Take a Trip to London: What is Going on Across the Pond Summer 2012
MASTER PAINTINGS WEEK
LONDON
Tel. +44 (0)20 7491 7408
www.masterpaintingsweek.co.uk
Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625)
Panoramic Landscape with Travellers
Oil on copper
22.2 x 33 cm (8¾ x 13⅛ in)
Price: £2,300,000 ($3.600.000)
Colnaghi Ltd
Frans Hals (1581/85-1666)
Portrait of the Reverend John Livingston
(1603-1672)
Oil on canvas, 58.4 x 47 cm (23 x 18½ in)
Price: £420,000 ($650,000)
Fergus Hall Master Paintings
Master Paintings Week
29 June to 6 July 2012
Now established as one of the key art events in the summer calendar, Master Paintings Week is a collaboration between twenty-three leading galleries and three auction houses. This week of exhibitions and events offers a wonderful selection of predominantly European paintings, dating from the 15th to the 20th centuries. New to Master Paintings Week in 2012 are Haldane Fine Art, Noortman Master Paintings and Theo Johns Fine Art Ltd. Each of the participating galleries, all of which are in the heart of London’s Mayfair and St James’s, will stage a special exhibition or event or unveil new discoveries, emphasising the unrivalled expertise to be found in London. Auctions will be held at Bonhams on 4 July, at Christie’s King Street on 3 and 4 July and Christie’s South Kensington on 6 July, while Sotheby’s sales will be on 4 and 5 July.
Boldly venturing into the 21st century, the organisers have commissioned a free iPhone app. Downloaded by over 1,000 people in the first ten days, it has an interactive map/GPS that not only shows all the participating galleries and auction houses but also the hotels and restaurants in the area. In addition, the website, www.masterpaintingsweek.co.uk, is synchronised via DigitisedArt so that information is continually updated. Visitors to London from 6 June might also spot ten black cabs sporting the MPW logo and images whilst five rickshaws, similarly bedecked, will be in the area on Sunday 1 July and Monday 2 July to ferry collectors around, courtesy of MPW.
As the Winter sales of Old Master paintings demonstrated, the market is strong, especially for rare and beautiful works in good condition. Besides the three international auction houses, London boasts more knowledgeable dealers than any other city in the world. Their galleries are a short walk from one another and will be open during Master Paintings Week:
Monday to Friday 10 am to 6 pm, Saturday 10 am to 5 pm, Sunday 12 noon to 5 pm.
Participating Galleries:
Riccardo Bacarelli and Bruno Botticelli Charles Beddington Ltd
BNB Art Consulting Ltd Colnaghi
Ben Elwes Fine Art Deborah Gage (Works of Art) Ltd
Richard Green Johnny Van Haeften Ltd
Haldane Fine Art Fergus Hall Master Paintings
Derek Johns Ltd Theo Johns Fine Art
John Mitchell Fine Paintings Moretti Fine Art Ltd
Noortman Master Paintings Philip Mould Ltd
Piacenti Art Gallery Robilant +Voena
Sphinx Fine Art Stair Sainty
Rafael Valls The Weiss Gallery
Whitfield Fine Art
The auction houses will be open:
Monday to Friday 9 am to 4.30 pm, Saturday and Sunday 12 noon to 5 pm
Auction houses:
Bonhams
Christie’s
Sotheby’s
www.masterpaintingsweek.co.uk
Further information on the OBA, entry criteria and competition terms and conditions can be found at www.theoldie.co.uk
The OBA Award – deadline 31 July 2012
Annual Competition to find UK’s Top Artist Aged 60+
Winner to Receive £5,000 Prize and Exhibition at the Abbott and Holder Gallery
The Oldie magazine and specialist heritage and fine art insurer Ecclesiastical have joined forces to create the annual Oldie British Artists Award (OBA) to celebrate the work of artists aged 60 and over as a counterblast to the unmade beds of the YBAs (Young British Artists). Open to all artists with a UK passport, applicants must have reached the age of 60 by the end of 2012. The OBA Award aims to recognise the achievements of older British artists and specifically to celebrate figurative art: pictures which are recognisably derived from the real world.
The new award has already secured an impressive judging panel. Chaired by painter and sculptor Maggi Hambling CBE, it includes Richard Ingrams, Editor of The Oldie, Huon Mallalieu, Arts Correspondent of Country Life, Philip Athill of Abbott and Holder Gallery, and Clare Pardy, Fine Art Underwriting Manager at Ecclesiastical.
Richard Ingrams said: “We are all familiar with rooms full of formaldehyde and rotting meat and sump oil and exploding sheds. So we thought it was high time that the art world was encouraged to produce a spot of painting. Let’s hope the OBA Award does just that. ”
Clare Pardy added: “It is a real privilege to support this inaugural award and I hope this is the start of a fantastic new tradition for the over 60s’ art scene. At Ecclesiastical we are celebrating our 125th anniversary this year and are taking the time to look back, recognise our achievements and be proud of our heritage. What better way to mark the occasion than get involved in creating a new tradition. I would encourage all over 60s artists in this country to enter the awards and help us get off to a flying start.”
Entries must be submitted by 31 July 2012 and must be on paper or canvas created using any materials (oil, watercolour or acrylic). No larger than 36” x 30”, the work must have been executed since 1 January 2011. An artist may only submit one work. The shortlist of the top ten will be announced on 17 August followed by the final judging in September. The winner will be announced on 16 October 2012 at an awards ceremony at the English Speaking Union in London.
STOWE HOUSE
Buckingham, MK18 5EH
Tel. +44 (0)1280 818166 (24-hour information line)
Tel. +44 (0)1280 818229 Office hours Monday to Friday
www.stowehouse.org
Fiona Bruce, Presenter
BBC ONE Antiques Roadshow
Normal opening hours:
Sunday to Thursday
During term-time: guided tours only at 2 pm and 3 pm from Sunday to Thursday.
The guided tour lasts approx.
45 minutes.
School holidays:
Open 1 to 5.30 pm
(last admission 5 pm) over Easter and throughout July and August.
Admission:
Adult: £4.75
Children under 16 free
NT Members: Adult: £4.10
Joint House and Garden tickets: Adult: £12.40
HHA Members free entry to House
Groups must book in advance Tel. +44 (0)1280 818229
shptbookings@stowe.co.uk
Antiques Roadshow to Visit Stowe House
The team of BBC ONE’s ever popular Sunday evening programme Antiques Roadshow is delighted to be visiting Stowe House, near Buckingham, on Thursday 19 July 2012. Visitors are invited to come along with their family heirlooms and car boot bargains. The doors are open from 9.30 am to 4.30 pm and entry is free.
This will be presenter Fiona Bruce’s fifth year with the Roadshow and she says, “Presenting the Antiques Roadshow is, for me, one of those rare and very lucky coincidences in television when you get to work on a show that you already love to watch. Exploring the human story behind every object is what makes the Antiques Roadshow so fascinating. And everyone loves the agony and ecstasy of the ‘what’s it worth?’ moment. The AR isn't just about antiques – it’s history, beauty and drama all wrapped up in one.”
