Edvard Munch Exhibition Opens In Stuttgart

The Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany, is celebrating the 150th birthday of Edvard Munch with a exhibition of their entire collection of his work, the first time the gallery has done so in more that 50 years.

Edvard Munch in Stuttgart: From the First Kiss until Death” showcases 60 works from all periods of the artist’s development. The highlight is the only surviving proof of Munch’s iconic print “The Scream.” The proof shows that Munch originally named it “Screaming.” Other works, both paintings and prints, show his enduring obsession with harsh emotions such as fear and jealousy, as well as his feelings towards women, who are often portrayed as demons or vampires like in this print titled “Vampir II.”

Munch had a close relationship with Stuttgart, often visiting the Staatsgalerie in order to promote his own work. The gallery has a long tradition of buying contemporary art and was thus able to build an impressive collection of Munch’s work.

“Edvard Munch in Stuttgart: From the First Kiss until Death” runs until October 6.

Andy Warhol Exhibit Opens In China, But His Chairman Mao Portraits Are Forbidden


The Power Station of Art in Shanghai has opened a new exhibition by Andy Warhol, but the famous pop artist’s portraits of Chairman Mao have been left out of the picture.

Agence France-Presse reports that the Andy Warhol Museum, which created the traveling exhibition, was told by the Chinese government that images of Mao would not be needed. Warhol painted many pictures of the Chinese revolutionary leader, such as this one hanging in Berlin shown here courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

As everyone knows, China has been reinventing itself as a capitalist superpower while still maintaining its Communist leadership. Images of Chairman Mao have been steadily disappearing from public display because the new China doesn’t jive with his idea of a peasant revolutionary Communist state. Bringing up memories of his Cultural Revolution, which saw countless works of art destroyed, also doesn’t sit well with Shanghai’s new image as a center for the arts.

The traveling exhibition, titled “Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal,” has already been to Singapore and Hong Kong and will run in Shanghai until July 28, at which point it will continue on to Beijing and Tokyo.

Metropolitan Museum of Art to reopen American Wing after $100 million remodel


The Metropolitan Museum of Art is famous for its impressive collection of American art, including iconic images such as Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. Now that collection has a larger, better designed home thanks to a $100 million renovation.

The New American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts open Jan. 16 and total 30,000 square feet of exhibition space, which is 3,300 more than previously. It houses American art from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and provides better lighting and access than the previous galleries.

Besides Leutze’s work, which has been given a new gilded frame, the collection is a who’s who of American art, including painters such a John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Remington. Cole’s painting View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm-The Oxbow is also on display and is shown below. There’s also a large folk art collection, historic furniture, and work by important silversmiths such as Paul Revere.

Paintings by Emanuel Leutze and Thomas Cole courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Your Paintings website puts UK’s art collections at your fingertips


An online collection now boasts half of all the publicly owned oil paintings in the United Kingdom.

Your Paintings was started in June by the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation and has already uploaded high-quality images of 104,000 oil paintings by 23,000 artists.

The goal is to put online all of the estimated 200,000 publicly owned paintings housed in some 3,000 institutions, making it a veritable Google Books of UK art. There are plenty of UK artists, as well as many other works from around the world and from all periods. While all are owned by the public, many are in buildings that aren’t generally open to the public, so this website helps make them available.

Right now the website is focusing on putting up all the oil paintings since that was the preferred medium of painters for several centuries, and a medium that British painters used quite well. Other media such as watercolor and tempera are represented, and more such paintings will probably go up in the future.

Users can tag paintings to help with the ongoing organization of the collection. There are also links to BBC’s online sound and video archives and various guided tours by different people in the art world.

The website also hosts regular online exhibitions. Currently there’s one on the arctic.

Detail from John Constable’s “The Hay Wain” courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Caixa Forum Madrid opens major exhibitition on Eugene Delacroix


Caixa Forum Madrid has teamed up with the Louvre and several other museums and galleries to host a major exhibition on French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix.

Delacroix (1798-1863) is most famous for his painting Liberté, shown above in this Wikimedia Commons image. This masterpiece commemorates the revolution of 1830 in which French king Charles X abdicated and fled to Great Britain. Absolute monarchy was abolished and a constitutional monarchy was created.

This exhibition brings together more than 130 works of the French master from all phases of his career and explores how he was inspired by Spanish painters such as Goya and later influenced Picasso. Unsatisfied with the artistic life in Paris, Delacroix set off to see the world and paint it. He was an adventure traveler in an age when that really meant something and many of his best paintings are of (then) hard-to-get-to countries. The painting below, courtesy Wikimedia Commons, shows The Women of Algiers in their Apartment.

Caixa Forum Madrid is an amazing free art gallery with three floors of exhibition space, a large bookshop, and a cool vertical garden in front. Visiting it is one of the ten best things to do in Madrid. The show runs until January 15, 2012. It will reopen at the Caixa Forum Barcelona in February.