Enfilade

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Accompanying an exhibition of photographs by Mimmo Jodice of works by Canova (Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa, 15 September 2013 to 23 March 2014), the catalogue will appear in English this September. As reported at the Robb Rebort, in 2009 Silvio Berlusconi presented members of the G8 with copies of the book Antonio Canova: L’invenzione della bellezza, each handmade with a marble cover weighing 21 pounds and 77 photographs by Jodice; only 39 copies were published by Marilena Ferrari House of Fine Art and Foundation (FMR) of Bologna, with 4 copies being donated to museums and 25 copies offered for sale at a whopping $200,000 each (itself interesting for the reception history of Canova). -CH

From ArtBooks.com:

Giuliana Ericani, Jodice: Canova (Venice: Marsilio, 2014), 116 pages, ISBN: 978-8831717571, $47. 

A disquiet expressed with a timeless vision. The decision to pay homage to Antonio Canova could not but start out of the encounter with the man who, back in 1992, had already understood his sculptures and captured their essence in images that have themselves become works of art. This man, this contemporary artist, could only be Mimmo Jodice. He is not only a photographer of art but a person with a keen gaze and vision who has decided to tackle perhaps the most complex sculptor of all time. Jodice chose to approach Canova with love and intellectual nobility and now, through a fascinating series of unprecedented details, is offering us a new, contemporary, conceptually lucid, authoritative, and captivating view of one of the greatest artists in history.

Giuliana Ericani was born in Trieste and graduated in Art History with Rodolfo Pallucchini at the University of Padua. She
is the director of the museums at Bassano del Grappa.

Adapted from the Office of Tourism of Versailles:

Le Témoin Méconnu: Pierre-Antoine Demachy (1723–1807)
Musée Lambinet, Versailles, 15 February — 18 May 2014

The Musée Lambinet in Versailles dedicates a unique exhibition to Pierre Antoine Demachy. This little-known artist of the eighteenth century, whose work has never before been showcased in a single exhibition, is a fabulous witness of his time. Strongly influenced by Italian art, Demachy applied to Paris cityscape types practiced by Canaletto and Guardi. He was among the artists whom the Empress Catherine II of Russia in 1768 placed an order through its ambassador to France, and the Count of Angivillers purchased for Louis XVI a view of the Seine at the Salon of 1783.

The work of Demachy will be presented through the following seven themes:
• Architectural whims and fantasy views
• Views related to the Louvre
• Demolition of churches and fire the Foire Saint-Germain
• Church interiors
• Other views in and around Paris
• Historic Events
• Views of the Seine and cityscapes

The press release, which includes a checklist of the major works exhibited, is available here»

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The catalogue is available from Artbooks.com:

Françoise Roussel-Leriche and Marie Petkowska Le Roux, Le Témoin Méconnu: Pierre-Antoine Demachy, 1723–1807 (Paris: Magellan, 2014), 216 pages, ISBN: 978-2350742809, $55.

To mark the 300th anniversary of Andreas Schlüter’s death, the Bode-Museum mounts this exhibition:

Schloss Bau Meister: Andreas Schlüter and Baroque Berlin
Bode-Museum, Berlin, 4 April — 13 July 2014

Bust of Landgrave Frederick II of Hesse Homburg, Berlin, 1701, bronze © Bad Homburg v. d. Höhe, Palace, Photo: Renate Deckers-Matzko

Andreas Schlüter (1659/60–1714) was a Baroque artist par excellence. Celebrated by his contemporaries as the ‘Michelangelo of the North’, Schlüter was not only a sculptor, but also an architect, town planner, and designer of magnificent interiors which were created to give lustre, for the first time, to the ambitious and emerging royal capital of Berlin. To commemorate the 300th anniversary of his death, the Bode-Museum is now holding the first ever major exhibition to be devoted to this important Berlin artist.

During the reign of Elector Friedrich III (from 1701 Friedrich I, ‘King in Prussia’), Schlüter was appointed official court sculptor and was entrusted with a variety of artistic roles in the Prussian capital, during a time when Prussia was emerging as a nascent new power.

This retrospective takes in all aspects of his multifaceted work and, enriched by numerous outstanding loans, recreates the opulent world that this creator of Baroque Berlin fashioned and inhabited. The exhibition in the Bode-Museum runs from 4 April until 13 July 2014 and is spread over a total of 16 galleries and side rooms. On display are not only Schlüter’s own works, but also those of the greatest role models of his time, including sculptures by such distinguished artists as Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Francesco Mochi, Francois Girardon, and Antoine Coysevox.

More information is available at the exhibition website.

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Published by Hirmer, the catalogue is available from Artbooks.com:

Hans-Ulrich Kessler, ed., Andreas Schlüter: Schöpfer des Barocken Berlin (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2014), 540 pages, ISBN: 978-3777421995, 50€ / $95.

Andreas Schlüter (1659/60–1714), der bedeutendste Architekt und Bildhauer der Barockzeit nördlich der Alpen, verwandelte um 1700 Berlin in eine moderne, barocke Residenzstadt. Anlässlich seines 300. Todestages erzählt das opulente Katalogbuch die spannende Geschichte von Schlüters künstlerischem Werdegang und bietet einen fundierten Überblick über sein Œuvre.

