International Art News

Albrecht Dürer – Abduction on a Unicorn, 1516 – etching (iron) – Meder, no. 67- Rosenwald Collection

From March 24 to June 9, 2013 – National Gallery of Art
Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) has long been considered the greatest German artist, uniquely combining the status held in Italian art by Michelangelo in the sixteenth century, by Raphael in the 18th and 19th centuries, and by Leonardo da Vinci in our own day.

While Dürer’s paintings were prized, his most influential works were his drawings, watercolors, engravings, and woodcuts. They were executed with his distinctively northern sense of refined precision and exquisite craftsmanship. The finest collection of Dürer’s drawings and watercolors is that of the Albertina in Vienna, Austria.

Albrecht Dürer – Portrait of a Clergyman (Johann Dorsch?), 1516 – oil on parchment on fabric painted surface: 41.7 x 32.7 cm (16 7/16 x 12 7/8 in.) Samuel H. Kress Collection

The Albertina’s works by Dürer have been acquired over many years, but the museum’s ability to amass such a collection of masterpieces results from primary sources that go directly back to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Dürer was his favorite artist, and the emperor spared no expense in searching for Dürer’s art. He used imperial ambassadors and the machinery of state to succeed in his purchases, among them extraordinary acquisitions from the Imhoff family in Nuremberg, whose works included Dürer’s personal estate.

This groundbreaking exhibition is a culmination of decades of acquisition, study, and exhibitions of early German art at the National Gallery of Art. It presents 91—including most—of the superb Dürer watercolors and drawings from the Albertina and 27 of the museum’s best related engravings and woodcuts. It also includes 19 closely related drawings and prints from the Gallery’s own collection.

National Gallery of Art

Federico Barocci, Italian, c.1533–1612; Study for the Head of Saint John the Evangelist for the Entombment, c.1580; oil on paper, mounted on linen; 16 5/8 x 12 3/4 inches; National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund 1979; image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

From February 27 to May 19, 2013 – The National Gallery
Experience the charm and sensitivity of Barocci’s masterpieces – never before seen outside Italy.

Federico Barocci (about 1533–1612) is celebrated as one of the most talented artists of late 16th century Italy. Fascinated by the human form, he fused charm and compositional harmony with an unparalleled sensitivity to colour.

The exhibition will showcase Federico Barocci’s most spectacular altarpieces, including his famous ‘Entombment’ from Senigallia and ‘Last Supper’ from Urbino Cathedral, thanks to the cooperation of the Soprintendenze delle Marche.

The display assembles the majority of Barocci’s greatest altarpieces and paintings, together with sequences of dazzling preparatory drawings, allowing visitors to understand how each picture evolved and revealing the fertility of Barocci’s imagination, the diversity of his working methods and the sheer beauty and grace of his art.

Federico Barocci, Italian, c.1533-1612; Entombment of Christ, 1579-82; oil on canvas; framed.

Barocci’s works, drawn from life and inspired by the people and animals that surrounded him, are characterised by a warmth and humanity that transform his religious subjects into themes with which all can identify.

He was an incessant and even obsessive draughtsman, preparing every composition with prolific studies in every conceivable medium.

Highly revered by his patrons during his lifetime, Barocci combined the beauty of the High Renaissance with the dynamism of what was to become known as the Baroque, a genre he was instrumental in pioneering. When he died in 1612, he was not only among the highest paid painters in Italy, but also one of the most influential.

The National Gallery

Boldini Woman in Pink oil on cavas - 1916

From October 13th 2012 to January 13th 2013 – Palazzo dei Diamanti
Boldini, Previati e De Pisis. Due secoli di grande arte a Ferrara reunites about eighty works including paintings, sculptures and works on paper that span over one hundred and fifty years of artistic production. The show opens with works from the first half of the 1800s: from paintings by Giovanni Antonio Baruffaldi and Giovanni Pagliarini inspired by the Purismo movement with literary or religious themes to the romantic fervour of those by Girolamo Domenichini, Massimiliano Lodi and Gaetano Turchi that commemorate the grandeur of the Estense heritage or give form to the hopes of the Risorgimento. From the middle of the century, the success of genres such as portrait, panoramic views or landscapes was often linked to artists active outside Ferrara, and above all, to Giovanni Boldini. He was prominent in the renewal of Italian and international painting in the second half of the century, first among the “Macchiaioli” in Florence and then in the Paris of the Impressionists. A wide selection of Boldini’s masterpieces shows his role as an undisputed protagonist in the Belle Époque, as does the establishment in 1935 of the museum dedicated to him. Included are portraits like Portrait of Young Subercaseaux, Firework, Walking in the Bois de Boulogne and Lady in Rose, interior paintings of his atelier, still lifes and panoramic views.

Palazzo dei Diamanti

Edgar Degas Place de la Concorde Oil on canavas 78.4x117.5 cm

From May 19th, 2012 – State Hermitage Museum
Edgar Degas’ work entitled Place de la Concorde (1876) is on display as part of the Revived Masterpieces series. The characters in the paining are the artist’s friend Ludovic Lepic and his two daughters, crossing the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Completed by the artist in 1876, this canvas is a very important milestone on the work of Edgar Degas and 19th century French painting as a whole. It is simultaneously a realistic portrait, a street scene and an urban landscape in the impressionist key.
For a year and a half, the painting underwent a process of restoration at the Hermitage, the primary goal of which was uncovering the part of the original painting that was caught under the frame. An area with a width of up to 4 cm was not covered with a layer of the lacquer applied later, which also made it possible to verify that the painting was initially made in a silver colour, and then covered with yellow lacquer. Thanks to the painstaking work of the restorers, it was possible to restore the famous canvas to its original condition and restore the true character of the master’s painting.

Hermitage Museum

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

Jacopo Robusti detto Tintoretto: Autoritratto, 1587, Parigi, Musée du Louvre – Département des Peintures

From February 25 to June 10, 2012 – Scuderie del Quirinale
JACOPO ROBUSTI (or CANAL), better known as TINTORETTO (1519-1594), is the only key Italian 16th century painter not to have had a major monographic exhibition devoted to his work to date. If we ignore the thematic exhibition of his portraits held in Venice in 1994, the last exhibition of the great Venetian master’s work was held in 1937, due among other reasons to the sheer physical impossibility of shifting the large canvases that he painted in Venice

The exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale is part of a broader programme designed to explore the work of those artists who have helped to make the story of art in our country so unique and so grandiose, ranging from Botticelli to Antonello da Messina, from Bellini to Caravaggio and, more recently, to Lorenzo Lotto and Filippino Lippi.
This exhibition, focusing on the three main themes that distinguish Tintoretto’s work: religion, mythology and portraiture, is strictly monographic and will be divided into sections comprising a handful of carefully selected and unquestioned masterpieces, beginning and ending with his two celebrated self-portraits of himself as a young man, from the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and as an old man, from the Louvre. Even though he was in competition with Titian, his contemporaries yet recognized his “utterly exquisite eye in portraiture”, and some of his most famous portraits from leading international collections will be on display here in Rome.
Also on display will be the spectacular Miracle of the Slave painted in 1548 for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, a work that allowed him to grab the limelight as one of leading lights of the Venetian art scene, while the exhibition closes with The Deposition (1594) from the Monastry of San Giorgio Maggiore, possibly the last work in which it is possible to identify the hand of the master. Other famous works on show will include what is considered to be one of his first acknowledged paintings, Jesus Among the Doctors (1542) lent by the Milan Cathedral’s Diocesan Museum, and such celebrated masterpieces as the Madonna of the Treasurers and the Stealing of the Dead Body of St. Mark, both from the Gallerie dell’Accademia, and the St Mary of Egypt and the St Mary Magdalen from the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Visitors will also have the privilege of being able to witness the unprecedented and spectacular juxtaposition of the Last Supper from the Venetian church of San Trovaso with another version of the same subject, from the church of San Polo, painted five years later to celebrate one of the Scuole del Sacramento’s favorite themes.

Jacopo Robusti detto Tintoretto: Trafugamento del corpo di san Marco, 1562-1566, Venezia, Gallerie dell’Accademia

Alongside the large canvases with their dramatic impact and their tense, rapid brushwork, visitors will also be able to inspect the artist’s intense historical and mythological works, charged with emotion, including, for example, the octagonal panels depicting Apollo and Daphne and Deucalion and Pyrrha, two of the fourteen made in 1541 for the ceiling of Casa Pisani and now in the Galleria Estense in Modena, or the splendid Susanna and the Elders from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Il Tintoretto 1518 – 1594 - Susanna and the Elders - oil on canvas (147 × 194 cm) — 1560-62 - Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

A major innovation at this exhibition is the commentary in the shape of texts in each room penned by Melania Mazzucco, a writer who has devoted numerous novels to, and written unforgettable pages on, Tintoretto and his circle. Her narrative will accompany visitors step by step, room by room, from the beginning to the end of the show.
This deliberately small exhibition comprises some 40 paintings (accompanied by a section devoted to the artistic environment contemporary with the Venetian master), all of the highest quality and on loan from leading international museums and collections, offering visitors a tight but extremely significant overview of the artistic career of Jacopo Tintoretto: that ‘tireless manual labourer’ as his fellow Venetian and art critic Boschin called him once and for all, ‘but without intending in any way to demean him’, as the great art critic Roberto Longhi pointed out, describing him in his turn as ‘a natural genius, a great inventor of dramatic tales that unfold in a choreography of vibrant light and shade… an endlessly entertaining performance.’

Museum Hours