Art Of The Day Weekly
#505 - from 8 March 2018 to 14 March 2018
Mary Cassatt, Summertime, ca. 1894-95, 100,6 × 81,3 cm. Coll. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago.
IN THE AIR
8th of March, 8 women, 8 exhibitions
It was not until 1977 that the UN organization decreed the 8th of March as ”International Women’s Day”. Yet this date has been symbolic for more than a century, as it is the day of the female workers’ strike in Petrograd, the crib of the Russian Revolution, in 1917. The recent Weinstein affair has given a new impulse to this date. Based on the current art news, here we have a very personal “best of” of female artists who are exhibiting at this time in Europe and in the USA. There are eight –what did you expect? – and, in order to ensure them a certain form of equality very much sought after in these times, they are listed in chronological order. We don’t wish to create any jealousies!
EXHIBITIONS
Mary Cassatt, La Toilette, 1890-1891, drypoint and color aquatint, 36,5 × 27 cm. Private collection.
Mary Cassatt
PARIS – She is the only woman in the Impressionist universe, together with Berthe Morisot, to have reached certain notoriety. Educated in Philadelphia, it was in Paris that Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) found her fertile ground. After being admitted to the Salon as of 1868 – a great honor at a time when women were not even allowed to study at the National School of Fine Arts– and supported by the great misogynist Degas, she took part in most of the Impressionists exhibitions between 1879 and 1886. She exceled in printing and pastels, and by doing very tender portraits of all her family, she modernized the theme of maternity.
• At the Musée Jacquemart-André, from 9 March to 23 July 2018.
Tarsila do Amaral, Antropofagia, 1929, oil on canvas, Fond. José e Paulina Nemirovsky et Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. © Tarsila do Amaral Licenciamentos
Tarsila do Amaral
NEW YORK – She used to say – not without certain humor- that she had done her “military service of Cubism”. That was when Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) studied in Paris with André Lhote and Fernand Léger, in the 1920s. She later developed a tropical, multicolored style, half way between Douanier Rousseau and Georgia O’Keeffe, but very much her own, which allowed her as she wished to represent the painting of Brazil, her native country.
• At the MoMA, from 11 February to 3 June 2018.
Carmen Herrera, Red with White Triangle, 1961, 121,9 x 167,6 cm, Private Collection, New York, © Carmen Herrera
Carmen Herrera
DÜSSELDORF – At nearly 103 – her birthday will be on 31 May- , she is the grand-mother of all contemporary artists! Given her long career, this native from Havana has been a friend of many artists, including Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists in New York, before finding her own way in geometric abstraction during a stay in Paris at the end of the 40s.
• At the Kunstsammlung Nordhein Westfalen, from 2 December 2017 to 8 April 2018.
Sheila Hicks
PARIS – A champion of textiles, this American artist born in 1934 also chose France as her second country. She has lived ever since her arrival in a small, charming passage in the Latin Quarter. She is capable of producing large cascades of colored wool, as well as minimalist and geometric woven works of all sizes, that remind us of the works by Ani Albers (she was the student of her husband, Josef Albers, in Yale). In her works she intertwines motifs of Western abstraction and pre-Colombian techniques.
• At the Centre Pompidou, from 7 February to 30 April 2018.
Ceija Stojka, untitled, no date, acrylic on cardboard. © Ceija Stojka, Adagp, 2017. Courtesy Galerie Kai Dikhas.
Ceija Stojka
PARIS – Life exposed her to lose all her family in the Nazi camps, and then, having escaped and being a Rom, she had to rebuild herself a life in the period following the Second World War. Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) was born in Vienna and could have gone through life without leaving any traces. But, luckily for us, she started painting after the age of fifty to exorcise the ghosts of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, and has left us works that deeply move the viewer. They are dark and black paintings with dogs, barbed wire, and cadavers, and –more surprising yet- paintings that burst with colors and trees, sunflowers, and caravans. In short, that burst with life, in spite of everything.
• At the Maison rouge, from 23 February to 20 May 2018.
Susan Meiselas
PARIS – Photographer Susan Meiselas, born in 1948, is a small woman who found herself in the most extreme situations in Nicaragua, in Salvador, or in Iraq, where she could have lost all illusions about the human race. On the contrary, she maintained a deep empathy of her fellow humans, as can be seen in her series on strippers or on the vagrancy of the Kurds throughout the world, documented in this exhibition through a moving wall.
• At the Jeu de paume, from 6 February to 20 May 2018.
Doris Salcedo, Palimpsesto, 2013-2017. © Photo Juan Fernando Castro.
Doris Salcedo
MADRID – She had already made a name for herself through a remarkable installation at the Tate Modern. Columbian artist Doris Salcedo (born in 1958), was marked by the years of violence in her country, and she continues to explore this painful past in the magnificent glass roof of the Palacio de Cristal, in the heart of the garden of the Retiro. Here it is water, under the form of drops, that writes the names of the victims.
• At Palacio de Cristal, from 6 October 2017 to 1 April 2018.
Théodora Barat
MARSEILLE – She has a name similar to that of a mythical actress in the beginning of Hollywood, Theda Bara. But they have nothing else in common. Even though Théodora Barat (born in 1985) produces a great part of her work as films, she is a more contemporary movement by combining various practices – photography, sculpture, and installations in general.
• At la Belle de mai, from 11 March to 8 April 2018.
OPENINGS OF THE WEEK
MON ENFANT PEUT EN FAIRE AUTANT
10 March 2018 - PARIS - Galerie Anne Barrault
When artists work with their children (photo: Topor)