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Slow Food: Still Lifes of the Golden Age

From 9 March through 25 June 2017 the Mauritshuis presents Slow Food: Still Lifes of the Golden Age , the first exhibition to be devoted to the development of meal still lifes in Holland and Flanders from 1600 onwards. The cornerstone of the exhibition is a masterpiece acquired by the museum in 2012, Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels by Clara Peeters. The exhibition features 22 masterpieces from Washington’s National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum among others including all the works by Peeters from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. The meal still life – a subset of the genre that shows prepared food laid out on a table without figures in the composition - originated around 1600 with painters in Antwerp such as Clara Peeters and Osias Beert. Haarlem-based painters such as Floris van Dijck and Nicolaes Gillis followed them shortly thereafter. Meal still lifes showing richly set tables piled high with tempting morsels and pr

Helen Frankenthaler Paintings and Woodcuts

As in Nature: Helen Frankenthaler Paintings Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts July 1–October 9, 2017 This exhibition comprises a selection of large paintings by Helen Frankenthaler from the 1950s through the 1990s, focusing on nature as a longstanding inspiration. Like many abstract artists, Frankenthaler continually tested the constraints of the genre, at times inserting into her compositions elements of recognizable subject matter that throw the abstract elements into relief. The paintings in this exhibition represent the full range of styles and techniques that she explored over five decades of work; while all are primarily abstract, they also contain allusions to landscape, demonstrating how Frankenthaler’s delicate balance between abstraction and a nuanced responsiveness to nature and place developed and shifted over time. As Frankenthaler once commented, “Anything that has beauty and provides order (rather than chaos or shock alone), anything resolved

ALICE NEEL: PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE

Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands  November 5, 2016 through February 12, 2017 Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles    4 March through 17 September 2017 Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany October 13, 2017, through January 14, 2018 This retrospective of paintings by Alice Neel (1900–1984) – one of North America’s most important female artists, although largely unappreciated during her own lifetime – is the fruit of a collaboration between several European institutions. The exhibition at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles places the US painter and her realist brush firmly in the spotlight. Imbued with a powerful psychological dimension, Neel’s portraits bear witness to   almost a century of evolution in attitudes towards gender and ethnicity, and to radical changes in fashion at the heart of American society.  Working in an epoch that declared abstraction the new modernism, Neel would always remain a “painter of modern life” as imagined by Charles Baudelaire, with whom she shared the

Pissarro. A Meeting on St. Thomas

Ordrupgaard Museum, Denmark 10 March – 2 July 2017   Is there a connection between Danish Golden Age painting and French Impressionism? Now, Ordrupgaard is marking the centenary of the sale of the Danish West Indies with an exhibition that highlights the meeting between the Danish Golden Age painter, Fritz Melbye, and the ‘father’ of French Impressionism, Camille Pissarro at Saint Thomas. The exhibition adds a completely new angle to the origins of Impressionism.  Most people are familiar with the great impressionist painter, Camille Pissarro, but few are aware that he was a Danish citizen. Pissarro was born in 1830 in the town of Charlotte Amalie at Saint Thomas. In 1850 the Danish painter, Fritz Melbye travelled from Copenhagen to the Danish colony, and the two young artists spend a couple of years in each other’s company.  Into Impressionism  Pissarro. A meeting on St. Thomas presents an extensive number of early works by Pissarro and Melbye, painted during their

Madonnas and Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy

The Fitzwilliam Museum  7 March – 4 June 2017  The Fitzwilliam Museum opens a major new exhibition that reveals the central place of religion in the Italian Renaissance home from March 7 - 4 June 2017. ‘Madonnas and Miracles’ will show how religious beliefs and practices were embedded in every aspect of domestic life. Challenging the idea of the Renaissance as a time of increasing worldliness and secularization, the exhibition will show ho w the period’s intense engagement with material things went hand in hand with its devotional life. A glittering array of sculptures and paintings, jewellery, ceramics, printed images and illustrated books will bear witness to the role of domestic objects in sustaining and inspiring faith. The culmination of a four -year European- funded project, ‘Madonnas and Miracles’ will present the fruits of a ground -breaking interdisciplinary investigation carried out at the University of Cambridge by members of the Department of Italian, and the Faculties of H

The Wyeths: Three Generations, Works from the Bank of America Collection

March 11-August 13, 2017 Mint Museum, Charlotte, N.C. For more than a century, the members of the Wyeth family have created works of art that have stirred the imagination and fascinated art lovers worldwide. The Mint Museum is now preparing to host an exhibition of Bank of America’s largest collection of unique works by one family, providing a window into the Wyeth family’s artists through more than 60 remarkable paintings, drawings, and photographs. The Wyeths: Three Generations, Works from the Bank of America Collection will open March 11 and remain on view through August 13 at Mint Museum Randolph, 2730 Randolph Road in Charlotte.  “Through our Art in our Communities program, Bank of America has made our corporate art collection available for museums and nonprofit galleries around the world,” said Bank of America’s North Carolina and Charlotte Market President Charles Bowman, who also sits on the Mint’s board of trustees. “This is the first time this unique Wyeth exhibi

Picasso: Encounters

The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.    June 4–August 27, 2017 Picasso: Encounters explores Pablo Picasso’s (1881–1973) interest in and experimentation with large-scale printmaking throughout his career, challenging the notion of Picasso as an artist alone with his craft. The exhibition includes important paintings on loan from the Musée national Picasso–Paris. The exhibition addresses his expansive formal vocabulary, the narrative preoccupations that drove his creative process, the often-neglected issue of the collaboration inherent in print production, and the muses that inspired him, including Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque. The exhibition begins with Picasso’s seminal Self-Portrait (1901) from his Blue Period as a representation of the artist’s mythic isolation. The painting, on loan from the Musée national Picasso–Paris, is followed by thirty-five of the artist’s most important graphic achievements