Displaying items by tag: allentown art museum

From the Fabulous '40s through the Swinging '60s to now, Pop Art's style has endured.

Earlier this year, the Allentown Art Museum explored the beginning of Pop Art's story in "British Pop Art Prints," which revealed how American Pop Art grew from a movement that started in London in the late '40s and early '50s by British artists such as Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi.

Then came the Americans — Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg — who rose from relative obscurity in New York to become some of the world's best-known artists, and had an influence on everything from design to fashion and film.

The museum explores that story in "American Pop: The Prints," an exhibit of works from the museum collection and Muhlenberg College that serves as a companion exhibit to "Robert Indiana from A to Z," a retrospective of work by one of the Pop movement's founding fathers.

For centuries, artists have incorporated the written word into their art. Robert Indiana, one of the original American Pop artists, made them the focus of his artistic career.

Today, Indiana's words are some of the most recognizable in the world. His most famous works — such as LOVE, HOPE and EAT — have become an integral part of today's artistic and cultural landscape.

"Robert Indiana from A to Z," opening Oct. 12 at the Allentown Art Museum, covers just about everything that is Robert Indiana, with 80 works and personal objects from the artist's collection spanning eight decades.

A traveling exhibition of master paintings by some of the greatest names in European art ends its East Coast summer residency at the Allentown Art Museum on Sunday, September 7. "Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums" features works by Italian Renaissance and Baroque masters such as Giovanni Bellini, Sandro Botticelli, Francesco Guardi, Salvator Rosa, and Titian, many of which have never before been exhibited in the United States. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these forty major works; after Allentown, the exhibition will travel west to the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Society of the Arts (SOTA), the exhibition is free to all visitors, Wednesday-Saturday 11-4 and Sunday noon-4. “The elimination of our admission fees this summer, and dual-language labels in English and Spanish, are intended to deliver a message that in this, our eightieth anniversary year, the Allentown Art Museum is accessible to all and that we encourage everyone to experience what this extraordinary institution has to offer,” says David Mickenberg, Priscilla Payne Hurd President and CEO of the Art Museum.

"Los Caprichos," a set of 80 etching and aquatint prints created by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya in 1797 and 1798, are considered to be among the most influential works of art in the Western world.

Strange, graphic and often cryptic, these images were far ahead of their time in their scathing depiction of Spanish social customs and used by Goya to critique everything from the rich and powerful to the excesses of the church.

The Allentown Art Museum is presenting a great opportunity to see this complete set of prized prints that, over the past two centuries, have influenced artists such as Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns.

Centuries ago, if you wanted to see the paintings of the great Italian masters, you would have embarked on something called The Grand Tour, a kind of traveling educational experience to the principal artistic centers of Renaissance Italy: Rome, Milan, Bologna, Florence, Siena, Naples and Venice.

This summer, The Grand Tour, by way of Glasgow, Scotland, is coming to Allentown.

The Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley is one of the stops on an once-in-a-lifetime American tour of paintings by some of the greatest names in Italian art. It's a rare opportunity to see the work of artists that quite literally changed the world. And admission will be free, due to an initiative to make the museum more accessible.