Miro Video by Tate Modern

Galerie Michael Intro Video

A Picasso comes to the Palestinians

Security guards keep close to the "Buste De Femme" by Pablo Picasso. It's on loan from a museum in the Netherlands.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• "Buste De Femme" was painted by Pablo Picasso in 1943; it's housed in the Netherlands
• It's being displayed for one month in the West Bank city of Ramallah
• Picasso used his art to express his feelings about the Spanish Civil War
• Art specialist says the work has much to say about today's divide in the Middle East

Ramallah, West Bank (CNN) -- In a small showroom in the West Bank city of Ramallah, two Palestinian security guards carefully watch over a masterpiece by one of the most famous artists in modern history.

The "Buste De Femme," painted by Pablo Picasso in 1943, is estimated to be worth $7 million. It was borrowed from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, by the International Academy of Art Palestine for a monthlong display in the West Bank.

Khaled Horani, art director of the academy, says the project took two years of negotiations, preparations and overcoming some political obstacles.

"This is the first time in history where a masterpiece of Picasso comes to Palestine in the occupied territories and also the first time we are going to show a masterpiece to the Palestinians," Horani told CNN.

While Horani acknowledges that just some 20 kilometers (about 12.4 miles) away, there are many contemporary masterpieces in Jerusalem museums. He is quick to point out the limitations for art lovers who live in the West Bank.

"It's not accessible for Palestinians from the West Bank to go there and see the artwork," making reference to Israeli security restrictions. "This raises the questions around the political situation and art in general and its accessibility," Horani said.

Painted just a few years after the Spanish Civil War, the "Buste De Femme" one of Picasso famous paintings. The Spanish artist wanted to express his feelings about the bloody war that had torn apart his homeland.

The painting took a 24-hour journey from the Netherlands to the West Bank

Professor Lynda Morris of Norwich University College of the Arts in England and a specialist on Picasso, compared it with the political situation in the West Bank.

She said Picasso strived to understand both sides of the Spanish Civil War, and that holds lessons for today. "... Probably in the West, we know much more of the Israeli side more than the Palestinian side, and the importance to begin to address that balance," Morris told CNN.

Twenty feet away in an adjacent room of the academy, the special packing crate for the painting has been put on exhibit as well with the shipping label "From Eindhoven to Palestine" displayed prominently.

"This is the smallest museum and this box will be part of the exhibition," Horani told CNN in an advance preview of the painting.

He said the painting's 24-hour journey from the Netherlands to the West Bank was documented as it made its way to Tel Aviv. It was then escorted by an Israeli security firm to Qalandia checkpoint and then on to Ramallah.

The painting exhibition, which officially opened its doors to the public on Friday, was attended by Palestinians and international art lovers.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad went to the opening. He said the painting would go back to the Netherlands taking with it a little bit of the region with it.

"Destination Palestine, by itself, is of great significance to us," Fayyad said. "It is really moving to see this great work of Picasso is here and this portrait goes back to Eindhoven and part of Palestine will be with it," Fayyad told CNN after touring the exhibition.

"This is really a big thing.
--Christine Hadid, Palestinian architect

Art connoisseur Ola Abu Gharbieh said seeing the work in the West Bank made her proud.

"Palestinians are artistic. They are fond of art, and they had the chance and opportunity to bring such a universal and international work of art here in Palestine, and I wish to have similar experiences in the future."

Christine Hadid, a Palestinian architect and a self-avowed art lover, said the exhibit helped break through common stereotypes people hold about Palestinian society.

"This is really a big thing. We can show the world we can do something like this. Our life is not only focused on war and on all the bad things that happen to us while we are living in closure" Hadid said.

"This breaks all closures to Ramallah and Palestine. Maybe next time we will have a masterpiece by another artist -- Van Gogh or someone else. It's a first step for bigger events hopefully."

James Franco's Invisible Art....

James Franco isn't profiting from his invisible art (from cnn.com)

James Franco’s venture into the invisible art business appears to be taking off, but he's not getting any money from it.

The star with an unreal number of titles has teamed up with artistic duo Praxis to open the Museum of Non-Visible Art (MONA), an institution “composed entirely of ideas.”

On its website, MONA describes itself as “an extravaganza of imagination, a museum that reminds us that we live in two worlds: the physical world of sight and the non-visible world of thought," which "redefines the concept of what is real." The museum goes on to add that "Although the artworks themselves are not visible, the descriptions open our eyes to a parallel world built of images and words. This world is not visible, but it is real, perhaps more real, in many ways, than the world of matter, and it is also for sale.

