Displaying items by tag: Abstract

 The Denver Art Museum is currently hosting the exhibition “Beyond Pop Art: A Tom Wesselmann Retrospective.” Tom Wesselmann, an American painter whose career spanned more than four decades, is widely regarded as one of the defining figures of Pop Art. Organized chronologically, “Beyond Pop Art” charts the evolution of Wesselman’s influential oeuvre.

The exhibition begins with Wesselman’s early abstract collages and moves to his well-known series, “The Great American Nude.”

Paintings by postwar abstract artist Mark Rothko are highly coveted — in May one of his works sold at auction in London for $50 million. But oddly enough, Harvard University has had a handful of Rothkos — faded by sunlight and splattered with food and drink — in storage. Now, new technology has led to a potentially controversial restoration.

Retired Harvard curator and conservator Marjorie Cohn was an apprentice at the Harvard Art Museums around the time Rothko was commissioned to create wall-sized paintings for a new space at the university's Holyoke Center. When the painter arrived with his finished, rolled-up canvases in 1963, Cohn remembers the entire conservation department showed up to stretch the huge plum and crimson-colored paintings onto wooden frames.

An enormous abstract sculpture, a sailboat of sorts, rests on a pedestal at the intersection of Beverly and San Vicente boulevards in West Hollywood. Its dark, carbon-fiber sails seem to billow in the wind, and corkscrew spirals of stainless steel, like twirling gusts of air, dance around it. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center rises up behind it, like towering, angry waves.

Frank Stella, the abstract artist who made the piece, circles it on foot, viewing it for the first time since it was installed. In a dapper sports coat and brown fedora, the 78-year-old New York artist — a fixture in the modern-art world for more than 50 years and one of the fathers of Minimalism — assesses the sculpture while in perpetual motion. He speaks quickly, pausing only to look up at the piece from different angles, hand on hip, squinting into the sunlight.

A court here on Wednesday issued a ruling that permits the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to display art as it sees fit in the Venetian palazzo given to it by the wealthy collector Peggy Guggenheim.

In a 16-page decision, the Paris tribunal rejected legal claims made by a group of her descendants that the foundation was bound to display Guggenheim’s vast collection of modern art the way she had originally presented it in her home.

Her family — seven grandsons and great-grandsons based in France — vowed to appeal after the tribunal dismissed their demands to revoke Guggenheim’s donation to the foundation unless the displays of Cubist, Surrealist and abstract postwar art were returned to their original state without additions of contemporary works.

This summer, fourteen monumental sculptures by Alexander Calder (1898-1976) are taking over the Rijksmuseum’s 'outdoor gallery' for the largest freely accessible outdoor exhibition of his work to date.

Calder (1898-1976) is undoubtedly one of the most celebrated inventors of modern sculpture. His cut-out and colorful abstract objects that move in the air or rest firmly on the ground can be found throughout the world, whether in museums or in gardens and public plazas, ranking him among the first and most prolific sculptors of large-scale outdoor works. This show of his monumental sculptures in the gardens of the Rijksmuseum creates a fascinating landscape of stately abstract forms.

Guest curator Alfred Pacquement, former director of Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou in Paris, has selected mobiles, stabiles, and standing mobiles by Calder from major museums and private collections.

This exhibition is the second in a series of annual international sculpture displays, which will be presented in the Rijksmuseum’s gardens over the next four years, made possible with funding from the BankGiro Loterij and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Modern Dialect: American Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman Collection, a striking new exhibition, opened at the Columbus Museum of Art June 6. The exhibition, on view through August 31, showcases American Modernist paintings from the 1920s to the beginning of World War II, a period marked by significant change and compounded by the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The more than sixty artists featured in Modern Dialect hail from all parts of the United States, and painted wherever they found inspiration. These artists adhere to a common interest, more than to a single style, in portraying their realities in a decidedly modern fashion. The exhibition reveals the scope of the American modernist aesthetic in the early 20th century, and the vision and integrity each artist brought to the representation of the American experience – from rural landscapes to modern industrial cities (and the people who inhabit them) to purely abstracted compositions.

Alexander Calder's abstract works revolutionized modern sculpture and made him one of the most celebrated artists of the 20^th century. In collaboration with the Calder Foundation, this exhibition brings together 40 of the artist's mobiles (kinetic metal works) and stabiles (dynamic monumental sculptures) to explore how Alexander Calder introduced the visual vocabulary of the French Surrealists into the American vernacular.

This is not good news: The Museum of Contemporary Art has lent a major painting from its permanent collection to a newly opened exhibition at a prominent Culver City art gallery, raising serious questions of conflict of interest.

A museum loan to a commercial enterprise is highly unusual, since the arrangement is typically irrelevant to a museum’s educational mission. Given MOCA’s recent history of troubling mercantile involvements, the gallery loan is disheartening.

Now that the first week of the big spring auctions is over, Sotheby’s is wasting no time touting its sales in London next month, hanging highlights in its York Avenue galleries for collectors to peruse during the contemporary-art previews this weekend.

Knowing that today’s appetite for prime abstract paintings appears boundless, Sotheby’s expects a 1927 Mondrian that has not been on the market since the 1950s to be a star of its June 23 auction. This stark canvas, “Composition With Red, Blue and Grey,” was first owned by Harry Holtzman, an artist who helped found the American Abstract Artists Group, an influential organization that espoused the principles of European Modernism, and who was a friend of Mondrian’s and an expert on his work.

The National Gallery of Art unveils a show of artwork from one of America's best known painters, Andrew Wyeth, on May 4th that has a decidedly new twist. The exhibit focuses on Wyeth’s fascination with windows – an apparently unnoticed feature of his work that came to light when a curator began wondering about a Wyeth acquisition that came to the gallery in 2009.

The evocative painting of a window with gently billowing curtains and a landscape through the window, “Wind from the Sea,” made curator Nancy K. Anderson start looking for more. “Are we making this up?” she asked, only to have Wyeth family members confirm his interest in windows.