Displaying items by tag: landscapes

The Nassau Museum of Art in Roslyn Harbor, New York is currently presenting the exhibition Alex Katz: Selections from the Whitney Museum of Art. The solo show consists of an array of large, striking portraits by the American artist Alex Katz (b. 1927). The exhibition is drawn from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s extensive collection of the artist’s work.  

A primarily figurative painter, Katz often portrays his friends and family, especially his wife Ada, in simple, brightly colored compositions. Because of these aesthetic predilections, he has often been associated with the Pop Art movement. Katz’s expansive oeuvre also includes numerous landscapes, particularly of New York City and Maine. Since 1951 Katz has been the subject of over 200 solo exhibitions and he has been included in nearly 500 group shows worldwide.

Alex Katz: Selections from the Whitney Museum of Art will be on view at the Nassau Museum of Art through October 13, 2013.  

The Sterling and Francine Clark Institute in Williamstown, MA recently received its most considerable gift of American paintings since its founding in 1955 and is holding an exhibition to celebrate the major acquisition. George Inness: Gifts from Frank and Katherine Martucci presents eight landscapes by the influential American painter George Inness (1825-1894) dating from 1880 to 1894. The works will appear alongside two Inness paintings collected by the Clarks themselves. The show will highlight Inness’ later work when he moved away from his signature plein-air style towards a more conceptual aesthetic that relied on the use of light and shadow.

The Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg significantly influenced Inness and inspired the artist to look at nature through a more spiritual lens. Inness moved away from straightforward depictions of the natural world towards a style that blended realism with a sense of otherworldliness. Inness achieved this through color, composition and painterly techniques that involved the gentle blurring of natural forms.

Highlights from the exhibition include Sunrise in the Woods, The Road to the Village, and Green Landscape. George Inness: Gifts from Frank and Katherine Martucci will be on view through September 8, 2013.

On May 8, 2013, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston unveiled a number of transformed galleries including a new Dutch and Flemish gallery, which has opened to the public after almost a year of renovations. The Art of the Netherlands in the 17^th Century Gallery features seven paintings by Rembrandt (1606-1669) and other works by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), and Jacob van Ruisdael (1628-1682). There are approximately thirty paintings in the gallery including landscapes, genre scenes, portraits, and religious works. The paintings are accompanied by a collection of Dutch furniture, decorative art objects, silver, and Delft pottery.

A companion gallery of 30 works, the Leo and Phyllis Beranek Gallery, also opened this week. Besides their respective collections, the Beranek and the Art of the Netherlands galleries highlight loans from important collections such as the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo collection, a renowned grouping of Dutch and Flemish paintings.

Two 18^th century rooms from Great Britain have been reinstalled at the MFA as part of the Alan and Simone Hartman Galleries. A gallery for British Art, 1560-1830 complements the Newland House Drawing Room, which has been on view at the MFA since the 1970s, and the Hamilton Palace Dining Room, which features the Hartman Collection’s silver holdings. The Hartman Galleries feature British paintings, furniture, silver, ceramics, and works on paper.    

On June 15, 2013 the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, PA will present the exhibition Jamie Wyeth, Rockwell Kent and Monhegan. Located off of the coast of Maine, Monhegan has been a popular destination for artists looking to capture its rugged wilderness, sweeping ocean views, and enduring inhabitants.

The Brandywine River Museum’s exhibition will focus on the works of Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946), a contemporary realist painter who favors figurative compositions over landscapes, and Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), a realist painter, printmaker, and illustrator who often drew inspiration from the natural world and man’s relationship with its almighty forces. While Wyeth and Kent never met, their works are inextricably linked thanks to Monhegan’s evocative nature. Together, their works tell the story of the island and its people, which spans a century.

Highlights from the exhibition include Wyeth’s most recent paintings of Monhegan as well as a number of Kent’s coastal landscapes from Wyeth’s personal collection. Jamie Wyeth, Rockwell Kent and Monhegan, which was organized by Maine’s Farnsworth Museum, will be on view through November 17, 2013.

The Museum of Modern Art’s William S. Paley collection is currently on view at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. A Taste for Modernism presents 62 works that cover all of the pivotal movements that defined the art world during the late 19^th and 20^th centuries. The exhibition features works by 24 major artists including Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Joan Miró (1893-1983), Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), and Francis Bacon (1909-1922). The William S. Paley collection has been on a North American tour since 2012 and the Portland Museum of Art is the only venue in New England that the exhibition will visit.

Highlights from the exhibition include two works by Cézanne, which Paley acquired from the artist’s son; eight works by Picasso that trace his artistic evolution over the first three decades of the 20^th century including Boy Leading a Horse (1905-06) from his Rose Period, the Cubist painting An Architect’s Table (1912), and the collage-inspired composition Still Life with Guitar (1920); Gaugin’s The Seed of the Areoi (1892), which was inspired by the artist’s trips to Tahiti; and Edward Hopper’s (1882-1967) realist landscapes.

William S. Paley (1901-1999), the media mogul responsible for building the CBS broadcasting empire, was an important art collector and philanthropist during the 20th century. Paley began collecting in the 1930s and took a particular liking to French modernist movements including Fauvism, Cubism, and Post-Impressionism. Paley played a major role in cementing the Museum of Modern Art as one of the most significant institutions in the world. MoMA was founded in 1929 and Paley fulfilled various roles at the museum including patron, trustee, president, and board chairman from 1937 until his death.

