Category Archives: 20e eeuw

Kees van Dongen. Singer, Laren

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Van Dongen is een van de meest bekende kunstenaars van de twintigste eeuw, samen met grootheden als Matisse, Braque en Picasso. Hij was enorm ambitieus. In de tentoonstelling krijgt u een compleet beeld van de kennis en kunde van deze publiekslieveling van Singer Laren. U wordt stap voor stap meegenomen op de weg die Van Dongen aflegt richting succes.

Welt in Aufruhr. Chagall – Schirn, Frankfurt, Duitsland

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Marc Chagall (1887–1985) gilt als einer der bedeu­tends­ten Künst­ler der Moderne. Die SCHIRN widmet ihm nach 15 Jahren erst­mals wieder eine groß ange­legte Ausstel­lung in Deutsch­land: CHAGALL. WELT IN AUFRUHR beleuch­tet eine bislang wenig bekannte, aber wich­tige Seite seines Schaf­fens – die Werke der 1930er- und 1940er-Jahre, in denen sich seine farben­frohe Palette zuneh­mend verdun­kelt.

Als jüdi­scher Maler war Chagall durch das natio­nal­so­zia­lis­ti­sche Regime einer exis­ten­ti­el­len Bedro­hung ausge­setzt. Bereits in den frühen 1930er-Jahren verar­bei­tete er den immer aggres­si­ver werden­den Anti­se­mi­tis­mus und emigrierte 1941 schließ­lich in die USA. Sein künst­le­ri­sches Schaf­fen in diesen Jahren berührt zentrale Themen wie Iden­ti­tät, Heimat und Exil. Mit rund 60 eindring­li­chen Gemäl­den, Papier­ar­bei­ten und Kostü­men zeich­net die Ausstel­lung die Suche des Künst­lers nach einer Bild­spra­che im Ange­sicht von Vertrei­bung und Verfol­gung nach. In der Zusam­men­schau ermög­licht die SCHIRN eine neue und äußerst aktu­elle Perspek­tive auf das Œuvre eines der wich­tigs­ten Künst­ler des 20. Jahr­hun­derts.

Niki de Saint Phalle – Schirn, Frankfurt, Duitsland

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Altijd fijn om een expositie van Niki de St Phalle te vinden. En deze was dan ook nog eens uitgebreid en divers. Wat een verrassing. Enkele werken had ik elders al gezien (in Hannover bijvoorbeeld, of in Mons, in België of Dortmund) maar ze zijn altijd weer even indrukwekkend en ‘food for thought’ bij het leven van De St Phalle.

Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg – Berlijn, Duitsland

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Kleine maar fijne expositie van het Berggruen Museum in de Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg.

While the Museum Berggruen is closed for major renovations, and a large section of the collection is on tour, the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg has made museum space available on it’s first upper level to show a small but representative selection of Berggruen works. In addition to Alberto Giacometti’s Katze (Cat, 1951), which found its place inside the Stüler building entrance, works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne now hang on the walls around Giacometti’s Große stehende Frau III (Large Standing Woman III, 1960).

Early Contact with the Surrealists

Three of these artists – Giacometti, Picasso and Klee – were in contact with the Surrealists, who are now the main emphasis of the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg. In works such as Klee’s Frau R. auf Reisen im Süden (Frau R. Travelling in the South, 1924) and Picasso’s Bildnis Nusch (Portrait of Nusch, 1937), the eyes ‒ which the Surrealists paid special attention to like hardly another part of the body ‒ are the focus of the images.

Portraits of Women

Another small group of works takes portraits of women as its subject: Cézanne’s Junges Mädchen mit offenem Haar (Young Girl with Loose Hair, 1873‒74), Picasso’s Frau in einem Sessel (Woman in an Armchair, 1939), Klee’s Rotes Mädchen mit gelbem Topfhut (Red Girl with Yellow Pot Hat, 1919) and Matisse’s portrait of Lorette (1917).

Hans Hartung. Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlijn, Duitsland

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Mooie expo in het derde ‘filiaal’ van de Max Hetzler Galerie.

