Displaying items by tag: gertrude stein

Nine Warhol prints of Jewish icons including Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein have gone missing from the walls of a movie editing studio in Los Angeles. The works are thought to be valued at $350,000, or £226,854 each, have been surreptitiously replaced by an industrious individual who had reportedly created fakes to replace the originals versions of the works and secretly installed the new works in place of the originals, according to TMZ.

This particular art crime only came to light when a member of the business took the works to a framer who realized that the works were indeed fake, leading to a police investigation.

On a Saturday afternoon in Chelsea, a group of a few dozen people milled around the International Print Center New York, drinking Champagne and making small talk about the show New Prints 2014/Winter. But this wasn’t a gallery opening, nor was it an artist’s talk. Rather it was a salon by Gertrude, a new company organizing events to discuss art.

The company is named for the writer and art collector Gertrude Stein, who was well known for the gatherings of artists and writers she organized in her apartment on the Left Bank of Paris.

The title of this exhibition is adapted from the phrase “the sight of a reason,” a line in Gertrude Stein's groundbreaking prose work Tender Buttons (1914). In her collection of “portraits” of everyday phenomena, Stein employed experimental syntax to free language from established usage and to “create a word relationship between the word and the things seen.” Sites of Reason: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions begins with an ongoing work by the Los Angeles–based artist Eve Fowler (American, b. 1964), which appropriates phrases from Tender Buttons and Stein's How to Write (1931) in commercially printed posters originally intended for public display—for instance, stapled to telephone poles or fences. Stein’s probing of the correlation between language and the physical world—and Fowler’s act of recontextualization—exemplify a set of concerns shared by the works presented here.

Between 1973 and 1996 Carter Burden, a former trustee of the Morgan Library & Museum and onetime New York City councilman, assembled the greatest collection of modern American literature in private hands. In doing so, Burden revolutionized the market in modern first editions by paying record prices for copies in the best possible condition and with notable attributes such as authors’ annotations and presentation inscriptions. The depth and breadth of his holdings were truly extraordinary—spanning the twentieth century and including focused concentrations on such movements as the Lost Generation, the Beats, and the Harlem Renaissance.

Beginning in 1997, after Burden’s sudden death the previous year, his family has made a gift to the Morgan of twelve thousand volumes from his collection. Gatsby to Garp: Modern Masterpieces from the Carter Burden Collection, on view from May 20 through September 7, brings together nearly one hundred outstanding works from the collection, including first editions, manuscripts, letters, and revised galley proofs.

One of the most significant artists of the 20^th century, Henri Matisse (1869–1954) is best known for his use of color and fluid, innovative forms. A leading figure in modern art, the French artist defined the Fauvist movement, but defied classification. The works of Nicolas Poussin, Édouard Manet, Auguste Rodin, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin inspired Matisse and he communed with groundbreaking artists such as Camille Pissarro, André Derain, and Gertrude Stein.

 The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Matisse: In Search of Painting opens on December 4 and explores the evolution of Matisse as a painter. Matisse worked rigorously, often painting the same scene and subject over and over again to gauge his own progress and compare various techniques, a process he developed during his academic training.

In Search of Painting features just 49 vibrant canvases but spans Matisse’s entire career. Organized by Rebecca Rabinow, a curator of modern and contemporary art, the exhibition places the works in pairs and groups by subject to illustrate Matisse’s methodical process. In the 1930s, Matisse began having photographs taken at various stages of each painting to document their evolution. Three of the finished canvases along with their accompanying photographs will also be on view. The juxtaposition illustrates Matisse’s own self-awareness and the arduous process that led to each finished canvas.

Matisse: In Search of Painting will be on view through March 17, 2013.