Like every end of December, in saying goodbye to the past year, there is a willingness to take stock and draw up rankings of the notable things that have happened in the 12 months that are behind us.
One of the favorite exercises consists in extracting from the mass of cultural events e international the most notable ones held all over the world. Of course, many will no longer be able to be seen, but there are still catalogs and web and social media resources to turn to as a consolation prize. This is why it is not a vain exercise to draw up these rankings. For the public it is certainly not the same as watching live, but at least it can help alleviate the FoMO (Fear of Missing Out) bias.
With the help of the art criticism of “Financial Times" Jackie Wullschläger we highlight 12 truly important exhibitions. Some are still open and you can find them first in the following list, starting from those most imminently closing.
Art exhibitions still open to visitors
Manet/Degas
New York, Metropolitan Museum on Modern Art, until January 7, 2024
Both Parisians from wealthy upper-class families, Edouard Manet (1832-1883) ed Edgar Degas (1834-1917) were contemporaries, they frequented each other, they respected each other, they imitated each other but also, let's say, they hated each other without, however, any acrimony.
Manet was extroverted and talkative, Degas reserved and monstrous. Politically Manet was on the left and Degas on the right, but artistically the roles were reversed: the first was conservative, the second an innovator.
Manet never wanted to join theimpressionism which he had also inspired. He refused to participate in the exhibition of impressionist painters in 1874, while Degas, who felt part of the movement, exhibited there.
When Degas gave Manet a family portrait with the painter slouched on a sofa and his wife at the piano covered in half by a strip of colour, Manet got angry and sent it back to him. There was no intention in Degas. At that time he painted like this, with the faces and figures cropped.
The MET exhibition shows the interconnections between the two artists with "a combustion chamber at the center" in the words of the "New York Times" art critic.
Rivalry like this one or the one between Matisse and Picasso they fuel the locomotive of art.
Kehinde Wiley|A Maze of Power
Paris, Quai Branly Museum Jacques Chirac, until January 14, 2024
In every age there is a Jacques-Louis David to portray with brushes on a large canvas and with a certain pomp the illustrious person at the head of a nation.
However, if we must talk about portraits of illustrious people, I think the "Men at Arms" series remains unsurpassed, the eight life-size frescoes by Donato Bramante in Brera or those by Andrea del Castagno in the Uffizi.
The contemporary artist who brings to mind these pictorial feats is African American Kehinde Wiley (1977—), already called by Obama for his portrait to be consigned to history.
At the Musée du Quai Branly, Wiley exhibits 11 colorful portraits of African heads of state under the title “Maze of Power”.
This is a project on which the painter has been working for 12 years. He toured Africa far and wide to find the correct way to represent its ruling class.
From this work Wiley's absolute figurative originality takes shape, expressing the variety, opulence, sumptuousness and also the pride of Africa.
An exhibition of power, that of its leaders, rendered with bright colors, refined and mannered settings whose vision is like a dream taking place in the rainforest.
Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915-1925
New York, Neue Galerie, until January 15, 2024
It is not only the war that is atrocious, "a needless massacre and a great crime" as President Woodrow said.
The German expressionist painter gives shape and colors to this truth Max Beckman (1884-1950). There Neue Galerie in New York dedicates a retrospective to him “Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915-1925”.
And to think that Beckmann had volunteered for the Western Front. In the autumn of 1914 he took part in the bloody battle of Ypres. A few months later he was discharged for nervous exhaustion.
Ypres was also a turning point for his art. From portraits and landscapes in his style, his paintings began to increasingly take on the figuration of Hieronymus Bosch, with the grotesque of the Flemish painter veering towards the desolately ironic of the German's paintings and engravings.
This is, for example, the portfolio of 10 lithographs from 1919 entitled “Inferno” (Hölle), partially on display in New York.
Here you can also see The Martyrdom, a lithograph from 2019, where the lifeless body of Rosa Luxemburg has the symmetrical arrangement of the lifeless one of Christ in the Deposition from the Cross of 1917.
Vertigo of color: Matisse, Derain, and the origins of fauvism
New York, one found at the Metropolitan Museum, until January 21st
Il Metropolitan exhibits 65 works by two artists protagonists of an exciting experiment with color: Henri Matisse (1869-1955) and Andre Derain (1880-1950). Color became the means by which they adapted reality to their way of seeing and feeling it.
And the color tones they used were so strong, dizzying and "invented" that to many they appeared "barbaric" when compared with the "politeness" of the great masters of impressionism. The Matisse/Derain palette gave life to a painting of imagination rather than impression. For this reason they became the “fauve”. And from fauvism modern art is born.
Matisse and Derain are two very different artists but for a short summer in 1905 in the small fishing village of Collioure, just south of Perpignan near the Catalan border, they met and "looked at the horizon [of the Gulf of Lion] with same stylistic lens,” writes Wullschläger.
