Displaying items by tag: figures

The National Portrait Gallery in London is to stage the first portrait show for an artist whose work ranks as some of the most recognizable of the 20th century.

Alberto Giacometti is well known for his tall and spindly sculptural figures. But he is far less well known as a portrait artist – a situation which the gallery hopes to redress with an exhibition opening in October.

According to Paul Moorhouse, curator of 20th century portraits at the NPG, the show has been five years in the planning. “Giacometti is one of the giants of 20th century art, one of the giants of modernism, but there is a great deal to be discovered about Giacometti,” he said on Tuesday.

Two stunning caryatid statues have been unearthed holding up the entrance to the biggest ancient tomb ever found in Greece, archaeologists said.

The two female figures in long-sleeved tunics were found standing guard at the opening to the mysterious Alexander The Great-era tomb near Amphipolis in the Macedonia region of northern Greece.

"The left arm of one and the right arm of the other are raised in a symbolic gesture to refuse entry to the tomb," a statement from the culture ministry said Saturday.

About seven years ago, an enlightened group of councilmen, business people and local supporters of the arts began efforts to transform a strip of wasteland along this city's Charlotte Avenue into a public amenity. On Aug. 20, after much community engagement, including "Design Your Neighborhood" workshops for young interns, Nashville's mayor Karl Dean dedicated the revitalized Edmondson Park. The once neglected site is now Nashville's first "art park"—a neatly fenced, tree-studded, undulating field of Bermuda grass with a walking path and a children's area, with a sophisticated "green" water-capture system, that forms a handsome backyard for a row of modest, attractive clapboard houses that bear witness to the city's ambitious urban redevelopment program. As a fitting tribute, during the 60th anniversary of the civil-rights movement, the park is named for William Edmondson (1874-1951), the city's celebrated self-taught sculptor, the son of former slaves, who lived nearby. Edmondson, who said that his carvings of figures and animals were divinely inspired, was the first African-American to have a solo show at New York's Museum of Modern Art, in 1937.

You can take a close-up look at artifacts, some of which are over 2,000 years old, in the Shards of the Past: Pre-Columbian Art from the Frost Art Museum exhibition, on display from May 7 through August 31.

The exhibition features 26 works…figures, vessels, bowls, and plates…from Peru, Colombia, Mexico and Central America, selected from the Frost Art Museum’s permanent collection. Pre-Columbian refers to the time in the Americas before the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish explorers. Cultures and civilizations were already flourishing, thriving and evolving, while remaining virtually isolated from other parts of the world. After the arrival of the explorers, we see the collapse of these civilizations and subsequent destruction of their temples and social structures along with a wealth of objects and ritual artifacts. Some of the relics from these cultures are intact for viewers to admire and study; others were ritually broken, and some were destroyed by the passage of time. Most of the surviving objects were found in graves, the remnants of offerings to the dead.

Widely considered one of the greatest sculptors of all time, British artist Henry Moore played a pivotal role in translating modernism into three dimensions. A new exhibition at the artist’s former home in Hertfordshire, England, examines the influence that Moore’s soaring, organic sculptures had on contemporary art.

“Body & Void: Echoes of Moore in Contemporary Art” presents works by some of the world’s most celebrated contemporary arts, including Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley, and Anish Kapoor. Works by a number of post-war artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, are also included in the exhibition. Site specific works by leading British artists Richard Deacon and Robert Long have been commissioned as part of the show.

“Body & Void” presents sculptures that examine Moore’s central themes, including the exploration of internal and external space, mother and child, and figures in a landscape, alongside contemporary works that touch on the same topics. For example, Hirst’s “Mother and Child (Divided),” a bisected cow and calf floating in giant tanks of formaldehyde, appears between Moore’s rose marble sculpture “Mother and Child” and “Stringed Mother and Child,” a single plaster cast that features two forms connected by a series of cords. The three works explore the same mother and child relationship in vastly different ways.

