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| | | Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam opens 'Rembrandt-Velázquez. Dutch & Spanish Masters' | |
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King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands (2nd-L) and King Felipe VI of Spain (2nd-R) pose for a picture during the opening of the Rembrandt-Velazquez exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on October 10, 2019. Robin van Lonkhuijsen / ANP / AFP.
AMSTERDAM.- Rembrandt-Velázquez. Dutch & Spanish Masters will present an outstanding selection of paintings by Dutch and Spanish Masters of the 17th century, including some of the greatest pieces by, amongst others, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Murillo, Hals, Zurbarán and Vermeer. In this exhibition, 60 paintings by Spanish and Dutch masters hang alongside each other in pairs, resulting in fascinating visual dialogues on realism and eternity, religion and beauty. This exhibition, which will be on show from 11 October 2019 to 19 January 2020, is the result of a special partnership between the Rijksmuseum and the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, marking the Year of Rembrandt 2019 and the 200th anniversary of the Prado. During a time of war and political tension, the Dutch and Spanish painting traditions approached closer to each other than it is generally thought. The 17th century has become known as the Golden Age of painting in both the Netherlan ... More |
The Best Photos of the Day Tate Britain presents the largest survey of work by William Blake (1757-1827) in the UK for a generation. This ambitious exhibition brings together over 300 remarkable and rarely seen works and rediscovers Blake as a visual artist for the 21st century. In this image: William Blake at Tate Britain, install view. Copyright Tate (Seraphina Neville)
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| | Olga Tokarczuk, Peter Handke win Literature Nobels | | What was kept in this Stone Age meat locker? Bone marrow | | Turner painting unveiled on Britain's new £20 note |
Polish author Olga Tokarczuk arrives prior to a press conference and a lecture on October 10, 2019 in Bielefeld. Sascha Schuermann / AFP / dpa.
STOCKHOLM (AFP).- Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk on Thursday won the 2018 Nobel Literature Prize, which was delayed over a sexual harassment scandal, while Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke took the 2019 award, the Swedish Academy said. Experts had predicted the Academy would go to great pains to steer clear of controversy with its pick of laureates, as it seeks to restore its reputation tainted by the scandal. But Handke, 76, was quickly seen as a divisive choice for his pro-Serb support in the Balkan wars. Tokarczuk, 57, considered the most talented Polish novelist of her generation, was honoured "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life". She told Swedish Radio she "couldn't believe" she had won, and was pleased to share it with Handke, "my favourite writer". "It's a very important award for Central Europe. It's an honour and a source of pride," Tokarczuk told AFP by telephone while on he ... More | |
A photo provided by Ruth Blasco, shows chop marks in the leg bone specimens from Qesem caves in Israel, which researchers say resulted from attempts to remove dry skin because the bones were kept weeks after the animals were hunted. Scientists believe the legs were kept for delayed consumption of their marrow. (Ruth Blasco via The New York Times)
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- Sealed for millenniums, Qesem Cave in central Israel is a limestone time capsule of the lives and diets of Paleolithic people from 420,000 to 200,000 years ago. Inside, ancient humans once butchered fresh kills with stone blades and barbecued meat on campfires. It was believed that early hominins were consuming everything they could put their hands on immediately, without storing or preserving or keeping things for later, said Ran Barkai, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. But not every meal was scarfed down right after a hunt. Barkai and his colleagues have found that the caves earliest inhabitants may have also stored animal bones filled with tasty marrow that they feasted on for up to nine weeks after the kill, sort of like a Stone Age canned soup. The finding may be ... More | |
A sample of the new twenty pound note featuring late British painter JMW Turner is seen during the launch event for the new note design at Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate, south eastern England on October 10, 2019. Leon Neal / POOL / AFP.
LONDON (AFP).- The Bank of England unveiled Britain's new £20 polymer banknote on Thursday, featuring artist J. M. W. Turner and his most cherished masterpiece. The note includes Joseph Mallord William Turner's self-portrait and his 1838 oil painting "The Fighting Temeraire". It will enter general circulation on February 2, 2020. "As the new Turner £20 testifies, money can be a work of art in everyone's pocket," Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said. The note was unveiled at the Turner Contemporary art gallery in the southeast English seaside resort of Margate. The £20 note ($24.50, 22.20 euro) accounts for more than half the banknotes in circulation. "Our banknotes celebrate the UK's heritage, salute its culture, and testify to the achievements of its most notable individuals," said Carney. "Turner's painting was transformative, his influence spanned lifetimes, and his legacy endures today. ... More |
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| | Exhibition at Kunstmuseum Den Haag examines Claude Monet's garden paintings | | Jill Freedman, photographer who lingered in the margins, dies at 79 | | Exhibition at Alte Nationalgalerie focuses on women artists in the Nationalgalerie before 1919 |
Claude Monet (1840-1926), Water lilies, 1914-17, oil on canvas, 166,1 x 142,2 cm, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.
