Displaying items by tag: creative process

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota is currently hosting the exhibition “Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process.” Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the show is the first major museum exhibition to focus on the drawings and creative process of the iconic American artist Edward Hopper. Known for his enigmatic renderings of rural and urban American life, Hopper’s paintings of seascapes, cityscapes, and their inhabitants are some of the most significant artworks of the 20th century.

“Hopper Drawing” offers viewers a rare glimpse into the creative process of an artist who produced one of the most lauded oeuvres in modern art. Hopper’s drawings illustrate his ever-changing relationships with his subjects, which include the street, the movie theater, the office, his bedroom, and the road. Drawn from the Whitney’s remarkable Hopper collection, which includes 2,500 drawings given to the museum by the artist’s widow, Josephine, “Hopper Drawing” includes drafts of some of the artist’s most recognized works alongside their painted counterparts. Works on view include “Early Sunday Morning,” “New York Movie,” “Nighthawks,” and “Office at Night,” from the Walker’s collection.

“Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process” will be on view at the Walker Art Center through June 20, 2014.

Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea, which is now on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, explores the artist’s lifelong fascination with the sea. Maurice Prendergast, a pioneering post-Impressionist painter, spent much of the late 19^th century and early 20^th century capturing modern life on the coast of New England.

 By the Sea is the first retrospective of Prendergast’s oeuvre in over two decades. The exhibition presents more than 90 works in a variety of media from over 30 public and private collections in addition to Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s own holdings. The exhibition traces the development of Prendergast’s highly personal style, which is recognized for its use of jewel-like colors and pattern-like compositions containing flattened, free-form figures. The exhibition also includes Prendergast’s sketchbooks and oil studies, allowing visitors to see into the Modernist artist’s creative process.

Highlights include the watercolor The Balloon, which is part of a private collection and has not been included in earlier Prendergast retrospectives; St. Malo, a bright watercolor on loan from the Williams College Museum of Art, which was lauded as one of the first American introductions of the bold European Post-Impressionist avant-garde; and a number of works that the artist contributed to the seminal Armory Show of 1913 (also known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art).

Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea will be on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art through October 13, 2013.

Hopper Drawing, which opens today, May 23, 2013 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, is the first major museum exhibition to focus on the drawings and creative process of Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Known for his enigmatic renderings of rural and urban American life, Hopper’s paintings of seascapes, cityscapes, and their inhabitants are some of the most significant artworks of the 20^th century.

The Whitney’s exhibition is not just a presentation of Hopper’s best-known works; it is a rare glimpse into the creative process that produced one of the most lauded oeuvres in modern art. Hopper’s drawings illustrate his ever-changing relationships with his subjects, which include the street, the movie theater, the office, the bedroom, and the road. Drawn from the Whitney’s remarkable Hopper collection, which includes 2,500 drawings given to the museum by the artist’s widow, Josephine, Hopper Drawing includes drafts of some of Hopper’s most recognized works alongside their oil painting counterparts. Works on view include Early Sunday Morning (1930), New York Movie (1939), Office at Night (1940), and Nighthawks (1942) together with their prepatory drawings and related works. The exhibition also includes pioneering archival research into the buildings and urban spaces that inspired Hopper’s work.

Drawing Hopper will be on view at the Whitney through October 6, 2013.

On view through April 12, 2013 at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Picasso and the Mysteries of Life: Deconstructing La Vie is the first exhibition devoted to Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) complex masterpiece, which defined his well-known Blue Period. A cornerstone of the museum’s collection, La Vie (1903) is accompanied by related works on loan from Barcelona’s Museu Picasso as well as works by Francisco Goya (1746-1828), Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), and Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) from the Cleveland Museum’s own collection.

The exhibition uses x-radiographs, infrared reflectographs, and other scientific methods to delve into the process behind La Vie. Displayed on iPads, the technological investigation illustrates Picasso’s creative process and how he altered the painting’s composition considerably before deeming the work complete.

Picasso drew preliminary sketches for La Vie in May of 1903. At the time, he was a young, unknown artist who still lived in his parents’ home in Barcelona. The first sketches depicted an artist in his studio and evolved into a more intricate scene meant to evoke thoughts about life and art and the intersection of the two. A solid analysis of La Vie has always eluded scholars due to its enigmatic subject, early history, and its relationship to Picasso’s other works from this time. However, the painting has never been examined as thoroughly and in-depth as by the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Picasso and the Mysteries of Life strives to make sense of the work by exploring the subjects of the painting. Carles Casagemas, the gaunt man featured in the work’s left foreground, was a friend of Picasso’s and a fellow artist. Casagemas committed suicide in 1901, prompting Picasso to contemplate the glorification of suicide and the bohemian lifestyle in modern art and culture. The woman standing behind Casagemas in La Vie has been identified as Germaine Pichot, his lover and a contributor to his suicide. Pichot stands as a symbol of Picasso’s coded representation of women and in a broader sense, as the fatal woman often portrayed in modern art.

A 163-page book by William H. Robinson, the Cleveland Museum’s curator of modern European art, accompanies the exhibition. The book further explores the role of La Vie in Picasso’s creative process as well as the important issues in the modernist culture of the 19^th and 20^th centuries that affected Picasso and his work. Robinson explores how Spanish and French literature affected Picasso’s Blue Period paintings, the impact of Rodin’s large retrospective of 1900 on the young artist, and Picasso’s ongoing struggle to fully understand the notions of fate and destiny.

Deconstructing La Vie is the inaugural exhibition in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s new Focus Gallery.