International Art News

Roy Lichtenstein - Crak!, 1963-4 Silkscreen © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein - Private Collection

From January 28 to April 8, 2012 – Museum of Comtemporary Art – Jacksonville
ReFocus: Art of the 1960s delves into one of the seminal and radical periods of contemporary art. The arts—literature, art, dance, and theater—went through a fascinating period of growth and change during the 1960s. New, experimental art forms like pop art and happenings drew new public attention to artistic expression. Trends in the arts reflected both the turbulent social and political trends of the time and the influence of artists and writers of an earlier generation.

Jack Wolfe -Havana, 1961, Oil on canvas Collection of Jon and Molly Ott.

By the 1960s, America had been involved in some sort of military conflict for nearly three decades, and it affected how artists saw the world. The civil rights movement and the sexual revolution helped to expand participation in the arts, and these new participants brought fresh insights to the art they practiced. Join MOCA as it explores major movements of the decade: Pop Art, Op Art, Performance Art, Minimalism, Color Field Painting, Action Painting and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Experience master works by artists that defined a generation: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Museum Hours

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG The Ancient Incident (Kabal American Zephyr), 1981-06 Patinaed cast bronze 86 1/2 x 91 x 21 inches (219.7 x 231.1 x 53.3 cm)

From September 28 to November 12, 2011 – Gagosian Gallery Paris

There is no poor subject. A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting than wood, nails, turpentine, oil, and fabric.
– Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg stands as one of the most inventive artists in American art, arguably the first of his generation to chart a viable course out of Abstract Expressionism towards the formal integration of art and the mess of life. His approach to making art using discarded materials, everyday objects and appropriated images eviscerated the distinctions between medium and genre, abstraction and representation, while his “flatbed picture plane” created an enduring change in the relationship between artist, image, and viewer. From the outset, the incidental, the immediate, and the perception of a presence greater than his own artistic virtuosity drove Rauschenberg’s creative energies. By working in what he called “the gap between art and life” he developed an altogether new visual language based on collage as a microcosm of the unbounded world that rejected the conventions of unitary meaning advanced by high art.

In the early Elemental Sculptures, Rauschenberg stripped the medium to its fundaments, using fragments of found wood, brick, concrete and iron to create sculptures and pedestals possessing a quiet humility that belies their latent energy. His unending fascination with the incidental materials that he came across in the urban environment is evident in two floor-based works, Hue Cart (1982), a little tricycle wheel jauntily positioned between three candy-striped construction poles, or The Brutal Calming of the Waves by Moonlight (1981), a simple yet forceful consisting of a crushed metal drum from which a large piece of scrap metal thrusts out into space.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG Overdrive, 1963 Oil and silkscreen ink on canvas 84 x 60 inches (213.4 x 152.4 cm)

Throughout his life, Rauschenberg also experimented with new ways to construct a pictoral surface — from dye transfer to silkscreen and chemical imprint — producing potent accumulations of collaged images that address their reproducible nature while re-envisioning the relation of art to life. In his humorously titled Urban Bourbon series from the early 1990s, found images such as a baby buggy, rocky seashore or a Greek statue are printed directly onto metal supports, then brushstrokes of varnish and lacquer are applied to transform the reflective surfaces creating interplay between control and chaos in layered and veiled similitudes.

The exhibition, presented in collaboration with the Estate of Robert Rauschenberg will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Robert Rauschenberg was born in 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas and died on Captiva Island, Florida in 2008. He has been the subject of numerous exhibitions worldwide including “Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective,” the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1997) (traveled to the Menil Collection, Contemporary Arts Museum and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, through 1999); “Combines,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2005) (traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, through 2007); and “Gluts,” the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2009), traveled to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2010.

Gallery Hours

Robert RAUSCHENBERG 29.7 x 37 x 38.3 cm. Shades, 1964 Lithograph on plexiglas on metal support and a lightbulb

From June 8 to October 30, 2011 – Moscow Museum of Modern Art
The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents the exhibition «Masterpieces of the 20th Century from the Collection of the Valencia Institute of Modern Art (IVAM)».

