 2011 – Kunsthalle Wien
Born into a Turin architect and civil engineer’s family, Carlo Mollino studied art history and architecture and made a name for himself as a skier, racecar driver and aerobatic pilot, as an author and photo artist. Yet his international renown is primarily based on his work as a designer of furniture and exclusive interiors in the spirit of the gesamtkunstwerk. His organic language of forms was not least inspired by the form of the female body – as particularly evidenced by the part of his photographic work he always kept private: over 1,000 Polaroids portraying beauties of Turin’s night life in the nude in mise-en-scène settings. The pictures were part of the preparation of his “House for the warrior’s rest” (today: Casa Mollino), a villa in Turin on the Po River.

The presentation will juxtapose furnishings of the villa with a selection of these Polaroids for the first time. It explores the boundaries and bridges between this universal artist’s male erotic imagination and his intellectual and artistic attitude.

Galerie Hours