National Gallery’s ‘Serial Portrait’ show reveals more than faces

Nikki S. Lee, "The Hip Hop Project (2)" (2001)

Washington Post
September 29, 2012

One senses mortality throughout “The Serial Portrait: Photograph and Identity in the Last One Hundred Years.” The National Gallery of Art exhibition traces a practice mostly peculiar to photography: the creation of multiple images of the same person, often self-portraits, tracing changes in identity that occur naturally over time or through manipulation of self-expression. In the first room of the show, male photographers focus on the female form, often their wives or paramours, producing visual essays that inevitably track the effects of aging. In later rooms, the serial photography project grows more experimental, more a question of identity, manipulations of gender and class. But death is always around the corner.

Nicholas Nixon’s “The Brown Sisters” dominates an entire wall, and, although full of life, the work leaves one with a shudder. An ongoing project, this collection of 37 prints documents the photographer’s wife and her three sisters in photographs made each year since 1975. Displayed in a grid of four rows, the photographs offer without comment what seems a miracle: a sustained communion among four sisters over almost four decades. But the lowest row, only seven photographs long, is terrifying. Will it be completed? When will this group of four be a group of three, then two, then one? What is the end of this project?

There’s only one end, and it’s a certitude, of course. The Nixon series, presented with three missing photographs on the lowest row, projects death into the present, into the midst of life, reminding one of Roland Barthes’s observation: “Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”

As you prepare to leave the exhibit, death returns in the form of an image that seems to be a giant reproduction of Robert Mapplethorpe’s last self-portrait, made a year before the photographer’s death from complications arising from AIDS in 1989.

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Nicholas Nixon, "The Brown Sisters" (1975)

Gillian Wearing, "Me as Mapplethorpe" (2009)

Alfred Stieglitz, “Georgia O’Keeffe” (1918)

Milton Rogovin, "Samuel P. 'Pee Wee' West (Lower West Side series)" (1974)

Expressionist Ecstasy: Remembering 20th Century Art's Color Revolution

Spiegel
September 28, 2012

The Folkwang Museum is hosting a show of work that juxtaposes French Fauvism with similar movements across Europe. Politically, the Continent might have been deeply divided in the early 20th century, but the exhibition in Essen provides ample evidence that its artists had much in common.

A new exhibition in Germany pays tribute to modern artists who revolutionized the use of color.

The show marks the first time the Folkwang Museum in Essen has focused on Fauvism and exploring its impact on subsequent art movements, such as German and Russian Expressionism.

The Fauves ("wild beasts") were named by critic Louis Vauxcelles, who was impressed by the revolutionary use of color and vivid brushstrokes on display in a 1905 exhibition of work by Henri Matisse and André Derain.

Led by Matisse, the Fauvists' work marked a break with Impressionism and more traditional approaches to painting, emphasizing painterly qualities and strong color over representational or realistic values.

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Das Museum Folkwang in Essen

André Derain (1905)

Erich Henkel (1910)

Franz Marc (1910)

Henri Matisse (1907)

Max Pechstein (1907)

The Dark Side: Exhibition Peers into Romanticism's Realm of Evil

Spiegel
September 27, 2012

A new exhibition in Frankfurt focuses on the dark side of the Romantic movement. Works from artists including Dalí, Goya and Munch examine themes of good and evil, sanity and madness and suffering and lust. Just the thing for the long winter evenings.

As autumn's dusky mantle begins to settle over Germany, the doors to a fitting new exhibition that explores the gloomy side of the Romantic movement have creaked open in Frankfurt.

Visitors to the city's Städel Museum are taken to a strange twilight world with the nightmarish visions, Satanic rites and somber death scenes featured in "Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst," which opened on Wednesday.

"The art works speak of loneliness and melancholy, passion and death, of the fascination with horror and the irrationality of dreams," the museum says in a statement.

Some 240 works from more than 70 artists comprise the show, encompassing some 150 years of fascination with mysticism and the supernatural. The paintings, sculptures, photographs and films were created by prominent artists such as Francisco de Goya, William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich, Johann Heinrich Fuseli, Edvard Munch, René Magritte, Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst. While some come from the Städel's own halls, others are on loan from internationally recognized collections like the Musée d'Orsay and Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the Art Institute of Chicago.

