“This year, the Fondation Vuitton strikes again with an exhibition of the Morozov Collection, about 200 French and Russian works bought by two other textile magnates, the brothers Mikhail and Ivan Morozov, who also made multiple Paris shopping trips” – New York Times
The Morozov brothers, wealthy Moscow textile merchants Mikhail (1870-1903) and Ivan (1871-1921), played a key role in bringing Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art to Russia in the first decades of the 20th century. Along with Sergei Shchukin, a fellow industrialist and art collector, they created an international audience for French art and had a transformative effect on Russian cultural life.
Between the years 1903 and 1914, Ivan Morozov spent more money than any other collector of his time, amassing a stunning collection of works by Matisse, Monet, Picasso, Bonnard, Sisley, Renoir, Signac, Vuillard, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Degas, Pissarro, and, most especially, Cezanne (17 paintings, all of which will be on display). On his bi-annual trips to Paris, he bought from the most discerning dealers, including Paul Durand-Ruel, Ambroise Vollard, and Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, as well as directly from the artists themselves. His collection comprises 278 paintings, not including 300 paintings by Russian artists (Chagall, Malevich, Serov, Vrubel, Levitan, Larionov, Goncharova) and 28 sculptures. The Morozov collection was nationalised after the October 1917 Revolution, and after World War II it was divided among the Hermitage Museum, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, and the Tretyakov State Museum.
This stunning catalogue has been published for a show of 100 highlights from the Morozov Collection that will run from 22 September 2021 – 22 February 2022 at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. It is the first time that works from the collection will travel abroad since they were acquired. This landmark exhibition will be the only stop for the show outside of Russia.
Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) is arguably the foremost Swiss artist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ignoring artistic conventions of his time he created a vast oeuvre comprising landscapes and portraits, monumental historic scenes and symbolic and allegorical figures, and also drawings and sketches. A number of recent international publications and exhibitions as well as rising prices for his works at auction indicate that Hodler today has secured his place as an important figure in art history. Although Hodler’s work has been widely published in recent years, a catalogue raisonné of his work has been lacking. This gap is being closed now by the Swiss Institute for Art Reasearch (SIK-ISEA) in Zürich. The result of years of scholarly work is going to be published in four parts until 2016. The new volume 2 documents Hodler’s oeuvre in portraiture and includes all known works. It presents also all works where attribution to Hodler is questioned by recent research, works where attribution has been proven wrong or that are proven forgeries. Text in German. The Swiss Institute for Art Research SIK-ISEA was founded in 1951 as a centre for art historical and art technological research and documentation. Based in Zürich and Lausanne and funded largely by the federal government of Switzerland, as well as by the governments of the canton (state) and the city of Zürich and those of other Swiss cantons and by private donors, it focuses on Swiss art and artists.
Text in German.
Paintings from the Indian subcontinent bedazzle the viewer with their minute details, colours and aesthetic qualities. Relatively modest in size, they often illustrate historical events, religious texts and poetry, or document life at court. Painted with water-solved pigments on paper, they invite closer observation and allow insight into the artistic traditions of India. “A Secret Garden” is the name of an outstanding private collection of Indian paintings. It comprises works spanning seven centuries from the time of the Sultans (1206-1526) through to the nineteenth century. This new book features a selection of 105 artworks from Danielle Porret’s collection. Each entry provides a stylistic analysis of the painting as well as a discussion of the subject matter by leading experts in the field of Indian painting.
This book, published to accompany the exhibition of the same title, explores Jean-Paul Riopelle’s interest in northern Canada and his works devoted to this theme. It highlights in particular the wonderful series of paintings he made in the 1970s, including both the works themselves and archival materials that delve into this period when Riopelle was especially energetic. It was a time when he organised a number of trips to the region to fish, hunt, and immerse himself in nature, seeking the communion that was so dear to him.
But it was not just the vegetation in northern Canada that attracted Riopelle; the indigenous peoples he encountered were also a source of great inspiration for him. In combination, these two aspects of the land filled his imagination and molded his intellectual and artistic perspective.
