Displaying items by tag: madrid

An Edward Hopper (1882-1967) retrospective, which was on view from October 10, 2012 to February 3, 2013 at the Grand Palais in Paris, welcomed a surprising number of visitors during its run. A total of 784,269 patrons visited the exhibition in less than four months, surpassing a blockbuster exhibition featuring the work of long-time Paris resident Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), which ran from 2008-2009 at the same French institution.  

To accommodate the high number of visitors, the museum stayed opened around the clock during the show’s final weekend. 48,000 people visited the Grand Palais to catch a final glimpse of the Hopper show, including Jill Biden, the wife of US Vice President, Joe Biden.

The exhibition’s popularity came as somewhat of a surprise to museum officials as the American realist painter and printmaker has never drawn such a crowd in the United States. While he came close, Hopper was unable to surpass the popularity of the 2010-2011 Claude Monet (1840-1926) retrospective, which saw 913,064 visitors.

Hopper, who didn’t sell his first painting until he was 40, has grown considerably in popularity since his death at 85. Wildly successful exhibitions in Madrid, London, Milan, and Rome, which took place before Hopper’s show at the Grand Palais are a testament to the artist’s continued relevance.

Opening on Sunday, December 16 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Portrait of Spain: Masterpieces from the Prado, will present over 100 masterpieces from one of the world’s most renowned collections of European paintings. Spanning from the 16^th century through the 19^th century, the exhibit explores the evolution of painting in Spain through the works of artists such as Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), El Greco (1541-1614), and Diego Velázquez (1599-1660). There will also be works on view by non-Spanish artists who influenced the country’s artistic development including Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804), and Titian (circa 1488-1576).

The exhibition marks the first time that Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado has lent such a considerable selection from their permanent collection to a museum in the United States. The loan is part of a new initiative by the museum to broaden access to its illustrious holdings.

The works, which include both paintings and works on paper, are mainly courtly and spiritual paintings that explore the realms of society, culture, politics, and religion in Spain. The exhibit was previously on view at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia, but ended its run last month. Portrait of Spain will be on view at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston through March 31.

Xavier Salomon, a curator in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s European paintings department, announced that the institution has acquired The Penitent Saint Peter by Jusepe de Ribera. The early work by the 17^th-century painter is the first Spanish painting purchased by the museum in over 40 years. One of the Met’s most esteemed artworks, Diego Velazquez’s portrait, Juan de Pareja (1650), had been the most recent Spanish acquisition.

The painting by Ribera is a full-length portrait of St. Peter from 1612-13, when the artist was in his early 20s. Up until about 10 years ago when the Italian scholar Gianni Papi realized that a group of paintings once attributed to an anonymous artist were in fact Ribera’s, none of the artist’s early works were known. Juan de Pareja wasn’t identified as a Ribera painting until last year.

Purchased from Madrid dealers Coll & Cortes, this is the second work by Ribera in the Met’s permanent collection. Officials declined to say what they paid for the painting, but experts value the work at around $1.3 million. The other Ribera painting in the museum’s collection is a late work from 1648, four years before the artist’s death, titled The Holy Family with Saints Anne and Catherine of Alexandria.

Titian’s Saint John the Baptist entered Madrid’s Museo del Prado’s collection in 1872 but rather than being credited to the Italian painter of the 16^th century, it was said to be by an anonymous Madrid School artist of the 17^th century. Fourteen years later, the painting was sent to the parish church of Nuestra Senora del Carmen in Cantoria in the province of Almeria where it remained on loan until 2007.  

The Prado held an exhibition of Titian’s work in 2003 and published an accompanying catalogue in which Miguel Falomir, Head of the Department of Italian and French Paintings at the Museum and the exhibition’s curator, suggested that the painting in Cantoria was a copy of a long-lost Titian painting. In 2007 the Museum embarked on a study of the work only to find that the piece was not a copy but an original Titian painting. The work’s preparatory layer of white lead and calcium carbonate and the similarities between that painting and two other depictions of Saint John the Baptist done by the artist in the early 1550s helped researchers to date the painting and bolstered their decision to re-attribute the work to Titian.

The work arrived at the Prado in poor condition and underwent thorough restoration by Clara Quintanilla. The will be on display alongside the two other versions until February 10, 2013.