August Gallery Listings

Arden Gallery, Boston

“Big Picture Show,” a rotating exhibition, including paintings by Ian Hornak, whose dramatic landscapes have a German Romantic feel. July 1–September 7, 2009.

Danese Gallery, New York City

“Forces of Nature,” another group show of painting and photography, featuring Julie Heffernan’s fantasy botanicals and April Gornik’s expansive landscapes. Through August 21, 2009.

Fischbach Gallery, New York City

“Everyone Loves Good News,” a group show, focusing on light-filled and upbeat recent paintings by gallery artists, including Glen Hansen, Denise Mickilowski and Meg Shields. Lowell Tolstedt’s Magnolias (2004), a colored-pencil close-up of dense pink petals, and Alice Dalton Brown’s oil Aegean (2008), an image of a billowing, diaphanous curtain over sparkling water, are particularly attractive. June 2–August 14, 2009.

Forum Gallery, New York City

“New Acquisitions,” thirty works by, among others, Steven Assael, Alan Magee and Tula Telfair. The gallery is also showing eleven of Charles Matton’s exquisite box constructions, including a miniature reconstruction of a classical sculptor’s studio and homages to James Joyce, Edward Hopper and Lucian Freud. July 10–August 22, 2009.

Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco

“Summertime,” a sampler of gallery artists. Veteran painter Ben Aronson’s heat-hazy, steep urban streets and Nicholas Africano’s garnet-colored glass sculptures stand out. Through August 29, 2009.

John Pence Gallery, San Francisco

A potpourri of gallery artists, as usual including some first-rate contemporary realists. “Small Works” runs through August 8, 2009. “Summer in San Francisco” is on view August 13–September 5, 2009.

Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York City

“Open Your Arms to the Sun,” evocations of heat in works poised between representation and abstraction, including Mary Beth Thielman’s solar plate etching Tangerine Sea and Kathya Lynch’s oil Sun. Through August 14, 2009.

Zone: Contemporary Art, New York City

“Monuments,” a solo exhibition featuring highlights from Richard Mayhew’s half-century career. Influenced by both the Hudson River School and the Abstract Expressionists, Mayhew combines ecstatic fields of color with a convincing vestige of spatial recession. The artist, who is also a jazz musician, often gives his paintings musical titles, as in the vibrant Fortissimo and Rhapsody and the more tonalist tree portrait Cello Solo (all three 2002). June 18–August 15, 2009.

Museums

Boscobel Restoration, Garrison, New York

“Home on the Hudson: Women and Men Painting Landscape 1825–1875,” with paintings tied to specific locations where artists lived and worked. Boscobel, completed in 1808, is a fine example of Federal architecture. June 7–September 7, 2009.

Bradywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania

“Fruits of Summer: Nineteenth-Century American Still Life,” a fifty-work survey of colorful arrangements, with paintings by artists including John F. Francis and the master of the genre, Raphaelle Peale, along with chromolithographs and botanical prints. June 6–September 7, 2009.

Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio

“Bessie Potter Vonnoh, Sculptor of Women,” a retrospective showcasing thirty-five works by Vonnoh (1872–1955), a successful artist with a flair for bronze statuettes. June 6–September 6, 2009.

Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York

“America’s Rome: Artists in the Eternal City,” in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of William Vance’s two-volume study America’s Rome, tracing the influence of Roman art and ideas. Organized around the Forum, the Colosseum and the Campagna, the show features eighty paintings by, among others, Thomas Cole and George Inness. May 23–December 31, 2009.

Frick Collection, New York City

The Frick’s four full-length portraits by James McNeill Whistler have been re-installed, alongside a spare grey-green seascape and fifteen of his Venetian etchings. June 2–August 23, 2009

Getty Museum, Los Angeles

“Capturing Nature’s Beauty: Three Centuries of French Landscapes,” a drawing exhibition featuring works by Poussin, Claude, Fragonard, Seurat and van Gogh. July 29–November 1, 2009.