In that summer of shared experiences Matisse and Derain were so artistically contiguous that it is difficult to distinguish one's paintings from those of the other. The young Derain, then 25 years old, was already intrinsically Fauvist, but Matisse, 10 years his senior, had to overcome strong conditioning that stemmed from his academic training. But, as a great innovator, which he was, he did it brilliantly.
Frank Hals
London, National Gallery, until January 21, 2024
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum , February 16-June 9, 2024
Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, 12 July-3 November 2024
La National Gallery of London exhibits, in eight rooms, one of the major retrospectives of the Dutch painter Frans Hals (1582-1666). The exhibition will then go on Amsterdam and then to Berlin and can therefore be visited until 3 November 2024.
The retrospective consists of 50 of the major paintings by the Haarlem artist who revolutionized the way of doing this genre of painting.
Neck portrays the bourgeoisie of Antwerp, Haarlem, Amsterdam and other cities. An entrepreneurial class that transformed the young Dutch Republic of the XNUMXth century into a world power on a commercial and economic level.
Hals paints these men, women and infants in a loose, spontaneous painting style, directly on the canvas without drawing. The active, practical, dynamic and vital spirit of this bourgeoisie is masterfully rendered in the painter's paintings, including large-format and collective ones.
Hals does not even disdain to portray the people who crowd the streets and taverns of the frenetic Dutch cities, a humanity that gives color and life to these places as well as to Hals' canvases.
Van Gogh said of him: “he painted portraits, nothing but portraits… but they are as good as Dante's Paradise, the Michelangelos, the Raphaels and even the Greeks”.
Mark Rothko 1903-1970
Paris, Louis Vuitton Foundation, until April 2, 2024
The mood of the world, like certain paintings by mark rothko (1903-1970), increasingly tends to shade towards the dark. The large backgrounds of burnished colour, created by the Baltic painter, generate a disturbance similar to mourning. That feeling towards which we are pushed by the collective picture of the current world.
And here, until April 2, 2024, we can visit the largest retrospective of Rotkho's art ever seen. It is held at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Alone it is worth a trip to the French capital.
The retrospective brings together 115 works. It is arranged chronologically and describes the artist's journey from the figurative experience in the XNUMXs up to, through Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism.
Rothko had a panoramic vision of his works up to and including the environment in which they were shown. In Paris you can see one of the Rotkho Rooms, the one set up for the collector Duncan Phillips, inaugurated by John Kennedy in 1961 in New York during a snowstorm.
Leaving the exhibition the visitor will have the impulse to go to Houston, Texas to visit the Rothko Chapel. 14 large black murals in an ecumenical and non-denominational space built with the contribution of the artist himself.
Art exhibitions closed
Spotlight on Reynolds
London, Kenwood House, until November 23, 2023
How to Victor Carpaccio it is the pictorial expression of the spirit of initiative and mercantile ingenuity of Venice, thus the work of Joshua reynolds (1723-1792) is the representation of the spirit of the great families of the century of the three kings George (1714-1820) which saw the birth of the empire and the industrial revolution.
To mark the 300th anniversary of the Plymouth artist's birth, Kenwood House in London hosted a free exhibition, "Spotlight on Reynolds".
The works on display are paintings by exponents of high society who were also his clients. There is also the first portrait, not connected to slavery, of a person of color, a Polynesian named Mai.
In this remarkable work of National Gallery, Reynolds seems to incorporate Enlightenment ideas from across the Channel such as that of Rousseau's noble savage. One of the portraits on display is that of Lord Mansfield, the innovative jurist, whose Somerset vs Stewart ruling of 1772 put Great Britain on the path to the abolition of slavery.
Reynolds' brush gave the worldly characters, in close competition for positions of power and business within the Georgian court, the dignity of legendary and heroic characters portrayed in solemn poses and against stage backgrounds. Master race legitimized by art.
Room with a view. Aby Warburg, Florence and the image laboratory
Florence, Uffiz Galleryi, until 10 December 2023
Florence it was an epiphany for the brilliant art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929), the founder of iconographic studies. Florence for him was an immense visual mine.
The former director of the Uffizi Eike Schmidt, together with the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, the Max-Planck-Institut and the Warburg Institute, brought to Florence some panels of a unique work conceived by Warburg: the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (Atlas of Images of memory).
To create it, the German scholar chose and arranged 917 images on 63 large panels (1,5x1,25 m) wrapped in black canvas, creating something similar to a physical website.
Each panel developed a theme and articulated it in its possible connections which, as Gombrich writes, "explained his vision of the forces that determined the evolution of the Western mentality". He composed them like a web of links that cross centuries, genres and cultures on a broomstick.
In Florence, some panels were exhibited with over 100 photographs, drawings and documents totally contextualized with reference works such as Botticelli's Primavera. The Warburg panel, in fact, was found in the same room as the spring.
Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise the previous days
Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, May 12-September 3, 2023
Paris, Musée D'Orsay, until 4 February
In the three months, from 20 May to 29 July 1890, Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) lived in the small village of Auvers-sur-Oise, 42 kilometers from Paris. Here he produced an astonishing quantity of some of the most celebrated paintings such as the Wheatfield with Flight of Crows, the Portrait of Doctor Gachet, the Church of Auvers-sur-Oise, the Cottage among the Trees, The Garden of Daubigny, the Field of wheat with reaper.
Most of the 70 paintings created in these three crucial months are exhibited at the Orsay Museum.
Van Gogh had moved to Auvers-sur-Oise a few weeks after leaving the asylum at St Remy, in Provence, convinced that his mental disorder derived in part from the climate and landscape of the south and that the restful greenery of the north it would help heal.
This passage is well described in Julian Schnabel's 2018 film, Van Gogh – On the Edge of Eternity (Prime Video), with an extraordinary Willem Dafoe nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe in the role of the painter.
In Paris you can also see the last painting, Roots of the Tree, created on the morning of 29 July 1890 in which the artist took his own life. Thick, lumpy, gnarly paint just like a root.
Vermeer
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum , February 14-June 4, 2023
In painting the fame of Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) in the world is equal to that of Leonardo. Charles Swann, the protagonist of the first book of Proust's Recherche, is a Vermeer scholar. And there are some beautiful and famous pages on the Dutch master. In Proust's work, Vermeer is cited 15 times compared to 6 for Leonardo, 11 for Botticelli and 13 for Rembrandt.
Il Rijksmuseum for this exhibition, already sold out from the second day like the Taylor Swift concerts, he collected 28 of the 37 surviving paintings by the Delf painter. It was undoubtedly the most anticipated exhibition of the decade.
This small corpus of works has been distributed in 10 rooms, allowing the paintings and also the visitors to breathe, avoiding crowds and allowing the stops that Vermeer's meticulous and meticulous small-format paintings require to fully appreciate their value and meaning.
The exhibition opens with the View of Delf with The Street of Delf next to it, the only other landscape painting by the painter. Followed by the Woman reading a letter in front of the window and the Milkmaid. And so on…
The effect is “monumental, almost dizzying,” writes Wullschläger.
Lisetta Carmi play hard
Florence, Bardini Museum, until 22 October 2023
Lisetta Carmi: Identities
London, Estorick Collection, until December 17, 2023
Trained as a pianist and therefore one of the greatest photographers on an international level, the Genoese Lisetta carmi (1924-2022) passed away at the age of 98 in the summer of 2022. A very long career with cosmopolitan experience that starts from Genoa where in the 60s he created reportages on dock workers, the camalli, and also on Ezra Pound, 12 portraits without ever exchange a word with the poet.
In 1965 he created the famous report on the transvestites of the Jewish ghetto of Genoa, from which Fabrizio de André took inspiration for one of his most famous songs.
Some shots of transgenders were on display in London, at Estorick Collection, together with some portraits of Genoa dock workers.
The exposition of Bardini Museum it included 180 photographs taken between the 1966s and XNUMXs. In Florence there were also two previously unpublished sections dedicated to the XNUMX flood and to the Florentine composer Luigi Dallapiccola.
In a 2019 interview Lisetta Carmi declared: “I gave voice to the poor, to those who cannot speak, who do not have the right to speak. In everything I have always photographed the last ones."
A large part of Carmi's photographic work, in fact, documents the social and human condition of the working classes.
For Wullschläger Lisetta Carmi was the discovery of 2023.
Artists at war
turin, Rivoli Museum, March 15-November 19, 2023
In the attic atrium of the Castello di Rivoli the two curators of the exhibition Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev e Marianna Vecellio they have collected more than 140 works by 39 artists who were or are in war situations.
The exhibition closed just a few weeks before ttragic events of October 7 in Israel and Gaza. If there were also the works created after this barbaric situation, the exhibition could have been emotionally much darker and more distressing.
Finding yourself in a war situation, as we saw with Max Beckmann, can mean a lot for an artist as also emerges in the works exhibited in Turin.
Here it is possible to see works by artists who lived in many different war contexts such as Francisco Goya, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Lee Miller, Zoran Mušič, Alberto Burri, Fabio Mauri, Bracha L. Ettinger, Anri Sala, Michael Rakowitz, Dinh Q. Lê, Vu Giang Huong, Rahraw Omarzad and Nikita Kadan.
The exhibition itinerary begins, and it could not have been otherwise, with the engravings of the Desastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War), 83 engravings by Francisco Goya made between 1810 and 1815. One of the most notable artistic documents on atrocity and horror of war. Frenchmen killing Spaniards and Spaniards killing Frenchmen. A carnage.
Happy Holidays.
