Ingres's "Comtesse d’Haussonville" goes to California

PASADENA, CA. - The Norton Simon Museum will present a special installation of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s stunning portrait of Comtesse d’Haussonville, 1845, on loan from The Frick Collection in New York. This portrait of the comtesse, a young woman known as Louise, Princess de Broglie, is the first loan from the Frick in an art exchange program between the venerable New York institution and the Norton Simon foundations. This captivating, large-scale work has never before traveled to California. Two related preparatory drawings from the Frick’s collections will accompany the work.

“The Frick Collection is one of the world’s most acclaimed art institutions and was especially admired and respected by Norton Simon,” says Walter Timoshuk, President of the Norton Simon Museum. “This exchange program not only brings some of the Frick’s marvelous works to the West Coast, but also honors Mr. Simon’s esteem for this exceptional institution.”

Located on Fifth Avenue, The Frick Collection is housed in the former mansion of industrialist Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) and is home to an internationally celebrated collection of Western fine and decorative arts, with works by Bellini, Fragonard, Gainsborough, Goya, Holbein, Ingres, Manet, Monet, Rembrandt, Renoir, Titian, Turner, Velazquez, Vermeer, Whistler, and others. “We are delighted more to form this special exchange with the Norton Simon Museum, whose superb works very rarely leave Pasadena,” says Anne L. Poulet, Director of The Frick Collection. “And what a pleasure it will be to view the Comtesse in a new setting—the Norton Simon’s beautiful and serene galleries.”

Comtesse d’Haussonville will be on view at the Norton Simon Museum from October 30, 2009, through January 25, 2010. Two preparatory drawings by Ingres will accompany the painting—one a direct study, executed around 1843 or 1844, which shows this same pose and his process in dealing with the folds of her elegant dress; the other a preparatory detail drawing for an 1839 commission for his monumental work, The Golden Age. All three works will hang alongside the Norton Simon’s portrait of Baron Joseph-Pierre Vialetés de Mortarieu, also by Ingres. A series of lectures and educational and family programs will be organized around the installation. A related exhibition, “Gaze: Portraiture after Ingres,” runs from October 30 through April 5, 2010.

Comtesse d’Haussonville
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780–1867) left behind a rich and varied body of work created during his long life. While many of his most known paintings are historical and religious depictions, his series of portraits, many of them of well-born, beautiful women, are among his most captivating. Ingres began his portrait of Louise d’Haussonville (1818–1882) in 1842, when he was 62 and the comtesse was 24. The picture shows the lovely young woman standing before a hearth in a well appointed room, a mirror on the wall reflecting the back of her head and neck. She wears an elegant, Delft-blue silk dress, its folds and details resplendent, a few pieces of gold jewelry, and an ornate red ribbon and tortoiseshell comb in her hair. One arm rests across her waist, the other is bent upward, and her hand is tucked under her chin. The comtesse looks directly ahead, and her slight smile and open expression invite the viewer into this lovely scene.

“Her contemplative pose, with hand to chin, is a motif Ingres revisits time and time again in portraits, history paintings, and surviving sketches,” says Carol Togneri, Chief Curator at the Norton Simon Museum. “The opportunity to have this beautiful portrait, as well as two working drawings that show his interest in this important detail, allows us to consider Ingres’s relationship and homage to antique art.”

http://www.nortonsimon.org/
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Artist: Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington and the Lincoln Sculptures

When we lived in Bethel this is how the Lincoln sculpture looked in the downtown I always loved looking at it. Then when we moved to the mid-west and stumbled upon it again in Illinois I now think of it as something I was supposed to see and remember.

Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington (March 10, 1876 – October 4 ,1973) was a prolific and innovative American sculptor. She was a master of naturalistic animal sculpture. Particularly noted for her equestrian statues she was active over a period of 70 years.

Huntington is recognized as one of America's finest animaliers, whose naturalistic works helped to bridge the gap between the traditional styles of the 1800s and the abstract styles of the mid-twentieth century. Her prominence also enabled other female artists to succeed. Her innovations in technique and display, as exhibited through her aluminum statues in Brookgreen Gardens, guarantee her place in the annals of art history.

During the 1940s and 1950s, she was increasingly distressed by modern art and what she considered a tasteless machine age. However, despite widespread public interest in abstract sculpture, Mrs. Huntington continued to win recognition and awards. She did her last equestrian statue when she was 91.

Huntington, along with her husband, Archer Milton Huntington, helped found nearly 20 museums and wildlife preserves as well as America's first sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina.