Getty Villa, Los Angeles

“The Golden Graves of Ancient Vanni,” archaeological treasures from the site of Cochis, destination of Jason and the Argonauts, now in Georgia. July 16–October 5, 2009.
 
“The Chimera of Arezzo,” the three-headed beast slain by Bellerophon through five centuries of classical art. The star attraction is an Etruscan bronze presented in partnership with the National Archaeological Museum, Florence. July 16, 2009–February 8, 2010.

Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York

“Paper Chase: Works on Paper by William Merrit Chase and His Contemporaries.” Artists include Chase’s Munich friends Duveneck and Twachtman and students Rockwell Kent, Georgia O’Keeffe and Charles Sheeler, as well as Winslow Homer, Edwin Austin Abbey and Julian Alden Weir. July 11–September 2009.

Menil Collection, Houston, Texas

“Body in Fragments,” a theme exhibition drawn from the museum’s diverse collections. Examples range from Egyptian and African sculpture to a medieval finger reliquary, to paintings by Picasso and Magritte. August 21, 2009–February 28, 2010.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

“Augustus Saint-Gaudens,” a reappraisal of the great nineteenth-century sculptor, whose work ranges from majestic monuments to cameo-carved bas-reliefs. The Met owns forty-five sculptures by Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), including a model of his exquisite Diana and a touching bas-relief memorial to Robert Louis Stevenson. This core will be supplemented by loans. June 30–October 12, 2009.

“Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages,” seventy works from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, exploring the role of drawing in medieval culture. June 2–August 23, 2009.

James A. Michener Museum, Bucks County, Pennsylvania

“Painting the People: Images of American Life from the Maimon Collection,” American Scene, social realist and regionalist images by artists including the Soyer brothers. July 11–October 18, 2009.

Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

“The Eight and American Modernisms,” with eighty paintings by Robert Henri, John Sloan and Maurice Prendergast, among others, who brought vivacious paint-handling to gritty urban scenes. Through August 23, 2009.

Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis

“Sin and Salvation: William Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision,” sixty works, mostly by the most earnest of Victorians, including the overworked Finding of the Saviour in the Temple and the powerful Lady of Shalott. The only American venue for this rare exhibition. Through September 6, 2009.

Morgan Library & Museum, New York City

“Pages of Gold: Medieval Illuminations from the Morgan,” approximately fifty single leaves “orphaned” from their original manuscripts, a common practice among nineteenth-century collectors. Italian, French and Flemish examples, along with Mr. Morgan’s last personal acquisition, a magnificent leaf from the twelfth-century Winchester Bible. Through September 13, 2009.
 
“New at the Morgan: Acquisitions since 2004,” a hundred items reflecting a wide range of interests. Highlights include a tiny, lavish sixteenth-century prayer book, a Watteau study for his Cythera paintings, an illustrated letter by van Gogh and visionary landscapist Samuel Palmer’s majestic Oak Tree and Beech, Lullingstone Park (1828). Letters and musical scores (accompanied by recordings at listening kiosks) offer insights into the creative process of writers and composers. Through October 18, 2009.

Museum of Biblical Art, New York City

“Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustration in Netherlandish Prints of the Sixteenth Century,” eighty works—woodcuts, engravings and books—from an important era of visual storytelling. Variations on contemporary dress and local landscape brought the Biblical stories home to a wide audience. Works by Lucas van Leyden, Henrick Goltzius, Jan Swart and others. June 5–September 27, 2009.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice,” fifty-seven paintings by the great sixteenth-century masters, focusing on their career rivalries and their development of the craft of oil painting. Standouts include Titian’s Flora and Danäe, and Tintoretto’s Susannah and the Elders. March 15–August 16, 2009. Travels to the Musée du Louvre, Paris (September 16, 2009–January 4, 2010).

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

“Painting the Cosmos: Science and the Art of Frederic Edwin Church,” a small show built around Church’s depiction of a volcano, Cotopaxi (1855), with books and other materials providing a scientific and literary context. Through September 27, 2009.