It is remarkable that the IVAM and the MMoMA collections are similar to each other in many respects. Each collection counts over 10,000 exhibits and tends to present a panoramic view of modern art in all its diversity, with special emphasis on the national heritage. So it comes as no surprise that the Moscow Museum of Modern Art hosts this important exhibition.

The IVAM collection presents an overview of the avant-garde art of the first decades of the 20th century and all art tendencies of the postwar period. The art of Julio González, a pioneering Spanish artist and sculptor of the first half of the past century, occupies a special place in the IVAM holdings. The IVAM holds the richest collection of his artworks. The exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art opens with Julio González’s oeuvre together with the works by Torres Garcia, a Uruguayan artist of the early 20th century. Also on view at the Museum, will be kinetic sculptures by Alexander Calder, installations by Kurt Schwitters and Man Ray, abstract works by František Kupka and works by classic Surrealist and Dadaist masters Joan Miro, Marcel Duchamp, André Masson, Jean Arp.

The exhibition will show experimental tendencies of the postwar period, which reflected a newly formed worldview. These are works by European masters, i. e. Antoni Tàpies, Antonio Saura, Karel Appel, Ad Reinhardt, Pierre Soulages, and works by celebrated American artists, i. e. Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra. Works by American Pop-art artists, such as Richard Hamilton, James Rosenquist and European representatives of this tendency, such as Eduardo Arroyo, Equipo Crónica group and others will also be exhibited.

Starting from the 1980s, artists have been actively using new media, new techniques and electronic devices. The IVAM responded to the new art trends early on and acquired for its collection works by Andreu Alfaro, Miquel Navarro, John Davies, Bruce Nauman, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Christian Boltanski, Eduardo Chillida and Juan Usle. Some of these artworks will be displayed at the exhibition «Masterpieces of the 20th century». Postwar Modern Art will be represented at the exhibition by the works by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

Since the IVAM holds the most extensive and valuable collection of photography in Spain, a section of the exhibition is devoted to photography of the past century. Among other photo masterpieces of the 20th century, the show will feature a work by Alexander Rodchenko, one of the greatest Russian photographers.

Museum Hours

Andy Warhol, “Ileana Sonnabend,” 1973. The Sonnabend Collection. © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, by SIAE 2011

From May 29–October 2, 2011 – Peggy Guggenheim Collection – Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Ileana Sonnabend. An Italian Portrait brings together more than 60 works by almost 50 artists, selected by Antonio Homem (director of the Sonnabend Gallery, New York, and adopted son of Ileana Sonnabend). It will include Andy Warhol’s portrait of Ileana Sonnabend, works on Italian themes by Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, works by Italians such as Tano Festa, Lucio Fontana, Mimmo Rotella, Schifano and Piero Manzoni, works by American artists inspired by Italian culture (Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, John Baldessari for example), by artists of the Arte Povera movement (Zorio, Anselmo, Calzolari, Jannis Kounnelis, and Merz), by several international photographers (including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Max Becher and Andrea Robbins), and by many others—whether Italian (Giulio Paolini, Luigi Ontani) or not (Bruce Nauman, Anselm Kiefer, Philip Haas, Rona Pondick for example).
Today she is not as well known as her ex-husband Leo Castelli but Ileana Sonnabend (1914-2007) was his equal in being one of the great figures of the art world in the XXth century. A Romanian beauty and heiress of a great industrial dynasty, Ileana Schapira (she took the name of her second husband, Michael Sonnabend) linked her destiny to that of the young executive of the Generali insurance company, when he was on a mission in Bucharest on the eve of World War II. It was in the United States that the two discovered their talents as exceptional art dealers and collectors. The exhibition set up in the sanctuary of another exceptional woman – Peggy Guggenheim – can be looked at like a Who’s Who of the great art currents, from the avant-gardes of the fifties to the most recent ones, from Rauschenberg to Lichtenstein, from the Becher couple to Jeff Koons. But the aim of this exhibition is mainly to illustrate the links Ileana Sonnabend had with Italy, embodied not only in the Arte povera (Kounellis, Merz, Pistoletto) but in Fontana’s slashes or Mimmo Rotella’s reassembled collages as well.

Museum Hours