calendario eventi  :: 

X

14/11/2002

Two exhibitions

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

From Monet to Picasso
Masterpieces on paper 1860-1960 from the Triton Foundation collection
November 15th 2002 - February 2nd 2003

Fifty major drawings of the 19th and 20th century open the new print gallery at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum. Sponsored by the Stichting Lucas van Leyden and the Erasmusstichting , the museum is developing a new print gallery in two phases, based on a design by Belgian architects Robbrecht and Daem. The gallery will be housed in the former Van der Steur building, which will be renamed in honour of the founder of the Erasmusstichting, Dr Elie van Rijckevorsel.

The ground floor gallery will exhibit a very special private art collection: a selection from the Rotterdam Triton Foundation collection. Collecting European masterpieces on paper was certainly a typically Dutch phenomenon in previous centuries, but has now become rather a rarity, certainly in respect of 19th and 20th century art. Fifty major drawings from the 1860-1960 period have been selected from the art collection of the Triton Foundation and will now be on public exhibition for the first time. This is the first result of some ten years of selective collecting of 'modern classics'.

The exhibition will present one or more works by artists such as Millet, Courbet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, Redon, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, Chagall, Leger and many others. There are two pastels by Claude Monet, depicting two bridges over the Thames. Another main attraction is the large pastel by Edgar Degas Woman bathing with servant girl. Several drawings by Pablo Picasso give a good overview of his activities in this area between 1900 and 1960, for example his major work Portrait of Jacqueline, a remarkably expressive brush drawing done in 1960.

Alongside all these famous French masters, the exhibition will show works by a number of artists who are rarely, if ever, exhibited in the Netherlands: major drawings by the British, Austrian and Czech artists Aubrey Beardsley, Egon Schiele and Franktisek Kupka respectively, which have never been seen in the Netherlands.

The drawings in the Triton Foundation collection have not been collected because they illustrate a creative process: rather than the first hesitant steps in the process, these drawings nearly always show us the expressive - and often colourful - final result. The Triton Foundation collection concentrates on drawings which are the fully-fledged result of the artist's efforts and which reflect his work in all its maturity. In other words, each drawing was made as an independent, and therefore saleable, work of art. Interestingly, many of the drawings were acquired directly from the descendants or inner circle of the artists, with this prominent providence lending extra cachet.

A number of sculptures from the Foundation collection will also be exhibited, including Géricault's Anatomy of a Horse dating from around 1820 and an Abstract Female Figure by Alexander Archipenko from 1914.

The collection is constantly being extended, which is why the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum has asked the Foundation to go through the museum's own collection to identify drawings it might want to acquire to supplement the collection. This will clearly indicate in which direction and at what level the drawing collection of the Triton Foundation could be developed.

_________

'Tiddly pom, the artist who drew Pooh' , illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard (1879-1976)
November 15th 2002 - February 2nd 2003

Winnie the Pooh will inaugurate the new print collection at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum on 15 November 2002. This exhibition follows a similar exhibition held in Dulwich, London, in 2000 after the University of Surrey, Guildford made its collection of the E.H. Shepard Archive available for the first time. Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam is mounting a show of the children's book illustrations featured in Dulwich, plus a number of other illustrations.

Winnie the Pooh is without doubt one of the best-known characters in children's literature. The books certainly owe some of their success to Ernest H. Shepard's wonderful illustrations. The exhibition will be the first-ever overview of Shepard's work as an illustrator of children's books to be mounted in the Netherlands. It goes without saying that his Pooh sketches will be at the heart of the exhibition, which will concentrate entirely on Shepard's work as an illustrator of children's books.

A main feature of the Rotterdam show will be thirty preliminary sketches he made for A.A. Milne's books, which will provide insight into the different stages of the drawings. These drawings demonstrate that Shepard was one of the greatest illustrators of the twentieth century. His work was characterised by a fluid and (apparently) spontaneous style. However, this spontaneity was carefully planned. For his Winnie the Pooh illustrations, he first made a number of pencil sketches, which will also be on show. He then blackened the reverse of the paper before laying the drawing on a blank sheet and scratching through the main strokes. Only then did he pick up his pen for what would become the final illustrations for the book.

E.H. Shepard was trained at the Royal Academy Schools in London (1897-1902). Although he received a thorough grounding as a painter, he was ultimately to concentrate almost entirely on drawing. His first book illustrations appeared in 1906, the year in which he also received his first commission from the English magazine Punch, for which he would continue to work for most of his life. In 1923 he was approached by Milne's publisher, Methuen, to illustrate Milne's book of children's verse entitled Now We Are Six. Despite the fact that Milne had earlier described Shepard as a "perfectly hopeless" artist, the collaboration between the two men was to prove extremely successful. In subsequent years Shepard illustrated another anthology of Milne's children's verse entitled When We Were Very Young and the books which would become world-famous, Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. For the illustrations, Shepard first prepared sketches of the stuffed animals of Milne's son, Christopher Robin, who was the main character in the Winnie the Pooh books. He then developed the sketches into highly individual figures. Having seen the illustrations, Milne revised his negative judgment on Shepard and wrote the following verse for him:

When I am gone
Let Shepard decorate my tomb
and put (if there is room)
Two pictures on the stone:
Piglet from page a hundred and eleven,
and Pooh and Piglet walking (157)..
And Peter, thinking they are my own,
Will welcome me to heaven. "

Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum
Museumpark 18-20 3015 CX
Rotterdam

stampa

permanent link