THE HAGUE.- Everyone knows Claude Monets world-famous paintings of water lilies. But how many have seen these explosions of colour in person and lost themselves in the reflections of Monets water lily pond, no longer certain where the water begins and the sky ends? The last large-scale Monet exhibition in the Netherlands was held thirty years ago. Many of the paintings of his famous garden have never been shown in this country, so it is high time for a major tribute. Monet The Garden Paintings brings together no fewer than forty masterpieces from collections across the globe. Monet painted them in preparation for his magnum opus: the Grandes Décorations. At the centre of the exhibition is one of the most popular paintings in the Kunstmuseums collection: Wisteria. This survey is the follow-up to the groundbreaking Monet retrospective mounted by the Kunstmuseum Den Haag (then the Haags Gemeentemuseum) ... More | |
Jill Freedman, Hyde Park, London, 1967. Vintage gelatin silver print, printed 1972 14 x 11 in. Captioned and stamped by photographer verso. Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York.
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- Jill Freedman, a tough-skinned photographer who immersed herself for months at a time in the lives of street cops, firefighters, circus performers and other tribes she felt were misunderstood, died Wednesday at a care facility near her home in New York. She was 79. Nancy Schiffman-Sklar, a cousin, said the cause was complications of cancer. Lots of people dream of running away and joining the circus, but Freedman actually did it, and created a body of images that captured the ache and solitude and weirdness of the American road at the point where, as she wrote, it sings with the sinister energy of insane clowns. For Freedman, this energy was her muse. In seven books and numerous gallery exhibitions and journalism assignments, she specialized in finding people on the rough margins of American life, rendering ... More | |
Sabine Lepsius, Selbstbildnis, 1885, © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Jörg P. Anders.
BERLIN.- By the beginning of the 19th century, a few women had succeeded in building up exceptional careers within a predominantly male art establishment. However, by mid-century restrictions had intensified for women artists and they were often denied access to art academies, fellowships and grants, as well as to important commissions. In their fight for visibility, women artists engaged with artists associations, where they fought for possibilities to exhibit and also increasingly for the attention of important supporters as well as the prestigious commissions and purchases associated with them. The exhibition and accompanying scholarly publication provide the first extensive study dedicated to all the works in the Nationalgalerie produced by women painters and sculptors before 1919. It is a revision of the museums collections viewed under the important aspect of current discourse about equal rights. The exhibition shows more than 60 paintings and sculptural ... More |
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| | Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen opens a comprehensive survey of the work of Carsten Nicolai | | Museum explores spooky science behind 'Frankenstein', 'The Mummy' | | Six months on, Notre-Dame's rebirth still years away |
Carsten Nicolai, anti, 2004. PP lightweight structure, sound, theremin, transducer, amplifier, light-absorbent black paint, 300 Ã 255 Ã 255 cm, Photo: Uwe Walter.
DUSSELDORF.- The exhibition presents a comprehensive survey of the oeuvre of the visual artist and musician Carsten Nicolai, who has worked on the intersections between fine art, music, and natural science since the early 1990s. Electronically controlled sound and light are the materials out of which Nicolai molds minimalist installations, acoustic performances, and visualizations of physical phenomena that reflect systems and structures of the media universe. Under the pseudonym Alva Noto, Nicolai is also a widely acclaimed practitioner of contemporary electronic music. Following his participations in documenta X (1997) and the 2001 and 2003 Venice Biennales, which put him on the map as a visual artist, he has shown his work around the world. At K21, he organized the spacious downstairs exhibition hall as an open set with a dual structure accommodating the presentation of his works, many of which solicit the viewers ... More | |
Boris Karloff as The Mummy. Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC.
