Tag: Picasso

Museum Exhibitions

Art versus politics

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / “Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945” an exhibition of more than 70 paintings and sculptures on loan from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin to the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, runs on three tracks. The first carries the art, two-thirds of which has never before been seen in the United States. The second, via informative and well-written wall texts, follows political developments in Germany during three-and-a-half fraught decades. The third consists of the imaginations of museumgoers who, like me, can’t help but see similarities between Weimar Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s rule and America during Trump’s rise and authoritarian presidency.

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Museum Exhibitions

Berthe Weill: The gallerist who loved art too well

Contributed by John Goodrich / Hindsight, of course, is 20/20. Looking back at the early decades of modernism, we may sense something inevitable about the ascent of Picasso and Matisse. Weren’t both driven, gifted artists poised to take advantage of their cultural moment? And wasn’t the time ripe for Matisse’s upending of expectations of color, and Picasso’s overturning of pictorial structures? Of course, life is not so tidy and linear for the artists operating in the moment. As the luminous exhibition “Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde” at NYU’s Grey Art Museum demonstrates, none of the early modernists had a monopoly on talent or a singularly dominant vision of what painting had to be.

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Books

The formidable women who shaped MoMA: Untold stories

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / I didn’t expect to particularly like MoMA’s Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art, but merely to learn from it. Turns out I loved all fourteen essays – each by a contemporary female writer, and each about a woman who worked at or for MoMA during the first decades after its founding in 1929. Many are beautifully written. While all are about formidable, pathbreaking women, none are hagiographic.

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Hacked

Shipping Guernica

At Looking Around, Richard Lacayo has a good summary of the situation with Picasso’s “Guernica,” and a little history lesson about the Spanish Civil War […]

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