Displaying items by tag: public collection

A plan to permanently secure a £35m painting by Rembrandt for the UK has been thwarted. The Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet (1657), which has hung in Penrhyn Castle in north Wales for 150 years, will remain in the UK under the ownership of an overseas buyer, who this week withdrew their export licence application.

The Art Fund had quietly started a campaign to try to buy the Rembrandt and present it to a major public collection, probably the National Museum Wales in Cardiff.

Nine photographs by Paul Strand (1890-1976), one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, have been acquired by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where they have gone on public display until September 20. Taken from Strand’s series of Hebridean photographs from South Uist in 1954, the works are the first examples of his Scottish work to enter into a public collection in Scotland.

This major acquisition, supported by the Art Fund, is composed of nine vintage black and white portraits of Scottish lives and landscapes in South Uist, an island in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland.

Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea, which is now on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, explores the artist’s lifelong fascination with the sea. Maurice Prendergast, a pioneering post-Impressionist painter, spent much of the late 19^th century and early 20^th century capturing modern life on the coast of New England.

 By the Sea is the first retrospective of Prendergast’s oeuvre in over two decades. The exhibition presents more than 90 works in a variety of media from over 30 public and private collections in addition to Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s own holdings. The exhibition traces the development of Prendergast’s highly personal style, which is recognized for its use of jewel-like colors and pattern-like compositions containing flattened, free-form figures. The exhibition also includes Prendergast’s sketchbooks and oil studies, allowing visitors to see into the Modernist artist’s creative process.

Highlights include the watercolor The Balloon, which is part of a private collection and has not been included in earlier Prendergast retrospectives; St. Malo, a bright watercolor on loan from the Williams College Museum of Art, which was lauded as one of the first American introductions of the bold European Post-Impressionist avant-garde; and a number of works that the artist contributed to the seminal Armory Show of 1913 (also known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art).

Maurice Prendergast: By the Sea will be on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art through October 13, 2013.

The American Folk Art Museum in New York is currently presenting the exhibition Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. The show features over 60 drawings by the self-taught artist Bill Traylor (1854-1949), many of which have never traveled past the southeastern United States. The exhibition is complemented by Traylor in Motion: Wonders from New York Collections, which includes additional works on loan from private collections.

Traylor, one of the most significant outsider artists, was born into slavery on an Alabama plantation. Following emancipation, his family farmed on the plantation until the 1930s. In 1939, Traylor moved to Montgomery and spent much of his time drawings images of the people he saw on the street and scenes pulled from his memory illustrating his time spent on the farm. Over the course of four years, Traylor produced between 1,200 and 1,500 drawings.

While he garnered little recognition as an artist during his lifetime, Traylor began to gain notoriety during the 1970s thanks to his friend, Charles Shannon, the foremost champion his work. The R.H. Oosterom Gallery in New York mounted the first significant exhibition of Traylor’s work, which led to nearly fort solo shows and hundreds of group exhibitions. Traylor’s drawings now reside in major public collections including that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Montgomery Museum of Art in Alabama hold the largest public collections of Traylor’s drawings.

Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts will be on view at the American Folk Art Museum through September 22, 2013.

The exhibition Photography and the Civil War, which is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, brings together over 200 photographs of the American Civil War. Spread across 11 galleries, the landmark exhibition also includes photographic artifacts and objects from the time period. The portraits of young soldiers, promotional images of political candidates, and landscapes of the blood-soaked battlefields come together to tell the story of a violent four-year war that transformed America forever.

From 1861 until 1865, the American Civil War claimed 750,000 lives and Photography and the Civil War aims to examine the role of photography during this devastating conflict. Organized by the Met’s senior curator, Jeff L. Rosenheim, the exhibition includes loans from renowned private and public collections.

Photography and the Civil War will be on view at the Met through September 2, 2013.

For another week and a half, visitors of the Gagosian Gallery in New York will be able to view a major exhibition dedicated to Helen Frankenthaler’s (1928-2011) paintings from the 1950s. Frankenthaler, one of the few female artists involved in the Abstract Expressionist movement, was a major force in 20^th century American art. Nevertheless, Frankenthaler has not had the lasting adulation that her male Ab-Ex counterparts such as Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970) have enjoyed. In fact, the Gagosian exhibition is the first show in three decades devoted to Frankenthaler’s work.

Painted on 21^st Street: Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 to 1959, which was organized in cooperation with the Estate of Helen Frankenthaler, brings together nearly 30 paintings, many of which have rarely been seen. The show was curated by John Elderfield, the Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and author of the foremost monograph on Frankenthaler’s, and includes paintings from Frankenthaler’s estate as well as private and public collections. Highlights from the exhibition include Painted on 21^st Street (1950-51), Mountains and Sea (1952), and Jacob’s Ladder (1957). The Gagosian exhibition spans the considerable range and diversity of Frankenthaler’s paintings and illustrates how she synthesized certain aspects of her counterparts work to create an entirely new approach to Abstract Expressionism.

Painted on 21^st Street will be on view through April 13, 2013.