Displaying items by tag: American Art

In the annals of 20th-century American art, few legends loom quite as large as that of Black Mountain College. Founded in 1933 by the classics scholar John Andrew Rice and the engineer Theodore Dreier, it was a progressive institution based in Black Mountain, a small North Carolina town that aimed to place art making at the heart of a liberal arts education. That same year, the Nazis forced the closing of another grand experiment, Germany’s Bauhaus school, prompting many of its teachers and students to decamp for the United States. Several landed at Black Mountain, most prominently Josef Albers, who was chosen to lead the art program, and his wife, Anni, who taught textile design and weaving.

Under Albers, whose course on materials and form was one of only two requirements (the other was a class on Plato), Black Mountain soon became known as a kind of Shangri-La for avant-garde art.

Rarely seen American paintings from a private family collection in Maryland will be going on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The museum said Thursday that Thelma and Melvin Lenkin of Chevy Chase, Maryland, are lending 19 major paintings to the museum for display April 17 through Aug. 16.

The Lenkin collection includes masterworks of American impressionism and from the Ashcan school, portraying scenes of daily life in New York.

On Tuesday, March 11, 2015, Thomas P. Campbell, the Director and CEO of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced that David Chipperfield Architects (DCA) has been selected to redesign the institution’s Southwest Wing for modern and contemporary art. The British firm will also potentially redesign the neighboring galleries for the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, as well as additional operational spaces.

The Met’s selection process included an international design competition led by a committee of the museum’s Board of Trustees. According to a press release from the Met, Campbell said, “We based the final selection of an architect on three criteria: vision, experience, and compatibility. David Chipperfield’s global architectural experience and sensibility, along with his commitment to the collaborative aspect of creating architecture, make him a perfect partner on this milestone project.”

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts presents "Telling Tales: Stories and Legends in 19th-Century American Art" through June 7, 2015, in the Center’s Upper-Level Galleries. The exhibition features paintings and sculptures that recount stories relating to American cultural aspirations and everyday life throughout the 19th century. Narrative landscapes by Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand of the Hudson River School, genre scenes by William Sidney Mount and Francis W. Edmonds and sculptures by John Rogers are among the highlights of the exhibition.

Assembled from the collection of the New-York Historical Society, Telling Tales integrates genre, historical, literary and religious subjects—through styles ranging from Neoclassicism to Realism—to paint a vivid portrait of American art and life during the country’s most formative century. The exhibition is organized into six sections: “American History Painting,” “English Literature and History,” “Importing the Grand Manner,” “Genre Paintings,” “Economic, Social, and Religious Division” and “Picturing the Outsider.”

“I showed the America I knew,” Norman Rockwell once declared. His America, of course, is the one many of us know and love. We recognize in his famous images the energetic and optimistic folks who are emblematic of this nation’s spirit.

For more than 60 years, this lanky, pipe-smoking fellow, who had the air of a gawky clerk in a country store, set out his vision of this country on magazine covers and illustrations.

Skarstedt announces an exhibition of work by American artist Keith Haring, at their Chelsea gallery this March. The exhibition uniquely presents 5 major works on canvas, all at a monumental scale and dating from 1984-1985, exposing a lesser-known side to the iconic artist. "Keith Haring: Heaven and Hell" is on view at Skarstedt (550 W. 21st Street) through April 18, 2015.

The exhibition’s title, "Heaven and Hell," recalls William Blake’s 18th century poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—a study in opposites of good and evil, angels and devils. As William Blake wrote, “Without contraries is no progression.” Haring similarly examined the duality between two sides of contemporary life in his 1984-1985 paintings. The apparent antagonism and struggle between the figures is one of the key features of Haring’s art.

More than 200 prints by the American pop artist Jim Dine, featuring imagery including paintbrushes, bathrobes, tools and hearts, have been gifted to the British Museum.

The collection was the largest gift made to the museum’s prints and drawings department in 2014.

“It is very exciting,” said the museum’s curator of modern prints, Stephen Coppel, who was allowed to select from Dine’s entire oeuvre, starting in the 1960s.

“It was a very generous offer, given that he has made over a thousand prints,” said Coppel. “Choosing was fun. It took some time and there was a lot of backing and forthing, but it is a really great group of things.”

Artists Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman have donated to the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies’s Original Print and Photography Collections, respectively.

The FAPE’s collections are displayed in U.S. embassies all over the world, and aim to promote the creativity and diversity of American culture. The tradition of artists donating artworks to the FAPE’s Original Print and Photography Collections began in 1989, when Frank Stella donated an edition of "The Symphony" to every American embassy, and every year, an American artist has donated a new edition of original prints.

On April 8, 2015, Doris and Donald Fisher’s inimitable collection of twentieth-century art will go on view at the Grand Palais in Paris. The exhibition marks the beginning of a small international tour that will include another stop at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, France. When the exhibition concludes, the Fisher Collection will return to its new permanent home -- the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

In 2010, SFMOMA announced an unprecedented partnership to house and display the art collection of Donald Fisher, the founder of the Gap, and his wife, Doris. Comprising over 1,100 works by 185 American and European artists, the Fishers’ collection is one of the greatest private collections of modern and contemporary art in the world.

The veteran American artist Alex Katz was inspecting the hang of his new paintings while I looked at them, but I could not ask him any questions. I was dumbstruck. The only thing I could have said to him at that moment would have been a stuttered, “How come you paint so well?”

How can simple pictures of faces be so unexpected, exciting and fascinating? Katz has been painting portraits for a long time now – he’s 87 and began his career in the age of Jackson Pollock – and his latest works do not shatter his established style. Their main novelty is that all the figures are set against black. Many of the pictures have a wide CinemaScope format so the people in them stand out as colourful shapes against a nightscape of glossy darkness.