Displaying items by tag: portraits

In Blair’s defence, his Victorian guru was so prolific in so many fields, it’s near-impossible to keep track of all he did. Morris is perhaps best known nowadays for his densely-patterned, curly-leaf wallpaper, so popular in middle class homes in the Seventies.

A window on the private world of China’s Ming and Qing emperors opens october 18, when some 200 works — portraits, costumes, and palace furnishings such as bronzes, lacquerware, and jade—drawn from the holdings of the Palace Museum in Beijing go on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition surveys the seminal role of imperial rituals and religion in the Forbidden City, along with hidden aspects of court life from the mid 14th through early 19th centuries.

At first glance the painting appears to show a modern-day Madonna and Child. The Madonna, wearing jeans, is sitting on a sun-dappled floor while the baby – a girl, surely – nestles between her mother’s protective legs. All seems calm and serene, until you notice the woman’s body language. Her shoulders are tense, her torso slumped, and she is staring not at her child but blankly at the floor. If this is what motherhood looks like then it is clearly not for the faint-hearted.

"Ginny and Elizabeth" was painted in 1976 by the American artist Alice Neel and modeled by her daughter-in-law and baby granddaughter. At the time Neel started work on the piece, she was finally receiving public acclaim for her work after decades of obscurity.

Like Keats, Hank Williams and Kurt Cobain, the Austrian painter Egon Schiele was an artist who never made it out of his 20s. He succumbed to the Spanish flu in 1918 at the age of 28, leaving behind a last, tortured sketch of his pregnant wife, made a day before she died in the same epidemic.

But for someone whose cheerless credo was “All things are living dead,” Schiele squeezed a lot out of the few years he was given. On Thursday, the Neue Galerie, a temple to German Expressionism, opens “Egon Schiele: Portraits,” the first American exhibition to focus on Schiele’s portraiture.

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presents "American Wonder: Folk Art from the Collection," on view October 1 through December 21, 2014. Featuring approximately fifty portraits, landscapes, weather vanes, decorative sculptures, and other works dating from the wake of the Declaration of Independence War to the end of the Civil War, this exhibition captures glimpses of young America during a period of boundless optimism, massive growth, and eventual upheaval. This distinguished collection at BAM/PFA—one of the most impressive American folk art collections from this period anywhere—results from the generosity of two collectors and patrons, Bliss Carnochan and Nancy Edebo. "American Wonder" is the last major art exhibition to open in BAM/PFA’s current museum building at 2626 Bancroft Way before the institution moves to a new location, currently under construction, in downtown Berkeley in early 2016.

American Wonder starts in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New England, where the country’s newly independent citizens were beginning to help define and assume a national identity—one aligned with the goals of liberty, self-improvement, and advancement.

Andy Warhol’s 102-part painting “Shadows” is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. The exhibition marks the first West Coast presentation of the monumental work, which was executed by the Pop art pioneer between 1978 and 1979. “Andy Warhol: Shadows” is organized by the work’s owner,  New York’s Dia Art Foundation, and coordinated by MOCA’s Senior Curator Bennett Simpson.

Warhol is best known for his appropriation of images from popular culture, including celebrity portraits, advertisements, and newspaper images, but in the last decade of his career, he began experimenting with abstraction. Warhol developed a fascination with shadows and in the late 1970s, they became subjects in their own right.

Christie’s has announced that two monumental works by Andy Warhol will lead its highly anticipated Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale on November 12. The silkscreen paintings, “Triple Elvis [Ferus Type]” (1963) and “Four Marlons” (1966), are expected to fetch around $70 million each. Brett Gorvy, Chairman and International Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s, suspects that interested buyers could try to acquire both works and keep them as a unique pair. Warhol’s current record at auction was set last November at Sotheby’s when his two-panel painting “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)” sold for $104.5 million.

“Triple Elvis” and “Four Marlons” are being offered for sale by the German casino company WestSpiel.

The "Self Portrait" by Rubens that graces the Rubens House is being restored. Visitors wishing to view the painting should do so by 7 September 2014; after that, the painting will travel to the National Gallery in London for restoration. The work will return in 2015 for the exhibition "Rubens in Private: The Master Portrays His Family," after which it will resume its usual place in the gallery.

Rubens’ "Self Portrait" is one of the Rubens House’s most notable paintings. It is of iconic value to Antwerp and rarely leaves the museum. The painting will soon be restored for the upcoming exhibition "Rubens in Private: The Master Portrays His Family," which offers a glimpse of Rubens as his family’s portraitist. The works are the most beautiful and intimate portraits the master ever created. They were painted not on commission, but out of love, and served primarily as keepsakes. In 2015 these breathtaking works of art will be displayed together for the first time in the place where they belong: Rubens’ former home in Antwerp.

Photographer David LaChapelle claims in court that his fired manager owes him more than $2.8 million from sales of his work. LaChapelle and David LaChapelle Studios sued Fred Torres, Fred Torres Collaborations (FTC) and Fine Art Accounts, on Aug. 8 in New York State Supreme Court.

LaChapelle described himself in the complaint as "a world renowned photographer and director whose career spans three decades," whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, GQ and Rolling Stone."

He has done portraits of Elizabeth Taylor, Muhammad Ali, Madonna, Hillary Clinton, Eminem and Leonardo DiCaprio, and directed music videos for Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Elton John, according to the lawsuit.

The master framers of Eli Wilner & Company recently completed two hand-carved and gilded, openwork Rococo-style frames for a pair of portraits by John Singleton Copley at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

The existing frames on the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Hooper were in presentable condition, but were not historically appropriate, leading the museum’s curators to seek a solution from Eli Wilner & Company. Copley was known to have selected a specific style of frame for paintings done at the time these portraits were painted.

Though finding antique frames for the paintings would have been the optimal choice, the chances of locating a pair of frames in the appropriate sizes and within budget was a near impossibility.