Como os dije en la entrada anterior de exposiciones temporales, aquí tenéis la ampliación de algunas de las exposiciones que se encuentran aún en cartelera o se inaugurarán este mes de febrero. De todas ellas, tan sólo podré visitar una: la de Delacroix. ¡Qué ganas!

Esta exposición, organizada en colaboración con la Fondation Beyeler, explora el significado de los conceptos de tiempo y espacio en la obra de Constantin Brancusi y Richard Serra, dos de los máximos exponentes de la escultura del siglo XX. Una selección de aproximadamente treinta esculturas de Brancusi, que se mostrarán en grupos temáticos, evidenciará aspectos esenciales de su obra, al tiempo que se enfrentará y dialogará con una treintena de obras del artista Richard Serra. En ambos casos se pondrá especial énfasis en el efecto producido por los diferentes materiales que emplean, ya sea el mármol, la madera, el cemento, el yeso o el bronce en el caso de Brancusi, o el acero, el caucho, el plomo o los tubos de neón en el de Serra. La presentación se realiza de forma yuxtapuesta, en ocasiones, o dedicando espacios individuales a cada uno de los creadores, poniendo de manifiesto sus similitudes y diferencias, y revelando el dinámico poder espacial de la escultura. La arquitectura de las dos sedes de la muestra juega un destacado papel, sumando una tercera voz a la selección de esculturas.

Fundación Mapfre (Madrid)
Odilon Redon (1840-1916)
11 de febrero - 29 de abril de 2012

A través de 170 obras procedentes de distintas instituciones, que comprenden óleos, dibujos, grabados, paneles decorativos y bocetos textiles, la muestra recorre la trayectoria artística y el universo singular de Redon. Se trata de la primera exposición monográfica organizada en España en 20 años del pintor francés, precursor del simbolismo y del grupo de los Nabis. El estilo personal, con un uso novedoso del color y las tonalidades, y una temática basada en las complejidades del pensamiento, lo esotérico y los mecanismos del sueño, fueron lo que hicieron que Redon influyera profundamente en las generaciones simbolistas, fauvistas y Nabis, convirtiéndose en uno de los pintores más destacados de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX y principios del XX. La exposición está comisariada por Rodolphe Rapetti, investigador del Institut National d'Historie de l'Art de París, y cuenta con la asesoría científica de Fred Leeman, ambos reconocidos expertos de la obra de Odilon Redon. Entre las instituciones que han colaborado con esta muestra destaca el Musée d'Orsay, el Gemeentemuseum de La Haya, el Museo Van Gogh y el Rijksmuseum de Ámsterdam, el Museo de Bellas Artes de Burdeos y el Staatliche Kunsthalle de Karlsruhe, así como de importantes colecciones extranjeras.

Coincidiendo con la celebración de su 20 aniversario, el Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza pone en marcha una nueva actividad expositiva que, con el título genérico de Miradas cruzadas, presentará periódicamente una novedosa instalación temporal de obras procedentes de sus colecciones. Para inaugurar el ciclo, a partir del 7 de febrero y coincidiendo también con ARCO 2012 dedicado este año a los Países Bajos, la muestra Mondrian, De Stijl y la tradición artística holandesa propondrá un diálogo visual entre las pinturas de Piet Mondrian y sus colegas Theo van Doesburg y Bart van der Leck, con algunas obras maestras del Siglo de Oro holandés. Esta confrontación permitirá apreciar la proximidad conceptual entre el arte de los miembros de De Stijl y la tradición artística holandesa, que comparten una misma visión utópica de la pintura.

Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid)
Chagall
14 de febrero - 20 de mayo de 2012

Organizada por el Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza y la Fundación Caja Madrid, y comisariada por Jean-Louis Prat, presidente del Comité Chagall, esta exposición será la primera gran retrospectiva dedicada al artista ruso en España y, como principal objetivo, destacará el gran papel que su obra ocupa en la Historia del Arte. Las salas del Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza expondrán trabajos de sus primeros años y de su periodo en París, la capital de la vanguardia en ese momento; también se recogerá su experiencia en la Rusia revolucionaria y en Francia, hasta llegar al exilio forzado en Estados Unidos en 1941. En las salas de exposición de la Fundación Caja Madrid la atención se centrará en el período americano y en su evolución artística posterior; se insistirá en los asuntos bíblicos que preocupaban al artista y en su relación con los poetas contemporáneos, además de presentar distintas obras de escultura, cerámica y vitrales.

