Magritte: The Treason of Images Exhibition

Fig. 1 René Magritte, La Décalcomanie, 1966, Huile sur toile, 81 × 100 cm, Dr Noémi Perelman Mattis et Dr Daniel C. Mattis, © Adagp, Paris 2016, © Photothèque R. Magritte / Banque d’Images, Adagp, Paris, 2016

Commemorating its 40th anniversary this year, the Centre Pompidou opened “Magritte: The Treason of Images” exhibition on September 27. The Belgian painter Rene Magritte was known as a surrealist who used imagination to its utmost and combined everyday images that on one glance appear unrelated. Magritte attempted to create a world of “hyper reality” where dreams and reality unite without contradicting each other (fig 1). Magritte interacted with philosophers including Michel Foucault whose influences on his work are clear.

The language of Magritte’s pictures

Fig.2 René Magritte, La Trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe),
1929, Huile sur toile, 60,33 x 81,12 x 2,54 cm, Los Angeles County Museum
of Art. Purchased with funds provided by the Mr. and Mrs. William Preston
Harrison Collection, © Adagp, Paris 2016, © Photothèque R. Magritte
/ Banque d’Images, Adagp, Paris, 2016

This exhibit proposes interpreting Magritte’s work from the viewpoint of ideology and art. Magritte repeatedly employed a number of motifs – curtains, letters, framed spaces and shadows – each with their own meaning. Magritte spoke through his paintings with this pictorial language like a philosopher presenting a well-argued theory. For example, his frames and segmented spaces refer to Plato’s allegory of the cave, and his shadows can be interpreted as the discovery of painting described in Pliny’s Natural History.

This is not a pipe

In “The Treason of Images (this is not a pipe)” (fig. 2), the words “This is not a pipe” are written below the painting. The picture and words seem to contradict each other, but even though the illustration could be mistaken for an actual pipe, it is still an illustration. The conflict between words and imagery has a long history that dates back to the biblical era when Moses, angered by the Israelites idolizing icons, destroyed the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.

Magritte: The Treason of Images Exhibition until Jan 23, 2017 (closed Tuesdays)

Centre Pompidou

19 Rue Beaubourg
75004 Paris
France
http://www.centrepompidou.fr/en

Opening times:

11:00-23:00　 Closed on Tuesday

Museum Voorlinden Opening

Fig.1 Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar [foto: Pietro Savorelli]

The Museum Voorlinden (fig 1), located in Wassenaar, in the suburbs of The Hague, the Netherlands, opened on September 11. Wim Pijbes, the former head of the national Rijksmuseum was appointed General Director. Voorlinden will exhibit works from the largest private collection in the Netherlands, gathered over fifty years by Joop van Caldenborgh. A portion of the artworks was shown in 1995, but the opening of Voorlinden will finally allow the entire collection to be displayed.

The Largest Collection

Fig.2 Richard Serra (1938) Open Ended (2007-2008)
Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar [foto: Antoine van Kaam]

Ever since he purchased his first piece when he was 16 years old, Caldenborgh has been visiting exhibitions and galleries both in and out of the Netherlands and collecting art. His interests are broad, including paintings, sculptures, prints and photographs. The construction of Voorlinden allowed his largest piece, Richard Serra’s Open Ended (fig. 2), to be shown for the first time. The sculpture weighs a total of 216 tons and required a reinforcement of the museum floor. Also on display are the unrealistically large and exhaustively detailed recreations of people in Ron Mueck’s Couple under an Umbrella and Leandro Erlich’s Swimming Pool, where viewers can observe people in a pool.

Nature and Art

Voorlinden was built on a large and verdant 40-hectar plot of land. Transparent glass walls along part of the building give visitors a sense of being out in nature while actually inside. Surrounding the structure are sixty outdoor sculptures by Henry Moore, Sol LeWitt and others. Guided tours of the sculptures are also available.

Museum Voorlinden

Buurtweg 90
2244 AG Wassenaar
The Netherlands
http://www.voorlinden.nl/?lang=en

Opening times:

Open daily 11:00-17:00

The Essential Art Space Opened in January 2016

fig.1 ©AkzoNobel Art Foundation

The AkzoNobel Art Foundation is commemorating its 20th anniversary with an inaugural showing of its corporate collection. The exhibition is at The Essential Art Space, which opened in January 2016 on the ground floor of the corporate headquarters building in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. (fig.1)

AkzoNobel N.V.

