International Art News

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

Edgar Degas (1834-1917)Woman drying her neck, after her bath1898Pastel on cardboardH. 62.2; W. 65 cmParis, Musée d'OrsayBequest of Count Isaac de Camondo, 1911© RMN-GP (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

From March 13 to July 1, 2012 – Musee d’Orsay
The first major monographic exhibition in Paris devoted to Edgar Degas (1834-1917) since the 1988 retrospective at the Grand Palais, Degas and the Nude contributes to the ambition of the Musée d’Orsay to show the recent progress in research regarding the great masters of the second half of the 19th Century, following the homage to Claude Monet (1840-1926) and more recently Edouard Manet (1832-1883).

This exhibition explores Degas’s evolution in his practice of the nude, from the academic and historical approach of his early years down to the inscription of the body in modernity throughout his long career. A predominant element in the artist’s work, together with dancers and horses, nudes are presented through all of the techniques used by Degas, including painting, sculpture, drawing, printing and above all pastel, which he brought to its highest degree of achievement.
Organised in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the exhibition takes advantage of the very rich collection of graphic works of the Musée d’Orsay, seldom shown due to its fragility, to which will be added exceptional loans from the largest collections, such as those of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Chicago Art Institute and the New York Metropolitan Museum.

Museum Hours

François Bard - Paulette 2011 - oil on canvas - 195 x 150 cm.

Until the 11th of June 2011 – Mazel Galerie
The close centrings on the subject, the legs, the torsoes or faces put his work within an avant-gardist conception of painting, which has integrated the contribution of photography into contemporary art.

François Bard’s aesthetics is different from a large part of current painting which is influenced by the legacy of American Pop-Art or the new wave of Street Art, as his works are much closer to Edward Hopper, Giorgio de Chirico and Edouard Manet than to Andy Warhol.

His characters or his landscapes seem to be isolated within a space the boundaries of which are indefinite and allow us to escape « somewhere else ».
These large surface areas may evoke the desolate setting that is described in Dino Buzzati’s novel Tartars’Desert, one of his reference books.
The background which reveals endless surface areas focuses our attention on the subject, the small pieces of sentences and enigmatic words sprinkled on the surface of the canvasses.
The atmosphere which emanates from all these elements arouses the feeling that time is suspended and it conveys an unspeakable feeling of void.

The timelessness of his works is emphasized by choices in compositions which remind us of those made by masters of painting.
« Fait divers » or « No Man’s Land » are symptomatic of his taste for compositions drawn from famous names of the history of fine arts.
« L’Homme Mort » (« The Dead man ») which Edouard Manet painted between 1864 and 1865, depicting the body of a matador lying on the sand of the arena which itself refers to medieval sculpture and to the traditional countenance of recumbent statues, is a perfect illustration of this kinship.
Thanks to this centring, Manet gave his matador a Christ-like dimension, while François Bard gives his henchmen wearing gloves the appearance of peace-making angels, kinds of imaginary body-guards of a paranoid society which is afraid of the individuals who are part of it.
The artist fully assumes this biased view and claims that he is « on a sacred side of painting ».

However, far be it from him to establish a distance with those who watch his works, as his sources of inspiration and his models come from his daily life and  from people around him.
He asserts : « it is from daily life that I try to paint my imaginary world.»

But through his longing for timelessness and sublimation, the artist does talk about us in his paintings.
The link between his daily life and our world is to be seen in the realism and naturalism of his pictorial technique, strengthening the kinship between his work and Manet’s. Edouard Mazel

Galerie Hours

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) - Summer or The Amazon - Circa 1882 - Oil on canvas H. 73; W. 52 cm - Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza© Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

From April 6 to July 3, 2011 – Musee d’ Orsay
More than a one man retrospective for Edouard Manet (1832-1883), the exhibition Manet, the Man who Invented Modern Art explores and highlights the historical situation around him, including the reaffirmed legacy of Romanticism, the impact of his contemporaries and the changes in the media at the time.
Manet was also Modern in the way he challenged the ancient masters from Fra Angelico to Velazquez. This exhibition takes another look at the many links that the painter resolutely created and rejected within both public and political spheres. For modernity was also a question of integration and of resistance. The exhibition will therefore focus on the teaching of Thomas Couture, Baudelaire’s support and encouragement, the reform of religious art, erotic imagery, the art of the fragment(ed), his relationship with women painters (Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès), the temptations of high society, his decision to remain outside the main Impressionism movement and his complicity with Mallarmé at his darkest.

