It has been a while since I have been so drawn to a movie as I was to the recent creation of Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris. This time the story and the coming-to-life of the most influential poets, painters and thinkers of the roaring 20′s in Paris are simply amazing!

In the movie, disenchantment with the present leads Gil, a naive but endearing American played by Owen Wilson, to return to the golden age of the 1920s. One night, having taken leave of the fiancée who doesn’t understand him, he is wandering the streets of Paris when a clock rings out the chimes of midnight. A vintage black car pulls up, its doors swing open and its passengers invite him to a party. After a while it dawns on Gil that he has been transported back in time to a soiree where he finds himself in the enjoyably loquacious company of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí.

I have lost myself in the feelings of this particular movie so much that I was genuinely upset that I cannot be there – up there on the screen! Dancing, drinking absinth and getting the inside scoop on a Picasso portrait!

Paris in the Twenties. Has there ever been, before or after, such an incredible concentration of talents in one space and time? Specifically the painters of the era with Picasso and Dali leading the way along with Henri Matisse, George Brack, Juan Miro, Franz Marc, and Amedeo Modigliani who are all mentioned and take part in the film.

The movie continues as the main character Gil meets Picasso’s mistress Adriana. Together, they have a romantic get-away back to the era of the Belle Epoque meeting Edgar Degas, Toulouse Lautrec, Paul Gauguin and Edward Manet who all believed that the Renaissance was the greatest period. Everyone, it seems, cling to the past. It turns out the grass might not be greener in any side.

If I had a chance to meet great painters like Gil’s meeting with Dali on a glass of table wine or his encounter with Gauguin at the Belle Epoque I would have liked to:
1. Share a cigarette with Frida Kahlo
2. Prepare a dinner for Georgia O’Keeffe
3. Dine with Pablo Picasso and find out who was his most beloved wife
4. Join Salvador Dali for coffee in Madrid
5. See New York through the eyes of Edward Hopper
6. Be there at Rockeffeler Center in the unveiling of the Diego Rivera giant mural in the 20’s
7. Get seriously drunk with Vincent van Gogh
8. See Jackson Pollack at work in his early studio; maybe even just paint drop his unfinished work.

This is my list – what would yours look like?

As I stepped into the SFMOMA, it was clear that the Steins had an enormous impact on this special landmark of San Franciscan Art. The Stein family, were the center of attention and their influence on the art scene of the entire West Coast did not go unappreciated.

The Steins are responsible in many ways for the turn-of-the century revolution in the visual arts through their adventurous patronage, deep ties to leading minds of the era, and legendary Paris salon gatherings. As powerful `tastemakers`, they had a commitment to the new, a confidence in their inclinations, and a drive to build appreciation for the work they loved. From the moment they first dared to admire Matisse’s scandalous Woman with a Hat (1905)—the “nasty smear of paint” that gave the fauves their name—the family was staking claims for modern art that would heavily influence their peers and transform the careers of several of the most important artists of the 20th century such as Henry Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde reunites the unparalleled modern art collections of author Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael Stein, and Michael’s wife, Sarah Stein. Jointly organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux-Grand Palais, Paris, this major touring exhibition gathers approximately 200 iconic paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and illustrated books not only by Matisse and Picasso, who are each represented by dozens of works, but also by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Henri Manguin, Francis Picabia, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Félix Vallotton, among others. The Steins Collect premiered at SFMOMA May 21 through September 6, 2011, before traveling to Paris and then New York.

I had a great time touring the SFMOMA, it is a special place in the heart of bustling San Francisco. However, my personal feeling is that although the city of San Francisco owes a debt of gratitude to the Steins, the art in any museum should take center stage. Paying homage to the Steins is good and well, but let us not forget why we are here for… I quickly skimmed through a rich array of archival materials—including photographs, family albums, film clips, correspondence, and ephemera—the exhibition provides on this influential family and went directly to the awesome Modern Art collection the museum has to offer with their powerful Rothko’s, sublime Juan Miro’s and their beautiful Diego Rivera’s. The museum also has an interesting educational annex created in tandem with Google called “Doodle 4 Google” where you can see kids getting involved in the arts. Seeing kids getting immersed in art as they create art in the middle of the SFMOMA was the highlight of my visit. Talk about getting creative!

