International Art News

Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917). Two Dancers, ca. 1905. Pastel on card. Batliner Collection. Albertina, Vienna. Photo © Fotostudio Heinz Preute, Vaduz

14 March 2012 – 31 December 2012 – Albertina
In spring 2007, one of Europe’s greatest private collections of classical modern art came to the Albertina as a permanent loan from the Rita und Herbert Batliner Foundation in Liechtenstein.

The Albertina is now in a unique position to compensate for the major gaps in the Austrian state-run museums’ holdings of international modern art with key works of French Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, German Expressionism, Fauvism and the Russian avant-garde.

Pablo Picasso- Woman in a green hat, 1947 - Albertina, Vienna - Batliner Collection © Succession Picasso / VBK, Vienna 2011. Photo: © Fotostudio Heinz Preute, Vaduz

The Batliner Collection has received acclaim from museums and connoisseurs for decades. It includes outstanding works by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon. These masterpieces can be seen in a new permanent exhibition at the Albertina.

The Batliner Collection is augmented by works from the Forberg Collection in Switzerland, which was also transferred to the Albertina on permanent loan.

Herbert and Rita Batliner began collecting art nearly half a century ago. Due to their close friendship with the legendary art dealer Ernst Beyeler, French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting formed a cornerstone of the collection from the very beginning, along with the work of Alberto Giacometti. Exceptional works by Monet such as The Water-Lily Pond, Edgar Degas’ Two Dancers, or Cézanne’s Arc-Tal and Mont Sainte-Victoire landscapes attest to the couple’s passion for French art.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Portrait of a young girl (Elisabeth Maître), 1879 - Albertina, Vienna - Batliner Collection. Photo: © Fotostudio Heinz Preute, Vaduz

Picasso became an additional focal point. Today he is represented in the collection with over 40 works, including ten paintings and numerous drawings and one-of-a-kind ceramics.

In the course of his travels, Herbert Batliner gained familiarity with Russian avant-garde art. He and his wife were inspired by the works they saw in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, to build their own fine collection of Russian avant-garde art from 1905-35.

The focus of their acquisitions was on Marc Chagall, but they also sought out works by Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova und Mikhail Larionow. The collection includes a major work by Kazimir Malevich, painted as a defiant memory image immediately following the artist’s release from a Stalinist prison.

Kees van Dongen- Woman with Blue Eyes, 1908- Albertina, Vienna - Batliner Collection © VBK, Wien 2009. Photo: © Fotostudio Heinz Preute, Vaduz

The permanent exhibition spans the most fascinating chapters from more than 130 years of art history, from Impressionism to the most recent present. Paintings by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Miró, Klee, Kandinsky, Chagall, and other masters offer a survey of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, the Fauves, Expressionism, and the Russian avant-garde. With late works by Picasso and exhibits by Rothko and Bacon, the exhibition leads over to the second half of the twentieth century, before it ends with works by contemporary artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter.

Albertina opening hours

Superflex, Burning Car, 2008 © Courtesy of Superflex and Nils Stærk, Copenhagen

From June 8 to October 9, 2011 – Museum Tinguely, Basel
The automobile is the foremost cultural touchstone of the 20th century, reflecting the social and  cultural development of the western world and beyond. Both technical device and instrument of locomotion, it offers the most highly developed and widespread interface for human-machine interaction – while also functioning as a carrier of meaning, an individualized living room, a medium for escapes great and small, and a means of distancing oneself from others and of creating a personal profile. The attraction of speed and the new feeling of time and space ushered in by the advent of the automobile had a formative influence on (urban) perception and the rhythm of modern life in the early years of the 20th century. The view through the windshield still drives our outlook on life today, as well as coloring the cinematic perspective on reality. The exhibition “Car Fetish” demonstrates the wide range of art influenced by the automobile. Around 160 artworks are featured by more than 80 artists, among them Giacomo Balla, Robert Frank, Jean Tinguely, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Chris Burden, Damián Ortega, Richard Prince or Superflex. The symbolic and often irrational superstructure we have built up around the automobile and which guides our enthusiasm for this, our favorite toy, refuses to be defeated even by never-ending stop-and-go traffic jams. Correspondingly open and eclectic is the field of art that explores the car as cult object and imagination machine. At the center of the largescale exhibition “Fetish Auto” at Museum Tinguely is a sweeping panorama across one hundred years of automotive history that examines this complex relationship both aesthetically and critically based on a representative selection of works. In recent years the study of fetishism has shifted its focus from the more exotic and marginal to centre of western consumer society and all that the world of goods seems to promise the purchaser. Although Modernism suppressed the (high) cultural phenomenon of fetishism as act of projection onto the object, it did not disappear, and thus today things still exercise for us a formative fascination based on their look and feel, attitudes and imagined qualities, as well as forms of use and handling. Examining this fascination based on the automobile as “complex thing” is one objective of the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue. The distinction between commodity, sexual and religious fetish hence becomes both an interpretative framework for the catalogue and a thematic access route to the exhibition.

