Our Art News Letter for May 2, 2015 - CATHERINE L. JOHNSON, Charlie Hebdo, El Anatsui, Georgina Adam, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Juan Antonio Picasso, Kour Pour, Louis XIII, Nicholas Roerich, Oscar Niemeyer, Paul Durand-Ruel, Picasso, Rembrandt...

The surviving Charlie Hebdo cartoonist who frequently drew Mohammed for the newspaper has announced he’s retiring the character. More

The entrance of the Palazzo Bollani during the 53rd Venice Biennale. It was also the venue for Costa Rica’s cancelled pavilion this year. (Image via Jean-Pierre Dalbéra/Flickr)

Over the course of the last month, the number of countries exhibiting at the 56th annual Venice Biennale has dropped from 90 to 88, following the withdrawal of Costa Rica and Kenya from the show. More

The Dealer,  Paul Durand-Ruel, Who Made Impressionism Famous - 

So universally popular are the Impressionists today, it’s hard to imagine a time when they weren’t. But in the early 1870s they struggled to be accepted. Shunned by the art establishment, they were even lambasted as ‘lunatics’ by one critic.

Monika Rostvold temporary removed her blindfold to interact with campus police.

Monika Rostvold, an art student at Texas State University, sparked a frenzy both on campus and online Monday when she sat on the steps of her university's library wearing nothing but a blindfold, a nude-colored thong, and pasties. More

Six Authors Withdraw from PEN Gala in Protest of ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Honor

More

Figueres, Spain: Art of Salvador Dalí

Georgina Adam wants to know why Sotheby’s is carting a lot of art to Qatar only to sell it back to buyers in Europe and North America. Sotheby’s said it “sets out to attract an international spread of bidders and buyers”. A painting by Kour Pour, the hot young US-based artist whose work is inspired by carpets, sold for $162,500, well over its $70,000-$90,000 estimate, going to a US buyer. More

Kour Pour

The Nicholas Roerich Museum will sell two works by Roerich's works that have never appeared at auction before to fund acquisitions:

His Country, dedicated to the interpretation of the Himalayan landscape. 

The Host of Gesar Khan. the great semi-mythical King, venerated widely throughout Central Asia.

Nicholas Roerich (October 9, 1874 – December 13, 1947) – was a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, perceived by some in Russia as an enlightener, philosopher, and public figure, who was influenced by a movement in Russian society around the occult. He was interested in hypnosis and other spiritual practices and his paintings are said to have hypnotic expression.

The world's top detective for Nazi looted art: Sleuth has tracked down £250 million worth of stolen art including priceless works by Picasso, Renoir and Matisse.  Read more

Picasso stage curtain painting going on view - A stage curtain believed to be the largest Pablo Picasso painting in North America is set to be displayed at a New York City museum.

Measuring 20 feet by 19 feet, “Le Tricorne” or “The Three-Cornered Hat,” was painted in 1919 for an avant-garde ballet troupe. It hung at the storied Four Seasons restaurant for 55 years.

It will be placed on long-term view at the New-York Historical Society beginning May 29. A related exhibition will run from May 29 through summer 2016. More

GET YOUR DANCE OUT! + CATHERINE L. JOHNSON / ARTIST + ST. PAUL’S SPRING 2015 ART CRAWL

A collage by Vik Muniz depicting Rio de Janeiro was seized in the scandal (all images courtesy the Oscar Niemeyer Museum )

A Brazilian museum has opened an exhibition of art seized amid the largest corruption scandal in its country’s history. Works Under the Guard of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, on view at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in the southern city of Curitiba, features 48 of the 203 photographs, sculptures, and paintings the institution is holding for the Federal Police. More

SOTHEBY’S TO AUCTION BIG ASS EGG - “Nearly 200 times the size of a chicken egg and at least 400 years old”, “Laid by the largest bird ever to live on the planet”.

