Displaying items by tag: Exhibition

“Widows are all much in demand,” sings the titular character in an English-language translation of The Merry Widow. “And if the poor things should be rich / Then there’s no end to the suitors at hand!”

And with so many gawkers gawking, a widow ought to be well dressed.

Mourning attire from 1815 to 1915 is the subject of a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire,” which opened on Tuesday in New York. And though Harper’s Bazaar urged “nun-like simplicity” of widow’s weeds in 1868, many of the frocks on display are very grand, embellished with lace, fringe and beads.

In photographic wanderings around New York City, Paul Strand sometimes used a fake lens so his subjects wouldn’t know their pictures were being taken.

Partly by this means, he brought greater spontaneity and realism into the photographer’s worldview circa World War I, leading an art form that had recently imitated painting into the modern age on its own terms.

Until his death in 1976, Strand, whom the Philadelphia Museum of Art regards as “one of the greatest photographers in the history of the medium,” produced work infused with left-of-center social views and curiosity about people and localities all over the globe.

It keeps no permanent collection, and its exhibition focus is on new artwork. But the past is ever-present at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

In fact, an old hand-drawn map of the site, dating to when this sprawling campus of 26 buildings was home to Arnold Print Works, serves just fine as a visual aid for museum director Joseph C. Thompson as he stands in a conference room and points out spots on the museum campus that are targeted for an ambitious expansion plan.

Buildings that now showcase art are marked on the old map as blacksmith shops and coal sheds.

Transcendence comes cheap and easy at "Matisse and Friends," the new exhibit at the Denver Art Museum, and, for most of us, that's a terrific help. We're all busy, no?

The show has just 14 paintings, and you can tour through, meaningfully, in less than time than it takes to watch a rerun of "Law & Order." See it on your lunch hour, or while the kids are at ballet class. Make it a date and get to the romance without having to be all that charming in the buildup.

Barbara Babcock Millhouse has given a painting by one of American art’s most distinguished abstract expressionist artists to Reynolda House Museum of American Art.

Allison Perkins, museum executive director, revealed “Birth,” a large-scale oil painting by Lee Krasner to an audience of more than 300 at the museum’s annual black-tie fundraising gala on Friday night.

The painting is on view in the museum’s exhibition “Love and Loss." The show examines the power of art to transform individual loss into expressions of shared experience.

At first glance the painting appears to show a modern-day Madonna and Child. The Madonna, wearing jeans, is sitting on a sun-dappled floor while the baby – a girl, surely – nestles between her mother’s protective legs. All seems calm and serene, until you notice the woman’s body language. Her shoulders are tense, her torso slumped, and she is staring not at her child but blankly at the floor. If this is what motherhood looks like then it is clearly not for the faint-hearted.

"Ginny and Elizabeth" was painted in 1976 by the American artist Alice Neel and modeled by her daughter-in-law and baby granddaughter. At the time Neel started work on the piece, she was finally receiving public acclaim for her work after decades of obscurity.

After two years of fundraising, Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries have finally secured the £2.25 million (approx. $3.6 million) necessary to buy the personal archive of early photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot. Although Daguerre is often credited with the invention of photography, Fox Talbot’s book “Pencil of Nature” was an early development for paper-based processes and the first photographically-illustrated book. The archive includes objects photographed in the book, documents relating to both his work and his personal life, and many other items. The Bodleian Libraries have several plans in the works for the archive including a 2017 exhibition, a catalogue raisonné of his work, and an online archive for scholarly research.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is organizing a major exhibition on the Seljuks, whose medieval Islamic empire expanded from central Asia into much of modern Anatolia in Turkey, without loans from Turkey, "The Art Newspaper" has learned. Experts fear that loans from any collections in Iran or Russia will also be missing in the Met’s show.

The Met’s problem securing Turkish loans echoes those surrounding the British Museum’s exhibition on the Hajj, which went ahead in London in 2012 without Turkish artifacts after tangled disputes over an inscribed stele with a relief of Herakles, which have yet to be resolved.

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.

A new exhibition will open at Christie's Mayfair 11 October 2014. "The Bad Shepherd" is a major exhibition exploring the continued influence of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and his artistic dynasty in the 21st century. This is the first exhibition ever to present the work of the Brueghels in dialogue with contemporary art and features many rarely seen works from private collections.

Artists include: Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Marten Van Cleve and Abel Grimmer Peter Doig, Nicole Eisenman, Jeff Koons, Sarah Lucas, Neo Rauch, Thomas Schütte, and Jeff Wall.