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

Until the 13th of January 2013 -  Hermitage Amsterdam
The Hermitage Amsterdam present Impressionism: Sensation & Inspiration: the world-famous Impressionist paintings from the vast collection of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, are presented in their artistic context.

Masterpieces by pioneers like Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Camille Pissarro are accompanied by the work of other influential French painters from the second half of the nineteenth century, such as Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérôme. The exhibition focus on contrasts between artistic movements. For instance, visitors can see and experience the sensational quality of Impressionism, the movement that heralded a new age.

All the paintings, drawings, and sculptures come from the collection of the St. Petersburg Hermitage. Seldom has such a rich survey of this period been on display in the Netherlands.

 Hermitage Amsterdam

Until June 17, 2012 – Palazzo dei Diamanti – Ferrara
This spring, Palazzo dei Diamanti is proud to present for the first time in Italy the works of Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923), one of the most remarkable interpreters of modern Spanish painting.

A protagonist of La Belle Époque and as renowned as Sargent and Boldini as a portrait artist, today Sorolla is considered one of the most fascinating Spanish artists during this crucial period from the late Nineteenth to the early Twentieth centuries, a period notable for the spread of Impressionism and Symbolism.

Ferrara Arte pays homage to Sorolla with an exhibition organized in collaboration with the Patronato de la Alhambra y El Generalife in Granada, the Museo Sorolla, and the Fundación Museo Sorolla in Madrid Curated by Tomàs Llorens, Blanca Pons-Sorolla, María López Fernández and Boye Llorens, the show will travel to Granada and Madrid after Ferrara.

Focusing on a pivotal period in the creative path of the painter, the exhibition presents works from the years of his full maturity and in particular, paintings stemming from his fascination with the theme of the garden and his time in Andalusia. Already successful, Sorolla continued to reflect on his art. In this period he develops a unique voice characterized by a poetic of silence and intimacy, crafting a sophisticated language that resonates astonishingly with contemporary Symbolist and Modernist movements. This introspective process and quest for simplicity is investigated here for the first time, throwing new light on Sorolla’s artistic persona. Similarities between the Spanish painter’s works and those of Giovanni Boldini will also be explored.

An outstanding series of portraits painted from 1906-07 of the painter’s family set in the garden with its fountains opens the exhibition. In paintings such as María dressed as a Valencian peasant, Skipping the rope or Watching fishes, the figures blend into sparkling backgrounds created with brushstrokes of pure colour or trace sinuous shapes on sparkling water. This play between subject and landscape prefigures the modernity seen in Sorolla’s later works.

Fundamental to Sorolla’s development as an artist was his discovery of Andalusia where he stayed regularly between 1908 and 1918. This markedly affected the style of his late maturity, and we perceive a gradual transition from naturalism towards one rich with Symbolist resonances. The exhibition traces his response to this land and its ancient culture, from the magnificent landscapes of the Sierra Nevada which provided material for dreamlike crystalline visions, to his studies of Andalusian subjects such as Joaquína the gypsy, interpreting them with an originality that was far from stereotypical.

What inspired Sorolla most of all in Andalusia were the Moorish gardens and patios of the Alhambra in Granada and the Alcázar in Seville, as can be seen in the extraordinary series of paintings that he dedicated to this theme over the course of a decade. Here, he captures the secluded and solemn charm of the places that profoundly influenced music and poetry in Spain at the time. The vegetation, the marbles, ceramics, fountains, light and colours create a rich sensory counterpoint that resonates through these compositions from which all human presence has been banished. The artist’s brushstrokes linger over the reflections on the water, on the light that seems to dissolve into geometric patterns and on the colourful mosaics of the garden, making them the protagonists in a painting which speaks a language that is ever more pure and refined.

Andalusia profoundly changed Sorolla’s work, leading to a style that culminated in the paintings inspired by the garden of his new house in Madrid. The elderly painter spent a lot of energy creating his garden, with a passion that is reminiscent of Monet and his lily pond. He took his inspiration from the verdant corners of Seville and Grenada, bringing from Andalusia fountains, tiles, columns, statues, fruit trees and ornamental plants. And like Monet at Giverny, Sorolla found in his garden an inexhaustible source of inspiration, transferring to the canvas the lessons of simplicity and lyricism he had acquired in Andalusia.

This enthralling narrative unfolds in the rooms of the Palazzo dei Diamanti, interwoven with Sorolla’s life experiences and contemporary culture, through a selection of about 60 paintings and a small selection of drawings and documents, coming from public and private collections, foremost the Museo Sorolla.

Museum Hours

Until February 12, 2012 – Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
As the result of an important agreement reached with the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, this autumn the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza will be presenting the first monographic exhibition in Spain on the work of the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot. Married to Eugène Manet, brother of her teacher Édouard Manet.
Berthe Morisot (Bourges, 1841-París, 1895), was the first woman to join the Impressionist movement. Born into an upper middle-class French family and educated in the arts and music, she managed successfully to combine her facet as an artist with the role of modern woman and active advocate of culture. The model and friend of Manet, whose brother Eugène she married, she was an ally of the Impressionist painters -including Degas, Renoir, Monet and Pisarro- and exhibited work of her own at virtually all of their exhibitions. Admired by intellectuals of the calibre of Mallarmé and Valéry, Morisot played a key role in the development of French Impressionism, taking part in the legendary First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874 and in other subsequent ones of the group.

More than thirty works from the Musée Marmottan Monet will be shown alongside others from the Thyssen collections, allowing visitors to discover the elegant, luminous work of this painter, expressed in the form of landscapes, scenes of daily life and female subjects. Morisot’s life and work also allow for an analysis of the role of women in late 19th-century France given that she was not just a great creative figure but also an urban, middle-class woman who was interested in fashion. In Paul Valery’s words: “Berthe Morisot’s uniqueness lies in the fact that she lived her painting and painted her life.”

Museum Hours

Until January 1st 2012 – Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Monet/Lichtenstein: Rouen Cathedrals presents a group of Monet’s Impressionist Rouen cathedral paintings together with Lichtenstein’s 1969 appropriation of the same subject.

Monet painted thirty views of the Rouen Cathedral from 1892–1895 from different viewing positions, all quite close to one another, at different times of day. The series stands as the hallmark of the revolutionary Impressionist movement. Over six decades later, Lichtenstein was inspired to paint his Cathedral series in the style of Pop art as a response to the exhibition Serial Imagery at the Pasadena Art Museum. Pop delved into the nature of repetition and seriality by taking an iconic image, cheapened by overexposure, and reinvesting it with renewed, ironic vigor and relevance.

For both Monet and Lichtenstein, the subject of the cathedral is less important than the act of seeing; the installation investigates the nature of this obsession with sight.

These paintings by Monet and Lichtenstein, essential to the formation of modern and post-modernism, present a visual narrative that unites the thematic concerns and visual strategies of these chronologically disparate artists.

Museum Hours

26 June – 19 September 2010 – Art Gallery of New South Wales
The most influential artists of the modern era are shown in strength in an exhilarating journey spanning 50 years, when paintings, drawings and prints edged their way by degrees towards purely non-representational images. An explosion of creative invention propelled these 140-plus works by Whistler, Cézanne, Monet, Seurat, Vuillard, Bonnard, Gauguin, Matisse, Derain, Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Hans Arp and Sophie Taüber-Arp.

This is one of the most ambitious exhibitions the Art Gallery of NSW has ever undertaken.

Gallery Hours