Arnold Odermatt, Wolfenschiessen, 1964 © Urs Odermatt, Windisch

The Exhibition
Automobility, or “self-propulsion” was a power the messengers to the gods already had at their disposal. And it so happens that in the year 2011 the car is celebrating its 125th birthday (in 1886 Carl Benz designed the famous Benz patented motorcar, the world’s first automobile). The exhibition at Museum Tinguely, conceived architecturally as a wheel with axis and radial segments, commences with the radical new concepts of art and society put forth by the Futurists, who linked human and machine Symbiotically in a new aesthetic of constant acceleration. In the “Futurist Manifesto” of 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti propagated automotive speed and the racecar as new ideal of beauty to replace the old model of the Nike of Samothrace. The Futurists worshipped the machine realm, dedicated poems to the racecar and struck up a “Hymn to Death.” In the visual arts Giacomo Balla and Luigi Russolo were the main figures to depict impressions of automotive movement as synaesthesia of light, sound and speed in the urban environment. These two artists form the historical prelude to the exhibition, with their own room in which visitors can experience the intoxication of the senses triggered by a panorama of works.
Two larger galleries in the “Fetish Auto” show are devoted to high points of the automotive worldview in the art of the 1960s and 70s. In many works of American Pop Art and its forerunners, the “American way of life,” genuinely bound up as it is with the car and the mobile lifestyle, along with its propagation in the mass media, is the chosen theme of artists such as Andy Warhol (“Disaster Series,” “Cars”), Ed Ruscha, John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, Mel Ramos, Roy Lichtenstein and Don Eddy. In Europe on the other hand, it was the Nouveau Réalisme movement exemplified by the works of Arman, César, Gérard Deschamps, Mimmo Rotella and Jean Tinguely that transformed the commodities of machine and automobile into art, whether by splashing them across posters or by layering, compressing or degenerating their material forms. In European varieties of Pop Art as well, as practiced for example by Konrad Klapheck, Paul Stämpfli and Franz Gertsch, and also in the work of artists exhibiting media-reflective tendencies such as Gerhard Richter and Wolf Vostell, the car often serves as a pictorial protagonist or a mirror of social developments. Wolf Vostell (“Das Theater ist auf der Strasse”) and Allan Kaprow, two of the main figures in Happening and Performance Art have been chosen for the exhibition. Allan Kaprow’ s 1961 “Yard,” made of towering stacks of tires, has been restaged for the show.
The stroll through the art history of automotive inspiration from the Futurists to today is accompanied in the exhibition by a second, theme-based, thread. The visitor can choose to approach the exhibition by way of art that fell under the sway of commodity fetishism (lacquer and chrome, the car acquisition as purchase of fictions and redirection activity, assembly line production and accumulation) with works by Ant Farm, Arman, Edward Burtynsky, Jan Dibbets, Hans Hansen, Peter Keetman, Len Lye, Hendrik Spohler, Peter Stämpfli and Pascal Weidmann; or through the art of religious fetishism (auto da fé, “Déesse,” nail fetish and car cemetery) with works by Kudjoe Affutu, Chris Burden, Jordi Colomer, Walker Evans, Jitish Kallat, Annika Larsson, Superflex and Dale Yudelman; or as sexual fetishism (phallic extension, motor potency, female curves, the car as bachelor machine) with works by Liz Cohen, Sylvie Fleury, Wenyu Ji, Allan Kaprow, Richard Prince, Pipilotti Rist, Bruno Rousseaud and Franck Scurti. Further apotheoses of the automotive state of mind can be found in rooms focusing on themes such as the accident, with works by Brassaï, James Dean, Robert Frank, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Mickry 3, Arnold Odermatt, Roman Signer and Wolf Vostell; on speed, with works by Horst Baumann, Géo Ham, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Richard Prince, Man Ray and Anton Stankowski; and on traffic, with works by Andreas Feininger, Robert Frank, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Julian Opie, June Bum Park, Peter Roehr, Samuel Rousseau, Bruno Ruckstuhl, Michael Sailstorfer, Stefan Sous and Peter Stämpfli. Finally, a further gallery is devoted to the subjects of “Retreat and Flight” or “Living Room and Outer Space,” featuring works by Michel de Broin, Edward Kienholz, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Zilla Leutenegger, Thomas Mailänder, Ahmet Ögüt, Betsabeé Romero and Andrea Zittel. In the middle, set up as axis of the entire show, is Damian Ortega’s large-scale work “Cosmic Thing,” a VW Beetle exploded through the space. At the entrance of the exhibition the visitors will be able to enjoy a selection of Andrew Bush’s Cardriver portraits “on the move”. An automotive love story compiled by Virgil Widrich out of famous film scenes will run continuously in the museum auditorium during the show.