Zunächst am Hof des polnischen Königs tätig, wurde Schlüter 1694 von Kurfürst Friedrich III. von Brandenburg, ab 1701 König Friedrich I. von Preußen, nach Berlin berufen. Fortan war er als Hofkünstler maßgeblich an der Umsetzung der Repräsentationsstrategien seines königlichen Auftraggebers beteiligt, wobei er sich an so glanzvollen Kunstzentren wie Rom und Paris orientierte. In 25 Beiträgen stellen namhafte Kenner Schlüters Werk umfassend vor, beginnend mit den Jahren in Danzig und Polen über seine Berliner Blütezeit mit Hauptwerken wie dem Reiterstandbild des Großen Kurfürsten,
dem Zeughaus und dem Berliner Schloss bis hin zu seinem
Spätwerk, der Berliner Villa Kameke.

Press release (4 October 2013) from D. Giles:

Linda S. Ferber, The Coast and the Sea: Marine and Maritime Art in America (London: D. Giles Limited, 2013), 104 pages, ISBN 978-1907804311, $30 / £20.

The Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, Florida, 25 January — 9 March 2014
The Baker Museum of Art, Naples, Florida, 19 April — 6 July 2014
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, January — May 2015
The Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, Connecticut, 6 June — 13 September 2015
The New York State Museum, Albany, New York, 24 October 2015 — 22 February 2016

A Southeast Prospect of the City of New York, ca. 1756–61. Oil on canvas. 38 x 72 1/2 in. (96.5 x 184.2 cm). Collection of the New-York Historical Society.

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The Coast and the Sea: Marine and Maritime Art in America will be published by D Giles Limited, in association with the New-York Historical Society, in December 2013. It is an appealing and colourful volume which presents over 50 of the best marine paintings and artifacts from the New-York Historical Society’s impressive maritime art collection.

The works range in date from 1750 to 1940, and are by eminent marine artists like Thomas Birch, John Frederick Kensett, and Charlton T. Chapman. Highlights include large format canvasses of famous sea battles, ships at work, portraits of heroic sea captains, dashing naval officers like James Gordon Bennett Jr. and pioneering merchants, such as the aptly named Preserved Fish of New York, prominent in shipping in the early 19th century. There are also maritime themed objects such as an engraved whale’s tooth from the late 19th century, and a silver presentation urn commemorating acts of bravery from the War of 1812. An essay by curator Linda S. Ferber places the works within their wider historical and cultural narrative.

The works are then arranged thematically rather than by artist or period; there is for example a chapter on the Anglo-Dutch tradition in American marine art: the War of 1812 with its great sea battles and heroes and romantic and idealized visions of the sea. A section on the merchant marine and maritime trade features paintings of major trading posts in and around the Pearl River Delta, including Hong Kong; some of these paintings were by a group of Chinese artists working in the European style specifically for the export market. There are views of the Hudson River and the great Port of New York, as well as Gilded Age nostalgia for the great age of sail, with its clipper ships and majestic wind-jammers.

Linda S. Ferber is Senior Art Historian, the New-York Historical Society.

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Note (added 1 August 2014) — The original version of this posting included only the first two exhibition venues.

For anyone with Richard Wilson on the mind, he turns up in Tate Britain’s ruin exhibition, too.

Ruin Lust
Tate Britain, London, 4 March — 18 May 2014

Curated by Brian Dillon, Emma Chambers, and Amy Concannon

Richard Wilson, The Inner Temple after the Fire of 4 January 1737, oil on canvas, 1737 (Tate Britain). The picture records the devastation caused by a fire that destroyed Crown-Office Row in the Inner Temple. The group in the centre includes Frederick, Prince of Wales (in blue, wearing the Garter star), who had sent fifty soldiers to help the firemen and later came to inspect the scene himself. More information is available here»

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Ruin Lust, an exhibition at Tate Britain from 4 March 2014, offers a guide to the mournful, thrilling, comic and perverse uses of ruins in art from the eighteenth century to the present day. The exhibition is the widest-ranging on the subject to date and includes over 100 works by artists such as J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, John Martin, Eduardo Paolozzi, Rachel Whiteread, and Tacita Dean.

The exhibition begins in the midst of the craze for ruins that overtook artists, writers and architects in the eighteenth century. J.M.W. Turner and John Constable were among those who toured Britain in search of ruins and picturesque landscapes, producing works such as Turner’s Tintern Abbey: The Crossing and Chancel, Looking towards the East Window 1794 and Constable’s Sketch for ‘Hadleigh Castle’ c.1828–29.

This ruinous heritage has been revisited—and sometimes mocked—by later artists such as Keith Arnatt, who photographed the juxtaposition of historic and modern elements at picturesque sites for his deadpan series A.O.N.B. (Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) 1982–84 and John Latham whose sculpture Five Sisters Bing 1976, which was part of a project to turn post-industrial shale heaps in Scotland into monuments. Classical ruins have a continued presence in the work of Eduardo Paolozzi, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and John Stezaker. In works such as Keith Coventry’s Heygate Estate 1995 and Rachel Whiteread’s Demolished—B: Clapton Park Estate 1996, which shows the demolition of Hackney tower blocks, we see Modernist architectural dreams destroyed.

