Europe’s Greatest Art Comes To America This Fall

From Philadelphia to Dallas and the Renaissance to the Roaring Twenties, Europe’s greatest art can be seen in special exhibitions across America this fall. The Detroit Institute of Art’s “Van Gogh in America,” previously reviewed by me on Forbes.com, highlights the offerings.

Brand name artists, big time museums, blockbuster shows with items on view that rarely cross the Atlantic.

No passport required.

Rodin: Atlanta

The city of Atlanta and Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917) share a little-known bond forged in tragedy. In May of 1962, Atlanta Art Association and High Museum of Art board members, patrons, artists and collectors embarked on a month-long tour of Europe’s cultural capitals. They would not return.

Their flight home crashed during takeoff June 3 at Paris’ Orly Field. 122 passengers died. 106 were Atlantans. Leadership of the city’s cultural community lay among the wreckage.

At the time, it was the worst single plane crash in aviation history.

Martin Luther King Jr. canceled an event upon hearing the news. Andy Warhol painted the subject.

To honor the victims, the French nation gifted the City of Atlanta Rodin’s The Shade, an oversized bronze casting of a man which stands outside of the High Museum to this day. A large, circular marker at its base lists the names of those who died and still serves as a memorial.

Rodin takes residence at the High, not in mourning of the crash, but in celebration of his artistic achievements, during “Rodin in the United States: Confronting the Modern” (October 21–January 15, 2023.)

Visitors will be surprised to learn how the world’s most famous sculptor’s popularity ebbed and flowed throughout the 20^th century in America. The Metropolitan Museum of Art became the first U.S. institution to acquire his work in 1893, but it wasn’t until the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.’s 1981 exhibition, “Rodin Rediscovered,” that a resurgence of appreciation for his art in the States was ushered in. That appreciation continues.

“By WWII, Rodin was broadly represented in U.S. collections and museums, but mostly with works that resonated with traditional expectations and processes in contrast to works that radically broke from those traditions, e.g. by using fragmentation and expressive abstraction or being overtly erotic,” Claudia Einecke, the High Museum of Art’s Frances B. Bunzl Family Curator of European Art, told Forbes.com. “By the late 1940s, such ‘classical’ works must have felt tame and conservative to critics, artists and collectors who were getting excited over the anti-traditionalist currents of their time. The revival of interest and appreciation for Rodin began in the mid-1950s when critics and curators emphasized and showcased precisely these unconventional, innovative aspects of Rodin’s works and processes.”

“Confronting the Modern” puts the artist’s edgier creations on view through loans of key works from more than 30 museums and private collections across the country.

“Post-war art tended to challenge and break with formal and conceptual traditions and expectations and critics championed innovation and provocation over other criteria,” Einecke explained. “Rodin’s radical expressiveness, near abstraction, and idiosyncratic processes met these criteria.”

Bear in mind, Rodin died near the outbreak of World War I. It would take the cataclysms of another world war and a half century for the art world to catch up with where he left off.

While in Atlanta, visit Rooftop L.O.A (leave of absence) where guests are placed high above the city in West Midtown, a perfect hangout during sunny Southern fall days and cool nights. The chic, 21+ lounge/pool/restaurant/nightspot with a Miami feel features a resort-style heated pool, cabanas and an indoor bar, as well a garden-inspired outdoor bar.

Inside Buckhead’s St. Regis Hotel, Atlas restaurant’s outrageously decadent chef’s tasting menu delights diners with course after course after course of rare and delectable treats sourced locally and from the globe, varying by season, surrounded by the Lewis Collection, one of the largest private Modern art collections in the world.

Botticelli: Minneapolis

If only he’d had a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle named after him perhaps “Botticelli” would flow off the tongues of Americans the way Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello do.

His creativity was equal to the honor bestowed upon his Italian Renaissance peers. A great rarity in the U.S., “Botticelli and Renaissance Florence: Masterworks from the Uffizi” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (October 16–January 8, 2023) features more than 45 loans from the storied collection from the Uffizi Galleries in Florence that rarely leave the museum, let alone Italy. The pieces will be on view alongside items from Mia, giving insight into life in Renaissance Florence and Botticelli’s (Italian, 1445–1510) work.

“These works testify to a singular genius and present seemingly endless clues about Botticelli’s biography and achievements, but we must live with the reality that a complete picture of the artist and an understanding of the meanings behind his mysterious paintings will always elude us,” Rachel McGarry, the Elizabeth MacMillan Chair of European Art and Curator of European Paintings and Works on Paper at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, told Forbes.com. “We can only speculate about Botticelli’s intentions, intellectual interests, religious faith, desires, loves, aspirations, proud moments, regrets and failures, worries, idiosyncrasies and habits.”