The reader will become acquainted with his less well known and unpublished works, and follow Riopelle’s artistic development as he ranged over the frozen landscapes of the far north and the limitless forests further south, taking stock of the way the natives adapted to their environment. The book emphasises the fact that Riopelle’s oeuvre deliberately kept its distance from works that depicted nature as the defining emblem of the Canadian nation. Rather, the artist was the bearer of a unique personal sensibility that was able to visually evoke that particular territory in a dialogue between reality and imagination.
The more than 100 works included in the book (paintings, sculptures, prints, and mixed-media works) are part of a narrative consisting of four main sections (Canadian Nordicity as Viewed from Paris; The Experience of the North; Borrowing from the North; The North and Art), whose themes are examined in essays contributed by specialists in relevant fields.
Internationally renowned artist Heiner Meyer (b.1953) utilises Pop Art strategies, combining visual material from a vast variety of contexts. His paintings combine comic figures, compositions by Picasso or Hockney, and advertising for modern luxury brands, condensing them into a new pictorial creation that allows for a diverse range of reflections that update the critical potential of Pop Art in the face of contemporary consumerism.
The publication Pop Art Now shows various views of the installation and paintings from the exhibition at the Kunstforum Wien, as well as recent works from the last two years. In her text, art historian Dr Renée Gadsden provides insights into the exhibition and Heiner Meyer’s oeuvre since the beginning of his artistic career.
Text in English and German.
Enduring Ideals illuminates both the historic context in which FDR articulated the Four Freedoms – Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear – and the role of Rockwell’s paintings in bringing them to life for millions of people, rallying the public behind the War effort and changing the tenor of the times. In telling the story of how Rockwell’s works were transformed from a series of paintings into a national movement, the exhibition also demonstrates the power of illustration to communicate ideas and inspire change. In addition to his celebrated paintings of the Four Freedoms, the exhibition brings together numerous other examples of painting, illustration, and more, by both Rockwell and a broad range of his contemporaries—from J.C. Leyendecker and Mead Schaeffer, to Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks, among others—as well as historical documents, photographs, videos, and artifacts; interactive digital displays; and immersive settings. While exploring the response of an earlier generation to the plea for defence of universal freedoms, the exhibition also resonates with our own time. The catalogue features essays by exhibition co-curators Stephanie Haboush Plunkett and James Kimble, by Laurie Norton Moffat, Director of the Norman Rockwell Museum, and by other contributors, including activist Ruby Bridges, artist and granddaughter of Norman Rockwell, Daisy Rockwell, and Ambassador William vanden Heuvel.
Using new techniques and new materials, Bernhard Huber creates abstract paintings in glass in large formats that shift on multiple planes between transparency, reflection and opacity. His colours are vibrant and clear. Rarely does he indulge in an opulent riot of colour but instead mainly produces stringent creations notable for their cool colour tones. The effects achieved are precisely calculated yet never overwhelmingly so. In this respect, Huber’s affinities with Concrete art, with which he also shares some of the formal qualities of his works, are revealed. Glass is for Huber a pivotal working material yet is not his sole medium. He has made the light-forming properties of glass the core of his artistic agenda, which goes beyond glass as a medium to encompass working in the fields of painting, sculpture and architecture. Colour and light have become his media of choice, with which he forms surfaces and spaces. He reacts sensitively to available architectural situations; his works are ‘site-specific’ to the utmost yet also stunningly configure the space surrounding them. He never simply makes stained-glass windows – he always forms several visual planes so that the ‘window principle’ is always extended into the interior space. Thus the glass surface becomes light sculpture and this in turn forms light space.
Text in English and German.
This artist’s book features a selection of Çağla Ulusoy’s abstract paintings distinguished by her unique visual language and colour palette, accompanied by collages that reflect the processes behind her practice. In her paintings, Ulusoy reshapes lived experiences from various cultures and traditions through an abstract visual language, infusing them with subconscious memories and imagery. Her collages, on the other hand, re-imagine her works within a hybrid narrative and fantastical universe, incorporating adorned figures and scenes. Comprising 83 selected paintings — which Ulusoy creates with materials such as acrylic, oil paint, sand, and wax and in which harmony and friction coexist on the same surface and the balance between colour and form is constantly challenged — and the collages accompanying them, the book deciphers the artist’s multilayered and uncanny visual language.
