Paris exhibition explores the fusion of two giants of American art in the mid-1980s
Author Archives: artNews
A performance in which she burns an effigy of Vladimir Putin, and an NFT of a vagina-shaped Virgin Mary are thought to be behind new charges
The museum narrowly beat the Met Fifth Avenue in New York into second place in 2022
The forest landscape, La Ronde Enfantine, will be returned by the Fitzwilliam Museum, UK, to the heirs of Robert Bing
Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence at the MFA Boston
From March 26 to July 23, 2023, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, will host the exhibition “Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence”, featuring more than 90 works by one of the greatest masters of Japanese Art
Source: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston · Image: Katsushika Hokusai, “Red Fuji” (c.1830–31)
Taking a new approach to the work of the ever-popular Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), this major exhibition explores in detail his impact on other artists—both during his lifetime and beyond. Throughout a career of more than 70 years, Hokusai experimented with a wide range of styles and subjects, producing landscapes such as the instantly recognizable Great Wave and Red Fuji (both about 1830–31), nature studies known as “bird-and-flower pictures,” and depictions of women, heroes, and monsters.
The exhibition brings together over 90 woodblock prints, paintings, and illustrated books by Hokusai with some 170 works by his teachers, students, rivals, and admirers. These unique juxtapositions demonstrate Hokusai’s influence through time and space—seen in works by, among others, his daughter Katsushika Ōi, his contemporaries Utagawa Hiroshige and Utagawa Kuniyoshi, the 19th-century French Japonistes, and modern and contemporary artists including Loïs Mailou Jones, Yayoi Kusama, John Cederquist and Yoshitomo Nara.
Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence is organized thematically, with sections focused on Hokusai’s teachers and students, surimono (privately commissioned prints), the origins of Japonisme, landscapes, nature studies and depictions of heroes and monsters. The largest section, located at the center of the exhibition, is dedicated to Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave) (1830–31). The print is presented alongside works that riff on or directly cite Hokusai’s iconic image, from John Cederquist’s How to Wrap Five Waves (1994–95) and Roy Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl (1963, Museum of Modern Art, New York) to Andy Warhol’s The Great Wave (After Hokusai) (1980–87, The Andy Warhol Museum) and a Lego recreation (2021) by certified master builder Jumpei Mitsui.
“The MFA is home to one of the largest and most significant collections of Hokusai’s works in the world, making us uniquely positioned to tell the story of his enduring appeal and his impact on other artists,” said Sarah E. Thompson, Curator of Japanese Art. “We hope visitors enjoy this new look at the legacy of the ever-popular painter, book illustrator and print designer.”
Related content
By Barbara Smits | Opinion
It seems that the modern art world wants the artist to be restricted to the haul and carry, booth setup, travel, out of town hotel expenses, adverse weather, damage to artwork, and watch the crowds meander by art show circuit rather than using local art for interior decorating or serious art show displays in art centers or galleries. Communities like art shows that draw crowds and money into their area, and seem determined to keep the art show circuit working to their own advantage.
What’s wrong with using local art for decorating that represents our community or state? I have tried for many years to get interior decorators and designers, hotel builders, local art galleries, etc., to purchase and display my artwork, but they will not do so. I do have my prints for sale in local retail shops, and people do like and purchase my artwork, and I have placed high in online art contests, but I have given up trying to break into the larger markets that seem to be dominated only by money and huge discounts for interior decorators or art dealers who purchase artwork. I have sold through interior decorators in the past, but that is not the case today.
Shouldn’t ALL types of art be given a chance to be seen and appreciated? Artists today are in the same situation as artists in the past when new forms of art began to take over the old ways of doing things, but meeting with great resistance from the art world establishment.
As an artist, I am motivated by deeper thoughts than producing an artwork of appropriate, matching colors to hang on a wall and then never look at it again for the next fifty years. There is nothing wrong with abstract art, and many people like it, but I am not motivated to produce it, and I should also have a chance to do my kind of art.
I am a photographer and writer, and I produce many different types of artwork. Some photographs I sell as straight images, others I manipulate with digital artistic software to create artworks, and on some I like to add text that includes my poetry or thoughts. I also like to produce motivational and inspirational works which seem to be taboo to many people in today’s world! In any case, my end product is a print, either a photograph or a print made on a printer, so it can be reproduced in larger numbers. That type of artwork doesn’t seem to be appreciated as a work of art, just as a cheap print that anyone can produce with an iPhone in today’s world.
