Displaying items by tag: art movement

The Hudson River School Art Trail will open for the season on June 22, 2013.The trail boasts guided hikes, which are organized by the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York and take visitors on a tour of the vistas, mountains and valleys that influenced the Hudson River School painters including Thomas Cole (1801-1848), Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900), and Sanford Gifford (1823-1880).

The Hudson River School Art Trail is divided into a number of large geographic areas and allows visitors to walk in the footsteps of some of the most significant artists of the 19^th century. The Hudson River School was the first major art movement to sweep America and it dominated the visual arts for over 50 years. The trail includes the home of Thomas Cole who is credited with founding the Hudson River School; Olana, the home of Frederic Edwin Church, an important figure in the movement; and views of the landscapes that are featured in the artists’ paintings.

The Hudson River School Art Trail was expanded last year, more than doubling its size from its original 8 sites in New York to 20 sites in New York, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

England’s Ashmolean Museum has acquired one of the most important Pre-Raphaelite paintings remaining in private hands. John Everett Millais’ (1829-1896) portrait of John Ruskin, the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, has been on loan to the institution since January 2012. The work was officially given to the museum by the Art Council England under the Acceptance in Lieu of Inheritance plan, which stipulates that under British tax law debts can be written off in exchange for objects of national significance. The painting recently appeared in Tate Britain’s highly successful exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde.

Millais, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, was commissioned to paint the portrait in 1853 by Ruskin himself. While working on the painting, Milliais fell in love with Ruskin’s wife, which ultimately led to the breakdown of the Ruskins’ marriage, Millais’ friendship with Ruskin, and the artist’s involvement with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. After marrying Ruskin’s wife, Effie, Millais gave the portrait to a friend in Oxford, Henry Wentworth Acland. The portrait remained in Acland’s family until his descendants sold it at Christie’s in 1965, where the late owner of the painting purchased it.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which formed in 1848, was a group of English painters, poets, and critics who rejected the traditional approaches to art and painting established by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael (1483-1520) and Michelangelo (1473-1564). Instead, the Pre-Raphaelites turned to medieval and early Renaissance art for inspiration often painting subjects from Shakespeare and the Bible. Pre-Raphaelitism, which rattled Britain from 1848 to 1900, was considered the country’s first avant-garde movement.

After bursting on the art scene in the late 1940s, Abstract Expressionism dominated American art, criticism, and commentary throughout the 1950s. Artists of the revolutionary Abstract Expressionist School rejected the widely accepted values that ruled post-war America and looked to emotion, rebellion, spontaneity, and movement for inspiration.

AB-EX / RE-CON: Abstract Expressionism Reconsidered, which is now on view at the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn, New York on Long Island, explores both the best-known and less familiar artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Organized by the museum’s director, Karl Emil Willers, AB-EX features over 80 works by 50 artists including those readily associated with Abstract Expressionism such as Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1933), Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), Franz Kline (1910-1962), Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), and Mark Rothko (1903-1970).

However, it is the inclusion of the lesser-known Abstract Expressionists that sets AB-EX apart. The exhibition features the works of Jon Schueler (1916-1992), a student of Diebenkorn who explored landscapes through the lens of abstraction; Fritz Bultman (1919-1985), who studied under Hofmann and favored bold, gestural forms; and often overlooked female Abstract Expressionists such a Grace Hartigan (1922-2008), Perle Fine (1908-1988), and Judith Godwin (b. 1930). The comprehensive exhibition illustrates the breadth and diversity of a single movement that is often reduced to a handful of artists and stylistic approaches.

AB-EX / RE-CON: Abstract Expressionism Reconsidered is on view through June 16, 2013.

The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. will unveil its first permanent installation in over 50 years. Founded by the art collector and critic Duncan Phillips (1886-1966) in 1921, the Phillips Collection is the United States’ first modern art museum.

The new addition to the institution is a room made entirely from beeswax titled Wax Room. The experimental piece is the work of Wolfgang Laib (b. 1950), a conceptual German artist who is well known for his sculptural works made from natural materials. Laib has been making his beeswax chambers for over 25 years using hundreds of pounds of melted beeswax to coat walls and ceilings. The otherworldly spaces he creates are warmly lit by single hanging light bulbs.

The Phillips Collection’s other permanent installation is its Rothko Room, which holds four paintings by the abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970). The intimate presentation of Rothko’s works was added as a permanent exhibit in 1960, six years before Duncan Phillips’ death. Phillips worked closely with Rothko, deciding which walls to hang each painting on and the kind of lighting and furniture that would best suit the room. The Phillips Collection was the first American museum to dedicate a space to Rothko’s work and it remains the only one designed in collaboration with the artist himself.

Laib’s progressive work is a welcomed addition to the Phillips Collection. While Phillips’ holdings consisted of many Impressionist paintings and other mainstream works, he also had a taste for the unconventional. Phillips was one of the earliest patrons of American modernists including John Marin (1870-1953) and Arthur Dove (1880-1946) and also harbored great admiration for Abstract Expressionism before it became a respected art movement.

Laib’s Wax Room will be unveiled on March 2, 2013.

Now on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. is Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848-1900, the first major survey of Pre-Raphaelite art to take place in the United States.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which formed in 1848, was a group of English painters, poets, and critics who rejected the traditional approaches to art and painting established by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael (1483-1520) and Michelangelo (1473-1564). Instead, the Pre-Raphaelites turned to medieval and early Renaissance art for inspiration often painting subjects from Shakespeare and the Bible. Pre-Raphaelitism, which rattled Britain from 1848 to 1900, was considered the country’s first avant-garde movement.

The exhibition at the National Gallery features approximately 130 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and decorative objects by the movement’s leading members including John Everett Millais (1829-1896), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), and William Holman Hunt (1827-1910). Organized by Tate Britain in collaboration with the National Gallery, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design will be on view through May 19, 2013.