Marking the first collaboration between Mia and the Uffizi Galleries, the exhibition will include paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, decorative arts and a selection of ancient Roman marble statues. It will be the largest and one of the most comprehensive shows on Botticelli ever staged in the United States.

At its center, Minerva and the Centaur (c. 1482).

“Botticelli’s enigmatic painting of Minerva and the Centaur, depicting a young maiden taming a centaur (half man, half horse), evokes endless meaning. This was intentional by the artist,” McGarry explains. “His paintings enthrall audiences not only because of their dazzling beauty, but also because their meanings are nuanced, layered and ambiguous. Botticelli’s figures’ wistful expressions and novel subject matter demand interpretation, but remain inscrutable.”

Modigliani and Matisse: Philadelphia

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954) lived a long and fruitful life as an artist. Amadeo Modigliani (Italian, 1884–1920) did not. Wracked by illness as a child and poverty–and substance abuse–as an adult, he died of tubercular meningitis long before being recognized as a central figure to Modern art. His lover commit suicide the next day, jumping from a window. She was pregnant with their child.

Both titans of the 20^th century share space in Philly, Modigilani at the Barnes Foundation and Matisse at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“Modigliani Up Close” (October 16–January 29, 2023) features nearly 50 works from major collections, presenting paintings and sculptures alongside new findings that have resulted from the technical research of collaborating conservators, conservation scientists and curators. Using analytical techniques, including X-radiography, infrared reflectography, and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF), previously unknown aspects of Modigliani’s work has been revealed. Visitors will feel closer to Modigliani as an artist, seeing his work through the eyes of the experts, catching glimpses of the artist’s hand hidden beneath the surfaces of his work.

This exhibition holds a special significance at the Barnes, as Dr. Albert C. Barnes was one of Modigliani’s earliest collectors in the United States and helped shape the artist’s critical reception in this country. In addition to works on paper, there are 12 significant paintings and one carved stone sculpture by Modigliani in the Barnes collection. With 12 paintings each, the Barnes and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, have the largest collections of Modigliani paintings in the world.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris and the Musée Matisse Nice, presents the first exhibition ever dedicated to the pivotal decade of the 1930s in the art of Matisse. Opening first in Philadelphia, “Matisse in the 1930s” (October 19–January 29, 2023) displays more than 100 works ranging from renowned and rarely seen paintings and sculptures, to drawings and prints, to illustrated books.

“Matisse in the 1930s” explores the remarkable changes in style that followed as Matisse discovered different ways of working across the mediums of easel and decorative painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing and the illustrated book.

Visitors to the show may need to cross a picket line to see it. Unionized employees at the museum are striking over a variety of workplace concerns.

Vermeer and Dalí: Dallas

When does only two paintings an exhibition make? When one of them is by Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632–1675). With only 34 authenticated paintings to his name in existence, most of them borrowed with the ease of snatching a bone from a junkyard dog, any opportunity to see Vermeer should be cherished.

Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter (c. 1663), from the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, and Salvador Dalí’s (Spanish, 1904–1989) The Image Disappears (1938), from the Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali, in Figueres, Spain, appear side-by-side for the first time.

Dalí’s appreciation for Vermeer will be examined in “Dalí/Vermeer: A Dialogue,” (October 16–January 15, 2023) at the Meadows Museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University.

The Image Disappears represents Dalí’s Surrealist transformation of Vermeer’s composition from Woman Reading a Letter.

Raphael: Columbus

Wrapping up at the Columbus Museum of Art are a set of six important tapestries designed by Raphael (Italian, 1483–1520) from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (GAM) in Dresden, Germany, on view in the U.S. for the first time. These tapestries are woven from the same Raphael designs used to create the tapestries for the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican in 1515-16. “Raphael—The Power of Renaissance Imagery: The Dresden Tapestries and their Impact” closes on October 30.

The Dresden works were woven in England in the 17th century at the noted Mortlake Tapestry manufactory. The production of the tapestries in England is a direct consequence of the acquisition of Raphael’s original cartoons (full-scale Renaissance preparatory drawings for a tapestry) by the Prince of Wales (later Charles I) for the British royal collection in 1623. Charles I subsequently commissioned sets to be woven in the Mortlake manufactory, England’s recently founded tapestry factory located just outside London. The tapestries were brought to Germany in the 18th century by Augustus the Strong (Elector of Saxony and King of Poland).

Commissioned by Pope Leo X, the tapestries and painted compositions depict episodes in the lives of Saints Peter and Paul. Originally intended to reinforce the authority of the papacy, the tapestries tell the story of the founding of Christianity and the spread of its message throughout the Roman Empire