Art Museum exhibits in the Pacific Northwest- Spring, Summer & Fall 2019 — arthistoryblogger.blogspot.com

There are several exciting art museum exhibits in the Pacific Northwest this Spring, Summer & Fall 2019.  Museums in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. all have some must see shows.  Let's look at these starting with the Vancouver Art Gallery's spring exhibit, French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850-1950. The text below is from their website.  Claude Monet, Rising Tide, 1882, oil on canvasBrooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Horace O Hovemeyer, 41.1260.30Photo: Brooklyn Museum Vancouver Art Gallery French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850-1950February 21 - May 20, 2019 French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850-1950 presents sixty paintings and sculptures from the Brooklyn Museum’s renowned European permanent and long-term loan collections. Identifying France as the artistic centre of international modernism from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, these works—which are diverse in subject matter, style and scale—were created by leading artists of the period, intended both for private collections and public display. The works in French Moderns exemplify the avant-garde movements that defined Modern art from the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries, tracing a formal and conceptual shift from depicting the pictorial to evoking the idea, from a focus on naturalism to the ascendance of abstraction. The exhibition includes examples of the key movements of the period—Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism—that emerged in and around Paris between 1850 and 1950 and quickly became part of the dominant Western canon. Organized primarily chronologically into several sections including The Academy, Breaking from the Academy, The Impressionists and their Circle, Early Modernism, Surrealism and Abstraction, this exhibition offers fine examples of painting and sculpture from this critical century in Western art history.French Moderns includes work by many celebrated artists including both those native to France, as well as those who trained and exhibited there, such as Pierre Bonnard, Gustave Caillebotte, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Gabriele Münter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Auguste Rodin.This exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum.John Henry Twachtman. Dunes Back of Coney Island, ca. 1880. Oil on canvas. 13 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. Frye Art Museum, 1956.010. Next let's look at three exhibits opening this June and closing in September, two in Seattle (at the Frye Art Museum and the Seattle Art Museum) and another in Portland (at the Portland Art Museum). Both the Frye and PAM have exhibits revolving around the art of 1900 (American Oil Painting and Paris respectively) and SAM will have a large exhibit of 19th century British Art focusing on the Pre-Raphaelites and Arts and Crafts.  Here is an overview of each of those three exhibits, with text from each museum's website.Frye Art Museum End of Day: American Oil Painting Around 1900 June 15 – September 29, 2019  Drawn from the Frye Art Museum’s permanent collection, End of Day presents a selection of portrait and landscape paintings by American artists based primarily in the northeastern United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The works in the exhibition span the fifty-year period between the Civil War and First World War, a time of profound social, economic, and political change marked by rapid industrialization, urbanization, and America’s rise as an international superpower. Against this backdrop, the images offer sentiments that oscillate between an embrace of progress and a sense of nostalgia for what was perceived to be a simpler, bygone American era rooted in rural traditions, with many expressing ambivalence toward the complexities of modern life. By the dawn of the twentieth century, American artists by and large looked toward their immediate surroundings and the everyday people within them for inspiration. Supported by improved transatlantic travel and communication, as well as a new class of collectors and patrons, many artists sojourned overseas. There they traveled widely, studying and living together in loose networks and artist colonies in countries such as France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain, to experience firsthand the paintings of the Old Masters and take in the new artistic styles being developed by their European counterparts. While these travels provided ample creative stimulation, familiar stateside locales from Coney Island to Cape Cod proved equally viable as sources of inspiration and subjects worthy of serious artistic representation. End of Day highlights an eclectic array of styles and influences, from the steady, refined brushwork of the Hudson River School’s serene landscapes, to the bold, loose strokes of Impressionism and Realism that sought to depict the world as it appeared before the artist’s eyes. The Frye Art Museum’s holdings in this area were primarily collected under the tenure of the Museum’s first director, Walser Sly Greathouse, who sought to complement Charles and Emma Frye’s Founding Collection of predominantly European oil paintings of the same period. All in all, the featured artists are indicative of an increasing desire to paint according to one’s own beliefs and inclinations rather than strictly adhering to long-held academic principles and traditions, heralding the individualist spirit that would come to characterize American art in the century ahead. End of Day: American Oil Painting around 1900 is organized by the Frye Art Museum and curated by David Strand, head of exhibitions and publications, with Erin Langner, exhibitions and publications coordinator. Lead support for the exhibition is provided by the Frye Foundation. Media sponsorship is provided by KCTS 9.   