This catalogue for an exhibition at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht features paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Younger and his contemporaries that depict the popular religious subject “Christ Carrying the Cross,” and examines these works for covert critiques of power and politics in Flanders during the 16th and 17th centuries. The show explores how artists incorporated both direct and indirect social and political criticisms into paintings on this theme, and brings together a selection of works from Bruegel the Younger, his predecessors, contemporaries, and followers.
At the beginning of 2020, just as global Covid-19 restrictions were coming into force, the artist David Hockney was at his house, studio and garden in Normandy. From there, he witnessed the arrival of spring, and recorded the blossoming of the surrounding landscape on his iPad, a medium he has been using for over a decade. Working outdoors was an antidote to the anxiety of the moment for Hockney – ‘We need art, and I do think it can relieve stress,’ he says.
This uplifting publication – produced to accompany a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts – includes 116 of his new iPad paintings and shows to full effect Hockney’s singular skill in capturing the exuberance of nature.
Volker Hermes: Hidden Portraits gathers the essential works by one of the most beguiling artists of the present era, in a very modern reinterpretation of historical privilege.
Using only elements of the original paintings, Volker Hermes masterfully alters photos of historical portraits to mask the faces of their subjects. With each figure concealed under their own ceremonial attire, these one-time elites quickly lose their individuality in a plume of decorations and accessories.
In this official collection, Hermes delivers his wry commentary on wealth, fame and social status with taut imagery, intense focus and a suitably shrewd sense of humour. His immaculately reproduced artworks are accompanied by the thoughts of German art historian Till-Holger Borchert and Professor Francesca Raimondi of Berlin’s Institute for Philosophy, as well as the artist himself.
A must-have revision of classical portraiture from a celebrated digital creator.
“Hermes’s meticulously described collages pay homage to their sources while gently ribbing the social pretensions and ambitions of the courtly classes.” – Christopher Alessandrini, metmuseum.org
This catalogue accompanies the first major exhibition in the UK dedicated to Anna Ancher (1859 – 1935), considered to be one the most innovative artists in Danish art history.
Bringing together recently discovered paintings from Anna Ancher’s home, alongside an extensive body of work made throughout the artist’s long career, the exhibition will feature more than 40 of her paintings, including the artist’s most famous masterpieces on special loan from Art Museums of Skagen. A central figure of the Skagen artist colony, based at the northernmost point of Jutland, Ancher is widely considered to be the most significant female painter in Danish art history. She is widely celebrated in her homeland yet remains relatively unknown to British audiences.
Ancher was an influential figure of the Scandinavian ‘Modern Breakthrough’ movement that sought to capture real life, demonstrated in her intimate, observational works, which documented everyday experiences in the fishing town of Skagen. Influenced by her travels to Paris, as well as French Impressionism, the artist produced vivid interiors and evocative landscape scenes in which light becomes the central figure. The exhibition will demonstrate Ancher’s bold approach to colour and radical interpretation of everyday scenes as a truly pioneering modern painter.
In 1851 John Ruskin came to the defence of the young artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood by writing two letters to The Times, refuting widespread criticism of their paintings. Soon afterwards he published a pamphlet entitled Pre-Raphaelitism, beginning almost a decade of public support for the work of William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and their associates.
Already established as one of the leading writers on art, he took a personal risk in defending the Pre- Raphaelite cause, but saw a parallel in the hostile reaction to the paintings of his artistic idol J. M. W. Turner. In Millais especially, Ruskin hoped to nurture a worthy successor in landscape painting, arguing that the Pre-Raphaelites’ attention to truth and detail offered the opportunity to establish a “new and noble school” of British art.
