Opening this Week
Revolutions
Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960
March 22, 2024–April 20, 2025
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
hirshhorn.si.edu
Revolutions is a major survey of 270 artworks by 126 artists from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s permanent collection. Celebrating the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, the exhibition aims to capture the shifting cultural landscapes of a century defined by new currents in science and philosophy and ever-increasing mechanization. Shown alongside these historic works are contributions from nineteen contemporary artists whose practices demonstrate how many revolutionary ideas from a hundred years ago remain critical today. Work by Francis Bacon, Amoako Boafo, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Rick Lowe, Sally Mann, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Cy Twombly is included.
Rick Lowe, Fire #4: This Time Athens, 2023, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC © Rick Lowe Studio
On View
El eco de Picasso
Through March 31, 2024
Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain
museopicassomalaga.org
Organized as part of Picasso Celebration 1973–2023, a series of international exhibitions and events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, The Echo of Picasso focuses on his influence on twentieth-century art. The exhibition places Picasso’s practice in dialogue with work by more than fifty artists, including Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem de Kooning, Thomas Houseago, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Cy Twombly, Tom Wesselmann, and Franz West.
Installation view, El eco de Picasso, Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain, October 2, 2023–March 31, 2024. Artwork, left to right: © Rebecca Warren, © Richard Prince. Photo: Pablo Asenjo, courtesy Museo Picasso Málaga
On View
The Whitney’s Collection
Selections from 1900 to 1965
Opened June 28, 2019
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
whitney.org
This exhibition of more than 120 works, drawn entirely from the Whitney’s collection, is inspired by the founding history of the museum. The Whitney was established in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to champion the work of living American artists. A sculptor and a patron, Whitney recognized both the importance of contemporary American art and the need to support the artists who made it. The collection she assembled foregrounds how artists uniquely reveal the complexity and beauty of American life. Work by Jay DeFeo, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann is included.
Installation view, The Whitney’s Collection: Selections from 1900 to 1965, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, June 28, 2019–May 2022. Artwork, left to right: © 2020 The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Norman Lewis; © 2020 The Franz Kline Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz
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Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained
April 21–July 21, 2023
Hill Art Foundation, New York
hillartfoundation.org
Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained is an exhibition curated by David Salle that brings together paintings and sculptures by artists working across different eras, mediums, and geographies to explore the notion of affinity between works of art. Alongside a painting by Salle from 1988, work by Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Mark Grotjahn, Brice Marden, Albert Oehlen, Pablo Picasso, Cy Twombly, and Christopher Wool is included.
Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 1990 © Albert Oehlen
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Transformers
Meisterwerke Der Sammlung Frieder Burda Im Dialog Mit Künstlichen Wesen
December 10, 2022–April 30, 2023
Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany
www.museum-frieder-burda.de
This exhibition, whose subtitle translates to Masterpieces of the Frieder Burda Collection in Dialogue with Artificial Beings, offers visitors the opportunity to meet artist-made avatars—human machines that are able to move, talk, and learn—and observe the richness of their movements, language, and responses. By juxtaposing these beings with key works from the museum’s collection, Transformers aims to create multidimensional experiences that reflect our increasingly artificially transformed world. Work by Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso, Gerhard Richter, and Jordan Wolfson is included.
Jordan Wolfson, Female Figure, 2014 © Jordan Wolfson. Photo: Markus Tretter, Kunsthaus Bregenz
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Ways of Freedom
Jackson Pollock to Maria Lassnig
October 15, 2022–January 22, 2023
Albertina Modern, Vienna
www.albertina.at
Ways of Freedom examines the creative interplay between Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel in a transatlantic exchange and dialogue from the mid-1940s to the end of the Cold War. Exploring radically impulsive approaches to form, color, and material, the exhibition includes more than ninety works by nearly fifty artists with loans from museums worldwide. This exhibition has traveled from the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany under the title The Shape of Freedom: International Abstraction after 1945. Work by Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, and Simon Hantaï is included.
Helen Frankenthaler, Beach Scene, 1961, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York © 2023 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Frisson
The Richard E. Lang and Jane Lang Davis Collection
October 15, 2021–November 27, 2022
Seattle Art Museum
www.seattleartmuseum.org
This exhibition celebrates the Friday Foundation’s gift of nineteen artworks from the Lang Collection to the Seattle Art Museum in honor of Seattle collectors Richard E. Lang and Jane Lang Davis. Dating from 1945 to 1976, the paintings, drawings, and sculptures in Frisson represent mature works and pivotal moments of artistic development from some of the most influential American and European artists of the postwar period. Work by Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, and Alberto Giacometti is included.
Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait, 1967, installation view, Seattle Art Museum © The Estate of Francis Bacon. Photo: Jueqian Fang
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The Shape of Freedom
International Abstraction after 1945
June 4–September 25, 2022
Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany
www.museum-barberini.de
The Shape of Freedom examines the creative interplay between Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel in transatlantic exchange and dialogue, from the mid-1940s to the end of the Cold War. Exploring radically impulsive approaches to form, color, and material, the exhibition includes more than ninety works by nearly fifty artists with loans from museums worldwide. Work by Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, and Simon Hantaï is included.
Installation view, The Shape of Freedom: International Abstraction after 1945, Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany, June 4–September 25, 2022. Artwork, left to right: © The Estate of Morris Louis/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany 2022; © 2022 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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America. Entre rêves et réalités
La collection du Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection
June 9–September 11, 2022
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Canada
www.mnbaq.org
Featuring more than a hundred paintings, photographs, sculptures, and video works drawn from the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, this exhibition, whose title translates to America. Between Dreams and Realities, offers a broad overview of modern and contemporary American art. Organized thematically, it looks carefully and critically at the notion of the American dream and uncovers how artists have variously grappled with questions of identity, the challenges of globalization, the realities of everyday life in America, and the complexities of its technological and political revolutions. Work by Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Sally Mann, Man Ray, Brice Marden, Nam June Paik, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Mary Weatherford is included.
Mary Weatherford, Engine, 2014, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC © Mary Weatherford. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio
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Albert Oehlen
“Grandi quadri miei con piccoli quadri di altri”
September 5, 2021–February 20, 2022
Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland
masilugano.ch
In this exhibition, Albert Oehlen: “Big Paintings by Me with Small Paintings by Others”, select works from Oehlen’s personal art collection are on view alongside some of his most significant paintings. In staging this large-scale exhibition, Oehlen aims to make relationships perceptible between his artworks and those by artists whose practices he has long admired. Work by Richard Artschwager, Willem de Kooning, Duane Hanson, Mike Kelley, and Franz West, among others, is included.
Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 1997/2005 © Albert Oehlen. Photo: Lothar Schnepf
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Chaïm Soutine/Willem de Kooning, la peinture incarnée
September 15, 2021–January 10, 2022
Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris
www.musee-orangerie.fr
Chaïm Soutine/Willem de Kooning, la peinture incarnée explores affinities between the work of Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) and Willem de Kooning (1904–1997). The exhibition, which places nearly forty-five works by the two artists in visual dialogue, considers how Soutine’s paintings, with their built-up surfaces and energetic brushwork, informed de Kooning’s art, shaping his figurative/abstract works in the late 1940s and beyond. This exhibition has traveled from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, where it had the title Soutine/de Kooning: Conversations in Paint.
Willem de Kooning, . . . Whose Name Was Writ in Water, 1975, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York © 2021 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Soutine/de Kooning
Conversations in Paint
March 7–August 8, 2021
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
www.barnesfoundation.org
Soutine/de Kooning: Conversations in Paint creates a visual dialogue and explores affinities between the work of Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) and Willem de Kooning (1904–1997). The exhibition, which presents nearly forty-five works, considers how Soutine’s paintings, with their built-up surfaces and energetic brushwork, informed de Kooning’s art, shaping his figurative/abstract works in the late 1940s and beyond.
Willem de Kooning, Woman, 1953, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC © 2021 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Degree Zero
Drawing at Midcentury
October 31, 2020–June 5, 2021
Museum of Modern Art, New York
www.moma.org
Bringing together approximately eighty works on paper from the museum’s collection, Degree Zero illuminates how artists used drawing to forge a new visual language in the aftermath of World War II. Modest, immediate, and direct, drawing was the ideal medium for this period of renewal. The exhibition looks across movements, geographies, and generations to highlight connections between artists who shared common materials and ideas between 1948 and 1961. Work by Jay DeFeo, Willem de Kooning, Alberto Giacometti, and Cy Twombly is included.
Jay DeFeo, Untitled (Florence), 1952, Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2020 The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Artistic License
Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection
May 24, 2019–January 12, 2020
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
www.guggenheim.org
This exhibition celebrates the institution’s extensive twentieth-century holdings through the eyes of six contemporary artists, all of whom have contributed to shaping the museum’s history with their own pivotal solo shows: Cai Guo-Qiang, Paul Chan, Jenny Holzer, Julie Mehretu, Richard Prince, and Carrie Mae Weems. Through collection highlights and rarely seen works from the turn of the century to 1980, this presentation includes nearly three hundred paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and installations selected by the six artists that engage with the cultural discourse of their time. Work by Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, and Lawrence Weiner is included.
