The Cult of Beauty

The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900, opening April 2 at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, is the first exhibition to comprehensively explore Aestheticism, an extraordinary artistic movement which sought to escape the ugliness and materialism of the Victorian era by creating a new kind of art and beauty.

The well spring of the 'new art' movements of the late 19th century, Aestheticism is now acknowledged for its revolutionary re-negotiation of the relationships between the artist and society, between the 'fine' and design arts, as well as between art and ethics and art and criticism. Aesthetic sensibilities produced some of the most sophisticated and sensuously beautiful artworks of the Western tradition.

Featuring superb artworks from the traditional high art of painting, to fashionable trends in architecture, interior design, domestic furnishings, art photography and new modes of dress, this exhibition traces Aestheticism's evolution from the artistic concerns of a small circle of avant-garde artists and authors to a broad cultural phenomenon.

The exhibition will feature paintings, furniture, ceramics, metalwork, wallpapers, photographs and costumes, as well as architectural and interior designs. Included will be major paintings by Whistler, Rossetti, Leighton, and Burne-Jones. Architecture and interior design will be represented by the works of Edward Godwin, George Aitchison, Philip Webb and Thomas Jeckyll, among others. Art furnishings designed by these and others, including William Morris, Christopher Dresser, Bruce Talbert, Henry Batley, and Walter Crane will showcase not only the designers and manufacturers they worked for, but also new retailers, such as Liberty's.

The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 is on view from April 2 to July 7 the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.  www.vam.ac.uk

Robert Crumb: Lines on Paper

Photo by Diane Tell

“R. Crumb: Lines Drawn on Paper” opened on Wednesday, March 23rd at the Society of Illustrators in New York with a special appearance by the revolutionary comic artist himself at the opening party. Curated by BLAB! Magazine founder Monte Beauchamp, the retrospective showcases 90 pieces of the controversial Crumb’s original work from the past four decades. A pioneer of the underground comic movement in the 1960’s, Crumb is notorious for his exaggerated, painstakingly detailed renderings and his penchant for dark, taboo and often salacious subject matter—not to mention his infamous appreciation for the buxom female form (which has garnered him much criticism from feminists). On display at the Society of Illustrators’ two-level gallery are some of Crumb’s original printing plates and a wide array of original prints and drawings, many of which would appear in Zap Comix, The East Village Other, Motor City, Head Comics, Despair and other counterculture comic magazines.  R. Crumb: Lines Drawn on Paper is now on view at the Society of Illustrators, 128 E. 63rd St, New York. www.societyillustrators.org

Text by Annabel Graham

LAST WEEK: WILLIAM E. JONES SHOW IN LOS ANGELES

From Ooga Booga in Los Angeles, where tonight William E. Jones will be signing some of his books: “William E. Jones is an artist and filmmaker who grew up in Ohio and now lives and works in Los Angeles. He has made several amazing films including the feature length documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004, about L.A.’s Latino Morrissey fans); and many video installations. The blog Amber Waves of Brain is a collection of his writings. He has worked in the adult video industry under the name Hudson Wilcox, and he currently teaches film history at Art Center College of Design under his own name.” This is also the final week of his exhibition in culver city: www.davidkordanskigallery.com

German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse

"From E. L. Kirchner to Max Beckmann, artists associated with German Expressionism in the early decades of the twentieth century took up printmaking with a collective dedication and fervor virtually unparalleled in the history of art. The woodcut, with its coarse gouges and jagged lines, is known as the preeminent Expressionist medium, but the Expressionists also revolutionized the mediums of etching and lithography to alternately vibrant and stark effect."  A, exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, explores this incredible epoch in German art history with holdings from the museum's own holdings of expressionist prints. "The graphic impulse is traced from the formation of the Brücke artists group in 1905, through the war years of the 1910s, and extending into the 1920s, when individual artists continued to produce compelling work even as the movement was winding down." The exhibit runs from March 27 to June 11. www.moma.org

Openings: Artist, Syd Barret, Man of Letters, Acid Casualty?

