Tag Archives: Pablo Picasso

DÜRER TO DE KOONING: 100 MASTER DRAWINGS FROM MUNICH

Jacopo Pontormo, “Two Standing Women,” light and dark red chalk, stumped, after 1530? (courtesy of Staatliche Graphische Sammlung Münich)

Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 6, $10-$15 (free Friday 7:00 – 9:00)
212-685-0008
www.themorgan.org

For the 250th anniversary of Munich’s Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in 2008, the Morgan Library sent over one hundred drawings for a special show. The German museum, which has never before lent works to an American institution for a single exhibition, has now returned the favor, sending across the pond one hundred master drawings from its extensive collection. Divided into two galleries by chronology, “Dürer to de Kooning: 100 Master Drawings from Munich” is a treasure trove of exceptional pieces, many by artists rarely seen in the Morgan. The first gallery features works from Italy, Germany, Holland, and France, dating from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, including Jacopo Pontormo’s red chalk “Two Standing Women,” Rembrandt’s “Saskia Lying in Bed, a Woman Sitting at Her Feet,” and Albrecht Dürer’s “Portrait of Kaspar Nützel,” in addition to sheets by Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Michelangelo, and Friedrich. The modern gallery is highlighted by drawings from an unusually wide range of artists not often displayed together in the same room, from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Nude Girl in Interior” and Arnulf Rainer’s “Adalbert Stifter (Death Mask)” to Willem de Kooning’s “Standing Man” and Georg Baselitz’s “Duck Pond,” as well as works by Bruce Nauman, Franz Marc, David Hockney, Sigmar Polke, Jean Dubuffet, Max Beckmann, Larry Rivers, Georg Baselitz, Emil Nolde, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, and Vincent van Gogh. Also on view at the Morgan right now are “Fantasy and Invention: Rosso Fiorentino and Sixteenth-Century Florentine Drawing,” “Beatrix Potter: The Picture Letters,” and “Happy Holidays from the Morgan!,” consisting of Charles Dickens’s original manuscript of A Christmas Carol, Truman Capote’s handwritten “A Christmas Vacation,” a letter from George Washington written at Valley Forge on Christmas Day, 1777, and other seasonal paraphernalia.

THE STEINS COLLECT: MATISSE, PICASSO, AND THE PARISIAN AVANT-GARDE

Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Tisch Galleries, second floor
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 3, $25
212-570-3949
www.metmuseum.org

Like last year’s “Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore” exhibition at the Jewish Museum, the Met’s “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde” does an extraordinary job revealing the fascinating life of a family dedicated to the love of art. In the first decade of the twentieth century, siblings Leo, Gertrude, and Michael Stein, along with Michael’s wife, Sarah, moved to Paris, where they became entranced by the work of such artists as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, Odilon Redon, and Edgar Degas. Although not wealthy, the upper-middle-class Steins had some extra money from the family’s old clothing business and real estate holdings, so they decided to spend whatever they could on up-and-coming artists whose work they could afford. Soon they were showing off paintings by the relatively little-known Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, hosting Saturday salons, and counting among their friends Claribel and Etta Cone, art dealer Ambroise Vollard, art historian Bernard Berenson, and such artists as Henri Manguin and Picasso and Matisse, whom they famously introduced to each other in 1905-6. The Met exhibit ranges from works that are known to have directly influenced the Steins to want to start collecting art to the many paintings that ended up hanging on their walls, complete with photographs and a site-specific video projection that shows exactly where they were hung in their Paris apartments. Leo, at one time an aspiring artist, and Gertrude, who became a famous and controversial writer, wrote often about their adventures in the art world, so the accompanying text is filled with delightful quotes that display the likes and dislikes of the siblings. “All our recent accessions are unfortunately by people you never heard of so there’s no use trying to describe them,” Leo Stein wrote in 1905, “except that one of those out of the salon [Matisse’s ‘Woman with a Hat’] made everybody laugh except a few who got mad about it and two other pictures are by a young Spaniard named Picasso whom I consider a genius of very great magnitude.”

But Leo grew unhappy later on with the direction Picasso was taking, at the same time that he was not thrilled with Gertrude’s growing relationship with Alice B. Toklas. “Both [Picasso] & Gertrude are using their intellects, which they ain’t got, to do what would need the finest critical tact, which they ain’t got neither,” he wrote in 1913, “and they are in my belief turning out the most go’almighty rubbish that is to be found.” In the 1930s, Gertrude admitted, “It is very difficult now that everybody is accustomed to everything to give some idea of the uneasiness once felt when one first looked at all these pictures on the walls.” And what pictures they are hanging on the walls of the Met in a smartly curated display, highlighted by Matisse’s revolutionary “Woman with a Hat,” Picasso’s justly famous portrait of Gertrude Stein, Cézanne’s “Bathers,” and three versions of “La Coiffure” by Manguin, Matisse, and Picasso. The exhibition also includes Jo Davidson’s sculpture of Gertrude Stein (another cast of which sits in Bryant Park), family photographs, a painting by Leo Stein and drawings by Sarah Stein, a clip from the 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, home movies of Sarah and Michael Stein at their villa designed by Le Corbusier, and Gertrude’s handwritten will. In conjunction with “The Steins Collect,” the Met will be screening a series of related films, including Perry Miller Adato’s Paris the Luminous Years on May 29 at 2:00 and Jill Godmilow and Linda Bassett’s Waiting for the Moon, about the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Toklas, on May 31 at 2:00.

