Displaying items by tag: sketchbook

An old woman, back bent and teeth buckled, kneels on the floor; beside her lie two vessels and a shallow bowl and spoon. Her gaze is misted and sad, but her eyes meet the viewer’s; in her arms, about to be devoured, is a newborn baby. In a picture nearby an elderly couple fly up into the air together, her arms clutch his legs, his outstretched hands clack castanets, associated with music, sensuality and sex. Their faces are angled towards each other, crimped with glee. The walls of the Courtauld Gallery in London are currently crowded with similar images: unsettling and superstitious, erotic and grotesque.

“Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album”, an ambitious new exhibition, opened this week. It marks the first time an institution or individual has tried to reconstitute one of Francisco Goya’s sketchbooks, which were broken up in 1826 after his death.

Entire artistic careers might be made from small aspects of Sigmar Polke’s multifarious art, which now fills 14 rooms at Tate Modern. The third Tate show devoted to Polke in 20 years, "Alibis" is a compendious and at times bewildering romp through a career that began in the early 1960s and ended with Polke’s death in 2010.

Dealing with Polke’s legacy has only just begun. There is a lot of messy unfinished business, and much of it is here. As well as paintings, there are films of early performances and games with potatoes, weirdly exposed and manipulated photographs, a slide-show room of photocopy experiments, tables of sketchbook drawings reproduced and flicked-through on iPad tablets.

A rare Grant Wood sketchbook from 1929 is back in Davenport after it went missing from a museum about 50 years ago, the museum said.

The 100-page sketchbook signed by Wood, the painter of "American Gothic," is again in the Figge Art Museum's possession, collections and exhibitions manager Andrew Wallace said Thursday.

The small book of drawings for the 24-foot, stained-glass window in Cedar Rapid's Veterans Memorial Building was likely stolen during an open house in 1966 at what was then the Davenport Museum of Art.

The New-York Historical Society is exhibiting a recently acquired sketchbook of drawings and watercolors by the Post-Impressionist American artist, Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924). The sketchbook, which is from the final years of the artist’s life, features 152 lined and paginated leaves. The volume includes many seaside scenes and park views populated by figures in endless variations.

Dr. Roberta J.M. Olson, curator of drawings at New-York Historical, said, “We are thrilled to add this volume of sketches to the collection of the New-York Historical Society, which holds the oldest public drawings collection in the United States. This sketchbook offers keen insights into Prendergast’s creative output during his final years and the intense graphomania that he demonstrated throughout his career.”

The sketchbook is currently on view in the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture. For preservation reasons, the watercolors require turning ever three months. The sketchbook’s 152 pages can be seen in their entirety on a nearby digital monitor thanks to turn-the-page technology.

An unpublished sketchbook belonging to the Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918) has surfaced from a private collection. Dating back to 1906 when Schiele enrolled at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts where he was to meet his future mentor, Gustave Klimt (1862-1918), the sketchbook contains over 40 never-before-seen works by the artist. The images will be reproduced later this month in Egon Schiele: The Beginning, the first book to explore the expressionist’s early works.

Schiele was an important figurative painter of the 20^th century and many of his works are erotically charged and noted for their raw emotional intensity. Schiele’s early sketchbook includes a self-portrait and various landscapes that illustrate his early predilection for the expressive brush strokes and dramatic lines that are now readily associated with his work.

Egon Schiele: The Beginning will also include sketches Schiele completed in 1905 on an old English dictionary. Only one of the dictionary sketches has been exhibited before.