Upcoming Art Museum Exhibits 2019

All across the United States there are some really interesting museum exhibits coming up in 2019.  There are dozens to choose from, let's look at several of them -

 

Monet: The Late Years

De Young Museum - Feb 16 – May 27, 2019

Kimbell Art Museum - June 16 – Sept, 2019

This traveling exhibition features fifty paintings by Claude Monet dating mainly from 1913 to 1926, the final phase of his long career, including twenty works from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. During his late years, the well-traveled Monet stayed close to home, inspired by the variety of elements making up his own garden at Giverny, a village located some 45 miles northwest of Paris. With its evolving scenery of flower beds, footpaths, willows, wisteria, and nymphaea, the garden became a personal laboratory for the artist’s sustained study of natural phenomena. The exhibition focuses on the series that Monet invented, and just as important, reinvented, in this setting. It reconsiders the conventional notion that many of the late works painted on a large scale were preparatory for the Grand Decorations, rather than finished paintings in their own right. Boldly balancing representation and abstraction, Monet’s radical late works redefined the master of Impressionism as a forebear of modernism.



Claude Monet, The Japanese Footbridge, 1899

The Frick Collection

Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture

February 21 - June 2, 2019

 

Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture will be the first major exhibition in the United States to focus on the portraiture of Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520/24–1579/80), an essential figure in the northern Italian tradition of naturalistic painting. The Frick will present about twenty of the artist’s most arresting portraits together with a selection of complementary objects — jewelry, textiles, armor, and other luxury items — that evoke the material world of the artist and his sitters and reveal his inventiveness in translating it into paint.



Giovanni Battista Moroni, Isotta Brembati, ca. 1555–56. Oil on canvas, 63 x 45 1/4 in. 

Fondazione Museo di Palazzo Moroni, Bergamo - Lucretia Moroni Collection

Art Institute of Chicago

Manet and Modern Beauty

May 26 – Sep 8, 2019

The first Art Institute exhibition devoted to Édouard Manet in over 50 years focuses on the transformation of the artist’s style in his later years.

 

By the late 1870s, when this exhibition begins, Édouard Manet had become recognized as a painter of modern life. He had long looked to historical subjects and style for inspiration but in the 1870s grew more and more immersed in the now—eventually proposing a radical new alignment of modern art with fashionable femininity. While he continued to pursue highly finished, heroically scaled paintings intended for the Salon throughout these later years (a time also marked by health problems and limited mobility), he simultaneously approached smaller works more fluidly and spontaneously, taking up pastel and watercolor while unapologetically embracing beauty and visual pleasure.

 

This exhibition is the first to focus on this important period in the artist's career, bringing together an impressive array of portraits of fashionable women—favorite actresses and models, bourgeois women of his acquaintance, and his wife—as well as intimate male friends. Among these are two striking paintings, one of the young model-actress Jeanne Demarsy and the other of his friend Méry Laurent. Called Jeanne (Spring) and Autumn (Portrait of Méry Laurent), the pair comprises the only two completed works in a project to portray the seasons through paintings of stylishly attired women.

 

Supplementing this display are the delicate and rarely seen letters Manet wrote to his friends, featuring exquisite illustrations of fruits and flowers; garden pictures, which themselves often feature fashionable women; and flower studies, consummate expressions of Manet’s colorist art at the end of his life. Punctuating the presentation are major multifigure paintings, including In the Conservatory and Boating, both shown in the 1879 Salon, that focus attention on modern social and gender relations. Together these works showcase the late flowering of Manet’s talent as he put his work, ever responsive to the moment, under the influence of contemporary femininity.

La Donna della Finestra, 1881, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, oil on canvas with underdrawing in chalk and graphite, 37 3/4 x 34 1/4 in., Birmingham Museums Trust, Purchased, 1883 (1885P2465), © Birmingham Museums Trust, Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

 

 

 

Seattle Art Museum

Victorian Radicals: From thePre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement

Jun 13 – Sep 8 2019

As industrialization brought sweeping and dehumanizing changes to 19th-century England, a small group of artists reasserted the value of the handmade. Calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelites, they turned to the unlikely model of medieval European craftsmen as a way of moving forward. Victorian Radicals presents an unprecedented 145 paintings, drawings, books, sculpture, textiles, and decorative arts—many never before exhibited outside of the UK—by the major artists associated with this rebellious brotherhood.

 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Morris dubbed themselves the Pre-Raphaelites in reaction to the Royal Academy of Arts, whose methods to artmaking they regarded to be as formulaic as industrial methods of production. This movement had broad implications and inspired a wide range of industries to rebel against sterility and strive to connect art to everyday life.