Displaying items by tag: italian art

Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) was clearly one of the superstars of twentieth-century art. He is the best known and most loved of all modern Italian painters. Working at the epicenter of avant-garde experimentation in Paris between 1906 and 1920, he developed an artistic vision that was entirely his own. This new exhibition is the first to be devoted to the artist at the Estorick Collection and focuses on Modigliani’s works on paper, showing the spiritual and stylistic development of his portrayal of the human face and form. "Modigliani – A Unique Artistic Voice" is on view at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art from April 15 until June 28, 2015.

'What I am seeking is neither the real nor the unreal but the unconscious, the mystery of what is instinctive in the human race'  - Amedeo Modigliani.

The Italian curator Francesco Bonami is organizing an auction of Italian art at Phillips New York on April 28. Around 50 works created over the past 100 years are due to go under the hammer, but Arte Povera, one of the best-known movements to come out of the country in the past century, will not take centre stage. Instead, Bonami will focus on less well-known artists, in a similar vein to the exhibition he organized at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2008, “Italics,” which shifted the focus from Arte Povera and Transavanguardia artists to those who had been side-lined by traditional readings of Modern and contemporary Italian art. “The idea is to open up the view of Italian art beyond the household names,” Bonami says.

Yet, Italian art experts have become so worried about the state of the 15th-century fresco dubbed “the greatest picture in the world”, that they have embarked on a major restoration project.

The work was only made possible with a hefty donation from a private citizen.

Piero della Francesca’s "The Resurrection," on display in Sansepolcro in north-east Tuscany, is widely hailed as one of the masterpieces of late 15th-century Italian art.

Three marble panels depicting children singing and playing music will go on tour in the United States beginning in 2014. Created by Italian sculptor Luca della Robbia for the Florence Cathedral’s organ loft, the panels will go on view at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta from October 25, 2014 until January 11, 2015.

The panels were removed from the Cathedral in 1688 during a renovation and eventually ended up in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, which is lending them for the first tour of its kind in the US.

Due to the panels’ subject and history, the exhibition will include audible church music organized in part by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

From October 10, 2013 through January 13, 2014, the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) will present Caravaggio’s Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, one of the artist’s earliest masterpieces. The painting, which is on loan from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT, will be exhibited alongside the DIA’s own painting by Caravaggio, Martha and Mary Magdalene.

Salvador Salort-Pons, the DIA’s executive director, Collections Strategies and Information, said, “Caravaggio influenced many painters from other European countries who came to Rome to learn the master’s dramatic and realistic style. Visitors will be able to explore two of the best Caravaggios in America side by side in the same gallery.” Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy is most likely the first religious scene that Caravaggio painted, a genre for which he is admired. It is also one of the artist’s few nightscapes, showcasing Caravaggio’s masterful use of light.

While Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy is one of the Italian master’s first religious paintings, Martha and Mary Magdalene is one of Caravaggio’s first known religious works staged in an interior. Side by side, the paintings will allow patrons to compare and contrast two of artist’s most spiritually and emotionally charged early works.