LOS ANGELES (AFP).- What is the spookiest thing about "Frankenstein," "The Mummy" and "Dracula"? The hideous monster? The ancient curse? The sharp fangs? Or the fact that these classic horror films were all rooted in real-life scientific experiments and discoveries? That is the premise of a new exhibition at Los Angeles' Natural History Museum, showcasing movie props from Hollywood's golden age of horror alongside scientific artefacts that inspired them. The "Natural History of Horror" -- opening Thursday, as Halloween looms -- displays the cloth wrappings used to mummify Boris Karloff in the 1932 classic movie alongside real ancient Egyptian corpse bindings from the museum's archeology collection. Visitors can pull a lever to recreate Luigi Galvani's 18th-century electrical experiment on twitching frog legs -- which inspired Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" -- while examining the metal shackles used to bind The Monster on-screen in ... More | |
In this file photograph taken on April 16, 2019, Patrick Palem, expert of the heritage restoration, holds the head of a statue showing the face of French architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc as Saint Thomas, stored in SOCRA workshop.
PARIS (AFP).- One day after the blaze that scarred Notre-Dame, President Emmanuel Macron addressed a nation in shock at the damage to one of its great cultural landmarks, with a promise that rang as clearly as the peal of the cathedral's bells. "We will rebuild the cathedral even more beautifully and I want it to be finished within five years," Macron said on national television on the evening of April 16, 2019. "And we can do it," he added. But six months after the April 15 fire that tore through the roof of the 13th-century Paris cathedral and toppled its spire, the reconstruction process is shaping up to be much more complex than many anticipated. Workers have had to clean up significant quantities of lead that melted from the roof and contaminated areas around the cathedral, with critics saying the authorities were slow to warn ... More |
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| | High Museum acquires two new works at Collectors Evening | | The British Museum opens the first major exhibition of Notgeld in the UK | | National Gallery audio tour tackles mental health myths |
Shirin Neshat (Iranian, born 1957), Possessed, 2001 (detail), 16mm and 35mm film transferred to digital video, 13:01, with sound. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2019. © Shirin Neshat.
ATLANTA, GA.- The High Museum of Art welcomed 200 guests for Collectors Evening on Oct. 3, 2019, to support the acquisition of two new works for the Museums collection. The acquired objects are Shirin Neshats film Possessed (2001) and Barbershop Stand and Shelf (ca. 19401950), a handmade work by an unidentified self-taught artist. Collectors Evening was another great success for our curatorial departments and a wonderful event dedicated to encouraging involvement from our patrons, said Rand Suffolk, Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., director of the High. The attendees voted to add some truly remarkable works to our collection, and we were thrilled to see their engagement, excitement and commitment to building the collection. Collectors Evening, ... More | |
25 pfennig turnip Notgeld note from Bielefeld, 1917 © Trustees of the British Museum.
LONDON.- During the First World War and the following inflation, many German towns issued their own emergency currency, called Notgeld (emergency money). This money, usually in low denominations, was intended to combat shortages in small change at a local level. However, Notgeld quickly became a collectible and towns designed it to especially appeal to collectors. The colourful and intricate Notgeld notes are a fascinating and almost untapped source of the cultural and political history of the war and the early Weimar Republic. Many of the notes comment on the inflation or sport political messages. Because the relative majority of the notes come from small towns and villages, Notgeld additionally is a great source to explore the rural and small-town Weimar Republic, a chapter often forgotten in historiography. This is the first major exhibition on Notgeld in the UK. Notgeld was first issued in August 1914, ... More | |
A visitor with the Mental Health Awareness Audio Tour at the National Gallery, London.
