Displaying items by tag: drawings

Though “Dance: Movement, Rhythm, Spectacle” occupies just one large room (arranged to feel like three) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it seems to open windows in many directions. Its exhibits range from the 1890s to the 1980s, vividly demonstrating how radically that century brought change to social dance, dance theater and ideas of dance in art. Diversely diverse, the show, which opened this month, offers a panoply of artistic media (photographs, paintings, watercolors, prints, woodcuts, etchings, graphite drawings, lithographs and film), dancers of various races and a huge assortment of dance costumes.

Opening this weekend at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art is the first major one-man exhibition in Japan of Cy Twombly, featuring some 70 drawings, paintings, and monotypes culled from a fifty-year period from 1953 to 2002.

First held in 2003 at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, where the museum’s first non-Russian curator Julie Sylvester organized the exhibit, the show was notable for the way in which the artist himself participated in the selection of the pieces.

“This show will really bring something new to the Kahlo discussion,” says curator Adriana Zavala of the human-plant hybrids and foliate still lifes presented in “Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life,” which opened May 16 at the New York Botanical Garden. 

The exhibition explores the artist’s passion for the natural world, evident not only in the rich diversity of Mexican flora and fauna depicted in the 14 paintings and drawings on view, but in her garden of exotic tropical vegetation — which is being re-created for the show — that she tended at Casa Azul, the house she shared with Diego Rivera in Coyoacán.

Ninety years ago, Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003) drew his first caricature. Now his stylized drawings of stars and scenes are the subject of an exhibit called “The Hirschfeld Century” at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, opening May 22. His work, which appeared in many magazines and newspapers over the decades, provides a vivid history of the performing arts in the 20th century.

It is rare for private collections of American paintings, drawings, and watercolors to span the entire nineteenth century—from America’s artistic development in the Federal period to the aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century. It’s rarer still when the collection is coupled with American sculpture spanning the same period, particularly considering that there were few American sculptors of note for much of the first half of the century. The art within this East Coast private collection encompass paintings by Trumbull and Stuart to Chase and Sargent and sculpture from Houdon to Saint-Gaudens.

Most American sculpture of the early nineteenth century consists of portraits that celebrate the founding fathers of the nation. As such they complement paintings of the period which, while also recording the likenesses of the early patriots, include historical events, often battles...

To continue reading this article about nineteenth-century sculpture, visit InCollect.com.

No museum exhibition is perfect, but some are less perfect than others. Surprisingly, even these shows sometimes turn out to be exceptionally valuable. They clarify notions of quality and the pleasures and rigors of looking, for curators and visitors alike.

“Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions” at the Morgan Library & Museum is one of these flawed gems. Of its nearly 100 drawings, about half are either weak or just acceptable, which is not good enough for an institution of the Morgan’s stature.

The Harvard Art Museums have named Edouard Kopp the Abrams associate curator of drawings in the museums’ division of European and American Art, officials announced this week. Overseeing the collection of pre-twentieth century drawings, Kopp will develop exhibitions and public lectures while organizing the rotation of works on paper within many of the museums’ galleries. 

Previously, Kopp served as associate curator of drawings for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where he was responsible for French and Germanic drawings.

All known drawings from Francisco Goya’s private “Witches and Old Women” album are being presented in their original sequence, thanks to extensive technical research undertaken by conservators, curators and art historians. An exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London (until May 25) marks the first time that all 22 ink drawings, which include depictions of elderly women fighting, witches carrying babies on their backs and pensioners dancing, have been shown together since their sale and dispersal in Paris in 1877.  

In what the noted Goya scholar Juliet Wilson-Bareau calls a “feat in forensics”, conservators and curators spent months examining the sheets to determine the pictures’ correct order. Although Goya (1746-1828) meticulously numbered each sketch, eight lost their numbers over the years.

Douglas Druick, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, announced today that Chicago attorney Irving Stenn Jr. has given the museum more than 100 drawings from his exceptional collection of seminal works produced in the 1960s. The drawings, by a who's-who of contemporary artists, represent a foundational period in the history of drawing when the way works on paper were made, used, and appreciated was undergoing radical change.

The gift includes works by Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, and Fred Sandback, as well as pieces by Agnes Denes, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Nam June Paik, and Ellsworth Kelly.

When art mavens see drawings with simplified lines, elongated torsos and the oval faces of androgynous subjects, they instantly think of Amedeo Modigliani. Small though it is, “Modigliani: A Unique Artistic Voice” at London’s Estorick Collection will give a great deal of pleasure to those who love them—and to those fascinated by the story of the handsome but apparently cursed, talented youth who crashed out on drink and drugs.

The show, which runs April 15 to June 28, constitutes a curious footnote to the Italian artist’s life, as it includes the 1918 painting “Dr. François Brabander” (1) plus a handful of drawings owned by the gallery’s fascinating American founder, Eric Estorick.