| The First Art Newspaper on the Net | | Established in 1996 | Saturday, February 11, 2017 |
| | | Erotica: Passion & Desire exhibition and sale tests taboos at London auction house | |
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Across the centuries, art has always been intrinsically linked to expressions of passion and sensuality. Erotic: Passion & Desire encompasses representations of love and sex from antiquity to the present day. Photo: Sotheby's.
LONDON (AFP).- Phallic furniture, graphic ancient Roman sculptures and hardcore photographs are among the new exhibits on show at London's Sotheby's auction house ahead of a sale of sexually-charged art through the ages. "Erotica: Passion & Desire", which opens on Saturday ahead of the sale next week, brings together over 150 titillating items to explore the varied attitudes to nudity and sex across eras and continents. "A lot of it is depictions of the human form, some of it more graphic than others. What we see is a subject that has repeated itself throughout history," Sotheby's head of sale Constantine Frangos told AFP. ... More |
The Best Photos of the Day French President Francois Hollande (front) visits The National Center of Costume and Scenography (Centre National du Costume de Scene or CNCS in French) along with mayor of Moulins Pierre-Andre Perissol (C) on February 9, 2017 in Moulins. Thierry Zoccolan / AFP
| Oxford's Bodleian launches seminal online catalogue of the complete works of William Henry Fox Talbot | | Christie's to offer Basquiat self-portrait from the collection of U2's Adam Clayton | | Parmigianino's 16th century masterpiece at risk of leaving the United Kingdom |
The Royal Exchange, London, winter 1844 to spring 1845. Photo: National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library.
OXFORD.- The Bodleian Libraries have launched an innovative web-based resource that brings together the complete works of British photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot, available to the public at foxtalbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. For the first time ever, users can discover and search through annotated digitized images of Talbots photographs gathered from collections around the world. The fascinating images show the emergence and development of photography while capturing moments of early Victorian life. This comprehensive online Talbot Catalogue Raisonné is an important new resource for scholars, educators, curators, conservators, photographers and historians in many fields, as well as anyone interested in photography. Catalogues raisonné encompass the entire corpus of an artists work and while they are common in art history, nothing of this scale has been attempted for photography ... More | |
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (1982). Oil stick on paper, 42⅝ x 30in. (108.3 x 76.2cm.) Estimate: £1 - 1.5m. © Christies Images Limited 2017.
LONDON.- Christies will present Jean-Michel Basquiats Untitled (1982, estimate: £1,000,000 - 1,500,000) from the collection of U2s bassist Adam Clayton as a major highlight of the upcoming Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction on 7 March. Held for over twenty-five years in Claytons collection, Untitled featured on the front cover of the catalogue for the exhibition Basquiat Drawings held in 1990 at The Robert Miller Gallery in New York. A deeply poignant self-portrait, the work offers a rare insight into Basquiats psyche at a pivotal moment in his career: a tear drops from his eye; his arms seem to pierce his body like an arrow. Basquiat depicts himself as a martyr: a Saint Sebastian-like figure for the contemporary age. Jean-Michel Basquiats Untitled will be on view as part of a global tour to Beijing (11-13 February), New York (24-26 February) and London (from 3 March) ahead of the auction at C ... More | |
Parmigianino's The Virgin and Child with Saint Mary Magdalen and the Infant Saint John the Baptist.
LONDON.- Culture Minister Matt Hancock has placed a temporary export bar on a 16th century masterpiece by Parmigianino, to provide an opportunity to keep it in the country. The Virgin and Child with Saint Mary Magdalen and the Infant Saint John the Baptist is at risk of being exported from the UK unless a buyer can be found to match the asking price of £24.5 million. This exceptional artwork is a rare example of a religious easel painting from the last decade of the artists short career. It is one of the finest examples by Parmigianino remaining in private hands and is the only late religious painting by the artist in the United Kingdom. The extraordinary work has been in the United Kingdom for nearly 250 years and was one of the first Parmigianinos to be bought by a British collector. Acquired from the Barberini Collection in Rome, it has passed through the collections of three of the countrys major collectors of Italian Renaissance painting. Minister of State for Digital and Cultu ... More |
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| Pompeii unveils Roman kiss for Valentine's day | | Exhibition shows painters and sculptors engaged in their everyday work | | Celaya Brothers Gallery opens "If you want to do something, forget this debt, and remember it later" |
A fresco in the House of the Chaste Lovers at the archeological site of Pompeii. Eliano IMPERATO / AFP.