Georges Roux (1855–1929). Night Party at the Universal Exhibition in 1889, under the Eiffel Tower, 1889. Paris, Musée Carnavalet. © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet  Portland Art Museum Paris 1900: City of Entertainment JUNE 8 - SEPTEMBER 8, 2019 Travel back to Paris at the dawn of the 20th century and experience the splendor of the sparkling French capital as it hosted the world for the International Exposition of 1900. This was the height of the Belle Époque, a period of peace and prosperity in France when fine art, fashion, and entertainment flourished as never before. Fifty-one million visitors from around the world attended the Exposition and flooded the city, where they enjoyed its posh restaurants, opulent opera house, artistic cabarets, and well-tended parks. For the French, it was an opportunity to show off their prowess in the arts, sciences, and new technology, and to highlight what made Paris unique from rivals London and Berlin. Paris 1900 re-creates the look and feel of the era through nearly 250 paintings, decorative art objects, textiles, posters, photographs, jewelry, sculpture, and film, and will plunge visitors into the atmosphere of La Belle Époque.   Exhibition organized by the Petit Palais Museum of Fine Arts, with exceptional loans from the Musée Carnavalet – History of Paris and the Palais Galliera Museum of Fashion, Paris Musées. Curated in Portland by Mary Weaver Chapin, Ph.D., Curator of Prints and Drawings.    La Donna della Finestra, 1881, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, oil on canvas with underdrawing in chalk and graphite, 37 3/4 x 34 1/4 in., Birmingham Museums Trust, Purchased, 1883 (1885P2465), © Birmingham Museums Trust, Courtesy American Federation of Arts.  Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement Seattle Art Museum  June 13 – September 8, 2019As industrialization brought sweeping and dehumanizing changes to 19th-century England, a small group of artists reasserted the value of the handmade. Calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelites, they turned to the unlikely model of medieval European craftsmen as a way of moving forward. Victorian Radicals presents an unprecedented 145 paintings, drawings, books, sculpture, textiles, and decorative arts—many never before exhibited outside of the UK—by the major artists associated with this rebellious brotherhood.Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Morris dubbed themselves the Pre-Raphaelites in reaction to the Royal Academy of Arts, whose methods to artmaking they regarded to be as formulaic as industrial methods of production. This movement had broad implications and inspired a wide range of industries to rebel against sterility and strive to connect art to everyday life. Danae, 1544–45, Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Italian, ca. 1488-1576, oil on canvas, 44 3/4 x 88 4/5 in., © All rights reserved. Later this fall there will be two more interesting exhibits, each quite different from one another, both at museums in Seattle.  SAM will be showing artwork from the famous Capodimonte Museum in Naples, including many Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces. At the same time the Nordic Museum will be showing a work of the Danish painter, L.A. Ring.Here is more information from the Seattle Art Museum website-   Seattle Art Museum  Flesh and Blood: Italian Masterpiecesfrom the Capodimonte Museum Oct 17 2019 – Jan 26 2020   Flesh and Blood offers a rare opportunity to view unforgettable works from the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. Renowned artists of the High Renaissance such as Titian and Raphael join Neapolitan masters including Artemisia Gentileschi, Jusepe de Ribera, and Bernardo Cavallino. The show reveals the many ways the human body can express love and devotion, physical labor, and tragic suffering. In the Garden Doorway, The Artist's Wife, L.A. Ring (1897) From the AFSMK (American Friends of SMK, The National Gallery of Denmark) website- Nordic Museum On the Edge of the World – Masterworks by L.A. Ring from SMK We are excited to announce that in 2019 our next big travelling exhibition will tour the United States! On the Edge of the World: Masterworks by L.A. Ring from SMK – The National Gallery of Denmarkwill open at the newly re-opened Nordic Museum in Seattle on September 14 and travel to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut in early 2020 with an opening on February 1. This is the first exhibition devoted solely to L.A. Ring’s art – shown outside the Nordic countries, and it is a rare opportunity to see the work of a highly gifted Nordic artist with a view on nature and modern life that corresponds with American Naturalism and Impressionism. Together with Vilhelm Hammershøi, L. A. Ring is one of the most important Danish artists from the late 1800s and early 1900s.   I am looking forward to seeing as many of these exhibits as I can this year!   

Read More