This is the first compilation of all of Ruskin’s published writings relating to the Pre-Raphaelites, beginning with the celebrated passage in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843) exhorting young artists to “go to nature in all …. rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing,” later claimed by Hunt to have been an inspiration. As well as Pre- Raphaelitism (1851), rarely reprinted since, and the fourth of the 1853 Edinburgh lectures, it includes all the comments on paintings in the annual Academy Notes (1855-9) which pertain to Pre-Raphaelitism, underlining Ruskin’s significant contribution to the movement’s popular success and the widespread acceptance of its principles. From the period after 1860, when Ruskin was concentrating more on social issues, come the the little-known articles published in the Nineteenth Century magazine under the title The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism (1878), and a number of lectures, including the last of his Slade Lectures, The Art of England (1883), delivered just a few years before his mental faculties failed.
Edited with a commentary and preface by Stephen Wildman, Director of the Ruskin Library and Research Centre, University of Lancaster, and with an introduction by Robert Hewison, one of Ruskin’s successors as Slade Professor of Art at the University of Oxford.
The use of pictures to communicate a story has a long tradition in Japanese culture that dates back more than a thousand years. Such narrative illustrations draw on Buddhist texts, classic literature, poetry, and theatrical scenes to create rich visual imagery realised in a wide range of media and format. Quotations from and allusions to heroic epics and romances were disseminated through exquisite paintings, woodblock prints, and in pieces of applied arts such as lacquer ware or ceramics, thus becoming anchored in the collective consciousness. As story-telling art found expression in a variety of materialities, it became an integral part of daily life. A fascinating narrative space evolved that combined artistic excellence and aesthetic pleasure.
Love, Fight, Feast features some one hundred paintings, woodblock prints, illustrated woodblock-printed books, as well as lacquer and metal objects, porcelain, and textiles from the 13th to the 20th century, alongside scholarly essays on a range of aspects of Japanese narrative art. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the renowned Museum Rietberg in Zurich, the book offers a unique survey of the multifaceted, colourful, and imaginative world of Japanese narrative art across eight centuries.
“An expansive retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris, shows why the visionary artist continues to turn heads.” — W Magazine
This illustrated catalogue is published to accompany the retrospective exhibition devoted to American artist Mark Rothko, curated by Suzanne Pagé and the artist’s son, Christopher Rothko. The show will feature over one hundred works. Born Markus Rothkowitz in Latvia in the early 20th century, the man who would soon become known as Mark Rothko began painting in the 1930s. While his early works were influenced by mythology and Surrealism, his first abstract paintings emerged in the 1940s with the Multiform series, followed by his Classic Years and the Black and Gray paintings. A key figure on the New York art scene, Rothko was an uncategorisable artist who deployed an extensive palette of colour and light with a talent that consistently triggers emotion. His great sensitivity shaped a poetic, enigmatic universe that leaves no one untouched.
Text in English and French.
In the spring of 2023, Fondation Louis Vuitton will be holding Basquiat x Warhol… Painting 4 hands, the most important exhibition ever devoted to the collaborative work of these two artists. The exhibition will feature more than 100 jointly signed paintings, in addition to individual works by Basquiat and Warhol, and works by other major artists (Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, etc.) in order to recreate the New York downtown art scene of the 1980s.
From 1984 to 1985, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) and Andy Warhol (1928–1987) jointly produced about 160 paintings, some of the largest in their respective careers. A genuine artistic dialogue of style and form had developed between them that dealt equally well with crucial issues such as the integration of the African-American community into the narrative of North America, a continent where Warhol was a major manufacturer of icons.
Artist Daphne Wright is fascinated with the collections of the Ashmolean Museum and the history of seeing they present. Her latest project grows out of a lifetime’s engagement with this theme. Much of Wright’s existing body of work is steeped in a deep understanding of the iconography and history of Western art, as represented in the Ashmolean’s extensive collection. This book establishes connections to the Ashmolean’s rich collection of 17th century Dutch Still Life paintings. These genre paintings portray a range of subjects from arrangements of flowers to fruit, fish and game. Sometimes the paintings include a symbolic reference to the transience of life, in the form of fruit that has begun to rot or flowers that are losing petals. In Fridge Still Life, the exposed body of a fridge, containing upon its shelves a raw chicken and bundle of asparagus, is topped with a vase of wilting tulips. This is a contemporary re-telling of a still life painting, with its various familiar elements, such as a brace of hanging pheasants, a bowl of fruit and a vase of blooms, with can connote status or vanitas. Wright has explored the transitory nature of life throughout her practice. In previous work, Wright has used plants and animals, with their shorter life spans, to stand in for the human. Wright’s work also resonates strongly with the Ashmolean’s extensive and celebrated cast collection. Prominent amongst the plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures are the gods and heroes of Homeric legend. These idealised images of men still form the basis of our ideas of masculinity today. With Sons on Couch Wright is seeking to capture the elusive moment of transition into manhood. The athletic figures in the cast court may have been updated to social media influencers, but the pressure young men face today to achieve a perceived ideal body type remain the same.
