Displaying items by tag: jim dine

More than 200 prints by the American pop artist Jim Dine, featuring imagery including paintbrushes, bathrobes, tools and hearts, have been gifted to the British Museum.

The collection was the largest gift made to the museum’s prints and drawings department in 2014.

“It is very exciting,” said the museum’s curator of modern prints, Stephen Coppel, who was allowed to select from Dine’s entire oeuvre, starting in the 1960s.

“It was a very generous offer, given that he has made over a thousand prints,” said Coppel. “Choosing was fun. It took some time and there was a lot of backing and forthing, but it is a really great group of things.”

How do you archive a performance? Can you put human speech and action under glass and frame it? Stow art that unfolds in three dimensions within acid-free archival boxes, to be filed away in a cool, dark vault?

The conundrum of how best to preserve the history of midcentury American performance art — art created before phones had video cameras — lies at the center of the Getty Research Institute's recently announced acquisition of Robert McElroy's archive. In more than 700 prints and 10,000 negatives, the photographer documented the performative works of Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg and other artists whose "Happenings" grew from niche New York art events into a full-fledged pop culture phenomenon.

Ileana Sonnabend was one of the greatest and most influential discoverers of artistic talent of the late 20^th century, known and appreciated for her intuition, strength of character, ground-breaking vision and for that eclecticism of taste and thinking that enabled her to understand and promote all that was new in American and European art. Created over many years and a material reflection of her commitment to supporting young artists and the avant-garde movements of the 20^th century, her extraordinary collection now finds a “European home” in the splendid monumental rooms on the second floor of the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna at Ca’ Pesaro.

The exhibition marks the first step in a long-term collaboration with the Sonnabend Collection and Sonnabend Collection Foundation, and offers an extraordinary opportunity to enrich the city’s 20^th-century art collections and the permanent displays at Ca’ Pesaro, which thanks to the works from the Ileana Sonnabend collection, will be able to offer its visitors a more comprehensive itinerary with plenty of masterpieces from the history of art of the whole of the 20^th century. The Sonnabend Collection picks up exactly at the point in which Ca’ Pesaro ended its collecting spree and relationship with the Biennale, and will lead the visitor past a series of works of the highest artistic quality forming part of the principal experimental schools of the late 20^th century through over 70 iconic works of the period.

Since September 2013, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. has acquired a number of important works from the 15th through 20th centuries including tempera-and-gold drawings on vellum from the Middle Ages and works on paper by Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin. Earl A. Powell III, the director of the National Gallery of Art, said, “These acquisitions are masterworks from the Middle Ages to the current moment that represent the highest levels of creativity in media ranging from printmaking and manuscript illumination to easel painting and photography. We are delighted that they can be shared with the public as part of our permanent collection.”

Among the museum’s recent acquisitions are a woodcut-illustrated book of Giovanni Boccaccio’s ‘Seminal History of Famous Women’, the Gallery’s earliest German woodcut book; ‘Still Life with Peacock Pie,’ a banquet piece measuring more than four feet across by the Dutch Golden Age painter Pieter Claesz; one of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s finest versions of ‘Avenue of Cypresses at Villa d’Este’; a watercolor by Cézanne titled ‘A Stand of Trees Along a River Bank’; an early drawing by Gauguin titled ‘Seated Nude Seen from Above’; a pastel of Waterloo Bridge by Monet; and Pop artist Jim Dine’s ‘Name Painting.’ The National Gallery of Art also received works by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Marc Chagall, Jasper Johns and Robert Motherwell from the celebrated Herbert and Dorothy Vogel Collection. 

The National Gallery of Art was established in 1937 for the people of the United States by a joint resolution of the U.S. Congress. Financier and art collector, Andrew W. Mellon, donated a portion of his sizeable art collection to the museum, forming its core holdings. The National Gallery of Art’s collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures and decorative arts spans from the Middle Ages to the present and includes the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas as well as the largest mobile ever created by Alexander Calder.