Mel Ramos, Kar Kween, 1964 © 2011 Pro Litteris, Zurich photo: Lee Stalsworth

Museum Tinguely has several works in its collection that were directly inspired by cars or that use car parts as material. Jean Tinguely was a great devotee of the “most beautiful artwork” in the world. He for example converted two racecar chassis into a winged altar, warned of the transience of western consumer culture by means of a drivable sculpture crafted from a Renault Safari, and arranged Eva Aeppli’s “Five Widows” with a Lotus racecar he had purchased (once driven by world champion Jim Clark) into a memorial assemblage for the often-fatal driving circus that is the Formula 1. For Tinguely as a Nouveau Réaliste, a great passion for speed and for the machine (he was notorious early on for his many car accidents) flowed into his work, and he hardly ever missed a Formula 1 race. Jo Siffert was a friend, as was the Swede Joakim Bonnier and racer Niki Lauda. Tinguely fanatically collected cars, preferably Ferraris, liked to drive Mercedes and decoratively painted a sidecar tandem that he sponsored in races. Restless Jean was – like the Futurists – besotted by the myth of speed. His relationship with the automobile was shaped both by euphoria and pessimism.

Andy Warhol - Ladies and Gentlemen, 1975 - Synthetic polymere paint and silkscreen inks on canvas 127 X 102 cm.

Until the 2nd of October 2011 – The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art
Francis Bacon (1909–1991) and Andy Warhol (1928–1987) were two great artists of the 20th century with very different approaches to creativity, to the processes of working, to the nature of images and to the notion of art in general. Bacon, who painted in the first person, transferred his visceral energy and enigmatic symbols and metaphors directly to the canvas, while Warhol, who worked in the third person, adopted existing forms and figures from the media and made them his own through various techniques of reproduction. And while Bacon belonged to a long and rich tradition of Expressionistic painters, Warhol marked the beginning of a new, more distanced development in contemporary art – Pop. Both produced meaningful works, however, that are ambiguous, complex and highly influential.

In this exhibition, key works by Bacon and Warhol will engage in an intelligent dialogue with those by some of the many different painters who have worked on the borderline between these two artistic languages, developing their own vocabularies with an emphasis on the manipulation and transgression of images, creating direct and indirect actions and narratives. They include Jim Dine, Larry Rivers, David Hockney, Miodrag Djuric Dado, Erro, Eduardo Arroyo, Jens Johannessen, Knut Rose, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Jörg Immendorf, and Martin Kippenberger, to name just a few. On the one hand, the spectator will be drawn into the seduction of a painterly expression that often adopts a provocative thematic, and on the other, will be challenged by the philosophical approach of artists who distance themselves from their subject matter. The result will be a fascinating exploration of the reach and influence of these two important tendencies in painting – Expressionism and Pop art – during the 20th century and beyond.

