Displaying items by tag: floral

On July 19, the Denver Art Museum opened In Bloom: Painting Flowers in the Age of Impressionism, the centerpiece exhibition for a campus-wide summer celebration. In Bloom explores the development of 19th-century French floral still-life painting, and features about 60 paintings by world-renowned French artists Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh and others. On view through Oct. 11, 2015, In Bloom is a ticketed exhibition, and free for museum members.

The colorful exhibition demonstrates how a traditional genre was reinvented by 19th-century artists, as the art world's focus was shifting to modernism.

While it may not feel like the first day of spring across much of the U.S., the canvases are in full bloom at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

“Van Gogh, Manet, and Matisse: The Art of the Flower” traces the evolution of the floral still life genre from the late 18th century to the early 20th century. It features 65 masterpieces from more than 30 artists including Henri Matisse, Edouard Manet, Paul Cézanne and Vincent Van Gogh.

With lilacs, roses, and peonies abounding, the bouquets are a feast for the eyes, from the most exquisitely crafted floral displays to the humblest of arrangements.

Almost 125 years ago, after bouts of self-mutilation and hospitalization, Vincent van Gogh announced to his brother Theo his plans to embark on a series of floral paintings. The iconic Post-Impressionist painter completed almost 130 of these works in this last phase of life. But following his death, the depictions of wildly spinning flora, left behind at the Saint-Rémy asylum where van Gogh was living, were eventually split up.

This May, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will exhibit four of the riveting depictions, side by side, for the very first time. The show, titled "Van Gogh: Irises and Roses," will feature just what it states.

It has been several years since I have seen a more beautiful exhibition than “Bouquets: French Still Life From Chardin to Matisse” at the Dallas Museum of Art. Although not as packed with famous masterpieces as the Kimbell Art Museum’s current, exemplary “Faces of Impressionism,” “Bouquets” operates at the same consistently high level of quality, with major and minor artists represented in top form.

Initially, I was afraid that so many paintings of flowers in vases — nearly 70 — would overwhelm a delicate subgenre of French paintings. But the exhibition proves so interesting and the galleries build on one another so confidently that one feels refreshed by each room.

Fifty years ago, during the summer of 1964, Andy Warhol began working on silkscreen paintings of flowers, a subject that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life. When Warhol had his first solo exhibition at the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in November 1964 it consisted entirely of Flowers. Best known for his vibrant pop imagery and searing commentary on art and popular culture, Warhol’s flower imagery reveals a softer, more intimate side of the artist. In retrospect, it is also a provocative series, appropriating a powerful symbol later identified with flower-power counterculture of the 1960s, the age of peace, love, and anti-war protest. The Flowers are the only subject that Warhol revisited throughout his entire career and in almost every medium. The artist’s floral imagery is among the quietest, most beautiful, and least studied. The Cheekwood exhibition is a rare occasion when Warhol’s artificial flower images meet the floral abundance of an actual garden. 

This exhibition traces Warhol’s engagement with floral images throughout his career, beginning with a group of his earliest commercial illustrations, drawn in the 1950s, and his creation of the Flowers series in 1964, to photographs, paintings, and screen prints through 1986 before his untimely death the following year. The development of Warhol’s career can be seen in the progression from the delicacy of the early illustrations to the boldness of the 1964 series to the tension between the beauty and banality of the photographs and prints late in his career.