 

An artistic innovator, Hans Hartung (1904–1989) is renowned for his contribution to European post-war painting. Having already worked as an abstract painter before the Second World War, he developed a dynamic gestural style after 1945, and became one of the most important representatives of European Informel. His work is characterised by its spontaneous, emblematic compositions, which explore the interplay between colour field and line.

This exhibition presents an opportunity to rediscover Hartung’s extraordinary journey out of Germany and through Europe, arriving in Paris in 1936 where he fought against Nazism during the Second World War. Becoming severely wounded in battle in 1944, Hartung thought himself ruined in the aftermath of a traumatic conflict. However, in the 1950s, he became a central figure of abstraction on an international scale, and in 1960 he won the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale, with a room dedicated to his work in the French pavilion.

In the first comprehensive show in Germany since Hartung’s 2007 solo exhibition Hans Hartung: Spontaneous Calculus, Pictures, Photographs, Film 1922–1989, at the Museum der Bildenden Künste in his native city of Leipzig, works spanning the artist’s oeuvre are on view: from the figurative watercolours and Informel ink drawings of the 1920s to the explosive aerosol paintings of the 1980s, and even his final painting T1989-N10, 1989, created one week after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Comprising about fifty works and a selection of memorabilia from his archives, this exhibition presents the exceptional variety of Hartung’s work, marked by a skillful blend of fervour and mastery of gesture.

Karel Appel. Encounter in spring and what follows – Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlijn, Duitsland

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Bijzondere werken van Karel Appel zoals ik ze eigenlijk nog niet eerder zag. Een eye-opener dus.

Encounter in Spring and what follows, an exhibition of work by Karel Appel (1921–2006), centring around a selection of paintings spanning from 1958 until 2006.

A founding figure of the avant-garde group CoBrA (1948–1951), Appel began his career in the aftermath of the Second World War. Over the course of six decades, the artist experimented widely, drawing on sources as diverse as folk art, outsider art and Jazz’s spirit of improvisation, and working across painting, sculpture, drawing, and stage design. Distinguishable for his astonishing capacity to innovate, Appel never settled in a signature style, media or subject. Alternating between abstraction and figuration, he adopted a material-oriented approach in his practice and promoted a genuine form of expression.

The exhibition’s starting point is the monumental and mesmeric painting Rencontre au printemps (Encounter in Spring), which was commissioned in 1958 for the inauguration of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. To mark the occasion, UNESCO invited Appel – among luminaries including Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Roberto Matta, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, and Pablo Picasso – to make a contribution. Appel painted the ambitious work, not on-site or in his Paris studio, which couldn’t accommodate its size, but in Sam Francis’ studio in Villejuif. He had, by this point, just returned from his first trip to New York for his second exhibition at Martha Jackson Gallery and was profoundly marked by his encounter with the painters of the New York School. As such, Encounter in Spring constitutes Appel’s first painting on such a momentous scale and remains one of the highlights of the UNESCO art collection.

Appel executed a sister painting, Encounter of Worlds, of the same size and year, which is in the collection of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Key works in his oeuvre, the two paintings introduce a pictorial language that comes very close to abstraction and is animated by the same spirit of Action Painting. While they might seem a far cry from CoBrA, founded only ten years earlier in Paris, both imply, at their essence, its rallying creed for freedom and spontaneity.

As its title suggests, the sweeping abstract gestures of Encounter in Spring seem to unfurl beneath the viewer’s gaze into an abundance of forms found in nature and landscapes. Treading the threshold between impression and expression, Appel consistently associated real-world experience with what is visible on the canvas and what to a cursory glimpse might appear abstract. This liminal quality binds the works that comprise this exhibition. Viewed in chronological sequence, they reveal the overarching influence of Appel’s discovery of American painting on his first visit to the continent in 1957, and beyond. This is strikingly evident in the richly textured surface of Shattered World, 1960, with its thick impasto paint that appears to have been applied directly from the tube to the left side of the canvas, as much as the primitively rendered face which emerges from the crude brushstrokes and vibrant palette of Visage-Paysage no.4, 1977.

