International Art News

El Greco and Jorge Manuel, Immaculate Conception, 1607-1613, oil on canvas, 108 x 82 cm, © Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid

From April 28 to August 12, 2012 – Museum Kunstpalast
It is for the first time that the elective affinity between early Expressionism and El Greco is examined with direct reference to originals and that the phenomenon of an Old Master becoming the catalyst of a young avantgarde art movement is illustrated this vividly. The intention is to reveal the multifaceted levels on which exponents of Expressionism concerned themselves with El Greco’s pictorial world. In the process, attention is paid to the genres of religious painting as well as portrait and landscape painting. A wealth of works tell us of the profound fascination which, quite astonishingly from today’s perspective.

The Vision of Saint John, aka The Opening of the Fifth Seal (1608-1614), oil on canvas painting by El Greco, 222.3 cm x 193cm, located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

El Greco inspired Beckmann, Macke, Kokoschka, Franz Marc and all the German avant-garde of the XXth century? This is one thing most had forgotten but this exhibition “El Greco and the Modernists” is here to remind us. It is presented one century after the storm that took place when the paintings by El Greco arrived on German soil. They belonged to the Nemes collection, and were presented in Berlin, then in Dusseldorf in 1912 and finally at the Städtische Kunsthalle. It was there that the young artists were able to see this strange artist up close and the way he transformed proportions using an aggressive palette, filling his compositions with ecstatic characters with wax-colored complexions… One hundred years later, the dream of bringing together the great master and his students is finally a reality. Next to some forty paintings by El Greco, brought in from the Metropolitan, the Louvre or Toledo, we h ave works by Beckmann, Lehmbruck or Oppenheimer put in counterpoint, proving that Cézanne was not their only reference.

Museum Kunstpalast

From 4 June to 27 November 2011 – The Museo Correr – Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia
The exhibition presents more than forty works, exploring Julian Schnabel’s career from the 1970s to the present and offering an opportunity to admire paintings and sculptures by a great artist and all-round American phenomenon. The retrospective illustrates his aesthetic, strongly influenced by Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly, but also drawing on the European and Mediterranean tradition. His art recalls the style of the old Spanish and Italian masters, like El Greco and Tintoretto, and reworks ancient and modern literary and cultural references from Homer to Aeschylus, to the art of the great masters like Giotto, Goya, Antoni Gaudí and Pablo Picasso.
Painter, sculptor and film director of international fame, Julian Schnabel stands out for his astounding capacity for creative metamorphoses and the arresting expressive power of his works. A painter first and foremost, he has explored various fields of art, including film, as the acclaimed director of Basquiat in 1996, Before Night Falls in 2000 (which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival), and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in 2007 (which earned him the award for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival). Schnabel’s films are closely connected to his art, and his work in film can be viewed as a natural continuation of his painting.
Best known for his plate paintings, Schnabel has in fact used an infinite variety of media and materials to create his works, from velvet to oil cloth, from pieces of wood from all over the world to sails, photographs, rugs, tarpaulins and in general any flat surface that inspires his creative process. This painting process influenced people into making new kinds of art.
Towards the end of the 1980s Schnabel began to work with outsize formats. This approach, although often interpreted by critics as a mere attempt to impress the viewer, actually springs from the artist’s desire to reference the imposing paintings of the past commissioned by the state or the church, as well as the “big paintings” of post-war America.

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Queen Donna Mariana of Austria About 1652–1653 Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez Oil on canvas - Prado Museum

Until 29th of May 2011- State Hermitage Museum
The exhibition of the Prado Museum in the Hermitage is one of the major events of the Year of Spain in Russia and the Year of Russia in Spain. From 25 February to 29 May 2011 visitors will be able to see 66 art works from the famous Madrid museum in the Nikolaevsky Hall of the Winter Palace. This is the biggest and most representative exhibition from the Prado Museum ever organized outside Spain.*

A prominent French traveller and writer Théophile Gautier said that the Prado Museum was “rather a museum of artists that a museum of art”. Indeed, the Prado Museum has an extensive collection of such greatest artists as Titian (about 40 paintings), Rubens (90 works), Velázquez (50 works), Goya (140 paintings and about 1000 drawings, etchings and engravings). Next to them are constellations of the names which are by no means less famous: the museum has fine collections of Bosch, Raphael, El Greco, Ribera, Murillo, Mengs, Tiepolo.

Careful selection of paintings for the exhibition in the Hermitage including the works of eminent artists of Western Europe and Spain – Rogier van der Weyden, Jheronimus Bosch, Raphael, Pieter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Titian, Paolo Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Luca Giordano, El Greco, Francisco de Zurbarán, José de Ribera, Diego Velázquez, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Francisco Goya – made it possible to demonstrate the diversity and highest level of the Prado Museum collection.

Spanish kings, as well as Russian tsars, have always been known for their love for art. It is their passion for collecting and gift of discovering greatest talents among contemporary artists the museum owes the collection to. For instance, Charles V, the king of Spain and ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, and his son Phillip II were the main patrons of Titian. Philip’s interest in the Dutch art explains why the majority of the Jheronimus Bosch’s works are in Madrid. Philip IV, the finest connoisseurs of art among the Spanish kings, made Diego Velázquez the court artist and was the patron of Pieter Paul Rubens and José de Ribera. Charles II, the last Habsburg King of Spain, brought Luca Giordano to Spain.

Philip V and Queen Isabel de Farnesio bought wonderful works by Nicolas Poussin and some of the Dutch and Flemish artists. Charles III invited Anton Raphael Mengs and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo to be  the court artists and his son and successor Charles IV made Francisco Goya the First Painter of the King. Ferdinand VII, painted by Goya first as prince and then as king, was the collector and patron of art; it was he who made a decision to establish the Royal Museum of Paintings and Sculpture which later became known as the Museo del Prado. The museum was opened on 19 November 1819.

Exhibited in the Hermitage are a range of paintings bought by Spanish kings or made upon their request: Portrait of an Unknown Man by Durer, The Holy Family with a Lamb by Raphael, David Victorious Over Goliath by Caravaggio, Charles V Standing with His Dog by Titian, three portraits by Velázquez, two still life paintings by Luis Melendez and The Grape Harvest by Goya as well as portraits of almost all Spanish kings the Prado Museum owes its glory to.

The Prado Museum has fine samples of sculpture from ancient times to the Renaissance and a comparatively small, yet including the best samples, collection of decorative art exhibits. However, the Prado Museum is primarily perceived as a  picture gallery. Among approximately eight thousand paintings of the XII-early XX century there are a few dozens of works without which the history of West European art would be impossible to imagine.

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.

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