Centro de Arte Canal (Madrid)
Da Vinci. El genio
6 de diciembre de 2011 - 2 de mayo de 2012

En el Centro de Arte Canal, de la plaza de Castilla, puedes ver la exposición DaVinci, El Genio, donde junto a algunos dibujos originales del artista del Renacimiento, se presentan más de 60 reproducciones de sus máquinas, las cuales el visitante puede manipular. En las 19 salas de la exposición de Da Vinci en Madrid, que coincide en fechas con la de pinturas de Da Vinci en la National Gallery de Londres, hay un primer ámbito dedicado al Da Vinci más íntimo, donde puedes ver manuscritos y dibujos originales del artista. Entre estos dibujos destaca el estudio de la Batalla de Anghiari, una gran pintura mural que en su día estuvo en las paredes del Palazzo Vecchio de Florencia. El segundo espacio está dedicado a la pintura, y en el se ven pinturas de discípulos de Leonardo Da Vinci, tanto italianos como españoles. Entre ellas destaca una copia de La Ultima Cena, de Giampetrino, que llegará desde la Royal Academy of Arts de Londres en el mes de febrero. Entre las obras de discípulos españoles, se pueden ver dos cuadros de Fernando de Yáñez de la Catedral de Cuenca, Piedad y Adoración de los Magos, recientemente restaurados. En la exposición de Da Vinci tienes también la posibilidad de ver la película en 3D, Leonardo Da Vinci, la mirada del genio, realizada expresamente para la muestra, en la que se propone un paseo por la obra del artista, mezcla de arte y ciencia.

Neue Pinakothek (Múnic)
George Stubbs
26 de enero - 6 de mayo de 2012

The English animal painter George Stubbs (1724-1806) is the most prominent representative of so-called 'sporting art' that reached its peak in the 18th century as a result of the growing enthusiasm for horse breeding, racing and hunting, as an occupation for the prosperous upper classes. His work largely comprises portraits of thoroughbreds and their jockeys, of dogs and hunting scenes. With his subtly balanced and sometimes bold compositions Stubbs developed a classical style using subjects derived entirely from contemporary life. In the Anglo-Saxon world, George Stubbs has long been regarded as one of the greatest artists of his time and, alongside William Hogarth and Thomas Gainsborough, as the most important artist of the 18th century. The Neue Pinakothek, which has a first-rate collection of English painting from the 18th and 19th centuries and boasts the only painting by George Stubbs in Germany, is staging the first exhibition on this artist to be held on the Continent. A selection of thirty paintings, mostly from collections in England, will be complemented by drawings and prints that underline the artist's far-reaching influence in the field of animal painting in France and Germany.

Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt)
Warhol: Headlines
11 de febrero - 13 de mayo de 2012

From 11 February to 13 May 2012, the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst will present a unique Andy Warhol exhibition such as has never been seen before: Warhol: Headlines. For the first time, the MMK is bringing together from international collections all of the eighty Andy Warhol works influenced by contemporary tabloids and other mass media. Warhol: Headlines is the first exhibition dedicated to the theme of headlines in the oeuvre of Andy Warhol. The objects to be shown –paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, and videos– shed light on the artist’s memorable treatment of the ambivalent character and sensationalism of contemporary media. Above all during the nineteen-sixties, Warhol –one of the most important artists of the twentieth century– directed his attention towards trivial subjects from popular culture, and he collected clippings as well as press photos from daily newspapers, film booklets, and handbills. His preoccupation with the printed media occupied a prominent place in his artistic production and, for the first time, is now being comprehensively examined and adequately appreciated through this exhibition. The show elucidates how he extracted such fundamental themes as celebrities, death, catastrophes, and current events from the media and sharpened their depiction in his works. His interest was directed not only towards the endlessly reproducible mechanisms of the mass media, but also the opinion-moulding reports themselves with their luridly formulated headlines.