Some of Britain’s leading antiques and fine arts specialists will be on hand to offer free advice and valuations to visitors, who are invited to raid their attics and bring along their ‘treasures’ for inspection by the experts. People with large pieces of furniture or other big items can send details and photographs of their objects to: ANTIQUES ROADSHOW, BBC, Whiteladies Road, Bristol BS8 2LR or e-mail them to: antiques.roadshow@bbc.co.uk. It may be possible to arrange to look at the item in advance and organise transportation to the venue.
Series Editor Simon Shaw says: “The team is looking forward to visiting Stowe House. It’s always exciting to see what will come to light on the day. We regularly see between 1,500 and 2,000 visitors on the day. Despite the high turnout everyone will get to see an expert.”
More information can be found at: www.bbc.co.uk/antiquesroadshow.
Seeking the Lost Treasures of Stowe
The Stowe House Preservation Trust (SHPT) recently launched an appeal for the public’s assistance in finding out what happened to the lost treasures of Stowe. Over 150 years ago Stowe House, the magnificent Grade I listed Neoclassical palace set in 400 acres of landscaped park in Buckinghamshire, was stripped of its contents in a series of auctions starting with the first Great Sale of Stowe, which lasted 37 days in 1848 when most of the paintings and works of art and much of the state furniture came under the gavel. By 1923 the house had been stripped of every fixture and fitting and faced the threat of demolition but escaped the bulldozers thanks to the foundation of Stowe School in 1923.
While many important items from Stowe found their way into national and international museums and institutions, most have disappeared into private collections. These are the pieces that the SHPT would like to track down, not to buy them back but to photograph them and thereby create a ‘virtual’ collection to give future visitors to Stowe an idea of the rooms in their original glory. The SHPT is also eager to discover images, sketches, photographs or prints of the interiors of the house and its contents before 1922. Such images, together with digitised auction catalogues, would form part of the online forum to identify lost treasures.
Who knows, perhaps a lost treasure or two might turn up on 19 July?
To find out how you can join in the search, or to register items, visit www.stowetreasures.org or e-mail losttreasures@stowe.co.uk.
Opening this month
THE STERLING AND FRANCINE CLARK ART INSTITUTE
225 South Street Williamstown
Massachusetts
Tel: +1 413 458 2303
www.clarkart.edu
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) A Box at the Theatre (At the Concert), 1880
Oil on canvas, 99.4 x 80.7 cm.
© Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA, 1955.594
THE STERLING AND FRANCINE CLARK ART INSTITUTE is one of the few institutions in the world with a dual mission as both a museum and leading international centre for research and scholarship in the visual arts. The Clark presents public and education programmes and organises groundbreaking exhibitions that advance new scholarship, and its research and academic programme includes an international fellowship programme and conferences. The Clark, together with Williams College, America’s foremost liberal arts college, sponsors one of the nation’s leading graduate programmes in art history.
International Tour from Clark Art Institute at Royal Academy of Arts this Summer
London is not only holding the Olympics this summer. The Royal Academy of Arts is hosting a major exhibition, From Paris: A Taste for Impressionism Paintings from The Clark, from 7 July to 23 September 2012, the only UK venue in a three-year global tour. This is the first ever international touring exhibition of the renowned Impressionist collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, which so far has been seen by over a million visitors in Milan, Giverny, Barcelona and Fort Worth, Texas. After London it will travel to Montreal, and venues in Japan, China and Korea.
This touring exhibition comprises more than 70 paintings, many of which have never before been on public display in the UK, including masterpieces by Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Sisley, Morisot, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and other prominent French painters of the period as well as an exceptional group of twenty-one paintings by Renoir. Among them are some of the most familiar masterpieces of the Impressionist era including Renoir’s A Box at the Theatre (At the Concert), an unabashed celebration of youth and beauty. The exhibition also embraces important works by pre-Impressionist artists such as Corot, Théodore Rousseau and J.-F. Millet as well as examples of highly polished academic paintings by Gérôme, Alma-Tadema and Bouguereau, illustrating the richness of the Clark’s holdings of French 19th century art.
The history of the Clark collection dates back to 1910 when Sterling Clark settled in Paris after a distinguished career in the United States Army and began collecting works of art, an interest he inherited from his parents. In 1919 Sterling married Francine Clary, a Frenchwoman who had been an actress at the Comédie Française in Paris and she joined him in what quickly became a shared passion, filling their homes in Paris, Normandy, Virginia and New York with a remarkable collection of paintings, silver, sculpture, porcelain, drawings and prints, all acquired with complete reliance on their own judgements and tastes. Together they created one of the finest collections of paintings, sculpture and drawings formed in the early 20th century. Although the French Impressionists were the heart of the collection, the Clarks ranged widely in their tastes and paintings by Old Masters from the Renaissance to the 19th century found favour as well as works by the modern Americans John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer. The most important work in America by Piero della Francesca, Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels, is one of their many treasures which also include paintings by Perugino, Goya and Fragonard, drawings by Dürer, Rembrandt and Rubens as well as one of the finest collections of English and Irish silver in the US.
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM IN BRITAIN
Claverton Manor
Bath, BA2 7BD
Tel. +44 (0)1225 460503
www.americanmuseum.org
Opening hours:
Tuesday to Friday
12 noon to 5 pm
Last admission 4 pm
Closed Mondays except
Bank Holiday Mondays
Admission (includes museum, exhibition and grounds):
Adult: £9, concessions £8, child (5-16) £5, family ticket £24, groups 15+ £7 each
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM IN BRITAIN, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2011, aims to inform its visitors about the cultural history of the United States in order to strengthen relations between the two countries. It contains over 15,000 items devoted to the decorative arts of America: fancy gowns and Shaker furniture, an extensive collection of native folk art, important holdings of early maps charting the discovery and exploration of the Americas, and one of the largest and finest quilt collections in the entire world. “Portrait paintings and Grandma Moses, painted furniture and Chinese export porcelain – you will find it all here on top of Claverton Hill.”
By Way of These Eyes:
The Hyland Collection of American Photography
14 July to 28 October 2012
Christopher Hyland, president and chief executive of one of the world’s leading firms specialising in luxury residential textiles and founder and president of the design and lifestyle HYLAND magazine, describes collecting photography as one of the greatest adventures of his life. Evocatively titled By Way of these Eyes, this exhibition presents American treasures from Hyland’s comprehensive collection of photography.
Photographers represented include, amongst others, Edward Steichen (1879-1973), Edward Weston (1886-1958), Paul Strand (1890-1976), Andreas Feininger (1906-1999), Brett Weston (1911-1993), Joyce Tenneson (b. 1945), Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), Shelby Lee Adams (b. 1950), Sally Mann (b. 1951), Herb Ritts (1952-2002), Thomas Barbéy (b. 1957), John Dugdale (b. 1960), and David Deal (b. 1970).
Hyland believes that his collection “represents in general the robust and dynamic spirit of American optimism in the twentieth century”. He is particularly fascinated by “bold clear images”, and the collection comprises photography from the early 20th century picturesque to the most contemporary, in particular abstract expressionist. The Hyland Collection also includes large abstractions by contemporary photographers experimenting in new technologies – most notably the work of Bill Armstrong. Both Armstrong’s and Hyland’s own photographs address the realm of transformation and of the divine, of the passage of time and of the constant insight derived from change. Hyland’s own transformation series, which depicts an individual gradually completely covered in tattoos captured in seven images, also addresses the issue of a spiritual journey.
