Impressionism at MFAH

MFAH Bowl of Roses abd dish  henri fantinI saw this image on greeting cards years ago, loved the flowers, didn’t know who painted them until now. I still think they’re beautiful.

“The acclaimed international tour of The Age of Impressionism: Great French Paintings from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute concludes in Houston at the MFAH. Showcasing the Clark’s renowned holdings of 19th-century French painting, this spectacular exhibition features more than 70 works of art by a stellar lineup that includes Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Also represented are Pierre Bonnard, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jean-François Millet, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.”

The Age of Impressionism: Great French Paintings from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Until March 23, 2014

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1001 Bissonnet St, Houston, TX

(Image: “Roses in a Bowl and Dish”, 1885 – Henri Jean Fantin-Latour)

 

“Afrofuturism” at the Studio Museum in Harlem

The Studio Museum in Harlem offers an installation that looks at visions of prospects to come thru art. “The Shadows Took Shape is a dynamic interdisciplinary exhibition exploring contemporary art through the lens of Afrofuturist aesthetics. Coined in 1994 by writer Mark Dery in his essay “Black to the Future,” the term “Afrofuturism” refers to a creative and intellectual genre that emerged as a strategy to explore science fiction, fantasy, magical realism and pan-Africanism. With roots in the avant-garde musical stylings of sonic innovator Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, 1914–1993), Afrofuturism has been used by artists, writers and theorists as a way to prophesize the future, redefine the present and reconceptualize the past.”

Studio Museum Harlem installation AfroFutirism“The twenty-nine artists featured in The Shadows Took Shape work in a wide variety of media, including photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture and multimedia installation. Participating artists include Derrick Adams, John Akomfrah, Laylah Ali, Edgar Arceneaux, Sanford Biggers, Edgar Cleijne + Ellen Gallagher, William Cordova (in collaboration with Nyeema Morgan and Otabenga Jones & Associates), Cristina De Middel, Khaled Hafez, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Kira Lynn Harris, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Wayne Hodge, David Huffman, Cyrus Kabiru, Wanuri Kahiu, Hew Locke, Mehreen Murtaza, Wangechi Mutu, Harold Offeh, The Otolith Group, Robert Pruitt, Sun Ra, RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Larissa Sansour, Cauleen Smith, William Villalongo and Saya Woolfalk.”

 

The Shadows Took Shape

The Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, NYC

 

Balthus at the MET

MET Balthus  12.26.13Balthus, (Balthasar Klossowski, 1908 – 2001), is currently featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.Focusing on his finest works, the exhibition will be limited to approximately thirty-five paintings dating from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Between 1936 and 1939, Balthus painted his celebrated series of portraits of Thérèse Blanchard, his young neighbor in Paris. Thérèse posed alone, with her cat, or with her two brothers… Never before shown in public will be the series of forty small ink drawings for Mitsou, in which the eleven-year-old Balthus evoked his adventures with a stray tomcat and which were published by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in 1921…This is the first exhibition of the artist’s works in this country in thirty years.”

Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations

Until January 12, 2014

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
5th Ave and 86 Street, NYC

 

The Frick goes Dutch!

FRick Dutch MastersThe Frick in NYC highlights work from a few Dutch masters until January 19, 2014. “The Frick Collection is the final American venue of a global tour of paintings from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Netherlands. While the prestigious Dutch museum undergoes an extensive two-year renovation, it is lending masterpieces that have not traveled in nearly thirty years. At the Frick, a selection of fifteen paintings includes the beloved Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665) by Johannes Vermeer and Carel Fabritius’s exquisite Goldfinch (1654).”

 

Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting

The Frick Collection

1 East 70th Street
New York, NY  

 

Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles

Barbara Chase Riboud Phil.Museum of ArtPhiladelphia Museum of Art highlights the work of this writer and sculptor.  “Bringing together more than forty works from the United States and Europe, this exhibition examines Barbara Chase-Riboud’s artistic career, focusing primarily on her important Malcolm X sculptures. Five works from that series—among them the Museum’s Malcolm X #3 of 1969—and five closely related sculptures are included. A group of drawings from the late 1960s and early 1970s made during the development of the Malcolm X series and roughly twenty of the artist’s Monument Drawings from 1996–97 are also on view. “

Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles

Philadelphia Museum of Art Until January 20, 2014

 

Image: “Malcolm X #3”, 1969 Barbara Chase-Riboud (Polished bronze, rayon, and cotton, 9 feet 10 inches × 3 feet 11 1/4 inches × 9 7/8 inches)

FYI –  per WikiPedia: “A stele, also stela, is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected for funerals or commemorative purposes, most usually decorated with the names and titles of the deceased or living — inscribed, carved in relief (bas-relief, sunken-relief, high-relief, and so forth), or painted onto the slab. It can also be used as a territorial marker to delineate land ownership.”

 

Robert Davidson Abstracts at SAM

BEST Robert DavidsonBorn in Alaska, moved to British Columbia as a child, Robert Charles Davidson is an artist of Haida Indian heritage. He “has been a pivotal figure in the Northwest Coast Native art renaissance since 1969, when he erected the first totem pole in his ancestral Massett village since the 1880s. For over 40 years he has mastered Haida art traditions by studying the great works of his great-grandfather Charles Edenshaw and others. More recently, Davidson has interjected his own interpretation of the old forms with forays into abstraction, explored in boldly minimalistic easel paintings, graphic works and sculpture, where images are pared to essential lines, elemental shapes and strong colors.

The exhibition will feature 45 paintings, sculptures and prints created since 2005, as well as key images from earlier in his career that show Davidson’s evolution toward an elemental language of form.“

Robert Davidson: Abstract Impulse
Until February 16, 2014

Seattle Art Museum – SAM
1300 First Avenue, Seattle, WA