Glittering Exhibition - "Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters" at Legion of Honor

Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters is the first major international exhibition to assemble works by England’s nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with the medieval and Renaissance masterpieces that inspired them. Important loans of paintings, works on paper, and decorative arts from international collections, as well as works drawn from the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, demonstrate the Pre-Raphaelites’ fascination with Italian masters, including Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, and Paolo Veronese, as well as northern Renaissance painters such as Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling.

-- Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco

Though weary of the stilted beauty of the Pre-Raphaelites paintings, I came away enchanted by this well-curated, and sparkling exhibition, which juxtaposed the Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters, relating the connections between these two groups, in the timeline of the artistic development of the Pre-Raphaelites. The amazing achievements of the Old Masters were self-evidence; while the Pre-Raphaelites impressed with their virtuosity and romantic beauty, however mannered they could be.

First group:


The Virgin and Child with an Angel, St George and a Donor, Hans Memling


Virgin and Child Enthroned with Angels, Master of the Saint Lucy Legend


Madonna and Child with Two Angels, Followers of Adriaen Isenbrandt


Virgin and Child, Dieric Bouts and or workshop


The Annunciation, Jan van Eyck


Mariana, John Everett Millais






Portrait of a Man, Lucas Cranach the Younger






The Ransom, John Everett Millais

Group 2:


The Holy Family, Perino del Vaga


Madonna and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist, Piero di Cosimo


Copy of The Annunciation by Fra Angelico, Cesare Mariannecci


The Meeting of Saints Dominic and Francis of Assisi, Fra Angelico


A Crowned Virgin Martyr (Saint Catherine of Alexandria), Bernardo Daddi


The Nativity, The Baptism of Christ, Christ and the Woman of Samaria, Noli me Tangere, Perugino


Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante, Dante Gabriel Rossetti


Dante's Dream


Valentine Reproaching Proteus for His Falsity, William Holman Hunt


Lorenzo and Isabella, John Everett Millais


Beata Beatrix, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Group 3:


Idealized Portrait of a Lady, Sandro Botticelli


Idealized Portrait of a Lady, Sandro Botticelli


Madonna and Child with Two Angels, Sandro Botticelli & The Virgin and Child, Workshop of Sandro Botticelli's


Portrait of a Lady Known as Smeralda Bandinelli, Sandro Botticelli




Flora & Proserpine, Dante Gabriel Rossetti


Love and the Maiden, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope

Group 4:


Self-Portrait, Raphael


Lucretia, Paolo Veronese


 Portrait of a Young Man with a Green Book, Giovanni Cariani


A Young Woman Holding a Mirror with Her Servant, Parus Bordone






La Pia, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

 
Lady Lilith, Dante Gabriel Rossetti


Bocca Bacciata - Dante Gabriel Rossetti


The Heart of the Rose, Edward Burne-Jones

Group 5:


The Passing of Venus, Edward Burne-Jones


The Entombment, Parmigianino (Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola)


Cupid's Hunting Fields, Edward Burne-Jones


The Wheel of Fortune & The Ascension, Edward Burne-Jones


The Tree of Forgiveness - A Mosaic in Rome, Edward Burne-Jones


Flora & Pomona, Edward Burne-Jones










Exhibition ends on September 30, 2018.


Other Related posts on Art · 文化 · Kunst:
- Erasing the Rules - A Robert Rauschenberg Retrospective at SFMOMA
- Edvard Munch at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
- Introduction to Fisher Collection and the 75th Anniversary Exhibit at SFMOMA
- "The Political Line" - Keith Haring Exhibition at De Young Museum
- Tomás Saraceno at SFMOMA
- Preview of the Newly Expanded SFMOMA
- Unauthorized SFMOMA Solo Show
- More Sculptures at Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University 

Featured Painting: Time Frame

Identifying myself primarily a representational artist, does not exclude me from time to time being drawn to purely abstract visions, which excite with contrasting or even clashing colors, interplay of of shades, lines, and intricacies of patterns and forms. One of my successful results is a recent gouache painting, Time Frame, which intrigues viewers with ever expanding viewfinders, appealingly complementing secondary colors, and an array of ever shifting lines of different lengths, angles, and hues.

 
Time Frame
Gouache on Paper
7” x 11”
Completed in 2018

This painting will be exhibited at Berkeley Expression Gallery, September - December 2018, as part of the “Autumn Colors” group exhibition.

Originally posted on matthewfelixsun.com

Other Related posts on Art · 文化 · Kunst:
- Featured Painting - Our Winter of Discontent
- Featured Painting -- Congregation
- Featured Drawing "Formation"
- Featured Painting "Birches"
- My Featured Painting - "Paris and Three Goddesses"
- My Featured Painting - Colony
- My Featured Painting - New Century's Shangri-La
- My Featured Painting - Procession

Featured Painting - Our Winter of Discontent

Immediately after the devastating 2016 US presidential election, I was in the grip of a stark vision, in which innocent and powerless people were rounded up by an oppressive strongman regime. That was the inception of my new project, “Our Winter of Discontent”, to evoke an assembly of miserable, discontent, and angry people, behind a sprawling web of barbed wire and menaced by dark clouds from above. This vision was not paranoid fiction; it was based on observation of Donald Trump’s increasingly divisive and hateful rhetoric, which led to his capture of the presidency, and reaffirmed the ugly political and cultural reality of an almost apocalyptic US.

The world at large had been threatened in recent years by rising totalitarian and nationalistic trends, and the diminishing of liberal democracy. The situation worsened every day as I painted, under the weight of Trump’s daily assault on democracy, free press, the rule of law, etc. My warning vision became a sad prophecy, as many asylum seekers and their young children were brutally separated, and summarily detained. It seemed -- and seems now -- that things could only get worse, that those behind the barbed wire fences could well include U.S. citizens and legal immigrants, not only those deemed “illegal.”

A good vision doesn’t necessarily lead to good painting. After many months’ struggle, I put aside my first attempt, which had become somewhat too belabored, and a bit unyielding, and started over with version two. Yet, though satisfying to a certain degree, it became a bit regimented, less spontaneous, and also a bit removed from my vision of a manic world of disorder.

Having learned my lessons from those two attempts, I started a third version, and it achieved what I set out to document, with an unsettling and fluid visual style that matches our disturbing and depressing zeitgeist.

Here, the final product, “Our Winter of Discontent”.

The painting was completed before the world was assaulted by the novel Coronavirus, which most brutally affected countries whose leaders are waging wars against science, and suppressing truth and the free press. The painting was created before the tsunami of “Black Lives Matter” protests took hold in the US. But it evokes, or perhaps portends, the suffering and struggle that rolls on ceaselessly through human history.

These are the emotions and historical trends that my painting “Our Winter of Discontent” is trying to capture and reflect.


Our Winter of Discontent
Oil on Canvas 22” x 28”
Completed in 2018


Originally posted on matthewfelixsun.com

Other Related posts on Art · 文化 · Kunst:
- Featured Painting -- Congregation
-Featured Drawing "Formation"
- Featured Painting "Birches"
- My Featured Painting - "Paris and Three Goddesses"
- My Featured Painting - Colony
- My Featured Painting - New Century's Shangri-La
- My Featured Painting - Procession
- Featured Painting - Waft