In conclusion, the SFMOMA is a great visit, but if you have to choose only one modern art museum in San Francisco, then I would suggest peeking into the de Yung at the Golden Gate Park with their Picasso exhibition.

Surrealist Leonora Carrington, 94, passed away last Wednesday in her home in Mexico City. The cause of her death was pneumonia. Carrington was known for dreamscape images inspired by folklore, religious ritual and occult symbolism.

Leonora Carrington is perhaps one of the lesser recognized Surrealists in popular culture, when juxtaposed to her male counterparts. She was the one-time partner of Max Ernst. She was acquainted with the likes of André Breton, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. Articles regarding her death mention her as “one of the last living links” to these men.

The artist did credit Ernst with her art education, after they ran off of as paramours to Paris. “From Max I had my education. I learned about art and literature. He taught me everything,” she told The Guardian in London in 2007. Though the artist credited Ernst and several contemporary art critics mention Carrington as a “link,” she is truly a leading figure in Surrealist art, and one of the last great Modern Mexican artists.

Born in Lancashire, Britain, her Irish nanny told her tales from Celtic folklore. Her father was against his daughter becoming an artist, but her mother was supportive, even gifting the budding artist with a volume of Hubert Read’s book on Surrealism. She eventually attended the Chelsea School of Art, then joined the London academy of the Cubist Amedee Ozenfant.

Ernst left his wife in 1938, and the outbreak of World War II saw him imprisoned and his wife institutionalized after a minor breakdown. Carrington eventually recovered and left for New York, showing at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, and making a general success for herself. She relocated to Mexico, where her knowledge and the execution of folklore and occult symbolism inside her work deepened. Her most common symbols are animal in nature–deer, hyenas, a white horse, among others.

In Mexico she wed a Hungarian photographer, Emeric Weisz. Together they had two sons, Gabriel Weisz-Carrington and Pablo Weisz-Carrington. She is survived by her two sons and five grandchildren.

Does Carrington’s story seem dreary? She was a talented and multimedia artist that painted cloaked figures, deer with trees sprouting from her back, and elusive dreamscapes. She sculpted. She wrote stories and screenplays. She was a mother and a wife. Her most famous written piece, a 1974 fantastical novel titled The Hearing Trumpet, is an account of a feminist uprising in a women’s retirement home. In 2005, Christie’s auctioned Carrington’s “Juggler” (1954). The final price was $713,000, which set a new record for the highest price paid at auction for a living surrealist painter.

In regards to being anyone’s muse, the artist once said this, “I didn’t have time to be anybody’s muse; I was too busy rebelling against my parents and learning to be an artist.” Leonora Carrington, a legendary Surrealist, leaves a legacy for the contemporaries attempting to trace her steps.

For the first time ever at the Brooklyn Museum, mothers are honored in a brunch and tour — “Extraordinary Women: Celebrating Mothers and Motherhood in Art through the Ages,” to be given on Mother’s Day on May 8. The tour features some of its most famous artworks, from ancient to modern periods.

Mary Cassatt is among one of the more well known women artists to be shown in the first time tour. The museum carries 19 paintings in its collection of the artist, but among the most famous to show is Woman in a Red Bodice and Her Child. The same model featured in this work is also present in Cassatt’s Breakfast in Bed. Known for her prominence with the French Impressionists, Cassatt was at first consistently rejected from the Salon as she choose not to take a male patron or protector.

Lilly Martin Spencer is one of the extraordinary women artists showcased in the tour. Spencer was the mother of thirteen children, of whom only seven lived, and the sole breadwinner for the family. Though they lived an unconventional and financially troubled lifestyle, the family was happy and Spencer is and was then a well-known artist. Among Spencer’s famous works to be shown will be her 1856 Kiss Me and You’ll Kiss the ‘Lasses.

More information about the event can be found at the website of the Brooklyn Museum. Tickets are sold out for the tour, but there’s always next year, which is certain to be even more spectacular! The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center For Feminist Art at the museum will also feature two series about empowering women and art. “Academic Symposium: From Portraits to Pin-ups: Representations of Women in Art and Popular Culture” will take place on May 14th starting at 11:30 A.M. Art historian Dr. Gail Levin will discuss her most recent book, Lee Krasner: A Biography, on May 15th at 2 P.M. If you are still looking for a Mother’s Day present, check out the most popular oil paintings for the occasion!