Our community is building a new cultural center that will open this summer, and they advertise and brag about bringing in displays and art shows from outside of the area to attract crowds, and they offer no opportunity for local artists to show there. It is really a slap in the face to local artists who might have something worthwhile to show, and visitors to the city might really enjoy seeing local artworks that portray the history of the community or other areas of interest, including statewide images.
The modern art world needs to change. Art galleries need to change. Arts organizations need to change. Art should be available for everyone to enjoy, not only for the rich to purchase it for investment purposes and then hide it away in private galleries to let it grow in value. Art should have something to say and be created for beauty, inspiration, and motivation, not just for money. Yes, we all like to make money from our work and be rewarded for our time and effort, but the artist should not just be motivated by money and following popular trends that sell. We are not helping the world by following that criteria for creating artworks; and I’m sorry to say that the world needs much help today.
I don’t think that change in the art world will happen in my lifetime, but we are in the modern age of technology, and perhaps change will come about in the coming years as people realize that we need art to help us understand the world, not just add color to a room!
The World Art News (WAN) is not liable for the content of this publication. All statements and views expressed herein are only an opinion. Act at your own risk. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission. © The World Art News
After Impressionism: exhibition in London explores the richness and complexity of post-impressionist art
From 25 March to 13 August 2023, the National Gallery presents “After Impressionism”, an exhibition that brings together for the first time the radical art of European cities from 1886 to 1914.
Source: The National Gallery · Image: Paul Cézanne: ‘Grandes Baigneuses’, National Gallery, London
While celebrating Paris as the international artistic capital ‘After Impressionism’ will also be one of the first exhibitions to focus on the exciting and often revolutionary artistic developments across other European cities during this period. Starting with the towering achievements of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Rodin, visitors will be able to journey through the art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created in cities such as Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna and Barcelona. The exhibition closes with some of the most significant modernist works, ranging from Expressionism to Cubism and Abstraction
‘After Impressionism’ explores two main themes in the development of the visual arts in Europe at this time: ‐ the break with conventional representation of the external world,; and the forging of non-naturalist visual languages with an emphasis on the materiality of the art object expressed through line, colour, surface, texture and pattern.
Highlights of this wide-ranging international survey include André Derain’s ‘La Danse’ (Private collection), Edgar Degas’s ‘Dancers in the Foyer’ (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen); Paul Cézanne’s ‘Grandes Baigneuses’ (National Gallery, London); Edvard Munch’s ‘The Death Bed’ (KODE Bergen Art Museums, Bergen); Paul Gauguin’s ‘Vision of the Sermon’ (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh); Camille Claudel’s ‘Imploration / l’Implorante’ (Musée Camille Claudel, Nogent-sur-Seine); and Lovis Corinth’s ‘Nana, Female Nude’ (Saint Louis Art Museum, St Louis.).
Lenders to the exhibition include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Art Institute of Chicago; Musée Rodin, Paris; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Museu nacional d’arte de Catalunya, Barcelona; Tate; and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut.
‘After Impressionism’ is curated by the art historian and curator MaryAnne Stevens and Christopher Riopelle, the National Gallery’s Neil Westreich Curator of Post 1800 Paintings, with art historian and curator Julien Domercq. MaryAnne Stevens says: ‘In this exhibition we seek to explore and define the complexities of a period in art, and in wider cultural manifestations, that can assert the claim to have broken links with tradition and laid the foundations for the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.’
Related content
Claude Monet and Joan Mitchell: Dialogue in Saint Louis
From March 24 through June 25, 2023, the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) presents “Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape”
Source: Saint Louis Art Museum · Image: Claude Monet, French, 1840–1926; “Water Lilies”, 1914-17; oil on canvas; 70 7/8 x 78 3/4 inches; Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris 2023.97; © Musee Marmottan Monet, Academie des beaux-arts, Paris
“Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape” is the first exhibition in America to examine the relationship between the paintings of two masters of their medium: the French artist Claude Monet (1840-1926) and the American artist Joan Mitchell (1925-1992). The exhibition presents 24 paintings, 12 by each artist, and will closely follow the development of Mitchell’s work from 1968 until 1992, a period when she lived in the small village of Vétheuil, France overlooking a house once inhabited by Monet. Organized in partnership with the Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, the exhibition adapts the Paris presentation of “Monet-Mitchell” now at the Fondation Louis Vuitton by incorporating eight different works by Mitchell and two by Monet.
