20th Century

A new exhibition in Villa Bardini allows visitors to admire major masterpieces and previously unpublished material associated with the figures of art historian Roberto Longhi and writer and translator Anna Banti, who “revolutionised” art history with the rediscovery of Caravaggio and Italian art of the 17th century. [...]

The exhibition showcases such masterpieces as Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard, Jusepe de Ribera’s Apostles and a moving sequence of ten small Morandis created by the Bologna-born artist and gifted to Roberto Longhi and Anna Banti on various different occasions in the course of their friendship.

At the turn of the 20th century, an unprecedented wave of women artists prevailed against social constraints and left Australia to pursue international professional careers.

This is the first major exhibition to focus on the vital role of these Australian women in the emergence of international modernism, including the now-famous, such as Nora Heysen, Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith, as well as the still under-recognised, such as CL Allport, Justine Kong Sing and Stella Marks.

Featuring celebrated and rediscovered paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture and ceramics, Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940 reclaims the place of these pivotal Australian women artists, recognising their contribution to the development of European art. They brought new ideas back to Australia and played an integral, often unrecognised role in modernising our nation.

Drysdale ruled the museum failed to adequately scrutinize the drawing’s provenance, relying on now-discredited records from Swiss dealer Eberhard Kornfeld, who claimed to have bought the work from Grünbaum’s sister-in-law. Authorities overseeing the dispute presented evidence that Kornfeld forged documents in order to sell the works discretely.

A statement by the municipality on Thursday said the artworks were put into storage during work on a town hall in Uden - which is being incorporated into the neighbouring municipality of Landerd to form the Maashorst municipality.

"It's most likely that the artworks were accidentally taken away with the trash," they said.

Bringing together more than 110 works – paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and ceramics – the exhibition shows Matisse's view of his eldest daughter, Marguerite Duthuit-Matisse (1894–1982), an essential but discreet figure in his family circle.

The exhibition features numerous drawings rarely, if ever, shown to the public, as well as major works from American, Swiss and Japanese collections, now on view in France for the first time. Photographs, archival material and paintings by Marguerite herself fill out the portrait of this little-known personality.

This first ever major comparative exhibition aims to re-read the art history of Paris from an Asian perspective, inviting the public to delve deeper into how Asian artists lived, worked, and exhibited there in a dynamic period of modern art history.

The exhibition transports audiences to an era when Paris was at the height of modernity. The new elegant Art Deco style influenced everything from fashion and furniture to advertising, drawing from Asian inspirations. Migrants from around the world imbued fresh influences into art, music, and dance. Asian artists brought their distinctive heritage to Paris and engaged with the city’s modern art world. At the same time, Paris was the seat of a colonial empire, which had complex and troubling implications for artists from the colonies.

IWM holds a fascinating but under-researched collection of European fine and popular prints gathered by John Crichton-Stewart, the 4th Marquess of Bute, when he was a diplomat in Paris during the First World War and donated to the museum in the early 1950s. It contains around 3,600 predominantly French prints, representing all aspects of French patriotic print production of the period, most of them lithographs, as well as relief and intaglio prints, and some drawings. It is envisaged that the PhD project will focus on this collection, as well as the museum’s collection of British lithographs of the period, mainly instigated by the government’s War Propaganda Bureau / Department of Information. These include the 1917 series Britain’s Efforts and Ideals by various artists and the work of soldier-artist Gerald Spencer Pryse.

The proposed investigation of these collections will fill in a curiously outstanding gap in the field. Both scholars of France and art historians have paid relatively little attention to lithography. Moreover, in both Britain and France, the cultural history of the conflict has often underplayed the specificities of artistic production in wartime.

This is an excellent opportunity that will enable a recent PhD graduate or Early Career Researcher to gain experience in a thriving cultural and research institution, as well as the opportunity to develop their own research portfolio in a supportive and well-established research environment.

The successful candidate will be a pro-active and knowledgeable postdoctoral researcher, whose expertise in the histories of sculpture will complement that of the Research Team at the Henry Moore Studios & Gardens, and will form a key element of our public programmes.

Conducted in collaboration with the Oskar Reinhart Collection, ‘Am Römerholz’, Switzerland, the unknown artwork was discovered when The Courtauld took x-ray and infrared images of Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto – a portrait depicting Picasso’s sculptor friend painted in 1901 and one of the earliest examples of the artist’s Blue Period – ahead of its display as part of the upcoming The Griffin Catalyst Exhibition: Goya to Impressionism. Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection, opening 14 February. 

The Courtauld’s analysis of the painting reveals it played an important role at a crucial stage in the young Picasso’s stylistic development, at a time when he was moving away from colourful, Impressionistic paintings towards a distinctly more melancholy artistic style which became the defining phase of his career known as his Blue Period. 

“It is hard to overestimate the significance of Munch’s painting ‘Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones).’ Capturing the tension between proximity and distance — spatial as well as emotional — the work addresses the universal theme of the human condition,” said Lynette Roth, the Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum at the Harvard Art Museums. “The Strauses had generously loaned their painting for the inaugural installation of the renovated Harvard Art Museums building that opened in November 2014, and we are thrilled to be able to teach with and display it alongside the other significant paintings from their collection going forward.”

Pablo Picasso’s prolonged engagement with paper is the subject of the groundbreaking exhibition Picasso and Paper, organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in partnership with the Musée national Picasso-Paris.

Showcasing nearly 300 works spanning the artist’s career, the exhibition highlights Picasso’s relentless exploration of paper. His appreciation of and experimentation with the material is revealed in the works ranging from collages of cut-and-pasted papers to sculptures from pieces of torn and burnt paper, manipulated photographs, drawings in virtually all available media, and prints in an array of techniques. The exhibition’s highlights include Femmes à leur toilette (1937–38), an extraordinarily large collage (9 13/16 x 14 1/2 feet) of cut-and-pasted papers, which will be exhibited for the first time in the United States; outstanding Cubist papiers collés; artist’s sketchbooks, including studies for his best known paintings, including Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; constructed paper guitars from the Cubist and Surrealist periods; and an array of works related to major paintings and sculptural projects.

Suzanne Valadon had not been the subject of a monograph since the one devoted to her by the Musée National d’Art Moderne in 1967. Presented at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2023 (“Suzanne Valadon. A World of Her Own”), then at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Nantes (2024) and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (2024), the tribute to this ostensibly modern artist, free of the conventions of her time, continues at the Centre Pompidou in 2025, enhanced by new loans and new archives.

The exhibition showcases this exceptional figure and highlights her pioneering, but often underestimated, role in the birth of artistic modernity. It reveals the great freedom of this artist, who did not really adhere to any particular movement, except perhaps her own. The exhibition of almost 200 works draws on a wealth of national collections, in particular the largest, that of the Centre Pompidou, but also from the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie.