Nick Sarazan

News archive: Newsletter we have received from various art websites.

 Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh

EDINBURGH.- The Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG), following an ambitious £17.6m restoration project and with an entirely new presentation of its world-famous collection. The project – the first major refurbishment in the Gallery’s 120-year history – has restored much of the architect’s original vision, opening up previously inaccessible parts of the building and increasing the public space by more than 60 percent. It has also added a range of new facilities that will utterly transform visitors’ experience of the Gallery. Entry to the new Portrait Gallery will be completely free.

The SNPG opened in 1889 as the world’s first purpose-built portrait gallery and is now an iconic landmark in the heart of Scotland’s capital. Over the past century, its collection of portraits has grown to become one of the largest and finest in the world, comprising 3,000 paintings and sculptures, 25,000 prints and drawings. This distinctive red sandstone building also houses the national collection of photography with some 38,000 historic and modern photographs.

Naoto Hattori. Japanese pop surrealism

I’ve been creating the imaginary world within my mind ever since I was a child. My vision is like a dream, where it’s a sweet dream, a nightmare or just a bizarre dream.” Hattori says. Born in Yokohama at 1975, he studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His paintings could be mistaken with digital art, but he does a spectacular work with acrylic. A fantastic and prolific imaginary is what we found in his gallery, as he says fruit of a “practice to increase awareness in stream-of-conscious creativity”. And here are some samples.
His work is currently been exhibited on “Les Enfants Terribles”, with Robert Crumb, Ray Caesar, and many others, from September 15 to December 31, 2011, at l’Hôtel de Région Rhône Alpes, Lyon, France.

Dutch Treat: A Glimpse of Holland’s Golden Age

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Continuing the Museum’s season of exhibitions devoted to the art and culture of the Netherlands, Dutch Treat offers visitors the rare opportunity to examine the work of one of the most accomplished painters of the Dutch Golden Age, Gerrit Dou (1613–1675), in depth.

In his own time, Dou was viewed as the very paragon of art, and was a great favorite of important and influential patrons. He and his fellow artists from Leiden, called fijnschilders (“fine painters”), captivated generations of collectors and art lovers with their scenes of contemporary life, rendered with painstaking detail and modeled in the subtle and rich chiaroscuro inspired by Rembrandt. His meticulously executed portraits and scenes of everyday life frequently use niches and windows to extend the space of the painting, heightening the viewer’s sense of reality and intensifying the painting’s illusions. These works also often contain hidden symbolism that encourage the viewer to search behind the mirror-like facade of visible reality.

A pupil of Rembrandt’s, Dou looked ahead to Vermeer in his love of domestic subjects, skillful rendering of light and texture, and fine execution. Ten works by Dou will be shown in this exhibition with related highlights from the Museum’s collections, including paintings, decorative arts, and furniture from one of the most celebrated periods in Dutch art.

 Curator of European Painting and Sculpture before 1900 and the Rodin Museum

Location
Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, first floor

Van Gogh Up Close

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Vincent van Gogh was an artist of exceptional intensity, not only in his use of color and exuberant application of paint, but also in his personal life. Drawn powerfully to nature, his works–particularly those created in the years just before he took his own life–engage the viewer with the strength of his emotions. This exhibition focuses on these tumultuous years, a period of feverish artistic experimentation that began when van Gogh left Antwerp for Paris in 1886 and continued until his death in Auvers in 1890.

Radically altering and often outright abandoning traditional painting techniques, van Gogh created still lifes and landscapes unlike anything that had ever been seen before. He experimented with depth of field and focus. He used shifting perspectives and brought familiar objects “up close” into the foreground. And he produced some of the most original works of his career; works that dramatically altered the course of modern painting. Through some 40 masterpieces borrowed from collections around the world, Van Gogh Up Close is the first exhibition to explore the reasons and means by which this impassioned artist made such unusual changes to his painting style in the final years of his life.
The landscapes that he painted around Arles show Japanese influence in their deep views of the countryside and high horizon lines, while the landscapes he went on to create in Saint-Rémy and Auvers in 1889 and 1890 are tightly packed, more structured works. Dominated by a screen of trees or falling raindrops, these paintings suggest the immediacy and closeness of van Gogh’s surroundings. A year before he died, he wrote in a letter to his sister, “I…am always obliged to go and gaze at a blade of grass, a pine-tree branch, an ear of wheat, to calm myself.”

In his final works, van Gogh closed in on his subjects in even more dramatic ways, reducing the depth of field and maximizing the expressive impact of his brushwork and color. An intimately focused view of a clump of iris, a tangle of almond branches, and the vibrant patterning of an Emperor moth are just a few of the images in an audacious series of still lifes which mark the culmination of the exhibition.

Christo, American, born Bulgaria, 1935,  Gift of the artist.

For a half-century, Christo and his late wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude have created large-scale, temporary works of art in both urban and rural environments. These projects have challenged the traditional definitions of sculpture and artistic practice while creating a new discourse for issues concerning the environment and aesthetics. From early wrapped objects to monumental outdoor projects including Running Fence (1972–1976), Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin (1971–1995), and The Gates, Central Park, New York City (1979–2005), the artists have used fabric—wrapped, draped, and folded over, around, and through natural and constructed forms—to transcend the traditional bounds of painting, drawing, sculpture, and architecture.