In 1968, Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell moved to the small village of Vétheuil in the north of France, where she would continue to live and work for the rest of her life overlooking a house where Claude Monet had lived between 1878 and 1881. The artist, a contemporary of Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston, already counted the late Impressionist amongst her influences, but it was during this time period that she most intimately shared an interest in Monet’s most enduring subject: the landscape and flora of northern France. Their gestural and energetic canvases reflect a mutual affinity with the landscape, rivers, and rolling fields of the greater Paris region.
“Monet and Mitchell fearlessly and exuberantly upended the established traditions within their medium, and it is a joy to bring their monumental paintings together for our community to experience,” said Min Jung Kim, the Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum. “We are thrilled to present these two artists in dialogue with one another, and thank the Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris for their generous loans to our exhibition.”
The exhibition examines the relationship to nature of these two artists and the ways in which they addressed similar themes of trees, earth, water, and flowers, as well as the inspiration of Monet and Mitchell’s gardens at Giverny and nearby Vétheuil, respectively. The exhibition also shows how Mitchell’s compositional formats, and vibrant, gestural style took inspiration from Monet’s. Mitchell’s vivid brushstrokes, saturated colors, and depiction of sunlight create an evocative sense of memory and feeling within her paintings, which abandoned formal composition and perspective. Monet’s later works, bold and undoubtedly abstract, were defined by their lack of formality, and are revered by generations for his brilliant, unexpected use of color and capturing of fleeting light. Monumental in scale and overwhelming in impact, the works in the exhibition highlight the fascination both painters had for expansive, panoramic formats, and their shared mastery of light, color, and expressive brushwork.
Related content
ARTEVENTO CERVIA is the first event in the world that viewed the kite as visual and performance art, blurring the lines between contemporary expression, theater, dance, circus, and puppetry.
This year it will be attended by 250 professional kite artists from 5 continents and over 2000 enthusiasts from all over the World!
From 21 April to 1 May 2023, on Cervia’s Pinarella Beach (Italy), 250 designers and pilots selected from among the most significant interpreters of a millenary tradition, in constant dialogue with the environment, will join over 2000 enthusiasts for the 43rd Edition of ARTEVENTO CERVIA, the original festival dedicated to kites and the environment, which has become a cult event for both promoters of the wind art and lovers of green tourism as well as sustainable creativity. In simultaneous flight, the event will show the most complete presentation of artistic, ethnic, historical, giant, sport, acrobatic, and even combat kites! All visitors and participants will dive into the magical practice that was born over 2500 years ago.
In the enchanting location at the southern gateway to the Po Delta Park, amidst salt marshes, pinewoods and the sea, the world’s first event dedicated to kites as an art form has been held since 1981. It is in Cervia, in fact, that the ‘artists of the wind’, new voices of an avant-garde poetic language, yet rooted in the history of mankind, have found their elective home over the course of more than four decades, experimenting with the effectiveness of this original artistic medium.
International artists who have made art history of the calibre of Jackie Matisse, Yayoi Kusama, Tal Streeter, Mimmo Paladino, Robert Rauschenberg, Curt Asker, Niki de Saint Phalle, Emilio Vedova, Karl Otto Götz, Jean Tinguely and Tom Wesselmann, Kazuo Shiraga (whose kite was sold by the Nagel auction house in Berlin last February for a record sum of € 1,140,000) and many others have used the kite as a means of artistic expression, creating true works of art. Jackie Matisse, granddaughter of Henri Matisse, for example, was a real fan of wind art: one day she saw a kite flying over the rooftops of Harlem in New York – a “line drawn in the sky” – and became fixated “on the idea of creating kites… using the sky as a canvas”. In 1995, she signed the Art Volant Manifesto and throughout his life he has created multiple works of ‘flying art’ with his brightly coloured kites used for performances designed to emphasise the ephemeral force of ‘chance’ in the artistic act that dialogues with the natural environment.
And it is precisely through the kite, as the paradigm of a new language of artistic creativity, that the ARTEVENTO CERVIA festival celebrates for the 43rd consecutive edition the reason that has made it the destination of an unmissable pilgrimage, namely the fact that it represents the cradle of a specific artistic current that has found its “place of the soul” on the Cervia beach. It will be , suitable for a diverse audience and spectators of all ages and abilities;The programme includes displays of artistic, ethnic, historical, and giant kites, acrobatic flight displays to the rhythm of music, multidisciplinary dance-theatre and contemporary circus performances, exhibitions, didactic workshops, night performances, the Flag Ceremony, the Special Award for Flying Merits, the Night of Miracles, the STACK Italia acrobatic flight championship, installations, air sculptures, a market, a food area, and much more.