The exhibition explores ruination through both the slow picturesque decay and abrupt apocalypse. John Martin’s The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum 1822 recreates historical disaster while Gustave Doré’s engraving The New Zealander 1872 shows a ruined London. The cracked dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in the distance was a scene partly realised during the Blitz.

Ruin Lust will include work provoked by the wars of the twentieth century, including Graham Sutherland’s Devastation series 1940–41, which depicts the aftermath of the Blitz and Jane and Louise Wilson’s 2006 photographs of the Nazis’ defensive Atlantic Wall. Paul Nash’s photographs of surreal fragments in the 1930s and 40s, or Jon Savage’s images of a desolate London in the late 1970s show how artists also view ruins as zones of pure potential, where the world must be rebuilt or reimagined.

The exhibition will include rooms devoted to Tacita Dean and Gerard Byrne. Dean’s nostalgic film installation Kodak 2006 explores the ruin of the image, as the technology of 16 mm film becomes obsolescent. In 1984 and Beyond 2005–07, Byrne reimagines a future that might have been. The installation presents a re-enactment of a discussion, published in Playboy in 1963, in which science fiction writers—including Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke—speculate about what the world might be like in 1984.

This transhistorical exhibition is curated by writer and critic Brian Dillon; Emma Chambers, Curator of Modern British Art; and Amy Concannon, Assistant Curator of British Art, 1790–1850. It will be accompanied by a book and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.

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From Tate Britain’s bookshop:

Brian Dillon, Ruin Lust: Artists’ Fascination with Ruins from Turner to the Present Day (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 64 pages, ISBN: 978-1849763011, £10 / $22.

Why are we fascinated by ruins? They recall the glory of dead civilisations and the certain end of our own. They stand as monuments to historic disasters, but also provoke dreams about futures born from destruction and decay. Ruins are bleak but alluring reminders of our vulnerable place in time and space. For centuries, ruins have attracted artists: among them J.M.W. Turner, Gustave Doré, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Patrick Caulf eld, Tacita Dean, and Jane and Louise Wilson. Ruin Lust explores the history of this obsession, from the art of the picturesque in the eighteenth century, through the wreckage of two world wars, to contemporary artists complex attitudes to the ruins of the recent past.

Brian Dillon is a novelist, critic, and curator who has explored many ancient and modern ruins and written widely on the history of ruination in art and culture. His books include: Objects in this Mirror: Essays; Sanctuary; In the Dark Room; and Ruins, an anthology of artists and critics reflections on ruination. He is UK editor of Cabinet magazine and reader in critical writing at the Royal College of Art.

From the Palais Fesch:

Le Bivouac de Napoléon: Luxe impérial en campagne
Palais Fesch, Musée des Beaux Arts, Ajaccio, 13 February — 12 May 2014

Napoléon Ier passe une grande partie de son existence en campagne ou en voyage. Il possède pour ses déplacements et ses bivouacs, une organisation particulière reproduisant pour partie l’étiquette impériale. Ses tentes de campagne sont de véritables palais tissés mobiles, ses bagages, – lit, table, fauteuil, écritoire, nécessaire ou encore chaise d’affaires – constituent un ameublement pliant et luxueux en boite. Les nombreuses voitures qui transportent les effets de l’empereur en campagne, escortées et conduites par un personnel de service nombreux, forment un véritable convoi.
Cet ouvrage, sous la direction de Jehanne Lazaj, conservatrice au Mobilier national, entend montrer l’ingéniosité d’objets prestigieux tout comme la somptuosité de l’artisanat d’Empire à travers l’étude de plus de 70 œuvres qui sont autant d’éléments de campements, de contexte ou de documents iconographiques. Le lecteur s’installe, ainsi, sous le tente de Napoléon pour appréhender une vision la plus
complète possible de la vie des bivouacs, les soirs de
victoire comme de défaite.

To mark the opening of Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting, curators Robin Simon and Martin Postle will be in New Haven this evening (5:30, Wednesday, 5 March 2014) for a session entitled “Putting Wilson on the Spot: Landscape, Art, and Location.” Exhibition press release from the YCBA:

Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 6 March — 1 June 2014
National Museum Cardiff, 5 July — 26 October 2014

Curated by Robin Simon and Martin Postle

Richard Wilson, Dinas Bran from Llangollen, 1770–71, oil on canvas,
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

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This spring, the Yale Center for British Art presents the first major exhibition in more than thirty years devoted to Welsh painter Richard Wilson (1714–1782), considered by many to be the father of British landscape painting. Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting, opening on March 6, 2014, will demonstrate the extent of Wilson’s influence throughout Europe and explore his work in its international context. The exhibition will focus on the nearly seven years he spent working in Rome in the 1750s, a transformational period for Wilson and for European landscape art.