Washington, DC—During the 17th century, the Dutch were a nation of merchants, engineers, sailors, and skaters. Water was central to their economic prosperity and naval prowess, essential as a means of transportation, and popular as a site for recreation year-round. In a special exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Water, Wind, and Waves: Marine Paintings from the Dutch Golden Age will explore the multifaceted relationship the Dutch had with water during their Golden Age.
Art News
This July, Sotheby’s will offer an outstanding bronze by the foremost sculptor of 16th -century Florence, Giambologna (1529-1608). The Dresden Mars was created as a personal gift for the Elector Christian I of Saxony (1560-1591). It is one of very few bronzes firmly documented during his lifetime, and one of a handful of works by Giambologna ever likely to come to market.
Pinpoint a figure staring directly out at you in an early Renaissance painting and chances are it’s a surreptitious self-portrait, slipped into a crowded scene. It took time for artists to feel comfortable devoting entire canvases to their own likenesses, and longer for masters such as Rembrandt van Rijn to return to self-portraiture over and over. But with the invention of photography in 1839, things changed. Artists could quickly and cheaply craft self-images that were divorced from their work, playing with their personas without wielding paintbrushes or chisels.
Now showing at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C. is the latest installment of the museum’s ongoing Women to Watch Series. Heavy Metal includes over 50 works from 20 contemporary artists, covering the huge breadth of techniques, materials, and artworks that encompass contemporary metal work. Seeking to defy the conventional association with metal work as a male-dominated art form, the exhibition shows all that woman are accomplishing in this diverse range of materials.
Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters is the first major international exhibition to assemble works by England’s nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with the medieval and Renaissance masterpieces that inspired them.
June 27th was another record-breaking evening in the art auction world. Bidding was fierce at Phillips’ 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale in London, which made 41% more than last year. One of the top achieving works, Francis Bacon’s Interior of a room (1935), was a highlight of the sale, going for $3,748,158.
This summer, the Yale Center for British Art will present an exhibition devoted to one of the earliest forms of photography and a British invention. Salt and Silver: Early Photography, 1840–1860 will explore the dissemination of salt prints across early centers of photographic production in Europe and North America.
The Brooklyn Museum is proud to announce the reinstallment of its acclaimed relief sculpture The Resurrection of Christ, by Renaissance artist Giovanni della Robbia, on view now in the Museum's 3rd floor Focus Gallery.
The Resurrection was created around 1520 and was commissioned by the Antinori family, historical Tuscan vintners since 1385. Nearly 400 years later, The Resurrection became the first Renaissance work to enter the Museum's collection when it was acquired in 1899.
This June, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Arthur Jafa: Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016), a masterful video installation by artist, filmmaker, and award-winning cinematographer Arthur Jafa.
A powerful new exhibition at New York’s Sean Kelly Gallery, Ravelled Threads brings together work by ten African artists utilizing fabric in different ways. Cloth has cultural and spiritual significance throughout Africa, with a long history of use in storytelling, historical record keeping, political activism, and cultural expression.