ARTEVENTO CERVIA – Historic ‘International Kite Festival’
In the name of a poetic of wonder between arts and cultures, the historic festival that has made Cervia not simply a kite capital but the world home of the art of wind, returns to celebrate the symbolic power of the rainbow with a record edition: 50 delegations from 5 continents will be present to promote peace, inclusion and environmental sustainability, with 11 days of unmissable entertainment.
ARTEVENTO CERVIA for 2023 will welcome as Guests of Honour the young ambassadors of Maori culture in the world of the Kaimatariki Trust & Te Kura O Hirangi group, coming to Cervia from the City of Turangi. Welcomed to Italy under the patronage of the New Zealand Embassy in Rome, the Maori delegation of 27 performers will be the protagonists, on the beach of Pinarella, of an extraordinary show that will include, along with the presentation of the anthropomorphic aboriginal kite, also performances of kapa haka (an exhibition of different Maori songs and dances) and waiata songs on the central stage of the Festival Village and a meeting with the public at the Maori Tent, located in the centre of the Wind Fair.
The Homage to ‘Images for the Sky’ with Mimmo Paladino and Master Masaaki Sato
The main theme of the 43rd edition of ARTEVENTO CERVIA will be a tribute to the “Images for the Sky” collection (created in 1989 by Paul Eubel under the aegis of the Goethe-Institut in Osaka) with the presentation of the restoration of Mimmo Paladino’s kite commissioned by the artist himself to Dr. Nella Poggi Parigi, one of the leading experts in the conservation and restoration of works of art on paper. Dr. Poggi’s consultant, as a scholar of the history and culture of kites, Caterina Capelli art director of ARTEVENTO CERVIA, followed the entire process of the restoration operation starting from its presentation in the prestigious venue of the Vatican Museums, during a conference that also emphasised the role of the Cervia festival as the main international observatory on kite art. On the kite constructed by Japanese masters Kazuo Tamura and Shoei Ogasawara, Campania artist Mimmo Paladino chose to depict a Vitruvian man with donkey ears surrounded by symbolic presences and golden brushstrokes, adding to the poetic value of the support the strength of a metaphorical representation that is both essential and powerful.
Also paying homage to “Images for the Sky” will be the presence of Wind Master Masaaki Sato. It is to the latter, the protagonist of the 43rd edition’s collateral exhibition under the patronage of the Japanese Institute of Culture, that ARTEVENTO CERVIA assigns the Special Award for Merits of Flight 2023, presented over the years to personalities promoting environmental and social sustainability such as, among others, Lucio Dalla, Tonino Guerra, Franco Arminio and Gherardo Colombo. Master Sato, with the contribution of the cicada kite made for the Viennese artist Hundertwasser, was one of the masters custodians of the ancient art of the Japanese kite involved in “Images for the Sky”, of which he is to all intents and purposes one of the last precious witnesses. ARTEVENTO CERVIA thus wishes to pay homage to Eubel’s historic project that valorised the idea behind the festival, that of making the kite, a cultural asset with a history stretching back thousands of years and a symbol of peace and environmental sustainability, the perfect trait d’union linking East and West, past and future, tradition and innovation, knowledge of the hands and intangible cultural heritage, through the art that gives form and colour to the primordial desire to fly, celebrating the marvels of creativity between human dreams and needs, and above all making us feel united in our diversity, because we are all flying in the same sky.
Successful Format
ARTEVENTO CERVIA has achieved great success over the years thanks to a rich and unique format which is once again being used in 2023. Themes, artists and events are as follows:
PROTAGONISTS: among the Masters of the Wind, guests of the 43rd edition: Michel Gressier (France), among the personalities who drafted the Wind Art Manifesto together with Jackie Matisse; Kadek Armika (Bali), winner of the first prize for best original work at the Festival du Cerf Volant in Dieppe 2022; Makoto Ohye (Japan); Robert Trepanier (Canada), is part of the Quebec Ministry of Education’s directory for his teaching activities and actively collaborates with Cirque du Soleil and the company Theatre Ciel Ouvert; George Peters (USA), has realised more than 80 national and international interventions commissioned by private, public and corporate institutions and has curated the image of Barack Obama’s campaign for the State of Colorado; Carl Robertshaw (UK), has created visionary set designs for the Superbowl, the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games, the likes of Bjork, Anthony and the Johnsons, Peter Gabriel, Nora Jones, Katy Perry and Alicia Keys, and fused the world of kites and puppetry in the performance The Hatchling presented to Queen Elizabeth at the Platinum Jubileum; Claudio Capelli (Italy), the creator of the festival and founder of ARTEVENTO, the first to imagine a contamination between visual and performing arts modulated by the energy of the wind in the form of an international event.
