Impressionism

Giuseppe De Nittis, Italy’s Unique Impressionist –First exhibition in the USA

It has become voguish for museum curators to present works by undervalued artists, oft from third world countries or by African-Americans, especially women. The Phillips Collection has joined this leaning but diverts from this trend by presenting the first exhibition in the United States of Giuseppe De Nittis (1846-84), a white male from Italy. Although not widely known in the USA, he was a celebrated artist of his time. His paintings are in renowned collections as the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, British Museum in London, Chicago’s Art Institute, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Middlebury College’s Art Museum, Washington’s National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Federico Zeri (1921-98), the eminent art historian, called him “Italy’s greatest artist of the 19th century” and “Italy’s Sisley, Monet, and Pissarro”. While not a bedazzling exhibition, nonetheless it is one that yields new insights into Impressionist art beyond its traditional cast of historical artists. De Nittis’s brand of paintings links the styles of Salon art with an idiosyncratic interpretation of Impressionism.

Washington’s NGA, “The Artful Traveler: Sargent in Spain”

A CENTURY AGO, WHEN portraiture was the leading platform proclaiming status and position, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was in high-demand as the top portrait artist of his era. He was lauded by his long-time friend, writer Henry James, for his ability to translate visual perception into art “as if painting were pure tact of vision, a simple manner of feeling.” (Henry James, “Picture & Text,” Harper’s Magazine, 1887.)

A Virtual Vernissage: ‘Google Arts & Culture’ Unveiled

When a friend raved about Google Arts & Culture, I nodded evasively. The awful truth was I only vaguely knew about this platform—I had heard of it, but had never used it. I wasn’t alone. As I began to explore, I came across a recent piece by Washington POST chief art critic Philip Kennicott where he admitted, “Before the pandemic shut down, I almost never visited the vast trove compiled by Google’s Art & Culture platform. I wrote about it when … it was announced in 2011 and then never paid it a second thought. Today, I find myself slinking back and enjoying parts of it thoroughly.” (Kennicott, WashPOST, 5/29/2020)

?J. M. W. Turner: Watercolors from London’s Tate, at Mystic Seaport, CT

The exhibition J. M. W. Turner: Watercolors from Tate, presented at the Mystic Seaport Museum in partnership with Tate, London, offers the largest number of this master’s watercolors to be seen in the USA in decades and it is the only North American venue. David Blayney Brown, the Tate’s Manton Senior Curator of British Art 1790-1850, curated this superb display that provides viewers with an extraordinary chance to see key watercolors spanning the entire career of this prominent artist. The distinct assortment of 97 works were chosen from the legacy known as the “Turner Bequest,” comprised of more than 30,000 works on paper, 300 oil paintings, and 280 sketchbooks. The vast collection was bequeathed to Great Britain after the artist’s death in 1851 (b. (1775). According to Brown, “Here we see not the public Turner, whose large oil paintings hung prominently in the Royal Academy, but the private artist who continually tested compositions, color, and tactile effect.”

Philanthropy Today: Murky Waters, Quirky Consequences, and the Joys of Public Art

Philanthropists may fancy themselves the Medici of today’s art world. Demanding or endearing, they control the money that shapes public access to contemporary art and culture. The Sackler family has earned the consequences of outraged headlines, with the Louvre the latest museum to scrub “Sackler” from its walls. Other major museums like the Met, the Guggenheim, and the Tate have stopped accepting Sackler money.

?Washington’s Freer Gallery with Whistler’s Watercolors: a Rare Look

Gilded Age industrialist Charles Lang Freer met artist James McNeill Whistler in London in 1890. Whistler was an American expatriate artist who had reinvented himself in the previous decade after suffering a serious fallout with his chief patron, Frederick Leyland, over Whistler’s resplendent but over-the-top design for Leyland’s “Peacock Room.”

The Peacock Room, designed by James McNeill Whistler for shipping magnate Frederick Leyland in 1876

Serena Dykman, director of, ‘Nana,’ a documentary about her grandmother, a concentration camp survivor.

Two recent documentaries, both directorial feature film debuts, approach the memory and history of World War II from distinctly different and refreshing perspectives.

Serena Dykman’s “Nana” is a eulogy, not only for her grandmother, Maryla Michalowski-Dyamant, a survivor of Auschwitz who died when Serena was 11, but for all victims of the Holocaust. “I remember a lot of people attending her funeral,” director Dykman recalls. “I remember that she was a very important person, a public person.” And Dykman remembers hearing the vocabulary of her grandmother’s mission – words like “Auschwitz,” “Birkenau,” “ghetto,” “Mengele,” “gas chambers” – “and not understanding them, but knowing they were bad words.”More

‘Cézanne Portraits’ at National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Paul Cézanne, Self-Portrait (1883-1887), 44 × 36 cm. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark.

The landmark exhibition Cézanne Portraits is a collaborative endeavor co-organized by London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC— for this, the final stop of its tour. Even though modified to some extent, due to loan restrictions, it reveals a remarkable selection of portrayals, disclosing the distinct qualities of this extraordinary artist, a forerunner to Cubism whose work became the essence for abstract art of the 20th century. Both Matisse and Picasso have said that Cézanne “is the father of us all.” Yet Cézanne stands alone between his Impressionist and Post-Impressionist peers for his deep respect for the art of the past. Throughout his career Cézanne continuously went to the Louvre to consult the Old Masters.More

Cézanne’s Realms of Inner Space (fantasy on a chance meeting with Friedrich Nietzsche)

“We philosophers are never more delighted than when we are taken for artists.” ~F. Nietzsche

“Painting from Nature is not copying the object: it is realizing one’s sensations.” ~P. Cézanne

“The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.” ~F. Nietzsche

Chapter 1. La Recontre

Pämierlieutenant Friedrich Nietzsche walked down the gangway into the bright Mediterranean sun, a battered valise in hand. The year was 1869. Scanning the busy dockside, he saw a sign over the customs house door announcing, ‘Marseille,’ along with a fingerpost directing travelers ‘ à droite’ for public transport to his next destination, L’Estaque. Conscription into the Prussian army two years earlier meant a brief return to active service as international tensions mounted, with a duty station assignment in Lucerne. But in spite of his military responsibilities and ongoing squabbles among diplomats far removed to the north, Nietzsche intended to use his short military leave to seek the warmth and intellectual stimulation of this azure-drenched, palm-fringed coastal retreat.

Above: Friedrich Nietzsche as a Prussian military officer (1868-69).

www.artesmagazine.com — Bobby Steggert (Henri Toulouse-Lautrec), Mara Davi (Suzanne Valadon) in Long Wharf’s production of ‘My Paris.’ All photos: T. Charles Erickson

A crippled man, diminutive in size, falls victim to drink, drugs and various other vices and dies before he is forty. Not the stuff you would gravitate towards if you were considering creating a musical, unless you wished to have your audience leave the theater feeling worse than it did when it sat down. You also probably wouldn’t think of writing a musical about a wicked witch or a girl named Mimi dying of HIV or a mother suffering from bipolar disorder. You’d walk away from the projects…and you would be wrong. xxxxxMore