Displaying items by tag: portraits

Haunting portrait photographs, including a swan-necked David Bowie photographed in 1978, the playwright Nell Dunn looking startlingly like a long-lost Bowie twin, and Vita Sackville-West, the writer, gardener and former lover of Virginia Woolf who was still formidable in the year before her death in 1962, have been donated to the National Portrait Gallery by the society photographer Lord Snowdon.

The gift of 130 original prints, including photographs of his former in-laws from the years he was married to Princess Margaret, is one of the largest ever to the gallery

Massachusetts’s Worcester Art Museum (WAM) is unveiling two newly restored William Hogarth (1697–1764) pendant portraits, the first paintings by the artist owned by an American museum, in the latest exhibition in the Jeppson Idea Lab series, which goes behind the scenes in the institution’s conservation lab.

The companion paintings, titled William James and Elizabeth James, were painted in 1744. Purchased by the museum way back in 1910 from a London art dealer, the pair was on display for nearly 100 years before they were taken down to make way for gallery renovations in 2008. When curators realized the paintings, thought to be in good condition, had never been examined by conservation experts, they seized the chance to take a closer look at the beloved canvases.

The banana. The zipper.

Along with his Marilyn Monroe portrait and the Campbell Soup cans, Andy Warhol’s album covers have their own place in the pop-art pantheon.

The Cranbrook Art Museum is kicking off what it says is the most comprehensive exhibition of authenticated Warhol record covers to date — including three recently discovered albums that never before have been shown in such a setting.

“Warhol On Vinyl: The Record Covers, 1949-1987+,” which opens to the public on Saturday and runs through March 15, features 60 unique album covers and nearly 100 in all, including color and size variations.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Marsden Hartley: The German Paintings 1913–1915 (August 3–November 30, 2014), the first focused look and the first solo exhibition on the West Coast in almost ten years of the American-born artist’s German paintings in the United States. From 1912 to 1915, Hartley lived in Europe—first in Paris and then in Berlin. There he developed a singular style that reflected his modern surroundings and the tumultuous time before and during World War I. Berlin’s exciting urban environment, prominent gay community, and military spectacle had a profound impact upon him. Marsden Hartley features approximately 25 paintings from this critical moment in Hartley’s career that reveal dynamic shifts in style and subject matter comprised of musical and spiritual abstractions, city portraits, and military symbols to Native American motifs.

Sandy Nairne has decided to step down in February 2015 as director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, after 12 years, to pursue his writing and advisory work, it was announced today, Thursday 12 June 2014.

Sandy Nairne says: ‘It has been a great privilege to lead such a special institution as the National Portrait Gallery, and I am very proud of what we have achieved over the past decade. The fact that two million visitors now come each year to visit exhibitions, take part in activities or see displays of this amazing Collection in London, as well as around the country or online, is testimony to the dedication of all who work at the Gallery and those who support it in so many different ways. The Gallery is in very good shape and will go from strength to strength.’

The title of this exhibition is adapted from the phrase “the sight of a reason,” a line in Gertrude Stein's groundbreaking prose work Tender Buttons (1914). In her collection of “portraits” of everyday phenomena, Stein employed experimental syntax to free language from established usage and to “create a word relationship between the word and the things seen.” Sites of Reason: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions begins with an ongoing work by the Los Angeles–based artist Eve Fowler (American, b. 1964), which appropriates phrases from Tender Buttons and Stein's How to Write (1931) in commercially printed posters originally intended for public display—for instance, stapled to telephone poles or fences. Stein’s probing of the correlation between language and the physical world—and Fowler’s act of recontextualization—exemplify a set of concerns shared by the works presented here.

The Museum of the City of New York in Manhattan is presenting “In a World of Their Own: Coney Island Photographs by Aaron Rose, 1961-1963,” the first exhibition of the photographer’s images of sunbathers and swimmers at Brooklyn’s most famous beach.

The diversity of people --and what they are doing -- is immediately arresting, as the photographs capture intimate portraits of regular and uninhibited New Yorkers in a world of their own.

The University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has received a gift of six original never-before-exhibited Andy Warhol prints from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

All with Warhol’s recognizable style and focus, the prints represent a period of the artist’s work from the late 1970s to mid-1980s, not long before the Warhol’s death in 1987 at the age of 58. The prints depict a range of subjects, from fashionable portraits to popular culture, and include such iconic images as Warhol’s portrait of friend and fellow artist Joseph Beuys and his striking representation of Lakota chief Sitting Bull.

Between 1786 and 1788, the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya painted four portraits of the Count of Altamira’s family. For the first time ever, these works, which are dispersed in public and private collections, will be exhibited together at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“Red Boy,” which depicts Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga, and “Condesa de Altamira and her daughter, Maria Agustina” are part of the Met’s collection. With help from the Spanish Consulate in New York, the Met was able to procure Goya’s portrait of Count Altamira, Vicente Isabel Ossorio de Miscoso from the Bank of Spain as well as the painting of his son, Vicente Joaquin de Toledo, which belongs to a private collection. The exhibition also includes a fifth portrait of the Count’s middle son, Juan Maria Osorio, which was painted by Goya's protege, Augustín Esteve. The work is on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art.  

Goya was contracted to paint a series of portraits of people connected to the Bank of San Carlos (now the Bank of Spain), which included the Count, one of the bank’s first directors and an important collector and patron of the arts. The Count was so pleased with Goya’s work that he commissioned the artist to do the rest of the Altamira family portraits. The Altamira paintings are among Goya’s earliest portraits of aristocrats. He was later appointed First Court Painter to the Spanish Crown.

“Goya and the Altamira Family” will be on view at the Met through August 3.

The Legion of Honor in San Francisco is currently hosting the exhibition “Intimate Impressionism,” which features nearly 70 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist landscapes, seascapes, still lifes, interiors, and portraits from the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Masterpieces by Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley are on view.

The sweeping exhibition offers glimpses into the artists’ processes and highlights their inspirations, favorite subjects, and individual perspectives. For instance, a section of the show explores how Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Sisley were motivated by their plein-air predecessors when painting the natural world. Depictions of artists’ studios, domestic interiors, and family members further deepen connections between the artists, their works, and the audience.

The exhibition, which will remain on view at the Legion of Honor through August 3, was made possible by the closure of the National Gallery’s East Building for a major renovation and expansion project.