Gauguin’s ‘will and testament’ - Robilant + Voena · Gauguin’s ‘will and testament ......
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32 THE ART NEWSPAPER Number 265, February 2015 EXHIBITIONS Continental Europe Gauguin’s ‘will and testament’ The French painter is the subject of a retrospective that includes important rediscovered sculpture GAUGUIN: MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON. DAHL: NASJONALMUSEET FOR KUNST, ARKITEKTUR OG DESIGN, OSLO. FRIEDRICH © STAATLICHE KUNSTSAMMLUNGEN DRESDEN, PHOTO JURGEN KARPINSKI POST-IMPRESSIONISM Riehen/Basel. The Fondation Beyeler’s Paul Gauguin retrospective will be the most ambitious exhibition mounted at the museum since its establishment in 1997. After six years of work, the museum has secured the loan of 50 paintings and sculptures from 13 coun- tries. It is being billed as the greatest exhibition of Gauguin’s work since “Gauguin: Tahiti” was held at the Grand Palais in Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (MFA) in 2003-04. Raphaël Bouvier, the Beyeler show’s co-curator, wants to present Gauguin as “one of the forerunners of Modern art”. The exhibition will also fill a gap, since Gauguin is the most important Post-Im- pressionist artist still missing from the Beyeler’s permanent collection. Although the Basel show is covering the artist’s full career, it will concentrate on his period in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, from 1891 until his death in 1903. It was there that he did his greatest work. In Polynesia he sought an exotic world, combining nature and culture, ROMANTICISM Dresden. The works of the Romantic landscape artists Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and his younger contempo- rary Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857) easily lend themselves to a study in sim- ilarities and differences. While Friedrich was born in Greifswald, on the Baltic coast (then in Swedish Pomerania) and Dahl in the Norwegian town of Bergen, then in the Kingdom of Denmark, both spent their adult lives and careers in Dresden, the German capital of the Duchy of Saxony. Both had attended the Academy of Art in Copenhagen and even shared a house and studio for almost 20 years. Yet each was distinct in significant ways. Friedrich’s trajectory was already falling by the time the 30-year-old Dahl, on the threshold of his career, moved to Dresden in 1818. Friedrich had con- siderable support and patronage from the Prussian royal family and the stamp of approval of none other than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but because of his support for bourgeois, liberal and democratic ideas, the artist fell out of favour during the repressive years fol- lowing the Congress of Vienna in 1814- 15. He was a member of the Academy of Art from 1816, but when the incumbent FOLKLORE St Moritz. Like the ancient Greeks, the Swiss have their own myth of a seduc- tive nymph, luring hapless youths to their deaths with her enchanting looks. La Diavolezza was a mountain-dwelling fairy whose beauty mesmerised young huntsmen into following her into the snowy unknown, never to be seen again. She achieved such renown that a moun- tain in the Engadin area of the Swiss Alps was named after her, and a nearby glacier after her most famous victim, Aratsch. The artist Pierre Huyghe and the architects François Roche and Camille Lacadee of the architect collective New-Territories are venturing out into this icy landscape to create What Could Happen, a large-scale installation on the banks of Lej Nair, a frozen lake, which, according to legend, emits a mysterious humming sound. Visitors will be trans- ported from St Moritz to this remote site by an Alpine train dating from 1910. A film of the three-day event, which has been organised by Giorgio Pace Pro- jects, will be shown at the Luma Founda- tion, Arles, in late spring. Culture seekers The Engadin valley, and St Mortiz in particular, is drawing a growing number of culture seekers on top of its steady stream of nature lovers and skiers. The contemporary art festival St Moritz Art Masters, which takes place from 21 to 30 August, is now in its eighth edition, and established dealers including Robilant + Voena, Gmurzynska and Karsten Greve have all opened spaces in the luxurious ski resort. It has also been reported that the dealer Vito Schnabel, son of the artist Julian, is taking over Bruno Bis- chofberger’s space in the town; its final show is of works by the Czech artist Jiri Georg Dokoupil (until 7 April). Other highlights nearby this month include shows by Rolf Sachs and Olivier Mosset at Andrea Caratsch, St Moritz (until 7 April), and Kimsooja at Galerie Tschudi, Zuoz (until 14 March). Julia Michalska • What Could Happen, Lej Nair, St Moritz, 26-28 February Art lures skiers off the slopes War stories Artists, in their pursuit of truth, have often turned to the subject of war. In “Fight History”, the second show in the three-part series “Crisis of History” at the Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam (6 February-9 March), ten art- ists confront the violence that has erupted across the Middle East. The Iraq-born artist Wafaa Bilal, for example, critiques Western action in Iraq through the adaptation of an American video game, and Cairo-based Nermine Hammam’s photography captures the disillusionment and isolation of individ- uals in post-revolution