Displaying items by tag: francisco goya

Next month, Sotheby’s London will sell approximately 120 works from the collection of the late Jan Krugier, a preeminent dealer of 20th century art. Krugier, who passed away in 2008, sold works for Pablo Picasso’s family and was close friends with the artist. He operated galleries in Geneva and New York and was a powerful presence at art fairs such as TEFAF Maastricht and Art Basel.

37 works will be sold during an evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art on February 5 and the remainder of the collection will be offered during the day sale on February 6. Most of the collection is comprised of works on paper and include pieces by Francisco Goya, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas and Pablo Picasso. Sotheby’s expects the entire collection to garner between $39 million and $57 million. The most expensive work to be offered is Alberto Giacometti’s cast bronze ‘L’homme qui marche III’, which is expected to fetch between $5 million and $8 million.

Last November, Christie’s New York held a highly anticipated sale of works from Krugier’s collection but the auction failed to meet expectations.

The Meadows Museum of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas has acquired a major work by Francisco Goya. Portrait of Mariano Goya (1827), which was acquired thanks to the Meadows Foundation and a gift from Mrs. Eugene McDermott, has not been on display in over 40 years. Completed just months before Goya’s death, the painting, which features the artist’s grandson, is one of less than a dozen portraits painted by the artist between 1820 and 1828. The masterpiece is currently on view at the museum.

Mark A. Roglán, the Linda P. and William A. Custard Director of the Meadows Museum and Centennial Chair in the Meadows School of the Arts, SMU, said, “The Meadows Museum will celebrate its 50^th anniversary in 2015, and the acquisition of this extraordinary work by Goya is a wonderful way to begin that celebration…The work stands as the pivotal linchpin in our growing collection. Indeed the acquisition of the Goya caps off many notable additions to our collection this year and marks a new phase in achieving Algur H. Meadows’ dream to create a ‘small Prado in Texas.’”

Spanning from the 10^th century through the 21^st, the Meadows has one of the foremost collections of Spanish art in the world. In addition to Portrait of Mariano Goya, the museum has five other Goya paintings and complete, first edition sets of all of his major print series.

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.