Despite what you've heard about Syd Barret if you bet against your life it was all true you would certainly lose. If you asked Syd Barret why he was famous he probably couldn't answer you - despite the fact that he was the founding member of the legendary band Pink Floyd. But who is the real Syd Barret? If you asked Syd, who is now dead, he would certainly say artist before musician. A new show opens today at the Idea Gallery in London that explores the enigmatic inner life of Syd Barret. For the first time, the largest collection of unseen photographs, personal love letters and original artworks will go on display offering an unprecedented insight into the inspired life of this rock legend. gallery.ideageneration.co.uk

Painting the King

Ouyang Chun - Painting The King is the first institutional one-man show to present the artist, who was born in Beijing in 1974, outside of China. His cycle (Wang/King) consists of thirty paintings, some of which are more than five metres long. It relates episodes from the life of a king in a breathtakingly painterly diversity, telling about his victories and defeats, about love and death. The pictures, which are partly crowded with figures and rendered in minute detail and partly feature an expressive and impasto brushwork, amalgamate history and fiction, as well as the search for beauty and the description of moral failure.  Painting The King is on view until June 12 2011 at the Augarten Contemporary at the Gustinus Ambrosi Museum in Vienne. www.belvedere.at

Rolla and Marion

Henri Gervex's 1878 painting Rolla was deemed immoral, as it depicted a scene from a poem by Alfred de Musset about a man who goes to bed with a very pricey prostitute, " . . .Marion was expensive. To pay for one night he had spent everything . . .. Rolla peered with a melancholy eye over the rooftops, he saw the sun coming up. He moved to the edge of the window. Rolla glanced back to Marie, she was tired and had fallen asleep again..." Whilst sprawled out and pillaged, Marion lays out on the bed panting, eyes closed, out of breath, satiated.....

Angry Young Men: the Birth of Modernity

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A new exhibition at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, dedicated to the early work of Picasso, Miró and Dalí, which played a decisive role in the beginning of modern art in Spain, is opening next week. The exhibition concentrates on Picasso’s pre-cubist period 1900 – 1905, whilst Juan Miró’s works of 1915–1920 are presented along with Salvador Dali’s from 1920–1925, both artists painting in the period before the discovery of surrealism. Each artist will be represented by 25 – 30 masterpieces selected to show aspects of the three artists in their earliest periods, works that are rarely shown in mainstream catalogues and exhibitions. For instance, Picasso’s early work was often colored by his strong political convictions. Picasso, Miró, Dalí. Angry Young Men: the Birth of Modernity is showing from March 12 to July 17, 2011. www.palazzostrozzi.com

Carving, Cutting, Breaking

"The things I make are a complex description of simultaneous unmaking and making, deconstructing an object or a body before putting it back together again – this could be interpreted as a violent process, but is often a very delicate and fragile one, a process of transplantation rather than dislocation. The works are an attempt to change the relationship of the object to the body, making visible the invisible, opening up something normally closed, softening a usually hard surface." - Jessica Harrison

Collective Unconscious: Surrealism Exhibit in Moscow

Giorgio de Chirico - Cavalli_in_riva_al_mare_1928

Giorgio de Chirico - Cavalli in riva al mare, 1928

InArtis project in collaboration with Moscow's State Historical Museum and with support of a concierge club presents the exhibition "The Collective Unconscious: Graphical Surrealism from De Chirico to Magritte". The exhibition starts on the 1st of May.