Egypt (below, Codes of My Kin, 2012). The show is supported by the Mondriaan Fund and Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, among others. L.H. In brief mysticism and eroticism, and dream and reality. The most important loan will be the monumental (nearly four metres wide) Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897-98, which is being lent by the MFA and which very rarely travels. Martin Schwander, the show’s co-curator, describes the work as Gauguin’s “artistic last will and tes- tament”. In return, the Beyeler is offer- ing a group of important Picasso loans to the MFA, although this has not yet been announced. Russia’s two major museums, the Hermitage Museum and the Pushkin Museum, are each lending three important paintings. These include the Pushkin’s Rupe Rupe, 1899, which has only rarely been lent since its arrival in Moscow more than a century ago. To help secure the Russian loans, the Beyeler is sponsoring the current Pushkin exhibition “Paul Klee: Not a Day Without a Line” (until 1 March), which includes loans from the Basel museum and the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. Important private loans include three paintings from 1902, the year before Gauguin’s death: Riders on the Beach II, (owner unidentified, but once in the Niarchos collection), The Incantation (courtesy of Ordovas gallery, London) and Bathers from an unnamed collection. Gauguin’s sculptures are often overlooked. However, his ceramics and carved wood scupltures are highly inventive, revealing a different side to his work. They had a powerful influence on such 20th-century artists as Pablo Picasso. Bouvier says: “It was Gauguin’s sculp- tures, their expressive power and their archaic air, that left their mark on Picasso’s first essays in the medium.” Among the exciting rediscoveries in the Beyeler show will be Gau- guin’s Thérèse, 1902, a carved figure of a stylised Polynesian woman. Sam Keller, the Beyeler’s director, had always wanted to include Thérèse, but it had disappeared around 1980, and was since hidden away in a private London collection. Keller spotted it at Frieze Masters last October, on the stand of the London gallery Lefevre Fine Art, which is lending the sculpture for the show. The haunting figure of the woman is said to depict a servant of the Marque- san Catholic bishop, Joseph Martin, who Gauguin believed had sexual relations with his employees. Sadly, the pendant sculpture of the bishop, Père Paillard (Father Lechery), 1902, now at the National Gallery of Art, Washing- ton, DC, is not being borrowed, so the bishop and the servant will not be reunited. The Fondation Beyeler is the only venue for the show, since securing the major loans for a second institution would have proved too difficult. The museum is expecting around 300,000 visitors, which is likely to make it Switzer- land’s most popular exhibition of the year. “Paul Gauguin” is supported by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis. Martin Bailey • Paul Gauguin, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 8 February-28 June Compare and contrast How the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and Johan Christian Dahl diverge professor of landscape died in 1824, Friedrich was passed over for the post (which was given, ironically, to Dahl). The greatest difference between the two lay, however, in their approach to landscape painting. Friedrich’s might be termed the landscape of meaning— that is, pictures of nature that stimulate the imagination or, through quasi-sym- bolic forms (famously, his Rückenfiguren, figures seen from behind), subjectively create a mood or mystery, or suggested political tendencies (figures dressed in Altdeutsch costume signalled his liberal and nationalistic leanings). Dahl’s style and sympathies lay in the landscape of observation. His chief attempt was to use light and colour to transcribe nature as precisely and objec- tively as possible. To ensure topographi- cal exactness, Dahl returned to Norway four times to make detailed and increas- ingly highly finished sketches that he worked into paintings on his return to Dresden. Dahl’s landscapes were also intended, and perhaps seen, as expres- sions of nationalistic feeling (although not as explicitly as Friedrich’s) and Dahl actively promoted Norwegian concerns, notably the conservation of ancient monuments and the foundation of the National Gallery of Norwegian art. The artists exhibited together until Friedrich’s work slowed and then stopped in 1835. They are paired once again in “Dahl and Friedrich: Roman- tic Landscapes” at the Dresden Alber- tinum, an exhibition of paintings and drawings that is the fruit of a collabora- tion between the Dresden Galerie Neue Meister, the Kupferstich-Kabinett and the Oslo National Museum of Art, under the patronage of H.M. Queen Sonja of Norway and Daniela Schadt. Donald Lee • Dahl and Friedrich: Romantic Landscapes, Dresden Albertinum, 6 February-3 May Leading loans: Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897-98, and the recently rediscovered sculpture Thérèse, 1902 Nationalistic and symbolic: Dahl’s Nordic River Landscape, 1819, and Friedrich’s Megalithic Grave in the Snow, 1807 Glacial installation: François Roche, What Could Happen (rendering), 2015
Transcript of Gauguin’s ‘will and testament’ - Robilant + Voena · Gauguin’s ‘will and testament ......
32 THE ART NEWSPAPER Number 265, February 2015
EXHIBITIONS Continental Europe
Gauguin’s ‘will and testament’The French painter is the subject of a retrospective that includes important rediscovered sculpture
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POST-IMPRESSIONISM
Riehen/Basel. The Fondation Beyeler’s Paul Gauguin retrospective will be the most ambitious exhibition mounted at the museum since its establishment in 1997. After six years of work, the museum has secured the loan of 50 paintings and sculptures from 13 coun-tries. It is being billed as the greatest exhibition of Gauguin’s work since “Gauguin: Tahiti” was held at the Grand Palais in Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (MFA) in 2003-04.
Raphaël Bouvier, the Beyeler show’s co-curator, wants to present Gauguin as “one of the forerunners of Modern art”. The exhibition will also fill a gap, since Gauguin is the most important Post-Im-pressionist artist still missing from the Beyeler’s permanent collection. Although the Basel show is covering the artist’s full career, it will concentrate on his period in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, from 1891 until his death in 1903. It was there that he did his greatest work. In Polynesia he sought an exotic world, combining nature and culture,
ROMANTICISM
Dresden. The works of the Romantic landscape artists Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and his younger contempo-rary Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857) easily lend themselves to a study in sim-ilarities and differences. While Friedrich was born in Greifswald, on the Baltic coast (then in Swedish Pomerania) and Dahl in the Norwegian town of Bergen, then in the Kingdom of Denmark, both spent their adult lives and careers in Dresden, the German capital of the Duchy of Saxony. Both had attended the Academy of Art in Copenhagen and even shared a house and studio for almost 20 years. Yet each was distinct in significant ways.
Friedrich’s trajectory was already falling by the time the 30-year-old Dahl, on the threshold of his career, moved to Dresden in 1818. Friedrich had con-siderable support and patronage from the Prussian royal family and the stamp of approval of none other than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but because of his support for bourgeois, liberal and democratic ideas, the artist fell out of favour during the repressive years fol-lowing the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15. He was a member of the Academy of Art from 1816, but when the incumbent
FOLKLORE
St Moritz. Like the ancient Greeks, the Swiss have their own myth of a seduc-tive nymph, luring hapless youths to their deaths with her enchanting looks. La Diavolezza was a mountain-dwelling fairy whose beauty mesmerised young huntsmen into following her into the snowy unknown, never to be seen again. She achieved such renown that a moun-tain in the Engadin area of the Swiss Alps was named after her, and a nearby glacier after her most famous victim, Aratsch.
The artist Pierre Huyghe and the architects François Roche and Camille Lacadee of the architect collective New-Territories are venturing out into this icy landscape to create What Could Happen, a large-scale installation on the banks of Lej Nair, a frozen lake, which, according to legend, emits a mysterious humming sound. Visitors will be trans-ported from St Moritz to this remote site by an Alpine train dating from 1910.
A film of the three-day event, which has been organised by Giorgio Pace Pro-jects, will be shown at the Luma Founda-tion, Arles, in late spring.
Culture seekersThe Engadin valley, and St Mortiz in particular, is drawing a growing number of culture seekers on top of its steady stream of nature lovers and skiers. The contemporary art festival St Moritz Art Masters, which takes place from 21 to 30 August, is now in its eighth edition, and established dealers including Robilant + Voena, Gmurzynska and Karsten Greve have all opened spaces in the luxurious ski resort. It has also been reported that the dealer Vito Schnabel, son of the artist Julian, is taking over Bruno Bis-chofberger’s space in the town; its final show is of works by the Czech artist Jiri Georg Dokoupil (until 7 April).
Other highlights nearby this month include shows by Rolf Sachs and Olivier Mosset at Andrea Caratsch, St Moritz (until 7 April), and Kimsooja at Galerie Tschudi, Zuoz (until 14 March). Julia Michalska • What Could Happen, Lej Nair, St Moritz, 26-28 February
Art lures skiers off the slopes
War storiesArtists, in their pursuit of truth, have often turned to the subject of war. In “Fight History”, the second show in the three-part series “Crisis of History” at the Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam (6 February-9 March), ten art-ists confront the violence that has erupted across the Middle East. The Iraq-born artist Wafaa Bilal, for example, critiques Western action in Iraq through the adaptation of an American video game, and Cairo-based Nermine Hammam’s photography captures the disillusionment and isolation of individ-uals in post-revolution Egypt (below, Codes of My Kin, 2012). The show is supported by the Mondriaan Fund and Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, among others. L.H.
In brief
mysticism and eroticism, and dream and reality.
The most important loan will be the monumental (nearly four metres wide) Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897-98, which is being lent by the MFA and which very rarely travels. Martin Schwander, the show’s co-curator, describes the work as Gauguin’s “artistic last will and tes-tament”. In return, the Beyeler is offer-ing a group of important Picasso loans to the MFA, although this has not yet been announced.
Russia’s two major museums, the Hermitage Museum and the Pushkin Museum, are each lending three important paintings. These include the Pushkin’s Rupe Rupe, 1899, which has only rarely been lent since its arrival in Moscow more than a century ago. To help secure the Russian loans, the Beyeler is sponsoring the current Pushkin exhibition “Paul Klee: Not a Day Without a Line” (until 1 March), which includes loans from the Basel museum and the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. Important private loans include three paintings from 1902, the year
before Gauguin’s death: Riders on the Beach II, (owner unidentified, but once in the Niarchos collection), The Incantation (courtesy of Ordovas gallery, London) and Bathers from an unnamed collection.
Gauguin’s sculptures are often overlooked. However, his ceramics and carved wood scupltures are highly inventive, revealing a different side to his work. They had a powerful influence on such 20th-century artists as Pablo Picasso. Bouvier says: “It was Gauguin’s sculp-tures, their expressive power and their archaic air, that left their mark on Picasso’s first essays in the medium.” Among the exciting rediscoveries in the Beyeler show will be Gau-guin’s Thérèse, 1902, a carved figure of a stylised Polynesian woman.
Sam Keller, the Beyeler’s director, had always wanted to include Thérèse, but it had disappeared around 1980, and was since hidden away in a private London collection. Keller spotted it at Frieze
Masters last October, on the stand of the London gallery Lefevre Fine Art, which is lending the sculpture for the show. The haunting figure of the woman is said to depict a servant of the Marque-san Catholic bishop, Joseph Martin, who Gauguin believed had sexual relations with his employees. Sadly, the pendant sculpture of the bishop, Père Paillard
(Father Lechery), 1902, now at the National Gallery of Art, Washing-ton, DC, is not being borrowed, so the bishop and the servant will not be reunited.
The Fondation Beyeler is the only venue for the show, since securing the major loans for a second institution would have proved too difficult. The museum is expecting around 300,000 visitors, which is likely to make it Switzer-land’s most popular exhibition of the year.
“Paul Gauguin” is supported by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis.Martin Bailey• Paul Gauguin, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 8 February-28 June
Compare and contrastHow the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and Johan Christian Dahl diverge
professor of landscape died in 1824, Friedrich was passed over for the post (which was given, ironically, to Dahl).
The greatest difference between the two lay, however, in their approach to landscape painting. Friedrich’s might be termed the landscape of meaning—that is, pictures of nature that stimulate the imagination or, through quasi-sym-bolic forms (famously, his Rückenfiguren, figures seen from behind), subjectively create a mood or mystery, or suggested political tendencies (figures dressed in Altdeutsch costume signalled his liberal and nationalistic leanings).
Dahl’s style and sympathies lay in the landscape of observation. His chief
attempt was to use light and colour to transcribe nature as precisely and objec-tively as possible. To ensure topographi-cal exactness, Dahl returned to Norway four times to make detailed and increas-ingly highly finished sketches that he worked into paintings on his return to Dresden. Dahl’s landscapes were also intended, and perhaps seen, as expres-sions of nationalistic feeling (although not as explicitly as Friedrich’s) and Dahl actively promoted Norwegian concerns, notably the conservation of ancient
monuments and the foundation of the National Gallery of Norwegian art.
The artists exhibited together until Friedrich’s work slowed and then stopped in 1835. They are paired once again in “Dahl and Friedrich: Roman-tic Landscapes” at the Dresden Alber-tinum, an exhibition of paintings and drawings that is the fruit of a collabora-tion between the Dresden Galerie Neue Meister, the Kupferstich-Kabinett and the Oslo National Museum of Art, under the patronage of H.M. Queen Sonja of Norway and Daniela Schadt.Donald Lee• Dahl and Friedrich: Romantic Landscapes, Dresden Albertinum, 6 February-3 May
Leading loans: Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897-98, and the recently rediscovered sculpture Thérèse, 1902
Nationalistic and symbolic: Dahl’s Nordic River Landscape, 1819, and Friedrich’s Megalithic Grave in the Snow, 1807
Glacial installation: François Roche, What Could Happen (rendering), 2015