In anticipation of the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth in 2009, the 2006 Springfield City Ornament depicts Abraham Lincoln:On the Prairie, the sculpture at the entrance to New Salem where he lived as a young man. The sculpture by Anna Hyatt Huntington portrays young Abe on horseback, reading a law book. Springfield artist Stan Squires interpreted the statue for the ornament design, silhouetting Lincoln and his horse between wisps of prairie grass and a split-rail fence.

Artist: Hubert Robert and some of his Bridges

Hubert Robert, French artist, born in Paris. (May 22, 1733 – April 15, 1808)

Hubert Robert spent eleven years in Rome; after the young artist's official residence at the French Academy in Rome ran out, he supported himself by works he produced for visiting connoisseurs like the abbé de Saint-Non, who took Robert to Naples in April 1760 to visit the ruins of Pompeii. The marquis de Marigny, director of the Bâtiments du Roi kept abreast of his development in correspondence with Natoire, director of the French Academy, who urged the pensionnaires to sketch out-of-doors, from nature: Robert needed no urging; drawings from his sketchbooks document his travels: Villa d'Este, Caprarola. Robert spent his time in the company of young artists in the circle of Piranesi, whose capricci of romantically overgrown ruins influenced him so greatly that he gained the nickname Robert des ruines.The albums of sketches and drawings he assembled in Rome supplied him with motifs that he worked into paintings throughout his career.

His success on his return to Paris in 1765 was rapid: the following year he was received by the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, with a Roman capriccio, The Port of Rome, ornamented with different Monuments of Architecture, Ancient and Modern. During the Revolution, he was arrested in October 1793. He survived his detentions at Sainte-Pélagie and Saint-Lazare, by painting vignettes of prison life on plates, before he was freed at the fall of Robespierre.Robert narrowly escaped the guillotine when through error another prisoner died in his place. Subsequently he was placed on the committee of five in charge of the new national museum at the Palais du Louvre.

Le Pont Sur Le Torrent, painted in the mid-1780s by Hubert Robert, measures over 20 feet wide by 13 feet high, and carries an estimate of $2 million - $3 million. Originally commissioned by the Duc de Luynes for the dining room of his mansion in Paris, in 1925 it was acquired at auction by William Randolph Hearst and once decorated the beachfront castle that the newspaper baron purchased in late 1927 in Sands Point, Long Island as a retreat for his wife Millicent. The awe-inspiring artwork has not been seen in public in more than 50 years.

Artist: Hubert Robert Title: The Bridge Confiscated Collection: Sel 169 (previously Sel 156) (Seligmann, Paris)

This work was seized by the Nazis from Edouard Alphonse James de Rothschild. In 1940, the Baron and his wife escaped to Lisbon, Portugal right after the Nazi occupation of France. From there they were able to continue on their way to New York City, New York. It is there that they waited until the end of World War II to return to their homeland of Austria. But before his escape to the United States, James and his wife did their best to hide their massive art collection worth millions from the Nazi's. He hid most of his collection somewhere on the Haras de Meautry farm and at his Château de Reux estate. But in 1940, the Nazi's caught up with the Rothschild's treasure, raiding and looting everything in sight.

In this image Hubert Robert draws a rare view of Paris and depicts its most iconic building, the cathedral of Notre Dame. It is shown from the unusual angle beneath the Pont au double also known as the Pont de l'Hôtel Dieu (replaced in 1883 with the current bridge). The cathedral is seen from the east with its two Gothic towers and flying buttresses. The imposing monumentality of the cathedral is tempered by the bridge which takes up nearly half the sheet. The main protagonists, the three fishermen in the lower left corner, while diminutive in comparison to the architecture do not fail to capture the viewer's eye either.

Strangely, and perhaps tellingly, Robert chose to emphasize the bridge rather than the Gothic church. Bridges, real or imagined were a frequent motif in Robert's oeuvre. Two paintings by him depict the transformation of two bridges in Paris: The demolition of houses on the Pont Notre-Dame in 1786 (Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle), and The demolition of houses on the Pont-au-Change in 1788 (Paris, Musée Carnavalet).

For a full discussion of bridges in Robert's work see Hubert Robert 1733-1808 und die Brücken von Paris (exhib. cat., Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, 1991).

Chagall Windows are Back at the Art Institute in Chicago

After five years out of sight, one of the Art Institute of Chicago's most popular works is back.

Belarusian artist Marc Chagall's "America Windows," dismantled in 2005 for safe keeping during the lengthy, vibration-heavy construction of the Modern Wing, reopens to the public.
Remember Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane's escapade into Chicago circa-1986?

