Impressionism

Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA: Post-Impressionist ‘Van Gogh and Nature’

www.artesmagazine.com — ‘A Wheatfield, with Cypresses,’ 1889. Oil on canvas, 72 x 90 cm. The National Gallery, London, bought Courtauld Fund, 1923 Image © The National Gallery, London 2014.

The parking lots of the Clark Art Institute have been packed all summer, including mid-week and early in the day. Even after extensive renovation and expansion, one summer after the reopening of Tadao Ando’s grand design, there is simply not enough space for cars. They line the road at the edge of the campus.

Credit that to the appeal of Van Gogh and Nature an exhibition focused on many less known and rarely encountered works by the Dutch post-impressionist. Adding to the number of visitors is a summer-long visit from Paris of the iconic work, Whistler’s Mother. xxxxxxMore

National Gallery’s Double-Header: Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte; Dutch Master, Joachim Wtewael

One of the most influential but least recognized of the French Impressionists, Gustave Caillebotte exemplified Charles Baudelaire’s definition of a “flaneur.” In an article published in Le Figaro in 1863, Baudelaire rhapsodized about the flaneur as a symbol of urban modernity—a “passionate spectator” who immersed himself in the city’s “ebb and flow of movement” as modern life created a kaleidoscope of the “fugitive and the infinite.” The flaneur rejoiced in his “incognito” while he recorded “the flickering grace of all the elements of life.” xxxxxxMore

The Film, ‘Mr. Turner’: Art is the Proper Task of Life

Impressionism’s precursor, J.M.W. Turner, embraced the magical power of light and a new way of seeing.

The portrait of the artist as a tortured genius is a ragged cliché, but clichés are clichés because they are truer than not. A luminary such as J.M.W. Turner would seem unusual territory for Mike Leigh, a limner of the common man whose butchers and bakers and candlestick makers struggle to stay afloat in the face of social and personal hardship. What Leigh showed us in his 1999 Topsy-Turvy, and lays bare again in Mr. Turner, is that great artists are mere mortals, too, ordinary people with ordinary problems facing quotidian pettiness and profound despair. And like the rest of us, rely on ego, self-deception, secrets and lies – and sometimes hope and grace – to cope. xxxxxxMore

National Gallery of Art: ‘Degas/Cassatt’- Joint Venture in Paris’s Belle Epoche

Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas shared a kindred sensibility toward making art in the 19th century not surprisingly because they came from similar backgrounds—privileged and born into cultivated upper-middle class banking families. Economic independence afforded Cassatt the luxury to devote her time entirely to being an artist, live a particular life style, pursue a career in a world ruled by men, as well as choose her destiny outside the boundaries of marriage. Few women of her day could claim an art education starting at the early age of fifteen studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia. Exasperated by the patronizing attitude of its male students and its teachers, exclusion from study of live nude models, as and sluggish teaching methods, Cassatt left the Academy and turned to the Old Masters. Moreover, she moved to Paris in 1866 with her mother and a family of friends, who acted as proper chaperones. xxxxxxMore

Arkansas’ Crystal Bridges: All the Art Museum Wal-Mart Money Can Buy

New England museums are expanding. The Museum of Fine Arts has completed its Art of the Americas wing, designed by Lord Norman Foster. The venerable Gardner Museum expanded with a design by Renzo Piano, who also designed the Harvard University Art Museums, unveiling in November, 2014.

During the Fourth of July weekend, the Sterling and Francine Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass will introduce the design by Tadeo Ando. It hugs the ground with reflecting pools enhancing the horizon line of Berkshire Mountains. Its prior annual attendance of 150,000 is anticipated to double. Nearby, Mass MoCA expects an uptick of some 40,000 to 165,000 through both the Clark’s expansion and first full season of an Anselm Kiefer building, in addition to the one displaying works by Sol LeWitt. xxxxxxMore

Editor’s Letter

“We have art in order not to die of the truth.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Left: *Raphael, Portrait of a Young Man (Self-portrait?), 1513-14. Plundered by Nazis in Poland. Never recovered. Estimated value, $100M.

Private Eye?

