International Art News

Camille Pissarro – Field of Cabbages, Pontoise – 1873 – Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection on deposit with the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

From 04 June to 15 September 2013 – Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza presente the first monographic exhibition in Spain on the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro (1830-1903). A key figure within Impressionism (he wrote the movement’s foundational letter and was the only one of its artists to take part in all eight Impressionist exhibitions from 1874 to 1886), Pissarro was nonetheless eclipsed by the enormous popularity of his friends and colleagues, in particular Claude Monet. Over 80 works – views of the Seine, Parisian perspectives, portraits and self-portraits –and among them the venerable with the long white beard – show how Pissarro was a gifted guardian of the temple. But he never dared the chromatic audacities Monet imagined or the virtuoso group scenes Renoir was so successful at.

Camille Pissarro – Self Portrait – oil on canvas – 1903 – 41 X 33 cm – Tate Britain

The exhibition aim to restore Pissarro’s reputation and presenting him as one of the great pioneers of modern art. Landscape, the genre that prevailed in his output, will be the principal focus of this exhibition, which offers a chronologically structured tour of the places where the artist lived and painted: Louveciennes, Pontoise and Éragny, as well as cities such as Paris, London, Rouen, Dieppe and Le Havre. While Pissarro is traditionally associated with the rural world, to which he devoted more than three decades of his career, at the end of his life he shifted his attention to the city and his late output is dominated by urban views.

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Max Ernst, The Fireside Angel (The Triumph of Surrealism), 1937, Oil on canvas, 114 × 146 cm, Private collection © 2013, ProLitteris, Zurich

From may 25 to September 8, 2013 – The Fondation Beyeler
Max Ernst (1891–1976) is one of modernism’s most versatile artists. Having started out as a Dadaist in Cologne, he soon became a pioneer of Surrealism in Paris. A tireless creator of new figures, forms and techniques, Max Ernst kept on evolving in new directions even up to his late years. His remarkable oeuvre, which defies any clear stylistic definition, was also shaped by his eventful life and the many different places in which he lived in Europe and America.

The major retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler will present an exemplary selection of over 170 paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and books by Max Ernst that encompass all aspects of his work. For the first time in Switzerland, visitors will be able to experience the full richness of Max Ernst’s multifaceted oeuvre.

Fondation Beyeler

Jim Shaw, Untitled (Faces in circle), 2009, oil on canvas, 152,4 x 152,4 cm., courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London/Hong Kong

From 8 June until 29 September, 2013 – Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen – Submarine Wharf
This summer Klaas Kloosterboer, Chris Martin and Jim Shaw will transform the Submarine Wharf into a gigantic art studio.
In the months leading up to the opening, the artists will be busy at work in the wharf, creating the exhibition on site. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen wishes to demonstrate the resilience and energy of the art of painting with a true ‘battle of the Titans’ between the three artists:

The Amsterdam-based artist Klaas Kloosterboer can be seen as an ‘inventor’. He experiments constantly, altering the form and appearance of his paintings. The exhibition will include works from the collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, augmented with loans and new works. Chris Martin lives and works in New York and is the ‘savage painter’: he uses his energy to make each painting an explosion of colour and power. In ‘XXXL Painting’ he will exhibit thirty existing paintings, and in the weeks leading up to the opening he will work on a new painting measuring 13 x 10 metres. Jim Shaw, the ‘storyteller’ from Los Angeles completes the trio. He paints and draws in a figurative, sometimes cartoon-like style on old film sets. In the Submarine Wharf he will present these ‘backdrop’ paintings, some measuring 4 x 15 metres.

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

John RUSSELL
Peonies and head of a woman (c. 1887)
oil on canvas – 40.7 x 65.0 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
The Joseph Brown Collection. Presented through the NGV Foundation by Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE, Honorary Life Benefactor, 2004 2004.218

15 Jun 2013 to 06 Oct 2013 – National Gallery of Victoria
For the first time, the story of the Australian artists who lived in France during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is presented in an exhibition of over 130 stunning works of art. Australian Impressionists in France challenges our understanding of Australian art during these revolutionary decades.

Beginning in the 1880s and continuing into the twentieth century, many of the best and brightest art students left Australia to continue their studies in Paris, the undisputed world capital of the arts. In France the Australians became part of the large community of French and foreign artists who were changing the course of art.

Charles Conder
England 1868–1909, lived in Australia 1884–90, Europe 1890–1905
Mrs Conder in pink c.1901- oil on canvas – 48.0 x 44.3 cm
New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester
Purchased by the Friends of the Museum, 1956 (L.F43.1956)
© Leicester Arts & Museums/The Bridgeman Art Library

Claude Monet demonstrated his Impressionist technique to John Russell; Charles Conder trawled the cabarets of Montmartre with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; and Vincent van Gogh considered Russell a friend. In France, Australian artists engaged in personal and artistic exchanges with artists from around the world.

The exhibition shows that during these years Australian art took place beyond the confines of Australia, and examines how the expatriate artists were part of the story of Impressionism in Australia. Through the inclusion of key works by French, British and American artists the exhibition also places the Australians’ work within an international context of Impressionist art.

Australian Impressionists in France brings together over 130 paintings, prints and drawings from major public and private collections around the world. It includes important paintings by John Russell, E.Phillips Fox and Charles Conder, as well as never before seen works by lesser-known artists.

National Gallery of Victoria

Olga Tobreluts. Ups and downs. Oil on canvas. 2012

January 24 to February 24 2013 – Moscow Museum of Modern Art
The Moscow Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with Triumph Gallery present a large-scale retrospective exhibition of Olga Tobreluts, a Russian artist, who became well-known internationally, primarily as a pioneering media art artist and a creator of massive video installations. She is one of the first contemporary artists who picked modern computer technologies as a medium. The latter enabled Tobreluts to develop her own singular yet extremely recognizable style one can clearly tell even in her early works. Tobreluts’s artworks appear to be intricate manipulations, in which historical realities and myths of modern culture are melted together for the purpose of transforming them into a magical super reality.

Olga Tobreluts. Venus. Print. 2003. Courtesy of The Moscow House of Photography.

Olga Tobreluts gave up using computer technologies as her artistic medium in 2003. The year saw her return to painting. She managed to find out her own painting manner by employing ancient painting techniques. She keeps developing her manner while carrying out experiments with the chemical makeup of paints to expand her range of methods of light transmission.
The MMOMA retrospective exhibition will show Olga Tobreluts’ well-known series of works made available courtesy of several museum and private collections. Apart from the above, the artist’s experimental works will be put on display for the first time

Moscow Museum of Modern Art – MMOMA

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