On November 8, 2011, Christo presented the National Gallery of Art with two original preparatory collages for Over The River, Project for the Arkansas River, Colorado, both dating from 2010, for the Gallery’s permanent collection. The gifts were unveiled during a press conference with Secretary of the Interior Kenneth Salazar, a day after the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management officially approved Over The River, a project that Christo developed with Jeanne-Claude. The gift, alongside the Gallery’s existing collection of preparatory works on paper from various stages of this project—two early drawings from 1992 and two large collages from 2000—illustrates Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s working process and brings to light the project’s development as it has evolved over the past two decades.

Over The River is a temporary art installation first proposed in 1992 by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. For this work, Christo will suspend 5.9 miles of silvery fabric panels high above the Arkansas River interstitially along a 42-mile stretch between Salida and Cañon City in Colorado. Fabric panels will be suspended at eight distinct areas of the river that were selected by the artists for their aesthetic merits and technical viability. The fabric, suspended ten to twenty-three feet above the river, will be translucent when seen from below, affording rafters and kayakers a view of the sky. However, when seen from above, from trails and the highway that parallel the Arkansas River, the panels will appear opaque. Through its intermittent installation, Over The River will seem to materialize and dematerialize, prefiguring the project’s temporary nature. If the permit process moves forward as planned, Christo hopes to present Over The River for two consecutive weeks in August 2014. Information about the project is located at

The Gallery is home to one of the world’s largest collections of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work. The two new preparatory collages will remain on view along with four earlier related works by Christo in the lobby of the East Building Auditorium through January 23, 2012.

American Realists of the Early 1900s

Robert Henri urged his students in Philadelphia and New York to reject idealism and to focus instead on reality, whether it be banal or harsh. “Draw your material from the life around you, from all of it. There is beauty in everything if it looks beautiful to your eyes. You can find it anywhere, everywhere.”

Henri’s Snow in New York depicts ordinary brownstone apartments hemmed in by city blocks of humdrum office buildings. This calm, stable geometry adds to the hush of new-fallen snow. The exact date inscribed—March 5, 1902—implies the canvas was painted in a single session. Its on-the-spot observations and spontaneous sketchiness reveal gray slush in the traffic ruts and yellow mud on the horsecart’’s wheels.

 
Seven Shows in U.S. and Europe Mark Publication of Catalogue Raisonné

NEW YORK—Numerous fall exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe are dedicated to the artwork of Sam Francis—coinciding with the publication of the Catalogue Raisonné of Canvas and Panel Paintings, 1946–1994, edited by Debra Burchett-Lere, who is the director of the Sam Francis Foundation in Glendale, California. The catalogue was published by the University of California Press, Berkeley.

Nico Delaive, owner of Gallery Delaive in Amsterdam, which had represented the artist in Europe for years and is currently holding its own exhibition (through Dec. 11), said the gallery owns approximately 1,100 paintings and works on paper by the artist, some of which he bought directly from the artist while others were acquired from the artist’s estate and foundation.

Among the reasons why the artist’s prices are lower than those of some other Abstract Expressionist painters, Jonathan Novak explains: “Sam was not part of the New York scene, and he did not get the same attention.” In addition, resolving the estate took ten years, because of disputes over money and artworks between the artist’s numerous ex-wives and children.

A large number of paintings appeared on the market over a short period of time in order for the artist’s heirs to pay the estate tax—Francis died with little cash on hand. This resulted in depressed prices, dealers say. “There was too much of Sam’s work on the market for a time, and people thought that the supply would never end,” said Novak. It was only after the estate was settled and the foundation was established “that people realized that all the art was gone. Everything now is on the secondary market, and the prices have been rising ever since,” Novak said. The foundation has relatively few works and does not make sales.

Work by Francis has frequently appeared at major auctions. The highest auction price to date is $6.4 million (estimate: $3 million/5 million) for the oil Middle Blue, 1957, sold at Christie’s in the spring of 2010. 

Willem de Kooning at the Museum of Modern Art

Some artists stagger under the weight of a retrospective, their work appearing too stylized, repetitive, and familiar. But not Willem de Kooning. With his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints all together and splendidly installed in MoMA’s spacious galleries, what becomes apparent is not only the works’ strong formal qualities but also the sense of warmth they convey and their ability to communicate directly with the viewer. Beyond that, we detect an emotionalism that is neither corny nor sentimental. Much of this comes as a surprise.

The show, de Kooning’s first full-scale retrospective, which will not travel, has been brilliantly curated by John Elderfield, the museum’s chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture. What is clear throughout is de Kooning’s big visual vocabulary, constituting his own clearly expressed language—a European-American blend. And all the elements, like his dance between abstraction and figuration, continuously worked in concert. 

The show begins with the early, and de rigueur, academic works, made between 1916 and ’26, when de Kooning moved to the United States. We see the adept student playing in the fields of art history, from 17th-century Dutch still-life painting to the work of Miró, Matisse, Braque, and Picasso.

But it’s the last section that’s so problematic for many—the simplified linear paintings made between 1983 and ’87, as de Kooning suffered the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. These works are a fitting conclusion to the retrospective, as the finely limned compositions attain the quality of delicate skeletons, extreme distillations, of all the earlier works. The Cat’s Meow (1987) is indeed the last word—at least almost.