POMPEII (AFP).- The lava may have cooled 2,000 years ago but Pompeii is a hot destination this Valentine's day with a special opening of the exceptionally preserved House of the Chaste Lovers. This rich baker's dwelling, complete with garden, stables, mill and a sumptuous fresco of a tender kiss, stands on via dell'Abbondanza, the once-bustling thoroughfare of this ancient Roman city. It also boasts the grinning skeletons of petrified mules caught in the 79AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Visitors will be able to snatch a rare glimpse this weekend of the 1500-square metre (16,000 square foot) site. After February 14 it will close its doors again for a four-year restoration as part of a multi-million euro Pompeii preservation project. "The complex encapsulates both the beauty and the challenges of Pompeii," archaeologist Alberta Mattelone, 40, told AFP. ... More | |
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Ãtude de chat, vers 1902, 27 x 20,5 cm. © Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, acquisition, 1954.
LAUSANNE.- This exhibition shows painters and sculptors engaged in their everyday work. Swiss drawings from the 1780s to the 1950s are presented in three sections Portfolios, The Path to Creation, Innermost Thoughts and introduce the visitor to some of the stages in the genesis of a work of art. Academic drawings, projects, roughs, composition sketches and figure studies reveal avenues explored and dead ends sometimes arrived at. The exhibition closes with more personal images bridging the gap between the public and private spheres. On show are works by Albert Anker, René Auberjonois, Alice Bailly, Balthus, Ernest Biéler, François Bocion, Gustave Buchet, Paul Cézanne, Ãmily Chapalay, Jean Clerc, Louis Ducros, Alberto Giacometti, Giovanni Giacometti, Charles Gleyre, Ferdinand Hodler, Giuseppe ... More | |
Hannah Black, Blank et (Etihad), 2016. Plexiglas, airline blanket.
MEXICO CITY.- Celaya Brothers Gallery presents If you want to do something, forget this debt, and remember it later, a group exhibition with artists Lene Adler Petersen & Bjørn Nørgaard (DK), Hannah Black (UK) and Paloma Contreras Lomas (MX), addressing the principles of capitalist accumulation and their social impact. The show is curated by Dana Kopel as part of the 2017 Curatorial Residency Program. If you want to do something, forget this debt, and remember it later navigates the ways in which bodies are shaped by and resist flows of capital, determinations of value, and inescapable debt through video, performance and installation. First, I want to note two things that might or might not be obvious: 1. That capitalism, or the debt that it runs on, demands fixed identities: you must remain the same personwith the same fixed and knowable name, race, gender, and so onin ... More |
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| Planned Norway massacre memorial may be shifted | | Swedish opera star Nicolai Gedda dies aged 91 | | 'Violence' moves NY museum to shut down anti-Trump art show |
A model of Memory Wound, the winning entry for the memorial by the Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg. AFP PHOTO / NTB scanpix /Jonas Dahlberg Studio.
OSLO (AFP).- The youth wing of Norway's Labour Party proposed Thursday to move the location of a controversial memorial for the victims of Anders Behring Breivik's 2011 massacre after local residents sued the state. The planned memorial, entitled "Memory Wound", would see a wide slit cut into a strip of land near the island of Utoya where most of Breivik's 77 victims were killed. But about 20 locals, some of whom helped save lives during the massacre, sued the state in June to block the project, arguing it would harm the local community and landscape. They see the planned memorial as too invasive and too close to their homes. Now, the Labour Party's youth wing and a support group for the victims' families have proposed moving the location in a bid to avoid a legal battle. "We ... feel that we cannot stay on the sidelines and watch a difficult process ... More | |
This picture taken on February 22, 2001 shows Swedish opera singer Nicolai Gedda. Janerik HENRIKSSON / TT NEWS AGENCY / AFP.
STOCKHOLM.- Swedish tenor Nicolai Gedda, whose superb vocal control made him a star on the international opera scene for half a century, has died at 91, his entourage said Friday. He died on January 8 after a heart attack at his home in Tolochenaz, Switzerland, his daughter told the French magazine Forum Opera on Thursday night. She had kept his death secret for a month, the magazine added. The Royal Swedish Opera and the mayor of Tolochenaz, just outside Lausanne, confirmed his death to AFP. With a diverse repertoire and an exceptionally long career, Gedda was one of the opera greats of the 20th century, alongside stars such as Maria Callas, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. "He had an amazing lyrical and elegant voice and he was especially distinguished within the French opera," Royal Swedish Opera spokesman Torbjorn Eriksson told AFP. ... More | |
This file photo taken on January 24, 2017 shows US actor Shia LaBeouf near the camera during his He Will Not Divide Us livestream outside the Museum of the Moving Image. TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP.