Christopher Hyland comments: “In photography, I seek poetry, panache and beauty. I am also looking for something new, something remarkable, something transformational. By way of your eyes, your mind computes where the subject is placed in negative or positive space, the use of light and dark, and whether the resulting image speaks to the ages. If a photograph resonates with you, it is truly something wonderful – a bit of the divine in the resulting emotions you experience as a viewer. I am delighted to have this opportunity to share my collection of American photography with a British audience and their international visitors in so important a year for their country. I can think of no better UK venue to showcase my collection than the American Museum in Britain, which was founded to deepen understanding of American art and culture in Europe – the birthplace of photography.”
Opening in September
ESTORICK COLLECTION OF MODERN ITALIAN ART
39a Canonbury Square
London N1 2AN
Tel. +44 (0)20 7704 9522
www.estorickcollection.com
Opening hours:
Wednesday to Saturday
11 am to 6 pm
Sunday 12 noon to 5 pm
Admission:
£5, concessions £3.50
Bruno Munari (1907-1998)
Curved Negative-positive, 1950
Oil on board
50 x 50 cm
Courtesy Miroslava Hajek
photograph Davide Biancorosso
THE ESTORICK COLLECTION OF MODERN ITALIAN ART – described by Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate, as “one of the finest collections of early 20th century Italian art anywhere in the world” – opened in January 1998. Comprising some 120 paintings, drawings, watercolours, prints and sculptures by many of the most prominent Italian artists of the modernist era, the Collection is housed in a Georgian Grade II listed building.
Bruno Munari: My Futurist Past
19 September to 23 December 2012
The exhibition aims to investigate the activity of one of the most complex, creative and multi-faceted figures of 20th century Italian art. It will analyse Munari’s aesthetic development from his initial Futurist phase (around 1927) to the post war period (up to 1950) when, as one of the founders of the Movimento Arte Concreta, he became a point of reference for a new generation of Italian artists.
Bruno Munari was born in Milan in 1907, and lived and worked there until 1998, the year of his death. He began his career within the Futurist movement, and was considered by Marinetti to be its most promising young exponent. From the very beginning, he was concerned with exploring the possibility of representing painting spatially through a continuous flow of forms rendered mutable through the incorporation of a temporal dimension, in accordance with the theories of Balla and Depero in their 1915 Manifesto ‘Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’.
In 1930 he presented Aerial Machine, the first ‘mobile’ in the history of Italian art. This was an object constructed from wood and metal comprising red spheres connected by white rods that was hung from the ceiling and moved by air currents. Around the same time he began designing his Useless Machines, the aim of which was to liberate abstract painting from its static nature, again employing the principle of causality introduced by the use of air as a force of movement for the suspended parts. The paradoxical name was intended to be a reflection on the usefulness of the useless (art) and the uselessness of the useful (machines), creating a distinction between his personal aesthetic and that of ‘orthodox’ Futurism, with its fascination with roaring machinery and its uncritical attitude towards progress.
In Paris in 1946, he exhibited the first spatial environment entitled Concave-convex, based once again around a hanging object made of metallic mesh carefully moulded in such a way as to recall certain forms studied in topology, such as the M̦bius strip. This was installed in semi-darkness and illuminated by spotlights with the aim of generating shadows and reflections Рmany of which recall the moir̩ patterns of certain kinetic paintings of the 1960s. Along with the black spatial environment with neon lights presented by Lucio Fontana in Milan in 1949, the Concave-convex represents one of the first installations in the history of modern Italian art.
Organised with the Archivi Bruno Munari, this exhibition will reveal the richness of Munari’s artistic research between 1927 and 1950, spanning the artist’s Futurist phase and early investigation of the possibilities of kinetic sculpture, the immediate post-war years during which he became a leading figure of abstract painting and his subsequent experiments with projected light and installation-based work.
PALAZZO STROZZI
Piazza Strozzi
50123 Florence, Italy
Tel. +39 055 277 6461
www.palazzostrozzi.org
Opening hours:
Daily 9 am to 8 pm
Thursday 9 am to 11 pm
Admission:
Adult: €10.00
Concessions: €8.50, €8.00, €7.50, €5.00; schools: €4.00
PALAZZO STROZZI is not a museum but a laboratory for how to make culture accessible to as many different audiences as possible and in as many different ways. Here, cultural events are not considered merely entertainment or part of the leisure industry. Culture is a fundamental part of our identity, our civility and our capacity to respond creatively. The Strozzi’s programme consists of exhibitions entirely conceived, curated and produced in Florence. Exhibitions illustrate how collaborations and world-class scholarship can create experiences that transform the visitor and the city alike.
The Thirties. The Arts in Italy Beyond Fascism
22 September 2012 to 27 January 2013
Curated by Antonello Negri with Silvia Bignami, Paolo Rusconi and Giorgio Zanchetti, Florence section curated by Susanna Ragionieri
In 1930s Italy, during the Fascist era, a very vigorous artistic battle was waged, involving every style and trend, from Classicism to Futurism, from Expressionism to Abstraction, and from monumental art to salon painting. The scene was enriched and complicated by the emergence of design and mass communication – posters, wireless, films, for example – which espoused many ideas from the “fine” arts and conveyed them to a broad public. It was a complex and vital time of experimentation, open to the outside world, the prelude to our modern era. The exhibition will present this decade through a selection of works, while at the same time offering a historically informed narrative, fully conveying the aesthetic, cultural and ideological atmosphere of the time.
The 1930s in Florence were a time of tremendous creative ferment. The Maggio Musicale was created in 1933, the main station at Santa Maria Novella completed in 1934, the Biblioteca Nazionale in 1935. The Palazzo Strozzi was purchased in 1937, then lovingly restored, to re-open in 1940 with the spectacular exhibition on the Tuscan art of the 16th century.
Despite the campaign in Africa (1935-1936) and the threats of war gathering overhead throughout the decade, Italy in general, and Florence in particular, were seedbeds then, as now, for innovation and creativity. This exhibition is an ideal opportunity to demonstrate the Palazzo Strozzi’s deep links with the city’s and the country’s history. As with every exhibition, there is an extensive educational programme, including activities at the Palazzo Strozzi, related events in the city and surrounding area, and a series of associated publications.
The Palazzo Strozzi’s international reputation is based in large part not on what it shows – the choice of subject for its exhibitions – but on how it is presented. The name for the Palazzo Strozzi’s innovative approach to cultural programming is ‘visible listening’, and it means bringing other voices into the spaces of culture in a ‘bottom-up’ way, as opposed to depending on the traditional ‘top-down’ approach that relies solely on the voices of experts.
