El Greco's painting, 'Laocoon', is watched by a visitor during a preview of the exhibition of 'El Greco and Modernism' at the Museum Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf, Germany. The exhibition runs from April 28, 2012 until August 12, 2012. AP Photo/Frank Augstein.
DUSSELDORF.- El Greco and Modernism is the first major exhibition in Germany focusing on El Greco’s paintings and pictorial world. Taking place one hundred years after a ground-breaking El Greco exhibition that toured Europe, El Greco and Modernism illustrates how the Old Master inspired and fascinated many artists of the early Modernist period. Born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Crete, 1541, El Greco moved to Italy, and later Madrid and finally Toledo in Spain, where he remained until his death in 1614. His paintings had a profound impact on the work of many modern artists including Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso and Delaunay. ... More
An unidentified member of the Serbian police poses with the "The Boy in the Red Vest" painting by French impressionist Paul Cezanne. AP Photo / Darko Vojinovic.
GENEVA (AP).- A Swiss art expert says a $110 million painting by Paul Cezanne damaged following a robbery four years ago can be restored. The director of the E.G. Buehrle foundation that owns the painting says the French impressionist's work "The Boy in the Red Vest" suffered rips to its canvas after it was stolen from a Zurich gallery. Lukas Gloor told a news conference in Zurich on Friday that the repairs will take time but he is confident they will restore the work to its former state. Four men were arrested in Serbia earlier this month when a pan-European police operation led to the seizure of the painting, which was stolen from a Zurich gallery in 2008. Masterpieces by Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh and Edgar Degas were also taken in the heist but subsequently recovered. ... More
Stephen Scott Young, Freedom. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd 2012.
NEW YORK, NY.-Christie’s Private Sales and Adelson Galleries present a special exhibition and sale of 40 works on paper by the American artist Stephen Scott Young (b. 1957) at Christie’s. The show will open May 14, coinciding with the publication of a new book, Once Upon an Island: Stephen Scott Young in the Bahamas, by Dr. William H. Gerdts, professor emeritus of art history at City University of New York, and author of more than 25 books on American art. The exhibition spans more than 20 years of Young’s career and a range of subjects and sizes, with 28 works on paper in watercolor and dry brush, as well as six drawings and six watercolor studies. Mr. Young and Dr. Gerdts will attend the opening reception on Monday, May 14, and will sign copies of the new book. The exhibition is open to the public through June 11 at Christie’s Private Sales Galleries on the 20th floor at 1230 ... More
BOSTON, MA.- Alex Katz’s bold portraits and lyrical landscapes are among the most recognizable images of contemporary art. Quintessentially American and characterized by cool detachment, his works spark a dialogue between abstraction and representation. In celebration of the 60-year career of Katz (born 1927), and the promised gift of an archive of the artist’s prints from the 1960s to today, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, will present Alex Katz Prints, on view from April 28 through July 29 in the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery. This retrospective—conceived and drawn from the collection of the Albertina Graphic Collection in Vienna, which received the gift of a major Katz print archive—will showcase approximately 125 works. Included among them will be portraits ... More
Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010/2012 (detail). Color photograph, 179.1 x 353.1 cm. Edition of 6. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures.
