International Art News

Henri Matisse, "La Blouse Roumaine", 1940, Huile sur toile, 92x73cm, Photo, (à gauche). Henri Matisse, "Le Rêve ou la Dormeuse", 1940, Huile sur toile, 81x65cm, Photo (à droite) © Succession H. Matisse - Collection Centre Pompidou / J-C. Planchet / Dist. RMN-GP (à gauche). Succession H. Matisse - Collection particulière (à droite)

From March 7 to June 18, 2012 – Centre Pompidou – Paris
Presenting an outstanding selection of masterworks assembled from the most important public and private collections across the world, this exhibition will examine a distinctive aspect of Matisse’s art: his repeated explorations of the same subject through different treatments – for him a way of exploring art itself. Expressed in variations of framing, draughtsmanship, brushwork and colour, this formal alternation is a recurrent feature of the artist’s work.
The exhibition will feature some sixty paintings, including four large gouache cutouts, and thirty or so drawings, some brought together for the first time since their creation. It covers the whole of Matisse’s artistic career, from 1899 to 1952, the major periods being represented in chronological order, from the pointillism he experimented with in the summer of 1904 (with two versions of Luxe, Calme et Volupté, here juxtaposed in a rare opportunity for direct comparison) to the ambitious paper cutouts of the 1950s (with the famous Nu bleu series of 1952), taking in on the way the renowned Thèmes et variations series of drawings on paper, a kind of conceptual culmination of the procedure.
The exhibition will be particularly illuminating in bringing to bear the tools of historical, critical and technical analysis on the genesis of the works displayed, this examination of pairs and series revealing the line of development of Matisse’s work as a whole, with its ruptures, reversals and breakthroughs. It shows too the degree to which Matisse’s work prompted and nourished the development of modern painting, endlessly posing the questions of representation, of realism, and of the relationships between drawing and colour, surface and volume, interiority and exteriority. Developing new formal solutions, putting into question his own, earlier advances, Matisse was a profound student of form.

Museum Hours

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

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.

Museum Hours

Tarsila do Amaral A Negra, 1923 óleo sobre tela © 2011 Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo

From 6 October to 29 January 2012 – The Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo
Exhibition of 150 national and international works from the MAC collection. The aim of the show MODERNISM IN BRAZIL is to present the “Brazilian Modernism” (1917-1948) from a position that questions the vision of the art produced in the country during this period

Among the pieces on display, divided into five blocks , are works by artists like Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral, Flavio de Carvalho, Di Cavalcanti, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Maria Martins, Giorgio Morandi, Iberê Camargo, Tomie Ohtake, Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Leger, Victor Brecheret, Antonio Gomide, Henri Matisse, Alfredo Volpi, Alexander Calder, Max Bill, Lygia Clark, Marc Chagall, Ismael Nery, Lasar Segall, Raoul Duffy and many others.

Read more

Fatima EL-HAJJ Une Promenade, 2011 Technique mixte sur toile, 150x 175 cm. © Fatima El-Hajj. Courtesy Galerie Claude Lemand, Paris.

From 16 September to 8 October 2011- Galerie Claude Lemand, 16 rue Littré 75006 Paris
Gardens of Soul – A tribute to Shafic Abboud
Her palette and her memory preserve the liveliness of the shapes, colours and light from these places and their inhabitants. More often, her paintings are a reflection of her own garden which she had laid out in front of her studio in Rmaileh, similar to how Claude Monet created his garden in Giverny and made it the main subject matter for his paintings during the last thirty years of his life. Yet Fatima El-Hajj’s garden is much more modest and different by nature than that of the Impressionist master. She endlessly paints the countless facets of her interior garden filled with silence and beauty, a woman lost in her reading or contemplation, a couple enraptured by the music or small groups of people attending the village’s or city’s fairs. She likes to suggest that her paintings are an invitation for the viewer to seek for his own interior garden, a paradise which is within us and brings us serenity, beauty and enchantment. Fatima El-Haj j does not conceal her admiration for the painters Edouard Vuillard, Henri Matisse, and especially Pierre Bonnard, as well as the Lebanese and Parisian artist Shafic Abboud, who had been her teacher and whom she admired and respected. Fatima El-Hajj is a follower of this school of painting and she is very grateful to all these great masters who helped her find her own path. (Claude Lemand).

“In her painting, there is an absence of concession, a seek for an inner world, a harmony born fr om conflicting feelings between tranquility, rebellion, dream and doubt. She paints on canvas or on panel, using oil or acrylic paints and her works are often of a large size. As a colourist, she does not neglect the effects of texture. The movement, light and shapes suggested in her paintings, beautifully merge together, sometimes bringing the work on the verge of abstraction.” (Thierry Savatier)

Born in 1953, Fatima El-Hajj first graduated in 1978 from the Institut des Beaux-Arts at the Lebanese University in Beirut, and later from the Academy of Fine Arts in Leningrad. She then completed her studies from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs of Paris in 1983. She was awarded the Picasso Prize in Madrid in 1985, and has been teaching in Beirut at the Institut des Beaux-Arts ever since. She has been regularly exhibiting her works since 1986 in Lebanon as well as in other Arab countries where she is well-known, such as Kuwait, UAE, Syria, Mo rocco and Qatar, but also in Europe, such as in Spain and France.
Fatima El-Hajj’s landscapes are inspired by the gardens and parks of the many cities she enjoyed and observed whilst travelling across Lebanon, Yemen, Morocco and France.

Jim Nutt: Plumb, 2004. Private collection. Photo courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York

Until the 25th of May – Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Since 1990, Jim Nutt has focused exclusively on female heads in spare line drawings and rich, detailed paintings. This exhibition is a retrospective of Jim Nutt’s work that emphasizes the development of these important paintings through their precedents in his own work. Acknowledging the groundswell in interest in this unique American artist’s work, this will be the first major presentation of Nutt in over a decade. Nutt’s history as an important artist dates to the mid-1960s where in Chicago he was a chief instigator of the irreverent “Hairy Who” group, now better known as the imagists.

While it was undoubtedly inspired by mid-twentieth century pop culture, especially comic books, advertisements, jukebox and pinball machine art, and street signs, Nutt’s art also explores the formal devices and techniques of historical painting. Northern European portraiture of the 15th and 16th century; Colonial American painting; the color and line explorations of Henri Matisse and Joan Miró; the quirky individualism of such artists as John Graham, Max Ernst, Arshile Gorky, and H. C. Westermann all offered lessons as Nutt has matured over four decades of artistic development. A fully illustrated catalogue is planned. This exhibition is organized by MCA Curator Lynne Warren.

Museum Hours