LAST CHANCE: THE RONALD S. LAUDER COLLECTION

Gerhard Richter, “Townscape PL,” oil on canvas, 1970 (The Ronald S. Lauder Collection, New York / © Gerhard Richter)

SELECTIONS FROM THE 3rd CENTURY BC TO THE 20th CENTURY/GERMANY, AUSTRIA, AND FRANCE
Neue Galerie
1048 Fifth Ave. at 86th St.
Monday, April 2, $20, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-628-6200
www.neuegalerie.org

In November 2001, Ronald S. Lauder opened the Neue Galerie, a wonderful museum on 86th St. that specializes in German and Austrian art. Over the last ten years, the institution has staged shows featuring the work of such artists as Egon Schiele, Max Beckmann, Alfred Kubin, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Christian Schad, and even Vincent van Gogh. In celebration of its first decade, the Neue Galerie is displaying “The Ronald S. Lauder Collection: Selections from the 3rd Century BC to the 20th Century,” which concludes its five and a half month run today. “My absolute love for and dedication to collecting art has been one of the guiding passions of my life,” Lauder, the son of Estée Lauder and Joseph Lauder, explains on the exhibition website. The well-curated and smartly hung show, which features grouped tags with thumbnail images, has sections dedicated to works by Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Gerhard Richter, and Vasily Kandinsky in addition to pieces by Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, Franz Marc, Joseph Beuys, and all the above-mentioned artists. There is also a room dedicated to Lauder’s extensive collection of arms and armor and medieval religious relics, and there is ornate furniture and clocks throughout. Like the Frick here in New York and Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, this exhibition offers an intriguing look inside the mind of one of the world’s major art collectors, in this case a man with extremely wide-ranging tastes who has been amassing his collection since he was in his teens.

CELEBRATING 100 YEARS

The final draft of George Washington’s 1796 farewell address is among the many amazing artifacts in NYPL exhibit (photo by Jonathan Blanc/New York Public Library)

New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Gottesman Exhibition Hall
Fifth Ave. at 41st St.
Through Sunday, March 4, free, 1:00 – 5:00
www.nypl.org

Today is your last chance to catch the New York Public Library exhibit “Celebrating 100 Years,” featuring a treasure trove of more than 250 items of literary paraphernalia. Divided into Observation, Contemplation, Creativity, and Society, the display honors the centennial of the landmark Beaux-Arts building on Fifth Ave. between 40th & 42nd Sts., built by Carrère and Hastings and dedicated by President William Howard Taft in 1911. Curated by Thomas Mellins, “Celebrating 100 Years” includes a bevy of fascinating memorabilia, from a Gutenberg Bible to a copy of Mein Kampf, from Jack Kerouac’s glasses and rolling paper to Charles Dickens’s letter opener, from a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair to Charlotte Brontë’s traveling writing desk, from Malcolm X’s briefcase and hat to Virginia Woolf’s walking stick and diary, showing a page she wrote just four days before her suicide. There are photographs, prints, and drawings by Diane Arbus, Man Ray, Faith Ringgold, Lewis Wickes Hine, Otto Dix, Francisco Goya, and Vik Muniz, marked-up manuscripts, speeches, and scores from Jorge Luis Borges, George Washington, Ernest Hemingway, John Coltrane, and T. S. Eliot, a copy of “The Star-Spangled Banner” with a bad typo, letters from Pablo Picasso, Harry Houdini, and Groucho Marx, and self-portraits by Kiki Smith, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Chuck Close, and Käthe Kollwitz. The exhibit, a kind of wonderful self-portrait of the library’s holdings, looks at the past, with cuneiforms dating back to the third century BCE, as well as aims forward, with a peek into their impressive digital archives.

COLLECTING MATISSE AND MODERN MASTERS: THE CONE SISTERS OF BALTIMORE

Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday – Tuesday through September 25, $12 (free Saturdays 11:00 am – 5:45 pm)
212-423-3337
www.thejewishmuseum.org

Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone were highly unusual, both as women and as art collectors. Born in the Victorian era and active in early-twentieth-century European society, they were never concerned with what was popular or a good investment. Instead, the two Baltimore sisters bought art that they wanted to live with — and that created quite a stir, because others in the art world did not understand their eclectic, avant-garde, far-ranging tastes. Through September 25, the Jewish Museum is displaying the charming exhibit “Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore,” featuring fifty paintings, sculptures, and drawings by Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Theodore Robinson, and, primarily, Henri Matisse, among others, as well as jewelry, embroidery, textiles, and other objects from Asia and Africa that the sisters collected. An extensive collection of letters, diaries, postcards, photographs, and other archival documents grounds the exhibit and lends insight into the sisters’ fascinating lives; they counted among their friends Matisse (who would send them photos of works in progress to titillate them), Leo and Gertrude Stein, and other seminal figures of the time. The exhibit includes an enlightening BBC film about the sisters, narrated by Michael Palin, as well as a photo series of their Marlborough Apartments that depicts how they lived with their art. The daughters of German-Jewish immigrants who amassed a fortune in the textile industry, Claribel (1864-1929) became a medical doctor, while Etta (1870-1949) served as the large family’s caretaker. Models of Victorian refinement, neither of the sisters married. After Claribel died suddenly, Etta continued to maintain her apartment as if she were still alive. Upon Etta’s death, the entire collection was bequeathed to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Walking through this engaging exhibit is like taking a stroll through the lives of these wholly original women.