The Mona Lisa of Vienna @ Jewish Ideas Daily

Here's an int. item by Susan Hertog for Jewish IDEAS Daily re. Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer" now permanently on display at the Neue Galerie in New York.

Gustav Klimt: Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (c) Wikimedia Commons

I've mentioned this stunning portrait here and here during my continual worship / pilgrimages to the Neue Galerie and Ron Lauder's ongoing personal commitment to collecting - and sharing - great art with the world.

Albrecht Dürer, Gabriele Münter @ Germany.info

Here's some art-related stuff I posted last week during my deskbound, digital-era day job:

"Jawlensky and Werefkin" (1908/1909) by Gabriele Münter, oil on cardboard, 32.7 x 44.5 cm, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus (© Deutsche Bundespost/Wikimedia Commons)

(1) Intro. - The Week in Germany (=all about art! JA!)

(2) Albrecht Dürer

(3) Gabriele Münter 

(I had also recently posted this here on this blog.)

When in Munich, I highly recommend the Lenbachhaus, which is perhaps my favorite museum in Germany, and certainly one of my favorite art museums in the world. (OK, so I may not have seen, like, EVERY single art museum in the world, but THIS ONE is a real gem - if you like German Expressionism and the Blue Rider movement, you will LOVE this museum. I guarantee it. The Lenbachhaus is due to reopen after an extended period of renovation in 2013.)

New Orleans Museum of Art @ NOLA

I visited New Orleans, and the city's excellent Museum of Art, for the first time recently. The eclectic collection at the NOMA - ranging from Degas to Warhol to Meissen Porcelain to African masks - is really worth taking in (even if the museum is not located in the center of the French Quarter! Taking a cab up the gorgeous residential Esplanade Avenue to the City Park where the museum is located is also a real treat.)

Estelle Musson De Gas arranging flowers, painting by Edgar Degas (1843-1917), ca. 1872 -1873 (c) WC

You can check out NOMA's YouTube channel here. 

As this video (among others) highlights, the museum recently celebrated its centennial:

I LOVE NOLA! & I LOVE NOMA!

Boundless in DC

I love this featured photo recently highlighted at welovedc.com, created by a diverse group of creative folks who all have one thing in common - they love DC, including its various "scenes" (cocktail, theater, fine arts, etc. etc. etc.). This site makes me proud to be a native Washingtonian (via various places my parents came from, incl. Germany + PA via - some three centuries prior - Scotland, Wales and the Netherlands).

Song 1 @ Hirshhorn

As a reminder to myself - and anyone else who might be interested in this - Doug Aitken's Song 1 is still on view nightly at the Hirshhorn through May 20. The Washington Post approved recently of its extension by another week. (It was originally set to end on May 13.)



Geeta Dayal, moreover, in an April 18 review for Wired was also full of high praise for Song1: "Wrapping the outside of a circular building in seamless 360-degree video projections took some work. But with Song 1, artist Doug Aitken transforms the drab concrete exterior of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., into a one-of-a-kind audiovisual spectacle."

(Let's just overlook her use of the word "drab" in this context - native Washingtonians do not like to hear "drab" applied to any structure within, or aspect of, their city. We get a little sensitive about stuff like that.) 

Friends of mine who have checked this out say it's pretty cool. Aitken projects film clips and images on to the Hirshhorn, using the circular outer shell of this modern art museum as a movie screen of sorts.

"The Hirshhorn 360-degree projection is a new form of film ... one that defies categorization." - Doug Aitken

So now this spectacle is still on view every night through May 20 after the sun sets (my favorite time of day - I have always loathed mornings and loved nights).

Among the "related events" listed on the museum's website, there is a funky Happening tonight (Friday, May 11) from 8 p.m. to midnight at the Hirshhorn featuring live performances. (You can buy $25 tickets to this Happening here.)

Graffiti as Art

Deutsche Welle recently reported on how graffiti can - and should - be preserved and protected by city and state authorities as art. According to this story, Germany has taken steps to conserve graffiti, as have Switzerland and Great Britain.

This reminds me of one summer when I visited a cousin in Hamburg as a recent college graduate (I had just spent four glorious years at McGill University in Montreal - je me souviens!) with my brother in the 1990's. There were these funny kinda smiley faces spray painted all over the city. Later, I heard, the guy behind the smiley faces was caught. Although these were less dramatic, creative and accomplished than many of the rare works highlighted in the Deutsche Welle story, they did prompt me at the time to put a smile on my face whenever I saw them.

Surrealist Adventures @ LACMA

LACMA (Photo: sailko/Wikimedia Commons)

Anyone who happens to be in LA between now and next Monday might want to check out an exhibition showcasing works by surrealist women artists from Mexico and the United States at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), which I would REALLY like to visit if I ever go to LA (which I, alas, never do - but I hope to visit LACMA someday!).

The exhibition's title is pretty cool: "In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States."

Screenings of female surrealist animation and female surrealist cinema round out this program at LACMA.

Frida Kahlo is, of course, included in this exhibition.

Munch Madness - The Biggest Bid

Edvard Munch in 1912
(Photo: Anders Beer Wilse/Wikimedia Commons)

As was widely reported yesterday, an original pastel version of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's (1863-1944) "The Scream" was auctioned off on May 2 for a record-breaking $119.92 million at Sotheby's in New York.