Works from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s collection in storage. Artwork, clockwise from top left: Jean Dubuffet, Martin Barré, and Wifredo Lam © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Willem de Kooning © 2020 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; David Hammons © David Hammons; Paul Wonner © Estate of Paul Wonner and William Theophilius Brown, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Cecilia Vicuña © Cecilia Vicuña; Maria Helena Vieira da Silva © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: David M. Heald
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Human Interest
Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection
April 2, 2016–April 2, 2017
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
whitney.org
Human Interest offers new perspectives on one of art’s oldest genres. Drawn entirely from the museum’s holdings, the more than two hundred works in the exhibition show changing approaches to portraiture from the early 1900s until today. Bringing iconic works together with lesser-known examples and recent acquisitions in a range of mediums, the exhibition unfolds in eleven thematic sections. Work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem de Kooning, Roe Ethridge, Duane Hanson, Mike Kelley, Sally Mann, Man Ray, Bruce Nauman, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Rudolf Stingel, Andy Warhol, and Jonas Wood is included.
Willem de Kooning, Woman and Bicycle, 1952–53, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Willem de Kooning
Drawn and Painted
November 19, 2016–March 19, 2017
Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey
artmuseum.princeton.edu
This installation comprises paintings of the late 1960s through the ’70s by Willem de Kooning, on loan from the Willem de Kooning Foundation in New York. The works on view reveal the intimate relationship between the drawn and the painted in de Kooning’s practice. Some clearly were composed with the aid of line drawing. Others combine relatively thin charcoal lines and broad areas of paint, and still others are drawn from chains or clusters of cursive brushstrokes of varying widths.
Willem de Kooning, Man on the Dunes, 1971 © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Legacy
The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
June 5–September 14, 2014
San José Museum of Art, California
sjmusart.org
Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection presents a selection of works from the historic gift of art pledged to the Whitney in May 2010 by longtime museum trustee Emily Fisher Landau. The exhibition, which includes more than seventy works by thirty-eight artists, traces many of the ideas that have preoccupied artists in the United States, particularly since the 1960s. Questions about the relevance of painting in the aftermath of Minimalism, debates about representation, “culture wars,” and a revived interest in personal narratives are explored. This exhibition has traveled from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Work by Richard Artschwager, Gregory Crewdson, Willem de Kooning, Nan Goldin, Neil Jenney, Vera Lutter, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Mark Tansey, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol is included.
Mark Tansey, Valley of Doubt, 1990 © Mark Tansey. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art
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Willem de Kooning
A Retrospective
September 18, 2011–January 9, 2012
Museum of Modern Art, New York
www.moma.org
This is the first major museum exhibition devoted to the full scope of the career of Willem de Kooning, widely considered to be among the most important and prolific artists of the twentieth century. The exhibition, with nearly two hundred works, presents viewers with an unparalleled opportunity to study the artist’s development over nearly seven decades, beginning with his early academic works, made in Holland before he moved to the United States in 1926, and concluding with his final, sparely abstract paintings of the late 1980s.
Willem de Kooning, Suburb in Havana, 1958 © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Rob McKeever
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Legacy
The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
February 10–May 1, 2011
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
whitney.org
Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection presents a selection of works from the historic gift of art pledged to the Whitney in May 2010 by longtime museum trustee Emily Fisher Landau. The exhibition, which includes works by fifty-three artists, traces many of the ideas that have preoccupied artists in the United States, particularly since the 1960s. Questions about the relevance of painting in the aftermath of Minimalism, debates about representation, “culture wars,” and a revived interest in personal narratives are explored. Work by Richard Artschwager, Gregory Crewdson, Willem de Kooning, Nan Goldin, Neil Jenney, Vera Lutter, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Mark Tansey, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol is included.
Installation view, Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February 10–May 1, 2011. Artwork, left to right © Mark Tansey, © Ed Ruscha. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art
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Willem de Kooning
Paintings, 1960–1980
September 17, 2005–January 22, 2006
Kunstmuseum Basel
kunstmuseumbasel.ch
Willem de Kooning is considered to be one of the leading exponents of American Abstract Expressionism and is celebrated in the US as a key figure in twentieth-century painting. In Europe, however, the artist’s significance has yet to be fully appreciated. This is particularly true of his work of the 1960s and ’70s, when he abandoned New York City for bucolic Long Island, where he lived and worked year-round from 1963 onward. The paintings of that time bear the stamp of his elemental response to the landscape, evident in the gestural vibrancy of the figuration and in the richness of hue. A concise selection of large-format paintings spotlights this groundbreaking period in de Kooning’s oeuvre.
Willem de Kooning, Untitled XI, 1975, Art Institute of Chicago © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York