Modigliani: A Life

Amedeo (“Beloved of God”) Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist, his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh’s. In Modigliani’s time, his work was seen as an oddity: contemporary with the Cubists but not part of their movement. His work was a link between such portraitists as Whistler, Sargent, and Toulouse-Lautrec and that of the Art Deco painters of the 1920s as well as the nerandw approaches of Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso. Jean Cocteau called Modigliani “our aristocrat” and said, “There was something like a curse on this very noble boy. He was beautiful. Alcohol and misfortune took their toll on him.” In [a] major new biography, Meryle Secrest...gives us a fully realized portrait of one of the twentieth century’s master painters and sculptors: his upbringing, a Sephardic Jew from an impoverished but genteel Italian family; his going to Paris to make his fortune; his striking good looks (“How beautiful he was, my god how beautiful,” said one of his models) . . . his training as an artist . . .and his influences, including the Italian Renaissance, particularly the art of Botticelli; Nietzsche’s theories of the artist as Übermensch, divinely endowed, divinely inspired; the monochromatic backgrounds of Van Gogh and Cézanne; the work of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi; and the primitive sculptures of Africa and Oceania with their simplified, masklike triangular faces, elongated silhouettes, puckered lips, low foreheads, and heads on exaggeratedly long necks. We see the ways in which Modigliani’s long-kept-secret illness from tuberculosis (it almost killed him as a young man) affected his work and his attitude toward life ; how consumption caused him to embrace fatalism and idealism, creativity and death; and how he used alcohol and opium with laudanum as an antispasmodic to hide the symptoms of the disease and how, because of it, he came to be seen as a dissolute alcoholic.  Modigliani: A Life comes out today, March 1, on Knopf.  www.randomhouse.com

 

All That is Unseen

Matthew Stone, boy wonder art star of London's underground, is one of the founders of the !WOWOW! art collective.  Stone is a photographer, sculptor, performance artist, curator, writer, optimist and cultural provocateur. One of Stone's performances at the Tate Britain in 2008 attracted over 4000 visitors. According to his website, Stone "is an artist and shaman." And there happens to be a sort of orgiastic, ritualistic shamanism in his photographs, what with the allusions to ceremonial dance, plumes of  thick white smoke and naked abandon.  In fact, Stone is most well known for his nude photographs - the three images above are part of a series called Ritual.  Matthew Stone will be participating in a group show entitled All That Is Unseen at the Nederpelt Gallery in Brooklyn - on view until March 14.  www.alannederpelt.com or visit the artist's website www.matthewstone.co.uk

Warhol's Lovers and More at the Los Angeles Modern Auction

Andy Warhol 'Love,' 1983, Artist Proof 8 of 17

An incredible collection of modern art from the estate of Max Pelevsky, an art collector and venture capitalist who died last year, will be on the auction block at the Los Angeles Modern Auctions. On display will be artists from Picasso to Andy Warhol to Ed Ruscha. Auction:  March 6. Preview Open Now www.lamodern.com

The Art of Norman Lindsay

The Australian artist Norman Lindsay (22 February 1879 – 21 November 1969) was a prolific illustrator, sculptor, writer, editorial cartoonist, scale modeler, and boxer. In his epic lifelong battle with the 'wowsers,' or moral elite, Lindsay kept drawing naughty pictures. At one point his work was even burned after being deemed blasphemous. If you're in Australia you can visit the Norman Lindsay Museum/Gallery in Faulconbridge 7 days a week.

Scott Campbell / Noblesse Oblige

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OHWOW inaugurates its Los Angeles gallery with a solo exhibition of recent work by New York based artist Scott Campbell. In Campbell’s West Coast debut, Noblesse Oblige, he uses copper, currency, graphite, ink, and neon, to transform tattoo subculture iconography into delicate and tempered work.

Campbell expands his use of cut currency, sourcing uncut sheets of dollars directly from the United States Mint, to create large, intricate work with a sunken relief effect. One piece uses $5K worth of currency sheets to create an over two-foot cube, into which a three dimensional skull is carved-out. These works employ the familiar blue-collar vernacular of tattoo flash-boards – a skull smoking a cigarette, a skeleton’s hand in a provocative gesture, a single eye emitting a penetrating ray – and highlight the irony that exists within that imagery.

Noblesse Oblige also includes a suite of prints. Using a tattoo gun, Campbell has engraved a collection of copper plates to make a group of etchings. By using the same plates to compose the separate prints, the artist plays with visual semantics – how meaning changes through arrangement. A series of drawings, executed onto the interior of ostrich eggshells, also flirt with interpretation. Morbid images, rendered in graphite onto these fragile surfaces that represent birth and transformation, point out the delicacy of opposition.

Noblesse Oblige opens on March 19 and runs till April 22, 2011 www-oh-wow.com