The parent organization of the foundation, Akzonobel N.V., is the world’s largest paints and coatings company and a producer of specialty chemicals. Headquartered in Amsterdam with offices in 80 countries, its products are used not only for planes, ships and housing, but also widely for devices such as computers, cosmetics and foods.

Opening Exhibition: Culture of Colors

The AkzoNobel Art Foundation has been collecting contemporary art for twenty years. The collection includes a large number of avant-garde pieces such as groundbreaking paintings and video art, and 3D works built with unusual materials. The opening exhibit “Culture of Colors” introduces this unique collection through the concept of color, a motif that is common to both the parent company and its art. The works are categorized around though-provoking themes such as the Power of Pigments centered on Peter Laurens Mol’s The Total Amount that displays pigments from 100 years ago. Sublime Splendor gathers works that reflect the tone and texture, and fluidity of paints, and Colors of Identity shows portraits of members of various races.

The Essential Art Space is open to the public. Admission is free.

The Essential Art Space

Christian Neefestraat 2,
1077 WW Amsterdam
The Netherlands
http://www.artfoundation.akzonobel.com/en

Opening times:

Monday-Friday 10:00-17:00

Georgia O’Keeffe Exhibition

London’s Tate Modern is showing a retrospective of Georgia O’Keeffe. Inspired by cubism and other avant-garde art movements in Europe, American artists in the early 20th century were creating novel, cutting-edge forms of expression. O’Keeffe was one of the driving forces behind this period of unprecedented stimulating and dynamic change in the American art scene.

Influence of Modernist Photography

O’Keeffe debuted her work in New York a century ago in 1916 and continued a long painting career of seventy years. She had a narrow range of motifs that included flowers, landscapes and animal bones and depicted these in exaggerated magnified dimensions. Her characteristic compositions have been attributed to the influence of modernist photography. One individual who particularly shaped O’Keeffe’s works was her husband Alfred Stieglitz who ran a gallery devoted to avant-garde art from Europe and was regarded as the father of modernist photography.

Large-scale Flowers

O’Keeffe’s masterpiece Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (fig. 1) depicts a single jimson weed blossom. O’Keeffe magnified the plant to fill the canvas but portrayed the center of the flower and veins of the leaves simply, limiting the use of colors to blue, green and white in contrasting shades. By incorporating techniques of photography, she gave new expression to the traditional theme of a still life of a plant.

Primal Landscape of America

Following the death of Stieglitz, O’Keeffe moved to Abiquiú, a small town in New Mexico in the American southwest which O’Keeffe had fallen in love with and visited many times. There, O’Keeffe used as motifs for her work, the dry and desolate landscapes and stones and buffalo bones that she collected herself. Her eyesight began to deteriorate in the 1970s, but she continued to paint with the help of an assistant until her death at 98.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Until October 30. (Closed Mondays)

Tate Modern

Bankside
London
SE1 9TG, United Kingdom

+44 (0)20 7887 8888
http://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern

Opening times:

Sunday to Thursday 10:00-18:00
Friday to Saturday 10:00-22:00

The Douanier Rousseau

Fig.1 Henri Rousseau, dit Le Douanier Rousseau (1844-1910) La charmeuse de serpents, 1907 Huile sur toile, 167 x 189,5 cm Paris, musée d’Orsay © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

An exhibition examining the painter Henri Rousseau, who flourished from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, is underway at Musée d'Orsay in Paris. The exhibition interprets Rousseau through the theme of “archaism” and also presents the works of the avant-garde Montmartre painters like Picasso, who revered and recognized early on the talent of the elderly painter, as well as the followers of naïve art who carried out his legacy. By displaying these pieces together, one can probe the influence of Rousseau on modern art.

New Expressions

Henri Rousseau was called “the douanier” because he worked at the Paris tax office while he taught himself painting. His lack of formal training gave rise to an unrefined style that was regarded as a new form of expression and greatly influenced the avant-garde painters in Paris.

The New World of the Modern Era

While illustrating in a simple manner, Rousseau’s works incorporated new phenomena of the times. For example, in Portrait of Pierre Loti he painted factory chimneys spewing smoke in the background. In Myself, Portrait-Landscape, he depicted the elated atmosphere of the Paris Expo through ships flying expo flags and a hot air balloon. The exotic atmosphere he portrayed in his masterpieces such as La charmeuse de serpents (Fig. 1) and The Dream is an unprecedented landscape born out of the spread of colonialism. The young painters may have been drawn to these new representations of the new world.

