Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay - San Francisco

The second of two exhibitions from the Musée d’Orsay’s permanent collection, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay follows on the heels of the first with a selection of the most famous late-Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir, as well as works representing the individualist styles of the early modern masters, including Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and the Nabis Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.

It is here where the Orsay’s collection shines brightest with masterpieces such as Van Gogh’s Starry Night over the Rhone, a haunting Portrait of the Artist, and Bedroom at Arles. The exhibition includes a superior collection of paintings from the Pont-Aven school, including Gauguin’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with The Yellow Christ. The exhibition concludes with the Orsay’s spectacular collection of pointillist paintings, represented by the masters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac.

Slingshot Art Gallery - San Francisco

Saturday night, the city and its artistic space come as a surprise: the band, the noisy crowd, the dance of glasses and feet.

A short walk reaches an interesting exhibition that per se reaches my inner world, not so much because its quality, about which I don't have enough knowledge to describe, but mainly because its capacity of awakening.

There's a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak

About the Exhibition

Maurice Sendak has written or illustrated more than 100 picture books over his 60-year career. A number of those books, including Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Chicken Soup with Rice, inspired generations of children and changed the landscape of picture books. Included in the exhibition are original watercolors, preliminary sketches, drawings, and dummy books from more than 40 of Sendak's books, all from the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, the repository for Sendak's artwork and working materials. This major retrospective sheds light on the many mysteries of his life and art by exploring the intensely personal undercurrents in his work; and it does so using Sendak's own words, insights, and remarkable stories.

Sendak was born in Brooklyn in 1928, the youngest of three children. His parents, poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, suffered greatly from the loss of many family members in Poland during the Holocaust. The sadness and complexities of the Holocaust, the rich memories of his parent's lives in Europe, and his own childhood experiences with his Jewish relatives, are currents that run through all of Sendak's work. The exhibition explores a number of different aspects of Sendak's books including his child characters, monsters, literary and artistic influences, and the settings of his stories. Visitors will delve into the hidden nuances and personal secrets within Sendak's work through exclusive interviews with the artist on digital touch screens throughout the exhibition. As Sendak himself said in one such interview, "When you hide another story in a story, that's the story I am telling the children." These hidden stories within Sendak's work form the core experience of There's a Mystery There.

I love the book "Where the wild things are". I love the way it is written, specially when it is said:"mischief of one kind and another". I only got to know this book after I moved to California. It is not a popular book in Brazil. The exhibition is interesting because it allows one to get to know better Sendak and his works, which are really interesting and more wide than only his book "Where the wild things are". 

Warhol Live - De Young Museum - San Francisco CA

Beautiful night, cool people, amazing exhibition.

Velvet Underground tribute cover band:

EDWARD HOPPER & COMPANY Mar 5 - May 2, 2009 - Fraenkel Gallery - San Francisco, CA

With ten rare paintings and drawings by Hopper, and work by eight photographers spanning the years 1936 to 1974, this ambitious exhibition explores Hopper's enormous influence on the medium of photography. 

The 8 photographers are: Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Stephen Shore, and William Eggleston. 

"Hopper's respect for humble subjects, his interest in psycological, his depth as a landscape artist, and his sensitivity to the power of color to communicate feeling, are only some of the elements that may have led the writer Geoff Dyer to theorize that Hopper " could claim to be the most influential American photographer of twentieth century - even though he didn't take any photographs." (...) The paintings and photographs in EDWARD HOPPER AND COMPANY are potent evidence of his legacy, each an acknowledgment of the implications of light, silence, of clear-sightedness." 

In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon

Stanford, California — The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University announces the presentation of In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon, February 14–May 6, 2007. The Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, originally presented the exhibition in 1985, then again put a major portion of the original works on view September 2005 in a 21st-century reprise of the original show. In 2006, the 20th-anniversary exhibition goes on a national tour, which ends at the Cantor Arts Center.

“No one who saw the original exhibition 'In the American West' in 1985 could forget the impact and beauty of Avedon’s colossal images. The Cantor Arts Center is thrilled to show this ground-breaking project to a new generation of museum-goers who will be amazed and inspired by the medium in the hands of the great master," said Hilarie Faberman, the Center's Robert M. & Ruth L. Halperin Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Richard Avedon was already world famous for elevating fashion photography to an art form and for his insightful portraits of men and women of accomplishment, when the Amon Carter Museum’s first director, Mitchell A. Wilder, saw Avedon’s 1978 portrait of a Montana ranch foreman. Wilder asked the artist to make portraits of others across the American West under the sponsorship of the Amon Carter Museum. From 1979 to 1984, Avedon traveled through 13 states and 189 towns from Texas to Idaho, exposing 17,000 sheets of film through his 8-by-10-inch Deardorff view camera.

Focusing on the rural West, Avedon visited ranches and rodeos, but he also went to truck stops, oil fields, and slaughterhouses. Rather than playing to the western myths of grandeur and space, he sought out people whose appearance and life circumstances were the antithesis of mythical images of the ruggedly handsome cowboy, dashing outdoor adventurer, or beautiful pioneer wife. The subjects he chose for the portraits were ordinary people, coping daily with personal cycles of boom and bust.

Instead of glamorizing these figures, he brought their various human frailties to the forefront. All his subjects are pictured against a seamless white backdrop that removes any reference to place, and many of the portraits are dramatically oversized, shocking in their stark detail. Visitors to the exhibition come face-to-face with images that shattered stereotypes of a glorified region.

A majority of the photographs have not been seen in the United States since the initial tour. Sixty three of the original 124 portraits will be on view in this exhibition, including all of the project’s most important and best-known images. Amon Carter Museum Senior Curator of Photographs John Rohrbach began working with Avedon in early 2003 on image selection and installation design. Following Avedon’s death in late 2004, Rohrbach continued to work on the exhibition with The Richard Avedon Foundation.

The New York publisher Harry N. Abrams, Inc., reissued the exhibition catalogue with a new introductory preface by Rohrbach. The catalogue, with 174 pages and 120 reproductions is available in the Cantor Arts Center Bookshop for $35 soft cover and $75 hard cover.

In the American West is organized by the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Generous funding for the exhibition is provided by the Katrine M. Deakins and Crystelle Waggoner Charitable Trusts, Bank of America. Presentation at the Cantor Arts Center is made possible by The Cowles Charitable Trust, Gilbert Ellenberger, an anonymous donor, and Cantor Arts Center members. 

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Sinto morrer aquela Marina. Aquela menina noturna, embebedada de sereno e noites frescas. Ouço músicas do passado e só me remeto a esse passado, vindo-me tão somente a sensação de noites. Eu era feliz nas noites. Nas noites eu via estrelas, claro. Via amigos, quase que com frequência. As noites alimentavam minhas paixões platônicas e me ensinavam o sabor da tristeza. Canso de me trancafiar entre quatro paredes e uma tela que não me levo aonde quero, porque onde quero já não está onde deveria. Tentei ver as coisas com o certo otimismo que me cobram, mas, infelizmente, o meu egoísmo de ser humano e minha imaturidade proposital me instalam nas fronteiras das dores e fatalidades. Medo de transbordar no novo que me surge. Atada, recorro a repetição, a qual é vaga.