Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism Exhibit at the National Gallery

This is a wonderful exhibit at the National Gallery. I happened upon a lecture on the artist while I was there and sat in on it. It's so sad that Bazille died so young. He was killed in battle during the Franco-Prussian War.

Here's more on the exhibit:

A scion of a Protestant upper-middle-class family from Montpellier in southern France, Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870) seemed destined for a career in medicine. In 1862 he traveled to Paris, ostensibly to pursue his medical studies, though he also enrolled as a student in the studio of the painter Charles Gleyre. It was there that he met fellow artists Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley, even sharing studio space with both Monet and Renoir at times. He soon became part of a dynamic circle of avant-garde artists and writers that included Édouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, Émile Zola, and Zacharie Astruc. Like his friends, Bazille created paintings inspired by contemporary life that challenged the aesthetic conventions of the day and helped to lay the groundwork of impressionism. Unfortunately, Bazille was killed in battle during the Franco-Prussian War, just prior to his 29th birthday, bringing his promising career to an abrupt and tragic end.

Because of the brevity of his career, the limited size of his extant body of work, and his absence from the impressionist exhibitions mounted after his death, Bazille remains a relatively unknown and underappreciated figure. This exhibition is the first major presentation of Bazille’s work in America in a quarter-century and brings together some 74 paintings (and two sketchbooks) from private and public collections in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Paintings by Bazille are exhibited alongside key works by the predecessors who inspired him—including Théodore Rousseau and Gustave Courbet—and by the contemporaries, such as Manet and Monet, with whom he was closely associated. Such juxtapositions underscore the extent to which Bazille actively engaged with the most significant pictorial issues of his era: the revival of the still-life form, realist landscapes, open-air figural painting, and the modern nude. Drawing inspiration from the vibrant cultural life of Paris, as well as the sun-drenched environs of his native Languedoc region to which he returned again and again, Bazille crafted a style of painting that was distinctly his own.

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Extending Tradition French Painting — At the National Gallery of Art

Great exhibit in the East Gallery just off to the left as you enter the building. Some really impressive paintings.

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There are a fair number of paintings by Picasso. They're some of my favorites by him.

Calder and Rothko at the National Gallery

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The Matisse Cut-outs at the National Gallery

My mom loved to see the Cut-outs every time she cam to Washington. They were in one of the tower rooms in the East Gallery. She loved just to sit and look at them. She got the above print as a birthday present one year. She hung it over the bed.

How the Cut-outs came about:

Diagnosed with abdominal cancer in 1941, Matisse underwent surgery that left him chair and bed bound. Painting and sculpture had become physical challenges, so he turned to a new type of medium. With the help of his assistants, he began creating cut paper collages, or decoupage. He would cut sheets of paper, pre-painted with gouache by his assistants, into shapes of varying colours and sizes, and arrange them to form lively compositions. Initially, these pieces were modest in size, but eventually transformed into murals or room-sized works. The result was a distinct and dimensional complexity—an art form that was not quite painting, but not quite sculpture.

Although the paper cut-out was Matisse’s major medium in the final decade of his life, his first recorded use of the technique was in 1919 during the design of decor for the Le chant du rossignol, an opera made by Igor Stravinsky.Albert C. Barnes arranged for cardboard templates to be made of the unusual dimensions of the walls onto which Matisse, in his studio in Nice, fixed the composition of painted paper shapes. Another group of cut-outs were made between 1937 and 1938, while Matisse was working on the stage sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. However, it was only after his operation that, bedridden, Matisse began to develop the cut-out technique as its own form, rather than its prior utilitarian origin.

He moved to the hilltop of Vence in 1943, where he produced his first major cut-out project for his artist's book titled Jazz. However, these cut-outs were conceived as designs for stencil prints to be looked at in the book, rather than as independent pictorial works. At this point, Matisse still thought of the cut-outs as separate from his principal art form. His new understanding of this medium unfolds with the 1946 introduction for Jazz. After summarizing his career, Matisse refers to the possibilities the cut-out technique offers, insisting "An artist must never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of a style, prisoner of a reputation, prisoner of success…"

The number of independently conceived cut-outs steadily increased following Jazz, and eventually led to the creation of mural-size works, such as Oceania the Sky and Oceania the Sea of 1946. Under Matisse’s direction, Lydia Delectorskaya, his studio assistant, loosely pinned the silhouettes of birds, fish, and marine vegetation directly onto the walls of the room. The two Oceania pieces, his first cut-outs of this scale, evoked a trip to Tahiti he made years before.

I never get tired of seeing them. They always bring back pleasant memories of my mom.

More of the Works of Matisse at the National Gallery

East Wing of the National Gallery Reopens

The East Wing of the National Gallery Reopened this past Friday. Here's a little about what's been changed:

More space for the permanent collection. One of the biggest upgrades was the allocation of more exhibit space in the existing five-story building. The renovations added 12,250 square feet, allowing for the permanent-collection works on display to be increased from 350 to more than 500. Much of that new space is in the museum’s three skylight-topped towers, two of which are connected by a new rooftop terrace.

Roof terrace: Once you’ve climbed to the top of towers one and two, be sure to head outside onto the new outdoor exhibition space, where you’ll be able to gaze over Constitution Avenue alongside a nearly 15-foot electric blue rooster. The sculpture, “Hahn/Cock” by Katharina Fritsch, was created for London’s Trafalgar Square and is on loan from the Glenstone Museum in Potomac. It’s joined by other works, including Nam June Paik’s “Ugly Buddha” and “Ugly TV.”

The view form the roof top terrace

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