International Art News

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

Edvard Munch - Girls on the Bridge - 1901 (1902–27.) - oil on canvas 136 X 125.5 cm - National Gallery, Oslo

Until the 14th of October 2012 – Tate Modern
Few other modern artists are better known and yet less understood than Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944). This exhibition examines the artist’s work from the 20th century, including sixty paintings, many from the Munch Museum in Oslo, with a rare showing of his work in film and photography.

Munch is often seen as a 19th-century Symbolist painter but this exhibition shows how he engaged with modernity and was inspired by the everyday life outside of his studio such as street scenes and incidents reported in the media – including The House is Burning 1925–7, a sensational view of a real life event with people fleeing the scene of a burning building.

The show also examines how Munch often repeated a single motif over a long period of time in order to re-work it, as can be seen in the different versions of his most celebrated works, such as The Sick Child 1885–1927 and Girls on the Bridge 1902–27.

Edvard Munch, The Sick Child 1907 © Munch Museum/Munch-EllingsendGroup/DACS 2002

Munch’s use of prominent foregrounds and strong diagonals reference the technological developments in cinema and photography at the time. Creating the illusion of figures moving towards the spectator, this visual trick can be seen in many of Munch’s most innovative works such as Workers on their Way Home 1913–14. He was also keenly aware of the visual effects brought on by the introduction of electric lighting on theatre stages and used this to create striking effect in works such as The Artist and his Model 1919–21.

Like other painters such as Bonnard and Vuillard, Munch adopted photography in the early years of the 20th century and largely focused on self-portraits, which he obsessively repeated. In the 1930s he developed an eye disease and made poignant works which charted the effects of his degenerating sight.

Tate Modern

Joan Miro - Self-Portrait, 1937-1938-February 23, 1960, oil and pencil on canvas, Collection of Emilio Fernández, on loan to the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

Until August 12, 2012 – National Gallery of Art
When you hear the name Joan Miró (1893-1983), what springs to mind? Playful shapes in red, blue, and black, floating free of gravity? Stick figures, naked and distorted? Cursive letters moving across barely brushed canvases? Suns, stars, and flowers? Fields of color?

But there is another Miró – not Miró the childlike inventor, the daring Surrealist, the poet of few words, or the lyrical abstractionist (although they are all here), but rather Miró the artist of his times. In his 90 years, he lived through two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and the rise and fall of Francisco Franco, the dictator who ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975. Through it all, he remained deeply tied to his homeland of Catalonia in northeastern Spain, a region with a distinct culture and proud spirit.

Joan Miro - Dog Barking at the Moon, 1926, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, A.E. Gallatin Collection, 1952

This exhibition traces the arc of Miró’s career while drawing out his political and cultural commitments. The first two rooms explore his early work, rooted in Catalonia and then transformed in the 1920s under the influence of Paris and the surrealists. A large middle section is devoted to the terrible years of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and its repressive aftermath, when Miró developed his mature vocabulary. The last two rooms cover the final decade of Franco’s rule, when Miró turned to making monumental paintings, both calm and explosive.

The story that unfolds is a complex one. Was Miró an activist, a fantasist, or both? Did his art emerge despite or because of difficult times? Miró always kept a figurative “ladder of escape” – one of his favorite images – with him, and he would scale it to flee from harsh conditions into the freedom of his imagination. Yet his ladder was firmly planted on the ground, and he often climbed down to decry oppression. These two impulses, however different, were resolved in Miró’s powerfully simple definition of an artist as “one who, amidst the silence of others, uses his voice to say something.”