Musée Eugène-Delacroix (París)
Fantin-Latour, Manet, Baudelaire: the Hommage à Delacroix
7 de diciembre de 2011 - 19 de marzo de 2012

It was 1863: the year Manet sparked a scandal with his Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and the year of Delacroix’s death. Shocked by the lack of official recognition, for the next Salon, Fantin-Latour created his Hommage à Delacroix. This seminal painting brought together a generation of innovative artists and critics, such as Baudelaire, around a portrait of the dead master. The exhibition traces the journey of the painting and tells the story of the artistic fraternity through other portraits of the artists shown in the painting and the works tying them to Delacroix’s legacy. The exhibition focuses on the creative brotherhood formed by the personalities depicted, with a number of works revealing cross-influences between these figures and others inspired by Delacroix’s particular legacy. In addition, it addresses the question of group portraits of artists and views of their studios as meeting places, beginning with that of Frédéric Bazille, once situated in an adjoining building. The exhibition concludes with the official homage to the artist by the sculptor Aimé-Jules Dalou, together with the decidedly exceptional one by Paul Cézanne, a remarkable tribute to Delacroix as the first French progressive modernist.

Louvre (París)
New Frontier: American Art Enters the Louvre. Thomas Cole and the Birth of Landscape Painting in America
14 de enero - 16 de abril de 2012

The Frick Collection presents an exhibition of nine iconic Impressionist paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, offering the first comprehensive study of the artist's engagement with the full-length format, which was associated with the official Paris Salon in the decade that saw the emergence of a fully fledged Impressionist aesthetic. The project was inspired by La Promenade of 1875–76, the most significant Impressionist work in the Frick's permanent collection. It explores Renoir's portraits and subject pictures of this type from the mid-1870s to mid-1880s. Intended for public display, these vertical grand-scale canvases are among the artist's most daring and ambitious presentations of contemporary subjects and are today considered masterpieces of Impressionism. On view only at the Frick, Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting is a landmark exhibition, bringing together several beloved masterpieces from around the world.

Metropolitan (Nueva York)
The Steins Collect. Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde
23 de febrero - 3 de junio de 2012

Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael's wife Sarah were important patrons of modern art in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century. This exhibition unites some two hundred works of art to demonstrate the significant impact the Steins' patronage had on the artists of their day and the way in which the family disseminated a new standard of taste for modern art. The Steins' Saturday evening salons introduced a generation of visitors to recent developments in art, particularly the work of their close friends Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, long before it was on view in museums. Beginning with the art that Leo Stein collected when he arrived in Paris in 1903—including paintings and prints by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Manet, and Auguste Renoir—the exhibition traces the evolution of the Steins' taste and examines the close relationships formed between individual members of the family and their artist friends. While focusing on works by Matisse and Picasso, the exhibition also includes paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Manguin, André Masson, Elie Nadelman, Francis Picabia, and others.

Metropolitan (Nueva York)
The Game of Kings. Medieval Ivory Chessmen from the Isle of Lewis
15 de noviembre de 2011 - 22 de abril de 2012

In 1831, a hoard of luxury goods—including more than seventy chess pieces and several other objects, all made of carved walrus ivory and dating from the twelfth century—was unearthed on the Isle of Lewis off the west coast of Scotland. The chess pieces (thereafter known as the Lewis Chessmen), which come from at least four distinct, but incomplete sets, are arguably the most famous chess pieces in the world today, and are among the icons of the collections of the British Museum in London and the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. For this exhibition, more than thirty chessmen from the collection of the British Museum are being shown at The Cloisters, the branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to the art and architecture of medieval Europe. This represents the first time such a large ensemble of the chessmen has traveled outside the United Kingdom. After the showing in New York, they will return to London.

MOMA (Nueva York)
Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art
13 de noviembre de 2011 - 14 de mayo de 2012

Diego Rivera was the subject of MoMA’s second monographic exhibition (the first was Henri Matisse), which set new attendance records in its five-week run from December 22, 1931, to January 27, 1932. MoMA brought Rivera to New York six weeks before the exhibition’s opening and gave him studio space within the Museum, a strategy intended to solve the problem of how to present the work of this famous muralist when murals were by definition made and fixed on site. Working around the clock with two assistants, Rivera produced five “portable murals”—large blocks of frescoed plaster, slaked lime, and wood that feature bold images drawn from Mexican subject matter and address themes of revolution and class inequity. After the opening, to great publicity, Rivera added three more murals, now taking on New York subjects through monumental images of the urban working class and the social stratification of the city during the Great Depression. All eight were on display for the rest of the show’s run. The first of these panels, Agrarian Leader Zapata, is an icon in the Museum’s collection.

