Displaying items by tag: drawings

A five-volume catalogue raisonné of Francisco de Goya’s drawings will be developed in a rare collaboration between the Museo Nacional del Prado and the Santander- and Madrid-based Fundación Botín. The project, which kicks off this month and is due to run for at least five years, will involve researching, cataloguing and conserving nearly 1,000 drawings by Goya, and will conclude with two exhibitions: one at the future Botín Center in Santander, when the first volume is published in 2016, and another at El Prado in 2019—for the museum’s 200th anniversary—when the rest of the volumes are due to be finished.

“The indisputable novelty of the catalogue is in its collaborative execution,” says an official release from the Fundación Botín. The foundation has dedicated €1.7 million to the editorial coordination and management of the project.

Leonardo da Vinci always impressed on his students the importance of depicting nature accurately. He wrote: “Painter, you should know that you cannot be good if you are not a master universal enough to imitate with your art every kind of natural form.” Indeed, his own paintings and drawings of the natural world are as scientifically accurate as they are beautiful.

Five centuries on, scientists and art historians are trying to work out to what extent Leonardo had a hand in both versions of "Virgin of the Rocks" – the one in the Louvre, in Paris, and the replica in the National Gallery in London.

The completely new presentation of the permanent collection of the Van Gogh Museum focuses on the development of Vincent van Gogh. The story of Van Gogh's life and art is the common theme of all floors of the museum; and his paintings, as well as his drawings and letters have now found a permanent place. All the myths surrounding Van Gogh – his suicide, illness and ear– will now be discussed in detail for the first time. More so than before, Van Gogh is presented in the context of his own time. His huge impact on generations after him will also be shown: the museum will demonstrate that Van Gogh has been a source of inspiration until this very day by presenting works on loan that will be regularly changed.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) is one of the most famous artists of all times and he has become an icon, an almost mythical, larger than life figure. This underlying idea is the start through the spectacularly redesigned Van Gogh Museum.

The “Nature and Metamorphosis” retrospective includes 56 paintings and 103 drawings from 1924 through 1990, spanning Peter Blume’s entire career. From jarring early works inspired by the machine age and growth of cities through profound ruminations on to power of nature. Blume’s work helped define American modernism.

While best known as a painter, Blume was a virtuoso, dynamic draftsman, and his drawings show a surprising range. The retrospective is curated by Robert Cozzolino, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) senior curator and curator of Modern Art. “Blume was critical to the development and reception of modernism in America. His work played a key role in disseminating avant-garde ideas in the U.S. art world using a method that resembled Flemish art transposed through the lens of Cubism and the unconscious.

Impressionist Claude Monet is one of history's most famous artists. Hard-edge painter Ellsworth Kelly is equally illustrious in contemporary circles.

They never met in person. Kelly was 3 when Monet died in 1926 at 86. Their approaches and their art could not be more different.

Yet their worlds intersected for a moment in 1952, an encounter illuminated in an exhibition that opened this weekend at the Clark Art Institute. "Monet / Kelly," featuring nine paintings by Monet and 20 artworks by Kelly, all but two of them drawings, runs through Feb. 15.

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, known for daring installations that can stretch as long as a football field, will announce Monday a group of long-term projects with some of the country’s most prominent living artists, including Laurie Anderson, James Turrell and Jenny Holzer, as well as a partnership with the foundation of the late post-abstract expressionist Robert Rauschenberg.

When the roughly $55 million project is completed in 2017, Mass MoCA will be the largest contemporary art museum in the country, with more than 250,000 square feet of gallery space. It will also be one of the most eclectic, with a campus that features everything from rock and bluegrass festivals to dance premieres and a 27,000-square-foot building devoted to the drawings of conceptual artist Sol LeWitt.

For the first time in Spain, the Museo del Prado is presenting a selection of 87 Spanish drawings dating from the 16th to the early 19th centuries from the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In terms of quality and quantity, this institution houses one of the most important collections of Spanish Old Master drawings outside Spain, numbering more than 200 works. Assembled in Seville in the early 19th century, it was subsequently sold on the London art market and acquired by the Hamburg museum in 1891.

The core of the collection comprises drawings by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and by some of his most important contemporaries and followers, many of them associated with the Academy founded in Seville by Murillo, Juan de Valdés Leal and Francisco de Herrera the Younger. In addition, the exhibition includes important works by other leading Golden Age masters such as Alonso Cano and Antonio del Castillo.

One of the world's most famous self-portraits is going on rare public display in the northern Italian city of Turin. Very little is known about the 500-year-old, fragile, fading red chalk drawing of Leonardo da Vinci but some believe it has mystical powers.

There is a myth in Turin that the gaze of Leonardo da Vinci in this self-portrait is so intense that those who observe it are imbued with great strength.

Some say it was this magical power, not the cultural and economic value of the drawing, that led to it being secretly moved from Turin and taken to Rome during World War Two - heaven forbid it should ever fall into Hitler's hands and give him more power.

There is very little about Picasso that John Richardson, his longtime biographer, doesn’t already know. As a friend of Picasso’s during the 1950s, while the artist was living in the south of France, Mr. Richardson saw more than most.

He can reveal juicy snippets about Picasso’s sexual escapades and recall many of his personal quirks: How Picasso would rub a concoction of oil heated with sticks of lavender into his scalp to make his hair grow; his passion for salt cod purée; his loathing of classical music. Mr. Richardson can also describe in riveting detail Picasso’s methods of painting, sculpting and drawing.

In the world of art with paintings by Monet and Rembrandt, and sculpture by Michelangelo and Rodin, drawings sometimes play second fiddle.

Grand Rapids Art Museum hopes to show that's not really the case with a major exhibition of works on paper from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Drawings, watercolors and pastels from artists such as Picasso, Van Gogh and Jasper Johns go on display this fall in the exhibition titled "Marks of Genius: 100 Extraordinary Drawings from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts."