Displaying items by tag: european art

The Art Institute of Chicago announced that Gloria Groom has been named the chair of the museum’s European Painting and Sculpture department. She will now oversee the museum’s collection of Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, early 19th-century, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist art.

Groom, who is also currently the Art Institute’s David and Mary Winton Green Curator, is known best for her work related to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and has written about the work of Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.

The creation of three shades of blue hues — Prussian, cobalt and ultramarine — in 18th and 19th century European art, spanning from the Rococo period to Impressionism, is the subject of a colorful exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum, "A Revolution of the Palette: The First Synthetic Blues and Their Impact on French Artists."

"Previously, there were a limited number of options for oil painting," noted conservator and curator John Griswold. "Common indigo blue pigment did not stand up in oil, often turning to mushy gray."

Life Lines: Portrait Drawings from Dürer to Picasso at the Morgan Library & Museum may not venture very far beyond canonical European artists, but it uncovers richness and diversity within a circumscribed field, especially in the work of its two anchors, Albrecht Dürer and Pablo Picasso.

Of the 51 drawings on display, only five were made the 20th century, with most dating from the 1600s and 1700s.

It was a heart-stopping moment when the conservator Alice Tate-Harte gently cleaned off centuries of thick black paint and grime and uncovered square Roman letters spelling out the name TITIANUS. The reputation of the bare-breasted young woman in the painting was instantly transformed: she has turned out to be a genuine work by one of the most revered masters of European painting, not a much later imitation of his style.

“It was a once-in-a-career moment, and there was nobody else in the conservation studio to share it – I had to ring my husband to have somebody to tell,” she recalled.

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.

On March 25th "Landscapes of the Mind. British Landscape Painting. Tate Collection, 1690-2007" was presented for the first time ever in Mexico City, an exhibition organized by Tate in association with Museo Nacional de Arte, as part of the celebrations of the Dual Year between Mexico and the United Kingdom.

This exhibition presents 111 artworks by British and European artists, with a plurality of techniques (painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture/installation, etc.) which ponder on the evolution of British landscape in art history. The term "Britain" is understood as the geographical entity of the British Isles, i.e., the archipelago that includes England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, before the independence of the latter in 1921.

One of Gustav Klimt's most famous paintings should not be returned to the heirs of its original Jewish owners, an Austrian panel has ruled.

The "Beethoven Frieze" was looted by the Nazis but returned to the family of Jewish industrialist August Lederer after World War Two.

But it was subject to an export ban.

The heirs had argued this forced Lederer's son Erich to sell the work at a cut-rate price. The museum where it is now on display disputed this claim.

On April 8, 2015, Doris and Donald Fisher’s inimitable collection of twentieth-century art will go on view at the Grand Palais in Paris. The exhibition marks the beginning of a small international tour that will include another stop at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, France. When the exhibition concludes, the Fisher Collection will return to its new permanent home -- the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

In 2010, SFMOMA announced an unprecedented partnership to house and display the art collection of Donald Fisher, the founder of the Gap, and his wife, Doris. Comprising over 1,100 works by 185 American and European artists, the Fishers’ collection is one of the greatest private collections of modern and contemporary art in the world.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has published a new handbook—the first in more than 20 years—of its encyclopedic collections. Featuring some 550 masterpieces from the Museum’s world renowned holdings of Asian, European, American, and modern and contemporary art, this volume includes a broad range of media from each of the Museum’s curatorial departments, including paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures, the decorative arts, costumes and textiles, arms and armor, and architectural settings. Expanded entries provide in depth information on some of the most significant works, among them Thomas Eakins’s masterpiece "The Gross Clinic" (1875) and a superb man and horse armor acquired in 2009.

The introduction to the handbook, written by Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, recounts the Museum’s institutional history and the formation and distinctive characteristics of its collection.

The Birmingham Museum of Art opened a new exhibit Saturday that features works of well-known Dutch and Flemish masters. The exhibition, called "Small Treasures," includes paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer and their contemporaries. These artists are often known for large canvases, but these paintings are small.

"We have two paintings by Rembrandt and two paintings by Vermeer," said Robert Schindler, the museum's curator of European art. "In terms of quality and the level of artistic skill that is on display here, [it] is just extraordinary. It does not get any better than this."