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.

Museum Hours

Jean Cocteau avec un revolver 1926 Berenice Abbott Épreuve gélatino argentique, 35,5 x 28 cm. Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc

From 21 February 2012 until 29 April 2012 – Musee du Jeu de Paume
With Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), urban experience is at the heart of the exhibition: in an America shaken by the Wall Street Crash, her images of 1930s New York convey her fascination with an urban landscape in the throes of dramatic change. Also known for championing the work of Eugène Atget, Abbott, who originally wanted to be sculptor, proved to be a great photographer of matter, space and light.
This is the first exhibition in France to cover every stage of Berenice Abbott’s career, featuring over 120 vintage prints by this American photographer as well as a series of documents never previously shown. The selection of portraits, architectural photographs and scientific plates shows the many facets of a body of work all too often reduced to a handful of familiar images.

Berenice Abbott came to the French capital in the 1920s and was trained by Man Ray before opening her own studio, where she began a successful career as a portrait photographer. Mixing in the artistic and intellectual circles of the day, she photographed a cosmopolitan cast including Eugène Atget, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Sylvia Beach, André Gide, Foujita, Max Ernst, and Marie Laurencin.

Park Avenue et 39e rue, New York 8 octobre 1936 Berenice Abbott Épreuve gélatino argentique, 19 x 24,5 cm. Museum of the City of New York. Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

The exhibition also features a substantial selection of images form her Changing New York project (1935-1939), for which she is best known. This undertaking was Abbott’s own initiative but was financed by the Works Progress Administration, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal efforts to combat the Great Depression. Conceived as both a record of the city and a work of art in its own right, this ambitious government commission focuses on the contrast between the old and the new in the rapidly changing city.
The photographs she took in 1954 when travelling along the US East Coast on Route 1 (the exhibition is presenting a never previously exhibited selection of these) reflect her ambition to represent the whole of what she called the “American scene.”
In the 1950s, Abbott produced a set of photographs illustrating the principles of mechanics and optics for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Combining aesthetic and educational concerns, these abstract, experimental images echo her photograms of the 1920s.
An active participant in the avant-garde circles in the 1920s, a determined opponent of Pictorialism and the school of Alfred Stieglitz, famous for bringing Eugène Atget to international attention, Berenice Abbott spent her whole career exploring the notions of documentary photography and photographic realism. This retrospective at Jeu de Paume brings out the richness of her approach, and both the diversity and unity of her work.

Museum Hours

From September 8 to December 31, 2011 – Oklahoma City Museum of Art
Faded Elegance: Photographs of Havana by Michael Eastman consists of twenty-nine, 6 x 7 1/2 ft. photographs taken by the artist between 1999 and 2010. Over the course of a decade, Eastman captured Havana’s changing cultural landscape in his images of the city’s architecture and lush interiors, ravaged by the effects of time. His large-scale photographs evoke the nostalgia and wealth of a bygone era, while shedding light on the harsh economic realities faced in present day Cuba. While in Havana, Eastman photographed a number of subjects, from the interiors of homes along Ambassador Way, to stairwells and music schools, to abstract patterns found on the exteriors of buildings. Eastman is known for his richly colored photographs, which he captures with his 4 x 5 camera. This exhibition will be the first to explore the depth and range of Eastman’s Havana photographs.

About the Artist
Michael Eastman has established himself as one of the world’s leading contemporary photographic artists. The self-taught photographer has spent four decades documenting interiors and facades in cities as diverse as Havana, Paris, Rome, and New Orleans, producing large-scale photographs unified by their visual precision, monumentality, and painterly use of color. Eastman is most recognized for his explorations of architectural form and the textures of decay, which create mysterious narratives about time and place. He continues to resist the digital movement, capturing his images on film and printing them himself.

Eastman’s photographs have appeared in Time, Life, and American Photographer, and they reside in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and other prestigious institutions. His books include Vanishing America (2008, Rizzoli) and Horses (2003, Knopf), which is now in its fifth edition. Eastman lives in St. Louis.

