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From the home page
Martin Gayford | Bloomberg News
The Royal Academy of Arts in London has never been host to an exhibition quite like David Hockney’s “A Bigger Picture.”
The academy has a history dating to 1768. The one-man show, which runs from Jan 21 to April 9, is a tour de force. It consists almost entirely of new work, using both low-tech media such as painting and the latest high-tech tools.
Hockney approaches the time-honored subject of nature in a fresh, contemporary way. The result is spectacular.
You might ask, what’s the point of a bigger picture? Hockney means the phrase in two ways. The first is paradoxical: the larger the image, the closer to it the viewer feels. While an ordinary-sized canvas is like a window on the world, a huge one envelops you. Abstract painters such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock worked on a large scale for this reason.
Hockney does the same, depicting what he likes to call “the visible world.” ...
Read more at Bloomberg News
NYC: Bearden’s centennial
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Holland Cotter | The New York Times
Across the country institutions large and small, art-specific and otherwise, are celebrating the Romare Bearden centennial year. There’s a reason for this. In Bearden’s embracing art all borders are down — between personal and universal, town and country, history and myth. Africa, Europe and the Americas too are borderless. Bearden is artist in chief of the modern cosmopolis, griot in residence of the global village. All hail.
That’s what New York City is doing in a series of exhibitions. Among those up and running there’s a succinct Bearden display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; a more expansive one at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a Harlem branch of the New York Public Library; and, best of all, a sparkling cross-generational Bearden shout-out at the Studio Museum in Harlem. ...
Read more at The New York Times
Paris: Voodoo in the material world
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Jorg von Uthmann | Bloomberg
Bondage means different things to different people.
For believers in Voodoo it’s not a sexual fantasy. They use it on fetishes to cast spells or to protect themselves against evil spirits.
About 100 African fetishes are on view at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. They come from the collection of the late Jacques Kerchache, a dealer and connoisseur of what used to be known as primitive art.
Kerchache was instrumental in founding the Musee du Quai Branly, opened in 2006, that displays objects from Africa, Oceania and the Americas as works of art, not as ethnological specimens. Some anthropologists demurred, yet the public appreciates the theatrical presentation, and the museum has become a popular attraction. ...
Read more at Bloomberg.com
London: Lucian Freud dies
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William Grimes | The New York Times
Lucian Freud, whose stark and revealing paintings of friends and intimates, splayed nude in his studio, recast the art of portraiture and offered a new approach to figurative art, died on Wednesday night at his home in London. He was 88.
He died following a brief illness, said William Acquavella of Acquavella Galleries, Mr. Freud’s dealer.
Mr. Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud and a brother of the British television personality Clement Freud, was already an important figure in the small London art world when, in the immediate postwar years, he embarked on a series of portraits that established him as a potent new voice in figurative art.
In paintings like “Girl With Roses” (1947-48) and “Girl With a White Dog” (1951-52), he put the pictorial language of traditional European painting in the service of an anti-romantic, confrontational style of portraiture that stripped bare the sitter’s social facade. Ordinary people — many of them his friends — stared wide-eyed from the canvas, vulnerable to the artist’s ruthless inspection. ...
Read more by William Grimes at The New York Times
Antalya: ‘Herakles’ whole
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Geoff Edgers | the Boston Globe
ANTALYA, Turkey - On its own, it seems unremarkable: the bottom half of an 1,800-year-old marble statue showing the legs and lower torso of a muscular figure.
But here, in one of Turkey’s most important museums, the “Weary Herakles’’ has served as a symbol of the many works stolen from the country, shuffled to shady dealers, and sold to American museums.
The top half of “Herakles,’’ which shows the bearded hero leaning on his club, has been at the [Boston] Museum of Fine Arts since 1982 ...
“It is part of our culture,’’ says Aykut Uzun, a tour guide standing in front of the lower half on a recent morning in this city on Turkey’s southern coast. “That’s why we want it back.’’
After years of denial and sputtering negotiations, Turkey will finally get its wish. ...
Read more at The Boston Globe
Paris: Winnipeg is a winner
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Peter O’Neil | National Post
PARIS — This is how Le Monde sees it: “In the cold and boredom, the Canadian city of Winnipeg generates very good artists.”
That appears to be the consensus view behind the success of an extraordinary exhibition of Winnipeg artists at a privately owned gallery in the Bastille area.