A variety of invisible pieces are available via Kickstarter, where $20 will yield an invisible sculpture by Praxis, and $50 will find a 19th century garment from James Franco’s imaginary film “Red Leaves” on your doorstep. Or rather, a card describing the 19th century garment from Franco’s film since the costume itself can be seen only in one's imagination.

“You will not receive a painting or a film or a photograph in your mailbox. What you will receive is something even more fascinating: The opportunity to collaborate in an act of artistic creation,” says MONA’s Kickstarter page. “You will receive a title card with a description of a piece of art, as well as a letter of authentication.”

Presumably these invisible pieces aren’t purchased with invisible money, and while Franco’s rep confirmed to CNN that the actor did agree to contribute some non-visible art, he hasn't seen any money from the project, which so far has garnered $12,577 through Kickstarter.

The other items from Franco that are up for grabs are the imagined short film “Red Leaves” and a full-scale steamboat from the movie. The film is in the $25 and up category and also comes with a PDF copy of the museum's catalog, while the steamboat is in the $100 and up category, which in addition to the title and description card comes with an invitation to a November 2011 after-party.

Joan Miro Biography

(1893-1983)

Joan Miro was born April 20, 1893 in Barcelona to Michel Miro Adzerias a goldsmith, and Dolores Ferra, the daughter of a cabinetmaker. At an early age, Miro attended drawing lessons in the evenings after school. At 14, after a brief period of time at a school of commerce in Barcelona he entered the La Lonja Academy of Fine Arts where he came under the influence of two teachers: Modesto Urgelle and Jose Pasco. He continued his studies with Pasco while working as a clerk in a business house until a serious illness caused him a leave of absence. Then in 1912 he entered the art school of Francisco Gali in Barcelona. During his years at the school he became interested and influenced by contemporary painting, Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism.

He attended drawing sessions of the Sant Lluch Circle, where the architect Gaudi had been a student. In 1916 he visited an exhibition of French art organized by Vollard in Barcelona. During this time Miro met many influential figures of the art world, such as F. Picabia, the founder of the Dada review “391,” Marie Laurencin, and Max Jacob. He had his first exhibition in 1918 at the Gallery Dalmau, and in the same year became a member of the Agrupacio Courbet, a group of young painters around Artigas. He painted “detailist” landscapes at this time. Then in 1919 Miro took his first visit to Paris, where he met and became friends with Picasso. He spent the subsequent winters in Paris, returning to Montroig with his family for the summer. At the end of 1920 he took a studio at 45 rue Blomet in Paris.

His first Paris exhibition in 1921, organized by Dalmau at the Galerie La Licorne was a complete failure. Until his next exhibition in 1923 Miro established a close relationship with the neighboring artists surrounding his studio in Paris; and with Henry Miller and Hemingway. Then in 1924 he joined Andre Breton Louis Aragon, and Paul Eluard in the Surrealist group, and in 1925 took part in the Surrealist exhibition at Galerie Pierre. During the years that followed he lived next to and worked closely with Max, Ernst, Magritte, Eluard, and Arp, he was married in 1930 to Pilar Juncosa on October 12^th, and continued exhibiting with the Surrealists from New York to London.

After the outbreak of war in Spain in 1936 he left, not to return for four years. He had 22 works included in the International Surrealist exhibition in the same year, at the New Burlington Galleries in London. In 1940 while beginning his Constellations series finished the next year, Miro returned to Paris in the face of the advancing German army. He returned to Spain that same year. In 1942 Miro returned to live in Barcelona, he begins to work with ceramics in collaboration with Artigas. He makes his first visit to the United States in 1947, and returns to Paris the next year where he produced numerous engravings and lithographs.

Museum collections include but not limited to…

• Hermitage Museum
• Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Guggenheim Museum, New York
• Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota
• National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC
• Tate Gallery, London, UK
• San Diego Museum of Art
• Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran
• Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco
• Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Museum, Quebec
• National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
• Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan
• Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland
• Museo Patio Herreriano de Valladolid, Spain
• New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
• Philadelphia Museum of Art, Palazzo Forti, Verona
• Reina Sofía National Museum, Madrid
• Staatsgalerie Stuttgart,
• Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio
• Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel
  
• and counting....
  

Miro: Blue Star

Miro, Joan (1893-1983)
Blue Star, 1927
Oil on canvas

Auction estimate: 5,000,000 - 7,000,000 Euro (7,195,279 - 10,073,391 usd)
Sold for: 11,586,520 EUR (16,673,650 USD) PREMIUM

Goya: Los Disparates / Los Proverbios

Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jose de
Renounce the Friend Who Covers You with His Wings and Bites You with His Beak, 1864
Etching
9 1/2 x 14 inches

Francisco Goya created his final and most enigmatic print series in the years between 1815 and 1824. For reasons that remain unclear, 40 years passed before their publication in 1864. The series was published under the title Los Proverbios, although Goya's own captions for the working proofs include the word "disparates," meaning "follies." As a result, this print series is known by both titles. The proverbs assigned to each plate were added upon publication.

