Displaying items by tag: light

The colorful, stained-glass effect decor items produced by Tiffany Studios represent some of the most beautiful and quintessential specimens of pre-war design such as the Oriental Poppy lamp, which sold for $1.1 million at Sotheby’s in New York this past May. As a painter, Louis Comfort Tiffany was fascinated with the interplay of light and color, and using opalescent glass as his canvas, created masterful renderings of nature — such as flowers or landscape scenes — and decorative geometric patterns in lampshades and leaded-glass windows that popped with color and texture.

A black flag emblazoned with the word ZERO hangs outside the museum, less ominous than classically revolutionary. Inside, a projection screen in the rotunda shows selections of films and printed matter from the exhibition upstairs. The signature image is a rocket launch, a perfect expression of the technologically inflected postwar optimism that defines the German art group Zero and the larger “Zero network” of like-minded artists, whose members hailed from various Western European capitals (and included outliers from America and Japan). Taken together, their work reveals a shared preoccupation with natural processes, everyday materials, plays of light and texture, and moving parts, both optical and mechanical.

“ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s,” which fills all six floors of the Guggenheim through January 7, 2015, was clearly an ambitious undertaking by Guggenheim curator Valerie Hillings (it is Zero’s first major museum survey in the United States). The group’s core members — Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, who met as students in Düsseldorf in 1959, and Günther Uecker, who joined them in ’61 — are relatively established figures, but less is known about their collaborative work and connections to the larger European scene.

Sopranos actor Federico Castelluccio now owns a painting that has been authenticated as a work by Italian baroque painter Giovanni Francesco Barbieri.

The painter, more commonly known as Guercino, a nickname he earned for his pronounced squint, was a master of chiaroscuro, or the treatment of light and shade, a talent which inspired comparisons to Caravaggio.

It looks like some pretty big congrats are in order for one of Arizona's own. On Tuesday, July 22, The National Endowment for the Arts announced that President Barack Obama would be awarding the National Medals of Arts as well as the National Humanities Medals on Monday, July 28, to a select group of artists throughout the United States, including Flagstaff-based artist James Turrell.

Turrell, who first began his artistic career in the early 1960s in California, has spent the last 50 years building a body of work that transforms perception through an innovative manipulation of light and space.

A young woman hangs sheer white linens on a clothesline. A refulgent angel descends from the heavens while shepherds tend their flocks by night. And an early motion-picture camera captures the fairyland allure of a world’s fair, slowly panning its illuminated buildings.

These vastly different images — from a 19th-century painting, a 17th-century print and a 20th-century film — are among the treasures in the current exhibition at Vassar’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. What brings them together is “Mastering Light: From the Natural to the Artificial,” a quirky, thought-provoking show that divides its subject into three sometimes overlapping areas: interiors and exteriors illuminated by daylight; nighttime events made visible by moonlight or firelight; and scenes either lighted by or on the subject of artificial light.

This August and September, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York will offer members an exclusive look at James Turrell’s major site-specific work Aten Reign. The popular installation will be showcased in Quiet Views, allowing visitors the chance to experience the luminous and immersive work in an intimate and meditative environment.

James Turrell, an American artist who is best known for his works that explore light and space, spent nearly six years planning the massive installation that has transformed the Guggenheim’s iconic Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda. Quiet Views consists of four events taking place on the evenings of August 12, August 19, September 9, and September 23 and will include two sittings on each day. Only sixty people will be present at each hour-long sitting.

James Turrell was organized by the Guggenheim in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The Sterling and Francine Clark Institute in Williamstown, MA recently received its most considerable gift of American paintings since its founding in 1955 and is holding an exhibition to celebrate the major acquisition. George Inness: Gifts from Frank and Katherine Martucci presents eight landscapes by the influential American painter George Inness (1825-1894) dating from 1880 to 1894. The works will appear alongside two Inness paintings collected by the Clarks themselves. The show will highlight Inness’ later work when he moved away from his signature plein-air style towards a more conceptual aesthetic that relied on the use of light and shadow.

The Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg significantly influenced Inness and inspired the artist to look at nature through a more spiritual lens. Inness moved away from straightforward depictions of the natural world towards a style that blended realism with a sense of otherworldliness. Inness achieved this through color, composition and painterly techniques that involved the gentle blurring of natural forms.

