Frida Kahlo, Scudiere del Quirinale, Rome, 20 March – 13 July 2014. Exhibition incorporating major paintings by Kahlo alongside photographs of the artist (taken mainly in the 1940s) and focussing especially on the theme of ‘self-depiction’ both in the form of traditional self-portraits and in the development of the Kahlo iconography and ‘legend’. Both the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue are by Helga Prignitz-Poda, one of the three authors of the Kahlo catalogue raisonne published in 1988.
America Latina: Photographs 1960-2013, Paris and Puebla
America Latina: Photographs 1960-2013. Shown first at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, 19 November 2013 – 6 April 2014 this exhibition moves to the Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico, 14 June – 29 September 2014. Brings together works by 70 artists from eleven countries, ranging from documentary photographers to contemporary artists who manipulate/modify the photographic image.
Sorolla, Dallas, San Diego and Madrid
Sorolla and America, Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, 13 December 2013 – 19 April 2014; touring to San Diego Museum of Art, 30 May – 26 August and finally Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, 23 September 2014 – 11 January 2015. Exhibition curated by the artist’s great-grandaughter Blanca Pons-Sorolla , presenting over 100 paintings, oil sketches and drawings, by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923) covering his early socially realistic themes as well as his better known landscapes and beach scenes. Exhibition focuses on key American collectors Archer Huntington and Thomas Fortune Ryan and the impact on the artist and American cultural society of the exhibitions he held in the States in 1909 and 1911. Accompanied by bilingual English/Spanish editions of the catalogue.
The exhibition and its catalogue (by the artist’s great granddaughter and Mark Roglan, Director of the Dallas Museum) have received an enthusiastic and thoughtful review by Richard Brettell in April’s edition of The Burlington Magazine (pp 267-269), which makes interesting comparisons with other recent Sorolla exhibitions over the last decade.
Miró, Madrid, Seattle and Duke University, N. Carolina
Miró: the Experience of Seeing, having opened at the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid in late 2013-January 2014, now in Seattle Art Museum 13 February– 25 May 2014; then to the Nasher Art Museum, Duke University, North Carolina 14 September 2014 – 22 February 2015.
Drawn entirely from the Reina Sofia’s collections it focuses on 50+ paintings, drawings and sculptures selected from the last 20 years of his career between 1963 and 1983.
Frida Kahlo, Long Beach, California
Frida Kahlo: Her Photos, Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California, 15 March – 8 June 2014. Selection made by leading Mexican photographer and historian Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, of some 257 photographs from the extensive archive (6,500 items) held in the Blue House in Mexico City. Both Kahlo’s father and maternal grandmother were professional photographers and she was herself a collector of nineteenth-century photographs, which she used and manipulated as working tools to inspire her own art. The exhibition is divided into six thematic sections: Kahlo’s parents; the Blue House; her crippled body; Frida’ loves; political struggle; and Diego’s gaze, and includes works by other photographers such as Man Ray, Tina Modotti, and Lola and Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
Robert Henri, San Diego
Spanish Sojourns: Robert Henri (1865-1929) and the Spirit of Spain, San Diego Museum of Art, California, 29 March – 9 September 2014; and touring to Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, 2014-2015.
The first exhibition devoted to the Spanish paintings by Henri, one of America’s ‘Ashcan School’ of artists, who travelled around Spain seven times between 1900 and 1926. Exhibition of 40 paintings, mainly portraits ranging from celebrated bullfighters and dancers to gipsy women and peasants.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue in hardback, which presents new scholarship on Henri and places his Spanish work in the context of other American artists, architects and writers inspired by Spain at the beginning of the early twentieth century.
Goya, Nashville
Goya: the Disasters of War, Frist Center for Visual Arts, Nashville, Tennessee, 28 February – 8 June 2014. Exhibition of the full series of 81 prints from the first published edition. Curated by Janis Tomlinson, Director of University Museums at the University of Delaware, it puts forward new research and reorders the series reviving Goya’s intentions for it seemingly interspersing war’s impact on the city and the countryside.
Visions and Nightmares: Four Centuries of Spanish Drawings, New York
Visions and Nightmares: Four Centuries of Spanish Drawings, Morgan Library, New York, 17 January – 11 May 2014. The first exhibition of Spanish drawings from the Morgan’s collection showing more than 20 sheets featuring works by Ribera, Murillo, Goya as well as Vicente Carducho, Alonso Cano and Eugenio Lucas and recently acquired drawings by Juan Carreño de Miranda and Mariano Salvador Maella. Complementing the drawings will be a selection of letters and books including an illustrated Don Quijote published in 1780.
Goya, New York
Goya and the Altamira Family, Metropolitan Museum, New York, 22 April – 3 August 2014. A picture-in-focus display of Goya’s four portraits of the Altamira family, including the Metropolitan’s portrait of Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga (1787-88) known as the ‘Boy in Red’, and a fifth family portrait by Agustin Esteve. This will be the first time that all five portraits have been brought together from American and Spanish private and public collections. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication in the form of a Bulletin.
Sorolla, Madrid
Fiesta y Color: The ethnographic gaze of Sorolla, Museo Sorolla, Madrid, 10 December 2013 – 20 May 2014.
Focuses on Sorolla’s images of the rural costume and customs that he saw on his travels over eight years through Andalucía, Aragón, Castilla, Cataluña, Extremadura, Galicia, Guipúzcoa and Valencia between 1911 and 1919.
Exhibition includes costume, jewellery, photographs and letters as well as some 25 paintings and drawings, several of which have never been shown in public before and some of which were acquired by Sorolla on his travels. His collection of regional costume is important as it was acquired before the big exhibition of Regional Dress held in Madrid in 1925, which stimulated collectors’ interest in such material.
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