Museum Hours

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669), The Blinding of Samson, 1636, oil on canvas, 206 x 276 cm, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Photo: Städel Museum

Until the 26th of June – Städel Museum
The holdings of the Städel Museum comprise masterpieces of European art from the late Middle Ages to the present. The temporary closure of its galleries in the course of the redevelopment measures carried out in the old building as part of the Städel’s extension and of making the new building accessible via the old building offers the unique opportunity to show the museum’s familiar treasures in an entirely new context. The temporary presentation of the Städel’s collection under the title “In Chronological Order. Städel Works of the 14th to 21st Centuries” in the Exhibition Building abandons the usual separation according to regions and replaces it by a strictly chronological cross-country hanging. This approach provides a condensed art-historical timeline which grants a new, unusual and often surprising view of both familiar and still to be discovered masterpieces of the Städel and ensures that parts of its collection can also be seen during the redevelopment work. Accompanied by a chain of references to political, social, cultural and scientific key events, the presentation not only offers unconventional adjacencies, but also illustrates the development of Western painting in a unique manner.

300 paintings: from Jan van Eyck to Gerhard Richter
The exhibition encompassing twelve rooms comprises 300 paintings from the Städel’s holdings. The range of masterpieces spans from Jan van Eyck and Andrea Mantegna, Rembrandt, Nicolas Poussin, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo to Max Beckmann, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, and Gerhard Richter. The monthly changing comprehensive program accompanying the exhibition reflects the works chosen under various thematic focal points such as technical innovations, natural sciences, history of the theater, and history of literature. The program also includes the new series “Guest Commentaries” with people from the fields of politics, business, and science who will explain their personal views of prominent works in the Städel.

Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Study for the nurse in the film 'Battleship Potemkin' by Eisenstein, 1957, oil on canvas, 198 x 142 cm, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Photo: Städel Museum, © The Estate of Francis Bacon / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010.

In Chronological Order
The building of large museums and the emergence of academic art history in the nineteenth century consolidated the separation of collections of paintings after regional schools. The art from the Middle Ages to the Baroque Age was categorized as Southern or Northern with the Alps providing the dividing line; in addition, artists were grouped after national schools (Italian, French, German, or English) and soon also after movements such as Symbolism, Impressionism, or Expressionism. “In Chronological Order” discards this familiar division and presents paintings from the Städel Museum from 1300 to the present in the chronological order of their making. This dense historical tour offers visitors a time travel through seven centuries of European art history, with the pictures arranged along a timeline of decisive historical events. To be found on a continuing band mounted above the paintings, the subjectively chosen political, cultural and scientific events make it possible to situate the works in their historical context and provide room for numerous associations.

Museum Hours

Daniel Richter, Phienox , 2000. Oil on canvas , 252 x 368cm . Falckemberg Collection, Hamburg (disclosure)

September 19, 2010 to January 9, 2011 – Museo de Arte Sao Paulo
Curated by Teixeira Coelho and Tereza de Arruda , the exhibition displays 83 works by 26 German artists who were born and raised under the changes of a divided Germany. From Berlin , Leipzig , Dresden , Hamburg, Dusseldorf , Munich and Karlsruhe. The show is specially designed for the MASP with dozens of works never before seen in the country.
The paintings were produced in the last two decades in the reunified Germany , post- Wall and arrived in Brazil in September, amid the International Art Biennial of Sao Paulo.

Made by artists who were born , mostly, after the second world war, and very little presented in Brazil , this exhibition brings the best paintings made in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This is actually the first exhibition of this size in Latin America , with such a variety of names and styles. Alongside established artists like Gerhard Richter and ARPenck , the show has young talents like Jonathan Meese , Tim Eitel , Albert Oehlen and Katherina Grosse, to name a few , and also features works of one of the most prominent and discussed painter today , Neo Rauch , who recently celebrated his 50 years with two retrospective exhibitions in Leipzig and Munich. And it also includes some names from the former East Germany, as W. Mattheuer and W. Tübke , showing what is now a strong part of the new trend in Germany.

All styles and movements are represented here, from abstract to figurative aesthetics through the “dirty”, almost “street”, and the classicism revisited and highly developed. All altogether 83 works, produced by Franz Ackermann , Werner Büttner , André Butzer , Tatjana Doll , Tim Eitel , Katharina Grosse, Eberhard Havekost , Bernhard Heisig , Anton Henning , Andreas Hofer , Jörg Immendorff , Martin Kippenberger , Markus Lüppertz , Michel Majerus Wolfgang Mattheuer , Jonathan Meese , Albert Oehlen , AR Penck , Neo Rauch , Daniel Richter, Gerhard Richter , Thomas Scheibitz , David Schnell , Werner Tübke , Corinne Wasmuht and Thomas Zipp .

A unique opportunity to see in Sao Paulo – the exhibition, specially designed for the MASP, will not go to other cities.

Museum Hours