Opening in October
CENTRO DI CULTURA CONTEMPORANEA STROZZINA (CCCS)
Palazzo Strozzi
Florence, Italy
Tel. +39 055 2645155
www.strozzina.org
www.palazzostrozzi.org
Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday
10 am to 8 pm
Thursday 10 am to 11 pm
Monday closed
Admission:
(ticket valid one month): €5.00 full price, €4.00 concessions (university students and other concessions);
€3.00 schools;
Thursday, admission free from 6 pm to 11 pm
Chiharu Shiota
In Silence, 2008
Black wool, burnt grand piano
Centre PasquArt, Biel/Bienne
Photo: Sunhi Mang
© Chiharu Shiota. All Rights Reserved
The Palazzo’s recently restored cellars, traditionally known as ‘La Strozzina’, are Palazzo Strozzi’s main platform for contemporary culture, hosting a broad range of events, activities and exhibitions representing the entire spectrum of contemporary creative activity.
Francis Bacon and the Existential Condition in Contemporary Art
Nathalie Djurberg | Adrian Ghenie | Arcangelo Sassolino | Chiharu Shiota | Annegret Soltau
5 October 2012 to 27 January 2013
Organised by the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina (CCCS) in conjunction with Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
Francis Bacon and the Existential Condition in Contemporary Art, co-curated by Franziska Nori (Director of the CCCS) and Barbara Dawson (Director of the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin), will host work by contemporary artists who breathe life into states of mind and into the kinds of questions man asks himself in his relationship with his own interior being, his own body and the outside world, especially today as he faces the crisis in values that is gripping contemporary society. The exhibition gets off to a masterly start with a core of paintings by the great Francis Bacon, whose work dialogues with that of five contemporary artists of international renown – Nathalie Djurberg, Adrian Ghenie, Arcangelo Sassolino, Chiharu Shiota and Annegret Soltau – all of whom share Bacon’s reflection on man’s existential condition and on the depiction of the human figure.
Alongside major works from international collections, the exhibition will present, for the first time in Italy, four unfinished works by Bacon which he kept in his workshop for many years and which have been on display in the DCG The Hugh Lane since 2005. They include what is thought to be the artist’s last work, discovered on an easel in his Reece Mews workshop in London while he was on his deathbed in Madrid in 1992. These canvases bear witness to one of the typical work processes espoused by the artist, involving setting aside but holding on to a partly finished painting in order to then return to it and complete it later on. Bacon used time as a tool for working on images and on the decaying process of his support materials, causing traces of the passage of time to build up in layers. These traces went on to become “scars”, which play a crucial role in helping us to understand the creative process on which his work is based. The individual human figures, incapable of finding complete definition in the space offered by the painting, become effective visual syntheses that condense and reflect the traces of memory of the artist’s troubled life.
BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
6 Cork Street
London
W1S 3NX
Tel. +44 (0)20 7734 3431
www.jacobsongallery.com
Opening hours:
Open weekdays 10 am to 6 pm
Saturday 11 am to 1 pm
The generation game of sculpture, a cuddly toy, a ....no I've said that
2010
250 x 360 cm
© Bruce McLean
Bruce McLean: The Shapes of Sculpture
An Exhibition of Recent Paintings
10 October to 3 November 2012
Bruce McLean has been investigating the condition of sculpture since the late 1960s creatively interrogating, in an astonishing diversity of media, the nature of its validity, its diverse possibilities of meaning, its propositions and pretensions, its presentations, positionings and re-positionings, its private and public settings, indoor and outdoor, and its critical contexts. The paintings in this forthcoming exhibition mark a new direction in this continuously lively, witty and profound inquiry.
They may be regarded as paintings of things that look like sculptures, or in some cases, paintings of paintings of things that look like sculpture, sometimes based on photographs of things in the artist’s studio that look like sculpture but are in fact merely two-dimensional representations based on photographs of sculptures; these are thus paintings of paintings of photos of sculptures and paintings of overlapping paintings of sculptures and other studio equipment. At this time when all art ends up as a photograph (especially sculpture), McLean starts with the photograph and work backwards (so to speak) toward discovering the shape and function of (the) sculpture.
Since sculptures (like paintings) exist in space, these new works may be regarded as paintings also of a specific space circumambient to the sculptures, an imagined space for imagined sculptures, or things that in the paintings look like sculptures in a painter’s studio. But Bruce Mclean is a sculptor, and always has been. He considers his whole oeuvre from performance pieces through photo-works and film works, architectural installations and paintings to be sculpture. Thus though the new paintings may in fact be sculptures (as designated by the artist, when it suits his mood) they are most certainly paintings as well. They can be hung on walls (nothing un-sculptural about that, incidentally) if the walls are big enough.
Bruce Mclean is a Scottish sculptor, performance artist, filmmaker and painter. He studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1961 to 1963, and from 1963 to 1966 at St Martin’s School of Art, London, where he and others rebelled against what appeared to be the formalist academicism of his teachers, including Anthony Caro and Phillip King. In 1965 he abandoned conventional studio production in favour of impermanent sculptures using materials such as water, along with performances of a generally satirical nature directed against the art world. In Pose Work for Plinths I (1971; London, Tate), a photographic documentation of one such performance, he used his own body to parody the poses of Henry Moore’s celebrated reclining figures. When in 1972 he was offered an exhibition at the Tate Gallery, he opted for a ‘retrospective’ he titled “King For a Day” which lasted only one day.
In 1971 McLean established Nice Style, billed as ‘The World’s First Pose Band’, while teaching at Maidstone College of Art. With them, and in other collaborative performances (Academic Board, 1975; Sorry! A Minimal Musical in Parts, 1977; The Masterwork: Award Winning Fishknife, 1979), he continued to use humour to confront the pretensions of the art world and wider social issues such as the nature of bureaucracy and institutional politics. From the mid 1970s, while continuing to mount occasional performances, McLean has turned increasingly to painting/sculpture and film work. In 1985 he won the John Moore’s prize for painting. Since retiring from his professorship of painting at the Slade School of Art, McLean has taken on a large studio in west London where he has been making increasingly large paintings and sculptural film works.
THE COURTAULD GALLERY
Somerset House
Strand
London WC2R 0RN
Tel. +44 (0)20 7848 2526
www.courtauld.ac.uk/gallery
Opening hours:
Daily 10 am to 6 pm
Last admission 5.30 pm
Admission:
Adult £6, concessions £4.50
www.courtauld.ac.uk/tickets
Peter Lely (1618-1680)
Boy as a Shepherd, c. 1658-60
Oil on canvas, 91.4 x 69 cm
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
THE COURTAULD INSTITUTE OF ART is one of the world’s leading centres for the study of the history and conservation of art and architecture, and its Gallery houses one of Britain’s best-loved collections. Based at Somerset House, The Courtauld is an independent college of the University of London.
Peter Lely: A Lyrical Vision
11 October 2012 to 13 January 2013
This exhibition is the first to examine the remarkable but forgotten group of large-scale narrative paintings produced in the 1640s and 1650s by Peter Lely (1618-80), England’s leading painter after the death of Anthony van Dyck. Often depicting a sensuous pastoral world of shepherds, nymphs and musicians in idyllic landscapes, these ambitious pictures are all the more extraordinary for having been painted during the turmoil of the English Civil War and its aftermath. Organised around The Courtauld’s enigmatic The Concert, the exhibition includes an important group of little-known paintings loaned from historic private collections.
