Displaying items by tag: Modernist

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has put its epic, 1930’s Thomas Hart Benton mural cycle, “America Today,” on display in its American wing for the first time since it received the cycle from AXA Equitable Life Insurance company in 2012.

“America Today,” one of Benton’s most famous works and considered one of the most significant American works of its period, was painted by the artist in 1930 and 1931 for the boardroom of the modernist, Greenwich Village building of the New School for Social Research.

Sue Roe's chronicle of artistic high jinks in modernist Paris comes wrapped in a cover of blushing red, inky black and bilious green. These are the colours in which Picasso painted the Moulin de la Galette, a hilltop windmill in Montmartre that no longer ground flour but instead served as a raffish dance hall. Female mouths are like bleeding wounds, male top hats have a silky black sheen, and an unnatural green glare alluding to that most toxic of local tipples, absinthe.

Inside, Roe's writing is almost equally vivid. Reading her account of the way modern painters saw the world anew in raw, garish tones, you might feel the need to reach for your sunglasses. Picasso, the protagonist of this group biography, follows a relatively monochrome course from the frostbitten poverty of his "blue period" to a "rose period" when his images are warmed by a new sensuality.

This exhibition celebrates the gift of Thomas Hart Benton's epic mural America Today from AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in December 2012. Benton (1889–1975) painted this mural for New York's New School for Social Research to adorn the school's boardroom in its International Style modernist building on West 12th Street. Showing a sweeping panorama of American life throughout the 1920s, America Today ranks among Benton's most renowned works and is one of the most remarkable accomplishments in American art of the period.

The ten-panel mural will be featured in a space that recreates the boardroom in which it originally hung.

The Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock has received 290 watercolors and drawings by the early American modernist, John Marin, from Norma B. Marin, the artist’s daughter-in-law and administer of his estate. Norma Marin said, “I am thrilled that this collection of my father-in-law's watercolors and drawings is going to the Arkansas Arts Center, where it will give people a deeper understanding of his work. The Arts Center has a long history of collecting and exhibiting great American works on paper on paper, so I feel like we've found the perfect home for them.” This substantial gift, coupled with the works already in the Center’s collection, establishes the Arkansas Arts Center as the second largest repository of works by Marin in the world.

Marin, who was one of the first American artists to experiment with abstraction, is best known for his depictions of urban structures, landscapes and seascapes. The gift spans Marin’s career, beginning with early architectural drawings, moving on to the works created by Marin at the turn of the century in Paris, and ending with the modernist works he made following his return to America. The collection also includes works that explore subjects not readily associated with Marin such as portraits, nudes, animals, and the circus.

The Arkansas Arts Center is planning a major Marin exhibition tentatively scheduled for 2016.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents the exhibition Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis, an interdisciplinary show that sheds new light on the experimental decade of the 1920s in Paris. During that time, Fernand Léger, a French modernist painter, played an important role in redefining painting by engaging with the urban environment as well as mass media.

The cornerstone of the exhibition will be Léger’s The City (1919), which is also a pivotal part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection. The show will include other works by the artist that explore the city theme as well as film projections, theater designs, architectural models, and print and advertising designs by Léger as well as his contemporaries including Piet Mondrian, Le Corbusier and Many Ray.

Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis, presents over 120 works, including loans from American and European public and private collections. The exhibition will be on view through January 5, 2014.

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hardford, CT announced the appointment of Oliver Tostmann as the institution’s new Susan Morse Hilles Curator of European Art. Tostmann, who previously served as a curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, will officially assume his position at the Wadsworth on October 28,2013.

An expert on Renaissance and Baroque artists, Tostmann has lectured extensively throughout the United States and Europe and his writings have been widely published. He will oversee the Wadsworth’s comprehensive European art collection, which includes 900 paintings, 500 sculptures, and 3,500 works on paper. Tostmann said, “I am delighted and honored to work in such a renowned institution. To explore the Wadsworth’s collection of European art is simply irresistible, and I embrace its commitment to scholarship.”

The Wadsworth Atheneum is the oldest free public art museum in the United States and boasts an impressive collection of baroque paintings, French and American Impressionist paintings, Hudson River School landscapes, modernist masterpieces, and extensive holdings in early American furniture and decorative arts.  