The Italianate villa, Chakrabongse House was built almost 120 years ago on the east bank of the Chao Phraya River with magnificent views to Wat Kalaya, the Wichai Prasit fort and Wat Arun. It was commissioned by Prince Chakrabongse and his wife Katya as a private retreat from their main residence Paruskavan Palace. Designed by Turin-born architect Mario Tamagno, the tall villa with its beautiful teak staircase and panelling has accumulated paintings and works of art from three generations of the Chakrabongse family. Prince Chula who inherited the house after the sudden death of his father in 1920 never lived here full time. Educated in England, the prince’s plans to spend more time in Bangkok were foiled by the Second World War. Instead he lived in Cornwall, while the house in Bangkok was well maintained but somewhat unloved. It was only when Narisa, who inherited the house on the death of her parents, that creating a home full of antiques, paintings and memories began.
In A House by the River Narisa takes the reader through her home, pointing out some important features and the precious items it contains. She also recounts the stories, happy and sad, of the people who stayed here – Prince Chakrabongse, Prince Chula, Lisba and now Narisa and Gee. She also explains why she started her publishing company and opened the boutique hotel, Chakrabongse Villas.
“…it should be noted that the outstanding quality of Wautier’s paintings is well served not only by the exhibition itself but also by the design of the catalogue, in particular the superb quality of its numerous colour illustrations and the many well-chosen details.” — Burlington Magazine
Michaelina Wautier (1604–1689) is a name unfamiliar even to connoisseurs of Old Master painting. This handsome book seeks to correct that, by exploring the surviving portraits, history paintings, genre scenes and still-lifes that can be identified as hers. Born at Mons, Wautier pursued a successful career in Brussels, which was then ruled by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Governor of the Habsburg Netherlands, whose collection ended up at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. This handsome book, produced by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in collaboration with the Royal Academy, brings together all the latest scholarship on the artist, alongside several exciting new attributions.
Apart from a handful of art historians no one has ever heard of the Brussels painter Hendrick De Clerck (1560-1630). Nevertheless, De Clerck was a contemporary of Peter Paul Rubens, the latter having gone down in history as an artistic trailblazer and painting powerhouse, while Hendrick De Clerck has quietly faded into oblivion. Yet the subtly coded, vibrantly coloured pictures that De Clerck painted for Archduke Albert of Austria and his wife Isabella are political propaganda of the highest order. In creating a mode of archducal representation that could help to gain an empire, the sky is quite literally the limit. De Clerck represents Isabella as wise Minerva, chaste Diana, the Virgin Mary. And that’s nothing compared to her husband, for in De Clerck’s paintings Albert is transformed into the sun god Apollo or even into Jesus Christ himself. Hendrick De Clerck’s mastery of ingenious pictorial strategy made him a leading player in one of the most ambitious projects history has ever seen. For those who know how to read them, his paintings tell a story of power, political promises, and grandiose ambition. Most of all, they are supreme examples of image-building; for as the Archdukes were well aware, even as a monarch you’re only as important as you make yourself. Text in English and Dutch.
The unique selection of almost 300 paintings and drawings collected in The Realism of It shows the evolution of artist Rik Vermeersch and unveils an amazing coherence throughout his work. His earlier gestural paintings later make room for more objective work, the so-called ‘digital paintings’, nudes in particular. With texts by Paul Depondt and Matthijs Van Dijk.
All these artworks are testimony to the renewal and relevancy of Aboriginal art in contemporary times.
Text in English and French.