1. Elephant birds are members of the extinct family Aepyornithidae. Elephant birds were large to enormous, flightless birds that once lived on the island of Madagascar, which lies about 420 km off the southeast coast of Africa. Wikipedia

El Anatsui’s Earth’s Skin (2007), in the collection of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

The Venice Biennale, which opens to the public in a little more than three weeks, announced today that it has awarded its highest honor, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, to artist El Anatsui, saying in a statement that the prize “acknowledges not just his recent successes internationally, but also his artistic influence amongst two generations of artists working in West Africa. More

Juan Antonio Picasso

“Los Picassos Negros” (“The Black Picassos”).

Pablo Picasso’s maternal grandfather, Francisco Picasso Guardeño, left Spain in the late 1800s to pursue business opportunities in Cuba. He died on the island in 1888, but not before falling in love and having four children with an Afro-Cuban woman, Cristina Serra. 

Juan Antonio Picasso is one of more than 40 living descendants of that union, the Cuban branch of the Picasso family, and he is the only one who is known to make his living as an artist. 

Juan Antonio Picasso - Se Van Los Seres. Photograph: Julie Schwietert Collazo

Except for his passion for art and the fact that his home town of Havana, like Pablo's Malaga, looks out over the sea, Juan Antonio has few similarities with the great Spanish artist.

Juan Antonio Picasso - Rapto Guajiro.110x130cm. Óleo

He says he feels more inclined toward Antoni Tapies - another Spaniard - than to Picasso, but further details his influences citing Cuban artists Nelson Dominguez, Roberto Diago and Eduardo "Choco" Roca.

Juan Antonio Picasso - Yose y Paloma.70x50cm-Tempera

He has currently mounted in Havana his third one-man show, after his March 2005 exhibition in the northeastern Spanish town of Figueras, where, he said, "it all went very well." "Mixtures," as he has dubbed his exhibition, brings together 31 works in oil, charcoal, water colors and tempera, in a compendium of nods at Cuban daily life not lacking in references to the island's syncretic religions or the kitchen appliances the government hands out to the island's inhabitants.

More: Guardian, LinkedIn,   Artnet, DominicanToday

The Rijksmuseum exhibit The Late Rembrandt has already drawn about 400 thousand visitors. This is great news for the museum, but apparently not for some of the visitors. The museum has also receive hundreds of complaints about how the busy the museum is, especially from Dutch people.
This is according to Rijksmuseum director Wim Pibjes, who is absolutely absolutely thrilled that the exhibit has drawn so many visitors, Het Parool reports. More

The found painting is thought to be the second version of Ingres's Le Vœu de Louis XIII (The vow of Louis XIII, 1824) Photo via: Wikipedia

The chance discovery of a painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, located in the town of Lons-le-Saunier, in the French province of Jura, was made during an inventory conducted by Emmanuel Buselin, curator and advisor of historical monuments of the region, the work was found in the attic of the chapel of the former hospital Hôtel-Dieu, Le Monde reports. More

A detail of the Ingres painting found in Jura, Photo via: La Voix de Jura

Our News letter for April 22, 2015 - Matisse, Picasso, Félix ZIEM, Rembrandt van Rijn, Goya

A man dealing with sewage problems in a building in Lecce, Italy that he purchased in the hopes of opening a restaurant, unearthed a subterranean world full of archeological relics dating to the era before Jesus was born, the New York Times reports. More

Missing Goya Found Amongst Seized Art Trove of Shoe Queen Imelda Marcos, former first lady of the Philippines and the owner of a famously massive shoe collection, turns out to have also briefly been in possession of an early 19th-century Goya canvas. The artwork somehow vanished from the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art (LACMA), apparently never to be seen again, until much of the shoe queen's property was seized by the Philippine government in 2014. More

What is this? A collector's curiosity. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Shell, an etching. The Netherlands. Dated AD 1650 (state II). Still-life was popular new genres in painting in seventeenth-century Holland, after the collapse of religious patronage, landscape, domestic interiors, and townscapes. Rembrandt engaged closely with the human content of his work, and this still-life study is unique in his printed work. The shell is a Conus marmoreus, which is native to south-east Africa, Polynesia and Hawaii.