The Douanier Rousseau Through July 17 (Closed Mondays)

Musée d'Orsay

1 Rue de la Légion d'Honneur
75007 Paris, France
+33 1 40 49 48 14
http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/

Opening times:

9:30-18:00 （Closed Mondays、Thursdays until 9:45 pm)

Paul Klee: Irony at Work

Fig.1 PAUL KLEE, Insula dulcamara, 1938, oil and colour glue paint on paper on hessian canvas, 88 x 176 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne

The largest retrospective since 1969 of Paul Klee is underway at the Centre Pompidou in France. Featuring some 250 important works, the exhibit casts a new light on the art and character of Klee through the theme of irony (fig 1).

Fig.2 PAUL KLEE, Der Held mit dem Flügel, 
Le Héros à l’aile, 1905, Etching, 25,7 x 16 cm,
Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne

The Concept of Irony

After studying at the art academy in Munich, Klee traveled to Italy. Viewing the perfected beauty of classical Greek art and the Renaissance, Klee concluded that if he pursued classical idealism, he would only be mimicking the past. Klee searched for his own, new means of expression and came upon the concept of “irony,” promoted by the philosopher of early German Romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel. Klee perceived irony as a new means for him to simultaneously express high ideals and criticism. “I served beauty by drawing her enemies (caricature, satire),” he wrote in his journal.

Can Man Fly?

The Hero with the Wing (fig. 2) depicts a sturdy man growing just one wing from his shoulder. Perhaps from numerous failed attempts to fly, his body is covered with wounds. Klee created this work two years after the Wright brothers succeeded in the world’s first manned flight. Klee was skeptical about people flying and expressed his sarcasm in this piece.

Behind the Poetic Works

The narrative power and poetic sentiment of Klee’s colors have always been cited as having a major role in the appeal of his paintings. But another layer of depth can be felt in his works by examining them from the viewpoint of irony.

Paul Klee: Irony at Work until August 1 (Museum is closed on Tuesdays).

Centre Pompidou

19 Rue Beaubourg
75004 Paris
France
http://www.centrepompidou.fr/en

Opening times:

11:00-23:00　 Closed on Tuesday

Easy Virtue. Prostitution in French Art, 1850-1910

Fig.2 Bed, after 1860, painted, gilt and carved wood, Ville de Neuilly-sur-Seine. Photo: Jan-Kees Steenman

At the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam a provocative exhibition on Parisian culture from the late 19th to 20th century is underway.

Fig.1 Edgar Degas, Absinthe, 1875–6, oil on canvas,
36 ¼ × 27 in., Paris, Musée d’Orsay

The Women Who Light Up the Parisian Night

The city of Paris underwent a dramatic change following the 19th century industrial revolution that improved the living environment and brought about the construction of the likes of the Paris Opera and the Eiffel Tower. Workers from all over France converged on the city to construct these magnificent buildings. And at night, those men flocked to women in search of pleasure.

At the time, Paris was full of prostitutes. The women ranged from call girls soliciting customers on the streets and in cafes to women working at brothels to high-class courtesans with homes provided by their upper class lovers. Even glamorous cabaret dancers or ballerinas at the Opera in the spotlight could be considered among them, since once their shows were over they effectively were the mistresses of their patron men.

Prostitutes From the View of the Artist

Artists took on the subject of prostitutes as a means of expression of modernité (the modern era and its culture), the term coined by the poet Charles Baudelaire. Edgar Degas painted a woman with a drink of absinthe in a café known for solicitations (fig. 1), and Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Picasso, Kees van Dongen and Frantisek Kupka all portrayed gaudily dressed women flirting with men in steamy cabarets.

Viewers are taken from the streets of Paris where men got their first glimpse of a woman or the cafes and dance halls where women sought customers, to the closed off world of brothels and other places of illicit affairs. In addition to artwork, the exhibition reveals the practical elements the women’s lives not depicted in the paintings such as a display of the bed of a high-class madam (fig. 2), small objects used by prostitutes and books to register and manage their labor.


Easy Virtue. Prostitution in French Art, 1850-1910 Until June 19

Van Gogh Museum

Museumplein 6
1071 DJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands
http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl

Opening times:

Until July 14       9:00-18:00 （Fridays until 22:00）
July 14 to Sept 4  9:00-19:00 （Fridays until 22:00 Saturdays until 21:00）
Sept 5 to Nov 6    9:00-18:00 （Fridays until 22:00）
Other dates          9:00-17:00 （Fridays until 22:00)