museum tuesday

from yarnstorm i learn today about the scottish colourists, whose wonderful works may be found at the kelvingrove art gallery and museum in glasgow, and elsewhere.

The Age of Enchantment

Beardsley, Dulac and their Contemporaries 1890-1930
The exhibition of British fantasy illustration will be the first such exhibition in Britain and the first worldwide for over 20 years. All works come largely from British museums and private collections, many of these will never have been seen publicly before. Borrowing from the past, illustrators such as Aubrey Beardsley, Edmund Dulac and Kay Nielson had lavish colour plates published in children's books such as The Arabian Nights, which became the coffee table books for a new age.

28th November 2007 - 17th February 2008 • Dulwich Picture Gallery • Gallery Road, Dulwich • London • 020 8693 5254

(featuring online lectures, videos, and comments on the times and the artists.)

GUSTAV KLIMT: THE RONALD S. LAUDER AND SERGE SABARSKY COLLECTIONS
October 18, 2007 - June 30, 2008

Spring 2008 WIENER WERKSTÄTTE JEWELRY
March 27-June 30, 2008

Summer 2008 NEW WORLDS: GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN ART, 1890-1940
July 10-September 22, 2008

Spring 2009 THE BIRTH OF EXPRESSIONISM: BRÜCKE IN DRESDEN AND BERLIN, 1905-1913
February 26-June 29, 2009

the neue gallery
1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street
new york new york

regarding the neue gallery, christopher benfey (who wrote the great wave about the historical process of japonisme), in slate magazine says, "The stratospheric price that cosmetics maven Ronald S. Lauder shelled out for Gustav Klimt's 1907 society portrait Adele Bloch-Bauer I—reportedly $135 million, [is] the most ever paid for a work of art....

"No American has done more than Lauder, a former ambassador to Austria, to raise the visibility (and enhance the value) of often neglected German and Austrian art in the United States.

The Bloch-Bauers were Jewish and the Nazis liked Klimts. Adele died in 1925 of meningitis. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, her husband fled to Switzerland, where he died in 1945, having left his art collection behind. The Nazis put three of the paintings in the Austrian Gallery and sold the rest. A complicated restitution case played out over many years, eventually going to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that Mrs. Altmann, who lives in Los Angeles, could sue the Austrian government in American courts for her family's lost property. In January, she was awarded the portrait of her aunt along with four other Klimt paintings, including a later portrait of Adele and three extraordinary landscapes (a genre in which Klimt excelled). During the legal maneuvering, Ronald Lauder remained a staunch supporter of Mrs. Altmann, and his loyalty was richly rewarded in the privately arranged sale."