This exhibition was organized by Tate Modern, London, in collaboration with Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, and in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) En été, 1868 Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie bpk / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Jörg P. Anders

From April 1 2012 to August 12, 2012  – Kunstmuseum Basel
The spectacular exhibition Renoir. Between Bohemia and Bourgeoisie: The Early Years at the Kunstmuseum Basel will focus on the underappreciated early work of the great painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919).
Fifty paintings—portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, among them masterworks from the collections of major museums such as the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, the National Gallery, London, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as virtually unknown works from private collections, form a magnificent panorama of the formative years of Renoir’s art.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was among the French painters who founded Impressionism. With a light palette, loose brushwork, and motifs from modern urban life and leisurely amusements in natural settings, he and his fellow innovators wrote art history. The painter’s Impressionist period and his late work have subsequently tended to eclipse other parts of his oeuvre. He has been celebrated as the “painter of happiness,” but that has also been a cliché to which he was reduced..

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) Café concert ou La première sortie, 1876 ©The National Gallery, London. Bought, 1923

The Kunstmuseum Basel now presents a grand survey exhibition, the first show ever to emphasize the artist’s outstanding and surprisingly complex early work, up to and including the eminent Impressionist paintings of the 1870s.
Renoir’s most important model during these first years of his career was his lover, Lise Tréhot. Their relationship lasted from 1865 to 1872. Lise sat for a series of important early works in which he staged her in a wide variety of roles and pictorial genres. This group of paintings constitutes a highlight of the exhibition. The two illegitimate children who issued from the relationship with Lise were given up for adoption—a fact that the artist kept secret throughout his life and that puts a new complexion on the ostensibly perfect idylls in his pictures of pairs of lovers and mothers with children.
Portraits of his friends and fellow artists Claude Monet, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley form another distinct group. Renoir’s own contribution to Impressionism is most clearly apparent in his landscapes, especially those of the countryside around Paris, and in his scenes of la vie moderne. The period from the mid-1860s to the late 1870s is defined by extraordinary social, political, and artistic developments. The tensions between bohemia and the bourgeoisie, two milieus in which Renoir moved, are readily apparent in his oeuvre. He experienced the political sea changes from the conservative climate of the Second Empire to the revolution of the Paris Commune and hence to the Third Republic, even as he avoided involvement in these conflicts whenever possible. A young artist’s chances of achieving visibility depended on his work being shown in the Salon. Renoir and his fellow Impressionists rebelled against that institution by organizing exhibitions of their own. In the late 1870s, however, as his work slowly found official recognition, his attitude toward the Salon grew friendlier as well. Renoir’s early work lets us trace his evolution as an artist in fascinating paintings. Paintings from this period reflect the growing range of his pictorial imagination as he spent many days studying the paintings at the Louvre, but also took in the revolutionary innovations of his time: the realism of Gustave Courbet, the Barbizon school’s en plein air painting, and the inspirations he received from Édouard Manet and Claude Monet, his closest artistic associates at the time.

Museum Hours

Léonard de Vinci, La Vierge à l’Enfant avec sainte Anne. Après restauration. 1503-1519. Huile sur bois. 168 x130 (largeur initiale : 112) cm. Paris, musée du Louvre, Inv. 776 © RMN, musée du Louvre / René Gabriel Ojéda

From March 29, 2012 to June 25, 2012 – Musee du Louvre
Leonardo da Vinci’s masterwork The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, restored with the aid of the C2RMF (Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France), is the centerpiece of an exceptional exhibition that reunites all surviving related works for the first time.

The beginning of the slow and complex genesis of the painting dates back to 1501, when it was first mentioned in Isabella d’Este’s correspondence. Leonardo da Vinci continuously worked to perfect this ambitious composition, left unfinished upon his death in 1519.

Compositional sketches, preparatory drawings, landscape studies and the National Gallery of London’s magnificent cartoon are brought together for the first time since the artist’s death to illustrate his lengthy meditation and expose the succession of solutions he had envisioned.

