International Art News

From September 19 2012 to January 6, 2013 – Musee du Luxembourg
On 29 January 1906, a group of art collectors and artists formed the Modern Art Club (Cercle de l’Art moderne) in Le Havre. Among the members were Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy and Emile Othon Friesz and some of the town’s biggest collectors at the beginning of the 20th century: Olivier Senn, Charles-Auguste Marande, Pieter van der Velde, Georges Dussueil, Oscar Schmitz, Edouard Lüthy…They set themselves the objective of promoting modern art in Le Havre.

Between 1906 and 1910, the group organised exhibitions, lecture series, poetry readings and concerts. Frantz Jourdain, Guillaume Apollinaire and Claude Debussy supported the club, which was linked from the outset to the newly established Salon d’Automne.
On its initiative, works by the great artists of the time were shown in Le Havre, especially at four annual exhibitions: the “old” Impressionists such as Monet and Renoir, and the Neo-Impressionists, but above all the young Fauves, brought by their friends Braque, Dufy, and Friesz. Le Havre, which was not too far from Paris, gave the Fauves a warm welcome and a potential outlet for their recent production, the very works that had sparked the scandal of the “wild beasts’ cage.”

Who were these men? What did they have in common? What was it about the historical, economic and cultural context of Le Havre that favoured the emergence of the club?

Le Havre was an industrial town, founded relatively recently (1517); by the mid 19th century, its flourishing port had become a major gateway for imports of exotic products. Local businessmen and notables were keen to give the city a “soul”. Consequently, a museum was established near the waterfront in 1845 and well-known artists were invited to regular exhibitions organised by the Art Friends Club (in 1868 Manet won a prize for his Dead Bullfighter, which had been refused five years before at the Salon de Paris). The merchants interested in these activities took an active part in the cultural life of the town and the success of their businesses had a direct influence on the fate of the artists, hence Eugène Boudin’s pithy comment: “No cotton, no paintings”.

In the late 19th century, a new generations of collectors appeared. They were all members of the Art Friends Club (Société des Amis des Arts), but had a particular interest in the work of young artists and often went to Paris to see the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, the galleries run by Druet, Bernheim and Vollard, artists’ studios and auction rooms. They joined Dufy, Friesz and Braque in this singular adventure.
The collections of two of them, Olivier Senn and Charles-Auguste Marande, are now in the Musée d’Art moderne André Malraux in Le Havre, donated by the artists themselves or by their descendants. The collections of van der Velde, Dussueil, Schmitz, Lüthy and others, although scattered, are well known.

Each one tells us something of the collector’s personality. Although there are some similarities due to shared tastes (for Boudin, Pissarro, Marquet…), the collections reveal individual quirks and daring choices. For instance, Senn started his collection with two major works by Delacroix and Courbet from the 1850s and went on to collect Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pieces, while Dussueil and van der Velde were immediately attracted by the very latest work, buying Matisses at the same time as the Steins, and before the Morozovs and Shchukin. Degas and Cross are well represented in the Senn collection, while Van Dongen was preferred by van der Velde or Dussueil. There was obviously complicity and emulation between them and paintings circulated and sometimes changed hands.

The exhibition presents some 90 works and takes visitors into the collectors’ world. Going beyond their private interests, they joined the club to defend a conception of their commitment to modern art and artists, and to the public interest. The show also looks at the personal careers of the artists linked to the club, at first united in the defence of Fauvism and then gradually going their separate ways. The Cercle de l’Art moderne can be seen as a unique and short-lived provincial phenomenon, an instant of grace due to a handful of people convinced of the need to defend modernity. Its avant-garde image stuck to the town and region in which it developed.

Musee du Luxembourg

Edvard Munch - Girls on the Bridge - 1901 (1902–27.) - oil on canvas 136 X 125.5 cm - National Gallery, Oslo

Until the 14th of October 2012 – Tate Modern
Few other modern artists are better known and yet less understood than Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944). This exhibition examines the artist’s work from the 20th century, including sixty paintings, many from the Munch Museum in Oslo, with a rare showing of his work in film and photography.