Sir Peter Lely was Charles II’s Principal Painter and the outstanding artistic figure of Restoration England. Since the 17th century, he has been celebrated for his flattering pictures of the great and the beautiful of Charles II’s court. However, Lely never wished to be principally a portraitist. When he arrived in war-torn England in the early 1640s, hoping to step into the vacuum left by the death of Sir Anthony van Dyck, Lely had high ambitions and devoted himself to paintings inspired by classical mythology, the Bible or contemporary literature. His pastoral subjects resonated with a lyrical dream of England, an Arcadia far removed from the political upheaval of the age.
Much to Lely’s disappointment, his narrative paintings did not find favour with many English patrons, and he produced no more than thirty. As the artist’s friend, the Royalist poet Richard Lovelace explained, all Lely’s English supporters wanted was ‘their own dull counterfeits’ or portraits of their mistresses. Lely was obliged to turn to portraiture, and he employed a large and productive studio to keep up with the high demand for his work. His paintings of figures in idyllic landscapes remained relatively unknown and yet they are among the most beautiful and seductive made in 17th-century England.
By 1654 Lely was judged to be ‘the best artist in England’ but from then on, aided by a flourishing studio, he produced almost exclusively portraits. He was knighted and granted an annual stipend by Charles II, as his predecessor Van Dyck had been honoured by Charles I. Peter Lely: A Lyrical Vision looks beyond our conventional understanding of Lely to reveal a neglected chapter of this major painter’s career. It sheds new light on one of the most ambitious group of paintings to have been produced in England in the 17th century.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, edited by Caroline Campbell with further contributions by Diana Dethloff, Karen Hearn and David Taylor and published by Paul Holberton in association with The Courtauld Gallery. ISBN: 978 1 907372 40 7
Price at The Courtauld Gallery Shop £25
FRIEZE MASTERS
Regent’s Park, London
Tel. +44 (0)20 7491 0533 www.friezemasters.com
Opening hours:
Thursday, Friday, Saturday
12 noon to 7 pm
Sunday
12 noon to 6 pm
Admission:
Adult, £27; concessions
(from 1 pm onwards), £20
Tickets available at www.seetickets.com
Fabrizio Moretti opened his gallery in Florence in 1999 with the inaugural exhibition From Bernardo Daddi to Giorgio Vasari and soon established a respected reputation in the field of Italian Old Masters. The gallery works closely with the most notable scholars and public institutions and is known for its dedication to research and for handling works of the highest quality as well as for making this particular area more accessible to private collectors. In 2005 Moretti opened his first gallery in London and moved to the present location in 2011. He also takes part in the annual Master Paintings Week. In 2007 he opened a gallery in New York in collaboration with Adam Williams Fine Art. Just steps away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this Upper East Side gallery offers a glorious space in which to present the finest of Italian Old Masters.
MORETTI FINE ART TO SHOW AT FRIEZE MASTERS
11 to 14 October 2012
Moretti Fine Art will be exhibiting at the first Frieze Masters, a new art fair in London, where they will present a selection of Italian Old Master paintings with a particular emphasis on the Renaissance. Fabrizio Moretti, a member of the Selection Committee for Frieze Masters, said: “We are delighted to be taking part in this exciting new event which we hope will attract new clients for works of art of high quality which have stood the test of time”.
Frieze Masters, which will feature some ninety of the world’s leading galleries, aims to give a contemporary perspective on the relationship between old and new art, from ancient times to the 20th century, and is staged to coincide with Frieze Art Fair, which concentrates on contemporary art. The two fairs will make London in October the focus for the international art world and it is hoped that they will both benefit from a crossover between audiences for contemporary and older art.
Amongst the fine paintings to be shown by Moretti will be Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Francesco d’Ubertino Verdi, called ‘Il Bacchiacca’ (1494-1557), a Florentine Mannerist artist who in 1540 became a painter at the court of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. The panel, which has escaped scholarly attention until now, is unpublished except for a colour reproduction in an advertisement in 1994 for a French auction house. The composition and execution are comparable to many of Bacchiacca’s known works including his Portrait of a Lute Player, now in the Kress Collection at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and his Magdalene in the Pitti Palace, and may have been executed around the same time in the early 1530s.
CURRENTLY ON VIEW
THE COURTAULD GALLERY
Somerset House, Strand
London WC2R 0RN
Tel. +44 (0)20 7848 2526
www.courtauld.ac.uk/gallery
Opening hours:
Daily 10 am to 6 pm
Last admission 5.30 pm
Admission:
Adult £6, concessions £4.50
www.courtauld.ac.uk/tickets
Mantegna to Matisse: Master Drawings from The Courtauld Gallery
14 June to 9 September 2012
Sponsors: International Music and Art Foundation, Friends of The Courtauld, the Tavolozza Foundation and the Doris Pacey Charitable Foundation.
The exhibition opens with a group of rare works from the 15th century, a time when drawing moved beyond the workshop traditions of the late medieval period to assume a new central role in individual creativity. For Renaissance artists such as Dürer, Mantegna and Leonardo, drawing was the fundamental basis of all the arts: the expression not just of manual dexterity but of the artist’s mind and intellect. These ideas achieved their full expression in the flowering of draughtsmanship in the 16th century. At the heart of this section is Michelangelo’s magisterial The Dream, c. 1533. Another highlight is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s engaging scene of drunken peasants cavorting at a festival in the Flemish village of Hoboken. Whereas Michelangelo sought ideal divinely-inspired beauty in the human figure, Bruegel revels in the disorder of everyday life.
Despite the important preparatory function of drawing, many of the most appealing works in the exhibition were unplanned and resulted from artists reaching for their sketchbooks to capture a scene for their own pleasure. Rembrandt’s spontaneous and affectionate sketch of his wife shows Saskia sitting in bed cradling one of their children. Rubens’s magnificent large drawing of his own wife, the beautiful young Helena Fourment, has a very different character. In its imposing presence, mesmerising skill and subtle characterisation, it is the equal of any painted portrait. A strong selection of works exploring the relationship between drawing and the landscape includes J.M.W. Turner’s unforgettable late masterpiece Dawn after the Wreck, which was immortalised by the critic John Ruskin as one of the artist’s ‘saddest and most tender works’.
The Courtauld collection includes an outstanding selection of drawings and watercolours by the great Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists for which the Gallery is most famous. Apples, Bottle and Chairback is one of Cézanne’s finest late works in any technique. Here we see the artist pushing watercolour to its extreme through his intuitive but masterful handling of successive layers of coloured washes over luminous white paper. Another highlight is the large crayon drawing by Cézanne’s younger contemporary, Georges Seurat, whose standing female nude materialises in an almost unfathomable manner from an intricate web of curving crayon lines. The exhibition concludes with work by the two greatest artists of the 20th century, Picasso and Matisse, who reinvented the art of drawing for the modern age.
Following its debut at The Courtauld Gallery, the exhibition will go on view at The Frick Collection, New York, from 2 October 2012 to 27 January 2013.
