International Art News

Claude Monet (1840-1926) »London, Houses of Parliament. Burst of Sunlight in the Fog«, 1904, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Bequest of Count Isaac de Camondo, 1911, © RMN (Musée d'Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski

Until 28 May 2012 – The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart will present approximately seventy late works – some quite large in scale – by William Turner, Claude Monet and Cy Twombly. The outstanding loans will serve to illuminate similarities and interrelationships between the works and exemplify their common characteristics.

Cy Twombly »Quattro Stagioni« (A Painting in Four Parts), 1993-1995, Part II: Estate, Tate, Purchased with assistance from the American Fund for the Tate Gallery and Tate Members 2002, Tate, London 2011, © Cy Twombly Foundation

The Staatsgalerie will be the only venue in Germany to show the outstanding late works of three of the greatest painters of the last two centuries. The exhibition will not only unite works by William Turner, Claude Monet and the late Cy Twombly, but also offer the visitors new perspectives on the art of each, in and of itself.

In his landscapes and seascapes, the English painter William Turner (1775–1851) developed an abstract pictorial language which was adopted by the Impressionists.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) »War. The exile and the Rock Limpet«, exh. 1842 Tate. Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856, © Tate, London 2011

Claude Monet (1840–1926) translated the motifs of that harbinger of abstraction into series with differing light atmospheres. With Cy Twombly (1928–2011) the exhibition will extend the spectrum to encompass the present: an important of exponent of Abstract Expressionism, the American developed the poetic pictorial language further in his monumental paintings.

Museum Hours

Cy Twombly, Brushes, Lexington,2005, dryprint on cardboard, 43,1 x 27,9 cm, courtesy : Schirmer/Mosel Verlag - Fondazione Nicola del Roscio

Wednesday first of February to Sunday the 29th of April 2012 – BOZAR – Centre for Fine Arts
The exhibition Cy Twombly. Photographs 1951-2010 presents more than 100 dry prints, generated from Polaroid photographs, which were selected in close cooperation with the artist himself prior to his death on July 5th, 2011. Cy Twombly’s photographs have been a rather recent discovery. Snapping photographs with his Polaroid camera since his student days, the artist did not make available to the public his photographic material until the 90s.

Cy Twombly, Painting Detail (Roses), Gaeta, 2009, dryprint on cardboard, 43,1 x 27,9 cm, courtesy : Schirmer/Mosel Verlag - Fondazione Nicola del Roscio

The subject matter of his photographs varies considerably. From still-life images of flowers and brushes, snap shots of his studio and museums interiors, details from his paintings to views of ancient temples and atmospheric landscapes, the ethereal and delicate photographs reveal the themes that have nourished the artist’s paintings, drawings, sculptures and graphic art. The exhibition will include a number of paintings by Cy Twombly and the intimate cinematic portrait “Edwin Parker” by artist Tacita Dean as a tribute to the recently deceased greatest artist of our times.

Centre Hours

Andy Warhol, “Ileana Sonnabend,” 1973. The Sonnabend Collection. © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, by SIAE 2011

From May 29–October 2, 2011 – Peggy Guggenheim Collection – Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Ileana Sonnabend. An Italian Portrait brings together more than 60 works by almost 50 artists, selected by Antonio Homem (director of the Sonnabend Gallery, New York, and adopted son of Ileana Sonnabend). It will include Andy Warhol’s portrait of Ileana Sonnabend, works on Italian themes by Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, works by Italians such as Tano Festa, Lucio Fontana, Mimmo Rotella, Schifano and Piero Manzoni, works by American artists inspired by Italian culture (Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, John Baldessari for example), by artists of the Arte Povera movement (Zorio, Anselmo, Calzolari, Jannis Kounnelis, and Merz), by several international photographers (including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Max Becher and Andrea Robbins), and by many others—whether Italian (Giulio Paolini, Luigi Ontani) or not (Bruce Nauman, Anselm Kiefer, Philip Haas, Rona Pondick for example).
Today she is not as well known as her ex-husband Leo Castelli but Ileana Sonnabend (1914-2007) was his equal in being one of the great figures of the art world in the XXth century. A Romanian beauty and heiress of a great industrial dynasty, Ileana Schapira (she took the name of her second husband, Michael Sonnabend) linked her destiny to that of the young executive of the Generali insurance company, when he was on a mission in Bucharest on the eve of World War II. It was in the United States that the two discovered their talents as exceptional art dealers and collectors. The exhibition set up in the sanctuary of another exceptional woman – Peggy Guggenheim – can be looked at like a Who’s Who of the great art currents, from the avant-gardes of the fifties to the most recent ones, from Rauschenberg to Lichtenstein, from the Becher couple to Jeff Koons. But the aim of this exhibition is mainly to illustrate the links Ileana Sonnabend had with Italy, embodied not only in the Arte povera (Kounellis, Merz, Pistoletto) but in Fontana’s slashes or Mimmo Rotella’s reassembled collages as well.

Museum Hours