Milwaukee Art Museum opens major exhibition on Impressionism

by Sean McLachlan on


An exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum is looking at Impressionism in a new light.

Impressionism: Masterworks on Paper is the first major exhibition to explore the drawings of famous Impressionists. Previous exhibitions have always focused on their paintings, such as Renoir’s Bathers with Crab, which is also part of the show and appears here in this photo courtesy Moira Burke.

The famous Impressionist exhibitions in Paris between 1874 and 1886 changed European art. Not only was the style vastly different than traditional painting, but the Impressionists emphasized drawing as a medium equal to that of painting. The exhibit gathers together more than 100 drawings, watercolors, and pastels by important artists such as Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

The Milwaukee Art Museum is one of Wisconsin’s great attractions, besides all the wonderful hiking, camping, and fishing. In addition to offering major shows such as this one, it boasts a collection of more than 25,000 works of art from a variety of different movements, from German Expressionism to Haitian folk art.

Impressionism: Masterworks on Paper runs from October 14, 2011 to January 8, 2012.

Paris: where Picasso got his inspiration

by Sean McLachlan on

Sometimes stereotypes live up to expectations. Paris has long been known as a city of artists, where aspiring painters/poets/writers go to light the spark of creativity that will make them famous. Of course most of them fail, but some succeed, and that feeds the legend. Pablo Picasso was one of the success stories.

Picasso went to Paris in 1900, when he he was 19, unknown, and striving to find his own style. Paris was full of avant-garde artists and the galleries were displayed the work of artists such as Modigliani, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. Picasso got to meet many of these big names. This photo, courtesy Wikimedia Commons, shows from left to right Modigliani, Picasso, and André Salmon in front the Café de la Rotonde. Being in such creative company helped the artist grow.

A new exhibition at the Pablo Picasso Museum in Barcelona examines these formative years in the life of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists. Feasting on Paris: Picasso 1900-1907 features sixty works by Picasso as well as twenty works from the artists whom he most admired. The juxtaposition of his and others’ art shows the sources of his inspiration, and how he turned that inspiration into a distinctive style of his own.

Feasting on Paris: Picasso 1900-1907 runs from July 1 to October 16.

Italian art in London

by Sean McLachlan on


One of the best collections of Italian art in the world can be found in an unlikely place: a quiet street in the London borough of Islington.

The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art is housed in an elegant Georgian mansion and boasts a comprehensive collection of Italian Futurist paintings. Futurism was a style born out of the havoc of industrialization and the carnage of World War One. It emphasized the speed and technological advance of modern society.

Typical of this style is Umberto Boccio’s The City Rises, shown here courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. This totally blew me away when I saw it at a special Futurist exhibition at the Estorick a few years ago. The people and buildings seem to be swept along by a windstorm of colored motion. It’s currently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Other paintings show Futurism’s trading ideas with Cubism, like Gino Severini’s Portrait of Eric Estorick, the museum’s founder. It’s more a study of angles and shading than an actual image of a man.

It’s not all Futurism here and the current exhibition, United Artists of Italy, is a collection of photographs of leading Italian artists. You can also get a taste of Italy at the cafe, where they serve up excellent cappuccinos (hard to find in London) and snacks.

Mummies of the World exhibition opens in Philadelphia

by Sean McLachlan on


Mummies are endlessly fascinating. To see a centuries-old body so well preserved brings the past vividly to life. While Egyptian mummies get most of the press, bodies in many regions were mummified by natural processes after being deposited in peat bogs or very dry caves.

Mummies of the World is a state-of-the-art exhibition bringing together 150 mummies and related artifacts. It opened last weekend at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia after successful runs in L.A. and Milwaukee. Visitors will see mummified people and animals from all over the world and learn how they came to be so well preserved.

Besides the required collection of ancient Egyptians, there are numerous mummies from other regions, such as this prehistoric man from the Atacama Desert in Chile.

%Gallery-126801%From South America there’s the famous Detmold child from Peru, dated to 4504-4457 B.C., more than 3,000 years before the birth of King Tutankhamen. This ten-month-old kid was naturally preserved by the incredibly dry climate of the Peruvian desert. There’s also a tattooed woman from Chile dating to sometime before 1400 AD who also dried out in a desert.

From Germany there’s Baron von Holz, who died in the 17th century and was preserved in the family crypt. Then there’s the Orlovits family: Michael, Veronica, and their baby Johannes. They were discovered in a forgotten crypt in Vac, Hungary, in 1994, where they had been buried in the early nineteenth century. The cool, dry conditions of the crypt and the pine wood used in their caskets helped preserve them.

There are animal mummies too. There’s a mummified cat from the Ptolemaic Period (305-30 BC), the same time in Egypt that the mummy portraits started coming into fashion. There are several naturally preserved mummies such as frogs, a lizard, a hyena, and even a howler monkey that dried out in desert conditions and are on display.

Several interactive exhibits give visitors a chance to see where mummies come from, how they were preserved naturally or artificially, and what they feel like. Visitors can even match DNA samples to see which mummies are related.

Mummies of the World runs until 23 October 2011.

[All photos courtesy American Exhibitions, Inc.]

London’s seamy side revealed in new exhibition

by Sean McLachlan on


London has always had an underworld, a dangerous side. Just go out late on a Saturday night and you’re sure to see a fight. For many, the hint of danger is one of the city’s attractions, at least if you don’t have to deal with it full time.

Back in the 18th and 19th century, there was nothing attractive about the St. Giles Rookery. It got its name because tiny apartments were stacked atop one another like birdhouses. Only the poorest of the poor lived there–the beggars, the prostitutes, the gin addicts. Especially the gin addicts. Gin was a national addiction, a cheap way to get blasted. Gin addiction was immortalized in Hogarth’s engraving Gin Lane, showing a drunken mother accidentally knocking her baby over a railing while a tradesman hawks his tools and a man hangs himself within view of an uncaring crowd.

Hogarth was no teetotaler. He liked a good drink, as his engraving Beer Street shows. It’s the same scene, gentrified. Industrious drinkers of real ale prosper and flirt in clean, attractive surroundings. It must have seemed like heaven to the denizens of the Rookery.

A new exhibition by the Museum of London looks at the lives of these nearly forgotten people, thanks to an excavation the museum sponsored at the site of the old Rookery. London’s Underworld Unearthed: The Secret Life of the Rookery features finds from the excavation along with contemporary and modern depictions of this Hell on Earth.

The finds remind us that these were real people living here. Children’s toys, simple crockery, and trick glasses used in drinking games give us a glimpse of their lives, and the gin bottles hint at how many of them died. The modern art, created by Jane Palm-Gold, draws comparisons with today’s urban blight. The permanent collection at the Museum of London is well worth a visit too in order to get a better understanding of one of the world’s most fascinating cities.

The show runs until June 3 at the Coningsby Gallery.

[Hogarth prints courtesy Wikimedia Commons.]