It used to be that art collecting was the province of the very rich—kings and sultans, popes and emperors. Then, in the Age of Exploration, an emerging merchant class arrived on the scene, in the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and England. They wanted ‘in’ because owning art was prestigious, a sign that you were traveling in the right circles. It meant that you could raise two crossed fingers at your next banquet and proudly boast, “The king and I, yup, we’re like that!” Collecting—or rather accumulating—wasn’t a case of art for art’s sake; there were matters of power and prestige on the line. Art was hung high in 17th and 18th century estates, salon style: floor to ceiling and end-to end, in a helter-skelter mix of portraits, landscapes and still lifes. The portraits were, of course, renderings of you and your wealthy forbears; the landscapes often reflected on pastoral settings or storms at sea, metaphors for good times and bad; and still lifes were crammed to bursting with all manner of fruits, vegetables, flowers, sea life and other dead animals. If life at your estate was truly bountiful—then this painting confirmed there were enough leftovers to make a painting. artes fine arts magazineMore

Musée de l’Orangerie Shows ‘I Macchiaioli’: Mid-19th C. Italian Modernist Painters

Years ago, I wandered into the modern wing of the Pitti Palace in Florence (left), and found myself alone in the sumptuous company of beautiful mid-to-late 19th century paintings, rich in pictorial poetry of the Tuscan landscapes and moments of Tuscan life, by the Italian painters, known collectively as the Macchiaioli.

Some scenes were painted horizontally, on small, wide planks of wood or cardboard, capturing the panoramic views of the Tuscan hills hugging the River Arno and its tributaries with hardened peasants tending to their quotidian chores; and others, painted on canvas, depicted scenes from forgotten parts of Florence; or interior activities of dutiful modern ladies of the emerging bourgeoisie; or valiant soldiers sacrificed in the Risorgimento—the three wars for Italian independence and unification from 1848 through 1870. Each, in turn, was full of lush color, tonal contrasts and spatial placements, executed in short fiery strokes that, from a distance, evoked the lyricism of the Tuscany. Yet as a whole they were devoid of treacly romanticism, but rich in loving realism. artes fine arts magazineMore

Metropolitan Museum of Art Fuses French Impressionism, Fashion, Modernity

“We find ourselves faced with the only reality—despite ourselves we encourage our painters to reproduce us on their canvases just as we are, with our costumes and customs.” ~Émile Zola (1868)

Does life imitate art, or art imitate life? Addressing that very quandary, a stunningly-curated show at the Met demonstrates how to pull out all the stops, with the depth of a collection being parlayed in the interest of a good story. The exhibit, Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity takes a revealing look at the role of fashion in the works of several impressionist painters. More than 80 major figure paintings by the most notable of the period are assembled from the Met collection, along with some key loans. Paintings are presented in concert with examples of period dress, accessories, fashion plates, photographs and prints, highlighting the vital relationship between artist and subject, the vastly divergent worlds of painter and patron, and the mise-en-scene of bourgeois Paris—between 1860-1880—just then emerging as the style and cultural capital of the world.

Above, left: Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926) Camille (1866), Oil on canvas, 90 15/16 x 59 1/2 in. Kunsthalle Bremen, Der Kunstverein in Bremen. artes fine arts magazineMore

Philly’s New Barnes Foundation with Faithful Interpretation of Collector’s Vision

In July, 1929, months before the stock market crash that resulted in the Great Depression of the 1930s, Albert Coombs Barnes (January 2, 1872 – July 24, 1951), sold his company for some $6 million. He made a vast fortune on the manufacture and sale of the antiseptic drug Argyrol, used to treat gonorrhea. By his thirties, he was a millionaire which in today’s dollars would make him a billionaire. Not only did the timely sale provide him with liquidity, but following the introduction of antibiotics during the post WW II war era, his medicine would have been obsolete.

This allowed him to focus entirely on his great passion–acquisition of contemporary art.

Left: Giorgio de Chirico, Portrait of Albert Barnes (1926). This and all other works pictured are collection: The Barnes Foundation. artes fine arts magazineMore

New Haven’s Yale University Art Gallery Re-Opens after Extensive Renovation

A recent tour of the newly expanded and renovated Yale University Art Gallery, in New Haven Connecticut, has visitors treading on a little-noticed engraved marker inlayed in the stone floor of the Ancient Arts gallery. Cool winter light slants into the space from nearby Chapel Street, illuminating the inscription: ‘Col. JOHN TRUMBULL, Patriot and Artist, Friend and Aid (sic) of WASHINGTON, lies beside his wife beneath this GALLERY OF ART. Lebanon 1756 – New York 1843.’ Look on the back side of any hard-to-find two-dollar bill and you can find a representation of Trumbull’s famous 1817 masterpiece, The Declaration of Independence. Large-scale versions of several pieces from his Revolutionary War series found their way into Bullfinch-designed niches in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. a decade later, but the smaller studies were eventually donated by a dispirited Trumbull to Yale University, after discovering, late in his life, that the American public had little appetite for history paintings, especially for events and personalities so recently transpired.