GUESTS OF HONOUR: the Maori team – Kaimatariki Trust & Te Kura O Hirangi from New Zealand. The kite as an opportunity for a valuable encounter between cultures to celebrate peace and get to know the host countries not only through the tradition of wind art but also through performances of theatre, dance, performance disciplines and folklore.
WIND GARDENS: the largest open-air exhibition of air sculptures and wind installations from around the world to celebrate environmental art and promote wind power as an inexhaustible source of renewable energy.
EXHIBITIONS AND LABORATORIES: the informative and educational activities of the Kite Museum to get to know one of the most fascinating and versatile human inventions, the subject of anthropological, historical and scientific research and emblem of a sacred relationship between man and the environment.
MEMORABLE PROGRAMME: “The Night of Miracles” (an original immersive show that has become emblematic of the spirit of the festival: collective performance of wind art, music and lights on the seashore), the “Special Award for Flying Merits”, the “Flag Ceremony”, the Kite Parade, Kite Aerial Photography demonstrations, acrobatic ballets in time to the music, STACK sport kite competitions and the original proposal of dance, puppetry, theatre and contemporary circus to build a poetics of wonder through the contamination of the arts. On the programme, performances of kapa haka and waiata songs by the Maori Kaimatariki Trust & Te Kura O Hirangi Team, Balinese dance-theatre performances and shows by Circo Madera (contemporary theatre-circus, without animals)
FESTIVAL VILLAGE: ‘Wind Fair’ and ‘Grand Circus Bazar’, kite and craft market, contemporary circus chapiteu.
Kite Photography
A unique exhibition of wind artists, ARTEVENTO CERVIA is for this very reason an unmissable appointment for the most extraordinary interpreters of KAP, the practice of taking aerial photographs using a device carried aloft by a kite, as the meaning of the acronym KAP makes clear: Kite Aerial Photography.
Practised for 136 years not only as an artistic medium, but also in the fields of archaeology, geology and zoology, KAP is represented at ARTEVENTO CERVIA by its undisputed masters and by a large group of enthusiasts determined to prefer the ecological flight of the kite to the more impactful solution of the drone for reasons of sustainability as well as artistic poetics.
Realised during the festival, the reportages set in the territory’s most identifiable locations become in turn an opportunity for in-depth studies, as in the case of the collateral exhibition dedicated to the undisputed Master of aerial photography Wolfgang Bieck (Germany), set in the evocative industrial archaeology area of the Magazzini del Sale (Salt Warehouses) in the historic centre of the city of Cervia.
Environment
With the motto “we are the rainbow”, the festival dedicated to wind art chooses all the colours of the rainbow as its flag to celebrate pluralism, dialogue and inclusion as instruments of peace, while at the same time identifying in that colourful bridge between earth and sky the emblem of a sacred relationship between man and the environment, a perfect prodrome of the environmentalist spirit that makes this spring event the great festival of sustainability.
In a stimulating climate marked by psychophysical wellbeing, through the wonder engendered by its spectacle and rich programming, for over 40 years ARTEVENTO CERVIA has been boosting a model of interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism inspired by environmental sustainability and social responsibility, encouraging the activation of inclusive and conscious collective good practices and promoting some of the goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Precisely on the common thread of sustainability, the festival will dedicate some artistic and popular insights to the bee, a pollinating insect emblematic of the rebirth and renewal of nature. ARTEVENTO thus celebrates the formative value of the experience of play and the effectiveness of active learning through the Educational Workshops of the Kite Museum, choosing the bee as the symbol of the training course dedicated to the youngest: a real school of kites.
ARTEVENTO CERVIA International Kite Festival is organised by ARTEVENTO with the patronage and cooperation of Regione Emilia Romagna, Municipality of Cervia, New Zealand Embassy, Japanese Cultural Institute, APT Servizi, Consorzio Aquiloni, BPER Banca, Cooperativa Bagnini Spiagge Cervia.
www.artevento.com
Story submitted by Culturalia. The World Art News (WAN) is not liable for the content of this publication. All statements and views expressed herein are only an opinion. Act at your own risk. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission. © The World Art News