Washington’s Tacoma Art Museum broke ground Thursday, September 5, 2013 on a $15.5 million expansion that will include new galleries. The 16,000-square-foot wing will house 280 works of Western art donated to the museum by German billionaires Erivan and Helga Haub. The collection, which ranks as one of the finest groupings of Western American art in the world, was accompanied by a $20 million gift from the Haubs.

The Tacoma Art Museum’s expansion, which is helmed by the Seattle-based architect Tom Kundig of Olson Kundig Architects, is slated to reach completion by fall 2014. The institution will boast the most significant public holding of Western artworks in the Pacific Northwest. The Haubs’ bequest includes landscapes by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, sculptures by Frederic Remington and works by modernist painters including Georgia O’Keeffe. The pieces range from the 1820s to the present and span various Western art genres.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts will sell a painting by Edward Hopper to start an endowment fund to acquire contemporary art. East Wind Over Weekhawken is one of two paintings by the American Modernist artist in the museum’s collection. The work will be sold at auction at Christie’s in New York in December and is expected to garner between $22 million and $28 million.

East Wind Over Weehawken was purchased by the museum from Hopper’s dealer, Frank K.M. Rehn, in 1952 for $2,750. If the painting realizes its pre-sale estimate, it will quintuple the funds generated annually for acquisitions. While a portion of the endowment will be used for purchasing historic art, the majority of new acquisitions will be in contemporary art, mainly American painting and sculpture.

The Pennsylvania Academy will keep its other Hopper painting, Apartment Houses, which was purchased from the artist directly and was the first oil painting by Hopper to enter the Pennsylvania Academy’s collection.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AK will soon debut a recently acquired painting by the American Modernist painter Edward Hopper. The work, titled Blackwell’s Island, was sold at Christie’s in May to a private collector for $19.2 million – the second highest price ever paid for a painting by the artist at auction. The Crystal Bridges Museum later announced that they had acquired the work from the private collection. The painting is slated to go on on view by mid-September in the museum’s Early 20th Century Art Gallery.

Blackwell’s Island depicts what is now known as Roosevelt Island, located off of Manhattan in the East River. The painting, which features a wide expanse of blue sky above swirling water and an industrial skyline, creates a sense of distance between the viewer and the impersonal subject. The composition promotes feelings of loneliness and isolation, which pervade much of Hopper’s work.

Crystal Bridges’ President, Don Bacigalupi, said, “This is a most ambitious composition for Hopper. He painted this work at the height of his powers and it exemplifies some of the best of Hopper’s style: a complex architectural composition with a full range of light and shadow, few people and drama of the past colliding with the present in the form of historic architecture meeting modern.”

While the Crystal Bridges Museum has a number of Hopper’s works on paper in its collection, Blackwell’s Island is its first major oil painting by the artist.

The American art sale, which took place today, May 23, 2013 at Christie’s in New York, realized $50.8 million, the highest total that the category has seen since May 2008. 99 out of the 135 lots offered sold and 85% sold by value.

The auction’s top lot was Edward Hopper’s (1882-1967) oil on canvas painting Blackwell’s Island (1928), which brought $19.1 million (estimate: $15 million-$20 million). Hopper also took the sale’s second top spot with his watercolor on paper Kelly Jenness House (1932), which sold for $4.1 million (estimate: $2 million-$3 million) and set the auction record for a work on paper by the artist. The Hopper sales reinforced the artist’s continued popularity among buyers and the strong market demand for exceptional Modernist works.

A highly anticipated collection of six paintings by the Wyeth family of artists sold for upward of $2 million. The works by N.C. (1882-1945), Andrew (1917-2009), and Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946) were put up for sale by New Jersey-based businessman and avid collector of the Wyeths’ works, Eric Sambol. The highlight of the collection was N.C. Wyeth’s Norry Seavey Hauling Lobster Traps Off Blubber Island (1938), which garnered nearly $844,000.

Other significant sales from the auction included Norman Rockwell’s (1894-1978) Starstruck (1934), which brought over $2 million, exceeding its high estimate of $1.2 million, Georgia O’Keeffe’s (1887-1986) My Back Yard (1943), which was purchased by the Cincinnati Art Museum for $1.8 million (estimate: $1 million-$1.5 million), George Bellows’ (1882-1925) Splinter Beach (1913), which achieved $1.2 million (estimate: $500,000-$700,000), and Sanford Robinson Gifford’s (1823-1880) Tappan Zee (1879-80), which sold for $1.1 million (estimate: $200,000-$300,000).