International Art News

From September 19 2012 to January 6, 2013 – Musee du Luxembourg
On 29 January 1906, a group of art collectors and artists formed the Modern Art Club (Cercle de l’Art moderne) in Le Havre. Among the members were Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy and Emile Othon Friesz and some of the town’s biggest collectors at the beginning of the 20th century: Olivier Senn, Charles-Auguste Marande, Pieter van der Velde, Georges Dussueil, Oscar Schmitz, Edouard Lüthy…They set themselves the objective of promoting modern art in Le Havre.

Between 1906 and 1910, the group organised exhibitions, lecture series, poetry readings and concerts. Frantz Jourdain, Guillaume Apollinaire and Claude Debussy supported the club, which was linked from the outset to the newly established Salon d’Automne.
On its initiative, works by the great artists of the time were shown in Le Havre, especially at four annual exhibitions: the “old” Impressionists such as Monet and Renoir, and the Neo-Impressionists, but above all the young Fauves, brought by their friends Braque, Dufy, and Friesz. Le Havre, which was not too far from Paris, gave the Fauves a warm welcome and a potential outlet for their recent production, the very works that had sparked the scandal of the “wild beasts’ cage.”

Who were these men? What did they have in common? What was it about the historical, economic and cultural context of Le Havre that favoured the emergence of the club?

Le Havre was an industrial town, founded relatively recently (1517); by the mid 19th century, its flourishing port had become a major gateway for imports of exotic products. Local businessmen and notables were keen to give the city a “soul”. Consequently, a museum was established near the waterfront in 1845 and well-known artists were invited to regular exhibitions organised by the Art Friends Club (in 1868 Manet won a prize for his Dead Bullfighter, which had been refused five years before at the Salon de Paris). The merchants interested in these activities took an active part in the cultural life of the town and the success of their businesses had a direct influence on the fate of the artists, hence Eugène Boudin’s pithy comment: “No cotton, no paintings”.

In the late 19th century, a new generations of collectors appeared. They were all members of the Art Friends Club (Société des Amis des Arts), but had a particular interest in the work of young artists and often went to Paris to see the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, the galleries run by Druet, Bernheim and Vollard, artists’ studios and auction rooms. They joined Dufy, Friesz and Braque in this singular adventure.
The collections of two of them, Olivier Senn and Charles-Auguste Marande, are now in the Musée d’Art moderne André Malraux in Le Havre, donated by the artists themselves or by their descendants. The collections of van der Velde, Dussueil, Schmitz, Lüthy and others, although scattered, are well known.

Each one tells us something of the collector’s personality. Although there are some similarities due to shared tastes (for Boudin, Pissarro, Marquet…), the collections reveal individual quirks and daring choices. For instance, Senn started his collection with two major works by Delacroix and Courbet from the 1850s and went on to collect Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pieces, while Dussueil and van der Velde were immediately attracted by the very latest work, buying Matisses at the same time as the Steins, and before the Morozovs and Shchukin. Degas and Cross are well represented in the Senn collection, while Van Dongen was preferred by van der Velde or Dussueil. There was obviously complicity and emulation between them and paintings circulated and sometimes changed hands.

The exhibition presents some 90 works and takes visitors into the collectors’ world. Going beyond their private interests, they joined the club to defend a conception of their commitment to modern art and artists, and to the public interest. The show also looks at the personal careers of the artists linked to the club, at first united in the defence of Fauvism and then gradually going their separate ways. The Cercle de l’Art moderne can be seen as a unique and short-lived provincial phenomenon, an instant of grace due to a handful of people convinced of the need to defend modernity. Its avant-garde image stuck to the town and region in which it developed.

Musee du Luxembourg

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.

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L'Écuyère 1920 Musée-Château, Dieppe © ADAGP, Paris 2011 © Château-musée de Dieppe/Bertrand Legros

Until the 17th of July – Musée d’Art Moderne Paris
The Musée d’Art Moderne is offering a fresh appreciation of Kees Van Dongen (1877–1968), the dazzling, disconcerting painter who made his reputation in Paris in the 1920s. This is a comprehensive look at a multifaceted personality: the socially-conscious Dutchman ever ready to caricature and denounce, the avant-garde artist and iconic Fauve, and one of the Roaring Twenties’ leading figures on the trendy Paris scene. The exhibition includes and adds to “All eyes on Kees Van Dongen”, shown at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam (18 September 2010 – 23 January 2011).

Twenty years after “Van Dongen: the Painter”, the retrospective organised in conjunction with the Boijmans Museum in 1990, this exhibition centres on the success that came with his Paris period. The latest research and exhibitions have given us a clearer idea of the inventiveness and artistic strategy of a painter who dazzles with his discoveries while disconcerting with the diversity of his subject-matter.

The exhibition title suggests not so much a succession of periods as an overlay of artistic poses: the Dutch rebel mixing in anarchist circles around 1895 and ever ready to caricature and denounce; and the avant-garde artist playing a very personal role in the Fauvist movement and a decisive one in its dissemination abroad, in Holland, Germany and Russia. The “urbane” Fauve Kees Van Dongen focused on the female body, and in particular on the face made-up to the point of deformation under the electric lighting he borrowed from Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec and which became, in a way, his trademark.

Colour made Van Dongen the guiding spirit of Fauvism, the colour he revivified with his trips to Morocco, Spain and Egypt and his reinvention of the Orient in the early 1910s. Yet Paris remained his dominant subject: the Montmartre of the early 20th century, where he would meet Picasso and Derain and which would charm him with its working-class vitality and vie de bohème; Montparnasse before and after the First World War, where he was one of the main driving forces with his depictions of a new, more eroticised woman; and then the Paris of the Roaring Twenties – the “cocktail period”, he called it – when he would devote himself exclusively to the new elite, to now forgotten literary men and women and stars of stage and screen, anticipating by forty years the world of Andy Warhol’s “beautiful people”. The poses are wildly overdone, with melodramatic costumes and props laying bare all the artificiality of models who existed solely in terms of the roles they played.

Van Dongen’s success – akin to that of Foujita – and his involvement with the avant-garde made him a special kind of artist, whose verve and freedom still fascinate.

The exhibition comprises some 90 paintings and drawings, together with ceramics, dating from 1895 to the early 1930s. Designed by the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum and organised in association with the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, it includes loans from major national and international institutions, and from outstanding private collections.

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