Here are a few of many of Picasso’s horse drawings & paintings. There are many great Pablo Picasso horse drawings from 1936 & 1937 when he was doing studies for Guernica.

The bottom right piece Tete de Cheva was actually stolen from a Swiss museum in 2008. Picasso seems to be very popular with art stealing criminal crowd.

On my trip to visit the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, I found the many images of Picasso’s horses to be electrifying! His preparation as he set forth to depict the Spanish Civil War of 1936 in this monumental piece is astounding and awe inspiring.

Google has launched a new discovery tool, called Art Project www.googleartproject.com. Visitors can explore 17 of the world’s most well-known museums. Not only can you walk the rooms of the galleries, but you can get close, EXTREMELY CLOSE, to the surface of some of the more famous paintings that hang on the walls. Fans of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” for example can zoom in on the canvas and see every detail of this paintings brush strokes and texture. How you ask?

Google provided the same cameras that were mounted on cars to capture the street views of cities all over the USA for this project. Team members then pushed these cameras around each participating museum to make an interior map of each location. Then to add another diminution to a visitors experience samples of art from each of the 17 galleries were selected and photographed with one super high-resolution image. Each image containing around seven billion pixels, for those who do not know how large that is, it provides you the same close visual as if you were shrunk and standing on the surface of the canvas itself. IT’S REALLY COOL!

One down fall with the program is the navigation of the rooms. It seems a bit limited compared to actually being there and you find yourself outside the museum if you get too excited with your clicker while walking the rooms, but for those who can’t travel to experience the work in person it is a close second.

Two big thumbs up for this ingenious idea for Art lovers everywhere!

Pablo Picasso the great, the Michelangelo of the 20th century, the raging bull of modern art is exhibiting in Seattle.

The Seattle Art Museum, is host to a comprehensive exhibit of the modern master, artist Pablo Picasso. These are Picasso’s private stash of art pieces that he did not intend to reveal or sell. In today’s art market, the value of this artwork is nearly incalculable. And you need to take yourself, family or friends to see this show, because, unless you travel to Paris any time soon, you won’t get another chance.

Picasso’s enormous collection was “given,” in lieu of inheritance taxes, to the French government, who quickly outfitted a large, handsome but derelict hotel in Paris with the enormous collection. Right now, the museum is closed for two years of renovation. Vive l’opportunite!

With all the intrigue of a modern espionage novel, the curators of the Seattle Art Museum where able to somehow finagle Paris into loaning its collection to Seattle through Jan. 17.

Picasso burst on the Paris scene like a burst of talent, the art world had not seen before. To say that Picasso was a precocious talent at age 19 is an understatement. He could already paint and draw like a master.

And paint he did. The collection is an undeniable display of all the glamor, brilliance and command of the many media that Picasso thrust upon an evolving 20th century art world, a world already reeling from the impact of Impressionism and Post Impressionism and the first extraordinary artworks by modern painters from Claude Monet to Vincent Van Gogh.

Picasso fathered the next giant steps that led to the modern-day transformation from painting as representation, to, well … be my guest in defining this potpourri of expression.

Most of his paintings stun a vibrant imagination. Two Women Running on the Beach, The Village Dance, Cat Catching a Bird, sketches from Guernica, playful and provocative sculpture – all this work is displayed with deep passion, eroticism, and of course, all the creativity of an artist who might be defined as the raging bull of modern art.

At the beginning of the exhibit, one is confronted by a life-size photograph, a self-portrait of the artist as a young man, around age 24, standing resolutely with two deep-set black eyes blazing, almost challenging, muscles hard and taut, and with a pose that suggests an ego beyond Picasso’s cool and calculating confidence, of which he is generally accused of exhibiting by the boatload. He seems to suggest in a prescient sort way that, yes, he is going to become an artist of unsurpassed depth and imagination. His black and white drawings suggest a master on terms with Rembrandt or Picasso’s fellow Spaniard, Goya. Certainly, Picasso does not surpass either. But to be held on a par with such genius and talent speaks volumes, and Picasso did speak volumes. This quotation is a favorite: “God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on creating other things.”

His bigger than life nature, like his artwork, must have remained irresistible, just as this show is irresistible. In the sketches and studies of Guernica (the original remains in Madrid), rage and indignity confront us with all the power of a full-force Blitzkrieg.

