International Art News

Edward Hopper (Nyack, 1882 - New York, 1967). Hotel Room. 1931 - Oil on canvas - 152.4 x 165.7 cm. Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.

Until the 16th of September 2012 – Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
The exhibition Hopper is the result of a collaborative project between the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux de France. These are two particularly important institutions with regard to Edward Hopper, given that Paris and early 20th-century works of art were key reference points for the artist, while the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid houses the most important collection of his work outside the USA.

Edward Hopper, Morning Sun, 1952, huile sur toile, 71,4 x 101,9 cm, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Howald Fund Purchase (exposition au musée Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid)

Despite their enormous popularity and apparent accessibility, Hopper’s paintings are among the most complex phenomena within 20th-century art in the opinion of the exhibition’s two curators, Tomàs Llorens (Honorary Director of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza) and Didier Ottinger (Associate Director of the MNAM/Centre Pompidou). In order to demonstrate this point the exhibition will be organised into two parts: a first half that covers the artist’s formative years from approximately 1900 to 1924, represented through a comprehensive selection of sketches, paintings, drawings, illustrations, prints and watercolours that will be complemented by works of artists as Winslow Homer, Robert Henri, John Sloan, Edgar Degas or Walter Sickert; a second half will cover the years 1925 onwards, that focuses on Hopper’s mature output and aims to illustrate his career in the most complete and wide-ranging manner possible. In order to do so, this section combines thematic groupings (recurring motifs and subjects in Hopper’s works) with an overall chronological ordering.

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

From May 19 to September 16, 2012 – Tampa Museum of Art
A Hundred Years – A Hundred Chairs. Masterworks from the Vitra Design Museum provides an opportunity to contemplate the fascinating history of chair design. Assembled from the expansive holdings of one of the world’s foremost design museums, this exhibition allows us to consider the aesthetic, technological and manufacturing concerns expressed through the design of the most ubiquitous of objects, the chair.

The exhibition begins in the last decades of the 19th century with curved wooden furniture that lent itself to mass-production. It was the introduction of the mass- produced object that changed the course of subsequent design. At the outset of the 20th century, design played a significant role in cultural development. Gerrit Rietveld designed furniture with simple lines, while Marcel Breuer created the first tubular steel chairs. This lightness in shape was subsequently a source of inspiration for Alvar Aalto, who was the first to use plywood, and for Jean Prouvé, who started to use techniques and materials that had previously only been used by the aeronautical industry.

Following the Second World War, design became a key element of daily life. American designers began to collaborate closely with industry. Designers like Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen and Harry Bertoia came up with designs that would be used for the mass production of furniture for American homes while in Europe, furniture design was developing mainly in Italy and Scandinavia. At the same time, the many designers wanted to make designer goods more accessible to the general public. Hans Wegner and Arne Jacobsen were forerunners in Scandinavian countries in creating wooden furniture, while the Italians turned their attention to more novel materials like plastic.

The considerable malleability of these materials, together with the development of new types of foam, gave rise to a wealth of creative fantasy in the sixties. At that time, Pop Art provided a source of inspiration and designers played on form and colour. The main representatives of this trend were Verner Panton and Joe Colombo. Later, in the seventies, designs became even more radical, leading to the emergence of opposition to the rules of Modernism. Groups of designers such as Memphis or Archizoom emphasized the amusing and playful nature of forms rather than functionality.

More recently, the eighties were marked by a search for individualism and pluralism, and the result was the emergence of a variety of remarkably novel approaches. Philippe Starck, Ron Arad and Gaetano Pesce are leading representatives of this trend. A search for simple but innovative shapes and materials found in the work of Frank Gehry and Jasper Morrison characterized the nineties. And finally, fantasy remains an indispensable criterion in the conception of forms as witnessed in the work of Ron Arad and Marc Newson.

Reproductions of drawings, sketches and documents belonging to the Vitra Design Museum accompany the chairs on display, and seven films reveal the manufacturing process of some of the chairs, giving the spectator general insight into different production techniques.

Tampa Museum of Art

Nicolas de Leyde, atelier, Sainte Barbe, Strasbourg, vers 1465 Provient de Wissembourg. Frêne, dos évidé, polychromie originale. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters. Berlin © bpk

Until July 8, 2012 – Œuvre Notre-Dame Museum
The sculptor Nicolaus van Leyden (c. 1430-1473) is considered to be one of the most important late 15th century artists north of the Alps, responsible for decisive innovations in both form and iconography. He was widely renowned in his lifetime for the modernity of his works and particularly for his skill in rendering facial traits. His importance was recognized essentially in the German-speaking areas of Europe, where he influenced the development of such widely famed sculptors as Veit Stoss, Michel Erhart or Tilman Riemenschneider. His work, however, is almost unknown to the general public and his background, career and output are shrouded in mystery, there being few extant works or written sources.