ESTORICK COLLECTION OF MODERN ITALIAN ART
39a Canonbury Square
London N1 2AN
Tel. +44 (0)20 7704 9522
www.estorickcollection.com
Opening hours:
Wednesday to Saturday
11 am to 6 pm
Sunday 12 noon to 5 pm
Admission:
£5, concessions £3.50
In Astratto: Abstraction in Italy, 1930-1980
27 June to 9 September 2012
Drawn from Liguria’s three main museums dedicated to contemporary art, this exhibition presents a survey of the myriad approaches to abstraction in Italian art which developed between the 1930s and the early 1980s.
Genoa’s Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce houses the collection of Maria Cernuschi Ghiringhelli. Comprising 233 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, it provides an overview of three decades of abstract research in 20th century Italian art. The wife of Virginio (aka Gino) Ghiringhelli – a painter and owner of the Milanese Il Milione gallery – Cernuschi began to acquire works of both Italian and foreign abstract painting, drawing, sculpture and graphics in the 1930s.
The Centro d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (CAMeC) of La Spezia acquired the collection of Giorgio Cozzani in early 2000, dedicated to an extensive and thorough documentation of the different expressive tendencies within 20th century art. This has been fully integrated into the museum’s own collection, with works purchased by the city of La Spezia over the course of the various exhibitions of the Premio del Golfo (1949-1965) – a prize inaugurated during the 1930s under the auspices of Futurism, and which continued after the war with a series of important surveys of the major artistic currents of the time.
Finally, the works from the Pinacoteca Civica in Savona’s Palazzo Gavotti belong to the large collection donated by Milena Milani, a writer, journalist, visual artist and leading figure of Lucio Fontana’s Spatialist movement. The companion of Carlo Cardazzo, one of the most important gallerists of post-war Italy, Milani was herself a protagonist of some significant episodes in contemporary art, often closely bound up with the cultural life of Savona and Albisola.
Curated by Matteo Fochessati, and organised by the Scientific Committee of the Regional Centre for Contemporary Art in Liguria, the exhibition is divided into six thematic and chronological sections: Historical Abstraction; MAC and ‘concrete’ research; Art Informel; Towards the Conceptual; Optical-perceptual Research; Analytical Painting-New Painting; and presents a selection of works by over forty artists.
SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT
Römerberg
D-60311 Frankfurt
Tel. +49 (0)69 299882-0
www.schirn.de
LIEBIEGHAUS SKULPTUREN-SAMMLUNG
Schaumainkai 71
D-60596 Frankfurt
Tel. +49 (0)69 650049-0
www.liebieghaus.de
Opening hours:
Tuesday, Friday to Sunday
10 am to 7 pm
Wednesday and Thursday
10 am to 10 pm
Closed Mondays
(Liebieghaus closed until
20 June)
Admission:
(Combined ticket for Schirn and Liebieghaus): €14, concessions €12, family ticket €24; free admission for children under 12
Jeff Koons (b. 1955)
Bluepoles, 2000
Easyfun-Ethereal
Oil on canvas
299.7 x 431.8 cm
Image: Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
© Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons (b. 1955)
Poodle, 1991
Made in Heaven
Polychromed wood
58.4 x 100.3 x 52.1 cm
© Jeff Koons
The SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT is one of Germany’s most renowned exhibition institutions. Since its founding in 1986, the Schirn has staged approximately 200 exhibitions, including major survey shows devoted to the Vienna Jugendstil, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism, to women Impressionists, to subjects such as Shopping—a century of art and consumer culture, the visual art of the Stalin era, new Romanticism in contemporary art, and the influence of Charles Darwin’s theories on the art of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The LIEBIEGHAUS houses a sculpture collection of the highest quality and offers an overview of five thousand years of sculpture from Ancient Egypt to Neoclassicism. Today some five thousand works are to be found in the former Liebieg Villa, located on the Schaumainkai.
JEFF KOONS. THE PAINTER & THE SCULPTOR
20 June to 23 September 2012
Sponsored by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Gas-Union GmbH, Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain, and City of Frankfurt am Main.
This Summer the Schirn Kunsthalle and the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt is devoted to the work of the American artist Jeff Koons (born 1955), who has played a pioneering role in the contemporary art world since the 1980s. The two concurrent exhibitions deliberately separate the painterly and sculptural aspects of his oeuvre and present each in a context of its own.
Comprising some forty paintings, Jeff Koons. The Painter at the Schirn focuses primarily on the artist’s structural development as a painter. With motifs drawn from a diverse range of high and pop-cultural sources, his monumental painted works combine hyper-realistic and gestural elements to form complexes as compact in imagery as they are with regard to content. Jeff Koons. The Sculptor at the Liebieghaus, presents some fifty world-famous and entirely new sculptures which enter into dialogue with the historical building and a sculpture collection spanning five millennia. Making its debut in Frankfurt is Jeff Koons’s new series Antiquity in which he explores antique art and its central motif – Eros.
Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania in 1955. He studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is today one of the world’s most prominent contemporary artists. His works are to be found at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Tate in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and elsewhere. They have been featured internationally in numerous solo exhibitions. He has been awarded many distinctions for his art, and his sculptures in the public realm, such as the monumental flower sculpture Puppy (1992), have attained far-reaching popularity.
In his paintings and sculptures, Jeff Koons employs elements from the consumer world and “high culture” alike, quotes artistic epochs as readily as he does objects from everyday life and advertising, and thus draws our attention again and again to such categories as beauty and desirability. Within this context, he has become an unequalled master of the interplay between the sublime and the banal.
THE STERLING AND FRANCINE CLARK ART INSTITUTE
225 South Street Williamstown
Massachusetts
Tel: +1 413 458 2303
www.clarkart.edu
Opening hours:
Daily in July and August,
10 am to 5 pm, open Tuesday through Sunday the rest of the year
Admission:
Free 1 November to 14 June; $15 from 15 June to 31 October
Children age 18 and younger, members, and students with valid ID admitted free all year.
Zhenmushou
(Tomb Guardian Beast)
Tang dynasty (618-907 AD)
Painted and gilt earthenware
65.7 x 30 cm
Unearthed 2009, Tomb M2, Fujiagou Village, Lingtai County, Gansu Province
Lingtai County Museum, Pingliang
THE STERLING AND FRANCINE CLARK ART INSTITUTE is one of the few institutions in the world with a dual mission as both a museum and leading international centre for research and scholarship in the visual arts. The Clark presents public and education programmes and organises groundbreaking exhibitions that advance new scholarship, and its research and academic programme includes an international fellowship programme and conferences. The Clark, together with Williams College, America’s foremost liberal arts college, sponsors one of the nation’s leading graduate programmes in art history.
