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The Mauritshuis : 11 October 2008 - 11 January 2009 Interest in urban development was just as great in the seventeenth century as it is now. New ramparts were raised outside the city gates, squares and market places emerged, streets were laid and canals dug; in short, cities gained ever more ground. Many painters were captivated by the burgeoning metropolis, which became a new and appealing subject. Jan van der Heyden and Gerrit Berckheyde were the most consistent and best known practitioners of this genre. They depicted Amsterdam and Haarlem many times over. Landscape painters, such as Jacob van Ruisdael, Jan van Goyen and Aelbert Cuyp, also turned their hands to cityscapes. Vermeer’s masterful View of Delft, one of the most impressive paintings in the Mauritshuis’s permanent collection, was the highlight of the exhibition. Among the cities ‘portrayed’ in the seventeenth century, and also on view in the exhibition, were Dordrecht, Hoorn, Nijmegen, Middelburg and The Hague. Pride of Pl...

From August 10 to November 9, 2003 the Fondation Beyeler presented a comprehensive review of the late work of Paul Klee. Beginning with the exquisitely colored pointillism of the Düsseldorf years (1931-32), through Klee’s emigration to Switzerland in 1933 as a result of the Nazi takeover, to the artist’s death in 1940, the exhibition represents every facet of this rich and productive final phase of his career. The exhibition was conceived in collaboration with the Sprengel Museum, Hanover. It resulted from a need felt by both of our institutions, each harboring a significant Klee collection, to convey a valid picture of the rich and varied development of the work created by this German artist who chose exile in his homeland during the Third Reich. The exhibition focused on a great overarching theme which holds significance not only for the art of the past but for modernism as well – that of the “late work”. We should recall that it was the major late work of artists of the waning ninet...

In a special investigation of the far-reaching influence and wide-ranging interpretations of Cubism in the early twentieth century, the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, brought together iconic works from France, the Americas, and Eastern Europe in Cubism Beyond Borders , on view August 31- December 8, 2013. The exhibition featured paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from the Blanton’s collection by Pablo Picasso, Albert Gleizes, Max Weber, Arshile Gorky, Alexander Archipenko, and others, as well as Diego Rivera’s Still Life with Gray Bowl (1915), (below) on loan from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. In the first decades of the 1900s, Paris was considered the capital of artistic innovation, with many young artists visiting, moving to, or studying in the city. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque’s development of Cubism between 1907 and 1914 reverberated throughout Paris’s annual salons, where the revolutionary new style found an international audience of artists. P...

In 2015, a major American collaboration will bring masterworks amassed by one of the longest-reigning European dynasties to the United States. Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections showcases masterpieces and rare objects from the collection of the Habsburg Dynasty—the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire and other powerful rulers who commissioned extraordinary artworks now in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The exhibition, largely composed of works that have never traveled outside of Austria, will be on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH); and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Debuting in Minneapolis in February 2015 before traveling to Houston and Atlanta, Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections explores the dramatic rise and fall of the Habsburgs’ global empire, from their political ascendance in the late Middle Ages to the height of their power in the ...

In 2009 the Peabody Essex Museum presented The Golden Age of Dutch Seascapes, 70 works by Dutch masters of maritime art working in the time of Rembrandt and Vermeer. Painted during the peak years of Dutch artistic achievement between 1600 and 1700, these superlative, emotional works are the first in which European artists realistically depicted natural settings, rendering coastal atmospheres with great focus and virtuosic technique. Artists such as Jacob van Ruisdael, Jan Porcellis, Simon de Vlieger and Ludolf Backhuysen were masters of air, light and water, and used their prodigious talent to convey a world of political allegory and mystical allusion on canvas. Nothing matches the sea as a subject for its versatility, its many moods, and the endlessly intriguing optical effects of water and light. Dutch masters of paint and color attracted to the seascape developed novel approaches to composition and technique. The methods pioneered by the artists in this exhibition trave...