In the Trees series from 1979, Appel’s formerly expressive free lines and solid areas of monochrome brushwork are here substituted for simplified, nearly analytical structures made from a sequence of short parallel brush marks which converge on ascending, vertical formats. The artist had previously come cross enlarged reproductions of details from paintings by Vincent van Gogh – a discovery which paved the way for this new sense of expression, merging discipline with spontaneity. In the late ’90s, works including Up to the Sky no.3, 1998, and Birth of a Landscape, 1999, present densely animated, near-impressionist landscapes, which pulsate with thick swathes of paint. By the 2000s, Appel’s idiom had evolved once more into looser compositions of colour and form: works such as Nimble Acrobat, 2000, and Thought’s Boomerang, 2000, appear light and airy, with large swathes of raw canvas still visible, while in Evening Forest, 2003, real wood branches are embedded on the surface of the work. Brimming with creative innovation, this exhibition encapsulates the work of an artist whose imaginative and experimental approach to the painterly medium never ceased.

Martin Klippenberger. Heute denken, morgen fertig. – Galerie Max Hetzler

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heute denken – morgen fertig, an exhibition of works by Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997) from the 1980s and 1990s from private collections. In addition to paintings, sculptures and drawings by Kippenberger, the exhibition will present photographs by Wilhelm Schürmann and Andrea Stappert.
Mooie expositie in een grote, lichte, ruime expositieruimte.

Basquiat. The Retrospective – Albertina Museum, Wenen, Oostenrijk

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Virtually no other artist comes anywhere close to being as representative of the 1980s and that decade’s pulsating New York art scene as does the brilliantly exceptional artistic phenomenon that was Jean-Michel Basquiat. Born in New York as the son of a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother in 1960, he ran away from home at age 17—initially making his way as a graffiti artist and at times even living on the street. It was not long, however, before he began his rapid ascent. Basquiat’s meteoric career can seem something like fast-forwarding through a movie filled with sequences where the principal character interacts with his era’s most significant artists, including David Bowie and Madonna. Moreover, Basquiat also maintained an inspiring friendship with Andy Warhol. His paintings were soon in extremely high demand, appreciating rapidly in value—and by 1982, he had become both the youngest-ever participant in documenta 7 and the first world-famous artist with Afro-American-Caribbean roots. Basquiat was unable to withstand the challenge posed by this quick success for long, however, and he died of a drug overdose in 1988.

Basquiat’s oeuvre is more current than ever and remains every bit as pioneering and visionary as it was back then. His works turn a spotlight both on African heritage and on problematic hierarchies in society, with omnipresent racism being the theme that he found most important and personally relevant. As an eccentric outsider and an exploited superstar of his times, Basquiat now stands among contemporary art’s most significant key figures.

Phyllida Barlow. LWL-Museum – Münster, Duitsland

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Om de expo van Andy Warhol in het Picassomuseum in Münster niet mis te lopen, trok ik op een tweede vrijdag van de maand naar de Duitse stad. Bijkomend voordeel: op die avond is de ingang van het LWL-Museum gratis. En omdat de expo van Phyllida Barlow erg klein was, vond ik dat prima. Het enorme bouwwerk in een koepel van het oude gedeelte van het museum pronkt roze in de grote ruimte. Een bezoekje waard, maar even more so doordat de vast collectie toch weer anders ingericht was dan de laatse keer dat ik hier was. Voldoende nieuws voor een mooi bezoek dus.

Andy Warhol. Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso – Münster, Duitsland

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Een erg fijne voorstelling van Andy Warhol in het Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso in Münster, in Duitsland. Volgens mij wisselt het museum nogal eens van naam, maar dat doet niets af aan de altijd bijzondere expo’s die ze organiseren. De huidige, met veel grafische prints van Warhol, is erg de moeite waard. Anderhalve verdieping vol met posters van bijv. Elisabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe en zelfs Queen Elisabeth de Tweede. En dat is behoorlijk toevallig, nu ze net een dag of wat geleden is overleden. Blij dat ik deze expo nog mee heb kunnen pakken.