The My Winnipeg exhibit opened June 23 at La Maison Rouge gallery and roughly 300 people a day have arrived to see more than 250 works by 70 artists.
Le Monde is not the only major media outlet to have paid notice: A Le Figaro reviewer said she “adored” the show, while Beaux Arts Magazine described My Winnipeg as “irresistible.”
With plenty of time to kill indoors, lots of inexpensive space for galleries and studios and a feeble commercial market, the thinking goes, artists are more likely to work collectively and experiment on the edges. ...
Read more at The National Post
'Christina’s’ landmark
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Brian MacQuarrie | The Boston Globe
The fishermen of tiny Cushing, Maine, pass the old Olson house at least every other day, but few of them give the weather-worn 18th-century home a second thought as they head to the wharf. In Cushing, population 1,400, it has always been part of the family.
But now, the locals might have to navigate through even more tourists who visit the classic Maine farmhouse, made famous in “Christina’s World,’’ the iconic 1948 painting by Andrew Wyeth.
The U.S. Department of the Interior has declared the house a National Historic Landmark, a designation reserved for places that “possess exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States,’’ according to the department.
Read more at The Boston Globe
Sharjah: Art of the Arab Spring
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Sylvia Smith | BBC News
Sharjah — Long before the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, an obscure art exhibition in the United Arab Emirates was already exploring themes of corruption and insurrection - works that have found new relevance amid the Arab political turmoil.
Walking around the various sites that make up the Sharjah Biennial, the classic line from The Third Man springs to mind.
Orson Welles comments that 30 years of warfare, terror and bloodshed in medieval Italy produced the Renaissance; and 500 years of peace, democracy and brotherly love in Switzerland produced the cuckoo clock.
Although not all the works on display in the art-savvy emirate consciously embroil themselves with the social, military and political turmoil currently besetting the Arab world, those that do touch a raw nerve and are more relevant to the international, intellectual crowd who now attend the Sharjah Biennial.
Read more and see the video of artist Imram Qureshi at BBC News
Elizabeth Catlett at 96
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Valerie Gladstone | The Root
Artist Elizabeth Catlett works almost every day in her sunny studio in Cuernavaca, Mexico, taking afternoons off to knit or cook or swim in her pool. She keeps many of her sculptures -- elegant African-inspired female figures and portrait heads made of bronze, wood and marble -- around her, though recent exhibitions have meant that she has had to send works away. "Stargazers: Elizabeth Catlett in Conversation With 21 Contemporary Artists," at the Bronx Museum, runs through May 29, and "Dígame: Elizabeth Catlett's Forever Love" will be at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University through May 26. ...
Currently finishing a wood sculpture of an embracing couple, she has had to put it aside for a month for her annual trip to New York for her birthday party, which was on Friday. Most of her life, she has come north -- for many years, with her late husband, the Mexican artist Francisco Mora -- to see her grandchildren, great-grandchildren and friends. "I love to go to New York," she says, "but I also love to return home. It's quieter, calmer, and I work better."
In Catlett's presence, her friendliness and warmth can make one forget her historical and artistic significance. Hailed for the emotional power of her graphics and figurative and abstract sculptures, she ranks among the great artists of our time. ...
Read more from Valerie Gladstone at The Root
NYC: Rebels’ bleak expressions
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Roberta Smith, The New York Times
If you sometimes feel that Germany has contributed more than its share of provocative, irreverent artists to 20th- and 21st-century art, you may be right. From Hannah Höch and John Heartfield to Martin Kippenberger and John Bock, the supply has been extraordinarily robust. During the postwar era, at least, we might credit an art-academy system that encourages independence, or maybe a society that remains somewhat more rigid than many of its Western counterparts.
For a heady sense of where it all began, consider “German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse” at the Museum of Modern Art, the largest exhibition that the museum has devoted exclusively to Germany’s first Modern movement. The style combusted spontaneously after 1905 among artists in Dresden and Munich who were inspired by the brilliant colors and distorted forms of the Post-Impressionists and then the Fauves, as well as by peasant art and primitive art; it sputtered out sometime in the 1920s. …
Read more by Roberta Smith in The New York Times
Mexico City: A grand new museum
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Sapa-Associated Press
The world's richest man, telecom tycoon Carlos Slim, gave a sneak peak at the new museum where he plans to show his vast collection of art and collectibles, including priceless pieces by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, French sculptor Auguste Rodin and Italian master Leonardo da Vinci.