National Academy Museum, New York City.

“Reconfiguring the Body in American Art, 1820–2009,” a wide-ranging exhibition featuring portraits, including Eakins’s 1902 Self-Portrait, nudes in paintings, drawings and sculpture (Kenyon Cox, Elihu Vedder, Thomas Dewing and Harriet Frismuth), genre scenes and a selection of contemporary works. Not a masterpiece show but an interesting survey of the vicissitudes of figurative art practice in the United States. July 11–October 18, 2009.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

“Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life,” thirty paintings—eight on loan from the Prado—by the eighteenth-century artist. Meléndez began with a royal commission to interpret the four seasons and went on to find compositional gold in arrangements of humble foodstuffs. The National Gallery’s acquisition, in 2000, of a Meléndez study of bread and figs was a revelation, sparking this exhibition. May 17–August 23, 2009. Travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (September 23, 2009–January 3, 2010) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (January 31–May 9, 2010).

“An Antiquity of Imagination: Tullio Lombardo and Venetian High Renaissance Sculpture.” July 4–October 31, 2009.

“Judith Leyster, 16098–1660,” ten works by this exuberant woman painter of the Dutch Golden Age, along with paintings by her probable mentor, Frans Hals. Through November 29, 2009.

“The Beffi Triptych: Preserving Abruzzo’s Cultural Heritage,” from the region devastated by a recent earthquake, a Sienese school altarpiece in remarkably good condition. The depictions of the Nativity and the Dormition of the Virgin in the wings are particularly fine. Through September 7, 2009.

Newark Art Museum, Newark, New Jersey

“Small but Sublime: Intimate Views by Durand, Bierstadt and Inness,” from a fine collection of Hudson River School paintings. These artists, known for their attention to natural detail, didn’t need epic scale to find remarkable landscapes. Through February 28, 2010.

New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, Connecticut

“Hudson River Paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” While the Met’s American galleries are being refurbished, many masterworks are on loan. This selection features paintings by Church, Durand, Inness and Kensett. Through September 2010.

Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts

“The Golden Age of Dutch Seascapes,” seventy works from the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. The Dutch were a preeminent sea power, and this exhibition includes settings such as Naples and India, as well as Netherlandish waters. Works by Caspar van Wittel, Abraham Willaerts and Ludoff Backhuysen feature battles, bustling commercial harbors and proto-Romantic storms. June 13–September 7, 2009.

Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine

“Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England,” with seventy-four works by Edward Hopper, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri and George Bellows, among others, who painted in Old Lyme, Cos Cob and Monhegon. June 25–October 12, 2009.

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

“Public Treasures/Private Visions: Hudson River School Masterworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Private Collections,” paintings by Cole, Durand, Bierstadt, Church and Kensett, on loan while the Met renovates its American Wing. June 15–September 30, 2009.

The Hyde Collection, Glen Falls, New York

“Degas and Music,” twenty-five works by the most classical of the Impressionists, focusing on his response to musical subjects. Curated by Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendal, who mounted the well-received “Degas and the Dance” exhibition a few years ago. July 12–October 18, 2009.

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

“Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence,” with sixty works—oils, watercolors, drawings and pastels—from 1910 to the early 1940s. Both artists practiced an organic modernism, creating dynamic abstractions from natural forms: flowers, waves, sun and moon. Both were also evocative colorists. June 7–August 23, 2009.

Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas

“Fantasies and Fairy Tales: Maxfield Parrish and the Art of the Print.” One of America’s best-known illustrators, with a droll sense of humor and a flair for crepuscular light. July 30–October 11, 2009.

Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts

“Prendergast in Italy,” seventy works—oils, watercolors, and monotypes—of Venice, Rome, Siena and Capri, based on Prendergast’s Italian tours of 1898–99 and 1911. Bright scenes of sunny sites and amiable crowds, supplemented by contemporary photographs and guidebooks. July 18–September 20, 2009. Travels to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (October 9, 2009–January 3, 2010) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (February 14–May 9, 2010).