Even with titles, the meanings of Los Proverbios remain ambiguous. Like Goya's "black" paintings, begun in 1819 after his recovery from a serious illness and filled with macabre visions, Los Proverbios are imbued with an overwhelming sense of pessimism and appear to reflect Goya's precarious mental state at the time. Each of the 18 etchings depicts isolated figures in dark, often nightmarish landscapes. While some plates appear harmlessly satirical, others depict gruesome monsters or attacks on innocents. Although the subject matter in this series is varied, the level of quality is constant. Goya's expert use of contour, line density, and tonal variation in weaving his dark visions clearly evidence his extraordinary abilities as a master printmaker.

Dali: St. George and the Dragon

Dali, Salvador
St. George and the Dragon,1947
Etching
17 3/4 x 11 1/4 inches

The most famous legend of Saint George is of him slaying a dragon. In the Middle Ages the dragon was commonly used to represent the Devil. The slaying of the dragon by St George was first credited to him in the twelfth century, long after his death. It is therefore likely that the many stories connected with St George's name are fictitious.

There are many versions of story of St George slaying the dragon, but most agree on the following:

A town was terrorized by a dragon A young princess was offered to the dragon and when George heard about this he rode into the village, slayed the dragon and rescued the princess.

The Legend of St. George and the Dragon

St. George travelled for many months by land and sea until he came to Libya. Here he met a poor hermit who told him that everyone in that land was in great distress, for a dragon had long ravaged the country.

'Every day,' said the old man, 'he demands the sacrifice of a beautiful maiden and now all the young girls have been killed. The king's daughter alone remains, and unless we can find a knight who can slay the dragon she will be sacrificed tomorrow. The king of Egypt will give his daughter in marriage to the champion who overcomes this terrible monster.'

When St. George heard this story, he was determined to try and save the princess, so he rested that night in the hermit's hut, and at daybreak set out to the valley where the dragon lived. When he drew near he saw a little procession of women, headed by a beautiful girl dressed in pure Arabian silk. The princess Sabra was being led by her attendants to the place of death. The knight spurred his horse and overtook the ladies. He comforted them with brave words and persuaded the princess to return to the palace. Then he entered the valley.

As soon as the dragon saw him it rushed from its cave, roaring with a sound louder than thunder. Its head was immense and its tail fifty feet long. But St. George was not afraid. He struck the monster with his spear, hoping he would wound it.

The dragon's scales were so hard that the spear broke into a thousand pieces. and St. George fell from his horse. Fortunately he rolled under an enchanted orange tree against which poison could not prevail, so that the venomous dragon was unable to hurt him. Within a few minutes he had recovered his strength and was able to fight again.

He smote the beast with his sword but the dragon poured poison on him and his armor split in two. Once more he refreshed himself from the orange tree and then, with his sword in his hand, he rushed at the dragon and pierced it under the wing where there were no scales, so that it fell dead at his feet.

Picasso: Les Communicants

Picasso, Pablo
Les Communiants, 1919
Oil on Canvas
13 7/8 x 9 1/2 inches
Provenance: Private. Upon Request
Literature: Private. Upon Request

By 1919, the year following the end of the First World War, Picasso was committed to two radically different stylistic tendencies in his painting. The first approach was a continuation of Synthetic Cubism. The problems of depicting objects in space continued to intrigue the artist, and he generally used a Cubist method when painting still-lifes. The second approach was Picasso’s new Neoclassical, manner, stemming from his work with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, in which he forged a style based on the linear precision of Ingres and the Old Masters. To counter the mechanical and analytical character of Cubism, which to many reflected the breakdown of traditional order during the war years, Picasso sensed that the time was right for a new approach to the figure, and his Neoclassical manner was essentially a recovery of figuration and re-examination of traditional formal values.

However, few admirers of the artist’s work found this stylistic bipolarity easy to accept. Critics thought that the artist was being insincere and was attempting to pander to public tastes. “Depending on one’s aesthetic point of view, Picasso’s Neoclassism of the late teens and early twenties represents either an eclectic blossoming or a chaotic decay because of ths refusal to work in an exculsivly Cubist style. Yet, stylistic complexity is the central issue of Picasso’s art in these years, and it was crucial to his worldwide fame” (M.C. FitzGerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentith Century Art, New York, 1995, pp. 100-101). Towards the end of the decade Picasso began to shift his allegiance form the pro-cubist Leonce Rosenberg, director of the Galerie de l’Effort Moderne, who had taken over Picasso’s sales during the war years while Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler had to remain in Germany, to his brother Paul, whose gallery was more conservatively oriented toward Renoir and the Impressionists. In 1919 Picasso had his one and only show at Galerie de l’Effort Moderne, a survey of Cubism, and thereafter he showed exclusively at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg, where his stylistic eclecticism was warmly received and generated more sales.