NEW YORK (AFP).- A streaming video performance installation that aimed to provide a forum for anti-Trump expression was shut down after it became "a flashpoint for violence," New York's Museum of the Moving Image said Friday. The participatory project "He Will Not Divide US," by actor Shia LaBeouf and two other artists, kicked off the day of Donald Trump's inauguration, January 20. It had intended to continue running throughout the new president's four-year term. But according to the museum, located in the city's Queens borough, the exhibit "created a serious and ongoing public safety hazard for the museum, its visitors, staff, local residents and businesses." "The installation had become a flashpoint for violence and was disrupted from its original intent," a statement added. The digital art project consisted of a ... More |
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| Exhibition in Dresden presents 19th-century paintings of Italy between Claude Lorrain, Turner and Böcklin | | Revered James A. Rocheleau bank collection to star in RSL's March 18-19 auction | | Retrospective of contemporary Native American artist on view at the Dayton Art Institute |
Gustav Adolf Kuntz (1843-1879), Roemische Gemueseverkaeuferin.
DRESDEN.- During the 19th century, Italy was a magnetic destination for many travellers from Northern Europe, including artists such as Carl Blechen, Camille Corot and William Turner, Oswald Achenbach and Max Klinger. In Germany, Johnann Wolfgang von Goethe fuelled the compulsion to head South with his "Italienische Reise" ("Italian Journey"), published in 1816/17 for the first time. "Italian" was the word Heinrich von Kleist used in a letter to describe the blue sky over Dresden, thereby expressing a deeply rooted yearning for the bright light of a country which, in equal measure, cast a spell with its ancient and Christian historical sites, its wealth of Renaissance art and its landscapes. The city of Rome became an artistic focal point in this context. Artists of various nationalities hoped to find impulses that would give direction to their creativity here. The exhibition "Beneath Italian Skies. 19th-century paintings of Italy between Claude Lorrain, Turner and ... More | |
Exceptionally fine example of the small Boston State Bank. All images courtesy of RSL Auction Co.
WHITEHOUSE STATION, NJ.- The James A. Rocheleau collection of superior-quality still and mechanical banks will headline RSL Auctions Saturday/Sunday March 18-19 auction at the companys New Jersey gallery. The entire opening session will be devoted exclusively to the 350-lot Rocheleau collection, which is known and admired throughout the bank-collecting community for its stellar condition. Day two will feature 500 lots of carefully curated multiple consignments of European and American toys and banks. The late Jim Rocheleau owned and operated Rally Building, a Detroit-based company he founded in the 1970s. Until the time of his passing last April, Jim was a very active bank collector and, for many years, a good personal friend of mine. It was obvious that he took pride in each new acquisition, said RSL partner Ray Haradin. Jim was first and foremost a condition buyer. Two of his mentors were Greg Zemenick and Donal Markey, who famously insisted ... More | |
Kay WalkingStick, Me and My Neon Box, 1971. Acrylic on canvas, 54 x 60 in. Collection of the artist. Photo: Lee Stalsworth, Fine Art through Photography, LLC Courtesy American Federation of Arts.
