Displaying items by tag: Rodin

On view through April 12, 2013 at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Picasso and the Mysteries of Life: Deconstructing La Vie is the first exhibition devoted to Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) complex masterpiece, which defined his well-known Blue Period. A cornerstone of the museum’s collection, La Vie (1903) is accompanied by related works on loan from Barcelona’s Museu Picasso as well as works by Francisco Goya (1746-1828), Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), and Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) from the Cleveland Museum’s own collection.

The exhibition uses x-radiographs, infrared reflectographs, and other scientific methods to delve into the process behind La Vie. Displayed on iPads, the technological investigation illustrates Picasso’s creative process and how he altered the painting’s composition considerably before deeming the work complete.

Picasso drew preliminary sketches for La Vie in May of 1903. At the time, he was a young, unknown artist who still lived in his parents’ home in Barcelona. The first sketches depicted an artist in his studio and evolved into a more intricate scene meant to evoke thoughts about life and art and the intersection of the two. A solid analysis of La Vie has always eluded scholars due to its enigmatic subject, early history, and its relationship to Picasso’s other works from this time. However, the painting has never been examined as thoroughly and in-depth as by the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Picasso and the Mysteries of Life strives to make sense of the work by exploring the subjects of the painting. Carles Casagemas, the gaunt man featured in the work’s left foreground, was a friend of Picasso’s and a fellow artist. Casagemas committed suicide in 1901, prompting Picasso to contemplate the glorification of suicide and the bohemian lifestyle in modern art and culture. The woman standing behind Casagemas in La Vie has been identified as Germaine Pichot, his lover and a contributor to his suicide. Pichot stands as a symbol of Picasso’s coded representation of women and in a broader sense, as the fatal woman often portrayed in modern art.

A 163-page book by William H. Robinson, the Cleveland Museum’s curator of modern European art, accompanies the exhibition. The book further explores the role of La Vie in Picasso’s creative process as well as the important issues in the modernist culture of the 19^th and 20^th centuries that affected Picasso and his work. Robinson explores how Spanish and French literature affected Picasso’s Blue Period paintings, the impact of Rodin’s large retrospective of 1900 on the young artist, and Picasso’s ongoing struggle to fully understand the notions of fate and destiny.

Deconstructing La Vie is the inaugural exhibition in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s new Focus Gallery.

The top sale at last night’s Impressionist and modern Art auction at Sotheby’s in New York was a 1932 painting by Pablo Picasso of his muse, Marie-Therese Walter. The suggestive Nature Morte aux Tulipes, estimated at $35 to $50 million, sold to a phone bidder for $41.5 million.

The sale at Sotheby’s took place just one day after Christie’s lackluster Impressionist and modern art auction and didn’t fare much better than its predecessor. While there were some notable sales, 31% of lots went untouched including mid-level works by Degas and Rodin. While many have been blaming the election and unfortunate weather for the mixed sales, the quality of the work featured has also in question. Many have taken note of the padded sales by both auction houses and during these delicate economic times, buyers want to spend money on exceptional works, not mediocre works by exceptional artists.

On a positive note, there were a number of impressive sales besides the Picasso portrait. Claude Monet’s 1881 landscape Champ de Blé estimated at $5 to $7 million fetched $12.1 million and a photograph of Marcel Duchamp taken by Man Ray sold for $2.4 million, well over it’s $1.7 million high estimate. Another work that exceeded expectations was Fernand Leger’s Les Contructeurs, which went for $1.37 million, more than double its low estimate. The sale brought in $163 million; it was expected to garner about $169 million in total.  

Scaffolding still blocks the view of Auguste Rodin’s monumental "Gates of Hell" at the entrance to Philadelphia's Rodin Museum. And Rodin's famous sculpture of the "Burghers of Calais" has yet to be cleaned up.

But the museum has undergone a $9 million renovation and is once again open to the public.   

Art-lovers in Argentina are up in arms after a cast of Auguste Rodin's inspiring "The Thinker" sculpture was defaced by vandals only to suffer more potential damage as it was cleaned.

Crafted more than a century ago, the statue depicts a seated male nude, his chin resting on his hand, lost in thought. Considered a masterpiece of late 19th-early 20th century art, it is Rodin's most recognizable work.

The original bronze and marble statue is on display at Paris's Rodin Museum, home also to "The Gates of Hell", the French sculptor's monumental masterpiece depicting a scene from Italian poet Dante's "The Inferno".

"The Thinker" in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires is number 3, the third of 22 original sculptures, eight of which were completed from the original mold during Rodin's (1840-1917) lifetime.

Exhibited on a plinth in a main square in front of Argentina's national Congress building, the sculpture is a popular tourist attraction in the city, which is known, fittingly enough, as the Paris of Latin America.

But the beloved work was defaced last week, splattered by unknown assailants with paint and spraypaint -- an act of vandalism that elicited cries of outrage across this culture-loving country.

Public ire was aroused anew on Thursday, when it was discovered that someone had defaced the base of the statue with more graffiti, scribbling the name "Enzo" on one side of the pedestal.

"It's scandalous," said Teresa de Anchorena, a member of a commission here tasked with preserving Argentina's heritage.

A statue by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin was stolen from the Israel Museum during renovations.

The bronze sculpture, "Naked Balzac with Folded Arms" was cast between 1892 and 1893 and was one of a series Rodin made while preparing a Paris monument to the French novelist and playwright Honore de Balzac.

The French writers guild, headed by Emile Zola, commissioned Rodin to create a monument to Balzac in 1891. Rodin worked on the project for eight years and cast several statues of Balzac, some of which are on display in museums throughout the world. The final version of the sculpture is at the monument, on Raspail Boulevard in Paris.

Art historian Stephanie Rahum wrote in her book on Impressionists and Post-Impressionists in the Israel Museum collection that Rodin considered the memorial his most important and daring work.