Nicolaus van Leyden’s European career included a notable period spent in Strasbourg between 1462 and 1467. He there executed several substantial works, in particular the epitaph for Canon Conrad of Bussnang in the St John Chapel of the Cathedral (signed and dated 1464) and especially the Great Door of the Chancellery, a building which, apart from a few fragments, has not survived.

Suite de Nicolas de Leyde, Vierge agenouillée d'une Annonciation, Vienne, vers 1480 Feuillu, polychromie originale. Slovaquie, Bratislava, Slovenska narodna galeria (dépôt de l’église de Vel’ky Biel). Photo : Pavol Breier

This is the first exhibition wholly devoted to Nicolaus van Leyden and it has been organized in collaboration with the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung Museum in Frankfurt, where it is on display from 27th October 2011 to 4th March 2012. It includes part of the artist’s work in wood and stone, among which are four sandstone busts of male figures in the keeping of the Œuvre Notre-Dame Museum in Strasbourg, including the celebrated melancholy Man leaning on his elbow. In particular, the exhibition bring together for the first time since the 19th century the two surviving fragments of the Strasbourg Chancellery portal decor, the Head of a bearded man,likewise belonging to the Œuvre Notre-Dame Museum, and its pendant, Head of a young woman, held by the museum in Frankfurt.

The exhibition brings together some 70 works, executed using various techniques and materials, from public and private collections in Europe and America, in particular Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, New York and Chicago. It is being held in the Œuvre Notre-Dame Museum, the exhibition rooms of which have been specially fitted out for the occasion.

Museum Hours

Davis Cone, Thompson, 1980, acrylic on canvas, 55 x 39 inches, Courtesy of Monica and Richard Segal

From February 5 to May 13, 2012 – Vero Beach Museum of Art
Beyond Reality  include works of American art that are closely associated with the concept of photo-realism, and also ultra-illusionistic paintings and sculpture that add an expressive dimension to the viewer’s understanding of realism. As an art movement, hyperrealism has spanned a broad range of subject matter, materials, and stylistic variations in works of art by artists as different from each other as John De Andrea, Richard Estes, and John Baeder. Beyond Reality will demonstrate connections between contemporary American hyperrealism and 20th-century material culture, in light of Courbet’s concept that “Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it.”

John De Andrea, Tara, 2002, polychromed bronze, 4-1/2 x 13-1/2 x 28”, courtesy of Monica and Rick Segal

The term “hyperrealism” was first used by art dealer Ivan Karp and some of his contemporaries around 1970. Other art critics more often used the terms photorealism or New Realism at the same time. However, hyperrealism can include photorealism as well as other highly detailed styles of realism. It is a term that can also be applied to sculpture, as in the work of Duane Hanson and Marc Sijan. Nearly all hyperrealist painters have used photographs for reference, but some, such as Richard Estes and Robert Bechtle, seem to retain more of the look of a photograph in their work. John Baeder and Davis Cone also work from photographs, but they subtly manipulate or exaggerate what was present in their reference photos.

Beyond Reality also include paintings and sculpture on loan from nationally-recognized artists as well as museums and major private collections, and works by Richard Estes, Duane Hanson, and Robert Bechtle among others.

Museum Hours

Edvard Munch, Madonna, 1895 Gift of Charles and Evelyn Kramer, New York, to the American friends of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1986

November 26th, 2010 – February 27th, 2011 – The Herakleidon Museum
The Herakleidon Museum is proud to announce the exhibition “Edvard Munch, Beyond the Scream”. The exhibition will include 80 graphic works of Edvard Munch from the Collection of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art – Gift of Charles and Evelyn Kramer, New York.
“He paints, or rather regards, things in a way that is different from that of other artists. He sees only the essential, and that, naturally, is all he paints. For this reason Munch’s pictures are as a rule ‘not complete’, as people are so delighted to discover for themselves. Oh, yes, they are complete. His complete handiwork. Art is complete once the artist has really said everything that was on his mind, and this is precisely the advantage Munch has over painters of the other generation, that he really knows how to show us what he has felt, and what has gripped him, and to this he subordinates everything else.” – Christian Krohg

Museum Hours