The Soumaya museum — named after the tycoon's late wife — opens to the public on March 29 and admission will be free.
"There are few, very few spaces where Mexicans can learn about the great masters of all time," Calderon said. "With this museum, Mexico is at the forefront when it comes to world art and architecture."
Read more at Times Live
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Beirut: Art blooms
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Shirine Saad, Papermag
In the last few years, a thriving contemporary art scene has emerged in Lebanon despite the country's political instability and weak government. Particularly in Beirut. There, a recent surge of conceptual artists have been investigating the heritage of war and the collective memories of a lost generation via their work. Several galleries have taken over industrial spaces, showcasing the region's underexposed talents and Middle Eastern art sales are fetching millions at auction.
Read more at Papermag
Aboriginal art fades
From the home page
The Australian
It began with a bang just over a decade ago in the lush years of fast-paced economic growth, faltered in the global financial crisis, and was quietly, sadly laid in its grave over the past two weeks, its funeral marked by a set of bleak auction results.
The Aboriginal art boom has run its course. Indigenous art-making in Australia will live on, but it will never be quite the same again. The old masters are dead or dying, the traditional cultures of the Centre and Top End are shifting, the art sector is changing, a page is being turned.
But not all the troubles of the indigenous art market are the result of these grand, long-term processes. Three commonwealth government reforms have helped destroy Aboriginal art's once-strong investment appeal. Gallerists, critics and collectors have looked on in amazement as bureaucrats have reshaped the Aboriginal art world, imposing regulatory constraints and reporting burdens on the once-freewheeling trade.
"The market's not exactly dead," says prominent Brisbane indigenous art gallery owner Suzanne O'Connell, "but it's certainly ailing.” …
Read more at The Australian
The museum "will be important for the Mexican people ... it will be a place for them to enrich themselves with international history, with art history, with the history of Mexico," Slim said at a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by President Felipe Calderon, Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and U.S. television host Larry King. Hundreds of guests packed the Soumaya late on Tuesday. …
"There are few, very few spaces where Mexicans can learn about the great masters of all time," Calderon said. "With this museum, Mexico is at the forefront when it comes to world art and architecture."
Read more at Times Live
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From the home page
Shirine Saad, Papermag
In the last few years, a thriving contemporary art scene has emerged in Lebanon despite the country's political instability and weak government. Particularly in Beirut. There, a recent surge of conceptual artists have been investigating the heritage of war and the collective memories of a lost generation via their work. Several galleries have taken over industrial spaces, showcasing the region's underexposed talents and Middle Eastern art sales are fetching millions at auction.
Read more at Papermag
From the home page
The Australian
It began with a bang just over a decade ago in the lush years of fast-paced economic growth, faltered in the global financial crisis, and was quietly, sadly laid in its grave over the past two weeks, its funeral marked by a set of bleak auction results.
The Aboriginal art boom has run its course. Indigenous art-making in Australia will live on, but it will never be quite the same again. The old masters are dead or dying, the traditional cultures of the Centre and Top End are shifting, the art sector is changing, a page is being turned.
But not all the troubles of the indigenous art market are the result of these grand, long-term processes. Three commonwealth government reforms have helped destroy Aboriginal art's once-strong investment appeal. Gallerists, critics and collectors have looked on in amazement as bureaucrats have reshaped the Aboriginal art world, imposing regulatory constraints and reporting burdens on the once-freewheeling trade.
"The market's not exactly dead," says prominent Brisbane indigenous art gallery owner Suzanne O'Connell, "but it's certainly ailing.” …
Read more at The Australian
Philip Gefter on Cartier-Bresson
“I have always interpreted “the decisive moment” to be one in which an equal balance is struck between activity and observation: the photographer recognizes something as it transpires in real time and choreographs an immediate response with the appropriate visual geometry locking in place in the frame and the right exposure of light to film at play, rendering the subject and the image, like two coils of DNA, inextricably linked. The result, then, is not just a moment in time caught by the camera but the timelessness of the moment expressed in visual form. Certainly Cartier-Bresson’s best-known images are a testament to this idea.”
Read more at The Daily BeastImage credits: Home page: Untitled © Natalie Guymala. Source: Mbantua Gallery & Museum, Darwin, Australia. This page: Museo Soumaya sketch: Fernando Romero. Awely © Minnie Pwerle. Source: Mbantua Gallery & Museum, Darwin, Australia. © Estate of Henri Cartier-Bresson.