Displaying items by tag: prints

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) was born into a family of French aristocrats, but he had no interest in high society. He immersed himself instead in Parisian night life, becoming the great artistic chronicler of cafe concerts and dance halls. His work is now the subject of an exhibit beginning July 26 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

"The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec: Prints and Posters" features more than 100 of his works. His subjects include a range of characters who fell well short of respectability: performers and spectators at the Moulin Rouge, cancan dancers on stage and prostitutes reclining in bed.

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.

Haunting portrait photographs, including a swan-necked David Bowie photographed in 1978, the playwright Nell Dunn looking startlingly like a long-lost Bowie twin, and Vita Sackville-West, the writer, gardener and former lover of Virginia Woolf who was still formidable in the year before her death in 1962, have been donated to the National Portrait Gallery by the society photographer Lord Snowdon.

The gift of 130 original prints, including photographs of his former in-laws from the years he was married to Princess Margaret, is one of the largest ever to the gallery

The Dali Museum debuted a sensational optical and intellectual experience delving into the world of double images and illusions. “Marvels of Illusion” opened to the public Saturday, June 14, 2014. Curated by Joan Kropf, the exhibit showcases a variety of Dalí paintings, prints and sculpture; a special work from the 16th Century from the School of Arcimboldo, on loan from the Ringling Museum; and rich explanatory material.

A centerpiece of the Marvels of Illusion exhibit is an interactive installation titled “Gala Contemplating You” which places visitors inside one of Dali’s most famous paintings. The installation is inspired by Dali’s 1976 painting “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Rothko),” which proved that 121 pixels could identify a particular human face. A corresponding web application allows virtual visitors from around the globe to submit their photos and become part of the experience as well.

This summer the Frist Center for the Visual Arts presents the critically acclaimed Real/Surreal: Selections from the Whitney Museum of American Art from June 27–October 13, 2014, in the Center’s Upper-Level Galleries. Focusing on art created between the 1920s and 1950s, the exhibition traces the influence of celebrated European Surrealists on American artists ranging from Man Ray and Federico Castellón to Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and many more.

Drawn from the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition features more than 60 paintings, photographs and prints. At the thematic heart of the exhibition is the meeting of realism—fidelity to a subject’s observable nature—and Surrealism—artwork that explores the imagination and subconscious in search of deeper realities. “This exhibition seeks to challenge and break down the traditional art historical categories of realism and Surrealism,” says Frist Center Curator Katie Delmez. “The two approaches, while seemingly opposite, do have points of convergence and their juxtaposition encourages new ways of looking at American art of this period.”

"Los Caprichos," a set of 80 etching and aquatint prints created by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya in 1797 and 1798, are considered to be among the most influential works of art in the Western world.

Strange, graphic and often cryptic, these images were far ahead of their time in their scathing depiction of Spanish social customs and used by Goya to critique everything from the rich and powerful to the excesses of the church.

The Allentown Art Museum is presenting a great opportunity to see this complete set of prized prints that, over the past two centuries, have influenced artists such as Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns.

Fifty years ago, during the summer of 1964, Andy Warhol began working on silkscreen paintings of flowers, a subject that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life. When Warhol had his first solo exhibition at the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in November 1964 it consisted entirely of Flowers. Best known for his vibrant pop imagery and searing commentary on art and popular culture, Warhol’s flower imagery reveals a softer, more intimate side of the artist. In retrospect, it is also a provocative series, appropriating a powerful symbol later identified with flower-power counterculture of the 1960s, the age of peace, love, and anti-war protest. The Flowers are the only subject that Warhol revisited throughout his entire career and in almost every medium. The artist’s floral imagery is among the quietest, most beautiful, and least studied. The Cheekwood exhibition is a rare occasion when Warhol’s artificial flower images meet the floral abundance of an actual garden. 

This exhibition traces Warhol’s engagement with floral images throughout his career, beginning with a group of his earliest commercial illustrations, drawn in the 1950s, and his creation of the Flowers series in 1964, to photographs, paintings, and screen prints through 1986 before his untimely death the following year. The development of Warhol’s career can be seen in the progression from the delicacy of the early illustrations to the boldness of the 1964 series to the tension between the beauty and banality of the photographs and prints late in his career.

The Morgan Library and Museum announced today that it has tapped John Marciari to lead its department of drawings and prints. Mr. Marciari, who is currently an independent curator, previously worked as curator of European art and head of provenance research at the San Diego Museum of Art.

“I am delighted that John Marciari will be joining the talented team of curators in our department of drawings and prints,” William M. Griswold, the Morgan’s director, said in a statement. “John is a noted scholar and curator with an exceptional record of achievement in the areas of connoisseurship, collection-building, and public engagement.” (Mr. Griswold announced last month that he will leave the museum to become director of the Cleveland Museum of Art.)

Around the middle of the 15th century, as the development of the printing press in the West led to an unprecedented exchange of ideas, artists began to make prints. By the year 1500, a new art form and a new means of communicating ideas was widespread—one that had as great an impact in its time as the Internet has had in our own.

Carnegie Museum of Art holds an exceptional collection of prints from this period, from the masterful innovations of Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt in 16th- and 17th-century Northern Europe to the fantastical prints of Canaletto, Tiepolo, and Piranesi in 18th-century Italy. Small Prints, Big Artists, opening this summer, presents more than 200 masterworks from the museum’s collection of over 8,000 prints. The intimately scaled woodcuts, engravings, and etchings reveal the development of printmaking as a true art form. Due to their fragility, many of these prints have not been on view in decades.

The art critic Robert Hughes described Goya's Disasters of War etchings as the greatest anti-war manifesto in the history of art. It is fitting, then, that as the world prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of the D-day landings and 100 years since the start of the 1914-18 war, 15 of these Goya prints will form the centrepiece of a powerful exhibition opening on Wednesday at the Louvre's outpost in Lens, a depressed former mining town flattened in the bombings of the first world war.

The exhibition's curator, the art historian Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, claims, however, that The Disasters of War: 1800 to 2014 is not pacifist.