NEW YORK, NY.- Cindy Sherman exhibits new, large-scale works that depict outsized enigmatic female figures standing in striking isolation before ominous landscapes. Looking directly out of the picture in our direction, each character is an eccentric specter, whose epic scale, vivid Chanel costumes and intense gaze suggests a sentry standing between the viewer and the distant background. Rather than staging scenes in her studio or using projected images, the dramatic landscape backgrounds were all photographed by Sherman and then manipulated in Photoshop to achieve a painterly effect. She photographed herself fully costumed, but without makeup, against a green screen and after the fact completed the images by digitally manipulating her features and altering the landscapes. The relationship of the women in these works to the landscapes they inhabit varies, with some characters appearing as if they inexplicably landed in an alien environment and others seemingly guarding their own ... More
BERLIN.-Sprüth Magers Berlin presents a solo exhibition of work by Jenny Holzer. Entitled Endgame, the exhibition includes a series of paintings marking the artist’s return to the medium after more than thirty years. Jenny Holzer searches for ways to make narrative a part of visual objects, employing an innovative range of materials and presentations to confront emotions and experiences, politics and conflict. While looking for subject matter for electronics and projections, the artist located a number of redacted, declassified government documents including policy memos, autopsy reports, and statements by American administration officials, soldiers, detainees, and others, generated during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These opaque documents became the foundation for Holzers silkscreened paintings in 2005; she began to create the fully hand-painted works ... More
TOKYO.- The Louvre - DNP Museum Lab project is a collaborative venture between the Louvre and Dai Nippon Printing Co. Ltd (DNP), designed to explore new approaches to art appreciation. The theme chosen for the ninth presentation is portraiture in the work of the great Spanish painter Goya. Faced with a work of art, each individual sees it from a different perspective: whether collector, researcher, curator, artist or just art lover visiting the Louvre, our personal interests and knowledge influence our response. For this ninth Museum Lab event, multimedia resources were developed to allow visitors to discover Goya’s Portrait of Luis María de Cistué from all these different perspectives, the ultimate goal of the presentation being for each participant to create his or her own relationship with the painting on display. From June 2013, two of the resources designed for this presentation will be reinstalled ... More
In a 1970 file photo Louis Armstrong is seen during a recording session in New York. AP Photo/Eddie Adams.
By: Brett Zongker, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP).- A live recording of Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong playing his trumpet for one of the last times is being released to the public for the first time. On Jan., 29, 1971, Armstrong was a featured performer at the National Press Club in Washington, celebrating the inauguration of fellow Louisiana native Vernon Louviere as the club's president. On Friday, Armstrong's performance is being played back in the same place for musicians, historians and some who were there for the original performance. The new album is called "Red Beans and Rice-ly Yours: Satchmo at the National Press Club." Looking back, the performance was Armstrong's goodbye in many ways. It was the last recording made of him performing live that was meant to be played back some day. His only later performances on trumpet were quick TV snippets with Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson. His health had been suffering for years after a heart ... More
Dawoud Bey, A Boy in Front of the Loews 125th Street Movie Theatre, 1976 (printed by 1979). Promised gift of Bruce and Vicki Adams.
CHICAGO, IL.-The Art Institute of Chicago has recently added the complete set of Harlem, U.S.A.--an iconic series of 25 images by acclaimed photographer Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953)--to its permanent collection. This major acquisition of photographs, almost all in vintage prints, has been made possible by contributions from more than two dozen patrons, including members of the Photography Committee and the Leadership Advisory Committee (LAC). To celebrate the occasion, the Art Institute will present Harlem, U.S.A. in the Modern Wing's Bucksbaum Gallery (G189) from May 2 through September 9, 2012 . This is the first time since its premiere more than 30 years ago that the artist's debut series will be seen in its entirety. An additional five photographs from that time--related to the series but never before printed or exhibited--have been donated by Bey to the museum and will also be on display. Anita Blanch ... More
Space shuttle Enterprise, riding on the back of the NASA 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, flies past the Chrysler building. AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews.
By: Meghan Barr, Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP).- In a city understandably wary of low-flying aircraft, New Yorkers and tourists alike watched with joy and excitement Friday as space shuttle Enterprise sailed over the skyline on its final flight before it becomes a museum piece. Ten years after 9/11, people gathered on rooftops and the banks of the Hudson River to marvel at the sight of the spacecraft riding piggyback on a modified jumbo jet that flew over the Statue of Liberty and past the skyscrapers along Manhattan's West Side. "It made me feel empowered. I'm going to start crying," Jennifer Patton, a tourist from Canton, Ohio, said after the plane passed over the cheering crowd on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid, the floating air-and-space museum that will be the shuttle's permanent home. "I just feel like to have a plane fly that low over the Hudson, right past New York City, and to have ... More
Victor Man, Untitled (from The White Shadow of His Talent), 2011. Oil on linen mounted on wood, 19 11/16 x 15 3/8 in. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA.
