Displaying items by tag: Modern Art

Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, which specializes in modern and contemporary art and design, has received a major gift from the Swedish-born sculptor Claes Oldenburg and his late wife and long-time collaborator, Coosje van Bruggen. The couple met in 1976 while van Bruggen was working as a curator at the Stedelijk. Together, they created a swath of colorful, large-scale public sculptures, including "Flashlight" in Las Vegas, "Clothespin" in Philadelphia, "Spoonbridge and Cherry" in Minnesota, and "Shuttlecocks" in Kansas City.

Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s gift includes 175 works by 34 artists and spans a wide range of media -- from correspondence material and archival documents to installations, collages, sculptures, photographs, works on paper, books, and posters. van Bruggen served as a member of the curatorial staff at the Stedelijk from 1967 to 1971, a breakthrough period for conceptual and minimalist art.

One of the missions of the Vilcek Foundation is to highlight the many contributions to American society and cultural made by immigrants to this country.

The exhibit “From New York to New Mexico: Masterworks of American Modernism from the Vilcek Foundation,” which opened Sunday at the Philbrook Museum of Art, explores the development of a uniquely American form of avant-garde art.

From February 8 to June 28, Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, is to exhibit the works of artist Paul Gauguin.

Around 50 masterpieces by the artist will be displayed at this exhibition, having been lent from leading international museums and private collections. Gauguin’s paintings are characterised by their luminous colors and elementary forms and have been incredibly influential in Modern art.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has published a new handbook—the first in more than 20 years—of its encyclopedic collections. Featuring some 550 masterpieces from the Museum’s world renowned holdings of Asian, European, American, and modern and contemporary art, this volume includes a broad range of media from each of the Museum’s curatorial departments, including paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures, the decorative arts, costumes and textiles, arms and armor, and architectural settings. Expanded entries provide in depth information on some of the most significant works, among them Thomas Eakins’s masterpiece "The Gross Clinic" (1875) and a superb man and horse armor acquired in 2009.

The introduction to the handbook, written by Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, recounts the Museum’s institutional history and the formation and distinctive characteristics of its collection.

For the third phase of its inaugural program, Paris’ Louis Vuitton Foundation is mounting an exhibition of major works that have been “key to the development of modernity, and have changed the course of art history in the twentieth century.” Keys to a Passion will be held from April 1 to July 6, 2015.

The Louis Vuitton Foundation, which opened in October 2014, was established by the French multinational luxury goods conglomerate, LVMH Group. It is housed in a building commissioned by LVMH’s chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Bernard Arnault, and designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect, Frank Gehry. Located in the Bois de Boulogne district, the diaphanous glass building spans 126,000 square feet and features eleven exhibition galleries presenting modern and contemporary works from the LVMH Group’s collection as well as masterpieces from Arnault’s personal holdings. The Foundation also hosts temporary exhibitions, artist commissions, multi-disciplinary performances, and events.

The Evening Sales of Impressionist and Modern Art and The Art of the Surreal that took place at Christie’s London on February 4 realized a combined total of £147,031,000/$222,751,965/€194,080,920, selling 88% by lot and 94% by value. The auctions had a combined pre-sale estimate of £92.8 million to £133.8 million. The top price was achieved by Joan Miró’s "Painting (Women, Moon, Birds)," which sold for £15,538,500/ $23,540,828/ €20,510,820 against an estimate of £4 million to £7 million. In total, 36 works of art sold for over £1 million / 45 for over $1 million.

Jay Vincze, International Director and Head of The Impressionist and Modern Art Department, Christie’s London: “We are very pleased with the strong results of this evening’s sales of Impressionist, Modern and Surrealist art which exceeded the top pre-sale estimate and welcomed registered bidders from 34 countries across 5 continents."

The former contemporary art dealer Yvon Lambert, who closed his gallery in Paris in December after trading for 48 years, is in talks to show part of his Modern art collection in the southern French town of Vence. Lambert is in discussions with the town’s mayor, Loïc Dombreval, about housing some of his holdings at the Château de Villeneuve, a 17th-century building which hosts Modern and contemporary art exhibitions. But the move may surprise city authorities in Avignon; since 2000, works from the Lambert collection have been shown in the city as part of a joint project.

Dombreval tells The Art Newspaper: “I can confirm that Lambert and Eric Mezil, the director of the Lambert collection, have proposed a program [of exhibitions] for the Château de Villeneuve which would begin in March. But this does not in any way mean that the Lambert collection will relocate from Avignon.

Five paintings by French impressionist Claude Monet, including his famous 1908 "Le Grand Canal" view of Venice, sold for a total of $84 million (73 million euros) in a London auction on Tuesday.

"Le Grand Canal", a hazy blue-and-green view of the banks of the Italian city painted at the peak of Monet's career, sold for $35.6 million (31.4 million euros).

It was part of a Sotheby's auction of impressionist and modern art works including paintings by masters Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse, and sculptures by Auguste Rodin.

At the start of the 20th century, Picasso was already living in Paris. The city had established itself as the center of international art at a time when the new machines that had been invented the century before, such as the automobile, the camera and the airplane, were starting to become democratized and to have an effect on lifestyles in the modern metropolis. Film made it possible for the first time to record and reproduce moving images. The speed of movement of people, goods and images had an impact on both life and the worldview, with movement becoming the protagonist and cultural episodes taking place in sequences that were as intense as they were brief. The Avant-gardes appeared as rapidly as they were soon to vanish.

Well aware of the revolutionary spirit of this time of change, Pablo Picasso employed highly unusual formal effects in his painting. With this tactic of transgression, he was able to bring inharmonious elements together in the same picture, in such a way that the resulting work destabilized the notion of static meaning.

You have likely heard the saying, "go big or go home." Defined in the Urban Dictionary as to "do whatever you are doing to its fullest," the term has been somewhat overused in modern language.

Since the 1940s, many artists have expressed the idea of going big through the size of their paintings. For those curious about the effect of standing before a large-scale painting, don't miss "XL: Large-Scale Paintings from the Permanent Collection" at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. Mary-Kay Lombino, curator, provided this statement about the exhibit: "By going big, artists radically extended the tenets of modernism. Their paintings, thanks to their monumental scale, had an emotional effect on their spectators."