Munch is often seen as a 19th-century Symbolist painter but this exhibition shows how he engaged with modernity and was inspired by the everyday life outside of his studio such as street scenes and incidents reported in the media – including The House is Burning 1925–7, a sensational view of a real life event with people fleeing the scene of a burning building.

The show also examines how Munch often repeated a single motif over a long period of time in order to re-work it, as can be seen in the different versions of his most celebrated works, such as The Sick Child 1885–1927 and Girls on the Bridge 1902–27.

Edvard Munch, The Sick Child 1907 © Munch Museum/Munch-EllingsendGroup/DACS 2002

Munch’s use of prominent foregrounds and strong diagonals reference the technological developments in cinema and photography at the time. Creating the illusion of figures moving towards the spectator, this visual trick can be seen in many of Munch’s most innovative works such as Workers on their Way Home 1913–14. He was also keenly aware of the visual effects brought on by the introduction of electric lighting on theatre stages and used this to create striking effect in works such as The Artist and his Model 1919–21.

Like other painters such as Bonnard and Vuillard, Munch adopted photography in the early years of the 20th century and largely focused on self-portraits, which he obsessively repeated. In the 1930s he developed an eye disease and made poignant works which charted the effects of his degenerating sight.

Tate Modern

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) Misia at the piano1902 - Oil on canvas - H. 46,2 ; L. 39 cm - San Francisco, Collection of Ann & Gordon Getty© ADAGP, Paris 2012

Until September 9th 2012 – Musee d’Orsay
Misia Godebska (1872-1950) was a legendary figure of the French art scene from the Belle Époque to the Roaring Twenties. At first she became known for her talent as a pianist. Her marriage in 1893 to Thadée Natanson, the editor of the journal La Revue blanche, propelled her to the centre of a group of creative artists who were champions of Symbolism and the decorative arts.

Félix Vallotton Misia at Her Dressing Table© RMN (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

At the height of her influence, she became one of the most sought-after portrait models of her time, sitting for Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir. She was a friend of Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Cocteau and Chanel, and financed the Ballets Russes for over ten years.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) Poster for La Revue Blanche 1895 Colour lithograph, brushwork, pencil and crachis - H. 128 ; W. 92 cm - Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France© Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

This multidisciplinary exhibition brings together portraits of Misia and her entourage, works, documents and accounts by contemporary artists that illustrate the prolific creative activity at the time Misia was the Queen of Paris.

Musee d’Orsay

Edgar Degas | Danseuse assise, penchée en avant, elle se masse le pied gauche (Dancer sitting, leaning forward, she massages her left foot) 1881–83 | Caillebotte legacy in Luxembourg, 1894 | Collection: Musée d’Orsay, Paris | Photograph: © Hervé Lewandowski | © RMN (RF22712)/Musée d’Orsay

Until June 24, 2012 – Queensland Art Gallery (QAG)
‘Modern Woman: Daughters and Lovers 1850 — 1918 | Drawings from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris’, an exhibition of drawings from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Eugène Boudin | France 1824–98 | La Dame en bleu (Woman in blue)1860–70 | Beige paper, pencil, watercolour | Bequest of Carle Dreyfus, 1953 | RF 29980, Recto | Collection: Musée d’Orsay, Paris | Photograph: © RMN (Musée d’Orsay) / Jean Schormans

It celebrates the changing roles of women during the Belle Époque as depicted by leading artists of the time such as Edgar Degas, Pierre—Auguste Renoir, Edouard Vuillard, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Bonnard, Auguste Rodin, Berthe Morisot and Jean François Millet. These artists increasingly abandoned idealised representations of the female figure, and turned to women from a diverse range of socioeconomic backgrounds, depicting them in their family lives and domestic activities, as well as in the public realm as spectators, performers and workers. Through these fascinating drawings, we see French society undergoing radical transformation.

Gallery 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

Pierre Bonnard, Le Café, 1915, Oil on canvas, 73 × 106.4 cm, Tate, Photo: © 2012, Tate, London © 2012, ProLitteris, Zurich

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.

Pierre Bonnard - Place Clichy, 1906–07 Oil on canvas, 102.1 × 116.6 cm Private collection © 2012, ProLitteris, Zurich

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