Last Call for Paula Modersohn-Becker at Galerie St. Etienne, through March 12: Art Fairs March 3-6.

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Still Life with Yellow Bowl and Earthen Ware Pitcher, 1906

It's Armory Art Fair Week with the typical overwhelming amount of venues to cover and the challenge of art fatigue to battle along the way.  I will visit a few on Sunday - lighter crowds and more room to see the art.

So - if you decide to go to the galleries, while the rest of the art world heads for the endless rows of booths featuring weary gallerists checking their smartphones. please make a point of visiting Galerie St. Etienne's Paula Modersohn-Becker exhibition before it closes next Saturday, March 12.  It is a stunning show!  And it is free!

Galerie St. Etienne is located at 24 West 57th Street.  Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 am to 5 pm.

My review of Diane Radycki's book Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Women Artist can be found here. and the biography is here.


Best wishes for your Art Weekend,

Beth New York

aka Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.
Director, New York Arts Exchange
www.nyarts-exchange.com 

Last Call: William Kentridge at Marian Goodman and Jacqueline de Ribes at the Met, Closing this Weekend

William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015

Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, NYC

The sun has come out today!  And, hopefully, we will have a comfortable week through Sunday.   Let's get to some art exhibitions, shall we?

Closing on Saturday, February 20th - William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance at Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th St.   Two videos and props from the videos on view: More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015) and Notes Toward a Model Opera (2015).  As always, this South African artist delivers one of the best shows this season, because he is one of the best artists of our time. Please do not miss this excellent show.

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait, 1903

And while you are in the building, please visit Paula Modersohn-Becker at Galerie St. Etienne (8th floor), through March 12th.  Museum quality - not to be missed!

Mike Bidlo, Not Duchamp Fountain, 2015

And Mike Bidlo: Not Duchamp Fountains and Bottlerack at Francis Naumann Fine Art (3rd floor), through February 26th. Trust Mike Bidlo to reinvent these Dada landmarks with gusto. Simply Smashing!

Richard Avedon, Jacqueline de Ribes in Yves Saint-Laurent, 1962

French aristocrat Jacqueline de Ribes (born Jacqueline Bonnin de La Bonninière de Beaumont on Bastille Day, July 14, 1929 and married to Vicomte Edouard de Ribes in 1948) became one of the most important fashion icons of her time, as well as a successful designer, businesswoman and philanthropist.   The Metropolitan Museum's exhibition of her dreamy clothes warms our hearts come rain, snow or bitter cold.  Closing on Sunday, February 21.  So hurry!

Save the day: Artist's Talk with Clarity Haynes and Beth Gersh-Nesic on Sunday, February 28 at Stout Projects, Bushwick Brooklyn, 3 pm.  More on this again.

Happy President's Week - 

Beth New York

aka Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.

Director, New York Arts Exchange

www.nyarts-exchange.com 

Women Rule! Three Events Dedicated to Women in the Arts, Thursday, November 12th

Diane Radycki on Paula Modersohn-Becker

Galerie St. Etienne, 24 West 57th St.

Thursday, November 12th at 6 pm, free

Professor of art history and director of the Payne Gallery at Moravian College, Diane Radycki offers New Yorkers a rare opportunity to hear her speak about the first modern woman artist, Paula Modersohn Becker. Director of GSE, Jane Kallir wrote in her beautiful essay: "Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) was almost completely unknown when she died following childbirth at the age of thirty-one, but within fifteen years she had become a near mythic figure in her native Germany. Posthumous exhibitions were staged at museums and prestigious galleries throughout the country. The artist’s letters and journals, limited excerpts from which were first published in 1913, became a bestseller when an expanded edition appeared in 1919-20. And she was famously eulogized by Rainer Maria Rilke, whose early career had been intimately intertwined with hers. Although these literary elements did not exactly overshadow Modersohn-Becker’s art, they gave her story a tragic cast that belies the unsentimental rigor of her achievement.."

Here is the PMB exhibition online. Paula Modersohn-Becker: Art and LIfe, at Galerie St. Etienne, November 3, 2015-March 12, 2016

Margaret Oppenheimer on "Madame Jumel Collects"

Mid-Manhattan Library, 455 Fifth Avenue, 

Thursday, November 12th at 6:30 p.m., free

Eliza Jumel has been featured on this blog before as a "ghost" invented by the incomparable artist Yinka Shonebare, during his exhibition at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights. Margaret wrote to me: "The amazing Eliza Jumel—raised in a brothel, indentured as a servant, and confined to a workhouse while her mother was in jail—rose to become one of New York's richest women. Along the way she turned herself into an art connoisseur, acquiring more than 240 paintings in Paris between 1815 and 1817." Art historian Margaret Oppenheimer will bring Jumel’s pioneering collection back to life through a slide lecture of the paintings, their owner, and the early 19th-century art scene in New York and Paris at the New York Public Library - Mid-Manhattan.

Oppenheimer holds a PhD from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts and is the author of a newly released biography, The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel: A Story of Marriage and Money in the Early Republic, as well as The French Portrait: Revolution to Restoration (2005), the collaborating writer of the first edition of Art: A Brief History (2000), and a contributor to A Personal Gathering; Paintings and Sculpture from the Collection of William I. Koch (1996). Her articles have appeared in Apollo, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, the Metropolitan Museum Journal, and other publications. 

Margaret volunteers as a docent at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in New York City, Eliza Jumel’s former home. (Please join me for a tour with Margaret on Saturday, December 5th.)

Kathleen Gilje, Linda Nochlin at the Bar of the Folies Bergère , 2005

 

Kathleen Gilje, Self-Portrait in Bougereau's Assault, 2012 (detail)

Jovana Stokic, Professor of Curatorial Studies, School of Visual Arts, NYC

Maura Reilly, Chief Curator, National Academy of Art, NYC

"Linda Nochlin: The Art Historian as Seen By Artists"  - A Panel with Linda Nochlin

Maison Francaise, NYU - Washington Mews

Thursday, November 12th, 7 pm, free

A rare opportunity to hear celebrated art historian Linda Nochlin discuss portraits of herself with one of the artists, Kathleen Gilje, and two curators (former Nochlin students at IFA) Jovana Stokic and Maura Reilly.  Maura edited Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader (Thames and Hudson, 2015). 

Which one will I attend - alas: none.  I teach "Picasso: The Artist, His Work and His Critics" on Thursday evenings at Purchase College.

Please join us for Margaret's tour on December 5th!   nyarts-exchange@verizon.net.  

Best wishes to my dear colleagues and friends as you celebrate this tribute to women in the arts!

Beth New York

aka Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.

Director

New York Arts Exchange