Art Of The Day Weekly
#330 - from 23 January 2014 to 29 January 2014
Fedor Kislov, Parade on Red Square, Moscow, 12 July 1937. © Musée olympique, Lausanne.
30 EXHIBITIONS IN EUROPE (2nd PART: SOUTHERN EUROPE)
From Lausanne to Istanbul, from Rome to Madrid, major names and artists, French in particular, are on the museum billboards: Odilon Redon, Matisse and Cézanne. But of course we will not miss el Greco nor Pontormo. Nor the rarer focus on Lissitzky, Cima da Conegliano or the Liberty movement , the Italian Art nouveau with its numerous ramifications.
ITALY
Gaetano Previati, The Dance of the hours, circa 1899, oil and tempera on canvas. Milano, Fondazione Cariplo
Liberty
FORLÌ –Italy has its own name for Art nouveau, it is Liberty. It had a rare energy and developed quickly as it did in France and Belgium. In a small town in Emilia-Romagna, the San Domenico museum analyzes in detail Dudovich’s billboards and Carlo Bugatti’s furniture, as well as Previati‘s paintings by bringing back to life the great exhibition of Torino of 1902. The Liberty movement also developed an interesting architecture but one will have to go to Palermo to see Basile’s masterpieces. Another destination is more accessible: the remarkable thermal baths of Salsomaggiore, decorated by Galileo Chini, a stained-glass master whose fame was acclaimed al the way to the kingdom of Siam.
• From 1 February to 15 June 2014
El Lissitzky, Proun 6, 1919-1920. Stiftung Moritzburg - Kunstmuseum des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt, Halle
El Lissitzky
TRENTE – The MART presents a man who was not only a painter, but an architect and a photographer, an art worker, a model maker, polemicist and revolutionary as well. El Lissitzky (1890-1941) knew the various upheavals of the Russian revolution form the inside and exported its forms and ideals –at the World Expo in Paris in 1937, as well as to London, Berlin or Rotterdam. He managed to slip through the cracks of Stalin’s repression which fell on his wife as she was deported to Siberia the day following the artist’s death …
• From 15 February to 8 June 2014
Matisse, the art of illustration
FERRARA – The Palazzo dei Diamanti has brought together a beautiful group of works on the theme of the face, from the Self-portrait in 1900 up to the Acrobats from 1952. While the Centre Pompidou lent some remarkable pieces, the institution is not talone. Others, the Tate Modern and the MoMA, the museum of Chaux-de-Fonds and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to mention but a few, have all contributed their important Matisse collections.
• From 22 February to 15 June 2014
Cima da Conegliano, Archangel Raphael with Tobias and two saints, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
Un Cinquecento inquieto
CONEGLIANO – He is one of the minor masters of the Renaissance, a symbol of gentleness, a contemporary of Tiziano and Lorenzo Lotto… All the territory of Treviso has contributed to the rediscovery of Cima da Conegliano as well of his contemporaries of the XVIth century, Palma the Elder, Andrea Solario and others: paintings, altarpieces, sculptures, medals and ceramics are presented in various exhibitions of which the most important is held at Palazzo Sarcinelli de Conegliano.
• From 1st March to 8 June 2014
Pontormo and Rosso
FLORENCE – These are two stars of the Mannerism movement: Rosso, who was celebrated in particular in France, at the court of François Ier, and Pontormo, who spent the greater part of his career in Tuscany. They were both trained by Andrea del Sarto but went on to develop their own vision of the maniera. Palazzo Strozzi brings back to life their artistic rivalry by presenting works that have rarely been confronted.
SPAIN
Giovanni Battista Langetti, Ixion, 193,6 x 258,4 cm, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico
Las Furias, from Tiziano to Ribera
MADRID – The museo del Prado looks into the unfortunate fate of the great figures of Greek mythology: Sisyphus, Ixion, Tantalus or Titius. They were condemned to roll a stone eternally, to have their liver eaten, to suffer from thirst, to cry under a wheel … Their fate inspired great artists of the Renaissance who turned out a number of interpretations. The exhibition presents about twenty of them, all focused on the epitome of suffering, that of the Laocoon…
• From 21 January to 4 May 2014
Cézanne
MADRID – As we can see in his numerous renderings of mountain Sainte Victoire, Cézanne was a great amateur of outdoor visions. As a matter of fact he died of pneumonia, which he caught during an outing under the rain. But he was also a champion of still lives, a typical indoor discipline. The Thyssen-Bornemisza museum presents a retrospective dedicated to the works by the master of Aix-en-Provence, for which it made a balanced selection of some fifty emblemetic works to illustrate the artist’s two passions.
• From 4 February to 18 May 2014
El Greco
TOLEDO – Domenikos Thetokopoulos, known as El Greco, was a native of Crete but he adopted Toledo, in the heart of Spain’s Castille region- as his home. In the four centuries since his demise no exhibition worthy of his art has been dedicated to him. It is finally the case of this one organized at the recently renovated Museo de Santa Cruz, as it brings together portraits (the genre that made him famous when he was alive), altarpieces and devotional engravings that greatly enlarged his audience.
• From 14 March to 14 June 2014
SWITZERLAND
Russian avant-garde and sports
LAUSANNE – As the winter Games of Sotchi appear at the horizon, the Musée olympique opens again with a targeted exhibition. From De Rodchenko to Stepanova, it studies how Soviet painters and photographers during the 1920-1930s found major inspiration in athletes in action.
• From 24 January to 11 May 2014
Odilon Redon, Flowers, 1909, oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm, private collection.
Odilon Redon
BASEL – Odilon Redon (1840-1916), a solitary artist considered one of the leaders of Symbolism, created strange, charcoal colored beings as well as others in solar pastels with bright colors. Three years after the exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, this retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler tries to define the artist by underlining his role as the announcer of latter movements, such as Surrealism.
• From 2 February to 18 May 2014
From Matisse to the Blaue Reiter
ZURICH – This exhibition at the Kunsthaus troes to show that German expressionism was not necessarily a spontaneous movement, but rather was nurrished by other avant-gardes, French ones in particular. To defend this theory it takes some one hundred works by Gauguin, Cézanne and Matisse and confronts them to the masters of the Blaue Reiter.
• From 7 February to 11 May 2014
Intriguing masks: Ensor
BASEL – Belgian artist James Ensor (1860-1949) was a great amateur of masks and hair pieces. The Kunstmuseum gives us a glimpse into his taste for satire and face contorsions through some 60 drawings and paintings, of which some are shown for the first time.
• From 9 February to 18 May 2014
Play objects. The Art of Possibilities
BASEL – The Tinguely museum presents some 100 works from the XXth century, by Josef Albers, Julio Le Parc or Jeppe Heim. Their specificity is that they can be modified, deconstructed, reassembled, thus turning art into a sort of game.
• From 19 February to 11 May 2014
The beauty of the body in Ancient Greece
MARTIGNY – In July 2011, two antique torsos of major importance were unearthed in Martigny. The Gianadda foundation, which has created from its beginnings a strong link with the town's Roman past (which can be seen in its numerous archaeologic display windows), was therefore perfectly capable of hosting some of the masterpieces from the British Museum, among which the famous Diadumen from Vaison-la-Romaine.
• From 21 February to 9 June 2014
TURKEY
Eteri Chkadua, In Black, 2013
Neighbours
ISTANBUL – To celebrate its tenth anniversary, the Istanbul Modern confronts the artistic practices in Turkey to those of the neighboring countries, based on the reading keys shared by the peoples of Middle East, Caucasia, the Balkans: travel, nomadism and odyssey.
• From 9 January to 8 May 2014