The reconstruction of his exhibition at the Gallery La Vie moderne, rganised in March-April 1880 at the start of the Salon, will raise the question finally of what “the freedom to create” meant to him. This means that Manet, the Man who Invented Modern Art focuses on later works that are less well known and, more importantly, little-understood if regarded as simply a stage of the process towards “pure painting”.
This is the first major exhibition devoted to Manet in France since the memorable 1983 exhibition at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, organised by Françoise Cachin, former director of the Musée d’Orsay.

Museum Hours

Egon Schiele, 'Two Women Embracing' (detail), 1915. Pencil, watercolour, gouache. 48.5 x 32.7 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, 'Water-carrier' (detail), c.1808-12. Oil on canvas. 68 x 50.5 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapesty .

Until the 12th of  December 2010 – Royal Academy of Arts
European Masterpieces from Leonardo to Schiele
The Royal Academy of Arts presents a major exhibition of works which showcases the breadth and wealth of one of the finest collections in Central Europe. The exhibition features over 200 works and includes paintings, drawings and sculpture from the early Renaissance to the twentieth century. Selected works by artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Goya, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Egon Schiele, Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso are on display, many of which have not previously been shown in the UK. The exhibition comprises works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, with additional key loans from the Hungarian National Gallery and provides a once in a lifetime opportunity to view these artworks in London.
The show is organised broadly chronologically, with thematic sections which consider the richness of the collections in relation to religious works, mythological subjects, portraiture, still lifes and landscape
painting. The exhibition opens with the dramatic St. Andrew Altarpiece, 1512, from Liptószentandrás,
drawing attention to the wealth of skill and sophistication of early wood carving in Hungary. The work
reflects the influence and exchanges of culture with Northern European painters, sculptors and carvers.
Key works from the early Italian School include rare and exquisite Renaissance bronze sculptures
attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea Riccio as well as fifteenth-century devotional paintings by
Jacopo Parisati da Montagnana and Liberale da Verona. The Northern European Schools are represented through paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder and Maerten van Heemskerck. At the heart of the exhibition sits a selection of over eighty Old Master drawings which includes works by Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Albrecht Altdorfer, Annibale Carracci and Giambattista Tiepolo and ranges from preparatory studies to presentation drawings.
The Italian School remains prominent throughout the galleries dedicated to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and includes religious and mythological paintings by artists including Jacopo Tintoretto and Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (Il Guercino) whilst works by Nicolas Poussin and Laurent de la Hyre highlight the French School. Large scale paintings by Peter Paul Rubens and Jacob Jordaens showcase the Flemish School and the exceptional Spanish collection is displayed through works by El Greco, Goya, Jusepe de Ribera and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest houses the state collection of international art works in Hungary andincludes the Este rházy collection, acquired in 1871. The collection began in the seventeenth century but expanded during the rule of Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy (1765 – 1833) who was primarily responsible fordeveloping the fine collection of Old Master paintings and drawings which is showcased in the exhibition.
One of the highlights of the exhibition is Raphael’s Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist , 1508 (known as The Esterházy Madonna).
Treasures from Budapest: European Masterpieces from Leonardo to Schiele includes still lifes, landscapes and portraits by some of Europe’s finest artists, including works by Royal Academicians Sir Joshua Reynolds, John Constable and Angelica Kauffmann. The exhibition concludes with a showcase of works by Impressionists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro and twentieth century artists including Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso and Egon Schiele alongside works by Hungarian artists such as Károly Ferenczy and József Rippl-Rónai.

Museum Hours

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Portrait of Pierre Baillot 1829

From the 22nd of September to the 5th of December 2010 – Art Gallery of New South Wales – Sydney
David to Cézanne, Master drawings from the Prat Collection, Paris
This exhibition of 100 drawings offers an in-depth exploration of the development of French art over the course of the 19th century.
The defining movements of neo-classicism, Romanticism, realism and Impressionism are represented through works of outstanding quality by the greatest French draughtsmen: Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-François Millet, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Gustave Moreau, Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne. The selection also represents a number of artists whose work, though less well-known, is often surprising for its inspiration and originality.
The exhibition comprises landscapes, portraits, figure and composition studies, meticulously finished drawings and quick sketches, all bearing witness to the vitality and richness of the French school of drawing.

This is the first time that the collection has been seen in Australia, offering a rare opportunity to see some of the most beautiful examples of 19th-century drawing and provides an insight into the fascinating world of the collector.;

The collection is, according to Pierre Rosenberg, former director of the Louvre:
“a top-rank ensemble … [striking for the] invariably perfect quality of each drawing … Rarely has there been such a manifest, coherent determination to conceive a collection as a creation; in isolation each sheet delights and enchants; all together these drawings … are a lesson in the history of art, a non-verbal lesson, and all the more enjoyable for that …”

Gallery Hours