Displaying items by tag: portraits

Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the Yale University Art Gallery are acquiring the Meserve-Kunhardt Collection, one of the nation’s most historically significant photographic collections and the definitive assemblage of portraits of Abraham Lincoln.

“With this remarkable acquisition, Yale has secured its place as the premier institution for the study of American photography from the Civil War to the Gilded Age,” says Yale President Peter Salovey. “I am delighted that faculty, students, and scholars from around the country and around the globe will have the opportunity to study this collection, learn from it, and share that knowledge.”

Paintings of the three wise men created by Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens for his childhood friend Balthasar Moretus have been reunited for the first time in 130 years at the National Gallery of Art.

And while biblical in theme, the pictures offer a glimpse into a friendship fostered 400 years ago.

Rubens painted the portraits around 1618 for his friend, who was head of the Plantin Press, the largest publishing house in 16th- and 17th- century Europe. The paintings were together for almost 300 years, until they were sold at a Paris auction in 1881.

The portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit, a young and successful couple that Rembrandt van Rijn painted just before their wedding in 1634, might hit the market very soon, "El País" reports.

The sale could be a sensational event, as the paintings have been in France since 1877, when they were bought by Baron Gustave de Rothschild, and have rarely been displayed in public since.

The current owner, Eric de Rothschild, has obtained an export permit, granted by the French Ministry of Culture and the Louvre Museum, and according to the French publication "La Tribune de l'Art," has put a €150 million price tag on the paintings in the documents.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has announced loans of important paintings by Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt van Rijn for its upcoming landmark exhibition "Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer" (October 11, 2015–January 18, 2016). Vermeer’s "The Astronomer" (1668) will be on loan from the Musée du Louvre in Paris, while the artist’s "A Lady Writing" (about 1665) will be on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Works by Rembrandt in the exhibition will include "The Shipbuilder and his Wife" (1633) on loan from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the full-length, life-size "Portrait of Andries de Graeff" (1639) from Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel in Germany. They will join the two seated full-length portraits by Rembrandt from the MFA’s collection, "Reverend Johannes Elison" and "Maria Bockenolle" (both 1634).

"A Lady Writing" portrays a privileged woman engaged in the art of letter writing, associated in 17th-century Holland with a certain level of education and wealth. Belonging to the same elite world, "The Astronomer" represents a “gentleman amateur” engaged in scientific inquiry that had relevance to the maritime navigation crucial to the mercantile interests of the young country.

The veteran American artist Alex Katz was inspecting the hang of his new paintings while I looked at them, but I could not ask him any questions. I was dumbstruck. The only thing I could have said to him at that moment would have been a stuttered, “How come you paint so well?”

How can simple pictures of faces be so unexpected, exciting and fascinating? Katz has been painting portraits for a long time now – he’s 87 and began his career in the age of Jackson Pollock – and his latest works do not shatter his established style. Their main novelty is that all the figures are set against black. Many of the pictures have a wide CinemaScope format so the people in them stand out as colourful shapes against a nightscape of glossy darkness.

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was one of the leading painters of his generation. His captivating portraits are universally admired for their insight into character, radiance of light and color, and painterly fluency and immediacy. "Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends," written by Richard Ormond, one of the foremost authorities on the artist, showcases Sargent’s cosmopolitan career in a new light—through his bold portraits of artists, writers, actors, and musicians, many of them his close friends—giving us a picture of the artist as an intellectual and connoisseur of the music, art, and literature of his day. Whether depicted in well-appointed interiors or en plein air, the cast of characters includes many famous subjects, among them Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, Gabriel Fauré, W. B. Yeats, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry James. Because many of the sitters were his close friends, the artist was able to take a more informal, intimate approach to these portraits than in his formal commissions—and not only are the works penetrating studies of character, they are also records of friendships, allegiances, and influences.

Richard Avedon may be synonymous with iconic fashion photography, but the lensman was known for his striking portraits of powerful personalities too.

While on commission by Rolling Stone magazine to cover the 1976 presidential election, Avedon created black and white portraits of luminaries such as Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford; A.M. Rosenthal, a former managing editor of the New York Times who gained fame for publishing the Pentagon Papers; and W. Mark Felt, also known as “Deep Throat.” Sixty nine of these portraits, collectively titled “The Family,” will feature as part of “Richard Avedon: Family Affairs,” now on at the National Museum of American Jewish History (NMAJH) in Philadelphia.

Three of Andy Warhol's most iconic portraits from the 1980s will go to auction at Bonhams in London on February 12 at the Post-War & Contemporary Art sale. Each depicts a person that was a close friend of the artist as well as an important figure of the decade: socialite Marjorie Copley, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

"Portrait of Marjorie Copley" (1980), an icy, demure departure from the bright Pop colors that largely dominated Warhol's work during this period, has been given an estimate of £180,000–£250,000 ($271,743–$377,421).

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.