Unearthed: Recent Archaeological Discoveries from Northern China
16 June to 21 October 2012
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute presents rare Chinese burial objects in an exclusive exhibition that considers both the discovery and the impact of modern Chinese archaeology. The exhibition features objects recently excavated from sites in the Shanxi and Gansu provinces and never before seen outside China, including a full-size stone sarcophagus discovered intact in 2004. Unearthed leads the Institute’s interrelated summer exhibition programme of four exhibitions, including three presentations in Williamstown and one in New York:
The Explorers’ Club, 46 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021
Phantoms of the Clark Expedition, 9 May to 3 August 2012
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA 01267
Through Shên-Kan: Sterling Clark in China, 16 June to 16 September 2012
Then & Now: Photographs of Northern China, 16 June to 16 September 2012
The exhibitions are part of the Institute’s current cultural exchange initiative with China, and were inspired by a scientific expedition to Northern China undertaken by the Institute’s founder in 1908 to document the region’s terrain, ecology, and meteorological conditions. In 2008, the Clark initiated a series of cultural exchange programmes through China’s Ministry of Culture to connect Sterling Clark’s pioneering work in China with contemporary audiences. It is through these efforts that special permission has been granted to allow these rare archaeological objects to travel to America for exhibition at the Clark. The 2012 exhibitions also commemorate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Through Shên-kan: The Account of the Clark Expedition in North China, 1908-9, written by Sterling Clark and naturalist Arthur deCarle Sowerby to document the events and findings recorded by their expeditionary team during the 17-month trek across the remote regions of Northern China.
“At a time when recent archaeology is changing China’s evolving sense of its own history, it is important to explore how these kinds of discoveries are affecting contemporary China’s reconsideration of its past,” says Michael Conforti, Director of the Clark. “Unearthed not only celebrates the magnificent objects discovered through archaeology, but also examines how recent archaeological finds are influencing modern China’s sense of its cultural identity.”
Unearthed is organised by the Clark’s curatorial team, working in collaboration with guest curator Annette Juliano of Rutgers University, a major contributor to the professional and public discourse on the innovative advances happening through recent archaeology in China. Presented in the special exhibition galleries of the Clark’s Manton Research Center on the Williamstown campus, Unearthed is supported by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM IN BRITAIN
Claverton Manor
Bath, BA2 7BD
Tel. +44 (0)1225 460503
www.americanmuseum.org
Opening hours:
Tuesday to Friday
12 noon to 5 pm
Last admission 4 pm
Closed Mondays except
Bank Holiday Mondays
Admission (includes museum, exhibition and grounds):
Adult: £9, concessions £8, child (5-16) £5, family ticket £24, groups 15+ £7 each
John James Audubon (1785-1851)
Raccoon
Aquatint copper-plate engravings on Whatman paper
Engraved, printed and coloured by R. Havell (London, 1835), from the double elephant folio
Birds of America
63.5 x 88.9 cm, 25 x 35 in
The American Museum in Britain
Patuxent Room, Winterthur
Michael John Hunt
Acrylic on canvas
91.44 x 66.04 cm, 36 x 26 ins
© The Hunt Gallery
John James Audubon: Fur and Feather
10 March to 28 October 2012
John James Audubon is known for his remarkable studies of American birds depicted in their natural habitats. His The Birds of North America (1827-1839), in which he identified 25 new species and a number of new sub-species, is considered to be one of the finest ornithological works ever completed. However, his studies of mammals are less well-known. This exhibition, on view in Claverton Manor at the start of the period room trail, complements The Compassionate Eye: Birds and Beasts from the American Museum’s Print Collection (see page 7).
Audubon’s earliest studies of birds date back to 1804 but work for his epic The Birds of America demanded a more peripatetic way of life and in 1820 he began his travels, supporting himself as a portrait painter and drawing master. His aim was to represent the authentic colours and detailed characteristics of each species life-size. He collected his own specimens, usually by shooting them, in order to record the colours before they faded. Wiring the birds in life-like positions, he transcribed their outlines as accurate pencil drawings.
John James Audubon changed forever the way in which nature is illustrated. His painstakingly executed, life-size images underscore his genius and confirm his place as one of the great American artists of the 19th century.
Painted Rooms: American Historic Interiors by Michael John Hunt
10 March to 28 October 2012
The American Museum in Britain is delighted to present an exhibition of forty of English artist Michael John Hunt’s exquisite interiors of Winterthur and Wynkoop, treasured historic houses in the USA. The works will be shown in the Museum’s period rooms and Gallery, before the exhibition travels to Winterthur later this year.
Celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic for his meticulously detailed architectural paintings, English artist Michael John Hunt (b. 1941) is entirely self-taught and has an intuitive understanding of perspective that would rival the abilities of many an artist. He has exhibited around the world from Amsterdam to Dubai and counts among his collectors members of the British Royal Family as well as Washington society.
One of the most striking features of Hunt’s portraits of American historic interiors is his theatrical use of natural light: sunlight filters between wood wall panelling, spills through window panes, and pools onto floorboards by open doorways. Fleeting shadows are thus captured forever in paint. Surprisingly, Hunt creates his pictures with layered acrylics and glazes producing subtleties of light and colour that are more usually associated with oil pigments. Thus Hunt illustrates his innate artistic dexterity – the painterly equivalent of a musician’s ‘perfect pitch’.
THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM
Trumpington Street
Cambridge
Cambridgeshire
CB2 1RB
Tel. +44 (0)1223 332900
www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk
Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday
10 am to 5 pm
Sundays and Bank Holiday Mondays: 12 noon to 5 pm
Admission: Free
Jade ornament with an animal mask
2nd century BC
Western Han Dynasty
Length: 16.7 cm; width: 13.8 cm
Unearthed at Xianggangshan 1983
Nanyue Wang Museum, Guangdong Province
THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM houses the University of Cambridge’s art collection and is a public museum and art gallery with an international reputation. More than half a million objects and works of art are held in five curatorial departments: Antiquities, Applied Arts, Coins and Medals, Manuscripts and Printed Books and Paintings, Drawings and Prints. The Fitzwilliam’s treasures range from Ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities to the arts of the 21st century and include masterpieces by Titian, Canaletto, Stubbs, Constable, Monet, Renoir and Picasso, one of the world’s foremost Rembrandt print collections, Handel music manuscripts and the famous Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, one of the most significant collections of Korean ceramics outside South-East Asia, medieval illuminated manuscripts and outstanding collections of pottery, porcelain and medieval coins. The Fitzwilliam Museum welcomes over 350,000 visitors a year, offers a wide-ranging programme of temporary exhibitions and events, and has an award-winning Education Service.
The Search for Immortality: Tomb Treasures of Han China
5 May to 11 November 2012
Curated by Dr James Lin
Made possible through the generous permission of China’s State Administration for Cultural Heritage, Xuzhou Museum and the Museum of the Mausoleum of the Nanyue King
Visited by over 30,000 people in the first two months, this exhibition, the first of its kind, relates the story of the quest for immortality and struggle for imperial legitimacy in ancient China’s Han Dynasty. The show features over 350 treasures in jade, gold, silver, bronze and ceramics in the most important exhibition of ancient royal treasures ever to travel outside China.
The Han Dynasty established the paradigm for united rule of China up to the present day. To maintain this hard-won empire, however, the Han emperors had to engage in a constant struggle for power and legitimacy, and these bitter contests took place on symbolic battlefields as much as on real ones. While written accounts provide an outline of these events, it is from archaeological discoveries over recent decades that the full drama and spectacle of this critical episode in Chinese history has been brought to life.
This pioneering exhibition compares the spectacular tombs of two rival power factions: the Han imperial family in the northern ‘cradle’ of Chinese history, and the Kingdom of Nanyue in the south (Guangzhou) – the gateway to the rich trade routes of the China Sea and Indian Ocean. These tombs have never been displayed together before and, through their remarkable treasures, show how the two kingdoms competed for the title of Emperor – and for the splendour in life and death that was expected of this pre-eminent status. In showing these two tombs together, The Search for Immortality sheds new light on a critical period of China’s early history that is still relatively unknown in the West. The exhibition will only be seen in Cambridge.