Highlights from the exhibition include Sunrise in the Woods, The Road to the Village, and Green Landscape. George Inness: Gifts from Frank and Katherine Martucci will be on view through September 8, 2013.

To celebrate their sponsorship of the George Caleb Bingham Catalogue Raisonné Supplement, Rachel Cozad Fine Art in Kansas City, MO presents an exhibition of four paintings by the American artist George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879). Three of the paintings on view were recently discovered and have never been on public display. The works on view, which have been added to the artist’s updated Catalogue Raisonné, are Baiting the Hook, Horse Thief, and two portraits.

Since 2005, 15 newly authenticated paintings by Bingham have been added to his oeuvre of approximately 500-recorded paintings. Renowned art historian E. Maurice Bloch and the University of Missouri Press first published The Paintings of George Caleb Bingham: A Catalogue Raisonné in 1986; the comprehensive Catalogue included all of Bingham’s known paintings at the time of publication. In 2005, art historian Fred R. Kline and the Kline Art Research Associates launched The George Caleb Bingham Catalogue Raisonné Supplement. The ongoing project is aimed at updating Bloch’s Catalogue while maintaining the high standard of scholarship on Bingham’s life and work that Bloch set in motion.

 Rachel Cozad Fine Art, which specializes in modern and contemporary art as well as 19^th and 20^th century American art, has a special focus devoted to Bingham. Bingham, who is best known for his paintings of American life on the frontier along the Missouri River, was a pioneer Luminism, a landscape painting style characterized by its careful depiction of light, the use of aerial perspective, and the practice of concealing visible brushstrokes.

Burst of Light: Caravaggio and His Legacy, which is currently on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT, is the first exhibition in over 25 years to focus on the legacy of the Italian master, Caravaggio (1571-1610). The show explores Caravaggio’s profound influence on 17^th century European art and includes 30 works by followers of the artist known as “Caravaggisti.”

Burst of Life will present five original paintings by Caravaggio including the Wadsworth’s own Ecstasy of St. Francis, which was acquired by the museum in 1944, making it the first Caravaggio work to join an American museum’s collection. The other works on view are Martha and Mary Magdalen from the Detroit Institute of Arts, Salome Receives the Head of St. John the Baptist from the National Gallery in London, The Denial of St. Peter from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO.

Burst of Light explores Caravaggio’s renowned use of light, painstaking attention to detail, and emotionally captivating compositions. The exhibition will be on view through June 16, 2013.

During a career that spanned much of the 20^th century, Russian artist Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was associated with a number of artistic movements, making a name for himself as a pioneer of modernism. Considered one of the most successful artists of his time, Chagall drew inspiration from his Orthodox Jewish upbringing, a theme that prevailed through the many mediums and styles he explored.  

The Musee de Luxembourg in Paris has organized an exhibition devoted to the artist titled Chagall: Between War and Peace. The show, which focuses on Chagall’s work between 1914, when he developed his own style, and the mid-1950s, when many critics deemed his work repetitive, includes approximately 100 oil paintings, watercolors, drawings and etchings in relatively chronological order.

Between War and Peace is broken into four pivotal periods in Chagall’s life and work. After living in Paris from 1910 to 1914 and associating with many prominent figures of the avant-garde, Chagall returned to his native Russia to be with his future wife, Bella. “Russia in Wartime” explores Chagall’s work from this period, which was haunted by the brutality and horrors that World War I brought to his homeland.

In 1922, Chagall left Russia for Berlin. He soon returned to Paris where he re-established himself as a painter. “Between the Wars” focuses on this period, which includes Chagall’s work as an illustrator. Many of the pieces from this time feature landscapes, portraits of the artist with his wife, circus scenes, and hybrid creatures, which are prime examples of Chagallian bestiary.

In 1937, Nazis seized any works by Chagall that resided in public collections in Germany. As World War II unfolded, Chagall left France for New York, which is the subject of “Exile in the United States.” His work took a somber turn as his native land was ravaged by the war. A particularly productive time for Chagall, he also created a number of works devoted to Bella, who died in 1944.

The exhibition’s final portion, “The Post-War Years and the Return to France,” explores Chagall’s move back to Europe in 1949. During this time Chagall experimented with stained glass, sculpture, ceramics, mosaic, and various engraving techniques. His works from this period radiates with light and emotional tonalities.

Chagall: Between War and Peace is on view through July 21, 2013.