International Art News

George Segal, Three People on Four Benches, 1980. Bronze and steel. Martin Z. Margulies Collection. Image © The George and Helen Segal Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

March 31 – September 9, 2012 – Tampa Museum of Art
Many leading artists of the 20th century went to great lengths to replace the representational with the abstract. But some artists found it difficult to rid their works of all traces of the real, and in particular, the figure. Masterworks of 20th Century Sculpture from the Martin Z. Margulies Collection allows a thoughtful consideration of the tension between the abstract and the representational that dominated 20th century aesthetic concerns.

An abiding fascination with the figure unites the works in the exhibition. While many modern artists abandoned the figure as inspiration, these seven artists made use of the figure (human and otherwise), even as the final work sometimes barely resembles the figure in reality. In the straightforward works by Willem de Kooning (Seated Woman on Bench), George Segal (Three People on Four Benches), Louise Nevelson (Dancing Woman), Manuel Neri (Untitled), and Deborah Butterfield (Jerusalem Horse), the form remains readily identifiable. With works by Joan Miro (Oiseau) and Isamu Noguchi (Figure and Judith), however, the work is more abstracted, but the referent is still the figure.

In this exhibition, our third partnership with the Martin Z. Margulies Collection in Miami, the Museum has selected key works from the latter half of the 20th century that pay tribute to the fascination with the natural form. The Margulies Collection is known for its extensive sculpture collection that contains some of the best examples of post-World War II movements in Europe and the United States.

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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.

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Edgar Degas - Woman in a Tub, c. 1883 - Pastell auf Papier - Tate: Bequeathed by Mrs. A.F. Kessler 1983 © Tate, London 2011

From February 10, 2012 to  May 13, 2012 – Albertina
Masterworks on Paper is the first exhibition devoted exclusively to the significance of drawing to the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist avant-garde movements—and to the development of modern art.
The Albertina, Vienna, Austria  – The exhibition will present up to 200 drawings, watercolours and pastels by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Active in France during the second half of the nineteenth century and closely associated with avant-garde movements, artists such as Manet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Seurat, Gauguin, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec created works on paper that may be less well known than their paintings but which are just as significant. This is the first international exhibition devoted exclusively to drawings by these artists and will considerably extend knowledge of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

The starting point for Impressionism on Paper is the fact that a large proportion (40%) of all the items shown in the eight Impressionist exhibitions held in Paris between 1874 and 1886 were works on paper. Many of these can be identified and are included on the selection list. To this core will be added numerous other examples by these artists and others that will provide an overview of their drawing skills at this critical stage in the development of a widely appreciated moment in the development of French art.

The aim is to demonstrate the different types of drawing pursued by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and to demonstrate the various purposes to which their works on paper were put.

Claude Monet Waterloo Bridge, London, 1901 Pastel Collection Triton Fondation, The Netherlands

Drawing is not an activity with which the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists have so far been closely associated. The exhibition, however, will illustrate unequivocally and for the first time that for these artists drawing was a primary function and not a secondary activity.   Although drawings were used as part of the preparatory process towards a painting, more and more they came to be regarded by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists as finished works of art in their own right. Many of the pastels by Degas, the watercolours by Cézanne, the pen and ink drawings by Van Gogh or the works in mixed media by Toulouse-Lautrec were made on a large scale specifically for exhibition.

Impressionism on Paper, therefore, will show that far from ignoring the art of drawing the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists chose to emphasize its primacy thereby ceasing to uphold or even recognize the traditional distinction between drawing and painting. Instead, they elevated the status of drawing to the level of painting itself regarding both practices as part of a single aesthetic.

Pierre-August Renoir - Nude Bathers Playing with a Crab, c. 1897-1900 - Pastell auf Papier - Sammlung Jean Bonna, Genf

The result was that the traditional hierarchy separating painting from drawing established during the Renaissance ceased with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. This, in turn, had considerable consequences for the development of modern art in so far as the fusion of line and colour resulting from a series of multiple gestural acts, which characterizes the best examples of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist drawings, paved the way for such artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly and Bridget Riley.

Museum Hours

Willem de Kooning. Pink Angels. c. 1945. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 52 x 40" (132.1 x 101.6 cm). Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

From September 18, 2011 to January 9, 2012 – The Museum of Modern Art
This is the first major museum exhibition devoted to the full scope of the career of Willem de Kooning, widely considered to be among the most important and prolific artists of the 20th century. The exhibition, which will only be seen at MoMA, presents an unparalleled opportunity to study the artist’s development over nearly seven decades, beginning with his early academic works, made in Holland before he moved to the United States in 1926, and concluding with his final, sparely abstract paintings of the late 1980s. Bringing together nearly 200 works from public and private collections, the exhibition will occupy the Museum’s entire sixth-floor gallery space, totaling approximately 17,000 square feet.

Representing nearly every type of work de Kooning made, in both technique and subject matter, this retrospective includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints. Among these are the artist’s most famous, landmark paintings—among them Pink Angels (1945), Excavation (1950), and the celebrated third Woman series (1950–53)—plus in-depth presentations of all his most important series, ranging from his figurative paintings of the early 1940s to the breakthrough black-and-white compositions of 1948–49, and from the urban abstractions of the mid 1950s to the artist’s return to figuration in the 1960s, and the large gestural abstractions of the following decade. Also included is de Kooning’s famous yet largely unseen theatrical backdrop, the 17-foot-square Labyrinth (1946).

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