A Taste for Modernism will be on view at the Portland Museum of Art through September 8, 2013. It will them travel to the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (October 10, 2013-January 5, 2013) and The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas (February-April, 2014).

Maine Sublime: Frederic Edwin Church’s Landscapes of Mount Desert and Mount Katahdin will open on June 9, 2013 at Olana in Hudson, NY. Olana State Historic Site was the home of Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), a major figure in the Hudson River School, and includes the artist’s studio. The villa is a mixture of Victorian, Persian, and Moorish styles and overlooks the Hudson River valley, the Catskill Mountains, and the Taconic Ridge.

The upcoming exhibition focuses on the 50-year period during which Church traveled and painted landscapes of Maine. Maine Sublime presents 10 oil and 13 pencil sketches from Olana’s collection and many of works will be on public view for the first time. The show will include loans from the Portland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and two private collections.

Church first visited Maine in 1850 and spent six weeks on Mount Desert. In 1852, Church explored the Mount Katahdin region and in the coming decades he would continue to visit and be captivated by Maine’s natural beauty. The plein-air sketch Wood Interior Near Mount Katahdin (circa 1877) is one of the works that has never been on public view but will be part of the upcoming exhibition.

Maine Sublime will be on view at Olana through October 31, 2013. The exhibition will then be on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art through the summer of 2014.

On May 1, 2013 the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam will re-open after being closed for months due to ongoing renovations. The exhibition that will inaugurate the newly updated space is Van Gogh at Work, an extensive overview of Vincent van Gogh’s (1853-1890) oeuvre that happens to coincide with the 160^th anniversary of the artist’s birth. What the Van Gogh Museum kept quiet until now is that the exhibition will reveal research amassed during an eight-year analysis of the artist’s work.

The project, which was led by scientists at Shell in collaboration with the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency and curators at the Van Gogh Museum, entailed analyzing hundreds of van Gogh’s canvases, pigments, letters, and notebooks. The research provided previously unknown insights into van Gogh’s temperament and personality. Contrary to popular belief spurred by the artist’s struggles with mental illness, van Gogh was not a manic painter, but painstakingly methodical. The use of an electric microscope and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry revealed that van Gogh used grids to accurately portray proportions and to create precise depth of field in his early landscapes.

Another insight the researchers uncovered involved van Gogh’s pigments. Tests done at the Shell Global Solutions labs revealed that some of the pigments used by van Gogh were chemically unstable and faded prematurely. In particular, scientists discovered that the color of the walls in van Gogh’s seminal painting The Bedroom was inaccurate. Van Gogh had used red and blue paints to create a violet hue but the red faded, leaving behind a much bluer color than he intended.

Beginning in September, the Van Gogh Museum will exhibit two versions of The Bedroom – one from its own collection and one from the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection. Van Gogh painted three versions of his room in Arles between 1888 and 1889 and all three of them have the same blue-hued walls. The presentation will also include a digital reconstruction of what the painting may have looked like when van Gogh first created it.

Van Gogh at Work will be on view through January 12, 2014.

The Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY is currently hosting the exhibition Albert Bierstadt in New York & New England. Guest curated by Anne Blaugrund, former director of National Academy Museum in New York, the exhibition features a wide selection of Albert Bierstadt’s (1830-1902) east coast paintings.

Bierstadt (1830-1902) a German-American painter best known for his lush landscapes of the American west, also spent time capturing the natural beauty of the White Mountains, the Hudson Valley, and New England in his work. All of the works on view were created between the late 1850s and 1880s and range from oil sketches to finished paintings. Albert Bierstadt in New York & New England is the 10^th annual presentation of 19^th century landscape paintings at the Thomas Cole site.

The Thomas Cole National Historic Site, which is also known as Cedar Grove, is comprised of the home and studios of Thomas Cole (1801-1848), the founder of the Hudson River School of painting. A National Historic Landmark, the site aims to communicate Cole’s profound influence on American art to a broader modern audience.

Albert Bierstadt in New York & New England is on view through November 3, 2013.

The Panoramic View: The Hudson and the Thames, which is currently on view at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, NY, focuses on the panoramic vista, a form that became popular among artists in the late 18^th century. The term panorama was originally coined by the Irish painter Robert Barker (1739-1806) to describe his wide-angle paintings of Edinburgh and London. The form was ideal for members of the Hudson River School and other artists entranced by the natural world as it allowed them to capture the sweeping grandeur of the landscapes that inspired them.

The Panoramic View includes works by Robert Havell, Jr. (1793-1878), an English artist who emigrated from London to New York and painted both the Hudson and the Thames; founder of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole (1801-1848); and Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900), a first-generation member of the Hudson River School. The exhibition features loans from galleries, private collections, and museums including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The New-York Historical Society.

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies The Panoramic River, which is on view through May 19, 2013.

The exhibition Photography and the Civil War, which is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, brings together over 200 photographs of the American Civil War. Spread across 11 galleries, the landmark exhibition also includes photographic artifacts and objects from the time period. The portraits of young soldiers, promotional images of political candidates, and landscapes of the blood-soaked battlefields come together to tell the story of a violent four-year war that transformed America forever.

From 1861 until 1865, the American Civil War claimed 750,000 lives and Photography and the Civil War aims to examine the role of photography during this devastating conflict. Organized by the Met’s senior curator, Jeff L. Rosenheim, the exhibition includes loans from renowned private and public collections.

Photography and the Civil War will be on view at the Met through September 2, 2013.