DAYTON, OH.- The Dayton Art Institute opens its 2017 special exhibition season with a major retrospective of contemporary Native American artist Kay WalkingStick, on view at the museum from February 11 through May 7. Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist features about 60 of her most notable works, drawn from public and private collections across the country and from the collection of the artist. The special exhibition demonstrates the breadth of WalkingSticks achievements and her contributions to American art. While WalkingSticks work has been widely exhibited and discussed, this touring retrospective will be the first survey of her singular career. The exhibition, which originated at the Smithsonians National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), was co-curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo), Associate Curator, and David Penney, Associate ... More |
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Picasso and Rivera: Conversations Across Time
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300 photographs of Rock & Roll musicians and Jazz greats at Shelburne Museum
SHELBURNE, VT.- Rock and Roll provided the soundtrack to American culture in the late 20th century. Drawn from one of the largest private collections of photographs of rock musicians in the United States, Backstage Pass: Rock & Roll Photography captures the intimate relationship between photographer and musician. Featuring more than 300 photographs many rarely seen by the public the exhibition will include studio portraits and candid outtakes of famous rock and roll stars and jazz greats from Miles Davis, Elvis and The Beatles to David Bowie, Prince, and The Beastie Boys. Backstage Pass: Rock & Roll Photography is on view February 11 through May 7, 2017 at Shelburne Museum. The relationship between rock and roll and photography is intimate and profound. A rock musicians career is predicated on a cult of personality the ability to strike a pose ... More
Exhibition of work by Robert Grosvenor opens at the Renaissance Society
CHICAGO, IL.- The Renaissance Society presents an exhibition of work by Robert Grosvenor. The centerpiece of the exhibition is an untitled sculpture from 1989-90, re-contextualized within a spare architectural installation. Over his 50-year career, Robert Grosvenor has produced a body of work that is at once solidly physical and conceptual, muscular and fluid. Grosvenor frequently melds industrial materials and found objects as he experiments with texture and scale, resulting in formal sculptures that reveal a handmade quality and subtle vein of humor. The works resist association, instead quietly and strangely asserting themselves both as assemblages of relationships and as discrete, holistic entities. For this sculpture, at once monumental and human-scale, Grosvenor adapts the materials of infrastructureconcrete blocks, steel, Plexiglas and paintevoking ... More
Richard Learoyd photography exhibition opens at Nelson-Atkins
KANSAS CITY, MO.- Contemporary English photographer Richard Learoyd, using a large camera obscura in his East London studio, creates figure studies, portraits and still lifes that are neither glamorous nor retouched, yet they exude serene power along with mesmerizing detail. Richard Learoyd: In the Studio, an exhibition organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and curated by Arpad Kovacs, Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs at the Getty, opened at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City Feb. 10. Learoyd will be in Kansas City and in conversation with Photography Curator April M. Watson in Atkins Auditorium on Friday, Feb. 17 at 6 p.m. The exhibition includes 18 large-scale color photographs and two artists books. Richard Learoyd is internationally recognized as one of the most compelling contemporary photographers of our ... More
Important work by the world-famous French artist Pierre Huyghe on view in Copenhagen
COPENHAGEN.- Copenhagen Contemporary presents an important work by the world-famous French artist Pierre Huyghe: the video installation Untitled (Human Mask) (2014). Footage from a Japanese coastal city devastated by a tsunami transports us to an eerie world where fiction and reality, culture and nature mesh and merge. Pierre Huyghes video Untitled (Human Mask) (2014) opens with footage from the nuclear disaster area of Fukushima following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The city is utterly ruined, its houses pushed away from their foundations and its streets empty of life. An unmanned drone camera takes us into a restaurant that initially seems abandoned, but in a dimly lit room we come across a monkey that has been trained to act as a waiter. We look on in wonder as we follow the animals restless movements inside the empty restaurant, moving ... More
MSK Ghent exhibits works by Francisco Goya & Farideh Lashai
GHENT.- In 2016, the MSK welcomed 137,132 visitors. With this record year, the museum continues the positive trend that began in 2015. Catherine de Zegher, director, says: Its clear that The Open Museum is growing: as a social meeting place for old and young, as a museum with a focus on art from the past and the present, and as a place of reflection on art, beauty and society. In February, we open the Goya / Lashai exhibition, which connects the present with the past in the fight against injustice and pain ... Whoever visits the museum in the weeks leading up to the opening might encounter the Iranian artist Parastou Forouhar making a work in situ. During the spring of 2017, the MSK brings together two artists in the newly established Drawings Cabinet. The exhibition Eyewitnesses links the social criticism of the Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828) to the ... More
Exhibition presents portraits that attempt to convey the transition to adulthood
