Displaying items by tag: saint louis art museum

Modern art, architecture and decorative arts created in the middle of the 20th century were swamped by the reactionary ruckus of the late 20th century post-modernist movement. 

Given the quality and originality of so much of the mid-century’s aesthetic industry, its relegation to obscurity was a big mistake and a now recognized lapse of taste. However, all wasn’t lost.

“Navigating the West” takes visitors on a river journey while telling the tale of the men who worked on Midwest rivers in the 1800s.

"Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River,” an exhibition that for the first time in decades brings together the river paintings and drawings of George Caleb Bingham, opened Sunday, Feb. 22, at the Saint Louis Art Museum. The exhibit runs through Sunday, May 17. It then will go for the summer in June to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

To celebrate the 131st birthday of Max Beckmann today (Thursday, Feb. 12), the Saint Louis Art Museum announces the upcoming publication of a hardcover book by Lynette Roth exploring in depth the museum’s outstanding holdings of paintings by the German artist, the largest collection of its kind in the world.

Roth, a former Mellon Fellow at the Saint Louis Art Museum, is the Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard Art Museums, in Cambridge, Mass.

Richly illustrated and filled with detailed information about one of the leading artists of the 20th century, Max Beckmann at the Saint Louis Art Museum will be published in June.

The Saint Louis Art Museum has received a $5 million gift from Barbara Taylor, president of the museum’s Board of Commissioners, and her husband Andy Taylor, chairman of the Missouri-based company Enterprise Holdings. The generous donation will fund a new sculpture garden, marking the end of a phased landscape plan created by Michel Desvigne. Desvigne, a Paris-based landscape architect, crafted the plan as part of a major expansion project at the museum, which included an addition by the British architect David Chipperfield. The Saint Louis Art Museum’s East Building opened to the public in June 2013 and a number of Desvigne’s landscape improvements have already been completed.

Construction is currently underway on the sculpture garden, which is located immediately south of the museum.

M. Melissa Wolfe will join the Saint Louis Art Museum as curator and head of the Department of American Art, the Museum announced today. She assumes her duties in January.

“Melissa Wolfe is an impressive and prolific curator, having organized dozens of groundbreaking exhibitions, symposia, and publications over her career that speak to her creativity and intellectual rigor,” said Jason T. Busch, the Saint Louis Art Museum’s deputy director for curatorial affairs and museum programs. “Her vision will guide the comprehensive evaluation and reinstallation of the Museum's American art galleries over the next two years.”

The Saint Louis Art Museum will present a free exhibition presenting new works by artist Nick Cave, the Missouri native who has captivated audiences with artworks spanning sculpture, fashion, installation and performance.

The exhibition, "Currents 109: Nick Cave," opens Oct. 31 and runs through March 8, 2015. The exhibition will include installations in Galleries 249 and 250 in the museum’s new East Building; a new media installation in Gallery 301; and an intervention in Gallery 102, a large gallery devoted to historical African art.

Bringing together a group of eight paintings and works on paper from the Saint Louis Art Museum and Switzerland's Beyeler Foundation, this exhibition showcases the entire oeuvre of Mark Rothko and celebrates the diversity of nearly 30 years of artistic output from this crucial figure in the American Abstract Expressionist movement.

The exhibition includes early Surrealist imagery by Rothko while Untitled, 1948 is emblematic of the artist's abstractions, known as "multiforms". Painted in a range of blue, yellow, orange and white shapes against a salmon-colored background, this work's importance is heightened since it is the last image that Rothko signed on the front of the canvas. The artist famously affirmed that his paintings should be "tragic and timeless"— an observation that inspired the exhibition title.

The Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute’s Museum of Art in Utica, New York is sending a collection of Thomas Cole paintings on an 18-month tour to four major art museums. “The Voyage of Life,” a series of four allegorical paintings depicting the different stages of life including “Childhood,” “Youth,” “Manhood,” and “Old Age,” will go to the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, the Saint Louis Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Dickson Gallery & Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee. The works will remain at the MWPAI until March 2, 2014.

Cole, the English-born American artist who founded the Hudson River School, was commissioned to paint “The Voyage of Life” by banker Samuel Ward between 1839 and 1840. When Ward passed away, Cole argued with Ward’s heirs over who had custody of the art. Ultimately, the heirs won and Cole painted another version of “The Voyage of Life” for himself. Cole’s second rendition of the series resides in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The MWPAI is producing a catalog to tour with the collection, which will include essays and notes as well as never-before-published material and research about the paintings.