"Not even Sotheby’s specialists expected such a figure," The New York Times' Souren Melikian wrote on May 3. "The estimate quoted to me the day before by Simon Shaw, head of the New York department, was $80 million, plus the sale charge."

The Daily Beast meanwhile has  compiled a photo gallery of some of the most expensive works of art ever sold. 

The Scream is an iconic image that is arguably one of the most famous paintings in the world. (The version sold at auction in New York was reportedly one of four original versions of this same subject. So far, it would seem, the buyer appears to prefer to remain anonymous.)

Munch, who was by all accounts a melancholy man who found it hard to approach women (his "Madonna" paintings depict some of the temptation mixed with trepidation he may have felt vis-a-vis the opposite sex), spent some time in the northern German city of Lübeck (my father's hometown) and joined the German Expressionist movement, although he is more often - and perhaps more accurately - referred to as a Symbolist painter and an important forerunner of Expressionism.

Munch autograph  (Photo: scanned from book/Wikimedia Commons)

One cannot help but wonder whether Munch himself could have ever imagined one of his works of art fetching the highest price ever at auction in the early 21st century?

I have a book about Munch in German somewhere in my apartment in Washington, D.C. I purchased it on an outing more than a decade ago when I lived and worked at a newspaper in Frankfurt for a few years. A German guy I was dating at the time kindly accepted my suggestion to visit an art museum in Bonn, where I bought this lovely little hardcover book about Munch. I was more preoccupied with the emotional distance of my teutonic beau at the time ... Methinks this dramatic Munch sale might be a reason to dust off this old volume and actually read it. (I must confess that I love art books, but often spend more time looking at the plates ie images in them versus reading all the text. A French-American man I knew during my college days in Montreal, Canada, for instance, gave me a softcover art book about Franz Marc - in French, I might add - in a bid to boost my good, but not totally fluent, French language skills. I have yet to read that volume cover to cover, but have looked at the Marc paintings many times over!)

Albrecht Dürer Redux

Albrecht Dürer, self portrait, ca. 1500
(Photo: The Yorck Project/Wikimedia Commons)

In this fascinating article recently posted by Spiegel Online International (the English-language version of top German newsmagazine Der Spiegel), the genius of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) is revisited and his life illuminated via state-of-the-art investigative methods conducted by microbiologists and other experts.

Idolized in 19th-century Europe as "a devout German craftsman with a long beard," this article underscores that he was by contrast actually "astonishingly modern."

Long before there was a Pablo Picasso or an Andy Warhol, there was an Albrecht Dürer:

"He had already begun painting in the open air and signed his works with a monogram -- the beginning of the copyright. Agents sold his woodcuts, which were reproduced on presses, to customers as far away as Spain and England. He was widely famous even during his lifetime -- the art world's first international star."

I particularly like this sentence about the Nuremberg-based Dürer: "He emerged from the darkness of the Middle Ages like a god of color."

Cindy Sherman @ MoMA

I keep hearing about this Cindy Sherman show that's on at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan - most recently via a targeted, exhibition-specific ad this morning on NPR - and it makes me want to go see it before it ends on June 11.

MoMA - Dept. of Film and Video (Photo: Wikipedia Loves Art photo pool on Flickr)

Given that Mad Men, a show which I am addicted to (and not just because Jon Hamm a.k.a "Don Draper" is one of the best-looking actors working in America today!), has renewed widespread interest in mid-20th-century American fashion trends, I am particularly keen on seeing Sherman's series of photographic self-portraits "that feature the artist in stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, and European art-house films." (MoMA)

Just as intriguing a prospect as taking in these self-styled, slick images prodced by Sherman is checking out which movies she has chosen to complement them: "In conjunction with the exhibition, Sherman has selected films from MoMA’s collection, which will be screened in MoMA’s theaters during the course of the exhibition." (MoMA)

Cindy Sherman has, as her official online biography states, literally "turned the camera on herself," chronicling her own life and times in pictures that provide thought-provoking social commentary in the process.

A one-woman show at MoMA in the heart of Manhattan is a great homage to a great artist.

(It also begs the question how many "one-woman" - versus "one-man" - shows there have been at major museums throughout human history - any statistic of this nature would more likely than not be rather sobering for female artists. Not that artists and art museums should be "bean counters" and promote people lacking talent just for the sake of coming across as "PC" - I'm just sayin' it would be an int. fact to consider in the big scheme of things!)

As this article by British daily The Guardian points out, Sherman "just can't seem to keep herself out of her art."

This makes her kind of akin to a hyper-creative "visual blogger," before the expression "to blog" ever existed. ("I blog, therefore I am?")

Even if she claims (as the Guardian piece suggests) that her art is not autobiographical, it is highly personal as she is at its very essence at every turn. Sure, her various incarnations over the years (Sherman was born in 1954) have provided a running social commentary on the state, or various stages of, "womankind." But by injecting herself into everything she does she has placed herself squarely at the center of her entire creative ouevre. This approach may no longer seem "new" today, but looking back on the 170 photographs on show in this sweeping MoMA retrospective of her work surely provides a kind of narrative built up over time that is unique in this world - has anyone else ever done this?