Museum Hours

Pierre Bonnard Décor à Vernon (La Terrasse à Vernon) 1920-1939. Oil on canvas, 148x194,9 cm New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 68.1 Gift of Florence J. Gould, 1968 . © The Metropolitan Museum of Art Dist. RMN, image of the MMA

Until the 3rd of July 2011 – Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny
Pierre Bonnard loved Nature and gardens. As of 1900 he used to spend a part of the year in the countryside. Between 1910 and 1938, he lived near Giverny and shared his time between Normandy and the south of France. As a reference to the artist’s Normand period the musée des impressionnismes has managed to bring together nearly 80 paintings and drawings from some twenty French and foreign museums – Orsay, the Pompidou Center, the future Bonnard museum in Cannet, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum …- as well as from private collections.

In 1910, Bonnard rented La Roulotte, a house located in Vernonnet, five kilometers from Giverny, which would become a recurrent theme in his work. In 1912 he bought it and stayed there regularly until 1938. And as of then he settled definitely in Cannet, near Cannes. Throughout these years the artist painted over one hundred landscapes inspired by Vernonnet and its surroundings.

This period is the least studied for it is often considered as one of transition between the production of his youth and that at Cannet. And yet, it was one that was particularly rich. At the turn of the century, Bonnard drifted away from the Nabi aesthetic and searched for a new language. His art turned progressively towards a stronger expression in which colors were freer, and his search ran parallel to that carried out at the same period by his friend and neighbor, Claude Monet.
Bonnard treated all themes at that time: landscapes in particular, but interior scenes as well, nudes or still lives, not to mention decorative painting often inspired from the landscapes along the embankments of the Seine. Around the paintings and drawings chosen to present this productive period, the exhibition adds an ensemble of the artist’s photographs in Normandy, as well as an important section of documents, correspondence and archives.  Art of the Day

Museum Hours

Jan Gossart (Netherlandish, ca. 1478–1532) Virgin and Child (Center Panel from The Norfolk Triptych), ca. 1528–30 Oil on oak panel Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Until January 17, 2011 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The first major exhibition in forty-five years devoted to the Burgundian Netherlandish artist Jan Gossart (ca. 1478-1532) brings together Gossart’s paintings, drawings, and prints and places them in the context of the art and artists that influenced his transformation from Late Gothic Mannerism to the new Renaissance mode. Gossart was among the first northern artists to travel to Rome to make copies after antique sculpture and introduce historical and mythological subjects with erotic nude figures into the mainstream of northern painting. Most often credited with successfully assimilating Italian Renaissance style into northern European art of the early sixteenth century, he is the pivotal Old Master who changed the course of Flemish art from the Medieval craft tradition of its founder, Jan van Eyck (ca. 1380/90–1441), and charted new territory that eventually led to the great age of Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640).

Museum Hours

Willem de Pannemaker. The Mercury Series

2 June to 26 September 2010

Active from 1535 to 1581, Willem de Pannemaker was a member of one of the most celebrated families of weavers in Brussels. Pannemaker is considered the great tapestry-maker of the Flemish Renaissance, working for the aristocracy and the principal royal families of 16th-century Europe. He supplied the courts of Charles I of Spain (Charles V of Germany) and that of his son Philip II with numerous masterpieces. Pannemaker’s monogram and the quality stamp of the city of Brussels and the Duchy of Brabant, which were obligatory on tapestries from 1544 onwards, appear on the series of The Loves of Mercury and Herse, formerly in the Medinaceli ducal collection.

For the first time the Museo del Prado will bring together in its galleries this magnificent series of eight mythological tapestries, which are now dispersed among important collections and private institutions such as the Fundación Ducal Medinaceli, the Alba Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Prado. The latter has two from the series, which use gold and silk thread to depict Ovid’s verses on the loves of the god Mercury, son and messenger of Jupiter, and Herse, daughter of the king of Attic.