International Art News

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.

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Edgar Degas - Woman in a Tub, c. 1883 - Pastell auf Papier - Tate: Bequeathed by Mrs. A.F. Kessler 1983 © Tate, London 2011

From February 10, 2012 to  May 13, 2012 – Albertina
Masterworks on Paper is the first exhibition devoted exclusively to the significance of drawing to the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist avant-garde movements—and to the development of modern art.
The Albertina, Vienna, Austria  – The exhibition will present up to 200 drawings, watercolours and pastels by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Active in France during the second half of the nineteenth century and closely associated with avant-garde movements, artists such as Manet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Seurat, Gauguin, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec created works on paper that may be less well known than their paintings but which are just as significant. This is the first international exhibition devoted exclusively to drawings by these artists and will considerably extend knowledge of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

The starting point for Impressionism on Paper is the fact that a large proportion (40%) of all the items shown in the eight Impressionist exhibitions held in Paris between 1874 and 1886 were works on paper. Many of these can be identified and are included on the selection list. To this core will be added numerous other examples by these artists and others that will provide an overview of their drawing skills at this critical stage in the development of a widely appreciated moment in the development of French art.

The aim is to demonstrate the different types of drawing pursued by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and to demonstrate the various purposes to which their works on paper were put.

Claude Monet Waterloo Bridge, London, 1901 Pastel Collection Triton Fondation, The Netherlands

Drawing is not an activity with which the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists have so far been closely associated. The exhibition, however, will illustrate unequivocally and for the first time that for these artists drawing was a primary function and not a secondary activity.   Although drawings were used as part of the preparatory process towards a painting, more and more they came to be regarded by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists as finished works of art in their own right. Many of the pastels by Degas, the watercolours by Cézanne, the pen and ink drawings by Van Gogh or the works in mixed media by Toulouse-Lautrec were made on a large scale specifically for exhibition.

Impressionism on Paper, therefore, will show that far from ignoring the art of drawing the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists chose to emphasize its primacy thereby ceasing to uphold or even recognize the traditional distinction between drawing and painting. Instead, they elevated the status of drawing to the level of painting itself regarding both practices as part of a single aesthetic.

Pierre-August Renoir - Nude Bathers Playing with a Crab, c. 1897-1900 - Pastell auf Papier - Sammlung Jean Bonna, Genf

The result was that the traditional hierarchy separating painting from drawing established during the Renaissance ceased with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. This, in turn, had considerable consequences for the development of modern art in so far as the fusion of line and colour resulting from a series of multiple gestural acts, which characterizes the best examples of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist drawings, paved the way for such artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly and Bridget Riley.

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From the 30th of  September 2010 to the 16th of January 2011 – Tate Modern
Gauguin is one of the world’s most famous and best-loved artists from the early 20th century. For the first time in the UK in over 50 years, Tate Modern presents an exhibition dedicated to this master French Post-Impressionist, featuring paintings and drawings from around the world. His sumptuous, colourful images of women in Tahiti and beautiful landscape images of Brittany in France are some of the most popular images in Modern art.

Gauguin was the ultimate global traveller, sailing the South Seas, and living in Peru, Martinique, and Paris among other places. This exhibition explores the role of the myths around the man – Gauguin as storyteller, painting himself as a Christ-like figure or even a demon in his own paintings, religious and mythical symbols in his work, and the manipulation of his own artistic identity. It features many of his iconic paintings, including those showing daily village life from the artist’s colony of Pont-Aven in Brittany, nude bathers and haystacks in the Breton landscape, and decorative works such as the carved wooden door panels around Gauguin’s hut in the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia.

Gauguin sought to escape European civilisation in the South Seas. Inspired by Tahiti’s tropical flora, fauna and island life, he immersed himself in its fast-disappearing local culture to invest his art with deeper meaning, ritual and myth.

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26 June – 19 September 2010 – Art Gallery of New South Wales
The most influential artists of the modern era are shown in strength in an exhilarating journey spanning 50 years, when paintings, drawings and prints edged their way by degrees towards purely non-representational images. An explosion of creative invention propelled these 140-plus works by Whistler, Cézanne, Monet, Seurat, Vuillard, Bonnard, Gauguin, Matisse, Derain, Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Hans Arp and Sophie Taüber-Arp.

This is one of the most ambitious exhibitions the Art Gallery of NSW has ever undertaken.

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FROM 4 JUNE TO 26 SEPTEMBER 2010 – Musee des Beaux Arts de Rouen
The Normandie impressionniste festival, from June to September 2010, pays tribute to Impressionism throughout the territory of Higher and Lower Normandy. This multi-disciplinary event (encompassing painting, music, cinema and literature), at a scale rarely seen in France, is a perfect opportunity to discover the exceptional heritage and all the creativity that lies in Normandy, the native region of the movement. It is in this context that the musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, which houses the largest Impressionist collection aside Paris, presents some one hundred masterpieces by the greatest masters, dedicated to the town with «one hundred church bells».

Paintings from the world over
This nationally important exhibition which is to be the major event of the festival brings together a group of exceptional works of art from private and public collections from all over the world, among them various master pieces never shown before in France. Over one hundred and thirty paintings by great painters from the end of the XIXth century, led by Monet, Gauguin and Pissarro, will allow the visitors to explore one of the last great themes in the history of Impressionism that has not yet been the focus of an exhibition, the role the Normand capital played in this pictorial revolution. The works are presented in a mostly chronological order. But at certain moments in the exhibition some iconographic themes are isolated in order to show the persistence of motifs now classical, found over various decades.

Monet and his Cathedrals
The exhibition covers a very large perspective, from the forerunners of Impressionism such as Turner to the representatives of the School of Rouen like Albert Lebourg, and sheds light on unknown artists such as Charles Fréchon, Robert-Antoine Pinchon or George Morren. But it grants special attention to three masters. Claude Monet is the one who seems the most intimately linked to the town. During his first stays, in 1872-73, Rouen is above all a port in which large trading ships anchored. The paintings he produced at the time show a little-known aspect of his «aquatic» research, just before Impression, soleil levant. He came back to Rouen in the spring of 1892 to create his first series of Cathedrals, and the second on the following spring. This mythical ensemble, one of the greatest revolutions in the history of art, would be finished in his workshop, and dated 1894. The exhibition presents eleven of those paintings, an unexpec ted blessing in 2010 when masterpieces constantly on demand travel ever so much less.

Pissarro on the other hand began in Rouen an extraordinary story of hotel rooms from which he painted, from 1883 to 1898, the founding masterpieces of the modern urban landscape. But in 1883 Pissarro still worked very often outdoors where his points of view were on either side of the Seine. His first vision of Rouen still includes peaceful embankments, even though the urban excitement seen from above interested him as can be seen in the masterpiece of the Courtauld Institute in London, La Place Lafayette. It is greatly due to Pissarro’s Influence that young Paul Gauguin, who wished to leave Paris, also settled in Rouen in 1884, where he stayed for ten months. His ill-known production there poses essential questions on Impressionism in the middle of the 1880s. The originality of these paintings also lies in the fact he stationed himself in his residential district, ignoring the downtown area and very rarely painted the Seine. Gauguin’s Ro uen is a green and mysterious village, with a very particular relief that suggests vertical and closed visions, in which the spectator has the impression of burying himself.
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