LONDON.- The first mental health-awareness audio tour of the National Gallery is launching on World Mental Health Day, 10th October 2019. Researchers from Kings College London and the McPin Foundation have co-created the audio tour with a group of young people including some affected by mental health issues, alongside members of the Gallerys Young Producers programme. The Medical Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation, and the British Academy have generously funded the tour, which is available free to visitors for 6 months. The audio tour aims to improve understanding of mental health among visitors to the Gallery, providing an opportunity to see its collection in an alternative way. The tour draws on young peoples experiences of mental health and connects these with the Gallerys paintings in order to challenge common myths about mental health and immerse visitors in the ... More |
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The Remarkable Story of Titian and Tintoretto's Return to Venice
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Tang Teaching Museum wins three national design awards in annual competition
SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY.- The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College has been honored with three awards in the 2019 American Alliance of Museums Publications Design Competition. The Museum won: First Prize in the Posters category for a poster created for the exhibition Rose Ocean: Living with Duchamp, designed by Jean Tschanz-Egger, Head of Design at the Tang Museum. The 2- by 3-foot poster features screen-printed text on clear mylar with the letters of the exhibition title made of orange circles with white dots in homage to the typography on a 1934 artist book by the legendary Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. (In the Posters category, second prize went to the Seattle Art Museum and an honorable mention went to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.) Second Prize in the Exhibition Collateral Materials ... More
In Brooklyn catacombs, classical music rises among the dead
NEW YORK (AFP).- Deep in one of New York's most prestigious cemeteries, the eerie vibrations of a string concerto ricochet off catacomb walls, a seance of sorts invigorating the spirit of classical music. Media reports regularly warn of the genre's impending doom, but Andrew Ousley, who founded the cheekily named "Death of Classical" series, says the obituaries are beyond premature. "Classical music can be relevant, it can be impactful for people who are not already among the template," he told AFP at a rehearsal in Brooklyn's famed Green-Wood Cemetery for this week's concert series. "The music is not dead; it's the creativity of the approach in getting to audiences that feels more the issue to me." After debuting his "Crypt Sessions" series -- an intimate show held in the crypt of Harlem's Church of the Intercession -- in 2015, Ousley began ... More
Hassan Hajjaj turns Moroccan clichés into London cool
LONDON (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- Hassan Hajjaj was in his element. On a recent afternoon, friends and strangers wandered into the Moroccan-born British photographers shop in the Shoreditch district here, clustering amid the joyous mess. There were stacks of multicolored T-shirts, racks of sweatshirts and djellabas, and piles of slippers with mock sports-brand insignia. Grocery-store cans and boxes marked in Arabic script served as decoration and furniture. Crowding the walls were vintage advertising posters and of course Hajjajs own photographs. In his instantly recognizable style of portraiture, he styles his subjects in a kind of faux-Orientalist swag, using items like the ones in the shop as props. In fact, he makes portraits right here, on the street, taping onto the brick wall his flamboyant backdrops, and shooting in full view of passersby. ... More
The Whitney Museum of American Art opens 'Pope. L: Choir'
NEW YORK, NY.- Pope.L brings his boundary-breaking practice to the Whitney with the debut of a newly commissioned installation, Choir (2019). For over four decades, Pope.L has used performance, painting, drawing, installation, video, sculpture, and theater to grapple with gender, race, and societal concerns. Expanding on his ongoing exploration of water, he investigates its physical properties and associationsranging from life-giving to destructiveto find connections between this ubiquitous substance and complex social issues. Pope.L was the recipient of the 2017 Bucksbaum Award, which is presented to an artist in the Whitney Biennial. Choir opened in the Lobby Gallery on October 10, 2019 and runs through Winter 2020. This exhibition is part of Pope.L: Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration, a trio of complementary exhibitions organized ... More
"Art Got into Me": The work of Engels the Artist on view at the Neuberger Museum of Art
PURCHASE, NY.- The Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY is presenting Art Got Into Me: The Work of Engels the Artist, a ten-year survey of work by Engels the Artist, a Haitian-born, self-taught artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. The exhibition will be on view through December 22, 2019. According to Dr. Patrice Giasson, the Alex Gordon Curator of Art of the Americas at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Engels calls into question the very notion of what constitutes painting. Abstract and poetic, his sculptural paintings are both aesthetically appealing and profoundly meaningful. Dr. Giasson notes that while Engels art is in dialogue with European and American art traditions, his work contains spiritual elements mixed with Haitian historical and social themes. Engels says he can create with anything, as I did not get ... More
Werkbundarchiv - Museum der Dinge opens third exhibition questioning the modernist design vocabulary