The present painting represents one side of Picasso’s stylistic coin at the end of the ‘teens. Based on an old photograph he kept, the subjects a young girl and boy on the occasion of their first communion. While some elements in the composition, such as the chair in the foreground and the sitters’ hands, are instantly recognizable, the children’s bodies have been broken down into sharply angular columnar plans and integrated within the space; the background is contrasted by means of the curved folds of drapery.

During the same winter Picasso painted a companion picture, almost three times the height of the presents work, but in a Neoclassical manner, Les premiers communiants (J. Palau I Fabre, op. cit., no. 347; coll. Musee Picasso, Paris), for which there are additionally several studies. The placement of the two children is identical and the chair is similarly arranged, although slightly angled into the picture plane. In place of a composed background in the Cubist version, Picasso borrows from the photograph a vague, empty space for the background of the Musee Picasso picture, in which shadows hint at depth.

The formal elements in both pictures seem diametrically opposed, and the subject itself carries very different connotations in each version. In the present painting the subject is only marginally relevant to overall conception of the picture, which is dominantly formal in intent and largely devoid of sentiment. The Neoclassical version is formally less innovative (except as an alternate response to the Cubist method). However the subject comes to the fire, and while there is a certain folk-like charm and refreshing simplicity in this rendering, modernists would surely object to its genre-like sentimentality and pietism. It is perhaps for this reason (and whatever personal meaning the photograph possessed) that Picasso did not sign and exhibition les premires communainats.

Picasso’s involvement in Neoclassicism began to diminish in th elate 1920’s as he exhausted the possibilities inherent in a limited range of subjects. However, throughout this period he continued to mine the richer vein of Cubism; it proved to be a durable formal discipline capable of periodic rejuvenation. After 1925, Picasso’s interest in the new surrealist movement provided the impetus for reasserting the formal concepts of Cubism, and this time subject matter would come mainly from his own inner life, his internal conflicts and emotional relationships with others.

Michael Visits the Florence Academy

This past February Owner and President of Galerie Michael, Michael Schwartz, visited the Florence Academy of Art, Florence Italy, to hand select artists to exhibit at Galerie Michael's Florence Academy Alumni Exhibition in September. Not only did Michael visit the studios of artists such as Daniel Graves, Founder of the Academy (Philosophy of Art), Professor and Alum's Robert Bodem and Hunter Eddy, and students Louis Fenne, Cornelia Hernes, and Vitaliy Shtanko but he also selected and commissioned some of the works for the gallery's upcoming show. (right: Alicia Ponzio, Below: Robert Bodem's sculpture studio)




The Florence Academy was founded in 1991 and specializes in highly skilled Realistic painting, drawing, and sculpting in the traditions of the Old Masters. The students of the academy go through a rigorous 4 year training followed by an apprenticeship.


During the first year of study the students focus on academic drawing and rarely pick up a paintbrush in fact it's not until they have the background, discipline, skills and knowledge do the students start painting. First the artists study the basics such as the materials needed to create defining works, the differences between manufactured paint and handmade oils, how to stretch canvas, make frames, and students study in depth the works of the Old Masters. (Right: Eran Webber and his studio)



Keeping in the tradition of the Old Masters, it's not until this basic foundation is laid, do the students study form, light and basic compositions. The models come in and the students start to create drawings and basic sculptures from live models.


The next step is taking what is learned and applying it to the canvas, however before this happens the old tradition of sketching is taught. Then once the sketch is created and reworked until the students the students learn light, shadow and color by the absence of color. Sepia tones and black and white tones are first used to gain understanding of light, shadow, depth, movement of paint and tones. After this step is mastered the artist has graduated and uses color but you will notice the colors are used as an accent in most of these artists' works, a way to accentuate the subject, move the eye, and enhance the overall image. (Right: Hege Elisabeth Haugen studio, Above: Alicia Ponzio's studio)



With this intensive study that the artists are able to create masterpieces that move and envelope its viewers. This technique is drastically different than the Impressionist who use conflicting colors to create movement, the Realists tend to lean on the enhancement of color or sometimes the lack of color to bring drama and focus to their work. (below: Cody Swanson's studio)


We hope that you can join the gallery in September in welcoming the first annual Florence Academy Alumni Exhibition! More information to come closer to the event.

Summer Sale 2011

SUMMER SALE 2011