Displaying items by tag: art history

New research in the archives has made it possible to pinpoint the exact location of Johannes Vermeer’s world-famous The Little Street. Frans Grijzenhout, Professor of Art History at the University of Amsterdam, consulted seventeenth-century records that had never before been used for this purpose and clearly indicate the site of The Little Street in Delft. The discovery of the whereabouts of Vermeer’s The Little Street is the subject of an exhibition running from 19 November 2015 to 13 March 2016 in the Rijksmuseum. It will then transfer to Museum Prinsenhof Delft.

Pieter Roelofs, curator of seventeenth-century paintings at the Rijksmuseum, said: ‘The answer to the question as to the location of Vermeer’s The Little Street is of great significance, both for the way that we look at this one painting by Vermeer and for our image of Vermeer as an artist.’

This fall, Stanford University will open the McMurtry Building, an innovative new facility to house Stanford’s Department of Art & Art History as well as the Art & Architecture Library. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the 100,000-square-foot space will unite the making and studying of art at Stanford under one roof for the first time. Open to students in time for the fall quarter and with a dedication ceremony on October 6, 2015, the $85-million building is the newest addition to Stanford’s burgeoning arts district at the entrance of campus.

During "Frans Hals: Work in Progress," from June 13 to September 27 in the Frans Hals Museum, visitors will be able to watch the restoration of Hals’s world-famous "Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse" as it happens. The museum’s restorers will be working on this painting in a workshop in one of the galleries under the public gaze. This ‘work in progress’ is part of an exhibition about the restoration of the three unique regent portraits that Frans Hals painted. Visitors will be able to watch the progress of this massive restoration project, learn about the restoration history and the art-historical context of the paintings and share in a number of extraordinary discoveries.

Regent Portraits
The Frans Hals Museum is home to the largest number of paintings by Frans Hals in the world, and in this exhibition will be concentrating on a unique part of this collection—the three regent portraits.

Opening today, on what would have been Leonardo da Vinci's 563rd birthday, the exhibition "Leonardo da Vinci and the Idea of Beauty" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The show will feature a recently rediscovered self-portrait of the artist and a suite of masterpieces by Leonardo including the long-admired "Head of a Young Woman (Study for the Angel in the 'Virgin of the Rocks')," a metalpoint drawing from the 1480s, widely renowned for its naturalism, and which art historian Kenneth Clark called the “most beautiful . . . in the world."

The exhibition marks a rare opportunity to see "Head of a Young Woman," in the US. The work, which Bernard Berenson believed was “one of the finest achievements of all draughtsmanship," belongs to the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, Italy.

The recently published Louis I. Kahn in Conversation: Interviews with John W. Cook and Heinrich Klotz, 1969–70 provides fresh insights into the philosophy and genius of one of America’s greatest twentieth-century architects. Transcribed from audio recordings of candid conversations that have never before been published in their entirety, these interviews with Kahn (1901–1974) were conducted by Heinrich Klotz, a young German architectural historian who was then a visiting professor at Yale University, and John W. Cook, who was teaching architecture at Yale Divinity School. The volume has been edited by Jules David Prown, Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Yale University and Senior Research Fellow at the Yale Center for British Art, and Karen E. Denavit, Information Analyst at the Center.

On March 25th "Landscapes of the Mind. British Landscape Painting. Tate Collection, 1690-2007" was presented for the first time ever in Mexico City, an exhibition organized by Tate in association with Museo Nacional de Arte, as part of the celebrations of the Dual Year between Mexico and the United Kingdom.

This exhibition presents 111 artworks by British and European artists, with a plurality of techniques (painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture/installation, etc.) which ponder on the evolution of British landscape in art history. The term "Britain" is understood as the geographical entity of the British Isles, i.e., the archipelago that includes England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, before the independence of the latter in 1921.

For most people, Canaletto is the artist who depicted Venice – the painter of some of the best known and most beautiful views of his home city. But for nearly ten years he was an adopted English artist chronicling a society which, unlike Venice, was changing at an unimaginable pace.

A new exhibition opening to the public on Saturday will for the first time bring together paintings Canaletto produced in Britain. Unlike previous shows, it will examine his stay between 1746 and 1755 in a social as well as an art history context.

“He is painting a new, vibrant and confident Britain,” said the show’s curator, Steven Parissien. “Things are looking good in Britain and it often takes an outsider to see it.

No Japanese school of painting was more ambitious, more accomplished, and more durable than the Kano school, which dominated Japanese art from the late 15th century to the mid-19th. Indeed, in Japanese art history, Kano and canon are virtually synonymous.

A new show called “Ink and Gold: Art of the Kano” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is devoted to those four centuries of achievement. It’s a splendid show, probably the greatest exhibition of Japanese art anywhere in the world this year, and the finest ever devoted to Kano painters. It’s full of (mostly) large-scale art that is stamped with a sense of its own authority, and yet still surprisingly fresh.

Of course, in the West, modern art made the idea of any kind of aesthetic canon seem boring. After Manet, it seems, art couldn’t be interesting unless it was seen to be flogging canonical (substitute “official,” or “academic”) art to death.

Géza von Habsburg, an art historian in suburban New York, would have inherited part of an Austrian empire if only his ancestors had not made some terrible life choices. He did inherit the title of archduke and an interest in the history of luxury goods — the kind his family commissioned for centuries. Recently, he watched as about 100 of his family’s former heirlooms were installed at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts here for a new exhibition, “The Habsburgs: Rarely Seen Masterpieces from Europe’s Greatest Dynasty,” that runs through May.

It is the most comprehensive display yet staged for the collections from these Holy Roman Emperors, who owned palaces from Ukraine to Mexico. Gowns, rifles, suits of armor, sorbet cups, gilded knickknacks and artworks by luminaries like Rubens, Titian, Velazquez, Tintoretto and Holbein have come from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art announces the opening of "Van Gogh to Rothko: Masterworks from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery," on view February 21 through June 1, 2015. The exhibition brings together 76 artworks by 73 influential artists from the late 19th century to the present, including Vincent van Gogh, Joán Miró, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Mark Rothko. The works were selected from the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, one of the finest collections of 20th century art in the country. General admission to the temporary exhibition is $10 and free to Members and youth under 18 years old.

“Crystal Bridges is one of only four venues to host the exhibition and we’re delighted to provide visitors a rare opportunity to share the gallery with some of the most prominent figures in art history. Albright-Knox is one of the oldest collecting institutions in the country—we’re grateful, as one of the youngest, to share these stunning works that helped shape the story of American art.” says Rod Bigelow, Crystal Bridges Executive Director.