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 September 9th 2012 – Musee d’Orsay
Misia Godebska (1872-1950) was a legendary figure of the French art scene from the Belle Époque to the Roaring Twenties. At first she became known for her talent as a pianist. Her marriage in 1893 to Thadée Natanson, the editor of the journal La Revue blanche, propelled her to the centre of a group of creative artists who were champions of Symbolism and the decorative arts.

At the height of her influence, she became one of the most sought-after portrait models of her time, sitting for Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir. She was a friend of Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Cocteau and Chanel, and financed the Ballets Russes for over ten years.

This multidisciplinary exhibition brings together portraits of Misia and her entourage, works, documents and accounts by contemporary artists that illustrate the prolific creative activity at the time Misia was the Queen of Paris.

Musee d’Orsay

 

Until June 24, 2012 – Queensland Art Gallery (QAG)
‘Modern Woman: Daughters and Lovers 1850 — 1918 | Drawings from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris’, an exhibition of drawings from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

It celebrates the changing roles of women during the Belle Époque as depicted by leading artists of the time such as Edgar Degas, Pierre—Auguste Renoir, Edouard Vuillard, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Bonnard, Auguste Rodin, Berthe Morisot and Jean François Millet. These artists increasingly abandoned idealised representations of the female figure, and turned to women from a diverse range of socioeconomic backgrounds, depicting them in their family lives and domestic activities, as well as in the public realm as spectators, performers and workers. Through these fascinating drawings, we see French society undergoing radical transformation.

Gallery Hours

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..

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

14 March 2012 – 31 December 2012 – Albertina
In spring 2007, one of Europe’s greatest private collections of classical modern art came to the Albertina as a permanent loan from the Rita und Herbert Batliner Foundation in Liechtenstein.

The Albertina is now in a unique position to compensate for the major gaps in the Austrian state-run museums’ holdings of international modern art with key works of French Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, German Expressionism, Fauvism and the Russian avant-garde.

The Batliner Collection has received acclaim from museums and connoisseurs for decades. It includes outstanding works by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon. These masterpieces can be seen in a new permanent exhibition at the Albertina.

The Batliner Collection is augmented by works from the Forberg Collection in Switzerland, which was also transferred to the Albertina on permanent loan.

Herbert and Rita Batliner began collecting art nearly half a century ago. Due to their close friendship with the legendary art dealer Ernst Beyeler, French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting formed a cornerstone of the collection from the very beginning, along with the work of Alberto Giacometti. Exceptional works by Monet such as The Water-Lily Pond, Edgar Degas’ Two Dancers, or Cézanne’s Arc-Tal and Mont Sainte-Victoire landscapes attest to the couple’s passion for French art.

Picasso became an additional focal point. Today he is represented in the collection with over 40 works, including ten paintings and numerous drawings and one-of-a-kind ceramics.

In the course of his travels, Herbert Batliner gained familiarity with Russian avant-garde art. He and his wife were inspired by the works they saw in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, to build their own fine collection of Russian avant-garde art from 1905-35.

The focus of their acquisitions was on Marc Chagall, but they also sought out works by Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova und Mikhail Larionow. The collection includes a major work by Kazimir Malevich, painted as a defiant memory image immediately following the artist’s release from a Stalinist prison.

The permanent exhibition spans the most fascinating chapters from more than 130 years of art history, from Impressionism to the most recent present. Paintings by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Miró, Klee, Kandinsky, Chagall, and other masters offer a survey of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, the Fauves, Expressionism, and the Russian avant-garde. With late works by Picasso and exhibits by Rothko and Bacon, the exhibition leads over to the second half of the twentieth century, before it ends with works by contemporary artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter.

Albertina opening hours