A wide-ranging public programme including lectures, workshops and events for all ages is planned, alongside a virtual exhibition and online activities.
LAST CHANCE TO SEE
PALAZZO STROZZI
Piazza Strozzi
50123 Florence, Italy
Tel. +39 055 277 6461
www.palazzostrozzi.org
Opening hours:
Daily 9 am to 8 pm
Thursday 9 am to 11 pm
Admission:
Adult: €10.00
Concessions: €8.50, €8.00, €7.50, €5.00; schools: €4.00
Joseph DeCamp, The Hammock
c. 1895, oil on canvas
111.8 x 127 cm
Chicago (IL), Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1996.9
Americans in Florence. Sargent and the American Impressionists
3 March to 15 July 2012
Americans in Florence is a landmark exhibition, not only because it is the centrepiece of Florence’s 2012 celebration of its links to America but also because it brings fresh interest and fresh scholarship to the American art of the late 19th and early 20th century. The exhibition is set in the cosmopolitan Anglo-American world of Sargent, Henry James, Berenson, Wharton, Vernon Lee, Horne and Stibbert at a time when Florence was re-inventing itself after decades of torpor, in the aftermath of being briefly the capital of the new unified Italy. The exhibition recounts not only the familiar story of the impact of the Tuscan landscape on a generation of young American artists –
many of them women – but also the decisive impact of the young Americans on Florentine society and Tuscan artistic practice.
Curated by Francesca Bardazzi and Carlo Sisi, the exhibition is divided into five sections with works by over thirty American artists who worked in Florence. Some, like John Singer Sargent, are famous while others are less well-known. On returning home, they all became celebrated artists who played a crucial role in forming the new generation of American painters and the birth of a national school of painting. Their paintings are shown alongside those by Florentine and Tuscan painters including Telemaco Signorini, Vittorio Corcos and Michele Gordigiani, whose work came closest to the sophisticated manner, rich in literary allusions, that was favoured by the cosmopolitan colony.
CENTRO DI CULTURA CONTEMPORANEA STROZZINA (CCCS)
Palazzo Strozzi
Florence, Italy
Tel. +39 055 2645155
www.strozzina.org
www.palazzostrozzi.org
Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday
10 am to 8 pm
Thursday 10 am to 11 pm
Monday closed
Admission:
(ticket valid one month): €5.00 full price, €4.00 concessions (university students and other concessions);
€3.00 schools;
Thursday, admission free from 6 pm to 11 pm
American Dreamers
Reality and Imagination in Contemporary American Art
9 March to 15 July 2012
Organised by the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina in conjunction with the Hudson River Museum (Yonkers, New York) and curated by Bartholomew Bland.
American Dreamers examines a particularly powerful aspect of contemporary art in the United States, where – from 11 September 2001 through to the current financial crisis – the sense of invulnerability and social and economic security has been challenged. Since the 1950s, many American artists have criticised the “dream” which is consistently fuelled by Hollywood imagery and the advertising campaigns of corporations such as Disney and Coca Cola. Today the “American dream” seems to be in crisis. Yet a sense of optimism, a capacity for creative imagination, and the willingness to believe in positive outcomes remain crucial to the American self-image.
The eleven American artists involved in the exhibition (Laura Ball, Adrien Broom, Nick Cave, Will Cotton, Adam Cvijanovic, Richard Deon, Thomas Doyle, Mandy Greer, Kirsten Hassenfeld, Patrick Jacobs and Christy Rupp) resort to their imagination to produce a personal revisitation of reality or at times even a flight from that reality, through the construction of parallel, alternative worlds which explicitly turn their backs on ‘true’ reality. Some of the works condense the essence of reality into miniaturised systems while others expand outwards into space, creating worlds in which the spectator can immerse themselves in parallel realities, and yet others feed on fantastic, dreamlike images or reflect on such symbolic themes as the home and the family which continue even today to play a central role in the construction of the myth of the ‘American way of life’.
MORETTI FINE ART
2a-6 Ryder Street
St James’s
London SWY 6QB
Tel. + 44 20 7491 0533
www.morettigallery.com
Opening hours:
Monday to Friday
10 am to 6 pm
Saturday 30 June,
10 am to 5 pm
Sunday 1 July,
12 noon to 5 pm
Giovanni Battista Vanni
(1600-1660)
Esther and Ahasuerus
Oil on canvas
201 x 262 cm
Fabrizio Moretti opened his gallery in Florence in 1999 with the inaugural exhibition From Bernardo Daddi to Giorgio Vasari and soon established a respected reputation in the field of Italian Old Masters. The gallery works closely with the most notable scholars and public institutions and is known for its dedication to research and for handling works of the highest quality as well as for making this particular area more accessible to private collectors. In 2005 Moretti opened his first gallery in London and moved to the present location in 2011. He also takes part in the annual Master Paintings Week. In 2007 he opened a gallery in New York in collaboration with Adam Williams Fine Art. Just steps away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this Upper East Side gallery offers a glorious space in which to present the finest of Italian Old Masters.
SEICENTO FIORENTINO: Sacred and Profane Allegories
20 June to 30 July 2012
Following its showing in New York in May, the exhibition SEICENTO FIORENTINO: Sacred and Profane Allegories will be shown in Moretti Fine Art’s London gallery to coincide with Masterpiece and Master Paintings Week.
The Seicento, or the 17th century, refers to Italian cultural and social history during this tumultuous period, characterised by several wars, conflicts and invasions as well as the patronage of the arts and architecture. It was also the period which saw the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Counter Reformation and the Baroque era together with advancements in Italian science, philosophy and technology.
Being unveiled in London is Esther and Ahasuerus by Giovanni Battista Vanni (1600-1660), a large painting illustrating the Bible story narrated in the Old Testament. Esther, a young Jewish woman married to the king of Persia, Ahasuerus the Great, better known as Xerxes I (485-465 BC), was the brave heroine credited with the salvation of the Jewish people. The work was executed for a Florentine gentleman and recorded in the documents of the Accademia del Disegno in a lawsuit that took place in 1650. The archive reveals that Vanni asked the Accademia to intercede with regard to payment from his patron. The painting was evaluated by the painters Giovanni Martinelli, Lorenzo Lippi, Mario Balassi, Baccio del Bianco and Agostino Melissi, but no agreement was reached so it is probable that the canvas was returned to the artist. It was subsequently owned by the Serristori family until 1977.
The exhibition is curated by Francesca Baldassari, an independent scholar in Florence, who has achieved international recognition for her expertise on Florentine painting of the 17th and 18th centuries. She is the author of monographs on Tuscan artists of the period, Carlo Dolci, Cristoforo Munari, Giovanni Domenico Ferretti and Simone Pignoni as well as two important books on the period, in both English and Italian, La collezione Piero ed Elena Bigongiari. Il Seicento fiorentino tra favola e dramma and La Pittura del Seicento a Firenze. Indice degli artisti e delle loro opera.