BERLIN.- Intense colors, abstract compositions of lines and constructivist patterns on cake plates, cups and saucers the sprayed decoration in ceramics of the 1920s and 1930s belongs to a different current in modern aesthetics than the functional, unadorned objects of the Werkbund and the Bauhaus. Applied using efficient stencil and spray techniques, they pay tribute both to rationalization and to the avant-garde painting of the early 20th century. Spray-decorated ceramics continued to be an economical and fashionable commodity even during the Great Depression, manufactured and marketed in hundreds of variations, and representing the economic, social, technical and artistic discourses of the times: the conception of artistic and design work, the relations between unique, individually made pieces and anonymous mass production, between ... More
Mudam Luxembourg opens a major exhibition dedicated to the work of Anri Sala
LUXEMBOURG .- Mudam Luxembourg Musée dArt Moderne Grand-Duc Jean presents Le Temps coudé, a major exhibition dedicated to the work of Anri Sala (b. 1974, Tirana). The exhibition brings together film, sound and sculptural installations produced between 2014 and 2019, and works on paper from three different series. In his films and installations, Sala uses sound and music, exploring their relation to image and architecture, history and time. The motif, both visual and musical, is ever-present as are forms of displacement and alteration. Entitled Le Temps coudé, the exhibition refers to the notion of warps or bends in our experience of space and time, borrowing from the French phrase for taking a sudden detour. Far from being mere accompaniments to the image, sound and music play a key role in Salas work. They are employed by the artist for their ... More
Belgrade's naked 'Victor' statue to be restored
BELGRADE (AFP).- Symbol of Belgrade, the "Pobednik" (Victor) statue, which has overlooked the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers since 1928, was taken down from the city's Kalemegdan fortress Thursday to be restored. The naked man with a square jaw and martial gaze holds a dove in one hand and a sword in another, symbolising the complex past of the volatile Balkans region. Initially, Belgrade commissioned the statue from sculptor Ivan Mestrovic to mark the defeat of the Ottoman empire during the First Balkans War in 1912-13. An alliance of the region's Slavs ended the five-century Ottoman domination, but Serbs and Bulgarians then fought each other over the spoils -- in the Second Balkans War. No sooner was that over when the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria sparked World War I. Mestrovic, who had begun building ... More
Outrage in Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo over Handke's Nobel win
BELGRADE.- Austrian writer Peter Handke's Nobel literature prize win on Thursday sparked outrage in Albania, Bosnia and Kosovo, where he is widely seen as an admirer of late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. In the 1990s, Handke emerged as a vocal defender of the Serbs during the bloody collapse of the former Yugoslavia, even comparing them to Jews under the Nazis, a remark he later retracted. His 1996 travelogue "A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia", caused a storm, and in 1999 he returned Germany's prestigious Buechner prize in protest at NATO's bombing of Belgrade. "Never thought would feel to vomit because of a Nobel Prize," Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama wrote on Twitter. "Given disgraceful choice made from a moral authority like the Nobel Academy, shame is sealed as a new value. No, we can't become ... More
Ethiopia turns former palace, torture site into tourist draw
ADDIS ABABA (AFP).- A palace that once housed Ethiopia's emperors and also served as a torture site under the communist Derg regime is to open to the public in a controversial government tourism project. The palace compound in Addis Ababa, which Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government has rebranded "Unity Park", was formally launched Thursday and will be open from Friday. Abiy's office said on Twitter Thursday that the project "symbolises our ability to come together". But critics have dismissed it as vanity project for Abiy that could prove divisive. Backed by the United Arab Emirates, the project cost more than $160 million (145 million euros), Ethiopian officials told reporters at a briefing earlier this week. Built in the late 1800s by Emperor Menelik II, who founded Addis Ababa, the palace was the residence of Ethiopia's rulers for more than ... More
Strong Impressionist and Modern Sale at Bonhams in London
LONDON.- Pferd, an important painting by the German Expressionist painter Franz Marc, sold for £1,095,063 at Bonhams Impressionist and Modern Art sale in London today (10 October). Unseen in public for 70 years and never before offered at auction, it had an estimate of £350,000-550,000. The sale made a total of £6,955,750 with 85% by lot, 94% by value. The total included £1,385,000 for ten works from the collection of Sir Warwick and Lady Fairfax, among the highlights of which were: Lun des Bourgeois de Calais: Ãtude de nu monumentale pour Pierre de Wissant by Auguste Rodin sold for £675,063. It had been estimated at £400,000-600,000. The sculpture relates to one of the artists most career defining subjects: The Burghers of Calais. Cheval au bord de la mare by Edgar Degas which sold for £225,063. Executed circa 1892 it had ... More
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Fondazione Prada
Flashback On a day like today, Scottish sculptor Benno Schotz died October 11, 1984. Benno Schotz (28 August 1891 Arensburg - 11 October 1984 Glasgow) was a Scottish artist. During his career, Schotz produced several hundred portraits and compositions including figure compositions, religious sculptures, semi-abstracts and modelled portraits. His bust of James Maxton is on public display at the Maxton remembrance garden in Barrhead near Paisley. In this image: The Psalmist (1974). Kelvingrove Park, Glasgow, Scotland.
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