Upcoming Gallery and Museum Shows, continuing thread

This companion Web site to a new book of the same title from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) will serve many readers as well as the book itself. While the web site lacks the large-size, printed reproductions of artwork and introductory texts of the book, it never the less provides reasonable screen resolution images of all of the 225 works reproduced in the book. The web site is organized into 16 chapters, starting with "From Distant Shores", which contains artwork documenting the immigrant experience, and ending with "Toward the Millennium", which is artwork created in the last 20 years of the Twentieth Century. In addition, the America's Art Web site links into SAAM's online permanent collection. This allows visitors to read caption information from the exhibition labels for each work of art, search on each artist's name to see if there is more of their work in SAAM's collection, use SAAM research databases, and even use the Museum's Ask-a service, Ask Joan of Art. [DS]

This exhibition follows Wassily Kandinsky's intriguing journey from figurative landscape painter to modernist master, as he strove to develop a radically abstract language.

Focusing on the first half of his career, the exhibition begins with a series of early landscapes inspired by the exquisite Bavarian countryside and folk imagery from Russian fairy tales and legends. It then explores how Kandinsky's style evolved after he moved to Germany and co-founded the ground-breaking Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group. This period had a major influence on his work and it was during this time that Kandinsky began to conceive of painting as an alternative pathway to spiritual reality. Increasingly, he stripped away descriptive detail by reducing recognisable elements, like hilltop castles and riders on horseback, to calligraphic lines. At the same time, he began to include large areas of vibrant colour to stimulate emotions associated with classical music and to provoke responses which the considered use of specific colours could lead to. In abstraction, Kandinsky felt that he had discovered a spiritual reality which was more powerful for not being tied to the outside world - an alternative music for the senses.

The exhibition continues by exploring the artistic changes which accompanied Kandinsky's move to Russia and subsequent return to Germany where he became a member of the Bauhaus. Contemporary developments in Russian avant-garde art and Bauhaus design, were to influence Kandinsky's abstract language further and to have a major impact on his later works.

This exhibition presents over 50 paintings and 30 works on paper. Many of these have never been exhibited in the UK making this an unmissable opportunity to see so many of this modernist master's most influential works together.

ART

Drawing interest to no-painting show
Art Institute exhibit creates dialogues between works

Tate Britain's Holbein in England exhibition, opening next Thursday, will bring about a reunion of some of the most influential British faces of the reign of Henry VIII. The exhibition includes a beguiling image, known until recently simply as A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling. It is an example of how the show, which features 38 portraits, reveals the networking involved in court life. The picture is thought to depict Anne Lovell, the wife of Sir Francis Lovell, a favoured associate of the king. The squirrel appears on the family coat of arms and scholars suspect the starling may be a punning reference to the family seat at East Harling, Norfolk.

Record advance sales for Velázquez show

Mark Brown, arts correspondent
Tuesday October 17, 2006
The Guardian


One of the most eagerly anticipated exhibitions in the art calendar has broken a record before it has even started: the Velázquez show has sold more advance tickets than any previous show, including Vermeer, Titian and Caravaggio.
The record advance ticket sales of more than 11,000 yesterday led to a plea from National Gallery bosses for people to book early to avoid disappointment.

For the first time, four rooms in the main gallery have been cleared to make way for the 46 works by the painter.

The National Gallery contains the largest collection of Velázquez paintings outside the Prado in Madrid, and these nine works, together with seven from other British collections, will form the heart of the exhibition.
It will include one of the jewels in the gallery's collection, The Rokeby Venus - the only surviving example of a female nude by Velázquez, painted at a time that sort of thing was frowned on by the Inquisition. More properly known as The Toilet of Venus, it picked up the name because it hung at Rokeby Hall in Yorkshire before it was acquired by the National Gallery a century ago thanks to the then newly-founded Art Fund.

The Prado has agreed to more Velázquez works leaving its walls than ever before. British curators, like children in the best sweetshop in the world, got to choose eight. They include Philip IV as a Hunter, with the king in his best hunting gear with his dog (Velázquez is also renowned as a painter of dogs) at his feet.

Gallery bosses believe the exhibition, which opens tomorrow, could be its most successful ever. "We really do advise people to book early," said a spokeswoman.

Tickets can be bought via the website Nationalgallery.org.uk or by telephone, 0870 906 3891, or in person.

In Hogarth's painting of 1748, O The Roast Beef of Old England, French soldiers in Calais, as pathetic and amphibian-looking as frogs, gaze enviously at a mighty side of beef. It is a potent symbol of English vigour and red-bloodedness, and they aren't getting any; it's being borne off to feed lucky British tourists. This painting is a symphony in anti-French and anti-Catholic sentiment - and now it is hanging in the Louvre, part of the first Hogarth exhibition in France.