National Gallery (Washington)
The Baroque Genius of Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione
29 de enero - 8 de julio de 2012

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609—1664) was perhaps the most complex and far-reaching interpreter of the baroque, the naturalistic style that dominated 17th-century European art. This exhibition presents the National Gallery's rich holdings of the artist's prints and drawings while suggesting, for the first time, the complex sources of his style, including Rembrandt and Claude Lorrain, as well as its importance for later artists, from Tiepolo and Piranesi to Watteau and Boucher. Organized according to themes and concerns in his work—biblical journeys, the memory of the antique, the Flight into Egypt, religious nocturnes, fantastic physiognomy, and graphic experiment—the exhibition presents Castiglione's works and comparative examples side by side, underscoring the serial aspect of his creativity. The installation includes approximately 80 works, most from the Gallery's collection but including a number of important drawings from private collections.

Hermitage (Amsterdam)
Rubens, Van Dyck & Jordaens. Flemish painters from the Hermitage
17 de septiembre de 2011 - 16 de marzo de 2012

From 17 September 2011 to 16 March 2012, the Hermitage Amsterdam presents a stunning selection from the Flemish art collection of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. With 75 paintings and about 20 drawings, this definitive survey includes numerous masterpieces by the three giants of the Antwerp School - Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Jacob Jordaens -accompanied by the work of well-known contemporaries. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) will be a special focus of the exhibition, represented by 17 paintings and many drawings. Rubens was the most accomplished and influential Flemish painter of the seventeenth century. At the same time, he was known as a charming aristocrat, diplomat, and collector, and his workshop was a smoothly operating business. It is the first time that this superb collection is shown in the Netherlands. Many of these paintings were acquired by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century. They belonged to world-class collectors such as Pierre Crozat and Heinrich von Bruhl, whose collections Catherine purchased in their entirety.

Ya está disponible en La Espada en la Tinta mi nueva reseña. Como este año es el bicentenario del nacimiento de Charles Dickens, qué mejor manera de hacerle un homenaje que hablando de uno de sus libros. En esta ocasión, de La tienda de antigüedades, editado por Nocturna Ediciones:

En palabras de León Tolstói, Charles Dickens era el novelista más grande del siglo XIX. Y no le faltaba razón. Sus novelas disfrutaron de una gran popularidad y era admirado por sus compañeros de profesión. No todos los escritores -ni artistas- podían decir lo mismo: algunos alcanzaban la fama de manera póstuma; otros, desgraciadamente, quedaron en el olvido. Pero Charles Dickens sabía lo que tenía que hacer para conmover los corazones de la sociedad victoriana. Tan sólo debía imprimir en sus obras una buena cantidad de crítica social, construir unos personajes entrañables -y generalmente pobres u oprimidos-, y narrar con un estilo directo y emotivo para que la gente, inmediatamente, se sintiera identificada.
Continuar leyendo

Como estos días no tengo mucho tiempo para hacer una entrada más elaborada, actualizo con un pequeño recopilatorio de pinturas mitológicas.

Comenzamos el año haciendo un repaso por algunas exposiciones de la temporada pasada, algunas de las cuales cerrarán pronto sus puertas. Disculpad el retraso en la actualización, pero es que últimamente voy muy justa de tiempo. Espero poder ampliar la información próximamente.

Alice in Wonderland will offer visitors a rare opportunity to view Carroll’s own drawings and photographs, alongside Victorian Alice memorabilia and John Tenniel’s preliminary drawings for the first edition of the novel. Carroll’s stories were soon adopted by other artists. Surrealist artists from the 1930s onwards were drawn towards the fantastical world of Wonderland where natural laws were suspended. From the 1960s through the 1970s, Carroll’s Alice tales also prompted conceptual artists to explore language and its relationship to perception, and the stories inspired further responses in Pop and Psychedelic art. Expect to see works by artists ranging from Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, to Peter Blake and Yayoi Kusama.

Metropolitan (Nueva York)
The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini
21 de diciembre de 2011 - 18 de marzo de 2012

Para ilustrar (y acompañar) un poco estos días navideños, he recopilado algunas pinturas del siglo XIX, cuyo tema principal es el paisaje invernal. Espero que os gusten tanto como a mí.