Léonard de Vinci, Sainte Anne, la Vierge et l’Enfant Jésus bénissant saint Jean Baptiste. Vers 1500. Pierre noire, rehauts de blanc. 141,5 x 104,6 cm. Londres, The National Gallery, NG 6337 © The National Gallery, Londres, Dist. RMN / National Gallery Photographic Department

Other painted artworks by Leonardo are also used to show how the Saint Anne is the true culmination of the artist’s numerous and varied explorations on nature and art.
To reveal the full scale of the artwork’s innovative nature, the exposition also strives to reposition the Saint Anne in the iconographic tradition of its subject (the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne) and demonstrate its considerable influence on Italian art in the early 16th century.

More recent tributes to the artist by Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, and Max Ernst bear witness to the masterpiece’s longstanding influence.

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Until the 20th of January 2011 – Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts
Abdul-Hay Mosallam Zahrara was born in 1933 at Dawaymeh, near Al Khalil (Hebron), in Palestine. He is a special kind of artist: He didn’t receive training at any institution; he discovered his own, very particular technique, based on painted reliefs, by himself. During his life, he worked in very special conditions, which are uncommon for artists usually encountered in the West… His whole life of exile when he was only 15 years old, the hard conditions of life in the Diaspora, his struggle for his country carried on through direct and artistic militance, are all factors which determined his artistic production in both subject matter and technique.
Of course, his subjects reflect his life. This is true for many artists. However, in this case, it is important to point out that he worked while living in the refugee camps, at first in Lebanon and later in Syria. He worked under the bombing during the siege of Beirut in 1982, and he succeeded in the holding an exhibition in the middle ruins of the city. At that time, his subjects were linked with the feelings and needs of the people who shared that hard life with him. This is still the case at present when the situation is changing, but still cannot be considered peace.

Through his work, Abdul-Hay strengthens the resistance of a people who are struggling on all levels to survive. He shows the life of the Palestinians – the village weddings and other gathering vividly painted on detailed reliefs, the quiet, happy, everyday life in Palestine, as it is in his dreams and the dreams of his people.
Abdul-Hay shows a particular sensibility towards women whom he regards as the motors of life and culture. In his works, the woman appears almost as the reason for life for the man. All his works, which are not connected with a particular event, are devote to the woman. Sometimes, she embraces the man. Often she is a palm tree at whose roots a man is seated playing the Oud (Arab string instrument similar to a guitar) for her. She is a tree, hence the symbol of life and strength. At other times, she is a boat, naked, with long hair, carrying the man. Always, the woman appears stronger than the man as if the artist is going against the current, challenging the subordinate role of women in the Arab World.
As regards technique, he uses very simple tools and materials in line with the sparseness of his life an exile and a fighter. A mixture of glue and sawdust makes up the reliefs in which the most minute details of facial features are carefully sculpted. On these reliefs, he paints in full color the figures surprised in the events of their life, or only green and brown for figures of his dreams about women. Four or five simple tools and a studio overflowing with raw materials, finished reliefs and pictures, complete the image of this extraordinary artist. For many years he had his studio in the Palestinian quarter of Damascus, still called “the Camp”. Sine 1992, he has lived and worked in Amman, Jordan.

His work is well-know in the Arab countries where he had more than 20 solo exhibitions, and participated in a great number of collective exhibitions with Arab and international artists. He is also known and appreciated in Europe where he has held solo exhibitions in Sweden, Finland, Yugoslavia and, more recently, in Switzerland (Zurich and Bern). Also in Europe, he contributed to collective exhibitions in Spain, Norway, Sweden, Czechoslovakia and the former Soviet Union and German Democratic Republic.
His artistic value has been recognized by American and European critics and journalists who wrote about his works in various magazines. In 1986, a film, “Gold Dust”, was made by Mohammad Mawas on his works. The title of the film points to the contrasts between the poverty of the raw materials and the value of their transformation in the artist’s work. In addition to his ongoing work, Abdul-Hay dreams of establishing a museum – not only for his own works and not only to collect works from the past, but as a place where one could house the present aspirations of his people.
Sally Bland

Museum Hours