THE HAGUE.- Emotional vulnerability, a search for personal identity and physical change are all key characteristics of adolescence. Contemporary photographers like Paul Graham, Rineke Dijkstra, Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff create portraits that attempt to convey the transition to adulthood. In the 1990s, they captured the euphoria of adolescents at the end of an era. The End of an Age in the Vincent Award Room features a selection of their images. Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959) made her international break-through with a series of portraits (1992-1994) of young people on beaches in Belgium, Croatia, America and Poland. In Long Island, N.Y., U.S.A., July 1, 1993, two boys in beach shorts pose for the camera with the sea in the background. Their expression is uncertain and their body language hesitant. Dijkstras image powerfully conveys the growing but still shaky ... More
Kunsthalle Basel presents a new series of fifty-five panels by Sadie Benning
BASEL.- Videos are what Sadie Benning first became known for; they won the then-teenage artist awards and visi- bility throughout the 1990s on the experimental art and video circuit. Lo-fi and black and white, they explore aspects of memory, identity, and the anxiousness of growing up queer in the Midwestern United States. I got started partly because I needed different images and I never wanted to wait for someone to do them for me, the artist once explained in an interview. Improvising with materials at hand and a toy camera, the adolescent Benning constructed fragmented, highly personal moving images, portraying the artist amid everyday objects, drawings, and scraps of handwritten text. More than two decades later, the homespun poetics, grainy images, and durational logic explored in these earlier video works has expanded and taken on quite a different form ... More
Cincinnati Art Museum presents "Transcending Reality: The Woodcuts of Kōsaka Gajin"
CINCINNATI, OH.- The Cincinnati Art Museum will present a special collection of Japanese woodcut prints from the late 1940s and early 1950s in the exhibition Transcending Reality: The Woodcuts of Kōsaka Gajin, February 11May 7, 2017. The first solo exhibition of Gajins work in the United States, Transcending Reality showcases the beauty of Japanese landscape and architectural monuments in more than 50 monochromatic woodcuts from the Cincinnati Art Museums Howard and Caroline Porter Collection of Twentieth Century Japanese Prints, the largest repository of Gajins late woodcuts outside of Japan. Cincinnati Art Museum Curator of Prints Kristin Spangenberg lends her expertise as lead curator for this exhibition. Mary Baskett, the museums former curator of prints (1965-71), has shared her ongoing research on the artist for this exhibition. Spangenberg and ... More
Exhibition offers a multi-faceted glimpse of the Werkbund living initiatives through the late 1950s
BERLIN.- Berlin after 1945: "How will we live?" was the question of the hour. The exhibition project gern modern? explores ideas for actual and idealized concepts of home that were developed by German Werkbund members in the war-ravaged city and asks about the issues timeliness and significance for the present. Partially unknown objects and documents from the collections of the Werkbundarchiv Museum der Dinge, in addition to numerous loans, offer a multi-faceted glimpse of the Werkbund living initiatives through the late 1950s. Architectural models and furniture, posters, plans and drawings, historical photos and films are on view, as well as learning boxes and a model kit from the Berlin Wohnberatungsstelle (home advice centre). With an incisive view of the history of the Berlin Werkbund, gern modern? offers a contribution to the current engagement with concepts ... More
'Blacklisted' South Korea artists sue president, officials
SEOUL (AFP).- Hundreds of South Korean artists filed a lawsuit against impeached President Park Geun-Hye and two officials Thursday over a state "blacklist" of creatives who had criticised the authorities. Park's former chief of staff and the ex-culture minister were charged this week for compiling and enforcing the list of nearly 10,000 artists in music, literature, film, dance, fine arts and theatre. The list of "left-wing" artists was aimed at starving them of government subsidies or private funding, according to prosecutors probing a wider scandal around Park. In the legal action, 461 artists sought one million won ($872) each for breach of their basic rights in privacy and freedom of expression and belief, said lawyers representing them. "The artists were forced to censor themselves to avoid being labelled as 'leftists' and treated unfairly in state support, or becoming ... More
New museum exhibition to feature original works by comic book artist Alex Ross
WINCHESTER, VA.- "Superheroes and Superstars: The Works of Alex Ross"a new exhibition featuring the work of one of the worlds greatest comic book artistswill be on view at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley (MSV) from February 11 through May 14, 2017. The MSV is the first venue to host this traveling exhibition, which has been organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. According to "Superheroes and Superstars" curator Jesse Kowalski, Alex Ross has revitalized classic superheroes into works of fine art with his unique, painted photo-realistic style. The MSV is thrilled to be the first venue to present Superheroes and Superstars, notes MSV Executive Director Dana Hand Evans, who adds that the Museum jumped at the chance to bring the exhibition to the region. Alex Ross is one of the premier illustrators of our time, says Evans. ... More
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Flashback On a day like today, French caricaturist and painter Honoré Daumier, died February 11, 1879. Honoré Daumier (February 26, 1808 - February 11, 1879) was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter, and sculptor, whose many works offer commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century. In this image: French artist Honore Daumier received a 6-month jail sentence when one of his early political cartoons of King Louis Philippe, portrayed as Gargantua, the gluttonous giant in the books of Rabelais seen in this image, was published in a paper. The Phillips Collection is hosting the first major exhibit of Daumier's works since his death in 1879 starting Feb. 19, 2000 in Washington.
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