Jan Toorop (1858–1928)

Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Germany. October 22, 2016- January 29, 2017

Jan Toorop is among the most renowned Symbolist painters produced by the Netherlands. But fewer people know that he worked in a far wider range of styles. In his quest for a distinctive personal style, Toorop experimented with Impressionism, Pointillism and Art Nouveau. It was not until 1891 that – looking beyond the Dutch borders to artists like Ensor, Van Gogh and the Symbolists – he hit on his own distinctive Symbolist style. The everyday world was banished from his work in favour of highly imaginative and visionary images. The guest curator of this exhibition, Gerard van Wezel, has spent the last thirty years conducting in-depth research on Toorop’s oeuvre. His involvement has enabled the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag to gather together all of Jan Toorop’s principal masterpieces in the first complete overview of his work ever to be presented in the Netherlands.

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The Colour Woodcut in Vienna around 1900

The Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria. October 19, 2016- January 15, 2017
Around 1900, Vienna was a cultural melting pot as well as a bastion of the arts and sciences. In the area of fine arts, the Union of Austrian Artists – Secession pioneered new artistic territory and became the seed from which Viennese Art Nouveau would sprout.
This period saw prominent Secessionists including Carl Moll, Emil Orlik, and Koloman Moser rediscover one of the world’s oldest printing techniques entirely anew, thus ushering in an unforeseen golden era of the colour woodcut. With their emphasis on outlines, on the stylisation of motifs, and on the interplay of contrasting hues, these artists’ colour woodcuts were thoroughly in keeping with the new formal ideals of the Art Nouveau style and went on to become popular items for collectors. Their decorative depictions of elegant ladies, exotic animals, and peaceful snowy landscapes, characterised by workmanship of the highest refinement and virtuosity, met with considerable acclaim and demand. With this exhibition on the colour woodcut in Vienna between 1900 and 1914, the Albertina is devoting attention to a hitherto little-noted chapter of Viennese Art Nouveau with the presentation of around 100 outstanding works from its own collection.
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Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900–1918

The Neue Galerie, New York City, USA. September 22, 2016-January 16, 2017

This exhibition examines the Klimt’s sensual portraits of women as the embodiment of fin-de-siècle Vienna. It includes approximately 12 paintings, 40 drawings, 40 works of decorative art, and vintage photographs of Klimt, drawn from public and private collections worldwide. Central to the exhibition will be the display of Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912), which are shown side-by-side for the first time since 2006. Adele Bloch-Bauer was an important Klimt patron and notably, the only subject the artist ever painted twice in full length.

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Apostles of Nature: Jugendstil and Art Nouveau

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Ahmanson Building, floor 2, Los Angeles, USA. August 13, 2016-March 12, 2017

Organized by LACMA’s Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, Apostles of Nature: Jugendstil and Art Nouveau explores the popular late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century style known as Art Nouveau in France and Jugendstil in Germany. Inspired by the British Arts and Crafts movement, which celebrated craft in an age of advancing industrialization, as well as by Symbolist and Romantic painting, Japanese prints, and folk art, European artists developed a style characterized by highly decorative forms drawn from nature, with curvilinear, serpentine lines and daring whiplashes of color. Art Nouveau quickly spread beyond France and Germany, influencing a range of artistic movements and artists’ groups, including the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte in Austria.

Despite disparate goals, approaches, and materials, Art Nouveau artists across Europe were unified in their desire to make beautiful things, and to make life more beautiful in turn. This exhibition brings together more than 50 objects from across the museum’s collections, including prints, posters, books, decorative arts, and textiles, to illustrate the movement’s efforts to create integrated, total works of art, or Gesamtkunstwerke, that would bring aesthetic ideals to bear on everyday modern life.