The exhibition categorizes the works both chronologically and geographically with an aim toward linking various interpretations of Romanticism, the post-Enlightenment movement that began sweeping across Europe by the end of the 18th century and continued its influence long after.

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Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie

Salvador Dalí

Füssli (1790)

"Frankenstein" (1931) directed by James Whale

"Faust" (1926) directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau

Goya (1797-8)

Ernst Ferdinand Oehme (1828)

Carlos Schwabe (1907)

Edvard Munch (1916-8)

René Magritte (1945)

Franz von Stuck (1893)

Caspar David Friedrich (1821-2)

Paul Hippolyte Delaroche (1845-6)

Samuel Colman (1836-8)

William Blake (1803-5)

Berlin's Culture War: Debate Pits Modern Art against Old Masters

Spiegel
September 14, 2012

All summer long, a heated debate has simmered in Berlin over the future of its world-famous collection of Old Masters paintings. The city wants to move the Gemäldegalerie to make room for a modern art museum that would rival MOMA. Critics say it will cause at least half of one of Europe's most important art collections to be put in storage for years.

It may have a few glaring omissions in its collection -- there is, for example, not a single Leonardo da Vinci -- but Berlin's Gemäldegalerie can still hold its own against the best of Europe's classical collections. Any talk of moving or splitting the works quickly stirs up passions in the German capital.

The Feuilletons, or culture pages, of Germany's newspapers have been brimming with a heated debate this summer over the future of the Old Masters. Following a wave of public outcry from prominent intellectuals, the city is reconsidering plans to move its 3,000-strong Gemäldegalerie collection out of its current home near Potsdamer Platz.

Spanning five centuries and including important European works by Vermeer, Brueghel, Caravaggio and Hans Holbein the Younger, the Gemäldegalerie collection of paintings was to be moved to a much smaller space on the city's Museuminsel, or Museum Island, to make way for a new museum of 20th-century art, including works from the private collection of German billionaire industrialist Heiner Pietzsch and his wife Ulla.

Earlier this week, the Prussian Cultural Foundation, which operates many of the city's top museums and is in charge of the proposed move, announced the commission of a feasibility study to weigh various alternatives. "Against the background of the controversial debate, it is a question on the one hand of developing an appropriate opportunity for exhibiting the Old Masters and on the other, of doing justice to the Nationalgalerie's 20th-century collection and the inclusion of the Pietzsch collection." The foundation is still standing behind its position to move the collection, but the study could slow or possibly end those plans.

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Caravaggio, Armor als Sieger

Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde

Tate Britain: Exhibition
12 September 2012 - 13 January 2013

Combining rebellion, beauty, scientific precision and imaginative grandeur, the Pre-Raphaelites constitute Britain’s first modern art movement. This exhibition brings together over 150 works in different media, including painting, sculpture, photography and the applied arts, revealing the Pre-Raphaelites to be advanced in their approach to every genre. Led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) rebelled against the art establishment of the mid-nineteenth century, taking inspiration from early Renaissance painting.

The exhibition establishes the PRB as an early example of the avant-garde: painters who self-consciously overturned orthodoxy and established a new benchmark for modern painting and design. It will include many famous Pre-Raphaelite works, and will also re-introduce some rarely seen masterpieces including Ford Madox Brown’s polemical Work 1852–65 and the 1858 wardrobe designed by Philip Webb and painted by Edward Burne-Jones on the theme of The Prioress’s Tale.

You’ll also see John Everett Millais’s first painting ‘en plein air’ entitled: Ferdinand Lured by Ariel 1849-50 and the politically charged: A Huguenot, on St Bartholomew’s Day, refusing to shield himself from danger by wearing the Roman Catholic Badge 1851-2.

The exhibition shows that the Pre-Raphaelite environment was widely encompassing in its reach across the fine and decorative arts, in response to a fast-changing religious and political backdrop, and in its relationship to women practitioners.

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The Beloved ('The Bride') 1865-6

Sir John Everett Millais, Bt
Ophelia 1851-2

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Lady Lilith 1866–8

Henry Wallis
Chatterton 1856