Displaying items by tag: sketches

In a visit with his daughters this past summer, President Obama spent nearly an hour at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the nation’s largest repository of paintings and sketches by Edward Hopper.

He also could have seen a few Hoppers at home.

Bay Area artist Richard Diebenkorn kept sketchbooks for his entire career; they served as a sort of nomadic studio where he experimented with visuals that bridged figurative and abstract ideas. Recently the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University acquired 29 of Diebenkorn’s sketchbooks, and this September they’re going on view to the public for the first time in Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed.

“The books are filled with stunningly gestural sketches of bits and pieces of daily life, both mundane capturing of everyday things, and powerful vignettes of intimate family moments,” Alison Gass, the Cantor’s associate director for collections, exhibitions, and curatorial affairs, told Hyperallergic.

In the spring of 1925, the famed painter John Singer Sargent was preparing to travel from London to Boston. His plan? To oversee the final installation of murals he’d created for the Museum of Fine Arts — mythic works that would join similar paintings at the Boston Public Library and Harvard’s Widener Library, cementing the artist’s relationship with the city he loved.

But Sargent never made the trip: He died in his sleep before embarking on the voyage.

All known drawings from Francisco Goya’s private “Witches and Old Women” album are being presented in their original sequence, thanks to extensive technical research undertaken by conservators, curators and art historians. An exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London (until May 25) marks the first time that all 22 ink drawings, which include depictions of elderly women fighting, witches carrying babies on their backs and pensioners dancing, have been shown together since their sale and dispersal in Paris in 1877.  

In what the noted Goya scholar Juliet Wilson-Bareau calls a “feat in forensics”, conservators and curators spent months examining the sheets to determine the pictures’ correct order. Although Goya (1746-1828) meticulously numbered each sketch, eight lost their numbers over the years.

Two Cézanne sketches found by conservators at the Barnes Foundation earlier this year went on view at the collection in Philadelphia today. The unfinished works were discovered on the backs of two of Cézanne’s landscapes, “The Chaine de L’Etoile Mountains” (1885–86) and “Trees” (1900), during a routine conservation treatment in 2014. The Barnes Foundation will display the watercolors in double-sided frames, allowing viewers to compare Cézanne’s finished, polished products with his incomplete works-in-progress.

The conservation session that yielded the discovery was headed by Barbara Buckley, senior director of conservation and chief conservator of paintings at the Barnes, with help from conservators from the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts.

Marc Chagall's drafts for the famous stained-glass windows at the St. Stephen Church in Mainz, Germany, designed in 1982 will go on display in the city next week before joining the permanent collection of the Diözesanmuseum (Diocesan Museum) in Tübingen, "Art Magazin" reports.

The hand-sketched plans for the magnificent blue windows were purchased for €70,000 ($78,000) by a group of local businessmen and the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the St. Stephan Church. The plans became available after they failed to sell at a Sotheby's auction in New York last year.

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.

The Courtauld Gallery in London is due to open its first space dedicated to drawings on 15 January. The gallery, named after Gilbert and Ildiko Butler, the American philanthropists who donated $750,000 towards its creation, will launch with an selection of drawings that have not been shown at the Courtauld for 20 years. “Unseen” (until March 29) includes a range of examples from the institution’s 7,000-strong collection of works on paper, from 15th-century Renaissance sketches to a 1962 piece by the Pop artist Larry Rivers.

“Unseen” is the first of around four exhibitions to be held at the gallery every year.

The Brooklyn Museum in New York City announced that it will exhibit eight rarely seen notebooks created by Jean-Michel Basquiat between 1980 and 1987. The volumes, which feature 160 pages brimming with poetry, wordplay, sketches, and personal observations, have never been publicly exhibited. “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” will also include thirty paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works drawn from private collections and the artist’s estate.

Basquiat, who rose to fame in the 1980s, is best known for his graffiti-tinged Neo-expressionist and Primitivist works.