It's hard to forget Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , and now a set of stained glass windows that figured into that trio's Art Institute trip are back in Chicago's conscience.
Chagall gave the deep cobalt blue windows to the Art Institute in 1977 to commemorate the American Bicentennial in honor of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley who died in 1976. The work is a nod to Chicago's support of public art in the '60s and '70s and features six panels depicting freedom of expression. Chagall came to stained glass just around his 70th birthday and continued until he reached 85 years when he had become truly excited with this new experience and his genuine love for the windows is most touchingly related by himself in numerous publications.

"I think we naturally respond to color," Douglas W. Druick, the museum's Searle Curator and chair of the Department of Medieval to Modern European Painting and Sculpture said. "Not only does one read the stained glass as a two-dimensional experience in windows, but one is brought into the art by the light spilling through the glass and bringing color into the room in which you're experiencing it."
But even that experience can be marred over time. After nearly 30 years on view overlooking McKinlock Court, the glass windows, subject to slight condensation, had attracted atmospheric deposits of oil and calcium carbonate, which appeared as a sheer white film dulling their filtered, colored light. Just as a dirty windshield acts as a screen from light, Druick said, the brilliance of colors in Chagall's windows was being muted.
Seizing on the opportunity provided by the 36-paneled windows' removal during the lengthy construction, the museum's conservation staff investigated various methods of cleaning, and, beginning about two years ago, the restorative work began. Associate Conservator Emily Heye was at the helm.
"Imagine large Q-tips and lots of time spent carefully rinsing after the fact," Heye explained via telephone of one of the steps of the cleaning process. Simultaneous to Heye's immaculate restorative work, a new exhibition space was designed and constructed for the windows in the east end of the museum's Arthur Rubloff building. Now reinstalled and framed tightly in the way that Chagall had intended, which Druick says "focuses on the windows in a particular way," the windows are ready for the museum's busy holiday season.

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From Breaking News Chicago - October 28, 2010 9:52 AM
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Source:http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local-beat/Art-Institute-Welcomes-Back-Famous-Windows-106072508.html#ixzz16Unopehp

The Public Warhol in a Public Square

Although winter hasn’t even started, there is already a lineup of public art projects scheduled for New York this spring. The Public Art Fund will be installing three sculpture exhibitions: at Union Square, City Hall Park and Doris C. Freedman Plaza, at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street.

“These aren’t site-specific installations; they are site-responsive,” said Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund, the nonprofit organization that presents art around the city. “They are all linked because they use New York City as a context.”

Perhaps the most surprising will be a 10-foot-tall bronze sculpture of Andy Warhol in Union Square (March 30 to Oct. 2). This will be only the second time the Public Art Fund has installed art there: the last project was “Woman’s Work” in 1993, the artist Rhonda Roland Shearer’s eight bronze sculptures of women scrubbing toilets, vacuuming and shopping for groceries while clutching squirming children to their bosoms.

But the New York artist Rob Pruitt chose this bustling area for the Warhol sculpture, called “The Andy Monument.” He had a particular corner in mind, at 17th Street and Broadway, just outside the building that once housed Warhol’s Factory. The sculpture depicts Warhol as he looked in the 1970s, in his signature fright wig, blue jeans and a tweed jacket. He is posed with a camera around his neck, carrying a shopping bag full of issues of Interview magazine, the publication he helped found.

“It’s conceived as a classical monument although it’s very contemporary,” Mr. Baume said. “It’s a real public Andy from the period where he would stand in Union Square giving out the magazines.”

By contrast, the London-based sculptor Eva Rothschild has claimed the plaza at the entrance to Central Park for a delicate work that she said would take “the form of a multidirectional arch.” The piece, which will be on view March 1 to Aug. 28, will rise nearly 20 feet and spill over the center of the plaza. Fashioned from red, green and black steel tubing four inches in diameter, it will echo the branches of trees in the park and be, as Ms. Rothschild put it, “another gateway between two different worlds of urban experience.”

Back downtown, in City Hall Park, more than 20 sculptures by Sol LeWitt will be installed from May 25 through Dec. 2. LeWitt, who died in 2007, was known for his Minimalist geometric work, and Mr. Baume has assembled large-scale pieces dating from the 1960s through 2006, including many that will be seen in this country for the first time. They will come from private collections and museums both here and abroad.

“There hasn’t been a career overview of his structures,” Mr. Baume said.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: November 25, 2010 - New York Times