Self-portrait as the Apostle Paul, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1661. canvas, h 91cm × w 77cm. His brow furrowed and eyebrows arched, Rembrandt peers out at us meaningfully. He has portrayed himself as the Apostle Paul, recognizable by the saint’s attributes, a sword and a manuscript. More

Félix ZIEM 'Chameliers et troupeau en Afrique du Nord'. Huile sur panneau, signée en bas à droite, dans un joli cadre en bois et stuc doré. 29,5 x 51 cm.

In her latest book, "In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art," the British writer Sue Roe offers a lively and concise account of their lives during a 10-year period when they struggled to find new ways to express themselves and, in the process, rocked the foundations of Western art. More

A colorful account of the birth of modern art in Paris

In her latest book, "In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art," the British writer Sue Roe offers a lively and concise account of their lives during a 10-year period when they struggled to find new ways to express themselves and, in the process, rocked the foundations of Western art. More

Our art Newsletter for April 16. 2015

Galerie Richelieu, dimanche le 19 avril 2015, pour l’exposition de Bertrand Tremblay.

Guerrilla Girls: Art in Action at the Pomona College Art Museum, curated by Benjamin Feldman, a Pomona senior and the Josephine Bump ’76 curatorial intern, is a small but potent look at the confrontational posters and publications created by the feminist group. Started in 1985 by an anonymous cluster of critics, artists, academics, and museum workers, the Guerrilla Girls have made a long career of critiquing the art world’s male- and Caucasian-centered focus. More

Leonardo da Vinci, Head of a Young Woman (Study for the Angel in the "Virgin of the Rocks").

Photo: courtesy Biblioteca Reale, Turin, Italy; Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William & Mary in Virginia in partnership with the Associazione Culturale Metamorfosi; and the MFA, Boston.

Opening today, on what would have been Leonardo da Vinci's 563rd birthday, the exhibition "Leonardo da Vinci and the Idea of Beauty" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. More

The exhibition "Graphic art masterpieces. Henri Matisse" premiered at the Bucharest Noblesse Palace and can be visited until June 7, the Romanian organizers announced at a recent press conference. More

During a recent paper conservation treatment, the Barnes Foundation discovered two unfinished sketches on the reverse sides of two watercolors by Cézanne.  The Sketches depict the landscape of southern France. More

The Chaîne de l'Etoile Mountains 

Trees

Marc Chagall (French/Russian, 1887–1985)

Le Ciel bleu, 1964

Lithograph with watercolor on BFK Rives paper

Overall Size: 29.8 x 22.3 in. (75.69 x 56.64 cm.)

Framed Size: 38 x 30 in. (96.52 x 76.2 cm.)

Signed and inscribed 'epreuve litho aquarellee' in pencil

The present work is a lithograph completed with a flourish of watercolor by the artist. The lithograph was hand-colored before the lithography in blue, yellow, orange, red and green was applied, with the extant registration marks for the lithograph at the lower portion of the sheet. The work is signed by the artist in pencil and further inscribed 'epreuve litho aquarelle'. More

In keeping with Easter Spirit; "Lamentation," circa 1650, most likely painted by students of Rembrandt van Rijn. (Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota) “Lamentation,” a painting from the permanent collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, depicts the time after Jesus was taken from the cross and before his interment in the tomb. More at: Boston Globe

Le Picador: Picasso 

The lithograph began as a book project about the Spanish passion for bullfighting. Picasso collaborated with author Jaime Sabartes on a book, “A los toros avec Picasso,” which included 103 of the artist’s drawings.
Picasso enjoyed the subject so much that he went on to create a series of four black–and-white lithographs, “La Pique,” “Le Picado,” Jeu de Cape,” and “Les Banderilles.” Later, at the request of the publisher, Picasso was asked to add color to the plates to which he obliged by using every color in his box of 24 litho crayons... More

THE OASIS OF MATISSE - 27 MAR - 16 AUG 2015

The Oasis of Matisse is the largest exhibition of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) in the Netherlands ever. Masterpieces by Matisse alongside work by his contemporaries from the Stedelijk Museum’s permanent collection. The Oasis of Matisse is an unforgettable experience! More