“Body and Void” fills the galleries and gardens at Perry Green, where Moore lived and worked for 50 years. The estate is also home to the Henry Moore Foundation, which was established by the artist in 1977. Although Moore amassed considerable wealth during his lifetime, he chose to live frugally and put most of his fortune towards endowing the Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts.  

“Body & Void: Echoes of Moore in Contemporary Art” will remain on view at Perry Green through October 26.

Christie’s Americana Week auctions, which included the sales of Important American Silver on January 23, Important American Furniture, Folk Art and Prints on January 24, and Chinese Export Art on January 27, fetched a total of $10,189,025.

The Chinese Export Art sale realized $3,034,750 and the top lot was a rare set of four large Chinese export porcelain nodding head figures from the Qianlong Period, which sold for $173,000. The Important American Silver sale netted $1,737,875 and the top lot, a silver Brandywine bowl by Cornelius Vander Burch from the late 17th century, brought $317,000. The Important American Furniture, Folk Art & Decorative Arts sale was the biggest hit of the week and realized $5,416,400. The top lot was an 18th century Chippendale carved Mahogany scallop-top tea table from Philadelphia, which garnered $905,000. Andrew Holter, head of American Furniture and Decorative Arts at Christie’s, said, “Today’s solid results underscore collectors’ continued appetite for works of exceptional provenance and quality.”

Approximately 100 artifacts, some dating back to the time of the pharaohs, are missing from the Aswan Museum on Elephantine Island in southern Egypt. On Wednesday, January 1, the Ministry of Antiquities announced that 96 works, mostly small figurines and beads, were missing from the museum’s store and that a lock on the inner door had been broken. The disappearance is a first for the museum.

The Aswan Museum opened to the public in 1912 and features Nubian artifacts including utensils, weapons, pottery and mummies.

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.

The touring exhibition The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece: Masterworks from the British Museum is currently on view at the Dallas Museum of Art through October 6, 2013. Presenting 120 objects from the British Museum’s renowned collection of Greek and Roman art, each work explores the human form and humanity as sources of artistic inspiration. The show spans three millennia of Greek civilization and includes marble and bronze sculptures, painted pottery, terracotta, and jewelry.

The Body Beautiful is divided into 10 thematic sections that illustrate the various ways the Greeks interpreted the human body including Cycladic figures and realistic Roman genre sculptures. Highlights from the exhibition include the Diskobolos (discus thrower) sculpture from the second century A.D., which is on view for the first time in the United States, and a model of Ancient Olympia as it would have appeared around 100 B.C. A video installation will be shown alongside the model providing glimpses of the original Olympic sites and artworks depicting the ancient athletic event.

Maxwell L. Anderson, The Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, said, “We will present a visually engaging and thought-provoking exploration of the human condition as seen by the ancient Greeks, and, equally, of the origins of our construct of beauty today.”

Thanks to the keen eyes of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s curators, the institution snapped up an important Old Master drawing at an auction at Swann Galleries for $840 (with premium). The auction, which took place on January 29, 2013, was part of the highly anticipated Old Masters Week in New York.

The drawing was described in the auction catalogue as being from the early 19^th century and of French origin. An illustration in brush, black ink, and gray wash of Socrates dying, the drawing was said to be modeled after Jacques-Louis David’s (1748-1825) painting The Death of Socrates, a work that resides in the Met’s permanent collection. The original painting by David was acquired by the museum in 1931 and is among the artist’s greatest works.

As it turns out, the alleged copy, which was given an estimated selling price of $500-$700, was a previously unrecorded preliminary compositional study for David’s painting. Along with the painting, the Met owns a well-developed chalk drawing of The Death of Socrates, which helped the Met’s curators to authenticate the compositional drawing despite differences in setting, positions, and gestures of the figures featured in the painting.

The drawing was acquired by the museum via Katrin Bellinger, a frequent agent for the institution.