LOS ANGELES, CA.-Blum & Poe announced The White Shadow of His Talent, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by artist Victor Man. With this new series of paintings and arrangements of images and objects, Victor Man creates non-linear scenarios that are loosely based on nine fictional texts forming the book If Mind Were All There Was. Man commissioned writers, curators, and artists to write texts revolving around the figure of Giuseppe Sacchi, a 17th Century Italian painter who gave up his profession as an artist to become a Franciscan monk and died young. Sacchi left no evidence of his work and further information about his biography does not exist. One of the few, supposed traces of his life can be found in the Basilica di San Francesco in Arezzo, where his name appears in the form of graffiti, added at an unknown date by ... More
Craig Kauffman, N.B. #10, 1989. Acrylic on silk 96 x 72 in. Image courtesy of The Craig Kauffman Estate.
SANTA MONICA, CA.- A rhythmic, wandering line has been present in Craig Kauffman’s paintings since the 1950s. Based in his experiments with skipping, dotted lines made with ink on paper, the line in those paintings displayed a loose, calligraphic hand that seems to define form, yet also describe a suspended space. In the Numbers paintings from 1989, Kauffman employed that line again to make numerals, boldly drawn in paint and hovering over a colored ground of imagery. In the third exhibition to be drawn from the Estate of Craig Kauffman (1932-2010), the Frank Lloyd Gallery presents a series of paintings by Kauffman made in 1989. Kauffman’s interest in unorthodox application of paint and his love of the physicality of painting are accompanied by a brilliant color sense. Kauffman considered these works, which became known as the Numbers, to be a continuation of his use of calligraphic line, and an integration of sen ... More
Arthur Bowen Davies, Evening Among the Ruins (detail). Photo: Courtesy Thomas Colville Fine Art.
NEW YORK, NY.- During the second edition of the Art and Antique Dealers League of America Spring Show NYC, opening on May 3 and running through May 6 at the Park Avenue Armory, fairgoers will have the rich opportunity to feast their eyes upon a diverse range of paintings that span from Old Masters through the 20th century. Here the world’s leading galleries will show off some of their finest pieces, in many cases unveiling them for public viewing for the very first time. Here are some the highlights: From London’s Piacenti Art Gallery comes a remarkably well-preserved 17th-century canvas depicting a rare subject: The Young David Gathering Stones for His Slingshot. Painted between 1617 and 1619 by Domenico Fetti (1589-1623), the painting features a beautifully rendered riverbed, bright sunlight, and a ruddy-haired and determined-looking David, all evoked in the distinctive pictorial style of an Italian virtuoso. ... More
Quote Painting is easy when you don't know, but very difficult when you do. Edgar Degas
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Michael Sailstorfer, winner of Vattenfall Contemporary 2012 Prize, exhibits at Berlinische Galerie BERLIN.- Michael Sailstorfer (*1979 Velden/Vils), is the prize-winner of “Vattenfall Contemporary 2012”. This choice pays tribute to an artistic position that re-questions and extends the classical concept of sculpture. In his often lavishly produced works he creates new, unfamiliar relations between everyday objects and processes, so generating images with great poetic effect. The central motif of his first major solo exhibition in Berlin is the forest. Five trees in the installation Forst, hanging upside down and revolving around their own axes, take up the whole of the 10-metre high exhibition space. While Sailstorfer brings nature into the exhibition space here, with his second work Schwarzwald (Black Forest) he takes art into nature: he produced a square field in an area of forest using black paint, which is reminiscent of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square dating from 1914/15. Its slow ... More
