International Artist Day 2022

On International Artists Day can we all spare some time to look at art? In our busy lives sometimes, the loveliest things get left out because we have no time for them. Tuesday 25^th October is International Artists Day. If you can visit a museum or exhibition in a gallery or just look at art online, you will be taking part.

Splash by Oenone Hammersley.

With so many interesting exhibitions on at the moment we are spoiled for choice. These are some of the exhibitions I would like to see in New York ‘Spasms of Reinvention’ at the Jewish Museum an exhibition focusing on the early 1960’s showing artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Marjorie Strider.

During the timeframe explored in this exhibition, epoch-changing events—such as the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963), and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (1963)—fundamentally altered the social and political landscape of New York City, and the nation. An unprecedented economic boom broadened the array of available consumer goods, and an expanding media network introduced new voices into increasingly urgent conversations about race, class, and gender. Emerging in this context, a generation of New York-based painters, sculptors, dancers, filmmakers, and poets rose to prominence, incorporating material directly from their urban surroundings and producing works that were as rich and complex as the city itself.

Marjorie Strider Low Tide.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is exhibiting a Cubism and Trompe L’oeil exhibition closing on 6^th November. This exhibition offers a radically new view of Cubism by demonstrating its engagement with the age-old tradition of trompe l’oeil painting. A self-referential art concerned with the nature of representation, trompe l’oeil (“deceive the eye”) beguiles the viewer with perceptual and psychological games that complicate definitions of truth and fiction. Many qualities seen as distinct to Cubism were, in fact, exploited by trompe l’oeil specialists over the centuries: the emphatically flat picture plane; the invasion of the “real” world into the pictorial one; the mimicry of materials; and the inclusion of new print media and advertising replete with coded references to artist, patron, and current events. In a contest of creative one-upmanship, the Cubists Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso both parodied classic trompe l’oeil devices and invented new ways of confounding the viewer. Along with Cubist paintings, sculptures, and collages, the exhibition will present canonical examples of European and American trompe l’oeil painting from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.

Pablo Picasso Factory Horta de Ebbo.

Also at the Met is another interesting exhibition ‘The Tudors Art and Majesty in Renaissance England’. I love Tudor paintings so this is a must for me.

At the Museum of Modern Art ‘Picasso in Fontainebleau’ is showing in a complementary exhibition to the Cubism, but if you adore this style of painting this exhibition will be on your list.

The Guggenheim is showing Alex Katz ‘Gathering’ which looks interesting and an American artist I don’t know. His painting is reminiscent of David Hockney’s work so I will be visiting this exhibition.

Gathering by Alex Katz.

In Washington DC, the National Gallery is showing ‘Sargent and Spain’ through January 2023.

Celebrated as the leading society portraitist of his era, John Singer Sargent influenced a generation of American painters. His personal captivation with Spain resulted in a remarkable body of work that documents his extensive travels from the north to the south and to the island of Majorca. Over three decades Sargent responded to the country’s rich culture by producing landscapes and marine scenes, pictures of everyday life, and architectural studies, as well as sympathetic portrayals of the locals he encountered. For the first time, Sargent and Spain presents approximately 120 dazzling oils, watercolors, and drawings, many of which are rarely exhibited. Also featured from the artist’s travels are some 28 never-before published photographs, several almost certainly taken by Sargent himself.

John Singer Sargent Spanish Fountain.

At The Phillips Collection in Washington DC there is an exhibition of ‘Italian Impressionists’ showing from 12^th November to 12^th February 2023. I personally can’t wait for this unusual exhibition.

The Phillips Collection, in collaboration with the Pinacoteca Giuseppe De Nittis, the City of Barletta, Italy, and the Puglia Region (Italy), is organizing the first exhibition in the US devoted to the work of Giuseppe De Nittis (1846-1884), an Italian painter whose career flourished in Impressionist Paris in the 1870s and 1880s. The exhibition will only be shown at the Phillips where it will feature approximately 70 artworks. Although not well known outside of Italy, De Nittis is a central figure to the aesthetic and institutional upheavals of 1870s Paris. His urban scenes of Paris feature innovative arrangements and plein air subjects painted with a detailed realism that depicts a sophisticated and economically booming city—a choice unique to De Nittis’s work. New research will be presented in the exhibition about De Nittis’s friendships with Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet, and his early collaborations in Naples with a young Gustave Caillebotte. Work from all periods of De Nittis’s career will be featured along with select works by his most important artist friends in Paris.

Breakfast in the Garden Giuseppe DE Nittis.

In London I sadly missed the Cezanne exhibition at the Tate Modern on now until 12^th March. I have seen many Cezanne exhibitions in my life, but I love his paintings so very sad to miss this. If you are in London, it’s a must see.

Forest Floor by Cezanne.

I was also sorry to miss Lucien Freud’s ‘Plant Portraits’ being exhibited at the Garden Museum in Lambeth now on until 5th March 2023. I much prefer his strangled and sometimes sinister looking plants to his nudes, but they are all on show in a major Lucien Freud exhibition at the National Gallery on now until 22^nd January so lucky you if you live in London.