In a strange way, it doesn’t matter if you like abstract painting or not. Picasso is the giant of expressionism and the creator of many emerging art styles. He was always ahead of the pack, bursting from the starting gate like Secretariat or Sea Biscuit. It can hardly be denied. You may dismiss his style, but must not reject the talent.

In 2005, viewers had the opportunity to experience Van Gogh works from the Kröller-Müller Museum in Atlanta, Georgia. The Kröller-Müller Museum is pairing with the Van Gogh Museum for a second time to showcase the artist’s works in three locations in Japan from 2010-2011.

The exhibition will show in the following three locations in Japan:

01.10.2010/20.12.2010 Tokyo The National Art Center
01.01.2011/13.02.2011 Fukuoka Kyusyu National Museum
22.02.2011/10.04.2011 Nagoya Nagoya City Art Museum

Radiography, infrared reflectography, pigment analysis, and other methods of research will reveal a more in-depth look at Van Gogh’s process. Van Gogh’s works are characterized by strong use of line, muted and vivid palette colors, swirling strokes, and somewhat distorted perspectives inside seemingly fantastical works of art. Though perhaps viewed as fantastical as a post-impressionist, Van Gogh also relied on realism.

Van Gogh’s Influences

Van Gogh will not show alone. Many works of the artist’s contemporaries and predecessors will be shown alongside Van Gogh in the tour. Viewers will have the opportunity to see works that directly influenced Van Gogh, (Rembrandt and Rubens) while getting to know the works of his contemporary painters (Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin). Van Gogh worked at Cormon’s studio for months, where he met students who would also become renowned contemporaries. Neo-Impressionism also made its debut around the time that Van Gogh became a serious practicing artist, having not taken up painting until his late twenties.

The show will provide a rare opportunity to study Van Gogh’s work in-depth and, alone, is worth the trip to Japan

It’s a big season for Picasso in the northeast. MoMA has a show, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is doing a Picasso & Friends show. Later this spring the Metropolitan Museum of Art will exhibit 300 of its Picassos…

The Guggenheim is also taking part in the Picassopalooza by showing two great still-lifes as part of a seventh-floor collection portraying the importance of Picasso on the Modern Art World.

For some reason Picasso is back as the most popular artist of the past century. Picasso’s popularity is on the rise a trend that just does not seem to fade.

The Reina Sofia Museum, as I covered last time, is the home of Spain’s Modern Art masterpieces. The experience at the Reina Sofia is a majestic walk through the great works of the Spanish Modernist — from Salvador Dali to Juan Miro. As you marvel at the illuminating creations you cannot avoid the glaring evidence of the massive effect of the Spanish masters on the modern art movement.

With that said, there is one Spanish artist who has set the tone for 20th century evolution of Modern Art, you guessed it… that artist is Pablo Picasso.

Even though Pablo Picasso is a Spanish native, his works were banned from the country throughout the rain of Generalisimo Franco. The artists’ public rejection of Franco made him unwelcomed by the tyrant in his own native country.

This prelude makes the story of the Guernica oil painting at the Sofia, Madrid an extra special one.

The Guernica is probably Picassos’ most famous creation. Not an easy task as his works of art have been grasping the highest average dollar value for the past 20 years.

Guernica is a depiction of the bombing of Guernica, Spain, by German and Italian warplanes at the height of the Spanish Civil War on April 26, 1937. My mother used to call it the grand rehearsal to the Second World War.

The Spanish Republican government commissioned Pablo Picasso to create a large mural for the Spanish display at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians.

As you walk through the Reyna Sofia, just as you are about to enter the Guernica hall, you get the feeling that you are about to encounter greatness… similar to the feeling you get as you enter the Sistine chapel, there are only a handful of artistic creations that inspire the same emotions. The Guernica at the Rheina Sofia is one such display.
When you set yourself in front of the display it takes many minutes to stare at it. You can probably spend an hour just staring at it and probably an entire semester analyzing this masterpiece in an art or history class.

The Sofia holds a room adjacent to the Guernica that holds famous paintings and sculptures relating to the Spanish Civil War including preliminary sketches of various parts of the Guernica.

This huge oil painting which was originally inspired by a newspaper clip, has gained a monumental status, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace. The symbolism is abundant in every stroke and it is an important engagement I recommend to any Madrid visitor.

In conclusion, the Guernica will forever remain Picasso’s greatest work. As the years go by the importance of the message it delivers to the world just gets more and more important and relevant.