Josef Albers, Mapplethorpes to lead Grogan auction DEDHAM, MA.- Albers, Mapplethorpe, Avery, Picasso, Hundertwasser and Poons are just a few of the Modern masters to be offered at Grogan and Company’s upcoming May 20th auction. The auction, which will include American and European Paintings, Prints and Sculpture of the 18th, 19th and 20th century, will also include a large collection of Old Master Drawings from a Wellesley, Massachusetts estate, as well as Furniture, Decorative Works of Art, Jewelry, Silver and Oriental Rugs and Carpets. The featured lot is Josef Alber’s Homage to the Square, ‘Late Sound’, a 40 x 40 inch oil on masonite created in 1964 by the venerated modern master of color. The painting of a black square over a gray square over a blue square is estimated at $200,000-400,000 and is one of more than a thousand works in a series Albers created over a period of twenty five years to study ... More
Lynn Chadwick: The Complete Candelabras 1953-1996 on view at the Willer Gallery LONDON.-The Willer gallery presents a unique exhibition of the complete series of limited edition bronze candelabras created by Lynn Chadwick, shown together for the first time. Lynn Chadwick is one of the preeminent British sculptors of the 20th Century. During a career spanning over 50 years until his death in 2003 he secured an international reputation underpinned by major prizes, important commissions, and a lifetime of private and public exhibitions, culminating with a major retrospective at Tate Britain in late 2003. Represented in the world’s leading public and private collections, increasing recognition of his major contribution to British sculpture ensures that his reputation continues to grow. Throughout his career, Chadwick’s work drew on the natural world in abstracted human and animal forms, and developed archetypal constructions instantly recognisable to those familiar ... More
Aimee Chang introduced as BAM/PFA's Director of Engagement BERKELEY, CA.-The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive announces the appointment of Aimee Chang as Director of Engagement. The newly created position brings the communications, education, and membership departments together to foster meaningful and transformative experiences for visitors at an institution that celebrates art, film, and cultural discourse. “We are ecstatic to welcome Aimee to the BAM/PFA team. Her groundbreaking work in a diverse range of education, communications, and curatorial roles at some of the finest museums in the country makes her uniquely qualified for this new and innovative role,” said Lawrence Rinder, director of BAM/PFA. “As Director of Engagement, Aimee will provide visionary and strategic leadership in the development of interactive and creative approaches to audience engagement in our ... More
Stik's brilliantly produced new studio work on view at Imitate Modern LONDON.- Celebrated, cutting edge street artist Stik branches out into iron and oak pieces during a new month long solo show entitled ‘Walk’, at Imitate Modern. This latest exhibition features large-scale canvases, light-boxes, and sculpture, all of which capture Stik’s trademark grittiness, and refined attention to detail. The gallery also hosts the long awaited launch of Stik’s new print also entitled ‘Walk’, produced by Squarity. Stik’s brilliantly produced new studio work encapsulates the essence of his massive and ubiquitous Hackney street stick-figures. Stik spent many years living and working on the streets. Having perfected his uncompromising style for over a decade, his lines are as slick as calligrapher’s. The pieces are fresh, simple and colourful, like those of a children’s storybook. Yet, they are loaded with poignant emotions and a mature sensibility, seemingly at od ... More
Valencian Institute for Modern Art presents an exhibition of works by José Saborit VALENCIA.- The director of the IVAM, Consuelo Císcar, writer and art critic, Carlos Marzal, and artist Jose Saborit, presented the exhibition "José Saborit. Further south ", which will remain on display through June 24. The Regional Minister of Culture, Lola Johnson, opened the shows. The exhibition, sponsored by the Valencian Parliament and curated by Carlos Marzal and the artist himself, of some one hundred works that explores the landscape Saborit making a journey from figurative stripped of anecdote, to abstraction. His pieces are characterized by the absence of color in a search for the essence treated as white. The paintings that José Saborit is showing in this exhibition present a journey that ranges from figuration stripped of anecdotal aspects and from reflection on landscapes that lie close to the artist's eye to abstraction. An invitation for us to advance from colour ... More
The collection of Henri Canonne
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On a day like today, French painter Yves Klein was born
